The Trump administration’s months-long campaign to challenge the way states conduct elections and oppose their efforts will reach a climax ahead of Election Day on Tuesday.
Those efforts include lawsuits, attempts to implement new U.S. Postal Service rules for voting by mail this year, threatening letters to state election officials, and plans to hire more poll watchers.
The administration may continue these efforts beyond Election Day.
Democratic lawmakers, attorneys general and advocacy groups are bracing for a fight if the administration attempts to interfere with polling places or challenge vote counts, especially in states that could decide whether President Donald Trump’s fellow Republicans narrowly lose the Senate majority.
“You have to be prepared for anything, and we are,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta told CNBC on Monday night.
“You know, we’ve been blocking, working, protecting and protecting the election for months and the last few weeks of the voting period, and it’s all going to culminate tomorrow, and every single one of Trump’s attempts has failed,” Bonta said.
“We don’t know what he’s hiding,” the attorney general said after President Trump’s Justice Department suffered a series of legal defeats in election litigation.
But he also said he, other California officials and 23 other Democratic state attorneys general have been preparing for Election Day and possible actions by the Trump administration to “disenfranchise and suppress votes and voters.”
“We planned the games, we planned the war games, we planned the tabletop games, we planned the scenarios for every possibility,” Bonta said.
“We have National Guard troops, ICE and Marines deployed to polling places near polling places, and armed groups ready to be stationed near polling places,” he said. “I think we’re ready for tomorrow’s ballot seizure and we’re ready for the monitors that are coming.”
Bonta said California authorities would immediately seek redress through the court system if such an extreme event occurred.
He said there is “a law now in place that makes it a criminal offense” to remove ballots from the custody and control of election officials.
Election workers open midterm election ballots at King County elections headquarters in Renton, Washington, on October 23, 2026.
David Rider Getty Images
On Monday, multiple federal courts were dealing with emergency filings of election-related lawsuits and appeals by the Trump administration.
The lawsuit includes a Sunday appeal by the Justice Department seeking to dismiss a lawsuit seeking to delay the certification of Alaska’s Senate election if incumbent Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan lost by a narrow margin, likely due to voter confusion caused by the presence of someone with the same last name on the ballot.
In a separate lawsuit, the Justice Department asked the Supreme Court on Monday to prevent California from counting about 20,000 mail-in ballots from voters the Justice Department suggests may not be U.S. citizens. Hours later, the Supreme Court rejected the request without any notable dissent.
In U.S. District Court in Washington, a Justice Department lawyer told Judge Reggie Walton on Monday that the agency plans to deploy 900 people to monitor polling places in all 50 states.
“In 2024, there were about 100 monitors,” attorney Kathryn Barragan said.
Separately, the Justice Department announced it would deploy about 1,000 election observers and observers.
Her statement came at a hearing where Walton is considering an emergency request by the NAACP to bar the Justice Department from using election monitors who are law enforcement officers from federal agencies such as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Prisons.
John Cusick, deputy general counsel at the Legal Defense Fund, a civil rights group, said there are three main reasons why the administration is using the Justice Department, Homeland Security and other federal agencies to target election procedures this election cycle.
“First and foremost, this is an attempt to intimidate voters and election officials,” Cusick said in an interview.
“The second element is confusion” regarding election rules, he said. “And the third unfortunate part is that they are trying to lay the groundwork to challenge the counting and certification of ballots after the election.”
He said there has been a “relentless barrage” by the administration targeting election officials and officials for illegal activities.
That included the Justice Department sending letters to state election officials warning them of possible criminal prosecution if they failed to maintain election records, he said.
“It created a very chilling effect,” Cusick said. “There is no question that this threat is a threat to our democracy.”
The Justice Department did not respond to CNBC’s request for comment for this article, but has previously defended its election-related efforts.
“Voting by noncitizens and other ineligible voters is a federal crime, and the Department will enforce the law whether the incident involves one illegal ballot or hundreds,” the Justice Department’s rapid response account on X said Oct. 12.
Asked on October 22 if there was a scenario in which the Justice Department would try to block states from certifying election results, Attorney General Todd Blanche acknowledged that was a possibility.
“I mean, is there a scenario?” Blanche told reporters in Virginia. “Yes, of course. There are scenarios that we can all come up with, like a doomsday scenario.”
“It is not the Department of Justice’s intent, and never our intent, to unfairly interfere with elections or the state confirmation or certification process,” the attorney general said.
“But what if we say there are no circumstances in which we would do such a thing? Of course I would not say that.”
Cusick and other experts point out that the president and the federal executive branch have no official role in administering elections, which are handled by the states designated by the Constitution.
In a ruling Sunday dismissing the Justice Department’s Alaska Senate lawsuit, District Court Judge Sharon Gleason said the Trump administration “has made demands concerning the timing, location, and manner of Alaska elections that are the responsibility of the state, not the executive branch of the federal government.”
A voter fills out a ballot at a polling place on Wayne County Community College’s Northwest Campus during the last day of early voting for the midterm elections, Sunday, November 1, 2026, in Detroit, Michigan, USA.
Emily Elkonin | Bloomberg | Getty Images
On Monday, a bipartisan group of former election officials told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in a filing that “increasing federal pressure and intimidation against election officials…is part of the administration’s pattern of asserting authority over elections and seeking to question the integrity of state and local officials.”
The suit was filed as part of a lawsuit in which the Justice Department is appealing a Friday order by a federal judge in California barring the Trump administration from “actually carrying out or attempting to carry out a series of efforts to intimidate, intimidate, or coerce election officials who assist others in exercising their right to vote.”
The judge cited the Justice Department’s threat to prosecute state and local election officials if they process and count ballots using legally required procedures.
The ruling noted that on Oct. 26, the administration sent a letter to the state of Washington identifying the possible noncitizens and “requesting the Washington Secretary of State to stop processing the ballots.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York convened the entire Senate Democratic Caucus Sunday night, with a briefing from him and election lawyer Marc Elias, and a Democratic aide briefing them on the “current state of election threats from Mr. Trump and his allies.” The aide spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the private meeting.
“Senate Democrats are not waiting until Election Day to confront these threats,” the aide said. “If Mr. Trump and his allies seek to thwart the will of voters, Senate Democrats stand ready to fight back immediately and aggressively on Election Day and as long as necessary to ensure the results are respected.”
California Attorney General Bonta said he expects President Trump and the Justice Department to continue targeting states over election procedures until the next cycle in 2028, when voters choose a new president.
“You can’t be naive about this. You have to be prepared for things to get much worse and expect things to get much worse. I don’t want to be alarmist,” Bonta said. “But I’m a realist and I understand his thinking, his actions and what he’s done. Maybe we can prepare for the worst, but it will never happen.”
“But we can’t afford not to prepare for it, and I expect it to escalate as he becomes more desperate.”
