As voters in several states prepare to cast ballots next week in statewide elections that could serve as a referendum on President Donald Trump, he’s renewing his push to insert himself into how elections are run.
Over the past few months, Trump suggested the federal government should play a bigger role in running elections, including banning mail voting and handling the counting of ballots to — this week — banning early voting.
“GET SMART REPUBLICANS, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE!!!” he posted on social media this weekend. But election experts warn it’s his actions that threaten free and fair elections by using possibly illegal and unconstitutional efforts to change the way Americans vote.
“This is a really extraordinary and chilling assertion of presidential power that is not lawful,” said Wendy Weiser, vice president for democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice, which focuses on democracy issues. “We can’t be frogs in boiling water that we don’t notice these things.”
Here’s what’s going on.
Trump has suggested changes to how people vote
The president has no role in any elections. The Constitution says states run elections and tabulate the votes, while Congress can dictate the time, place and manner of elections.
Yet Trump has suggested and appeared to demand that he and the federal government should play a bigger role in determining nearly all aspects of voting, from how people vote to who votes to how ballots are counted. That includes:
He’s proposed doing away with how millions of people cast ballots, like trying to ban mail-in voting and all forms of early voting. Voting by mail is safe and legal and every state has some form of it, at the very least for military service members. “The president is wildly overplaying his hand,” Matt Germer, the director of the governance program at the R Street Institute, a conservative think tank, told me this summer. “There are trade-offs to voting by mail, but by and large it is a secure method for voting, and it is also a necessary part of our voting system.
He’s proposed limiting who can vote. He issued an executive order this spring to try to require people to provide proof of citizenship — such as a passport or other documents — when registering to vote. Yet only about half of Americans have a passport. (Lower courts have paused this order from taking effect.) His administration is also trying to gain access to voter rolls in at least 40 states, even suing some of them to get the information. Trump is “asking for troves of confidential voter information,” writes the Brennan Center for Justice, “by demanding full copies of states’ computerized voter registration lists, including driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers.”
He’s proposed controlling how ballots are counted by calling for potentially banning voting machines.
He’s sending monitors to polling places. Justice Department officials will monitor statewide elections in California and New Jersey next week, which actually isn’t all that unusual. But it comes as Trump is accusing Democrats of manipulating the vote in California, and it’s being led by a Justice Department that obtained indictments against Trump’s perceived political enemies. California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) said he worries that election observers in his state will be used to discount the vote results. “This is a preview of 2026,” he warned.
That is the antithesis of how the framers set up America’s democracy, experts say
Election experts emphasize that states run elections and do the counting, and Congress certifies the results. The president, by design, has no role.
“When I was in office,” said former Republican Kentucky secretary of state Trey Grayson, “The number one principle of election administration at the national level was that the states run elections and Congress should be minimally involved. The last thing I want to do is allow President Newsom to set election law by executive order.”
“There are good reasons why we don’t have a single person — a president — in charge of elections, let alone being in charge of the counting and tabulation of ballots,” Weiser said. “That is a potentially dictatorial move. And I don’t say that lightly.”
What it could mean for elections in 2026
Trump has his eye on next year’s elections that will determine which party controls Congress for the last two years of his presidency.
And he’s doing something about it. He pressured Texas and other Republican-led states to redraw their congressional maps in the middle of the decade to help his party keep or expand its narrow House majority, and that sparked a national redistricting battle.
“I actually believe that there is a good chance that we are not going to have an election in which people can make an actual choice in 2026,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut), a prominent Trump critic, warned back in March. “My hair is on fire about it.”
A lot of what he predicted Trump would try has come to fruition, like targeting law firms tied to Democrats and investigating their main fundraising platform.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D), who is fighting Trump’s troop deployment to Chicago, has said he fears troops will also be deployed in 2026 “to intimidate people from going to the voting booth.”
Experts I’ve talked to say Democratic politicians’ concerns aren’t unfounded.
Trump frames attempts to take control of elections as necessary to “Save Our Country” from Democrats. That’s language autocrats in countries such as Hungary have used to demonize the opposition, said Kim Lane Scheppele, who studies the rise and fall of constitutional governments and is teaching at Stanford Law.
“Trump is on full-blast mode on ensuring next year’s elections aren’t free and fair,” she said.