In stark contrast to his constitutional powers, US president Donald Trump said on Monday that Republicans should nationalise the elections, continuing to peddle false conspiracy theories about electoral fraud that, according to him, led to Biden's victory in 2020. These statements are part of the US president's strategy to influence the midterm elections to be held in November.

Trump's words come less than a week after the FBI raided an election office in Fulton, Georgia, with orders to confiscate all physical ballots from the 2020 election, voting machine records and images produced during the count. The justification given for this action was the possible failure to preserve official records, which constitutes fraud against voters.

Between late 2020 and early 2021, Fulton was the epicentre of Donald Trump's battle to overturn the election result. This is where the so-called “Big Lie” originated, according to which the real winner of the 2020 presidential election was Trump (but this was the real "Big Lie").

The then-president had also telephoned Georgia's Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, asking him to find enough votes, about ten thousand, to overturn the lead of Biden, the first Democrat to win in Georgia since 1992. MAGA conspiracy theorists rejoiced at the actions of the FBI and the Department of Justice, seeing them as confirmation that the election had indeed been stolen.

Democrats have emphasised the gravity of the searches and called the FBI's action a “subversion of the democratic process”. All attempts to take the 2020 election results to court have failed, proving that Trump's claims were the real lie.

During his first term as president, Donald Trump tried everything he could to prevent Joe Biden's clear victory in the 2020 presidential election from being certified, even attempting a coup on 6 January 2021 to remain in office. Once back in power, he pardoned all those imprisoned for taking part in the coup.

Midterm elections will be held in November, which will be central to the continuation of the Trump era: the Democrats are, in fact, favoured to regain control of the House, and if they succeed, they could further obstruct Trump's authoritarian policies and resort to impeachment again. This is a tool detested by the current US president, who has openly told Republicans that if he loses the election, it will be used against him again.

Although there are not enough votes for such a measure to pass the Senate, Trump has already been impeached twice, but he has had references to these events removed from some museums, such as the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. In order to continue dictating the political agenda, the Republicans must win the elections: in recent days, the Democrats have achieved an unexpected success with a 14-point lead in a special election for the Texas State Senate in a county where Trump had beaten Harris by 17 points.

At present, it is difficult to understand the political context in which the election will take place, but what is certain is that the president is pushing ahead with moves aimed at invalidating the electoral process, or at least casting doubt on its veracity. In a comprehensive and detailed article, the Washington Post has outlined some scenarios that could arise.

Although it seems too bleak a picture, it is nothing new. Already in 2020, Donald Trump, despite the ongoing Covid pandemic, insisted that his voters only vote in person at the polls, and not by post: postal voting was described as “rigged” and as such should be avoided.

This contributed to the so-called “red mirage”, studied at the drawing board by the White House: votes at the polls are counted before postal votes, which sometimes arrive days after Election Day. This led to a situation where Trump, on election night, was ahead in all the key states and was able to announce that he had won, even though millions of votes still had to be counted.

In the days that followed, the wave of postal votes in favour of Biden overturned the result, but by then the “lie” had taken hold among the president's voters: Trump had falsely predicted that the Democrats would try to rig the results through postal votes, and Biden had won precisely with those votes.

After the election, Trump tried to contest the results by any means necessary, culminating in the storming of the Capitol: on that same day, 147 Republicans, including deputies and senators, had decided to vote against Biden's inauguration as president. In an interview with the New York Times last month, Trump said he regretted not seizing voting machines in key states in the 2020 election.

During an interview with the New York Times, last month, Trump said he regretted "not ordering the National Guard to seize voting machines in swing states after his loss in the 2020 election". Furthermore, in August, he said he would lead a movement to abolish postal voting at all levels: according to the President, "an attempt that would be opposed by the Democrats, who steal on a scale never seen before".

The point is that the Constitution does not give the federal government the power to decide how the electoral process is conducted, but rather gives that power to individual states. Each state has different rules on whether or not to accept postal voting, and in fact, every attempt by the executive branch to block this type of voting has been taken to court.

The latest of these would have prevented all votes received by electoral offices after Election Day from being counted, a case that the Supreme Court has decided to take on, and on which there will therefore be an official verdict in the future. Meanwhile, Trump has been waging a battle for months to redraw electoral districts.

This is an unusual request, both because the design of electoral districts is a state matter and because they are redrawn every ten years, following the census, which also determines the allocation of seats in the House of Representatives for each state based on population. The president made no secret of why he wanted to make this move: he stated that he wanted “five more seats in Texas for the Republicans”.

This move did not have the desired effect, both because some of the new maps were taken to court, slowing down the process, and because the Democrats, instead of standing by and watching, took action in response. Faced with the possibility of redrawing the Texas constituency to favour Republicans, California Governor Gavin Newsom responded by redrawing his own constituencies to give Democrats an advantage.

It is difficult to say at this stage which party will gain more seats from this redrawing, but neither is likely to gain a particular advantage as Trump had initially hoped. Another attempt to manipulate the electoral process is coming before the Supreme Court: the judges are considering a case that could destroy a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the law that protects the voting rights of minorities in the country and guarantees so-called “minority constituencies”.

In a state with a strong minority presence, such as African Americans in the South, at least one constituency must be guaranteed that can elect its own representative to Congress. This is why, in states with a large Republican majority, it is minorities who guarantee Democratic representation: eliminating that provision would mean a sweeping Republican victory in some states, structurally changing the composition of the House of Representatives.

Louisiana has filed a complaint with the Court on the basis of "unconstitutionality". The decision is expected in the coming weeks.

Given how close most of the judges are to Trump, there is a good chance they will rule in his favour. However, the more time passes, the more unlikely it becomes that the constituencies can be redrawn in time for the November elections.

In that case, the discussion would be postponed until 2028. In the meantime, without any evidence, Trump continues to consider voting machines disastrous, even though they guarantee a lower margin of error than human counting.

The president would like more reliable machines, with standards that are not available on the market, or a return to manual counting: this is a problem, not least because the United States does not have many poll workers, and the few election officials are giving up as voting has become so polarised that it is causing unrest. Election officials, who manage the voting process by working at the polls, are under constant attack: in 2024, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, 38 per cent of them experienced intimidation and abuse, and many resigned due to fears for their safety.

After 2020, a dozen Republican-led states passed legislation to criminalise actions taken by election officials, such as soliciting mail-in ballots. Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security, which has been in the news recently for the ICE killings, has cut funding to CISA, an agency that protects elections from cyberattacks and physical threats.

In addition, the Department of Justice is collecting information on citizens: it has requested that 23 States provide the personal information of all voters, including sensitive data such as social security numbers. According to the government, this is a check to correct any errors.

However, many have pointed out that these cross-checks risk removing legitimate voters from the electoral register, or identifying negligible errors that would have no impact on the final results, but which Trump could use to contest the entire electoral process. An administrator in Texas has stated that about a quarter of Travis County citizens eligible to vote are identified in federal databases as “non-citizens”.

There is also the question of how the Department of Justice will store this data, as it has not indicated how it will defend against possible hacker attacks. During the deployment of ICE militias in Minnesota, Pam Bondi offered to withdraw the troops in exchange for the handover of voter registration records.

Among other things, Bondi is a well-known denier of the 2020 election results. When she was questioned in the Senate to obtain confirmation to head the Department of Justice, she refused to answer the question of who won the 2020 election.

And she is not alone. FBI Director Kash Patel spoke in 2023 about journalists who "helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections," and Ed Martin, a lawyer who assists the president in exercising his power to grant pardons, called the 2020 election process "rigged." Steve Bannon also touched on the topic of the electoral process in his podcast, War Room, and spoke of sending federal agents to liberal-majority cities, trying in every way to make postal voting illegal, pushing for a redefinition of constituencies and trying to suppress turnout by requiring proof of identification at the polls.

Although Bannon is no longer part of Trump's team, his advice closely resembles the actions taken by the White House in recent months. In 2024, Trump ran his election campaign by emphasising that he had won in 2020 and that the victory had been stolen from him.

The president cannot bear the concept of defeat, and for this reason he resents the democratic process and the possibility of winning and losing elections. Imagine this scenario, published a few days ago in The Atlantic: on election night, the Republican Party maintains control of the Senate, as predicted, but the situation in the House of Representatives is more uncertain, with many seats still to be decided.

At that point, the president goes before the cameras and says, “We won the House, even though in the coming days the others will try to steal it, as they did in 2020”. The situation, at that point, would be on the verge of collapse.

In her newsletter on Substack, historian Anne Applebaum, referring to the federal government's request to Minnesota to share its records, stated that "The federal government, in other words, is using a violent paramilitary to extort an American state, apparently with the intent of influencing the coming midterm elections. If nothing else, this is the moment when everyone across the country should begin focusing on those elections, and putting every effort into ensuring that they are fair."