“In four years, you don't have to vote again. We'll have it fixed so good, you're not gonna have to vote.” - Donald Trump, July 26, 2024
“I should have” seized election boxes in 2020. - Donald Trump, Jan. 5, 2025
President Trump, Republicans, and conservative billionaires are determined to dominate the 2026 and 2028 elections, using federal power to steal elections where necessary. Their strategy is to create sufficient doubt about the election process that voters will endure Republican vote-tally chicanery. Their tactics feature Presidential Executive Orders, Department of Justice (DOJ) lawsuits sowing doubts about voter rolls and balloting integrity, and Republicans gaslighting voters about Democratic Party election criminality. Moreover, Putin is likely continuing Russia’s participation in Republican election manipulation.
Trump issued an executive order, for instance, asserting Presidential power to decertify voting machines and limit mail-in ballots. Lower courts have ruled repeatedly against the order, however, noting that the Constitution grants states and Congress exclusive authority to conduct elections. In addition, the DOJ is suing to obtain confidential voter rolls from at least 44 states. Each list creates an opportunity for Republicans to claim they are riddled with nonvoters in instances where elections are won by Democrats – although analyses rebut such claims.
Democratic officials in Michigan, for instance, are dealing with DOJ suits alleging mismanagement of voter rolls, questioning overseas military voter procedures, and challenging absentee ballot signature matching. Moreover, they are contending with suits by Republican state legislators seeking access to confidential Michigan election security instructions. The legislators are even proposing that the DOJ oversee the entire state’s 2026 election, including monitoring “polling places, absentee ballot processing, voter registration activities and central count facilities across Michigan.”
Studies find few if any voting irregularities, and Democrats are resisting, winning suits protecting the integrity of voter rolls. Even so, the Republicans’ ultimate tactic for stealing elections was given a test run in January 2026 when federal agents summarily seized 2020 election ballots from Democratic-leaning precincts in Fulton County, Georgia. Democrats are resisting that unconstitutional tactic also, but its potential for election disruption is evident.
Vigorous legal resistance is important. But equally important is Democrats’ need to appreciate their stunningly narrow pathway to victory in 2028, posed by the 2022 upgrade of Presidential election certification procedures - the Election Count Reform Act (ECRA)
ECRA: The Importance of the 2026 Election to 2028
ECRA empowers governors in 2028 to determine their state-wide presidential winner. It provides a 36-day window for state and federal courts to resolve post-election controversies. Then by the second Wednesday of December, state governors (and Washington D.C.’s mayor) must submit a slate of electors for their state’s winning presidential candidate to Congress; final Congressional tabulation of Electoral College electors (made infamous by January 6) occurs in early January. ECRA does permit a state’s submitted slate of electors to be rejected by a majority vote of the House of Representatives and separately by the Senate. In that event, the state is stripped of its Electoral College votes – its voters disenfranchised – and the threshold number of electors necessary for election of the president is commensurately reduced below 270.
These rules create two pathways for Russian-Republican election thievery in 2026 that ensure a Republican is elected President in 2028.
First, Republicans win majorities in both Houses of Congress in 2026.
Or second, ensure that 2026 balloting results in a Republican becoming governor in one or more swing states. (That is because - as in recent elections - the 2028 presidential election is highly likely to hinge on results in the swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and perhaps Arizona and Nevada.)
For Democrats, blocking those two pathways dramatizes the importance of a robust 2026 blue wave that elects a Democratic majority in at least one House of Congress and elects Democratic governors (and preferably attorneys general and secretaries of state) in the swing states. Those officials will become the key actors overseeing an accurate and fair presidential election in 2028. Democrats currently occupy all those positions in Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin - and partly in Pennsylvania (Democratic governor) and Nevada (Democratic attorney general and secretary of state) – but all of those offices are on the ballot in 2026.
The Supreme Court
ECRA provides a third pathway for Republicans and Putin to prevail in both 2026 and 2028 by granting final authority to resolve legal election disputes to the Supreme Court.
That is greatly concerning because the Roberts Republican majority is fringe conservatives well out of the mainstream. They support the unconstitutional abuse of executive authority by an administration “embracing Nazi slogans and tropes,” reports the Atlantic.
Moreover, Court Republicans are elitists, comfortable preserving Trump’s wage suppression economy, dissected here by what Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig describes as “one of the most important studies you’ve probably never heard of.”
Finally, they are racists. They overturned a fifty-year-old unanimous precedent last year to rule that people can be arrested (aka “Kavanaugh Stops”) solely on the basis of how they look, speak, or where they work – a fulsome embrace of racial profiling. That portends placing their partisan thumbs on the 2026 elections by ruling this year in Louisiana to eviscerate what remains of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. That ruling may well induce a wave of frantic partisan gerrymandering, creating as many as 10-12 net new Republican House districts – and perhaps securing a House of Representatives majority in 2026.
Will the Roberts Republicans Render Democracy Quixotic?
History is discouraging. The Rehnquist court, for instance, abandoned democracy in a partisan panic to issue Bush v Gore – rejecting an orderly recount – elevating an election loser to be president. The Roberts Republican apparatchiks are even more partisan. They may well exploit an orchestrated MAGA disinformation environment - and bogus claims that they face a presidential decision-deadline – to anoint another losing Republican president.
Perhaps the best option for Democrats - aside from massive public protests – is to refute any contrived Roberts Court rush-to-judgment à la Rehnquist. A deliberate and careful presidential vote count is within its ECRA remit.
Roberts Republicans at the Abyss
James Madison believed the exalted presumption for Supreme Court justices ensured reasoned rulings divorced from the tumult of politics. In contrast, Roberts Republicans mock Madison - the New York Times editorially concluding the Court is failing “to live up to its constitutional role.” And they have mocked numerous other Republican jurists who are displaying the courage to meet Madison’s standard now.
The choice facing the Roberts six is stark. Will they continue to mimic Russian apparatchiks and Weimar era elitists?
Or will several feel the weight of history and find uncommon courage to step away from the abyss - to channel Madison and save the Founders’ 250-year grand experiment in democracy?
George Tyler is a former deputy assistant treasury secretary and World Bank official. He is the author of books including Billionaire Democracy and What Went Wrong.
