Trump’s call to ‘nationalise’ elections sparks fury
President Donald Trump’s call for Republicans to “nationalize” the elections sparked a strong reaction from lawmakers, including several Republicans.
Democrats have expressed new concerns that Trump intends to interfere in the November midterm elections that will determine control of Congress.
In a podcast interview with former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino released Monday, Trump repeated his baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him and said his party should “take over” and “nationalize” voting in at least 15 places, without detailing what he meant.
Under the U.S. Constitution, state governments, not the federal government, oversee elections, and most contests are administered by county and local officials.
Democratic officials and voting rights advocates said Trump’s comments, made just days after the FBI searched his election office in Fulton County, Georgia, for the 2020 election, showed he planned to undermine, perhaps even manipulate, this year’s election results.
“This is not about the 2020 election,” Democratic U.S. Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia said at a news conference.
“This is obviously about what happens next.”
In the Oval Office on Tuesday, Trump urged Republican lawmakers to pass election reforms and reiterated his call for more national control.
“The state is the federal government’s agent in elections. I don’t know why the federal government doesn’t do these things,” Trump told reporters.
The president’s party has historically lost seats in midterm elections, and Democrats need to flip only three Republican-held districts in November to take control of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Brendan Nyhan, a professor of political science at Dartmouth College, wrote of X: “The last time he started talking like this, his allies minimized the risks and we ended up with January 6.” He referenced the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, by a mob of Trump supporters.
Trump has frequently expressed a desire to overhaul the nation’s elections, citing false claims that his 2020 loss to Democrat Joe Biden was due to fraud.
He called for mail-in ballots to be outlawed, questioned the security of voting machines, and claimed that millions of non-citizens vote regularly.
In recent years, Democrats have tried to implement some national election reforms, such as universal voting by mail, and address some aspects of voter ID laws, but without success.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Trump wants Congress to pass the bill called the SAVE Act, prepared by Republicans and containing new voting conditions.
“The President believes in the Constitution of the United States,” he said.
“However, he believes there is clearly a lot of fraud and irregularities in American elections.”
Some of Trump’s allies in states with close races told Reuters they believed Trump could threaten to withhold federal election-related funding to states that resist new voting measures such as ID requirements or limits on voting by mail.
The government provides hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid to states each year to help administer elections, including voting equipment, cybersecurity upgrades and training of election workers.
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