In May, I logged in to a virtual town hall meeting convened by two of my elected officials in Oregon—Secretary of State Tobias Read and U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley, both Democrats—on election security in the midterm elections.

I wasn’t surprised to hear that Read and Merkley were concerned that the Republican Party and President Donald Trump might attempt to disrupt the 2026 midterms. But my attention was seized when Merkley said, “We may need to have a citizen brigade just stand outside places where votes are counted just to say, ‘We citizens are protecting our counting process, thank you very much.’”

Bear in mind that Oregon has the longest- and smoothest-running vote-by-mail system in the country, one that has been in place since 2000 without a hint of irregularity. Vote by mail is a point of civic pride, just like Crater Lake or legal weed, and a particular point of pride for this magazine because one of its contributing editors, Phil Keisling, Oregon’s Secretary of State for much of the 1990s, did so much to make “vote at home,” as it’s sometimes called, a reality. If Merkley, from what The Washington Post once called “tidy Oregon,” was contemplating a protective people’s blockade of election boards, how serious is the prospect of election trickery elsewhere?

The answer is: serious. I was inspired by Merkley’s comment to start looking seriously into the covert battle over how the midterm elections are conducted.

Citizens can be forgiven for feeling confused and anxious. We all know that Trump’s popularity is falling, and the Democrats are licking their chops for a possible “blue wave” feast this fall. But sober observers like The Atlantic’s David Graham, The Washington Post’s David Ignatius, and NBC political analyst (and Washington Monthly contributing editor) Jonathan Alter have recently posed diverse scenarios ranging from contested House races to troops in the streets, all of which scheme to produce underhanded Republican triumphs.

These may be the most important midterms since 1862, when the opposition to Lincoln came close to crippling the Union war effort. What, I wondered, could I do to help protect them? What could my neighbors do?

And the answer to this question is a good deal less bleak than it might seem, given the president’s ramblings. It’s not clear that Trump has a plan to subvert the midterms, and even less clear that he and his crew have the skills to execute a plan should he get one. And beyond that, there’s actually a good deal that ordinary people—you and me—can do to make sure the midterms don’t go off the rails. (See sidebar.)

Let’s consider what the administration has signaled it may try to do: Trump is demanding that Congress pass a monstrosity called the SAVE America Act, which would require voters to prove their American citizenship and produce government ID before registering or voting. It would, estimates run, disfranchise at least 10 percent of eligible citizens who lack the necessary documents to register. Driver’s licenses, even with REAL ID, would not be sufficient. You would need a birth certificate or passport. And Trump declares it “will guarantee the midterms. If you don’t get it, big trouble,” He said in March. “And [if you Republicans] pass the act, you will win the midterms, and you will win every election for a long time.”

So far, however, the Senate Republican Conference has refused to abolish the filibuster, which requires a bill to reach 60 votes to pass—and without 60 GOP votes, the bill won’t get an up-or-down vote, meaning it’s doomed. While agitating for the SAVE Act, Trump has meanwhile issued two executive orders designed to skew the midterm elections toward the Republican Party. In March 2025, he issued an order to the federal Election Assistance Commission. This independent federal agency helps states improve their voting procedures and voting machine systems and circulates a “National Mail Voter Registration Form” that voters can use instead of the state forms. Trump ordered the commission to alter the national form to require registrants to prove they are citizens—with documents most citizens do not have and cannot easily obtain. States may continue to use their own forms—but Trump’s order threatens funding cutoffs unless states change those forms to require the same documents. He also ordered states to stop accepting mail ballots postmarked before Election Day but received afterward. (The administration had joined the Republican Party in asking the Supreme Court to impose that timing limit—but late last month the Court refused to do so.)

The major problem with this order is that, well, Trump has no power over elections, or even over the Election Assistance Commission. Under Article I of the Constitution, states make their own rules. Congress can change those rules by statute if it chooses. Conspicuous by its absence is any role whatever for the president. In his first foray into election regulations, Trump blithely asserted sweeping power he does not have. Three federal courts have enjoined the March 2025 order.

In March, Trump issued a new executive order, asserting the power to rewrite the rules for mail voting in the states and the District of Columbia.

This order is, not to mince words, a complete mess. It instructs states to provide the Postal Service with a list of voters eligible for mail ballots. It directs USPS to change its rules so that it will deliver mail ballots only to voters who appear on that list. In June, Postmaster General David Steiner told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that, under the proposed rule, the Postal Service would refuse to process ballots in any state that declined to turn over its absentee-voter list to USPS. Meanwhile, confusingly enough, the order requires Homeland Security to compile its own list of “state citizens” from federal databases that were never designed, in their totality, to list every American citizen. It’s not clear what use would be made of the “state citizenship” lists—but it’s easy to imagine federal authorities or Trump allies jumping into the midst of state vote-counting to challenge vote totals because the lists don’t match.

The day after Steiner’s comments, Federal District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston enjoined most of Trump’s March order, writing that “USPS lacks statutory authorization to promulgate any binding regulations on mail-in voting.” She also voided the DHS provision: “The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections.” A week later, a federal judge in Washington blocked the USPS from carrying out changes to its delivery of mail-in ballots, pointing to a settlement agreement reached between the NAACP and the Postal Service in December 2021.

The attack on mail voting thus is at a standstill—though the government has indicated it will appeal.

Whether or not Trump can command the Postal Service, he has power over federal law enforcement and has already begun using it to disrupt or distort elections. On June 11, FBI agents fanned out across Ohio to seize the records of a non-partisan non-profit that supports liberal causes and conducts voter registration drives. And California Governor Gavin Newsom announced that FBI agents are investigating him and his wife, filmmaker and activist Jennifer Siebel Newsom.

Political misuse of the FBI antedates the Trump era, of course. But Trump’s subservient FBI Director, Kash Patel, seems ready to deploy the Bureau to an unprecedented extent.

Earlier this year, when FBI agents seized the 2020 election voting records in Fulton County, Georgia, they were joined by Tulsi Gabbard, then the Director of National Intelligence. The DNI has no role in domestic politics. And while Gabbard is now gone, Trump’s pick for acting director, Bill Pulte, has only one visible qualification: slavish loyalty to Trump. The DNI has no power to order or conduct intelligence operations. Still, as the acting head of the “Intelligence Community,” a rogue DNI could proclaim that intelligence “shows” foreign involvement in the elections, which might justify emergency measures to “protect” them. Recall that one of the canards about the 2020 election was that Venezuela, before it became the 51st state, was trying to manipulate American voting machines.

Beyond the legal framework, some observers worry about intimidation of voters at the polls. This may or may not be worth worrying about. The Republican National Committee has announced a plan to send “disciplined and ruthless” hired monitors to 17 battleground states to “supervise” voting and vote-counting. Trump has referred to these as his “election integrity army,” which is comforting if you’re a fan of Soviet plebiscites. Trump’s aides have invoked the spectacle of ICE agents at or near the polls, which would pretty clearly violate federal law. In March, Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar,” refused to rule out sending ICE agents to election sites, asking instead what Democrats are “afraid of.” In June, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin also refused to rule out deploying ICE at the polls. On June 23, ICE agents actually appeared at a polling place in Syracuse, New York, to threaten a poll worker who had posted a criticism of ICE on her social media.

Beyond ICE, there’s the prospect of National Guard troops “securing” the polls or—in the most dystopian of scenarios—regular military being deployed because Trump, citing a chimerical “national security” threat, invokes emergency powers to control the elections. Trump has already sent National Guard (and even regular Marine units) into American cities to suppress protests against ICE sweeps—a move that has been blocked by the federal courts, including a “shadow docket” ruling by the Supreme Court.

How do we assess Trump’s eagerness to impose his will on the elections? First, the bad news: Trump would clearly feel no compunction about cheating in any election—or canceling it altogether—and he has a smorgasbord of executive tools that would enable him to do so, ranging from bureaucratic maneuvering to misuse of law enforcement to physical threats to apocalyptic tools such as the use of the Insurrection Act to impose something like martial law.

The second bit of bad news is that there’s nothing in our system that, of its own force, would prevent all this: Trump could, in theory at least, get away with these things. After January 6, 2021, no one should be shocked if he tries.

But there is good news as well: a Trump coup attempt is unlikely to succeed, and there will be one hell of a fight before it happens.

The first obstacle in Trump’s way is himself. There is something wrong with this man, and whatever it is, it is getting worse. Even with command of the executive branch, he is so erratic and impulsive that he may be incapable of formulating a successful strategy.

The second obstacle is public opinion. As of this writing, Trump is roughly as popular as the Texas screwworm. He knows it, those around him know it, and others whose help he may be counting on know it. His party is likely to lose the midterms, perhaps in a “wave” election. Such an election, carried out in 470 separate votes in 50 states, is very hard to steal—and when a faltering leader summons his ambitious minions to steal it for him, they may actually hesitate. As Josh Marshall of Talking Point Memo noted in June, “you build autocracies when you’re popular (often by goosing the economy in a smart and concerted way), not when you’re swirling the bowl with approval ratings in the mid-30s and falling.”

To overturn a national election, the president needs politicians—who tend to treat unpopularity like a contagious disease. They live and die by the principle explained by Abraham Lincoln, our greatest politician, in 1858: “Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; against it, nothing can succeed.” Helping a popular president is more attractive than risking criminal prosecution—or political defeat—to save an unpopular one.

Beyond that, stealing an election is a complex and unpredictable process—and Trump’s team may not have the skills to do it.

Yes, the president has competent helpers—Homan, White House policy chief Stephen Miller, and budget director Russell Vought come to mind. Much of his team, though, has a kind of Keystone Cops quality: JD Vance, Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kash Patel, Mullin, Todd Blanche, who have bungled efforts to obtain grand jury indictments, impose lawful tariffs, conduct immigration operations, build a ballroom, or arrange a Fourth of July concert. These are people who literally can’t paint a swimming pool.

History suggests that when an incompetent underling asks a professional politician to risk their future to help an unpopular leader commit a daylight robbery, the underling hesitates. And it might not take much reluctance to derail the Trump express: The New York Times recently reported that Vance and Miller wanted to respond to protests in Minneapolis by invoking the Insurrection Act and declaring martial law—but were stymied by one obscure right-wing White House lawyer who protested against this gross violation of the Constitution.

It wouldn’t take many monkey wrenches to halt a Trump coup d’etat.

Almost every day, we hear that the administration has found some new way to fix the elections (the Postal Service, ICE, the FBI, the Office of National Intelligence, the SAVE America Act, etc., etc.). That flow may evince not so much official confidence as actual desperation. Each new stratagem may be less a superweapon than a fresh shipment from Acme to Wile E. Coyote—Jet-Propelled Unicycle, Dehydrated Boulders, etc. Surely this scheme, this legal invention, this threat, this bluster, will allow him to catch that gosh darned Road Runner.

And there is, at least potentially, more good news.

Powerful forces—civil society groups and state governments—are mobilizing to oppose these schemes in court. At least 22 states (plus the District of Columbia) have filed lawsuits against the administration to block the executive orders. An all-star team of litigants are at the ready: the League of Women Voters (national plus state chapters), the ACLU and its state affiliates, the Brennan Center for Justice of New York University, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the League of United Latin American Citizens, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, and (to defend the voting rights of on duty military personnel) the Secure Families Initiative, to name only a few. These groups have run up an impressive score against this administration in areas including the use of the military in Los Angeles, Portland (Oregon), Minneapolis, and Chicago, as well as attempts to change election laws by fiat. They live for these cases, and they are good at them.

Trump’s legal team is a tad less impressive. There’s been a bloodbath at the Department of Justice and other federal agencies. As a result, federal courtrooms have been flooded with government lawyers who are newcomers or hacks. Virtually any federal district judge who has brushed up against the administration’s lawyers has now concluded that they are not just incompetent but liars as well.

The next good news is that each of us—lawyer and non-lawyer alike—has a role to play in safeguarding the election.

“Democracy is not a spectator sport,” goes an old saying attributed to Lotte Scharfman, a refugee from Nazism who became a stalwart of the League of Women Voters. And there’s a strong chance that groups like the League will prevail if Trump attempts to steal seats in Congress. Ordinary citizens can get involved now and play an important role in that battle.

Senator Merkley did not call me back about his comments at the town meeting. Still, his office sent a prepared statement calling for “robust citizen action” in areas such as organized nonviolent protest.

The first and most important thing for citizens to do, they emphasize, is to vote. “Number one,” Oregon Secretary of State Read told me. “Have your plan about how you’re going to vote. Spread the word next—connect with others with similar concerns, repeat good information and combat misinformation.”

“People should not be cynical,” said Edward B. Foley, an election law specialist at Ohio State. “Voting really, really matters.”

The spear-shaking about RNC poll watchers or ICE agents is meant to intimidate, most of those I talked to believe. ICE at the polls would be illegal, and the idea may serve more as a bluff than a weapon. “Do I think the average voter is going to face ICE at the polls?” Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the voting rights and elections program at the Brennan Center, said in an interview. “I do not.”

“The key thing from the perspective of the voter is that they are not going to see any of that,” Adav Noti, executive director of the Campaign Legal Center, told me. For most voters, the experience will be “perfectly pleasant.”

The one caveat is that voters should make sure their registration is correct well in advance of Election Day, in case there has been some muddling of, or meddling with, the lists. If you vote by mail, return your ballot the day you receive it; consider dropping it off at a drop box or state election office. Or vote in person and do so early. Involve family and friends; if you go to the polls, go with a group.

And “do not give in to the constant feed of doomscrolling,” Perryman, of the pro-democracy litigation nonprofit Democracy Forward, told me.

There will be local resources to help with any voting problems you may have. “Almost every state has a non-partisan voter protection infrastructure,” Noti, of the Campaign Legal Center, said. And citizens can do more than consult them: voters, including non-lawyers, can volunteer to help the effort. These groups will educate you about election proceedings and equip you to tell genuine news from malicious misinformation. They also offer ways you can help reinforce and protect clean elections in your community.

(This post includes a detailed list of some of the most important of these groups, with suggestions of how volunteers can help.)

In the end, though, Merkley, I think, is right—the 2026 elections may be settled in the streets. The powerful resistance to Trumpism over the past decade shows the power of what the Founding generation called “the people out of doors.” Demonstrations can, of course, be silenced by bullets. But a demonstration on the scale of the “No Kings” demonstrations last October and March would have a profound effect on every decisionmaker.

“If we get down to the place where Republicans or Donald Trump are trying to interfere in the election,” Marc Elias of Democracy Docket (a high-visibility anti-Trump advocacy group) told Rachel Maddow, “then we’re going to need people to mobilize. We’re gonna need them to mobilize peacefully; we’re going to need some of them to mobilize within the law, but we’re going to need the public to be prepared to be active in protesting any efforts by the Republicans to overturn the will of the voters.”

That’s news I can use. I have walking shoes. And I’m nothing special—millions of Americans of all ages believe in elections, voting, democracy, and law.

No matter what Acme gizmo Trump deploys, millions of us won’t stand still while he tries to steal our election.

Beep, Beep.

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Trump’s Election Subversion Plans?