What's Happening to the 2026 Midterm Elections?

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 most of the federal officials who safeguarded the 2020 results, redrawing congressional maps mid-decade after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act on April 29, suspending an active primary, and pitching a sitting Democratic senator on switching 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 who in 2020 declined Trump’s request to “find” 11,780 votes^[29]), 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]

Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version put the words “find 11,780 votes” in quotation marks. Only the word “find” is Trump’s; the rest is our description.

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] By late July 2026 that record had grown to 0-for-18: on July 29, a federal judge rejected the DOJ’s demand for New Jersey’s voter rolls, noting that judges in more than a dozen other states had reached the same conclusion.^[74] By August 3, it was 0-for-20, after a judge dismissed the DOJ’s demand for Colorado’s voter rolls “with prejudice”; of the 20 losses, 12 came from judges appointed by Republican presidents, 8 of them by Trump.^[77] By August 7, the record was 0-for-21, after a judge dismissed the DOJ’s demand for the District of Columbia’s voter list; a Washington State case argued days earlier was still undecided.^[78]

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.

Obtained voting machines in Puerto Rico

In May 2025 (reported in February 2026), a team working for Gabbard investigated Puerto Rico’s voting machines. Three sources told Reuters the aim was to investigate claims that Venezuela had hacked the machines, and that the probe produced no clear evidence of Venezuelan interference.^[136] Gabbard’s office confirmed the investigation but denied a link to Venezuela, saying its focus was vulnerabilities in Puerto Rico’s electronic voting systems. It said federal officials “facilitated the voluntary turnover of electronic voting hardware and software to ODNI for analysis.”^[7]^[8]^[136]

Senator Mark Warner of the Senate Intelligence Committee said: “What’s most alarming here is that Director Gabbard’s own team acknowledges there was no evidence of foreign interference, yet they seized voting machines and election data anyway.”^[136]

Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version quoted Sen. Warner with words that do not appear in the reporting we cite; his quote above is from Reuters. It also said the machines were “seized,” which is Warner’s word; Gabbard’s office describes the handover as voluntary. A paragraph speculating that Puerto Rico was a test run for seizing machines in states has been removed because no source we cite supports it.

On May 22, 2026, Reuters reported that the Puerto Rico machines figured in a larger effort. 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]

The effort outlasted Gabbard herself. She resigned as director of national intelligence, and in June 2026 Trump installed Bill Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and a man with no intelligence background, as acting director. In early July, Pulte began firing dozens of intelligence officials, whom agency leaders described as suspected “deep state” employees. Trump was direct about the assignment, telling reporters he expected Pulte to “find out some things about the rigged elections.” By law the director of national intelligence has no role in domestic elections except cases of foreign interference, and Gabbard had already spent roughly 18 months looking for evidence to support the 2020 claims and found none.^[64]

On July 9, 2026, Trump removed the last three members of the Election Assistance Commission, the small federal agency Congress created after the 2000 election to certify voting systems, maintain the national voter registration form, and distribute election funds to states. The commission is built to be bipartisan, with no more than two members from either party, and it cannot take official action until the Senate confirms replacements. That leaves it frozen in the months before the midterms. Trump had previously ordered the agency to rewrite the national registration form to require documentary proof of citizenship, something most states have never required. A White House official said the president “reserves the right to remove individuals that may not be totally aligned with the important task of securing America’s elections.”^[65]

The 2020 story is also being retold from the top. Trump scheduled a primetime address for July 16 in which he is expected to claim that newly declassified intelligence shows the 2020 election was compromised by foreign interference, an address Pulte reportedly encouraged. The day before, at his confirmation hearing to become the permanent intelligence chief, Jay Clayton repeatedly declined to say that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, saying only that Biden was “certified.” For context: about 60 courts rejected the fraud claims, Trump’s own first-term attorney general found no fraud that would change the result, and Trump’s own cybersecurity agency called 2020 the most secure election in American history.^[66]

Money entered the picture too. Wisconsin’s elections commission, a body of three Democrats and three Republicans, voted 5-1 in July that there is probable cause Elon Musk violated the state’s election bribery law when he offered $1 million payments to voters during the 2025 state supreme court race, and referred the complaints to a county prosecutor. Musk, then a senior Trump adviser, had handed out two $1 million checks at a rally days before that election.^[67]

In late July 2026, Musk moved from past controversy to future spending. The New York Times and Axios reported that he had authorized his super PAC, America PAC, to spend $100 million to $120 million on a get-out-the-vote operation for Republicans in at least eight states, reviving the vehicle he used to spend more than $260 million in 2024. This is legal campaign spending. What drew attention was the scale and the coordination: Axios reported that Musk had been in talks with Trump’s political team about how he could help hold the GOP’s congressional majority, and an America PAC spokesman said the group was “excited to again be part of the team.”^[76]

The promised address happened on July 16, and the documents it rested on are public. In a 27-minute primetime speech, Trump said American elections had been “left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen,” accused China of obtaining 220 million voter records, and said intelligence officials hid it from him. Reviews of the declassified files by CNN, Newsweek, and FactCheck.org found they say something close to the opposite: the documents state China “did not deploy interference efforts” to change the 2020 outcome, describe election systems as difficult to manipulate, and detail a Russian influence effort that worked in Trump’s favor, spreading corruption stories about the Bidens and sowing doubt about mail-in voting. A member of the White House’s own election task force, asked afterward whether any votes were changed, said the intelligence shows “zero evidence that a foreign power flipped the vote in 2020, ‘22, or ‘24.”^[68]

Two follow-ons matter for how the midterms will run. After ABC and NBC declined to put the speech on their broadcast networks, Trump said their licenses should be revoked; the FCC’s own Democratic commissioner called that unconstitutional, and networks do not hold the licenses in any case, their local affiliates do. And a federal appeals court allowed a Trump-backed Postal Service rule to move forward while it is litigated. The rule would require every mail ballot to carry a tracking barcode, require states to send voter data to a federal system, and let the Postal Service refuse ballots that do not meet the new requirements, changes that would have to be in place in the weeks before ballot mailing begins in September.^[69]

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 most of the federal officials who protected 2020

A ProPublica investigation published in April 2026 found that nearly all of at least 75 federal officials who helped safeguard the 2020 results have resigned, been fired or been reassigned.^[1] About two dozen Trump appointees now hold election-related posts; ten worked to reverse the 2020 vote, and the rest are their associates.^[1]

ProPublica concluded that the guardrails and people that held the line in 2020 “would largely be missing” today, though a few guardrails have endured: judges have blocked key parts of a March 2025 executive order on federal control of voting, and some Republican state officials have fought Justice Department lawsuits demanding state voter rolls.^[1] Experts told ProPublica that 2026 will serve as “an unprecedented stress test of the integrity of American elections.”^[1]

Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version said ProPublica found 75 state and local election officials had been replaced and that roughly 24 of their replacements had worked to reverse the 2020 results. ProPublica’s figures concern federal officials: nearly all of at least 75 are gone, and of about two dozen Trump appointees, ten worked to reverse the 2020 vote. It also said the 2020 guardrails had been “systematically dismantled”; ProPublica wrote that they “would largely be missing,” and that a few have endured.

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, “Well, there’s a ton of evidence that the election was rigged,” referring to the 2020 presidential election, and added, “What I can tell you is that we have multiple investigations going on in Arizona, in Georgia — 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. Of the evidence, Blanche said, “That’s not something that DOJ needs to tell you about. There’s been evidence about that for many, many years.” Democracy Docket reported that Blanche could not explain why the Justice Department had not released the evidence to the public.^[43]

Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version misquoted Blanche’s reference to the investigations and characterized his remarks as conceding that the DOJ had no evidence ready for release. His words and Democracy Docket’s reporting now replace that characterization.

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 Week After Callais (May 2026)

In less than a week, April 29 through May 4, 2026, a series of actions changed the legal and practical landscape of the 2026 midterms. The Supreme Court’s ruling on April 29 was the legal backdrop for most of them, but they did not simply follow from it in sequence: Florida’s new map was drafted by the governor’s office before the ruling, in anticipation of it,^[139] and Alabama’s governor called her special session on May 1, two days before Trump’s May 3 “vote twice” post.^[140]^[26] This is the part of the story that has changed fastest.

Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version said these actions were all connected and that everything after the ruling “was an implementation” of it. The record shows Florida’s map was drafted before the ruling and Alabama’s session was called before Trump’s post.

The Supreme Court ruling

On April 29, 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 applies nationwide and had been used to require districts that allowed minority voters a real chance of electing candidates of their choice. The Court held that Section 2, “properly interpreted,” “imposes liability only when circumstances give rise to a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred.”^[137] 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.

Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version described Section 2 as applying to “jurisdictions with histories of racial discrimination.” Section 2 applies nationwide; the Court’s holding is now quoted from the opinion.

Hours before the ruling came down, on the night of April 28, 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 MS NOW that historically it is not uncommon for justices to attend state functions, but that “the problem here” is “the symbolism, that these six justices — and only these six — were there. It does nothing to disabuse the appearance that the court is playing partisan political favorites, an impression this court should be invested in avoiding.”^[21]

Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version misquoted Vladeck, rendering “favorites” as “favors,” and credited the interview to MSNBC. The outlet is MS NOW, and his words are now quoted in full.

Correction (October 2, 2026): An earlier version of this article dated the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision to May 1, 2026. The opinion is dated April 29, 2026. Louisiana suspended its primaries two days later, on May 1.

There is one more piece of context about the case worth noting on the public record. The lead plaintiff, Phillip “Bert” Callais, is described in the complaint as a “non-African American voter” from Brusly, Louisiana; he said in 2024 that he was a member of his local board of supervisors. On May 5, Democracy Docket reported that on January 6 and 7, 2021, he posted photos and a video showing himself on the Capitol grounds at the “Stop the Steal” protest, amid the crowds gathered to block certification of the 2020 election. No report says he entered the building. Reposting an Elon Musk post that promoted a widely debunked claim about noncitizen voting, he wrote: “This is f#€king insane, non citizens voting in our country.”^[138]^[33]

Democracy Docket itself noted that “There is no indication that Callais’ personal views played a role in the Supreme Court’s legal reasoning.” Callais is one of twelve plaintiffs, and Newsweek reported in October 2025 that the suit was organized by attorney Paul Loy Hurd.^[138]

Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version said Callais attended Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally; Democracy Docket, which first reported the story, describes photos and video of him on the Capitol grounds at the protest. It also said the case was “steered” by Callais and called it the largest Voting Rights Act decision of the modern era. He is one of twelve plaintiffs in a lawyer-organized suit, and that ranking has no source, so both claims were removed.

Trump’s directive

On May 3, 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]^[23]

Democracy Docket reported that three states, Alabama, Louisiana and Tennessee, were racing to change their congressional maps after the ruling.^[26]

Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version said Trump was pressuring six named states (Louisiana, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee) as part of a coordinated mid-decade gerrymander that would decide control of the House. We found no source for the six-state list or for that projection, and both were removed.

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.” The plaintiffs’ central evidence is testimony from the map’s drawer, Jason Poreda, a senior analyst in DeSantis’s office, who told the Legislature: “Partisan or electoral performance data was considered, but certainly not at the exclusion of all of the other standards.” The complaint says partisan metrics were “mixed in” across the whole map, including in the “final balancing” of districts. A lawyer for the state Senate countered that Poreda “repeatedly denied drawing the map with partisan intent.” Under Florida precedent, courts can strike down a map if partisan intent plays any role, not just a dominant one.^[25]^[139]

Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version said Poreda testified that he used partisan data “mixed in” across the entire map. “Mixed in” is the plaintiffs’ description in their complaint; Poreda’s own words are now quoted.

Alabama convenes a special session

On May 1, two days after the ruling, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey called a special session to redraw the state’s congressional map; it convened May 4.^[140] According to Democracy Docket, two options were on the table: revert to the Legislature’s 2023 map, which would likely leave one Black-majority Democratic district, or draw a new map likely to make all seven districts Republican. House Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter and Senate President Pro Tem Garlan Gudger said in a joint statement that “we have a responsibility to give our state a fighting chance to send seven Republican members to Congress.” Democracy Docket described that as an aim to eliminate both seats held by Black Democrats.^[26]

Alabama had been bound by a court order 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 used to revisit that order. Meanwhile, the state’s May 19 primary went ahead on the old map. Black voters challenging the map asked the Supreme Court to deny Alabama’s request, citing voting already underway. If courts ruled for Alabama, voters might have cast ballots in May 19 districts that would no longer exist by November.^[26]

In the end, the votes were set aside. After the Supreme Court vacated the court-ordered map, Ivey announced on May 12 that the state would use the 2023 Legislature-drawn map and set special primaries for August 11 in the 1st, 2nd, 6th and 7th districts. Lawmakers approved legislation to nullify the results of the ongoing primaries in those districts, the Associated Press reported.^[140]

Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version put quotation marks around a goal to “eliminate both congressional seats currently held by Black Democrats” and attributed those words to Ledbetter and Gudger. That phrase is Democracy Docket’s characterization; their joint statement spoke of sending “seven Republican members to Congress.”

Louisiana eliminates an elected office held by an exonerated Black man

This was an act of Louisiana’s Republican-led legislature and governor, not of the Trump administration. It is included here because it happened the same week. 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]

Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version presented this story among the administration’s actions on the 2026 elections. It was a Louisiana legislative act, and we have removed it from lists of administration actions elsewhere in this article.

Trump tries to recruit Fetterman to switch parties

Not tied to Callais, but reported the same week: on May 4, Politico reported, citing multiple high-level GOP officials, that Trump and a handful of Senate Republicans were trying to persuade Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman to become a Republican, or at least an independent, to help the GOP keep its slim Senate majority. According to Politico, Trump “has made the sell, offering his patented total and complete endorsement plus a financial windfall.” Trump had already sent the pitch through Fox News host Sean Hannity in March; Hannity relayed Trump’s message that Fetterman would have “our full support, more money than he ever dreamed of.” Sens. Dave McCormick (R-PA) and Katie Britt (R-AL), who are close to Fetterman, were doing much of the courting.^[141]^[28]

Fetterman told Politico: “I’m not changing. I’m a Democrat, and I’m staying one.”^[141]

Party-switching by elected officials is a long-recognized feature of American politics. What drew attention here was a sitting president personally offering an endorsement and money to change a senator’s party and, with it, control of the Senate. Fetterman has not switched. On September 9, he appeared by video at the Republican Party’s midterm convention in Dallas to praise Sen. McCormick, calling himself “a common-sense Democrat,” the AP reported.^[141]

Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version credited this story to The New Republic and said Trump “personally directed” Senate Republicans to recruit Fetterman. Politico reported it first and describes Trump making the pitch, through Sean Hannity and in talks with senators, rather than giving an order. The Hannity quote now uses the wording the outlets agree on. A paragraph describing the effort as one of several tools to “engineer the partisan composition of Congress” was removed because no source connects it to the other actions in this section.

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 recent cycles. Lydgate attributes that to candidates realizing election denial is “a bad campaign strategy” in competitive races. After the 2022 midterms, an NPR analysis found that Republican secretary of state candidates who denied the 2020 results generally underperformed other GOP candidates in competitive states, and a separate States United analysis put the penalty at roughly 3 percentage points. 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]

Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version attributed the roughly 3-point penalty to the 2022 NPR analysis. NPR found that such candidates underperformed; the 3-point estimate comes from a separate States United analysis.

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 April 29, 2026. Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) asked John Marck, one of Trump’s federal judicial nominees and the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas, whether Trump is eligible to run for a third term under the Constitution. Marck replied, “I would have to review the actual wording of it.” Coons then asked the other three nominees (Jeffrey Kuntz, Arthur Roberts Jones, and Michael Hendershot), “Anybody else brave enough to say that the Constitution of the United States prevents President Trump from seeking a third term?” None of them said yes.^[34]^[142]

The 22nd Amendment states that “no person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice.” It was adopted after Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected to third and fourth terms.^[142] 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 exchange came as Trump continued to tease another run. On May 4, he told an audience he would be leaving the White House “eight or nine years from now,” Common Dreams reported. The four nominees, if confirmed, would serve as federal district judges.^[34]^[142]

Joyce Vance, a former federal prosecutor and University of Alabama law professor, said Trump’s declared intention to run for a third term should not be brushed off as mere trolling.^[34]

Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version dated this hearing to May 4 and 5; it took place on April 29. It said Coons asked each nominee directly; he questioned Marck directly and then asked the other three as a group. It said Joyce Vance’s “mere trolling” remark was about the nominees; it was about Trump’s own talk of a third term. Several Trump quotes cited as context (from the State of the Union, a Corpus Christi speech and an early-2026 Reuters interview), a description of the May 4 event as a small-business summit, the amendment’s 1951 ratification date, and the claim that these nominees would rule on any third-term challenge were removed because our sources for this section do not support them.

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:

Trump declares the results rigged, as he did in 2020 and as he has already done about Virginia’s 2026 redistricting referendum.
Compliant federal authorities require investigation of those results before they are finalized.
Trump calls on House and Senate leadership to organize the chambers as if Republicans won, ignoring jurisdictions still under federal review.
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.
Federal agents make mass arrests at protests, regardless of whether violence has occurred.
The largest existing federal detention infrastructure (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) holds the arrested.
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. In early May, the Department of Homeland Security closed the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, an office within DHS that Congress set up to be independent of ICE and CBP and that reviews complaints about civil rights abuses, excessive force, and other alleged misconduct in immigration detention. HuffPost reported the closure on May 4. The office’s complaint-filing website is offline.^[143] 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, Senate Republicans released a $72 billion ICE/CBP/DHS spending package from the Judiciary and Homeland Security committees, moving through budget reconciliation, which needs 51 votes instead of 60.^[36]

Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version said the administration shut the ombudsman’s office on May 5 and described it as an independent office. It is an office within DHS that Congress set up to be independent of ICE and CBP, and HuffPost reported its closure on May 4.

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 prohibits sending federal troops to voting locations unless that is “necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States.”^[30]

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. All 13 states that responded said none of their troops were deployed to polling locations in 2024; the other two, Alabama and Tennessee, did not respond, and CNN said it could not find evidence they sent troops to polling locations. 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 said he plans to send troops to polling locations in any future election.^[30]

Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version said 11 of the 15 states responded to CNN; CNN reports that 13 responded and two did not. It also labeled the polling-place law “Posse Comitatus,” a label our source does not use, and said Hegseth’s claim was laying “narrative groundwork” for a future deployment; that speculation has been removed.

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 a February interview with NBC, asked whether he would trust the midterm results if Republicans lost Congress, he said, “I will, if the elections are honest.” Moments earlier he had said of the states that count votes, “If they can’t do it honestly and it can’t be done properly and timely, then something else has to happen.”^[11] The Virginia claim is the first concrete application of that framework to a 2026 election.^[2]

Correction (October 5, 2026): an earlier version joined these two remarks into one quotation, as if “something else has to happen” were part of his answer about accepting the results. NBC’s transcript shows it came first, about states that cannot count votes honestly.

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:

Action	Court Result
DOJ voter roll lawsuits (21 decided)	All 21 dismissed; 12 by Republican-appointed judges, 8 of them Trump’s^[9]^[48]^[78]
March 2025 election executive order	Blocked as unconstitutional^[17]
Mass firing of 17 inspectors general	Ruled unlawful, reinstatement ordered^[17]
March 2026 federal voter lists EO	Challenged by 23 states, litigation ongoing^[17]
DOJ voter data demands	Multiple 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]^[14] 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] The pattern continued in 2026. In July, DHS claimed roughly 250,000 noncitizens were registered to vote across California, New Jersey, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. Snopes rated the claim False, and New Jersey’s actual figure was about 6,600 people, fewer than 400 of whom had cast a ballot.^[75]

“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 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]

Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version said the DNI’s presence at the Fulton County raid violated the law governing intelligence agencies. We found no source establishing that, and the statement was removed.

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 April 29 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 change their congressional maps or primaries mid-decade.

Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version said these states acted “in coordination with Trump’s directive.” Florida’s map was drafted before the ruling, and Alabama’s session was called two days before Trump’s May 3 post.

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 (called May 1) that legislative leaders said would give the state “a fighting chance to send seven Republican members to Congress.” Lawmakers later nullified the May 19 primaries in four redrawn districts and held special primaries on August 11.^[26]^[140] Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version stated as fact that the session was convened to eliminate both majority-Black districts; that is Democracy Docket’s characterization of the leaders’ stated goal.

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]
Nearly all of at least 75 federal officials who helped safeguard the 2020 results have resigned, been fired or been reassigned. About two dozen Trump appointees now hold election-related posts; ten worked to reverse the 2020 vote, and the rest are their associates.^[1] Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version said 75 officials had been replaced and that about 24 replacements had worked to reverse the 2020 results.
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 April 29 Supreme Court ruling that gutted the Voting Rights Act) posted photos and video of himself on the Capitol grounds at the “Stop the Steal” protest on January 6, 2021, Democracy Docket reported; no report says he entered the building. He is one of twelve plaintiffs.^[138]^[33] Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version said he attended Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally.
At an April 29 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, four Trump federal judicial nominees did not affirm that the 22nd Amendment bars a third term. On May 4, Trump told an audience he would be leaving the White House “eight or nine years from now.”^[34]^[142] Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version placed the hearing on May 4 and 5 and quoted Trump’s May 4 remark in words our source does not use.
In early May, DHS closed the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, an office within DHS set up by Congress to be independent of ICE and CBP.^[35]^[143] The same week, Senate Republicans released a $72 billion ICE/CBP/DHS spending package carrying $1 billion in Secret Service security money; according to a breakdown obtained by Fox News, $220 million of it was for “White House complex hardening,” including security for Trump’s ballroom. After the Senate parliamentarian ruled against the provision on May 16, Republicans dropped it, and Trump signed the roughly $70 billion bill on June 10 without it.^[36]^[144] Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version said the office was shut down on May 5 and that the package included $1 billion for the ballroom. HuffPost reported the closure on May 4, and only $220 million of the $1 billion was tied to the ballroom.
May 6: The FBI searched the Portsmouth, Virginia office of Sen. L. Louise Lucas (D), the 82-year-old Senate President Pro Tempore and one of the Democratic architects of the Virginia redistricting referendum Trump denounced two weeks earlier. The FBI said only that it was conducting a court-authorized search; a person familiar with the matter told the Associated Press it was part of a corruption investigation. Agents also went into a nearby cannabis business Lucas opened in 2021. Lucas said the raid could be political retribution for her redistricting role. Court records later showed that a federal judge had authorized the FBI to monitor her phone from March 6 to April 5, before the referendum vote, The Virginian-Pilot reported.^[37]^[145] Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version gave a “corruption” matter as the FBI’s stated cause; the FBI said only that it executed a court-authorized search, and the corruption description comes from an anonymous source quoted by the AP. It also called this the first publicly reported FBI raid on a Democratic state legislator’s office in the second Trump term, which we could not source.
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 “rigged,” then says he can’t promise “a definitive answer.” Blanche said, “What I can tell you is that we have multiple investigations going on in Arizona, in Georgia — 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.” Democracy Docket reported that Blanche could not explain why the Justice Department had not released the evidence to the public. 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] Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version misquoted Blanche’s reference to the investigations and characterized his remarks as designed to avoid ever producing a finding; Democracy Docket’s reporting replaces that characterization.
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]
Trump has pitched Sen. John Fetterman on switching parties to preserve the GOP Senate majority, offering an endorsement and a “financial windfall,” according to Politico. Fetterman declined.^[141]^[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 to Ed Gallrein, a Trump-endorsed challenger the Defense Secretary had personally campaigned for; Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) lost his primary on May 16 to an opponent Trump endorsed, finishing third, according to NPR; 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]^[146] Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version gave Massie’s margin as 55-45, a figure our sources do not support, and said Cassidy lost a runoff; he lost his primary.
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]
May 29: The FBI visited the homes of Wisconsin election officials. As part of FBI Director Kash Patel’s review of 2020 voting in swing states Trump lost, agents in the Milwaukee area interviewed current and former election officials and, in some cases, showed up unannounced at their homes. An agent left a business card at the home of Michelle Hawley, who directs Milwaukee’s Election Commission; agents also spoke with Robert Kehoe, deputy administrator of the Wisconsin Elections Commission. The questions centered on two claims that have been investigated and found baseless: a flash drive briefly left in a vote tabulator on election night in 2020, and an account of a “secret room” where someone supposedly printed ballots for Joe Biden. Local officials said they worried the bureau would try to seize Milwaukee’s 2020 absentee ballots, as it did in Fulton County, Georgia. That worry is sharper in Wisconsin, where state law numbers absentee ballots in a way that could let someone match a ballot back to an individual voter. The chair of the state elections commission, Ann Jacobs, said, “Our secret ballot is secret for a reason… It’s sacrosanct.”^[54]
June 2: The Postal Service published the rule that would put the mail-in order into effect. The day after Judge Nichols declined to block the executive order, the Postal Service published a proposed rule in the Federal Register to carry it out. Under it, a state would have to give the Postal Service the name and address of every voter due to receive a mail or absentee ballot, plus a unique barcode for each ballot envelope, at least 30 days before ballots are sent. The Postal Service would then check outgoing ballots against that list and decline to deliver any ballot not addressed to someone on it. A state that would not hand over its voter list, or could not meet the order’s other requirements, would risk having its mail ballots returned undelivered. The public comment period runs through July 2. Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows said that if the courts allow the rule, “you will see a virtual elimination of mail-in voting, unless the states supply voter lists to the federal government.” The White House said it “remains confident that the Executive Order will be implemented by the November election.” Around the same time, the Justice Department said the Department of Homeland Security was working to make “citizenship list information” available to the states.^[52]
June 2: A second judge heard a challenge to the mail-in order and has not yet ruled. In Boston, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani heard arguments from a coalition of 23 Democratic-led states and voting-rights groups asking her to halt the order. She said she was “very concerned” that it could keep eligible voters from voting, and pointed to a provision directing the Justice Department to prosecute state and local officials who issue ballots to people the federal government deems ineligible. She also questioned how reliable a federal eligibility list would be, noting that voters who change their name after marriage, or who move, could be wrongly dropped. She took the request under advisement; as of June 10 she had not issued a decision. Democratic Party groups separately asked a federal appeals court to speed up its review of the May 28 ruling.^[53]
June 4: The Senate again declined to advance the SAVE Act. The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act would require documentary proof of citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, to register to vote, a change that would end most online and mail registration. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) tried to attach it to an immigration funding bill, and it failed 48 to 50, short even of a simple majority and well short of the 60 votes it would need. Four Republicans (Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Mitch McConnell, and Thom Tillis) joined every Democrat in voting no. The bill has passed the House several times but has not cleared the Senate.^[55]
June 5: Trump called the 2026 election “rigged” before it has happened, and extended the claim to California. In an NBC “Meet the Press” interview taped June 5 and aired June 7, Trump said, “The election was rigged, it was a dirty election and it’s happening again right now in California,” referring to California primaries whose votes were still being counted. When host Kristen Welker said there was no evidence, Trump answered, “There’s a lot of evidence,” without citing any, then ended the interview: “You’re a one-sided crooked network… Let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough.” The remark fits his earlier statement that he will accept the midterm results only “if they are honest.”^[56]
June 14: The Homeland Security secretary says he’d “throw out the Constitution” to stop noncitizen voting, then walks it back. On CNN, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said he was ready to “throw out the Constitution” to ensure “only citizens of the United States are voting,” then immediately backpedaled: “I mean, not throw it out. Throw it out as an argument.” He said DHS is reviewing state voter rolls ahead of the midterms, claiming it had found “thousands” of registrations it considered questionable, though he did not name the states or rolls. He defended the citizenship-check effort and the SAVE Act and would not rule out a role for ICE at polling places, saying officers “would only be there if a threat is arised.” Studies have consistently found noncitizen voting to be very rare, and the Constitution assigns the running of elections to the states.^[57]
June 22: The administration moves to tie homeland-security grants to election changes. The Department of Homeland Security proposed conditioning more than $1 billion in grants, money states use for terrorism prevention, infrastructure protection, and disaster preparedness, on states adopting hand-marked paper ballots and running their voter rolls through a contested federal citizenship database. States that refuse reportedly face about a 20 percent cut in those grants; the jurisdictions that would have to change include Delaware, Georgia, Nevada, South Carolina, and Los Angeles County. A former Justice Department lawyer predicted the requirements “will be blocked in the courts.”^[58]
June 22: The Justice Department loses a ninth voter-data case and still cannot point to widespread fraud. A federal judge in Maryland ruled that states need not turn over the voter information the department had demanded, the ninth straight loss; five of the nine came from judges Trump appointed. An NBC News review found that, months before the midterms, the department still could not substantiate the president’s claims of widespread voter fraud, with efforts to prosecute noncitizen voters stalling for lack of evidence.^[59]
June 24: The Postmaster General confirms, under oath, that the Postal Service won’t deliver ballots for states that don’t hand over voter rolls. At a Senate hearing, Postmaster General David Steiner was asked by Sen. Gary Peters whether the Postal Service would deliver ballots to states that refuse to provide their voter lists. “Under our proposed regulation? No,” Steiner said, adding that the Postal Service would “tell the state that we need the manifest.” Peters called it a way to “coerce” states and a “back-door way for the federal government to get voting information that states control under the Constitution.”^[60]
June 24: Trump cancels the signing of a major housing bill to force a vote on the SAVE Act. About an hour before the ceremony, Trump called off the signing of the bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, one of the largest housing-affordability bills in years, and tied it to passage of the SAVE Act, the citizenship-documentation voting bill the Senate lacks the votes to pass. “Today’s Housing News Conference and Signing is hereby cancelled until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE AMERICA ACT,” he posted. It was the second time in a week he held a Republican priority hostage to the voting bill.^[61]
June 23: Trump says he called a federal prosecutor and changed a California election result. At a Pennsylvania rally, Trump claimed he phoned the U.S. attorney in California, Bill Essayli, about the state’s gubernatorial primary because he worried his endorsed candidate, Steve Hilton, would not advance. “I said, ‘Do me a favor. Take a look,’” Trump recounted, and “about an hour after the call… Mr. Hilton has won.” In fact, Hilton advanced because California, which uses a top-two primary, was still counting ballots in the days after the election, as it does every year; there is no evidence a prosecutor changed any tally. What Trump described, a president calling a prosecutor to intervene in an election, is the part that stands out.^[62]
June 23: Federal agents confront a poll worker at her polling place over a social-media post. On New York’s primary day, two federal agents confronted poll worker Paigelynne Gonyea at the Syracuse polling place where she was working; after they reached her by phone, she asked them to come inside because she was afraid to meet them alone outside. They carried copies of her social-media posts and her driver’s license and handed her a notice from ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility saying they were investigating threats against ICE personnel. Her January post had named Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who fatally shot Renee Good in Minneapolis, with the caption “I think today is a great day for Jonathan to be indicted.” A DHS spokesperson said she “committed a federal crime by posting the address of an ICE law enforcement officer online”; Gonyea said she does not recall posting his address, and Syracuse.com said it could not independently verify DHS’s claim. A local elections commissioner said election law gives law enforcement no role inside a polling place unless responding to an emergency, and the state Board of Elections said the incident “did not disrupt voting and was not related to the election process.”^[63]^[147] Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version dated this June 24 and said agents went to her workplace. It happened June 23, during New York’s primary, at her polling place, where she had invited them in after they called. It also described Renee Good as “an unarmed woman,” which our sources do not say, and omitted DHS’s allegation that Gonyea posted the agent’s address, which she denies.
July 23: More than two dozen states sue over disaster aid tied to election and immigration changes. The states filed in federal court in Rhode Island over conditions the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Department of Homeland Security placed on already-appropriated grants, including FEMA disaster aid. To keep the money, states would have to verify voter citizenship through a federal database, move toward hand-marked paper ballots, run federally prescribed election audits, and cooperate with federal immigration enforcement. The states argue that attaching those policy conditions to appropriated funds violates the Administrative Procedure Act and the Constitution’s Spending Clause. A FEMA spokesperson called the suit opposition to “common-sense measures designed to protect election security.”^[70]
July 25: A federal appeals court refuses to let the mail-in voting order take effect in 23 states. After a lower court blocked key parts of Trump’s March executive order on June 25, finding they were likely unconstitutional, the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals voted 2-1 to leave that block in place while the case proceeds. The blocked provisions would require U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Social Security Administration to build a federal “citizenship list” of eligible voters and route mail ballots only to people on it. The Justice Department signaled it may ask the Supreme Court for emergency relief, setting up the next stage of the fight.^[71]
July 27: The Justice Department takes the mail-voting order to the Supreme Court. Two days after losing at the appeals court, the department asked the justices, on the Court’s emergency docket, to put the injunction on hold and let the order take effect in the 23 states and Washington, D.C. that challenged it, 99 days before the November midterms. The Court ordered those states to respond by August 3. Because the request goes to the emergency docket rather than a full argument, a single order from the Court could decide whether the federal government screens the nation’s mail ballots this fall. Restricting mail-in ballots stands to affect the two parties differently, since Democratic voters have been more likely than Republican voters to vote by mail.^[73]
Late July: A former Trump strategist predicts a “national emergency” by late August. Steve Bannon said he believes the president will declare a national emergency by late August, ahead of the November election, claiming there would be “enough evidence by mid-August to show that we have a massive problem” of election fraud, the same fraud that roughly 60 courts, Trump’s first-term attorney general, and his first-term cybersecurity agency found did not exist. Asked directly, Trump said he was not considering declaring a national emergency around the midterms and said he was not aware of the proposal. A 17-page draft that allies circulated earlier in the year would give the president extraordinary control over the 2026 election, including hand-counting of ballots and voter identification at the polls.^[72]
Trump has already called one 2026 election result “rigged”^[4] and has said he will accept the midterm results “if the elections are honest.”^[11]
August 11: Trump won’t rule out an “election emergency.” Two weeks after saying he was not considering declaring a national emergency around the midterms, Trump gave a softer answer. Asked on a Real America’s Voice program whether he would declare a “national security emergency for elections” to impose citizenship, photo-ID, and mail-in rules without Congress if the Senate could not pass the SAVE Act, he said, “Let me just say that stranger things have happened, OK? I’ll leave it at that.” He did not commit to it, but he did not rule it out. Legal scholars say no such presidential power exists; the Constitution assigns the running of elections to the states and to Congress.^[79]
August 24: The Supreme Court lifts one of the two blocks on the mail-voting order, without ruling on whether the order is legal. By 6-3, in an unsigned order, the justices granted the emergency applications from the Justice Department and a dozen Republican-led states and lifted the injunction that had blocked the March executive order in the 23 states and Washington, D.C. that sued. The majority did not decide whether the order is lawful. It decided that those states had gone to court too early: any harm to them, the Court reasoned, would come from “the downstream action that the Secretary might take in the future,” which at this stage was “no more than conjecture.” The Court added a line worth reading carefully, because it limits its own ruling: the decision “does not mean that any measure taken by the Government to implement the Order will necessarily be lawful.”

Two things follow that the headlines mostly did not carry. First, there were two injunctions, both from Judge Indira Talwani in Massachusetts, and only one fell. The one the Court lifted, from June, covered the states that sued. A second one she issued on August 11, in a case brought by the League of Women Voters and other non-profit groups, applies nationwide, was not before the Court, and is still in force. Second, the Postal Service had already published its final rule but said it would not put it into effect for November without a green light from the Supreme Court. So as of this writing, the barcode-envelope requirement still cannot be implemented for the midterms. Election law professor Rick Hasen expects the trial court to respond by amending the surviving injunction to bar implementation of the final rule outright.

Justices Sotomayor and Kagan dissented together, writing that the decision “merely postpones adjudication” rather than resolving the constitutional questions. Justice Jackson dissented separately, writing that the ruling “needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections.”^[80]
August 25-27: the argument shifts from whether the rule is lawful to whether it can physically be done in time. The rule requires election officials to submit each mail voter’s name and address to a new Postal Service portal, along with unique Intelligent Mail barcodes assigned to the envelopes used to send and return that voter’s ballot. Postal officials and election administrators warned that with ballots already going out, mismatched barcodes, incomplete records, technical failures or confusion among thousands of local election offices could stop eligible voters from receiving ballots. The objection is operational rather than ideological, and it comes in part from the people who would have to run the system. States sued again on August 26. The Postal Service still cannot implement the rule for November 3, because the nationwide injunction was not affected by the Supreme Court’s decision.^[81]
August 27: a judge blocks the Postal Service rule itself. Judge Talwani granted a fourteen-day restraining order against the final rule, in the League of Women Voters case and a parallel case brought by states, finding the challengers likely to win on two independent grounds: the rule is probably unconstitutional, because the president cannot insert the federal government into elections without authorization from Congress, and the Postal Service probably lacked the authority to issue it at all. Her order noted the administration had offered no “evidence regarding fraudulent absentee or mail-in voting,” and gave “no reply” to the states’ showing that compliance before the midterms would be practically impossible; the government’s interest in “correcting an unsubstantiated problem through likely unconstitutional means,” she wrote, “is dwarfed by the overwhelming risk of pervasive disenfranchisement.” A hearing on a longer-lasting injunction is set for September 3. The executive order’s separate directive that Homeland Security compile lists of eligible voters and send them to the states was not blocked and remains in effect.^[82]
September 1: a Postal Service official says the ballot system is untested, and describes what one mismatch would do. Sen. Richard Blumenthal released an account from a USPS official describing the build of the mail-ballot portal as “secretive, rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed.” According to the account, USPS compressed into weeks a system that would normally take nine months to a year, and eliminated testing procedures for the platform to meet deadlines the official called impossible. The specific behavior worth understanding: if a state delivers a batch of 10,000 ballots and USPS cannot match a single one against the portal, USPS would refuse to mail the other 9,999 and expect the state to take the whole batch back to resolve the one. The official warned that “potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all,” and Blumenthal’s letter alleges USPS kept building the portal while injunctions barred implementation. This is one official’s account relayed by a senator, and USPS has not publicly rebutted the technical claims.^[84]
August 26: the DOJ’s election monitors draw their first sustained objection, from a Republican governor. The department has sent more than 80 monitors to primaries in seven states this year and says it plans about 1,000 at polling sites in November. In Wyoming, where two Civil Rights Division attorneys observed the primary in Laramie County without advance notice to some state officials, Gov. Mark Gordon asked his attorney general to look into conduct he called “a bit aggressive” and “irregular,” and the county’s chief election clerk said the observers arrived unannounced, showed no credentials, and asked questions outside the scope of federal voting rights law. Gordon did not allege the election was compromised, praised how it was run, and said he does not object to monitors as such; his concern was that these “seemed to exceed what the authority that Congress had given them was.” Watch the number, not the incident: Wyoming was two attorneys in one county, and November is planned at roughly a thousand.^[83]
September 9: the president promises a $5,000 payment if Republicans keep Congress. At the Republican Party’s first midterm convention, in Dallas, Trump said: “If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them, because of our tremendous strength and success economically, I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000.” He called it “the Trump dividend” and added, “Now all we have to do is win.” He did not say where the money would come from. Vice President Vance said on Fox News that tariffs would pay for it and that it would go to the middle class, a limit the president had not mentioned. With roughly 240 million adult citizens, the cost would be about $1.2 trillion; tariff revenue was about $154 billion in the first ten months of the fiscal year, and Congress would have to approve any payment. Election-law scholar Rick Hasen wrote that a campaign promise delivered through the normal processes of government is protected speech, not vote-buying. Republican Rep. Chip Roy asked how it would be paid for. The president’s two earlier dividend promises, $5,000 from DOGE savings in 2025 and $2,000 from tariffs later that year, were never paid.^[85]
September 10: asked whether Congress would have to approve the payment, the president says “we think not.” In an interview with CBS News Texas, Trump said, “Well, we think not. I think they will do it if we needed it. But we think not.” CBS noted that it is not clear what legal authority a president would have to make payments that could cost more than a trillion dollars without Congress. That evening, ABC’s Rachel Scott asked why a strong economy would need “an incentive for people to turn out to vote.” Trump said the money was not about turnout but “a reward for people having to put up with” the Biden years. Two nights earlier he had described it as depending on the result: “So if the Republicans win, you win with us, and you get $5,000.”^[85]^[89]
September 10: the president leads the convention in a pledge. Closing the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, Trump asked the audience to raise their right hands and repeat a pledge “to the greatest president in the history of the United States.” The pledge he led included the line “I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try to cheat like hell like they do. There has never been bigger cheaters,” and it ended with “So help me God.” Some headlines said he had supporters vow to cheat. The transcript published by Mediaite shows the crowd repeating the lines praising Trump and the closing oath, with no crowd response recorded to that line, and The Hill reported that “some in the crowd tried to repeat” the pledge amid laughter. “Like they do” referred to Democrats; moments earlier he had said Democrats oppose voter ID “because they want to cheat.” CNN’s fact check found no basis for broadly describing Democrats as election cheaters. Neither Trump nor the White House has said whether the line was meant as sarcasm.^[92]
September 13: the president says the $5,000 payment will “happen 100 percent.” Speaking to reporters outside Air Force One, Trump said, “The $5,000 is going to happen 100 percent,” and explained why it would not come before the election: “I don’t want to do it now, because if the Democrats get it, our country will be in shambles and they won’t be able to do it.” In an NBC News interview on September 10, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had said the administration could “earn the money that Donald Trump wants to pay out, not from the deficit and not from taxpayers,” pointing to the Trump Platinum Card, a $5 million visa program that has not launched: “We have a waitlist of more than 100,000 people who want to come. That’s $500 billion.” Newsweek noted that a place on the waitlist is not itself revenue, and that even 100,000 payments would cover about 41 percent of the estimated $1.23 trillion cost.^[94] National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett suggested it could pass through Congress as part of a reconciliation package. The Hill noted that the administration cannot spend public money without funds set aside by Congress.^[93]
September 4-9: the Postal Service rule is blocked again, and Republican election officials ask the Supreme Court to leave it that way for November. On September 4, Judge Talwani replaced her temporary order with a preliminary injunction, writing that “Congress has never delegated its Elections Clause power to the USPS” and that putting the rule in place “less than seventy days before the November 2026 election threatens disenfranchisement of millions of United States citizens who seek to vote by mail.” The administration asked the Supreme Court to let the rule take effect anyway. On September 9, Republican secretaries of state from Kentucky, North Dakota, South Dakota, Georgia, New Hampshire and Kansas, joined by Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, filed a brief asking the Court not to. They took no position on whether the rule is lawful or good policy. Their argument was about timing: “late changes breed confusion, that confusion keeps eligible voters from voting, and that a chaotic election erodes confidence in the result.” Federal law requires states to send ballots to military and overseas voters by September 19. On September 14, the Court turned the administration down (see below).^[90]
September 2-10: a Florida county gets a preview of the envelope review. Leon County’s elections office voluntarily submitted its outgoing mail-ballot envelope to the Postal Service for review under the new rule. On September 2, USPS rejected it because the words “return service requested” sat 0.236 of an inch from the return address instead of a quarter inch, a difference of 0.014 of an inch. The county had mailed tens of thousands of ballots in the same envelopes in 2024 and in this year’s primary. After an initial denial on appeal, USPS approved the design on September 10, and the county plans to mail roughly 32,000 ballots by Florida’s September 24 deadline. While the injunction stands, the review is voluntary. Supervisor of Elections Mark Earley, who signed a court brief opposing the rule, said, “The chaos factor is the real problem. I’ve had voters tell me ‘I don’t trust anything anymore, so I’m just not going to vote.’” Florida’s Department of State said the state’s vote-by-mail process “has not been impacted by the executive order.”^[91]
September 14: the Postal Service rule is kept out of the midterms. Shortly before the Supreme Court acted, Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee in Washington, blocked the rule in a separate case, writing, “No statute grants the Postal Service the power to issue key parts of the Rule,” and that the government “does not point to any record evidence that there will be significant fraud in the upcoming elections.” Then the Supreme Court denied the administration’s request to let the rule take effect, in an unsigned order saying the government “is unlikely to succeed on the merits.” Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that the rule may fall within the Postal Service’s authority, but that applying it this year would be unlawful “because state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections.” The order covers only November, so the rule could return for later elections. Trump responded on Truth Social that the justices “are merely a shell of their original selves.” Utah’s Republican lieutenant governor, Deidre Henderson, said, “Utahns can have confidence that the 2026 election will proceed as normal.”^[95]
September 15: the president attacks the Court, and the attorney general says the effort will continue. The morning after the ruling, Trump posted that it was “a big loss for Republicans, and America itself,” and wrote, “This Supreme Court is bullied and cajoled by the Radical Left into making decisions that have set America back at least a hundred years.” CBS News reported that Trump himself voted by mail in Florida this year. Attorney General Todd Blanche said the administration would comply with the order, but added, “President Trump’s efforts to make sure that we have free and fair elections are not going to stop just in November or after or thereafter. So I expect you’re going to see that work continue.”^[99]
September 14: a whistleblower alleges DHS officers were told to pose as voters. A federal whistleblower’s disclosure, published by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Alex Padilla, alleges that a Homeland Security program called the “Unlawful Voter Initiative” directed immigration agency employees to use personal information to look up individual voters’ records on state voter-lookup websites, which some states limit to people checking their own records. The report says officers had a quota of 40 people a day and that the program “has potentially already committed thousands of violations of state law.” DHS said it “accessed publicly available data from states’ voter rolls and cross referenced them with known aliens in our systems.” These are allegations; no court, inspector general or state has found that the searches broke state law. The senators asked DHS to respond by September 21.^[96]
August 18: a Census Bureau report on noncitizen voting. The bureau released a report claiming more than 24,000 noncitizens voted in 2020, which would be less than 0.02 percent of the roughly 160 million ballots cast. Trump posted “I WON THE ELECTION!” CNN, citing three former bureau officials who served under Trump, reported that the administration had installed analysts from the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute inside the bureau, and NPR reported the analysis was not done by career civil servants. The next day, the Commerce Department removed language banning political interference from its scientific integrity policy, NPR reported.^[97]
September 1-13: a lawsuit over ICE at the polls, and a denial. On September 1, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said “ICE isn’t there to patrol the polling places,” but that agents could be there if there is a threat or if “we’re serving a warrant on someone that we have been actively tracking down.” On September 10, Denver and a coalition of immigrant rights and voting groups sued to keep armed federal officers away from polling places, citing a federal law that bars bringing “any troops or armed men” to a place where an election is held. On September 13, Tom Homan said “there is no plan for enforcement action at polling places.”^[98]
September 15: the FBI director won’t commit to keeping agents away from the polls. At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Sen. Richard Blumenthal asked FBI Director Kash Patel, “Can you commit to this committee that you will not send FBI agents to the polls on Election Day?” Patel said the FBI “will follow the law,” and when asked whether sending agents would be against the law, said, “I don’t know that we can’t legally do it.” Later, asked about a Republican candidate’s claim that Patel had promised an FBI presence in Michigan before Election Day, Patel pointed to election crimes coordinators in all 56 FBI field offices: “you bet we’re going to have them there.” He also agreed, when asked by Sen. Alex Padilla, that the FBI has no plans to seize ballots or voting machines. He did not announce a plan to station agents at polling places; he declined to rule it out.^[100]
September 16: DHS says it flagged 14,576 Pennsylvania registrants, and its Nevada number shrinks from about 16,000 to 185. In a September 9 email obtained by Votebeat and Spotlight PA, the Department of Homeland Security said a USCIS fraud unit had matched Pennsylvania’s public voter roll against DHS databases using names, dates of birth, addresses and phone numbers, and had not used Social Security numbers, though it told the state in July that Social Security numbers were used in some matches. DHS wrote that “Each one of the 14,576 individuals identified should be carefully reviewed by your state.” Pennsylvania’s Secretary of the Commonwealth, Al Schmidt, had written that DHS staff “did not have high confidence” in the number, which DHS disputes; as of September 16 the state had not received the list. In Nevada, NPR reported, DHS called its roughly 16,000 figure “the ceiling” on a recorded call and then sent a list of 185 voter IDs it was confident about.^[101]
September 10: allies press the Commerce Secretary to ban voting machines. CNN reported that Trump allies, “including some inside the administration,” are urging Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to use supply-chain authority to bar voting machines containing Chinese-made parts. Emails obtained by the group American Oversight show two activists discussed election security with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles in August 2025, were connected to a Justice Department official, and sent him a “Proposed Ban Plan.” One wrote that it “can immediately force states to move to hand-marked and hand-counted ballots like the President wishes.” Commerce did not respond to CNN and has taken no action; voting-system vendors noted that foreign-made parts are common and that paper records allow results to be audited.^[102]
September 17: the Postal Service says it stopped building the system. Postmaster General David Steiner told the Associated Press that work on the computer system behind the ballot-refusal rule has halted. “There’s an injunction so we’re not doing anything,” he said. A memo sent to all postal employees the day before said the agency would “not be enforcing any of these new rules in the 2026 federal election,” and that “for Election Mail it is business as usual.” Steiner said he had planned to launch the portal around September 15. He also said the Postal Service will keep encouraging barcoded ballot envelopes in future elections through pricing rather than a requirement: “If you use the barcode in the envelope, we’ll charge you a lower price.” The rule is paused for this election, not withdrawn.^[103]
September 17: Virginia’s attorney general says the voter searches may have broken state law. Attorney General Jay Jones, a Democrat, wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin demanding the department confirm whether it directed anyone to look up Virginia voters’ records without their permission, and preserve the related records. Virginia’s lookup tool is limited to people who attest that they are checking their own record, and Jones wrote that “Virginia Election Code does not permit disclosure of this protected information to the federal government without a court order.” DHS had not responded when the story published, and no court has ruled on the claim.^[104]
September 14-21: a sworn filing partly supports the whistleblower, and senators ask for an investigation. In a federal voter-data case, the Justice Department filed a declaration from a senior official in the immigration agency’s fraud unit, who swore that the unit “has been investigating potential illegal voting by aliens who are not lawfully permitted to vote” and had used Social Security Administration data to help decide “whether illegal voting may have occurred.” That supports part of the whistleblower’s account. It does not address the central allegation, that officers posed as voters on state websites. Eighteen senators asked the department’s inspector general to investigate immediately, and two asked California’s attorney general to review whether state law was broken. A department spokesperson said the media was “conjuring controversy out of commonplace law enforcement.” No inspector general, court or state has made a finding.^[113]
September 23: the Democratic Party committees sue over federal agents at polling places. The DSCC, the DCCC, the Democratic Governors Association, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries filed against ICE, DHS, the FBI and their directors in federal court in Washington. Trump is not a defendant. It is the third suit in that courthouse making similar arguments. The legal claim is worth understanding because it does not depend on finding a written order. A federal criminal statute bars any officer of the United States from bringing armed men to a polling place, and the Voting Rights Act bars intimidating voters. The committees argue that the threat is the harm: “dispatching armed federal agents to the polls, or even threatening to do so, is forbidden by federal law,” because “voters need not actually be arrested, questioned, or even approached in order for such threats to intimidate them from exercising the franchise.” Since no voter can know in advance whether agents will be at their polling place, they say, the effect “chills voting everywhere, not only where ICE and FBI agents actually appear.” They are also candid that they have a partisan stake: “Every Democratic-leaning voter intimidated into staying home is a vote lost to Democratic candidates.” The government’s position remains that no deployment is planned. The one document the plaintiffs point to is one nobody outside the government has read, a withheld ICE file titled “Checklist for Law Enforcement Voter Integrity 9.15.25 - FINAL DRAFT”; ICE says a records request turned up 11,103 potentially relevant documents that would take about 22 months to process, which is well after the election. No emergency motion has been filed.^[116]
September 1-23: Homeland Security’s investigators begin a nine-state “voter fraud surge,” and two California counties sue. CNN reported internal guidance directing Homeland Security Investigations, the criminal-investigations arm of ICE, to run a “coordinated criminal voter fraud surge initiative to pursue investigative leads, conduct field interviews, and support timely prosecutorial review” in nine states from September 1 to mid-October. Voting opens in seven of those states before mid-October. The Justice Department has a long-standing policy of avoiding “overt” investigative steps close to an election, because they run “the risk of chilling legitimate voting and campaign activities”; DHS is not bound by it. The administration’s own figures give a sense of scale: about 1,600 cases and 160 arrests, with many of the arrests for related offenses such as false claims of citizenship, and 70 people charged with unlawful voting since January 2025. Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter argued that even a few cases matter, because “the actions of even one malicious actor on the ground can fatally undercut that security.” On September 18, San Francisco, Santa Clara County, two nurses’ unions and the voter-registration group Voto Latino sued, arguing that sending agents to question people at home about their eligibility intimidates voters, which the Voting Rights Act forbids. One nurse in the suit, a naturalized citizen, says she changed her plan from voting in person to voting by mail out of fear of being targeted. DHS says HSI “is actively rooting out and investigating election fraud wherever it can be found.” No court has ruled; a hearing is set for October 1.^[118]
September 24: Nevada says its records show the 185 were citizens. In a letter to DHS obtained by the Nevada Independent and the New York Times, a Nevada deputy attorney general wrote that “our records indicate that they were citizens” and “You have provided nothing of substance to suggest otherwise.” State officials checked each flagged voter’s registration record, including the type of ID used to register. The state is careful about the limit of that check: because DHS identified the voters only by number, it cannot be completely certain it is looking at the same people. DHS says the 185 were a subset that had been manually reviewed.^[119]
September 25: the Supreme Court lets the government keep using its rebuilt citizenship-check system. SAVE is a Homeland Security database that states can use, voluntarily, to check whether people on their voter rolls are citizens. The administration expanded it last year, and at least 67 million registrations have been run through it. In June a federal judge vacated the rebuilt version; on September 25 the Supreme Court put that ruling on hold, 6 to 3, while the appeal continues. The majority found the administration likely to win under a 1996 law and noted that federal law already bars systematic removals from the rolls within 90 days of an election, which limits what can change before November. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, writing for the three dissenters, said the harm of “burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters” outweighs any harm to the government. Accuracy is the open question: in Travis County, Texas, officials found that at least 10% of the 97 voters SAVE flagged as apparent noncitizens were citizens.^[120]
September 23-24: an ad carrying the president’s midterm message aired with the line “paid for by the U.S. government.” A 30-second spot ran overnight on Fox News and Newsmax. It looks like a campaign ad, and near the end a line at the bottom says it was paid for by the government. The White House had posted a 15-second version on its YouTube channel on September 13. It called the ad “educational and unapologetically patriotic” and one of its “public service announcements,” but did not say which part of the government paid for it; no appropriation, contract or producer has been identified, and the ad buy is estimated at $14,000. Federal appropriations law bars spending public money on “publicity or propaganda,” a restriction the Government Accountability Office reads to cover material whose obvious purpose is self-promotion or that is purely partisan. The Hatch Act, which bars federal employees from campaigning on the job, does not apply to the president, though it would apply to employees who worked on the ad. Two Republican senators objected: Thom Tillis said “using taxpayer dollars, it feels like Viktor Orban,” and John Kennedy said, “I don’t generally like to see politicians use public money to pay for their own campaign ads.” The next day a second government-paid ad, about the capture of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, aired on CBS and other networks. The top Democrats on the appropriations committees asked the White House to pull the ads, and a White House official said they “are clearly not political.”^[117]^[121]
September 25-27: more government-paid ads, one of them a 2024 campaign spot. A minute-long ad built on Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech began airing on September 25. Then came a 30-second spot the Associated Press described as “virtually identical to one that aired in 2024” as a Trump campaign ad, now ending with “Paid for by the U.S. Government”; it ran during NFL games on September 27. AdImpact, which tracks ad spending, estimated the ads had cost more than $1.7 million, a figure it says is incomplete. The White House’s position is that these are public service announcements like those of past administrations, and it is true that the ads label themselves, which matters because the Government Accountability Office has treated hidden government sponsorship as central to its propaganda findings. Critics answer that past campaigns promoted policies, not the sitting president. On September 25 the watchdog group Public Citizen asked the Government Accountability Office and the Office of Special Counsel to rule on whether the ads break the law; neither has acted. Sen. John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, said, “I don’t think any public official, including President Trump or Kristi Noem or John Kennedy, should spend public money on private ads for themselves.”^[122]
September 29: the ads’ money is traced to border funds. The Wall Street Journal reported, and Sen. Susan Collins, the Republican who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, confirmed, that the government-paid ads were funded with Customs and Border Protection money from the 2025 budget law. The administration has not confirmed the source. Several Republican senators objected; Majority Leader John Thune said the ads “shouldn’t be paid for with taxpayer dollars.”^[125]
September 29-30: an administration official says Homeland Security is paying, and the FCC’s chairman sees nothing to review. An administration official told Axios that “The Department of Homeland Security is placing the ad buys using money from an existing budget,” and Axios reported that the president is personally choosing which ads run. The ad-tracking firm AdImpact counted 2,766 airings in the first week, CNN reported. On September 29, Sen. Maggie Hassan asked the Senate to declare that such ads “should not be paid for by the United States government.” Sen. Cynthia Lummis, a Wyoming Republican, blocked it, pointing out that presidents of both parties have aired public service announcements. “When a Democratic president tells Americans what to do, it’s a public service,” she said. “When this president tells Americans that liberty is worth defending, it’s suddenly a problem.” The next day Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said of a complaint asking broadcasters to stop airing the ads, “There’s nothing in there that strikes me to merit any sort of FCC review.” Also on September 30, the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington asked the Homeland Security inspector general to investigate whether the spending broke federal budget law.^[127]^[128]^[129]^[130]
September 30: a photo-ID requirement fails in the Senate. The day before, at the launch of a new government website, Trump said, “We must pass, and now can pass in theory very easily, the SAVE America Act.” Senate Republicans then attached a requirement to show photo identification when voting, which The Hill calls “a core element” of that bill, to a separate bill banning members of Congress from buying new stocks. The procedural vote to begin debate failed 53 to 47, with every Republican in favor and every Democrat and independent against; it needed 60. Republicans argue that photo ID should not be controversial, citing polls that show public support for it, the Washington Examiner reported. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Republicans had “loaded it up with a poison pill — a voter ID bill that would gut mail voting and that has failed six times.”^[131]
September 30: $500 health-insurance payments go out with a letter from the president. The administration began sending $500 to more than 950,000 people who buy Affordable Care Act coverage in the 30 states that use the federal marketplace, most of them earning more than 400 percent of the federal poverty line. The White House says the money comes from a $500 million fund of excess fees that insurers pay to run healthcare.gov. Each payment comes with a letter from Trump: “For years, the Biden administration overcharged you to fund the operation of HealthCare.gov,” it says. “That money belongs to hard-working Americans, not the Government, and now I’m returning it to you!” STAT reported that it is unclear what legal authority allows the administration to pay only some enrollees. The payments arrive about five weeks before the election and are separate from the $5,000 payment Trump has promised if Republicans keep Congress. Jonathan Oberlander, a health policy professor at the University of North Carolina, called them part of an effort “to buy continued Republican control of the House and Senate via promises of direct government payments to voters.”^[132] A Reuters analysis published October 1 found that the 30 eligible states include eight of the nine most competitive Senate races and 10 of the 12 most competitive governor’s races, and that 71 percent of the money, $339 million, goes to people in those 13 states. Eligibility is limited to the states that use the federal marketplace. The White House did not respond to the suggestion that the payments are meant to influence the election. Reuters also noted a precedent from the other side, Joe Biden’s $2,000 promise during the 2021 Georgia Senate runoffs, partly delivered as $1,400 checks.^[135]
September 28: a judge throws out the election conditions on homeland security grants. The administration had told states and cities it would hold back 20 percent of their counterterrorism grant money, over $200 million, until they moved toward hand-marked paper ballots, ran their voter files through the SAVE citizenship system and checked the citizenship of poll workers, at their own expense. Judge Amir Ali ruled that the grant law does not allow that: “The statute does not authorize FEMA to withhold counterterrorism grants until states and high-risk urban areas achieve policy objectives on their own dime.” He said voter confidence may be “a laudable goal, but it is not a counterterrorism goal.” The administration can appeal, and a separate suit by two dozen states over conditions on disaster aid is still pending.^[126]
August 26 to October 1: the Pentagon changes the form overseas voters use, and the Democratic Party sues. Americans who live abroad, along with military members and their families, register and request ballots using a federal form run by the Pentagon’s Federal Voting Assistance Program. Since 2013 it has included a checkbox for a citizen who has “never lived in the United States,” typically an American born abroad. Thirty-eight states and Washington, D.C., let those citizens vote, and the program’s own 2016 estimate put about 11,590 of them on the rolls. In late August, weeks before the September 19 deadline for mailing ballots to these voters, the Pentagon used an “emergency” request to remove that checkbox; the White House budget office approved it on August 28, two days after receiving it, and the usual public comment period opened afterward. The Pentagon’s explanation is that the old form “may confuse voters about the information they are required to provide under Federal law,” and that removing the box “will reduce confusion and avoid the use of the form by those who are ineligible.” It says states can keep accepting older versions. The Republican National Committee has argued in court in eight states that these voters are not eligible, in one filing describing them as voters who “largely favor Democratic candidates”; courts in four states rejected those challenges and one in North Carolina accepted one. On October 1, the Democratic National Committee sued, calling the emergency “transparently false.” The RNC’s response: “Enforcing citizenship and residency requirements isn’t disenfranchisement—it’s following the law.” No court has ruled.^[133]
September 28: Trump is asked again about an emergency declaration. In an interview with TIME, published October 1, Trump was asked whether he would rule out declaring a state of emergency before the midterms if there were no widespread violence. “I don’t rule anything out or in. We’ll see. You mean the Insurrection Act?” he said, referring to the law, dating to 1807, that lets a president use the military inside the country in certain circumstances. When the reporter said yes, he answered, “No, I’ve never used it. I could use it. A lot of people think I should use it sometimes.” Asked whether he plans to send ICE agents to polling places, he said, “Haven’t thought of it.” The Hill noted that he has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act before, in Los Angeles, Portland and Minneapolis, and has not done so.^[134]
September 17: the Pentagon’s third-ranking official does not rule out Guard troops at polling places. In a closed Senate Armed Services briefing, Defense Undersecretary Elbridge Colby was asked directly whether he had ever discussed deploying the National Guard for voter security on Election Day. He said he had heard such discussions were taking place but was not leading on the issue. Sen. Kevin Cramer, a North Dakota Republican, said Colby “never once said ‘yes’ or ‘no.’” The administration does have an answer in writing: Gen. Dan Caine wrote to Sen. Elissa Slotkin in August that there are “no plans to send Federal military personnel or Federalized members of the National Guard to polling places during the 2026 elections.” What Colby declined to do was repeat it.^[105]
September 16: the international observers say no invitation came. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has observed every U.S. federal election since 2002, always after an invitation from the sitting administration. Its election-monitoring office told Democracy Docket that it has not received one this year. “We are currently waiting on that invitation from the United States,” a spokesperson said. The arrangement is mutual: under a 1990 agreement signed by 57 countries, each invites observers from the others. This is an absence rather than an announced decision. No official has said the United States will not invite observers, and the State Department did not respond to a request for comment.^[106]
September 17: one in ten Americans is now in a different House district. A report from the nonprofit Protect Democracy found that 34.8 million people live in a different congressional district than they did during the 2024 cycle, and that about a fifth of Americans are in a district where more than a quarter of the electorate is new. Both the Associated Press and Democracy Docket trace the mid-decade redistricting wave to Trump’s request that Texas redraw its map, after which California responded and the practice spread. Redrawing maps between censuses is legal. It was also rare: by Pew Research’s count, in the past 50 years a state did it outside the normal ten-year cycle only twice before this round.^[107]
September 9: the president says the Iran war will end after the election. Before flying to the same convention, Trump told reporters, “I think the war is going to end immediately after the election,” and said Iran was “desperate to try and affect the election so that we can get a nice, weak group of people in there.” In Dallas that night he said Iran was “hoping that we lose, so they can deal with dumb, weak Democrats.” An NBC News poll found 69 percent of Americans disapprove of his handling of the war.^[86]
September 9: a Senate candidate’s late-night interview moves off broadcast television. Jimmy Kimmel announced that his interview with James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Texas, would be posted to YouTube rather than aired on ABC. He told viewers the FCC “has threatened me, threatened our show, threatened our network, ABC, our affiliates, our local stations” over guest bookings, and that he was acting “out of consideration for our local stations, especially our ABC affiliates in Texas.” No FCC order barred the interview. The decision followed January FCC guidance that talk shows could no longer assume candidate interviews are exempt from the equal-time rule, which requires broadcasters to offer comparable airtime to opposing candidates. CBS made the same call for Stephen Colbert’s Talarico interview in February. The FCC did not respond to requests for comment.^[87]
September 10: a proposed rule for the next census. This one concerns 2030, not this year’s election, but it belongs in the record because it would change how representation is allocated afterward. The Census Bureau proposed counting only U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents toward each state’s share of House seats and electoral votes, excluding other immigrants including refugees and asylees, and dropping the race and ethnicity questions asked in every census since 1790. The Fourteenth Amendment says seats are apportioned by “the whole number of persons in each State.” The Supreme Court blocked a citizenship question in 2019, and a 2020 order to exclude undocumented immigrants was rejected in court. New York’s attorney general said the state is “exploring our legal options.” Comments are open until October 13.^[88]
September 17: the Postal Service says it stopped building the system. Postmaster General David Steiner told the Associated Press that work on the computer system behind the mail-ballot rule had halted: “There’s an injunction so we’re not doing anything.” A memo to all postal employees the day before said the agency would “not be enforcing any of these new rules in the 2026 federal election,” and that “for Election Mail it is business as usual.” He said he had planned to launch the portal around September 15. He also said the Postal Service will keep encouraging barcoded ballot envelopes in future elections through pricing rather than a requirement. The rule is paused for this election, not withdrawn.^[108]
September 10 and 18: two lawsuits over armed federal officers at polling places. Both were filed in federal court in Washington and both are before the same judge. The first, brought by LULAC, argues the administration would be acting outside its legal authority. The second, brought by the NAACP and eight other organizations, makes a single claim under the Voting Rights Act. The older law at the center of the first case is worth knowing about: a statute passed in 1865 bars ordering troops or armed men to any place where an election is held, and Congress repealed its exception for “keeping the peace” at the polls in 1909, leaving only the authority to repel armed enemies. Neither case had been decided as of September 21.^[109]
September 14: a complaint over who controls the biggest super PAC. Federal law bars someone holding federal office from directing how an organization that takes unlimited contributions spends its money. The Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission arguing Trump has described doing exactly that, in public and repeatedly. Asked in the Oval Office how he decides, he said, “How do I make it? I sit down and I say, ‘let’s do this, let’s do that.’” Of the money itself: “this is money from MAGA Inc. This is my money that I control.” MAGA Inc. calls the complaint “frivolous” and says it “fully complies with the law.” A complaint is an allegation, not a finding, and this one may not produce either: the commission has two of its six seats filled, which is not enough to hold a meeting.^[110]
September 18-21: the administration answers the polling-place lawsuits. The second suit, brought by the NAACP and eight other groups, names the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department, the FBI and their leaders as defendants. The president is not one of them. The Justice Department’s response was direct: “The DOJ has never said it would send federal law enforcement to polling locations,” a spokesperson said, and “Any suggestion otherwise is fearmongering.” A Homeland Security spokesperson said, “ICE is not planning operations targeting polling locations,” while adding that someone posing an active threat near a polling place could still be arrested. Both things in this story are true at once. No order to send officers to the polls has been documented, and several officials, asked to rule it out, have declined to. The plaintiffs had not asked the judge for emergency action as of September 21.^[111]
September 19: Missouri mails ballots under its old map while a court considers the new one. Missouri’s legislature redrew its congressional districts in 2025, part of the round of mid-decade redistricting that followed Trump’s push in Texas. Opponents gathered signatures to put the new map to a statewide vote, and on September 3 the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that the petition suspends the map until voters decide, so the 2022 districts apply this November. The U.S. Supreme Court has twice left that ruling in place. Republican officials have asked a federal appeals court to restore the 2025 map, and that court heard arguments on September 17 without ruling. Meanwhile ballots for military and overseas voters went out on September 18, and absentee voting begins September 22. Election officials say another switch would move roughly 190,000 voters across three counties, and ballots already cast cannot be recalled.^[112]
September 21: an appeals court orders the 2025 map, then puts its own order on hold. A three-judge panel of the Eighth Circuit ruled that Missouri must use the 2025 map in November. Its reasoning is the strongest argument the map’s supporters have, and it deserves a fair statement: the August primaries were held under the 2025 districts, and the court held that the Constitution “requires continuity in the constituency throughout all stages of a single election,” so a primary and a general election cannot run on different maps. Two of the three judges were appointed by Trump. One of them, Judge David Stras, wrote separately that he would have dismissed the appeal because the referendum group lacked standing. The court stayed its order until 5 p.m. on September 28 to give the Supreme Court time to act, and the group behind the referendum said it would ask the justices to step in. Trump’s Justice Department had urged the Supreme Court on September 10 to side with the map’s Republican backers. If the justices do nothing, Missouri will switch maps after absentee voting has begun.^[114]
September 22-23: the case goes back to the Supreme Court for the third time in three weeks. The referendum group filed at about 10:30 p.m. on September 22. What it asks for first is not a new stay but a clarification: that the Court’s own September 10 order already blocks the replacement injunction, because, as the filing puts it, “this Court’s stays are not invitations for a lower court to repackage the same relief and try again.” Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who handles emergency applications from that circuit, asked for a response by 2 p.m. Eastern on September 23. Two friend-of-the-court briefs arrived that morning, one from the Campaign Legal Center and the ACLU and one submitted for Florida, Texas and 20 other states. The strongest evidence in the file comes from the people who would have to carry the order out. Missouri’s county clerks, whose association represents all 116 local election jurisdictions, told the appeals court that “at this point, it is practically impossible to revert to the HB 1 map due to the extensive time and cost required to reprint and distribute new ballots within statutory timelines.” Boone County’s clerk said nearly half of her voters would change districts. Johnson County’s clerk advised voters to hold off on absentee voting if they could, because state law does not allow a second ballot once one is cast. The appeals panel acknowledged that it did not know how many jurisdictions were affected, what it would cost or how long it would take, and then wrote that “[p]resumably, local election authorities needed only a few days.” Absentee voting opened on September 22.^[115]
September 25: the Supreme Court settles Missouri’s map for this year. For the third time in a month the justices stepped in, this time with an unsigned opinion and no noted dissents: “In short, as a matter of state law, the 2022 map—not the 2025 map—must be used in the 2026 congressional election.” On the timing: “The election is not merely upcoming; it has already started.” The Associated Press reported that more than a million potential Missouri voters, nearly 1 in 4 statewide, had been shifted from one district to another during the fight. Gov. Mike Kehoe, a Republican, said the state would follow the order. The president wrote, “The Supreme Court of the United States will just not let Missouri have an Election Victory.” The 2025 map is still on the November ballot as a referendum, so voters will decide whether it applies in future elections.^[123]
September 21: the Justice Department describes its November plans for election monitors. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said, “This is going to be the biggest DOJ election observer effort in history,” and that she plans to send 1,000 monitors to jurisdictions the department is selecting. Federal monitors have long been part of Election Day, and in half a dozen primary jurisdictions local officials described them to CNN as professional. CNN also reported that some of those sent during the primaries were recently hired attorneys who had helped challenge the 2020 result. A Justice Department spokesperson said, “To imply that our team will act improperly based on nothing more than speculation would be dishonest.”^[124]

The administration describes all of these actions as protecting election integrity. Critics, including Republican election officials, Trump-appointed judges, and nonpartisan election experts, describe them as unprecedented federal and state interference in elections that have not yet happened.^[1]^[9]^[17]

Correction (October 2, 2026): an earlier version listed among these critics “the Republican author of Louisiana’s primary suspension legislation.” The legislator in question, state Sen. Jay Morris, wrote the bill eliminating the New Orleans clerk’s office, a Louisiana legislative act rather than an administration action, and Louisiana’s primaries were suspended by the governor’s executive order, not by legislation. He has been removed from this list.

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. MS NOW: Not a good look: All 6 conservative justices attended Trump’s white-tie state dinner (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 Office of Top Democratic Leader in 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 says he will send an ‘Election Integrity Army’ into every state for 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)

52. CNN: Postal Service won’t deliver mail ballots for states that don’t hand over voter lists, under plan for Trump directive (June 10, 2026) and Votebeat: USPS proposes mail-ballot rules to implement Trump’s executive order (May 29, 2026)

53. Democracy Docket: Trump order targeting mail voting leaves judge “very concerned” (June 2, 2026) and The Boston Globe: Judge hears arguments over Trump’s mail-in voting executive order (June 2, 2026)

54. NBC News: FBI sought to interview top Milwaukee County election official and The Washington Post: FBI interviews election workers in Wisconsin amid Trump’s false 2020 claims (May 29, 2026)

55. NPR: Senate again blocks the SAVE Act (June 4, 2026) and Fox News: Four Senate Republicans join Democrats to block Trump’s SAVE Act (June 4, 2026)

56. CNBC: Trump storms out of NBC interview after election-fraud and DOJ-fund questions (June 7, 2026) and Time: Trump storms out of NBC interview after being challenged on false claims (June 8, 2026)

57. The Hill: Mullin won’t rule out ICE agents near polls for the midterms (June 2026) and Fox News: DHS chief Mullin refuses to rule out ICE at polls, claims only American citizens should be in line (June 2026)

58. CNN: Homeland Security to condition grants on states adopting election changes (June 22, 2026) and The New Republic: Trump threatens to defund Homeland Security for states over election changes (June 22, 2026)

59. NBC News: Trump’s DOJ struggles to show evidence of widespread voter fraud (June 2026)

60. PBS NewsHour: USPS won’t deliver mail ballots to states that don’t provide voter rolls, Postmaster General says (June 24, 2026) and Democracy Docket: Postmaster General Steiner says the Postal Service will not deliver mail ballots without state voter rolls (June 24, 2026)

61. CNBC: Trump cancels housing bill signing over the SAVE America Act (June 24, 2026) and NBC News: Trump cancels plan to sign major housing bill as he fights Congress over the SAVE Act (June 24, 2026)

62. New York Magazine (Intelligencer): Trump says he changed California election results with a phone call (June 25, 2026) and Rolling Stone: Trump says Steve Hilton advanced because he called a U.S. attorney (June 2026)

63. The New Republic: ICE tracks down a poll worker to force her to delete an Instagram post (June 25, 2026)

64. NBC News: Top intelligence agency begins mass firings under new Trump appointee, source says and CNBC: Acting DNI Pulte fires dozens of intelligence officials (July 3, 2026)

65. ProPublica: Trump Pushes Out Remaining Members of Bipartisan Election Commission Ahead of Midterms (July 9, 2026) and Votebeat: Trump fires all Election Assistance Commission members, leaving agency unable to act (July 9, 2026)

66. The Guardian: Trump intelligence pick Jay Clayton refuses to say Biden won 2020 election (July 15, 2026) and CNBC: Trump to claim declassified intel reveals 2020 election interference (July 13, 2026)

67. NBC News: Elon Musk likely broke the law by promising voters $1 million payouts, Wisconsin board says (July 14, 2026) and WBAY/WISN: Wisconsin election commissioners refer complaints, say Elon Musk violated state’s bribery law (July 14, 2026)

68. CNN: What Trump’s newly declassified documents do and don’t tell us about threats to US elections (July 16, 2026) and FactCheck.org: FactChecking Trump’s Election Security Speech (July 2026) and The New Republic: Trump’s Own Election Fraud Guy Admits He’s Found No Proof (July 17, 2026)

69. U.S. News (Reuters): FCC Commissioner Says Trump Call to Revoke ABC, NBC Licenses Is Unconstitutional (July 17, 2026) and Newsweek: Donald Trump Scores Legal Victory In Major Mail-In Voting Change (July 18, 2026)

70. CBS News: 25 states sue FEMA and DHS, accusing Trump administration of withholding funding (July 23, 2026) and U.S. News (AP): More Than 24 States Sue Trump Administration After It Put Conditions on Receiving Disaster Funding (July 23, 2026)

71. CBS News: Federal appeals court upholds ruling blocking Trump’s order to create federal voter list (July 25, 2026) and CNBC: U.S. appeals court rules Trump cannot implement mail-in voting order (July 25, 2026)

72. Yahoo/AOL: Trump says he’s not considering declaring a national emergency ahead of midterms (July 2026)

73. The Washington Post: Trump administration asks Supreme Court to allow new limits on mail ballots (July 27, 2026) and CNBC: Trump administration asks Supreme Court to intervene to allow mail-in voting restrictions (July 27, 2026)

74. Democracy Docket: Trump DOJ loses bid for New Jersey voter rolls, now 0 for 18 (July 29, 2026) and Politico (via Yahoo): Federal judge rejects DOJ attempt to obtain unredacted NJ voter rolls (July 29, 2026)

75. Snopes: Did DHS Find 250,000 Noncitizens Registered To Vote in 4 States? (July 2026) and CBS News: Trump, Mullin claim noncitizens registered to vote in California, New Jersey, Nevada, Pennsylvania (July 2026) and PolitiFact: Fact-checking the DHS claim of 250,000 noncitizen voters (July 17, 2026)

76. Newsweek: Map Shows States Elon Musk’s Midterm Money Machine Could Impact Most (July 30, 2026) and Axios (via Yahoo): Exclusive: Musk plans massive push for GOP in midterms (July 29, 2026)

77. Democracy Docket: Trump DOJ now 0 for 20 after judge dismisses Colorado voter roll lawsuit “with prejudice” (August 4, 2026) and The New Republic: Trump Suffers 20th Straight Loss in Pathetic “Voter Fraud” Crusade (August 4, 2026)

78. Reuters (via AOL): Analysis: Trump loses 21 straight court battles for state voter rolls as midterms near (August 7, 2026) and Democracy Docket: After 20 straight losses, Trump DOJ struggles to defend demand for Washington state voter rolls (August 4, 2026)

79. Democracy Docket: Trump signals openness to unconstitutional plot to take over elections (August 2026) and HuffPost: Trump Entertains Plot To Declare A ‘National Emergency’ Over Elections (August 2026)

80. Votebeat: Supreme Court lifts 1 of 2 injunctions on Trump’s mail-voting executive order for 2026 elections (August 24, 2026) and NPR: Supreme Court gives Trump an interim win on his mail voting order, but hurdles loom (August 24, 2026) and CBS News: Supreme Court allows Trump to implement key parts of order restricting mail voting ahead of midterms and The Federalist: SCOTUS Overturns Injunction On Trump’s Mail-In Voting Order (August 24, 2026)

81. NOTUS: Postal Officials Say Trump’s Mail-Ballot Push Will Create Widespread Errors and CNBC: States sue to block Trump-backed USPS mail-ballot rule after Supreme Court setback (August 26, 2026) and Roll Call: Mail-in voting battle continues as midterms near (August 24, 2026)

82. NBC News: Judge blocks Trump’s Postal Service regulation on mail-in ballots (August 27, 2026) and CNN: Judge pauses US Postal Service plan to implement Trump’s new mail voting restrictions (August 27, 2026) and CBS News: Judge temporarily blocks new Postal Service rules for mail voting (August 27, 2026)

83. CNN: Republican governor asks his AG to look into ‘aggressive’ behavior by Trump admin’s election monitors (August 28, 2026) and NBC News: Wyoming’s Republican governor raises concerns over ‘aggressive’ DOJ election monitors (August 28, 2026) and WyoFile: Gov. Gordon concerned by ‘aggressive’ DOJ election observers during Wyoming’s primary election (August 28, 2026)

84. NBC News: Whistleblower says USPS system Trump ordered for mail ballots is flawed and untested (September 1, 2026) and Talking Points Memo: Postal Service whistleblower warns that new project will sow chaos in the election (September 2026)

85. CNBC: Trump’s $1 trillion-plus ‘dividend’ plan meets immediate bipartisan pushback (September 10, 2026) and CBS News: At RNC midterm convention, Trump pitches $5,000 checks to U.S. citizens, but only if GOP wins House and Senate (September 10, 2026) and Fox News: Trump makes stunning first-of-its-kind cash promise in bid to rally GOP voters at Dallas midterm convention (September 9, 2026) and Election Law Blog: Trump’s pledge is almost certainly protected by the First Amendment against bribery or vote-buying (Rick Hasen, September 10, 2026)

86. NBC News: Trump says the war in Iran will end after Election Day (September 9, 2026) and The Hill: Trump predicts Iran war will end ‘immediately after the election’ (September 9, 2026)

87. Variety: ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live’ Moves Interview With Texas Senate Candidate James Talarico From TV to YouTube Due to FCC Threats (September 9, 2026) and Deadline: Kimmel Says Trump’s FCC Has Threatened Show, So His James Talarico Interview Will Air On YouTube Instead Of ABC (September 9, 2026) and Fox News: Kimmel reveals he’s interviewing James Talarico under ‘unusual circumstances,’ citing FCC threats (September 10, 2026) and NBC News: FCC says late-night and daytime talk shows can’t assume equal-time exemption for candidate interviews (January 2026)

88. Federal Register: Decennial Census of the Population of Americans; Proposed Residence Criteria and Proposed Regulations for Demographic Questions (Census Bureau, September 10, 2026) and Roll Call: Census overhaul proposed by Trump administration could reshape Congress (September 9, 2026) and Talking Points Memo: Trump Admin Officially Moves to Reshape National Political Power With New Changes to 2030 Census (September 9, 2026)

89. CBS News Texas: President Trump says he doesn’t think $5,000 dividend payments would need to be approved by Congress (September 10, 2026) and The Daily Beast: Trump and ABC’s Rachel Scott, on the $5,000 checks (September 11, 2026)

90. Law Dork: Federal judge blocks new USPS mail ballot restrictions as general election ballots begin to be mailed and SCOTUSblog: Trump administration asks Supreme Court to clear the way for it to implement new mail-in voting rule and The Washington Post (via The Spokesman-Review): GOP secretaries of state ask Supreme Court to block Trump mail-in ballot rule (September 10, 2026)

91. Tallahassee Democrat (via Yahoo News): ‘Ridiculous’: Postal Service rejects Leon mail ballot envelopes. Here’s why (September 10, 2026) and Democracy Docket: In ominous sign, USPS initially rejected Florida county’s mail ballot over spacing issue (September 11, 2026)

92. Mediaite: Trump has convention audience raise their hands and pledge to vote, with full transcript (September 10, 2026) and The Hill: Trump leads convention in pledge, “You go to hell” if you don’t vote (September 10, 2026) and CNN: Fact check, Trump, RFK Jr. and others make false claims on night 2 of GOP convention (September 10, 2026)

93. The Hill: Trump says $5K dividend checks to Americans will ‘happen 100 percent’ (September 13, 2026)

94. NBC News: Lutnick says Trump’s $5,000 checks for Americans wouldn’t rely on taxpayer funds (September 10, 2026) and Newsweek: Trump’s $5,000 checks may rely on wealthy visas. Will enough sign up? (September 12, 2026)

95. Supreme Court of the United States: Order in No. 26A305, United States Postal Service v. California (September 14, 2026) and AP: Supreme Court rejects Trump mail ballot restrictions ahead of midterms (September 14, 2026) and Fox News: Supreme Court rejects Trump bid to revive strict mail-ballot rules before midterms and Washington Examiner: Trump-nominated judge blocks USPS mail-in ballot rule as Supreme Court weighs case and CNN: Supreme Court rejects Trump’s plan to limit mail-in voting in midterms (September 14, 2026)

96. AP (via WSOC-TV): DHS voter probe may break state laws and wrongly implicate US citizens, whistleblower alleges (September 14, 2026) and NPR (via Houston Public Media): Federal agents may have broken state laws in voter fraud hunt, whistleblower claims and CNN: DHS training materials instruct agents to potentially break laws, whistleblower says and Sen. Alex Padilla: Padilla, Schumer announce DHS whistleblower report

97. CNN: Experts slam Trump’s unusual new census report as a ‘hijack by the White House’ (August 20, 2026) and NPR (via KSMU): A Census Bureau report on noncitizen voting has ties to a Trump-aligned think tank and NPR (via Houston Public Media): Trump officials cut political interference ban after unusual Census Bureau report

98. Colorado Sun: Denver, Latino groups sue to keep ICE agents away from voting places (September 10, 2026) and Spectrum News: Denver, immigrant rights groups sue Trump administration to stop armed officers at polls and The Hill: ICE has no plans to ‘sweep polling locations’ for noncitizens, Homan says and Democracy Docket: DHS chief says ICE could make arrests at polling places

99. AP: Trump slams the Supreme Court for rejecting his push to restrict mail ballots (September 15, 2026), CNN: Trump lashes out at Supreme Court justices, saying his appointees ‘are not the people I interviewed’ (September 15, 2026) and CBS News: Supreme Court blocks new Postal Service rules for mail ballots in blow to Trump (September 15, 2026)

100. Roll Call: Patel won’t rule out FBI at the polls on Election Day (September 15, 2026), ABC News: Kash Patel clashes with Dems about possibly sending FBI agents to polling places (September 15, 2026) and CBS News: FBI Director Kash Patel hearing, live updates (September 15, 2026)

101. Votebeat: Trump administration explains how it identified potential noncitizen voters, says it will provide list to Pennsylvania (September 16, 2026) and NPR (via WITF): DHS acknowledges the noncitizen numbers it touted on voter rolls were inflated (August 26, 2026)

102. CNN: Trump’s Commerce Secretary under pressure to use his powers to block voting machines (September 10, 2026)

103. AP: Postal Service chief says work stopped on computer system key to Trump effort to limit mail voting (September 17, 2026)

104. AP: Virginia’s attorney general says DHS may have violated state election law after whistleblower report (September 17, 2026)

105. AP: Senators from both parties voice criticism about Pentagon briefing on US defense strategy (September 17, 2026) and The Hill: Pentagon No. 3 frustrates senators in closed-door briefing on Iran war, Trump defense strategy (September 17, 2026)

106. Democracy Docket: These international observers have monitored US elections for decades. This time, the Trump admin didn’t invite them (September 16, 2026) and The Fulcrum via IVN: No Watchdogs Allowed (July 21, 2026)

107. AP: The fight over congressional maps put nearly 35 million people into new House districts, report says (September 17, 2026) and Democracy Docket: Trump started a redistricting war. Now 1 in 10 Americans are in new House districts (September 17, 2026)

108. AP: Postal Service chief says work stopped on computer system key to Trump effort to limit mail voting (September 17, 2026)

109. NAACP v. Department of Homeland Security: complaint (September 18, 2026) and NPR: It’s illegal for armed federal officers to be at polls. Lawsuits seek to ensure that (September 18, 2026)

110. Campaign Legal Center: complaint to the Federal Election Commission (September 14, 2026) and The Washington Sun: Trump Calling MAGA Inc. Funds ‘My Money’ Spurs FEC Complaint (September 18, 2026)

111. NAACP et al. v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security et al., No. 1:26-cv-03263: complaint (September 18, 2026), The Hill: NAACP sues to block Trump administration from sending armed agents to polls (September 18, 2026) and States Newsroom: Trump administration faces second lawsuit to block ICE agents at polls (September 18, 2026)

112. Missouri Independent: Missouri election officials begin mailing ballots as they await ruling on congressional map (September 19, 2026), Missouri Independent: Missouri Republicans ask federal court to revive gerrymandered map, block referendum (September 16, 2026) and NBC News: Conflicting court rulings leave Missouri’s congressional map in limbo (September 2026)

113. League of Women Voters v. DHS (D.D.C.): Declaration of Nicolas S. Bartell, Doc. 146-1 (September 14, 2026), Sen. Padilla et al.: Letter to DHS Inspector General Cuffari (September 17, 2026) and Washington Examiner: Whistleblower alleges DHS voter fraud investigation could violate state laws (September 14, 2026)

114. U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit: Opinion, Onder v. Missouri, No. 26-2797 (September 21, 2026), Associated Press via KPRC: Appeals court favors Trump-backed Missouri congressional map, but Supreme Court will have final say (September 21, 2026), Roll Call: Appeals court backs GOP-drawn map in Missouri (September 21, 2026) and CNN: Supreme Court deals another blow to GOP hopes of capturing extra congressional seat (September 10, 2026)

115. Supreme Court of the United States: Emergency Motion to Clarify and Alternative Emergency Application for Stay, People Not Politicians v. Onder, No. 26A388 (September 22, 2026), Supreme Court of the United States: Docket for No. 26A388, Democracy Docket: Missouri election workers warned switching maps this late is ‘practically impossible’ but the 8th Circuit ordered it anyway (September 22, 2026) and CNN: Missouri’s embattled, Trump-backed congressional map returns to Supreme Court for a third time (September 23, 2026)

116. DSCC v. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, No. 1:26-cv-03330 (D.D.C.): Complaint (September 23, 2026) and Democracy Docket: Democrats sue Trump admin to keep armed agents from polls during midterms (September 24, 2026)

117. Associated Press: US government foots bill for television advertisement featuring Trump’s midterm messaging (September 24, 2026) and The Independent: Trump commercial ‘paid for by the US government’ running on Fox News raises eyebrows (September 24, 2026)

118. CNN: Exclusive: DHS plans to launch voter fraud investigation surge Tuesday (August 31, 2026), Associated Press (via ABC News): Administration’s focus on noncitizen voting has led to 160 arrests. Experts say that shows it’s rare (September 2026), California Nurses Association v. Mullin, No. 3:26-cv-10680 (N.D. Cal.): Complaint (September 18, 2026) and CourtListener: California Nurses Association v. Mullin, docket

119. The Nevada Independent: 185 noncitizen voters flagged by Trump admin in Nevada are likely citizens, state says (September 24, 2026) and New York Times (via The Philadelphia Inquirer): From 16,000 to 185 to zero: Trump’s claims of illegal voting in Nevada fizzle (September 24, 2026)

120. Associated Press: Supreme Court lets Trump administration use revamped federal voter eligibility database for now (September 25, 2026) and Supreme Court of the United States: Department of Homeland Security v. League of Women Voters, No. 26A308, docket (September 25, 2026) and Courthouse News Service: Supreme Court greenlights national citizenship database ahead of midterms (September 25, 2026)

121. CBS News: New Trump-focused “Love Me” ad campaign paid for by taxpayers hits airwaves (September 24, 2026)

122. AP: Trump administration begins airing 2024 Trump campaign ad in latest taxpayer-funded messaging (September 27, 2026) and NBC News: White House releases new taxpayer-funded ad describing ‘final battle’ (September 28, 2026) and Axios: White House defends Trump video ad Dems call “government propaganda” (September 25, 2026) and Public Citizen: Taxpayer-Funded Trump Ad Violates the Hatch Act (September 25, 2026) and CBS News: Sen. Kennedy urges Trump to focus on affordability, address nation on Iran ahead of midterm elections (September 27, 2026)

123. Supreme Court of the United States: People Not Politicians v. Onder, No. 26A388, per curiam (September 25, 2026) and AP: Supreme Court rejects a Trump-backed Missouri congressional map for the third time (September 25, 2026) and The Hill: Trump slams Supreme Court for blocking Missouri’s GOP-favored map for third time (September 27, 2026)

124. CNN: Inside Trump’s plan for the ‘biggest DOJ election observer effort in history’ (September 25, 2026) and Democracy Docket: DOJ close to recruiting 1,000 election monitors for midterms, Harmeet Dhillon says (September 22, 2026)

125. AP: Homeland Security taps $20M in taxpayer funds for pro-Trump ads (September 29, 2026) and NBC News: Pro-Trump TV ads paid for with Customs and Border Protection money, official says (September 29, 2026) and The Hill: GOP senators push back on Trump’s taxpayer-funded ad (September 2026)

126. U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia: Memorandum Opinion, Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County v. DHS (September 28, 2026) and AP: Trump can’t force election changes by blocking counterterrorism funds to states, judge says (September 28, 2026)

127. Axios: Scoop: Trump’s hand-picked, taxpayer-funded ads about to ramp up (September 29, 2026) and CNN: Trump’s ads have cost taxpayers at least $2.5 million, with funding from Customs and Border Protection (September 29, 2026)

128. Washington Post: Republican blocks Senate resolution criticizing Trump’s taxpayer-funded ads (September 29, 2026) and Daily Caller: GOP Senator Blocks Toothless Resolution Denouncing Trump’s Taxpayer-Funded Ads (September 30, 2026)

129. Deadline: FCC Chairman Doesn’t See Anything ‘Out Of The Ordinary’ About White House Airing Of Taxpayer-Funded Trump Ads (September 30, 2026) and Al Jazeera: US FCC head says controversial Trump ads do not raise concerns (September 30, 2026)

130. CREW: Complaint to the DHS Office of Inspector General on financing for pro-Trump television ads (September 30, 2026)

131. Washington Examiner: Trump launches America.gov AI website (September 29, 2026) and The Hill: John Thune sets data center, stock trading votes to shore up incumbents and U.S. Senate: Roll Call Vote 253, cloture on the motion to proceed to H.R. 7008 (September 30, 2026) and Washington Examiner: Senate Democrats block congressional stock trading ban over voter ID ‘poison pill’ (September 30, 2026) and Democracy Docket: GOP voter ID bill falls short in Senate (September 30, 2026)

132. USA Today: Trump to begin sending $500 ACA refund checks to 1 million Americans (September 30, 2026) and CNBC: Trump administration starts sending $500 Obamacare refund checks (September 30, 2026) and The Hill: White House begins mailing $500 ObamaCare ‘refund’ checks (September 30, 2026) and STAT: Right before midterms, Trump dangles $500 refunds for select ACA enrollees (September 10, 2026)

133. U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia: Complaint, Democratic National Committee v. U.S. Department of Defense (October 1, 2026), NPR: Trump officials changed forms for overseas voters amid a GOP push to restrict voting (September 30, 2026) and The Epoch Times: DNC Sues Over Pentagon Change to Overseas Voter Form (October 1, 2026)

134. TIME: Read TIME’s ‘What Trump Has Built’ Interview Transcript (October 1, 2026) and The Hill: Trump not ruling out invoking Insurrection Act around midterms (October 1, 2026)

135. Reuters (via Yahoo News): Trump’s $500 Obamacare ‘rebate’ checks land in prime political battlegrounds (October 1, 2026)

136. Reuters (via U.S. News): Exclusive: US spy chief’s office investigated voting machines in Puerto Rico (February 4, 2026)

137. Supreme Court of the United States: Louisiana v. Callais, No. 24-109, opinion (decided April 29, 2026)

138. Democracy Docket: Exclusive: Bert Callais, lead plaintiff in case that gutted Voting Rights Act, is an election conspiracist who was at Jan. 6 protest (May 5, 2026) and Newsweek: Plaintiff in Major Supreme Court Case Unaware He Was Involved (October 2025)

139. Florida Politics: Ron DeSantis signs Florida’s new congressional map (May 4, 2026) and Florida Politics: Plaintiffs make their case against Florida’s map, but will a Judge stop its use before the Midterms? (May 15, 2026)

140. Alabama Daily News: Gov. Ivey calls special session to address congressional map (May 1, 2026), Office of the Governor of Alabama: Governor Ivey Celebrates Major Court Victory in State’s Redistricting Battle, Calls Special Election for Alabama-Drawn Congressional Map (May 12, 2026) and AP (via OPB): Democratic incumbents win US House primaries in Alabama districts redrawn after Supreme Court ruling (August 11, 2026)

141. Politico: Inside the Quiet Republican Effort to Flip Fetterman (Jonathan Martin, May 4, 2026) and AP: Sen. John Fetterman’s isolation from Democrats grows stark in Pennsylvania (Marc Levy, September 9, 2026)

142. U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary: Nominations hearing (April 29, 2026) and Washington Monthly: Trump’s Pathetic Court Picks Hit New Low (Jonathan Alter, May 7, 2026)

143. HuffPost: Trump Admin Closes Watchdog Office For Immigration Detention Abuses (May 4, 2026) and NPR: DHS blames funding lapse for shutdown of internal detention oversight (May 7, 2026)

144. Fox News: Senate GOP tucks $1B for Trump ballroom security into sweeping funding bill (May 5, 2026), Fox News: Senate parliamentarian rejects $1 billion in reconciliation bill for White House security, Trump ballroom (May 17, 2026) and CBS News: Trump signs $70 billion immigration bill, capping lengthy fight over ICE funding (June 10, 2026)

145. AP (via Spectrum News): FBI searches Virginia Senate leader’s office as part of corruption probe, source says (May 6, 2026) and The Virginian-Pilot: Louise Lucas’ phone was wiretapped by FBI, journalist’s records intercepted, court records show (July 13, 2026)

146. NPR: Endorsed by Trump, Ed Gallrein defeats Rep. Thomas Massie in GOP House primary (May 19, 2026), NPR: 4 takeaways from Tuesday’s primary night in half a dozen states (May 20, 2026) and AP: Senate advances bill aimed at ending Iran war as Cassidy, after primary loss, flips to support (May 19, 2026)

147. AP: Election worker says federal officers confronted her at polls over social media post criticizing ICE (June 26, 2026) and Syracuse.com: Homeland Security defends its warning visit to Syracuse woman over social media post (June 27, 2026)