Trump allies could use midterm ‘counting window’ to disrupt results, experts warn | Donald Trump

Election experts have warned that Donald Trump’s administration could take advantage of the crucial hours and days following the November midterm elections to disrupt the results after struggling to impose a crackdown on voting.

With less than six weeks until the election closes and control of the US Congress hanging in the balance, the post-election “counting window” is seen as a particularly vulnerable time by former US federal government officials.

Even though the Supreme Court rejected the US president’s proposal to impose drastic restrictions on mail-in voting earlier this month, there are fears that Trump and his allies will take advantage of the vote-counting period to amplify unfounded claims in order to challenge results that do not suit them.

“I think because the administration has lost many of its attempts to disrupt the normal process in court, it is going to use the allegation of foreign interference at the end of voting days to seize equipment or ballots, whether it is legally justified in doing so or not,” Caitlin Durkovich, former deputy homeland security adviser for resilience and response at the National Security Council, said at a press briefing hosted by the Brennan Center for Justice earlier this week.

Some states take days – even weeks, in the case of California – to finish counting votes after an election. Control of the House and Senate could hinge on results in states with delayed results.

“It’s in this period, this waiting time that doubt begins to surface,” Durkovich said Tuesday. “And when it is then amplified by foreign actors and, frankly, by domestic actors, it starts to create distrust in the integrity of the process.” »

State election officials are trying to prepare the public to understand the process now, to avoid manufactured controversy later, said Larry Norden, vice president of elections and government program at the Brennan Center. “To me, that’s the biggest threat right now,” he said.

“I think a lot of people may think, just because they see all these headlines thrown at them, that things have changed — that it’s become harder to vote,” Norden added. “In the history of American elections, in some ways, there have never been more options for how people can vote, and they are still in place heading into this election. »

Early voting eliminates most of the threats voters fear before the election, he suggested. “The earlier they vote, the more they feel like their vote will count, and I think that’s a really important message that we need to get out to people.” »

The power of doubt about the validity of votes and the risk that Trump will unveil “emergency” measures on ballots or voting machines on Election Day loom large.

“Every state in the country is now holding actual elections,” said Ben Hovland, former chairman of the Election Assistance Commission. “That really means the election is here, and that means that that has to be taken into consideration in every court decision that we look at.”

A Supreme Court ruling this month upheld a lower court injunction barring the Trump administration from using the U.S. Postal Service and the Department of Homeland Security to control the delivery of mail-in ballots.

But groups such as the NAACP, the National Urban League and other advocacy organizations remain concerned about the Trump administration’s insistent assertion — without evidence — that the 2026 midterm elections will be illegitimate unless the federal government intervenes.

Normally, the Justice Department and the FBI enter a “quiet period” just before the election, to avoid influencing the results. This was not the case this year.

The Department of Homeland Security continues to seek voter rolls from states that do not voluntarily turn them over. The federal government has asked states to preserve their 2024 election records for later investigations. And DHS is running an independent “illegal voter initiative” to find non-citizen voters on the state rolls, an initiative that an anonymous whistleblower told Congress last week uses “highly questionable data” and could be illegal.

The federal government’s claims that voters are illegally registered — numbers that don’t stand up to scrutiny — and Trump’s rhetoric alleging fraud without proof, “support a narrative of fraud aimed at undermining confidence in elections,” Hovland said.

Much of the president’s campaign rhetoric revolves around foreign interference. Experts distinguish between foreign influence – propaganda essentially – and foreign interference, or direct manipulation of vote counts.

“It’s very important that people understand that we don’t have any examples of countries trying to interfere in the electoral process, in this technical process,” said Beth Sanner, a former deputy director of national intelligence who is now director of geopolitics and strategy at International Capital Strategies.

“It just didn’t happen,” she said. “That didn’t happen in 2020.”

Election security has improved across the country, partly in response to false claims about Trump’s 2020 defeat.

“Every state is checking their results,” said Geoff Hales, former head of joint collaborative cyber defense partnerships at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA. “Election officials across the country have really taken cybersecurity seriously. »

Despite the president’s insistence that the country faces a foreign threat to elections, Hale said the federal government has significantly reduced staffing and spending on election security at CISA, and with it the technical assistance that was once provided to state election officials.

“The federal support that previously existed has declined sharply,” he added. “This means that cybersecurity services have been cut, funding for information sharing environments has been reduced, and threat briefings regarding nation-state adversaries, which used to take place dozens of times a year, are occurring rarely, if at all. »