President Donald Trump speaks to reporters before boarding Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House in December 2025. (Photo by Tom Brenner/Getty Images)
As President Donald Trump tries to assert power over U.S. elections, he has raged on social media, cajoled Republican lawmakers and unleashed the Department of Justice on his political enemies.
What has he accomplished with all that effort? Not a lot.
Six months before the November midterm elections, the Trump administration’s quest to exercise authority over the contests and impose sweeping restrictions on voters has proved largely unsuccessful. The aggressive campaign — separate from Trump’s more effective foray into redistricting fights — has been stymied by the courts, rebuffed by many state election officials and opposed by key Republican senators.
“I think there’s many out there who are worried about the constant drumbeat of what the administration is trying to do and what they might do in the future. I hear this from voters, I hear this from election officials,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research.
“And what I see is that there is a vast chasm between wanting to do something and trying to do something and actually successfully doing it.”
Months yet to go
Much could change between now and November, of course.
Facing likely Republican losses in the midterms, election experts warn that Trump could lash out with increasingly brazen attempts to control elections. Or that the Justice Department will conduct more raids targeting election officials, like the FBI seizure of ballots from the 2020 presidential election from Fulton County, Georgia.
Democrats remain braced for federal election interference, especially the prospect of Trump deploying immigration enforcement agents or the military at polling locations — an action prohibited under federal law that some administration aides have nevertheless refused to flatly rule out.
But Trump’s record of achievement up to this point is poor.
The SAVE America Act, which would require voters to prove their citizenship, is stalled in the U.S. Senate despite Trump’s repeated demands for its passage. Federal courts blocked an executive order Trump signed last year that sought to impose a proof-of-citizenship rule unilaterally.
The Justice Department hasn’t secured a single court victory in the 30 lawsuits it’s filed to force states and the District of Columbia to turn over sensitive personal data on voters. A bipartisan group of state secretaries of state is fighting the Trump administration in court — only 13 Republican states have provided the information.
And an executive order signed in March that would limit voting by mail faces five federal lawsuits, with an initial courtroom showdown set for Thursday in Washington, D.C. Federal agencies have yet to finalize plans to implement the directive, which election law experts call illegal and unconstitutional.
“America’s Elections are Rigged, Stolen, and a Laughingstock all over the World. We are either going to fix them, or we won’t have a Country any longer,” Trump posted on Truth Social in late April.
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told States Newsroom that Trump is committed “to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters.”
Jackson named several federal laws that she said provide the Justice Department oversight over states’ election administration. She also noted Trump’s support for the SAVE America Act.
“Anyone breaking the law will be held accountable,” Jackson said in an email.
System under strain
Trump has placed the nation’s electoral system under immense stress before.
After the 2020 election, the president and his allies worked to overturn the results, with Trump leaning on then-Vice President Mike Pence to reject Electoral College votes. The effort failed but it led to a mob storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and disrupting Congress’ certification of Joe Biden’s victory.
Today, the system is holding but under strain. An analysis released Thursday by Issue One, a pro-democracy group, likened American elections to a resilient patient with a strong immune system. Yet the Trump administration, rather than boosting the body’s immunity, acts like a virus, it said.
“America’s election system’s immune system is not breaking, but it is actively fighting against the virus of democratic backsliding,” the analysis reads.
The group identified three safeguards it says are in critical condition: Congress, internal checks within the executive branch and the information ecosystem.
Election officials have watched with particular concern as the Justice Department probes the 2020 election. Trump has long falsely asserted that the election was stolen and in January 2021 pressured the Georgia secretary of state to find him enough votes to overturn his loss in that state.
After the FBI obtained a warrant to seize 2020 election ballots from Fulton County, which encompasses Atlanta, in January 2026, the DOJ last month sent a subpoena for information on the county’s election workers. The subpoena demands the names, positions, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses of election workers and poll volunteers who worked the 2020 general election.
Fulton County is fighting the subpoena in court. On Wednesday, a federal judge ruled that the FBI doesn’t have to give the ballots back to the county, though he noted the seizure “was certainly not perfect.”
Supporters of President Donald Trump demonstrate at a ‘Stop the Steal’ rally in front of the Maricopa County Elections Department in Phoenix on Nov. 7, 2020 . (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)The Justice Department has also obtained a grand jury subpoena for election records in Arizona and demanded 2024 ballots from Wayne County, Michigan, which includes Detroit. And the FBI recently interviewed a Wisconsin election official about the 2020 election, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.
Local leaders have promised that they won’t bend to pressure from the Trump administration.
“This whole thing is designed to harass, intimidate and chill participation in our election process,” Fulton County Board of Commissioners Chair Robb Pitts, a Democrat, said in a video statement. “It’s not going to work, it’s not going to happen.”
Blue state action
Some states are pursuing additional safeguards against federal election interference.
For example, New Mexico lawmakers passed a bill that makes intentionally obstructing polling places a felony and prohibits the military or any armed federal personnel from polling locations.
The legislative push, concentrated in Democratic states, comes as Trump administration officials have sidestepped direct questions about whether troops or federal agents could be deployed to the polls.
“It’s yet another gotcha hypothetical,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said at a recent U.S. Senate hearing.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth listens to questions during a news conference at the Pentagon on March 2, 2026. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)The Connecticut General Assembly passed legislation May 6 that imposes a 250-foot buffer zone around election sites where warrantless arrests and searches, use of force and ID checks by state or federal officers, including immigration agents, are banned. The measure also bans masked or concealed identities near polling places, among other provisions.
Connecticut state Rep. Matt Blumenthal, a Democrat who chairs the state House Government Administration & Elections Committee, said that if nothing happens during this fall’s elections, “I’ll say, ‘Good, it worked.’”
The goal of the bill isn’t to create confrontations between Connecticut law enforcement and federal forces, but to deter intimidation in the first place, he said.
“We have a responsibility to protect all of our residents, but especially our voters, related to our elections — to prevent these sorts of tools of threat and intimidation and terror from being used to shape our political life,” Blumenthal said in an interview.
Connecticut state Sen. Rob Sampson, a Republican, said that he wouldn’t support abuse from the federal government. But Democrats, he said, were spinning a false narrative of voter intimidation for political purposes and attempting to distract from weaknesses in election security.
“In the last few years, I don’t always trust the results,” Sampson said on the Senate floor. “Now, some people will go out there and say, ‘Oh, you’re an election denier.’ I’m not saying that there’s tens of thousands of faulty or erroneous or fraudulent votes. I’m just saying that there’s definitely some.”
GOP elections bill stalled
Trump and Republicans in Congress say major action is needed to boost election confidence.
At Trump’s urging, the U.S. House passed the SAVE America Act in February. In addition to requiring voters to show documents such as a passport or birth certificate that prove citizenship, the legislation also imposes ID requirements at the polls and would require states to bolster efforts to clean voter registration lists.
Polling suggests Americans support at least some of the bill’s provisions. A Politico poll conducted in April found 52% of Americans support requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote, while 18% oppose.
Democrats, election administration experts and some Republicans say the proposal would lead to chaos. Its provisions would take effect immediately, upending voting requirements potentially months or weeks before elections. Married women and others who have last names that don’t match their birth certificates could face additional obstacles registering to vote.
The SAVE America Act hasn’t advanced in the U.S. Senate. Sen. John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican and major proponent of the bill, attempted to add the measure onto a budget bill in April, but the Senate rejected it, 48-50.
“This doesn’t mean Trump and his allies in Congress will stop,” Héctor Sánchez Barba, president and CEO of Mi Familia Vota, a Latino voting rights group, said in a statement.
The Senate has since moved off the SAVE America Act and would need to hold a procedural vote to return to it. Whether that happens is in doubt, but Kennedy indicated to Punchbowl News that he intends to force another amendment vote later this month. His office didn’t respond to an email from States Newsroom seeking confirmation.
A mail ballot drop box at a polling station n Arlington, Virginia, on Election Day 2025. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)Postal Service
Without the SAVE America Act, Trump’s options to legally restrict voting are limited.
Trump signed an executive order in March attempting to limit the U.S. Postal Service’s delivery of ballots through the mail. The order also directs the Department of Homeland Security to create “state citizenship lists” that include the names of voting-age citizens in each state — effectively creating a national voter list.
But the order has come under legal attack from Democratic groups, a coalition of Democratic states and multiple voting rights organizations. Its opponents are hopeful that federal judges will soon block the directive like they did a March 2025 order that included a proof-of-citizenship requirement.
“I don’t have confidence that the Trump administration or Donald Trump will refrain from trying to interfere with our elections,” Blumenthal said. “But I have great confidence that the American people will stand up against it.”
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