The people on the Intertoobs who are “election experts” are terrified by what Trump will do to the midterms. The election officials actually in charge in the states? Not so much:
In interviews with CNN, more than a dozen election officials from both parties said Trump’s address surfaced little new in terms of evidence. Several GOP officials even scoffed at his presentation, pointing to the data that the administration released to try to bolster its case that there are massive numbers of non-citizens voting in US elections.But, but, but! Voter rolls! Dead people!!
Matt Crane, a Republican who runs the Colorado County Clerks Association, said his text chat with a bipartisan group of colleagues was filled with “a lot of laughing emojis, and like, ‘you got to be kidding me?’ that this was all it was.”
A GOP official from a state Trump won three times also panned the speech, which included the declassification of intelligence reports that Trump said posed an “unprecedented election security nightmare” with threats from China and Venezuela. (Trump didn’t mention that the reports also made clear that neither country ever tampered with US election results.)
“I read the documents,” the official told CNN on the condition that his state not be identified. “It was old. I’ve already seen this stuff. It wasn’t new to me. We already had most of this information.”
Trump has long peddled false and fantastical claims that thousands and perhaps even millions of undocumented immigrants are voting in US elections. Isolated cases do exist, but comprehensive studies from right-wing and left-leaning think tanks have concluded that this occurs on a tiny scale.Texas turned theirs over. Then flagged over 2000 voters DHS wrongly considered non-citizens.
Still, the administration said it had reviewed public data and uncovered hundreds of thousands of non-citizens on the rolls in Pennsylvania and Nevada, and in California and New Jersey, which are Democratic strongholds. Some officials in those states have called for more transparency, demanding to know how DHS arrived at those numbers.
Even some red states that voluntarily turned over their voter lists to the Trump administration for examination were swept into the president’s latest push. The administration said more than 28,000 non-citizens had been found on rolls in states with GOP election officials.
The DHS citizenship database being used to review voter rolls – called SAVE, or Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements – has a record of overstating the number of registered non-citizens. DHS itself acknowledges that states using the system voluntarily for voter-roll maintenance must further investigate any matches.???? But Plumber Mullin said that’s why DHS was taking over the election process.
Sam Hayes, the GOP executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections who has aggressively backed several of Trump’s election policies, said his team wouldn’t rubber-stamp the administration’s findings. He said the state, which DHS claimed had 1,599 non-citizens on its rolls, would conduct its own verification, which takes time and requires contacting registrants.Not that Trump isn’t threatening people who are simply doing their jobs;
“There’s nothing we accept at face value and just start removing folks” from the voter rolls, Hayes told CNN. “We’ve got to make our own independent assessment of this. … We still have to do the due diligence on our end.”
Hayes also threw cold water on Trump’s desire for quick answers, saying: “It’s going to be tough to get it done by the midterms, but we’re working toward that goal.”
Georgia election officials told CNN the administration’s claims about non-citizens on their rolls appear inflated. Of the 2,549 registrants flagged by DHS, they said, only about 20 had ever cast a ballot in the state.
At a follow-up press conference Friday, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened fines and even potential “prison time” for election officials who don’t comply with the Trump administration’s demands for voter rolls and other election overhauls.But it’s more likely Trump will send DOJ lawyers with indictments of state officials, than he’ll send ICE to every polling place on all 50 states. Although it might be amusing to see local law enforcement enforcing state voter protection laws.
Election officials told CNN they take these threats seriously, especially after seeing the Trump-era Justice Department indict several of his political opponents. But at the same time, officials said, their focus is on their work.
“There is the concern about, ‘Could I be made the example of?’” said Crane, the Republican who runs Colorado’s bipartisan election clerks’ association. “But I think, by and large, it’s become somewhat white noise at this point.”
A Democratic election administrator from a battleground state told CNN, on condition of anonymity, that he got a concerned call from his mother after she heard Mullin’s comments about possibly prosecuting election officials.
Earlier this month, the Justice Department sent similar warning letters to all 50 states. Idaho’s Republican attorney general was among those who pushed back, rebuking the DOJ in a sharply worded reply letter that said the “insinuations of criminal violations of the federal election laws are not well taken.”
“Stop threatening your friends in Idaho,” wrote James Craig, a top lawyer from the Idaho attorney general’s office.
A GOP election official from another state told CNN that even some officials in red states don’t feel safe, because of the Trump administration’s unpredictability.
“It’s extremely concerning when they talk like that, and we have no idea what they’re going to do,” the official said.
It’s even more likely Trump has convinced his voters to stay home in November:
But Trump’s unpopularity is only part of the story. The real headline is that the president is sabotaging his own side’s turnout in the very act of seeking to meddle in the election. It’s like a burglary that’s backfiring in real time. Trump is trying mightily to break into democracy’s back door but making such a racket with his crowbar that he’s woken up the whole neighborhood. And now, the neighbors are shouting over the fences and grabbing their baseball bats. Democrats and Independents are more motivated than they’ve been in decades to defend their rights.😎
Indeed, Democratic enthusiasm is higher than it was even in the 2018 “blue wave” election, when they turned out in historic numbers and crushed Trump’s side with a gain of 40 seats in the U.S. House. Today, a whopping three-fourths of Democrats say it’s “more important” to vote in 2026 than in previous midterms. That’s energy, if I’ve ever seen it.
And it gets worse for the president. Every lever he pulls to “tilt” the playing field risks convincing his own voters they don’t need to show up at all. Remember when he told MAGA faithful that if they re-elected him, they wouldn’t need to go to the polls again? “We’ll have it fixed so good,” he boasted, “you’re not gonna have to vote.” It seems like they took it to heart.
Data shows Republicans aren’t nearly as animated about the midterms as Democrats. In fact, the same Post-Ipsos survey from this month finds that GOP voters are ten percentage points less likely to say they’ll vote in the elections in November. That means if the vote were held today, millions more Republicans than Democrats would be staying home — the type of enthusiasm gap that could decisively sway the outcome.
