The Trump administration is asking a federal judge to quickly lift her recent ruling against major provisions of a presidential executive order on elections, arguing in an appeal that the court’s action will effectively prevent the government from putting new voting restrictions in place before the November election.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

Last week, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani halted President Donald Trump’s efforts to create centralized lists of adult citizens and give the U.S. Postal Service unprecedented authority over who can vote by mail. Her 37-page ruling concluded that the president did not have the constitutional authority to regulate state elections, as his March executive order tried to do.

The executive order directed the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Social Security Administration to create a nationwide list of verified U.S. citizens over 18, and thus presumably eligible to vote in federal elections. It also called on the U.S. Postal Service to create a system to handle and accept mail-in ballots only from voters on preapproved lists.

Talwani’s order prevents the federal government from enforcing those provisions of the order against the 24 jurisdictions (23 states and the District of Columbia) whose attorneys general and governors brought the lawsuit in federal court in Massachusetts. The list includes most Democratic-led and swing states, including Arizona, California, Michigan, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

This week, the Trump administration appealed Talwani’s ruling to the First Circuit Court of Appeals and said it is still proceeding with its efforts to set up the new system for the rest of the states. But it warned that the judge’s order will make it impossible for the U.S. Postal Service to create a bifurcated system for the November election, even if the administration ultimately prevails on appeal. Government attorneys asked Talwani to lift her ban by Monday.

The request for a quick decision suggests that the Trump administration may be trying to speed things up so the case reaches the U.S. Supreme Court as soon as possible.

“Operationally, it would not be possible for us to put a two-tiered system in place where one set of rules apply to the ballot mail of the Plaintiff States, and another applies to the remaining states,” Steven Monteith, the Postal Service’s chief customer and marketing officer and executive vice president, said in a court filing. “Doing so would cause operational confusion and significantly increase the complexity and efficiency of implementing any final rule.”

But the Trump administration’s nationwide efforts to use the Postal Service to regulate who gets ballots also hit a separate legal roadblock this week when another federal judge in Washington, D.C., ruled that the executive order violates a years-old agreement requiring the federal government to ensure voters who request mail-in ballots get them in time to ensure they can be counted.

U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan concluded that the Trump administration’s plans to send ballots only to voters on preapproved lists breached a 2021 agreement between the Postal Service and the NAACP meant to ensure that the agency prioritized ballot delivery. In contrast to Talwani’s ruling, Sullivan’s decision applies nationwide.

“These proposed rules directly undermine commitments that the Postal Service made to ensure mail-in ballots are delivered and counted,” said Anthony Ashton, senior associate general counsel for the NAACP, in a statement.

The U.S. Postal Service and Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

A federal judge on Monday blocked the Trump administration’s overhaul of an immigration verification system to check voter eligibility across the nation, striking down a central pillar of the government’s efforts to exercise more federal control over elections.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

The judge cited Texas’ use of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, database, which flagged several voters who were actually citizens as noncitizens, as evidence that it threatened both privacy and voting rights less than five months before the November midterm election.

“The federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” Judge Sparkle Sooknanan said in her 75-page ruling. “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”

Sooknanan’s decision does not eliminate SAVE, a decades-old immigration-status verification program. But it blocks the Trump administration’s 2025 overhaul of the system, which made it easier for states to check their voter rolls against the federal database, which includes individuals’ citizenship status and Social Security numbers.

Election officials have found that the modified database, however, is prone to error, something Sooknanan referenced in her decision. Federal officials, she wrote, “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.”

The ruling could strengthen challenges by voters who were removed, flagged, or placed under review by the system.

“States have partnered with the federal government to access the database and are actively removing United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information,” the judge wrote.

Voting rights groups, Trump administration react to ruling

The case was filed by the League of Women Voters and other groups who argued that the SAVE system was inaccurate and that using it to check voter rolls violated citizen privacy rights.

“Today’s decision is a resounding victory for voters,” said Marcia Johnson, chief of activation and justice for the League of Women Voters. “Efforts to create a federal voter database to facilitate voter purges threaten the fundamental right at the heart of our democracy.”

Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School who worked in the White House on democracy and voting rights issues under President Joe Biden, agreed that voters would benefit from the ruling.

“This provides incremental reassurance that they won’t be inaccurately singled out and have to jump through even more hoops to vote,” he said. “It stops the use of a deeply flawed process to cause trouble for real eligible citizens.”

However, James Percival, the general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security, which maintains the SAVE database, criticized the ruling as a misguided effort to block the Trump administration from trying to address voter fraud.

“It’s amazing how hard the Left will fight to stop us from solving problems they insist do not exist,” Percival said in a statement.

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Michael Morley, a professor at the Florida State University College of Law and faculty director of the FSU Election Law Center, said the ruling prevents the federal government from using all the information at its disposal to ensure that only eligible voters take part in elections.

“It seems to leave the government in a somewhat tenuous position of being able to provide citizenship data to states for voting purposes that is less accurate than it otherwise would be,” he said. “It restricts the government’s ability to take advantage of all of the most accurate sources of information it has in order, in most cases, to confirm people’s citizenship status.”

Judge cites Texas’ use of SAVE database in ruling

Texas intervened as a defendant in the case since it had been actively using SAVE to verify the citizenship status of its more than 18 million registered voters. The state gained access to the database in March 2025 after signing a memorandum of agreement with the Department of Homeland Security.

In October, the Texas Secretary of State’s Office announced SAVE had flagged 2,724 people as “potential noncitizens” and sent the list to county election officials to investigate. That process involved mailing letters to each person flagged, requesting additional information to verify their citizenship. If county officials received no response after 30 days, the person’s registration was canceled.

Some voters who responded to the notices turned out to be U.S. citizens after all; others had their registrations canceled, although a specific number hasn’t been released. Hundreds of other registrants who were flagged had registered at the Texas Department of Public Safety, the agency that issues driver’s licenses and state IDs. In Texas, proof of citizenship is required to obtain those documents.

In the ruling, Sooknanan said the state’s use of the database burdened and risked disenfranchising voters by incorrectly flagging naturalized citizens as noncitizens. The judge pointed to examples of voters in Texas who were U.S. citizens and had to provide proof of citizenship to keep their registration active and at least one U.S. citizen whose registration was revoked without their knowledge.

Sooknanan also pointed to an amicus brief filed by Travis County voter registration officials as evidence that the use of the overhauled SAVE database was inaccurate. The state flagged 97 potential noncitizens in Travis County. Voter registration officials found that about a quarter of those voters had registered at DPS and therefore had likely provided proof of citizenship.

Travis County officials were later able to confirm that at least 11 people who were flagged as potential noncitizens were in fact citizens.

“Texas threatened to revoke their voter registrations because of information obtained through the modified SAVE system; and they were required to confirm their citizenship to maintain their voter registrations,” Sooknanan said.

The secretary of state’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Celia Israel, the Travis County tax assessor-collector and voter registrar, said the ruling is “validating.”

“We have asked a lot of questions in the past several months about the SAVE database and about its accuracy,” Israel said. “The lawsuit confirms that there are inaccuracies and that it is worthwhile for us officials at the county level to ask the state questions.”

Other civil rights groups and voters have also challenged Texas’ use of the database in a federal court in Austin. The lawsuit is still pending.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Natalia Contreras is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

Every week, it feels like President Donald Trump’s administration is making a new piece of news about elections. It is investigating past elections in at least four states. It is exploring what feels like every possible avenue to get ahold of voter data in individual states and counties. It is attempting to create new administrative hurdles to mail voting and prioritizing major voting legislation over all else.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

But it all ties back to one thing: the repeated assertions from the president and his allies that noncitizens are voting in significant numbers.

No evidence has emerged to support that. Election officials and experts have repeatedly said those assertions are false and such cases are rare. But they appear to be the animating force behind everything the administration is doing.

Scattered reports that investigators for the Department of Homeland Security are requesting detailed data on individual registered voters confirm the administration’s ongoing focus on finding and prosecuting any such cases.

Earlier this month, the New York Times reported that the Justice Department was pressing prosecutors to focus on 90 open investigations into potential noncitizens voting as a top priority. Federal prosecutors have already brought some cases against individuals that officials are touting, including one in Louisiana last week.

But despite the administration’s zeal, it isn’t clear how many such cases there are to bring. States have run more than 60 million records of registered voters through a revamped federal immigration database that the administration has encouraged state election officials to use to validate the citizenship of registered voters, according to the Department of Homeland Security. That’s around a third of the voters registered in the U.S., according to estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Out of those, the department told Votebeat, the system has flagged around 24,000 as potential noncitizens — about 0.04%. All those cases “have been referred to ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations for further investigation,” the department said in a statement.

As Votebeat reported in April, the Department of Homeland Security is sending subpoenas to local elections officials in Texas, searching for detailed information about individual voters. Investigators have also contacted at least one county in North Carolina, a development reported last week by Axios.

The Department of Homeland Security said it is “actively rooting out and investigating election fraud wherever it can be found,” and declined to comment on specific cases.

Twenty-four thousand potential cases sounds like a lot, but election officials have already found that at least some of those potential noncitizens have turned out to be citizens.

It also isn’t clear how many of those people have actually voted. Experts across the political spectrum agree that noncitizens who don’t understand the laws may accidentally register to vote, so that in and of itself is not necessarily a sign of intentional fraud. The Department of Homeland Security didn’t respond to questions about how many cases of noncitizen voting the agency has documented, or how many registered voters flagged as potential noncitizens have turned out to be citizens.

But administration officials and those who support the investigations have been quick to dismiss questions about whether the small number of cases means noncitizen voting isn’t a big issue.

Last weekend, CNN anchor Kasie Hunt asked Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin about data from the conservative Heritage Foundation that showed only 25 cases of people being prosecuted for voter fraud where citizenship was an issue.

“Well, 25 is too many,” said Mullin. “It’s kind of like one illegal death, one individual that dies from the hands of an illegal is one too many. It’s all preventable. One person voting illegally is one too many. We shouldn’t have to worry about even one.”

Justin Riemer, president of Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections, a conservative nonprofit focused on voting issues, agreed with Mullin’s perspective.

“Why is it such a bad thing that they are enforcing federal law?” Riemer said. “To me, any election crime is serious and needs to be prosecuted. I don’t think it’s a good system that this happens, regardless of how often it happens.”

Ken Cuccinelli, who during the first Trump administration was acting deputy secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, said outside investigations are no substitute for federal investigations that have much more authority to examine potential fraud.

“It may be that they bring nothing of it and that will tell us more than anything else, but I suspect that’s unlikely,” he said.

Ultimately, Cuccinelli said, “this is as much about confidence in who is participating in the voter rolls and whether our states themselves are helping, hiding, or hurting the security and transparency of our elections system.”

Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School who worked in the White House on democracy and voting rights issues under Joe Biden, characterized the Trump administration’s search as an unproductive hunt for a “boogeyman” to cast doubt on American elections.

“The notion that noncitizens are voting in elections in sufficient quantities to swing those elections, particularly in statewide contests, is a fiction,” he said.

Lorraine Minnite, a Rutgers University political science professor and author of a book on voter fraud, suggested that the Trump administration investigations were an effort to create “maximum chaos and intimidation” across the country.

“The picture of the federal government sending Homeland Security to investigate is such overkill that you have to believe that they are trying to create a spectacle to intimidate people and go on a fishing expedition using bad data,” she said.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

Federal officials have served a subpoena on one of the nation’s leading nonprofit voter outreach groups, which has financially supported the Ohio election advocacy group at the center of a deepening investigation by the Trump administration, according to a source familiar with the probe.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

The FBI served the subpoena on America Votes, a Washington-based organization founded by prominent Democratic leaders that works to turn out voters nationwide, the sources said.

America Votes, which has given the Ohio Organizing Collaborative at least $500,000 in recent years, according to its tax filings, issued a statement Wednesday confirming it had received a subpoena “asking for basic records related to funding of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative. We have been informed America Votes is not a target of the investigation.”

The subpoena signals a broader FBI investigation into the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a statewide nonprofit group founded in 2007 that works on voting rights efforts. The Ohio Organizing Collaborative’s sister organization, Ohio Organizing Campaign, said it registered nearly 160,000 Ohio voters in 2024, describing the effort as the largest independent voter registration program in the country.

Prentiss Haney, an Ohio Organizing Collaborative board member and former director of the group, said the FBI appeared to be seeking information from America Votes and other voting rights groups that worked with his organization.

“This is very far reaching,” he said. “They seem to be fishing for any- and everything related to civil rights and voting rights infrastructure.”

The FBI and Justice Department did not respond to emails seeking comment. Last week, FBI special agents searched the Ohio Organizing Collaborative’s offices and questioned staff members and volunteers about potential voter registration fraud, according to Haney and others familiar with the investigation.

Haney said he did not know the full extent of the FBI investigation.

The FBI probe comes amid rising concerns ahead of the November midterm election about Trump administration efforts to question the legitimacy of voting in America. Trump has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that voter fraud cost him the 2020 presidential election. Most recently, he accused Democrats, again without evidence, of rigging results in the California primary earlier this month.

FBI agents have seized ballots from the 2020 presidential election in Fulton County, Georgia, and secured election records in Maricopa County, Arizona.

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, has been at the forefront of efforts among elections officials to scrutinize potential voter fraud. Last year, LaRose referred more than 1,200 cases to the Justice Department for criminal investigation, largely related to alleged unlawful voter registration of voting activity. LaRose said he found more than 1,000 noncitizens who had registered to vote, including 167 noncitizens who appeared to have voted in federal elections between 2018 and 2024.

But the figures represent allegations, not yet proven cases. Previous batches of LaRose voter-fraud referrals have produced few prosecutions: AP reported that of 621 criminal referrals sent to Ohio’s attorney general, prosecutors secured indictments against only nine people for voting as noncitizens over a decade.

Voter fraud is exceedingly rare across the country and studies, audits, and court cases have found no evidence that it occurs at anything close to the scale needed to alter modern statewide or federal election outcomes except in very unusual cases.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

Since returning to office last year, Trump has repeatedly tried to remake American elections, including by issuing two executive orders that would erect new federal rules and restrictions on voting and various aspects of elections. Voting rights advocates and a variety of states have filed lawsuits that have already frozen key tentpoles of Trump’s first executive order on voting and could do the same for the second. If Trump wants to see these measures impact this November’s elections, his administration has to move fast.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

In recent days, the Trump administration has taken new steps to erect the architecture it would need to implement key pieces of the president’s most recent election executive order, which called in March for the Department of Homeland Security to create “State Citizenship Lists” of all U.S. citizens who are over 18.

In response to the order, the Department of Homeland Security unveiled plans to set up a special system by the end of this month — then revised its plans just days later, showing how quickly the administration is moving to try and put these measures in place.

The executive order also calls on the U.S. Postal Service to set up a new process where it could block voters from receiving mail-in ballots if they are not on a vetted list provided to the federal government 60 days before an election, and the agency has proposed new rules to do so. Many election officials say the move could cause chaos, and is beyond the president’s authority.

Setting aside the constitutional questions around the efforts, voting rights advocates say that it could be practically very difficult for the agencies involved to create a workable system before the November election.

“Elections are like a battleship, it’s not like you can turn them around on the fly,” said Rick Hasen, a UCLA political science professor and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project. “It seems exceedingly unlikely that any of this will be in place by November.”

The administration’s court filings hint at some of the difficulties.

On Friday, June 5, the Trump administration filed a four-paragraph notice to a court in Boston overseeing a legal challenge to the March executive order. In that notice, the Department of Homeland Security said it was moving ahead with plans to allow states to check voter eligibility by submitting their entire voter lists to a federal database known as Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE.

It also said the department would create a portal that would allow state election officials to “securely access citizenship-related data” from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, the Social Security Administration, and the U.S. Department of State — by June 30.

But three days later, this past Monday, the Trump administration changed plans and filed a new notice with the court, outlining a new memorandum rescinding the previously stated policies. Per the notice, that memo walks back some of the specifics of the earlier implementation plan, promising only to provide by June 30 “a mechanism for States to receive secure, state-focused citizenship-related information from each agency.”

The previously mentioned portal would come sometime later this year, the revised notice said, and the new memo also rescinded the proposal that would let states submit their voter rolls to SAVE because, the notice said, that approach wasn’t specifically called for in the executive order.

Some states have already used the system — which was previously used to verify immigrants’ eligibility for benefits — to check voter eligibility after the administration revamped the database and vigorously encouraged states to do so, but others have questioned the accuracy of the SAVE system and declined to use it.

The initial notice also said that the Homeland Security department “contemplates working with” the U.S. Postal Service to access its data on mail ballots and use it to “monitor mail-in and absentee ballot flows, identify anomalies that may suggest voter fraud or misuse, and generate authorized investigative leads.”

In the second notice, the administration instead told the court the two agencies were having “preliminary conversations” on potential data-sharing, and decisions would be contingent on final legal and policy determinations.

Beyond the logistical challenges, the proposals are facing legal challenges that could block them from taking effect. A coalition of Democratic party committees and some nonprofit groups have challenged the Trump executive order as unconstitutional. And while a federal judge in Washington, D.C. declined to immediately halt major provisions in that case, a federal judge in Boston could still do so. That judge expressed concerns last month during a hearing on a separate case brought by Democratic officials from twenty-three states, the District of Columbia, and a different group of nonprofits, and is expected to rule soon.

John Davisson, deputy director at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, called the latest Trump administration move “a five-alarm fire for the protection of privacy and voting rights” across the country.

“Building a citizenship registry is beyond the federal government’s power, illegal under the Privacy Act, impossible to construct without introducing catastrophic error, and guaranteed to cause untold numbers of perfectly legal voters to be denied their right to vote if implemented,” he said.

The Trump administration says its efforts are a way to integrate federal systems to help ensure there is no fraud in the country’s electoral system.

The Department of Homeland Security didn’t respond to a request for comment. In April, Lauren Bis, a spokesperson, said SAVE “is a critical tool for state and local governments to safeguard the integrity of elections across the country.” The Trump administration has sued a majority of U.S. states in an effort to secure access to their voter registration databases.

Votebeat Brunch: Is your election rigged? Separating fact from fiction.

California’s primary election set off a new wave of unsubstantiated allegations — including from Trump — that the vote was rigged. To separate fact from fiction, Votebeat spoke to Renee DiResta, an associate research professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy and an expert in disinformation. DiResta served for five years as technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory and co-led a nonpartisan Election Integrity Partnership that studied misinformation during the 2020 election. The interview was conducted in writing and has been lightly edited for clarity, brevity, and style.

Q: The California election has triggered a new flood of unsupported allegations that the vote is rigged. What advice do you have for voters trying to separate fact from fiction?

Many election rumors spread because they are emotionally compelling, not because they’re supported by facts. When people encounter a claim that an election was “rigged,” they should ask a few questions:

- What is the original source of the claim?

- Is there any evidence, or just screenshots, anecdotes, or speculation? “It just seems weird” isn’t evidence.

- Have election officials, courts, or independent observers said anything?

- Do multiple credible sources support the claim?

People should also be careful about treating isolated irregularities as proof of widespread fraud. Every election has some mistakes, and administrative errors. Those are not automatically evidence that they were manipulated. Officials will often explain what happened quickly, but you sometimes have to go check because their posts generally don’t go viral. A useful rule of thumb is: The stronger the claim, the stronger the evidence must be.

Q: What are some tools people can use to get reliable information amid a flood of misinformation?

A good starting point is official election information from state and local election offices, since they can provide direct information about procedures, vote counting, and certification, and they know the local rules better than anyone else. Fact checks are helpful as well. Keep in mind that getting answers takes time. Asking an AI for facts isn’t going to get you an immediate answer in most cases because it has to work with what’s out there, too. Asking Grok or another AI can help, but it’s sometimes dependent on how recent or specific the issue is. Be wary and double check, or check again later.

Q: Is there more state and federal officials should be doing to address election misinformation?

Election officials who communicate quickly and responsively about voting procedures, counting, audits, and certification tend to leave less room for rumors to thrive. Communicating in advance can help, too. And strengthening influencer disclosure rules would go a long way toward shifting incentives.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

The FBI agents arrived at David Bolter’s Milwaukee home on a cool, cloudy Wednesday morning in late May. They were armed with a list of questions for the 2020 poll worker, who had raised concerns about the way local officials handled the 2020 election, Bolter told Votebeat.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

President Donald Trump relied on Bolter’s claims in an unsuccessful 2020 lawsuit that sought to throw out more than 220,000 votes. That would have been more than enough to move Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes from Democrat Joe Biden, who won the state, to Trump. Though courts, several election reviews, and many audits rejected Trump’s claims, the Republican never stopped believing that he was cheated out of the presidency in 2020.

That appears to be why, last month, the FBI sent agents back to Milwaukee to question Bolter as part of an expanding national effort by the second Trump administration to investigate long-debunked claims of fraud in the 2020 election.

The investigation into the 2020 election appears to be relying on already disproven allegations from people like Bolter. Bolter declined to divulge more about his conversation with the FBI, which has not been previously reported, but allegations from Bolter’s 2020 affidavit were central to some conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. For example, he alleged that somebody in Milwaukee’s absentee ballot counting facility announced around midnight on Election Day that a “huge truckload of ballots” was going to be delivered — an accusation for which there has so far appeared to be no additional evidence.

Around the same time Bolter says he talked to the FBI, two plainclothes agents with FBI badges showed up at the apartment of a former Milwaukee resident and 2020 poll worker about an affidavit she submitted, according to the former poll worker, who asked to be identified only by her first name, Christine, to give her the freedom to discuss an ongoing investigation.

Christine had also submitted an affidavit about the 2020 election, saying election workers had been told that all votes were counted, but she then saw workers continuing to count ballots around midnight. That affidavit was the focus of the agents’ questions, Christine told Votebeat.

“I suspected wrongdoing, but I’m not saying that it actually happened,” she said. “I’m just one lowly person that was working there.”

During the interview, she added, an agent showed her a photograph of Claire Woodall, the former Milwaukee election chief, asking her if she recognized the former election official who has been central to false allegations about the 2020 election. She identified her by name. Woodall didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Caroline Clancy, a spokesperson for the FBI’s Milwaukee office, declined to comment.

While investigators seem mainly focused on the 2020 vote, some elections experts believe the Trump administration’s wide-ranging probe is actually designed to create more doubts among Americans about future elections, as Republicans face strong political headwinds that could cost them control of Congress later this year.

“This isn’t about the 2020 election, this is about the 2026 and 2028 elections,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research. “This is about intimidating election officials. This is about creating a stream of disinformation designed to delegitimize an election the president may believe he’s going to lose. This is designed by the president’s underlings to satisfy the unrealistic expectations of a president that still cannot comprehend that he lost an election that he definitely lost, and it’s incredibly destabilizing.”

Wisconsin is the latest known target of the Trump administration’s 2020 investigation. The FBI is looking to interview elections officials and Milwaukee police officers in what some worry could be a precursor to an effort to seize ballots from the 2020 presidential race, as it already has in Georgia.

The Trump administration is revisiting allegations of election fraud that have been repeatedly scrutinized

In January, federal investigators seized 600 boxes of ballots from the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia. The heavily Democratic county, home to Atlanta, was key to Biden’s narrow 2020 victory in the state.

As in Wisconsin, the FBI in Georgia has built its investigation on allegations that have already been repeatedly scrutinized by audits, investigations, and courts without unearthing any evidence of fraud or tampering that could have overturned the results.

The Georgia search represented an unprecedented intervention by the federal government into local administration. Even more unusually, Tulsi Gabbard, who will step down at end of this month as director of national intelligence, personally oversaw the seizure and arranged for Trump to speak directly to the FBI agents via cell phone after they carried out the operation.

The Trump administration investigations stretch from Arizona, where federal officials subpoenaed computerized records of a partisan review state lawmakers conducted of Maricopa County’s 2020 election, to Puerto Rico, where the Office of the Director of National Intelligence procured voting machines to examine for potential security risks.

The administration’s investigations aren’t entirely limited to 2020. The U.S. Department of Justice sent a letter in April to Wayne County, Michigan — home to Detroit — demanding all ballots cast in the 2024 election, which Trump won. But even in that case, to support the request, the Justice Department cited accusations of fraud made after the 2020 election, including a lawsuit that was quickly dismissed after a judge wrote that “plaintiffs’ interpretation of events is incorrect and not credible.” Wayne County never handed over the ballots, because it doesn’t have possession of them.

What do the 2020 elections mean for 2026?

The FBI faces challenges in pursuing cases tied to the 2020 election since the five-year statute of limitations that applies to most of the likely charges expired last year. Law enforcement veterans said it is possible that the Justice Department could pursue broader conspiracy charges in the case, but the prospect remains unclear.

FBI Director Kash Patel suggested in April that the Justice Department would soon announce arrests related to the 2020 election, but that has not yet occurred. Officials with the FBI and Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment.

John Keller, a former acting head of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section who resigned in 2025 after refusing the Trump administration’s demands to drop corruption charges against then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams, said the administration appeared to be trying to normalize federal investigations of state elections to pave the way for future intervention.

“They are using enforcement directed at the 2020 election as a test run for what they can get away with on Election Day this year, or after, to try and delay certification or invalidate an election” if the results don’t go their way, he said.

Injecting federal law enforcement officials into an ongoing election is a more extreme and serious action than investigating a past one, and it could face stiffer opposition. But it’s clear, at least, that the administration is scrutinizing current elections closely.

Trump last week blasted California’s long vote counting process in its primary election and asserted that Democrats were trying to steal the election and federal authorities were investigating. Last month, Trump also said he was ordering the Justice Department to investigate an error that led to some voters in Maryland receiving ballots for the wrong party in the state’s upcoming primary. State officials in both cases have explained the true causes of the issues and that nothing nefarious was behind them.

Any effort to seize ballots in an ongoing election would create unprecedented new issues, such as a breach in the chain of custody over cast ballots, that could prevent election officials from declaring a winner and throw results into uncertainty.

Catherine Engelbrecht, co-founder of the Texas-based conservative group True the Vote, which has promoted debunked theories about the 2020 election, said she understands Trump’s intentions but believes the 2020 election questions should have been resolved “in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election.”

“This is not necessarily the way I would have recommended that it would be handled,” she said. “The fact that it wasn’t addressed has left this lingering void.”

In most cases, however, Trump’s claims of voter fraud were addressed in the wake of the 2020 election. Time and again, courts, state investigations, and even the Justice Department concluded that there was no evidence of problems or fraud that would have changed the results.

Engelbrecht said she views the Trump administration’s ongoing investigations as an effort to dig into long-standing concerns about the voting process it wants to address for future elections.

“The past is prologue,” she said. “If we don’t understand what happened, we are doomed to repeat it.”

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.