President Donald Trump’s claims about election fraud may have quieted down after he won the 2024 election, but they are making a comeback now, ahead of the midterm elections this November. He said this week that Republicans should even “take over” voting in more than a dozen states.
Trump, recently told former Federal Bureau of Investigation deputy director Dan Bongino on his podcast that the GOP “should take over the voting in at least 15 places” because those places “are so crooked.” However, he also included some incorrect alleged election numbers, and experts have noted that this proposal is not exactly constitutional.
In fact, Article 1 of the Constitution puts that power with states, KCBS Political Analyst Mark Sandalow explained.
“Now there have been some exceptions to that, you know, the… voting rights act put the federal government in charge of some elections where they weren’t letting people vote in the South. In 2000, famously the Supreme Court told Florida, you can no longer recount the [former Vice President Al] Gore and [former President George W.] Bush election,” Sandalow added. “But, it’s hard to tell whether the president is just playing to his base and sort of treating the public as idiots, or whether he’s delusional and he really believes that he won the 2020 election.”
Experts cited by CNN also said that the proposal is not constitutional. Lawyers told Newsweek that there is no legal basis for the president to nationalize elections, as he indicated interest in doing.
Trump and Republicans have made repeated claims that the 2020 election – which he lost to former President Joe Biden – was corrupted, though evidence of these claims has not been provided. Election fraud claims have played a role in the deadly Capitol riot of 2021 as well as several lawsuits and legal charges.
Some voter fraud can be tracked in the U.S. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, has an online map tracking what it claims are cases of election fraud and Audacy has reported on three Trump supporters accused of voter fraud themselves. Still, research has shown that voter fraud is rare in the U.S., per the Brookings Institution.
“No election outcome in the U.S. has ever been altered by ballot fraud,” Brookings said in October 2024.
During his talk with Bongino, Trump said that: “People were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegally ... and it’s ... amazing that the Republicans aren’t tougher on it. The Republicans should say ‘we want to take over.’”
Audacy previously reported on Trump making similar claims about migration and voter fraud back in 2024. Migrant voting fraud narratives are a myth that’s been around since the 1800s, according to Ron Hayduk, an expert on noncitizen voting at San Francisco State University quoted by the NPR. Illegal immigrants are not allowed to vote.
Trump’s latest claims about voter fraud come amid warning signs for the GOP (now in majority control of both the House and the Senate). A Harvard/CAPS/Harris poll of 2,000 registered voters conducted last week found that just 43% of likely voters believe the country is on the right track.
Approval for Republicans was down, while approval for Democrats was at its highest since 2024. Per the poll results, Democrats now have 4-point lead in the midterms.
USA Today also noted that a special election in Texas last week was also a warning sign for Republicans. Democrat Taylor Rehmet managed to flip a Republican seat in the election for Texas state Senate in a district Trump won by 17 percentage points in the 2024 presidential election. The president had even backed Republican Leigh Wambsganss in the race.
“I’m not on the ballot,” Trump told reporters on Feb. 1, USA Today said. It described Trump as trying to distance himself from the failure.
“It’s unclear as to whether or not the president is simply trying to fire up his base so that he can claim that the midterm results, that [if] they don’t go the way he wants, are corrupt, or whether or not the president simply, you know, sort of like the way that the Fonz back in ‘Happy Days’ couldn’t say the words, ‘I’m wrong’ – maybe the president simply cannot accept in his brain the fact that he lost and this is the only way that he can rationalize it,” said Sandalow of the president’s proposal for the GOP to take over elections.
As Trump trots out his election fraud claims again, Democrats are now also sounding their own election interference alarm bells, POLTICO reported. Immigration enforcement issues in Minneapolis, including the fatal shooting of two U.S. citizens by federal agents, have resulted in concerns that these deployments could act as voter suppression in November, the outlet said.
There’s also the issue of Attorney General Pam Bondi responding to the violence in Minneapolis with a letter to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz demanding that the state give the Justice Department complete access to its voter rolls. This letter was published by The New York Times.
According to the Brennan Center for Justice, the federal government has no authorization to demand confidential voter information from the states. Even so, the Trump administration has tried to demand access to voter records from 44 states and Washington D.C. It’s also sued 20 for not complying, but two courts have sided with the states.
Bondi’s letter to Walz was described by the Brennan Center as “an unambiguous abuse of power.”
In Fulton County, Ga., where Trump was briefly booked into jail on felony counts related to trying to overturn an election, the FBI recently raided an elections office to seize ballots, drawing criticism from the American Civil Liberties Union. NBC News reported that lawyers in Fulton County are preparing to file a lawsuit against the FBI.
“You’re going to see some interesting things come in,” Trump told Bonginio. “But you know, like the 2020, election, I won that election by so much.”
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board pushed back against these claims last month, writing: “The nation’s MAGA minds are still looking back at 2020 and stretching to justify President Trump’s delusion of a stolen election.”
As for what the public thinks, the United States Democracy Center nonprofit organization said that “winning elections drives confidence up, while losing elections pushes confidence down,” when it comes to the confidence in elections. That tends to make belief in election integrity somewhat politically polarized and causes it to shift as different parties win.