Trump admin turns to threats, coercion after courts reject president’s assault on voting

After crashing headfirst into a series of legal hurdles, President Donald Trump’s long-running effort to restrict voting access ahead of the 2026 midterm elections shifted gears this week.

The White House’s attempts to seize control over elections have suffered a series of courtroom drubbings in recent weeks as judges — including many of his own appointees — have consistently blocked them for violating federal laws or the U.S. Constitution. 

So the Trump administration is adopting a new strategy, turning to intimidation and coercion after legal bullying has mostly failed. 

Now, the Department of Justice (DOJ) is threatening election officials with jail time over the possibility of a noncitizen voting, and sending federal agents to monitor polls in key Democratic strongholds. Meanwhile, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is trying to leverage an anti-terrorism grant program to force states to overhaul their election operations.

But, so far, the attempted intimidation is inspiring more brazen defiance than fearful compliance, with state election officials characterizing it as “insulting” and “bizarre.”

Trying to scalp some scapegoats

Since returning to the White House, Trump has doggedly pursued a few intertwined electoral policy goals. His first executive order on voting attempted to force voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship (DPOC) when they registered and ban mail-in ballot grace periods. It also ordered the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to work with the Social Security Administration to expand its Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database into a citizenship checking tool freely available to state election officials for mass — but error-filled — audits of their voter registration rolls. 

His second voting-related executive order directed DHS to create lists of U.S. citizens eligible to vote and the United States Postal Service (USPS) to only deliver mail ballots to states that provided lists of authorized voters. 

Both orders — and the administration’s ham-fisted attempts to execute them even though the U.S. Constitution clearly authorizes states to control the “Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections,” unless Congress passes a superseding law — are aimed at slaying a pair of Trump’s spurious 2020 election loss scapegoats: noncitizen voting and mail-in ballots. 

Courts quickly blocked most of the first order, but that didn’t stop the administration from trying to find workarounds.

The DOJ demanded that states turn over their voter registration rolls to it, so the agency could then add them to DHS’s SAVE. Many refused, and the DOJ ended up suing 30 states and Washington, D.C. But the DOJ has lost every case that’s been decided so far, including one appellate decision. 

That effort suffered another blow in June, when a federal judge in D.C. ruled SAVE’s expansion was unconstitutional. (However, another judge in Florida soon poked a hole in that decision, ruling that four Republican-led states should be allowed to continue using the revamped program to flag potential noncitizens on their voter rolls).

June also saw the U.S. Supreme Court rule against the Trump administration in one case questioning birthright citizenship and another challenging Mississippi’s mail-in ballot grace periods. 

New tactics, same old results?

Trump tried to shout and post his policy preferences into existence, then tried to sue them into existence, and now he’s trying to intimidate them into existence.  

Harmeet Dhillon, head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, threatened the top election officials in every state Tuesday with criminal prosecution over potential noncitizen voting in the upcoming midterm elections. 

That same day, Dhillon also announced that her office will send federal election observers to 15 jurisdictions across six states to monitor the remaining primary votes, which all happen to be Democratic Party strongholds. She tied the deployment to the DOJ’s broader voter roll crusade and specious claims of widespread voter fraud.

Meanwhile, FEMA posted a new grant notice for fiscal year 2026. The agency said it will withhold 20% of Homeland Security Grant Program funding from states and urban areas until they provide proof that they have complied with a host of new election security requirements sought by Trump, including mandatory use of the SAVE database.

And while Congress is in recess, Trump’s allies on the Hill have promised to try yet again to pass his top legislative priority, the SAVE America Act. The bill, which would impose DPOC and voter ID requirements and ban universal mail-in voting, has stalled in the Senate, where it only garnered 48 ayes on its last vote in June, well short of the chamber’s 60-vote threshold to overcome a filibuster.

Still, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) vowed to try again, saying he would include it in a third reconciliation package the House will take up this summer. That would theoretically allow the bill to pass with a simple majority. 

Despite the shift in strategy, the administration’s new scheme to achieve its policy goals faces the same considerable legal and political headwinds that doomed earlier attempts.

The GOP already tried to use reconciliation to enact the SAVE America Act this year. It failed. Trump responded by demanding that Senate Republicans kill the filibuster or fire the Senate Parliamentarian, who blocked the anti-voting legislation from being included in the budget bill. 

Republicans have largely ignored the president.

It’s unclear whether FEMA’s new funding conditions could survive a legal challenge. The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to tax and spend for the general welfare. Executive branch agencies need statutory authority before they can impose conditions on spending programs like grants. And even if they have that authority, the U.S. Supreme Court has consistently ruled that the conditions on federal funds must be unambiguously clear and relate to the program’s interest, which might exclude imposing “election integrity” prerequisites on anti-terror grants. 

Moreover, the Court has said that funding conditions cannot be used as a loophole to make otherwise unconstitutional conduct kosher. Given that one federal court has already ruled that turning SAVE into a voter citizenship audit program violated the separation of powers, one might argue that the administration is fielding the new grant conditions for an end run around the Constitution.   

As for the DOJ’s not-so-veiled threats, state election officials have already called the administration’s bluff.

Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson (R), her state’s top election official, called the DOJ’s prosecution warning letter “truly bizarre behavior” by the federal agency “that is supposed to be protecting civil rights.”

Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes (D) called the letter “insulting.” 

“Arizona election officials have always worked to ensure that only eligible citizens are registered to vote, and we will continue following Arizona law — not directions that come from political rhetoric or intimidation,” he said. 

And Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D) invited the DOJ’s election observers to do their best in the upcoming primaries. 

“Michigan’s elections are transparent, accurate, accessible, and secure,” Benson said in a statement. “And while the US Department of Justice continues to pursue baseless allegations to confuse voters about those facts, we welcome anyone who wants to – in compliance with the law – observe Michigan’s elections process.”

Despite the federal frustrations, Trump has seen some success at the state level, where his MAGA allies have ameliorated the sting of litigation losses with a string of new laws. Fourteen states now have statutes similar to SAVE on the books, and more are looking to follow suit, a recent Center for American Progress report found.