Richard Hasen

So if you go to Canada or Germany or Australia, they have a civil service body that runs elections.

There's a lot to be said for that.

And back in that book, I...

advocated for that to try to rationalize our elections so that the voting machinery would be uniform, we'd have uniform rules, it would be easy to vote, and we'd have all kinds of safeguards.

But I've now recanted that because I think American democracy is too weak

What we've seen with the Trump administration is that Donald Trump is trying to use every power at his disposal to direct the federal government to do what he wants, regardless of the safeguards that are built in.

And so I think American democracy could not handle federalizing or nationalizing elections because it would raise the potential to concentrate power in the hands of a tyrannical president.

I think there's a good chance that another executive order comes out on voting.

Trump has said on multiple times he's going to do it.

He had a post on his Truth Social media site that said that we're going to have voter ID in this country, whether...

Congress passes the SAVE Act or not.

So he's going to do something.

But the executive order might be just for show.

He might know, as he does with some things that he does, that the courts are going to stop him.

But that's just one lever among many that Trump could try to use to interfere with the 2026 elections.

Let me talk about some others.

One is

what we saw in Georgia recently with the FBI coming in and seizing ballots.

Now, those ballots were seized for a past election, the 2020 election.

What would happen if the FBI gets some judge to sign a search warrant and tries to seize ballots in an election that has not been called yet?