On this, the year of America’s 250-year history, we are facing the most serious threat to our system of “we the people” government since 1860. We are watching our constitutional republic in America move incrementally but steadily from self-governance toward authoritarian governance. We say this because the very foundation of democracy — the ability to hold valid, trusted elections — is being threatened.
A brief history.
During the months before the 2020 Presidential election, President Trump repeatedly told audiences that if he lost it was because the election was rigged. After the election, and throughout January 2021, we discovered how far he was willing to go to overturn the election, refusing to accept the decision of the American voter, including:
- He asked the Georgia Secretary of State to “find 11,780 votes” to change Georgia’s result. Republican Brad Raffensperger refused.
- He wanted the Michigan vote counting to stop because he was ahead in the beginning of the pivotal state but lost it as the count continued, and pressured officials not to certify the result in the days after the election. Republican officials refused to comply.
- He urged his supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol to prevent Congress and Vice President Mike Pence from carrying out their constitutional duty to certify the 2020 result. Only Vice President Pence’s courage to put country over party prevented America from suffering its first failed election in its nearly 250-year history. Trump now wants to pay those attackers from a highly questionable fund created to pay supposed victims of alleged weaponization of the legal system. It is worth noting that President Trump considered the 2016 and 2024 elections error-free — undoubtedly because he won them.
In the last 18 months, various actions of the Trump Administration led us and others to fear that it will not accept and allow a losing result in the 2026 congressional elections. Those actions include:
1. On his first day in office in 2025, President Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of roughly 1,500 people charged or convicted for the 2021 attack on the Capitol, including those convicted of violently attacking police and, ,via commutation, those convicted of seditious conspiracy.
2. Since the start of his second term, he has fired or forced out some 75 federal officials who played important roles in ensuring valid elections. Some have been replaced by people who actively worked to reverse the 2020 vote.
3. In January 2026, Kurt Olsen, a leading election denier and currently the Administration’s director of “election security and integrity,” directed the FBI to seize ballots from the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia. though the Justice Department has yet to produce evidence supporting the affidavit’s underlying fraud claims, and senators have called the seizure’s legal basis “misleading.”
4. In March 2026 the Justice Department obtained 2020 ballot images in Maricopa County, Arizona, and — citing claims of fraud in 2020 — demanded ballots from the 2024 election in Wayne County, Michigan.
5. Last week, FBI agents searched the office and questioned staff of an Ohio group that supports voter registration efforts without a search warrant.
6. More recently, the Assistant U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles announced multiple election fraud investigations after California’s primary election and said that he plans to charge people with election fraud as soon as California certifies its vote count.
7. Signed an executive order claiming authority to regulate Federal elections; thankfully, multiple federal courts — including in Maryland, Virginia, and the 1st Circuit — have blocked the order, ruling that power rests with Congress and the States. The Supreme Court briefly allowed a related mail-ballot rule to move forward in August before blocking it again on September 15.
8. Recently, the president torpedoed a bipartisan housing bill he himself had publicly supported, using it as leverage, saying he wouldn’t sign it until Congress passed his voter suppression act.
9. Finally, his Postmaster General has endorsed a rule that the Post Office will not distribute mail-in ballots in states that refuse to turn over their voting rolls to the Administration.
All of this is more evidence that he is relentlessly trying to move authority over the election process from the states to the Federal Government — contrary to the clear language of the Constitution.
We have taken part in many disagreements over controversial issues but always agreed that our constitutional electoral process is vital to our democracy, which means accepting and honoring a losing result. We believe America’s government gives the people the power to govern themselves, rather than an authoritarian ruler exerting that power over them.
If we cannot continue to hold valid, trusted elections, the ability of the American people to govern themselves will stop and our collective voice silenced. We will return to the way human governance was conducted everywhere before the founding of our constitutional republic — the authoritarian model.
What must be done to prevent that in 2026?
- First, Congress must reclaim its Constitutional powers and review and reject many of the President’s executive orders.
- Second, Federal, state, and local officials who possess election responsibilities must be prepared to refuse unlawful demands to override actual election results. Every official responsible for the electoral process must be ready to put country over party and self.
- Finally, the rest of us — in pulpits and classrooms, on podcasts, at work, and around kitchen tables — must defend the most fundamental freedom we hold: the right to choose who governs us. Lose it, and we lose everything it protects.
Let us repeat: Donald Trump has never acknowledged a lost election, and if the November elections don’t go his way, Americans should not expect him to break his long-established behavior. Benjamin Franklin’s admonition is as true today as it was at our founding, when he was asked about the result of Philadelphia’s Constitutional Convention: “A Republic, if you can keep it.” We have disagreed throughout the decades on how to run this country. We do not disagree that the American people, not one man, must decide who runs it next.
So, can you keep it?
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