Stealing Elections, American Style: Voting rights attorney David Walbert on how the 2026 election could be hijacked — and saved

Election deniers, egged on by President Donald Trump, are now running elections in numerous locales across the country. The playbook for stealing elections has remained the same for over a century: “control who votes, control how votes are counted, and control who decides when the counting stops.”

That’s the argument by veteran voting rights lawyer David Walbert in his new book, “Stealing Elections, American Style.” He recounts stories of voter suppression and stolen elections dating back 150 years.

Walbert says these time-tested strategies could be deployed to thwart the will of the people in the 2026 election. He warns that there could be an unprecedented new tactic: If House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Trump loyalist, refuses to seat new members of Congress in January 2027, the country could be plunged into an uncharted constitutional crisis.

“One of the lessons that the election deniers learned in 2020 was it's good to control the people that count,” Walbert told me. He quoted an elections official from Louisiana who helped flip the outcome of the 1876 presidential election, which was won – or stolen -- by Rutherford B. Hayes.

“They may have us in the vote, but we got them in the count,” said the official.

Walbert explained that the current 435 House members’ terms end at noon on January 3, 2027. The House clerk’s list of representatives-elect would determine who is initially seated, potentially affecting control of election contests.

“If the Republicans can finagle that to have a majority of one in that first group that is seated, then they've got a big leg up on cheating,” he said.

Walbert said he is also “very worried about deployment of people to intimidate voters. The position of ICE on this — they keep waffling on what they're going to do.”

David Walbert has litigated dozens of election cases in his five decades as an attorney in Georgia. He argued a landmark election case in the U.S. Supreme Court and has taught constitutional law and testified before Congress as an expert on voting rights legislation. He holds degrees from Stanford, the University of Michigan, and Case Western Reserve Law School.

Walbert said that a key lesson from the Jan. 6 insurrection by Trump supporters is to anticipate and prepare for how to counter every scenario for how the 2026 election could be hijacked.



Walbert said there is one way to pre-empt cheating. “If the Democrats win overwhelmingly in November, I see no danger of this happening.”