Is Trump Actually Trying to Steal the 2026 Midterms?
What's actually happening less than four months before November.
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon added a new line to his office’s emergency planning list this year, one that now sits next to severe weather, bomb threats and power outages. “This time, we’re adding to that list of hazards: we’re adding the possibility that the federal government might do something that directly or indirectly affects the election negatively,” Simon, a member of the state’s Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party, told ABC News at the National Association of Secretaries of State summer conference in Rapid City, South Dakota, last Tuesday.
Simon was not alone. Secretaries of state from both parties, gathered in South Dakota for what is usually a quiet annual meeting, told ABC News they are now scenario-planning for federal interference in the elections that will decide control of the House and Senate this November. States are constitutionally responsible for running elections. Whether the federal government tries to override that responsibility this fall has moved, for several of these officials, from a hypothetical to a working assumption.
Trump Sets the Stage From the East Room
The conference in Rapid City coincided, by chance, with a primetime address President Donald Trump delivered from the White House on July 16. He announced he had declassified a trove of documents that he said proved “the largest compromise of election data in history,” accusing China of the “illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files” through a unit built to target American elections, according to Roll Call. He warned of “rogue bureaucrats” and called the U.S. election system “so broken and so vulnerable that no one can defend it.” At no point did he connect any of it to a foreign actor actually changing a vote.
House Intelligence Committee ranking member Jim Himes told MS Now the speech was laying groundwork. “He was setting the basis for him to turn around at midnight on Election Day and say, ‘I warned you,’” Himes said, sketching a scenario in which Trump could deploy “federal officers from the Department of Homeland Security to seven states” to seize ballot boxes over unfounded fraud claims. “That is the moment in which American democracy dies,” he said. Rep. Joseph D. Morelle, ranking member of the House Administration Committee, told C-SPAN he heard a president preparing to “sow so much confusion” that he could later “claim extraordinary powers.”
A Case the Evidence Doesn’t Support
The documents Trump released do not appear to support the case he built around them. ABC News reported the heavily redacted files don’t back up his claims, and a related ABC News report found the declassified documents themselves say U.S. election systems “would be difficult to manipulate.” Trump also did not mention a March 2021 National Intelligence Council report that contradicted, with “high confidence,” many of the same claims, per Roll Call.
The same week, Trump and DHS sent letters to Pennsylvania, New Jersey, California, and Nevada, claiming that an internal review had found 278,000 noncitizens registered to vote across the four states combined. “There’s no foundation to it,” Stephen Maynard Caliendo, a political science professor at North Central College, told PBS affiliate WTTW. “Up to 250,000 voters could be one voter, and it’s a federal crime to register to vote or to try to cast a vote if you’re not a U.S. citizen, if you’re not eligible to vote. It’s very rare. It doesn’t happen very often.”
Trump’s Fraud Claims Are Older Than This Cycle
Trump has mentioned election fraud 544 times since returning to office in January 2025, and 3,062 times since launching his first presidential bid in 2015, an average of 1.3 times a day this year, according to data from Roll Call’s Factbase. Of the 132 U.S. races at every level of government where Factbase found him raising fraud claims, one race is missing: the 2018 ballot-harvesting scheme run by North Carolina operative McCrae Dowless, the one instance a bipartisan elections board actually found and unanimously confirmed, which cost Republican Mark Harris his seat.
The week before his speech, the White House removed the three remaining members of the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission, a move some state officials told ABC News added unnecessary instability to the running of the election. Downballot, Arizona Republicans just nominated a slate of 2020 election deniers, Andy Biggs for governor, Warren Petersen for attorney general and Alexander Kolodin for secretary of state, to the three offices that will run the state’s elections beyond this cycle, including its 2028 presidential vote, MS Now reported. And Republican officials, from the White House to Capitol Hill, have been selling Trump’s voter ID push, the SAVE America Act, by comparing it to needing a photo ID for Olive Garden’s pasta pass, a comparison MS Now’s Steve Benen noted ignores that the bill also requires proof of citizenship, something Olive Garden does not.
The Agency Built to Stop Election Interference Is Gone
Trump said in his speech the country “must take urgent action” against foreign interference. But the agency built for that purpose has been hollowed out since he returned to office, MS Now reported. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, created during Trump’s first term, lost more than 100 workers to DOGE firings, while over 600 more were placed on leave, reassigned, or took buyouts. The administration proposed a 17% budget cut, roughly $500 million, and a staff reduction of nearly 30%. CISA also halted funding for the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, which gave local governments free security training and threat monitoring.
State officials told MS Now they are no longer getting the threat briefings they once received routinely. “They’re flying blind,” said a former senior national security official who served during Trump’s first administration and was granted anonymity to discuss the matter. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin has said states will get resources only if they hand over voter rolls to a federal database, called SAVE, that a judge recently found unlawful in its current form over concerns it could wrongly flag eligible voters. “We’re not trying to change the outcome,” Mullin said. Cait Conley, who served as senior adviser to CISA’s director under President Biden and is now running for Congress in New York as a Democrat, drew a straight line between the cuts and the speech. “If Donald Trump were truly concerned about election security, he would not have fired hundreds of federal workers whose jobs were to secure our elections,” she said.
Plan B, Plan C, and a Paper Ballot Backup
West Virginia Secretary of State Kris Warner, a Republican who has criticized the administration’s pursuit of private voter data, told ABC News his office has a fallback for nearly any scenario. “If it’s determined that we can’t use a tabulator, for example, we’re prepared to get those ballots counted by hand,” he said. New Hampshire’s David Scanlan, also a Republican, said his state has been told federal election monitors will be present at its upcoming primaries. “We welcome observers. It’s a public process,” he said. “What we don’t want is federal interference in the actual election process itself.”
Connecticut Secretary of State Stephanie Thomas, a Democrat, described the planning process itself. “Election officials are constantly preparing for the unknown. It’s what we do, so we’re always scenario planning from the most mundane to the most extreme situations,” she said. “This administration, for better or worse, is just giving us more to plan for.”
If Homeland Security Comes for the Ballots
Campaign Legal Center, a voting rights group that has sued the administration over several of its election actions, argues the pattern adds up to something larger than any single move: an attempt to seize personal voter data, purge voter rolls, gerrymander maps and, eventually, deny results the administration doesn’t like. The group notes that no president has the constitutional power to cancel or postpone a federal election, and that authority over elections rests with the states and Congress. Sen. Maria Cantwell recounted asking a home-state election official what he would do if Homeland Security tried to block mail ballots. “He says, ‘I don’t give a damn if I have to Uber them. I’m getting the voters their ballots,’” Cantwell said.
Confidence in Elections Splits Right Down the Middle
Roughly 4 in 10 Americans say they have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the people who run elections in their state, a higher share than say the same about the Supreme Court, Congress or the executive branch, according to a Marquette University Law School poll conducted in June. That confidence splits sharply by party, 53% of Democrats versus 29% of Republicans. A separate YouGov-Economist poll found 28% of Americans still believe the 2020 election was rigged, including half of Republicans and 66% of Republicans who identify with the MAGA movement. Trump made his speech less than four months before the midterms despite a Washington Post-Ipsos poll, released the same morning, showing 37% of Americans approve of his job performance, and 61% disapprove.
Too Big to Rig
Earlier that same Thursday, hours before the primetime address, a reporter pressed White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt at a briefing on why the administration was investigating supposed fraud in elections Republicans lost but not examining the 2024 race Trump won. Leavitt smiled and answered with a phrase her boss made famous. “Because it was too big to rig,” she said. “... There was a massive amount of votes for this president. That’s why he’s in the Oval Office right now.”