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Skye Perryman, CEO of Democracy Forward, expressed confidence in the resilience of the foundations of US democracy, pointing to the legal system and the distributed nature of American elections, which she said builds a defense against crass political interference, even from the US president.

“The president can try to imagine whatever he may wish to imagine,” Perryman said. “He can’t imagine a new constitution, and the constitution, frankly, is quite clear in no uncertain terms; there’s not a role for the president in election administration in this country.”

Nonetheless, Donald Trump’s continuous false claims about a stolen election in 2020, and his increasingly strident demand for the US Congress to pass a package of federalized oversights of elections, have raised concerns among progressive voters that the administration may mar November’s midterms with misinformation, or worse.

The administration billed Trump’s primetime TV address last month as a presentation of new evidence that the 2020 election was illegitimate, and that his administration had uncovered new findings about vulnerabilities in the US election system. Instead, Trump claimed China had illicitly acquired voter information on 220 million Americans, and that China had undermined his 2020 campaign in other unspecified ways, arguing that intelligence officials had suppressed this information.

Trump’s claims fell apart under scrutiny. His own intelligence officials had already concluded that China refrained from interfering in the US election out of concern for potential political blowback if caught.
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