Senate Democrats test responses to possible election disruptions

Senators test responses to deepfakes, threats and federal intervention

Senate Democrats have held two election-disruption exercises this year as they prepare for possible threats to the 2026 midterms. The sessions brought together senators, voting-rights groups and legal experts to examine how misinformation and government action could affect voting.

Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, participated in a recent exercise with senators including Alex Padilla, Adam Schiff, Mark Warner, Elissa Slotkin and Raphael Warnock. The session took place in a Washington conference room last month, according to The Guardian.

One scenario involved realistic deepfake videos produced with artificial intelligence and circulated on social media several weeks before voting began. The videos appeared to show evidence of widespread election fraud. In the exercise, forensic experts quickly identified the material as synthetic, but The Guardian reported that media outlets it identified as right-wing and the president amplified the claims.

The scenario then included death threats against election workers and armed men appearing at polling places. Senators were asked how they would respond.

Justin Vail, who leads the Washington office of the nonpartisan advocacy group Protect Democracy, said the exercise was not intended to predict a specific outcome. “These tabletop exercises are a standard planning tool for experts and stakeholders to prepare for potential scenarios. We’re not predicting exactly what would happen,” Vail said.

The exercises were intended to expose gaps in preparation and coordination, Vail said. “But we do want to create a realistic context that can help us identify gaps, test our assumptions, and strengthen coordination, and then ultimately develop some recommendations to increase our preparedness.”

Protect Democracy and other voting-rights and legal groups participated alongside election attorney Marc Elias, former Attorney General Eric Holder, election law expert Norman Eisen and members of Democracy Forward. Skye Perryman, the organization’s chief executive, said the legal system and the distributed structure of U.S. elections provide resilience against political interference.

“The president can try to imagine whatever he may wish to imagine,” Perryman said. “He can’t imagine a new constitution, and the constitution, frankly, is quite clear in no uncertain terms; there’s not a role for the president in election administration in this country.”

The planning has been shaped by Trump’s continuing claims about the 2020 election, which The Guardian described as false, and his demand that Congress approve new federal oversight of elections. Voting-rights advocates have said the administration’s public statements and the actions of agencies under its supervision could foreshadow more direct interference.

In a prime-time television address last month, the administration presented Trump as offering new evidence that the 2020 election was illegitimate and that his administration had found vulnerabilities in the U.S. election system. Trump instead claimed that China had illicitly obtained voter information on 220 million Americans and had undermined his 2020 campaign in unspecified ways. He also argued that intelligence officials had suppressed the information.

The Guardian reported that Trump’s claims did not withstand scrutiny. His intelligence officials had already concluded that China refrained from interfering in the U.S. election because of concern about political consequences if it were caught.

Trump also threatened the broadcast licenses of networks that declined to carry the address live. During the speech, he again urged Congress to pass the Save America Act, which would ban mail-in ballots nationwide and add identification requirements when voters register and cast ballots. Republican senators have refused to eliminate the 60-vote filibuster threshold needed to pass the measure.

Jon Ossoff, a Democratic senator from Georgia, described Trump’s address as “signaling his unmistakable intent to attack these elections and our voting rights, just as he tried to throw out our votes and seize the presidency in 2020”.

The exercises included scenarios involving a threat to withhold Office of Management and Budget funding from states that did not submit voter rolls for federal oversight. Senators also considered a possible Federal Communications Commission response against news outlets that covered deepfakes.

“The development of AI will only add to the complexity and could create confusion among voters in our fragmented media landscape,” Vail said. “Unfortunately, that confusion can be to the benefit of the administration’s strategy.”

Other scenarios involved armed people in tactical gear at ballot drop boxes, online publication of license-plate information, a firebombing of an early-voting site and a last-minute unilateral deployment of Department of Homeland Security agents and the National Guard to polling stations. The Guardian reported that armed vigilantes at ballot drop boxes were not purely hypothetical, citing Arizona during the 2022 midterms.

Perryman said the exercise pointed to the need for broad coordination. “The main lesson of the exercise is that this is an all-hands-on-deck moment, and it is an all-hands-on-deck response,” she said. “And so what that means is that, we’re not looking at any one silver bullet to be able to fully protect elections. It’s going to take all of us.”