So is Donald Trump right about all of this?

Well, short answer, no.

I thought you might say that.

But let me respond to some of the specifics, because I do like to be kind of nuanced and precise about this.

So it's true that when we have seen problems with voter fraud, it has been overwhelmingly in the absentee process rather than in-person voting.

And that's because you know, if you're gonna try to commit fraud, it doesn't really make sense as a practical matter to try to do it, you know, one by one with voters going in and pretending to be somebody else in the polls.

That just doesn't happen.

Why not just fix it?

And what did states do or other people do in challenging any of the redistricting results until the 1960s? Were there court cases before then?

Well, so part of what happened is that as we had the great migration of voters to cities, both with World War I and then with World War II, these increased.

Existing districts often became very unbalanced in population terms.

So districts that were centered on urban areas got larger and larger and larger in terms of the number of people.

Rural areas didn't increase nearly as much.

And most of these state legislatures were designed in a way that gave extra representation to rural areas if you just used an equal population kind of figure.

And then as this pattern developed in the 20th century, a lot of states just simply did not redistrict after a new census.

So for a very long time, the Voting Rights Act had legislators dealing with Section 5, Section 2, and the 14th Amendment, all trying to figure out how they were supposed to draw districts under these basically three sets of rules.

What could Congress do to change the way elections are held?

I think that begins to get us into the more significant questions in a sense.

So even if the president doesn't have the power to do this, once he puts the marker out there on this by issuing the executive order, then the question becomes, you know, what's going to happen in the states and what's going to happen in Congress? Congress, in theory, does have the power to determine issues like the appropriate use of absentee ballots in national elections.

Congress could require absentee ballots to be provided.

It could determine the conditions under which they can be used.

And I think, in theory, it probably could ban their use.

There might be some constitutional challenges individual voters would bring.

I take it that though it's very unusual, there's no legal impediment to mid-decade redistricting.

What could Congress do to change the way elections are held?

I think that begins to get us into the more significant questions in a sense.

So even if the president doesn't have the power to do this.

Once he puts the marker out there on this by issuing the executive order, then the question becomes, you know, what's going to happen in the states and what's going to happen in Congress? Congress, in theory, does have the power to determine issues like.

the appropriate use of absentee ballots in national elections.

Congress could require absentee ballots to be provided.

It could determine the conditions under which they can be used.

There's no legal impediment to mid-decade redistricting.