Republican members of the Senate Armed Services Committee blocked a Democratic effort Thursday to strengthen existing bans on federal troops entering polling stations or seizing ballots or voting machines, two senators told MS NOW.
Democrats called the Republicans’ opposition to the measure “deeply alarming” and predicted that President Donald Trump would deploy federal troops in an effort to interfere in this November’s midterm elections, which polls suggest his party will lose.
“I introduced these amendments to protect our free and fair elections from military interference,” Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., said. “It’s deeply concerning that none of my Republican colleagues on the committee voted to include it.”
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said he feared the party-line vote was a sign that Trump and his Republican allies would try to use the federal troops to sway the outcome of the midterms.
“Republican opposition to barring use of federal troops at the polls is deeply alarming, signaling this extreme step is part of Trump’s agenda to suppress voting,” he said. “I’m fearful about it portending illegal domestic deployment of our military.”
The Republican chairman of the committee, Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., did not respond to MS NOW’s request for comment.
Slotkin said she first proposed that the committee adopt an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, which approves the annual defense budget; the amendment would have prohibited the use of any funds to deploy federal troops to seize ballots, voter rolls, voting machines or other election materials.
After that amendment was voted down, she proposed a second amendment to require that Congress be notified of any deployment of troops to polling places, except for the deployment of U.S. military forces to repel “armed enemies of the United States.”