With the midterm elections expected to determine the Republican Party’s control of Congress for the last two years of President Donald Trump’s term, there are new concerns rising over his potential to use the military at polling sites, which is against federal law.

Trump and senior officials won’t rule out sending troops to polling sites, and in September a senior Pentagon official reportedly told senators that there were discussions about deploying troops on Election Day. The Trump administration’s most senior general said in August that there were no plans to send troops to polling sites.

A new study shows that the majority of Americans — regardless of political party — do not support using troops at polling sites and say that it would significantly reduce the overall public’s confidence in the military as an institution.

The Democracy and Security Network at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, with NORC at the University of Chicago, polled 2,800 Americans between Oct. 7 and Oct. 20, half of whom were veterans, and found that 59% of respondents agreed that the president should not use the federal military to monitor or administer elections. The margin of error for the poll was plus or minus 3 percentage points.

“The introduction of military forces into any election in the United States — a scenario that has not been seen in roughly 150 years — could do significant and irreparable harm to the legitimacy of the vote,” the report’s authors wrote.

The president has repeatedly threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, which gives him the authority to send troops or federalize a state’s National Guard to suppress an insurrection, and Trump administration officials have previously cited authorities under Title 10 of the United States Code to send troops to American cities to assist local law enforcement with protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“People are worried. I think they’re just worried about law enforcement or federal military in general being more involved in elections, and I’m not confident that they’re particularly looking at military versus ICE versus FBI or they’re just concerned in general about that level of interference,” said Lauren Voss, one of the researchers who conducted the study.

Earlier this year, Trump said in an interview with The New York Times that he regretted not ordering the National Guard to seize voting machines in swing states after he lost the election in 2020.

Trump has also repeatedly called into question the security of the U.S. election system and amplified false claims of widespread voter fraud in what many say is an attempt to sow doubt among Americans about the election results.

In a recent interview with Time magazine, the president said he hadn’t ruled out invoking the Insurrection Act or declaring a national emergency around the midterm elections on Nov. 3.

Last month, the undersecretary of defense for policy, Elbridge Colby, reportedly said during a closed-door Senate Armed Services Committee hearing that there were discussions taking place about deploying the National Guard to polling places during the midterms.

Federal law prohibits the use of military troops at polling locations during an election, except if force is necessary to repel an armed enemy of the United States.

An American official convicted of violating the “troops at polls” law, as it is called, can face up to five years in prison “and be disqualified from holding any office of honor, profit, or trust under the United States,” according to the statute.

But the German Marshall Fund’s study found that only 64% of Americans knew that the use of troops at the polls is illegal.

The disparity was more pronounced when political party was factored in, with only 42% of Republicans knowing about the prohibition versus 72% of Democrats.

The president has increasingly deployed the military within the United States, including along the border to assist U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Homeland Security in security operations, and in Washington, D.C., where he says the National Guard’s continued presence is necessary to combat crime.

The researchers found, overall, that domestic deployments are contributing to the declining trend of Americans’ trust in the military as an institution.

Based on the survey results, the researchers concluded that the general public expects troops to refuse unlawful orders, that the courts should order that a military campaign should end if it is found in violation of international law, and that Congress has an obligation to hold the president accountable for ordering illegal military operations by cutting off funding.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has repeatedly failed to directly answer whether he has plans to deploy troops to the polls next week, calling it a hypothetical. But in a recent memorandum, he did outline how he planned to use the Department of Defense to “ensure the integrity of the upcoming election,” namely to root out any foreign actors who attempt to interfere in it.

In a recent letter to Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, the assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense and hemispheric affairs, Mark Ditlevson, confirmed that the Pentagon had no plans to deploy active duty troops or federalize the National Guard to polling sites.

Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also assured Slotkin in an earlier letter that there were no plans to send troops to seize voting machines, ballots or other election-related materials.

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