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Judge Mark Wolf served for 40 years as a US district judge in Massachusetts. He founded and chaired Integrity Initiatives International, which leads the campaign for an International Anti-Corruption Court to hold kleptocrats accountable. In November 2025, he resigned from the bench to protest President Trump’s assault on the rule of law.
This Halloween, the scariest thing isn’t ghosts and ghouls. It’s the Trump administration’s ongoing attacks on the legitimacy of the midterm elections.
Is there a legal basis for Trump’s election interference? In Off the Bench—a new series from the Renew Democracy Initiative and The Next Move—former Federal Judge Mark Wolf breaks it down how the administration could send armed agents to the polls or attempt to seize ballots—and how all of that squares with the law.
In Judge Wolf’s own words:
President Trump has been laying the groundwork to claim the election was stolen and it was corrupt. This is very disturbing. Kash Patel, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in recent testimony, has declined to rule out having agents, meaning armed agents, at the polls, which would be a violation of United States law that prohibits armed civilian officers or military officers from being at the polls.
The president has said earlier this year to The New York Times that he regrets not using the National Guard to seize voting machines and ballots in 2020. I think if the president loses elections relating to the House of Representatives and/or the Senate, there’s the risk that he’ll attempt to seize ballots. The only way that could be done lawfully is to get a judicial warrant, and there’s never been a request for a federal judicial warrant to seize ballots before an election is concluded. I’ve removed the word unimaginable from my lexicon.
Stay tuned for more videos from Off the Bench with Judge Mark Wolf.
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