Trump's election interference plan comes into focus

New reporting shows the roots of Trump's plan to "nationalize" elections. Plus, American Doom notches a transparency win in federal court

NOTE: A federal judge has ordered the release of a Justice Department affidavit that led to the Jan. 28 FBI raid at a Fulton County elections warehouse. The judge’s decision came after several motions calling for the release of the document were filed. American Doom was the first to file a motion to unseal the affidavit — beating national media outlets to the punch — and we’d like to thank Atlanta attorneys Sarah Brewerton-Palmer and Meredith Kincaid for making that possible.

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Now, on to the news.

President Donald Trump’s plans to interfere in November’s midterm elections are becoming clearer by the day. Trump is helpfully telegraphing his plans on Truth Social, where in the past few weeks he has been on a posting frenzy about widespread election fraud, sharing false claims and old conspiracies dating back to 2020.

Trump has posted these claims more than 30 times since Jan. 19, as I report for Zeteo today.

All of this comes as Trump’s poll numbers continue to slide, and as Republicans face increasingly stiff odds of maintaining control of the House of Representatives and even the Senate in November. Trump has openly worried that he’ll face impeachment if Democrats take power in Congress following the midterm elections.

On the day that FBI agents raided a warehouse in Fulton County, Georgia on Jan. 28, Trump shared posts containing election lies and conspiracies over a 12-hour period from morning to night. Following the shocking raid – the first time in U.S. history that federal law enforcement has seized election materials from a state – Trump appeared on his former FBI deputy director Dan Bongino’s podcast on Monday and called for Republicans to “nationalize” elections.

Inside the FBI raid in Georgia — and what it really means

“The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” Trump told former FBI deputy director Dan Bongino on his podcast, falsely claiming that he won the 2020 election in several states where Joe Biden was declared the winner, and saying Republicans should take over elections in “15 places.”

The comment was broadly interpreted to mean “states,” but that’s not what Trump said. That’s important, because, as I’ve reported over and over again during the last five years, America’s election infrastructure is swarmed with officials who believe the president’s lies about elections — and remain poised to do something about it.

Nearly 300 election deniers at work in local election offices

That means counties. Prior to insisting that Republicans should “nationalize” elections, Trump talked about counties.

“I won a thing called counties,” Trump said, adding that counting his 2024 election win by counties is “becoming a very good count because it’s accurate, you know it covers the whole country. It’s like a landslide.”

I don’t think the combination of these two talking points — winning the majority of U.S. counties and somehow nationalizing our election processes — is a coincidence. Again, Trump’s posts on Truth Social are helpful in understanding his thinking.

On Jan. 23, Trump shared a link to a 2021 Epoch Times report. That report falsely claimed that votes were flipped in 2020 from Trump to Biden in 15 counties in Pennsylvania.

The report was originally shared on Jan. 20 by an anonymous X account under the handle “@TheSCIF.” Trump then linked to the report through @TheSCIF’s X post on the president’s Truth Social. In the post, @TheSCIF claimed that “direct switches of votes from one candidate to another” occurred throughout Pennsylvania during the 2020 election.

This “vote switching,” as it is known in election denier circles, resulted in Trump losing hundreds of thousands of votes throughout the state – a claim that has been discredited by both Democratic and Republican election officials, and centers around conspiracies about foreign manipulation of voting machines, primarily in Georgia.

“These removals affected at least 15 counties,” in Pennsylvania, @TheSCIF wrote on X, which Trump linked to.

We know what President Donald Trump’s attempts to interfere in elections looked like back in 2020. Trump and Republicans didn’t repeat those efforts in 2024 — funny how there only seems to be widespread election fraud when Democrats lose — but until now, it hasn’t been entirely clear how the president and his supporters would interfere in November.

Now, we have some ideas.

National strategy, local focus

Trump’s threats to “nationalize” elections and focus on 2020 election fraud conspiracies span the nation. In his interview with Bongino, Trump also lamented the case of Tina Peters, a Colorado elections worker who was convicted for tampering with election materials and is currently serving out her sentence in state prison there.

Trump has already issued a pardon for Peters, which doesn’t apply because she has not been convicted of a federal crime. In the interview with Bongino, Trump vaguely threatened state officials over the Peters case, saying “they better let her out fast.”

“Trump is trying to rewrite the history of his loss in the 2020 election and undermine Americans’ civil rights,” Colorado Secretary of State, Jena Griswold, a Democrat, told American Doom in a statement. “He has abused executive power – suing Democratic led states for private data on American voters, using ICE to terrorize American citizens and coerce states to comply with unlawful election demands, and weaponizing the DOJ to try to free his criminal allies. We must all hold the line, and not give in. Trump will not succeed.”

Peters was a local election official. Those same officials may be the target of Justice Department investigations into debunked fraud claims in Georgia, sources have told American Doom.

“Now you’re going to see something in Georgia,” Trump said recently, referencing the Jan. 28 FBI raid in Fulton County and the ballots that the agency confiscated, “you’re going to see some interesting things come out.”

With the weight of a Justice Department investigation into Fulton County, we could see the Georgia State Election Board (SEB) make a play to take over election administration there — something made possible thanks to the post-2020 law SB 202. Exactly what this would look like isn’t clear: SB 202’s language giving the SEB power to take over election administration in counties is fairly vague.

Dysfunction and chaos at the Georgia State Election Board

Regardless, we’ll know more about what crimes Trump’s Justice Department believes were committed in Fulton County in 2020. On Sunday, a federal judge ordered the release of the DOJ’s affidavit that led to the raid on Jan. 28.

American Doom was the first news outlet to file a motion to have the document unsealed, followed by media organizations like the Atlanta Journal Constitution, the Associated Press and others.

Flurry of posts replay 2020 gameplan

Trump’s current focus on election fraud claims is strikingly similar to the lead-up to the 2020 election, when the president amplified fears of widespread election fraud tied to mail-in voting. At the time, states were preparing for large numbers of mail-in ballots due to voters’ fears of being exposed to Covid as the coronavirus pandemic raged. Those ballots were expected to be mostly from Democratic voters, which wouldn’t be counted until after in-person ballots – cast primarily by Republicans voting for Trump – were counted.

As the result for mail-in ballots came in, Trump’s lead in crucial states like Pennsylvania began to go toward Biden. Trump and Republicans falsely chalked this up to mail-in ballot fraud – claims that were rebuffed by Republican election officials like Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt and others, and were thrown out by courts as part of Trump’s 62 lawsuits attempting to overturn the election.

With Democrats continuing to lead every major poll and possibly slated to take control of the House, Trump has ramped up his election fraud claims. Since Jan. 19, Trump has posted about past or current election fraud falsehoods more than 30 times. The posts include references to most of the major right-wing conspiracies surrounding elections, including manipulation of voting machines by the Chinese, an Italian spy agency and the Iranian and Venezuelan governments; ballot harvesting; “deliberate evidence destruction;” double-counted ballots; and more.

Twice, Trump has shared posts that espouse the racist Great Replacement Theory. The posts directly allege that Democrats are allowing undocumented immigrants to flood the country, where they then vote in elections. (Noncitizen voting is exceedingly rare. Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security has found just 10,000 instances of noncitizens being registered to vote among a review of almost 50 million voter registration records, the New York Times reported.)

Nothing will stop Georgia's election deniers

Combined with an administration-wide effort to pursue election fraud claims – through Justice Department lawsuits against dozens of states that seek lists of voters, as well as Gabbard’s reported directive to prove 2020 fraud claims – Trump’s recent posts on Truth Social allude to more than just the random, late-night and early morning sharing that the president routinely practices. The content that Trump is consuming and sharing is now having real-world effects – and Democrats and voting rights advocates worry that it’s just the beginning of even more unprecedented interference in elections by the president and his administration.

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