Trump has a plan to steal the midterms. It will probably fail.

Ever since the United States entrusted its presidency to a would-be insurrectionist in January 2025, many Americans have feared for the integrity of their nation’s future elections.

And not without reason. President Donald Trump made his contempt for democracy clear on January 6, 2021. Shortly after retaking office last year, he pardoned the rioters who’d stormed the Capitol in his name, gutted the agency that protects America’s voting infrastructure from cyberattacks, attempted to unconstitutionally deter the counting of many mail-in ballots, and threatened to prosecute officials who had faithfully administered the 2020 election. 

If concerns that Trump might unduly influence the 2026 midterms aren’t new, however, they’ve grown markedly more plausible over the past two weeks.

In late January, the FBI seized 2020 election records — ballots, voter rolls, and scanner images — from a government facility in Fulton County, Georgia. This raid represented a new frontier in the president’s use of federal law enforcement to advance his conspiratorial claims of electoral impropriety. 

Meanwhile, as ICE agents brutalized and killed protesters in Minnesota, US Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote a letter to that state’s governor, Tim Walz, in which she appeared to propose a bizarre quid pro quo: If Walz wished to see “an end to the chaos in Minnesota” — and, implicitly, a pullback in ICE operations there — he should give the Department of Justice access to his state’s voter rolls.

If the subtext of these actions was unclear, the president spelled it out this week. In an interview with his former deputy FBI director Dan Bongino, Trump said that Republicans in Washington, DC, should “take over the voting” in at least “15 places.” 

These developments came amid a decline in the GOP’s poll numbers. And they have intensified fears that the president may try to preserve his party’s control of Congress through undemocratic means.

“For anybody who doubted that this administration is laying the foundation to interfere in elections, the deluge of activity over the last two weeks should lay those doubts to rest,” said Wendy Weiser, vice president of democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice, a legal think tank at NYU Law School.

This interference could take many forms. But recent events have increased experts’ level of concern about two possibilities in particular:

• That the Trump administration will try to seize ballots and voting machines from key jurisdictions before votes have been fully counted.
• That Trump will deploy ICE or other federal agents to the vicinity of critical polling places, so as to deter turnout among voters in general — and those with undocumented family members, in particular.

Below, I explain how recent events have made these hypotheticals more thinkable — and why the administration’s efforts to unduly sway the midterms in its favor are, nonetheless, unlikely to succeed.

The nightmare scenario

The “nightmare scenario” for this year’s elections has long gone something like this: Control of the House comes down to a small number of close races. Republicans lead on Election Day in many of these contests, but their advantage steadily erodes as mail-in ballots arrive. The White House attributes these adverse trends to mass voter fraud and demands a halt to vote counting. 

When states refuse to comply, the White House orders the military to seize ballots and voting machines from pivotal precincts before all votes have been tallied. The chain of custody over these ballots breaks down, making the elections’ true winners impossible to determine. The House’s incumbent GOP majority then asserts the authority to seat the Republican candidates in the contested races. American democracy, as we’ve known it, ends.

Even before the past two weeks, there was reason to take this hypothetical seriously. Indeed, throughout its first year in office, the second Trump administration appeared to be laying the groundwork for such treachery. 

In an executive order last spring, Trump asserted that, if a mail-in ballot arrives after Election Day, states cannot legally count it. Currently, many states — including Nevada and Virginia — count ballots that arrive shortly after Election Day, if they were postmarked on time. 

In that same executive order, Trump called on the Election Assistance Commission to decertify every voting machine in the United States — and then recertify only those that met an exacting set of requirements. As The Atlantic’s David Graham notes, it’s not even clear that the government could procure enough voting machines to meet these new standards in time for November’s midterms.

Regardless, courts blocked both of these measures. Yet each established a rationale for the administration to reject any future election results that it did not like: This November, several states will count mail ballots in a manner that the White House has formally declared illegal, while virtually every precinct in the country will use voting machines that it has deemed untrustworthy.

Meanwhile, the House of Representatives has the constitutional authority to judge “the qualifications of its own Members.” And in the wake of a closely contested race in 1985, the House did choose to override a state-certified election result, and seat the candidate who had officially lost, on the basis of its own recount. Were the White House to impede vote counting in critical contests this November, it is conceivable that House Republicans could act on this precedent.

The Fulton County raid offers a legal blueprint for stealing an election

The FBI’s raid in Fulton County makes this series of events a bit easier to envision. 

That raid’s ostensible aim was to search for evidence of voter fraud. But the president’s allegations of such malfeasance are baseless. Fulton County’s 2020 results have already been recounted, audited, and challenged in court multiple times. And the legitimacy of those results has been unfailingly affirmed.

Yet the administration was nonetheless able to secure a search warrant from a magistrate judge to seize the county’s ballots. 

The White House’s success in garnering judicial approval for its confiscation of voting records — despite the overtly political and legally dubious nature of its investigation — has unnerved many legal experts. And some now fear that Trump could conceivably win a magistrate’s approval to seize midterm ballots before they have been counted. 

“The nightmare scenario used to be that Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act and have the military seize ballots and machines from a swing state on election night,” said Derek Clinger, senior counsel at the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School. “But Fulton County suggests a much more plausible scenario: one where the seizure of ballots is conducted with the appearance of a legal process. I think that approach is both more likely to happen and also harder to challenge in real time.”

Trump may be drumming up a national security rationale for seizing voting machines

This said, what Clinger describes as the old worst-case scenario — in which Trump orders the military to interfere with vote counting, on grounds of national security — has also become more thinkable in recent days.

To see why, one must consider the oddest aspect of the Fulton County raid: the fact that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard personally attended it. 

The DNI (aka America’s spy chief) has no statutory role in overseeing the enforcement of federal election law. Gabbard’s involvement therefore initially mystified many current and former government officials.

But the Wall Street Journal subsequently revealed that Gabbard had been tasked with leading an administration-wide effort to find evidence of foreign interference in the 2020 election. 

This week, we learned that, as part of that effort, Gabbard oversaw an investigation into alleged cyberattacks on Puerto Rico’s election infrastructure. Specifically, the probe reportedly tried — and failed — to find proof that Venezuela had hacked voting machines on the island.

“I think it is, tragically, an unfortunate possibility that ICE paramilitary forces will be misused in an attempt to deter people from participating in elections.”

Justin Levitt, former DOJ official

There is no public evidence that any foreign government interfered in the 2020 election. But Trump and his allies have long taken a “the more, the merrier” approach to explaining away his defeat that year: In their account, mass voter fraud by undocumented immigrants, chicanery by American election administrators, and cyberattacks from Venezuelan hackers were all responsible for Joe Biden’s victory. 

That last theory first took off in November 2020, when Trump’s attorney Sidney Powell falsely claimed that the voting machine companies Dominion and Smartmatic were secretly Venezuelan. In Powell’s telling, those firms’ machines were designed by the Chavez regime to facilitate election rigging. It quickly became gospel on parts of the right that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro had exploited secret programming within Dominion’s machines to flip votes to Biden.

In December 2020, on the basis of such conspiracy theories, Powell pitched the president on an audacious plan: Declare a national security emergency and order the National Guard to seize voting machines in swing states. In an interview with the New York Times last month, Trump said that he regretted not acting on this advice.

Given this context, Gabbard’s presence at the Fulton County raid — and her newly revealed search for evidence of Venezuelan hacking in Puerto Rico — are alarming. They indicate that the White House may be trying to engineer a pretense for (illegally) seizing voting machines this November, in the name of protecting America’s national security. 

Such a plan would be consistent with remarks that Cleta Mitchell — a conservative lawyer, “Stop the Steal” activist,” and outside adviser to Gabbard’s election interference probe — made last fall. 

In September, Mitchell said that the president “is limited in his role with regard to elections, except where there is a threat to the national sovereignty of the United States.” She suggested that Trump was therefore “thinking that he will exercise some emergency powers to protect the federal elections going forward.”

How ICE could chill voter participation

Finally, recent events have also amplified fears that the administration will use ICE as a means of voter suppression.

Bondi’s attempt to extract sensitive voter information from Minnesota — by implicitly threatening to prolong intensive ICE operations in that state if it failed to comply — alarmed many Democrats. 

To some in the party, Bondi’s request signaled that the administration sees immigration enforcement as a tool for meddling in elections. Specifically, they fear that the White House may order ICE operations in the vicinity of key polling places on Election Day, so as to deter turnout. 

Their reasoning is simple: If ICE is harassing residents and causing traffic jams in heavily Democratic precincts, fewer Americans will make it to the voting booth in those areas. And voters with undocumented family members may be especially likely to stay home.

“I think it is, tragically, an unfortunate possibility that ICE paramilitary forces will be misused in an attempt to deter people from participating in elections,” said Justin Levitt, a former DOJ official and professor at Loyola Law School. 

Why American democracy will (probably) survive

Nevertheless, although experts are taking these hypotheticals more seriously, they generally believe that Trump’s attempts at election interference will fail. 

“There is a very high risk that the administration will use every tool at its disposal to get voting machines or ballots in the course of an upcoming election,” the Brennan Center’s Weiser told me. “But I don’t think there is a high risk that they will succeed.”

Weiser and others warned against reading too much into the administration’s success at securing a search warrant for Fulton County’s 2020 voting records.

“I think every magistrate judge in the country would understand the difference between a search warrant to seize materials for an election that happened five years ago and a search warrant to seize election materials from an election in progress,” Levitt said. “I understand why people are worried. But it’s not remotely the same.”

Further, contrary to Mitchell’s claims, there is no clause of the Constitution that gives the president authority over election administration, in the event of a foreign attack (whether real or imagined). Thus, any attempt to seize ballots or voting machines through military order would likely encounter vigorous resistance from the judiciary, elected officials, and perhaps, from the armed forces themselves. 

Indeed, Trump’s mere remarks about taking control of election administration provoked rebukes from some Republicans this week. And one heartening lesson of the past month is that such backlash can still constrain the president: After Border Patrol’s killing of Alex Pretti sparked bipartisan criticism, Trump demoted the agency’s commander and pulled 700 ICE agents out of Minnesota. 

In an interview Wednesday night, Trump indicated that these moves were motivated by negative press coverage, telling NBC News of the shooting, “I hate even talking about it. Two people [get killed] out of tens of thousands and you get bad publicity.”

Needless to say, were the White House to order the military to interrupt vote counting, Trump would suffer even worse “publicity.”

Meanwhile, although it would be outrageous for the president to use ICE as a voter suppression tool, it would also be highly unlikely to flip elections in his favor. 

“Trump wants to project ICE as an all-powerful force everywhere,” Levitt said. “And they are, as Minneapolis is proving emphatically, not. There simply aren’t enough ICE personnel to blanket a modestly large city. We live in a big country. And it is hard to control through fear.”

Even in the Twin Cities — where Trump deployed some 3,000 immigration enforcement agents — ICE’s presence seems to have mobilized Democratic voters, rather than deterring them. In a special election on January 27 for Minnesota House district 64A, the Democratic candidate defeated her Republican opponent by a 91-point margin. In 2024, a Democrat had won the seat by 66.6 percentage points.

“There is clearly an effort afoot to interfere in our elections and that is something that people should be alarmed about,” Weiser said. “But this can be thwarted. And it must be.”