Unprecedented concerns for election officials. Hold the line America against the autocrat.
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State and local elections officials regularly plan for floods, fires and computer glitches.
This year, they are teaching poll workers what to do if immigration enforcement officers show up. They are drilling them about the statute that bars federal agents from voting places. They are running through the limits of what federal monitors may and may not do on Election Day.
Much of the preparations for Nov. 3 can be distilled into one overarching concern — that the Trump administration will somehow attempt to meddle with the voting process or the results. The tricky part, officials said, is predicting what shape that interference might take while also recognizing that it might not materialize at all.
“This is the first time ever that we have had to engage in scenario planning to safeguard against potential federal interference in elections,” said Shenna Bellows, the secretary of state in Maine. “It seems like the federal government is now adversarial to the states.”
It remains to be seen whether any of these scenarios will play out. Many federal officials have dismissed the idea that agents or soldiers could be sent to the polls, and the courts have blocked most of President Trump’s efforts to insert the federal government into state and local election administration.
Even so, the Trump Administration has already taken significant steps to try to shape the voting process this year. Mr. Trump has sought to sow doubt about the security of elections. His administration has demanded that states turn over voter lists, and has tried unsuccessfully to change mail voting rules. Last week, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit in Alaska seeking to pre-emptively block the certification of the Senate race there if the Republican candidate loses by a narrow margin.
With one week until Election Day, officials around the country say that they are bracing for even more unwanted and potentially undemocratic federal intervention — even as they can’t be sure what, if anything, the Trump Administration might do. To prepare, secretaries of state and other state and local officials have met with lawyers and local law enforcement agencies, trained poll workers and held meetings to consider what could come next.
Among their top concerns: that Mr. Trump’s attacks on the integrity of American voting systems could form the basis for challenging the legitimacy of the results. Along with that unease comes the worry that any federal intervention could further undermine public confidence in elections and cause voters to stay home.
The next step is a guessing game, they said.
Could federal officials try to seize ballots, as they did earlier this year in Fulton County, Ga., as part of a criminal investigation that thus far hasn’t resulted in any charges?
Could Mr. Trump deploy Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel or other federal agents to polling sites, even though his homeland security chief has said I.C.E. will not patrol polling stations and would be deployed to such an area only to investigate “specific threats?”
Might he invoke the Insurrection Act and somehow summon the military in connection with the election? Mr. Trump has refused to rule out the possibility.
Barb Byrum, the clerk of Ingham County, Mich., said she was already concerned by some actions of the Trump administration, including the Justice Department’s deployment of federal election monitors to her county during the August primary. She said it was the first such deployment of federal monitors to her county in her nearly 14 years as clerk.
“The feds suggested that there were long lines, voters were not offered provisional ballots and clerks and precinct workers failed to use the qualified voter file to check voters,” she said. “All of which is simply not true.”
After the primary, Ms. Byrum put her election workers through additional training on what federal monitors were and were not permitted to do under state law.
“They can watch the process,” Ms. Byrum said. “They can’t touch anything, they can’t ask any questions. They can literally just watch — monitor.”
Ms. Byrum said she found it disheartening that she now considered the federal government a potential threat to the election.
During a recent online forum, Lisa Lyons, the clerk and registrar of deeds in Kent County, Mich., said her staff regularly communicated with her government’s legal team about potential troubles.
“We’re going to follow the law,” she said. “We’re going to follow the Constitution. We’re going to protect our election equipment.”