Weekly calls and tabletop drills test responses to federal election threats
The coordination is organized around a division of responsibility: secretaries of state supervise elections, while attorneys general defend the laws governing them. The Progressive State Leaders Committee, the public policy arm of the Democratic Attorneys General Association, has led the expanded effort since early this year. Participating civic groups include the Democracy Defenders Fund, the States United Democracy Center and the Brennan Center for Justice.
Brown said the Justice Department and Trump administration were “the biggest adversary to a smooth election.” He added: “Trump lies about the election on a regular basis. Truth is not a goal of his. That creates a whole host of concerns for us.” The Guardian reported that Trump had falsely called the 2020 election “rigged” on his first day in office last January and had made similar claims hundreds of times since he lost that election to Joe Biden.
The Justice Department’s summer plan to deploy 1,000 poll monitors prompted the NAACP to file a lawsuit on October 4 seeking details about the deployment. CBS News reported that the department deployed 289 monitors in 2022.
The department also sued 30 states for unredacted voter lists containing sensitive personal information. Democratic attorneys general participated in challenges to those lawsuits, and the Justice Department has lost 26 of the lawsuits that courts have ruled on.
Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, wrote to state election officials this summer and threatened prosecutions if they did not cooperate adequately in searching for voting fraud, The Guardian reported.
Brown, a former U.S. attorney and federal prosecutor, chairs the Progressive State Leaders Committee’s election-protection working group. He has led weekly Zoom calls with the committee’s partners, including secretary of state offices and the three civic organizations. The calls address general election-security questions and potential event scenarios, including ICE agents appearing near polling places and ballots being seized in some races.
Brown also led two in-person tabletop exercises, one in Milwaukee in May and another in Detroit in September. Participants included personnel from secretary of state offices and other Progressive State Leaders Committee partners.
Brown’s office separately co-led legal moves that blocked a March executive order seeking to overhaul and restrict voting by mail. The Supreme Court ruled against the order last month, The Guardian reported.
Concerns about federal intervention also followed Trump’s July 16 nationally televised address, in which he alleged large-scale noncitizen voting and voting-by-mail fraud. The Guardian characterized those allegations as false. Trump said noncitizen voting, which has long been illegal and historically rare, posed a “crisis of election security.” The conservative Heritage Foundation cited 100 cases over a 25-year period.
Trump also told The New York Times that he regretted not calling out the National Guard to seize ballots in the 2020 election. At a mini convention in Texas last month, he urged Republicans to “cheat like hell like they do.”
Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield said, “From day one, Trump has been taking dead aim at our elections.” He added, “We’re trying to dispute some of the misinformation that the Trump administration keeps putting out,” including claims about the dangers of voting by mail. Rayfield noted that Oregon was the first state to adopt all voting by mail and that two Republican secretaries of state in the last decade had been happy with the voting system.
Arizona Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said the increasing cooperation among attorneys general and secretaries of state represented “an all-hands approach” to threats of federal interference. “We have an adversary we didn’t expect in the form of this administration,” Fontes said. A central concern of his office, he added, was that the administration’s “constant drumbeat of lies is going to suppress the vote.”
The planning has drawn input from nonpartisan organizations. Norm Eisen, executive chair of the Democracy Defenders Fund, participated in the Milwaukee and Detroit exercises and some Zoom calls. Eisen said, “The pro-democracy AGs are preparing for anything that this anti-voter administration may throw at them.” He added, “The level of preparation by the AGs and the secretaries of state is off the charts.” Eisen is a former special counsel for ethics and government reform to Barack Obama.
Larry Norden, an elections expert with the Brennan Center who attended a handful of the Zoom calls and both tabletop exercises, warned: “Leaders in the administration, including at the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security, have repeatedly threatened or attempted to exert control over the midterm elections.” He said, “for the last 18 months, they have been met by pushback and consistently lost. I don’t expect that to change in the coming weeks, but everyone involved in this fight knows we must continue to be prepared.”
Two new groups created in 2026 seek to bolster coordination and protect election results. AGSOS Election Protection Pac is raising funds to elect more Democrats to state offices, while AGSOS Election Protection Action serves as a policy arm. Sean Rankin, president of the Democratic Attorneys General Association, said, “it is a concern that the administration will try to seize ballots and the AGs and secretaries of state are working on responses to that to find solutions if that happens.”
Mai Ratakonda, a top election-protection attorney with the States United Democracy Center, said the Justice Department seized 2020 ballots from Fulton County, Georgia, earlier this year. She said election officials are “ready and prepared to respond” to the threat of ballots being seized during the midterms. Rayfield concluded that Trump “continues to take steps to interfere in our elections … This president has stretched our democracy more than any president in my lifetime.”