u. s. election

WASHINGTON — President Trump appeared poised to question the security of U.S. elections with a planned prime-time speech Thursday night, eliciting fears from Democrats and voting rights advocates that he is planning yet another play for federal control over voting in November’s midterms.

The exact reason for the speech has not been disclosed by the White House, with Trump only characterizing it to reporters this week as “really, really big news.” He confirmed it would have to do with “free and fair elections.”

The Washington Post reported, citing sources, that Trump planned to argue that there are vulnerabilities in the nation’s election infrastructure and claim that China had accessed U.S. voter data. The White House declined to confirm any such details Wednesday.

The announcement of the speech set off concerns among the president’s political opponents, as well as elections experts and voting rights advocates, that Trump could again escalate claims that the nation’s voting system is vulnerable to domestic fraud and foreign attacks.

He has previously said that Republicans should “nationalize” election administration, a job that falls to the states under the Constitution, and has pressured his party to tighten federal voting rules.

“We don’t know anything about what he might say … or what he might try to do with his very limited powers, as the president, over elections,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research. “I expect we’re going to hear a lot of rehashed and debunked claims.”

The president could potentially use new claims to argue that the nation is facing an emergency in upcoming elections that necessitates further federal intervention into voting, Rep. Joseph Morelle of New York, the ranking Democrat on the House Administration Committee, which has oversight of elections, said in an interview with The Times.

“This is going to be the rationale for declaring a national emergency,” Morelle said. “It’s transparent that he is creating the emergency and he’s creating the evidence out of whole cloth to suggest there is an emergency.”

Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the Senate Rules Committee, which oversees federal elections, told The Times on Wednesday that Trump was using a known playbook to “[sow] doubt about the outcome before a single vote has been cast.”

“All signs show that tomorrow’s speech will be more of the same: debunked conspiracy theories offered up not because they’re true, but because chaos and doubt are the only cards he has left to play,” Padilla said.

The speech, which Trump announced on social media Monday, comes four months ahead of midterm elections that will determine whether his party retains legislative control in Washington.

White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt dismissed news reports about what Trump might say in the 6 p.m. PDT speech as speculation, and said “nobody knows yet what President Trump will ultimately say.”

The address also comes as Trump’s ceasefire with Iran has fallen apart, renewing expectations for increased gas prices, and his approval rating on the economy has steadily dropped. On Tuesday, it also became public that Trump had paid $5.6 million to the writer E. Jean Carroll, as ordered by a jury that in 2023 found Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming her.

“What we’re going to be talking about Thursday is, it doesn’t get bigger,” Trump told reporters who asked Tuesday about the speech. “Because without free and fair elections you don’t have a country.”

Trump has spread baseless claims of widespread election fraud for years. But his prioritization of his claims about the voting system — even as much of the nation’s attention is on cost-of-living issues — has been on particularly clear display in recent days.

He has aggressively lobbied reluctant Republican senators to pass his voter ID legislation, refusing to sign a bipartisan housing bill over it; he fired all remaining members of the bipartisan U.S. Elections Assistance Commission; and his Justice Department said it would send election monitors to six states.

Since the midterm primaries began, Trump has also sown doubt about election security — chiefly in California, where he suggested Democrats had cheated or attempted to in the gubernatorial and Los Angeles mayoral primaries.

Georgia Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff, whose state was often at the center of Trump’s 2020 fraud claims, said the president’s speech posed a threat to voting rights.

“I expect him to use whatever he puts out there on Thursday as a pretext, either for some attempted unconstitutional use of federal power to interfere in the election,” Ossoff said Tuesday on MS Now, “or to give his proxies and loyalists in state and local jurisdictions some cover for whatever they might attempt, or to lay the groundwork for challenging the result.”

Any effort to federalize or take over elections would face serious legal obstacles, said Nahal Kazemi, a Chapman University law professor. Although Congress can pass laws regarding election administration, as it did with the Voting Rights Act, the executive branch doesn’t play a role in running elections.

“You run into essentially a brick wall that is the Constitution, which makes very plain that states run elections,” Kazemi said.

When it comes to concerns about foreign interference, experts say there is little evidence of other countries attempting to hack systems or change votes. Instead, foreign actors have largely operated via disinformation campaigns, as the U.S. determined had occurred in the 2016 and 2020 elections.

“Of the information that is available to us now, there’s no reason to be alarmed about the possibility that a foreign adversary is going to take over election systems,” said Kazemi, who has studied foreign election interference.

One of the things that helps make American elections generally secure, she said, is that they are not centralized but are run by thousands of counties. Hacking into so many voting systems would be extraordinarily difficult for a foreign adversary, she said.

Jenny Farrell, executive director of the League of Women Voters of California, said California “takes elections security extremely seriously” and has one of the most secure systems in the country, subject to strict voter verification measures and intense chain of custody and auditing procedures.

Democrats have worked with elections experts in recent months on attempts to assure the public that U.S. elections are safe and secure. They have also tried to counter claims by Trump that mail ballots and voting machines are unreliable.

A slew of 2020 election reviews, including by Trump’s first administration, concluded that Trump lost and Biden won. Election experts say there is no evidence that widespread fraud determined the outcome of the election.

A judge also found that claims pushed by Trump and his attorneys that the company Dominion Voting Systems manipulated votes cast through its machines in favor of Biden were untrue.

ATLANTA — President Trump has tried many ways to tighten his grip on U.S. elections, from signing executive orders to pushing restrictive legislation in Congress. Monday’s Supreme Court ruling siding with states that accept late-arriving mail ballots was the latest example showing the limits of his reach.

It followed back-to-back rulings last week that barred his two sweeping executive orders seeking to change national election rules, more court rulings preventing his Department of Justice from obtaining detailed state voter data and his stalled attempts to get the Senate to pass the SAVE Act. That measure would eliminate nearly all absentee voting, require citizenship documents to register to vote and impose photo identification requirements nationwide right before the midterm elections.

“It’s been a mixed bag for Republicans,” said University of Notre Dame law professor Derek Muller. But the president, he added, “has come up mostly empty-handed.”

Trump’s efforts have not been entirely fruitless. Republican-run states have satisfied his demands to redraw congressional district lines, efforts buoyed by the Supreme Court striking down a key section of the Voting Rights Act, and he has been directing his Department of Justice to investigate voting and election operations, which Democrats see as a possible prelude to their involvement in November.

All the activity around how the nation votes and runs its elections is a reflection of the Republican president’s long fixation on his false claim that his 2020 election defeat was rigged. He has been so frustrated by the inability of the Senate to pass the SAVE Act that he has refused to sign a bipartisan housing bill.

He weighed in again Monday after the Supreme Court’s decision in the mail ballot deadline case, saying on his social media account that he is trying to “save America from crooked elections.” Voting rights groups and Democrats see him abusing power and attempting to suppress legal voters to gain an advantage in the midterms, when control of Congress is at stake.

Regardless, Muller said Trump faces legal and political realities: The Constitution gives the states and Congress authority over elections while providing no such role for the president.

“That’s how federalism works,” Muller said.

Here’s a look at Trump’s efforts to reshape election rules and what options he might have left for the November midterms.

Focus on noncitizens and voter data has met roadblocks

The president has repeatedly said U.S. elections are riddled with fraud in part because of noncitizen voting. Research shows the problem to be rare, accounting for a minuscule percentage of fraud cases. Convictions are measured in the hundreds over periods in which tens of millions of ballots are cast.

Trump’s view resulted in a multiagency push to nationalize voter data and use federal resources to help states remove voters from the rolls. The Department of Justice has sought detailed voter files from multiple states, data that would include dates of birth and partial Social Security numbers. Democratic and some Republican secretaries of state balked, and federal lawsuits followed. The administration has lost every case so far.

Homeland Security citizenship check rejected in court

Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, with help from the DOGE effort led by Elon Musk, revamped a government tool called SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements). The program has been a key pillar of his efforts to cull potentially ineligible voters from state rolls.

Last week, a federal judge blocked its use as a mass citizenship check.

The administration, according to its own news releases, had allowed local election administrators to search users by the thousands, using a wider range of metrics rather than DHS-issued identification numbers. At least 67 million registrations, primarily in Republican-controlled states, were analyzed. Tens of thousands were flagged as potential noncitizens or people who have died, but some voters were wrongly identified as ineligible.

U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan ruled that Trump’s changes aggregated Americans’ sensitive personal data in a way that could result in voters being wrongly purged from the rolls.

“All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” Sooknanan said in her order.

Executive orders used in place of legislation

As presidents before him, Trump signed executive orders when Congress would not enact his policy preferences.

Trump’s first order reflected his emphasis on noncitizens. Like the SAVE Act pending on Capitol Hill, it sought to require would-be voters to document their citizenship to be able to register to vote.

U.S. District Court Judge Denise Casper put a temporary block on the order last year as she considered the case and last week made her decision permanent. The Constitution, Casper wrote, “does not grant the President any specific powers over elections.”

Trump issued a second order in March, as the SAVE Act’s rough path in Congress became obvious. He called for a national voter list using data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Social Security Administration. Further, the order would have empowered the U.S. Postal Service to determine who gets an absentee ballot and threatened local elections officials with prosecution.

Absentee voting is a staple of U.S. elections, but Trump describes the practice, incorrectly, as allowing fraud — even as he has used it himself. A 2025 report by the Brookings Institution found that mail voting fraud occurred in only 0.000043% of total mail ballots cast.

Democratic secretaries of state sued, and U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani made the same legal assessment as Casper. The provisions, she wrote last week, “unconstitutionally violate the separation of powers.”

The White House has indicated it will appeal.

Even Trump says the SAVE Act has long odds

Trump on Monday called the Senate logjam “crazy” and one of the holdouts, Republican Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, “Trump-deranged.”

It’s the latest legislative tussle that prompted Trump to demand Republicans scrap the filibuster, which requires most major legislation to get support from 60 of the 100 senators. But that likely wouldn’t matter in this case, with four of the Senate’s 53 Republicans declaring their opposition to the bill itself: Murkowski, Susan Collins of Maine, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Thom Tillis of North Carolina.

The president acknowledged Monday that the SAVE Act is “probably not going to happen.”

Trump still has options for the November elections

Both major parties have national operations to monitor elections, including legal teams ready to file challenges.

Despite the Republican National Committee losing the mail ballot case, Chairman Joe Gruters on Monday alluded to those efforts: “We are not going to be deterred by this decision, and the RNC will keep fighting to have elections end on Election Day,” he said.

Meanwhile, Trump has been developing a possible roadmap for more aggressive actions.

His U.S. attorney in Los Angeles said in June that he had opened multiple election fraud investigations, and he sent a prosecutor to the county’s vote-tabulation center after California’s June primary. Six months earlier, FBI agents executed a warrant and seized ballots and other records from the 2020 election in Georgia’s Fulton County, which includes Atlanta.

Muller, the law professor, said local elections officials “already are having conversations about chain of custody disputes” for ballots as they are cast, collected, counted and stored.

He and UCLA law professor Rick Hasen noted that judicial warrants are required for the kinds of actions that happened in Fulton County. Muller predicted “the bar would be even higher” for any warrant the administration requests during a live election.

Hasen added that he’s working to educate judges around the country on the importance of chain of custody for ballots.

“Republicans believe him when he says the election is rigged. And then when Republicans try to change voting rules to tighten things up, that causes Democrats to also think that the election system is being rigged,” Hasen said. “So, if what he’s trying to achieve is undermine voters’ confidence in the election process, he seems to have succeeded spectacularly.”

Barrow writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Ali Swenson in New York contributed to this report.