President Donald Trump’s pitch on a podcast Tuesday to “nationalize” elections is garnering mixed reactions.
Trump thinks federalizing elections could fight what he calls corrupt state-run elections. As it stands, that’s unconstitutional without intervention from Congress.
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon joined Cathy Wurzer on Morning Edition Thursday to talk about what this means ahead of the midterm elections.
“He's putting a legal gloss on something that is a lot more serious, which is a takeover,” Simon said. “There was the raid last week of the Fulton County, Georgia, election office. There's the ongoing quest by the Department of Justice to get sensitive personal information on millions of voters, not only in Minnesota, but in dozens of other states. So I would say a fair observation would be that there is some sort of attempt at a creeping takeover of at least parts of the election system.”
Simon said Minnesota is actively planning for contingencies, “just as we do for a weather event or a power outage or a bomb threat or anything like that.”
Listen to the conversation by clicking the player button above.
