When Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin declared in September that Immigration and Customs Enforcement could serve warrants on individuals at polling places this fall, officials in Denver, a liberal city where roughly 14% of residents are foreign-born, quickly sued.

“Every day we find new things to be astonished about but I think that we just want residents to not be afraid to vote because that’s ultimately what the president was after,” Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, a Democrat, said in an interview.

Johnston and other local and state officials across the country are bracing for possible federal election interference from now through Nov. 3 — even as they remain unsure of what will actually happen.

One month from Election Day, President Donald Trump’s long-running pressure campaign over elections is approaching a decisive moment. For the past year, the Trump administration has sought to bend the U.S. election system to the president’s will across multiple fronts, despite the Constitution’s guarantee that states administer elections.

Interviews and public comments by more than a dozen current and former election officials, legal experts, lawmakers and others ahead of the midterms reveal anxiety over what Trump may do. Election administrators often plan for natural disasters, bomb threats and other possible problems, but this year many are also thinking about possible disruptions driven by the federal government.

Potential scenarios range from armed federal personnel deploying at or near the polls to Trump declaring a national emergency — ideas widely condemned as illegal by election law experts. Homeland Security denies it plans to specifically target polling locations.

Others include efforts to discredit voting machines or federal law enforcement obtaining search warrants to seize ballots, a fear that’s grown since the FBI took 2020 election ballots in Fulton County, Georgia, earlier this year.

Barb Byrum, the country clerk in Ingham County, Michigan, which includes much of Lansing, said that when she became a clerk 13 years ago, she and other officials conducted table-top exercises to plan for power outages and tornadoes. Now it’s moved on to “federal misbehavior,” she said.

“It’s really unfortunate that’s where we are. But that is, in fact, where we are,” Byrum, a Democrat, said in an interview.

Memories of 2020

Fears of election interference are at least partly rooted in previous efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn his 2020 election loss in key swing states, culminating in a mob of his supporters storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The riot led to Trump’s second impeachment in the House on a charge of inciting an insurrection, but the Senate acquitted him.

Nearly six years later, Trump’s approval ratings are sagging and Republicans are fighting to retain control of Congress amid encouraging polling for Democrats. Loss of the House or Senate would effectively end Trump’s legislative agenda and lead to investigations that consume his final two years in office.

“A desperate Trump is a dangerous Trump,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, said during an appearance at the progressive Center for American Progress in September. 

At the same time, Americans’ trust in elections is eroding. Just 49% of respondents said they expect the midterm elections to be free and fair, according to a national survey of more than 5,000 adults in early September conducted by the University of California San Diego Center for Transparent and Trusted Elections.

Still, election officials and legal experts remain largely confident any interference effort ultimately won’t succeed. The United States has a decentralized election system run by state and local officials that guards against large-scale efforts to steal elections or prevent voting, they say, predicting courts would swiftly rule against the deployment of federal agents. 

Many votes are also cast by mail, sidestepping any Election Day show of force. More than 1 million votes have already been cast, according to data compiled by the University of Florida’s Election Lab.

“It’s not going to happen,” David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, told reporters on Tuesday. “You’re not going to have to run a gauntlet. You’re not going to see troops or armed individuals at the polls.”

‘I don’t rule anything out or in’

Trump and his aides refuse to flatly rule out interfering in the midterms. In an interview with TIME magazine published Thursday, Trump declined to take extreme measures off the table. Asked about sending ICE to the polls, he said only that he hadn’t thought of it.

“I don’t rule anything out or in. We’ll see,” Trump said of a national emergency.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has dismissed questions about sending troops to the polls as “another gotcha hypothetical,” though the Department of Defense has said it has no plans to deploy active-duty troops or federalized National Guard members. 

Some Republicans have suggested they would welcome the presence of soldiers if state and local authorities want them. “If that’s something that they decide that they need to look at, then that’s fine with me,” Rep. Mike Collins, a Georgia Republican, told reporters in September.

Mullin, the Homeland Security secretary, last month sought a Department of Justice investigation into whether ballot tabulation machines that read barcodes or QR codes comply with federal law, raising concerns that the Trump administration could create a pretext to dismiss the validity of some ballots. 

The Georgia State Election Board’s executive director recently called on the DOJ to potentially intervene in the state over the use of QR code-based tabulation.

Earlier this year, Mullin also warned that election officials who don’t “participate in securing the elections” could face prosecution. He promised to “hold election officials accountable.”

Roadblocks to interference

But with Election Day nearing, Trump has been stymied on every major initiative to influence the election process this year:

• Congress didn’t pass the SAVE America Act, which would require voters to prove their citizenship. 
• The U.S. Supreme Court blocked the U.S. Postal Service from imposing new rules on mail ballots. 
• The Justice Department has lost more than two dozen lawsuits seeking to force states to turn over sensitive voter data. 
• A DOJ push to prosecute noncitizen voters has led to only a few dozen prosecutions, reflecting studies that consistently found that noncitizen voting happens extremely rarely. In the most recent action, U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche in late September announced indictments against 10 noncitizens over allegations of unlawfully voting.

The White House did secure a recent victory when the Supreme Court allowed states to use a supercharged version of a Homeland Security computer program that can identify possible noncitizen voters. But the decision will have minimal impact on the midterms because, under federal law, it’s too close to Election Day for most states to purge large numbers of voters off their rolls.

In response to questions from States Newsroom, White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis in a statement accused “extreme liberal Democrats” of preventing Americans from having full confidence in their elections by not supporting the SAVE America Act, though the legislation faced bipartisan opposition in the Senate. 

“President Trump is absolutely right: we fix this now, or we lose our country,” Bis said.

ICE at the polls?

Trump’s failure to advance his signature election-related policies has left him with few options to exert control outside of increasingly audacious and potentially illegal options. So when Mullin said that ICE can execute warrants at polling sites, the remarks provoked a swift backlash from voting rights activists and Democrats.

“The only reason why we would be at polling places is if there is a threat to that polling place or we’re serving a warrant on someone that we have been actively tracking down,” Mullin said during a news conference on Sept. 1.

On Friday, Homeland Security sent an unsigned statement to States Newsroom denying any plans to target polling locations, adding that Mullin has answered the question “dozens of times.” 

DHS said ICE agents are part of trained special response teams that can rapidly respond to major incidents if necessary to aid local law enforcement, regardless of location.

“Any ‘anxiety’ among election officials is the unfortunate result of fake news reports of ‘federal interference’ despite the Secretary’s numerous clear statements to the contrary,” the DHS statement said.

Notably, the statement does not address Mullin’s remark about serving warrants.

At least three lawsuits seek to block any possible deployment of federal agents to election sites. The oldest case, filed on Sept. 10 by Denver and several voting rights groups, points to Mullin’s comments and alleges ICE has already conducted law enforcement operations at polling places this year.

ICE agents “swarmed” a parking lot of an active polling site in San Antonio in May to detain someone, the suit says. In June, agents visited a Ventura County, California, polling place and accosted an election worker at a Syracuse, New York, polling place, it says.

Preparing for the worst

Tina Barton co-chairs the Committee for Safe and Secure Elections, a nonprofit group that helps elections and officials and law enforcement think through how to protect election workers and voters from violence, threats and intimidation. She said the organization has about 138 events on its calendar this year, compared to 67 in 2024.

In communities with concerns about a possible federal presence, the organization has officials work through a scenario involving ICE activity near a polling place that affects voters coming to the area, allowing local leaders to think through questions about what their legal options would be, how they would respond and what they would tell the public.

“Their conversation and how they choose to move forward, that’s owned by them and their community and how they choose to handle that. What we encourage is relationship-building ahead of time with them, conversations ahead of time,” Barton said.

Local election officials receive an “incredible” amount of training in how to handle crises, said Kamryn Hoadley, who advises Michigan election officials for Keep Our Republic, a pro-democracy nonprofit. “They are truly as prepared as somebody could be for anything that will happen on Election Day,” Hoadley said.

In Los Angeles County — the most populous county in the country, with more than 10 million residents — election officials have studied the potential for disruptions to the election. 

But Dean Logan, the Los Angeles registrar-recorder/county clerk, emphasized in a statement that scenarios concerning federal agents at polling sites and the seizure of ballots haven’t occurred in his area and haven’t been upheld in court.

“We’ve engaged in scenario and tabletop planning with our partners so that if an unexpected situation arises, roles are clear and our response is calm, coordinated, and focused on voter access and participation, rather than politically reactive,” Logan said. 

“Voters should know the behind-the-scenes work is thorough, and the fundamentals of a secure election are sound,” he said.

Five weeks before Election Day, President Donald Trump’s sprawling effort to identify and remove noncitizen voters hasn’t produced the kind of large purges that could meaningfully affect the midterm elections.

Even a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision giving states access to a supercharged Department of Homeland Security computer program to verify voters’ citizenship will have a limited immediate impact, election experts say. 

As Republicans fight to retain control of Congress, Trump and his allies have spent the past year aggressively seeking to root out noncitizen voting. 

They have called into question the security of the upcoming elections, following the lead of the president, who has long made spurious claims of voter fraud to dismiss unfavorable results.

Those efforts are now colliding with federal law — and the reality long shown by studies and available data that noncitizen voting is rare.

Little impact seen from court ruling

The Supreme Court on Sept. 25 ruled in a 6-3 decision that states can access Homeland Security’s SAVE system, which draws upon citizenship information stored across the federal government to scour voter rolls in the hunt for possible noncitizens. A district court judge had blocked the program in June.

But the high court’s decision came during a quiet period under the National Voter Registration Act that prohibits most states from conducting mass purges of voters in the 90 days before a federal election. 

The timing limits election officials to only searching for information on individual voters, even though Homeland Security has touted SAVE to states as a tool that can quickly scan millions of names.

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority acknowledged as much, writing in its unsigned opinion that the quiet period “limits the potential impact” of the court’s decision. 

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, writing for the court’s three liberals, agreed the decision would have minimal short-term effects but argued the possibility of disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighed any risk of harm to the government.

David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, in a statement emphasized that voters will continue to experience the same safe, secure and reliable voting process this year as in the past.

“This decision will not have any significant impact on the 2026 election, as systematic voter list maintenance is prohibited within 90 days of a federal election, which the Supreme Court explicitly confirmed,” Becker said.

Post-2026

The more significant fallout from the Supreme Court’s decision may come in the weeks and months after the election, when states can once again remove large numbers of voters from their rolls. 

The Supreme Court is also set to hold oral arguments in December in a case that involves the reach of the National Voter Registration’s Act’s quiet period — leaving open the possibility the justices could give states more leeway to purge voters ahead of elections.

But for now, the restrictions remain in place.

“Until the Supreme Court says, reinterprets otherwise, the quiet period is still the quiet period,” Aaron Blacksberg, federal policy counsel at the Institute for Responsive Government, said in an interview.

Separately, a U.S. district court judge on Monday blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to require states to use SAVE as a condition of receiving some Federal Emergency Management Agency grants. Judge Amir H. Ali, an appointee of President Joe Biden, wrote that FEMA exceeded its authority in imposing election-related requirements.

Is the data reliable?

SAVE’s critics, which include Democrats and privacy advocates, warn that the system relies on incomplete and sometimes outdated data, resulting in false positives. SAVE was previously used to check whether noncitizens were eligible for various government benefits before the Trump administration last year repurposed it into a tool to check citizenship.

When U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, a President Joe Biden appointee for a district court based in Washington, D.C., ruled against the program in June, she highlighted sworn declarations by naturalized citizens that Texas had threatened to revoke their voter registrations because of inaccurate Social Security data in SAVE.

“SAVE was never designed to verify citizenship: it relies on outdated and inaccurate data that produces false matches, risks disenfranchising eligible voters, and exposes sensitive personal information to misuse and bad actors,” Tim Harper, a project lead focused on elections and democracy at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a nonpartisan organization focused on civil liberties in the digital age, said in a statement.

The Trump administration and some Republicans hail SAVE as a powerful tool to ensure the accuracy of voter rolls and identify noncitizens who shouldn’t be registered to vote. They note that its use by states is voluntary.

“It’s remarkable that we had to file an emergency petition in the Supreme Court just so we can use government data to stop noncitizens from voting illegally. American elections are for Americans,” James Percival, Homeland Security’s general counsel, said in a statement.

In an email to States Newsroom, White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis faulted Democrats for not voting for the SAVE America Act, a bill that would require voters to produce documents proving their citizenship before voting. The bill has stalled in the U.S. Senate amid bipartisan opposition.

“The American people overwhelmingly support this commonsense legislation that enacts basic election security measures like voter ID and ensures only Americans are electing America’s leaders. President Trump is absolutely right: we fix this now, or we lose our country,” Bis said..

How many instances of noncitizen voting?

The Trump administration’s intense focus on noncitizen voting — which also includes a legal effort to force states to turn over voter data to the Department of Justice — contrasts with the extremely rare nature of noncitizen voting, according to past studies and election experts.

The U.S. Census in August identified about 24,000 instances of noncitizen voting in the 2020 election out of roughly 160 million votes cast, or 0.015% of all votes. One study of the 2016 election placed the prevalence of noncitizen voting at 0.0001% of votes cast.

But Homeland Security has suggested large numbers of noncitizens may be registered to vote. In July, the department said it had identified over 250,000 potential noncitizens on the voter rolls in California, New Jersey, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

On Monday, U.S. Senate Democrats in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin wrote that they couldn’t trust those numbers. For instance, DHS initially floated nearly 16,000 possible noncitizen voters in Nevada. In the end, the agency provided state officials with a list of 185 people that officials said were noncitizens. All turned out to be citizens.

“Federal law already prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal elections, and every eligible voter across America has the right to cast a ballot — and should be able to do so without fear of being wrongly purged from the voting rolls,” Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, said in a statement following the Supreme Court’s decision.

The alleged scale of potential noncitizen voter registration by Homeland Security also doesn’t match the scope of the agency’s law enforcement actions. Earlier in September, Homeland Security Investigations, a DHS agency, reported making 160 recent arrests from 1,600 open voter fraud cases.

When noncitizens do end up on voter rolls, administrative errors are sometimes to blame. In July, New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, announced that a software glitch caused about 6,600 noncitizens to become registered to vote and that about 400 had cast ballots. 

And in April, then-Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson, a Republican, wrote in a letter to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services that some noncitizens had been registered to vote because of a clerical error despite acknowledging on a voter application that they weren’t U.S. citizens.

“That is why we urge voter registrars to use all available sources to confirm a person’s citizenship status — including SAVE data and other information about the registrant — when they are investigating whether the person is eligible to be a registered voter,” Nelson wrote in an email obtained by Democracy Forward, a pro-democracy legal organization.

President Donald Trump is tapping $20 million in Homeland Security funding to pay for TV ads that heavily feature him ahead of the midterm elections, Democrats said Tuesday as the promos critics call propaganda come under bipartisan attack.

The Trump administration recently moved the funds into a U.S. Customs and Border Protection budget line intended for “commemorative events” related to border security, according to federal records. Congressional Democrats said the dollars appear to be funding the ad campaign.

The ads face mounting criticism as Republicans confront an angry electorate that, according to polling, appears likely to place Democrats in control of the House and possibly the Senate. Yet the messaging reflects Trump’s strategy of centering the election on himself and telling supporters to vote as if he was on the ballot, as he urged during the GOP midterm convention.

The three ads released so far feature stylized imagery of Trump and include “Paid for by the U.S. Government” disclosures. One is nearly identical to a 2024 Trump campaign ad. Some $2 million in ads have aired on cable and broadcast stations over the past week. 

“This is the final battle,” Trump says in a voiceover in one black-and-white ad that shows him walking silently toward the camera. Another ad uses the song “Love Me” by the artist JMSN. Attorneys for the performer have sent a cease-and-desist letter to the administration demanding the ad be taken down.

Both Dems and Republicans object

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, slammed the ads as indistinguishable from Trump’s 2024 campaign ads, yet funded by taxpayers. “It’s an absolute violation of what democracy is supposed to look like. Americans sat down to watch football, not to be force fed Trump’s propaganda on their own dime,” Schumer said Monday on the Senate floor.

Some GOP senators have also split with the Trump administration over the ads. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a South Dakota Republican, told reporters that while he liked the ads’ message, tax dollars shouldn’t pay for them. Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana and Sen. John Cornyn of Texas have also pushed back, among others.

“I don’t think any public official, including President Trump or (former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi) Noem or John Kennedy, should spend public money on private ads for themselves,” Kennedy told “Face the Nation” on CBS.

$20 million materializes

On Tuesday, Sens. Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, and Christopher Murphy of Connecticut, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Homeland Security Subcommittee, in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said his department appeared to have dedicated $20 million to the ads that had been provided to Customs and Border Protection, a sub-agency of DHS, in the “One Big Beautiful Bill” Act last year.

House Democratic Reps. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut and Henry Cuellar of Texas in their own statement also cited federal apportionment changes by the Office of Management and Budget recorded by OpenOMB, a non-governmental database that tracks apportionments. 

OpenOMB shows that on Sept. 19, $20 million was moved into a fund that pays for border security commemorative events and that previously held just $500,000.

The following day, Homeland Security awarded a $20 million contract to LMD Agency, Inc., a Maryland-based marketing firm, for a “national media campaign,” according to federal contract data.

Republican blocks resolution on ads

Sen. Maggie Hassan, a New Hampshire Democrat, sought unanimous consent in the Senate on Tuesday to pass a resolution stating that the federal government shouldn’t pay for the ads. 

“The Department of Homeland Security should be working to tackle the enormous national security threats we face like stopping fentanyl, not bankrolling a vanity project for the president,” Hassan said.

Sen. Cynthia Lummis, a Wyoming Republican, objected, saying the heart of the ads is about defending American values from communism and socialism. Lummis said if that message has Hassan concerned, it says “more about her side of the aisle than it does about” the ads. The action by Lummis halted action on the resolution.

Administration defends ads

The White House and Homeland Security didn’t deny that the government fund was being used to pay for the ads, in response to questions from States Newsroom.

The White House said in an unsigned statement that the ads — which it calls public service announcements — are educational and intended to remind Americans “to love their country and understand what makes it worth defending, at home, at our borders, and abroad.” 

Homeland Security referred States Newsroom to a White House webpage that also defends the ads. The page says they aren’t campaign ads, noting that Trump isn’t on the ballot and that the messages include no call to action.

Government ethics and legal experts say that explanation misses the point.

“There’s a distinction between providing people with information about government programs and engaging in communication that merely aggrandizes government officials. And what we have here is purely aggrandizing Donald Trump,” Samuel Bagenstos, who served as general counsel to the Office of Management and Budget during the first year and a half of President Joe Biden’s administration, said in an interview.

Bagenstos, who is now a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, said that if the issue was simply whether the ads violate the Hatch Act, a federal law that limits federal employees — but not the president – from engaging in partisan politics on the job, the question of the ads’ legality could be more complicated. 

But the most important legal issue with the ads, he said, isn’t the Hatch Act but whether the messages violate prohibitions on using government funds for propaganda. 

During his time in government service, which also included a stint as general counsel to the Department of Health and Human Services during the Biden administration, Bagenstos said agencies were constantly communicating with the public, and there’s always a question of how far officials can go. But he said these kind of issues were reviewed carefully, often in ways that annoyed communications staff who wanted to put out messages immediately.

“But if something like this had crossed my desk, I would have said, ‘You can’t pay for this ad. It is clearly illegal,’” Bagenstos said, adding that the ads are the kind of thing he would have considered resigning over. “It’s that clear a violation of law and it’s really corrosive to democracy,” he said.

Similarity to franking?

Members of Congress and state-level officials regularly release slick official communications that sometimes echo campaign messaging. But that practice, known as “franking,” comes with clear restrictions, including a U.S. House prohibition on mass mailings 60 days before an election.

In sending franked mail, members of Congress are barred from sending mail that “solicits political support” for the lawmaker or any person or political party, Margaret Dylus-Yukins, senior legal counsel for ethics at the Campaign Legal Center, wrote in an email.

The Trump ads, by contrast, don’t pertain to any policymaking process or function of government, and while the White House has said the messages remind Americans to love their country, there’s no apparent connection to any federal program or service, Dylus-Yukins wrote. 

Instead, she wrote that their inflammatory language, widespread distribution and touting of Trump’s term in office, as well as their close proximity to the midterms, “all suggest that these advertisements were produced with the intent to solicit political support for President Trump’s political allies ahead of the midterm election.”

“These advertisements therefore appear to be in violation of the Hatch Act and raise serious concerns about the use of taxpayer funds to possibly sway the upcoming election’s outcome,” Dylus-Yukins wrote.

No lawsuit yet

As of Tuesday afternoon the ads didn’t appear to face a legal challenge. 

The watchdog group Democracy Forward said Monday it was launching an investigation into the ads and had filed records requests for communications regarding the ads and financial paperwork related to them.

Bagenstos suggested the courts may not be the best avenue to fight the ads. Instead, he said, Congress needs to assert itself and retaliate against inappropriate spending.

“In our separation of powers system, what our framers expected was that Congress would stand up for its power first,” Bagenstos said.