Deniers return to the airwaves with fresh claims

Many of the people making the fresh allegations are current or former officials who in 2020 worked to bolster Trump's false claims of mass voter fraud. Over recent weeks they have taken their claims of election vulnerabilities to conservative-friendly media outlets, as the November 2026 midterms approach. The allegations echo the claims Trump has pushed to justify asserting more control over voting.

Georgia machines and the QR code claim

Cleta Mitchell, who worked to help Trump overturn the 2020 election results, has seized on recent reports that voting machines in Georgia carried a privacy vulnerability to argue the state is not doing enough to secure voters' ballots. In an interview on Friday with Steve Bannon, the conservative strategist and longtime Trump ally, she claimed the machines tally a QR code instead of voters' choices.

Mitchell told Bannon she had learned, "on good authority, from some of the highest levels in the Trump administration", that the justice department was asking the Georgia secretary of state about voter data the state shares with two non-profit groups. She accused Georgia and other states of being 'hypocrites' for refusing to share voter data with the federal government.

'Compromised' machines and a midterm 'psyop'

Ed Martin, the controversial former US pardon attorney, repeated claims from top administration officials that voting machines containing parts manufactured in China and other countries were 'compromised'. Other election deniers have sown doubt about the predicted outcome of the 2026 midterm elections.

• •In September, Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, which drew up and published Project 2025, told Fox Business that forecasts Democrats could flip the Senate were 'a psyop', saying the polling firms' prognosticating was a covert operation meant to depress conservative turnout.
• •Martin told Eric Bolling of Real America's Voice on Monday that Trump had met Tina Peters, a Colorado politician convicted of crimes over her efforts to interfere with the 2020 election results, and that she had sat in the Oval Office with the president hours earlier to talk through election integrity plans.
• •Martin added that Trump was taking election integrity seriously and would act on his own if Congress declined to pass the Save America Act: "If the Congress won't pass the Save America Act, and they won't, then the president's going to have to do what he's going to do".

Trump's own push, and where it stands

Trump himself has worked to undercut public confidence in US elections with false fraud claims and unverified insecurity claims, taking that case to a prime-time address earlier in the year. His administration's voting crackdown, presented as a security measure even though experts say elections are already secure, spans several fronts:

• •New rules restricting mail-in ballot voting, a method Trump has criticized even though he has used it himself
• •A federal database of eligible voters
• •A requirement that voters show proof of citizenship when voting in federal elections

Most of those measures are now held up by court challenges; the Supreme Court, however, has let the administration proceed with compiling the federal database of eligible voters.