With the midterm elections just a week away, President Donald Trump is preemptively casting doubt on the results if they go against Republicans. On Tuesday, reporters asked the president if he would accept the November results unconditionally. “If the election was honest, I would,” Trump responded.
This is a familiar line from Trump. As The Washington Post summarized, “In 2016, Trump said he would accept the results of the election ‘if I win.'” In 2020, he repeatedly refused to commit to accepting the results, saying, “We’ll have to see what happens.” In 2024, Trump said he would accept the results if the election was ‘fair, legal and good.’ “
Trump has yet to admit he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden and has claimed he won more than 100 times despite no evidence of widespread voter fraud. The president has lost at least 64 court cases challenging the results.
But some analysts are increasingly concerned that Trump may take more steps to invalidate the results this time, especially as the Justice Department becomes increasingly involved in the election. Earlier this month, the Justice Department filed criminal charges against two dozen green card holders in California, accusing them of illegally registering to vote or casting fraudulent ballots. Last week, Trump personally asked the Justice Department to file a lawsuit against Alaska to block the certification of the state’s Senate election if the Republican incumbent loses. The New York Times reported that this was “a highly unusual move that suggested an attempt to interfere with the outcome.”
On Monday, the Trump administration threatened Washington state with legal action if it did not purge about 400 people from its voter rolls who claimed they were not U.S. citizens.
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“The timing of this request — a week before the election — is undoubtedly designed to cast unfounded doubts about the election results,” Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs said in a statement Monday. “We take our responsibility to protect voter information seriously and will only respond to requests that follow due process. We saw what happened in California and do not want Washingtonians to be harassed.”
Even if these attempts don’t work, the overall goal may be to shake voters’ confidence in the security of U.S. elections. “This is part of the playbook for electoral takeovers that I’ve seen around the world, and unfortunately in some other authoritarian environments,” Michael McNulty, a former senior election adviser at the U.S. Agency for International Development, told the New York Times. McNulty has studied elections in countries including El Salvador, Hungary and Venezuela. “Trump has essentially destroyed the independence of the Department of Justice, and it has been weaponized,” he said.
“Time and again, the evidence shows that American elections are secure. State and local election officials have painstakingly implemented layered security measures in communities across the country to protect the integrity of the election,” Ben Hovland and Emma Herbert wrote in a recent article by the Center for American Progress. “Despite all this evidence, the Trump administration continues to cast doubt on the security of the election. As the Center for American Progress has detailed, alleging voter fraud or invoking a national security emergency provide powerful excuses to challenge the election results, even as these accusations are made to justify such election subversion. Widespread voter fraud is a myth and the president has no constitutional or legal authority to control the election.”
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