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Hot on the heels of a visit with his favorite strongman, President Trump burped up some incoherent and unconstitutional thoughts on election administration and the scope of his authority.
Immediately after meeting with Putin in Alaska last Friday, Trump gushed to Sean Hannity about how his authoritarian buddy totally agrees with him.
“You know, Vladimir Putin said something, one of the most interesting things. He said, ‘Your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting,’” Trump said. “He said, ‘Mail-in voting, every election.’ He said, ‘No country has mail-in voting. It’s impossible to have mail-in voting and have honest elections.’”
“We talked about 2020. He said, ‘You won that election by so much … you lost it because of mail-in voting.’ It was a rigged election.”
Trump clearly remains fixated on his loss to Joe Biden, and Putin is more than happy to rub his sores. So now Trump is going to try to get rid of voting machines and mail-in voting — and maybe federalism while he’s at it.
Literally every credible source imaginable that has reviewed the 2020 election has found that there was no widespread voter fraud, no hacked voting machines, no trove of fake mail-in ballots, no vast anti-Trump conspiracy. But why should Trump listen to cybersecurity experts or elections officials or dozens of judges when he’s got Putin?
Despite what Trump says, it takes approximately 10 seconds with Google to find out that 34 countries also have mail-in voting, including several democracies in Western Europe, like the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Germany.
Russia does not, but somehow the absence of mail-in voting has not resulted in honest elections there. Instead, the Kremlin controls who is allowed to run against Putin, while candidates who oppose him are barred from the ballot. And of course Putin’s leading critics have a nasty habit of turning up dead, making running a viable campaign a bit difficult. Putin has also managed to rule Russia for 25 years straight by changing the constitution when necessary to give his dictatorship a veneer of legality.
In Russia’s sham elections, Putin isn’t just guaranteed to win — he’s guaranteed to win via huge landslides.
In 2024, the only candidates allowed to run in Russia’s presidential election didn’t mount real campaigns or challenge Putin’s authority. Alternatives exist only to make Putin look good. They help maintain the fiction that he’s being chosen by voters, as opposed to the reality that he’s a strongman who has seized control of the country. And their assured poor performance — no other candidate in the 2024 race topped five percent — allows Putin to claim an overwhelming, historic mandate every time.
It’s this arrangement that Trump really covets. Why shouldn’t he be allowed to rule for decades with no real worry that he could ever be defeated again like he was in 2020? Why can’t he dictate how elections are run to ensure landslide after landslide after landslide like Putin has managed to do?
The law is clear (whatever that’s worth)
Never one to bother determining whether he actually has the authority to do something, Trump has just decided to barrel forward, declaring in a Truth Social post that he’s going to “lead a movement” to get rid of mail voting and voting machines and he will be issuing an executive order to “help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections.”
Had he just stopped there, it would have been garden-variety Trump blather, another in an endless series of all-caps rants about elections. But he took it to the next level this time around: “Remember, the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.”
This is, quite literally, the opposite of what the Constitution says about elections in Article I, Section 4: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of choosing Senators.” In cases going back nearly 100 years, the Supreme Court has interpreted this clause to mean that states dictate not only the time, place, and manner of elections but also voter registration, fraud prevention, vote tabulation, canvassing, recounts, and primaries.
To the extent there is a debate as to the scope of Article I, Section 4, it is only as to how much authority Congress has to regulate federal elections. In 1993, Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act, requiring states to allow people to register to vote at the state’s motor vehicle agency. In 2002, in the wake of the dangling chad debacle in Bush v. Gore, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, which established the independent, bipartisan Election Assistance Commission (EAC), responsible for certifying voting machines, maintaining the National Voter Registration Form, and providing technical assistance to states to improve election administration. The law also required states to adopt new procedures for voter registration databases and voter identification.
You’ll note there is no role for the president here, no authority he can wield. Trump can issue executive orders until the end of time, and that wouldn’t give him the power to change state election rules. His claim that states are nothing more than “agents” of the federal government runs afoul of the basic tenet of federalism, which divides power between the central federal government and the individual states.
Trump’s usual method of exacting compliance — threatening to withhold federal funds — doesn’t work super well here either. That’s because the federal government provides very little in the way of funding for election administration. Congress has provided one-time funding multiple times in recent decades, but there is no ongoing federal money. States have received federal grant money to help cover major purchases, such as voting machines, but overall, federal funds accounted for only about four percent of all election spending from 2003 to 2020.
Besides the whole constitutional leaving-it-to-the-states thing, there are sound security reasons to have elections operate at the state level. A decentralized election structure, rather than a single nationwide one, is much less vulnerable to cyberattacks. And given that Trump has warmly welcomed Russia’s hacking efforts and election interference in the past, states need all the security they can get.
Speaking of security, while Trump is busy pretending that mail-in ballots and voting machines are the problem, the real security problem is, unsurprisingly, his administration.
In February, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency was forced to freeze all its election security work, a victim of Trump’s belief that CISA’s efforts in combating election disinformation are actually censorship. Also gone? Funding for the Election Infrastructure Information Analysis Center, which had helped election equipment vendors and state and local election officials share information about security risks. The Critical Infrastructure Partnership Advisory Council, which served as a forum for private-public sector sharing of threat assessments and security policies, is gone too.
But to be fair, who needs cybersecurity if there are no more electronic voting machines?
Rage against the machines
Trump’s Truth Social screed says he wants to get rid of “Highly ‘Inaccurate,’ Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES, which cost Ten Times more than accurate and sophisticated Watermark Paper, which is faster, and leaves NO DOUBT, at the end of the evening, as to who WON, and who LOST, the Election.”
Because Trump genuinely has no idea what he’s talking about when it comes to voting machines, it isn’t clear if he doesn’t know that most voters already vote via paper ballots, which are then tabulated by voting machines, or if he is somehow calling for a return to hand counting of paper ballots. If it’s the latter, that’s beyond stupid. Computers are much better than humans at the boring, repetitive task of counting things, so hand counting has a higher rate of error than scanning ballots via machine.
For example, in 2024, after being thoroughly brain-poisoned by Trump’s rhetoric about voting machines, the Gillespie County Texas Republican Party decided to hand-count their primary election results — about 8,000 ballots. It did not go well.
First, it took until the wee hours of the next day just to get through those few thousand ballots. Next, one precinct judge reported miscounting the totals in seven different races and, when reviewing tally sheets, found multiple errors in other precincts. All but one of the 13 precincts had incorrect vote totals on the official reconciliation forms. After the party chair declared the results correct and certified them as final, he found an additional discrepancy. Somehow, in spite of all this, he then decided the vote count was accurate and did not require an audit or a recount, thank you very much. That is the world Trump wants.
It’s bad enough that Trump willfully refuses to understand the basics of federalism and thinks the states exist only to be bossed around by the federal government. It’s worse that he believes he personally represents the entire federal government. He’s head of the executive branch, but even toddlers know that there are two other branches, neither of which is overseen by Trump. However, given how eagerly the conservatives who control the Supreme Court and Congress have dispensed with their job of checking the executive branch, why shouldn’t Trump conclude that he, and he alone, rules us all?
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading.
Trump is working for Putin and that’s scary!!!! Wake up! Any candidate running against him has to WIN or the USA as we know it will not survive!
Today, Democrats Abroad International Chair Martha Pugh send us a letter asking us to defend vote-by-mail. We know that Trump is attacking us particularly since he found that our members have put Democratic candidates in power with our votes.
Here is what she said.
Donald Trump recently announced he will sign an executive order to ban all mail-in voting nationwide - a lawless power grab he does not have the constitutional authority to make.
Let’s be clear: elections belong to the states, not the President. Trump’s executive order is nothing short of an authoritarian attempt to seize control of our election systems, strip away one of the safest and most accessible ways to vote, and lay the groundwork for voter suppression in 2026.
This is an existential threat to democracy. For millions of overseas voters, service members, their families, and Americans living abroad, mail-in ballots are often the only way our votes can be counted. If mail-in voting is eliminated, many of us will be silenced entirely.
We cannot let Trump intimidate or strongarm state officials into submission. Our state Governors and Secretaries of State are a crucial defense against this illegal assault.
Defend your vote
You can help defend your vote today. Call your Governor and Secretary of State to demand they reject Trump’s unconstitutional order and protect mail-in voting.
We’ve prepared calling scripts, contact directories, and a sample social media post to make it easy for you to take action. Read our Take Action guide here
Thank you for doing all you can to encourage our elected leaders to do what they can to protect our vote!
In Solidarity,
Martha McDevitt-Pugh
International Chair of Democrats Abroad
Democrats Abroad
https://www.democratsabroad.org/
Sorry that the links did not copy.