The Trump administration is using the Justice Department, the FBI, and a presidential executive order to systematically dismantle American voting rights before the 2026 midterms. Election experts and former officials are calling it what it is: a coordinated campaign to change the rules of the game before they lose. The only surprising part is how openly they're doing it.
The Playbook, Laid Out in Plain Sight
Here's the thing about a cover-up: you're supposed to cover it up. The Guardian has pieced together what the Trump administration is doing to voting rights ahead of November, and the picture it paints is less a shadowy conspiracy than a very loud man telling you exactly what he plans to do.
The administration has filed DOJ lawsuits demanding sensitive voter data from 30 states, pushed an executive order sharply restricting mail-in voting, and installed 2020 election denialists in key positions at the DOJ and FBI. Federal investigators have launched probes into debunked fraud allegations in Georgia, Wisconsin, and other swing states that Trump lost in 2020. Every single one of those swing states. What a coincidence.
This is all happening, as The Guardian reports, despite the fact that federal law explicitly gives states and Congress the power to set election rules. The administration is not trying to work within the system. It is trying to bulldoze the system on a tight midterm schedule.
The DOJ Has Lost Every Single One of Those Lawsuits So Far
The Justice Department has filed 30 active lawsuits against states and Washington DC demanding they hand over voter rolls containing private information including driver's license numbers and Social Security numbers. Courts have ruled on eight of them so far. The DOJ has lost all eight.
Eileen O'Connor, a senior counsel with the Brennan Center who spent eight years in the DOJ's voting section of the civil rights division, was blunt with The Guardian. "The Department of Justice has no authority to sweep up the voter rolls, which contain private information like drivers' licenses and social security numbers, from every state in the nation."
Losing in court has not slowed anyone down. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche went on Fox News last month and told viewers there was "a ton of evidence that the election was rigged" in 2020. There is not a ton of evidence. There is no meaningful evidence. Numerous audits and court cases after 2020 found nothing. But when you have already decided on the conclusion, the evidence is kind of beside the point.
Mail-In Voting Is in the Crosshairs
In late March, Trump signed an executive order dramatically tightening the rules around mail-in voting, a method he has claimed without evidence enables fraud. The order hands the United States Postal Service unprecedented authority to write new rules making it harder to vote by mail. The postal service. The one his allies tried to cripple before the 2020 election by pulling sorting machines out of facilities.
Officials from 23 Democratic states, including California and Washington DC, filed a lawsuit in early April to block the order. They argue it is an unconstitutional federal intervention into how states run their own elections. That is also what the Constitution says, but the Constitution has had a rough few years.
Larry Noble, a former general counsel at the Federal Election Commission who now teaches law at American University, told The Guardian that Trump is recycling the same debunked claims about mail fraud that failed every legal test in 2020 and 2021. "Numerous audits and lawsuits have failed to find any meaningful fraud in the 2020 election," Noble said. Trump's working theory, Noble explained, is that Democrats winning is itself proof of cheating.
Armed Agents at Polling Places Is Now a Conversation We're Having
O'Connor flagged something in her comments to The Guardian that deserves more attention than it's getting. The administration, she noted, has "raised the prospect of deploying federal immigration agents at polling sites." Federal law, she points out, explicitly bans federal officers from interfering in elections and prohibits armed federal agents from being anywhere an election is being held.
So we're now at the point where the former DOJ election law expert has to remind people that you cannot send ICE agents to a polling station. In America. In 2026. This is the sentence we are living in.
The DOJ's civil rights division voting section, which used to handle all of this, has been hollowed out. According to The Guardian, it went from roughly 30 lawyers to less than half that after Trump took office. The people who were supposed to protect voting rights have been replaced or driven out. The people who replaced them believe the 2020 election was stolen.
He Already Called the California Primary Rigged
If you wanted a preview of what November is going to look like if Democrats have a good night, look at what happened after California held its primaries in early June. Trump-backed Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt lost his early voting lead as ballots were tabulated. California, the largest state in the country, routinely takes longer than other states to count votes. This is well known and not mysterious.
Trump went on Truth Social and wrote that it was "Not possible for Spencer Pratt to have lost the L.A. runoffs after the big lead he had... 3rd World Nation." He then claimed, without providing any details, that the results were "under investigation by the US attorney's office in Los Angeles." The DOJ sent a federal prosecutor to observe ballot processing in LA.
This is the trial run. One local mayoral race where Trump's guy lost, and the President of the United States instantly declared fraud and dispatched a federal prosecutor. Multiply that by every competitive House and Senate race in the country on a night in November when Democrats potentially take back the chamber, and you start to understand the scale of what we are watching unfold.
The Dingo Take
Trump told Republican lawmakers at a House retreat back in January exactly what he was afraid of and exactly what he intended to do about it. "You gotta win the midterms, because if we don't win the midterms, it's just gonna be... I mean, they'll find a reason to impeach me," he said. He is not hiding the motive. He is not pretending this is about election integrity. He told people directly: I need to win or I face consequences, and I intend to make sure I win.
What's unfolding, as The Guardian's reporting makes clear, is a systematic pre-rigging of the conditions under which the election takes place. Intimidate election workers with FBI investigations. Drain the DOJ's voting rights section of the lawyers who know the law. Restrict mail-in voting. Sue states into handing over private voter data even as courts throw out every case. Float the idea of armed federal agents at the polls. And then, the moment a result comes in that you don't like, declare fraud before the ballots are even finished being counted.
Eight courts have now ruled against the DOJ in those voter data lawsuits. Eight. The losing streak hasn't slowed anyone down by a single step. That is the tell. This was never about winning in court. It's about burning enough time, creating enough chaos, and establishing enough of a pre-built narrative that when November comes and the results are bad, the machinery is already in place to call the whole thing a lie.
