The day after Democrats won sweeping victories in the midterm elections, an Arizona county official delivered a stark warning to his fellow Republicans about election denialism — it needed to stop.

The state has been a hotbed of election fraud conspiracy theories. After President Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss, state lawmakers even pursued an audit in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, that found no evidence of fraud.

“To my fellow Republicans who have been trafficking in these lies for the last six years, you need to stop,” Maricopa County Supervisor Thomas Galvin said at a county Board of Supervisors meeting.

As Republicans grasp for answers following their stunning losses, election officials, voting rights advocates and researchers are watching to see whether Trump will lead the party toward false narratives around election fraud or to accept normal explanations, such as voter dissatisfaction and poor campaign messages.

The path they choose could help determine whether the country moves past an era defined by Trump’s election denial after his 2020 loss. 

But Trump has sent mixed signals.

As the scale of GOP losses became clear last week, Trump initially pledged to accept the results. 

That changed over the weekend. On Truth Social, Trump shared posts from others suspicious of the results. By Monday, he had grown more explicit.

“Does anybody really believe that this ‘Election’ was honest. How could the Polls be so wrong???” Trump wrote in a social media post.

‘180 in an hour’

Polls leading up to the midterms largely favored Democrats, though some understated the level of support for Democratic candidates. 

Trump has long promoted falsehoods about stolen elections and voter fraud. After the 2016 election, Trump claimed millions of people had illegally voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton. 

In 2020, Trump tried to overturn his losses in key battleground states with lawsuits that raised unfounded claims of fraud. His rhetoric eventually led his supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

He also pressured election officials, including a demand that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger “find” enough votes to overturn his loss in the state.

Gabriel Sterling, a Republican and former longtime official in the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office, publicly denounced Trump’s allegations of voter fraud in the wake of the 2020 election. 

Now a senior fellow at the Secure Democracy Foundation, a nonprofit focused on strengthening elections, Sterling voiced concern this week that election denialism will become a tactic of politicians moving forward.

“I was sort of surprised and pleased about the president’s initial responses,” Sterling said in an interview. “But I also took it with a grain of salt, knowing that he can go 180 in an hour, depending on who he’s talking to.”

Fewer online rumors

Election rumors haven’t gained nearly the same level of traction this year as they did in 2020, researchers of online disinformation say. 

Immediately after Trump’s initial acknowledgment of Republican defeat, only a few committed election denialists were questioning not simply the results but the security of the elections, according to The Election Rumor Rundown, a website by the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington.

Kate Starbird, a professor at the University of Washington who studies online disinformation, wrote in a viral social media post last week that the atmosphere in her lab was “giddy” as her team absorbed the possibility that claims of rigged elections may be in the past, “at least for the time being.”

As Trump has moved back toward denialism, however, online conversation around denialism and conspiracy theories has grown. Starbird shared a graph on Monday showing a spike in discussions on X focused on rigged, dishonest or fraudulent elections after Trump posted on his site, Truth Social.

In a Monday interview, Starbird said “hardcore” election deniers have been advancing conspiracy theories for the past week. They have been excited by Trump’s return to the denialism conversation, which she said also drew in additional online influencers.

Still, Starbird said election deniers lack the kind of popular support and infrastructure they’ve enjoyed in the past. Within days of Election Day 2020, protests were already emerging around the results, but that kind of on-the-ground movement is absent this year.

“I’m still pretty confident that the ingredients for a full-fledged election denialism movement are not in place,” Starbird said.

Lawsuits show ‘red line’

Since Election Day, conspiracy theories have not received nearly as much attention from major media platforms as they did following the 2020 election. That year, Trump supporters made wild, false claims about voting machines during TV appearances.

Some of those statements led to massive legal payouts. Dominion Voting Systems, a large manufacturer of election equipment, sued Fox News, alleging defamation by hosts and guests. Fox settled the lawsuit in 2023 for $787.5 million. In 2024, Newsmax settled a lawsuit filed by Smartmatic, which builds electronic voting systems, for $40 million.

Two former Georgia election workers sued former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Trump political adviser, for defamation surrounding the 2020 election, and secured a $148 million judgment against him. In early 2025, the women reached a settlement that included undisclosed compensation.

“I think those suits did chastise people and remind potential dangerous elements where the red line is where you can really get yourself in trouble,” Kevin Johnson, executive director of Election Reformers Network, a nonpartisan group that seeks to protect elections from polarization, said in an interview.

Election deniers join administration

At the same time, Johnson added, some election deniers ended up working in the second Trump administration. 

Former U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said Trump had won Pennsylvania in 2020, though Biden won. FBI Director Kash Patel has refused to say whether Biden won the 2020 election — a stance echoed by numerous Trump nominees who evade offering a direct answer when questioned during congressional hearings.

Since Election Day, some Trump supporters have joined the president in embracing denialism about the midterms. Kari Lake, a prominent Arizona Republican and Trump’s nominee to be U.S. ambassador to Jamaica, wrote on social media without evidence that the “math isn’t mathing here.” Mike Lindell, the former MyPillow CEO, has called for a “full recount” of the midterm elections.

However, nearly all high-ranking elected Republicans have acknowledged the losses, with some putting forward political and policy explanations. 

For instance, Vice President JD Vance, widely expected to run for president in 2028, faulted the war with Iran and hasn’t repeated Trump’s denialism comments.

Sen. Ted Cruz, who will soon be the only Texas Republican in a statewide office, described the election results as a “Watergate-level repudiation.” 

House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, said the “people have spoken.”

Confidence in elections

Election denialism’s more limited reach so far this year among leading Republicans — other than Trump — comes after election administrators spent the past six years attempting to bolster public confidence in elections, current and former election officials said.

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, said in an interview that election officials had prepared to respond to false claims surrounding the election, not only by rebutting falsehoods but also providing accurate information about elections and the results. In his state, that included going to court if the Trump administration attempted to interfere, he said.

But so far, Simon said, the volume of rigged and stolen election claims in Minnesota doesn’t match what he’s seen before.

“Compared to past election cycles, I have seen fewer examples after this election of people making election denialism claims,” Simon said.

Americans broadly trust elections, according to a survey conducted in September and October by the Pew Research Center. 

Nearly identical percentages of registered voters supporting Republican and Democratic candidates — 90% and 91%, respectively — expressed some level of confidence that elections in their community would be well run. By contrast, 97% of Democratic-supporting voters voiced confidence in 2024, compared to 88% of Republican-supporting voters.

Building trust in elections requires a lot of work in between elections, said Ari Mittleman, executive director of Keep Our Republic, a pro-democracy nonprofit. Over time, the role of election officials has evolved to encompass public outreach.

“Even if their job description largely centers around being an administrator, they now need to be an ambassador for the entire profession,” Mittleman said in an interview.

Ahead of Election Day, Trump and other federal officials declined to flatly rule out forms of federal election interference, raising fears among Democrats and voting rights advocates that the administration would try to disrupt voting or discredit the results.

The Trump administration heavily promoted efforts to root out noncitizen voting. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security arrested dozens of noncitizens over alleged election crimes in the weeks before the election and the U.S. Department of Justice sued dozens of states in an unsuccessful attempt to obtain sensitive voter data to aid its efforts to find noncitizen voters.

The Justice Department also sued California to try to force the state to set aside the ballots of 20,000 individuals the Trump administration said were suspected noncitizens. The DOJ dropped the lawsuit after the Supreme Court rejected the request on the eve of Election Day.

Will ‘fever’ break?

Speaking on the Friday after Election Day, Simon said he remained ready for legal action if necessary. He said he was pleasantly surprised by Trump’s tentative acceptance of the results, but warned that “as we’ve come to know and learn, that could change” — seeming to anticipate the president’s turn toward denialism days later.

Simon said he was not yet convinced the 2026 election would “break the fever” of election denialism, given the looming presidential race in 2028. Election deniers are still incentivized to push false claims for online attention or money, he said.

“My hope is that we can get back to understanding that elections are fundamentally fair and honest and secure,” Simon said.

Alabama Republicans had hoped Rep. Shomari Figures would deliver a concession speech on Tuesday night after the state legislature redrew his district to be more GOP-friendly. 

Instead, the Democrat declared victory — winning nearly 54% of the vote.

“We know what happened with this district,” Figures told supporters as he invoked the Republican gerrymander. “But we had a job to do. And so we put our hands to the plow and we did not look backwards.”

The Republican project to gerrymander congressional districts across the country, initiated by President Donald Trump more than a year ago, failed to deliver significant wins for the party — and, in North Carolina at least, even worked against it. Amid a nationwide blue tsunami and voter backlash in Southern states that split apart districts where a majority of residents are Black, Democrats won seats that Republicans redrew to give themselves an advantage.

States typically draw new maps every 10 years after the census. But Trump’s redistricting push, which kicked off in Texas in the summer of 2025, triggered a nationwide rush as Republican and Democratic states battled to set the electoral landscape ahead of this week’s midterms.

A late April decision from the U.S. Supreme Court set off another round of gerrymanders. The court sharply curtailed federal protections against racial gerrymandering, clearing the way for Southern states to break apart majority-Black districts that often elect Democrats.

Republicans had once hoped mid-decade redistricting would create a buffer against the losses the president’s party traditionally suffers in midterm elections. Perhaps, the thinking among Republicans went in 2025, the party could even maintain a narrow majority with the help of the gerrymandered districts.

It didn’t turn out that way, as the GOP’s effort proved woefully insufficient against the strength of the Democratic vote. 

As of Thursday afternoon, Democrats had won 247 House seats, far above the 218 needed for a majority, while Republicans had won 153, according to The Associated Press. Thirty-five races had yet to be called.

“Let this be a lesson: never capitulate, never acquiesce to those who would use power for improper purposes,” Eric Holder, a former U.S. attorney general under President Barack Obama and the chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, said in a statement.

Gains were expected

New Republican maps could have netted the party as many as 15 seats, according to estimates from the nonpartisan Cook Political Report with Amy Walter. GOP-controlled state legislatures advanced news maps in Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina and Tennessee, in addition to Alabama and Texas.

In response, Democrats successfully gerrymandered a single state, California, where the party picked up five seats it had targeted. Voters approved a Democratic gerrymander in Virginia, but the state Supreme Court struck down the measure. A state court also imposed a Democratic-leaning district in Utah.

In states where Republicans targeted Democratic seats for gerrymandering, the party made no net gains, according to a Wednesday memo from the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. 

“This is close to an extinction-level event for Republicans in many parts of the country,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, said at a news conference Wednesday as he broadly described his party’s losses.

GOP efforts fail

DeSantis signed a new Florida map aimed at securing four new GOP seats into law in May. Democrats now appear likely to retain all four.

The redistricting failure was starkest in North Carolina, where Republicans are on track to lose six seats. 

In the state’s 1st Congressional District, Democratic Rep. Don Davis won reelection Tuesday with just over 50% of the vote, overcoming a GOP gerrymander in what was the most expensive U.S. House race in history.

In Rocky Mount, a city of about 55,000 in North Carolina’s 1st Congressional District, Letrice Felton voted for the first time on Tuesday. The 50-year-old said she cast a ballot because of rising costs and poverty within the city. More than 60% of the city’s residents are Black and roughly 1 in 5 residents live in poverty, nearly double the national rate.

“To see people out in Rocky Mount, walking with beds of carts, with clothes and stuff,” Felton said. “It’s very sad. And they need help, and it’s like, there’s no resources here for it.”

Jislem Rodriguez, 18, voted for the first time Tuesday at Edgecombe Community College in Rocky Mount. Rodriguez said she is concerned about the economy.

“Money isn’t really lasting like it used to,” she said. 

In Texas, state lawmakers sought to secure five additional seats for Republicans. The party instead flipped only a single newly gerrymandered district and suffered a net loss of one seat.

When Republicans redrew most of the targeted districts, they assumed Latino voters would continue backing GOP candidates, Brandon Rottinghaus, a professor of political science at the University of Houston, said in an interview.

A significant share of Latino voters instead cast ballots for Democrats. Nineteen percent of Latino voters in Texas who said they voted for Trump in 2024 voted for Gina Hinojosa, the Democratic candidate for governor, in 2026, according to CNN voter polls (poll results weren’t available for specific House races).

“On paper, these districts are still Republican but the trend has been in general toward the Republicans and the Latino vote — which these are premised on — has shifted back to the Democrats,” Rottinghaus said.

Black voter backlash

The NAACP reported strong turnout among Black voters on Tuesday. Eighty-one percent of Black voters supported Democrats in the election, up from 70% in 2024 and 73% in 2022, according to exit poll data analyzed by NPR.

Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the Legal Defense Fund, a legal advocacy group focused on racial justice, said in a statement that Black turnout was especially pronounced in states that redrew maps following the Supreme Court’s decision on racial gerrymandering — Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Tennessee.

In the case, Louisiana v. Callais, the court’s conservative majority significantly limited the consideration of race when drawing legislative maps. Section 2 of the federal Voting Rights Act had previously limited states from using maps that diluted the voting power of minority citizens.

“Black and brown voters made a statement last night,” Nelson said. “Despite relentless attempts to silence their voices and stifle their power, voters of color turned out in extraordinary numbers.”

For example, Alabama voter turnout was nearly 44%, up from nearly 39% in 2022. In Montgomery County, part of Figures’ gerrymandered district, turnout among Democratic voters rose 39% over 2022.

“I’m at a loss for words, because we had the deck stacked against us,” Figures said during his victory speech.

Future maps?

The prospects of additional gerrymanders before the 2028 election are mixed.

Maryland voters approved a measure that would ease the way for the blue state to pass a Democratic gerrymander. Democratic Gov. Wes Moore said Wednesday that he wants new maps after the redistricting measure, called Question 3, passed with 60% of the vote.

“Donald Trump is not done. He has already been very clear about his intention to go after additional states,” Moore told reporters Wednesday.

The White House didn’t respond to questions about Trump’s support for future GOP redistricting efforts.

At least some Republicans have expressed reservations about pursuing new maps after such a sharp rebuke by voters. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, announced Wednesday that he wouldn’t call the state legislature into special session to pass new maps before the Democratic governor-elect, Keisha Lance Bottoms, takes office in January.

Kemp had previously called a special session earlier this year, but lawmakers opted not to advance redistricting legislation.

“The voters of our state have spoken,” Kemp said in a statement.

Gerrymandering critics have called for a national ban on the practice — or at the very least, a ban on the mid-decade redraws.

Common Cause, a nonpartisan watchdog that opposes gerrymandering, said the failure of Trump’s redistricting push sets the stage for federal reform.

“At the end of the day, the American people this time around, they rejected the attempts to rig the midterms through gerrymandering,” Common Cause president and CEO Virginia Kase Solomón told reporters on Wednesday.

In Missouri, voters rejected a gerrymander passed by the GOP-controlled state legislature — called the Missouri First map — that targeted a seat in Kansas City held by longtime Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver. 

The measure failed resoundingly, 62% to 38%. The map wasn’t in effect for the 2026 election because of a state Supreme Court decision, but voter approval would have implemented it for the 2028 election.

“In the future, I hope that the people of Missouri will be served by a Congressional map like the Missouri First map that better represents our state,” Rick Brattin, Cleaver’s Republican opponent, said in a statement that attacked the Missouri Supreme Court for issuing a decision “to benefit Democrats” by blocking the map.

Cleaver, who won reelection with 69% of the vote, said in his own statement that his campaign overcame major hurdles, including the gerrymandered map, which was in place for the primary election and part of the general election.

“As I’ve always said from the beginning,” Cleaver said, “the will of the people always prevails in the end.”

Stateline’s Elisha Brown contributed reporting.

Ahead of the midterms, Democrats wargamed dozens of scenarios looking at how President Donald Trump might try to undermine the election, everything from seizing voting machines to falsely declaring a foreign attack.

But when the blue tsunami arrived Tuesday night, Trump seemed to let it wash right over him.

In a series of late-night interviews, the president said he would accept the results. He acknowledged that Democrats had performed well as they retook the House and Senate. And while he refused responsibility for Republicans’ newfound misfortune, he also spoke of cutting deals with Democrats.

“Yes, I’ll accept them,” Trump said on Fox News when asked about the results. He added a short time later, “Congratulations to the Democrats, they did a good job.”

The comments marked a stunning departure for a mercurial president with a long history of alleging elections were stolen in response to unfavorable results. 

They also stood out because this year’s midterms were his first election while in office since 2020, when he led a campaign to overturn his loss that helped spur the mob that sacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

“My first thought was, ‘Well, I’m glad that’s on tape,’” Pamela Smith, president and CEO of the election security nonprofit Verified Voting, said in an interview.

Fears of federal interference

Election officials spent months planning for the possibility of federal election interference on Election Day. After the FBI seized ballots from the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia, in January, state and local leaders across the country weighed how they would respond if the Trump administration tried to take their ballots or voting equipment. 

They mapped out what poll workers would do if federal agents showed up at the polls. Some states even passed new limits on federal law enforcement and military servicemembers at the polls, even though federal law already prohibits armed personnel at election sites.

“There have been so many different kinds of threats and it’s just been so far to get to this day, far too hard for the election officials,” Smith said Wednesday.

None of those extreme scenarios came to pass on Election Day. Instead, Democrats won resounding victories up and down the ballot.

As of midday Wednesday, Democrats had secured 54 Senate seats, according to The Associated Press. Democrats had also won at least 228 seats in the House, well above the 218 necessary to control the chamber. 

The not-close race for control of Congress and a high voter turnout “made it impossible to challenge these results,” David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, told reporters.

Trump blamed the loss on his absence from the ballot, even though he had exhorted Americans to vote as if he were on the ballot. Vice President JD Vance blamed the war with Iran. 

“The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026,” Vance wrote on social media.

Both men sought to explain Republicans’ deep losses — not claim that they didn’t happen. 

Ballot fight consumed officials

But despite Trump’s pledge to accept the results, voting rights advocates said the Trump administration very much attempted to interfere ahead of Election Day and influence how states ran their elections.

The U.S. Department of Justice sued California over the ballots of 20,000 suspected noncitizens and Alaska over alleged voter confusion in the U.S. Senate race. 

California election officials had warned the Justice Department’s demand would have thrown the election into chaos and the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the request Monday. Meanwhile, a federal judge tossed the Alaska lawsuit on Sunday.

Justice Department lawyers raised the possibility that election officials could be prosecuted if they counted the ballots of noncitizens or if they failed to follow federal recordkeeping laws. They issued subpoenas to election workers in Los Angeles County, demanding records that suggest prosecutors are examining whether election officials were “aiding and abetting” noncitizen voters.

The DOJ also sued dozens of states for unredacted copies of their voter rolls containing sensitive personal data. Federal judges have rejected those lawsuits in at least 27 decisions so far, and the Trump administration has won none of its cases.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security ran election-related field operations that federal judges found could intimidate voters. The department also launched a powerful computer program to identify possible noncitizen voters, but Democrats and election experts said its results were unreliable and prone to falsely flagging U.S. citizens.

More broadly, Trump urged GOP state lawmakers across the country to redraw their congressional maps to be more favorable to Republicans — a process that accelerated after the Supreme Court weakened limits on racial gerrymandering. But in Alabama, North Carolina, Texas and elsewhere, the new maps did little to shield GOP candidates.

Earlier this year, Trump also pushed the U.S. Postal Service to impose restrictions on mail ballots, a move blocked by the Supreme Court. And he unsuccessfully demanded Congress pass the SAVE America Act, which would have immediately imposed stringent rules requiring voters to prove their citizenship, leaving states with no time to prepare.

“Despite unprecedented executive branch efforts to interfere in election administration, state and local officials responsible for running our elections have continued to do their jobs and uphold the process,” Michael McNulty, senior policy director at Issue One, a group focused on protecting American democracy, said in a statement.

Some legal wrangling continues

Trump’s admission of defeat may not fully end his administration’s pressure campaign over elections.

Late on Election Day, the Justice Department secured a rare court victory when the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a decision by a three-judge panel removing limitations on the Trump administration threatening election workers with prosecution. 

The decision came after a federal judge in California last week issued an order prohibiting the DOJ from threatening election officials with criminal charges if they didn’t comply with demands related to setting aside the ballots of alleged noncitizen voters.

“We will conduct our criminal investigations without fear or favor,” Bill Essayli, first assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, wrote on social media Tuesday.

The Justice Department’s lawsuit seeking to require California to set aside the ballots of 20,000 suspected noncitizens also remains unresolved. Even though the Supreme Court declined an emergency request by the DOJ, a federal judge has scheduled a hearing on Nov. 13 to examine the list that could include witness testimony.

The consequences of any ruling now aren’t clear. California’s ballots are currently being counted, meaning it would be effectively impossible now to identify whether a ballot came from a suspected noncitizen. The hearing will take place several weeks before election officials must certify results, however.

The hearing could reveal new information about how the Trump administration developed the list. The DOJ has said Homeland Security compiled it based on a public copy of California’s voter roll that was checked against government records and data from the Lexis Nexis research service. 

California election officials have said they’ve found evidence that U.S. citizens are on the list, and in a court hearing on Monday, a Justice Department attorney acknowledged it has a “high error rate.”

Jonathan Miller, chief program officer of Public Rights Project, which represents Los Angeles County in the lawsuit, in a statement framed the dispute in simple terms.

“State and local officials run our elections — and the federal government cannot interfere,” Miller said.

American democracy faces one of its biggest stress tests of the modern era, as President Donald Trump’s sprawling campaign for power over elections encounters a firewall of judges, state election workers and voting rights leaders heading into Election Day.

A cascade of courtroom losses over the weekend dealt a major blow to the Trump administration’s last-minute efforts ahead of Tuesday to assert authority over voting and hold the prospect of prosecutions over the heads of state election officials. 

But another round of last-minute court hearings was set for Monday — and the U.S. Department of Justice asked the U.S. Supreme Court to require California to set aside the ballots of 20,000 suspected noncitizens.

Democrats, voting rights groups and even some former Trump administration officials have said they are braced for a range of possible disruptions and interference, especially as the president stares down the prospect of a blue wave that could wash away Republican control of Congress. Elections forecasters have said Democrats are on track to win control of the U.S. House and possibly the Senate, amid voter unhappiness with rising consumer costs.

“I fully expect my former boss, Donald Trump, to try to steal this election,” Miles Taylor, a deputy Department of Homeland Security chief of staff during the first Trump administration who became an outspoken Trump critic, told reporters last week.

Trump and his supporters have said the federal government’s actions are necessary to protect against noncitizen voting, which they warn cancels out the votes of Americans. 

While researchers have consistently found that noncitizen voting is rare and doesn’t impact the outcome of elections, Homeland Security has arrested dozens of noncitizens on allegations of election crimes in recent weeks, part of a concerted effort by the Trump administration to ramp up enforcement ahead of the election.

The last-minute push, Trump allies note, comes after the Senate didn’t advance Trump’s signature election legislation, the SAVE America Act, which would have imposed stringent requirements on voters to show proof of citizenship. The legislation passed the House but faced bipartisan opposition in the Senate.

“They voted against proof of citizenship so they can cheat,” Trump said during a rally in Salina, Kansas, on Sunday.

In the past four days, a federal judge ordered the list of 20,000 suspected noncitizens in California shared with an immigrant rights group, which said Saturday it found major problems with its veracity.

Another judge blocked the Justice Department from threatening election workers with prosecution. In Alaska, a judge dismissed a lawsuit that preemptively sought to question the certification of the results of Alaska’s U.S. Senate race. An appeals court also upheld limits on preelection field operations by Homeland Security.

On Monday, judges were expected to weigh requests to restrict federal law enforcement agents from serving as election monitors and additional limits on armed federal personnel at polling locations. Federal law broadly prohibits armed federal troops or agents at election sites.

Planning for ‘every single scenario’

As the court losses pile up, Democrats, civic leaders and election experts have watched with a wary eye toward how Trump will respond.

Election preparations by critics of the Trump administration have been underway for months. Congressional Democrats have mapped out dozens of scenarios, including the possibility that Trump will falsely point to a foreign threat against U.S. elections as an excuse to disrupt voting or seize voting machines.

They have also assembled a field army of volunteers to assist voters and monitor polling locations for signs of federal interference. Teams of lawyers have drafted a range of possible lawsuits that can be quickly filed if problems arise.

Virginia Kase Solomón, president and CEO of the nonpartisan watchdog Common Cause, said her organization is deploying more than 21,000 election protection volunteers sporting bright yellow shirts. Common Cause has also trained 3,000 volunteers to work a voter hotline.

“Common Cause is prepared for every single scenario and we are refusing to let fear win,” Kase Solomón said during a recent press briefing.

Noncitizen voters

The Trump administration’s actions follow a refusal by dozens of states, including California, to share their full voter roll that includes sensitive personal data — information the Trump administration says would allow it to identify noncitizen voters.

“California could, but refuses to, provide the unredacted list, which would resolve this entire dispute in a matter of hours,” Bill Essayli, first assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, wrote on social media over the weekend.

But Trump has spent years promoting falsehoods about stolen elections, long before the more recent focus on noncitizen voting. After he lost the 2020 election, the president and his allies waged an extensive pressure campaign in a bid to overturn his losses in key battleground states. 

Some supporters advanced baseless conspiracy theories about voting machines. As the midterm elections approach, Trump has again begun casting a cloud of suspicion over voting machines. 

He spoke about alleged vulnerabilities in the machines during a primetime speech in July, though in every state except Louisiana, machines produce paper records that can later be checked. In the final hours of the election, the president is returning to the theme.

“You know the paper ballots cost 9% of what these crooked machines cost,” Trump said at a rally in Dubuque, Iowa, on Sunday.

Trump’s intensifying rhetoric has been matched by the Justice Department’s rapid-fire legal challenges over the past several days seeking to influence elections, which under the U.S. Constitution are run by the states.

With polls set to open in a matter of hours, federal judges have blocked the Trump administration at every turn.

Threats to election workers

Late Friday, Judge Trina Thompson, an appointee of President Joe Biden in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, issued a temporary restraining order preventing the Trump administration from threatening election workers nationwide with prosecution. 

The order came after Essayli, during a court hearing last week, raised the possibility that California election officials could face “criminal liability” if they count the ballots of noncitizens. 

The Justice Department on Thursday also sent a letter to election officials nationwide that reiterated requirements under federal law to preserve election-related records and listed the criminal consequences of noncompliance.

When election officials perform the work in the manner required by state and federal law, “they do not violate federal criminal law even if a particular ballot belongs” to an ineligible voter, Thompson wrote.

The Justice Department has appealed the order to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

“Reminding election officials to follow federal law is a civic service, not a ‘threat,’” Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter said on X.

Supreme Court weighs ballots case

Weeks after the Justice Department sued California in an effort to force election officials to set aside and not count the ballots of 20,000 voters it said were suspected noncitizens, the case reached the Supreme Court on Monday.

“If it turns out that those individuals cast ballots but are not, in fact, U.S. citizens, then California’s counting of their votes will violate (federal law) and will debase or dilute valid votes cast by U.S. citizens,” U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote in an emergency application to the high court.

The Justice Department has so far failed in its effort to require California to set aside ballots from individuals on the list, which was compiled by Homeland Security based on checks of government records and use of the research service LexisNexis. A district court judge and the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals have both ruled against the Trump administration.

An immigrant rights group raised serious concerns about the list over the weekend after a judge forced the Trump administration to share a copy with the organization.

The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, or CHIRLA, said in a court filing Saturday that an analysis by data experts found that 42% of the names weren’t found on California’s current voter file. At least 22 names on the list are on a list of U.S. citizens compiled by the organization, the analysis found.

Judge James Boasberg, an appointee of President Barack Obama in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, on Monday prohibited the Justice Department from demanding that California set aside ballots — echoing previous rulings in the case now before the Supreme Court.

In Washington state, the Justice Department has demanded election officials set aside about 400 ballots from voters it alleges are noncitizens. On Sunday, several civil rights groups sued to block any segregation of ballots.

“We are days away from Election Day and these threats, again, are an attempt to sow fear and throw out eligible votes with no transparency,” Lilliane Ballesteros, executive director of the Latino Community Fund of Washington state, said in a statement.

Federal monitors at the polls

On Sunday, the NAACP asked for a temporary restraining order to prevent a wide swath of federal law enforcement agents from serving as election monitors.

The Justice Department has deployed election monitors for decades to watch polling places for compliance with federal voting rights laws. But the Trump administration has expanded the program, and plans to have roughly 1,000 monitors stationed across all 50 states on Election Day.

Justice Department lawyers typically serve as monitors, but the Trump administration this year also plans to tap federal law enforcement agents. In a court filing, the NAACP alleged the deployments are illegal and will have a chilling effect that intimidates voters.

“The law is clear — law enforcement agents can have an intimidating effect on voters, especially Black voters, and they have no role and no right to be inside our polling places,” Kristen Clarke, NAACP general counsel, said in a statement.

The Justice Department said in a court document that monitors aren’t allowed to have firearms and have been instructed not to interfere with voting and must dress in business casual clothing.

Senior Judge Reggie Walton, an appointee of President George W. Bush in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, held a hearing on Monday. The public docket indicated Walton would issue an order.

Alaska challenge tossed

Judge Sharon Gleason, an appointee of President Barack Obama in U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska, on Sunday dismissed a Justice Department lawsuit that preemptively sought to pause certification of the Senate race.

The DOJ wanted a certification pause if Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan lost to Democrat Mary Peltola — and if Sullivan lost by less than the number of votes received by another candidate of the same name, Dan J. Sullivan.

The New York Times reported last week that Democrats worked to recruit Dan J. Sullivan, leading Trump to call for him and Peltola to be kicked out of the election. While Alaska election officials had initially tried to prevent Dan J. Sullivan from appearing on the ballot, the Alaska Supreme Court cleared his candidacy earlier this year.

The Justice Department’s lawsuit had also asked for an order requiring all ballots for Dan J. Sullivan be set aside for further investigation. Gleason gave little credence to the request and wrote that the Trump administration had offered no explanation for how it would work.

“The absence of any explanation from the United States as to how its requested relief could redress its alleged injury while simultaneously maintaining the secrecy of the ballot is telling,” Gleason wrote.

The Justice Department immediately appealed the decision to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is unlawfully scrutinizing naturalized U.S. citizens and placing them at risk of disenfranchisement, civil rights groups alleged in a lawsuit Wednesday, less than a week before Election Day.

The lawsuit, filed in California, came as Homeland Security asked for an emergency order to restart election-related field operations in nine states after a federal judge paused them over concerns they could sweep up U.S. citizens.

The developments add to the growing legal war over the midterm elections being fought in federal courts across the country. President Donald Trump’s administration is waging an aggressive and highly visible effort to target alleged noncitizen voting — a campaign Democrats and voting rights groups fear will wrongly ensnare Americans entitled to cast a ballot.

Homeland Security and its sub-agency, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, “created a rushed, flawed process that brands naturalized and derivative citizens as potential criminals in the federal government’s eyes and then tries to disenfranchise them,” the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit was filed by OCA-Asian Pacific American Advocates and Common Cause, with representation from the American Civil Liberties Union.

The lawsuit accuses Homeland Security of operating what it calls an “Unlawful Voter Initiative” — a policy by USCIS to target thousands of naturalized and derivative citizens for voter eligibility investigations and tracking. The allegations are rooted in a whistleblower report released in September by U.S. Senate Democrats that said DHS is investigating naturalized citizens without their knowledge.

“Naturalized citizens are U.S. citizens, with exactly the same right to vote as anyone born here,” John C. Yang, president and executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, said in a statement.

DHS lists

OCA-Asian Pacific American Advocates and Common Cause are asking a federal judge to block Homeland Security from targeting naturalized citizens and from demanding that any state or local election official not count ballots from voters based on their inclusion in any list of alleged noncitizen voters compiled by DHS. 

The U.S. Department of Justice has sued California in an effort to force election officials to not count the ballots of 20,000 suspected noncitizen voters and demanded Washington state not count the ballots of 400 suspected noncitizens. 

Homeland Security compiled those lists.

Election officials in California and voting rights advocates have voiced deep reservations about the reliability and accuracy of the list. The federal judge in the California lawsuit signaled during a hearing Tuesday that he will likely assign a special master to examine the list, but was leaning against requiring election officials setting aside ballots.

Homeland Security didn’t respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

“The Trump Administration will not allow illegal aliens to steal the votes of hardworking American citizens. American elections are for Americans only,” Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in a news release Wednesday touting a wave of voter fraud arrests.

Enforcement ramping up

For the past several weeks, Homeland Security has ramped up efforts to target alleged noncitizen voters. Dozens of noncitizens have been arrested across the country, with their names and photos publicized in news releases and on social media.

Noncitizen voting is a misdemeanor offense, though individuals can also face deportation.

Last week, U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín, an appointee of President Joe Biden in the Northern District of California, blocked Homeland Security from conducting election-related field operations that could sweep up U.S. citizens. She issued a preliminary injunction after voting rights advocates alleged DHS was sending armed agents to homes to question residents about their voter status. 

The injunction bars operations in California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin until polls close. 

On Tuesday, Homeland Security filed an emergency motion asking the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to pause the injunction. The Trump administration asked the appeals court to rule by Thursday.

“The preliminary injunction will continue to interfere with ongoing federal law enforcement operations relevant to the security and integrity of the midterm elections,” Gabriel Schonfeld, a U.S. Department of Justice lawyer, wrote in a court filing.

The 9th Circuit appears set to move swiftly, ordering all court papers in the case to be filed by Wednesday.

One in 10 eligible voters 

Roughly 10% of Americans eligible to vote this year are naturalized citizens, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census data. The percentage of eligible voters who are naturalized has risen from about 6.2% in 2000.

California has the largest share, with naturalized citizens comprising nearly 22% of eligible voters. Florida, New Jersey and New York have the next highest percentages, ranging from 17% to 20%.

Some voting rights advocates say they’ve heard from naturalized citizens who fear they could be caught up in the Trump administration’s push against noncitizen voting.

“It is a concern we have heard from our members across the country,” Omar Nourledin, senior vice president of policy and litigation at Common Cause, told reporters on Wednesday. “And it is a well-founded concern given the junk data that the U.S. Department of Justice has used to compile these lists.”

Less than a week before Election Day, President Donald Trump’s unprecedented drive for power over elections has set the stage for a series of courtroom fights that could quickly lead to a high-stakes showdown at the U.S. Supreme Court over the limits of federal authority.

Democrats and voting rights advocates have long feared Trump would attempt to interfere in the midterm elections, especially if Republicans appear poised to lose control of Congress. With early voting well underway across much of the country, they say those concerns are being confirmed as the Trump administration rushes forward a last-minute legal campaign to pressure election officials in a growing number of states.

The U.S. Department of Justice over the past two weeks has sued Alaska and California, seeking extraordinary federal intervention in their elections. Signs suggest the legal campaign might expand: On Monday the DOJ demanded election officials in Washington pull aside ballots of 400 alleged noncitizens. The department made a similar ask for 20,000 people in California before suing that state.

“I think we should be prepared to see suits like this anywhere where there’s a close election, especially in an election that could determine control of the House or Senate,” said Shelby Wayment, staff attorney at the Safeguarding Democracy Project at the University of California, Los Angeles.

States administer elections under the U.S. Constitution, with only Congress holding the power to override state-level rules and regulations. But Trump has sought to bend that constitutional guarantee to the breaking point, legal experts on elections say.

The Justice Department is claiming a federal criminal law against noncitizen voting entitles the agency to demand California and Washington election officials not count ballots.

In Alaska, the Justice Department preemptively sued to block state officials from certifying the results of the U.S. Senate election if Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan loses to Democrat Mary Peltola by a margin that’s less than the number of votes cast for an alleged spoiler candidate of the same name, Dan J. Sullivan. Trump has said the DOJ acted at his direction.

Groundwork to challenge results?

The Justice Department is engaged in “preemptive election interference,” Steve Vladeck, a leading expert on federal courts and a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, wrote online. While he expressed confidence that the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, won’t endorse the DOJ’s “nonsense,” he voiced concern that the lawsuits will eventually stop seeming extraordinary.

“Preemptive election interference is a prelude,” Vladeck wrote. “Its whole point is to have the theories and the filings in place — and the specter of mischief in the air — before the counting starts so that the results can be attacked if, but only if, they don’t come out the ‘right’ way.”

All of it comes as Trump stares down the prospect of political defeat in the midterm elections. If Democrats retake the House or Senate, they will likely launch a series of investigations into the president and members of his administration that could bog down his final two years in office.

Asked Tuesday if he will respect the results of the midterms, Trump told reporters, “I will if they’re honest.”

Trump has laid groundwork to attempt to discredit unfavorable results, writing on Truth Social on Monday that the federal government would be closely watching the race for U.S. Senate in Minnesota. Republican Michele Tafoya, a former broadcast journalist, faces Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, a Democrat.

“The only way she can lose is if they cheat by playing games with the Ballots as they come in,” Trump wrote of Tafoya.

Courtroom losses

Previous efforts by the Trump administration to influence elections this year have largely failed. The Supreme Court blocked proposed restrictions on mail ballots, and federal courts across the country have blocked the Justice Department’s attempts to obtain state voter rolls that contain sensitive personal information, such as driver’s license and Social Security numbers.

Democrats and voting rights experts anticipate that federal courts will also block the latest round of legal action from the Trump administration. Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat, emphasized in a statement that the Trump administration doesn’t have the authority to interfere in his state’s elections.

“The Trump administration is afraid and desperate. Their attempts to take over our elections will fail,” Padilla said.

The Trump administration has long said identifying and removing noncitizen voters is a top priority, though studies have consistently shown noncitizen voting rarely occurs. For instance, even if all 20,000 individuals on the DOJ list are noncitizens, it would represent only about 0.08% of the nearly 23.2 million registered voters in California. 

Still, the Justice Department has stepped up arrests of alleged noncitizen voters in recent weeks as part of a heavily publicized campaign it calls “Operation Protect the Vote.”

“Enforcing federal law increases the integrity of elections. It increases confidence in elections,” acting U.S. Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter said at a recent news conference.

The Trump administration’s new plan to assert authority over vote counting in California suffered its first courtroom loss on Monday, when a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declined to grant the DOJ’s request for an emergency order requiring state and local officials to segregate the ballots of voters on the list of 20,000.

In a 2-1 decision, the panel dismissed the appeal on procedural grounds. The judges ruled the court didn’t have jurisdiction over the case because the Justice Department didn’t give a district court judge sufficient time to weigh the request.

Emergency of the administration’s making

The Justice Department filed the lawsuit in mid-October, despite the Trump administration initially saying this summer it had identified more than 190,000 possible noncitizen voters in California. DOJ lawyers then waited several days before seeking an emergency order, and then asked the judge to rule on their request in less than a day.

“This timing challenge is entirely of the federal government’s own doing. And it understandably leads skeptics to believe that this isn’t about improving California vote rolls, but is an attempt to cause confusion and discredit the impending election,” Stephen Richer, a legal fellow at the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, said in a statement.

The case could quickly be back before the 9th Circuit. The district court judge in the case, Judge David Carter, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, held a hearing Tuesday and said he would rule Wednesday. His decision is almost certain to be appealed, regardless of what he decides — first to the 9th Circuit and then, potentially, to the Supreme Court.

The Justice Department would likely again encounter skepticism from the 9th Circuit.

Appellate Judge Mark Bennett, a Trump appointee, wrote in a concurring opinion Monday that he would also deny the Justice Department’s request on the merits. The Trump administration offers “no workable plan” for how California would set aside ballots and he noted that the evidence that individuals on the list are actually noncitizens is contested.

“Courts tend to frown upon people creating their own emergencies and then saying, ‘Hey, look, we’re in an emergency,’” said Aaron Blacksberg, federal policy counsel at the nonpartisan Institute for Responsive Government.

Speedy resolution in Alaska 

In Alaska, the Justice Department’s lawsuit may move quickly — because Democrats and voting rights groups want a quick resolution.

Peltola’s campaign and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the main campaign operation of Senate Democrats, have filed an emergency motion seeking a fast dismissal of the case. Lawyers for Alaska’s election officials are also asking a judge to rule by Monday, prior to Election Day.

“This lawsuit and this requested relief cast a cloud over Alaska’s election that is contrary to the public interest and that the Court should not allow to linger,” Margaret Paton Walsh, an assistant Alaska attorney general, wrote in a Monday court filing.

U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason, an appointee of President Barack Obama in Alaska, has ordered briefs in the lawsuit to be filed on an accelerated timeline over the next few days — a sign she plans to rule quickly.

Keeping status quo

Whatever cases may reach the Supreme Court, the justices are generally reluctant to authorize dramatic changes to elections close to Election Day. 

Over time, the justices have adopted a doctrine called the Purcell principle, which advises against major changes to election policy and practice just before an election because voters could get confused. 

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has faced accusations that it applies Purcell unevenly. This spring the high court effectively paved the way for Republican-controlled Southern states to eliminate majority-Black congressional districts after it severely weakened the federal Voting Rights Act.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a conservative, has drawn a distinction between federal courts ordering last-minute changes to elections and states making changes themselves. In September, the Supreme Court three times refused to overturn a Missouri Supreme Court decision that blocked the use of a gerrymandered congressional map drawn to aid Republicans.

The court’s unsigned opinion in the Missouri case offers hints about what could lie ahead for a case challenging the Justice Department’s demands of California, where voters have been sending in mail ballots for weeks.

“The Purcell principle applies with even greater force here. The election is not merely upcoming; it has already started,” the opinion says.

In the Missouri case, the Supreme Court took a strong stand against chaos, Blacksberg said.

“My hope is we’ll see an emerging theme of erring on the side of stability when there is a close question and also pro-light touch from the federal government,” Blacksburg said.

The U.S. Department of Justice plans to send election monitors to every state ahead of Election Day, expanding a long-standing practice that’s spurred concern this year among Democrats and voting rights advocates because of President Donald Trump’s push to influence elections.

The Justice Department for decades has deployed monitors across the country to watch the voting process. During President Joe Biden’s administration, the DOJ sent monitors to 64 jurisdictions across 24 states for the 2022 midterm elections.

The 2026 monitoring program is larger, with the Justice Department announcing it will have a presence in all 50 states. DOJ spokesperson Kiersten Pels told States Newsroom on Monday that about 1,000 monitors will be involved but that the department won’t disclose the full list of monitored locations until Election Day — Nov. 3.

“Every monitor will merely observe and report any potential violations of federal law to the Department, which will be reviewed after Election Day,” Pels said in a statement.

Lawsuits prompt unease

While election monitors, who watch polling places and election officials for compliance with federal voting rights laws, have long been a feature of U.S. elections, the Trump administration’s extraordinary moves to assert federal authority over state-run elections have left many Democrats and even some Republicans uneasy about this year’s expansive effort.

The Justice Department has sued dozens of states in an attempt to force election officials to turn over voter lists that contain sensitive personal data, such as driver’s license and Social Security numbers. The DOJ has lost 27 cases so far, and won none.

Less than two weeks ago, the Justice Department sued California to block election officials from counting ballots from roughly 20,000 voters it says are suspected noncitizens. 

And on Friday, the DOJ sued Alaska to preemptively prevent the certification of its U.S. Senate election if the Republican incumbent loses by less than the number of votes received by another candidate of the same name, citing the potential for voter confusion.

But concerns about DOJ monitors began building in August after Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon, a Republican, expressed reservations about monitors, calling their actions “very odd” after DOJ personnel watched voting in the state’s primary election. 

Andrew Walchuk, senior policy director and counsel for voting & fair representation at the watchdog group Common Cause, told reporters last month that monitors in and of themselves are nothing new, pointing to the long history of the DOJ’s monitoring program.

“But with this administration, we will be watching their activity very closely,” Walchuk said.

1,000 monitors, 95,000 polling places

Election experts have emphasized that even with a 1,000 monitors, the Justice Department presence across the country will be far too small to interfere with voting on a wide scale. For example, the 2024 election included more than 95,000 polling places, according to survey data from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

“The math just ain’t mathing,” Harry Black, a senior counsel at the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, said during a panel discussion on the midterms earlier this month at the University of Pittsburgh.

In early October, the NAACP sued the Justice Department for records about the election monitoring program. In their complaint, lawyers for the NAACP argued that the “unprecedented deployment” of federal officials could jeopardize the election and interfere with the right of voters to cast their ballots without intimidation.

U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, an appointee of President Joe Biden in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., denied a request by the NAACP for an emergency order directing the DOJ to immediately begin producing records. The underlying lawsuit remains pending.

Local announcements of locations

While the full location list for the election monitors remains closely held, the Justice Department last week began notifying counties that will have monitors. In turn, some state and local election officials have announced where monitors will be present.

In Washington state, DOJ monitors will deploy to King County, which includes Seattle. In Oregon, they’ll be sent to the Portland area.

Salt Lake County in Utah will receive at least one monitor. Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican who has clashed with the Trump administration after she refused to hand over voter data, told reporters last week that the Justice Department offered assurances about how the monitors will act.

“They won’t be approaching voters. They won’t be wearing any sort of insignia,” Henderson said.

In Maine, DOJ monitors are expected to be present in Portland and Lewiston. Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat, has said her office “will monitor the monitors very carefully to ensure that they don’t cross any lines.”

Pels said all monitors must meet the same legal and ethical requirements, which includes not interfering in the voting process.

“Every monitor has the same role: observe for potential violations of federal law and report concerns to the Department, which the Department will review after Election Day and act where appropriate,” Pels said.

Reporting contributed by Maine Morning Star’s Lauren McCauley and Utah News Dispatch reporter Alixel Cabrera.

America’s future cannot be left to politicians while the rest of us watch.

We cannot condemn money buying influence, hatred dividing communities and loyalty to individuals replacing loyalty to the Constitution, then surrender our responsibility to change course.

As a proud American Muslim who chose this country as my home, I refuse to abandon its promise. But loving America requires the courage to confront its failures and the determination to repair them.

Patriotism demands more than waving a flag. It demands living up to what that flag represents.

Disappointment is not a plan. Outrage is not a strategy. Silence leaves our future in someone else’s hands.

The Constitution begins with “We the People.”

That means us. And on Nov. 3, 2026, those words must become action.

Seeing something and saying something are no longer enough. We must do something: Vote, organize, challenge misinformation, defend our neighbors and demand accountability.

Our ballots must carry an unmistakable message: Public office belongs to the people.

Reclaim democracy from big money. When wealth purchases privileged access, politics begins to resemble legalized bribery. Elect leaders committed to pursuing a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United, strengthening donor disclosure and expanding participation by small donors. A citizen’s influence should never depend on the size of a check.

Protect the vote. Demand secure, accessible elections, fair district boundaries and protection for election workers. Voters should choose their representatives; representatives should not manipulate maps to choose their voters. Candidates must accept lawful outcomes after legitimate challenges are resolved. Democracy cannot depend on whether your side wins.

Reject division disguised as leadership. Demand answers about groceries, housing, healthcare, education, energy costs and jobs. A struggling farmer and a struggling city worker deserve solutions, not reasons to hate each other. Reject prejudice against any race, religion or birthplace.

Unity, not uniformity. We can disagree without denying anyone’s dignity or belonging.

Defend constitutional limits. No president or party owns the government. Demand congressional oversight, respect for lawful court orders and protection for whistleblowers. Defend peaceful protest, religious liberty, due process, free speech and a free press, including when those freedoms inconvenience leaders we support.

Rights defended only for our allies will not remain secure for anyone.

Restore trust in the courts. Demand enforceable ethics standards, financial disclosure and clear recusal rules. I support constitutional reform establishing fixed judicial terms and electing federal judges, with strong safeguards against donor influence and political pressure. Judges must remain free to uphold the Constitution even when their decisions are unpopular.

Let the people directly choose their president. Pursue a constitutional amendment replacing the Electoral College with a national popular vote, supported by clear counting and recount rules. Every voter should matter, wherever that voter lives.

These changes will require sustained work and broad agreement. One election can begin that work.

Give young Americans real influence. Create a “We the People” Youth Council of high school students from rural, suburban and urban communities, reflecting each region’s racial, religious, cultural and economic diversity.

Make participation accessible regardless of family income. Keep the council independent of campaigns. Give students mentoring and regular access to officials from both parties elected on Nov. 3.

Within its first year, the council should publish a democracy agenda, convene bipartisan forums and publicly track lawmakers’ responses.

Young people deserve more than photographs with politicians. They deserve a voice in the democracy they will inherit.

Before voting, ask candidates: What will you do, by when, and how will we measure your progress?

Then keep asking after Election Day.

Verify your registration. Make a voting plan. Help another eligible voter. Attend town halls. Track commitments.

No party owns patriotism. No politician owns America.

On Nov. 3, turn conviction into votes. On Nov. 4, turn promises into accountability.

“We the People” must mean us, and it must mean now.

God bless America. Let us make it worthy of its promise.

I will do my part. I promise.

In front of a friendly crowd at a small-town community center last week, Democratic 1st Congressional District candidate Mitchell Berman launched into the pitch he’s made countless times in the last several months.

“Growing up in rural Wisconsin, I never saw running for Congress on my bingo card,” Berman told the room full of supporters in the Rock County community of Milton.

The son of a roofing contractor and a foundry worker, a first-generation college graduate and an emergency room nurse, he wove together stories from his daily work and his own family’s experience grappling with the healthcare system.

Berman ticked off a litany of priorities he’ll pursue in  the House of Representatives if he is elected and if Congress returns to a Democratic majority in November.  Those included restoring funds cut from federal healthcare programs, supporting union organizing, raising the minimum wage and taking steps to shore up Social Security in the face of threatened cuts in less than a decade.

“Well, we only have 21 days to go. We are in the final stages of this race,” Berman said. “We have always looked at this district as having an opportunity. But right now we’re one point up in the polls.”

A cheer and applause burst from the crowd.

“We are continuing to build momentum,” Berman said. “We are filling rooms like this across the district because people are sick and tired of the partisan politics. They are ready for people to go to Washington and actually get things done.”

Berman is the latest in a string of Democrats who have hoped to turn the 1st CD back to a Democratic seat after decades of Republican representation, including by U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Janesville) for the last eight years.

Steil is a former corporate lawyer and one-time aide to his popular predecessor, former House Speaker Paul Ryan. When Ryan gave up the seat in 2018 after two decades, Steil easily topped the Democratic challenger, union activist Randy Bryce, whose candidacy drew national attention.

While the margins have narrowed in the ensuing three reelection campaigns, Steil has continued to maintain a solid  advantage — leading the Cook Political Report to label the district “likely Republican” for most of the current term, until recently shifting it to the less-definitive “lean Republican.”

In 2026 Democrats are leaning harder into their campaign to wrest the district from its long-time GOP dominance.

Berman’s campaign sees in the polling trends and the Cook Political Report shift evidence that the seat is winnable thie year. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee added Wisconsin’s 1st District to a list of races targeted for special attention — and some party spending — this fall.

U.S. Rep Mark Pocan, who has endorsed Berman and spoke at the Milton rally, says this year’s cycle has changed the dynamic of the district, and the race.

In his previous terms, Steil “did his very best to be as flavorless as possible,” Pocan says. “He wasn’t upsetting anyone and he’s a nice guy but he didn’t have positions.”

Steil joins Tiffany rally

Steil’s campaign declined to make him available for an interview despite repeated requests over the last week. The campaign also declined to respond to a list of questions about criticisms that have been lodged against him in the race.

Steil has continued to cultivate an upbeat presence in the district, documented on his office’s social media with visits to local fire departments, healthcare facilities and factories.

He also joined last week’s Waukesha County rally with Republican candidate for governor Tom Tiffany, sponsored by the GOP-aligned Hunter Nation organization, whose members are lobbying for passage of legislation that would create a controversial sandhill crane hunt.

Taking his turn at the podium, Steil excoriated “how radicalized the Democratic party has become, where they are going after all aspects of our culture” — zeroing in on controversies over whether trans girls should be allowed on girls’ sports teams.

“They want to come after our hunting rights,” Steil said, although not spelling out specifics. Steil also condemned “higher taxes on the Democratic side.” 

“This is not your grandfather’s Democratic party anymore,” Steil said. “This is a radicalized, activist socialist party that we are seeing on the left.”

Drilling home the Tiffany rally’s get-out-the vote message, Steil urged the crowd to “run on the assumption that the Democrats are going to vote in full strength in the liberal core cities in Wisconsin.” To counter that, he said, “We need to get that message out to our friends, our family, our neighbors, our coworkers, folks in church on how important this election is and how important it is that people like us get out and vote.”

Pocan interprets the shift in Steil’s profile during his latest term as an attempt to advance within the Republican party. “So instead of quietly rubber stamping Donald Trump, he’s now doing it more vocally,” Pocan says.

Drawing a contrast

While Steil has emphasized an image of Democratic radicalism, Berman’s campaign is drawing a contrast  between the Democrat’s working-class background and the Republican incumbent’s history as a corporate lawyer and his voting record in Congress.

“My dad owned a small roofing business that he built from the ground up,” Berman told the Milton crowd. “My mom, she worked long hours in the foundry. But they instilled in me the values of hard work, perseverance, and they taught me to always stick up for the little guy.”

He pointed to a resume that included working part-time at UPS — a union job — to help make ends meet in college, working off student debt after he graduated, and then making a career in healthcare, including 11 years as a Veterans Administration nurse — a job he had to quit because he couldn’t run for political office as a federal employee.

It was at the VA “where I started to recognize that a lot of these issues that we were having didn’t stem from me and my coworkers not having the capability to deliver the type of care that patients deserve,” Berman said. “But we were being handcuffed at the bedside by bad policies that were trickling down from Washington.”

Cuts to the VA health system early in President Donald Trump’s second term exacerbated those issues, he said. “That’s when I realized it was going to take somebody from the ground floor, from the bedside, standing up and fighting for change if we actually wanted to succeed.”

Berman said an insurance company denied his mother a colonoscopy in her late 40s despite a doctor’s recommendation because she wasn’t yet 50. At 49 she got the procedure in an emergency, he said, and was diagnosed with late stage colon cancer.

“So that same insurance company that denied that preventive procedure then began increasing our premiums,” Berman said. “At that point they could no longer afford insurance. Medicaid was the safety net that caught my mom.”

The massive tax and spending bill — the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — that Trump and the Republican majority in Congress enacted in mid-2025, with its cuts amounting to nearly $1 trillion over the next 10 years to Medicaid, along with other provisions, are a key talking point for Berman, who points out that Steil voted for the cuts.

The war in Iran that has driven up gasoline and diesel fuel prices and tariffs that have hobbled farmers also contribute to escalating difficulty for families in the 1st District, the state and across the country, Berman told voters in Milton.

He blames Steil for not voting to block the tariffs or end the war.

“You know, I don’t think it’s too much to ask for all representatives to be in Washington working for us, making Washington work for working people, because that’s what they should be doing,” Berman said. “So, while he’s making it more difficult for us, we’re here at home, struggling, trying to put food on the table, trying to make rent.”

Spotlight on  Steil’s record

With increasing tenure, Steil has advanced to new leadership roles, expanding his opportunity to advance his legislative priorities. His higher profile has also made him a bigger target for Democrats.

In January, as chair of the Committee on House Administration, which oversees federal election-related policies, Steil introduced the Make Elections Great Again Act.

Federal law generally delegates election administration to the states, minimizing the authority of the federal government. The Steil legislation would impose new national requirements on states, including mandating photo IDs in all states and setting new restrictions for what qualifies as a legal ID.

Among many other requirements, the bill would also compel states to check every 30 days on whether existing registered voters are still eligible. It would “improve voter confidence, bolster election integrity, and make it easy to vote, but hard to cheat,” Steil said when he introduced the legislation.

The bill has not advanced. The Trump administration and Republican leaders instead focused on the SAVE America Act, which included similar requirements for voter citizenship verification and other limits. The SAVE America Act stalled in the U.S. Senate after passing the House.

Voting rights groups condemned the SAVE Act and also rejected Steil’s bill.

“Election officials — including in Wisconsin — have shown again and again that elections are secure,” said Samuel Liebert, Wisconsin state director for All Voting Is Local, when Steil introduced his measure. “Codifying suspicion into law doesn’t strengthen democracy; it undermines public confidence and puts election workers in harm’s way.”

Oversight, votes and campaign donations

Steil also chairs the House Subcommittee on Digital Assets, Financial Technology, and Artificial Intelligence — a panel that, among other things, oversees the crypto currency industry.

Earlier this month, the crypto PAC Fairshake launched a pro-Steil ad in the Milwaukee media market, reserving $735,914 in airtime for the ad, WisPolitics reported. According to Tech Influence Watch, an independent organization that tracks tech political spending, crypto interests have spent $1.3 million to support Steil in the 2026 election, a mix of campaign donations and independent spending.

In a post on X earlier this month, Steil wrote approvingly of a Commodities Futures Trading Commission announcement of advanced rulemaking on regulations for crypto transactions and crypto asset markets.

Steil “advocates for clear digital asset regulations, emphasizing consumer protection. His support may influence regulatory frameworks moving forward,” reported the outlet Coinfomania, which covers the crypto industry.

Steil’s campaign did not respond to a question about what his call for “clear regulations emphasizing consumer protection” would mean in concrete terms.

He is one of a bipartisan group of 21 lawmakers who cosponsored  legislation on regulating the crypto industry that the industry had sought. After passing the House, the bill foundered in the Senate, in part due to Democrats’ objections over President Donald Trump’s profiteering from crypto transactions, HuffPost reported.

At Berman’s Milton rally, however, Pocan suggested the outcome of the proposed legislation would be looser regulation for crypto businesses — “making sure they don’t have enough regulation so they can continue to operate in that dark realm.”

The Milwaukee Courier linked Steil’s votes to campaign donations from interested industries. The bills involved were not enacted. The donors included Blackstone, a corporate owner of rental housing nationwide, which made its contribution around the time Steil voted on bills cutting rental assistance and increasing mortgage fees; banking and credit businesses around the time of a vote to reduce regulations including on banking firms; and mortgage companies around the time of a vote that would have raised fees for borrowers.

Steil’s campaign did not respond to a question about the donations and bills identified in the Courier reports.

The Berman campaign has highlighted the findings. A TV ad also highlighted earlier reporting on Steil’s votes for federal tax breaks for data centers and donations totaling $300,000 to his campaigns from related industries.

Curbing Congressional stock trading

Besides the issue of the crypto industry’s pro-Steil ads, the Berman campaign has targeted the spot’s message, crediting Steil with writing a bill “banning members of Congress from trading stocks.”

A measure Steil authored, the Stop Insider Trading Act, prohibits members of Congress and their families from buying new stocks and hikes the penalties for violating an existing law against failure to disclose stock purchases and insider trading.

After passing the U.S. House, Steil’s bill stalled in the Senate when it failed to clear 60 votes to move forward to a vote in the chamber. In a Facebook post, Steil blamed Democrats for blocking the bill.

But Pocan says that when Steil’s bill was introduced, it effectively halted the momentum for a stronger, bipartisan measure banning members and their families from buying, selling or owning stock.

Their bill was on a trajectory to garner  enough support to force a House vote on the measure, Pocan says. That stalled after Steil introduced his bill, which would allow members to continue to own or sell stock and included a provision that allowed them to buy stock if they were reinvesting dividends.

“That is the opposite of a stock ban bill, but he’s taking credit for it,” Pocan told the crowd in Milton.

Even in the face of repeated Democratic disappointments in the district that go back decades, Pocan contends the 2026 race offers a new context. Voters’ disenchantment with Trump is part of that, but Democrats are also betting on a message that highlights the incumbent’s record in terms that resonate with people this year.

“I think those are all stances in a year that corruption is a big issue,” Pocan says. With his status as an outsider rather than a politician, “I just think Mitchell Berman in many ways is the right candidate right now.”

Lilly Goren, a political scientist at Carroll University in Waukesha, sees too many unknowns to offer a clear prediction. 

“I think the potential things that could make a difference — and I don’t know if they will — are that the map is slightly different, and whether the Blue Wave, if it comes to pass, will be sufficient to bring an upset to such a consistently Republican district,” Goren says.

There have been anecdotal reports that Trump supporters are ignoring survey calls, which could mean pollsters aren’t hearing from voters who could make a difference in the result. 

On the other hand, Trump’s record-low approval ratings “suggest that Republican support is not necessarily out there and enthusiastic,” Goren adds. “The question becomes, also, whether people come out and vote, or whether they stay home.”

Baylor Spears contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — A couple hundred people carrying decorated umbrellas walked from the former Black Lives Matter Plaza near the White House to the U.S. Capitol lawn Saturday for a No Kings get-out-the-vote event in the nation’s capital.

No Kings, a coalition that has drawn millions of Americans to protests three times since the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term, spread out its fourth effort across several Saturday events in Washington, D.C., in addition to thousands across the nation, to encourage early voting. 

The Umbrella Walk was one of them. No Kings worked with the advocacy group Umbrella Walk 4 Change to hold the street protest. 

Octavia Clapp, a 25-year-old protester from Maryland, said using her right to vote especially matters as Trump attempts to wield authority over voting. The Trump administration has spent more than a year in court battles with dozens of states and voting rights groups seeking to force states to provide sensitive voter data and curb voting by mail.

“I think cracking down on mail-in voting and restricting people’s ability to vote easily is anti-democratic,” she said. “Democracy is really important to me, and freedom is really important to me.”

Linda Levine, a Washington, D.C., resident, said restrictions on abortion rights drew her to the march. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that established abortion as a constitutional right. 

“I am 83 and I can’t believe that my daughter has less rights now than I had,” she said. “We fought for them and this Supreme Court took them away.”

Her daughter, Ari Hershey, attended with her two young sons to show them how to protest.

It was a record number of participants for the Umbrella Walk 4 Change, according to the walk’s organizer, Peter Stinson.

Stinson said he hopes Saturday’s events will lead to larger, more powerful demonstrations in front of the Capitol and eventually impeachment of the president.

“We need 30,000 people right here, right here, every day for about four to six weeks,” he said. 

Ashley Thoj from Lorton, Virginia, attended with her spouse Aida Thoj. For Ashley, early voting was the walk’s most important message.

“Especially now that we’re in early voting periods, just getting people to get out to the polls,” she said.

Already, more than 8.5 million Americans have voted in the 2026 midterm election, according to the University of Florida Election Lab.

Unlike past No Kings events, only some of Saturday’s actions involved protests. The events across the United States included help with voter registration, walks to ballot drop-off locations and car pool sign-ups.

At the Umbrella Walk, Stinson ended the march with a reminder to participants to vote and help others vote.

“Work within your circle of influence,” he said. “Work within your skill set.”

MADISON – About 1,000 people gathered at 2 p.m. on a sunny Saturday afternoon for a No Kings protest in James Madison park near Lake Monona in downtown Madison. The crowd swelled to about 1,500 as protesters marched to the Capitol in a long line with police stopping traffic at intersections along the way. The Forward Marching Band played “Solidarity Forever” on tubas, horns and drums as marchers carrying signs protesting the Trump administration rounded the square and converged in front of City Hall to listen to speakers who urged everyone to vote early in the 2026 midterm elections.

Gina Idsinga came to the rally from her home in McFarland with a homemade sign that displayed the names of her five grandchildren and the statement: “I need to be able to tell my  grandchildren I did not stay silent.” 

“I feel very strongly about what is going on and we just need to band together and keep community in mind,” she said. “No country is a good country without taking care of its people and this administration is definitely not taking care of its people.”

Beside her, Idsinga’s friend Dee Reid carried a sign that said “No crowns for clowns.” She said she came out to support “all the things that this country has worked hard to keep,” including abortion rights, Social Security and Obamacare. She has been thinking about retiring soon, she said, but the cost of living is making her worry about whether she will be able to stop working. Her kids are also struggling with high costs, she said. “Both have really good careers and can’t buy a house. Interest rates are high, housing is not affordable and things are going in the wrong direction, so we need to focus on what’s good for us and not on starting wars in places we really don’t need to right now.”

Dineen Seymour-Nahn, a retired public school teacher in Madison said, “We have to vote in Crowley and Josh Kaul, and just vote in Democrats up and down the ticket, because really, if we don’t win this, who knows what will happen in 2028? With Tom Tiffany in there, he’ll undo everything we’ve done even in the last two years with some really good Supreme Court races. All that will come back – gerrymandering, anti-abortion laws, so that’s why we’re here.”

Sue Jennik, the president of the  League of Women Voters of Dane County stood behind a table in front of City Hall with information on the candidates running in Wisconsin in 2026, the proposed constitutional amendments voters will see on on their ballots and instructions on how to register, vote early and use a ballot drop box: “Everything people need to know to protect their right to vote,” she said.

“Don’t trust an email that tells you you’re registered to vote if you just moved to Wisconsin,” said Melissa Markquart, a singer in the protest group the Raging Grannies. “We have grannies out registering people to vote, and they’ve had people tell them they got emails that said they were already registered – but there’s no automatic registration in Wisconsin,” she added.

Ajak Johnson, one of the march organizers, ran back and forth along the line directing marchers throughout. “These national events keep happening and we keep organizing things here on the ground,” she said. “I think it’s important for people to come together.” 

Early voting starts in Wisconsin on Oct 20, she added, “and I would just hope that people would leave here with a plan to early vote.”

After the U.S. Department of Justice sued California over its refusal to remove voters the federal government alleges are noncitizens, voting rights advocates fear the Trump administration is violating a court order blocking it from rooting out noncitizens with states’ voter data.

U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan on Oct. 9 ruled against the Justice Department’s year-long project to obtain state’s unredacted voter rolls, which include sensitive personal data, and share them with the Department of Homeland Security to identify possible noncitizens. The DOJ on Friday said it plans to appeal the decision.

In letters sent on Oct. 13, the Justice Department gave California officials 48 hours to review and remove a list of some 20,000 registered voters that the Trump administration believes are noncitizens. 

Many are concentrated in the Los Angeles area, and state and local elections officials both refused to act on the list. The DOJ immediately sued after its deadline passed on Thursday.

The Justice Department’s lawsuit, coming less than three weeks before Election Day and with voting underway in California, amounts to the latest development in President Donald Trump’s efforts to assert authority over elections, which under the U.S. Constitution are administered by the states. Trump faces a deluge of investigations and pushback if Democrats retake one or both chambers of Congress in November.

Democrats and voting rights groups have previously raised alarms about the possibility of the Trump administration attempting to interfere with voting. For some, the legal action against California only exacerbates their concerns. 

Letter sent, hearing requested

On Thursday, several Democratic senators wrote to U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche to demand that the DOJ confirm it won’t seize ballots or other election materials.

The watchdog groups Common Cause and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, which represents voters who sued to block the DOJ’s voter data sharing, have asked Sooknanan to hold a hearing to look into whether the Trump administration’s actions violate her order. They said the DOJ has adopted an “exceedingly narrow view” of her decision.

“By attempting to superintend voter roll list maintenance and prohibit registered voters from exercising the franchise without adequate consideration of the reliability of the underlying data, DOJ’s October 13 letters and the actions described in the California (lawsuit) appear to implicate — and perhaps outright violate” Sooknanan’s order, lawyers for the groups wrote in a court filing.

On Friday, Sooknanan ordered the Justice Department to respond to the request for a hearing in District of Columbia federal court by Monday.

Email exchange

Common Cause and CREW filed in court a late Thursday email exchange with Christian Dibblee, a Justice Department trial attorney, in which Dibblee writes that Homeland Security obtained a publicly available voter roll of California voters — as opposed to the full, unredacted roll that DOJ has sued states over — and that DHS didn’t use the SAVE system to identify possible noncitizens. 

SAVE, a computer system operated by DHS, combs through government databases to verify citizenship, but critics point to examples of the program falsely flagging U.S. citizens. The U.S. Supreme Court in September ruled that states could continue accessing SAVE ahead of the midterm elections, but most states are currently prohibited from conducting mass purges of voters because it’s too close to the election.

Sooknanan’s order “does not extend to using other methods, nor does it prohibit taking enforcement actions based on those other methods,” Dibblee wrote, adding that Homeland Security also wasn’t a party to the lawsuit challenging the DOJ’s voter roll effort.

The Justice Department’s lawsuit against California offers a broad overview, but few specifics, of how Homeland Security compiled its list of suspected noncitizens. It says that Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, compares “information about voter rolls” with “its internal data” to identify possible noncitizens. Additional investigative steps, not described, are used to assign a confidence level — low, medium or high — to each match.

ICE then connects high confidence matches with an “alien number” and those individuals are compared against internal records regarding naturalization and parental citizenship. Records from the State Department and Social Security Administration are also reviewed, the DOJ says in its lawsuit.

Individuals that ICE still believes to be noncitizens are then sent to Homeland Security Investigations, a sub-agency of ICE, according to the Justice Department. HSI conducts an “analytical data enrichment process” before sending data to HSI criminal investigators in the field.

In a statement Friday, DHS said it uses multiple data sources, from both government and commercial third-party sources, to supplement public information.

Mullin slams ‘unlawful voting’ 

In a Thursday statement, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin called the number of alleged noncitizens registered to vote in California “completely unacceptable.” He said even one noncitizen vote cancels out the ballot of a U.S. citizen and undermines elections.

“DHS is committed to identifying unlawful voting, protecting the integrity of federal elections, and ensuring that only eligible American citizens elect America’s leaders,” Mullin said.

Democrats and voting rights experts have questioned the Justice Department’s decision to file the lawsuit with the election underway. The DOJ previously lost a lawsuit seeking to force California to turn over its unredacted voter roll — one of 23 similar lawsuits over state voter data that the Trump administration has lost.

The Trump administration’s efforts to identify large numbers of noncitizen voters have, up to this point, also fallen short of its own standards. Over the summer, the federal government claimed that California had upwards of 190,000 noncitizens on its voter roll. 

By contrast, Thursday’s lawsuit alleges only roughly 20,000 noncitizen voters — about 0.08% of the nearly 23.2 million registered voters in California.

DHS said Friday that 190,000 remains the number of potential noncitizen voters but that 20,000 represents a subset who have gone through a manual verification process so far.

“Every count, recount, hand count, lawsuit, and audit has found that there’s no widespread voter fraud in the U.S.,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, wrote on social media. “The Trump Admin’s last-minute demands are meritless, and we look forward to making our case in court.”

WASHINGTON — The No Kings movement that has brought millions to the streets across the United States three times since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term is staging its next event at the polls.

Organizers across hundreds of advocacy groups will pull together thousands of events nationwide Saturday to encourage early voting in this year’s midterm elections. Voting is already underway in dozens of states, and roughly 5.1 million ballots – both in-person and mail – have been cast, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab.

Saturday’s “No Kings: Vote Early Day of Action” events include marches and walks to the polls where early voting is already underway and open on the weekends. Also planned are gatherings that offer live music, food and assistance for voter registration, car pool sign-ups and information on how to become a poll observer.

[image or embed]

— Ashley Murray (@ashleymurray.bsky.social) October 14, 2026 at 10:43 AM

Beatriz Lopez, executive director of Voto Latino, spoke at a press conference about early voting outside the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2026. (Video by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)

“The best way to prevent any funny business from this administration after Election Day is to make sure that our turnout is massive — so clear, and so overwhelming that our victory for democracy is impossible to question,” Alma Couverthie, a senior organizer with the advocacy group Common Cause, said at a Wednesday morning press conference in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Common Cause is one of the nearly 320 organizations coordinating the events under the direction of nine national steering committee groups.

“There is no time to sit on the sidelines. We need everyone. So I urge you, make your plan to vote early. Don’t trust in the way you voted before. Check again. Make sure you know where you’re going, how you’re going, and who you’re bringing with you,” Couverthie said.

This one is different

Ezra Levin, co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible, one of the nine steering committee groups, said Saturday’s events will be distinct from previous No Kings Day rallies in June and October 2025, and March 2026.

“It is different in the sense that No Kings One, Two, and Three were designed to send a message that the American people were not simply going to sacrifice their constitutional rights, that they were willing to stand up,” Levin told States Newsroom during an Oct. 9 interview.

The message of the three marches was “well sent,” he said, as each successive one expanded in numbers. It started with 5 million attendees across 2,100 individual events nationwide on June 14, 2025, to more than 7 million at 2,700 events on Oct. 18, 2025, and then reached 8 million across 3,330 events on March 28, 2026, according to organizers.

With Trump at historic low approval ratings, and with an “electoral wipeout” likely ahead if polls are on target, Levin said No Kings messaging “is largely completed” and that action is the next step.

“The goal of No Kings on October 17 is therefore not just to protest and get attention to the fact that people aren’t afraid to stand up, but to use this tool that is available to us right now in October, and it is a different constitutional right, not just the constitutional right to organize and make your voice heard — but your constitutional right to vote,” Levin said. 

As of Wednesday, more than 2,500 events were scheduled for Saturday in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, according to No Kings organizers.

Deirdre Schifeling, chief political and advocacy officer for the ACLU, said the civil liberties organization has been training thousands of volunteers to assist voters in knowing their rights and what to do if they encounter issues at the polls.

“We know that the best way to protect our freedom is to act free. That means showing up at the polls and making sure that your neighbors can show up too. See you at the polls on Saturday,” Schifeling said at the Wednesday press conference.

Joining forces

Other concerted efforts to do what organizers call “get out the vote” are joining No Kings events Saturday to amplify and strengthen their messages, leaders say.

Bishop William Barber, Repairers of the Breach founder and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, has been organizing 1,000 marches nationwide to the polls in an effort he announced in July as “Love Forward Together.”

So far, Barber’s campaign has organized 652 marches in 428 locations across the United States, according to Repairers of the Breach.

Standing before the U.S. Supreme Court Wednesday alongside No Kings organizers, Barber said the overall goal despite the campaign or group “is about people being conspicuous in their courage and in their commitment.”

“There is no competition. We have one competition. We are competing against a low voter turnout that can no longer exist in this democracy if we are to have a democracy, and if we are to have a democracy that serves all the people,” Barber said. 

The Interfaith Alliance will be more than 10 days into a 15-state “The Vote is Sacred” bus tour Saturday when it stops in Charlotte, North Carolina, to join a “No Kings: Vote Early Day of Action” event.

Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush said the tour is about mobilizing faith communities to be “trained up” to recognize possible illegal interference at polling places.

“Unfortunately, this administration has threatened to disrupt. … We are going to bring the nonviolent spiritual mobilization that has been with us, and we’re going to be trained up all across the country,” Raushenbush said during an Oct. 6 interview with MS NOW’s “The Rachel Maddow Show” after the tour’s stop in Kansas City, Missouri.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment, but referred States Newsroom to a statement from a Republican National Committee spokesperson.

“From Virginia to Louisiana, Democrats have tried to manipulate congressional maps for political gain. Republicans are restoring the rule of law, protecting fair representation, and making it easier to vote and harder to cheat,” according to the statement from Ally Triolo, the RNC’s election integrity communications director.

As President Donald Trump refuses to rule out taking extreme action in the midterm elections, voting rights advocates and civil rights leaders are bolstering their voter protection efforts in anticipation of possible federal interference.

The focus by activists comes amid uncertainty among advocates and election officials over what Trump may do before, during and after Election Day. Some organizations are preparing to deploy volunteers to the polls to help assure voters in places where fear of federal intimidation may run high.

On Tuesday, several groups — including the Save America Movement, the American Federation of Teachers labor union and the National Action Network — launched Vote Safe, an initiative that will put local volunteers at polling locations in areas where they say pressure on Black, Latino and Asian voters is highest. 

The program will include Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Ohio. The volunteers will document any intimidation and serve as a reassuring presence for voters, organizers said.

“The fear is the point and we must do something about it,” Mary Corcoran, executive director of the Save America Movement, a nonpartisan pro-democracy group, said on a call with reporters. “Left unaddressed, fear does the work of keeping people home without a single agent setting foot at a polling place.”

Volunteers will include clergy members, veterans, teachers and others trained to provide clear answers on voters’ rights, Corcoran said.

In Ohio, where Vote Safe will launch on the first day of early voting, Republican Sen. Jon Husted is facing former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown in one of the most closely watched Senate races in the country. Springfield, Ohio, also has a large Haitian immigrant population that has been repeatedly attacked by Trump, who is seeking to deport them.

The Rev. Al Sharpton, a civil rights leader who founded the National Action Network, suggested on Tuesday’s press call that some Americans in Ohio fear they could also be detained or even deported by ICE because of their skin color.

“‘You don’t understand, any Black looks like a Haitian in Ohio,’” Sharpton said, recalling a previous conversation with a journalist in Ohio. “You’ve got to prove you were from Alabama, not Port-au-Prince, after you’re deported.”

ProPublica reported on Tuesday that more than 500 U.S. citizens have been detained by immigration agents during the second Trump administration. About a dozen citizens, mostly children, have been deported.

What Trump has said

Trump, who has long made false claims about stolen elections and voter fraud, has maintained ambiguity surrounding what election-related actions he may take after the U.S. Supreme Court blocked his plan to use the U.S. Postal Service to restrict mail ballots. Congress also didn’t pass the SAVE America Act, a measure he championed that would require voters to offer documentary proof of citizenship.

In a recent TIME magazine interview, Trump said he hadn’t thought of deploying Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, agents to the polls. 

But he also left open the possibility of declaring a national emergency, which legal experts say would give him no power over elections. Under the Constitution, states administer elections, not the federal government.

Earlier this year, Trump told reporters he would “do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections.”

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has said ICE agents can serve warrants at election sites, despite a ban on armed federal personnel at polling places. At the same time, DHS has denied any plans to target polling places.

DOJ election monitors

The Department of Justice’s plans to deploy 1,000 election monitors at polling places has also fueled concern among Democrats and voting rights advocates — and some Republicans. 

While the DOJ regularly dispatches monitors each election cycle, the scope of the effort and Trump’s history of pressuring election officials has led to unease about how the monitors will behave. 

Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon, a Republican, earlier this year expressed reservations about Justice Department monitors, calling their actions “very odd” after DOJ personnel watched voting in the state’s primary election. 

On Monday, the NAACP sued the Justice Department for records about its election monitor program, alleging the DOJ didn’t comply with Freedom of Information Act timelines.

“Americans deserve to know whether the Justice Department is abusing its law enforcement powers to the detriment of voters and the election officials tasked with running our elections,” Kristen Clarke, the NAACP’s general counsel, said in a statement.

Justice Department spokesperson ​​Kiersten Pels wrote in an email to States Newsroom that monitors comply with all legal and ethical requirements. Pels added that they don’t interfere with the voting process and that their work “is consistent with longstanding Department practice of monitoring elections for compliance with federal law.”

U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche dismissed concerns about the monitors in an interview on “Fox News Sunday.” While confirming plans for about 1,000 monitors, he emphasized that the department sends out monitors every federal election.

“They’re not going to Republican states, they’re not going to Democrat states. They’re going to every state to make sure that our elections are carried out legally, fairly and appropriately,” Blanche said.

After Election Day

The preparations by civic groups also include post-election planning for potential disruptions to vote counting or attempts to overturn losses.

The FBI seized ballots from the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia, in January. The then-director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, was present at the raid at Trump’s request, underscoring its importance to the president. 

The Justice Department also spent months seeking information on election workers in Fulton County during the 2020 election before a federal judge quashed the subpoena in July.

The raid raised questions among activists and election experts about whether federal law enforcement would seek search warrants to obtain ballots after Election Day.

Ballot seizures are a point of concern, said Andrew Walchuk, senior policy director and counsel for voting and fair representation at Common Cause, a voting rights group. The raid was “an alert” to election offices that a seizure is something they need to prepare for, Walchuk said.

“It is definitely something that groups across the country are ready for, that we’re watching,” Walchuk told reporters last week.

Like other groups, Common Cause’s election preparations include training a network of volunteers who can help voters and identify potential problems. In Texas alone, more than 400 volunteers are already, said Marliza Marin, Common Cause’s Texas program manager. 

“It’s kind of unheard of to have this many volunteers already trained,” Marin said.

WASHINGTON — A coalition of civil rights groups and union organizations Friday sued the Trump administration to prevent the deployment of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to polling locations during November’s midterm elections.

The suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia is the second this month, following comments from top Trump officials citing a federal policy to allow ICE officers to enter polling locations in certain circumstances to conduct immigration enforcement.

The groups argue the policy violates the federal law that prohibits “armed men” at election sites, and also causes voter intimidation, which is barred under the Voting Rights Act.

Under federal law, “troops” or “armed men” are allowed at polling locations only if “such force be necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States.” And the section of the Voting Rights Act the groups cite prohibits “intimidation,” “threats,” or “coercion” against a person for voting or attempting to vote.

“The result is predictable: voters across the country—particularly Black, Latino, and Asian voters, naturalized citizens, and members of mixed-status families—are afraid to vote, help others vote, and participate in civic life,” according to the suit. 

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin earlier this month noted that agents could conduct immigration enforcement at polling places. And before U.S. senators this week, FBI Director Kash Patel did not rule out sending FBI agents to polling locations, but said officers would “follow the law.”

The Department of Justice dismissed the idea that officers would be sent to polling locations. 

“The DOJ has never said it would send federal law enforcement to polling locations,” a DOJ spokesperson said in a statement to States Newsroom. “Any suggestion otherwise is fearmongering.”

In a statement to States Newsroom, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said those “who are here legally and are not breaking other laws have nothing to fear.”

“Allegations that DHS law enforcement engages in ‘racial profiling’ are disgusting, reckless, and categorically FALSE,” the spokesperson said. “What makes someone a target for immigration enforcement is if they are illegally in the U.S.—NOT their skin color, race, or ethnicity.”

The DHS spokesperson added that ICE was not planning any operations that targeted polling locations. 

NAACP among groups suing

“We reject this administration’s attempt to desecrate our polling sites by converting them into militarized zones through the unlawful deployment of ICE or any other federal agent,” Kristen Clarke, the NAACP’s general counsel, said in a statement. 

NAACP is one of nine groups that filed suit. The rest are Mi Familia en Accion, Asian Pacific American Advocates, the National Urban League, Minnesota 8, the Service Employees International Union, the American Federation of Teachers, the International Union of Painters and the United Food and Commercial Workers International.

“Turning the fundamental right of exercising our vote into a high-stakes encounter with the militarized strong arm of the current administration isn’t protection and it isn’t oversight; it’s disenfranchisement, period,” Clarke said. “The NAACP calls on the court to reject this blatant attempt by federal officials to obstruct our elections through tactics pulled straight from the Jim Crow playbook.” 

The nine groups are represented by the Legal Defense Fund, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law, LatinoJustice PRLDEF, the National Immigration Law Center, Protect Democracy and the Democracy Defenders Fund. 

Voting rights groups and Democratic officials are looking to defend against what they see as possible election interference from the Trump administration ahead of the upcoming midterm elections, now that they’ve won a major battle over mail ballots.

Common Cause, a nonpartisan pro-democracy organization, announced a “voter protection” campaign Thursday that would place thousands of volunteers at polling sites in 25 states.

The initiative is designed to counter potential administration moves to intimidate voters, such as ordering troops or law enforcement officers to polling places.

The Democratic Party is also upping its voter protection efforts, launching its own initiative this week to deploy 10,000 volunteers to assist voters at polling locations in all 50 states plus seven U.S. territories.

Both efforts are described as preemptive efforts to head off any possible attempts by President Donald Trump to skew election results. Trump for years has alleged, without evidence, U.S. elections are beset by myriad attempts at fraud.

He has used that pretext in attempts to enact policies to restrict voting, including the order limiting vote-by-mail that the U.S. Supreme Court blocked for this election. 

‘Breathing down our neck’

Voting rights advocates say they are preparing for more efforts to dissuade voters from casting ballots. 

Voters are “facing aggressive and deliberate threats from this administration and anti-voter forces that are tied to this administration,” Common Cause CEO Virginia Kase Solomón said. “Whether it be voter intimidation at the polls, the attacks on mail-in voting or attempts to collect your personal data, the barriers that voters are facing right now … are not only real, they are urgent. And they are intentionally designed to make everyday Americans give up.”

The Democratic plan, led by the Association of State Democratic Conferences, a coalition of the 57 state and territorial party leaders, was also in part a reaction to Trump, ASDC Chair Jane Kleeb said in an interview.

“We had to react to the threat that was breathing down our neck,” Kleeb, who is also the chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party, said in an interview.

Trump has broadly accused Democrats of trying to cheat, and has placed particular focus on the possibility of noncitizens voting.

White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis wrote in a Thursday email that the administration would continue to guard against that possibility.

“Despite extreme Democrats and the media claiming it never happens, the evidence of non-citizens registering and voting in our elections continues to pile up,” Bis wrote. “Any non-citizens found registering and voting in our elections will be arrested and held accountable. Only Americans should be electing American leaders.”

The Justice Department has charged a handful of voter fraud cases of foreign nationals in recent months. 

The administration has also argued a software glitch in New Jersey that registered 6,600 noncitizens showed why tighter regulations on voting are needed.

“There continues to be a narrative and a concern that noncitizens are voting,” Ari Mittleman, the executive director of the civic education group Keep Our Republic, said, adding that examples like the New Jersey glitch kept the issue “on the minds of many.”

Troops at the polls?

Common Cause officials and Kleeb highlighted the possibility of federal troops or law enforcement, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, at polling places as a strong concern.

“We don’t know exactly what Donald Trump is going to do,” Kleeb, whose interview was conducted before the Supreme Court’s mail voting decision on Sept. 14, said. “But if we take him at his word, he will disrupt the vote-by-mail process, and he will have people outside of polling locations to intimidate voters.”

Administration officials have dismissed the idea of sending federal agents to the polls, but have not completely ruled it out. 

FBI Director Kash Patel repeatedly dodged the question during a U.S. Senate hearing Wednesday.

At a press conference this month, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said ICE would not have a sizable presence at election sites, but could deploy as part of the agency’s routine duties.

“ICE isn’t there to patrol the polling places,” Mullin said. “We’re there to enforce specific threats. The only reason why we would be at polling places: Because there is a threat to that polling place or we are serving a warrant on someone we are actively tracking down.”

And then-White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called a question about sending ICE agents to the polls “disingenuous” at a February press briefing.

“I can’t guarantee that an ICE agent won’t be around a polling location in November. I mean, that’s frankly a very silly hypothetical question,” she said. “But what I can tell you is I haven’t heard the president discuss any formal plans to put ICE outside of polling locations.”

Disinformation, distrust

Trump’s relentless focus on election regulations has contributed to a distrust of elections. Only 34% of adults in a AP-NORC and USAFacts poll this month said they trust government certifications of election results “a great deal” or “quite a bit.”

Solomon said on the Thursday press call announcing the voter protection drive that the administration and its allies were seeking to sow distrust in the election.

The program, which the group said was the country’s largest nonpartisan election protection effort, hopes to counter that narrative by installing voter advocates at polling stations.

Volunteers will receive about an hour to 90 minutes of training on their state’s voting laws and how to help voters. ASDC volunteers will also receive about an hour of training. 

“They are trained to check for things like signage, polling place accessibility, long lines,” Common Cause Director of Policy Carol Evans said. “They are trained to be a positive and joyful presence at the polls to make the experience better for voters. And importantly, they are our eyes and ears on the ground to alert us to serious issues.”

In another voter education initiative, Keep Our Republic has launched a series of town hall-style events in the five states in which it operates — Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — to give election officials a platform to speak to voters and increase trust in the election process, Mittleman said.