Voters fill out their ballots at a Sioux Falls polling place during the South Dakota primary election on June 2, 2026. (Photo by Makenzie Huber/South Dakota Searchlight)
WASHINGTON – The 2026 midterm elections are likely to face mass voter challenges, the Brennan Center for Justice warned Tuesday, that could “undermine the democratic process.”
President Donald Trump and the Republican Party are laying the groundwork to challenge the electoral process in individual states as Trump has made “election integrity” a centerpiece of his recent domestic policy initiatives, including address of July 16 to the nation.
Found a center at New York University School of Law in the report on Tuesday that private citizens filed more than 185,000 ballot eligibility challenges in 2024, although “the actual number is likely higher” because many election officials were not contacted or sent incomplete responses to the inquiries. The center is considered left-wing.
Mass challenges are a relatively recent phenomenon, driven by improvements in electoral technology and transparency. Thousands of votes can now be challenged at once.
They have rarely been successful, but experts fear that they raise voters’ doubts about the fair conduct of the elections. Historically, such challenges have often been used to suppress the voices of people of color, a separate brief he said.
“Eligible voters facing challenges sometimes do not vote simply because the process is too confusing. Responding to a challenge requires many steps that can be confusing to voters. They may not understand the options available to them to verify their identity,” said Andrew Garber, general counsel at the Brennan Center.
Garber stated that “challenges to mass voters have become a key element of the campaign to use election integrity as an excuse for voter suppression.”
He found that in 2024, election deniers filed complaints “in addition to spreading lies about widespread voter fraud, refusing to certify the election, disparaging voting machines, viewing polls in bad faith, filing frivolous lawsuits, and threatening election officials with physical harm or criminal penalties.”
Garber warned that this year such challenges are likely to become “an integral strategy in the playbook to undermine the democratic process.”
Massive challenges, he said, “generally add no value to choices while creating new costs.”
However, there is one gigantic concern: “There are cases of people eligible to vote being removed from the rolls and finding out about it after the deadline for registering and voting in the next election,” the report says. “As is often the case with voter suppression, the effects are often felt by vulnerable people.”
Mullin threatens
The Trump administration is pressing state officials to check voter rolls and tighten election security, the report predicts, opening the door to federal facilitate in staging mass challenges.
Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin he said last week that hundreds of thousands of foreigners are registered to vote in California, New Jersey, Nevada and Pennsylvania and threatened to prosecute election officials in states that “fail to participate in securing elections” ahead of the November midterms. He did not provide the source of his data.
Trump has demanded that Congress require people to show proof of citizenship when registering to vote and photo ID at the polls. So far, parliamentarians do not want to agree to such a solution SAVE America Act which in various versions would restrict voting and remains deadlocked in the US Senate.
Trump and his allies have argued for years that the 2020 election was marred by voter fraud. No evidence of widespread fraud was found.
Election officials largely maintain that their rolls are exact and up-to-date.
“In most states, list-keeping practices tend to keep pace with natural changes in voters’ lives, such as relocations,” said a report this month by the nonpartisan Center for Innovation and Election Research.
Massive challenges
Recent mass challenges have rarely been successful.
The report cited efforts in Georgia, Michigan, Texas, Florida and Iowa in 2022.
“These challenges have been widely rejected for lack of evidence or failure to comply with state law,” the Brennan Center said.
Brennan’s study found that in 2024, private citizens filed at least 185,232 voting objections in the states surveyed. The Center found that of them, officials accepted at least 5,477. This means that they could have removed the voter from the rolls, considered him or her inactive or taken other steps to make it more arduous for him or her to vote.
According to the report’s methodology, researchers sent requests to Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas, as well as many counties in those states.
“One conclusion is clear: because only about 3 percent of the challenges were explicitly accepted, these challenges made little contribution to maintaining the list in 2024.” Brennan said.
For example, in 2023, Georgia contacted approximately 875,000 voters who had moved or had not voted for several years. That’s more than a hundred times the number of Georgia voters who successfully challenged the following year.
The Center prepared the report by sending requests for access to public records to 42 local government units. She requested any documents related to the challenges posed by the 2024 elections and how officials handled those challenges. Also included were court filings, public reports, and election board meetings.
“It is impossible to obtain a complete record of subpoenas: they are often made ad hoc, officials may have no obligation to follow up on them, and the documentation provided is often incomplete,” the center noted, adding that some officials refused to provide documentation or stated they had not received any subpoenas.
