Trump Militarized Cities in ICE Crackdowns. Is Militarizing the Ballot Box Next?

Part of the Series

Voting Wrongs

Two months after Donald Trump’s second inauguration, the White House released the text of a sprawling executive order allegedly designed to ensure the integrity of U.S. elections. It demanded that states share their voter rolls with federal officials; mandated onerous proof-of-citizenship rules for people registering to vote (rules which didn’t include drivers’ licenses as valid forms of ID for this purpose); threatened local and state officials who didn’t cooperate with this power grab with legal sanctions; and ostensibly outlawed the counting of any mail-in ballots received after Election Day.

More recently, the White House announced it would soon be delivering another executive order going after mail-in voting more generally, and, in particular, that it would be targeting California’s voting system which, it alleged without evidence, was rife with fraud.

In the wake of lawsuits filed by Democratic-led states, the District of Columbia, and the League of United Latin American Citizens, courts have issued preliminary injunctions against the bulk of the provisions in Trump’s executive order from March. And when the administration pushes new restrictions on voting, California and other states have already made it clear they will head straight to court.

Yet even if many of Trump’s efforts to curtail voting end up stalled in the courts, the practical effect is one of intimidation: He is marshalling the full force of the U.S. government and all of the resources of the Departments of Justice (DOJ) and Homeland Security (DHS) to craft a narrative that elections that don’t favor Republicans are inherently suspect.

In January 2021, Trump and his acolytes attempted to prevent the peaceful transfer of power, alleging that the election which he lost by millions of votes to Joe Biden was riddled with fraud. Between 2021 and 2024, many of the people involved in these schemes were successfully prosecuted, and many others — including Donald Trump himself — were investigated and charged with multiple felonies.

On day one of Trump’s second term in office, the MAGA leader issued mass pardons and clemencies for the January 6 insurrectionists and began a process of turning FBI and DOJ resources against those who had investigated and prosecuted them. That process has lasted all year, has resulted in wholesale purges, and, if Trump has his way, will lead to a slew of prosecutions against the officials who backed Jack Smith’s special investigation.

There is now a systematic effort afoot to break down, or render impotent, key institutional players that could serve to limit Trump’s efforts to manipulate the outcome of the 2026 elections.

Many of the people who peddled outlandish election conspiracies five years ago are now in positions overseeing election integrity in the United States. These include Heather Honey, an outspoken 2020 election denier who is now the DHS point person on “election integrity,” charged with communicating to the states how the feds intend to protect elections from threats foreign and domestic to undermine the voting process. A New York Times investigative report found that Honey has, in private conversations with hard-right activists, proposed declaring a “national emergency” to allow federal official to bypass states and seize control over voting processes. The civil rights division of the Justice Department is now headed by another high-profile election denier, Harmeet Dhillon. And most of the senior personnel in the voting rights section of the Department of Justice have been dismissed, as have most active cases involving allegations against locales for creating racially discriminatory barriers to voting.

And it isn’t just a matter of a few bad actors being elevated to key roles and a few good actors being fired. Trump came into office determined to undermine the independence of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) — and promptly proceeded to fire board members who had been nominated by Democratic presidents. He has issued executive orders attempting to place independent executive branch agencies, including the FEC, under his direct control. And, with Trump having proceeded to fire key members of the FEC, the board no longer has the quorum to set in place meaningful election-protection policies, leaving it fundamentally hamstrung as the 2026 election season ramps up. In other words, there is now a systematic effort afoot to break down, or render impotent, key institutional players that could serve to limit Trump’s efforts to manipulate the outcome of the 2026 elections.

Making a bad situation worse, during the DOGE purges, the new administration slashed spending on cyber security and other security measures that warn states of threats to election systems, leaving elections officials largely floundering in the face of risks they no longer were receiving adequate briefings on. The administration also gutted the teams at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, as well as in the FBI, that work to counteract foreign interference in U.S. elections. This is a historically unprecedented rollback of election security safeguards.

And at a state level, too, the rot is also accelerating. In key swing states such as Pennsylvania, the GOP has elevated election denying legislators to control the committees charged with setting election policy. Add into the mix Trump’s order to GOP state legislators in Texas and many other states to engage in mid-decade gerrymandering, so as to secure more than a dozen additional seats in the House of Representatives, as well as the likely Supreme Court ruling undermining Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and thus allowing southern states to legislate out of existence Black-majority districts, and the stage has been set for a massive onslaught on the concept of a level playing field for elections. Republicans could, in consequence, lose the popular vote by several percent and still end up in control of Congress.

None of this is to say that the Democrats won’t win control of the House next year — recent polls suggest Republicans are in deep electoral trouble. Thus, even with the GOP’s head start guaranteed by all of these shenanigans, it’s entirely possible Democratic candidates will overcome Republican advantages in dozens of districts around the country.

But Trump’s actions this past year do not give confidence that he will easily accept such an election defeat. He is maneuvering key agencies to be utilized to challenge results that don’t go his way, and his executive orders suggest a willingness to use federal muscle — even that of the military — to seize control both of election processes and of ballot boxes if things head too far south for the Republicans.

That’s a doomsday scenario that an increasing number of state and federal legislators are warning about. Officials worry about troops and DHS agents being deployed to polling stations to intimidate would-be voters, about cyberthreats being downplayed by the feds, about ballot boxes being seized. High-profile Democratic governors such as Illinois’s Jay Pritzker and California’s Gavin Newsom have warned that the deployment of National Guard troops into cities this year is likely a precursor for a concerted effort to send federal agents into Democratic cities and states during the 2026 elections. And U.S. senators such as Alex Padilla have announced they are prepared to introduce legislation to try to counter any presidential effort to declare a national emergency around the midterm elections.

In more normal political times, the president would calm these roiling waters by pledging to respect both the election process and the election result. These aren’t, however, normal times. Recently, Trump took to social media to predict the GOP would win the midterms “in RECORD NUMBERS.”He has also demanded, on social media, that states “must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.” None of this suggests a commander-in-chief willing to simply sit back and absorb the sort of electoral humbling that opinion polls indicating Democrats now have a double-digit lead heading into the midterms, suggest voters will attempt to serve up to the GOP 11 months from now.