An FBI raid on Ohio’s Ohio Organizing Collaborative and a Trump executive order seeking to limit delivery of mail ballots are part of a wider push to disrupt election participation, according to Norm Eisen and a Democracy Defenders Fund-led coalition—backed by
The stakes weren’t theoretical last week in Ohio. They arrived in the form of agents at the door.
One hundred FBI agents raided the office of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative. a voter registration project in the state. and also targeted the homes of people connected to the group. The FBI seized documents and laptops and cell phones, saying it was looking for evidence of fraud in voter registration. The raid came as Ohio’s political landscape is poised for major shifts in 2026. with expectations that Democrats could flip a Senate seat and potentially the governor’s office. Ohio Organizing Collaborative registered 100,000 voters in 2024.
Norm Eisen. an election-protection attorney and executive chair of the Democracy Defenders Fund and Democracy Defenders Action. pushed back hard on what he called the intimidation angle. In a conversation that also turned to Trump’s broader election efforts. Eisen said the Ohio raid was “sham. bogus intimidation and harassment. ” adding that the group has been investigated repeatedly by the federal government and by the state of Ohio without wrongdoing being found. Eisen said organizers had received subpoenas and had been harassed across Ohio. and he compared the effect of that scrutiny to the Streisand effect: when officials insist something is phony. they end up drawing attention to it instead.
Just as those raids were happening. Eisen and others described another track of pressure on voting access: a Trump executive order seeking to enlist the U.S. Postal Service in restricting vote-by-mail delivery. The goal. as Eisen described it. was to have mail carriers refuse to deliver mail ballots to people who are not on a federal list of registered voters—a list Trump is attempting to compile.
Eisen said that effort is being blocked through litigation and that it hasn’t been implemented far enough along for it to take effect. He pointed to multiple lawsuits across the country and said his team sued early. including against Trump’s first election takeover executive order. which eventually was enjoined and blocked. He argued that the Postal Service’s role is to deliver mail, not to check recipients against a database. Eisen called the approach unconstitutional.
In his telling, the election fight isn’t only about one order or one raid—it’s about whether courts can keep elections functioning while pressure from the political branches tries to interfere with who gets to vote and how their votes are handled.
Eisen said his organizations have built a wide legal front against Trump’s attempts to undermine democracy. Counting all civil litigation and criminal defense. plus briefs filed on behalf of a bipartisan judges group. Eisen said Democracy Defenders Fund and Democracy Defenders Action have over 300 legal cases and matters. He cited several examples: a brief that “knocked out the slush fund case. ” a landmark civil win tied to the Kennedy Center case. work that helped lead to the throwing out of “phony crony Trump U.S. attorneys. ” and the election work he said the groups are now pivoting toward with the express aim of obtaining court orders that protect free and fair elections.
The conversation also reflected on how this pressure is being met on multiple fronts, not just in court.
Eisen described an election-protection coalition that brings together state attorneys general—naming Tish James. Rob Bonta. and Keith Ellison—and legacy civil rights and legal organizations such as the ACLU. the Brennan Center. and the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. He also listed groups and litigators including the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and Protect Democracy. alongside grassroots organizers like Common Cause and Movement Voters Project. He said coordination happens openly through public meetings and public discussions. including appearances on podcasts and platforms such as The Nation and his publication. The Contrarian. He added that the coalition operates with allies across political lines. including conservatives who now participate in what he described as the democracy movement.
The federal pressure campaign—Eisen’s Ohio raid example, and the mail-ballot restriction described in the executive order—plays out against a backdrop of other resistance stories that the show’s political news segment tied to broader public reaction.
After the talk about election access. the program shifted to the week’s other flashpoints: arrests tied to alleged vandalism at the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool. a protest-driven move by ICE to change detention warehouse plans. and grassroots pressure that pressured Georgia Republicans to abandon a redistricting effort. Those cases were presented as evidence that public pushback—legal and physical—can force decisions to be reconsidered.
In Georgia. for instance. the governor called a special session of the state legislature “for the sole purpose of redistricting. ” aimed at eliminating Black congressional districts and electing white Republicans instead of Democrats. Two grassroots groups. Fair Fight Action. founded by Stacey Abrams. and the Southern Poverty Law Center. were credited with organizing massive protests where thousands of mostly Black protesters filled the capital of Georgia the day the legislature was supposed to have its initial meeting. The Republicans who controlled the legislature canceled the special session and did not proceed.
In the ICE detention context. the program described a plan involving $700 million for warehouses that ICE said it would use to house people detained for immigration-law violations. The segment said there was a large uprising in small towns—often in red states—against placing these “Trump prisons” in their communities. ICE later announced it would sell $700 million worth of seven warehouses. after the original plan involved converting empty industrial spaces into prisons that would house thousands of people. The plan had been for 11 warehouses; ICE would keep four, with one already blocked by a judge.
Together. the segment’s election-focused sequence—federal action in Ohio. a Postal Service confrontation in the courts. and high-visibility public resistance elsewhere—left Eisen’s central concern clear: election protection is not a background task. It is a live contest over whether democratic participation can proceed normally.
At the end of the conversation. Eisen also connected election protection to broader resistance and to his own long legal record in fights over Trump-era institutions. He described defending against election interference as part of an evolving strategy: earlier efforts. he said. were designed to “strike sparks of light” and trigger public alarms about a slide toward autocracy. while current efforts focus on securing court orders that protect the basic mechanics of democracy—free and fair elections.
Eisen Democracy Defenders Fund Democracy Defenders Action election protection Ohio Organizing Collaborative FBI raid voter registration mail ballots U.S. Postal Service executive order litigation Georgia redistricting ICE warehouses