Congressional Democrats are preparing for a new kind of midterm challenge: the risk that President Trump will attempt to undermine November's elections by claiming fraud or interfering in the voting process. At the center of their effort is a task force of at least 11 senators, as well as staff and a constellation of outside experts and groups convened by top congressional Democrats to protect against what Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., describes as "direct threats posed by President Trump and MAGA Republicans." "The goal of our task force is to ensure that every vote counts, and every American can participate in our democracy without coercion, intimidation or threats from Donald Trump or anyone else," Schumer said in April while announcing the initiative. Members have already played a central role in challenging preelection maneuvers by the administration — including efforts to obtain state voter rolls and limit mail-in voting — even as they collectively prepare for an array of scenarios they fear could unfold over the coming 10 weeks.
Senate task force staff have a list of roughly 100 possible threats, including the prospect of a national election emergency declaration from the White House and the presence of federal troops and law enforcement at polling locations. This account of that effort is based on interviews with more than a dozen people involved in those preparations, including Democratic lawmakers, their staff, election litigators and experts in academia and at nonpartisan good governance organizations. Those conversations reveal a Democratic establishment intent on avoiding what multiple people described as a "failure of imagination" that prevented lawmakers from anticipating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S.
Capitol, but also Democratic lawmakers limited by both a lack of Republican buy-in and a shortage of legislative maneuvers to address the risks they see. Even as task force members acknowledged there is no magic "protect democracy" button tucked away in a Capitol cloakroom, they each emphasized the power of legislators as messengers and organizers, able to prepare the public and their state and local counterparts to act when necessary to ensure a legitimate election. It remains to be seen how the president may choose to wade into the midterm voting process in the coming months, but since returning to office, Trump has focused deep attention on the way U.S. elections are administered.
"We have very important elections coming up," he said in a July address from the East Room of the White House. "We want those elections to be honest." Trump used the speech to call on Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, a package of changes to election law that would, among other measures, require voters to show proof of citizenship when registering to vote and a photo ID before they can cast a ballot. "How easy is that to do, unless you want to cheat?
The only reason you wouldn't do it is you want to cheat because your policies are so bad, and your candidates are so pathetic that you can't get away or can't get elected any other way," he said. Members of the Democratic task force say the remarks should be understood alongside his executive order seeking to restrict voting by mail and federal investigations into 2020 election ballots as an effort to make voter fraud — which studies and investigations have found to be vanishingly rare — seem plausible. Among them is Justin Vail, a leader at Protect Democracy, a cross-ideological group that says it uses litigation, advocacy and research to protect American elections.
He previously served as a special assistant to President Joe Biden, working on democracy issues. Vail says Trump's speech was an effort to sow doubt in November's elections, a first step in what his organization characterizes as a three-step playbook: deceive, disrupt and deny. "First, he deceives Americans, manufacturing false claims about voter fraud and the security of our elections," Vail said.
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