Experts urge courts to step in as MAGA ballot seizures threaten 'widespread chaos'

Five and one-half years after losing to Joe Biden, U.S. President Donald Trump continues to promote, without evidence, the repeatedly debunked claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him. FBI agents, on orders from Trump loyalist and FBI Director Kash Patel, seized hundreds of ballots from an elections office in Fulton County, Georgia in January — and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) later targeted election ballots in Arizona and Michigan, two other states that Biden won. These ballot seizures, according to Wired reporter Kim Zetter, are raising concerns from elections experts that Trump allies could create major chaos in the 2026 midterms.

"As U.S. voters look to the November midterms," Zetter reports in Wired, "the Trump Administration is obsessed with looking back to past elections, seizing ballots cast years ago in several states in search, it claims, of fraud or other malfeasance. But experts believe the goal may be more varied…. These federal seizures have even trickled down to the local level. In March, a Republican sheriff in California, (Chad Bianco) obtained a warrant to seize about 650,000 ballots from a statewide redistricting election held in November."

The Wired reporter continues, "He announced, with no evident authority to do so, that his deputies would conduct a recount. Election experts fear the trend could grow, creating widespread chaos after the midterms, if courts fail to scrutinize what appear to be politically motivated requests from groups intent on undermining election outcomes they don't like."

One of the elections experts who is sounding the alarm is Gowri Ramachandran of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University Law School.

Ramachandran told Wired, "It's really important for the public, for grand juries, for judges to not allow these actions.… to become some kind of precedent. This is not, and shouldn't be, a rubber-stamp issue."

Anna Baldwin, director of voting rights litigation at the Campaign Legal Center, is sounding the alarm as well — telling Wired, "There is understandable concern that this is a dry run for going after ballot seizures in an ongoing election. Obviously, the concern is you now have highly placed election denialists within the federal government who have the ability to use the enormous power the federal government has, and to abuse it."

Chris Edelson, an election law expert and political scientist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is hoping that judges will stand up to these ballot seizures but isn't sure that they will.

Edelson told Wired, "You can't count on anything. Trump has shown that normal rules don’t always matter if you get people to go along with you.… I expect most judges will not go along, but it only takes one, or some."