The State Officials Defending the Midterms from the President
Now and then, not often, Deidre Henderson will still work up the nerve to drive herself to the market for milk or bread. She will sit in the parking lot in her big S.U.V., engine running, doors locked, ruminating on risk. Generally, she heads home without getting out of the car.
Henderson, who is fifty-two years old, is the lieutenant governor of Utah, a Republican midway through her second term. That makes her the state’s chief election officer. (Elsewhere, the responsibility most commonly falls to a secretary of state.) It also makes her a target. Along with her counterparts in dozens of other states, Henderson has refused to allow the Trump Administration to obtain state voter rolls and to oversee the removal of voters it deems unqualified, in advance of the midterms, on November 3rd. For that resistance, election conspiracists have deluged her with threats of sexual violence and murder.
“It’s scary,” she told me late this summer. “It’s horrible. Honestly, I’ve had to have counselling just to function, to deal with the burden of fear that comes from the threats I’ve been getting.”
Many of the messages, however disturbing, are protected speech under the First Amendment. Some, though, have been treated by law enforcement as posing a credible danger to Henderson’s life or safety. In Utah, a lieutenant governor does not routinely get a security detail. But in Henderson’s first term, when she opposed Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 Presidential election, she received threats that were so intense and specific that the Department of Public Safety placed her under protection for more than two years. The protection resumed before the 2024 election for a period. Henderson said that at times she has hired other protection. (The D.P.S. declined to comment on Henderson’s security detail.)
It was not always this unnerving to be an election official. But persistent lies about voter fraud, a centerpiece of Trump’s political narrative, have set loose torrents of hostility toward the men and women who oversee balloting nationwide. There are more than ten thousand voting jurisdictions in the United States, ranging from townships to states. In a national survey of local election officials this year, a third of them reported that they had personally been subjected to threats, harassment, or abuse because of their work. Half said they feared for the safety of their colleagues.
In this election season, the familiar threats, online and often pseudonymous, have been accompanied by new ones from federal authorities. The Department of Justice has warned Henderson and her counterparts that they may face criminal prosecution and imprisonment if they fail to surrender state voter rolls and purge them as the President directs.
Never before, not even when Trump tried to nullify his defeat by Joe Biden, six years ago, has an American President marshalled the coercive authority of the executive branch to reshape an election for his own benefit. Trump fought in court, in Congress, and in state legislatures to reverse the results of the 2020 election, but, as Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth political scientist who studies democratic erosion, told me, “he did not use his powers to try to undermine that election in advance.” And Trump ultimately failed to persuade high-level subordinates, such as William Barr, who was then the Attorney General, to wield their government power on his behalf. This year, multiple federal agencies, following Trump’s directives, attempted to strong-arm state election officials long before the first votes were cast. Trump, Nyhan told me, has tried “to tilt the playing field the way authoritarian populist leaders do in countries around the world.”
Article I, Section 4, of the Constitution reserves for the states the power to prescribe the “Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives,” with the proviso that Congress may change the rules by statute. The Framers granted the President no role in elections. Trump has declared otherwise. In an August, 2025, post on Truth Social, he wrote, “Remember, the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.” Trump is open about his motives. He has warned Republicans that if they fail to purge the “millions and millions” of noncitizens who, according to his fantastic claims, are voting, they “will never win another election as a Republican.”
Early in his second term, Trump issued an executive order to restrict voter registration, impose new standards for voting machines, step up prosecution of “election crimes,” and forbid state authorities to count ballots that are mailed on time but arrive after Election Day. This past March, he issued another executive order with fresh instructions for election oversight, including a call for the Department of Homeland Security, in concert with other agencies, to “compile and transmit to the chief election official of each State a list of individuals confirmed to be United States citizens” and eligible to vote. The same order outlined new restrictions on voting by mail, specifying that the U.S. Postal Service “shall not transmit mail-in or absentee ballots from any individual” who does not appear on a U.S.P.S. list of eligible voters. How that list would be compiled, and by whom, and under what criteria, was left unclear. A coalition of states, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and voting-rights groups separately filed suits. (The Brennan Center for Justice at N.Y.U. School of Law, where I am a senior adviser, is a co-counsel in two of the legal challenges.) For now, courts have blocked the most consequential provisions of both orders, primarily on the ground that the President has no lawful authority to impose them.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department set to work on a separate path. In a string of nearly identical lawsuits, filed beginning in September, 2025, it accused chief election officers in thirty states and the District of Columbia of violating Title III of the Civil Rights Act by failing to hand over electronic copies of their unredacted voter-registration lists. All but one state fought the lawsuits, including seven that had Republican chief election officers. (Oklahoma agreed to submit to the D.O.J. demand in exchange for dismissal of the case.) In response to United States of America v. Deidre M. Henderson, the Utah lieutenant governor, like most of her counterparts, cited privacy laws that obliged her to protect the personal information of voters, and said that the Trump Administration had no legal power to demand access in any case.
Since the litigation began, twenty-seven U.S. district judges and one appellate panel have reached decisions. All of them ruled against the Trump Administration. The case against Henderson was dismissed on October 23rd. One representative opinion, by Judge David O. Carter, in California, held that the D.O.J.’s declared purpose was “contrived” and that its demand for voter lists “wholly disregards the separation of powers.”
As its civil lawsuits foundered, the Justice Department reached for another weapon to compel obedience from state election officers. In a letter dated July 7th, the Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon warned Henderson and her counterparts that the D.O.J. was “also authorized to prosecute criminal violations” of the relevant statutes. Winning the civil litigation, in other words, would not prevent a state election official from being indicted for unspecified crimes. None of the election officials surrendered to that threat. “Garbage—I’m not breaking the laws,” Arizona’s secretary of state, Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, told me. Trump, he said, is “trying to pick his own voters, because he doesn’t believe in the American people. He believes in preserving his own power.”
The following week, the Secretary of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin, issued a warning of his own. His department had repurposed a program called SAVE(Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements), which previously had been used only to check immigrants’ eligibility for federal benefits, and pressed state election officials to use it to verify citizenship. A federal judge had blocked this use of SAVE. Mullin, however, warned that election officials who failed to use SAVE to screen voter rolls for noncitizens could face “prison time.” (The Supreme Court later stayed the district judge’s order but noted that it was too late to make large-scale changes to voter- registration lists.)
The Trump Administration’s efforts to cull the electorate before the midterms have, by and large, failed. Courts stripped the President’s executive orders of meaningful impact. At least sixteen states, all Republican-controlled, voluntarily agreed to turn over voter rolls to the Justice Department, but only three—Alaska, South Carolina, and Texas—signed agreements allowing the D.O.J. to oversee the removal of supposedly ineligible names. Twenty-eight states have voluntarily registered to use the SAVE data to check their voter lists for noncitizens, but it is unclear how many have relied on it to remove voters. In any case, it is too late for further purges: the statutory deadline to “systematically remove” ineligible voters is ninety days before a federal election.
In a last-ditch effort, the Justice Department brought a new lawsuit on October 15th, asking a California judge to require the state to set aside the ballots of about twenty thousand people, who the Administration alleged were “likely noncitizens.” The following day, the acting Deputy Attorney General, Trent McCotter, sent a letter to Los Angeles County election officials, threatening them with prosecution if they knowingly count the alleged noncitizens’ votes. On October 19th, McCotter said that twenty-eight California residents had been charged with violating federal voting laws.
Similar D.O.J. claims of widespread voter fraud elsewhere have proved spurious. In Nevada, the Administration alleged that there were nearly sixteen thousand noncitizens on voter rolls and produced the names of a hundred and eighty-five people, saying that it had manually verified their alien status. In September, state officials established that all of them were U.S. citizens. (A spokesperson for the D.O.J. said that the department continues to investigate individual cases of alleged noncitizens who voted in recent Nevada elections. A White House spokesperson said that, though “extreme Democrats and the media continue to dismiss concerns about voter fraud, the Trump Administration is taking decisive action to protect our elections, including prosecuting election crimes.”)
In another late-breaking intervention, this one even more extraordinary, the Trump Administration asked a federal judge on October 23rd to prevent certification of the Alaska Senate race if the Republican incumbent, Daniel S. Sullivan, loses narrowly. D.O.J. lawyers argued that the presence of a candidate named Daniel J. Sullivan on the ballot may deprive the senator of votes intended for him. (The Alaska Supreme Court had already ruled, in June, against an effort by the senator and the state G.O.P. to disqualify the challenger.)
Michael Waldman, the president of the Brennan Center, told me, “It turns out that our backstop is the fragmented nature of our political system, and federalism—that the election isn’t run by decree by any President, good or bad.”
If one thing has been decisive in safeguarding the nation’s electoral machinery, it is the tenacity of state officials who willingly accepted the political, financial, and personal risks of defying the President. They did so in a strong majority of states, including some under Republican control. “In order to protect democratic institutions,” Nyhan said, “we still depend on politically ambitious people sacrificing their careers.”
Henderson is among the most intrepid of the chief election officers who have stood in Trump’s way. For months, not a single Utah G.O.P. leader offered her public support. Yet, even as other Republicans who were resisting federal orders avoided open conflict with Trump, she spoke out against unlawful intervention from Washington. “It sure looks like they’re trying to take over control of elections to make sure only people they want to vote are voting,” she said recently. “To me, as an American and a Republican, it’s offensive.”
The Justice Department launched its campaign to seize control of voter rolls in May, 2025, when it began sending letters to state election officials which alleged that they had “anomalies” on their lists. Henderson received a letter that July, citing the Attorney General’s authority to bring “enforcement actions” under the National Voter Registration Act and questioning whether Utah was obeying the law. “Utah has the lowest rate in the nation for voter registration records removed” from the rolls, it alleged. The letter directed Henderson to “produce for inspection” a full electronic copy of Utah’s voter rolls, which contain sensitive personal information such as driver’s-license numbers, partial Social Security numbers, full dates of birth, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses.
It was unexpected and perplexing, Henderson said, to “get a letter from the U.S. Attorney General’s office citing all sorts of federal code.” Scott Cheney, a Utah assistant attorney general who serves as her principal legal adviser on elections, was out of the country. Henderson requested help from the office of Utah’s attorney general, Derek Brown. Brown sent over two lawyers, who, Henderson said, seemed to believe that she had no choice but to comply.
Henderson was skeptical. “I knew there were other federal statutes that applied,” she said, including the Privacy Act and the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act, which limit the release of personally identifying details. Henderson and the lawyers decided that the D.O.J. had overstepped. Their ensuing correspondence with the department began politely but devolved into threats and demands emphasized in italic type. She declined to hand over personal information about voters, citing state and federal privacy laws, and instead offered “the most current version of the public statewide voter registration list.” The next letter came from Dhillon, the Assistant Attorney General. Henderson’s reply was unacceptable, she wrote: “The Attorney General is demanding an electronic copy of Utah’s complete and current” voter rolls, and “Utah must ensure that it contains all fields.” Any contrary obligations that Henderson thought she had under Utah election and privacy statutes, Dhillon wrote, were “clearly preempted by federal law.”
Months later, the D.O.J. explained for the first time precisely why it was seeking the voter rolls. On December 2nd, a new D.O.J. lawyer, Eric Neff, sent Henderson a proposed “memorandum of understanding,” which disclosed that the D.O.J. intended to do a complete analysis of the rolls. Neff, a longtime legal warrior on behalf of election conspiracy theories, explained that the department would notify the state of any “insufficiencies, inadequacies, deficiencies, anomalies, or concerns” that it found. Utah would have forty-five days to “clean” its voter rolls and send back an updated list proving that “proper list maintenance has occurred.” The existence of this agreement between the state and the federal government, according to the memorandum, could not be publicly disclosed. The Justice Department sent a similar memorandum of understanding to many of Henderson’s counterparts in other states. Henderson decided to disregard the request for secrecy. She made all the correspondence public and announced that Utah would not comply with the D.O.J.’s demands.
On September 16th, the Justice Department filed lawsuits against the chief election officers of Maine and Oregon. Later that month, it did the same in California, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New York, and Pennsylvania. In January, at a conference of the National Association of Secretaries of State, Henderson denounced Dhillon’s contention that states needed federal help to clean up their rolls. (Dhillon had claimed that the D.O.J. had “found two hundred and sixty thousand plus dead people” on state registration lists.) “The things that have been said publicly, frankly, are quite appalling,” Henderson told a White House official, Jared Borg, in open session, adding, of Dhillon, “She’s pretty much slandered all of us.”
By the time Dhillon’s office filed suit against Henderson, on February 26th, the Justice Department had already lost three of the cases against state election officers. Henderson began to taunt the Trump Administration.
“0-8,” she posted on Threads on May 21st, after judges dismissed five more of the D.O.J.’s lawsuits.
“0-9,” she posted on June 22nd, when a Maryland judge did the same.
“Persistence in the face of defeat is usually an admirable quality, but not in this case,” she posted on July 14th, when the count was 0–13.
I asked Henderson one day why she had chosen this provocative tone.
“Am I provoking?” she replied, sounding a little annoyed. “Now, it’s interesting that the person bringing the conflict into the light, highlighting the injustice of the situation, the unconstitutionality and illegality of the situation to the public, is the one that’s considered provocative.”
Had other Utah Republicans urged her to turn down the heat? I asked.
“Not to my face,” she said.
Many of them, though, including the highest-ranking state legislators, criticized her for refusing to coöperate with the Trump Administration. Some, notably the former gubernatorial candidate Phil Lyman, accused her of being involved in election fraud. “I don’t think that her voter rolls can withstand scrutiny,” he told me. Others privately expressed fear that Henderson would provoke retaliation from the President, perhaps causing the state to lose pending federal grants to build nuclear power plants and to restore the Great Salt Lake.
For years, Henderson had told her staff that her No. 1 rule was “If it feels good, don’t say it.” She wanted to do her job and stay out of political combat. But that stance was changing. Utah’s governor, Spencer Cox, has said that he will not seek a third term in 2028, and Henderson told me that she is “seriously considering running.” I asked whether she thought her public conflict with Trump would hurt or help that campaign. “I have no idea, and I don’t care,” she said. “If discharging the duties of my office with fidelity means that I am unelectable in 2028, I am O.K. with that.”
Renae Cowley, a Republican political consultant who admires the lieutenant governor, said that she did not doubt Henderson’s commitment to principle but thought another consideration might also be on her mind. “I think that Deidre is strategically poking the bear, and it is both a brilliant political strategy and exactly what her voters want her to do,” Cowley said. “We’re Westerners for a reason,” she continued. “We wanted to be able to live our lives and do so free from the all-seeing eyes of the government. Of all the things to push back on, this is perhaps the most palatable, strategic, winningest issue that she could pick.”
In mid-August, I visited Henderson in Utah. As I rode with her to her office, she steered her S.U.V. onto the capitol grounds and edged toward what appeared to be a blank granite façade. An unmarked entrance opened to reveal a dimly lit parking bay, just big enough to accommodate side-by-side vehicles, for Henderson and Governor Cox.
In an hour, at Henderson’s request, a team of election and law-enforcement officers from across the state would gather in her conference room for a crisis-management exercise. She had asked an outside consultant to devise scenarios for the midterms to test the preparedness of her team. Election officials around the country run similar tabletop exercises before each voting cycle, to plan for contingencies ranging from extreme weather and power failures to bomb threats and foreign interference.
First, Henderson convened her senior staff for an update on the workaday operations for the election: auditing certification procedures, offering assistance to voters, unsnarling data conflicts, interpreting obscure rules. They met in the lieutenant governor’s private office, which is outfitted with polished dark wood, green curtains, and tan leather chairs. A painting on one wall depicts Seraph Young, who in 1870 became the first woman to cast a ballot in the Utah Territory. It is a point of pride for Henderson that voting rights for women there predated the Nineteenth Amendment by half a century.
Ali Majid, the state director of election systems, told Henderson that his quarterly audit of voter rolls had been updated to comply with a Utah statute that required a passport, a birth certificate, or similar proof of citizenship to vote in state races. He reported that thirty-five hundred people would soon be disqualified from voting in state elections because they had not responded to requests for that documentation. (Most states have no such requirement.)
Henderson was disturbed by the number. She had been mistakenly disqualified a few years back, because she was born in the Netherlands, where the Air Force had stationed her father. “Are we making sure clerks are actually reaching out to voters?” she asked.
In one database, Majid said, the list of registered but inactive voters included “thirty-three voters that were unconfirmed and ten voters that were likely noncitizens.”
“None of them ever voted,” Henderson said, in what seemed like more of a statement than a question.
“None of them ever voted,” Majid confirmed.
Next, Henderson and her staff discussed a new D.H.S. rule, announced in July. Mullin’s department had said that it would cut twenty per cent of FEMA homeland-security grants to states that did not comply with “election security” requirements. No one at the table was sure what the state attorney general planned to do about the rule, but they hoped that Utah would join lawsuits by other states to challenge it.
“Because we’re going to lose all the funding, not just twenty per cent,” Henderson said, sounding resigned.
“There’s the nonsense of it,” Ryan Cowley, Utah’s election director, replied. “You have FEMA, who knows nothing about elections, now dictating not just, like, ‘You have to have secure elections.’ Now they’re dictating exactly how.”
On September 28th, a federal judge ruled that FEMA could not withhold the funds.
The President’s campaign to seize control of the midterms has gone far beyond voter purges and threats to withhold federal funding. Ranging widely across the executive branch, it has included F.B.I. raids to seize election and voter-registration records, and menacing suggestions that Trump may send armed ICE agents to the polls.
One of Trump’s earliest attempts to “take over” elections, as he has put it, was the 2025 executive order on voting, which would have required, among other things, that people show a passport or comparable proof of citizenship in order to register. A national survey found that at least twenty-one million Americans do not possess or have no ready access to those documents. The House had passed a similar requirement, called the SAVE (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility) Act, but Republicans in the Senate were struggling to wrangle enough votes. Trump tried, unsuccessfully, to bypass Congress and impose the rule himself.
The same executive order directed the Election Assistance Commission, an independent federal agency, to “rescind all previous certifications of voting equipment” and establish new standards to address some of the claims that Trump and his allies had made about rigged election machinery in 2020. This provision of Trump’s order was among those struck down by a federal judge.
The President also enlisted law-enforcement agencies to produce new evidence of voter fraud, past and present. This past January, Kurt Olsen, a prominent election denier and at the time the newly appointed White House director of election security and integrity, asked the F.B.I. to launch a criminal investigation in Fulton County, Georgia, according to an F.B.I. affidavit, and the Bureau did so with uncommon dispatch. Trump had brought unsuccessful lawsuits alleging extensive fraud by Fulton County election officials in the 2020 Presidential election. The F.B.I.’s mission was to revive those allegations. In Georgia, dozens of F.B.I. agents—accompanied by Trump’s director of National Intelligence, who called the President immediately afterward—seized more than six hundred and fifty boxes of ballots, tabulator tapes, electronic ballot images, and other records from the 2020 election.
Five months after the Georgia raid, about a hundred F.B.I. and D.H.S. agents descended on the Cleveland offices of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a left-leaning group that advocates for voting rights and organizes voter-registration campaigns. The agents seized records and electronic devices, looking for evidence of unspecified criminal behavior. Last year, the President also ordered the D.O.J. to launch a criminal investigation of Chris Krebs, a former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, in part on the ground that he had publicly disputed Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was rigged.
Federal law-enforcement agencies have also been involved in what amounts to a psychological operation ahead of the midterms. Trump’s subordinates have been hinting for months that ICE agents or other federal officers may turn up at polling places on Election Day. Federal law forbids the presence of “troops or armed men at any place where a general or special election is held.” But in March, Todd Blanche, who was then the Deputy Attorney General, said that he saw nothing wrong with it. “Why is there an objection to sending ICE to polling stations?” Blanche asked at the Conservative Political Action Conference. “Illegals can’t vote.” Mullin has raised the prospect several times, saying that ICE is not restricted from conducting enforcement operations at polling places, and may even be needed to protect them. (In a statement, D.H.S. said that it has no plans for operations “targeting polling locations.”)
Voting-rights advocates regard these statements as thinly veiled efforts to intimidate lawful voters. “They make headlines to use them as deterrents with no intention of deploying” on a large scale, Maria Teresa Kumar, the founding president of Voto Latino, said, noting that Latino voters have seen a lot of ICE violence in their communities, and that millions of citizens live in “mixed-status families,” with relatives who are vulnerable to deportation. Kumar said that the spectre of illegal voting was a pretext for the ICE threats, citing a study that found that fewer than 0.0001 per cent of ballots in the 2016 Presidential election, or one in a million, were cast by noncitizens.
The Trump Administration, for all its efforts, has failed to establish a commanding position over the federal voting landscape. No indictments or evidence of voter fraud have emerged from the raids in Ohio and Georgia. A Trump-appointed judge blocked a subpoena to collect what he called a “staggering” amount of personal information about election workers in Fulton County. Senate Republicans never found enough votes to pass the SAVE Act.
David Becker, a former senior trial attorney in the D.O.J.’s voting section and the founder of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, said that he saw “no coherent strategy” in the disparate attempts to carry out Trump’s wishes for the midterms. “There’s malevolence, but there’s a lot of incompetence,” he said, citing competing directives from the D.O.J. and D.H.S. and the stunning record of setbacks in court. “They don’t have a single success.”
Becker continued, “I think there’s a lot of people within the conspiracy-theory ranks—within the economy of grift that’s grown around election denialism—who are seeking approval from President Trump. And they’re all doing their thing to do that. And often those things conflict.”
Control of the House and the Senate will be decided by some very close races. Even the marginal success of Trump’s effort to disqualify voters in states that agreed to use D.H.S. citizenship data might tip one or more of these contests. And there is still a hypothetical risk, election experts say, that the President could do something new and outlandishly lawless on or close to Election Day.
In Henderson’s conference room, a test of nightmare scenarios commenced at 10 a.m. with a cheerful slide that read “Ready for Anything.” Cowley and Majid, the state election officials, were there. So were several lawyers and the election clerks of two of Utah’s twenty-nine counties.
The consultant who wrote the scenarios said she had devised “scary situations” that Utah’s previous contingency planning might not have addressed. About nine in ten Utah voters cast ballots by mail, but most of the scenarios would involve federal agents dispatched to Utah polling places or tabulation centers.
“I will just let you know they’re a little bit provocative, and that’s intentional,” she said. “I want to drive up the temperature just a little bit.”
Utah, which has long been represented exclusively by Republicans in Congress, might seem an unlikely place for conflict with Trump over elections. But in 2025 court-ordered redistricting created a strongly Democratic-leaning First Congressional District centered in Salt Lake County, where Kamala Harris beat Trump by ten points in 2024.
In one scenario, the consultant said, “the President announces that federal agents are going to ‘flood the zone’ on Election Day in certain areas with large immigrant populations.” He does not specify where the agents will go but states that “2026 will be the most secure election ever, thanks to ICE, C.B.P., and D.O.J.” Angry protests begin to build, but the protesters find no federal agents to confront.
“I think the first thing to do,” Henderson said, is “we try to find out from the federal agency, Who are you sending? What is the purpose of it?” State law-enforcement leaders, she said, should handle communication with their federal counterparts.
“I think this is an opportunity to remind the public of what you can and can’t do around polling places,” Cowley added.
The consultant laid out an escalated scenario. Now the election is days away, and federal agents have set up checkpoints on roads near early-voting sites. News cameras arrive. The Salt Lake County clerk requests assistance to secure the polls, but the sheriff, unsure about jurisdiction, declines. Meanwhile, “the neighboring chief of police deploys officers to ‘protect and support the federal agents.’ ”
One of the lawyers said that the legal questions were complicated because federal agents could say, “We’re not interfering with elections. We’re investigating a bomb threat.”
“You don’t want to pit yourself against the Feds,” a senior staff member said. Instead, he suggested, state law enforcement could try to coördinate with the federal agents to clear the roads to alternative voting centers: “The win is we are trying to help voters get to polling places.”
Another escalation. Federal agents arrive at multiple Utah voting centers on Election Day, enter the “no-electioneering zone,” and begin to question voters. The state attorney general posts on social media that federal officers are expected to comply with all state and federal laws. Trump responds, “This guy has no idea what he’s talking about. He has no power over our federal officers.”
The agents in this scenario clearly appeared to be breaking the law. Could state authorities do anything to stop the incursion?
Henderson said that she would leave it up to the commissioner of public safety to decide whether “state law enforcement needs to intervene.” Nobody wanted a standoff between armed state and federal officers. (Voting-rights lawyers, however, would already be racing to federal court.)
Yet another escalation. Citizens’ groups are now setting up counter-perimeters and demonstrations outside a voting center where federal agents are deployed. A car drives through the scene, injuring one of the Feds. The President posts that he is sending more federal officers to “secure the election against violent individuals.”
“It’s totally law enforcement,” the lawyer told the room. “It has nothing to do with elections or free speech at this point. They’ve got to de-escalate the situation.” All a local election official can do now, Henderson said, is give directions to move voters away from danger and toward another polling place.
One last escalation. The clock winds back to October 29th. F.B.I. agents show up at a county election office and execute a search warrant to seize “all mail ballots and mail-ballot return envelopes, a current list of all voters eligible to vote in Salt Lake County, and a current list of all voters who were sent a mail ballot.” An election worker on the scene reports that half the ballots and envelopes have been loaded onto F.B.I. trucks. “So, if that’s the case, I’ve already been taken to jail,” one of the county clerks said. She meant that she would have tried to safeguard the election by resisting the seizures.
Another lawyer cut in. “First of all, do you recognize you’re dealing with a signed federal search warrant? Do not interfere,” he said. “There’s certain precautions that you can take.”
He rattled them off: Stay calm. Don’t hide files or shut down computers; doing so would look like obstruction. Contact counsel immediately. Request the lead agent’s name and agency, the prosecutor’s name, and a copy of the warrant. Don’t consent to searches beyond the warrant’s scope. Assign an observer to watch what is taken. Mark whether that includes privileged materials.
Henderson’s mind seemed to be elsewhere. She was thinking, she later told me, about the broken chain of custody of the confiscated paper votes. How, she was wondering, could election officials reliably reconstruct how the votes were cast?
“Are these ballots that have been counted?” she asked finally.
She got no answer.
If Trump manages to interfere with the midterm elections in a meaningful way, experts told me, it will probably resemble the final minutes of Henderson’s tabletop exercise.
Stephen Richer, a Republican who was the Recorder of Maricopa County, Arizona, in 2021, resisted chaotic efforts by Trump, state legislators, election deniers in Washington, and conspiratorial litigants to discredit Biden’s victory in the state. Now a fellow at the Cato Institute and Harvard’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, Richer has studied just about every way an election can be attacked. He believes that nearly all the election threats commentators have talked about this year are “overblown.” But there is one that still worries him.
“I think Fulton County was the real warning shot,” he said. “It showed an increased appetite for actually going into voting jurisdictions and taking tabulation equipment or ballots. And if they do that after all the ballots have been counted and certified, then it’s old hat, and we’ll defend the election if it’s defensible against liars. If they do it during a live election, I don’t know what we do.” The problem is the same one that preoccupied Henderson: chain of custody over ballots.
Suppose, Richer said, the F.B.I. rolls up to a voting center and seizes paper ballots before they are digitized or tabulated. Even if election authorities obtain an injunction and get the ballots back the same day, the ballots will have been “in an unobservable place for an hour or two hours, whatever it is,” he told me. “And I don’t know if I would trust those anymore.” Much the same quandary arises if agents seize and later return tabulation equipment.
Becker, the former D.O.J. voting lawyer, agreed that “if they were to break chain of custody, it would be very bad and very difficult to reconstruct.” (Depending on circumstances, he explained, “there might be ways” to authenticate the votes.) But in order to seize ballots, he noted, federal authorities would have to obtain a warrant, and the magistrate judge who signed the Fulton County warrant came in for a drubbing by legal commentators because the F.B.I. affidavit she approved did little more than recycle disproved conspiracy theories. After that, Becker said, “I don’t know if they’re going to find a federal judge who will issue a warrant” to seize voting materials, “especially in the middle of elections.” Richer’s hypothetical, he concluded, is “extremely unlikely yet disastrous if it happens.”
After the tabletop exercise, I walked with Henderson through the vaulted marble halls of the capitol on her way to lunch. We ran into Brown, the attorney general, who had been elected as a MAGA stalwart and has carefully avoided public comment on Henderson’s conflict with the Administration. I introduced myself as a journalist and told Brown what I was writing about. He took a step back and shot a look of unease, or perhaps reproof, at the lieutenant governor.
“Election law is a growth industry, and not in a good way,” he declared, in a faux-jocular tone. His expression did not convey amusement. He excused himself and walked briskly away.
Henderson told me that Brown “has been very good and supportive” behind the scenes, and she said the same thing about Cox. Still, she added, “there’s been a lot of silence. And that’s been challenging. Because, in my mind, I’m standing up for our legislature. I’m standing up for our state. I’m standing up for our voters.” A few weeks later, more than a year into the dispute, Cox spoke out in defense of Henderson for the first time. “It is wrong for the D.O.J. to investigate or threaten the lieutenant governor for carrying out her responsibilities under Utah law,” he posted on X.
When Henderson started her political career, she was closely aligned with her party’s “most conservative elements,” according to the Utah senator Todd Weiler, a Republican who has similarly turned against Trump. A lifelong member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, she had dropped out of Brigham Young University at eighteen to get married. (She earned her degree in 2022.) She had her first child at twenty. In the fall of 2007, she was, at thirty-three, a stay-at-home mother of five, wondering, as her youngest started preschool, what came next.
In those days, Henderson listened to a lot of right-wing talk radio: Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck. She considered herself a political junkie and thought that she might like to get involved. At the time, Jason Chaffetz was a little-known conservative firebrand running a long-shot challenge to the incumbent congressman in Utah’s Third District. Henderson went to hear Chaffetz speak one evening, at a small gathering in a private home. His campaign platform emphasized limited government, border enforcement, opposition to same-sex marriage, and a ban on federal funding for abortion. Henderson’s husband, Gabe, a physical therapist, recalled, “She said, ‘We found our candidate. We are going to help Chaffetz.’ ”
Chaffetz, recalling those early days, said he knew nothing about Henderson at first except that she was willing to work for free. She began to put in daily shifts, and soon she was planning events, giving speeches, and reaching out to local notables. After Chaffetz won, he gave her a paid position as his campaign manager.
Bryan Schott, a veteran political reporter at the Salt Lake Tribune and the founder of Utah Political Watch, a local journalism outlet, said that Henderson played a decisive role in Chaffetz’s victory: “The people who run campaigns here in Utah will tell you that she’s responsible for him getting into Congress the first time.” Chaffetz balked at handing her that much credit but said, “She was a talent, and I encouraged her to run for her own seat.” Henderson did just that in 2012, seeking and winning an open seat in the state Senate. By then, Gabe Henderson said, her political philosophy was evolving beyond the Chaffetz talking points: “She came home and said, ‘I am tired of being muzzled by what he wants me to say. I want my own voice.’ ”
Henderson built a reputation in the Senate for pragmatism but also for stubborn resolve on matters of conviction. She championed a bill to reduce criminal penalties for polygamy, arguing that fear of prosecution kept women trapped in abusive marriages. Although she supported the state’s ban on abortion after eighteen weeks of pregnancy, she walked out during the vote for a bill that required women seeking abortions to have ultrasounds, which she said was too intrusive. Knowing that the measure would pass, she recalled, “I thought, Well, I’ll just take a walk during roll call.” The way she recounted the story, she was surprised to discover that “all the other women followed.”
On the morning of the first day I spent with Henderson, she drove me to a graveyard. “It’s a little dorky,” she said, climbing out of the driver’s seat. “But this is a place I go on occasion when I need to reset.”
Henderson had dressed for work in heels that were not made for the rain-soaked grass. She led me to a modest bevel marker, embedded at an angle into the ground and inscribed “MARTHA HUGHES CANNON—1857-1932.”
Cannon, Henderson explained, was an immigrant from Wales who joined a wave of nineteenth-century pioneers from the Church of Latter-day Saints as they fled violent persecution back East. It was a history of faith and hardship that Henderson had learned as a child.
Cannon “became deeply involved in the women’s-suffrage movement,” Henderson said. “And one of the interesting things about Utah women that people don’t understand is they were portrayed by the Eastern press as subjugated and enslaved. They were ridiculed and mocked because of their religious beliefs and practices, but they were very much empowered.”
Cannon had earned a degree in medicine, a rarity for women at the time. She studied oratory. She became a well-known advocate for women’s right to vote, testifying in Congress. And in 1896, the year Utah achieved statehood, she became the first woman to be elected to the state Senate. Henderson said, “She ran against her husband, Angus, and won.”
“On the hard days, and there are a lot of them, I remember Martha,” she said, standing over the grave. “If you wonder why I’m the nail that’s sticking up to get hammered down, or why I’m saying the things I say, why I’m taking my role so seriously, it’s because it’s not mine. It’s entrusted to me right now. And I think about Martha and other women all the time.” Later, she described herself as “a heretic” within her party, adding, “I’m not going along with the Holy Scripture of the current Administration, which is election denialism.”
Henderson attributed the silence of some of her peers to timidity. “I think one of the biggest problems we have is that not everybody in the Republican Party thinks that we’re doing the right things, but a lot of people in the Republican Party are afraid to say that,” she said. “They’re afraid to push back. They’re afraid to speak out.” Chaffetz, the man she helped elect to Congress and a likely opponent if she runs for governor in 2028, said that, in his view, Henderson was the one who had strayed: “Politically, she’s a very different person than when I knew her, not nearly as conservative.”
On a drive south of Salt Lake City, Henderson paused for a pit stop at one of Utah’s drive-through “dirty soda” franchises, a regular habit, and ordered a quart of Diet Mountain Dew infused with a syrupy jolt of artificial strawberry and pineapple. (L.D.S. doctrine, as she understands it, forbids coffee and tea but does not prohibit caffeine.) I told her what Chaffetz had said about her becoming less conservative. Nothing in her expression suggested that she took offense at the remark, but her choice of words—in response to a man who now works as a Fox News podcast host—was tart. “I’ve mellowed,” she said. “I’m not always so certain of my rightness in everything. I’m much more curious now than I was before. I’ve seen that there’s talking and then there’s doing. And when it comes especially to state government, local government, you gotta have doers. Talkers don’t matter.”
On September 4th, Henderson received a reminder of the retribution that might await her. (Similar reminders arrived in other states.) Neff, the D.O.J. voting lawyer, notified Henderson formally that she might be in breach of federal law because she had failed to comply with the Justice Department’s demands. “As you are aware, you are currently under investigation,” he wrote, directing her to preserve all relevant records.
“Um, no, I was not aware, but I guess I am now,” Henderson responded on Threads. “It would be nice if the good folks at the D.O.J. would focus on actual problems instead of baselessly harassing election officials.”
Henderson and I had spoken about Trump’s many political enemies who had been placed under criminal investigation or indictment. These were expensive and life-changing burdens, even for those who avoided trial and conviction. How did she think about the risk to herself?
“I’m actually not terribly concerned about being prosecuted,” she told me. “I don’t presume to be someone important enough for the President to actually care about.” But, she added, “on the other hand, too, it gives me a little bit of hope when they start escalating like this. Because they’re getting a little desperate. Their attempts aren’t working.” ♦