{"id":441219,"date":"2026-01-31T17:11:12","date_gmt":"2026-01-31T17:11:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/441219\/"},"modified":"2026-01-31T17:11:12","modified_gmt":"2026-01-31T17:11:12","slug":"worst-case-scenarios-how-democratic-election-officials-are-preparing-for-potential-trump-intrusion-in-the-midterms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/441219\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Worst-case scenarios\u2019: How Democratic election officials are preparing for potential Trump intrusion in the midterms"},"content":{"rendered":"

Washington
\n \u00a0\u2014\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n Democratic election officials are preparing for potential federal government intrusion in the midterms, as President Donald Trump\u2019s appointees escalate their efforts to find evidence for his long-debunked election fraud claims<\/a>.\n <\/p>\n

\n The potential for federal government intervention in state elections \u201cis now in a category, like a weather event, like a bomb threat, like a power outage\u201d that officials must prepare for, Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon told CNN. Simon spoke just hours after the FBI\u2019s seizure of 2020 ballots<\/a> from Fulton County, Georgia.\n <\/p>\n

\n Simon, a Democrat, stressed that he was not predicting such an intrusion. But he and his colleagues have discussed a range of moves, from seeking to protect voters from interactions with federal law enforcement at polling places to navigating the administration\u2019s push for access to personal information<\/a> about tens of millions of voters.\n <\/p>\n

\n The Trump administration has pushed to alter election ground rules ahead of the midterms, including with an executive order last year that has been partially blocked<\/a> in court.\n <\/p>\n

\n The FBI search of Fulton County\u2019s elections office came days after Attorney General Pam Bondi linked the immigration crackdown in Minnesota to her agency\u2019s demand for the state\u2019s unredacted voter rolls<\/a>, alarming state election chiefs who are already worried about cyberattacks<\/a>, threats to workers<\/a> and other potential hurdles to completing each count.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cThis is now a legitimate planning category. It\u2019s extraordinarily sad, but it would be irresponsible for us to disregard the possibility,\u201d Simon said during the annual winter meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State.\n <\/p>\n

\"Minnesota<\/p>\n

\n Democratic secretaries of state said they were reluctant to provide explicit details about their advance planning for fear of alarming voters or providing a roadmap for any bad actors. But they said their preparations were evolving with the novel risks posed by the administration.\n <\/p>\n

\n In Nevada, Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, who heads the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, said he wants to ensure that polling places in heavily Latino east Las Vegas will have enough staff and voting equipment to keep lines short during peak hours.\n <\/p>\n

\n He worries long lines could expose voters to harassment by federal immigration agents and others, \u201calthough we know that noncitizens are not voting in Nevada.\u201d ProPublica last year<\/a> found more than 170 cases of US citizens being detained during immigration operations or protests.\n <\/p>\n

\n Just this week, as her state also became the target<\/a> of a federal immigration surge, Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows looked up the federal statute<\/a> that limits the presence of armed military at polling places.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cIf people are too scared to go out to get groceries or to go to work, they\u2019re going to be too scared to go out and vote, if there are armed federal agents roaming the streets next November,\u201d she said.\n <\/p>\n

\n Connecticut Secretary of State Stephanie Thomas said her team is preparing for longstanding issues such as cyberattacks but also new threats specific to the Trump era, like \u201cif troops are sent to a polling place.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cWe basically take the news of the day, worst-case scenarios, and make sure that we are thinking about any emergencies before they occur,\u201d Thomas said.\n <\/p>\n

\n Responding to those concerns, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement: \u201cDemocrat conspiracies have no basis in reality and their claims shouldn\u2019t be amplified uncritically by the mainstream media.\u201d She said US Immigration and Customs Enforcement \u201cis focused on removing criminal illegal aliens from country, who should be nowhere near any polling places because it would be a crime for them to vote.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cPresident Trump cares deeply about the integrity of our elections \u2013 and so do the millions of Americans who sent him back to office based on his pledge to secure our election,\u201d she said.\n <\/p>\n

\n The president has long repeated debunked claims<\/a> that his 2020 loss was marred by fraud and recently declined to rule out sending the National Guard to seize voting machines, as he considered doing<\/a> after his loss to Democrat Joe Biden.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cI should have,\u201d he told The New York Times in a January interview<\/a>, adding later: \u201cWe have very dishonest elections. OK, I say it to you loud and clear. I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s politically correct or not to say it. I shouldn\u2019t complain. I won three times.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n In the early weeks of the administration, Trump hollowed out a federal cybersecurity agency<\/a> that assists election offices, and the administration cut funding for a federal platform for information-sharing between states to monitor election misinformation and threats.\n <\/p>\n

\n The Department of Justice, which has amplified claims that undocumented immigrants have infiltrated US elections, without independent evidence, has sued two dozen states for full voter rolls, including personal information such as Social Security numbers and home addresses.\n <\/p>\n

\"US<\/p>\n

\n Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard<\/a>, who rejects a bipartisan consensus that Russia sought to influence the 2016 election<\/a>, was present when FBI agents seized the 2020 ballots in Fulton County, Georgia, under a search warrant. Her office said afterward that ensuring election security is within Gabbard\u2019s legal duties, particularly with regard to counterintelligence.\n <\/p>\n

\n Trump has also upended convention by kicking off a mid-decade redistricting campaign<\/a> aimed at helping his party eke out additional US House seats in November\u2019s midterms. The Justice Department later joined a lawsuit seeking to invalidate California Democrats\u2019 retaliatory effort<\/a> to redraw their own House maps.\n <\/p>\n

\n In interviews with CNN during this week\u2019s gathering, Democratic election chiefs worried about the administration\u2019s increasing confrontations with state and local authorities, all while the federal government has drastically scaled back cybersecurity support for elections.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cThe mechanics of securing elections \u2026 has completely been eliminated, and instead, it\u2019s been replaced with these bizarre conspiracy theories that have no grounding in the way things actually work,\u201d said Bellows, the Maine secretary of state.\n <\/p>\n

\n Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold said the recent events in Minneapolis, where federal agents killed two Americans during anti-ICE protests, \u201cis already showing people how far they are willing to go\u201d to push their agenda forward.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cThis is a scary time in our history,\u201d Griswold said.\n <\/p>\n

\n The annual NASS meeting is typically a low-key, bipartisan affair where top election officials listen to experts to discuss the latest advances on topics such as cybersecurity and compare notes on policy issues.\n <\/p>\n

\n This week\u2019s gathering at a downtown Washington hotel had some of the air of a typical conference: A breakfast buffet laden with pastries and sliced fruit, skirted tables with vendors hawking election software and voting machines lining the halls, name badges that helped government officials, non-profit advocates and private election advisers make introductions and exchange business cards.\n <\/p>\n

\n The drastic changes over the last year were an unavoidable part of the conversation.\n <\/p>\n

\n At one open session, Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican who serves as her state\u2019s top election official, confronted a White House official about Justice Department civil rights head Harmeet Dhillon<\/a> saying that states needed federal help to clean their voting rolls.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cShe\u2019s pretty much slandered all of us,\u201d Henderson said. \u201cAnd to me, that\u2019s problematic to publicly claim that secretaries of state are not doing our jobs and that the federal government has to do it for us. Not OK.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Most states are resisting DOJ\u2019s requests for their sensitive voter registration data, and Dhillon\u2019s office is now suing two dozen states for their records.\n <\/p>\n

\n Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson, a Republican and the current president of NASS, has turned over the voter data the administration is seeking. But he refused to sign an agreement put forward by the Justice Department requiring the state to \u201cclean\u201d the rolls within 45 days of the DOJ\u2019s review, seeing that as an incursion on the bottom-up process of list maintenance in Mississippi.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cThe federal government has a tiny role in elections, and I get that. And when Congress acts, that\u2019s one thing,\u201d Watson told CNN. \u201cBut outside of that, the states are the ones that should be in charge.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Still, he doesn\u2019t expect federal action to emerge as an issue in the midterms.\n <\/p>\n

\n The erosion of bipartisanship has cut both ways among the state election community. While many Democrats were openly critical of the White House\u2019s approach, some Republicans came to its defense and encouraged the administration\u2019s efforts to impose more security measures on the franchise \u2013 including with proposals to add a proof of citizenship to voter registration \u2013 that could also make it hard for eligible voters to cast ballots.\n <\/p>\n

\n Republican West Virginia Secretary of State Kris Warner told CNN he has \u201cno fear\u201d of federal interference in the 2026 elections. His brother, former West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner, joined the Trump administration last year as a senior Justice Department official.\n <\/p>\n

\n Warner acknowledged that some Democrats \u201chave their concerns in their states, but I don\u2019t see that as a concern in West Virginia.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Election officials are adapting to make up for the gap created by the administration\u2019s elimination of the federal government\u2019s cybersecurity support, as Idaho\u2019s Secretary of State Phil McGrane noted, pointing out states are standing up their own coordination platforms.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cIt would be better if we were working in unison, as we have done in the past, but I know there has been a lot of efforts to ensure that the resilience of the system isn\u2019t weakened,\u201d he told CNN.\n <\/p>\n

\"An<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Washington \u00a0\u2014\u00a0 Democratic election officials are preparing for potential federal government intrusion in the midterms, as President Donald…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":441220,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":{"0":"post-441219","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-united-states-of-america","12":"tag-unitedstates","13":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","14":"tag-us","15":"tag-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=441219"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441219\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/441220"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=441219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=441219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=441219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}