In January, the Franklin County Board of Elections in Ohio received a surprising call.

The man on the line said he was an agent at the Department of Homeland Security – and he needed immediate access to voter records. Franklin County has a large population of Democrats and has long been a focal point of Republican skepticism about urban voting centers in Ohio.

In the coming weeks, the requests multiplied. According to emails reviewed by Reuters, the agent asked for voter registration forms and voting histories for dozens of voters – records that include driver’s license numbers and other confidential data. He pressed for information about local voter-registration groups, describing the request as an “investigation” and “very time sensitive.” But he offered no explanation for what prompted his probe or where it was headed.

The requests were a bolt from the blue for Franklin County election officials. Under the US Constitution, elections – even for national offices such as the presidency – are run by states, not the federal government. Adding to the confusion, DHS’s mission has traditionally focused largely on counterterrorism, border security and immigration enforcement.

“We’d never received a call from Homeland Security before, so that was unusual,” said Antone White, the county’s elections director. He said he complied, but still does not know the purpose of the inquiry. DHS declined to comment on the Ohio operation, but said its agents are “actively rooting out and investigating election fraud wherever it can be found.”

The US attorney’s office for southern Ohio declined to comment on whether any federal investigation was underway.

The Ohio episode is part of a larger pattern Reuters found in at least eight states: a wider-than-known federal push into the machinery and conduct of US elections, which since the founding of the republic in 1789 have been run by states and local governments. Trump administration officials and investigators have fanned out across the country, seeking confidential records, pressing for access to voting equipment and re-examining voter-fraud cases that courts and bipartisan reviews have already rejected.

In Ohio, federal investigators have collected voter records in at least six counties, two of them solidly Democratic and the others politically competitive, citing unspecified investigations. The scope of those probes hasn’t been previously reported.

In Nevada, the FBI sought voter information from the secretary of state’s office, a request not previously disclosed, as part of a Justice Department probe into the 2020 election.

In Colorado, a senior Trump administration cybersecurity official approached a county clerk to seek access to voting machines, the clerk said, in another previously unreported incident.

The episodes are prompting local election officials in some states to reassess a federal government long viewed as a partner in election security. In Colorado, at least 63 county clerks are consulting with their statewide association on how to respond to possible federal subpoenas or the arrival of federal agents at polling places. And in South Carolina, officials from more than 40 counties plan to attend an all-day July workshop focused on similar scenarios, including the presence of armed federal officers at voting sites, officials in those states told Reuters.

President Donald Trump, a Republican, has been open about his desire to expand federal authority over elections, calling on his party this year to “take over” and “nationalize” voting in at least 15 places.

It isn’t just bluster. Through executive orders and proposed legislation, his administration has sought to require proof of citizenship to vote, allow federal agencies to compile voter registration lists and mandate use of a Homeland Security database to verify eligibility. The administration has pushed aggressive voter-roll purges, limits on mail-in voting and baseless claims about voting machines. And Trump has directed DHS and the Justice Department to intensify investigations of election fraud allegations.

“President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters," said White House Spokeswoman Abigail Jackson. "Noncitizens voting is a crime. Anyone breaking the law will be held accountable."

The Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment.

Conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation think tank have for years argued that voter fraud – including voting by non-citizens and other ineligible voters – poses a serious threat to US elections. Trump and his allies have also pressed false claims that voting machines were rigged against him in the 2020 election. Courts and election law-scholars have found that these claims are unsupported by evidence. But Trump’s relentless cries of cheating have had an effect: A Reuters-Ipsos poll last week found that 63 per cent of Republicans believe the 2020 vote was stolen and that a majority of Americans support voter-ID requirements.

Rather than seek a sweeping federal takeover of elections, the administration appears to be testing constitutional limits one state and one county at a time, Reuters found.

Minnesota’s secretary of state, Democrat Steve Simon, said states now have to prepare for the possibility “that our own federal government will interfere with the election, either directly or indirectly,” whether through federal agents at polling places, emergency executive action or the seizure of election equipment. “It would be irresponsible for me or anyone administering the elections not to game out scenarios, not to think about the possibilities of what federal interference would look like,” said Simon.

Amy Burgans, the Republican clerk and treasurer of Douglas County, Nevada, said that even the prospect of federal enforcement can be unsettling for election officials. “There is an intimidation factor,” she said, citing concerns about personal legal exposure if an inquiry escalates. High-profile actions, including federal raids and record demands tied to the 2020 election, have heightened that anxiety.

“It puts the question in the back of your mind,” Burgans said. “Who’s going to be next?”

Reuters identified at least 20 current and former Trump officials who supported efforts to overturn the 2020 election or promoted broader voter-fraud claims and have since been involved in the White House’s renewed push to reshape federal elections. Some actions have drawn national attention, including a January raid on election offices in Fulton County, Georgia, aimed at reviving Trump’s bogus claims of fraud there in the 2020 vote. Others have unfolded off the radar, like the collection of voter data in Franklin County, Ohio, a heavily Democratic county that includes Columbus.

Reuters interviewed more than two dozen state and local election administrators, reviewed hundreds of pages of correspondence between election officials and federal authorities through public records requests, and consulted more than a dozen election-law experts.

Nine administrators – including five Republicans, two Democrats and two independents – said they feared the administration’s actions could open the door to intensified federal scrutiny of election results this November, when control of US Congress is at stake.

That doesn’t mean elections are destined to be overturned, several election experts told Reuters. But attempts at tampering cannot be ruled out. “If the election turns on a few jurisdictions, states or counties where there are disputed races, then we'd be more likely to see attempts at subversion,” said Richard Hasen, an election-law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Federal scrutiny tests old alliances

The push has played out across a range of jurisdictions.

They include battleground states, Democratic counties within otherwise Republican states, and areas deeply supportive of Trump. Election-law experts said the strategy seems to be less about a single “takeover” than finding multiple pressure points – probing voter rolls, seeking access to election machines, searching for evidence of fraud – that could potentially be used to justify stricter rules or contest outcomes if the margin is narrow.

Even in some conservative regions that voted overwhelmingly for Trump, the federal push into election administration has unsettled local officials who once dealt with Washington at arm’s length.

That includes several counties in Colorado, where a lobbyist tied to the Trump administration made a series of calls to Republican election clerks last summer. Three clerks told Reuters that the lobbyist, Jeff Small, raised the possibility of White House partnerships with their offices and discussed access to voting machines. Carly Koppes, the president of the Colorado Clerks Association and a clerk in Weld County, said she spoke with Small and was aware of at least nine other counties he contacted.

Small previously served as a senior adviser to the interior secretary during Trump’s first administration. He later worked as chief of staff to Lauren Boebert, a Republican congresswoman from Colorado and Trump ally who has promoted the president’s false claims about the 2020 election. Small now works in Washington at a public-affairs and lobbying firm, where he focuses on energy issues.

One of the people Small called was Steve Schleiker, the Republican clerk and recorder in El Paso County, a reliably conservative region. Schleiker said he was home on a Friday night last summer when Small phoned, identifying himself as acting on behalf of the White House. Small praised the clerk’s handling of elections and asked whether someone from the Department of Homeland Security could follow up with him. Schleiker agreed.

Minutes later, Schleiker received a second call. That caller said Trump was frustrated with the pace of carrying out his election agenda and was seeking local “partners” to help execute it, but did not specify what the agenda entailed, Schleiker said. The caller identified himself, Schleiker added, as a senior official at another arm of Homeland Security: the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is responsible for safeguarding elections and other critical infrastructure. Reuters was unable to confirm the caller’s name.

The caller then asked for access to El Paso County’s voting machines, made by Dominion Voting Systems. Schleiker said he refused, telling him that granting access would violate Colorado law. The call ended abruptly, he said. Dominion has been the target of debunked claims promoted by Trump and allies that its machines were used to rig the 2020 election — allegations repeatedly rejected by courts and election officials.

Reached by Reuters, Small confirmed that he had contacted Schleiker and other Colorado clerks but said the accounts of his and others’ outreach contained inaccuracies, without offering specifics. He said Schleiker’s description of a call from a senior CISA official was “not accurate,” but declined to elaborate. Small didn’t respond to follow-up inquiries.

The White House did not respond to questions about Small. In a statement, DHS declined to say whether a CISA official had called Schleiker, but said that Small “does not have any role with DHS and has never been formally authorized to conduct any official business for the department.”

“I was incredulous”

In Ohio, federal agents have sought access to sensitive voter records as the state re-enters the ranks of closely watched midterm battlegrounds.

Recent polling shows the state’s high-stakes U.S. Senate race statistically tied, with control of the chamber potentially hinging on Ohio and a handful of other contests. Both the Senate race and the contest for governor are highly competitive in Ohio, making turnout and election administration in large counties especially important. After years of trending Republican, Ohio’s shift back toward battleground status has given its election offices outsized national significance.

White, the director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, said the federal agent who called his office in mid-January said he was coordinating his investigation with Ohio’s Republican secretary of state. White said he later called the secretary of state’s office to confirm the request and was told it was legitimate. He complied. The secretary of state’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

In Franklin County, the agent collected unredacted registration and voting records for at least 50 voters, including signatures, addresses and partial Social Security numbers, according to email correspondence between DHS and the county. In a March 16 email to White’s office, the agent, who works for the Homeland Security Investigations division at DHS, also sought information about a local voter-registration group, calling it a “priority” and offering to seek a summons if necessary.

Election-fraud investigations have traditionally been handled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department, not Homeland Security. White said his office turned over the records because “DHS is a law enforcement agency,” and his office routinely complies with requests from legal authorities at the state and local level.

In his emails, the DHS agent told White’s staff he had been working with an unidentified prosecutor. The US attorney’s office for southern Ohio said it would neither confirm nor deny any federal voter-fraud investigation.

White said the agent never explained the basis for the request and has not contacted his office since.

Reuters found that Homeland Security agents have also sought records from at least five other Ohio counties. Among them is Montgomery County – home to Dayton, a solidly Democratic city in a politically competitive region.

In February, three agents visited a vocational high school in Dayton to investigate an uncorroborated claim by a former student that, two years earlier, an organizer of a voter registration drive at the school had improperly advised her how to vote. Reuters couldn't establish the identity of the organizer.

“I was incredulous,” David Lawrence, the superintendent of Dayton Public Schools, said in an interview. Lawrence said there was no evidence or corroborating claims to support the allegation. “I asked them, ‘Why here, and why now?’” He said the agents told him voter fraud allegations were now being prioritized. “They said, ‘We have agents everywhere. Every time we get these things, we investigate them.’”

The election fraud investigations mark a departure for DHS – particularly its Homeland Security Investigations unit, which previously focused on transnational crimes such as money laundering, human trafficking and terrorism.

“Everything that HSI does is supposed to have some sort of immigration or border nexus," said A. Scott Brown, who spent more than 20 years in supervisory roles at the agency before retiring in 2023. “What are they pulling resources away from? An investigation of a child being exploited? Fentanyl being smuggled?”

In its statement, DHS defended changes at the agency: “Under President Trump, HSI is committed to restoring integrity to our election systems and ensuring that American citizens and only American citizens are electing American leaders.” Early in his new term, Trump dismantled key election-security functions at the department’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and slashed its budget and staff. For years, CISA focused on protecting election infrastructure from cyber threats. In 2020, days after CISA publicly rejected Trump’s claim that the election was stolen, Trump fired the agency’s director.

Since Trump returned to power, CISA’s role has shifted markedly. Several local election officials told Reuters they now struggle to obtain security assessments from the agency and instead have hired private contractors to evaluate physical and cyber risks.

At the same time, people who championed bogus claims disputing the 2020 election have moved into positions of influence in DHS and CISA. Among them: Marci McCarthy, who was CISA’s director of public affairs until joining the Pentagon this month. She previously served as chair of the DeKalb County Republican Party in Georgia and was active in party efforts attacking the legitimacy of the 2020 vote.

The administration has also created a new “Election Integrity” office within DHS and appointed Heather Honey, a prominent promoter of debunked election fraud claims, to lead it. A former corporate investigator with no experience in administering elections, Honey took part in Republican-led efforts to reexamine Arizona’s 2020 results and worked on voter-eligibility challenges in Pennsylvania. Honey and McCarthy didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The DHS statement said CISA is “serving as the national coordinator for securing and protecting the nation’s critical infrastructure” and “delivering timely, actionable cyber threat intelligence” – including “defending against both nation-state and criminal cyber threats.” The people DHS recruited are “focused on keeping our elections safe, secure, and free” while implementing “the president’s policies,” the statement said.

Re-examining the 2020 vote

Elsewhere, the Trump administration is mounting on-the-ground efforts to revisit the 2020 election and scrutinize who is eligible to vote. On April 14, the Justice Department demanded that Michigan’s Wayne County – a solidly Democratic county in a pivotal state – turn over an array of 2024 election records. State officials declined to comply and said they will file a court challenge, denouncing the demand as baseless. Last August in election battleground Nevada, the state’s then-acting US attorney, Trump appointee Sigal Chattah, announced a wide-ranging investigation into alleged voter fraud focused on 2020. Months later, the FBI contacted the office of Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar seeking specific voter information related to that election, Aguilar said in an interview. His office told the FBI the requested data did not exist and therefore Nevada could not comply.

Even so, Aguilar said, the probe had a chilling effect, leaving employees worried about potential criminal exposure and straining relations with federal authorities. “People were afraid,” said Aguilar, a Democrat. He said the FBI later closed the investigation without filing charges. The FBI declined to comment.

And in the Republican-led state of Missouri, a senior Justice Department official intervened last September.

Andrew “Mac” Warner, who served in leadership roles in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division during the Trump administration, contacted at least two county clerks seeking access to Dominion voting equipment and election records in the Republican-led state, according to the clerks and the Missouri Association of County Clerks and Election Authorities. One clerk no longer had the equipment, and the other refused access.

Warner, who recently left the Justice Department, declined in a call with Reuters to comment on why he contacted the clerks, but he did not dispute their accounts.

More recently, the state’s top election official, Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, disclosed in February that his office had shared publicly available voter-roll data with federal authorities so the names could be screened against citizenship databases. The federal government returned a list of individuals flagged as potential noncitizens, which Hoskins’ office then asked county clerks to review.

But clerks in several of Missouri’s largest counties, including St. Louis and St. Charles, said most individuals flagged by the federal screening were US citizens, many of them naturalized. Smaller counties reported similar conclusions. In Miller County, Clinton Jenkins, the Republican clerk and head of the state clerks association, said none of the people reviewed in his county had voted illegally.

“It looks like if you have too many vowels in your name, you show up on a list,” Jenkins told Reuters, suggesting that some of the names appeared to belong to people of Latino and Hispanic heritage. Hoskins did not respond to requests for comment.

Jenkins said harassment and pressure from people who believe unfounded claims of election fraud – including demands for hand counts and access to voting machines – have taken a toll in Missouri, where Trump has won each of his three bids for the presidency. Since 2024, about 15 election officials in Missouri have resigned over a 14-month period, citing job stress and mental-health strain, Jenkins said, calling it “unprecedented.” Before that, he added, typically one or two clerks quit a year before their terms ended. Some have been targeted by statewide efforts by far-right activists to vet Republican nominees for clerk and other offices and press candidates to pledge to eliminate voting machines.

The administration has now sued 30 states, including nine with Republican leadership, that have refused to turn over voter-roll information. Most of the states are citing state laws protecting the confidentiality of that information – and the states’ constitutional prerogative to manage elections.

West Virginia Secretary of State Kris Warner, a Republican and longtime Trump supporter who served in Trump’s first administration, said he never expected to be battling his former boss over states' rights.

"One of the things that I campaigned on was fighting federal overreach," Warner, who took office last year, told Reuters. "I just didn't have any idea at the time I was campaigning that it was going to be the Department of Justice demanding our voter files."

Bracing for federal intervention

Several election officials said the federal push has already changed how they’re preparing for November’s vote. Some described turning more frequently to lawyers and drafting internal playbooks for dealing with federal warrants, subpoenas or demands to access voting equipment.

Koppes, the Republican clerk and recorder in Colorado’s conservative Weld County, said she has trained her staff to recognize FBI credentials, to know what a legitimate federal subpoena looks like, and who to contact if federal agents arrive unannounced. She has also discussed with the county attorney how her office would respond if federal law enforcement attempts to seize ballots, machines or other voting materials.

Koppes described the moment as one of constant “whiplash,” from the president’s calls for new voting rules, to the FBI’s January raid on Georgia election offices, to threats from people who believe claims of rigged US elections and have targeted clerks. Their security preparations include a glass-breaking tool — typically used to escape a car — placed at windows in the clerk’s office, in case staff need to evacuate immediately. For many election administrators, concern deepened in January when federal agents, acting at the White House’s direction, seized ballots, voter rolls and other records in a raid in Georgia’s Fulton County based on an affidavit citing fraud claims repeatedly rejected by courts and audits.

The anxiety has filtered down to voters. In La Plata County, a conservative corner of southwestern Colorado, Clerk Tiffany Lee said she increasingly fields calls from residents asking whether they must bring proof of citizenship to vote — there is no such requirement — or whether they should remove themselves from the registration rolls altogether.

“I’ve done this 30 years,” Lee said. “I’ve never seen this level of fear.”

In Williamson County, Texas, elections administrator Bridgette Escobedo faced death threats in February after an edited video circulated online falsely suggesting she had tampered with a ballot storage room. County officials said the video was doctored.

The threats were serious enough that Escobedo, who is not affiliated with any political party, required police protection and temporarily moved out of her home. Her account comes from testimony she gave at a county commission meeting, as well as public records and social media posts reviewed by Reuters. Escobedo declined to comment further.

The most difficult moment, she told commissioners, was reassuring her staff.

“That was the hardest part,” Escobedo said. “Looking at my employees and telling them you don’t need to be afraid.”