US officials prepare for chaos amid concerns Trump will try use federal power to swing midterms

Two months before Americans vote in midterm elections that could reshape the balance of power in Washington, local and state officials across the country are rehearsing for a crisis that once seemed unthinkable:

What if the US president tries to use the power of the federal government to tilt the vote his way?

In California, officials have gamed out what would happen if US President Donald Trump dispatches federal agents to polling places, intimidating voters and suppressing turnout.

In Michigan, state officials are advising local clerks how to respond if the federal government demands access to voting machines.

And coast to coast, election officials are bracing for legal battles over everything from ballot seizures to voter-fraud investigations.

Reuters interviewed more than 50 state and local election officials from both political parties, including a dozen secretaries of state, the top election officials in their states. Nearly all said they are adopting new strategies to prepare for political interference, misinformation, cyber attacks and even threats of violence ahead of the midterms. Their efforts span jurisdictions large and small, in areas controlled by Trump’s Republican Party as well as the opposition Democratic Party.

White House dismisses concerns of federal interference in midterms

The preparations reflect growing alarm among state and local officials that the biggest threat to November's elections might come not from foreign meddling or technical failures, but from the Trump administration itself, as the president seeks to expand the federal government's role in elections, an area long overseen by states and localities.

The White House has dismissed concerns that federal actions could disrupt the midterms, arguing that the administration is enforcing election laws and safeguarding confidence in voting. It blamed Democrats for what it described as widespread voting by noncitizens, despite scant evidence to support those claims. A Reuters investigation published in July and independent studies have found that voting by noncitizens is extraordinarily rare and unlikely to affect election outcomes.

“The distrust in our elections is caused by extreme Democrats,” said White House spokesperson Lauren Bis. The Trump administration has good reason for pursuing allegations of voter fraud “despite the media and Democrats denying it for decades,” she added.

Yet Trump has openly portrayed many of his election-related initiatives as ways to help Republicans win.

Under the US Constitution, elections are administered by states and localities, not the president. However, Trump has urged Republicans to "nationalize" voting in at least 15 places, directed federal law enforcement to pursue debunked voter-fraud claims and sought to restrict mail-in balloting. His administration has also launched probes of election officials and offices in Wisconsin, Georgia and elsewhere.

His push to redraw congressional maps before the midterms sparked a nationwide redistricting battle that’s expected to give Republicans a net advantage in House races. He has sued states that refused to provide federal agencies with confidential voter data, including birthdates, driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers, and gutted programs designed to thwart cyber attacks and foreign interference. At the Republican Party’s midterm convention in Dallas last week, he urged supporters to “cheat like hell” and vote whether they’re “registered or not” in the upcoming midterms.

“Election officials are concerned about the role the federal government is going to play,” said Bill Gates, a Republican lawyer and former official in Maricopa County, Arizona, who now advises and trains election officials around the country. The mood, he said, is one of “apprehension,” rather than the close cooperation that once characterized election cycles.

More than a dozen local and state election officials said they are hiring outside lawyers or seeking legal training for themselves and their staff to prepare for potential demands by the administration for access to sensitive voting records or election equipment.

Nearly twice that many said they are expanding public outreach and social media campaigns to counter misinformation, including the false claims made by Trump and Republican allies that voting machines are unreliable and mail-in voting is inherently corrupt.

And most said they are scrambling to fill gaps left by the Trump administration’s cuts to programs that help safeguard elections from cyber attacks and physical security threats. That includes ongoing work to fortify election offices with camera systems and bulletproof glass – a trend that began after Trump disputed his loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 election, igniting waves of violent threats by Trump supporters against election workers.

The administration’s election rhetoric could prove to be mere bluster, said David Becker, a former voting-rights lawyer for the US Justice Department who now runs the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a group that works to build confidence in elections. Courts have repeatedly rejected the administration’s efforts to change mail-in ballot rules and obtain confidential voter rolls from states that refused its demands. Other actions, such as sending armed agents to polling sites, would likely be illegal and risk political backlash, Becker added.

But with control of Congress potentially hinging on a small number of races, many election officials say they cannot assume such guardrails will hold. The stakes are enormous: A Republican loss of one or both chambers would end the governing trifecta that has enabled much of Trump's agenda, opening the door to aggressive Democratic oversight of him and new obstacles to his legislative and judicial priorities.

Subpoenas, warrants, private attorneys

Election officials are planning for a wide range of scenarios, particularly in battleground states and Democratic strongholds targeted by Trump's false election-fraud claims. Any disputed result, they say, could trigger federal investigations, courtroom battles, and even civil unrest.

Wisconsin offers insight into those preparations.

In Dane County, home to Wisconsin’s capital, county attorneys have begun drafting court filings to fight any attempt by the Trump administration to seize voting equipment or election records, and they are preparing for the possibility that federal immigration agents could appear at polling places, said the Democratic county clerk, Scott McDonell.

“It’s going to be a matter of speed,” McDonell said of any legal response. The county is also preparing for possible protests over disputed results.

He said January’s FBI raid on election operations in Georgia’s Fulton County was a wake-up call, convincing him that the Trump administration could try to intervene.

Dana Barrett, a Fulton County commissioner, told Reuters the raid exposed a vulnerability few local governments had anticipated. After federal agents seized about 650 boxes of 2020 election records as part of an investigation into voter-fraud allegations previously rejected by courts and audits, the county rushed to hire outside counsel and sued to recover the records. “The only thing that would have been nice is if we had already had those people on board,” said Barrett, a Democrat. “But how could you know?”

The county, Georgia's most populous and a Democratic stronghold, lost that legal fight in May, when a federal judge ruled prosecutors could retain the records while their investigation continues.

Wisconsin faces similar pressure. In May, FBI agents sought to question at least eight current and former Milwaukee city and county employees about the 2020 election. Trump’s loss in the state had spurred him and his allies to sue the state’s two largest Democratic-leaning counties, Milwaukee and Dane, in unsuccessful cases alleging voter fraud. Almost immediately after the FBI visits - some of them to people’s homes - Milwaukee city and county leaders moved to secure legal representation.

The FBI declined to comment on its election-related work.

Milwaukee County retained the Democracy Defenders Fund, a legal nonprofit that has battled the Trump administration in Fulton County and a number of other places. The city separately hired two firms, the Washington Litigation Group and the Public Rights Project, to represent current and former city employees.

Legal groups are providing their services free of charge in the city and county of Milwaukee and in states including California, New Mexico and Pennsylvania. In some jurisdictions, including Fulton County, election offices and individual officials have hired private lawyers at their own expense.

In Michigan, a pivotal state in the fight for control of the US Senate, the Democratic secretary of state’s office has consulted private attorneys about defending local election officials against potential federal scrutiny. The Trump administration has threatened to investigate at least one Democratic-led county in the state over alleged voter fraud in the 2024 election, despite producing no evidence of significant irregularities.

“We’re prepared,” Michigan Deputy Secretary of State Aghogho Edevbie told Reuters. He said his office has advised local election officials on how to respond if federal authorities seek access to voting records or equipment. “We do have counsel on standby for any local election official that needs it.”

Some are seeking training on how a federal investigation might play out.

In March, nearly two dozen election officials and local attorneys gathered at a Miami Beach hotel for training by two former senior Justice Department officials - one appointed during a Republican administration, the other during a Democratic one. The training explained the mechanics of federal investigations, including how to distinguish different types of warrants and subpoenas - and how to challenge them in court.

According to six participants, they reviewed a redacted copy of the search warrant used in the Trump administration's January raid in Fulton County to better understand what agents could seize and how they could be challenged.

"Most of us aren't even familiar with this stuff," said Chris Walker, clerk of Jackson County, Oregon, a jurisdiction of 220,000 residents that voted for Democrat Barack Obama in 2008 but backed Trump in the last three presidential elections. A federal raid like the one in Georgia would be a "nightmare scenario," she said after attending the training.

Natalie Adona, who runs elections in Marin County, California, a heavily Democratic county north of San Francisco, said the seizure of 650,000 ballots by a far-right, pro-Trump California sheriff this year convinced her to prepare for the worst. The seizure remains tied up in court. State officials and voting-rights groups say the sheriff, Chad Bianco of Riverside County, lacked authority to take the ballots and was pursuing unfounded fraud allegations. In a statement, Bianco said the seizure was lawful.

Adona’s office hosted training on search warrants, subpoenas and questioning by federal agents. She and her team also participated in a drill on how to respond if US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents appeared at a polling place. "I'm just trying to do my job," said Adona, who is not registered with any political party.

In May, Trump refused to rule out sending ICE agents or the military to polling places. Such a move would likely trigger legal challenges under a federal law that generally prohibits armed federal deployments at election sites. At his March confirmation hearing, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin dismissed concerns that immigration agents could intimidate naturalized citizens and other legal voters.

“There shouldn't be illegals at the polling spot,” he said, and any officers sent to polling places would be there to combat potential threats, “not for intimidation.”

In a statement, a DHS spokesperson said “ICE is not planning operations targeting polling locations,” but noted that the agency could make arrests at polling places if an active public-safety threat emerges.

The Supreme Court blocked Trump’s mail voting plan on Monday from taking effect before November’s elections. But the legal battle still forced election officials to prepare for disruptions that could have affected millions of voters.

Trump and his allies have spent years portraying mail voting as vulnerable to fraud despite a lack of evidence of widespread abuse. Trump himself has voted by mail in recent elections in his home state of Florida.

Under the plan, states would have been required to provide the US Postal Service with lists of mail-ballot recipients and use USPS-approved ballot envelopes, allowing the Postal Service to reject ballots that do not meet the new requirements. Before the Supreme Court blocked the plan, a Postal Service whistleblower warned Congress it could wrongly delay or reject thousands of legal ballots.

The USPS has said it will follow court rulings regarding the plan.

In Philadelphia, officials had contingency plans in place in case the plan went ahead, including satellite election offices where voters can pick up ballots, said Seth Bluestein, a Republican on the Philadelphia Board of Elections. "We've worked with our city solicitor to have a plan in place for how to respond."

Panic buttons and a handgun

Election officials say years of false election-fraud claims have raised the threat of harassment and violence, prompting a wave of security upgrades across the country.

Derek Bowens is elections director in Durham County, North Carolina, a heavily Democratic area in a state with a pivotal US Senate race. He said he is acquiring his first firearm to protect himself and his family.

“My perspective has changed,” said Bowens, who was appointed to the nonpartisan role in 2017. "I'm very conscious now of my surroundings. I tend to go home immediately after work. I don't spend a lot of time outside of the house."

Since moving into a new building before the 2024 presidential election, his office has added ballistic doors, bulletproof glass, panic buttons and armed guards. The mailroom has a dedicated exhaust system to remove hazardous fumes from contaminated packages. It’s also stocked with Narcan, a nasal spray used to reverse opioid overdoses in the event of accidental exposure to tainted mail.

The chief election coordinator at each of Durham County's 68 polling places will carry a tracker-equipped badge that can summon law enforcement to their precise location with the press of a button. The county adopted the badges after the 2024 primary election, when a man entered a polling place after voting had ended and threatened to “vote with a bullet” if he couldn’t cast a ballot.

Durham County is among at least a dozen jurisdictions where election officials told Reuters they’re fortifying their offices. The measures include shatter-resistant window film, barriers to prevent vehicles from ramming buildings, surveillance systems and motion sensors to monitor voting equipment and ballot storage areas. Several jurisdictions have arranged security escorts for late-working staff.

In Detroit, a predominantly Black Democratic stronghold, City Clerk Janice Winfrey now has around-the-clock police protection after receiving death threats following Trump's false fraud claims in 2020. The city’s 36 absentee-ballot drop boxes are monitored by police through a network of surveillance cameras. And every window in election headquarters has been replaced with bulletproof glass.

“I long for the days when elections were just boring,” said Winfrey. “It absolutely makes me sad that this is what democracy has come to.”

It isn’t just Democratic locales that are preparing. In Irwin County, Georgia, a Republican area that voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2024, Election Supervisor Ethan Compton is giving two poll workers at each precinct panic buttons. The devices can transmit a photo and GPS coordinates to election headquarters, the sheriff's office and 911 emergency-call centers. Many poll workers are elderly, Compton said, like “somebody’s grandmother,” and the devices “give them peace of mind.”

Getting the word out: AI has made lies cheaper, easier to create

Election officials say one of the biggest threats may be a battle over reality itself.

Falsehoods about rigged elections, compromised voting machines and voter fraud can ricochet online long before officials can respond, fueled by social media, partisan influencers and increasingly sophisticated AI tools.

The scenarios they fear are multiplying: a convincing video appears to show an election worker destroying ballots; AI chatbots amplify fabricated news stories; or text messages falsely tell voters that polling places have moved or voting machines have been compromised.

AI has made falsehoods cheaper to create, harder to spot and easier to spread. Election officials increasingly view combating misinformation as a defining challenge of the midterms. The falsehoods can come from either party, though it was Trump's debunked claims of rigged voting machines and widespread voter fraud that spread widely online during the last election cycle.

When Bobbie Gross became clerk of Mesa County, Colorado, in 2023, she inherited a crisis of public trust. Her predecessor, Tina Peters, had allowed pro-Trump election-fraud conspiracy theorists to access county voting equipment after the 2020 election and was later convicted on felony charges after sensitive machine data was posted online.

At sentencing, a state judge said Peters had caused “immeasurable damage” to confidence in elections. Peters was released by Colorado’s Democratic governor in June. Peters has argued she was preserving election records and should not have been prosecuted.

Gross, a Republican, responded to the crisis with an aggressive campaign. She invited skeptics, activist groups and students to observe elections in person, used social media to explain every stage of the voting process and hired a technology firm to post ballot images online so voters could inspect them for themselves.

Confidence in local elections has "gotten significantly better," she said, though some voters remain convinced the system is rigged.

Cybersecurity holes

For years, election officials relied on Washington for help defending elections from foreign governments. Now many say that support is fading.

Election officials remain concerned about influence operations linked to Russia, China and Iran. Election-security researchers say those countries have sought to meddle in past US elections, though all three governments deny doing so. Here, too, many officials say Trump is making matters worse.

One of their most important partners was the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA. The agency, set up by Trump during his first term, tracked foreign influence campaigns, shared intelligence on emerging cyber threats and warned state and local officials when false information or malicious cyber activity appeared designed to undermine an election.

But CISA angered Trump in 2020 when its director declared that year's presidential election secure. Within weeks of Trump's return to office in 2025, his administration dismantled much of CISA’s infrastructure. CISA cut nearly 1,000 workers, about 30% of its total staff, and stopped funding a platform that shared real-time intelligence and analysis on election cyber threats with states.

The impact was almost immediate.

In a February 2025 email, CISA's regional director told New England secretaries of state that staff assigned to election security had been placed on administrative leave pending a review of the agency's mission. Those employees included some who ran efforts to counter disinformation and foreign influence operations. Reuters received the email through a public-records request.

Election officials from both parties said they were losing a critical source of expertise. In a March 2025 letter to the homeland security secretary, Pennsylvania’s Republican Secretary of State Al Schmidt warned of “serious consequences” from scaling back CISA's election-security work. He cited a 2024 case in which federal agencies quickly debunked a fabricated video falsely depicting an election worker destroying ballots. Counties would struggle to replicate that kind of forensic analysis on their own, Schmidt said.

In a statement, a CISA spokesperson said the agency “remains fully equipped and prepared to address any national security cyber threats that face our nation” and “is stronger than ever.”

Some election officials, however, are now building their own defenses.

In Maine, another state with a crucial US Senate race, Democratic Secretary of State Shenna Bellows said states are forging new partnerships with one another, nonprofits and private-sector cybersecurity groups to compensate for cuts in federal support. After CISA funding dried up last year, Maine expanded its reliance on private cybersecurity specialists, she said.

But the loss of federal cybersecurity support leaves many local offices exposed to threats they cannot handle alone, said Joseph Kirk, the election supervisor in heavily Republican Bartow County, Georgia.

"My IT director's great," Kirk said. "But he can't fight a nation-state. It takes a nation-state to fight a nation-state."