Trump’s desire to ‘nationalize’ voting alarms election security experts
To election security experts, an FBI raid on the elections office in Atlanta, Georgia, may be a sign of things to come.
Nine months before the 2026 midterm elections, their concerns about federal interference in local election procedures were only heightened when President Donald Trump suggested “nationalizing” elections in at least 15 locations — apparently including Atlanta, where he is still trying to prove he won the 2020 presidential election.
“Voters across the country are outraged at the violence inflicted on our communities, most visibly in Minnesota, by immigration enforcement and federal agents,” Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s voting rights project, told Straight Arrow News. “It is no surprise that the Trump administration is looking to manufacture reasons to challenge votes, change election rules, and kick voters off the rolls in 2026.”
“This raid is further proof that the Trump administration is desperate not only to sow distrust in our democratic process, but to distract from its egregious abuse of power,” Lakin added.
In a divided nation, where the federal government and the states are increasingly at odds, Trump would like to take this constitutionally appointed power away from states.
How he intends to do so is not yet clear. Whether it would be legal is far less murky.
‘We should take over the voting’
Recent days have given election security experts plenty to consider.
Last Thursday, FBI agents loaded hundreds of boxes of 2020 ballots into trucks at the Fulton County elections office in an Atlanta suburb. They worked under the supervision of Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, whose job normally involves overseeing the work of the nation’s spy agencies. However, Gabbard had announced last April that her office has been investigating voting machines to protect election integrity.
The day after the raid, Gabbard arranged a call between Trump and FBI agents involved in the raid. The call inserted Trump into a sensitive criminal investigation in which he has a personal stake.
Then, on Monday, Trump said on a podcast that Republicans should nationalize voting to obliterate what he calls widespread voter fraud.
“The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over.’ We should take over the voting … in at least many, 15 places,” Trump told podcast host Dan Bongino, the former deputy director of the FBI. “The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting. We have states that are so crooked, and they’re counting votes.”
He singled out Georgia, which he said “everybody knows” he won in 2020. Joe Biden won the state by fewer than 12,000 votes out of about 500,000 cast.
“You’re going to see some interesting things” in Georgia, Trump said, apparently referring to the FBI raid.
Trump has a long history of claiming elections are rigged. Before the 2016 presidential election, he said that if he lost, it would be because of voter fraud. He continued claiming fraud, especially by noncitizen voters, after losing to Biden four years later — even though numerous investigations failed to verify his allegations. He predicted more fraud in 2024 and repeated the false claims about noncitizen voters in the interview with Bongino.
His repeated allegations have election law experts wondering whether he will intervene in the midterms in an effort to keep Republicans in control of Congress. He recently told Republican lawmakers that he expects to be impeached again — following two impeachments during his first term — if Democrats take power in the House.
Election law experts are concerned about the possibility that Trump will intervene in this year’s midterm elections in an effort to maintain power over Congress. Trump also supports proposed legislation called the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, which would require documentary proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote.
The House passed the legislation, known as SAVE, last year, and a sponsor recently wrote a letter to Senate Republicans asking them to act on the measure.
“American elections should be fair and free, not subject to foreign influence,” wrote Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas. “Illegal aliens have no right to be in America, and they certainly shouldn’t be voting.”
However, the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center says the legislation “could silence millions of voters by creating new barriers to voter registration that make it harder for Americans to make their voices heard.”
Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer described SAVE as “Jim Crow 2.0.”
Limited authority
The president alone cannot constitutionally seize voting administration. The election clause in the U.S. Constitution bestows states with the power to determine the “time, places, and manners” of elections. Many election law experts say that the president cannot legally federalize elections.
“The law is crystal clear: It is illegal to deploy federal troops or armed federal law enforcement to any polling place,” Sean Morales-Doyle, director of voting rights and elections for the Brennan Center for Justice, wrote. “In fact, it is a federal crime for anyone in the U.S. military to interfere in elections in any way. More specifically, it is a crime, punishable by up to five years in prison, to deploy federal ‘troops or armed men’ to any location where voting is taking place or elections are being held, unless ‘such force be necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States.’”
Trump, however, has repeatedly taken unprecedented or at least unusual actions, from deploying the military on routine law enforcement missions to suing his own administration. “[G]iven the recent politicization of the Justice Department, it’s reasonable to doubt whether the administration’s own lawyers would pursue charges related to a deployment ordered by the president,” Morales-Doyle wrote. “But these crimes are subject to a five-year statute of limitations, so anyone who complies with such an order could still face prosecution in the future.”
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Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
