2026 Midterms: US Officials Advise States on Vote Fears
With the 2026 midterms now measured in days, a quiet network of current and former American national security officials has been working behind the scenes with state governments and members of Congress, trying to prepare the country for a contingency many of them once considered unthinkable: that the federal government itself could interfere in the voting.
According to a new report in the Washington Post, roughly ten officials with backgrounds in the Defense Department — several of whom previously specialized in countering authoritarian governments overseas — have spent months discreetly advising governors, election administrators, and lawmakers from both political parties. Their shared worry is that the trump administration might undermine the integrity of the vote in the midterm elections 2026 to protect the Republican Party’s hold on power, and their private efforts have reached the officials who actually run the country’s elections.
The report has not been previously made public. Its two sources spoke only on the condition of anonymity — for themselves and for the lawmakers and state leaders they met — out of concern about retaliation.
The Quiet Push to Prepare States for the 2026 Midterms
The group at the center of the report is small — about ten people, a mix of officials still serving and others who have left government. Their experience sits in the national security world: the Defense Department and work that involved pushing back against authoritarian regimes abroad. What makes their involvement notable is that they describe their motivation not as partisan, but as a professional alarm that the skills they once used to defend democratic processes overseas are now needed at home.
Over the past several months, the group has consulted with officials from ten states, meeting with governors, election officials, and members of the House and Senate from both parties. The focus, according to the report, is on the states and jurisdictions where tightly contested races will determine who controls Congress for the rest of the president’s term — the races that could decide whether the opposition gains a legislative check on the White House.
One member of the group described the reception in blunt terms: “All of them have said we’re concerned but we don’t know what to do.” The same person said the effort’s goal was simple: “The outcome that we hope for is that states would be prepared for any contingencies should they arise.”
The group is still in contact with congressional staffs, and at least one state has kept meeting with them as it works through potential vulnerabilities. For a country where elections are administered at the state and county level — more than 10,000 separate election jurisdictions, according to the Election Assistance Commission, most of them run by counties — the fact that federal officials’ warnings now come through unofficial back channels rather than official ones tells its own story.
Ten States, Two Parties, and the Same Fear
One of the report’s striking details is the bipartisan nature of the alarm. The officials the group has met include members of the House and Senate from both the Republican and Democratic parties, alongside governors and election administrators who share a fear of federal intervention. That crossing of party lines matters, because concerns about election interference in American politics are usually filtered through the lens of partisan advantage. Here, the anxiety is directed at the sitting administration — and it is shared by Republicans as well as Democrats.
The effort centers on battleground terrain: the states and tight districts where control of Congress will be decided, in a cycle where early voting is already underway and election polls are being parsed daily for signals about which party’s voters are turning out.
State officials’ uncertainty — “we’re concerned but we don’t know what to do” — reflects the novelty of the threat. Election administrators spend their careers planning for equipment failures, weather emergencies, and foreign cyberattacks. Planning for the possibility that the Department of Justice, the FBI, or other federal agencies might become the source of disruption is outside every playbook.
The Fulton County Search That Set the Tone
Much of the anxiety traces back to a single event: a federal search of an elections office in Fulton County, Georgia, earlier this year. The execution of that search warrant sent a shock through the election administration community nationwide. In the months since, several states have begun hiring private lawyers at their own expense, and election offices have sought training on how a federal investigation might actually unfold — what agents can seize, how different warrants and subpoenas work, and how they can be challenged in court.
In March, nearly two dozen election officials and local attorneys gathered at a Miami Beach hotel for a training session led by two former senior Justice Department officials — one appointed by a Republican administration, the other by a Democratic one. According to six participants, the group reviewed a redacted copy of the search warrant used in the Fulton County operation, walking through what agents were authorized to take and where the legal lines were drawn. One attendee, the clerk of a mid-size Oregon county, described a federal raid on an elections office as a “nightmare scenario.”
Michigan, a pivotal state in the battle for Senate control, has gone further: the secretary of state’s office has consulted private attorneys about defending local election officials after the administration threatened to investigate at least one Democratic-led county over alleged 2024 voter fraud made without evidence, and now has counsel on standby for any local official who needs it.
DOJ News: Warning Letters to Every State
The Justice Department’s own actions have fed the unease. In July, the department sent letters to the chief election official of every state, warning that state and local administrators could face prosecution if federal authorities concluded they had knowingly allowed noncitizens to vote or had failed to take adequate steps to keep them off the voter rolls. Election officials from both parties described the warnings as baseless intimidation, though they said they were preparing to respond if federal authorities followed through with investigations or prosecutions.
An assistant attorney general said the letters were meant to remind officials of their obligations under federal law to maintain accurate voter rolls — a matter, she said, of “knowing failures to act” rather than administrative errors. But the letters landed hard in state capitals. A lawyer in the office of Idaho’s Republican attorney general wrote back that his state had already purged noncitizens from its registration lists, adding pointedly: “You can stop threatening your friends in Idaho.”
The pressure has operational costs: responding to subpoenas and document demands could consume the time of offices already stretched thin heading into a national election.
FBI Outreach Lands in a Climate of Mistrust
Even routine federal election-security work now arrives wrapped in suspicion. After Russia’s 2016 interference operation, outreach from the FBI and other federal agencies to state election officials became standard practice ahead of major elections. This cycle, an FBI email inviting election leaders to discuss security support for the midterms instead set off alarms — coming, as it did, just days after the Fulton County search and amid the director of national intelligence’s efforts to examine voting machines, alongside the president’s continued claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
One Republican election administrator told CNN the Fulton County search had raised the alarm nationwide, warning that any breakdown in coordination between states and federal agencies could create openings for foreign actors seeking to influence the vote. The trust deficit is compounded by the administration’s cuts to federal election security programs during its second term, including the closure of offices that had been dedicated to countering foreign influence operations. Current and former officials have said the federal government’s commitment to fighting election interference has weakened just as the midterms approach.
The Constitution gives states the power to set the “Times, Places and Manner” of congressional elections, with Congress holding the power to alter those rules. But the day-to-day machinery — voter rolls, voting equipment, polling-place staffing, ballot counting — lives with state and local officials who do not have the power of federal intelligence services behind them.
Foreign Adversaries and the Intelligence Gap
The federal-local disconnect has a second dimension: foreign threats. Less than a month before the midterms, the administration has publicly warned that foreign adversaries are targeting the vote and has ordered the military and intelligence agencies to counter them. The National Intelligence Council, which produces strategic assessments for the intelligence community, considers Russia the most active adversary, using digital operations to sow division and undermine confidence in results; China is focusing on individual races where American policy toward Beijing is at issue, and Iran, which has run influence and cyber operations against past American elections, is active again. Artificial intelligence, analysts note, has made such campaigns cheaper to produce, easier to scale, and harder to identify.
Yet much of what Washington knows is not reaching the officials who run the elections. Utah’s lieutenant governor, a Republican who oversees her state’s elections, told the Post: “We’re in the dark when it comes to any sort of intelligence. We’re not being informed if there are problems.” The gap is partly the administration’s own making: over the past two years it has dismantled much of the federal machinery built to move intelligence, cybersecurity help, and warnings from Washington down to the state and local offices that need them.
For swing states and the battlegrounds that will decide the battle for the senate and the House, that leaves a dangerous double exposure: heightened foreign interference activity at precisely the moment the federal government’s own role has become the thing state officials fear most.
Voter Turnout, Swing States, and What’s at Stake
The stakes of the 2026 midterms are unusually high. Control of both chambers of Congress is in play, and with it the ability of the opposition to check the president’s agenda for the rest of his term. Election polls are tracking voter turnout patterns closely, with early voting data in several states already being mined for partisan signals. In the tightest races — the swing states and split districts that will decide the majorities — even small disruptions to the process could carry outsized consequences.
That arithmetic is what makes the quiet advisory effort so consequential. The officials involved are not trying to tilt any race; by their own account, they want administrators ready for contingencies — legal, logistical, and communications plans in place before anything happens, rather than improvisation after it. The documents the Post reviewed suggest the advice is practical: how states should prepare for federal inquiries, what legal exposure their officials face, and how to protect the machinery of the count.
The bipartisan roster of worried lawmakers also points to a political dimension. If members of the president’s own party are meeting privately with national security officials about how to defend their states’ elections from his administration, the concern has moved well past partisan talking points and into the realm of governing reality.
What Happens Between Now and November
With Election Day approaching, the quiet network shows no sign of winding down. The group remains in contact with congressional staffs, and at least one state is still meeting with them as it works through vulnerabilities — suggesting the preparations are being treated as live and ongoing rather than theoretical. States that have hired outside counsel are keeping those lawyers on retainer; offices that attended the spring training sessions have their playbooks for warrants and subpoenas ready.
The deeper question is whether the formal channels can be repaired. Rebuilding trust between state election administrators and Washington would require both the restoration of the election-security infrastructure the administration cut and a sustained signal from federal agencies that their election-season work is aimed at protecting the process rather than policing the people who run it. With the FBI’s outreach being received as a threat rather than a helping hand, that repair is unlikely to happen before voters cast their ballots.
For now, the country’s election system is being defended partly through the official channels that still function — and partly through an unofficial network of security professionals who once worried about foreign authoritarians and now worry about their own government. It is an unprecedented arrangement for an American midterm election.
Source: The Washington Post