Before, during, after: Outside groups race to counter any election interference by Trump

Outside good-government groups are scrambling this month to secure the midterm results, bracing for the possibility that the Trump administration will interfere in the process to keep Republicans in power.

The campaign, which features a who’s who of pro-democracy advocates, comes in direct response to vows by President Trump and top Cabinet officials that the federal government will play a heavy hand in monitoring the elections, a task the Constitution largely leaves to state and local officials.

The outside groups are operating side by side with Democrats on Capitol Hill, who have launched their own multipronged campaign designed to ensure that Trump doesn’t subvert the process to prevent Democratic majorities in the next Congress. 

The groups see three categories of potential hazard. 

The first relates to Trump’s efforts, before the elections, to federalize the system and adopt tougher voting rules, which have sowed confusion heading into Nov. 3. The second involves administrative promises to monitor polling sites on Election Day, which critics deem a form of voter intimidation. And the third pertains to any federal attempt, postelection, to corrupt the results. 

All of them are informed by Trump’s efforts to overturn the outcome of the 2020 race, including the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. 

“It used to be that the federal government tried to help people vote, and right now we have a federal government that is trying to ensure that certain people it doesn’t like cannot vote,” said Andrew Walchuk, a leading voting rights expert at Common Cause.

Trump has long claimed, without evidence, that U.S. elections are rife with fraud and that Democrats can win only by cheating. And he’s escalating that message heading into the midterms, not only rhetorically but with specific executive actions.

The president has pushed, for instance, for GOP-led states to redraw their House maps in favor of Republicans. He’s tried to limit mail-in voting, even pushing the U.S. Postal Service to withhold mail-in ballots of people suspected to be ineligible to vote. He’s sought to gather the voting rolls of individual states in search of ineligible people. And he’s pressed Congress to adopt tougher voting laws.

With the exception of redistricting, most of those campaigns have failed, toppled by the courts or opposition on Capitol Hill. The administration has lost in every single case — more than 25 — it brought seeking to compel states to turn over their rolls.

Trump has repeatedly claimed Democrats cheat in elections. An analysis from The New York Times found he has cast doubt about the integrity of U.S. elections 445 days out of his second term — more than 70 percent of the days since he returned to office.

Jonathan Diaz, director of voting advocacy and partnership with the Campaign Legal Center, said the Trump administration no longer has many of the moderating voices it did during his first term.

“Those people are gone,” he told The Hill.

“The second Trump administration........

© The Hill