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- [00:00]
A
I know that you guys know each other very well, so just pretend you know also me very well. Feel free to, like, disagree with, like, the, the, you know, setup of a question or like.
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B
And also I do feel like I know you. I've been listening to your voice for years. You're like an NPR figure in my life. So I was like, way back in the FiveThirtyEight podcast days, you know, listening.
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C
Hello, and welcome to the GD Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Drake. On Monday's episode, we began to set the table for the 2026 midterms. Today, we're going to acknowledge that there's something of a bull threatening all the.
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A
Fine china we've just laid out.
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C
Pardon the strained metaphor. Put bluntly, the 2026 midterms will be the first nationwide federal election with Trump as president since since 2020, when he pushed to overturn the results in enough states to undo that election. Some recent developments have already caused a teacup or two to wobble.
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A
I promise I'm done with the metaphor now.
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C
This week on Dan Bongino's podcast, Trump suggested that Republicans move to nationalize elections in 15 unnamed states and later reiterated his push from behind the Resolute desk. At a bill signing ceremony. Last week, Trump in an unusual move, the FBI raided a Fulton county elections office, seizing 2020 ballots and other voting records. In the background of all of this, starting last year, the Department of Justice began requesting full voter rolls with private voter information from the states in an apparent attempt to create a national voter file. Trump has also issued executive orders attempting to change the elections process nationally, including that all ballots be received by the time polls close close on Election Day, and that Americans show government issued proof of U.S. citizenship when they register to vote. For what it's worth, he's also quipped about canceling the election, something he can't do, and about ending mail voting. Concerned about losses at the midterms, state Republicans, at Trump's request, have already pursued mid decade gerrymandering to try to buttress their majority, which after Democratic retaliation, will result in roughly a wash. Trump's latest comments about nationalizing elections come after a Democrat won a state Senate seat in Tarrant County, Texas, by overperforming Trump's win in 2024 by 30 percentage points. It doesn't take a detective to put these pieces together. A president who has a record of only accepting election results when he wins is concerned about Republican losses at the midterms. He said himself to Republicans that he doesn't want the ensuing result, which would be Democratic investigations into his administration. In an attempt to prevent that, Trump may sow doubt in the results in 2026 or try more serious interventions today. We're going to dig into what that could look like and also detail the ways American elections are designed to be resilient. After all, it's not one bull in one china shop. There are more than 9,000 jurisdictions administering elections nationwide. And no matter what Trump says, the Constitution charges the states with running elections. Here with me to discuss this all is dear friend of the pod, Nathaniel Rakic, managing editor at Vote Beat.
- [03:25]
A
Welcome to the podcast, Nathaniel.
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D
Hi, Galen. Good to be here.
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A
Good to have you. And also here with us, excitingly, is.
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C
Nathaniel's colleague at Vote Beat, editorial director of Vote Beat, Jessica Huseman. Welcome, Jessica.
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B
Thank you so much. I'm so excited.
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A
And I'll just say here that Vote.
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C
Beat is a nonprofit newsroom that covers voting and election administration.
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A
So we, while listeners may know Nathaniel in his horse race and public opinion.
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C
Capacity, his day job is actually covering.
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A
How elections work in America, alongside Jessica, of course. So I'm excited to have both of you here today.
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C
And I, I want to begin with what has already happened before we cast.
- [04:04]
A
Forward to any hypotheticals. So, Nathaniel, what steps is the Trump administration taking to create a national voter roll, and to what end?
- [04:15]
D
Yeah, well, to what end is kind of the big question. I think one of the hardest things about all this is that it is difficult to read the minds of the Trump administration and especially, you know, people who believe that the 2020 election was stolen and believe a lot of things that, frankly, aren't true. And they're not, you know, exactly being super forthcoming with us in the media about it either. But basically, what's happening with regard to the federal intervention in the voter rolls is that the Department of Justice under Donald Trump has asked virtually every state at this point to hand over the unredacted copies of its voter registration lists. So that includes people's names, addresses, personal information, often like Social Security numbers or at least partial Social Security numbers, dates of birth and stuff like that. Basically, I think the, the upshot here is that DOJ wants to, in fact, I mean, it has been reported that DOJ has been discussing a deal with certain states that basically would allow them to take those voter rolls, look through them, identify people they believe shouldn't be able to vote, and states, hey, you have to take these people off the rolls. Obviously, that is potentially problematic because a lot of the databases that people use to flag, quote, unquote, non citizens are unreliable. They're not the most up to date. You know, those people may have become citizens, they may have errors in them. And also I think there is a real question about kind of the, whether this administration is acting in good faith in terms of, you know, actually wanting to get just non citizens off their voter rolls and not maybe people who wouldn't vote for them. But basically so far, according to Do, 14 states have complied with that request. A heck of a lot more haven't. DOJ is suing 23 states, mostly Democratic run states, but also some kind of more moderate Republican run states like Georgia with the Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who obviously was kind of like famous for standing up to Trump's efforts in 2020 in Georgia. But basically they, the states and DOJ are locked in this kind of like legal fight for access to that data. At the same time, dhs, the Department of Homeland Security has also upgraded system they have called save, which is basically a database of citizenship. But it was not very useful prior to 2025. But what the Trump administration did was they have upgraded it so that now you can upload thousands of names up there in bulk to essentially compare it against their citizen database to again see if you know, there are non citizens on the voter rolls. Again, the issue is that a lot of states have done this. Actually 26 states have either agreed to do this, already done it. And in those states, what we've seen in places like Texas is that actually a lot of those people again are citizens, have actually proven their citizenship already. Our reporter in Texas, Natalia Contreras, has written a lot about how when you register to vote at the like Department of like Motor Vehicles in Texas, like you show them your documentation there and the state didn't bother to check with the Department of Motor Vehicles when they got this information from the federal government to say that said there are all these non citizens on your voter rolls. So that is kind of the, the general idea and Right. As you kind of point out, Galen, I think the, the functional upshot of this is that the, the federal government is seeking the ability to have a national voter roll and basically have control over who is on the voter roll in these states. Even if technically the states are still in charge of kind of like maintaining the voter roll. But it, it gives this kind of an unprecedented amount of national power to the federal government.
- [07:51]
A
Yeah. On its face, having a way to double check that there are no people registered to vote who shouldn't be voting, don't have the legal right to vote noncitizens, whether they're in the country legally or illegally doesn't necessarily seem on its face like a problem. But, Jessica, where does this run into problems? Like, are the people in Texas that Nathaniel mentioned getting thrown off the voter rolls without the opportunity to sort of rebut or prove that they have citizenship?
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C
I mean, in practice, what kinds of.
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A
Issues could using a national voter file in this way create?
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B
Lots of issues. So I think the first answer is yes, people can get thrown off the rolls. About a year ago, Natalia covered a related, but not the same issue of a citizenship check in Texas in which there were. Texas ran a very similar style of check and sent out all of these notices and inactivated some voters. And Natalia, through her, actually got a voter reactivated, put back on the rolls after having been taken off because they were flagged as a non citizen despite having been, like, born and raised in the country. They were like a white lady in rural Texas and a Trump voter. And so anyway, it was an interesting story, and so that's definitely a possibility. I also think that it's important to keep in mind that the voter rolls that he's getting, if you put them all together, wouldn't really amount to a national voter roll. States have sent things this. The voter rolls are a static point in time, when in reality, they're living documents. So he's got all these voter rolls, but they're already out of date. They were out of date five minutes after he received them because there are.
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A
People constantly registering to vote or moving or changing their names or things like that.
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B
Exactly. Right. So consider the state of Texas, which is where I'm talking to you from. Right. Like we've got 254 counties. Each of those counties is maintaining its own voter roll. They're transmitting that to the state. They do times. It's not set in stone when they sort of update the statewide voter list. So I don't know at what point in time and the voter list was sent. Right. It's going to be different in every county. And then as soon as it's sent. Great. That's a snapshot in time. But the next minute, someone in Texas is registering to vote or they've moved and they've notified the state and so that voter registration has moved and his address is out of date.
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A
Yeah. So we're talking about a world in which people could wrongly be removed from voter rolls, which is a big deal, could lead to disenfranchisement.
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C
But are there.
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A
Is there a sense that this quote unquote, national voter file could be used.
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C
In another way to make claims after.
- [10:39]
A
Election Day, when people have already cast their ballots. Like, is there a different concern going on here? Because I'll say that while 13 states have complied, there are plenty of states led by many Republicans, but also basically every state led by a Democrat has declined to do this because they're concerned about what this could lead to. So beyond disenfranchisement, which is a big issue, what are those other concerns?
- [11:04]
B
First of all, I think that there's, like, a pretty clear argument that sharing this data with the federal government violates the Privacy act of 1974, which is this, like, big act that dictates what kind of data the government can keep and under what conditions. Right. And part of that is that they have to say, hey, here's what we're going to do with the data. And they have to give states enough time to comment on that. It has to be put out for public comment. It's like a massive bureaucracy. All of those steps are skipped here. And so a lot of the lawsuits that the states have filed against the federal government rely heavily on that Privacy Act. And that's specifically important because the Privacy act makes it so that the person who shared the entity that shared the data is liable for that privacy violation. So states themselves are on the hook, like with money, if it is determined by courts that the federal government possessing the data in this way does violate that act. And we've asked the White House to respond to questions about whether or not this violates the act. They refuse to respond to those questions and to my knowledge, haven't responded substantially to anyone. And so there's real financial liability, to say nothing of disenfranchisement, which is obviously the more severe problem. So there's a chain of problems that go from sort of like the voter being on the hook to taxpayers being on the hook for millions of dollars in fines.
- [12:39]
A
At the same time, the White House is pursuing this, quote, unquote, national voter file. Republicans are also looking to pass the SAVE act, which has already passed the House and is waiting in the Senate. Doesn't look like it will pass the filibuster. So unless something changes with the filibuster, unlikely to actually become law.
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C
But among other things, it attempts to.
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A
Establish national voter idea laws and proof of citizenship. Now, of course, it is already illegal for non citizens to vote in federal elections. The idea, though, that Americans should show some ID in order to vote or, you know, at some point prove that they are citizens again, at face value.
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C
Does not seem necessarily crazy or even.
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A
Outside the bounds of what other liberal democracies do. So I kind of want to ask again here, what is the concern about the SAVE act and how it could be used?
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D
I think it's important to differentiate between, like, political objections and like, kind of like administrative objections. Right. And legal objections, for that matter. So when Caroline Levitt, the White House press secretary, was asked what Trump meant by his nationalize the voting comments, she said he meant to pass the SAVE act, which I'm not sure that's what he meant personally, but let's take it at face value for a minute. You know, as you point out, Galen. Right. The Constitution says states run elections, but it also gives Congress the power to pass laws that kind of govern elections. And so, legally speaking, obviously, Congress can pass those laws. The kind of a Democratic version of that would be HR1, the for the People act that, you know, we talked about back in, like, 2021, when Democrats had full control of government. That's like legally, totally fine.
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A
Which was trying to end gerrymandering and, you know, making it easier to register to vote or vote by mail or things like that or early voting, etc.
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D
Right, exactly. So, and that is distinct from some of the executive actions that Trump has taken. Like, he issued a big executive order last year that was like a lot of the provisions actually, of like the SAVE act and stuff, which was like proof citizenship to vote. It was things about like certification of voting machines. It was no ballots can arrive after election day, mail ballots, that stuff like the president does not have the authority to do that. Right. And courts have largely, like, struck down that executive order. So those, that's kind of like the legal argument. Right. There's no kind of legal objection to the, to the SAVE act or Congress passing some kind of law. There's obviously the political arguments. Democrats don't believe in, like, kind of like voting restrictions. They generally want to kind of liberalize the franchise. Republicans obviously, you know, driven in part by a belief that the 20, their massive voter fraud was kind of like plaguing the 2020 and other elections, they want to clamp down and make sure that that can't happen. And I think obviously we've covered that. And, you know, people, liberals are going to believe one thing and conservatives are going to believe one thing, and that's that the administrative.
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C
Well, no, wait, hold on.
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A
That's not, that's, in some ways that's, that's, that's not that. Like, you know, for example, Georgia, Georgia Secretary of State did an audit in 2024 that looked at the Georgia voter rolls and found that just 20 of the 8.2 million people registered to vote in Georgia were not citizens, and only nine had ever voted, which that's certainly nine too many. Those people can be prosecuted, jailed, whatever. But if we're talking about competing ideas of to what extent fraud happens in American elections, one side believes one thing, one side believes another, and the facts show that it, while it does happen in America, it's at a minuscule scale that would not change the results of elections. And I know you know that, but I'm just sort of chiming in here for dramatic effect.
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D
No, it's, It's. It's a good thing to note. I meant more that I think there are legitimate political disagreements about whether. Whether we should prioritize. Like the. The most number of people should be able to vote. The, you know, the process isn't as kind of like, tightly regulated versus, like, we're okay with some people not being able to vote if we kind of, you know, like voter id, I think, being a good.
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C
Right.
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A
Something that happens in many other countries, but that Democrats reject here because they believe that it will make it harder for people to vote.
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C
Which, by the way, the academic research.
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A
On that is kind of muddled in suggesting that voter ID may not do much in terms of preventing people who want to vote from voting.
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D
Right. I should mention that a lot of these kind of reforms are not actually, like, don't have the partisan implications that a lot of people assume.
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B
I think one thing that's important to point out is that it is true that, like, the vast majority of liberal democracies do require an ID to vote, but those liberal democracies also provide free photo IDs to everyone that look identical. Right. So in Mexico, for example, you get a photo id, it looks the same. There's no sort of, like, you know, these little skirmishes. We are having state to state about which IDs count. Right. Like, that's part. Like, that's. That is a huge part of the reticence of Democrats to go with this. Right. I think that if we did have some form of national ID that we all agreed was valid, real ID would go a long way in making this happen. But it's been 30 years and we haven't done it yet. I think we. The circumstances in the United States, because we are a federal system without a national ID or a list of people. Right. Like, one of the reasons the SAVE act is such a. It is. Is ineffective. And one of the reasons we can't just easily check citizenship in the United States is because there exists in no place a centralized list of everybody who's supposed to be here. Right. And we don't have that list because we don't issue national IDs.
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D
Right.
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B
Like there is that list in other countries because they have these IDs that they've given and they're all in a database.
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A
We don't have that in America. That only exists state by state. Like New York is responsible for all the people who are supposed to be here in New York. Texas is responsible for all the people.
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D
I mean it often doesn't even exist state by state.
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B
I was just going to say that. Right. Like in most states it actually exists county to county to county. So you know, years ago I built, before I was covering voting, I built a database on dead children. And you would assume that like dead children would be like, and when they've died would be collected centrally. It is not right. Nor is driver's license data, nor is voter registration. The only reason voter registration data is collected centrally is because there's a federal law that requires it to be. And that law didn't even pass until 2002. So before that even that was the Wild West. Right. So I think, think people assume that all of our data is connected and it's just not.
- [19:35]
A
Well, I want to say for a second that if I am a Republican who's worried about voter fraud, listening to this conversation, I don't know that the conversation we're having right now would allay my fears. I would go, you mean to say that nobody's keeping track of who should be here and whether or not they should vote? I mean, how does this all come together to create a, a resilient, functioning, fraud proof system?
- [20:01]
D
The answer is the decentralization really helps counties. They do a good job. And that is how. But like I think that is, it's completely valid. Again, like I think like it could be perfectly valid political aim to be like, we should have this kind of like national list that we can compare against. But again, practically speaking we don't. It's. It also actually creates like a equal protection issue. Right? Because the SAVE act would say from here on out you have to prove your citizenship. Well, like I'm already registered to vote. I haven't proved my citizenship and I wouldn't have to under, under this bill. So like you've basically created a two tiered system. So there are a lot of practical issues with, with the, the SAVE act as well. So I just wanted to get that out there. But no, obviously, like, I think the system is quite robust against fraud because of like all the checks in place on the local level. And I'm sure Jessica has more to say about that.
- [20:49]
B
Yes, I, I think that that's true. I mean, you know, I think because of how decentralized it is, it means that sort of, of we have people that are responsible for a very small amount of data. They're not responsible for all of it, and they can sort of manage that in a way that makes sense for their communities. And I also think that voting is such a personal thing and it's such a community driven thing that the needs from community to community are so different that the localization and the sort of, the way that counties like this voter system is totally different from this voter system. You know, we, we are. The cost is standardization, but I think the benefit is that it's, it's hard to manipulate a system that is, that, that is that diffuse. And, and so I think that alone protects it more than I think people, people realize. And, and I also think that people overestimate the value of the federal government monitoring this stuff, right? Like the matches aren't particularly good. These are databases that are maintained by human beings that are typed into. Right? This is not this magical clean database. I think that people have this really, this really silly understanding of how useful government data is because they watch shows like Criminal Minds and csi and there's like one nerdy woman with curly hair and glasses who can find anything in 12 seconds and tell you all the Bangladesh in the San Francisco area. Like that, right? Like that data. That's an actual scene. I just. That was in Criminal Minds. That actually did happen. Like, and I was screaming at the TV and my sister was like, what is wrong with you? She's just pulling files. And I'm like, those files don't exist. And anyway, it was not as compelling for her, a teacher, as it was for me. But the point is, right, like, we assume that all of this data is connected and that it can talk to each other and that what is returned to us when it does speak to each other is accurate. Like it is not. And so, sure, like, we could build all of these systems, right? But we are a 50 state situation. We're all going to argue about that. Like, it may be that the states can get everybody to centrally report something to the state, but the likelihood that all of these states with all of these different political motivations are going to be like, sure, federal government monitor our Data is so low. And I think, like, at some point, Republicans would even reject that, even if they're like, slightly on board for this. So I think just, it's sort of not practical in a, in a country such as ours.
- [23:33]
A
Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense that on one level, there is a philosophical debate about the usefulness of federalism to begin with. And usually Republicans have been on the side of states rights over, you know, national governments rights. There are also arguments in favor of a diffuse system that can make it more resilient from, you know, you don't have to meddle in one single election. You have to meddle in elections in 50 states that take place in more than 9,000 different jurisdictions. And in some ways, that diffuseness makes it more resilient. Put those sort of philosophical debates aside for the moment. We're in a period right now where I think there are serious doubts about whether the people arguing for a more nationalized system are doing so in good faith. And so while we could sit here and have a real debate about creating that national list, national id, national voter roll, doing so in the context of somebody who has already tried to undermine one federal election is maybe a little bit beside the point. So let's talk about some other stuff going on here. Are there any other changes that Republicans are trying to make to election law before election day 2026? We talked about the SAVE act, we talked about the executive orders. We've talked about this, you know, attempt at making a voter roll file, which is not. Not law, but just sort of moves from the administration.
- [24:58]
D
The SAVE act is not the only legislation that has been proposed in Congress. Last week they also introduced the Mega act, which is the Make Elections Great Again act, which is basically like.
- [25:08]
C
And that is the end of today's preview. Head over to GDPolitics.com to become a paid subscriber and catch the full episode. Our conversation continued for another half hour. We covered the FBI raid on an elections office in Fulton county and whether there's a serious threat of federal law enforcement taking custody of ballots in 2026. We discussed other possible threats to election integrity and also reasons for optimism. Like I said, head over to GDPolitics.com to become a paid subscriber and catch the whole thing. Paid subscribers get about twice the number of episodes, can join in the paid subscriber chat, and most importantly, we'll keep.
- [25:44]
A
This podcast going through 2026.
- [25:47]
C
When you become a subscriber, you can connect your account to wherever you listen to podcasts so you'll never miss an episode. There's a link in the show notes explaining how to do that again. Head over to GDPolitics.com, see you there.