President Donald Trump said Monday that Republicans should nationalize elections, continuing to double down on false conspiracy theories about widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
The suggestion — which runs contrary to the Constitution’s delegation of election administration to state governments — comes less than a week after the FBI raided an elections office outside Atlanta, seizing ballots and other voting records from the 2020 election.
“The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over. We should take over the voting in at least 15 places.’ The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” he said during an appearance on former Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino’s podcast, which he relaunched Monday.
The president repeatedly insisted that he won the 2020 election “in a landslide,” alleging without evidence that people “voted illegally” in the election. He also nodded to the FBI’s raid in Fulton County, Georgia, teasing that “you’re going to see some interesting things come out” in Georgia.
Dozens of challenges to the results of that election yielded no credible evidence of widespread voter fraud, and both a statewide audit and a recount requested by the Trump campaign verified that former President Joe Biden won the state.
Trump has intensified his efforts to undermine the results of the 2020 election in recent months, vowing in January that “people will soon be prosecuted for what they did” with regards to the election. His Justice Department has also sued nearly two dozen states, demanding access to their statewide voter registration rolls.
Trump’s latest threat to nationalize voting harkens back to a promise he made last summer to sign an executive order bringing “honesty” to the 2026 midterm elections.
“Remember, the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes,” he wrote in an August social media post. “They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.”
Trump has not signed such an executive order, and the White House has yet to clarify how it might pursue such an effort in compliance with the constitution.
A separate executive order signed by Trump last March that aimed to add proof of citizenship to the national voter registration form and alter mail-in voting procedures for states has been largely blocked by federal judges, although its final fate remains uncertain.