Polls are looking pretty bleak for Republicans—and the Trump administration’s various attempts to interfere with the elections haven’t been too successful either.

In recent weeks, the Department of Justice, helmed by Attorney General Todd Blanche, a proponent of conspiracy theories about widespread noncitizen voting in the 2020 election, has pulled out all the stops to sow doubt in voters’ minds about the security and validity of the electoral process.

To do this, the DOJ has spent the last year demanding unredacted voter rolls, issuing executive orders to wrest control of elections from states, raiding election offices, proposing new laws to disenfranchise millions of citizens, and claiming that noncitizens were voting en masse across the country. (Incidents of verified noncitizen voting are vanishingly rare, as multiple bipartisaninvestigations have shown.)

There have also been escalating threats by the DOJ against election officials. On Thursday, the DOJ sent letters to election officials in all 50 states warning them that they would pursue criminal action if they failed to preserve election records for 22 days. Earlier that week, a federal judge had admonished the Trump administration for making similar threats around criminal prosecution against election officials in a different case.

“They're trying to create chaos and distrust in the system,” says Shelby Wayment, staff attorney at UCLA Law’s Safeguarding Democracy Project. “They're trying to file these now knowing they have virtually no chance of winning and then after they can claim the election was fraudulent.”

“This Department is following the facts and the law, not anyone’s political timetable,” a spokesperson for the DOJ tells WIRED, pointing out that the previous administration’s Justice department sued Alabama and Virginia ahead of the 2024 election, claiming the DOJ was at the time trying “to stop them from removing suspected noncitizens from their voter rolls.”

Experts say that while the DOJ’s current legal efforts, including escalating fights in Alaska and California over candidates and voter rolls, are faltering, they’re also designed to lay the groundwork to question the results of this week’s vote.

“We have to expect absolutely, if the election doesn't go the way the president wants, that we will see the administration’s attempt to sow doubts in the election and maybe even challenge those results, but I'm also not worried about it,” David Becker, a former DOJ lawyer and the head of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, tells WIRED.