Submitted by Charlotte Lin
This URL is behind a pay wall. It is posted here for those with subscriptions.
The text is from the submitter.
Donald Trump has made no secret of his desire to assert federal control over elections. From the beginning of his second term, he has issued executive orders attempting to restrict voter registration, impose new regulations on voting machines, and limit voting by mail. (Most of these have been blocked by the courts.) And attempts to seize power over voting have come from every corner of the executive branch: an F.B.I. raid of election offices in Georgia in January, mounting lawsuits against states by the Justice Department, and warnings that armed ICE agents may be sent to the polls this fall.
How big a threat is Trump to the midterms? In this week’s issue of The New Yorker, Barton Gellman, whose writing ahead of the 2020 election anticipated key maneuvers that Trump and his allies would pursue to try to overturn that result, reports on what might happen this year. First, the good news: there is little evidence of a master plan. As a former senior trial attorney in the D.O.J.’s voting section tells Gellman, there has been “no coherent strategy” from the Administration to upend the midterms. “There’s malevolence, but there’s a lot of incompetence,” he added, noting the near legal wipeout that Trump’s lawyers have experienced in courtrooms across the country. “They don’t have a single success.”
Gellman writes that even Trump’s marginal influence on voting could have an impact on close races this year. And he reports on the scenarios that some local election officials have been preparing for—all centered on the fear “that the President could do something new and outlandishly lawless on or close to Election Day.” Here’s just one nightmarish, if unlikely, hypothetical: suppose that the F.B.I. shows up at a polling place and seizes ballots or voting machines, citing some suspected irregularity, and breaks the chain of custody and leaves actual results in doubt. But that would take getting a warrant from a judge—as one expert puts it, “extremely unlikely yet disastrous if it happens.”
Much of the hope for the nation’s election integrity this cycle rests on local officials, including Republicans, who have stood up to immense pressure from Trump, and even faced death threats from strangers. Gellman profiles the lieutenant governor of Utah, Deidre Henderson, who is tasked with running the state’s elections, and has fought a lonely, and boldly public, battle for the rule of law. “It sure looks like they’re trying to take over control of elections to make sure only people they want to vote are voting,” Henderson tells Gellman, about the Administration’s actions. “To me, as an American and a Republican, it’s offensive.”