Four document releases in four weeks.
That’s the pace a White House task force has kept since Trump’s late-July primetime address on election security, and each one has pushed the same idea a little further: that foreign actors and noncitizens are undermining American elections.
It started with declassified intelligence memos on voting machine vulnerabilities, material largely already public and consistent with an existing U.S. assessment that found no evidence China altered the 2020 result Trump lost. Next came New Jersey.
Governor Mikie Sherrill disclosed that a software error had registered 6,600 noncitizens to vote, with fewer than 400 actually casting ballots. DHS turned that admission into a public notice days later, arguing the error proved the need for federal oversight of state voter rolls. This week brought a Census Bureau analysis claiming 24,000 noncitizens voted in 2020, built from 128 million records using a methodology the agency never disclosed.
Stay up-to-date with the latest news!
Subscribe and start recieving our daily emails.
David Becker, who runs the Center for Election Innovation and Research, put it plainly. “This alleged analysis based on census data fails the laugh test,” he said. “The administration does not provide a sufficient explanation of how it arrived at these numbers, and for good reason.”
What ties these releases together, according to people watching the pattern closely, is the goal sitting underneath them.
Steve Bannon has described Trump’s July address as laying what he calls a “predicate,” the legal groundwork needed before taking bigger action. On his War Room podcast, he told listeners to clear their schedules. “Take your No 2 pencil out,” he said. “It’s coming. It’s coming. Just block the last week of August out. It’s coming.”
He’s described the endgame as an executive order folding the stalled SAVE America Act “plus plus plus plus” into a single document Trump could sign without waiting on the Senate.
Former White House attorney Ty Cobb reached the same conclusion independently.
He told PBS after Trump’s speech: “I think tonight’s speech is intended to add the predicate that he needs to declare an emergency at or about the time of the elections.” He called it “a virtual certainty” that ICE agents would be stationed at polling places, adding that the intent would be “anything to intimidate minority voters, particularly immigrant voters, and also I think anything that allows them to try to seize voting machines, as Trump wanted to do in 2020, but Bill Barr explained to him there was just no basis for it.”
Trump has left the door open himself.
Asked directly this month by conservative broadcaster Wayne Allyn Root whether he’d declare a national security emergency over elections if the SAVE America Act keeps stalling, Trump answered without ruling it out. “Let me just say, stranger things have happened, OK?” he said on Real America’s Voice. “I’ll leave it at that.” Root had pitched it to him as a shortcut around Congress entirely. “If you do this in the next month, we will get photo ID, proof of citizenship and a limit to mail-in ballots, and you don’t even need the Senate’s help.”
Aria Branch, a partner at the Elias Law Group who has already beaten earlier Trump election orders in court, doesn’t think there’s an actual legal basis behind any of it, just an ongoing search for one.
“I think they believe there may be one,” she said. “I think such a document just doesn’t exist, because the fact is our elections are secure. Noncitizen voting in our elections is just not a widespread problem.” She described the broader campaign as an attempt “to stoke fear and lay the groundwork for future action.”
Featured image via Political Tribune Gallery
