A series of actions taken by Donald Trump’s administration to sow doubts about the integrity of the US election have intensified concern among voting experts – and raised hope among election deniers – that he could declare a national emergency. The White House and US federal agencies have released a series of documents this summer – including controversial analyzes of alleged non-citizen voting and historical intelligence memos – stoking expectations that the US president could take steps to exert greater control over the November US midterm elections. Trump used a prime-time television speech in July to claim – again – that the US election was vulnerable to foreign manipulation, and repeat the lie that the 2020 presidential election, which he lost to Joe Biden, was stolen. Trump’s speech led Steve Bannon, his former political strategist, to predict that the US president will declare a state of emergency for national security reasons to “protect” the election. “Get out your No. 2 pencil,” Bannon, a right-wing commentator, said on his War Room video podcast on July 29. “It’s coming. It’s coming. Just block the last week of August. It’s coming.” While Trump and his allies could try to use a national emergency declaration to delegitimize the November results, experts say such a declaration would not replace constitutional restrictions on executive power in election administration. No president has ever attempted to invoke an emergency to assert control over voting. When asked earlier this month by Wayne Allyn Root, a right-wing host, if he would “declare a national security emergency for the election,” Trump did not reject the idea. “Let me tell you, stranger things have happened, okay?” the president told Real America’s Voice, a right-wing cable channel. “I’ll leave it at that.” The administration is “trying to lay the groundwork to declare some kind of emergency to nationalize the election,” said Aria Branch, a partner at Elias Law Group, who led a lawsuit blocking Trump’s previous executive orders on election administration. “I think the president is looking for any opportunity to do that.” ‘We need to be prepared for everything.’ “I mean, listen, I think it’s pretty obvious that man is losing control in reality, so I think we need to be prepared for anything,” said Santiago Mayer, president of Voters of Tomorrow, a voter advocacy organization led by Generation Z. “We’ve spent a lot of time thinking and preparing for any eventuality and anything he might try. I think our focus at the end of the day is to get enough voters where no matter what he gets, he’s not going to be successful.” Progressive organizations in the democratic space have also been preparing for something to happen before the elections. The presence of Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s former director of national intelligence, at an FBI raid in Fulton County, Georgia, raised questions earlier this year. Gabbard later testified before Congress that she had been leading an investigation into allegations of foreign interference in the US elections. Gabbard’s team was involved in the seizure and examination of voting equipment in Puerto Rico, and spent months examining possible vulnerabilities in voting machines and the possibility of foreign interference. When Gabbard resigned on June 30, Trump named his former ally Bill Pulte as her interim replacement, a move widely criticized by members of both parties, who noted Pulte’s lack of intelligence experience. While Jay Clayton later took over permanently, Pulte is said to have pushed the election interference narrative to a less visible role. “That’s why Pulte is so important,” Bannon said in July. “So, ah, Jay has to…Clayton…has big shoes to fill. Every day we’re going to be chasing him, like, where’s the next post about this going to be?” The night of Trump’s speech in July, Bannon texted CNN: “We need a National Security Emergency over the midterm elections immediately – this is a powerful predicate for that.” address. “Well, I think tonight’s speech is intended to add the predicate that you need to declare an emergency at or around election time,” he said. ICE agents at the polls is “a virtual certainty,” said Cobb, who questioned whether National Guard officers would also show up. “Anything that intimidates minority voters, particularly immigrant voters, and I also think anything that allows them to try to take over voting machines, like Trump wanted to do in 2020, but [then-attorney general] Bill Barr explained to him that there was simply no basis for it. Machine vulnerabilities, foreign access to state voter registration data and foreign digital manipulation strategies were already known to the public and amounted to a US intelligence assessment that found no evidence that Beijing tampered with the 2020 vote, which Trump lost. A week later, Trump and his allies quickly seized on an announcement by Mikie Sherrill, the governor of New Jersey, that 6,600 noncitizens had registered to vote due to a software error. After voting, the disclosure was used to escalate false claims that there are dozens of noncitizens on the voter rolls. On July 31, DHS published a public notice arguing that New Jersey’s administrative errors demonstrated the need for standardized federal oversight. The task force also declassified documents in a Michigan case in which the FBI investigated alleged fraudulent voter registrations by a get-out-the-vote organization, in which no criminal charges were filed, and investigative material related to a data mining of voter information in Maricopa County, Arizona. The pace of releases has been accelerating. On Monday, the task force declassified and released investigative files related to an investigation into Chinese intelligence, which revealed how disgraced former Democratic U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell had told FBI agents how he had “occasionally connected” with Christine Fang, a Chinese national allegedly involved in a political influence campaign. On Tuesday, the U.S. Census Bureau released a report saying it had identified 24,000 noncitizens who voted in the 2020 election in a preliminary comparison of 128 million records. He did not reveal his methodology and was harshly criticized by democracy advocates. “This supposed analysis based on census data does not pass the laugh test,” said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Research and Innovation. “The administration does not provide a sufficient explanation for how it arrived at these numbers, and rightly so.” Branch, of Elias Law Group, suggested that the Trump administration is “looking” for the legal basis. for an executive order. “I think they believe there may be one. “I think such a document simply does not exist, because the fact is that our elections are secure,” he said. “Non-citizen voting in our elections is simply not a widespread problem… The whole fear and narrative around that issue is completely unfounded, and is really just to stoke fear and lay the groundwork for future actions.” The tool he used to flag non-citizens on voter rolls is known to be inaccurate. ‘The founders recognized the risk of centralize power.’ When asked about the possibility of an executive order declaring a national emergency in the election, the White House did not rule it out and declined to comment on hypotheticals “The American people overwhelmingly support this common sense legislation that ensures that Americans, and Americans alone, decide our elections. “President Trump is absolutely right: we fix this now, or we will lose our country.” The Save America Act would require states to submit their voter lists to federal inspection, effectively giving DHS the power to deregister anyone it deems ineligible to vote. The law would also drastically reduce mail-in voting (a practice that Trump repeatedly criticized, but which he himself has reportedly done as recently as this week’s Florida Republican primary) and would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote and a limited set of photo IDs to cast a vote. “I mean, we’ve been closely monitoring what the administration is saying,” said Branch, who sees the rhetoric itself as an act of intimidation. “The constitution is extremely clear on this, and the founders recognized the risk of centralizing power over elections in the executive branch,” he added, “very helpful, in terms of litigation, to push back on these types of efforts.”
