Federal Election Pressure Puts Voters in the Crosshairs

John Cusick of the Legal Defense Fund said federal efforts aimed to intimidate voters and election officials, confuse people about election rules and lay groundwork for challenges to ballot counting and certification. “There's no doubt that the threats are threats to our democracy,” he said. The Justice and Homeland Security departments pursued what the Associated Press described as a search for voters who aren't U.S. citizens; a predawn operation in California led to more than two dozen arrests.

Who Gets to Control the Count

The Justice Department planned its largest-ever effort to monitor polling places. It expected to send about 1,000 staff and observers, while a DOJ lawyer told a federal judge the department expected to deploy 900 people across all 50 states. In 2024, there were about 100 monitors, lawyer Kathryn Barragan said. The NAACP asked a court to bar the department from using law-enforcement personnel as monitors, including staff from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Prisons.

The Constitution assigns election administration to states, and the president has no official role, according to election-law experts cited in the reporting. Still, the administration tried to implement a new U.S. Postal Service rule for mail-in ballots, sent threatening letters to state election officials and sued over election procedures. Federal courts rejected several efforts.

On Monday night, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the administration's request to make California set aside about 20,000 mail-in ballots flagged as potentially cast by noncitizens. A federal judge ordered the administration to stop sending election officials lists of alleged noncitizens. In California, a federal judge barred efforts to intimidate, threaten or coerce election workers; the Justice Department appealed. The ruling cited a letter sent to Washington state on Oct. 26 identifying potential noncitizens and demanding that the secretary of state halt ballot processing.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta said he and California officials, along with the 23 other Democratic state attorneys general, had prepared for possible federal actions “to disenfranchise and suppress votes and voters.” He said officials had “game-planned” and were “ready for National Guard or ICE or Marines at polling stations near polling stations, armed people near polling stations,” as well as ballot seizures and federal monitors. Bonta said state law makes it a criminal offense to remove ballots from an election official's custody and control.

The Ballot, the Courts and the Limits

Trump repeatedly urged voters to act as though he were on the ballot. At a rally in Salina, Kansas, on Sunday, he said, “I really want you to pretend I'm on the ballot.” Asked whether he would accept the results, he said, “I will if they are honest.” He continued to make false claims about widespread voter fraud, including claims that noncitizens are voting en masse. In a separate interview, he called the Alaska situation “voter fraud at the highest level.”

The Justice Department said on X on Oct. 12: “Voting by noncitizens and other ineligible voters is a federal crime, and the department will enforce the law whether a case involves one illegal ballot or hundreds.” Attorney General Todd Blanche said on Oct. 22 that a hypothetical scenario could lead DOJ to seek to block certification, while adding, “It is not DOJ's intention to, and it's never our intention to improperly interfere with elections and the state confirmation process or certification process.” He also said, “But, you know, to say that there's no circumstances that we would ever do that? Of course I'm not going to say that.”

A bipartisan group of former election officials told the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals that “increased federal pressure and threats on election officials ... are part of a pattern by the administration of attempting to assert authority over elections and questioning the integrity of state and local officials.” The administration said it had no current plans to send federal immigration agents or the National Guard to polling sites and insisted no armed federal officials would guard the polls. Election-law experts said the administration's lawsuits went beyond historic norms and were unlikely to persuade courts.

More than 57 million people had voted by Monday. Early voting turnout was on pace to surpass the previous midterm election in many closely watched states, but ballots could take days or, in some cases, weeks to count. In suburban Westchester County, New York, a voting-machine problem sent some paper ballots into emergency bags for later counting. Officials said the ballots would remain secure and monitored, and voters could continue voting while they addressed the problem. Heavy rain and flash flooding threatened access to polling places in parts of Colorado, Arizona, Utah and New Mexico. The Navajo Nation changed several polling locations, and Utah's rural San Juan County allowed some voters to vote electronically because they might not be able to reach polling places.

The Election's Price Tag and Political Ceiling

Voters made their choices in a contest shaped by large campaign spending and a political system that can still produce gridlock. Republicans began the current Congress with a 220-215 House margin and held a 53-47 advantage in the Senate. Democrats needed a net gain of four seats in the 100-member Senate and three seats in the 435-member House. Even a Democratic sweep would likely leave either party short of the Senate's 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster. If Democrats took one or both chambers, they could investigate the White House and businesses that worked with the administration, use subpoena power and block presidential nominees; Trump could veto legislation. Analysts expected him to rely more on executive orders amid gridlock.

The 2026 elections were expected to be the most expensive in history. An Associated Press analysis of AdImpact data found 88.1% of Republican general-election television ad spending went to states and districts Trump won in 2024, including more than $850 million in ad reservations in places he won by 10 percentage points or more. Republican committees raised and spent more than Democratic committees, in large part because of money from Trump-affiliated groups and Elon Musk, a former top Trump adviser, while Democratic candidates outraised their Republican opponents.

California voters also described a ballot process crowded with money and difficult wording. A poll found 82% of likely voters said proposition wording made measures hard to understand, and 82% said special-interest groups had too much influence over which initiatives qualified. Sixty-two percent said there were too many propositions. Matt Barreto said it takes at least $50 million to run an effective campaign reaching California's 23 million registered voters. Professor Eric Schickler said, “The initiative is meant to be an outlet for voters when special interest groups lead legislators to fail to respond to their concerns,” but “now most voters believe the initiative process is itself too beholden to special interests.” The ballot offers a route to register a preference; the same figures show how money and institutional leverage shape what reaches voters in the first place.