Legal scholar exposes the bluff behind Trump’s ‘unprecedented’ threat

President Donald Trump has escalated the "ongoing assault" on voting rights in the U.S. in "unprecedented ways," according to one legal scholar, but one of his major moves is largely a bluff that should not be taken as any cause for panic.

John Pfaff is a professor at the Fordham University School of Law, and on Monday morning, he published a new piece for MS NOW urging readers not to "spark panic" over Trump's threats to flood midterm polling places with election monitors. No matter how much Trump might want "to swarm polling places with federal officers," Pfaff argued, "he simply doesn’t have anywhere close to enough at his disposal."

"In July 2026, President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice reportedly dispatched six federal prosecutors to oversee Arizona’s primary elections, according to Democracy Docket, which cited records it had reviewed," Pfaff wrote. "The prosecutors were reportedly sent to the state’s two most populous counties, Maricopa (home to Phoenix) and Pima (home to Tucson). This comes as the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division said it will dispatch 1,000 monitors to the polls for the midterm elections, and as FBI Director Kash Patel continues to equivocate about whether FBI agents will be sent to the polls (even though federal law explicitly bans armed officers from polling sites)."

He added: "These threats raised serious concerns about the openness and fairness of the upcoming midterms. And we should definitely not downplay the ongoing assaults on voting rights that the Trump administration certainly didn’t start but has definitely amplified in unprecedented ways. But it is also important not to oversell these threats, because that is what the Trump administration wants. In fact, because of important structural limitations it faces, fear is what the administration needs."

As Pfaff argued further, Trump has nowhere near the manpower necessary to deploy armed election monitors across the nation, even just in key districts for major swing states. Instead, his threats are all about inducing fear about the potential of running into armed officials while trying to vote, and the ensuing intimidation. Reports about these threats treating them as credible, he added, only help serve Trump's purpose.

"The first challenge to Trump’s would-be meddling is the fact that we have so many polling sites, spread out over so much area," Pfaff explained. "Take what Trump’s DOJ did in Arizona. Six observers were reportedly sent to Maricopa County (which has ~250 in-person voting locations) and Pima County (which had 120 in-person locations during its recent primaries). That’s nearly 400 polling locations spread across two counties that cover a combined 18,000 square miles — in a state where about 75% of all people vote by mail anyway. This act was pure theater, certainly designed more to get headlines than to actually monitor anything."

The second issue, he added, is "staffing."

"Federalism has tied Trump’s hands many times during his two administrations, but one of its strongest impacts has been structural, not legal," he wrote. "Because we rely on cities, counties and states for most law enforcement activities, the federal government simply does not have as many police and prosecutors as it would need to threaten elections on a real scale. The FBI, for example, has fewer than 14,000 sworn officers (called 'special agents'). For comparison, the New York Police Department alone has 33,000 officers. Meanwhile, Chicago has 11,500, while Los Angeles has fewer than 9,000 law enforcement officers."

If Trump were to, hypothetically, deploy all of the federal law enforcement agents at his disposal, that would only add up to around 2.5 times the size of the NYPD, not enough to enforce election rigging across the country, even if it were something he could manage. He might only manage the numbers he needs if he tapped into the military and National Guard, "which would move us out of a discussion about 'voter suppression' into something much darker."