President Donald Trump has lost roughly two dozen court cases involving his attempts to seize control of local elections, and has successfully installed members of his Big Lie cult into key positions of power. Now, according to a recent report, Trump is ratcheting up his efforts to make sure that Republicans retain control of Congress in the November midterm elections, regardless of the will of the voters.
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“A series of moves by Donald Trump’s administration to sow doubt in the integrity of US elections have intensified concern among voting experts – and sparked hope among election deniers – that it could declare a national emergency,” reported The Guardian’s George Chidi on Sunday. “The White House and US federal agencies have released a string of documents this summer – including disputed analyses of alleged voting by noncitizens and historical intelligence memos – stoking expectations that the US president could move to exert greater control over November’s US midterm elections.”
Chidi added, “Trump used a primetime television address in July to claim – again – that US elections were vulnerable to foreign manipulation, and repeat the lie that the 2020 presidential election, which he lost to Joe Biden, was stolen.”
He continued, “Trump’s speech prompted Steve Bannon, his former political strategist, to predict the US president will declare a state of emergency on national security grounds to ‘protect’ elections.”
Trump similarly alluded to right-wing radio host Wayne Allyn Root, when asked if he would declare a national emergency, that “let me just say, stranger things have happened, OK? I’ll leave it at that.”
Aria Branch, a partner at the Elias Law Group that has blocked other Trump election orders, told The Guardian that the administration is “trying to lay the groundwork to declare some sort of emergency to nationalize elections. I think the president is looking for any opportunity to do that.” At the front of these efforts is his SAVE America Act, which would give the Department of Homeland Security the power to de-register everyone it deemed ineligible to vote and significantly reduce mail-in voting.
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“The constitution is extremely clear on this, and the founders recognized the risk of centralizing power over elections in the executive branch,” Branch told Chidi. “Very helpful, in terms of litigation to push back on these types of efforts.”
Dan Vicuña, Senior Policy Director for Voting and Fair Representation at Common Cause, told AlterNet in June that Trump’s efforts to curtail voting are quite possibly illegal.
“I think some of these attempts to federalize, to nationalize elections are clearly illegal,” Vicuña explained. “You’ve seen some of that overreach already struck down — attempts to order independent agencies to force a strict voter ID requirement on people. That has been rejected. Common Cause is in court challenging the latest executive order to turn the United States Postal Service into some election administration agency and to create a further bureaucratic layer to make it more difficult to vote by mail. In terms of the president’s authority to order around USPS, it’s illegal.”
He added, “In terms of USPS’s authority to become some sort of national election administration agency, it far exceeds the legal authority that Congress gave to the postal service. The statute describing what kind of work the postal service would do is about postal service work — processing mail and selling stamps. It has nothing to do with election administration.”
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