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Trump Ramps Up Involvement in Elections10/30 06:04
DENVER (AP) -- After months of extraordinary steps to ensure his party
maintains control of the U.S. House of Representatives in next year's midterms,
President Donald Trump is turning his sights toward the voting process in next
week's elections.
That pivot is raising alarm among Democrats and others who warn that he may
be testing strategies his administration could use to interfere with elections
in 2026 and beyond.
Late last week, Trump's Department of Justice announced it was sending
election monitors to observe voting in one county in New Jersey, which features
a race for governor that Trump has become deeply invested in, and to five
counties in California, where Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom is pushing a ballot
measure to counter the president's own effort to rejigger the congressional map
to elect more Republicans.
That announcement was followed with a pre-emptive attack by Trump on the
legitimacy of California's elections. The post on his own social media platform
echoed the baseless allegations he made about the 2020 presidential election
before he and his allies tried to overturn his loss in a campaign that
culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
"Watch how totally dishonest the California Prop Vote is!" Trump wrote last
weekend on Truth Social, referring to Proposition 50, the lone issue on the
state's special election ballot. "Millions of Ballots being 'shipped.'"
The combination has prompted responses from several prominent Democrats, who
were already bracing for Trump to use his presidential powers to tilt next
year's midterms to his side.
"It's a bridge they're trying to build the scaffolding for, all across this
country, in next November's elections," Newsom said in a video in which he also
predicted the administration will send masked immigration agents to polling
stations next week.
During early voting so far, there has been no indication that troops or
federal officers have shown up near polling sites or ballot drop boxes in any
state. Despite the warnings from some Democrats, millions of voters already
have cast ballots through early in-person or mail voting, a process that has
produced no significant problems.
Voting expected to be 'safe and secure'
Trump has long accused the Biden administration of trying to interfere in
last year's presidential election after the Justice Department filed federal
charges against him related to his attempts to overturn the 2020 results and
his retention of classified documents after leaving office.
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson, using the president's favorite
derogatory nickname for California's governor, said in a statement on
Wednesday: "Newscum ought to stop fearmongering to score political points with
the radical left flank of the Democrat party that he is courting ahead of his
doomed-to-fail presidential campaign."
Tuesday's elections are purely state-based, with no federal offices on the
ballot. Trump has no ability to change the outcome in any way, experts said.
"Voters who go to vote in the 2025 election are going to find a very safe
and secure process," said David Becker, a former Department of Justice voting
rights attorney who now runs the Center for Election Innovation & Research.
"For example, I'm 100% confident that whoever wins the statewide elections in
Virginia and New Jersey, regardless of what the president says, will take
office."
Some ballot questions have big implications for 2026
The relatively low-profile off-year elections are headlined by the races for
governor in New Jersey and Virginia, California's redistricting question and
the mayor's race in New York City.
Two of the states where voting already is underway are considering measures
that have major implications for next year's midterms.
In Pennsylvania, voters will decide whether three Democratic justices keep
their seats on the state's supreme court. If they're removed, the court will
have a 2-2 ideological split and potentially be unable to resolve disputes over
voting and election procedures next year in the critical swing state.
In California, voters will decide whether to temporarily override an
independent redistricting process and allow the Democratic-controlled
Legislature to redraw the state's congressional districts. If voters pass the
measure, it could create five new seats Democrats could win to counter Trump's
push for Texas and other Republican-led states to redraw their districts and
increase the number of winnable Republican House seats.
'These are not normal times'
That's one reason the administration's decision to send monitors drew so
much attention. It's not unusual for the federal government to send monitors to
observe voting and ballot counting in certain areas, but it's typically done in
consultation with local jurisdictions. That did not happen this time.
Instead, the Trump administration announced the monitors solely in response
to requests from local Republican parties.
Federal monitors are only allowed to observe, are prohibited from talking to
voters or even poll workers, and have no way to influence the counting of
votes, said Becker, who has served as a monitor and also trained them.
"I don't think voters are ever going to notice or see any of these people,"
he said.
Still, the Democratic attorneys general in California and New Jersey raised
alarms, with New Jersey's Matt Platkin calling it "highly inappropriate" and
California's Rob Bonta saying the move is especially concerning given Trump's
record.
"These are not normal times," Bonta said in a call with reporters this week.
"We have to look at the broader context here about what the Trump
administration is saying and what they are doing."
The action follows a monthslong campaign by Trump to use the powers of his
office to boost his party's political prospects ahead of the midterms, where
the incumbent party traditionally loses seats in Congress. The president has
pushed states where Republicans control the redistricting process to redraw
their boundaries to create more conservative-friendly seats. He also has
directed his administration to investigate Democratic politicians,
fundraisersand donors.
Is Trump positioning for the midterms?
Newsom and his Illinois counterpart, Gov. JB Pritzker, have warned that
Trump's attempts to send the U.S. military into their states' most populous
cities -- Los Angeles and Chicago -- are precursors to deploying the military
or federal agents to polling places in Democratic-leaning cities next year.
They and other Democrats also have alluded to how some Trump allies in 2020
used manufactured claims of election fraud to propose using the military to
seize voting machines.
At the same time, the Justice Department is demanding detailed voter data
from the states and Trump issued an executive order trying to reshape how
elections are run, which has been largely halted by the courts because the
Constitution gives that power to the states, and, in some cases, Congress. It
spells out no role for the president in setting election rules.
Until fairly recently, Trump had been relatively quiet about the 2025
elections, mostly taking steps that other presidents have made in election
years, such as supporting his party's nominees in key races.
Hannah Fried, executive director of the voting rights group All Voting is
Local, said the Nov. 4 election will provide "an important set of data points"
about issues that could crop up in future elections, especially next year.
"That's the big dog," Fried said of the midterms. "Everybody in the
country's going to be voting in 2026. This is about control of Congress. As a
country, we all have a stake in that."
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