Trump slashes election security efforts while making it harder for some to vote | Opinion
President Trump hates fair elections so much that he keeps attacking them. His latest attack is his most dangerous.
President Donald Trump's approach to elections has been consistent since he entered politics in 2015. He casts any vote won by an opponent as fraudulent. And he portrays any attempt to safeguard America's election systems as rigging the game to cheat him.
So it comes as little surprise that Trump, two months into his second term as president, is trying to make it harder to vote for people who don't support him while also slashing away at security systems that keep our elections safe and secure.
Remember: Just about every accusation Trump makes is really a confession. When he says elections are rigged to harm his chances, he really means he's working as hard as he can to rig elections in his favor.
Here's another thing to keep in mind about Trump. He's intent on making changes in areas where he has little or no authority, to provoke legal challenges that will eventually reach the U.S. Supreme Court. He expects the hard-right majority on that court, including three justices he appointed in his first term, to give him what he wants.
There are plenty of groups lining up to fight Trump's assault on our elections and plenty of experts around who can explain how wrong he is in his approach. I spoke to a few to get their perspectives.
Trump doesn't have the authority to do this. Everybody knows it.
Last Tuesday, Trump issued an expansive executive order impacting the conduct of elections across the nation.
Plenty of the focus in that order was on Trump's attempt to impose identification requirements at polling places, calling for voters to show a U.S. passport, a REAL ID driver's license or something similar.
Because he is inherently dishonest about this sort of stuff, Trump branded that as "Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections." That, of course, is a bunch of bunk.
Larry Norden, vice president for government and elections at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy institute, called Trump's order "a massive overreach" sure to be challenged in the courts. Norden noted that "literally tens of millions of Americans don't have" the kinds of identification Trump was trying to mandate at polling places.
And, Norden told me, Trump's order attempts to disqualify the use of machines that use barcodes on ballots to help track votes. Twenty-one states use those types of systems, he said, and, more important, there is no voting machine on the market right now that meets the requirements of Trump's order.
"The whole thing with the barcodes is silly, and it plays up conspiracy theories," Norden told me. "At the end of the day, what this would mean would be decertification of tens of thousands of voting machines, if it was followed through, at a cost to the states of hundreds of millions of dollars."
He said Trump lacks the authority to impose this, and for good reason.
"We don't want the president to be deciding the rules of the elections because he could shape them to try to favor himself," Norden said. "I'm very concerned that this is all going to be used, if there are election results that people aren't happy with in 2026, to question results."
Trump always questions election results, whether he wins or loses. So that, sadly, is a safe bet.
Trump has purposefully weakened election security
Trump, in February, had Attorney General Pam Bondi disband the Department of Justice's Foreign Influence Task Force, established in Trump's first term to track disinformation campaigns by Russia and other rogue nations. This month, he slashed the budget of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, known as CISA, which helps state and local officials keep elections safe and secure.
Why cut funding for election security?
Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt, speaking Thursday in a media briefing organized by Keep Our Republic, a nonpartisan group focused on election security, told me the very act of holding elections has become "polarizing," with elections officials "perceived as enemies or combatants."
Schmidt can't say for sure why Trump is doing this. But he noted that Trump has claimed, without evidence, that elections officials try to influence the outcome of political contests.
Suzanne Spaulding, a former undersecretary for the National Protection and Programs Directorate in the Department of Homeland Security (which became CISA), told me the work of countering foreign interference in our elections "got caught up in the allegations that somehow all disinformation work is really about censoring political views."
She worries about "robust efforts at foreign interference" tracked during last year's election from Russia, China, Iran and other geopolitical foes with an interest in sowing discord in America.
"It is no longer really being monitored, analyzed or countered by those entities, as far as we can tell," Spaulding said. "We are now leaving our state and local election officials and, frankly, our federal officials and folks across the country without the tools and the information they need to understand the nature of foreign threats to that election infrastructure and the training and the tools needed to address it."
This is happening because of Trump's ego
That's the point here.
Trump is still scalded by the verified instances of Russia attempting to interfere in our elections, often when he is on the ballot. Russia's favorite Republican in America can't stop whining about what he calls "Russia, Russia, Russia" ‒ what sensible people see as a reasonable concern about an international threat.
And his oh-so-fragile ego is still wounded from his loss in the popular vote in 2016 (when he won the presidency) and in 2020 (when he lost it). He can't accept the loss.
Even his win last year, including the popular vote, can't erase the damage to his political psyche.
So he'll abuse the power of the presidency with an executive order that will eventually reach the Supreme Court. This is the part where we once again have to hold out hope that a majority of the justices there will see themselves as a coequal branch of government in place to constrain executive overreach and not as Trump's personal attorneys.
Follow Paste BN columnist Chris Brennan on X, formerly known as Twitter: @ByChrisBrennan