TRUMP’S PROPOSED VOTE STEAL PART 2

YESTERDAY WE RECALLED TRUMP’S DESPICABLE ACTIONS of claiming he won the 2020 election. Today in Part 2, we examine his plans for attempting to steal the 2026 midterms.

Fulton County Actions. Austin Sarat reports “The FBI’s Seizure of 2020 Ballots in Georgia is a Signal of What’s to Come,” The Guardian, February 1, 2026:  “While the nation’s attention was focused on the ICE invasion of Minneapolis,” Sarat writes, “another part of Trump’s authoritarian state apparatus was in action more than a thousand miles away. On Wednesday 28 January, the FBI carried out a stunning raid at the central election facility in Fulton county, Georgia. Its purpose: to seize ballots cast in the 2020 election. Such an action is unprecedented.”

Note too, such federal seizure and control of possible evidence complicates state and local investigations. And federal goons’ deals about voter rolls only exacerbate this.  

What the President Wants, the President Gets. Sarat continues, “In the name of election integrity, the administration seems bent on ensuring that elections can be free and fair only if they turn out the way the president wants. That’s why it would be a mistake to write off the raid as just a rehashing of the past.”

A Wake-Up Call. “It should also serve as a wake-up call,” Sarat observes, “a preview of what is in store in several months. The FBI, the justice department, and the intelligence community are all coming to places like Fulton county, places where, left to their own devices, voters might not do what the president wants them to do.”

Trump’s Big Lie. Jamil Smith reports “What Is Happening in Fulton County Is A Warning to America,” The Guardian, February 4, 2026: “What in the hell were FBI agents doing in an election facility in Fulton county, Georgia, last week?” writes Smith. “They surely weren’t investigating a crime. Nor were they serving the public.”

Smith continues, “Justifying Donald Trump’s ‘big lie’ about winning the 2020 election may seem like his own lost cause – but like his Confederate forebears, he is weaponizing it, damage be damned. Not even his subsequent election victory has quieted Trump’s appetite for more power, earned or otherwise.”

Countering the Trump Bullshit. Just as Pence and Barr had integrity (and courage) to counter Trump’s claims, Stephen Richer (Republican former elected recorder of Maricopa County, Arizona) writes a Guest Essay in “What Really Drives These Bogus Claims of Voter Fraud?” The New York Times, February 5, 2026. Richer cites a Reuters article noting “that even the pro-Trump Heritage Foundation’s database of election crimes listed only 24 instances of noncitizens voting in U.S. elections from 2003 to 2023.” Also, he observes, “Recently, a number of states have undertaken investigations into noncitizen voting, cross-checking voter rolls with citizenship status, and found it virtually nonexistent.”

Trump’s Concoctions. Richer continues, “For President Trump, the myth of noncitizens voting is part of the broader story he’s concocted to avoid accepting that he lost to Joe Biden in 2020. But it also appears to be about this fall’s election. Mr. Trump may well intend to send the F.B.I. to run elections in Fulton County, Ga., or the Department of Homeland Security to seize ballot tabulators from Los Angeles County.” 

“I don’t think it’s likely he will do so,” writes Richer. “But I also wouldn’t have predicted that the F.B.I. would take hundreds of boxes of 2020 election materials from Fulton County, as it did last week. And I certainly wouldn’t have predicted that Republicans would attempt to derail the electoral count on Jan. 6, 2021.”

Or that the president would have encouraged that day’s Capitol riots.  

Richer concludes, “Everyone—Democrats and Republicans—should use the new state-level proof that noncitizen voting is virtually nonexistent to push back against the real danger to our democracy: craven politicians using the issue to undermine our free and fair elections.” 

Hear! Hear! And a message to loser Trump and his goons: Cut the bullshit. ds

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2026