Context Matters: Trump Administration Summons Secretaries of State

 

Despite Donald Trump’s claim earlier this month, U.S. states are not agents for the federal government in elections. State officials don’t work for him. Trump said it as part and parcel of his stab at getting Republicans to take over state elections—Trump said they should be “nationalized.” I don’t know why the federal government doesn’t do them anyway,” he said, adding that it’s a “disgrace” how “horribly” some states run elections. Anyone who has been watching knows what this is about. 

It’s more of the same from the candidate who asked state officials in Georgia to find him 11,780 votes so he could overturn the result in an election that he lost. With Trump, his complaints about others are always projection: He wants to make sure he can steal the midterm elections if his party loses, and no better way to do them than to get election administration out of pesky officials who insist on doing a fair count.

Hence Trump’s appeal to “nationalize” elections. He wants to take control. That context makes it particularly interesting that federal agency “election partners” from FBI, DOJ, DHS, the Postal Inspection Service, and The Election Assistance Commission “invited” election officials from across the country to a briefing on “preparations” for the midterms. 

Secretaries of state and local officials run each state’s election. Not the president. While they might coordinate with their local U.S. Attorney(s) in advance of an election, a nationwide call like this is unprecedented, particularly in the absence of a credible, identified threat from a foreign country that would require, say, cyber intelligence coordination.

The call is being organized for February 25. No one seems to know precisely what it’s about. But Trump’s claim that majority Black/Democratic counties, like Fulton County, Georgia, aren’t fit to run elections, and they should be taken over by Republican interests, is a pretty good bet.

The email invite is signed off on by Kellie M. Hardiman, who identifies her role as “FBI Election Executive,” a position I have not heard of previously. As a career federal prosecutor and a U.S. Attorney for eight years during the Obama administration, and as someone whose responsibilities included election protection, I’m fairly familiar with DOJ’s internal architecture for this work. NBC reported that one state election official said that “No one has heard of this person — and we’re all wondering what an 'FBI Election Executive' is.”

NBC also reported that “An FBI spokesperson said in a statement Friday: ‘The Election Executive is not a new role. There have been designated executives in previous election cycles to take point on coordinating election related matters and speaking on behalf of the FBI.” 

This is not completely out of bounds. DOJ doesn’t get involved in deciding who won a specific election, but they do investigate claims of fraud (there have been exceptionally few successful prosecutions, and when they are brought, for the most part, they seem to involve fraud on behalf of Republican candidates). 

There are meetings among state and federal partners in advance of elections. But it feels different in a cycle where the president is openly seeking greater control and making false claims about fraud where elections are run by his political opponents. And most of DOJ’s election protection work, at least in Democratic administrations, involves pushing back against voter suppression (like this case). Those are civil cases and the FBI and other law enforcement agencies do not get involved in them.

Hardiman wrote to state election officials that the FBI and other federal agencies “would like to invite you to a call where we can discuss our preparations for the cycle, as well as updates and resources we can provide to you and your staff.” State officials are concerned.

NPR correspondent Miles Parks put it like this: “President Trump wanted a bigger role in local processes. Just two months into his second term, he signed an executive order aimed at adding new voting restrictions, for instance. Most of that has been blocked by the courts at this point. But he also laid off much of the election security staff at the Department of Homeland Security. And I was talking about all of that with the secretary of state of Minnesota, Steve Simon, who's a Democrat, and he said the idea of federal interference is on election officials' minds as they game plan out every scenario.”

Following the execution of a search warrant on election officials in Fulton County, Georgia, based on old, disproven claims of elections fraud, a bipartisan group of “more than a dozen election officials” told Politico: “they fear Trump is laying the groundwork to undermine results still months away.”

Chief among those concerns is the risk of federal troops or an executive branch agency like ICE being deployed to the polls, which could easily intimidate voters who have watched ICE indiscriminately arrest people and put them into deportation proceedings, only checking their immigration status after the fact (more here). But that is the sort of move that would be likely to provoke nationwide outrage. Don’t expect it to be the Trump administration’s only move.

Trump began issuing executive orders designed to make it more difficult for Americans to register and vote as soon as he took office. The SAVE Act is circulating in the Senate (we discussed it recently here). And the administration has been seeking states’ voter rolls, which could provide it with fodder for making wholesale challenges, and permitting private parties in states to do so too, forcing individual voters to go on the defensive and prove they are eligible to vote and disrupting state proceedings. That is most definitely not the kind of burden that should be imposed on Americans’ fundamental rights.

Trump has said that Atlanta and other cities with Democratic strongholds as seeing “horrible corruption on elections.” “The federal government should not allow that,” he said Tuesday. “The federal government should get involved. These are agents of the federal government to count the votes. If they can’t count the votes legally and honestly, then somebody else should take over.”

Last April, a federal judge enjoined Trump from enforcing his executive order on voting. She wrote, “A president cannot make new law or devise new authority for himself—by executive order or otherwise. He may only wield those powers granted to him by Congress or by the Constitution.” She pointed out that “our Constitution entrusts Congress and the states — not the President — with the authority to regulate federal elections.”

Presidents do not get to dictate the rules in our elections. But to ensure this election is free and fair, it appears that state election officials, along with federal judges, will have to keep the president in check. They will have to keep him for usurping power that is not properly his, as he has done on so many other occasions. Do you know who your secretary of state (they have different titles in some states) is?

Maine’s Secretary of State Shenna Bellows told me, “In any other year, the invitation might seem innocuous, but in the context of Trump’s assault on the rule of law and threats to elections, the odd invitation raises concerns. I’ll be attending with skepticism.”

Here is a list of election officials in every state. If you aren’t already, get familiar with yours. And make sure they know you’ll be watching how they handle the meeting on February 25. Call them or send them a letter in the next day or two, letting them know that you know Donald Trump isn’t entitled to “nationalize” our elections and you expect them to uphold the law.

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-Joyce Vance