The MAGA movement is obsessed with "voter fraud" and "election fraud," and President Donald Trump continues to claim, without proof, that the 2020 election was stolen from him — a claim that has been repeatedly debunked. Many MAGA Republicans believe that undocumented immigrants are voting in U.S. elections in big numbers, offering no proof to back up that claim.

One of the many MAGA influencers who is making claims of widespread voter fraud is far-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, who, in 2016, promoted the "Pizzagate" conspiracy theory (which falsely claimed that a pizzeria in Washington, D.C. was being used for child trafficking).

Voter fraud, Posobiec claims, is rampant.

But Slate reporters Jacqueline Sweet and Marisa Kabas, in an article published on October 3, allege that Posobiec's own voter registration raises some questions.

"The Republican National Committee, last fall, enlisted him to speak to poll watchers about election security," Sweet and Kabas note. "Posobiec is particularly focused on Pennsylvania, repeatedly accusing the state's Democratic officials of fraud, even spreading conspiracy theories that were followed by an RNC lawsuit."

Sweet and Kabas, however, allege, "The focus on voter fraud in Pennsylvania is particularly ironic because it sure looks like, and a trail of documentation suggests, that Posobiec is living in Maryland but voting in Pennsylvania. If so, that would be a violation of voting laws, experts say."

Sweet and Kabas allege that Posobiec "voted in Pennsylvania elections from 2004 to 2024, both in person and by mail, according to a copy of his voting record viewed by Slate and the Handbasket."

"There's nothing untoward about any of that, provided Posobiec actually lives in Pennsylvania," Sweet and Kabas note. But they allege that "Posobiec listed a Maryland address — the same one he and his wife show in social media posts — more than a dozen times in his 2024 political contributions, according to Federal Election Commission filings."

Attorney Adam Bonin, an expert on Pennsylvania election law, told Slate, "Your legal residence is where your life is rooted, the place you come back to. Usually, where your spouse lives is where you are presumed to live, but we look at the totality of the circumstances…. You only have one residence for voting, and you can't choose where you vote based on convenience or politics."

Read Jacqueline Sweet and Marisa Kabas' full article in Slate at this link.

The potential risk of noncitizens illegally casting ballots has dominated the national conversation on election policy in recent years. But one major voice on the issue hasn’t been heard.

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

Pennsylvania is home to someone who has perhaps more experience addressing noncitizen voting than anyone else, a Republican who uncovered hundreds of noncitizens had registered to vote and cast ballots in Philadelphia: Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt.

“I’ve always heard my whole life, even though I grew up in Western Pennsylvania, about concerns about voter fraud and voting irregularities in Philadelphia elections,” Schmidt told Votebeat and Spotlight PA in a recent interview. “So I wanted to be able to sort out fact from fiction.”

But despite this experience, Schmidt hasn’t embraced the exaggerated claims about the prevalence of noncitizen voting common in today’s political rhetoric. Instead, he feels officials need to strike a balance between election security and voter access.

PennDOT error led to noncitizens registering to vote

When Schmidt came into office as a Philadelphia city commissioner in 2012, he began looking into various claims of voter fraud. Eventually he discovered that an error with the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation’s motor voter system — which helps register voters who are obtaining a driver’s license — was enabling noncitizens to register. (In Pennsylvania, noncitizens are permitted to obtain a driver’s license.)

As Schmidt explained to a state Senate committee in 2017, despite PennDOT having the paperwork confirming the individuals’ noncitizen status, they weren’t prevented from interacting with the voter registration screens when completing the license application process. The programming error that allowed noncitizens to register was fixed in 2017, and state Auditor General Tim DeFoor is currently conducting an audit to assess the system.

Schmidt discovered that this glitch had led to 168 noncitizens registering to vote in Philadelphia alone and he discovered an additional 52 registered by other means. Schmidt found that collectively they cast 227 votes in the years they were registered. But the scope of the problem statewide was potentially much larger.

The glitch that allowed them to register dated back to the mid-1990s, and in 2018, the state sent letters to 11,198 voters across the state asking them to confirm their eligibility, though not necessarily meaning they were noncitizens. At least 1,915 of those voters were later confirmed to be eligible, and another 501 registrations were canceled or had been canceled previously. The state said this week it did not have an exact count of how many noncitizens were registered as a result of the error.

For Schmidt, the incident wasn’t just a bureaucratic or election integrity issue; it also became a personal, human story. Many of the noncitizen voters Schmidt identified were in the process of applying for their citizenship but were at risk of having their applications rejected — or even being deported — because a simple technical glitch allowed them to register to vote when they weren’t legally allowed to. Schmidt went to several immigration court hearings to testify about how these registrations had been the result of the government’s mistake.

Schmidt suggested many of the noncitizens who registered through PennDOT might not have known they were doing anything illegal, since they had already presented the department with paperwork showing they weren’t citizens and were given the option to register anyway. Language barriers or the habit of just clicking through screens to get to the end could have also played a role, he said.

“I want to emphasize it’s an election integrity issue, and it is just a human issue in terms of being decent when it comes to people who want to become new Americans and any of us would be happy to have as our friends or neighbors,” he said.

Schmidt still emphasizes the rarity of noncitizen voting

That episode represents one of the largest instances of illegal noncitizen voting in recent history. But it still represented only a fraction of a percent of Philadelphia’s roughly 800,000 registered voters at the time. And other recent investigations into noncitizen voting have turned up even fewer examples.

A recent audit of Utah’s 2.1 million registered voters found only one noncitizen registered, and they hadn’t actually voted. Michigan discovered only 15 potential noncitizens voting in the 2024 election. An audit of Georgia’s voter rolls in 2024 found only 20 noncitizen registered voters out of the 8.2 million voters registered in the state. Even in Florida, where Republican state leaders have been focused on noncitizen voting, an audit discovered only 198 voters the state deemed “likely” noncitizens.

“One thing that became very clear through that research and all evidence suggests that noncitizens voting in elections in the United States occurs very rarely,” Schmidt said. “It doesn’t mean that it’s not important. Like I said before, every vote is precious, and we want to make sure that we do everything we can to safeguard and strengthen election integrity. But there’s no evidence to suggest that it happens in any widespread way whatsoever.”

Nevertheless, fears about noncitizen voting have risen to the forefront of election policy debates in recent years, in large part due to President Donald Trump.

After losing the 2020 election, he suggested without evidence that his loss was due to immigrants being registered to vote. He made similar claims during the 2024 campaign. Last year, he signed an executive order that sought to mandate proof of citizenship when registering to vote.

The Department of Justice is collecting voter rolls from states and coordinating with the Department of Homeland Security to check if noncitizens are voting, and Republicans in Congress are pushing hard to pass a bill, the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship when registering to vote — a step some GOP-led states have already taken on their own.

Asked what he thinks when he hears this rhetoric, and specifically when Pennsylvania is brought into the conversation, Schmidt said people should view the instances of confirmed fraud that are brought up as examples of the system working properly.

“It’s important that we, I think, see it not as a vulnerability, but as an aspect of the strength of our system, and that we are safeguarding election integrity,” he said. “When people break the law, whether intentionally or not, they’re held accountable.”

Schmidt noted that seeking to identify and remove noncitizens from voter rolls can inadvertently have harmful effects. In recent years, some states searching for noncitizens have flagged voters for removal who were in fact citizens. A recent ProPublica investigation found that 14% of Denton County, Texas, voters flagged as noncitizens by a Department of Homeland Security database were actually citizens after all.

Schmidt said people need to be able to “walk and chew gum at the same time.” Policymakers and election officials have to balance being vigilant about fraud with not overreacting to the low level at which noncitizen voting occurs.

“It’s important to take it seriously,” Schmidt said. “But at the same time, putting so many resources behind looking into something that there’s really no evidence is occurring in any way that’s widespread or systematic … if not done responsibly, again results in eligible citizens being disenfranchised from that process, and certainly can do more harm than good.”

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Jordan Wilkie of WITF produced the audio version of this story.

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

Since losing to Joe Biden in 2020, now-President Donald Trump has been relentless in his assertion that the election was “rigged,” pushing all manner of conspiracies relating to voter fraud regardless of the fact that numerous studies have proven it vanishingly rare. But although voter fraud is exceptionally uncommon, there have been a few cases over recent years. Ironically, they tend to be committed by Trump supporters.

The latest example comes out of Wisconsin, where today conservative activist Henry Wait was found guilty on two counts of misdemeanor election fraud and one count of felony identity theft. The head of a group dedicated to promoting Trump’s claims of election fraud, Wait admitted to requesting the ballots of Republican state Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Democratic Racine Mayor Cory Mason without their consent.

His intention, he explained, was to prove that the state’s election system was vulnerable to fraud. In total he requested as many as eight illicit ballots, all of which were flagged by the Wisconsin Elections Commission for fraud.

“I tested the system and the system failed,” Wait said, ignoring that the fraudulent votes had, in fact, been recognized as such, and the irony that he had actually proved the system works.

Wait isn’t the only MAGA supporter convicted of such actions. In 2024, another Wisconsin resident — former Milwaukee election official Kimberly Zapata — was found guilty of using her work-issued laptop to obtain three military absentee ballots using fake voter information. Earlier this month, Trump voter Matthew Laiss was convicted of voting in both Pennsylvania and Florida after unsuccessfully arguing that he should receive immunity under Trump’s pardon of those involved with attempts to overturn the 2020 election. And in 2024, Ohio resident and monthly Trump donor James Saunders was convicted of double voting in two different elections: voting in both Ohio and Florida first in the 2020 presidential election, then the 2022 midterms. While Saunders tried to argue that he’d done it by mistake, the judge didn’t buy that he would repeat the same mix-up twice.

Currently, Trump is fixated on passing the SAVE America Act, an election reform bill that he claims will prevent voter fraud, but that critics argue is an attempt to disenfranchise millions of voters. Trump is desperate to pass the bill before the November midterms, in which the GOP is forecasted to face major defeats.

On Monday, the president pushed congressional Republicans to work to pass the legislation through Easter if necessary.

“Make this one for Jesus,” he said.

President Donald Trump continues to falsely claim that he won the 2020 presidential election — and now that fabrication is fueling the agendas for a new generation of potential Republican governors.

Michigan Republican strategist Jason Cabel Roe argued that the emphasis on supporting Trump’s election denial is “silly because they know better,” wrote The Washington Post's Dan Merica, Patrick Marley and Clara Ence Morse. The former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party then added “but, you know, it’s still what the base wants to hear.” Despite this obsession, however, Roe added that voters are far more concerned about the economy and the price of gas.

“There’s enough muddying of what everybody’s feelings are about election integrity at this point — and maybe even a little exhaustion with relitigating an election that was six years ago — that I just don’t know that it really matters to voters,” Roe explained. His position was supported by a March NBC News poll which determined voters are mostly concerned with inflation and the cost of living, followed by threats to democracy.

The Republicans running for governor in their respective states on election denier platforms include Minnesota's Mike Lindell, who founded MyPillow; Arizona's Rep. Andy Biggs; Georgia's Lt. Gov. Burt Jones; Pennsylvania’s Republican treasurer's Stacy Garrity; Wisconsin's Rep. Tom Tiffany; Michigan's state Senate Minority Leader Aric Nesbitt and Rep. John James; and California's Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco.

In addition to demonstrating their fealty to Trump, election denying also means these candidates could try throwing out valid vote counting efforts in the 2028 presidential election if urged by the White House.

“This is an important issue,” Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, chair of the Democratic Governors Association, a group preparing to make Republicans’ history of election denialism a key issue in 2026, said at a speech. “But it’s not the only issue, and it shouldn’t necessarily be the lead thing. Almost everyone in this economy is struggling because of [Trump] and these folks that are running, these election deniers, were willing to do anything for this president. So, their past attempts to steal an election were to steal it for a guy that’s made life tougher. They’re certainly not going to stand up to him to try to make life easier.”

As conservative columnist George F. Will wrote in February, Trump has thoroughly litigated his claims of election fraud, and they have all been found wanting.

“Someone should read to him ‘Lost, Not Stolen,’ a 2022 report by eight conservatives (two former Republican senators, three former federal appellate judges, a former Republican solicitor general, and two Republican election law specialists),” Will explained in The Washington Post. “They examined all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed in multiple states by Trump and his supporters. Twenty cases were dismissed before hearings on their merits, 14 were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before hearings. Of the 30 that reached hearings on the merits, Trump’s side prevailed in only one, Pennsylvania, involving far too few votes to change the state’s result.”

Will added, “Trump’s batting average? .016. In Arizona, the most exhaustively scrutinized state, a private firm selected by Trump’s advocates confirmed Trump’s loss, finding 99 additional Biden votes and 261 fewer Trump votes.” Therefore he wrote of Trump, “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”

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.

President Donald Trump wants to ban mail-in balloting, and MS NOW analyst Jordan Rubin is concerned that the Supreme Court is prepared to help him do it, even if that means “injecting needless chaos” into American elections.

“The Supreme Court may be on the verge of injecting needless chaos and uncertainty into the midterm elections and beyond,” Rubin wrote for MS NOW. “That possibility was on display Monday, when the court heard a GOP-backed challenge to counting mail ballots that come in after Election Day, even if they’re postmarked by Election Day.”

Describing the efforts of Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart to fight Trump’s mail-in ballots policy, Rubin wrote that some of the judges instead seem to “endorse” Trump’s position “to disqualify later-arriving ballots.”

“There’d be no reason for those parties to advance that position if they thought it would hurt Republicans’ electoral prospects,” Rubin wrote. “President Donald Trump has railed against mail ballots. He has also made unproven voter fraud claims a centerpiece of his elections stance. That dynamic was at play at Monday’s hearing, during which Stewart noted that the federal government has ‘sounded the antifraud theme’ but still could not show ‘a single example of fraud from post-Election Day ballot receipt in this century.’”

Rubin noted that the more pro-Trump judges clamored for mail-in voting bans.

“Justice Samuel Alito, who sounded likely to side with the Republicans, seemed receptive to the ‘fraud’ narrative, as he cited arguments that ‘confidence in election outcomes can be seriously undermined if the apparent outcome’ of an election ‘is radically flipped by the acceptance later of a big stash’ of ballots,” Rubin wrote. “Justice Brett Kavanaugh asked about fraud, too, wondering, ‘Is that a real concern? Is that something we should be thinking about? Confidence in the election process?’

Ultimately Rubin predicted that Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett will be the “pivotal votes in the relative center of the dispute.” Rubin’s nervous take was shared by Slate legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern, who argued that there have been “some very disturbing questions from the Republican-appointed justices in today's Supreme Court arguments — definitely several votes to strike down laws in 30 states which count mail ballots that arrive shortly after Election Day, as long as they're cast by Election Day. Not what I was hoping to hear."

He added, "Alito strongly implied that vote-by-mail, as practiced in most of the country today, is highly susceptible to fraud. [Neil] Gorsuch and [Clarence] Thomas leaned in that direction as well. [Amy Coney] Barrett and [Chief Justice John] Roberts are harder to read.” By contrast, Politico’s Josh Gerstein predicted that the Supreme Court seems “likely to deliver a defeat to Trump and rule states can count ballots received after Election Day, with Roberts, Barrett and maybe Kavanaugh joining the liberals.”

Trump has a long history of refusing to accept defeat when he loses at something. He accused the Emmy Awards of being rigged when he was not recognized for his reality TV show, “The Apprentice.” During the 2016 presidential election he falsely claimed Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) stole the Iowa caucuses from him, and then declared he would only accept the result of the general election if he won. Despite winning in the Electoral College, Trump received fewer popular votes than Clinton, and so falsely blamed millions of illegal ballots. He created a voter fraud commission to find evidence of tampering but never produced any proof.

During the 2020 election, Trump preemptively attacked mail-in voting, declared victory despite losing and inaccurately claimed votes were being "dumped" on him. Biden won that election in both the popular and electoral vote, and in response Trump attempted a coup on January 6, 2021. Despite continuing to claim that the election was stolen, Republican columnist George F. Will wrote for The Washington Post that Trump has had many days in court, and they all prove him to be stating untruths.

“Someone should read to him ‘Lost, Not Stolen,’ a 2022 report by eight conservatives (two former Republican senators, three former federal appellate judges, a former Republican solicitor general, and two Republican election law specialists),” Will said. “They examined all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed in multiple states by Trump and his supporters. Twenty cases were dismissed before hearings on their merits, 14 were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before hearings. Of the 30 that reached hearings on the merits, Trump’s side prevailed in only one, Pennsylvania, involving far too few votes to change the state’s result.”

Will added, “Trump’s batting average? .016. In Arizona, the most exhaustively scrutinized state, a private firm selected by Trump’s advocates confirmed Trump’s loss, finding 99 additional Biden votes and 261 fewer Trump votes.” Therefore he wrote of Trump, “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”

President Donald Trump knows that recent history, older history and current polling all point to Republicans sustaining massive losses to Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections. After Virginia Democrats successfully pushed through a referendum on Tuesday to gerrymander the state to their advantage, Trump publicly revealed his strategy for coping with this — election denial.

“Writing on Truth Social, Trump on Wednesday claimed a ‘RIGGED ELECTION’ had taken place in Virginia despite there being absolutely no evidence of any irregularities or fraud in the conduct of the plebiscite the previous evening in which 1,575,288 voters cast ballots in favor of a constitutional amendment which permits the implementation of new districts drawn by Virginia’s Democratic-led General Assembly, bypassing an independent, bipartisan commission which has drawn district lines since 2020,” wrote The Independent's Andrew Feinberg on Wednesday.

He added that the measure, which voters approved by a three-point margin without any reports of irregularities, passed by levels similar to those at which Trump lost Virginia to Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election.

“Trump also groused about the ballot measure’s language, calling it ‘purposefully unintelligible and deceptive,’” Feinberg reported. “‘As everyone knows, I am an extraordinarily brilliant person, and even I had no idea what the hell they were talking about in the Referendum, and neither do they!’ he said.”

Conservative historian Robert Kagan, who has written extensively about military history, told CNN's Christiane Amanpour in February that he believes Trump plans on rigging the midterm elections so he cannot lose.

“I am worried, as I have said and others have been pointing out, about whether we will even have free and fair elections in 2026, let alone in 2028,” Kagan told Amanpour. “I think Trump has a plan to disrupt those elections, and I don't think he's willing to allow Democrats to take control of one or both houses as could happen in a free election.”

Trump has a long history of denying elections when he loses them, such as the 2016 Republican Iowa caucuses, the 2016 presidential popular vote and the 2020 presidential election against Vice President Joe Biden. All of this Trump’s claims have been thoroughly analyzed by impartial experts and found baseless, especially about the 2020 election (since Trump used his loss to Biden as the basis for a coup attempt).

In the 2022 report “Lost, Not Stolen,” eight conservatives (two former Republican senators, three former federal appellate judges, a former Republican solicitor general, and two Republican election law specialists) studied all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed in multiple states by Trump and his supporters. As right-wing columnist George F. Will later explained in The Washington Post, “Twenty cases were dismissed before hearings on their merits, 14 were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before hearings. Of the 30 that reached hearings on the merits, Trump’s side prevailed in only one, Pennsylvania, involving far too few votes to change the state’s result.”

Will added, “Trump’s batting average? .016. In Arizona, the most exhaustively scrutinized state, a private firm selected by Trump’s advocates confirmed Trump’s loss, finding 99 additional Biden votes and 261 fewer Trump votes.” Therefore he wrote of Trump, “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”

In October 2021, shortly before Election Day, Mahabubul Tayub was reviewing the voter rolls for the tiny Philadelphia suburb of Millbourne, where he was on the ballot as a candidate for mayor. Something didn’t seem right.

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

Dozens of new voters had been registered in recent weeks, he noticed, including some people he knew — people who didn’t live in Millbourne.

Tayub won the mayoral election that November, but it would take years for authorities to fully unravel what was behind the odd registrations he discovered: a brazen attempt at election fraud.

Just last month, his opponent in the 2021 race, Md Nurul Hasan, pleaded guilty in federal court to 33 felony charges in a failed scheme to steal the election by illegally registering dozens of nonresidents as Millbourne voters, then casting mail ballots on their behalf. Two associates also pleaded guilty to multiple charges, including fraudulent voter registration.

The case serves as a reality check amid a raging national debate over election security and the threat of voter fraud, especially in swing states like Pennsylvania. It’s proof, on one hand, that despite the many safeguards in place, voter fraud can happen at the local level, with lasting consequences for the community. On the other hand, it also helps illustrate how difficult it would be to orchestrate such fraud on a larger scale without detection.

“It seems to be in the local races this pops up the most, where there is a smaller turnout and there is possibly a direct connection between the person committing the bad act and the person who is going to benefit from the bad act,” said Jim Allen, the Delaware County elections director.

It’s in these small jurisdictions, he said, that “the temptation is highest and the risk-reward is highest.”

Two immigrants became friends, then competitors

Millbourne is a tiny borough at the eastern edge of Delaware County, bordering Philadelphia. It covers less than 50 acres — not even a tenth of a square mile — and has roughly 1,200 residents.

The land was originally the homestead of the Sellers family, immigrants from Derbyshire, England. In the mid 1700s, John Sellers opened Millbourne Mills, a flour mill that drew its name from nearby Mill Creek, now Cobb’s Creek — the dividing line between Delaware County and Philadelphia.

As small as it is, the borough has seen huge demographic changes in recent decades. In 1980, it was more than 90% white, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, but by 2020, it was majority Asian. That was driven by immigration from South Asia, including India and Bangladesh.

Now, Market Street, the main thoroughfare through Millbourne, is dotted with South Asian grocery stores and boutiques selling Indian, Bangladeshi, and Pakistani clothing. In 2023, Sellers Avenue — a short, mostly residential street named after the founding family — was given a second name: Bangladesh Avenue, a change that the local Bangladeshi community celebrated as a testament to their growing economic and political power.

Tayub, 47, grew up in Chittagong, a port city in southeast Bangladesh. He graduated from university there with a degree in economics, and moved to Philadelphia, then Millbourne in the early 2000s. Hasan, 48, is also from Chittagong, and Tayub said the two had become friendly when he and Hasan lived in the same Philadelphia building.

“All the friends [who were] the same age, all the people from Bangladesh” socialized together, Tayub recalled.

Tayub also got to know former Millbourne Mayor Tom Kramer, a Democrat who later encouraged him to run for the five-member borough council. Tayub and Hasan both launched bids as Democrats and won in the 2015 municipal election, Tayub said. (Both Tayub and Hasan are U.S. citizens.)

In the spring of 2021, Kramer decided against running for another term as mayor. Tayub entered the race, with Kramer’s support. Hasan jumped in, too.

The town’s voters skewed heavily Democratic, which meant whoever won the party primary was likely to coast to victory in the fall. And whether it was Hasan or Tayub, the winner was poised to become the first Bangladesh-born mayor of a U.S. town, a prospect that received media attention in Bangladesh.

Tayub said he wasn’t worried about the competition. “I have faith people know me,” he said.

Tayub won the primary by 18 votes out of 258 cast. But Hasan launched a write-in campaign for the November general election with the support of two other council members: Md Munsur Ali and Md Rafikul Islam, who lost his primary bid for reelection to the council. (Md is an abbreviation for Muhammad, and a common prefix for Bangladeshi names.)

How the plot unfolded

According to the federal indictment that laid out the men’s attempt to steal the election, the three conspired to obtain personal information from non-Millbourne residents — mainly friends of Hasan’s and Ali’s. Hasan then registered them to vote in Millbourne using the Department of State’s website, the indictment said — in some cases updating existing registrations by changing them to Millbourne addresses — and requested mail-in ballots on their behalf.

The indictment said Hasan and Ali told the residents of nearby communities, including Upper Darby and Philadelphia, that they would not get in trouble, so long as they “did not vote in another election in November 2021.”

The indictment described an effort to “cover up the fact that defendant HASAN was requesting mail-in ballots for dozens of different people,” in which Hasan alternated email addresses when registering the voters, as well as the addresses, and requested that the mail ballots be sent to various locations.

According to the indictment, after receiving the ballots, Hasan and the others wrote in Hasan’s name for mayor and cast the ballots. In all, the indictment says, Hasan and his co-conspirators fraudulently registered nearly three dozen people.

The indictment doesn’t identify the voters who were registered improperly, but one of the people whom Hasan registered confirmed his involvement and agreed to speak with Votebeat and Spotlight PA on condition of anonymity, out of concern that their involvement in the scheme could jeopardize their current employment.

The voter confirmed giving Hasan their driver’s license and allowing Hasan to proceed with the Millbourne registration and request a mail ballot for them.

“I trusted him and thought if I only give one vote, it’s not a problem,” said the person. “He made us fools.”

Suspicion ahead of Election Day: ‘I know these people.’

The votes hadn’t even been counted when Millbourne residents began to catch on to the scheme. According to the indictment, the borough added 29 voters between the primary and the November election. Given that Millbourne had fewer than 600 voters, it was a noticeable jump.

After Tayub grew suspicious of the new voter registrations, he brought his concerns to Kramer, the departing mayor, though neither man remembers exactly when.

“I know these people, they never live [in] Millbourne,” Tayub recalled thinking when he saw some newly registered names. “They live [in] Upper Darby.” Tayub’s attorney filed a complaint with the county elections office on Oct. 28, 2021. Tayub and Kramer said they also reported the matter to law enforcement around the time of the election. The district attorney’s office did not respond to a question about when and how they became aware of the matter.

Allen, the county elections director, said in an email that Hasan himself had questioned some voter registrations months earlier, in April, and his office had referred that matter to the district attorney. Allen wrote that in the months and years after Tayub’s complaints, “we received and responded to periodic inquiries from investigators.”

But Tayub and others in Millbourne said they grew frustrated because although the county was taking steps to look into the situation, for nearly a year afterward, they didn’t observe much progress.

“I couldn’t take it,” Tayub said during a recent interview with Votebeat and Spotlight PA.

Tayub, Kramer, and the borough’s secretary, Nancy Baulis, all met with an assistant district attorney before the May 2022 primary to discuss the status of the case, and Baulis and Kramer followed up with emails to county officials, including the district attorney, a few months later expressing frustration about the apparent lack of movement.

Kramer shared those emails with Votebeat and Spotlight PA. In his, he wrote that the assistant district attorney at the meeting had said that “this particular situation was very problematic politically,” and would generate media interest.

In an interview, Kramer said after sending that email, he reached out to the FBI. He said the investigation seemed to pick up after that.

The federal indictment came in February 2025.

The county separately charged Hasan with unlawful voting and related charges in March, and the case is pending. Because of that, District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer said he could not discuss the matter, but said in an email that it is “inaccurate” to say that the county did not move quickly on the case before the FBI’s involvement.

Neither the district attorney’s office nor the assistant district attorney Kramer mentioned in his email responded to a request for comment on what Kramer said he was told at the May 2022 meeting.

The Pennsylvania Department of State said it “first became aware of the fraud allegations when it was contacted by federal law enforcement.”

“I don’t have any comment beyond stating the obvious, that there has been a prosecution,” Allen, the county election director, said. “It was a very difficult matter to investigate because you can’t make assumptions [based on] ‘Well, this house looks empty.’ Well, was it empty last fall? How do you know it’s empty? Did someone move out?”

Asked after an April borough council meeting if he had any explanation or comment, Hasan declined. “I don’t want to say anything now,” Hasan said.

Hasan’s attorney, Michael Dugan, said his client had no comment in response to a list of questions about the scheme. Islam, Ali, and their respective attorneys did not respond to emails with detailed questions for this story.

The reality of election fraud vs. false claims

Cases like Millbourne’s muddy the intensifying national debate over election fraud: how widespread it is, what to do about it, and, more fundamentally, whether our election system can be trusted.

In recent years, an ecosystem of conspiracy theories about election manipulation has flourished online. Justin Grimmer, a political scientist at Stanford University, has researched the kind of broad claims of systematic election fraud that President Donald Trump and his allies made after the 2020 election to explain his loss, and said he has found no evidence of any such conspiracy.

But Grimmer’s research has turned up real instances of fraud, and they typically look like what happened in Millbourne — a local race, involving a relatively small number of votes.

“I think it gives some insight into why it would be very hard to do this in a broad national way,” he said. “This sort of fraud will leave lots of markers that people will end up discovering.”

The kind of “marker” Grimmer is referencing is the evidence Tayub was able to cite: actual names and addresses for the people who were drawn into the scheme.

Scaling a scheme like the one in Millbourne to one that involves enough votes to swing a statewide or national election would be hard, Grimmer said, because it would involve so many people.

The perpetrators here had access to driver’s license numbers, which according to the indictment they got directly from the voters. Allen, the county election director, said he was unaware of any other fraud case where voters gave out their personal information like this.

Stephanie Singer, a former Philadelphia city commissioner who was in office in 2016 when a ballot box stuffing scheme orchestrated by a former congressman was happening, has developed an algorithm that looks for anomalies in election results in the hopes of catching attempted fraud. Georgia is currently using the program to monitor its elections.

“Part of the job, not just of the board of elections, but of us as a democratic populace, is to guard against that,” she said. “The people who win the elections have access to money and power, and that means it’s really tempting to cheat.”

These attempts to cheat, even if they are initially successful at changing the results, are frequently caught, and election officials uphold those cases as examples of the safeguards working. Even so, the very fact that they occur can help destroy trust in elections.

Incidents like those in Millbourne and in a 2018 North Carolina congressional race that required a new election can serve as a “proof of concept” for those already suspicious that election fraud is happening, Grimmer said.

He recalled a county elections meeting in Oregon where he was trying to counter points made by a speaker who believed there was a broad conspiracy to steal elections, and cited a local incident from California as an example.

“In that setting, I can explain that it’s very different than the kind of conspiracy he’s alleging,” he said. “But if someone’s suspicious, all of a sudden it does reveal that it is possible to do this at least on a small scale.”

“If I’m not sufficiently persuasive in that meeting that it’s hard to scale this up,” he added, “you could see how this can further undermine trust” in election administration.

In Millbourne, the story isn’t over

Nearly four years after the election fraud, and a month after the guilty pleas, a tense mood still hung over Millbourne’s five-member borough council.

Two members resigned recently for reasons unrelated to the fraud case, which until recently left only three members, including Hasan and Ali. Despite their convictions, the men refused to immediately resign, and weren’t legally required to do so. Sentencing is scheduled for June.

By staying in office, Hasan and Ali allowed the borough to keep conducting council business. Without them, the council wouldn’t have had enough members.

But recent council meetings were marked by fraught exchanges over the matter.

The borough council building is a tight space. A sliding partition and support pillar split the room between attendees and the U-shaped arrangement of folding tables where council members sit.

At an April 15 meeting, Kramer, the former mayor, stepped in front of the pillar when it was his turn to offer public comment.

“I’d like to address our felonious council people,” Kramer said, facing Hasan and Ali. “I wanted to ask if either one of you had any intention of resigning.”

The eyes of the other borough officials shifted to Hasan to see how he would respond.

Hasan, wearing a purple button-down shirt and gray jacket, looked uncomfortable as he answered, shifting his feet and looking around the room or down at his papers.

“Actually the court has a restriction,” he said. “I don’t want to say anything.”

But on May 13, borough officials confirmed that Hasan had formally submitted his resignation, though the council has yet to accept it.

As of Tuesday, Ali had not resigned.

Getting a public official out of elected office — outside of defeating them at the ballot box — is not simple, even if the official has pleaded guilty to a felony.

“It’s not just automatic,” James Gallagher, the borough’s solicitor, explained at an April meeting. He said Hasan and Ali’s resignations would be “in the best interest of the borough.”

The state Legislature can impeach local elected officials, but rarely uses that power. The other option is a quo warranto action, a legal action challenging a public official’s right to hold office, typically brought by the district attorney or state attorney general.

Chris Cosfol, a resident of Millbourne, said he wants the district attorney’s office to bring such an action. The ordeal has been “embarrassing” for the borough, he said, and he thinks the members should have automatically been removed from office once they entered a guilty plea.

Neither the district attorney’s office nor the attorney general has yet taken such action.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

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

In mid-December 2020, federal officials responsible for protecting American elections from fraud converged in a windowless, dim, fortified room at the Justice Department’s downtown Washington, D.C., headquarters.

They had been summoned by Attorney General William Barr.

Over the preceding weeks, Donald Trump’s claims that the presidential election had been stolen from him had reached a crescendo. He’d become obsessed with a conspiracy theory that voting machines in Antrim County, Michigan, had switched votes from him to Joe Biden.

With each day, Trump ratcheted up the pressure to unleash the might of the federal government to undo his defeat.

Barr interrogated experts from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, crammed in beside top FBI officials around a cheap table. He needed the group of around 10 to answer a crucial question: Was it really possible the 2020 presidential vote had been hacked?

ProPublica’s description of the previously unreported meeting comes from several people who were in the room or were briefed on the gathering. Everyone understood that the meeting represented an important moment for the nation, they said. Barr, who did not respond to requests for comment, had walked a delicate line with Trump, instructing the FBI to investigate allegations of election irregularities while declaring publicly there had been no evidence “to date” of widespread fraud.

The nonpartisan specialists from CISA, backed by their FBI counterparts, explained they’d unravelled what had happened in Antrim County. A clerk had made a mistake when updating ballot styles on machines, leading to a software problem that initially transferred votes from Republicans to Democrats, they said. There was no fraud, just human error — which would soon be publicly confirmed through a hand count of the county’s ballots.

Listening intently, Barr seemed to understand both the truth and that telling it to the president would almost certainly cost him his job.

At the end of the meeting, Barr turned to his top deputy, made hand motions as if he was tying on a bandana and said he was going to “kamikaze” into the White House.

What happened next is well known. When Barr met with Trump in the Oval Office on Dec. 14, the president launched into a monologue about how the events in Antrim County were “absolute proof” that the election had been stolen. Barr waited to get a word in edgewise before telling his boss what the experts from CISA had told him.

Then Barr offered his resignation letter, which Trump accepted. Barr left believing he’d done his part to preserve democratic norms.

“I was saddened,” Barr wrote of Trump in his memoir. “If he actually believed this stuff he had become significantly detached from reality.”

Barr was one of many federal officials — most of them Trump appointees — who refused to bend to the president’s demands, which only intensified after Barr was gone. Although rioters inspired by Trump managed to delay the certification of his defeat by storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, ultimately the institutional guardrails of American democracy held — barely.

But if faced with the same tests today, the guardrails and people that held the line would largely be missing, an examination by ProPublica found.

ProPublica scrutinized what happened the last time Trump lost a national election. Some of that happened in plain sight: After a cascade of defeats in court, Trump began pressuring state and local officials to overturn the results. But more happened behind the scenes, like the meeting that helped persuade Barr to hold the line.

Our reporting uncovered previously undisclosed aspects of a federal effort to safeguard the results of the 2020 vote, which involved at least 75 people across several agencies. Today, nearly all of those people are gone, having resigned, been fired or been reassigned, particularly in the departments of Justice and Homeland Security. That included the cybersecurity specialists who had established that the Antrim County allegations were false and reported their findings to Barr.

The people we identified as resisting attempts to overturn the 2020 results have been replaced by roughly two dozen people Trump has installed in positions that could affect elections. Ten of them actively worked to reverse the 2020 vote, and the rest are associates of such people. In some cases, ProPublica found, officials have been hired from activist groups that are pillars of the election denial movement. Experts warn that shows the movement has merged with the federal government.

These new officials could influence how Trump reacts to the upcoming midterms as polling shows Republicans are approaching what could be a significant electoral loss, with the president’s approval rating nearing record lows, and public concern growing about the weak economy, the administration’s mass deportation effort and the war on Iran. Seemingly in preparation to head off such a blow, Trump has stepped up his efforts to “nationalize” the 2026 elections, saying that Republicans need “to take over” the midterms. Democrats who monitored Trump’s attempts to block his 2020 loss have begun to question whether he will allow a “blue wave,” particularly if it flips control of a House of Representatives that impeached him twice in his first term.

ProPublica’s examination reveals new details on how the president has unleashed his loyalists to transform elections. This includes the background of this year’s FBI raid in Georgia to seize 2020 election materials and how they are using federal resources to search for noncitizens voting. Ultimately, ProPublica’s reporting shows how thoroughly and expansively the Trump administration has overhauled the federal government into what some fear is a vehicle for making sure elections go his way.

ProPublica’s reporting is based on interviews with roughly 30 current or former executive branch officials familiar with the work of Trump loyalists installed in election roles. Most spoke on condition of anonymity because they fear retribution, including those knowledgeable about the December 2020 Barr meeting.

The Trump administration maintains its actions will make U.S. elections fairer and more secure — and keep those prohibited from voting, such as noncitizens, from doing so.

“Election integrity has always been a top priority for President Trump,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement. “The President will do everything in his power to defend the safety and security of American elections and to ensure that only American citizens are voting in them.”

Spokespeople for the DOJ and DHS emphasized that their departments are focused on ensuring elections are free and fair, and that they are working closely with the states to achieve those goals. Contentions to the contrary, they say, are false.

A few guardrails have endured, preventing Trump from fully realizing his agenda for elections. Judges have blocked key parts of a March 2025 executive order in which Trump attempted to exert greater federal control over aspects of voting, and some Republican state officials have fought back against Justice Department lawsuits demanding state voter rolls.

Late last month, Trump issued another executive order on elections that attempts to exert unparalleled federal control over mail-in voting and voter eligibility, which Democrats and voting rights groups are challenging in court.

Experts say 2026 will serve as an unprecedented stress test of the integrity of American elections.

“Our election system withstood” Trump’s “attacks following the 2020 election,” said Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat who has led the pushback to the administration’s actions on elections, “but this will be an even tougher test, with more election deniers having access to federal power than ever before.”

The Dismantling

Barr has said that in the high-stakes days following the 2020 election, he felt like he was playing Whac-A-Mole with Trump’s “avalanche” of false election claims.

The investigators at DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency supplied intelligence that disproved many of them, not just those involving Antrim County.

CISA was created by Trump in his first term to counter cyber threats in the aftermath of Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 vote. It soon came to provide crucial expertise and support to thousands of local election officials grappling with increasingly sophisticated attacks.

After the 2020 election, it also played a crucial part in puncturing fallacies spread by Trump supporters, producing a “Rumor Control” website to rebut them. And it partnered with state officials and technology vendors to release a statement calling the election “the most secure in American history.” Trump swiftly fired Chris Krebs, whom he had appointed to lead CISA, but Krebs’ defense of the election’s soundness reverberated widely in the media and on Capitol Hill.

Among Trump’s first actions upon returning to the Oval Office was eviscerating CISA.

Starting in February 2025, DHS leadership put employees focused on countering disinformation and helping safeguard elections on leave. The leadership also froze the agency’s other election security work, which included assessing local election offices for physical and cybersecurity risks, and disseminating sensitive intelligence information on threats. Eventually, all three dozen or so CISA employees specializing in elections were fired or transferred to work in other areas.

“It took years of dedicated, bipartisan, cross-sector partnership to build the security infrastructure we’ve had, and dismantling CISA leaves a gaping hole,” said Kathy Boockvar, an elections security expert who served as Pennsylvania’s secretary of state from 2019 to 2021. “We are making the job of securing our democracy exponentially harder.”

A DHS spokesperson told ProPublica that the changes at CISA were in response to “a ballooning budget concealing a dangerous departure from its statutory mission,” which included “electioneering instead of defending America’s critical infrastructure.” The spokesperson said that CISA’s mission is still to coordinate protection of critical infrastructure, including by supporting local partners against cyber threats.

It isn’t just CISA that’s been gutted.

The Trump administration has discarded or diminished other federal initiatives with roles in protecting election integrity or blocking foreign interference. While many of these actions have been reported, together they reveal the full sweep of the changes.

First, the administration got rid of the National Security Council’s election security group, which convened departmental leaders to coordinate federal actions related to voting. Then in August, the administration dismantled the Foreign Malign Influence Center, a branch of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that had stymied efforts by Russia, China and Iran to interfere in the 2024 election.

A spokesperson for ODNI said the center was redundant and that its functions were folded into other parts of the office’s intelligence apparatus in ways that “arguably makes our ability to monitor and address threats from foreign adversaries stronger, more efficient and more effective.”

However, former national security officials, including one who had worked at the center, told ProPublica that its functions had largely ceased. Caitlin Durkovich, who led the NSC’s election security work during the Biden administration, said that under Trump the federal government has “abandoned” its traditional role in preserving election integrity and security.

“Nearly every program and capability to stop bad actors and support election administrators has been dismantled,” she said. “Heading into the midterms, this leaves states and localities exposed, without the intelligence support or federal coordination they need to detect and respond to threats in real time — precisely when the stakes are highest.”

The early months of the second Trump administration also brought seismic changes to three parts of federal law enforcement with central roles in elections.

Kash Patel, the FBI’s new director, dismantled the public corruption team, which had been deployed in previous administrations to help monitor possible criminal activity on Election Day. The Foreign Influence Task Force, which aimed to combat foreign influence in U.S. politics, was also disbanded. (An FBI spokesperson said the bureau “remains committed to detecting and countering foreign influence efforts by adversarial nations.”)

Furthermore, the Justice Department substantially reduced the role of its Public Integrity Section, which had been responsible for making sure the department’s inquiries weren’t improperly influenced by politics.

After the 2020 election, senior lawyers in the section warned against having the FBI investigate fraud claims raised by Trump allies, saying that the agency’s involvement could damage its reputation and appear motivated by partisanship. In this instance, they were overruled by Barr and his deputies, but former officials said this was a rare case in which their guidance was ignored. The need to directly overrule the unit, they said, made it a roadblock — one that no longer exists.

A month after Trump returned to the Oval Office, the unit’s top staff resigned when agency leaders directed them to dismiss corruption charges against then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams. More resigned later or were transferred. The 36-person section was reduced to two. The administration no longer mandates that it review politically sensitive cases, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.

Another key DOJ office, the Civil Rights Division’s voting section, had enforced federal laws that protect voting rights, particularly those that combat racial discrimination. In December 2020, the assistant attorney general overseeing the Civil Rights Division was one of the many department leaders who said they would resign if Trump promoted Jeffrey Clark, a leader who supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results, to head the department after Barr’s resignation. This mass threat of resignation ultimately led Trump to not promote Clark.

But now, nearly all of the section’s roughly 30 career lawyers have resigned or been moved. This largely started last spring after Harmeet Dhillon, Trump’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, put out a memo saying their mission would shift from ensuring voting rights to enforcing Trump’s executive order on elections.

The Trump administration then filled the section with conservative lawyers who are now litigating against the lawyers they replaced. At least four of those newly appointed lawyers participated in challenging the 2020 vote or have worked with people who helped Trump try to overturn the 2020 election.

“It’s just a shocking and depressing reversal of the federal government’s role in making real the promise of nondiscrimination in voting and racial equality,” said Anna Baldwin, an appellate attorney for the Civil Rights Division who resigned last year and is now one of those litigating against the Justice Department in a new role at Campaign Legal Center.

The Justice Department didn’t respond to specific questions about the dismantling of the Public Integrity Section or the change in mission for the Civil Rights Division.

In all, at least 75 career officials who’d played important roles in elections work at DHS, DOJ and other departments have left or been fired, ProPublica found.

Team America

Late last summer, after the Trump administration had forced out most of the career specialists, a small group of political appointees began convening at the Department of Homeland Security’s headquarters.

The group — which once called itself “Team America,” according to sources familiar with the matter — looked for federal levers it could pull to make Trump’s March executive order about elections a reality, an effort that has not been previously reported.

They represented the new type of people running the show.

Its core members included David Harvilicz, a DHS assistant secretary tasked with overseeing the security of election infrastructure, including voting machines, and three of his top staffers. As ProPublica has reported, Harvilicz had co-founded an AI company with an architect of Trump’s claims about Antrim County.

Despite the setbacks the executive order had met with in court, there “was not a whole lot of discussion or disagreement” about acting on the directive from Harvilicz or one of his deputies, said a former federal official who interacted with group members. “It was just us saluting to do it.”

This small group was part of a wider team at DHS, DOJ and the White House seeking to push forward the president’s agenda. Some of Trump’s new guard are well known: After the 2020 election, Patel pressured military officials to help investigate a conspiracy theory about voting machines, according to a former Justice Department official. (Patel did not respond to a request for comment but claimed in congressional testimony that he did not recall the event.) Others, like Harvilicz, are more obscure but still wield consequential powers.

These newcomers are seeking to carry out Trump’s executive orders and are unlikely to push back against his false claims that American elections are rife with fraud.

Team America members have echoed or spread such material themselves.

Heather Honey, who serves under Harvilicz in a newly created position focused on elections, falsely asserted that there were more ballots cast in Pennsylvania than voters in the 2020 presidential election. Trump cited this claim, which has been traced back to her, while exhorting his followers to march on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

At least 11 administration appointees, including Honey, have ties to the Election Integrity Network, a conservative grassroots organization seeking to transform American elections. It is led by Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who tried to help Trump overturn the 2020 election. Gineen Bresso, who holds a top job in the White House counsel’s office, coordinated with the network’s leadership in 2024 as the Republican National Committee’s election integrity chair, ProPublica has reported. Since moving into government, Honey has maintained close ties to Mitchell’s organization, and she and at least two other federal officials have given its members private briefings.

Experts say these former activists who helped forge a movement built on the idea that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump are seeking to make sure that does not happen again.

“The election denial movement is now interwoven within the federal government, and they are working together toward a shared goal of reshaping elections” in ways that undermine the freedom to vote, said Brendan Fischer, a director at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan, pro-democracy legal organization. “It’s not just last-minute slapdash attempts to overturn the results” as in 2020, “but more systematic efforts to influence how elections are run months ahead of time.”

In response to questions sent to DHS, Harvilicz and Honey, a DHS spokesperson disputed that they were seeking to use the department’s powers to advantage Trump, writing that its employees “are focused on keeping our elections safe, secure, and free” and working to “implement the President’s policies.” In response to questions about their ties to the election denial movement, the spokesperson wrote, “To meet the diverse and evolving challenges the Department faces, we hire experts with diverse backgrounds who go through a rigorous vetting process.”

Mitchell did not respond to detailed questions from ProPublica. The White House answered questions sent to Bresso about her connection to Mitchell’s network by reiterating its commitment to making American elections secure.

Through the fall and winter, as the Justice Department demanded that states turn over confidential voter roll information, Team America worked to solve problems hindering the use of digital tools to comb the lists for noncitizens who had illegally registered to vote. Honey and others ironed out the technical details of merging information from different agencies and crafted data-sharing contracts. When Honey or others hit roadblocks, they’d go to the White House or senior DHS leaders who “would come in hot” to clear her path, said officials who interacted with them.

Initially, the plan was to run voter information obtained by DOJ through a Homeland Security tool called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system.

More recently, according to two people familiar with the matter, Team America has worked to harness a more powerful tool used by another branch of DHS, Homeland Security Investigations, to increase its ability to search for noncitizen voters and bring criminal charges against them.

While DHS told ProPublica that SAVE has identified more than 21,000 potential noncitizens on voter rolls in the past year, officials who have checked those results in detail have found vast inaccuracies, as ProPublica has reported. Most states — including those with millions of voters — have eventually marked only a few to a few hundred potential noncitizens as registered to vote, and far less have ever voted. The DHS spokesperson also called SAVE “secure and reliable.”

As the election approaches, current and former officials and election security experts expressed concerns that Harvilicz and Honey, who’ve espoused debunked conspiracy theories about elections, are in positions to control the narrative around the vote’s soundness.

It’s hard to debunk false claims “coming with the seal of the federal government,” said Derek Tisler, counsel and manager with the Brennan Center for Justice’s elections and government program. “I certainly worry what damage that could do to voters’ confidence.”

Red Flags

Perhaps nothing better reflects the breakdown of the guardrails that thwarted Trump’s rashest impulses in 2020 than his creation last fall of a special White House post reinvestigating his loss to Biden.

In December 2020, just days after Barr rebuffed Trump’s Antrim County claims, lawyers in the White House counsel’s office helped prevent the president from heeding activists’ call to essentially declare martial law to seize voting machines. This multihour shouting and cussing match has been called the craziest meeting of the first Trump administration.

But the lawyer whom Trump hired in 2025 as his director of election security and integrity, Kurt Olsen, had worked to overturn Trump’s loss in court in 2020 and was later sanctioned by judges, including for making baseless allegations about Arizona elections.

Olsen’s work in the second Trump administration has breached the firewall between the White House and DOJ officials, established after Watergate to prevent law enforcement officers from making decisions based on political pressure, said Gary Restaino, a former U.S. attorney in Arizona.

“This is not a constitutional or even a statutory requirement,” Restaino said, “but it’s a democracy requirement to make sure that citizens throughout America understand that decisions about life and liberty are being made in an objective and consistent manner.”

In a previously unreported series of events, around the end of 2025, Olsen flew to Georgia to meet with Paul Brown, the head of the FBI’s Atlanta field office, according to people familiar with the matter.

Olsen wanted the FBI to seize 2020 ballots from Fulton County, a Democratic stronghold, and gave Brown a report he claimed would justify the extraordinary action. Brown and his team emphasized to Olsen that any investigation his team did would be independent and fair.

When Brown and his team examined the report, they found that Georgia’s election board had already looked into its allegations, dismissing many altogether, and concluding that others came down to human error, not criminal wrongdoing. The report had been assembled by a longtime ally of Olsen’s and participant in the Election Integrity Network who had a history of discredited claims, ProPublica has reported.

Based on their own investigation, Brown’s team submitted an affidavit to their superiors at DOJ that did not make a strong enough case to move forward with what Olsen wanted.

Soon after, Brown was offered a choice: retire or be moved to a new office, people with knowledge of the exchange told ProPublica.

Olsen did not respond to requests for comment.

An FBI spokesperson said that Brown “elected to retire” and that its “work in the election security space is entirely consistent with the law.”

Brown’s ouster after refusing to carry out the seizure of 2020 election materials has been reported, but Olsen’s involvement and the details of their interactions leading to Brown’s retirement have not been previously disclosed.

With Brown gone, the case moved ahead under his replacement.

Trump administration officials also took another step to keep control of the investigation.

Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi chose Thomas Albus, whom Trump had appointed as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, to prosecute the case even though it fell far outside his usual regional jurisdiction. Albus had been meeting with Olsen since around the time the White House lawyer was hired, ProPublica has reported. (Albus declined a request for comment.)

In late January, the FBI carried out an unprecedented raid in Fulton County — and the agency’s affidavit, put together by Albus and Brown’s replacement, cited a version of the report Olsen gave to Brown as evidence supporting the seizure. ProPublica was part of a news coalition that sued to unseal the affidavit.

An FBI spokesperson said that its agents “followed all procedure to ensure everything was in proper order, and FBI evidence team had the necessary court-authorized search warrant before they arrived on site.”

Ryan Crosswell, who worked in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section for around half a decade, handling a number of election cases, called Brown’s replacement and Albus’ involvement a “red flag” because of the unusual circumstances of their appointments.

“They’re just moving through people until they find someone who’s willing to do exactly what they want,” Crosswell said.

The Justice Department did not respond to a question about Crosswell’s comment.

The extraordinary raid was also enabled in a previously unreported way by the destruction of the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section.

Multiple former lawyers for the section said they likely would have tried to block the Fulton County investigation because it lacked strong evidence, had a clear political slant and went against department directives that actions should not be taken “for the purpose of giving an advantage or disadvantage to any candidate or political party.”

Crosswell said, “Based on everything we know, if PIN was still there, we’d say no.”

John Keller was principal deputy chief of the Public Integrity Section from 2020 to 2025 and was acting chief when he resigned in early 2025. He worries that allegations of irregularities in the upcoming election will be handled on a partisan basis.

“Without that review and without apolitical, objective, honest brokers involved in the process, there is a much greater risk for intentional manipulation or inadvertent interference,” Keller said.

“Dismantling the Brain”

The week the FBI seized Fulton County’s ballots, about half of the nation’s secretaries of state converged on Washington, D.C., for their winter conference.

They had urgent questions about elections for Bondi, then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and other luminaries who had promised to appear at the event. But none of the headline names showed, leaving conference attendees staring at an empty podium, until the session was abruptly canceled.

The breakdown was emblematic of a widening chasm between state officials and the parts of the federal government that had, until recently, worked with them to secure American elections.

Shenna Bellows, Maine’s Democratic secretary of state, said in an interview that the trust between the Trump administration and states is “absolutely demolished.”

This loss of trust reflects that election deniers have assumed so many top roles at federal agencies. Honey sometimes represents DHS on cross-departmental conference calls with state election chiefs, an unsettling reality for those who spent years countering the false claims she made from outside the government.

On a February call, state officials expressed confusion about whether the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency would still assess their election systems for physical and cyber vulnerabilities. Honey said it would, but Bellows said she’d been told it wouldn’t.

Two DHS officials told ProPublica CISA’s remaining staff avoids election work, afraid they could lose their jobs if they engage with state and local officials. “In CISA, elections are a toxic poison,” one said.

A DHS spokesperson said state and federal officials are still working together “every single day” to protect elections and that “The claim that DHS has a broken partnership with states and made our elections less secure is simply false.”

The cuts to career election specialists and their divisions have eliminated information channels that spotlighted threats as voting took place, including Election Day command posts run by the Justice Department and FBI. Another information channel, which DHS used to fund, will still operate but will be available only to state and local election offices, not the federal government.

Jessica Cadigan, a former FBI intelligence analyst who investigated Election Day threats, said FBI headquarters’ command post was critical to her cases.

“That is dismantling the brain, if you will,” she said. “They are the ones that piece the whole thing together.”

An FBI spokesperson said the agency will still have capabilities to monitor the situation on the ground through designated election crimes coordinator experts in all its field offices.

Jena Griswold, Colorado’s Democratic secretary of state, has come to see the federal government as adversarial to elections and election administration, rather than a partner.

Colorado is one of around 30 states the Justice Department has sued for confidential voter roll information. At least four courts that have fully considered those cases so far have dismissed them, although the Justice Department has appealed most of the decisions. (The others are pending.) Griswold told ProPublica she has added another lawyer to her staff to fight whatever comes next from the Trump administration.

“Donald Trump,” she said, “has made American elections less safe.”