GOP STEAL ELECTION
5/20/26 ESTB
MERRI OK
SEE DOJ 3 FAILS
SEE BIG LIE ILLEGAL VOTER FRAUD
SEE GERRY
SEE MIKE JOHNSON
see crm
PULTE DNI NEW TULSI GABBARD STONE
BANNON CLETA PULTE RUDY ESSAYLI
VOTE BY MAIL ELECTION INTEGRITY BS
SEE VOTE ROLL PURGE
VOTER SUPPRESSION POLL WATCHER
CRM PODCAST BIG LIE 10 26 MMA
STEINER USPO ~ MAIL IN BALLOT, PVT SEC HU RTS
SEE CARAVAN XENO
ROGER STONE PULTE LOOMER FOREIGN BS
SEE FASCISM
SEE MILITARIZATION POSSE COMM BANNON EMERGENCY INSURRECTION ACT
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DOJ FAILS
'A bad look': Trump DOJ's aggressive court blitz completely collapses
AN 11 4 26
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AN 11 26
Speaking exclusively with AlterNet, one of America's top election and polling experts explained on Thursday why the 2026 midterm elections didn't end with another coup attempt.
President Donald Trump attempted to rig the 2026 midterm elections before Election Day through many methods. These included attempts at restricting mail-in voting, sending law enforcement to the polls, trying to force states to purge voters from their rolls and threatening to file frivolous lawsuits.
After Election Day, however, Trump accepted the Democrats' sweeping takeover of the Senate and House of Representatives. He didn't declare a national emergency to seize ballots or stop the voting. There was no Big Lie claiming without evidence that the election was stolen, such as the one Trump spread after losing the 2020 presidential election. Instead he did exactly what all candidates are supposed to do in a democracy — graciously accept the election results, at least in public.
So what happened?
"This was such a thumping that even he couldn't deny it with a straight face," Kyle Kondik, Managing Editor at Sabato's Crystal Ball (a top election prediction and analysis group that is centered at the University of Virginia), told AlterNet. He also pointed out that Trump could not stop Joe Biden from winning the 2020 election, even though he tried through illegitimate lawsuits and then the Jan. 6th insurrection.
"This is one of the biggest waves in American history," Kondik added, drawing a comparison between voter dissatisfaction with Republican corruption and inflation in two previous sets of midterm elections with the voters' verdict with the current Republican administration's corruption and inflation.
"The Watergate wave of 1974 might be the only comparable election in modern history," Kondik told AlterNet. "This was kind of like 2006, but clearly bigger." The 1974 midterms occurred under President Gerald Ford, who controversially pardoned his predecessor Richard Nixon after he resigned in disgrace for covering up a politically-motivated burglary (the so-called Watergate scandal). The 2006 midterms occurred under President George W. Bush, who was fighting scandal for misleading the public about why America invaded Iraq. Both also struggled with poor economies marked by high inflation.
After both the 1974 and 2006 midterm elections, Democrats capitalized on widespread dissatisfaction with the economy and scandals that they elected Democrats in the following presidential elections (Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Barack Obama in 2008). Kondik indicated that the victorious party could do this again in 2028.
"When there's such a huge swing all sorts of voters move, but the biggest shifts back toward Democrats seemed to be among young people and Hispanics," Kondik told AlterNet.
He continued, "The giant wave only makes the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination more worth having, because Trump is weak and may never truly bounce back in approval. So Trump may drag down whoever the Republican nominee is. I think the fight for the Democratic nomination is wide open."
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AN 11 26
Former Asst. U.S. Attorney Andrew Weissmann says there are at least three reasons President Donald Trump did not try to deny the midterm election that swept Republicans out of power in a rush of voter wrath. And one of those reasons came from directly inside Trump’s administration.
“In Trump 1.0 there were internal people to the White House and the Department of Justice and the FBI and within the intelligence Community who were pushing back [against Trump’s incursions against democracy in 2021,” Weissmann told Bulwark publisher Sarah Longwell in a Thursday night podcast.
Trump 2.0, he said, is more of a science experiment on what happens when you have only loyalty and incompetence as hiring criteria. But in 1.0, Weissmann said the military and other leaders made clear that they were not willing to do to keep Trump in power.
This year, however, some members of Trump’s legal team were pushing back less overtly, subtly signaling to judges and courts that Trump’s legal filings to intercept democracy had no foundation.
“There were signs of people internally not going along with things,” said Weissmann. “… The solicitor general, when they filed a brief in the Supreme Court on the list of 20,000 [California ballots] to set aside, he obviously didn't have enough clout or power to tell the White House ‘we're not doing that,’ or ‘no, or I'm leaving.’ But when you read the [Solicitor General John Sauer’s brief, I have never read a brief that signals as loudly as it could that this is a bull—— application.”
“It's read the following way: our office has been told that there is this list and we have been told that it is believed to be accurate based on information that, at the time they looked at it, that may support a review,” said Weissmann, between smiles. “I mean, people were joking about it. I'm not sure you could put more caveats into that. That is not how you start a brief. [Sauer’s] basically saying, ‘this is bull——, and I'm forced to do this.”
The internal people not going along with Trump’s schemes to overthrow the 2026 midterms, however, did not include AG Todd Blanche, Trump’s former defense attorney who Trump brought on to run the DOJ.
“Not Todd Blanche. He's all in, in the grossest way,” Weissmann told Longwell, and then added that if there was any official in the second half of Trump’s term worthy of impeachment it was Blanche—who has been serving Trump ever since he failed to protect him from a hush-money conviction over illegal funds paid to a sex-industry worker.
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an 11 26
On Thursday, with Mississippi’s razor-thin race for the Senate still undecided, Republicans launched a desperate last-minute bid to stave off what appears to be another red seat – one of the reddest, in fact – flipping blue. With the Democrats ahead by an exceptionally slim margin, the National Republican Senatorial Committee has sent a letter to county clerks and election officials throughout the state demanding that late-arriving affidavit ballots be separated and preserved, possibly with the intention of challenging their validity should the numbers not go their way.
The narrow race in Mississippi is one of the big surprises of the midterms, at one point coming down to a margin of just a few dozen votes out of nearly a million counted. By Thursday morning, Democratic candidate Scott Colom’s lead had grown to over 1,700, and according to a statement issued by the campaign, “We're confident Scott's lead will continue to grow as the remaining votes are counted. We're staying focused and protecting the integrity of our election.” According to the Mississippi Secretary of State, there are “approximately 3,600 outstanding absentee-by-mail ballots that must be received within five business days and an unknown number of affidavit ballots that will be processed within the 10-day window counties have to certify their results.”
As Democracy Docket explains, “Like other states, Mississippi allows voters who don’t appear on local polling precincts’ registration records to cast a provisional, or ‘affidavit,’ ballot. But unlike in most other states, Mississippians cast huge numbers of affidavit ballots this year, after Secretary of State Michael Watson (R) flagged 230,000 voter registrations as ‘inactive.’” State law decrees that election officials must count affidavit ballots provided that the voter was previously registered in the precinct where they attempted to vote, the voter and the precinct’s poll manager properly signed the affidavit ballot’s envelope, and the voter provides acceptable voter identification within five business days of Election Day. According to Democracy Docket, “This process will be closely watched by both campaigns and could lead to litigation. Unlike most states, Mississippi doesn’t have a recount law, but candidates can try to sue to exclude or include certain ballots from the final count.” Now, judging by the GOP’s demands regarding affidavit ballots, it appears the party may attempt to have them excluded should they add to Colom’s lead.
Should current Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS) ultimately lose, it will represent yet another historic shift in an already history-making midterm season, which has seen the GOP decimated due to blowback from President Donald Trump's wild unpopularity. Mississippi hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1982, and Colom would be the state’s first black senator since just after the Civil War. Other states that saw shocking seat flips included Texas, which elected its first Democratic senator in nearly 40 years and its first Democratic governor since 1991, South Carolina, which hasn’t elected a blue senator since 1998, and Kansas, which hasn’t had a Democratic senator in nearly 100 years.
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MMA 11 26
The election denial movement failed — but it will be back
Key players are disorganized and spent the run-up to the midterms chasing shadows and promising a deus ex machina from Trump that never came
Written by John Knefel
Published 11/05/26 12:55 PM EST
In the aftermath of the midterms, it is clear that the faltering but resilient election denial movement — made up of a strange amalgamation of MAGA media figures and their allies in government —- lost in every conceivable way.
Democrats won the House and Senate by historic margins, deflating all but a few deadenders who were still trying to claim voter fraud until the last minute. On election night, even former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, whose War Room podcast has been a hub of the denialist movement, looked for enemies to blame more than supposed fraud to undercover.
But any hopes that the election denial fever has permanently broken are premature. Rejecting Democratic Party wins remains a core, foundational element of the movement that Trump built and will likely continue to be one for the foreseeable future.
To MAGA media, bad polls were a “psyop”
By the final weeks of the campaign, MAGA media was staring down major losses with few counterattacks other than to criticize polling, an act of desperation that aged poorly.
The talking point solidified around late September, when Bannon called the midterm polling a “psyop,” a term his guest, Republican strategist Alex DeGrasse, agreed with. Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts also said the data was a “psyop by so many of these polling firms in order to do what, to depress conservative turnout.” And right-wing media figure John Solomon suggested that public polling was potentially a “suppression tool,” citing his guest, Rep. Jimmy Patronis (R-FL).
MAGA media gadfly Wayne Allyn Root was pushing that line until the eve of the election, arguing that “anyone who believes polls in Texas showing that Talafreako is winning is a fool.”
Any hopes that the election denial fever has permanently broken are premature
These types of claims echo Fox News’ editorial approach to the 2020 election. In the final days before voters cast their ballots that year, Fox regularly used anecdotal evidence to suggest that the race was much closer than polls suggested, thereby helping to set the stage for the January 6 riot. The events of that day wouldn’t have been possible had right-wing media not fully embraced and amplified false narratives about insecure elections, underscoring how the so-called election integrity movement is fundamentally anti-democratic.
For years within MAGA media it has been taken as gospel that any discrepancies in polling — including phenomena like a “red mirage” that misleadingly shows Republicans with an early lead — is proof positive of voter fraud. Last minute attempts by right-wing media to seed that doubt again this cycle seem to have proven inadequate, given the losses Republicans faced across the country, but nonetheless were one tool in the toolbox.
The plots failed, but it wasn’t for a lack of trying from MAGA media
The denialist movement’s recent strategies and tactics coalesced at times, but the coalition was deeply disorganized by the time the polls opened.
Over the summer, MAGA media figures like former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and conspiracy theorist Wayne Allyn Root, concocted a conspiracy in plain sight that aimed to push Trump to declare a national emergency or issue an executive order seizing control of election systems. That didn’t happen.
Former Colorado county clerk Tina Peters, a hero in the election denial movement, and her lawyer, Peter Ticktin, who claims to be a childhood friend of Trump’s, allegedly met with the president in the White House on at least two occasions since June. Peters has said that she called on Trump to issue an executive order banning machines or mail-in ballots. That didn’t happen either.
Right-wing media spent months urging Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would’ve mandated federal voter ID laws and would’ve forced people to prove their citizenship at the time of registration. The act has been stalled for months, and has no path to becoming law at this point.
Bannon spent over a year calling for Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to stalk polling sites. That didn’t happen. Neither did the Trump administration heed the call from right-wing media figure Jerome Corsi, who reportedly circulated a draft national emergency order, to deploy the military or National Guard to administer or otherwise oversee elections.
As of right now, there is no indication that Trump has the appetite to declare martial law after the election but before certification, as Ticktin has repeatedly called for. Nor are there signs that his administration will attempt to seize voting machines or ballots.
For as much as these figures were desperate to spread confusion in the run-up to voting and sow doubt afterwards, they have largely failed.
Election denial remains at the core of MAGA
After a political movement attempts an insurrection like we saw on January 6, 2021, it is a mistake not to take their threats seriously. The coalition that made that day possible was composed of longtime conservative movement lawyers like Cleta Mitchell and John Eastman, former advisers like Bannon, and right-wing media figures like Alex Jones and the late Charlie Kirk, all of whom came together in an action designed to prevent the certification of a federal election.
Similarly, the plot to subvert the midterms before they happened included then-Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte and his chief of staff, as well as media figures like Peters, Ticktin, Root, and more. Under the second Trump term, the boundaries between top government official and bizarre curiosity on an obscure livestream are not clear, which makes it a challenge to evaluate whether the MAGA media kooks and cranks that make up so much of his social life really have their hands of the levers of power or if they are simply gassing themselves up to impress their audiences.
In this case, many of the most bombastic and anti-democratic proposals ultimately went nowhere or failed — but, like a zombie, the election denial movement is brainless but not dead. Root, for his part, responded to the results by arguing that the election was stolen but also that Republicans deserved to lose. Mitchell wrote on social media that the “work of securing our elections is FAR from completed,” while failing to articulate any concrete next steps. True the Vote, a key organization in this space, sent out a fundraising request the morning after the midterms. Trump-aligned think tank the America First Policy Institute is seeking information about the administration of elections in Minnesota. And MAGA “prophet” Julie Green said: “There was a red wave last night. It was stolen.”
Bannon recently said in a CBS News interview that “the core belief of the MAGA movement is we won the 2020 election.” That load-bearing myth will likely continue to be central to whatever political formation arrives after Trump shuffles off the stage.
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...Key findings:
Figures most frequently claiming to have the ear of Trump and his staff: Ten people made nearly half of the 123 total claims: Tina Peters (10), Wayne Allyn Root (7), Glenn Beck (6), Sean Hannity (5), Buck Sexton (5), Clay Travis (5), Trey Yingst (5), Bill O’Reilly (5), Peter Ticktin (5), and Jack Posobiec (5).
Election denial activists’ claims to be in touch with the White House increased as midterms approached: Twelve election denial figures account for 30% (or 37) of the total claims. In June they had just 2 claims and none in May, but the claims jumped to 16 in July and have remained significant since.
These interactions could be influencing policy: Nearly two-thirds of the claims about these interactions (80 out of 123) mentioned influential policy discussions, including relations with China, the Iran war, and election integrity efforts.
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RWW --> 11 26
With polls indicating that the Democrats are poised to win big in the midterm elections, the Trump administration is already attempting to mount legal challenges in certain races and cast doubt on the results.
A post published last month by the Center for Renewing America, an influential right-wing think tank, suggests a more radical strategy, asserting that a number of Democrats could be prevented from holding office even if they win their elections.
The post, titled “Can Congress Seat a Member-Elect Who Vows to Destroy our Constitution?” argues that even winning candidates from what it believes to be a purported “Red-Green Alliance” between “neo-Marxist progressives and anti-Western Muslims” can and should be kept from being seated in Congress. The post, in effect, claims that Muslim and progressive candidates don’t have to be legally accepted into their elected positions.
“This is another attempt to contort and twist basic norms that have never been used this way for their own partisan purposes,” says Richard Pildes, a professor at New York University’s School of Law.
The CRA was founded by Russell Vought, one of the main architects of Project 2025 and now the director of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought faced criticism for his anti-Muslim comments—he once said that Muslims had a “deficient theology” and “do not know God”—when he was nominated for OMB director during the first Trump administration.
The Center for Renewing America (CRA) did not respond to a request for comment.
Though Vought has described himself and allies, including members of the CRA, as “radical constitutionalists,” he has taken several steps that have infringed on the powers of other branches of government to expand the power of the executive branch. Most notably, although Congress is tasked with allocating and approving funds for the operation of the federal government, Vought has impounded, refused, or delayed the disbursement of funds, including billions of dollars that Congress has approved. Last year, Vought put a freeze on $5 billion in foreign aid funding, which was followed up by clawing back more than $800 million this year, a move that may violate the Impoundment Control Act, Maine senator Susan Collins said in late September.
The recent CRA piece—authored by Benjamin Osborne, a Georgetown Law School graduate who is serving as the organization’s legal fellow—argues that the beliefs the organization has imputed to so-called Red-Green politicians are against the US Constitution. Osborne writes that “when someone elected to Congress has personally embraced the destruction of the constitutional order espoused by these groups, he or she cannot truthfully swear to support that order as a condition of taking office.”
According to another CRA publication from earlier this year written by the organization’s executive director, Wade Miller, the so-called Red-Green Alliance includes the “Squad,” the nickname for the group of four progressive women of color who all won seats in Congress in 2018: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, and Ilhan Omar. It also includes politicians like New York mayor Zohran Mamdani and Michigan senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. These politicians, the publication claims, are purveyors of “ideology dedicated to destroying capitalism, Christianity, and the Western political tradition.” None of the politicians named in the piece have self-identified as Marxists, though some, including Ocasio-Cortez and Mamdani, are Democratic Socialists.
Corey Brettschneider, a professor of politics and constitutional law at Brown University and host of the The Oath and the Office podcast, says that both posts are “engaged in an attack on the Constitution and then trying to use the law of that as an attack on opponents,” something he believes a court would quickly be able to identify and quash.
Trying to use a Muslim politician’s religion as a reason for them to be disqualified from holding office, says Brettschneider, would likely be even more difficult than taking aim at a certain political group. “The protections I'd say are even stronger against that maneuver because the Constitution is explicit in saying you can't have a religious test for office,” he says.
El-Sayed’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment on whether it was aware of the Renewing America piece or what, if any, steps it is taking to prepare for challenges to a possible win.
While any successful legal case based on the CRA's logic would be unlikely to hold up in court, Brettschneider says, “clearly what they're doing is floating it to see if it will stick.”
Christian Grose, a professor of political science at the University of Southern California, says the effectiveness of a strategy like the one outlined by the CRA would likely vary widely depending on the margins of a possible Democratic victory. If the Democrats win one or two seats in the Senate, he says, Republicans could try to dispute results in order to maintain control of the Senate. “But if Democrats win the Senate by something like four seats, I think we will be less likely to see those kinds of things,” he says. “The bigger the margin is on either side, the less likely this will be a viable strategy, and it becomes more preposterous the larger number of winning candidates that someone would try not to seat.”
For members of the House, the outcome could depend on whether Democrats can snag a majority. If Republicans maintain the majority, they could vote to refuse to seat incoming Democrats. In 1967, the House refused to seat Adam Clayton Powell Jr., a Democrat representative from Harlem and the first Black person from the state of New York to be elected to Congress, due to allegations that he was misappropriating funds.
Grose says that any legal case would risk going unresolved beyond the start of the new Congress in 2027, meaning that whether or not a senator whose win was challenged could be seated would likely be determined by a judge issuing an injunction. “It could become a Congress-versus-courts showdown,” he says.
Pildes is more direct: “This isn't going to happen.”
But just because the legal strategy may not work, it doesn’t mean the administration or Republicans wouldn’t make the attempt. Brettschneider noted the administration’s multiple attempts to charge former FBI director James Comey with various crimes, even if prosecutors are unlikely to secure a conviction. “We absolutely need to take it seriously because Trump has been dismantling the guardrails and the norms that are supposed to protect against this, or trying to influence the courts through appointments,” he says. “Even if they don't get away with it directly, threatening and shutting down opponents creates fear and makes people worry ‘they might come after me next.’”
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mma
Election denial activists promote dubious database to catch supposed voter fraud
Written by Alex Kaplan
Published 11/02/26 3:56 PM EST
A group of election denial activists — Peter Ticktin, Jerome Corsi, Wayne Allyn Root, and John W. “Rick” Richards Jr. — have been using right-wing podcast appearances ahead of the upcoming midterms to promote ELLY, a tool Richards created that they claim helps expose voter fraud. They have also claimed to have passed on supposed data from ELLY to the Trump administration, even as experts have criticized the tool for potential “high false positive rates,” privacy concerns, “and unvalidated accuracy claims that threaten eligible voters’ rights.”
What is ELLY?
ELLY, a tool that supposedly analyzes voter rolls, was developed by election denial activists and is reportedly “being marketed to county officials” in Georgia, Missouri, and North Carolina ahead of the midterm elections. According to NBC News, ELLY is used to “aggregate public records like obituaries, U.S. Postal Service data, property tax information or maps from Google to help users cross-reference the data with voter registrations.”
ELLY is being pitched to officials as “an alternative to ERIC,” or the Electronic Registration Information Center, “the nonpartisan data-sharing network that’s considered the gold standard in helping states maintain accurate voter records.” ERIC became a target of misinformation from right-wing media in recent years, and multiple Republican-led states have since left the group.
NBC News noted that “America’s voter rolls are largely built for registration, not removal, and election officials do struggle to keep them up to date.” But the report explained that ELLY “will rely entirely on public records,” using data that “is less reliable than the personal, protected information government entities have and use … to maintain voter rolls, like Social Security and driver’s license numbers.”
David Becker, who helped build the Electronic Registration Information Center and now runs the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, has “said ERIC didn’t use public data because it was clear the rate of false positives would be too high.” He told NBC that “even names and birthday[s] or birth date[s] result in huge numbers of false positives, far more false positives than true positives. And so in order to get quality data, you need to have the sensitive information.”
Who is behind ELLY?
ELLY comes from John W. “Rick” Richards Jr., a retired physician from Georgia, and his son, John W. Richards III. The two created a similar tool called “EagleAI NETwork” that they promoted in 2023 and which was reportedly used in Georgia “to file mass voter challenges in 2024.” Election experts told NBC News at the time that “the kind of public data that Richards plans to use may lead to a high rate of false positives,” adding that EagleAI “draws inaccurate conclusions and then presents them as if they are evidence of wrongdoing” and “might employ search techniques that could be discriminatory.”
“The results are going to vastly over-inflate potentially inaccurate voter registrations,” said Becker.
EagleAI was also promoted by fellow election denial activist Cleta Mitchell, who founded the Election Integrity Network and helped the effort to undermine ERIC. In February, Richards was photographed dining with Mitchell along with Heather Honey and Marci McCarthy, who are two election deniers Trump installed in his administration.
Kris Jurski, whom NBC News has described as “a Florida activist who has promoted election conspiracy theories and built his own voter roll review program,” claimed that he also “helped build ELLY.” NBC also reported that he “has been promoting it to activist groups and on social media.”
Who is promoting ELLY for the midterms?
Citation
From the October 20, 2026, edition of The Gateway Pundit's War Zone with Wayne Allyn Root, streamed on Rumble
During media appearances in the weeks leading up to the 2026 midterm elections, several election denial activists have promoted ELLY, making claims about what it can find and encouraging audiences to use the tool.
Jerome Corsi, who has a history of spreading conspiracy theories, touted ELLY on the podcasts of David “Nino” Rodriguez and Wayne Allyn Root, saying that he wanted to “mak[e] sure you’re aware of it and others are aware of” the tool. Corsi has claimed that ELLY is “50 different databases coordinated” with all kinds of information regarding voters that will “monitor mail ballots coming and be able to determine which ones are valid and which ones are not valid” and thus “prove that crimes were committed.”
Video
Citation
From the October 16, 2026, edition of DO NOT TALK, streamed on YouTube
Peter Ticktin, an attorney and longtime friend of President Donald Trump, has said that ELLY includes information connecting “voter rolls together with the property appraisers of your county.” He has claimed that with the tool, “we’re going to catch these guys doing the crimes that they’re doing, and then we’re going to be able to make it transparent,” declaring: “This is our opportunity to get our country back.”
Wayne Allyn Root, a radio host with a history of spreading election denial and conspiracy theories, has repeatedly had Corsi, Ticktin, and Richards on his podcast to discuss ELLY. Root also urged his audience to email him to get them in touch with Corsi, Ticktin, and Richards about the database.
During Richards’ repeated appearances alongside Corsi and Ticktin on Root’s podcast, he has claimed that ELLY “democratized the entire U.S. voter roll.” Richards has also said that “we can forward the exact data to the politicians and the lawyers to prove what the outcome should have been.”
Who would even use the dubious ELLY tool?
The tool is apparently being pitched to other election denial activists, state and county election officials, and even the Trump administration. On October 30, election denial activist Peter Bernegger claimed that there are “big problems with mail-in ballots for midterms in Wisconsin,” citing ELLY and an absentee mail-in ballot list from the Wisconsin Elections Commission.
During podcasts, Ticktin, Corsi, and Root have clearly expressed that they are trying to get the database to Trump, his administration, or the GOP in hopes that they will use it in the 2026 elections. These three election denial activists all appear to have ties to the Trump administration, repeatedly claiming that they have interacted with the president and his staff. And some of these interactions appear to have led to policy outcomes: Root recently took credit for Trump announcing $1 million for anyone who reports voter fraud that leads to a conviction.
Root has also said that “the facts of the ELLY system” combined with the “synergy” of the $1 million offer could help Trump declare a national emergency “after the election,” something they all have pushed for since last year. Ticktin also seemed to suggest that the supposed data gives Trump “what he needs” for such a declaration.
Video
Citation
From the October 28, 2026, edition of The Gateway Pundit's War Zone with Wayne Allyn Root, streamed on Rumble
Promoting ELLY on Root’s October 26 show, Corsi said that “average Americans can take advantage of” Trump’s offer by using “our database.” During another appearance, Corsi claimed that people could use his and Ticktin’s websites to document supposed tips about election fraud, explaining they’re going to create a “structured mechanism.” According to Corsi, they will use ELLY to check tips, go “through Peter Ticktin’s office [to] file it into the Department of Justice under this $1 million bounty,” and then “we’ll make sure they’re filed with the FBI, and we’ll make sure you get credit for the case that’s filed.“ Root said that he would put their form on his website as well.
Other claims from these election deniers include:
Ticktin claimed that he and Corsi had been “advising the president of the program that Rick Richards has developed,” which Trump was “pretty happy” about.
Corsi claimed that “these databases have been turned over to the Department of Justice and to Homeland Security,” which are “using the tool themselves to do their criminal investigations.”
Root asked Richards and Corsi to give him “bullet points” about the database “because I’d like to send it to President Trump and make sure he knows it exists out there, and I'd like to send it to some Republican candidates I know here in the state of Nevada to make sure they know it exists.”
Root also suggested that he would write a column regarding the database and would “text” and “call” Trump about it, promising to “send it to President Trump’s office — I’ve got good friends there who hand everything to President Trump.”
Corsi has expressed hope that candidates in the upcoming midterms “who lose or those who want to contest an election, perhaps even before it’s certified,” could use the database “to challenge an election result.” Corsi also said that he would “like to share this with candidates” in order to “show you in your race the ballots that ought to be challenged,” so “if candidates get in touch with us, we will get them the data” that could establish “a pretty good basis for saying this election was fraudulently conducted and should not be certified.”
Ticktin urged “every one of the candidates that loses” in the midterms to “contact me or Jerome Corsi or Rick Richards” to “help you get set up with this program,” adding, “If you qualify for turn[ing] people into the DOJ, we’ll give you the information you need to be able to do that.”
Video
Citation
From the October 27, 2026, edition of The Gateway Pundit's War Zone with Wayne Allyn Root, streamed on Rumble
The effort to tout ELLY comes as election denial activists have pushed other measures to try to undermine the midterms. Corsi and Ticktin were reportedly involved with a proposed executive order declaring a “national emergency” over elections that circulated within the Trump administration. Root also proposed his own version of a national emergency, saying he messaged and spoke with Trump about it. He subsequently pushed it to Trump during an interview.
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Key election denial activists in the right-wing media ecosystem
10/01/26 10:00 AM EDT
06/30/26 10:00 AM EDT
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AN 10 26
Zeteo reports that President Donald Trump and Republicans are “engaging in an all-out effort to challenge the results of next week’s midterm elections in a desperate campaign to cling to power” for the next two years. But sources inside the White House confirm that Trump is personally issuing the marching orders — regardless of the damage it does to American democracy. ADMIT ON AK?
“The president and the White House are steering all of this,” a Trump adviser told Zeteo.
The Trump administration is already spreading unfounded fears of noncitizen voting, in what Zeteo writers Justin Glawe and Asawin Suebsaeng describe as “selectively and vindictively targeting political opponents and liberal state leaders.” They’re also conducting arrests and threatening to criminally prosecute Democratic election officials, and they’re strong-arming the politicized Justice Department to argue in court that an election isn’t legally legitimate unless Trump’s side is the winner in it.
“To help sway the election in Republicans’ favor, the DOJ is apparently violating its own policies by attempting to interfere with how states administer elections and determine the validity of votes,” reports Zeteo. “And even as its lawsuits flounder, the Trump-Vance administration has zero intention of taking its foot off the gas between now and Election Night, and possibly beyond.”
The dark cloud looming over November consists of three scenarios that have election officials "holding their breath,” reports Zeteo. This includes the prospect of the president installing military troops or federal law enforcement in polling locations. It could also include attempts to block the certification of valid election results, either by lawsuit or by outright seizing ballots or voting machines. And Trump himself has suggested he might challenge the election victories of Democrats if Republicans are not victorious in certain elections.
“Again: Trump has refused to rule any of this out,” reports Zeteo, “and has indeed test-run preliminary versions of each authoritarian power grab.”
According to sources speaking with Zeteo, Trump is already hammering away in the background, demanding if his lieutenants and assorted hacks are “ready for different election challenges.”
Trump has already admitted his intent on the record, reports Zeteo, telling reporters that “I’m the one that said do it,” when explaining a Justice Department lawsuit seeking to proactively decertify the outcome of the race for one of Alaska’s U.S. Senate seats if a Republican is not the winner.
It does not matter that Justice Department guidelines are clear that the DOJ is not supposed to interfere with how states handle elections, according to the DOJ’s own website. But consistency is not the Trump administration’s strong suit, reports Zeteo.
DOJ spokespeople did not respond to Zeteo’s request for comment, including on details of whether or not the head of the public integrity section officially waived its own guidelines.
“Either way, the intent of the policies is clear,” Zeteo reports.
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MMA
10/29/26
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MMA
MAGA’s Alaska response paves the way for a new Trumpian subversion campaign
Written by Matt Gertz
Published 10/29/26
Dishonestly claiming that a new report about the Alaska Senate race validates President Donald Trump’s yearslong campaign to delegitimize elections his party loses, MAGA pundits are paving the way for a new attempt to subvert the 2026 election if the GOP suffers significant defeats.
The campaign of Democratic nominee Mary Peltola “work[ed] with people trying to recruit” retired teacher Dan S. Sullivan to join the race against incumbent Republican Sen. Dan J. Sullivan, and “the group worked to coax other would-be spoilers into the race, to dilute the incumbent’s support and help catapult the Democrat to victory,” The New York Times reported Wednesday, citing interviews and text messages (the Peltola campaign denies such involvement).
The Times report noted that “ballot-stacking tactics are common in politics and generally considered legal — and have been employed by both parties in Alaska.” But Trump promptly and opportunistically responded by claiming the account showed “Voter Fraud at the Highest Level” — and decreed that Peltola and Dan S. Sullivan “should be removed from the Ballot and prosecuted.”
Trump’s propagandists are responding to his fervor with overheated attacks on Peltola, arguing at times that the ballot-stacking proves that he’s been right all along about Democratic election malfeasance.
“So the president has been saying for years now that they're cheating,” Fox & Friends co-host Lawrence Jones said on Thursday morning. “They’re cheating in the election. And now we have proof of it. "
“Now, in this scenario, this decides the power in the Senate,” his colleague, Brian Kilmeade speculated. “You think 2020 was controversial? That’ll look like a day at the beach compared to this if Sullivan — the real Dan Sullivan — loses.”
Video
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From the October 29, 2026, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends
Jones and Kilmeade are engaged in a noxious rewriting of history that diminishes what happened in 2020 — and makes it more likely something similar will happen again if Republicans don’t triumph in the 2026 midterms.
The ballot-stacking tactic described by the Times report is sleazy — it’s wrong to try to confuse voters. It’s also much more likely to backfire by becoming public than to succeed in getting voters to pick the wrong candidate. Alaska voters are canny enough to have elected a write-in candidate for Senate in recent memory and the state has ranked-choice voting, meaning that even a confused voter could vote for both Dans and have their ballot count for the incumbent.
All that said, it is unfortunately not uncommon for political operatives to try to prop up additional candidates because they think it will help their own candidate win. Republicans in the MAGA era have regularly employed such tactics. GOP operatives seeking Trump’s reelection ran a presidential campaign for Kanye West in 2020, and GOP-aligned super PACs backed the Green Party candidate for president in 2024 and spent millions in support of a far-left Senate candidate in Ohio in 2026. Even in Alaska this very year, “in the U.S. House race, Democratic candidate Eric Hafner — a felon who has never lived in Alaska — is being boosted by Republican groups,” the Alaska Beacon reported.
But that does not resemble in the slightest what Trump has alleged over the years, which is a massive coordinated effort by Democrats to steal elections through voter fraud. This is entirely a fabrication, given the incredibly low number of confirmed cases of election fraud. And it requires advocates of 2020 election denial — which now includes virtually all Republican officeholders and right-wing media pundits — to accept the logical leap that Democrats decided to falsify enough votes to steal 2020 from Trump but not 2016 or 2024, while also, in Trump’s telling, still stealing California.
Kilmeade’s claim that the 2020 election was “controversial” gives the game away.
Trump and his Fox News propagandists spent the weeks after that vote trying to churn up dust, claiming widespread voter fraud. The courts ultimately rejected such claims from the Trump campaign, his subversion effort failed thanks in part to Republican elected officials who stood up to him, and Fox ended up on the hook for a massive defamation settlement over its promotion of voter fraud conspiracy theories.
But before President Joe Biden took office, a horde of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol seeking to overturn the election on Trump’s behalf. Fox helped purge the GOP of Republicans who stood against him, justify the mob’s insurrection, minimize the subversion effort, and return Trump to office so he could fill the administration with election deniers. And now the network is poised to try again.
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UPDATE NYT RECRUITED?
bulwark an 10 26
Trump is planning a coup in plain sight as he anticipates devastating losses in the upcoming midterm elections, at least according to a conservative commentator.
"While it might feel to you as though this year’s midterm elections sneaked up on us, a handful of House Democrats have been preparing for this moment for years," reported Joe Petricone of the conservative publication The Bulwark on Tuesday. "One of the upshots of January 6th and the related attempts to disrupt the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential win was that congressional Democrats realized they could no longer count on American elections going smoothly. As a result, there is now significant infrastructure to track and respond to election disputes as they arise. Democrats are just hoping that they’re not missing anything."
After reviewing the efforts taken by Democratic lawmakers to protect the elections against possible efforts by Trump to meddle in the midterms, Perticone detailed one example in which the interference is already occurring.
"While voting is underway in many states, the Trump administration has already started to meddle, filing a lawsuit in the Alaska Senate race arguing that voters might not understand the difference between the two Dan Sullivans," Perticone wrote, referring to a third party candidate in Alaska named Dan Sullivan who happens to share the same name as the incumbent Republican, Sen. Dan Sullivan. "That’s the argument of a lawsuit filed by the Justice Department, contending that Alaska should delay the certification of its results in the event that incumbent Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan loses the race to Democratic challenger Mary Peltola by a margin less than or equal to the number of votes received by the other Dan Sullivan."
Perticone continued, "A federal judge fast-tracked the suit, which the DSCC and Peltola campaign supported; it could be dismissed later this week."
He closed with a warning about anti-Trump voters being complacent about the results of the elections.
"While public polling generally indicates Democrats will perform well next week, a blue wave is not a sure thing," Perticone wrote. "Regardless, there are widespread feelings among Dems that major blue victories are imminent, and most Democrats in Congress believe the president and his supporters are reacting to that narrative by preparing to fight to prevent it, however they can, from becoming reality."
Perticone is not alone in fearing that Trump will attempt a coup to avoid losing control of Congress. Speaking to AlterNet earlier in October, Harvard University government professor Dr. Steven Levitsky broke down his concerns.
"I have no doubt that Trump is willing to order some sort of a coup against democracy to try to overturn the elections," Levitsky told AlterNet. "He has shown over and over again that he is not a democrat and is perfectly willing to engage in really old-school authoritarian tactics to overturn elections."
He continued, "We don't know for sure whether he can get away with it. There are some troubling signs. One of them is that we're just completely unprepared for a sort of radical seizure of power in this way. The courts have been pretty good, not great, on Trump's efforts to sort of overstep his bounds on elections, but courts move slowly. And it's just not at all clear, if on election night Trump were to order the seizure of ballot boxes, declare some kind of an emergency, mobilize troops, that courts could move quickly enough to stop it. So at the very least, it would create a massive, massive crisis."
Yet ultimately, Levitsky was reassuring.
"Ultimately, I don't think he's got the power to get away with it," Levitsky told AlterNet. "Unfortunately, we're living in a world where the chances of it happening are well above zero. But looking at, one, Trump's public support and his political power, which is in pretty sharp decline: there's a lot of evidence that the most successful assaults on democracy are carried out by presidents with 70, 80, 85 percent support, whether it's Putin or Chávez or Fujimori or Bukele. All of these guys had 80 percent support. Trump's at 35, 36."
He continued, "And secondly, if you look at the Trump administration's record in planning, orchestrating, carrying out major policy initiatives, from DOGE to the Liberation Day tariffs to the war in Iran, it's just utter, utter incompetence, lack of foresight, lack of coordination, lack of planning. Fraud is hard. Repression is hard. Destroying constitutional rule is hard. If I had to bet a dollar — glad I'm not — I don't think these guys have the capacity to do it."
In June, Pooja Chaudhuri, senior counsel/deputy legal director at Democracy Defenders Fund, told AlterNet that people can be disenfranchised at the local level by being quietly purged and not learning about that fact until it is too late for them to vote.
"I used to staff the Election Protection Coalition when I worked as a voting rights attorney at the Lawyers' Committee, and we actually saw voters going to the polls and being told by the poll worker, ‘You're not registered to vote,’ or ‘You're not in the poll book,’ and it's too late by the time you find out on Election Day to register to vote in many states. Here, a voter may very well be purged and find out too late — and then they will be disenfranchised," Chaudhuri told AlterNet.
Dr. Justin Levitt, a Loyola Law professor who worked on voter rights for President Joe Biden, told AlterNet in September "nothing that Pooja said indicates that DHS has any capacity or authority either to do the work themselves or to persuade anybody else. I mean, if local officials want to disenfranchise their own citizens, there are ways. But most of them don't."
After reviewing statistics which show most Americans trust their local election officials, he contended that "most local election officials are actually serving their constituencies, and their constituents know it. Ninety-two percent, across party lines, across time. That is a stunning level of trust in the process, and a confidence rating that very few institutions enjoy."
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mma
Election denial movement sets stage for chaos on Election Day and its aftermath
So-called election integrity activists are calling for Trump to declare martial law, mandate hand-counting of ballots, seize voting machines, and refuse to certify elections at a whim
Written by John Knefel & Sophie Lawton
Published 10/20/26 2:17 PM EDT
Updated 10/20/26 4:58 PM EDT
The election denial movement has spent months trying and largely failing to subvert the midterms, and now some of its major figures are articulating their plans to attempt to disrupt the vote on Election Day and sow chaos in the weeks and months that follow.
Their proposals include calling for President Donald Trump to declare martial law, sending Immigration and Customs Enforcement or the military to polling places, forcing officials to count ballots by hand, demanding the federal government seize voting machines, and working to stop the certification of some elections.
The main figures pushing at least one or more of the above measures include former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, former Colorado county clerk Tina Peters, her lawyer Peter Ticktin, and conservative lawyer Cleta Mitchell, among other election denial and right-wing media figures.
These developments follow months of activity from right-wing media operatives who have pushed for the implementation of various anti-voting rights measures, many of which have been thwarted, have stalled, or never came to fruition. A MAGA media effort to convince Trump to declare a national emergency seems to be dead in the water.
Even as many of these pre-Election Day efforts have faltered, new conspiracy theories continue to emerge. Mitchell, who aided Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, has claimed without evidence that left-wing organizations are illegally harvesting ballots from nursing homes, for example.
But as the election draws near, some figures have set their sights on the day itself and what comes after.
Pushing for chaos on Election Day
Noncitizen voting is a vanishingly rare occurrence
Right-wing media figures in the election denial movement are pushing to make Election Day confusing and chaotic on the pretext of preventing noncitizen voting — a vanishingly rare occurrence.
Forcing hand-counts
Tina Peters, a hero to election deniers, and her lawyer Peter Ticktin, a personal friend of Trump’s, have been pressing Trump to attempt to force officials to hand-count ballots, sometimes instead of machines and sometimes in addition to them.
In July, Peters released a “100-Day Risk Mitigation Election Plan” that would require officials to “apply the ‘Bank-Teller Method’: independently hand-count every ballot for federal contests before certification and reconcile that count with the tabulator result.”
Then in August, Peters claimed the administration already had the “authority” to “issue immediate cybersecurity guidance and assistance to transition all counties to hand mark paper ballots,” and that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had the duty to interfere in how states use voting machines.
Peters has also allegedly met with Trump on at least two occasions since her release from prison on election-related charges — once on June 30 and again on October 5.
Ticktin, meanwhile, has taken a slightly different approach recently, acknowledging that eliminating machines at this point is not feasible. On September 29, Ticktin said, “We could still have an order that requires — not hand-counting and get rid of the machines, because there’s no time for that — but let the machines do the count, but before the count — but then let us commandeer and get the ballots. If we have the ballots, we can count them ourselves.” He added that “it would be done after the election, but before certification."
Video
Citation
From the September 29, 2026, edition of Alex Jones Live's The Alex Jones Show
Ed Martin is another proponent of this unnecessary and counterproductive measure. On Bannon’s War Room episode on October 6, Martin claimed that any election officials who want to “switch out your state and stop using the Chinese compromised machines, you can do it, and you can just ask [Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne] Mullin for the money and he can help you pay for more people, pay for hand-marked paper ballots and counters and everything else.” He also noted that “Tina Peters met with Trump” recently.
Cleta Mitchell has long been on crusade to limit the use of voting machines, and, like Peters, has demanded that Lutnick interfere in state election processes based on an incorrect interpretation of an obscure federal regulation. Mitchell said that Lutnick should order “mandatory, pre-certification manual confirmation hand counts of ballots in 5% of the precincts and central count for each jurisdiction in the country.”
Stationing ICE and other federal officers or the military at polling places
Calls for ICE or other federal officers at polling places aren’t new — Steve Bannon has been making the demand since at least August 2025 and has continued to do so throughout the midterm election cycle — but they have become more widespread. As recently as August, Bannon said: “I think ICE agents belong at polling places."
Mike Davis, a frequent guest of Bannon’s, said on September 1: “I would have ICE agents and other federal law enforcement at every polling place across America. And that should only scare away noncitizens.”
YouTube streamer Tim Pool said in July that “at the bare minimum, we expect something like we will have federal law enforcement agency at polling locations in states that do not cooperate” with the Department of Homeland Security.
Jerome Corsi, former employee of Alex Jones, took an even more extreme line in calling for Trump to send the military to polling sites under the guise of a national emergency. “Donald Trump can take control of the elections,” Corsi said on September 12. “He can have the military or National Guard go in and make sure the elections are done legitimately.” Corsi claims to have been involved in drafting a proposed “national emergency” order.
Several other right-wing pundits have endorsed the idea of having ICE at polling places over the course of the year as well, including The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro, MAGA influencer Benny Johnson, Fox News’ Jesse Watters.
The right-wing media figures plotting to sow doubt and contest results after the midterms
Declaring martial law and involving the military in recounts
Ticktin is the most vocal election denial activist to suggest that Trump invoke martial law after the midterms.
On September 19, Ticktin said during an appearance on Real America’s Voice, “Either we’re going to fix this thing before this election or we’re probably going to see martial law after this election.”
Then during an appearance on The Alex Jones Show on September 29, Ticktin said that if the election is “stolen from us because of their machines,” then Trump will “have to declare martial law.”
“I didn’t say declare martial law for the elections,” he added, “I’m saying in the event that the elections are stolen, what other options are there?”
Video
Citation
From the September 29, 2026, edition of Alex Jones Live's The Alex Jones Show
A few other prominent figures in the election denial movement have also called for Trump to declare martial law. These voices include MAGA “prophet” Julie Green and Douglas Frank, one of Ticktin’s fellow travellers.
On September 15, Green claimed that an impending declaration of martial law would lead to the mass arrests of politicians, judges, and lawyers. “It’s not just an election. There has to be a political reset,” Green said, “During the martial law it will not just be politicians tried for treason. So will judges, AGs, lawyer, prosecutors, who are against this nation."
On August 22, Frank said of Trump, “I wouldn't be a bit surprised if he declares martial law and we have the National Guard come out and we have to redo the election.”
MAGA fantasies about involving the military after the election extend beyond these calls for martial law as well. Where Corsi wanted the military to take over election systems, others in the movement have called on the military to intervene in the counting or recounting of votes.
Seizing machines or ballots
Beyond suggesting the president declare martial law, Ticktin has concocted a plan for the government to seize ballots or election machines in order to “count them ourselves” and prevent supposed fraud. Ticktin predicted on Alex Jones’ show that Trump would “seize the machines” in order to protect himself from prosecution by the Democrats if they win the House and Senate.
QAnon influencer and election denier Juan O. Savin said in an interview streamed on Rumble that any election machines with foreign components could “be seized as evidence and investigated and canceled.” Savin pushed for Trump to delay the election, but argued, “If you need the public to turn their brains on and become engaged, don't pause it then. Let it run the distance and then go seize those machines” after the election is over.
Right-wing media figures have previously supported the seizing of election materials, such as when the FBI raided election offices in Fulton County, Georgia, and when Sheriff Chad Bianco seized 650,000 ballots in Riverside County, California. Real America's Voice host Wayne Allyn Root said of Bianco’s efforts, “I guarantee you he was going to find that all or most of them are filled with fraud and filled with illegal aliens,” and called the court’s order to return the ballots “a disgrace."
Trump himself has reportedly said that he “regretted not ordering the National Guard to seize voting machines in swing states after his loss in the 2020 election,” according to The New York Times.
Pushing for Trump to delay the election
Juan O. Savin is not the only figure who has suggested Trump delay the elections in order to investigate voting machines or other election infrastructure. In an interview with David Nino Rodriguez on Rumble, former Overstock.com CEO turned election conspiracy theorist Patrick Byrne called on Trump to “delay things."
Byrne's plan includes Trump putting former U.S. Agency for International Development employee Tim Meisburger in charge of elections countrywide and making it a one-day affair in which “you have to show an ID” and “there's no technology used.” He further suggested Trump “delays them and then puts this guy in charge of the election. And he could do a national security order, do something like that, and we could have an election like they run it in Burma.”
Video
Citation
From an October 15, 2026, stream by David Nino Rodriguez uploaded to Insights 21 channel on Rumble
Demanding Trump or other officials not certify elections
In an early October interview, Juan O. Savin claimed Trump has indicated “that we're going to fight hard to not allow them to certify the election after the election for reasons that we raise between now and Election Day,” citing voting machines with foreign-made parts as the “reason."
Video
Citation
From an October 6, 2026, stream on YouTube by Michael Jaco
Later in the interview Savin referenced Byrne's conspiracy theories on election machines (Byrne suggested Trump seize the machines following the 2020 election) and asked, “How can you certify a vote that was done with uncertifiable — uncertified machines?” Savin then reiterated, “So what's Trump going to do? He can't certify the election. He lets it go forward, and let's have the food fight after the fact."
What comes next when “the core belief of the MAGA movement is we won the 2020 election.”
The election denial movement has not accomplished many of the key goals it’s set for itself. The SAVE America Act has no apparent path to become law. Trump has yet to issue a national emergency declaration or an executive order to take control of state election systems. The administration’s many efforts to uncover supposedly widespread noncitizen voting haven’t produced any tangible evidence of its existence.
These are real losses, but Trump and his media allies remain dedicated to subverting elections in the United States. As Bannon recently said to CBS News, “The core belief of the MAGA movement is we won the 2020 election." That load-bearing lie continues to animate Trump’s movement, and there is no reason to believe that it will be any different on Election Day or in the days after.
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// nevada fail
an 10 26
President Donald Trump’s grandiose claims of voter fraud are falling apart under the weight of his own Justice Department’s figures.
The president’s administration is being asked to account for its broad allegations of fraud in California after the DOJ put forward charges on only 34 ballots said to be illegal from the nearly 94 million that have been cast in the state since 2020.
On Monday, federal prosecutors made public a statewide probe into noncitizen voting and out charges against 28 lawful permanent residents. The San Francisco Chronicle reports 23 of them are alleged to have put in 34 ballots between them in elections going back to 2020.
Put another way, that is 0.00004 percent of what was put to the vote in California’s eight statewide contests over the period, hardly the sort of numbers to back up the administration’s claims of rampant illegal voting.
The department has been at odds with the state over this. In July, the Department of Homeland Security released a preliminary review saying it had found over 190,000 possible noncitizens registered to vote in California.
By October, the figure was down to about 20,000, and the Justice Department filed suit when state officials would not comply with federal requests to root out suspected noncitizens and keep their votes off the tally.
And yet the criminal cases unsealed on Monday were limited to fewer than three dozen questionable ballots in the whole state.
The 28 defendants are U.S. residents but not citizens, so they are barred from federal elections; they face charges of false statements on naturalization papers and fraudulent registration.
Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter says the prosecutions make good on the administration’s demands, pointing to the 28 on the government’s list of suspects. “California refused to look at that list,” he said in a statement from the Justice Department.
Election experts are having none of it. Rick Hasen of UCLA’s election law program sees the case as a “drop in the bucket” compared to the 23 million voters on the California roll.
Hasen also pointed out that some of those charged never actually cast a ballot despite the illegal registration. The figures do nothing to prove every name on the administration’s list is a legitimate voter, but they do illustrate how few cases federal prosecutors have mustered in light of earlier estimates.
McCotter concedes some on the suspect list may in the end be shown to be American citizens, and Gov. Gavin Newsom was quick to deride that as the administration goes after access to registration records.
Federal judges have already turned down the administration’s bid for the full voter rolls on privacy and legal grounds.
For their part, California officials say the records are kept in order and will have none of Trump’s contention that the state’s elections are rife with fraud.
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David Gilbert @ Wired: Maricopa County, Arizona, Is Again Ground Zero of Election Conspiracy Theories
In 2020, Maricopa County became the epicenter for Trump’s claims the election was stolen. Six years, later the president and his allies are dusting off their “rigged” playbook ahead of the midterms.
10/19/2026
Will Bunch @ Inquirer: Are the secrets to a Trump postelection coup locked in a White House safe?
What two ex-high-ranking U.S. government officials fear about a presidential emergency should terrify all Americans.
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mma
October 17, 2026, edition of MS NOW's MS NOW Reports
ALI VELSHI (HOST): Angelo, one of the things that Ezra Levin told me last night, and I'm sure he'll tell me again today, he's been saying it freely, is that the idea here is to make whatever you do in the election so big that it cannot be undermined. Turn turn out so big that it cannot be undermined. Victory so big that they they cannot be undermined. I think it's important to note that at the moment, the subject of this is Donald Trump and his enablers, but this kind of movement does not have to be a uniquely Democratic party movement. It's a it's a democracy movement.
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS): Yeah. And I think that's really important here because there's two ways that they can come at this, or that they've been telegraphing they're going to do it.
One is to flood the zone with so much misinformation that it feels like there's a pretext about the results. It sort of undermines the outcome because it sort of cast this overarching shadow around it. By doing all this pre-organizing, especially when it's so visible that it's overwhelming, it makes it a lot harder for that misinformation to land. No matter how much they try to pump the system or work the algorithms, it's just — It does not fertile ground because people have a framework for interpreting and saying, no, that doesn't sound right to me. I saw all these protests a couple weeks ago. I saw a 100-year-old lady a couple weeks ago. This doesn't make any sense. I don't believe it. It doesn't make sense.
So the other way is then brute force, which is what they're also suggesting they're going to do. But brute force only works when there's no connective tissue and there's no community. So one of the byproducts of this is not just this overwhelming display, but these connections don't just disappear. They stay. And that means that it's a lot less likely that people duck and cover and get scared at the mere threats of them using brute force. And so it undermines the two ways that they've already said they're going to come at this, or potentially come at undermining an attack in the elections. And I think that's a real powerful part of this.
It's not just a visual. It's that it grapples with their main source of power, the narrative that they typically use to distort. We're actually controlling it now.
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an 1026
A Republican election official says she is being threatened with investigation and criminal liability after defying the Trump administration's demands, warning that threats to American elections are now coming from inside the federal government.
Lieutenant Governor of Utah, Deidre Henderson, who oversees elections in the heavily Republican state, revealed the extraordinary pressure she has faced to give up sensitive voter information during an interview with CBS News' 60 Minutes.
Henderson states that election officials are usually threatened with attacks on election integrity coming from non-governmental actors and cyber criminals, but is now receiving pressure from the President Donald Trump administration.
"In the past two elections that I oversaw as lieutenant governor, the threats were all external: non-state actors, cyber security threats and other things," she said to correspondent Lesley Stahl before adding, “But now we also have threats coming from within our own government."
She said the Justice Department unlawfully demanded that states surrender their complete voter registration lists, including confidential information which is protected under state law.
Henderson said officials were asked to provide Social Security numbers, full dates of birth and driver's license numbers. She said federal authorities did not offer any reasonable explanation for their demands or how they planned to use the information. Henderson and 29 other states from both parties refused to give in to the demands.
After the refusal, she received a September letter from the DOJ's Civil Rights Division stating she was under investigation and involved in ongoing litigation over compliance with federal election laws. The department also threatened her with potential criminal or civil liability if she did not preserve the voting records. The dispute came after the DOJ filed a federal lawsuit seeking Utah's voter data.
The Republican Utah Gov. Spencer Cox defended Henderson after the letter became public.
"It is wrong for the DOJ to investigate or threaten the lieutenant governor for carrying out her responsibilities under Utah law," Cox wrote at the time.
Trump administration officials have argued the voter records are necessary to identify noncitizens improperly registered to vote. Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, told CBS that there are potentially thousands of cases under investigation.
But Henderson said Utah's own review found just 52 questionable registrations out of more than 2 million voters. The administration has sued states that refused to provide complete voter lists, even as officials say privacy laws protect the data they seek.
This warning comes at a time when a broader federal campaign is underway, including the seizure of 2020 ballots in Georgia and legal action against California over alleged noncitizen voting. The California secretary of state has challenged the government's evidence and said it is threatening eligible voters.
Henderson has no plans to back down from the threats and said she will continue to resist the DOJ’s requests.
"I have to tell myself it doesn't matter what the consequences are, as long as I feel like I'm doing what's right," she said, continuing: "I think this is an important thing for me to do, holding these guardrails, holding the line. Someone has to."
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RWW --> $
Brittany Gibson @ Axios: Trump's MAGA allies openly discuss martial law
MAGA activists are pushing for President Trump to resort to extraordinary measures — including martial law — if they believe the midterm elections are "rigged."
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bonta sue 100x
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an 10 26
President Donald Trump's first assistant U.S. attorney keeps getting caught in lies, according to one keen observer.
National security expert Marcy Wheeler pointed to a recent tweet from Bill Essayli listing details about the case against California and Los Angeles County over a conspiracy theory about mail ballots. According to the federal government, 20,000 of the people who got ballots were "likely noncitizens."
The administration has been caught in this fight before. In Nevada, the administration used this same system and claimed that as many as 15,903 noncitizens might be on the state’s voter rolls. The state demanded evidence, and Homeland Security whittled the list down to 185 names, claiming it had "manually" verified they were noncitizens.
Nevada officials then checked the 185 names against state records and concluded every one was a U.S. citizen.
In a letter to DHS, Deputy Attorney General Greg Ott wrote: “As for the 185 individuals, our records indicate that they were citizens,” adding that the federal government had “provided nothing of substance to suggest otherwise.”
Now California must use the same system and face the same allegations. So, the parties asked the judge to block the federal government's demand.
The Justice Department argued that California must segregate those ballots until their citizenship status can be verified, and Attorney General Todd Blanche accused the state of refusing to comply with federal law.
Essayli falsely claimed on X, "Make no mistake: California has no interest in protecting the integrity of its elections. We presented the evidence. Their answers: "It's not widespread fraud." "It's too late we already mailed the ballots." "It's already illegal to vote illegally." "We can't trust your evidence." A law that isn't enforced is meaningless. Today we are asking a court to require California to follow the law and not count ballots cast by noncitizens," he claimed.
Wheeler said that in this case, Essayli was "outright lying here."
She cited, "The same untested garbage that has been shown to be fraudulent in other states. He is confessing to a conspiracy to deprive naturalized citizens, like Harmeet Dhillon, of their right to vote," Wheeler bashed.
Indeed, Essayli's claims still have not been independently verified and resemble a system that failed in Nevada.
His problem is that the lawsuit itself describes the people as “likely noncitizens,” not confirmed noncitizens. California officials say the federal government has not explained the basis for the suspicion or provided enough identifying information to verify the list.
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AN 10 26
Historian Timothy D. Snyder knows what is likely coming on the evening of Nov. 3 and it's allegations that the election was "rigged." He wants Americans ready and prepared to respond quickly, if not before he makes the claim.
Speaking to former GOP strategist Steve Schmitt, Snyder said he doesn't want to think of it as first you vote and second you act.
"The other part is being prepared to win," he said, "because I agree with you completely in your forecast. I think this is going to be overwhelming. I think it's going to be bigger than people think basically. And I think, if anything, the Democrats are scared to imagine how big their victory is going to be because if it's big they're going to have to take responsibility for stuff. So, part of it is not just voting and being like, 'oh, what is Trump going to do?' But think, you know what? The people I'm voting for are going to win. And I'm willing to take action along those lines, which means telling people how I voted, telling people what I expected, doing your own media work."
The other thing it means, he said, is that Americans must "call the shot in advance," a pool metaphor for calling which ball will go into which pocket.
"However we think it's going to go, your scenario is very plausible, probably I have some other ideas of what they might do," he continued. "But whatever they do, it's what losers do. And you have to get that out ahead of time and you have to be ready to laugh at it. Like every trick that Trump can play has been played by Viktor Orban, or has been played by somebody else in the last couple of years. You have to get out in front of people and say, look, when they do that, like when Trump claims that he won, that's what he did because he lost, right? And it's the kind of thing that losers do."
In the media space, he said that Democrats must come out ready to tell their story about why they won and how they intend to use that win to deliver on the top issues like the affordability crisis, gas prices and corruption.
"Morning of Nov. 4th we should be thinking about money out of politics, end of corruption. We should be thinking about things that are good that could happen," Snyder said.
Doing that will inoculate everyone against Trump's idea that he really won and that it was all rigged.
"Trump going on TV and saying, well, you know, I'm raising my hand to say that by the way they stole the election again, it will seem a little archaic and silly," Snyder explained. Especially "if you can put it in the context of, 'Hey, we actually have a moment of hope.'"
He warned that letting Trump frame the narrative gives him a better chance of being taken seriously. Instead, he wants Democrats and those around them to frame it as "we're going to start doing really important and transformative stuff, I think that makes the setting much harder for Trump to do the kind of thing that you're describing."
One of the disaster scenarios that conservative retired Judge Michael Luddig warned about is that Republicans could refuse to seat any of the Democratic lawmakers elected. Snyder thinks Trump has likely already had that conversation, along with every other possibility.
"We should deny that Trump is omnipotent, because he's not. And the things that he might wish to happen still depend on other people fulfilling his wishes, and whether they fulfill his wishes are going to depend on how big the Democratic victory is, whether those people think that they might go to prison for what they're doing and also the overall atmosphere."
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an pp 10 26
A few months into President Donald Trump’s second term, political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security made an unusual request of its agency focused on cybersecurity: Secretly acquire a voting machine and hack it.
The appointees wanted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to procure the machine, examine it and report back the findings so they could be given to the White House, according to two former administration officials with knowledge of the request.
The proposition was shocking to CISA’s career staffers, according to one of the former officials. CISA typically worked to thwart hackers. Moreover, the agency had been directed not to alert the voting machine company if it uncovered flaws, contrary to its standard practices. The request made the CISA employees fear they were being asked to take part in political interference.
“My thought was they could keep it in their back pocket to invalidate any [election] results they don’t like,” one of the former officials said. “This goes against everything CISA represents.”
The CISA employees repeatedly told the political appointees that their request was impossible, in part because the agents capable of pulling off such an operation had just been laid off by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative. The appointees eventually stopped pressing CISA.
Though not acted on, the request shows how the Trump administration has tried to use the agency for its own ends while draining it of resources for one of its critical missions: protecting the nation’s voting systems.
In Trump’s second term, his administration has laid off or pushed out more than 1,000 CISA employees, shrinking the agency by about one-third. The president’s 2027 budget proposal would reduce funding for the agency by another $700 million, which could necessitate 900 additional layoffs.
In response, Democratic lawmakers have called for an investigation into CISA’s ability to do its job and demanded answers as to why federal funds are not being used to support election security as directed by Congress.
Since Trump signed the CISA Act in 2018, the agency has worked with state authorities and voting machine vendors to help protect election infrastructure from cyberattacks. During Trump’s second term, though, CISA has abandoned much of this work. Several state election authorities said the agency provided them no assistance — and no explanation for its absence — during the most critical planning stages for the upcoming midterms.
“There is a difference between deprioritizing and being nonexistent,” said Ryan Macias, an election technology and cybersecurity expert who has worked as a consultant for CISA. In 2025 and through mid-September 2026 — when the bulk of preparations for the election typically would have been completed — “they were nonexistent. Literally nonexistent.”
While Trump has repeatedly warned that America’s elections are vulnerable to hacking, in some cases repeating disproven claims, experts said his administration is undermining the federal government’s role in helping secure them.
Though CISA re-emerged in September with a last-minute security plan for the election, some state officials told ProPublica they fear that what is left of the agency has been compromised by a conspiracy-obsessed presidential administration. In recent months, in reviving debunked theories about the 2020 election, the Trump administration has declassified troves of records, including sensitive material that state officials provided to CISA. Some state authorities said they no longer trusted the administration enough to share information with CISA, a key to the agency’s success in past elections.
“They’ve violated the entire premise of that information-sharing relationship,” said one former high-ranking federal cybersecurity official who now advises state governments on national security. “There’s no fucking way they’re ever going to give any information to CISA. And it’s unclear if they ever will in the future.”
A spokesperson for the White House declined an interview request but defended Trump’s handling of election security in an emailed statement. “President Trump has done more than any other President to ensure we have free and fair elections,” said Lauren Bis.
Bis referred specific questions about CISA’s handling of elections to DHS. DHS and CISA did not respond to interview requests or to a detailed list of questions.
“There’s no fucking way [state governments are] ever going to give any information to CISA. And it’s unclear if they ever will in the future.”
A former federal cybersecurity official who advises state governments
Current and former CISA employees and state election officials describe an agency that has become significantly less equipped to help states fight legitimate cyber threats. State leaders say they have used their own resources to shore up gaps left by CISA, such as paying for sensor technology that can detect unusual activity in election networks. But some services, like intel on foreign actors, can’t be replicated. Some people interviewed said they were worried that Trump and his allies continue to ratchet up rhetoric about voting security, particularly about threats to voting machines. Officials in one large voting jurisdiction said they have met privately with machine vendors to come up with a contingency plan if the federal government seizes their machines or declares them unusable.
“I don’t pay attention to what the president says. I pay attention to what his administration does,” Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said. “And what they’ve done is basically cut us off and left us on our own.”
Defending elections from hackers wasn’t always part of DHS’s remit.
Throughout the mid-1990s and 2000s, a series of cyberattacks rocked the federal government, demonstrating the emerging threat. In 2007, hackers broke into the Pentagon and stole terabytes of sensitive data. The digital heist, by an unknown foreign adversary, was so damaging that one intelligence leader later described it as an “espionage Pearl Harbor.”
Under George W. Bush, DHS underwent a reorganization to more effectively combat terrorism and respond to disasters like Hurricane Katrina. The department dedicated resources under an office called the National Protection and Programs Directorate to help fortify advanced cyber defense systems and important infrastructure. The office’s work ranged from helping secure events like the Super Bowl to protecting chemical plants to issuing cybersecurity warnings to the private sector and the public. In 2018, Trump signed a bill making the office a stand-alone agency, allowing for more federal funding and transforming it into, essentially, the ultimate tech support desk for anything DHS designated “critical infrastructure.”
The bill renamed the agency CISA.
Though Trump helped create CISA, he didn’t much appreciate the work the agency did under its old name to expose the extent of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Russian agents had unleashed a massive disinformation campaign, with a Kremlin-backed troll farm creating thousands of social media accounts posing as Americans and promoting Trump, according to bipartisan reports from the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released before the 2020 election. A dozen Russian military agents were indicted for what the Justice Department described as “a sustained effort to hack into the computer networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Democratic National Committee, and the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton.”
Trump publicly downplayed this interference, but DHS leadership saw the Russia attack as an escalation. In January 2017, before Trump took office, DHS upgraded America’s elections to the status of critical infrastructure. This placed the polls and all voting technology used in federal elections under the watch of what would soon become CISA.
To carry out this function, CISA needed help. But states and voting machine vendors were wary about sharing data on weaknesses in voting systems, fearing it could be exploited if certain details were to become public. State officials were also reluctant to cede any role in election preparation to the federal government.
Gradually, though, CISA and state election officials negotiated a fragile trust. At its center was a commitment: The sensitive information states and vendors shared with CISA would be kept confidential.
“It took years and years of building trust, of talking to election officials, of hiring people with elections experience who could be validators for the work that CISA wanted to do, before they finally built strong working relationships,” said Derek Tisler, who specializes in election security as counsel for the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan institute based out of New York University School of Law.
Under Director Chris Krebs, CISA hosted penetration testing in which its agents would try to hack into a state’s system to locate weaknesses that could then be patched, along with tabletop exercises simulating a series of potential catastrophes around elections. CISA also offered regular secret-level briefings to secretaries of state to share federal intelligence. And CISA paid for sensor technology that looked for potential malicious online activity on election networks, notifying officials about emerging threats.
“The staffing was there, the expertise was there, the visibility was there, the funding was there,” Macias said.
The consortium shared data as run of the mill as spambots as well as more serious threats. If Virginia caught unusual activity in its system, it could let other states know to be vigilant.
While CISA had prepared for attacks from the Chinese and Russian governments, or lone wolf hackers, few there had expected the threat to elections would come from inside the White House. But when Trump refused to concede to Joe Biden in 2020, claiming the vote had been rigged, CISA became a key component of the guardrails that ultimately led to the election results being certified.
The agency, in a statement co-signed by secretaries of state and voting machine vendors, vouched for the election’s integrity, calling it “the most secure in American history.” When Krebs publicly rebutted claims amplified by the White House as “unsubstantiated” or “technically incoherent,” Trump fired him over Twitter.
As Congress prepared to vote on certifying the election results, it was members of CISA, along with the FBI, who convinced then-Attorney General Bill Barr that the conspiracy theories embraced by the president could be explained by human error, not systemic fraud or hacking.
When Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, his administration immediately started to dismantle CISA. The administrative notices were sent out just a couple of weeks after the inauguration and included the team in charge of dispelling disinformation.
For the employees under the DOGE microscope, work became impossible, said one former senior CISA employee. “Those groups couldn’t even order a pizza.”
DOGE laid off people critical to the agency’s election work, including those who’d worked closely with states. The Trump administration cut funding for the technology that monitored web and election servers, blinding the federal government to breaches it had detected.
When it came time for states to prepare for the 2026 midterms, CISA had disappeared.
On the evening of July 16, in the Black Hills of South Dakota, dozens of election officials and their staffs gathered for a reception near Mount Rushmore. It was the third night of an annual conference for secretaries of state, drawing participants from red and blue states. They’d spent the week discussing state voter roll maintenance and voter ID — issues that at times made for disagreements.
At about 8 p.m., a wave of discomfort swept through the crowd, visible on attendees’ faces as they glanced frequently at their phones, according to people at the event. Any minute now, Trump was going to address the nation on election security. Some at the reception worried he would declare a national emergency, as his allies had urged him to do months earlier, and use it as a pretext to direct the government to seize voting machines.
Then reports on the speech began rolling in, and the mood shifted. The claims Trump was making were unsubstantiated and outlandish. Many had been examined ad nauseam, including by those at the reception, and roundly debunked. The collective anxiety that was palpable moments earlier melted away, as many saw the speech as another attempt to revive disproved theories unlikely to be taken seriously by most voters.
“Everyone just sort of guffawed and put their phones away and went to the bar,” recalled Quinn Raymond, co-founder of VoteShield, a nonprofit that works with states to help monitor voter registration data, who was at the event.
Still, if the speech made little impact, records published by the Trump administration to support the president’s claims damaged the already eroding relationship between CISA and state election officials. The material included raw information states had shared with the agency that was supposed to remain private, such as a log of communications from Election Day 2020 detailing activity being monitored in several states.
“It betrayed the trust of all partners who were willing to share information at the time,” said Geoff Hale, who worked on CISA’s elections team from the agency’s inception until last year. Now he specializes in election security at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a nonprofit that advocates for digital and civil rights.
Bis, the White House spokesperson, denied that the Trump administration broke any agreements in releasing the information. “The release of such information is exactly the sort of transparency news organizations should applaud,” she said. Bis also defended Trump’s speech, saying it had been fact-checked “by the agencies whose evidence was released and did not mischaracterize any information.”
Hale and others said the speech was one of several instances demonstrating the Trump administration’s reckless attitude toward sensitive data collected by CISA. Earlier this year, Politico reported that acting CISA Director Madhu Gottumukkala had uploaded records to ChatGPT, even though DHS had barred its employees from using the unsecure program. A CISA spokesperson told Politico that Gottumukkala had been permitted to use the technology for a “short-term and limited” basis.
Last May, an independent journalist named Brian Krebs exposed that CISA published private data, including passwords, cloud keys and other information, on its public GitHub page, in a folder labeled “Private-CISA.” A CISA spokesperson told the journalist there was no indication that sensitive data was compromised.
Some state election authorities were also alarmed to see the lengths to which the Trump administration went to legitimize the president’s fixation on the 2020 race.
In fall 2025, Missouri election officials produced a memo stating Andrew McCoy Warner, a Department of Justice official and prominent 2020 election conspiracy theorist, had called several clerks asking for access to voting machines. Tulsi Gabbard, then the director of national intelligence, had also led an operation in Puerto Rico to seize election machines. When the private cybersecurity contractor hired to examine the machines, Mojave Research Inc., failed to find evidence supporting claims about 2020, the federal government became “dissastified” with its services and stopped renewing its contract, its CEO later told reporters.
A spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence told reporters in August that Mojave’s work ceased because it had completed its contract. Testifying before Congress in March, Gabbard said the seizing of voting machines came at the request of an assistant U.S. attorney in Puerto Rico.
“What happened in the second Trump administration is from almost day one — I mean, literally the first two months — they took all that was built up by Trump 1 and just decimated it,” said David Becker, founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonprofit that works with state election authorities. “Election officials lost trust in the federal government.”
It didn’t help that, in his speech, the president mocked CISA’s defense of the 2020 election, calling the statement about it being the most secure in history a “very pat line” concocted as part of a deep-state cover-up. One former career CISA employee described being crestfallen at the Trump administration’s erosion of all they’d accomplished.
“We worked so hard to build that trusted relationship,” said Caitlin Durkovich, former DHS assistant secretary for infrastructure protection and co-founder of the cybersecurity firm Civira Partners. “I don’t know how you put it back together.”
A few weeks after Trump’s speech, the state election officials gathered once more, this time for a video call with Nick Andersen, who had replaced Gottumukkala as CISA’s acting director.
Though the primaries were already under way, this was the first time many had met Andersen, a former cybersecurity adviser to Trump’s White House who had joined CISA a year earlier. Andersen is also a district representative for the Republican Party in Virginia, according to the party’s website. In March, he gave a speech to the Fairfax GOP chapter titled “Fighting Democrat Redistricting.”
Speaking over video in August, the boyish-faced former Marine Corps engineer announced that DHS was preparing to release a plan on how it would work together with state officials to secure the election, according to five people who were present at the video meeting, some of whom shared notes with ProPublica.
Many on the call were stunned at what they perceived as a lack of understanding of election planning. Early voting for the general election was just around the corner. They had spent over a year preparing for the midterms, and there was no more time for ambitious work.
Some peppered Andersen with questions: Where had CISA been when there was still time to make improvements?
Andersen blamed any lapses or perceived breaches in trust on the federal government shutdown in fall 2025, twirling his pen uncomfortably and sipping from a Monster energy drink.
Fontes, Arizona’s secretary of state, was blunt about his feelings regarding working with Andersen and CISA, according to several of the people on the call.
“I told him I didn’t trust him,” Fontes recalled in an interview. “I did raise my voice a little bit, because I’m frustrated — very frustrated — that they would have the temerity to come in, clear the entire deck of competent professionals, stop supporting the states, eviscerate the coordination efforts that they had and then suddenly come in and say: ‘Oh, we’re from the federal government. We’re here to help.’”
Indeed, one recently departed CISA official said attempting to do the agency’s typical election work now would be futile. In previous years, CISA had finished almost all its preparations with the states by Labor Day.
“That ship has sailed,” the official said.
CISA published its security plan for the 2026 election on Sept. 24. The 13-page document describes how, over the past two years, CISA has “recommitted to its statutory mission and remains resolute in strengthening the security of elections.”
State officials said their planning will ensure a secure election, even without help from CISA. Yet they and cybersecurity experts worry that Trump will say the election was hacked if Republicans don’t win in November.
The security plan calls for “leveraging collaborative partnerships” with states the agency has abandoned since Trump took office. Shenna Bellows, Maine’s secretary of state, said she’d welcome that but was skeptical of the agency’s motivations.
“For CISA to promise election officials now, at this point in time, that they are going to be a resource for the 2026 election is too little, too late,” she said.
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Alabama Supreme Court rules it has no jurisdiction to enforce election law
AN 10 26
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Guests on Steve Bannon’s podcast call for Commerce Secretary Lutnick to intervene in state elections
Guests Cleta Mitchell and Ed Martin, two lawyers involved in the election denial movement, argued that voting machines are not secure. Mitchell is already pointing at Georgia, a major hub of election denial in recent years.
Written by John Knefel
Published 10/07/26
Two guests on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast are calling for Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to intervene in state election systems on the grounds that voting machines are not secure.
Cleta Mitchell and Ed Martin are both lawyers who have been involved in election denial efforts. Mitchell was on the January 2021 call when President Donald Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” votes for him to overturn the election. Martin is a former Trump Department of Justice official who claims to have worked on a “path” to get former Colorado county clerk and prominent election denial activist Tina Peters out of state prison.
Mitchell singled out Georgia’s election systems in her commentary, building on conspiracy theories that Trump concocted about vote tampering in that state following his loss in 2020. Trump’s administration has continued to pursue some of those theories, including federal agents seizing thousands of ballots and other voting records from Fulton County in January.
Appearing on Bannon’s October 6 show, Mitchell argued that the U.S. commerce secretary should intervene in state election administration, with Mitchell arguing that a 2019 national emergency declaration issued by Trump gives Lutnick “not only the authority but the duty to act” and calling for him “to order that the software in the Dominion systems in Georgia be replaced and upgraded.”
On October 1, Georgia State Election Board Executive Director James Mills sent letters to the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security asking the administration to make changes to the state’s voting machines just weeks before the upcoming midterm elections. (Mills has generally pursued aims that align with Trump’s false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election.)
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution explained that “there’s no indication the state’s voting machines have been tampered with during an election,” and a privacy concern raised in the letters “does not alter election results.” The only Democrat on the election board told the paper that Mills’ letters were “clearly a bad-faith attempt to set up a contest to election results that Republicans do not like.”
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From the October 6, 2026, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room
CLETA MITCHELL (GUEST): Well I think that one of the things that's really important is that a lot of people have said, well, the president needs to declare a national emergency for elections. Well, guess what? He already did. He did that in May of 2019. He declared that there was an emergency because foreign-owned -- it's called information and communications technology and services, and that includes election infrastructure -- manufactured in whole or in part or controlled by companies that are foreign adversaries, which includes China. And there's not a voting system in America today, an electronic voting system in America today that is not manufactured in whole or in part in China.
So the president in May of 2019 issued this emergency -- relying on the National Emergencies Act of 1976 issued an executive order ordering the Department of Commerce to promulgate regulations, which they did. The Department of Commerce regulations took effect in February of 2024, and they are the law.
And it gives Howard Lutnick, as secretary, not only the authority but the duty to act. And so here are some of the things that Secretary Lutnick can do today. And that he needs to do today.
He needs to order that the software in the Dominion systems in Georgia be replaced and upgraded, as all the other jurisdictions have done since 2022 when it was determined by Dr. Halderman that Dominion systems have nine vulnerabilities. The software was upgraded. It was to correct all of those vulnerabilities. And guess what? Georgia has yet to install the upgrades to guard against the vulnerabilities.
Secretary Lutnick should oversee that today.
...
The other thing he needs to do is, the Department of Homeland Security sent him, along with a letter that Ed is referring to -- the Department of Homeland Security doesn't have authority to mandate that states get rid of these vulnerable voting systems. But the Department of Homeland Security has created this fund -- they've created grant-funds through FEMA, they've written a mitigation plan.
All Secretary Lutnick has to do is take it and implement it. He has the authority to mandate it.
Martin similarly claimed that “Lutnick has a chance to step up and also be a player” in efforts “for states to change their election systems,” warning of “a red-hot crisis” and “a five-alarm fire” for the upcoming midterms.
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From the October 6, 2026, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room
ED MARTIN (GUEST): You mentioned the breaking news. There's a letter that came out a month ago and it didn't get much attention until yesterday when I was looking at it closely and I put it up. And it's a legal finding from Secretary Mullin of the DHS, a legal finding -- it's not Ed Martin's opinion, it's not Bannon's opinion, it's not Cleta's opinion, it's not a filing in a court -- it's a DHS finding that machines for election are using foreign parts and they cannot be secured.
And so much so that the letter from Mullin says, I've got a special fund -- it's a billion dollars, I went and found out, one billion with a B, dollars for states to change their election systems to protect themselves. So look, I think this is a red-hot crisis. I mentioned in an interview yesterday that Tina Peters was meeting with President Trump, and that happened. And I haven't talked to her since the meeting, but I know they didn't meet about the Colorado prison system.
We know we've got a five-alarm fire coming in less than four weeks, and all hands on deck.
...
I think Lutnick has a chance to step up and also be a player because of how the law is, but states are going to have to protect themselves too.
Questions about the security of Georgia’s elections have been a concern in the lead-up to the midterms. Local news station WTVM recently covered a town hall convened by former secretary of state chief operating officer Gabe Sterling to give Georgians confidence in the existing systems.
“Voting in this state, in your home county, and across the nation is safe, is run by professionals, they have redundancies, tons of safeguards, and it really is a secure, secure election,” said Sterling, who previously refuted Trump’s election conspiracy theories in 2020.
Georgia Public Radio also covered the subject, quoting an election system expert who agreed that the changes were not necessary and could be detrimental to a free and fair election.
Ben Adita, the executive director of Voting Works, a nonprofit that sells open-source voting systems, testified in front of the board Thursday. During the meeting, he told the committee that Raffensperger has already taken steps to mitigate the privacy flaw, and warned about changes close to the election.
"The proposal to upgrade software with two weeks to go is really fraught and risky," Adita said. "The proposal to alter the vote casting process statewide is fraught whether you have two weeks — or two or six months, frankly — of lead time."
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AN 10 26
President Donald Trump’s Justice Department plan to use a “a historic number” of election-monitoring initiatives is facing a challenge in court from civil rights lawyers.
The NAACP has taken legal action against Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, the head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, asking for information concerning the department's plans to deploy more than 1,000 election monitors for the November 3 election.
The lawsuit, which has been brought in the federal court in Washington, is asking a judge to compel the department to respond to a Freedom of Information Act request that was submitted on September 1. The NAACP claims that the Department of Justice failed to meet the statutory deadline for deciding on the request and is therefore seeking emergency intervention before Election Day.
According to the complaint, the planned deployment “stands to jeopardize the election” and could interfere with voters’ ability to cast ballots “free from intimidation.”
The request for records asks for information regarding the legal basis of the operation, the locations where the monitors will be deployed, how they will be selected and trained, whether state officials gave their consent, and whether personnel from federal law enforcement agencies could take part.
The extent of the operation has attracted attention since Dhillon has stated that the department aims to send around 1,000 monitors to the polling stations. Todd Blanche, the Attorney General, said on Sunday that monitors would be going to all 50 states.
Blanche described the operation as being in line with the Justice Department's long-standing role in elections. For a long time, the department has sent federal officials to oversee compliance with voting-rights laws, but the NAACP contends that this year's initiative has moved away from that traditional function and is now focused on examining allegations regarding ballot security.
The Justice Department stated to The Guardian that its observers “comply with all legal and ethical requirements” and would not intervene in the voting process.
Concerns over the way the monitors would operate grew following an incident at Wyoming's primary. The Republican governor, Mark Gordon, stated that two federal monitors came to a polling place without being informed and tried to look at the voting machines. He called their actions "aggressive, unexpected, and disruptive".
The department denied that description and stated that the monitors had not done anything improper.
Kristen Clarke, who is the general counsel of the NAACP and previously headed the Civil Rights Division under President Joe Biden, stated that the organization would like the government to make public the authority it considers to be the basis for the operation and the way in which it plans to carry it out.
Now that Election Day is less than a month away, the conflict is causing part of Trump's election campaign to be brought before a federal judge and may compel the Justice Department to make public the details, which the NAACP says is the largest election-monitoring operation in the history of the United States.
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MS NOW explores the relationship between election denier Tina Peters and the Trump administration and her calls to “get rid of voting machines”
Peter Baker: President Trump has “expressed a willingness to do things that we’ve never seen in this country be done before in order to alter the results of an election”
Written by Media Matters Staff
Published 10/06/26
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From the October 6, 2026, edition of MS NOW's On the Line With Alicia Menendez
ALICIA MENENDEZ (MS NOW ANCHOR): I have a million questions, Let's start with this one. Peter, Why won't the White House just say that they didn't meet with Tina Peters?
PETER BAKER (NEW YORK TIMES CHIEF WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT): It's a really good question. When they say they don't confirm private meetings, of course they confirm private meetings when it suits their interests. It's in this case, obviously, they feel some degree of concern that it will cause, you know, backlash, right? I mean, to Laura's point, you know, it's remarkable that the people who manage to use these machines to rig the 2020 election forgot to do it in 2024, right? This is an election that the president won, doesn't complain that that one was rigged, same machines, same voting structures, same, you know, system that he is now saying is unfair and was unfair in 2020, perfectly fair two years ago when he happened to win.
So, you know, we'll see. But I think the point of the machines is really interesting because remember back in 2020, after the election, before January 6 in the Oval Office, the president of the United States, hosted a number of advisers, outside advisers, including Mike Flynn, who had been his national security advisor and later convicted, and eventually pardoned. Mike Flynn, a retired three star general, told the president of the United States at that point, that he should order the National Guard to seize voting machines in six states that Trump lost and then rerun the election so that therefore he could theoretically win, again.
The president didn't do it that time. But when my colleagues went and interviewed President Trump in January of this year, he said he regretted not taking that advice. He regretted not using the military to seize voting machines and rerunning elections with no legal basis whatsoever until he could get a win. And so, when we say, you know, what's she doing there? I think it's reasonable to ask that question, given that he himself has expressed a willingness to do things that we've never seen in this country be done before in order to alter the results of an election.
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10/06/26 11:43 AM EDT
10/01/26 9:33 AM EDT
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Tuesday marks 28 days until the Nov. 3 election, and Democrats are preparing for a "doomsday scenario," CNN reports.
It's not unheard of for the Democratic Party or presidential campaigns to assemble an army of lawyers ready to file lawsuits or go to judges at a moment's notice. This year, however, something else is brewing, and it's much bigger.
Senior CNN reporter Annie Grayer told Manu Raju that for months Democrats have been working behind the scenes to play out possible scenarios that would have been unheard of even six years ago "because Democrats do not want to leave anything up to chance here."
"Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has been convening groups of senators, lawyers, outside experts to do the sort of role-playing scenarios where they're given very specific scenarios to talk through how they would handle potential intervention from the [Donald] Trump administration, what that intervention could look like."
The Democratic doomsday preppers are crafting plans for what would happen if the National Guard was deployed to polling locations by the Trump administration, or even if the Guard soldiers attempt to seize ballots from those locations. They're planning how to deal with misinformation that comes from deep-fake videos and other AI.
"What I've learned is that the senators in these groups were even role-playing different figures in the Trump administration. So, playing the role of attorney general, playing the role of director of national intelligence, playing the role of director, homeland security secretary to get in the position of what possible interference could happen, and then talk through how they would respond to it as Democrats and in the House," said Grayer.
Rep. Joe Morelle (D-N.Y.) is working on his own similar effort to walk through 150 threat possibilities and how he would deal with them. He's also traveling around the country to raise awareness among Democratic voters to watch for specific things and report them as soon as possible.
Meanwhile, the Senate side is "building the largest election observer program," she said.
"The first time that we've seen that in the Senate," Grayer said, describing official staffers around the country to observe and be prepared to act if some kind of skullduggery ensues.
"What lawmakers realize is they couldn't rely on the national party here," she explained. "They had to build something on their own in this off-year election for Democrats. But so they've tapped into the legal community and built this really strong legal apparatus to be ready to respond at a moment's notice. I talked to one lawyer for this story who told me that she's a go-bag ready, just in case she has to be deployed at a moment's notice."
It suggests that while they all believe strongly in the system and in elections, they're not discounting any possible dirty tricks from the White House, Grayer explained. They intend to cast a wide net of possibilities as Nov. 3 approaches and post-election legal battles begin.
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MMA
Who's calling for the Trump administration to send federal agents to polling places?
Right-wing media personalities have pushed for the Trump administration to send federal agents and the military to polling places and interfere with vote counting, but voting rights groups are pushing back
Written by Jack Winstanley & Reed McMaster
Published 10/02/26
Ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, right-wing media figures have called for President Donald Trump to deploy federal law enforcement, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, or the military to polling stations across the country to “surround the polls” as votes are cast or to interfere with vote counting after the election.
While administration officials have offered mixed messaging on whether they'd actually send law enforcement agents or military to polling places, the law directly prohibits any potential effort to station armed federal agents at polls, and experts say this policy could potentially disenfranchise voters who feel intimidated by their presence. In order to prevent this kind of interference by federal agents at the polls, civil rights, labor, and voting rights groups have filed lawsuits ahead of the midterms.
The proposal to deploy ICE officers to polling stations is just one of several election-related policies floated by right-wing media and the Trump administration ahead of the 2026 midterms. Right-wing media figures have also suggested the president could declare a national emergency over alleged voter fraud in order to increase federal control over the midterms, and have pushed for restrictive voting requirements such as those included in the SAVE America Act. The courts have blocked many of the administration's actions to implement parts of these policies.
Is it even legal for law enforcement or the military to be at polling places?
As the Brennan Center for Justice's Sean Morales-Doyle has written, “The law is crystal clear: It is illegal to deploy federal troops or armed federal law enforcement to any polling place.” Dale Ho, then-director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Voting Rights Project, similarly stated, “There's no law that I'm aware of that permits, or that would authorize, the president to deploy federal law enforcement or military or anything like that for domestic use in … or around polling places.”
Experts explain that stationing federal law enforcement at polling sites risks intimidating voters out of casting their ballots. The ACLU noted that the mere presence of federal immigration agents at polling places could qualify as illegal voter intimidation, with its report listing “the deployment of federal immigration agents or federalized National Guard in or around polling places in targeted communities during early voting or on Election Day to try to suppress voting” as an example of “illegal voter intimidation.” The ACLU also specifically cites “aggressively questioning voters about their citizenship, criminal record, or other qualifications to vote” as another example of illegal voter intimidation.
Ahead of the midterm elections, several lawsuits have already been filed to block federal agents from interfering at the polls, including one from a coalition of civil rights groups and unions. The Brennan Center also noted that any individual can sue under the Voting Rights Act if they are “intimidated from voting by the presence of ICE agents or soldiers.”
Who has been among the biggest proponents of having federal agents at polling places? Steve Bannon.
For months, former Trump White House aide Steve Bannon has been a prominent voice supporting the deployment of federal agents to polling stations, regularly advocating on his show for ICE to be present at polling stations.
Bannon said ICE officers will be near polling places: “If you don't have an ID — if you're not a citizen — you're not voting.” [Real America’s Voice, War Room, 8/19/25]
While interviewing former Trump Department of Homeland Security adviser Todd Bensman, Bannon stated, “I think ICE agents belong at polling places.”
Bannon dismissed fears of voter intimidation, stating, “It's intimidation. It should be intimidating to noncitizens. Yes, we want it to be intimidating to noncitizens. You should not go to a polling place.” [Real America’s Voice, War Room, 8/13/26]
Bannon called it a “minimum requirement” for ICE to be present at polling stations. [Real America's Voice, War Room, 7/17/26]
Bannon said that stationing ICE at airports can be “a test case … to really perfect ICE's involvement in the 2026 midterm elections.” Bannon added, “They can’t work the machines, you know what they’ll do? Just walk up and down, hey, we're going to speed things through — can we check your IDs? That’s what’s going to happen in the fall of ’26 because, folks, we’re tired of having elections stolen.” [Real America’s Voice, War Room, 3/23/26]
Bannon stated, “And I'm saying you're going to have ICE agents around the polls to make sure you can't have illegal aliens in there voting.” [Real America’s Voice, War Room, 2/19/26]
Bannon also said in February, “You’re damn right we’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November.” [Real America’s Voice, War Room, 2/3/26]
Who else in right-wing media has promoted federal agents at polling places?
Article III Project founder Mike Davis: “I would have ICE agents and other federal law enforcement at every polling place across America. And that should only scare away noncitizens.” [Real America's Voice, War Room, 9/1/26]
Podcaster Tim Pool stated that, “at the bare minimum,” he expects federal law enforcement to be present at polling locations in states that do not cooperate with DHS. He said, “This press conference had me expecting, OK, Trump made the announcement. Markwayne Mullin, DHS, they're going to come out and they're going to say, here's what we intend to do. I mean, at the bare minimum, we expect something like we will have federal law enforcement agency at polling locations in states that do not cooperate.” [Rumble, Tim Pool Daily Show, 7/17/26]
The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro: “Making sure illegal immigrants do not show up at polling sites is not a horrible use of ICE.” [The Daily Wire, The Ben Shapiro Show, 3/24/26]
Podcaster Benny Johnson: “Can we deploy ICE to every voting booth in America? Would that fix the fraud? Of course, it would.” Johnson continued, “Why are we even talking about the SAVE Act? You don't need the SAVE Act if you don't have a nation overrun with criminal aliens.” [YouTube, The Benny Show, 3/24/26]
On X22 Report, the host declared that ICE and the National Guard can “absolutely” “assist with helping in the elections.” [Rumble, X22 Report, 3/24/26; X22 Report, accessed 9/24/26]
Fox’s Jesse Watters argued for ICE to be at polling locations. Watters said, “Well, one of the demands, they say no ICE agents can be at a polling station. What's the trouble with that, Jessica? What's the problem? If illegals aren't voting, why can't ICE agents be at a polling station?” [Fox News, The Five, 3/23/26]
X22 Report’s host also argued that “if you pre-position ICE in certain areas around the country, maybe with the National Guard, that makes it a lot more difficult for the illegals to actually vote in the election.” He added that lawsuits preemptively filed over potential ICE deployments to polling locations were an attempt “to find out if ICE is going to be at the voting centers.” [Rumble, X22 Report, 3/3/26]
During an appearance on Newsmax, radio host Tony Katz questioned, “Why aren’t ICE agents at polling places? Why aren't we ensuring that Americans vote?” [Newsmax, Carl Higbie Frontline, 3/3/26]
The Gateway Pundit wrote in a blog that any concern from Democrats about voter intimidation because of ICE presence “only makes sense if illegal aliens are, in fact, showing up to vote.” The blog, which also shares Bannon’s call for ICE to “surround the polls,” states, “Democrats will inevitably argue that ICE’s presence at the polls constitutes voter intimidation, but that concern only makes sense if illegal aliens are, in fact, showing up to vote.” [The Gateway Pundit, 2/4/26]
Newsmax host Carl Higbie said, “ICE at polling places shouldn’t be a problem because illegals shouldn’t be voting in our elections.” [Newsmax, Carl Higbie Frontline, 2/2/26]
Who has suggested deploying the military to interfere with vote counting after the election?
In response to host Alex Jones asking what “martial law after the election” would look like, attorney Peter Ticktin said “it would be the FBI probably going out and seizing the machines where there’s a good reason to suspect that the vote was not a real vote.” He further explained, “Let the machines do the count, but before the count — but then let us commandeer and get the ballots. If we have the ballots, we can count them ourselves. You know, there’s ways we can do it, and it would be done after the election, but before certification.” Earlier in the episode, Ticktin claimed Trump's “going to seize the machines. … If it’s stolen from us because of their machines, we’ll be — then he’s going to have to declare martial law.” [Alex Jones Live, The Alex Jones Show, 9/29/26, 9/29/26]
Mark Cook, described by Colorado Newsline as one “of the most influential election deniers in Colorado,” said during an interview with podcaster David Nino Rodriguez that “if the military shows up to ensure that the people can run their own election unfettered, I’m all for that.” He stated, “What really needs to happen is the people that have been manipulating elections, that have stolen the elections from the people and have blocked the people away from having oversight in their own elections, we need someone to hold them back so citizens can have the oversight necessary to conduct their own elections and ensure and verify the integrity of the vote. So if the military shows up to ensure that the people can run their own election unfettered, I'm all for that. Bring them.” [Rumble, 2/19/26; Colorado Newsline, 6/18/24]
On Brighteon Broadcast News, host Mike Adams argued, “We need the military to count the votes, especially in the blue cities, because you can’t trust Democrats.” While speculating about a potential “armed uprising” from the left, Adams added, “I think Trump actually sort of tactically needs that to happen in order to declare the emergency and deploy the troops before Election Day.” [Natural News, Brighteon Broadcast News, 1/14/26; Media Matters, 4/2/18]
On Health Ranger Report two days later, Adams repeated his call to “have the military count the votes.” He argued, “You have to have a national emergency to where you deploy the military, especially in blue cities,” in order to count the votes. [Natural News, Health Ranger Report, 1/16/26]
What has the Trump administration said about deploying federal law enforcement or the military to the polls?
The Department of Homeland Security has offered mixed messaging on the potential for sending ICE officers to polling locations. In February, DHS Deputy Assistant Secretary for Election Integrity Heather Honey — whom ProPublica has described as “a protege of Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who tried to help Trump overturn the 2020 election results” — reportedly told a group of secretaries of state that “any suggestion that ICE will be present at any polling location is simply not true.” But Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has refused to rule out the possibility; during his confirmation hearing, Mullin said that if ICE is sent to polling places, “there will be a reason for us to be there, and it’ll be known why we’re there.” Mullin added in September that agents could make arrests at polling places if needed, noting that the “only reason” agents “would be at polling places is if there is a threat to that polling place or we’re serving a warrant on someone.”
White House border czar Tom Homan, meanwhile, downplayed concerns about federal law enforcement presence at polling stations, noting, “Part of DHS' job is secure elections, and I’m not going to say … what our plan is going forward, but if only U.S. citizens can vote, I don’t see the issue of what they’re concerned about.” And earlier this year, Trump expressed his own willingness to send federal agents to the polls when a reporter asked whether he would “send the National Guard or ICE to voting locations in November” and Trump responded that he would do “anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections.”
What do voting rights groups advise voters to do in response to threats of law enforcement or the military at polling places?
Voting rights groups have resources to prepare voters for the possibility of federal agents or the military intimidating voters at polling stations. Democracy Security Project Action Fund suggests voters “go to vote.gov and check your eligibility; be sure that you’re registered” and know “the most convenient polling place for you, whether that’s in person or vote-by-mail. Keep track of deadlines.”
Additional recommendations from the ACLU include:
What to do if there are reports of ICE, National Guard, or other federal agents in your community during early voting or Election Day
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an 10 26
Harvard expert: Trump is fully prepared to launch a brute-force coup
Matthew Rozsa October 01, 2026
President Donald Trump has made it very clear that, if it is within his power, he will steal the 2026 midterm elections rather than allow Democrats to win them. If he succeeds, America will cease to be a democracy — yet even if he fails, he has already made democracy in America into an "if" rather than a given.
That, at least, is the assessment of Dr. Steven Levitsky, Professor of Government at Harvard University. When he spoke with me for AlterNet, Levitsky made it clear that there is a non-zero chance of Trump successfully turning America into an effective dictatorship before the 2026 election cycle is over. The question is not whether he has the legal authority to declare martial law, send the military (and/or ICE and/or other forms of law enforcement) to seize ballots or to demand Republicans in Congress simply refuse to seat Democrats. From a strictly legal perspective, he cannot do any of those things.
The concern is that Trump also has what Levitsky described as "de facto" power — that is, the capacity to effectively implement these or other anti-democratic measures in defiance of the law. After all, Trump has already engaged in mass deportations, silenced media critics, levied tariffs, destroyed national monuments and slapped his name all over the place regardless of the legality behind those measures. Perhaps most notably, he attempted a coup after losing the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden and was able to regain power thanks to the complicity of right-wing media and the complacency of America's top legal and business institutions.
In that sense, as Levitsky pointed out, American democracy is already in a sense permanently weakened. We are no longer a consolidated democracy, or one in which democratic institutions consistently work even if there are other social injustices; we are an unconsolidated democracy, or a government in which it is never entirely certain whether basic democratic structures will remain in intact.
Trump trying to steal the midterms through brute force.
Rozsa: President Trump has repeatedly said, either directly or through various surrogates, that he is considering declaring a national emergency, implementing martial law, sending ICE or the military to the polls, and in other ways directly hindering the actual process of the election occurring. Does he have the power to do these things?
Levitsky: Well, it depends whether you're talking about de facto power or legal power, constitutional power. I'm not a constitutional expert, but most would agree that he does not have the formal power to do these things. The Constitution gives the federal executive almost no power over election administration. That is left to the states. So the kind of federal intervention that Trump is talking about is almost certainly unconstitutional.
The real issue, of course, is whether he has the de facto power to do it, whether he can pull it off. And first, I'd say from the outset, I have no doubt that Trump is willing to order some sort of a coup against democracy to try to overturn the elections. He has shown over and over again that he is not a democrat and is perfectly willing to engage in really old-school authoritarian tactics to overturn elections.
We don't know for sure whether he can get away with it. There are some troubling signs. One of them is that we're just completely unprepared for a sort of radical seizure of power in this way. The courts have been pretty good, not great, on Trump's efforts to sort of overstep his bounds on elections, but courts move slowly. And it's just not at all clear, if on election night Trump were to order the seizure of ballot boxes, declare some kind of an emergency, mobilize troops, that courts could move quickly enough to stop it. So at the very least, it would create a massive, massive crisis.
But ultimately, I don't think he's got the power to get away with it. Unfortunately, we're living in a world where the chances of it happening are well above zero. But looking at, one, Trump's public support and his political power, which is in pretty sharp decline: there's a lot of evidence that the most successful assaults on democracy are carried out by presidents with 70, 80, 85% support, whether it's Putin or Hugo Chávez or Fujimori or Bukele. All of these guys had 80% support. Trump's at 35, 36.
And secondly, if you look at the Trump administration's record in planning, orchestrating, carrying out major policy initiatives, from DOGE to the Liberation Day tariffs to the war in Iran, it's just utter, utter incompetence, lack of foresight, lack of coordination, lack of planning. Fraud is hard. Repression is hard. Destroying constitutional rule is hard. If I had to bet a dollar — glad I'm not — I don't think these guys have the capacity to do it.
Rozsa: When I talked with Justin Levitt from Loyola Law School, he was very doubtful that Trump could use law enforcement and/or the military in this way. I then interjected with a recent quote from attorney Peter Ticktin, who is one of Trump's advisers. When someone told Ticktin that there would be riots if Trump attempted a coup, Ticktin responded, quote, "Our armed forces are a lot bigger than they are." Levitt then replied that this was a fantasy. But my question is, do you think Ticktin has a point, logistically speaking?
Levitsky: What does "logistically speaking" mean?
Rozsa: That because their armed forces are a lot bigger than the forces that could be arrayed against them, they could ultimately carry out a coup.
Levitsky: Well, this is a little frustrating because, again, there is a non-zero chance that they could carry out a coup. The reason why I think it's a relatively low probability — and we're dealing with a lot of speculation here — is that they have to pull off two things to militarize in that way. One, they've got to get the military to go along with egregiously, openly anti-democratic behavior, which they might, but it's not certain that the military would go along. And secondly, repression is really hard, especially if you're talking about an unpopular government in a context where there isn't a perceived crisis. In the aftermath of something like 9/11, or if we were at war, or if there were a real subversive organization in the country — if Americans were really scared about something, or if they really liked Trump — they'd be more likely to tolerate repression.
This is a context that is very unfavorable for carrying out repression. Look at what the Trump administration tried to do in Minnesota. They made the streets of Minneapolis look like El Salvador in the 1980s for a while, and it blew up in their face politically. And so if they couldn't militarize Minneapolis in January 2026, I think chances are that an effort to do it at the national level would fail.
Rozsa: Certainly, I hope you're right, but here is my counter to what you're saying, and I want to emphasize I'm playing devil's advocate. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but this is the thought that keeps occurring to me. It's the information ecosystem in which a lot of Americans choose to live. To illustrate what I mean: after January 6th, I kept hearing over and over again, "That's it. Trump's political career is dead. He just attempted a coup." Even some right-wing media outlets were initially critical of him. But then the far-right outlets were backing his attempts to gaslight people about what happened, and soon even the more mainstream conservative outlets began to fall in line, either downplaying it or contributing to the gaslighting, so that by the time the 2024 election rolled around, an event that had once been considered disqualifying was no longer an impediment to him being reelected.
Using that same reality, what is to stop CNN, which is soon going to be taken over by a pro-Trump family, and Fox News and all of these conservative outlets from spinning their own version of events regarding Trump's coup attempt, and in so doing, reducing the backlash against it? Do you see what I'm saying?
Levitsky: Yeah, look, I take your point about January 6th and the elite reaction to January 6th. After the shock wore off, after two or three days, when Republican politicians kind of put their finger to the wind, the elite abdication that occurred after January 6th was shocking. I certainly didn't expect it, and it was really costly. The reason why we have Trump today, and the reason why we're facing this threat, is exactly the dynamic you just described: that elites just decided to look the other way.
Could that happen again? Well, the thing to watch, and what was really critical in the 2021–2024 period, which I agree with you was just really, really decisive, was the behavior of Republican elites. Almost all Republican elites got in lock[step]. A few of them wandered off the reservation for a couple of weeks, but they all came back. And the ones who didn't, like Liz Cheney, were purged from the party. The unified Republican message that January 6th was okay, was justified, was acceptable, that the election might have been unfair — it was the fact that it was a unified message coming from the Republican elite. That's what allowed that myth to persist and allowed Trump to remain politically viable.
So one of the keys, one of the things to look for, is how Republican leaders would respond to this coup. If there is unified or even majoritarian Republican politician support or acquiescence or even silence in the face of this coup, then we're in worse shape. If a number of leading Republicans speak up, we'll be in better shape. But even so, Trump has less support, even in his own coalition, than he had back in 2021. I think the evidence shows that the support is weaker. It's thinner. And you can throw in CNN if you want, but the right-wing media ecosystem is real, but it's a third of the country. It's a third of the country. And a third of the country may well mobilize or support a coup attempt. I think there's reason to think that much of that MAGA base would support it. But Fox News lying about the coup is not going to affect majority public opinion in the United States.
Rozsa: CNN, by the way, will also lie about it now that it's been purchased by the Ellisons. And I would say I'm not only concerned about Republicans —
Levitsky: CNN might lie about it. We don't know that.
Rozsa: I think they will. I think Ellison has made it very clear where he stands. But my —
Levitsky: Ellison wants to make a lot of money in the medium term. And with Trump this weak, that's a hell of a bet, to bet on a coup.
Rozsa: Well, the other point I wanted to make is it's not just Republicans who need to go along. Jacob Weisberg wrote a great book called Profiles in Cowardice about individuals who aren't part of that coalition, but for transactional reasons decided to participate. People like Jeff Bezos, people like the head of the law firm Paul, Weiss. That type of logic, which argues that only a sucker makes a sacrifice in the name of principle, that a smart person goes where the power is — that could also facilitate a coup. What do you think?
Levitsky: I think you're misreading the balance of power today. This is not December 2024. It's not January, February 2025. Trump is in a political [corner]. He's politically weakened. And I'm as dismayed at the behavior of Paul, Weiss and universities and Jeff Bezos as Jacob Weisberg is. But those guys are making a different calculation today. To jump on the Trump train as it's descending into chaos is a much, much [riskier bet]. It turned out to be a pretty stupid bet in early 2025. The law firms that cooperated, the universities that cooperated — they're not better off for having acquiesced to or appeased Trump than those that ultimately resisted. But as Weisberg lays out in his book, there was a logic to it.
And it's not a very pretty logic from the standpoint of someone who cares about democracy, but there was a logic to it. I don't think that logic exists anymore. I think it's utterly irrational for somebody who's thinking about making money in the next two years to support a coup led by somebody that's unpopular. It's super high-risk.
Trump trying to steal the midterms through legal chicanery.
Rozsa: Now I want to talk about another way that Trump could pull this off. Let us say, hypothetically, that he isn't able to overturn the results through physical force and all of his efforts at frivolous litigation fail. He could, through the bureaucracy, get Democrats who were elected ultimately rejected. And I'm thinking of two possible methods. The first is through bureaucrats that he's embedded in positions of election administration and certification who believe in the Big Lie. And the second is by convincing Speaker Johnson or Leader Thune to reject Democratic victories when they are handed over to Congress in 2027. What do you think of either of those possibilities?
Levitsky: In terms of the first one, there's been talk in my world of kind of packing local election administrations with election deniers, and to some extent that has happened. But I don't think it ever amounted to as much as the supporters hoped and people like me feared initially. And again, looking at this administration and its efforts — its war efforts, its tariff efforts, its DOGE efforts — it strains my imagination to think they could pull off some kind of extraordinary coordinated feat like this. The Johnson Congress option —
Rozsa: Or Thune.
Levitsky: Or Thune, yeah. I think that is more credible. First of all, it's entirely legal, it turns out. If Republican candidates scream fraud and Johnson can point to a, quote-unquote, contested election, it is actually in his power to decide who gets the seat. And looking at his behavior, I think he'd do it. And if the balance of Congress [hinges on] a handful of seats — three, four, five seats — I'm going to worry a lot about that. To the extent that the Democrats achieve some sort of a landslide, that becomes less likely, becomes more difficult. We have to be very thankful that Trump is so unpopular that the Republicans are tanking this badly in the election. If it were a very close election, I would be very worried about that outcome. I'm a little less worried because I don't think it's going to be two or three seats holding the balance. I think it's going to be much more than that.
Rozsa: Now, when I asked the same question of Professor Levitt, he said, and I'm quoting, "The key moment isn't anything that Mike Johnson has a part in. The key moment is who's put on the roll of potential House members when at noon the House dissolves as a body. At 12:01, there is no House. There is no Speaker Johnson. He's just a dude. The Clerk of the House is the person who controls the roll. The Clerk of the House has a non-discretionary, very clear statutory duty to recognize the potential members who show up with certificates of election from their states, the things that the state officials have certified." Do you agree with his analysis there?
Levitsky: I'm not enough of an expert on that to say. I have no opinions. I just don't know.
Rozsa: Well, I want to ask this. Do you think it would be possible, if it seemed like Speaker Johnson was considering playing along with Trump's coup attempt, that Democrats could perhaps convince a few anti-Trump Republicans in the House to hold an early election to replace Johnson as speaker with someone who won't go along with him?
Levitsky: Yeah, I think that's actually a relatively likely scenario. Again, and thank God, because Trump is so unpopular and because this sort of a coup would be so unpopular — there's uncertainty, but I think there's a pretty good chance that Democrats could find a handful of Republicans — it wouldn't take many — they need to vote Johnson out.
Rozsa: Of course, my concern is that they'll face so much pressure from the Republican media that they'll ultimately be cowards and just toe the party line.
Levitsky: It's certainly possible. But again, given the balance of public opinion and political strength right now — I mean, in part just given Trump's age and his physical condition — it's very hard to bet on Trumpism in the medium term right now. Much harder than it was even, you know, a year and two quarters ago.
Trump's long-term consequences for American democracy — regardless of the midterms.
Rozsa: I want to take a step back from these immediate questions and ask something much deeper. What does it say about the health of American democracy that these worst-case scenarios are even plausible? I've been following politics since I was a teenager in the late 1990s. I've been covering it professionally since the 2012 election. And in my lifetime, at least, there was never any serious threat to democratic institutions. Based on my research into American history, the closest analogy I can think of was the 1860 presidential election, which ultimately led to a civil war. But even then, it didn't seem like people were questioning that Lincoln had been legitimately elected. They simply didn't want him to win, because then he would limit the expansion of slavery. What does it say about the state of democracy right now that these things are even possible?
Levitsky: I'll put it in boring political science terms. It means that the United States, at best today, is an unconsolidated democracy. I've argued that the United States has actually slid into kind of mild competitive authoritarianism under Trump 2.0. I don't think the regime at present is fully democratic. But even for those who argue that Trump's abuses are not sufficient to say that we've lost our democracy, the U.S. has become what political scientists call an unconsolidated democracy.
My day job is as a Latin Americanist. I've studied political regimes in Latin America for years and years and years. And what I was brought up learning was that democracies in countries like Peru and Argentina were unconsolidated in the sense that there was always uncertainty that all the powerful actors would play by the rules of the game. There was never certainty that everybody was committed to democratic rules of the game.
The United States for years and years and years was held up as an example of a consolidated democracy, where everybody knew that everybody was committed to democratic rules of the game. You could take for granted that elections would be free and fair, that everyone would play by the rules, that the government would play by the rules. There would be uncertainty over the outcomes of elections, but there was never uncertainty around the procedure of the elections. And that is long gone — since the 2020 election, but certainly with all the discussion we've had around the election today. Even if one agrees with me that the likelihood of a coup is relatively low, there is a lot of uncertainty.
There's uncertainty about whether the election will be fair. There's uncertainty about whether the government will accept the results of the election, or that there'll be an effort to manipulate the outcome of the election after the election. That uncertainty is a classic sign of what we call an unconsolidated democracy, an unstable democracy. And that sets the United States apart from all other established democracies in Europe and in Canada, and makes it much more like some of the unstable democracies we see in Latin America and elsewhere.
Rozsa: Have there been any of those unstable democracies in Latin America that went back to being consolidated democracies?
Levitsky: Yeah. Very often, sadly, after they tip into a period of authoritarian rule. But yeah, Argentine democracy was considered an unconsolidated democracy in the 1980s. There were several coup attempts. Today, it's considered a consolidated democracy. Brazil may not be a great example, because they had a similar —
Rozsa: With Bolsonaro.
Levitsky: In 2022. Yeah. So maybe it's not fully consolidated. I think they handled it better than we did. But Argentina is a much more consolidated democracy than it was in the 1980s.
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MMA
Right-wing media figures urge immediate purges of voter rolls following Supreme Court’s election database decision
Written by Sophie Lawton
Published 10/01/26
After the Supreme Court ruling on the modified Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database, right-wing media figures and election denial activists are calling on states to purge their voter rolls — even though there is a moratorium on the systematic removal of voters from voter rolls 90-days prior to election day, and evidence the database could boot eligible voters from the voter rolls.
What did the court say about the modified SAVE database?
The Supreme Court recently gave the Trump administration a win on its so-called election integrity efforts, ruling in favor of the government's attempt to weed out exceedingly rare cases of noncitizen voting using the modified SAVE database, which has been newly updated with data from the Social Security Administration. The database was “dramatically revamped” to allow searching through bulk uploads of voter lists for potential noncitizens.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson highlighted in her dissent that the newly shared SSA data that has been linked to the modified SAVE database “contains information about natural-born U.S. citizens as well as naturalized citizens and noncitizens," which she suggested could lead to citizens being pulled into bulk searches and potentially flagged for removal from the voter rolls.
There are already examples of citizens being inaccurately flagged by the modified SAVE database. In one review of registrants flagged by the database in Texas, “some 20% were later found to be citizens who were reinstated.”
The court's ruling also notes that the National Voter Registration Act does not allow states to conduct “any program the purpose of which is to systematically remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters” less than 90 days prior to an election, but included the footnote:
We will consider the scope of this provision in Republican National Committee v. Mi Familia Vota, et al., No. 25–1017, which asks whether the NVRA prohibits States from implementing programs within 90 days of federal elections to cancel the registrations of voters who are not U.S. citizens. The parties in this case do not ask us to address that question and have not briefed it, and we do not need to decide it here.
The Trump administration may use this nonanswer about the 90-day moratorium from the Supreme Court as an opportunity to ignore the moratorium and encourage states to do mass purges of voter rolls using the data from DHS.
All of this is to the delight of figures like Cleta Mitchell and Hans Von Spakovsky who agree: The voter roll purges must go on.
What are election deniers saying about the ruling?
Right-wing media figures with ties to the election denial movement have called for purges based on the Supreme Court’s ruling — despite the clear language barring such purges within 90 days of the election.
War Room host Steve Bannon introduced one of his segments about the ruling by calling it “a flashing green to go purge these voter rolls with 39 days left” and hosted guests who argued the 90-day moratorium is moot.
Former Justice Department official Jeff Clark — who in 2022 praised the election conspiracy theory film 2000 Mules — spoke with Bannon about the ruling on the evening of September 25, arguing that the 90-day moratorium from NVRA is “blown up” because of an Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act — or IIRAIRA — provision that he says is “very clear.” The passage Clark seems to be quoting apparently pertains to the sharing of information about citizenship and immigration status between government entities, not the removal of registered voters from the voter rolls.
Bannon asked Clark if states “can purge these voter rolls and do it right now for the 3 November election” despite the 90-day moratorium, to which Clark replied, “Yes.”
Clark also dismissed cases where individuals have been incorrectly flagged as noncitizens and barred from voting if they don't prove their citizenship fast enough, saying, “Tough.” He argued, “It's reasonable to expect people who want to vote … to come forth and prove that and to prove that on a timely basis.”
Video
Citation
From the September 25, 2026, evening edition of Real America's Voice's War Room
During the same edition Clark appeared on, election denial activist Cleta Mitchell made similar arguments, claiming that the 90-day moratorium was irrelevant because it “only applies to what the statute says is a systematic review and analysis of the voter rolls.” She called for a “very targeted process” of finding individuals who may be noncitizens. Mitchell encouraged people to use “citizen challenge laws” and go to their local election officials to demand “that those names come off before the election.”
Video
Citation
From the September 25, 2026, evening edition of Real America's Voice's War Room
During these interviews, Bannon raised the issue of whether Democrat-run states could be forced by DHS to use the SAVE database to clean their voter rolls. He asked Clark, “Practically, can the White House just tell people, Hey, the decree came out, and you're going to purge those voter rolls because the 90 days is not relevant?” Clark claimed the ruling will “disproportionately have an effect of making it harder to have the Democrats, you know, steal elections using illegals votes in red states than in blue states because, you know, it's not like Adrian Fontes in Arizona is going to be all hepped up about trying to get this information.” Mitchell argued that DHS “can make public the numbers, and they need to fight back when these blue state secretaries of state, these Democrat secretaries of state, who wanna act like there's nothing to see here. There's a lot to see here.”
Hans von Spakovsky — who has worked to “raise unfounded allegations of widespread voter fraud throughout the course of his decades-long career as a conservative activist” — also offered up action items on “blue states” that do not purge their voter rolls during a radio interview this week. He claimed that “there's one current remedy which is the U.S. Department of Justice suing California under the National Voter Registration Act, which requires states to maintain accurate voter rolls.”
Von Spakovsky also put forward that passing the SAVE America Act would “force blue states to actually check for citizenship” and agreed with the host that placing ICE agents at polling sites would deter noncitizens from voting.
Newsmax's Carl Higbie monologued about the ruling, calling it a “major win for the midterm elections” and saying he is “interested to see if this cuts away any historical Democrat voting numbers.”
Whether they are willfully ignoring the 90-day moratorium provision, arguing it simply does not count, or conspiring to create work-arounds, these right-wing media figures are more than happy to have the Supreme Court backing up their efforts to create chaos during the November elections.
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AN 10 16
Retired Judge J. Michael Luttig wrote a Substack column Thursday warning that the next big Jan. 6 will be Jan. 3 and that Americans should prepare for it to get ugly.
On Jan. 6, a president refused to accept his loss and relinquish his power in a peaceful transfer of the office, recalled Luttig.
"Today, almost six years later, the 47th President – the very same man – and his Republican congressional allies are determined to prosecute the president’s war against American democracy to its catastrophic end," he wrote. "That catastrophic end for which they senselessly yearn could well come on January 3, 2027, when Donald Trump and his Republican congressional allies wage the final battle in this president’s determined war to corrupt America’s democracy and deliver a lasting political victory over the Democrats for his MAGA Republican Party."
The next date for the transfer of power comes when the House and Senate will be sworn in. Luttig fears it will be the final dying breath of the GOP as they are forced to hand over power to those who defeated them.
"Since his return to the White House, the president’s every unconstitutional act in his effort to seize control over the midterm elections five weeks away – each hailed by his prostrate Republican Congress — has been toward the end of ensuring that Republicans retain a majority in the 120th Congress," explained Luttig.
He cited a conversation between Trump and Dan Bogino on February 2 in which Trump said, “The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over. We should take over the voting ... The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.’”
During his midterm convention in Dallas Trump pledged he'd give every American adult a $5,000 "dividend" if Republicans maintain power in the House and Senate. He also demanded that everyone attending the event swear an oath to him and the GOP to vote on Nov. 3.
"So unalterably subjugated to Trump is today’s Republican House that even a decisive victory for Democrats and a resounding repudiation of Trump and the MAGA Republicans at the polls in November will not guarantee that a Democratic majority-elect will be seated in the 120th Congress on January 3," Luttig cautioned.
The retired judge said that Trump has spent the past year pressuring Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and other House Republicans to treat a possible Democratic midterm win as fraudulent, even if all of the votes haven't been completely counted or even cast.
In Luttig’s view, that pressure is working: if Democrats win control of the House, Republicans may claim the election was stolen and, on Jan. 3, try to block some of the Democratic winners from being seated in the new Congress.
It appears that Johnson is on board: “We cannot and will not allow [the Democrats] to take the majority in the House of Representatives," he told members the following day.
"Over the past year and a half since his return to the White House, the 47th President has exploited every conceivable unlawful means possible to rig the upcoming midterm elections in favor of the Republicans, and the federal courts have struck down as unconstitutional every one of these unlawful attempts," said Luttig.
He warned that Trump is likely to "try every unlawful means over the next five weeks to ensure that Republicans handily win the midterm elections in November. Those of us who oppose his illegality will look to the courts, but the federal courts will be institutionally incapable of checking his final unlawful rampage."
He said that the only hope for America to dodge a constitutional crisis on Jan. 3 is for Republicans to be forced to answer whether they'll betray their oath of office for Trump one last time.
"America’s time of testing has finally come," said Luttig.
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AN 9 26
President Donald Trump has repeatedly said that he will do everything in his power to prevent Democrats from reclaiming either chamber of Congress in the upcoming midterm elections. Now Marc Elias, an election attorney who founded the voting rights organization Democracy Docket, is warning that Trump has already guaranteed the 2026 election will be historically unfair — even if Democrats do ultimately prevail.
"It is easy to look at the individual pieces," Elias told MS NOW host Nicolle Wallace on Tuesday. "We have a big victory, as you mentioned, in the Supreme Court, preventing an illegal gerrymander from going into effect in Missouri. There was a setback involving the ability of the SAVE database to be rolled out, halted in the Supreme Court. There was a victory you mentioned in the trial court. There have been other cases that have been filed, right? There's just a lot going on, but what it's doing is building and building and building toward Election Day. And there is no sign that Donald Trump is de-escalating. All the signs are that his administration is escalating and that his allies are escalating."
He added, "And I expect that that, Nicolle, is just what we are facing over the course of the next five weeks, and then, frankly, in the two or three weeks afterwards."
Wallace replied to Elias by asking, "What is the best-case scenario, then? Is the best-case scenario that the courts can handle the volume of frenetic garbage he throws at them, or what? You tell me. What's the best-case scenario?"
Elias replied, "The best-case scenario is that we are able to keep up with the vote suppressors and election deniers. We're able to bring litigation fast enough. We're able to get favorable results from the courts in enough cases that we have free and fair enough elections. There's no on/off switch there. It's a continuum."
He continued, "And I've said this before: I think the 2026 elections are going to be less free and fair, by relative standards, than the 2024 and 2022 elections. But we win enough of these cases that we are able to protect democracy, and then, frankly, Democrats sweep the House and the Senate in such convincing fashion that it demoralizes the post-election subversion efforts. It's one thing to try to steal a seat or five seats. It's another thing if they've lost five or six Senate seats and a couple dozen House seats. At that point, one hopes that it just becomes a big demoralizing factor, and that we're able to move forward."
Speaking to AlterNet earlier in September, constitutional law professor at Loyola Law School constitutional law professor and former deputy assistant attorney general Justin Levitt countered the view among critics like Elias that Trump can rig the 2026 midterms.
"He is trying to project power that he does not have," Levitt told AlterNet about Trump. "He would love the American public to believe that he actually has operational control of forces able to execute on any of those five things or others, but he doesn't. He's not in charge of the systems that govern the election process. As much as he thinks he is, he's not."
He added, "And so I have firmly believed for a while that the single biggest risk to the '26 elections is that the American public falls for the marketing stunt and bestows magical wizard powers on a tired old man. That we do it to ourselves. That we get so spun up and freaked out thinking that he's got a magic ring that lets him do whatever he wishes that we decide to stay home, or we decide to trim our own sails, because we imbue him with an aura of invincibility that he has not earned and does not have."
Levitt concluded, "So I'm convinced the biggest risk — and I don't think it's actually going to happen; I think we're smarter than this — but I think the biggest risk is that we do it to ourselves, pretending he's got power he doesn't have because he desperately wants to convince us that he's got this power."
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NOTE ELECTION DENIER SEEDED INTO SYSTEM
A loyal supporter of President Donald Trump has been convicted on nine counts of election fraud, the *San Francisco Chronicle* reported Monday.
Gaea Powell, a Moms for Liberty activist, ran for a county clerk-recorder spot in a small California town, promising that she could improve "election integrity." As the Chronicle reported, "it turns out this conservative candidate wasn’t following election laws herself."
A county jury found Powell guilty of nine felony counts, including lying about her residence, unlawfully registering to vote and fraudulently voting.
It comes from both the 2022 and 2024 elections, when Powell ran for mayor of Arroyo Grande. She claims that she didn't know or attempt to commit fraud.
“I respect the jury’s role. But I am deeply disappointed by today’s verdict,” Powell’s statement said. “I have maintained from the beginning, and I maintain today, that I did not knowingly deceive anyone and did not act with fraudulent intent.”
Powell represented herself in court rather than hire a lawyer. She claimed that there was evidence that could have vindicated her, but that it was "excluded during the trial," the report said.
She claims she'll appeal.
As the report explained, it isn't the first time a conservative candidate who pledged to create strict voting laws has also been found guilty of breaking existing laws.
Trump supporter Tina Peters, a former Colorado clerk, tampered with voting machines and then claimed fraud in the 2020 election. She was commended by President Donald Trump.
Another is Chad Bianco from Riverside County, who was the sheriff at the time and was running for governor when he claimed voter fraud was a huge problem. He then seized hundreds of thousands of ballots. The case went all the way to the California Supreme Court, which ultimately ruled he broke the law.
The justices even went so far as to write that Bianco exposed the ballots to “alteration or tampering” when he illegally seized them.
The heavily Republican senior community in Florida, The Villages, had a small group of four residents caught voting twice in 2020. They voted in Florida in person and in a previous state by absentee ballot.
The Villages conspiracy made the cases politically notable because reports of their activity came as Trump claimed that Democrats had committed widespread fraud to steal the 2020 election.
In 2020, Republican Donald “Kirk” Hartle voted twice in Nevada: once for himself and again under his late wife's ballot.
A 64-year-old Republican woman even went so far as to use the "everybody does it," excuse when she cast a ballot in her deceased mother’s name in 2020. Reporting said she did so because she believed Democrats were committing widespread fraud.
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RWW 9 26 -->
David Gilbert @ Wired: Hundreds of Election Deniers Will Be on the Ballot This November
197 election deniers are running for Congress or statewide office in 43 states. Many of them are seeking roles that would put them in charge of voting for the 2028 presidential election.
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AN 9 26
President Donald Trump is struggling to keep Republicans in control of both Houses of Congress in the upcoming midterm elections — and, for that reason, reports indicate he has plans to steal them even if the courts find Democrats prevailed.
"Since Trump returned to office last year, his backers — including Bannon and a lawyer close to Trump — have pressed the president to declare a national emergency that they say would unlock powers for him to rewrite election rules," The Washington Post's Patrick Marley and Laura Meckler reported on Sunday. "The idea resurfaced last month, when Trump appeared on a Real America’s Voice program hosted by Wayne Allyn Root. With election legislation stalled in the Senate, Root pressed Trump to declare an emergency that he said would allow him to limit mail ballots and require people to prove their citizenship to register to vote."
Trump replied to Root, “Let me just say that stranger things have happened, okay? I’ll leave it at that.”
Even though it is likely courts would not uphold Trump abusing his emergency authority, the concern among legal authorities is that he could act in ways that impair the elections' integrity before the courts have a chance to stop him.
"On legal grounds, the theory that the president can claim power over elections by declaring an emergency is laughable, said Hofstra University law professor James Sample," the Post reported. "But Sample is treating it as deadly serious."
He added, "In the weeks after Trump lost the 2020 election, lawyers backing him came up with another theory Sample viewed as preposterous: that Vice President Mike Pence could reject some states’ electoral votes and let Trump claim victory. Pence refused, but the theory set the stage for the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The Constitution gives states and Congress authority over elections, not the president. A national emergency declaration triggers greater powers under federal law, Sample said, but none of them affect elections."
The journalists concluded, "The risk, he said, isn’t whether the notion would survive in court. It’s that Trump could use it to take sweeping actions while voting is ongoing and before courts can respond."
As Sample told them, “The idea is simply to do first and say, ‘So what?’ So much of Trump 2.0 is to outrun and outpace the courts.”
Indeed, the Post found that pro-Trump local politicians often make comments that suggest, through their words and actions, that they will toe the president's line on refusing to acknowledge elections unless their side wins.
"In 2022, commissioners in New Mexico’s Otero County listened as an attorney insisted they were obligated to certify that year’s midterm results," the Post reported. "This kind of motion was normally a drama-free event. But the three commissioners didn’t see it that way, and they delivered their votes in rapid succession: 'Nay,' 'Nay,' 'Nay.'"
The Post added, "Among other issues, they cited debunked conspiracy theories about Dominion Voting Systems machines that had circulated in MAGA circles since Trump refused to accept his 2020 defeat."
When an attorney said they were legally required to certify the results, Commissioner Vickie Marquardt laughed and said, "So then what? They’re going to send us to the pokey?”
Speaking to AlterNet in June, Pooja Chaudhuri, Senior Counsel/Deputy Legal Director at Democracy Defenders Fund who specializes in voting rights, expressed alarm at the possibility of Trump stealing the election through a variety of tactics.
“I think there are two things to consider," Chaudhuri told AlterNet. "One is that the election is made up of voters, and so the outcome depends on people turning out to the polls and voting. The problem is ... the chilling effect on voters.”
Chaudhuri continued, “When voters hear that ICE may be deployed to the polls, that mail-in voting rules are changing close to the election, a lot of voters might say, ‘I'm just not going to go out and vote.’ That could happen in many different ways. There are vulnerable communities — people may come from mixed-status families — they're US citizens, but they might decide, "I'm not going to vote." So one aspect is the chilling effect on voters that all of these actions would have.” In addition to that factor, Chaudhuri worried that both gerrymandering and the FBI's recent seizure of Fulton County, GA, could also keep voters away from the polls.
“We're going to see consequences in terms of voters saying, ‘I don't want the FBI to get my personal ballot in the future,’” Chaudhuri concluded. “So, to sum up, I do agree that putting it all together, it does paint an ominous picture.”
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AN 9 26
President Donald Trump is struggling to keep Republicans in control of both Houses of Congress in the upcoming midterm elections — and, for that reason, reports indicate he has plans to steal them even if the courts find Democrats prevailed.
"Since Trump returned to office last year, his backers — including Bannon and a lawyer close to Trump — have pressed the president to declare a national emergency that they say would unlock powers for him to rewrite election rules," The Washington Post's Patrick Marley and Laura Meckler reported on Sunday. "The idea resurfaced last month, when Trump appeared on a Real America’s Voice program hosted by Wayne Allyn Root. With election legislation stalled in the Senate, Root pressed Trump to declare an emergency that he said would allow him to limit mail ballots and require people to prove their citizenship to register to vote."
Trump replied to Root, “Let me just say that stranger things have happened, okay? I’ll leave it at that.”
Even though it is likely courts would not uphold Trump abusing his emergency authority, the concern among legal authorities is that he could act in ways that impair the elections' integrity before the courts have a chance to stop him.
"On legal grounds, the theory that the president can claim power over elections by declaring an emergency is laughable, said Hofstra University law professor James Sample," the Post reported. "But Sample is treating it as deadly serious."
He added, "In the weeks after Trump lost the 2020 election, lawyers backing him came up with another theory Sample viewed as preposterous: that Vice President Mike Pence could reject some states’ electoral votes and let Trump claim victory. Pence refused, but the theory set the stage for the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The Constitution gives states and Congress authority over elections, not the president. A national emergency declaration triggers greater powers under federal law, Sample said, but none of them affect elections."
The journalists concluded, "The risk, he said, isn’t whether the notion would survive in court. It’s that Trump could use it to take sweeping actions while voting is ongoing and before courts can respond."
As Sample told them, “The idea is simply to do first and say, ‘So what?’ So much of Trump 2.0 is to outrun and outpace the courts.”
Indeed, the Post found that pro-Trump local politicians often make comments that suggest, through their words and actions, that they will toe the president's line on refusing to acknowledge elections unless their side wins.
"In 2022, commissioners in New Mexico’s Otero County listened as an attorney insisted they were obligated to certify that year’s midterm results," the Post reported. "This kind of motion was normally a drama-free event. But the three commissioners didn’t see it that way, and they delivered their votes in rapid succession: 'Nay,' 'Nay,' 'Nay.'"
The Post added, "Among other issues, they cited debunked conspiracy theories about Dominion Voting Systems machines that had circulated in MAGA circles since Trump refused to accept his 2020 defeat."
When an attorney said they were legally required to certify the results, Commissioner Vickie Marquardt laughed and said, "So then what? They’re going to send us to the pokey?”
Speaking to AlterNet in June, Pooja Chaudhuri, Senior Counsel/Deputy Legal Director at Democracy Defenders Fund who specializes in voting rights, expressed alarm at the possibility of Trump stealing the election through a variety of tactics.
“I think there are two things to consider," Chaudhuri told AlterNet. "One is that the election is made up of voters, and so the outcome depends on people turning out to the polls and voting. The problem is ... the chilling effect on voters.”
Chaudhuri continued, “When voters hear that ICE may be deployed to the polls, that mail-in voting rules are changing close to the election, a lot of voters might say, ‘I'm just not going to go out and vote.’ That could happen in many different ways. There are vulnerable communities — people may come from mixed-status families — they're US citizens, but they might decide, "I'm not going to vote." So one aspect is the chilling effect on voters that all of these actions would have.” In addition to that factor, Chaudhuri worried that both gerrymandering and the FBI's recent seizure of Fulton County, GA, could also keep voters away from the polls.
“We're going to see consequences in terms of voters saying, ‘I don't want the FBI to get my personal ballot in the future,’” Chaudhuri concluded. “So, to sum up, I do agree that putting it all together, it does paint an ominous picture.”
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Conservative columnist David French has a warning for Americans who oppose President Donald Trump: The party's recent actions in Missouri foreshadow how they plan on undermining democracy in the upcoming midterm elections.
"It’s only September, and America just barely averted the first constitutional crisis of this year’s midterm elections," The New York Times columnist David French wrote on Sunday. "Hang with me here because this gets a bit complicated. Last September, the Missouri Legislature passed a redistricting bill called H.B. 1. This bill was part of the wave of mid-decade census redistricting initiated after President Trump essentially ordered the state of Texas in July to redistrict to create more Republican-majority congressional districts and diminish Democratic voting power in the state."
French then described how Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, despite being repeatedly ordered by both the US Supreme Court and the Missouri Supreme Court to implement a non-gerrymandered congressional map, was "brazen" in defying those court orders in order to push through a map that would benefit Trump's Republican Party.
"The secretary of state wrote an email directing that the new maps should still be used in November, directly defying the Missouri Supreme Court," French reported. "The court was not amused and immediately scheduled a hearing for Sept. 10 to determine whether to hold Hoskins in contempt of court."
After ultimately and begrudgingly complying with the Missouri Supreme Court's ruling, which the US Supreme Court reinforced, French wrote that Hoskins was found to have "engaged in 'contumacious conduct' (strong words in legalese that mean willfully disobedient or rebellious) — but that he’d 'purged' himself of his contempt through his belated compliance. A fraudulent election was averted, for now."
He concluded, "I wanted to walk through this situation in detail because it’s indicative of exactly how MAGA attempts to fix elections. It uses the complexity of the law (and public ignorance of the law) to obscure the utter brazenness of its defiance."
The Missouri incident is just one of many that indicate Trump is planning on stealing the 2026 midterm elections. Earlier in September, The Washington Post's Patrick Marley and Laura Meckler reported on how Trump is contemplating declaring a national emergency so he can meddle with the results.
"Since Trump returned to office last year, his backers — including Bannon and a lawyer close to Trump — have pressed the president to declare a national emergency that they say would unlock powers for him to rewrite election rules," The Post reported. "The idea resurfaced last month, when Trump appeared on a Real America’s Voice program hosted by Wayne Allyn Root. With election legislation stalled in the Senate, Root pressed Trump to declare an emergency that he said would allow him to limit mail ballots and require people to prove their citizenship to register to vote."
Trump then told Root, "Let me just say that stranger things have happened, okay? I’ll leave it at that.”
"What they all add up to is a desire to avoid any accountability to the voters in the midterm elections — to ensure, to preordain the outcome of a midterm that he thinks is going to go badly for him,” Dan Vicuña, Senior Policy Director for Voting and Fair Representation at Common Cause, told AlterNet in June. “We know, from the Big Lie of the 2020 election to spurring on a violent revolt to overthrow a free and fair election, that he has no respect for democratic norms, for the voice of the people. This is entirely about his own power and his own ego. He will even invest in protecting that ego and protecting his power at the expense of the needs of the public. People are suffering with high gas prices and affordability issues, and he does not care. All that matters is protecting his power, and he has no interest in whether he does that through democratic means.”
He added, “I think this all adds up to a desire to ensure that his party stays in power and his ability to do what he wants — to attack vulnerable communities — remains intact.”
“I think some of these attempts to federalize, to nationalize elections are clearly illegal,” Vicuña concluded. “You've seen some of that overreach already struck down — attempts to order independent agencies to force a strict voter ID requirement on people. That has been rejected. Common Cause is in court challenging the latest executive order to turn the United States Postal Service into some election administration agency and to create a further bureaucratic layer to make it more difficult to vote by mail. In terms of the president's authority to order around USPS, it's illegal. In terms of USPS's authority to become some sort of national election administration agency, it far exceeds the legal authority that Congress gave to the postal service. The statute describing what kind of work the postal service would do is about postal service work — processing mail and selling stamps. It has nothing to do with election administration.”
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AN 9 26
Former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor sounded the alarm against a piece of tech he thinks his ex-boss is trying to use to block voters from the polls.
According a column on his Substack for the group DEFIANCE.org, Taylor said that an immigration-verification tool called SAVE would give the federal government an unprecedented role in elections, which are traditionally run by states and local governments. SAVE stands for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements.
One of the key reasons that the American elections are so difficult to hack is how decentralized they are. Each state has its own election rules, and each county has its own process. So there are thousands of different variables. A foreign adversary that breaches one system can only impact that specific jurisdiction. But if Trump creates a centralized federal database, it would be a massive change that could be hacked all in one place. Taylor called it a kind of "Master Switch" that a foreign adversary could flip to decide that millions of people are suddenly ineligible to vote.
"Former homeland security officials like myself have watched in slow-motion horror as the administration moves to hand control of American elections to a tiny DHS office (partially run by contractors) that receives the least congressional oversight and scrutiny of almost any corner of the department," wrote Taylor.
What makes SAVE different is that it's already a program being implemented under DHS for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). That office operates independently of Congress because it is funded by immigration application fees rather than congressional appropriations.
"In my experience, offices like that behaved like fiefdoms, because functionally they were, i.e. they were self-funding, self-directing, and accustomed to minimal scrutiny. That also means they’re places where it’s especially tough to shine a light," Taylor warned.
SAVE wasn't built to handle elections, though. The aim was to stop benefits fraud.
An example he cited comes from Missouri, which used SAVE's database to make allegations about "noncitizen voters" before it ever actually verified them. Local clerks were told to flag them as temporarily unable to vote.
"In hundreds of cases the tool was simply wrong, and in one county more than half of those flagged as noncitizens proved to be U.S. citizens. In another case, Texas flagged 2,724 voters as suspicious based on SAVE data and began demanding proof of citizenship, only to discover some of those removed already had proof on file with the state, which ordered them reinstated," Taylor revealed.
He said that it's clearly disenfranchising voters. Already seven states have run roughly 35 million voters through the system and flagged 4,200 people. That's 0.01 percent of voters. Those haven't even been verified for accuracy. Now Trump wants to deploy it across the U.S. to decide whether people get to vote.
He recalled during his time at DHS that they had been doing a deep dive into what Russia did to the U.S. during the 2016 election and noted that experts are still trying to map out everything ten years later.
"In its comprehensive review, the Senate Intelligence Committee found that Russian actors targeted election systems in all fifty states; in one, Illinois, they evidently penetrated the voter database and were 'in a position to delete or change voter data.' So why weren’t they able to manipulate the election outcome? Well, one reason is that there wasn’t some central nervous system for them to attack. Our elections are scattered across those all of those fifty states and thousands of counties, on different systems built by different vendors. So breaking into Illinois only got them as far as Illinois," he said.
Under Trump's new system, "a savvy hacker" or a group of hacktivists like "Anonymous" could easily access whether an entire party or demographic could be blocked from the polls.
Finally, he warns that centralizing voter eligibility would also give whoever controls the White House a lot of influence at a time when Americans already don't trust the executive branch.
He championed the states refusing to turn over voter-roll data, noting that they are protecting election security, not undermining it.
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AN 9 26
On Thursday, a former federal judge detailed what he deemed “the final battle for America’s democracy,” laying out President Donald Trump’s plan to seize power on January 3, 2027. This is according to attorney and former U.S. Circuit Judge Michael Luttig, who warns that “Trump and his MAGA Republicans might bury our democracy once and for all.”
“Trump instigated a war against America’s democracy on January 6, 2021,” asserts Luttig. “Today, almost six years later, Donald Trump and his Republican congressional allies are even more determined to prosecute the president’s war against American democracy to its catastrophic end than they were on January 6, 2021. That catastrophic end could well come on January 3, 2027, when Trump and his Republican congressional allies wage the final battle in Trump’s determined war to corrupt America’s democracy and deliver a lasting political victory over the Democrats for his MAGA Republican Party.”
Over the course of his second term, says Luttig, Trump has taken steps to “seize control of the midterms” to ensure that Republicans retain a majority in the 120th Congress. As Trump himself declared in February, “The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over. We should take over the voting.’ ... The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.” And the Republicans, notes Luttig, “have dutifully fallen in line … So unalterably subjugated to Trump is today’s Republican House that even a decisive victory for Democrats and a resounding repudiation of Trump and the MAGA Republicans at the polls in November will not guarantee that a Democratic majority-elect will be seated in the 120th Congress on January 3.”
The core of the plan involves a Republican plot to claim the election was rigged after they lose. According to Luttig, “This is how the crisis would unfold. The precursor of the crisis will come sometime before noon on January 3, when Speaker [Mike] Johnson (R-LA) removes current House Clerk Kevin McCumber and replaces him with a person loyal to Johnson and House Republicans who they know will refuse to list on the statutory roll of representatives-elect to the 120th Congress any Democrat-elect whom Johnson and the Republicans direct him or her not to list. Under Rule II, Clause 1 of the Rules of the House, the Speaker of the House has the unilateral power to remove the incumbent clerk, and then the power under Title 2 U.S.C. § 5501(a) to replace him temporarily with whomever he wishes until the House elects a successor.
McCumber is a Republican appointed by former Speaker Kevin McCarthy. He is widely respected for his integrity and faithful adherence to the Constitution and is reputed to be unwilling to carry out orders he considers to be unconstitutional.”
“The constitutional crisis will begin, warns Luttig, when “sometime before the 120th Congress has been gaveled into session, the loyal temporary clerk refuses to list Democrat representatives-elect on the clerk’s roll of representatives-elect that determines who may participate in organizing the new Congress.” Such action will be met with lawsuits arguing that the clerk must perform its mandated action, which will work their way through appeals. “The next moment of constitutional crisis will come if and when,” says Luttig, the court orders the elected Democratic representatives be seated and the clerk refuses. “Judicial review of the House’s decision not to seat Democratic representatives-elect in the 120th Congress would take weeks, if not months, during which time the United States would be in the throes of a paralyzing constitutional crisis.”
From there, the matter would end up before the Supreme Court, which would be forced to answer “perhaps the most fundamental question under the Constitution: Is the United States of America a democracy, in which ‘We the People’ elect our representatives to the Congress and to the presidency, or is it not?” Should the Court decide to side with Republican claims of fraud, Luttig concludes, “two hundred and fifty years into the greatest experiment in self-government in the history of the world, the Republican Party would finally meet the fate to which it has been destined since January 6, 2021, and cement its place in history as the most corrupt political party ever to emerge in the United States of America.”
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mma 8 26
Roger Stone says national emergency declaration for elections is “brilliant” and “revolutionary”
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MSNBC 8 26 NOT TRYING TO PROVE BIG LIE IN CT, JUST GIN UP A GOOD ENOUGH STORY TO DECLARE EMERGENCY
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AN 8 26
Cleta Mitchell: “We had three networks that didn't cover the president's speech. I want to know what their relationship is with China.”
Written by Media Matters Staff
Published 08/28/26
Video
Citation
From the August 27, 2026, edition of Real America's Voice's Just the News No Noise
JOHN SOLOMON (HOST): I want to turn to something that is now sort of a repeat theme and just what the White House Transparency Task Force is getting out there. We knew in 2020 that Venezuela hacked the machine. We knew that there were five foreign powers who could hack our machines, that had the capability in 2020. We knew that China took 220 million of our voter files, and we knew that illegal aliens were getting on the voter rolls. And we knew now, in 2020 we knew that these foreign-made parts were there. That's the first time that the intelligence community learned that there were foreign parts, the Chinese parts, in our machines. Six years passed with almost no action until President Trump jumps into the breach this last month. How did we go six years with an intelligence community knowing all these threats and almost no action?
CLETA MITCHELL (GUEST): You know, John, that is such a good question, because let me add to that. And you referenced it today in the Just the News article. In 2019, Sen. Wyden and Sen. Klobuchar introduced a bill. They had 40 co-sponsors and many of the — most Democrats — and that would have strengthened the oversight of the voting machines, the voting technology. And Sen. Wyden gave a floor speech on the Senate floor in July 2019, where he was castigating his Republican colleagues for not paying attention to the intelligence reports and the threats that had been conveyed to the intelligence committee, to the Senate Intelligence Committee, about the vulnerability of the voting systems.
Now, as soon as Biden gets elected, and when President Trump, who is looking at the 2020 election and saying, gee, there seems to be a lot wrong here, the Democrats completely went silent. Not only that, they wanted to silence anyone who was criticizing the voting technology. Don't forget all the things that they have done, that they did, and continue to try to silence those of us who ask questions.
So my question is, how is it that the Democrats were so concerned about it? Look at the videos of Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi. The movie that they made, Kill Chain, about the vulnerabilities of the voting machines. And suddenly after 2020, they forgot all of that. And now they say that we're crazy people because now we see that the intelligence community knew things and they didn't tell anybody. And they particularly kept it from President Trump and then subsequently President Biden. I mean, John, we wouldn't know any of this if you hadn't gone into the administration temporarily as a special government employee to get all of this out in the public. But my question is, it's still going on, this gaslighting, this disregarding.
We had three networks that didn't cover the president's speech. I want to know what their relationship is with China, why they wouldn't want to have covered the president's speech in which he told the truth about China's interference. And I want to know where those Democrats are today who were so concerned in 2019. Now we have the proof of it, and there's nowhere to be heard. And in fact, all they want to do is tell us to be quiet.
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an 8 26
With the midterms right around the corner and President Donald Trump relentlessly pressing his conspiracies about voter fraud, an insider and whistleblower from his first term has revealed that his “tin-foil hat” plan to “interfere in the democratic process” is underway. This is according to Miles Taylor, who served as Deputy Chief of Staff in the Department of Homeland Security during Trump’s first administration and exposed a number of its secrets. On Wednesday, he sounded the alarm that a plot Trump began nearly a decade ago is coming to its most dangerous phase.
Over the course of the past year, Trump and his allies have been asked repeatedly whether federal troops will be stationed at polling places during the midterms. They have tended to dodge the question, saying there are “no plans” to do so without ruling it out. But “evidently,” writes Taylor, “all of that controversy was aimed at the wrong place. While Washington officials debated Election Day polling sites, the administration was quietly reassigning battalions of officers to start homing in on the election from their cubicles, combing through voter rolls in a secret operation without precedent.”
Taylor is referencing new bombshell reporting by the Washington Post, which revealed on Tuesday, writes Taylor, “that hundreds of federal immigration officers at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, including the specialists who vet immigration applications for fraud and security threats, have been pulled off their day jobs and reassigned to monitor voting lists for supposed noncitizen voters. This places DHS agents directly into a role that was never envisioned when the Department was created and which has ominous implications for the midterms and future elections.” Despite the fact that they are being intentionally obscure about this, says Taylor, “the Trump administration expects Americans to trust that they are merely hunting for ‘illegal’ registrants. Yet the operation raises urgent questions about potential abuse, oversight, and whether DHS agents will play a larger role in unlawfully purging American citizens from voter rolls.”
It’s all part of a wider effort, asserts Taylor, to convert “the Justice Department’s Voting Section from a shield for voters into a weapon against them. His administration has sued at least 30 states and the District of Columbia to extract voter roll data, ordered federal agencies to build ‘approved’ lists of voters, and as we speak, is still moving ahead with plans to control the delivery of ballots in the mail.”
All of this began under Trump’s first term, according to Taylor, who writes, “I dealt with this in the first Trump administration, when the White House sent us on a foolish odyssey at DHS to expose this (non-existent) nationwide voter fraud conspiracy it keeps talking about. There wasn’t any evidence of such a conspiracy. It was tin-foil hat stuff. But I realize now the point was never to find the fraud. The point was to manufacture a number big enough to justify voter purges, prosecutions of election officials, and federal interference in states where the White House expects to lose. That’s what they’re doing now.”
He notes that thousands of DHS agents and federal prosecutors have been reassigned from their actual responsibilities and directed to help the president “seize control over who is allowed to cast a ballot.” For example, “the Trump administration continues to assert that all of its efforts are focused on the phantom menace of ‘noncitizen voters.’ But the pretext is collapsing under its own weight. Trump and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin claim they’ve found roughly 278,000 noncitizens are unlawfully registered to vote in the United States. But when Nevada pressed the department on Mullin’s claim of 16,000 in their state, DHS admitted it had confirmed just 185, then refused to hand over the names so the state could investigate.”
According to Taylor, “Nothing in American history looks like this. At all. Yet there are plenty of examples of regimes around the world mounting election takeovers that look very similar. Students of history would call it authoritarianism.”
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AN 8 26 VID
President Donald Trump's loyalist and election denier, Tina Peters, is on a roadshow. Peters managed to score a commutation from a Democratic governor after her conviction for state crimes around the 2020 election. She was slated to be in jail for nine years. She only served 20 months.
The new election conspiracy roadshow drew the attention of CNN reporter Marshall Cohen, who spoke with host Dana Bash on Friday. Bash questioned whether Peters has able to do much since she's "preaching to the converted." Cohen explained it's all about access.
Peters has met with the White House, the Commerce and the Justice Departments.
"The question of influence is something we're going to find out as we get closer and closer to the midterms and see if the president enacts some of these very extreme and aggressive ideas and proposals that Tina Peters is pitching," Cohen warned. "You just saw on your screen photos of her meetings this week in Washington, D.C.. She sat down with Harmeet Dhillon, who is the chief of the Justice Department's civil rights division."
Dhillon has been pushing her own election changes while at the DOJ.
Peters also met with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, which prompted questions on Lutnick's role in elections.
"The Commerce Department is home to the Census Bureau [which] put out a report claiming that there were tons of non-citizens voting in elections," Cohen explained. "It suggests that the office is also trying to play in this space, which is why it's notable that Tina Peters is meeting with him."
He said he spoke with Peters' lawyer Peter Ticktin, "who is also pushing for some very aggressive moves before the election."
According to his comments, Peters "has a plan."
"And I don't know whether, you know, she'll get the support to make sure her plan gets implemented. Her plan differs from mine greatly. It's still going to need an emergency order in order to have it happen," Ticktin said.
The idea of declaring a national emergency so the president can take over the 2026 midterm elections isn't a "hypothetical situation," said Stateline.
Nick Brown, Washington state’s Democratic attorney general, said that they're already preparing for Trump's attempts to nationalize the election.
Last week, when asked about nationalizing the election, Trump told a conservative commentator, "Stranger things have happened, OK? I’ll leave it at that.”
Trump has yet to hit the "nuclear option," said Cohen. He also noted all of this is coming, again, because Democratic Gov. Jared Polis (Co.) commuted Peters' sentence, releasing her early.
"He said, it's the right thing to do, but he's disappointed in what she's up to in Washington," said the reporter.
The other thing that is making officials "lose their mind," Cohen said, is that Peters could be appointed to a post to consult on election security for the state of California. The post was offered by the Shasta County election official, who is a 2020 election denier.
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1ST NON WACKO CALL?
MMA
08/18/26
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8 26
BREAKING: Trump DOJ Announces 1,000 Monitors to Watch You Vote
1K POLL WATCHERS HARMEET
Aug 17, 2026
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon just announced the Justice Department will deploy 1,000 election observers for the midterms. The DOJ wants you to think this is business as usual, but Democracy Docket founder Marc Elias breaks down why this deployment is anything but and how it's laying the groundwork for what comes after Election Day. Meanwhile, it's no surprise the announcement comes the same day the DOJ lost its 23rd straight court case over access to sensitive voter data. Plus, where are these 1,000 monitors actually coming from?
https://demdock.com/4fBUQam00:00 DOJ Announces Plan For 1,000 Election Monitors 01:09 Harmeet Dillon Announces Election Observers 02:34 Playing Dillon's Full Announcement Clip 03:44 Dillon Normalizes an Unprecedented Power Grab 05:02 DOJ Run By Election Deniers, Not Independent 07:02 Where Will These Thousand Monitors Come From 09:43 History Proves The Alarm Was Justified 11:19 DOJ Loses 23 Straight Voter Data Cases 15:39 What Observers Can And Cannot Legally Do 17:49 How You Can Help Protect The Vote Democracy Docket is the leading digital news platform covering voting rights and elections in the courts — from an unapologetically pro-democracy and independent standpoint.
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an 8 26
First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli promised President Donald Trump that California was “a fraudster’s paradise,” and pledged would announce charges within weeks of his appointment. That was two months ago.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported on Friday that Essayli talked a big game but has failed to deliver.
After the California primary election, Trump and Republicans sounded the alarm that there had to be fraud going on because it was taking too long to count the ballots in Los Angeles County.
"They are trying to steal the governor of California primary, and the mayor of Los Angeles, primary, away from two great Republican candidates. Here we go with the very late and massive numbers of mail in ballots," Trump ranted in all-caps on Truth Social.
Essayli posted his own promise to Trump on X, saying, "Without commenting on any specific investigation, my office has multiple election fraud investigations underway in coordination with @FBILosAngeles . We will follow the evidence wherever it leads and prosecute any violations of federal election law to the fullest extent."
Only a few days later, he was speaking to Glenn Beck, promising to charge individual actors “in the next … one to two months.”
“I hate to put timelines on things,” Essayli said. “We need some of these results to be certified so we can prove some of the allegations. But we will be charging some people.”
He also called on the public to send tips proving voter fraud was "widespread" in California.
“We are looking for any widespread conspiracy, if you will. Right now, I would say our investigations lean more into individual actors,” he explained. “Theoretically, I’d have to charge thousands of people to prove that it changed the outcome of the election. … But we are looking. We are looking.”
When he spoke to Chris Cuomo on News Nation, Essayli said, “there is evidence of voter fraud … and when we’re ready to bring those cases, you’ll see the evidence. You’ll see the case.”
But, that was at the beginning of the summer. On June 14, Essayli promised KCRA news, “So some of them are more developed and they’re ready to charge.”
After nothing for months, it appears the prosecutor is beginning to change the narrative, the report explained. The Chronicle cited Essayli, saying that to get access to the voter rolls, the Justice Department must sue the state of California and it might take a while.
A constitutional law professor explained how situations like this go beyond a debate about whether widespread voter fraud exists.
“At this point, unfortunately, I don’t know why anybody would believe the Department of Justice,” said Justin Levitt, who teaches at the Loyola Law School. “And that is not a thing that I relish saying as somebody who used to work there … It’s also not something that I would have said in the administration of any individual other than President Trump.”
When The Chronicle called the office to ask what the hold-up was, they were told they'd have an update in two weeks.
“It turns out that voter fraud does occasionally happen, but it is incredibly rare, like single-digits-of-balance rare,” Levitt said. “The elections in California, the elections in Southern California, the elections in other parts of California are very clean. And election officials work incredibly hard to make sure that they’re very clean. It does great disservice to the election officials when people run their mouths.”
He explained that Essayli is "a piece" of the larger whole of the Justice Department and currently the DOJ doesn't enjoy much credibility in court.
“I’m not sure this U.S. attorney has established himself as a trusted local partner with the sort of vague allegations of widespread wrongdoing that he hasn’t been able to back up. To be clear, he hasn’t been able to back it up because I don’t personally believe that these things he was saying are true," Levitt said.
Trump and Republican allies spent over a week spreading claims that fraud was afoot in California and calling for action. Levitt explained that these kinds of conspiracy theories from officials spread further mistrust and sow doubt.
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The forgotten tape proving the GOP never stopped rigging democracy
Thom Hartmann August 13, 2026
Back in the days when conservatives were so hungry for media platforms that they’d come on progressive shows, I used to regularly debate Wayne Allen Root (here and here, for example). Instead of trying to convince me, though, Root has recently taken to giving Trump ideas about things to do, like stealing the election this fall.
On his show on “Real” America’s Voice, Root told Trump:
“Let me put an idea in your head. Because it’s so hard to get the Senate to do anything, now they’re on recess, they never get anything done. If they never get the SAVE America Act done, you have the right to declare a national security emergency for elections. …
“And the Supreme Court ruled in 1983, under Reagan, in INS vs. Chadha that if you declare a national security emergency as the President of the United States, they can’t challenge it. It can only be overturned by a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress.
“So if you do this in the next month, we will get photo ID, proof of citizenship, and a limit to mail-in ballots, and you don’t even need the Senate’s vote.”
Trump seemed both unsurprised and unfazed, as if this were a regular topic of conversation in the White House.
“Let me just say that stranger things have happened,” he replied, adding, “OK, I’ll leave it at that.”
Since 1968, stealing elections has become a sport for Republicans. That was the year that Nixon was running for president against VP Hubert Humphrey — who had just successfully negotiated peace between North and South Vietnam — when Nixon had his people reach out to the leaders of South Vietnam and promise them riches if they’d refuse to go to Paris and sign the deal.
When the FBI informed President Johnson about it, he correctly called it “treason,” although we didn’t learn about it until years later when the LBJ Library released the tapes.
In 1980, it was Reagan’s turn to steal an election. Jimmy Carter was riding high in the wake of Nixon’s resignation and VP Agnew’s stepping down to avoid a bribery prosecution, but then the Iranians seized the American embassy in Tehran.
The president of Iran, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, wanted to release the hostages and had worked out a deal with Carter to do just that, but the Reagan campaign met with the Ayatollah’s people and promised to sell them weapons and military spare parts if they’d just hold the hostages until after the election, destroying Carter’s re-election chances.
The hostages were released, by way of sealing the deal, at the exact moment when Reagan put his hand on the bible to be sworn in, and for years Reagan shipped them banned weaponry until the deal was busted wide open as the Iran-Contra Scandal.
In 2000, Republicans knew the election would probably come down to Florida, the state then run by candidate George W. Bush’s brother Jeb, so Jeb had his secretary of state purge at least 50,000 Black people from the voting rolls just months before the election. His brother won the state, and thus the White House, by 537 votes: it would have been an epic loss without that last-minute voter purge. And then five corrupt Republicans on the US Supreme Court shut down the Florida Supreme Court-mandated recount, which would’ve revealed the purge.
None of these Republican election thefts are controversial; all are well-documented.
As was Trump’s willingness to see his own Vice President, Mike Pence, hanged by an angry mob if that was what it’d take to keep Donald in the White House for another four years. It’s safe to assume that if he was okay with that, there’s nothing off the table for this fall.
While Trump’s legal power to seize control of our election this fall is in dispute, his ability to disrupt it isn’t.
— He’s already issued an executive order directing the Post Office to refuse to deliver ballots to or from citizens not on his approved voter list or in states that refused to give him their voter rolls. Postmaster General David Steiner says he’s willing to do what Trump wants.
— A federal judge back last October ordered ICE to provide his court with the details of ICE’s plans for this fall’s election and ten months later they’re still stonewalling, refusing to turn over any internal documents.
— Reuters reported last month that White House officials had already discussed declaring a national emergency and creating a federal voting task force, including ways of bypassing the Election Assistance Commission and seizing control of voting and vote-tabulating machines.
— Voters in 41 states have election deniers on the ballot this fall, while dozens of known election deniers have taken control of election-running positions across the country.
So, given that the feds are not only not going to help but are actively working toward rigging or even seizing control of this November’s election, it’s going to be up to us and the individual states to make sure our voices are heard and our votes are properly counted.
We should be thinking of this as an election continuity exercise that may not be necessary but, like wearing a seatbelt, could be essential if Trump tries to repeat 2020 in some way. At the moment, he’s essentially a cornered rat.
Therefore, Democrats must:
— Educate Americans about the Constitution, which hands elections off to the states exclusively with only minimal federal standards.
— If Trump tries to claim a national emergency — even if it has a real basis, like Iran hitting us hard or some other 9/11-type event — Americans need to know that we held elections through the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Republican Great Depression, both World Wars, and through other times of national crisis, and 2026 must not be an exception.
— States need to prepare for litigation with complaints, TRO motions, and even appellate briefs composed and ready to file on a moment’s notice. Taking days to fully respond to a Trump attempt to blow up our elections could be disastrous, as Al Gore learned 26 years ago.
— Involve Republicans when we can find the rare ones who will put country above party. Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of Georgia pushed back in 2021 when Trump tried to get him to “find” roughly eleven thousand ballots; we must be looking for other Republicans who may have enough integrity to resist a Trump-led coup attempt.
— Steel the spines of our election administrators by having their backs, both legally and physically. Secretaries of state, county clerks, election boards and governors should all know in advance exactly who has authority to order what. The last thing we want are thousands of local election officials asking, “Are we supposed to comply?” on Election Day. When coup attempts work it’s typically because they used the element of surprise to their benefit; we need to blunt that weapon.
— Prepare for Trump’s goons — federal (like ICE or the National Guard) or Proud Boys/Klan-types — around polling places. This is a violation of a federal law that dates back to the Civil War; it’s illegal for “troops or armed men” to show up at any polling places in the country, and the penalty is five years in prison.
— Encourage early voting and other ways to build redundancy into our election systems, and tell people to check their voter registration now at vote.org, particularly if they live in a Red state, as those states have been actively and aggressively purging their voting rolls for months now, especially in their blue cities.
— Be prepared for the corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court to intervene, as they did in the 2000 election, to try to hand various elections to Republicans. They’ve already granted Trump sweeping immunity from criminal acts, presumably including election fraud.
— Finally, as Al Gore can tell you from sad experience, we need to prepare for the inevitable onslaught of rightwing propaganda calling elections into question and claiming fraud.
People old enough to remember how the GOP gamed this in Florida in 2000 know what I’m talking about; Republican congressional staffers flew down to Florida (along with John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett) to pound on counting center windows and demand the election Al Gore won be given to the “rightful winner,” George W. Bush.
While Trump can’t legally cancel the election, the more he and his toadies can cast doubt on its legitimacy, the more likely it is that they can pull off the same type of coup as Republicans did in 1968, 1980, and 2000.
For over a decade now, close races immediately produce Republican claims of fraud: lawyers, election officials and communications systems must be fully prepared to deal with lies and propaganda long before November.
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mma
Trump says “stranger things have happened” after Wayne Allyn Root pitches his national security emergency idea on elections directly to him
Written by Media Matters Staff
Published 08/11/26
In an interview with Wayne Allyn Root, a host for Real America's Voice and longtime supporter of the president, Donald Trump appeared to give credence to the emerging far-right notion that he could declare a national emergency regarding elections. Trump previously distanced himself from the notion. Media Matters has been documenting this for months.
Media figures who've pushed claims of widespread election fraud — some of whom say they have been involved with drafting such an order that is “sitting on his [Trump’s] desk” — have urged Trump to give himself “king-like powers” by implementing the proposal, as it would supposedly empower Trump to “be able to make the rules” and use the National Guard to oversee midterm elections.
John Solomon, Steve Bannon, Cleta Mitchell, and others have appeared to signal that Trump could attempt to severely curtail voting rights under the pretext of declaring a national security emergency posed by China.
Media Matters has been covering the right-wing media personalities converging on the idea of an executive order for Trump to sign regarding elections for nearly a year. In fact, Wayne Allyn Root laid out the same plan to Steve Bannon weeks ago.
Update (8/11/26, 3:30 pm ET): At Election Law Blog, Rick Hasen lays out a case for vigilance but against panic:
This is ridiculous and people should not panic over it. The President has no role to play in running elections, a points courts have repeatedly raised in challenges to his two executive orders on elections. Calling it a “national emergency” doesn’t change things. There’s no part of the Constitution or federal law that would give the President power to say how states run their mail ballot programs, voter id, etc.
Now Trump could do a lot of things bad by declaring an emergency (Just Security has a good primer). Perhaps under the Insurrection Act he could try to mess with posting by sending troops into the streets. For many reasons that I’ve talked about elsewhere, it’s very unlikely he’s going to do that for political reasons. But even that is not a power over elections. (I’m also much more worried he will try to illegally mess with the tabulation and certification of votes if there is a close election for control of the House or Senate.)
This CAP report does a good job showing that a president’s declaration of a national emergency would not give him power over elections. But this has been the fever dream of the conspiratorial right for quite some time, going back to Cleta Mitchell floating this idea a couple of years ago.
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From the August 10, 2026, edition of Real America's Voice's America's Top Ten Countdown
WAYNE ALLYN ROOT (HOST): Let's segue way to the midterm. Listen. This is the whole ball of wax, the whole kit and kaboodle, the whole kitchen sink. We got to win the midterm because, otherwise, the last two years of your presidency, you and I both know you're not going to be able to pass anything. We got to win. So what's the strategy to win the midterm?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP (GUEST): Well, one thing is the Senate has to get going on SAVE America. I really believe that because people expect that to happen, and it has to happen. And you have a couple of Republicans who are voting for it, a few. You know, it's about an 89% issue with the overall population, including Democrats. SAVE America's voter ID — with photo, by the way. You know? It's nice to have them. They're fighting on the photo. We don't want a photo. Now why don't they want? Because they want to cheat. You know? It's very simple. There's only one reason. But we want to have that.
We want to have proof of citizenship. So it'd be nice to say, yes. I'm a citizen. Here's my citizenship. Proof of citizenship. And ideally, but we're not even stressing this because it's — that's only a 79% issue. You know, that's not in the 90s. The mail-in ballots are so corrupt. You know that.
ROOT: Right.
TRUMP: They're so corrupt. You saw it in California the other, a couple weeks ago when Spencer Pratt had a very substantial lead. And the election kept going on and on. You know, going on for weeks. It's — it might still be going on, actually. But, all of a sudden, you hear a report that the woman that nobody ever heard of is surging. Nobody ever heard of her. She's surging.
...
ROOT: So, let me put an idea in your head. OK? Because it's so hard to get the Senate to do anything, now they're on recess. They don't get anything done, if they never get the SAVE America Act done, you have the right to declare a national security emergency for elections and the Supreme Court ruled in 1983, under Reagan, that INS v. Chadha, that if you declare a national security emergency as the President of the United States, they can't challenge it. It can only be overturned by a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress. So if you do this in the next month, we will get photo ID, proof of citizenship, and a limit to mail-in ballots and you don't even need the Senate's vote.
TRUMP: Let me just say that stranger things have happened OK? I'll leave it at that.
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an 8 26
Trump has already said that he is considering seizing ballot boxes during the 2026 midterm elections, most recently during a radio appearance with far right host Wayne Allyn Root. Even though his attempts to gain access to state voter rolls have overwhelmingly lost in court, there are still concerns that his efforts could spread chaos and sow doubt as to the legitimacy of the results if Democrats win key races.
Now a former Trump official is getting into specifics about exactly what Trump plans on doing — and who should be worried.
“If you overlay the refusers (the states that declined to hand over their voter rolls to Trump’s DOJ) with this fall’s top battleground races, then thirteen light up as high risk: Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin,” wrote former Trump Homeland Security adviser Miles Taylor on Tuesday. “These states are home to some of the most important House and Senate toss-up races. Depending on how the results look after Election Day, the Fulton scheme could hypothetically be carried out in any of them.”
He added, “These thirteen are the likeliest targets, but they aren’t the only states at risk. There are battleground states that actually cooperated with the DOJ’s voter roll demands — including Ohio, Texas, Iowa, Florida, Nebraska, and North Carolina — that could be hit, too. Here the pretext would simply be flipped around: We ran the voter lists they gave us, and we found anomalies. So we have to go investigate.”
Even though Trump’s ballot box seizures are unlikely to hold up in court, Taylor added, he could still tamper with the results. Similarly, all it takes is a single magistrate judge to grant Trump access to the boxes in the first place, which is enough to create distrust in the result.
“In the end, Trump’s team doesn’t care about losing in court,” Taylor wrote. “All they care about is fighting the battle in the court of public opinion for two months — between the election on November 3, 2026, and January 3, 2027, when the next Congress is supposed to be seated. That’s long enough to diminish confidence in the results and to create enough justification for Speaker Mike Johnson to secure support from his caucus not to hand over power. Indeed, under the law, the House majority has the final say over who gets seated in the chamber.”
Taylor offered specific suggestions as to what advocates of democracy can do to stop this from happening.
“Attorneys general should consider sending public letters to the chief judges of every federal district in their states putting them on alert,” Taylor said. “The letters should ask that any warrant application having to do with ballots or election equipment be heavily scrutinized and challenged, or elevated to a district judge. These frontline judges are the last check before the FBI trucks roll in, and after what happened in Fulton County, all of them need to know that they might be served bogus claims from the FBI for seizing America’s votes.”
He added, “In the meantime, every at-risk state must have their emergency motions pre-drafted and ready to file within hours (fortunately, many already do). Secretaries of state should harden the chain of custody for ballots so an FBI seizure can’t feed on ambiguity. Local prosecutors must know their election-interference statutes front and back and be ready to prosecute lawbreaking feds (at DEFIANCE.org, we’ve helped many of them gear up to do precisely that). Finally, states should keep coordinating as a bloc, pre-bunking the ‘uncertainty’ narrative before the Trump administration decides which races it wants to contest.”
Speaking to AlterNet about this issue, Rutgers University political scientist Saladin Ambar — who specializes in the history of race in America — elucidated how the president is likely to play on racist sentiments to validate his actions with the public.
“Without any involvement of, or connection to race, Trump, I think, because of his ego, his obsessive will to power, is more than capable of finding other rationales and/or building blocks to make a ‘case for a national emergency’ to call off or delay the midterm,” Ambar told AlterNet.
He added, “What I will say is that going back, frankly, to our Declaration of Independence, which accused King George of fomenting insurrection and by that [Thomas] Jefferson was alluding to British support for some African Americans who were obviously enslaved to join the rebellion and to take up arms against the colonies at the time, going all the way back to the Declaration, presidents have and/or statesmen in America have used the fear of black uprisings, racial uprisings, riots and so forth as a pretext for declaring states of emergency for engaging in all kinds of unconstitutional acts, perhaps the greatest in the last 100 years being [Franklin Roosevelt's] removal of Japanese Americans to imprisonment camps.”
Speaking to AlterNet in June, Senior Policy Director for Voting and Fair Representation at the nonprofit Common Cause Dan Vicuña provided more detail about the various ways Trump could steal the midterms.
“What they all add up to is a desire to avoid any accountability to the voters in the midterm elections — to ensure, to preordain the outcome of a midterm that he thinks is going to go badly for him,” Vicuña explained to AlterNet. “We know, from the Big Lie of the 2020 election to spurring on a violent revolt to overthrow a free and fair election, that he has no respect for democratic norms, for the voice of the people. This is entirely about his own power and his own ego. He will even invest in protecting that ego and protecting his power at the expense of the needs of the public. People are suffering with high gas prices and affordability issues, and he does not care. All that matters is protecting his power, and he has no interest in whether he does that through democratic means.”
He concluded, “I think this all adds up to a desire to ensure that his party stays in power and his ability to do what he wants — to attack vulnerable communities — remains intact.”
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07/30/26
Multiple figures behind the proposal have also urged Trump to declare a “national emergency” over the midterm elections
Written by Alex Kaplan
Published 07/30/26
A group of activists in the election denial community — including Tina Peters, a former Colorado election official convicted of charges related to the 2020 election, and Clay Parikh, who has served as a “special government employee” for the Trump administration — claim they presented a key government agency responsible for protecting elections with “operational guidance” for the midterms in the form of a “risk mitigation” and “practical election-security plan” to implement in the 100 days before the elections. The proposal appears to be the latest attempt to push the Trump administration to take over election processes ahead of the midterms.
The new proposal, dated July 22 and called the “100-Day Risk Mitigation Election Plan” and “Operational Guidance for the November Federal Election – 2026,” urges the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — an agency housed under the Department of Homeland Security that is “one of the main federal partners for states on election security, sharing intelligence on potential threats to voting infrastructure and providing quick regional support,” per MS NOW — to “concentrate on six achievable measures,” including “transition[ing] the general electorate away from ballot-marking devices (BMD) to hand-marked paper ballots” and “insisting that the official count can only be certified after a full hand-count of every ballot.”
It also lays out an implementation framework that would involve classifying all counties based on current election processes and their ability to transition ahead of the midterms and then providing each county with implementation plans. During a podcast interview discussing the plan, Peters acknowledged that “CISA is not a forceful body that they can make people do things, but they can actually make recommendations,” and suggested that DHS could use a recently announced grant for states “that comply with certain things like paper ballots and so on and so forth” as an “incentive.”
Voting machines and tabulators have been the target of election conspiracy theories for years, sparking campaigns to replace them with full hand-counts. As experts have explained, a system of hand-counted paper ballots would be less accurate, more expensive, impractical, and “potentially riskier than the current system of machines with auditable paper trails that almost all cities and states use.” Studies have actually shown that “hand-counting ballots produces more errors than machine tabulation,” and as the Brennan Center for Justice has explained, “Many checks exist to ensure that voting machines count ballots correctly and produce accurate election results.”
Peters released the new proposal, which she called a “practical election-security plan,” on her website along with a July 24 letter to the acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency thanking him “for meeting with us … and for giving us the opportunity to present our concerns and proposed path forward for the 2026 federal election.”
These are the figures who signed the letter to CISA:
Peters, who publicly released the plan, is the former county clerk of Mesa County, Colorado, and was “convicted in 2024 for her role in a brazen plot to examine voting machines under her control after the 2020 election” before Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis commuted her sentence. She met with Trump at the Oval Office in late June, later claiming that she told him, “If we don’t fix these machines, if we don’t get rid of these machines, we’re going to lose the next election.”
Parikh, who has served as a “special government employee” in the Trump administration and who was cited in the FBI’s warrant for its raid of a Fulton County, Georgia, election facility. Parikh was also involved in Kari Lake’s unsuccessful legal effort to claim fraud was involved in her 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election defeat and has reportedly “served as a witness in other cases … challenging the use of voting machines.”
Conrad Reynolds, a podcast host who reportedly ”thinks Arkansas voting machines could be flipping votes” and who was involved with Restore Election Integrity Arkansas and its push for an amendment “aimed at requiring all elections in Arkansas to be conducted with paper ballots and removing language in the Arkansas Constitution that permits elections to be conducted by voting machines.” Reynolds has also run the Arkansas Voter Integrity Initiative, which has aimed for “getting rid of voting machines” in favor of paper ballots.
Will Huff, who often co-hosts Reynolds’ podcast and has pushed election-related conspiracy theories about “dirty voter rolls” and “the mail-in ballot scheme.” Huff has also been involved with Restore Election Integrity Arkansas and the Arkansas Voter Integrity Initiative.
Peters also explained the proposal during a July 27 podcast appearance, claiming that Trump's July 16 speech indicated “a lot has come out about the vulnerabilities of our election infrastructure.”
Video
Citation
From the July 27, 2026, edition of America, Can We Talk?, streamed on Rumble
TINA PETERS (GUEST): Now, so — and that’s in that 14-page memo to CISA. But here’s what you can do. If we cannot physically get rid of the machines before November, then having — you know, taking the preliminary count that comes from the machines, but not certifying the election until — and however long it takes — until finishing up the hand-count. Then, if those two things don’t meet, then then you know.
So it’s a way if you’re — if you use that as your preliminary results and then you have — I’m going to say it again — then you have an actual hand-count, however long it takes to get it done, and then you have the certification. The thing of it is is that a lot of the judges that are put in the place to certify the results are taking the word of an electronic device. They can't actually see that, yes, we had a group of people, Democrat and Republican, that have checked this out.
It’s just like, you would always check your bank ledger, right? You just, you know, check, make sure everything is, you know, before you realize that it’s valid. That’s what we need. And if it take — right now, they’re taking how many weeks to finish an election anyway, right?
Additionally, Peters said on the podcast that she had urged Trump during their Oval Office meeting to fire members of the Election Assistance Commission — which Trump subsequently did.
Trump has taken actions to expand his control over election processes, and election deniers have been proposing policies for even more power ahead of the midterms
In recent months, Trump and his right-wing media allies have advocated for passage of the SAVE America Act and other policies to increase federal control of the midterms. As USA Today reported, “Trump is working to gain unprecedented control of the 2026 U.S. midterm elections” with “a series of new assertions of presidential power.”
These actions have included firing key leaders of the federal Election Assistance Commission, putting election deniers in administration positions that oversee elections, and issuing executive orders that would tighten rules for mail-in voting and create a federal list of U.S. citizens eligible to vote.
ProPublica also noted that Trump “eviscerat[ed] CISA” at the start of his second term, replaced career election specialists at the Department of Homeland Security with his allies, including some who have ties to the election denial movement, and “discarded or diminished other federal initiatives with roles in protecting election integrity or blocking foreign interference.”
Right-wing media and election deniers have called for the president to further expand his power by issuing a national emergency executive order that would supposedly give Trump “essentially king-like powers” over the midterms. Two of the signatories of the letter to CISA — Reynolds and Huff — have called for the declaration of such a “national emergency,” and Peters has said she believes “Trump could sign an executive order to get rid of the machines and say that they are — that a vendor cannot have that much influence over our elections.”
As part of those calls, election deniers reportedly circulated a draft of a proposed executive order within the administration, and right-wing media figures appear to be weaving together a narrative about foreign interference in American elections by countries like China and Venezuela that could be used as a “predicate” for a national emergency.
The new proposal to CISA from Peters and the others in the election denial community appears to be the latest attempt to control election processes for the midterms.
//
06/30/26 10:00 AM EDT
The plot to subvert the midterms is getting stranger and more dangerous
07/02/26 10:05 AM EDT
02/26/26
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With just 97 days until the midterm elections of 2026, Democrats are fired up, while Republicans are in the doldrums. That means Democrats have a good chance of retaking control of the House. It’s even possible (although less likely) that Dems will retake the Senate.
One of the biggest uncertainties is what (if any) tactics Trump and his lapdogs will use to reduce the odds of a Democratic victory, especially in the House, where 435 seats are up for reelection.
I’ve spent the last several days talking with election experts and political advisers. When I spoke with them last year, they were most worried about gerrymandering, restrictions on mail-in voting, voter IDs, and the demise of what’s left of the Voting Rights Act.
They’re still worried about many of these things (Trump just filed with the Supreme Court an emergency request to allow his executive order that restricts voting by mail, after a federal appeals court blocked key parts of it over the weekend).
But now, with 97 days to go, they’re most worried about the elections process. I’ve summarized their concerns below.
It’s possible that Trump will do nothing to interfere in the elections, of course. It’s also possible that he’ll do everything the experts fear he might do. Please weigh in with your thoughts about what he’s most likely to do.
1. He’ll do nothing other than claim the elections are rigged.
By this view, Trump will continue to sow doubts about the reliability and security of elections, especially in predominantly Democratic cities and states, but he won’t do more. Experts who hold this view tell me Trump doesn’t really care all that much about the midterm elections. His real goal is to continue to generate doubts about the 2020 election, so that when the history of that election is written, questions arise about whether Biden legitimately won.
2. He’ll deploy federal agents at voting places.
Some experts I talked with believe Trump will try to suppress voting by deploying federal immigration agents or federalized National Guard in or around polling places in predominantly Democratic communities during early voting or on Election Day. Or he’ll deploy federal agents in official attire to hover near voters, questioning them about their citizenship and asking about voter fraud.
It’s a federal crime for anyone — including federal, state, and local officials — to “intimidate, threaten, [or] coerce … any other person for the purpose of interfering with the right of [that] other person to vote or to vote as he may choose.” Most states also prohibit voter intimidation. Additionally, federal law explicitly prohibits the presence of armed federal agents at the polls.
But proving intimidation is difficult. Besides, by the time any lawsuit alleging intimidation were filed, voting would be long over.
3. He’ll try to stop state certifications.
Alternatively, election experts tell me that Trump will stop states with predominantly Democratic voters or large Democratic cities from certifying the results in House races. (Election rules about certification vary by state, but most require election officials to certify by late November or early December.)
In recent years, Trump has persuaded some local officials to use false claims of fraud or of noncitizens voting as justification to decline to certify election results. Since 2020, more than 30 local officials in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania have refused to certify election results, usually in hopes of forestalling Democratic victories.
Experts tell me that if there are similar delays and refusals after November 3, Democrats will go to court to force local officials to certify results. They’ll probably win these cases, as they have in the past. But such litigation is inevitably accompanied by delays and uncertainty that could give Trump and Republicans time to whip up public support for recounts, audits, or similar tactics we saw after the 2020 election.
4. He’ll try to prevent the House clerk from assembling the roll of new members to be sworn in January 3, 2027.
A final scenario that’s been described to me is that Trump will prevent the House clerk from assembling the roll of new members to be sworn in. Normally, on January 3, the clerk simply goes to the House chamber with the roll of newly elected representatives. Although the people on that roll are not yet official members of Congress, they elect a new speaker of the House. The winner of the race for speaker then swears in the rest of the members of the House, and they then begin conducting legislative business.
But some experts predict that Trump will declare that the election is full of fraud and demand that Speaker Mike Johnson fire the current nonpartisan House clerk. Johnson could substitute a toady who produces a roll of new House members — one that includes Republicans in races that Democrats believe they won.
What can Democrats then do? They’ll contest Trump’s move in the federal courts, but the courts are reluctant to get involved in matters of internal legislative governance, regarding them as “political questions” that the judiciary should leave to Congress.
Hence, today’s Office Hours question: What’s Trump’s most likely move on the midterms?
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
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Free and fair elections this November should produce a Democratic wave, mass repudiation of Trump, and the possibility of a new impeachment. With each passing day, it becomes increasingly clear that Trump has only one strategy for averting that fate: stealing the 2026 midterm election. He can’t seem to deliver a speech without returning to his obsession that he actually won the 2020 election, most recently in a prime-time address filled with false evidence of supposed foreign interference.
On January 6, 2021, Trump attempted to stage a coup and he will surely try again. Last time, only the integrity of a handful of Republican officials spared the Republic that fate. Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, rebuffed Trump’s demand to find exactly 11,780 votes, and Vice President Mike Pence refused to go along with Trump’s scheme, laid out in detail by John Eastman, to refuse to certify the results.
This time, Trump is relying on four possible strategies to steal the election. The survival of our democracy depends on whether each of them can be foiled, and how.
Trump has only one strategy for averting that fate: stealing the 2026 midterm election.
The first is to use executive orders and directives to gain control of voter rolls, which will then be purged using commercial databases that are rife with errors. These demands were spelled out in detail in Trump’s executive order of March 31. The order also required the U.S. Postal Service to deny mail balloting to states that did not comply with Trump directives.
This ploy has been complemented by threats from other Trump officials. Earlier this month, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened local election officials with prison time if they did not comply with Trump demands. But as I wrote in this piece, so far the courts have consistently blocked every single Trump effort to take over elections. Just last Saturday, the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit blocked the Trump administration’s effort to move forward with mail-in voting restrictions in 23 states that sued ahead of November’s midterm elections.
Trump’s second strategy is to somehow get Congress to pass his SAVE America Act, which could require proof of citizenship and photo ID for people to register and vote, and otherwise turn control of elections over to the federal executive. Trump has been willing to hold hostage one important legislative objective after another to try to compel Congress to pass this legislation. He has tied its passage to the renewal of a foreign surveillance law that expired last month, and refused to sign a bipartisan housing policy bill. The housing measure went into law without his signature.
Read: The SAVE Act comes for everything
The SAVE America Act has passed the House but is dead in the Senate. As Senate Majority Leader John Thune keeps telling Trump, the votes are simply not there. The House stuck a mini-SAVE in a budget bill that can be passed without Democratic votes, but Senate rules may disqualify it and Thune doesn’t want to pass that bill at all, because it would force his vulnerable members to take a series of unpopular votes, as my colleague David Dayen explained.
In the run-up to the November elections, the focus will shift to strategy number three: voter suppression, intimidation, and election disruption, both before and on Election Day. Democratic state attorneys general have been having regular “tabletop” exercises to anticipate Trump tactics and counter them.
What if the FBI showed up to a polling place, demanding election materials or equipment? Suppose federal troops or ICE agents were deployed to intimidate voters or disrupt the election? What if Trump declared a national emergency? Attorneys general have been working with secretaries of state to anticipate and block these and other tactics.
One valuable memo has just been circulated by Doran Schrantz, the former executive director of the Minnesota ecumenical progressive group ISAIAH, and one of the most savvy on-the-ground organizers in the progressive movement. Her memo, titled “Act Free to Be Free: A State and Local Pro-Democracy Framework,” summarizes all the possible Trump tactics, and strategies for anticipating and countering them.
She calls for “mapping the actual machinery of election administration,” finding the vulnerabilities, and “deploying organized people into the specific vulnerable spaces (county board meetings, legislative hearings, certification processes) well before November. The job is to pre-position the case against their power grab by naming their strategy in public, making it transparent, and going on offense.” The rapid response mechanisms, Schrantz writes, need to be political, legal, media, operational, and above all, organized, with massive grassroots deployment of large numbers of well-prepared citizens. The entire memo is worth a careful reading.
The most alarming Trump tactic would be an echo of January 6, 2021: an effort to stage a coup by overturning the results. The Constitution provides in Article I, Section 5 that each house of Congress is the sole judge of its membership. But actual election results are certified by the states. Courts have repeatedly held that such certification is mandatory.
The process and legal requirements are explained in this guide published by four legal defense-of-democracy groups, led by the Brennan Center. If a cabal of Republican secretaries of state or governors tried to stall or overturn actual results, the courts would quickly intervene. Only in the cases of extremely close elections, within a state’s legitimate rules for a recount, could certification be legitimately delayed.
Wendy Weiser, vice president of the Brennan Center, told me, “Across all states, certifying election results is a mandatory duty. If an official improperly delays or refuses to sign off on the results, state officials and courts can step in to compel certification. Every attempt to refuse certification since the modern election denier movement began has been unsuccessful.”
But a more sinister scenario was posed in a widely circulated article last week by *New York Times* columnist David French, an anti-Trump conservative who is also a lawyer. French points out that the process for contesting an election to the House is governed by the Federal Contested Elections Act of 1969. Under that act, a losing candidate has 30 days after certification by a state to challenge the certification, and the challenge is ultimately decided by a simple majority vote of the respective chamber.
French poses a coup scenario, in which “even if Democrats win a House majority after all the votes are counted this fall, one or more defeated Republican candidates could try to persuade the lame-duck Republican majority not to permit their Democratic opponents to take office while the challenge is pending.” The incoming House would subsequently be flipped from majority Democratic to majority Republican. Because the Constitution is clear that each house is the sole judge of its membership, the courts could not intervene.
I’ve written about this risk, and something about French’s column struck me as off. I double checked, and confirmed that it is the new incoming Congress, not the lame-duck Congress (which expires on January 3) that certifies the new membership. I triple checked with Brennan’s Wendy Weiser, and she confirmed my finding.
Read: The 2026 Elections: Resisting the rigging
When I emailed French, he also confirmed my reading of the law, but said that he was posing this scenario because the challenge process begins in the old Congress and that Republicans might try to act under “bad-faith readings of the law.”
But if dozens of losing Republican candidates, in a coordinated effort, claimed that they had really won, the usual judicial deference to the political process might well not apply. Courts would likely step in to uphold state certifications, and the duly elected new Congress would be seated.
If this Republic survives, it will take a combination of citizen mobilization and vigilant courts that have increasingly lost patience with Trump’s efforts to govern as a dictator.
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Democrats have been speculating about and prepping for the numerous ways in which President Donald Trump could meddle with forthcoming midterms, but according to a new piece from The New York Times, there is one person he could fire that would completely upend the results — and it is completely legal.
Writing on Monday for the Times, veteran reporter Jeffrey Toobin stressed that Trump's "obsession" with preventing a GOP wipeout in the midterms remains a very live threat, even as his efforts to spread claims about election fraud have fallen flat so far. Toobin spoke with Rep. Joe Morelle, a New York Democrat, about his efforts to game out various scenarios, including ways that the president could try to block the certification of certain results after the elections, an idea that has gotten less attention recently as Trump has focused on efforts to control who is allowed to vote.
"The process for installing a new House of Representatives begins when the states certify the results in each of the 435 races. The rules vary by state, but most require election officials to certify by late November or early December," Toobin explained. "In recent years, Trump-aligned local officials have frequently used false claims of fraud or noncitizens voting as justification to decline to certify election results. Since 2020, more than 30 local officials in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, North Carolina and Pennsylvania have refused to certify election results, many in hopes of forestalling Democratic victories."
Morelle said that the plan for this possibility is to take Trump to court over it, something the "Democrats have had success" with recently, using courts to force local officials to certify results.
Still, there is another person that Trump could potentially target as a way to halt the process of swearing in a new Democratic-majority: the House of Representatives Clerk, who has "the job of assembling the 'roll' of new members to be sworn in on Jan. 3, 2027." The current clerk, Kevin McCumber, is widely considered to be a "nonpartisan" figure, and would be unlikely to go along with demands from Trump to interfere with the swearing-in process.
"One disaster scenario, according to Mr. Morelle, would be this: After results show the Democrats winning a majority in the House, the president declares that the election is full of fraud and the winners don’t need to be certified," Toobin explained. "Mr. Trump could then demand that Speaker Mike Johnson fire Mr. McCumber, which Mr. Johnson has the legal right to do. Under the procedures of the House, the speaker can install a more compliant successor — that is, a G.O.P. toady. In this scenario, Speaker Johnson’s designee, at Mr. Trump’s instigation, would produce a roll of new House members that included Republicans in races that Democrats believed they had won."
He added: "While the speaker does have the unilateral power to remove the clerk, his choice for a permanent replacement would have to be approved by a vote of House members. Mr. Morelle said that in that case, Speaker Johnson might not be able to persuade his slim Republican majority to replace Mr. McCumber."
“You’d have a number of members who are retiring, who I think would no longer be beholden to Johnson or the president, who I think would take a very, very dim view of efforts to overturn the election," Morelle said.
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Former intelligence officials are demanding answers about an alleged CIA document used by President Donald Trump to promote his election denial claims. According to officials, this “weird” document appears to have been “tailor made” for Trump rather than adhering to normal agency procedure. According to MSNOW, these officials “think the public should know when and why it was written, and who requested it.”
The matter involves a CIA note on the People’s Republic of China entitled “Sensitive PRC Reporting from 2018 – 2020.” As MSNOW explained, “The date is redacted, and it is unclear where within the CIA it originated. Trump quoted directly from the three-page document in his speech when citing debunked claims that the intelligence community withheld information from him about China, and called on the Justice Department to ‘fire those involved in the cover-up’ and ‘file criminal charges if appropriate.’”
Former officials, however, have raised alarms that the document appears to be “raw intelligence all supporting a single view — alleging that China wanted Trump to lose the 2020 election and sought to influence the outcome — without including the full scope, context or any definitive conclusion from the agency’s information. The Trump administration, the officials said, should answer whether the document was drafted in response to a narrowly tailored request from someone within the administration, noting that to do so with the purpose of supporting Trump’s accusations about the security of America’s elections would be a clear politicization of the country’s intelligence community.”
According to a Democratic lawmaker with national security oversight, there are many questions about the document, a list of which will be sent to the CIA. For example, “the document does not show traditional accountability markers, such as authorship and footnotes, and the high degree of confidence expressed in the document is unusual.” Six former CIA and intelligence officials agreed that the CIA and White House should answer questions.
“The fact that the document presented only one viewpoint and appeared to be crafted in response to a narrow query should be investigated, the former officials said,” explained MSNOW. “The Steady State, a group of former national security and intelligence officials, is calling for an independent investigation by key congressional committees and the inspectors general for the intelligence community and CIA. Steven Cash, executive director of The Steady State and a former CIA and Department of Homeland Security official, is sending a letter Tuesday to top lawmakers on the intelligence committees and agency watchdog offices, detailing key ‘anomalies’ in the document.”
The Steady State concluded that the document “departs in both style and format” from CIA drafting norms and does not have caveats typical of CIA analysis. One former official called it “weird,” saying it “doesn’t read like a finished product.” According to former CIA analyst Julie Curlee, the document looks recently generated and “tailor made.” As she explains, “Released under CIA letterhead, but with its author and publication date redacted, it has all the hallmarks of a memo built to serve the president’s political needs and the intelligence community’s authority turned against the American public.”
“Was this done to placate Trump?” another former senior intelligence official wondered.
mma
07/17/26
Bannon calls for ICE at polling locations based on Trump admin claims about noncitizen voting
07/17/26 1:18 PM EDT
07/17/26 12:35 PM EDT
Fox News buries Trump’s election denial address
07/17/26
mma
AHead of tonight’s speech, Fox praises Trump as a leader on election security — ignoring his repeated efforts to undermine it
Written by Zachary Pleat
Published 07/16/26
In the week before President Donald Trump’s July 16 prime-time address, during which he reportedly plans to push conspiracy theories that China interfered in his 2020 election defeat, Fox News has portrayed Trump as a leader on election security. However, his second administration has repeatedly taken actions to weaken the nation’s election security, including dismantling much of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, disbanding multiple task forces to combat foreign influence on elections, and failing to work with local and state officials to secure elections.
Fox claims Trump will help secure America’s elections
Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer previewing Trump’s address: “He made election integrity a main pillar for his second term agenda.” [Fox News, America’s Newsroom, 7/15/26]
Video
From the July 15, 2026, edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom
Fox contributor Johnny Jones: “Election integrity is what President Trump is working on finding and establishing.” [Fox News, The Five, 7/10/26]
Fox contributor Ben Domenech: “It’s a “wise move” for Trump to “make a case” for legislation related to elections because “they are popular when you look at them in a polling situation.” Domenech claimed that Americans “tried to have major changes happen in this country when it comes to election integrity. They do not believe those changes have been made. The president is arguing in favor of them.” [Fox News, Special Report, 7/14/26]
Fox anchor Trace Gallagher defended Trump from criticism about “the GOP midterm election integrity.” Gallagher aired a clip of former CIA Director John Brennan saying that “Donald Trump is going to do everything in his power, and beyond that, to be able to affect the outcome of the election.” [Fox News, Fox News @ Night, 7/13/26]
But Trump and his administration have taken numerous actions that undermine election security
CNN detailed how the Trump administration dismantled much of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency infrastructure that combats election threats. CNN reported that these Trump administration efforts have included firing 130 CISA staffers, “including 10 regional security specialists who worked with local and state election officials.” The acting agency director also “put all election-security and counter-disinformation work on hold pending an internal review” in early 2025. Former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem “also ordered CISA in February and March to cancel more than $9 million in annual contracts with the Center for Internet Security, a non-profit group. Many of the cuts imposed by DHS targeted the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, or EI-ISAC, which brought together more than 1,300 election and law enforcement officials around the country to help monitor and share information about threats to voting.” [CNN, 4/9/25]
CNN also reported that the Trump administration “disbanded the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force,” which “was among several agencies that warned that Russia, Iran and other countries were conducting operations meant ‘to undermine public confidence in the integrity of U.S. elections and stoke divisions among Americans.’” CNN described it as “a key FBI task force charged with investigating foreign efforts to influence elections.” CNN additionally reported that the administration “also left in the wind the fate of another FBI task force that investigated threats against election workers and polling places.” [CNN, 4/9/25]
CNN: “Secret US cyber operations shielded 2024 election from foreign trolls, but now the Trump admin has gutted protections.” CNN reported that “a year into a second Trump administration, many of the government centers previously tasked with repelling foreign influence operations have been disbanded or downsized — and local election officials are preparing to face a continued onslaught of foreign influence operations largely on their own.” The article continued: “The administration has shut down foreign-influence-focused centers at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI and the State Department that helped warn the public that China, Russia and Iran’s spy services were targeting Americans with election-related disinformation. The Department of Homeland Security has also slashed its election security teams, which pass intelligence to local election offices and help them defend against cyber threats.” [CNN, 1/28/26]
NBC News reported that multiple state officials say the Trump administration has canceled election security briefings. A February article reported that several secretaries of state “said intelligence briefings from the federal government were invaluable during the first Trump administration,” but the administration stopped those briefings. The article noted that a February invitation by the Trump administration to participate in a call with the FBI about midterm election preparations was “the first time they have heard from anyone in this Trump administration about election security in months — or ever.” [NBC News, 2/9/26]
Nextgov: Trump’s 2027 budget proposal “would notably eliminate CISA’s election security program entirely, including cutting funding for information-sharing support to state and local officials and removing dedicated election security advisors across the country.” Nextgov reported that Trump’s budget proposal “would also end CISA’s support for the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, or EI-ISAC, a key hub for sharing threat intelligence, cyber alerts and incident response resources with state and local election officials.” According to the article, these actions “would scale back one of the federal government’s main avenues for coordinating with state and local election officials on election cybersecurity risks like ransomware attacks, phishing campaigns and efforts by foreign adversaries to probe election systems and conduct influence operations.” [Nextgov, 4/7/26]
NOTUS: “The Justice Department Hasn’t Taken Its Usual Steps to Protect the 2026 Election.” NOTUS reported that “five months out from the midterm elections that will determine control of Congress, his Justice Department has canceled election-integrity training sessions for prosecutors and FBI agents, deleted a 281-page guide to prosecuting election offenses, fired most of the lawyers in its Public Integrity Section and failed to replace the director of its Election Crimes Branch.” Additionally, “the DOJ has not taken the usual steps to establish a ‘command center’ to monitor and address the typical emergencies that pop up around Election Day, three sources with knowledge of the situation told NOTUS. A command center team would address things like voter intimidation and targeted disinformation meant to hinder a fair process. These actions — and inactions — have alarmed current and former prosecutors, who say the Justice Department is not prepared to deal with threats to election integrity in the November elections.” [NOTUS, 6/8/26]
Last week, Trump fired Democratic members of the Election Assistance Commission. On July 10, The Associated Press reported: “The White House on Friday confirmed the executive action against members of the Election Assistance Commission, which distributes federal grants to states, oversees the testing of voting systems and maintains the national voter registration form.” According to the AP, “It’s the latest instance of the Republican president trying to exert White House influence over how U.S. elections are conducted.” [The Associated Press, 7/10/26]
MMA 7 26
What you need to know about John Solomon, the man driving Trump's latest election fraud nonsense
Written by Media Matters Staff
Published 07/16/26
In a new piece for MS NOW, Media Matters Vice President Julie Millican details the many reasons not to trust right-wing journalist John Solomon, who is reportedly helping orchestrate President Donald Trump's Thursday prime-time speech on election fraud:
Creating “phantom scandals” has made Solomon a key element of the right-wing media’s propaganda machine. He gained prominence for his quest to discredit Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation during Trump’s first administration — first while working for Sinclair Broadcast Group’s Circa News, and later after becoming executive vice president of digital video at The Hill. Many of the “phantom scandals” Solomon pursued served to rewrite history by claiming that it was really Democrats with corrupt relationships with Russia who worked to undermine Trump in the 2016 presidential election — not the other way around.
...
Enter Rudy Giuliani.
As the House Democrats’ impeachment reports found, Solomon was one of the most critical figures in Trump and Giuliani’s plot to extort the Ukrainian government into meddling in the 2020 U.S. election on Trump’s behalf. As I laid out at the time, Giuliani, then Trump’s personal attorney, worked with con men and Trump cronies to pursue an “investigation” into Ukraine that he said showed both Ukrainian collusion with Democrats in 2016 and evidence that then-Vice President Joe Biden acted corruptly in Ukraine to benefit his son.
...
Solomon has also advanced election denial conspiracy theories, which have recently fixated on China. Since March, he has repeatedly claimed that the 2020 election was not secure because China allegedly accessed voter registration data in multiple states. In Solomon’s telling, the Democrats and the so-called deep state hid this information from the public, while China tried to submit fake ballots on Biden’s behalf. (The United States National Intelligence Council, the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security, however, all concluded that there was no evidence of foreign interference in the 2020 election.)
In June, Trump appointed Solomon a “special government employee” to run a “task force” related to declassifying documents about the 2020 election. Around the same time, Trump nominated Bill Pulte — who Solomon has said he knows “pretty well” — to become acting director of national intelligence.
Solomon is now in a position to potentially create a “phantom scandal” directly from the White House, and right-wing media figures like Bannon have suggested such a narrative could be a “predicate” for Trump to declare a national emergency over election security ahead of the midterms.
Read the whole thing at MS NOW.
For more Media Matters coverage of Trump's speech and the unfolding effort by the president and his media allies to undermine the midterm elections, see here, here, and here.
//
07/16/26 12:23 PM EDT
07/16/26 1:42 PM EDT
07/15/26
MMA
Misinformer John Solomon, who reportedly pushed for Trump’s prime-time speech, has spent months claiming China interfered in the 2020 election to help Joe Biden
Solomon's new role on a White House task force, along with Trump's expected address, appear to be part of an effort to relitigate the 2020 election and undermine the midterms
Written by Hanne MacDonald & Jack Wheatley
Published 07/16/26
John Solomon, the conservative media figure and “special government employee” who reportedly played a key role in “urging” President Donald Trump’s upcoming speech, has been touring right-wing media for months claiming China interfered in the 2020 election.
On July 16, Trump is planning to deliver a prime-time address to the nation which will reportedly “focus on voting machine security and alleged efforts by foreign nations to influence U.S. elections,” including “allegations that Beijing compromised U.S. voter data and evidence the CIA knew about the action and didn't share that information with Mr. Trump during his first term.”
According to MS NOW, “It is not clear whether the president will present any credible new evidence that the 2020 election was stolen,” but Trump is “expected to release declassified intelligence documents” as part of a push “being driven by” acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte and Solomon, “a former journalist who has frequently amplified election fraud claims.” From Politico:
Trump’s senior staffers drafted a version of the speech they believe is grounded in claims fully supported by the intelligence. But another camp — including acting DNI Bill Pulte and right-wing media figure John Solomon — is pushing Trump to go beyond what his senior advisers are comfortable with.
Aides worry the president could insert material they do not believe can be substantiated, an especially sensitive prospect as the White House asks television networks to carry the speech (readers may recall the costly lawsuits settled by Fox News, Newsmax and OANN).
Solomon, a longtime proponent of right-wing conspiracy theories who also played a key role in Trump’s first impeachment, recently joined a White House task force that NBC News reported is “gathering thousands of pages of documents from U.S. intelligence agencies, with plans to declassify some of them, which would give President Donald Trump an opportunity to amplify new accusations about past elections.”
In recent months, Solomon has used his website, his online shows, and repeated right-wing media appearances to circulate claims that China interfered in the 2020 election — allegations which Trump is expected to repeat during his prime-time address. Since March, Solomon has argued that the 2020 election was not secure with China accessing voter registration data, suggested that China attempted to illegally submit fake ballots for Joe Biden, and claimed that Democrats and the government hid intelligence reports about China's actions. He also used these claims to push for Congress to pass the SAVE America Act (previously the SAVE Act) — which experts say would create new barriers for voters and potentially disenfranchise millions.
Misinformer John Solomon has a new White House role to declassify documents — reportedly in support of Trump's efforts to relitigate 2020 and undermine the midterms
Solomon “has a history of bending the truth to his storyline” with exaggerated claims and conspiracy theories
Media Matters named Solomon the 2019 Misinformer of the Year for his record of stretching facts in his stories to fit broader pro-MAGA agendas. Solomon became a key figure working alongside Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani to dig up dirt on Joe Biden related to Ukraine and to discredit investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Solomon laundered Giuliani’s conspiracy theories in his columns published by The Hill; the publication later found that “Solomon failed to identify important details about key Ukrainian sources, including the fact that they had been indicted or were under investigation. In other cases, the sources were his own attorneys.” In 2019, ProPublica wrote that Solomon’s work was “the starting gun that eventually set off the impeachment inquiry into the president.” A 2012 profile by the Columbia Journalism Review said that Solomon “has a history of bending the truth to his storyline. As a reporter for the AP and The Washington Post, he dug up his share of genuine dirt, but he also was notorious for massaging facts to conjure phantom scandals.” [Media Matters, 10/17/19, 12/26/19; Politico, 2/19/20; ProPublica, 10/25/19; Columbia Journalism Review, 7/9/12]
Solomon — host of Just the News No Noise and John Solomon Reports — has temporarily stepped aside as editor-in-chief of Just The News and is now working for the Trump administration as a “special government employee” on a White House “task force to investigate elements of the 2020 election.” NBC News reported that Solomon’s task force “is gathering thousands of pages of documents from U.S. intelligence agencies, with plans to declassify some of them, which would give President Donald Trump an opportunity to amplify new accusations about past elections. … The group has been charged with gathering information from federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies, including related to the 2020 presidential election, signs of ballot irregularities, potential voting machine issues and possibly beyond.” Another report said that Solomon “has requested access to files related to an analysis that dissented from a U.S. intelligence assessment in 2021 that found no indications that a foreign actor had tried or succeeded in altering ‘any technical aspect’ of the 2020 vote.” In describing his unpaid role at the White House, Solomon said he will be releasing “some documents, some secrets and things you should know about when it comes to weaponization, election integrity, other things.” [Just the News, Just the News No Noise, 6/18/26; The New York Times, 5/29/26; Reuters, 7/13/26; NBC News, 6/30/26; Media Matters, 6/4/26, 7/6/26, 7/2/26]
Trump is preparing to deliver a prime-time speech on July 16 reportedly focusing on “voting machine security and alleged efforts by foreign nations to influence U.S. elections,” including “allegations that Beijing compromised U.S. voter data and evidence the CIA knew about the action and didn't share that information with Mr. Trump during his first term.” According to NPR, the address may be used to “amplify election lies before an audience of millions in an effort to boost Republican prospects before midterms that threaten to hobble Trump for the remainder of his term.” MS NOW reporting also noted that the speech comes after efforts by Pulte and Solomon to declassify documents in their new White House roles. Intelligence officials are concerned that the release of these files may expose sources and methods, as well as “sow confusion and erode public trust in elections.” [MS NOW, 7/14/26; CBS News, 7/15/26; NPR, 7/15/26]
The Brennan Center for Justice: “Experts agree that there is no evidence of foreign interference” in the 2020 election. The Brennan Center has noted that “influence and interference are not the same, but President Trump and his supporters conflate the two concepts when raising the specter of foreign meddling in U.S. elections.” In reality, “the only confirmed instance of election interference was in 2016, when Russia’s intelligence agencies hacked into election board infrastructure, including registration databases,” and investigations have found “no evidence of interference in the 2020 federal elections.” Additionally, “the Intelligence Community’s last report on the 2024 elections stressed that although foreign actors remained intent on using influence to undermine U.S. democracy, it had not uncovered any acts of interference.” As MS NOW also reported, there were “extensive reviews by the U.S. intelligence community under both the Trump and Biden administrations” and they “found no credible evidence calling the 2020 election into question.” [Brennan Center for Justice, 3/27/26; MS NOW, 7/14/26]
Solomon’s appointment to the White House task force and Trump's upcoming prime-time address about election security come as Trump attempts to change voting processes before the upcoming midterms under the guise of “election integrity.” Trump has been promoting the SAVE America Act (previously the SAVE Act), which experts say would create new barriers for voters and potentially disenfranchise millions of Americans — an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice says it “would be the most restrictive voting bill ever passed by Congress” — as he calls for the GOP to “nationalize the voting” and rails against voting by mail. For months, pro-Trump election deniers and prominent right-wing media figures such as Steve Bannon have been urging Trump to declare a national emergency ahead of the midterms to “justify dictating new rules to state and local governments” related to voting and elections. Some election deniers have also reportedly been “circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election” for Trump to use to declare a national emergency [Brennan Center for Justice, 2/11/25, 2/2/26, 2/10/26; NPR, 4/13/25; USA Today, 7/13/26; Truth Social, 7/24/26; Media Matters, 10/28/25, 6/30/26, 7/10/26; Real America's Voice, War Room, 6/29/26; The Washington Post, 2/26/26]
Since March, Solomon has been on a right-wing media tour claiming China interfered in the 2020 election
Solomon has been making the case on his own shows and website that China hacked the 2020 election
Solomon published an article in March suggesting China interfered in the 2020 U.S. election by accessing voter registration data. He wrote: “Voter registration data is not the same as ballots, where Americans choose their candidates. But it contains sensitive personally identifying information, including driver's license data and partial Social Security numbers. The data is considered so sensitive that several Democrat states are currently trying to keep the Trump Justice Department from obtaining it and liberal groups claim it is a holy grail of election integrity.” Solomon added, “In the hands of a foreign power, such data could be used to mimic social personas designed to influence elections or to make absentee ballot requests to cast fake votes, something the FBI feared China might be doing during the 2020 election, according to recently declassified documents.” [Just The News, 3/16/26]
Solomon repeated the claims on his show John Solomon Reports, where he said “China clearly had access to voter registration data, much like they did in Great Britain. It was kept secret by the intelligence community, according to its own ombudsman.” He added that there “may be some serious issues in the elections that were kept from us.” [Just the News, John Solomon Reports, 3/24/26]
Solomon said on his other show that “you now have proof that the deep state” hid information about China accessing voter registration data because it “did not want to further the president’s policies.” [Real America's Voice, Just the News No Noise, 3/18/26]
In an April article for Just the News that repeated claims of 2020 election interference by China, Solomon wrote, “Memo newly declassified by DNI Gabbard shows concerns about integrity of American voting were far greater than the public was told by previous administrations.” The article explained: “Though officials say that an ongoing second Trump administration investigation has found no evidence yet that vote-counting machines were directly compromised in the 2020 election, the memo shows how such machines could be vulnerable to intrusions in the future and made clear that the voter registration databases that were breached by China and Iran were easy targets.” [Just the News, 4/20/26]
Solomon has repeatedly claimed the 2020 election was not secure because China accessed voter registration data
On War Room, Solomon said “we have now learned six years too late” that Americans in 2020 were “force-fed a fake story that it was the most secure election in American history.” He reiterated that “China had infiltrated voter registration data in numerous states,” suggesting “that could have a profound effect on senators who thus far have been kicking the can down the road on the SAVE America Act. … It might change your notion about adding more election security measures to the 2026 election.” [Real America's Voice, War Room, 5/13/26]
On The Sean Hannity Show, Solomon called claims of China accessing U.S. voter registration data “one of the largest penetrations and impacts on election security in American history.” Solomon continued, “There’s a whole assessment that China could go make fake ballots or they could go deregister people so when they showed up in the polls to vote for Trump, they couldn't vote.” [Premiere Radio Network, The Sean Hannity Show, 5/8/26]
Solomon: “In 2020 they told us it was a perfect election, the most secure election in history. Over the last two weeks, Tulsi Gabbard has declassified two bombshell documents — one revealing that alongside of Iran, China infiltrated the voter databases of many states — multiple states.” [Premiere Radio Network, The Sean Hannity Show, 4/22/26]
On War Room, Solomon claimed “2020 wasn't a perfect election” because “Iran and China hacked voter registration databases.” He added, “We've been sold the story that this was a secure election. It wasn't.” [Real America's Voice, War Room, 4/21/26]
Solomon argued that U.S. intelligence officials knew the 2020 election was not “the most secure in American history” because “we now have confirmed that both Iran and China hacked into voter registration databases and used that data for … malinfluence measures.” [Real America's Voice, American Sunrise, 4/21/26]
Solomon has claimed that China attempted to submit fake ballots for Joe Biden
Solomon suggested that China had plotted to submit fake ballots in 2020 “to swing the election to Joe Biden.” Solomon said that China “reached more than a dozen states' voter registration databases,” then “sent tens of thousands of fake driver’s licenses to the United States in the summer of 2020” with the goal of voting “in the names of Americans and try[ing] to swing the election to Joe Biden.” [The First, I’m Right with Jesse Kelly, 4/22/26]
Discussing his reporting on Fox News, Solomon claimed China was “hacking in and getting data from our voter registration databases, doing some early influence campaigns, maybe sending some driver’s licenses that could be used to file fake ballot registrations.” [Fox News, Hannity, 3/19/26]
Solomon connected claims that China accessed U.S. voter registration data to a plot to fake driver's licenses to the U.S. to interfere with the 2020 election. Solomon explained, “Voter data is accessed by Chinese intelligence. Then China sends driver's licenses to Chicago O'Hare airport and the FBI’s Chinese intelligence sources tell them it was an effort to send those licenses here so someone could file fake ballot requests and vote and stuff the ballot box for Joe Biden.” The claim that fake drivers' licenses seized at Chicago O’Hare International Airport were connected to voter fraud was previously debunked; Reuters wrote in 2020 that the licenses “had no apparent connection to Democratic Party registration or the upcoming election.” [Real America’s Voice, The Charlie Kirk Show, 3/19/26; Reuters, 9/10/20]
Solomon claimed that once China had voter registration data, it “could do malign influence operations on social media” or “file votes in the names of other people. That’s a very real fear.” [The First, I’m Right with Jesse Kelly, 3/18/26]
Solomon said on the Stephen Gardner Show that “at our request here at Just the News,” Gabbard had declassified “documents showing that China had infiltrated at least a dozen and as many as 18 states’ voter registration databases. Once you have a state’s voter registration data, you have the holy grail of being able to manipulate elections.” He also stated: “We now know that there were people who voted illegally, rules were changed without legislatures’ approval. So these narratives that the left created are now being debunked by real evidence.” [Rumble, Stephen Gardner Show, 5/19/26]
Solomon has claimed China has an “alliance with the Democratic Party” and the government hid that China accessed voter registration data
On The Glenn Beck Program, Solomon claimed, “It is pretty clear that China either has a preference with the Democratic Party or some sort of alliance with the Democratic Party, based on what the FBI wrote.” Solomon cited a June 2025 article he wrote for Just the News reporting that Trump FBI Director Kash Patel had “turned over to Congress an intelligence report raising concerns that China had mass-produced fake U.S. driver's licenses to carry out a scheme to hijack the 2020 election with fake mail-in ballots for Democrat Joe Biden.” The article went on to note that “the newly declassified intelligence reports from August 2020 weren’t corroborated or fully investigated.” [TheBlaze, The Glenn Beck Program, 3/23/26; Just the News, 6/16/25]
On Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, Solomon claimed that the Biden administration “knew our voter registration data was breached, that it had been accessed by China,” and said that keeping it secret was “a real disservice to the American public.” Solomon also claimed, “There are scores of raw intelligence reports that show Chinese meddling in the American election, and there’s one report raising concern that Ukraine was engaged in a plot to do something bad in the 2024 election to help Joe Biden.” [Real America’s Voice, War Room, 3/17/26]
On War Room, Solomon claimed that “we've all been kept in the dark” about “infiltrations of the voter data in 2020 by China.” He added, “If Russia does it, it's a bad thing. If China does it, apparently we just keep mum about it.” [Real America’s Voice, War Room, 3/16/26]
On Donald Trump Jr.’s podcast, Solomon claimed China may have engaged in “ballot box-stuffing,” saying, “We have new evidence that China was considering doing that, maybe in concert with some Democrats, in 2020.” [Rumble, Triggered with Donald Trump Jr., 3/30/26]
Solomon claimed that “for the first time, there’s evidence that the Democratic Party might have been working with foreign powers to have them intervene in our elections.” [Real America's Voice, War Room, 3/26/26]
On The Sean Hannity Show, Solomon claimed that “our own intelligence community harbored its own deep dark secret” since 2020 that China had “gained access to U.S. voter registration data in America.” Solomon added, “There are several blue states trying to block Trump's Justice Department from reviewing that data to make sure we don't have illegal aliens or noncitizens on the voter rolls. So it’s so sensitive we don’t trust our own government, but it turns out China penetrated it in America and for the last six years we’ve all been kept in the dark.” [Premiere Radio Network, The Sean Hannity Show, 3/19/26]
Solomon has used his claims to promote the SAVE America Act, which experts say would disenfranchise millions of voters
Discussing his reporting on War Room, Solomon said the federal government needs to engage in “hand-to-hand combat that would win the SAVE Act” and argued, “We still need voter ID.” Solomon also said that administration officials should “call the senators one-by-one and say here’s what we found in your state. … You can have a briefing senator-by-senator saying sir, in your state China accessed your voter data registration. In your state, thus far we found x number of noncitizens who made it through your state’s very good system, which means we still need voter ID to prevent this.” [Real America's Voice, War Room, 3/23/26]
Solomon also encouraged the White House to “have a briefing in the White House press room” and “walk the press through the evidence” after Bannon suggested that there has been “no urgency” on the Save America Act. Solomon added, “Once they see the evidence, it’s kind of hard to ignore. It’s pretty clear evidence.” [Real America’s Voice, War Room, 3/23/26]
Solomon argued that the federal government should explain to senators “why the SAVE America Act is important to your state and your constituents” because “your state was one of the states that was penetrated by China.” [Real America's Voice, War Room, 3/20/26]
Why It Matters
The Trump administration appears to be trying to undermine the midterm elections
Solomon's task force appointment appears to be part of broader efforts by the Trump administration and right-wing media to undermine the midterm elections.
In recent months, Trump and his right-wing media allies have advocated for the SAVE America Act and other policies which experts warn would create voting restrictions and barriers that “would stop millions of American citizens from voting.”
Meanwhile, right-wing media and election deniers have boosted and intensified conspiracy theories and narratives about foreign interference in the 2020 election, as the Trump administration also uses its levers of power to reinvigorate old claims that have been previously investigated and debunked.
Finally, former Trump strategist Steve Bannon has suggested both Solomon's task force and Trump's prime-time address could serve as a “predicate” for the president to issue a “national security emergency executive order” — part of a plan that right-wing election deniers have cheered for Trump to give himself supposedly “king-like powers” over the midterms.
//
Fox contributor and Giuliani collaborator John Solomon is the 2019 Misinformer of the Year
12/26/19 4:44 AM EST
The plot to subvert the midterms is getting stranger and more dangerous
07/02/26 10:05 AM EDT
06/04/26
MMA
Trump is poised to bring his administration’s “chum cycle” tactic to election denial
Written by Matt Gertz
Published 07/15/26
President Donald Trump’s latest attack on American democracy relies on an old tactic. Throughout his second administration — and even dating back to his first — Trump appointees have laundered documents they claim prove Democratic and “deep state” malfeasance through credulous right-wing outlets, counting on MAGA media to amplify their conspiracy theories and hoping that mainstream outlets would pick them up as well. Now they’re applying the same playbook to election denial.
On Thursday night, Trump plans to use a White House address to relitigate his Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. While details are sparse, reports suggest he could use declassified intelligence documents to accuse China and Venezuela of election interference and target the 2020 Senate elections in Georgia. Allies in the election denial community have suggested such claims could be used as a "predicate" to declare a “national emergency” that would justify an executive order implementing voter suppression policies by fiat.
Right-wing journalist John Solomon and Trump crony Bill Pulte, recently installed by the president at the White House and as acting director of national intelligence, respectively, are reportedly leading the effort to scrounge up the documents Trump will use to make his case — and taking those records out of context to support his conspiracy theories (“They try to put bits and pieces together and then make these conclusions,” one administration official told MS NOW).
Such duplicitous methods are necessary because the 2020 election’s security has been litigated over and over again, with the intelligence community under Trump’s auspices finding “no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect” of the voting process and the attorney general he appointed, William Barr, stating in December 2020 that “we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.” But MAGA hacks like Benny Johnson and Steve Bannon are already frothing at the mouth over the speech, promising that it will bring about “doomsday for the deep state” and “change the direction of politics.”
The salvo Trump and his administration are telegraphing is incredibly dangerous — but it is simply the election denial version of what they’ve previously tried to do to delegitimize the federal probes of Russian interference in the 2016 election, Trump’s retention of classified documents, and his role in the January 6 insurrection, among other cases. I previously described this tactic as the Trump administration’s "chum cycle":
The Trump administration chums the waters by handing over documents related to one of the myriad past investigations into the president’s actions; the president, top Trump officials, and Republican officeholders say they show a massive scandal; and mainstream reporters point out their narrative is farcical while MAGA media stars call for the indictment, arrest, prosecution, jailing, and perhaps execution of their political enemies.
Amid one such campaign, which targeted former President Barack Obama, The New York Times reported that “Trump hopes enough information will be released by his intelligence appointees to muddy the waters and lend a patina of confusion about what Mr. Obama may have done, according to people familiar with his thinking.” Trump has tried to stock his administration with officials who will employ the same tactic to the same ends.
The innovation this time around seems to be that Trump is using a primetime White House address to detail the allegations, rather than merely using his social media platform or a Fox interview to accuse his enemies of crimes or misconduct.
How the right used the “chum cycle” to create confusion around stories like the Russia, January 6, and classified documents probes
All of these were once treated as huge bombshells in MAGA media, but quickly faded from prominence once their central premises proved faulty.
Probable cause for the Mar-A-Lago raid. In December, Fox News Digital reported that “the FBI did not believe it had probable cause to raid President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in 2022, but moved forward amid pressure from the Biden Justice Department,” citing “newly declassified documents.” Trump administration officials amplified the story and MAGA pundits called it a “massive” “bombshell” that should lead to “charges and arrests.”
But the Trumpist spin was nonsense: The FBI concerns detailed in the documents predated the acquisition of Mar-a-Lago surveillance video showing “Trump aides secretly removing boxes of records,” which convinced the bureau’s leaders that probable cause had been reached.
The Jan. 6 toll records. In October, Fox News Digital reported that “former Special Counsel Jack Smith was allegedly tracking the private communications and phone calls of nearly a dozen Republican Senators as part of his investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riots,” citing a document “recently discovered by FBI Director Kash Patel and exclusively obtained by Fox News Digital.” GOP senators expressed outrage over the conduct, while pundits on Fox and Newsmax called it “authoritarianism” and suggested Smith was “going to go to jail.”
In reality, the FBI had reviewed the toll records of senators in order to establish who Trump and his alleged co-conspirators were trying to contact before and during the January 6 insurrection.
The “Clinton Plan.” In late July 2025, The New York Post reported that a newly declassified annex to special counsel John Durham’s report on the origins of the Russia probe supposedly unveiled a “plot” in which Hillary Clinton’s campaign manufactured evidence to smear Trump for colluding with Russia. MAGA pundits described this as “a coordinated criminal cover-up to protect Clinton” and said she “should be behind bars” for it.
In fact, Durham reportedly assessed these emails were forgeries “likely made by Russian spies.”
Obama’s “treasonous conspiracy.” Earlier that month, former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard declassified and provided to Fox documents she claimed proved “a treasonous conspiracy in 2016 committed by officials at the highest level of our government” which aimed “to subvert the will of the American people and enact what was essentially a years-long coup.” She called for the prosecutions of figures including Barack Obama; as MAGA media figures chimed in and suggested Obama and others face charges of “treason,” Trump posted to Truth Social an AI video featuring Obama being arrested and imprisoned.
What the documents actually show is that Obama received an intelligence report that Russia had not hacked election systems to change vote totals in the 2016 election (which the Obama administration said publicly at the time), then asked for another intelligence report detailing other actions taken by the Russian government in an effort to influence the election. The intelligence community — and subsequently the Justice Department and a Senate committee helmed by current Secretary of State Marco Rubio — concluded that this was a multifarious effort which included the hacking and release of Democratic emails.
The “unmasking” charade. In May 2020, during the first Trump administration, then-Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell produced a list of senior Obama administration officials who had received Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn’s name after asking the National Security Agency to reveal through the standard process of “unmasking” the identity of an individual generically referenced in an NSA report. Fox hosts described this as “the biggest abuse of power scandal in American history” and called for the officials to be charged with “felonies.” Trump himself said on the network that the “Obamagate” plot was “the greatest political crime in the history of the United States,” and then-DOJ spokesperson Kerri Kupec — now Fox’s legal editor and VP — confirmed in a Fox interview that Barr had appointed then-U.S. Attorney John Bash to review the case.
There was never any evidence that the unmaskings were improper, and Bash closed his investigation five months later, filing no charges. Nearly two years after that, Buzzfeed published Bash’s final report to Barr, in which he stated that the senior Obama officials had not unmasked Flynn “for political purposes or other inappropriate reasons” and that “all but one of the requests that listed a senior official as an authorized recipient of General Flynn’s identity were made by an intelligence professional to prepare for a briefing of the official, not at the direction of the official.”
It’s unclear whether the Trump administration officials furiously trying to generate these scandals are deliberately lying about the contents of the documents they declassify, or if they are themselves so steeped in MAGA media conspiracy theories that they are predisposed to run with the most deranged and purportedly damning interpretations of otherwise innocuous records (Gabbard, Grenell, and Patel all had right-wing media careers of their own before joining the federal government).
What’s clear is that the “chum cycle” tactic relies on the credulousness of right-wing media to launder the documents, run with the administration’s overwrought claims, and saturate the MAGA base’s news environment with furious denunciations and calls for retribution.
And when you combine that Trumpist propaganda apparatus with a Trump administration shorn of guardrails and a MAGA base predisposed to believe that the president is so popular that only fraud can explain Republican defeats — and then use Trump himself to apply the tactic to election denial — the potential for disaster becomes explosive.
Trump’s plot to steal the election is what set 2020 apart
08/16/23 1:48 PM EDT
The Trump administration’s chum cycle
12/18/25 11:39 AM EST
The plot to subvert the midterms is getting stranger and more dangerous
07/02/26
==
AN 7 26
President Donald Trump is reportedly planning on delivering a speech in the near future amplifying his false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him — and social media users on X are raising the alarm.
“Things are about to get very, very, very bad,” posted podcaster Chris Mowrey. Similarly Shannon Watts, the New York Times bestselling author of “Fired Up,” wrote that this means there will be “a Civil War instead of midterm elections.”
Journalist Pedro L. Gonzalez struck an ominous note by pointing out that Trump also plans on declaring Georgia’s two senators, Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, to be illegitimate.
“If this is true it just shows that Trump is becoming more and more authoritarian, but the stupid kind of authoritarian who can’t even mask regime lies in a convincing way and so it’s obvious to everyone that he is terrified of his opponents (Ossof [sic] is a viable presidential candidate for Dems, one with more appeal than Vance) and also the average voter, which is why he keeps shamelessly pushing the SAVE America Act,” Gonzalez argued.
Policy consultant Adam Cochran also posted a lengthy analysis about the report, poking several holes in Trump’s arguments about supposed 2020 election fraud.
“Doesn’t work like that,” Cochran said. “First off, there was no fraud, but you seized the ballots and the paper back ups to make sure no one could question it.”
He added, “Second, the Constitution has no way to nullify a swearing in. Only peer expulsion. Third, this sudden ‘announcement’ is when Trump is down by two senators and desperate to pass a bill. Lastly, Trump had 64 court cases to try and litigate the election, including in Georgia. No case turned up any evidence, including after an audit of these ballots.”
Cochran concluded, “Trump’s own lawyers and advocates then admitted to making up the conspiracy about this county, and were charged for it. Part of the court evidence included their own email records of coming up with the plot.”
Melanie D'Arrigo, the vice president of legislative affairs for New York’s chapter of the National Organization for Women, was more succinctly than Cochran while likewise noting that his claims about Georgia had been litigated.
“The same Georgia election where Donald Trump was indicted by a jury of his peers for trying to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to ‘find 11,780 votes,’ to overturn the state's 2020 presidential election results?” D’Arrigo wrote. “That election?”
Meanwhile Adam Kinzinger, a former Republican congressman from Illinois, simply said that the reporting if true would be “insane. INSANE.”
Trump has made a number of efforts to avoid losing the 2026 midterm elections, from unsuccessfully trying to pass the SAVE America Act to require voters to show proof of citizenship and likewise unsuccessfully attempting to get the US Postal Service to decide who can send by ballots by mail to purging voters from the rolls and threatening to send ICE to intimidate voters at the polling places.
“Someone should read to him ‘Lost, Not Stolen,’ a 2022 report by eight conservatives (two former Republican senators, three former federal appellate judges, a former Republican solicitor general, and two Republican election law specialists),” conservative columnist George F. Will wrote for The Washington Post on Monday. “They examined all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed in multiple states by Trump and his supporters. Twenty cases were dismissed before hearings on their merits, 14 were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before hearings. Of the 30 that reached hearings on the merits, Trump’s side prevailed in only one, Pennsylvania, involving far too few votes to change the state’s result.”
Will added, “Trump’s batting average? .016. In Arizona, the most exhaustively scrutinized state, a private firm selected by Trump’s advocates confirmed Trump’s loss, finding 99 additional Biden votes and 261 fewer Trump votes.”
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Tina Peters' right-wing media tour: Endless conspiracy theories about voter fraud and boasts about advising Trump on how to fix it
Peters' complaints, including about “foreign agents,” appear to be linked to a broader plot to subvert the midterms by manufacturing a pretext for Trump to declare a national emergency and seize control of voting systems
Written by John Knefel
Research contributions from Alex Kaplan & Sophie Lawton
Published 07/10/26
Following her release from prison last month, former Colorado election official Tina Peters has hit the ground running with more than 17 appearances in right-wing media. During her media tour, Peters has spread numerous conspiracy theories about supposed voter fraud and foreign interference in elections, while repeatedly boasting about advising President Donald Trump on how to fix the purported problem.
Peters — who was released following commutation of her sentence on charges related to 2020 election conspiracy theories — has claimed that she urged Trump to issue executive orders that could severely curtail voting rights during a White House meeting and argued that Trump should unilaterally ban the use of voting machines and mail-in ballots, actions that would almost certainly be challenged in court.
Peters and her lawyer, Peter Ticktin, met with Trump on June 30, seemingly as part of an emerging plot to subvert the midterm elections. According to CNN, Ticktin, who also claims to be the president’s childhood best friend, is pressing Trump to issue “an executive order to effectively seize federal control of the upcoming midterms by declaring a national emergency based on alleged foreign interference through electronic voting machines,” and is involved in drafting a proposed EO toward that end.
Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, a vocal supporter of Peters, and others on his War Room podcast have spent weeks calling for Trump to take those exact actions.
Peters’ right-wing media tour: “Get rid of the machines”
Peters, a former Mesa County clerk, looms large among MAGA media figures who deny the results of the 2020 election. Following a pressure campaign by Trump, Colorado’s Democratic Gov. Jared Polis commuted Peters’ nine-year sentence, ostensibly on free speech grounds, a decision publicly opposed by two members of the commutation board. (Polis then fired them for speaking out.)
Media Matters found Peters has made at least 17 appearances in right-wing media programs or events since her release on June 1, including an interview that day on Bannon’s show.
During a June 24 fundraiser for herself, Peters said that “Trump called me the other day,” and later added: “I believe Trump could sign an executive order to get rid of the machines.”
On an appearance the same day on The Alex Jones Show, Peters reiterated that Trump “called me” and again argued that the president “should do an executive order to ban electronic voting machines across the nation.” She also alleged that “there were parts made in China” in the equipment she’d seen. (There is no public evidence of foreign interference in the 2020 election.)
The next day, Peters appeared on the Joel Oltmann Untamed podcast, where she repeated and broadened her recommendation to Trump. “We’ve got to get rid of the machines,” Peters said. “President Trump needs to sign an executive order —”
“And the mail-in ballots,” host Joel Oltmann interjected.
“And the mail-in ballots,” Peters agreed, “Saying it’s unconstitutional that these things are allowed to be done. There’s no security threshold when you have foreign agents that have proprietary authority, power, over the things that are used for our most sacred right, which is to vote who we want to represent us.” Peters also said Trump asked her to “get me the info.”
On a June 28 appearance on Faith & Freedom, Peters said that “we have to get rid of the machines. The machines don’t have any transparency; they are flipping votes.”
Then on July 2, Peters went on a livestream and described her White House meeting with Trump. “We are, right now, you know, with meeting the president yesterday, giving him a real solution to how to stop what’s happening.”
“There is a plan,” Peters said. “Yesterday, when I was with the president, he talked — and I can’t get into the plan — but we talked, he basically said to his lead counsel to do what I was asking.”
Peters repeated that read out of her meeting on July 5 in an interview on The Roger Stone Show.
“I just met with President Trump, and I told him, I said, sir, Mr. President, we have four months … We are going to lose the election if we don’t get rid of the machines,” Peters said. She added: “We have a plan going forward, I spoke to the president about it, and I’m hopeful that something can be done.”
What exactly that “something” is remains to be seen, but the last few weeks have provided some clues, and it looks a lot like what Peters’ own lawyer is advocating.
The plot to declare a national emergency and seize voting systems
Peters’ comments fit into a larger MAGA campaign to undermine the midterms that stretches from fringe media shows to the highest reaches of the administration. Although some aspects of the scheme aren’t publicly clear, Bannon and those in his orbit have laid out the basics.
First, a White House “task force” that includes right-wing media figure John Solomon — who previously laundered false allegations about the Biden family’s connection with Ukraine — would likely release documents purporting to show that China had interfered, or is planning to interfere, with U.S. elections. Judging by Bannon’s recent rhetoric, acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte, a Trump attack dog, and Pulte’s chief of staff Christina Norton, who has ties to the election denial movement, appear to be key players in this aspect of the operation.
Last month, NBC News reported that FBI Director Kash Patel “promoted” an “unsubstantiated claim” that “asserts that the Chinese mass-produced driver's licenses to be used in a mail-in ballot scheme,” and that Patel “linked to an article written by John Solomon.”
Next, Trump would use the declassified documents — potentially presented out of context — as a “predicate” to declare a national emergency, thereby granting himself “king-like powers” over elections, in the words of the scheme’s supporters.
Trump would then issue an executive order attempting to curtail voting rights along the lines of the SAVE America Act, which could force voters to show proof of citizenship when registering, and — if Peters’ recommendations hold sway — ban the use of machines and mail-in voting. The executive order could serve as a back door to enact the voter suppression legislation, which has stalled in Congress and doesn’t appear to have a clear path toward becoming law.
As a guest on Bannon’s show described it: “Stop talking about the SAVE Act and do a national security emergency for elections, which is the SAVE Act, which contains everything that's in the SAVE Act, Steve, and more and more.” The guest, Wayne Allyn Root, also claimed that he texted Trump about a national emergency executive order.
After Media Matters reported on the Bannon-Pulte-Solomon operation, Bannon confirmed its existence. “I want to give the devil his due,” Bannon said on July 2.
“This is about this effort we're doing to make sure that we get official details and facts on the 2020 election, and then layer on top of that, a national security emergency, and layer on top of that, an executive order that is Save America,” Bannon said, adding: “Fantastic.”
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AN UTAH DISPATCH 7 26
As part of a hypothetical scenario in a made-up state, Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson along with eight other panelists were asked what they would do if they were faced with a fictional president that asked for political favors in exchange for federal aid and not only pressured them to hand over private voter information, but also wanted to seize ballots before they were counted.
That was the premise of an episode of the PBS series “Breaking the Deadlock” titled: “How to Fix an Election” that was broadcast on Tuesday.
In the episode, Aaron Tang, a law professor at the UC Davis School of Law, moderated a panel that, alongside Henderson, included other prominent officials including former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Texas congressman Rep. Dan Crenshaw, and businessman Mark Cuban.
Tang asked them to confront hypothetical dilemmas that put pressure on voting rights and elections. Henderson was given a scenario to hand over private voter information to the federal government in the name of preventing ineligible people from voting.
“First of all, there is no evidence that there is any sort of widespread voting by people who are ineligible,” Henderson said in the show. “And the federal government doesn’t have access to our voter files because the U.S. Constitution expressly reserves the right to states to choose the times, places and manner of elections.”
But that scenario isn’t far off from a reality Henderson and other state election officials are facing in real life. For months, President Donald Trump’s administration has been pressuring them to hand over sensitive and private voter information.
The same day the episode aired, Henderson said in a social media post she had received “another love letter” from the U.S. Department of Justice “sprinkled throughout with threats of criminal prosecution” for resisting the agency’s demands for private voter data.
“This is truly bizarre behavior by the federal agency that is supposed to be protecting civil rights,” Henderson wrote.
In February the Department of Justice filed lawsuits against Utah, alongside other states “for failure to produce their full voter registration lists upon request.”
For months, President Donald Trump’s administration has demanded that states provide copies of their voter lists, calling the information necessary for election integrity efforts. While some states have turned over lists that withhold sensitive personal data, most have declined to offer all the information on their lists while citing state and federal privacy laws that protect American’s personal data.
Henderson has said she is among those fighting to protect Utah voters’ protected information.
“Neither state nor federal law entitles the Department of Justice to collect private information on law-abiding American citizens,” Henderson has said in response to the DOJ lawsuit. “Utahns can be assured that my office will always follow the Constitution and the law, protect voters’ rights, and administer free and fair elections.”
A review by Henderson’s office has confirmed that noncitizen voting isn’t a widespread problem in the state. The issue has, however, remained a focal point among Republicans across the country.
The letter the Department of Justice sent on Tuesday cited portions of federal code that outline the duties of state and local elections officials, including maintaining elections records and taking action to ensure that only U.S. citizens are allowed to vote.
“Any election officer, including the chief election officer of the state, who knowingly retains noncitizens on the state’s (voter registration list) or facilitates noncitizens in receiving and casting ballots could be subject to criminal liability,” the letter says.
While Utah approved a law allowing the release of some voter information for a fee — including name, address, age range, party affiliation, and vote history — other personal information, like social security numbers, full birth dates and driver’s license numbers, remain “strictly private for all voters and may only be disclosed to government entities for election administration purposes,” according to the Utah lieutenant governor’s website
During the PBS episode, the panel discussed a made-up situation in which the exchange of those private voter files would result in quicker federal action that would prevent a dam from collapsing, potentially avoiding deaths.
Henderson called it a “tough situation” during the panel discussion.
“It’s definitely hard to see trade-offs for something that is imminent and much needed versus standing on principle and following the rule of law,” she said. “But I also say, if we don’t have the rule of law, we don’t have anything, we don’t have a country, we don’t have freedom, and if we’re willing to trade those things in the moment, then we’re willing to risk an awful lot for temporary gains.”
In a comment issued about the PBS episode, Henderson said she left the taping “with a renewed commitment to the principles that have shaped our country for the past 250 years and which are essential to preserving our free government for the next 250 years.”
---
AN 7 26
GA RECORDER
Donald Trump’s Department of Justice has its sights fixed on Georgia, its election system and those who run it.
Should our state and local election officials be nervous? No, because they’ve done nothing wrong.
But yes, because this isn’t about right or wrong, it’s about power.
Just this week, Trump officials sent letters to elections officials here in Georgia and other states, threatening them with criminal prosecution if they knowingly allow noncitizens to vote. The letters are pure bluster that shouldn’t be taken seriously, mainly because safeguards against noncitizen voting are already so strict that it almost never happens.
Other actions are more serious.
Back in January, you may remember, FBI agents swooped in to seize hundreds of boxes of ballots cast in Fulton County during the 2020 elections. Presumably, they’ve spent the last six months sifting through those boxes in search of something, anything, and so far we have no indication that their search has been successful.
The Trump administration has also demanded names and contact information for thousands of Fulton County employees and volunteers who had worked on the 2020 election, without really explaining why they needed such data. Earlier this week, a federal judge quashed that request, calling it “staggering … unreasonable.” It “would not be a legitimate use of the grand jury and its subpoena power,” he wrote, warning that it “threatens to chill participation in future elections.”
The judge, William Ray, was appointed to the bench by Trump in 2017.
In addition, according to an internal FBI memo leaked last week, some 260 FBI analysts from all around the country have been yanked from their normal crime-fighting duties for additional intense scrutiny of Fulton County’s 2020 election, with agents and analysts told to work overtime and on weekends to complete whatever task they’ve been given.
I make two predictions:
They’ll find nothing.
They won’t admit they found nothing.
They won’t admit they found nothing because they can’t admit they found nothing. That outcome is simply not acceptable to Trump. It is not acceptable to his ego, and it is not acceptable to his plans to disrupt the 2026 midterms. Admitting they found nothing, after six years of whining from Trump, would undermine the last remaining structural support from an administration that may already be teetering on collapse.
Most likely, I suspect they will claim to have found thousands of mail-in ballots in which signatures don’t match, because you can always claim that signatures don’t match. From day to day, my own signature doesn’t match exactly, and the same is true of most people. For that and other reasons, claims of unmatched signatures won’t hold up in a court of law, but to Trump that won’t matter. He intends to make his claim in the court of public opinion, which operates under a different, far less rigorous standard.
Since he can’t produce proof of criminality and fraud, he wants to create the public illusion of it, particularly involving voting by mail. Armed with that illusion, he can create a whirlwind of controversy to try to justify seizing control of elections not just in Fulton County or Georgia but nationwide, allowing him to decide which votes to count and which to discard.
In ordinary times that charge might sound hyperbolic, but it’s hard to reach a different conclusion given the many unprecedented, previously unimagined ways in which Trump is seeking to undermine faith in fair elections and seize control. To cite yet another example, his administration is now withholding terrorism-prevention funds from states that refuse to give him control over their elections.
These are not separate actions. These are not just things that are happening. These are actions carried out with one particular goal in mind, which is to dictate who wins and loses this November and in Novembers yet to come.
And we in Georgia just happen to be at Ground Zero in that struggle.
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an 7 26
President Donald Trump could use the military to steal the 2026 midterms, which he and his fellow Republicans have panicked about losing, according to legal experts — although they emphasize that doing so would break centuries of precedent.
“Just this year, President Trump said he regrets that he did not order the National Guard to seize voting machines after the 2020 elections,” wrote Lawfare’s Natalie K. Orpett, Molly Roberts and Loren Voss on Wednesday. “Steve Bannon urged Trump to ‘call up the 82nd and 101st Airborne’ in 2026 to ‘get around every poll’ and make sure that only citizens are voting. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, when asked whether he would refuse an order to deploy troops to polling places during the midterms, avoided answering—and falsely claimed that troops were deployed to polling places in 15 states under Joe Biden.”
The scholars pointed out that “the Constitution mostly reserves to the states the authority to administer elections, with a role for Congress” but that the Elections Clause is limited enough that a sufficiently creative person could try to poke holes in it.
“It defines only states’ power to ‘prescribe’ the ‘Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections’ and Congress’s power to ‘make or alter such Regulations,’” Lawfare explained. “It says nothing about other actions that might affect elections—ensuring security, for example. However, neither the Constitution nor any founding-era law affirmatively authorizes the president to involve the military in U.S. elections, and the few statutes that address the question at all prohibit it in most circumstances.”
After reviewing the evolution of election law in terms of this issue from the Constitutional era through the early republic, the Jacksonian era, the Civil War and Reconstruction, they focused on the bill often cited as a rationalization for using the military for domestic law enforcement.
“The Posse Comitatus Act (18 U.S.C. § 1385), enacted in 1878, ensured that the military could be used for law enforcement only in a set of drastic situations explicitly defined in law,” Lawfare wrote. “By the late 1880s, all major cities had civilian police forces.”
They continued, “Today, the Posse Comitatus Act is widely regarded as the critical limitation on domestic military deployment. The current version of the statute bars the use of any part of the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, or Space Force ‘as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws.’ Posse comitatus literally means ‘power of the county’; legally, it refers to a group of people mobilized by officials such as a sheriff to enforce the law or keep the peace. The Posse Comitatus Act exists to keep troops—as opposed to civilians—from filling that role. But the rule isn’t ironclad: As described in our companion piece, the act itself carves out explicit exceptions, such as the Insurrection Act.”
The military is barred from following illegal orders in terms of domestic election interference, but statute does not provide for a specific cause of action. It serves as an affirmative statement of the law — and as further proof that Congress gives elections a special status. The standard limitations on domestic use of the military were apparently insufficient to safeguard elections; Congress deemed it necessary to pass three separate statutes to confer additional protections.”
Lawfare concluded, “These laws have survived more than 160 years, across roughly 80 or so election cycles. And they haven’t gone unnoticed. The Justice Manual sets forth specific procedures for enforcing § 592. The Defense Department Directive on Defense Support of Civil Authorities, last updated in 2018, forbids ‘DoD personnel and National Guard in Title 32 status’ from ‘conduct[ing] operations at polling places and strictly refrain from activities similar to those prohibited by’ 18 U.S.C. §§ 592-594.”
Speaking with AlterNet in June, Democracy Defenders Fund Senior Counsel/Deputy Legal Director Pooja Chaudhuri explained that sending troops to the polls could very well intimidate citizens from voting.
“I think there are two things to consider,” Chaudhuri, who specializes in voting rights as well as election law litigation and advocacy, told AlterNet. “One is that the election is made up of voters, and so the outcome depends on people turning out to the polls and voting. The problem is ... the chilling effect on voters.”
Chaudhuri continued, “When voters hear that ICE may be deployed to the polls, that mail-in voting rules are changing close to the election, a lot of voters might say, ‘I'm just not going to go out and vote.’ That could happen in many different ways. There are vulnerable communities — people may come from mixed-status families — they're US citizens, but they might decide, "I'm not going to vote." So one aspect is the chilling effect on voters that all of these actions would have.”
Dan Vicuña, the Senior Policy Director for Voting and Fair Representation at Common Cause, a nonprofit good government group, elaborated on other ways Trump is meddling with America’s free elections.
“What they all add up to is a desire to avoid any accountability to the voters in the midterm elections — to ensure, to preordain the outcome of a midterm that he thinks is going to go badly for him,” Vicuña told AlterNet. “We know, from the Big Lie of the 2020 election to spurring on a violent revolt to overthrow a free and fair election, that he has no respect for democratic norms, for the voice of the people. This is entirely about his own power and his own ego. He will even invest in protecting that ego and protecting his power at the expense of the needs of the public. People are suffering with high gas prices and affordability issues, and he does not care. All that matters is protecting his power, and he has no interest in whether he does that through democratic means.”
He added, “I think this all adds up to a desire to ensure that his party stays in power and his ability to do what he wants — to attack vulnerable communities — remains intact.”
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7 26 MMA
Written by Matt Gertz
Published 07/07/26
The MAGA plot to subvert the 2026 midterm elections is coming into focus. Election denial bigwig Steve Bannon has outlined a scheme in which President Donald Trump — aided by right-wing journalist John Solomon at the White House and Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence — would declassify and release documents purporting to show significant foreign interference in past U.S. elections. The president would then use that theory as the “predicate” to declare a “national emergency” and try to seize control of the elections apparatus to curtail voting rights in November.
The foundational lie of this scheme — and of election denial writ large — is that Trump is such a popular figure that only massive election fraud could explain the defeat of his movement at the polls. And the right’s propaganda apparatus is essential in buttressing that lie by ignoring or explaining away all evidence to the contrary. Outlets like Fox News don’t just celebrate the president as an heroic, visionary figure — they tell viewers that the polls are wrong and “The MAGA Momentum Is Unstoppable.”
Here's how this scheme has worked in the past, and a glimpse into how Trump and his propagandists are kicking into gear again this cycle.
Poll trutherism is the foundation of election denial
Trump is an historically unpopular president. Polls over the decade since he entered the political spotlight have consistently found that he is broadly disliked, and his job approval is currently tracking near its all-time lows, according to poll aggregations from The New York Times, Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin, and the conservative RealClearPolitics. The most recent results from pro-Trump Fox News are in line with those averages, showing 39% of respondents approve of the job Trump is doing while 60% disapprove, with his performance underwater by large margins on issues from the economy to immigration.
The president has responded to these dire numbers not by trying to appeal to a broader swath of the country but by declaring that he is actually popular and that news outlets have fabricated these results to damage his political standing.
“Fake polls — I got one today,” the president told reporters in February. “I saw one today that I'm at 40%. I'm not at 40%. I'm at much higher than that. I'd love to run against anybody. The real polls say ‘you'd kill everybody, it wouldn't even be close.’”
In late June, he likewise argued that other, unnamed surveys show his “REAL POLL NUMBERS ARE THE HIGHEST THEY HAVE EVER BEEN,” with his job approval at “at 65%, and more!”
As with so many of Trump’s actions, this is simultaneously laughable and menacing. It is ridiculous on its face that the president of the United States is so unwilling to accept that the majority of the public don’t like him that he’s instead concocted a vast conspiracy theory implicating the bulk of the nation’s pollsters and media outlets while apparently inventing “REAL POLL NUMBERS” that show he is beloved.
But Trump inevitably carries that absurd argument to its logical conclusion: When election results correspond with the public polls and Trump loses, he decries those elections as “rigged.” He famously attributed both his popular vote defeat in 2016 and his popular and electoral vote losses in 2020 to election fraud, and baselessly warned in the leadup to the 2024 election that only rigging could explain it if he lost again (this time he won both the popular and electoral votes despite his low favorability).
He’s also extended that argument to elections for other allied candidates. If you accept the polls, Trump’s actual unpopularity is “putting the Republican Party at risk of a severe rebuke from voters in just six months’ time in the 2026 midterm elections,” as CNN noted in May. But Trump’s lie turns that reasoning on its head — if his “REAL” numbers are so good that the GOP should really be romping in their elections and only massive election fraud could explain Democratic victories.
Last month, for example, Trump baselessly claimed that “cheating dogs” who administer elections in California had stolen the Los Angeles mayoral race from former reality TV personality and conservative candidate Spencer Pratt. He added that “they” had only “approved” Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton to make the run-off because “I started hitting them” with baseless fraud allegations. (Pratt’s share of the vote was on track with polling of the race and just under the vote share Trump himself received in LA in 2024, while Hilton and fellow Republican gubernatorial candidate Chad Bianco combined to run three points under Trump’s statewide total that year — but the president has claimed that loss was also the result of fraud.)
He has also urged Republicans to pass legislation to curtail voting rights, arguing that failure to do so will result in midterm defeats. “We can only lose the midterms if we allow ourselves to lose the midterms, if we are foolish, stupid and unwise,” Trump said Friday. “But if we terminate the filibuster as we should do and immediately vote for the SAVE America Act, then we will not lose an election for 100 years.”
MAGA media are hiding Trump’s unpopularity from their audience
The right-wing propaganda machine plays a key role in this farce.
Republicans spent decades tearing down the press and urging their supporters to get their information only from ideological allies. That opened up the party base to Trumpian lies, like his claims about news outlets producing fake polls.
MAGA media could try to keep their audiences grounded in reality, leveling with them about Trump’s unpopularity and pushing the party to change course. But in the lead-up to both the 2020 and 2024 elections, they portrayed Trump as the odds-on favorite and suggested a defeat could only result from fraud. And since Trump returned to office, the right-wing commentariat has largely toed the president’s line and hidden worrying signs about his faltering support.
The strategy is particularly obvious — and noxious — on Fox. The network’s hosts and commentators are aware that Trump is deeply unpopular, as it employs pollsters whose own surveys show it. But they are concealing that knowledge from viewers — a group that often includes the Fox-obsessed president himself — rather than leveling with them.
Fox hosts hide the network’s brutal polls while touting Trump as “the ultimate dealmaker” ushering in a “golden age” that makes the United States “the envy of the world” — and that “America, just like McDonald’s, we’re loving it.”
Its pundits swoon over how his “support among his base, among Republicans, is as strong as any president we've seen in modern history” and assure viewers that “the polling that you're seeing come in on Trump is incorrect.”
They point to outdated polls that suggest Trump’s actions are popular over their own survey data when it says otherwise.
After the crowd at Madison Square Garden loudly jeered the president when he appeared on the Jumbotron at Game 3 of the NBA Finals between the hometown New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs, Fox & Friends claimed his reception was actually “mixed.”
And when dismal turnout marred Trump’s efforts to make the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence all about himself, they pretended otherwise.
Those efforts have not fully assuaged the president — he has publicly urged Fox to fire its pollsters and even threatened to have them criminally investigated on the grounds that their negative results purportedly constitute “ELECTION FRAUD.”
But by downplaying the evidence of the president’s unpopularity, the network is nonetheless priming its viewers to believe him if Republicans are defeated in the midterms and he responds by crying “fraud.” And with election deniers consolidating power across the administration and laying the groundwork for a future attempt to subvert the vote, the stakes couldn’t be higher.
//
The plot to subvert the midterms is getting stranger and more dangerous
07/02/26 10:05 AM EDT
The right enters a post-proof era of election denial
06/10/26 2:35 PM EDT
Here’s the familiar playbook Trumpists will use to try and overturn the election if he loses
11/01/24
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The plot to subvert the midterms is getting stranger and more dangerous
Right-wing media figures including Steve Bannon, John Solomon, and Cleta Mitchell appear to be weaving together a narrative about interference by China in US elections to justify a national emergency to curtail voting rights
Written by John Knefel
Published 07/02/26
Over the last several weeks, the outlines of a plot have begun to emerge that could signal how President Donald Trump, along with MAGA media figures and activists, could attempt to severely curtail voting rights under the pretext of declaring a national emergency posed by China.
The details of the scheme remain publicly vague, and may not yet come to pass, but the short version looks something like this: First, the White House would declassify and release documents purporting to show foreign interference in U.S. elections, especially by the Chinese Communist Party.
Next, Trump would use that supposed “proof” of a stolen election to declare a national emergency, thereby — according to those pushing this idea — giving him extraordinary powers over the upcoming midterms. That move would serve as a way to advance the anti-voting rights measures in the SAVE America Act, like forcing voters to prove their citizenship, without having to actually pass the law — which Congress, so far at least, appears reluctant to do.
The main players here come not only from the fever swamp backwaters of MAGA media, but also from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the White House. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon is a central node, attempting to advance the operation on his War Room podcast, aired on right-wing network Real America’s Voice, long a major source of misinformation about the 2020 election.
The main players here come not only from the fever swamp backwaters of MAGA media, but also from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the White House
Bannon’s RAV colleague John Solomon, whose role in the plot appears to be running the declassification effort, was recently appointed to a White House “task force” into supposed election integrity. Solomon was Media Matters’ Misinformer of the Year in 2019 for his role in laundering misinformation about the Bidens and Ukraine through his opinion columns.
Also in the mix is Peter Schweizer, who founded the Government Accountability Institute with Bannon and has moved from spreading misinformation about the Clintons to claiming that China is taking over the United States by exploiting birthright citizenship.
Then there’s Cleta Mitchell, a right-wing lawyer who was on the January 2021 call when Trump urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough ballots to tip the state his way. She referenced Schweizer in a June 20 appearance on War Room, positively paraphrasing an argument he made on his podcast acknowledging that much of the voting activity he wants to suppress is actually legal.
“Peter Schweizer put it pretty well last week in a podcast that he does with Eric Eggers, and the question they posed is: If fraud is made — if election fraud is made legal, is it still fraud?” Mitchell asked. “Because what's happened in California over the last decade is that the far-left Democrat, socialist, Marxists, communists have completely upended every vestige of election integrity.” (Bannon had teed her up by referencing the Los Angeles mayoral primary, claiming without evidence: “They stole it right in front of our face and laughed at us the entire time.")
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From the June 20, 2026, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room
Mitchell is supported by a loose array of election deniers who have called on Trump to issue an executive order to seize “king-like powers” over voting systems, supported by the national emergency decree.
Bill Pulte, the newly installed acting DNI, and his recently appointed chief of staff, former Republican National Committee official Christina Norton, also appear to figure heavily into the plan. On June 20, Bannon said Pulte’s role at DNI is “to get to the bottom of the 2020 stolen election.” Ten days later, Bannon described Norton as “one of the top election fraud people in all of the RNC” and said Pulte is “signaling where he's going on this” with her hiring, adding that “my understanding is that there is going to be real revelations about the stealing of the 2020 election."
The same day, NBC News reported that Solomon’s task force “is gathering thousands of pages of documents from U.S. intelligence agencies, with plans to declassify some of them, so President Donald Trump can amplify new accusations about past elections.” In describing his unpaid role at the White House, Solomon said he will be releasing “some documents, some secrets you should know about when it comes to weaponization, election integrity, other things."
Solomon’s recent media footprint offers clues about what he is likely looking to find, declassify, and present — possibly out of context. The subhead of a May 6 article of Solomon’s states: “The evidence continues to stack up that the U.S. intel community sought to downplay China's actions in 2020 as Trump sought reelection.” Then, during a May 19 interview, he said: “We do know the FBI had grave suspicions that China was trying to rig the election, probably with help from people on the ground, to help Joe Biden specifically."
The Supreme Court’s narrow June 30 decision to protect birthright citizenship could turbocharge the Bannon-Solomon-Pulte scheme, in part by providing fodder for anti-Chinese sentiment on the right. On Solomon’s website, Just The News, an article about the birthright citizenship case referenced Schweizer’s book and hyped the supposed China menace.
Birthright citizenship abuse via birth tourism, when foreign nationals travel to the United States on temporary visas specifically to give birth, is an issue that Trump addressed early in his second term.
Investigative journalist Peter Schweizer detailed this practice extensively in his 2026 book, “The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign Powers Use Immigration as a Weapon,” in which he described how China has industrialized the practice on a large scale through an organized industry.
Michelle Mittelstadt of the Migration Policy Institute told FactCheck.org that “birth tourism is a very small occurrence – of the 3.6 million U.S. births annually, a tiny fraction is due to foreign women who are not regularly domiciled in the U.S. coming here for the purpose of giving birth to secure U.S. citizenship for their child.”
And as the American Immigration Council’s Dara Lind noted: “Consulates have a ton of discretion under existing law to deny someone a visa. And suspicion of birth tourism _has_ served as a reason to deny visas in the past. If the problem is insufficient enforcement, good news, you can solve that problem without changing the law or Constitution!”
Bannon stated plainly on June 29 that Solomon’s “task force” and “also Pulte” would be central to creating a “predicate” for the declaration of a national emergency and subsequent executive order achieving the anti-voting rights goals of the SAVE America Act.
On June 30, Bannon interviewed another of his RAV colleagues, Wayne Allyn Root, who further elaborated what a national emergency declaration could look like.
“Stop talking about the SAVE Act and do a national security emergency for elections, which is the SAVE Act, which contains everything that's in the SAVE Act, Steve, and more and more,” Root said.
Just days earlier, on June 24, Trump canceled a signing ceremony for a bipartisan housing bill to pressure Congress to pass the stalled out SAVE America Act, which he referred to as a “National Emergency."
The “predicate” Bannon is hoping to manufacture could also be for other election initiatives the administration is working on — such as trying to force courts to give the administration access to various state voter rolls — an issue the administration is facing significant resistance to.
Whether this harebrained plot congeals into an active conspiracy to subvert the midterms remains to be seen, but given that Trump has already tried to overturn one election it would be a mistake not to take these rumblings seriously. There may indeed be an emergency — it’s just not the one that Bannon and company are talking about.
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Jack Posobiec, who helped spread a conspiracy theory about Democrats running a satanic child abuse ring, was invited by the Republican National Committee this month to speak to a group of volunteers about how to monitor elections in Michigan.Credit...Rebecca Noble for The New York Times
Alexandra Berzon
By Alexandra Berzon
Sept. 26, 2024
See more of our coverage in your search results.
Add The New York Times on Google
A few years ago, Jack Posobiec was a fringe figure and a right-wing agitator best known for helping spread “Pizzagate,” a conspiracy theory about Democrats running a satanic child abuse ring underneath a Washington pizza parlor.
This month, he was invited by the Republican National Committee to speak to a group of volunteers about how to monitor elections in Michigan.
The invitation was one sign of how the party uses figures and fictions that were once considered out of bounds to energize its activists. The counsel that Mr. Posobiec delivered was another.
He blasted elections in the Democratic stronghold of Philadelphia, for example, joking that officials in Venezuela learned how to conduct their elections, widely seen as corrupt, by visiting the city and studying how it is done, according to a recording of the Sept. 4 meeting obtained by The New York Times.
The key to elections, he said, is that “it doesn’t matter who votes. It matters who counts the votes.”
Both Republican and Democratic groups have long dispatched such monitors to polling places, typically with instructions to report problems with equipment, long lines or any other issues. Democrats generally emphasize issues related to restrictions on voting and Republicans look out for voter fraud....
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Cleta Mitchell reacts to the Supreme Court late-arriving mail-in ballots ruling by saying it's time to challenge early voting
Mitchell to Steve Bannon: “There's a lot in that opinion that would suggest that we ought to be challenging early voting. We ought to be challenging unfettered absentee voting.”
Written by Media Matters Staff
Published 06/30/26
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From the June 29, 2026, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room
CLETA MITCHELL (GUEST): You know, I think that - I don't know, but Amy Coney Barrett writes for the majority, and this is what is shocking, is that there are five justices of the Supreme Court who believe and who wrote in this opinion that there is a difference between casting the ballot, that is when the voters make their choice, and when the ballot is received. That makes no sense.
Frankly, according to their opinion, I actually think that this gives us good grounds to challenge early voting and to say that voting is — there's a lot in that opinion that would suggest that we ought to be challenging early voting. We ought to be challenging unfettered absentee voting because they also point out, which Marc Elias conveniently forgets to discuss, that — repeatedly they referred to the fact that the ballots had to be postmarked on or before election day.
Well, California doesn't require a postmark. I think we ought to challenge that. I think that what we have to do on our side is that we have to do what the left has done. And I know that that when Stephen Miller started America First Legal Foundation after — in 2021, the idea was to build a judicial attack mob that's similar to what the left has. And we haven't really done that.
I mean, they — there are — we've done a lot better. But these guys, the left challenges everything. And we are getting these terrible decisions from these awful left-wing trial court judges all over the country. And then this decision — to me, the worst part of this decision is it emboldens these left-wing crazy judges that are inhabiting our courts all over the country. That's the constitutional crisis we face, is all of these judges.
But I will tell you that I think that there is a roadmap in this. Unfortunately, it requires congressional action and we see how terrible Congress, the US Senate is. So I mean it's, we have a crisis because the judges are not letting the president do his job and they're trying to do Congress's job.
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June 30, 2026, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room
STEVE BANNON (HOST): SAVE America Act — a lot of people are saying, hey, do we have time to implement it? Are we going to have lawsuits? But President Trump is driving forward. We're a huge proponent of that.
We also know that Bill Pulte is at DNI, and that John Solomon of Real America's Voice is leading a task force on declassification. And yesterday, Pulte hired, from the RNC, as his chief of staff, one of the top election fraud people in all of the RNC to be his chief of staff. So he's telling you where he's — signaling where he's going on this.
My understanding — I don't have any access to this classified information — but my understanding is that there is going to be real revelations about the stealing of the 2020 election.-
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[### Pulte picks RNC's former election integrity director for his ...
Democracy Docket
https://www.democracydocket.com › News](https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/pulte-picks-rncs-former-election-integrity-director-for-his-national-intelligence-agencys-chief-of-staff/)
4 days ago — Acting national intelligence director Bill Pulte picked Christina Norton, known for running the GOP's 2024 poll watcher program, as his ...
Acting national intelligence director Bill Pulte has picked Christina Norton, a GOP lawyer known for running the GOP’s controversial 2024 poll watcher operation, as his chief of staff, reports The New York Times. Norton also was Pulte’s chief of staff at the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which he still leads.
When the Republican National Committee (RNC) called for an army of 100,000 poll watchers in 2024 – in alignment with the Trump campaign’s prejudicial declarations of voter fraud – Norton was tapped to serve as its election integrity director. In that role, she oversaw the planning for the RNC’s massive poll watcher program, which drew on a slew of election conspiracists and deniers of the 2020 election results to train volunteers.
Pulte’s hiring of Norton fuels voting rights advocates’ concerns that he’ll be using the national intelligence office to fulfill President Donald Trump’s agenda to subvert this year’s midterms, by amplifying and prioritizing wild goose chases for voter fraud.
One clear example of how Norton approached her role as the RNC’s chief poll watcher and voter fraud investigator can be found in an April 2024 meeting among rightwing activists she attended, where she laid out plans for monitoring voters in that year’s elections.
The RNC’s poll watcher activities had previously been curtailed from 1982 to 2018 due to its intimidation tactics against Black and Latino voters in the early 80s. Under a consent decree, the RNC was only able to carry out “ballot security” programs under court approval and supervision during that time period. But when the decree was lifted, the RNC went all out in revamping its poll watcher missions in 2020 and 2024, much of it in cahoots with the Trump campaign.
For Norton in 2024, that meant working with scores of grassroots far-right and MAGA activists, many of whom were still peddling the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. Some of those activists were at the April 2024 meeting with Norton, and continued these “stolen election” narratives as incentivization for that year’s poll watching strategies.
Among the speakers at that meeting:
Steve Stern and Raj Doraisamy, the meeting’s organizers, both rightwing activists who have close ties to the “Pillow Guy” Mike Lindell, who’s since had to shell out millions of dollars from lawsuits for falsely claiming that voting machines were hacked and fraudulent votes were cast in the 2020 election.
Seth Keshel, a retired U.S. Army intelligence officer who claimed that he counted 150,000 fraudulent votes in the 2020 election from North Carolina, and made similar allegations of “big-time” fraud in Madison and Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Arizona.
Linda Szynkowicz, founder of the conspiratorial FightVoterFraud.org site, who’s claimed without evidence that she’s spotted thousands of felony-grade election crimes.
Jay Valentine, an amateur cybersecurity activist who worked with Trump’s former lawyer Sidney Powell to overturn 2020’s election results.
Marly Hornik, founder of New York Citizens Audit, whose claim to fame was saying he discovered millions of fraudulent voter registrations in New York, but was ultimately served a cease and desist letter from the attorney general for confronting “voters across the state at their homes” after falsely claiming to represent the Board of Elections.
As the Nebraska Examiner reported, Norton neither disputed nor objected to the claims made at the meeting.
“If reports are true that Bill Pulte, whose installation as acting D.N.I. already raises serious legal questions, is bringing a former senior R.N.C. official who cavorted with election deniers and conspiracy theories into O.D.N.I. as his chief of staff, Americans have every reason to fear that this administration is once again eroding the wall between our intelligence agencies and domestic elections,” said Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Intel Committee, in a statement to the Times.
Perhaps the most notorious recruit to the RNC’s 2024 poll watching apparatus was Jack Posobiec, the person responsible for the “Pizzagate” conspiracy that Democrats were behind a diabolical pedophilia ring run out of a D.C. pizza shop.
The RNC invited Posobiec to train a group of poll watcher volunteers in Michigan in September 2024. There, he shared voter fraud myths and told the trainees, “it doesn’t matter who votes. It matters who counts the votes.”
It was an escalation of a similar statement that Trump made in 2024 when he announced his own campaign’s robust poll watcher operation: “Having the right people to count the ballots is just as important as turning out voters on Election Day.”
[### Bill Pulte Picks G.O.P. Election Operative for Spy Agency Job
The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com › U.S. › Politics](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/26/us/politics/pulte-spy-agency-christina-norton.html)
5 days ago — Christina Norton is the new chief of staff at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, former officials said.
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Election deniers reach a fever pitch calling for a “national emergency” declaration so Trump can give himself “king-like powers” over the midterms
Tina Peters: “I believe Trump could sign an executive order to get rid of the machines and say ... that a vendor cannot have that much influence over our elections”
Written by Alex Kaplan
Published 06/30/26
After President Donald Trump issued an executive order at the end of March aimed at stopping supposed fraud with mail-in ballots, election deniers have urged Trump to declare a national emergency to allow a federal takeover of election processes. On June 24, Trump echoed those calls and suggested that passing a bill to supposedly combat election fraud is a “national emergency.”
Media figures who have pushed claims of widespread election fraud — some of whom say they have been involved with drafting such an order that is “sitting on his [Trump’s] desk” — have urged Trump to give himself “king-like powers” by implementing the proposal, as it would supposedly empower Trump to “be able to make the rules” and use the National Guard to oversee midterm elections. Others claim that they have asked Trump directly to invoke the proposed order, saying it would be “very easy” for the president to “issue an executive order through a national emergency and have the National Guard count those ballots by hand.”
Election deniers drafted executive order declaring a national emergency to implement election policies and Trump issued an executive order on mail-in ballots
Since at least April 2025, a group of right-wing figures and Trump allies have called for Trump to issue a national emergency declaration “to make sure that the elections in 2026 are secure,” even proposing and circulating among Trump administration officials a draft executive order that would “declare a national emergency” and “empower the president to ban mail ballots and voting machines as the vectors of foreign interference.” Those involved include attorney Peter Ticktin, former Infowars staffer Jerome Corsi, and QAnon influencer Wayne Willot, known online as Juan O. Savin.
During his second term, Trump has issued two executive orders related to elections. As explained by The New York Times, a March 2025 order instructs the Election Assistance Commission “to require people to show government-issued proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote in federal elections, and directs state or local officials to record and verify the information,” and it “seeks to require states to count ballots by Election Day.” Multiple federal judges have since blocked that executive order.
On March 31, Trump issued an executive order that directs the Department of Homeland Security to “compile and transmit to the chief election official of each State a list of individuals confirmed to be United States citizens who will be above the age of 18 at the time of an upcoming Federal election and who maintain a residence in the subject State,” and instructs the U.S. Postal Service to “transmit ballots only to individuals enrolled on a State-specific Mail-in and Absentee Participation List.” NPR reported that “election experts said the order was unconstitutional.” After Trump signed the executive order, election deniers hailed it as a “win” that will leave Democrats “toast.” On June 25, a federal judge blocked parts of the order.
While Trump reportedly “shrugged off reports that he could consider declaring a national emergency around the midterm elections,” he has repeatedly advocated for the SAVE America Act, which would put restrictions on voting but has struggled to pass in Congress. On June 24, Trump canceled plans to sign bipartisan housing legislation “until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE AMERICA ACT, which I consider to be a National Emergency.”
## Since Trump issued the executive order in March, election deniers have repeatedly urged Trump to also declare a national emergency ahead of the midterms
Savin, who wasinvolvedwith the proposed national emergency executive order,claimedthat Trump “is going to have to declare a national election emergency that gives him essentially king-like powers within the area of elections.”He added that the proposal is “sitting on his [Trump’s] desk, the 17-page order which my team put together within the coalition.” He’s also claimed that Trump “wants to sign it and [is] having the legal people review it to make sure that we got everything right,” may try to issue the order in “bite-sized pieces,” and that Trump has “tried to break up” the proposed order and it will “ultimately … get sealed in one summary executive order at some point in time, but they’ve taken a couple of pieces out and done them individually.”
Ticktin, also supposedlyinvolvedwith the proposed order,saida national “election emergency” would allow Trump to “be able to make the rules.” He also said that it would give Trump “additional forces of some sort” like the National Guard to have “camera observation” of ballots and make “sure the counting is done and done correctly.”
Corsi, another figure supposedlyinvolvedwith the proposed order, said that hebelievedTrump is “very strategically laying out his plans” with multiple executive orders related to elections and “saving his powder for that one last executive order, which will come much closer to the election.” He also claimed that the “nightmare” of Trump’s impeachment and removal by a Democratic-controlled Congress “can be avoided by that kind of an executive order” and Trump’s authority under the national emergency could “extend to utilizing the National Guard to intervene in states that didn’t cooperate.” During another appearance in which he discussed the order, Corsi claimed that “politically, Donald Trump cannot afford to let the 2026 midterm election occur under the current rules because he will most certainly lose. And that’s not going to happen.”
Former Mesa County, Colorado, clerk Tina Peterssaidduring a stream following her release from prison that she had spoken with the president and she believes “Trump could sign an executive order to get rid of the machines and say that they are — that a vendor cannot have that much influence over our elections.”She also said on a separate podcast that “we need to get rid of the machines” and “mail-in ballots,” and Trump “needs to sign an executive order ... saying it’s unconstitutional that these things are allowed to be done.” Corsi has also claimed that Peters will “play a major role in one of the key factors in Trump ultimately declaring the need for the elections to be supervised by the federal government.”
Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock CEO who has been aprominent fundraiserfor election denial efforts andplayed a rolein trying to overturn the 2020 election,saidTrump should announce a national emergency to “run our election this year ... and teach them how to run them in Iraq.”He later added that he hoped the president would declare an emergency “this summer.” Byrne is supposedly involved with the proposed order.
Savin’s supposed “chief of staff,”Matt Meck,saidthe proposed national emergency order is “what we think needs to be done.”Meck — a board member of Fight Voter Fraud Inc., an organization which “has been criticized in the past for repeatedly advancing unfounded claims based on its misinterpretation of voter registration information and other data” — is supposedly involved with the proposed order.
Mark Cook, described byColorado Newslineas one “of the most influential election deniers in Colorado,”said, “How much more of an emergency do we need to establish here? It's right in our faces, and we have to do something immediately.” Cook is also supposedly involved with the proposed order.
Laura Scharr, thefounderof South Carolina Safe Elections,saidthat “it can’t just be an executive order — they’ve blown off the other two executive orders [related to elections] that Trump put out.”She added, “The only way is through a national emergency.” Scharr, who is supposedly involved with the proposed order, concluded that “it must be a national emergency. It has to happen as soon as possible.”
Wayne Allyn Root — a radio host who hasclaimedthat mail-in ballots were used to “rig and steal the 2020 election” and who the Nevada Currentreportedis “known for subscribing to conspiracy theories”— has authoredmultiple columnsfor The Gateway Pundit advocating for the proposed national emergency. On his show, Root claimed to have texted the president about a national emergency and he said that he would urge Trump to “sign Jerome Corsi’s executive order on election integrity, Mr. President, and do it now.”
John Goodman, who ispart ofthe “Florida Election Integrity Committee,”saidonStern American's “election integrity call” that “if you like the SAVE Act, you should love the national security emergency even more because it's like the SAVE Act on steroids,“ and that such a declaration “will be the trick, unobstructed.” He has also claimed that the call for “a national security emergency on elections” based on his ideas has been “very well received by Trump's legal team.” Root has said that “John Goodman, my election expert, has been telling me” that a national emergency is “the way to go,” and he claimed that Goodman “sent me all the reasons … as to what I could pass on to President Trump to push the urgency of a executive order to deal with election fraud and election integrity.” Corsi has also claimed to “have been working with” Goodman.
Linda Szynkowicz, thefounderof Fight Voter Fraud Inc.,claimedon her podcast that the Constitution “gives the president the power in a state of emergency from foreign intervention in the elections,” for which “we have more than enough proof.” She made this claim in response to Goodman’s call for a “national security emergency.”
David Clements, a podcaster“criss-crossed the country to who hasevangelize about purported election fraud,”saidat a local Republican event in Oregon that it would be “very easy” for Trump to “issue an executive order through a national emergency and have the National Guard count those ballots by hand.”During a podcast appearance with Corsi, Clements also claimed that he did not see “any scenario where we can run a clean election without the aid of the National Guard.”
Douglas Franksaidin an appearance alongside Ticktin on theTake Your Power Back Showthat “we have people all over the country ready to support the president in case he needs to make some kind of emergency order.” The Los Angeles Times reported that Frank has given speeches across the country as “part of a multi-pronged effort by the election denial movement to make a significant impact on future elections.”
Tamara Favorito — who reportedlyhelps runthe “election integrity” organization VoterGA with her husband, Garland Favorito —saidon a stream that Trump “needs to hurry” to declare a national emergency “because November is not very far away.” After being asked if there was “enough time before the midterms for” Trump to declare “the national security emergency and executive orders that mandate the things that make elections safe,” Favorito responded that “if the election officials in the counties put their mind to it, I believe it can be done, but he [Trump] needs to hurry because November is not very far away.”
Gregory Stenstrom, a Pennsylvaniapoll watcherwhoclaimedwithout evidence that he saw votes for Biden being uploaded to voting machines in 2020,saidonStern American’s “election integrity call” that “Trump is required to take executive action.” Stenstrom said, “In the executive order that is being drafted by Peter Ticktin and Mr. Corsi, they can refer to multiple cases within the courts right now that show that President Trump is required to take executive action because certain secretaries of state and certain county officials in key counties are cheating and not complying with the law.” Stenstrom was also part of a lawsuit that reportedly alleged that there was “negligent and fraudulent misrepresentation related to the 2020 general election,” but which a local district attorney said there was “no merit found to the claims.”
## Why this sounds familiar and continues to matter
Trump and his right-wing media allies have been pushing claims of election fraud for years. During Trump's second term, election deniers known for promoting conspiracy theories about the 2020 election have been given access to the levers of power — feeding already debunked claims to the Department of Justice, taking roles in the administration, and contributing to federal investigations. Some, like Peters, Byrne, and Martin Rodil, claimed they have spoken directly with Trump and administration officials. (The Guardian reported Rodil became a source “for the Trump camp and ultimately for investigators and … promoted two major allegations about Venezuela.”)
As the 2026 midterms approach, right-wing media and the Trump administration appear to have ramped up their efforts to undermine the midterm elections — invoking repeatedly debunked conspiracy theoriesabout widespread election fraud in the U.S., relying on one-off incidents and hypotheticals that are often exaggerated or misleading, and pushing for Trump policy priorities like the SAVE America Act.
Election deniers have already claimed that primaries for the 2026 midterms have featured election fraud, and Savin himself has claimed that the primary elections have been “laying the groundwork” for Trump to declare a national emergency — language which the president has now repeated.
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Trump suggested that Bill Pulte at DNI may investigate “rigged elections.” Steve Bannon's War Room podcast is thrilled.
Bannon's War Room has been a longtime hub for election denial and was instrumental in stirring up the January 6 riots
Written by Sophie Lawton
Research contributions from John Knefel
Published 06/23/26
On his podcast War Room, Steve Bannon and his guests are celebrating Bill Pulte's position as acting director of National Intelligence, claiming he will “get to the bottom of the 2020 stolen election." Earlier this month, discussing the appointment, President Trump himself said that Pulte “may find out some things about the rigged elections.”
Pulte started in the role last week after President Donald Trump intervened to stop the Senate confirmation hearing of his DNI nominee, Jay Clayton, despite congressional backlash to Pulte's original appointment as acting DNI. Bannon has been pushing for Pulte as DNI since Trump originally appointed him in early June, calling him “a patriot” and claiming, “It's time now for smash mouth” with members of Congress who opposed his appointment. Even Republican senators have noted objections to Pulte.
Bannon has made it clear that his focus on Pulte's role is absolutely about elections, saying, “Bill Pulte is the perfect choice, the perfect choice to run DNI right now. It also shouldn't be lost on anybody that these elections, the stolen elections, which they're now in your face of how they're going to do it with the mail-in ballots.”
Bannon's War Room has been a longtime hub for election denial and was instrumental in stirring up the January 6 riots. Bannon has already begun laying groundwork for interfering in the midterm elections or denying their legitimacy on the show. Now, he and his guests are suggesting Pulte's time in office will lead to proof that the 2020 election was stolen.
Before Pulte started as acting DNI, Bannon suggested Pulte use the position to “maybe look around the files, maybe actually check into the, you know, some of the election files of 2020.”
In a June 20 interview with former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, Bannon explicitly said, “The reason Jay Clayton ain't at DNI right now and Bill Pulte is … is to get to the bottom of the 2020 stolen election.” Bannon then noted that both John Solomon, an election conspiracy theorist, and Pulte are now working together and “they need to stay at DNI.” Giuliani argued Pulte's appointment was important because the California primary elections “look like it was so crooked that nobody will believe it, so either they're cheating or they're making everybody believe they cheat.”
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From the June 20, 2026, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room
Giuliani also praised Pulte and specifically his work on elections, saying that “he knows what happened for real,” an apparent reference to the 2020 election that Giuliani has claimed was stolen. He then asked, “How do we have a republic if we don't have free elections?”
On the June 19 edition of War Room, Bannon suggested those opposing Pulte’s appointment are “afraid Pulte's going to get his hands on” proof the 2020 election was stolen and that they're “damn right” that MAGA will “use it in the midterm.” Bannon added, “Bill Pulte's in, and he and Solomon are going to get their hands on it, and you're going to have to live with it. The American people are going to see the receipts.”
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From the June 19, 2026, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room
Article III Project founder and regular War Room guest Mike Davis told Bannon about Pulte: “He'll go in there and he'll rip apart that place for as long as President Trump needs Bill Pulte to rip apart that place.” He said, “President Trump can keep Bill Pulte as the acting DNI for as long as he wants and I love it,” adding “There is so much that needs to be exposed at the DNI, and Bill Pulte is the perfect man to do it.”
Another frequent War Room guest and election conspiracy theorist, Jack Posobiec appeared on Bannon's show and suggested members of Congress were scared to confirm Pulte because they did not want to expose election fraud, saying, “Could it be that there was some kind of foreign interference or some kind of penetration of those election systems down there in Fulton County that leads to a massive, massive problem with that 2020 count?"
Now, after weeks of focusing on Pulte uncovering election fraud, Bannon and guests are questioning whether Pulte's priority in office should be prosecuting former director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci.
//
06/18/26 12:51 PM EDT
06/18/26 6:28 PM EDT
06/17/2
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MMA 6 26
Right-wing media’s response to results of LA mayoral primary race is a preview of their midterm playbook
Right-wing media have been using footage from an emerging group of right-wing influencers to allege fraud during CA primary elections
Written by Kayla Gogarty
Research contributions from Hanne MacDonald, Isabella Sherk, Gideon Taaffe & Jack Winstanley
Published 06/18/26
Following Nithya Raman's late surge over Spencer Pratt in the primary results for Los Angeles mayor, right-wing media and the Trump administration leveraged often misleading videos from an emerging group of right-wing influencers to undermine the results.
This tactic fuels election misinformation narratives among the right-wing media and serves to provide so-called “proof” of their conspiracy theories to dispute election results, even though their “proof” is often exaggerated or misleading and voter fraud is extremely rare.
An emerging group of right-wing influencers are mirroring James O'Keefe's tactics
As MAGA-aligned influencers try to make a name for themselves in a crowded field, there is an emerging group of right-wing influencers who describe themselves as “independent journalists” and post on-the-ground, documentary-style videos that spread right-wing narratives on social media. These influencers are using James O’Keefe’s template for undercover sting-style and often misleading videos meant to expose and embarrass liberal organizations and causes.
Among these influencers are Nick Shirley, who gained prominence in recent months following his so-called investigation into fraud in Minneapolis day care centers; Muckraker's Anthony Rubin (who describes himself as a “guerrilla journalist”); and several influencers affiliated with Turning Point USA's Frontlines, including Cam Higby, Savanah Hernandez, and Jonathan Choe. O'Keefe also entered the fold in March, launching Citizen Justice League — a self-described “network of citizen journalists” — and descending into California along with Choe and other Frontlines influencers.
### In March, right-wing influencers descended on Skid Row, claiming to uncover voter registration fraud
In March, several right-wing influencers including,
Rubin, Cam Higby,
, Savanah Hernandez descended on Skid Row — a 50-block neighborhood in Los Angeles that is officially called Central City East. These self-described “independent journalists” published content alleging a voter registration fraud scheme on Skid Row that involves canvassers registering people to vote and sign ballot initiatives in exchange for cash, cigarettes, and marijuana. Most of the videos appear to be in collaboration with O'Keefe's Citizen Justice League.
Citation
Screenshots via YouTube and Instagram / Media Matters
O'Keefe and others from O'Keefe Media Group “went undercover on Skid Row, posing as homeless individuals,” and they claimed that they captured “28 Instances Of Cash Changing Hands For Ballot Signatures & Voter Registration Forms” on hidden cameras, including footage of a petitioner, Brenda Brown. In the video, O'Keefe alleged that Brown “hands cash money to the homeless person, not only for signing the California ballot initiative, but also as payment for them to register to vote.”
Video
Citation
From a March 17, 2026, YouTube video from O’Keefe Media Group and Citizen Justice League
On March 24, O'Keefe published a second video, alleging that homeless individuals were being paid “to forge the signatures and addresses of current registered voters on ballot measure petitions.”
Following the publication of the Skid Row videos, right-wing media outlets and personalities — including Sinclair’s The National News Desk and, the New York Post,
, and
— spread the videos and their claims of bribes. O’Keefe, in particular, was interviewed on several programs — including
, The Charlie Kirk Show, The Alex Jones Show, and Steve Bannon's *War Room* — where he made unfounded claims that this alleged fraud has occurred potentially
of times.
### After the California primaries, right-wing media leveraged content from right-wing influencers and suggested fraud in Nithya Raman late surge in votes
When the votes started to be counted in the jungle primary race, current mayor Karen Bass quickly qualified for the runoff; for the second spot, Spencer Pratt had an early lead, but as Nithya Raman surged ahead of him in the following days, right-wing media's election denial machine went into action, asserting that the election was rigged without pointing to any specific instances of voting fraud.
As Cam Higby noted during a discussion of the California primaries, “To be clear, we don't know for sure that the crimes that we caught people committing in our investigation are directly linked to the mayoral primary or the gubernatorial primary. We're just pointing out, ‘Hey, seems a little bit weird that they're doing a ballot scam just a couple months before the election.’”
Regardless, right-wing media are still using O'Keefe's and other right-wing influencers’ claims about unhoused people registering to vote at homeless shelters on Skid Row to make vague assertions about the Los Angeles primary. On The Benny Show, California Post's Joel Pollak said, “I think the evidence is starting to point us toward a vote harvesting operation that probably targeted Skid Row and other areas where there were many homeless people who could be registered to vote and could be encouraged either to sign their ballots in favor of Nithya Raman or to give them to people who would collect the ballots for them.”
On his show, The Daily Wire's Michael Knowles questioned Raman's second-place win, claiming, “What that implies is that Democrat activists went around and harvested ballots and perhaps forged ballots or bought ballots to beef up Nithya Raman, who nobody likes, to make sure that Spencer Pratt was not in the runoff.” Minutes later, Knowles praised O'Keefe: “Thankfully, we have James O'Keefe who has come out, done an undercover investigation to actually film these ballot harvesters paying people to register.”
On War Room, Election Integrity Network’s Cleta Mitchell — whom The Guardian called “a rising star of Republican election denialism” in 2024 — similarly invoked O'Keefe during a discussion of the California primaries with Bannon. Mitchell alleged that O'Keefe has recently published videos “showing the political hacks going to the homeless, who are the predominant constituency I suppose in LA now, and offering them drugs and money for ballots. … They knew as of election night how many votes the third-place finisher needed and they just gone out and gotten those votes.”
### The Trump administration picked up right-wing influencers’ videos to cast doubt on the California primaries
The Skid Row videos came amid Trump and his right-wing media allies’ push for the passage of the SAVE America Act, which aims to rewrite election laws nationwide and would, if passed, create new barriers for people attempting to register to vote. On March 24, the same day O'Keefe released his second Skid Row video, Trump posted to Truth Social a screenshot of and link to O’Keefe’s social media post promoting the video, adding, “Terrible!”
In his March 17 video, O’Keefe specifically claimed, “The Department of Justice has been sent these tapes of election fraud cash exchange for voter registration happening in broad daylight, and we have informed the Department of Justice there are more tapes coming.”
Two months later, the DOJ announced that petitioner Brenda Brown, who had been featured in O'Keefe's video, was “charged with one felony count of paying another person to register to vote, a federal charge that carries a maximum penalty of five years in federal prison.” Following the charges, First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli credited O'Keefe's undercover video for leading to the charges: “I think that was widely reported and it was all over the press and as a result of that, initiated and opened up a criminal investigation with the FBI.” Essayli also said that Brown is “simply the first person that we are announcing charges for in this investigation resulting from some undercover videos that took place at Skid Row.”
O'Keefe and other right-wing influencers have boasted about their role in these investigations, and after the California primaries, Essayli went on a right-wing media tour, claiming to have evidence of election fraud in California that will lead to prosecutions and encouraging people to send in tips to help the DOJ investigate the supposed election rigging.
### This California playbook is a preview of what the right-wing media and the Trump administration will do to undermine the midterm elections results
As the 2026 midterms approach, right-wing media and the Trump administration appear to have ramped up their efforts to undermine the midterm elections – often invoking existing and repeatedly debunked conspiracy theoriesabout widespread election fraud in the U.S. and typically relying on one-off incidents and hypotheticals that are often exaggerated or misleading.
Content from right-wing influencers serves to provide the so-called “proof” of election conspiracy theories and fuels election misinformation narratives throughout right-wing media. It also gives the administration an excuse to argue for policies or actions that would restrict voter access.
While the March content focuses on Skid Row, it dovetails with other videos from these creators that misleadingly claim to show widespread voter fraud in other places, as well as previous content with now-debunked accusations about homelessness services in California.
In January, Benny Johnson was on the ground in California, including on Skid Row, claiming that he would help American taxpayers “see first-hand how criminal California fraud is robbing our nation blind.” In February, Nick Shirley published alleging voter fraud in California. According to Shirley, he went “to locations from California’s public voter rolls from the Secretary of State, and not a single location could verify the voter rolls.”
All of this content claiming fraud in California has been fodder for vague claims of widespread election fraud for those unhappy with the results of the California primaries — and it is all a preview of how this playbook can be used to undermine the upcoming midterm elections.
//
### Nick Shirley rebooted James O’Keefe’s debunked voter fraud myths for a new audience
02/18/26 4:25 PM EST
### The Flaws In The O'Keefe “Voter Fraud” Scheme
01/11/12 4:54 PM EST
### The right enters a post-proof era of election denial
06/10/26
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AN 6 26
A candidate endorsed by President Donald Trump claimed that he tried to commit voter fraud, but did not provide any evidence that such fraud is an actual issue.
Georgia State Sen. Greg Dolezal, the Trump-endorsed Republican nominee for lieutenant governor, told the Charlie Kirk Show in a February broadcast only recently discovered that he and “a number of friends” submitted fraudulent mail-in ballot applications that included forms signed by children. Their goal was to prove that they received ballots in return to prove that Georgia’s system facilitates fraud.
Notably, Dolezal did not furnish any evidence to verify his claims.
“Earlier this year, Dolezal introduced Senate Bill 568 (SB 568), a proposal that would have assigned early voters to a single location, required voters to use hand-marked paper ballots and expanded the public release of voter information,” Democracy Docket reported. “While that bill failed two votes short of the majority needed, Dolezal has continued attempting to revive Republicans’ push to overhaul Georgia’s elections.”
They added, “During a special legislative session Saturday, Dolezal proposed an amendment to an election bill that would require counties to manually recount every voter cast in the top two races on a ballot before certifying an election. The GOP-controlled Senate approved the amended bill and the House is considering the measure Monday. If passed, the recount requirement would apply to the races for governor and U.S. Senate in November.”
In his appearance on the Charlie Kirk Show, Dolezal said that “the way you get an absentee ballot is you would sign your name to a ballot request form, send it in, and they’d send you a ballot. They’re supposed to check the signatures. Well, we know essentially that they didn’t check the signatures because myself and a number of friends botched our signatures, had kids sign signatures, do all that, send our ballots in the ballot request forms, and in every case, we got a ballot back.”
He did not identify the friends who helped him, elaborate on how voters names were supposedly swapped, explain how the effort was organized or discuss if any of the ballots issues were completed, cast or counted.
“So, yes, we do have essentially a Republican, governor or secretary of state, General Assembly,” Dolezal said. “We’ve moved the needle a good bit. We did move on voter ID, and we have passed some good things, but there has been really no interest in looking at what happened in 2020.”
Democracy experts argue that Trump is trying to spread misinformation about voter fraud so he can falsely claim that any election lost by Republicans was stolen. He falsely claimed that the 2016 Iowa GOP caucuses were stolen when he lost them, that he actually won the 2016 presidential election popular vote when he did not and that he won the 2020 presidential election when he did not. On that last occasion, he attempted a coup after being defeated by then-former Vice President Joe Biden.
Dan Vicuña, Senior Policy Director for Voting and Fair Representation at Common Cause, told AlterNet earlier this month that Trump is trying to rig the 2026 midterm elections by sowing doubts about the validity of likely Democratic victories.
“What they all add up to is a desire to avoid any accountability to the voters in the midterm elections — to ensure, to preordain the outcome of a midterm that he thinks is going to go badly for him,” Vicuña told AlterNet. “We know, from the Big Lie of the 2020 election to spurring on a violent revolt to overthrow a free and fair election, that he has no respect for democratic norms, for the voice of the people. This is entirely about his own power and his own ego. He will even invest in protecting that ego and protecting his power at the expense of the needs of the public. People are suffering with high gas prices and affordability issues, and he does not care. All that matters is protecting his power, and he has no interest in whether he does that through democratic means.”
He added, “I think this all adds up to a desire to ensure that his party stays in power and his ability to do what he wants — to attack vulnerable communities — remains intact.”
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an 6 26
President Donald Trump appointed Bill Pulte to serve as acting director of national intelligence, tapping him to manage the entire national security apparatus of the United States. The "unorthodox" pick reportedly came from longtime GOP operative Roger Stone, Semafor reports.
According to Semafor, MAGA forces joined together to convince Trump that, despite his lack of intel experience, Pulte could still manage the 17 intelligence agencies that the post oversees.
Pulte will serve in the job while also remaining in his current job as Federal Housing Finance Agency Director. This adds to Pulte's other job, chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
What Stone, Trump and other MAGA allies believe is that Pulte can use his "attack-dog mentality" in "waging an internal war to ramp up the declassification of sensitive information," according to the Tuesday report.
“He’s like a bulldozer,” said a source familiar with Pulte when speaking to Semafor about Pulte. “Bulldoze the bureaucracy and accelerate document releases and declassifications.”
Stone is best known for his ongoing loyalty to former Republican President Richard Nixon, whom Stone has tattooed on his back. The self-described "dirty trickster" has remained a close confidant and informal adviser to Trump since the 1970s and became a key part of the 2020 "Stop the Steal" movement. He was later convicted on seven counts of lying to Congress and obstruction of justice relating to special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation. Trump commuted his sentence before Stone served a day in prison. He was later pardoned. He's also known for his conspiracy theories and spreading unfounded rumors about Trump's critics.
CNN reporter Kevin Liptak commented after the announcement that Pulte has used his post as the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency to target some of Trump's foes.
"This, I think, suggests that the president will put in this position someone whohas gone after this retribution campaign, who has advanced some ideas of vindication against some of his enemies," the reporter said.
Semafor noted that the biggest barrier to Pulte will be the U.S. Senate. For him to take on the job, Trump needs the votes and right now it doesn't appear he has them.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said, “I don’t see any evidence of his qualifications for that job, but I’m willing to listen.”
“We don’t need a weaponized DNI, we need professionals there,” Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) also told reporters on Tuesday. “If he’s somebody we want in that position permanently, he’s got a lengthy road ahead of him.”
Stone wouldn't comment on the record about his involvement in picking Pulte, Semafor reported.
The one positive of the nomination, a banking lobbyist told Semafor, is that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Pulte don't get along. With Pulte otherwise engaged, Bessent will be able to focus on housing issues.
“If I was Bessent, my wheels are turning right now, like: ‘What can I accomplish in the housing space while I have this open field?’” the banking lobbyist said.
Democrats appear ready for a fight.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) released a statement about Pulte on Tuesday, saying, “Today, President Trump is rewarding his lackey — who has no national security experience — with a perch atop our nation’s intelligence community. What could go wrong?”
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5 26
The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports the TrumpifiedmpifiedGeorgia ElectionBoard has quietly hired an election denier to be the board’s official state investigator, even as Trump’s grip on the state becomes less guaranteed.
Jason Frazier is a MAGA activist who has challenged the registrations of thousands of Fulton County voters and who cheered as Trump’s politicized FBI raided a county ballot warehouse in January, reports AJC writer Caleb Groves.
Critics were quick to ridicule the new hire.
“It’s shocking that an allegedly nonpartisan board would hire a political operative with a years-long record of baselessly accusing counties of wrongdoing to then turn around and ‘investigate’ these same counties,” said Sara Tindall Ghazal, the board’s only Democrat. “The majority members of the State Election Board appear determined to double-down on their MAGA credentials, foment public distrust in our elections and further marginalize themselves into irrelevance.”
Frazier is now in a position to officially investigate the same election processes he has spent years criticizing as a private citizen, said AJC, but the board “was quiet about his hiring.”
Board executive director James Mills announced that the agency has hired part-time investigators during a May 14 meeting but never mentioned the new hires by name. The AJC reports Frazier’s name later appeared on a list of taxpayer-funded agency staffers on the board website.
“The hiring was apparently so sensitive that Vice Chair Janice Johnston suggested the board could file a complaint against The Atlanta Journal-Constitution after being made aware the AJC was seeking records related to Frazier’s hiring,” reports Groves.
“Should we file an ethics complaint? But I don’t know who to file it against, other than the, I don’t know, the AJC or an unknown leaker,” Johnston said.
Mills did not respond to an emailed request to identify the agency’s new hires. Rather than answer, Johnston responded to the AJC’s questions by demanding who had given the info to the press.
Georgia First Amendment Foundation board member Richard T. Griffiths said the election board’s reluctance to make public the details of Frazier’s hiring is concerning.
“At a time when the public is concerned about transparency of the elections and the integrity of the elections process, the total activity of the elections board should be available to the public and that includes hirings,” said Griffiths. “If the elections board is not providing the basics that all state agencies are required to provide, what does that say to the public about whether they can trust the board to make sensitive decisions about the elections process?”
The hiring comes at a time when President Donald Trump’s grip on many states is in question. The last time Trump lost the state of Georgia in 2020 his approval average was 46.4 percent, with Biden’s approval a modest 47 percent.
Trump’s aggregate approval in Georgia recently clicked in at a low of 37 percent.
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https://www.alternet.org/msn-uk/kennedy-center-trump-grenell/
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AN 5 26
The FBI is revisiting President Donald Trump's 2020 election conspiracy theory as part of his ongoing effort to change the results of the election after he lost. The new focus is on Wisconsin.
So far, Trump's FBI has seized 2020 election ballots from Georgia and copies of voting data in Arizona from a review Republican lawmakers conducted. *The Washington Post*reported Friday that current and former election officials in Milwaukee have been interviewed by FBI agents in their own homes. The question will be whether the FBI demands the ballots as they did in Fulton County, Georgia.
The move would "set off alarms because Milwaukee maintains its absentee ballots in a way that could allow agents to determine who voters selected — undermining the secrecy of their ballots," the report said. One's vote is supposed to be a secret, but Trump would then have access to information on whether his allies supported him in 2020.
One question has been about an incident involving an official grabbing all of the flash drives and missing one of them. Another election worker then gave the flash drive to a police officer, who delivered it to the local official. It was never unattended, the report said. At the time, it became a huge conspiracy theory spread by MAGA supporters.
A man then filed a lawsuit claiming he saw a "secret room" in the election office and drew a floor plan showing where it was and indicated he heard someone snoring behind the door. The election denier has his own criminal history. The FBI demanded to know if there were ballots "printed" in the secret room.
Trump's agents went from the state’s deputy elections director to the former officials' homes, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported. They next intend to interview police who were responsible for protecting election officials who delivered the results, reported WISN-TV.
The ballots haven't been seized yet, but there is a larger fear that things are headed in a worrisome direction.
"Ordinarily, election officials by now would have destroyed ballots from an election that was held nearly six years ago. But Milwaukee County officials have hung on to the 2020 ballots because of litigation," the Post explained.
One concern in Fulton County is that no copies were made of the ballots taken by the FBI. So, there would be no record to compare it to if the DOJ asserted that the count was "wrong." What's different in Milwaukee, however, is that numbers are assigned to a voter's absentee ballot, which can be traced back to the person. In other states, the ballots are simply thrown together.
Officials said that they are desperately trying to guard the ballots and said those numbers are redacted when copies are released to the public. In theory, the FBI wouldn't be able to match the numbers to the logbooks without them.
“Our secret ballot is secret for a reason,” declared elections chair Ann Jacobs. “It’s sacrosanct. It is at the heart of our American democracy. And those people who demand to know how everyone voted are violating those core tenets of what it means to vote as an American.”
“You’re going to see things like, ‘Here are the Biden voters in your neighborhood,’” said former Wisconsin chief election official Kevin Kennedy. “The bottom line is the potential for mischief is there, and we have seen in this age of social media that it will happen.”
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AN 5 26
A small disclaimer on a website just exposed a secret project with no reporting, oversight, transparency or accountability under the thumb of President Donald Trump's office.
Audrey Henson, who researches and writes about the intersection of technology and power, found the disclaimer in the footer of a page on the TrumpRx website, which claims to offer access to drugs the government is trying to renegotiate prices for.
"In the footer of the page, beneath all of it, I found something I have never seen on a federal government website in my life. A byline. The government does not do this," explained Henson. "The IRS does not sign its work. The FBI does not. Social Security does not. No federal agency that has ever built a website has felt the need to take credit for it. In plain bold text, sitting directly above the privacy policy, it said: Designed and Engineered in D.C. by National Design Studio. So I clicked through."
What she said she found was "The National Design Studio," an "office" created by one of Trump's executive orders in Aug. 2025.
According to Joe Gebbia, co-founder of Airbnb, the goal was to redesign how Americans experience their government online. He reports directly to Trump's chief of staff, Susie Wiles.
"His position requires no Senate confirmation, which means he files no financial disclosures, which means the office he runs does not appear in any federal procurement database, which means, as far as the official record is concerned, it barely exists," wrote Henson. That, she said, is the point.
Staff is hired under Section 3161, which allows for temporary advisory bodies meant to be part-time advisors and volunteers. Their salary isn't public, and there is no inspector general to keep an eye on ethics. Henson called it essentially what DOGE was meant to be, the "department" that was promised would save $2 trillion by cutting "waste, fraud and abuse" in government. Gebbia was previously working for DOGE.
So, Henson compared the names from DOGE with those of the National Design Studio and found them remarkably similar. " The National Design Studio is not a successor to DOGE. It is DOGE with a better logo and a design philosophy," she said.
What she found in the code of the pages on TrumpRx is that each page is "making phone calls to servers all over the internet with dozens per second." One of those is "PostHog," a Silicon Valley analytics company that records what users do on a website and reports it back to those who own it. It's everything from following mouse movements to scrolls and clicks.
"I had not clicked anything. I had just opened the page, and it was already on the phone with PostHog telling them about me," Henson said. It includes your IP address and any other identifying information it can obtain. Henson said it's not something she expected to see on a government website.
So, she checked other government sites. Real Food, Trump Accounts and others are all part of the PostHog tracking and data collection.
"And on ndstudio.gov alone, running alongside PostHog, was something someone had built entirely by hand. Five hundred and forty lines of custom JavaScript with a name embedded directly in the code: AutoMonitor. What it appears to do is rewire the part of the browser that handles how a page talks to the outside world, so that every conversation the page has with any server gets copied and forwarded to a private backend with no public presence. The studio has the structural ability to keep a copy of every recording as it passes through their infrastructure. I cannot prove they are keeping one. The pipe is built that way on purpose, and that is the part that matters," Hensen explained.
The problem is that the government requires a number of things for websites, which include privacy disclosures, notices in the Federal Register and published contracts with outside vendors, she said. None of those exist on the 12 National Design Studio programs. Those laws were enacted after Watergate to protect Americans from secret government surveillance programs. Each missing piece at those 12 sites is a crime, resulting in 36 breaches of federal law. There is a privacy disclosure on the Trump Rx page, but Hensen said that some paragraphs contradict each other.
"A federal health website is lying to the people using it and cannot even keep the lie consistent," Hensen warned.
Then she went searching for more, finding at least 40 on top of the first 12. Some of the sites haven't been announced.
"I started reading the names. Sites that looked like they belonged to the State Department. To NASA. To the Department of Homeland Security. And then two that stopped me cold: a working preview of vote.gov, and something called fbi-kirk-tipline. I checked the public ownership records for every subdomain, and every single one traced back to the same place, the Executive Office of the President," she said.
The sites were built by the National Design Studio. Everything was built by the White House using the same Cloudflare account, which isn't normal for a federal agency either.
"The login screen for the gated preview sites read: loveisaskill.cloudflareaccess.com. Love is a skill is a phrase Gebbia has used publicly to describe Airbnb’s design philosophy," said Henson. To her, this indicates Gebbia owns these personally, not the government.
Akash Bobba, one of the people on DOGE, now controls one of the sites for an agency as well as emails and security configurations. It "means a White House staffer has full visibility into who applies for grants, who gets approved and who inside that agency is talking to whom," said Henson.
Henson also remembered an Oct. 2025 conference call in which Bobba was recorded saying that the group was building a federal voter registration system on vote.gov.
"Voters would register through a federal portal, their identities verified through Login.gov, their citizenship verified through DHS’s SAVE database, their registrations transmitted to the states," Henson continued. "A state election director asked him what data the federal government would retain. He said, on a recording, in an election year: I don’t know what they retain and what they are logging. The person presenting a federal voter registration system to state election directors did not know what data his own system kept on American voters."
She noted that there is a previous law that blocks the White House from overseeing voter registration, so it violates that law too.
A few weeks before Trump signed the executive order, essentially forcing small parts of the SAVE Act on the public, the security certificate appeared. The order mandates that within 90 days of the signing, they must have a federally created "list" of citizen-verified voters. That 90 days is up in a few weeks. The Justice Department told the judge overseeing lawsuits against the order that it was in the deliberation phase. The websites show that the claim doesn't match up with reality.
"The certificate is dated April 10. DOJ told a federal court the infrastructure does not exist. Both of those cannot be true," Henson said. "Either DOJ lied to a federal judge, or the studio is building a replacement for the country’s voter registration site without telling the agencies whose work it would replace. There is no third option."
She then went to the State Department website for passports. The White House owns that website now, too. On May 5, the first security certificate was issued. The new website has no official seal on it or a privacy notice. She said that, based on the staging environment, it looks to her like the government wants to require Americans "to upload their passport photo through a White House-controlled website, on the same Cloudflare account, by the same people, with no privacy notice on file. A passport photo is biometric quality. Linked to your identity through Login.gov. Collected through infrastructure the White House owns, sealed from public view."
She cautioned that it appears the site is being built this week.
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AN 5 26
Ex-Bush official sounds alarm on Trump's 'open fire hydrant' of grift - Alternet.org
//
The New York Times Editorial Board, in a strongly worded editorial, says “there has never been an example of presidential corruption like this.”
The paper of record is accusing President Donald Trump not only of “presidential corruption,” but also of “political self-dealing,” and “destroying the pillars of American democracy to empower himself.”
At issue is what the Times calls the Trump Justice Department’s “$1.8 billion political slush fund.”
“Ostensibly set up to compensate those who the department claims have ‘suffered weaponization and lawfare,’ it will in fact reward loyalists willing to defy the law and commit violence on behalf of the president,” the editors charge.
They allege that the fund actually encompasses three of Trump’s “most alarming behaviors”: corruption, using the DOJ “as an enforcer to punish his perceived opponents and protect his friends and allies,” and attempting to rewrite history “about the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress.”
How is Trump destroying pillars of American democracy?
“He claims elections are legitimate only if he wins,” they write. “He uses federal law enforcement to investigate and prosecute his perceived enemies. He purges his party of officials who defy him. He describes members of the other party and civil society as traitors and enemies.” Trump “incentivizes his supporters to break the law on his behalf and rewards them when they do,” and he “directs his allies to change election rules to keep his party in power.”
The agreement to create the fund came after Trump dropped a highly-controversial $10 billion lawsuit which reports say IRS lawyers were intending to contest.
In exchange for dropping the lawsuit, Trump and his supporters would receive “government handouts,” the Times says.
Trump and his family would gain immunity from IRS audits, and his supporters who were allegedly victimized by government lawfare would receive payments.
Times editors note that the fund holds another purpose: encouraging “future lawlessness on Mr. Trump’s behalf.”
“It sends the message that he will use his power not only to shield people who break the law from accountability,” they say, “but also to shower benefits on them. Just as punishment is a deterrent, rewards are an incentive.”
The editors urge Americans to be “cleareyed” about what Trump is actually doing: “taking their money and showering it on criminals.”
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an 5 26
Over the past year, election-denying allies of President Donald Trump from both inside the government and out have sought voting data from across the country in an effort to “investigate” their assertions of electoral fraud. Now, according to new reporting from Talking Points Memo, “election conspiracy theorists” are attempting to lay the groundwork for a Department of Justice probe into Michigan.
In April, Michigan officials were left in “bewilderment” when DOJ Civil Division chief Harmeet Dhillon demanded public records pertaining to the 2024 election from the Wayne County clerk, asserting that it was part of an investigation into voter fraud. Officials weren’t bewildered because they were surprised at the request — quite the opposite, as the FBI has been scooping up voting data from districts across the country that voted against Trump, from Arizona to Georgia — but because Dhillon had sent it to the wrong office entirely, addressing it to the county clerk, when in Michigan, townships run elections.
According to local officials, her request not only suggests that Trump’s DOJ doesn’t understand the basic facts of electoral processes, but it raises pressing questions about what the president’s allies intend to do with the voting data. Election denying activists in Michigan are not shy about answering that question, asserting that they’re conducting what they call an “audit” of electoral results in an effort to fight a “cabal” of their enemies.
As Talking Points Memo explains, these investigations are “being carried out with the help of various election conspiracy theorists who are now in positions of power in the government. Kurt Olsen, a 2020 election denier, has been working as White House election security czar. Heather Honey, another activist, has an election security role at DOJ. Clay Parikh, another special government employee involved in the Fulton County raid.” While these figures provide federal support, election denying activists on the ground are doing much of the legwork.
According to Talking Points, “voter fraud alarmists” are “using documents obtained last year from a massive FOIA lawsuit that sought copies of Detroit’s 2020 ballots and other records. Yehuda Miller, a New Jersey-based activist who has been involved in election denialism for the last several years, obtained hundreds of thousands of ballot images from the City of Detroit. The question now on the minds of some Michigan elections officials is whether Miller’s ‘audit’ — regardless of how baseless and misleading the results may be — will prompt federal action. And, whether the conclusions that Miller has drawn may have already made their way to the Trump DOJ.”
Chris Thomas, who ran elections for the state of Michigan for nearly 40 years and faced a “mob” trying to stop the count in 2020, says that “those seeking the records have been in communication with a voter fraud alarmism nonprofit called Michigan Fair Elections and with the far-right, conspiracy theorist website Gateway Pundit, and say that they’ve enlisted dozens of volunteers to comb through the ballots.” He says it’s possible that the DOJ already has the FOIA data, and that the “‘audit’ could yield results that, while bogus to anyone familiar with election law, prompt some form of action” from the agency. He has his doubts, however, that the amateur investigation would prove useful in any potential criminal proceedings, saying, “I don’t think that stuff would stand up at all.”
While Talking Points notes that it’s unclear whether Miller is working directly with the DOJ, his activist allies have said they would share their findings with the agency.
“I sure as heck am going to be sharing it with everybody that I know, and I’ve got a lot of contacts up in the DOJ,” said Patrick Colbeck, an election conspiracy theorist and former GOP Michigan state senator. “Everything they share, I will make sure it gets to them,” he asserted, referring to the DOJ.
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