November Is Coming: Here Are Some Ways Trump Is Trying To Steal The Election

So far, the judicial branch of the United States government has done a consistent job of preventing President Donald Trump from manipulating and/or flat-out stealing the upcoming midterm elections. But the real story isn’t that federal judges are standing between voters and our democracy; the real story is that the president of the United States keeps forcing judges to play that role in the first place.

But before we get deeper into that, let’s be clear on one thing: Donald Trump has never produced a single shred of evidence that the 2020 election was rigged against him. 

In fact, while we’re here: Republicans have never produced a single shred of evidence that U.S. elections need to be any more secure than they have been for decades. They’ve never produced a shred of evidence indicating widespread voter fraud, or even regular instances of voter fraud. They’ve never produced a shred of evidence that noncitizens are voting in U.S. elections. They’ve never produced evidence that mail-in voting is being used to cheat, that voting machines have been rigged, that people are voting under the names of dead people, or that entire Democratic states have conspired to defraud their election processes. They’ve never produced any evidence to counter the many investigations and studies that have shown time and time again that voter fraud of any kind is extremely rare in the U.S.

For the last several years, Trump and MAGA Republicans have made these extraordinary claims, but they’ve never given anyone a single tangible reason to believe any of them. They’ve never substantiated any of it, and all of their attempts to fix what isn’t broken — and the propaganda they rely on to justify doing so — constitute the only real election interference U.S. voters need to fear.

Again, Trump hasn’t been successful — his many attempts to undermine democracy have caused him nothing but public embarrassment — but here are the ways he has tried and will try to steal the midterms.

Trump Rejects International Election Monitors

For two decades, the federal government has welcomed a key group of international election observers to monitor the midterms. According to The Hill, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has observed and reported on midterm and presidential races since 2002, but the Trump administration has decided to break that tradition and will not allow these monitors with the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) to participate.

Here’s a little more on the organization, via The Hill:

The U.S. is one of the 57 members of the OSCE, an international body created after the Cold War to promote democracy and human rights in post-Soviet states. The U.S. hosting OSCE election observers is viewed as an important signal of transparency that encourages countries with more vulnerable democracies to open up their elections to observation and monitoring. 

“The Trump Administration’s decision not to invite international observers to the United States is deeply antithetical to the spirit of freedom, democracy and transparency that defines our elections,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), the outgoing ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement. 

“I urge the Trump Administration to respect the role of independent election observers and ensure that the United States holds itself to the same standards that we would expect of any other democracy.”

Shaheen is also a member of the Helsinki Commission, an independent organization led by members of Congress and housed on Capitol Hill that monitors OSCE compliance in member states. 

The election-monitoring mission of the OSCE’s human rights office, the ODIHR, does not have any enforcement mechanisms, and it does not determine whether an election is legitimate. Its purpose is to assess the election environment and make recommendations to bring it more in line with OSCE commitments on democratic standards. 

Trump’s decision to keep the OSCE out puts the U.S. in the company of only a few nations, including Belarus and Russia, whose “most recent elections were widely condemned as a sham,” as The Hill reported.

“A defining characteristic of a strong, secure democracy is its willingness to subject its electoral processes to independent scrutiny,” said the Democracy Renewal Group, founded by about 200 former U.S. Agency for International Development staff members purged by the Trump administration. “If this decision stands, the United States will join a notorious group of countries too threatened by independent scrutiny to invite observers: Russia, Belarus, and Yugoslavia under Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.” 

So, why break this tradition? Well, if you ask a number of Democratic lawmakers, it’s because Trump doesn’t want the way his administration moves to be scrutinized, because that would make it difficult to cheat.

“I think Trump doesn’t want any observers at all because I think he’s got some hijinks that he’s going to lay on the nation on Election Day,” Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) told The Hill. “I think this is a tip, when you say you don’t want the OSCE observers, that means there’s something you don’t want to observe.”

Exactly.

Meanwhile, as we previously reported, Trump’s Justice Department plans to deploy 1,000 federal election monitors of its own. According to Reuters, that represents “the largest number in its history and nearly double the 590 deployed in the 2024 election.”

So, the administration wants monitors; it just wants monitors it handpicks. Not suspicious at all, amirite?

Trump Wants A Federal Takeover Of The Voting Process

Since early this year, Trump has called for a federal takeover of the voting process, which the U.S. Constitution leaves to the states to oversee.

“We should take over the voting, the voting, in at least 15 places,” he said in February, during a sit-down with right-wing podcaster Dan Bongino. “The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”

In July, the DOJ sent letters to every state’s chief election official, warning that state and local election administrators could face prosecution if federal authorities conclude they knowingly allowed noncitizens to vote or failed to take adequate steps to keep them off voter rolls, Reuters reported. Is it the federal government’s job to police states and how they conduct their elections? Of course not. Has that stopped Trump from issuing an executive order that would essentially give him the power to do just that? Nope. Has it stopped Trump’s DOJ from demanding that states fork over their voter rolls to be inspected by the federal government? No, but courts keep telling the administration it has no right to force any state official to turn over such information, which is why Trump is now 0 for 26 in getting courts to approve the DOJ’s plans to obtain state voter rolls.

In June, a federal judge ordered the Department of Homeland Security to stop allowing states to use a centralized national database of citizens built for checking immigration status to screen their voter rolls, which the database was repurposed for last year via an executive order signed by Trump.

But then last month, Trump’s conservative friends on the U.S. Supreme Court — whom he derides as “disloyal” every time they rule against him — reversed that decision, allowing for the expanded database to be used.

This month, under the direction of DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, ICE reviewed tens of millions of voter rolls, claiming to be looking for noncitizen voters. Please don’t hold your breath waiting for the administration to report any significant findings. 

Trump keeps trying these roundabout ways of seizing control over elections for the same reason he has spent the last year or so trying to force the SAVE Act through Congress, and for the same reason he called for an end to mail-in voting up until he got desperate enough to encourage his voters to vote by mail: he’s trying to restrict the vote and fish for reasons to disenfranchise Democratic voters.

When All Else Fails, He Asks Republicans To Cheat

No matter how many times Trump finds a fresh way to undermine the U.S. democracy, the GOP’s prospects for maintaining both chambers — or either chamber — of Congress continue to look more and more abysmal as we are just a few weeks out from election day. Because, again, the overwhelming majority of Trump’s attempts at his own brand of election interference have failed. Now, he’s down to just a few moves: telling absurd lies about Democrats, bribing voters to vote red with $90 checks and $5,000 IOUs, and, when all else fails, telling his constituents flat-out that they should cheat.

Oh, y’all remember “Trumpapalooza,” right? Remember this part?

 “So please, raise your right hand: I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States,” Trump said, directing his audience to repeat the pledge, which ended with him saying, “I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try to cheat like hell like they do.” 

Only “they” don’t — not according to the dozens of judges across lower courts, appellate courts, and the Supreme Court, the former head of election cybersecurity, and Trump’s own first-term attorney general and Department of Justice, all of whom said six years ago that there was no evidence of election rigging.

If your vote wasn’t important, they wouldn’t be working this hard at stealing it from you, folks. Act accordingly.

SEE ALSO:

The GOP Is Staging Klan Rallies Across The Country To Win The Midterms

RFK Jr. Claims Arabs ‘Don’t Produce Science’ Or Literature