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There are no plans to send the military to polling places during the midterm elections, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine wrote in a letter sent to Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) that was released Monday.
The letter from Caine , the highest-ranking officer in the U.S. military, comes weeks after Slotkin sent a letter asking Caine and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to publicly confirm the U.S. military will not play a role in the November elections.
“The Joint Force has no plans to use such personnel to seize ballots, voting machines, or other election-related material,” Caine wrote in the letter. “I have neither received nor anticipate receiving any unlawful order concerning the role of the Joint Force in the upcoming November 2026 midterm elections.”
Slotkin, a member of the Senate Armed Services and Homeland Security committees, has repeatedly raised the issue as anxiety grows among Democrats and some election officials about the potential for the Trump administration to meddle in the upcoming elections.
Close Trump allies — including Steve Bannon, who was the White House chief strategist early in Trump’s first term — have called on the president to deploy the military or immigration officers to polling places.
Trump has not said he would do so, but did not explicitly rule it out in the past . Trump has deployed a whole of government approach to fighting what he falsely describes as a rigged elections system, making unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud.
In June, Slotkin introduced the Protect Our Polls Act to protect the integrity of elections from federal interference.
“President Trump has been saying the quiet part out loud: he wants to undermine our elections any way he can, and he refuses to rule out sending uniformed military to the polls, or to collect ballots and voting machines,” Slotkin wrote in a statement introducing the bill.
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