{"id":225795,"date":"2026-09-28T02:29:22","date_gmt":"2026-09-28T02:29:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/trump-allies-could-use-midterms-counting-window-to-disrupt-results-experts-warn-the-guardian\/"},"modified":"2026-09-28T02:29:22","modified_gmt":"2026-09-28T02:29:22","slug":"trump-allies-could-use-midterms-counting-window-to-disrupt-results-experts-warn-the-guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/trump-allies-could-use-midterms-counting-window-to-disrupt-results-experts-warn-the-guardian\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump allies could use midterms \u2018counting window\u2019 to disrupt results, experts warn – The Guardian"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fears grow that loyalists in key states could use critical period when votes are counted to amplify false claims
Election experts have warned Donald Trump\u2019s administration could use the crucial hours and days after November\u2019s midterm elections to disrupt the results after struggling to enforce a crackdown on voting.
With less than six weeks remaining until polls close, and control of US Congress in the balance, the post-election \u201ccounting window\u201d is seen as as a particularly vulnerable moment by former US federal government officials.
While the US president\u2019s bid to impose sweeping restrictions on mail-in ballots was rejected by the supreme court<\/a> earlier this month, there is apprehension that Trump and his allies could use the period while votes are counted to amplify unfounded allegations in a bid to challenge results that don\u2019t go their way.
\u201cI think because the administration has lost so many of their attempts to disrupt the normal process in court, that they are going to use the claim of foreign interference at the end of voting days to either seize equipment or to seize ballots, whether they\u2019re legally justified to do so or not,\u201d Caitlin Durkovich, a former deputy homeland security adviser for resilience and response on the national security council, told a briefing staged by the Brennan Center for Justice earlier this week.
Some states take days \u2013 even weeks, in California\u2019s case \u2013 to complete a count of votes after an election. Control of the House of Representatives and Senate may hinge on results in states with a delayed result.
\u201cThat period, that waiting time, is where doubt begins to surface,\u201d Durkovich said on Tuesday. \u201cAnd when it is then amplified by foreign actors and, frankly, by domestic actors, it starts to cause distrust in the integrity of the process.\u201d
State-level elections officials are trying to prepare the public to understand the process now, to head off a manufactured controversy later, said Larry Norden, vice-president of the elections and government program at the Brennan Center. \u201cTo me, this is the biggest threat right now,\u201d he said.
\u201cI think a lot of people may think just because they\u2019re seeing all these headlines being thrown at them that things have changed \u2013 that it\u2019s become more difficult to vote,\u201d added Norden. \u201cIn the history of American elections in some ways, there have never been more options for the way that people can vote, and they are still in place going into this election.\u201d
Early voting eliminates most of the threats voters apprehend ahead of an election, he suggested. \u201cThe earlier they vote, the more secure they can feel that their vote is going to count, and I think that\u2019s a really important message for us to be delivering to people.\u201d
The power of doubt about the validity of votes, and the risk of Trump unveiling \u201cemergency\u201d measures on ballots or voting machines<\/a> around election day, looms large.
\u201cEvery state in the country now has live ballots out,\u201d said Ben Hovland, former chair of the Election Assistance Commission. \u201cThat really means the election is here, and it means that needs to be taken into consideration for any court rulings we\u2019re looking at.\u201d
A supreme court decision this month upheld<\/a> a lower-court injunction on the Trump administration using the US Postal Service and the Department of Homeland Security to vet mail-in ballot deliveries.
But groups such as the NAACP, the National Urban League and other rights organizations remain concerned about the Trump administration\u2019s insistent claim \u2013 without evidence \u2013 that the 2026 midterm elections will be illegitimate unless the federal government intervenes.
Normally, the Department of Justice and the FBI enter a \u201cquiet period\u201d just ahead of elections, to avoid influencing the results. That has not been the case this year.
The Department of Homeland Security continues to pursue voter-roll lists in states that would not turn them over voluntarily. The federal government has asked states to retain their 2024 election documentation for later inquiries. And DHS is pursuing an independent \u201cunlawful voter initiative\u201d to find non-citizen voters on state rolls, one that an anonymous whistleblower<\/a> told congress last week that is using \u201chighly questionable data\u201d and may be unlawful.
The federal government\u2019s claims of illegally-registered voters \u2013 claiming numbers that do not bear up under scrutiny \u2013 and Trump\u2019s rhetoric alleging fraud without evidence, \u201cback up a narrative of fraud to undermine confidence in the elections\u201d, Hovland said.
Much of the president\u2019s election rhetoric revolves around foreign interference. Experts make a distinction between foreign influence \u2013 propaganda, essentially \u2013 and foreign interference , or directly manipulating vote counts.
\u201cIt\u2019s very important for people to understand that we don\u2019t have any examples of a country trying to interfere in the electoral process, in that technical process,\u201d said Beth Sanner, a former deputy director of national intelligence who is now director for geopolitics and strategy at International Capital Strategies.
\u201cIt just didn\u2019t happen,\u201d she said. \u201cIt didn\u2019t happen in 2020.\u201d
Election security has improved across the country, partially as a reaction to false claims about Trump\u2019s 2020 defeat.
\u201cEvery state audits its results,\u201d said Geoff Hales, former chief of joint cyber defense collaborative partnerships at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA. \u201cElection officials across the country have really taken cybersecurity seriously.\u201d
Despite the president\u2019s insistence that the country faces a foreign threat to elections, Hale said the federal government has sharply cut staff and spending on elections security at CISA, and with it the technical assistance that once flowed to state election\u2019s officers.
\u201cThe federal support that used to be there has pulled back sharply,\u201d he added. \u201cThis means that cybersecurity services have been reduced, funding for information sharing environments have been cut, the threat briefings about nation-state adversaries that used to occur dozens of times a year are occurring rarely or not at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Fears grow that loyalists in key states could use critical period when votes are counted to amplify false claimsElection experts have warned Donald Trump\u2019s administration could use the crucial hours and days after November\u2019s midterm elections to disrupt the results after struggling to enforce a crackdown on voting.With less than six weeks remaining until polls […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":225796,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-225795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-us","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225795","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225795"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225795\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/225796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}