Health Check for the 2026 Elections: Are the Safeguards Still Holding?

American democracy depends on a system that has proven remarkably resilient in administering free and fair elections across our vast and diverse country. That resilience comes from a network of overlapping safeguards that reinforce one another under stress.

Think of America’s elections as a resilient patient with a strong immune system. When one part of the system weakens, others compensate. That’s what has allowed U.S. elections to withstand shocks that might have destabilized weaker and more centralized election systems.

Historically, the executive branch has played a supporting role – like a vitamin – in helping boost the election system’s immunity. Federal agencies have, in past cycles, supported states and localities in enforcing voting rights, securing cybersecurity infrastructure, and providing resources and guidance.

However, in President Trump’s second term, the executive branch is now the most significant threat to elections, behaving more like a virus. The President and his allies have advanced a multi-pronged election takeover playbook to tilt the playing field, drawing on authoritarian tactics seen around the world over the past two-plus decades. As we’ve seen in those countries, some viruses do more than cause temporary illness—they can permanently weaken the body and make future infections easier. The danger in this moment is not only what happens in 2026, but whether new habits of election manipulation become embedded in the system for years to come.

The executive branch’s shift from vitamin to virus doesn’t mean the system is failing. But it does mean the immune system is being tested in a new way: not by external threats or the usual partisan tricks, but by sustained attacks coming from within. Six months out from the 2026 elections, the key question is whether the guardrails that protect elections – the system’s core “antibodies” – are still strong enough to hold under extreme pressure.

What follows is a health check of those nine safeguards: where they remain robust, where they’re showing signs of stress, and what that tells us about the election system’s condition as we look ahead to November. The nine safeguards are:

• Congress: Critical Condition
• Internal executive branch checks: Critical Condition
• Election officials: Severely Stressed
• State political leadership: governors and state legislatures: Severely Stressed
• Courts: Stable but Under Stress
• Law enforcement and military norms: Severely Stressed
• Civil society: Severely Stressed
• Information ecosystem: Critical Condition
• Voters: Stable but Under Stress

Congress – Critical Condition

The Framers designed Congress to be the primary check on executive power, but in the second Trump administration, Republican lawmakers have largely abdicated their constitutional duty as a co-equal branch of government.

However, the administration’s push to nationalize elections has drawn some GOP resistance. When President Trump floated the idea of Republicans nationalizing voting in February, he triggered pushback from many Republican members of Congress, including Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE), among others.

While notable, these acts remain isolated. The overwhelming majority of Republicans continue to look the other way while the executive branch interferes in elections in unconstitutional ways. And they continue to support legislation, like the SAVE America and MEGA Acts, that would shift power over elections from states and Congress to the executive branch. Without more Republicans standing up for the Constitution, Congress will remain a weak guardrail in critical condition.

Internal Executive Branch Checks – Critical Condition

One of the most important safeguards in our election system is the internal machinery of the federal government, including career civil servants, agency lawyers, and senior nonpartisan officials who interpret and carry out presidential directives. In past cycles, this was a crucial buffer between political pressure and execution. In 2020, when the White House and allies pushed the DOJ to seize voting machines and election materials, senior officials refused to comply in the absence of credible evidence, helping prevent federal agencies from being weaponized to overturn the election.

In his second term, President Trump has swiftly eroded this safeguard by installing individuals who sought to overturn the 2020 results in key roles tied to election policy, voter data, and election security across agencies like DOJ and DHS. This includes, among others, Kurt Olsen (White House); Markwayne Mullin, David Harvilicz, Joseph Voiland, Marci McCarthy, and Heather Honey (DHS); Harmeet Dhillon, Eric Neff, Christopher Gardner, and Megan Frederick (DOJ). Actions that were once rejected by seasoned career officials are now being normalized.

At the same time, the Trump administration has significantly weakened another critical internal check by dismantling federal election security and anti-disinformation capacity. The administration has gutted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), firing and sidelining election security specialists, drastically cutting election security budgets, and ending work on countering disinformation.

Removing these internal checks are a central key piece of the president’s election takeover playbook to remove impartial professionals and replace them with election-denying loyalists who will eagerly obey orders to carry out election subversion based on false, thoroughly debunked election fraud narratives.

Election Officials – Severely Stressed

America’s election officials remain one of the strongest safeguards in our democracy. Our decentralized election system depends on thousands of heroic state and local officials to run elections, and that diffusion of authority has long been one of our system’s greatest strengths. No president can simply order a nationwide change. In recent cycles, many of those officials—Republican and Democrat alike—have served as a critical frontline defense, refusing improper requests, pushing back on executive branch pressure, and upholding the integrity of the process.

That frontline, however, is now under heavy pressure from the executive branch. DOJ lawsuits against 30 states for private voter data, federal investigations, threats of criminal charges, seizures of voting materials, DOJ requests for names of election workers, and even raids of election offices are increasingly being used to intimidate election administrators. These actions send a clear signal: compliance is safer than resistance. The goal is not always immediate control, but future leverage – to seek compliance the next time President Trump calls a Secretary of State and demands that they “find the votes” to overturn the will of the people – as he did in Georgia in 2020.

The pressure is also personal. Issue One’s recent election official turnover report found many administrators leaving because of threats, harassment, burnout, and fear. One local official’s son received threatening calls—a stark reminder that the intimidation extends beyond the workplace.

In addition, the administration and its allies are attempting partisan interference through state and local election boards. These boards have historically been largely technical and nonpartisan, but they’re increasingly becoming battlegrounds where partisan actors attempt to reopen past election reviews, challenge procedures, and change rules to tilt the playing field. In states like Georgia and North Carolina, board-level shifts have already translated into renewed 2020 investigations and changes in election administration leadership. Yet even under this pressure, most election officials continue to do their jobs impartially and lawfully—a reminder that this guardrail remains strong despite facing tough tests.

State Leadership: Governors and State Legislatures – Severely Stressed

The Constitution and the decentralized design of the U.S. election system provide one of the most durable defenses against any single actor seizing centralized control or manipulating elections at scale. Article I Section 4 of the Constitution clearly gives states the responsibility for administering elections, making governors and state legislatures a central line of defense against executive overreach.

In some states, governors and legislatures have taken key steps to protect against and resist executive interference in elections overreach, such as passing laws to limit the role of federal agents near polling places, reinforcing state control over election administration, and pushing back publicly against efforts to nationalize elections. These actions reflect the strength of federalism when state leaders are willing to assert their authority. But in other states, particularly red states, this guardrail is under severe stress. GOP-controlled state legislatures have worked to adopt key elements of President Trump’s election takeover agenda—passing proof-of-citizenship requirements to register, narrowing acceptable forms of voter ID, and sharing sensitive voter registration data with federal agencies. These policies are affecting tens of millions of voters and often placing new burdens on groups like married women, rural and young voters, seniors, and lower-income Americans. The result is a patchwork system where some states are reinforcing election protections while others are advancing a more centralized, restrictive approach.

Courts – Stable but Under Stress

Federal courts, particularly lower district courts, have been the most immediate check on the administration’s election agenda, repeatedly affirming that control of elections belongs to states and Congress. Courts have blocked nearly all provisions of President Trump’s March 2025 executive order, and, so far, courts in seven states have ruled that the Department of Justice has no right to obtain states’ complete voter registration lists, with one judge warning the demand poses a “risk that threatens the right to vote.” Courts have also largely continued to demand actual evidence in election disputes, rejecting unsupported fraud claims and conspiracy theories that seek to overturn lawful outcomes.

Despite these strengths, the judiciary faces serious vulnerabilities. The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais gutted Voting Rights Act protections and has triggered a new round of aggressive gerrymandering. Also, the Court’s authority ultimately depends on the administration’s willingness to comply, and Trump has repeatedly attacked judges who rule against him while using delay and non-compliance as a strategy. The 2024 Supreme Court immunity ruling granted presidents broad protection for “official acts,” significantly limiting avenues for accountability.

At the lower-court level, a few judges have signed off on extraordinary seizures of election materials based on long-debunked false election fraud claims. This raises the possibility that isolated lower-court rulings could be weaponized to disrupt the 2026 elections. Overall, the judiciary remains a vital guardrail, but one operating under mounting strain.

Law Enforcement and Military Norms – Severely Stressed

The longstanding norm that law enforcement and the military remain neutral in elections has been one of the quietest but most important safeguards in American democracy. Historically, federal law enforcement has played a limited, supporting, and clearly defined role—focused on protecting voting rights, not intimidating voters or shaping electoral outcomes—and the military has remained entirely outside the political process.

That guardrail is now under growing strain. Increased rhetoric from Trump and his allies around deploying federal law enforcement, including ICE agents, to polling places, as well as federal law enforcement raids of election offices, shatters the line between legitimate enforcement and partisan interference. While these actions would almost certainly be illegal and unconstitutional, the perception or threat of federal force around voting can have a chilling effect—deterring participation and forcing election officials to prepare for nightmare scenarios of federal law enforcement or military intervening in elections.

Civil Society – Severely Stressed

Civil society is increasingly active and engaged in protecting free and fair elections. Nonpartisan groups, watchdog organizations, journalists, and community networks are exposing misconduct, calling for accountability, educating voters, and using litigation, advocacy, and grassroots organizing to defend democratic norms.

But civil society groups are also under growing pressure, facing investigations, funding retaliation, legal harassment, and political intimidation designed to drain resources and deter opposition. In response, civil society must act together in sustained coordination, as successful defenses in places like Poland and Senegal have shown that broad coalitions monitoring and responding in real time make election subversion far less likely to succeed.

Information Ecosystem – Critical Condition

America’s information environment is in critical condition. This guardrail is crucial, though, because President Trump and his allies’ election takeover playbook relies on spreading false claims of election fraud to convince the public the system cannot be trusted—and to justify later attempts at intervention or control.

Big tech platforms are built to reward outrage, polarization, and sensational falsehoods, supercharging false election narratives to spread faster than corrections. This problem has been worsened by sustained pressure from the Trump administration casting efforts to curb dangerous, false, and extremist content as attacks on free speech. The rise of AI-generated political content adds a new layer of risk, making it cheaper and easier to flood voters with convincing fake images, audio, and disinformation at scale. Meanwhile, local media continues to disappear, while independent media faces increasing political pressure from the administration.

Voters – Stable but Under Stress

Voters remain the most fundamental guardrail in the system, with the ultimate power to hold leaders accountable. Despite concerns about new restrictions in some states, such as voter ID laws, documentary proof of citizenship requirements, and limits on mail voting, America’s voters remain broadly committed to the legitimacy of the system.

Polling consistently shows that large majorities say they would accept election results even if their preferred candidate loses, that confidence in fair ballot counting persists across party lines, and that more than nine in ten Americans reject political violence as a response to election outcomes. At the same time, that confidence is being actively tested. Recent polling shows that sustained claims of election fraud have eroded trust in elections for many. However, even amid polarization and false narratives, the public’s baseline commitment to a free and fair election process remains one of the system’s strongest stabilizing forces.

Conclusion

America’s election system’s immune system is not breaking, but it is actively fighting against the virus of democratic backsliding. The core safeguards—the Constitution, decentralized administration, election officials, state elected officials, courts, civil society, and voters—are holding strong, but they are not holding with the same strength. What makes this moment different is not just the level of pressure, but its source: an unprecedented degree of threats and attacks – a rapidly spreading virus – coming from within the federal executive branch itself.

The deeper danger is that if this virus is allowed to take hold, it may not leave when one administration ends. Once the playbook of manipulating elections becomes normalized, future leaders from either party can inherit it, refine it, and use it again.

We’ll check back on this election system health check three months before election day to see how these safeguards are holding up under the pressures of the final stretch.