The One-Sentence Version

The Trump administration and Republican-led states are taking a series of unprecedented actions to change the rules of the 2026 elections before they happen: seizing ballots, suing states for voter data, replacing the officials who certified the 2020 results, redrawing congressional maps mid-decade after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act on May 1, suspending an active primary, eliminating an elected office held by an exonerated Black man, and recruiting a sitting Democratic senator to switch parties. Whether these actions add up to election security or to changing the outcome of an election before it happens is the question this article tries to lay out.

Why This Matters Right Now

Midterm elections happen in November 2026. Every seat in the House and a third of the Senate are on the ballot. Whoever controls Congress controls the legislative agenda, the budget, and the power to investigate the executive branch.

The administration’s approval ratings have fallen to the mid-30s.[1] Democrats have flipped 28 state legislative seats since Trump took office; Republicans have flipped zero.[1] A Virginia redistricting referendum backed by Democrats passed on April 21[3] — and by the next morning, Trump had declared it “RIGGED” on Truth Social.[4]

Against that backdrop, the administration has taken a series of actions affecting how the 2026 elections will be run. Some of these actions are routine. Many are not. Several have been blocked by federal courts, including by judges Trump himself appointed.[9]

What You Need to Know First

Who runs elections in America?

Elections in the United States are run by states, not the federal government. Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution gives state legislatures the primary authority over the “times, places and manner” of holding elections. Congress can override state rules, but the president cannot. The executive branch has no constitutional authority to administer elections.

This matters because much of what follows involves the federal executive branch attempting to exert control over state election systems. Whether you think that’s appropriate depends on whether you think there’s a problem that justifies it.

What are midterm elections?

Midterms are federal elections held halfway through a president’s four-year term. The president isn’t on the ballot, but all 435 House seats and about a third of the 100 Senate seats are. The president’s party almost always loses seats. Voters historically use midterms to push back against the party in power.

What Has the Administration Done?

Seized 2020 ballots from a Georgia election office

On January 28-29, 2026, the FBI raided Fulton County’s elections office in Atlanta and seized 700 boxes of 2020 ballots, tabulator tapes, voter rolls, and ballot images.[5] The raid was based on Trump’s claims of fraud in the 2020 election. Those claims had already been rejected by 60+ courts, by his own first-term attorney general (William Barr), and by Republican election officials in Georgia.[6]

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was physically present during the raid.[5] The DNI’s legal role is foreign intelligence. Federal law prohibits the DNI from domestic law enforcement activities. Congressional leaders from both parties questioned why the nation’s intelligence chief was at a domestic ballot seizure.[6]

During the raid, Gabbard called Trump, who spoke to FBI agents on speakerphone.[5] Officials described the call as a “pep talk” from the president to agents raiding a county election office.[5]

Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes responded: “This administration is weaponizing law enforcement for the purpose of satisfying the president’s obsession with his 2020 election loss.”[5]

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican (the same official Trump pressured in the 2020 “find 11,780 votes” phone call), urged Georgians to “focus our efforts on building a safer, more affordable future” rather than “wasting time and tax dollars trying to change the past with baseless and repackaged claims.”[5]

In April 2026, the same Fulton County faced a third action. On April 17, the Department of Justice issued a subpoena requiring the county’s election board custodian to appear in federal court with “the full election staff roster, including names, home addresses, email addresses, and personal phone numbers” of everyone involved in the 2020 presidential election. The subpoena could affect nearly 3,000 county employees, temporary poll workers, and volunteers. Fulton County filed a 27-page motion to block the subpoena on May 4. Commission Chair Robb Pitts framed the demand directly: the purpose is “to intimidate workers in our county, to discourage people from voting.” He vowed the county would fight it “with every possible resource.” The same November 2026 midterms will be administered, in part, by the people whose home addresses and personal phone numbers the federal government is now demanding by name.[32]

Sued 30 states for voter data

The Department of Justice filed lawsuits against 29 states plus the District of Columbia, demanding complete voter registration records.[9][1] The data requested included full names, home addresses, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, driver’s license numbers, and complete voting histories.[1]

The administration said this was necessary to verify citizenship status and prevent noncitizen voting. Critics noted that the scale of the data request, covering tens of millions of voters, went far beyond what any fraud investigation would require, and that the DOJ planned to share the data with the Department of Homeland Security.[1]

As of May 2026, the DOJ is 0-for-8 in courts on these lawsuits.[9][48] Judges have dismissed cases in California, Oregon, Michigan, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and, on May 21, Maine and Wisconsin.[9][48] The Rhode Island case was dismissed by Judge Mary McElroy, a Trump appointee, who called it a “fishing expedition,” and the Maine case by Judge Lance Walker, also a Trump appointee.[9][48] Four of the eight judges who have ruled against the DOJ were appointed by Trump.[48] Twelve Republican-led states voluntarily complied with the requests.[1]

U.S. District Judge David O. Carter, dismissing the California case, wrote: “The taking of democracy does not occur in one fell swoop; it is chipped away piece-by-piece until there is nothing left.”[9]

Signed executive orders on federal voter lists and mail-in voting

On March 31, 2026, Trump signed an executive order directing DHS to create federal voter lists for each state and ordering the U.S. Postal Service to send mail ballots only to voters on the approved federal lists.[1][17]

The order was drafted in part by Kurt Olsen, an attorney who was involved in efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.[1]

New Hampshire’s Secretary of State responded: “The Federal Government cannot usurp New Hampshire’s express constitutional authority to run elections.”[1] Arizona’s Secretary of State noted that mail-in balloting was “designed by Republicans” and had “kept the GOP in power” for decades.[1] Twenty-three states and multiple lawsuits challenged the order.[17]

An earlier executive order in March 2025, which attempted to mandate proof of citizenship for voter registration, had already been blocked by federal courts as unconstitutional.[17]

In February 2026, Trump had also declared: “There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not!”[10][11] — asserting executive authority over elections that the Constitution reserves to Congress and the states.

Seized voting machines in Puerto Rico

In May 2025 (reported in February 2026), Gabbard’s DNI office obtained voting machines from Puerto Rico, claiming to investigate Venezuelan hacking.[7] Three Reuters sources confirmed the investigation’s focus.[8] No evidence of foreign interference was found.[7]

Senator Mark Warner of the Senate Intelligence Committee said: “Absent a foreign nexus, intelligence agencies have absolutely no lawful role in domestic election administration. This is exactly the kind of overreach Congress wrote the law to prevent.”[7]

Puerto Rico doesn’t vote in presidential elections. Election security experts noted that seizing machines from a territory where the political stakes are lower could serve as a test run for seizing machines in states.[6]

On May 22, 2026, Reuters reported what that test run was for. Trump administration officials, led by White House election adviser Kurt Olsen, had spent months trying to ban the Dominion voting machines used in more than half of U.S. states by having the Commerce Department declare their components a national security risk, which would have pushed much of the country to hand-counted paper ballots before the midterms. The teardown of the Puerto Rico machines was part of the justification effort; it found chips manufactured in China, Japan, South Korea, and Malaysia, but no Venezuelan code and no evidence of hacking. The plan failed because officials could not find legal grounds for it. About 98% of U.S. election jurisdictions already produce auditable paper records, and University of Michigan election-security expert Alex Halderman said switching to hand counting “would be chaotic and might facilitate cheating.”[50]

Held DHS hostage over the SAVE Act

The SAVE Act (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act) would require documentary proof of citizenship (a passport, birth certificate, or naturalization papers) to register to vote.[12] Trump attached it to DHS funding, creating a 40+ day shutdown that left 240,000 federal workers without pay.[1] Over 480 TSA officers quit during the shutdown.[1]

The administration framed the bill as necessary to prevent noncitizen voting. But noncitizen voting is already illegal under federal law, and the data on its prevalence is clear:

  • The Heritage Foundation’s own voter fraud database documents roughly 85 cases of noncitizen voting out of billions of ballots cast over decades.[19]
  • The Brennan Center for Justice reviewed 23.5 million votes in 2016 and found a noncitizen voting rate of 0.0001%.[20]
  • Kansas, which implemented the exact type of proof-of-citizenship requirement the SAVE Act proposes, blocked 31,000 citizens from registering and caught virtually zero noncitizens.[18]

An estimated 21 million eligible American citizens lack the documents the SAVE Act would require.[12] They are disproportionately elderly, low-income, disabled, rural, and minority voters.[12] Only 21% of households earning under $50,000 have passports, compared to 64% of households earning over $100,000.[12]

When Senate Democrats offered to support a version of the bill, Senator John Cornyn filibustered his own legislation to prevent it from passing.[1] That raised the question of whether the bill’s purpose was election security or a campaign talking point.

Replaced 75 election officials who protected 2020

A ProPublica investigation published in April 2026 found that 75 state and local election officials who played key roles in protecting the integrity of the 2020 election had been removed from their positions.[1] Roughly 24 of their replacements had previously worked to reverse the 2020 results, and 10 had been directly involved in efforts to overturn the election.[1]

The investigation concluded that the guardrails that held in 2020 (career officials who refused to submit to political pressure) have been systematically dismantled.[1] Election experts described the 2026 midterms as an “unprecedented stress test” for American democracy.[1]

Announced arrests over the 2020 election

On April 19, 2026, FBI Director Kash Patel appeared on Fox News and announced that arrests were “coming soon” related to the “2020 rigged election.”[1] He did not name targets or cite specific crimes. The claims underlying the investigation had been rejected by 60+ courts, Trump’s own attorney general, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and multiple nonpartisan fact-checkers.[6]

The institutional structure behind the announcement became visible on May 12, when NOTUS reported the existence of an FBI team that bureau personnel call the “payback squad.” The team’s formal name is the Director’s Advisory Team. It was created in 2025 and works out of an off-site location separate from the FBI’s standard field offices, pulling agents from the New York and Washington field offices on a rotating basis. A senior FBI official confirmed the team’s existence to NOTUS and described its mandate as “getting to the bottom of some abuses of power that happened” during the prior three administrations. NOTUS reported that the team’s next planned product is an indictment of former CIA Director John Brennan on “grand conspiracy” charges, expected within weeks, likely filed in the Southern District of Florida.[42]

On May 17, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche took the framing further. On Fox News with Maria Bartiromo, Blanche said there is “a ton of evidence” the 2020 presidential election was stolen, citing “multiple investigations going on in Arizona, in Fulton County, Georgia.” He also said: “It takes a lot of work to uncover what happened in 2020,” and: “I’m not going to promise there’s going to be a definitive answer.” The 2020 election was reviewed by approximately 60 federal courts (none of which found election-altering fraud), by Trump’s own first-term Attorney General William Barr (who told Trump in December 2020 there was “no there there”), and by CISA, which called the 2020 election “the most secure in American history” under the Trump administration. The Acting AG’s “ton of evidence” framing concedes by its hedging that the DOJ does not in fact have a body of evidence ready for public release. It is a statement designed to validate the 2020-stolen claim while preserving the ability to never produce a finding.[43]

Dismantled election security infrastructure

The administration’s FY2027 budget proposal eliminates CISA’s election security division entirely.[17] The Election Assistance Commission’s technical standards committee, the 15-member body that sets security standards for voting equipment, has nearly half its seats blocked by the administration, leaving no body to update security standards before November.[17]

The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, which enforces the Voting Rights Act, has lost 70% of its attorneys.[17] The voting rights section is operating with minimal staff.[17]

The Post-Callais Coordination (May 2026)

In a single week, May 1 through May 4, 2026, five separate actions changed the legal and practical landscape of the 2026 midterms. They are connected. The Supreme Court’s ruling on May 1 was the legal trigger; everything that followed was an implementation. This is the part of the story that has changed fastest, and it is the part that is hardest to dismiss as routine.

The Supreme Court ruling

On May 1, 2026, the Supreme Court issued a 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais. The ruling struck down Louisiana’s congressional map containing two majority-Black districts and gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the part of the 1965 law that restricted racial gerrymandering and required jurisdictions with histories of racial discrimination to draw districts that allowed minority voters a real chance of electing candidates of their choice. The ruling reversed the legal foundation of Allen v. Milligan (2023), the case that had compelled states like Alabama and Louisiana to draw additional majority-Black districts.

Hours before the ruling came down, all six conservative justices (Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett) attended the white-tie state dinner at the White House for King Charles III. Each brought their spouse. None of the three Democratic-appointed justices attended. Georgetown Law professor Steve Vladeck told MSNBC the timing “does nothing to disabuse the appearance that the court is playing partisan political favors.”[21]

There is one more piece of context about the case worth noting on the public record. The lead plaintiff, Phillip “Bert” Callais, is a non-African-American voter from Brusly, Louisiana and a 2024 member of a local board of supervisors. According to reporting on May 5, he attended Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6, 2021, and posted photos and video documentation from the event on his social media. In December 2025, he posted on X: “This is f#€king insane, non citizens voting in our country,” rhetoric that tracks Trump’s repeatedly-debunked claims about noncitizen voting. The article does not allege he entered the Capitol or participated in violence. It documents that the legal vehicle that delivered the largest Voting Rights Act decision of the modern era was steered by a plaintiff who attended the rally that immediately preceded the most serious attack on the U.S. Capitol since 1814.[33]

Trump’s directive

On Truth Social, Trump publicly told Republican-led states to redraw their maps mid-decade, even at the cost of suspending or rerunning active elections:

“If they have to vote twice, so be it. We should demand that State Legislatures do what the Supreme Court says must be done.”[22]

He projected the outcome:

“The byproduct is that the Republicans will receive more than 20 House Seats in the upcoming Midterms!”[22]

The 20-seat projection matters because the projected House majority margin in 2026 is small enough that a coordinated mid-decade gerrymander across the targeted states would, by Trump’s own framing, decide control of the chamber before any votes were cast. The targeted states he was pressuring: Louisiana, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee.[22][23]

Louisiana suspends its primary

On May 1, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry signed an executive order suspending the state’s U.S. House primaries, scheduled for May 16 and June 27, citing the Callais decision. More than 100,000 absentee ballots had already been sent to voters across the state. Some had already been completed and returned. Those ballots may now be invalidated retroactively.[24]

Civil rights groups, the ACLU, the Elias Law Group, and a Louisiana candidate filed parallel emergency challenges. On May 2, the 19th Judicial District Court in East Baton Rouge denied an emergency restraining order to keep the primary on the ballot. Marc Elias, a longtime voting-rights attorney, called the situation “both a redistricting power grab and a dry run for authoritarian election subversion this fall.”[24]

Landry on social media after Trump praised his action: “If there is one thing the Republican Party should learn from President Trump — it’s to FIGHT!”[24]

Florida signs a 24-of-28 map

On May 4, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a new mid-decade congressional map. The map gives Republicans a partisan advantage in 24 of Florida’s 28 U.S. House districts, about 86% of the delegation. Republicans currently hold 20 of the 28 seats; the new map adds four more.[25]

The same day, voters represented by the Elias Law Group and other firms filed Equal Ground Educ. Fund v. Byrd in Leon County Circuit Court. The lawsuit argues the map violates Section 20 of the Florida Constitution, which prohibits drawing districts “with the intent to favor or disfavor a political party or incumbent.” The amendment was passed by Florida voters by referendum in 2010 specifically to prevent this kind of mid-cycle redrawing.[25]

The complaint describes the new plan as “one of the most extreme gerrymanders in American history.” Map-drawer Jason Poreda, a DeSantis aide, testified to the Florida legislature that he used partisan data “mixed in” across the entire map during the “final balancing” phase. Plaintiffs argue that statement is itself a constitutional violation.[25]

Alabama convenes a special session

Alabama Governor Kay Ivey called a special session to redraw the state’s congressional map. The session is considering two options: revert to a 2023 map that would leave one majority-Black congressional district, or draw a new map eliminating both majority-Black districts entirely. Alabama House Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter and Senate President Garlan Gudger Jr. publicly stated the legislative goal: to “eliminate both congressional seats currently held by Black Democrats.”[26]

Alabama is currently bound by a court-ordered agreement to use its existing two-majority-Black-district map until 2030, the result of Allen v. Milligan. The Callais ruling is the legal hook the state is using to revisit that order. Meanwhile, the state’s May 19 primary election is moving forward despite the redistricting uncertainty. Black voters filed opposition to expedite Alabama’s request to change maps, citing voting already underway. If courts rule for Alabama on new maps, voters may have cast ballots in May 19 districts that no longer exist by November.[26]

Louisiana eliminates an elected office held by an exonerated Black man

On May 1, the same day he suspended the state primary, Governor Landry quietly signed legislation abolishing the longstanding New Orleans criminal court clerk position, days before Calvin Duncan, the Democrat who won that election with 68% of the vote in November, was scheduled to take office on May 4.

Duncan, 63, spent nearly 30 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. His murder conviction was vacated in 2021 after evidence emerged that police officers had lied in court. His name is on the National Registry of Exonerations. He campaigned on fixing the system that wrongly convicted him.[27]

The bill’s Republican author, state Sen. Jay Morris (whose district is several hours from New Orleans), told the legislature openly in April that the goal was to “implement the clerk consolidation before Duncan took office, preventing him from starting a four-year term.” Morris: “It’s unfortunate for Mr. Duncan, I concede that. He seems very nice, but we don’t make policy around here for just one person.”[27]

A federal judge issued a temporary restraining order Sunday allowing Duncan to take office Monday morning. Louisiana appealed to the Fifth Circuit (widely considered the most conservative federal appellate court in the country), which froze the order. Duncan: “Now, this bill tells people exactly what they had believed, that their vote doesn’t count.”[27]

New Orleans is a Democratic-leaning city with a predominantly Black electorate. Republican legislators argued the consolidation was about saving money: about $27,000 for the state and $233,000 for the city, with $1.17 million in state expenditures shifted to the parish. The legislative auditor’s office described the long-term cost effects as “unknown.”[27]

Trump tries to recruit Fetterman to switch parties

Less directly tied to Callais but part of the same week’s pattern: on May 4, The New Republic reported that Trump has personally directed Senate Republicans to attempt to recruit Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman to switch from Democrat to Republican, a move that would help preserve the GOP’s slim Senate majority. Sean Hannity revealed the pitch on Fox News in March: that Fetterman “is gonna be run as a Republican, he’s gonna have our full support, more money than he ever dreamed of.” Sens. Dave McCormick (R-PA) and Katie Britt (R-AL) were named as offering to help with the recruitment, which included a party endorsement and what was described as a “financial windfall.”[28]

Fetterman, asked May 4 by Politico, said: “I’m not changing. I’m a Democrat, and I’m staying one.”[28]

Party-switching by elected officials is a long-recognized feature of American politics. The notable thing in this case is the framing: the recruitment is one tool among many being used in the same week to engineer the partisan composition of Congress before the election. The Fetterman push closes when he says no. The redistricting effort, the primary suspension, and the elected-office elimination remain open paths.

Who Will Certify the 2026 Elections?

A separate but related story about the 2026 midterms involves the people who will run them. The Constitution gives state officials, not the federal government, the primary role in administering and certifying election results. In 2020, those officials (secretaries of state, governors, and attorneys general from both parties) refused to bend under pressure. Some of them are no longer in office.

On May 4, NPR published an exclusive analysis from States United Action, a nonprofit that has tracked candidate positions on the validity of the 2020 election since 2022. The analysis identified at least 53 candidates who have publicly denied the 2020 election results currently running for office in 23 states, including five presidential swing states, for the offices that have a direct role in certifying future elections.[29]

In Arizona, the GOP front-runner for governor, Rep. Andy Biggs, voted against certifying the 2020 results in the U.S. House and reportedly called a key Arizona state lawmaker at the time about ways to interfere with the certification process. People who have denied 2020 results are running for all three of Arizona’s critical statewide certification roles: governor, secretary of state, and attorney general.[29]

In Georgia, Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who refused Trump’s 2020 request to “find” 11,780 votes, will leave office. In Michigan, Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, who had armed protesters outside her home in the weeks after the 2020 voting ended, will also leave. Both swing states will elect new secretaries of state and governors this year. Both currently have election deniers in the running for those jobs.[29]

States United CEO Joanna Lydgate: “We’ve watched these state officials on both sides of the aisle stand up and push back when Trump has tried to interfere with elections and election results in the past. We know that they will do that again. But it’s incredibly important that we elect people who believe in our system and who believe in free and fair elections.”[29]

The number of election deniers running this cycle is actually down from 2022. Lydgate attributes that to candidates realizing election denial is “a bad campaign strategy” in competitive races. A 2022 NPR analysis found that Republican secretary of state candidates who denied 2020 results underperformed other GOP candidates by roughly 3 percentage points in competitive states. The deniers running anyway are concentrated in either Trump-by-double-digits states or in crowded primaries where candidates are seeking Trump’s endorsement.[29]

Brendan Fischer, who leads research on efforts to undermine elections at the Campaign Legal Center: an “election denial infrastructure” has cropped up since 2020 — “an energized and active force within Republican politics” that Republican candidates “need to be at least somewhat responsive to.”[29]

The Judges Who Would Hear the Cases

A separate test of the system played out in the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 4 and 5, 2026. Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) asked four of Trump’s federal judicial nominees a direct question: does the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution bar a sitting president from running for a third term? None of the four (John Marck, Jeffrey Kuntz, Arthur Roberts Jones, and Michael Hendershot) affirmed that it does. Marck’s answer: “I would have to review the actual wording…”[34]

The 22nd Amendment, ratified in 1951 specifically to prevent indefinite presidencies after Franklin Roosevelt’s four terms, is unambiguous on its face: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.” The amendment is one of the shortest, plainest provisions of the modern Constitution. It does not turn on novel statutory interpretation, contested legislative history, or contemporary cases of first impression. A federal judicial nominee who cannot answer the question in a Senate hearing on the merits is sending a signal — to a confirming Senate, to a watching president, and to the public record — that the answer is unsettled.[34]

The context that makes those answers consequential: Trump has now made the third-term claim repeatedly. February 25, 2026 (State of the Union): “this should be my third term.” February 27 (Corpus Christi): “we’re entitled to it, because they cheated like hell in the second.” May 4 (small-business summit): “When I get out of office in, let’s say, eight or nine years from now…” Reuters early 2026: “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.” The 22nd Amendment is the constitutional ceiling on those statements. The judicial nominees being asked are the people who would, if confirmed, sit in judgment of any future challenge to a third-term run.[34]

Joyce Vance, a former federal prosecutor and University of Alabama law professor, warned against dismissing the nominees’ refusals as “mere trolling.”[34]

The Emergency-Powers Architecture

A New York Times opinion piece on May 5, 2026 by Thomas B. Edsall pulled together the legal mechanisms several constitutional-law experts say have been assembled in the background of the elections themselves. The piece is sourced through Joel McCleary (founder of Keep Our Republic), Elizabeth Goitein (senior director of the Brennan Center’s liberty and national security program), Jonathan Winer (a former U.S. special envoy and Clinton-era deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement), Shalev Gad Roisman (a law professor at the University of Arizona), and Kenneth Mayer (a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison). It draws on McCleary’s April 23 report and Winer’s April 29 Washington Spectator essay.[31]

The experts describe a three-tier architecture. Each tier is real. Each was put in place openly. Each layer expands what the next can do.

Tier 1: NSPM-7

National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, signed September 25, 2025, directs the Department of Justice, Treasury, IRS, and other federal agencies to investigate, prosecute, and disrupt groups designated as domestic terrorist organizations. The memorandum’s stated targets are conduct animated by “anti-Americanism, anticapitalism and anti-Christianity… extremism on migration, race and gender; and hostility toward those who hold traditional American views on family, religion and morality.” It does not mention right-wing extremist violence.[31]

There is no statutory category of “domestic terrorist organization” in federal law. Congress has not created one. The memorandum cites no statute and no constitutional provision; it asserts the designation power under Trump’s claim that the president can direct the executive branch as he sees fit. McCleary describes NSPM-7 as the most concerning of the three tiers because “it operates in plain sight but outside any legal framework. Unlike a national emergency declaration, it doesn’t activate defined statutory powers — it asserts authority that no statute grants. Unlike PEADs, it isn’t waiting for a catastrophic trigger — it’s already operational.”[31]

Tier 2: National emergency declarations

A presidential declaration of national emergency unlocks statutory authorities contained in 137 different provisions of law. These statutes give the president broad powers in areas including communications, banking, and detention.[31]

The primary check on a national emergency is a congressional resolution to terminate it. Goitein describes that as “a very weak constraint, as Congress would have to muster a veto-proof supermajority.” Courts can also serve as a check on the actions taken pursuant to an emergency, but the Edsall piece notes courts are typically reluctant to second-guess the underlying determination that an emergency exists.[31]

Tier 3: PEADs

Presidential Emergency Action Documents are draft executive orders, directives, and communications prepared in advance for a particular type of emergency. They are classified. They were first created during the Eisenhower era as part of nuclear-war contingency planning.[31]

McCleary’s April 23 report describes them this way:

“These powers — codified in classified presidential emergency action documents — allow a single individual to suspend fundamental constitutional rights, detain civilians, seize property, impose martial law and censor communications. They require only a presidential signature. No prior congressional approval is needed. No court reviews them before activation. No statutory mechanism exists for Congress to restrict or terminate these powers once invoked.”[31]

There is no statutory or constitutional limit on the number of PEADs a president may create, the subjects they may address, or the scope of authority they may claim.[31]

How the experts say it could be used

Jonathan Winer’s April 29 Washington Spectator essay describes a hypothetical sequence applied to the 2026 elections:

  1. Trump declares the results rigged, as he did in 2020 and as he has already done about Virginia’s 2026 redistricting referendum.
  2. Compliant federal authorities require investigation of those results before they are finalized.
  3. Trump calls on House and Senate leadership to organize the chambers as if Republicans won, ignoring jurisdictions still under federal review.
  4. The attorney general directs the FBI and the Joint Terrorism Task Force to treat coordinated demonstrations as organized political violence, identifying organizers and mapping funding.
  5. Federal agents make mass arrests at protests, regardless of whether violence has occurred.
  6. The largest existing federal detention infrastructure (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) holds the arrested.
  7. The administration takes over communication systems, seizes property, and freezes bank accounts.[31]

McCleary points to the FY2025 budget appropriation of $45 billion for immigration enforcement, including $38.3 billion for ICE facility construction — a 265% increase over the prior fiscal year. He argues that the scale “far exceeds the needs of the department,” raising the question of whether “the administration plans extrajudicial removal without hearings — which requires emergency authority to bypass due process protections” or whether “the infrastructure is being built for a purpose or scale beyond what immigration enforcement alone would justify.”[31]

Two developments this week add operational evidence to that argument. On May 5, the administration shut down the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, the independent watchdog office, required by law, that reviews complaints about civil rights abuses, excessive force, and other misconduct in ICE and CBP detention. The office’s complaint-filing website is offline. ICE recently told Congress it plans to hold at least 99,000 people in detention on any given day in FY2026 and FY2027, with DHS calling 100,000-person daily capacity “critical” to the goal of arresting and removing 1 million people a year.[35] Use of force inside ICE detention has surged 37% from the prior year (a Washington Post analysis); 30+ people died in ICE custody in 2025, the deadliest year in 20+ years; 18+ have died in 2026 so far.[35] Also on May 5, the Senate Judiciary and Homeland Security committees released a $72 billion ICE/CBP/DHS spending package that, by reconciliation, will move on a 51-vote majority.[36]

The point of including these in this section is the structural one Edsall and McCleary make: the operational infrastructure for the kind of post-election scenario they describe is being built and de-constrained at the same time. Detention bedspace expands. The watchdog that would investigate abuse closes. The funding moves. None of these actions requires assuming the worst about anyone’s intent. What they do is shift the practical constraint, in the specific direction the experts identified.

McCleary’s framing for the cumulative picture, which he stresses is not a conspiracy theory but an observation:

“We do not allege secret coordination. We observe public convergence. Each instrument was enacted openly. Their combined effect — mass detention capacity plus terrorism designation of political opposition plus criminal prosecution of association — has no precedent in American law outside wartime.”[31]

What Trump has said publicly

The legal architecture above is consistent with what Trump has said in his own words. Edsall catalogs the statements:

  • Reuters interview, beginning of 2026: “It’s some deep psychological thing, but when you win the presidency, you don’t win the midterms… when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”[31]
  • February 3, 2026 White House bill signing: “Look at the facts that are coming out. Rigged, crooked elections. Take a look at Detroit. Take a look at Pennsylvania. Take a look at Philadelphia… the federal government should not allow that. The federal government should get involved.” Trump on the states: “agents of the federal government to count the votes. If they can’t count the votes legally and honestly, then somebody else should take over.”[31]
  • January 2026 New York Times interview, asked what could stop him from doing what he wanted: “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me, and that’s very good.”[31]

Kenneth Mayer of the University of Wisconsin: Trump “has obliterated the boundaries and guardrails that we had long thought would serve as meaningful constraints on presidential extremism. He is acting as if his will is law, the government and everything in it belongs to him, and everyone owes their allegiance to him, not to the Constitution, the law or the public good.”[31]

Whether the architecture will be used the way the experts describe is not yet known. What is known is that it has been built, that the public statements about its purpose are on the record, and that the constraints on its use (congressional supermajorities, judicial deference to “exclusive” presidential powers) are weaker today than they were a year ago.

Troops at Polling Places

A short exchange in Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s congressional testimony on April 29-30 deserves its own section because it touches the most sensitive question of the cycle: would the federal military be ordered into polling places in November 2026?

Federal law (Posse Comitatus, 18 U.S.C. § 592) prohibits federal troops at voting locations unless their presence is “necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States.” It is one of the oldest legal protections against the militarization of American elections.

At the House Armed Services hearing on April 29, Rep. Jill Tokuda (D-HI) asked Hegseth whether he would comply with a hypothetical Trump order to deploy troops to polling places during the 2026 midterms. Hegseth deflected the hypothetical with a false historical claim:

“I will note that in 2024, troops were depl… — that was Joe Biden by the way, Joe Biden — were deployed to polling locations in 15 states.”

He repeated the claim. The next day, in Senate testimony, Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) challenged him on it. Hegseth said it again: “in 2024, under the Biden administration, 15 states did deploy troops to polling stations.”[30]

CNN’s Daniel Dale fact-checked the claim. CNN contacted all 15 states identified by a Stars and Stripes article that Hegseth’s claim appears to track. Eleven states responded; all said the same thing: National Guard members were not deployed to polling locations in 2024. The Guard’s role was cybersecurity support, internal liaison work with election offices, or, in Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington, the Guard was never actually activated for the 2024 election. (Oregon has been a 100% vote-by-mail state since 1998 and has no traditional in-person polling places.)[30]

Even where state Guards did support 2024 elections, those activations were ordered by state governors, not by President Biden. The federal-government-deployed-troops-to-polling-places framing Hegseth used twice on the record is wrong on the activation authority and on the actual deployments.[30]

Two things stand out about the exchange. First, Hegseth used a false claim to deflect Tokuda’s actual question: would he obey an unlawful order from Trump in 2026? Second, he did not answer the actual question. CNN noted that Trump has not publicly said he plans to deploy troops to polls. The narrative groundwork (a Biden-era precedent for federal-troop deployment to polling places, invented on the record under oath) is being laid anyway.[30]

The Virginia Test

On April 21, Virginia voters approved a referendum to redraw the state’s congressional map.[3] The measure passed 51.45% to 48.55%.[3] By the next morning, Trump posted on Truth Social:

“A RIGGED ELECTION TOOK PLACE LAST NIGHT IN THE GREAT COMMONWEALTH OF VIRGINIA!”[4]

He blamed “a massive ‘Mail In Ballot Drop’“[4]: standard procedure for counting mail ballots, the same process used in every election.

Even Virginia Republicans who opposed the referendum made no effort to question the legitimacy of the result.[2] The margin was clear and the votes were counted normally. But the result was unfavorable, so it was “rigged.”

This matters because Trump had already set the stage. In February, he said he would accept the 2026 midterm results only “if the elections are honest” — and that “if the elections aren’t honest, then something else has to happen.”[11] The Virginia claim is the first concrete application of that framework to a 2026 election.[2]

The Mail-In Voting Question

A significant portion of the administration’s election actions target mail-in voting. Trump has called it “cheating” and signed executive orders restricting it.[15]

On March 23, 2026, Trump cast a mail ballot in a Florida special election.[15] Palm Beach County records confirm this.[15] That same day, he said at a rally in Memphis: “Mail-in voting means mail-in cheating.”[15]

Mail-in voting has been used in the United States for decades. Oregon has conducted all elections entirely by mail since 1998.[15] Utah, Washington, Colorado, and Hawaii do the same. Arizona, a Republican-led state, has offered no-excuse mail voting since 1991, and a majority of Arizona voters use it.[15]

About one in four Republicans voted by mail in the 2024 election.[15] Trump’s proposal to restrict or ban it would disproportionately affect his own voters in states where the GOP built its turnout strategy around mail ballots.[16]

What the Courts Have Said

Federal courts have been the primary check on these actions. Key rulings:

ActionCourt Result
DOJ voter roll lawsuits (8 decided)All 8 dismissed; 4 by Trump-appointed judges[9][48]
March 2025 election executive orderBlocked as unconstitutional[17]
Mass firing of 17 inspectors generalRuled unlawful, reinstatement ordered[17]
March 2026 federal voter lists EOChallenged by 23 states, litigation ongoing[17]
DOJ voter data demandsMultiple states refused; courts backing refusals[9]

Judges appointed by presidents of both parties have rejected the administration’s legal arguments.[9] At least one Trump-appointed judge called the DOJ’s approach a “fishing expedition.”[9] Another warned that democracy is “chipped away piece-by-piece.”[9]

But courts can only rule on cases brought before them, and the administration has responded to each blocked action by trying a different approach.[17] When the election executive order was blocked, Trump escalated to calling for “nationalized voting.”[10] When states refused voter data, the DOJ filed lawsuits.[9] When the lawsuits were dismissed, the FBI raided an election office.[5]

The Counter-Arguments

”Election integrity is important — what’s wrong with securing elections?”

Nothing. Election security is genuinely important. The question is whether these specific actions are designed to secure elections or to control their outcomes. Seizing six-year-old ballots from a county the president lost, suing 30 states for voter Social Security numbers, and threatening to send ICE agents to polling places[13] go well beyond standard election security measures. No previous administration of either party has taken comparable actions.[17]

“Noncitizen voting is a real problem”

Every major study, including those conducted by conservative organizations, has found noncitizen voting to be vanishingly rare.[19][20] The Heritage Foundation’s own database shows roughly 85 cases out of billions of ballots.[19] The system the SAVE Act would create blocked 31,000 eligible citizens in Kansas while catching virtually no noncitizens.[18] The databases used to verify citizenship are unreliable: Virginia’s flagged voters as noncitizens, and 94% of those flagged turned out to be U.S. citizens.[12]

“Mail-in voting has fraud risks”

Mail-in voting fraud rates have been studied extensively and are consistently found to be negligible.[15] Five states conduct all elections entirely by mail with no significant fraud issues.[15] Both parties use mail voting heavily.[15] The president himself votes by mail.[15] The Oregon system has been running since 1998 with an exemplary security record.[15]

“The administration is just enforcing existing law”

Several of the actions described above have been ruled illegal by federal courts.[9][17] The DNI’s presence at the Fulton County raid violated the law governing intelligence agencies.[6] The mass firing of inspectors general violated federal statute.[17] Executive orders attempting to federalize elections exceeded the president’s constitutional authority.[17] Courts have consistently found that these actions go beyond existing law — they violate it.[9]

Where Things Stand Now

Six months before the midterm elections (as of May 4, 2026):

The legal landscape changed last week. The Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais ruling on May 1 struck down Louisiana’s congressional map and gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The decision reversed Allen v. Milligan (2023) and removed the legal floor that previously constrained racial gerrymandering nationally.[21]

Three Republican-led states have moved to redraw their congressional maps mid-decade in coordination with Trump’s directive.

  • Louisiana suspended its U.S. House primaries (May 1). A state court denied an emergency restraining order on May 2. More than 100,000 absentee ballots had already been sent.[24]
  • Florida signed a new map giving Republicans 24 of 28 seats (May 4). Voters sued the same day under the state’s constitutional ban on partisan gerrymandering.[25]
  • Alabama convened a special session to eliminate both of its majority-Black congressional districts. The state’s May 19 primary is moving forward despite redistricting uncertainty.[26]

Trump has publicly projected the result. On Truth Social: “If they have to vote twice, so be it.” And: “The Republicans will receive more than 20 House Seats in the upcoming Midterms!”[22]

Other actions remain in motion.

  • The DOJ has lost all eight voter-roll cases decided so far (0-for-8), four of them before Trump-appointed judges, and continues to press the rest.[9][48]
  • The March 2026 executive order on federal voter lists is being challenged in court by 23 states.[17]
  • FBI Director Patel has announced “imminent” arrests related to the 2020 election, with no details provided.[1]
  • The administration’s budget eliminates CISA’s election security division and leaves the voting equipment standards committee unable to function.[17]
  • Trump officials spent months trying to ban the Dominion voting machines used in more than half of U.S. states and switch the country to hand-counting before the midterms; the plan failed for lack of legal grounds (Reuters, May 22).[50]
  • 75 election officials who protected the 2020 results have been replaced. Roughly 24 replacements were involved in efforts to reverse those results.[1]
  • 53 election-denying candidates are running in 23 states for the offices that certify elections.[29]
  • Defense Secretary Hegseth has twice refused, on the record, to rule out following a hypothetical Trump order to deploy troops to polling places.[30]
  • Constitutional-law experts at the Brennan Center, Keep Our Republic, and the University of Arizona have catalogued the three-tier emergency-powers architecture (NSPM-7 + national emergency declarations + PEADs) that could be used to disrupt the elections themselves. Joel McCleary: “We do not allege secret coordination. We observe public convergence.”[31]
  • The DOJ has subpoenaed Fulton County, Georgia for the names, home addresses, email addresses, and personal phone numbers of nearly 3,000 people who worked the 2020 election. The county filed a 27-page motion to block; commission chair Robb Pitts called the purpose “to intimidate workers in our county, to discourage people from voting.” This is the third major action against Fulton County, after the January FBI raid and Patel’s April “arrests coming soon” announcement.[32]
  • The lead plaintiff in Louisiana v. Callais (the May 1 Supreme Court ruling that gutted the Voting Rights Act) attended Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6, 2021 and posted photos from the day on social media.[33]
  • Four Trump federal judicial nominees have refused to affirm, in Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, that the 22nd Amendment bars a third term. Trump himself made the third-term claim again on May 4: “When I get out of office in, let’s say, eight or nine years from now…”[34]
  • The Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, the independent watchdog for ICE and CBP detention abuse, was shut down on May 5. The same week, the Senate released a $72 billion ICE/CBP/DHS spending package that includes $1 billion for Trump’s White House ballroom routed through the Secret Service as “security” funding.[35][36]
  • May 6: The FBI raided the Portsmouth, Virginia office of Sen. L. Louise Lucas (D), the 82-year-old Senate President Pro Tempore who was the legislative architect of the Virginia redistricting referendum Trump called “RIGGED” two weeks earlier. The stated cause was a “corruption” matter tied to a state cannabis regulatory issue at a dispensary she co-owns. This was the first publicly reported FBI raid on a sitting Democratic state legislator’s office of the second Trump term.[37]
  • May 8: The Virginia Supreme Court 4-3 struck down the voter-approved Democratic redistricting referendum. The court’s reasoning was procedural: Virginia’s “general election” includes the early voting period, and Democrats took the legislative vote on October 31, 2025, after early voting had begun (40% of ballots had already been cast). The new Democratic map, which would have shifted Virginia’s delegation from 6-5 D to as much as 10-1 D, is gone. The current 6-5 D map remains through the 2026 midterms. Trump celebrated the reversal as a “huge win” against a “horrible gerrymander” — the same referendum he had called “RIGGED” on April 22 when it passed. Both the result the voters approved and the result the court reversed are now characterized by Trump as illegitimate or corrupt depending on the direction.[38]
  • May 10: Trump announces an “Election Integrity Army” for the 2026 midterms. On Truth Social: “We will be doing the same again in 2026, but it will be much bigger and stronger.” Trump did not elaborate on who would be part of the army or how large it would be. The post came in response to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s announcement that Democrats are forming an election integrity task force with former AG Eric Holder and election lawyer Marc Elias. Schumer: “Donald Trump knows, his party knows, that they’re at risk of losing this election in 2026, which is why they’re working round the clock to tilt the scales unfairly in their favor.” A Marist poll the same week showed Democrats leading the generic House matchup by 10 points.[39]
  • May 11: Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry on 60 Minutes: nullifying 45,000 already-cast ballots was “not a big deal.” Asked about the 45,000 Louisiana voters whose primary ballots were nullified by his executive order suspending the U.S. House primaries, Landry said: “Well, it’s not a big deal. It’s not my fault.” He added that those voters “will vote again in November.” Landry also told 60 Minutes that anyone with grievances should “take it to the United States Supreme Court.”[40]
  • May 12: The factual foundation of the Supreme Court’s Callais ruling has been publicly identified as wrong. Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion claimed Black voter turnout now exceeds white voter turnout, using that to justify gutting the proof-of-intentional-discrimination requirement under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. University of Florida voting expert Michael McDonald flagged to The Guardian that Alito’s analysis used “voting age population” (the total population over 18, regardless of voter eligibility) instead of comparing only eligible voters. Including ineligible voters (incarcerated individuals, people with felony convictions in disenfranchising states, non-citizens, the unregistered) inflates the denominator for Black populations because Black Americans are disproportionately represented in those categories due to documented criminal-justice and citizenship disparities. When properly accounting for ineligible voters, white voter turnout significantly exceeds Black turnout, and the racial turnout gap has widened since the 2013 Shelby County decision. McDonald: “If I wanted to manipulate the numbers in a way that was favorable to the government’s interest, I would be using voting age population.” The empirical claim Alito’s legal conclusion rested on is incorrect; the post-Callais state-by-state map redrawings rest on it anyway.[41]
  • May 12: The FBI’s “payback squad” (formally the Director’s Advisory Team) becomes public. NOTUS reported that the team, created in 2025, is building criminal cases against former officials seen as Trump’s political enemies, with an indictment of former CIA Director John Brennan on “grand conspiracy” charges expected within weeks. A senior FBI official confirmed the team’s existence and described it as a “special investigative” unit addressing “abuses of power that happened” during the prior three administrations. The team is the institutional infrastructure behind the Patel-announced 2020 arrests already in this article and the Comey indictment from April 2026.[42]
  • May 15: ABC News took every FiveThirtyEight (538) article offline. All 538 URLs now redirect to a generic abcnews.com/politics page. The deleted archive included 538’s 2020 election forecasts, its tracking of Trump’s first-term approval ratings, its statistical methodology for evaluating polls, and the rolling generic-ballot averages that academics and journalists relied on. ABC’s March 2025 layoffs shuttered the 538 brand; the May 2026 step removes the published historical record of the brand. The deletion landed two days before Acting AG Blanche’s May 17 “ton of evidence” 2020-stolen claim on Fox News. The published, methodologically-disclosed record that would be cited to evaluate that claim is no longer at its original URLs.[44]
  • May 17: Acting AG Todd Blanche tells Fox News there is “a ton of evidence” the 2020 election was stolen, then says he can’t promise “a definitive answer.” Blanche said the DOJ has “multiple investigations going on in Arizona, in Fulton County, Georgia.” Asked about timing: “It takes a lot of work to uncover what happened in 2020.” On certainty: “I’m not going to promise there’s going to be a definitive answer.” The framing validates the stolen-2020 claim while preserving the option to never produce a finding. Of note: the AG’s three documented points of reference (about 60 federal courts, Trump’s own first-term AG William Barr, and Trump’s first-term CISA) all found the 2020 election was secure and that there was no election-altering fraud.[43]
  • May 18-19: The Justice Department creates a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to compensate Trump’s allies, with no commitment to bar payments to violent Jan 6 rioters. Pressed by Sen. Chris Van Hollen on whether a Jan 6 pardonee later convicted of five counts of child sex crimes would be eligible for a payout from the fund, Acting AG Blanche declined to say no. The fund is administered by a five-member commission Blanche appoints; recipients’ names will remain “confidential” except in quarterly reports that go only to Blanche. Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA): “looting the Treasury for his own gain.” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), the first Republican leadership rift: “Yeah, not a big fan… I don’t see a purpose for that.” The fund’s relevance to this article: it converts Jan 6 and 2020-era defendants from people charged for election interference into people the federal government pays.[45]
  • May 19: Trump withheld unrelated federal funds from Colorado to pressure Gov. Jared Polis into commuting Tina Peters’ sentence. Peters was the former Mesa County, Colorado clerk convicted in 2024 of breaching her county’s election equipment in pursuit of 2020 election conspiracy theories. She had been sentenced to nearly nine years in state prison. Trump had previously issued her a federal pardon, which had no legal effect because she was convicted of state crimes. Per Votebeat’s reporting, when the pardon did not work, the administration withheld federal money owed to Colorado on unrelated programs. Polis announced the commutation May 19; Peters will be released June 1. Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold: “A clear message is being sent to those willing to break the law and attack our democracy.” Matt Crane, Colorado County Clerks Association: “furious, disgusted, and deeply disappointed.” Peters had been the most prominent state-level accountability case for an actual election-system breach by an election official. The federal pressure campaign (congressionally appropriated funds withheld from a state to extract a personal clemency favor) tracks the pattern that drove the first Trump impeachment in 2019, when $391 million in Ukraine aid was used the same way.[46] On May 20, the Colorado Democratic Party censured Polis, a fellow Democrat, for the commutation, stating that reducing the sentence “under pressure from Donald Trump, is not justice” and that it “sends a message to future bad actors that election tampering has consequences, unless you’re friends with the president.”[49]
  • Louisiana eliminated the elected office of an exonerated Black man who won 68% of the vote, days before he was set to take office.[27]
  • Trump has been pressuring Sen. John Fetterman to switch parties to preserve the GOP Senate majority. Fetterman declined.[28]
  • May 19-20 — Trump removed two Republicans who crossed him and moved against a third, in the same week as the votes above. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) lost his primary 55-45 to a Trump-endorsed challenger the Defense Secretary had personally campaigned for; Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) lost his runoff days earlier after Trump opposed him; and Trump endorsed Ken Paxton over incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in Texas. The relevance to this article is the incentive structure: the price of a Republican breaking with the president on election-related questions is now demonstrated, which bears on whether the congressional majority will use any of its oversight tools before November.[47]
  • May 26, 2026 — Trump-backed Paxton beat Cornyn nearly two-to-one in the Texas Senate runoff, ending three terms for a former Senate Majority Whip and producing Trump’s clearest demonstrated ability to defeat a Senate Republican incumbent. Paxton now faces Democratic state Rep. James Talarico in November.[47]
  • May 28, 2026 — A Trump-appointed federal judge declined to block Trump’s mail-in voting executive order. U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, ruling in the D.D.C., said the plaintiffs had not yet suffered injury because the government had not actually produced a citizenship list and the Postal Service had not yet implemented any new rule. The executive order itself remains in effect. Plaintiffs may refile when the administration takes implementing action. Another federal judge in Boston is preparing a ruling on a similar lawsuit, expected as soon as early June.[51]
  • Trump has already called one 2026 election result “rigged”[4] and has said he will only accept midterm results “if they are honest.”[11]

The administration describes all of these actions as protecting election integrity. Critics, including Republican election officials, Trump-appointed judges, the Republican author of Louisiana’s primary suspension legislation (who said openly he was writing it to prevent one specific elected official from taking office), and nonpartisan election experts, describe them as unprecedented federal and state interference in elections that have not yet happened.[1][9][17][27]

In 2020, the guardrails held. Career officials certified results under enormous pressure. Courts dismissed frivolous challenges. The system worked because the people inside it chose to follow the law.

In 2026, the question is no longer only whether those people are still there. It is also whether the elections themselves — the dates, the maps, the offices on the ballot — will be the ones the voters expected when they registered.[1]

Sources

1. ProPublica: Inside Trump’s Effort to “Take Over” the Midterm Elections (April 2026)

2. Democracy Docket: Election Deniers Claiming Virginia Vote Was “Rigged” (April 2026)

3. NPR: Virginia Voters OK Redistricting (April 2026)

4. Al Jazeera: Trump Calls Virginia Election “Rigged” (April 2026)

5. Atlanta Journal-Constitution: FBI Raids Fulton County Election Office (January 2026)

6. The Bulwark: Warning Signs of Election Interference (February 2026)

7. CNN: Gabbard’s Office Obtained and Tested Voting Machines in Puerto Rico (February 2026)

8. NBC News: Gabbard’s Office Examined Puerto Rico Voting Machines

9. Democracy Docket: Trump DOJ Loses Again, Now 0-for-5 on Voter Roll Cases (April 2026)

10. Washington Post: Trump Calls to “Nationalize Voting” (February 2026)

11. The Independent: Trump Will Only Accept “Honest” Results (February 2026)

12. Brennan Center for Justice: The SAVE Act Analysis

13. The Hill: Bannon Calls for ICE to “Surround the Polls” (February 2026)

14. Newsweek: Warnings on “Nationalizing Elections” and ICE at Polls

15. PolitiFact: Trump Voted by Mail, Then Called Mail-In Voting “Cheating” — Pants on Fire (March 2026)

16. ABC News: Trump Urges Republicans to “Nationalize Voting” (February 2026)

17. Brennan Center: Trump’s Campaign to Undermine the Next Election

18. Brennan Center: Disbanded — Trump’s Voter Fraud Commission (2018)

19. Heritage Foundation: Voter Fraud Database

20. Brennan Center: Noncitizen Voting Study (2017)

21. MSNBC: Supreme Court conservative justices’ attendance at King Charles state dinner raises ethics concerns (April 30, 2026)

22. Democracy Docket: Trump demands states cancel elections, rig maps after Supreme Court Callais ruling (May 4, 2026)

23. The New Republic: Trump Threatens States to Rig Midterm Elections (May 4, 2026)

24. Common Dreams: Louisiana Governor Suspends Elections (May 1, 2026); KATC: Court denies emergency request to continue Louisiana congressional primary (May 2, 2026); Democracy Docket: Louisiana sued for suspending active election (May 2, 2026)

25. Democracy Docket: Voters sue to block Florida’s new map (May 4, 2026); Bloomberg Law: Florida sued over new GOP-favoring congressional map

26. Democracy Docket: Chaos — Alabama prepares to eliminate majority-Black districts while moving forward with elections it may annul (May 4, 2026)

27. The Guardian: Louisiana Republicans eliminate elected office won by Democratic exoneree (May 4, 2026)

28. The New Republic: Trump ordered Republicans to win — John Fetterman switch parties (May 4, 2026)

29. NPR: In many states, election-denying candidates are running to control voting (Miles Parks, May 4, 2026)

30. CNN: Fact check — Hegseth twice made a false claim to Congress about troops being sent to voting places under Biden (Daniel Dale, May 4, 2026)

31. The New York Times: Thomas B. Edsall, The President Is Preparing to Disrupt the 2026 Midterms (May 5, 2026); citing Joel McCleary, “Continuity of Government, Presidential Emergency Action Documents and the Evolution of Executive Emergency Powers” (Keep Our Republic, April 23, 2026); Elizabeth Goitein, Brennan Center for Justice on PEADs; Jonathan Winer, “Emergency Planning: The President Is Preparing to Challenge 2026 Midterms” (The Washington Spectator, April 29, 2026); Shalev Gad Roisman, “President Trump in the Era of Exclusive Powers” (University of Arizona, April 2025).

32. The New Republic: DOJ wants to name every 2020 election worker in Fulton County, Georgia (May 4, 2026)

33. The New Republic: The plaintiff in the Callais Supreme Court case is a January 6er (May 5, 2026)

34. Common Dreams: Trump’s third term — illegal — and his judicial nominees won’t say so (May 5, 2026)

35. The Independent: ICE shuts down office that investigates abuse in detention centers as use of force explodes (May 5, 2026)

36. HuffPost: Republicans push $72 billion bill for ICE — and Trump’s ballroom (May 5, 2026)

37. The New Republic: FBI raids home of top Democratic leader in Virginia redistricting wars (May 6, 2026)

38. Washington Post: Virginia Supreme Court strikes down new House map favoring Democrats (May 8, 2026); The New Republic: Trump blurts vile plot to steal midterms as crushing new poll hits (May 11, 2026)

39. The Independent: Trump announces ‘Election Integrity Army’ for 2026 midterms (May 10, 2026)

40. HuffPost: Jeff Landry on 60 Minutes — Louisiana election suspension ‘not a big deal’ (May 11, 2026)

41. Democracy Docket: SCOTUS used faulty racial voter turnout data to shred Voting Rights Act in recent ruling (May 12, 2026)

42. NOTUS: FBI created ‘Payback Squad’ to handle political cases, sources say (May 12, 2026) and The New Republic: Kash Patel created a ‘payback squad’ just to help Trump (May 13, 2026)

43. Democracy Docket: Attorney General says ‘ton of evidence’ exists of stolen 2020 election, also says he can’t promise a definitive answer (May 17, 2026)

44. New York Times: FiveThirtyEight articles removed from ABC News website (May 16, 2026)

45. Associated Press: Justice Department announces a $1.7B fund to compensate Trump allies in a deal to drop IRS suit (Hussein, Tucker, Durkin Richer, May 18, 2026) and The Independent: Todd Blanche won’t tell Congress if Jan 6 rioters will be paid (May 19, 2026) and The Independent: Senate leader Thune splits with Trump over the weaponization fund (May 19, 2026)

46. Votebeat: Polis commutes Tina Peters’ sentence amid Trump pressure (May 19, 2026)

47. Slate: Thomas Massie’s primary loss and Trump’s hold on the GOP (May 2026) and Politico: Ballroom won’t be funded after Senate GOP drops $1 billion Trump security request, amid anger over the Paxton endorsement (May 20, 2026)

48. Democracy Docket: Trump DOJ loses in Maine, Wisconsin as courts rebuff demand for voter rolls (May 21, 2026)

49. NBC News: Colorado Democrats censure Gov. Jared Polis for commuting election denier’s sentence (May 20, 2026)

50. The New Republic: Trump moves to ban voting machines (May 22, 2026) and HuffPost: Trump officials tried to ban voting machines used in more than half of U.S. states (May 22, 2026)

51. Reuters: Judge allows Trump to implement mail-in voting executive order (May 28, 2026) and NPR: A federal judge in D.C. declines to block Trump’s executive order on voting by mail (May 28, 2026) and NBC News: Judge declines to block Trump’s mail-in voting executive order (May 28, 2026)