President Donald Trump is escalating his crusade to exert control of America’s elections as his party barrels towards a potentially bruising midterm.
The Justice Department has already filed lawsuits in nearly every state to try and gain access to voter files. Trump revisited his longstanding bid to restrict mail voting, sparking a legal battle that reached the Supreme Court. He sought to make anti-terrorism funds for state and local governments contingent on how they administer elections. He has threatened to withhold federal election funding from states that refuse to change voter registration forms and sparred with Republican lawmakers over a bill to overhaul elections.
But with most of those efforts stalling, on Thursday, just 12 days before Election Day, the DOJ took things even further: In an extraordinary move, it asked a court to preemptively block Alaska’s Senate results if Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan loses, stunning current and former election officials in both parties.
“Boy, they are scraping the bottom of the barrel. It feels like a real desperation play to me, because it has got zero basis in the law,” said Ben Ginsberg, a veteran Republican election law expert who was counsel to George W. Bush’s 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns.
At virtually every corner, courts have rebuffed Trump’s efforts, and legal experts expect the latest DOJ maneuver to have the same outcome. The requests for voter rolls were blocked repeatedly by members of Trump’s own party and struck down in court. The attempt to restrict mail voting was ultimately blocked by the Supreme Court. Federal judges blocked both the anti-terrorism and election funding efforts. The SAVE Act, which would require voters to provide proof of citizenship at the polls, has stalled in the Senate.
But Trump keeps pushing, telling reporters Friday that he had personally green-lit the Alaska lawsuit: “I’m the one that said ‘Do it.’”
The gambit is another sign that Trump is once again ramping up his efforts to exert greater control over how elections are administered — with officials bracing for what may come next.
“I think there is an attempt to lay a foundation to say, ‘If we had won these lawsuits, we would have won the election,’” Gabriel Sterling, a Republican and former senior Georgia elections official who sparred with Trump over his false claims of fraud in the state in 2020, said of the Alaska lawsuit. “So, for them, filing and losing for them is the same difference, tactically speaking, potentially.”
Trump has been claiming elections were being stolen from him since the 2016 primaries, and his wide-ranging legal and political attempts to overturn his 2020 election loss sparked a riot at the U.S. Capitol in January 2021, even as some in his party want him to move on.
“The federal government is his company, and he gets to call all the shots of his company, and that’s just never how it’s been done before,” said Stephen Richer, Maricopa County, Arizona’s former GOP chief election official.
POLITICO reached out to the offices of every Republican statewide election official in America for a response to the DOJ’s action in Alaska. Four declined to comment, and the rest did not respond. Their silence shows just how powerful Trump remains in the party, and how few are willing to cross him just days before November’s midterms.
“The survival rate politically of people who oppose Donald Trump on this issue is not great if you’re Republican,” said Richer, who was ousted by a more conservative Republican in a 2024 primary after defending the county’s 2020 election results against a yearslong campaign from Trump and his allies to try to prove they were rigged.
Arizona Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes railed against the DOJ’s lawsuit, accusing the department of “working as the president’s lawyers.”
“The Department of Justice is acting in a monstrously political way, and it’s purely inappropriate, and they lose a lot of credibility by putting their thumb on the scales,” Fontes said in an interview Friday afternoon. “This attempt in Alaska, if it comes to Arizona, will also fail.”
The Justice Department, in a statement posted on social media, said “claims that DOJ is trying to stop Alaska’s election are FALSE.” Instead, the DOJ argued it was “seeking to protect election integrity, consistent with the National Voter Registration Act (enacted by Congress) and ensure the will of Alaska voters is respected.”
Washington state Attorney General Nick Brown, a Democrat, described the legal filing in Alaska as “part of a concerted effort to control the election and to try to dictate the outcome in Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s favor.”
Brown said he worried the administration would contest the results of the midterms.
“That is not hypothetical,” Brown said. “This is what the president has done for years now, and he has the entire power of government, and most importantly, the Department of Justice around elections, acting at his request.”
Sterling predicted the effort would backfire on the GOP.
“By talking about stolen elections, by talking about cheating, they’re suppressing their own vote and they’re encouraging the votes of their opponents,” he said. “So tactically, I think it’s politically moronic.”
The DOJ lawsuit in Alaska comes less than two weeks before a midterm election cycle in which Republicans are bracing for losses across the map. And the Trump administration’s increasing interventions are raising questions about how far his administration intends to go in trying to assert federal authority over elections that by law are run by state and local officials.
A current Georgia Republican election official, granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations around the Alaska lawsuit, said they are prepared to forcefully push back on any action from the federal government.
“Bring it on,” the official said. “I think there’s zero credible way for any entity, much less the DOJ, to say that the election results in Georgia are suspect.”
The lawsuit is the culmination of years of escalating tensions between the federal government and state election officials over election proceedings.
In February, a typically staid gathering of the nation’s top election officials turned fiery when Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican and her state’s chief election official, confronted a senior White House aide over the DOJ’s voter roll push.
The DOJ “pretty much slandered all of us to publicly claim that secretaries of state are not doing our jobs and that the federal government has to do it for us. Not OK,” Henderson said to White House Deputy Director of Intergovernmental Affairs Jared Borg, as her colleagues and reporters looked on.
On Wednesday, Henderson’s office received a letter from the Justice Department informing her that election monitors will be sent to her state. Her office responded the next day by distributing instructions to poll workers noting that the DOJ observers “must not interfere with voting” and giving guidance in case “a situation arises involving law enforcement or legal demands.”
Henderson was unsparing in a recent interview with CBS News.
“In the past two elections that I oversaw as lieutenant governor the threats were all external,” she said. “But now we also have threats coming from within our own government.”
Lisa Kashinsky contributed to this report.
