Courts blocked key administration plans while pressure continued
As Americans head to the polls Tuesday, voting experts are watching how the Trump administration’s efforts to assert more federal control over elections will play out. Courts have thwarted most of the administration’s plans to date, but President Donald Trump and his top deputies have kept up the pressure. Most recently, the administration threatened to prosecute election officials who do not reject ballots from people the federal government has identified as likely noncitizens. The administration has not explicitly ruled out sending federal agents to the polls or seizing ballots or voting machines.
Since President Donald Trump retook the White House, the administration has tried to force states to turn over their unredacted voter rolls and restrict mail-in voting. The Department of Homeland Security has used its resources to identify and prosecute noncitizen voters, an effort that has unfolded alongside broader immigration-enforcement operations at the agency. Trump has justified the steps by claiming, without evidence, that American elections are beset by fraud and illegal voting is tipping the scales in favor of Democrats. Election experts said the cumulative effect has been to ramp up anxiety about the midterms and erode voters’ trust in the system. Ben Hovland, whom Trump fired earlier this year as a commissioner for the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission, said, “The administration has been creating a lot of noise, a lot of confusion, a lot of doubt.” He said he worries the message could make voters “sit it out” and “throw their hands up.”
In an emailed response to questions, a DHS spokesperson said Immigration and Customs Enforcement “is not planning operations targeting polling locations,” adding that ICE would only arrest people at the polls to address a safety threat as part of “intelligence-driven targeted enforcement.” The spokesperson said DHS and the Justice Department “are laser focused on identifying, prosecuting and removing aliens who vote and dilute the votes of U.S. citizens.” The spokesperson also said, “Our message to aliens who vote in American elections is clear: we will find you, arrest you, and you will face the consequences — including criminal charges and deportation.”
ProPublica reported that the administration’s multipronged effort targeting alleged noncitizen voters has already led to eligible voters being improperly removed from the rolls. Voting rights groups fear the effort could block some U.S. citizens from voting when they show up Tuesday. Federal officials have made clear they plan to go after anyone they think is committing voter fraud. On the first day of early voting in Texas, Aaron Reitz, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas, posted a YouTube video announcing his intentions. “If you violate federal election law,” he warned, “I will hunt you down and prosecute you.” The threat came days after the Justice Department sued California to block the state from counting mail ballots from more than 20,000 voters it claims are “likely” noncitizens.
The administration had obtained California’s public voter rolls, which DHS had blended with its own immigration information and third-party data. California called the claim that 20,000 noncitizens were on its voter rolls “specious” in a court filing. A Los Angeles County analysis of a sample found that many identified voters were not registered in the county or had never voted, and some said on their forms that they were born in the United States.
The Justice Department told ProPublica, “Federal law prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal elections, and the Department has a duty to enforce it.” A federal judge rejected the department’s motion for an emergency order that would have barred California from counting the 20,000 voters’ ballots, and a federal appeals panel later backed that decision. On Thursday, the administration sent grand jury subpoenas to California officials demanding records about their response to allegations of noncitizens on the state’s rolls. Late Friday, a federal judge issued a restraining order blocking the department’s demands, calling them an “intimidation plan” that would interfere with legal voting.
Last week, the Justice Department wrote to Washington state, threatening to sue if officials there refused to review a list of 400 voters the department believed were noncitizens within 24 hours. U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters late last month that the department was considering additional actions involving “a number of states that we’re looking at.” Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs called the list “not reliable,” saying it included U.S. citizens, people who were not registered to vote and duplicate entries. He wrote, “Time and time again, DHS claims about noncitizen voter registration turn out to be greatly exaggerated or false.”
Sam Trepel, Rule of Law program director at States United Democracy Center and a former attorney for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, called the California and Washington actions a “disturbing use of prosecutorial authority.” She worries the department may try to seize ballots cast by voters identified as likely noncitizens before or after the election, which would “put their votes at risk and undermine trust more broadly.” Voting rights advocates also worry the effort could frighten eligible voters so they do not show up. A federal judge recently put limits on a multistate DHS door-to-door effort to find suspected noncitizen voters, at least through Election Day, saying it was illegally intimidating legal voters. David Janovsky, acting director of The Constitution Project at the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight, said, “A voter could say, ‘Well, maybe I don’t want to put myself on the target list here, maybe I won’t register, or maybe I won’t vote.’”
Parties say they expanded poll-watching operations
Before and on Election Day, it is typical for the major political parties to mount poll-watching operations. Democrats and Republicans both said they expanded those activities for the pressured midterm. Republicans will focus on issues such as voter eligibility and voter-roll accuracy, according to Ally Triolo, the Republican National Committee’s election integrity communications director. Democrats will concentrate on voter intimidation and other hurdles to voting, Angelo Fernández Hernández, a Democratic National Committee spokesperson, said.
An incident in Leon County, in the Florida Panhandle, illustrates the widespread anxiety about law enforcement at the polls. Mark Earley, the county’s supervisor of elections, told ProPublica he was “furious” when two marked U.S. Customs and Border Protection vehicles parked outside the county’s busiest early voting location last month, after he had been repeatedly reassured by the administration that agents would not do so. Earley reported the sighting to the FBI, then learned the agents were headed out of state and had stopped by to try to vote themselves. The episode generated a flurry of news coverage. Earley said, “Given the negative media coverage regarding federal agents at the polls, it shows pretty bad judgment that they showed up in their official vehicles.” ProPublica reported that federal law enforcement near polling places is against the law.
It is routine for Justice Department monitors to watch over polling places, and the agency has assured states that its observers will follow the law and not interfere with voting or election administration during the midterms. Still, state officials remain concerned. During Wyoming’s primary election, poll workers said they felt uneasy when Justice Department monitors asked about their training and sought to inspect voting systems. Wyoming’s governor criticized the conduct as “a bit aggressive” and “irregular.”
Nick Brown, Washington’s attorney general, leads a group of Democratic state officials and voting rights advocates that has planned how to respond if there is real federal interference. The group has “war-gamed” how to react if government agents attempt to commandeer voting equipment or ballots. Brown said, “We’ve seen the tension and chaos that’s in the air,” and called the federal government “the biggest challenge to smooth elections right now, which is not the way it’s supposed to be.” A Justice Department spokesperson said, “the best preparation for any election official is following federal law.”
Experts say state rules will complicate voting for some residents
States often change laws and rules related to voting. Since 2024, Republican-led states have taken a number of steps that experts say will make it more difficult for some of their residents to cast ballots and have them count. A North Carolina law, for example, requires voters to provide proof of identification when sending mail-in ballots. Under new rules, ballots now come with two envelopes, both of which must be sealed. Ballot rejections have skyrocketed, Democracy Docket reported, because voters are not sealing the inner envelope.
Texas and other states have cut back on the number and location of polling places, especially in areas favoring Democrats. In hotly contested Tarrant County, which includes Fort Worth, the number of polling sites fell by almost a third. The reduction could increase the risk of long lines and voter confusion on Election Day.
Voting rights groups such as the Texas Civil Rights Project are tracking two issues involving the state’s voter-registration systems. A software error at the Texas Department of Public Safety stopped several hundred thousand new voter registrations from being forwarded to local election officials, preventing them from being added to the rolls. A separate state system for updating registration information was not processing changes for several weeks, leading to more backlogs. Counties said they had been able to address these problems.
Security threats raise election officials’ concerns amid isolated equipment complaints
Every election features some issues with voting equipment. So far, complaints involving touch-screen voting machines have been isolated, including one from Dolly Parton’s sister in Tennessee, spawning fears that the machines were “rigged” to switch votes. ES&S, which makes the machines involved in the complaints, told ProPublica it had not received widespread reports. Election experts said occasional problems with touch-screen machines do not signify tampering or manipulation. They said any attempt to tamper with programming would surface during testing by election officials and be corrected.
Incidents in the run-up to the midterms have ratcheted up election officials’ concerns about potential physical and cyber attacks. Last month, officials in several states, including Arizona, received envelopes containing an unknown white powder. Arizona eventually deemed the material nontoxic, but Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said, “the fear it caused was real.” In 2024, false bomb threats, thought to have come from foreign actors, caused widespread evacuations of vote-counting sites across the country. The disruptions were brief in part because a message board funded by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency alerted election officials that the FBI had deemed the threats not credible.
ProPublica reported that Trump has dismantled CISA since retaking the presidency, leaving state and local election officials to grapple with physical and cyber threats on their own. Election nonprofits stepped up to try to fill the gap, and states, with CISA’s help, enhanced their cyber defenses. Derek Tisler, counsel and manager for the Brennan Center for Justice’s elections and government program, said the federal government’s absence weakened the defenses. “States acting on their own just do not have the same power,” he said.
Election lawyers fear aggressive post-election challenges
Election lawyers said they feared that the administration’s actions in the run-up to the midterms suggested the government would aggressively pursue post-election challenges if the results were not to Trump’s liking. Late last month, the Justice Department sued Alaska, seeking to block the state from certifying the result of its Senate race if the Republican incumbent did not win. A federal judge threw out the lawsuit Sunday, but the administration is expected to appeal.
Trump said he personally ordered the lawsuit to be filed. It claims the system was unfairly rigged against Sen. Dan Sullivan because another Alaska man named Dan Sullivan also qualified for the general-election ballot. The New York Times reported last week that campaign aides to Democratic Senate nominee Mary Peltola orchestrated the second candidate’s candidacy after a monthslong, statewide search to recruit someone with the same name.
ProPublica said the Alaska case was unusual because federal law prohibits government interference with an active election and because election challenges usually come after voting is complete, most often through state courts by losing candidates. Brown said, “This is using the federal government to interfere with our election process in a way that I think is pretty troubling on multiple levels.” In response to ProPublica’s questions, the Justice Department pointed to Blanche’s social-media statement that it “does not seek to stop any ballot from being cast or to stop the certification of Alaska’s election.” The lawsuit calls it “vital” that Alaska not certify “any election result that may be impacted by voter confusion” and asks the judge to prevent Alaska from doing so.
Some election lawyers suggested that if Republicans suffer significant losses, Trump could try to pressure Republicans in Congress to block new members from being seated. Several lawyers, including Derek Muller, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, said the incoming Democratic majority would be able to fend off such an effort; courts, too, are likely to stymie it, though it might cause a short delay, according to Muller. Brown said he and other attorneys general are planning how to respond if local election officials or boards refuse to certify results based on their own fraud claims or the administration’s claims. He added, “I worry tremendously about what they might do.”
ProPublica said its reporters are monitoring voter suppression and interference, election observers and poll watchers, extremism tied to the election and Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity at the polls. Zach Despart and Andy Mannix contributed reporting.