Last week, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released its “Election Infrastructure Security Plan.” It’s a rather routine report outlining best practices for states to follow before administering an election.

CISA releases one before every election, and this year’s report has nothing new. It includes recommendations for how states can best safeguard their elections from various cybersecurity threats. Among those recommendations are that states use paper ballots for post-election audits, which almost every state already does.

Despite being routine, election deniers and anti-voting activists are promoting the report as some sort of Trump administration mandate to restrict voting ahead of the midterms. It’s a fascinating peek into how Trump’s most dedicated allies will spin a nothingburger into a major administration victory — a different type of disinformation campaign that falls under the radar.

• “PAPER BALLOTS ARE BACK ON THE TABLE,” conservative influencer David Freeman — who posts online under the pseudonym Gunther Eagleman — wrote. “This plan calls for paper ballots you can actually hold and manual audits after Election Day… That is how a free country runs elections, and it is common sense that should never have been controversial.” Reminder: States have been doing this for years.
  
  
• The Election Integrity Network — the anti-voting advocacy group run by Trump ally Cleta Mitchell — also praised the CISA report. “CISA’s new 2026 Election Infrastructure Security Plan puts a welcome focus on something every voter deserves: results that can be checked,” EIN wrote online. “Paper ballots. Manual Audits. Clear records. That is a common sense direction for election security.”
  
  
• Even Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin took to social media to push the false narrative about the CISA report: “This [CISA] plan, which will be implemented in full, is crucial to the security, freeness, and fairness of choosing the leaders of our country.”

Meanwhile, the Institute for Responsive Government (IRG), a nonpartisan government watchdog, pointed out that the CISA report is nothing new and doesn’t change anything for the upcoming midterms.

• “The report summarizes DHS’s and CISA’s approach to safeguarding election infrastructure for the 2026 election,” IRG said in a statement. “This is not a new program nor does it appear to present new risks — this report largely repeats existing past CISA programs and identifies some internal structural changes.”

But the IRG points out one important fact that the CISA report conveniently left out:

• “Many of CISA’s election experts were fired or left the agency,” IRG said. “CISA’s Acting Director recently announced that the agency is looking to hire additional experts for various cybersecurity purposes, including election security. These new hires can potentially help election officials, but trust between local and state governments and CISA, and DHS more broadly, is currently broken.”

➤ How did the Trump administration gut CISA?

Quote of the week

Jeff Clark, the former DOJ attorney who assisted Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election, coined a new term to explain why Democracy Docket founder Marc Elias’ efforts to protect voting rights are actually Marxist lawfare. I’m not sure any of these MAGA figures actually know what Marxism means. 

For months, prominent election deniers have been calling on Trump to declare a national emergency to take over voting for the midterms.

Notable MAGA allies like lawyer and conspiracy theorist Peter Ticktin, far-right commentator Wayne Allyn Root and convicted election denier Tina Peters have all said they pitched the president on their own various plans to wrest control of aspects of voting from the states — whether it be an emergency executive order or declaring martial law.

Here’s what some of them are saying:

• Trump is “going to have to declare martial law,” Ticktin said on Root’s show recently. “That’s the only thing that can happen” for Republicans to win the midterm elections, he proclaimed. Ticktin has been pushing this suggestion based on the debunked conspiracy that machines had been compromised by America’s foreign adversaries, who were colluding with the Democratic Party to rig the midterms.
  
  
• Trump called into Root’s show in August, where the TV host pushed the president to use an emergency order to limit mail voting and require proof of citizenship and voter ID to cast a ballot. “Let me just say stranger things have happened,” the president said in response, signaling an openness to such an action. “I’ll leave it at that.”
  
  
• Peters, meanwhile, believes Trump can ban all voting machines that use foreign-made components under an executive order he signed in his first term that regulates how information and communication technology developed by foreign adversaries is used domestically.

Here’s the thing: Any of the moves Trump could make would be blatantly unconstitutional.

• “If the president were willing to violate the Constitution by purporting to declare a national emergency, or use some other mechanism to try to take over the elections, or postpone or cancel the elections, the first thing that would happen is the states would say, ‘Good luck with that,’” Center for Election Innovation & Research executive director David Becker told Democracy Docket. “Because the federal government doesn't run elections.”
  
  
• “Federal courts would invalidate any attempts by a president to claim authority to nationalize elections,” Center for American Progress scholars Michael Sozan, Allison McManus and Dan Herman recently wrote. “The Constitution clearly grants states — with Congress as a backstop — the authority to administer elections, which states have done through multiple national emergencies and tests of national sovereignty.”

But the fact that the president would so blatantly try to rig voting is a dangerous marker on the state of American democracy: It would mean a president is attempting to sidestep the Constitution — which empowers states to run elections — to prevent his party from losing.

➤ Why the chatter over a Trump takeover of elections is worrisome