President Donald Trump on Monday said Republicans should nationalize elections and take them over from the states as he repeated his disproven claims of voter fraud.
“The Republicans should say, 'We want to take over. We should take over the voting in at least — many, 15 places.' The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” Trump said during an appearance on former Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino’s podcast.
The statement marks a dramatic escalation of Trump's stance on election administration, advancing a position that Democrats had warned he could stake out with his calls for stricter voting rules and investigations into alleged fraud.
Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution states that “the times, places, and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof,” though Congress can pass federal regulations, too.
The U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted this to mean that states have control over voter registration, election supervision, prevention of fraud, counting of ballots and more.
Asked for more details on how and where Trump would want to nationalize elections, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson did not offer any further specifics.
“President Trump cares deeply about the safety and security of our elections — that’s why he’s urged Congress to pass the SAVE Act and other legislative proposals that would establish a uniform standard of photo ID for voting, prohibit no-excuse mail-in voting, and end the practice of ballot harvesting,” she said in a statement.
Trump's suggestion comes as the Justice Department has sued dozens of states in an attempt to force them to turn over their voter rolls, alarming election officials. It also comes after the FBI seized hundreds of boxes of election materials last week from a Fulton County, Georgia, elections office in connection with the 2020 election, with Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard present.
In the Monday podcast appearance, Trump alluded to the FBI's Fulton County raid.
“We have states that are so crooked, and they’re counting votes — we have states that I won that show I didn’t win. Now you’re going see something in Georgia where they were able to get with a court order, the ballots, you’re going to see some interesting things,” he said.
Trump has repeatedly claimed without evidence that there is widespread voter fraud in the United States and that he won the 2020 election.
In Congress, some of Trump's allies have tried to advance his election-related priorities. House Republicans recently introduced the MEGA Act, a bill proposing major restrictions on voting, such as banning universal mail voting and ranked choice voting.
Federal courts have already blocked Trump from shaping election rules, preventing implementation of portions of his March 2025 executive order, which ordered major election changes including requiring people to prove their citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections.
"The Framers of our Constitution recognized that power over election rules could be abused, either to destroy the national government or to disempower the people from acting as a check on their elected representatives," U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly wrote in a ruling last week blocking provisions of Trump's executive order, including the proof of citizenship requirement.
She continued: "Accordingly, they entrusted this power to the parts of our government that they believed would be most responsive to the will of the people: first to the States, and then, in some instances, to Congress. They assigned no role at all to the President. Put simply, our Constitution does not allow the President to impose unilateral changes to federal election procedures."
