President Donald Trump’s call for Republicans to “nationalise” elections has drawn furious pushback from lawmakers, including from a few Republicans.
Democrats have voiced fresh concerns Trump intends to interfere with the November mid-terms 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 “nationalise” voting in at least 15 places, without detailing what he meant.
Under the US 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 US 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.
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 US House of Representatives.
“The last time he started talking like this, his allies minimised 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 US 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 fuelled 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.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump wanted Congress to pass a Republican-authored bill, the SAVE Act, that includes 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.