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President Trump has warned that the country’s election systems are vulnerable to foreign meddling. Federal agents are scouring state rolls and federal databases to try to find noncitizen voters. And the homeland security chief has asked the Justice Department to examine whether a commonly used voting machine can be trusted.
Just weeks away from the midterm elections, Mr. Trump’s longstanding attacks on the integrity of voting systems are crystallizing into what many election officials and Democrats fear is an attempt to lay the groundwork to challenge the results in November.
So far, the president has been stymied in his efforts to directly assert federal control over elections, which under the Constitution are administered by the states. Last month, the Supreme Court blocked Mr. Trump’s effort to have the U.S. Postal Service screen mail ballots.
Instead, Mr. Trump and his allies across the government have intensified another tactic: systematically laying out unsubstantiated and false claims in an effort to sow doubts about the safety of the country’s decentralized election system.
The result, election officials fear, could be an effort by administration officials to try to contest results that do not favor Republicans by citing their own findings that the vote is tainted.
Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he had grown increasingly worried that Mr. Trump may claim foreign interference in the election as a reason to seize voting machines, noting that the president made dubious claims about the country’s election defenses in a speech in July.
“President Trump will use any tool, legal or not, to try and make sure he gets the results he wants this year,” Mr. Warner said in an interview, adding that he had reached out to business leaders, former military leaders and veteran federal law enforcement officials to ask them to stand up to Mr. Trump if he contests the results.
“Good people of both parties and independents are going to have to say, ‘No, we’re not going to allow this to take place,’” he added.
White House officials maintain that the administration’s efforts are designed to ensure a fair election. When asked if the president will accept the outcome of the midterms, Lauren Bis, a White House spokeswoman, referred to his recent response to that question.
“Of course I will,” Mr. Trump said earlier this month. “But we don’t want cheating.”
Nearly every day, the president questions the reliability of the vote. At a rally Wednesday in Arizona, a state that was a major focus of his effort to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election, Mr. Trump once again made false assertions about voting machines that year.
“The damn machines were broken in Republican areas,” Mr. Trump said, repeating his lie that the election was stolen from him.
The administration’s intense focus on potential election issues comes as Mr. Trump has been conferring with outside supporters urging him to consider drastic actions. Last week, Mr. Trump met in the White House with Tina Peters, a former Colorado county clerk who was convicted of tampering with voting machines after the 2020 election, according to two people familiar with their meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private conversation.
Ms. Peters has long pushed the unsubstantiated claim that voting machines are vulnerable to foreign interference and has called for the Trump administration to inspect or take them into custody — a move legal experts say would be an overreach of federal authority.
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President Trump, who has continued to falsely claim that he won the 2020 election, has been relentless in his efforts to sow doubts about the integrity of American voting. Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times
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