Democratic state attorneys general, other top state officials and civic groups have accelerated planning to thwart any federal meddling in the November midterm elections by Donald Trump as he continues his false charges of widespread voting fraud and veiled threats of interfering in the process.
Since early this year, 24 Democratic attorneys general have expanded coordination with about a dozen Democratic secretaries of state and several civic groups using weekly Zoom calls and in-person tabletop exercises to strategize about countering any federal intervention in the elections.
The enhanced cooperation is significant because many secretaries of state are responsible for supervising elections and state attorneys general are charged with defending the laws governing them. The coordination efforts by the state officials are being spearheaded by the Progressive State Leaders Committee (PSLC), the public policy arm of the Democratic Attorneys General Association.
The Democratic attorneys general say they are especially worried about interference in the elections by the Department of Justice and other parts of the Trump administration given the president’s repeated false charges of rampant voting fraud in US elections.
On Trump’s first day in office last January, he falsely called the 2020 election “rigged” and has made similar claims hundreds of times since he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden.
Nick Brown, the Washington state attorney general, said that the justice department and the Trump administration were “the biggest adversary to a smooth election”. Brown added that “Trump lies about the election on a regular basis. Truth is not a goal of his. That creates a whole host of concerns for us.”
The Department of Justice, for instance, announced dubious plans this summer to deploy 1,000 poll monitors, which prompted the NAACP to file a lawsuit on 4 October seeking details of how the monitors will be deployed; by comparison, in 2022 the justice department deployed 289 monitors, according to CBS news.
In another worrisome move, the justice department has sued 30 states to obtain their unredacted voter lists that contain sensitive personal information. Democratic attorneys general have been involved in challenging the justice department lawsuits, and the justice department has lost 26 of the lawsuits that courts have ruled on.
Furthermore, Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the justice department’s civil rights division, this summer wrote to state election officials threatening prosecutions if they didn’t cooperate adequately in hunting for voting fraud.
To counter threats of federal intervention in the November elections, Brown has led the weekly Zoom calls with PSLC partners including offices of secretaries of state and key civil society groups such as the Democracy Defenders Fund, the States United Democracy Center and the Brennan Center for Justice.
A former US attorney and federal prosecutor, Brown said the Zoom calls focus on election security issues in general and potential event scenarios –including the possibility of ICE agents showing up near some polling places and ballots being seized in some races.
Brown, who chairs the PSLC election-protection working group, also led two “tabletop” in-person exercises in Milwaukee in May and Detroit in September that included attenders from secretary of state offices and other PSLC partners.
Besides these efforts, Brown’s office co-led the legal moves that blocked Trump’s radical plans in his March executive order to overhaul and curb voting by mail, which the supreme court ruled against last month.
The fears of federal meddling in the elections have been fueled by Trump’s drumbeat of baseless allegations about large-scale noncitizen voting and voting-by-mail fraud, both of which the president falsely alleged in a nationalized televised address on 16 July.
In his TV speech, Trump made the factually inaccurate claim that noncitizen voting, which has long been illegal and historically rare, poses a “crisis of election security”.
Trump’s fixation with portraying noncitizen voting as a crisis has been significantly undercut by data from the conservative Heritage Foundation, which cited just 100 cases over a 25-year period.
Other concerns about federal meddling in the next elections were spurred by Trump’s comments to the New York Times that he regrets not calling out the national guard to seize ballots in the 2020 election, and his urging Republicans last month at a mini convention in Texas to “cheat like hell like they do”.
Oregon’s attorney general, Dan Rayfield, shares Brown’s concerns about the threat to the elections posed by Trump.
“From day one, Trump has been taking dead aim at our elections,” Rayfield said, “We’re trying to dispute some of the misinformation that the Trump administration keeps putting out,” including about the dangers of voting by mail.
Oregon, he noted, was the first state to adopt all voting by mail and has had two GOP secretaries of state in the last decade who have been happy with the voting system.
Elsewhere, Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, Adrian Fontes, whose office has participated in a number of the Zoom calls and the two tabletop exercises, said the increasing cooperation this year with the attorneys general represents “an all-hands approach” to cope with the threats of federal interference. “We have an adversary we didn’t expect in the form of this administration.”
Fontes added that a central concern of his office was that the administration’s “constant drumbeat of lies is going to suppress the vote”.
The Democratic attorney general efforts have benefited from the input of several non-partisan groups.
Norm Eisen, the executive chair of the Democracy Defenders Fund who participated in the Milwaukee and Detroit tabletop exercises and has been on some of the Zoom calls, praised the the work of the attorneys general preparing to combat federal election meddling.
“The pro-democracy AGs are preparing for anything that this anti-voter administration may throw at them,” said Eisen, a former special counsel for ethics and government reform to Barack Obama. “The level of preparation by the AGs and the secretaries of state is off the charts.”
More broadly, Larry Norden, an elections expert with the Brennan Center who has participated in a handful of the Zoom calls and the two tabletop strategy exercises organized by the PSLC, warned: “Leaders in the administration, including at the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security, have repeatedly threatened or attempted to exert control over the midterm elections.”
Norden noted that “for the last 18 months, they have been met by pushback and consistently lost. I don’t expect that to change in the coming weeks, but everyone involved in this fight knows we must continue to be prepared.”
To better protect election results and bolster coordination between the Democratic attorneys general and Democratic secretaries of state, two new groups were created in 2026. One of them is called the AGSOS Election Protection Pac, and it’s working to raise funds to elect more Democrats to both state offices, and the other is dubbed AGSOS Election Protection Action, which serves as a policy arm.
Addressing the PSLC work to counter Trump administration election interference threats, Sean Rankin, the president of the Democratic Attorneys General Association, noted that “it is a concern that the administration will try to seize ballots and the AGs and secretaries of state are working on responses to that to find solutions if that happens”.
Mai Ratakonda, a top election-protection attorney with the States United Democracy Center, stressed that since the justice department early this year in a highly unusual move seized 2020 ballots from Fulton county, Georgia, election officials are “ready and prepared to respond” to the threat of ballots being seized in the midterms.
More broadly, Rayfield cautioned that Trump “continues to take steps to interfere in our elections … This president has stretched our democracy more than any president in my lifetime.”
