David Remnick: [00:00:00] Speculation about the midterms has reached a real fever pitch as the final stretch is now upon us. And amid all the predictions about which party will emerge triumphant and by how much, there's also been some alarm. Will it be a free and fair election? As soon as Trump returned to office, he began making moves to create disruption, demanding private voter data from states, threatening election officials with jail time, and even seizing ballots from prior elections to investigate alleged fraud.
And while so far none of the White House's efforts have threatened to really significantly alter the results, the Department of Justice has hinted that there's more to come. Attorney General Todd Blanche has not ruled out using force of law to prevent election certifications. 
Clip: It's not DOJ's intention to, and it's never our intention, to improperly interfere with elections or the state [00:01:00] confirmation process or certification process.
But, you know, to say that there's no circumstances that we would ever do that, of course I'm not gonna say that. 
David Remnick: The Justice Department has already filed a lawsuit against officials in Alaska before a single vote has even been counted. We've got a really interesting story about election interference in The New Yorker this week, and it's from the reporter Barton Gellman.
And I asked Bart Gellman just how concerned we ought to be 
Barton Gellman: So big picture, I'm not terribly anxious because a huge amount of what the president and his people tried to do came in advance of the election. Mm-hmm. They made a lot of extraordinary efforts, some of them plainly unlawful, to tilt the playing field, and they have largely failed up until now.
David Remnick: Well, g- give me the instances of what he's tried so far and what has been blocked by, for want of a better word, 
Barton Gellman: the 
David Remnick: system. 
Barton Gellman: You had a vigorous [00:02:00] effort by the Justice Department initially to decide who gets to vote. 
David Remnick: Mm-hmm. 
Barton Gellman: Justice Department demanded of all 50 states that they hand over their full electronic voter rolls, and then as it gradually emerged, the Justice Department would sift through them and then come back and tell the states, "The following people on your rolls, um, are ineligible, uh, because we say so."
David Remnick: These are categories of people or individuals? And how would they do that? 
Barton Gellman: They, they would've done individuals. They never said how they would do it, but they have purported many times to be able to say that, for example, hundreds of thousands of people are on the voter rolls nationally who are non-citizens, which is, you know, wild fantasy.
Mm-hmm. Here's an example. In Nevada, they said that there were 16,000, um, ineligible non-citizens on the Nevada rolls. Then Nevada said, "What are you talking about?" They produced [00:03:00] 185 names, which they said- Yeah ... they had hand-checked. Nevada then in September announced that it had looked through, and each of the 185 was a United States citizen.
So the Trump administration has been making sort of wildly incorrect claims. 
David Remnick: It sounds pretty lame, the effort this time around. 
Barton Gellman: Well, that's the thing. In our story in The New Yorker, we quote David Becker, who's a longtime voting rights lawyer and- He said the efforts were lame. He said they were, they were conflicting and incompetent.
He said it was a combination of malevolence and incompetence. You know, 
David Remnick: over and over again, we, we point to institutions that have, you know, kind of turned tail, that have been chickened, that have bent the knee, to use all the cliches of the last few years, whether it's law firms or universities or various institutions around the country.
Here, it's possible to say that there were some heroic actions, people who did their job, [00:04:00] namely judges. Can you give an example of where the federal government, through the Justice Department, made a challenge that was in the end lame and the court stood up? What would be a good example of 
Barton Gellman: that? Well, I mean, here's the thing.
The Justice Department sued 30 state chief election officers. So far, 27 of those cases have led to rulings. The Justice Department is zero and 27. It has lost every single case. 
Clip: Hmm. 
Barton Gellman: It has appealed a bunch of them. One has already gone to appeal. They lost that, too. Now, it is unlikely that ever in the history of the U.S.
Justice Department has the U.S. government lost 27 cases in a row of the same kind, and they are battling over and over and over again and continuing to battle and continuing to appeal, and the Attorney General, Todd Blanche, has said he may bring this to the Supreme Court. Now, that's a little bit odd [00:05:00] if you think of it in terms of the midterms because it's way too late to the election rolls.
First of all, lots of states are already voting But second of all, there's a law that says you can't do mass changes to the voter registration lists within 90 days of an election. And so my conclusion is that they are thinking ahead to 2028 and still hoping that some, you know, wild long shot will come through for them, and they'll be able to purge voter rolls for the presidential election.
David Remnick: Do you think it's possible that if, that if the midterms turn out poorly for Donald Trump, that part of the reason, ironically, is the election denial, you know, 
Barton Gellman: oath of fealty? I do think that. First of all, I think that there are demonstrably a substantial number of voters, even voters who voted for him, uh, in 2024, who don't like the election denial.
David Remnick: They just rolled their eyes and vote for him anyway. 
Barton Gellman: They did, but will they do it again? And will they [00:06:00] do it with their state and district candidates for the- Right ... Senate and the House? But also, uh, the more he tries to suppress the vote, the more there is a backlash, and the more likely it is that people say, "No, I want my vote counted, and I'm gonna make the extra effort to get to the polls on election day."
And we're seeing that already with early voting. 
David Remnick: Bart, I called you some months ago, having read your journalism on this very subject in The Atlantic, and I know that you've been working for the Brennan Center at NYU for, for some time. And the question was how to approach this story. And when you told me that, "I think I wanna do it through the politics of Utah," why did you decide to concentrate your reporting efforts on Utah?
Barton Gellman: A couple of reasons. Uh, one is it is-- I, I totally get your first reaction. Yeah. Utah sounds like an unlikely place [00:07:00] for a conflict with the president. Utah has been re-represented exclusively by Republicans in Washington for longer than I can recall. In twenty twenty-five, a federal judge imposed a new redistricting on Utah, so there is now a relatively safe Democratic district.
Every seat counts in this fight for the House. Mm-hmm. And so there's a reason to fight about Utah now. Kamala Harris beat Donald Trump by ten points, I think, in Salt Lake County, and that's the first congressional district in Utah. And second of all, Utah has a remarkable lieutenant governor. 
David Remnick: That's Deidre Henderson, who's a lieutenant governor there.
Barton Gellman: Exactly. Deidre Henderson. 
David Remnick: So tell me about the conflict there. 
Barton Gellman: Well, the conflict is that the Justice Department came to Deidre Henderson, as it did in all the other states, and said, "Please hand over a full, unredacted copy of your electronic voting rolls," and then later said, "So [00:08:00] that we can clean them for you."
David Remnick: They were that blunt about it? 
Barton Gellman: You know, look, here's what, here's what their proposal was. Their proposal was, "We will analyze your voter rolls. We will come up with a list of discrepancies and problems and ineligible voters, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera." 
David Remnick: You- And does the Justice Department have a right to do this if, if in fact the Constitution guarantees the states The responsibility of dealing with elections, what role does the DOJ have?
Barton Gellman: Zero. That's why they're zero for 27 in court. Right. A representative opinion by Judge David Carter in California in, in one of the identical cases said that the government's position, quote, "Wholly disregarded the separation of powers." 
David Remnick: Mm. 
Barton Gellman: It, it's a made-up claim of authority. 
David Remnick: So this conflict had what effect on the lieutenant governor's life?
Barton Gellman: Well, she's in a reliably red state. It is a mix of MAGA [00:09:00] Republicans and less than MAGA Republicans. I mean, it's a Romney state, and it's also- Right ... a Mike Lee state. She has been all her life a conservative Republican, but the election conspiracists and election deniers very much did not like her refusal to cooperate with the Trump administration on voting, accused her of being a traitor and an election cheater, and she, um, was flooded with death threats, and because she's a woman, grotesque threats- Mm
of sexual violence- And this is- ... against herself and her family. 
David Remnick: And this is somebody I think, well, most lieutenant governors have ambition to be governor. I think she wants to be governor. How will that affect her political fortunes? 
Barton Gellman: So I asked her two days in a row because I didn't like the answer the first time.
And I got the same answer the second time. She said, "I don't know, and I don't care, and I know you don't believe me." So this is a person, wait for it, of principle. [00:10:00] She is a person of principle. I think she is absolutely willing to lose the governor's election if this position disqualifies her in the eyes of the voters.
But I quote a very interesting political analyst in the story who says that she is strategically poking the bear, that by, by standing up for Utah's independence and Utah's integrity in conducting the vote, and in Utah's desire not to give up deeply personal information about every voter to the federal government in Washington, she is appealing to an important political constituency in Utah, and this may possibly turn out to be a winner for her.
David Remnick: Hmm. Now, the Trump administration has claimed in another state, in California, that it has 20,000, quote, "likely non-citizens" on its voter rolls. The DOJ charged 28 immigrants in California, that's 28 [00:11:00] green card holders, with election related charges. How has California responded? 
Barton Gellman: California has said your lawsuit not only lacks merit, but it's honestly absurd.
The lawsuit in California And you know, I'm not a lawyer and I have no crystal ball, but I, I would put a bet on this, is gonna fail. Uh, partly for the same reason that all of the lawsuits about the voter rolls have failed, which is that the federal government has no lawful role in deciding who gets to vote in California.
But also for about 20 other reasons, because this lawsuit is even more, I'll say, unusual. I mean, the th- the things that the Trump administration wants to do, which, which is to set aside and not count 20,000 mail votes, is not only beyond the power of the federal government, it's against the law for the state to do it.
David Remnick: Mm-hmm. 
Barton Gellman: Honestly, I think it is more setting the stage for a post-election [00:12:00] argument, uh, about why the election was a hoax and a fraud and shouldn't count. 
David Remnick: You know, Todd Blanche, the attorney general, has said he won't rule out intervening in the midterms despite all these losses in the courts. Voting is underway.
The DOJ is suing Alaska in an effort to preemptively block election certification if, if, if the Republican incumbent loses. What do you make of the Alaska lawsuit? 
Barton Gellman: I don't know how many different ways to say, um, meritless. So the voting rolls suits, they've lost zero for 27. The California case is even more extraordinary, and the Alaska goes beyond that.
David Remnick: Why is that? 
Barton Gellman: Because it's outcome-oriented. It's saying that you should refuse to certify, that you, Judge, should order that the certification of the election be blocked if and only [00:13:00] if the Republican loses. There's no possible precedent for that case. The, the Trump administration is now asking a federal court to overrule the state authority when, again, the Constitution says the state's in charge of elections.
David Remnick: So what is left for Donald Trump? Does he have any other mechanisms, any other tricks, any other legal recourse that he can challenge the ballot on the midterm elections? And looking forward to 2028, is it just smooth sailing? 
Barton Gellman: So- When you're dealing with a president whose central political message has been about election fraud, the suspense is never entirely over.
There are people who are worried because Trump's lieutenants have quite deliberately tried to make them worried- Right ... that ICE agents will be deployed at the polls. And the fear is not that they're going to deter [00:14:00] illegal aliens from voting because illegal aliens, undocumented people don't, aren't allowed to vote.
The fear is that there are many people- Yeah ... especially Latinos- Mm-hmm ... who have been witness to a great deal of ICE violence in their communities, and there are many people in the Latino community who are living in what they call mixed status families. Hmm. That is to say, they have relatives who are here who might be subject to deportation, and they're afraid of coming to the attention, even though they're citizens of ICE at all.
And so it's intimidating. But people should know that it is a crime under federal law to deploy troops or armed people in the vicinity of polling places. The experts I talk to don't believe that the Trump administration is actually going to do it. They're trying to get the effect by scaring people in advance.
And there are a lot of lawyers standing by with pre-printed, uh, uh, court interventions to get them out [00:15:00] of there if they do come. And I will say one more thing about this. Sure. It is quite possible that the threat of ICE deployments is going to spark a countermove, a counterreaction, a backlash among voters who say, "How dare you?
I'm not going to be deterred. I'm going to come to the polls." 
David Remnick: There was just some leaked audio that came to light i- in which Mike Rogers, who's running against Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, talked about an effort to send off-duty or retired law enforcement officers to polls in Detroit, and he said this: "Go ahead, try to intimidate them."
Steve Bannon has called for federal agents at the polls. Now, how likely is all this? 
Barton Gellman: This has been something that Republican operatives have talked about doing and to some extent have actually done for many decades- Hmm ... actually. For a long time, for example, the state of New Jersey was under a court supervision to make [00:16:00] sure that no intimidating, you know, law enforcement-looking people came to the polls there.
Uh, you- I, I don't think it's actually going to happen on any substantial scale. I think that courts will eject those folks if they do try to come, and I think that election officials are now unfortunately very experienced with all the different ways they can be intimidated, and they are pre-briefed and they know what to do.
A rare note of optimism when the talk is about politics on The New Yorker Radio Hour. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me. 
David Remnick: The New Yorker's Barton Gellman. You can read his piece, which is called The State Officials Defending the Midterms from the President, at newyorker.com.