In May, I logged in to a virtual town hall meeting convened by two of my elected officials in Oregon—Secretary of State Tobias Read and U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley, both Democrats—on election security in the midterm elections.
I wasn’t surprised to hear that Read and Merkley were concerned that the Republican Party and President Donald Trump might attempt to disrupt the 2026 midterms. But my attention was seized when Merkley said, “We may need to have a citizen brigade just stand outside places where votes are counted just to say, ‘We citizens are protecting our counting process, thank you very much.’”
Bear in mind that Oregon has the longest- and smoothest-running vote-by-mail system in the country, one that has been in place since 2000 without a hint of irregularity. Vote by mail is a point of civic pride, just like Crater Lake or legal weed, and a particular point of pride for this magazine because one of its contributing editors, Phil Keisling, Oregon’s Secretary of State for much of the 1990s, did so much to make “vote at home,” as it’s sometimes called, a reality. If Merkley, from what The Washington Post once called “tidy Oregon,” was contemplating a protective people’s blockade of election boards, how serious is the prospect of election trickery elsewhere?
The answer is: serious. I was inspired by Merkley’s comment to start looking seriously into the covert battle over how the midterm elections are conducted.
Citizens can be forgiven for feeling confused and anxious. We all know that Trump’s popularity is falling, and the Democrats are licking their chops for a possible “blue wave” feast this fall. But sober observers like The Atlantic’s David Graham, The Washington Post’s David Ignatius, and NBC political analyst (and Washington Monthly contributing editor) Jonathan Alter have recently posed diverse scenarios ranging from contested House races to troops in the streets, all of which scheme to produce underhanded Republican triumphs.
These may be the most important midterms since 1862, when the opposition to Lincoln came close to crippling the Union war effort. What, I wondered, could I do to help protect them? What could my neighbors do?
And the answer to this question is a good deal less bleak than it might seem, given the president’s ramblings. It’s not clear that Trump has a plan to subvert the midterms, and even less clear that he and his crew have the skills to execute a plan should he get one. And beyond that, there’s actually a good deal that ordinary people—you and me—can do to make sure the midterms don’t go off the rails. (See sidebar.)
Let’s consider what the administration has signaled it may try to do: Trump is demanding that Congress pass a monstrosity called the SAVE America Act, which would require voters to prove their American citizenship and produce government ID before registering or voting. It would, estimates run, disfranchise at least 10 percent of eligible citizens who lack the necessary documents to register. Driver’s licenses, even with REAL ID, would not be sufficient. You would need a birth certificate or passport. And Trump declares it “will guarantee the midterms. If you don’t get it, big trouble,” He said in March. “And [if you Republicans] pass the act, you will win the midterms, and you will win every election for a long time.”
So far, however, the Senate Republican Conference has refused to abolish the filibuster, which requires a bill to reach 60 votes to pass—and without 60 GOP votes, the bill won’t get an up-or-down vote, meaning it’s doomed. While agitating for the SAVE Act, Trump has meanwhile issued two executive orders designed to skew the midterm elections toward the Republican Party. In March 2025, he issued an order to the federal Election Assistance Commission. This independent federal agency helps states improve their voting procedures and voting machine systems and circulates a “National Mail Voter Registration Form” that voters can use instead of the state forms. Trump ordered the commission to alter the national form to require registrants to prove they are citizens—with documents most citizens do not have and cannot easily obtain. States may continue to use their own forms—but Trump’s order threatens funding cutoffs unless states change those forms to require the same documents. He also ordered states to stop accepting mail ballots postmarked before Election Day but received afterward. (The administration had joined the Republican Party in asking the Supreme Court to impose that timing limit—but late last month the Court refused to do so.)
The major problem with this order is that, well, Trump has no power over elections, or even over the Election Assistance Commission. Under Article I of the Constitution, states make their own rules. Congress can change those rules by statute if it chooses. Conspicuous by its absence is any role whatever for the president. In his first foray into election regulations, Trump blithely asserted sweeping power he does not have. Three federal courts have enjoined the March 2025 order.
In March, Trump issued a new executive order, asserting the power to rewrite the rules for mail voting in the states and the District of Columbia.
This order is, not to mince words, a complete mess. It instructs states to provide the Postal Service with a list of voters eligible for mail ballots. It directs USPS to change its rules so that it will deliver mail ballots only to voters who appear on that list. In June, Postmaster General David Steiner told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that, under the proposed rule, the Postal Service would refuse to process ballots in any state that declined to turn over its absentee-voter list to USPS. Meanwhile, confusingly enough, the order requires Homeland Security to compile its own list of “state citizens” from federal databases that were never designed, in their totality, to list every American citizen. It’s not clear what use would be made of the “state citizenship” lists—but it’s easy to imagine federal authorities or Trump allies jumping into the midst of state vote-counting to challenge vote totals because the lists don’t match.
The day after Steiner’s comments, Federal District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston enjoined most of Trump’s March order, writing that “USPS lacks statutory authorization to promulgate any binding regulations on mail-in voting.” She also voided the DHS provision: “The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections.” A week later, a federal judge in Washington blocked the USPS from carrying out changes to its delivery of mail-in ballots, pointing to a settlement agreement reached between the NAACP and the Postal Service in December 2021.
The attack on mail voting thus is at a standstill—though the government has indicated it will appeal.
Whether or not Trump can command the Postal Service, he has power over federal law enforcement and has already begun using it to disrupt or distort elections. On June 11, FBI agents fanned out across Ohio to seize the records of a non-partisan non-profit that supports liberal causes and conducts voter registration drives. And California Governor Gavin Newsom announced that FBI agents are investigating him and his wife, filmmaker and activist Jennifer Siebel Newsom.
Political misuse of the FBI antedates the Trump era, of course. But Trump’s subservient FBI Director, Kash Patel, seems ready to deploy the Bureau to an unprecedented extent.
Earlier this year, when FBI agents seized the 2020 election voting records in Fulton County, Georgia, they were joined by Tulsi Gabbard, then the Director of National Intelligence. The DNI has no role in domestic politics. And while Gabbard is now gone, Trump’s pick for acting director, Bill Pulte, has only one visible qualification: slavish loyalty to Trump. The DNI has no power to order or conduct intelligence operations. Still, as the acting head of the “Intelligence Community,” a rogue