A midterm election defeat too overwhelming for Trump to challenge?
WASHINGTON – Months of warnings that the Trump administration would send armed agents to the polls, seize voting machines or try to undermine Democratic victories largely came to nothing on Election Day.
What happened?
All the preparation and turnout by local elections officials, lawyers and voting rights organizations helped ensure that any Trump administration attempts to overstep were quickly halted, according to David Becker, a former DOJ official and election integrity expert.
“For all of the handwringing and speculation about how the federal government might interfere, how foreign adversaries might attempt to interfere … we’re seeing elections go very normally, with only minor problems,” Becker, founder and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, told reporters on Election Day.
Later, Becker singled out election officials nationwide for doing their jobs despite “a turbulent, and at times hostile, political environment.”
“In the past year, election officials have faced legal threats from the administration, the withdrawal of federal resources that previously supported their work, and intense public scrutiny,” Becker said. “They withstood all those challenges to get the job done for their voters today.”
Above all, Becker and other experts said, the sheer size of the Democratic victory left the Trump administration and its allies with too few legal options and too little to contest.
Trump himself shut down talk of rejecting the results Tuesday night, telling The New York Times that he was "absolutely willing to accept those results." So far, Trump hasn’t claimed fraud in the midterm elections, instead writing on Truth Social that he “wasn’t on the Ballot” and would otherwise have won “IN A LANDSLIDE!”
Aarti Kohli, executive director of the Asian Law Caucus, said her organization's monitors reported long lines and language access issues, but none of the election interference issues they feared.
“So far our monitors are reporting what we hoped to see: voters voting, poll workers helping them and problems getting fixed,” she said.
Before the election, Democratic state attorneys general, local governments and voting rights advocates very publicly went to court early and often.
And federal judges repeatedly reined in Justice Department efforts to intervene in election processes that under the Constitution are supposed to be run by state and local officials. For example, judges, and ultimately the Supreme Court, rejected DOJ's bid to force California to set aside mail-in ballots from about 20,000 voters it alleged were "likely" noncitizens.
More: Voting machine snafus, polling place floods. Was there election interference?
The DOJ has also lost more than two dozen court cases in which it sought full statewide voter files, according to Democracy Docket.
State governments and voting rights advocates spent months preparing for the worst, with Democratic lawyers war-gaming various scenarios in which the Trump administration might seek to intervene and overstep its authority.
Cities, counties and civil rights groups sued to keep armed ICE agents away from polling places, and tens of thousands of volunteers showed up to monitor the polls on Election Day. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin confirmed late on Election Day that his agency had sent no Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to polling locations.
For months, DOJ said it would send election monitors to polling places, and it did, deploying about 1,000, in what DOJ officials said was its largest-ever effort.
In Michigan, home to one of the most hotly contested Senate races, DOJ monitors asked poll workers in Dearborn and Flint about their training and requested training materials. After the Michigan Department of State said that was “not permitted under the law,” DOJ agreed and said it would inform the monitors.
In New Mexico, the secretary of state's office said monitors in Bernalillo County were "asking some unusual questions and doing things that are not allowed by law such as questioning voters." DOJ later said it believed "the issue is resolved."
"Right now, we are not seeing the kind of large-scale systemic interference that we were prepared for," Leah Greenberg, co-founder of the progressive group Indivisible, told USA TODAY on Election Day.
Trump had long hinted he might order the seizure of voting machines or ballots, following his longstanding – and unfounded – assertions that the 2020 election he lost to Joe Biden was rigged. FBI agents in January executed a warrant and seized 2020 ballots and other records in Fulton County, Georgia, in a search for evidence of that. That same month, Trump also told The New York Times he regretted not ordering the National Guard to seize voting machines after that loss.
No federal seizures of voting machines or ballots were reported on Election Day.
Yet there are still opportunities for the federal government to challenge the results.
A federal judge in Anchorage dismissed DOJ's lawsuit seeking to preemptively block certification of Alaska’s Senate race featuring two candidates named Dan Sullivan – one is the Republican incumbent and one is a retired schoolteacher – and Democrat Mary Peltola. The DOJ is appealing that decision and has escalated a criminal investigation into whether Democrats recruited the retired teacher to confuse voters. Peltola's campaign has denied involvement.
Results in Alaska's Senate race are still pending. And California will count ballots for at least several days, according to its vote-by-mail deadlines.
Contributing: Sarah D. Wire