(GPB News) – President Donald Trump has suggested at least twice that the federal government “run” elections in 15 states, including Georgia.
That was after the Department of Justice seized 700 boxes of 2020 ballots from Fulton County.
It’s been more than five years since President Trump lost in Georgia in the 2020 presidential election, which he still —without evidence — insists was rigged.
On Jan. 28, federal agents raided a warehouse in Fulton County and seized the boxes of 2020 ballots.
Less than a week later, on former FBI deputy director Dan Bongino’s podcast, Trump promised those ballots would prove him right.
“Now you’re gonna see something in Georgia where they were able to get with the court order and the ballots, you’re going to see some interesting things come out,” he promised “But you know, like the 2020 election, I won that election by so much. Everybody knows it.”
Days later, in the Oval Office, Trump doubled down.
“Take a look at Detroit. Take a look in Pennsylvania. Take a look at Philadelphia. You go take a look in Atlanta. Look at some of the places that — horrible corruption on elections,” he said. “And the federal government should not allow that. The federal government should get involved.”
Lori Ringhand is a professor of law at the University of Georgia. She said that it would be unprecedented in modern history for the federal government to take over the administration of an election in the states.
Trump can’t do it alone, she said. It would require an act of Congress.
“And frankly, I don’t think Congress would enact a law,” she said. “That’s creating a massive federal bureaucracy to do something that’s just not going to work very well.”
She said the effort would struggle under legal scrutiny, and this Congress doesn’t seem to have an appetite for that kind of legislation.
Congress is considering a bill called the SAVE Act, which would include a national requirement of proof of citizenship to vote. But Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters that’s as far as he wants to go.
“There are other views probably when it comes to nationalizing or federalizing elections,” Thune said, “but I think at least on that narrow issue, which is what the SAVE Act gets at, I think that’s what the president was addressing.”
Georgia Republicans aren’t on board, either. Georgia GOP Chairman Josh McKoon says he’d rather see the five members of the State Election Board step in.
“I want a level playing field and I don’t feel like we get that in Fulton County at all under the current leadership,” McKoon said. “And so I think that the State Election Board ought to make that finding and it to be placed under state management.”
But the State Election Board has so far said it isn’t interested, either.
President Trump has previously tried to shape election policy through his use of executive orders. Those are still tied up in the courts.
Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University, said the president could use the repeatedly discredited claims of fraud in the 2020 ballots to justify declaring an electoral emergency, and then try to intervene.
“I expect that even if he does go down that route, that he’s going to get a lot of pushback, in part because states retain the power to control their own elections,” she said. “And so I think it becomes a question of whether or not you see secretaries of states and governors and state legislators who would go along with this particular gambit.”
That seems unlikely in Georgia. For instance, while nearly a dozen states including Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas have turned over their voter rolls to the federal government, Georgia has not.
That’s because Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who President Trump asked to find 11,780 votes back in 2021, says he won’t do it.
