Who Controls the Ballot Box? The Authoritarian Fight for Federal Control of Our Votes

Join ProPublica to learn how the Trump administration has dismantled guardrails meant to protect the vote and what it all means for the midterm elections.

Senior editor Robin Fields will lead a discussion with ProPublica investigative reporters
Doug Block Clark, Jen Fifield, Jeremy Kohler and Peter Elkind to talk about what’s at stake during this year’s midterms.

Oct 27 at 1 PM - 2 Pm PT (4 PM - 5 PM ET)

RSVP: https://events.propublica.org/voting-guardrails


Over the last year, ProPublica has published a series of in-depth investigations into the Trump administration’s attempts to assert federal control over elections, an effort that has increasingly defined Donald Trump’s second presidency.

Reporters on our election team dug into the origins of Trump’s plan to sharply restrict mail-in voting, a push that could have caused chaos in the midterms had the Supreme Court not blocked it. The reporters found that the White House had initially suggested even more disruptive ideas and left top Postal Service officials out of crucial discussions that produced Trump’s final executive order on mail-in voting. A White House spokesperson said the administration hadn’t interfered improperly with the Postal Service and that the president’s order had “added important safeguards to vote-by-mail.”

Earlier, the reporters looked into Trump’s bid to pool data from across the federal government — including confidential information like Social Security numbers — and try to identify noncitizens on state voter rolls. Our reporting showed that the main tool the government was using, known as SAVE, was highly inaccurate and had misidentified hundreds of eligible voters in Missouri and Texas as potential noncitizens. An official at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that oversees SAVE, acknowledged it couldn’t always find the most accurate citizenship information, particularly for naturalized citizens, but said it was up to states to decide how to use data provided by the system.

The team next examined how the Trump administration had systematically demolished the institutional guardrails that held — barely — when Trump tried to overturn his loss to Joe Biden in 2020. The reporters found that at least 75 federal staffers, mostly at the departments of Justice and Homeland Security, who’d helped to safeguard the 2020 vote had resigned, been fired or been reassigned. They also showed the administration had repeatedly appointed people who’d worked to reverse Trump’s 2020 loss into critical election-related roles. The Trump administration maintained its actions would make elections fairer and more secure, keeping those prohibited from voting, especially noncitizens, from doing so.

More recently, our team brought readers inside the Trump administration’s failed hunt for noncitizen voters. Reporters documented how insiders at an agency called Homeland Security Investigations warned that a tech platform the administration was using to find and prosecute noncitizens on state voter rolls was likely to produce an “ungodly” number of false positives.

ProPublica’s reporting showed the administration went forward with the effort anyway and that, despite intense White House pressure, through May it had produced only a few dozen prosecutions for illegal voting and election-related crimes — and even fewer convictions. The administration insisted the effort was producing meaningful results and would hold those breaking the law accountable.

Join us for this discussion.