Even as diversionary battles flare across the political landscape—immigration raids, diplomatic blunders, legal losses in court, and the lingering Epstein fallout—Donald Trump is making his move where it matters most: elections.
The administration is pressing aggressively to obtain voter rolls and election materials from states across the country, particularly in roughly 15 battleground states, while Trump openly calls on Republicans to “federalize” the conduct of federal elections. This is not a theoretical replay of 2020. The effort is operational now through four means: formal Justice Department demands, active litigation, seized election materials, and scheduled federal briefings with state officials.
The Constitution gives the president no operational role in administering elections. Article 1, Section 4—the elections clause—assigns authority over the “Times, Places and Manner” of federal elections to the states, subject to congressional regulation. The executive branch is not part of that structure. As U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly recently put it when rejecting one of Trump’s attempts to reshape election procedures, the Constitution gives “no role at all to the President” in setting election rules.
Yet in recent months—and intensifying in recent weeks—the Justice Department has demanded full, unredacted voter rolls from states nationwide, including sensitive personal data, such as partial Social Security numbers and birth dates.
The department invokes the National Voter Registration Act, or NVRA, which requires states to make “reasonable efforts” to maintain accurate rolls. But the scope and scale of these requests are unprecedented. DOJ is not merely seeking confirmation that states are conducting routine list maintenance. It has demanded expansive voter-roll data, historical election materials, and back-end administrative records far beyond what is necessary to assess statutory compliance—including information that could be used to scrutinize or challenge individual registrations.
Many states have refused. DOJ has responded with more than 20 lawsuits, but it has yet to secure a decisive victory. Earlier this month, a federal judge in Michigan dismissed the department’s attempt to obtain that state’s voter data, ruling that the statutes cited do not authorize such sweeping demands. Efforts in Oregon, California, and Georgia have also stalled or been rebuffed.
The pushback has crossed party lines. Oklahoma’s Republican election chief wrote that his office could not legally provide confidential data under state privacy law. Kentucky’s State Board of Elections asked why the DOJ needed driver’s license numbers and other sensitive identifiers merely to evaluate list maintenance.
Yet the pressure has not abated. According to reports, the administration has given states 45 days to remove voters whom the DOJ deems ineligible. That compressed timetable sits uneasily alongside the NVRA’s deliberate notice-and-wait framework, which reflects Congress’s recognition that voter list maintenance is error-prone.
DOJ has indicated it intends to compare state voter rolls against the federal SAVE immigration database. That system has historically produced false positives, including naturalized citizens misidentified as noncitizens because federal records were outdated. Large-scale data matching inevitably generates errors—common names, outdated addresses, clerical discrepancies. The statute’s safeguards exist precisely because eligibility determinations require care. A 45-day clock all but guarantees that mistakes will fall hardest on eligible voters.
Voter rolls are not abstract spreadsheets. They contain names, addresses, party affiliations in some states, and voting histories. In legitimate state hands, they are administrative tools. In the wrong hands, they become instruments for advancing allegations of fraud or irregularity.
The possession of comprehensive voter data enables mass eligibility challenges in targeted counties, cross-referencing registration rolls against other databases to flag supposed inconsistencies, singling out demographic concentrations for public allegations, and launching investigations that generate damaging headlines even if they produce no indictments.
Most such claims might ultimately fail in court. But often they will not be fully tested because of the ticking clock after an election. The objective need not be victory on the merits. It may be delay, uncertainty, and public doubt—especially in close races.
Recall Trump’s 2020 instruction to DOJ: “Just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen.” In 2020, he lacked the institutional control and data access he sought. Today, the federal government is attempting to secure both.
The effort extends beyond litigation. DOJ has sent sweeping letters to states demanding voter-roll data on accelerated timelines. Attorney General Pam Bondi reportedly floated easing immigration enforcement in Minnesota in exchange for access to voter rolls—an extraordinary linkage that underscores how central voter information has become to the administration’s strategy.
Federal agencies—including the FBI, DOJ, the Department of Homeland Security, the Postal Inspection Service, and the Election Assistance Commission—have invited chief election officials from all 50 states to a nationwide call to discuss “preparations” for the midterms. New Hampshire’s Republican secretary of state publicly questioned the purpose of the meeting, noting that election administration has historically remained a state responsibility.
None of this guarantees a constitutional breakdown. The American election system is highly decentralized. Thousands of bipartisan workers administer elections across roughly 9,000 jurisdictions. Courts have thus far rejected the most sweeping legal theories advanced by the administration.
But the risk is narrower, and therefore more plausible. Armed with extensive voter data from battleground states, federal officials could mount targeted interventions in competitive districts: issuing “analyses” that cast doubt on results, filing litigation to delay certification, and encouraging congressional actors to treat uncertainty as justification for intervention.
Once the federal government has comprehensive voter data in hand, it is too late to restore the status quo. In a landslide election, it would not matter. But Trump is betting on a race close enough that confusion, coercion, and data-driven doubt could tip the balance. That is why now is the moment—not on the threshold of the election or after the votes are counted—for vigilance and strong resistance.
What can be done to stop this? There are legal countermoves that the states could be launching. The same constitutional design that makes centralized takeover difficult also supplies tools to blunt accumulated leverage.
Election lawyers across the political spectrum—including Marc Elias and others who have spent years litigating voting rights cases—have outlined practical steps states and Congress could take now to reduce the opportunity for manipulation. Many of those proposals do not expand power. They clarify it.
Start with voter challenges. States are not required to maintain open-ended procedures that allow private actors—or federal officials armed with imperfect data—to trigger mass eligibility disputes. The NVRA contemplates deliberate, notice-driven list maintenance, not bulk database-driven purges. States can narrow challenge procedures to prevent strategic misuse of federal data comparisons.
Certification is even more critical. The vulnerability exposed in 2020 was not the casting of ballots themselves, but the postelection phase. Statutes can make explicit what should already be clear: Once statutory conditions are met, certification is ministerial. Laws can provide expedited judicial remedies to compel compliance and impose consequences for refusal. Delay loses its potency when ambiguity is removed.
Congress, for its part, has authority under the elections clause not to federalize the administration of elections but to impose guardrails on federal actors. It could codify blackout periods for election-related investigative steps. It could require that any search warrant or subpoena involving elections be approved by the Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney in the affected district, preventing jurisdictional maneuvering. It could restrict federal law enforcement presence near polling and counting sites. These are structural protections, not partisan weapons.
None of these measures are dramatic. All reinforce the constitutional allocation of authority. The system’s resilience depends less on rhetoric than on whether those guardrails are put in place before Trump’s playbook is tested in a close race.
