US midterm elections 2026: Will Donald Trump enforce martial law after November 3? MAGA activists reveal shocking plans if results don't favour Republicans

Donald Trump's Make America Great Again (MAGA) supporters have floated the idea of enforcing martial law if November 3 midterm elections are found to be 'rigged', according to reports. This involves MAGA election activist Tina Peters, her attorney Peter Ticktin. During a video conference of MAGA election activists on Rumble, Ticktin spoke of security breaches in the upcoming elections. Tina Peters was on the video call.

Peters has suggested manually recounting of ballots, even before the midterm election. She also has pitched for hand-marked paper ballots. White House adviser Peter Navarro has been promoting his conspiracy theories surrounding 2020 election results.

Meanwhile, FBI and the US cyber defense agency CISA are urging election officials -- and the American public -- to be on guard against AI-powered tricks ahead of next month's midterm elections.


An alert issued Friday by CISA and the FBI says that hackers may try to disrupt the midterm elections using bogus text messages and emails aimed at stealing passwords or other sensitive data. The alert says that "election officials, candidates, and their political organizations are attractive targets to malicious cyber criminals."

The alert says that "super intelligence," a Trump-approved term for AI, is allowing hackers to sharpen their rogue emails and texts to make them look and sound more convincing.

President Donald Trump’s midterm campaign blitz arrived in Georgia on Friday for a rally with top Republican candidates in a state that has long been the epicenter of the president’s false claims about election fraud.

New White House press secretary Katie Zacharia defended her legal background and justified her truncated inaugural briefing on Thursday as she navigates a rocky first week as the president’s chief spokeswoman. Zacharia said she did not have time to prepare for her first briefing on Tuesday fully and that keeping it short was always the plan because Trump would field questions from journalists later that morning.

The Trump administration sued California election officials Thursday, asking a judge to bar the state from counting mail-in ballots for next month's midterm elections from people the federal government has identified as “likely” noncitizens until their immigration status can be confirmed.

The lawsuit comes after the Justice Department said California officials failed to meet a 48-hour deadline to review a password-protected thumb drive that contains a list of 20,000 names. The federal government says those are likely noncitizens who were sent ballots to participate in the Nov. 3 election, although the secretary of state said the administration has provided no evidence to support that claim. The state mails ballots to all registered voters.

The lawsuit follows a letter sent earlier this week by a top Justice Department official who threatened potential legal action if California didn't comply.

The federal government didn't specify where the 20,000 voters were concentrated, but the list was sent directly to Los Angeles County Registrar Dean Logan on Tuesday, his office confirmed in a statement. His office said the list contained names of voters throughout California, not just Los Angeles, even though Logan is the only county election official named as a defendant in the lawsuit. He doesn't have jurisdiction over ballots outside Los Angeles County.

In a statement Thursday, Logan said his office can’t withhold ballots or refuse to count them “based solely on unverified allegations.”

Over 23 million people are registered statewide, and there are a handful of competitive congressional races in other California districts that could determine which party has control of the U.S. House for the final two years of President Donald Trump's term.