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The Trump administration is engaged in a multi-pronged effort to undermine the integrity of and confidence in the 2026 election.
At the center of the effort is President Trump himself. In a Monday appearance on Dan Bongino’s podcast, Trump said:
Minnesota is a mess. There’s something in the water up there. I won the state three times, but I got no credit for it. I won that state three times but it’s a rigged state. Really rigged badly with the Somalians, and the Somalians and the theft.
The Democratic presidential candidate won Minnesota in 2016, 2020, and 2024. Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen, which he continues to make repeatedly, have been exhaustively debunked.
In his podcast appearance, Trump went on to suggest that “Republicans ought to nationalize the voting” because “we have states that I won that show I didn’t win.” The Constitution says that the “times, places, and manner of holding elections“ will be determined by the states.
Trump’s efforts to undermine confidence in the 2026 midterms are not just rhetorical. On January 28, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents raided the Fulton County, Georgia, election office. The agents executed a warrant to seize records related to the 2020 election.
Former President Joe Biden won Georgia in 2020. But, without any factual backing, Trump has claimed that he was the true winner. On January 2, 2021, in a recorded call, Trump famously pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” 11,779 additional votes — enough to make him the winner — in Fulton County.
The warrant authorized the seizure of physical ballots, voting machine “tabulator tapes,” voter rolls, and electronic data, which Trump administration officials claimed constituted evidence of a crime.
Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence (DNI), was on site during the Fulton County raid. The DNI has no role in domestic law enforcement and is supposed to be focused on foreign intelligence gathering. According to the Wall Street Journal, she has “spent months investigating the results of the 2020 election that Donald Trump lost.”
While the raid is unlikely to uncover any actual evidence of wrongdoing, it does demonstrate Trump’s willingness to use the full spectrum of federal government power to interfere with state election administration and advance his political interests.
A national voter purge
Beginning in May, the Department of Justice (DOJ) began sending letters to state officials requesting complete, unredacted voter rolls containing sensitive information on voters, including drivers license and social security numbers.
The Trump administration has claimed it has authority to ask states for their voter rolls under the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), which requires states to maintain accurate lists of their registered voters and make certain records available to the public. The DOJ is arguing that it needs to inspect state voter rolls to “ensure that states have proper voter registration procedures and programs to maintain clean voter rolls containing only eligible voters in federal elections.” However, The NVRA does not require states to disclose sensitive voter data to the public or to the federal government. In reality, the Trump administration is creating a national voter roll in order to purge what it alleges is widespread voter fraud by noncitizens.
At times, the administration has admitted this purpose openly. In a statement to Democracy Docket, about an agreement with the DOJ to use some of the voter data, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson wrote that the goal of using the data is to “prevent illegal aliens from corrupting our republic’s democratic process and further ensure the integrity of our elections nationwide.”
The actual number of noncitizens who illegally vote in U.S. elections is very small. However, any attempt to purge voters would likely lead to many eligible voters being removed from the voter roll, as has already played out in states purging their own voter rolls.
In August 2024, for example, Alabama’s Secretary of State Wes Allen (R) announced that he wanted “to ensure that Alabama has the cleanest and most accurate voter file in the country.” So, he removed over 3000 people from the state’s voter roll that he claimed were non-citizens. However, it turned out that over 700 of those people had recently become citizens and were eligible to vote.
As of the end of January, at least 44 states and Washington D.C. received requests from the DOJ for their voter rolls. Eleven states, all led by Republicans, have said they will comply with this request. Twenty-four states and Washington D.C., mostly led by Democrats, have been sued by the DOJ for refusing to provide voter rolls. (These lawsuits are rife with errors, includ