David Graham

You know, they've held historically that you don't want to change the rules of the election within the last weeks, months.

And so they tend to be fairly restrained about that.

So there's a question not only of things that might come to the court before the election, but also things that might come to the court later.

after the election, emergency appeals, issues about stopping voting or, you know, a scenario like the Bush v. Gore case in 2000.

One thing that experts did tell me, though, is Bush v. Gore, although it is very controversial and very high profile, is a little bit unusual.

Usually these cases don't make it to the Supreme Court.

And usually when they do on election issues, as compared to some of these other things, court watchers see the court being a little bit more restrained and hesitant to rock the boat.

They see it as a dangerous statement.

Trump has a habit of sort of pushing the envelope in these statements and then writing it back as either a joke or saying he didn't mean that.

What I heard time and again was people saying, you know, we believe there will be elections in 2026.

Everything moving forward indicates that there's preparation.

Trump wouldn't be pushing to states to gerrymander if he didn't think there were going to be elections.

So we're not going to see canceled elections.

But the question is whether they are really free and fair.

And when he says things like that, it doesn't sound like he's preparing for free and fair elections, especially when you take that next to the actions he's taking to to undermine the security of the system in other ways and to cast doubt on it.

What's, I think, scary about emergency powers for the president is that they're fairly broad and a lot of them are unexplored.

So we've seen people around Trump suggesting that declarations of emergency would be really useful.

And what's unclear is whether courts would allow that, how fast courts could react to stop them.

Could courts react before, for example, voting machines were seized, which would raise questions about chain of custody and whether tallies could be trusted, or would they be slower to get to it?

And what would he do with that kind of emergency power?