Your Periodic Reminder: Rigged Elections Prevent Important Legislative Fixes

The cumulative effect of tolerating, rather than abolishing, rigged elections is evident in today’s Congress

By Seth Keshel, MFEI Special Advisor

February 17, 2026

[Editor's Note: Michigan Fair Elections is honored to have noted election analyst Seth Keshel contributing to our work here in Michigan. In the following Substack post from February 9, Keshel gives us a "big picture" view of what is at stake in election integrity. For those of us in the trenches, it is, indeed, an important reminder. Keshel writes on Substack at

CaptK's Corner. Let 'er rip, Seth.]

Prior to the 2018 midterm elections, turnout figures and political trends were easily predictable. For eight decades leading into them, it wasn’t difficult to establish benchmarks that, if achieved, showed the obvious trajectory of election outcomes, like “if we get this many votes here, we will win.”

Oh, yeah, well the Republicans got smoked in the House that year, right?

For sure - the GOP got crushed, losing 42 seats and handing the House back to Nancy Pelosi. But did you know the GOP, led by the hapless Paul Ryan, had 6 million more votes than they did when they flipped 62 Democrat seats red in the 2010 midterm?

It is quite clear to me that the 2018 midterms were the first pass at what happened to our 2020 election, and since it went with the grain of the standard midterm outcome (president’s party gets clobbered in the House), no one so much as raised an eyebrow - especially since the consolation prize was a Republican expansion of the Senate majority. It took the loss of a monumental historical figure holding the presidency two years later to really wake people up to what a mess our elections have become. A vast majority of Republicans today believe the 2020 presidential election was determined by massive cheating, but most stop short of scrutinizing down-ballot outcomes. In my published figures, Republicans would have won these Senate seats alongside Trump’s reelection in 2020 without the rigging:

• Arizona (McSally)

• Georgia (Loeffler)

• Georgia (Perdue)

• Michigan (James)

• Minnesota (Lewis)

  
  

In 2022, add another:

• Nevada (Laxalt)

In 2024, bake in three more:

• Michigan (Rogers)

• Nevada (Brown)

• Wisconsin (Hovde)

There are other seats on the fringe of my estimates that cause me to hesitate - like both Arizona Senate seats from 2022 and 2024, but I’ll play it conservative for the sake of this exercise. I won’t even get into how many House seats were wiped out through the same tactics, contributing to today’s extremely narrow majority.

Could you imagine Trump today with 62 Senate seats? That is what he would have if he had the 9 above in support of his desired legislation in the Senate. With the SAVE Act looming on the horizon, the impact of election rigging is brought into full focus.

If you’re unfamiliar with the SAVE Act, read this article before advancing further in this one. This piece of legislation is front and center in the battle for election integrity and perfectly captures exactly my frustration with deflated majorities directly linked to electile dysfunction*.

(*when you have difficulty maintaining an election, your election lasts for longer than four days, you have a sudden severe and noticeable lost of interest in voting, and in the worst cases - premature inauguration)

The House has already passed the SAVE Act, but the issue is the 60-vote requirement in the Senate. With 62 Senate seats comprised of today’s 53 GOP seats and the nine ripped off seats listed above, two pathways to passing the SAVE Act would exist:

I. The Hard Way

62 Senators gives room for Susan Collins (Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) to be dead-weight Republicans and still get the bill across, as long as Mitch McConnell votes for it. Otherwise, 59 falls short and J.D. Vance wouldn’t play a role here. Collins, Murkowski, and McConnell would all feel the heat to get it done with the 60 votes because the second option would definitely do the trick.

II. Break Glass in Case of Emergency

You’ve heard of nuking the filibuster, which means using rule changes to lower the number of required votes to pass legislation to a simple majority (50 + Vance). That would allow for Collins, Murkowski, and McConnell to pull the McCain act in today’s Senate with just 53 GOP seats; fortunately for us, Utah’s John Curtis is one of the 49 co-sponsors of the bill and Thune would be the 50th vote, setting up Vance to break what would certainly be a tie, barring John Fetterman deciding he never wants to run for anything as a Democrat ever again.

With 62 Senators, the SAVE Act would be a done deal under the second option.

My sense is that Thune and Republicans don’t want to nuke the filibuster for two reasons:

• Valid concern that the precedent will doom the Senate to tyranny of the majority (but it may happen anyway next time Democrats run the chamber)

• Fear that nuking the filibuster will result in weak Republicans in the chamber refusing to support the bill (like legislators who refused to object to 2020 election certification because of January 6th events)

This is why Thune’s plan, as of now, is to call in a “talking filibuster,” which would end when Democrats can no longer actively engage the chamber in speech. Sounds like rules kids make up on the fly in the yard, but that’s the plan… if and when it gets to a vote.

None of this would be necessary if we had legitimate election outcomes for at least the past three federal cycles. Investigations into the 2020 election are in full swing and now under the watchful eye of DNI Gabbard, but God only knows how many House, Senate, statewide office holder, state legislative, county commission, sheriff, city council, school board, and dog catcher seats have been ripped off while Americans have nodded along with the corruption of voter registration, expansion of mail-in balloting, and promotion of weeks-long early voting periods which serve little purpose other than to provide ample time to collect as many ballots as possible in what amounts to an adult Easter egg hunt.