Nov. 5, 2025, 5 a.m.
“Biden was grossly incompetent, and the 2020 election was a total FRAUD! The evidence is MASSIVE and OVERWHELMING,” President Trump said on Truth Social—not back in 2020 or 2021, but this June.
Nearly five years after his loss to Biden, and approaching the one-year anniversary of his own comeback win, the president is trying to use a combination of legal maneuvers and public pressure to instill doubt in elections before the first votes are cast in the upcoming midterms, which historically favor the party out of power.
Since Trump returned to office, the Justice Department has gone after states for failing to turn over voter information and is investigating Democratic donation platform ActBlue. In a sweeping executive order, Trump tried to bar states from accepting ballots that arrive through the mail after Election Day. He also vowed to ban mail-in voting and electronic voting machines, while floating changes to the U.S. Census to exclude undocumented immigrants.
“This is a very relentless and broad-based push to meddle in elections,” said Wendy Weiser, vice president for democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice, who described the president’s “unprecedented and false claim of authority over elections” as “very concerning.”
Trump’s litany of complaints, threats, and directives may seem isolated, but experts say they point to a coordinated strategy to increase public distrust in elections, expand federal control over the process, and lay the groundwork to possibly contest next year’s midterm results.
“It is a multipronged effort, and they all feed in together,” Weiser said. “So if you sort of pull them apart and look at each of them in isolation, you're missing the big picture.”
In one of the administration’s most public pushes, the Justice Department is suing eight states for refusing to turn over information from voter-registration rolls sought by Attorney General Pam Bondi. The department requested detailed voter rolls, including driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers, claiming it needs the information to ensure states comply with voter-list maintenance requirements under the Help America Vote Act.
(AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
ASSOCIATED PRESS
“One of the things that [state] Secretaries find so alarming is, even though they've asked the Department of Justice why they want this information, what they'll use it for, they haven't gotten any answers,” a spokesperson for the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State said in a statement.
A March executive order, one of Trump’s first election-related moves, requires proof of citizenship for mail-in voter registration, bars states from counting ballots received after Election Day, and compels federal agencies to share data with state officials to purge ineligible voters. The courts have put most of these provisions on hold.
Trump has vowed to ban mail-in voting and get rid of electronic voting machines, though he has yet to issue a formal order. The power to ban mail-in or absentee ballots is reserved to the states, but both Weiser and Michael Morley, director of Florida State University’s Election Law Center, say Trump could withhold federal funding if states don’t adopt his preferred policies—a tactic used before.
Despite Trump’s sweeping rhetoric, he lacks the legal power to do most of what he has vowed or attempted to do so far.
“He's got zero inherent constitutional power, and Congress hasn't seized it to give him power,” said Justin Levitt, who was the White House's first senior policy adviser for Democracy and Voting Rights under President Biden. “And absent that, the power really lives in the states, where he can persuade like-minded states to follow his lead, but he can't really execute much on his own.”
When it comes to mail-in voting, Levitt said Trump may try to pressure Republican secretaries of state and other elections officials to restrict or ban it in their states, but they’re unlikely to follow suit.
Republicans in 2024 encouraged mail-in voting, which is popular among senior citizens and other key parts of the GOP constituency. Since Trump’s rise, the GOP has increasingly performed well with infrequent voters, who would be the most impacted and potentially discouraged by changes to election procedure, Levitt said.
“I think that his own campaign folks are probably telling him, ‘Hey, stop it. You're costing us votes every time you do that,’” Levitt said of Trump’s claims that mail-in voting is fraudulent.
What's different this time, in 2026, is that it appears the federal government is situating itself to be the primary spreader of disinformation about elections. ”
—David Becker, Center for Election Innovation and Research
Even if Trump attempts to ban mail-in ballots, courts will likely block him. But experts say these efforts could still shape public perception of election legitimacy.
“I think many of the election officials I talked to, and I myself, are concerned that this is all an effort to delegitimize elections that the president thinks he might lose,” said David Becker, executive director and founder of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research.
Weiser and Becker noted the administration is now using the federal government to potentially take action in response to election doubts, not just pressure other actors as Trump did in 2020.
“What's different this time, in 2026, is that it appears the federal government is situating itself to be the primary spreader of disinformation about elections,” Becker said, “and so there is great concern about how the federal government—I would go beyond the word ‘influence,’ I would say how the federal government might interfere.”
Experts warn the DOJ’s lawsuits could lay the foundation to question midterm results. If states refuse to comply with the administration’s orders, Trump could claim their elections are invalid in order to justify federal interference, according to Jonathan Diaz, the Campaign Legal Center’s director of voting advocacy and partnerships.
“Those states’ refusal to go along with his illegal orders is going to form the basis for challenges to those results,” Diaz predicted.
But Morley said he doesn’t see the Trump administration going that far. If officials get the voter rolls and they’re clean, he said, “that'll take a lot of steam out of reform efforts” because it would show current safeguards are adequate.
In the next 12 months, the administration’s grip on elections may tighten, with Trump potentially deploying federal law enforcement or the military at polling locations. Governors are already sounding the alarm. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker warned that soldiers could be stationed outside polling places to “intimidate people who are not Republicans.”
“I am worried that they're teeing up plans not just to undermine trust, but to justify much more extraordinary and unlawful federal interference in actual elections: collecting, taking control of the data and machinery of elections, floating the ideas of emergency powers,” Weiser said.
The DOJ plans to send federal election monitors to counties in New Jersey and California during this year’s off-cycle elections, at the request of state GOP officials.
Not only might increased federal oversight impact this year’s elections or the coming midterms, it could set the stage for larger federal control in elections to come, Becker said. But once the precedent is set, Republicans who cheer the administration’s moves could be sorry the next time a Democrat returns to the White House.
“If the power to basically dictate to states how they run elections is handed over to a White House because you happen to be in the same party as the president at the time, you're going to be very disappointed at how that power is used when the party of the president is different,” he said.
Levitt predicted the pressure campaign coming from Trump will set up mental barriers to voting, although he added that the president lacks constitutional power to control elections and it’s up to Americans to see past that.
“He doesn't have the lever,” Levitt said. “He can't push the button that makes it happen, and that's A), really important for people to understand, but B), can also feel unusual, because he's got the lever, he's got that button in a lot of other places.”
