Jonathan Diaz: In January 2026, the FBI showed up at the Fulton County, Georgia Elections Office in Atlanta with a search warrant.

Simone Leeper: This is Jonathan Diaz. He's a colleague of mine and the Director of Advocacy and Partnerships at Campaign Legal Center. He manages our efforts to protect election results and defend against election sabotage.

Jonathan Diaz: That search warrant said that the FBI was there to take custody of ballots from the 2020 presidential election in Fulton County and several other election materials as part of a broader investigation by the federal government into the 2020 election results. This would be bad enough if they were just doing it to try and prove that his 2020 victory was stolen from him. But it's become very clear based on statements from the White House and other members of the administration that the Department of Justice and the federal government are not afraid to use and abuse these law enforcement authorities in the future to potentially disrupt or subvert the results of future elections.

Simone Leeper: Unfortunately, what happened in Fulton County was just one of a series of concerning actions this administration has taken in the lead up to the 2026 midterms, which begs the question, are President Trump and his allies laying the groundwork to undermine our elections?

I'm Simone Leeper, and this is Democracy Decoded, a podcast where we examine our government and discuss innovative ideas that can create a stronger, more transparent, accountable, and inclusive democracy. I work for Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan organization that for 25 years has been leading a campaign to solve the wide range of challenges facing American democracy.

This season on Democracy Decoded, we're focusing on something that is at the very foundation of our country, but doesn't usually get the splashy headlines, the rule of law. When it works well, we hardly notice it. But when a presidential administration and its allies undermine or outright ignore this constitutionally enshrined cornerstone of our democracy, things start going sideways very quickly for Americans.

The rule of law ensures all people, including our most powerful public officials, are subject to the same laws and that those laws are equally enforced. It means that no one should be above the law, and it preserves the checks and balances that prevent any one branch of government or any one individual from becoming too powerful.

The rule of law also protects the rights that define us as Americans, from the freedom to speak out and express political dissent to the right to choose our own leaders. And the right to choose our own leaders is what we're going to focus on today. Our episode looks at the ways in which various actors may be trying to undermine that right through various tactics which can result in election subversion.

These days, attacks on American elections often start at the top. The president returned to power last year after repeatedly making false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. In his second term, he has continued to lay the groundwork to undermine faith in election results that don't go his way. Now, his approval rating hovers around historic lows, a midterm election is fast approaching, and his unfounded attacks on America's voting systems have only gotten louder.
Jonathan Diaz: He is desperately searching for any proof that his conspiracy theories, his falsehoods about the 2020 election are legitimate in any way. He's not found any because there isn't any. He lost.

Simone Leeper: Jonathan Diaz again. He explained further about Trump's search for evidence in Fulton County, Georgia.

Jonathan Diaz: Fulton County is a heavily democratic, heavily Black jurisdiction in metro Atlanta. The president quite famously lost the 2020 election in Georgia by a very close margin. And in fact, in the days immediately after the election made a phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger that was recorded and later released. And the president demanded that the Secretary of State, who is a Republican, find him the 13,000 or so additional votes that he would need to win the state. Secretary Raffensperger, to his credit, refused to do that and Joe Biden was certified as the victor of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.

But the president has never really let that loss go. And now that he is back in the White House and at the helm of the federal government, he is using all of the law enforcement authorities that the federal government has to attempt to prove that he won the 2020 election, which he didn't. In Fulton County and in several other states that the president lost in 2020, the Department of Justice is abusing their law enforcement authority and issuing subpoenas and obtaining search warrants to seize ballots, voting machines, and election materials.

Simone Leeper: Unfortunately, the ballot seizure in Fulton County wasn't just an isolated incident. The Department of Justice has issued subpoenas to try to obtain search warrants to seize ballots, voting machines, and election materials in several other states as well.

Jonathan Diaz: Similarly, in Arizona, the Department of Justice sent a subpoena to the president of the Arizona Senate seeking records related to an unauthorized review that the Arizona legislature did of the 2020 election results. That review, which was totally bogus and completely unauthorized by law, nevertheless confirmed that Joe Biden won the 2020 election in Arizona.

And the DOJ has sent similar subpoenas, initiated criminal investigations into the 2020 election results in Michigan, in Wisconsin, in Minnesota, all states that the president lost. So these seizures, or requests, for data related to the 2020 election are a pretty significant escalation from the federal government using its criminal investigatory authority in pursuit of the president's election denial agenda.

Simone Leeper: Not only is the federal government engaging in these harmful practices, but it's inspiring copycat behavior by the president's allies in state and local government. And that's what happened in Riverside County, California in early 2026.

Jonathan Diaz: A county sheriff in California hopped on this trend and seized over half a million ballots in Riverside County to challenge the legitimacy of a 2025 special election in California.

Simone Leeper: Sheriff Chad Bianco took possession of 650,000 ballots that had been cast by voters. It was one of the most dramatic slow- moving acts of election subversion in recent history, and it was brought to you by the dismal arms race to gerrymander state's congressional districts.

Chad Dunn: California is a blue state, but Riverside County is, depending on who you ask, slightly red, slightly blue, a purple county.

Simone Leeper: This is Chad Dunn. He leads the UCLA Voting Rights Project.

Chad Dunn: California had a kind of off- cycle election about whether or not the state could redraw their congressional districts in response to Texas and President Trump ordering Texas to redraw their congressional districts. And because the California Constitution limits redistricting to basically once a year into a commission, they had to amend the constitution, that takes a vote in California.

So there was this election, Proposition 50 overwhelmingly passed. The electorate adopted a new congressional map. Republicans in the state were unhappy with this election outcome. So a number of people then thereafter alleged that this election wasn't fair, including the president. And so Sheriff Bianco ultimately went to a local judge and was able to receive a search warrant. And the Sheriff's Department executes that search warrant by actually going into the county office and confiscating the ballots. And then took the ballots back to the sheriff's office where they purported to have sheriff's deputies who had no training whatsoever as election officials to start "recounting" the ballots.

Simone Leeper: You don't have to be an election administrator or an attorney to guess the problem here. The chain of custody of people's marked ballots is tightly prescribed in a democracy.

Jonathan Diaz: There are also specific laws in many states, including California, that limit who has access to ballots and election materials because they need to be kept secure, because we need to maintain a clear chain of custody over ballots and election materials. The county sheriff is not one of those people who is authorized to take custody of ballots in California.

Simone Leeper: Once again, my colleague Jonathan.

Jonathan Diaz: Nevertheless, the sheriff ordered his deputies to seize half a million ballots. This escalation, the use of search warrants and subpoenas to seize election materials, is really dangerous.

Chad Dunn: As soon as a law enforcement officer can exercise a search warrant and open the vault, obtain all those records, break all the seals, break all the chain of custody information, haul it down to a law enforcement office, and then have people who've never handled ballots in their lives go through them, the value of whatever information on those materials is completely gone.

Simone Leeper: Once again, Chad Dunn.

Chad Dunn: So even if you believe the government was correct that there might've been something untoward going on in election administration for which there should be an investigation and prosecution, you've destroyed all the evidence that you need to prove that offense. And so the UCLA Voting Rights Project filed a case with the California Supreme Court to put a stop to what we called an illegal recount and an illegal election contest.

Jonathan Diaz: Campaign Legal Center filed an amicus brief on behalf of California- based civic engagement and membership organizations, including organizations with members in Riverside County, arguing that the sheriff's actions violated California state law and asking the California Supreme Court to decide this issue quickly, not just because the custody of those ballots was in question, but also because of what this represents for elections across the country. We don't want this action by the Riverside County Sheriff to be the first in a series of dominoes. We don't want other law enforcement officials in other states to get ideas and think, oh, maybe I can go and seize ballots and mess with elections in my jurisdiction.

Simone Leeper: Fortunately for voters, at the end of September, the California Supreme Court ordered the Riverside County Sheriff to return the hundreds of thousands of illegally seized ballots, saying his actions violated state law and jeopardized key election protections. This decision echoed what Campaign Legal Center and our clients told the court. No one, including law enforcement, is above the laws that safeguard our elections.

But when a California sheriff abducts ballots or the Department of Justice badgers election offices, it doesn't just affect that election, it creates misinformation. A reasonable person could ask why would the sheriff or the DOJ or the president get involved if there weren't problems with these elections? But of course, that very doubt undermines elections that time and time again judges have found to be accurate and secure.

Jonathan Diaz: Election misinformation is a huge problem for American
democracy-

Simone Leeper: Jonathan Diaz of Campaign Legal Center.

Jonathan Diaz: ... especially today. From specific, kind of targeted instances like misinformation about the date or time or location of elections that's designed to keep people from voting to broad narratives about the security or integrity of our elections.

Chad Dunn: There's all kinds of election misinformation and it does a disservice to our democracy.

Simone Leeper: Chad Dunn of the UCLA Voting Rights Project.

Chad Dunn: What we're really seeing develop in the last few years that really I hadn't been familiar with other than in the history books is that the government engaging in misinformation and reporting of the election outcomes. And so you're seeing a number of semi- officials who are coming in and alleging that they have secret information or that they have access to the ballots and election materials in a way other people don't, and they performed some kind of audit or investigation, and they've concluded that the election outcome was actually 500 votes the other direction and such and such should have been elected instead of so- and- so.

Simone Leeper: All of this is especially egregious because our elections are incredibly safe and secure.

Chad Dunn: We have things like poll watchers. You have tracking serial numbers and barcodes on ballots and records. You have complete transparency of election materials. There are multiple people around ballots at any given time, so if somebody wants to do something wrong, there are multiple witnesses to see them doing something wrong. There are redundancies in the record keeping. Anybody ever has any question about whether they can rely on their election materials, and I can say this without regard to a specific location.

You go to any central count in the United States of America and watch them tabulate the votes, you will walk out absolutely convinced that you can count on the election results because those systems are so redundant and transparent and excellent. But what we're seeing now is folks who either don't know better or are interested in engaging in misinformation, and the trouble is is that people sitting at home hear from their trusted political speakers and they start to believe some of this stuff.

Jonathan Diaz: The overall goal in spreading false information about our elections is to sow fear and distrust among the American public in our election system. That has two effects that they're going for. First, it depresses participation because if people think that the whole system is so broken and so rigged that their vote doesn't matter, they won't turn out and vote. And secondly, by introducing doubt in the minds of the public over whether or not the election is legitimate, it allows people like the president and his allies to not just publicly question results that they don't like, but to take active steps to overturn those results with some degree of either a lack of public opposition or active public support because they've convinced a certain segment of the public that the election was broken or stolen in some way.

So spreading false information about who is voting, how they're voting, about how elections are being run is the kind of necessary first step in the plot to overturn election results that are unfavorable to the president and his party.

Chad Dunn: Polling in support of free democracy and the right to vote is still really high, but what we've seen over the history of humankind is the more government officials and private actors are able to convince another percentage of the public that the system is rigged, that the elections can't be trusted, that the outcome isn't really what they announce it as, the more and more people start to turn to other solutions, some sort of autocratic system that our country has worked hard to stay out of as a democracy.

Simone Leeper: America has always faced challenges to its democracy from the very authoring of the Constitution, but we are in a unique moment. We have a duly elected president actively waging a campaign to discredit elections. He has even issued executive orders that aim to exert authority over state's elections, even as legal experts confirm that he has no legal grounds on which to claim that authority.

Jonathan Diaz: So I don't think it is unreasonable to be worried about the possibility of election subversion or election sabotage, especially through the federal government's law enforcement authority and the abuse of DOJ and DHS and their component agencies to either intimidate voters or threaten election workers or somehow try and disrupt or interfere with the midterm elections in 2026.

Simone Leeper: While Jonathan is concerned about the upcoming midterms, he also thinks some of the catastrophizing people are engaging in isn't warranted.

Jonathan Diaz: I've seen some folks really panic and say things like, "Well, he's just going to cancel the midterm elections." That's probably going too far. The president, both legally and functionally, just he can't cancel the election. He doesn't run the election. He can't threaten to fire state and local election workers if they don't cancel the election, they don't work for him. The president's ability to actually functionally affect the midterm elections is pretty limited, but it's not zero. And we've seen during this second Trump term that the president and his allies are willing to go far beyond what the law allows to enforce their will on the American people.

Simone Leeper: From his first weeks back in office, the president took aim at our election infrastructure, issuing a series of executive orders aimed at making voting harder, voting districts less representative, ballots easier to tamper with, and voters more vulnerable to being thrown off voting roles.

Jonathan Diaz: President Trump has signed two executive orders directly related to elections. The first was signed in March of 2025, and it directed several federal agencies to change the rules for federal elections, mostly aimed at forcing voters to provide documents proving their US citizenship in order to register to vote for federal elections. It also attempted to invalidate the ballot receipt deadlines in 17 states that allowed for ballots to be received up to a certain number of days after election day, so long as they were cast or postmarked by election day.

Fortunately, under the constitution and federal law, the president has no power to order any of these things. The president has no authority to set election qualifications for voters, has no authority to set voter registration rules. He has no power to set aside state laws that determine when your ballot has to be received by.
So on behalf of LULAC, the League of United Latin American Citizens, Secure Families Initiative, an organization of military and overseas families, and the Arizona Students Association, which represents hundreds of thousands of students in Arizona, CLC and our partners at Democracy Defenders Fund sued the administration over this executive order. We were victorious in that lawsuit and our federal court in DC issued an order blocking the implementation and enforcement of several key provisions in that lawsuit.

Simone Leeper: Unfortunately, things didn't end there.

Jonathan Diaz: Despite his loss in court over the first executive order in March of 2026, the president took another swing and issued a second voting executive order, this one mostly targeting mail- in voting. The order directed several federal agencies, most of them within the Department of Homeland Security, to create a national database of eligible voters whose citizenship has been verified by the federal government and to use that database to determine whether people are eligible to vote in general and to vote by mail.

The order also told the US Postal Service that they needed to develop their own list of voters eligible to vote by mail in each state. There's a few problems with that. Number one, the government has no authority to create a national citizenship registry. They have no ability to create an accurate citizenship database because they don't have that information, and they certainly don't have any power to force states or USPS to use their federal citizenship database to decide who gets to vote or how.

So there've been a number of lawsuits filed challenging the second executive order, including another lawsuit brought by CLC with Democracy Defenders Fund on behalf of the same plaintiffs who challenged the first order. So again, the president tried to enforce his will on elections through an executive order, and again, federal courts have blocked that order and found that the president just doesn't have the power to do that.

Simone Leeper: Even the highest court in the land weighed in on this executive order. The government appealed lower court orders all the way up to the Supreme Court. In a win for voters, the court denied the government's application for a stay, leaving the lower court orders in place and ensuring that voting by mail remains in place for the 2026 midterm elections. Meanwhile, President Trump has continued to threaten to nationalize voting. Nationalizing elections, that is giving the federal government greater power to regulate and run elections, would be a radical departure from America's tried and true system. But the Constitution is clear, states, not the president, own the powers that Trump is reaching for.

Jonathan Diaz: The United States by design has a largely decentralized election system. Election rules are set by the states. Congress can set national standards or rules around election administration, but primarily election law is creation of the states. And so that's one of the reasons why in the realm of elections, the president has been comparably less able to directly interfere than in other areas like immigration, where the federal government and the president have a lot of power and a lot of authority. Just because of our constitutional design, our elections structure that's provided a really robust defense against federal intrusion.

Chad Dunn: I spent the first part of my career advocating that there be a larger federal role in elections. And in fact, from the civil rights era, the 1960s till present, a lot of us who support the equal right to vote for all citizens very much advocated for a bigger federal government involvement.

Simone Leeper: Once again, Chad Dunn of UCLA. Like so many people, the current state of affairs disorients him. He's of a generation that traditionally looked to the federal government to protect fair elections and to be, if nothing else, a reliable arbiter of the law.

Chad Dunn: Many of us viewed the federal government as the firemen per se for voting rights. That's who you called when there was a voting rights problem. What has happened recently though, especially during the Trump administration, is that the federal government has been trying to exercise its power in suppressive ways. And so people like me who used to view federalism in the election context as somewhat bad, it allowed Texas and Florida and North Carolina to get away with vote suppression while other states were empowering and enfranchising voters now have to rethink our priors. As we see if you concentrate election power in one official, how damaging that can be if it gets in the hands of somebody that has just deeply different views about how wide the scope of American democracy ought to be.

Simone Leeper: Although his executive orders have been blocked by the courts, President Trump still has power to shape the perception and reality of elections. After losing in 2020, his handling of election security has been erratic at best. As just one example, in his second term, the president has worked to defund and defang CISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which was created in 2018 to protect elections from outside interference. Even more alarming, he continues to install officials throughout the federal government who have made clear that they do not trust American elections.

Jonathan Diaz: In his second term, President Trump has appointed quite a few proponents of the false narratives around the 2020 election into key roles at the White House and other federal agencies, including some roles that have direct oversight over the federal government's election operations. Historically, the federal government, at least in recent decades, has played a key role in making sure that our elections are safe, secure, and accurate by providing resources to states to protect elections from outside threats.

But that's largely gone away. Now, the federal government is staffed at the highest levels by individuals with a history of supporting conspiracy theories and falsehoods about our elections and who have spent the better part of the last decade actively undermining public trust in our election system. It includes a number of attorneys and activists who were instrumental in President Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election. And although they were unsuccessful, now that they are occupying senior positions in the federal government, they are abusing their authority to impose their agenda on election administration across the country.

Simone Leeper: Jonathan is concerned, but again, cautions us not to blow this out of proportion.

Jonathan Diaz: It's a huge problem when the people who run several of our federal law enforcement agencies and people in the White House don't believe in free and fair elections. And have spent their careers peddling conspiracy theories about elections that are totally detached from reality, and using those conspiracy theories to justify restrictions on the right to vote. Those are the people who are now in charge of the federal government, and that is scary. Fortunately, the actual power of the federal government to interfere with elections is limited.

Simone Leeper: But even if that power is limited, Jonathan says there is still a need for new laws.

Jonathan Diaz: So although states still have and will continue to have the primary responsibility for actually running elections, Congress does have a really important role to play here, and Congress has the power to pass laws that govern federal elections nationwide. They can eliminate a lot of the practices and procedures and laws that states have adopted that restrict access to voting or that make it easier for bad actors to threaten or undermine election results.

Congress can also legislate restrictions into the executive branch. For a long time, we have operated under the assumption that DOJ would remain independent from the White House, that there would be a certain level of separation between the people who are enforcing laws and the politicians running the administration. That's gone. That doesn't exist under this administration. And so there's a real need for laws, enforceable laws passed by Congress to reinforce the limitations on DHS and DOJ's ability to interfere with state and local elections, to establish national standards to make sure that voting access is the same no matter what state you live in.

Chad Dunn: I'm hopeful at this moment that the courts are holding the line in terms of the constitution and saying, look, people have reasonable disagreements and people have unreasonable disagreements about how elections ought to be run, but the form for that is state legislatures and Congress. It's not for the White House, a governor, mayor, or some executive branch official.

Simone Leeper: Chad Dunn again.

Chad Dunn: The legislative process really does do a reasonably good job of averaging out bad ideas, taking reasonably good ideas, but working on the possible disruptive effects they could have and having solutions to those at the same time. And so I think as Americans, the number one thing we can do if we care about our election outcomes is insist that our laws are adopted by our elected officials and our legislature in Congress.

Simone Leeper: After hearing everything that both our guests today had to say, one thing became clear to me, our democracy is under threat, but attempts to subvert our elections will not be successful. There are real challenges ahead, but they are not insurmountable. Millions of Americans care deeply about the health of our democracy, and organizations like Campaign Legal Center are working tirelessly to defend it. By protecting the freedom to vote and calling on our lawmakers to do the same, we can ensure that our democratic system remains resilient. The future of our elections depends on the actions we take today.

Next time on Democracy Decoded, we'll take a look at how the definition of American citizenship is under attack and how the president is trying tovdeprive certain citizens of their democratic rights.

This season of Democracy Decoded is produced by JAR Podcast Solutions for Campaign Legal Center. Campaign Legal Center is a nonpartisan legal organization dedicated to solving the wide range of challenges facing American democracy. For a quarter- century, Campaign Legal Center has been leading a campaign for democracy in courtrooms and capitals across the country. A campaign for voting rights and fair representation, a campaign to hold our government and elected officials accountable, a campaign to limit the corrosive influence of big money in our elections, and a campaign for the rule of law so every American can participate meaningfully in the democratic process.

Today, the threats to our democracy go beyond anything we could have imagined when we first opened our doors. During this pivotal time for our democracy, Campaign Legal Center needs support to continue to fight on behalf of the American people. Your tax- deductible donation directly funds our efforts to do just that. If you would like to support our work, visit campaignlegal.org and click on the donate button.

Special thanks to our guests, Jonathan Diaz and Chad Dunn. I'm your host, Simone Leeper. Thanks so much for listening. If you've learned something new today, find us on your podcast platform of choice and hit subscribe.

You'll get updates as we release new episodes. Leading this production for Campaign Legal Center are Casey Atkins, multimedia manager, and Madeline Greenberg, communications associate. This podcast was produced by Sam Eifling, editing and mixing by Luke Batiot.

Democracy Decoded is a member of the Democracy Group, a network of podcasts dedicated to engaging in civil discourse, inspiring civic engagement, and exploring the future of our democracy. You can learn more at democracygroup.org.