Trump alarmed legal scholar so much he abandoned the thesis of his own election book

President Donald Trump's attempts to take over the election system have so shocked a prominent legal expert that he has now abandoned the entire thesis of his own election reform book.

According to Rick Hasen in his latest article for Slate, he previously believed — and laid out an elaborate case in his 2012 book, The Voting Wars: From Florida 2000 to the Next Election Meltdown — that America needs to follow the example of most other democracies around the world and create a single national agency tasked with running elections. That way, everyone has a consistent expectation, no matter where they live, of the process to cast a ballot, and the endless litigation over how elections should be run can be tamped down.

But one thing persuaded Hasen he was wrong: Trump declaring war on states in an attempt to do exactly that.

Trump's FBI conducted a raid on election offices in Fulton County, Georgia, a focal point for years of his conspiracy theories about a rigged 2020 election, all while Republicans in Congress push a bill that would force every state around the country to adopt harsh new restrictions on voting rights.

"As I wrote in the New York Times last summer, when the president tried to impose his authority over various aspects of American elections via an executive order: 'What I had not factored into my thinking was that centralizing power over elections within the federal government could be dangerous in the hands of a president not committed to democratic principles,'" wrote Hasen. "At this point, American democracy is too weak and fragile to have centralized power over elections in the hands of a federal government that could be coerced or coopted by a president hell-bent, like Trump, on election subversion."

The other reason centrally planning U.S. elections at the national level is a bad idea, wrote Hasen, is that in other countries that do this, like Canada and Australia, the national election body is a nonpartisan, independent civil service that does not serve at the will of the leader. But the Supreme Court could be on the brink of a decision that makes it impossible, for Congress to even create agencies like this in the first place, requiring the president have power to hire and fire agency heads as he pleases. Trump would essentially have a blank check to control elections in this scenario.

"Diffusion of power in the states makes it much harder for Trump to mess with the midterm elections," Hasen concluded. "Whether or not the Framers intended it, our messy, decentralized, partly partisan, uneven system of administering elections turns out to be the best bulwark against would-be authoritarian presidents."