Federal election investigations and seizures of voting records have intensified concerns that the US government is undermining public trust in the electoral system ahead of the midterm elections.
Federal agents have seized ballots, examined voting machines and demanded sensitive voter information from states. President Donald Trump has also suggested that voting should be nationalised and urged Republican voters to “cheat like hell”.
The intervention has alarmed officials from both parties, including Utah’s Republican lieutenant governor, Deidre Henderson, who oversees elections in the deeply conservative state.
“In the past two elections that I oversaw as lieutenant governor, the threats were all external: non-state actors, cyber security threats and other things,” Ms Henderson said. “But now we also have threats coming from within our own government.”
Federal election investigations target voter rolls
US elections are administered by towns, counties and states. Congress can make laws regulating elections, but the president does not have a role in running them.
During his second term, however, Mr Trump has signed executive orders seeking new federal voting rules, including a requirement for documentary proof of citizenship when registering and measures relating to postal ballots.
The Department of Homeland Security has also sought to make some federal assistance conditional on states adopting security measures, including citizenship checks. States that failed to comply could have faced the withholding of 20% of their Homeland Security Grant Programme funding.
The Justice Department has asked almost every state for complete voter rolls, including confidential information such as social security numbers, full dates of birth and driving licence numbers.
Ms Henderson said she was not given satisfactory explanations for the request and refused to hand over the records. Officials in 29 other states, both Democratic and Republican, have also declined to comply and have been sued by the Justice Department.
The administration says access to voter rolls would allow it to remove immigrant voters who are not entitled to vote. It has alleged, without providing evidence, that 278,000 non-citizens are registered to vote.
Non-citizen voting does occur but is described in the material as extremely rare. New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill said thousands of non-citizens were mistakenly registered in her state after a software error, although about 340 actually voted.
The Justice Department has charged more than 100 non-citizens with voting illegally since the start of Mr Trump’s second term. In Utah, Ms Henderson said she had found 52 questionable voters among more than two million registered voters.
Harmeet Dhillon, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said the administration was examining “thousands” of possible cases. She said more than 1,000 election observers and monitors would be deployed during the midterms to increase confidence in the process.
The Justice Department has also sued California, claiming the state was mailing ballots to more than 20,000 likely non-citizens. California Secretary of State Shirley Weber said the federal government was threatening the voting rights of thousands of people without explaining how they had been identified, and questioned the accuracy of the data.
Ms Weber said the department’s efforts to access protected voter information and purge electoral rolls would “cause chaos and fuel public distrust in our elections”.
Ballot seizure in Georgia fuels concerns
In January, armed federal agents seized ballots and other election material from a facility in Fulton County, Georgia, under a criminal search warrant. More than 600 boxes of records from the 2020 election were taken away.
Fulton County Commissioner Dana Barrett said: “In my wildest dreams, I never imagined that we would be raided by the FBI.”
The state’s secretary of state described the warrant as containing “baseless and repackaged claims”. After Tulsi Gabbard, then director of national intelligence, arrived, the boxes were loaded on to trucks and disappeared, according to the material.
Ms Barrett said she did not know where the ballots were and believed the seizure was “political theatre aimed at undermining the 2026 and 2028 elections”.
An internal FBI email showed that 260 analysts had been temporarily reassigned to a “priority investigation” into the Georgia material. No outcome has been announced, while dozens of previous investigations into the 2020 election in Fulton County have produced no significant change.
“People see all of these investigations and FBI raids and subpoenas and they say, ‘Something must be wrong there. Why should I believe the results?’” Ms Barrett said.
Ms Henderson said she was told in writing last month that she was under investigation. “Someone has to” hold the safeguards around elections, she said, adding that she still believed honest and fair elections were possible.
Her concern was whether defeated candidates would accept the outcome. She said candidates who lost were refusing to concede even when races were not close, adding that a gracious concession could help restore public confidence.
Only about half of Americans expect the midterm elections to be free and fair, according to recent surveys cited in the material.
Ms Dhillon described fears that Mr Trump might challenge the midterm results as “paranoia”. She said any illegal vote by a non-citizen should be challenged individually rather than used to dispute an entire election.
“Absent some shocking contingency that is unexpected, there should be no interruption in the usual course of counting and certifying the results in the states,” Ms Dhillon said.
