Terry Gross

More information is available at hewlett.org.

This is Fresh Air.

I'm Terry Gross.

Election season is underway, with primaries today in Texas, North Carolina, and Arkansas.

Meanwhile, President Trump is pushing Congress to pass legislation, the SAVE Act, that would change how every American citizen registers to vote and votes.

Predictions are that millions of American citizens would be unable to fill the ID requirements.

It would cause chaos at the polls, make it chaotic for counties and states overseeing elections.

and possibly make it challenging to decipher who really won.

But Congress seems unwilling to pass that, so President Trump is threatening to issue an executive order that would do all that and more.

My guest, Rick Hasson, is an expert in election law.

He founded the popular Election Law blog.

He's a professor of law and political science and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law and the author of numerous books, including A Real Right to Vote,

How a Constitutional Amendment Can Safeguard American Democracy, and the forthcoming book, Unbent Arc, The Rise and Decline of American Democracy, 1964 to 2024.

Rick Hasson, welcome back to Fresh Air.

I want to start by expressing my condolences.

I know that your mother died in late February about a week ago, and I'm very sorry.

I'd like to talk with you about the executive order or orders that President Trump is threatening to sign.

One of them, this story was broken by the Washington Post last week, and it has to do with a conspiracy theory.

Would you describe the conspiracy theory?

So can you be more specific about how this executive order, which we'll explain in a minute, ties in with this conspiracy theory about foreign interference in 2020 and 2024, leaving out, by the way, Russia, which really did try to interfere and which did have bots and stuff that were interfering with reality, with truth?