Historically, the midterm election after a party change in the White House is a bloodbath for the president's party.
Donald Trump is hoping to avoid such an outcome by taking away some of the biggest weapons available to Democrats.
As such, the president is targeting mail-in ballots and voting machines that he believes are suspect.
This all got started with Trump allegedly asking Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to redraw the state's district maps to give the GOP more seats.
In all but one election in modern history, the president's party has seen dozens of seats change hands, so Trump is clearly hoping to minimize the damage, but that move may backfire with several Democrat-led states now looking to further gerrymander their maps.
Democrats are not even denying that they have gerrymandered their maps in the past, using the excuse that since they did so immediately after the census was conducted, it’s all fine.
Dems in the Texas state House pushed back by leaving the jurisdiction to avoid a quorum ahead of a redistricting vote they knew they would lose, but now they are allegedly returning, which will put the proposed maps on the floor for a vote.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of mail-in ballots significantly increased over past elections, as Democrats made big moves at the federal and state levels to expand that mode of voting.
This resulted in more votes cast in a presidential election than we have ever seen.
The problem, however, is that Trump believes that this type of voting is also the easiest way to rig an election.
A secondary problem, according to Trump, surrounds voting machines that are not calculating votes properly and that can be easily manipulated.
This week, Trump announced that he was introducing a new executive order to address both of these issues, posting to Truth Social, “I am going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS, and also, while we’re at it, Highly ‘Inaccurate,’ Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES.”
His post continued, “WE WILL BEGIN THIS EFFORT, WHICH WILL BE STRONGLY OPPOSED BY THE DEMOCRATS BECAUSE THEY CHEAT AT LEVELS NEVER SEEN BEFORE, by signing an EXECUTIVE ORDER to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections.”
This push will be contested by Democrats and activist groups, as many of Trump’s claims regarding the 2020 election were never proven in court, at least not to the extent that the irregularities were deemed to have impacted the outcome of the 2020 election.
I can’t really say too much about the voting machines, but I can tell you that I support the effort to eliminate mail-in ballots, other than for people who are out of the country and for military personnel serving overseas. With expansions of in-person voting opportunities, there is simply no excuse to open up the election to possible corruption of this front. And it's not so much a federal election that I am worried about as it is state and local elections, which are sometimes won by only a few dozen votes (the point being, any fraud can impact these elections, and we need to eliminate it).
