Election officials have run statewide trainings preparing for federal agents to seize ballots during an active election, a scenario once considered impossible before President Donald Trump's hunt for voter fraud.
Voting officials and the legal community are "actively preparing for" ballot seizures and search warrants, NPR reported Wednesday.
The University of California, Los Angeles' Safeguarding Democracy Project released a guide for judges that same day, shared first with the network, to help them handle search warrant requests tied to the voting process.
One state election official, who did not have permission to speak publicly, told NPR their office has led three separate statewide trainings this year to prepare for law enforcement seeking to take ballots or election materials while an election is still underway.
"Lots of things that were off the table are now on the table," said Rick Hasen, the project's director and the guide's lead author.
Trump has said he regrets not pushing harder for the federal government to seize election equipment after the 2020 election, according to NPR. Two search warrants executed this year, in Fulton County, Ga., and Riverside County, Calif., already involved the seizure of ballots.
"This is the thing we really fear," the state official said. "[Say] we have really close races [in our competitive districts] then the [Justice Department], FBI come knocking on one of our county doors and they say, 'We believe there's hijinks going on, we're going to confiscate all the ballots so we can count them.'"
If officials take ballots before an election is certified, they might not be able to say with confidence how many ballots were returned, or whether the ones seized were tampered with, NPR reported. Election workers call that breaking the chain of custody.
"They could do so much damage if they did that," the official said.
Legal experts still consider a mid-election seizure extreme and unlikely, largely because a judge must approve any warrant before ballots can be taken, NPR said.
"Right now, the judiciary writ large has their antennae up, anticipating what might be coming down the pike," said Philip Pro, a retired federal judge who served as chief judge for the District of Nevada. "They're going to be prepared."
The warrant served on the Fulton County elections office alarmed lawyers not only because it happened, but because of how it was approved, Hasen told NPR.
"Eventually we got to see the search warrant and it confirmed some of our worst fears," Hasen said. "It contained information about potential fraud in Georgia that was based on discredited conspiracy theories."
Magistrate judges, who usually handle warrant requests, are not experts in elections, Hasen said, which means they could find themselves sorting through dubious claims at a time when misinformation is widespread. One of the guide's central recommendations is that they not do it alone.
"One of our key recommendations is to bring election administrators into the conversation," Hasen said.
Warrants are typically requested and granted in secret, without a public hearing or testimony, which limits a court's ability to examine what it is being told, Maureen O'Connor, a retired chief justice of the Ohio Supreme Court, said. During an ongoing election, she said, transparency should come first.
"This isn't something that the judge has to just look the officer in the eye and say, 'yeah, I think I can trust him,'" O'Connor said. "That deserves to be discussed in a courtroom on the record, with the judge asking questions of witnesses under oath and determining then, by the totality of the circumstances, whether there should be a warrant issued."
O'Connor and Pro both belong to Keep Our Republic, one of many civil society groups preparing for possible federal interference in this year's elections.
"[Judges] are going to be looking behind the curtain rather than simply relying on what is presented [in the affidavit] as being gospel," Pro said.
Hasen pointed to a Michigan mayoral race in 2025 in which the chain of custody was broken for just a few dozen ballots. That result, decided by 11 votes, is still in dispute, and voting officials worry a similar fight in a House or Senate race could determine control of Congress.
"We want judges to understand you can't unscramble the egg," Hasen said. "Once the ballots have been taken out of the custody of election officials, there are at least going to be conspiracy theories that ballots have been altered or added to or removed."
The guide urges judges to weigh other options before granting a warrant, Hasen said, including waiting until after an election is certified, deciding whether copies of ballots would satisfy investigators, or letting law enforcement watch a count or a recount instead.
"Because all the things to do, if that does happen," Hasen said, "are really second-best solutions."
A Census Bureau report published last month claimed an analysis of voter records identified 24,000 people tied to administrative records indicating noncitizen status, and Trump declared on Truth Social that he had won the 2020 election, WIRED reported.
John Abowd, the bureau's former chief scientist, called the report "statistical nonsense" and told WIRED the alleged noncitizen voters are more likely to be data errors.
Marc Elias, the Democratic election lawyer whose firm represents the party committees challenging Trump's election executive order, wrote last week that the administration's moves amount to a "blueprint to rig" the midterms.
In August, the Supreme Court sided 6-3 with the administration and lifted an injunction against that order.
U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani blocked a revised Postal Service mail ballot rule on Sept. 4, finding no evidence of mail-voting fraud to justify it, according to a separate NPR report.
The administration returned to the justices this month, asking them to let the rule take effect before November.