The 2026 Elections: Resisting the Rigging
Wesleyan University President Michael Roth, who has been a leader in organizing college presidents to resist Donald Trump’s demands, has come up with a terrific idea to help safeguard the midterm elections. He proposes something called Democracy Summer 2026, evoking the heroic Freedom Summer of 1964 that aimed to advance voting rights in Mississippi.
“Wesleyan University is reaching out to colleges across the country to build a network of institutions to protect our democracy,” Roth explains. “We hope that by the fall thousands of students will be working side by side with election administrators and civic organizations to support poll worker recruitment, election protection efforts, and lawful observation.”
He added, “During Democracy Summer 2026, many schools will offer internships for young people eager to join campaigns. In recent years Wesleyan students have been engaging with potential voters in places like Michigan and North Carolina, in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. By the fall our network will launch thousands of students into meaningful work side-by-side with election administrators and civic organizations. The elections of 2026 are crucial, but we are building democratic muscles that should endure.”
Roth’s initiative is a nonpartisan cousin to Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin’s Democracy Summer program, which trains students to be organizers and campaign workers for progressive candidates.
If we take stock of all the ways that Trump is threatening free and fair elections next fall, student election workers can’t do everything, but they can do a lot. Trump has tried to “nationalize” elections, meaning have the federal government take control of election administration, which the Constitution clearly delegates to the states. He issued an executive order to that effect back in March.
Trump’s Justice Department has demanded voter rolls from at least 44 states, and most have refused to provide them. The idea is to have the Justice Department take over voter lists and then conduct bogus purges. The courts have sided with the states, and if the case ever reaches the Supreme Court, even this high court is likely to disallow Trump’s demand.
In the case of the flagrantly illegal raid on Fulton County, Georgia, voting records from 2020, Trump is trying to relitigate his bogus claims that he lost Georgia in 2020 because of illegal voting. This has been disproven over and over again. Here again, even a Trump-friendly Supreme Court is likely to hold that such incursions are illegal.
Trump and the Republican House have also tried to narrow the franchise by passing legislation requiring proof of citizenship and photo ID for people to register and vote. The so-called SAVE America Act passed the House last week, but it won’t get the required 60 votes to pass the Senate.
Occasionally, Trump blurts out the truth. On February 5, he told the National Prayer Breakfast, “They rigged the second [2020] election. I had to win it. I needed it for my own ego.”
In a recent interview with NBC News, Trump was asked if he would accept election results. He replied, “I will accept the results of the election only if I think that it is fair.” As Susan Glasser observed in The New Yorker, “The point seems to be that, for Trump, any election won by a Democrat is, by definition, unfair, fake, rigged.”
At bottom, Trump is relying on two strategies to undermine free and fair elections: First, depress who is able to register and vote; second, create maximum chaos and intimidation on Election Day.
On the former, it is up to the courts and election integrity organizations to block Trump’s maneuvers. On the latter, the more that citizen activists work to prevent Election Day intimidation, the fairer and freer elections will be. A number of groups, such as Indivisible and Run for Something, have mobilized people to work to elect Democrats. That also becomes a force to insist on free and fair elections.
Several election protection groups have never been stronger, working to both track and litigate threats. They include the Brennan Center for Justice, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Protect Democracy, Democracy Docket, as well as Democratic secretaries of state and attorneys general.
Taken together, these and other groups have done a superb job of challenging all of Trump’s attempted incursions. Despite the conservative cast of the courts, Trump’s ploys have been so outlandish that the democracy groups have been winning key cases more than they have been losing.
One other risk, which may seem a little far-fetched (but with Trump, nothing is too far-fetched): If Democrats do take back the House, Trump may even try a variant of January 6, 2021, and try to prevent new House members from being seated, claiming massive (if totally invented) fraud.
Thus far, in special elections, Speaker Mike Johnson has not quite stooped to this, but he came close. Democrat Adelita Grijalva was sworn in as the representative for Arizona’s Seventh Congressional District last November 12, after a record-setting 50-day delay following her special-election victory on September 23. Johnson’s excuse for refusing to seat her was the government shutdown and House recess.
The old Speaker is no longer Speaker when the new Congress reconvenes on January 3, 2027. If the House changes hands, under the House rules the clerk of the House, who is a nonmember staffer, swears in the new House, which then elects the Speaker.
This adds one more obstacle to a coup. To overturn the election, Trump and Johnson would have to revise the House rules, and some anti-Trump Republicans might refuse to go along.
But if Trump and Johnson did find a way to refuse to recognize election results to avoid turning over control of the House, that would be a move to outright dictatorship. It would be more serious even than the constitutional crisis of 1876, when conservative Republicans in Congress lined up with Southern Democrats to fraudulently overturn the presidential election results in a deal that ended Reconstruction.
A citizen uprising, as in the case of Minneapolis and ICE, can’t guarantee that a desperate Trump won’t attempt another coup. But we can make it a lot harder for him to try.
The post The 2026 Elections: Resisting the Rigging appeared first on The American Prospect.