Trump and his Republican allies in the dismantling of American democracy do not want people to vote this fall or in 2028. In their view, there is a clear reason for that.

Joyce Vance noted this week that Howard Lutnick, Trump’s wealthy Commerce Secretary, claimed that more than 24,000 noncitizens illegally voted in the 2020 election. The claim is false, but it is being used as the basis for Republican efforts to impose even stricter rules that would make it harder for married women, racial minorities, city residents, and low-income people to vote in this year’s elections and in 2028. The evidentiary record points the other way: a Brennan Center review of 23.5 million ballots cast in surveyed jurisdictions in 2016 surfaced roughly 30 suspected noncitizen votes, and state-run audits — including a multi-year Georgia review of millions of registrations — have found comparably rare cases, with nearly all flagged attempts blocked before a ballot was counted. The mechanics of the proposed rules explain who would bear the burden: the House passed the SAVE Act in April 2025 to require documentary proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate or passport, to register for federal elections, but an estimated 69 million voting-age women have surnames that no longer match their birth certificates after marriage, and only about half of American adults hold a passport.

This week, the Center for American Progress also released a fact sheet summarizing an investigation that identified 15 separate, interconnected tactics the Trump administration, Republican governors, and GOP members of Congress are using now to influence the fall election. Those tactics range from firing the commissioners of the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission — which Congress created through the Help America Vote Act of 2002 in direct response to the 2000 Florida recount to set voting-system standards and administer election grants — to encouraging voter purges in red states and placing ICE agents outside polling places in apparent violation of federal law.

The Supreme Court’s six Republican justices are also considering whether to allow Trump’s chosen Postmaster General to let mail carriers refuse to deliver ballots unless voters appear on a Trump-approved list. A federal judge has already blocked Trump’s executive order on the matter twice, saying the Constitution makes clear that elections are run by the states and that the executive branch has no authority to regulate them. The issue is now before the Court.

The Constitution repeatedly refers to the “right to vote,” including in five amendments stating that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged….” Critics say those plain words have not stopped Republicans on the Court from approving actions that would allow ICE behavior at odds with those protections.

The article argues that Republicans have a 58-year history of committing crimes and treason to help place their candidates in the White House. It points to several past elections:

• In 1968, Nixon allegedly sabotaged LBJ’s Vietnam peace deal shortly before the election. LBJ and Senate Republican Leader Everett Dirksen reportedly called it “treason” in a phone call that was not released until decades after Johnson’s death. Nixon then beat Humphrey after promising a “secret plan” to end the war, while more than 20,000 additional Americans and more than one million Vietnamese died.
• In 1980, Reagan’s campaign allegedly made a deal with the Iranian Ayatollah to keep the 52 hostages taken during Carter’s presidency until after the election. Iran kept the agreement, damaging Carter’s chances, and Reagan later secretly and illegally sold American-made weapons to Iran in what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal.
• In 2000, Florida Governor Jeb Bush allegedly purged 57,000 mostly Black Floridians from the voter rolls months before the election, helping George W. Bush win by 537 votes. When the Florida Supreme Court ordered a recount, five Republican justices, including Clarence Thomas, blocked it. The piece says a later recount showed Al Gore had won. It also quotes Jimmy Carter as saying, “I don’t think that George W. Bush won the election in 2000, and he probably lost Florida and nationwide…”
• In 2024, the article says Greg Palast, using official state-by-state statistics, found that 4,776,706 voters were wrongly purged from the rolls. The figures he cited included 2,121,000 mail ballots disqualified by Republican challenges, 1,216,000 provisional ballots thrown out uncounted, 3.24 million new registrations rejected or never processed, and 585,000 spoiled in-person ballots. Palast found that Black voters were four times as likely as white voters to have mail ballots rejected, and that Black, Hispanic, and Asian-American voters were more than three times as likely as white voters to receive provisional ballots that were never counted. He concluded that without that voter suppression, Kamala Harris would be president and the House and Senate might also be in Democratic hands.

The article says the same pattern is now being reinforced by federal power under Trump’s control. It says Trump and his allies have fired or pushed out at least 75 career election security officials, gutted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — the Homeland Security unit created in 2018 that became the federal government’s lead agency for securing election infrastructure after Russia’s 2016 interference — and removed the Election Assistance Commission’s commissioners, leaving the agency effectively defunct.

It also says the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, historically the federal government’s voting-rights enforcement arm and now led by an official intent on undoing civil rights protections, has threatened election officials in all 50 states with prison for even minor mistakes in election administration. The Justice Department has also sued more than 30 states in an effort to obtain their voter files.

The article further states that the FBI raided the Fulton County elections office with Tulsi Gabbard, then director of national intelligence, present and at Trump’s personal direction, while agents removed hundreds of boxes of 2020 ballots.

It adds that Steve Bannon has repeatedly said, including this week, that ICE agents will ignore the post-Civil War federal law — a Reconstruction-era statute now codified at 18 U.S.C. § 592 — banning armed government officials from polling places. It also says Trump has repeatedly floated declaring a national emergency or a state of insurrection to shut down elections this fall, either nationwide or in Democratic-leaning areas.

The article contrasts Trump’s approach with the secrecy of earlier Republican election scandals, saying Nixon and Reagan at least hid their actions. It says Trump is now openly boasting about the effort, including to Congress, where he reportedly said that if lawmakers pass his voter-suppression bill designed to block low-income people and married women from voting, “We’ll never lose a race. For 50 years, we won’t lose a race.” The immediate decision points behind that boast are concrete: the Supreme Court’s pending ruling on the postal-ballot dispute, the fate of the proof-of-citizenship legislation in Congress, and how states answer the Justice Department’s voter-file lawsuits.

The piece describes this as corruption on a Putin-like scale and says Republican lawmakers are not pushing back, while much of the national press avoids the issue. It argues that the United States has endured five illegitimate presidencies since Nixon’s 1968 conduct because the press failed to investigate and Democratic leaders were too cautious to raise the issue.

The article concludes that, unlike in 1968, 1980, 2000, and 2024, no one can claim not to know what is happening now, because Trump and his allies are doing it openly and his advisers, including Bannon, are publicly celebrating it.