Trump Administration Pushes to Centralize Federal Control Over Elections Ahead of the Midterms

Details

Over the past year, the Trump administration has pursued a multi-front effort to assert federal control over how Americans vote—an authority the Constitution assigns mainly to the states and Congress. The administration cut the federal offices that worked on election security, gutted the bipartisan commission that certifies voting equipment, demanded voter data from most states, seized 2020 ballots in Georgia and later surged 260 FBI analysts onto the case, reached into local election offices in at least eight states, backed legislation and executive orders to require documentary proof of citizenship, and called for Republicans to "nationalize" the vote. Officials justify the campaign as a response to noncitizen voting and a stolen 2020 election. Both claims are contradicted by the available evidence, including audits conducted by Republican officials in Republican-led states.

The campaign unfolds against an unusually direct backdrop. In January, Trump told House Republicans at a party retreat that if they lose the midterms, Democrats "will find a reason to impeach me." With his approval rating near record lows and polling pointing toward possible Republican losses, Democrats who tracked his 2020 efforts have begun asking whether he will accept a result that flips a House that impeached him twice.

Part I — The Claim and Its Origins

The 2020 Election and the Claims That Followed

The current dispute over the 2020 election traces back to a December 2020 meeting at Justice Department headquarters, first reported by ProPublica. In a windowless, fortified room, then–Attorney General William Barr summoned roughly ten experts from CISA, alongside FBI officials, to answer whether the presidential vote could have been hacked. The specialists explained that the Antrim County, Michigan, anomaly Trump had fixated on was a clerk's error, not fraud—a conclusion soon confirmed by a hand count. Barr told Trump as much, then resigned. He was one of many officials, most of them Trump appointees, who declined to bend; the certification was delayed by the January 6 attack but ultimately held.

The Legal Record: 64 Cases

A recurring defense of the fraud claims holds that the courts never actually examined them. That is not accurate. The 2020 cycle produced more than 400 election-related lawsuits nationwide—the most litigated presidential election in recent history—brought by both parties, along with campaigns, activists and voters, over everything from mail-ballot deadlines, drop boxes and poll observers to signature-cure rules and pandemic voting accommodations. Only a fraction sought to overturn the result, and estimates of that fraction range from roughly three dozen to about 70 depending on how they are counted. One tally—a 2022 report titled "Lost, Not Stolen", written by a group of eight prominent conservatives including former federal judge J. Michael Luttig and former solicitor general Theodore Olson—put it at 64 across the six battleground states. Of those 64, Trump and his allies won just one and lost 63: 20 were dismissed on standing or procedural grounds before any hearing, 14 were voluntarily withdrawn, and 30 reached a hearing on the merits, where judges ruled against Trump in all but one. The single case Trump won, in Pennsylvania, concerned a deadline for voters to "cure" missing identification on mail ballots—not fraud—and involved far too few votes to affect the result. Pennsylvania was the epicenter of the litigation; its attorney general at the time, Josh Shapiro, said he went "43-0" defending the state's election in court. Judges who did reach the evidence rejected it directly; a Nevada court found that the plaintiffs "did not prove under any standard of proof that illegal votes were cast and counted."

The Pressure Campaign on Georgia and the Fake Electors

The 2020 result was among the most heavily verified in American history. Every state canvassed and certified its count; Georgia certified Biden's win more than once, the last time on December 7, 2020; the Electoral College met on December 14; and Congress certified the outcome in the early hours of January 7, 2021, after the Capitol attack failed to stop it. Because 98 percent of 2020 ballots were cast on paper, the closest states could check the machine totals against physical records. Georgia counted its presidential ballots three times—an initial tally, a full hand recount of nearly 5 million ballots, and a machine recount sought by the Trump campaign—each confirming Biden, a result Republican Gov. Brian Kemp certified and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger affirmed. In Arizona, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey said Biden had won, and a Maricopa County review commissioned by the Republican-led state Senate reaffirmed his victory—widening his margin—while the Republican attorney general's separate inquiry reached the same result. Trump and his allies lost 63 of the 64 lawsuits they brought to overturn the result before judges appointed by both parties, including at the Supreme Court. Trump's own attorney general, William Barr, said the Justice Department had found no evidence of fraud that would change the outcome, and CISA called the vote the most secure in U.S. history—verdicts rendered by Trump's own government.

"The Boss Is Not Going to Leave"

The intent behind that pressure was later described under oath by lawyers who had worked on it. In a proffer video that ABC News obtained and published in November 2023, former Trump attorney Jenna Ellis—who had pleaded guilty in the Fulton County, Georgia, racketeering case days earlier—told prosecutors that a senior White House official, deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino, said to her at a December 2020 White House gathering that "the boss is not going to leave under any circumstances. We are just going to stay in power." Ellis said the remark came just after she had noted that the Supreme Court had rejected the campaign's election challenges, leaving her with the impression that Scavino "was serious." In her own proffer, Sidney Powell described a December 18, 2020, Oval Office meeting at which plans to seize voting machines were discussed. The episode is one reason Democrats who tracked the 2020 effort now watch the administration's midterm moves so closely.

The Theories and Their Reckoning

The specific stories offered to explain a "stolen" 2020 election have shifted repeatedly even as the underlying assertion stayed fixed. The first wave, in November and December 2020, centered on mail-in fraud, rigged Dominion voting machines, and "illegal" last-minute changes to state voting rules. As those claims collapsed, attention turned to two Atlanta election workers—Ruby Freeman and her daughter Wandrea' "Shaye" Moss, falsely accused of stuffing ballots—and to a cluster of foreign-interference theories, most exotically "Italygate," the claim that an Italian defense contractor used satellites to switch votes, which Trump's own team pressed the Justice Department to chase down. In 2022 came 2000 Mules, Dinesh D'Souza's film alleging paid "mules" stuffed drop boxes; that December, the Twitter Files recast the story as one of government-directed social-media censorship; and from 2024 onward the emphasis swung back to foreign interference—the premise embedded in the draft emergency order described below. Each iteration replaced the last as evidence failed to materialize.

Dominion, Smartmatic, and the Fox Settlement

What did not shift was the outcome once these claims met adversarial scrutiny, where they produced a sustained record of retractions, settlements, and defeats. Fox News paid Dominion $787.5 million in April 2023 to settle a defamation suit over its airing of machine-rigging claims—among the largest known media defamation settlements in U.S. history. Smartmatic, the other voting-technology company named in the fraud claims, settled with One America News in April 2024 and with Newsmax—reportedly for $40 million—that September.

Giuliani, Powell, and the Sanctions

Rudy Giuliani, who spread the Freeman-and-Moss ballot-stuffing story, conceded in July 2023 that his statements about the two women were false, and that December a federal jury ordered him to pay them $148 million. Sidney Powell, who filed the "Kraken" suits alleging a vast Dominion conspiracy, defended against Dominion's defamation claim by arguing in a 2021 filing that "no reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact."

2000 Mules, Gateway Pundit, and the Retractions

The Gateway Pundit, whose founder Jim Hoft published many of the false Atlanta stories, settled with Freeman and Moss in October 2024, and the site—which had insisted for years that the women committed fraud—posted a note from its editor about the resolution. Salem Media pulled 2000 Mules from all platforms and apologized in May 2024 after a Georgia man the film had implicated sued, and D'Souza himself apologized to that man in December 2024.

The Censorship Revival: Hines v. Stamos

The theory that the 2020 result was engineered through a government-coordinated censorship apparatus—advanced in the Twitter Files and by figures such as Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and Mike Benz—produced its own marquee lawsuit, and its own defeat. On May 2, 2023, America First Legal, the group founded by White House aide Stephen Miller, sued on behalf of Jill Hines and the Gateway Pundit's Jim Hoft, alleging that the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) and the Virality Project—research collaborations involving the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington, Graphika, and the Atlantic Council—had run "an unconstitutional censorship scheme" that surveilled and suppressed conservative speech. On July 1, 2026, after court-ordered jurisdictional discovery, U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty of the Western District of Louisiana dismissed the case in full (Hines v. Stamos, No. 3:23-cv-00571-TAD-KDM), holding that the plaintiffs lacked standing and the court lacked jurisdiction over the defendants. The ruling was striking because Doughty had earlier been sympathetic to the censorship theory as the trial judge in Murthy v. Missouri. His opinion found that "discovery has confirmed the absence of any factual basis to conclude the EIP or VP, let alone any particular Defendant, coerced any social media platform to censor Plaintiffs' posts or accounts," and that when Facebook and Twitter restricted the plaintiffs' content, they acted on their own policies rather than at the researchers' direction—one Gateway Pundit post, the court noted, had been labeled by Facebook hours before EIP ever flagged it. Under the Supreme Court's Murthy standard, "coercion is beyond mere communication." The case was dismissed without prejudice.

The dismissal underscored a pattern that runs through the wider fraud narrative: an accusation generates extensive coverage while the eventual exoneration draws little. Even some Republicans have named the contradiction. Pressed in late June 2026 to square the party's continued focus on fraud with its support for the SAVE America Act, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky put it bluntly: "It's ironic that we control the House, Senate, Supreme Court, and the White House—and we're yelling 'election fraud'? … We won all the damn elections."

A Sustained Campaign of False Claims, 2021–2026

Underpinning the institutional moves that followed is a continuous stream of false statements about elections. A Reuters tally found that over roughly six months, Trump claimed the 2020 election was rigged at least 107 times—an average of more than once every two days. Election experts told Reuters the repetition is not incidental but a deliberate effort to build a justification for contesting or intervening in races Republicans could lose in 2026.

The claims have continued into the current cycle. Ahead of California's June primaries, Trump asserted within two weeks that he would have won the state with an honest count, that California does not allow people to vote in person, and that the state mails out 15 million excess ballots—each false, according to a CNN fact-check. California offers in-person voting at polling places and vote centers, and it mails ballots to registered active voters rather than to millions of surplus recipients. The recurring sequence—asserting fraud without evidence, then citing the resulting distrust as grounds for federal action—is what critics describe as manufacturing a predicate.

In late June, Trump went a step further and described directing a federal prosecutor to intervene. Speaking at a Pennsylvania truck facility on June 23 and again in the Oval Office on June 24, he claimed he had called "the very powerful, very good U.S. attorney in California" after the June 2 primary and said, "Do me a favor. Take a look. They are trying to steal that election"—and that the Republican gubernatorial candidate, former Fox News host Steve Hilton, advanced to the November runoff as a result. The account echoed the "do us a favor" phrasing from the 2019 Ukraine call at the center of his first impeachment. No evidence of fraud has emerged in the primary, and it was unclear what a prosecutor could have done to change a vote count; California's slow tallies reflect state laws designed to maximize participation. There is no single U.S. attorney for California, which has four federal districts; on June 5, Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, had announced "multiple election fraud investigations." Hilton said he had no knowledge of any such call, and Los Angeles County's elections chief said no one at the Justice Department had influenced its operations. Gov. Gavin Newsom's office called the remarks an admission that "the President of the United States is personally directing federal prosecutors to start investigations into his political opponents when his preferred candidate may lose the election."

The falsehoods extend to Trump's own popularity, which analysts argue serves the same predicate-building function. In a July 10, 2026 New York Magazine analysis—an opinion column by Intelligencer's Ed Kilgore—the case is made that Trump's "poll denialism" conditions supporters to treat any electoral defeat as fraud: a president this popular, the logic runs, could only lose by cheating. Kilgore documents a pattern of fabricated or cherry-picked numbers: with his approval near all-time lows, Trump posted on June 29, 2026, "Highest Poll Numbers Ever. Even Higher than Election Day," when the Silver Bulletin polling average showed 39.5 percent approval and 57.4 percent disapproval; in November 2025 he claimed the "HIGHEST POLL NUMBERS OF MY 'POLITICAL CAREER'" with no documentation while averages had him at 41 percent; and at CPAC in February 2025 he touted outlier polls in the mid-50s to low 70s when the average stood at 48.7 percent. Kilgore notes the denialism predates 2020 and runs through every race Trump has contested: he claimed massive illegal voting robbed him of a 2016 popular-vote win, recast his roughly 1.5-point 2024 popular-vote margin as a historic landslide, and now attributes Republican defeats in states like California to fraud—showing, in Kilgore's judgment, every sign that he will not accept a Democratic victory in the 2026 midterms.

Part II — What the Evidence Actually Shows

How Officials Detect Voter Fraud

Largely absent from the administration's case is an account of how American elections actually detect illegal voting—the question of how anyone knows the rate is low. The answer is that the system is built from overlapping, independently verifiable checks, most of which leave a paper record.

Registration Screening: HAVA, SAVE, and ERIC

New registrations are matched against government databases: the Help America Vote Act requires every state to keep a centralized registration list and to verify each applicant against motor-vehicle and Social Security records, a check the Social Security Administration performs for 45 states.

At the Polls: ID Requirements, E-Pollbooks, and Signature Matching

Most states verify the signature on every returned mail ballot against the voter's file. Electronic poll books, used across 41 states in 2024, flag anyone who has already voted, and where eligibility is uncertain a voter casts a provisional ballot that counts only after officials confirm it.

There is no national voter-ID requirement. Thirty-six states ask voters for identification at the polls—about two dozen accept photo ID, the rest also accept non-photo documents—while the other fourteen and Washington, D.C., verify identity by signature or other means. Whether such laws matter is among the most heavily studied questions in election research, and the findings cut against both extremes of the debate. The largest analysis—a 2021 study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics drawing on 1.6 billion records across a decade of elections—found that strict ID laws had essentially no effect on turnout overall or for any racial group, and no measurable effect on the already minute rate of fraud. Earlier work had reached more alarming conclusions; a widely cited 2017 study reported that strict laws sharply depressed Latino turnout, but a reanalysis found coding errors that, once corrected, erased the result. A Government Accountability Office study did find modest turnout declines of two to three points in Kansas and Tennessee after they tightened their laws, concentrated among young and Black voters, and a 2017 review concluded the turnout effects are "modest, if any." What the research does not show is that ID requirements catch meaningful fraud—because the fraud they target, one voter impersonating another at the polls, barely exists.

After the Count: Audits, Paper Trails, and Certification

After the polls close, states cross-check their rolls against other states and against federal death records through the Electronic Registration Information Center, and a growing number—15 states use risk-limiting audits and 45 require some post-election review—hand-count random samples of paper ballots to confirm the machine tally. Because about 98 percent of 2024 ballots left a paper trail, those audits and any recount rest on physical evidence. It was this architecture that led federal cybersecurity officials, with their state counterparts, to call the 2020 vote the most secure in American history.

The Fraud Claims, Tested

Noncitizen Voting

The administration frames its actions as enforcement of existing law against noncitizen voting. "Election integrity has always been a top priority for President Trump," White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said, pledging to ensure "only American citizens are voting." On the underlying prevalence, the evidence is unusually one-sided. A Brennan Center study of 23.5 million votes across 42 jurisdictions in 2016 found suspected noncitizen voting in about 30 cases—roughly 0.0001 percent—with 40 of the 42 jurisdictions reporting none. The conservative Heritage Foundation's own fraud database documents only dozens of noncitizen-voting cases over decades against more than a billion votes cast, and analyses of that database find most cases involve lawful permanent residents, often misinformed by officials. Casting a ballot as a noncitizen is already a felony that can lead to prison or deportation, and the federal form requires an attestation of citizenship under penalty of perjury.

The pattern holds in recent state reviews, many run by Republicans. In Utah, Republican Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson's review of all 2.1 million voters found a single noncitizen registrant, who never voted; Henderson, herself once wrongly flagged because she was born abroad to a U.S. service member, said there is no widespread problem. Idaho's Republican secretary of state validated 36 noncitizens out of 1.1 million; Georgia's Raffensperger found 20 of 8.2 million; Louisiana's Republican secretary of state reported 390 registrations and 79 votes spread across decades, calling it not a systemic problem; and Montana identified 23 of about 763,000. In Michigan, a Republican county clerk's claim of 15 noncitizens shrank to four on review, with one verified citizen wrongly placed under criminal investigation. Nationwide, a New York Times analysis found that of 49.5 million registrations run through SAVE, 0.02 percent were flagged as potential noncitizens—a figure that itself includes false positives.

These claims have been tested before. In 2017, Trump's Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, formed to investigate his claim that millions voted illegally in 2016, disbanded within months without producing evidence; a member's court-obtained records showed a draft section on fraud was empty. Stephen Richer, the Republican who oversaw voter registration in Maricopa County, wrote that he found two possible noncitizen votes among 2.5 million registrations and concluded the issue is mostly about scoring political points and fundraising.

Impersonation and "Dead Voter" Claims

In-person impersonation is the rarest documented form of election fraud, for a straightforward reason: it is a felony that yields a single vote and is easily caught, since the impersonator must gamble that the real voter has not already voted and will not notice. A comprehensive canvass by law professor Justin Levitt found 31 credible incidents between 2000 and 2014, out of more than a billion ballots cast; a News21 investigation that reviewed 2,068 alleged fraud cases since 2000 counted ten. One survey experiment found the share of people reporting they had impersonated a voter to be statistically indistinguishable from the share reporting they had been abducted by extraterrestrials. As Levitt summarized it, an American is likelier to be struck by lightning than to impersonate a voter at the polls.

The "dead voter" claim rests on a confusion between a name on a list and a ballot cast. Voter rolls always lag reality, because a death must be certified and reported before a registration can be canceled, and federal law bars states from running systematic purges in the 90 days before a federal election—so some deceased registrants are on the rolls on every Election Day. States find and remove them through death records and the ERIC cross-match, but a dead person's lingering registration is not a vote. When the 2020 claims were actually checked, they collapsed. Georgia's Republican secretary of state investigated Trump's assertion of thousands of dead voters and confirmed four, each a relative who had returned a recently deceased family member's absentee ballot. Arizona's Senate audit alleged 282 dead voters; the state attorney general confirmed one. A Pennsylvania suit claiming more than 21,000 dead registrants conflated registration with voting and was rejected by a federal judge. A Michigan audit found 2,775 ballots recorded from people listed as deceased—0.02 percent of the vote—but 98.5 percent of them had voted legally by mail and then died before Election Day. A Stanford study of 4.5 million records in Washington State found at most fourteen ballots possibly cast for the dead, a rate of 0.0003 percent.

The handful of genuine cases tend to cut against the narrative rather than support it. In Pennsylvania, Bruce Bartman, a registered Republican, requested an absentee ballot in his dead mother's name and cast it for Trump; he pleaded guilty and told the judge he had "listened to too much propaganda." In Nevada, Donald Kirk Hartle, a Republican who publicly claimed someone had fraudulently voted his late wife's ballot—a story amplified by conservative media—turned out to have cast it himself.

Double Voting Across State Lines

The same pattern holds for double voting: a 2020 study in the American Political Science Review estimated roughly one apparent double vote per 4,000 voters in 2012, then showed that a clerical-error rate of just 1.3 percent would account for all of them—and that purging registrations aggressively enough to stop them would cancel more than 300 legitimate registrations for every double vote prevented.

What the Academic Literature Finds

The strength of the case against widespread fraud is that independent methods converge: prosecution records, journalistic case counts, survey experiments, and record-matching audits, each with different blind spots, all land at rates far too low to affect an outcome. The apparent exceptions tend to dissolve on inspection into measurement error. When two researchers used a 2014 survey to estimate that more than a million noncitizens had voted in 2008, other scholars showed that a survey misclassification rate of just 0.1 percent—a few citizens mistakenly checking "noncitizen"—was enough to manufacture the entire result; among respondents who identified as noncitizens consistently across two survey waves, none had cast a validated vote.

None of this means fraud is literally zero, and the honest version of the skeptics' case has real points. Citizenship is generally not cross-checked at the polls, so a determined noncitizen who registers can go undetected for a time; a low count of prosecutions partly reflects how hard detection is, not only how rare the conduct is; and isolated cases genuinely do occur and are prosecuted. The bipartisan 2005 Carter-Baker commission, often cited by mail-voting skeptics, did call absentee ballots "the largest source of potential voter fraud"—though it was ranking a risk within a category that all subsequent data show is tiny in absolute terms, and it did not recommend curtailing mail voting. What the weight of the evidence rules out is not the occasional fraudulent ballot but the premise driving the current campaign: fraud on a scale that could change who wins.

Mail-In Ballots: The Method Gap and the Blue Shift

Why Mail Ballots Lean Democratic

Central to the method's political charge is a fact the attacks rarely acknowledge: mail ballots lean Democratic not because they are fraudulent but because of who chooses to use them. Before 2020 there was little partisan difference in voting by mail. That changed in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic drove a large expansion of mail voting, Trump spent the campaign attacking it as fraudulent, and Democrats urged their voters to embrace it: by that November, nearly 60 percent of Democrats but only about 30 percent of Republicans cast mail ballots, according to MIT's survey of the electorate. The gap has since narrowed as some Republican strategists have promoted early voting—37 percent of Democrats to 24 percent of Republicans voted by mail in 2024—but the partisan split persists. Because the mail pool is disproportionately Democratic, any batch of mail ballots counted on its own tilts blue.

The Red Mirage and the Count-Night Lead

That self-selection, combined with when each kind of ballot is tallied, produces the "red mirage" and "blue shift" that Trump has repeatedly cast as evidence of theft. Ohio State election-law scholar Edward Foley documented the pattern as early as 2013 and found versions of it election after election: because in-person votes—which skew Republican—are usually counted first, while the slower mail and provisional ballots, cast disproportionately by younger, lower-income and more mobile voters who lean Democratic, are counted later, early returns can show a Republican lead that shrinks as the count proceeds. Foley and MIT's Charles Stewart projected the effect would be unusually large in 2020, and it was—magnified in states such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which by law could not begin processing mail ballots until Election Day, so hundreds of thousands of Democratic-leaning mail votes were tallied only after the in-person totals. Trump led Pennsylvania by roughly 690,000 votes early on November 4, 2020, before the mail count erased the margin, and in Wisconsin a batch of absentee ballots reported before dawn reversed his lead. Where states instead let officials process mail ballots before Election Day—as Florida does—the count finishes faster and the shift barely registers, underscoring that the swing is an artifact of counting rules rather than a sign that anything had changed. Trump nonetheless seized on it in real time, demanding that officials "STOP THE COUNT."

What Trump Has Said About Mail Voting

The attack on the method itself has been just as persistent. As the litigation over absentee ballots advanced toward the Supreme Court, Trump repeatedly disparaged mail-in voting with claims that fact-checkers have long debunked. CNN's Daniel Dale addressed several in a March 24, 2026 fact-check. Trump's assertion that mail-in voting is "really dishonest" is false: it is a legitimate method used by legitimate voters—Trump among them—and all available evidence shows fraud rates are tiny, even if slightly higher than for in-person voting. He also mischaracterized what Jimmy Carter and the 2005 Commission on Federal Election Reform (the Carter-Baker Commission, which Carter co-chaired) concluded: Carter never said "you can't have" mail ballots, and the commission did not say cheating was inevitable. Though skeptical of mail voting, the commission highlighted Oregon's successful mail-only elections after it adopted safeguards, recommended ways to make mail voting more secure, and called for further research. Trump's claim that the US is the "only country in the world that does this type of mail-in ballot" is misleading rather than provably false—he did not define "this type"—but dozens of countries use mail-in ballots, and several wealthy democracies, including Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany and Switzerland, permit widespread use. In an April 21, 2026 CNBC interview, Trump extended the pattern to a separate issue, repeating his long-debunked lie that the US is the "only nation" with birthright citizenship; in fact about three dozen countries grant it, including Canada, Mexico and most of South America.

Part III — The Federal Campaign, 2025–2026

"Team America" and the Officials Now in Charge

ProPublica describes a small group of DHS political appointees that called itself "Team America," convened to find federal levers to implement Trump's March 2025 election order. Its core members included David Harvilicz, a DHS assistant secretary overseeing election-infrastructure security who, the outlet previously reported, co-founded an AI company with an architect of the Antrim County hacking claims and has said he wants to ban voting machines. Under him is Heather Honey, who originated the false claim—cited by Trump on January 6, 2021—that more ballots were cast than voters in Pennsylvania in 2020.

At least 11 administration appointees, including Honey, have ties to the Election Integrity Network, the group led by Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who worked to help Trump overturn the 2020 result. Brendan Fischer of the Campaign Legal Center told ProPublica that the election-denial movement "is now interwoven within the federal government," shifting from the "last-minute slapdash attempts" of 2020 to systematic efforts months ahead of an election. A DHS spokesperson disputed that the department's officials sought to advantage Trump, saying they are "focused on keeping our elections safe, secure, and free," and that DHS hires "experts with diverse backgrounds who go through a rigorous vetting process."

One concrete project Team America advanced was running state voter rolls through the Homeland Security tool known as SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) to find noncitizens, and—more recently, per two sources—harnessing a more powerful Homeland Security Investigations tool to search for noncitizen voters and pursue criminal charges. DHS said SAVE flagged more than 21,000 potential noncitizens on voter rolls over the past year and called the system "secure and reliable." Its accuracy, however, quickly became a problem in the states that adopted it.

Dismantling the Election-Security Apparatus

An April 2026 ProPublica investigation by Doug Bock Clark and Jen Fifield, based on interviews with roughly 30 current and former officials, found that at least 75 career officials who did elections work across the departments of Homeland Security and Justice and other agencies have since left, been fired or been reassigned, and that the roughly two dozen people installed in their place include ten who worked to reverse the 2020 vote.

Cuts to CISA and the End of Federal Election Support

CISA, which Trump created in his first term after Russia's 2016 interference, had debunked numerous fraud claims and, with state officials, declared the 2020 vote "the most secure in American history"—a statement that cost its director, Chris Krebs, his job. ProPublica reports that among Trump's first second-term actions was cutting the agency's election work: starting in February 2025, staff focused on disinformation and election safeguards were placed on leave, the agency's election-security assessments were frozen, and the roughly three dozen CISA employees specializing in elections were eventually fired or transferred. Kathy Boockvar, a former Pennsylvania secretary of state, told ProPublica that dismantling CISA "leaves a gaping hole" built over years of bipartisan work. A DHS spokesperson said the changes addressed "a ballooning budget concealing a dangerous departure from its statutory mission" and that CISA still coordinates critical-infrastructure protection.

The reporting traces a wider sweep across the government: the National Security Council's election-security group was eliminated; the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's Foreign Malign Influence Center—which had countered Russian, Chinese and Iranian interference in 2024—was dismantled in August; FBI Director Kash Patel disbanded the bureau's public corruption team and its Foreign Influence Task Force. ODNI said the influence center was redundant and its functions folded elsewhere; the FBI said it "remains committed to detecting and countering foreign influence." But former officials told ProPublica the functions had largely ceased, and Caitlin Durkovich, who ran the NSC's election-security work under Biden, said nearly every capability to support election administrators and stop bad actors had been dismantled heading into the midterms.

Two Justice Department offices that served as internal checks were also cut. The Public Integrity Section, which vetted politically sensitive cases, was reduced from roughly 35–40 lawyers to about two after a wave of resignations that began when leadership ordered the dismissal of corruption charges against then–New York City Mayor Eric Adams (covered in a separate entry); the administration no longer requires the unit to review such cases. The Civil Rights Division's voting section—which enforces anti-discrimination voting law—lost nearly all of its roughly 30 career attorneys after Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon issued a memo redirecting its mission from protecting voting rights to enforcing Trump's election executive order. The administration then staffed the section with conservative lawyers, at least four of whom challenged the 2020 vote or worked with those who did. Anna Baldwin, a former division appellate attorney now litigating against the department at the Campaign Legal Center, called it a depressing reversal of the government's role in nondiscrimination in voting.

Removing the Election Assistance Commission's Leadership

On July 9, 2026, Trump dismantled the leadership of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC), the bipartisan federal panel Congress created after the disputed 2000 election to strengthen and secure voting. The Washington Post reported that Trump fired the commission's two Democratic members—Chair Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland—and accepted the resignation of Republican commissioner Christy McCormick; Votebeat reported the terminations arrived by email stating "your position as Commissioner of the Election Assistance Commission is terminated, effective immediately." With the fourth commissioner, Republican Donald Palmer, having voluntarily left in April 2026 for the Heritage Foundation, the EAC now has zero commissioners. By statute the four-member body may include no more than two members of the same party, and any replacements would need confirmation by the Republican-controlled Senate; the White House did not say whether or when Trump would name successors.

The commission's work bears directly on the midterms: it maintains the national mail voter registration form, tests and certifies voting equipment, distributes federal election-security funds, and issues guidance to state and local officials. Trump's March 2025 executive order had directed the EAC to redesign the federal form to require documentary proof of citizenship—one of the provisions courts blocked. According to the Institute for Responsive Government, a nonprofit cited by the Post, EAC staff can continue certifying equipment, disbursing funds and maintaining the form, but cannot establish new policies or guidelines without commissioners—leaving decisions on voting-system certifications and the federal form effectively frozen ahead of November. ProPublica and NBC News also covered the purge, and Democracy Docket reported election chiefs and lawmakers calling the firings "dangerous," "reckless" and "desperate."

The timing was legally significant: the firings came less than two weeks after the Supreme Court's late-June ruling in Trump v. Slaughter, which allowed Trump to fire a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission and gave presidents broad power over agencies designed to be independent—overturning decades of precedent, though tempered by a same-day decision shielding the Federal Reserve Board. The EAC purge is among the first applications of that ruling to a bipartisan election body, and it could prompt new litigation testing the ruling's reach. "It's an open question about the EAC and the Federal Election Commission" whether bipartisan election agencies retain removal protections, election-law scholar Rick Hasen told Votebeat. The White House said the president "reserves the right to remove individuals that may not be totally aligned with the important task of securing America's elections and ensuring every legal vote is counted." Sen. Alex Padilla and Rep. Joe Morelle, the top Democrats on the committees overseeing election policy, called the move "a blatant part of his plan to politicize our elections," saying Americans deserve elections "not overseen by partisan loyalists and election deniers beholden to Trump."

The Executive Orders and the Courts

Much of the administration's program has run into the courts. Trump's March 2025 executive order sought to require documentary proof of citizenship on the federal voter-registration form, to penalize states counting mail ballots that arrive after Election Day, and to withhold election funds from noncompliant states. On June 24, 2026, U.S. District Judge Denise Casper in Boston permanently blocked most of it, writing that the Constitution "does not grant the President any specific powers over elections" and that the Justice Department had failed to substantiate its claims of "widespread illegal voting." It was the third court to strike the order; judges in Washington, D.C., had previously enjoined the citizenship requirement and barred its application to military voters. The Constitution's Elections Clause assigns the "times, places and manner" of federal elections to the states and Congress, and a Brookings analysis concluded it leaves "no space for presidential authority" over election rules.

Trump's second order, issued in March 2026 after the SAVE America Act stalled in the Senate, would have directed DHS to build federal lists of eligible voters and ordered the Postal Service to deliver mail ballots only to people on those lists. On June 25, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani blocked its key provisions for the 24 jurisdictions that sued, finding that federal agencies "lack the ability to create complete and accurate lists" and that "both Congress and the president lack any role regarding voter eligibility." In blocking the order's attempt to give the Postal Service authority over who could vote by mail, Talwani wrote that the Constitution "does not grant the President any specific powers over elections"—underlining the words "does not" for emphasis, The Atlantic noted. The White House said it expects to "ultimately prevail" on appeal.

The Postal Service moved to implement that order through a proposed rule of its own, released in June, that would have its employees screen mail ballots against state-provided voter lists—and withhold delivery where states refuse to comply. At a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing on June 24, 2026, Postmaster General David Steiner confirmed the consequence directly. Asked by Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) whether the Postal Service would still deliver ballots in a state that declined to hand over its absentee-voter list, Steiner answered: "Under our proposed regulation, no." The admission marked a reversal from his earlier assurance that the agency would "absolutely" keep delivering mail ballots and defer to the courts. Democrats warned the rule would coerce states into surrendering voter data or lose mail voting for millions of Americans; Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) urged Steiner not to let the Postal Service become "a pawn in this authoritarian playbook." The regulation was in a 30-day public-comment period, with a final rule due by the end of July.

The mail-ballot question then reached the Supreme Court directly. On June 29, 2026, in Watson v. Republican National Committee, the Court ruled 5–4 that federal law does not bar states from counting absentee ballots postmarked by Election Day but received afterward, upholding a Mississippi grace period. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee, wrote for a majority that included Chief Justice John Roberts and the three Democratic-appointed justices, over a dissent by Justice Samuel Alito joined by Justices Thomas and Gorsuch and, in part, Kavanaugh. The ruling rejected the reading of Election Day as a ballot-receipt deadline—the theory behind Trump's first executive order and a nationwide Republican litigation campaign that the administration's solicitor general had urged the Court to adopt. It left grace periods intact in roughly 30 states, including 14 and Washington, D.C., that allow them for all mail ballots, before November. Mississippi's Republican attorney general, who had defended the law in court, nonetheless urged state lawmakers to repeal the window. Trump called the decision a tremendous loss and renewed his demand that the Senate pass the SAVE America Act, writing that the only reason to oppose it was "CHEATING."

The SAVE America Act

In Congress, the administration's priority is the SAVE America Act. On February 11, 2026, the House passed the bill 218–213, almost entirely along party lines, with Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar the only Democrat in support—the third straight year the House has approved a version. The measure would require documentary proof of citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, to register to vote in federal elections, a government-issued photo ID to cast a ballot, and would direct states to share registration data with DHS for citizenship checks.

Noncitizen voting in federal elections has been a federal crime since 1996, and registration forms already require applicants to swear citizenship under penalty of perjury. Critics say the documentary-proof requirement would effectively end mail and online registration and burden eligible voters. The Brennan Center estimates more than 21 million voting-age citizens lack ready access to proof of citizenship, and a Bipartisan Policy Center analysis found that 9 percent of eligible voters lack easy access to such documents and that 52 percent of registered voters do not have a passport matching their current legal name—a particular concern for married women who have changed their names. The bill faces a Senate filibuster. Majority Leader John Thune has said it lacks the votes, and beyond the Democrats, five Republican senators—Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, Thom Tillis, Bill Cassidy and Mitch McConnell—have opposed it, several objecting to its near-ban on mail ballots. Trump has pressed Senate Republicans to end the filibuster to pass it, which they have declined to do, and on June 24 he withheld his signature from a bipartisan housing bill—passed by veto-proof margins—until the Senate acts, a move several Republicans called counterproductive. The standoff has since widened: The Atlantic reported in early July that Trump dismissed the housing bill as a "yawn" compared with election legislation, has encouraged Congress to block other measures—including national-security legislation—unless the SAVE America Act, which he has deemed a "National Emergency," is attached, and has left Congress gridlocked over the annual defense-spending bill, with shouting matches and strategy standoffs between the president and Republican lawmakers. Votebeat noted that even the bill's failure could let the administration argue the 2026 results were tainted. Legal scholars add that the Supreme Court held in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council (2013) that voter qualifications are set by the states, not Congress.

"Losing Literally Every Single Case"

By early July, an Atlantic analysis by Toluse Olorunnipa tallied the cumulative record: the Justice Department has lost at least a dozen election lawsuits, and over a two-week span district judges ruled against both of Trump's major voting executive orders, blocked the voter-roll demands, and barred the government's modified SAVE citizenship-verification system. The streak followed Trump's February 13 boast that he had "searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted" and found an "irrefutable" theory that would let him bypass Congress and impose voting rules, including a national voter-ID requirement, for the midterms. "It is losing literally every single case it's involved in," David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research and a former DOJ voting-section attorney, said of the administration. "I can't remember the DOJ or any administration losing more than one or two trial-court cases a year, at the most. We are well into the double digits with this administration, and the year is not even half over yet." A Justice Department spokesperson said the administration is "devoting significant resources" to the litigation, and White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said clean voter rolls were a campaign pledge that is "why millions of Americans sent him back to the White House."

The Atlantic noted the losing streak echoes the aftermath of 2020, when a Washington Post review found 86 judges had ruled against Trump or his supporters within a month of Biden's victory. But it also catalogued where Trump has succeeded in reshaping the electoral landscape: the Supreme Court's Louisiana v. Callais ruling in April gutted the Voting Rights Act and cleared the way for Republican-led states to redraw congressional maps eliminating Democratic-leaning districts with large minority populations; in early July the Court rolled back campaign-finance restrictions on political parties, which Trump hailed as "A BIG WIN FOR REPUBLICANS"; and a Center for American Progress report by Gréta Bedekovics and Devon Ombres found at least 12 states have passed laws since 2024 requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register or mandating citizenship-verification checks. "They're trying to appease Trump in these ways and implement his will in the states," Bedekovics said.

Time now constrains what remains possible through ordinary channels: judges generally frown on major voting-law changes in the weeks before an election, and early voting for the midterms begins as soon as September in some states. That, election officials told The Atlantic, is what drives fear of unprecedented moves outside the legal process—such as seizing voting machines, something Trump has said he regrets not ordering the National Guard to do in 2020, or deploying federal agents to polling places. The courts have proved a solid bulwark so far; whether other institutions and the public hold, the analysis concluded, will determine the sanctity of the vote.

Demanding State Voter Rolls

Since May 2025, the Justice Department has demanded unredacted voter rolls—including driver's-license and partial Social Security numbers—from at least 44 states and Washington, D.C. When most refused or offered only publicly available versions, the department began suing; by spring 2026 it had filed against roughly 30 states, nine of them led by Republicans. Federal judges in California, Michigan and Oregon dismissed the cases, with the California court warning against "the centralization of Americans' information within the Executive Branch." The department separately offered states confidential agreements under which the federal government would flag voters for removal; Eileen O'Connor, a former Voting Section attorney, told Stateline the aim is a national database of every voter. West Virginia's Republican secretary of state, Kris Warner, a Trump ally, said he campaigned against federal overreach and never expected to be fighting the department over his own state's files.

The litigation reached the appellate level for the first time on June 24, 2026, and the result was another loss. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled 2–1 against the Justice Department in its bid to force Michigan to turn over unredacted voter data, including dates of birth, partial Social Security numbers, and driver's-license numbers. Writing for the majority, Judge Andre Mathis—a Biden appointee, joined by Senior Judge R. Guy Cole Jr., a Clinton appointee—held that the 1960 Civil Rights Act the department invoked did not require states to hand over a statewide voter list, and that the government was using a law meant to protect voting rights "for an inverse purpose—to ensure that some people have not voted." Judge John Nalbandian, a first-term Trump appointee, dissented. The decision affirmed a lower-court ruling by Judge Hala Y. Jarbou, herself a Trump appointee. Democracy Docket noted it was the department's first appeals-court loss after nine straight defeats in district courts, setting up a possible path to the Supreme Court.

The defeats have continued, often at the hands of Trump's own appointees. In a ruling blocking the department's push to obtain Pennsylvania's voter data, Chief Judge Cathy Bissoon of the Western District of Pennsylvania wrote that the administration's "efforts have been rebuked by every court to consider them," noting that ten courts had already blocked similar demands in other states—and adding in a footnote that the demands "have yielded one unexpected benefit, namely, bipartisan agreement. Five of the district judges are Trump appointees." Among them is Judge Stephanie Gallagher, a 2019 Trump nominee, who dismissed the department's suit against Maryland, writing that "the Court joins every court to have addressed this issue" in holding that states cannot be compelled to hand over unredacted voter files. Not every state has resisted: The Atlantic reported that at least 10 states have voluntarily turned over the personal information of millions of voters to the Justice Department.

The Minnesota "Ransom Note"

The data demands have at times been tied to immigration enforcement. On January 25, 2026—the day a Border Patrol agent shot and killed a U.S. citizen during operations in Minneapolis—Attorney General Pam Bondi sent Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz a letter demanding several concessions to "restore the rule of law," including handing over the state's voter rolls. State officials read the letter as conditioning relief from federal immigration operations on the data. Secretary of State Steve Simon called it an attempt to coerce the state and "an apparent ransom"; Arizona's Adrian Fontes likened it to organized crime. At a later hearing, the presiding judge said the letter suggested a "quid pro quo," and UCLA's Richard Hasen called it reprehensible, saying it showed immigration enforcement was being used to pressure blue states.

The Citizenship-Check Tool That Flags Citizens

The administration's principal instrument for finding noncitizen voters has itself become a source of error. At Trump's direction, DHS spent 2025 dramatically expanding SAVE—once used mainly to check immigrants' eligibility for public benefits—into a tool that lets states mass-verify voters' citizenship. The March 2025 executive order gave states free access and, under a 30-day deadline, directed U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to partner with DOGE to fold in tightly held Social Security Administration data. A USCIS deputy, David Jennings, told a call hosted by Cleta Mitchell's Election Integrity Network that his team tested and deployed the expansion in two weeks.

A ProPublica–Texas Tribune investigation found that DHS rushed the tool into use before it could reliably determine current citizenship, producing persistent errors—especially for people born abroad, who often receive Social Security numbers years before naturalizing. DHS had to send corrected results to at least five states. In Boone County, Missouri, clerk Brianna Lennon found that more than half of the 74 voters SAVE flagged were citizens—including a man her own staff had registered at his naturalization ceremony. Brian Broderick, who runs the USCIS verification division, conceded the system cannot always find the most current citizenship information but said it was up to states how to use the data, and denied the rollout was reckless. He also acknowledged that voters flagged by SAVE are referred to DHS for possible criminal investigation.

The bulk searches undercut the premise behind them. Across at least seven states with about 35 million registered voters that reported results, SAVE identified roughly 4,200 people—about 0.01 percent—as potential noncitizens, consistent with prior findings that noncitizens rarely register. Many of those were wrong. Texas ran more than 18 million voters through the system and flagged 2,724; at least 87 confirmed citizens across 29 counties were swept up, and more than 5 percent of those checked proved to be citizens. Missouri went further than most, directing local clerks to make flagged voters temporarily unable to cast ballots before confirming the findings; after corrections, St. Louis County's list of 691 fell to 133, and Boone County's 74 dropped to 33. About 70 Missouri clerks from both parties wrote to the state House speaker urging better methods, and in March voting-rights groups sued Texas over the system, arguing it discriminates against naturalized citizens. Lennon said she would not purge voters on the tool's say-so because it is "not ready for prime time."

The courts have now weighed in on the expanded system itself. In one of a string of late-June and early-July rulings against the administration's election program, a federal judge barred the modified SAVE system—which had folded Social Security records and other data on native-born Americans into what was once a noncitizen-focused database—writing that it "knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote."

Law Enforcement Enters the Process

The Fulton County Raid and the FBI Surge

On January 28, 2026, the FBI raided Fulton County, Georgia's election hub, seizing more than 650 boxes of 2020 ballots, tabulator tapes and voter rolls. ProPublica reports the operation was driven by Kurt Olsen, Trump's new director of election security and integrity—a lawyer who worked to overturn the 2020 result in court and was later sanctioned by judges for baseless Arizona allegations. Olsen flew to Georgia to press Paul Brown, head of the FBI's Atlanta field office, to seize the ballots, providing a report assembled by a longtime ally with a history of discredited claims. When Brown's team concluded the case was not strong enough, Brown was given a choice—retire or relocate—and retired. The raid proceeded under his replacement, with a prosecution handled by a Missouri-based U.S. attorney assigned far outside his jurisdiction. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard joined the search and connected the agents by phone to Trump, though the warrant did not allege foreign interference.

An NPR review found the supporting affidavit omitted key findings from earlier Georgia investigations, including a 2024 conclusion that the issues "do not affect the accuracy of the results of the 2020 General Election in Fulton County," which had been confirmed by audit and recount. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, the Republican who rebuffed Trump's January 2, 2021 demand, on a recorded call, to "find 11,780 votes"—one more than Biden's certified winning margin in the state—criticized the probe as an attempt to "change the past with baseless and repackaged claims." The Brennan Center's Wendy Weiser called the raid unprecedented, saying she was aware of no other instance of the federal government confiscating original state election records, and warned it could be "a practice run" for accessing machines or ballots during a future election. The NAACP asked a federal judge to bar the government from using the seized voter data for anything beyond the criminal case. Former Public Integrity Section lawyers told ProPublica they likely would have blocked the investigation had the unit still been intact. A state judge registered his own unease: in February, Judge Robert C.I. McBurney of the Fulton County Superior Court wrote in a terse ruling, "We are left to hope that the bureau and the Department of Justice handle the ballots and related records with the care required to preserve and protect their integrity."

For months afterward the investigation was publicly dormant—no criminal charges resulted from the raid, and the bureau offered no update—though in May the Justice Department demanded the identities of every worker who staffed Fulton County's 2020 election; the county moved to quash, and a judge temporarily blocked the request while litigation continues. Then, on July 2, 2026, the New York Times reported, based on an internal FBI memo, that Director Kash Patel had designated the Georgia probe a "priority" effort and that the bureau was assigning 260 investigative analysts—drawn from field offices across the country—to the case. The memo said the analysts would complete "approximately 708 records checks" by a July 17 deadline, with overtime "including weekends and holidays" authorized and the Atlanta field office providing training. A former senior FBI official told the Times they could not recall an investigative surge of that magnitude outside a sustained command post for an event like an inauguration or a terrorist attack; typical federal cases surge five to ten analysts. Fulton County Commission Chair Robb Pitts called the deployment a "Hail Mary" to keep a sham investigation alive, noting the bureau had held the documents since the night of the raid. Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the reports "raise serious questions about whether the F.B.I. is diverting extraordinary resources to pursue claims about the 2020 election that have already been repeatedly examined and rejected," warning that "politicizing federal law enforcement in service of relitigating a settled election" risks "casting a shadow over the integrity of the 2026 elections before a single vote is cast." Rep. Nikema Williams of Atlanta called the surge "another troubling sign of a pattern in this administration to attempt to toss out, overturn, or cast doubt on election results that do not fit partisan narratives," and Senate Democrats have opened scrutiny of the deployment. Raffensperger responded that "Georgia runs the most secure elections in the nation" and that his office stands ready to assist any investigation that reassures Georgians their votes are counted accurately.

The intelligence apparatus has been enlisted in the same effort. After Gabbard left the ODNI, Trump instructed his new acting director of national intelligence, Bill Pulte, to find and disclose evidence that he actually won the 2020 election. As DNI, Pulte would have access to essentially all of the classified information in the government's possession and the authority to selectively declassify reports—a combination lawmakers fear he could use to release an incomplete or misleading account of 2020 while undermining public confidence in the fairness of the coming midterms. The concern mirrors Warner's warning about the FBI surge: that the machinery of national security is being turned toward relitigating a settled election on the eve of another one. The Senate was scheduled to weigh Trump's nominee to serve permanently as DNI, Southern District of New York U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton, at a hearing later in July 2026.

Pressure on Georgia's Voting Machines

Georgia has simultaneously become a front in the fight over voting equipment itself. Key Georgia Republicans, echoing Trump's hostility to voting machines—his allies' draft emergency order would mandate hand-marked, hand-counted paper ballots nationwide—have pushed to scrap the state's touchscreen ballot-marking devices in favor of hand-marked paper ballots. In July, Raffensperger argued that the evidence points the other way: a statewide audit of all 1.11 million ballots cast in Georgia's June 2026 runoff elections found just 23 discrepancies, every one traced to hand-marked absentee or provisional ballots, while the 1,079,408 ballots completed on touchscreen devices produced zero. "Human beings make human errors. The likelihood of a discrepancy... is greatest when that ballot has been marked by hand," he said, adding, "We run elections with nearly perfect accuracy"—and noting that at the hand-marked error rate, a 5-million-ballot presidential electorate would project roughly 3,500 discrepancies. State Election Board member Carolyn Roddy defended the push to eliminate touchscreens: "It's the opportunity for manipulation... that we're trying to protect against." The Atlanta Journal-Constitution noted the debate unfolds as the administration ramps up pressure on states to change election practices and as the Justice Department has demanded Georgia's voter registration lists.

Reaching Into Local Election Offices, State by State

A second investigation, published by Reuters on April 27, 2026—part of a body of work that won the news agency a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting—found that the administration has gone beyond cutting federal capacity and begun reaching directly into local election administration in at least eight states. Reporters documented federal officials demanding confidential voter records, seeking access to voting equipment, and reviving fraud cases that courts and bipartisan reviews had already rejected. Rather than a single sweeping takeover, Reuters concluded, the administration appears to be testing constitutional limits one state and one county at a time, in a domain run by states and localities since 1789.

The administration has also used the Department of Homeland Security—specifically its Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) unit—to pursue election-fraud inquiries, a role traditionally left to the FBI and Justice Department. In Ohio, a newly competitive Senate battleground, HSI agents obtained voter records from at least six counties, including heavily Democratic Franklin County (Columbus), where an agent collected unredacted data for at least 50 voters—signatures, addresses and partial Social Security numbers—and pressed for information on a local voter-registration group. In Dayton, three agents visited a vocational high school over an uncorroborated, two-year-old claim about a registration drive; the school superintendent, David Lawrence, said he was incredulous and was told fraud allegations were now a priority. A. Scott Brown, a retired HSI supervisor, questioned what such work displaces, asking whether it pulls agents from cases involving exploited children or fentanyl smuggling. DHS said its agents are "actively rooting out and investigating election fraud wherever it can be found."

The push has also unsettled Republican officials in deep-red jurisdictions. In Colorado, a White House–linked lobbyist, Jeff Small—a former chief of staff to Rep. Lauren Boebert—called at least 10 GOP county clerks last summer raising the idea of White House "partnerships," and a follow-up caller who identified as a CISA official sought access to El Paso County's Dominion voting machines; the Republican clerk refused, citing state law. (DHS said Small held no role at the department.) In Missouri, a senior Justice Department civil-rights official sought access to Dominion equipment from at least two clerks, who declined. After the state ran its rolls through federal citizenship screening, clerks in St. Louis, St. Charles and smaller counties found most flagged individuals were citizens, many of them naturalized; one Republican clerk, Clinton Jenkins, said names with "too many vowels" seemed to trigger the list. Jenkins said about 15 Missouri election officials had resigned over 14 months citing stress, a pace he called unprecedented.

Other states fit the pattern. In Nevada, the FBI sought 2020 voter data that did not exist before closing the probe, which Democratic Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar said still left staff afraid. In Arizona, the FBI subpoenaed the state Senate's 2020 audit records and HSI sought the prior attorney general's fraud-probe files. In Connecticut, a Justice Department official directed the state to investigate complaints from a group with a history of unfounded claims. And in Michigan, the department's April demand for Wayne County's 2024 records was refused.

The cumulative effect, officials told Reuters, is intimidation and uncertainty. Administrators described training staff to recognize federal credentials and subpoenas, consulting attorneys, and—in one Colorado county—keeping a glass-breaking tool at the windows in case of evacuation; in Williamson County, Texas, a nonpartisan administrator required police protection after a doctored video drew death threats. UCLA election-law professor Richard Hasen cautioned that subversion is not inevitable but becomes more likely "if the election turns on a few jurisdictions" with disputed results. Many individual probes were refused or quietly closed, and Republican as well as Democratic officials pushed back—but the documented willingness to deploy federal law enforcement against local election offices is what experts say makes November's margins consequential.

A False Predicate: Hegseth's Testimony on Troops at the Polls

The prospect of federal force at the polls surfaced directly in late April, when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made a false claim under oath. At an April 29 House Armed Services Committee hearing, Rep. Jill Tokuda (D-HI) asked whether he would carry out a hypothetical Trump order to send troops to polling places during the midterms—an act, she noted, that federal law (18 U.S.C. § 593) bars except when necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States. After saying he rejected the premise that Trump would issue unlawful orders, Hegseth asserted that under Biden in 2024, troops were deployed to polling locations in 15 states, repeating the claim for emphasis. He made the same assertion the next day in sworn testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, where Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) challenged it.

A CNN fact-check by Daniel Dale found the claim false on multiple counts. Any National Guard support tied to the 2024 election was ordered by state governors, not the president, and every state that responded to CNN said none of its personnel had been stationed at polling places. Instead, Guard members worked out of public view on election cybersecurity or as liaisons, or their state's Guard was not activated at all. Iowa's Guard spokesperson said its personnel assist with cybersecurity from the state emergency operations center—"in a basement"—and have never gone to a polling station; Arizona's said it activated two cyber personnel on standby who were never called upon and sent no one to polling sites. The Pentagon declined to comment. The only recent election in which some states placed Guard troops at polling places was 2020—under Trump—when out-of-uniform personnel filled staffing gaps caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Trump has not announced plans to send troops to the polls, but the episode showed a Cabinet secretary inverting the historical record while declining to rule out a future deployment that statute forbids.

Part IV — Toward November

The July 2026 Primetime Address

The Declassified Files and What They Say

On the evening of July 16, 2026—four months before the midterms, a week after he moved against the Election Assistance Commission, and the night before the FBI's self-imposed deadline in its revived Fulton County inquiry—Trump delivered a primetime address to the nation on what the White House billed as election integrity. After opening on crime, the border and the economy, he turned to 2020, pointing to dozens of declassified intelligence reports posted to whitehouse.gov as he spoke and asserting that China had "compromised" some 220 million voter-registration files between 2020 and 2023 and had interfered in the election. He called the situation a "crisis," said "deep state" officials had concealed the evidence from him during his first term, and promised "swift" action in the days ahead—though he stopped short of alleging that any votes had been changed or any result altered. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt had promised the material would "shock you" and be "backed by facts and by evidence."

The Intelligence Community Assessment: Russia, Not China

The evidence did not match the billing. Voter-registration data of the kind Trump described is largely public and commercially available, and access to it does not let anyone alter a ballot; he presented no proof that any votes had been switched. The declassified reports themselves cut against him. The intelligence community's March 2021 assessment, Foreign Threats to the 2020 US Federal Elections, opens with the finding that there were "no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 US elections, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results." The documents describe influence operations—propaganda and proxies—rather than interference with ballots or machines, and on that count they pointed at Russia: the assessment found Moscow, on Vladimir Putin's authorization, "using a range of measures to denigrate former Vice President Biden" while Kremlin-linked actors sought "to boost President Trump's candidacy"—including, as The Atlantic noted, by circulating claims that mail-in voting was fraudulent and that primaries were "rigged," the very narratives Trump himself would go on to champion. The White House's own comparison chart judged only Russia to have been "observed" targeting election processes, marking China and Iran as taking merely preliminary steps. The China memo Trump spotlighted—that Beijing had taken "low level exploratory steps to undermine" Trump, aimed at hurting him rather than helping Biden—was, its own authors noted in the very next sentence, a minority view that "differs from the IC's judgment that Beijing has considered but not deployed influence efforts"; elsewhere the assessment stated the community "has seen no evidence that Beijing is engaged in an effort to influence the outcome of the presidential election." Trump also passed over a released document describing efforts by Turkey to "covertly influence" US politicians' thinking about the race.

The Venezuela Memo

The other centerpiece document concerned Venezuela—the wellspring of the long-running claim that Dominion and Smartmatic machines were built to flip votes. It undercut that theory too. Trump's own release, a "Summary of Select Intelligence Reporting from 2004–2020 on Venezuela's Electronic Voting Manipulation Capabilities", found that the intelligence "did not definitively confirm that large-scale electronic fraud was successfully executed in specific Venezuelan elections," that the CIA's "baseline assessments" held "other factors better explained electoral outcomes," and that the reporting came from "limited sourcing." The government, in short, could not confirm that Venezuela had rigged even its own elections, let alone any in the United States—and a related 2006 assessment, CNN noted, had found that Venezuela and Smartmatic could not "manipulate the outcome of elections outside Venezuela," and that even manipulating its own required "insider access" to the machines—access no foreign actor has to American elections.

The Noncitizen Numbers

The speech's headline domestic figure held up no better. The White House said DHS had found roughly 250,000 noncitizens registered across four states—California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Nevada—drawn from commercial databases; the department's more reliable check against government citizenship records, the SAVE system, identified about 28,000 across 25 states.

Trump's parallel claims about hackable voting machines fared no better against the record. Reviews of voting equipment have repeatedly found vulnerabilities without evidence any were exploited in 2020; an assessment Tulsi Gabbard commissioned of machines seized from Puerto Rico, which does not vote in federal elections, likewise turned up no vote-flipping. Trump's own CISA director, Chris Krebs, testified in December 2020 that the election was the most secure in American history and called machine-manipulation claims "wild and baseless"; Trump fired him days later and, in an April 2025 executive order, stripped his clearance and ordered him investigated.

John Solomon and the Sourcing

Much of the raw material for the address was assembled by John Solomon, a conservative writer brought into the White House as a special government employee to identify documents for declassification. Solomon has spent nearly a decade at the center of MAGA-era narratives—Uranium One, the Ukraine campaign against Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch that preceded Trump's first impeachment, and 2020 election-fraud claims—many of which collapsed under scrutiny, and he has acknowledged that his declassification work is also meant to aid a Justice Department grand jury pursuing Trump's perceived enemies. Even parts of the pro-Trump media greeted his role warily; the blog Conservative Treehouse appended a "caution" note to its preview of the speech because Solomon was "responsible for the content." Afterward, Solomon himself acknowledged that no votes had been changed in the 2020, 2022, or 2024 elections and that there was no intelligence that Venezuela had tampered with US voting machines; asked whether the 2020 results showing Biden won were accurate, he said, "I'm researching."

Reactions

The politics around the address were unusually fraught for Trump's own party. Republicans, several of whom feared that a renewed fraud focus would hurt them in November, were reported to be bracing for it. Georgia Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, whose 2020–21 victories some in Trump's orbit had suggested he would declare illegitimate, said Trump was "afraid to lose the midterms"; Warnock, noting that Georgia's congressional delegation is majority Republican, pressed the logical hole in the fraud claim—asking how "the same ballots that elected my Republican colleagues" could be legitimate while the ones that elected him and Ossoff were not. The White House, which said the speech would not focus on Georgia, called Ossoff a "total phony." Election experts had doubted anything new would emerge, and the release largely bore them out—"I expect most of this to be just declassified versions of stuff we already knew publicly," David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation and Research had told the Christian Science Monitor. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, who reviewed the released files, was blunter: "I have seen zero new facts. I have seen zero evidence backing any of these claims," he said, calling the release "a repackaged version of all of the stuff that we've known for years." Pressed on why Trump could not accept a 2024 result his own team called secure, Leavitt offered a revealing formulation: 2024, she said, "was too big to rig."

Calls to "Nationalize" the Vote

Trump has been explicit about the goal. On the Dan Bongino Show, he urged Republicans to "take over the voting" in at least 15 places and to "nationalize" elections, and he posted on social media that states are "merely an 'agent'" that must do what the federal government directs. Cabinet officials have echoed the theme: at a February press conference, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said the department had been "proactive to make sure we have the right people voting," a remark border czar Tom Homan declined to defend. At a February 13 rally at Fort Bragg, Trump told uniformed troops to "vote for us" in the midterms and shared the stage with a Senate candidate, despite Defense Department rules barring partisan activity by active-duty service members; most troops did not react.

The Draft Emergency Order

A separate proposal has circulated outside the government. In February 2026, the Washington Post reported that pro-Trump activists who said they were coordinating with the White House were circulating a 17-page draft executive order that would declare a national emergency over elections and, on that basis, ban most mail-in ballots, mandate voter ID, require hand-marked and hand-counted paper ballots, and order voters to re-register with proof of citizenship for 2026. The draft's central premise—that China interfered in the 2020 election—contradicts the U.S. intelligence community, which concluded with high confidence that China did not attempt to change the outcome and that Russia, not China, ran the main foreign influence campaign. Democracy Docket's analysts found the draft also cites a nonexistent provision and statutes that do not grant the powers claimed.

Figures associated with the effort include Florida lawyer Peter Ticktin, who said he had "certain coordination" with the White House, and Jerome Corsi, along with contacts to Michael Flynn, Mike Lindell and Patrick Byrne, all involved in efforts to overturn the 2020 result. Trump said he had "never heard about it." Legal scholars across the spectrum say a president has no such authority, but they also warn that an unlawful order can remain in force during litigation: Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs stood for more than ten months before the Supreme Court struck them down, and an election order issued close to November could disrupt voting before courts intervene.

"The Predicate He Needs": Bannon, Cobb, and What Comes Next

Some who have tracked the campaign read the address less as an argument than as scaffolding. Steve Bannon had said the speech needed to serve as a "predicate" for a "national security emergency executive order" on elections, and has predicted that ICE agents will "surround the polls" in November. Ty Cobb, a lawyer in Trump's first White House, told PBS NewsHour that he read the speech the same way—as adding to "the predicate that he needs to declare an emergency at or about the time of the elections"—and called federal agents at polling places "a virtual certainty." Those are the same instruments the draft emergency order circulating among Trump allies and his earlier musings about federal force at the polls had already foreshadowed. Reviewing the released files, The Atlantic's Tom Nichols concluded that they "actually undermine and refute" Trump's charges, and that for all the foreign adversaries who seek to erode confidence in American elections, "no regime, no spies, no saboteurs have yet matched the damage that America's own president did" that night.

Public Opinion

Polling reveals a more divided and nuanced public than either side's rhetoric suggests. A February Washington Post–ABC–Ipsos poll found that 54 percent of adults—and 55 percent of independents—oppose the federal government taking over election administration and vote-counting in certain states, with only 23 percent in support. An NPR/PBS/Marist survey in March 2026 found 66 percent of Americans confident their state or local government will run a fair and accurate election in November—down from 76 percent in October 2024, with confidence falling among Democrats and independents. At the same time, Trump's messaging has gained traction. An April Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 63 percent of Republicans (versus 9 percent of Democrats) believe the 2020 election was stolen, 82 percent of Republicans agreed that noncitizens cast large numbers of fraudulent ballots, and 62 percent of Republicans favored a federal law-enforcement presence at polling places. Voter-ID requirements drew bipartisan support of 77 percent. Support for actually deploying troops to polling places, however, was low—about 28 percent overall, with Republicans themselves roughly split. Yet the same survey carried a notable counterpoint: roughly 71 percent of Republicans and 79 percent of Democrats remained confident their own ballots would be counted, a confidence researchers link to turnout. The Brennan Center's Derek Tisler captured the core worry of the experts ProPublica interviewed: it is difficult to debunk false claims when they arrive "with the seal of the federal government."