With the Trump administration assaulting both the spirit and the letter of the United States Constitution on multiple fronts, President Donald Trump has also become increasingly vocal—and combative—in his plans for US election administration.
After nearly a decade of federal and state investment in election security and integrity initiatives, researchers and election officials working on the ground around the country have been clear that US election infrastructure is as robust and transparent as it’s ever been. In a March executive order and subsequent comments on social media, though, Trump has promoted a baseless counternarrative that US election infrastructure is outmoded and unreliable, requiring federal intervention.
Trump’s administration has also curtailed a significant portion of the federal government’s election security work and installed officials within the Department of Homeland Security who deny the validity of Trump’s 2020 presidential loss. Most recently, election conspiracy theory promoter Heather Honey was appointed a deputy assistant secretary for election integrity within the US Department of Homeland Security in late August.
“Remember, the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes,” Trump wrote on Truth Social last month. “They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them.”
Nonpartisan election experts emphasize that this is a completely inaccurate and misleading interpretation of the US Constitution and the decentralized, state-controlled election model it describes.
“It’s right there in the Constitution from the very beginning, Article One, that the states set the time, place, and manner of elections. The states run the elections; Congress can add rules, but the president has no role,” says Lawrence Norden, vice president of the elections and government program at the Brennan Center at New York University School of Law. “Trump makes all these pronouncements that he’s going to end mail voting, that voting machines can’t be trusted, but he can’t do that. He certainly has the bully pulpit, though, to mislead and confuse the public—and the power to intimidate.”
Pamela Smith, president of Verified Voting, a nonpartisan nonprofit that promotes election system integrity, emphasizes that it is very difficult to unpack and disentangle the concerns the administration is raising from the inherently inappropriate use of the presidency as a vehicle for attempting to dictate election requirements. “It’s really hard to talk about all of this when the context is just wrong,” Smith says. “It’s not up to the White House to say to the Election Assistance Commission, ‘You should change how you do voting machine certification and decertification.’”
Ben Adida, executive director of the nonprofit open source voting equipment maker VotingWorks, points out that it is a good thing to encourage state and local officials to prioritize replacing aged voting machines so they comply with current best practices and standards. He says that this was a “positive development” from the March executive order, though he also notes that, “the timing suggested in that executive order is much too tight to be realistic.”
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