Title: How Trump May Be Changing the Elections Process

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Brian: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. While some people are calling on everyone to turn down the temperature because of all the political violence in America, it looks so far like the assassination of Charlie Kirk is amping up the rhetoric from President Trump and many of his allies. Here's the part we're going to talk about in this segment. Not just the rhetoric, lots of people on all kinds of sides say all kinds of things, but actions that might impinge upon a free and fair election in next year's congressional midterms.

Briefly, on the rhetoric, we have headlines like these over the weekend: CNN, "Trump has turned up the temperature after Kirk's killing, Spencer Cox, the governor of Utah, is trying to turn it back down." Similarly, the New York Times, "As Trump vows vengeance, Utah's governor calls to lower the temperature." Now, Politico reported on turning up the temperature in words and in possible election-related deeds in several pieces over the weekend. One of their newsletter headlines was called, "How Kirk's Death is fueling Republicans' redistricting race."

It said, "President Donald Trump's already brass knuckle push for red state redistricting is taking on an increasingly apocalyptic valence among MAGA stalwarts following the killing of Charlie Kirk." The article focused on a meeting of conservatives in Indiana over the weekend that had been scheduled before the killing. It cites Alex Bruesewitz, a top Trump advisor and longtime friend of Kirk, who the article says made the case to what they call still hesitant Indiana lawmakers for a congressional map that delivers Republicans all nine Indiana districts, called up Democratic-held areas in Indianapolis and Northwest Indiana, those are the two areas of the states with Democrats in Congress.

It quotes Republican Senator Jim Banks of Indiana at the conference, saying they killed Charlie Kirk as if the Democratic Party did it. That was in contrast to what Utah's Republican Governor Cox, who we mentioned, made a point of saying Friday, as the time spotlights, Cox said there is one person responsible for what happened here, and that person is now in custody and will be charged soon and will be held accountable. Senator Banks, at the Indiana conference he sponsored, said, "They killed Charlie Kirk, the least we can do is go through a legal process and redistrict Indiana into a nine-to-zero map," as if tilting the elections is a form of vengeance.

That's where we'll begin to dive into potential midterm elections, hardball, which we should say was already going on. We had already planned to speak with Ari Berman, our guest, Mother Jones national voting rights correspondent, on his latest article about this. In fact, he was scheduled for last Thursday's show, but we postponed him so we could spend more time covering the aftermath of the killing. Ari Berman joins us today in this now somewhat altered context.

He's also author of the books, Minority Rule: The Right Wing Attack on the Will of the People and Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. His Mother Jones article about the strategy toward the midterms is called Project 2026. It lists 10 ways, 10, that he writes Trump and his allies are tilting the midterms in their favor before anyone has cast a vote. He writes 1 of the 10 involves this quote after President Trump met with Vladimir Putin last month, Vladimir Putin, that hero of free and fair elections, and Trump came out saying this.

President Trump: Vladimir Putin said something. One of the most interesting things he said, "Your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting." He said mail-in voting every election. He said no country has mail-in voting. It's impossible to have mail-in voting and have honest elections. He said that to me. It was very interesting because we talked about 2020. He said, "You won that election by so much," and that's how he got it. He said, "And if you would have won, we wouldn't have had a war. You'd have all these millions of people alive now instead of dead." He said, "And you lost it because of mail-in voting." It was a rigged election, but mail-in voting--

Brian: With Vladimir Putin being cited as a champion of honest elections, Ari Berman, thanks for joining us. Welcome back to WNYC.

Ari Berman: Hey, Brian. Great to talk to you again. Thank you.

Brian: Was Trump accurate there, citing Putin, that no other country has mail-in voting?

Ari Berman: No, he wasn't accurate. Basically, none of what he said was accurate. I think citing Vladimir Putin as an expert on [laughs] free and fair elections, it's pretty shocking in its own right.Russia is not exactly known for a flourishing democracy under Putin. No, plenty of countries have mail-in elections. Lots of countries use it. The United States has used it for quite some time. It was relatively uncontroversial until 2020, when Trump didn't like that more Democrats than Republicans suddenly started voting by mail because they took the pandemic more seriously.

Trump cited Putin because Trump wants to issue another executive order that hasn't come out yet, but I assume is still forthcoming, that the president says he wants to ban mail-in voting. Now, the president doesn't have the power to do that because the state legislatures in Congress set the rules for how elections work on both the state and the federal level. Nonetheless, I think it's indicative of the lengths that the president is trying to go to influence the midterm elections in his party's favor by changing the mechanics of who can and can't vote.

Brian: The Trump-Putin clip and that topic of mail-in voting was in your item number 1 on your list of 10 ways that are already underway to try to tilt the results of the 2026 elections. Item number one that you call nationalizing voter suppression. What else is in that item?

Ari Berman: It's really unusual, first off, that the president of the United States is trying so hard to change voting procedures because, as I just said, that is something that is widely established to be the power of both the states and the Congress. Normally, if presidents want to change laws, they go through the Congress, but Trump is not trying to do that. He's trying to do this through executive action. He issued an executive order back in March that would change how voting works in a number of different ways.

He wanted to require proof of citizenship to register to vote for federal elections, so something like a passport or a birth certificate. Millions of Americans don't have those documents or don't carry those documents around with them on a regular basis. He wanted to say that mail-in ballots must be received by election day, as opposed to a postmarked by election day, which is the rules in 17 states. He wanted to give DOJ and the Department of Homeland Security the power to go through a state voter rolls.

There was one really interesting part of that executive order that didn't get that much attention, but he said he wanted to rescind the certifications of current voting equipment and require new equipment that's actually not currently available. A lot of election experts are worried that Trump is basically going to say the voting machines were rigged, and he's going to use that as an excuse to try in some capacity to challenge the results of the midterm. That was just one executive order back in March.

The president has since gone further, saying he wants to ban mail-in voting, saying he wants to get rid of voting machines. There's a lot of concern about him sending federal troops into democratic cities, places like Los Angeles and Washington, DC, and what that could mean for elections. Could you have the military patrolling the polls? Could ICE be at polling places? There is already a lot of dangerous rhetoric coming from Trump's allies. You had Cleta Mitchell, a former Trump lawyer who tried to overturn the 2020 election, basically saying that she believes that Trump is going to, in her words, exercise some emergency powers to take over the election process.

Brian: Let me play that clip.

Ari Berman: Go ahead.

Brian: I pulled that clip after reading it in your article, and I thought that was very relevant. By the way, folks, we're still in item number 1 of the 10 ways that Ari Berman and Mother Jones wrote up that there are attempts to tilt the election in advance of the 2026 midterms. These are all 1(a), 1(b), 1(c), 1(d), 1(e). I think the overarching thing that you're talking about here, Ari, is whatever power the president has to interfere or to direct, let's say, how elections are carried out, because that's typically a state function.

You did cite Trump attorney Cleta Mitchell on a Jody Hice podcast just this month, arguing that Trump does have the power to call a national emergency, and we know that's one of the things he does. He declares states of emergency to take more power over state election procedures. Here's that clip.

Cleta Mitchell: Look, the president's authority is limited. The chief executive is limited in his role with regard to elections, except that where there is a threat to the national sovereignty of the United States, as I think that we can establish with the porous system that we have, then I think maybe the president is thinking that he will exercise some emergency powers to protect the federal elections going forward.

Brian: Emergency powers, and she hangs it on national security. Do you understand what she's getting at there for something that Trump might hypothetically do?

Ari Berman: Yes. I guess there were things, for example, that Trump considered in 2020, doing things like seizing voting machines in battleground states, that he ultimately did not do because he was persuaded not to do those things. I think the concern here is that Trump is more likely to try to do those kinds of things now because all the people that might have talked him out of it are gone from his administration and his outside allies, people like Cleta Mitchell, people like Steve Bannon are openly saying things like the president could exercise these emergency powers to take over the election, or we could have ICE at polling places. That was something that Steve Bannon said.

Alot of these things at the beginning seemed like conspiracy theories about what Trump might do. Now his allies are basically coming out and saying it, whereas Trump keeps having increasingly apocalyptic rhetoric about the elections, talking about not only the 2020 election being rigged, but already seeming to blame mail voting, seeming to blame voting machines for what might happen in 2026, already taking executive authority in lots of different avenues, including with the voting process, but obviously going much further in things like deploying the National Guard to LA and DC.

There's just a lot of concern about things Trump might do that no other president has considered doing in an election contest, Republican or Democrat. Whether or not they're legal, that doesn't seem to be something that's going to deter the president from trying to do them.

Brian: Let me back up and go over a couple of hypotheticals that you mentioned along the way there. One is that the mass deportation agenda with ICE and National Guard deployments could overlap into some kind of election intimidation, I guess, is how you're characterizing it. You're talking about ICE being deployed near the polls. What could they even do near a voting place that would affect anything about how people vote?

Ari Berman: That's a good question because we've never seen that kind of thing before, but you certainly could see them stationed just outside polling places, which in and of itself could deter people from voting. You could have, for example, the military try to seize voting machines. We already know that the president considered that in 2020. We already know that the executive order that he issued talks about rescinding certifications on voting machines. We also know that the Justice Department has been trying to get access to voting equipment in states like Missouri, which is also extremely unusual.

You could have the military play some roles in terms of equipment, things like that. I think it's less about them changing individual votes and more about an atmosphere of intimidation where people feel afraid to go out and vote because it's basically a police state. Not that long ago in our country, we had, for example, people being given poll tests and literacy tests, and the federal government and state governments being used in a very intimidating way to disenfranchise people.

It's not hard to imagine some of those tactics being brought back, not maybe in terms of the letter of the law, but in terms of the actual ambiance of what it's like when people try to cast their ballot. If voting seems difficult and scary, some people may just decide not to do it because they don't want to go through the hassle.

Brian: You're citing Jim Crow era practices. Related to what you were just saying about deploying ICE, in that nationalizing voter suppression section you mentioned, and you mentioned it here already, Trump's call for proof of citizenship to register to vote. On that one, a lot of people might think, "Why would that be so objectionable? Being a citizen is basically the only requirement for eligibility, besides, I guess, age and residency in the voting district. By extension, if you're a citizen and going to legally cast a ballot, you don't have to worry about ICE." What would you say to those?

Ari Berman: I think the problem is that having to show a passport or a birth certificate when you register to vote is beyond what is currently required in nearly every state. It's very burdensome because when Kansas tried to do this not too long ago, that requirement blocked 1 in 7 new registrants from registering to vote, and these were all American citizens. The problem was they did not carry things like a passport or a birth certificate around with them when they registered to vote.

This is not just voter ID as we think about it, Brian. This is not a driver's license. These are documents that people either don't have or they don't carry around with them on a regular basis. I think there's a lot of reasons to believe that people could be disenfranchised. You could imagine a scenario where the law is not even in effect, but ICE is going around asking people for citizenship papers. People might not carry those around with them. People might have relatives who have different kinds of legal status.

We've already seen American citizens being deported or attempted to be deported by this administration. There's a climate of fear because of the Trump administration's immigration policies that could then be used to weaponize what their election policies might be. That's something that's not just going to keep undocumented people away because they already are not voting. That's something that could then keep American citizens away because they don't have that documentation, or they're just afraid to show up because they don't want to be harassed by the federal government.

Brian: Listeners, we invite your calls with questions or comments or concerns or even experiences on attempts to tilt next year's midterm elections already going on now. Your concerns about actual voter fraud also welcome. Voter suppression or anything related, 212-433-WNYC, for Ari Berman, voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones. His article called Project 2026. 212-433-WNYC, call or text, 212-433-9692.

Just backing up for a second on mail-in voting. I was looking up to see if there are any examples or any meaningful examples of mail-in voter fraud, and I really couldn't come up with any. What I came up with was all these things that you can find in a Google search about why it's secure. Like after the 2020 election, Trump's lawyers, trying to challenge the results, of course, never presented any evidence in court that mail-in voting flipped the result anywhere. They only challenged it on technical grounds.

There was a report from the Bipartisan Policy Center, which by definition is bipartisan, and concluded it's not a threat to election integrity. I found this really interesting one from the American Statistical Association. This was just before the election in 2020 came out that October. They did a statistical analysis to try to answer the question as they framed it. Does voting by mail increase fraud? Estimating the change in reported voter fraud when states switch to elections by mail.

They compared voter fraud cases in states with or without mail-in voting in October 2020, looking at elections before that, and their conclusion was, "We find no evidence that voting by mail increases the risk of voter fraud overall. Moreover, we estimate that Washington," I think that means Washington State, "We estimate Washington would have reported 80 more cases of fraud had it not introduced its vote-by-mail law in 2011." That's interesting, right?

Ari Berman: That is interesting. The 2020 election was probably the most scrutinized election in American history in terms of voter fraud claims. Every credible expert and every credible authority that looked at that election concluded there was no voter fraud. You had the Department of Homeland Security say it was the most secure election in American history.

Brian: That was under Trump, right?

Ari Berman: That was under Trump.

Brian: Trump's Department of Homeland Security in the run-up to January 6th?

Ari Berman: Yes. This was the election where mail-in voting was used at the highest levels in American history. We had the most secure election in American history with mail-in voting at the highest numbers. They've never been able to substantiate any kind of these claims. I think people have this mistaken impression of mail-in voting, where you get a ballot and you don't have to prove who you are. You have to prove who you are with mail-in voting, just like any other form of voting.

You have to put some kind of ID number or some kind of record that election officials are going to match in the databases to prove that you are who you say you are. The only difference is that you're voting remotely as opposed to voting in person, but the same kind of requirements apply. Interestingly enough, one of the reasons why Republicans did better in 2024 is they started urging people to vote by mail again, despite Trump's claims.

They said to people, "Vote early if you want to, vote by mail if you want to, vote however is most convenient for you," because the reason why Republicans initially used mail voting in larger number than Democrats is because they had more rural voters, they had more elderly voters, they had voters who had more difficulty getting to the polls. Trump's rhetoric about mail-in voting, both in 2020 and now, is very at odds with the fact that lots of Republicans have used mail voting, lots of Republicans have continued to use mail voting, and actually, it's something that a lot of Republican operatives want their voters to use to try to increase turnout in the elections.

Brian: Here are some texts that are coming in. One says, "Hi, I enjoy the show, but really can't understand why it's so egregious to ask people to produce a federal document to register." Another one says, "Needn't go back to Jim Crow for voter intimidation. Florida arrested ex-convicts who had been told they were eligible to vote for doing so." I'm going to ask you to verify that. I'm not familiar with that incident.

Another listener actually asks, "They verify--" It's already popped off my screen. Sorry, these texts go by fast, but I'm paraphrasing the gist. It was that since they verified mail-in voting by looking at your signature, they know who you are, and therefore they can know how you, as an individual, voted. Should I be concerned about that? What would you say to any of those texts?

Ari Berman: I'm going to take the one about Florida first because that is a really good example of voter intimidation happening in recent years. In 2018, Florida voters passed a ballot initiative restoring voting rights to people with past felony convictions, because Florida was one of only a handful of states that didn't allow you to vote if you had a felony conviction, and that disenfranchised over 1 million people.

Florida voters passed this ballot initiative restoring voting rights to ex-offenders. Then the Florida legislature changes that law and says that people have to pay all fines, fees, and restitution to be able to vote. A lot of people owed fines because of the way the criminal justice system worked in Florida, so they weren't sure if they were eligible to vote. There was a lot of gray area if people who had served their time and thought they were eligible to vote, if they actually could be able to cast a ballot.

What the governor of Florida said is, Ron DeSantis, he said, "We found all these incidents of fraud." The incidents of fraud were actually people who had served their time, paid their debt to society, thought they were eligible to vote, were told by election officials they were eligible to vote, but then the state claimed they were ineligible. What you had is you had police come to people's doors and arrest them, and the people were shocked. They said, "Why am I being arrested?" They said, "You're being arrested for voting." It was this very intimidating thing. You could look up the videos online.

There's armed officers showing up at people's doors and basically arresting them when the ex-offenders thought they had a clean record, wanted to vote, and now they're threatened with going back to jail simply for the act of voting when they were told they were eligible. It was an example of how a state was using its power to try to intimidate people into making voting seem scary, or in this case, perhaps even criminal. That was a specific example. It's the kind of voter intimidation tactic that I think is relevant when you hear Trump attack the voting process and saying he wants to go after certain people and tilt the voting system in his favor in one way or another.

Brian: A few more texts. Critical one says, "I was with your guest up until he mentioned ICE being stationed at the polls. To me, this is a form of gaslighting. What citizen that has the right to vote will be concerned about ICE being at the polls? This is how the right wins these types of arguments." I'm not going to make you go over it again, but you explained how you think, in your view, that could wind up intimidating people who would be legal voters.

Here's that one that I was starting to paraphrase so I can get as specific as possible a response from you.Listener writes, "When you use a mail-in ballot, it is opened and your signature is verified. Could a record be kept of my name and who I voted for by nefarious people?" This says, "Could a mail-in ballot put me at risk if I vote against a person in power?" I think that's the specific concern that this listener has. Could a mail-in ballot put me at risk if I vote against a person in power? They know it because they open and they look my signature and who I am.

Ari Berman: I don't see how that's really any different than how you currently would do it, because when I vote now, I sign my name and I check in in person to the polls and they verify my signature. They know who I am. Then I cast my ballot, and I put it in my machine. I guess the difference is there that I was anonymous with mail voting. Yes, you would put your name on it or you'd have some kind of identifying feature, but that is kept private. I've never heard of that. I've never heard of someone then using mail ballots to compile a list of somebody and saying, "Now we know how people cast their ballot." I've never heard of that, so that's not something that I would be concerned about.

Brian: Another listener writes, "Would the speaker support compromise legislation that would provide for a national holiday for federal elections, coupled with national voter ID?"

Ari Berman: I think that would be problematic because, first off, a national holiday sounds good in practice. The problem is, if there's a national holiday, first, a lot of things shut down, so it might actually not make the voting process easier. It would also mean that if there's no school, for example, I have two kids who are 10 and 7. If there's no school, it doesn't necessarily make it easier for me to vote if I have my kids with me, and it's no longer a workday. It would be convenient to give people time off to vote. I think that's something that should be done. A national holiday has some unintended consequences.

I think if you're going to cut some kind of deal for voter ID, it would have to be to expand voting access in some other kind of way. For example, let's say there was a compromise where you had voter ID, but then they also had guaranteed access to mail-in voting, guaranteed access to early voting. I could see some kind of compromise being cut in that way. States have cut compromises like that in other places. That's the kind of compromise I think would be possible, which is to say, "Fine, let's compromise on the ID front, but let's expand voting access in other ways so that people aren't disenfranchised."

The problem with the ID thing is that you have to have some mechanism in which everyone gets the ID that's now required. There are plenty of places that do that. There's lots of European countries, Brian, in which they give everyone an ID so there's no fights over voter ID, and they automatically register everyone to vote, so there's no fight over voter registration. If you did something like that, then I wouldn't see a problem with that. We've seen examples of states, for example, that require ID, and then in places like Texas or places like Alabama, they're closing DMV offices and making it hard to get the ID at the places where you need to get them.

Brian: Listeners, if you're just joining us, my guest is Ari Berman, Mother Jones national voting rights correspondent, on his article called Project 2026. It lists 10 ways, 10 ways, that he writes Trump and his allies are tilting the midterms in their favor before anyone has cast a vote. We're already like two-thirds of the way through this segment, and we've only gotten through number 1, that he calls nationalizing voter suppression, because there are so many items within that. We're going to take a break and go on to item number 2 and see how close to all 10 we can get. More of your calls and texts, 212-433-WNYC.

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Brian: Brian Lehrer on WNYC, as we continue with Ari Berman, Mother Jones voting rights correspondent, on his new article, Project 2026, that lists 10 ways, 10 ways, that he writes Trump and his allies are tilting the midterms in their favor before anyone has cast a vote. I want to jump ahead to your item number 9, because it's the focus that I mentioned in the intro, which is a half hour ago now. Front and center after the killing of Charlie Kirk at the Indiana Conservative Conference over the weekend, it was ramping up redistricting efforts.

We know about Texas, we know about the Democrats' response in California. There are things going on in other Democratic and Republican-controlled states. Indiana is an example where the fervor to do something after Kirk's death was invoked this weekend, according to Politico, to increase a push to eliminate the 2 Democratic congressional districts out of the 9 in the Hoosier state. What's the big picture as you see it?

Ari Berman: The big picture is that Trump is normalizing something that is very abnormal, which is mid-decade redistricting. Redistricting is something that's supposed to happen at the beginning of the decade after the census comes out. It started with Texas, with Trump pressuring Texas to redraw its districts just to give him and the Republican Party five more seats. That was extremely unusual, and it's continuing after Texas. Missouri passed a map on Friday that would eliminate one Democratic seat. There's only two in that state, so they've already passed a map.

This was overshadowed by the Charlie Kirk news that would eliminate 1 of 2 Democrats in the state. This is something that Missouri Republicans previously declined to do, but Trump got involved, and so they did it. Now we're seeing Indiana being pressured to do so, to eliminate two Democratic districts so that there will be no Democratic representatives if they go forward with it. Other states are being pressured or considering this. Florida, Ohio is going to go through with it. This is just something that's extremely unusual, Brian.

Absent a court order, states almost never draw new maps mid-decade. Now they are drawing new maps in a number of states, it could be more than a half dozen, simply for the purpose of making it harder for the House to change hands so that Trump doesn't face any accountability if there's a Democratic Congress. I think this is probably the most effective tactic that Trump's used to try to influence the midterms, because you're actually just changing the composition of districts. The other things may or may not work, but this kind of gerrymandering is very, very hard to counteract.

Brian: I've heard multiple Republicans say the Democrats started it, and they cite Illinois, they cite New York, they cite California. I'm in New York, the New York example is not really right, but it's interesting. New York had done the opposite. They passed by voter referendum back in 2014, I think it was, a state policy that there would be an independent redistricting commission, not controlled by either party.

When that commission failed in its attempt, because they couldn't come to consensus between the Democrats and the Republicans on the commission to redistrict their way after the 2020 census, then it fell to the Democratic-controlled legislature, and they did try a partisan redistricting that got thrown out by New York's Democratic-appointed Court of Appeals. There were guardrails in New York. There are not guardrails in Texas that would make that attempt fail in the same way, apparently. What about Illinois? Why do they keep citing Illinois as starting this whole round?

Ari Berman: I don't think Illinois started it. Illinois is a state that's gerrymandered in the Democrats' favor, just like there's lots of states that are gerrymandered in the Republicans' favor. It's certainly true that both sides have used gerrymandering. I think it's also true that Democrats have been more willing to try to ban gerrymandering through things like independent commissions, and also at the federal level. You may remember, Brian, there was federal voting rights legislation during the Biden era, and one of the things that bill, the For the People Act, would have done was ban gerrymandering at the federal level.

Every Democrat, but three members of Congress, voted to ban gerrymandering, and every Republican opposed it. The parties have very different positions on that, but I think you also have to draw a distinction between redistricting as it happens once a decade and mid-decade redistricting. What Trump is doing, putting pressure on states to redraw their maps mid-decade, that is almost completely unprecedented. It's almost completely unprecedented for states to do it, and it's absolutely unprecedented for the president of the United States to call on states to do this.

This was not something that a previous Republican or a previous Democratic president had ever done. Trump is injecting himself into the redistricting process in a way that no other president has ever done at the mid-decade level or at any level for that matter. That's what really makes this distinct, and that's what makes what Texas did very different from what Illinois might have done in terms of following the normal processes.

Brian: Let's take a phone call. Here's Mary Ellen in Westchester. You're on WNYC with Ari Berman, Mother Jones voting rights correspondent. Hi, Mary Ellen.

Mary Ellen: Hi. Thank you for taking my call. I just wanted to point out, going back to what you were talking about before, and someone had put in a comment saying that what's the big deal about requiring government identification? That's the type of argument that superficially sounds okay, but when you actually delve into what the Trump administration is trying to do, for example, with the SAVE Act, which passed the House a while ago, the so-called SAVE Act, I would call it suppressing voting, not saving it, that would require the types of government issued documentation that people don't have or that doesn't match their current names.

For example, it would disenfranchise a lot of married women who changed their names when they got married, who have been voting forever, for years and years, without any problem. Suddenly they would be required to produce documents such as a birth certificate, which even if they carry it with them, so much whether they carry it with them, the birth certificate doesn't match their current legal name.

Brian: Let me get a response to that. How do they do that now? I don't know. My mom, she was born Ruth Waldman and then got married to my dad and became Ruth Lehrer, hi, Mom, hi, Dad, but she never had any trouble registering to vote. What about that listener's concern?

Ari Berman: That was a big concern that was raised when Congress tried to pass this bill, known as the SAVE Act, to require proof of citizenship to register to vote. There was a study by the Brennan Center for Justice that found that 67 million married women could potentially have problems casting a ballot because their names had changed when they got married. This was basically thought of as a poll tax on married women, that they were going to be treated differently because their names had changed, and if they showed their birth certificate, it would be a different last name, and they would have to get some kind of supporting documentation explaining it.

Interestingly enough, Republican women were more likely to change their name and take their partner's names. This was something that may have had some unintended consequences, and it may be one reason why the SAVE Act isn't really moving in the US Senate after it passed the US House, because this is something that could disenfranchise lots of Republican voters as well, which I always say is even if one party is making it harder to vote, it doesn't mean that there's not going to be friendly fire in terms of who might be affected by these kind of things.

With all of these things, you have to dig a little bit deeper. It's not just about requiring some kind of identification, it's about the specifics of how it's required. Often, more people are impacted by these kind of laws than you would initially think.

Brian: By the way, to the listener who is concerned about their signature, identifying them, and mail-in ballots, a few people have written in now to say things like this. Listener writes, "Brian, I haven't voted absentee in a while, but there are two envelopes, no signature on the actual ballot, just like there is no signature on the in-person ballot." That, as far as it goes, is true. Let's go on and back up to your item number 2. We're not going to get through even a large minority of your 10 ways that the election is already being tilted in advance of next year's midterms. Item number two is the president and his allies, you write, are trying to silence his enemies. You cite another executive order, one on April 24th. What was that?

Ari Berman: There was multiple executive orders in April, but I think the one you're referring to is targeting ActBlue, which is the online platform where Democrats have raised a lot of money from, millions and millions of dollars. Trump investigated them, I think, because it was so effective in raising money for Democrats, and said he wanted the attorney general to issue a report on whether there would be criminal charges against this group. He's also done a lot of the same kind of things with people involved in the election processes.

He's not just going against Democratic affiliated groups, he's going against election officials, for example, that defended the validity of the 2020 election. He's trying to strip their security clearances, doing things like that. He's going after law firms that defended Democrats or defended nonprofit groups. I think this is concerning because, first off, I think he's trying to gut the infrastructure that could be used to support Democrats, progressives, but I think he's also going after the election process itself. I think the fear is that if Trump once again tries to challenge the validity of the elections in 2026 or in 2028, the people that spoke out in 2020 against that, they will be afraid to do so again for fear of retribution.

Brian: Having just read your article last week before Charlie Kirk was assassinated, I couldn't help but think of the kinds of things that you were just citing when I heard Trump's first statement from the White House after the murder, kind of turning up the temperature. Tell me if you think this signals more like what you were just describing. Listen to the clip. Hang on.

President Trump: For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.

Brian: Sorry, that was not the part I meant to pull. That was my error. He did talk about, and I could look up the reference, but I think it'll take me too long, kind of going after them. I wonder if you heard his statement in the context of your beat, the battle over advantage in next year's midterm elections.

Ari Berman: I did, because I could imagine him going after groups that do voter registration work, get out the vote efforts, pro-democracy organizations. You could imagine this being used to go after groups like the ACLU, for example, and just be another thing, another excuse for the president to go after people that he believes are at odds with his agenda. Now, I think they were going to do this regardless, but they rarely let this kind of crisis go to waste. They're definitely going to try to, you've already heard in the rhetoric, but they're definitely going to try to use Kirk's assassination as another way to try to increase federal power to go after people that the president and his allies don't like.

I think that's dangerous, and I think that's totally at odds with what should be done in the wake of this kind of assassination, which is try to unite the country. I think Trump's going to use it to try to further divide the country, and I think he's going to use it in a way that tries to, in a lot of ways, do things that he believes are going to benefit himself and his party, as opposed to trying to bring the country together in some form or another.

Brian: Here's a New York Times headline that doesn't have the exact quote that I was referencing from last week, but refers to things that Trump has said even since. New York Times headline over the weekend, "Trump downplays violence on the right and says the left is the problem." It says President Trump seemed to excuse violence from right-wing or other supporters and promised investigations into who was funding and organizing the left.

He had said something similar in that initial statement from the White House, but it's that promised investigations into who was funding and organizing the left. What do they mean by the left? I imagine they're not talking about just militia groups that are actually organizing some kind of violence to the extent that those even exist, but things like going after ActBlue, Democratic fundraising arm, right?

Ari Berman: Yes, exactly. They've done this. They've gone after law firms, they've gone after universities. They've gone after places that you wouldn't even think would be categorized as the left, and aren't categorized as the left. That's why they could go after groups that have received money from George Soros, for example, which is a lot of organizations, or they could go after groups that have been critical of the kind of rhetoric and policies that have been promoted by people like Charlie Kirk and groups that have criticized the administration.

A lot of the people they're going after and a lot of people that Trump has categorized as his enemies, you would not think of as the left, you would not think of as Democrats. We talked about, for example, that the Department of Homeland Security declared the 2020 election the most secure in American history. That came from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, called CISA. Trump fired the director of that group, Chris Krebs. Not only that, but then he then stripped Krebs of his security clearance.

Krebs had to leave his job in the private sector because they were going to go after his colleagues. That's just one example of Trump going after people that really were nonpartisan or apolitical that worked in the election process. Right now you have, we haven't even talked about what the Department of Justice is doing, but they're talking about potentially criminally charging election officials. They're trying to get access to voter registration records, they're trying to get access to voting machines.

You really could see the administration weaponized to go after people that are front and center in the election process, whether or not it's election officials themselves, whether or not it's groups that work on election issues. You could easily see Trump shifting from going after his political opponents to categorizing that in the broadest possible ways to go after people that are heavily involved in the election process to either pursue an agenda that would make it easier for Republicans to win or pursue an agenda that would then challenge the validity of the election system and not have people stand up in response to that like they did in 2020.

Brian: We're already over time. I want to ask you about one final thing that I just can't ignore. Listeners, this article is framed by Ari Berman of Mother Jones as 10 ways that Team Trump is trying to tilt the 2026 midterm election results even now. It's really like 100 ways because each of these items has (a), (b), (c), (d), (e), (f), (g), not listed like that by letters, but there are so many in some of them. The one that I really want to mention is what you call state-level voter suppression and election subversion, because this is who really controls and certifies elections in the United States, unless Trump succeeds, which might be fairly unlikely, in declaring some kind of national emergency and federalizing the election.

There were already some close calls on that score after the 2020 election during that battle, the run-up to January 6th. There have been a lot of changes in Republican led states, especially as to who controls election rules and election certification. I wonder how much that's on your radar screen, and then we're out of time.

Ari Berman: It's definitely on my radar screen. I'll just give you the example of North Carolina. That's a place in 2024 where a Republican state Supreme Court candidate tried to overturn the election. He came very close. Both the state Court of Appeals and the state Supreme Court were ready to throw out enough ballots to potentially declare him the winner until the federal court stepped in. At the same time that that happened, you had the state Board of Elections flip from Democratic control to Republican control because of a law that was passed by the North Carolina legislature, which is controlled by Republicans.

Now the North Carolina Board of Elections, which is the place that both certifies elections on the state and county level, that is under Republican control. It's not just under Republican control, but it's under control of people that have questioned the election process, that have tried to cut back on voting access, that have made false claims of voter fraud. Those are the people that, when it comes time to certify the results, they're going to be the body that signs off on that.

Brian: North Carolina is interesting because, in many ways, it's still a purple swing state.

Ari Berman: Still a purple state. Very much so. We saw Trump try to do this state by state by state in 2020 and fail. We've seen that whether it's in Georgia or whether it's in North Carolina, a lot of these bodies have changed in terms of who's on them. The election denial movement has been very focused on taking control of these election bodies at both the county and state level to either try to make it harder to vote by doing things like closing polling places or cutting back early voting hours or potentially not certifying the election outcomes if a Democratic candidate wins a close election, like we saw them try to do in North Carolina in 2024.

This election denial movement, this is one of the big takeaways of my article. This election denial movement is a lot more organized than it was in 2020, when it was very much seat-of-the-pants effort by Trump. They're in positions of power in ways that they weren't in 2020. It doesn't mean that elections won't be certified, but in places like North Carolina and places like Georgia, there are more obstacles to certifying them than there were before.

Trump can try to influence these bodies just like he's trying to influence these bodies at the state legislative level, and urging people to gerrymander. He could exert the same kind of pressure on some of these local election or state election bodies, and there might be a different result this time or at least a fight that then goes to the court that gets very drawn out and leads people to lose confidence that their ballot might be counted.

Brian: Ari Berman, Mother Jones voting rights correspondent. We're spending a lot of our time on this show these days covering this year's election, but I thought it was important enough with so much that you document that's going on this far in advance of the congressional midterms next year to take a little detour and talk to you today. Thank you very much for joining us.

Ari Berman: Thanks so much, Brian. Always great to talk to you.

 

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