Editorial: Intent behind Trump's election bluster couldn't be clearer

The Virginian-Pilot and Daily Press Editorial Board, The Virginian-Pilot on Jul 30, 2026

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The Trump administration on Monday petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to ignore the Constitution and allow the implementation of an executive order that would severely restrict voting by mail nationwide. Even high school civics students know elections are the dominion of the states, but President Donald Trump naturally believes that power should be his.

It’s the latest evidence of the president’s desperation about the upcoming midterm elections and polling that suggests an electorate that favors Democrats heading into the fall. Rather than try to win back support or curb the policies that have fueled Americans’ anger, Trump wants to impose his will on the election process.

The court should not let him, and election officials — in Virginia and across the nation — must continue to hold the line against these baseless, unconstitutional attacks on our democracy.

On July 16, Trump delivered a prime-time address in which he uncorked a stream of familiar lies about the integrity of American elections. He repeated his disproven claims about winning the 2020 election (he did not) and tried to hype previously released documents about foreign influence campaigns as some type of bombshell (they were not).

The president outlined efforts by China to obtain U.S. voter files before the 2020 election, but that has been widely documented. In fact, many states maintain their voter information in publicly available files.

He claimed that hundreds of thousands of noncitizens are on state voting rolls, but cannot document instances in which they voted in numbers that would influence the outcome of any federal election. Even a recently discovered glitch affecting a New Jersey database that incorrectly registered 6,600 noncitizens resulted in fewer than 400 people casting ballots. Worrisome, sure, but not a national crisis.

Numerous reviews by federal, state and local officials — including many conducted during Trump’s first term — along with independent analyses and courts on multiple levels have yet to find anything to support the president’s fictitious claims. Virginia election officials are among those who audit results and test machines regularly to ensure accuracy and integrity, with reports available at elections.virginia.gov.

U.S. Sen. Mark Warner knows. The Virginia Democrat has been a forceful and consistent voice on election integrity issues and released a lengthy memo documenting all the president’s lies in his recent address.

As vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Warner worked with Republican chairmen — including former Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina and now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio, formerly a senator from Florida — to document foreign influence campaigns and produce an extensive record of investigations that contradict the president’s outlandish accusations.

If anything, Trump’s failure to take those warnings and that evidence seriously following the 2016 election enabled China and Russia to expand their efforts before the 2020 vote. And it was Trump — not a foreign actor — who rallied his supporters in a bloody, violent and failed attempt to prevent Congress from certifying President Joe Biden’s rightful election.

What Trump wants, more than anything, is doubt. Doubt about the effectiveness of election security. Doubts about foreign states’ meddling and noncitizens voting. And doubts about the results, which would enable him to reject them as fraudulent, as he did in 2020.

His campaign for the SAVE Act is an attempt to follow through. To be sure, there are areas of election law ripe for reform that federal and state lawmakers can and should pursue, but the SAVE act is an extreme measure, meant to rig the rules of the game at the expense of the broader public will.

If the president was legitimately concerned about American elections, he wouldn’t have gutted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s election security programs, disbanded the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force or, earlier this month, fired all the remaining members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. That he did gives away the game.

His pressure campaign on Congress and this petition to the Supreme Court are the last-gasp efforts to undermine our democracy before voters head to the polls. He cannot be allowed to succeed.

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