Trump Says Republicans Need to ‘Nationalize’ Elections and ‘Take Over the Voting’

President Donald Trump on Monday said that Republicans should “nationalize” elections in key states, claiming without evidence that it is the only way to stop noncitizens from illegally voting.

“These people were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegally,” Trump said during a Monday episode of former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino’s podcast. “Amazing that the Republicans aren’t tougher on it. The Republicans say, ‘We want to take over.’ We should take over the voting in at least 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”

“If Republicans don’t get them out, you will never win another election as a Republican,” Trump added, referring to the country’s undocumented immigrant population.

Trump’s comments come in the wake of Justice Department officials’ raid on a Georgia election office last week, seizing thousands of voter records in apparent pursuit of evidence that Trump won the state in the 2020 election.

Trump called into Bongino’s nearly two-hour podcast on Monday — his first in 10 months after leaving the FBI earlier this month — with the pair speaking for almost 20 minutes about Trump’s immigration agenda, the deployment of National Guard troops to Democratic cities and the upcoming midterm elections.

Trump previously hinted at federalizing the election system in a Truth Social post while on the campaign in August 2024, though the White House has not signaled its intention to follow through on his proposal.

Such a mandate would seemingly contradict the Constitution’s elections clause, which delegates the responsibility of election administration to state governments. The clause dates back to the original drafting of the Constitution in 1787.

Trump’s comments come just a week after the Justice Department refiled its lawsuit against the state of Georgia, seeking the state’s sensitive voter data. The DOJ said it was investigating “Georgia’s compliance with federal election law.”

Trump also repeated on Monday’s podcast episode his belief that he won Georgia in the 2020 election, citing an unsubstantiated voter fraud scheme designed to suppress Republican votes.

“I won the popular vote by millions. I won a thing called counties. …You’re never going to have that again if you don’t get these people out,” Trump said in the episode, which has been viewed more than 2 million times on Rumble as of Monday afternoon. Of the Georgia case, he added, “You’re going to see some interesting things come out.”

State officials in Georgia announced on Monday that they would be filing counter-litigation against the Trump administration for violating the terms of its search warrant during a raid on the state’s election office last Wednesday.

Fulton County Commissioner Marvin Arrington Jr., in a statement to NBC News, said the Justice Department failed to catalog the documents it seized, leaving state officials without confirmation that the DOJ returned everything after making copies of the files.

“They got copies of our voter rolls and all the original ballots,” Arrington said. “Now we cannot verify that we’ve received everything back because there was no chain-of-custody inventory taken at the time the records were seized.”