With the midterm elections a week away, President Donald Trump is pre-emptively casting doubt on the results if they are unfavorable to the Republican Party. On Tuesday, reporters asked the president if he would unconditionally accept the results in November. “I will if they’re honest elections,” Trump responded.

It’s a familiar line for Trump. As the Washington Post summarized, “In 2016, Trump said he would accept the election results ‘if I win.’ In 2020, he repeatedly declined to commit to accept the results, saying ‘We’re going to have to see what happens.’ In 2024, Trump said he would accept the results if the election was ‘fair and legal and good.’”

Trump has yet to admit he lost the 2020 election against Joe Biden, in one six month period alone claiming he won more than 100 times, despite there being no evidence of widespread voter fraud. The president has lost at least 64 court cases challenging the results.

But some analysts are growing increasingly worried Trump might do more to annul voting results this time around, especially as the Department of Justice is getting increasingly involved in the elections. Earlier this month, the DOJ filed criminal charges against more than two dozen green card holders in California, accusing them of illegally registering to vote or casting fraudulent ballots. Last week, Trump personally requested a DOJ lawsuit against Alaska to block certification of the state’s Senate election if the Republican incumbent loses. The New York Times reported it was “a highly unusual move that signaled an effort to potentially intervene in the outcome.”

On Monday, the Trump administration threatened Washington state with legal action if it did not purge around 400 people from its voter rolls that they claim are not U.S. citizens.

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“The timing of this request — one week before the General Election — is no doubt intended to cast unfounded suspicion on the results,” Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs said in a statement on Monday. “We take our responsibility to protect voter information seriously and will only respond to requests that follow due process. We saw what happened in California and don’t want Washingtonians to be harassed.”

Even if these attempts don’t work, the overall goal may be to rattle voter confidence in the security of the U.S. elections. “This is part of the election takeover playbook that I’ve seen around the world and unfortunately in some other autocratic environments,” Michael McNulty, a former senior elections adviser for the U.S. Agency for International Development, told the New York Times. McNulty has studied elections in countries like El Salvador, Hungary and Venezuela. “Trump has essentially undermined the independence of the DOJ and it’s been weaponized,” he said.

“Time and again, the evidence shows U.S. elections are secure. State and local election officials, in communities across the country, painstakingly implement layered security to protect the integrity of elections,” Ben Hovland and Emma Hulbert write in a recent article for Center for American Progress. “Despite all this evidence, the Trump administration continues to call the security of elections into question. As the Center for American Progress has detailed, alleging voter fraud or invoking national security emergencies provide powerful pretexts for challenging election results, despite the fact that these claims are contrived to justify just such election subversion. Widespread voter fraud is a myth, and presidents have no constitutional or legal authority to take control of elections.”

The post How Trump is prepping to deny election results appeared first on Salon.com.

The California Scheme Comes to Washington State

The Department of Justice on Wednesday told Washington state officials to segregate ballots from 400 people who it claimed are — or, at least, “appear to be” — noncitizens registered to vote.

It’s a repeat of what the DOJ has undertaken in California — first in Los Angeles and then in each other county in the state.

“People who are non-citizens are registered to vote and are voting in our state,” Neil Floyd, the acting U.S. attorney for the Western District of Washington, claimed in a press release yesterday. Floyd is a former immigration judge who was hand-picked by President Trump for the post. “We have identified over 400 non-citizens who are registered to vote and have voted in multiple elections.”

The DOJ’s claims to have found large numbers of noncitizen voters have repeatedly fallen apart. Some California county officials said the lists of supposed noncitizen voters provided to them by the DOJ contained only people who had not voted. Others said the lists contained people who did not live in the county in question. The DOJ this summer claimed to have found 16,000 noncitizen voters in Nevada, a number it eventually reduced to 185. As Nevada officials investigated, it turned out none of those people identified were, in fact, noncitizen voters.

In recent weeks, the DOJ has also been charging alleged noncitizen voters, a few dozen at a time. Its not clear how solid those cases are, and they will not have a chance to be litigated before the election.

“We take our responsibility to protect voter information seriously and will only respond to requests that follow due process. We saw what happened in California and don’t want Washingtonians to be harassed,” a spokesperson for Washington’s secretary of state said in an email to NBC. “The timing of this request — one week before the General Election — is no doubt intended to cast unfounded suspicion on the results.”

In California, a federal appeals court ruled 2-1 yesterday that it could not order Los Angeles to go forward with the DOJ’s similar demand there — that local officials segregate ballots. The court did not reach the merits, finding on procedural grounds that it was not time for it to weigh in. But the judges suggested the outcome would have been similar on the merits.

Despite its sloppiness, the impact of the DOJ’s scheme is two-fold.

First, it serves to bolster Trump’s frequent but baseless claims that noncitizen voting happens on a mass scale and swings elections. This will become useful after the election, as the administration seeks to further undermine confidence in the result.

Second, the claims — coupled with recent operations to arrest alleged noncitizen voters, a DOJ program dispatching poll watchers to blue cities, Trump’s offer of a bounty for “voter fraud,” and a noted escalation in anti-immigrant rhetoric — stand to suppress turnout among voters who are legally registered but who nonetheless fear getting caught in the administration’s crosshairs.

Bolsonaro Family Hits a Rough Patch

• The tale of President Trump’s Brazilian ally Flávio Bolsonaro has gotten grimmer in the 24 hours following his surprising loss to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
• First, Trump declined to vigorously back Bolsonaro’s charges that his election loss was tainted. Trump called the election “rigged,” but didn’t go further. Soon after, Bolsonaro backed off his vow to try to get the outcome annulled.
• Also yesterday, Bolsonaro’s was ordered by Brazil’s Supreme Court to hand over his passport as he is under investigation for an alleged a money laundering scheme.
• Bolsonaro’s brother, Eduardo Bolsonaro, has been living in Texas, and had suggested publicly that Flávio should leave the country. Eduardo, after being convicted for a scheme to get the Trump administration to intervene in his father Jair Bolsonaro’s trial following his coup attempt, has been, from Texas, lobbying the Trump administration to intervene in his brother’s now unsuccessful presidential campaign. 

As Democrats’ midterm expectations soar, history advises only a lowercase, cautious optimism.

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