President Donald Trump has announced a nebulous “Election Integrity Army” that he claims will stop Democrats from “suppressing” Republican votes in the midterms.
The president has for years spread election conspiracy theories, despite evidence that voter fraud is vanishingly rare, and has spent much of his second term pushing Republicans to enact voting restrictions and redraw their congressional districts to favor the GOP.
Last month, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announced an expansive effort to identify Republican “threats” to election integrity and work to mitigate them.
In a Sunday Truth Social post, Trump railed against the effort, which has also tapped former Attorney General Eric Holder and prominent election law attorney Marc Elias, who oversaw the Democratic Party’s response to Trump’s failed effort to overturn his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden in court.
“The Democrats are totally unhinged and we will not allow them to threaten the integrity of our Elections,” Trump wrote.
He added that for the 2024 election, “Republicans had an Election Integrity Army in every single State to preserve the sanctity of each legal vote. We will be doing the same again in 2026, but it will be much bigger and stronger.”
The post did not elaborate on what the “army” would look like.
In 2024, the Republican National Committee recruited more than 100,000 volunteers and attorneys to monitor polling places in swing states and help with election-related litigation as part of its so-called “Protect the Vote” program.
For the November midterms, Trump and his allies have embraced increasingly extreme—and legally questionable—tactics, including purging voting rolls, trying to restrict mail-in voting, and threatening to deploy immigration agents to polling sites.
Trump has also demanded that Senate Republicans nuke the filibuster and pass the SAVE America Act, which would put onerous new requirements on voters and county election officials by requiring voters to appear in person and present proof of citizenship, with additional burdens placed on women who changed their last names after getting married.
The bill’s critics—including the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board—say that with millions of Americans lacking ready access to the necessary documents, the problems created by the bill far outweigh the scope of the issue that it claims to solve.
With the bill stalled in the Senate, Republicans have been busy taking advantage of last month’s Supreme Court ruling that gutted the Voting Rights Act to try to rush through new congressional districts before the midterms, even though primary voting is already underway in some states.
Schumer announced his task force the same day the court handed down its ruling.
In his Truth Social post attacking the initiative, Trump insulted both Holder and Elias, whom he called a “terrible lawyer with a horrible track record.”
Elias fired back in a post on X.com that Trump’s latest attack on him was “as unhinged as ever.”
“I wear his scorn as a badge of honor,” Elias wrote.
In a follow-up post, he noted that he had beaten Trump and allies more than 60 times in court when Trump tried to “steal the 2020 election.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
