A new analysis from Issue One finds that half of all counties in 11 Western states have lost their chief election official since the 2020 election, underscoring a deepening workforce crisis driven largely by stress, threats, and burnout — not electoral defeat or term limits. “This isn’t just normal turnover,” the report’s authors wrote in…
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence obtained voting machines from Puerto Rico and probed them for security vulnerabilities, the office said in a statement to CNN Wednesday. The extraordinary move comes amid Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s broader search for voter fraud at the behest of President Donald Trump, who has falsely claimed that the 2020 election was rigged despite numerous court rulings and audits debunking the claim. Gabbard was present as FBI agents executed a search warrant in Fulton County, Georgia, last week related to the 2020 election. The ODNI claimed in its statement to have found “extremely concerning” cybersecurity and operational deployment practices with the voting machines in Puerto Rico but did not provide detailed evidence. The US attorney in Puerto Rico, Homeland Security Investigations agents and an FBI supervisory special agent “facilitated the voluntary turnover of electronic voting hardware and software to ODNI for analysis,” an ODNI spokesperson said. It’s unclear exactly when the agency received and studied the voting machines. Read Article
President Trump’s declaration that he wants to “nationalize” voting in the United States arrives at a perilous moment for the relationship between the federal government and top election officials across the country. While the executive branch has no explicit authority over elections, generations of secretaries of state have relied on the intelligence gathering and cybersecurity defenses, among other assistance, that only the federal government can provide. But as Mr. Trump has escalated efforts to involve the administration in election and voting matters while also eliminating programs designed to fortify these systems against attacks, secretaries of state and other top state election officials, including some Republican ones, have begun to sound alarms. Some see what was once a crucial partnership as frayed beyond repair. They point to Mr. Trump’s push to overturn the 2020 election, his continued false claims that the contest was rigged, the presence of election deniers in influential government positions and his administration’s attempts to dig up evidence of widespread voter fraud that year, even though none has ever been found. Read Article
In the wake of an extraordinary FBI raid on a Fulton County elections office, Georgia Republican lawmakers are moving to rework how the state conducts its elections in advance of a crucial midterm election. Under a draft House proposal obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Georgians would have two in-person voting options for casting their ballot. Election Day voters would use hand-marked paper ballots, which would be tabulated by machines. Georgians voting early would be able to choose to fill out a ballot by hand or select their candidates using the current touchscreen system, which prints out a paper ballot receipt. Touchscreen votes would be hand-counted. The proposal was expected to be considered in the House Governmental Affairs Committee on Monday, but the meeting was called off after the proposal’s language immediately sparked controversy among local election officials and Democrats. Read Article
Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt on Wednesday rejected President Donald Trump’s false claims about voter fraud in the state as Trump targeted Philadelphia in his push to nationalize elections. The state’s top election official said Trump’s proposal would violate the Constitution, which he noted clearly gives states exclusive authority to administer elections. “Pennsylvania elections have never been more safe and secure,” said Schmidt, who served as Philadelphia’s Republican city commissioner in 2020, when the city was at the center of Trump’s conspiracy theories. “Thousands of election officials — Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike — across the Commonwealth’s 67 counties will continue to ensure we have free, fair, safe, and secure elections for the people of Pennsylvania,” he said in a statement. Read Article
Donald Trump lost his bid for reelection in 2020. But for more than five years, he’s been trying to convince Americans the opposite is true by falsely saying the election was marred by widespread fraud. Now that he’s president again, Trump is pushing the federal government to back up those bogus claims. On Wednesday, the FBI served a search warrant at the election headquarters of Fulton County, Georgia, which includes most of Atlanta, seeking ballots from the 2020 election. That follows Trump’s comments earlier this month when he suggested during a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that charges related to the election were imminent. “The man has obsessions, as do a fair number of people, but he’s the only one who has the full power of the United States behind him,” said Rick Hasen, a UCLA law professor. Read Article
Weeks before the 2024 election, American military hackers carried out a secret operation to disrupt the work of Russian trolls spewing false information at US voters. From their perch at Cyber Command at Fort Meade, Maryland, the military hackers took aim at the computer servers and key personnel of at least two Russian companies that were covertly pumping out the propaganda, according to multiple sources briefed on the operation. The trolls were trying to influence election results in six swing states by publishing fictitious news stories that attacked American politicians who supported Ukraine. One of the companies had held “strategy meetings” with Kremlin officials on how to covertly influence US voters, according to an FBI affidavit. In one case, the Cyber Command operatives planned to knock offline computer servers based in a European country that one of the Russian companies used, the sources said. Though the Russian trolls continued to create content through Election Day, when President Donald Trump defeated then-Vice President Kamala Harris, one source briefed on the hacking effort said it successfully slowed down the Russians’ operations. Read Article
Earlier this month, President Donald Trump floated the idea of canceling the 2026 midterm elections, drawing widespread attention and concern even as White House officials later dismissed the remarks as facetious. But election experts consistently agree that Trump has neither the legal authority nor the practical ability to cancel elections. And state and local election officials consistently say they will carry out the elections they’re legally required to run. The election system is under real strain, and bad-faith efforts to undermine it are serious. But after talking with local election officials, lawyers, and administrators across the country, I don’t see evidence that upcoming elections are at realistic risk of not happening at all. Elections happen because thousands of local officials follow state and local law that mandates them — and history shows they’ve done so before, even under immense pressure. The greater danger isn’t no election, but one that’s chaotic, unfairly challenged, or deliberately cast as illegitimate after the fact. Read Article
The 2026 midterm elections are right around the corner, which means Americans are bracing for the onslaught of campaign advertisements, fundraising solicitations, and media coverage of the contests that will determine control of the U.S. Congress and state capitols across the nation. If 2024 was any indication, artificial intelligence (AI) and its potential to disrupt American elections will feature prominently in the national dialogue leading up to November. While AI’s actual impacts were far less than originally feared, the rapid improvement of AI tools raises concerns that 2026 could be the year its harmful effects come to full fruition. Despite its characterization as a tool of electoral deception, AI presents a mix of opportunities and risks. This piece provides an overview of AI’s impact on the election ecosystem and the potential issues policymakers should consider when determining how to adapt and respond during this contentious election year. Read Article
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, has spent months investigating the results of the 2020 election that Donald Trump lost, according to White House officials, a role that took her to a related FBI search of an election center in Georgia on Wednesday. Gabbard is leading the administration’s effort to re-examine the election and look for potential crimes, a priority for the president, the officials said. The national intelligence director is usually focused on ensuring the president has the best intelligence available to make national-security decisions. Gabbard has been sidelined from some of those deliberations, including the Venezuela operation earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal has reported. Read Article
Republicans in Congress have unveiled a new bill that would impose the most extreme voting restrictions ever proposed at the federal level. The new bill goes far beyond even the SAVE Act, which the House passed last year and which one historian called “the most extraordinary attack on voting rights in American history.” It’s being unveiled at a time when GOP anti-voting legislation has been steadily gaining GOP support in the Senate, after a push by President Donald Trump and anti-voting groups. Introduced by Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Wisc.), the chair of the House Administration Committee, the proposal is called the Make Elections Great Again Act, or MEGA Act — a name deliberately echoing President Donald Trump’s campaign slogan. Read Article
The acting director of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency uploaded sensitive government contracting documents to a public version of ChatGPT last summer, triggering automated security alerts and raising questions about AI governance at the agency responsible for defending federal networks and critical infrastructure. Madhu Gottumukkala, who has led CISA since May 2025, uploaded at least four documents marked “for official use only” to OpenAI’s ChatGPT platform between mid-July and early August, Politico reported. The documents contained contracting information not intended for public release. Cybersecurity sensors detected the activity in early August, generating several alerts in the first week alone, according to the report citing four Department of Homeland Security officials. Read Article
Even before winning reelection, President Donald Trump and his supporters put immigration at the center of their messaging. In addition to other conspiracy theories, the right-wing went all in on the false claim that immigrants were voting illegally in large numbers. The Trump administration has since poured billions of dollars into immigration enforcement, and in March, Trump issued an executive order requiring the Department of Homeland Security to ensure that states have “access to appropriate systems for verifying the citizenship or immigration status of individuals registering to vote or who are already registered.” In May, DHS began encouraging states to check their voter rolls against immigration data with the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program, run by US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). SAVE now has access to data from across the federal government, not just on immigrants but on citizens as well. Experts have warned that using disparate sources of data—all collected for different purposes–could lead to errors, including identifying US citizens as noncitizens. According to the plaintiffs in a new legal complaint, it appears that it’s already happening. Read Article
The state’s top two Republican lawmakers are asking the Arizona Supreme Court to rule that county supervisors don’t have to accept the vote total figures they get from election officials. In a new filing, attorneys for Senate President Warren Petersen and House Speaker Steve Montenegro argue that supervisors have “discretion” to determine whether to certify…
Fulton County, Georgia, officials said Wednesday that the FBI seized original 2020 voting records while serving a search warrant at the county’s Elections Hub and Operations Center. The FBI earlier Wednesday said they were conducting court-authorized activity at the facility. The development comes after President Donald Trump has repeatedly said there was voter fraud in the 2020 election, specifically in Georgia, that contributed to his election loss. Georgia officials audited and certified the results following the election. Fulton County officials expressed concern over the seizure of the ballots. “These are the original voting records, original absentee ballots,” Fulton County Commissioner Marvin Arrington, a Democrat, told ABC News regarding the materials seized by the FBI. “Once that stuff leaves our custody, where is the chain of custody? How can we know if we’re going to get everything back? How can we know if they might do something mischievous?” Read Article
Hawaiʻi GOP lawmakers rolled out their priorities for the legislative session on Thursday in an announcement that was critical of their Democratic counterparts for focusing too much on the Trump administration and its potential impact on the state budget. “What a waste of time. Not one issue about Hawaiʻi was mentioned,” Rep. Diamond Garcia, one of the House’s most outspoken members, said about the Democrats’ opening day speeches and press conferences. “It was about Trump, it was about ICE, it was about ski masks, it was about Greenland, it was about whatever else but the issues facing Hawaiʻi.” On Thursday, Garcia and seven of his GOP colleagues (sans Rep. Kanani Souza, who charts an independent course) held a press conference at the Capitol Rotunda to introduce their package of 2026 bills. Read Article
Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson says some Michigan voters may be at risk of criminal investigation or having voter registration cancelled after a Republican county clerk made claims that he found proof of non-citizens voting in Michigan. She said an investigation into Macomb County Clerk Anthony Forlini’s allegations that he had identified 15 non-citizens who were registered to vote in Michigan returned mixed results. Of the 15 residents flagged by Forlini, the Bureau of Elections identified four apparent non-citizens who are registered to vote in Michigan. The Michigan Department of State will send them a letter asking to confirm their eligibility to vote and will cancel their registration if they don’t respond. Read ‘Article
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on Monday confirmed to the press that he received a letter from Attorney General Pam Bondi over the weekend demanding that the state better cooperate with federal immigration authorities and that it hand over its voter registration lists and safety-net benefits data. Whether the nation’s chief law enforcement officer should expect the governor to bend to her demands was perhaps made clear by his rejoinder: “There’s two million documents in the Epstein files we’re still waiting on. Go ahead and work on those.” Bondi’s letter on Saturday described Operation Metro Surge, the name Immigration and Customs Enforcement gives its Minnesota activities, as an urgent effort “to protect Americans from the dangers presented by unchecked illegal immigration, including violent crime,” but that has received scant support from local law enforcement, detention centers, officials or residents. She recalled that Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey told ICE during a recent press conference that it should “get the fuck out of Minneapolis.” Read Article
A group of college students from three North Carolina universities — including the nation’s largest HBCU — filed a federal lawsuit against North Carolina election officials on Tuesday after the state rejected efforts to place early voting sites on their campuses. The lawsuit, which asks the court to order the restoration of the voting sites before early voting begins next month, accuses North Carolina’s Republican-led State Board of Elections of “targeted efforts to place additional, unnecessary, burdensome, and ultimately unjustifiable obstacles” on students. The litigation comes just weeks after the elections board voted against including on-campus early voting sites at Western Carolina University, UNC Greensboro and NC A&T State University. Read Article
A federal judge in Oregon dismissed a Justice Department lawsuit seeking Oregon’s unredacted voter rolls on Monday in another setback to wide-ranging efforts by President Donald Trump’s administration to get detailed voter data from states. In a hearing, U.S. District Judge Mustafa Kasubhai said he would dismiss the suit and issue a final written opinion in the coming days. The updated docket for the case showed that Oregon’s move to dismiss the case was granted. Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield welcomed the move. “The court dismissed this case because the federal government never met the legal standard to get these records in the first place,” he said in an emailed statement. “Oregonians deserve to know that voting laws can’t be used as a backdoor to grab their personal information.” Read Article