Will Trump mess with elections?

It's the final frontier - the one there's no coming back from

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As I’ve been watching Donald Trump’s assault on the constitution unfold, one question that has been hovering in my mind is what his regime might try to do to election administration. Almost any damage he does to the country and constitution can at least be mitigated somewhat if he can only be eventually removed from power. But if free and fair elections become impossible, then all bets are off.

Elections in the United States are administered at the state level. There’s a Federal Elections Committee (FEC), but it mostly just makes sure that federal campaign finance law is followed and doesn’t actually oversee the running of elections.

This decentralization has been both a blessing and a curse. On the plus side, it makes it difficult to subvert federal elections. There isn’t some central body that is counting all of the votes that the president can threaten and manipulate. When Trump wanted to overturn the 2020 election, he had to get on the phone to Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and beg him to steal some votes for him. Kemp, to his credit, told him to get stuffed. But imagine if Trump had been able to get on the phone to some random MAGA guy who he had appointed head of federal elections. The call might have gone very differently.

But, on the other hand, state administration of elections has left a lot of scope for shady and discriminatory actions by state governments. Southern states could easily get away with restricting African-Americans from voting during Jim Crow because the federal government didn’t have any existing mechanism to force them to act differently. The idea that this was just states exercising their rights to run elections how they wanted became a convenient smokescreen for the rest of the country to leave the South alone.

A lot of what observers of U.S. elections have been worried about in recent years are basically versions of this latter problem - discriminatory actions by state governments. States - mostly Republican ones - try to manipulate the rules around voter registration and access to the ballot in order to make it harder for non-Republican constituencies to vote. This is sometimes called the “New Jim Crow”, and it has certainly been a problem - although there’s also some academic research which shows that it tends to piss people off so much that it actually leads to a counter-mobilization which cancels out its effects.

But what really worries me about Trump is not so much the continuation of this activity by the states, but that he might try to get the federal government seriously into the election tampering business. This is difficult to do because of the lack of a national election administration agency, but it’s not impossible. And there are some discouraging early signs.