They tried to overturn the 2020 US election. Now, they hold power in Trump’s Washington

The people who tried to overturn the 2020 election have more power than ever – and they plan to use it.

Bolstered by the president, they have prominent roles in key parts of the federal government. Harmeet Dhillon, a lawyer who helped advance Donald Trump’s claims of a stolen election in 2020, now leads the civil rights division of the justice department. An election denier, Heather Honey, now serves as the deputy assistant secretary for election integrity in the department of homeland security. Kurt Olsen, an attorney involved in the “stop the steal” movement, is now a special government employee investigating the 2020 election.

A movement that once pressured elected officials to bend to its whims is now part of the government.

“The call is literally coming from inside the house,” said Joanna Lydgate, co-founder and chief executive officer of the States United Democracy Center. “Now it has its tentacles in the White House, in Congress and federal agencies, and with outside groups really feeding into that infrastructure.”

The Trump administration is going after states with dubious requests for voter data that could ensnare qualified voters and will serve as an underpinning for future claims of fraud. They are working to install rules that limit voter access or sow seeds of distrust in who can vote and how. Trump has put federal agents in cities around the country, raising fears that officers could be tapped for election purposes.

“All of this, while focused on past elections, is misdirection about what the actual intention likely is, which is to interfere with the 2026 elections and attempt to delegitimize them if the president’s party doesn’t do well,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research. The results of the 2025 off-year elections, in which Democrats saw big wins, likely “strengthen the administration’s resolve to interfere in state elections and to further spread doubt about outcomes”, he said.

Some state and local elections officials say they no longer have working relationships with the federal government and do not trust the expertise they used to tap into on election security.

“The federal government is no longer a trusted partner in democracy,” Jena Griswold, the Democratic secretary of state in Colorado, told the Guardian.

Arizona secretary of state, Adrian Fontes, said: “There would have to be a significant shift in the rhetoric and the attitude coming out of senior leadership in the administration before I open my door and say, ‘Yeah, you guys, come on in.’ It’d be foolish of me to let the fox into the hen house.”

Asked for comment, the White House did not address questions about what authority Trump believes he has over elections or whether he would use emergency powers to take control of elections, as election experts fear he may.

What have they done with their power?

Trump’s 2024 win ignited the promotion of election denialism, both in the ranks of the president known to reward loyalty and in outside groups that had long been lobbying for new laws and policies that fit with their false claims of rampant election fraud.

On the first day of Trump’s term, he granted clemency to all those who stormed the Capitol in the January 6 insurrection. By November, he issued dozens of preemptive pardons for those involved in a fake electors scheme and other attempts to subvert the 2020 elections results. Ed Martin, a stop the steal activist, has assisted with pardons.

Lydgate, of States United, said the administration’s strategy on elections is “death by 1,000 cuts, with the goal of making sure that this group of election deniers can get the results that they want”.

The three key pillars of the strategy, she said, are taking power away from nonpartisan elections officials, overwhelming election administrators with frivolous work and threats, and attempting to shape the electorate in their favor by removing them from the rolls.

“There have always been political leaders who complain about the results of elections, but not in this way where you are trying to discredit the entire system and that you’re channeling the resources of the federal government in furtherance of that measure,” said Derek Tisler, counsel and manager in the Brennan Center’s elections and government program.

Election activists helped draft a bill that would require people to prove their citizenship in order to vote. When the US House passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (Save) Act, Cleta Mitchell, the leader of an influential “election integrity” group, was presented with the vote count card.

When Trump issued an executive order in March about “preserving and protecting the integrity of American elections”, it appeared similar to a “US Citizens Elections Bill of Rights” that Mitchell had promoted, with both calling for documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote. Much of the executive order has been stalled by the courts.

The quest for widespread citizenship verification among election activists convinced that high numbers of non-citizens are voting led to an expanded, controversial use of a system intended to screen for citizenship for public benefits, not voting. The Trump administration has said it expanded the service to search more databases and allow election officials to search for people in large batches instead of individually. Officials reportedly briefed Mitchell’s group to explain the new uses. Voting rights groups have sued over this expansion.

Mitchell declined to comment.

Another election denier obsession – “cleaning” rolls they allege hold scores of invalid voters, despite regular and careful maintenance by elections officials – has gotten the force of the federal government behind it. The justice department has sought the voter rolls of dozens of states in an effort to amass a national voter roll, the purpose of which is not clear.

Some states have refused to turn this over, citing voter privacy concerns and a lack of clarity. Voting rights experts and elections officials fear the administration will use the database, which is near-certain to be incomplete, to kick off fishing expeditions on past or future fraud claims.

A justice department spokesperson said the agency has authority to ensure states have “proper voter registration procedures and programs to maintain clean voter rolls containing only eligible voters in federal elections”. Data sent to the department as part of requests for voter rolls “is being screened for ineligible voter entries”, the spokesperson said.

“Clean voter rolls and basic election safeguards are requisites for free, fair, and transparent elections,” Dhillon said in a statement. “The DOJ Civil Rights Division has a statutory mandate to enforce our federal voting rights laws, and ensuring the voting public’s confidence in the integrity of our elections is a top priority of this administration.”

Harming relationships with states

It’s not just the active steps the Trump administration has taken to empower election deniers. The administration has also weakened its expertise on cybersecurity and elections, even compared to the first Trump administration. Election disinformation research and foreign interference work has been disbanded. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has seen massive cuts.

Becker, of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, said he’s spoken to election officials in both parties who don’t trust the federal government as a partner on elections right now, in “stark contrast” to the first Trump administration.

“In addition to the affirmative action of hiring conspiracy theorists into the federal government, there’s this additional negative action of dismantling the positive things the federal government had done in the past,” he said.

The Department of Homeland Security said in response to concerns about CISA’s diminished role: “Unlike the previous administration, CISA is focused squarely on executing its statutory mission: serving as the national coordinator for securing and protecting the nation’s critical infrastructure and is delivering timely, actionable cyber threat intelligence, supporting federal, state, and local partners, and defending against both nation-state and criminal cyber threats.”

States are starting to take on more roles that the federal government would have assisted with. Fontes said the federal government used to provide intelligence and technical advice, and that he had a direct line to the former head of CISA for any concerns. This year, his office has had “almost no interactions whatsoever” with the federal government.

“It’s like playing regular football, but you’ve only got an eight-man team,” he said. “We no longer have a partner. It feels like we have an adversary, and that’s not a healthy way to govern.”

Because Trump doesn’t have authority over election administration, he will rely on his allies in state and local elections roles to carry out his marching orders, said Samantha Tarazi, co-founder and chief executive officer of Voting Rights Lab.

“In the ways that you’re seeing more high-profile election deniers in positions in the federal government, you have to also keep in mind that the benches are currently also being stacked at the more grassroots level, in county boards and state boards of elections, for example,” Tarazi said.

In some places – including the Georgia state elections board and county boards in Arizona – activists already hold positions with election oversight. And a high-profile election challenge in North Carolina, where a Republican who lost a judicial election tried to disqualify voters after the fact, served as a test case for how elections could be challenged going forward.

What this means for the midterms

In the lead up to the midterms, these efforts to undermine elections will intensify, and claims will heat up that Democrats or the courts are trying to prevent the Trump administration from putting rules in place to protect elections – all part of a plan to undermine results if Republicans lose. Attempts to limit access to voting and remove voters from the rolls will expand in 2026 as well.

There will be pressure campaigns on local officials to put policies in place that Trump can’t legally install himself. If his candidates lose, he and his allies will pressure local officials not to certify results or to issue voter challenges. In short, 2026 could look a lot like 2020, depending on who wins.

Election denial activists want Trump to go further: some have called on him to declare a national emergency to stake claim over elections. Mitchell acknowledged on a podcast earlier this year that the president’s authority in elections is limited – “except where there is a threat to the national sovereignty of the United States”.

US senators have warned of the threat of a national emergency on voting, citing Trump’s hiring of election deniers in prominent roles and their potential to influence the administration.

“From day one, Donald Trump has worked to undermine our free and fair elections. He has stacked his team with election deniers like Ed Martin, Kurt Olsen, and Heather Honey, whose extremist playbook is clear: push Trump to declare a fake ‘national emergency’ to meddle in state elections because they know Republicans cannot win on their record,” California Democratic senator, Alex Padilla, said in a statement.

The courts serve as a “significant limiting factor” to Trump’s ability to steal an election, just as they did in 2020, Becker said. The decentralized nature of elections in the US also makes it hard to overturn results. But the chaos already being sown is more extreme than it was last time.

“There’s no question in my mind that there is a potential for political pressure to be exerted against election administrators,” Fontes said. “And my call to election administrators, not just here in Arizona but across the nation, is to stay strong. Just do your job.”