EVEN THOUGH PRESIDENT TRUMP’S EFFORTS to bend elections to his will have so far largely failed, don’t mistake defeat for retreat. The federal government’s highest power centers are working overtime to tilt the election in the administration’s favor.

On Thursday, the Department of Justice sued California, accusing the state of harboring noncitizens on its voter rolls. The suit was filed forty-eight hours after DOJ mailed county election officials a password-protected thumb drive purportedly containing a list of alleged noncitizen voters. This item was delivered with an ultimatum: use the list within the next two days to review the names and prepare to separate their mail-in ballots when returned—or get sued. An L.A. County official rejected the thumb drive as an insecure medium for such a list, and the lawsuit against the state followed.

On Friday, the administration escalated from litigation to threats of criminal prosecution. In a letter to Los Angeles County officials, DOJ warned that knowingly counting ballots from people federal agencies had identified as noncitizens could make election workers criminally liable—even though California officials say the administration has provided no evidence to substantiate its claims. Trump amplified the threat on Truth Social: “They will all go to jail for a long period of time!!!”

The administration’s tactics in California mirror what the Department of Homeland Security tried in Nevada, where Secretary Markwayne Mullin claimed nearly 16,000 noncitizens were on the voter rolls and sent a letter to state officials pressuring them to review each case. Upon scrutiny, that number fell to 185 and then to zero. The pretext for the purge completely fell apart, yet the Trump administration keeps pushing these sorts of voter-fraud narratives and making demands for election officials to go to great lengths to restrict voting access.

While January 6th showed Americans what one vivid form of election subversion looks like, schemes of that sort rarely announce themselves with the clamor of an insurrection. More often, they are carried out through the subtle machinery of government: paperwork, pressure, propaganda. And the authoritarians in the Trump administration are not discouraged by failure. They’re like battering rams, hammering at the system again and again, hoping it will eventually break down in a way that benefits them.

So don’t miss what’s happening now. Trump’s election interference effort is well underway.

Swinging against the system

The falsehood that has been used to provide a basis for all the administration’s actions is simple: They pretend voter fraud is widespread. This initial lie has a natural corollary in turn: The only way to stop the fraud is to put the Trump administration in charge of who gets to vote.

Based on this false framework, Trump has issued a pair of executive orders intended to put his appointees in a position to control who can vote in our elections. The administration has interpreted these orders expansively as an instruction for agencies to create new voter requirements, to compel the states to provide unredacted voter rolls, and to prohibit mail-in ballots unless voters were placed on a new federal voter registry. Those plans faced heavy resistance, even in red states, as the Constitution strictly leaves the power to administer elections to the states.

When those efforts faltered, Trump pivoted. He demanded that Congress pass the SAVE America Act to enact some of these restrictions and requirements, but even a Republican-controlled Congress wouldn’t pass it. At the same time, DOJ tried to get the voter data another way: by suing states to hand it over. But the courts are shutting those efforts down, too; the Trump administration is 0–26 in those cases, with Republican-appointed judges delivering some of those defeats. Additionally, the Supreme Court stepped in to stop the postal rule, keeping mail-in voting safe, secure, and out of Trump’s hands for now.

DHS’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) tried to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in terrorism preparedness grants unless states and local governments accepted the imposition of FEMA’s de facto nationwide election code. The agency’s demands included stipulations about what kind of voting equipment to use; the means by which voters cast ballots; how post-election audits and ballot reconciliation processes are conducted; and how to make citizenship checks on voters and election workers. A judge recently blocked DHS from withholding the grants, and FEMA has rescinded the unlawful election-related requirements the agency had attempted to impose.

At this point, Trump should have taken the dozens of Nos to amount to a larger No. He didn’t. He keeps pounding away.

Trump gave a primetime speech in July, during which he accused...