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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Memories of 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I don’t rule anything out or in’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roadblocks to interference

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

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

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

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

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

ICE at the polls?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Preparing for the worst

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

WASHINGTON — Latino advocacy groups and voting rights organizations Thursday filed a suit in federal court challenging the Trump administration’s policy of allowing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to enter polling locations in certain circumstances to conduct immigration enforcement during the 2026 midterm elections. 

The suit in the District Court for the District of Columbia argues that Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s recent comments that ICE agents would be at polling locations for the purpose of immigration enforcement violates federal law that prohibits federal “armed men” at election sites. 

The statute allows for “troops” or “armed men” at polling locations only if “such force be necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States.” 

“The specter of armed officers at polling places threatens the freedom of this upcoming election,” according to the lawsuit. “It places voters in fear that they will be confronted by armed federal immigration enforcement officers if they choose to cast a ballot.”

In a statement to States Newsroom, a DHS spokesperson said that “ICE is not planning operations targeting polling locations.” 

“ICE conducts intelligence-driven targeted enforcement, and if an active public safety threat endangered a polling location, they may be arrested as a result of that targeted enforcement action,” the spokesperson said. 

Earlier this month, Mullin said that ICE officers at polling locations would be there “to enforce specific threats.” 

“The only reason why we would be at polling places, if there is a threat to that polling place or we’re serving a warrant on someone that we have been actively tracking down,” he said. “ICE’s job is immigration (and) custom enforcement. That’s their job and so if we’re doing something, we’re doing that specifically.”

The suit asks the federal court to prevent the Trump administration from following that polling place policy and declaring it unlawful, as well as barring “officers from operating or carrying weapons in the vicinity of open polling places, including dropboxes, curbside voting locations, and similar places where votes are taken, collected, received, counted, or certified during early voting periods and on Election Day itself, for any reason other than repelling armed enemies of the United States.”

The civil rights groups that joined the suit said the tactic would lead to voter suppression.

“Sending armed ICE officers to polling places is not immigration enforcement — it is voter suppression, plain and simple,” UnidosUS President Janet Murguía said in a statement. “All Americans — including Latino voters  — have a constitutional right to cast their ballot without fear of interrogation, detention, or family separation.”

The suit was filed by the oldest U.S. Latino civil rights organization, League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC; the largest Hispanic civil rights organization, UnidosUS; the voter mobilization group Common Cause; and the city and county of Denver, Colorado, which has a large immigrant population and has been targeted by ICE multiple times for immigration enforcement. 

“The right to vote, and to do so without fear of intimidation, is fundamental to our democracy and to being an American,” Denver Mayor Mike Johnston said in a statement. “Stationing ICE agents near polling places is only meant to scare people and suppress votes. We’ll fight tooth and nail to prevent it.”

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said earlier this year he’d “do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections” this fall, declining to rule out sending the National Guard or federal law enforcement officers to polling locations throughout the country.

Those comments came a few months after Trump casually and briefly mentioned canceling the midterm elections that will determine control of Congress. 

Any such actions would lie outside the bounds of presidential power and the law, according to experts interviewed by States Newsroom. Nonetheless, one Democratic U.S. senator is sending letters to numerous members of the administration asking for commitments troops won’t be sent to the polls, and state officials are readying plans to keep voting secure.

“The president can say whatever he wants, but his powers are extraordinarily limited in this way,” said Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows. 

With two months until voting ends on Nov. 3, the administration’s only publicly disclosed plan to monitor elections is a decades-old Justice Department program that sends federal workers throughout the country.

Michigan Deputy Secretary of State Aghogho Edevbie said there are strict rules for the people who participate, including that they can only observe if state election officials allow it or if a court orders it. 

Edevbie said his state will allow DOJ monitors during this fall’s elections to observe but not to interfere. 

“Their job is not to interrogate individual voters,” he said. “Now outside of the polling location, outside of the 100 feet, if they want to talk to a voter, they absolutely can. But if those interactions tip over into actions that we deem to be actions of intimidation, we will revoke our permission for them to be here.”

The Department of Justice declined an interview request from States Newsroom, writing in a statement the administration hopes “to have the largest monitoring effort in the Department’s history,” totaling around 1,000.

DOJ election observers have been dispatched to monitor primary elections throughout the year without much fanfare, though Wyoming Republican Gov. Mark Gordon said in late August that their behavior in his state was “a bit aggressive.” 

“It just was irregular, and I have asked the attorney general to start looking into, you know, kind of the nature of the visits and all that sort of stuff,” Gordon said, according to reporting from WyoFile, an independent nonprofit newsroom.

Will ICE be sent to the polls?

White House staff have sent somewhat mixed messages on what else the president may try to do. A White House spokesperson wrote in an email they wouldn’t “engage in hypotheticals,” adding that “Anyone breaking the law will be held accountable.”

The spokesperson pointed to comments former press secretary Karoline Leavitt made in February when she said she hadn’t heard the president say he would consider sending Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to polling locations. 

Trump has repeatedly raised concerns that noncitizens may try to vote in the elections, despite it being illegal. There, however, isn’t much evidence of that having happened, with the Bipartisan Policy Center writing, “there is no evidence that noncitizen voting has ever been significant enough to impact an election’s outcome.”

Leavitt added, “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. But what I can tell you is I haven’t heard the president discuss any formal plans to put ICE outside of polling locations. It’s a disingenuous question.”

A few months later, Trump was asked whether he would rule out sending the National Guard or ICE officers to polling locations. He did not answer the question directly. 

“I’d do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections. We have to have honest elections,” he said.

Trump has repeatedly raised grievances about the outcome of the 2020 election without providing any evidence of fraud significant enough to change the outcome. He hasn’t expressed doubts about election integrity in 2016 or 2024 — the years he won despite a Democratic president running the country at the time. 

This year, Trump has said he believes Democrats can only win if they cheat without releasing any proof of fraud or plans for sabotage. At the same time, he’s acknowledged that, historically speaking, Republicans are likely to lose seats in Congress during the November midterm elections.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said during a press conference in early September that ICE officers “will be where we need to be” when serving warrants. He did not rule out an ICE presence under some circumstances.

“ICE isn’t there to patrol the polling places. We’re there to enforce specific threats. The only reason why we would be at polling places, if there is a threat to that polling place or we’re serving a warrant on someone that we have been actively tracking down,” he said. “ICE’s job is immigration (and) custom enforcement. That’s their job and so if we’re doing something, we’re doing that specifically.”

‘Egregious history’ 

Federal law enforcement officers cannot enter polling places under most circumstances, according to Steve Huefner, the C. William O’Neill professor in Law and Judicial Administration at Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University.

“There’s this really egregious history of uniformed police officers intimidating Black voters in the Jim Crow era, and so today we have laws that prohibit uniformed officers from being observers at the polling place,” he said.

Additionally, there’s a federal law from the Civil War era that bars any federal official with a weapon from showing up at polling locations, unless that “force is necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States.”

Those prohibitions apply at the polling site and usually within 100 feet of that location, sometimes more. But there could be a loophole beyond that radius, Huefner said. 

“If they just happen to be very close to a polling place, but not within 100 feet, it probably gets much trickier to figure out whether the president can have military troops in that kind of circumstance,” he said. 

Any attempt to place either federal law enforcement, the National Guard or military members at or near polling locations would likely end up in the court system, which Huefner said would in many ways be “uncharted territory.”

“It’s being characterized as an effort to help states, but states aren’t asking for this help,” he said. “States don’t feel like they need this help. States feel perfectly adequate to run safe, free, fair elections. And so it’s uncharted in the sense that we’ve never seen this kind of tension between states and the federal government. And this worry that what’s happening is an effort to intimidate voters on the part of the federal government.”

Slotkin letters

Members of Congress have also raised concerns the president may try to send members of the military or National Guard to polling locations. 

Michigan Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin sent letters to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine in August, asking they provide assurances the government wouldn’t “send Federal troops to the polls or to seize election materials of any kind.”

Slotkin requested the two “confirm that deploying the military to polling places for political purposes would undermine the integrity of our free and fair elections, pose an existential threat to our democracy, and taint the military as a politicized institution.”

Caine replied in a letter released by Slotkin’s office that the joint forces had and would continue to act ”in accordance with the Constitution and the law.”

“Election administration and security remain the fundamental responsibility of state and local officials,” he wrote. “The Joint Force has no plans to send Federal military personnel or Federalized members of the National Guard to polling places during the 2026 elections. Likewise, the Joint Force has no plans to use such personnel to seize ballots, voting machines, or other election-related material.”

Hegseth hadn’t responded as of early September and a Pentagon spokesperson wrote in a statement that as “with all Congressional correspondence, the Department will respond directly to the member.”

States make plans

Bellows, the Maine Secretary of State, said she and other elected officials are planning for several scenarios that could come up during election season, building on past experiences. 

“We have run free, fair and secure elections through pandemics, through heightened threats in 2024. In Maine, for example, there were six swatting incidences at polling locations and voting continued uninterrupted,” she said. 

Despite the president’s comments throughout the year, Bellows said the Constitution and law “are crystal clear that federal law enforcement, ICE or otherwise, are strictly prohibited at polling places.”

Maine law also makes it illegal to interfere with anyone’s voting rights, which Bellows said she and others in state government will be watching closely this fall. 

“If any federal armed officer were interfering with a citizen’s right to vote on Election Day, we would take every available legal action to disrupt and prosecute that because that is criminal and prohibited,” she said. 

Director of Elections for Washington state Stuart Holmes said the Constitution and court rulings have made it clear that only state legislatures and Congress have the ability to regulate elections. 

“And until either of those act, it’s business as usual,” he said. 

The Department of Justice could send election observers to Washington state this fall, Holmes said, but those people wouldn’t have any more authority or access than the regular citizens who are also allowed to observe certain aspects of the election. 

“They can come in and they can watch and observe the process,” he said. “But the county auditor or elections director in that county is the administrator of that process and can set the rules based on the safety and operations of their facility.”

It is illegal for anyone to interfere with a voter’s ability to cast a ballot, regardless of whether they’re near or inside a polling location. That would include an observer asking voters to show their identification, Holmes said. 

“Doing something like that could be seen as intimidating or interfering with their ability to cast their vote freely,” he said. 

Despite the speculation around what Trump may or may not do, Holmes said he and other officials in Washington state are preparing much like they would for any other midterm elections.