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.

Since losing to Joe Biden in 2020, now-President Donald Trump has been relentless in his assertion that the election was “rigged,” pushing all manner of conspiracies relating to voter fraud regardless of the fact that numerous studies have proven it vanishingly rare. But although voter fraud is exceptionally uncommon, there have been a few cases over recent years. Ironically, they tend to be committed by Trump supporters.

The latest example comes out of Wisconsin, where today conservative activist Henry Wait was found guilty on two counts of misdemeanor election fraud and one count of felony identity theft. The head of a group dedicated to promoting Trump’s claims of election fraud, Wait admitted to requesting the ballots of Republican state Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Democratic Racine Mayor Cory Mason without their consent.

His intention, he explained, was to prove that the state’s election system was vulnerable to fraud. In total he requested as many as eight illicit ballots, all of which were flagged by the Wisconsin Elections Commission for fraud.

“I tested the system and the system failed,” Wait said, ignoring that the fraudulent votes had, in fact, been recognized as such, and the irony that he had actually proved the system works.

Wait isn’t the only MAGA supporter convicted of such actions. In 2024, another Wisconsin resident — former Milwaukee election official Kimberly Zapata — was found guilty of using her work-issued laptop to obtain three military absentee ballots using fake voter information. Earlier this month, Trump voter Matthew Laiss was convicted of voting in both Pennsylvania and Florida after unsuccessfully arguing that he should receive immunity under Trump’s pardon of those involved with attempts to overturn the 2020 election. And in 2024, Ohio resident and monthly Trump donor James Saunders was convicted of double voting in two different elections: voting in both Ohio and Florida first in the 2020 presidential election, then the 2022 midterms. While Saunders tried to argue that he’d done it by mistake, the judge didn’t buy that he would repeat the same mix-up twice.

Currently, Trump is fixated on passing the SAVE America Act, an election reform bill that he claims will prevent voter fraud, but that critics argue is an attempt to disenfranchise millions of voters. Trump is desperate to pass the bill before the November midterms, in which the GOP is forecasted to face major defeats.

On Monday, the president pushed congressional Republicans to work to pass the legislation through Easter if necessary.

“Make this one for Jesus,” he said.

In October 2021, shortly before Election Day, Mahabubul Tayub was reviewing the voter rolls for the tiny Philadelphia suburb of Millbourne, where he was on the ballot as a candidate for mayor. Something didn’t seem right.

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

Dozens of new voters had been registered in recent weeks, he noticed, including some people he knew — people who didn’t live in Millbourne.

Tayub won the mayoral election that November, but it would take years for authorities to fully unravel what was behind the odd registrations he discovered: a brazen attempt at election fraud.

Just last month, his opponent in the 2021 race, Md Nurul Hasan, pleaded guilty in federal court to 33 felony charges in a failed scheme to steal the election by illegally registering dozens of nonresidents as Millbourne voters, then casting mail ballots on their behalf. Two associates also pleaded guilty to multiple charges, including fraudulent voter registration.

The case serves as a reality check amid a raging national debate over election security and the threat of voter fraud, especially in swing states like Pennsylvania. It’s proof, on one hand, that despite the many safeguards in place, voter fraud can happen at the local level, with lasting consequences for the community. On the other hand, it also helps illustrate how difficult it would be to orchestrate such fraud on a larger scale without detection.

“It seems to be in the local races this pops up the most, where there is a smaller turnout and there is possibly a direct connection between the person committing the bad act and the person who is going to benefit from the bad act,” said Jim Allen, the Delaware County elections director.

It’s in these small jurisdictions, he said, that “the temptation is highest and the risk-reward is highest.”

Two immigrants became friends, then competitors

Millbourne is a tiny borough at the eastern edge of Delaware County, bordering Philadelphia. It covers less than 50 acres — not even a tenth of a square mile — and has roughly 1,200 residents.

The land was originally the homestead of the Sellers family, immigrants from Derbyshire, England. In the mid 1700s, John Sellers opened Millbourne Mills, a flour mill that drew its name from nearby Mill Creek, now Cobb’s Creek — the dividing line between Delaware County and Philadelphia.

As small as it is, the borough has seen huge demographic changes in recent decades. In 1980, it was more than 90% white, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, but by 2020, it was majority Asian. That was driven by immigration from South Asia, including India and Bangladesh.

Now, Market Street, the main thoroughfare through Millbourne, is dotted with South Asian grocery stores and boutiques selling Indian, Bangladeshi, and Pakistani clothing. In 2023, Sellers Avenue — a short, mostly residential street named after the founding family — was given a second name: Bangladesh Avenue, a change that the local Bangladeshi community celebrated as a testament to their growing economic and political power.

Tayub, 47, grew up in Chittagong, a port city in southeast Bangladesh. He graduated from university there with a degree in economics, and moved to Philadelphia, then Millbourne in the early 2000s. Hasan, 48, is also from Chittagong, and Tayub said the two had become friendly when he and Hasan lived in the same Philadelphia building.

“All the friends [who were] the same age, all the people from Bangladesh” socialized together, Tayub recalled.

Tayub also got to know former Millbourne Mayor Tom Kramer, a Democrat who later encouraged him to run for the five-member borough council. Tayub and Hasan both launched bids as Democrats and won in the 2015 municipal election, Tayub said. (Both Tayub and Hasan are U.S. citizens.)

In the spring of 2021, Kramer decided against running for another term as mayor. Tayub entered the race, with Kramer’s support. Hasan jumped in, too.

The town’s voters skewed heavily Democratic, which meant whoever won the party primary was likely to coast to victory in the fall. And whether it was Hasan or Tayub, the winner was poised to become the first Bangladesh-born mayor of a U.S. town, a prospect that received media attention in Bangladesh.

Tayub said he wasn’t worried about the competition. “I have faith people know me,” he said.

Tayub won the primary by 18 votes out of 258 cast. But Hasan launched a write-in campaign for the November general election with the support of two other council members: Md Munsur Ali and Md Rafikul Islam, who lost his primary bid for reelection to the council. (Md is an abbreviation for Muhammad, and a common prefix for Bangladeshi names.)

How the plot unfolded

According to the federal indictment that laid out the men’s attempt to steal the election, the three conspired to obtain personal information from non-Millbourne residents — mainly friends of Hasan’s and Ali’s. Hasan then registered them to vote in Millbourne using the Department of State’s website, the indictment said — in some cases updating existing registrations by changing them to Millbourne addresses — and requested mail-in ballots on their behalf.

The indictment said Hasan and Ali told the residents of nearby communities, including Upper Darby and Philadelphia, that they would not get in trouble, so long as they “did not vote in another election in November 2021.”

The indictment described an effort to “cover up the fact that defendant HASAN was requesting mail-in ballots for dozens of different people,” in which Hasan alternated email addresses when registering the voters, as well as the addresses, and requested that the mail ballots be sent to various locations.

According to the indictment, after receiving the ballots, Hasan and the others wrote in Hasan’s name for mayor and cast the ballots. In all, the indictment says, Hasan and his co-conspirators fraudulently registered nearly three dozen people.

The indictment doesn’t identify the voters who were registered improperly, but one of the people whom Hasan registered confirmed his involvement and agreed to speak with Votebeat and Spotlight PA on condition of anonymity, out of concern that their involvement in the scheme could jeopardize their current employment.

The voter confirmed giving Hasan their driver’s license and allowing Hasan to proceed with the Millbourne registration and request a mail ballot for them.

“I trusted him and thought if I only give one vote, it’s not a problem,” said the person. “He made us fools.”

Suspicion ahead of Election Day: ‘I know these people.’

The votes hadn’t even been counted when Millbourne residents began to catch on to the scheme. According to the indictment, the borough added 29 voters between the primary and the November election. Given that Millbourne had fewer than 600 voters, it was a noticeable jump.

After Tayub grew suspicious of the new voter registrations, he brought his concerns to Kramer, the departing mayor, though neither man remembers exactly when.

“I know these people, they never live [in] Millbourne,” Tayub recalled thinking when he saw some newly registered names. “They live [in] Upper Darby.” Tayub’s attorney filed a complaint with the county elections office on Oct. 28, 2021. Tayub and Kramer said they also reported the matter to law enforcement around the time of the election. The district attorney’s office did not respond to a question about when and how they became aware of the matter.

Allen, the county elections director, said in an email that Hasan himself had questioned some voter registrations months earlier, in April, and his office had referred that matter to the district attorney. Allen wrote that in the months and years after Tayub’s complaints, “we received and responded to periodic inquiries from investigators.”

But Tayub and others in Millbourne said they grew frustrated because although the county was taking steps to look into the situation, for nearly a year afterward, they didn’t observe much progress.

“I couldn’t take it,” Tayub said during a recent interview with Votebeat and Spotlight PA.

Tayub, Kramer, and the borough’s secretary, Nancy Baulis, all met with an assistant district attorney before the May 2022 primary to discuss the status of the case, and Baulis and Kramer followed up with emails to county officials, including the district attorney, a few months later expressing frustration about the apparent lack of movement.

Kramer shared those emails with Votebeat and Spotlight PA. In his, he wrote that the assistant district attorney at the meeting had said that “this particular situation was very problematic politically,” and would generate media interest.

In an interview, Kramer said after sending that email, he reached out to the FBI. He said the investigation seemed to pick up after that.

The federal indictment came in February 2025.

The county separately charged Hasan with unlawful voting and related charges in March, and the case is pending. Because of that, District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer said he could not discuss the matter, but said in an email that it is “inaccurate” to say that the county did not move quickly on the case before the FBI’s involvement.

Neither the district attorney’s office nor the assistant district attorney Kramer mentioned in his email responded to a request for comment on what Kramer said he was told at the May 2022 meeting.

The Pennsylvania Department of State said it “first became aware of the fraud allegations when it was contacted by federal law enforcement.”

“I don’t have any comment beyond stating the obvious, that there has been a prosecution,” Allen, the county election director, said. “It was a very difficult matter to investigate because you can’t make assumptions [based on] ‘Well, this house looks empty.’ Well, was it empty last fall? How do you know it’s empty? Did someone move out?”

Asked after an April borough council meeting if he had any explanation or comment, Hasan declined. “I don’t want to say anything now,” Hasan said.

Hasan’s attorney, Michael Dugan, said his client had no comment in response to a list of questions about the scheme. Islam, Ali, and their respective attorneys did not respond to emails with detailed questions for this story.

The reality of election fraud vs. false claims

Cases like Millbourne’s muddy the intensifying national debate over election fraud: how widespread it is, what to do about it, and, more fundamentally, whether our election system can be trusted.

In recent years, an ecosystem of conspiracy theories about election manipulation has flourished online. Justin Grimmer, a political scientist at Stanford University, has researched the kind of broad claims of systematic election fraud that President Donald Trump and his allies made after the 2020 election to explain his loss, and said he has found no evidence of any such conspiracy.

But Grimmer’s research has turned up real instances of fraud, and they typically look like what happened in Millbourne — a local race, involving a relatively small number of votes.

“I think it gives some insight into why it would be very hard to do this in a broad national way,” he said. “This sort of fraud will leave lots of markers that people will end up discovering.”

The kind of “marker” Grimmer is referencing is the evidence Tayub was able to cite: actual names and addresses for the people who were drawn into the scheme.

Scaling a scheme like the one in Millbourne to one that involves enough votes to swing a statewide or national election would be hard, Grimmer said, because it would involve so many people.

The perpetrators here had access to driver’s license numbers, which according to the indictment they got directly from the voters. Allen, the county election director, said he was unaware of any other fraud case where voters gave out their personal information like this.

Stephanie Singer, a former Philadelphia city commissioner who was in office in 2016 when a ballot box stuffing scheme orchestrated by a former congressman was happening, has developed an algorithm that looks for anomalies in election results in the hopes of catching attempted fraud. Georgia is currently using the program to monitor its elections.

“Part of the job, not just of the board of elections, but of us as a democratic populace, is to guard against that,” she said. “The people who win the elections have access to money and power, and that means it’s really tempting to cheat.”

These attempts to cheat, even if they are initially successful at changing the results, are frequently caught, and election officials uphold those cases as examples of the safeguards working. Even so, the very fact that they occur can help destroy trust in elections.

Incidents like those in Millbourne and in a 2018 North Carolina congressional race that required a new election can serve as a “proof of concept” for those already suspicious that election fraud is happening, Grimmer said.

He recalled a county elections meeting in Oregon where he was trying to counter points made by a speaker who believed there was a broad conspiracy to steal elections, and cited a local incident from California as an example.

“In that setting, I can explain that it’s very different than the kind of conspiracy he’s alleging,” he said. “But if someone’s suspicious, all of a sudden it does reveal that it is possible to do this at least on a small scale.”

“If I’m not sufficiently persuasive in that meeting that it’s hard to scale this up,” he added, “you could see how this can further undermine trust” in election administration.

In Millbourne, the story isn’t over

Nearly four years after the election fraud, and a month after the guilty pleas, a tense mood still hung over Millbourne’s five-member borough council.

Two members resigned recently for reasons unrelated to the fraud case, which until recently left only three members, including Hasan and Ali. Despite their convictions, the men refused to immediately resign, and weren’t legally required to do so. Sentencing is scheduled for June.

By staying in office, Hasan and Ali allowed the borough to keep conducting council business. Without them, the council wouldn’t have had enough members.

But recent council meetings were marked by fraught exchanges over the matter.

The borough council building is a tight space. A sliding partition and support pillar split the room between attendees and the U-shaped arrangement of folding tables where council members sit.

At an April 15 meeting, Kramer, the former mayor, stepped in front of the pillar when it was his turn to offer public comment.

“I’d like to address our felonious council people,” Kramer said, facing Hasan and Ali. “I wanted to ask if either one of you had any intention of resigning.”

The eyes of the other borough officials shifted to Hasan to see how he would respond.

Hasan, wearing a purple button-down shirt and gray jacket, looked uncomfortable as he answered, shifting his feet and looking around the room or down at his papers.

“Actually the court has a restriction,” he said. “I don’t want to say anything.”

But on May 13, borough officials confirmed that Hasan had formally submitted his resignation, though the council has yet to accept it.

As of Tuesday, Ali had not resigned.

Getting a public official out of elected office — outside of defeating them at the ballot box — is not simple, even if the official has pleaded guilty to a felony.

“It’s not just automatic,” James Gallagher, the borough’s solicitor, explained at an April meeting. He said Hasan and Ali’s resignations would be “in the best interest of the borough.”

The state Legislature can impeach local elected officials, but rarely uses that power. The other option is a quo warranto action, a legal action challenging a public official’s right to hold office, typically brought by the district attorney or state attorney general.

Chris Cosfol, a resident of Millbourne, said he wants the district attorney’s office to bring such an action. The ordeal has been “embarrassing” for the borough, he said, and he thinks the members should have automatically been removed from office once they entered a guilty plea.

Neither the district attorney’s office nor the attorney general has yet taken such action.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

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

President Donald Trump wants to ban mail-in balloting, and MS NOW analyst Jordan Rubin is concerned that the Supreme Court is prepared to help him do it, even if that means “injecting needless chaos” into American elections.

“The Supreme Court may be on the verge of injecting needless chaos and uncertainty into the midterm elections and beyond,” Rubin wrote for MS NOW. “That possibility was on display Monday, when the court heard a GOP-backed challenge to counting mail ballots that come in after Election Day, even if they’re postmarked by Election Day.”

Describing the efforts of Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart to fight Trump’s mail-in ballots policy, Rubin wrote that some of the judges instead seem to “endorse” Trump’s position “to disqualify later-arriving ballots.”

“There’d be no reason for those parties to advance that position if they thought it would hurt Republicans’ electoral prospects,” Rubin wrote. “President Donald Trump has railed against mail ballots. He has also made unproven voter fraud claims a centerpiece of his elections stance. That dynamic was at play at Monday’s hearing, during which Stewart noted that the federal government has ‘sounded the antifraud theme’ but still could not show ‘a single example of fraud from post-Election Day ballot receipt in this century.’”

Rubin noted that the more pro-Trump judges clamored for mail-in voting bans.

“Justice Samuel Alito, who sounded likely to side with the Republicans, seemed receptive to the ‘fraud’ narrative, as he cited arguments that ‘confidence in election outcomes can be seriously undermined if the apparent outcome’ of an election ‘is radically flipped by the acceptance later of a big stash’ of ballots,” Rubin wrote. “Justice Brett Kavanaugh asked about fraud, too, wondering, ‘Is that a real concern? Is that something we should be thinking about? Confidence in the election process?’

Ultimately Rubin predicted that Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett will be the “pivotal votes in the relative center of the dispute.” Rubin’s nervous take was shared by Slate legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern, who argued that there have been “some very disturbing questions from the Republican-appointed justices in today's Supreme Court arguments — definitely several votes to strike down laws in 30 states which count mail ballots that arrive shortly after Election Day, as long as they're cast by Election Day. Not what I was hoping to hear."

He added, "Alito strongly implied that vote-by-mail, as practiced in most of the country today, is highly susceptible to fraud. [Neil] Gorsuch and [Clarence] Thomas leaned in that direction as well. [Amy Coney] Barrett and [Chief Justice John] Roberts are harder to read.” By contrast, Politico’s Josh Gerstein predicted that the Supreme Court seems “likely to deliver a defeat to Trump and rule states can count ballots received after Election Day, with Roberts, Barrett and maybe Kavanaugh joining the liberals.”

Trump has a long history of refusing to accept defeat when he loses at something. He accused the Emmy Awards of being rigged when he was not recognized for his reality TV show, “The Apprentice.” During the 2016 presidential election he falsely claimed Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) stole the Iowa caucuses from him, and then declared he would only accept the result of the general election if he won. Despite winning in the Electoral College, Trump received fewer popular votes than Clinton, and so falsely blamed millions of illegal ballots. He created a voter fraud commission to find evidence of tampering but never produced any proof.

During the 2020 election, Trump preemptively attacked mail-in voting, declared victory despite losing and inaccurately claimed votes were being "dumped" on him. Biden won that election in both the popular and electoral vote, and in response Trump attempted a coup on January 6, 2021. Despite continuing to claim that the election was stolen, Republican columnist George F. Will wrote for The Washington Post that Trump has had many days in court, and they all prove him to be stating untruths.

“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 said. “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.” Therefore he wrote of Trump, “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”

In the days since President Donald Trump called for the federal government to “nationalize” elections, two former high ranking officials from Pennsylvania, former Gov. Tom Corbett and former U.S. District Court Judge John Jones III, have spoken out.

Both have a history in Republican politics. Corbett was the last Republican governor of the commonwealth, leaving office in 2015, and Jones ran as a Republican for Congress before being appointed to the U.S. District Court bench by GOP President George W. Bush.

But that hasn’t stopped them from speaking out against the party’s current standard bearer, President Trump, especially when it comes to matters pertaining to elections.

The two have been involved with a nonprofit called Keep Our Republic, which was founded in 2020 to push back on unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud through civic education and work with elections officials in swing states.

Corbett and Jones spoke to the Capital-Star about what the U.S. Constitution says about what powers the federal government has to administer elections (unambiguously, very little), and their concerns and hopes for the 2026 election as the Trump administration continues to sow distrust in its potential outcome.

“The constitution’s pretty clear that the manner of the elections is left up to the states, and not to the federal government,” Corbett said. “The president would like to have it differently, but I don’t think he can have it differently.”

Elaborating on his comment that he’d like to “nationalize” elections, Trump named Philadelphia as a county he would like to see the federal government have a presence. Philadelphia was also a target of Trump’s unprecedented efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, cited in numerous failed lawsuits and false claims about widespread fraud.

But Corbett, who also served as Pennsylvania Attorney General, says Article I, Section Four of the Constitution spells out unambiguously that election administration is a power given to states and their legislatures, not the Executive Branch or Congress.

“We can wish to win the lottery, but it’s not gonna happen,” Corbett said of Trump’s goals. “Unless he’s found some scholar who thinks it can be done, and he can say, ‘Well, that scholar says it can,’ I don’t think there’s anything there.”

Trump and his allies notably did cite fringe legal theories in some of their attempts to overturn the 2020 election. However, they did not pass muster in courts.

That’s why Corbett’s not particularly concerned about the federal government taking over elections in part of the state, despite what Trump has said and may even attempt.

“I think the courts would become very involved, very quickly,” Corbett said. “They’re not gonna agree with just allegations. They’re gonna be looking for facts.”

And Corbett is confident that federal courts would uphold state and local governments’ abilities to administer elections on their own terms. As precedent, he cited the dozens of lawsuits brought by Trump in 2020 attempting to have the results of that year’s election dismissed or overturned. Virtually all were thrown out, and a number resulted in disciplinary actions against lawyers working for the president.

But Corbett isn’t convinced Trump’s end goal is to have the federal government administer elections.

“I don’t know the president personally, and I’ve never read his book, “The Art of the Deal,” but I think this is a negotiation tactic on his part,” he said. “I’m not sure what the endgame is at the moment … But I think it’s a political ploy.”

The goal, Corbett said, could be to get access to state voter rolls, or an attempt to push states to require voter ID, something Corbett is in favor of for Pennsylvania.

Still, the former governor acknowledges that Trump’s rhetoric, along with his administration’s push to investigate the 2020 election, despite numerous judges finding no evidence of fraud, have put the country in “uncharted waters.”

“We’ve never been here,” he said. “If you’re asking me for a prediction, to a certain extent, I can’t predict. What I can say is, ‘This is what’s happened in the past.’ And I’m confident that [judges and elections officials] will do what they’re supposed to do — what they’re legally obligated to do — until somebody demonstrates that’s a wrong confidence.”

As a former federal judge, Jones, who is now the president of Dickson College in Carlisle, brings a different perspective to the discussion than Corbett, a former prosecutor. He heard about Trump’s call to “nationalize” elections shortly before appearing on CNN to discuss the U.S. Department of Justice’s “Weaponization taskforce” — a team assembled by the Trump administration to look into prior federal investigations of the president and his allies.

However, just before air, the anchor asked Jones if he could pivot to discuss Trump’s latest comments about the election. Despite some concern from his communications team, Jones agreed to discuss the new topic.

“When I went on CNN central, I said to the anchor who was interviewing me, ‘I mean this respectfully but very directly, the president of the United States needs to read the Constitution,’” Jones said. “It’s pretty clear from the overwhelming pushback since then that everyone recognizes you can not, without a constitutional amendment, ‘nationalize’ elections to the extent the federal government takes over. That’s just a nonstarter.”

Like Corbett, Jones is confident in the ability of U.S. courts to stop the administration from taking illegal steps to exert powers over elections. He points to cases both in the aftermath of the 2020 election and during the current second Trump administration, where lower court judges displayed a willingness to stand up to the president and his policies under difficult circumstances.

“The lower courts have done extremely well with an onslaught of executive orders that have been issued since last year,” he said. “You’ve seen what’s happening in Minnesota. The lower courts are inundated with these cases, and they’re handling them in the face of frankly ICE disregarding court orders … That’s not easy when you’re on the bench.”

However, Jones sounds less optimistic than Corbett about the upcoming election.

“I think that given how imperiled the administration feels it will be with a Democratic majority in Congress, you’re going to see them use every tool in the toolbox to disrupt the election,” Jones said. “I’m sorry to say that, but that’s probably the reality we’re facing.”

Jones cited recent actions by Trump such as seizing material related to the 2020 election from Fulton County, Georgia, another county the president has repeatedly targeted like Philadelphia. He also cited a recent interview in which Trump said he “regrets” not having the national guard seize voting machines following the 2020 election.

Jones also pointed to Jan. 6, 2021, as proof that Trump may be unwilling to accept election results that he doesn’t view favorably. Though following the attack on the U.S. Capitol, Congress passed a law clarifying that the vice president can not, as Trump insisted, overturn the results of an election.

And, he notes, there are steps the federal government can take to influence voting, short of administering an election itself.

“There are ways to sort of chip around the outside of this that I think may predict that there’s some trouble ahead,” Jones said. He pointed specifically to efforts to seize voter role information in states like Minnesota, which Jones noted he struggles to see legal justification for, or how it could make an election safer.

“What are we doing here?” Jones said. “Is this to delegitimize the election consistent with Trump’s narrative? Good luck with that because it’s been investigated and reinvestigated. Or maybe it’s to intimidate people.”

Jones repeatedly pointed to the dozens of failed cases brought by Trump in 2020 , none of which were able to turn up evidence of large-scale voter fraud that Trump continues to allege took place.

And, like Corbett, that history, both in court and in local election bureaus, is what gives Jones hope.

“By and large, my experience is Pennsylvania county commissioners, heads of election bureaus, councilors, solicitors, they really want to get it right,” Jones said. “So despite all the noise, so to speak, I’m going to put my faith in the 67 counties and their ability to conduct an election.”

President Donald Trump is planning to nationalize the 2026 midterm elections by falsely claiming China stole the 2020 presidential election from him.

“Pro-Trump activists who say they are in coordination with the White House are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting,” reported The Washington Post on Thursday.

The plan would allegedly mandate voter ID and ban mail-in ballots during the November midterm elections. Trump also promised earlier this month that he will “search the depths of legal arguments not yet articulated or vetted” so he can find “an irrefutable one” to present “in the form of an Executive Order.”

Trump’s Democratic critics accused him of trying to steal the upcoming midterm elections.

“We’ve been raising the alarm for weeks about President Trump’s attacks on our elections and now we’re seeing reports that outline how they may be planning to do it,” Sen. Mark R. Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told The Post. “This is a plot to interfere with the will of voters and undermine both the rule of law and public confidence in our elections.”

Non-Democratic experts share Warner’s assessment. Marc Hyden of R Street, a Republican advocacy group, recently wrote that Trump definitely lost the 2020 presidential election and his refusal to accept that imperils Republicans’ political future.

“The 2020 presidential election results have been argued in numerous court cases and been the subject of myriad audits and studies, and nobody—no matter how hard they’ve labored—has proven that the election was stolen,” Hyden wrote. “Why Trump simply won’t accept this is beyond me, especially considering his return to the White House, and he should remember that his stolen election claims helped Democrats flip Georgia’s two Senate seats in 2020.”

White House spokeswoman Abigail T. Jackson insisted to AlterNet earlier this week that there is indeed voter fraud.

“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 noncitizen voters,” Jackson told AlterNet. “The President has also urged Congress to pass the SAVE 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. Noncitizen voting is a crime. Anyone breaking the law will be held accountable.”

By contrast, as Republican columnist George F. Will recently wrote in an editorial, “Donald Trump’s belief in widespread fraud in the casting and counting of 2020 ballots is entailed by his belief that it is theoretically impossible for him to lose at anything. His certitude infects millions of Americans, some of whom think it inconceivable that he could ever be mistaken. Others doubt that anyone could win the presidency while obsessing about a complex conspiracy for which there is no evidence.”

Trump has a lengthy history of claiming that it is impossible for him to lose anything unless it is stolen from him. During a 2016 presidential debate, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton accurately noted that Trump accused the Emmy Awards of being rigged against him when he was snubbed for his work on the reality TV show “The Apprentice.” Trump also baselessly alleged fraud and demanded a new election earlier that year when he lost the Iowa Republican caucuses to Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. Throughout the subsequent general election Trump repeatedly claimed he would only accept the result if he won, and repeated this assertion during the 2020 cycle. Trump declared victory even though Democratic nominee Joe Biden ultimately won by a clear margin in the popular vote (81.3 million to 74.2 million) and the same Electoral College margin (306-232)

Trump subsequently attempted 64 court challenges including 187 allegations, and the 2022 report “Lost, Not Stolen” by eight conservatives (two former Republican senators, three former federal appellate judges, a former Republican solicitor general, and two Republican election law specialists) determined that “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."

As George F. Will wrote, “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.” Therefore he wrote of Trump, “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”

Despite his legal losses, Trump continues to claim that he won, and used that argument to attempt a coup on January 6, 2021. Five years later, Trump is plotting to similarly ignore the democratic process to guarantee he does not lose, especially as Democrats would likely impeach Trump if they took control of the House.

“Here is the reality: the president has no authority to run federal elections,” said University of Kentucky law professor Joshua A. Douglas. “The Constitution, through the Elections Clause in Article I, Section 4, assigns that power to the states, while allowing Congress to make or alter election regulations. Courts have already blocked the president’s executive order on voter registration rules. Neither an executive order nor presidential bombast can override our decentralized constitutional structure.”

Trump has instead said he will deploy “sheriffs” and “law enforcement” at the polls, but according to Douglas “federal and state law prohibit voter intimidation, and longstanding restrictions — including limits on the use of federal troops at polling places — would severely constrain any attempt to deploy armed officers. Should the feds try, courts would almost certainly issue immediate orders to prevent voter intimidation.”

One of the most influential conservative newspapers in America is urging President Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans to abandon the SAVE America Act.

“The decentralized nature of American elections is a source of resilience, and Republicans rightly opposed President Biden’s attempt to federalize voting rules on the lax California model,” wrote The Wall Street Journal editorial board on Tuesday. “Have they given up federalist principle? If 51 Senate votes are all it takes to limit mail ballots across the country and require voter ID, Democrats next time will use 51 votes to mandate ballot harvesting and ban voter ID.”

The Journal also spoke out against doing away with the filibuster in order to ram the bill through against Democratic last-resort resistance.

“That’s to say nothing of what else progressives have in mind if Republicans do them the favor of launching a pre-emptive strike on the filibuster,” the Journal pointed out. “Mr. Schumer might make new states out of Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, meaning four new Democratic Senators. He might add Justices to the Supreme Court. In exchange for laying the groundwork, Republicans get . . . the SAVE America Act? No thanks.”

Finally, the Journal contested Trump’s notion that “voter fraud is endemic,” pointing out that despite millions of dollars spent investigating his big claims none have been verified.

“Audits in a variety of places—Georgia, Michigan, Texas, Utah, Idaho—have found noncitizen voting and registration to be rare,” the Journal wrote. “Other states might be worse, but consider incentives: Illegal immigrants who want to stay are trying to avoid being noticed by the authorities. Green card holders have much to lose if they commit a crime. Prosecuting violators is good for deterrence, and vigilance is important.”

The Journal is not alone among prominent conservative voices to speak out against Trump’s voting restriction bill. Many Republican senators are also opposing it for various reasons. Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska argued it would make voting more “daunting” than it already often is in her home state, as thousands of Alaskans are not connected to any road system.

“Under this bill, registering to vote could mean purchasing plane tickets and securing lodging and transportation, at a personal cost of hundreds to thousands of dollars,” Murkowski argued in a February editorial. Her North Carolina colleague, Sen. Thom Tillis, said in a similar statement that “I’m content with the safety and security of our elections” in his states, while Montana Sen. Steve Daines said that “the total ban” on mail-in voting is “a problem” for him. West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito told the Journal she opposed the bill as it would be “problematic because a lot of people use mail in voting, and a lot of them are in rural areas such as mine.” Maine Sen. Susan Collins, while supporting the bill, will not back Trump’s attempts to force it through by eliminating the filibuster.

“The filibuster is an important protection for the rights of the minority party that requires senators to work together in the best interest of the country,” Collins told the Journal.

In addition to conservative senators, at least one conservative historian is also alarmed by the SAVE America Act. Speaking to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in February, Robert Kagan said he fears there will not be free and fair elections in 2026 or 2026 because Trump will refuse to relinquish power to the Democrats.

“I am worried, as I have said and others have been pointing out, about whether we will even have free and fair elections in 2026, let alone in 2028,” Kagan told Amanpour. “I think Trump has a plan to disrupt those elections, and I don't think he's willing to allow Democrats to take control of one or both houses as could happen in a free election.”

Meanwhile George F. Will, a former adviser to President Ronald Reagan and Washington Post columnist, wrote in February that Trump’s repeated lie that he actually won the 2020 election is part of a deeper and dangerous mass dishonesty among his voting base.

“Donald Trump’s belief in widespread fraud in the casting and counting of 2020 ballots is entailed by his belief that it is theoretically impossible for him to lose at anything,” Will explained. “His certitude infects millions of Americans, some of whom think it inconceivable that he could ever be mistaken. Others doubt that anyone could win the presidency while obsessing about a complex conspiracy for which there is no evidence.”

The columnist added that “two former Republican senators, three former federal appellate judges, a former Republican solicitor general, and two Republican election law specialists” managed to analyze “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.” Therefore he wrote of Trump, “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”