I don’t have an answer to that question, but I do have three recent articles that attempted to address it. So, for your perusal and contemplation, here they are.
Trump Goes Public With Plan to “Take Over” Elections.
Days after the FBI seized 700 boxes of ballots and voting records from the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia, President Trump called on Republicans “to take over the voting in at least 15 places” in advance of the next election, raising new fears that his administration plans to interfere in the midterms and beyond.
“Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” Trump told former deputy FBI director and conservative commentator Dan Bongino on his radio show on Monday. “We have states that I won that show I didn’t win. Now you’re going to see something in Georgia where they were able to get, with a court order, the ballots. You’re going to see some interesting things come out.”
Trump is once again saying the quiet part out loud, suggesting that the FBI raid in Georgia was a prelude to how his administration intends to interfere in state and local election processes in advance of the midterms.
There are still many unanswered questions about the Georgia raid, such as why a criminal investigation has been opened into an election that took place six years ago and was audited three times and why Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was present for the operation when she is barred by law from participating in domestic law enforcement operations. The New York Times reported on Monday that Gabbard called Trump and put him on speakerphone with FBI agents who took part in the raid, which represents yet another erosion of democratic norms.
That’s a statement of the threat, to put a marker on where we are now.
Why Trump can’t cancel the 2026 midterms — and why that fear distracts from the real risk.
Earlier this month, President Donald Trump floated the idea of canceling the 2026 midterm elections, drawing widespread attention and concern even as White House officials later dismissed the remarks as facetious.
But election experts consistently agree that Trump has neither the legal authority nor the practical ability to cancel elections. And state and local election officials consistently say they will carry out the elections they’re legally required to run.
The election system is under real strain, and bad-faith efforts to undermine it are serious. But after talking with local election officials, lawyers, and administrators across the country, I don’t see evidence that upcoming elections are at realistic risk of not happening at all. Elections happen because thousands of local officials follow state and local law that mandates them — and history shows they’ve done so before, even under immense pressure. The greater danger isn’t no election, but one that’s chaotic, unfairly challenged, or deliberately cast as illegitimate after the fact.
Stephen Richer, the Republican former recorder in Maricopa County, Arizona, said the idea that a president could simply halt or meaningfully cancel an election misunderstands how elections function on the ground. The system, he said, is “made up of so many disparate actors” — thousands of local officials, courts, vendors, and administrators operating under different authorities and timelines. Even if there were a coordinated attempt to get these people not to go through with the election, “you’ve got to figure at least half of those people aren’t big fans of the president, and many of the rest are on autopilot regardless of what they think of the president.”
[…]
If you’re worried about what lies ahead, election officials say there are meaningful ways to respond — and that spreading fear isn’t one of them. Richer said the bigger danger now is renewed distrust of election results. That distrust makes it easier for those in power to make bad-faith attempts to twist the math after votes are cast.
His advice is straightforward: “Continue being a repository for facts and truth about election administration, and kindly and sensitively inject those into conversations that you are a part of if you hear something you know to be wrong.” He added, “Don’t be dismissive. It never works.” And, he said, “you are responsible for the false information you spread.”
Aguilar said that academic voices predicting doom “don’t understand the nuances” of state and local law and that voters should be skeptical of them. Those who want better information should go to their local and state elections offices.
There’s also a risk that continually framing elections as likely not to happen — or as already lost — could have the opposite of the intended effect, discouraging participation rather than protecting democracy. If you’re concerned about what might happen in your county, there are concrete ways to help now: sign up to be a poll worker, volunteer to help register voters, offer your business or community space as a polling location, or donate to organizations preparing to defend election laws and certification in court.
My takeaway from this is that the bad actors are going to do lots of fearmongering in advance of November. We must not abet them in that effort. Wallowing in doomsday scenarios and giving Trump’s bloviations more weight than they deserve will work against us. Don’t make it harder than it needs to be.
The Fight Is Upon Us: What The Right to Vote Looks Like on Trump’s Terrain of Violence.
We know about Donald Trump and elections. We had a preview of it in 2020. And now we’re in Trump II where the president has already gone a long way to building a highly politicized domestic paramilitary force which is under his direct personality authority. Many people have rightly been worried for months about the president using ICE to harass voters or create a climate of fear in key cities on election day. Remember that right after the killing of Alex Pretti on Jan. 24, Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter to the governor of Minnesota offering to withdraw ICE from Minneapolis if the state would essentially surrender its sovereign governing authority. Along with surrendering public assistance rolls and abolishing sanctuary policies, Bondi demanded access to the state’s voting rolls to free Minneapolis from ICE occupation. So the nexus beyond violence and occupation and the state’s sovereign authority to administer elections no longer has to be imagined. It’s right there.
[…]
Traditionally, voting rights has been fought out especially in the courts but also in state legislatures and in various forms of protest activism. There’s also a strong remedial element. If states pass onerous voter ID laws, you want to have people helping voters understand what kinds of IDs they need to vote and where to get them. But the prospect of armed paramilitaries harassing or obstructing voting at the behest of the president or other coercive and extra-constitutional attacks puts us in totally new territory. It not only requires new policy responses it requires a very different mentality and field of imagination for what kinds of resistance to unconstitutional and criminal attacks on the electoral process are possible.
As we’ve discussed numerous times over the last year, the critical issue here is the latent, underused and often under-appreciated sovereign authority of the states. And we are beginning to see the first signs of states using these powers. At least two states have set up portals for citizens and members of law enforcement to report criminal conduct of ICE and other federal agents for future prosecution. These are small steps, not directly tied to voting. But they show a growing recognition that the federal government is now in renegade, anti-constitutional hands and is committing various criminal acts as matters of policy. So much of modern state authority is invested in institutions and processes aimed at collaborating with federal authorities that it takes much more of a leap of imagination than it might seem from the outside to do otherwise.
This will of course still require a lot of court actions and possibly legislative actions as well. It will certainly require a lot of citizen organizing. But it has to be heavily tilted toward protecting each state’s ability to conduct elections in the face of extra-constitutional incursions by the federal government. Conventional voting rights law just doesn’t envision federal occupations where certain classes of citizens may not want to venture outside of their homes or fear getting shot. I don’t know how they would view a gambit like Bondi’s asking for voting rolls as the price of withdrawing federal forces from a state. While we’re at it, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) should absolutely add robust protections against ICE, CBP or any other DHS police agency becoming involved in any way in election administration to his list of asks to approve DHS funding. Even if the White House doesn’t agree to this or even if they agree and then violate the new law it is critical to raise the salience of the issue and public focus on it now.
For those of us who’ve been following voting rights activism for a long time, we’re in different territory. It’s no longer about passing good laws where possible and contesting the constitutionality of bad ones everywhere else. We’re in a terrain where broad and often force-based extra-constitutional and anti-constitutional actions must be assumed. State control over the administration of elections is now the sheet anchor of democratic government in the United States. It must be defended not only in the courts but through creative and aggressive means by state authority itself, by creative non-compliance, by withholding state resources and revenues from the federal government, by collaboration with citizen-led initiatives and even down to mobilizing a state’s policing authorities to block illegal actions by the federal government to deprive citizens of their right to a free and fair election. Every player in the constitutional system is not only permitted but obliged to make their own judgments on the constitutionality of actions by every part of the government. The promise of the American democratic experiment now resides in the Free States of the Union. They cannot accede to the illegitimate actions of a renegade executive.
The people who have the power and the authority to resist Trump’s depredations must go all out in doing so. The rest of us need to put all the pressure on them to do that.
Hope that was helpful. We do have some experience now in dealing with this fuckery, and there are a lot of people doing a lot of work to actively counter it. Don’t make it harder for them, find ways to get involved, and put pressure on those who need it to make sure they do the right thing. We can do this.
UPDATE: From Bill Scher at the Washington Monthly this morning:
Trump’s call for a partisan takeover of the electoral apparatus understandably triggered reciprocal panic in Democratic circles about voter suppression and outright vote stealing. Considering how far Trump was willing to go to steal the 2020 election—from disparaging mail ballots to pursuing dubious litigation to egging on an unruly mob hellbent on obstructing the Electoral College count—every American committed to free and fair elections must remain on the highest alert until Trump has fully left the political sphere.
But what Trump precisely said, how the White House is cleaning it up, and what congressional Republicans are doing, suggests less of a coordinated plan to commandeer the midterms and more of a Republican Party in disarray amid a rising Blue Wave. It doesn’t mean that Democrats should be overly sanguine about MAGA’s capacity to disrupt the midterms. A tragic imagination is helpful in these times. But both the current state of the GOP’s vote suppression efforts and, importantly, its past failed attempts are well worth keeping in mind.
That’s a pretty good summary of where I am. Go read the rest, it’s worth your time.
Do you think the new gerrymandered districts will confuse voters, resulting in lower turnout?
@Doris Murdock I’ve looked at my voter certificate on the Harris County Tax Office website and it’s now showing me in one of the revised districts. I went from 9 to 7. I’m guessing that the mass-mailout of new certificates, which is standard at the beginning of even-numbered years, was delayed to prevent confusion during the Cong. Dist. 18 (pre-revision) special election. Having an updated document is not an assurance that some voters won’t be confused by the revisions, though.
Votebeat Texas has an article on the certificate mailout delay.
https://www.votebeat.org/texas/2026/02/05/voter-registration-card-mailing-delayed-by-redistricting-team-problem/
My certificate arrived mixed in with grocery sales papers and coupons in my US mail. Orange this year.