Tuesday is Election Day for voters in California, New Jersey, New York City, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.
At first glance, process-wise at least, everything is proceeding pretty much as normal. There’s every reason to have faith in the electoral system and trust in election administrators. Millions of people have already cast their ballots safely, securely, and with minimal intimidation.
Yesterday, the National Task Force on Election Crises hosted a briefing in which Task Force members and election experts Tammy Patrick and David Becker explained that, while the political environment has shifted dramatically since the 2024 elections, the infrastructure that actually runs our elections has not.
According to Patrick:
What we’ve seen so far is that election professionals have been prepared, early voting and election activities to date have been relatively uneventful, and we anticipate the same for next week.
Becker added that all states holding major elections in 2025 use voting machines with paper ballots — which are verifiable, auditable, and recountable — so we will have “absolute confirmation and verifiability on those elections.”
Depending on the margins in some of these races, we may not know the outcomes by Tuesday night, but if we are patient and give election officials the space to fully audit each race, we will have results we can trust.
On the other hand, we’re not oblivious to reality. These are the first elections under the second Trump administration, which has quickly consolidated unprecedented power. Election deniers are in control of the federal government — including the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security. And the Pentagon.
The electoral process hasn’t changed, so far. The environment has.
The administration is trying to stoke fear
For starters, the Trump administration has tried to send (and in some cases, succeeded in sending) National Guard troops to patrol the streets of Chicago, Los Angeles, Memphis, New Orleans, Portland, and Washington, D.C. The threat of ICE and Border Patrol raids looms in almost every major city — and even American citizens have not been immune from that threat. Federal agents have already detained 170 U.S. citizens in immigration sweeps.
The National Guard and DHS’s mandates do not relate to the election — and state and federal election laws tightly regulate how the Guard and federal agents can be involved in and around elections — but their presence might deter otherwise likely voters from casting their ballots — or at the very least add to an elevated climate of fear.
In addition to the harm these deployments are doing to so many communities and to our national security today, the prolonged presence of soldiers and DHS agents on American streets raises risks of future abuses, including in an election context. We can too easily see the Trump administration attempting to unlawfully use these and additional forces in 2026 to intimidate voters, create flashpoints of violence, and even attempt to seize ballots after the polls close (as was planned after his own election defeat in 2020).
The first step in doing any of that is normalizing these deployments, as they are right now.
Read more: ‘The Chipocalypse’ is now.
Meanwhile, Department of Justice personnel will be sent to monitor polling places in six counties in New Jersey and California. Monitoring is a standard DOJ practice, but it’s usually reserved for states with a history of widespread voter suppression and typically in years with federal races on the ballot. (With one exception, the elections on Tuesday are for state and local offices and ballot initiatives.)
The administration’s intentions here are pretty transparent. The DOJ monitors are mostly being sent to counties with high Latino populations — for example, Passaic County in New Jersey has the largest Latino population in the state. The announced (though potentially not visible to the average voter) presence of these DOJ monitors on top of the ongoing threat of intimidation by ICE and other federal agents may deter some people from voting.
Groundwork to disrupt the midterms
As concerning as these developments are, though, the truth is that the DOJ monitoring mission is actually not about the 2025 election. It’s about the 2026 election. The DOJ monitors — like the normalization of militarized forces on the streets of American cities — are another piece of the groundwork for the Trump administration to interfere in the 2026 election and to try to change the electoral process if it can.
It could look something like this: The DOJ monitors for the 2025 election produce alleged “findings” of voter fraud or misconduct by election officials. This helps the administration cast doubt on this year’s results in California and New Jersey (which are likely to be unfavorable for them). But the allegations could also be used to justify future federal actions to “fix” the “problems.” So the president signs a new executive order illegally trying to ban mail-in voting ahead of the 2026 midterms. An isolated threat to the 2025 elections becomes an all-out assault on the 2026 elections.
And it’s not just the monitoring mission. The DOJ has also demanded access to voter registration databases in at least 40 states, including California and New Jersey. They could use allegations of ineligible voters on the rolls to justify additional actions against states and election officials. (Not only would this likely be an overreaction even if there were a small number of ineligible voters on the rolls, but these investigations are often just plain wrong about who they identify as ineligible.)
Combined, these efforts form a concerted strategy to find a pretext in 2025 for major changes to 2026. Don’t believe us? President Trump isn’t trying to hide what he plans to do with the DOJ’s “findings” in California, falsely claiming in a Truth Social post earlier this week: “No mail-in or ‘Early’ Voting, Yes to Voter ID! Watch how totally dishonest the California Prop Vote is! Millions of Ballots being ‘shipped.’ GET SMART REPUBLICANS, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE!!!”
Even if this intimidation and pretext-seeking doesn’t succeed in disrupting this and future elections, there’s another frightening specter beginning to rear its head for the 2026 election.
Right now in Washington, Speaker Mike Johnson has thus far refused to seat Congresswoman-elect Adelita Grijalva more than a month after she won a special election in Arizona. While there is precedent for delays in seating some special election winners, this delay is now the longest in recent American history. Speaker Johnson’s defiance in the face of public pressure raises concerns that he might try to enlist his GOP conference in future schemes to block the swearing-in of duly-elected representatives following next year’s midterms.
Vigilance is key
For now, the actions of the Trump administration and its allies are not so much attempts to disrupt the 2025 elections — for the most part, they won’t — but rather preparations for 2026. It’s a test to see how far they can push the boundaries and what the American people will let them get away with.
The key to making sure the administration doesn’t succeed in silencing the voices of voters — in this election or the next one — is vigilance. Refusing to let them push the boundaries.
So while we do expect smooth elections with accurate results this year, we will still be watching the DOJ monitors for any unreasonable demands for access, inappropriate behavior, or misleading communications. We will take note of any instances of DHS or National Guard presence near polling places. We will continue to monitor state voter registration databases to make sure eligible voters aren’t improperly removed. And we will watch to confirm that all elections are appropriately certified and that there aren’t any last-minute attempts to change the rules in order to disenfranchise thousands of eligible voters (see: North Carolina Supreme Court race in 2024).
Read more: A zombie lawsuit aims to overturn NC Supreme Court race.
Protecting the 2026 elections requires learning from what we see this Tuesday and applying those lessons next year, as part of our overall planning to address the whole spectrum of threats — from unlawful use of the military to parliamentary shenanigans in Congress.
Of course, the Trump administration will be watching and learning too. Their goal is to consolidate power and crack down on the opposition in order to corrupt future elections and stay in power. But that outcome is not at all inevitable. Not when we know the plot of this spooky movie so well.
Understanding the administration’s tactics and connecting the dots between them is the first step toward making sure the 2026 election process and results are as trustworthy as we expect them to be in 2025.
SCOTUS to weigh Trump tariffs next week
Next Wednesday, the Supreme Court will consider the legality of Trump’s sweeping tariff regime.
One of the core issues is whether Congress intended to grant the president such sweeping tariff powers. As Damon Root writes in Reason:
As a legal matter, the Supreme Court has many excellent reasons to overrule Trump’s tariffs. For one thing, the constitutional authority “to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises” as well as the authority “to regulate Commerce with Foreign nations,” are assigned exclusively to Congress, which means that Trump is wielding power that the Constitution did not grant to him. His tariffs thus deserve to be struck down for violating both the constitutional separation of powers and the nondelegation doctrine.
Trump’s tariffs also violate the major questions doctrine, which says that before the president may wield significant regulatory power, the president must first point to a clear and unambiguous delegation of such power to him by Congress. Yet the supposed tariff-making authority that Trump cites—the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA)—does not even mention tariffs anywhere in its text, which hardly qualifies as a clear and unambiguous delegation.
Join us next Wednesday at 5 p.m. ET / 2 p.m. PT for a livestream reaction with Protect Democracy’s Ori Lev and Audrey Roofeh from Integrity Matters to unpack the “major questions doctrine” and other developments at oral arguments.
(For what it’s worth, Congress is insisting that it very much did not intend to grant Trump these powers, filing a bipartisan amicus brief. The Senate also passed a series of bipartisan tariff rebukes this week.)
Read more: Trump’s tariff roller coaster.
Landmark report points to possibility of electoral reform
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is one of the most prestigious academic associations in the country. Earlier this month, its electoral system design working group released their final report: Expanding Representation: Reinventing Congress for the 21st Century.
(See the working group members here.)
Said the Academy:
The report’s authors argue that the “winner-take-all” system used in most U.S. elections — where only the top vote-getter earns a seat — contributes to polarization, disengagement, and a lack of meaningful competition. By contrast, proportional systems allow more voters to see their preferences reflected in Congress, can reduce partisan divides, and virtually eliminate gerrymandering.
“This report is rooted in optimism about what is possible for American democracy,” said Laurie L. Patton, President of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. “When every vote counts, when voters feel they have real choices, and when Congress more closely reflects the views of the American people, our democracy will be stronger and more resilient.”
They’re hosting a launch event with working group members (also) next Wednesday, at 2:30PM ET. Register to attend here.
How you can help
If you live in California, New Jersey, New York City, Pennsylvania, or Virginia, make sure you go vote in person or return your ballot by Tuesday. If you have an absentee ballot you haven’t mailed yet, it’s probably best to return it in person to make sure it gets counted. Double check your registration, absentee ballot return information, and polling place here.
If you don’t live in one of those places, text a friend who does. Make sure they voted or have a plan to. And it’s never too early to think about next year’s elections. Start learning about the candidates who are running, when your primaries and registration deadlines are, and how you can get involved. Double check your voter registration status, and maybe even consider hosting a voter registration drive or volunteering to work the polls.
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Excellent overview. Just want to add that there are local and state races next week, too, and we shouldn't ignore them what are the impact they might have.