Bulwark Takes - Marc Elias Sounds Alarm On Trump’s Election Plan

Episode Date: August 18, 2025

Marc Elias warns that Trump’s latest plan is not just bluster. By banning mail voting and claiming that states answer to him, Trump is setting up the biggest threat yet to American elections in 2026.

Hey, everybody, Tim Miller from the Bullwork here. We're back with our new friend, new-ish friend, Mark Elias of Democracy Docket. I'm sure you know him. We should be monitoring his work. He's a Democratic campaign lawyer du jour. Who now is leading the fight in a lot of courtrooms against Trump's attack on democracy. I want to grab him because I am, I'm pretty alarmed by the statement that Trump put out on truth social, the bleat he put out, about mail-in ballots. I want to read that for everybody.

But first, Mark, I guess I'm wondering. Could you give us kind of an alarm scale for you on what you're seeing out of the White House today on mail-in ballots? Look, I think it's very alarming. I think, you know, anytime the President of the United States says that he is going to shut down the predominant method of voting in, you know, a quarter of the states, a method of voting that Democrats disproportionately rely on versus Republicans, and to boot is also going to attack unspecified voting equipment. We're not sure what voting equipment is that he's attacking, but he's going to attack that. It is something we have to take both literally and seriously. Yeah. So here's the statement.

Bikianz, I'm going to lead a movement to get rid of mail-in ballots. And also while we're at it, highly inaccurate, very expensive and seriously controversial voting machines, which costs 10 times more than accurate and sophisticated watermark paper, which is faster and leaves no doubt. Okay, so we'll set with that for a second. But we move forward. He goes on to talk about how he has an executive order plan. He's saying, quote, signing an executive order to help bring honesty to the 2026 midterm elections. Remember, the states are merely a, quote, agent for the federal government and counting and tabulating the votes.

They must do what the federal government, as represented by the president of the United States, me tells them for the good of our country. There's a lot there. But the... The U.S. the punctuation, the capitalization, the occasional quotient. are on words. Yeah. You know, Tim, you and I share something in common.

You worked for Deb Bush. I worked for Hillary Clinton. And there are times like this that I just think, how the fuck did we lose to this guy? How? How? You know, we got called low energy. I hear you. There's that element of this as well.

And, you know, we could do a whole separate show on that. But for me, like, I just look at this, Mark, and what I wanted to have you is like, if there's this executive order, I mean, you know, who knows what that actually means. But I think that there are real threats. if you're a red state, you know, if you're a voter that uses mail in red states, that is an issue. Last time you're on the pod, we talked about, I think he's laying the groundwork here for challenging these elections in the post-20206. If you look at the states that have mail-in ballots, which is a lot of states where Democrats

could gain next year, Nevada, Colorado, California, I think that is there. Like, when you read that, like, where do you see the biggest, you know, threats? Yeah, so I see three threats. The first is a very practical threat, which is that, as you point out, in some states where Republicans control the state government, what he may be talking about by leading a movement is not an executive order, but rather getting those states to decertify their voting equipment or at least parts of it and to change their laws to do away with mail in voting, which, by the way, would be catastrophic unto itself because most of these states don't have, when you institute widespread mail and voting, including, by the way, in states like Florida, in states like Arizona, in states like Utah, one of the things you do is you don't have as many places to have polling locations. You don't have a, you don't recruit as many election workers. You don't buy as many voting machines. So the doing the way with mail and voting, even or they're curtailing it in those states, would have a dramatic impact on all kinds of voting

and create all kinds of lines and displacement. So that's kind of like problem number one. Problem number two, or thing number two that I worry about, is this so-called executive order. Remember, it was in March that he issued his last executive order targeting voting. My law firm and I sued him on behalf of the Democratic Party, and we won the partial victory we needed for this stuff that was immediate. That litigation is ongoing. But he has made clear in a variety of cases that he believes that he believes that he,

is the first, second, and final word as to what the law means with respect to elections. Now, that's not true. It's unconstitutional. It violates, you know, all notions of the law, rule of law. But that's, but that's his attitude. And then the third, and this is the thing that actually, Tim, I see the least commentary about, but I think is actually the greatest threat is that last part that you read. He believes in his structure of government, the states act as agents of the federal government. And he sits on top of the federal government. Why do I say that's the most dangerous part? Number one, it's, it like runs contrary to the history of the Constitution, contrary to the text constitution, and with respect to elections, you know,

can't be reconciled with the Constitution. But I think, Tim, if you look at what he is doing with respect to the National Guard, you look at what he's doing with respect to deploying the military in states like California, you look at what he is doing. with the masked, you know, grabbing of people off the streets. And it actually speaks to this structure, which is that he believes that sort of all layers of government layer up, level up to him, and that he is ultimately in charge, not just of the executive branch, you know, unitary executive, but actually in charge of the entire federal government.

And that all state and local police power and election authorities and law enforcement all are at his command. And that will be catastrophic for 2026 midterm elections if he's able to effectuate that. But I would argue, Tim, that's part of the catastrophes we're seeing every day in the news. We'll just say for the non-constitutional scholars out there in case you're wondering, this is his statement about how all of these local elections, you know, level up to him as the, you know, chief head executive in charge of everything. It's just objectively not counter to what is in the Constitution in the same way like

birthright citizenship. It's not one of the close calls. Article 1, Section 4, Clause 1 says that states have authority over the, quote, time, places, and manner of election administration. Right. Subject only to congressional override. And what's interesting is it doesn't say anything in there about the president, right? It says that the states have this power subject to congressional override does not mention

the president by design, by the way, by the president. history, and also as long as we're doing a little bit of a background lesson here, the fact is the Constitution was a confederation of states, right? The reason we have a Senate, as flawed as the system is, is because states have representative at the federal government. In fact, members of Congress are chosen by the way in which states choose to have them chosen. So this notion that somehow there's the federal government and states do their business, you know, that would, by the way, not just be untrue and not just, like I said, a historic, but also, Tim, since only one of us in this, has ever been a Republican, you know, isn't it the Republican Party that preaches

the virtue and the critical importance of federalism that is actually states that have the primary responsibility for so many things? Yeah, wasn't it my people? Usually, they're throwing back at you or my former people, throwing back at you, were a republic, not a democracy, every time I'm fighting for democracy. That's the fundamental underlying point of that argument, right? Which is that like, this is not a just, our country's not set up as a direct democracy where everyone, you know, votes on everything. Like, we have a federated republic and states have powers, localities have powers. We like, we used to, we being,

I'm not, it's not we anymore, but the Republicans making that argument, I guess we in the sense of people who still support that, that traditional system of government would argue that, like, Yeah, government is better, closer to the people. We want localities to make these decisions, not that we don't want Donald Trump, the king, to be like, no, Colorado, you cannot have all-male ballot elections because I think that's unfair. Like the people of Colorado and their elected representatives would decide to do it. And by the way, Colorado has been having mail-in ballots for quite some time now without

any issues. And the only time any issues arise are when Donald Trump or one of his goons like Tina Peters, decide that they want to monkey it, you know, try to jimmy up the works. Right. As does Washington State in Oregon, as does Utah and Hawaii. And when you get beyond the states that are near virtually all are all mail-in voting, you get to states like Arizona, which has, I think, 75% of the people vote by mail. Florida, which frankly, Republicans took power in Florida in large measure

because they were superior at running vote-by-mail programs. grams. Georgia's got vote by now. I mean, the notion that somehow, you know, this is all a democratic conspiracy is bunkers. Okay. So just back really quick to close out on this and why I wanted to have you on and just kind of how to fight back and what the threats are. I mean, to me, some of the stuff like arguing about the specifics or educating people on the specifics of mail-in ballots and why they're safe, I think is important. But it's kind of like Donald Trump is just looking for any pretextual reason to take more control over the elections federally, potentially to send in his mass thugs, and potentially worst-case scenario, it's something

that we're careening towards challenging results he doesn't like to prevent Democrats from actually taking over the House and the post-election of 2026. And so, I mean, like, there are multiple kind of steps here, but, you know, what do you see as the way is to start to push back on that and educate people about the danger of where we're going. Yeah. So look, I think you make a really important point. And I say this to people who say, you know, when they say, well, you know, Donald Trump got more of the black vote. Yes, he got more of the black vote, but he still lost the black vote. So when people say, and I've seen some of this on social media today, well, you know, Republicans did a lot more with vote by mail last

election. Yes, they did more, but still the overwhelming majority of Democrats, of places that have voted by mail, more Democrats than Republicans utilize vote by mail. So you can expect that in 2026, that pattern will continue. And what that means is that Donald Trump will not be able to stop mail-in voting before election day. I don't believe he's going to be able to. The courts won't abide by it. I don't think he's going to be able to achieve it in large trumps of the country where there's either mixed government or Democrats control the process. What he will do is what you said is that he will set up a permission structure before election day that says you don't need to count ballots that are cast by mail. In fact, not only don't you need to,

you shouldn't be counted ballots cast by mail because they are inherently suspicious. They are inherently fraudulent. Then when you were in the post election and Mike Johnson is rummaging around for a few extra seats here and there, or John Thune needs a couple of extra seats here and there. Donald Trump will use the power of the federal government, the FBI, the military, whatever, to the Department of Justice to claim that there was widespread fraud in these ballots, and that will allow Republicans to say, aha, those elections that Democrats won in those places were fraudulent, and the way we know it is because they used this ballot. system that we told everyone was fraudulent advance, and now it turns out it was fraudulent.

And that is a real risk that we face as we head into 2022. And we all need to combat it. We need the legacy media to stop both sides in this. I mean, some of the headlines I saw today from the New York Times and the Washington Post were just like, I mean, like literally. The president proposes reforms to the election system. Oh, wait, no, hold on. I'm going to give this one to you in real time. The headline in the Washington Post is Trump previews executive order on voting. That's it. Previews executive order or voting.

Like, like, but the executive order would be illegal. Like, it would be unconstitutional. Like, he's not previewing an executive order in the way in which, like, you know, you know, Joe Biden declared national bald eagle month. Yeah, right. You know what he was going to say in a speech at the state of the union, right? It's just like, it's these old habits dying hard. You know, so look, I mean, part of the reason why I love the bulwark is that you guys tell it like it is.

It's part of why I started democracy not going to tell it like it is. But we need the legacy meeting to really step up their game here and like tell it like it is what's happening. And then we need citizens all around the country to understand that this is a potential thing that they will face. And, you know, call their legislator show up at county election board meetings. Like don't see the grassroots energy around this, which has been really strong in the. to stop this deal. This is going to be the last thing I want to ask you about. Because I think that's a really great point.

There were we did, and you did, there were warnings going into 2024, you know, about if you listen to Steve Vantage show, if you listen to what's going on at TV USA, there have been a lot of MAGA folks activated to take roles at local, you know, in local election boards, you know, in roles at the county level. And, you know, you see this sometimes, particularly now you get the house rate. in places that will matter, right? Because it's in red states, you know, where, where they're like, look at the Don Bacon district or something, right, where you have a- In Nebraska.

Yeah, right. In Nebraska, you got a MAGA local election official in one of those counties that is going to do, you know, what Donald Trump wants. So that didn't end up really coming to fruition in 2024 because Donald Trump won, so you had no incentive to challenge elections. But those people are still there. And so, like, how worried are you about that in 2026? and are there things that, you know, folks on our side can do to get more involved

kind of at the local level and the election administration side of things? Yeah, look, I'm very worried about it. I mean, just to rewind the tape, not all the way back to 2020, when we know that was Donald Trump's plan because he tried to do it in Michigan and elsewhere. In 2022, right, the first midterms after 2020, my team and I, we had to sue coaches in Arizona because they were refusing to certify the election results. We had to sue two counties in Pennsylvania because they were refused. choosing to certify the election results. Like, this is not a hypothetical. We saw this in

2022. We expected it in 2024. And as you say, the only reason why it didn't happen is because Donald Trump won. So it is something I'm very focused on in 2026, because what's happened over time is that the election and Ires have multiplied in these local election boards, right? It has gotten every election cycle, there are more and more of them, as good people get sort of pushed out and unfortunately bad people get pulled in. And also, think about it this way, Tim. You know, in 2020, when Donald Trump tried to prevent the certification of elections in Wayne County, Michigan, it was kind of a national, I mean, it was a national story as a national opera. I'm just not sure that the, that the media would cover it as anything other than just like,

sort of the latest political tactic. You know what I mean? Like, you know, so, so I'm not. So I'm not sure that there will be quite as much outrage from many of the institutions, which means that it is ultimately up to us and people who watch this video to inform themselves about how elections are running their state. Are they run at the state level? Unlikely. Are they run at the county level? Most places. Some places they run at the town level, the precinct. I mean, in New Hampshire, almost everything is done at the precinct level. And figure out where your elections are administered. And then, you know, if you have time to I'm an election volunteer. That's great. Election worker. They always need them. But if not,

you know, be involved. Go do meetings. You know, pay attention to what's happening. And don't assume that without citizen participation, everything will just be okay. Right. I appreciate you. Michael Ias, Democracy docket.com. I saw it was, I didn't actually see the headline of the New York Times article reference, but I saw the tweet that they sent about the article promoting the article about Donald Trump's social media posts about his executive order about trying to the federal takeover elections. And I was like, fuck, this is a big deal. I got to get Mark Elias on this. We've got to tell people what's really happening. So I appreciate you jumping on. And unfortunately, there'll be many more opportunities for shenanigans like this for us to talk again soon,

all right? I look forward to it. And maybe I'll get on the big stage with you again on the main podcast. Oh, you'll be back. Don't you worry about it. Don't you worry about it. We'll see you soon.