Donald Trump said at the beginning of this year that Republicans should “nationalise the voting”.
“The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over, we should take over the voting in at least 15 places,” he told Dan Bongino, the conservative commentator and former deputy FBI director.
Those of us who knew he wasn’t joking have spent months rehearsing for the possibility that he’ll try to take over the US midterm elections in two weeks’ time.
In fact, for much of this year, I’ve been sitting in on meetings that would’ve seemed paranoid under any other president, run by groups preparing for Trump to try to hijack the ballot boxes and overturn the results. Some are suing him in federal court over his executive order to take control of election rules, his use of voter databases and more. Some have organised protests that have drawn millions into the streets. Others are providing legal support to poll workers or training local prosecutors to charge federal agents who break election law.
Dozens of organisations are involved, and they are meeting more often as 3 November gets closer. There have been war games with current and former government officials, as well as sessions on “red lines” — the extreme things Trump might do and which should send everyone into the streets.
I take the threat seriously, because I used to work for the man. And I saw the earliest signs of how he likes to put his thumb on the scales in elections.
In August 2018, I brought together the heads of the FBI, the intelligence community and my own department, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), at the White House podium to warn Russia not to interfere in that year’s midterms. We were concerned they might try to meddle again.
But Trump called afterward, angry. “That was a terrible press conference,” he raged at one of the cabinet members who participated. “Why did you do it? Who put you up to this?”
Weeks later at the United Nations, he publicly accused China of trying to interfere in the midterms, but he said nothing about the country his team had actually told him was a threat: Russia. That’s when it clicked for me. Trump didn’t seem to mind foreign interference in American elections, if it was helpful to him. The Russians had backed him in 2016, and he seemed to welcome their interference in 2018. What I suspect irked him was that nations like China could use propaganda to undercut him personally, or his hand-picked candidates.
Back then, I thought the selective enforcement was outrageous. We shouldn’t let any foreign nation hack our democracy, whether or not they were aligned with the President’s political interests. Of course, it got far worse in 2020. Trump fanned the flames of baseless “voter fraud” claims after he lost, and for the first time in the history of the United States, a president attempted to prevent the transfer of power.
So when Trump said earlier this year that his party “ought to nationalise voting” — i.e. take over the election process, which is run by the individual 50 states — we took him seriously. The comment came weeks after an unprecedented raid in which FBI agents seized 2020 election ballots in Georgia, in the same county in which Trump was indicted for trying to overturn the 2020 election. The charges were dropped after he won in 2024, because Justice Department policy bars prosecuting a sitting president, not because Trump was exonerated.
That’s when it really hit home: this time could be even more serious. But unlike 2020, when most Americans were appalled to see a president try to overturn an election, we’d be ready.
While most of us don’t necessarily expect the military to be sent to the polling stations to grab the ballots, we have to prepare for the possibility. Trump said earlier this year that one of his regrets in 2020 was not sending the National Guard to seize voting machines. Another fear based on past behaviour is that Trump’s team will use government powers to create doubt about results in states he loses — justifying lawsuits, seizures and delays.
Let’s look at Michigan, where the Maga candidate for Senate, Mike Rogers, is trailing Democrat Abdul El-Sayed. For the past year, the Justice Department has demanded states hand over full voter rolls, including sensitive personal data, allegedly so it can certify there are no “non-citizens” on the registration lists. Like most other states, Michigan refused, and federal courts have twice backed them up. If Rogers loses, many of us expect a possible Trump administration lawsuit arguing that Michigan’s refusal means its results can’t be trusted.
The “non-citizen” voter appears to be the White House’s likeliest reason given for interference, despite the fact these claims keep falling to pieces. In Nevada this year, DHS breathlessly declared that it had found nearly 16,000 non-citizens on the voter rolls and demanded that they be investigated. The department later conceded it could stand behind only 185 of those names. Then the state’s review found none of them were non-citizens. But that hasn’t stopped DOJ officials from warning election workers that they could be prosecuted if they knowingly count mail-in ballots from anyone the federal government flags.
Trump has been even blunter in his warnings on Truth Social: “They will all go to jail for a long period of time!!!”
On Monday, ProPublica reported that Trump appointees had asked CISA, the election security agency I helped create, to secretly buy a voting machine, hack it, send the results to the White House and tell no one, including the manufacturer. Staff refused, but it raised the spectre that the White House might be trying to quietly find weaknesses, which might allow it to send the FBI after the election to seize ballots for a “recount” because of suddenly discovered vulnerabilities. A spokesperson for the White House defended Trump’s handling of election security in a statement to ProPublica.
So what would Trump’s objections, prosecutions and possibly ballot seizures be designed to do? Our first concern would be a possible attempt to overturn legitimate results. Secondly, it could be an effort to buy time to keep power from changing hands. Each step gives Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson a reason to delay seating the new Congress on 3 January. The conservative former judge J Michael Luttig has warned about this, and the possibility of “another Jan 6”.
Enough uncertainty might allow Trump’s party to keep its hands on Congress, even if voters have chosen to put the political opposition in charge.
So what are we doing about it?
First is turnout. Last year, I told organisers the watchword for 2026 should be a phrase coined by Trump himself: “too big to rig.” We’d need wide enough margins so that there would be nothing to litigate. History shows that it’s tough to steal elections when the people have turned out in such overwhelming numbers — when they’ve waited in line for hours at the polls — that they know in their bones the opposition dominated. That was the point of this past Saturday, when more than 3,000 No Kings events were organised coast-to-coast in America to get people to vote early.
“This is anti-election sabotage,” Ezra Levin, the co-founder of the group that organises No Kings, told me.
The second area of preparation is for legal warfare. Many of our groups are working to debunk potential stolen-election claims now, so that by the time the lawsuits arrive from Trump, voters already suspect “non-citizen” numbers of being a ruse to delay results the President doesn’t like. Lawsuits are being drafted in all 50 states in advance in order to push back against potential inaccurate claims from the Trump administration.
Jennifer Roberts, a former mayor of Charlotte who now works on election protection with the Carter Center, expects the 60 or so election lawsuits of 2024 to become closer to 600, and points out that lawyers on a hotline can get a judge to order federal agents away from a polling place within hours. Local prosecutors are ready, too.
The third arena will be the streets. The pro-democracy groups are working out when they might urge people to stay home and when to urge them to flood the streets. The emphasis is on keeping protests peaceful, because I know from firsthand experience that Trump could be hoping for any excuse for a crackdown. One broken window and he might declare another emergency and call the opposition radicals. If we deny him that, we’d be able to take another slogan from him: “Stop the steal.”
I spoke on Saturday in Washington, DC at the No Kings protest on the ground where Trump wants to build a monument to himself, a soaring triumphal arch. Half the crowd seemed to be current or former federal employees. A year ago, people like that were afraid to “like” a post criticising the President, and with good reason. The Trump administration was firing federal employees en masse, including individuals believed to be anti-Trump. On Saturday, those people carried signs while cars drove past honking.
If you ask anyone who’s been in election protection war games, they’ll tell you that there could be dark days ahead. But from the polling to the mood in the streets, there is also a sense that there are more of us than them. More Americans, across party lines, are angry about corruption and want the rule of law back than support a man who seems to want to run the elections himself.
The last time Trump said “stop the steal”, it was false. This time, if he tries to steal it himself, millions of people intend to stop him.