President Trump’s executive order seeking to impose federal oversight on state-run elections is not needed and is not legal. And tasking Elon Musk’s incompetent DOGE team makes it even worse. Voter fraud and multiple votes by the same person in a single election is a largely nonexistent bogeyman of Trump’s. Voting by people who are not U.S. citizens is another disproven fear in the president’s mind. The same for dead people voting (except in Chicago during the old days).

There is no problem here, but involving Musk could create one. From the beginning of his ill-fated tenure in government, Musk has seemed to embrace the Silicon Valley ethos of acting first and asking questions later. Over and over, he seems to lack any understanding of the systems that he’s cutting or reformulating, only realizing after the fact that he has, for example, fired the people in charge of monitoring the nation’s nuclear arsenal.

Having proven that he is not at all up to the task of governmental reform, Musk is apparently going to be given responsibility for overseeing the one thing that undergirds all others: the right to vote, which has been this nation’s bedrock for over two centuries.

We shudder to imagine it. His targeting of Social Security has already apparently suffered from a fundamental misunderstanding of the government’s technology, and the result will likely be that eligible recipients will get booted from the rolls. With voting, there’s no do-over; if and when eligible voters are turned away at the polls, there will almost certainly not be a chance to fix it before the results of the election are declared, disenfranchising those citizens and no do-overs.

In this case, expecting incompetence is actually the more charitable assumption. The more cynical one is that Trump and Musk know this and want to weaponize it to their electoral advantage, intentionally depriving what are understood to be unfriendly voters of their right to to participate in elections with onerous requirements or simply zapping them from the rolls.

Trump has already demonstrated his antipathy to free and fair elections that don’t result in his victory. He, his MAGA political movement and its subservient media apparatus have tried mightily to retrofit the Jan. 6 insurrection into some peaceful protest whose aims were simply to express dissatisfaction, but this isn’t true.

Everyone knew what was happening, and it seemed then that this would be the end of Trump’s political career because he’d finally crossed a line that could not be uncrossed: he attempted to overturn an American presidential election. Trump spent the lead-up to the 2020 election and the months after his loss lying about mass fraud and stolen elections not because he necessarily bought the conspiracies, but because he fundamentally does not believe in this democratic system.

Of course, that all rests on the order functionally going into effect in the first place, which it definitely shouldn’t given that it pretty plainly violates the Constitution and its vesting of the power to run elections in the states and in Congress. Trump has not shown himself too concerned with constitutional or statutory constraints; the courts and Congress don’t have to go along.

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