Trump is holding more than a billion dollars in anti-terrorism and disaster money hostage unless states change how they run their elections. Refuse, and he takes 20 percent of your security funding. Five months before the midterms his own party is expected to lose.
As reported by CNN and confirmed by The New Republic, the administration
is now telling states they will lose a fifth of their Homeland Security grants unless they agree to a sweeping set of election demands.
These grants, more than a billion dollars this fiscal year, are the money states use to prevent terrorist attacks, protect infrastructure, and prepare for natural disasters. DHS has handed this funding out for years, no strings attached. Now the strings are the whole point.
What does Trump want in exchange? States must phase out the electronic voting systems currently used by about 30 percent of American voters. They must run every voter roll through a federal citizenship database called SAVE, a system experts warn is so error-prone it flags eligible citizens as ineligible.
They must conduct manual election audits directed by Trump’s own administration. The cost of compliance is staggering on its own. Georgia officials estimate it would cost them $66 million.
Here is the part they are counting on you to miss. Every
one of these changes is being sold as a way to stop voter fraud. Election security experts say several of them would do the opposite.
Forcing rushed, hand-marked overhauls and pushing flawed citizenship databases onto state rolls months before an election is exactly how eligible voters get wrongly purged and how chaos gets introduced into a system that was working. The fraud risk is the policy.
And the timing tells you everything. Trump’s approval is at the lowest point of either of his terms. His rural base has cratered. His own internal expectations for the midterms are bleak. So he is reaching for the one lever a president is never supposed to touch: the machinery of the vote itself.
The Constitution gives power over elections to the states and to Congress. Not to the president. Three federal courts have already blocked earlier versions of these orders. Legal experts expect states to sue again, and expect them to win.
He cannot win the room. So he is trying to rewrite the rules of the game.
