'If You Can Keep It': The Pushback Against Election Deniers

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🗓️ 3 November 2025

⏱️ 43 minutes

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Summary

As it’s filled election security roles at the Departments of Homeland Security and Justice, the Trump administration has elevated people who are known election deniers — activists who’ve pushed unproven claims about fraud in the 2020 election or in American election systems more generally.

And the administration has asked states to turn over voter roll data that includes private information. It’s even sued eight of them for some of that data in an unprecedented push for federal control of voter information.

How are the systems and processes behind the 2026 midterm faring in 2025? Especially as the federal government pushes to have more control over what’s traditionally been the jurisdiction of state and local officials? We hear one of those officials as well as a panel of experts.

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0:00.0	Support for NPR and the following message comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
0:05.4	RWJF is a national philanthropy working toward a future where health is no longer a privilege but a right.
0:12.1	Learn more at RWJF.org.
0:25.3	You're listening to the 1A podcast. I'm Jen White.
0:26.2	And I'm Todd's Willie.
0:29.0	Conducting elections in the U.S. is complicated.
0:33.1	With more than 174 million people registered to vote in the U.S. In communities that are geographically spread out, and with many local races to manage,
0:38.3	state and local governments are responsible for managing the polls.
0:41.8	The federal government, and especially the president,
0:44.3	has had a limited role in how American citizens vote.
0:47.0	But President Donald Trump and his administration are trying hard to change that.
0:52.2	The Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security
0:55.1	are pushing for states and local election officials to turn over vital information, like lists of voters,
1:01.8	and even actual ballots. Trump officials have even moved to gain access to voting machines in places
1:07.6	like Colorado, and a lot of secretaries of state and local election
1:11.7	officials have refused. Meanwhile, the administration has appointed political activists with ties
1:17.6	to Donald Trump's election denier movement, the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election he lost.
1:23.7	For today's If You Can Keep It, our ongoing series on the state of our democracy, we look at the moves that Trump administration is making to gain more control over elections even after falsely claiming that the 2020 election was stolen and what it could all mean for 2026.
1:40.0	Stay with us, all that and more after this short break.
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