How Republicans might disrupt the 2026 midterm elections

Attempts to change elections laws and procedures have already begun and are far more likely to tip the balance than ICE being deployed to polling places.

President Trump said, twice in early January, that there shouldn’t be midterm elections this year (all legislators in the House and one-third of the Senate are up for election), claiming as always that it was a joke. The president has no legal role in running elections and can’t issue an executive order to cancel them. (And he said he won’t, if that matters.) State and county officials operate elections according to federal and state laws. But there are countless ways the President and his supporters could change election outcomes. Mostly legally. Some have already begun.

The red line: Elections must be decided by the count of all the votes

There’s a red line after which we’re not living in a democracy anymore: Elections must be decided by the count of all the votes. Sometimes it’s not clear how to count a ballot (think “hanging chads” from the 2000 election), so disputes routinely get resolved by courts, which apply the law as written. That’s normal. After court rulings, the votes determine the winner. That’s democracy.

Yet after the 2020 presidential election some local officials refused to certify vote totals and then on January 6, 2021, most Republicans in Congress voted to toss out state-certified vote totals in order to throw the election to Trump. That had never happened before. It failed. We came very close to crossing that red line.

At least crossing the red line would be obvious.

But there are far more ways the election could be subverted that aren’t as glaringly obvious.

Tipping the balance by changing elections laws and procedures

This first section isn’t the most exciting, but it is the most likely: Changing election laws and procedures is legal and has an impact on who votes.

Although we no longer have poll taxes, literacy tests, and race and gender-based disenfranchisement, politicians still use gerrymandering, ID requirements, polling place convenience, and the availability of mail-in voting to sway elections in their favor. (By the way, around 3% of the voting age population still isn’t allowed to vote in the midterms: citizens residing in Puerto Rico, D.C., and other U.S. territories have no voting representation in Congress, and most citizens with felony convictions cannot vote. Who do you think that benefits?)

Redrawing congressional district maps

After President Trump suggested Texas redraw its maps for a partisan advantage last year, California (+5D), Missouri (+1R), North Carolina (+1R), Ohio (+2R), and Texas (+5R) all redrew their congressional district maps for an overall likely gain of 4 House of Representatives seats for Republicans. (Florida, Maryland, and Virginia have also taken steps to do so.)

Proof of citizenship for voting and ID

Republicans have also passed the SAVE Act in the House which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote in the name of preventing mass non-citizen voting, a conspiracy theory easily disproved by the fact that in a decade of fearmongering no mass voter fraud has been prosecuted either by Trump or by any Republican state attorney general. (Well, except for this Republican who voted illegally nine times and these other Republicans convicted of election fraud.)

What the bill would do is make registering to vote harder for anyone who doesn’t already have a passport or whose name doesn’t match their birth certificate, like most married women. The law would also go into effect immediately and require most states to make significant changes to their election administration procedures just months before the 2026 election, creating an opportunity for mass confusion.

Trump has demanded the Senate pass the bill but it’s been stalled without any votes from Democrats to reach the 60-vote Senate filibuster threshold, and it will probably remain that way. Last year Trump issued an executive order to do this, and it was blocked in court, pending appeal.

Speaking of ID, state lawmakers in Kansas recently revoked the drivers licenses of trans people, and since Kansas requires ID to cast a vote, you can see where that might be going (disenfranchising voters Republicans don’t want).

Limiting mail-in voting

Republicans also want to curb mail-in voting, an option that they claim is insecure and benefits Democrats. Nearly 1 in 3 voters voted by mail in 2024: Since 2000 Oregon has run its presidential election voting entirely by mail, and a handful of other states now also allow anyone to vote by mail, including red-state Utah which votes entirely by mail. (As with non-citizen voting, Republicans have not been able to find any mass mail-in voting fraud to prosecute either.)

In a new March 31 executive order, Trump directed USPS, the postal service, to develop plans to require voters to register with the federal government prior to mailing a ballot and to reject mailed ballots that don’t conform to new USPS tracking requirements. USPS could finalize those rules as late as August, creating new chaos for state officials just months before the election. But the order will be challenged, and likely blocked, because no law gives the president or USPS this power.

In last year’s proof-of-citizenship executive order as well as in proposed legislation and a lawsuit brought by the Republican National Committee in Mississippi that’s now before the Supreme Court, Republicans want to prohibit states from counting ballots postmarked by election day if they arrive after election day. USPS plans a double-whammy on that one: 1) It plans to delay postmarking, meaning a ballot mailed on or even before election day may not be postmarked until after election day. 2) It plans to lengthen mail delivery by routing local mail through further-away hubs, making it uncertain how far in advance a ballot would need to be mailed for it to be counted.

Last year’s executive order (the same one again) also required changing requirements for electronic voting systems under the guise of security and withholding grants to states that don’t comply with some of these updated rules. Courts will probably prevent any of that from being enforced before the midterms.

(Do Democrats want to expand mail-in voting for their own partisan advantage? Probably! But making voting easier is a good thing for everyone.)

Republicans have also proposed to prohibit ranked-choice voting and ballot harvesting.

Manipulating polling place availability, like their location, open hours, and capacity, is also expected. The long lines are intentional.

No one of these measures would likely turn an election, but taken together and they are happening together, they add up.

Voter roll purges

Republicans have also sought to ramp up voter roll purges, that is, un-registering voters who may not be eligible to vote. Voter roll purges by state officials are normal because people move out of state or die, and a bipartisan interstate organization named ERIC has helped states manage voter rolls effectively since 2012.

Indiscriminate purges right before an election could prevent eligible voters from voting. For example, Georgia aggressively purges voter rolls, disproportionately de-registering Black people.

Last year DOJ began demanding that states turn over voter registration lists to cross-reference with immigration databases to force states to purge immigrants from rolls. Some states have complied with DOJ, but courts have blocked those demands where states didn’t. So in the March 31 executive order, DHS is directed instead to provide lists of citizens to states, presumably so that red states would have new fodder for their own enforcement.

The Trump Administration and Republican states have already begun doing it, and an investigation found that the lists were wrong at least 81% of the time: First, many immigrants go on to become citizens and become eligible to vote before they registered. Second, a name on one list might match the name of a voter, but it might not be the same person. So an eligible voter may be taken off the rolls, or an immigrant might be deported for something they didn’t do. That’s the problem ERIC was designed to solve. (Although some part of the list was correct, it doesn’t appear that anyone on the list actually voted illegally.)

Refusing to certify election results

Here’s one way that’s not legal: After the 2020 presidential election and 2022 midterms, a handful of local elections officials simply refused to certify the result. While state laws do require that officials tally votes and then certify the count, local officials can gum up the system by delaying or refusing to do so until state officials or courts can intervene. But if those state officials and higher courts are friendly to Trump and gullible to conspiracy theories, then they might not.

Sham candidates and dark money

Then there’s the money behind elections. In 2024, “300 billionaires and their immediate family members donated more than $3 billion — 19 percent of all contributions” to political campaigns and related entities, overwhelmingly in support of Republicans. The money typically goes to advertising to swing voters. Which billionaires will show up to sway this year’s elections won’t be known until reporting deadlines after the election, if ever. It’s all legal.

In Nebraska, the Democratic candidate for Senate might actually be a Republican, filing at the last minute to siphon votes from the candidate Democrats are expected to vote for. Down-ballot, in 2020 a sham candidate swung the election of a state official in Florida from Democrat to Republican. And you probably remember Republican representative-turned-felon George Santos who fabricated his life story and was expelled from Congress. Trump commuted his sentence last year.

Seizing election equipment and sham investigations

The conspiracy theory that foreign nations hacked electronic elections equipment still has adherents even though it hadn’t gone well in court. In 2023, Fox News agreed to pay a voting equipment maker nearly $1 billion over lies it told constantly about the 2020 election and Trump advisor Sidney Powell pleaded guilty to unlawfully accessing secure elections machines in Georgia. You might remember back in 2020 Trump fired his own cybersecurity director for saying the election was the most secure in U.S. history.

Now, in January, the FBI seized elections materials from Fulton County, Georgia in what seems to be a continuation of that conspiracy theory, and in March a Republican sheriff running for governor seized 650,000 ballots cast in California in 2025. Trump recently commented that he should have seized ballot boxes during the 2020 election. In March, DOJ subpoenaed Arizona for records from state Republicans’ own sham audit of 2020 election results. They’re looking for anything to keep the lies alive. Now Trump supporters are talking about an executive order to take over elections based on the same conspiracy theory of foreign control of voting machines. It’s not legally possible, and Trump said he won’t.

But DOJ or local officials could seize more voting equipment — equipment meant for or used in the midterms — as a part of a misguided or sham investigation, disrupting the election.

A standing army and a pardon for the mobs (unlikely)

You might be thinking about whether Trump will send ICE’s 22,000 officers to polling places to arrest, or scare away, would-be voters under an immigration pretense. DHS had said ICE won’t, but in his confirmation hearing new DHS Secretary Mullin wouldn’t rule out immigration enforcement at polling locations. There’s also the National Guard (though Democratic governors would challenge their deployment) and other federal agents to wonder about (though what their pretense might be is anyone’s guess). There are nearly 100,000 polling places across the country, so intimidation nation-wide wouldn’t be possible, but targeting polling locations in the (currently) 18 toss-up districts could shift the needle just enough for a few more Republican wins.

White supremacist militias, like the ones that were on the front lines of the January 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol, could pick up the slack. Trump pardoned the violent January 6, 2021 rioters, and they may expect him to do the same if they mobilize again.

I don’t think these are likely to happen, though.

A wartime rally

Between 2011 and 2013, Trump predicted in various statements that then-President Barack Obama would “start a war with Iran” to get re-elected or for other political reasons. He didn’t, but Trump did. I leave the inference up to you. (So far polling indicates the new Iran war has hurt Trump, though.)

Congress has the final say

Finally, after the election, the House and Senate could simply decline to seat elected legislators. The Constitution gives the House and Senate the final say in whether a legislator-elect meets the Constitutional qualifications for office (age, citizenship, residency) and was “duly” elected. It has been extraordinarily rare, but the House and Senate have prevented legislators-elect from taking office, leaving the seat vacant. Although there are complex procedures around this, to “exclude” someone from taking office the other elected legislators ultimately only need a majority vote — and a Supreme Court willing to allow it.

Whichever party holds the most seats in each chamber could vote to hold the other party’s open seats vacant, but since that party would already have majority control over the chamber, taking away a seat from the minority party might not actually confer any new power, which makes this whole hypothetical extremely unlikely. Could the rules be abused to flip which party holds a majority? Anything is possible, I guess. (This is sort of similar to Congress’s role in having the final say in certifying the presidential election, but the Constitutional provisions and procedures are completely different.)

Trump need not order election interference

Trump himself was criminally charged in Georgia state court in 2022 for his role in the submission of a fraudulent slate of presidential electors to Congress for certification on January 6, 2021 and for making false statements about illegal voting in a call with Georgia’s top elections official, until a replacement prosecutor dropped the charges in 2025 (not because of the charges’ merits but because he “lacks the resources” to continue and other “difficult” logistics). A federal investigation also alleged that Trump sought to ignore true vote counts, manufactured fraudulent slates of presidential electors, and used the January 6 riot to obstruct the congressional certification of the presidential election, but this too was dropped after Trump’s re-election because DOJ prosecutors cannot prosecute their boss.

But as you can see from the long list of ways that elections can be manipulated, it doesn’t require an order from the top. Local and state elections officials, legislators in Congress, friendly judges, and mobs have all stepped forward on their own before to support Trump and might do so to support other candidates this fall.