The Trump Administration Is Interfering in the 2026 Midterm Elections To Entrench the Imperial Presidency

In the 18 months since Inauguration Day, President Donald Trump and his administration have seized unprecedented executive branch power to implement extremist and unpopular policies. Now, to lock in that power and escape accountability, the administration is waging an unconstitutional effort to subvert voters’ will in the November 2026 midterm elections. For decades, political scientists who study backsliding democracies around the world have identified a crucial tactic used by would-be authoritarians: Once they have dismantled traditional checks and balances and weaponized government against their perceived political enemies, they move to disrupt and control elections to ensure that they and their allies remain in office. The right to freely and fairly vote for elected leaders is the most fundamental feature of a democratic republic. It is the mechanism through which all other rights are ultimately protected and through which the government derives its legitimate authority. As the United States marks 250 years of democratic self-governance, that right—and the republic it sustains—faces the gravest threat from within.

This report is the third in a Center for American Progress series documenting how the Trump administration planned and then built an imperial presidency. This report revisits earlier analyses, which detailed the steps that the administration was taking to aggregate power, create a strongman presidency, and implement a far-right policy agenda. The report then documents how the administration, through a multipronged plan across 15 interlocking tactics, is working to subvert elections and manufacture victories in the midterms—all in service of consolidating the administration’s unprecedented power. These tactics include, but are not limited to, weaponizing federal departments controlled by loyalists, erecting massive hurdles for eligible Americans to register to vote and to cast their ballots, triggering a mid-decade gerrymandering crisis that severely disadvantages Black and Latino voters, assailing state and local election administrators, and musing publicly about deploying National Guard troops and federal agents to polling places or demanding that state officials not certify elections. The stakes are stark: A sitting president and his administration have created a near-constitutional crisis involving the very elections that have sustained U.S. democracy.

With breathtaking speed, the Trump administration has seized unprecedented executive branch power and used it to impose an agenda that most Americans reject. To cement that power and escape accountability, the administration is actively attempting to subvert the will of the people in the November 2026 midterm elections. The engineering of election results is a hallmark of authoritarian consolidation in backsliding democracies around the world.

The administration has aggregated unprecedented power and assailed perceived political enemies

Over the past two years, the Center for American Progress has tracked and analyzed how the Trump administration planned for and constructed an imperial presidency that discards checks and balances and abuses the rule of law. In October 2024, the authors published the first report in this series, “Project 2025 Would Destroy the U.S. System of Checks and Balances and Create an Imperial Presidency.” That report analyzed the far-right Project 2025 playbook, an audacious road map for an unconstrained president to establish political supremacy and force the implementation of a radical policy agenda. Many of the steps the Trump administration is now taking to subvert elections were recommended in the Project 2025 playbook.

In April 2025, the authors published the second report, “Trump’s First 100 Days: Creating an Imperial Presidency That Harms Americans.” That report detailed how the Trump administration in just 100 days was moving with alarming speed to seize and aggregate power, fulfilling nearly every prediction in the first report. The administration claimed sweeping constitutional authority under Article II and the so-called “unitary executive theory” to assert primacy over Congress, the courts, the federal bureaucracy, the media, universities, and civil society while incorporating elements of oligarchy and systemic corruption. Its tactics involved weaponizing the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) for political purposes, including assailing perceived political enemies on bogus charges; stripping the independence of independent federal agencies created by Congress; and replacing nonpartisan civil servants with loyalists, even at intelligence and security agencies—all steps that threaten Americans’ safety, prosperity, and fundamental rights.

Now, 1 1/2 years into the presidential term, the Trump administration has gone even further to aggregate executive power, implement its far-right policy agenda, and evade accountability. Perhaps most notably, the administration has intensified its aggressive campaign to silence, punish, and neutralize a wide range of political adversaries, often at the direct instruction of the president, despite long-established bipartisan norms against doing so. The DOJ has twice indicted former FBI Director James Comey on baseless criminal allegations; a federal judge dismissed the first indictment. Furthermore, the second indictment appears predicated on Comey’s use of the phrase “86 47,” which neither explicitly states a threat of violence nor differs from others’ use of the same phrase, which a federal judge ruled was not a real threat subject to criminal penalties. The DOJ also sought twice—unsuccessfully—to prosecute New York Attorney General Letitia James on unsupported bank fraud charges. Before the DOJ’s failed prosecution, James investigated and sued Trump for fraud. Trump attempted to fire and the DOJ then investigated Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook on mortgage fraud allegations after she opposed Trump’s preferred monetary policies, prompting a rare rebuke from the U.S. Supreme Court, which held that Trump failed to provide Cook with the required cause and process for removal. Beyond individual officials, the administration has also moved aggressively against universities, nonprofit organizations, media companies and journalists, and other pillars of civil society—a sweeping campaign to neuter institutional voices that might rally public resistance to its agenda, even though scores of federal courts have at least temporarily halted those unlawful attacks.

Simultaneously, the Trump administration has continued to thwart Congress’ constitutional authority; ignore court orders and clear statutory law; and illegally gut federal agencies and vital programs, among many other aggregations of power. Yet, on the policy front, the administration has failed to reduce the cost of living for everyday Americans, made health care less accessible and more expensive, launched a reckless war with Iran, deployed the military and federal agents into Democratic-controlled cities resulting in the killings of American citizens, and fought to strip Americans of fundamental constitutional rights—all while giving massive tax breaks to billionaires and corporations.

Everyday Americans have taken notice, and they are not pleased. The approval of President Trump and his administration’s policies is near historic lows. A July 2026 Pew Research Center poll found Trump’s overall approval at only 34 percent, while a CNN poll from the same month found that a record-high 73 percent of Americans said Trump has not paid enough attention to the nation’s most important problems. And a January 2026 Navigator Research poll found that 52 percent of Americans describe the federal government as “authoritarian,” and almost half were more likely to say the word “democracy” does not describe their government than said it does. The public alarm has translated into action: In March 2026, approximately 8 million Americans in all 50 states participated in a peaceful “No Kings” mass mobilization to protest the imperial presidency and its harmful policies, the largest single-day mass protest against a president in American history.

The administration is attempting to entrench its immense power and escape electoral accountability

With the November midterm elections approaching, the administration is using every lever of government to consolidate its executive branch power. Yet, the administration faces the very real prospect of being held accountable by voters and losing control of at least one chamber of Congress, significantly hampering the administration’s ability to advance its policy agenda.

Rather than moderating its positions to win public support, the Trump administration has instead chosen a perilous path that authoritarians around the world have taken to consolidate their control over government: engineering an election victory for their party at all costs. This is the defining hallmark of “competitive authoritarianism”—a system in which elections are nominally allowed to proceed but the conditions surrounding them are so corrupted that genuine democratic competition may be impossible. A central component in the administration’s election subversion plan is asserting and centralizing executive branch control over elections, despite the Constitution granting no authority to the president or executive branch over elections and explicitly delegating those powers solely to the states and to Congress.

The administration’s election subversion effort must be understood against the backdrop of what Trump and his allies attempted six years ago. During and after the 2020 election, Trump led an unconstitutional and illegal multipronged plan, based on the “big lie” of widespread voter fraud, to attempt to retain presidential power at any cost.

As CAP explained in a prior report:

Trump and his allies attempted to discredit the election results, relying on the myth of widespread voter fraud; pushed state officials to reverse valid election results; arranged for people to sign documents presenting themselves as either duly authorized or potential alternate presidential electors—or “fake electors”—for Trump in seven states; enlisted a high-ranking U.S. Department of Justice official to support their claims of an invalid election; waged a relentless pressure campaign on Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the Electoral College results; and helped incite the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

The U.S. House of Representatives impeached Trump one week after the January 6 insurrection for his pivotal role in trying to block the peaceful transfer of power and destabilize the republic. Trump was also indicted on a range of related federal charges, which were subsequently dropped by the DOJ after he was reelected. Hours after Trump was inaugurated in 2025, he issued sweeping pardons and commutations to the January 6 rioters, including key leaders of far-right militias, sending a dangerous, autocratic signal that he is willing to overlook violent behavior that benefits him. The 2020 attempt to overturn the election, alarming as it was, may have been only a rehearsal for what is now occurring with the full machinery of the federal government behind it. As experts in authoritarianism have concluded, a strong indicator of a future successful coup is a past failed one, with examples including Vladimir Lenin’s unsuccessful 1905 Russian Revolution and Adolf Hitler’s failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch.

The administration’s actions to engineer favorable election results follow the authoritarian playbook

This report documents the third and most dangerous part of a recognizable authoritarian-minded sequence: The leader attempts to entrench their power and agenda by engineering favorable election results. The scholarly framework for understanding what is happening in the United States is clear.

Political scientists Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt, and Lucan A. Way have described it as a system of competitive authoritarianism, where the “formal architecture of democracy, including multiparty elections,” may remain intact but the system is not truly democratic, and competition is engineered to be unfair. Levitsky identifies three typical stages to competitive authoritarianism: 1) accumulating power by capturing independent institutions and dismantling checks and balances; 2) sidelining political opponents; and 3) changing the playing field of electoral politics by manipulating rules governing gerrymandering, runoff elections, and campaign advertising. At this third stage, autocrats can “maintain a veneer of democracy while eviscerating its substance.” And as Levitsky warns, citizens may not fully see it “until it is too late.”

New York University scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, observes that modern authoritarian-minded leaders gain power and “then they manipulate elections to stay there,” adding that “even if they hold elections, they use intimidation and a mix of semilegal and legal tactics to get the outcome they need to be able to claim that their repressive agendas are the expression of popular will,” turning the machinery of democracy against democracy itself. Stanford University’s Larry Diamond warns that competitive authoritarianism may allow multiparty elections to take place, but renders them “no longer free and fair,” enabling a domineering leader to “assert monolithic control over government, in a grip that cannot be broken by any normal means.” Historian Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny, notes that authoritarian-minded leaders try “to make political life impossible for their opponents” by weakening the rules of democratic elections. Finally, CAP’s Robert Benson details how authoritarian leaders manipulate electoral laws and other processes to ultimately achieve “manufactured majorities,” distorting democratic systems to ensure that they retain control despite often representing only a minority of voters.

Seen in this light, the 15 election subversion tactics analyzed in this report are not an American innovation; instead, they are drawn from a well-established global power consolidation playbook, and compelling examples abound:

• In Russia, Vladimir Putin has systematically corrupted elections and escaped accountability by coercing and intimidating voters, buying votes, and frequently changing electoral laws and the timing of elections while targeting political opponents with bogus criminal cases.
• In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party used its legislative supermajority to rewrite electoral rules, draw unfair districts, deploy politicized election audits, and buy votes, all while maintaining the outward appearance of fair elections—until April 2026, when a massive cross-sector coalition finally defeated him after 16 years.
• In Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has investigated and imprisoned electoral opponents, removed opposition mayors from office, and weaponized state resources to increase favorable votes.
• In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro spent months before the 2022 election spreading baseless claims of electoral fraud, asserting that voting machines were rigged, and then using those claims to unsuccessfully subvert unfavorable results.
• In Venezuela in 2024, Nicolás Maduro declared victory but refused to publish precinct ballot counts, dismissing evidence documented by the opposition of their own win as a foreign-orchestrated coup attempt while systematically dismantling the bureaucratic and institutional structures that might have provided accountability.

The foreign parallels to the Trump administration are unmistakable: The goal is not necessarily to win more votes, but to engineer a system where fewer votes are needed to escape accountability and entrench power. What makes the American case particularly alarming is the fast pace. The Trump administration has moved with even greater speed than autocrats such as Orbán or Putin did in the early stages of their consolidation of power, and it is doing so with the resources of the world’s most powerful government.

Moreover, the administration is carrying out its quest to consolidate power unabashedly. President Trump’s repeated public statements clearly articulate that the objective of changing election rules is to engineer favorable results. Trump has said:

• If Congress passes his favored legislation to change election rules, it would “guarantee the midterms.”
• If Senate Republicans change the filibuster rules to pass new laws governing voter ID and mail voting, “we will never lose the midterms, and we will never lose a general election.”
• If Senate Republicans fail to pass his preferred voting legislation, “The Republican Party will never win another Election. I will, sadly, be the last Republican President.”
• His preferred voting rules changes would mean “[w]e’ll never lose a race. For 50 years, we won’t lose a race.” In another instance, Trump increased this time frame to 100 years.
• His mid-decade gerrymandering plan for U.S. House seats, coupled with a ban on mail ballots, would allow Republicans to “pick up 100 more seats.”

Constitutional and statutory law prevent presidents from exercising unilateral control over elections

One of the foundational aims of the Constitution is to prevent presidents from becoming kings. James Madison, one of the document’s key architects and later the fourth president of the United States, warned in Federalist No. 47 that, “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands … may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” And the Constitution, in conjunction with well-established federal and state laws, is unambiguous when it comes to elections: Presidents have no authority to unilaterally dictate how elections are administered, and almost every election subversion tactic discussed in this report violates this foundational principle, whether in letter or in spirit. Article I, Section 4 (the Elections Clause) says, “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations.” As David Becker of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research has noted, “Hamilton foresaw, and made clear in Federalist 59 that a democracy must diversify power of elections in order to protect itself from an overzealous executive, and therefore power over elections would reside with the several states.”

Federal courts have consistently and emphatically enforced this principle. Over the past 18 months, courts have invalidated the Trump administration’s unilateral attempts to assert presidential control over elections—for example, by permanently enjoining attempts to impose new conditions on voter registration and related documentary proof of citizenship requirements as well as preventing the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) from illegally refusing to deliver mail ballots, thereby reaffirming states’ authority over elections. As discussed below, long-standing federal laws—many directly rooted in the language of the Constitution—separately prohibit interference with election administration, foreclosing several of the subversion tactics described in this report.

The 10th Amendment reinforces this structure further. By reserving to the states all powers not specifically delegated to the federal government in the Constitution, it confirms that presidents cannot seize election administration authority—which the Constitution assigns to the states and Congress—by executive fiat. The states have built an entire architecture of law, regulation, and institutional practice governing how officials conduct elections, covering voter eligibility and registration, the delineation of voting districts, methods and time frames for voting, vote counting, certification, and the resolution of disputes. States have been administering their elections for more than two centuries, with Congress occasionally imposing additional requirements largely designed to protect and expand voting rights, precisely as the founders designed.

Yet despite these clear limits and repeated court rulings, the administration continues, alarmingly and aggressively, to press forward, often seemingly operating near or outside constitutional and legal boundaries, thwarting checks and balances, and endangering free and fair elections. This pattern suggests that the administration’s goal is not to prevail in court on every front, but to use the legal process itself as a tool of delay, disruption, and intimidation, changing conditions on the ground faster than courts can restore them, while eroding the public’s trust in the very elections it is trying to manipulate. This is the same Article II overreach that defined the first two phases of this imperial presidency, now applied to elections themselves.

Perhaps just as alarmingly, the imperial presidency’s efforts at consolidation have been actively enabled by a set of institutional and political actors who have abdicated their own constitutional or civic responsibilities:

• Far-right justices on the U.S. Supreme Court have repeatedly declined to act as a meaningful check on executive overreach, most strikingly when they bucked more than two centuries of legal history in Trump v. United States in 2024 to rule that presidents enjoy broad immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts, effectively removing one of the most fundamental guardrails against executive misconduct. Far too often, the Supreme Court has failed to enforce the rule of law when the Trump administration defies it. In 2026, the high court abandoned almost a century of precedent and statutory law and gave Trump the right to fire, without cause, the leaders of independent agencies, allowing him wide latitude to bend agencies to his demands. And in April 2026, the far-right justices invalidated a pillar of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that Congress designed to protect voters of color, in the process jettisoning its principle that courts not implement last-minute changes before elections and supercharging the partisan gerrymandering scheme that Trump started in 2025.
• The current Congress has largely surrendered its constitutional role, including its oversight duties and power of the purse, declining to investigate the administration’s abuses of law and spending authorities and weaponization of the federal bureaucracy. Many Republican lawmakers have abandoned long-held views defending states’ rights to administer elections as they now aggressively push to pass legislation that would federalize election administration, echo Trump’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud, and support other unconstitutional overreaches by Trump, including his attempts to limit counterterrorism funding to states that refuse to follow his unilateral election directives, a decision that has triggered a lawsuit from 25 states and Washington, D.C.
• State and local elected officials loyal to the administration and its election conspiracies have provided another pillar of support—among them, at least 30 local officials in eight states who have refused to certify election results since 2020.
• A network of allies in civil society and the media who seem to benefit materially and politically from the administration’s agenda has amplified its narratives and provided cover against accountability.

Without these enablers, the administration’s authoritarian consolidation of power could not have advanced as far or as fast as it has.

The United States is witnessing something without modern precedent, going beyond even President Richard Nixon’s criminal scheme in Watergate. The Trump administration is carrying out an aggressive, multifaceted plan to attempt to nationalize elections and rig the electoral playing field to entrench its power and agenda. This section discusses the 15 tactics that make up this plan. Some of them are outright unconstitutional or illegal; others exploit legal gray areas, manipulate existing loopholes, or shatter bipartisan democratic norms that generations of Americans built. Many of these tactics are being carried out in plain view while others are being pursued through quiet bureaucratic action, largely out of public sight. Considered individually, any single tactic might appear limited, but taken together, they dangerously stack the system in favor of the administration’s agenda. While many of these tactics have been or will be stopped by the courts, blocked in Congress, or resisted by key states, the point is that they should all be seen for what they are: efforts to stoke fear, create chaos, and pressure officials to comply before courts can intervene—and ultimately to engage in inappropriate partisan interference in the nation’s elections. These tactics represent corrosive democratic backsliding that threatens the people’s fundamental right to hold their leaders accountable through free and fair elections.

Spreading disinformation about elections is a foundational tactic of authoritarian-minded leaders. Around the world, authoritarian governments have deployed disinformation as a primary weapon to evade accountability and consolidate power, often weaponizing state-allied media and social media to flood public discourse with false narratives that discredit the opposition, undermine trust in democratic institutions, and manufacture consent for a continued grip on power. The Trump administration has taken the same approach, deliberately reshaping the information ecosystem to stoke public mistrust and lay the groundwork to justify intervening in or contesting election results—while simultaneously attacking the mainstream media as “fake news” and “enemy of the people” to erode the credibility of accurate reporting that might otherwise hold it accountable.

In Trump’s case, he and the administration have systematically deployed the lie that widespread voter fraud, aided by Democrats, occurred in prior elections. In July 2026, Trump elevated the lies in a prime-time address to the nation, where he cherry-picked widely disputed information to assert that elections are vulnerable to being “rigged and stolen,” in the process blaming foreign adversaries, voting machines, and noncitizens on state voter rolls. He has continued his discredited claims of widespread fraud more specifically in the 2020 presidential election, as well as in subsequent elections Republicans lost, including Los Angeles’ high-profile June 2026 nonpartisan mayoral primary. Voter fraud allegations provide a powerful rhetorical pretext for deploying the machinery of the federal government to run roughshod over the constitutional and legal requirements regarding how elections are conducted.

The election fraud that the Trump administration still insists occurred in 2020 has been comprehensively debunked as exceedingly rare, and the Trump DOJ has brought criminal charges in only a handful of illegal voting cases, despite the president’s pressure on DOJ attorneys to prosecute such cases. Yet Trump’s baseless allegations are echoed relentlessly by people such as Elon Musk and amplified across social media networks and sympathetic media. Now, 46 percent of Americans believe the false narrative. Targeted disinformation is especially powerful when amplified by social media algorithms engineered to reward outrage and falsehoods. AI-generated content has supercharged this threat to an entirely new level of sophistication and scale, especially as the administration refuses to place guardrails on this new technology.

Although Trump complains about rigged elections, he is the one manipulating elections, and often in plain sight. As Trump has acknowledged, his strategy is simple: Repeat that a verifiable lie is a truth until enough people believe you. The fraud narrative is being deployed to demoralize voters and pre-position the administration to justify contesting unfavorable election results. Ultimately, those who would advance this narrative may hope it could fuel civil unrest that gives the administration a dangerous pretext to invoke emergency powers. Government agencies now responsible for investigating election fraud are led by committed election deniers, making institutional pushback likely a near impossibility, as the next section documents.

The design of America’s federal election infrastructure rests on a crucial principle: that officials responsible for helping the states protect election integrity and voting rights must be insulated from undue political pressure, especially from the president. In 2020, that design worked, as Trump’s own appointees—including U.S. Attorney General William Barr and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Director Chris Krebs—successfully pushed back against the president’s false election fraud claims, even in the face of immense pressure from the president and his allies. Yet now, the Trump administration has torn out that insulation and mainstreamed the discredited “big lie,” while ensuring that the departments and agencies responsible for election security are led by committed election deniers, including then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, current Attorney General Todd Blanche, and FBI Director Kash Patel. Trump also installed prominent election deniers Kurt Olsen and Heather Honey in key White House and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) positions overseeing election-related matters. The administration’s posture was captured by then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, who said her department was using its resources to ensure “we have the right people voting, electing the right leaders to lead this country.” As former conservative federal appellate judge J. Michael Luttig observed in his 2025 essay titled “President for Life,” “Trump is clearly willing to subvert an election in order to hold onto the power he so craves, and he is now fully enabled.”

Under the false banner of election integrity, the administration has weaponized these loyalists to try to seize control of election administration, with Trump proclaiming in early 2026, “The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.” As authoritarians often do, top administration officials have reached into the bureaucracy to help achieve that goal: At least 75 career election security officials across several agencies have been fired or reassigned, or have resigned—and they have sometimes been replaced by election-denying political loyalists. A group called “Team America,” which includes election deniers, has worked at DHS headquarters specifically to implement Trump’s election agenda.

At the DOJ, election denier Harmeet Dhillon now leads the Civil Rights Division—historically the government’s primary instrument for protecting voting rights—where she has steered attorneys toward investigating election officials instead of protecting the rights of voters. In July, Dhillon sent letters to election officials in all 50 states, threatening them with criminal prosecution if they facilitate noncitizen voting, a threat amplified weeks later by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who relied on flawed data to assert widespread noncitizen voter registrations. In response to the Dhillon letter, Utah’s top election official and Lieutenant Governor Deidre Henderson (R) called it “truly bizarre behavior by the federal agency that is supposed to be protecting civil rights.”

Despite the administration’s claim that election integrity is its goal, top officials have dismantled the infrastructure and guardrails that Congress designed for the federal government to help states run safe and secure elections immune from undue political interference.

The most consequential casualty is the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), an independent agency that Congress created in a bipartisan manner after the 2000 presidential election to assist states in administering elections. In July 2026, just four months before the midterm elections, the Trump administration fired the EAC’s two Democratic commissioners without cause and asked the Republican commissioner to resign, weakening the agency’s ability to meet its congressional mandate to maintain the national mail voter registration form, test and certify voting systems, distribute federal funding, and offer crucial support for state and local election administrators. In the coming weeks, the White House could try to take steps, almost certainly illegal, to direct the EAC staff to implement Trump’s election wish list, such as altering the federal voter registration form to require documentary proof of citizenship.

Another major casualty of the administration’s election subversion is CISA, which Congress created in 2018 as the primary agency responsible for helping election administrators stop cyberattacks and foreign interference after Russia’s 2016 attacks. Eight years later, Trump—the same president who signed CISA into law—has severely weakened the agency and its election security resources, with the administration’s most recent budget proposing to eliminate the election security program entirely. This is happening as the DOJ is now investigating Trump’s former CISA director, Chris Krebs, for publicly telling the truth about the 2020 election, sending a message that institutional impartiality will be punished. These actions make elections significantly more vulnerable to manipulation, as many have warned, including congressional Republicans. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes (D) cautioned that officials are “effectively flying blind” and have “lost confidence in the administration’s capacity to collaborate in good faith.”

The hollowing out of impartial experts extends across the election security architecture. The administration disbanded the National Security Council’s election security coordination group, the Foreign Malign Influence Center at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), and the DOJ’s and FBI’s Election Day command posts and Foreign Influence Threats Task Force, while also firing the head of the Defense Department’s U.S. Cyber Command, which helps protect elections from foreign attack. FBI Director Patel has dismantled the public corruption team that monitored election-related criminality. Alarmingly, in June, Trump installed political ally Bill Pulte—a housing official with no national security experience who has targeted Trump’s political opponents such as Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook—as the acting director of national intelligence. In this role, Pulte immediately began purging intelligence experts, and Trump instructed him to “declassify almost everything.”

These important bureaucracies were not redundant. Each was built in direct response to documented threats to democracy. Their elimination or politicization leaves the country without what one former official described as its election security “brain,” stripped of the institutional knowledge, interagency coordination, and commitment to the public interest that a bipartisan majority of Congress specifically required when it built these pro-democracy guardrails. While expertise and resources outside of the federal government remain available to states, the pattern is undeniable: The administration is systematically eliminating the safeguards best positioned to detect, document, and resist the election manipulation described in the tactics that follow.

In another assault on voting rights, the Trump administration has embarked on a coordinated campaign to collect and weaponize sensitive personal information about Americans with the unconstitutional goal of controlling who can vote, a favored strategy that authoritarians use to steer election results. These actions again rest on the false claim of widespread fraudulent voting, including by noncitizens. The primary tools here are the DOJ’s demands for sensitive voter data from states (including Social Security numbers and driver’s license numbers) and DHS’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system, originally designed to verify immigration status for public benefits. The SAVE system has been repurposed to cross-check voter registration databases, resulting in “the largest set of national voter roll data [the federal government] has ever collected.” Part of the explicit pressure campaign is to compel states to purge their voter rolls, potentially removing eligible voters from registration lists in ways that could reshape the electorate in Trump-friendly ways before a single ballot is cast. Experts have warned this program relies on data that produce erroneous results and flags naturalized citizens and other lawful voters for potential removal. Indeed, states that have examined the SAVE system’s output have found large-scale inaccuracies. As CAP has written, in states using the SAVE system—including Texas and Missouri—the system erroneously “flagged hundreds—potentially thousands—of U.S. citizens” as noncitizens, particularly mistakenly identifying naturalized citizens.

Despite the administration’s demands, the fact remains that the Constitution reserves election administration, which includes voter registration and list maintenance, to the states, not the federal government. Election officials across the nation have repeatedly refused to comply, prompting the DOJ to sue more than 30 states to force action. In all 21 decisions thus far, federal courts have rejected the administration’s arguments and sided with states’ refusals, including some states run by Republicans, finding no legal basis for the administration’s directives.

Another major tool in the administration’s aggregation and consolidation of power is the issuance of executive orders, which Trump has done at a rapid pace. These orders abuse the separation of powers and seek to bypass Congress, assert unconstitutional control over federal government levers, and take punitive actions against uncooperative states. Yet, the Constitution’s Take Care Clause and Supreme Court precedent make clear that the president must “faithfully execute” the laws Congress passes, not act as an independent lawmaker.

To seemingly rig the rules without congressional hurdles, Trump has issued two executive orders that would have imposed sweeping new voting restrictions. His March 2025 executive order (EO), which has been blocked by the courts, would have mandated that Americans provide documentary proof of citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, when registering to vote using the national registration form. The EO also would have mandated that mail ballots be received by Election Day, overriding contrary state laws; effectively forced decertification of previously certified voting equipment; and conditioned federal election funding on states’ compliance. As CAP has documented, this order could have blocked tens of millions of eligible Americans from registering to vote while unconstitutionally directing the independent EAC to help implement these restrictions. Federal courts have emphatically struck down major portions of the order as unconstitutional usurpations of both state and congressional authority, with one judge permanently enjoining the EO in June 2026 and another ordering the administration to shut down the SAVE system in its current form, citing disturbing inaccuracies that have led to eligible voters being removed from voter rolls as noncitizens. And in a rare loss for the administration in the U.S. Supreme Court, a majority of justices ruled in June that states may count mail ballots that are postmarked on time but arrive after Election Day.

A second executive order, issued in March 2026, purported to transform USPS into an election enforcement agency. In an unprecedented move, the order instructed USPS, in conjunction with DHS and the Social Security Administration, to create a citizen verification database of approved voter lists and refuse to deliver ballots to any American not on those lists, while threatening to withhold federal funds from states that did not grant the administration access to their voter files and to cross-check their lists. In the summer of 2026, federal courts struck down the key components of this EO, finding it to be an unconstitutional infringement of state authority over elections and that Congress did not delegate authority to USPS to control mail voting. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit also concluded that implementing the EO would “sow confusion and threaten disenfranchisement of many eligible voters.” In July 2026, the administration appealed the matter to the Supreme Court, asking the high court to reverse the lower court decisions blocking the EO.

In tandem with its executive orders, the Trump administration has relentlessly pushed Congress to enshrine similar changes in statutory law by passing the so-called Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act and its even more extreme successor, the SAVE America Act, which passed the Republican-controlled House but has thus far stalled in the Senate. Making his intent clear, Trump declared that the legislation would “guarantee the midterms” for Republicans. In July, Trump refused to sign bipartisan housing legislation because Congress had not included the SAVE America Act, as he continues to pressure the Senate to amend the filibuster rules to pass his “number one priority.” Trump used his July 2026 address to the nation from the White House to demand that Congress pass the legislation, claiming the “only reason [Congress] wouldn’t do it is you want to cheat.”

Both election-related bills would require all Americans to present, in person, documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote or update their registration, forcing the vast majority of Americans to rely on a passport or birth certificate as proof of citizenship, despite federal and state laws already implementing effective safeguards and criminal sanctions against noncitizen voting. In practice, this deeply harmful legislation would prevent Americans from being able to register to vote by mail and eliminate online voter registration, a service provided in 42 states.

As CAP has documented, more than 140 million American citizens do not possess a passport. The burden would fall particularly hard on rural voters, who may live hours from a government office, and on the estimated 69 million women who took their husband’s last name after marriage and whose birth certificates no longer match their current legal name. Trump has been clear about his motive, repeatedly stating that if the SAVE Act were enacted, Republicans would “never lose a race” for the next 50 years. Even with the current Senate stalemate, several states have begun enacting their own unreasonably onerous proof-of-citizenship requirements, creating a growing patchwork of barriers to voter registration across the country.

Mail voting sits at the heart of the administration’s fraud narrative. The administration’s repeated attempts to largely eliminate this popular, safe, and fair form of voting could disenfranchise tens of millions of Americans. Trump, who himself has voted by mail, has proclaimed without evidence that “[m]ail-in ballots are corrupt. Mail-in ballots, you can never have a real democracy with mail-in ballots.” Yet, as discussed above, the president has no authority under the Constitution or any law to override state laws and unilaterally change the rules governing voting by mail. Thirty-seven states plus Washington, D.C., either permit no-excuse mail voting or administer their elections completely by mail. Trump’s executive orders, as described above, attempted to impose unlawful restrictions on mail voting, directing the attorney general to take all necessary enforcement actions against noncompliant states, including withholding federal funding on which states rely.

Aside from the administration’s unlawful attempts to turn USPS into an election enforcement agency, it has simultaneously worked to disrupt mail ballot delivery through various structural changes to USPS. Under a new USPS initiative, the agency is consolidating mail processing facilities across the country, and new rules mean that items may not be postmarked on the day they are dropped off. During his first term, Trump openly admitted to blocking USPS funding to hamper mail voting, and his appointed postmaster general slowed mail delivery, removed letter sorters, and issued stark warnings to election officials that mail-in ballots would no longer be treated as priority mail. Given this history, the administration likely could take additional steps in the coming months to degrade mail voting, making it harder for millions of eligible voters to cast ballots and laying the groundwork to ultimately challenge election results.

The administration’s assault on voting methods extends beyond mail ballots to the equipment that states principally use to count those votes. Trump has repeatedly and falsely claimed that voting machines are inaccurate and untrustworthy, and the administration has mounted a sustained campaign to undermine public confidence in them, despite courts having repeatedly rejected the fraud claims it continues to advance. For example, Dominion Voting Systems reached a $787 million defamation settlement from Fox News in 2023 and a $67 million settlement from Newsmax in 2025 related to broadcasts that perpetuated false claims about Dominion’s voting equipment. One of the administration’s most flagrant acts involves the 2025 executive order directing the EAC, in the name of election integrity, to effectively decertify all voting equipment it had previously certified. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, this would affect machines used in 39 states, with no voting system currently on the market able to meet the administration’s new standards. Congress created the EAC as an independent, bipartisan commission specifically to insulate voting system standards from political interference; for this reason, a federal judge ruled that the administration has no authority to direct the EAC how to certify voting machines. The administration has compounded the situation by blocking appointments to the Technical Guidelines Development Committee, preventing the qualified experts who oversee equipment security standards from doing their jobs.

The administration’s ultimate goal appears not to be proving specific wrongdoing but rather ensuring that any unfavorable election result can be plausibly attributed to machine manipulation, no matter how false the claim may be. Trump has already telegraphed this intent: In a January 2026 interview with The New York Times, he said he regretted not sending the National Guard to seize voting machines after the 2020 election. And as discussed below, the administration has already started seizing voting machines in certain states and local jurisdictions.

A favored tool of authoritarian-minded leaders is to force the unfair redrawing of district maps to help ensure that political loyalists win their elections. This practice allows elected officials to choose their preferred voters rather than voters choosing their elected officials. Although many states, controlled by both major political parties, have track records of unfair gerrymandering, the Trump administration orchestrated an unprecedented mid-decade gerrymandering crisis beginning in July 2025, with profound consequences for Democratic-leaning voters, especially minority voters. Trump ordered Texas Republicans to redraw the state’s U.S. House map mid-decade, outside the normal post-census cycle, with the explicit goal of creating five additional Republican-leaning districts in the state. After Texas did so, other Republican-controlled states followed, including Missouri and North Carolina. Unwilling to cede the electoral playing field after Texas acted, voters responded with a pro-Democratic gerrymandered map in California, yet the Supreme Court struck down Virginia voters’ subsequent attempt to redraw their state’s congressional districts. Trump’s demands were a publicly declared tactic to cement a structural Republican House majority for the foreseeable future—an explicit acknowledgment that the goal is not fair representation but engineering the composition of the legislative branch designed to check executive branch power.

The Supreme Court, in April 2026, then handed Trump’s allies an additional antidemocratic gerrymandering weapon. In its ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, the court’s far-right supermajority gutted a key protection of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), prompting dissenting Justice Elena Kagan to conclude that Section 2 of the VRA had been rendered “all but a dead letter.” Section 2 had long served as the primary legal tool for ensuring that minority communities could elect representatives of their choice, giving rise to the majority-minority districts that have allowed Black, Latino, and other minority voters meaningful representation in the House for decades. With that protection ripped away, Republican lawmakers in Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, and South Carolina moved swiftly to dismantle minority-held districts and dilute Black voting strength. Louisiana went further still, canceling an already-ongoing primary election to start fresh with a gerrymandered map that sharply reduces minority representation. Florida passed a gerrymandered map hours after the Callais decision, in defiance of its own state constitution, which explicitly forbids partisan gerrymandering.

If this gerrymandering crisis continues, few, if any, Black-majority congressional districts may remain standing across the entire South, undoing decades of progress spurred by congressionally passed civil rights legislation. This entire gambit is deeply corrosive to American democracy and represents a transparent power grab. It does not merely tilt elections; it reinforces the Trump administration’s efforts to cement power by gutting the fundamental right of all Americans to fairly choose the leaders who represent them.

As another prong in its plan to sabotage the 2026 elections, the Trump administration has turned the DOJ—including the FBI—and DHS into instruments of intimidation against the nonpartisan officials who administer elections. Taking a page from authoritarians worldwide, Project 2025 explicitly proposed charging election officials with criminal conspiracy for their “misapplication of state law to help voters cast ballots during the 2020 election,” and the Trump administration then created multiple new DOJ task forces and units specifically designed to pursue such charges. These threats have come directly from Trump: In January 2026, he declared that “people will soon be prosecuted for what they did in the 2020 election”—without identifying targets or a legal basis—an unmistakable warning to election administrators. The targeting extends even to the president’s former appointees. As discussed above, the DOJ is investigating Chris Krebs, Trump’s former CISA director, for publicly refuting Trump’s baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

DHS has added to the climate of intimidation through its direct pressure on state and local election officials, even as those officials engage in wide-ranging scenario planning to counter election threats. In February 2026, then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem made a hastily arranged, undisclosed visit to election officials in Arizona, where she publicly blasted the state’s election processes. A Reuters investigation found that DHS federal agents have contacted county boards of elections across the country, demanding “immediate access” to a range of sensitive voter data and seeking details about local voter registration groups. The FBI even seized computers and documents from one such nonprofit organization in Ohio. As explored above, in July 2026, the DOJ sent letters to election officials in all 50 states, threatening them with criminal prosecution if they facilitate noncitizen voting, a threat repeated by DHS Secretary Mullin, who incorrectly asserted that DHS can lawfully force states to remove people from voter rolls.

When election officials fear prosecution simply for doing their jobs, the independence of election administration collapses, and authoritarian leaders can trample on states’ constitutional rights to administer free and fair elections. As the November midterm elections approach, investigations and prosecutions are likely to escalate significantly and extend further to pro-voter, nonprofit organizations that support voter registration, election monitoring, and civic engagement, as already seen in the aforementioned Ohio case. In one positive development, in August, a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s ban on nonpartisan organizations helping newly naturalized U.S. citizens register to vote, determining that it was likely driven by discriminatory intent.

In one of the most alarming escalations in the administration’s election interference campaign, federal law enforcement officials have operated at the gray edges of the law, physically seizing ballots, voting machines, and election-related records from state election offices across the country under the cover of prosecutorial power. In January 2026, FBI agents—accompanied by then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who later testified that Trump personally directed her to be present—executed a federal search warrant at an elections office in Fulton County, Georgia. They seized hundreds of boxes of ballots, ballot images, voter rolls, and other records from the 2020 presidential election, a seizure that so far has survived legal challenge as the FBI has deployed more than 260 analysts to Atlanta as part of this “priority investigation.”

Fulton County Commission Chair Robb Pitts called the investigation an effort to “intimidate workers in our county, to discourage people from voting.” In July, a federal judge placed a limit on the administration’s investigation, invalidating the DOJ’s “staggering” attempts to get personal information on thousands of 2020 election workers in Fulton County.

In March 2026, the FBI compelled the Arizona Senate to hand over hard drives and servers containing ballot images and voter data from the state’s partisan audit of the 2020 election, a review that had already confirmed Trump’s loss. Similarly, the DOJ has demanded election-related materials or access to voting equipment in Colorado, Missouri, and Wayne County, Michigan, among others. Separately, the ODNI obtained and tested voting machines from Puerto Rico, prompting Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, to warn that intelligence agencies have no lawful role in domestic election administration absent a genuine foreign nexus. At the heart of this tactic is the weaponization of law enforcement and intelligence, which are designed to function above overt partisan pressure. Directing them against election administrators corrupts both the agencies and the democratic processes they exist to protect.

The Trump administration has signaled its potential willingness to deploy federal troops, including the National Guard, in ways that could directly interfere with the 2026 elections. While White House officials have issued public denials, Trump told The New York Times in January 2026 that he regretted not ordering the National Guard to seize voting machines after the 2020 election based on his debunked fraud claims. U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, asked directly by senators whether he would rule out sending troops to polling places, sidestepped the question.

The administration has already demonstrated its willingness to deploy military forces in domestic contexts, sending troops to multiple Democratic-governed cities under various pretexts only to have several federal courts halt those deployments as unlawful. If they were to be deployed during the election, including under the guise of a national emergency, the administration might conceivably order the military to take a wide range of actions, such as seizing voting machines, blocking roads near polling locations, demanding identification from voters, standing guard as officials count votes, or even blocking duly elected members of Congress from entering the U.S. Capitol to be sworn into office. Each of these actions would be patently illegal and would likely be stopped by the courts, but they would not be free of harm.

The use of military force to intimidate voters and subvert elections or target political opposition is a defining feature of authoritarian regimes worldwide. Examples of the use of military force include:

• In South Korea, President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law in 2024 and ordered elite special forces to storm the national assembly to prevent lawmakers from voting to restore democratic order.
• In Belarus, President Aleksandr Lukashenko deployed armed security forces that beat and arrested more than 35,000 citizens who protested his fraudulent 2020 election.
• In Venezuela in 2024, President Nicolás Maduro used the military to physically control polling centers, ballots, and voting machines, enabling him to alter results and fraudulently declare victory.

American laws barring military involvement in elections were not enacted arbitrarily; they reflect hard-won lessons from U.S. history about why democratic governments must keep military power firmly under civilian control. In the Declaration of Independence, two of the founders’ 27 grievances against King George III directly condemned a king who made the military “independent of and superior to the Civil power” and kept standing armies among the people without legislative consent—concerns that shaped the Constitution’s design of strict civilian oversight of the armed forces. Those concerns reared their head in 1876, when federal troops barricaded South Carolina’s statehouse to prevent a peaceful transition of power after a disputed election, producing the instability the founders feared. Less than two years later, Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act, bedrock legislation barring the military from conducting law enforcement activities, including monitoring polling sites. This prohibition reinforced an 1865 law now codified at 18 U.S.C. § 592, which makes it a federal crime to station armed forces at election sites. The military itself understands the high stakes: Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee in March 2026, Gen. Gregory M. Guillot, commander of U.S. Northern Command, recognized that troops should not be “anywhere near” polling places, warning that their presence would “give the perception that we’re trying to operate illegally.” Soldiers take an oath to “support and defend the Constitution,” and deploying them to undermine an election would betray that oath and weaken the nation.

The Trump administration and its allies have also raised the alarming threat to deploy federal agents near polling places. Trump supporter and former White House strategist Steve Bannon made it explicit, declaring, “You’re damn right we’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November.” DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin testified at his March 2026 confirmation hearing that ICE officers would be at polling places “if there is a specific threat for them to be there.” ICE lawyers subsequently admitted to a federal judge that the agency may have thousands of documents relating to possibly deploying agents to polls. And then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said in March 2026 that there should be no objection to deploying ICE agents in this manner. The administration has sent ICE agents and other federal personnel to Democratic-controlled cities, stoking chaos, including in Minneapolis, where federal agents killed two American citizens. These actions fuel fears of voter intimidation and ultimately suppression, especially in Democratic-leaning jurisdictions or places with high numbers of voters of color.

The prohibition on deploying federal agents near voters reflects hard-won lessons from the civil rights era, when Southern law enforcement officials used their badges to terrorize Black voters out of exercising their right to vote, prompting Congress to include in the Voting Rights Act an explicit prohibition on any person “acting under color of law” from intimidating or coercing voters. Congress has recognized this danger repeatedly, understanding that few threats to democracy are more corrosive than turning the power of the government against the voters it is meant to serve. This is why Congress has built multiple overlapping statutory protections against this kind of official intimidation. Federal law makes clear that no federal personnel may be deployed near voting sites to intimidate voters, a prohibition rooted in several statutes, with many states having similar laws. The danger is compounded when agents are armed and instill the fear associated with immigration enforcement. The credible possibility of ICE agents at polling places will likely suppress turnout in immigrant communities, particularly in Democratic-leaning jurisdictions and communities of color, arguably the intended result of the administration’s threats.

Perhaps no threat to the upcoming election would be more alarming than the possibility that Trump will declare a national emergency to postpone, cancel, or seize control of the midterms, a tactic that strongman leaders in nations such as the Philippines and India have deployed to evade electoral accountability. Trump’s own words strongly suggest he is open to delaying the November election. In January 2026, he told an audience, “I won’t say cancel the election; they should cancel the election,” and a week later said, “When you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.” And in August, Trump indicated he is open to declaring a national emergency to curb voting access.

The administration may seek to exploit “national security” as cover for this outcome. Indeed, a leaked 17-page draft executive order, developed by far-right election deniers and given to the White House, proposes declaring a national emergency based on alleged foreign election interference to exert sweeping control over the 2026 midterm elections, prohibiting most Americans from casting mail ballots and requiring all voters to reregister in person. Although Trump has denied that he is considering such a plan, historian Timothy Snyder warns that it is a recognizable authoritarian move: With the war with Iran underway and a consequential election approaching, “these are the structural conditions for a coup attempt in which a president tries to nullify elections and take permanent power as a dictator,” and that “it is utterly predictable” that Trump will “seek to exploit the war (or the next one) to alter the elections” to steer favorable results.

Yet the constitutional reality, settled since the founding, forbids such a move, even though the president retains broad national security powers. The authority over elections rests with the states—not the president—under Article I, Section 4, a design the founders adopted deliberately to prevent any single leader from controlling the process by which power changes hands. Federal courts have confirmed this. Reviewing Trump’s March 2025 election EO, a federal court found definitively that “[o]ur Constitution entrusts Congress and the States – not the President – with the authority to regulate federal elections,” and that “[n]o statutory delegation of authority to the Executive Branch permits the President to short-circuit Congress’s deliberative process by executive order.” As CAP has explained, the historical record makes the emergency premise hollow, as states administered elections unimpeded through the Civil War, both world wars, military operations in the Middle East, and the COVID-19 pandemic without presidential seizure of election administration. In 2020, it was the states—not the federal government—that adjusted election procedures in response to the pandemic, demonstrating that genuine emergencies can be addressed through legitimate channels that respect rather than override the Constitution’s clear allocation of authority.

If all other election sabotage tactics fail to engineer election results, the Trump administration may seek to simply refuse to recognize the results altogether. By seeking to delay or block state election certifications, the administration could try to deny the seating of duly elected Senate and House members, thus overturning an election outcome that voters have already decided. This is effectively a playbook that Trump attempted in 2020.

If it follows that same route, the administration might once again pressure governors, secretaries of state, or election administrators to delay vote counts and certifications, as Trump’s first administration did nearly six years ago. On January 2, 2021, Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and pressured him to “find” enough votes to overturn Joe Biden’s win. That pressure campaign became the basis for a federal indictment that observed that certification of election results is “foundational to the United States’ democratic process” and had “operated in a peaceful and orderly manner for more than 130 years” until Trump attacked it.

Since 2020, at least 30 local officials in eight states have refused to certify election results based on unsupported fraud claims. Fortunately, state courts have upheld the law and made clear that certification is a mandatory legal obligation. Trump and his supporters may attempt to bring litigation after the election, not necessarily to prevail in court, but to create delays, cast doubt, and hinder the timely seating of elected officials.

Then, when the 120th Congress convenes on January 3, 2027, bad actors could attempt to exploit the Senate or House’s organizational process to try to change the composition of either chamber, even though such an outcome would be difficult to achieve. Under potential pressure from the administration or its allies, members-elect could try to challenge their colleagues’ right to take the oath of office with, for example, bad-faith fraud claims weaponizing each chamber’s own complicated procedural rules. In a closely divided chamber, a bad-faith challenge to just one legitimate winner could be an attempt to flip effective control in a constitutional coup reminiscent of the plot to reverse the 2020 presidential election.

While any such efforts are unlikely to succeed and can be countered by legitimately elected members, the point is that it has all been put on the table for the transparent purpose of grabbing power via illegally interfering in elections. The assertion by the far-right, Trump-aligned Heritage Foundation that Congress can use its Article I, Section 5 authority to declare elections invalid and refuse to seat members cannot be read as an effort to improve U.S. elections. Nor should House Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-LA) waiting for seven weeks to swear in Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ) be treated as merely a scheduling issue. The purpose of interfering with election outcomes is to consolidate power for a regime that has already taken steps to grow its power and allow the administration to escape accountability, leaving its agenda largely unchecked.

The 15 tactics documented in this report—by turns unconstitutional, illegal, corrosive to democracy, or without precedent in American history—represent the gravest threats yet posed by an imperial presidency that has been quickly dismantling democratic guardrails. As the nation marks its 250th anniversary, a sitting president and his administration are attempting something that has never been done in U.S. history: use the levers of executive power to engineer minority rule and entrench unaccountable power.

But the authoritarian playbook, for all its ruthlessness, has a fatal weakness: It depends on acquiescence. Fortifying free and fair elections for November 2026 and beyond requires proactive engagement, application of the rule of law, and a commitment to democratic principles. State officials, courts, Congress, civil society, and individual citizens across the ideological spectrum must defend people’s constitutional rights and prevent democratic backsliding without regard to partisan outcomes. Free and fair elections have guided this nation through a Civil War, two world wars, and a pandemic; through sustained vigilance, they will continue to chart its course.

The authors would like to acknowledge Jadon Urogdy for his contributions to this report.