Will Trump Steal the Midterms?

You know, it would help if these states would change their voting laws like the rest of the world so everything could be counted on election night. But hey, if there’s one thing I love, it’s good government liberals and their reforms that are supposed to make things more democratic but end up just laying the roots for some fascist like Trump to take advantage of the instability that every other democratic nation in the world doens’t have. Just have all the votes counted on election day! Get your damn ballot in! Anyway, will Trump use this to steal the midterms? Probably he will try.

“For anybody who doubted that this administration is laying the foundation to interfere in elections, the deluge of activity over the last two weeks should lay those doubts to rest,” said Wendy Weiser, vice president of democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice, a legal think tank at NYU Law School.

This interference could take many forms. But recent events have increased experts’ level of concern about two possibilities in particular:

That the Trump administration will try to seize ballots and voting machines from key jurisdictions before votes have been fully counted.

That Trump will deploy ICE or other federal agents to the vicinity of critical polling places, so as to deter turnout among voters in general — and those with undocumented family members, in particular.

Below, I explain how recent events have made these hypotheticals more thinkable — and why the administration’s efforts to unduly sway the midterms in its favor are, nonetheless, unlikely to succeed.

The “nightmare scenario” for this year’s elections has long gone something like this: Control of the House comes down to a small number of close races. Republicans lead on Election Day in many of these contests, but their advantage steadily erodes as mail-in ballots arrive. The White House attributes these adverse trends to mass voter fraud and demands a halt to vote counting.

When states refuse to comply, the White House orders the military to seize ballots and voting machines from pivotal precincts before all votes have been tallied. The chain of custody over these ballots breaks down, making the elections’ true winners impossible to determine. The House’s incumbent GOP majority then asserts the authority to seat the Republican candidates in the contested races. American democracy, as we’ve known it, ends.

Even before the past two weeks, there was reason to take this hypothetical seriously. Indeed, throughout its first year in office, the second Trump administration appeared to be laying the groundwork for such treachery.

In an executive order last spring, Trump asserted that, if a mail-in ballot arrives after Election Day, states cannot legally count it. Currently, many states — including Nevada and Virginia — count ballots that arrive shortly after Election Day, if they were postmarked on time.

In that same executive order, Trump called on the Election Assistance Commission to decertify every voting machine in the United States — and then recertify only those that met an exacting set of requirements. As The Atlantic’s David Graham notes, it’s not even clear that the government could procure enough voting machines to meet these new standards in time for November’s midterms.

No, it probably won’t work. Yes, ICE is likely to be used as Trump’s personal force. Yes, this is a serious threat to democracy. And yes, the states need to get their shit together and create common sense reforms that make such scenarios far, far harder to try.