US election officials brace for possible Trump administration interference in midterm vote

State officials who administer US elections were on high alert as voting in the midterms unfolded on Tuesday, bracing for possible intervention by President Donald Trump's administration amid fears that federal authorities loyal to the president could disrupt voting, challenge ballot counts or attempt to block the certification of unfavorable results.

Trump has repeatedly questioned the integrity of American elections, most notably his 2020 loss to former president Joe Biden, and has urged his party to "nationalize" voting in at least 15 places. The Constitution gives the states primary authority to organise and administer elections, and the president has no direct role in running them. US courts have so far rebuffed most of the administration's legal challenges to voting procedures and ballot eligibility, while the White House says it is protecting election security.

One battleground concerns who gets to vote. The Justice Department has requested voter registration data from all 50 states and sued 30 states plus the District of Columbia to obtain their registration lists, saying it needs them to find non-citizens. It has since lost more than two dozen of those cases. The department also demanded that ballots be set aside from about 20,000 people in California and more than 400 in Washington state whom it suspects are non-citizens. The US Supreme Court rejected that request, handing the administration a major reversal on the eve of the midterms, and Washington state has refused to comply.

Studies have repeatedly found non-citizen voting to be exceptionally rare, with offenders risking stiff fines, imprisonment or deportation. The Heritage Foundation's database of documented voter fraud cases includes 100 instances of non-citizens voting from 1982 to 2025, roughly 0.000008 percent of more than 1.3 billion votes cast in presidential elections over that span, the New York Times reported in April. The Justice Department has nonetheless warned election officials in every state that they could face prosecution for knowingly allowing non-citizens to vote, and Trump has offered $1 million for information leading to a voter fraud conviction, without providing details.

At polling stations, the Justice Department plans to send around 1,000 election monitors to all 50 states, its largest deployment ever. At the same time, the administration broke with two decades of precedent by not inviting observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, drawing widespread criticism from election integrity experts, human rights groups and Democratic lawmakers. Democrats noted that only Russia and Belarus among OSCE members also reject independent observers, and warned that federal monitors could intimidate voters. The department says its monitors will be unarmed, barred from interfering with voting, and drawn from neither the FBI nor Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The administration says it is not planning operations targeting voting centers, although Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has said ICE agents could serve warrants there. When questioned, Trump has declined to rule out declaring a national emergency or invoking the Insurrection Act, which allows the president to deploy troops at home. A Civil War-era law bars troops and armed federal agents from polling places, and legal experts say an emergency declaration would not give the president power over elections.

Concerns also surround the counting of votes. Federal agents could seek warrants or subpoenas for ballots, voting machines or records, potentially disrupting the count, and in January the FBI seized ballots and other 2020 election records in Fulton County, Georgia, a focus of Trump's false claims that he won that year. State officials warn that similar action during an active count could undermine safeguards tracking how ballots are handled. Trump could allege fraud involving mail-in ballots, voting machines or votes counted after election night, but the Supreme Court ruled in June that states may count mail ballots postmarked by election day that arrive afterward.

After election day, attention will turn to certification. The Justice Department has already sued Alaska to delay certification of its Senate race if Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan narrowly loses to Democrat Mary Peltola, citing a second candidate named Dan Sullivan who it says is trying to confuse voters, an allegation he denies. Trump said he ordered the lawsuit. Experts say federal law does not allow the department to block certification, which courts can compel officials to carry out, though unresolved disputes could delay the seating of newly elected lawmakers in January.

Democratic party leaders, lawmakers and allies spent weeks gaming out more than 150 scenarios of possible federal interference in a so-called war room ahead of the vote, focusing on countering administration moves in the days that follow. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, working with a coalition of voting rights groups including the ACLU and Democracy Forward, has prepared legal roadblocks against any federal interference, and courts have repeatedly upheld the states' authority over elections.