Voting rights advocates are raising fears that the Trump administration may attempt to "hijack" the 2026 election after a new report revealed that a top election integrity official suggested invoking a "national emergency" to justify a federal takeover of state-run election processes.
The New York Times reported on Wednesday that during a call in March with right-wing activists, the woman who has since been appointed to President Donald Trump's newly created "election integrity" position within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had suggested that the president could declare a "national emergency" to give his government new authority to dictate election rules typically decided by state and local governments.
Heather Honey, formerly a Pennsylvania-based private investigator who came to prominence as a leading proponent of Trump's efforts to overturn his 2020 loss to former President Joe Biden, said this authority would come from "an actual investigation" of the loss, which she has baselessly argued was marred by widespread fraud.
In the US, elections are administered by states, with the president having no legal authority over how they are carried out. But Honey suggested that the Trump administration has "some additional powers that don't exist right now," and that by using the investigation as a pretext, "we can take these other steps without Congress and we can mandate that states do things and so on."
Seeming to recognize the extreme step she was proposing, Honey added: "I don't know if that's really feasible and if the people around the president would let him test that theory."
The 2020 election was subject to numerous state-level recounts and audits and over 60 failed court challenges in state and federal jurisdictions—many of which were dismissed by Republican and Trump-appointed judges for lack of merit and credible evidence.
An investigation by the Associated Press last year found that across the six battleground states Trump claimed were beset by widespread fraud, only 475 individual ballots out of millions of votes cast were flagged by election officials as "potentially" affected by fraud. Even if every single one of the ballots had been proven fraudulent, it would not have been nearly enough to swing the election result in Trump's favor.
Meanwhile, several aides and officials who served Trump during the waning days of his first administration testified before the January 6 commission that the president was well aware he'd lost the election, but continued to push false claims of fraud in an effort to cling to power.
Matt Crane, a former Republican election official who served until earlier this year as a consultant for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)—which Trump recently purged of election experts—told the Times that officials who have roposed relitigating the 2020 election "are not coming with an objective frame of mind to say, 'Let's look at the facts and see where that takes us.'"
"They have their destination in mind and cherry-pick facts to help stand up their crazy theories, so there's nothing objective about it," he said.
Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the administration had begun this effort to reboot the election fraud narrative, with Trump tapping former campaign lawyer and "Stop the Steal" proponent Kurt Olsen as a "special government employee" tasked with reinvestigating 2020. Olsen has reportedly already begun asking intelligence agencies for information about the 2020 election and has also suggested he wants to purge government employees who are disloyal to Trump.
Trump has also sought to implement many of the proposals from the "US Citizens Elections Bill of Rights," proposed by the Election Integrity Network (EIN), a group of pro-Trump election deniers, of which Honey is a member. The group has become deeply influential during Trump's second term, receiving a briefing from the DHS in June on how a database run by the department can be used to verify the citizenship status of registered voters, according to a report from Democracy Docket.
The group has called for new restrictions on mail-in ballots, early voting, and to make it easier for voter rolls to be scrubbed and for election results to be challenged. Many of these proposals have made it in some form or another into Trump's executive order on elections and the SAVE Act, which Republicans passed through the House earlier this year, that would require all voters to show passports or birth certificates in order to register to vote, which voting rights groups have denounced as a "modern-day poll tax."
As Max Flugrath, the communications director for the voting rights group Fair Fight Action, noted, "Judges have blocked Trump's March executive order on elections—a move courts called an overreach that belongs to the states, not the White House."
"Despite the rulings, Trump allies are pressing ahead," Flugrath said. "The DOJ is collecting massive voter roll data, DHS is pressuring states to upload files, and Honey is spreading false claims and framing the directives as 'best practices.' It's election disinformation rebranded as policy." Those actions, he said, are being urged on by the EIN, which has promoted Trump "pushing the limits of executive power."
Honey is just one of many EIN members with a direct line of communication to Trump.
Trump has also elevated a leading EIN operative, Marcy McCarthy—who also pushed debunked theories of widespread illegal voting in Georgia—to be CISA's director of public affairs.
EIN's founder, Cleta Mitchell, was notably one of the lawyers present on Trump's phone call in January 2021 in which he attempted to pressure Georgia election officials to "find" him enough votes to be declared the winner of the state, which resulted in him being indicted three years later.
On a podcast with a Christian nationalist influencer last month, Mitchell likewise pushed the idea that Trump could use emergency powers to assert control over the election.
"The president's authority is limited in his role with regard to elections except where there is a threat to the national sovereignty of the United States—as I think that we can establish with the porous system that we have," she said.
She seemed to suggest Trump was on board with the idea, saying, "I think maybe the president is thinking that he will exercise some emergency powers to protect the federal elections going forward."
Flugrath said these statements, and those reported by the Times, "should be a five-alarm fire," as they suggest Trump will use past false claims of voter fraud as "a cover to hijack elections" in the future.
He noted that in April, Trump himself seemed to echo EIN's theories of sweeping authority, saying during a speech that "we're gonna get good elections pretty soon" because "the states are just an agent of the federal government."
"Trump is embedding EIN operatives into the government to push his election takeover agenda, all built on lies about his 2020 loss," Flugrath said. "EIN seems to be using a playbook to decimate the independence and fairness of elections: Sow doubt in elections, install loyalists in government, use doubt sowed to push an 'emergency,' and change election rules."
"It's a federal strategy to control elections and rig our democracy," he continued. "Independent elections are the foundation of freedom. If Trump can control our elections, he can dismantle other checks on power. Protecting free, state-run elections is the firewall between democracy and authoritarianism."
