How Trump Could Break The 2026 Elections

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On this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, David opens with his reaction to the racist AI video of Barack and Michelle Obama that was posted and quickly deleted by President Trump’s Truth Social account. He argues that when the president engages in this behavior, it undermines his administration’s other actions that resemble those of a normal presidency.

David is then joined by Stephen Richer, a former Republican county recorder of Maricopa County. They discuss Stephen’s experience navigating Trump’s 2020 election denial, standing up to pressure from the president, and confronting election denialism within his own party. They also examine the Trump administration’s current activities in Georgia and how they could set the stage for more election denialism in 2026.

Finally, David reflects on Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as the series marks its 250th anniversary. Though the monumental work remains essential to understanding the fall of Rome, David explores how Gibbon’s moralizing of history can lead modern readers to dangerous conclusions.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: Hello, and welcome back to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Stephen Richer, formerly recorder of Maricopa County, Arizona, the chief election official in the city of Phoenix in the swing state of Arizona, and we’ll be discussing election integrity and the threats to election integrity—the conspiracy theories and lies that are told about elections past, and that present a threat to the integrity of free and fair elections in 2026.

My book this week is The [History of the] Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which I choose because this month, February 2026, marks the 250th anniversary of the publication of the first volume of that famous book in February 1776. There are six volumes altogether, the last published in 1788, but February 1776 announces the arrival of this tremendous achievement of historical research and English literary triumph.

Before turning to either the dialogue or the book, I wanna begin with some thoughts about a very upsetting thing that happened over the past few days, and that is the posting on the social-media account of the president of the United States of a scurrilous, racist, insulting, and stupid video about the past president of the United States President Barack Obama and his wife, former First Lady Michelle Obama.

I’m sure many of you have seen the video or images of it; you know what I’m talking about. You’ve heard the many stories that the Trump White House has told, many contradictory stories about how this came to be. I’m not interested in decoding which of those stories is closest to the truth or furthest from a lie, and I’m not interested in adding my voice, one more condemnation to this offensive and stupid act. The whole country has reverberated with condemnation, which is right and just, and I’ll say I agree. What more can be said?

But there is a deeper thing going on here that does deserve some comment. Race, of course, is the fundamental chasm, a fundamental wound in American society, and moving toward a more just racial constitution of the United States has been the work—oh, well, it’s been a work that you cannot date when it begins and you cannot date when it ends. It goes on and continues to this day. But the society is changing, and a new racial constitution has been coming into being. Right now, about 93 million Americans are either immigrants themselves or the children of immigrants; that’s almost a third of the country. It’s a different country than it was when the Civil Rights Act was passed or when the affirmative-action programs of the 1970s began to be devised. In the half century since those affirmative-action programs have come to be devised, the racial fabric of America has been reinvented in many ways. And one of the questions that we’re all left [with] in the 2020s is whether these programs of racial restitution continue to make sense in a country that is so different from the country that existed when these programs were put into place.

Now, it has fallen in the Trump administration’s time to respond to these changes. The Supreme Court of the United States has ruled, in important decisions, that it is more and more skeptical of programs of racial preference to correct for past racial injustice. In 2023, a pair of cases ruled that preferential treatment of undergraduates seeking admission to colleges is probably almost always illegal. And the Trump administration, in one of its more normal actions, something that you would expect from a more normal kind of government, has followed up, or responded to this, the lead of the Supreme Court, by issuing executive orders rolling back preferential treatment in many areas of employment and hiring. And many American companies have responded by changing their approach to equal opportunity. They’re ending the practice of trying to ameliorate past injustice by having preferences in the present and moving toward an approach that treats all applicants more equally than they have been treated in the recent past.

I must say, I regard this as progress. I think this is the right way to go. I think it’s the only way to go in a country where, as I say, 93 million people are immigrants or the children of immigrants to whom America’s tortured racial history was something that happened before their families arrived on these shores, and they don’t understand why their life chances should be abridged or artificially boosted because of something that happened in a past that was not their own familial, personal past. It’s not sustainable in such a country to treat people from certain backgrounds more favorably and people from other backgrounds less favorably. It’s not sustainable, and it will only inflame feelings that are already touchy enough. But the administration that has the job of bringing us to a more perfect union, of restoring more equal treatment, of finding some way forward from the preferential programs of the past, it is absolutely indispensable that such an administration show itself in every respect to be animated by ideals of equal treatment, racial fairness, justice for all.

When the president is acting like some kind of internet troll, some kind of Klansman with access to an AI machine, he discredits everything that his administration is doing that looks like something that another administration might also do. He ratifies every allegation of every critic of that administration, of every critic of the Supreme Court, of every critic of anyone who has ever held out for equal treatment under law by saying, You know what? The president is obviously motivated by racial animus. He’s overseeing these acts of racial profiling by a paramilitary force that is masked and poorly trained and poorly led; and that is apprehending people because they don’t like the way their accent sounds, they don’t like the look of their face, and sending them to prisons, where they’re held without due process for weeks and months; that is sending children under the age of 10 to similar kinds of camps—in every way that this administration tries to prove that it is indeed motivated by the worst, ugliest, most primitive kinds of prejudice. And then it asks Americans to trust it as it dismantles outdated correctives to the prejudices of the past. This isn’t sustainable either.

If you are going to attain equal justice, you have to do it by treating people equally; I believe that. I think the Supreme Court, its decisions on these matters have been broadly correct. I think it’s going in the right direction. And I think that the critiques of past diversity programs, maybe they were not as powerful at the beginning as they are at the end, but by the 2020s, they remain very powerful. And there are 93 million people to whom all of this has to seem oppressive, unfair, and none of their concern. But if we’re going to get from here to there, we can’t be poisoned by the kind of talk that comes off the president’s social-media page and comes from the lips of the people around him. The people who lead the government must be seen to be just for anyone to believe in the justice of what they do. And this is one case of so many where even the parts of the Trump administration’s agenda that some people might like, that even I might like, are disqualified and discredited by the Trump administration’s own actions and by the president’s own personality.

It’s so tragic. It’s so unnecessary. It’s so ugly. It’s so stupid. It’s so shameful. It just makes you wince and say, Why does it have to be like this? Why can’t it be better? Why can’t we be having a politics that is productive? Why can’t we be talking about things that matter? Why do we have to have people who act like children and adolescents at their worst when we are discussing the things that matter most, or should matter most, to us all?

And now my dialogue with Stephen Richer. But first, a quick break.

[Break]

Frum: Stephen Richer was elected recorder of Maricopa County, Arizona, in November of 2020, and served in that role from the 1st of January 2021 to the end of December 2024. Maricopa, of course, is the county around the city of Phoenix, the biggest city in what has become a crucial swing state, and the recorder is the most important election official in that county.

Richer, a Republican, held firm against President [Donald] Trump’s conspiracy theories and wild allegations against the election of 2020, and then faced another round of such allegations in 2022 and another round again in 2024, when Kari Lake was on the ballot, first for Arizona governor and then for the United States senator from Arizona. Richer now writes, teaches, and practices law. He’s a native of the state of Utah, a graduate of Tulane and the University of Chicago, from which he holds both his law degree and also an M.A.

I got to know Stephen as a regular contributor to my Frum Forum website in the 2010s. He’s a man of steadfast courage, and it’s a pleasure to welcome him to The David Frum Show at a time when the Trump administration is mounting a renewed attack on the independence and integrity of the American voting system.

Stephen, welcome to The David Frum Show.

Stephen Richer: Thank you very much. Thanks for all you taught me previously, and it’s good to be back. My wife keeps saying, When do you think these invitations are gonna dry up? And then President Trump does something related to elections, and I get another round of interviews and invitations, so it’s good for business.

Frum: So long as he’s crazy, you’ll be employed.

Richer: (Laughs.)

Frum: (Laughs.) Or you’ll be busy anyway because you have a new life away from all of this madness. But let’s start with your first exposure to the madness. So you take office on the 1st of January of 2021, minutes before the attack on Congress, in the throes of all of these denunciations of the integrity of the vote, especially in your state. What was that like in 2021?

Richer: It was surreal because so many people were asking things about the 2020 election, and I was just getting into this office. I was still figuring out, basically, how to dial out of the office, who works in different spots in the office. COVID’s going on. It’s an office of 160 people; I’m just trying to get to know everyone’s faces. And meanwhile, we have January 6 that happens, and then we have protesters outside of our facility. We have some of my erstwhile allies saying that my office had participated in stealing the 2020 election. And then, by my second week, I had been subpoenaed from the Arizona Senate for all of the materials relating to the 2020 election, and that began the whole endeavor known as the Cyber Ninjas forensic audit. And (Laughs.) boy, we spent a whole year going over 2020, and it was a lot.

Frum: Because you were a Republican and always have been a Republican, people in the president’s camp were looking to you to agree with their story, however farcical it was, and you didn’t.

Richer: That’s right. Well, I was very patient with it, and a lot of the people who were coming to me with these allegations were people who I considered friends, they were supporters, and so they were people who I presumed to have good-faith questions about election administration. And I thought that if I dug in, if I researched them, and if I got them answers, and I did it in a way that was polite, and if I did it in a way that was factual, that this would just be a scientific process, and we would have questions, and we would have answers, and we would move on. It took me a while, but maybe a year into the process, I realized that was not going to be the case.

Frum: Yeah. I’ll say here, as someone who’s known you for a while and then watched you or observed you in your public presence, in these public interactions, you’re a very nonfiery personality. You are very patient and low-key, and you agree to take seriously a lot of things that—people will say, I had a vision. It came to me in a dream. The ballots are hidden in a vault underneath a lake. And you would say, Okay, can you give me the GPS location of the vault and the lake? (Laughs.) And you never lost your cool, but the allegations just got wilder and wilder, didn’t they?

Richer: They did, and more than that, they seemed adverse, they seemed stubborn to getting any answers, and eventually, I just realized, You don’t want answers from me. You don’t want me to investigate. You just want me to affirm what you want to believe to be true. And that was very saddening to me because I come from a world in which the epistemological process is highly valued, in which man is a rational creature and things can be scientifically discovered. And so why did I try to be nice? I tried to be nice because I don’t think anyone has ever persuaded somebody else by telling them that they’re an idiot, even though it might be satisfying to say. And I tried to be nice just so that when I look back on my actions throughout this whole affair, I can hopefully at least feel good that I wasn’t too terribly mean to people. I’ve had a few moments where I’ve slipped, but I think I’ve done pretty well.

Frum: Now, you make the point that what was especially frustrating about these allegations was it was not one allegation that people would dig in and stick to, no matter all the contrary evidence. It was a series of contradictory allegations, and each time one fell apart, another would manifest itself, and then it would fall apart, and then there would be another, and it was just a wild series of mutually contradictory—always the same answer, but never the same explanation.

Richer: That’s right, and you’re on the internet, I think, a healthy amount, but you’re on the internet enough to see that a lot of these claims keep popping up. It’s like Whac-a-Mole. And weirdly, the burden of proof always seems to be on those of us who won all the court cases, those of us who won all of the audits, and yet it’s on us to disprove every single wild-eyed allegation. I really hate that framework—I think it should instead be on the movant, so to speak, on the people who are alleging the thing, to have to bear the burden of proof. But what I do is: Somebody throws out a claim, I investigate it, and then I disprove it, and then they move on to another one. And it’s frustrating, and it’s exhausting, and again, it just goes to the fact that a lot of these people aren’t looking for facts; a lot of these people are just looking for affirmation of their beliefs. But my mentality is that if there’s still people out there who are looking for facts, then I wanna give it to them.

Frum: Let’s bring this forward to the present because the reason all of this is suddenly so very, very urgent is not just that we’ve had this ever-continuing claim by Donald Trump, where he says things like, I won the state of Minnesota three times, when he won it no times. And you might think, Okay, well he’s just a deluded old man who happens to be president, and that’s probably not even the most harmful, untrue thing he believes. He is president now—no one doubts that—and he wasn’t president for the four years after the election he lost, and that’s history. But right now, the president and his supporters, including the director of national intelligence, are engaged in an attack on the voting system in Georgia in 2026, with an eye to what looks like some scheme to distort or twist the elections that are expected in November of this year. You have written about what you think may be going on. What’s going on?

Richer: We don’t know. I think we’re gonna find out more in the next 48 hours because the affidavit for the warrant in Fulton County, Georgia, is going to be unsealed, and that could give us a better idea of what motivated this FBI search, what allowed the judge to be convinced that they had probable cause that a crime had been committed. But I don’t know to what ends. Is it really just to pursue one or two people and try to charge them with a crime? Is it with the goal of claiming that the 2020 election should be, I don’t know, undone for—sort of like when they find out that a football team had actually used drugs or had paid players and they strike off the championship from the historical records, and this way, they’ll strike off Joe Biden’s 2020 victory from the historical records? Or is it for stuff moving forward? I’m not sure, but this is unprecedented territory. Sure, Donald Trump and others have done a lot to cast doubt on our election system, but this is the first time where the entire machinery of law enforcement of the federal government has mobilized and has gone into a county.

Frum: Well, one thing that you hear said that they may be thinking of is, in the wilder precincts of election denialism in 2020 and 2021, there was a fantasy that the government of Venezuela, not a known technological leader, but that somehow had magic technology, which allowed it to change the outcome of votes in the United States. And now there has been the Trump raid into Venezuela, which a lot of us hoped would be some effort to restore Venezuela democracy, but, no, it’s just a kidnapping of one of the thugs who runs Venezuela, leaving all the other thugs intact. But the election aspect is, some people speculate that what Trump has in mind is take Nicolás Maduro, former dictator, put him in front of an American court, and have the prosecutors—the ones who have not resigned because they have integrity, but the ones who remain who don’t—have them say, Dictator Maduro, you can either spend the rest of your life in an American jail, or we can let you go, if you just affirm this crazy idea we have that magic Venezuelan technology changed the results in 2020. Does any of that sound like something that could happen?

Richer: So some of your listeners might be like, What the heck is David talking about? What is he making up? This is so facially ludicrous that nobody would believe this. But people do believe this. This is born out of a theory from the 2020 election that two election technology companies, Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems, had connections to [former Venezuelan President] Hugo Chávez, who had somehow gotten in cahoots with those companies to rig future elections, and that this tabulation equipment flipped votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. And I should say that we know this isn’t true because 98 percent of Americans vote on paper ballots and those paper ballots can’t be hacked and they are hand-count audited after the election. Nonetheless, people believe this, and so some people think that, Oh my gosh, the reason we went to Venezuela, the reason that we extracted Maduro isn’t because of narcoterrorism, isn’t because of opioids in American streets, isn’t because of wanting to get their oil, but is because finally, the plot will be uncovered to steal the 2020 election.

And so if you’re Nicolás Maduro and you’re sitting there in, I think, presumably not the nicest conditions, I think he’s gotta be thinking about this as potentially a golden ticket out because you and I know, and many [who] are surrounding Trump know, that the one way that you can get in his good grace, no matter what misdeed you have committed in the past, is that you can tell him that he certainly has never lost an election and that the 2020 election was stolen from him. This has just been a path for so many people to get appointments, a path for other people to get pardons, a path for people to get business negotiations. Even right now, Tina Peters, the Mesa County clerk who committed a number of felonies under state law in Colorado, but they were done in the name of Donald Trump winning the 2020 election, he’s pulling out all the stops to try to get her out of prison in Colorado, and I think it could even extend to a mass murderer like Maduro.

Frum: Well, Trump let out the former president of Honduras, who’s one of the biggest drug dealers in the world. That wasn’t about the election. By the way, in the Tina Peters case, she was convicted under state law, correct? So Trump can’t just pardon her—he has to muscle the state of Colorado into somehow releasing her.

Richer: But it’s extraordinary what he’s doing right now. He’s pulling funds from Colorado. He vetoed a water bill that was very important to the residents of Colorado. He’s calling [Governor] Jared Polis a terrible person on a regular basis. And so he will leverage whatever power he has. And in the instance of Maduro, he does have much more power than he has over Tina Peters.

Frum: Now, let’s go to the forward-looking part of this. Are we seeing in Georgia some kind of dress rehearsal for using the muscle of the federal government and the military or other assets to intervene in state-run elections in 2026, and try to stave off what otherwise looks like a likely Republican defeat if the elections are allowed to be free and fair? And the scheme seems to be: Find some way, by looking backwards to 2020, to prevent the elections of 2026 from being free and fair.

Richer: Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know how much of this is about Trump’s ego and about looking backwards. You had the president of the Brennan Center on previously. He’s somebody who has said that this is about looking forwards—this is about the 2026 election; this is about the 2028 election. But your guess is as good or better than mine, and so is this a dress rehearsal for involving the federal government in ways that never would’ve been before contemplated?

And I’ll say that, over the last few months, I’ve ordinarily been pretty reluctant to embrace any sort of theory that Donald Trump can manipulate the 2026 elections. People normally talk about stationing ICE at a few voting locations, or they talk about him pulling federal funding from cybersecurity programs. And to those allegations, or to those concerns, I usually say, Well, at the end of the day, the counties run elections. They’re run by bipartisan teams. They have a lot of checks and balances built into the process. And they’re gonna be administered. But this is the first instance in which I could begin to believe that something truly spectacular is going to happen in which our 2026 midterm elections are not administered like past elections have been.

Frum: Well, let me ask you because you sat in the chair; you ran the office. You know the very minute details of how elections are administered, something most of us don’t pay attention to, because we just think we’ll go vote. The votes get counted. We believe what they say. Sometimes the one we want wins, and we’re happy. And sometimes the one we want doesn’t win, and we say, Wait ’til next time. But going inside the box, supposing you—I’m not going to ask you to say anything that, probably, the people who would abuse this information don’t already know—but you’re at a tabletop exercise, and you’re invited, in the name of election-hardening, to say, We want you to play the other team. We want you to play the leader of the team that is trying to cheat in 2026. On the basis of your knowledge, what would be your scheme for interventions to sway the result against the will of the people in 2026 if you had to tabletop that exercise?

Richer: Yeah, so we do a fair amount of this, actually, within a number of different election communities, and I always fall back on where I think President Trump is most potent is still in the post-election procedures, still in sowing doubt in the minds of enough Americans that they don’t think the elections are legitimate and, therefore, I don’t know, they don’t have to recognize the new elected officials, or the Congress doesn’t have to seat its new members. That’s certainly a popular theory that’s floating about: that Speaker Mike Johnson, the outgoing speaker, will choose not to seat the new members, because they’re in allegedly disputed elections.

I find that to be much more plausible than, We’re gonna go in, and we’re gonna tip over every single tabulation machine so that those can’t be used, and then there’s just pandemonium because they have to do hand-count auditing. Or: We’re going to try to send the FBI to run the 9,000 different voting jurisdictions in the United States. Our election system is just so disaggregated, so driven by state law, so driven by local nuances, that I think it would be very, very challenging for the federal government to really take over here.

Frum: Well, a lot depends on whether the ’26 elections are close or not close. If we’re in a true wave, and 40 seats are changing hands, and the Senate is changing majority, probably, at that point, if you try to send the FBI to do something, it would be both hopeless, but it would also look obviously illegitimate. But if it’s not 40 seats that are changing hands but just six, and you have an idea in the week before the election which those six are likely to be, could you do something then? Could you send Tulsi Gabbard and the FBI to Charlotte and Tucson and a few chosen jurisdictions and seize machines there? Would that have any positive outcome for them, or is it still hopeless?

Richer: Yeah, so I think that is a scenario that’s been discussed, where you don’t go to every 9,000 voting jurisdictions. You don’t go to all the precincts. You certainly don’t go to all the polling places. But you do go to the competitive swing races for the United States House, and you do something to disrupt them. And perhaps, in that instance, you could present law enforcement on such a significant level that election administrators would just have to throw their hands up and say, We can’t operate in this environment, or We can’t operate without our machinery, such that you can never get a conclusive result. I still don’t know how, at the end of the day, you make the ballot say something different than what they said. But just seizing everything and not even allowing the process to go on, that would be pretty extraordinary, but that would have, obviously, a disruptive effect, and then I guess we would never really know who won those contests.

And I think that this is especially vulnerable in California, where California usually takes about two weeks to complete their count because almost everyone votes by mail, and a large percentage of people either drop off their mail ballot on Election Day or they even mail it, they postmark it, on Election Day and then it doesn’t even arrive until several days later. And so if the administration already knows that it’s gonna come down to just a few swing districts in California, moves in there—California, of course, is already ready to be seen as sort of the liberal boogeyman, and so maybe the narrative writes better there.

Frum: Based on your experience in Arizona, how far down this highway will other Republican officials go? When Donald Trump and the people around him and Kari Lake were saying these crazy things about the elections in your state, did most Republican officeholders sort of shrug wearily, or did they say, Well, it may not be true, but it’s our team that’s saying the thing that is not true, so we have to be full throated?

Richer: Do not underestimate the importance of politics for a politician. David Mayhew said politicians are “single-minded seekers of reelection,” and I learned that when I got into office. And Republicans care about the opinion of Donald Trump because he is uniquely powerful within the Republican Party. And so almost every single Republican that I spoke with after the 2020 election, in terms of elected Republicans, knew that there was very little to Donald Trump’s allegations of a stolen election. At best, they stayed quiet. At worst, they went full-throated along with it because they knew it was a path to political riches, whether higher office or fundraising and so on and so forth. And so I was just consistently disappointed at how few people there were who were willing to stand up and say, No, two plus two still equals four, even if the president doesn’t want it to be so.

Frum: How robust are the state courts and the federal courts in election administration?

Richer: So I do think that this is one thing that we can take some solace in and that was very consistent and strong from 2020 onward, is that—I know that people take issue with courts of appeals and with the United States Supreme Court on some highly politicized issues, but in terms of election denialism, in terms of saying that, for instance, again, that Dominion tabulation was connected to Hugo Chávez, there was not a single state or federal court that indulged those fanciful lies. And so still, I think that if there’s one place where we consistently win because we have all the facts and we have all the law, it’s in the courts. And so I still have put great faith in the courts, I still have a lot of confidence in the courts, and I do think that that is one of the bulwarks against anything that might happen in the 2026 election.

Frum: Can you decode the role? How is it that the director of national intelligence has any role in anything to do with an election?

Richer: Well, I think all the formalities and lines have been blurred quite a bit in the Trump administration, and even this one is a bit confusing because President Trump said that he had no idea why Tulsi Gabbard was there. And then the next day, at the National Prayer Breakfast, he said, Well, Pam—being Pam Bondi, the attorney general—had asked her to be there. And then a number of other people have had shifting analysis as to whether or not she was supposed to be there and what she’s been doing there. But I think Tulsi Gabbard realizes, as many have realized before her, that Donald Trump cares deeply about this and less important than coloring within the lines, or only doing what is within your purview, is showing Donald Trump that you care about this and doing “something about it.” And so I think that, for her positioning within the Trump administration, it was a smart move. Now, will he eventually expect her to produce something? There, I think, she could be in a little more challenging position because I think that most of this is being done by the Justice Department and the FBI, and they would say, maybe, This is our stuff; butt out. But I think being there certainly helped her in Trump world.

Frum: Yeah. The FBI is an institution that is being broken before our eyes as well, and good officers are being driven out; bad officers are being hired. The FBI is being turned into an arm of very, very partisan justice. How much confidence do you have in them? And you’ve seen them in Arizona—what do you think is likely to happen in 2026?

Richer: I have a lot of confidence in the FBI and the Department of Justice as it previously existed, and I still have a lot of confidence in a lot of the people there. These people are amazing. They really believe in the role of the agencies. They believe in doing justice. They’re highly professional. They’re highly skilled. Unfortunately, as you said, those people are leaving. And if you look at The New York Times story, I think, just a day or two ago about what’s going on with the applications to the Department of Justice, it’s very telling. One, the number of applications is way down, and they’re struggling to recruit the same high-quality, high-caliber people that they were previously. And two, as part of the application process, applicants have to answer questions about which parts of the Trump agenda they like most, how they will advance the Trump agenda, and this is just so anathema to anyone who really believed in the Justice Department’s mission and the FBI’s mission that I do think it will have a corrosive effect. I just don’t know how long it will take to get to the tipping point where those are the types of people who are running ops.

Frum: What is the SAVE Act, and why do the Republicans care about it so much?

Richer: Yeah, there’s a few pieces of legislation right now that Republicans are trying to put forward to supposedly close gaps in problems that they see with election administration. One’s the SAVE Act, one’s the SAVE America Act, and one’s the Make Elections Great Again Act.

The SAVE Act is aimed primarily at proof of citizenship when registering to vote. So under the National Voter Registration Act, the NVRA, which was passed in the ’90s, if you wanna vote in elections in the United States under federal law, you just have to attest under penalty of law that you are a United States citizen—you don’t have to show documented proof of citizenship. The Republicans wanna change that such that you have to show either a passport or a birth certificate when registering to vote. Now, I actually think that there’s something to that idea. I don’t think that’s an unduly onerous burden. But the way in which they’ve drafted it is problematic, the way in which they’re trying to impose it is problematic, and there’s also a lot of states’ rights people who say, Well, I actually think that this should be best left to the states.

Frum: And there is also something about this that is a little, like, politicians are older than they used to be—like, not dealing with the present-day America. If the vote were restricted to people who have a valid passport for international travel, wouldn’t that skew the electorate much more toward the Democrats than toward the Republicans? In 1996, having a passport probably did indicate you were a Republican leaner, but not in 2026.

Richer: So I should first say that this is predicated oftentimes on a false notion that there are large numbers of noncitizens who are participating in American elections, and that’s simply not true. It’s not true both by the number of people who have been prosecuted for this, but it’s also not true because a number of states, even in recent weeks, have affirmatively investigated the number of noncitizens on their rolls—I wrote about this in The New York Times—and just, simply, the numbers aren’t there.

And then, secondly, yes, I’m not even sure that the political calculus is right. As you’ve noted before, the demographics of the Republican Party have materially changed, even from where they were in 2016. Republicans are no longer the disproportionately educated, disproportionately affluent country-club party that maybe we once envisioned them [to be], and they are actually potentially less likely to have passports because they’re not living in coastal cities and taking those international trips. And so I do think that that’s another curious wrinkle to the SAVE Act. Now, maybe Republicans would say, Well, that’s not our goal here, and Our goal is just to further secure elections. I would say we need to clean up how it’s being done technically, and I still don’t think that there’s a great justification for it.And a lot of people say, Well, Stephen, voter ID polls really well, and I say, It does—this is not voter ID. Again, voter identification is what you do when you show up to vote, and you take, usually, a driver’s license, and you say, I am the person who is registered to vote. SAVE Act is about, when you first register to vote, whether or not you have proof of citizenship, which might, as David said, be a passport, or it might be a birth certificate.

Frum: So what are the other acts that the Republicans are interested in?

Richer: So the MEGA Act does things like—it’s this whole laundry list of sort of things that the Republicans have talked about in the elections context for a while, stuff like banning ranked-choice voting, stuff like banning states from sending out mail ballots to all registered voters, things like banning states from allowing mail ballots to come back after Election Day if they’ve been postmarked on Election Day. So my complaint against this isn’t necessarily policy item for policy item, but it is very much a federalization of election administration. And if there’s one thing that separates sort of the Trump camp from the [Senator Mitch] McConnell camp is the McConnell camp would say, It was wrong when Democrats tried to do it with H.R. 1 in 2021, it was wrong when I probably looked at this way back earlier in my political career, and it’s wrong now. And the Trump people would say, We want to change election administration. We wanna do it through executive order, even. And if we can’t do it through executive order, then we wanna do it through federal legislation.

Frum: Well, I think there are also Republicans that are in the group of: We remember a world where Republicans were more likely to have a passport than Democrats were, but that was a world of long ago; we’re mad about mail-in ballots because they helped Biden in 2020, because, in 2020, there was a special circumstance where people who took COVID seriously were more likely to vote by mail than people who didn’t take COVID seriously and Democrats were more likely to take COVID seriously than Republicans. But what also seems weird about this, for Republicans to make such a fetish of it now, is in normal times, who is most likely to vote by mail? Active-duty military personnel and older people. So you’d think, Well, gee, if I’m a Republican, why do I wanna make that more difficult?

Richer: Well, this is an irony, and in Arizona, it was the “[John] McCain machine” that we used to call it that really, really got mail voting down to a science for a while. And it was all the people, we like to say, in Sun City or out in Gilbert, which are sort of towns further removed from the central core of Phoenix, who didn’t wanna go into a voting location, who didn’t wanna get out of their 55-plus communities, who wanted to mail in their ballots, and so a lot of these narratives have flipped. It’s interesting to somebody like me, who’s been watching this for a little while. It’s not always rational. But I’m trying to meet it where it is.

Frum: Yeah. These are things—you can debate the SAVE Act, you can debate these other measures, in a way you can’t debate someone who believes that Hugo Chávez, from beyond the grave, is tampering with American voting dials.

Richer: That’s right. And again, my complaint with the SAVE Act is often about the predicate, the false predicate, which is that large numbers of noncitizens are voting in our elections. And that, again, that has been demonstrated time and time again to be false. Now, absolutely, we can have a public-policy debate about what’s the appropriate amount of documentation for proof of citizenship—public-policy debate. But too often in the Trump world in election administration, we’re debating facts that shouldn’t have to be debated.

Frum: Let’s wrap this up with—take us back to what happens on a voting day in most of America. So you show up, you stand in line, you execute your vote however your county does it, and then you leave. And then you don’t think about it until you turn on the TV. What happens after you leave that room?

Richer: So if you vote at a voting location, you’ll either fill in your ballot with a hand mark—you’ll hand mark it with pen, and you’ll fill in the ovals—or you’ll have a touch screen, and then it’ll print a piece of paper. And then you’ll feed it into a tabulator at the voting location.

Frum: Let me pause you right there. So even though you’ve used a machine to generate the ballot, the ballot remains a paper ballot.

Richer: Correct. Again, so 98 percent of Americans have a paper ballot of some form, whether that’s filling it in yourself by hand, or whether that’s touching ovals on a screen and then printing it off and still having a paper ballot.

Frum: Right, and here in my precinct in Washington, that’s what we do: We touch the screen. We get a piece of paper. Then what happens?

Richer: And then you’re going to go, as the voter, and you’re going to make sure that it has all of your selections as you intended. So it would say, For this race, you voted for this person. For this race, you voted for this person. For this race, you voted for that person. And then you’re gonna feed it into a little mini tabulator that is at a voting location. At the end of the night—

Frum: Wait, stop—who supervises this?

Richer: County or city workers who have been trained to do this, who are bipartisan teams. Oftentimes, depending on the jurisdiction, they’ve been offered up by the county Republican Party or the county Democratic Party. But these are almost, in most circumstances, a bipartisan team of paid temporary county or city employees.

Frum: So they’re not full-time city or county employees; they’re people who have been specially recruited for that one-day service.

Richer: Correct. For working a voting location, those are ordinarily temporary workers.

Frum: And there’ll be someone named by the Republicans, someone named by the Democrats.

Richer: That’s right.

Frum: Okay. And they’re watching what’s going on.

Richer: That’s right. And there’s a whole bunch of procedures. Usually, you have to document a whole bunch of different things. But at the end of the day, you’re going to take all of the ballots that have been run through that tabulator, and you’re going to take the memory device from the tabulator itself, and you’re gonna wrap that memory device in tamperproof packaging, make sure that it can’t be damaged, make sure that it can’t be tampered with. You’re gonna give it to a bipartisan team, and they’re going to take both those ballots and that memory device to a central count facility—so that will be either within your county or within your city—where all of the different voting locations go into in order to aggregate the results. And when they aggregate the results, not only will they load that memory device into this main server to add to the other votes that have come in, but they’ll make sure that the number of votes that it recorded is the same as the number of ballots that were returned from that voting location, such that if the memory device reads, 1,123 ballots have been read on this, there better be 1,123 ballots that are in the drawer where they went after they were tabulated.

So that’s one component of it. There’s a whole bunch of other components because, obviously, some people vote by mail; some people get a mail ballot, and they drop it off. But an important part of this is we don’t just load those into the elections-management server, print the results, and then say, Well, hope everyone enjoyed their election. There’s always going to be post-election audits that are going to be open to public observation and are gonna be done in a bipartisan manner. So here, we really get to the core of the Hugo Chávez claim, which is that the tabulation equipment itself took votes that were for Donald Trump and it awarded them to Joe Biden. And we know that’s not the case because what we do is we select random batches of ballots, we see what the machine count was on them, and then we give those physical paper ballots to bipartisan teams of Republicans and Democrats, who hand-count them and they make sure the machines got the count right.

Frum: One of the complaints that the Trump people had was they couldn’t bring their bands of enthusiasts into those counting rooms.

Richer: Yeah. So, one, every county differs in terms of how many observers it allows, but in terms of people who actually work the process, we, in Maricopa County, we welcomed all types. If you were somebody who didn’t believe in the validity of elections, that’s fine; we still took you in. But we didn’t just take you and your five buddies and just send you off to one voting location. We take you in, we train you, we talk with you, and then we integrate you into other teams—teams of people from different backgrounds, teams from people of different politics, teams from people who have been doing this different lengths of time—and there is a little bit of that sort of almost watchfulness over each other. And I think one of the really beautiful things about election administration is that, in almost all instances, the people who come in and are part of this process develop a camaraderie with the people that they work with, and they develop a sense of pride in the results, and they develop a sense of defensiveness in that they were part of this process. And so I say to anyone who is still questioning how these things work, either go and get a tour of your elections facility, or better yet, figure out how you can be an observer for your political party, or figure out how you can participate in at least one part of the election process.

Frum: You mean convert cheap cynicism on Twitter into actual civic participation, and maybe not only will you have a better understanding, but you might be a better person at the end of the process.

Richer: Yeah, and there’s some great social-science studies about people who serve on a jury walk away with a better perception of the criminal-justice system. And while this hasn’t been as studied in the election-worker context, from my anecdotal experience, I firmly believe that is true, and it is something that is constructive, and it’s something that’ll actually teach you, rather than just retweeting or resharing the Rumble video or the Truth Social post or the Twitter post.

Frum: In Maricopa County, how many people are involved in the process in a big year, like in a presidential year?

Richer: Yeah, so for the 2024 presidential election, we had about 2.6 million registered voters in Maricopa County, and we had over 3,000 temporary workers helping with that process. That’s everything from the people who are working at a voting location, to people who are driving box trucks, to people who were working in our warehouse, to people doing signature verification, to people who were actually taking the ballots out of their return mail envelopes in bipartisan teams and smoothing them out and making sure there aren’t rips or gum on the ballots before we put them into the tabulators. And so, really, it’s a very time-intensive process, it’s a very redundant process, but it’s a pretty remarkable process, and there are lots of ways to get involved, and I think that you’ll find that, far from being complicit in a grand international scheme that seems fitting for a Mission: Impossible movie, I think that you’ll find that it gets a little boring, tiring after you’ve been doing it for hours and hours and hours. But it’s important because that is how we can affirm the validity of the election.

Frum: So in just your one county, in just Maricopa, we need to get 3,000 people to be involved in the conspiracy.

Richer: And so that is really another reason why our system is hardened against broad-scale attacks because, I mentioned, there are about 9,000 different voting jurisdictions in the United States, and each of those voting jurisdictions, they’re not as big as Maricopa County—Maricopa County is only smaller than Los Angeles County in terms of elections jurisdictions—but they have a number of people working. And so to have a conspiracy, you would have thousands and thousands of people in on it, and my experience with most political secrets is as soon as more than three or four people know about it, it’s probably getting out.

Frum: Stephen, thank you so much for joining me today. I learn so much from you every time we speak. I’m grateful to you for speaking to me today.

Richer: Thanks, David. I really appreciate it.

Frum: Bye-bye.

[Music]

Frum: Thanks so much to Stephen Richer for joining me today on The David Frum Show.

Now, as I mentioned at the top, this month, February 2026, marks the 250th anniversary of the publication of the first of six volumes of Edward Gibbon’s [The History of the] Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Now, I won’t claim to have read every word of all six volumes, nor have I listened to all 126 hours of the audiobook, as recorded by Charlton Griffin, who is an incredible hero. I’ve listened to a lot of them, and I strongly recommend the audiobook; it is a fascinating way to spend time. But it’s a lot either way, whether you read the six volumes or listen to the 126 hours. But I’ve dug deeply enough into the book to have absorbed its message for our time, and that’s what I wanna talk about today, because this series of books remains not only a tremendous monument of history, not only a great milestone in intellectual development, it continues to shape discourse in our own time in ways that are powerful, but also sometimes a little misleading. So let me explain what I mean, why this book is so relevant and why I’m talking about it today.

Edward Gibbon was a man of the Enlightenment. He was a secularist. He was someone who had what we would call a broadly liberal—the word would not have been used that way in his time—but a broadly liberal view of politics. He was a man of great tolerance. He was an easygoing man, the opposite of a persecutor, the opposite of an advocate of any kind of arbitrary or absolute authority, so in that sense, a very modern figure. But in another way, as an historian, he was quite an old-fashioned figure, a backward-looking figure. His book, begun in 1776—the last volume was published a dozen years later, in 1788—is very much under the imprint of the ideas of Niccolo Machiavelli, who lived 250 years before Edward Gibbon, and through Machiavelli to the classical literary tradition of the Romans and the Greeks.

When Gibbon is explaining the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, he, again, is a very modern man—he uses not only literary evidence; he uses coins and inscriptions and all the techniques that were made available by archaeology as it existed in his time—and many of his ideas, as I say, are very strikingly modern, but his central explanation of what happened to the Roman Empire is backward-looking. It’s the Machiavelli explanation. What he thinks happened was that there was a decline in the civic virtue of the Roman people, and this decline in civic virtue was the key culprit of the collapse of the Roman Empire. What did he mean by civic virtue? What he meant was a kind of self-denying, materially austere commitment to active citizenship, active participation in public life. There was more of that early; there was less of that later. As that civic participation declined, so did the Roman Empire. And many people who read his book, in 1776 and after, took from that reading a message that was, in some ways, very helpful to building modern societies—we all should be active citizens—but also misleading because it created an idea that people are more virtuous at one period, less virtuous at another. It made the story of the success or failure of societies very much a matter of individual behavior and less of institutional success.

Now, again, Gibbon was in no way a naive person; he understood the importance of institutions. One of the big villains of his book is the rise of the Christian Church, which, in his telling, diverts Roman attention from this-worldly to otherworldly activities, from being willing to work on behalf of the commonwealth in the here and now to looking for some kind of reward in heaven, for being less willing to use weapons to serve in the military and more inclined to privatize their life. And there’s obviously some truth to this. Christianity did change the way the Roman civilization worked. But it’s not clear that there was any less involvement in civic life in Roman life in the 400s or 500s than there was in the 100s, when he begins his story. But what he did introduce—and this is really the thing we need to be cautious of—was a kind of biologization of history, an idea of decline and decadence. Decline makes sense when we talk about individual creatures. After a certain point in our lives, we are all on the path of decline, leading to extinction. And he brought concepts from the idea of art and science, the idea of decadence, into history in a way that biologized the development of societies. And this is an idea that, in our time, can lead to some pretty sinister complexes, this hunt for decline and decadence, and this desire to reaffirm society by somehow purging us of the things that make us freer, that give individual life more scope—again, not blaming Gibbon for that, but these are ideas that, through, Gibbon have haunted the discussion of political science and economic development and historical development.

I think, as we return to this mighty work from 250 years ago, there’s a lot to benefit from, including, above all, the extraordinary labor that went into producing this giant work that is still so fascinating to read, still so eminently quotable, in a literary style that resonates to this very day. But the reason the Roman Empire declined and fell was not because the Romans were virtuous at one time and less virtuous at the other. They were met with concrete problems of the here and now, problems of climate change, problems of plague, problems of the faster military development of their neighbors. Romans started with a big organizational advantage over the less-organized societies on their borders. As the Romans developed, as the world developed, those neighbors caught up and equalized the military balance, and the Romans were not up to the task. The Romans also developed problems of succession. They couldn’t provide orderly ways that didn’t involve coups and assassinations and civil wars, of making sure that executive power flowed in continuous ways through bureaucratic systems. Partly, that was because of the material primatism of the time. Partly, that was because of just the scale of distance on which they had to work. But partly, that was an institutional failure that was inherent in the way they organized the world and that we can learn some lessons from.

The world is always old and always new. Human beings age, but societies don’t. And if there’s a lesson to be learned from The [History of the] Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, it is to think less about decline and fall and think more about: How do we preserve and maintain the success of the society that modern-day people have, Americans and people in other democracies? How do you preserve what you have as institutions? How do you keep alive the incentives to maintain the act of citizenship that Gibbon taught as so important?

Anyway, those are my reflections on [the] 250th anniversary of this amazing work. But go read some of it, more of it, all of it if you can, yourself and see what you think.

Thanks so much for joining me today on The David Frum Show. As always, the best way to support the work of this program, if you want to do so, is by subscribing to The Atlantic and supporting the work of all of my colleagues. Please share and subscribe to the program and share it on social media if you’re so minded. And you can follow me on social media as well: @DavidFrum on X (Twitter) and on Instagram. See you next week on The David Frum Show—oh, and one last word: I wish a very meaningful Valentine’s Day to all who celebrate this often difficult but potentially very rewarding holiday. Thank you so much for joining me this week on The David Frum Show.