Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin called on the Pentagon on Tuesday to explicitly guarantee that active-duty U.S. troops will not be deployed to polling stations or used to confiscate ballots during the upcoming November midterm elections.
In letters addressed to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Dan Caine, Slotkin pressed military leaders for a clear commitment.
“I’d ask you to confirm a simple statement: the Department of Defense will not send Federal troops to the polls or to seize election materials of any kind,” Slotkin wrote.
In response, the Pentagon said in an email that it intends to reply directly to the senator, consistent with its standard procedure for congressional inquiries.
Slotkin told The Associated Press that President Donald Trump has been laying the groundwork to contest the midterm election results.
Vote (File)
She pointed to past instances, including discussions after the 2020 election regarding the potential seizure of voting machines, previous deployments of the National Guard over the objections of local Democratic officials, and the 2025 deployment of active-duty Marines to Los Angeles during an immigration enforcement operation.
“He’s very clearly laying the breadcrumbs to be able to say the day after the election that he didn’t really lose the House or he didn’t really lose the Senate,” Slotkin said.
The issue previously surfaced during an April congressional hearing, where Slotkin questioned Hegseth on whether he would carry out an order to seize ballots.
Hegseth dismissed the inquiry as a “gotcha hypothetical” at the time, adding, “I’ve never been ordered to do anything illegal, and I won’t.”
The White House has firmly rejected allegations that the administration would deploy armed forces during the vote. White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles pushed back against the claims in an interview with Vanity Fair last year.
“I say it is categorically false, will not happen. It’s just wrongheaded,” Wiles said.
Chief of Staff Susie Wiles
Under federal statute, the deployment of armed military personnel to voting sites is strictly prohibited unless required to “repel armed enemies of the United States.” Any domestic military election involvement would typically fall to state-governed National Guard units rather than federal armed forces.
Slotkin sent a similar inquiry ahead of the 2020 election while serving in the House. Gen. Mark Milley, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, affirmed the military’s neutrality in his response.
“I believe deeply in the principle of an apolitical U.S. military,” Milley wrote in 2020. “In the event of a dispute over some aspect of the elections, by law U.S. courts and the U.S. Congress are required to resolve any disputes, not the U.S. military.”
