The MAGA movement is obsessed with "voter fraud" and "election fraud," and President Donald Trump continues to claim, without proof, that the 2020 election was stolen from him — a claim that has been repeatedly debunked. Many MAGA Republicans believe that undocumented immigrants are voting in U.S. elections in big numbers, offering no proof to back up that claim.

One of the many MAGA influencers who is making claims of widespread voter fraud is far-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, who, in 2016, promoted the "Pizzagate" conspiracy theory (which falsely claimed that a pizzeria in Washington, D.C. was being used for child trafficking).

Voter fraud, Posobiec claims, is rampant.

But Slate reporters Jacqueline Sweet and Marisa Kabas, in an article published on October 3, allege that Posobiec's own voter registration raises some questions.

"The Republican National Committee, last fall, enlisted him to speak to poll watchers about election security," Sweet and Kabas note. "Posobiec is particularly focused on Pennsylvania, repeatedly accusing the state's Democratic officials of fraud, even spreading conspiracy theories that were followed by an RNC lawsuit."

Sweet and Kabas, however, allege, "The focus on voter fraud in Pennsylvania is particularly ironic because it sure looks like, and a trail of documentation suggests, that Posobiec is living in Maryland but voting in Pennsylvania. If so, that would be a violation of voting laws, experts say."

Sweet and Kabas allege that Posobiec "voted in Pennsylvania elections from 2004 to 2024, both in person and by mail, according to a copy of his voting record viewed by Slate and the Handbasket."

"There's nothing untoward about any of that, provided Posobiec actually lives in Pennsylvania," Sweet and Kabas note. But they allege that "Posobiec listed a Maryland address — the same one he and his wife show in social media posts — more than a dozen times in his 2024 political contributions, according to Federal Election Commission filings."

Attorney Adam Bonin, an expert on Pennsylvania election law, told Slate, "Your legal residence is where your life is rooted, the place you come back to. Usually, where your spouse lives is where you are presumed to live, but we look at the totality of the circumstances…. You only have one residence for voting, and you can't choose where you vote based on convenience or politics."

Read Jacqueline Sweet and Marisa Kabas' full article in Slate at this link.

WASHINGTON — Mass voter challenges are likely to occur in the 2026 midterm elections, the Brennan Center for Justice warned Tuesday, with the potential to “undermine the democratic process.”

President Donald Trump and the Republican Party have been laying the groundwork for questioning the election process in state after state, as Trump has made “election integrity” the centerpiece of his recent domestic policy initiatives, including in a July 16 address to the nation.

The center, at NYU School of Law, found in a report Tuesday that more than 185,000 challenges to voter eligibility were filed by private citizens in 2024, though “the real number is likely higher” since many election officials either were not contacted or sent incomplete responses to an inquiry. The center is regarded as left-leaning.

Mass challenges are a fairly recent development, spurred by improvements in election technology and transparency. Thousands of votes now can be challenged at once.

They’ve rarely been successful, but experts worry they create voter doubts about whether elections are being conducted fairly. Historically such challenges have also often been used to suppress the votes of people of color, a separate brief said.

“Eligible voters facing challenges sometimes don’t vote simply because the process is too confusing. Responding to a challenge requires numerous steps that can trip up voters. They may not understand their options for verifying their identity,” said the report by Brennan Center Counsel Andrew Garber.

Garber found that “mass voter challenges have become a key element in the campaign to use election integrity as a pretext for voter suppression.”

In 2024, he found, election deniers lodged challenges, “in addition to spreading lies about widespread voter fraud, refusing to certify elections, discrediting voting machines, engaging in bad faith poll watching, filing frivolous lawsuits, and threatening election officials with physical harm or criminal penalties”

This year, Garber warned, such challenges are likely to be an “integral strategy in the playbook to undermine the democratic process.”

Mass challenges, he said, “add basically zero value to elections while creating new costs.”

One big worry, though: “There are instances of eligible voters being removed from the rolls and learning of their removal after the deadline to register and vote in the next election,” the report said. “As is often the case with voter suppression, vulnerable individuals frequently suffer the effects.”

Mullin threats

The Trump administration is pushing state officials to examine their voter rolls and tighten their election security, thus opening the door for the help of the federal government in conducting mass challenges, the report predicted.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said last week that hundreds of thousands of noncitizens are registered to vote in California, New Jersey, Nevada and Pennsylvania and threatened to prosecute election officials in states that don’t “participate in securing the elections” ahead of the November midterms. He has not specified the source of his data.

Trump has demanded Congress require people to show proof of citizenship when they register to vote and photo IDs at the polls. So far, lawmakers have so far been reluctant to approve the SAVE America Act that in various versions would restrict voting, and it remains stalled in the U.S. Senate.

Trump and his allies have maintained for years the 2020 election was marred by voter fraud. No evidence of any widespread fraud has been found.

Election officials have largely maintained their rolls are accurate and up to date.

“In most states, list maintenance practices tend to keep pace with natural changes in voters’ lives, such as moving,” said a report this month by the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research.

Mass challenges

Recent mass challenges have rarely been successful.

The report cited efforts in Georgia, Michigan, Texas, Florida and Iowa in 2022.

“These challenges were widely rejected for lack of evidence or failure to comply with state law,” the Brennan Center found.

In 2024, Brennan’s research found that private citizens filed at least 185,232 voter challenges in the states studied. Of those, the center found officials accepted at least 5,477. That means they may have removed the voter from the rolls, declared them inactive or taken other steps to make it difficult for them to vote.

Researchers sent requests to Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas and to numerous counties in those states, the report methodology said.

“One takeaway is evident: With only around 3 percent of challenges clearly accepted, challenges contributed little to list maintenance in 2024,” Brennan found.

For instance, Georgia got in touch with about 875,000 voters in 2023 who had moved or had not voted for several years. That was more than a hundred times the number of Georgia voters who were successfully challenged the next year.

The center compiled the report by sending public records requests to 42 state and local government entities. It asked for any documents involving voter challenges in 2024 and how officials dealt with those challenges. It also looked at court filings, public reporting and election board meetings.

“Acquiring a complete record of challenges is impossible: They are often made ad hoc, officials may have no obligation to track them, and the records produced are often incomplete,” the center noted, adding that some officials refused to provide records or said they got no challenges.

After days of speculation among election officials and experts about what President Donald Trump might say in a heavily hyped primetime speech on elections, Trump on Thursday night delivered a mix of familiar claims, grievances, and assertions about election security that stopped short of alleging that votes had been altered or that results had been changed.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

Instead, Trump revived years-old evidence that China attempted to gather American voter data and that election systems are vulnerable to hacking, information that has long been public and that election officials said they have taken steps to mitigate. He also claimed to have identified 270,000 noncitizens on the voter rolls — election officials said they weren’t sure how that number was arrived at — and resurfaced old fraud allegations related to voter registration in Michigan.

In conjunction with Trump’s speech, his administration released newly declassified documents related to election integrity — some still heavily redacted — that in many cases did not fully back up the president’s claims.

“Every American deserves to know that when they cast their vote, that vote will be counted accurately,” Trump said, alleging that current election systems fall “catastrophically short of that standard.”

As he spoke, many secretaries of state from around the country were at dinner in South Dakota, closing out the summer meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State. Many did not watch the address, convinced after years of Trump’s election-related allegations that he was unlikely to say anything he hadn’t said before — though many staff members attending the conference did watch, and some secretaries issued statements later.

Trump concluded the speech by again calling for passage of the SAVE America Act, his top legislative priority, which would impose photo ID and proof-of-citizenship requirements on voters nationwide.

“The kids playing wizard in the park have a firmer grip on reality than any of this,” one Republican staff member said as he entered Mount Rushmore.

NASS bussed conference participants to the monument on Thursday night, shortly after Trump’s speech concluded, as part of a preplanned event on a day when red, white, and blue was the recommended dress code. Secretaries and their staff filtered past state flags into five reserved rows of seats as “Yankee Doodle Dandy” played and the sun set.

Election officials, experts respond to Trump’s election speech

Not all secretaries of state were in South Dakota, and some did watch the speech. “I have seen zero new facts. I have seen zero evidence backing any of these claims,” said Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat. “It appears to me to be a repackaged version of all of the stuff that we’ve known for years, and I was a little disappointed in the lack of new information.”

Election experts said the voting equipment vulnerabilities Trump appeared to be referring to in his speech have long been publicly known. “Everyone in this space knows that technology is vulnerable and works to put in safeguards and controls to secure it anyway,” said Geoff Hale, a visiting fellow for election security at the Center for Democracy & Technology, who previously worked for a decade at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

Hale said he was still reviewing the documents released by the White House, but pointed out that nearly all Americans vote on systems that require a voter-verifiable paper ballot, to ensure a paper backup that can’t be hacked.

One declassified document, quoted by Trump in his speech, stated, “We judge that U.S. adversaries, including at a minimum Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, as well as non-state groups, have the capability to compromise U.S. election infrastructure.” But Pam Smith, the president and CEO of Verified Voting, noted that some components of election infrastructure — such as public-facing election websites — are more vulnerable than others — such as voting machines. “There was a lot of conflation, it seemed to me, of different types of technology, the vast majority of which doesn’t actually affect election outcomes,” she said.

According to Trump, China also illicitly acquired the data of 220 million U.S. voters. However, voter data is widely publicly available, and it wasn’t clear from Trump’s speech whether he was alleging that voter registration databases were breached. Trump did allege that “members of the deep state” tried to downplay China’s acquisition of the data, “covering it up from both the president and the American people.”

Election officials from various states were quick to clarify that their data was secure. “I have no information, either from the federal government or anybody else, that Arizona’s voter information has been compromised,” Fontes told Votebeat.

The Chinese government didn’t steal any Wisconsin election data either, Wisconsin Elections Commission appointee Ann Jacobs, a Democrat, said on X. “If they bought our voter data, that is public data and they are allowed to buy it. So can you! So can anyone!”

Trump makes new claims about noncitizen voters

One new, or at least more specific, claim made by Trump in the speech is that there are 270,000 noncitizens registered to vote nationwide. According to a Department of Homeland Security memo released after the speech, that number appears to mostly be derived from a review of public voter files in four states: California, Nevada, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, a Democrat who heads the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, said his office hasn’t heard from the Department of Homeland Security. “We don’t even understand how they calculated those numbers,” he said, adding that Trump “truly does not understand elections, not even at the basic level.”

Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt, a Republican, said in a statement that the state follows all laws and requires voters to take steps to verify their identity before casting a ballot, adding that “all evidence has shown that noncitizen voting is extremely rare across the country, including in Pennsylvania.”

“We welcome DHS sharing their methodology and list of potential ineligible voters so we can carefully review the validity of their claims,” Schmidt said.

The president and his allies have long alleged that voting by noncitizens is widespread, but election officials, audits, investigations, and academic research have found it to be extremely rare, and noncitizens who vote illegally are subject to criminal penalties and deportation.

Multiple states have audited their voter rolls and found tiny numbers of noncitizens registered, most of whom have never cast a ballot. Nonetheless, the Trump administration has made the search for noncitizen voters a driving force behind its election agenda. Last year, the administration revamped a Department of Homeland Security data tool, Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, and encouraged states to use it to check their voter rolls for noncitizens.

States that did so reported finding relatively small numbers of potential noncitizens, and at least some of those flagged voters were later determined to be citizens, prompting many experts and election officials to warn that the SAVE program was unreliable.

For example, in Texas, officials flagged 2,724 potential noncitizens, some of whom county officials have determined are citizens, though it isn’t clear exactly how many. They’ve also found that hundreds of the flagged voters had registered through the Texas Department of Public Safety, which requires proof of citizenship, such as a passport, and keeps copies of such documents on file. In April, Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson, a Republican, raised concerns about SAVE’s accuracy in a letter to federal officials.

In June, a federal judge blocked the overhaul of the SAVE program, saying it violated privacy and voting rights.

A Michigan case of suspected voter registration fraud

The president also spotlighted a six-year-old fraud allegation in Michigan as an example of election misconduct being “buried and covered up.”

Police reports showed that in the lead-up to the 2020 election, a woman working for a Tennessee-based company, GBI Strategies, submitted thousands of voter applications to the city clerk of Muskegon, a largely Democratic city. Most were legitimate, but the clerk identified irregularities with several hundred of them. The suspicious registrations were caught in time for the election.

The matter was initially investigated by Michigan State Police and Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office, but the investigation was turned over to the FBI in March 2021. The story made headlines at the time, but it was largely ignored on a broader scale until 2023, when a conservative news site amplified old reports about it, and it has been an occasional Republican talking point in the state since.

Nessel’s office said in a statement Thursday night that the incident provided a “perfect example of the system working exactly as it should,” meaning the clerk noticed suspected fraud and flagged it before anyone could vote improperly.

Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s Democratic secretary of state who is now running for governor, emphasized in a statement after the speech that the state’s elections are “secure and safe.”

“This was the case in 2020, 2022, 2024 and will be again in 2026,” she said in a release. “Because in every election, over 1,600 bipartisan professional election administrators and thousands of trained poll workers ensure that the law is followed and that every valid vote counts.”

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

With just 97 days until the midterm elections of 2026, Democrats are fired up, while Republicans are in the doldrums. That means Democrats have a good chance of retaking control of the House. It’s even possible (although less likely) that Dems will retake the Senate.

One of the biggest uncertainties is what (if any) tactics Trump and his lapdogs will use to reduce the odds of a Democratic victory, especially in the House, where 435 seats are up for reelection.

I’ve spent the last several days talking with election experts and political advisers. When I spoke with them last year, they were most worried about gerrymandering, restrictions on mail-in voting, voter IDs, and the demise of what’s left of the Voting Rights Act.

They’re still worried about many of these things (Trump just filed with the Supreme Court an emergency request to allow his executive order that restricts voting by mail, after a federal appeals court blocked key parts of it over the weekend).

But now, with 97 days to go, they’re most worried about the elections process. I’ve summarized their concerns below.

It’s possible that Trump will do nothing to interfere in the elections, of course. It’s also possible that he’ll do everything the experts fear he might do. Please weigh in with your thoughts about what he’s most likely to do.

1. He’ll do nothing other than claim the elections are rigged.

By this view, Trump will continue to sow doubts about the reliability and security of elections, especially in predominantly Democratic cities and states, but he won’t do more. Experts who hold this view tell me Trump doesn’t really care all that much about the midterm elections. His real goal is to continue to generate doubts about the 2020 election, so that when the history of that election is written, questions arise about whether Biden legitimately won.

2. He’ll deploy federal agents at voting places.

Some experts I talked with believe Trump will try to suppress voting by deploying federal immigration agents or federalized National Guard in or around polling places in predominantly Democratic communities during early voting or on Election Day. Or he’ll deploy federal agents in official attire to hover near voters, questioning them about their citizenship and asking about voter fraud.

It’s a federal crime for anyone — including federal, state, and local officials — to “intimidate, threaten, [or] coerce … any other person for the purpose of interfering with the right of [that] other person to vote or to vote as he may choose.” Most states also prohibit voter intimidation. Additionally, federal law explicitly prohibits the presence of armed federal agents at the polls.

But proving intimidation is difficult. Besides, by the time any lawsuit alleging intimidation were filed, voting would be long over.

3. He’ll try to stop state certifications.

Alternatively, election experts tell me that Trump will stop states with predominantly Democratic voters or large Democratic cities from certifying the results in House races. (Election rules about certification vary by state, but most require election officials to certify by late November or early December.)

In recent years, Trump has persuaded some local officials to use false claims of fraud or of noncitizens voting as justification to decline to certify election results. Since 2020, more than 30 local officials in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania have refused to certify election results, usually in hopes of forestalling Democratic victories.

Experts tell me that if there are similar delays and refusals after November 3, Democrats will go to court to force local officials to certify results. They’ll probably win these cases, as they have in the past. But such litigation is inevitably accompanied by delays and uncertainty that could give Trump and Republicans time to whip up public support for recounts, audits, or similar tactics we saw after the 2020 election.

4. He’ll try to prevent the House clerk from assembling the roll of new members to be sworn in January 3, 2027.

A final scenario that’s been described to me is that Trump will prevent the House clerk from assembling the roll of new members to be sworn in. Normally, on January 3, the clerk simply goes to the House chamber with the roll of newly elected representatives. Although the people on that roll are not yet official members of Congress, they elect a new speaker of the House. The winner of the race for speaker then swears in the rest of the members of the House, and they then begin conducting legislative business.

But some experts predict that Trump will declare that the election is full of fraud and demand that Speaker Mike Johnson fire the current nonpartisan House clerk. Johnson could substitute a toady who produces a roll of new House members — one that includes Republicans in races that Democrats believe they won.

What can Democrats then do? They’ll contest Trump’s move in the federal courts, but the courts are reluctant to get involved in matters of internal legislative governance, regarding them as “political questions” that the judiciary should leave to Congress.

Hence, today’s Office Hours question: What’s Trump’s most likely move on the midterms?

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

President Donald Trump is reportedly planning on delivering a speech in the near future amplifying his false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him — and social media users on X are raising the alarm.

“Things are about to get very, very, very bad,” posted podcaster Chris Mowrey. Similarly Shannon Watts, the New York Times bestselling author of “Fired Up,” wrote that this means there will be “a Civil War instead of midterm elections.”

Journalist Pedro L. Gonzalez struck an ominous note by pointing out that Trump also plans on declaring Georgia’s two senators, Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, to be illegitimate.

“If this is true it just shows that Trump is becoming more and more authoritarian, but the stupid kind of authoritarian who can’t even mask regime lies in a convincing way and so it’s obvious to everyone that he is terrified of his opponents (Ossof [sic] is a viable presidential candidate for Dems, one with more appeal than Vance) and also the average voter, which is why he keeps shamelessly pushing the SAVE America Act,” Gonzalez argued.

Policy consultant Adam Cochran also posted a lengthy analysis about the report, poking several holes in Trump’s arguments about supposed 2020 election fraud.

“Doesn’t work like that,” Cochran said. “First off, there was no fraud, but you seized the ballots and the paper back ups to make sure no one could question it.”

He added, “Second, the Constitution has no way to nullify a swearing in. Only peer expulsion. Third, this sudden ‘announcement’ is when Trump is down by two senators and desperate to pass a bill. Lastly, Trump had 64 court cases to try and litigate the election, including in Georgia. No case turned up any evidence, including after an audit of these ballots.”

Cochran concluded, “Trump’s own lawyers and advocates then admitted to making up the conspiracy about this county, and were charged for it. Part of the court evidence included their own email records of coming up with the plot.”

Melanie D'Arrigo, the vice president of legislative affairs for New York’s chapter of the National Organization for Women, was more succinctly than Cochran while likewise noting that his claims about Georgia had been litigated.

“The same Georgia election where Donald Trump was indicted by a jury of his peers for trying to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to ‘find 11,780 votes,’ to overturn the state's 2020 presidential election results?” D’Arrigo wrote. “That election?”

Meanwhile Adam Kinzinger, a former Republican congressman from Illinois, simply said that the reporting if true would be “insane. INSANE.”

Trump has made a number of efforts to avoid losing the 2026 midterm elections, from unsuccessfully trying to pass the SAVE America Act to require voters to show proof of citizenship and likewise unsuccessfully attempting to get the US Postal Service to decide who can send by ballots by mail to purging voters from the rolls and threatening to send ICE to intimidate voters at the polling places.

“Someone should read to him ‘Lost, Not Stolen,’ a 2022 report by eight conservatives (two former Republican senators, three former federal appellate judges, a former Republican solicitor general, and two Republican election law specialists),” conservative columnist George F. Will wrote for The Washington Post on Monday. “They examined all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed in multiple states by Trump and his supporters. Twenty cases were dismissed before hearings on their merits, 14 were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before hearings. Of the 30 that reached hearings on the merits, Trump’s side prevailed in only one, Pennsylvania, involving far too few votes to change the state’s result.”

Will added, “Trump’s batting average? .016. In Arizona, the most exhaustively scrutinized state, a private firm selected by Trump’s advocates confirmed Trump’s loss, finding 99 additional Biden votes and 261 fewer Trump votes.”

President Donald Trump continues falsely claiming that the 2020 election was stolen from him — and voters in a key swing state are fed up with it.

“It's bull,” an Arizona woman told MS NOW correspondent Jillian Frankel in an interview that aired on Tuesday. “I think, I mean, we can count the vote, and we should allow everybody to vote and make sure everything is counted, honestly. And I don't believe in rigged [elections], but there's always corruption, right? And that's gonna be high.”

An Arizona man told Frankel that Trump’s election denier rhetoric “plays negatively with me, because it's like, come on, that's foolishness. And no, that's just a waste of time, and I don't like that.”

Another Arizona man told Frankel that “I've heard that ever since the 2020 election, and it's bogus. And it's sad that someone who doesn't win just claims that it was all a sham. But if he would have won, would he have also claimed it was a sham? Probably not.”

MS NOW anchor Katy Tur cut away from the interviews to observe that “Donald Trump did try to claim the 2016 election was a sham until he started winning, and then he stopped. So there's evidence for that.” She then asked MS NOW political reporter Shawna Thomas for her views on the subject.

“I think it's actually, in some ways, telling, because the president spoke out about the elections and what happened in 2020 last week and gave that big speech,” Thomas opined, referring to Trump’s Thursday speech repeating his debunked claims about the 2020 election. “In some ways, that's part of why we are grouping these three candidates together, and we are talking about this and then putting that question to the voters. Jillian Frankel, our reporter who's out in Arizona, she talked to voters about many things. She asked that question, one, because we were curious what they would say in Arizona. But when she just asked them the open-ended sort of ‘why are you voting, what do you care about,’ they came back to the economy, policies, the things your guest in New York was talking about — gas prices. So I think in some ways he put another focus on election denialism that maybe voters wouldn't have even been thinking about as much, at least today, on Arizona primary day, if he hadn't done that.”

Trump’s obsession with the 2020 election speaks to what some experts believe is a deeper pathology in his overall outlook. Mother Jones' national voting rights correspondent Ari Berman spoke to Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman about that exact subject in an interview last week.

“The disturbing thing here is that Georgia is just a microcosm of what they’re planning to do to interfere in the midterms,” Berman told Goodman. “The raid on Fulton County, Georgia, the taking of 700 boxes of ballots, that is a preview of the type of suppression and intimidation the Trump administration wants to do everywhere in 2026. And we’re seeing this with the primetime address the president is planning to give.”

He added, “He’s going to lie and say there was rampant fraud and foreign interference in the 2020 election, so that he can then say we have to seize voting machines, we have to stop mail voting, we have to do all the things that he tried to do in 2020 but was unsuccessful.”

Berman concluded, “And the bottom line here is they keep lying about the 2020 election so that they can justify massive interference in the 2026 election. It really is that simple. You put all the different moves of the administration together, that is the underlying goal, to build a narrative that will justify some kind of unprecedented intervention in the midterms to challenge how people vote, how votes are counted and how elections are certified.”

Speaking with this journalist for Salon days before the 2020 election, Dr. Bandy X. Lee, a psychiatrist formerly from Yale University, predicted that the president’s displayed psychological tendencies would make it impossible for him to admit defeat.

“Just as one once settled for adulation in lieu of love, one may settle for fear when adulation no longer seems attainable,” Dr. Lee told this journalist at the time. “Rage attacks are common, for people are bound to fall short of expectation for such a needy personality—and eventually everyone falls into this category. But when there is an all-encompassing loss, such as the loss of an election, it can trigger a rampage of destruction and reign of terror in revenge against an entire nation that has failed him.”

She continued, “It is far easier for the pathological narcissist to consider destroying oneself and the world, especially its ‘laughing eyes,’ than to retreat into becoming a ‘loser’ and a ‘sucker’ — which to someone suffering from this condition will feel like psychic death.”

As conservative columnist George F. Will wrote for The Washington Post in February, Trump repeatedly failed to prove any fraud when given a chance to do so in court.

“Someone should read to him ‘Lost, Not Stolen,’ a 2022 report by eight conservatives (two former Republican senators, three former federal appellate judges, a former Republican solicitor general, and two Republican election law specialists),” Will wrote. “They examined all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed in multiple states by Trump and his supporters. Twenty cases were dismissed before hearings on their merits, 14 were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before hearings. Of the 30 that reached hearings on the merits, Trump’s side prevailed in only one, Pennsylvania, involving far too few votes to change the state’s result.”

Will concluded, “Trump’s batting average? .016. In Arizona, the most exhaustively scrutinized state, a private firm selected by Trump’s advocates confirmed Trump’s loss, finding 99 additional Biden votes and 261 fewer Trump votes.”

- YouTube www.youtube.com

President Donald Trump is reportedly planning on claiming that the 2020 Georgia Senate elections were stolen and that the two Democratic incumbents, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, are not legitimate lawmakers.

One prominent conservative commentator is arguing that if Trump does indeed act in this way, it will benefit Ossoff, who is up for reelection in a competitive race this November.

“Jon Ossoff is running for re-election this year in Georgia and the President is rumored to be making an in-kind contribution to Ossoff's campaign,” wrote right-wing podcaster Erick Erickson on X on Monday.

Erickson is not alone in criticizing Trump for reviving his 2020 Big Lie, which holds that he won the election even though he was proved beyond a reasonable doubt to have been defeated by then-former Vice President Joe Biden.

“Things are about to get very, very, very bad,” podcaster Chris Mowrey stated on X. Journalist Pedro L. Gonzalez offered a more detailed take.

“If this is true it just shows that Trump is becoming more and more authoritarian, but the stupid kind of authoritarian who can’t even mask regime lies in a convincing way and so it’s obvious to everyone that he is terrified of his opponents (Ossof [sic] is a viable presidential candidate for Dems, one with more appeal than Vance) and also the average voter, which is why he keeps shamelessly pushing the SAVE America Act,” Gonzalez posted.

Policy consultant Adam Cochran pointed out that Trump’s attempt to dislodge Ossoff and Warnock from power misunderstands how the Senate operates.

“Doesn’t work like that,” Cochran pointed out. “First off, there was no fraud, but you seized the ballots and the paper back ups to make sure no one could question it.”

He continued, “Second, the Constitution has no way to nullify a swearing in. Only peer expulsion. Third, this sudden ‘announcement’ is when Trump is down by two senators and desperate to pass a bill. Lastly, Trump had 64 court cases to try and litigate the election, including in Georgia. No case turned up any evidence, including after an audit of these ballots.”

He completed his thought by writing, “Trump’s own lawyers and advocates then admitted to making up the conspiracy about this county, and were charged for it. Part of the court evidence included their own email records of coming up with the plot.”

In addition to falsely claiming that the 2020 election was stolen, Trump is employing a number of tactics to try to make sure he does not lose control of Congress during the 2026 midterm elections. He has threatened to use ICE and radical groups at polling places to intimidate voters, potentially purged voters from the rolls, attempted to impose restrictions on mail-in voting and pushed for strict voter ID laws, most notably the SAVE Act.

Writing for The Washington Post in February, conservative columnist George F. Will broke down how Trump’s claims about the 2020 election have been decisively debunked.

“Someone should read to him ‘Lost, Not Stolen,’ a 2022 report by eight conservatives (two former Republican senators, three former federal appellate judges, a former Republican solicitor general, and two Republican election law specialists),” Will wrote. “They examined all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed in multiple states by Trump and his supporters. Twenty cases were dismissed before hearings on their merits, 14 were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before hearings. Of the 30 that reached hearings on the merits, Trump’s side prevailed in only one, Pennsylvania, involving far too few votes to change the state’s result.”

Will concluded, “Trump’s batting average? .016. In Arizona, the most exhaustively scrutinized state, a private firm selected by Trump’s advocates confirmed Trump’s loss, finding 99 additional Biden votes and 261 fewer Trump votes.”

Every week, it feels like President Donald Trump’s administration is making a new piece of news about elections. It is investigating past elections in at least four states. It is exploring what feels like every possible avenue to get ahold of voter data in individual states and counties. It is attempting to create new administrative hurdles to mail voting and prioritizing major voting legislation over all else.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

But it all ties back to one thing: the repeated assertions from the president and his allies that noncitizens are voting in significant numbers.

No evidence has emerged to support that. Election officials and experts have repeatedly said those assertions are false and such cases are rare. But they appear to be the animating force behind everything the administration is doing.

Scattered reports that investigators for the Department of Homeland Security are requesting detailed data on individual registered voters confirm the administration’s ongoing focus on finding and prosecuting any such cases.

Earlier this month, the New York Times reported that the Justice Department was pressing prosecutors to focus on 90 open investigations into potential noncitizens voting as a top priority. Federal prosecutors have already brought some cases against individuals that officials are touting, including one in Louisiana last week.

But despite the administration’s zeal, it isn’t clear how many such cases there are to bring. States have run more than 60 million records of registered voters through a revamped federal immigration database that the administration has encouraged state election officials to use to validate the citizenship of registered voters, according to the Department of Homeland Security. That’s around a third of the voters registered in the U.S., according to estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Out of those, the department told Votebeat, the system has flagged around 24,000 as potential noncitizens — about 0.04%. All those cases “have been referred to ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations for further investigation,” the department said in a statement.

As Votebeat reported in April, the Department of Homeland Security is sending subpoenas to local elections officials in Texas, searching for detailed information about individual voters. Investigators have also contacted at least one county in North Carolina, a development reported last week by Axios.

The Department of Homeland Security said it is “actively rooting out and investigating election fraud wherever it can be found,” and declined to comment on specific cases.

Twenty-four thousand potential cases sounds like a lot, but election officials have already found that at least some of those potential noncitizens have turned out to be citizens.

It also isn’t clear how many of those people have actually voted. Experts across the political spectrum agree that noncitizens who don’t understand the laws may accidentally register to vote, so that in and of itself is not necessarily a sign of intentional fraud. The Department of Homeland Security didn’t respond to questions about how many cases of noncitizen voting the agency has documented, or how many registered voters flagged as potential noncitizens have turned out to be citizens.

But administration officials and those who support the investigations have been quick to dismiss questions about whether the small number of cases means noncitizen voting isn’t a big issue.

Last weekend, CNN anchor Kasie Hunt asked Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin about data from the conservative Heritage Foundation that showed only 25 cases of people being prosecuted for voter fraud where citizenship was an issue.

“Well, 25 is too many,” said Mullin. “It’s kind of like one illegal death, one individual that dies from the hands of an illegal is one too many. It’s all preventable. One person voting illegally is one too many. We shouldn’t have to worry about even one.”

Justin Riemer, president of Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections, a conservative nonprofit focused on voting issues, agreed with Mullin’s perspective.

“Why is it such a bad thing that they are enforcing federal law?” Riemer said. “To me, any election crime is serious and needs to be prosecuted. I don’t think it’s a good system that this happens, regardless of how often it happens.”

Ken Cuccinelli, who during the first Trump administration was acting deputy secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, said outside investigations are no substitute for federal investigations that have much more authority to examine potential fraud.

“It may be that they bring nothing of it and that will tell us more than anything else, but I suspect that’s unlikely,” he said.

Ultimately, Cuccinelli said, “this is as much about confidence in who is participating in the voter rolls and whether our states themselves are helping, hiding, or hurting the security and transparency of our elections system.”

Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School who worked in the White House on democracy and voting rights issues under Joe Biden, characterized the Trump administration’s search as an unproductive hunt for a “boogeyman” to cast doubt on American elections.

“The notion that noncitizens are voting in elections in sufficient quantities to swing those elections, particularly in statewide contests, is a fiction,” he said.

Lorraine Minnite, a Rutgers University political science professor and author of a book on voter fraud, suggested that the Trump administration investigations were an effort to create “maximum chaos and intimidation” across the country.

“The picture of the federal government sending Homeland Security to investigate is such overkill that you have to believe that they are trying to create a spectacle to intimidate people and go on a fishing expedition using bad data,” she said.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

On Monday a former National Security Agency official issued a warning: President Donald Trump does not care about his public image because he plans on stealing the midterm elections.

“Everything he's doing suggests someone who doesn't care about public opinion,” Ben Rhodes, who served as Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications under President Barack Obama, told MS NOW’s Nicolle Wallace. “I mean, Nicolle, announcing essentially an insider trading scheme where hedge funds can buy access to Truth Social posts, really, so they can make money off of trades on Trump's war — I mean, it's a policy designed in a laboratory to be deconstructed by [Sen.] Jon Ossoff [D-GA] and motivate Democratic voters.”

Referring to Trump’s repeated claims that there is no affordability crisis in America, that he does not think about Americans’ financial situations and that claims of high prices are a “Democratic hoax,” Rhodes observed that “Trump's midterm election strategy is not to lower prices, is not to even talk about affordability. Trump told us his midterm election strategy last week: it's to steal the election. It's to say that there's a combination of foreign interference and domestic fraud. He'll try everything he can to disrupt voting itself. So we have to be worried about ICE agents or military even at polling sites, based on some trumped-up fake threat, based on some trumped-up fake threat. We have to worry about ballot boxes being seized before votes can be counted. We have to worry about Donald Trump saying, the minute the elections are over, that they were stolen.”

He added, “And this time around, he has a Justice Department led by, you know, Todd Blanche and Kash Patel, people who will go along with that and echo whatever he says. ... He's got a guy that's in line to be the director of national intelligence who won't even say that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.”

Rhodes concluded, “This is happening before our eyes. This is not a conspiracy theory. He gave a primetime address last week telling us that his midterm election strategy is to steal the midterm elections, not to contest them and win them for Republicans. And so I think, number one, we have to be calling that out and telling people what to expect so that they see it before it happens. Number two, we have to fortify state elections, right? The elections are still run by the states in this country, not the federal government, and we're going to need to be driving that principle home. Number three, I hope the Democrats win by a decisive enough margin that it just looks ridiculous and absurd for him to be contesting this at all. That matters, Nicolle."

Speaking with AlterNet in June, the Senior Policy Director for Voting and Fair Representation at the good government nonprofit Common Cause identified a number of signs that Trump plans on stealing the midterm elections. These included trying to restrict mail-in voting, threatening to send ICE and radical groups to polling locations, gerrymandering in a partisan way, purging eligible voters and pushing for voter ID laws.

“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.”

Vicuña continued that many of these efforts are also illegal.

“I think some of these attempts to federalize, to nationalize elections are clearly illegal,” Vicuña wrote. “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.”

He concluded, “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.”

George F. Will, a conservative columnist and former adviser to Republican President Ronald Reagan, broke down in February how Trump’s loss in the 2020 election to Joe Biden is beyond reasonable doubt.

“Someone should read to him ‘Lost, Not Stolen,’ a 2022 report by eight conservatives (two former Republican senators, three former federal appellate judges, a former Republican solicitor general, and two Republican election law specialists),” Will wrote for The Washington Post. “They examined all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed in multiple states by Trump and his supporters. Twenty cases were dismissed before hearings on their merits, 14 were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before hearings. Of the 30 that reached hearings on the merits, Trump’s side prevailed in only one, Pennsylvania, involving far too few votes to change the state’s result.”

Will added, “Trump’s batting average? .016. In Arizona, the most exhaustively scrutinized state, a private firm selected by Trump’s advocates confirmed Trump’s loss, finding 99 additional Biden votes and 261 fewer Trump votes.”