The president responded to a question from Sean Hannity.
A day after Donald Trump told Sean Hannity that he wanted lawmakers at polling stations, a chorus of experts including multiple state secretaries told ABC News that the president could not ask them to go there.
“Will you have interviews?” asked Fox News host Trump on Thursday. “Will you have an opportunity to monitor, prevent fraud and check whether these are registered voters or not?”
“We will have everything,” Trump replied. “We will have sheriffs, and we will enforce law, and we will hopefully have American lawyers, and we will have everyone, and generals of lawyers. But it is very hard.”
Dale Ho, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, told ABC News that the president could not give orders to local sheriffs and could not send federal troops to polling stations.
“There is no law that I am aware of that permits, or that the president would authorize to enforce federal law or use military or anything like that for domestic use in and around or around polling stations,” Ho told ABC News . “Just checking someone’s ID at the door’s really does nothing from an election security perspective – from a voter intimidation perspective, I can see how having legislation asking people for IDs when you enter a sales location can be intimidating. . “
The officials sent out on election day to help track order do not check IDs.
“While I cannot speak for every individual sheriff, I am not aware of plans to operate outside of normal duties on Election Day,” David A. Mahoney, sheriff of Transylvania, North Carolina, told ABC News in an email. “I have no contact with the Department of Justice regarding polling stations. I have no plans to conduct ID checks, and voters in Transylvania County should not expect any elections on election day.”
Under the Voting Rights Act, DOJs can submit pollsters to designated locations “to help assess federal voting rights law,” according to the department’s website.
The DOJ did not respond to a request for comment from ABC News.
Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s School of Law, said Trump’s remarks to Hannity were a “disgrace.”
“The shame is not that he can not achieve it, the shame is that the president is actually trying to scare voters into thinking that there will be an illegal presence in legislation at the polling stations, illegally checking IDs,” Weiser said. added that Trump “has no authority over an official of the state election administration, and that many jurisdictions do not even allow legislation on polling stations.”
Nellie Gorbea, the Rhode Island Secretary of State, likens Trump to Trump.
“The president must stop spreading false information,” said Gorbea, the state’s official election official. “These are just tactics to suppress the mood.”
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon said police could not be called to polling stations.
“It’s not legal,” Simon said. “Well, of course, if there’s an incident in an election place – if someone you know shrinks on the floor or if there’s a robbery or something that deserves a call for legislation – you can of course always “Call the police, but you can not preemptively station or assign people to a polling station. You just can not do it. It’s illegal.”
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