In Texas, a Navy veteran worries his fellow Americans could be scared off by Justice Department prosecutors dispatched to voting centers. California and Washington are fighting to prevent the federal government from throwing out ballots it insists are illegitimate, while Alaska is navigating a challenge to election results before the vote is even in. In Florida, an activist of Haitian descent worries about being arrested, detained or worse if ICE agents show up in her precinct and decide to judge her citizenship from her skin color.
None of the fears appear unfounded, as the Trump administration has spent months threatening to meddle in the midterms by whatever means it deems necessary.
“Unfortunately it does seem like the administration is throwing spaghetti at the wall just to see what might stick,” Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, told HuffPost.
So far the administration’s attempts have not been terribly successful.
Whether it’s threatening criminal prosecution against election officials and poll workers over alleged noncitizen voting; demanding states turn over sensitive voter data, conform to federal voter restrictions, and remove registered voters from state rolls based on claims of noncitizen voter fraud; or trying to stop the counting of mail-in ballots from alleged noncitizens, these attempts to expand federal authority have so far mostly failed. (Trump has suggested declaring a national emergency over voter fraud and seizing ballots or voting machines if necessary, but state election officials insist that isn’t going to happen.)
But even if the administration’s attempts are unrealistic or rejected by the courts, legal experts, voting rights groups and voters themselves say the chaos and intimidation that comes with those efforts is the point.
“Even if [interference] doesn’t stick, it continues that drumbeat of: ‘There’s something going wrong in our election cycle and you should be concerned,’” Lakin warned.
“The [administration] thinks if they can raise doubt now, and again later after the results of the election don’t turn out the way they would like, the doubt has already been created and they can try to take you along on a lawless ride,” she said.
Trump regularly casts doubt on elections, at least 440 times in his second term, telling his supporters that results are rigged or that his opponents cheat — despite the fact there is no evidence for any of that. He also stokes fears about illegal voting by noncitizens, even though bipartisan data has shown repeatedly that noncitizen voting is extremely rare.
But in 2026, that attempt to sow doubt has escalated to action. Ignoring the Constitution and the Supreme Court precedent that states control elections, the Justice Department has tried to assert control over elections or modify how they are administered with a flurry of litigation against state and election officials around the country.
In California, where noncitizen voting is illegal — just like it is everywhere in the U.S. — Trump’s hamfisted demands that the state pull 20,000 ballots unless citizenship for those voters could be verified was already rejected by two courts. U.S. District Judge David Carter, a Clinton appointee, excoriated the administration in his ruling, writing that “Never before in American history has the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state and local government to abandon their own Constitutional elections procedures and bend to the will of the Executive Branch.”
In Washington state, the federal government has asked the state to set aside 400 ballots from alleged noncitizens after the state refused to share unredacted voter rolls with the Justice Department. A spokesperson for the Washington Secretary of State told NBC they found the timing of the government’s request dubious and “no doubt intended to cast unfounded suspicion on the results.”
By using the legal process, the administration is trying to give Trump’s conjecture a veneer of credibility. Even when that veneer is too weak to survive scrutiny in the courts, it’s enough to create “confusion, uncertainty and doubt in the minds of voters,” Lakin said.
Lakin pointed specifically to the administration’s push to block the certification of Alaska’s election if the GOP incumbent loses. In its suit, the DOJ argues that if the GOP candidate loses, it might be an unfair result based on voter confusion due to an independent candidate with the same name, Dan Sullivan, also on the ballot — even though the ballot clearly marks one candidate as the Republican incumbent.
“It does have a purpose,” Lakin said of the DOJ lawsuit, which the ACLU has sought to dismiss. “And that is to put a question mark over the results before any vote is even counted and ultimately to give the president a pretext if he doesn’t like how it turns out. This is a broader strategy of the Trump administration since the start of his second term: sowing doubt in our elections. That’s part of the point, if not the point: chaos by design.”
The New York Times has since reported that staffers for the Democratic candidate, Mary Peltola, allegedly sought out spoiler candidates, a practice that is not illegal and utilized by Republicans as well. The Peltola campaign has denied any involvement with the independent Sullivan campaign. Alaska’s Republican Governor Mike Dunleavy announced on Oct. 29 that he would open a probe.
It’s not just doubt the administration is cultivating. For some voters, it’s intimidation.
During the primary cycle in Texas this May, armed ICE agents swarmed a parking lot of a polling site to detain someone and did so in full view of voters before being asked to leave by a local sheriff on the premises. In June, armed ICE agents visited an active polling site in Ventura, California. Local election officials said they watched as masked agents in vests created an intimidating, unwelcoming atmosphere. ICE agents also entered a polling place in Syracuse, New York, in June and told an election worker they were investigating activity regarding a poll worker’s social media posts criticizing ICE from five months earlier.
According to polling in September by the University of California San Diego, less than 50% of voters say they think the elections will be “free and fair.” The study also highlighted specific concerns about involvement by federal agents, with an overall 40% of those surveyed saying they think it is likely federal immigration officers will appear at polling centers and a “substantial and uneven” expectation between different racial groups. An NPR/PBS News/Marist survey, however, found that the majority of voters trusted their own state and local officials to run a fair election.
In Lee County, Florida, this September, a voter intimidation complaint was filed with local election officials after election observers said they witnessed private armed guards standing within a 150-foot boundary of voting centers in predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods.
“Observers noted that the armed guards spoke with the poll deputies, opened doors for voters, and walked along the sidewalk of the entrance. Their locations made them unavoidable to voters entering the polling sites and conveyed that they held official authority over the sites,” the complaint, filed by a coalition of voter and civil rights groups and reviewed by HuffPost, stated.
Observers also reported seeing local law enforcement conducting multiple, “prolonged” traffic stops on a main road leading to these polling sites. Lee County Supervisor of Elections Jenna Persons-Mulicka told ABC there had been “incidents in the past that warranted security” and that they had provided security on request at various times over the last 20 years.
In Monroe County, Florida, election officials investigated after a voter reported masked Customs and Border Patrol agents at an early voting site in Key Largo on Oct. 20. In a statement to HuffPost, Supervisor of Elections Sherri Hodies said the investigation had found CBP had detained a driver “just outside” the 150-foot restriction zone where electioneering and law enforcement are barred, and no interference had occurred.
And in Virginia, the commonwealth’s attorney sued the administration last week over concerns that federal agents could disrupt voting. Though the Department of Homeland Security has said since February that ICE officers — who have assaulted or killed at least 25 people nationwide so far — won’t be at polling places in November, the messaging from the top has been confusing, which Virginia authorities pointed out directly.
In September, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin stated that ICE agents could legally enter polling sites and make arrests, even though the presence of armed agents or law enforcement officers inside polling sites is illegal. FBI Director Kash Patel has also refused to rule out whether his agency would send federal agents to the polls.
“Threatening to send armed agents to polling stations is unlawful and contravenes the bedrock values of free and fair elections we hold dear in this country,” Arlington County, Virginia, Board Chair Matt de Ferranti said in a statement last week. “These statements are a clear attempt to stoke fear and undermine confidence in our elections.”
The NAACP and the civil rights advocacy group Advancement Project allege the DOJ is setting the stage to intimidate voters under the guise of protecting elections. In a lawsuit, they accuse the DOJ of purposefully conflating a standard program that allows monitors at polling places to ensure voting laws are followed with a far rarer “federal observer” program that sends court-appointed federal observers to polling sites, with the intent to cast a wide net to chase down voter fraud and circumvent states’ rights to run or administer their elections without federal pressure.
This summer, 2020 election denier and DOJ Civil Rights Division leader Harmeet Dhillon said the department would deploy at least 1,000 election monitors to all 50 states in search of voter fraud. Attorney General Todd Blanche has said it would be more. The exact numbers are unclear, and a spokeswoman for the department told HuffPost that the number would only be revealed when the election was complete.
Hani Mirza, an attorney representing Advancement Project, told HuffPost in an interview this week that the change of the civil rights division’s focus, combined with the deployment of monitors — which will include criminal prosecutors — is troubling.
“If you have prosecutors or other law enforcement there… that could be used as a form of investigation. It could be used to target voters and election workers and other officials,” he said.
In Wyoming, Republican Gov. Mark Gordon told The New York Times that monitors acted “aggressive” and “irregular” earlier this year when in the state to monitor the primary election. Their “behavior seemed to exceed what the authority that Congress had given them was,” he told KUSA.
A county clerk in Laramie, Wyoming, told the Times monitors showed “complete disregard” for the rules for monitors, asked poll workers how the county acquired new election equipment and said they wanted to examine vote tabulators.
DOJ spokesperson Kiersten Pels told HuffPost that monitors “will not identify themselves as prosecutors” and said that “state and local approval is not required for Department monitoring.” Pels also said they would observe all laws while monitoring.
According to the NAACP lawsuit, one volunteer poll watcher, U.S. Navy veteran Nicholas Little, says he is worried that, with tensions so high already around the country, a “confrontation” could erupt in his district in Harris County, Texas, if he were, for example, to witness a Justice Department monitor interfering with voters and tried to call police. Joining the NAACP lawsuit to push back against the Trump administration seemed necessary, he told HuffPost by email.
“This is a dangerous precedent the federal government is setting,” Little said. “I stay up at night wondering if I will wake up to freedom and democracy, or chains and martial law.” The results of the election, he added, “will set the tone for the nation’s entire future.”
Another voter included in the lawsuit, Daniella Pierre, an American of Haitian descent and president of the Miami-Dade County branch of the NAACP, alleges that the administration’s treatment and targeting of Haitian people and nonwhite immigrants could mean she and people who look like her might receive “heightened scrutiny” from monitors tasked to find fraud.
Whether ICE agents actually show up or criminal prosecutors make their presence felt, the administration has achieved their goal of making things murky and scary, said Lakin.
“The reality is, unfortunately, President Trump doesn’t even need to send a single person out there at this point to have this effect of uncertainty,” she said.
The trick is, Lakin said, if voters end up asking themselves one important question: “Will I be put in a position where I don’t feel comfortable going to the polls, and I stay home instead?”