By David Morgan, Bo Erickson and Jonathan Landay
WASHINGTON, Feb 3 (Reuters) – President Donald Trump’s call for Republicans to “nationalize” elections drew pushback on Tuesday from lawmakers, including from a few Republicans, as Democrats voiced fresh concern that he intends to interfere with the November midterms that will determine control of Congress.
In a podcast interview with former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino released on Monday, Trump repeated his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him and said his party should “take over” and “nationalize” voting in at least 15 places, without detailing what he meant.
Under the U.S. Constitution, state governments oversee elections, not the federal government, and most contests are administered by county and local officials.
Democratic officials and voting rights advocates said Trump’s comments, just days after the FBI searched the election office in Fulton County, Georgia, for 2020 ballots, show he plans to try to undermine or perhaps even manipulate the results of this year’s elections.
“This is not about the 2020 election,” Democratic U.S. Senator Mark Warner of Virginia said at a press conference. “This is frankly about what comes next.”
On Tuesday in the Oval Office, Trump urged Republican lawmakers to pass election reforms and reiterated his call for more national control.
“The state is an agent for the federal government in elections. I don’t know why the federal government doesn’t do them anyway,” Trump told reporters.
MIDTERMS COULD CHANGE HOUSE CONTROL
The president’s party has historically lost seats in midterm elections, and Democrats need to flip only three Republican-held districts in November to gain control of the U.S. House of Representatives.
A senior Republican campaign operative told Reuters it did not appear there was an overarching strategy behind Trump’s comments, beyond an ongoing Justice Department effort to procure voter rolls from many Democratic-leaning states.
Lawmakers and election experts were less sanguine.
“The last time he started talking like this, his allies minimized the risks and we ended up with Jan 6,” Brendan Nyhan, a political science professor at Dartmouth College, wrote on X, referring to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters.
Trump has often expressed a desire to overhaul the country’s elections, based on false claims that his loss in 2020 to Democrat Joe Biden was fueled by fraud. He has called for mail-in ballots to be outlawed, questioned the security of voting machines and claimed falsely that millions of non-citizens regularly cast ballots.
In recent years, Democrats tried without success to implement some national election reforms like universal mail-in voting and address some aspects of voter ID laws.
The two top congressional Republicans, House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, did not offer support for taking over elections but defended Trump’s demands that voters provide proof of U.S. citizenship and photo identification.
Thune told reporters on Tuesday he was “not in favor of federalizing elections.”
“I’m a big believer in decentralized and distributed power,” he said. “It’s harder to hack 50 election systems than it is to hack one.”
Johnson said it was unnecessary to take over elections in some states, but argued that Trump’s concerns about election integrity were justified.
Some Republicans briefly threatened on Tuesday to block a deal to end a partial government shutdown unless the bill included citizenship and voter ID provisions.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump wanted Congress to pass a separate Republican-authored bill, the SAVE Act, that includes those new voting requirements.
“The president believes in the United States Constitution,” she said. “However, he believes there has obviously been a lot of fraud and irregularities that have taken place in American elections.”
Several Trump allies in states with close races told Reuters they believe Trump might threaten to withhold federal election-related funding to states that resist new voting measures, such as ID requirements or limits on mail balloting.
The government provides hundreds of millions of dollars in federal assistance to states each year to help administer elections, including for voting equipment, cybersecurity upgrades and election worker training.
GEORGIA ELECTION OFFICE SEARCH
Last week, the FBI executed a search warrant for 2020 ballots in Fulton County, Georgia, a central battleground in Trump’s unsuccessful effort that year to remain in power, which will also host one of the most competitive Senate races this year. The county district attorney’s office charged Trump with election interference in 2023, though the case was dropped in November, a year after Trump won his second term in office.
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, appeared in Georgia alongside the FBI, alarming Democratic lawmakers. It is highly unusual for the director of national intelligence to be involved in operations involving domestic elections, particularly if there is no clear foreign nexus.
Warner, who co-chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, has said Gabbard’s office has not alerted Congress to any foreign threats to election infrastructure.
Gabbard’s appearance in Georgia “under a thin veil of legitimacy” raised “serious legal and constitutional questions and politicizes an institution that must remain neutral and apolitical,” Warner said on Tuesday.
Gabbard said in a letter to Warner and Congressman Jim Himes, the Democratic co-chair of the House Intelligence Committee, that Trump had requested her presence at the FBI raid last week. She also said she has the legal authority to coordinate and analyze election security matters.
In April, Gabbard said at a cabinet meeting that her office was investigating election integrity issues, asserting there was evidence that electronic voting systems are “vulnerable to exploitation to manipulate the votes being cast.”
(Reporting by David Morgan, Bo Erickson and Jonathan Landay; Additional reporting by Jarrett Renshaw, Erin Banco and Bhargav Acharya; Writing by Joseph Ax; editing by Scott Malone, Deepa Babington, Rod Nickel)
