The 2026 midterm elections are fast approaching, and as they do, the crisis of the American Republic, such as it is, grows more acute. Trump and the Republican Party are historically unpopular , their favorability ratings dropping with every additional cent paid at the pump and every bomb or missile that lands on the Middle East. With frantic desperation, Trump and the Republicans search for ways to salvage their prospects for the elections in November.
In this article we will begin to unwind the flurry of plots the Trump administration has hatched to steal the midterms, specifically the recently defeated executive order targeting mail-in voting and the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) attempts to infiltrate every part of our national election infrastructure.
Back in March, Trump issued Executive Order 14399, compelling the United States Postal Service (USPS) to overhaul the vote-by-mail process. The order required all states to create and submit new State Citizenship Lists to the Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS), who would use the data to determine who would receive a mail-in ballot. In short, the DHS would supervise voting by mail as Trump and the Republican Party saw fit.
Trump’s executive order was challenged in court, unleashing a “whipsawing legal battle” over its implementation. First, Judge Indira Thalwani issued a temporary restraining order (TRO) halting the order’s implementation. The Supreme Court then overruled that order on a technicality. When the case landed back in Thalwani’s court a few weeks later after civil society groups refiled their motions, she issued another TRO. The federal government then appealed once again. On Sunday, September 13, another federal judge blocked states from complying with the DHS-supervised USPS policy. On Monday, September 14, the Supreme Court upheld Thalwani’s second TRO, effectively striking down EO 14399.
Some are celebrating the Supreme Court majority’s decision. But the decision is cold comfort when disenfranchising potentially millions of voters was stopped, not by a mass movement or a democratic congress, but by a one-paragraph emergency decision handed down by a handful of unelected judges.
Before the Supreme Court struck down the executive order, a USPS whistleblower revealed that the Trump administration had ignored Thalwani’s TROs and continued scheming as the legal battles raged. Working through the legal fog and under impossible time constraints—some states are already mailing out ballots that would be counted as defective under Trump’s new standards—produced a chaotic “shitshow” within the USPS.
The shitshow has only intensified. The New York Times recently uncovered that a record-breaking number of mail-in ballots are being tossed out by the post office due to late arrival. The practice started with the 2024 presidential election and has worsened with subsequent elections. These delays—and the de facto disenfranchisement they cause—are driven by decades of USPS austerity imposed by both Democratic and Republican administrations. In one particularly egregious case in Washington, a state with universal mail-in voting, 75% of ballots sent through USPS (as opposed to being left in a drop box) were thrown out due to late delivery.
The DHS under Secretary Markwayne Mullin is also looking for other ways to put itself between voters and the ballot box. Trump’s Executive Order 14399 contained the threat of “prosecution of individuals and public or private entities engaged in, or aiding and abetting, the printing, production, shipment, or distribution of ballots to individuals who are not eligible to vote in a federal election.” This is a reiteration of threats made publicly by Trump and Mullin.
Trump has made a number of baseless claims about foreign (namely Chinese) interference and allegations of hundreds of thousands of noncitizens on the registration rolls (now walked back by some DHS officials) to insist that our elections are “insecure.” These claims also tie “election integrity” to national security and immigration enforcement, placing the response to these issues under the jurisdiction of DHS. Not only was this a justification for placing USPD under DHS supervision, but, with the effort to disrupt mail-in voting stalled, it also justifies DHS’s efforts to get its hands on voter registration rolls and its agents into polling places. The former was already outlined in 14399, and ICE offered $5 million for compiling all publicly available voter registration information into a single database under its control.
It has been standard practice for Republican state governments to purge their voter rolls in the run-up to an election, often targeting Black and Latino voters, as Greg Palast has spent a career documenting. These efforts have only escalated in the Trump era. In the first administration, infamous Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach was tapped to run the Presidential Commission on Election Integrity. This commission’s task was nominally to “prove” that Trump had really won the popular vote in 2016, not merely lucked into an Electoral College majority, but its real work consisted of uniting disparate Republican efforts to disenfranchise voters into a single federal policy. Now this push has returned—this time under the auspices of a cabinet department as opposed to an ad hoc presidential commission.
Trump’s executive order called for compiling State Citizenship Lists to be used by DHS to control USPS’s dispersal of mail-in ballots, and prevent noncitizens from receiving them. Before 14399 was struck down, DHS was already pursuing other legal routes for using its databases for the purposes of “election monitoring.” The Department of Justice filed a formal request with the Supreme Court to use its databases to engineer a sort of federal CrossCheck system, which was recently granted.
Failing the weaponization of data systems and the postal service, DHS can always resort to good old-fashioned harassment and intimidation at the polling place. On June 23 in Syracuse, New York, ICE agents entered a polling place and, in full view of those lined up to cast their ballot in person, began to question and harass poll worker Paigelynne Gonyea about an Instagram post she had made in January about ICE agents’ murder of Nicole Good in Minneapolis. About a month earlier in San Antonio, Texas, a man was pulled over by police for a traffic infraction in front of a polling place. Minutes after being stopped, ICE agents arrived and detained the man using their infamous swarm tactics.
Concern about ICE agents maintaining an aggressive presence in and around polling places has only grown as Election Day draws nearer. The Democratic Party members of the House Homeland Security Committee sent a letter to Secretary Mullin informing him that federal law prohibits federal agents, especially armed ones, from entering polling places unless they are fighting an invading enemy. On September 10, the Latino civil rights groups LULAC and UnidosUS, along with Common Cause and the City of Denver, took DHS to court hoping to secure a ruling explicitly blocking ICE from carrying out any enforcement operations near polling places.
All these issues raise the fundamental problem with the Department of Homeland Security. What purpose does it serve? What does “homeland security” even mean? Most of the agencies that comprise DHS are, at least nominally, federal law enforcement agencies. CBP and ICE enforce immigration laws and customs regulations. But the policies that they enact are described as “border security” and now “election security,” which is legally considered a question of “national security.” Annexing these roles into the jurisdiction of DHS moves the act of voting into a state of exception: everything is permitted in order to secure the national interest, regardless of existing law.
ICE is a paramilitary force that reports directly to the President to carry out his every whim, and he has many whims. The Supreme Court—the same nine people who will supposedly protect our voting rights—has declared presidential decisions to be “official acts,” and therefore presumptively legal. DHS is far from exhausting all avenues at its disposal to interfere with the election. It is hard to believe that the Supreme Court, which gutted the Voting Rights Act and has given so many victories to Trump, would suddenly wield its immense power to defend voting rights and close off Republicans’ last chances at securing an electoral majority.
In the coming months, Light & Air will continue to track the Trump administration’s attempt to disenfranchise millions of Americans. As socialists, we must defend the right to vote at the same time that we ruthlessly criticize the lack of democracy in our country and demand a new constitution that places all power in the hands of the working-class majority.
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