The Dirty Move Republicans Could Pull to Keep the House
Election-denying Trump allies could use a rare procedural maneuver to overturn a Democratic midterm win in 2026.
NOT ONE TO LEAVE THINGS TO CHANCE, such as free elections, President Donald Trump is mapping his way to victory in the 2026 midterms, most notably with the aid of Republican state legislators in Texas and elsewhere working to carve out new districts for the GOP. Democrats have limited options to do the same. So if they are going to win control of the House, they will probably have to pick up seats the usual way. But even then the struggle for control of Congress may not end with a simple counting of the votes. Recent instances of election denialism plus the legal mechanisms at Congress’s disposal for seating members suggest that, in a closely divided election, it may be possible for Republicans to hold on to their majority by selectively rejecting election results.
The current electoral map is favorable for Democrats in 2026, who need a net of only three pickups to retake the House. Among the most likely to turn blue are districts that Democrats narrowly lost in 2024. In fact, six seats were decided by less than 2 percent in just four states: Iowa, Colorado, Nebraska, and Pennsylvania.
Enter the gerrymander.
“A very simple redrawing, we pick up five seats,” Trump told reporters over the summer, sending Texas state legislators an unmistakable signal in his Russia-if-you’re-listening style. “And there could be some other states. We’re gonna get another three or four or five in addition. Texas would be the biggest one.”
Democratic governors and state legislators have threatened their own redistricted routes to the majority. But even if they succeed or manage to win the thing fair and square, Trump may uncover another way to claim what the electorate denies him.
Namely, Trump’s allies in the House could contest the narrowest Democratic victories, demanding 2020-style recount after recount to engineer enough ballots to win. If state election boards resist, Trump could pivot, goading Speaker Mike Johnson into tasking the Committee on House Administration, or some other panel packed with MAGA acolytes, into investigating bogus allegations of fraud. Following typical election-denying logic, they’d eventually hit Trump’s numbers, and then Johnson could push for a full House vote to seat the aggrieved Republican candidates.
Too brazen, even for MAGA? It so happens that Speaker Johnson has the authority to do it. “Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members,” the Constitution stipulates. In 1969, Congress passed the Federal Contested Elections Act to further delineate the statutory machinery for executing its constitutional authority to judge contested House elections.
This power is not hypothetical, it’s historical. In 1985, Indiana certified results showing Republican Richard McIntyre defeating Democrat Frank McCloskey by 34 votes. A Democratic-controlled task force ordered a recount, citing allegations of inconsistent standards for absentee ballots. Their conclusion? It was the Democrat who received 4 more votes than the Republican. The full House rejected Indiana’s certification and seated McCloskey. Republicans walked out.
In Indiana again, in 1961, a House race was overturned. Though the state certified that Republican George Chambers beat J. Edward Roush by 12 votes, Democrats in Congress contested the result. Democratic Speaker Sam Rayburn refused to swear in either candidate, kicking the matter over to the Committee on House Administration. It ruled that the Democrat had really prevailed, squeaking out a win by just 99 votes.
In the 1936 elections, a recount in New Hampshire by the state’s Ballot Law Commission determined that Republican Arthur Jenks had bested Democrat Alphonse Roy by 10 votes. Undeterred, Roy pointed to a discrepancy where 34 ballots recorded for Jenks on the tally sheets were not in the ballot box. An investigation by the House Committee on Elections reported that, based solely on verified ballots, Roy had won by 20 votes. The Republicans cried foul. The House voted to overrule New Hampshire’s certification and seat the Democrat.
Republicans tossed out House election results more than twice as often as Democrats, mostly during Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era when elections were marred by violence, fraud, suppression, and intimidation of black voters. In 2026, it would only take a few election-denying congressional Republicans in pivotal states to gin up phony accusations of vote rigging and put control of Congress in a contested state.
The pool of congressional naysayers is ample. There’s Pennsylvania’s Daniel Meuser, Glenn Thompson, Mike Kelly, Scott Perry, Lloyd Smucker, Guy Reschenthaler, and John Joyce. In Colorado, we have Lauren Boebert. Iowa has rejectionist Randy Feenstra. They could give Speaker Johnson cover for invoking the Federal Contested Elections Act.
Not that he’d need it. Johnson, the lead author of the 2020 amicus brief arguing for the nullification of electoral votes in four swing states won by Joe Biden, who rallied 125 House Republicans to back the scheme, is now the most powerful election denier in the House. He is a true believer. None of the findings in the 76 lawsuits filed by Trump’s minions, nor in any of their appeals to the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, invalidated Joe Biden’s win, yet Johnson is unrepentant. “The Constitution was violated in the runup to the 2020 election,” he persists in claiming.
There is no dearth of Republican congressional election deniers in states identified for potential midterm pickups by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Asserting voter fraud without evidence has become commonplace inside MAGA, not just by winning candidates like Trump in 2016 and 2024, but among aggrieved Republican candidates who lose.
For Democrats counting on the courts to save them from yet another Trump power grab, fuhgeddaboudit. When the 1985 dustup found its way into the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, the judges ruled that it was none of their business: “The House is not only ‘Judge’ but also final arbiter. Its decisions about which ballots count, and who won, are not reviewable in any court.”
Reversals in the House are rare. From the 1st Congress in 1789 to the 107th in 2002, only 128 races were overturned out of approximately 35,000. But in one instance, disputes were decisive: Five disputed seats determined control of the House in 1839. In 2026, overturning Democratic victories to keep Republicans in charge would not be unprecedented.
It’s a dark, highly pessimistic scenario. Indeed, the possibility of invoking the Federal Contested Elections Act makes gerrymandering seem quaint. But one lesson of this year is that whatever isn’t nailed down in advance is apt to be seized at the earliest opportunity. So what might have been dismissed as tin-foil imaginings a year ago may now be considered a prophetic warning in Trump’s second-term America.
Steve Posner is a professor at the University of Southern California.
 | A guest post by
|