Jonathan P. Baird

Among the strange stories happening now is the story of the FBI seizing ballots in Fulton County Georgia from the 2020 presidential race. Why would the FBI be seizing these ballots now? That race is long over and the results were audited three times. It was a clean election but Donald Trump has said, “People will soon be prosecuted for what they did”.

That was the election where Trump told the Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger “to find me 11,780 votes”. Fulton County prosecutors indicted Trump along with 18 co-defendants for racketeering and fraud. His ascension to the presidency in 2024 allowed him to escape justice but for Trump the Georgia loss became a mad obsession. Contrary to all evidence, he has continued to believe that he was cheated. He has expressed regret that he didn’t federalize the National Guard to seize voting machines in 2020.

While this could be looked at as lunacy because the 2020 presidential term is over and what difference does it all make, I think that is the wrong way to view the seizure of the over 700 boxes of certified votes. The real question is what it means for the 2026 mid-term election and the 2028 election.

With Republicans spectacularly losing races even in red states. Trump is making a concerted multi-pronged effort to insure Republicans will not lose. He has called on Republicans to “take over the voting in at least 15 places” in advance of the next election. He has said elections should be “nationalized”. He has also said the U.S. shouldn’t hold a mid-term election this year because Republicans risk losing their majorities in the House and Senate.

Lost is the constitutional understanding that the President has no power over elections. States control elections. It is right there in the Constitution, Article 1, Section 4, Clause 1, the elections clause.

It is hard to evaluate the appropriate level of paranoia to have about Trump election interference but some facts are certain. Trump is very afraid of losing the House and Senate in 2026 because of his unpopularity. That is an outcome he wants to avoid at all costs because of the certainty of public investigation into his crimes and the likelihood of a renewed impeachment effort. He wants to keep people from voting so he can maintain unrestrained power. He also wants to undermine confidence in the legitimacy of any election where he or Republican candidates lose.

Key to the Trump effort is voter suppression. Voter suppression can take many forms. It is about creating roadblocks so that voters who might be likely to vote against him or Republicans are not able to vote. I thought it was telling when Attorney General Pam Bondi said she would remove ICE and Border Patrol from Minnesota if the state would agree to hand over its voter rolls. That has little to do with immigration.

Voter rolls include identifying information like driver’s license numbers and Social Security numbers. It is private information that is maintained by top election officials in each state. The Trump regime has been trying to gain access to state voter data.

The federal government has sued more than 20 states and Washington DC for not complying with the data request. There has been no legitimate reason given to acquire this information. They are an encroachment on state’s power to run elections as outlined in the Constitution. However 11 red states have passed along full statewide voter registration lists to the feds.

I think the Trump regime wants the data so they can purge voters from the rolls if they think these voters will vote for Democrats. The purged voters would be mostly African American and women who have changed their names. Just last week Trump was baselessly railing about voter corruption in Detroit, Philadelphia and Atlanta, cities with large African American concentrations that always vote against him. He equates corruption with people who vote Democratic.

I would be remiss if I did not mention the SAVE Act (short for Safeguard American Voter Eligibility) which passed the House by a 218-213 margin. The name is maximally Orwellian. The SAVE act would require people to present a valid U.S, passport or birth certificate when registering to vote. The proposal has drawn concern for women who changed their name after marriage. Name discrepancies could lead to significant voter disqualification.

The SAVE Act would likely prevent millions from voting. An estimated 21 million Americans do not have documents proving their citizenship readily available and 2.6 million lack any form of government-issued photo ID. Many of the disenfranchised would be African American, Latino. Native American, students and low income people. The SAVE Act has been called Jim Crow 2.0. The future of the SAVE Act remains uncertain in the Senate.

Trump has threatened to impose a ban on mail-in voting. He routinely alleges voter fraud with absolutely minimal basis. It is hard not to wonder if he will use ICE or the military (via the Insurrection Act) to intimidate people from voting. Steve Bannon has talked about ICE surrounding the polls.

No one knows for sure whether Trump will try and cancel elections. I am not saying it is impossible but it is a mistake to make that assumption. They are throwing up voting barriers, minor and major, and I haven’t even mentioned their gerrymandering. They will have post-election schemes too.

We must not give the regime powers it doesn’t have. They must be defeated at the polls and by mass popular rejection. Just as happened in Minneapolis, democracy can beat them back and people of all political stripes must vote like their lives depend on it. Those concentration camps they are building are not just for immigrants.