Lara Trump claims changes to election process after inauguration

Lara Trump, co-chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC) and wife of Donald Trump’s son Eric, has said that the Republican-controlled administration following her father-in-law’s inauguration should consider changing the US electoral process.

Speaking to Fox News host Sean Hannity on Wednesday after her father-in-law’s historic victory about how to make the election process more secure and transparent, Lara Trump said that with Donald Trump in office, a GOP majority in the Senate and potentially in the Also in House, the Republican Party finally has a chance to address the issues “99 percent plus of Americans agree on.” These include proof of citizenship and voter IDs, according to Lara Trump and Hannity.

“We don’t have a perfect system right now,” she told Hannity. “We’ve got to get through this system, we’ve got to play the hand that we’ve been dealt. You’ve got election season now instead of election day, and a lot of nuance around the country that makes it very confusing and really worrying for a lot of people .”

“Maybe now that Donald Trump is inaugurated, we’ll move forward and maybe we’ll have something that passes so that we can have a regular federal election process that all states adhere to, and we feel very good about that across the country ,” she suggested.

While the details of this potential change to the US electoral process are thin, proposals from the RNC co-chair seem to confirm many experts’ fears that Donald Trump’s return to the White House could significantly alter American democracy. A “unified federal election process” probably refers to a desire to standardize procedures at the national level rather than letting each state choose its own process; this may include homogenizing the deadlines for postal ballots, absentee ballots and when votes are counted across the country.

Newsweek reached out to the RNC and Trump’s 2024 campaign for comment via email early Thursday morning outside normal business hours.

“Congress has broad powers to regulate congressional elections in Article I, Section 4, (of the U.S. Constitution),” said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Newsweek.

“In my experience, state and local election officials strongly oppose attempts to centralize any election administration power in the federal government,” he added. “Usually, it’s Republicans who strongly oppose federalization of elections. So this will be interesting to see if it happens.”

Lara Trump, standing next to her father-in-law as he delivered his early victory speech Tuesday night in Florida, was one of the main figures in the Republican Party who cast doubt on the fairness and legitimacy of the electoral process ahead of Election Day.

The RNC filed more than 100 lawsuits challenging various aspects of voting across the country, as reported by the Associated Press.

This was to facilitate legal challenges more effectively in the event that Donald Trump lost a close election.

Although no evidence of widespread voting irregularities has been found in the 2020 election, Donald Trump and his close allies have not yet abandoned their false claims of massive fraud in the last election. Back in April, CNN reported that the RNC sent a scripted call to voters’ phones on behalf of Lara Trump, claiming that Democrats committed “massive fraud” in the election.

The call said the “chaos and questions of the 2020 election” should not be allowed to “ever happen again.”

Donald Trump will officially take office on January 20, 2025, returning to the White House after four years out of power. He is only the second president in US history to serve two non-consecutive terms. In her concession speech, Vice President Kamala Harris called for a peaceful transfer of power in the coming weeks.

Donald Trump is expected to get the support of a Republican-controlled Senate, while it is not yet clear which party will control the House with dozens of races still to be called.

Update 11/7/2024, 10:43 am ET: This article was updated to include a comment from Rick Hasen.