Stephen Richer

But your guess is good or better than mine.

And so is this a dress rehearsal for involving the federal government in ways that never would have been before contemplated?

I'll say that over the last few months, I've ordinarily been pretty reluctant to embrace any sort of theory that Donald Trump can manipulate the 2026 elections.

People normally talk about stationing ICE at a few voting locations, or they talk about him pulling federal funding from cybersecurity programs.

To those allegations or to those concerns, I usually say, well, at the end of the day, the county's

run elections they're run by bipartisan teams they have a lot of checks and balances built into the process and they're going to be administered but this is the first instance in which i i could begin to believe that something truly spectacular is going to happen in which our 2026 midterm elections are not administered like past elections happen well let me ask you because you sat in the chair you ran the office you know the very minute details

Yeah, so we do a fair amount of this, actually, within a number of different election communities.

And I always fall back on where I think President Trump is most potent is still in the post-election procedures.

still in sowing doubt in the minds of enough Americans that they don't think the elections are legitimate.

And therefore, I don't know, they don't have to recognize the new elected officials or the Congress doesn't have to seat its new members.

That's certainly a popular theory that's floating about that Speaker Mike Johnson, the outgoing speaker, will choose not to seat the new members because they're in allegedly disputed elections.

I find that to be much more plausible than, you know,

You know, we're going to go in and we're going to tip over every single tabulation machine so that those can't be used.

And then there's just pandemonium because they have to do hand count auditing or we're going to try to send the FBI to run the 9000 different voting jurisdictions in the United States.

Our election system is just so disaggregated.

so driven by state law, so driven by local nuances, that I think it would be very, very challenging for the federal government to really take over here.

Yeah.

So I think that is a scenario that's been discussed where you don't go to every 9,000 voting jurisdictions.

You don't go to all the precincts.

You don't go, certainly don't go to all the polling places, but you do go to the competitive swing races for the United States House and you do something to disrupt them.