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Election officials in several Democratic-led states say they are preparing now for the possibility of federal interference in the 2026 midterms, after the FBI’s January raid on election offices in Fulton County, Georgia, deepened fears about how far the Trump administration may go in the name of investigating old fraud claims, according to Newsweek.
On January 28, federal agents executed a search warrant at Fulton County’s election offices and seized 2020 election materials, including ballots and tabulator records, as part of an investigation tied to President Donald Trump’s long-debunked claims about the 2020 election.
That raid is now central to a broader warning from voting-rights advocates and state election officials: what happened in Georgia over a five-year-old election could become a playbook for disruption in a live one. Fulton County challenged the seizure in court days later, arguing the warrant was overly broad and that the affidavit used to justify it omitted key facts.
The referral that triggered the raid came from Kurt Olsen, a Trump-allied attorney who now serves as the administration’s director of election security and integrity.
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon said officials are treating the threat of federal election interference like an emergency scenario. “We have to treat this like a bomb threat,” Simon said.
Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold has struck a similar tone, saying her office is preparing legal and operational responses in case federal officials try to interfere with ballots, voting equipment, or election administration.
Part of that preparation is legal. In January, the Supreme Court ruled in Bost v. Illinois State Board of Elections that candidates have standing to challenge rules governing how votes are counted in their own races. The ruling did not decide the mail-ballot dispute at the center of that case, but it did give candidates more room to go to court before an election is over.
Election-law scholars have since argued that the same logic could be used to challenge any attempt by the executive branch to seize ballots or otherwise disrupt vote counting before certification.
The fear is not coming out of nowhere. Trump has already tried to expand federal control over elections through a March 2025 executive order that called for proof of citizenship to register to vote and sought to block states from counting mail ballots received after Election Day.
Major parts of that order were blocked by federal judges in 2025 and again in early 2026, with courts emphasizing that the Constitution gives states and Congress — not the president acting alone — the main authority to set election rules. The Justice Department has also sued states over access to voter rolls, another sign of the administration’s aggressive posture toward election administration.
For now, election officials say the goal is simple: be ready before anything happens. Griswold has said “everything is on the table” when it comes to preemptive legal action, a sign that states are not waiting to be blindsided.
The bigger point is not that officials know exactly what the administration will do next. It is that after 2020, after the Georgia raid, and after repeated attempts to push federal power deeper into the election process, they no longer believe they can afford to assume it will stop on its own.
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