With the Supreme Court temporarily allowing President Donald Trump to continue his USPS campaign against mail-in voting, opponents of the president are increasingly worried that he could effectively negate the will of voters should they elect a Democratic Congress to check him in the 2026 midterm elections. The stakes are heightened because midterms determine control of the House and Senate, the chambers with the power to subpoena the executive branch, fund or withhold funding from agencies, and — critically for this scenario — certify presidential elections under the Electoral Count Act, the statute at the center of the January 6, 2021, crisis. But according to a recent NPR report, Democrats have a plan to counter that scenario if necessary.

"Eric, Republicans are in control of both chambers of Congress, and they control what comes up for a vote," NPR host Juana Summers asked congressional reporter Eric McDaniel on Sunday. "So what does that leave Democrats actually able to do other than sounding the alarm, speaking out?"

McDaniel replied, "I mean, they're planning, right? They've held tabletop games so they're not caught off guard by the same failure of imagination - what they describe to me as a failure of imagination - that caught them off guard five or six years ago, around January 6. Allied groups are also directly involved in litigation to stop the Department of Justice from obtaining state voter rolls, which they describe both as federal overreach and a pretext to encumber eligible voters."

The tabletop exercises echo a practice that became common among election officials and advocacy groups after 2020, when war-gaming scenarios — including efforts to disrupt the transfer of power — helped shape how states and courts responded to disputes that culminated in the attack on the Capitol.

The conversation also included remarks from Vanita Gupta, a task force advisor who served as the No. 3 official in Biden's Department of Justice and is now at New York University Law School.

"Maybe the process of getting from here to a new Congress may be messier than any of us would like, but we are going to have free and fair elections so long as people don't take for granted their right to vote," Gupta told NPR.

Commenting on Trump's July speech falsely claiming that China had stolen the 2020 election from him, former principal deputy Director of National Intelligence Sue Gordon described the dangers of the "questionable" remedies Trump proposed for his inaccurate claims of election theft. Her reference to intelligence community warnings traces back to the 2016 and 2020 cycles, when U.S. intelligence agencies publicly documented foreign influence operations targeting American elections.

"I think this was a dangerous speech about an incredibly important topic, with some really questionable remedies in mind," Gordon said at the time. "So let me go through that. Number one: since 2016, the intelligence community has been saying that foreign actors intended to influence our election for the purpose of undermining democracy — not undermining a president, undermining democracy. If you recall, the whole 2016-to-2021 first Trump term turned on us trying to say that, and him interpreting it as us spreading misinformation when we tried to share that information. So this is not new — that foreign actors try to influence our election. They do."

She added, "And with the advent of the digital era, there are lots of tools available to them. So this is not a new threat. It is one he certainly knew of. He had an entire term to deal with it."

Trump's campaign against voting is widely viewed as a genuine threat to American democracy. Among the most consequential elements is his effort to compel states to turn over their voter rolls, which could be used to prevent legitimate voters from casting their ballots. The fight comes as Congress in 2022 updated the Electoral Count Act to clarify that the vice president's role in certifying electoral votes is ministerial, one of the few bipartisan election-law reforms since 2020 — though that law does not address the administrative disputes now unfolding over mail voting and voter-roll access.

"The other thing is that, as you well know, the administration has been trying to compel states to turn their voter rolls over to the federal government and to consolidate all of that in a mega database," Susannah Goodman, Common Cause's Policy Director in the Voting and Fair Representation Program, told AlterNet in June. "A number of states have refused to turn over their unredacted voter rolls with personal identifying information — Social Security numbers, driver's licenses, et cetera. Common Cause and our partners have intervened in, I think, 17 of those cases on behalf of voters."

She continued, "I don't believe there has been a single case... where, when the state has resisted and claimed they are not going to turn these voter rolls over, the court has dismissed the case or compelled the states to turn them over. The government has not had a compelling reason, and the states have won. So when states fight back, they win. We have been involved in that litigation. That is another huge power grab by the administration. It is also an illegal power grab, and when we have pushed back, we have won."