President Donald Trump has renewed his focus on election integrity — including calling for what he described as the “nationalization of voting” — even as many Republicans on Capitol Hill show little appetite to embrace his push.
The firestorm erupted on Monday when Trump appeared for an interview with his former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino.
“The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” the president told Bongino. “We have states that are so crooked, and they’re counting votes.”
The comments are part of a broader renewed focus on election integrity after years of claiming the 2020 election was stolen. Last week, the White House deployed Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard to Fulton County, Georgia, where she attended an FBI raid of a state election office. The raid coincided with the Justice Department taking legal action against 24 primarily Democratic states for their voter rolls as the administration tries to make Minnesota disclose its voter information.
GOP officials have long expressed concerns about Trump’s rhetoric regarding elections. Although those concerns are less acute after Trump won reelection in 2024, Republicans, from House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) on down, distanced themselves from the president’s talk push to “nationalize the voting.”
“I’m a big believer in decentralized and distributed power, and I think, you know, it’s harder to hack 50 election systems than it is to hack one,” Thune told reporters on Tuesday.
“It’s always been the responsibility of the states to administer elections and it’s a system that works well, so long as the states make it a priority to ensure the integrity of our elections,” said Johnson, who admitted he had not spoken to Trump about the Bongino interview.
The White House itself tried to downplay the controversy on Tuesday with press secretary Karoline Leavitt claiming Trump was only indicating support for the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act. The federal legislation, which has earned support from Republicans, would require proof of citizenship to register to vote and proof of identification to actually cast a ballot. The bill has stalled in the Senate because of Democratic opposition.
“The president believes in the United States Constitution,” Leavitt said Tuesday. “However, he believes there has obviously been a lot of fraud and irregularities that have taken place in American elections. And again, voter ID is a highly popular and common-sense policy that the president wants to pursue, and he wants to pass legislation to make that happen for all states across the country.”
A second White House official told the Washington Examiner that Trump “cares deeply about the safety and security of our elections,” in part, because “more than a dozen states do not require a photo ID to vote” and “while some states maintain accurate and up-to-date voter rolls, other states do not.”
“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,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told the Washington Examiner.
Trump’s comments and his administration’s crackdown could have an impact far beyond this week on Capitol Hill.
Georgia, the site of Trump’s FBI raid last week, is the home of competitive races for the governorship and the U.S. Senate this fall. Claremont McKenna College politics professor John Pitney, a former Republican strategist, agreed, pointing to absentee ballots, or voting by mail, as being “at the top of Trump’s hit list.”
“But banning mail voting could backfire, big time. Republican state parties are actually pushing mail voting,” Pitney told the Washington Examiner. “One study found that voters aged 65 and older were most likely to use mail-in voting in 2024. Older voters also tend to support the GOP. Trump seems to think that mail voters are for undocumented immigrants. In fact, they tend to be old, white citizens — his own base.”
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Nevertheless, Republican strategist Dennis Lennox defended Trump, contending that he “heard [the] president’s comments as an inartful shorthand for something” that even moderate Republicans have championed.
“Congress has clear constitutional authority under the Elections Clause to set baseline rules for federal elections, even if conservatives have traditionally been wary out of respect for federalism,” Lennox told the Washington Examiner. “The reality is that federal elections are no longer uniform across the country. Republicans are increasingly recognizing that some guardrails may be appropriate.”
