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Election experts and legal analysts have raised concerns that the Trump administration and Republican leadership will challenge or interfere with the 2026 midterm outcomes. Trump has pushed the SAVE Act, which would make it much more difficult for Americans to register to vote, in the name of preventing non-citizens from illegally participating in elections.
The administration has also attempted to access full, unredacted voter roll data in over 30 states, although so far their efforts have failed in every state that has taken them to court. Simultaneously, Trump has produced a laughably poor analysis to “prove” he won the 2020 election.
One of the most common assumptions of how Republicans will try to deny election results and interfere with certification is that they will attempt to do so in close races, or in blue states where they can accuse Democratic leaders of letting “illegals” vote. The ultimate goal of this is to create a backstop against swearing in a Democratically held House by interfering with issuance of state election certificates or pressuring the U.S. Senate or House to block seating of duly elected members. However, there is also a hidden danger of election denial and interference even in deep blue, heavily gerrymandered districts in deep red states like Texas.
If Republicans fail to hold onto the House or Senate in the 2026 midterms, the nearly inescapable conclusion is that they will reject the results. In fact, they may not even wait for the results to come in. The White House and Speaker Johnson, working with local state Republicans, will likely use the full force of the federal and state government to keep the Senate and House under GOP control.
After looking at the various theories presented by election experts of how they will accomplish this, here is what may happen may happen, particularly in red states where the state and federal government can collude to deny certification under the jurisdiction of GOP-friendly courts.
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First, Republicans will use the lack of the SAVE Act, any minor voting anomalies, and even outright conspiracy theories to claim that people voted illegally or machines miscounted votes. State and Federal authorities, particularly the Blanche at the DOJ and Patel at the FBI, will immediately launch investigations. Republican news outlets and social media will amplify this messaging, and Donald Trump will claim the entire election is fraudulent and potentially declare a national emergency.
Election experts agree on the likely chain of events up to this point, but here is where the most likely scenario diverges from the scenarios that are most discussed. I see a lot of “election disaster porn” on social media that focuses on scenarios that wouldn’t work, such as directly refusing to swear in and seat democrats, particularly those from hotly contested swing districts.
These theories usually make the mistake of treating the House as a continuous body (it is not, and The Atlantic has made this mistake previously) and looking at swing districts as the most likely point of contention. Some revolve around the unlikely “rogue Clerk of the House” scenario. Others revolve around an impossible invocation of Article I Section 5 of the Constitution to deny Democrats the majority.
The scenario that looks the most plausible and passes constitutional muster, according to my own analysis and that of respected election lawyers critical of other scenarios, is that deep red states in the South will use every tool available to delay certification of Democratically controlled districts until after January 3rd.
If those seats are not certified by that date by the Clerk of the House, the majority of Representatives on the roll call will be Republicans. Mike Johnson would be elected Speaker again. This scenario is the one that Edward Foley, a professor of law at The Ohio State University and writer for Election Law Blog, worries about most. “If states haven’t wrapped up all their procedures for certifying the winners by that date, it could enable either of the political parties to unfairly keep control of the House of Representatives by refusing to seat members whose states don’t certify their victories until after that date.”
Alexandra Chandler, director of Impact Programs, Free and Fair Elections at Protect Democracy, recognises seizure of ballots and delays in certification as one of the biggest threats to the election. “If the Department of Justice seizes ballots, voting machines and other election materials on election night or shortly after, that could seriously disrupt the legally required post-election processes governing the canvassing, counting, and certification of races, and potentially break chain of custody over ballots in a way that could fuel conspiracy theories and make it difficult to declare a widely accepted winner.”
Democrats, particularly those in blue states, are already quietly preparing for these eventualities. They are anticipating efforts to seize ballots and deny the outcomes. Legal teams are pre-writing legal challenges to ballot seizures. However, doing this in red states controlled by the GOP, in court systems where Republicans have put most of the judges on the bench, will be more challenging.
The consequences of failure to get elections certified in time are likely to be devastating. Once Johnson is Speaker, has the option of refusing to swear these Democratic representatives in indefinitely.
We have seen the GOP engage in similar tactics with Adelita Grivalja and Merrick Garland. Legal scholars looking at the case of Grivalja largely concluded that there was no constitutional mechanism to force Johnson to swear her in. Thus, once he has the gavel back, he can hold it until January 3rd, 2029.
Both state and federal governments will attack the legitimacy of the vote in these districts in a coordinated and simultaneous way. They will exploit friendly judges like Reed O’Connor and Matthew J Kascmaryk and friendly circuits like the Fifth Circuit to further their aims.
The Trump administration will likely claim that there was foreign interference or illegal non-citizen voting, which would give them a chance to drag it into FISA court.
This court handles classified information behind closed doors, which will increase delays and prevent any evidence contradicting their claims from being seen by the public. Blanche and Patel, two of Trump’s biggest yes-men who have no qualms about putting the President ahead of Democracy, will take point on this.
Additional tactics will likely include the seizing of ballot boxes by state or federal officials, deliberately ruining the chain of custody and preventing election boards from certifying vote totals. This will open the door to states using their own actions to justify contesting the totals. For his part, Mike Johnson can refuse to budge until the various investigations into foreign interference and fraud are closed.
There are laws and legal precedents created specifically to prevent these tactics from succeeding. However, it’s unclear if they can hold up under a combined assault by determined state and federal governments, especially when supported by a court system hand-picked to return the decisions they want. Normally, these actions would be illegal; unfortunately, there is no chance that the DOJ, the State of Texas, or the 5th Circuit would bring charges.
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Groups can file writs of mandamus to compel the government to fulfil its duty to certify the elections, but again, this runs into the problem of heavily conservative judges in conservative circuits acting as accomplices. If there are splits between lower court judges, it will get kicked up to the 5th Circuit, which simply has to drag its feet a bit to achieve what the GOP wants. They can easily hand-wave away harms as “hypothetical” and insist that any wrongs will surely be righted once certification is completed at some later, unnamed date because election integrity is paramount. This is legal Calvinball, but we have seen SCOTUS engage in it constantly over the past few years.
By my count, the GOP could deny about 18 seats to Democrats by exploiting states where the GOP controls (or will control) the state offices of Governor, legislature, courts, and attorney general. This is almost exactly enough to ensure they control the House.
This would be difficult to stop. First and foremost, red state officials would be operating hand in hand with the federal government to delay certification. To avoid this, Edward Foley advised that “it is essential that states do whatever it takes to complete all of their necessary procedures for certifying the results of their House elections — including any recounts and litigation — before January 3.”
But what happens if the Texas state House, Senate, Governor, Lieutenant Governor, attorney general, and their hand-picked state courts ensure that certification does NOT happen by that date? The federal courts that could override them are the most conservative Circuit in the US, and the Department of Justice and FBI will throw their weight behind Texas’s efforts, potentially deliberately interfering with the ballot chain of custody. The guardrails identified by the expert on this scenario are already down; most Americans simply haven’t realised this yet.
They don’t need to win court cases to succeed. They simply need to find judges that will help them delay, and there appear to be plenty of those in the 5th Circuit.
Our Constitution and legal system never expected that they’d have to hold up against such a coordinated assault on election integrity. With the effective destruction of the Voting Rights Act, collusion by state and federal governments to achieve the same end, and a politicised court and DOJ, I am dubious of whether these protections will hold.
However, there are even bigger issues at stake here. I believe this is a trial run for 2028. Republicans have consolidated power in the White House, and I cannot imagine the executive branch willingly surrendering it ever again, especially once they’ve succeeded in thwarting the 2026 election process. Any race that comes down to a Contingent election, where neither candidate wins a majority of Electoral College votes, will almost certainly be handed to the GOP by a House and Speakership they control. Alternatively, the House can refuse to certify winning candidates they don’t want.
The 2026 will be a crucible determining whether free and fair elections in 2028 will even be possible. If Republicans succeed via the method I describe here, it will make the 2028 election, and all those after, a moot point.