President Donald Trump’s efforts to control parts of the voting process have been well chronicled.
Although the Constitution makes running elections the province of the states, Trump has sought to limit mail-in balloting and force states to open their voter rolls to federal authorities, supposedly to halt voting by non-residents. He has aggressively pushed his SAVE America Act, which would require voters to show documents such as passports or birth certificates in order to cast ballots — research by the Brennan Center for Justice found that more than 21 million American lack access to these documents.
As the midterms approach, concerns have arisen that militarized personnel could be directed to polling stations, with the idea that the presence of troops would dissuade certain minority, Democratic-leaning voters from casting a ballot. But UCLA School of Law Professor Richard Hasen is warning of a different threat.
If the battle to control Congress appears to be close, Hasen said, “I worry not on the front end in terms of voters being blocked going to the polls, but on the back end: pressure to try to interfere with the tabulation of ballots, or the certification of election results, or the seating of members of Congress.”
How would this happen? Hasen, who founded the UCLA Safeguarding Democracy Project in 2022, says that because all members of the House of Representatives are up for election every two years, once votes are counted, the first order of business is to swear in the new members and elect a speaker.
That generally is the prerogative of the majority party, but that majority could be in doubt, if the election is close and those who appear to be on the losing end contest the results. Who, then, would control the House?
“At that point there is no Speaker of the House. Mike Johnson is no longer Speaker of the House. He might become Speaker of the House again,” Hasen said. “But there are all kinds of machinations that could potentially happen if things are very close and there’s a fight over who’s the legitimate winner of particular congressional races.”
If this were to happen, Hasen anticipates the battleground would not be in major cities, which he noted tend to have large Democratic majorities. Rather, he said results could be contested “in any number of states where there are competitive elections.”
That, in turn, could create districts, or even states, where the outcome is in doubt for some time, complicating the organization of the House and potentially the Senate as well.
Hasen and others have noted that Trump’s repeated questioning of the results of the 2020 election, and his unfounded allegations of cheating by Democrats, have managed to undermine the confidence some people have in the election system. I asked him if there is an irony in the president pushing the SAVE America Act, supposedly seeking to strengthen voting and election integrity, when experts note there has never been widespread election fraud — nowhere near enough to overturn the outcome of a national election — and that this could result in fewer people casting ballots.
“I wouldn’t use the word ‘ironic,’” Hasen said. “I would use the word ‘Orwellian.’ It’s really turned on its head the idea of election integrity — trying to mess with elections in the name of protecting election integrity.”
