For a guy who promised to keep “piling up the facts” about our president to illuminate the truth about his ongoing assault on our country and our way of life, it may seem out of character to offer a prediction.  But this prediction is grounded in facts and a clear-eyed review of past actions, which all point to one incontrovertible fact: Donald Trump is trying to rig the November elections to keep MAGA world in charge in Washington.  He’s been doing it right out in the open, in front of our eyes, stacking lie upon lie about a false “crisis of election security” so he can undo enough MAGA losses in November to maintain Republican control of the House and Senate for the last two years of his term of office.  So he can get away with God knows what.

We all witnessed him try to unlawfully snatch victory from the jaws of his defeat in 2020 and fail, thanks to the dozens of lawyers and judges who argued against and struck down his nonsensical pleadings in court cases across the country, and to the members of Congress and Vice President Pence who refused his treasonous efforts on January 6, 2021.  But his basic approach – to election stealing, to everything – is to never admit defeat (even when defeat is obvious) and always fight back with greater force.  Getting his ducks lined up before this November’s election is critical: he knows that if Democrats take control of either house of Congress he won’t be able to get the Compliant Congress^® to pass anything to smooth the MAGA path for 2028.

The “facts” he is abusing to make his argument concern voting by mail and voting by non-citizens.  Voting by mail is a simple, reasonable, pretty uncontroversial method of voting, which Trump himself has reportedly taken advantage of for years (apparently without any fraud, eh?).  Yet Trump has been lying about problems with voting by mail for years, despite research by conservative and GOP organizations finding no significant issues: as reported recently by the New York Times,

An election fraud database maintained by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, includes just under 300 cases of proven “fraudulent use of absentee ballots” over a 43-year period, from 1982 to 2025. And in 2025, the Brookings Institution found that fraud accounted for only four out of 10 million mailed ballots.

Only 300 cases of fraud in 43 years !?  Only four cases (one two three FOUR) out of 10,000,000 ballots!?!   (BTW,  Brookings headline is that there was “very low fraud and significant benefits to voters” [emphasis added])  Hardly an issue of fraud, or of election results being compromised.  Might Trump have something else in mind?

Mr. Trump has admitted that combating fraud is not the only reason to target the practice. In March, he told Republican lawmakers that passing a strict voter identification law cracking down on mail ballots, which Democrats now use more than Republicans, would “guarantee the midterms” for his party.

I.  Am.  Shocked.  So shocked.

I’m all for keeping non-citizens from voting in our elections.  As it so happens, it is already illegal for non-citizens of the U.S. to vote in U.S. federal elections.  Also illegal for non-citizens to vote in state elections in all 50 states; municipalities in three states and the District of Columbia do allow them to vote in some municipal elections.  The documented instances of non-citizens becoming registered to vote is exceedingly small; the number of those illegally registered to vote who then actually voted  is even smaller than that.  In summary, there is no evidence that non-citizens have ever voted in large enough numbers to have changed the outcome of any election, despite the hair-on-fire claims of TFG.

There has been a lot of activity in the past week over voting by mail, starting with a Supreme Court ruling that “allowed the Trump administration to move forward with plans to restrict mail-in voting before the midterm elections.”

…the justices said President Trump could proceed with implementing an executive order he had signed, which directed the U.S. Postal Service to help decide which voters should receive mail-in ballots. Under the executive order, the Department of Homeland Security will also create lists of U.S. citizens that the administration believes could be used to monitor voter rolls for noncitizens.

The decision means the administration can move ahead with planning for restricting the use of mail ballots even as a lower court continues to weigh the legality of Mr. Trump’s executive order.

It’s important to remember that the Constitution gives the states — the states — the authority conduct elections for Congress (both houses), subject to Congressional approval or revision of those plans by virtue of laws passed by the Congress.  Laws passed by Congress, not executive orders from the president –- Constitutionally speaking, the president has ZERO authority over conducting elections, including through the use of executive orders.  (It is believed that the Supreme Court justices are aware of this.)  Yes, Congress has passed laws concerning federal elections: for example, to establish a uniform election date across the country, to require states with more than one representative in the House to draw districts rather than elect all representatives statewide, and to limit campaign contributions.

But this Congress has refused to pass the SAVE Act that the president wants enacted to “ensure election integrity and prevent non-citizens from voting.”  If passed into law, this proposal would “add a new layer of documentation requirements on top of a verification system that is already in place and working.”  In practice,

Every American, including people who have been registered for decades, would need to appear in person at an election office with qualifying documents. Online voter registration, which 42 states currently rely on, would be upended or eliminated. Mail registration would end entirely. Voter registration drives would become functionally ineffective, since they depend on reaching people at events and public spaces where no one carries a passport or birth certificate.

A standard driver’s license alone does not qualify in most states. A REAL ID alone does not qualify. A military ID alone does not qualify. A tribal ID alone does not qualify. Only five states currently issue enhanced driver’s licenses that meet the bill’s requirements on their own.

(snip)

For most Americans, qualifying requires one of the following: a valid U.S. passport or passport card, a certified birth certificate paired with a photo ID, a naturalization certificate, or a Consular Report of Birth Abroad. If your name does not match across those documents, additional paperwork such as a marriage certificate would also be required.

(snip)

The requirement applies any time a voter updates their registration, including after moving, changing their name, or switching political parties. Millions of already-registered Americans would need to comply, not just people registering for the first time.

Meanwhile, back in court last week: opponents of Trump’s plan refiled their objections in light of the Supreme Court ruling, leading to a federal judge halting Administration efforts to restrict voting by mail, and to the Justice Department appealing that ruling.  And since the election is only two months away and the first mail-in ballots are about to be sent out, “The whipsawing legal battle could have major ramifications for the midterms. Nearly one-third of Americans vote by mail and election officials contend there isn’t enough time to revise their systems to comply with the new Postal Service directives.”  The Postal Service, officially, insists it has to obey the executive order, and “won’t deliver mail ballots unless states provide a list of voters who should receive them and format the envelopes in a certain way.”

But, a Postal Service official has filed a federal whistle-blower report that claims “the agency is moving forward with a ‘secretive, rushed’ effort to carry out President Trump’s order exerting federal control over mail voting, despite a court order blocking those plans.”

The official filed a whistle-blower report, published on Tuesday morning by the office of Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, asserting that the “risky and haphazard” implementation of Mr. Trump’s order could lead to a “catastrophic failure” in the mail ballot system ahead of this year’s midterm elections.

(snip)

The official at the Postal Service, describing their work on the portal in the whistle-blower report, raised “grave concerns” that the portal’s verification process could reject tens of thousands of ballots in a bulk-mailing batch if “even one bar code on one single ballot” failed to properly scan, and that the rushed, “slapdash” development of the portal would significantly increase the chance of errors and other failures in the verification process.

“Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all,” the official said in the report, which was prepared with the assistance of Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit group that represents people seeking to expose potential lawbreaking.

(snip)

The Postal Service confirmed in a statement that it had continued work on the portal amid the legal battle, but asserted that it was in compliance with the courts because it was not currently using parts of the new system that could invalidate people’s votes.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports today that hundreds of Department of Homeland Security agents have been pulled off of their regular duties of “investigating such serious crimes as human trafficking and terrorism” to scour state voter rolls using the personally identifiable information of individual voters looking for non-citizens who are registered to vote.

Given the decades of evidence showing how rare noncitizen voting is, it’s unclear what the administration will discover, how verifiable any findings will be and what President Trump or Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin plans to do with those findings.

(snip)

Mr. Trump’s unrelenting focus on noncitizen voting has concerned election officials from both parties. So far, the administration has been unable to verify his claims, and has effectively admitted at times that its numbers have been overstated. Yet the public repetition of falsehoods about election fraud has continued to sow doubt and distrust in the electoral process ahead of a charged midterm election that will determine control of Congress [emphasis added].

All of it has left voting-rights groups and Democrats increasingly concerned that the president will try to interfere with the election. And it has alarmed former officials with the Department of Homeland Security that the agency is being weaponized as part of the effort.

Jamelle Bouie summarizes that “the president’s plot to subvert the integrity of the midterm elections looks like this.”

Issue a rule requiring states to give lists of mail-in voters to the Postal Service if their citizens hope to receive mail-in ballots. Knowing that this is a blatantly unconstitutional seizure of the states’ prerogative to run their own elections, count on a federal court to block the rule. Then challenge the injunction, arguing — under the Supreme Court’s “Purcell principle” — that it is too late to make any adjustments to voting procedures, and that the new rules should be treated as the status quo. Then hope that the Supreme Court accepts the argument that the new rules are the status quo and therefore can’t be blocked.

This would leave states that rely on mail-in voting scrambling to accommodate the new rules, leading to the kind of chaos that might keep voters from casting a ballot in the first place. And in states that reject the rules, the administration can tar the results as fraudulent. None of this would stop the public from electing a Democratic majority, but it could give that majority the taint of illegitimacy — and even tee up a situation where new members are challenged in the next session.

It is important to say that there is no way to know, at this point, if any of this will actually work in the end. But it clearly is the plan.

Is it a plan to rig the election?  To rig the counting of the votes in this election?  If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck and sounds like a duck, do you have any doubt it’s a duck?