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BySRSam Reyes·CMCal Morrow·EQEliza Quinn·DPDana Park
BREAKINGMay 3, 2026

8 Things You Should Know About Trump’s Effort to “Take Over” the Midterm Elections

A major ProPublica investigation published in April-May 2026 details how the Trump administration has systematically dismantled election security infrastructure, replaced career officials with election-denial-linked appointees, and issued executive orders and DOJ demands aimed at reshaping how the 2026 midterm elections are conducted and overseen. The investigation identifies at least 75 career officials removed from election-related roles, replaced in part by figures connected to efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

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⚡Both sides have significant internal splits on this story. Arguments below represent the dominant positions — see The Divide below for the full picture.

Trump is pushing allies into election administration roles across multiple states. Does this represent dangerous interference in a core democratic process, or legitimate engagement with party governance—and who actually controls how elections run?

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Personnel replacements signal capture not reform
Liberal
The cleanest way to understand what's happening is to look at who is gone and who replaced them. Chris Krebs declared 2020 the most secure election in American history and was fired within days. Every CISA election specialist has since been fired or transferred. The replacements include at least eleven figures tied to Cleta Mitchell — the attorney on the call where Trump pressured Georgia to 'find' 11,780 votes. That is not personnel rotation. That is installing the losing team's operatives as referees for the rematch.
Conservative
Personnel loyalty to a prior administration's conclusions is not the same as nonpartisanship. Career officials who treated 'disinformation' enforcement as a license to suppress conservative political speech were themselves operatives — just operatives you agreed with. If you accepted Obama reshaping agency culture away from Bush-era priorities, you need an actual principle that distinguishes this case rather than just pointing to which direction the rotation ran.
Liberal
The principle is straightforward: none of Obama's agency appointments were people who had personally participated in an attempt to overturn a specific election result. 'Political alignment' and 'connected to an active effort to reverse a certification' are not the same category, and collapsing that distinction is how we lose the thread entirely.
Conservative
That distinction is real, but it runs into a legal wall — presidential appointment authority does not require nominees to pass an ideological purity test defined by the opposing party, and 'connected to' is doing a lot of work in an argument that needs more precision to be actionable.
Dismantling foreign interference detection capacity
Liberal
The Foreign Malign Influence Center — which coordinated the federal response to Russian, Chinese, and Iranian interference in 2024 — has been formally disbanded. Kash Patel has also eliminated the FBI unit that monitored Election Day criminal activity. Whatever your objections to how those institutions operated, gutting them creates an information vacuum. The next foreign actor attempting manipulation doesn't need to be favorable to any particular American interest — they just need the detection architecture to be gone.
Conservative
You're describing a lock the locksmith can pick. CISA and the intelligence community didn't just detect foreign interference — they decided which foreign interference narratives to amplify and which to suppress, and those decisions tracked partisan interests with suspicious consistency. If the institution built to call balls and strikes was itself calling them selectively, disbanding it isn't leaving the field unprotected. It's admitting the umpire was crooked.
Liberal
Fixing a biased umpire means replacing the umpire — not canceling the game and sending everyone home. Disbanding detection capacity entirely doesn't correct selective enforcement; it just means the next Russian operation runs without any federal eyes on it at all.
Conservative
State-level election security infrastructure exists, allied intelligence partnerships still function, and a federal center whose independence you can no longer defend isn't the same thing as no defense — that conflation overstates what was actually lost.
Voter roll lawsuits invert federalist design
Liberal
The DOJ is suing roughly thirty states to obtain confidential voter roll data on the predicate of noncitizen voting. But no large-scale evidence of noncitizen voting affecting any election outcome has been publicly produced — election law experts across the ideological spectrum have called documented cases extraordinarily rare. The lawsuits accomplish something different from what they claim: they force state officials to hand confidential voter data to a federal executive that has already shown willingness to use government machinery for partisan ends.
Conservative
Rare documented cases is not the same as no problem. Documentation requires investigation, and if you've pre-decided the problem is too small to investigate, the circle is conveniently closed. More importantly, the federal government has statutory authority to enforce the NVRA — demanding that states comply with voter list maintenance requirements isn't federalism's inversion, it's federalism's normal operation when states ignore federal law.
Liberal
The NVRA argument would hold if the lawsuits were targeted at states with documented compliance failures. Suing thirty states simultaneously, without producing the predicate evidence, looks less like enforcement and more like constructing a national voter data apparatus under legal cover.
Conservative
Lawsuits are how you produce the evidence — you don't get to demand proof before permitting the investigation that would generate it, and characterizing routine civil litigation as 'constructing an apparatus' tells us more about your priors than about the legal process.
Contested 2026 result lacks neutral arbiters
Liberal
The scenario that concerns me isn't a dramatic visible fraud — it's a close 2026 result adjudicated by officials whose prior documented position is that Democratic victories are presumptively illegitimate. The machinery for a democratic crisis doesn't require activation in every election. It only needs to be in place when the margin is close enough to require it. The people who held the line in 2020 are largely gone. What's the enforcement mechanism if the same pressure is applied to their replacements?
Conservative
The enforcement mechanism is the same one that worked in 2020: Republican secretaries of state, state courts, and ultimately federal judiciary, none of which have been replaced. Raffensperger held the line. Georgia's state machinery held the line. You're projecting a national collapse onto an institution that is constitutionally decentralized precisely to prevent it — the diversity of state administration is the safeguard, and it's still there.
Liberal
Raffensperger held the line and got primaried for it. The lesson the next Republican secretary of state draws from that sequence is not 'resistance is rewarded.' Decentralization is only a safeguard if the people manning those positions believe there's a cost to capitulating.
Conservative
He held the line, ran again, and won reelection — the story you're telling erases the second half, and it matters, because it's evidence that the accountability mechanism you claim is broken actually functioned.
Reform requires proportionality to the threat
Liberal
Even granting that CISA expanded into content moderation territory that warranted correction, the response has been simultaneous: foreign interference detection dismantled, FBI election-monitoring unit eliminated, thirty-state voter roll lawsuits filed, eleven new appointees tied to 2020 reversal efforts installed. Targeted correction of specific abuses looks like X. What's been done looks like Y. The signature of reform is proportionality. The signature of capture is total.
Conservative
Total is a word that requires specifics. State election administration is untouched. Federal courts are untouched. The actual ballot-casting and counting infrastructure — run by counties and states — is entirely outside what you're describing. You've catalogued changes to federal advisory and intelligence functions and called it the elimination of election integrity. That's a significant overstatement of what federal agencies actually controlled.
Liberal
Federal advisory and intelligence functions are exactly what provide the shared factual baseline for evaluating contested results. When those functions are controlled by one party's loyalists, 'the courts will sort it out' becomes 'which facts do the courts start from' — and that question doesn't have a neutral answer anymore.
Conservative
Courts establish facts through adversarial process with evidence from both sides — that's precisely why the judiciary's independence matters more than any single agency's framing, and that independence remains intact.
Conservative's hardest question
The strongest challenge to this argument is that presidential personnel authority is real and broad, and that a conservative who accepted Obama's reshaping of agency culture cannot consistently object to Trump's. The response — that the specific ideological profile of these appointees, tied to 2020 election denial rather than ordinary partisanship, makes this qualitatively different — is honest but difficult to operationalize as a legal or institutional standard.
Liberal's hardest question
The strongest challenge to this argument is that state-level election administration remains constitutionally and practically in state hands, and many of the officials who would certify 2026 results are Republican secretaries of state who have already shown — in 2020 — a willingness to resist federal pressure. If Brad Raffensperger held the line once, the structural case for imminent democratic collapse may be overstated, and the alarm risks becoming the kind of catastrophizing that numbs rather than mobilizes the public it is trying to warn.
The Divide
*Both parties are fracturing over whether election security reforms represent legitimate governance or democratic sabotage.*
MAGA/POPULIST
Fully supports the administration's election overhaul as necessary to prevent fraud and noncitizen voting.
TRADITIONAL CONSERVATIVE
Worries that dismantling nonpartisan election infrastructure undermines Republican credibility and creates legal vulnerabilities.
PROGRESSIVE LEFT
Treats this as an imminent democratic emergency requiring urgent mobilization, legal challenges, and state-level resistance.
INSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRAT
Pursues legal challenges and voter registration drives, focusing on winning midterms through turnout strategy.
The Verdict
Both sides agree
Both sides accept that the 2020 election's institutional integrity was genuinely defended by the career officials and nonpartisan infrastructure that Trump is now dismantling—the conservative argues this makes dismantling those institutions reckless, the liberal argues it makes the dismantling deliberately destructive, but neither denies the original institutions worked.
The real conflict
FACT CONFLICT: Whether noncitizen voting at scale exists—conservatives assert unverified claims of meaningful noncitizen registration justifying federal data demands; liberals note no large-scale evidence of actual noncitizen voting affecting outcomes has been produced, making the lawsuits appear pretextual rather than responsive.
What nobody has answered
If a close 2026 result is contested between Republican and Democratic officials, and the Foreign Malign Influence Center has been dismantled, the FBI's public corruption unit eliminated, and CISA's election security staff fired, what specific institution or person with acknowledged credibility on both sides would the public turn to in order to establish a shared factual basis for who actually won—and does the absence of such an institution constitute a structural defect or a manageable gap?
Sources

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