Having failed to keep the trust of voters he needs to keep Congress red while barring all others from casting ballots, Donald Trump is now setting the stage for midterm chaos.

This state’s cozy relationship with the administration gives Florida no protection. In fact, quite the opposite.

Florida led a legal fight to make sure it could use SAVE, an error-ridden federal database that purports to identify noncitizen voters.

The Department of Justice is in court denying it used SAVE to identify 20,000 “possible” noncitizens who might vote in California. The DOJ is suing to prevent California from counting mail-in ballots of all 20,000 until they can be proven innocent.

The election is nearly here

This comes on the heels of the Department of Homeland Security’s request for the DOJ to investigate a voting system used on Election Day by every county in Florida and more than 68% of the country.

Neither issue will be resolved by an election that’s less than two weeks away. There is no time left to sift through tens of thousands of voter registrations to prove citizenship. There’s no way to replace or upgrade election systems already counting millions of ballots.

Trump knows this. But he also knows fake crises will lay the groundwork for challenging results, leading to post-election courtroom chaos, voter outrage, delayed election certification or worse: Deerfield Beach lawyer and longtime Trump friend Peter Ticktin is pushing the idea that Trump could declare a national emergency and seize control of the election.

Trump has already been rigging future results, and Florida has obliged. Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Legislature hastily redrew congressional boundaries in an effort to give the GOP a better chance of staying in power. It’s just what Trump demanded of red states.

‘Cheat like hell,’ Trump said

As for an accurate vote, “Cheat like hell,” Trump urged at a rally in Dallas. He has made it possible. DOGE eviscerated the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which protects elections.

Then Trump’s political appointees ordered CISA to secretly find a voting machine, hack it and reveal its vulnerabilities to the White House — although not to the manufacturer, which could address problems.

“My thought was they could keep it in their back pocket to invalidate any [election] results they don’t like,” a former CISA official told ProPublica. But CISA staff said no.

Trump refuses to rule out invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy the military, and regrets not ordering the National Guard to seize ballots after his 2020 loss.

DHS believes ICE can enter polling places to make arrests.

DOJ removed the manual outlining when voting materials may be legally seized from its website. It will send 1,000 “election observers” to polling places across the country. They will comply with all legal requirements, a DOJ spokesperson said. Far-fetched, you say? Immigration enforcement agents were spotted this week at early voting sites in Key Largo and Tallahassee.

Yet the administration cannot answer the most basic question about the theory it’s using to undermine voting for everyone: Where are the arrests of 2020’s millions of noncitizens and fraudster voters?

Trump was swept back into office after spending four years declaring that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Why, with the power of the federal government at his fingertips for two years, has Trump not ferreted out the 7 million voters who gave Biden the edge?

How many voters have been criminally charged for conspiring to undermine that presidential election? Not 7 million, not 700,000, not even 7,000.

One, though, comes to mind: Donald Trump.

MAGA braces for a beating

In the past few weeks, the administration has made weak efforts to help states secure free and fair elections. But it’s too little, too late. Assistance was needed months ago.

Washington’s helping hand comes amid years of accusations of ineptitude or sabotage by local workers and more recent threats to criminally charge state election officials, all of it accelerating as MAGA seems headed for a beating at the polls.

“The threats that we’re getting now,” Utah Republican Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson told The Washington Post, “are mostly from our own government.”

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