Overview

The Trump regime is following the Project 2025 ¹ playbook for the creation of an authoritarian regime that can not be removed from power by the voters. There is an upside to the regime making its unlawful intentions so clear: the People can prepare. With information and planning, we can identify federal threats to our elections, spot falsehoods, understand and use legal constraints on the regime, and stand up for free and fair elections.

The Regime’s tactics can be summarized into four categories:

1. Federalized Elections: Trump is writing new executive orders purporting to regulate elections.
2. Purged Voter Rolls: There may be federal efforts by the regime to force states to purge legitimate voters from the rolls.
3. Disruptions: There may be federal efforts to seize voting equipment, ballots, or other election materials.
4. Voter Intimidation: Deployment of the military or federal officers (such as National Guard troops or ICE agents) to intimidate voters. In some jurisdictions, such as the former Confederate Sates, armed and violent vigilante groups may be deployed against citizens.

Federalized Elections

Federal and state laws guard against the types of election interference the president has threatened. Most fundamentally, the US Constitution clearly gives the president no authority to set election rules; that power belongs solely to the states and Congress. If all else fails, Trump may try to invent a National Emergency as an excuse to seize control of the voting process, or even to completely nullify it.

Purged Voter Rolls

When election officials delete names from voter rolls in an effort to remove outdated or ineligible registrants, this work is called “purging the rolls.” Sometimes legitimate voters are accidentally purged. As a result, they may not receive their absentee ballot or may show up to vote only to find that they cannot cast a regular ballot.

Over the last two decades, voter roll purging has increased. According to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, over 19 million voters were removed from the rolls between 2020 and 2022.² Election denial groups have been challenging voters’ eligibility on a massive scale and pressuring election workers to investigate large numbers of legitimate voters based on dubious claims or outdated and unreliable information. Many voters may not know that they have been purged until they try to vote.

Disruptions

The Brennan Center points out that the administration will attempt to sow confusion through a fog of investigations, executive orders, disinformation, and legal maneuvers that are difficult for any one person or organization to track in full. Individually, each action can appear somewhat legitimate on the surface. Together, they form a coherent and deeply alarming strategy.

That strategy has roots in the election subversion efforts of 2022 and 2024, and shares the same key components: deceive voters about the trustworthiness of election systems, disrupt the smooth operation of those systems, and use the ensuing chaos to deny election outcomes that they don’t like. In 2026, we will see that strategy supercharged, with the full power of the federal government put in its service.

Voter Intimidation

For Blacks in the US, polling places have long been militarized zone, “guarded” by the violence and intimidation of white racists. After the US Civil War when the formerly enslaved began gaining some political power in state legislatures, racists used murder, rape, lynching and other forms of violence to discourage Black voting.

Despite centuries of struggle and gradual progress, this sorry aspect of the nation’s history never completely disappeared, and is currently surging back with a vengeance. The Trump regime along with some complicit state legislatures are organizing a new network of voter intimidators, this time hoping to target any group they feel my hinder their ability to remain in power. True to form, they will focus their efforts on the most vulnerable groups first.

Multiple federal and state laws in the US explicitly prohibit the government from deploying troops or other federal agents to polling places. Still, Trump has repeatedly suggested that he may deploy the National Guard or Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers to polling places during the 2026 midterms. Trump and his allies have claimed the deployments could be necessary to guard against supposed voting by non-citizens, which is not happening at a level that would impact any election results.

Such actions could have a major chilling effect on election turnout, especially for communities who have often been subject to harassment and intimidation in the past. When people are afraid to cast their ballots, their right to vote is compromised.

Footnotes