Less than a year from the midterm elections, state and local voting officials from both major political parties are actively preparing for the possibility of interference by a federal government helmed by President Trump.
The problem is, no one knows what might be coming.
Steve Simon, the Democratic secretary of state of Minnesota, likened it to planning for natural disasters.
"You have to use your imagination to consider and plan for the most extreme scenario," Simon said.
Carly Koppes, the Republican clerk of Weld County in Colorado, said officials in her state are shoring up their relationships with local law enforcement and county and state attorney's offices, to make sure any effort to interfere with voting is "met with a pretty good force of resistance."
"We have to plan for the worst and hope we get the best," Koppes said. "I think we're all kind of conditioned at this point to expect anything and everything, and our bingo cards keep getting bigger and bigger with things that we would have never have had on them."
Trump, who continues to spread false claims about voting in America, issued an executive order in the spring that sought to mandate major changes to the elections system. That order has so far mostly been blocked by the courts, but he's teased other executive action as well. And his administration is still investigating his loss five years ago, while pardoning people associated with his efforts to try to overturn that defeat.
All of that has made it clear to those in the elections community that Trump plans to have a heavy hand in their processes next year. Here are a few things voting officials are watching for.
More executive action to take control of voting
The Constitution is clear: States control their own election processes, with Congress able to set guidelines for federal races. The president has virtually no authority when it comes to voting.
But Trump is testing that, and those in his circle have pushed fringe theories for how he can change how ballots are cast and counted.
Earlier this month, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the White House is working on a new executive order that will seemingly target mail voting. Trump also said earlier this year that he wanted to ban some voting machines, though it's unclear exactly what he was referring to.
Election officials agree he does not have the legal authority to do either of those things. But recently, Trump ally and attorney Cleta Mitchell, who advised Trump in 2020, broached a bolder strategy to enact election changes: declaring a national emergency.
"The president's authority is limited in his role with regard to elections except where there is a threat to the national sovereignty of the United States — as I think that we can establish with the porous system that we have," Mitchell said on a podcast appearance in September.
It would be keeping with one of Trump's broader policy strategies: This year he's invoked presidential emergency powers more frequently than any other modern president.
Election experts say there's no legal basis for Mitchell's theory, but numerous voting officials told NPR it's something that's come up in conversations about next year.
U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., who previously oversaw voting in California as secretary of state, also brought up the scenario recently on the Senate floor.
"If the Trump White House tried to declare some fake national emergency to create a pretense for federal intervention, I will force a vote here in the Senate to stop it," Padilla said.
Troops on the ground
Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, a Democrat, says six months ago he wouldn't have taken the premise of federal troops at polling places seriously.
But seeing how the National Guard was deployed — and justified — this summer changed his thinking.
"You have National Guard deploying to cities to supposedly quell these 'demonstrations' — basically people in frog suits and riding their bikes naked is the biggest threat," Hobbs said. "And yeah, I start thinking that maybe it could be possible."
Ahead of the 2020 election, Trump spoke of a desire to have federal law enforcement patrol voting locations, and this year, his former adviser Steve Bannon said on his War Room podcast that he hopes Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are patrolling polling places in the midterms.
Legal experts say such intervention is clearly illegal, but until the federal government disavows such actions clearly, Simon said voting officials have to game out how to respond.
"One thing that would help is if someone at the federal government would come out and categorically say, 'No, no, no, stop the presses, stop everything. You'll never have to worry about that. That's not something we would ever consider doing,'" Simon said. "That would go a long way."
In response to questions about forces outside polling places, and other scenarios mentioned in this story, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson characterized them as "baseless conspiracy theories and Democrat talking points" but did not directly answer whether the White House would commit not to send agents to voting locations. She reiterated that the president is permitted to send federal personnel to localities to help quell violent crime.
Who is a trusted source?
For the last decade, as voting officials have fought to dam up a tsunami of false information about their work, they've begged people in their communities to go to "trusted sources" for election information.
In 2026, figuring out who is a trusted source may be more difficult than ever.
Along with Trump himself, his administration has elevated to prominent government roles numerous people who have a history of spreading false information about elections, and local officials worry their message may be drowned out by those with much bigger megaphones.
One of the hires alarming voting officials interviewed by NPR works at the Department of Homeland Security. Heather Honey, who's now deputy assistant secretary for elections integrity, worked alongside Mitchell for the past few years to help spread election conspiracy theories, including one about votes in Pennsylvania that Trump mentioned in his speech on Jan. 6, 2021, shortly before a mob stormed the Capitol.
"I equate this to having a moon landing conspiracy theorist and flat earther being offered a job at NASA," Hobbs said.
DHS did not respond to NPR's request for comment.
Numerous officials at the Department of Justice also have a history of election denial.
Unprecedented demands
The insistence to relitigate 2020 also has voting officials worried about what sort of actions administration officials plan to take. Already this year, DOJ has made unprecedented requests to investigate voting machines, access old ballots, and accumulate mass amounts of voter data.
This summer, a consultant in Colorado contacted Koppes and other clerks in that state, in some cases saying he was associated with the White House and asking about accessing their voting machines.
The White House denied to CNN and other outlets authorizing the requests, but separately, in Missouri, a Department of Justice official reached out to clerks there asking basically the same thing.
In each instance, they were told no.
"Since 2020, people in the elections world have become even more knowledgeable of the responsibilities of the different levels of government [when it comes to voting equipment]," Koppes said.
A similar push and pull is playing out with elections data. The Trump administration has quickly built what is essentially a searchable national citizenship database, and is trying to entice states to run their voting records through it to root out noncitizens on voter rolls. While many Republican election officials have eagerly embraced the system, other GOP officials and their Democratic counterparts have been hesitant to engage with the tool, as there are questions about how well it works, what happens to the voting data once it's been run through the system and, in many states, whether even using the tool is legal under state law.
Still, the administration is intent to investigate voter rolls as it continues to push false narratives about widespread noncitizen voting. The DOJ recently sued eight states (all states Trump lost in 2020) in an effort to compel them to turn over their rolls.
"It's really not a red state or blue state thing," said Al Schmidt, the Republican secretary of state of Pennsylvania, in an interview with PBS News Hour about the data demands. "It is a — in my view, a concerning attempt, a concerning effort to consolidate and overreach at the federal level. In the United States of America, it's the states who run elections, not the federal government."
Vulnerable targets
Since Trump took office, the federal government has pulled back on virtually all of its work related to cybersecurity and elections. The Department of Homeland Security laid off employees focused on election security, and stopped funding a partnership that helped local elections offices share threat information.
Wesley Wilcox, a Republican election supervisor in Marion County, Fla., said smaller counties especially will be more vulnerable to cyberattacks due to the cuts, and Russia, China or any other U.S. adversary may see an opportunity.
"That's what I would do," Wilcox said. "I mean, if I were on that side of the fence, I'm like, 'OK, they're cutting this stuff out. Let's go get them.' You know, 'cause the defenses are down."
Secretary Hobbs, of Washington, told NPR that two years ago he was notified by DHS about a hack in one of his counties. The state responded immediately to make sure the breach wouldn't impact the voter registration database.
Now, Hobbs said, "I don't even know if I would have gotten that phone call, to tell you the truth."
In Arizona, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, said he didn't even contact DHS' cyber agency after an online candidate portal was hacked this summer because he didn't have confidence in the agency's "capacity to collaborate in good faith or to prioritize national security over political theater."
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