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It’s good to know that something useful came out of the global disaster that was the Alaska “summit” between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin: Putin told Trump how to bring “fair and honest” elections to the United States.

I know. It’s billionaire rich: Putin as the Great Election Integrity Whisperer. The same Putin who hasn’t lost an election since the last unrigged one, for Deputy Blackboard Eraser in Leningrad Elementary School.

It seems that Vlad told Don that the 2020 election here was rigged (nothing to say, apparently, about the 2016 and 2024 elections) and that what he needs to do to make sure that never happens again is get rid of mail-in voting. By decree.

And, never one to take issue with a real live alpha male, Trump, before he had time to wipe the Anchorage dust off his knees, posted that such a decree is in the works. No summation could do this justice so, with apologies, here’s the post:

We are now the only Country in the World that uses Mail-In Voting. All others gave it up because of the MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD ENCOUNTERED. WE WILL BEGIN THIS EFFORT, WHICH WILL BE STRONGLY OPPOSED BY THE DEMOCRATS BECAUSE THEY CHEAT AT LEVELS NEVER SEEN BEFORE, by signing an EXECUTIVE ORDER to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections. Remember, the States are merely an “agent” for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. 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. With their HORRIBLE Radical Left policies, like Open Borders, Men Playing in Women’s Sports, Transgender and “WOKE” for everyone, and so much more, Democrats are virtually Unelectable without using this completely disproven Mail-In SCAM. ELECTIONS CAN NEVER BE HONEST WITH MAIL IN BALLOTS/VOTING, and everybody, IN PARTICULAR THE DEMOCRATS, KNOWS THIS. I, AND THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, WILL FIGHT LIKE HELL TO BRING HONESTY AND INTEGRITY BACK TO OUR ELECTIONS. THE MAIL-IN BALLOT HOAX, USING VOTING MACHINES THAT ARE A COMPLETE AND TOTAL DISASTER, MUST END, NOW!!! REMEMBER, WITHOUT FAIR AND HONEST ELECTIONS, AND STRONG AND POWERFUL BORDERS, YOU DON’T HAVE EVEN A SEMBLANCE OF A COUNTRY. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!!! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (Bolding is mine)

He even went the Russian dictator one better by throwing “VOTING MACHINES” into the garbage bin along with the mail-in ballots:

I am 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 cost Ten Times more than accurate and sophisticated Watermark Paper, which is faster, and leaves NO DOUBT, at the end of the evening, as to who WON, and who LOST, the Election.

Suffice it to say, we are not the only country in the world that uses mail-in voting. And not only are the states not “agents” for the federal government in overseeing elections, but they are entrusted by the Constitution with primary responsibility for election administration. 

In fact, far from telling the states what to do, the president has just about zero role in running our elections — for some very good reasons hashed out by the Founding Fathers. 

Finally, I’ll leave to your discernment what in the world “Men Playing in Women’s Sports” has to do with any of this.

The Avatar of Election Integrity

In a preface to the 2016 edition of my book about the trustworthiness of our elections, CODE RED: Computerized Elections and the War on American Democracy, I gently mocked Trump — who had introduced “rigged” into the national conversation leading up to the 2016 election — as our “avatar of election integrity.” 

But I noted that “it was only a matter of time before someone, whether from a place of fairness or from one of self-interest, called into question a vote counting system that cannot be seen.”

Since zero-sum, just-win, con man Trump and “fairness” never belong in the same sentence, we can say with complete confidence that Trump’s interest in election protocols and administration derives purely from a place of self-interest. 

And we can safely go further: Anything Trump proposes will advance the cause of unfairness. It will, in short, be ginned up as a thumb on the electoral scales for the benefit of Trump.

That is certainly the case with his current drive to ban mail-in voting. Billed as a security measure against rigging by those dastardly Democrats, it fits perfectly into Trump’s well-established habit of projection — since Trump automatically assumes that his opponents or enemies would of course do anything he himself would do. 

The projection also serves, more subtly, as protection for his own schemes: When the accused reflexively circle the wagons and claim that such vulnerabilities to rigging don’t exist and such malfeasance as vote count manipulation is therefore impossible, it clears the way for Trump himself, or operatives working for his benefit, to go to town. 

When it comes to election fraud “conspiracy theories,” no responsible person will be caught dead sounding like or echoing Trump — a reticence that serves to clear the way for any fraud he or his side might commit to go unchallenged.

When it comes to election fraud “conspiracy theories,” no responsible person will be caught dead sounding like or echoing Trump — a reticence that serves to clear the way for any fraud he or his side might commit to go unchallenged. Thus his baseless “Stop the Steal” charges not only cemented the politically invaluable myth of the “stolen election” in MAGAworld lore, but also chilled, so cold as to effectively preclude, any challenges — even those resting on a sound forensic basis — to dubious outcomes in Trump’s favor.

Of course, a ban on mail-in voting would primarily serve the cause of lowering turnout — an outcome perennially sought by Republican strategists. Trump apparently is convinced such a ban would work in his favor, although some analysts have raised the possibility that it might wind up impacting enough rural MAGA voters to backfire, while others have pointed out that, in recent years, low turnout has actually been a key to Democratic success.

Clearly, though, the mail voting ban is intended to help Trump by keeping Congress in the hands of his MAGA enablers — who, like the Reichstag in 1933, will continue to fall all over themselves passing the modern American equivalent of Hitler’s Enabling Act, ceding ever more power to Trump’s “unitary executive,” under cover of whatever fresh “emergency” he gins up as pretext.

While analysts such as elections expert Rick Hasen have been quick to point out the limitations of federal control over election protocols and administration — and the nonexistent constitutional role for the president in particular — we are currently operating near or at the edge of the rule of law.

The will of Trump, especially when it comes to his hold on power, should not be taken lightly, whatever the Constitution says. Certainly the many red states (and counties) under the control of his wholly-owned-and-operated MAGA Party are — like Texas when it came to gerrymandering — under enormous pressure to do his bidding.

So while it is hard to see how the president could eliminate mail-in voting nationwide, we are likely to see a broad patchwork of cutbacks and bannings where Republicans rule. 

All of these “reforms” constitute a multifront assault on the bedrock protocol of American democracy — including Trump’s demand for “more Republican seats” via even more extreme gerrymandering; his call for a new census aimed at reducing representation of blue states; the escalating intimidation of both election workers and judges tasked with keeping the election free and fair; and the attempts to indirectly federalize elections under his own control via his Justice Department’s unprecedented demands for voter information and other critical data from state and local authorities. 

Taken together, they represent exactly what an autocrat like Putin would, and apparently did, prescribe. The “managed democracy” playbook is being implemented at blitzkrieg speed before our eyes.

‘Ban the Machines!’ — But Which Machines?

This leaves Trump’s strange call to get rid of the “voting machines.” 

It’s not at all clear which machines he means — and it is likely enough that he himself does not know. But it matters greatly. 

If he’s talking about machines on which voters cast their ballots electronically — known as Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) — with no “paper” involved at any stage, those machines have pretty much had their day, peaking years ago at about a quarter of the votes nationwide, and now accounting for only about 1.3 percent of the votes. (Trump might be interested to know that for his shocking victory in 2016, 28 percent of the votes were counted on those deservedly suspect DREs.) 

The absence of an auditable/recountable paper record spooked even those legislators, regulators, and administrators who initially saw the full computerization of our elections as a great advance in convenience and efficiency.

Trump is calling for “paper” but does not appear to have given much, if any, thought to how that paper is to be counted or, indeed, how it is to be marked to record the voter’s choice.

Notably absent from his latest rants is any demand that ballots be hand counted — which would be truly revolutionary, and almost certainly spark a full-on revolt and mass resignations of election administrators throughout the country, virtually all of whom regard hand counting of long, multicontest American ballots as a massive headache and Luddite nonstarter. 

Trump just seems to want votes to be recorded on paper because he claims Democrats have been rigging the computers that scan the paper and tabulate the votes. In one sense, his suspicion is understandable: Why should anyone trust “a vote counting system that cannot be seen”? 

On the other hand, though, his claims are mighty rich considering that forensic analyses, since the Help America Vote Act supercharged the computerization of American elections in 2002, have consistently shown unexplained anomalies pointing in the precise opposite direction — that is, favoring Republican candidates including, of course, Trump. 

Apparently, the president is unaware of the pervasive phenomenon known as “the red shift” (I coined the term, in its electoral context, in 2004).

One reasonable step towards transparency would be separating out the federal races — president, Senate, and House — of which there are only very rarely more than three on any ballot, and counting those by hand in public view. 

As an advocate for genuine election integrity and security, I have no quarrel with Trump’s call for paper. However, the devil, as is often the case, is in the details. It makes all the difference in the world how a voter’s decision is recorded on that paper.

If the ballots are marked by computerized ballot marking devices (BMD) rather than by hand, such that the votes are represented by barcodes or QR codes, many of the same vulnerabilities to rigging that make Trump distrust “voting machines” persist: Votes can be flipped in such a way as to evade both audits and recounts.

Constructive Reforms Versus More Thumbs on the Scale

I’ve been making the case for some form of public, observable vote counting for more than two decades.

I am, of course, aware of the difficulties involved in publicly hand-counting American ballots, which can sport dozens of contests, from president down to dogcatcher — unlike those single-contest ballots of parliamentary systems in, say, Canada or Europe. This concern is especially pertinent in the Trumpocene’s hyperpolarized, hostile, and potentially violent political environment that might now make bipartisan cooperation in the process highly problematic.

One reasonable step towards transparency would be separating out the federal races — president, Senate, and House — of which there are only very rarely more than three on any ballot, and counting those by hand in public view. 

Hand-marked and hand-counted ballots for those federal offices would at least protect elections for the now all-powerful federal government from being rigged. 

It would achieve this without unduly burdening election administrators, and it might also provide the additional benefit of serving as a kind of indirect check on many of the other computer-tallied contests — especially the statewide ones, such as governor and attorney general — by flagging for audit or recount any results that were significantly out of line with the partisan split in the hand-counted federal contests.

It’s not perfect, but it would be a major step up in security and would certainly answer Trump’s call for more trustworthy elections. 

If only that were his true goal. 

Unfortunately, we’ve seen by now more than enough to know that, as with all his “deals,” genuine fairness is the last thing on his mind: It’s strictly about gaining the advantage and winning.

These are a few of the ways Trump is going about that:  

His Orwellian “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections” executive order, temporarily blocked by the courts, requiring documents proving citizenship in order to register to vote, along with other new burdensome hurdles, nationwide;

His demand for mid-decennial super-gerrymandering to guarantee yet more Republican House seats and keep that supine body under his thumb for the duration; 

His demand for a new, unconstitutional census, to reduce blue-state representation in Congress; 

His attack on mail-in voting, which he believes, rightly or wrongly, will hit Democratic voters hardest; 

His pardoning of nearly all the January 6 convicted felons who refused to accept Trump’s 2020 election loss and were prepared to bring down the government at his bidding, in what he referred to as “a day of love”; 

His insistence that election administrator-turned-Trump operative Tina Peters, convicted by a jury of serious election-related crimes, immediately be freed, warning of “harsh measures” to be taken if his demand is not met; 

His gutting of federal agencies, such as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), charged with protection US elections from interference;

His attacks, and those of his MAGA associates, on election administrators and judges who are in position to uphold the honesty of the elections of 2026 and 2028; 

His planned indefinite deployment of troops to blue cities; 

His legal and extra-legal attacks on what remains of the 60-year-old Voting Rights Act.

And his call to ban “voting machines” of the kind that already play only a negligible part in nationwide voting.

Less Popular, More Powerful: A Dangerous Combination

All of these tactics — however couched in transparent pretexts — are aimed at either directly gaining electoral advantage, or at setting the stage for disrupting the coming elections, intimidating Democratic (e.g., urban) voters, and  overturning any results Trump doesn’t like.

Cheating and grifting — whether on the golf course, in business, on one’s wife, or in politics — come as naturally to Donald Trump as does lying. We know that; we’ve seen it over and over and over. 

Several astute observers have reached the same conclusion: Trump is getting more unpopular by the day and more powerful by the hour. That trend portends electoral doom, and Trump, the inveterate cheater, knows it. 

It’s early, yet clear enough that his game is not at all about reaching out to a broader swath of voters, but rather about putting still more red thumbs on the electoral scales — that is, not about popularity, but about power.

Because there’s still something left of our democracy, despite Trump’s ongoing authoritarian putsch, next year’s election precariously holds the key to his quest for absolute power. It would be terribly naive, given all we know and have seen, to simply assume that it will be free and fair. 

Apart from Trump’s own villainous instincts, the guiding inspiration here appears to be Vladimir Putin, who, in Anchorage, briefed his aspiring counterpart on what he needs to do. Trump, it seems, was all ears about getting the hang of dictatorship. Speaking from the Oval Office Tuesday, he let it be known: “I have the right to do anything I want to do, I’m the president of the United States.” 

Because there’s still something left of our democracy, despite Trump’s ongoing authoritarian putsch, next year’s election precariously holds the key to his quest for absolute power. It would be terribly naive, given all we know and have seen, to simply assume that it will be free and fair. 

If we are to have any chance of making it so, a huge challenge lies before us. This will be a central focus of our ongoing coverage and analysis here at WhoWhatWhy, up to and beyond next November. It would behoove us all, whatever else is on our plates, to pay close attention.