Trump doesn't care if he wins fairly  —he's rigging the system: experts

President Donald Trump has done a number of things that suggest he plans on stealing the 2026 midterm elections. According to experts who spoke with AlterNet. If voters do not act now to stop him, he could conceivably succeed in doing so.

There are many factors suggesting Trump will try to steal the midterms. In addition to attempting a coup after his loss to then-Vice President Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, he has imposed restrictions on mail-in voting, insinuated that he would deploy ICE and radical groups to polling locations, suggested he will purge voters from the rolls using DOGE and state-shared voter files, pushed for voter ID laws and employed partisan gerrymandering all over America. When asked how he plans to win the midterms despite his historically low approval ratings (stuck in the 30s), he has repeatedly professed indifference as to what voters think of him.

A representative from the Democracy Defenders Fund — a nonprofit organization staffed by a bipartisan group of lawyers, politicians, activists and other experts concerned about Trump’s anti-democracy measures — elaborated on how each of these variables when combined pose a serious threat to the democratic integrity of the midterms.

“I think there are two things to consider,” Pooja Chaudhuri, Senior Counsel/Deputy Legal Director at Democracy Defenders Fund who specializes in voting rights as well as election law litigation and advocacy, told AlterNet. “One is that the election is made up of voters, and so the outcome depends on people turning out to the polls and voting. The problem is ... the chilling effect on voters.”

Chaudhuri added, “When voters hear that ICE may be deployed to the polls, that mail-in voting rules are changing close to the election, a lot of voters might say, ‘I'm just not going to go out and vote.’ That could happen in many different ways. There are vulnerable communities — people may come from mixed-status families — they're US citizens, but they might decide, "I'm not going to vote." So one aspect is the chilling effect on voters that all of these actions would have.” In addition to that intimidating factor, Chaudhuri argued the gerrymandering and FBI seizure of Fulton County, GA also could keep voters away from the polls.

“We're going to see consequences in terms of voters saying, ‘I don't want the FBI to get my personal ballot in the future,’” Chaudhuri argued. “So, to sum up, I do agree that putting it all together, it does paint an ominous picture.”

Dan Vicuña amplified Chaudhuri’s observations. He is Senior Policy Director for Voting and Fair Representation at Common Cause, a nonprofit good government group with a distinguished pedigree tracing back to 1970.

“What they all add up to is a desire to avoid any accountability to the voters in the midterm elections — to ensure, to preordain the outcome of a midterm that he thinks is going to go badly for him,” Vicuña told AlterNet. “We know, from the Big Lie of the 2020 election to spurring on a violent revolt to overthrow a free and fair election, that he has no respect for democratic norms, for the voice of the people. This is entirely about his own power and his own ego. He will even invest in protecting that ego and protecting his power at the expense of the needs of the public. People are suffering with high gas prices and affordability issues, and he does not care. All that matters is protecting his power, and he has no interest in whether he does that through democratic means.”

He concluded, “I think this all adds up to a desire to ensure that his party stays in power and his ability to do what he wants — to attack vulnerable communities — remains intact.”

Not only are these efforts anti-democratic; some of them may be 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. 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.”

Susannah Goodman, Common Cause’s Policy Director in the Voting and Fair Representation Program, offered other examples of Trump’s potentially illegal behavior.

“The other thing is that, as you well know, the administration has been trying to compel states to turn their voter rolls over to the federal government and to consolidate all of that in a mega database,” Goodman said. “A number of states have refused to turn over their unredacted voter rolls with personal identifying information — Social Security numbers, driver's licenses, et cetera. Common Cause and our partners have intervened in, I think, 17 of those cases on behalf of voters.”

She added, “I don't believe there has been a single case, Dan — correct me if I'm wrong — where, when the state has resisted and claimed they are not going to turn these voter rolls over, the court has dismissed the case or compelled the states to turn them over. The government has not had a compelling reason, and the states have won. So when states fight back, they win. We have been involved in that litigation. That is another huge power grab by the administration. It is also an illegal power grab, and when we have pushed back, we have won.”

Some illegal power grabs, though, may not be caught until it’s too late. Chaudhuri pointed out that “even without the amount of chaos we're seeing for this election, we've seen it in past elections when well-meaning states might start scrubbing their voter rolls closer to the election and voters start getting notices — for example, ‘You have a felony, you have to come and verify at the elections office.’ Many voters don't get these notices and then can't comply with the timeframes under state law. So if we've seen it in the past in a different context, we're definitely going to see it here, because this is a much larger-scale assault on our voting system.”

The risk of being purged from the voting rolls without knowing about it is amplified by the possibility that Trump may do this intentionally.

“The administration's demand that every state turn over its voter rolls has culminated in the most recent executive order Trump issued, where one of the buckets orders two executive branch agencies to compile these massive databases called the state citizenship lists,” Chaudhuri explained. “Under the terms of the executive order, those lists have to be made available to the states 60 days before the election. We've seen states like Texas and Missouri use federal government lists — they've used the SAVE database — in order to verify whether people are citizens, and have wrongly purged and wrongly targeted people who are US citizens. The administration now creating these massive lists before every federal election is going to create not just massive chaos, but also, again, a chilling effect on voters.”

When asked if people could simply show up on Election Day thinking that they're registered to vote only to find out that they are not, Chaudhuri described this as “a very realistic concern.”

“I used to staff the Election Protection Coalition when I worked as a voting rights attorney at the Lawyers' Committee, and we actually saw voters going to the polls and being told by the poll worker, ‘You're not registered to vote,’ or ‘You're not in the poll book,’” Chaudhuri said. “And it's too late by the time you find out on Election Day to register to vote in many states. Here, a voter may very well be purged and find out too late — and then they will be disenfranchised. The one thing we would encourage voters to do is to vote early. And if they're voting by mail, to again vote early and not wait close to Election Day to get in their ballots.”

While voters may feel helpless in light of these threats, there are things they can do. If they want to confirm they have not been illegally scrubbed from the voting rolls, they can vote early and contact their local election authorities. Additionally Goodman explained that there are ways for ordinary people to stop what Trump is doing on an organized rather than personal level — but they need to act now.

“The first is that the voting rights community is fighting all of these attacks,” Goodman said. “So while it seems overwhelming when you read about them and, as you said, put it all together — and the through-line is that he wants to alter the outcome of the election — Common Cause, the ACLU, Lawyers' Committee, Campaign Legal Center, all of our groups are working together in a coordinated way to address all of these assaults on many different levels: legislatively, with litigation, with grassroots organizing, meeting people at the kitchen table. There is an assault, but it is being answered in the states.”

She added, “And the second thing is we have faith in voters — that voters will turn out and they will cast their ballots. Our election protection outreach is really designed not to intimidate voters, not to tell them that it's game over, but to tell them that the reason these attacks are happening is because their voice is very powerful and they need to make a plan to vote. They need to vote early if possible, and stay engaged.”

Vicuña added that voters similarly succeeded in stopping Trump’s anti-voter legislation, the SAVE Act. Yet even if voters are able to entirely thwart Trump’s attempts to steal the midterms, there still may be lingering damage.

“The only thing I'd add is that even when these efforts to subvert the election fail, they run a risk of sowing confusion,” Vicuña opined. “That's why we're involved with a lot of nonpartisan organizations and election protection efforts across the country — to combat misinformation and give voters the right information they need to know what their local rules are. Trump is a chaos agent trying to sow confusion, and we're going to push back in that way as well.”

Chaudhuri encouraged people to pay attention to these issues and not feel discouraged, despite “media fatigue” covering Trump’s scandals.

“There is so much going on, and that might be number six of your five — we're being bombarded by new things happening all the time every day,” Chaudhuri said. “The news is dominated by five new things that nobody even thought of. And so that's a tactic as well — to desensitize the public and the average voter, and shift the focus away from what matters, which is voters being informed of what could go wrong and having the tools to know what they can do in order to cast their ballot and have that ballot count.”

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