By Asawin Suebsaeng & Justin Glawe
Photos: Facebook|Wikimedia Commons
Wargames:
- Democrats and election officials are preparing for unprecedented threats from the Trump administration to November’s midterms.
- Much of the secretive wargaming across the nation is focused on what to do if President Trump sends armed federal agents or U.S. troops to intimidate voters at polling locations or raid election offices.
- Senior election officials and Democratic leaders are urging people to take Trump’s authoritarian threat seriously – but they emphasize that Americans need to get out and vote in overwhelming numbers and reject his fearmongering.
Since early last year, Donald Trump and his Republican Party have been working constantly to rig the 2026 midterms and other future elections in any way they can. In response to this flagrantly authoritarian endeavor, a vast, loose network of elected Democrats, legal nonprofits, and aligned groups and activists has dedicated an astounding amount of resources and time to preparing for the many credible ways that the president could attempt to steal elections, if his party loses. It’s happening all over the country.
For this article, Zeteo interviewed numerous knowledgeable sources in a variety of states and cities – people in governors’ offices, sources on Capitol Hill, state attorneys general offices and prosecutors, secretaries of state and other top election officials, prominent liberal attorneys, pro-democracy advocates, and others – to catch a glimpse of just how much these Democratic politicians and their allies are prepping for an all-out onslaught from the Trump-Vance administration ahead of, and after, November.
Overwhelmingly, these sources said that what was most unsettling to them was that for many months, they’ve been wargaming and meticulously planning how to defend their upcoming elections from Trump in ways that mirror how they’d plan to protect elections from a foreign adversary, not the president of the United States.
The Trump administration is engaging in numerous dirty tricks, intimidation tactics, and voter suppression salvos during this election cycle. But perhaps the most depraved among the lot is the administration’s ongoing public threat to sic men with guns – FBI agents, ICE officers, or even U.S. troops – on voting sites or election offices in counties that President Trump has deemed enemy territory, to both intimidate Democrats and potentially even seize ballots and election materials.
Election officials and lawyers noted how surreal it is, even after a decade of Trumpism, to treat the nation’s duly elected president as the primary threat to the freedom and fairness of American elections. Several of the sources said that they’d never before thought they’d have to spend this much time and energy figuring out exactly what they’d do if the U.S. government – acting like a far-off regime we’d typically hear about from victims who fled it – sends armed agents to harass voters and election workers.
Any deployment of National Guard troops or federal law enforcement like ICE would be illegal, as federal law prohibits armed federal agents from being sent to polling places “unless such force be necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States.”
The Trump-Vance administration, however, has a lengthy track record of breaking laws and norms, and defying the courts, when they want. The president would have to invoke the Insurrection Act to legally justify armed agents at the polls – though there would almost certainly be no genuine justification for doing so.
The second greatest fear expressed by many Democrats, election officials, and others working to prepare for Trump’s threats to the midterms is the prospect of the feds attempting to seize ballots.
The apparent test run for this tactic occurred in January, when the FBI raided an elections warehouse in Fulton County, Georgia, and seized tens of thousands of ballots from the 2020 election. Election defenders who spoke to Zeteo say they hope that judges in November would think carefully about issuing search warrants for the FBI amid an ongoing election, as opposed to the January raid that sought records from 2020.
‘Wargaming Like a Motherfucker’
The Trump-Vance administration has its eye on key counties in battleground states, like Fulton, Georgia, and Wayne County, Michigan, as well as counties in Pennsylvania and Arizona.
Trump is already casting doubt on the future general-election results from the Michigan Senate race, following Abdul El-Sayed’s Democratic primary win, with his trademark racism. Trump called Wayne County, home to Detroit, “one of the most corrupt voting areas in the United States” and “strictly Third World!” He told his supporters to “Get ready for another Rigged Election.”
The high-stakes race in Michigan will almost certainly prove decisive in determining whether Republicans lose the U.S. Senate in the midterms, an outcome that would be a devastating blow to President Trump’s remaining agenda. According to sources in and close to the Trump White House, the administration is already eyeing Michigan for potential aggressive challenges in court in the aftermath of the midterms, and Justice Department officials are “monitoring Detroit very closely,” a White House official told Zeteo.
In April, the Justice Department demanded Wayne County hand over more than 800,000 ballots from the 2024 election. Working with a Republican state lawmaker in Arizona, the Justice Department has also obtained scans of ballots from the 2020 election and other materials from Maricopa County, a key battleground in one of the country’s most important swing states.
Arizona is among the top targets of Trump’s administration’s election-subversion operations. In a recent interview with Zeteo, the state’s Democratic secretary of state Adrian Fontes assured voters that he and his colleagues are “prepared for anything except for Godzilla,” emphasizing: “We have contingencies for everything.”
Fontes continued: “We game out any imaginable scenario – and that includes the new concerns that have arisen in 2026 in this different approach that the federal government has towards local elections. We’ve never faced these kinds of threats in this country before. The bad guys are inside the castle, and they have badges and guns.”
Local election officials and liberal politicians in an array of states, various sources told Zeteo, have repeatedly run exercises and simulations with staffers on what to do if ICE, the FBI, or the National Guard show up at their offices or near a polling location in this election. So far, it has been a massive undertaking, with the wargames and contingency planning often stretching well past normal business hours.
For instance, one senior election official in a battleground state told Zeteo that in recent months, their staff had diligently put a step-by-step plan in writing, and run tabletop exercises, for what they need to do to secure the building of an elections office if Trump and FBI Director Kash Patel’s agents suddenly show up to grab records.
Election staff have undergone comprehensive know-your-rights-style training in the event a Trump-aligned agent demands to illegally enter or seize voting machines, ballots, or other documents or information on voters present. In multiple blue and battleground states that Trump has explicitly targeted, election officials have already privately met with sheriffs and police chiefs to discuss what local law enforcement is legally required to do, should armed feds try anything patently illegal, like demanding access to a voting location.
One battleground-state election official said that their office told local law enforcement that their job, if Trump’s armed feds show up and try to enter a polling place, is to tell the agents to “take a hike, plain and simple… You aren’t allowed in, and we won’t let you commit a crime on our watch.”
This official, like other sources for this story, was granted anonymity to discuss plans and internal deliberations that they were not authorized to speak on publicly.
Lawyers for state and local governments have been put on standby, in the event any emergency legal action – like a rapid-fire court challenge to something Team Trump or the Republican National Committee attempt on or after Election Day 2026 – is required. Draft court filings are already written for a host of urgent scenarios, as legal nonprofits, state attorneys general, and county attorneys have spent an inordinate amount of time studying Republicans’ possible or likely maneuvers, including if Trump sends ICE to the polls or the GOP attempts to get scores of legitimate ballots in Democratic strongholds thrown out after the election.
Legal nonprofits and Democratic Party legal teams are setting up their “war rooms” early to monitor real-time events on Election Day, anticipating having to quickly grab a go-bag and rush straight to a precinct or county that, in the words of one longtime Democratic-aligned voting rights attorney, “Trump tries to fuck with.”
“Everyone is wargaming like a motherfucker,” the attorney said.
‘All of This Is Absolutely Unprecedented’
Voting rights groups across the country are “treating federal election sabotage as a real possibility,” said Max Flugrath of Fair Fight, a voting rights advocacy group involved with preparations to fight back against Trump’s election threats nationwide.
Furthermore, knowledgeable sources stressed to Zeteo, states’ elected officials and senior election staff have had very frank discussions with prosecutors about imposing swift and severe consequences for any armed federal officers who try to do Trump’s bidding at the polls. “They all need to know that if they go along with this, prison will be waiting for them,” a senior Pennsylvania official told Zeteo.
Other officials have already said they’ll prosecute federal agents who attempt to interfere in the midterms.
“A federal badge is not a license to violate the Constitution, and it is not a shield from state criminal law,” Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner said in May, adding, “we will prosecute ICE agents who break the law. There is no category of American who gets to operate above it.” Krasner is part of a coalition of nearly a dozen district attorneys who, according to Politico, “warned the Trump administration that any federal agents sent to polling places within their jurisdictions will be prosecuted.”
The notion of Trump using ICE or troops to intimidate voters and elected officials should not be treated as an idle threat.
This summer, Trump has publicly refused to rule out sending ICE or National Guard soldiers to the polls. Indeed, as Zeteo reported in February, Trump and other senior administration officials have privately discussed how it would be done, should he give the order.
Last month, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin openly threatened local election officials with arrest and prison if they didn’t bow to the Trump administration’s lies and demands. A growing chorus of state and national Republican figures now openly support sending ICE to the polls, supposedly to fix the fake, nonexistent problem of noncitizens voting en masse.
There’s no way to know whether the president will ultimately order any agent or soldier to a voting site on or around Election Day. Democratic sources are painstakingly urging voters not to allow fear of federal agents or troops at the polls to scare Americans away from casting a ballot. But that doesn’t make the threat any less real or despotic, and Democratic and election officials, and their grassroots allies, are gearing up accordingly.
“Trump is absolutely weaponizing the federal government, he has filled high-level positions of his administration with election deniers, he is using every tool that he can – the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, the bully pulpit of the presidency,” said Jena Griswold, Colorado’s Democratic secretary of state who has been on Trump’s enemies list for years. “All of this is absolutely unprecedented… We are working around the clock to make sure that we are prepared for federal interference.”
‘We’re Not Going to Just Hand Over the Ballots’
As poll workers and election officials count ballots on Election Day, they’ll follow federal, state and local laws that govern that tabulation of Americans’ votes.
Election officials worry that the normal vote-counting process could be interrupted – and that FBI agents, with warrants in hand, could show up at election offices and tabulation centers to seize ballots and other election materials, or even voting machines. In this disturbing and unprecedented scenario, local law enforcement might have to buy time, warding off the agents as election officials inside facilities try to obtain judicial orders barring the federal government from entering.
Local police defending Americans’ ballots – by force, if necessary – from armed federal agents of the Trump administration is just one of the scenarios that have been discussed by public officials, pro-democracy groups, and local government attorneys across the country, according to sources who spoke with Zeteo.
Those same officials and groups are prepared to monitor courthouses in anticipation of Justice Department officials seeking warrants to seize ballots and other election records, and are pre-drafting legal memos that would seek judicial orders to halt these seizures.
“We’re not going to just hand over the ballots and the machines just because the president says to do so,” Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows told Zeteo. Maine is one of a handful of states that will decide which party controls the Senate next year.
This isn’t liberal hysterics. It’s easy to imagine Trump’s agents seizing ballots or other election records. That’s because it’s already occurred in one of the most important locations in the country – Fulton County, Georgia, which contains most of Atlanta.
In January, a magistrate judge approved a search warrant that allowed the FBI to seize tens of thousands of ballots and other records from the 2020 election. Pro-democracy sources and election officials throughout the country who spoke to Zeteo expressed concern of an “October surprise” related to the materials seized by the FBI eight months ago.
“If they do try to make some claim about foreign interference, surely it’s going to be from something from the stuff they took from us,” Fulton County Commissioner Dana Barrett, a Democrat, told Zeteo.
Barrett is among thousands of local elected officials across the country who are preparing for general election chaos in November – as well as Trump’s efforts to interfere in the midterms. Recently, Barrett attended a national conference of county officials, where she said there were plenty of discussions about November.
“Election officials, Republican or Democrat – all of them are concerned about federal interference, so this is not solely Democrats,” Barrett said. “Even small counties have to be prepared, have legal teams in place thinking about things like, what happens if ICE shows up, if the FBI has a warrant… These conversations were being held across the aisle.”
Preparing for ‘Doomsday’
After states certify election results, the documents will be sent to the clerk of the House of Representatives. There, Republicans could attempt a last-ditch effort to overturn the election wins of Democrats. This “doomsday scenario,” which Zeteo recently outlined, involves challenging election results based on Trump and Republicans’ many misleading and outright false claims of election fraud.
Trump routinely lies about and questions the validity of wins by many Democrats, and people he doesn’t like, as he did after Abdul El-Sayed won the Senate primary in Michigan.
Democrats and election officials across the country expect Trump to propagate false and misleading claims about election fraud in November, and that those claims will form the backbone of possible Republican challenges to election wins by Democrats when candidates arrive on Jan. 3 to take their oaths of office.
Fraud claims could also come from right-wing election observers dispatched by the current House of Representatives. The House will send observers from both parties to oversee more than 75 individual races, according to a House source familiar with the plans who spoke to Zeteo.
To prepare, House Democrats are wargaming various scenarios and boning up on state and local election laws that may have to be cited in the event of mass challenges by Republicans.
A House Democratic source added that Democrats are trying to balance taking the threat of the “doomsday scenario” seriously while assuring voters that their voices will be heard in November.
Barrett in Fulton County described the balance as one between “catastrophizing” and taking Trump’s threats seriously.
“I don’t want to be the person who says the sky is falling, but I also don’t think we’re out of the woods until we’re through the midterms and the midterms are certified,” Barrett told Zeteo. Fontes said the best way to combat Trump’s election threats might be for Democrats to simply beat Republicans by large margins.
“The biggest threat is the threat itself that might drive away voters,” Fontes, Arizona’s secretary of state, said. “Today, we all have to exercise the same anti-authoritarian spirit that we exercised 250 years ago, but in this case it’s not picking up rifles. It’s getting out and voting. That’s how we get rid of this new form of tyranny that we’ve seen emerge.”
Similarly, Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin told Zeteo last month that his party and its voters need to ensure that the midterms are just “too big to rig.”
‘We Are The Terrorists…’
Whatever happens in this year’s midterm elections, so much damage has already been inflicted. It is a glaring testament to how corrupt and authoritarian Trump and the Republican Party are today, forcing a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose philosophy on U.S. elections, and working around the clock to cement policies rooted in Trump’s lies about a stolen 2020 election.
Beyond Trump’s dangling the threat of sending ICE, feds, and troops to the polls, the president is overseeing a large-scale network dedicated to voter suppression efforts, election-related attacks on immigrants and Black voting power, voter purges, and many, many other methods of assaulting the integrity of the American democratic order.
Numerous independent groups are rushing to meet the sheer intensity of the moment. The American Civil Liberties Union announced the launch of their “largest ever election safeguarding initiative, investing more than $24.5 million to protect our right to vote.” Skye Perryman, president of the legal nonprofit Democracy Forward (which constantly fights the Trump-Vance administration in court), told Zeteo that her group is taking a hyper-vigilant approach to the coming midterms and attempting to “be prepared for anything,” given the unique nature of Trump and his party’s anti-democratic barrages. And this summer, the NAACP announced its “largest-ever spending on a midterm election,” driven in part by Trump and Republicans’ attempts to take a sledgehammer to Black voting power in the South.
One of the groups hitting the streets this year to stand up to Trump’s onslaught is Common Defense, which describes itself as “a veteran-led grassroots movement dedicated to protecting democracy.”
Selina Cardenas, a Marine Corps veteran, is Common Defense’s deputy director of organizing in Arizona, where the organization is working with the secretary of state’s office. Cardenas described to Zeteo how she and her colleagues are now using their military training and tactical experience to inform their nonviolent plans for “deploying” for the group’s on-the-ground election protection initiatives, including to help volunteer poll-watching on Election Day (especially if Trump sends armed agents to voting locations), rally and protest organizing, and coordinating with elected officials.
Even today, she has a hard time processing the fact that she feels the need to use her military expertise to protect the nation’s democratic process from its own ruler.
“Never in a million years did I think my Marine Corps training would have to be used for the protection of my own country and our own citizens, on American soil and against the president and other Americans,” Cardenas said. “To train for so long to protect this country against terrorists and foreign enemies in war, only to find out that we are the terrorists.”
“I never thought it would come down to this,” she said, adding: “It’s scary, because this president will stop at nothing to get what he wants.”
