In July 2026, President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice reportedly dispatched six federal prosecutors to oversee Arizona’s primary elections, according to Democracy Docket, which cited records it had reviewed. The prosecutors were reportedly sent to the state’s two most populous counties, Maricopa (home to Phoenix) and Pima (home to Tucson). This comes as the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division said it will dispatch 1,000 monitors to the polls for the midterm elections, and as FBI Director Kash Patel continues to equivocate about whether FBI agents will be sent to the polls (even though federal law explicitly bans armed officers from polling sites).
These threats raised serious concerns about the openness and fairness of the upcoming midterms. And we should definitely not downplay the ongoing assaults on voting rights that the Trump administration certainly didn’t start but has definitely amplified in unprecedented ways.
But it is also important not to oversell these threats, because that is what the Trump administration wants. In fact, because of important structural limitations it faces, fear is what the administration needs.
Trump can’t actually deploy enough people to significantly undermine elections. But he wants us to think he can. And that’s why overly credulous reporting on Trump’s threats actually serves his purpose.
The first challenge to Trump’s would-be meddling is the fact that we have so many polling sites, spread out over so much area. Take what Trump’s DOJ did in Arizona. Six observers were reportedly sent to Maricopa County (which has ~250 in-person voting locations) and Pima County (which had 120 in-person locations during its recent primaries). That’s nearly 400 polling locations spread across two counties that cover a combined 18,000 square miles — in a state where about 75% of all people vote by mail anyway. This act was pure theater, certainly designed more to get headlines than to actually monitor anything.
Now, it is true that to affect the results of the midterms, Trump does not need to target every district in the country — there’s no way he can suppress enough votes to pull off a GOP upset in, say, New York’s 10th District, home to Brooklyn’s liberal Park Slope, which Democrat Dan Goldman won by 66 percentage points in 2024 and Brad Lander will likely win by more.
The Cook Political Report released a list of in-play Congressional seats in September, showing 43 competitive races: 11 classified as “lean D,” 22 as “toss-up,” and 10 as “lean R.” Those 43 districts are spread across 19 states, from New York to Florida to Texas to Washington, and cover over 242,000 square miles. They are home to surely thousands of polling sites. And it’s likely that the list of in-play districts has grown since then, as national anger with Trump grows. In at least one district classified as “likely R,” Maine’s 2nd, recent polling has the Democratic contender up by 2 to 6 percentage points, which suggests it’s not “likely R” anymore.
Because we rely on cities, counties and states for most law enforcement activities, the federal government simply does not have as many police and prosecutors as it would need to threaten elections on a real scale.
This leads us to the second big challenge Trump faces: staffing.
Federalism has tied Trump’s hands many times during his two administrations, but one of its strongest impacts has been structural, not legal. Because we rely on cities, counties and states for most law enforcement activities, the federal government simply does not have as many police and prosecutors as it would need to threaten elections on a real scale. The FBI, for example, has fewer than 14,000 sworn officers (called “special agents”). For comparison, the New York Police Department alone has 33,000 officers. Meanwhile, Chicago has 11,500, while Los Angeles has fewer than 9,000 law enforcement officers.
It’s true that the FBI is not the only law enforcement agent in the federal government. In fact, about half of all federal law enforcement serve in agencies that are part of the Department of Homeland Security. And while it can be somewhat tricky to make clean comparisons between federal agencies and local police, we can make some rough calculations. The primary armed agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement are in Enforcement and Removal Operations (~6,000 officers) and Homeland Security Investigations (~7,000 officers). Agencies like the U.S. Marshals, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives add another 11,000. Perhaps the biggest source would be Customs and Border Protection, which has about 21,000 field agents and another 25,000 armed officers who serve at points of entry (like the person who scans your passport at JFK Airport).
That means even if Trump were to redeploy 100% of all these officers to target the polls in November, he’d have at his disposal a force that was only 2.5 times the size of the NYPD alone, and he obviously couldn’t do that.
The only way to get the sort of manpower he needs would be to fully deploy the National Guard and the U.S. military nationwide, which would move us out of a discussion about “voter suppression” into something much darker. (And the chairman of the Joint Chiefs is already on the record saying there are “no plans” to use the military in the midterms.)
Why is it important to say all this? It’s not to brush off suppression efforts, which have been a major tactic of the Republican Party, especially since the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013. Rather, it is because Trump needs the breathless, this-is-a-real-threat coverage. He needs it, because that is the whole point.
Trump lacks the manpower to deploy agents at any sort of real scale, and those he can deploy will likely face overt hostility from dedicated poll workers and monitors. They may be able to sow some doubt and confusion (although they also seem fairly inept when they have tried), but any impact will be thin and sporadic.
But coverage of his threats which doesn’t put his structural weakness front and center can create a sense of fear that keeps people at home in much larger numbers, thus doing for him the job he cannot really do himself.
The post Don’t let Trump spark panic about election monitors appeared first on MS NOW.
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