Voting Rights as a Political Capital in the Donald Trump Era

What began during Donald J. Trump’s first presidency as a reactive justification for losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton - namely, unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud - has since evolved into a central political narrative of the Republican Party. It has served to legitimize a turn toward increasingly restrictive election laws and procedures, presented as necessary safeguards against fraud. This shift tends to rely on procedural justifications and draws on the line of reasoning established by the Supreme Court over the past decade, which has significantly weakened federal protections for voting rights - most notably the Voting Rights Act of 1965 - by prioritizing procedural form over the substantive implications of voter disenfranchisement. Within this context, the rhetoric of electoral integrity, framed through the lens of fraud prevention, has enabled the normalization of restrictive voting practices under the guise of legal legitimacy. Following the 2020 presidential election, this rhetoric materialized through numerous lawsuits filed by Trump and affiliated Republican organizations, targeting voting methods - such as mail-in ballots - as fraud-prone, despite their well-established role in expanding access to the ballot. It also served as a banner under which GOP-controlled state legislatures introduced initiatives to restrict voting procedures between 2021 and 2024. These actions can be interpreted either as attempts to suppress or dilute the opposing party’s electoral power or as efforts to manufacture a problem to mobilize the Republican base. The paper aims to assess how Donald J. Trump and the Republican Party under his leadership frame the issue of voting rights, and what this framing reveals about the potential direction of federal policy in a second Trump administration. It will explore whether the "stolen election" narrative has been strategically deployed as a tool for consolidating political power and examine how it aligns - or conflicts - with the current federal legal framework. It will also consider what further legal or institutional changes might be anticipated. The analysis will be structured around the following research questions: (1) How does the Republican Party’s evolving approach to election law reflect broader strategies of leveraging legal frameworks for partisan consolidation, and what might this suggest about a second Trump administration? (2) In what ways do federal-level interventions under Trump’s leadership represent an escalation and formalization of state-level voter suppression efforts? (3) What risks does the instrumentalization of election law pose for the integrity of democratic elections within the American federal system?