Earlier this year, we asked a group of election experts about what worries they had about the administration of the 2026 midterms. Now, let’s check in on how the American people are feeling.

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

Several polls in recent months have asked about people’s confidence in the election, the likelihood of voter fraud, and how — if at all — election laws should be changed. Their responses defy easy categorization: Many are concerned about fraud and support efforts to weed it out, but they’re also worried about voter disenfranchisement and oppose federal intervention in elections.

Polls: Many Americans are concerned about voter fraud

With President Donald Trump continuing to spread fear about widespread voter fraud in the midterms — despite his claims about past elections being repeatedly debunked — about half of Americans say they have concerns along these lines. According to an Ipsos/Reuters poll conducted April 15-20, 46% of American adults agreed with the statement that noncitizens cast a large number of fraudulent ballots in U.S. elections, and 50% were very or somewhat concerned about ineligible voters casting a ballot in the midterms.

Trump’s invections against mail voting have also trickled down to the general public: The same survey found that 53% of adults were concerned about fraudulent mail-in or absentee ballots in the midterms.

More generally, a Marist University/NPR/PBS News poll conducted March 2-4 found that 50% of adults thought it was likely that there would be voter fraud in the November elections. By contrast, none of the experts in Votebeat’s informal survey thought it was likely that a significant number of ineligible voters would cast ballots in 2026. Studies have repeatedly shown that noncitizen voting and voter fraud by mail are exceedingly rare.

It’s important to look at polls in the aggregate, and not every survey agrees that such a large percentage of Americans have been convinced by Trump’s claims. In a YouGov/CBS News poll conducted March 16-19, only 23% of adults said they thought noncitizens vote “a lot” in federal elections, although an additional 27% said they do so “sometimes.” And just 32% thought voter fraud and irregularities were generally widespread in U.S. elections; 57% thought they occurred only in a few isolated incidents, and only 11% said there was no voter fraud or irregularities whatsoever.

Still, 38% of YouGov/CBS News’ respondents thought “a lot” of fraud takes place when ballots are cast by mail, compared to just 13% who said the same of ballots cast in person, and 42% said ineligible voters casting ballots was a “major problem” — not quite half, but a meaningful minority.

Unsurprisingly, the slice of the populace that is most likely to fret about fraud is Republicans. For example, 54% of Republicans thought there were widespread fraud and irregularities in U.S. elections versus just 14% of Democrats and 28% of independents. And 69% of Republicans said that ineligible voters were a major problem, compared with 20% of Democrats and 39% of independents.

Americans are also worried about voter access, federal troops, and attempts to overturn election results

Fraud isn’t the only concern that Americans have about elections, though. In fact, all three polls found that more people are worried about disenfranchisement than fraud. In the Ipsos/Reuters poll, 57% said they were very or somewhat concerned about eligible voters being prevented from voting, and 44% of respondents to the YouGov/CBS News poll identified that as a major problem. And according to Marist, 58% of adults think it’s likely that many people will show up to vote in 2026 and be told they’re not eligible.

When it comes to the tradeoff between voting access and security, Americans are slightly more likely to prioritize access. When Marist asked respondents what concerned them more, 59% said “making sure that everyone who wants to vote can do so,” while 41% said “making sure that no one votes who is not eligible.”

That also comes across in Americans’ opposition to stationing federal agents at voting locations. According to Ipsos/Reuters, people disagree with the idea that federal law enforcement should be present at polling places, 55% to 40%, and they disagree with sending National Guard troops there by an even wider margin: 67% to 28%. However, in the Marist poll, only 54% of adults opposed having the National Guard at polling places, while 46% supported it. The difference might be explained by the fact that Marist specified that they would be there “to monitor November’s election” — a reminder that how pollsters word their surveys matters.

What really keeps Americans up at night, though, is what could happen after votes are cast. In the YouGov/CBS News poll, 47% of adults said “votes not being counted properly” is a major problem with U.S. elections, and 55% said “attempts to overturn official election results” are. Similarly, 69% of Ipsos/Reuters’ respondents said they were very or somewhat concerned about attempts to overturn official election results — by far the highest share of any scenario posed to them.

Americans have mixed views of Trump’s election agenda

So people are plenty worried about how the midterms will go — but what, if anything, do they think should be done about it? Well, the polls found that Americans have complicated, even contradictory, views on that.

First — as Trump has boasted many times — Americans strongly support many of Republicans’ plans to tighten election rules. About 80% of adults support requiring voters to show ID, according to both YouGov/CBS News (which asked specifically about photo IDs) and Ipsos/Reuters (which just asked about “official ID”). And per YouGov/CBS News, 66% of adults favor requiring people to show proof of citizenship in order to register to vote. Respondents said, 43% to 29%, that such a requirement would do more to prevent illegal voting by noncitizens than to prevent legal voting by citizens (28% said it would do both things equally).

There is, of course, pending federal legislation to implement a proof-of-citizenship requirement, but interestingly, the YouGov/CBS News poll found that people narrowly oppose one of those bills, the SAVE Act, 31% to 28%. However, the important number there is the 41% who weren’t sure where they stood on it — probably a symptom of the fact that many Americans aren’t closely following the debate over the bill in Washington. Indeed, 36% of adults told YouGov/CBS News that they don’t even know what’s in it!

On the other hand, Americans clearly aren’t on board with Trump’s movement to end mail voting. According to YouGov/CBS News, 49% of adults believed that mail voting should be available to all voters who want it, while 39% thought it should only be allowed for voters who can’t vote in person. Only 12% thought it should never be permitted.

The same poll also found Americans are skeptical of the Trump administration’s efforts to get more involved in election administration. Only 41% of respondents thought there should be more federal oversight of elections than there is now. An identical 41% thought the current level of oversight was sufficient, and 18% thought there should be even less than there is now.

Similarly, when YouGov/CBS News asked who should have the final say in how states administer their elections, only 29% said the federal government. A whopping 71% said it should be up to the individual states.

Americans trust local election officials

The public’s preference for local election administration reflects a broader truth: For all their anxieties on a national level, Americans still largely feel good about how the midterms will be run in their neck of the woods.

In the Marist poll, 66% of adults said they were confident that their state or local government would run a fair and accurate election this November, although that was slightly lower than the share who thought that ahead of the 2020, 2022, or 2024 elections. And per YouGov/CBS News, 35% of adults have “a lot” of confidence in their local election administrators, 39% have “some,” and only 26% have “not much” or “none at all.”

Finally, about 70% of respondents to the YouGov/CBS News and Ipsos/Reuters polls said they were confident that their own vote would be counted correctly. And Marist found that 63% had either “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence that ballots cast in the election would be counted accurately.

Notably, these questions were the only ones in this article without a significant partisan split: For example, 68% of Democrats had confidence that 2026 ballots would be counted accurately, and 67% of Republicans did.

Overall, Americans’ views on election administration can seem to be all over the map. They’re worried about elections getting overturned, but also think vote-counting will be accurate. They take fraud seriously and support election-security measures, but they’re concerned that voters will be disenfranchised.

It doesn’t necessarily make for a cohesive narrative, but it’s possible to reconcile all the data above: It’s not unreasonable to want both fraud-free elections and full voter access; to support federal laws but feel they should be implemented on the state level; and to worry about worst-case scenarios but acknowledge they are unlikely to happen. The partisan debates over voting that we’ve all grown accustomed to don’t leave a lot of room for nuance, but arguments made by politicians and activists are often merely archetypes; Americans’ actual beliefs are considerably more complex.

Nathaniel Rakich is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Nathaniel at nrakich@votebeat.org.

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

There are always unanswered questions heading into any election. But usually those questions are more along the lines of “who’s going to win?” and less “will the federal government interfere with the election?”

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

But here in 2026, President Donald Trump’s broadsides against the legitimacy of U.S. elections and efforts to overhaul election laws have generated lots of uncertainty — and anxiety — about whether this will be a normal election year. Election officials and voters alike are left to wonder whether there will be new requirements for voters, physical interventions at the polls, or attempts to overturn results after the fact.

Despite seemingly endless speculation, no one knows for sure how likely any of these things is. But to get the most well-informed assessments, we turned to the people who spend the most time thinking about elections.

We asked 37 experts in the field of election administration — academics, lawyers, former election officials, etc. — to answer 26 questions about the likelihood of various scenarios coming to pass in the 2026 midterms.

Their answers reflect a general sense of cautious optimism about the most dire scenarios — such as an election getting overturned — and skepticism that the federal government will successfully change voting rules. But they also still believe the election will face serious challenges, including federal agents potentially showing up at polling places.

Election experts say new federal laws are unlikely, but split on state laws and court intervention

Since retaking office in 2025, Trump has pushed aggressively for the federal government to set more rules around how elections are run, promoting legislation that would require registering voters to prove their citizenship with documentation and issuing two election-related executive orders. (The first executive order has largely been blocked in court, though the administration has appealed. The second is currently under litigation, and the conventional wisdom is that it will be halted as well.)

However, experts were skeptical that these measures would ever take effect. Thirty-four of our 37 respondents said it was unlikely that the federal government would successfully require new registrants to prove their citizenship for the midterms, and 32 said it was unlikely that the federal government would successfully require all voters to show an ID or restrict the use of no-excuse absentee or mail ballots. (They provided their answers before Trump issued his second executive order, which sought to regulate mail voting through the U.S. Postal Service.)

Likewise, virtually all respondents thought it was unlikely that the federal government would restrict the hours or locations of in-person voting or limit or eliminate the use of voting machines to tally ballots in the midterms.

However, experts were more open to the possibility that some of these policies could take effect in individual states. Although none thought it was likely that a significant number of states would limit or eliminate the use of voting machines, about a quarter of respondents thought it was at least somewhat likely that a significant number of states would restrict the use of no-excuse absentee or mail ballots in the midterms. About one-third thought it was at least somewhat likely that a significant number of states would strengthen their voter ID requirements or restrict the hours or locations of in-person voting.

Even more respondents, 15 of the 37, thought it was at least somewhat likely that a significant number of states would pass proof-of-citizenship requirements before the election — perhaps unsurprisingly, given that such laws were working their way through several state legislatures at the time. Those laws have since passed in Florida, Mississippi, South Dakota, and Utah, although Florida’s does not take effect until 2027 and Mississippi’s is limited in scope.

Overall, though, most experts didn’t expect states to significantly change their election laws this year. Derek Muller, an election law professor at the University of Notre Dame, pointed out that many states have part-time legislatures that won’t be in session between now and the election. “I expect new legislation in the months ahead that might affect the 2026 election to be negligible,” Muller said.

If there are going to be major election-law changes before the midterms, experts expect them to come from the third branch of government: the judiciary. Seventeen experts said it was at least somewhat likely that pre-election court rulings would significantly alter election rules shortly before the midterms, although 19 still said that was unlikely.

In follow-up interviews, those who thought this was likely said that they were keeping an eye both on currently pending cases — such as a U.S. Supreme Court case that could require all mail ballots to arrive by Election Day — and those that have not yet been filed. That said, a Supreme Court ruling earlier this year will probably encourage litigants to bring any cases challenging election rules well before the election, making last-minute rule changes less likely.

Experts expect federal agents to disrupt the 2026 election

For many election officials and voting advocates, the nightmare scenario for the 2026 midterms is if federal agents, such as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, attempt to disrupt voting or the counting of ballots. It’s already illegal for armed troops to visit voting locations, and the Trump administration has repeatedly said that it will not send ICE agents to polling places this year. However, new Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin has declined to absolutely rule it out, and a majority of the experts we surveyed expected something like this to happen.

Twenty-seven of the 37 respondents said it was at least somewhat likely that the federal government would deploy some form of military or law enforcement at or near polling places in the midterms. A slight majority said it was likely that Trump would ask the National Guard or federal agents to seize voting equipment during the election, and over three-quarters said it was likely that Trump would ask them to seize voting equipment after the election. (It’s worth noting that respondents gave these answers just a few weeks after the FBI raided an election office in Fulton County, Georgia, and Trump said that he regretted not asking the National Guard to seize voting machines after the 2020 election.)

Multiple respondents told Votebeat that the seizure of voting equipment was more likely after the election because the election results will be known at that time. “Before the election, no one will know where seizing equipment or ballots could shift pivotal races,” said Christopher Mann, the research director at the Center for Election Innovation and Research. “After the election, a bad actor will have a better picture of where seizing voting equipment or ballots can shift the overall outcome.”

Twenty-eight experts said it was at least somewhat likely that there would be physical threats to voters or polling places in the midterms, including 11 who said it was very likely. (They were perhaps recalling 2024, when a string of bomb threats forced some polling places to close temporarily, though election officials were able to minimize disruptions to voting.) However, experts were divided on whether these threats would deter people from voting. Twenty-one experts said it was unlikely that a significant number of voters would decide not to vote because of threats or physical intimidation, while 16 said that was likely.

Notably, experts were not very confident about their predictions about armed intervention in the midterms. Some also pointed out that, even if it’s likely that Trump might order federal agents to interfere in the election, that doesn’t mean they will succeed. “Election officials, courts, and other state and local officials are going to stop any attempt to seize voting equipment or ballots,” Mann predicted.

And some experts emphasized that even if there are incidents at specific polling places, they expect the election overall to run smoothly. “I’m an optimist, which probably led to many of my answers,” admitted Jeff Greenburg, a retired election official in Pennsylvania and a senior adviser at the Committee of Seventy, a Philadelphia-based government watchdog group. But Greenburg said he doesn’t expect that physical threats to voting “will significantly impact elections nationwide. I have faith and trust in our election officials, as well as the rule of law, and believe in the end every vote cast will be counted.”

Losers may claim fraud, but it’s unlikely an election gets overturned

Election experts of all stripes are confident that U.S. elections are secure. All 37 respondents said it was unlikely that a significant number of ineligible voters would cast ballots in the midterms, including 35 who said it was not at all likely. Experts also unanimously said that it was unlikely that voter fraud would influence the outcome of a 2026 congressional race.

However, that isn’t expected to stop candidates from questioning the election results. Almost three-quarters of experts thought it was at least somewhat likely that a significant number of losing candidates would claim fraud influenced the outcome of the election. All 37 thought it was likely that at least one congressional or statewide election would be legally challenged, with 30 calling it very likely.

At the same time, though, most experts don’t expect those challenges to succeed. Thirty-one of the 37 respondents thought it was unlikely that any congressional or statewide elections would be successfully overturned.

Nathaniel Rakich is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Nathaniel at nrakich@votebeat.org.

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

Regrets — we’ve all had a few. One of President Donald Trump’s, apparently, is not directing the National Guard to seize voting machines after the 2020 election in search of evidence of fraud.

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

That revelation, part of a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times on Jan. 7, commands particular attention in a world where Trump has already sought to push the boundaries of his power, deploying the National Guard to multiple U.S. cities to crack down on protests and crime. The November midterms will be the first federal general election with Trump as president since that 2020 contest, and even before his comments to the Times, plenty of people were already worried that Trump would attempt to deploy the National Guard around the 2026 election.

The National Guard isn’t necessarily the problem here; the Guard actually has a history of helping with election administration, such as when troops in civilian clothing helped fill in for absent poll workers during the pandemic in 2020. But many Democrats and election officials are worried that Trump could, say, send them to polling places to interfere with voting on Election Day. If troops were to take possession of voting machines or other equipment, it could break the chain of custody and invalidate scads of ballots. And if troops just show up outside polling places, even if they don’t try to impede the administration of the election, their presence could still intimidate voters.

That’s a worst-case scenario. However, there are significant legal and practical barriers to Trump doing this.

First, it’s clearly illegal: Federal law prohibits stationing “troops or armed men at any place where a general or special election is held, unless such force be necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States.” It’s also illegal for members of the military to prevent, or attempt to prevent, an eligible voter from voting and to interfere “in any manner with an election officer’s discharge of his duties.” That could include taking possession of voting machines.

Even the Insurrection Act — which grants the president wide leeway to use the military for domestic law enforcement in emergencies, and which Trump threatened to invoke just last week in Minneapolis — wouldn’t give troops the right to break these laws, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

Second, courts have so far significantly reined in Trump’s existing National Guard deployments — raising questions about whether he’d even have control of the Guard in key states. In December, the Supreme Court signed off on a temporary restraining order preventing the Trump administration from deploying troops to Illinois, whose Democratic governor had challenged his authority to do so. (National Guard troops are usually under the command of their state’s governor.)

The Supreme Court’s order for now functionally limits Trump to deploying the National Guard in states where he has the governor’s consent. And the 2026 midterm elections are likely to be decided in states whose governors mostly aren’t the type to let Trump deploy troops there. Of the 60 U.S. House seats currently listed as “in play” by Inside Elections, an election handicapping website, 38 are in states with Democratic governors.

And while the path to the U.S. Senate majority does mostly run through red states, and Republicans have, on the whole, not shown much interest in standing up to Trump, it’s not a given that every Republican governor would acquiesce to Trump sending in troops — especially for as norm-shattering a reason as to police an election.

The New York Times also reported this week that multiple Republican politicians privately criticized Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. And plenty of sitting Republican governors have had their differences with Trump publicly as well:

• Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio (home to three competitive House seats and a pivotal Senate race) is very much an old guard Republican who has objected to Trump’s most controversial behavior.
• Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa (also home to three competitive House seats and a potentially interesting Senate race) endorsed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over Trump in the 2024 Republican presidential primaries and is not running for reelection this year.
• Gov. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire (home to two competitive House seats and a vulnerable Democratic-held Senate seat) is a moderate Republican who disavowed Trump in 2016 and waited a conspicuously long time to endorse him in 2024.
• Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia (home to another vulnerable Democratic Senate seat) famously rebuffed Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election result in his state.

The Trump administration has thrown cold water all over the idea that it will mobilize the National Guard this November. A White House spokesperson told NPR in November that concerns about troops at polling places were “baseless conspiracy theories and Democrat talking points.” And in an interview with Vanity Fair late last year, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles said that “it is categorically false, will not happen.”

But given Trump’s avowed interest in using the National Guard to subvert an election, many officials aren’t taking any chances. At a conference of local election administrators earlier this month in Virginia, attendees were already gaming out what to do in a scenario where armed troops arrive at a polling place.

Any attempt to use the military to influence the election — even if it’s quickly extinguished by a court — would be one of the most brazen acts of election interference in modern times. Whether or not it ultimately affected the outcome of the election, it could still shatter many Americans’ belief in the sanctity of the voting booth.

Nathaniel Rakich is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Nathaniel at nrakich@votebeat.org.

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

The redrawing of states’ congressional districts typically happens only once per decade, following the release of new U.S. Census data. But we’re now up to six states that have enacted new congressional maps for the 2026 midterms; that’s more than in any election cycle not immediately following a census since 1983-84. Even more are expected to join the fray before voters head to the polls next year. Ultimately, more than a third of districts nationwide could be redrawn, threatening to confuse and disenfranchise voters.

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

The truly unusual thing, though, is that four of those states passed new maps totally voluntarily. Texas, Missouri, and North Carolina all redrew their districts after President Donald Trump urged them to create more safe seats for Republicans to help the GOP maintain control of the House of Representatives next year, and California did so in order to push back against Trump and create more safe seats for Democrats. (The other two states redrew for more anodyne reasons: Utah’s old map was thrown out in court, and Ohio’s was always set to expire after the 2024 election.) To put that in perspective, only two states voluntarily redistricted in total in the 52 years from 1973 to 2024, according to the Pew Research Center.

So the current “redistricting wars” are truly unprecedented in modern politics — and that’s had some chaotic consequences. In Texas, for instance, voter advocacy groups sued over the new map, arguing that it discriminated against Black and Latino voters. They scored a temporary win on Nov. 18 when a panel of federal judges struck down the new map and reinstated the old one. That ruling, though, came less than three weeks before Texas’ Dec. 8 filing deadline, sending candidates and election officials scrambling to readjust their plans.

But that wasn’t even the end of the story: The state appealed the ruling to the Supreme Court, which for two weeks left Texans hanging about which map would be in force. Finally, on Thursday — four days before the filing deadline — a majority of the justices stayed the lower-court ruling, putting the 2025 map back in place for the midterms.

Meanwhile, in Indiana, lawmakers are considering whether to pass their own new map under the less than ideal conditions of threats to their physical safety. A proposal to eliminate the state’s two Democratic-held seats passed the state House on Friday, but there’s genuine suspense over whether the plan can pass the state Senate, where at least 14 Republicans are against mid-decade redistricting. (Sixteen Republicans would need to join with the chamber’s 10 Democrats to block it.)

The pressure on these GOP holdouts has been intense, with Trump calling out several of them by name on social media and threatening to support their primary challengers. But in the last few weeks, things have gotten much darker: 11 state senators — most of them redistricting opponents or fence-sitters — have been the targets of swatting attempts, bomb threats, or other threats. Although it’s not confirmed that the threats were motivated by redistricting, many of the lawmakers receiving them have decried them as intimidation tactics meant to make them toe the line.

Finally, of course, the push to draw more congressional districts scrupulously engineered to vote a certain way threatens to make Congress less representative of the electorate.

Last week, on the day before Thanksgiving, a panel of federal judges declined to issue a preliminary injunction against North Carolina’s new congressional map, clearing the way for its use in the 2026 election. Although the judges did not find sufficient evidence that the Legislature had drawn the map with the intent to racially discriminate, they did come away convinced that the map would have a “disparate impact on black voters.”

That’s because the map’s goal is to flip the 1st District from the Democratic to the Republican column, and since race and partisanship are so closely correlated in the South, that meant watering down its Black population. Since 1992, the northeastern North Carolina-based 1st District has been configured to enable Black voters to elect the candidate of their choice, but the new map decreases the district’s Black share of the voting-age population from 40 percent to 32 percent. As a result, there are no longer enough Black voters in the district to reliably pull their candidates over the finish line. A political scientist attested in the case that Black voters’ preferred candidate would have carried the new 1st District only seven times in 63 recent statewide elections.

None of this, though, may run afoul of the law. Federal courts have set a very high bar for proving racial gerrymandering claims — and in 2019, they decided to stop trying to umpire partisan gerrymandering altogether. That, as much as anything else, has opened the door to the rash of mid-decade redistricting we’re currently experiencing. Virtually all of the states that have taken the plunge so far have drawn maps with extreme partisan biases that make congressional elections less responsive to the will of voters. For an unprecedented arms race that has caused no shortage of angst, that could be the most indelible impact.

Nathaniel Rakich is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Nathaniel at nrakich@votebeat.org.

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