The Guardian - Trump’s former chief political adviser, Steve Bannon, is urging him to get the elections “squared away” even before the voters have a chance to weigh in. Former legal advisers have suggested the electoral system is in itself an emergency justifying extraordinary intervention, possibly including federal agents and the military stationed outside polling stations.
When Bannon was asked whether voters might find this intimidating, he replied: “You’re damn right.”
The administration itself, meanwhile, is moving on multiple fronts. Most visibly, Trump is pressuring Republican-run states to redraw their congressional maps outside the usual once-a-decade schedule and lock in as many additional safe Republican seats as possible.
Texas has gerrymandered an additional five GOP seats, Ohio two, and Missouri and North Carolina one each, and other states are considering whether to follow suit. (California voters, in response, have just approved a map promising five additional Democratic seats.)
Meanwhile, the justice department has abandoned its decades-long defense of voting rights, and in some instances – notably, a pending supreme court case that risks erasing a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act – has switched to the side arguing against protecting minority rights. The Department of Homeland Security has slashed funding and cut staff at an agency dedicated to protecting elections from physical and cybersecurity threats.
The administration is also demanding states hand over sensitive voter data and purge voter rolls, despite grave concerns about this deterring or disenfranchising large numbers of legitimate voters. In an executive order issued in March, the White House said it wants voters to produce birth certificates or passports as proof of eligibility. It wants the vote count to be over on election night, disregarding provisional and late mail-in ballots. In fact, Trump would like to do away with mail-in balloting altogether.
.Another possibility is that Trump will seek to wrest control of voting machines from state and local officials, as he came close to doing five years ago.
“Those of us engaged in this fight are witnessing a wholesale attack on free and fair elections,” said Marc Elias, a prominent election lawyer involved in more than 60 suits against the government. “From executive orders to budget cuts, the Trump administration is undermining election security and promoting voter disenfranchisement.”
Perhaps the biggest underlying fear is that Trump has no interest in democracy and aims, ultimately, to destroy it. “I don’t think Donald Trump wants another election,” California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, opined as Trump invoked legally questionable emergency powers to deploy national guard troops to US cities.
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