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Good morning and welcome to the final stretch. We are now less than 50 days from the Midterm elections. Today I have some updates on efforts to interfere in those elections. You should also check out my conversation on election threats over at The Raid, where I spoke to longtime journalist Jon Carlos Frey. Despite the broken American healthcare system’s best effort to knock me off my horse (more on that on Saturday), I’m firmly in the saddle and ready to stay on top of everything related to Trump and Republicans attempts to interfere in the Midterms. If you support what you see here, please spread the word and consider becoming a paid subscriber. You can also show your support by buying us a coffee. Now, on to the news… - jg
On the heels of its crucial loss at the Supreme Court over its attempt to heavily restrict mail-in voting, the Trump administration is refocusing its efforts to interfere in the Midterms by trying to force states to purge voters — and planning to prosecute election officials who refuse to do so.
Here’s how this works: The Department of Homeland Security has compiled its own list of people it says are eligible voters. DHS wants states to remove those voters it has deemed ineligible, despite the fact that election officials are prohibited from last-minute voter purges by the 90-day “quiet period” of the National Voter Registration Act. If states don’t purge voters based on DHS’ (extremely faulty) lists, it looks like arrests are a reasonable possibility.
Like everything else the Trump administration is doing in regards to the election, this is completely unprecedented. The federal government has never arrested election officials this close to an election, just as the federal government through law enforcement agencies like the Justice Department has never seized ballots from state and local officials, like the FBI did with its January raid on a Fulton County elections warehouse.
The federal government has never used passport data, as it currently is, in order to identify voters who could be ineligible to vote. It will be Latino voters most affected by voter purges or intimidation stemming from Trump sending ICE or the National Guard to the polls. Why target Latinos? The Trump administration would say that it’s because they’re the most likely to be found on voter rolls where they shouldn’t legally be. The reality: Latinos tend to vote for Democrats, and Trump wants as few of those people able to vote as possible.
To back up Trump and Republicans’ false claims of widespread voting by noncitizens, last week, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, along with the DOJ, announced the arrest of 16 people across the country who had allegedly committed election crimes. Mullin and the DOJ claim that the voters were either lawful permanent residents or undocumented immigrants who had illegally voted in presidential elections. (Noncitizens voting in federal elections is prohibited by law, but noncitizens can vote in some state and local elections.) The arrests are part of a universe of roughly 1,600 cases of noncitizen voting the DOJ says it’s pursuing.
Those cases go back years, meaning they represent a minuscule fraction of the hundreds of millions of votes cast in federal elections over that time period — meaning that even if all 1,600 cases involved undocumented immigrants voting for Democrats, it would have had no impact on who won those elections. Still, Mullin, the DOJ, and the election denial movement are acting as if the 16 arrests and 1,600 alleged voter fraud cases are the smoking gun that proves widespread election fraud. They are not.
It’s likely that at least some of the people arrested last week didn’t know they weren’t supposed to vote in federal elections — they were automatically registered to vote when they got a driver’s license, for instance, or simply didn’t understand the distinction between being a lawful permanent resident and a full-fledged citizen.
But, as in the lead up to the 2024 election, Trump and Republicans will use the issue of noncitizen voting to lay the groundwork for saying this year’s elections were stolen. The obvious difference this time: Trump wields power over the federal government.
Now, Trump will, at minimum, use noncitizen voting to sow doubt in November’s election results. Slightly less likely but exponentially worse, Trump will use noncitizen voting as an excuse to send ICE or the National Guard to polling locations, and seize ballots.
These are just some of the options on the table. Which one Trump will use is a guessing game. Whether sending ICE or troops to the polls and seizing ballots holds up in court is another unknown. But by the time we reach that point we’re once again in a full-blown constitutional crisis.
The irony of Trump’s ploys is that they reek of how things work in banana republics and oppressive government regimes. While Trump and Republicans call Democrats “communists,” it’s Trump and Republicans themselves who are acting like socialist and authoritarian regimes throughout history — questioning the validity of elections, and sending in armed goons to ensure their side wins.
The dynamic of armed election interference should be familiar to anyone who is even vaguely familiar with the last 70 years of history in Latin America.
One of the lessons in those countries has been — as it’s also been more recently in Hungary — to simply vote the goon out of power by such incredible margins that even Trump’s supporters must concede that Republicans lost the election. It will also take some Republicans who have a shred of morals left to also concede. Based on what polls look like at the moment, it will be no surprise to any of them that Democrats will win in November. The only question is whether they’ll admit their losses publicly, or whether they’ll continue to support Trump’s efforts to undo the democratic process.
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