Congress members, state election chiefs, and voting rights advocates are decrying President Donald Trump’s insistence that the federal government wrest control of elections from the states.
But Trump himself is doubling down on his stance.
In a radio interview on The Dan Bongino Show Monday, Trump said he believes that Republicans should “nationalize voting.”
“These people were brought to our country to vote and they vote illegally. Amazing that the Republicans aren’t tougher on it,” Trump falsely claimed. “The Republicans should say, we want to take over. We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many, 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”
Shortly after Trump’s appearance, Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), rebuffed the president’s comments on social media.
“Trump wants to control election outcomes because he knows his party can’t win on their failed policies and disastrous track record,” Padilla wrote. “We’re not going to let him.”
But at a press conference in the Oval Office Tuesday, Trump reinforced his comments that his administration should take over elections from the states.
“If you think about it, a state is an agent for the federal government in elections,” Trump said. “I don’t know why the federal government doesn’t do them anyway.”
Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D) told Democracy Docket that Trump’s recent comments were “alarming rhetoric.”
“Trump is using the federal government to weaken our democracy, and he has escalated his attacks in his second term,” Griswold said. “He will not succeed.”
Chelsey Wininger, the executive director of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, issued a statement on behalf of 21 Democratic state election leaders that echoed Griswold’s concerns.
“Donald Trump is calling for the end of free and fair elections in America,” Wininger said. “His previous attempts to intimidate Secretaries of State and other election officials have failed, and now he is clearly trying to interfere with how states run elections. Trump’s obsession with his 2020 loss has led to him personally ordering federal law enforcement agents to investigate election administrators. This is authoritarianism, plain and simple. The Constitution must be upheld, and states must continue to run our elections.”
It’s not just elected officials calling Trump out. Public policy think tanks and voting rights advocates also criticized the president’s comments — reiterating that the Constitution clearly states Trump has no authority to take over elections.
“Any calls to ‘nationalize’ our elections are a power grab by the Trump Administration,” Rebekah Caruthers, the president and CEO of Fair Elections Center, told Democracy Docket. “Our Constitution says that Congress and the states set the rules for our elections, and the hardworking election officials in thousands of jurisdictions all over the country run them—not the president.”
Mark Lindeman, policy and strategy director at Verified Voting, echoed that view. “As president, Trump has spoken and acted as if he has unlimited power, including unlimited power to interfere in elections,” Lindeman told Democracy Docket. “Americans should expect him to cross Constitutional lines, and we should be ready to push back.”
Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, said in a statement that Trump’s comments are a “big red flag” for what’s to come.
“All of this would be bad enough even if floated by an ordinary lawmaker as a bill in Congress,” Olson said. “But this trial balloon for a federal takeover is not coming from any ordinary official. It is coming from a man who already once tried to overturn a free and fair election because it went against him, employing a firehose of lies and meritless legal theories, and who repeatedly pressed his underlings, many of whom in those days were willing to say ‘no,’ about schemes such as sending in federal troops to seize voting machines.”
Following Trump’s comments, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) was asked by reporters on Capitol Hill Tuesday whether he supported the federal government taking control over elections from the states. Though Johnson initially acknowledged that states, not the federal government, control election administration, he did his part to advance Trump’s conspiracies about voting on the president.
“What you’re hearing from the president is his frustration about the lack of some of the blue states, frankly, of enforcing these things and making sure that they are free and fair elections,” Johnson said.
“We had three House Republican candidates who were ahead on election day in the last election cycle, and every time a new tranche of ballots came in, they just magically whittled away until their leads were lost, and no series of ballots that were counted after election day were our candidates ahead on any of those counts,” Johnson continued, referring to 2024 races in California. “It just looks on its face to be fraudulent.”
Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) said on social media that Johnson was “lying” in his comments about California’s mail-in ballots.
“He knows that counting mail votes is not “magic” or “fraudulent,” it is following the law,” Beyer wrote. “Echoing these lies shows how beholden Johnson is to the Liar In Chief, but the Speaker of the House should be above such awful behavior.”