President Trump’s declaration that he wants to “nationalize” voting in the United States arrives at a perilous moment for the relationship between the federal government and top election officials across the country.
While the executive branch has no explicit authority over elections, generations of secretaries of state have relied on the intelligence gathering and cybersecurity defenses, among other assistance, that only the federal government can provide.
But as Mr. Trump has escalated efforts to involve the administration in election and voting matters while also eliminating programs designed to fortify these systems against attacks, secretaries of state and other top state election officials, including some Republican ones, have begun to sound alarms. Some see what was once a crucial partnership as frayed beyond repair.
They point to Mr. Trump’s push to overturn the 2020 election, his continued false claims that the contest was rigged, the presence of election deniers in influential government positions and his administration’s attempts to dig up evidence of widespread voter fraud that year, even though none have ever been found.
The worry, these election officials say, is that Mr. Trump and his allies might try to interfere in or cast doubt on this year’s midterm elections. The president is urgently trying to defend the Republican majorities in Congress, and the political environment has appeared to grow less friendly to his party.
On Tuesday, a day after Mr. Trump’s comments about wanting to “nationalize” elections, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said the president was referring to federal election legislation in Congress. Yet after Ms. Leavitt’s attempt to clarify Mr. Trump’s initial remarks, he doubled down on his assertion that the federal government should oversee state elections.
“Look at some of the places — that horrible corruption on elections — and the federal government should not allow that,” he said. “The federal government should get involved.”
Even before Mr. Trump’s latest remarks, state officials had pointed to other evidence of his aims regarding elections.
The F.B.I. seized ballots and other 2020 voting records last week from an election office in Fulton County, Ga., which on Wednesday challenged the seizure in court. The Justice Department has sued nearly half of the states in the country to try to obtain their full voter rolls with Americans’ personal information in an effort to build a national voter database.
Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a threatening letter to Democratic officials in one of those states, Minnesota, suggesting that the administration might wind down its immigration enforcement efforts there in exchange for concessions, including handing over its voter data.
The New York Times also reported that Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, met with F.B.I. field agents the day after the Fulton County search and called Mr. Trump, allowing the president to talk on speakerphone with agents involved in the investigation.
“We can’t trust the federal government, and they are now adversaries of the states,” Shenna Bellows, the Democratic secretary of state in Maine and who is a candidate for governor, said in an interview. “They are abusing their power by trying to build this national voter database that is completely outside of the scope of their authority under the Constitution, and they’re afraid to actually engage in dialogue.”
The tensions are a sharp shift for election officials in the states — which the Constitution dictates are in charge of carrying out elections — after decades of close alliance with the federal government.
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These officials — who are much more accustomed to policy nuance and procedural debate than the raw politics of the Trump era — bristle at the administration’s insinuations that they are doing a poor job and are not securing the country’s elections.
“The things that have been said publicly, frankly, are quite appalling,” Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, Republican of Utah, said last week at the National Association of Secretaries of State conference in Washington. She was speaking during a question-and-answer session with Jared Borg, a deputy director at the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs.
Ms. Henderson, who oversees Utah’s elections, called out Ms. Bondi in particular and the Justice Department’s efforts to push states to hand over their voter rolls.
“She’s pretty much slandered all of us,” Ms. Henderson said. “And to me, that’s problematic to publicly claim that secretaries of state are not doing our jobs and the federal government has to do it for us. Not OK.”
In a statement, Michael Adams, the Republican secretary of state in Kentucky, pointed to the Constitution as clearly delineating authority over elections to the state.
“President Reagan famously noted that ‘the federal government did not create the states; the states created the federal government,’” Mr. Adams said. He also criticized efforts by Democrats under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to set up nationwide mail-in voting through Congress, and said he was grateful to Mr. Trump for helping the state buy new machines during his first term. “I’m optimistic for a similar partnership in his second term,” he added.
Some Republican secretaries of state, however, have completely embraced the president’s actions and rhetoric regarding elections.
“I stand with the Trump administration and President Trump for his great work on election integrity,” Chuck Gray, the Republican secretary of state in Wyoming, said during an interview session with reporters at the conference last week. He ran through a litany of administration programs he supports, including the push to use federal databases and the might of the Justice Department to force changes to state voter rolls. “Voter lists should contain only qualified electors,” he said. “This is common sense.”
The presence in Fulton County this week of Ms. Gabbard, whose agency’s authority over U.S. elections is limited to investigating international interference, particularly worried some election officials. They noted that Ms. Gabbard had no experience working on the mechanics of elections.
“It is an absolute travesty and a waste of taxpayer dollars that she is chasing down some boogey monster, some phantom, some fiction from six years ago,” Sarah Copeland Hanzas, the Democratic secretary of state in Vermont, said in an interview.
On Monday, Ms. Gabbard wrote a letter to members of Congress, noting that her presence in Fulton County was requested by the president and that her office has “broad statutory authority to coordinate, integrate and analyze intelligence related to election security.”
Election officials have also expressed worries about Mr. Trump’s attempts to alter election policy through executive orders. In March, he signed an executive order to make sweeping changes to the electoral process, but it was knocked down in court. Since then, he has said on social media that he wants to end mail-in voting, even though he does not have the power to unilaterally change voting laws.
Some state election officials have said they feel abandoned by the federal government in other ways. Information-sharing programs housed within the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency were shut last year, with little to no replacement. Without those programs, some election officials worry they could be blind to potential cyberattacks.
In a separate question-and-answer session at the election conference last week, Ms. Bellows, the Maine secretary of state, noted that there was no federal situation room on Election Day last year “for the first time in a long time.”
“We were getting reports about bomb threats in New Jersey from public media, rather than the Sit Room, as would have happened in the past,” Ms. Bellows said.
The lack of support in critical areas, coupled with the pressure from the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security, encapsulates a shift in tone, said Stephanie Thomas, the Democratic secretary of state from Connecticut.
“Since last year, I would say that it feels like the approach is using a sledgehammer when a conversation might suffice,” she said.
Nick Corasaniti is a Times reporter covering national politics, with a focus on voting and elections.
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