By Kim Rogers and Eric Ming
As the midterms approach, Donald Trump and his allies are escalating their attacks on fair elections — pressuring the Supreme Court to give them near-total control over mail voting, threatening elections officials, and firing federal experts who try to protect democracy.
But in the background, thousands of state and local officials are hard at work, reminding us who actually runs elections (hint: it’s not the federal government).
A 250-Year Tradition of State and Local Control
The Constitution is clear: States run elections (it’s in Article I, Section 4):
“The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of [choosing] Senators.”
Notice who’s not in there? The president. Not once — and that’s on purpose.
Our founding fathers had just fought a war against one king, and they didn’t want to end up with another. As they drafted the Constitution, they deliberately placed elections in the hands of the states, reserving some oversight powers for Congress.
The president gets to vote. That’s about it.
The genius of that decentralized design is that it makes elections nearly impossible to steal. Nearly 10,000 officials run our elections across 50 states and thousands of local jurisdictions. There’s no single lever to pull, no single office to pressure, and no single database to hack. That’s the whole point.
Trump’s Unconstitutional Crusade for Federal Control
Despite that constitutional clarity, the Trump administration is doing its best to demonstrate what federal control over elections would look like. It’s not pretty.
To start, the administration has tried to bully states into handing over massive reams of sensitive voter data. Last winter, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi kicked it up a notch with a mob-style offer: If Minnesota handed over its data, maybe ICE would back off in Minneapolis.
After Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon basically told the feds to jump in a lake, things escalated. Within a few weeks, federal agents were showing up at election offices — this time in Fulton County, Georgia, where they seized files from the 2020 election.
The legal justification for the Fulton County raid was dubious at best. But it sent a clear message to local officials: Give Trump the election results he wants, or the feds will come knocking.
State and Local Control: A Feature of Secure Elections, Not a Bug
Despite pushback from state officials of both parties, Trump has doubled down on his efforts to remake our elections. Under his nightmarish vision, the U.S. would replace our decentralized, locally managed election system with one run by Washington — a radical shift that would undermine the very safeguards that make our elections secure.
In practice, federal control would destroy the structural firewall that prevents large-scale election fraud — replacing local officials accountable to voters with federal officials who answer only to the president. In short, this would hand Trump (and any future president) enormous control over our democracy.
In pursuit of that goal, Trump has issued a slew of executive orders in a largely unsuccessful attempt to change election rules. His orders have spread confusion among voters, and his attacks on local officials have fostered a dangerous atmosphere that makes it harder to recruit and retain qualified elections staff. It’s a slow drip of institutional erosion that causes long-term damage.
Want to Protect Elections? Start at the Bottom of Your Ballot
Before you spiral: There’s a solution. In every corner of America, honest and hard-working people are running for local election offices.
Here’s the problem: Their races are underfunded, under-the-radar, and almost invisible in the national political ecosystem.
That’s where we come in. The organization we lead — the State + Local Election Alliance (SLEA) — identifies and invests in races for the offices that determine how votes are cast, counted, and certified. We work with candidates from all parties — because when democracy is under siege, everyone who believes in fair elections is on the same side. With deep candidate research and smart targeting, we win the most important races you’ve probably never heard of.
For decades, enemies of democracy have understood that if you control elections, you control the game. They’ve built coordinated, well-funded infrastructure to win these races — elevating election deniers like Tina Peters in Colorado and Justin Heap in Arizona.
But democracy is fighting back — and it’s winning.
Investing in The Races That Matter Most
Our mission at SLEA is to protect key pressure points in the democratic system — from day-to-day election management to the courts that decide election disputes.
That work is based around a basic truth: Many of the leaders who will oversee elections in 2028 are candidates for office today. Electing pro-democracy candidates now, particularly in swing states and districts, will determine the future of fair election administration — with enormous consequences for control of the White House and Congress.
Safeguarding the 2028 elections needs to start with unseating election deniers in places like Fulton County, where County Commissioner Bridget Thorne (who worked with the Trump administration to orchestrate the raid on Fulton County’s election offices) is up for re-election. It also means protecting incumbents who uphold the democratic process — like county commissioners in Washoe County, Nevada, who pushed back when their colleagues refused to certify local elections.
Judicial races are another under-the-radar target (don’t forget that Bush v. Gore started in state court). Hyper-partisan judges have already shown their willingness to overturn elections — most notably in North Carolina, where bad-faith legal challenges recently delayed a duly elected candidate from taking office for six months. This year, judicial candidates and sitting judges will be on the ballot in swing states where their rulings could be consequential in 2028. We can protect democracy by defending impartial judges, electing new faces committed to judicial fairness, and beating extremists who value partisan politics over the rule of law.
The fight to protect the 2028 elections has already begun. It starts at the bottom of your ballot — with pro-democracy candidates who will keep our elections free and fair for generations to come.
Kim Rogers and Eric Ming are executive directors of the State + Local Election Alliance. Learn more about the State + Local Election Alliance by visiting www.state-elections.org or donate directly to this cycle’s most important state and local election officials through Oath.
Next absolutely mandatory change: the end of the electoral college, which falsifies the will of the majority of voters in about 95% of all presidential elections.
There’s no reason for an unpopular candidate to win a rigged election. The electoral college needs to go. There’s better ways to do this.