US election interference is hard. Messing with your mind is easy

You’ve likely heard the ominous what-if scenarios about election disruptions in November: immigration agents or federal troops roaming polling places, federal officials seizing ballots and voting machines, and President Donald Trump issuing an executive order postponing or cancelling the election. Courts and legal experts have given solid reasons that each one of those potential election disruptions is unlikely. But the threats have served their purpose: People are harbouring doubts.

The federal government doesn’t have to interfere with the mechanics of the voting process to disrupt the election. The easiest way for bad actors to interfere in the midterm elections right now is to let fear and distrust mess with our minds. By intimidating people into thinking they’ll face harassment at the polls or casting doubt on the integrity of the process, the administration is planting the seeds that the results can’t be trusted.

I recently spoke with a naturalized US citizen from Venezuela who lives in Miami. She’s a young professional, married with kids, and until recently had been an active member of her local political party. She’s a reliable voter, but she told me she won’t be voting in person this year. The ICE raids that have terrorized her community have left her and her neighbors isolated and afraid.


“I don’t want to go and vote in person, because I am terrified that they’re going to bring out the National Guard,” she told me. “You know, I have PTSD.”

This is where Trump has brought us: US citizens fear risking their safety to exercise their constitutional right to vote.

For the last 21 months, the federal government has mounted an unprecedented attack on state sovereignty over elections. Trump signed two executive orders that seek to radically dictate state election policy. The Department of Justice sued 30 states and the District of Columbia to gain access to sensitive voter data. The White House seized Georgia’s ballots from the 2020 election. And Trump tried to rehash his election conspiracy theories in a prime-time speech earlier this year.

Judges from county courthouses to the US Supreme Court have rebuffed much of it. But the effort has undercut voter confidence. A University of Georgia survey of more than 11,000 voters found only 58% of Republicans, 63% of Democrats, and 49% of Independents trusted that votes would be counted accurately nationwide. And a recent poll from AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that only 34% of US adults trust government certifications of election results “a great deal” or “quite a bit,” down from 40% in 2024.

Sometimes all it takes is a headline to sow doubt. That’s what happened in 2016 when Russian hackers got access to the Illinois state voter registration database. The hackers went unnoticed for weeks and only when they started accessing thousands of records per second did Illinois election officials shut the system down.

“Russia wanted to be noticed,” said David Becker, who runs the non-partisan election watchdog site The Center for Election Innovation and Research. “They wanted the American people to think that our foreign adversaries had … the ability to change our elections.” Since then, US adversaries, particularly Russia, Iran and China, have focused on manipulating social media to make voters, particularly supporters of losing candidates, believe that their elections were stolen.

Fortunately, millions of voters haven’t been intimidated by these global or domestic scare tactics. Records indicate that two weeks into early voting, an unprecedented number of votes have already been cast across the country, in many states exceeding records broken in 2018, 2022 and 2024.

And in unprecedented fashion, state elections officials have locked arms in a bipartisan effort to resist any attempt by the administration to interfere.

State officials are taking a traditional “all hazards approach,” said Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, who leads the National Association of Secretaries of State. They’re prepared to handle election disruptions involving everything from natural disasters and bomb threats to power outages. This year, he told me, they’ve added “federal interference.”

States have amassed teams of lawyers who are prepared to act quickly in the unlikely event that federal troops do show up, said Becker. They are also prepared to get before a judge if federal officials attempt to seize election equipment and get a ruling “before the chain of custody is irrevocably damaged,” he explained.

But as a reminder, it’s a crime for anyone to order federal troops to a polling place — a violation punishable by up to five years in prison, a fine and disqualification from public office. Federal laws bar Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from the polls. And it’s logistically impossible for Trump to cancel an election because thousands of officials across the country control elections, not the White House.

The internet is an inviting host for allowing the mischief to continue in the weeks ahead. Let’s keep our wits about us. Thank the hard-working elections officials who keep the system sound, and don’t be duped.