Democratic state attorneys general, other top state officials and civic groups have accelerated planning to thwart any federal meddling in the November midterm elections by Donald Trump as he continues his false accusations of widespread voter fraud and veiled threats to interfere in the process. Since early this year, 24 Democratic attorneys general have expanded coordination with about a dozen Democratic secretaries of state and various civic groups through weekly Zoom calls and in-person tabletop exercises to strategize how to counter any federal intervention in the election. Cooperation is important because many secretaries of state are responsible for overseeing elections and state attorneys general are charged with upholding the laws that govern them. Coordination efforts by state officials are being led by the Progressive State Leadership Committee (PSLC), the public policy arm of the Democratic Attorneys General Association. Democratic attorneys general say they are especially concerned about election interference by the Justice Department and other parts of the Trump administration given the president’s repeated false accusations of rampant voter fraud in the US elections. the 2020 elections to Joe Biden. Nick Brown, the attorney general of Washington state, said the justice department and the Trump administration were “the biggest adversary to a smooth election.” Brown added that “Trump lies about the election on a regular basis. The truth is not one of his goals. That creates a whole host of concerns for us.” By comparison, in 2022 the Justice Department deployed 289 monitors, according to CBS News. In another troubling move, the Justice Department has sued 30 states to obtain their unredacted voter lists that contain sensitive personal information. Democratic attorneys general have been involved in challenging the Justice Department’s lawsuits, and the Justice Department has lost 26 of the lawsuits that the courts have ruled on. Additionally, Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the Justice Department’s civil rights division, wrote this summer to state election officials threatening prosecution if they did not adequately cooperate in the search for voter fraud. To counter threats of federal intervention in the November election, Brown has led weekly Zoom calls with PSLC partners, including secretaries of state offices and key civil society groups such as the Democracy Defenders Fund, the Center for American Democracy and the Brennan Center for Justice. Brown, a former U.S. attorney and federal prosecutor, said the Zoom calls focus on general election security issues and potential event scenarios, including the possibility of ICE agents showing up near some polling locations and ballots being seized in some races. Secretary of State and other partners of the PSLC. In addition to these efforts, Brown’s office co-led legal efforts that blocked Trump’s sweeping plans in his March executive order to reform and curb mail-in voting, which the Supreme Court ruled on last month. Fears of federal meddling in the election have been fueled by Trump’s drumbeat of baseless accusations about large-scale noncitizen voting and mail-in voting fraud, both of which the president falsely alleged in a nationally televised speech on July 16. In his television address, Trump made the factually inaccurate claim that noncitizen voting, which has long been illegal and historically rare, poses an “election security crisis.” Trump’s obsession with portraying noncitizen voting as a crisis has been significantly undermined by data from the conservative Heritage Foundation, which cited just 100 cases over a 25-year period. Other concerns about federal meddling in the upcoming election were spurred by Trump’s comments to Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield, who shares Brown’s concerns about the threat to the election posed by Trump. Oregon, he noted, was the first state to adopt all mail-in voting and has had two Republican secretaries of state in the last decade who have been happy with the voting system. Elsewhere, Arizona’s Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, whose office has participated in several of the Zoom calls and the two tabletop exercises, said the increased cooperation this year with attorneys general represents “an all-in approach” to addressing threats of federal interference. “We have an adversary we did not expect in the form of this administration.” Fontes added that a central concern of his office was that the administration’s “constant drumbeat of lies is going to suppress the vote.” The Democratic attorney general’s efforts have benefited from input from several nonpartisan groups. Norm Eisen, CEO of the Democracy Defenders Fund, who participated in the tabletop exercises in Milwaukee and Detroit and has been on some of the Zoom calls, praised the work of attorneys general preparing to fight the feds. electoral interference. “Pro-democracy AGs are preparing for anything this anti-voter administration can throw at them,” said Eisen, former special adviser on ethics and government reform to Barack Obama. “The level of preparation of attorneys general and secretaries of state is off the charts.” More broadly, Larry Norden, an elections expert at the Brennan Center who has participated in a handful of Zoom calls and the two strategy exercises hosted by the PSLC, warned: “Administration leaders, including the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security, have repeatedly threatened or attempted to exert control over the midterm elections.” Norden noted that “over the last 18 months, they have been fulfilled.” “To better protect election results and strengthen coordination between Democratic attorneys general and Democratic secretaries of state, two new groups were created in 2026. One of them is called AGSOS Election Protection Pac, and is working to raise funds to elect more Democrats to both state offices, and the other is called AGSOS Election Protection Action, which serves as a political arm. Addressing the PSLC’s work to counter the Trump administration’s election interference threats, Sean Rankin, president of the Attorneys’ Association Democratic Generals, noted that “it is concerning that the administration is trying to seize ballots and attorneys general and secretaries of state are working on responses to that to find solutions if that happens.” With Fulton County, Georgia, ballots, election officials are “ready and prepared to respond” to the threat of ballots being seized in the midterm elections More broadly, Rayfield warned that Trump “continues to take steps to interfere in our elections… This president has strained our democracy more than any other president in my time. life.”
