Trump Election Power: What Is Already Happening Before the 2026 Midterms — Is America Better Yet?

By Roberto Zapatero
Is America Better Yet?

PUBLIC ALERT — LIVING RECORD — AUGUST 28, 2026

No national emergency has been declared over the 2026 midterm elections.

There is no public order canceling the election. There is no announced deployment of military troops to polling places. And the roughly 1,000 federal personnel the Justice Department says it hopes to deploy in November are election monitors, not federal poll workers.

Those facts matter.

So do the things that are already happening.

With the November 3 midterms approaching, the Trump administration is pressing deeper into election administration through federal grant money, statewide voter records, citizenship databases, Postal Service regulations and Justice Department monitoring.

President Donald Trump has publicly said Republicans should “nationalize” voting and “take over” voting in at least 15 unspecified places.

His allies are openly discussing something more extraordinary: a national-security emergency involving the election.

One Trump ally proposed that idea directly to the president this month.

Trump did not reject it.

This is the first IABY public alert examining what is already documented, what remains an allegation, and what the public should watch next.

Trump has already said he wants Republicans to “take over” voting

On February 2, Trump told former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino that Republicans should “nationalize” voting and “take over” voting in at least 15 places.

He did not explain exactly what that meant or identify the places.

The constitutional problem is straightforward.

For congressional elections, Article I’s Elections Clause assigns the “Times, Places and Manner” of elections first to the states, with Congress authorized to make or alter those rules by law.

The Congressional Research Service’s Constitution Annotated describes that authority as extending to registration, supervision of voting, prevention of fraud, vote counting, election officials and election returns.

The president is not given a parallel Elections Clause power to run congressional elections.

That does not mean the executive branch has no election role.

The Justice Department enforces federal voting-rights and election laws. DHS operates federal databases. USPS carries election mail. Federal prosecutors investigate federal crimes.

The question is where enforcement of existing federal law ends and presidential control over state election administration begins.

That boundary is now being tested in several places at once.

Counterterrorism money is being tied to election rules

The FY2026 Homeland Security Grant Program is a $1.064 billion FEMA program designed to help states and local governments prevent, prepare for, protect against and respond to terrorism and catastrophic events.

This year, the administration attached a new condition.

FEMA says it will withhold from drawdown an amount equal to 20% of a recipient’s total Homeland Security Grant Program award until DHS confirms compliance with federal election-security requirements.

Those conditions include:

• plans to transition away from voting systems that use barcodes or QR codes to record or count voter selections toward equipment accepting hand-marked paper ballots;
• a manual audit of at least 5% of ballots;
• reconciliation between the number of voters who participated and ballots cast;
• use of DHS’s SAVE system to check citizenship status across voter-registration databases; and
• citizenship verification involving people working in election administration.

The separate 20% holdback is in addition to a minimum election-security spending requirement within portions of the grant program.

States can refuse to comply.

But refusing could mean losing access to a substantial portion of federal money intended for terrorism prevention, cybersecurity, emergency preparedness and related public-safety work.

That is why a multistate coalition sued the administration on July 23.

The states argue DHS and FEMA are attempting to accomplish through grant conditions what Congress did not authorize them to impose directly on state elections.

The administration says the requirements are legitimate election-security safeguards.

Those competing legal claims are now before the courts.

What is not disputed is the mechanism:

Access to a portion of federal homeland-security funding is being conditioned on compliance with federal election requirements.

The administration is also pursuing voter records

The grant program is not the only path into state voter information.

Trump’s March 31 executive order, Executive Order 14399, directs DHS to work with the Social Security Administration to build and transmit to each state a State Citizenship List derived from citizenship, naturalization, Social Security, SAVE and other federal records.

The order calls for the lists to be transmitted at least 60 days before regularly scheduled federal elections.

It also directs federal agencies to take lawful steps against what the administration considers noncompliance and says federal funding may be withheld where existing law authorizes it.

Separately, the Justice Department has demanded statewide voter-registration lists.

By April 1, DOJ said it had sued 30 states and the District of Columbia for refusing to provide full voter rolls requested by its Civil Rights Division.

The department says the Civil Rights Act of 1960 authorizes those demands so federal officials can inspect records and identify improper registrations.

States have challenged that interpretation in court.

Then another connection emerged.

A May opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel concluded that the Civil Rights Division could share statewide voter-registration lists with Homeland Security Investigations, or other DHS components, for purposes including identifying people believed to be ineligible to vote, provided applicable privacy requirements are satisfied.

And this week, Homeland Security Investigations sought outside help collecting even more election information.

A federal contracting notice described a potential contractor obtaining publicly available voter-registration and voting-history records nationwide to support what HSI calls “fraud detection and data segmentation.”

That procurement effort does not establish that the government has already created one complete nationwide voter database.

But it does document the government's interest in obtaining those records on a national scale.

That leaves a basic public-record question:

What voter information is being collected across the federal government, which agencies can access it, and what ultimately happens to it?

The Postal Service fight shows why timing matters

Trump’s March executive order also reached into mail voting.

It directed USPS toward new requirements involving federal-election ballot envelopes, tracking and state voter information.

The Postal Service eventually finalized rules implementing parts of that order.

States and voting-rights organizations sued.

This week alone, the legal status changed repeatedly.

On August 27, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani temporarily blocked major provisions of the finalized USPS rule for elections through November 3.

Among the provisions she blocked were envelope requirements, portal-registration requirements, voter-enrollment provisions and rules that could result in noncompliant ballot mail not being transmitted.

Talwani found that states faced serious harm because election officials were already approaching ballot deadlines without enough time to redesign envelopes, alter systems, train workers and transmit new voter information.

On August 28, the Justice Department appealed.

This is important even if courts ultimately settle the constitutional question.

Election officials cannot stop preparing an election while judges deliberate.

They must print ballots.

Program systems.

Train workers.

Explain procedures to voters.

Comply with federal deadlines for military and overseas ballots.

And make all of those decisions while litigation can change the rules again.

That produces a danger separate from whether an executive action eventually survives judicial review:

A rule does not have to remain in force forever to cause disruption before Election Day.

Then there are the 1,000 Justice Department monitors

Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon says DOJ plans to deploy approximately 1,000 election monitors during the November election.

The distinction here is essential.

These are not federal poll workers.

DOJ election monitoring itself is neither new nor inherently improper.

The Civil Rights Division has sent personnel to elections for decades to monitor compliance with federal voting-rights laws.

In 2022, DOJ monitored 64 jurisdictions in 24 states.

In 2024, it monitored 86 jurisdictions in 27 states.

Dhillon has publicly described the proposed 2026 personnel as neutral observers.

She said they have “no role in stepping in” and are there to observe and document. If they see what DOJ considers unlawful conduct, the department can pursue legal action afterward.

That is considerably different from federal employees operating polling places or deciding who gets a ballot.

But the proposed scale is significant.

CBS reported that DOJ sent 289 personnel in the 2022 midterms and 714 during the 2024 presidential election. The planned 1,000-person deployment would therefore be larger than either.

And an incident in Wyoming this month shows why the monitors’ actual conduct needs scrutiny.

During Wyoming’s August 18 primary, two DOJ officials were sent to Laramie County.

According to Laramie County Clerk Debra Lee, the officials sought information about poll-worker training, election equipment and tabulators, and initially proposed interviewing voters.

Lee said her office refused to allow voter interviews inside polling places.

Republican Gov. Mark Gordon subsequently described the monitors’ behavior as “a bit aggressive” and “irregular” and asked the Wyoming attorney general to investigate.

No one involved has alleged that the monitors changed the election result.

DOJ says its personnel were there to enforce federal civil-rights and voting laws and ensure ballot security and transparency.

That distinction should be preserved.

But with roughly 1,000 monitors contemplated for November, Wyoming provides a concrete question for every state:

Exactly what are federal election monitors authorized to observe, request and document — and what happens when state election officials believe they have crossed that line?

The intelligence community entered the picture

Another part of this investigation concerns the nation's intelligence apparatus.

Earlier this year, then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard appeared during an FBI search of Fulton County, Georgia's election facility connected to the 2020 election.

She also became involved in an investigation involving voting machines and election data from Puerto Rico.

That raised an unusual question because the Director of National Intelligence's central responsibility concerns foreign intelligence, not routine domestic election administration.

After the Fulton County search-warrant affidavit became public, Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said it showed no foreign-intelligence connection explaining Gabbard's presence.

Then came the March 18 Senate Intelligence Committee hearing.

Warner noted that the annual threat assessment did not identify foreign election interference as it had in previous years and pressed Gabbard about the absence of a current identified foreign threat to the midterms.

At the same hearing, Gabbard said she had been present at the Fulton County operation at Trump's request but had not participated in the law-enforcement search.

Warner offered an alarming interpretation.

He said he believed Gabbard's involvement suggested an organized misuse of national-security authority in domestic politics and could “provide a pretext” for what he called Trump's unconstitutional efforts to seize control of the coming election.

That is Warner's allegation.

It is not an established IABY finding.

But Congress's unanswered questions are factual.

In June, Warner and Sens. Alex Padilla and Gary Peters said they still had not received intelligence products that would explain some of these election investigations or substantiate public claims regarding voting-system insecurity.

They demanded information about election threats, agency coordination, past-election investigations and the intelligence underlying them.

The intelligence picture has also evolved since March. Senior intelligence officials have warned that foreign adversaries can still be expected to target U.S. elections.

So the responsible question is not whether foreign threats exist.

It is:

Why were intelligence resources being used in domestic election investigations, what information resulted, and has any of it become part of the justification for later federal election actions?

Now comes the national-emergency question

This is the part we cannot report as having happened.

IABY located no public election-specific national-emergency declaration in the White House presidential-actions record through August 28, 2026.

Trump did issue an unrelated national emergency on August 26 concerning foreign threats to the U.S. bulk-power system.

IABY found no evidence connecting that declaration to the election.

But discussion of an election emergency is not imaginary.

In February, The Washington Post obtained a 17-page draft executive order circulated by pro-Trump activists who said they had been coordinating with the White House.

The proposal sought to use allegations of Chinese election interference as the basis for a national emergency and proposed sweeping changes including restrictions on mail voting and voting machines.

The White House did not confirm that the activists' draft represented administration policy.

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has subsequently discussed the need for a national-security “predicate” that could support an emergency executive order and survive immediate litigation.

Before Trump's July election speech, Bannon again described the administration's election material as a possible predicate for emergency action.

Then on August 11, conservative broadcaster Wayne Allyn Root presented the idea directly to Trump.

Root proposed declaring a “national security emergency for elections” to impose voter identification, proof-of-citizenship requirements and limits on mail voting if Congress did not enact the administration's preferred election legislation.

Trump answered:

“Stranger things have happened.”

That statement does not prove Trump intends to declare an emergency.

It does establish that when the proposal was placed directly before him, he did not reject it.

What would an emergency declaration actually do?

This is where some public claims have outrun the law.

A national emergency does not give a president unlimited powers.

Under the National Emergencies Act, after declaring an emergency the president must identify the statutory authorities under which he intends to act.

The declaration activates powers Congress has already placed in law.

It does not manufacture new constitutional authority over elections.

That means the single most important legal document, if an election emergency is ever declared, will not merely be the words “national emergency.”

It will be the list of statutes cited beneath them.

Those statutes will tell states, Congress, courts and the public what powers the president is actually claiming.

And they can be challenged.

There is also a major legal barrier concerning military or armed federal presence at elections.

Federal law, 18 U.S.C. §592, generally prohibits federal officers from ordering or keeping troops or armed men at a place where an election is being held, except where such force is necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States.

IABY has found no announced Trump administration plan to station military troops at polling places for the November election.

Public speculation and advocacy by Trump allies should not be confused with an actual government order.

What is established — and what is not

Here is where the public record stands tonight.

Established: Trump has publicly said Republicans should “nationalize” and “take over” voting in some places.

Established: FEMA is conditioning access to 20% of Homeland Security Grant Program awards on compliance with specified election requirements.

Established: DOJ has demanded statewide voter-registration records from dozens of states and has sued states that refused.

Established: DOJ's own lawyers have concluded that voter-registration information obtained by the Civil Rights Division may, under stated conditions, be shared with Homeland Security Investigations.

Established: HSI has sought a contractor capable of obtaining publicly available voter-registration and voting-history records nationwide.

Established: Trump's March executive order directed federal agencies into citizenship verification and mail-ballot administration.

Established: USPS produced rules implementing portions of that order; courts have intervened, and DOJ is still litigating to revive them.

Established: DOJ plans approximately 1,000 election monitors for November.

Established: Wyoming's attorney general is now examining complaints about the conduct of two DOJ monitors during that state's primary.

Established: Gabbard became involved in domestic election investigations while serving as the nation's top intelligence official, prompting congressional demands for information about the legal and foreign-intelligence basis for that involvement.

Established: Trump allies have openly advocated an election-related national-security emergency.

Established: Trump was presented with that proposal directly on August 11 and responded, “Stranger things have happened.”

And now the limits:

Not established: that Trump has decided to declare an election emergency.

Not established: that an emergency declaration has already been drafted or approved by the White House.

Not established: that DOJ's approximately 1,000 monitors are being deployed to interfere with voting.

Not established: that military troops will be stationed at polling places.

Not established: that the separate federal initiatives documented here constitute one coordinated secret operation.

Not established: that Trump can lawfully take control of state-run congressional elections simply by declaring an emergency.

Those distinctions are not technicalities.

They are the line between investigating a threat and predicting one.

Why publish this alert now?

Because waiting until an emergency declaration appears would answer only one question.

The federal government is already acting.

States are already litigating.

Election officials are already adapting to changing federal requirements.

Voter information is already being demanded.

Federal monitoring is already occurring.

And the president has already said publicly that Republicans should “take over” voting in some places.

The important question therefore is not only whether Trump eventually declares an emergency.

It is whether the federal government is assembling — separately or together — enough money, data, regulatory authority, law-enforcement presence and national-security justification to exert far greater influence over an election the Constitution primarily places in the hands of states and Congress.

We do not yet know the answer.

We intend to find out.

What IABY is watching next

This is a Living Record.

We will watch for:

• any presidential declaration involving election security;
• any executive order citing emergency statutes in connection with November voting;
• any instructions involving the National Guard, military personnel, ICE or other armed federal agents near polling locations;
• the locations, instructions and conduct of DOJ election monitors;
• findings from Wyoming's investigation;
• additional FEMA grant enforcement or money actually withheld;
• further voter-record demands and any evidence showing how federal agencies use the information;
• developments in the USPS litigation;
• intelligence products relating to Fulton County, Puerto Rico or alleged foreign election interference;
• congressional responses and court rulings;
• and evidence showing actual effects on voters and election administrators.

If an emergency declaration appears, IABY will not begin with its rhetoric.

We will begin with the statutes it cites.

Then we will ask exactly what the president claims those laws allow him to do.

Sources and record

This alert relies heavily on primary government records, including FEMA's FY2026 Homeland Security Grant Program materials; Executive Order 14399; Department of Justice litigation and election-monitoring announcements; a Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel opinion; congressional correspondence; the National Emergencies Act; federal election statutes; and the Constitution Annotated.

Current litigation and reporting were cross-checked using Reuters, the Associated Press, CBS News, The Washington Post, Democracy Docket and other directly attributable sources. Claims or interpretations from Marc Elias, Aaron Parnas, Mark Warner, Steve Bannon, Wayne Allyn Root and other political or advocacy figures were treated as leads or attributed statements, not as independent proof.

Method note: AI assisted with research organization, source comparison, drafting, editing and verification. AI output is not evidence. Consequential factual claims were checked against cited records and reporting.

Watch IABY for updates. Subscribe free to get new reporting by email.

If you have firsthand records, government correspondence, election instructions or other documentation relevant to this investigation, contact IABY. Please remove unnecessary personal information before sending records.

I write for you.

— Roberto

isamericabetteryet.org

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