The White House’s Plan to End Fair Elections, Legally
Win McNamee/Getty Images, Politico
By Ian Mann ’28
It has only been 10 months since Donald Trump took office. In that time, his administration has used the full force of its powers to remake our nation. The White House has indulged in almost all of the fantasies of Trump’s presidential campaign. He promised tariffs bigger than ever before. Liberation Day delivered them. He promised waves of mass deportations. ICE agents are conducting raids across the country. Trump’s 2024 rallies now sound more like prophecies than campaign events.
Still, one of the themes of the campaign has so far remained unfulfilled. Donald Trump told his supporters, “You won’t have to vote anymore.” After the 2020 election saw Trump’s initial attempt to undermine democracy, this cycle saw him take his efforts further.
The administration has been trying to keep its word. In March, President Trump signed an executive order that would throw out some mail-in ballots and impose voter ID requirements nationwide, but as of October, parts of that order have been struck down. One member of the House sponsored a Constitutional amendment to allow Trump to run for a third term, but it lacked Democratic support and went nowhere. The White House has put pressure on red states to take their gerrymanders further, but they’ve been unable to make a difference. Democracy under Trump’s second stint in power has seemed to be resilient.
The administration might find better success in its plans to weaponize the U.S. Census. During Trump’s first term, Republicans attempted to add a citizenship question to the census. When the Supreme Court blocked this effort, the White House decreed that the House apportionment would be based only on citizens, anyway. This would last until President Biden’s first day in office, when he signed an executive order reversing the decision. Now, the White House is returning to the census as a tool in their plans for American democracy.
Article I, Section 2, of the Constitution gives Congress power over each census, but since 1840, the Census Act, and later the U.S. Code, has placed administrative control within the executive branch. It’s too late for the Republican Party to have a say in the 2020 census, but they’re moving forward with a different plan. In August, President Trump announced plans to hold a new census halfway through the decade.
The U.S. Code only allows for the U.S. Census Bureau to conduct censuses every ten years, which has historically meant that this plan would require action from Congress. Senators Britt and Hagerty have introduced a remedy in the Senate, while Representative Greene introduced a similar measure in the House. Trump also doesn’t seem to be waiting around for Congress to act, with his Truth Social post saying that the Census Bureau will “immediately begin work” on the new census. His plan has also been helped by the early resignation of the Census Bureau’s director, allowing Trump appointee George Cook to serve as the acting director of the organization. President Trump now also has the ability to nominate a supporter for the position.
The census is important for distributing funds fairly, but politically, its role is to apportion House seats and Electoral College votes. If the White House were to succeed in holding a new census that only counted American citizens, it would continue the xenophobic and exclusionary policies of the current administration, but it would not necessarily have a direct political effect. According to an article published by the Oxford University Press, if the 2020 census had only based apportionment on the number of U.S. citizens in each state, California and Texas would’ve each lost one seat and New York and Ohio would’ve each gained one seat. In the 2024 presidential election, for instance, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump would’ve received exactly the same number of Electoral College votes under an alternate census. If the current administration were to accurately conduct a new census, then they would likely only gain a marginal benefit from excluding noncitizens.
The logistical effort in running a census is immense, let alone for one that is unplanned and short-notice. Given the government’s poor relationship with reliable data and the herculean effort a mid-decade census would require, it’s far more likely that a Trump-controlled Census Bureau will simply publish its own set of numbers, independent from the truth of who lives where.
Short of a coup d’état and soldiers marching through the streets, this is the closest we can get to the end of democracy. The Constitution already includes unrepresentative systems into our government. The Electoral College selects the president, with the people indirectly influencing the result, and the Senate overrepresents rural states. If the Census Bureau takes a partisan approach to its count, the advantage it would give to the Republican Party would be much larger than what either of these two systems currently give. The Republican Party has already tied noncitizens to the Democratic Party, and the next step is to say that blue states have more noncitizens than red states. The plan is to take House seats and electoral votes from blue states to give them to red states, and to convince everyone that it’s the right thing to do.
The White House has already done the second for its supporters, and they control the means of doing the first. All that is left is to overcome the checks and balances that are in the way.
The Supreme Court prevented the Republican Party’s first attempt at using the census against non-citizens in Department of Commerce v. New York, but they’re unlikely to rule the same way again. The Court ruled against the Trump administration only as a result of the Department of Commerce’s lying to the judiciary about why they were adding a citizenship question. In fact, the Court explicitly upheld the question as constitutional in general. The Supreme Court also declined to rule on the constitutionality of Trump’s later executive order in both Trump v. New York and Trump v. Useche. All current precedents from the Roberts Court show that the conservative majority, strengthened since Department of Commerce, is incredibly likely to uphold a mid-decade census as within the executive branch’s purview. The Supreme Court would have to deviate from the course it’s currently set if it wishes to strike down this plan, and would only do so after the White House enacts reapportionment.
Congress has the original control over the census. The U.S. Code does not currently allow the Census Bureau to conduct a census outside of the ten-year cycle. There are measures in the House and the Senate to amend this, but their passage would require near-unanimous support in both chambers and the Senate to exempt the bill from the filibuster. However, their failure would require enough members of Congress to break from the Republican Party, which they have only done rarely this past year. The administration may also decide to ignore Congress, as they are already making a habit of doing. They may look to order a new census without proper authorization or frame their effort as a correction of the 2020 census rather than a new procedure.
The final hurdle for the Republican Party is public opinion. In Poland, voters ousted their right-wing government as it looked ready to cement its hold on power. In Hungary, an opposition party seems poised to defeat Viktor Orbán and end 15 years of autocratic rule. In Malawi, public protest halted an authoritarian takeover and forced free and fair elections. Under the White House’s plans, some public support is still required. Any form of extreme reapportionment would require the Republican candidate to retain support from the party’s base.
The Republican Party has incorporated attacks on noncitizens into its rhetoric and has often tied those attacks to attacks on the Democratic Party. The claim that the census’s inclusion of noncitizens benefits blue states would be a revelation, but to many Trump supporters, it would not be a surprising one. Similarly, mid-decade reapportionment would be unprecedented, but the current administration has already weakened that norm by pushing for redistricting in red states like Texas, North Carolina, and Ohio. Democrats, in attempting to avoid an unfair House, have responded in kind in California and are attempting to do the same in states like Maryland and Virginia. While they’ve been successful in keeping the current battle to a draw, this back-and-forth on redistricting has had the effect of normalizing political upheaval halfway through the decade. President Trump has dedicated support among his base. January 6th did not stop him from winning his party’s nomination and the presidency. We don’t know how a mid-decade census would change people’s minds, but there’s no reason to expect it to be different.
There’s no easy way to stop a partisan mid-decade census. If the Trump administration follows through on its plan, both the House and the presidency will join the Senate in having a decidedly Republican tilt. If the results are severe enough, it would put the Oval Office permanently out of reach for the Democratic Party.
The United States is entering its 250th year. If our democracy ends, it feels like it should end dramatically. It may end with a bureaucratic maneuver run from a single office building in Suitland, Maryland, instead.