The activists staking out the ballot drop boxes in suburban Phoenix wore body armor and face coverings. With guns at their sides, they recorded residents as they deposited their votes during the last midterm elections.
Voting-rights groups sued, and a federal judge put a stop to them, ruling they had to stay at least 250 feet away while armed to ensure voters were not intimidated.
Four years later and 100 miles to the south, Pima County Attorney Laura Conover is treating the 2022 incident as a lesson on the importance of moving quickly this fall if anyone — including Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents — tries to interfere with the election’s administration. For her county along the U.S.-Mexico border, Conover has drawn up court papers so she can immediately file litigation to protect the vote.
“When it comes to preparing for elections, we are on overdrive,” she said.
In 2022, one of the greatest threats to elections came from activists like the armed men and women looming near drop boxes and questioning America’s voting procedures. This year, Conover and other officials across the nation are preparing for the possibility that the most serious risks may come from President Donald Trump, his agencies, and allies — including many now in power at the federal, state, and local levels. Election officials are contemplating ideas that once sounded outlandish, such as troops seizing voting machines, the president dictating last-minute election rules, or rogue officials blocking the certification of results.
For the last year and a half, Trump and his administration have disparaged long-standing voting practices, dismantled federal agencies that protect elections, impounded ballots from past elections, amplified conspiracy theories, threatened to prosecute election officials, tried to limit mail ballots, and pushed to require proof of citizenship to register to vote.
Their efforts have touched on nearly every stage of voting and could affect control of Congress, as Republicans try to retain their slim majority. A Democratic takeover of the House would stall Trump’s agenda, block funding for his initiatives, trigger a flood of investigations, and mire his administration in congressional hearings.
The high stakes seem top of mind for the president. “I’m going to be impeached,” he warned supporters at a South Carolina rally last month.
With seven weeks until Election Day and some ballots already in the mail, the White House and election administrators are clashing over nearly every aspect of the midterms, from who is eligible to vote to whether absentee ballot envelopes must have barcodes on them.
Agents, troops, and monitors
Last month, former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon told the audience of his popular MAGA podcast that the president should send an “up-armored ICE presence at these polling booths.”
Critics might call that intimidation, Bannon said, and they would be right. “It’s an intimidation if you’re a foreigner,” he said. “It should be intimidating.”
In Maine, the Republican nominee for governor also said he’d ask the administration to send ICE agents to the polls. Georgia’s Republican gubernatorial nominee spoke favorably of using National Guard troops. The GOP candidate for governor in Michigan said he’s talked to the head of the FBI about agents having a presence in the state ahead of Election Day. All three states are key in determining which party will control Congress and, after 2028, the presidency.
Federal law makes it a felony to station troops or armed agents where an election is being held. But the statute carves out an exception for repelling enemies of the United States, and Trump’s critics worry he could invoke that provision by arguing without evidence that noncitizens could try to vote.
Even a brief appearance by troops at the polls — and the inevitable online clips of them there — could dissuade voters from casting ballots, election officials and experts worry.
The talk of troops and federal authorities at the polls has pushed local officials into preparation mode. This year, 10 Democratic prosecutors from around the country, including Conover in Arizona’s Pima County, formed a group to push back on the administration on elections and other matters.
They call their group Fight Against Federal Overreach — or FAFO, after the slang term for messing around and finding out. They trade tips every two weeks on video calls.
“With this president, you have to prepare for anything and everything,” Conover said.
Mary Moriarty, the top prosecutor in Minnesota’s Hennepin County, which includes Minneapolis, said she’ll be watching for ICE agents at the polls.
“They certainly know we’ve charged two ICE agents already and that we take this seriously,” said Moriarty, a member of FAFO who filed charges against agents for incidents during the federal agency’s enforcement surge in the Twin Cities.
Most worrisome to local leaders is the possibility that federal officials could seize ballots or voting equipment.
They don’t consider the prospect theoretical. In January, Trump told the New York Times he regretted not having troops take possession of voting machines after he lost the 2020 election. The FBI later took 2020 ballots in Georgia and obtained electronic images of 2020 ballots in Arizona. And the MAGA-aligned sheriff of Riverside County, Calif., confiscated ballots from a 2025 redistricting referendum.
The military’s top officer said last month that the administration has no plans to send troops to polling places in November.
“I have neither received nor anticipate receiving any unlawful order concerning the role of the Joint Force in the upcoming November 2026 midterm elections,” Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in a letter to Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D., Mich.).
He said the military has no plans to use troops to seize ballots, voting machines, or other election material.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has been less categorical, but said this month that ICE would go to polling places only if agents were looking for someone or to respond to a threat. “If we’re serving a warrant, we will be where we need to be,” he said.
The Justice Department said it will beef up its plans to send election monitors to polls this fall. A top department official has said she would deploy as many as 1,000 of them, but hasn’t said where they will go.
The approach has drawn objections, including from Republicans. Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon (R) called the conduct of Justice Department attorneys who monitored primaries in his state last month “aggressive” and “irregular” after a county clerk said they asked to examine voting machines.
“I don’t like the federal government coming in and taking our votes,” Gordon said.
Rushing to rewrite mail voting rules
Inside the U.S. Postal Service this summer, software engineers and policymakers scrambled to build something new: a verification system that, according to an anonymous whistleblower, could hold up an untold number of ballots.
By late August, members of the team realized the rushed schedule would leave them just four days to test the full system. When a member raised concerns about the technology’s quality and the lack of testing, a senior Postal Service official gave little guidance other than saying, “We cannot fail.” The official said everything must work perfectly and there was no other choice, according to the whistleblower disclosure that a federal official submitted to Congress two weeks ago.
As the deadline approached, multiple officials used profanity to describe the plan as a disaster, calling it a “s— show,” according to the disclosure. The Postal Service was scheduled to launch the technology on Sept. 1, but so far it hasn’t been made available.
Under the Postal Service plans, election officials would upload lists of voters through an online portal. They would then submit their mail ballots to the post office, sometimes in batches of thousands at a time. If postal clerks found any mismatches — including for voters who moved or got married and changed their names — they would reject the entire batch, according to the whistleblower.
The Postal Service moved fast, but it did not compromise its work, Postmaster General David Steiner said in a statement. “We stand behind both the rigor of our process and the resulting system,” he said.
Whether any of the Postal Service’s changes will take effect is unsettled. Trump signed an executive order telling the Postal Service in March to review ballot envelopes and limit who could receive mail ballots. A federal judge blocked the order in June, but last month the Supreme Court cleared the way for it to temporarily go into effect when it found states had sued prematurely. After the Postal Service formally announced its new rules, the judge — hearing the challenge again — blocked those plans. The administration is now again asking the Supreme Court to give it the green light, and a decision is expected soon.
White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said Trump will keep fighting in court for what she called “common-sense measures to protect the security of mail-in ballots and ensure only Americans vote in American elections.”
Time is running out. Local officials in North Carolina and Wisconsin started mailing ballots to voters early this month under existing policies. Other jurisdictions are set to do the same soon.
“It’s the potential for complete chaos,” said Gerry Cohen, a Democrat on the Board of Elections for Wake County, N.C.
A recent incident in Leon County, Fla., brought a preview of the confusion Trump’s last-minute rules could bring. The county elections supervisor submitted his ballot envelope to the Postal Service in case the new rules go into effect — only to have the Postal Service reject it because the return address was 0.014 inches too close to another line of text.
The Postal Service later relented and accepted the envelope, but Mark Earley, Leon’s elections supervisor, said Friday that the incident was a taste of the nationwide “chaos and confusion” possible if the rules go into effect.
Hunting for noncitizen voters
Trump’s executive order in March also directed the Department of Homeland Security to assemble a list of citizens for states to check their voter rolls against. And it instructed the attorney general to prioritize prosecuting state officials who issue ballots to ineligible people.
His plan is premised on debunked claims that voting by noncitizens is rampant. Voting-rights advocates and election officials warn Trump’s agenda could lead to a raft of uncounted ballots from eligible voters.
The federal government’s citizenship data is often flawed. Anthony Nel of Denton, Texas, learned that last year when he faced the prospect of losing his right to vote.
Nel, a 29-year-old higher education administrator who said he leans liberal, received a letter telling him he would soon be kicked off the voter rolls because state officials weren’t sure whether he was a citizen. Nel, who was born in South Africa and became a U.S. citizen in his teens, didn’t have time to renew his expired passport before officials removed him from the rolls. He reregistered once he updated his passport but worries voters with less time and money could lose their right to cast ballots.
Trump’s plans are “being described as voting security,” Nel said. “From what I am seeing, it looks more like voter suppression.”
Trump continues to spread unsupported claims that voting by noncitizens is partly to blame for his 2020 loss. But court records and independent reviews show noncitizens rarely register to vote or try to cast ballots. Georgia officials determined noncitizens accounted for about 0.002% of the state’s registered voters and a study of voting in 42 jurisdictions in 2016 found one potential noncitizen vote for every 783,000 ballots.
That hasn’t stopped Trump and his allies, who have pointed to a software glitch in New Jersey that led to the state motor vehicles division inadvertently registering about 6,600 noncitizens in 2023 and 2024. They say that error shows the need for more scrutiny of voter rolls.
The administration’s approach is meant to protect elections and “ensure states’ voter rolls are accurate, up-to-date and do not include aliens who are not eligible to vote or to be registered to vote,” said Zach Kahler, a spokesperson for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
The push for emergency powers
Since Trump returned to office last year, his backers — including Bannon and a lawyer close to Trump — have pressed the president to declare a national emergency that they say would unlock powers for him to rewrite election rules.
The idea resurfaced last month, when Trump appeared on a Real America’s Voice program hosted by Wayne Allyn Root. With election legislation stalled in the Senate, Root pressed Trump to declare an emergency that he said would allow him to limit mail ballots and require people to prove their citizenship to register to vote.
“Let me just say that stranger things have happened, OK?” Trump responded. “I’ll leave it at that.”
Peter Ticktin, a lawyer and longtime Trump friend who has spent months urging the president to declare an election emergency, called Trump’s answer “definitely a shift.”
“I’m feeling good about my prospects,” Ticktin said.
The White House did not answer questions about whether Trump is considering declaring an emergency.
On legal grounds, the theory that the president can claim power over elections by declaring an emergency is laughable, said Hofstra University law professor James Sample. But Sample is treating it as deadly serious.
In the weeks after Trump lost the 2020 election, lawyers backing him came up with another theory Sample viewed as preposterous: that Vice President Mike Pence could reject some states’ electoral votes and let Trump claim victory. Pence refused, but the theory set the stage for the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The Constitution gives states and Congress authority over elections, not the president. A national emergency declaration triggers greater powers under federal law, Sample said, but none of them affect elections.
The risk, he said, isn’t whether the notion would survive in court. It’s that Trump could use it to take sweeping actions while voting is ongoing and before courts can respond.
“The idea is simply to do first and say, ‘So what?’” Sample said. “So much of Trump 2.0 is to outrun and outpace the courts.”
When officials refuse to certify
Perils lurk even after votes are cast.
In 2022, commissioners in New Mexico’s Otero County listened as an attorney insisted they were obligated to certify that year’s midterm results.
This kind of motion was normally a drama-free event. But the three commissioners didn’t see it that way, and they delivered their votes in rapid succession: “Nay,” “Nay,” “Nay.”
Among other issues, they cited debunked conspiracy theories about Dominion Voting Systems machines that had circulated in MAGA circles since Trump refused to accept his 2020 defeat.
“I have huge concerns with these voting machines, I really do,” said Commissioner Vickie Marquardt.
After the attorney told the commissioners that a court would likely force them to certify, Marquardt laughed. “So then what? They’re going to send us to the pokey?” she responded, using another word for jail.
Certification is the final stage of an election, when local and state officials sign off on vote tallies so the winners can take office. But in recent years, officials in pockets of the country have tried to block results by refusing to certify them — 35 of them in eight states from 2020 to mid-2024, according to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a research and advocacy group that has sued the Trump administration over its election policies.
Those efforts have failed. The Otero County standoff, for example, ended when a court ordered the election certified and Marquardt and another commissioner relented.
Marquardt doesn’t know what she will do this November. She said she still has “huge concerns” about the security of mail ballots, voting machines, and drop boxes.
“I would do it again if I felt strongly about it because I don’t think it’s right to certify something you don’t think is right,” she said.
A refusal to certify results creates legal uncertainty and, even if it fails, can undermine faith in how elections are run. Some fear those who block certification could try to prevent the winners from taking office in Congress. Disputes must be settled quickly because the winners are slated to take office in early January.
In Nevada’s Washoe County, Commissioner Jeanne Herman has voted against certifying every election since 2020, including her own reelection. Those elections were certified with the approval of others on the commission.
“Elections need to be fair and honest, and until they are, I’m not going to lie and say this election was great,” she said.
Similar clashes could emerge elsewhere, with potential hot spots in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Texas, according to the nonpartisan Voting Rights Lab.
Once local officials question their own results, “the damage has already been done in terms of public confidence,” said Charley Olena, a senior vice president with the nonprofit group.
One ballot at a time
Whatever the courts decide, and no matter the moves Trump makes, November’s election will largely depend on thousands of local jurisdictions and the hundreds of thousands of workers staffing them.
On a recent August afternoon in Madison, Wis., three of them sat around a table to decide whether one person’s vote should count.
The ballot had come in an envelope that was partially unsealed. Poll workers hadn’t counted it on the night of the gubernatorial primary, citing the possibility that someone could have tampered with it. Now the city’s Board of Canvassers examined the envelope, passing it back and forth and running their fingers along its edge. One corner of the flap wasn’t sealed. The rest of it was.
“I don’t think you can grab the ballot out,” said Lydia McComas, the city clerk.
The board counted the ballot and moved on to other quirks and anomalies. At least one voter’s ballot was not counted because of a jam in a voting machine. Another voter was given a ballot for the wrong ward. And one voter was inadvertently issued a ballot in the name of another person with the same name.
For more than two centuries, officials across America have been carrying out this painstaking work.
In recent years, Madison — a Democratic bastion in a swing state — has come under fire for mistakes. McComas’s predecessor resigned last year after 193 ballots went uncounted in 2024. In this spring’s contest for a state Supreme Court seat, workers failed to transport 23 absentee ballots to counting sites before polls closed, nearly preventing them from being tallied.
Local officials make mistakes, McComas said, but they learn from them to make future elections run more smoothly. It’s important to let the public scrutinize their work at every stage, she said, from testing machines to tallying results.
“If the public’s not confident in our work,” she said, “they’re not confident in democracy.”
