Administration Grasps at Straws in Latest Bid to Mess with Elections

The Justice Department’s preemptive challenge to the certification of an election winner in Alaska hints at what might come next in the Trump administration’s effort to undermine the midterms. It is very, very unusual for the Justice Department to challenge the certification of election results, which is emphatically a state responsibility. There’s every reason to think that the same Justice Department that brought this flimsy legal case may be readying similar postelection challenges in other states. Political parties and candidates grapple over this kind of thing all the time, for better or worse. What would be new, and especially dangerous, is the use of the august and powerful Justice Department as a partisan tool.

The Alaska lawsuit is a significant escalation of a long-running scheme. For almost two years, President Trump has waged an unprecedented campaign to leverage federal power to undermine elections. He issued two executive orders to overhaul voting, pushed hard for national vote suppression legislation in Congress, and mused about taking over elections. And he has certainly exploited his control over the executive branch in the effort. Under his direction, the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security likewise used their coercive powers to try to dictate how states administer elections.

But the reality is that the president has no authority over elections, and so these efforts have been thwarted at every turn. His executive orders and overreach were blocked by courts, the SAVE Act died in the Senate, and state and local authorities still run elections according to the law, not the president’s whims. Trump’s plot to seize control of the midterm elections appears to have been defeated.

The administration hasn’t given up on election meddling, as its recent efforts in Alaska and California illustrate. But, having failed to convince a single court that it has some set of extraordinary powers it can use to subvert elections, the administration is turning to a vote suppression strategy we’ve seen before, though never from the federal government.

Two weeks ago, the Department of Justice sent Los Angeles County election officials a list of more than 20,000 individuals on the state voter rolls who “the Federal Government believes are likely noncitizens” and demanded that county and state election officials prevent any ballots cast by those individuals from being counted unless their U.S. citizenship is confirmed. The government claimed this last-minute request was an emergency even though the data it relied on was from August 2025. Election officials refused, in part because complying with the demand would require them to violate multiple state and federal laws.

This effort is strikingly similar to the tactics that right-wing activists and partisan actors have often used to try to disenfranchise large numbers of voters. In recent years, activists have asked election officials to cancel the registrations of hundreds of thousands of voters through frivolous “mass voter challenges.” They typically base these challenges on faulty lists of supposedly ineligible individuals they compile by cross-referencing unreliable and outdated data sources. The resulting lists are typically garbage. For example, the 4,000 challenges activists and Republican lawmakers filed in Pennsylvania in the days before the 2024 election were so baseless that state authorities concluded they were made in “bad faith” to undermine confidence in the election.

The federal government’s list of supposed non–U.S. citizens in California was similarly built by matching an incomplete and out-of-date public copy of the state’s voter rolls against unreliable data sources, using an unnamed outside “data analytics and investigative platform” to “enhance” the data, according to the government’s court filings. The similarity should not come as a surprise; one of the activists behind the 2004 challenges in Pennsylvania, Heather Honey, is now the DHS deputy assistant secretary for election integrity. And the list DHS produced seems just as flawed: LA County analyzed a sample of the names on the list and found that many were actually born in the United States and many more were no longer on the voter rolls.

After California refused to go along with the administration’s vote suppression demands, the Justice Department followed up with a lawsuit asking a federal court to order election officials not to count the votes of thousands of voters on its shoddy list. This is another hallmark tactic of fringe partisan actors: a frivolous lawsuit right before (or right after) Election Day. Tellingly, the government initially told the court that its lawsuit was related to a prior case filed by a right-wing legal organization seeking aggressive purges of voters from the rolls. For the last decade or so, conservative legal organizations and lawyers for the Republican Party have filed dozens of baseless suits both before and after elections seeking such purges or to toss out votes based on bad data analysis. Now the federal government has joined in on this strategy.

Late last week, they pushed this litigation strategy into even more frivolous — and nakedly partisan — territory. Pursuant to a direct order from Trump, the DOJ filed a suit asking a court to block certification of the U.S. Senate election in Alaska unless the Republican candidate wins.

It is not just the election denier movement’s legal strategy that the administration has brought inside the federal government. The Trump administration has also begun employing the voter intimidation tactics used by fringe activists, relying in large part on DHS to sow fear. For example, recent reporting reveals that armed federal agents have been going door to door questioning people about their citizenship and voting history. A federal court just blocked this practice, ruling that it is intimidating those working to turn out legitimate voters.

In years past, activists have engaged in similarly intimidating door-to-door canvassing in supposed pursuit of proof for their election fraud conspiracies. In 2024, the Heritage Foundation released misleading videos of these encounters to lend credence to false claims of widespread voting by noncitizens. The images released of DHS agents knocking on doors echo those from the Heritage Foundation videos.

Partisan groups have previously been rebuked by courts for sending armed vigilantes to voting sites. Trump administration officials haven’t directly threatened to deploy armed federal agents to polling places (which would be a federal crime), but they have repeatedly and publicly refused to rule it out. And in past cycles, activist groups publicized names and photos of individuals they claim voted illegally — claims that are often erroneous, claims that are often erroneous, as exemplified in one subsequent defamation suit. Now the federal government is publicizing photos and videos of agents in tactical gear arresting Californians at their homes and in their pajamas who allegedly voted illegally.

As Election Day nears, the election deniers Trump brought in to populate his administration are increasingly duplicating the tactics they used when they were on the outside looking in. These tactics are more dangerous when they’re backed by the immense resources and authority of the federal government. That the administration has resorted to these moves is an implicit acknowledgment that the executive branch doesn’t really have any more authority over elections than partisan citizen activists. Public officials are bound by the same laws prohibiting voter intimidation as everyone else. Government letterhead may lend a veneer of legitimacy to misinformation and heated demands, but these fringe tactics don’t become more legitimate when deployed by the federal government. The administration still needs to persuade election officials, courts, or the public to get what it wants.

The administration is abusing its power, but when it comes to elections, that power is limited. It’s no match for the American people if we all show up.