Trump's Plot to Control American Elections: DHS Funds Held Hostage, a 17-Page Emergency Order to Nationalise Voting, DOGE Given Access to All Voter Data, and 23 State AGs Fighting Back
Introduction
The story that broke across American political media on June 22, 2026 — that the Trump administration is holding millions of dollars in Homeland Security grants hostage unless states agree to abandon electronic ballots, implement its preferred citizenship verification system, and submit their election administration to federal direction — did not emerge from nowhere. It is the latest, and in some respects the most brazen, chapter in a sustained 18-month campaign that has now touched virtually every dimension of how Americans vote: registration, identification, ballot casting, ballot counting, mail voting, machine certification, voter roll maintenance, and the fundamental constitutional question of who controls elections in the United States.
That question is not ambiguous. Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution assigns the power to regulate the time, place, and manner of federal elections to the states, with Congress — not the president — holding a limited oversight role. Three federal courts have already found portions of Trump's election executive orders unconstitutional. Twenty-three state attorneys general, led by Massachusetts AG Andrea Joy Campbell, have filed motions for summary judgment to permanently block the administration's second major election executive order. The Brennan Center for Justice, the American Civil Liberties Union, and dozens of other voting rights organisations have filed lawsuits that are working their way through the federal courts. And yet the campaign continues — through new funding conditions, through proposed emergency declarations, through DOGE's access to voter data, and through what critics are characterising as an escalating strategy to reshape the electorate before the 2026 midterm elections in ways that would benefit Republicans.
This article lays out the full picture: what has actually happened, what is being proposed, what legal authorities say, what states are doing in response, and what the 2026 midterms — the elections these measures are most immediately aimed at — will look like if the administration succeeds, and if it does not.
The Funding Threat: Homeland Security Grants as a Lever
The story that generated Monday's headlines was reported by CNN and amplified by The New Republic: the Trump administration is conditioning a portion of Homeland Security funding to states on those states agreeing to implement specific election administration changes. The conditions are not small technical adjustments. They include stopping the use of electronic ballots, implementing the administration's preferred citizenship verification system to check voter registrations, conducting manual election audits at the administration's direction, and committing to a gradual phase-out of all electronic ballot systems.
States that decline to meet these conditions face losing 20 per cent of their DHS security grants — funding that is used not for election administration but for preventing terrorist attacks, maintaining critical infrastructure security, and preparing communities for natural disasters. This money has historically flowed to states without political conditions. It was never designed as a lever for federal control over election administration. Using it as one — threatening to reduce a state's ability to respond to terrorism or natural disasters unless that state changes how it conducts its elections — represents a form of financial coercion that legal scholars have compared to the kind of conditional spending that the Supreme Court addressed in NFIB v. Sebelius (2012), where the Court held that Congress could not use the threat of withdrawing existing Medicaid funding to coerce states into expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.
The timing is explicit: as The New Republic noted, the president approaches a potentially significant midterm election in November 2026, and every element of the funding conditions is designed to reshape the electoral architecture in ways that have been associated — in academic research, in voting rights litigation, and in the documented experience of elections in multiple states — with reduced voter participation, particularly among communities of colour, young voters, and low-income voters, all of whom trend Democratic.
The Paper Trail: From March 2025 to June 2026
Understanding the DHS funding threat requires tracing the full sequence of actions that preceded it — a sequence that reveals not an improvised response to election security concerns but a systematic, multi-phase campaign designed with long-term electoral consequences in mind.
In March 2025, Trump signed the first major election executive order of his second term — a sweeping document that attempted to assert presidential control over significant aspects of federal election administration. Its core provisions included requiring the Election Assistance Commission to add proof of citizenship to the national voter registration form (a passport, birth certificate, or naturalisation certificate), mandating that the Department of Defense include citizenship verification requirements for overseas voter registration, ordering the EAC to rescind certification for voting machines that did not meet new federal standards — machines used in 39 states — and granting DOGE and the Department of Homeland Security access to voter files and voter list maintenance records from every state. Three federal courts subsequently found the citizenship verification provision of this order unconstitutional, blocking the EAC from implementing it.
The Brennan Center's analysis of the voting machine decertification provision documented its practical consequences with specificity: the new federal standards for recertified machines were standards that no voting system currently on the market could meet, leaving states with no feasible path to compliance. The cost of replacing all decertified machines in time for the 2026 election — across 39 states — was projected to run into the billions of dollars. States were already absorbing the impact of the administration's previous decisions to roll back federal support for election security when the machine decertification order arrived on top of them.
The DOGE voter data access provision generated its own wave of alarm. Election security experts noted that DOGE's track record in other federal programme reviews — repeatedly flagging legitimate payments and enrolled beneficiaries as fraudulent based on faulty data analysis — did not inspire confidence that it would handle voter registration data with the care that sensitive personal information requires. The Brennan Center warned explicitly that DOGE employees might use voter file access "to claim fraud and erode public trust in elections," or might use faulty analyses to pressure state officials to aggressively purge voters who are in fact US citizens — a scenario that had already played out in voter eligibility challenge campaigns ahead of the 2024 election, when vigilante groups used faulty data to challenge the eligibility of tens of thousands of registered Americans.
The Second Executive Order: March 2026 and the Mail Ballot Power Grab
A year after the first executive order — and apparently unsatisfied with the progress being made through that mechanism, much of which was being blocked in court — Trump issued a second major election executive order in March 2026. This one targeted mail voting, the form of ballot casting that had expanded dramatically since 2020 and that has been a consistent target of Republican election integrity rhetoric. The order was Executive Order No. 14399, titled "Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections."
Its provisions were extraordinary. Among the most sweeping: it attempted to require the US Postal Service to decide who is allowed to vote by mail — effectively giving a federal agency the power to refuse to deliver ballots cast by anyone not on newly created federal lists of approved mail voters. It ordered that election officials who process mail ballots not pre-approved under the new federal lists could be prosecuted. It maintained the citizenship documentation requirements from the first executive order and extended them. It threatened states that count legitimately cast mail ballots received after Election Day with EAC funding penalties — targeting what are called "receipt deadline grace periods," a common state provision that allows ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted when received shortly afterward.
The coalition response was immediate and multi-jurisdictional. Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell co-led 23 attorneys general, along with the Governor of Pennsylvania, in filing both a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of EO 14399 and a subsequent motion for summary judgment seeking its permanent block. Their core argument was direct: states have important constitutional authority to administer elections, which includes in large part the regulation of federal elections, and the president has no constitutional authority to make or alter laws governing federal elections. A hearing on the motion was scheduled for June 2, 2026.
The Brennan Center, which filed its own lawsuit challenging the order, described it as a document that "could disenfranchise millions of American citizens, compromise the security of sensitive personal data, and disrupt election administration across the country" — all on the basis of what the organisation characterised as "false claims about voting and elections" that the administration had been advancing since 2020 without providing credible evidence.
The 17-Page Emergency Order: The Nuclear Option
Sitting in the background of all of these developments — the funding threats, the executive orders, the court battles — is a document that may represent the most radical election intervention yet proposed: a 17-page draft executive order, reviewed in full by PBS News in February 2026, that would use a presidential declaration of national emergency as the basis for taking sweeping federal control over the 2026 midterm elections.
The draft order, whose existence Trump denied when asked about it by a PBS journalist ("Who told you that?"), would declare a national emergency based on alleged foreign interference in American elections. Within that emergency framework, it would require hand-marking of all paper ballots nationwide, with hand-counting conducted in public. It would require all 211 million registered American voters to re-register for the 2026 election in person at a county election office, using only a birth certificate, passport, or naturalisation certificate to prove citizenship — a requirement that would effectively disenfranchise millions of eligible Americans who do not have immediate access to those specific documents. It would prohibit most Americans from casting mail ballots. And it would centralise a range of election administration decisions in the federal executive branch in ways that have no precedent in American history.
Peter Ticktin, a Florida attorney who has known Trump since he was 15 years old, confirmed to PBS that the draft was circulating among presidential supporters. He defended its legal basis: "The President has power to take charge in an emergency. Frankly, no government could work with no one in charge in times when a foreign country is invading surreptitiously or with a bold attack."
The Center for American Progress published a detailed constitutional analysis of the draft order's legal foundations and found them comprehensively inadequate. None of the authorities cited in the draft — the National Emergencies Act, the Federal Information Security Modernization Act, the Defense Production Act, two prior Trump executive orders, and constitutional provisions — "delegates the president any power to change voting laws, let alone the wholesale takeover of federal and local elections that the draft EO attempts to enact." The Supreme Court's own precedent, CAP noted, holds that when the Constitution specifically grants power to an entity other than the executive branch — which it does, clearly, with respect to election administration — the president's power is at its weakest. A national emergency declaration does not override this constitutional assignment.
The requirement for 211 million Americans to re-register in person with citizenship documentation was identified by analysts as the single most operationally destructive provision. The logistics of processing 211 million in-person re-registrations through county election offices between a declaration and the November 2026 election are simply not achievable. The DMV database errors, the naturalization record gaps, the documentation unavailability for millions of elderly, low-income, and rural Americans who do not possess a current passport or easy access to their birth certificate — all of these would produce a mass disenfranchisement of legitimate voters whose eligibility is not in question. In Missouri, as the Brennan Center documented, approximately 35 per cent of the people flagged through the administration's preferred citizenship verification tool (SAVE) were American citizens who registered to vote at their naturalisation ceremonies. In Texas, hundreds of flagged voters were citizens who had registered at the state's Department of Public Safety.
The Tulsi Gabbard Dimension: Cult Leader Influence Over the Intelligence Apparatus
Running parallel to the election control story was a bombshell investigation published by the Washington Post that directly implicated former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard — who, under Trump's administration, had oversight of the CIA, FBI, and NSA — in a different but related abuse of intelligence authority. The Post reported that Gabbard may have been taking orders on political decisions from Chris Butler, the leader of a group that many former members have described as a cult.
The implications of a DNI potentially operating under the influence of a private individual's directives — rather than the president and the intelligence community's own professional standards — while having authority over the nation's most sensitive intelligence agencies are profound. The intelligence community's role in election security specifically — monitoring foreign interference attempts, sharing threat information with state election officials, assessing the threat landscape — makes the question of who was directing Gabbard's decision-making directly relevant to the election integrity narrative the administration has been using to justify its election control campaign.
Gabbard is no longer a member of the Trump administration as of the time of this writing. Her former colleagues in the administration were largely silent about the Post report. Conservative commentator Meghan McCain defended Gabbard on X. The broader question of what decisions were made about the intelligence community's election security role during Gabbard's tenure, and who was directing those decisions, has not been answered.
The Constitutional Architecture: Why Experts Say This Is Unprecedented
The legal consensus among constitutional scholars is remarkably consistent on the core question: the president of the United States does not have authority under the Constitution to impose election administration requirements on states. This is not a contested legal ambiguity. It is the settled constitutional framework within which American elections have operated since the founding.
Article I, Section 4 assigns the regulation of the time, place, and manner of federal elections to state legislatures, with Congress holding the power to override state choices by statute. The president is not mentioned in this framework. Presidential power over elections, under the Constitution, is zero absent a specific congressional delegation of that power — and Congress has not made any such delegation. The Election Assistance Commission, which the administration's executive orders have repeatedly attempted to weaponise, is specifically designed by Congress to be an independent bipartisan agency insulated from presidential control. The president cannot direct the EAC any more than he can direct the Federal Reserve.
Senator John Cornyn of Texas — a Republican who was the Senate majority whip — provided an unusually candid assessment of the broader governing approach of which the election control campaign is a part. In a Semafor interview published Monday, Cornyn said that conversations with the president are "not particularly useful" because "he can and will" flip his position depending on the last person he spoke to. "The president seems to revel in chaos, which is so different from any other leader that I've ever seen," Cornyn said. His comments, offered at the moment of his departure from the Senate, represented the kind of insider assessment that Republican officeholders rarely voice publicly and that carries particular weight because of its source.
The Midterm Stakes: What November 2026 Looks Like From Here
The election control campaign's ultimate target is the 2026 midterm elections. The administration faces a potentially unfavourable midterm environment: presidential parties typically lose seats in the midterm elections of a president's second term, and the political climate of mid-2026 — marked by the Iran war, continuing inflation pressures, significant domestic political controversy across immigration, election integrity, and institutional independence — does not obviously favour the Republicans who would need to maintain their Congressional majority.
The measures the administration is pursuing — mandatory citizenship documentation for registration, elimination of electronic voting machines, mandatory re-registration for all voters, control over voter lists through DOGE, restrictions on mail voting, financial penalties for non-compliant states — would, according to multiple independent analyses, reduce voter turnout, particularly among the demographic groups most likely to vote Democratic. This is not a hidden agenda. It is the documented historical effect of each individual measure, now assembled into a comprehensive package.
The legal response has been substantial. Three federal courts have found core provisions of the March 2025 executive order unconstitutional. A coalition of 23 state attorneys general has moved for summary judgment against the March 2026 order. Every major voting rights organisation in the country has filed or is preparing litigation. The federal courts — including, potentially, the same Supreme Court that just ruled on the Etan Patz case and that has shown both deference and resistance to different aspects of the administration's agenda — will be the ultimate arbiters of how much of this programme survives.
But the legal process takes time, and time is the administration's ally in the immediate term. Litigation that is not resolved before November 2026 leaves contested election rules in place for that election. Funding threats that create uncertainty and compliance pressure may produce voluntary changes in some states even before courts rule. And a draft emergency executive order, if signed, would produce immediate chaos in election administration nationwide that courts would need months to sort through — potentially including election-day uncertainty about which rules are in force in which jurisdictions.
Why This Story Matters Beyond Party Lines
The election control campaign's partisan motivations are evident and have been documented. But it is worth being precise about why the constitutional dimension of this story matters independently of which party benefits.
American elections have been administered by states since the Constitution was ratified. The decentralised structure of American election administration — different rules in different states, managed by state and local officials who are accountable to their own electorates — is not merely a historical accident. It is a structural safeguard. A nationally uniform, federally controlled election system administered by officials appointed by and accountable to a sitting president is, by definition, a system in which the sitting president has control over the rules that determine who can vote and how — regardless of which party's president is doing the controlling.
The specific provisions being advanced by the Trump administration — mandatory re-registration requirements that would disenfranchise millions of legitimate voters, voting machine standards that no currently available machine can meet, DOGE access to all voter data, postal service authority over mail ballot delivery — are measures that would produce these consequences regardless of who controlled the executive branch and regardless of which voters were disenfranchised by them. The principle that the federal executive branch should not control election administration is not a Democratic principle or a Republican principle. It is an American constitutional principle that has been maintained across every prior administration of both parties.
That it is under systematic assault in mid-2026, four months before a midterm election, and that the assault involves financial coercion of states, draft emergency declarations, access to voter data by a political appointee's staff, and the invalidation of voting machines used in 39 states — is a story that every American voter, regardless of party, has a direct stake in understanding.
Sources
- The New Republic — Trump Threatens to Defund States That Don't Make His Election Changes (June 22, 2026):
https://newrepublic.com/post/212151/trump-threatens-defund-homeland-security-states-election-changes-2026-midterms - PBS NewsHour — Trump Says He's Not Mulling a Draft Executive Order to Seize Control Over Elections. Here's What We Know (February 27, 2026):
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-says-hes-not-mulling-a-draft-executive-order-to-seize-control-over-elections-heres-what-we-know - Brennan Center for Justice — Status of Trump's Anti-Voting Executive Order (Updated June 2026):
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/status-trumps-anti-voting-executive-order - Brennan Center for Justice — The President's March 2025 Executive Order on Elections Explained:
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/presidents-executive-order-elections-explained - Center for American Progress — Trump's Executive Order on Elections Aims to Dictate How States Run Elections and Handpicks Which Citizens Can Vote (April 16, 2025):
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/trumps-executive-order-on-elections-aims-to-dictate-how-states-run-elections-and-handpicks-which-citizens-can-vote/ - Center for American Progress — The Trump Administration Has No Legal Authority to Invoke National Security and Take Over Elections (March 3, 2026):
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-trump-administration-has-no-legal-authority-to-invoke-national-security-and-take-over-elections/ - Massachusetts Attorney General — AG Campbell Moves to Permanently Block President Trump's Executive Order Restricting Mail Voting (April 24, 2026):
https://www.mass.gov/news/ag-campbell-moves-to-permanently-block-president-trumps-executive-order-restricting-mail-voting-exerting-federal-control-over-elections - CNN — Trump Administration Conditions DHS Homeland Security Grants on State Election Changes (June 22, 2026):
https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/22/politics/trump-dhs-election-conditions-states - Semafor — Senator Cornyn on Trump's Governing Style: 'He Seems to Revel in Chaos' (June 22, 2026):
https://www.semafor.com/article/06/22/2026/cornyn-trump-chaos-interview - Washington Post — Tulsi Gabbard May Have Taken Orders from Cult Leader Chris Butler, Investigation Finds (June 22, 2026):
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/06/22/gabbard-butler-intelligence-orders/ - US Constitution — Article I, Section 4: Elections Clause:
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-4/ - Supreme Court of the United States — NFIB v. Sebelius 567 US 519 (2012) (Unconstitutional Spending Coercion Precedent):
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/567/519/