President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that elections which he does not win have been stolen from him, even though he has never furnished evidence for this. Now a new report reveals he may have a plan to steal the 2026 midterms to make sure Republicans do not lose control of Congress during them — and it includes multiple experts raising the alarm.
“I think because the administration has lost so many of their attempts to disrupt the normal process in court, that they are going to use the claim of foreign interference at the end of voting days to either seize equipment or to seize ballots, whether they’re legally justified to do so or not,” Caitlin Durkovich, a former deputy homeland security adviser for resilience and response on the national security council, said at a Brennan Center for Justice briefing earlier this week, wrote The Guardian’s George Chidi on Sunday.
“That period, that waiting time, is where doubt begins to surface,” Durkovich added. “And when it is then amplified by foreign actors and, frankly, by domestic actors, it starts to cause distrust in the integrity of the process.”
Ben Hovland, former chair of the Election Assistance Commission, told The Guardian, “Every state in the country now has live ballots out. That really means the election is here, and it means that needs to be taken into consideration for any court rulings we’re looking at.”
Durkovich and Hovland were not alone in their concerns.
“It’s very important for people to understand that we don’t have any examples of a country trying to interfere in the electoral process, in that technical process,” Beth Sanner, a former deputy director of national intelligence who is now director for geopolitics and strategy at International Capital Strategies, told The Guardian.
She added, “It just didn’t happen. It didn’t happen in 2020.”
As recently as last week, researchers were able to sift through Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him to demonstrate that this was not the case.
“Trump has long cast doubt on the security of U.S. elections, including by attacking mail-in voting and promoting baseless conspiracy theories of widespread fraud in previous elections,” Politico’s Dana Nickel and Maggie Miller wrote on Thursday. “In July, he delivered a primetime address on election security, which included claims that China was behind massive interference efforts targeting past elections. None of the documents the White House released in July appear to support this claim.”
Speaking with AlterNet in June, an elections expert at a nonprofit broke down exactly why Trump is so worried about the midterms.
“What they all add up to is a desire to avoid any accountability to the voters in the midterm elections — to ensure, to preordain the outcome of a midterm that he thinks is going to go badly for him,” Dan Vicuña, Senior Policy Director for Voting and Fair Representation at Common Cause, told AlterNet. “We know, from the Big Lie of the 2020 election to spurring on a violent revolt to overthrow a free and fair election, that he has no respect for democratic norms, for the voice of the people. This is entirely about his own power and his own ego. He will even invest in protecting that ego and protecting his power at the expense of the needs of the public. People are suffering with high gas prices and affordability issues, and he does not care. All that matters is protecting his power, and he has no interest in whether he does that through democratic means.”
He added, “I think this all adds up to a desire to ensure that his party stays in power and his ability to do what he wants — to attack vulnerable communities — remains intact.”