Now, I won’t say, ‘Cancel the election. They should cancel the election,’ because the fake news will say, ‘He wants the elections canceled. He’s a dictator.’” That’s what president Donald Trump told a group of Republican lawmakers last week. Republicans have been so successful, the president said, that “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”
In the last two weeks, the president has made a number of remarks about canceling the November midterm elections. Though it’s not clear how he would actually go about doing that, it’s evident that he has an interest in determining the outcome.
Having spent years identifying, documenting, and tracking the various strains of stolen election conspiracy theories after the 2020 presidential election, after having otherwise spent more than a decade working in and around U.S. elections, I have a passing familiarity with our election systems. Since late 2020, I have also spent a great deal of time thinking about how those systems can be compromised — not because I have any interest in compromising them myself, but because others clearly do, and I want to understand the possibilities.
From both his recent remarks and his years’ worth of similar quips, it is clear that the current president is among those with an interest in compromising American democracy. By freeing himself of midterms, Trump keeps himself free of future impeachment attempts, as he noted earlier this month. In fact, by removing the opportunity for the opposition to take majorities in Congress, he forestalls any meaningful attempts at oversight, removes any possibility of the co-equal branch endangering his agenda, and is enabled to continue functioning as a runaway executive with a congressional rubber stamp.
Trump’s desire to reign free from the consequences of elections is clear. But is it even possible to steal an election? After all, the theories Republicans put forward to explain how the 2020 election was “stolen” from Trump fell flat: after literally dozens of recounts and investigations, no evidence has been found of voting machines being hacked or large numbers of fake ballots being smuggled into the system or anything else which would have altered the outcome of that race. Trump lost 2020 fair and square.
But what if he wasn’t willing to take the same risk in 2026? What if, inspired by his own lies, he wanted to tilt the scale in his favor?
Unfortunately, there are ways.
ACTUAL HACKING
Starting with the idea which was popularized by right-wingers in the aftermath of Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, can an American election actually be hacked? In short, not really. One of the great peculiarities of the American election system is, in this case, a strength. Rather than having a unified, federal election system like most developed nations, elections in the United States are administered by the states, with that administrative power devolved down to the county level. So, in effect, instead of having one election system, we have more than 3,000. Each of these 3,000-plus jurisdictions is free to set its own procedures, establish its own contracts with voting machine vendors, and otherwise shape how an election is conducted locally.
Why does this present a problem for actually hacking the election by – as conservatives insisted after the 2020 election – hacking into voting machines and changing votes? Because it would require thousands of separate hacks, infiltrating thousands of county-level voting systems, many of which use different machines and employ different procedures. Rather than being able to insert malicious code into a centralized system and have it proliferate, hacking the decentralized American election system would require a great deal of manpower, and enough separate incursions into secure systems to make it unlikely that the effort would go undetected.
Even if the system were centralized, though, hacking it would be remarkably difficult. First, there is the fact that the voting machines manufactured by companies like Dominion, Smartmatic, Clear Ballot, and others are, understandably, designed to be incredibly secure. They are rigorously tested for both hardware and software malfunctions before being deployed, and are kept under constant surveillance after being deployed (something former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters learned the hard way).
Second, and more to the point, is the fact that votes are not actually cast at the machine. In most jurisdictions, voters make their selections on the machine’s screen, the machine prints a slip of paper with the voter’s selections on it, and the voter then deposits that slip into the box as their actual vote. According to Derek Tisler with the Brennan Center for Justice, about 98% of American voters live in areas where, in one way or another, their vote is ultimately cast on a piece of paper.
Combined, what all of this means is that hackers would not only need to infiltrate thousands of separate election systems, they would also need to find a way to ensure that most voters operating in those systems would print, submit, and never look at the slips of paper bearing their actual votes. When it comes to altering the outcome of federal elections, hackers do not stand much of a chance.
When it comes to the Trump administration, though, an idea’s infeasibility is no guarantee that it won’t be tried. In fact, they already tried, in a way. Last summer, a former Trump appointee turned GOP operative called several Republican clerks in Colorado and asked if they would grant access to their voting machines. The clerks declined.
THE STRONGMAN’S PLAYBOOK
The goal of hacking an election system is to impact the tabulation or counting procedure. With that being all but ruled out by the difficulties listed above, a president intent on swaying the outcome of an election could look earlier in the process: not at the vote counting, but the vote casting. By employing vote-buying, intimidation, and state violence, a voting population can be effectively herded in the desired direction.
Unlike hacking, the strongman’s playbook is known to work. In fact, despots around the world use it every year.
Vote-buying is the easiest way to start, especially if the people intent on rigging an election are the same people who already control the government’s treasury. It works exactly how you would guess: corrupt leaders dole out cash in exchange for votes, which increases their own vote share and decreases the total number of voters available to their opponents. Though not particularly visible in the United States, vote-buying is incredibly common around the world.
According to Nic Cheeseman, Professor of Democracy at the University of Birmingham and author of the book How to Rig an Election, “between 2012 and 2016, more than two-thirds of elections in Africa and almost half of all elections in Asia and post-Soviet Europe featured significant vote-buying.”
If vote-buying does not get the job done, though – or, perhaps more likely, if a paranoid strongman facing an election fears that vote-buying will not get the job done – the strongman’s playbook has other tools to call upon: intimidation and violence. If you can intimidate the opposition, if you can make them too scared to show up to vote, then you can increase your chances of winning.
Right now, these tactics are being deployed in Uganda, where strongman Yoweri Museveni just extended his 40-year rule for another term. During the run-up to this month’s contested election, Museveni declared opposition supporters “terrorists,” and had police raid the homes of opposition figures. When Museveni declared victory and protests against alleged electoral fraud kicked off, so did the reprisals. So far, seven protesters have been killed, and Museveni is set to begin his 7th term.
Unlike a mass effort to hack the nation’s disparate voting systems, I consider aspects of the strongman’s playbook to be well within the realm of options Trump might consider as the midterms approach. He proposed it himself in 2020, and local election officials are right this moment preparing for the possibility of federal troops at polling places. If that sounds far-fetched to you, consider what an Americanized version of the strongman’s playbook would look like – billionaires offering handouts to friendly voters, the military deployed to the streets of opposition-controlled cities to depress turnout, the occasional killing of a protester – and you might realize that it is not so far-fetched after all. Add in a declared national security emergency, and it just might be enough.
While I expect Trump to deploy whatever parts of the strongman’s playbook he believes he can get away with, even wielding those authoritarian measures is not the approach to rigging the 2026 midterms that I fear most. The most dangerous option, the most effective option, is much simpler.
Just lie.
JUST…LYING
The weakness in our political system is not the machinery, it’s the people. If you want to compromise the outcome of an election, you do not need to hack the machines, you need to influence the election administrators.
Though our election system is spread out across more than 3,000 jurisdictions, county-level results are certified at the state level, meaning there are only 50 officials in the country who certify vote totals and, by doing so, render their count the official count.
Right now, 26 of those officials are Republicans. Only one of them has a proven record of standing up to Trump’s election-bending pressure: Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger.
To be clear, a concerted effort by Republican Secretaries of State to lie about who won elections in their states would not go unnoticed. County officials and records would contradict them. Millions of people would be able to tell, right off the bat, that they were witnessing an effort to steal an election through sheer dishonesty – and, despite that, they still might not be able to do anything about it.
In the wake of the 2020 election, as the Trump team attempted to assemble both a rationale and an operation to steal an election which had already occurred, many local Republican officials around the country refused to certify results that did not comport with their preferences or the latest conspiracy theories. After that debacle, many states passed laws making it illegal for officials to refuse to certify election results. But what happens if the opposite is tried? What happens if officials around the country choose to certify bogus election results in dozens of congressional races?
In a scenario like this, supporters of the legislative coup would again concoct a host of post hoc reasons for why the action was necessary, or why the bogus results were in fact the actual results, but underlying it all would be the same thing which has animated so much of Trump’s second term. A simple question: who’s going to stop me?
On paper, the answer to the question in this case is “the courts.” In reality, judicial recourse feels like more of a crapshoot every day. Trump appointed nearly a quarter of the active federal judiciary, and a number of his judicial appointees have demonstrated a fondness for flouting precedent and ruling however the administration desires. Then there’s the fact that Trump and other chief administration figures have made it clear that they don’t care what the courts say, anyway. The administration is openly defying about one-third of the rulings against it, per an analysis conducted by the Washington Post. And if they choose not to abide by court rulings, what then?
When I asked University of Denver political science professor Seth Masket about this scenario, he provided some comfort, saying that such a scheme would be unlikely to succeed given the coordination required, but that it’s not impossible. I’m not sure I asked the question correctly, though, because the scenario I fear most doesn’t require much coordination at all; it doesn’t even require that the false vote totals be believable (a feat which would require enormous coordination between county-level and even precinct-level officials). All it requires is for the lie to attract enough institutional support that it becomes the next best thing to true. A lie backed by the DOJ, with or without the support of the National Guard, is no small thing. In January 2021, acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen did not stand by Trump’s lies or the violent attack on the Capitol. Current Attorney General Pam Bondi is a different story.
All of this to say, if state election officials choose to lie, and the courts either side with them or are ignored outright, what then? What prevents losers from being sworn-in as winners? At this point, I’m genuinely asking, because I don’t know the answer. No one has tried. We have never been to that place before. In a few months, we might find out in a hurry that there aren’t any backstops, that the on-paper answer of “the courts” — as compromised, ineffective, and unenforceable as they are — might be the only defense, and that’s no defense at all.
What then? What happens if they lie, and lie, and keep lying even though we know it’s a lie, and even though they know that we know that it’s a lie? After a decade of Trump, that doesn’t sound so unlikely, does it? But what happens then?
What happens is that they probably succeed, that a handful of losers are sworn into Congress, robbing their constituents of the representation they actually voted for, and the rest of us take one more step into an America we never really expected to find ourselves living in.
Who is going to stop them? If the answer is simply “the courts,” a branch of government with no enforcement powers, then the question remains unchanged: who is going to stop them?
And what happens then? Or, more importantly, what do we do then, if electoral solutions have been exposed as meaningless? That’s a longer conversation for another time, but there are options worth considering.
Will the 2026 midterms be stolen? I don’t know. What I do know is that we’ve yet to find the rules, laws, norms, or institutions which can prevent Donald Trump from doing the unprecedented. What I know is that the president is openly telling us that he wants to tamper with the midterm elections.
What I know is that the least we can do is believe him.
