Democratic state attorneys general, other top state officials and civic groups have accelerated planning to thwart any federal interference in the November midterm elections from Donald Trump, as he continues his false accusations of widespread voter fraud and veiled threats of interference in the process.
Since the start of this year, 24 Democratic attorneys general have expanded their coordination with a dozen Democratic secretaries of state and several civic groups using weekly Zoom calls and in-person tabletop exercises to develop a strategy to counter any federal intervention in the election.
This enhanced cooperation is important because secretaries of state are responsible for overseeing elections and state attorneys general are responsible for defending the laws that govern them. State officials’ coordination efforts are led by the Progressive State Leadership Committee (PSLC), the public policy arm of the Association of Democratic Attorneys General.
Democratic attorneys general say they are particularly concerned about election interference from the Justice Department and other parts of the Trump administration, given the president’s repeated false accusations of widespread voter fraud in the U.S. election.
On his first day in office last January, Trump falsely called the 2020 election “rigged” and has made similar statements hundreds of times since losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden.
Nick Brown, Washington state’s attorney general, said the Justice Department and the Trump administration were “the greatest adversary to a smooth election.” Brown added that “Trump lies regularly about the election. The truth is not one of his goals. This creates a whole host of concerns for us.”
The Justice Department, for example, announced questionable plans this summer to deploy 1,000 poll observers, prompting the NAACP to file a lawsuit on October 4 seeking details on how observers would be deployed; For comparison, in 2022 the Justice Department deployed 289 monitors, according to CBS News.
In another worrying move, the Justice Department has sued 30 states to obtain their unredacted voter rolls containing sensitive personal information. Democratic attorneys general have participated in challenging the Justice Department’s lawsuits, and the Justice Department has lost 26 of the lawsuits decided by the courts.
Additionally, Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the Justice Department’s civil rights division, wrote to state election officials this summer, threatening legal action if they did not adequately cooperate in the hunt for voter fraud.
To counter threats of federal intervention in the November election, Brown led weekly Zoom calls with PSLC partners, including secretaries of state’s offices and key civil society groups such as the Democracy Defenders Fund, the States United Democracy Center, and the Brennan Center for Justice.
A former U.S. attorney and federal prosecutor, Brown said the Zoom calls focus on election security issues in general and potential event scenarios — including the possibility of ICE agents showing up near some polling locations and ballots being seized in some races.
Brown, who chairs the PSLC’s Election Protection Task Force, also led two in-person “tabletop” exercises in Milwaukee in May and Detroit in September, which included participants from the Secretary of State’s offices and other PSLC partners.
In addition to those efforts, Brown’s office co-led the legal moves that blocked Trump’s sweeping plans in his March executive order to revise and restrict mail-in voting, which the Supreme Court ruled against last month.
Fears of federal interference in the election have been fueled by Trump’s baseless claims about widespread non-citizen voting and mail-in voting fraud, two claims falsely made by the president in a nationally televised speech on July 16.
In his televised speech, Trump inaccurately claimed that non-citizen voting, which has long been illegal and historically rare, poses an “election security crisis.”
Trump’s obsession with portraying non-citizen voting as a crisis has been significantly contradicted by data from the conservative Heritage Foundation, which cites only 100 cases over a 25-year period.
Further concerns about federal interference in the upcoming election have been sparked by Trump’s comments to the New York Times that he regrets not calling in the National Guard to seize ballots in the 2020 election, and by his urging Republicans last month at a mini-convention in Texas to “cheat like they do.”
Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield shares Brown’s concerns about Trump’s threat to the election.
“From day one, Trump has targeted our elections,” Rayfield said. “We are trying to challenge some of the misinformation that the Trump administration keeps spreading,” particularly about the dangers of mail-in voting.
Oregon, he noted, was the first state to adopt mail-in voting and has had two Republican secretaries of state in the past decade who have been happy with the voting system.
Separately, Arizona Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, whose office participated in a number of Zoom calls and both simulation exercises, said this year’s growing cooperation with attorneys general represents “an all-hands-on-deck approach” to confronting threats of federal interference. “We have an adversary we never expected in the form of this administration.”
Fontes added that a central concern of his office was that the administration’s “constant drumming of lies is going to suppress the vote.”
The Democratic attorney general’s efforts benefited from contributions from several nonpartisan groups.
Norm Eisen, executive chairman of the Democracy Defenders Fund who participated in the Milwaukee and Detroit simulation exercises and participated in some Zoom calls, praised the work of attorneys general preparing to combat federal election interference.
“Pro-democracy AGs are preparing for whatever this anti-election administration might throw at them,” said Eisen, former special adviser on ethics and government reform to Barack Obama. “The level of preparation of AGs and state secretaries is extraordinary.”
More broadly, Larry Norden, an elections expert at the Brennan Center who participated in a handful of Zoom calls and the two strategy simulation exercises hosted by the PSLC, warned: “Administration leaders, including those at the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security, have repeatedly threatened or attempted to exert control over the midterm elections. »
Norden noted that “over the past 18 months, they have faced retaliation and consistently lost. I don’t expect that to change in the coming weeks, but everyone involved in this fight knows we must continue to be prepared.”
To better protect election results and strengthen coordination between Democratic attorneys general and Democratic secretaries of state, two new groups were created in 2026. One of them is called AGSOS Election Protection Pac, and works to raise money to elect more Democrats to both state offices, and the other is dubbed AGSOS Election Protection Action, which serves as its political arm.
Addressing the PSLC’s work to counter the Trump administration’s threats of election interference, Sean Rankin, president of the Democratic Attorneys General Association, noted that “it is concerning that the administration is attempting to seize ballots and that attorneys general and secretaries of state are working on responses to that to find solutions if that happens.”
Mai Ratakonda, a senior election protection attorney at the United Democracy Center of the United States, noted that since the Justice Department earlier this year seized 2020 ballots in a highly unusual manner in Fulton County, Georgia, election officials have been “ready and prepared to respond” to the threat of ballot seizure in the midterms.
More broadly, Rayfield warned that Trump “continues to take steps to interfere in our elections… This president has strained our democracy more than any president in my lifetime.”
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