More alarming than the rhetoric of Trump and his allies are the actions the Trump administration has taken based on this disinformation. Fortunately, the courts have repeatedly blocked most of these efforts thus far. However, these past actions demonstrate how the administration may utilize the resources and power of the federal government to undercut confidence in the outcome of the 2026 midterms or potentially attempt to undermine the will of American voters.
U.S. elections are safe and secure
Time and again, the evidence shows U.S. elections are secure. State and local election officials, in communities across the country, painstakingly implement layered security to protect the integrity of elections. For example, voting equipment undergoes extensive testing for certification, and election officials conduct pre- and post-election testing to ensure equipment is working as intended. Additionally, mail ballots feature extensive safeguards and accounting to ensure mail voting is a secure method of voting, and according to a Brookings Institution analysis, documented cases of mail voting fraud accounted for only 0.000043 percent of all mail ballots cast. Finally—contrary to election deniers’ claims—foreign nationals are not voting in large numbers. In the rare cases in which it is discovered that noncitizen voting has occurred with intent, it is prosecuted. Many cases of alleged noncitizens on voter rolls turn out to be a clerical error rather than a crime, and just 0.04 percent of voter verification cases run through a federal citizenship tool turn out to be noncitizens.
Despite all this evidence, the Trump administration continues to call the security of elections into question. As the Center for American Progress has detailed, alleging voter fraud or invoking national security emergencies provide powerful pretexts for challenging election results, despite the fact that these claims are contrived to justify just such election subversion. Widespread voter fraud is a myth, and presidents have no constitutional or legal authority to take control of elections.
A decade of election denial
The Trump administration and election deniers have tried to sow doubt about the security of election infrastructure, mail ballots, election results, and the citizenship of voters for the past decade. These claims do not hold up to scrutiny, and in the rare instance that someone is under oath, election deniers often walk back their claims.
Perhaps the most prominent and long-standing scapegoats of the Trump administration’s election disinformation campaign have been noncitizens. After losing the popular vote in 2016, President Trump attributed that loss to the “millions of people who voted illegally” and subsequently launched the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity to attempt to prove it. However, the commission disbanded without finding any evidence. This has not deterred the administration from continuing to make unsupported claims about widespread fraud by alleged noncitizen voters.
President Trump has also frequently targeted mail ballots, repeatedly questioning the integrity of this proven method of voting. He even went so far as to promote Russian President Vladimir Putin’s opinion that mail ballots are untrustworthy, despite the fact that Putin is the leader of a country without free elections. However, President Trump himself has voted by mail on several occasions. And in early October, President Trump released a video urging his supporters to vote by mail, despite his supposed staunch belief in the fraudulent nature of mail ballots.
Finally, the aftermath of the 2020 election and the years that have followed have seen numerous false claims and conspiracy theories about voting equipment. The lack of any credible evidence to support such claims has come at a cost to the American voting public, as well as to those peddling the theories. For example, when Dominion Voting Systems sued for defamation following an onslaught of falsehoods, Fox News settled for $787.5 million, and Newsmax settled for $67 million, rather than defend their claims. Similarly, President Trump’s lawyer Sidney Powell made “crackpot” claims about a prominent voting machine manufacturer. Yet, when sued for defamation, her lawyers argued that “no reasonable person would conclude that [her] statements were truly statements of fact.”
Despite this track record, President Trump repeated many debunked claims in his July 2026 primetime speech alleging election fraud in the 2020 election, quoting from a declassified memo as proof of “shocking vulnerabilities” in U.S. voting systems. However, the memo itself concluded that election equipment “would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to alter the election outcome,” and a National Intelligence Council assessment from 2021 found “no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 US elections.” In other words, as former Attorney General Bill Barr concluded, the narrative that the 2020 election was stolen was “bullshit.”
Despite knowing the falsity of claiming that elections are rigged, the Trump administration repeatedly cries wolf, only to later lose in court or walk back its claims. As a result, the biggest threat to U.S. democracy at this moment is not widespread fraud, but rather the willful disregard for the truth aimed at undermining Americans’ faith in their elections.
The Trump administration’s actions are predicated on debunked claims
The administration has pursued an agenda based on these lies to make the case that the president is addressing or attempting to address purported election fraud. In March 2025, President Trump issued an executive order aimed at circumventing Congress on the contents of the federal voter registration form to require documentary proof of citizenship. The order also demanded changes to the voting system standards used for federal testing and certification of voting equipment. However, the courts blocked the executive order because it sought authorities the president does not have and did not respect the role of states or Congress in determining how elections are administered.
President Trump issued a second executive order on elections in March 2026, focused partially on postal rules and regulations for mail ballots. The order demanded that states provide a list of voters eligible to receive a mail ballot to the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), which in turn would ensure mail ballots be delivered only to those listed. While the Supreme Court temporarily blocked this aspect of the order in September, the court left in place a component that directs the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to create state lists of eligible voters by using federal databases that have well-documented accuracy issues.
Other administration efforts, primarily focused on identifying alleged noncitizen voters, are equally shocking. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has aggressively pursued state voter lists. When dozens of states refused to comply, citing state and federal privacy protections, the courts unanimously ruled against the administration. So far, the administration has lost in all 26 cases that have been resolved related to its efforts to acquire voter data.
One apparent reason for pursuing these voter lists is to compare the records to the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system to match the lists in a hunt for noncitizen voters. In states that have turned over data, the matching has been flawed. In states that have not, the list matching has been even more incorrect and risks disenfranchisement of U.S. citizen voters caught up in a faulty process. DHS claimed in July that there may be as many as 15,903 noncitizens registered to vote in Nevada, but its later review sent only 185 names to the Nevada Secretary of State. In September, the state confirmed that all 185 were U.S. citizens.
Open records requests identified significant efforts by DHS, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the FBI, and the DOJ to provide some support for the Trump administration’s claims about election integrity. As a result of the administration’s actions, only roughly 156 people have been charged with voting-related offenses nationwide. That is the total number of people, regardless of citizenship status, charged with election-related crimes in a country with more than 200 million registered voters. Additionally, the alleged criminal actions in these cases are often the result of confusion rather than willful disregard of the law; this is not the widespread conspiracy that it has been made out to be. Many of those charged deny ever registering to vote or voting at all. Omar Muñoz, a lawful permanent resident recently charged in California, says, “Politics is a nice chess game if you know how to play. Unfortunately, they used me as one of their props.” Mr. Muñoz offers an important reminder of the human cost of the administration’s efforts to retain power regardless of the costs or consequences. It is also a reminder that the number of actual noncitizen voters charged pales in comparison to the more than 500 American citizens U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has wrongly detained in President Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. Taken together, these facts show that the administration is more focused on pushing a false narrative of widespread fraud than protecting the rights and freedoms of American citizens.
While a price tag has not been calculated, the administration’s pursuit of evidence of widespread election fraud has diverted significant law enforcement resources away from finding the “worst of the worst,” as President Trump claimed he would do. Instead, it is easy to imagine that taxpayers are conservatively paying tens of millions of dollars for this pet project of the Trump administration. While some of this may be about proving President Trump’s 2020 fraud narrative, these efforts are likely laying the groundwork to contest the midterms and possibly future elections.
What to expect when you’re expecting election denial
The administration has expended significant resources to advance the false narrative of widespread fraud. The Trump administration and its allies will likely continue to rely on the themes of alleged noncitizens, mail ballots, and voting machines as the premise for claiming the election results are suspect. A weaponized DOJ will likely support these efforts.
Capitalizing on the perceived legitimacy of the courts was central to President Trump’s post-2020 election playbook, in which the Trump campaign and its allies filed dozens of baseless lawsuits challenging the results of the election. Despite the sensational nature of this litigation, 61 of the 62 were dismissed, several of them on the merits, and then-Attorney General Bill Barr confirmed that “to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election.”
But during the second Trump administration, the DOJ has seemingly lost its independence, often acting instead as President Trump’s personal law firm. This can be seen most recently in the DOJ’s lawsuit against California, which began mailing ballots to its 23 million voters on October 5. On October 13, the DOJ sent letters to California election officials with a list of 20,000 “likely noncitizen” voters, demanding the state withhold ballots not yet mailed, or “segregate” ballots already mailed and returned, until the state verifies the citizenship for every voter listed. The DOJ demanded compliance within 48 hours, an unreasonable window given this would have required the review of 417 voters per hour. The DOJ promptly sued upon that window expiring, and that case is still pending.
The Trump administration does not appear to be acting in good faith to ensure only citizens vote. Rather, this effort fits within a long-standing pattern of propagating the myth of widespread noncitizen voting, which could be used as a pretext for refusing to certify results. As an example of this political theater, on October 19, 28 green card holders were criminally charged for allegedly registering to vote, and HSI arrested 11 in California. These included green card holders who do not remember registering to vote and claim not to have voted. And an initial examination of the DOJ’s list by the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office showed that 1 in 4 listed a U.S. birthplace. The administration appears uninterested in the facts or protecting the integrity of elections, instead conducting these few arrests to make headlines and obscure the incredibly low numbers of actual noncitizen voters. Similarly, bringing this litigation based on questionable list matching while voting has already started almost certainly amounts to harassment of election officials and misuse of the courts.
This type of lawsuit will likely become more widespread, as any potential litigation filed by a weaponized DOJ in various races around the country will help push election deniers’ narrative that election results cannot be trusted. While the DOJ’s win-loss record will likely continue to be abysmal in these contrived circumstances, the point is likely not to win, but rather to create room for doubt and fuel conspiracy theories that can then be used to undermine the legitimacy of newly elected officials or to contest certification efforts. Furthermore, the cover of DOJ litigation could create the needed uncertainty for certification bodies willing to entertain such claims.
Dating back to 2020, President Trump and his allies’ election denial playbook has included contesting results or certification. In the fallout from the 2020 election, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger stood up to President Trump’s demands to “find” 11,780 votes—the number he would need to overcome President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the state. Fortunately, Secretary Raffensperger refused the president’s requests and upheld his oath of office. President Trump also made phone calls to local certification officials seeking to undermine the election results in other states across the country. This could occur again in the aftermath of the 2026 election if the president fears being held accountable by a newly elected Congress less friendly to the president’s agenda.
Conclusion
For the past decade, the Trump administration and election deniers have spread false information, confusing voters and selling the narrative of widespread fraud. But a lie is still a lie no matter how many times it is repeated. It is imperative to understand how these falsehoods have been utilized to justify actions by the Trump administration that further these claims and set the stage for undermining the midterm election results. Such actions are straight out of the authoritarian playbook and predictable in an imperial presidency.
The ultimate check on such power grabs is the American people, who express themselves in free and fair elections. It is important for voters across the political spectrum to stay vigilant and make sure their voice is heard. For the country to thrive, the truth must matter, the rule of law must govern, and most of all, the will of the voters at the ballot box must be protected. That is how Americans choose their leaders in a democracy.