Whistleblower tells Congress DHS non-citizen voter initiative may be unlawful
Election experts gathered Tuesday at a Brennan Center for Justice briefing to flag what they described as an exposed period in the November midterm cycle — the hours and days between the close of polls and the final vote count, when control of the US House and Senate may still be in flux.
Caitlin Durkovich, a former deputy homeland security adviser for resilience and response on the National Security Council, framed the counting window as a likely fallback for an administration that has lost multiple court battles over its attempts to disrupt the voting process. “I think because the administration has lost so many of their attempts to disrupt the normal process in court, that they are going to use the claim of foreign interference at the end of voting days to either seize equipment or to seize ballots, whether they’re legally justified to do so or not,” Durkovich told the briefing.
“That period, that waiting time, is where doubt begins to surface,” Durkovich said. “And when it is then amplified by foreign actors and, frankly, by domestic actors, it starts to cause distrust in the integrity of the process.”
Though Trump’s bid to impose sweeping restrictions on mail-in ballots was rejected by the Supreme Court earlier this month, concern remains that the administration and its allies could use the period while votes are being counted to amplify unfounded allegations and challenge results that do not go their way. Some states take days — and, in California’s case, weeks — to complete a vote count. Control of the US House of Representatives and Senate may hinge on results in states with delayed counts.
Larry Norden, vice-president of the elections and government program at the Brennan Center, said state-level elections officials are trying to prepare the public for the post-election process now, in an effort to head off a manufactured controversy later. “To me, this is the biggest threat right now,” Norden said.
Norden also pushed back against the impression that voting itself has become harder. “I think a lot of people may think just because they’re seeing all these headlines being thrown at them that things have changed — that it’s become more difficult to vote,” he said. “In the history of American elections in some ways, there have never been more options for the way that people can vote, and they are still in place going into this election.” Early voting, he added, largely removes the threats that worry voters ahead of an election. “The earlier they vote, the more secure they can feel that their vote is going to count, and I think that’s a really important message for us to be delivering to people,” Norden said.
The power of doubt about the validity of votes, and the risk of Trump unveiling “emergency” measures on ballots or voting machines around election day, looms large, according to the briefing. Ben Hovland, former chair of the Election Assistance Commission, pointed to a recent court ruling as one guardrail: a Supreme Court decision earlier this month upheld a lower-court injunction blocking the Trump administration from using the US Postal Service and the Department of Homeland Security to vet mail-in ballot deliveries.
“Every state in the country now has live ballots out,” Hovland said. “That really means the election is here, and it means that needs to be taken into consideration for any court rulings we’re looking at.”
Federal actions affecting the voting process have continued despite that ruling. The Department of Homeland Security is pursuing voter-roll lists in states that have not turned them over voluntarily, and the federal government has asked states to retain their 2024 election documentation for later inquiries. The Department of Justice and the FBI normally enter a “quiet period” just ahead of elections to avoid influencing the results; that has not been the case this year.
DHS is also pursuing an independent “unlawful voter initiative” to find non-citizen voters on state rolls. An anonymous whistleblower told Congress last week that the initiative is using “highly questionable data” and may be unlawful.
Groups including the NAACP and the National Urban League remain concerned about the Trump administration’s insistent claim — without evidence — that the 2026 midterm elections will be illegitimate unless the federal government intervenes. The federal government’s claims of illegally registered voters — claiming numbers that do not bear up under scrutiny — together with Trump’s rhetoric alleging fraud without evidence, “back up a narrative of fraud to undermine confidence in the elections,” Hovland said.
Much of the president’s election rhetoric revolves around foreign interference. Experts make a distinction between foreign influence — propaganda, essentially — and foreign interference, or directly manipulating vote counts.
“It’s very important for people to understand that we don’t have any examples of a country trying to interfere in the electoral process, in that technical process,” said Beth Sanner, a former deputy director of national intelligence who is now director for geopolitics and strategy at International Capital Strategies. “It just didn’t happen,” she said. “It didn’t happen in 2020.”
Election security has improved across the country, in part as a reaction to false claims about Trump’s 2020 defeat, according to the briefing. “Every state audits its results,” said Geoff Hales, former chief of joint cyber defense collaborative partnerships at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. “Election officials across the country have really taken cybersecurity seriously.”
Hales added that federal support for those state efforts has eroded. “The federal support that used to be there has pulled back sharply,” he said. “This means that cybersecurity services have been reduced, funding for information sharing environments have been cut, the threat briefings about nation-state adversaries that used to occur dozens of times a year are occurring rarely or not at all.”