Asked this week whether he would respect the results of Tuesday’s midterm elections, President Donald Trump answered with a caveat: “I will if they are honest elections, yeah.”
Read that like a contract lawyer would. A promise that depends on a condition, where only the person making the promise decides whether the condition was met, isn’t really a promise. It’s an option, and Trump holds it. Since he has claimed fraud even in elections he won, the safe assumption, as CNN’s Zachary B. Wolf argues, is that he will find these elections dishonest, especially if Republicans lose the House, the Senate or both.
Some of the wilder pre-election scenarios have simply run out of time. Trump has not declared a national emergency to nationalize the elections, though he would not rule it out. His attempt to turn the Postal Service against mail-in voting failed, at least for this cycle, and millions of Americans have already voted early or by mail. That leaves the counting and whatever comes after it.
Election officials, for their part, plan for the mundane disasters: bad weather, network outages, swarms of bees, and the kind of bomb threats, probably called in from abroad, that disrupted voting in Georgia and elsewhere in 2024. When Dolly Parton’s sister Stella posted that a voting machine had changed her vote, experts told CNN that this usually comes down to a stray touch or a long fingernail, and now and then a badly calibrated machine. Voters should check their ballots. Mostly, though, the trouble is the voter’s finger.
The legal long shots
The more organized effort is coming from the Justice Department. In California, the administration says about 20,000 people on the rolls could be noncitizens. In Washington state, it said this week that 400 possible noncitizens had voted 1,500 times in past elections, which comes to 3.75 votes apiece, a lot of civic participation from people who supposedly aren’t allowed any. The department sent both states letters demanding they set those ballots aside. When California said the demand ran afoul of its laws, the department sued. Critics have asked how the lists were put together, and noted that claims of tens of thousands of noncitizen voters have tended to shrink once anyone examines them.
The California suit, which the department announced on Oct. 15, has gone badly. District Judge David Carter refused to order the ballots segregated. An appeals court turned the department down on Oct. 26. On Friday a split Ninth Circuit panel rejected it again, 2-1. NBC News reported that the majority found “there is no feasible way to identify and segregate the ballots of specific individuals without potentially catastrophic effects on the entire system,” while Judge Patrick Bumatay, a Trump appointee, dissented.
Then there is Alaska, where Trump told the Justice Department to get involved in the Senate race. A New York Times report seemed to tie Democrats to an effort to recruit a second candidate named Dan Sullivan to confuse voters. The real Sen. Dan Sullivan will be listed on the ballot as the incumbent and the Republican, which limits the confusion somewhat. Ben Ginsberg, the Republican election lawyer, called the episode “remarkably politically clumsy and embarrassing for (Democrat Mary Peltola’s) campaign,” but added that “there’s not an illegality here.” The department opened a criminal probe anyway, and Alaska’s Republican governor has said he might not certify the results. Separately, the administration has stepped up its investigation of Rep. Ilhan Omar, the Somalia-born Minnesota Democrat, which raises the question of whether Republicans might try to block her from being seated.
Experts in both parties call all of this a long shot, and Trump’s election challenges do poorly in court. I think the interesting question is why you would keep filing cases you keep losing. The answer is that the case is not really the product. Eric Holder, Barack Obama’s attorney general, told CNN: “They’re just throwing all this stuff out there in an attempt to discourage people from believing in the system and trying to discourage people from coming out and registering to vote and then actually voting themselves.”
The same logic applies to Trump’s offer of $1 million to anyone whose tip leads to an election-fraud conviction. “If there was evidence of fraud, uh, they would have found it already,” Ginsberg said. “So I take it more as sort of performance art right before the election.” A bounty that pays out only on a conviction that probably won’t happen costs close to nothing in expectation. As performance art goes, that’s cheap.
Boots, briefcases and field offices
What’s different this time is who runs the Justice Department: Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer. Blanche has said the department has no plans to contest results in any state, but he won’t rule it out. “Of course, I’m not going to say that,” he told reporters in October. “But am I planning my days around the election to be somewhere to not certify? Of course not, no, not at all.”
The department is also sending about 1,000 election monitors to all 50 states. Both parties have used monitors for years. CNN calls the new number more than double the last midterm’s. Newsweek counts 289 monitors in 2022 and 714 in 2024, which would make it about three and a half times the 2022 figure. A thousand monitors across 330 million people works out to one per 330,000, too few to run anything. Monitors aren’t supposed to interfere with voting, but they can collect material for later federal challenges. The RNC is expanding its own poll-watching too. That fits the broader push to control the midterms that watchdogs have called unlawful.
Federal law bars the military and armed federal agents from polling places. FBI Director Kash Patel still wouldn’t rule out sending agents there: “I don’t know that we can’t legally do it,” he told a Senate hearing. He said agents and intelligence analysts would be kept in field offices for election security, with “election crisis coordinators manned at all 56 field offices.” Being ready for a crisis is sensible. The concern is an administration that keeps finding crises where there is no evidence of one.
Who seats whom
House Speaker Mike Johnson, who helped Trump challenge the 2020 results in Congress, called questions about blocking lawmakers from being seated “silly; of course we’ll have a peaceful transfer.” He said he would seat members whose wins are certified by their states: “I may not like some of those outcomes, but that’s our system, and for anyone to suggest otherwise is absurd.” He also predicted Republicans will keep the House, which is a minority view among people who follow these things closely.
The Senate has its own precedent. In 2008 the extremely close race between Al Franken and Norm Coleman held up a seat until Franken was finally declared the winner, and in the end senators decide whom to seat. The most effective protection against a contested election is a lopsided result, and that is the one thing election officials can’t provide.