A Democracy Drive Thread
Executive orders rewriting voter rules, lawsuits to seize voters’ private data, and a campaign against mail ballots and voting machines — a federal drive to control elections the Constitution leaves to the states.
The Constitution leaves the running of elections to the states, with Congress empowered to regulate federal contests; the president’s role is to enforce the law, not write new voting rules. Beginning in 2025 the administration nonetheless moved to assert federal control over how Americans vote — through executive orders, Justice Department lawsuits demanding states’ private voter data, and a sustained campaign against mail ballots and voting machines ahead of the 2026 midterms. This thread tracks that effort in chronological order, with sources, including the courts that have repeatedly found it exceeds the president’s authority.
July 26, 2024
In his own words
At the Turning Point Action “Believers’ Summit” in West Palm Beach on July 26, 2024, candidate Trump urged Christian voters to turn out “just this time,” telling them that once he was elected they would no longer need to vote in future elections. The remark — that things would be “fixed so good” voting would be unnecessary — has been widely cited as a statement of intent about the durability of American elections under a second Trump term.
“Get out and vote. Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore… In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote.”
March 25, 2025
Trump signed an executive order, “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections,” directing federal agencies to require documentary proof of citizenship on the national voter-registration form, to push states to reject mail ballots received after Election Day, and to condition election funding on compliance. Election administration, however, is set by the states and Congress — not the president.
April 3, 2025
Nineteen Democratic-led states sued, arguing the order usurped powers the Constitution assigns to the states and Congress. Federal courts agreed, blocking its key provisions; U.S. District Judge Denise Casper in Boston later permanently barred most of the order, including the proof-of-citizenship requirement, holding that a president cannot add voting rules Congress has not enacted.
April 24, 2025
On the ground
ActBlue called it an “oppressive use of power.” Trump’s own campaign fundraising had faced similar complaints about donor practices.
July 2, 2025
On the ground
The effort rests on no new evidence, data or legal authority, but on the administration’s unsupported claims that elections are easy prey for fraud, as the department pressed states to hand over voter data.
July 15, 2025
In his own words
Gov. Greg Abbott added redistricting to a special session, citing a Justice Department letter that challenged four Texas districts. The push set off a nationwide redistricting fight ahead of the 2026 midterms.
July 25, 2025
On the ground
House Speaker Pro Tem Chad Perkins said the White House called him after the Missouri Independent reported his doubts in July 2025. Rep. Eric Burlison confirmed the administration was targeting Cleaver’s district. Cleaver called the push “dangerous” and a step toward “one-party rule.” The legislature passed the map that fall; state and federal courts later blocked it from use in the 2026 election.
August 7, 2025
On the ground
The Democrats had gone to Illinois to deny the Texas House a quorum for the redistricting Trump demanded to add five Republican seats. Cornyn, then facing a primary challenge from Ken Paxton, had written to Patel asking the FBI to find them and to investigate them for “bribery” over donations covering their trip; he said Patel “assigned agents in both the San Antonio and Austin office.” Trump had said days earlier that the FBI “may have to” get involved. No criminal warrants existed — only civil warrants from the Texas House speaker, which federal agents have no authority to enforce. Former Attorney General Eric Holder said the FBI had no jurisdiction.
August 18, 2025
Trump declared he would move to ban mail-in voting and eliminate voting machines before the 2026 midterms, repeating unfounded fraud claims and asserting he would act by executive order. Election experts noted, again, that the president has no authority to dictate how states conduct their elections.
On the ground
After Democrats fled the state to block the Trump-requested map, Speaker Dustin Burrows let them leave the floor in August 2025 only with written permission and a Department of Public Safety escort. Collier refused to sign, slept on the House floor, and called it “illegal confinement.” Other Democrats joined her protest.
August 26, 2025
Heather Honey, a conservative election researcher known for promoting false claims about the 2020 election in Pennsylvania and Arizona, was appointed to a senior role in the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Strategy, Policy and Plans. The position, which did not exist under the previous administration, focuses on election integrity.
September 24, 2025
On the ground
The Archives blamed a technician’s mistake; the records showed a spotless Navy career. The agency’s inspector general opened an investigation, and Hakeem Jeffries demanded a criminal probe.
September 25, 2025
The Justice Department began demanding full, unredacted voter rolls — including partial Social Security and driver’s-license numbers — from more than 40 states, then sued some 30 states and Washington, D.C. when many refused. Federal courts repeatedly rejected the demands, ruling they trampled the states’ role as primary administrators of elections; by mid-2026 the department had lost case after case, with an appeals court delivering its biggest setback yet.
October 9, 2025
Dominion Voting Systems — the voting-machine maker that became the central target of the 2020 “rigged election” conspiracy theories, and that had won a $787 million settlement from Fox News over them — was sold to Scott Leiendecker, a former Republican elections director in St. Louis and founder of the voter check-in vendor KNOWiNK. As sole owner he renamed the company Liberty Vote, saying he would push for hand-marked paper ballots and “improve election integrity.”
October 22, 2025
On the ground
The previous map, drawn by Republicans two years earlier, already let them win 10 of 14 seats in 2024 in a closely divided swing state. North Carolina’s governor cannot veto redistricting. Davis called the new map “beyond the pale.” Hundreds of protesters accused lawmakers of doing Trump’s bidding.
October 24, 2025
On the ground
The DOJ announced on Oct. 24, 2025 that it would monitor polling sites in Los Angeles, Orange, Kern, Riverside and Fresno counties and in Passaic County, after letters from the California and New Jersey GOP to Civil Rights Division head Harmeet Dhillon. California’s secretary of state objected in writing. Monitors observe but have no law-enforcement power or access to ballots. “It’s a very high bar to justify Washington’s intervention into state-only elections,” said David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation & Research.
November 2, 2025
In his own words
Trump posted: “No mail-in or ‘Early’ Voting, Yes to Voter ID! Watch how totally dishonest the California Prop Vote is! Millions of Ballots being ‘shipped.’ GET SMART REPUBLICANS, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE!!!” He called his 2020 loss “the biggest scandal in American history” and urged the Justice Department to investigate it. He had earlier vowed an executive order to ban mail voting. Legal experts say states, not the president, run elections. A year later, in October 2026, Trump urged his own supporters to vote by mail.
“No mail-in or ‘Early’ Voting, Yes to Voter ID! GET SMART REPUBLICANS, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE!!!”
November 4, 2025
In his own words
In a Truth Social post on Nov. 4, 2025, Trump called the process unconstitutional and “rigged” against Republicans, adding: “All ‘Mail-In’ Ballots, where the Republicans in that State are ‘Shut Out,’ is under very serious legal and criminal review. STAY TUNED!” He offered no evidence and didn’t say which agency was reviewing them.
“The entire process, in particular the voting itself, is RIGGED.”
December 11, 2025
In his own words
After Indiana’s Republican-led Senate rejects his mid-decade redistricting push 31–19, Trump vows to back primary challengers against the Republicans who voted no. The day before, he had warned that “anybody that votes against Redistricting… will be, I am sure, met with a MAGA Primary in the Spring.” He later endorsed challengers against seven of the eight senators who voted no and were up for reelection.
“Anybody that votes against Redistricting, and the SUCCESS of the Republican Party in D.C., will be, I am sure, met with a MAGA Primary in the Spring.”
January 5, 2026
Former Civil Rights Division lawyers warned in court filings that the data campaign was a “stalking horse” for building a federal national voter roll, with collected data routed to DHS for screening. Weeks later, Attorney General Pam Bondi granted a single U.S. attorney, Thomas Albus, authority to pursue voter-fraud investigations in all 94 federal districts — the prosecutor who had also appeared on the warrant for the FBI’s seizure of Fulton County, Georgia election records.
January 14, 2026
In his own words
In a January 2026 Oval Office interview, Trump said: “It’s some deep psychological thing, but when you win the presidency, you don’t win the midterms,” before adding that “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”
“When you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”
February 2, 2026
In his own words
“The Republicans should say: ‘We want to take over. We should take over the voting in at least — many, 15 places,’” Trump said on Feb. 2, 2026. “The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.” He repeated that immigrants “were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegally,” and later said that if states can’t run elections “honestly,” “somebody else should take over.”
“The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”
February 5, 2026
On the ground
Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard’s office, hunting for voter fraud at Trump’s behest, obtains Puerto Rico’s voting machines and tests them for vulnerabilities. The U.S. attorney, Homeland Security agents and an FBI supervisor arranged the handover. ODNI claimed “extremely concerning” practices but released no detailed evidence.
February 6, 2026
On the ground
The invitation, sent in early February 2026, was signed by Kellie M. Hardiman, whose LinkedIn page says she was appointed seven months earlier. “No one has heard of this person — and we’re all wondering what an ‘FBI Election Executive’ is,” one state election official told NBC News. The FBI said the role is not new and that it has held such outreach in prior cycles. The invitation came as the Justice Department was suing dozens of states for their voter-roll data.
February 25, 2026
In his own words
Noem said there were “no plans.” A DHS official later said ICE would not be at polling places and called other claims “disinformation.”
February 26, 2026
On the ground
The Washington Post first reported the draft in late February 2026, and NPR and the Guardian reviewed it. Titled “Establishing Security, Integrity, and Transparency for United States Elections with Protections Against Foreign Interference” and dated April 2025, it would require all voters to re-register for 2026 with proof of citizenship, end machine tabulation and compel hand counts, require every race to be counted by midnight on election day, ban most mail-in voting, and ban ballots in any language but English. It justifies all of it with claims of Chinese interference in 2020; a 2021 intelligence review found China considered influencing that election but did not act. Ticktin, Trump’s military-school classmate, said he had emailed Trump about the need for an emergency order and was in touch with people at the White House. Asked about the draft, Trump said he had never seen it, but weeks earlier he had posted that he’d found a legal theory giving him power to make some of the same changes.
“Peter Ticktin: “If President Trump can’t call a national election emergency, then we will lose our country.””
March 11, 2026
In his own words
The SAVE America Act, which would require voters to prove citizenship with documents such as a passport or birth certificate, passed the House without anti-transgender provisions. Trump called for language barring transgender athletes from teams matching their gender identity and banning “transgender mutilation of our children.” In the Senate, an amendment to add a trans sports ban failed 49–41, short of the 60 votes needed. Trump threatened to refuse to sign any bills until the act passed.
March 14, 2026
David Harvilicz, the Department of Homeland Security's assistant secretary for cyber, infrastructure, risk and resilience policy, has called for the federal government to ban voting machines in all federal elections, claiming they are vulnerable to exploitation. Harvilicz is a co-founder of a company with James Penrose, who was involved in attempts to seize voting machines following the 2020 election.
March 23, 2026
On March 23, 2026, Steve Bannon stated on his 'War Room' podcast that President Donald Trump's deployment of ICE agents to major U.S. airports to assist the TSA should be viewed as a 'test run' or 'test case' for deploying ICE agents to polling places during the 2026 midterm elections to prevent noncitizens from voting.
In his own words
On Truth Social Trump wrote that there should be no deal with Democrats “unless, and until” they pass the bill. He expanded his demands to voter ID, no mail-in voting with exceptions, all paper ballots, “no men in women’s sports” and no transgender procedures for minors. Democrats had called the bill a nonstarter. As TSA officers left the job, Trump deployed ICE agents to more than a dozen airports.
“I don’t think we should make any deal with the Crazy, Country Destroying, Radical Left Democrats unless, and until, they Vote with Republicans to pass ‘THE SAVE AMERICA ACT.’”
March 24, 2026
A day before calling mail voting “mail-in cheating,” Trump cast a mail-in ballot in a Florida state House special election covering his Mar-a-Lago club, having skipped the in-person early-voting days available that weekend. Asked to square it with his rhetoric, he said he voted by mail “because I’m president of the United States.”
“Because I’m president of the United States … I did a mail-in ballot.”
March 31, 2026
With the 2025 order largely blocked, Trump signed a new executive order targeting mail and absentee voting: directing DHS to build and hand each state a list of “eligible” citizens, and threatening to withhold delivery of states’ ballots unless they submitted mail-voter lists to the Postal Service 60 days out. Voting-rights groups sued immediately and experts said he again lacked the authority; a federal judge in Washington declined to block the order in late May.
June 22, 2026
Trump revealed at a rally that he had personally phoned Bill Essayli, the U.S. attorney for central California, and asked him to “take a look” at the state’s elections — fearing his endorsed candidate, Steve Hilton, might not advance in California’s primary. Essayli had announced an election probe on June 5; it had not previously been known that Trump personally ordered it. Hilton in fact advanced once more ballots were counted, while Trump and allies used California’s slow count to push baseless fraud claims.
“I called up the very powerful and very good U.S. attorney in California, and I said, ‘Do me a favor. Take a look, they are trying to steal that election, too.’”
June 23, 2026
Liberty Vote moved to dismiss “with prejudice” — meaning it can never be refiled — the $1.3 billion defamation suit Dominion had brought against MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell over his false claims that its machines flipped votes in 2020, settling on confidential terms with each side bearing its own costs. Under the same new ownership, the company had already quietly settled its parallel cases against Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell — unwinding the main legal accountability that remained for the 2020 election-fraud lies.
June 24, 2026
Testifying to the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Postmaster General David Steiner confirmed the Postal Service would refuse to deliver mail-in ballots in any state that declines to hand the federal government a “manifest” of its voters — names, addresses, and ballot barcode numbers — under a proposed rule implementing Trump’s March 2026 elections executive order. All 47 Democratic senators wrote the agency calling it an unconstitutional attempt to turn USPS into a White House-controlled election authority.
“Under our proposed regulation, no. We would tell the state that we need the manifest.”
July 9, 2026
On July 9, 2026, Trump fired all of the remaining commissioners of the Election Assistance Commission — the bipartisan federal agency created after the disputed 2000 election to help states run their elections — dismissing Democrats Thomas Hicks and Ben Hovland and Republican Christy McCormick and leaving the four-seat body with no commissioners at all, just months before the 2026 midterms. Because the EAC cannot take significant action unless three confirmed commissioners agree, the purge effectively freezes the agency. It came days after the Supreme Court, in Trump v. Slaughter, swept aside decades of precedent that had shielded independent agencies from the White House and held that the president may remove their leaders at will — clearing the path for Trump to pull yet another election body under his direct control.
July 10, 2026
On July 10, 2026, U.S. District Judge Mae A. D’Agostino dismissed the Justice Department’s lawsuit demanding New York’s unredacted voter registration records, ruling that the DOJ had failed to state the “basis” and “purpose” that federal law requires to obtain them. It was the administration’s 12th consecutive loss in the roughly 31 voter-roll suits it has filed against states and the District of Columbia — an 0-for-12 record, with judges across the ideological spectrum, including several Trump himself appointed in his first term, rejecting the department’s legal theory. Days earlier the Sixth Circuit had handed the DOJ its first appellate defeat as well, affirming the dismissal of an identical demand to Michigan.
On the ground
On July 10, 2026, U.S. District Judge Mae D’Agostino dismissed the Trump DOJ’s lawsuit demanding New York’s unredacted statewide voter-registration list, ruling that no federal law — not the Civil Rights Act, the National Voter Registration Act, nor the Help America Vote Act — authorized the demand. It was the department’s 12th consecutive loss in its nationwide campaign to force all 50 states to hand over their voter rolls to the federal government; days later a court tossed its West Virginia suit as well, making it 13 straight. By early August 2026 the streak had reached 21 straight losses.
July 14, 2026
On the ground
On July 14, 2026, the Wisconsin Elections Commission found probable cause that Elon Musk violated the state’s election-bribery statute when he offered and handed out $1 million payments to voters during the April 2025 Wisconsin Supreme Court election, in which he spent at least $20 million backing the conservative candidate, who lost. The bipartisan commission referred the matter to the Brown County district attorney, who can bring criminal charges.
July 16, 2026
In his own words
In a 25-minute primetime address from the East Room on July 16, 2026, Trump again disputed his 2020 loss, claiming he had declassified documents revealing “shocking vulnerabilities” in U.S. election infrastructure, Chinese efforts to influence American elections, and voting-machine and noncitizen-voter concerns — and said he had ordered the Justice Department to prosecute those involved. He produced no evidence that any vote count had been altered; repeated audits and reviews, many run by Republicans, have found no such fraud. The speech was a pitch for his stalled SAVE America Act.