How to Deter Trump From Rigging and Overturning the Midterm Election

[Celerity]

Today on TAP: As on January 6th, even Republican opposition may not suffice to keep him from trying.

https://prospect.org/2026/02/05/how-to-deter-trump-from-rigging-overturning-midterm-election/


An FBI press office staffer approaches the Fulton County Election Hub and Operation Center, January 28, 2026, in Union City, Georgia. Credit: Arvin Temka/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP

The good news about Donald Trump’s efforts to take control of the upcoming election is that the legal changes he’s seeking to make won’t get through the Congress. The bad news is that his illegal efforts might succeed. When Trump first raised the topic on a podcast over the weekend, his own press secretary felt compelled to say he was only referring to his support for the SAVE Act, now pending before Congress, which would require a raft of documentation from those trying to register to vote. Given the 60-vote threshold that the bill will run up against in the Senate, however, the nation will be saved from SAVE by Democratic opposition.

Similarly, Trump has no legal authority to get states to send him their voter rolls, which he fairly lusts after so he can strike likely Democratic voters from these lists. That absence of legal authority was rather glaringly revealed last week when Attorney General Pam Bondi offered Minnesota a deal: If the state just forked over its rolls, she hinted that the administration might just withdraw its ICE and Border Patrol goons. No administration action has revealed so starkly as Bondi’s ploy the fear Trump harbors about the coming election, and the absence of legal channels available to him to rig or curtail it.

As we’ve seen in Atlanta over the weekend, Trump can use the FBI to try to seize ballots, though he’s being sued by local government officials over that action. Come November, he could, I suppose, send in the feds to stop the vote counting in Democratic cities (and keep in mind that virtually every large American city is heavily Democratic). The problem with that is that if an urban county can’t certify its votes, neither can the state in which it’s located certify its votes. Impounding the ballots in, say, Harris County (Houston and its suburbs) means that Texas can’t certify its statewide election results for senator, governor, and its members of Congress and the legislature. Trump would probably be fine with that if he’d interceded in so many states that the new Congress couldn’t convene, but it’s hard to imagine that Republican elected officials would feel the same way.

In fact, a rift has already opened between Republicans on Capitol Hill, in various statehouses, and even in the West Wing, on the one hand, and Trump himself over the extreme measures he’s advocated for rigging the election. The GOP’s Senate majority leader, John Thune, has pointedly noted that the Constitution vests the administration of elections in the states, not the federal government. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s attempts to walk back Trump’s podcast comments made clear that much of the White House staff isn’t on board with overt election-rigging and denial, either.

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