Thune Rejects Trump's Push to Nationalize Elections

Not everyone is rushing to follow President Trump's call to put elections under federal control, NBC News reports. A day after Trump told a conservative podcast that the GOP should "nationalize the voting," Senate Majority Leader John Thune said he wants no part of that. "I'm not in favor of federalizing elections," the South Dakota Republican told reporters, calling it "a constitutional issue" and praising the current state-run system as both effective and harder to hack. "I'm a big believer in decentralized and distributed power," he said. He did acknowledge he backs the idea of requiring voters prove they are citizens by showing ID, the Hill reports.

House Speaker Mike Johnson also acknowledged that states have long handled elections and that the system "works well"—when they focus on security, which he claimed is a concern in "some of the blue states." Johnson claimed three GOP House candidates saw leads evaporate on election day in a way that "looks, on its face, to be fraudulent," while admitting, "Can I prove that? No." Both he and the White House pointed to the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote. Noncitizen voting is already illegal, and voting-rights advocates say stricter ID rules can block eligible voters who lack documents. The bill has passed the House, but is struggling to get the 60 votes it needs in the Senate, PBS reports.

Trump's remarks came in a lengthy riff on election fraud, including his false claim that he actually won Georgia in 2020. He suggested Republicans should "take over the voting" in multiple states, seizing on an FBI search of a Fulton County elections facility last month as evidence that "you're going to see some interesting things." The FBI has said it was carrying out court-approved activity to obtain 2020 election records; there's no evidence of widespread voter fraud in that race or anywhere in the US.

Democrats and civil-rights groups blasted Trump's proposal as undemocratic. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called it "dangerous autocratic poison" and compared it to one-party rule in authoritarian states. Rep. Sanford Bishop of Georgia said it was "a blatant attempt to intimidate and to try to take over the electoral system," arguing elections are "American," not partisan. The NAACP said it "condemns in the strongest possible terms" Trump's comments and labeled them "a blatant assault on the Constitution."