President Donald Trump mimics a weightlifter while he speaks at a dinner he hosts for Republican Senators at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., February 7, 2025. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
President Donald Trump has lost 21 out of 21 of his lawsuits to suppress voters, including in front of Republican judges. Now a legal reporter argues that as the president continues to suffer defeats, his tactics are getting “ominous.”
While reviewing Trump’s and MAGA’s voter suppression movements in Missouri and Texas, Democracy Docket's Zachary Roth reported on Sunday that “most ominously, Trump and his MAGA backers are already starting to target the Great Lakes State with their lies about illegal voting.” He quoted Trump on social media saying that his supporters should not “discount all of those fake mail-in ballots that will ‘surprisingly’ show up at the last moment. Get ready for another Rigged Election.”
Roth listed several methods Trump is using to try to rig the 2026 midterm elections in his favor, including “Trump’s order aimed at severely restricting mail voting, which the Supreme Court is now set to weigh in on; his administration’s effort to prod states into removing large numbers of voters from the rolls; and even a potential scheme by House Republicans to prevent Democrats who won their races from being seated.”
While it remains unclear whether these other efforts will work, Roth said that “still, it was another bad week for one major Trump administration anti-voting project: the Department of Justice (DOJ) crusade to obtain state voter rolls. Judges dismissed DOJ’s lawsuits against Colorado and Washington, D.C., bringing the department’s record in these cases to a frankly hilarious zero wins and 21 losses — or 22 if you count an appeals court defeat.”
Describing Trump’s repeated failures, Roth said that “one unfortunate DOJ lawyer was forced to admit this week in the lawsuit over Washington state’s rolls that nothing distinguishes that case from all the others that have been dismissed. He was reduced to arguing that all those federal courts — 20 at the time — had ‘misconstrued’ U.S law when they ruled that DOJ isn’t entitled to states’ unredacted voter rolls. Only the department, he suggested, is correctly interpreting the statute at issue.”
Speaking to AlterNet in June, Common Cause’s Senior Policy Director for Voting and Fair Representation Dan Vicuña argued that Trump’s anti-democracy measures can be traced back to the 2020 presidential election.
“What they all add up to is a desire to avoid any accountability to the voters in the midterm elections — to ensure, to preordain the outcome of a midterm that he thinks is going to go badly for him,” Vicuña told AlterNet. “We know, from the Big Lie of the 2020 election to spurring on a violent revolt to overthrow a free and fair election, that he has no respect for democratic norms, for the voice of the people. This is entirely about his own power and his own ego. He will even invest in protecting that ego and protecting his power at the expense of the needs of the public. People are suffering with high gas prices and affordability issues, and he does not care. All that matters is protecting his power, and he has no interest in whether he does that through democratic means.”
He added, “I think this all adds up to a desire to ensure that his party stays in power and his ability to do what he wants — to attack vulnerable communities — remains intact.”
After that article was published, the White House reached out to AlterNet with its own comment.
“President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters," White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said. "The Civil Rights Act, National Voting Rights Act, and Help America Vote Act all give the Department of Justice full authority to ensure states comply with federal election laws, which mandate accurate state voter rolls. This campaign pledge from the President is why millions of Americans sent him back to the White House. The President has also urged Congress to pass the SAVE America Act and other legislative proposals that would establish a uniform standard of photo ID for voting, prohibit no-excuse mail-in voting, and end the practice of ballot harvesting. Noncitizens voting is a crime. Anyone breaking the law will be held accountable.”