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.
Ed Martin, a former senior Justice Department official, told Real America’s Voice that Ms. Peters and the president had discussed “election integrity,” saying both are concerned that foreign actors could exploit election vulnerabilities to change votes. That unsubstantiated claim was echoed this summer by Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary.
Ms. Bis declined to comment on the meeting, as did Peter Ticktin, a lawyer who has represented both the president and Ms. Peters.
Despite all the inflammatory rhetoric, it is unclear that Mr. Trump would actually pursue the extreme measures his supporters are seeking. And election experts note that the administration’s attempts to assert more federal control over voting have been repeatedly blocked by the courts.
“There’s been a lot of posturing,” said Lawrence Norden, who oversees the elections and government program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, noting that election workers across the country are committed to ensuring a fair vote. “I think mostly election officials are tuning this out. They have elections to run.”
Still, some state and local officials say they are now taking preparations to defend their elections against what used to be a reliable ally: the federal government.
Deidre Henderson, the Republican lieutenant governor of Utah, said that for the first time her state had planned for a situation involving such potential interference, including the prospect of a federal agent showing up to a polling station with a warrant.
“We have had to figure out how to handle some measure of maybe interference from federal officials,” Ms. Henderson said during a George Washington University panel this month. “I don’t think we’ve ever had to think about that before and I don’t necessarily expect it, but right now it would be foolish to not at least think through some scenarios.”
Some voting rights advocates are also worried that a longstanding program by the Justice Department to deploy federal monitors to the polls to protect the civil rights of voters could instead be used to interfere with the elections.
During Wyoming’s primaries in August, two Justice Department monitors tried to interview voters and examine voting machines at polling places, local officials said. Gov. Mark Gordon, a Republican, called their actions “aggressive, unexpected, disruptive,” saying it “certainly didn’t seem to show respect for the state.”
In an expansion of past efforts, the department plans to have 1,000 monitors in all 50 states this year. The N.A.A.C.P. has sued, seeking information about the deployment. “This administration has made clear its intent to disrupt and interfere with the way elections are run in our country,” said Kristen Clarke, the group’s general counsel.
Attorney General Todd Blanche has defended the program, telling Fox News earlier this month that the monitors “are making sure federal law is being enforced appropriately.”
Mr. Trump has been relentless in his efforts to sow doubts about the integrity of American elections, singling out a variety of issues that he claims are suspicious, whether voting by mail or California’s slow vote counting.
At a rally in Alaska this week, Trump took aim at the state’s ranked-choice voting system, calling it a “way to cheat.” He said he had instructed the U.S. attorney in Alaska to closely monitor vote tallies there.
Over the last year, his administration has pushed to find evidence to support his claims. Mr. Trump and Mr. Mullin asserted this summer that 278,000 noncitizens were registered to vote across multiple states, a claim that the government has not been able to substantiate. Homeland security officials have mobilized hundreds of agents to try to find noncitizen voters.
Ms. Bis said Mr. Trump’s actions were meant to ensure the country had “free and fair elections.”
“Every American should be asking why the radical left continues to fight against common-sense election integrity measures, like voter ID and citizenship verification, to make sure only Americans decide our elections,” she said.
Mr. Trump has also left open the possibility of taking more extreme steps. He has refused to rule out invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy the military in connection with the elections, a move encouraged by some of his supporters.
“You have the right to declare a national security emergency for elections,” Wayne Allyn Root, a conservative TV and radio host, told Mr. Trump during an interview in August, referring to a legally dubious theory popular among right-wing election activists.
“Let me just say that stranger things have happened,” Mr. Trump responded. “I’ll leave it at that.”
Mr. Ticktin, who took part in the June meeting with the president and Ms. Peters and says he maintains “pretty direct” communication with Mr. Trump, said he believes the president would consider deploying the military in connection with the midterms.
If many Republicans lose their seats “and we can show that there’s something that was wrong with the election, then it could lead to a serious situation such as martial law or something,” he said.
In late August, the president’s top military adviser, Gen. Dan Caine, said there were no plans for the armed forces to deploy troops in relation to the elections.
The president also said earlier this year that he regretted not seizing voting machines in the 2020 election. Ms. Peters, who also met with Mr. Trump in June, has said she has urged Mr. Trump to take possession of voting machines she claims were constructed with foreign-made equipment.
“I said, ‘We are going to lose this country if we don’t get rid of these machines before the midterms,’” she told the pro-Trump outlet Lindell TV. Ms. Peters also said she had urged him to fire members of an independent, bipartisan commission that supports states in administering their elections.
Mr. Trump forced out the panel’s members in July.
The lobbying efforts by election denialists echoes the lead-up to the assault by Mr. Trump’s supporters on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to try to stop the certification of the 2020 election. At the time, a number of conspiracy theorists pressed Mr. Trump on novel ways to try to overturn that election.
At the time, Mr. Trump was flanked by advisers who were willing to push back on such moves. He is now surrounded by loyalists who are judged not so much on their legal assessments, but rather their ability to turn the president’s wishes into action.
They include top policy adviser Stephen Miller, who has been heavily involved in the efforts to assert more federal control over elections, according to according to people with knowledge of his efforts.
Mr. Miller, who did not return requests for comment, circulated a draft of an executive order to limit mail voting months before Mr. Trump signed a similar version in March. Some of Mr. Trump’s aides initially pushed back on the order because they felt it was too draconian, according to the people familiar with the events.
But Mr. Trump decided to sign the order, which was ultimately blocked by the Supreme Court, once it became clear that his efforts to have the Senate pass legislation that would restrict mail voting were futile.
Maggie Haberman, Devlin Barrett and Julian E. Barnes contributed reporting.