President Donald Trump knows the midterm elections are shaping up to go poorly for him and the Republican party so he’s trying to cast as much doubt about the country’s election systems as possible, U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin said at an event Monday morning. 

Meeting with three Madison-area election officials, Baldwin noted that Trump made 107 false claims about the results of the 2020 election in the six months from December 2025 to May of this year while taking a number of actions to restrict voting or discredit election systems ahead of the November election. 

The U.S. Supreme Court recently struck down Trump’s proposed executive order to limit the ability of the U.S. Postal Service to process absentee ballots sent through the mail. His administration has, at various times, promised to send ICE agents, National Guard troops, FBI agents and other federal law enforcement to polling places on Election Day — an action that opponents see as an effort to intimidate Democratic voters. He advocated strongly for the passage of a bill that would institute strict national voter ID requirements. 

Trump’s Departments of Justice and Homeland Security have been working since he was inaugurated last year to build a national database of registered voters. The effort by the DOJ to obtain Wisconsin’s voter rolls was halted in May by a federal judge. DHS is now working to compile a federal voter registration list for ICE to use to search for non-citizens who are registered to vote. 

“With everything so unaffordable, so expensive, the Trump administration should be focused on that,” Baldwin said. “But instead, I think, they are worried that they’re going to be held accountable for things this election, and so they’re selling conspiracy theories. The president has a history of election denialism, and so instead of focusing on lowering costs, he’s focusing on undercutting the midterm elections.”

At the meeting in the city county building in Madison, Baldwin met with Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell, Sun Prairie City Clerk Elena Hilby and Waunakee Village Clerk Karla Endres. McDonell is an elected Democrat while the other two serve as non-partisan officials. 

The three election officials outlined the ways in which Wisconsin’s election systems are built to be resilient and transparent. 

In the years since the 2020 presidential election, a subset of Wisconsin’s electorate has remained skeptical of the state’s election system — repeatedly making false claims that fraud has stolen victories from their preferred candidates. 

McDonell said Monday that every step of the process is done in public, from the pre-election tests of the voting equipment to the voting itself and the counting process. Election officials, he said, try to plan for anything that could go wrong so if it does, they’re able to respond and get ballots counted. 

“We assume failure at every point along the way, and so we’re checking to make sure everything’s accurate as we go along,” he said. 

The three clerks said that in the remaining weeks before the election, they’re working on their emergency response plans in the event that Trump does send armed agents to the polls. Last week, U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, the Republican candidate for governor, celebrated the Trump administration planning to send DOJ staff to the polls. 

Hilby said that she wants the people working the polls in Sun Prairie to know what to do if federal agents show up, balancing the need to follow the law against the risk that poll workers could be put in danger. 

“An armed federal agent is illegal to have at the polling place,” Hilby said. “I wouldn’t want my election officials confronting them, but more approach them and say, you know, ‘what are you here for? Do you have a warrant?’ Get whatever information they can, so they can contact me, so I can immediately contact my city attorney, and I would probably be on the phone to [McDonell], so we knew how to respond. I don’t want to put them in danger. I also want to protect the election.” 

McDonell said it’s “frustrating” that local election officials are being forced to plan for this contingency and that he would like more concrete advice from the state elections commission. This year, the Wisconsin Elections Commission has issued a number of guidance documents to clerks about problems with the U.S. Postal Service, but remained silent on the question of federal agents at the polls. 

“It’s good to have some statewide advice on how to handle these situations, but it is tough,” he said. “We’ve been doing a lot of planning around these scenarios, making sure we have criminal defense attorneys, federal criminal defense attorneys, on retainer in case we have to rush to [federal court] to get an order. So a lot of planning is going on behind the scenes for different scenarios.”