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Using Criminal Prosecution to Manipulate the 2026 Election

Trump Attacks Elections by Targeting Election Officials

In 2020, state and local election workers faced an unprecedented wave of hostility, threats, and violence because of Trump’s big lie about the presidential election results. Trump’s repeated claims of fraud and stolen votes spurred vigilantism across the country, which often went unchecked by law enforcement. Given this increased risk in election work, experts and administrators warned that fewer people—and maybe not enough people—would be willing to take on these important jobs that ensure our elections run safely and securely.

Fast forward to 2025. Trump has already sought to wield impermissible power over future elections (power which actually belongs to the states and Congress) through a series of executive orders (which are already being challenged). But his more recent moves are even more concerning. With the Department of Justice now firmly in his grasp and willing to do his bidding, Trump has adopted another alarming tactic to control and weaken elections: criminalization.

New threats to investigate and prosecute election workers for doing their jobs will further discourage people from doing this work. Without election workers, voter rolls are more likely to have errors, wait times are more likely to be long, and polling locations are more likely to close and consolidate—making it harder to cast a ballot and less likely that a person will. These threats may scare people into ignoring real problems with election security or spending their time investigating manufactured ones.

The Trump Administration’s efforts to criminalize election work is part of the larger right-wing assault on elections, much of which is happening at the local level. Across the country, states  are turning to burdensome voter ID laws, rank partisan gerrymandering, and restricted voting opportunities to make voting less accessible and less fair. And the collective federal and state attacks on elections reveal a chilling strategy: rather than try to win elections, the right is simply trying to break them.

The DOJ Is Using Investigative and Prosecutorial Powers to Intimidate Election Workers Across the Country

This month, the New York Times reported that senior Justice Department officials were “exploring whether they can bring criminal charges against state or local election officials if the Trump administration determines they have not sufficiently safeguarded their computer systems….” Specifically, DOJ lawyers were instructed to find ways that an election official could be criminally charged for hypothetically failing to follow “security standards for electronic voting.”  

Several states have already received letters from the DOJ inquiring about their election procedures and seeking access to voter information. DOJ’s criminal prosecutors have sent separate broader requests for information to at least two states.

The threat of unfounded criminal prosecution seriously affects the people who administer our elections, and not in a good way. A July 2025 survey from the Brennan Center for Justice found that nearly half of the election workers polled were concerned about politically motivated investigations of election officials. Fifty-nine percent worried that political leaders would interfere with their jobs.

None of the DOJ’s actions should be surprising. Project 2025 devised a plan for the incoming administration to prosecute those who help people vote. Project 2025 suggested that the administration prosecute the Pennsylvania secretary of state for the state’s use of provisional ballots. It also recommended that the DOJ shift resources to investigating and prosecuting voter registration fraud—which is exceedingly rare— presumably to undermine the public’s confidence in elections and discourage citizens from voting.

The Brennan Center put a finer point on the ramifications of this criminalization effort, recalling Trump’s attempt in 2020 to get Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffenburger to “find” 11,000 more votes: “It’s not difficult to imagine a scenario in which that same pressure is applied to an election official in a critical battleground county or state in 2026, this time with the very real threat of criminal prosecution looming over their head.”

States Are Following Trump’s Lead and Undermining Elections Through Criminal Investigations

Trump has a history of dismissing election evidence he dislikes, calling Russian interference in our presidential election a “hoax” and claiming he won the 2020 election. Now that he is back in power, he is using that power for retribution. For example, he ordered criminal investigations into Christopher Krebs, who led the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency during Trump’s first term. Krebs’s agency issued a joint statement after the 2020 election, describing it as “the most secure in American history” and contradicting Trump’s claims about lost or missing votes. States are mirroring this federal approach to undermining election integrity and launching attacks on voters.

  • Texas
    • Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has announced he is investigating more than 100 voters to determine their eligibility—the majority of them from Democratic stronghold Harris County. Houston attorney Cris Feldman called the investigation a “pretext” designed  to scare voters away from the polls and undermine elections.  
  • Ohio
    • Last year, Ohio’s Secretary of State Frank LaRose accused county prosecutors of failing to investigate over 600 cases of “voter fraud” that his office had identified. Several prosecutors pushed back against LaRose’s claims, noting that many of the cases involved instances of voter registration mistakes, which lacked criminal intent and were “meritless.” Atiba Ellis, an elections law professor, warned that “[p]rosecuting voters for fraud that doesn’t exist sounds like a formula for intimidation.”
  • Iowa
    • In advance of the 2024 election, Paul Pate, Iowa’s Republican secretary of state, compiled a list of people he “suspected” were non-citizens and directed  poll workers to challenge their ballots. After completing a review of the more-than–2000-person list (after the election), he found that only 277 of them were actually non-citizens. Of that number, only 35 actually cast a ballot. He has referred those 35 individuals for criminal investigation, but declined to share how many eligible voters had their ballots rejected because they were on his suspicion list.
  • Tennessee

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