Most Americans say the midterm elections will be fair, a new pollby The Washington Post, ABC News and Ipsos finds.
And Americans are right, say numerous election law experts. President Donald Trump has tried making dramatic changes to voting during his second term, but most of them have been held up in the courts or Congress.
“Trump’s efforts are failing,” writes Michael Waldman, head of the Brennan Center for Justice, which has opposed many of Trump’s efforts to reshape voting. “Citizens can cast ballots with confidence.”
Here’s the latest. (And here are the best practices for votingin the 2026 midterm elections given all the confusion.)
Get The 5-Minute Fix in your inbox
Trump has focused on voting machines
Trump has blamed some of the most common ways Americans vote — mail ballots and electronic voting machines — for his 2020 loss.
The Supreme Court struck down his efforts to restrict mail voting. But his focus on voting machines has been somewhat quieter and more bureaucratic.
Voting machines were at the center of conspiracy theories from the 2020 election, and this summer, Trump dismantled a federal board that, among other duties, helped oversee electronic voting equipment, saying its members couldn’t be trusted to secure elections.
Since then, Trump has given a prime-time address where he alleged voting machines were “vulnerable” and “easily compromised.” He has posted on social media that he would try to end the use of all voting machines. In September, the Trump administration raised questions about whether a common voting machine could be trusted. (Election experts say voting machines are heavily tested and far faster and far more accurate than humans. Voting systems also must include a paper record.)
Critics say Trump is trying to insert himself into the vote-counting process and sow doubt about the security of U.S. elections.
Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly said the best way to secure elections is to give the executive branch more control over how people vote. (Which would be unconstitutional.)
“We should take over the voting, the voting, in at least 15 places,” Trump said in February.
There’s also a battle over who is a registered voter
Noncitizen voting is rare. But Trump has claimed that it’s rampant, and his administration has been on a relentless pursuit to find evidence of it, using tactics that election officials say have threatened the ability of citizens to vote.
The Justice Department has tried to get states to hand over voter rolls, including voters’ dates of birth and partial Social Security numbers. And Trump threatened to imprison California election officials if they let people that the government says are noncitizens cast ballots.
But the Justice Department has lost several court cases about noncitizen voting.
On Wednesday, a group of Democratic groups sued Trump and the Justice Department, arguing it was pressuring states to remove voters from their rolls and intimidating them.
“We should be very proud we have gone 250 years, and we are still having elections,” Arizona Secretary of State Adrien Fontes (D) said in an interview earlier this year. “We are an ornery bunch of Americans, and we are not going to let politicians in D.C. disrupt our way of expressing ourselves.”
Could troops or ICE be sent to the polls?
Some election officials are deeply concerned that the Trump administration could take actions on Election Day that scare people away from voting.
The Justice Department plans to send 1,000 monitors to polls. Trump administration officials have said that while Immigration and Customs Enforcement won’t be patrolling polls, they haven’t ruled out the possibility that agents might be serving warrants near the polling sites. Trump has said he wouldn’t rule out sending the National Guard to polls; the highest-ranking military officer said he has no plans for any military deployments.
Still, a group of national security experts has started advising states on how to combat any interference from the Trump administration.
And Some Republicans have voiced concern that Trump’s rhetoric could lead to a Democratic president trying to change elections law to benefit their party.
“The last thing I want to do is allow President Newsom to set election law by executive order,” former Kentucky secretary of state Trey Grayson, a Republican, said in an interview last year.
Amber Phillips writes The 5-Minute Fix newsletter, a quick analysis of the day’s biggest political news. Send her an email here, or ask a question that could be featured in an upcoming newsletter.
The post The last-minute battles over how to vote in the midterm elections appeared first on Washington Post.
