President Donald Trump’s plan to overhaul elections could hurl 2026 into turmoil by forcing states to hand-count ballots or scramble to spend millions of dollars on voting systems that aren’t yet on the market, according to election officials and voting experts.

If put into effect, his recent executive order attempting to transform elections could make it impossible for some states to use voting machines, election experts said. No voting systems are commercially available that meet the standards the president put forward in his executive order. Election officials broadly oppose hand-counting ballots as an alternative because the practice is time-consuming and prone to errors.

If Trump’s plan ever comes to fruition, it could hit taxpayers hard. Outfitting every state with new machines could cost $1 billion or more.

“It will create chaos in the states, and it seems almost designed to create chaos,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research.

Trump’s order, however, probably won’t be implemented anytime soon. Scholars say he has exceeded his authority by claiming powers he doesn’t have, and his order quickly drew five lawsuits from state officials, Democrats and voting rights groups.

The directive Trump signed last month is aimed at requiring voters to prove they are citizens when they register to vote, changing the deadlines in some states for returning ballots by mail, allowing federal agencies to review state voter lists and making states buy new voting systems. It yielded legal challenges a week later from state attorneys general, the Democratic National Committee, the League of Women Voters, the League of United Latin American Citizens and others.

The White House said the administration will prioritize federal election funding for states that seek to comply with the executive order. The administration contended that states have time to make headway because the midterm elections are more than a year away.

The executive order builds on Trump’s years-long embrace of conspiracy theories and his false claims that he won his 2020 reelection bid. After he lost, he mounted a wide-ranging effort to overturn the 2020 results that culminated in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Since winning a second term last year, Trump has continued to question long-standing voting practices and is now using the Oval Office to try to reshape how elections are conducted — even though the Constitution says those duties belong to state legislatures and Congress.

Courts will have the final say on whether Trump has the authority to tell election officials what to do. If he gets his way, the 2026 midterm election will be costly and chaotic, with many states struggling to conduct them, experts and election officials said.

The president does not oversee the federal Election Assistance Commission, but Trump’s executive order tells the independent agency to set new standards for voting systems and decertify all systems that have been certified under past guidelines.

That would create a logistical and budget earthquake for many states. For one thing, they would probably have an impossible time buying new voting machines and software.

“There is not yet a single system out there that satisfies that standard that is commercially available,” said Lawrence Norden, vice president of elections and government at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

States rely on the federal guidelines, and 11 states have laws that explicitly require their machines to meet those standards.

Those 11 include the swing states of Georgia and North Carolina, the reliably Republican states of Ohio and Texas, and the solidly Democratic states of Delaware and Oregon.

Election officials around the country expressed skepticism that they would have to follow the executive order because of the legal questions surrounding it. If they do, they said they would be in a quandary.

“If they were to have every polling place in the country buy new equipment, there isn’t enough supply within a reasonable time frame to do that,” said Gerry Cohen, a Democrat who sits on the elections board for Wake County, North Carolina.

LaVera Scott, the director of elections for Lucas County, Ohio, said she has been fielding calls from her peers because she serves as the vice president of an association of election officials. Her county last purchased machines in 2019 for $6.5 million, with more than half the money coming from the state, she said. Now, the equipment would cost more.

“Most of us don’t have a huge account sitting somewhere where we can say, ‘Okay, oh, another $8 million — we got it,’” said Scott, a Democrat whose county includes Toledo.

States often take a year or more to procure machines because they are so costly and must meet exacting requirements. Georgia spent more than $100 million on a new voting system in 2019, and replacing all machines in the country would cost $1 billion to $3 billion, according to a 2022 report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Election Data and Science Lab. The costs would be lower if vendors developed software for machines that states already have, but it’s unclear if the existing equipment would meet the new standards.

There is little sign that states would get much help for their costs. Last year, Congress gave states $55 million in election security grants, down from $75 million in 2023.

Time is as much of a concern as cash because procuring voting systems takes so long. Louisiana has sought new voting machines for seven years and probably won’t have them available in all jurisdictions for the midterm elections.

“It’s not like you go to a store and buy $200 million worth of new voting machines and then just set them up and plug them in and they’re ready to go,” said Becker, of the election research center.

Election officials need time to install equipment, test it and train workers. Changing systems “is not like flipping a light switch,” said Joseph Kirk, the nonpartisan elections supervisor for Bartow County, Georgia.

“It would take time and resources to do it correctly,” Kirk said. “Voters deserve a system they understand and that they trust, that’s being operated in a responsible way. Trying to change very, very quickly to a completely new method of voting just isn’t a good idea.”

Some states could try to use their existing systems even if the executive order went into effect. Officials in North Carolina, for instance, argue their law requiring equipment to be federally certified is broad enough to accommodate machines that Trump’s order would decertify. And officials in Georgia say their law requiring certification applies only during the procurement process.

Even if they could find the money, states probably wouldn’t find any machines for sale. The Election Assistance Commission established new guidelines in 2021, but no machines have yet been certified to those standards. Trump’s order would require the commission to set standards that go further by barring machines from using ballots with barcodes in many situations.

Trump wants his new policies followed by the fall, which would give states about a year to prepare for the 2026 midterm elections. Getting machines by then appears impossible. Vendors would need to develop the new systems and win certification for them in record time. Then, they would need to manufacture machines at an unheard-of scale because so many states would be clamoring for them. States would need to get them as soon as possible because they would need to install them and train thousands of election workers.

“I don’t see possibly of a way for them to have us something that we could even think about buying,” said Terry Burton, the elections director in Ohio’s Wood County and the president of the state association for election officials.

If they didn’t have machines, election officials would have to count ballots by hand — an idea championed by some of Trump’s most stalwart supporters but panned by election officials and academics who have studied the practice.

“In a large election, it would take an extraordinary amount of time and would require multiple recounts to get it where it was reasonably accurate,” said Burton, a Republican.

Some leading GOP election officials have praised aspects of Trump’s order while remaining largely mum on the parts that could make them buy new machines. Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose (R), for instance, applauded a provision of the order meant to give states better access to federal citizenship databases — but didn’t say what he thought of the changes to voting systems.

Lannie Chapman, a Democrat and the clerk of Salt Lake County in Utah, said she saw Trump’s order as an attempt to push election officials to count ballots by hand. The order, she said, “is taking us way, way back beyond the punch card system to a point where I can’t even fathom how long it would take us to certify an election.”