Comment: Why Trump is desperate to ‘nationalize’ election rules

Published 1:30 am Monday, March 16, 2026

By Carl P. Leubsdorf / The Dallas Morning News

The two political parties regularly win and lose control of Congress without it threatening the country’s well-being. President Donald Trump and the Republicans are behaving as if they fear this time will be different.

Why are they so terrified about polls showing the Democrats will win the House of Representatives — as they did four years ago – that they indicate they’ll do whatever is necessary to prevent it?

It’s not the legislation a Democratic House would try to pass; or prevent. It’s not the fact that New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries would displace GOP Speaker Mike Johnson as second in line for the presidency. It’s not even Trump’s stated concern he would again be impeached; though that could well happen.

It’s the GOP’s fear a Democratic-controlled House would do what the Republican Congress has steadfastly refused to do: subject the Trump administration to normal congressional oversight at a time the odor of scandal pervades it.

Recognizing its vulnerabilities is inspiring both legal and extra-legal efforts to prevent it, including changing the rules for November’s balloting.

It’s not just the Epstein case, where Trump’s Justice Department either slow-walked or withheld documents that could involve Trump and other top officials, like Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick; it’s how it weaponized its procedures against former officials who sought to prosecute Trump.

It’s how the administration unilaterally and illegally withheld congressionally appropriated funds, from foreign aid projects to domestic social safety net assistance. It’s how Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services revised vaccine guidance for children, threatening a whole generation with increased disease. It’s how the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency flouted the legal rights of immigrants and U.S. citizens in its zeal to achieve the White House goal of more deportations.

And it’s how Trump and other officials — and their families — enriched themselves by taking advantage of their official contacts.

With polls showing Democrats ahead in both the enthusiasm and intentions of voters, the White House sought to persuade Republicans to redistrict as many states as possible to make them more favorable for GOP House candidates. But Democratic counter-efforts may offset GOP gains.

The GOP also wants to pass a voter bill that would have the practical impact of barring millions of legitimate voters in the name of countering unproven allegations of fraud.

But it hit a Senate roadblock after narrowly passing the House, and Majority Leader John Thune seems disinclined to modify the rules to improve its chances.

The bill, mistakenly called the SAVE (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility) America Act, would override state rules by enhancing the Department of Homeland Security’s role in supervising elections, requiring states to make prospective voters show documentary proof of citizenship, imposing strict voter ID requirements and tightening mail-in voting procedures.

The main target is alleged non-citizen voting, though it’s already illegal and, according to every major study, extremely rare. The bill would impose major new costs on millions of voters who have neither passports nor birth certificates, especially poor people and married women.

Jessica Riedl, a former GOP Senate aide now at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution, said in a post on X that 47 percent of voters don’t have a passport in their current name, 11% lack access to their birth certificates and 57% of women have new last names from their marriages, requiring an updated birth certificate to vote.

Now, The Washington Post reported, Trump is considering an executive order to implement some of the stalled bill’s questionable procedures and give the federal government unprecedented and probably illegal power over November’s balloting.

According to the Post, the proposed executive order being pushed by election deniers would declare a national emergency on national security grounds — the unproven contention that China interfered in the 2020 election — and use it to ban mail-in voting and voting machines. That’s the election Trump falsely claims was rigged against him.

A 2021 intelligence review concluded China considered efforts to influence the 2020 election but didn’t go through with them, the Post said. But that hasn’t stopped Trump from directing Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, to investigate alleged foreign interference in U.S. elections.

That would be Trump’s second executive order since returning to office that sought to increase federal authority over elections. Court challenges blocked the first one, requiring states to submit their voter registration data to the homeland security department; any new one would presumably encounter the same resistance.

That’s because Section 4 of the Constitution’s Article I is quite explicit in giving states – not Washington — the authority over congressional elections. It says, “The Times, Places and Manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives shall be prescribed in each state by the Legislature thereof, but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations, except as to the Places for choosing Senators.”

Trump wants to change that. In a podcast interview with former FBI deputy director Dan Bongino, he urged GOP officials to “take over” voting procedures in 15 unnamed states. “The Republicans ought to nationalize voting,” he said.

In one promising note, ICE said its agents would not monitor polling places next November, easing a persistent concern of Democratic and other local officials.

But the midterm elections are still eight months away, and critics fear that Trump’s illegal efforts to interfere with them have only just started.

Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief for the Dallas Morning News. Email him at carl.p.leubsdorf@gmail.com. ©2026 The Dallas Morning News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.