In the days since President Donald Trump called for the federal government to “nationalize” elections, two former high ranking officials from Pennsylvania, former Gov. Tom Corbett and former U.S. District Court Judge John Jones III, have spoken out.
Both have a history in Republican politics. Corbett was the last Republican governor of the commonwealth, leaving office in 2015, and Jones ran as a Republican for Congress before being appointed to the U.S. District Court bench by GOP President George W. Bush.
But that hasn’t stopped them from speaking out against the party’s current standard bearer, President Trump, especially when it comes to matters pertaining to elections.
The two have been involved with a nonprofit called Keep Our Republic, which was founded in 2020 to push back on unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud through civic education and work with elections officials in swing states.
Corbett and Jones spoke to the Capital-Star about what the U.S. Constitution says about what powers the federal government has to administer elections (unambiguously, very little), and their concerns and hopes for the 2026 election as the Trump administration continues to sow distrust in its potential outcome.
“The constitution’s pretty clear that the manner of the elections is left up to the states, and not to the federal government,” Corbett said. “The president would like to have it differently, but I don’t think he can have it differently.”
Elaborating on his comment that he’d like to “nationalize” elections, Trump named Philadelphia as a county he would like to see the federal government have a presence. Philadelphia was also a target of Trump’s unprecedented efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, cited in numerous failed lawsuits and false claims about widespread fraud.
But Corbett, who also served as Pennsylvania Attorney General, says Article I, Section Four of the Constitution spells out unambiguously that election administration is a power given to states and their legislatures, not the Executive Branch or Congress.
“We can wish to win the lottery, but it’s not gonna happen,” Corbett said of Trump’s goals. “Unless he’s found some scholar who thinks it can be done, and he can say, ‘Well, that scholar says it can,’ I don’t think there’s anything there.”
Trump and his allies notably did cite fringe legal theories in some of their attempts to overturn the 2020 election. However, they did not pass muster in courts.
That’s why Corbett’s not particularly concerned about the federal government taking over elections in part of the state, despite what Trump has said and may even attempt.
“I think the courts would become very involved, very quickly,” Corbett said. “They’re not gonna agree with just allegations. They’re gonna be looking for facts.”
And Corbett is confident that federal courts would uphold state and local governments’ abilities to administer elections on their own terms. As precedent, he cited the dozens of lawsuits brought by Trump in 2020 attempting to have the results of that year’s election dismissed or overturned. Virtually all were thrown out, and a number resulted in disciplinary actions against lawyers working for the president.
But Corbett isn’t convinced Trump’s end goal is to have the federal government administer elections.
“I don’t know the president personally, and I’ve never read his book, “The Art of the Deal,” but I think this is a negotiation tactic on his part,” he said. “I’m not sure what the endgame is at the moment … But I think it’s a political ploy.”
The goal, Corbett said, could be to get access to state voter rolls, or an attempt to push states to require voter ID, something Corbett is in favor of for Pennsylvania.
Still, the former governor acknowledges that Trump’s rhetoric, along with his administration’s push to investigate the 2020 election, despite numerous judges finding no evidence of fraud, have put the country in “uncharted waters.”
“We’ve never been here,” he said. “If you’re asking me for a prediction, to a certain extent, I can’t predict. What I can say is, ‘This is what’s happened in the past.’ And I’m confident that [judges and elections officials] will do what they’re supposed to do — what they’re legally obligated to do — until somebody demonstrates that’s a wrong confidence.”
As a former federal judge, Jones, who is now the president of Dickson College in Carlisle, brings a different perspective to the discussion than Corbett, a former prosecutor. He heard about Trump’s call to “nationalize” elections shortly before appearing on CNN to discuss the U.S. Department of Justice’s “Weaponization taskforce” — a team assembled by the Trump administration to look into prior federal investigations of the president and his allies.
However, just before air, the anchor asked Jones if he could pivot to discuss Trump’s latest comments about the election. Despite some concern from his communications team, Jones agreed to discuss the new topic.
“When I went on CNN central, I said to the anchor who was interviewing me, ‘I mean this respectfully but very directly, the president of the United States needs to read the Constitution,’” Jones said. “It’s pretty clear from the overwhelming pushback since then that everyone recognizes you can not, without a constitutional amendment, ‘nationalize’ elections to the extent the federal government takes over. That’s just a nonstarter.”
Like Corbett, Jones is confident in the ability of U.S. courts to stop the administration from taking illegal steps to exert powers over elections. He points to cases both in the aftermath of the 2020 election and during the current second Trump administration, where lower court judges displayed a willingness to stand up to the president and his policies under difficult circumstances.
“The lower courts have done extremely well with an onslaught of executive orders that have been issued since last year,” he said. “You’ve seen what’s happening in Minnesota. The lower courts are inundated with these cases, and they’re handling them in the face of frankly ICE disregarding court orders … That’s not easy when you’re on the bench.”
However, Jones sounds less optimistic than Corbett about the upcoming election.
“I think that given how imperiled the administration feels it will be with a Democratic majority in Congress, you’re going to see them use every tool in the toolbox to disrupt the election,” Jones said. “I’m sorry to say that, but that’s probably the reality we’re facing.”
Jones cited recent actions by Trump such as seizing material related to the 2020 election from Fulton County, Georgia, another county the president has repeatedly targeted like Philadelphia. He also cited a recent interview in which Trump said he “regrets” not having the national guard seize voting machines following the 2020 election.
Jones also pointed to Jan. 6, 2021, as proof that Trump may be unwilling to accept election results that he doesn’t view favorably. Though following the attack on the U.S. Capitol, Congress passed a law clarifying that the vice president can not, as Trump insisted, overturn the results of an election.
And, he notes, there are steps the federal government can take to influence voting, short of administering an election itself.
“There are ways to sort of chip around the outside of this that I think may predict that there’s some trouble ahead,” Jones said. He pointed specifically to efforts to seize voter role information in states like Minnesota, which Jones noted he struggles to see legal justification for, or how it could make an election safer.
“What are we doing here?” Jones said. “Is this to delegitimize the election consistent with Trump’s narrative? Good luck with that because it’s been investigated and reinvestigated. Or maybe it’s to intimidate people.”
Jones repeatedly pointed to the dozens of failed cases brought by Trump in 2020 , none of which were able to turn up evidence of large-scale voter fraud that Trump continues to allege took place.
And, like Corbett, that history, both in court and in local election bureaus, is what gives Jones hope.
“By and large, my experience is Pennsylvania county commissioners, heads of election bureaus, councilors, solicitors, they really want to get it right,” Jones said. “So despite all the noise, so to speak, I’m going to put my faith in the 67 counties and their ability to conduct an election.”
This story was published by Pennsylvania Capital-Star.