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Five-Alarm Fire Warning After Trump Says 'Republicans Ought to Nationalize the Voting'
(www.commondreams.org)
this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2026
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The thing is, there's no mechanism for nationalizing voting, and I don't really see a clear path for Republicans to do that in the next nine months. They'd have to pass legislation to do that, which would be extremely difficult given their margins in congress. Even then, states control elections as a function of the Constitution, and while the Supreme Court is happy to approve whatever unconstitutional bullshit Trump dreams up, it will take times to get through the courts. He could try to seize control of the voting process from states, but I don't know that he has the infrastructure to manage the whole voting process through the executive branch, and the fact that he's asking the Republicans to do this for him makes me think he knows this. Either way, any kind of coup on the election process would face the same legal challenges as legislation.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't be extremely worried. I think it's unlikely that the Republicans will, "nationalize the voting," but I think it's very likely he'll send federal goons in to, "prevent voter fraud," (AKA suppress the vote).
The Executive Order has been their "clear path" to all sorts of shit they have no right doing.
Yes, but most of those have either not been achieved yet or have only been achieved because they were relatively easy. He tried to abolish the 14th Amendment through EO on day one, and it's just getting to the Supreme Court now. He's been able to illegally dissolve federal agencies because the Republicans in Congress have abdicated their power, and destroying something is much easier than building it.
Even if he signs an EO to take over the elections tomorrow, he'll still face legal challenges that will likely wind up in the Supreme Court, and he'll still need to build out the infrastructure to run these elections federally, something the federal government has never done. I'm not saying that he can't steal the elections, or that we shouldn't be worried, but the idea that he's just going to, "federalize," elections in fifteen states before the midterms seems pretty unlikely.
Listen to what you just said. Congress won't act to stop him and SCOTUS takes a year before they might stop him. If he does do an EO tomorrow, the legality of the order likely won't be settled until after the midterms. The only things in his way are logistics and the people.
What would stand between him are the state's Attorneys General. They have been very successful in blocking Trump's actions through the courts (at least until the Supreme Court, which has been ruling against lower courts' decisions at an incredibly high rate). It's likely that the AGs would block this long enough for the midterms.
Hasn't there already been significant efforts towards a national vote? We saw the massive progress turn into a slow burn on the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which was the closest we've ever come.
That's about ending the Electoral College. What Trump is talking about is the federal government taking control of how elections are run. The state's are in charge of conducting their own elections, even federal elections, rather than the federal government, per the Constitution. This is what makes it difficult for Trump to rig elections through direct methods such as ballot stuffing.
The time for the courts to process cases is in favor of the administration seizing control not against it. There is an absolute worry about these clowns seizing control of elections, as they know the blue states will do nothing if they do send the feds in, even with their own state police and national guard, forewarning of the plans, they will do nothing, the republicans know it, we know it.
Until that changes there is nothing to stop them. Ignoring it won't help, we need new opposition leaders. New politicians and appointees. That is about step one and we keep trying to skip forward to step 3, which will fail without completing the prior steps.
I mean, if you're talking about Trump sending in federal agents to seize ballots, then yes, that would be bad and there is very little an individual state could do to stop it without an armed conflict. At that point, ballot stuffing would be a secondary concern over the fact that a second Civil War had broken out. I maintain that the more likely scenario, though, will be Trump sending CBP and ICE goons to stop, "illegals," from voting, which would be a flimsy pretense for voter suppression. But, "federalizing the elections," would require upednig Article 1, section 4 of the Constitution, and even with our deeply fucked up court system, I can imagine Trump getting that through in 9 months. Maybe I'm wrong, and a favorable court would allow him to proceed until he got it to the Supreme Court, but I think that's a stretch.
I tend to agree even our courts would be unlikely to directly support directly defying the constitution as such at this point, although since they cancelled lower courts issuing nationwide injunctions I would not be certain. That is license for the feds to throw people in camps without habeous corpus, with no way to stop them. It was a huge betrayal and our media sucks, our historical experts suck, the entire ivy league should all be burnt to the ground because they left us ignorant of that and so many other important facts we should know to prevent total ruin, which is on our path.
I disagree that there is nothing the states could do. They have armed personnel, they have citizens that support them, they have the law on their side. We outnumber them, we have a national guard, we have cops, and we could create militias, blue states not only should physically prevent the feds from marching in and running fixed elections, they have a duty to.
Not standing up to them is what led us here, if we stand up now, we can prevent it from getting worse. It's the lack of pushback that has led the establishments, the courts, et al, to give up pre-emptively. We made sure the democrats won in 2020 and they did nothing with it, allowed everyone to get away with betraying the country, with rank corruption. Not even a cross word from our geriatric leadership let alone a concerted effort to nail them to the wall. Not a purging of traitors from the establishment, not making sure the federal agencies fulfilled their statutory duties but allowed them to remain captured, in this context namely the justice department.