This week at Democracy Docket: Election chiefs huddle to combat Trump’s meddling, and an illegal draft executive order aims to give him control of elections

The most restrictive voting bill ever passed by a chamber of Congress. The Department of Justice’s grab for state voter rolls. And a potential executive order giving President Donald Trump the power to take over elections — the Constitution be damned.

This week, Trump and his allies kicked into high gear their illegal campaign to prevent fair elections in 2026. Democracy Docket not only covered every step, but revealed key new information along the way.

Since January, Democracy Docket’s Matt Cohen has been speaking to secretaries of state about meetings they’ve been holding to conduct planning exercises, including tabletop simulations, gaming out their response to Trump’s expected interference in the midterms. This week, we published Matt’s exclusive report. It’s an important read.

Related: Matt also reported on a call held by Trump administration officials from the FBI and other agencies with those same secretaries of state, and many others. When the election officials asked the administration to affirm that — despite recent comments by Trump — states, not the federal government, run elections, they were met, according to one secretary, with “stunned silence.” 

Meanwhile, Democracy Docket’s Jim Saksa was working his congressional sources on the SAVE America Act — the monster voter suppression measure now before the Senate. First, Jim scooped the news that Democrats want Congress’ investigative arm to probe whether a new White House website, created to build voter support for the bill, violates federal laws that prevent public money from being used for political purposes. (And honestly, it’s hard to see how it doesn’t.) Then Jim pieced together some encouraging new signs that the GOP Senate leader still isn’t on board with a MAGA push to change the filibuster rules so as to get SAVE America to Trump’s desk. 

But it isn’t just the U.S. Congress that’s out to radically restrict voting. As Democracy Docket’s Jen Rice reported, the Florida House this week passed its own version of SAVE. “This would do a lot of the same things, in terms of preventing American citizens from voting who don’t have access to documentary proof of citizenship documents,” one advocate told Jen about the bill. A Florida Democrat, speaking on the House floor, called it “poll tax by paperwork.”

Also this week, the Justice Department sued five more states to gain access to their unredacted voter rolls — bringing the total number of states being sued to 29, plus Washington, D.C. As Democracy Docket’s Yunior Rivas reported, four of the latest five — Utah, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and West Virginia — are deep red states with GOP election officials, underlining the growing reality that even many Republicans are balking at the administration’s unprecedented and dangerous power grab.

Finally, Matt and Jim Saksa got their hands on an early version of a draft executive order — blatantly unconstitutional, of course — declaring a national emergency and giving Trump control of voting. The draft they obtained, which includes bans on voting machines and on no-excuse mail voting, was drawn up last April and has circulated since then among anti-voting activists. But those activists have reportedly been coordinating with the White House on a more recent version of the order, which uses a flimsy conspiracy theory about Chinese interference in the 2020 election to justify the emergency declaration.