Military Meddling at the Polls

As the 2026 midterm elections approach, the Trump administration has put forward increasingly improbable claims about the security of election administration in the United States. This escalating rhetoric has led to concern among many observers, including some members of Congress, that the administration may attempt to use national security resources—including the military—to administer or otherwise intercede in the election.

These concerns, while troubling, are not simply wild speculation. After losing the 2020 election, US President Donald Trump began to make threats about using the US military to intervene on his behalf—the most prominent of which was the threat to use military forces to take custody of ballots in states where Trump had lost. Recent reporting suggests that these desires have not abated. At the beginning of 2026, Trump admitted in an interview with The New York Times that he regretted not ordering the National Guard to seize voting machines in swing states.

Indeed, Trump has already demonstrated a willingness to break both norms and precedents in the use of the military in domestic settings during his second term. In June 2025, he federalized the California National Guard against the wishes of California Governor Gavin Newson. A federal judge ultimately found that the deployment had violated the Posse Comitatus Act because of the troops’ support for federal law enforcement. Later that year, Trump federalized the Illinois National Guard—also over the objections of Illinois Governor JB Pritzker—using a justification that the US Supreme Court ultimately found to be unlawful. Trump further used his authority in 2025 to deploy National Guard forces from 32 states to the streets of Washington, DC, in an unprecedented and effectively open-ended deployment under the auspices of fighting crime—a case that is still being litigated in the court system. In another norm-breaking move, the administration has refused to rule out the deployment of military forces (either National Guard or Active Duty) to polling places during the 2026 midterm elections—a move that would be effectively without precedent in the United States. Other than for the administration of elections during and immediately after the Civil War, federal military forces have played no role in election administration and execution. This is both intentional and normative: There are a number of laws that prevent military forces from being involved in election administration as well as a well-documented public aversion to having uniformed military forces involved in domestic affairs in the United States.

In August 2026, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine replied to a query from Senator Elise Slotkin (D-MI) confirming that the US military had no plans to intervene in the upcoming midterm elections. The reply was reassuring to dedicated election-watchers, yet failed in many ways to realistically account for the ways in which militaries around the world can be and are used to interfere in elections. Indeed, it is precisely because there is so little precedent for domestic military involvement in the United States that many US-based experts are unsure about what election interference may look like. Seizing ballots, after all, would be extreme, and military leaders should recognize an order to do so as unlawful. Yet the president’s power over military forces is expansive. It is therefore worth investigating when and how national security resources may be used in the lead-up to and aftermath of elections in the United States.

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