In a sweeping announcement about a forthcoming executive order, President Donald Trump argued Monday that states are ultimately subservient to the White House when it comes to setting election policy.

“Remember, the states are merely an agent for the federal government in counting and tabulating the votes,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Monday morning. “They must do what the federal government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.”

Trump also claimed the executive order would end mail-in voting, falsely claiming that other countries stopped the practice due to fraud, as well as “very expensive and SERIOUSLY CONTROVERSIAL voting machines.”

It’s not clear which voting machines Trump was referencing. The president’s allies and friendly media outlets like Fox News and NewsMax were successfully sued by Smartmatic and Dominion for billions of dollars after the 2020 election for falsely claiming that their voting machines were rigged to elect Democratic President Joe Biden.

Either way, Trump has lost dozens of lawsuits attempting to prove fraud, and reportedly nearly signed an executive order at the end of his last term ordering the Department of Defense to seize voting machines, purportedly to examine them for fraud.

A previous executive order from Trump this year, purporting to compel the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission to alter voter registration request forms to include a proof of citizenship section and deny forms to states or voters who don’t provide the information, was struck down by a judge as unconstitutional in April. The judge in the ruling remarked that “no statutory delegation of authority to the Executive Branch permits the President to short-circuit Congress’s deliberative process” on regulating elections via executive order.

The Constitution of the United States doesn’t say much about the role of the executive branch in elections.

States are mentioned prominently as the primary administrators, while Congress is empowered to make regulations. The president isn’t mentioned at all.

David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, told CyberScoop that Article 1, Section 4 of the Constitution “states unambiguously that the regulation of elections is the power of the states, and only Congress can change that.”

“The president plays literally no role in elections, and that’s by design of the founders,” he said. “Alexander Hamilton foresaw, and made clear in Federalist 59, that a democracy must diversify the power of elections in order to protect itself from an overzealous executive, and therefore power over elections would reside with the several states.”

The contention that the president of the United States had specific authority over states in elections was also waved away as nonsense by constitutional scholars.

“States are agents of the federal government? *lights syllabus on fire,*” wrote Elizabeth Joh, constitutional law professor at the University of California, Davis.

Voting machine security has been a fiercely debated topic in Washington D.C., and among states, particularly over the past two decades as the country has moved toward electronic voting machines.

Voting machines and the software they rely on do have vulnerabilities, but safeguards exist to detect large-scale hacking attempts like those Trump claims. 

First, American elections are famously decentralized, with different states and localities relying on different machines, software and other products. That means a hacker would have to compromise multiple systems and companies to affect votes outside of a single county or state.

Second, voting machines, with few exceptions, are not connected to the internet. Many of the vulnerabilities a hacker would need to exploit the machine require direct, physical access. While this scenario doesn’t make a compromise impossible, experts say the chain-of-custody procedures that voting machines are subject to would make it extremely difficult to gain access to a significant number of voting machines.

Finally, 97% of U.S. voters vote on a machine with paper backups, which allow state officials to audit paper ballots to ensure they match the vote totals reported by the machine. Every post-election audit conducted by a state following the 2020 election confirmed the accuracy of the machine count. 

The president’s post reinforces the idea that, after years of cooperation during past elections,  the federal government and states are likely to have a contentious and adversarial relationship over the next two-to-four years.

In some states like Arizona, election officials have decried their crumbling relationship over the past year with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the federal government’s top civilian cyber agency. Under the Biden and first Trump administration, CISA played a robust, high-profile role providing cybersecurity support and technical expertise to states to harden defenses around voting machines and election infrastructure.

But the White House has fired or sidelined many CISA officials who worked on election security, and fired the regional advisers who provided assistance. Other federal agencies like the FBI and Department of Justice have disbanded task forces on election-related foreign influence operations, and have shifted much of their resourcing to investigating voter fraud.

The DOJ is suing or attempting to take legal action in multiple states, alleging that their voter registration systems are poorly maintained.  Federal complaints have often focused on minor procedural errors made by states or localities to question the citizenship and eligibility of hundreds of thousands of voters.

The president’s announcement came the same day that conservative media outlet Newsmax informed the Securities and Exchange Commission it had agreed to a $67 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems over false claims the network made in the wake of the 2020 election that their voting systems had been hacked or compromised to alter the outcome of the presidential election. 

Fox News also paid $787 million to settle a lawsuit with Dominion, and Newsmax had already paid $40 million to another voting machine manufacturer, Smartmatic, to settle similar defamation charges.

In an article on the settlement, Newsmax remained defiant about its role in the 2020 election, claiming that they would have succeeded in proving the vote tallies were rigged if not for the courts rigging proceedings against them.

“Despite its confidence in its reporting, Newsmax determined the Delaware court with Judge Eric Davis presiding would not provide a fair trial wherein the company could present standard libel defenses to a jury,” the outlet wrote.

Becker said Trump “has spread lies about our elections for years now, and every time he and his allies are offered an opportunity to back those statements up in court, with evidence subject to cross-examination, they’ve failed.”

“In defamation cases brought against Fox News, Rudy Giuliani, Kari Lake, and Mike Lindell, every defendant had an absolute right to defend their statements as true, and every defendant failed to present even a shred of evidence,” he added. “All either settled for vast amounts, conceded liability for defamation, or were found liable.”

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