Democratic attorneys general expand coordination ahead of midterms
Twenty-four Democratic state attorneys general have expanded their coordination with about a dozen Democratic secretaries of state and several civic groups over possible federal interference in the November 2026 midterm elections, The Guardian reported on October 21. Attorneys general are the chief legal officers of their states. The effort has been under way since early 2026, and the Progressive State Leaders Committee, the public policy arm of the Democratic Attorneys General Association, is spearheading the election-protection work.
Much of the coordination runs through weekly Zoom video calls and in-person tabletop exercises, in which officials talk through hypothetical scenarios. Washington Attorney General Nick Brown chairs the committee's election-protection working group and leads the weekly calls. Participants include offices of secretaries of state, the Democracy Defenders Fund, the States United Democracy Center and the Brennan Center for Justice. Brown led tabletop exercises in Milwaukee in May 2026 and in Detroit in September 2026. According to the Guardian, the scenarios on the calls include ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents appearing near some polling places and ballots being seized in some races.
Brown has called the Justice Department and the Trump administration "the biggest adversary to a smooth election." His office co-led the legal challenges that blocked President Donald Trump's March 2026 executive order on voting by mail, and the Supreme Court ruled against that order last month. Democratic attorneys general were also behind litigation to block both of Trump's executive orders on election rules, the New York Times reported on July 24. A multistate complaint in Illinois et al. v. Federal Emergency Management Agency was filed on July 23, 2026. The 85-page filing cites Section 4(d) of a 2025 elections executive order, which directs the Attorney General and the Homeland Security secretary to take actions relating to elections.
The federal side of the debate has its own milestones. The Justice Department announced in summer 2026 plans to deploy 1,000 poll monitors for the midterms, people who observe voting and counting. The NAACP filed a lawsuit on October 4 seeking details of that deployment. CBS News has reported that the department sent 289 poll monitors in 2022. Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the department's civil rights division, wrote to state election officials in summer 2026 threatening prosecutions if they did not adequately cooperate in hunting for voting fraud.
The department has also sued 30 states to obtain their unredacted voter lists, meaning full lists without redacted personal details. Of the lawsuits that courts have ruled on, the department has lost 26.
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon said his office is likely to keep coordinating with the state attorney general's office to keep watch on the Justice Department's election watchers, Reuters reported on October 21. On October 9, Democracy Forward published a public records investigation describing expansive attempts by the Trump-Vance administration to interfere in the 2026 midterm elections.
