With ICE terrorizing Minneapolis, the Justice Department giving murderers a pass while investigating the Fed Chair, and Trump now threatening to attack our allies over Greenland, only one question matters: How do we stop him?
The GOP could, of course. Along with the Democrats, they could vote to impeach him in the House, convict him in the Senate and remove him from office. His cabinet could remove him under the 25th Amendment; his bonkers letter to Norway, in which he justifies going to war with NATO for not receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, would suffice to find him unfit to hold the office of president.
There is no indication Republicans will find their spine and do any of this. Democrats can throw sand in the gears by withholding funding or attaching conditions to it, but so long as they are out of power, they can’t do much to rein in the President himself.
That leaves it to the people, namely, the voters. The November midterm elections seem an eternity from now, but 2025 is now behind us, and we made it this far, albeit not without significant trauma. As we look ahead to our chance to remove the GOP from power and put real checks on this rogue White House, a few nagging questions persist: Will Trump screw with the midterms? Will they be free and fair? Will we even have them?
Without a more disciplined way to think about these questions, they can leave us feeling fearful, even paralyzed. These, after all, are democracy-ending developments. So let’s break these questions down and separate real threats from speculative ones. Through fact-based analysis, we can focus on the main threats to our elections while categorizing others as less likely and therefore lower risk.
While much of the fear and even panic has been focused on whether Trump will “cancel” the midterm elections this year, the more pressing and realistic threat is that he will try to rig them, as would-be dictators have traditionally attempted. There are many examples of this, but three stand out: gerrymandering efforts, executive orders around voting procedures, and Justice Department efforts to interfere with state elections, including by demanding voter data.
Gerrymandering fails to move the needle
Trump and his cronies saw one clear path to keeping the House under GOP control and holding accountability for Trump and his cabinet at bay: forcing unprecedented mid-decade redistricting, even without a new census to justify it. This nakedly partisan move would create new gerrymandered maps that would eliminate blue seats by ruthlessly cracking and packing Democrats into new districts.
That effort has not gone as planned, at least so far. A grossly partisan move by Texas to shift five seats to the GOP was met tit-for-tat by California voters in a referendum led by Gov. Gavin Newsom. That shifted five seats to the blue column in that state.
Moves by North Carolina and Missouri to add a couple GOP seats are being countered and could be undone thanks to a bold move by Virginia, which has a new Democratic trifecta, to shift four of its seats blue. And in the Midwest, Ohio Republicans struck a deal with Democrats over redistricting, while Indiana state legislators told the White House to take a hike, despite or perhaps in direct response to overt and disgusting threats against the lawmakers and their families. Even if a state like Florida succeeds in its next session in making its map redder, this could fall apart in a blue wave election.
The net result is essentially a wash, not nearly the ten or so seats the White House had hoped to net out of its efforts.
Trump’s executive orders around voting have been blocked
Marc Elias’s Democracy Docket has been faithfully tracking Trump’s sweeping attempts to rewrite election rules by Executive Order. Trump has attempted to impose, by decree, the following changes, among others:
Proof-of-citizenship requirements via federal registration forms;
Loss of election funding for states that do not go along; and
A national “received-by-Election-Day” rule disqualifying even timely postmarked mail-in ballots
Many of these orders have been blocked by federal courts. Indeed, as Democracy Docket reported just over 10 days ago,
A federal court blocked core provisions of President Donald Trump’s anti-voting executive order Friday,
[ruling]that the president had no authority to impose new election rules that threatened to disenfranchise voters and override state law.In a sweeping order, District Judge John H. Chun, appointed by President Joe Biden, ruled in favor of Washington and Oregon, permanently halting enforcement of key sections of Executive Order 14248 — Trump’s March 2025 directive
[aimed]at reshaping how states run elections.The court found the order violated the Constitution by
[attempting]to concentrate election power in the presidency, a move the judge warned posed a direct threat to democracy.
As the Associated Press noted, that ruling followed “similar rulings in a Massachusetts case brought by 19 states and in a Washington, D.C. case by Democratic and civil rights groups. In the latter case, per the ACLU, the judge had issued a “decisive ruling” in League of Women Voters Education Fund v. Trump,
permanently blocking a provision of President Trump’s March voting executive order that sought to add a requirement to show a passport or similar document proving citizenship when registering to vote with the federal voter registration form that would disproportionately impact voters of color.
That ruling found the President lacks authority to unilaterally alter election procedures. Those powers rest with the states and with Congress.
Like the other district court judges adjudicating these matters, in his decision 11 days ago, Judge Chun was clear and unsparing.
“In the framework of our Constitution, the President’s power to see that the laws are faithfully executed refutes the idea that he is to be a lawmaker,” the judge wrote. “Accordingly, the Constitution entrusts Congress and the States — not the President — with the authority to regulate federal elections.” He added, “Whenever the President issues an executive order, the power to issue the order must stem either from an act of Congress or from the Constitution itself. If the President lacks a statutory or constitutional basis the act is unlawful.” (Internal quotation omitted.)
This is, of course, the beginning and not the end of judicial review of these orders. But even this SCOTUS conservative majority might find it hard to get five justices to agree that the Constitution’s assignment of the management and conduct of federal elections to the states allows the White House on its own to impose new and universal rules, without even an act of Congress.
Trump’s goal here extends beyond the rules themselves. He wants to intimidate state officials, confuse voters, and lay the groundwork for claims that the states somehow cheated to achieve results that he doesn’t like.
Justice Department demands for voter info have stalled
Unsatisfied with new gerrymanders and new executive orders, the regime has sought to harvest voter data to put pressure on state election officials. The DOJ has made demands upon state officials to turn over their voter files unredacted, including versions that include sensitive personal information and identifiers.
As The Guardian reported,
The department has asked at least 43 states for their comprehensive information on voters, including the last four digits of their social security numbers, full dates of birth and addresses….
Eight states (all red ones) turned over that information, but dozens of others refused.
The Brennan Center for Justice explained that the DOJ believes this voter information is somehow necessary to ensure compliance with the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act. But both laws already require states to conduct voter roll list maintenance, including reasonable efforts to remove those who should no longer be voting. Moreover, a single snapshot of those rolls, as the DOJ has demanded, doesn’t provide sufficient information to evaluate a state’s list maintenance programs.
What the DOJ is really after is more nefarious. It aims to create distrust in our election systems, chill people from registering, and thereby depress voter turnout. Along the way, it would create serious privacy and security risks over a vast and centralized collection of personal information that would be a prime target for hackers.
This could also lead to manipulation of data to support bogus claims of voter fraud, a familiar authoritarian play. First they demand the data, then use it to cast suspicion over the voter rolls, and finally cite “integrity” as the pretext for surveillance and selective enforcement. (This same playbook is being used to undermine support for Medicaid and SNAP benefits, for example.)
Per The Guardian, state election officials in blue states have pushed back against these efforts. “Our position on this starts and ends with the law. We looked at state law and federal law regarding disclosure of this very sensitive personal information on millions of people, and what we discovered, or at least the way we’ve concluded, is that the law protects voters from this kind of disclosure under these circumstances,” said Steve Simon, the top election official in Minnesota, one of the states sued by the DOJ.
Arizona’s Secretary of State, Adrian Fontes, was blunter. “Pound sand,” 𝕏he tweeted in response to the DOJ lawsuit against his state seeking voter data.
Federal judges agree and are growing wise to the DOJ’s true motives. In dismissing the case the DOJ filed against California, for example, Judge David O. Carter stated,
While the DOJ has told this Court that its purpose for demanding the sensitive voter information of Californians is ‘voter roll maintenance enforcement and compliance,’ representations made by the DOJ elsewhere paint a starkly different picture that this Court cannot ignore.
Judge Carter concluded,
the DOJ’s campaign to collect sensitive voter data . . . paints an alarming picture regarding the centralization of Americans’ information within the Executive Branch — without approval from Congress or Americans themselves.”
David Becker, the executive director for the Center for Election Innovation & Research, summed up the stakes concisely. “The federal government does not have the right to collect information on hundreds of millions of American voters unless Congress has authorized it. It has not.” Becker added, “This appears to be more focused on amplifying false narratives about problems with our election system and preparation for elections that candidates aligned with the president might lose.”
We saw this in 2020, and we would have seen it again in 2024 had Trump lost. His default is to challenge election results he doesn’t like while crowing about those that go his way. To prepare the ground, Trump sows seeds of doubt early so his efforts to delegitimize the results will stick if he needs them to.
His tools are myriad: claims of fraud, voter panic over nonexistent undocumented immigrant voting, conspiracies over machine tallies, even personal attacks upon election officials. The GOP is likely to lose the House and may even lose the Senate in the next general election, and Trump’s efforts to tilt the results his way are failing. That almost certainly means he will pivot this year to undermining the results so he can claim they are illegitimate.
To prepare for this, we need to set some solid stakes in the ground, especially as he consolidates influence over major media outlets such as CBS.
There’s no evidence of election fraud, but Trump won’t care
The Trump election playbook in 2020 was clear: deploy widespread claims of fraud, cite random instances of tabulation errors and blow them out of proportion, and get enough of his followers to believe that the election was stolen that they would even stage an insurrection to keep him in power.
That effort failed in large part because there were enough guardrails, especially within the White House and the Justice Department, to keep him from involving the federal government directly in the amplification of fraud claims.
But those guardrails are now gone. Trump will have many DOJ and White House officials willing to go before the cameras and openly lie about widespread election cheating, even if not backed by any actual evidence. We are seeing test runs of this right now, where Trump’s White House lackeys are making verifiably false claims about ICE agent Jonathan Ross’s supposed injuries from being “struck” by Renee Good’s car, and the DOJ has been investigating bogus claims of criminality against Trump’s political enemies.
The limits of what Trump can do with false fraud claims
The good news is this: election challenges still have to be adjudicated by the courts. Trump’s “evidence” will still be nonexistent if and when the losers file lawsuits. Trump will need to find another avenue to use these bogus claims to cling to power.
Trump may attempt to use claims of “fraud,” for example, to assert vast powers he does not have. He may try to pressure Speaker Johnson, if he is still in his position, to not seat winners. None of these efforts is likely to change the outcome.
For example, the Speaker cannot exclude a member who meets the constitutional qualifications and was properly elected under state law. While Johnson may try a feint, such as keeping Congress “out of session” to prevent seating new members, that can’t hold up for long once a decisive election has granted the other side power.
False claims of election fraud carry a longer term risk, however. They poison a democracy by calling legitimacy into question, raising the risk of increased polarization, radicalization, and even domestic terrorism. For these reasons, we need to keep a close eye on Trump’s wild claims and stamp out the fires as they are lit. It won’t prevent many from being taken in by his lies, but it could prevent a repeat of January 6.
In response to calls to get out the vote for the midterm elections, it’s common to see a few folks grumble, “If we even have elections…”
While that fear is understandable, suggesting that we might not have midterms at all plays into the hands of the Trump regime. It suggests that Trump has some magic wand he can wave to make the midterms not happen, and that we ought to prepare ourselves for that eventuality.
Trump makes a lot of noise about canceling the midterms, but he simply can’t do it. It’s beyond his power as president, no matter how many “executive orders” he brandishes.
*The states run federal…
