How Trump could undermine the midterms

The president really has no power over elections – but that hasn’t stopped Trump from laying the groundwork to challenge results in November

When Donald Trump commandeered primetime US television last Friday, he delivered a familiar, but still extraordinary, message. The president argued once again that the results of the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden, were illegitimate.

US elections are “vulnerable to being rigged and stolen”, Trump alleged, claiming that “the trust of the American people was lost” when he was defeated.

Historically, incumbent parties underperform in midterm elections and with the president’s popularity sagging – he has an approval rating of just 37% – Republicans appear on course to lose seats in the US Senate and House of Representatives, as well as in state and local elections, in November.

Trump’s latest intervention, in which he accused China of interfering with the 2020 election, is viewed by US voting rights activists as just the latest escalation of a bid by the White House to influence, and potentially alter, the results of the 2026 midterm elections.

“The number one threat facing American elections is the continued lies coming out of the White House,” said the Arizona secretary of state, Adrian Fontes, the official responsible for overseeing the state’s elections.

The president is fighting to persuade Congress to approve legislation, the Save Act, that would allow the US federal government greater control over elections. Trump has also called for the federal government to take direct control of elections in some states, falsely claiming that his defeats there in 2020 were illegitimate.

There’s just one snag. “We have an election system that is not run by the federal government,” said Ben Berwick, who leads Protect Democracy’s election law and litigation team. “It’s run by states and local jurisdictions.”

The president, he added, “really has no power over elections”. So what can Trump actually do?

Republicans in a handful of states have already scrambled, at Trump’s urging, to redraw their congressional maps in the wake of a landmark decision by the US supreme court – controlled by a conservative supermajority – that effectively gutted a major section of the Voting Rights Act.

Louisiana led the way, tearing up its old map of four Republican and two Democratic districts in favor of a new one, which will probably give Republicans five of the state’s six congressional seats. Such efforts are designed to shift the outcome of future elections.

And with threats to mail-in voting, sowing fears about voting machines, as well as a steady stream of unfounded allegations of election fraud, many fear Trump appears to be laying the groundwork to challenge results that don’t go his way in November.

The memory of the deadly 6 January attack on the US Capitol in 2021, fueled by Trump’s denial of his election defeat, looms large.

“It’s reckless that the president will continue to do what he’s doing, and that the folks around him will continue to let him do what he’s doing, and potentially trigger that sort of behavior that could cost lives,” added Fontes. “This is a powder keg out there, and there’s a lot of folks who just just want to get on with their lives, who just want to get on to solving their own problems.”

Mail-in ballots

Trump has repeatedly tried to restrict voting by mail, and likened it to cheating, despite doing so himself . It is a key focus of his administration’s efforts. In November, the administration could use the US Postal Service (USPS) to “control the flow of mail-in ballots, and potentially not send ballots to certain voters”, Berwick said.

Democratic voters are deemed more likely to cast their ballots by mail than Republicans: about one in four registered Democrats did so in 2024, according to the States United Democracy Center, alongside 1 in 5 registered Republicans.

Eight states and the District of Columbia rely almost exclusively on postal ballots. The USPS, at Trump’s direction, proposed a rule that would require states to turn over their voter roll information to the federal government, which would then tell states which voters were ineligible.

That proposal, enforced by an executive order in March, faces a wall of legal challenges and was ruled unconstitutional by a judge. Cases pursued by the civil rights group NAACP in Washington DC and the League of Women’s Voters in Massachusetts have challenged the plan in court.

Celina Stewart, CEO of the League of Women Voters, said the organization intervened to ensure the bid to restrict mail-in voting was “shut down” in time for state primary elections, taking place in the months ahead of November’s general election. “And so I think that was really important for us,” she said, “just to make sure that voters knew how that was going to work, and make sure that they understood what their rights were, and how they could execute their ballot effectively”.

Voting machines

At polling stations, Trump is also pointing to electronic voting machines, which he suggested in his 16 July TV address could be compromised by foreign actors. “China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China’s illicit acquisition of 220 million US voter files,” he said.

Declassified files from US investigators show that China downloaded publicly-available election data in 2022. Those same investigators concluded that China did not interfere in the election.

Voting rights advocates believe Trump may have been telegraphing his intent to try to block the use of some voting machines in a late-day election gambit, invoking national security as a rationale.

“The thing that maybe worries me the most is what we saw in Fulton county and elsewhere,” Berwick said, referring to an FBI raid in January that resulted in the seizure of 2020 ballots and election material in Georgia. The administration “may try to do something similar in the immediate post-election period under the sort of pretext of investigating ineligible voting, or votes cast by ineligible voters”, he suggested, “in a way that, if done in the immediate post-election period, would be designed to disrupt the ability of states to count votes and certify elections”.

In the meantime, the White House has actively undermined safeguards to the election system. The Election Assistance Commission, a US federal agency designed to help states overcome technical challenges in election administration, which currently has no commissioners. Trump fired the Democrat members, and allowed the Republicans to resign. More than a third of the staff of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency was meanwhile cut by Trump’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency”, the cost-cutting drive fleetingly led by Elon Musk, including the entire team looking at cybersecurity threats in elections.

“One cannot help but notice the irony of the administration’s purported interest in securing our election systems, and yet gutting the very agency responsible for that,” said Hannah Fried, co-founder and CEO of All Voting is Local.

Save Act

The Save Act, which is stalled in Congress, would require voters to present their passport or birth certificate to register to vote, and then to provide photo ID from a narrow list of valid identifications to vote in person. Campaigners argue such restrictions would disproportionately impact Black, Native, elderly and student voters.

The legislation would also sharply constrain voting by mail, too. And it would require states to turn over their voter rolls to the federal government.

Absent that legislation – which is constitutionally questionable – federal agencies under Trump may still try to pressure states to purge voter rolls using unreliable or unverified federal data sets. Courts have consistently blocked attempts by the federal government to force unvetted voter purges.

Some states – led by Republican officials – have already turned over voter rolls, when requested by the federal government.

Berwick highlighted the prospect of federal agencies like the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security seeking voter lists from states, “presumably to then send to states lists of voters they believe are ineligible, which are very likely to be inaccurate”.

While far-right figures like Steve Bannon, an ally and former adviser of Trump, have called for the deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents or federal law enforcement at voting sites, and the president himself has explicitly raised the prospect, it is considered remote because federal law plainly outlaws the presence of troops or federal agents at polling places.

Voter intimidation has already manifested at early voting sites and drop boxes, said Stewart, of the League of Women Voters, who cited an incident in Arizona where armed contractors confronted voters. “The president in particular is pushing for increased ICE funding,” she said. “So you have to ask: for what?”

Stewart highlighted how her organization successfully sued to stop armed drop-box intimidation in 2022, securing a court order within 24 hours. The incident was a demonstration of “how quickly things like that can happen” she said, “but equally as quickly … how we can shut that down”.

Pins and needles

Trump’s increasingly inflammatory rhetoric is itself a threat to the integrity of the 2026 election, said Georgia state senator Saira Draper, a leading voting administration expert, who warned that narrative attacks are designed to undermine outcomes, regardless of who wins.

“By sowing distrust in elections, no matter what the outcome is, he continues on the division, whether his party wins or not into the next term,” said Draper, who suggested that such constant rhetoric turns followers into “foot soldiers for the cause”.

Some of those foot soldiers sit on county boards of elections, which are required to certify elections. And some are running for office, successfully winning the Republican nomination, like Alex Kolodin , who helped lead failed legal efforts to overturn Arizona’s 2020 and 2022 election results, who is now the Republican candidate for Arizonan secretary of state: its top elections official.

After the 2020 election, some Republican elections board members refused to certify fair elections, threatening to disrupt the process. A mass refusal could cast doubt on the results in conservative states that have taken a Democratic turn in a swing year.

“This federal interference led by the president isn’t helping anybody,” said Fontes. “It’s not good for, in my view, any circumstance across the country, and it’s got everybody on pins and needles for no really good reason.

“I mean, what’s the really good reason why folks are afraid, that there’s something wrong with our elections? The only explanation is that Donald Trump can’t get over getting his butt kicked in 2020.”