President Donald Trump is urging Republicans to “take over” voting nationwide, repeating unfounded claims about widespread voter fraud as his administration pushes to reshape election rules ahead of this year’s midterms.
The comments come as the White House and congressional Republicans move to overhaul election procedures. It’s a push that has already drawn sharp criticism from voting-rights advocates and election officials.
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What Trump said
In an interview with conservative podcaster Dan Bongino, who resigned from his post as deputy FBI director in December, Trump alleged that noncitizen voting is influencing election outcomes. It’s a claim that election officials and multiple investigations have rejected.
“The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over.’ We should take over the voting… In at least many, 15 places,” Trump said. “The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting. We have states that are so crooked, and they’re counting votes.”
The president did not elaborate on how he wants Republicans to “nationalize” voting. However, in a statement to ABC News, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said Trump, “cares deeply about the safety and security of our elections. That’s why he’s urged Congress to pass the SAVE Act and other legislative proposals that would establish a uniform standard of photo ID for voting, prohibit no-excuse mail-in voting, and end the practice of ballot harvesting.”
Immediately after Trump made the comments, legislators began to respond.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, while on the Senate floor, said “Does Donald Trump need a copy of the Constitution? What he is saying is outlandishly illegal.”
Election investigation
Trump’s comments come after the FBI searched an election office in Fulton County, Georgia. They seized 700 boxes of election materials for an investigation into Trump’s repeated but unproven claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
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Georgia’s secretary of state reported that out of 8.2 million registered voters, only 20 were found to be noncitizens and just nine of them had ever cast a ballot.
As Straight Arrow News previously reported, before Congress certified Joe Biden as the winner, Trump placed a phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in which he asked that the official “find” enough votes to change the outcome.
Joe Biden won Georgia by 11,779 votes, or less than one-fourth of 1% of all votes cast. In Fulton County, which includes most of the city of Atlanta, Biden received almost 73% of the more than 500,000 votes cast.
Now, the county plans to file a federal lawsuit, claiming the seizure was unlawful.
