Donald and Melania Trump
President Donald Trump has already endeavored to hack the 2026 midterm elections with an effort to redraw congressional lines to guarantee Republican wins. Then Attorney General Pam Bondi began demanding voter rolls from blue states to cut voters out, using the claim that federal systems say they're not citizens. However, Democratic attorneys general have a plan.
Last week, the former Maricopa County recorder called out the system the feds use to purge voters from the rolls, noting it often leads to false positives, with legitimate voters being purged without their knowledge.
Politico reported Monday that for months, the officials have been preparing a defense to protect the vote in November.
“[Trump] wants to continue to have his party prevail, seemingly by whatever means necessary,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta told Politico. “So we have to be ready for that, sad and tragic as it is.”
Over the past several months, Trump has been hammering his 2020 election loss as fraudulent and using that same claim to justify tighter election restrictions. Republicans are desperately trying to pass voter legislation that would require gathering new documents to prove citizenship, not only to register to vote but also to vote in person.
“I tell you what, Republicans have to win this one,” Trump said, speaking in Georgia. “We’ll never lose a race. For 50 years, we won’t lose a race.”
It's only one of Trump's many concerning comments about the election, Democracy Docket wrote.
Asked if Trump would accept the results of the midterms if Republicans lose, he said he would, but only “if the elections are honest.” However, he then claimed that Democrats would cheat anyway.
Washington Attorney General Nick Brown said that Trump and his GOP allies are making the kinds of comments that are a “red-alarm fire that people need to take very seriously."
“He will try anything,” Brown promised when speaking to Politico. So, “we have to just sort of think creatively about: If you were the president and you were trying to invalidate an election or undermine an election, what are the oddball, ludicrous, unconstitutional theories that you might advance?”
Earlier this month, Politico noted that Trump even requested to "nationalize" elections that are generally run by state and local governments.
“If the president said, ‘Look, I want my ICE people to protect American elections … go to all these polling places and stand out in front with guns,’ I think they would do it,” said Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, a Democrat. “And I think we all need to be prepared to deal with that problem.”
Recently, the Trump administration was able to get a judge to issue a search warrant to seize documents in Fulton County, Georgia.
“We recognize that what happened in Fulton County could happen in Detroit. Not because there’s any merit to claims that anything wrong happened in Detroit, but because we know that those claims will be made again,” said Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel (D).
“The president and his administration know and understand that Democrats don’t win statewide in Michigan without counting the Detroit vote,” she added. “So of course Trump wants to undermine in people’s minds the integrity of Detroit elections, even though that’s not borne fruit whenever that has been investigated.”