TRUMP ADMINISTRATION HAS PLOT TO STEAL THE NEXT ELECTION
By Stephen Prager
Voting rights advocates are raising fears that the Trump administration may attempt to“ hijack” the 2026 election after a new report revealed that a top election integrity official suggested invoking a“ national emergency” to justify a federal takeover of state-run election processes.
The New York Times reported that during a call in March with right-wing activists, the woman who has since been appointed to President Donald Trump’ s newly created“ election integrity” position within the Department of Homeland Security( DHS) had suggested that the president could declare a“ national emergency” to give his government new authority to dictate election rules typically decided by state and local governments.
Heather Honey, formerly a Pennsylvania-based private investigator who came to prominence as a leading proponent of Trump’ s efforts to overturn his 2020 loss to former President Joe Biden, said this authority would come from“ an actual investigation” of the loss, which she has baselessly argued was marred by widespread fraud.
In the US, elections are administered by states, with the president having no legal authority over how they are carried out. But Honey suggested that the Trump administration has“ some additional powers that don’ t exist right now,” and that by using the investigation as a pretext,“ we can take these other steps without Congress and we can mandate that states do things and so on.”
Seeming to recognize the extreme step she was proposing, Honey added:“ I don’ t know if that’ s really feasible and if the people around the president would let him test that theory.”
The 2020 election was subject to numerous state-level recounts and audits and over 60 failed court challenges in state and federal jurisdictions— many of which were dismissed by Republican and Trump-appointed judges for lack of merit and credible evidence.
An investigation by the Associated Press last year found that across the six battleground states Trump claimed were beset by widespread fraud, only 475 individual ballots out of millions of votes cast were flagged by election officials as“ potentially” affected by fraud. Even if every single one of the ballots had been proven fraudulent, it would not have been nearly enough to swing the election result in Trump’ s favor.
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