Take over the voting, and fire the checkers

Donald Trump has put the program in a sentence himself.

The Republicans should say: 'We want to take over. We should take over the voting in at least 15 places.' — Donald Trump

The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting. — Donald Trump

In February the Justice Department demanded unredacted voter rolls from exactly fifteen states ^[1]; in March it sued twenty-nine states plus the District of Columbia ^[2]. The number he named and the number in the first filing are the same. The seizures came before the lawsuits. In January, FBI agents carried roughly seven hundred boxes of 2020 ballots and election materials out of Fulton County, Georgia, on a referral from Kurt Olsen ^[3]. Tulsi Gabbard, then the director of national intelligence, was at the scene, and the president was on her phone, talking to the agents while they worked.

It was a rigged election. — Donald Trump

Brad Raffensperger, Georgia's Republican secretary of state, called the probe baseless.

People will soon be prosecuted for what they did. — Donald Trump

Olsen's title is director of election security and integrity, and Gabbard had put the effort in a phrase of her own ^[3].

After years of lies, censorship, and cover ups, the American people deserve transparency, truth, and accountability. — Tulsi Gabbard

In September, a whistleblower described the searches from the inside: federal employees working to quotas of forty names a shift, about twelve minutes each, run against state voter rolls and flagging naturalized citizens, assured by agency lawyers that no one would be held personally liable ^[4]. Months before the Fulton County raid, Gabbard's office had seized Puerto Rico's voting machines in the name of cybersecurity and found no Venezuelan interference ^[5]. FEMA tied counterterrorism grant money to election mandates until Judge Ali blocked it ^[6]. And this week the administration announced a thousand federal monitors for polling places, recording machine serial numbers and seals ^[7]. The claims are large, the administration's own findings are small, and the distance between them is arithmetic. The Homeland Security secretary says officials are reviewing more than 300,000 "suspected" cases; the Justice Department's own count of noncitizens charged with illegal voting stands at 50 ^[8]. A federal review of about 49.5 million voter registrations referred 0.02 percent for further inspection ^[9]. The administration alleged China took voter files for up to 220 million Americans; a 2021 assessment found no Chinese influence campaign, and the files are largely public ^[10]. The acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, has described the 2020 investigations both ways, in the same month ^[11].

Well, there's a ton of evidence that the election was rigged. — Todd Blanche

I’m not going to promise there’s going to be a definitive answer. — Todd Blanche

In Ohio, an investigation that began with six names grew past fifty, and four of the original six had already had their provisional ballots rejected for missed deadlines: votes that were never counted ^[12]. The machinery that would have checked any of it was coming apart at the same time. The Election Assistance Commission, which certifies voting systems, had its remaining members fired in July; the last Republican resigned, leaving it with no leadership ^[13]. CISA, the federal election-security coordinator, is down roughly a third of its staff, its election specialists gone, and it released its security plan forty days before the vote ^[14][15]. The Justice Department's Public Integrity Section, which prosecutes federal election crimes, has gone from 36 lawyers to 2, the FBI's election and public-corruption units have been disbanded, and a group of appointees called "Team America" now runs the searches with DHS tools ^[14]. The two tracks ran through the same months and served each other, and nothing the administration has put out says the firings were ordered so the claims would go unchecked. They simply advanced together. Twenty-three district courts have dismissed the administration's lawsuits seeking state voter data ^[16], and a D.C. appeals court blocked the SAVE database from checking citizenship on state rolls in September ^[17]. The department has quickened its appeals toward the Supreme Court, where it already holds an interim win on mail-in voting ^[16]. Its argument is now one sentence.

Absent a final Court determination on this matter there is no other process to ensure a fair election in 2026 — United States Department of Justice

The sentence is close to true now. November 3 is thirty-four days away. A thousand federal monitors will record machine serial numbers and seals, with no body left to certify what they record ^[7]. Two prosecutors will stand where thirty-six stood ^[13]. One court that has already ruled once for the administration is being asked to rule again in time ^[16]. That is the machinery left to check the count.