Trump might send ballot-snatchers to these 13 states. Election officials are ready to fight.
The FBI already seized ballots once this year in Georgia on debunked claims. Now, the Trump team is laying the groundwork to do it in the midterms.
The Trump administration is laying the groundwork to seize ballots in contested midterm races. While they’ll likely lose in court, losing is actually part of the plan.
Earlier this year, the president’s agents did an obvious dry run for how to steal future elections. On January 28, the FBI raided the election hub in one of the most contested 2020 battlegrounds — Fulton County, Georgia, where Trump was previously indicted for pressuring officials to “find 11,780 votes” that didn’t exist. The president himself said the raid would help him find out who “really won” the 2020 election, despite the fact that those ballots had been counted three times, each time confirming that Trump lost. (Also, it goes without saying that it’s unconstitutional for the federal government to run an unauthorized “recount” of an election because the president is a sore loser.)
But here’s what should spook every U.S. state: it worked. After Trump’s DOJ sued Fulton County for its 2020 records and failed, it decided just to go seize them. The FBI quietly went to a magistrate judge earlier this year and sought a warrant to raid the county’s election offices. Their filing rested largely on fraud claims debunked years ago and identified no concrete evidence of a crime. But the judge signed it anyway. Then FBI agents barged in and carted off 656 boxes, including the county’s only copy of its 2020 ballots. And Georgia wasn’t a one-off: the administration has gone after 2020 ballots in Arizona’s biggest battleground county, too.
Election-watchers are rightfully worried this tactic will be used in the heat of the 2026 midterm elections. And here’s how the Trump administration might do it:
Since last year, DOJ has demanded that nearly every state hand over its complete, unredacted voter lists, including driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers. For states that have complied, the Trump administration has evidently been running the data through DHS databases to weed out “illegal aliens.” But the databases are notoriously faulty, and there is limited oversight over who might get purged, raising fears that legitimate U.S. citizens in key battlegrounds would be dropped from the voter rolls.
A dozen red states complied and handed over their lists. But thirty states and D.C. refused and were sued by the Trump administration. The good news is that DOJ has lost every single one of these cases so far in federal court (twenty-one times already) with judges ruling that no federal law gives DOJ the right to demand states’ unredacted voter files. A normal Justice Department would have dropped the other cases after losing just five times.
So why are Trump’s lawyers still fighting?
Because they’re creating a pretext. In my opinion, the Trump administration is preparing the rationale for its future warrant affidavits to go seize ballots in these “non-compliant” states. This will be their logic: We asked X state to let us verify its rolls to weed out fraud; it refused; the courts blocked us; therefore, no one can say whether noncitizens decided this election. So to investigate any fraud claims, we need to go get the ballots themselves.
The result would be chaos-by-design. Picture FBI agents carting boxes out of election offices in two or three states with razor-thin margins, races that decide control of the House and Senate. While the ballots sit in federal custody, certification of a victor will be difficult if not impossible. In the meantime, voters will rightfully fret that Trump’s agents are meddling with the results. MAGA candidates on the losing end will refuse to concede, citing the “ongoing investigations.” And the White House will make sure the fog stays thick enough to hand GOP leaders in Congress a pretext to delay seating new members, which will be the final step in preventing a peaceful transfer of power if Democrats win either chamber.
So where is this likeliest to happen?
If you overlay the refusers (the states that declined to hand over their voter rolls to Trump’s DOJ) with this fall’s top battleground races, then thirteen light up as high risk: Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin. These states are home to some of the most important House and Senate toss-up races. Depending on how the results look after Election Day, the Fulton scheme could hypothetically be carried out in any of them.
These thirteen are the likeliest targets, but they aren’t the only states at risk. There are battleground states that actually cooperated with the DOJ’s voter roll demands — including Ohio, Texas, Iowa, Florida, Nebraska, and North Carolina — that could be hit, too. Here the pretext would simply be flipped around: We ran the voter lists they gave us, and we found anomalies. So we have to go investigate.
Would these seizures hold up? Especially if the investigations are all conveniently conducted in places where it might help a losing MAGA candidate contest the results? In the end, probably not. Warrants require probable cause of an actual crime, the ballots belong to states themselves under state law, and the refusing states have already beaten this Justice Department twenty-one straight times. More importantly, there is almost certainly not going to be evidence in these places that illegal voters have somehow voted in such numbers that they’ve influenced the outcome.
But the Fulton County scheme proved a major weakness in the system. An initial FBI raid just needs a single magistrate judge’s signature. After that, getting the ballots back can take months of litigation. With the ballots in the custody of the feds, they’ll have the upper hand to claim possible “fraud” because they’ll control the evidence.
In the end, Trump’s team doesn’t care about losing in court. All they care about is fighting the battle in the court of public opinion for two months — between the election on November 3, 2026, and January 3, 2027, when the next Congress is supposed to be seated. That’s long enough to diminish confidence in the results and to create enough justification for Speaker Mike Johnson to secure support from his caucus not to hand over power. Indeed, under the law, the House majority has the final say over who gets seated in the chamber.
This is no conspiracy theory. Trump tried to do this once before in 2020, albeit in a far more fly-by-night fashion. He ginned up stolen-election claims out of nothing. He went to courts across the country. Of course, he lost more than sixty of those election cases, but that almost didn’t matter. His goal was to create enough uncertainty in the court of public opinion to give Republicans air cover on January 6, 2021 to refuse to certify the results. (It nearly worked, were it not for Vice President Mike Pence’s refusal to go along with the plot… and a violent mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol and discredited the whole effort.)
The real difference this time is that nobody gets to be surprised. Fulton County was an obvious rehearsal. Every single state must be on guard. Attorneys general should consider sending public letters to the chief judges of every federal district in their states putting them on alert. The letters should ask that any warrant application having to do with ballots or election equipment be heavily scrutinized and challenged, or elevated to a district judge. These frontline judges are the last check before the FBI trucks roll in, and after what happened in Fulton County, all of them need to know that they might be served bogus claims from the FBI for seizing America’s votes.
In the meantime, every at-risk state must have their emergency motions pre-drafted and ready to file within hours (fortunately, many already do). Secretaries of state should harden the chain of custody for ballots so an FBI seizure can’t feed on ambiguity. Local prosecutors must know their election-interference statutes front and back and be ready to prosecute lawbreaking feds (at DEFIANCE.org, we’ve helped many of them gear up to do precisely that). Finally, states should keep coordinating as a bloc, pre-bunking the “uncertainty” narrative before the Trump administration decides which races it wants to contest.
When he came for their voter rolls, most states told Donald Trump “no” and beat him every single time in court. The law is on their side. This fall, they need to be ready to say it again when the feds come for their ballots — with the paperwork already filed, before the FBI is at the door.
Your friend, in defiance,
THE ANT HILL IS OUR MEMBERS-ONLY CORNER OF THE COLONY, WHERE “DEFY ANTS” GET MORE THAN JUST THE NEWSLETTER.
TODAY’S FEATURE: TEST YOUR KNOWLEDGE ON TRIVIA TUESDAY!
IF YOU’RE ALREADY A DEFIANCE MEMBER, THEN STEP RIGHT IN. IF NOT, SIGN UP HERE, SO YOU DON’T MISS A THING.
