Republicans Are Already Plotting to Steal the Midterms

It’s not at all clear that the president has any power to issue such instructions in a country where elections are managed by the states and the bipartisan EAC. Richard Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law, believes many parts of the executive order are unconstitutional. The EAC “is an independent agency,” he said. Trump “may try to argue under the unitary executive theory that he has such power, but that will have to be resolved in the courts.” (Trump was dealt a blow on April 24, when a U.S. District Court judge halted the executive order’s proof of citizenship requirement.) Hasen characterized Trump’s executive order as a “power grab,” issued “perhaps in the hopes of influencing how future elections are run in order to try to help his preferred candidates and party win.”

Constitutional law professor Doug Spencer of the University of Colorado Boulder said that, while the EAC order is a “gray area,” he, too, fears that the likely result of any such effort would be to disenfranchise voters who have trouble proving their citizenship, putting an “onus” on voters to secure what should be an inalienable right. It’s “going to lead to many people who have a fundamental right not being able to exercise it,” he said, “and, in my opinion, that’s a problem for a country that wants to call itself a democracy.” Spencer also cautioned that it was far from obvious that the executive order would actually work as intended. In recent years, the Republican Party’s share of low-propensity voters—those who don’t consistently vote, a group disproportionately affected by restrictions—has grown significantly. In other words, the issuance of an executive order intended to make it easier for Republicans to win elections could ironically disenfranchise a growing part of its base.

But even if it does disenfranchise some Republican voters, the executive order goes further than simply making voting more onerous, providing several ways for Republicans to both win elections and challenge elections they have lost. It directs the U.S. attorney general to sue states that count mailed ballots that are postmarked before Election Day but arrive afterward, effectively killing vote-by-mail. It also mandates that state election officials share voter databases with the secretary of homeland security, and the administrator of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, the cost-cutting commission run by billionaire Elon Musk, all of whom could challenge lists, potentially purging voters.