This absurd legal ploy could let Trump steal the midterms — and it's just the start

No joke. No foolin’ around. The operation is in place to overturn the results of next Tuesday’s vote in the midterm elections.

President Donald Trump has already put the wheels in motion for a “legal” reversal of the voters’ choice in Texas, Alaska and other battleground states where control of the U.S. Senate is in the balance.

To understand the first step in their putsch plan, check out Episode 5 of Jim Crow Reloaded, a 4-minute episode exposing the mass challenge of 800,000 voters:

While America slept, Trump’s vigilante organizations, as we explain in Jim Crow Reloaded, are challenging voters of color. In 2024, the Texas Trump front group True the Vote challenged over three-quarters of a million voters’ registrations. This year, they’re keeping the number secret.

You can bet that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, overseeing his own race for US Senator, will move to disqualify the ballots cast by vigilante-challenged voters. Do the vigilantes have to have proof that the voters are illegal? Nope, they just have to claim they have “reason to believe” voters are illegal. Funny, of the more than one million voters True the Vote and other Trump fronts have challenged over the past two election cycles, not one has been proven to be an “illegal” voter, which is, after all, a felony crime.

Count on Paxton to also challenge absentee ballots. Folks, mailing in your ballot is risky business. For example, the GOP just won a case that if the voter licked the outside envelope shut but did not lick the inside envelope, the ballot can be tossed out. So, “if your tongue ain’t wet, you ain’t counted yet.” There are a million gotcha tricks to disqualify mail-in ballots from “no signature match” (e.g. you signed without a middle initial) to wrong color pen.

And then there’s the provisional ballots. If you’re white, chances are you’ve never seen one of these. According to the official Elections Assistance Commission records, in 2024, MORE THAN 436,000 PROVISIONAL BALLOTS WERE DISQUALIFIED. That alone re-elected Trump.

You never heard of that on US TV? Of course not, white boy. These ballots are given, in overwhelming numbers, to voters of color, especially young men.

Here’s a funny story. Or maybe not so funny. At the Palm Springs Book Festival, I asked if anyone in the audience had ever been shunted to a “provisional” ballot. Only two people in the audience were Black. And only two people raised their hand to say they’d been forced to a provisional ballot. Yep, it was the two Black men.

All the excuses that caused the voter to be shunted to a provisional ballot (ID or signature challenges, registrations missing or challenged) keep those ballots out of the count. Notably, not one of these alleged ne’er-do-wells was charged with the crime of improperly attempting to vote. (Note for statistics geeks: Because half the states don’t report on provisionals rejected, the number of ballots thrown in the dumpster could easily have topped a million.)

If not for disqualifying provisional ballots, Trump would not have been elected in 2024. Nor in 2016 when a whopping 700,000 ballots were disqualified.

What happened in 2020 to allow Biden’s victory? The number of provisional ballots rejected fell that year by half. How? Our partners in the SaveYourVote.org campaign, Black Voters Matter Fund and the Transformative Justice Coalition, ran a massive phone-banking operation AFTER the election to get “provisional” voters to go to their county registrar’s office to “cure” their ballots—show new ID—to get their votes counted. As a result, Biden and Georgia Senate candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock won.

That was Trump’s fight with Georgia’s Secretary of State. In 2020, Trump told the elections official, “All I want to do is this; I just want to find 11,780 votes,” to flip the race from Biden. What Trump was specifically seeking was for the state, which had already disqualified thousands of votes, to simply disqualify a few more mail-ins and provisionals.

Now, to enforce Trump’s demands in 2026, his FBI director, Kash Patel, can be counted on to literally seize the ballots to go through and “find” votes to disqualify in Texas, Ohio, Michigan and Georgia.

The Certification Game

If the Trump and Patel goons can’t “find” enough votes to overturn the likely victories of Democrats in Texas, Ohio and Alaska, they’ll drop The Big One: stop the certification of the vote, a function normally left to county elections boards.

If they succeed in blocking certifications, ALL of their votes in those counties will be excluded from the count. Expect the Justice Department to seek to block certification of the votes in Travis (Austin, Texas), Harris (Houston), Cleveland, Dayton (Ohio’s Black cities) and all of Alaska, or at least its Native-majority (i.e. Democratic) Arctic-zone counties.

Expect the DOJ to say that the voter registries in those minority heavy counties are rife with vigilante-challenged voters and—cover the children’s ears!—alien voters.

Already the DOJ has handed out lists of supposed noncitizen voters to remove from the rolls. How odd: if the Feds know a voter is an alien, then the Feds can and should bust those scheming little foreigners for sneaking into our voting booths. The reason Kash Patel hasn’t convicted alien voters is because there are none. The lists of noncitizen voters are just a bunch of folks with names similar to ICE deportees, names like “Jose Garcia,” who are on the Homeland Security’s deportation (“SAFE”) lists.

The Trumpsters already have a head start in Ohio. Before Trump’s candidate for Senate, John Husted, was appointed to a vacated seat, he was Ohio’s Secretary of State. He used that post to purge over 800,000 voters from the rolls, a list smelling to High Heaven of racial bias; an ethnic cleansing that went all the way to the Supreme Court. The Court, wearing Black robes to cover their white sheets, blessed the removal of Black Ohioans.

Now, Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown, although he leads in the polls, has to somehow win with a voter roster bleached whiter than white. But if former Senator Brown does win, look for Justice to try to block certification in those key urban counties.

In Alaska, where Mary Peltola is likely to kick GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan in the patoot, Trump’s Justice attack dogs have ALREADY asked the courts to overturn the election that hasn’t happened yet! Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s personal attorney and now his personal election hit man, has demanded a judge reject a Democratic victory because there are two Dan Sullivans on the ballot, a weird artifact of the state’s ranked-choice voting system.

It is one of the weirdest election suits I’ve ever seen. The Trump Administration is saying, if the Republican wins, the vote is legit. If he loses, it isn’t.

For 27 years, the Greg Palast Investigative Team has been covering vote suppression for The Guardian, BBC, Rolling Stone, and now The Hartmann Report and Raw Story.