How could Trump rig the midterms?

For the past year and a half, President Donald Trump has been trying to take control of U.S. elections.

He largely hasn’t succeeded. The reason is simple: The U.S. Constitution gives the president no lawful authority over how states run elections. And courts have said as much while knocking down many of his efforts.

But with each loss, Trump has grown more desperate and his actions more brazen, raising the risk that he will try something even more lawless as he struggles to stave off a Republican loss in the midterms.

With just under three months until Americans head to the polls, election officials across the country have been meeting privately to discuss how Trump may try to undermine a fair vote and to game out their responses to such attempts.

While officials have largely been tight-lipped about what scenarios they are preparing for, it’s not difficult to identify — based on the statements and actions of Trump and his allies — several alarming ways the president could undermine Americans’ right to vote this year.

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This is the first in a series of stories by Democracy Docket examining the Trump administration’s grave threats to the 2026 midterms. It offers an overview of the multiple ways Trump could interfere with the vote — and threaten U.S. democracy.

Though he’s voted by mail several times, Trump has relentlessly attacked mail voting as a vehicle for election fraud, going back to his first run for president in 2016.

“I am going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS,” Trump declared on social media last year.

And an attack on mail voting is an attack on voting: Nearly one in three voters cast a mail ballot in the 2024 general election, amounting to more than 48 million votes. Not coincidentally, more Democrats than Republicans voted by mail.

Trump’s most blatant and dangerous attack on mail voting was a March executive order directing the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) to only deliver ballots to voters on pre-approved lists maintained by the federal government.

If voters aren’t on the lists, they won’t receive a mail ballot, Postmaster General David Steiner told lawmakers earlier this year.

A federal judge in Massachusetts blocked USPS from carrying out Trump’s directive in June, but the Trump administration is still trying to get that voting restriction, and others in Trump’s order, in place before the midterms.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) and a dozen Republican-led states asked the Supreme Court to lift the lower court block, claiming that it was issued prematurely because USPS never finalized a rule it proposed carrying out Trump’s instructions.