The U.S. Department of Justice once worked closely with states to assist with elections.
That was before Donald Trump’s presidency.
“For a long time, the federal government and the Department of Justice have helped states as partners [by] having election monitors and helping us respond to interference at the polls or destruction of ballot boxes — all those things,” Washington state Attorney General Nick Brown told Raw Story.
Brown speaks from experience, having served under former President Joe Biden as U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington, where he deployed officials from his office to help local and state officials troubleshoot problems.
In 2024, Brown successfully ran for state attorney general. Now, he chairs the election protection working group for the Democratic Attorneys General Association.
“The reality now is that our biggest adversary to running smooth elections is the president,” Brown said.
Over the past year, Brown and other Democratic attorneys general, along with secretaries of state, have been involved in an unprecedented effort to safeguard the 2026 midterm elections by coordinating legal research and strategies.
In May, they met in Milwaukee to game out various worst-case scenarios in which the election system might buckle under pressure from Trump and his allies.
“We’ve had a good set of tabletop exercises with those partners and with some others in the room to help us sort of walk through in real time these sorts of scenarios and sort of game-planning what might happen at the national level,” Brown told Raw Story, “or even if there’s just some rogue county election official who says, ‘I’m not going to certify this election in my county because the president said it’s corrupt.’
“These are no longer hypotheticals,” he added. “They’re real-life, current-happening situations because of the president’s misinformation and lies about election security.”
A county commission in rural New Mexico, one of whose members was convicted of illegally entering the U.S. Capitol grounds on Jan. 6, 2021, refused to certify primary election results in the 2022 midterms. Later that year, an Arizona county stalled on certifying results in an election in which Trump ally Kari Lake was running for governor and refused to concede her loss. In one California county, a majority of supervisors voted to declare the results in the 2024 election “under duress,” in response to unfounded claims by constituents that their voting machines were vulnerable to hackers.
The current phase of the Democratic officials’ efforts is focused on a battle to prevent the Department of Justice from accessing sensitive voter data, such as driver’s license and Social Security numbers. Brown’s office represents Washington State Secretary of State Steve Hobbs in a lawsuit brought by the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division in one such case.
The Department of Justice continued an unbroken losing streak earlier this month with an adverse ruling from a federal judge in Minnesota, making it the 23rd ruling against the federal government in its quest for sensitive voter data.
In the lawsuit brought against Washington state, U.S. District Court Judge Kymberly Evanson reportedly expressed skepticism about the federal government’s need for sensitive voter data during a hearing earlier this month, but has yet to rule on the matter.
“No, we can’t give you this voter data because Washington state law does not allow us to do that, and we protect voter information pretty closely, with good reason,” Brown told Raw Story, summarizing the state’s argument.
Brown’s office has also closely monitored Trump’s effort to prevent the U.S. Postal Service from delivering ballots to voters who are not on a national list, which was blocked by a federal judge earlier this month. Washington, like other western states with widely dispersed populations in rural areas, relies heavily on mail-in voting.
“And that really direct, overt, obvious attempt to stop states like Washington from running their own elections is just a big threat to our system,” Brown said. “So, we as a state, and, more importantly, as a coalition of states, are just trying to do everything we can to keep the president from acting illegally, contrary to the interests of Americans.”
State officials are also on guard against the potential that Trump might order a federal agency to seize voting machines or ballots in the middle of the Nov. 3 general election.
“We’ve been sharing legal research around what happens if the president declares an emergency illegally and tries to stop an election from happening,” Brown said. “What is the proper legal authority to do anything like that, and what is the challenge that states could bring? We’ve had to think about what happens when the FBI shows up and demands voting machines, like they did in Fulton County, Georgia.”
State officials also play a crucial role in the final step of the congressional elections. Secretaries of state are responsible for transmitting documents certifying the election winners to the respective clerks of the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate. Attorneys general serve as counsel for their secretaries of state, as well as their states’ top law enforcement official.
Brown said he’s cognizant of the potential for Trump’s congressional allies to use procedural tactics to block Democrats from being sworn in as new members of the House, as highlighted in a recent Raw Story report.
“I think you’re right to raise that as a possibility,” he said.
“That point of certification, from the secretaries of state to Congress is obviously a very vital one,” Brown said. “It’s not subject to much debate; it’s fairly procedural. I would hope that would continue.
“I think it would be remarkable in the worst sense to imagine that the House would somehow reject certification from a state,” he added. “But I think these things that used to be totally ridiculous hypotheticals are now much more imaginable.”