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Five-Alarm Fire Warning After Trump Says 'Republicans Ought to Nationalize the Voting'
(www.commondreams.org)
this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2026
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The thing is, there's no mechanism for nationalizing voting, and I don't really see a clear path for Republicans to do that in the next nine months. They'd have to pass legislation to do that, which would be extremely difficult given their margins in congress. Even then, states control elections as a function of the Constitution, and while the Supreme Court is happy to approve whatever unconstitutional bullshit Trump dreams up, it will take times to get through the courts. He could try to seize control of the voting process from states, but I don't know that he has the infrastructure to manage the whole voting process through the executive branch, and the fact that he's asking the Republicans to do this for him makes me think he knows this. Either way, any kind of coup on the election process would face the same legal challenges as legislation.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't be extremely worried. I think it's unlikely that the Republicans will, "nationalize the voting," but I think it's very likely he'll send federal goons in to, "prevent voter fraud," (AKA suppress the vote).
The Executive Order has been their "clear path" to all sorts of shit they have no right doing.
Yes, but most of those have either not been achieved yet or have only been achieved because they were relatively easy. He tried to abolish the 14th Amendment through EO on day one, and it's just getting to the Supreme Court now. He's been able to illegally dissolve federal agencies because the Republicans in Congress have abdicated their power, and destroying something is much easier than building it.
Even if he signs an EO to take over the elections tomorrow, he'll still face legal challenges that will likely wind up in the Supreme Court, and he'll still need to build out the infrastructure to run these elections federally, something the federal government has never done. I'm not saying that he can't steal the elections, or that we shouldn't be worried, but the idea that he's just going to, "federalize," elections in fifteen states before the midterms seems pretty unlikely.
Listen to what you just said. Congress won't act to stop him and SCOTUS takes a year before they might stop him. If he does do an EO tomorrow, the legality of the order likely won't be settled until after the midterms. The only things in his way are logistics and the people.
What would stand between him are the state's Attorneys General. They have been very successful in blocking Trump's actions through the courts (at least until the Supreme Court, which has been ruling against lower courts' decisions at an incredibly high rate). It's likely that the AGs would block this long enough for the midterms.