Trump Tests Limits With Emergency Powers Over Elections

Following the disinformation-filled State of the Union and days before the first 2026 primary elections, reports have surfaced that President Donald Trump might try to use emergency powers to seize control over the election. With the SAVE America Act stalled in the Senate and his 2025 election executive order effectively blocked, it seems like the president and his allies are running out of options.

Those encouraging the president to take another step deeper into the land of authoritarianism are just throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall and hoping something sticks. According to the Washington Post, anti-democracy agents with ties to Trump are urging the president to declare a presidential emergency based on disproven claims about Chinese interference in 2020. As reported by Democracy Docket, legal experts immediately shredded the purported draft, including its failure to state an actual emergency.

Since last year, legal experts and pro-democracy groups have warned about Trump’s renewed efforts to undermine election integrity and the 2026 midterm election. The new emergency powers inquiry emerges at a time when Trump’s other election schemes have failed to bear fruit. Although the DOJ has yet to be successful in its pursuit of unredacted voter files in over two dozen states, it announced lawsuits against five additional states. Many have raised concerns about the federal government’s overreach into state election administration and rehashing debunked claims about a previously decided election. At the same time, a federal judge has also ordered the administration into mediation with Fulton County officials over the FBI’s arguably illegal raid and seizure of 2020 ballots.

On Thursday evening, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Committee on House Administration Ranking Member Joe Morelle released a statement rejecting any attempt to claim emergency power over elections based on “debunked claims.”

“Donald Trump has repeatedly said he wants to nationalize our elections, because he intends to steal them,” read the statement. “Once again, the President appears intent on manufacturing conspiracy theories so Republicans can desperately cling to power while their extreme agenda is being overwhelmingly rejected by the American people.”

Prior Trump administration officials debunked China’s election interference

As with all the other allegations made about the 2020 election by Trump and his allies, the claim about China was investigated and dismissed. A declassified report from the National Intelligence Council, titled “Foreign Threats to the 2020 US Federal Elections,” found no credible evidence of Chinese interference. It represented an assessment from the full U.S. intelligence community.

For Trump’s claims to be true, it would mean that his administration and the people he appointed were negligent and exposed this country to international destabilizing influences. The current actions ring even more hollow considering the defunding of necessary election integrity infrastructure meant to protect against so-called foreign interference.

Overall, there were “no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 US elections, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results.”

In fact, given the level of security and safeguards in place, the intelligence leaders found “that it would be difficult for a foreign actor to manipulate election processes at scale without detection by intelligence collection on the actors themselves, through physical and cyber security monitoring around voting systems across the country, or in post-election audits.”

Released the day after the infamous Capitol attack on January 6, 2021, and almost two weeks before former President Joe Biden was sworn in, the 2020 Elections report makes it clear there was no interference by foreign entities as Trump now claims. Both the declassified and classified versions of the report considered intelligence reporting gathered by December 31, 2020, while Trump was still president.

State election officials have expressed frustration with the Trump administration’s failure to maintain a baseline standard of support for election administration and security. Ironically, according to NBC, the intelligence agency and election security officials were helpful during the first Trump administration.

Move marks an escalating election attack after the State of the Union

Even before Thursday’s news, Trump’s escalating rhetoric set off alarm bells. During the State of the Union, Trump ordered Congressional leaders from his party to prioritize his election subversion agenda under the guise of SAVE 2.0. Fact checkers have been hammering Trump all week on his insistent repeating of disproven and discredited claims about non-existent fraud.

Ashiya Brown, Michigan State Director for All Voting is Local Action, told DAME that Trump’s State of the Union rhetoric was about power and manipulation.

“The Trump administration is hiding its true agenda behind lies, conspiracy theories, and misinformation,” she said. “As he often does, he used non-citizen voting, which is exceedingly rare, as a Trojan horse for restrictive voting policies that would make it harder for all eligible voters to exercise their constitutional right.”

She said that efforts like SAVE 2.0 are about “taking power away from everyday voters.”

“In Michigan, over 1.1 million people were registered to vote through methods that could be disrupted by these bills,” Brown said. “And that’s not even taking into account that nearly half of Black citizens in Michigan ages 18-29 do not have a license with a current address or updated name, and 30% do not have a license at all.”

Brown, a former election security specialist with the Michigan Department of State, also raised concerns about the lengths the administration would go to take power from every voter. Trump’s election administration proposals follow the pattern of broad usurping of power from independent federal agencies and the states. It would give his administration, filled with loyalists with no concern for the Constitution, near absolute power to determine who can and cannot vote.

“Their aim with any of these efforts, whether it is enforcing documentary proof-of-citizenship laws, limiting vote-by-mail, or even refusing to rule out sending ICE to polling locations, is to limit who votes and influence election results,” Brown said.” The refusal to rule out ICE presence at polling locations, along with the FBI’s seizure of election-related materials and Pam Bondi’s attempts to extort sensitive voter data by leveraging ICE presence in Minneapolis communities after a CPB officer murdered Alex Pretti, are really aimed at invoking fear, chaos, and confusion among election officials and voters alike.”

Election interventions should protect and expand access, not stifle it

Unlike President Lyndon B. Johnson’s advocacy during the passage of the historic Voting Rights Act of 1965, the current actions represent an attempt to drag the country backward. Legal Defense Fund Policy Counsel Louis Bedford told DAME via email that SAVE 2.0 would “impose onerous and discriminatory obstacles at a time when the freedom to vote is already under attack.”

“Since the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the federal government has, in many respects, acted as a bulwark against discrimination,” Bedford said. “Under this proposal, however, the federal government would begin acting as a direct threat to Black voters and other voters of color.”

According to Bedford, over 100 restrictive voting laws have been enacted by more than 30 states since the 2013 Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder. He said the administration was claiming to “solve a problem that does not exist.”

Trump and his supporters have distorted support for the voter ID requirements in the SAVE 2.0. While Americans generally support voter ID, there’s no indication that the majority supports the strict provisions in either SAVE 2.0 or its even scarier cousin, the MEGA Act. Bedford highlighted how the financial and logistical challenges of requiring additional documents, such as a passport or birth certificate, could affect a broad cross-section of would-be voters.

“The bill goes further by requiring eligible voters to secure those specific documents, which would impose unnecessary costs and function as a modern-day poll tax,” he said. “These barriers echo practices of Jim Crow that were outlawed decades ago after generations of hard-fought struggles for voting rights.”

Even as the Trump administration looks for ways to undermine election administration and integrity, there are state-level efforts running parallel to the president’s disinformation campaign. Brown said that signature-gathering is underway in Michigan for a ballot initiative seeking to adopt documentary proof-of-citizenship for voting.

A review of a tracker from the Voting Rights Law shows dozens of bills advancing in states that could negatively affect people’s ability to vote. Bills range from documentary proof-of-citizenship bills to measures that increase the ability to challenge voter eligibility at the county level.

Again, people are already required by law to prove their identity and citizenship when they register to vote. Audits and analysis of these claims continue to show that so-called non-citizen voting and related fraud is “extremely rare.” In its review of a prominent conservative database often used to justify these efforts, the Migration Policy Institute reported only 23 instances of non-citizen voting in the period of 2003-2022.

Whether it’s claims of foreign interference or exaggerating voter fraud, the Trump administration provides little reason to trust its judgment. These efforts aim to limit the potential opposition. Anyone claiming to care about protecting democracy and the sanctity of our elections would advocate measures that expand access to the franchise and resource state and local officials. It would look like ensuring fair representation of people’s choosing, not elected officials choosing their constituencies.

Bedford referenced several legislative proposals that strengthen and expand our democracy, including the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.

“If the administration were serious about fair elections, it would work to enforce the Voting Rights Act to protect Black voters and other voters of color,” he said, “Instead of advancing rhetoric rooted in conspiracy theories or casting suspicion on Black political participation, it should focus on policies that protect and expand access to the ballot for all eligible Americans.”