A few weeks ago, Republican election officials in Colorado began receiving unsolicited calls and texts from a GOP consultant who said he was working with the Trump administration on “election integrity.”
In a text to one of the officials, the consultant, Jeff Small, indicated he was acting on a request from Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff. In a phone call with another clerk, Small said he was coordinating with the White House and the Justice Department to “implement” an elections executive order signed by President Donald Trump, recalled Justin Grantham, the top election official in Fremont County.
Grantham and Carly Koppes, who oversees elections in Weld County in northern Colorado, told CNN that Small made a specific request: Would they give a third party access to their election equipment?
Both declined.
“Not only is that a hard no, I mean, you’re not even going to breathe on my equipment,” Koppes said.
The outreach to the Colorado clerks is just one of a flurry of recent federal actions launched by the Trump administration and groups aligned with the president.
While the White House distanced itself from Small, Trump and his allies are collecting vast amounts of voter data and working to change the ground rules for next year’s midterms, often by invoking federal government authority.
Next year’s midterms hold enormous stakes for Trump and his opposition. Democrats need to net just three seats in the US House in 2026 to flip control of the chamber from Republicans. A Democratic-led House could block Trump’s legislative agenda and launch investigations of the president in the second half of his second term.
Samantha Tarazi, CEO of the nonprofit Voting Rights Lab, which has closely tracked state developments, said she believes Trump is gearing up “to use the power of his office to interfere in the 2026 election.”
“What started as an unconstitutional executive order — marching orders for state action regardless of its fate in court — has grown into a full federal mobilization to seize power over our elections,” she said.
White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said Trump is “fighting for election integrity” and will keep doing so “despite Democrat objections that reveal their disdain for commonsense safeguards like verifying citizenship.”
“Free and fair elections are the bedrock of our Constitutional Republic, and we’re confident in securing an ultimate victory in the courtroom,” he said in an email.
Aggressive moves to remake the board
Restricting who can access election machines and sensitive voting software has grown even more important to election officials in recent years following voting system breaches in states such as Colorado and Georgia. Trump allies had sought access to machines to find evidence that could back up the president’s claim that widespread fraud marred the 2020 election.
But election watchdogs and some Democratic election officials say activity by Trump and aligned groups since his return to the White House has raised fears of a broader effort to reshape elections.
Recent actions by the administration and its allies include:
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Trump signing an executive order in March that sought to force states to require proof of citizenship to register to vote and take “enforcement action” against states that accept mail ballots after Election Day. Federal judges have blocked parts of the executive order, noting that the power to regulate elections rests with the states and Congress, not the president.
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The Republican National Committee pushing to obtain voter registration records from states. On the day Trump signed the executive order, the RNC sent records requests to 48 states and Washington, DC, seeking information on how they maintain voter registration lists. And the RNC has sued New Jersey – home to a closely watched gubernatorial race this fall – alleging officials there have failed to respond to its requests for voter data and documents related to voting machine audits. A spokesperson for New Jersey’s elections division declined to comment on the litigation.
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The Justice Department asking more than a dozen states in recent weeks to provide voter lists, explain their procedures for removing potential ineligible voters from their rolls or discuss entering into information-sharing agreements to help the agency root out election fraud. The demands range from seeking copies of voting rolls in political battlegrounds such as Michigan to a broad request in Colorado to provide election records as far back as 2020.
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Republicans in Texas undertaking a rare mid-decade redistricting, following entreaties from Trump. A map released Wednesday by GOP lawmakers who control the state legislature aims to take over five additional Democratic seats, which would to give the GOP the edge in 30 of the state’s 38 congressional districts.
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The Republican-controlled House in April approving the SAVE Act, which mirrors parts of Trump’s executive order requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote. The proposed legislation also would make it a crime for election officials to mistakenly register someone to vote who has not provided proof of citizenship. Critics note that it’s already illegal for noncitizens to cast ballots in federal elections and say requiring proof of citizenship could disenfranchise eligible voters who lack the needed documents or changed their name through marriage.
To justify the redistricting in his state, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott cited a letter from Harmeet Dhillon, head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, that challenged the legality of four existing congressional districts.
Dhillon said in a statement: “Clean voter rolls and basic election safeguards are requisites for free, fair, and transparent elections.”
She said the agency “has a statutory mandate to enforce our federal voting rights laws, and ensuring the voting public’s confidence in the integrity of our elections is a top priority of this administration.”
Trump has been blunt about his partisan goals in Texas, and he has suggested that other GOP-controlled states should pursue their own redistricting efforts – a move that threatens to set off an all-out redistricting war this year with Democrats in California and other Democrat-led states.
The administration’s recent actions have unsettled some election officials, who have endured years of threats and harassment following the 2020 election and the conspiracy theories about election fraud that flourished in its aftermath.
Election officials “are surfing on quicksand,” said David Becker, executive director and founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research and a former DOJ voting rights attorney.
“They don’t know what the executive order means, if it has any meaning whatsoever,” he said. “They don’t know if they will be investigated just for having done their jobs. They don’t know if the vast power of the federal government is going to be weaponized against them. They don’t know if the Department of Justice is going to be suing them.”
A recent survey of 858 local election officials by the liberal-leaning Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s Law School bears that out. It found more than half of local election officials – 59% – say they are concerned about political leaders engaging in efforts to interfere with how election officials do their jobs. And 46% said they were concerned about politically motivated investigations of their work or that of their fellow election officials.
The fight over voting machines in Colorado
In early July, as previously reported by The Washington Post and media outlets in Colorado, Republican election clerks began receiving calls and texts from Small. Small, who has worked for Colorado GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert and for the US Interior Department during Trump’s first term, now is a principal with a Denver public affairs firm.
County officials interviewed by CNN said Small told them he was reaching out specifically to Republican clerks in blue states in a push to help advance Trump’s executive order.
Grantham, the election clerk in Fremont County, said Small’s outreach to only Republican officials was an early red flag during their conversation. Another concern arose, he said, when Small mentioned gaining access to the county’s election equipment.
“My response was, ‘I didn’t believe that the president had the authority in the Constitution to write executive orders to affect elections and that until the Supreme Court found that he could, I would not let anybody access my voting equipment.”
CNN reached out to Small, and his attorney, Suzanne Taheri, responded to CNN’s inquiry. In a text, Taheri said Small’s outreach “supported efforts by allies in the administration to encourage officials to participate in President Trump’s election security executive order.”
He undertook the activity “on a volunteer basis, during his own free time, while on paternity leave,” she added. Neither Small nor Taheri answered questions about who exactly in the administration asked him to contact the clerks.
The White House distanced itself from Small’s actions in a statement.
“Jeff Small does not speak for the White House nor was he ever authorized to do official business on behalf of the White House,” a White House spokesperson said in an email to CNN.
Miller did not respond to CNN requests for comment.
The impact on local election officials
In Colorado, election officials say, there is heightened sensitivity around who can access election equipment, after the high-profile prosecution of former Mesa County elections clerk, Tina Peters. She became a celebrity among pro-Trump activists who have advanced false claims that voting machines had been rigged to flip votes from Trump to then-candidate Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
Many state laws set strict security standards for voting machines to prevent tampering with elections. Colorado has specifically barred third parties from accessing election equipment.
Last year, a judge sentenced Peters to nine years in prison after she was convicted on state charges for her role in a breach of her county’s election system as part of an unsuccessful hunt for fraud.
Trump and his administration have taken up Peters’ cause, however.
Earlier this year, the Justice Department said it was reviewing her case as part of a broad mandate from Trump to counter prosecutions it said were aimed at “inflicting political pain than toward pursuing actual justice.”
And in a social media post in May, the president weighed in personally, calling Peters an “innocent Political Prisoner” and directing the Justice Department to “to take all necessary action to help secure” her release.
Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold told CNN that her office has provided recent voter data to the Justice Department that’s generally available to the public.
But she said she declined to comply with a request related to records from the 2020 election because the federal government has no “legal basis” to seek it. Federal law only requires the preservation of election data in federal races for 22 months.
Griswold, a Democrat, said Trump’s recent actions demonstrate the president “is using the power of the federal government to undermine American elections and undermine voter confidence in them.”
In Colorado, a state Trump lost in all three of his White House bids, tensions over election administration remain high.
Koppes, the Republican clerk of Weld County, said she faced so many threats for her outspoken defense of the 2020 election results – and her county’s use of Dominion Voting machines – that she began to vary her routes to and from work, a practice she continues today.
Crane, the head of the clerk’s association, said it took a “lot of courage” for county clerks to rebuff the recent overtures, given the climate of suspicion and harassment that still persists. He noted that an elections office in southern Colorado housing Dominion machines was firebombed recently. No one was injured in the after-hours incident.
“The threats against election officials are very real,” he added.
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