Polls are looking pretty bleak for Republicans—and the Trump administration’s various attempts to interfere with the elections haven’t been too successful either.
In recent weeks, the Department of Justice, helmed by Attorney General Todd Blanche, a proponent of conspiracy theories about widespread noncitizen voting in the 2020 election, has pulled out all the stops to sow doubt in voters’ minds about the security and validity of the electoral process.
To do this, the DOJ has spent the last year demanding unredacted voter rolls, issuing executive orders to wrest control of elections from states, raiding election offices, proposing new laws to disenfranchise millions of citizens, and claiming that noncitizens were voting en masse across the country. (Incidents of verified noncitizen voting are vanishingly rare, as multiple bipartisan investigations have shown.)
There have also been escalating threats by the DOJ against election officials. On Thursday, the DOJ sent letters to election officials in all 50 states warning them that they would pursue criminal action if they failed to preserve election records for 22 days. Earlier that week, a federal judge had admonished the Trump administration for making similar threats around criminal prosecution against election officials in a different case.
“They're trying to create chaos and distrust in the system,” says Shelby Wayment, staff attorney at UCLA Law’s Safeguarding Democracy Project. “They're trying to file these now knowing they have virtually no chance of winning and then after they can claim the election was fraudulent.”
“This Department is following the facts and the law, not anyone’s political timetable,” a spokesperson for the DOJ tells WIRED, pointing out that the previous administration’s Justice department sued Alabama and Virginia ahead of the 2024 election, claiming the DOJ was at the time trying “to stop them from removing suspected noncitizens from their voter rolls.”
Experts say that while the DOJ’s current legal efforts, including escalating fights in Alaska and California over candidates and voter rolls, are faltering, they’re also designed to lay the groundwork to question the results of this week’s vote.
“We have to expect absolutely, if the election doesn't go the way the president wants, that we will see the administration’s attempt to sow doubts in the election and maybe even challenge those results, but I'm also not worried about it,” David Becker, a former DOJ lawyer and the head of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, tells WIRED.
“They have failed at everything they've tried to do. Our systems have held firm. Our institutions have held firm.”
34 federal district courts have ruled against Trump since he took office in 2025 blocking access to voter rolls and preventing executive orders being implemented, according to analysis from the Brennan Center.
Former deputy assistant attorney general at the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division Justin Levitt thinks that a lot of the actions taken by the Trump administration are about a show of force and optics more than anything else. “What you’re seeing now is a ton of marketing. They are trying to communicate that they're in charge, and I think it's not working,” says Levitt, now a law professor at Loyola Marymount University. “But it is really important to remember that the federal government isn't in charge of the election process. State and local officials are.”
WIRED has laid out the details of the DOJ’s legal efforts in California, Nevada, Washington, and Alaska below, which have all been met with disdain from local and state officials.
California
California is officially a hotbed of election controversy. In October, the DOJ filed a federal lawsuit seeking a court order against California to compel them to sequester mail-in ballots associated with approximately 20,000 voters, claiming that these voters were noncitizens. On Wednesday, a federal judge in a strong-worded order rejected the request.
“Never before in American history has the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state and local government to abandon their own Constitutional elections procedures and bend to the will of the Executive Branch,” US District Judge David Carter wrote in his order filed late on Wednesday.
Almost immediately, the DOJ filed an appeal and a federal court quickly denied it.
The judge pointed out that similar claims from the administration about noncitizens on voter rolls hadn’t held up to scrutiny, and he had “further questions of credibility” about how they arrived at that number in the first place.
Last week, a federal judge also ruled that the DOJ had to turn over its list of around 20,000 names to the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, so that the group could analyze the dataset. On Saturday, the group submitted a legal filing stating that an analysis of the list found that over 40 percent of the names weren’t even in the state’s current voter files. In response, the DOJ has suggested that the publication of their analysis violated the terms of the lists released to them, and is urging a federal judge to consider whether contempt charges might be applicable here.
“The DOJ has clearly written rules that prevent it from engaging in any investigative activity close to an election—rules that private attorney Todd Blanche cited when representing his client, Donald Trump, in September 2024,” Becker says. “But the DOJ continues to violate its own policies.”
To cap it all off, the DOJ issued grand jury subpoenas to California’s local election officials last week, indicating that despite repeated court losses it has no intention of backing down.
Alaska
In October, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit designed to block certification of the election result in Alaska’s Senate race if Democrat candidate Mary Peltola wins.
The reason for the lawsuit is the presence of a spoiler candidate on the ballot with a similar name as the incumbent Republican candidate Daniel Sullivan. The DOJ’s lawsuit was filed despite the Alaska Supreme Court ruling in the summer that Daniel J. Sullivan Jr could remain on the ballot as no laws had been broken.
A New York Times investigation last week alleged that Democrat-aligned operatives were involved in getting a spoiler candidate on the ballot, though Peltola’s campaign denied any involvement in the effort to get Daniel J. Sullivan Jr on the ballot. Asked about whether the common practice of putting spoiler candidates on the ballot was illegal, Todd Blanche said “it certainly should be.” On Truth Social, Trump said Peltola “should be removed from the Ballot and prosecuted.”
“I just want to clear the air: I knew nothing about any other candidates on the ballot except for me and the incumbent,” Peltola told supporters in Juneau last week. “I am not interested in tricking voters.”
On Thursday, Alaska Governor Michael Dunleavy ordered an investigation to determine whether state criminal or civil charges could be pursued against Peltola. In an interview with NewsNation, Dunleavy said that he could not commit to certifying victory for Peltola if that investigation was still ongoing.
“Dunleavy’s threat to overrule the will of Alaskan voters exemplifies what Alaskans hate about partisan politics and shows why he’s the least popular governor in the country,” a Peltola campaign spokeswoman tells WIRED. “Mary won’t be intimidated by Dunleavy, Sullivan, or any of their DC allies who are trying to steal this election from Alaskans before votes are counted—and she’s going to win this race by focusing on solutions to Sullivan’s price hiking policies and putting Alaska first.”
On Friday, the DOJ held a press conference in Anchorage and said that, in addition to their lawsuit seeking to block the certification of the election result if Peltola wins, they were also launching their own investigation to determine if federal civil or criminal charges could be applicable in this case. "We are aware of … the sprawling conspiracy to prop up Daniel J. Sullivan as a sham candidate,” said US Attorney for the District of Alaska Michael Heyman.
On Sunday, a federal judge threw out the DOJ’s lawsuit, ruling that their request likely violated Alaskans' right to a secret ballot. Hours later, the DOJ asked a federal appeals court to overturn the ruling.
Nevada
In July, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claimed that they had identified over 270,000 noncitizen voters in just four states: California, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. But that bold assertion soon started to unravel.
DHS officials had also claimed that there were 15,903 noncitizens on Nevada’s voter rolls, but then later conceded in a meeting with Nevada officials that they didn’t have evidence. The number of suspected noncitizens on voter rolls then dropped down to 185, but there was no evidence to support that claim either.
“As for the 185 individuals, our records indicate that they were citizens,” Nevada’s Deputy Attorney General Greg Ott wrote in a letter to DHS. “You have provided nothing of substance to suggest otherwise.”
“The Department accessed publicly available data from states’ voter rolls and cross referenced them with known illegal aliens in our systems,” a DHS spokesperson tells WIRED about the situation. “It’s not rocket science; it’s an easy step to secure our elections.”
Ott added in the letter that while Nevada takes allegations of noncitizen voting seriously, “it also has a strong interest in preventing the wrongful disenfranchisement of voters” and is “committed to preventing the chilling effect on the right to vote from taking actions based on unfounded and unverifiable allegations of noncitizen voting.”
Washington
Last week, the DOJ claimed that federal data appeared to show that 400 noncitizens were registered to vote in the state of Washington and demanded that officials isolate those ballots, describing them as “the tip of the iceberg.”
They received another withering letter in return: “The timing of your letter is profoundly disappointing,” wrote Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs. “If you had valid concerns about voter registrations, the time to raise them was a month ago.” Hobbs added that their decision to publicly raise their concerns so close to the election was “not a sign of good faith to ensure a free, fair, and accurate election.”
Hobbs added that the DOJ had failed to provide individualized proof that any of the people on the list were ineligible to vote, and didn’t offer any information about how they arrived at the lists of names or what sources were used. “Given the Department of Justice’s recent acts of election interference in California, Alaska, and now in Washington, it would be particularly inappropriate for Washington to simply assume the Department’s unsupported allegations here are credible.”
Texas
While not a filing by the Justice department, the Potter County Republican party has filed a lawsuit seeking to prevent the state from certifying the vote unless all Texas ballots are counted by hand.
The GOP’s basis for demanding a manual audit include purported threats from artificial intelligence’s ability to supposedly hack into virtually any voting machine undetected, a claim presented without evidence, and the presence of voting machine parts manufactured in China. Levitt, the former deputy assistant attorney general at the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, described the lawsuit as “nuts.”
“That would be the technical term,” Levitt said. “I wish that they had filed the thing in Comic Sans on the back of a Burger King placemat, because I think that would help people evaluate how serious it is.”
