Donald Trump Doesn’t Want You to Vote

Source: ACLU

Instead of winning hearts and minds, Trump is threatening to “federalize” state and local elections by decree.

An Unpopular President

Since clinging to power is his raison d’etre, Donald Trump is scared to death of the 2026 midterm elections, and he’s sounding the alarm.

Every single poll shows he is a deeply unpopular president. Since Election Day 2024, there have been 88 special elections to fill vacancies around the country. On average, Democrats have been running ahead of Kamala Harris’s 2024 margin by 13 percentage points. Just last week, Democrats flipped a Republican-held state legislative seat in New Hampshire, marking the tenth straight election that has shifted red to blue. Consider these examples:

• Last month, Democrat Chastity Martinez won a special election to fill a vacancy in the Louisiana House. Martinez took 62% of the vote in a deep red district that gave Trump a 13-point margin in the 2024 presidential election.
• In a special election to fill a Texas House seat in the Ft. Worth suburbs, Democrat Taylor Rehmet defeated the Trump-endorsed Republican candidate by a 14-point margin. Trump won that House district by 17% on Election Day 2024.

It all started when Democrats won gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia by double digits in 2025. Democrats are poised to ride a “blue wave” similar to the 2018 midterms, when they picked up 41 House seats and were awarded the Speaker’s gavel.

Why Not Win Hearts and Minds?

If this were a normal administration, the president and his team would be tacking to the center, wielding messaging and policy proposals designed to capture 50 plus one. Not the Trump administration: They seem perfectly fine with tossing grievance-filled red meat to their MAGA base, even as it drives down Trump’s favorability ratings.

But you can’t win elections that way, no? It doesn’t work that way…unless winning hearts and minds places a distant second to subverting a free and fair election. That is what Trump and Republicans are trying mightily to do. Here are some ways they’re doing it:

1) Demanding voting data from mostly Democrat-led states and Washington, DC

Although the US Constitution explicitly assigns the management of elections to state and local officials, Pam Bondi’s DOJ is not taking no for an answer: It is suing 30 states and Washington, DC, demanding that they turn over sensitive unredacted voter registration data that often includes birthdates, partial social security and driver’s license numbers. Courts in California, Michigan, Georgia, and Oregon have already rejected DOJ’s claims. At least half a dozen Republican-led state election offices have given the DOJ a thumbs-down.

Pam Bondi and Kash Patel are two key figures in Trump’s effort to subvert the midterms. Source cited.

Not only is this a solution in search of a problem. DOJ’s court filings and demand letters are riddled with misspellings, incorrect legal citations, and uncertainty about basic facts. Democracy Docket explains:

Across cases, DOJ filings contradict one another about who is leading the Voting Section, misspells the names of their own attorneys, and misstates election officials titles. In one case, DOJ lawyers even left internal drafting comments visible in court filings…

Demand letters repeatedly cite laws that do not exist, misname federal statutes, and invoke phantom provisions of the US Code…undercutting the [DOJ’s] claim that it is competently enforcing election law while demanding unprecented access to state voter data.

In its latest snafu, the DOJ spent months emailing a misspelled address to demand Oklahoma’s voter rolls.

2) The SAVE (Donald Trump) Act: Making it harder for people to vote

The SAVE Act, which is now being debated in the US Senate, would fundamentally change the character of voting in America. It would require most voters to show a birth certificate or passport when registering to vote. An estimated 21.3 million Americans don’t have easy access to those documents.

The bill not only requires proof of citizenship, but also proof of residence when registering to vote. An estimated 9% of Americans have moved in the past year, but many don’t update their driver’s license until it expires. The proof-of-citizenship requirement would effectively spell the demise of mail-in and online registration and voter registration drives.

The SAVE Act would impose onerous burdens on the following:

• Married women who have changed their names and do not have a birth certificate that matches their legal names. That’s an estimated 34% of married women in that quandary;
• Less than half of all Americans who either don’t have a need for a passport or can’t afford one;
• People with disabilities and the elderly who rely on mail-in or online voter registration; and
• Rural voters who must travel long distances to election offices to register in person.

The Big Lie 2.0

The rationale behind Trump’s antagonistic rhetoric toward US elections is the spectre of noncitizen voting. Trump has built his political career on demonizing immigrants, and fearmongering about noncitizen voting is part of a grand strategy to sow doubt in our electoral system, in which voters look for someone to blame. Trump then steps in to “federalize” election infrastructure, an action prohibited by the US Constitution.

Never mind that there is scant evidence of noncitizen voting. The Heritage Foundation, Trump’s Project 2025 policy advisor, revealed that within its database containing 1,546 instances of suspected voter fraud, it found just 68 cases of noncitizens voting going back to the 1980s.

And then there is the absurdity of noncitizen voting: Why would people who are in this country illegally, whose primal need for food, shelter, and a steady income outweigh most other earthly pursuits, whose lives are spent living in the shadows and avoiding authority figures…why would these people risk arrest, imprisonment, and deportation by voting illegally in US elections?

A Year of Sowing Doubt

Attorney Marc Elias is on the front lines of the ongoing battle for free and fair elections. Notably, he guided the state-by-state responses to litigation filed by the Trump campaign contesting the results of the 2020 presidential election. Of the 64 cases, Elias won all but one, which was eventually overturned in his favor. Elias is the founder of Democracy Docket.

Elias shares cogent words about the battle for our democracy:

Donald Trump craves power for power’s sake. He has no core convictions other than to govern and rule without constraints. Like most aspiring dictators, Trump is both attracted to elections and repelled by them. To suffer a defeat in the 2026 midterms would mean the end of his absolute power and an even worse humiliation than he suffered before.

That is why, last spring, he was already fixated on rigging the midterm elections through extreme gerrymandering. By October, Trump was insisting that all forms of voting except in person on Election Day be banned. ‘No mail-in or early voting,’ he declared on social media.

By the new year, Trump [said] that he wished he had seized ballots after the 2020 election. Then he called upon the GOP to take over voting in 15 places. He repeated his false claim the states are agents of the federal government for the counting and tabulation of votes. He even mused that he wished there were no midterm elections at all.

Donald Trump does not want free or fair elections. He just wants to win at any cost.

Coda

The SAVE Act advanced in the US Senate to full floor debate by a 51-48 vote. Republicans plan “marathon” sessions to wear down Democrats who unanimously oppose the bill. Final passage of the SAVE Act will require a 60-vote threshold under current filibuster rules. It is very unlikely to pass.