"In our democracy, voters have to have the last word, and the 2026 midterm election is approaching. Our election system is facing something new, something it hasn't ever faced before. For the first time, the federal government itself is a threat to the integrity of elections. This is a big deal."
That's how Michael Walden, president and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, began a Tuesday video about his organization's new report, The Trump Administration's Campaign to Undermine the Next Election, which aims to "connect the dots" on a host of maneuvers by the White House.
In the report, Walden said, "we show the concerted strategy that appears to be unfolding to undermine the elections and make sure that people are not able to cast free and fair votes. Some of these are things you know about. Some of these are things that are a bit obscure. Some of these are things that haven't happened yet."
The actions, he explained, range from "the pardoning on the very first day of this presidential term of the January 6th insurrectionists," to "the firing of election security officials all across the federal government," to "improper requests to states for access to their voter rolls."
Threats to U.S. elections are not new. The report notes that "in 2020, 2022, and 2024, our nation held federal elections. Despite the pandemic, threats of violence, denial of results, and extraordinary pressure, these were secure and accurate. Election officials worked together across party lines. The system held."
However, going into the 2026 cycle, Republican U.S. President Donald Trump and his allies have not only taken the steps that Walden mentioned, but also other actions outlined in the report.
The report sounds the alarm about Trump's March executive order "that aims to overhaul and exert partial control over significant parts of the nation's election systems," some of which has been blocked as it faces a series of challenges in federal court. The document details the impact and status of various provisions, as well as why they are wrong.
The Brennan Center also laid out how the Trump administration is "weaponizing" federal agencies, penalizing law firms, threatening election officials and nonprofits, undermining prosecution of election subversion, and scaling back protections.
The section on scaling back election protections highlights Trump's dismantling of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency as well as a "paradigm shift" at the U.S. Department of Justice's (DOJ) Civil Rights Division, led by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon.
After the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate confirmed Dhillon, she "issued new mission statements that signal the division's move away from protecting the rights of marginalized groups and toward efforts such as rooting out voter fraud, which is actually extremely rare," the report points out. "The DOJ has since dropped every voting case in which it had been a plaintiff at the start of this administration, and it has withdrawn its involvement in several other voting and redistricting suits. It also gutted the Civil Rights Division of its career staff."
Within the division, "the voting section is now led by Maureen Riordan, a longtime DOJ lawyer who rejoined the department after a stint at the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), a conservative organization that has for years sued election officials to try to force aggressive purges of the voter rolls," the document adds. She's now bringing that strategy to the federal government, with suits in North Carolina and California, and threats of others.
"The administration is setting the stage for election subversion. This power play poses a grave threat to the future of U.S. election infrastructure. It is also, in many respects, illegal," the report warns. "The various institutions and actors that operate the constitutional checks and balances safeguarding U.S. elections—including the courts, Congress, independent federal agencies, state legislatures, state and local election officials, and the people themselves—must prevent the Trump administration's power grab from succeeding."
The Brennan Center's report was published the same day that Republican lawmakers in Texas issued arrest warrants for the Democratic colleagues, who fled the state to block a GOP gerrymandering effort directed by Trump. The rigged map, if approved, could help the president's party retain control of the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2026 elections.
Republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
