特朗普政府试图重塑选举运作方式

The Trump administration has made multiple efforts to reshape how elections are run, with just months before the midterms, and the debate over election security has led to tension between the White House and election administrators as the president falsely claims voter fraud is rampant nationwide. Ourlid Landers has more. The Trump administration has taken broad efforts over the last several months to assert control over elections.

Today alone, a federal judge blocked the administration from using a revamped immigration database to check voter rolls, and the Postmaster General told the Senate the Postal Service won't deliver mail ballots in states that refuse to hand over their voter lists. For perspective on what all this means heading into November, I'm joined by Gabe Sterling of the Georgia Secretary of State's office. Gabe, thank you so much for joining Newshour.

Have a beer. So we mentioned this testimony today that the Postmaster General had on Capitol Hill saying that they will not deliver these mail ballots if states don't comply with this demand to provide a list of names of who is voting in that state. If the postal service denies this kind of service, how many people in your state would be impacted by that? Well, it's interesting. Vote by mail is really big out west. They really get the large land masses and everything, it really affected people in Alaska and California, and Washington, and Utah I mean, the irony and, and Florida is the biggest one in the in the east of the Mississippi who uses it.

So you're talking about millions of voters being affected by this potentially, but I don't understand the legal mechanism, hook, that would allow them to say, if you don't do this, then we will do that. Congress has been silent on this. I cannot see any legal way that will actually come to fruition, because we were 132 days away from the election. Yeah, we're, we're close. You're certainly right about that. The president canceled a bill signing ceremony earlier today on housing legislation, saying that he was canceling it until the Save America Act has passed.

That legislation would require voters to show proof of citizenship when they're registering to vote and photo ID at the time of voting. It's already illegal to vote in this country if you're not a citizen, so is that legislation necessary in your view? Look, I think as a public policy, good to have guardrails in place to prevent non-citizen voting. The reality is it is microscopically small in existence right now. But this adds a lot of layers of problematic. issues for lots of voters.

I'm not sure where my birth certificate is, but in Georgia we already have all these kinds of systems in place, but there are other states The reality is it would take millions if not billions of dollars and 2 to 3 years of planning and thought and execution so you would make sure you're not disenfranchising voters. You can't just pass a law and all of a sudden these things happen. This would cause chaos