Trump’s $1 million bounty has Americans on the edge

Ever since President Donald Trump made it clear he would rig the 2026 midterms if he could not win them legitimately, American voters have felt jittery — all the more so after he offered a $1 million bounty to anyone who uncovered voter fraud.

"As polls show the Republican majority in Congress in peril, Mr. Trump has ramped up his baseless attacks, even dangling a $1 million reward to tipsters who help secure a voting-fraud conviction," wrote The New York Times' Beth Reinhard and Kevin Williams on Sunday. "Some voters are nervous about what he might do next."

Tiffany Hall, a 56-year-old Black physician from Ohio, told the Times that "I am very concerned that the election will be disrupted in ways that will affect the margins,”

Jeanne Russell, a 77-year-old Black retiree and registered Democrat from Maine, predicted to Reinhard and Williams that “I’m kind of foreseeing that there will be some dirty tricks," although she was hopeful that election officials could stave them off.

Esther Bowling, 43, and also of Ohio, argued that elections might be stolen by those who did furnish voter IDs.

“If you are an American citizen you should have to show a photo ID to vote,” Bowling told the Times.

Speaking to AlterNet in June, Common Cause Senior Policy Director for Voting and Fair Representation Dan Vicuña argued that the Trump administration may ultimately violate the law. He said that this could happen through methods ranging from voter purges and creating voter ID requirements to using law enforcement to interfere with the vote.

“I think some of these attempts to federalize, to nationalize elections are clearly illegal,” Vicuña told AlterNet. “You've seen some of that overreach already struck down — attempts to order independent agencies to force a strict voter ID requirement on people. That has been rejected. Common Cause is in court challenging the latest executive order to turn the United States Postal Service into some election administration agency and to create a further bureaucratic layer to make it more difficult to vote by mail. In terms of the president's authority to order around USPS, it's illegal. In terms of USPS's authority to become some sort of national election administration agency, it far exceeds the legal authority that Congress gave to the postal service. The statute describing what kind of work the postal service would do is about postal service work — processing mail and selling stamps. It has nothing to do with election administration.”