How Hard Is It to Rig an American Election, Really?

0:01This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.

0:19I'm Michelle Cottle. I cover national politics for New York Times Opinion. And this week, I've got the usual crew with me, columnists Jamel Bowie and David French. Guys, welcome. Hello, hello. Michelle, hey. Are we ready? As always, we are, yeah. It's been a hectic few days. Trump has repeatedly called to nationalize the election. He continues to peddle his election fraud nonsense and the grandless claim that a host of non-citizens are voting illegally. And better still, the FBI raided an election center in the great state of Georgia. So this is all very troubling for me. Jamel, I want to start with you.

1:04because we've talked about this a little before. Under the Constitution, elections in the U.S. are generally handled by the states. Shifting power to the president and the federal government would, you know, pretty much destroy that. Does Trump's idea have any teeth? Should I be worried about this? So Trump keeps saying they have to nationalize the elections, they have to federalize the elections, what have you. And this sort of just depends on Congress at this point, right? The relevant part of the Constitution says that states shall handle elections, blah, blah, blah, unless Congress decides they want to step in and do something, right?

1:41That's kind of the thing. So the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is Congress saying we want to do something, right? And so Congress has that authority. So unless Congress decides to sort of lay down some standards, right? If Congress decides that for whatever reason it wants to nationalize election administration, then I'm not sure that there is anything to worry about in that regard, because otherwise, as I think we've discussed, election administration in this country is extremely decentralized, right? Like, it's not even the case that it's centralized in each individual state. It's centralized in each individual precinct.

2:18Setting aside the fact that the executive, or the president specifically really has no legal authority here, right? Like I want to be very clear about what I'm saying here. I'm not doing the kind of thing where I say, well, we can't do that. It's illegal. I'm saying that if you are the head of a board of elections or you lead your precinct in like Georgia and Donald Trump calls you and says, I want you to throw out ballots, you can say to Donald Trump, okay, and then ignore him. Like there's no authority he has over you, right? This is part of what federalism means. Now, in terms of like things to be concerned about, since Trump very clearly is like worried about the outcome of the midterm elections, is like worried about, you know, being exposed to political accountability should Democrats win office.

3:11I think he's obviously gonna try to whip up fears of voter fraud. He's already doing it. And the last thing I'll say here, I don't want to monopolize this. The last thing I'll say here is that I actually think it's really important to listen to how Trump talks about this. He doesn't actually talk about it in terms of the midterms. His mental model for the election is the presidential election. And he is preoccupied with his loss in 2020 and losing the popular vote in 2016. And this, you're sending the FBI to Georgia to, you know, take materials from the 2020 elections. To me, that suggests that all of this is less really about like subverting the elections that are actually going to happen and more about finding material for Trump to be able to say, no, I actually won.

3:57And I think it's important if you're thinking about this in terms of sort of like what is like what could happen, like what is likely to happen? What do they have the capacity to do? That the energy here is all about I want to prove that I was right. The energy here isn't really how do I specifically target, you know, two dozen house races. I get your focus on 2020, Jamel, but I actually worry about this more in terms of it just seems like he's laying the groundwork, not even for meddling in this election, which I'm sure he would love to do. But just for – he knows his party is in line to get a thump in, and he wants to discredit that.

4:40You know, like he's already laying the groundwork for claiming that every Republican loss is a fraud and needs to be overturned or, if nothing else, just cause massive civil disruption and public – you know, just protests and all kinds of conspiracy theories. So that is actually what I most think he's up to. But, you know, it can be both, right? Can I say, though, just on that point that the ability for that to have impact is very much a function of Trump's own broader political standing. So we can imagine a world, actually kind of hard to imagine, but we can imagine a world where Trump is a popular president, where he is, his approval rating is 55-45, right?

5:30And he's riding high. and in this world, maybe there is a midterm backlash, a small one, and Democrats won control the House. In that world, right, I could see this maybe working, right? Not just because of Trump's persuasive power, but because the actual observable kind of political reality would seem to suggest that the public likes Trump. But if we get to November and Trump's approval rating has dipped from where it is now, if that's where Trump is politically, then all of the screaming about fraud and illegals in the world isn't going to change the fact that people can see with their plain eyes that the man is unpopular and that people are going to respond accordingly.

6:10And Republicans are going to understand, right, that like the people are going to respond accordingly. So I'm actually quite skeptical that this would work out in part because it really does depend on just how, not even how feasible the claim is or how, you know, realistic, but just his own political standing. Okay, I'm going to cling to that optimism. But David, I want you to jump in here and have at it. So I'm going to disagree with Jamel a little bit here. I think it's coming time to distinguish between Trump and MAGA. Because I agree with Jamel 100 million percent that Trump's real focus isn't on some random congressman in like Georgia 4.

6:54Like he doesn't care about that. He definitely cares about the 2020 election. He wants to find something, to do something, to manufacture something where he can say, look, see, everyone laughed at me. I really won. MAGA, however, is wanting to have a life after Donald Trump. And if you look at sort of the Stephen Miller side of things, in many ways, what we're seeing in reporting is demonstrating is that he's more ruthless often than Trump's own instincts. And this is a big part of MAGA, is they're more vicious, more cruel, even than Donald Trump. And they also understand fully and also often have a greater degree of sophistication.

7:34I always object when people call Trump dumb. But when you're talking about political sophistication, sort of thinking down, turning around the next corner, I don't think Trump thinks in those lines. And I think MAGA is fully aware of what it has done. They are governing as if they will never lose power. And they're very keenly aware of that. And so I think when you see a situation where you have, say, Trump is raiding Fulton County, Ban is saying, get ICE all around polling precincts. Trump is waiting for that phone call from Chelsea Gabbard. Tommy Tuberville is saying, get rid of voting machines.

8:09And so you've got this kind of environment where you have MAGA, I think, very focused on the midterms because they've been governing like they're never going to lose power. They were the ones who had this theory after Trump won in November of 2024 that there was this vibe shift, that they were transforming American political culture, and all of that is crumbling. And so I think two things are true at once. I think, number one, and this is hopeful, I think this is the hopeful thing, it is very difficult to hack an American election on a nationwide basis. It's really, really hard, and that is because of, you know, the decentralization.

8:47So when Trump says we need to centralize or nationalize, what he's wanting to do is break through some of these firewalls, if he possibly can. But my concern is you have a cohort in the administration that is not backward-looking the way Trump is. It's very forward-looking. They have a generational project. And I don't think that they want to see their generational project go up in flames after two years, after 2024. And so I think there will be every effort made that they can get away with to try on the front end, suppress the vote. And this is where ICE comes in. And then on the back end, here's what to watch.

9:28This is something that in sort of the MAGA public, they believe this is proof of fraud and it's called the blue shift. So because Because Democratic voters have, ever since Trump, you know, it used to be before Trump, mail-in balloting didn't cut one way or the other. But then Trump comes along and says, mail-in balloting, corrupt, fraud, etc. And then the Democrats got this big mail-in balloting edge. And what that means is, in a lot of locations, the mail-in ballots are counted a little bit later. And so you have this sort of red, you know, the initial red move followed by the blue shift. They use this as proof to this day.

10:05To this day, you will hear Republican members talking about this as basically like the Democrats see how many votes they need to manufacture. And then in comes the blue shift and they magically went, watch for this. Watch for after Election Day in closely contested races where Republicans are ahead. watch for an enormous effort made to call into question the legitimacy of all counting going forward after that. So I want to talk about the kind of diffuse way elections are run and how hard it is and how many local officials and boards you have to play with, which is what a couple of years back, more than a couple now, you know, Steve Bannon's precinct strategy, right?

10:55His goal was to flood the lowest levels of the electoral system. You know, like the people who are out there watching the votes and counting the votes and setting how your county handles ballots and things like that, flood those with MAGA activists so that the next time there was any question about fraud or who could vote or anything like that, they wouldn't need to do anything illegal or overthrow ballots. They would just have their people in place who would automatically be inclined to rule anything in their favor. And they have worked on that in some ways. I mean, you look at Georgia where they've got a system in place where anytime there's a question about local election administration, they can just lead, you know, say we need to bring in the state election board to deal with this.

11:48It's dominated by Republicans. So I do think you're right that MAGA has been working very hard at the lowest levels to get these pieces in place. That said, I do still want to argue that Trump doesn't care about this or that individual congressman. But if he loses control of the chambers of Congress, he knows that that ends his running amok without any oversight. I mean, the Republican Congress has been pathetic in terms of keeping him in a lane, any kind of lane. And he does know that if the Democrats wind up controlling something, that ends for him. So I do think there's a, in addition to whatever humiliation, he would suffer as the albatross around the party's neck that sank it in the midterms.

12:38So I do think that he is not just backwards focused, even though he is obsessed with how everybody laughed at him and he can't get over it that he's never going to get a chance to beat Joe Biden. So anyway. I just don't think people realize how much a sort of a median county committee level Republican in a lot of red areas is radicalized on this issue and willing to go to the barricades on this issue. And so that's the X factor here that I think, you know, it became obvious on January 6th that he had a cohort of people who would be willing to charge the Capitol on his behalf. But that's sort of the tip of the iceberg or tip of the spear, if you will.

13:17You have a whole superstructure beyond that of people who have been extraordinarily radicalized on this issue from year after year after year of misinformation, disinformation, illegals are voting, et cetera, et cetera, great replacement theory, et cetera, et cetera. And so he has a lot of willing partners down to the precinct level who firmly believe that if Republicans lose, it's because the fix was in. One thing that does somewhat frustrate me about these conversations, and you sort of hear it in how we're always talking about what Trump wants, what MAGA wants, what Bannon wants, what they want.

13:56And there's this thing that happens where this observation about what they want becomes, becomes, in the discussion, an assumption about their capabilities to accomplish and to do. And it also becomes this sort of strange assumption that they are the only ones with agency. So what matters is what they want. And if what they want is X, Y, and Z, then we should assume that they maybe have the capacity to do it. And that represents like a clear and present danger. And I guess I'm just sort of skeptical on both ends. Like, from my perspective, observing this presidential administration, observing this political movement, that for all of the energy and the desire, the actual ability to execute is often not quite there.

14:49Like, let's look at ICE. Let's look at the use of ICE, right? The reason this is possible has less to do with any particular operational sophistication from Stephen Miller and more to do with two decades of law and judicial settlement that gives the White House, gives the presidency broad immigration enforcement authority. So what we're really seeing here is what happens when you give really broad authority to a president who wants to abuse it. Right. It was the path of least resistance. Yeah, we're dealing with the reality we have, not the reality we wish we had. Right, right. But my point is that where Trump has been most destructive, it has been in those areas where there's a path of least resistance, right?

15:37Where there is kind of just a, I want to do this and then I can do it mechanism happening. Where Trump is least successful is where that doesn't exist or where it requires a bit of a heavier lift, where it requires the coordination of various other actors who may have their own interest involved here. And so when thinking about the upcoming elections or just like electoral subversion in general, like my sort of frame of reference here is sort of what is the path of least resistance for Trump to be able to do something? And those are the places where there should be like concern. But in as much as we are simply, we are talking about, you know, MAGA wants to take over at the precinct level, right?

16:24Or MAGA wants to stop the voting, stop the counting, rather. that requires, right, like in a very logistical, operational sense, a level of organization and sophistication that has not been demonstrated. And moreover, there are other people with agency besides them, right? And so I've just, I think I've been kind of emphatic about this recently. And I think it boils down to, I'm just kind of tired of the assumption that Trump and those around him are the only people with agency. I think Jamel's point is well taken in talking about let's distinguish intentions from capabilities, because you can intend a lot of things or want a lot of things that you're not capable of doing, which is one of the reasons why I talked about this incredibly decentralized electoral system is very difficult to hack.

17:15But if you're talking about intentions combined with capabilities, there's a lot of capability here that exists in MAGA in 2026 that did not exist in MAGA in 2020. And including an infrastructure of local activism, including an infrastructure of local legal strategies, etc., that was really kind of created in 2020 to try to contest the election. but it never really went away. And in many ways, it's only sort of been enhanced. And so what you've seen since 2020 is steady progress by MAGA of obtaining more and more control in local and state election commissions, for example. You had, for example, you know, noise made after the Fulton County raid, the two Republican members of a state election commission essentially saying, maybe we need to be taking over Fulton County.

18:05Now it's not, they're not doing it yet, but would they have the capability of doing that? But yeah, and Jamel's exactly right that people have agency in response and have tools they can use in response for sure. But when you don't control any of the elected branches of government, a lot of your tools that you have in response are quite limited. And so you're essentially resting on the incredible strength of institutionalized, decentralized election administration that is very difficult to hack, running up against a political movement that attempted to corrupt it in 2020 and failed and has enhanced its capabilities since that time.

18:44And in many ways, Field and Bolden, because they tried their best, they assaulted the Capitol and then won and got back in power and got pardoned. And so from that standpoint, I do think you can't be alarmist in the sense of making up capabilities that do not exist. But, you know, they have shown that they can do some vicious things in the real world as inept as they are. The amount of oppression in Minneapolis, what they did in Midway Blitz in Chicago, they've set up detention facilities where thousands of people are being held in brutal conditions, and all of these things have happened in the real world.

19:19I'm not saying they can stop a blue wave, but I'm saying that this could get very dangerous between now and then because the capabilities have been enhanced, sadly. So shifting slightly, guys, what do you think that state and local polls, Democrats, just Trump critics, can do or should be doing at this point, either in preparation or to push back against these attempts at anti-democratic meddling or at least laying the groundwork for trouble in the midterms? Well, I should say, So in terms of what should be done, right, there are lots of practical things that can be done, right? So if you're worried about ICE, right, states can just make clear, right, that federal agents cannot conduct immigration enforcement acts near polling places.

20:11That's a straightforward thing that you can do. And that is, you know, federal agents do have to follow state law. You can work on further modernization of just ballot counting, right, making sure that there is a process for ballots to be counted as quickly as possible to kind of preclude any conspiracizing about, you know, a blue shifter or whatnot. The Times ran this really interesting piece about the president's calls for nationalizing elections, and it quoted Republicans, Republican election administrators, who themselves were very, if not skeptical, but like affronted at the suggestion that they were running shoddy elections.

20:54and me personally, this isn't sort of like baseless faith. This is just sort of looking at how people with their own separate spheres of power tend to operate. I myself am not entirely sure that there'll be all that many Republican election administrators who are going to want to completely upend the way they do things because an unpopular president is complaining about losing elections. Like I'm not, I'm just like not, I'm not certain about that. And I don't know, like this is a place where I just think public vigilance is actually going to be the most potent thing, right? If Americans are intensely apathetic about the election, then there's going to be more opportunities for shenanigans.

21:33But if Americans are very attentive or care very much, if they're very motivated to go vote, and at this stage it looks like there's going to be at least a large number of Americans who are going to be very motivated to go vote, then the extent to which you can do much actually is like radically reduced, right? Like, people are going to notice if you are trying to, you know, stop the vote count. And they're going to complain, and they're going to act, and they're going to react. The one thing that I want to throw in there, just because I feel I should be as pessimistic as possible, is I don't think we're counting enough on the fear factor.

22:10You know, if you look around, poll workers have been driven out because they are getting threats. They are, you know, worried about themselves and their family. It's a little bit like what we see with Republican members of Congress. They talk about, you know, being afraid for their safety and the safety of their loved ones. You know, back before Trump, too, showed its true colors. You know, like you saw officials in Republican districts talking about how they were going to set up these systems where they had loyalists watching the vote count and they were ready to scream fraud at a moment's notice.

22:48I don't know that that's just a product of loyalty. It's also a product of like they don't want to incur the wrath of a very vengeful, very scary president and his very scary ground troops on some level. I don't know. The administration's goons executed people on the street in Minneapolis, and the reaction wasn't that people left the street. No, no. I get that, but we're not talking – we're talking in generalizations of what we've seen over the last several years. I mean, go ahead, David. Yeah, when I look at solutions, I think of the problem, I tend to zoom it to a higher level. And there are two things that have really made all of this possible for Trump to build what is genuinely a grassroots movement that would contest an adverse electoral outcome, no matter what.

23:39And he's accomplished that by two ways. One is misinformation, and the other one is impunity. So the misinformation is obvious. It's just he's, it's firmly, it's a fixed belief in millions and millions of Republicans that the 2020 election was stolen. So that's the misinformation. And then the impunity is the pardons, the commutations, all of that, the sense from Minneapolis and other places that these federal agents can do what they will. And there's not going to be any accountability. There's not going to be any internal discipline. So you create this environment in which people feel like they can go to push it to the limit and beyond.

24:16and they're going to be okay. And that's one of the reasons why I have been such a, like, it's almost like, David, can you talk about something else? Because I've talked so much about federal immunities and I've talked so much about legal immunities. And that is actually something that people can make concrete, there can be concrete actions. There's a universal civil rights act that is being proposed in many states to bring Jamel's point into play that to impose state-level consequences for violations of federal constitutional law, I think states should enact that. And then the other thing is, as long as we're talking about potential shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, shut it down to block federal immunity.

25:02We have a world where right now, if you want to sue the federal government for violation of your civil rights, good luck, good luck. You have an unbelievable immunity barrier that doesn't exist for state and local governments. So there's a very simple law. It's called the Bivens Act. It adds five words, just five words to Section 1983. And what it will do is it will mean that you can sue the government, the federal government, the exact same way that you can sue state and local governments. And guess what? Here's the magical thing about that. Civil liability cannot be pardoned by the president.

25:37So the president can keep somebody out of prison. he cannot keep somebody out of bankruptcy court. And so, you know, if we have these 17-point plans and all of these things you want to do with ICE, I've got a one-point plan. Strip their immunity, and then you apply the Constitution. Okay. I like the practical suggestions that appeals to the, you know, planner in me. Okay. All right. With that, I think I could stay here and argue with all day, but I think we gotta land the plane and move on to your favorite part of the show, recommendations. So, as always, David and Jamel, tell me, what have I gotta check out?

26:21Well, if you subscribe to Criterion Channel, which is just an app for the Criterion collection, sort of selected films, indie films, Hollywood films, all kinds of films, they have a really wonderful selection of films for Black History Month from a wide number of Black filmmakers. So I would highly recommend people check out that collection. I'm at the moment watching a film by a filmmaker, Charles Burnett, called Killer of Sheep from 1977. And it's just sort of a slice of life drama about a working class Black family and looking at kind of the disappointments, the little triumphs of all the people in the family.

27:02It's a really wonderful and well-observed film. And that's sort of Burnett's style So just I would recommend people check that out for something a little different than the usual Hollywood fare and something to mark Black History Month. Brilliant. David? So, Michelle, I've been streaming. Yes! I'm always be streaming, Michelle. Talk to me. Always be streaming. Talk to me. So I've got two. Two? So my recommendation is Hugh Laurie. My recommendation is Hugh Laurie. I love Hugh Laurie. So Hugh Laurie is in the show The Night Manager, which after almost 10 years is back. Tom Hiddleston, Hugh Laurie, phenomenal.

27:48Great. It's still my heart. Tremendous. And then Tehran. In Tehran, Hugh Laurie is a South African nuclear inspector who we're still trying to figure out what his angle is. And I just have decided that I'm just watching Hugh Laurie and basically whatever. And for those who didn't realize this, he came up as, I think, as a comedian. And he was a regular in Veep. But yeah, so Tehran, Night Manager, they're both spectacular. They're very well done. And just watch Hugh Laurie. You will not regret it. If you want to see some of Laurie's earlier comedic work, you should watch the series. A little bit of Fry and Laurie, which is Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry.