Members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) stand inside a vehicle loaded with boxes outside the Fulton County Election Hub and Operation Center after the FBI executed a search warrant there in relation to the 2020 election, according to a law enforcement official familiar with the matter, in Union City, Georgia, US, 28 January 2026. REUTERS/Elijah Nouvelage

The US mid-term elections represent an important check on President Trump’s power. But there are widespread fears that the Trump administration is doing what it can to disrupt and undermine them.

November’s US congressional elections look set to be a referendum on President Donald Trump’s second term in the White House. There’s much at stake and, while it’s still early in the campaign season, the outlook suggests Republicans will lose the House of Representatives and possibly also the Senate. That could mean the administration faces investigations, significantly stronger challenges to the panoply of controversial policies and, should Democrats regain control, the President himself could well face impeachment for a third time.

Americans are facing rising cost-of-living pressures, now exacerbated by the Iran war. Polls show the public disapproves of President Trump’s handling of immigration, the economy, trade and inflation.

Among all this, there are genuine fears that President Trump will attempt to use the power of the federal government to steer the outcome – perhaps illegally. Although the rioters were later pardoned by the President, no one has forgotten the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol by an angry mob of his supporters. Critics are concerned that President Trump is now using the apparatus of federal power to resurrect his ‘Big Lie’ that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, and to set the stage for suppressing the vote in November.

Trump’s Department of Justice (DoJ) is pressuring states to hand over confidential voter data that critics say can be used to purge lawfully registered individuals. As of early March, the DoJ had filed federal lawsuits against 29 states and the District of Columbia seeking access to voter registration data. ‘Accurate, well-maintained voter rolls are a requisite for the election integrity that the American people deserve,’ said Attorney General Pam Bondi. Twelve states so far have complied with the data requests.

President Trump and allies claim, without evidence, that large numbers of undocumented migrants have been voting illegally in US elections. They are pushing a bill in Congress, the SAVE America Act, which would impose stringent citizenship identification rules. Proponents say it’s necessary to safeguard US elections by tackling voter fraud. Opponents are concerned it will disenfranchise eligible voters.

‘All of these things are very concerning,’ says Bruce Spiva, Senior Vice-President at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan voting rights advocacy based in Washington, DC. ‘They are trying to essentially impose authoritarian control by rigging the elections and setting them up so that they will win.’

The ‘Big Lie’ revisited

Alarms were raised in January when the FBI raided an election office in Fulton County, Georgia, and seized hundreds of boxes of ballots from the 2020 presidential election. Fulton County – Georgia’s largest by population – had been a focal point of President Trump’s unfounded claims of election fraud. President Trump and others were indicted in Fulton County on criminal conspiracy charges for their attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Those charges were dismissed after he was re-elected president.

Speaking ahead of the raid, President Trump warned that ‘people will soon be prosecuted for what they did.’ Tulsi Gabbard, his Director of National Intelligence, oversaw the operation. Her office does not oversee FBI operations and should have had no role in the raid. White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said that ‘as the Director of National Intelligence, it is a part of […] Gabbard’s role to make sure that American elections are free of foreign interference’ and that they are safe and secure.

The FBI’s criminal investigation began with a referral by Kurt Olsen, one of President Trump’s former campaign lawyers who pushed fraud theories about the 2020 election, who’s now the administration’s Director of Election Security and Integrity. Georgia Republicans who deny the 2020 results supported a 20-page affidavit used to authorise the FBI raid. Critics say it recycles the same old false claims.

Fulton County’s 2020 ballots were audited and recounted three times following the election − Biden’s election win was confirmed each time. Fulton has sued to get the records back. ‘There are no bombshell discoveries. There are no smoking guns. The five central allegations in this affidavit have been investigated ad nauseam, and they have either been rejected, discredited or explained by non-nefarious reasons,’ says Saira Draper, a delegate to the Georgia state legislature and an election lawyer for Democratic campaigns.

Some election experts fear that FBI and DoJ officials will fabricate claims that they found irregularities in Fulton County that Georgia Republicans in turn will use to justify a state takeover of local elections. ‘It could be kind of a prologue or rehearsal for the midterms, to see if they could maybe get away with directly interfering in the election,’ says Spiva.

In early March, Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen confirmed that he had complied with a federal grand jury subpoena for state Senate records relating to an audit of 2020 election ballots in Maricopa County. Those records have been passed to the FBI. The development suggests an expansion of the FBI’s probe of the 2020 vote to include Arizona, where President Trump has also claimed he lost because of fraud.

Creating chaos

Behind the scenes, activists are reportedly pushing President Trump to issue an executive order declaring a national emergency that would allow him to take over the conduct of the midterm elections. A draft order would cite interference by China in 2020 and use that as a legal basis to nationalise the elections.

Reports say that around 30 activists as well as high-ranking federal election officials appointed by President Trump attended a summit in Washington, DC, on 19 February, where they discussed a ban on all mail-in ballots and the possibility of replacing electronic voting machines with hand counts of paper ballots.

Asked by a reporter about such a draft executive order, President Trump said he’d ‘never heard of it.’ An anonymous White House official who spoke to the media sought to distance the administration from the draft order and the summit.

Still, opponents have raised the alarm. ‘President Trump cannot declare an “emergency” to override the Constitution and seize control of American elections,’ said Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi, an Illinois legislator who has introduced a bill, the Free Elections Act, which ‘makes clear that emergency authorities cannot be abused to rewrite election rules.’

Jan Baran, a partner at law firm Holtzman Vogel in Virginia, says the separation of powers principle embedded in the Elections Clause of the Constitution gives Congress room to legislate on the ‘Times, Places and Manner’ of federal elections. This doesn’t translate into a free-floating authority for the president to redesign election rules by order. ‘Whatever role the federal government is to undertake in elections should start – and does start – with legislation passed by Congress and signed by the president,’ says Baran, a Republican.

‘If the next test of the scope and power of federal authority over elections is a presidential proclamation, or executive order, I don’t think that’s going to be effective. It will, in all likelihood, be enjoined, as have many orders professed by Trump,’ he adds.

Real consequences

Republicans in Congress are under pressure from Trump to pass election legislation in 2026. The House of Representatives narrowly approved the SAVE America Act, but it has been blocked in the Senate. In March, President Trump threatened to refuse to sign other pieces of legislation until Congress passes the Act, despite Senate Majority Leader John Thune having advised that the bill can’t be advanced on procedure without Democratic votes or a major change in the chamber’s rules.

Other ongoing election-related matters have a greater chance of being genuinely consequential. Mid‑decade redistricting drives in several states – notably California, Texas and soon Virginia – will put new voting maps in effect for 2026. President Trump initiated the drive in a bid to gain Republican seats in the House but it’s not clear that his allies will ultimately gain an advantage.

Further, the US Supreme Court is also debating whether to reverse the 1976 landmark Buckley v Valeo campaign finance ruling, which restricts how much parties can spend to help their candidates. Lifting that limit would assist electoral candidates who are financed by large donations from wealthy individuals.

Still, the targeting of jurisdictions such as Fulton County – a Democratic-leaning county with a large Black community that encompasses the city of Atlanta – echoes earlier narratives tying election fraud allegations to Black-majority urban areas such as Detroit and Philadelphia. An executive order such as the one described above, even if quickly ruled unconstitutional by district courts, could create legal chaos.

Former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, whom President Trump dismissed following a series of controversies, stirred public debate in February when she said her agency would play a role in enforcing national requirement for citizenship identification. ‘We’ve been proactive to make sure we have the right people voting, electing the right leaders to lead this country,’ Noem said at a press conference in Arizona. Trump has picked Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin, a loyalist, to replace Noem, and any involvement by the department in future elections is therefore yet to be confirmed.

Carol Anderson, the Robert W Woodruff Professor of African American Studies at Emory University, says President Trump’s moves appear intended to sow distrust in the electoral process and mobilise supporters around claims that minority communities are illegitimately influencing elections. ‘It really has to do with sowing the seeds of discontent, of questioning the validity of the votes, the sanctity, the security of the votes,’ she says. ‘If Trump can create enough havoc, create enough chaos, then that will allow all kinds of really bad things to happen.’

William Roberts is a US-based freelance journalist and can be contacted at wroberts3@me.com