Since early this year, 24 Democratic state attorneys general have expanded coordination with about a dozen Democratic secretaries of state and several civic groups, aiming to counter any federal intervention in the November vote.

The push is driven by a track record of election claims from Donald Trump, who falsely called the 2020 election "rigged" on his first day in office in January and has repeated similar claims hundreds of times since losing to Joe Biden.

How the coordination works

The effort is spearheaded by the Progressive State Leaders Committee, the public policy arm of the Democratic Attorneys General Association. It runs on weekly Zoom calls and in-person tabletop exercises in which participants strategize about countering any federal intervention.

The two offices bring complementary duties. Secretaries of state are responsible for supervising elections, while state attorneys general are charged with defending the laws that govern them.

Washington attorney general Nick Brown, a former US attorney and federal prosecutor, chairs the PSLC election-protection working group and leads the weekly calls. The scenarios the calls cover are concrete:

• •ICE agents showing up near some polling places
• •Ballots being seized in some races

Brown also led two "tabletop" in-person exercises, one in Milwaukee in May and another in Detroit in September, held with secretary of state offices and PSLC partners.

Federal actions prompting the effort

The state officials are reacting to a series of moves by the justice department under the Trump administration.

This summer the department announced plans to deploy 1,000 poll monitors. That prompted the NAACP to file a lawsuit on 4 October seeking details; CBS News reported that 289 monitors were deployed in 2022.

The department has also sued 30 states to obtain their unredacted voter lists, which contain sensitive personal information, and has lost 26 of the lawsuits decided by courts. Meanwhile Harmeet Dhillon, head of the justice department's civil rights division, wrote to state election officials this summer threatening prosecutions if they did not cooperate adequately in hunting for voting fraud.

Early this year, in a highly unusual move, the justice department seized 2020 ballots from Fulton county, Georgia.

Trump's election claims

Trump escalated his public messaging in a nationally televised address on 16 July, falsely alleging both large-scale noncitizen voting and voting-by-mail fraud. He called noncitizen voting a "crisis of election security", though the practice is long illegal and historically rare. The conservative Heritage Foundation has cited just 100 noncitizen voting cases over a 25-year period, undercutting the president's claims.

His private remarks have been blunter. Trump told the New York Times he regrets not calling out the national guard to seize ballots in the 2020 election. Last month at a mini convention in Texas, he urged Republicans to "cheat like hell like they do".

Officials respond

State officials describe the preparation as urgent. Brown said the justice department and the Trump administration were "the biggest adversary to a smooth election". He added that Trump lies about the election on a regular basis and that truth is not a goal of his, which creates concerns.

Brown's office co-led legal moves blocking Trump's March executive order to curb voting by mail, an order the supreme court ruled against last month. Oregon attorney general Dan Rayfield was direct: "From day one, Trump has been taking dead aim at our elections," he said.

Rayfield said officials are trying to dispute some of the misinformation that the Trump administration keeps putting out, including about voting by mail. Oregon was the first state to adopt all voting by mail, and had two Republican secretaries of state in the last decade who were satisfied with the system.

In Arizona, Democratic secretary of state Adrian Fontes called the increasing cooperation with the attorneys general "an all-hands approach" and said: "We have an adversary we didn't expect in the form of this administration". A central worry, he said, is that the administration's "constant drumbeat of lies is going to suppress the vote".

Outside observers see the same level of alert. Norm Eisen, executive chair of the Democracy Defenders Fund and a former Obama ethics special counsel, said: "The level of preparation by the AGs and the secretaries of state is off the charts".

Larry Norden, a Brennan Center elections expert, warned that administration leaders, including at the justice and homeland security departments, have repeatedly threatened or attempted to exert control over the midterm elections. But he noted that for the last 18 months they have been met by pushback and consistently lost, and that everyone must stay prepared.

New structures are backing the work. Two groups created in 2026 aim to protect election results: the AGSOS Election Protection Pac, which is working to raise funds to elect Democrats to both state offices, and AGSOS Election Protection Action, which serves as a policy arm. Sean Rankin, president of the Democratic Attorneys General Association, said it is a concern that the administration will try to seize ballots and that the AGs and secretaries of state are working on responses.

Election officials themselves say they are not caught off guard. Mai Ratakonda of the States United Democracy Center said officials are "ready and prepared to respond" to ballot seizures, a readiness shaped in part by the justice department's seizure of Fulton county's 2020 ballots.

Rayfield's caution captured the mood heading into November. Trump, he said, continues taking steps to interfere in elections and has stretched democracy more than any president in his lifetime.