Task force accelerates election document releases since July speech
White House spokesperson Lauren Bis declined to address the possibility of an executive order declaring a national emergency on elections when asked by The Guardian, instead framing the dispute around the Save America Act, which would require states to submit their voter rolls to federal inspection, effectively give the Department of Homeland Security the power to de-register anyone it deemed ineligible to vote, curtail mail-in voting, and require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote and a narrow set of photo IDs to cast a ballot.
Aria Branch, a partner at the Elias Law Group who led a lawsuit blocking Trump’s previous executive orders on election administration, told The Guardian that the administration is “trying to lay the groundwork to declare some sort of emergency to nationalize elections.” Branch said she believed Trump was “looking for any opportunity” to take such a step.
In a primetime July address, Trump claimed US elections were vulnerable to foreign manipulation and repeated his assertion that the 2020 presidential election — which he lost to Joe Biden — was stolen, The Guardian reported. The speech prompted Bannon, on his War Room video podcast on 29 July, to predict Trump would declare a state of emergency on national security grounds “to protect” elections.
“Take your No 2 pencil out,” Bannon said on the podcast, according to The Guardian. “It’s coming. It’s coming. Just block the last week of August out. It’s coming.” On the night of the address, Bannon texted CNN: “We need a National Security Emergency about the midterm elections immediately – this is a powerful predicate for that.”
Asked earlier this month by Wayne Allyn Root, a rightwing broadcaster, whether he would “declare a national security emergency for elections,” Trump did not rule out the possibility. “Let me just say, stranger things have happened, OK?” Trump told Real America’s Voice, a rightwing cable channel. “I’ll leave it at that.”
“Extreme liberal Democrats are keeping Americans from having full confidence in their elections by refusing to vote for the Save America Act,” Bis told The Guardian. “The American people overwhelmingly support this commonsense legislation that ensures Americans, and Americans only, decide our elections. President Trump is absolutely right: we fix this now, or we lose our country.”
Ty Cobb, a former White House attorney, told PBS after the July address that the speech was “intended to add the predicate that he needs to declare an emergency at or about the time of the elections.” Cobb said Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at polling places was “a virtual certainty” and questioned whether National Guard officers would also be deployed. He cited what he described as Trump’s 2020 attempt to seize voting machines — an effort that then-Attorney General Bill Barr, Cobb said, told Trump had “no basis.”
The Guardian reported that Democratic members of Congress have been war-gaming responses to executive provocations, including scenarios with AI-generated disinformation videos and ICE agents at polls. Santiago Mayer, president of Voters of Tomorrow, a Gen Z-led voter advocacy organization, told The Guardian the administration needed to be met with voter turnout that could withstand any action: “I mean, listen, I think it is quite obvious that the man is losing his grip in reality, so I think we need to be prepared for everything. … I think our focus at the end of the day is to turn out enough voters where, no matter what he pulls, it won’t succeed.”
After Trump’s address, a White House “Government Transparency Task Force” — composed of members from the office of the director of national intelligence, the NSA, the CIA and the Department of Homeland Security — began releasing declassified “election integrity” documents on the White House website, according to The Guardian. The first tranche included intelligence memos describing electronic voting-machine vulnerabilities, foreign access to state voter registration data, and foreign digital manipulation strategies. Much of the material was already public, The Guardian reported, amounting to a US intelligence assessment that found no evidence Beijing altered the 2020 vote Trump lost.
A week later, Trump and his allies seized on New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill’s announcement that 6,600 noncitizens had registered to vote because of a software error. Although fewer than 400 of them voted, the disclosure was used to escalate claims about noncitizens on the rolls. On 31 July, DHS released a public notice arguing that New Jersey’s administrative errors demonstrated a need for standardized federal oversight, The Guardian reported.
The task force has also declassified documents in a Michigan case in which the FBI investigated suspected fraudulent voter registrations by a get-out-the-vote organization — no criminal charges were filed — and investigative material related to a data scrape of voter information in Maricopa County, Arizona.
On Monday, the task force released files related to a Chinese intelligence investigation disclosing that former Democratic US Representative Eric Swalwell told FBI agents he had “occasionally hooked up” with Christine Fang, a Chinese national allegedly engaged in a political influence campaign. On Tuesday, the US Census Bureau released a brief claiming it had identified 24,000 noncitizens voting in the 2020 election from a preliminary match of 128 million records. The bureau did not reveal its methodology, and the analysis drew sharp criticism from election specialists.
“This alleged analysis based on census data fails the laugh test,” David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, told The Guardian. “The administration does not provide a sufficient explanation of how it arrived at these numbers – and for good reason.”
Branch, of Elias Law Group, told The Guardian that the administration is “searching for” the legal basis for an executive order. “I think they believe there may be one. I think such a document just doesn’t exist, because the fact is our elections are secure,” she said. “Noncitizen voting in our elections is just not a widespread problem … All of the fear and narrative around that issue is just completely unfounded, and it’s really just to stoke fear and lay the groundwork for future action.”
In July, DHS separately released an analysis arguing that 278,000 noncitizens are registered to vote in federal elections, The Guardian reported. DHS did not reveal its methodology or how confident its officials were in their assessment. The tool used to flag noncitizens on voter rolls is known to be inaccurate, according to The Guardian.
The Guardian’s reporting also detailed the role of Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s former director of national intelligence, whose presence at an FBI raid in Fulton County, Georgia, earlier this year raised questions. Gabbard later testified to Congress that she had been leading an investigation into claims of foreign interference in US elections. Her team was involved in the seizure and examination of voting equipment in Puerto Rico, The Guardian reported, and spent months scrutinizing voting-machine vulnerabilities and the possibility of foreign interference.
Gabbard resigned on 30 June, after which Trump named his longtime ally Bill Pulte as acting director — a move criticized by members of both parties for Pulte’s lack of intelligence experience. Jay Clayton later took the post permanently, but Pulte reportedly continued pushing the election-interference narrative in a less visible role. “This is why Pulte is so important,” Bannon said in July, according to The Guardian. “So, ah, Jay has got to – Clayton – has big shoes to fill. Every day we’re going to be dogging him on, like, where’s the next release on this.”
Branch told The Guardian she views the rhetoric itself as an act of intimidation. “I mean, we’ve been closely monitoring what the administration is saying,” she said. “The constitution is extremely clear on this, and the founders recognized the risk of centralizing power over elections in the executive branch,” adding that the constitutional structure would be “very helpful, in terms of litigation to push back on these types of efforts.”
The Guardian noted that no president has previously attempted to invoke an emergency to assert control over voting, and experts said a national emergency declaration would not supersede constitutional limits on executive power over election administration.