Donald Trump suggested in a conservative podcast released Monday that Republican state officials “take over” and “nationalize” elections in 15 states to protect the party from being voted out of office.
Trump has framed the issue as a way to prevent undocumented immigrants from voting. Claims that non-citizens vote in numbers that affect an election lies. But it raised concerns about the president’s potential efforts to rig November’s midterm elections.
While defining his victory in terms of the counties he won in 2024 – and ignoring the huge population difference between big cities and rural counties – Trump said about immigrants: “If the Republicans don’t get them, you can’t win another election as a Republican.”
Trump said that immigrants were “brought” to the United States to vote, “and they vote illegally. And the, you know, it’s amazing that the Republicans aren’t stronger on this. The Republicans have to say ‘we want to take over.’ We need to replace voting in at least that many – 15 places – the Republicans need to nationalize voting.
“We have states that are so lopsided — and they’re counting the votes — we have states that I won, that show I didn’t win,” Trump continued. “Now, you’re going to see something in Georgia, where they got a court order to get the ballots. You’re going to see some interesting things come out.”
said Trump comments to Dan Bongino, the podcast host turned short-lived former deputy director of the FBI, came less than a week after FBI agents served a criminal search warrant to seize nearly 700 boxes of ballots and other election materials from Fulton county, long the target of Trump’s false claims of election fraud. Trump reportedly made a brief phone call to the agents, along with the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, to congratulate them on the end of the raid.
Voting is not a national process in the US: the constitution gives each state the responsibility of managing its elections. Congress can enact laws to protect the constitutional rights of voters to preserve the one-person-one-vote standards and prevent discrimination, but the federal government does not control the election apparatus.
Trump’s comments also come as Congress considers several bills that could have a significant impact on the US election.
Anna Paulina Luna, a representative from Florida, led the effort by a group of Republicans to add the Save America Act of the spending bill needed to end the government shutdown, but the effort failed. The act requires proof of citizenship – not just a driver’s license – when registering to vote or updating voter registration. It also largely bans mail-in voter registration and government-sponsored voter registration, and charges election officials with a felony if they register a voter without citizenship documentation, even if that voter is a citizen.
An earlier version passed the House but stalled in the Senate. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York described the legislation as a “poison pill” if added to the spending bill as an amendment.
Tighter elections billthe Make Elections Great Again Act, introduced last week by Bryan Steil, a Republican representative from Wisconsin. In addition to the provisions of the Save Act, the legislation would ban ranked-choice voting and universal voting by mail, require all mailed ballots to be in an election office before the polls close, prevent third parties from assisting voters and create a national election auditing system.