The plot to undermine the 2026 elections
The Trump administration is engaged in a multi-pronged effort to undermine the integrity of and confidence in the 2026 election.
At the center of the effort is President Trump himself. In a Monday appearance on Dan Bongino’s podcast, Trump said:
Minnesota is a mess. There’s something in the water up there. I won the state three times, but I got no credit for it. I won that state three times but it’s a rigged state. Really rigged badly with the Somalians, and the Somalians and the theft.
The Democratic presidential candidate won Minnesota in 2016, 2020, and 2024. Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen, which he continues to make repeatedly, have been exhaustively debunked.
In his podcast appearance, Trump went on to suggest that “Republicans ought to nationalize the voting” because “we have states that I won that show I didn’t win.” The Constitution says that the “times, places, and manner of holding elections“ will be determined by the states.
Trump’s efforts to undermine confidence in the 2026 midterms are not just rhetorical. On January 28, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents raided the Fulton County, Georgia, election office. The agents executed a warrant to seize records related to the 2020 election.
Former President Joe Biden won Georgia in 2020. But, without any factual backing, Trump has claimed that he was the true winner. On January 2, 2021, in a recorded call, Trump famously pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” 11,779 additional votes — enough to make him the winner — in Fulton County.
The warrant authorized the seizure of physical ballots, voting machine “tabulator tapes,” voter rolls, and electronic data, which Trump administration officials claimed constituted evidence of a crime.
Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence (DNI), was on site during the Fulton County raid. The DNI has no role in domestic law enforcement and is supposed to be focused on foreign intelligence gathering. According to the Wall Street Journal, she has “spent months investigating the results of the 2020 election that Donald Trump lost.”
While the raid is unlikely to uncover any actual evidence of wrongdoing, it does demonstrate Trump’s willingness to use the full spectrum of federal government power to interfere with state election administration and advance his political interests.
A national voter purge
Beginning in May, the Department of Justice (DOJ) began sending letters to state officials requesting complete, unredacted voter rolls containing sensitive information on voters, including drivers license and social security numbers.
The Trump administration has claimed it has authority to ask states for their voter rolls under the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), which requires states to maintain accurate lists of their registered voters and make certain records available to the public. The DOJ is arguing that it needs to inspect state voter rolls to “ensure that states have proper voter registration procedures and programs to maintain clean voter rolls containing only eligible voters in federal elections.” However, The NVRA does not require states to disclose sensitive voter data to the public or to the federal government. In reality, the Trump administration is creating a national voter roll in order to purge what it alleges is widespread voter fraud by noncitizens.
At times, the administration has admitted this purpose openly. In a statement to Democracy Docket, about an agreement with the DOJ to use some of the voter data, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson wrote that the goal of using the data is to “prevent illegal aliens from corrupting our republic’s democratic process and further ensure the integrity of our elections nationwide.”
The actual number of noncitizens who illegally vote in U.S. elections is very small. However, any attempt to purge voters would likely lead to many eligible voters being removed from the voter roll, as has already played out in states purging their own voter rolls.
In August 2024, for example, Alabama’s Secretary of State Wes Allen (R) announced that he wanted “to ensure that Alabama has the cleanest and most accurate voter file in the country.” So, he removed over 3000 people from the state’s voter roll that he claimed were non-citizens. However, it turned out that over 700 of those people had recently become citizens and were eligible to vote.
As of the end of January, at least 44 states and Washington D.C. received requests from the DOJ for their voter rolls. Eleven states, all led by Republicans, have said they will comply with this request. Twenty-four states and Washington D.C., mostly led by Democrats, have been sued by the DOJ for refusing to provide voter rolls. (These lawsuits are rife with errors, including being addressed to the wrong officials and citing laws that do not exist.)
In Minnesota, the DOJ has recently turned to a new tactic for getting sensitive voter information. On the same day that Alex Pretti was shot and killed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers in Minneapolis, Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter to Governor Tim Walz stating that he could “bring an end to the chaos in Minnesota” if he cooperated with the federal government on “common sense solutions.”
One proposed solution was turning over the state’s voter rolls to the Trump administration. The letter made no attempt at explaining how sharing voter data would help reduce tensions between federal agents and Minnesota officials and residents. Instead, it was an effort to leverage the killing of U.S. citizens by CBP officers to advance the administration’s plans to disrupt future elections.
Voter suppression by presidential fiat
The Trump administration has also attempted to use executive orders to overhaul and federalize the election system. On March 25, Trump signed an executive order, entitled “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections,” that instructs the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) to add a proof of citizenship requirement to the federal voter registration form. It also requires that the Secretary of Defense add a proof of citizenship requirement to the voter registration form used by military and overseas voters. The executive order does not mention birth certificates as a valid proof of citizenship, instead listing a passport, military ID, or a government-issued ID that indicates citizenship. This would require most people to use a passport to prove their citizenship, something only around half of Americans have.
Additionally, the order instructs the Attorney General to take action against states that count mail-in ballots mailed prior to Election Day that were received afterward, a practice that is allowed by more than a dozen states. The order also instructs federal agencies, including the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), to review state voter registration lists and records for instances of voter fraud. States that do not comply with parts of the order are at risk of losing federal funding.
It is already against the law for noncitizens to vote, and studies have found that noncitizen voting is incredibly rare. A proof of citizenship requirement could disenfranchise millions of eligible voters. A 2023 study by the Brennan Center for Justice found that 21.3 million people, or over nine percent of voters, “don’t have proof of citizenship readily available.”
Multiple judges have since blocked much of Trump’s executive order. Last week, a federal judge permanently blocked two parts of the order “that sought to impose proof-of-citizenship rules.” U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly argued in the ruling that Trump’s attempts to control elections were unconstitutional. “Put simply, our Constitution does not allow the President to impose unilateral changes to federal election procedures,” Kollar-Kotelly wrote.
The Trump administration has floated additional executive orders related to election administration. In August, Trump posted on Truth Social that he was “going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS” and “Seriously Controversial” voting machines. “WE WILL BEGIN THIS EFFORT, WHICH WILL BE STRONGLY OPPOSED BY THE DEMOCRATS BECAUSE THEY CHEAT AT LEVELS NEVER SEEN BEFORE, by signing an EXECUTIVE ORDER to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections,” Trump wrote. Trump went on to falsely claim that “the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes.”
In November, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that the White House was “working on an executive order to strengthen our elections in this country,” suggesting that the order would relate to mail-in voting.
I'm surprised they haven't said that "a vote for a Democrat shall count as 3/5 of one vote"
Trump and the Republicans are going to get smoked in November and they know it. They will try every dirty trick they can think of to prevent that outcome, and they may make a difference on the margins, but they can only cheat their way to a win when it's close, and as we have seen repeatedly over the past year, it is unlikely to be close. But once defeated then the real "fun" will begin. They will scream about massive voter fraud. They will scream about illegal aliens voting. They will scream about Democrats cheating. They will file hundreds of lawsuits that they will lose. And then come January, they will try to refuse to seat the victorious Democrats. But they will lose. Why, because we, the people, will not stand for it. Oh, we won't debase ourselves or our Capitol with another J6 terrorist attack, but we will enforce the outcome of the election no matter what Trump thinks.