Democratic state attorneys general, top state officials, and civic groups accelerated planning to thwart any federal meddling in the November midterm elections by Donald Trump. The coordinated defense follows repeated false charges of widespread voting fraud from the president and veiled threats of federal interference in the electoral process.
Weekly Strategy Sessions and Tabletop Exercises Target Federal Overreach
Since the beginning of this year, 24 Democratic attorneys general have stepped up their teamwork alongside roughly a dozen Democratic secretaries of state and multiple civic organizations. The coalition relies on weekly Zoom calls and in-person tabletop exercises to strategize about countering potential federal intervention. The Progressive State Leaders Committee (PSLC), which is the public policy arm of the Democratic Attorneys General Association, is spearheading these cooperation efforts.
Key civil society groups—including the Democracy Defenders Fund, the States United Democracy Center, and the Brennan Center for Justice—take part in weekly Zoom calls directed by Washington state Attorney General Nick Brown, who also heads the PSLC election-protection working group. Brown, a former U.S. attorney and federal prosecutor, stated that the calls focus on general election security issues and potential event scenarios, including the possibility of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents showing up near polling places and ballots being seized in select races.
Brown also led two in-person tabletop exercises in Milwaukee in May and Detroit in September. These sessions included representatives from secretary of state offices and other PSLC partners. Norm Eisen, executive chair of the Democracy Defenders Fund and a former special counsel for ethics and government reform to Barack Obama, participated in the Milwaukee and Detroit exercises. Eisen praised the state-level preparation, noting that the pro-democracy attorneys general are preparing for anything that the administration may throw at them, with a level of preparation that is off the charts.
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Legal Pushback Against Department of Justice Actions
State officials have expressed acute concern regarding potential interference from the Department of Justice and other parts of the Trump administration. On his first day in office last January, Trump falsely called the 2020 election rigged, a claim he has repeated hundreds of times since losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden. Nick Brown identified the Justice Department and the Trump administration as the biggest adversary to a smooth election, adding that Trump lies about the election on a regular basis.
The Department of Justice announced dubious plans this summer to deploy 1,000 poll monitors, prompting the NAACP to file a lawsuit on October 4 seeking details on how those monitors would be deployed. By comparison, the Justice Department deployed 289 monitors in 2022, according to CBS News. The Justice Department has sued 30 states to obtain unredacted voter lists containing sensitive personal information. Democratic attorneys general have challenged these lawsuits, resulting in the Justice Department losing 26 of the cases that courts have ruled on.
Harmeet Dhillon, head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, wrote to state election officials this summer threatening prosecutions if they did not cooperate adequately in hunting for voting fraud. Despite these pressures, Brown’s office co-led legal moves that blocked Trump’s plans in a March executive order to overhaul and curb voting by mail, a restriction the Supreme Court ruled against last month.
Fears of Ballot Seizures and Voter Suppression Tactics
Fears of federal meddling have been fueled by Trump’s drumbeat of baseless allegations regarding large-scale noncitizen voting and voting-by-mail fraud. Trump falsely alleged both issues during a nationalized televised address on July 16, claiming that noncitizen voting poses a crisis of election security. Figures compiled by the conservative Heritage Foundation—which pointed to only 100 instances across a span of 25 years—profoundly undermined that assertion.
Additional concerns stem from Trump’s comments to the New York Times expressing regret that he did not call out the National Guard to seize ballots in the 2020 election, as well as his urging of Republicans last month at a mini-convention in Texas to cheat like hell like they do. Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield echoed these concerns, stating that Trump has taken dead aim at elections from day one and continues to take steps to interfere.
In Arizona, Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes participated in the Zoom calls and tabletop exercises, describing the increasing cooperation as an all-hands approach to cope with federal interference threats. Fontes noted that a central concern for his office is that the administration’s constant drumbeat of lies will suppress the vote. Similarly, Larry Norden, an elections expert with the Brennan Center who participated in the PSLC strategy exercises, warned that leaders in the administration, including at the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security, have repeatedly attempted to exert control over the midterm elections.
