‘Everything Is On The Table’: Officials Prepare For Trump To Try To Steal The 2026 Election

The courts, state election officials and even candidates themselves all have opportunities to stop any election trickery in its tracks.

When the Department of Justice raided the election offices in Fulton County, Georgia, to seize ballots, tabulations and other materials related to the 2020 election on Jan. 28, it signaled a new phase in President Donald Trump’s efforts to prove his conspiracy theory about election fraud. It also raised a new fear that this president, who already tried to steal one election, may be setting the stage to try to steal another.

That raid wasn’t just about settling Trump’s old scores, but it also looked like “a test run for messing with election administrators and the counting of ballots in the midterm elections in 2026,” Richard Hasen, an election expert at UCLA Law School, wrote in Slate in January.

Since entering politics in 2015, Trump has claimed, falsely, that every election he has taken part in was marred by fraud. In his second term in office, he has moved to weaponize the federal government against this imaginary fraud by seeking to restrict voting and seize control of the electoral process from the states. This has led to mounting fears that he will seek to interfere in the 2026 midterms in various ways, including deploying the National Guard, surrounding the polls with immigration enforcement officers, declaring a national security emergency — and, following the raid in Fulton County, seizing ballots and voting machines.

This is easier said than done. First off, any effort to seize ballots on or after Election Day would be wildly illegal.

“There is almost no circumstance in which it would be appropriate or legal to seize ballots or election equipment,” said Wendy Weiser, vice president of democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice, a progressive voting rights nonprofit organization.