The real reason Trump's attempt to meddle with the midterms is already doomed

Even though it's only February, President Donald Trump's attempts to gum up the works ahead of this fall's midterm elections are virtually guaranteed to fail.

That's according to MS NOW's Ryan Teague Beckwith, who wrote in a Thursday essay that all of Trump's efforts to change the way the 2026 midterms will be conducted will likely all be for naught for one simple reason: He's too late. Beckwith wrote that even with nine months to go before Americans head to the polls, all of the preparations for the voting process are already being handled behind the scenes, meaning any sudden changes from the federal government are likely to be shot down in court.

"Right now, in local elections offices from Seattle to Miami and everywhere in between, election administrators are busy checking thousands of signatures submitted by candidates to get on the ballot, putting the finishing touches on training manuals for election judges and poll workers and sending out postcards to verify addresses of voters who haven’t cast a ballot recently," Beckwith wrote.

"They’ve already started recruiting the part-time staffers and volunteers who will help them run the election," he continued. "In fact, the national “Help America Vote Day” recruiting drive already happened in late January."

The MS NOW columnist explained that one common rule with elections is abiding by the "even-numbered year rule," in which no changes to elections can be made in a year when Americans are voting in a major election. He wrote that if Trump and Republicans hoped to make major changes to the voting process, they should have done so before December 31, 2025. Likewise, any attempt to pass election-related laws in time for the 2028 presidential election should happen before the end of 2027.

"Judges have long followed a similar principle when deciding cases that would change election rules too close to an election, following the logic that it is better to move forward with an imperfect system than try to change it drastically at the eleventh hour," he wrote.

Republicans have recently rolled out legislation to impose severe new restrictions on voting, and two GOP lawmakers entertained the idea of a "standing filibuster" in an attempt to include the controversial SAVE Act — which would require voters prove their citizenship before casting a ballot — during the recent government funding negotiations. The Trump administration's FBI is also organizing a conference call with state election officials and federal agencies, which Nevada's secretary of state described as "beyond crazy." Beckwith said these and other attempts to impose last-minute changes to elections are still little more than bluster giving their timing.

"With these proposals to dramatically change how Americans vote just months before a major election, Trump and congressional Republicans would all but guarantee chaos at polling places around the country," he wrote. "They would disenfranchise potentially millions of voters and create a massive headache for candidates, state parties, elections officials and the judges called in to clean up the mess. And that would undermine public confidence in elections."

"America’s voting laws aren’t perfect, and we can always have a debate over how to fix them," he added. "But in terms of this November’s elections, that time has passed."

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