I'm writing this three days before the 2026 midterms, and I'll say it plainly: this may be the most consequential midterm election of my lifetime.
That's a high bar, because 2010 was enormously consequential, and I think it has flown under the radar. Two years after Barack Obama was elected, Republican turnout surged. The GOP picked up 63 House seats and took control of the chamber. But the bigger prize was further down the ballot: Republicans gained roughly 680 state legislative seats and flipped about 20 legislative chambers.
2010 was a census year, so those new majorities drew the congressional and legislative maps for the following decade. We are still living inside some of those lines. (Redistricting used to happen once a decade like clockwork. The mid-decade map fights of the past year show that norm is gone too.)
But 2010 worked slowly, through structure. 2026 will be direct, and its consequences will be obvious to everybody. We're going to find out what happens when Donald Trump is no longer enabled by a House and Senate that refuse to use their constitutional authority to check the Executive branch, or what happens if he still is.
What the administration is doing to election officials
In that vein, I've been watching the Trump administration's campaign to reach into state and local elections. Here's a quick summary of the past few months.
The Justice Department demanded full, unredacted voter rolls from 49 states and D.C. Courts have turned it down again and again. As of late October, no district or appellate court had ruled in DOJ's favor in those voter-data suits. On October 9, a federal judge in Washington struck down the policy nationwide, finding it exceeded DOJ's legal authority and violated privacy laws.
In July, DOJ's Civil Rights Division sent letters to all 50 states warning election officials they could face criminal charges over noncitizens on their rolls.
Then came California. DOJ assembled a list of about 20,000 people it calls "likely noncitizens," sued the state and Los Angeles County to keep their ballots from being counted, and on October 23 sent letters to county registrars across the state. The letters gave officials 48 hours to commit to working with DOJ and DHS, asked them to set aside those voters' mail ballots, and demanded Social Security numbers, copies of state IDs, and registration applications. One letter warned that officials who knowingly count such ballots "risk becoming aiders and abettors to a federal crime."
The lists haven't held up well. In a preliminary review of 200 names, Los Angeles County found nearly 40% indicated they were born in the United States. Butte County found that 32 of its 47 names weren't on its active rolls. Nevada County found no evidence of noncitizen voting at all. A federal judge found the administration's process for identifying noncitizens not credible, and on October 30 the Ninth Circuit, 2–1, refused to order the ballots set aside. Meanwhile the administration has issued more than 100 subpoenas for voter records in at least 13 states.
Enter the NRA
I've been waiting to see whether anyone would connect all this to, of all organizations, the National Rifle Association. The NRA already won the constitutional fight that protects your county registrar.
The case is Printz v. United States, decided in 1997. The 1993 Brady Act included an interim provision requiring local "chief law enforcement officers," in practice sheriffs, to run background checks on handgun buyers until the federal instant-check system was ready. Two sheriffs refused and sued: Jay Printz of Ravalli County, Montana, and Richard Mack of Graham County, Arizona. The NRA funded the case, and it was argued before the Supreme Court by Stephen Halbrook, a longtime NRA legal consultant.
The Court ruled 5–4 for the sheriffs. Writing for the majority, Justice Antonin Scalia laid down the rule:
"The Federal Government may neither issue directives requiring the States to address particular problems, nor command the States' officers, or those of their political subdivisions, to administer or enforce a federal regulatory program."
Here's the important point. The Brady Act was a duly passed act of Congress, signed by the President, and that didn't matter. Even with Congress's full authorization, Washington could not conscript a county sheriff into carrying out its program. The Court also refused to weigh burdens and benefits case by case. It said commands like that are simply incompatible with our system of dual sovereignty.
Now look at what DOJ is asking of California's counties. They're supposed to take a federal list, investigate the citizenship of the people on it, gather their Social Security numbers and IDs, and segregate their ballots, all within 48 hours and under threat of prosecution. That is asking local officers to administer a federal enforcement program. Under Printz, it's doubtful even Congress could order that. And Congress hasn't.
The wrinkle, and why it actually makes the point stronger
To be fair, elections aren't sheriffs. The Constitution's Elections Clause (Article I, Section 4) lets states set the "times, places and manner" of congressional elections, but it also lets Congress "make or alter" those rules. That's an unusual grant of direct power. In the 1990s, federal appeals courts upheld the National Voter Registration Act ("Motor Voter") against states' Tenth Amendment challenges on precisely that ground, in cases like Voting Rights Coalition v. Wilson (9th Cir. 1995) and ACORN v. Edgar (7th Cir. 1995). So Congress probably has more power to direct election officials than it had to direct sheriffs.
But notice who holds that power: Congress. The Elections Clause gives the President nothing. The Executive can enforce laws Congress has passed, but it can't invent new duties for county clerks by letter. Apply Printz or apply the Elections Clause, and you land in the same place. The only branch that could plausibly give orders to local election officials is the legislative branch, and it hasn't. That's a big part of why the administration keeps losing in court.
There is one thing the federal government legitimately can do here, and it's worth being precise about it. Voting by a noncitizen in a federal election is a federal crime, and so is knowingly helping someone do it. Washington can prosecute an official who actually knows a ballot is illegal and counts it anyway. What it can't do is use the threat of prosecution to make local officials do its investigative work. And an official who counts a registered voter's ballot isn't "knowingly" doing anything wrong just because that name appears on a federal list that also contains U.S.-born citizens.
Enforcement is Washington's job, and it has the tools
Enforcing the ban on noncitizen voting is not the responsibility of state and local governments. It's federal law, enforced by federal prosecutors, and people do get prosecuted for it. So how do those cases usually get built? Mostly from the federal government's own records.
The key document is the N-400, the application for naturalization. It asks applicants, under penalty of perjury, whether they have ever registered or voted. A noncitizen who voted and later applies for citizenship either discloses it or lies about it, and either way the government now has evidence. In one New Jersey case, two people who registered and voted as noncitizens were charged after falsely swearing on their N-400s that they never had. In a recent North Texas case, prosecutors charged a man with lying on his naturalization application because the five-year statute of limitations on the voting itself had already run.
The 28 people charged in California this month fit the same pattern. Only six were charged with voting as a noncitizen; the rest face felony charges that include lying on naturalization applications or registration forms. DHS said its investigation drew on naturalization records, and court documents point to a benefits-fraud audit as the starting point.
When the administration has tried the opposite approach, matching state voter rolls against immigration databases, it hasn't gone well. ProPublica found that the matches produced many false positives, and agents often discovered people weren't even registered in the counties where investigators thought they were. From January 2025 through May 2026, 41 people had been charged with crimes related to noncitizen voting, with convictions or guilty pleas in 14 cases.
That's the legitimate path: federal investigators, federal records, federal grand juries. A subpoena for one person's registration record is ordinary law enforcement. Ordering county registrars across an entire state to run a citizenship investigation on a 48-hour deadline is something else.
The shield cuts both ways
I hope the irony gets noticed. The constitutional doctrine the NRA built to keep Washington from drafting a Montana sheriff into gun control is the same doctrine that keeps Washington from drafting a California registrar into its hunt for noncitizen voters. Federalism isn't a team jersey. A principle that protects gun owners from the federal government also protects voters from it.
That brings me back to Tuesday. The courts are holding, for now. But the Constitution's real answer to an Executive branch that overreaches on elections isn't a judge. It's Congress. Whether we get a Congress willing to use the authority it already has is the question on the ballot.