On January 28, 2026, FBI agents walked into a warehouse in Union City, Georgia, and started carrying out boxes. By the time they left the Fulton County Election Hub, they had roughly 650 boxes of records from the 2020 presidential election — including the county’s original paper ballots, the ones that had already been counted three separate times, each time confirming Donald Trump lost.
Nobody has been charged with anything. The ballots are still in federal custody.
Miles Taylor, who served as chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security during Trump’s first term and later revealed himself as the author of the anonymous 2018 New York Times “Resistance” op-ed, argues that Fulton County wasn’t an investigation at all.
It was a dry run.
In a post published August 11 on his Substack, DEFIANCE.org, Taylor names thirteen states where he believes the same tactic could be used on live ballots this November: Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin.
Every one of them refused to hand its voter rolls over to Trump’s Justice Department. Every one of them is hosting House or Senate races that could decide control of Congress.
The Lawsuits DOJ Keeps Losing on Purpose
Since last September, the Justice Department has demanded complete, unredacted voter registration data from nearly every state — names, addresses, driver’s license numbers, partial Social Security numbers.
A dozen red states handed them over.
Thirty states and Washington, D.C. said no, and DOJ sued every one of them.
It lost every one. As of this month, the department is 0 for 21. Judge after judge has ruled that no federal law entitles Washington to states’ private voter files.
Twelve of the first twenty rulings came from judges appointed by Republican presidents — eight of them appointed by Trump himself.
A Bush appointee in Colorado threw the case out with prejudice, meaning it can never be refiled.
A Justice Department interested in winning would have stopped after the fifth loss. Taylor’s read is that winning was never the point.
The losses are the point — they create the story. We asked to check the rolls. They refused. The courts blocked us. So nobody can prove noncitizens didn’t decide this election, and now we have to go get the ballots.
Taylor calls the result “chaos-by-design,” and the mechanics are ugly and simple. An FBI raid only needs one magistrate judge’s signature.
Getting the ballots back can take months of litigation. While boxes sit in a federal evidence room, certification stalls, losing candidates refuse to concede, and the people holding onto the evidence get to decide what it says.
Ballots Are One Lever. There Are Others.
Taylor’s piece focuses on seizures, but it fits inside a much wider pattern that Democracy Docket laid out in an August 6 analysis.
Mail-in ballots
Trump’s March executive order directed the Postal Service to deliver ballots only to voters on federally approved lists, with DHS creating the lists from immigration and Social Security databases.
Postmaster General David Steiner told lawmakers that ballots would not be delivered to voters who weren’t on the approved lists.
Nearly one in three voters — more than 48 million people — voted by mail in 2024.
On August 11, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani expanded her injunction nationwide, writing that the order threatened “increasing chaos and an erosion of trust in our democracy.”
The administration has asked the Supreme Court to lift the injunction.
The referees
On July 9, Trump fired the last three commissioners of the Election Assistance Commission — two Democrats terminated by email, the Republican allowed to resign.
The fourth had already left for the Heritage Foundation. With CISA’s election security work already gutted, the only federal agency devoted solely to election administration now has no quorum, four months before a national election.
Armed agents at the polls
Steve Bannon has promised ICE will surround polling places in November. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said at his confirmation hearing he doesn’t understand the concern.
Federal law bars armed officials from polling places except to repel armed enemies of the United States, and separately bars the military from interfering in elections.
A Marist poll this spring found more than 70% of Republicans surveyed would support it anyway.
The emergency theory
Peter Ticktin, an 80-year-old Florida lawyer who met Trump at military academy in the 1950s, has been circulating a 17-page draft executive order that would declare a national emergency over alleged foreign interference and assert federal control of the midterms.
Liza Goitein of the Brennan Center pointed out that the law it leans on, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, governs economic sanctions — it does not let a president seize voting machines owned by counties.
The Window That Actually Matters
Election Day is November 3. The next Congress is seated January 3, 2027. Taylor’s argument is that everything above is ficused on those nine weeks, because under federal law, the House itself — meaning the current Republican majority — has the final say over who gets seated.
That’s the 2020 playbook with better staffing.
Trump lost more than sixty court cases that year and it nearly worked anyway, because the goal was never a verdict. It was a “fog of confusion.”
What’s Being Done to Stop Interference in the 2026 Midterms?
State officials aren’t waiting. Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon told CNN that federal intrusion is now in the same category as a bomb threat or a power outage.
Officials from both parties told ABC News in July they’re actively gaming out scenarios.
Taylor has concrete ideas:
- Attorneys general should write the chief judges of every federal district in their states, warning them to scrutinize any warrant touching ballots or voting equipment.
- Secretaries of state should harden ballot chain-of-custody so a seizure can’t feed on ambiguity.
- Emergency motions should be drafted now, filed within hours, not weeks.
Thirty states told this administration “no,” and they won every single time.
Now we need to get ready to say it again — with documents and paperwork ready to go, and lawsuits ready to file before anyone from Washington knocks on the door.
