President Donald Trump is using the US Department of Homeland Security to quietly assert federal control over elections in at least eight states, according to an investigation out Monday from Reuters.

Under the US Constitution, elections are run by states, rather than the federal government. But under Trump, who has called on Republicans to “nationalize” voting in Democratic strongholds, DHS—which typically handles issues of counterterrorism, immigration, and national security—along with other executive agencies, has launched what Reuters described as “a wider-than-known federal push into the machinery and conduct of US elections.”

“Trump administration officials and investigators have fanned out across the country, seeking confidential records, pressing for access to voting equipment, and reexamining voter-fraud cases that courts and bipartisan reviews have already rejected,” the report continued.

Branko Marcetic, a writer for Jacobin, said that the revelations showed that “Trump’s push to steal future elections by taking federal control of them is quietly gaining steam.”

In Ohio, DHS agents have called local boards of elections in at least six counties, requesting immediate access to data about specific voters, including registration forms, voting histories, and other confidential data, citing unspecified “investigations.” Though Ohio leans red, all of the requests were made in counties that either had competitive elections coming up in 2026 or were solidly Democratic.

The Nevada secretary of state received a request from the FBI for voter information as part of an investigation into the 2020 election, which Trump has continued to claim was marred by fraud that cost him a victory despite evidence to the contrary. He never fulfilled the request because those records did not exist.

In Arizona, the state senate complied with a similar subpoena for records related to its report on an audit of the 2020 election, while DHS requested information related to the state attorney general’s fraud probe.

In Colorado, Jeff Small, a lobbyist with connections to the White House who claimed to be working on behalf of Stephen Miller, the president’s homeland security adviser, called 10 county clerks to request access to Dominion voting machines, which were at the center of Trump’s fraud conspiracy theories.

Later, some of those clerks received the same request from a person who identified themselves as a senior official at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which oversees election security. The clerks said they did not comply with these requests, which some said would violate state law.

These efforts follow a high-profile January raid by the FBI on an election facility in Fulton County, Georgia, to seize hundreds of boxes of ballots, tabulator tapes, and voter roll information from the 2020 election. Trump has directly influenced the investigation, speaking with FBI agents about it the day after dispatching Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, to take part.

According to Reuters, election officials in many other states are bracing for similar investigations and raids into their operations.

“There is an intimidation factor,” said Amy Burgans, the Republican clerk and treasurer of Douglas County, Nevada. “It puts the question in the back of your mind… Who’s going to be next?”

As Republican chances of prevailing in the 2026 midterms appear grim, Trump has suggested on multiple occasions that elections be “canceled,” something he has no power to do.

He has thus far failed in his efforts to pass the SAVE America Act through the Senate, which would require every voter to reregister and provide documents proving their citizenship, a measure experts say would likely disenfranchise millions of eligible voters.

But Reuters’ investigation has revealed efforts to achieve similar ends by contacting states to compare their voter rolls with federal citizenship databases.

This happened in Missouri, where Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins shared publicly available voter roll data with federal authorities, who handed back lists of potential noncitizens flagged for removal.

Clerks in several of Missouri’s counties said that most of the individuals flagged in the federal screenings were US citizens who’d been naturalized.

Clinton Jenkins, the Republican clerk for Miller County, said none of the names of people identified by the review had voted illegally. Rather, he suggested that federal authorities were targeting people who seemed to be of Hispanic and Latino heritage.

"It looks like if you have too many vowels in your name, you show up on a list,” Jenkins said.

“They are doing this through DHS, which it’s clear by now this administration views as its own personal police force,” Marcetic said.

“It seems one of the ways this effort will take shape is, as with DHS’s deportation efforts, to racially profile voters and try to invalidate their votes by pretending they’re not citizens,” he added.

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