SAVE Act, Republicans’ sweeping election overhaul, fails in the Senate | Miles Parks/NPR

The SAVE America Act, a far-reaching Republican election overhaul that President Trump said should be his congressional allies’ top priority, has officially failed in the Senate. The measure was voted on Thursday as an amendment as part of lengthy debate over an immigration funding package. The election bill has languished in the Senate for months, after the House passed a version in February on a near party-line vote. The election proposal would have taken effect immediately, even as voting is underway in congressional primaries. Notably, the legislation would have required voters to show a document proving their U.S. citizenship, like a passport or a birth certificate, when they registered to vote. Research has shown millions of Americans don’t have easy access to those documents. And experts say such a provision is unnecessary, as noncitizens have never been shown to vote at anything but microscopic numbers in American elections. Read Article

National: Congress weighs cuts to states’ already ‘insufficient’ election security dollars | Jonathan Shorman/News From The States

Ahead of the November midterm elections, President Donald Trump and his Republican allies have demanded Congress pass sweeping voting restrictions, including showing proof of citizenship to register — all in the name of election security. At the same time, the only federal agency dedicated solely to helping states and localities run smooth and secure elections operates on a meager budget. It provides grants for election security far smaller than in the past. And U.S. House Republicans have signaled they want sizable further cuts. The agency, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, sits at the center of a fight playing out in Congress over how to best ensure secure elections. The debate has thrown into sharp relief a yawning gap between GOP rhetoric over election tampering and actual congressional support for election security efforts. Read Article

National: Election threats are focused on campaign systems, not voting machines | Greg Otto/CyberScoop

Cybersecurity threats to the 2026 midterm elections are targeting the accounts and platforms that campaigns, donors and voters use to communicate, according to a security report released Monday by Check Point Software Technologies. So far in this election cycle, threats are not aimed at voting machines or ballot-counting systems. Instead, threat actors are going after the email accounts, websites and fundraising platforms that election organizations depend on. Jeremy Fuchs, a campaign manager for Check Point, told CyberScoop that the report’s core findings reflect a broader trend in cybersecurity: Bad actors are using AI to make their attacks larger and more effective. “The barrier to entry is lower and the quality is so much higher than it was three years ago, 10 years ago, that everything is going to look more realistic and it’s going to be more effective at accomplishing whatever goals [attackers] have,” he said. Read Article

National: Federal judge hears challenge to Trump’s order on voter list | Michael Casey/Associated Press

A federal judge on Tuesday heard from voting rights groups and a coalition of two dozen states that want the courts to halt President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to create a federal voter list and limit who can receive a mail ballot. The plaintiffs argued in two lawsuits that Trump’s order should be found unconstitutional because the states and Congress, not the president, have the power to set election rules. They also told the court that the move imposes a costly burden on state election officials to comply and would spread fear about the possibility of prosecution. “This is going to be a sea change in the way that some states administer their ballots,” said Michael Cohen, who was part of a team representing California, adding that “it will be difficult to overstate the disruption that this will cause.” Trump’s executive order, the second one aimed at elections during his second term, comes as he continues to raise the specter of widespread voting by noncitizens as a reason to change election rules. But states already have detailed processes aimed at keeping their voter rolls accurate, and voting by noncitizens has been shown to be rare. It also is a felony that can be punishable by deportation. Read Article

National: How the Supreme Court is reshaping the US midterm elections | Jan Wolfe/Reuters

The U.S. Supreme Court this year already has given a boost to President Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans in the nationwide battle over redrawing electoral maps. In the coming weeks, it could rule in favor of the Republicans in two more significant cases related to elections ahead of the November elections that will decide control of Congress. In a case from Mississippi, Republican Party officials are seeking to strike down state laws that allow late-arriving mail ballots to be counted as long as they ​are postmarked by Election Day. Trump has sought to cast doubt on the security of mail-in ballots, though evidence of voter fraud is rare, and Democratic voters tend to use this mode of voting more than Republicans. Read Article

National: Sometimes officials send duplicate ballots. Here’s how security measures prevent double voting. | Alexander Shur/Votebeat

Ahead of the Wisconsin Supreme Court election in April, Green Bay election officials accidentally sent duplicate ballots to 150 voters, prompting an administrative complaint before the Wisconsin Elections Commission and conspiracy theories online. In a slightly different example from this year, some voters in Maryland initially received primary ballots for the wrong party. Election officials then intentionally issued new ballots for the correct party to all voters who had requested a mail ballot, and the original ballots were voided. Nonetheless, President Donald Trump falsely suggested that nobody knew what was happening with the original ballots and that “any Republican running in Maryland doesn’t have a chance” because voters who received them, which were disproportionately Democrats, would be allowed to vote twice. Despite the heightened attention, election officials accidentally sending duplicate ballots — or sending out an erroneous batch before intentionally sending corrected ballots to the same voters — is a rare but well-understood mistake nationwide that hardly ever results in the type of double voting Trump has warned of. “Once any ballot is received and accepted, it locks down that voter’s record, so that a second ballot could not be accepted for that same voter,” said Tammy Patrick, chief programs officer of the National Association of Election Officials. “That’s the way it works everywhere.” Read Article

National: How to Make Sense of the Barcodes on Your Ballot | Luke Belant/NCSL

The way ballots are created and counted has been modernized significantly since the passage of the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002. Accuracy and reliability problems with older equipment, including punch card and lever machines, increased interest in ballot-counting equipment among legislators at the state and federal levels. Hand-counting ballots at scale was time-consuming, expensive and often inaccurate, so machine counting was considered the path forward. The federal government established voluntary voting system guidelines under the newly created Election Assistance Commission, and many states adopted federal standards, in some cases adding their own requirements for voting machines. These standards have been updated over time to adjust to evolving technology. Today’s voting systems tabulate paper ballots and use barcodes for a variety of reasons. Barcodes store information such as the election date and year and the county that produced the ballot. They also tell the voting machine where to look for voter selections on the ballot. The machine-readable format can be read by software programs and then translated for human viewing. Read Article

National: Bang, Bang, Bang: Callais Kills Off the Voting Rights Act | Pamela S. Karlan/Just Security

The authors of the Reconstruction Amendments did not trust the Supreme Court to ensure that Black Americans would be able to participate fully in the political life of the nation. That is why the amendments expressly gave Congress the power to enforce their provisions through additional legislation. It took nearly a century, but as part of the Second Reconstruction, Congress fulfilled that responsibility. It enacted a Voting Rights Act that goes beyond merely restating the constitutional prohibitions contained in the first sections of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The single most important contribution the Court ever made to minority citizens’ voting rights was to uphold and apply those congressionally expanded prohibitions. The current Supreme Court thinks differently. Section 2, as amended by Congress in 1982, was designed, and had been read for decades, to bar not only intentional discrimination but also practices and procedures that resulted in minority voters having less opportunity to elect representatives of their choice. (That “results” language, after all, is what the text explicitly provided.) In Louisiana v. Callais, the Court returned amended section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to a mere restatement of the constitutional prohibition on purposeful vote dilution. We are only just beginning to see how Justice Samuel Alito’s disingenuous opinion for the Court threatens to dismantle a fundamental pillar of the Second Reconstruction. Read Articlea>

Arizona Supreme Court declines to review fake electors case against Trump allies | Sasha Hupka/Votebeat

The Arizona Supreme Court won’t review lower court rulings that crippled Attorney General Kris Mayes’ fake electors case, leaving the prosecution of 18 people who attempted to overturn the state’s 2020 election results in limbo. The case is one of several that arose in the aftermath of the 2020 election when allies of President Donald Trump, who lost the election, tried to install him anyway. Those people, who became known as fake or false electors, attempted to cast electoral votes for Trump in multiple states he lost and submit those certificates of votes to Congress. In Arizona, those people — alongside other Trump allies — were later indicted on felony charges of fraud, conspiracy, and forgery. Their case has been on pause since Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Sam Myers sent it back to a grand jury last year, ruling that prosecutors had failed to provide a full copy of the relevant federal election law before the original jurors handed down their indictments in April 2024. Read Article

California’s slow ballot count makes it a target for critics. It doesn’t mean elections are rigged | Nicholas Riccardi/Associated Press

Days after the state’s primary, California voters are in a familiar position — waiting to find out which candidates will go on to the general election in their most high-profile races, for governor and Los Angeles mayor. It’s not surprising those have yet to be resolved, along with several closely contested congressional races, because the state routinely takes days, or even weeks, to fully tally races. Nor is it unusual for President Donald Trump to complain about the pace of the count and allege fraud, as he did Thursday. It’s something he’s done repeatedly in the past. Trump’s posts prompted a response from Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, whose press office posted a clip of a CNN video explaining how the nation’s most populous state prioritizes accuracy and accessibility over speed, drawing out the count. Read Article

Colorado: ‘It brainwashes people:’ Head of county clerks is concerned Tina Peters’ disinformation against elections will continue | Carl Bilek and Ryan Warner/CPR News

The executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association is concerned that former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters will continue to sow election lies now that she has been released from prison. “All of that disinformation really has an aggregating effect where it goes out. It brainwashes people. They think there are problems with these machines,” said Matt Crane, a Republican and former county clerk himself, in reference to the machines used to count ballots after an election. Peters was convicted of several felonies and misdemeanors and sentenced in 2024 to nearly nine years in prison for her role in tampering with Mesa County’s voting machines. Her sentencing came months after the 2020 presidential election when many Trump supporters were in search of evidence of election rigging. She did not find any evidence of wrongdoing. Read Article

Georgia voting overhaul could bring big payday to companies | Caleb Groves and Tamar Hallerman/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A vendor set up outside the state Capitol during the General Assembly’s legislative session in March to tout his voting touchscreens and ballot tabulators. Election Systems & Software wasn’t there by chance. The Nebraska-based company was angling for a lucrative statewide contract it expected to go out for bid in early 2027, one that would determine how millions of Georgians cast ballots. On paper, the state isn’t due for new voting equipment until 2029. But after years of headlines about unpatched security flaws, unceasing conspiracy theories and polling showing a sizable chunk of Georgia voters with little confidence in the current system, lawmakers may choose to remedy the situation by taking bids for new machines in time for the 2028 elections. The contours of what that new system may look like could emerge during the June 17 special session. Lawmakers are tasked with redrawing the state’s political maps and finding a way to replace the QR codes currently used to count votes ahead of a self-imposed July 1 deadline. Vendors, however, are quietly positioning themselves for an even bigger prize: the prospect of a rare statewide contract worth upward of $100 million. Georgia voting overhaul could bring big payday to companies

Indiana: Candidate argues social media posts, obscure law should nullify votes | Cate Charron/Indianapolis Star

A Trump-backed state senate candidate is still fighting to win a tight election by making an unusual legal claim that voters’ social media posts exposed that they voted illegally under an obscure state law. Republican Paula Copenhaver was one of many primary challengers seeking to defeat Indiana senators who defied U.S. President Donald Trump’s demand to redraw Indiana’s congressional district boundaries to favor Republicans. She was vying to unseat incumbent state Sen. Spencer Deery of West Lafayette, but lost by three votes in the May 5 primary. In her request for a recount, Copenhaver argues that social media posts and interviews with a journalist prove that several Democratic voters wrongfully crossed over to the Republican primary, swinging the election in Deery’s favor. The crossover voting warrants investigation, she claims. Her argument hinges on a largely unenforced Indiana law that many voters, advocates and experts say they have never heard of. Her method of challenging voters in a recount is likely a first in Indiana and appears to conflict with the state’s enforcement interpretation. Read Article

New Hampshire: Federal judge orders state to make it easier for voters to prove citizenship | Holly Ramer and Julie Carr Smyth/Associated Press

A federal judge has said that New Hampshire must make voter registration easier by allowing applicants to attest to their U.S. citizenship if they don’t have the documents to prove it. The case was seen as the first major legal test of an election reform that has been pushed nationally by President Donald Trump and has gained favor among many Republicans, though U.S. District Court Judge Samantha Elliot said she was not deciding whether requiring proof of citizenship itself is constitutional. Her ruling late Thursday night on a narrower question of New Hampshire law was significant, however, because it underscored the potential perils of implementing strict requirements for voters to document their U.S. citizenship so they can cast a ballot. Elliot found that changes in 2024 to the state voter registration law unconstitutionally removed one method of proof — namely, a voter’s sworn affidavit attesting to citizenship. Read Article

North Carolina: Republican election officials say GOP and state auditor pressured them to reject campus voting site | Kyle Ingram/Raleigh News & Observer

Republican election officials in Jackson County say they were pressured — by their own party and the state auditor’s office, one says — to reject a plan for an early voting site on Western Carolina University’s campus. “I’ve been told that if I don’t vote a particular way, that they will do whatever they have to do to remove me from the board,” Republican board member Jay Pavey said. The comments came during a stunning board meeting on Tuesday morning in which Pavey sided with the board’s Democratic minority to approve the contested polling site for use in the midterm elections this fall. “I know that I’m bucking my party by this, and I may very well be a one-term person on the board of elections, but if that’s it, that’s fine,” he said. “I will stand on this hill and I will die on this hill.” Tuesday’s meeting also followed the unexpected resignation of one of the board’s Republican members. Read Article

Pennsylvania: New study finds that ballot curing helps more mail ballots get counted | Carter Walker/Spotlight PA

Mail voters who are informed and have opportunities to fix ballot errors ahead of elections are much more likely to have their votes counted, a new study of the 2024 election in Pennsylvania has found. The study, from the University of Pennsylvania, provides hard evidence to back up the arguments that county officials have used for years to justify such “notice and cure” policies for defective mail ballots. “Vote curing policies help balance the tension between promoting both access and integrity in mail balloting,” the study’s authors wrote. “In short, vote curing can reduce the number of eligible voters whose deficient mail ballots become ‘lost votes.’” Read Article

Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson stepping down | Natalia Contreras/The Texas Tribune

Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson announced Tuesday she will resign effective July 17, capping off three and a half years as the state’s top election official. “It has been my goal to ensure that voting in Texas is secure, accessible and fair,” Nelson said in a press release. “We have worked extensively to ensure accurate voter rolls and to educate voters about what they need to know to vote with confidence.” The press release did not say why Nelson is resigning from her role. Her office did not respond to a request for comment. By law, Gov. Greg Abbott is required to nominate someone to fill the vacant position “without delay.” It’s unclear how quickly Abbott will move to fill Nelson’s role or whom he is considering for the job. Read Article

Wisconsin: Milwaukee Council OKs election legal counsel in wake of FBI inquiry | Vanessa Swales/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Is the Milwaukee City Attorney’s Office gearing up for a possible legal storm tied to the 2020 election? The answer: most likely. With no public discussion, the city’s Common Council unanimously voted June 2 in favor of authorizing the City Attorney to hire outside counsel for election-related needs. Late last month, the city’s judiciary and legislation committee took up the substitute resolution authored by Alderman DiAndre Jackson. No public report was available and council members discussed the item in closed session, voting to approve its passage to full council. City Attorney Evan Goyke declined to comment on the basis for the request. The move comes after the Federal Bureau of Investigation has interviewed a high-ranking election official in recent weeks about the 2020 presidential election. Read Article

National: Ballots Have Been Seized Across the US. No One Knows What Will Happen Next | Kim Zetter/WIRED

As US voters look to the November midterms, the Trump administration is obsessed with looking back to past elections, seizing ballots cast years ago in several states in search, it claims, of fraud or other malfeasance. But experts believe the goal may be more varied. The seizures began in January when FBI agents armed with a warrant raided an election facility in Fulton County, Georgia, and grabbed 600 boxes of ballots from 2020. This was followed in March by the Department of Justice obtaining ballot images from 2020 in Maricopa County, Arizona, and—citing claims about supposed fraud in 2020—demanding ballots from the 2024 election in Wayne County, Michigan. Read Article

National: The Justice Department wants to interview 2020 election workers | Katelyn Polantz and Tierney Sneed/CNN

The Justice Department wants to interview some poll workers and ballot counters who participated in the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia, in a new effort to dig up details about the ballot-processing, prosecutors revealed at a court hearing last week. A prosecutor working with a grand jury in Fulton County told a federal judge on May 19 that once the Justice Department has names and addresses of 2020 election workers in the investigation, federal investigators would try to talk to the workers. The unusual investigative approach could potentially reinflate fraud theories that have been roundly rejected by several voting and law enforcement authorities about the result of the 2020 election, which President Donald Trump continues to want to avenge. Read Article

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