Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has refused to rule out deploying troops to polling stations during November’s midterms.
Hegseth, 45, was grilled on the matter during a marathon House Armed Services Committee hearing on Wednesday. Democratic Rep. Jill Tokuda pointed to comments made by President Donald Trump earlier this year, when he lamented not having sent the National Guard to seize voting machines in the wake of his 2020 election loss.
Federal law makes it a crime, punishable by up to five years in prison, to bring “troops or armed men” to a polling place.
Tokuda, 50, read the statute into the record before asking Hegseth if he would carry out such an order from Trump, 79.
The defense secretary dodged, prompting Tokuda to press him again. He kept evading. Eventually, the Hawaii Democrat boiled it down to a binary: “It’s a simple question. Who would you follow? The president or the Constitution?”
Hegseth then deflected with an attack on Trump’s predecessor. “I will note that in 2024, troops were—that was Joe Biden, by the way—were deployed to polling locations in 15 states,” he told the committee. “Explain that one to me.”
Except it never happened, at least not in the way Hegseth claimed. As The Hill reported at the time, the roughly 250 National Guard personnel active across 15 states on Election Day 2024 had been activated by individual state governors—not by Biden—to provide cybersecurity and logistical backup to local election officials.
No federal troops were ordered to polling places, and federal law would have made any such order a crime.
Tokuda had bolstered her question by quoting Trump’s January interview with The New York Times, in which the president said he “should have” deployed the National Guard to seize voting machines in swing states but he worried they weren’t “sophisticated enough” to pull it off.
The Daily Beast contacted the Pentagon and the White House to ask if they would rule out sending troops to polling stations for the midterms. They did not immediately reply.
Hegseth, after dancing around the question at the hearing, pivoted instead to praising the Pentagon’s record on domestic deployments—including the dispatch of federalized California National Guard members and U.S. Marines to Los Angeles last summer, which a federal judge ruled illegal in September for violating the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act. “Los Angeles would’ve been on fire for the summer had we not come across our law enforcement friends and helped them out,” he claimed.
It was not the first time Tokuda had cornered Hegseth in front of the same committee. In June, she demanded he confirm he would not order troops to fire on protesters. The defense secretary refused, calling the question a “false hypothetical.”
By the end of Wednesday’s marathon session, several Democrats were openly calling on Hegseth to resign.
