Garnet DeGrave and other organizers with Citizen Action Wisconsin watched in shock as news broke this June that FBI agents had raided the office of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a nonprofit that hosts voter registration drives and does political organizing. The incident was largely understood to be an attempt to intimidate progressive organizers in the state and foster uncertainty in the state’s elections. DeGrave realized if a similar situation happened in Wisconsin — if a government agency interfered with community organizers or, in the worst case scenario, the election — they were woefully unprepared.
“There weren’t enough people that were organized in the western half of the state to be able to handle that,” DeGrave, Citizen Action Wisconsin’s northeast organizer, said.
This spurred the organization to try to fill the gap. At the end of September, Citizen Action Wisconsin — which does grassroots organizing around electoral and issue-based campaigns for social and racial justice — partnered with local organizations to pivot to election protection ahead of a crucial midterm.
It’s one of many community organizations and advocacy groups across the United States that have built out their election protection and defense work this year in an effort to combat misinformation and protect election integrity — a basic tenet of democracy that has come under attack from a president who is an election denier. Alongside national groups like the ACLU, which has had 68,000 sign-ups for its Democracy Defenders Task Force program, these state and local organizations have undertaken an unprecedented coordinated effort to bolster voting rights amid efforts by the federal government to undermine election results.
According to DeGrave, the work falls into two categories. “Election protection” is pre-election work to help people overcome any barriers to voting — a process that differs in every state. This can include challenging laws that might restrict voter access, running voter assistance hotlines or holding voter education campaigns.
“Election defense,” on the other hand, is work during voting and after polls close to ensure every vote is counted and to defend election results. This can include nonpartisan poll watcher programs and community-led trainings that prepare people to mobilize in the event of a contested count due to political interference.
For Citizen Action, the pivot was a natural one, as the group had done small-scale election protection work and occasional direct action, DeGrave said. Citizen Action partnered with GROWW, a grassroots group that organizes behind progressive candidates in western Wisconsin, to host training sessions on how to mobilize in the event of election interference. In Michigan, Voters Not Politicians is running a similar election defense program, taking inspiration from protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. In Maine, organizations like the League of Women Voters have worked to grow a statewide poll watching program — a tactic also being used by groups in Florida and California.
Though election protection and defense efforts have been an integral part of American politics for decades, part of the reason this year’s efforts have grown in size is because the stakes feel so high.
“This election is such an important moment for us to be prepared for, in order to vote out authoritarians,” DeGrave said.
In the lead-up to the 2026 midterm elections, the Trump administration has intensified tactics that advocates say are meant to intimidate or disenfranchise voters.
On the pretext of combating voter fraud — which experts say is virtually nonexistent in the U.S. — the administration has demanded sensitive voter information to identify alleged noncitizen voters from every state. Its attempts have been consistently denied by judges, though that hasn’t stopped the administration from trying to remove 20,000 people from voter rolls in California or from creating a federal voter database that’s incorrectly flagged some voters as noncitizens. The administration also tried to make voting more difficult for Americans with new Postal Service restrictions on mail-in voting, which a district court put on hold until after the election.
State Republicans have followed President Donald Trump’s lead. Since Trump entered office in January 2025, at least 19 states have passed laws that will make it harder to cast ballots in the midterms.
Government officials have also repeatedly implied they will deploy armed federal agents to poll sites, an action illegal under national law since it could constitute voter intimidation. The administration has also indicated its intention to send around 1,000 Department of Justice federal monitors to all 50 states to observe voting procedures, which advocates say is another intimidation tactic. And privately, Trump opponents worry he could claim that foreign governments interfered in the election as a way to discredit results.
“It’s highly, highly unlikely. But if ICE were to be around the polling places, we want our observers to report it.”
Jen Lancaster, League of Women Voters of Maine
Mel Neal, legal counsel on voting rights issues for democracy defense organization the Campaign Legal Center, characterized the Trump administration’s actions as undermining trust in the election system. “They are attacks on democracy and are an attempt to sow distrust in our election system so that election results can’t be trusted,” she said.
In response to these threats, organizers have built statewide coalitions of nonpartisan poll watchers: people who travel to poll sites during early voting and on Election Day to ensure that people are able to vote without difficulty.
Such poll watching programs have been around for decades, explained Amy Keith, executive director of Florida’s chapter of Common Cause, a national voting rights group founded in opposition to the Vietnam War in 1970 whose initial campaign successfully reduced the voting age from 21 to 18.
Poll watching emerged first and foremost to document any and all issues that could discourage voters trying to cast their ballots: police presence, overlong lines, lack of disability access, language barriers, etc. Jen Lancaster, the deputy director of the League of Women Voters of Maine, said the league’s poll watching program emerged during COVID-19 to ensure all polling places followed public health standards, such as by implementing plexiglass or acrylic barriers.
“We are always watching for anything that could intimidate or deter or make it harder for voters,” Keith said. The goal, she added, was “to make sure that polling places are calm and welcoming, so that everybody can have that experience to cast their ballot and to participate in the process.”
But this year, organizations have also begun advising volunteers about what to do if agents from federal agencies like the FBI or ICE show up.
“It’s highly, highly unlikely,” Lancaster emphasized. “But if ICE were to be around the polling places, we want our observers to report it.” The presence of any officer, including ICE agents, near a polling location can discourage voters, which is why organizers look out for it. “It can be scary to walk by an armed officer in order to cast their ballot,” Keith said. Poll observers don’t typically engage in direct action themselves when these situations arise; instead, they alert their teams, who often have experienced advocates or lawyers on standby to provide advice or assistance.
Why we need to think outside the box this electionMaine’s nonpartisan poll watching program has grown to around 400 registered volunteers. “For Maine, this is a pretty big number,” Lancaster said. In Florida and California, poll watching programs co-run by Common Cause chapters reported over 1,000 recruits. They are part of a nationwide boom in poll watching volunteers, which state-level chapters of Common Cause and the League of Women Voters have worked quickly to accommodate.
Eileen Ma, director of democracy and national initiatives at the Asian Law Caucus, which has co-led an election protection program in California since 2012 with Common Cause, said the program could only channel the surge of volunteers into trained roles because of years of infrastructure development.
“We have the capacity to bring on and train 1,000 volunteers because we built up over time the materials and the expertise and the practical knowledge of how to do that,” Ma said. “The work over the last decade [has] been critical to our being able to respond in this moment.”
Advocacy organizations have also, for years, operated national and state-level voter hotlines where prospective voters can call to clarify any questions they have about voting and make plans to cast their ballots. All day, including on weekends, Keith and her team at Florida Common Cause field calls about early voting, ID laws and polling locations.
Lately, the Florida Common Cause team and other organizations with voter hotlines have fielded questions related to new voter ID laws, which have gone into place in several states. These laws have caused confusion about what identification can be used to vote, organizers said.
Keith sees clarity on voter laws as crucial to combatting voter misinformation, which she and other advocates characterize as an unfortunate side effect of the Trump administration’s efforts to undermine election results.
Misinformation has included false rumors about the number of noncitizen voters in elections, how ballots marked by poll workers could be disqualified, incorrect guidance about how to register to vote, and more.
“We want people to have the correct information, not misinformation — whether it’s disinformation being spread by bots or [others] intentionally trying to confuse people, or it’s misinformation because they don’t understand the process,” Keith said.
By combatting these rumors through voter education and voter hotlines, which are increasingly available in more languages, Keith believes trust in the electoral system — the number one defense against attempts to overturn election results — could be restored.
Groups around the country are using various channels to get correct information to voters. In Wisconsin, the legal advocacy group Law Forward has invested in its social media strategy, and used social media and op-eds as avenues to combat voter misinformation.
Democracy Defense Foundation adviser Brian Jones said the organization, which was founded in 2024 in part to reverse the erosion of trust in the U.S. electoral system and operates in eight states, has heavily invested in partnering with community organizations like churches and local nonprofit groups to get information about elections out.
In Maine, where internet access in rural areas remains an issue, Lancaster said the League of Women Voters prints a newspaper with information about candidates across the state. This year, they distributed 50,000 copies in 16 counties. In rural counties, they left the newspapers in town hubs — community centers and libraries — for people to see.
“There’s a transparent system here and play,” Jones said. “People need to understand that and ensure that faith and trust in their elections, and it’s not driven by just a partisan point of view.”
Unlike Common Cause and the League of Women Voters, organizations that have worked in voting rights spaces for years, like Citizen Action Wisconsin and GROWW, don’t have a volunteer base dedicated to this type of work. In the past month, Citizen Action Wisconsin and GROWW have trained about 70 volunteers across Wisconsin in voting rights and post-election mobilization, and then trained those volunteers to conduct outreach to get others involved in election defense.
“If they talk to five people and those five people talk to five people, then we can actually end up at over 700 people that are motivated and organized and ready to be deployed in a rapid response situation if something does go wrong with the election,” DeGrave said.
Volunteers will be posted outside of key polling sites across Wisconsin when ballot counts begin, and will remain at the ready to host vigils and press conferences outside polling sites if any issues arise.
In Michigan, Voters Not Politicians, which primarily focused on distributing information about early voting and ballot drop-off locations to voters across the state, has worked on recruiting dozens of volunteers to mobilize in anticipation of election interference.
Communications director Melinda Billingsley said the organization plans to have volunteers watch polls and, if needed, advocate for voters experiencing issues at the ballot box as part of a statewide nonpartisan poll watching program.
In the event of a contested election, “we’re recruiting folks to be willing and able to go to any place they’re needed and to throw a party and create a joyful, safe atmosphere,” Billingsley said. This strategy is partially inspired by anti-ICE protests across the United States, which has involved organizers utilizing creative approaches to defend community members from federal agents.
Though organizers have welcomed the increased interest in poll watching and voter education programs this year, many are wondering how to sustain that energy in future election cycles, where the stakes will arguably be just as high.
“It’s even more important because in 2028, we have a presidential election year and in 2030, we have a census year,” Darius Kemp, California Common Cause’s executive director, said. Census counts help determine congressional districts, and voting rights organizations are advocating and educating against legislation that would skew a census count, such as a proposed rule to not count noncitizens.
But beyond ensuring fair and accurate elections safe from federal interference, organizers see the expansion of their work as critical to restoring Americans’ faith in the electoral system, which has dropped in the past decade.
“It is not just a one-day struggle,” said Ma, from the Asian Law Caucus. “It’s not just a one kind of activity kind of struggle. It has to be a full-frontal assault or full-frontal defense, however you choose to look at it, in order to preserve people’s voting rights.”
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