With Republicans potentially losing their current seven-vote majority in the House in next year’s midterm elections (or, less likely, their six-vote majority in the Senate), President Trump has been sending clear signals of his intent to interfere with the fairness and integrity of those elections.
After saying in a social media post on Monday that “DEMOCRATS … CHEAT AT LEVELS NOT SEEN BEFORE,” he promised to sign a new executive order aimed at “MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD” in order “to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 midterms.” Mr. Trump also promised to “lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN ballots and also, while we’re at it, Highly ‘Inaccurate,’ Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial Voting Machines.” He also claimed that the United States is the only country using mail-in balloting. (In fact, it is used in Canada, Britain and many other countries.) Mr. Trump’s claim that “the States are merely an ‘agent’ of the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes” is as legally wrong as it is politically dangerous. That can also be said about his plans to issue an executive order interfering with how states run their elections.
The fear that Mr. Trump will try to subvert the 2026 elections is real — after all, he tried to overturn the results of the first presidential election he didn’t win. But even if Mr. Trump fails to keep the House and the Senate in Republican hands, he will have delegitimized future Democratic victories in the eyes of his MAGA base.
Mr. Trump wants his supporters to believe that Democrats can win only by cheating. “Democrats are virtually Unelectable without using this completely disproven Mail-In SCAM,” he wrote in his Monday post. (Never mind that he raised his claim after he was apparently lectured on the supposed insecurity of mail-in ballots by the noted democracy enthusiast Vladimir Putin.) It’s a recipe for further polarization and, as someone in Mr. Trump’s orbit told The Times, “maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.”
It is going to be up to states, the courts and ultimately the American people to stop this further erosion of American democracy.
For decades, I argued that the United States should join other modern democracies in having national nonpartisan administration of elections. What we have instead is a hyper-decentralized system that gives states the primary role in running elections, and states in turn give their counties the authority to conduct elections and count ballots. I had thought that the variety of voting rules, machines and personnel was inefficient and particularly dangerous in polarized times, when every local mistake becomes evidence of some claim of a stolen or botched election.
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