Here Are 19 - Yes, 19! - Ways Trump and Republicans Are Plotting to Rig and Steal the Midterm Elections
Attacking immigrants and Black voting power. Gutting election security. Voter purges. Threats of arrests and raids. And so much more. Trump’s assault on elections is truly unprecedented.
Note from our Editor-in-Chief:
This week, we are running our ‘Start The Steal’ series, with three months left in the 2026 midterm elections. The president and his allies are conducting a scorched-earth campaign to rig the coming elections, and we believe it’s the biggest story in America right now. To keep reporting this story the way it needs to be told, we need your support. In this new age of American authoritarianism, independent media is more important than ever. Subscribe to Zeteo and never hit another paywall. And read on for Part Two of our special series, below. – Mehdi
They’re Trying Everything
Before he came back to power, Donald Trump’s legal and political advisers were already hard at work drafting legal memos and policy papers about how to blackmail blue states into giving in to his authoritarian, heads-I-win-tails-you-lose demands on election policies and administration.
As we approach the high-stakes 2026 midterms, the president, various departments in his administration, and GOP allies across the United States are waging nonstop warfare on election integrity and voting rights, fueled by Trump’s lies about the 2020 election that he lost.
It’s a mammoth effort involving the gerrymandering wars, voter suppression bills, closing polling sites, the seizure of election records, voter purges, and Trump officials vindictively targeting election officials. The list goes on, and on.
In the closing days of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Donald Trump campaigned on letting Americans die if Democrats didn’t cave to his crank policy demands – and he somehow won. On the campaign trail, he vowed to use presidential power to withhold emergency, life-saving aid and federal disaster relief if blue states didn’t do what he said. He would, in his own words, “force it down” his enemies’ throats.
Throughout Trump’s second term, his policy team, led by Stephen Miller, has weaponized virtually every lever of the federal government to extort Democratic states into submission. Sources with direct knowledge of the matter described to Zeteo how senior Trump advisers decided early on, well before Election Day 2024, that this vindictive, mafia don-style approach to federal aid would be applied to Trump’s crusade to tear out the guts of American election administration and replace it with a system built to rig elections in Republicans’ favor for decades to come. Drafts of policy and legal memos aimed toward this end, the sources added, were written by then-future administration appointees months before Trump had reclaimed power.
Just a few days after he was inaugurated as president again, Trump announced he wanted to condition California wildfire aid on whether the solidly Democratic state submitted to his election crackdown and adopted his restrictive voter-ID rules. During the violent, deadly siege of Minnesota, the Justice Department suggested that the blue state needed to hand over its voter rolls to the feds, if the state wanted the brutal occupation to end.
Horrifying, unprecedented, and woefully corrupt as these threats are, they’re just one of many, many ways that Trump and the Republican Party are devoting vast resources and time – on Capitol Hill, within the bowels of the Trump administration, in state legislatures, in state and local commissions, and elsewhere – to their plots to rig and pervert elections in the coming midterms and, indeed, all future elections.
And they’re doing almost all of it out in the open.
Of course, when Trump was in power the first time, he and congressional Republicans tried to illegally overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, culminating in a failed but deadly coup at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. One thing that is different in Trump’s second term is that he has appointed and surrounded himself – in every corridor of power in the federal government – almost exclusively with extremist sycophants and cultists who are unconcerned with protecting democracy and wish to help him rig elections in his and his party’s favor.
In advance of this year’s midterm elections, Trump and his vast election denial network are already working to sow widespread distrust in the forthcoming results and lay the groundwork for legal challenges, recounts, and audits that the GOP hopes will help them cling to power in Congress.
For nearly two years now, President Trump and his close allies have been coming at this from practically every conceivable angle: “It’s like tracking a new Jan. 6-style plot every week,” a Democratic lawyer involved with efforts to combat Trump’s election-stealing plots previously told Zeteo.
President Trump and Republicans’ efforts to interfere in this year’s midterm elections threaten every aspect of elections – registering to vote, voting itself, tabulation, certification of election results. At the top of the list of concerns for Democrats, election officials from both parties, and pro-democracy groups are the attempted federal takeover of elections, seizure of ballots, voting machines, and other election records, and the prospect of Trump deploying troops or federal law enforcement to polling locations. Trump and Republicans are counting on their far-right allies on the Supreme Court to continue giving them more and more advantages as the midterms near.
Below are the many startlingly anti-democratic ways in which Trump and his allies are now trying to rig and attack your free and fair elections.