On August 19, 1934, Germany held a plebiscite vote. According to a German citizen in Pirmasens, on the morning of the vote, “I went to my polling place. Many storm troopers were waiting at the entrance. They were very quiet, but every voter was carefully observed and noted. Inside many Nazi officials in uniform hung around the voting booths.”

During a podcast on February 4, 2026, former Trump senior adviser Steve Bannon “urged Immigration and Customs Enforcement to surround polls during November midterms, alongside military units like the 82nd and 101st Airborne under the Insurrection Act,” ostensibly to check IDs. The intimidation factor, however, cannot be overlooked.

It is a federal crime for the military or federal officials to interfere in elections unless “such force be necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States.” U.S. Code § 593 was established in 1948 to criminalize the presence of troops at polling places. A previous law, enacted following the War Between the States, allowed troops at the polls when necessary to “keep the peace,” however the revised 1948 law made the presence of federal troops illegal.

Article I, Section 4, of the US Constitution, known as the Election Clause, defers to the states in regard to election decisions. Congress can intervene and create federal laws that override state regulations regarding elections, but that has yet to happen.

On February 3, Trump called for Republicans in Congress to “nationalize the voting” ahead of the midterm elections later this year.

“The Republicans should say, we want to take over, we should take over the voting, the voting in at least many, 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” Trump told Dan Bongino, the former deputy director of the FBI, in a podcast appearance.

The president made the remark less than a week after the FBI searched an election office in Fulton County, Georgia, and seized records from the 2024 election, which Trump insists was fraudulent.

After a redistricting scheme designed to favor Republicans collapsed, Trump launched personal attacks on Indiana Republicans. The attack came after Republican state senators joined Democrats to defeat a proposed congressional redistricting map. Trump verbally attacked Indiana Senate Pro Tem Rodric Bray after the redistricting proposal failed.

On February 4, the day after Trump called for an unconstitutional federal takeover of voting, the Supreme Court ruled against a similar Trump redistricting proposal in California. The ruling came after the court allowed the redrawing of a congressional district in Texas.

A Democrat victory in the House of Representatives will diminish Trump’s power and take the gavel away from Mike Johnson. In 2018, during Trump’s first term, the GOP lost control of the House. This humiliating defeat may be repeated in November. Trump is desperate to avoid this fate, knowing the Democrats will aggressively investigate his administration and vote to impeach him.

During an interview with Reuters, Trump said “we shouldn’t even have an election” in 2026. The president “expressed frustration that his Republican Party could lose control of the U.S. House of Representatives or the Senate in this year’s midterm elections.”

If Bannon’s scheme to send federal troops to polling places is successful, they will no doubt refrain from handing out ballots pre-marked for Republicans, as storm troopers in Nazi Germany did for Hitler, but the mere presence of armed troops in combat gear will certainly intimidate voters, especially Latinos who may be abducted while casting a vote and sent to El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, or the “detention centers” (concentration camps) in converted warehouses across America purchased by ICE.

As for Democrats and Independents who may express outrage at the presence of troops, it is possible they will be shot in the face like Renee Goode or ten times in the back like Alex Pretti. Or maybe they will only be blinded, like an anti-ICE protester in Santa Ana, California, or the woman who had her hand severed by a “non-lethal” ICE projectile in Minneapolis.

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Kurt Nimmo is a journalist, author, and geopolitical analyst, New Mexico, United States. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). Visit the author’s blog.

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