It’s a midterm election year, and Wisconsin voters will head to the polls for a primary on Aug. 11 and general election Nov. 3.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is sowing doubts about the integrity of elections. To find out more, WUWM’s Maayan Silver turned to Edgar Lin with Protect Democracy. It’s a nonpartisan, anti-authoritarian group that works to protect elections.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Maayan Silver: Your Executive Override report summarizes the Trump administration's subversion efforts in 2020, 2022 and 2024, and has described them as "deceive, disrupt, and deny." Can you explain?
Edgar Lin: This is a three-part playbook. "Deceive" is manufacturing a fraud problem that isn't there, right? The non-citizen voting narrative, the inflated bad voter rule claims, but then using the machinery of the government to make disinformation look like actual evidence.
The next section is "disrupt." Using that manufactured doubt in the deceive prong as the pretext to make voting harder or seize control of election data and machinery. The voter roll lawsuits, the push for the SAVE Act, the pressure on election officials, right? Those all fit into the "disrupt" prong.
And finally, the third one is "deny." If the favored candidate loses anyway, they use everything that was built in the first two stages to contest, delay or overturn results. That's kind of the big picture of the deceive, disrupt and deny strategy.
Why does Protect Democracy posit that 2026 will be different than any election in American history?
In 2020, the election denial movement was a losing candidate, and had institutional pushback: courts, election officials from both parties. In 2026, [election denialism] is official federal policy. The federal government itself is generating the fraud narrative and using real federal tools to act on it: the lawsuits that demanded voter data, private sensitive voter data, FBI raids. And earlier [in July], selectively declassified intelligence.
That's sort of the throughline of our report. It's not that the lies are louder, it is that it is backed by the federal government. And so with the internal checks in the past pretty much dismantled, now anything Trump does has the full force of the of the federal government. So that's that's what we're looking at as what's different in 2026.
In Wisconsin, the FBI is seeking interviews with Milwaukee election officials who helped administer the 2020 election. How does that play into the strategy and what are you watching for in Wisconsin?
I think that's exactly what they envision for the "disrupt" strategy. So the goal then is if they were to seize ballots from [Wisconsin's] 2020 [election], the issue is would they then take it and match it with their system that has been shown to be highly inaccurate, the SAVE system that wasn't designed to do this job? Let's start with that, right? And could there be pretext to then remove people who are actual eligible voters, U.S.- born citizens, which we've actually seen in other states.
If we think about, you know, the Wisconsin misinformation recently, the president amplified a false claim that Wisconsin has more registered voters than eligible voters. Except here's the trick. It conflates the state's 8.3 million-name list, which deliberately keeps inactive records as a fraud prevention practice so the official can spot if someone moved or became deceased with roughly the 3.7 million people actively registered, right? So it is basically continuing to spew disinformation and misinformation for the public that then justifies the action that they may take under the disrupt strategy.
You mentioned the SAVE database. It's an online federal tool to help government agencies verify immigration status. How's it being used in elections?
SAVE was built to check immigration statuses, not for [elections], but for benefits applications. It was never, ever designed to verify citizenship for voting. And I think nearly one in five queries can't produce a definitive answer. And what's even worse is DOJ has sent states draft agreements that would let the department handpick voters for removal with no criteria at all for who gets removed. No rules, no standards, no limits. It's just hard to imagine who gets picked and who doesn't.
Alabama flagged over 3,200 voters as non-citizens. Through that system, then admitted 2,074 of them were eligible, including a natural-born citizen who made a form error. Virginia's purge swept up a woman born in Brooklyn. Ohio referred 521 cases for prosecution supposedly, exactly one was legitimate. And so I just wanna bring that out here, in the sense that the SAVE system is not something that is truly designed for this and therefore yields a lot of inaccurate results.
So once you take the voter data, plug it into the SAVE system, you can imagine when the errors come, those people will be challenged for eligibility to vote, right? In Wisconsin, at least, we have same-day registration [so someone could re-register on election day]. In states where there's not same-day registration, those voters could be permanently removed for this election.
What can people do about increasing doubt-sowing about elections?
I would say there are three things people can do, and I'm going to talk about simple things. The first one is get yourself ready. Double-check your voter registration now, two minutes at myvote.wi.gov. Send that link to the five people they know, so that they can make sure that their registration is up-to-date. Know the election deadlines and make a plan to vote, make a plan to go early if that's the preferred method, in person or by mail, but make a plan to vote and vote early. If you are voting by mail, I would especially recommend that you vote early, given sort of the potential [delay] that's involved with USPS. Again, we have same-day registration as a backstop, so that's still an option.
Second, become part of the system instead of just watching it. Sign up to be a poll worker with your municipal clerk. Wisconsin has lost a lot of clerks and a lot of election workers since 2020, right? The single most patriotic thing you can do this year is to help run the election and observe the process, the machine, the count, share what you see. The first-hand account is an antidote to conspiracy theories.
And third, and finally, be ready to show up. If officials come under pressure to break the law this fall, peaceful, visible public support is what keeps them from facing it alone. The "deception" strategy runs on confusion and despair. Every registered voter, every poll worker, every accurate conversation at a kitchen table is a direct counter to it. None of us needs to do everything, all of us can do something.
