MAGA commentator Steve Bannon voiced support for Donald Trump’s push to nationalize elections, calling on the president to deploy ICE officials and military troops to polling sites.
Trump said in a Monday podcast interview that “the Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” despite the fact that the Constitution grants states explicit jurisdiction over election administration. His call sparked outrage from Democrats and largely fell on deaf ears in the GOP — but Bannon, a conservative firebrand who has been a prominent voice in election conspiracy theories, was forceful in his support for the idea.
The former White House strategist called for the Trump administration to send Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to polling sites to prevent noncitizens from voting, citing a debunked conspiracy theory about widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.
“We’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November. We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again,” Bannon said Tuesday on his podcast. “And you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stolen.”
The conservative influencer reiterated his response a day later, calling for Trump to go even further and send U.S. Army troops to voting locations. Federal law prohibits the president from deploying military troops “at any place where a general or special election is held,” and it is a crime in several states to carry a firearm at or near a polling place.
“President Trump has to nationalize the election. You’ve got to put — not just, I think, ICE — you’ve got to call up the 82nd and 101st Airborne [Divisions] on the Insurrection Act,” Bannon said Wednesday. “You’ve got to get around every poll and make sure only people with IDs, people … actually registered to vote and people that are United States citizens vote in this election.”
Democrats have raised alarm in recent months that Trump could send troops to polling sites, expressing concern over the possibility of voter intimidation. White House chief of staff Susie Wiles dismissed the idea in an interview with Vanity Fair last year, calling it “categorically false.”
Trump has repeatedly floated the idea of invoking the Insurrection Act, a 19th-century law that allows the president to deploy the military to suppress an insurrection or public disturbance. He threatened to use the law to send troops to Minnesota last month, citing turmoil over his administration’s immigration crackdown — which has left two people dead in Minneapolis — but later walked back his comments, saying, “I don’t think there’s any reason right now to use it.”
Trump’s push to consolidate federal power over elections comes as his administration has escalated pressure on Democratic-led states to share voter information with the federal government, with the Justice Department suing nearly two dozen states for their voter rolls and the FBI seizing 2020 ballots from an elections facility in Georgia.
After the 2020 presidential election, Trump considered signing an executive order that would have directed the military to seize voting machines, but he ultimately never followed through on the threat. He told The New York Times in an interview last month that he “should have” used the National Guard to seize election boxes, but did not say whether he would consider doing so in the future.
Democrats swiftly condemned his call to nationalize elections, with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer calling the proposal “outlandishly illegal” and Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) referring to it as “an authoritarian takeover of our electoral process.”
Still, Trump pushed forward with the threat Tuesday, telling reporters in the Oval Office that states are merely “agents of the federal government” — an incorrect interpretation of the Constitution’s delegation of election administration duties.
But Republican lawmakers were reluctant to rally around the threat, with Speaker Mike Johnson acknowledging that “it’s always been the responsibility of the states to administer elections.” Senate Majority Leader John Thune also expressed skepticism, saying that he’s “not in favor of federalizing elections.”
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