Washington
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Democratic election officials are preparing for potential federal government intrusion in the midterms, as President Donald Trump’s appointees escalate their efforts to find evidence for his long-debunked election fraud claims.
The potential for federal government intervention in state elections “is now in a category, like a weather event, like a bomb threat, like a power outage” that officials must prepare for, Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon told CNN. Simon spoke just hours after the FBI’s seizure of 2020 ballots from Fulton County, Georgia.
Simon, a Democrat, stressed that he was not predicting such an intrusion. But he and his colleagues have discussed a range of moves, from seeking to protect voters from interactions with federal law enforcement at polling places to navigating the administration’s push for access to personal information about tens of millions of voters.
The Trump administration has pushed to alter election ground rules ahead of the midterms, including with an executive order last year that has been partially blocked in court.
The FBI search of Fulton County’s elections office came days after Attorney General Pam Bondi linked the immigration crackdown in Minnesota to her agency’s demand for the state’s unredacted voter rolls, alarming state election chiefs who are already worried about cyberattacks, threats to workers and other potential hurdles to completing each count.
“This is now a legitimate planning category. It’s extraordinarily sad, but it would be irresponsible for us to disregard the possibility,” Simon said during the annual winter meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State.
Democratic secretaries of state said they were reluctant to provide explicit details about their advance planning for fear of alarming voters or providing a roadmap for any bad actors. But they said their preparations were evolving with the novel risks posed by the administration.
In Nevada, Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, who heads the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, said he wants to ensure that polling places in heavily Latino east Las Vegas will have enough staff and voting equipment to keep lines short during peak hours.
He worries long lines could expose voters to harassment by federal immigration agents and others, “although we know that noncitizens are not voting in Nevada.” ProPublica last year found more than 170 cases of US citizens being detained during immigration operations or protests.
Just this week, as her state also became the target of a federal immigration surge, Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows looked up the federal statute that limits the presence of armed military at polling places.
“If people are too scared to go out to get groceries or to go to work, they’re going to be too scared to go out and vote, if there are armed federal agents roaming the streets next November,” she said.
Connecticut Secretary of State Stephanie Thomas said her team is preparing for longstanding issues such as cyberattacks but also new threats specific to the Trump era, like “if troops are sent to a polling place.”
“We basically take the news of the day, worst-case scenarios, and make sure that we are thinking about any emergencies before they occur,” Thomas said.
Responding to those concerns, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement: “Democrat conspiracies have no basis in reality and their claims shouldn’t be amplified uncritically by the mainstream media.” She said US Immigration and Customs Enforcement “is focused on removing criminal illegal aliens from country, who should be nowhere near any polling places because it would be a crime for them to vote.”
“President Trump cares deeply about the integrity of our elections – and so do the millions of Americans who sent him back to office based on his pledge to secure our election,” she said.
The president has long repeated debunked claims that his 2020 loss was marred by fraud and recently declined to rule out sending the National Guard to seize voting machines, as he considered doing after his loss to Democrat Joe Biden.
“I should have,” he told The New York Times in a January interview, adding later: “We have very dishonest elections. OK, I say it to you loud and clear. I don’t know if it’s politically correct or not to say it. I shouldn’t complain. I won three times.”
In the early weeks of the administration, Trump hollowed out a federal cybersecurity agency that assists election offices, and the administration cut funding for a federal platform for information-sharing between states to monitor election misinformation and threats.
The Department of Justice, which has amplified claims that undocumented immigrants have infiltrated US elections, without independent evidence, has sued two dozen states for full voter rolls, including personal information such as Social Security numbers and home addresses.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who rejects a bipartisan consensus that Russia sought to influence the 2016 election, was present when FBI agents seized the 2020 ballots in Fulton County, Georgia, under a search warrant. Her office said afterward that ensuring election security is within Gabbard’s legal duties, particularly with regard to counterintelligence.
Trump has also upended convention by kicking off a mid-decade redistricting campaign aimed at helping his party eke out additional US House seats in November’s midterms. The Justice Department later joined a lawsuit seeking to invalidate California Democrats’ retaliatory effort to redraw their own House maps.
In interviews with CNN during this week’s gathering, Democratic election chiefs worried about the administration’s increasing confrontations with state and local authorities, all while the federal government has drastically scaled back cybersecurity support for elections.
“The mechanics of securing elections … has completely been eliminated, and instead, it’s been replaced with these bizarre conspiracy theories that have no grounding in the way things actually work,” said Bellows, the Maine secretary of state.
Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold said the recent events in Minneapolis, where federal agents killed two Americans during anti-ICE protests, “is already showing people how far they are willing to go” to push their agenda forward.
“This is a scary time in our history,” Griswold said.
The annual NASS meeting is typically a low-key, bipartisan affair where top election officials listen to experts to discuss the latest advances on topics such as cybersecurity and compare notes on policy issues.
This week’s gathering at a downtown Washington hotel had some of the air of a typical conference: A breakfast buffet laden with pastries and sliced fruit, skirted tables with vendors hawking election software and voting machines lining the halls, name badges that helped government officials, non-profit advocates and private election advisers make introductions and exchange business cards.
The drastic changes over the last year were an unavoidable part of the conversation.
At one open session, Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican who serves as her state’s top election official, confronted a White House official about Justice Department civil rights head Harmeet Dhillon saying that states needed federal help to clean their voting rolls.
“She’s pretty much slandered all of us,” Henderson said. “And to me, that’s problematic to publicly claim that secretaries of state are not doing our jobs and that the federal government has to do it for us. Not OK.”
Most states are resisting DOJ’s requests for their sensitive voter registration data, and Dhillon’s office is now suing two dozen states for their records.
Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson, a Republican and the current president of NASS, has turned over the voter data the administration is seeking. But he refused to sign an agreement put forward by the Justice Department requiring the state to “clean” the rolls within 45 days of the DOJ’s review, seeing that as an incursion on the bottom-up process of list maintenance in Mississippi.
“The federal government has a tiny role in elections, and I get that. And when Congress acts, that’s one thing,” Watson told CNN. “But outside of that, the states are the ones that should be in charge.”
Still, he doesn’t expect federal action to emerge as an issue in the midterms.
The erosion of bipartisanship has cut both ways among the state election community. While many Democrats were openly critical of the White House’s approach, some Republicans came to its defense and encouraged the administration’s efforts to impose more security measures on the franchise – including with proposals to add a proof of citizenship to voter registration – that could also make it hard for eligible voters to cast ballots.
Republican West Virginia Secretary of State Kris Warner told CNN he has “no fear” of federal interference in the 2026 elections. His brother, former West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner, joined the Trump administration last year as a senior Justice Department official.
Warner acknowledged that some Democrats “have their concerns in their states, but I don’t see that as a concern in West Virginia.”
Election officials are adapting to make up for the gap created by the administration’s elimination of the federal government’s cybersecurity support, as Idaho’s Secretary of State Phil McGrane noted, pointing out states are standing up their own coordination platforms.
“It would be better if we were working in unison, as we have done in the past, but I know there has been a lot of efforts to ensure that the resilience of the system isn’t weakened,” he told CNN.
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