What to Expect Next in the Trump Administration’s Strategy to Meddle with the Vote

Last Monday, President Trump posted on social media that he would sign an executive order aimed at eliminating mail voting. It would be his second executive order on elections, following a March executive order that, among other things, sought to implement a show-your-papers rule requiring Americans to present a passport or similar document to register to vote. Since then, the White House has seemingly walked back its threat for a new elections executive order. But that doesn’t mean the president’s attempt to undermine upcoming elections is now over.

In fact, as the Brennan Center recently explained in The Trump Administration’s Campaign to Undermine the Next Election, there is a concerted White House effort to interfere in future elections. In our previous report, we laid out everything the administration has done thus far and explained how these actions can be seen as part of a bigger strategy. But what additional steps can we expect in the coming months, even without a new executive order?

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If we dig into the details of the March order, we can see the drumbeat of actions that are likely to come: from the spread of misleading claims and reports by federal agencies, to the instigation of spurious investigations and prosecutions, to attempts to meddle with vote counting. Laying out this strategy gives state and local governments, pro-democracy civil society, and voters time to prepare and ensure that we have free and fair elections this November, in 2026, and in 2028.

In the coming months, federal agencies may use false claims that large numbers of non-U.S. citizens are registered to vote to pressure states to purge their voter rolls, as well as potentially justify attempts to contest election results that the administration disagrees with. The reality is that states already have multiple systems in place to ensure that only eligible American citizens vote. But that has not stopped Trump and his allies from asserting, against all evidence, that there is widespread noncitizen voting.

The March executive order instructs DOGE and the Department of Homeland Security to review each state’s voter rolls to “identify unqualified voters.” The Justice Department has already requested rolls in at least 15 states. In some cases, states have pushed back, arguing that the federal government is asking for voters’ protected personal information, such as social security and driver’s license numbers.

The federal government will likely run whatever information it is able to obtain through the flawed Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program, which is essentially a federal search engine that states can use to look up individuals’ citizenship and immigration status. DHS and DOGE recently overhauled SAVE but did not address several issues with the program, including its reliance on incomplete or outdated information that may produce incorrect results. Instead, the revamp now allows states to run their entire voter lists through SAVE, increasing the chances that the program will be abused to spread false claims. DHS set the stage for that kind of abuse when it explained the changes to the program by making the baseless claim that “illegal aliens have exploited outdated systems to defraud Americans and taint our elections.”

A number of states have already touted their use of the revamped SAVE program, and more could follow suit. The March executive order directs the DOJ to withhold funds from states that are not “cooperating” with the department’s efforts. The DOJ has begun filing lawsuits against election officials, encouraging aggressive voter list maintenance that could disenfranchise eligible voters, and demanding compliance with its expansive requests for information. It may follow up with more litigation to try to force state officials to purge their voter rolls or encourage private actors to use the DOJ’s findings to pursue baseless voter challenges.

State officials have made outlandish claims about huge numbers of noncitizens on their rolls in the past, and they’ve always been proven false. Even private actors have pursued mass challenges to remove registered voters, generally to no avail. This time, such claims might come from the federal government and might stem from the SAVE program’s results, giving the allegations a veneer of legitimacy.

Beyond the real threat of disenfranchisement, false claims about noncitizen voting may give election deniers fodder to contest elections, refuse to certify election results, or incite civil unrest. Any claim that there are large numbers of noncitizens on the rolls should be greeted with skepticism. And as they have done in the past, courts will need to enforce the law and stop any effort to overturn elections on the ground that a large number of ballots were tainted by poor voter list maintenance.

In the coming months, there may be government reports containing false or misleading claims about the security and accuracy of election systems. President Trump has taken the unusual step of ordering DHS to “review and report on the security of all electronic systems used in the voter registration and voting process . . . [including to] report on the risk of such systems being compromised through malicious software and unauthorized intrusions into the system.”

There is reason to worry about the impartiality of the current administration’s reports on this topic. Since his election loss in 2020, Trump and his allies have consistently disputed the security and accuracy of the country’s election systems to bolster his claim that he actually won that election. Just last week, the administration announced that a new role, deputy assistant secretary for elections integrity, would be filled by an “election integrity” activist whose misleading research on Pennsylvania’s 2020 vote count, among other things, has fueled false conspiracy theories about stolen elections. And in his recent Truth Social post promising to ban mail voting, President Trump stated that he hopes to get rid of “Highly ‘Inaccurate’, Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES.”

In postelection litigation, claims casting doubt on election security were repeatedly dismissed by courts across the country. Nevertheless, in the months after the 2020 election, several of Trump’s allies engaged in a multistate campaign to access voting equipment and then used that access to further stoke conspiracy theories. In the years since, Trump and those close to him have persisted, with his FBI director Kash Patel refusing to acknowledge that Biden won the 2020 election and his Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought saying that the election was “rigged.”

In the same March order in which he calls for DHS to report on the security of election systems, the president, without any clear justification, demanded that the U.S. Election Assistance Commission decertify every voting machine it previously certified. The president does not legally have the power to order the commission to do this, and the directive is currently being challenged in multiple lawsuits. Even the unfounded suggestion that the standards for certifying voting machines aren’t up to par may nonetheless lead people to distrust the machines currently used around the country.

In reality, election security has dramatically improved over the past several years. States have implemented new security measures, including employing intrusion-detection services and maintaining backup copies of voter rolls. While each state’s procedures are different, election officials generally test voting machines before use and audit machines after each election to ensure that votes were accurately counted. Most importantly, more than 98 percent of voters cast ballots that generate a paper record, allowing officials to confirm the accuracy of electronic vote totals. Absent this context, any reports from the administration purporting to detail security flaws should be met with extreme skepticism.

The March executive order also calls for the attorney general to “prioritiz[e]” the prosecution of “election crimes.” While that in and of itself is unobjectionable, the focus of the executive order, as well as statements and actions taken by the president and his appointees, suggests that these prosecutions may target election officials and others who work to assist voters. Additionally, the prosecutions may cause the DOJ to shift its focus away from protecting voters, which has been at the core of the department’s work on elections since at least the 1960s.

Last month, The New York Times reported that the DOJ was exploring ways it could bring criminal charges against election officials related to their management of election systems. This follows a recommendation made last year in Project 2025, a policy blueprint for a conservative presidential administration, to use a 150-year-old civil rights law to prosecute people, including election officials, who help others vote.

The administration has already targeted at least one official who played a key role in safeguarding the 2020 election. Trump called on the DOJ to investigate the conduct of Chris Krebs — his own appointee to lead the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in 2018 — for publicly rejecting claims that the 2020 election was rigged or stolen. More recently, the DOJ reportedly began an investigation of a political adversary, New York Attorney General Letitia James, under that Reconstruction-era civil rights law, making the threat that it will follow through on the Project 2025 proposal all the more real.

Project 2025 did not just urge prosecutions of election officials. It also encouraged the DOJ to ramp up prosecution of “voter registration fraud,” lamenting the department’s retreat under President George W. Bush from a series of politically motivated “voter registration fraud” cases against organizations conducting nonpartisan voter registration drives in the lead-up to the 2004 election. It’s not hard to imagine what this type of persecution would look like or what kind of chilling effect it would produce: Officials in Florida and Texas have recently targeted organizations conducting voter registration drives with the threat of criminal investigations and penalties, seriously curtailing their nonpartisan efforts to engage voters.

Florida offers clues about another potential use of law enforcement to intimidate voters more directly. In 2022, five days before Florida’s primary election, Gov. Ron DeSantis announced the arrests of 20 people with past felony convictions at a press conference, claiming that they knowingly voted while ineligible. But publicly available evidence suggested that most, if not all, of the individuals genuinely thought they were eligible to vote. The public announcement scared eligible voters away from voting, even outside of Florida.

The DOJ’s recent suit against Orange County, California, demands personal information about 17 noncitizens removed from the rolls, 16 of whom apparently self-reported and asked to be removed. The very rare instances in which noncitizens have registered or voted have often turned out to be the result of errors by state officials, or people misunderstanding or being misled about their eligibility. If the DOJ begins prosecuting people for mistakenly registering to vote due to a misunderstanding, it may have a chilling effect. Eligible Americans may fear the risk of exposing themselves to federal retribution just for participating in elections and choose instead not to vote at all.

Newly formed task forces — including the DOJ’s Weaponization Working Group, the Election Integrity Task Force of the U.S. attorney’s office in New Jersey, and the Election Accountability Special Unit of the Washington, DC, U.S. attorney’s office — seem to provide additional infrastructure for the DOJ’s shift from protecting voters to intimidating the people who run our elections. The Weaponization Working Group was explicitly created with the goal of pursuing officials who prosecuted Trump or others involved in the January 6 insurrection attempt. These task forces were started and are being led by Trump administration officials Pam Bondi, Alina Habba, and Ed Martin — who, between them, have made false claims about previous elections and election fraud, pursued baseless litigation aimed at Trump’s political rivals, and threatened to use the DOJ to publicly “name” and “shame” individuals whom they do not have a basis for formally charging.

All of this could mean that new investigations and prosecutions will be announced in the coming months that seek to cast doubt on the people who make our elections work. Those directed to pursue these prosecutions have reportedly struggled to find any legal basis for them. But even the announcement of an investigation can have an impact on elections. And, of course, in lieu of criminal charges, we may see public shaming, which in recent years has been tied to an uptick in threats and harassment of election officials.

Finally, we must be prepared for the possibility that federal agencies could be used to interfere in election operations, including through efforts to prevent legitimately cast ballots from being counted. The deployment of multiple Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents outside a peaceful rally being held by California Gov. Gavin Newsom on the upcoming November election, as well as President Trump’s recent calls to expand the National Guard’s role in law enforcement, highlights how fraught such conflict could become. It should go without saying, however, that the deployment of federal law enforcement to interfere in voting is plainly illegal.  

The president’s recent Truth Social post about the new elections executive order signals two areas that federal agencies may target: voting machines and mail voting.

It’s worth remembering that just weeks after the 2020 election, the president sought to have his attorney general, the Department of Defense, and DHS seize voting equipment. Staff refused to cooperate, but such pushback is far from certain today. This year, a DHS official and an individual claiming to work for the administration reportedly asked election officials in Colorado for access to their equipment.

Attempts to seize equipment could be accompanied by demands not to certify election results. President Trump infamously pressured election officials in Georgia and Michigan to aid his efforts to reject election results that he did not like in 2020. Since then, more than 30 rogue local officials in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Utah, and Virginia have refused to certify election results, frequently citing a lack of trust in their voting equipment.

Mail voting may be another flash point. Even before Trump’s Truth Social post promising to ban the popular, long-standing practice, his March executive order commanded the attorney general to “take all necessary action” to prevent states from counting absentee or mail-in ballots after Election Day, regardless of whether state law permits such ballots to be counted. In fact, 30 states allow at least some categories of ballots (most often military and overseas ballots) to be counted a few days after Election Day if they were mailed beforehand. While the attorney general does not have the authority to prevent states from following their own laws for counting ballots, this command sets up a potential conflict between the federal government and the states over the counting of ballots in the days after Election Day.

None of these moves means that the administration will succeed in meddling with elections this November, in 2026, or in 2028. State and local governments are constitutionally responsible for running elections, and any federal interference would mostly be limited to intimidating those who make our elections work (from election officials to civil society to voters) or undermining public confidence to such an extent that people stop participating in elections or refuse to accept the results.

The good news is that many of the next steps in the drive to intervene in our elections are already apparent, and relevant actors can be prepared to respond. Courts — which are responsible for upholding the law and protecting the integrity of our democratic system — should remain skeptical of, and ready to quickly dismiss, unfounded claims targeting election officials, voters, or election equipment, as well as federal efforts to interfere with how state and local governments count votes and run elections under their own laws and practices.

States must equip local election officials and law enforcement with the tools to understand their rights and obligations in the face of federal interference, including how to respond and coordinate. Election officials must feel that state and local authorities will support their ability to do their jobs in accordance with the law. That may include refusing federal agencies and other non-state actors who make illegal requests for access to election data and equipment.

Finally, voters must not be afraid to participate. In fact, they must participate in our democracy in every way they can: by joining civic groups, calling and emailing their elected officials, assisting voter registration drives, joining peaceful protests, and signing up to be poll workers. Democracy depends on the people and their belief in elections.

We are likely to see a concerted campaign over at least the next 15 months to confuse and undermine confidence in our election system — with the full force of the executive branch behind it. Voters must remember that this system has been built over many decades for accuracy and resiliency. They should know that the president’s actual authority over elections is extremely limited. They must refuse to be taken in, turned off, or intimidated. Voting is powerful. Regardless of whom they support, if Americans exercise their right to vote in force, they can overcome any attempt to undermine it.