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The upcoming midterm elections seem destined to serve as a bellwether for the state of democracy in this deeply fraught period of U.S. electoral history. The results will be interpreted as a referendum on the catastrophically unpopular second Trump administration and will determine much of the legislative landscape over the next two years. Substantial Democratic victories could significantly constrain Trump’s powers or even place his presidency in jeopardy, and the Election Day performance of crucial structures and procedures could attest to either a resilient democracy — insofar as the country’s very flawed but still-vital electoral institutions are worthy of the name — or, conversely, a system that has at last been compromised by years of right-wing attacks, leaving the integrity and legitimacy of future votes in serious question.
The Trump administration, keenly aware of the stakes, has gone to unprecedented lengths to exert undue influence on electoral procedures. Having mobilized the Department of Justice (DOJ), the FBI, and other arms of the federal government now radically subservient to Trump, the administration is pursuing numerous strategies, legal and extralegal, to bludgeon its way into sensitive databases, neutralize electoral safeguards, and disenfranchise legitimate voters, with the intent of negating the wishes of the U.S. public and illicitly enshrining their own power.
Pressure Points
In reality, states are fully capable of maintaining their own rolls without the DOJ’s intervention (removing individuals who have died or moved out of state, for instance). And, more to the point, cases of “illegal voting” are extraordinary rarities, and have collectively had less-than-negligible — zero — impact on any real election results. Since the DOJ’s rationales are utterly fictitious, it’s not hard to imagine that there may be other motives underlying their aggressive nationwide efforts to access voter rolls, given that these initiatives originate from an administration led by and filled with election deniers.
Obtaining unredacted state rolls has not always been a simple matter, and the Trump Justice Department has in many cases resorted to strongarming, undermining, or otherwise attempting to manipulate state governments and other agencies to further its aims. Any plan to wrest election operations away from the states must inevitably find ways to circumvent the fundamental obstacle to federal control — Article 1, Section 4 of the Constitution, according to which elections are to be overseen solely by the states. Of course, questions of constitutionality have never burdened Trump’s conscience, and he has openly announced his desire to “nationalize” elections and place them under federal (i.e., his) jurisdiction. Were that to someday occur, unfettered voter roll access would be a boon for election manipulators.
Still — in court, at least — the Trump administration’s efforts to attain that level of nationwide control have been less than fruitful. The Trump DOJ has initiated numerous lawsuits that seek to force states to sign data-handover agreements: no fewer than 31 to date, with one of those filed against Washington, D.C., and the rest against states, most of them governed by Democrats. Of the remaining 20 states not sued, 16, all Republican-led, dutifully volunteered to submit their voters’ crucial personal data to Trump’s feds without a fight. Back in December 2025, the DOJ sent Republican governors a confidential deal to sign; it gave the federal government unprecedented roll access and also allowed the DOJ to share that highly sensitive personal data with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The text of those confidential agreements, Eileen O’Connor wrote in a Brennan Center report, “reveals both the DOJ’s plans to interfere with the states’ authority to run elections and how dangerously insecure the sensitive data will be in the department’s hands.”
The administration is pursuing numerous strategies, legal and extralegal, to bludgeon its way into sensitive databases, neutralize electoral safeguards, and disenfranchise legitimate voters.
O’Connor then cited an especially troubling case in which a “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, employee working at the Social Security Administration (SSA) at the time of the former agency’s ransacking of the latter was found to have signed an agreement to illicitly funnel voter data to an external entity. The incident came to light in the course of a union lawsuit against the SSA and its DOJ counsel, which were forced to admit in court that this employee was contacted by, and voluntarily contracted with, a “political advocacy group,” which goes unnamed in the filing, but which had the “stated aim … to find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States.”
Doing its part, the Trump DHS, a whistleblower report alleges, has ordered immigration officers to break various laws in pursuit of its “Unlawful Voter Initiative,” a hunt for — again, non-existent —“illegal” votes; the department directed subordinates to lie to gain data access and enforced unmeetable quotas, which effectively guaranteed high error rates, translating to high rates of erroneous/illicit disenfranchisement of legal voters.
The end goal seems to be, if possible, to subject all 50 states’ confidential voter data to the same fate. However, at least in some legal arenas, Trump’s DOJ has been decisively thwarted: nearly all of these lawsuits against the states plus D.C. — out of a total of 31 cases, 26 and counting — have already failed spectacularly in the legal system. The overwhelming extent of these defeats hints at the lawsuits’ farcical baselessness and unconstitutionality.
Chris Diaz is the director of legislative tracking at Voting Rights Lab, a non-partisan, non-profit voter advocacy group that provides expert analysis of the shifting dynamics within U.S. electoral systems and democratic institutions. “Judges have consistently found,” Diaz wrote in an email to Truthout, “that the Department of Justice’s demands for unredacted state voter rolls overstep constitutional bounds and violate state privacy laws.” Still, Diaz pointed out, this failure could be spun into further justifications for denying legitimate outcomes, as in all likelihood, “we can expect the administration to use its inability to get this information as a reason to challenge, or undermine, election results it doesn’t like in those states that have refused to give them the unredacted lists.”
Misuse of Data
Unlike the lower and lesser courts, the Supreme Court, highest in the land, purports to represent timeless principles that transcend petty partisanship; currently dominated by Republicans, it just happens to accede to the president’s wishes far more often than not. Recently, the Supreme Court overruled a lower court’s stay, ruling 6-3 (along partisan lines) to allow the administration’s use of a tool called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system, clearing the way for both federal and state governments to use the system to identify “non-citizen voters.”
Initially built to review the citizenship status of state-benefits applicants, the SAVE system has been adapted (with dubious efficacy) to trawl voter data, in part by enabling it to compare voter information against Social Security databases. SAVE is notoriously unreliable, routinely returning errors, as Diaz told Truthout, especially false positives that misidentify real citizens as ineligible non-citizens. “This has caused problems in states that have relied on it for voter list maintenance purposes.” In September, he noted, “Nevada officials found that every individual on a list of 185 purported non-citizens provided by the federal government was in fact a citizen.”
Experts at CISA, in the last election, were able to debunk Trump’s lies about rigged voting machines at a critical juncture. Today, many of the overseers involved in that series of events have been fired.
Beyond the system’s usefulness in carrying out purges, experts also believe that the Trump administration is so intent on using SAVE because the software can dredge through data and generate results — whether they are accurate is a different question — to promote false claims of large-scale illegal voting. In addition, SAVE plays a role in the federal government’s plan to compile lists of vote-eligible citizens in each state, as Trump sought to do with his anti-democratic executive order in March of 2025. However, as Diaz told Truthout, the “primary risk here is last-minute attempts to push states to use [SAVE’s] unreliable federal data to pursue aggressive voter roll purges.”
There is, Diaz explained, an existing safeguard against late-game disenfranchisement, in that “federal law prohibits systematic list maintenance within 90 days of a federal election.” Nevertheless, “some states may be willing to push the limits of the law to pursue aggressive hunts for purported non-citizens,” he added — and given what we’ve seen from Trump’s election-denying state allies, it would not be surprising. Indeed, Republicans have set about attempting to undermine that prohibition: NPR reported that the Supreme Court, once again, has already “agreed to the Republican National Committee’s request to take up an Arizona-based case that could narrow the [90-day] quiet period’s scope.”
There is likewise a precedent for “quiet period” extension in the form of, per the same NPR article: “a brief, unexplained ruling the Supreme Court’s conservative majority made before the 2024 election, allowing a Virginia program for removing suspected noncitizens to continue during that year’s quiet period.” The latter decision ended up allowing Virginia to purge eligible citizens and deny them the vote.
Mafia-esque Tactics
The administration and its most powerful agencies have gone to great lengths to test out pressure tactics. In one unnerving gesture, polling locations in the midterms will be surveilled by an unprecedented number of federal “election observers” who will “ensure polling locations are complying with federal law,” as the DOJ told CNN. Observers are not new, but deploying a thousand of them is. Perhaps even more egregiously, in July of 2026, DHS took steps to condition the provision of counterterrorism funding upon states’ compliance with certain demands — what DHS called “common-sense election security measures.” The measures they were pressing to impose involved supplying voter roll data to the SAVE system. Unless states complied with its demands for data, DHS would freeze 20 percent of their funds. On September 28, a federal judge blocked that particular power play.
The repurposing of federal police to attack the president’s opponents may in some respects be the most concerning development of all.
Such tactics have increasingly approached the mafia-esque. In the course of ordering states to both share their voter rolls and to preserve older data from the 2024 election (presumably to scrape more data and challenge those results as well), the Trump Justice Department went so far as to level clear threats at state officials. The Associated Press (AP) obtained one of the DOJ’s demand letters, in which “a Justice Department official told Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican, that she is ‘under investigation’ and subject to ongoing litigation over the state’s failure to turn over statewide voter registration lists.” Similarly, as an article from the Campaign Legal Center relates, “The DOJ even sent a letter to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz at the start of 2026 with several demands, including access to the state’s unredacted voter rolls, and suggested that compliance with the demand was a condition of removing federal immigration law enforcement officers from the Minneapolis area.”
An especially chilling investigation by ProPublica documented the administration’s behind-the-scenes undermining or outright eradication of federal agencies and experts at the Foreign Malign Influence Center (FMIC), the FBI’s public corruption team, the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and others. Experts at CISA, in the last election, were able to debunk Trump’s lies about rigged voting machines at a critical juncture that halted the false narrative. Today, many of the overseers involved in that series of events have been fired, and experts and officials throughout the system are being replaced with toadies.
Across several federal agencies, ProPublica’s investigation identified 75 fired experts who have been replaced with “roughly two dozen people” now installed in high-level oversight positions “that could affect elections. Ten of them actively worked to reverse the 2020 vote, and the rest are associates of such people. In some cases, ProPublica found, officials have been hired from activist groups that are pillars of the election denial movement.” Relatedly, Voting Rights Lab has tracked and reported on numerous worrisome instances of infiltration and abuse of power in state entities like election boards, including the many state-level election-denying officials who have refused to certify results. Trump also forced out the administrators of the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission.
The downfall of the democratic vote is not yet a foregone conclusion. We can be certain, however, that the current administration will do everything in its power to put its thumb on the scales.
The repurposing of federal police to attack the president’s opponents may in some respects be the most concerning development of all. In an appalling decision (reminiscent of the Bureau’s longstanding propensity for political meddling, from the Palmer Raids to COINTELPRO), FBI director, Trump devotee, and children’s book author Kash Patel requisitioned 100 federal agents in June of 2026 to raid the offices of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a pro-democracy social justice non-profit and the leading voter-registration organization in the swing state. In February of the same year, the FBI had raided Georgia state election offices and actually seized official election records, citing a pretense of “investigating” purported voter fraud in 2020 — Trump’s pet grievance.
The salience of the illegal-voting narrative among Trump’s base (an overwhelming 86 percent of Republicans polled in 2024 believed, against all evidence, that non-eligible voter participation was a concern) shows no sign of abating, and those kinds of narratives, according to Diaz, “could build momentum for enacting more restrictive laws.” Diaz told Truthout:
False and misleading claims about ineligible voters lay the groundwork to undermine public trust and manufacture pretexts to contest election outcomes as demonstrated by the months-long legal battle following the 2024 North Carolina Supreme Court race, where the losing candidate challenged thousands of ballots after the election, [and] bad-faith actors could leverage flawed data to launch targeted voter challenges and try to manipulate results in close races.
The Trump administration’s efforts to overturn democratic elections make for frightening times, especially as they arrive amid all the other crises and abuses of power that have characterized the nascent fascism that increasingly shadows the United States. Even short of Trump’s extremist dreams of total federalization, there remain weaknesses in U.S. electoral institutions that are cause for severe concern — from the now-compromised election oversight agencies to the deniers among state election officials to the weaponized transformation of the DOJ from a civil rights and voting rights adjudicator (however flawed) into a rabidly Trumpist attack dog. But despite the looming threats, there is still every reason to believe that the downfall of the democratic vote is not yet a foregone conclusion. We can be certain, however, that the current administration will do everything in its power to put its thumb on the scales.
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