Trump’s comments raise concerns about potential efforts to rig the November midterm elections – key US politics stories from Tuesday 3 February at a glance
Donald Trump suggested on a conservative podcast released on Monday that Republican state officials “take over” and “nationalize” elections in 15 states to protect the party from being voted out of office.
Trump framed the issue as a means to prevent undocumented immigrants from voting. Claims that noncitizens are voting in numbers that can affect an election are a lie. But it raises concerns about potential efforts by the president to rig the November midterm elections.
Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, a Democrat, responded to Trump’s comments on Tuesday. “That statement alone makes clear that this threat to our election security, the basic premise of our democracy, is forward looking, to 2026, to 2028,” he said. “This is about whether these same tactics we’re seeing now, or worse, will be used to disrupt free and fair elections.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt later told reporters that the president “believes there has obviously been a lot of fraud and irregularities that have taken place in American elections, and again, voter ID is a highly popular and commonsense policy that the president wants to pursue and he wants to pass legislation to make that happen for all states across the country”.
