{"id":837601,"date":"2025-03-29T16:12:47","date_gmt":"2025-03-29T21:12:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/03\/29\/trump-is-still-trying-to-undermine-elections\/"},"modified":"2025-03-29T16:12:47","modified_gmt":"2025-03-29T21:12:47","slug":"trump-is-still-trying-to-undermine-elections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/03\/29\/trump-is-still-trying-to-undermine-elections\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump Is Still Trying to Undermine Elections"},"content":{"rendered":"
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So far, it\u2019s a tossup which of the Trump Administration\u2019s wrecking balls will prove most destructive: the one that accelerates global warming, the one that abandons our allies, the one that torches the economy, or the one that compromises public health. Yet all of these are distractions from the President\u2019s long-standing pet project: decimating free and fair elections. It may be that we have become so accustomed to hearing Donald Trump\u2019s false claims about rigged elections and corrupt election officials that we have become inured to them, but in the past seven weeks he has pursued a renewed multilateral program to suppress the vote, curtail the franchise, undermine election security, eliminate protections from foreign interference, and neuter the independent oversight of election administration. And, as with the rest of Trump\u2019s calamitous agenda, he is doing it in full view of the American people.<\/p>\n

Consider Trump\u2019s remarks during his first Cabinet meeting: \u201cWe have to get to honest elections. We have to go back to paper ballots. We have to go back to voter I.D. One-day election, ideally, or short-term\u2014not these forty-eight-day and sixty-one-day elections, where boxes are put in a room and, \u2018Oh, let\u2019s move the boxes because we\u2019re putting in a new air-conditioning system.\u2019 Then you see the boxes move and then you say, \u2018Well, where are all the boxes? You know, what happened to the boxes that never came back?\u2019 Now our elections are extremely dishonest.\u201d This from a man who won the popular vote, all the swing states, and the Electoral College, and who bragged to the Republican Governors Association, on February 20th, that his victory was so decisive that the outcome was \u201ctoo big to rig.\u201d (In the next breath, he suggested that, even so, the Democrats must have cheated, because \u201cwe only won by millions of votes. We should have won by a lot more than that.\u201d) As Marc Elias, an elections lawyer who litigates on behalf of Democrats, told me, \u201cWhen Donald Trump says that he does not believe there should be voting machines, you should believe him. When he says there should only be voting on Election Day, you should believe him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now that Trump has installed a surfeit of election deniers<\/a> throughout his Administration\u2014Vice-President J.\u00a0D. Vance; the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel<\/a>, and Attorney General Pam Bondi (both of whom, in their confirmation hearings, refused to say that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election); the deputy F.B.I. director, Dan Bongino; White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller\u2014the President has been busy dismantling the guardrails protecting voting and voters. On February 6th, two weeks before the governors\u2019 meeting, it was reported that Trump had fired the chairman of the bipartisan Federal Election Commission<\/a>, Ellen Weintraub, dismissing her with a letter stating simply, \u201cYou are hereby removed as a Member of the Federal Election Commission, effective immediately. Thank you for your service on the Commission.\u201d Weintraub is a vocal Trump critic, who served as one of three Democrats on the commission, alongside three Republicans, but the F.E.C. is an independent agency, created by Congress to enforce campaign-finance rules. In her role as chair, Weintraub rebuked Trump in 2019, when he said that he might accept foreign intelligence on his opponent without informing the F.B.I., and again in 2020, when he claimed that mail-in voting would promote widespread fraud. Trevor Potter, a former Republican chair of the F.E.C. and the president of the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, wrote<\/a>, \u201cIn claiming to fire a commissioner of the Federal Election Commission, the president violates the law, the separation of powers, and generations of Supreme Court precedent.\u201d He added that the F.E.C.\u2019s commissioners \u201care confirmed by Congress to serve the vital role of protecting the democratic rights of American voters. As the only agency that regulates the president, Congress intentionally did not grant the president the power to fire FEC commissioners.\u201d<\/p>\n

Less than two weeks later, Trump issued an executive order that states, \u201cNo employee of the executive branch acting in their official capacity may advance an interpretation of the law as the position of the United States that contravenes the President or the Attorney General\u2019s opinion on a matter of law.\u201d In plain language, this mandate cancels the independence of independent agencies and, in the context of the F.E.C., gives the President the ability to make and adjudicate campaign rules to his advantage. The Democratic National Committee, along with the Democratic Congressional and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committees, is now suing Trump and Bondi\u2019s office, on the ground that the order violates federal law, but for now it stands.<\/p>\n

Trump also has been talking about taking over another independent agency, the U.S. Postal Service, which he does not have the authority to do. His hostility to voting by mail is well-known: during the first Presidential debate of 2020, for example, he claimed that voting by mail would cause \u201cfraud like you\u2019ve never seen,\u201d an assertion he repeated during an appearance on \u201cDr. Phil\u201d a couple of months before the 2024 election. Control of the Postal Service could offer additional ways to undermine elections, perhaps by raising the price of postage, so that the cost to the states of mailing ballots would be prohibitive, or by banning the automatic mailing of ballots to voters.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Trump, with the help of Elon Musk\u2019s DOGE<\/em>, fired some hundred and thirty employees of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA<\/em>), of the Department of Homeland Security. Among other things, CISA<\/em> monitors and reports on foreign interference in our elections: think China, Iran, North Korea, and, especially, Russia. (Around the same time, Bondi disbanded the F.B.I.\u2019s Foreign Influence Task Force, in order to \u201cend risks of further weaponization and abuses of prosecutorial discretion\u201d\u2014a not so subtle dig at those who investigated Russian interference<\/a> in the 2016 election and beyond.) For years, Republicans have claimed that the agency was using its authority to combat misinformation and disinformation as a way to collude with social-media platforms, to censor Americans<\/a>. Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, stated in her confirmation hearing that CISA<\/em> \u201chas gotten far off mission\u201d in monitoring misinformation and disinformation, and her deputy, Troy Edgar, told the Senate that CISA<\/em> needed to be \u201creeled in.\u201d (It was a point of pride for Noem that, when she was governor of South Dakota, she refused to take a seven-million-dollar cybersecurity grant from D.H.S.)<\/p>\n

But CISA<\/em> also supplies\u2014or used to supply\u2014state election officials with computer-monitoring equipment to help them \u201charden\u201d their election systems against outside intrusions. The bipartisan National Association of Secretaries of State wrote in a letter<\/a> to Noem on February 21st, in advance of a review she was conducting of CISA<\/em>, that the assistance of the agency is crucial to helping guard elections from cybercriminals and foreign attacks. Steve Simon, the Minnesota secretary of state and the current president of NASS,<\/em> told me that \u201celection security is national security, and that\u2019s not just what we say. That\u2019s what the federal government has said over three Presidential Administrations.\u201d The review was completed in early March, but it will not be released to the public. Tim Harper, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told the news site CyberScoop<\/em>, \u201cWithout transparency on the agency\u2019s plans, [states] are left scrambling to prepare for upcoming elections.\u201d He went on, \u201cIf CISA<\/em> is abandoning them, election officials deserve to know\u2014keeping them in the dark only helps bad actors.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s efforts to undermine elections are also being aided by Republicans in Congress who are pushing for the adoption of a piece of legislation called the SAVE<\/em> Act. In the estimation of Michael Waldman, the president of the Brennan Center for Justice, \u201cthe SAVE<\/em> Act would be one of the worst voting laws in congressional history.\u201d The bill, which is being characterized by its sponsors as a way to insure that noncitizens do not vote in federal elections, would, in fact, codify obstacles to voting. For a start, it would require documentary proof of citizenship in order to register to vote\u2014such as a passport or a birth certificate that matches one\u2019s legal name.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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More than half of Americans do not have a passport and would have to rely on their birth certificate to be able to vote. And there are an estimated sixty-nine million women whose name on their birth certificate does not match their married name. So if those women do not have a passport, they could be effectively disenfranchised.<\/p>\n

If the SAVE<\/em> Act passes, it would also prevent Americans from registering to vote by mail or online, and it would end mass voter-registration drives\u2014conducted by, for example, the League of Women Voters\u2014that cannot verify people\u2019s citizenship. The law would also discourage people from becoming election officials, because they would risk criminal penalties if they registered someone without the required proof of citizenship, even by mistake. And it would allow for a \u201cprivate right of action\u201d against \u201can election official who registers an applicant to vote in an election for Federal office who fails to present documentary proof of United States citizenship\u201d\u2014in other words, officials could be sued by private citizens who believed they were not following the letter of the law.<\/p>\n

The Administration and congressional Republicans \u201care only beginning their attacks on our elections,\u201d Lawrence Norden, the vice-president of the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center, told me. \u201cAll the things they have done so far were in Project 2025. But there is a lot more in Project 2025, including the weaponization of the D.O.J. And I\u2019m worried that they are going to keep hammering away at the guardrails that exist and attempt to intimidate and silence anyone who is trying to insure that there are some kind of guardrails on our elections.\u201d<\/p>\n

Harri Hursti, a veteran election-security researcher and a co-founder of Nordic Innovation Labs, a global cybersecurity firm, explained the process to me like this: \u201cWhat you do is, you come in and dismantle election security. Then you run one election in order to end elections. But you need to dismantle every single safety net to make certain that, when you run that election, there\u2019s no one keeping it safe. And then, when the questions are rising calling that election result into question, then there\u2019s no one able to defend it. That\u2019s how you end democracy.\u201d\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Sue Halpern
Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So far, it\u2019s a tossup which of the Trump Administration\u2019s wrecking balls will prove most destructive: the one that accelerates global warming, the one that abandons our allies, the one that torches the economy, or the one that compromises public health. Yet all of these are distractions from the President\u2019s long-standing pet project: decimating free<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":837602,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1441,4],"tags":[5582,5052],"class_list":{"0":"post-837601","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-still","8":"category-trump","9":"tag-still","10":"tag-trump"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/837601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=837601"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/837601\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/837602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=837601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=837601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=837601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}