Colorado: Tech glitches disrupt Democrats as they consider primary candidates | Rae Solomon and Caitlyn Kim/CPR

Over the last two weekends, Colorado Democrats held caucus meetings to help decide who will be on the primary ballot in June, but the meetings were beset with technical difficulties that have led to confusion and consternation from some who attended and concerns about whether delegates lost their voice in the process. In previous years, the process has run on paper ballots and in-person voting. This year was the first time the Party introduced voting by app. Delegates described using Airtable, a business workflow app that is not designed to run elections, to register their votes. The software struggled to handle the high volume of users throughout the process, and finally crashed toward the end of the day on March 14. “People are getting pretty tired and upset at that point in time,” said State House District 6 candidate Iris Halpern, who is hoping to serve as a delegate in several statewide races at the party convention in Pueblo later this month. “I think most people tried to be patient and stick with it. But I’m pretty sure we probably did lose some folks throughout the day.” Read Article

National: In bid for voter data, Trump’s DOJ lays groundwork to undermine confidence in midterms | Jonathan Shorman/Stateline

The U.S. Department of Justice has begun connecting its push to obtain sensitive personal data on millions of voters to whether the upcoming midterm elections will be fair and secure, laying the groundwork for the Trump administration to potentially cast doubt on the results. The Justice Department has sued 29 states and the District of Columbia over their refusal to provide unredacted voter rolls that include the driver’s license and partial Social Security numbers of voters. The department has lost three of those lawsuits so far this year. But as the Justice Department begins appealing the losses, it has filed emergency motions warning the “security and sanctity of elections” would be questioned in those states — California, Michigan and Oregon — without immediate rulings. Read Article

Illinois: 10 years after Russians attacked the state voter registry. Is your info safe now? | Chuck Goudie/NBC Chicago

Tuesday’s primary election is almost at the 10-year mark since Russian hackers gained access to Illinois’ voter data – a watershed moment in election security – that to this day prompts a simple question: is my ballot secure? Securing your vote is not as easy as simply posting up some election judges, keeping uniformed officers awake and having a day’s supply of I Voted stickers. November 2016 is an election that lives in Illinois infamy. As voters cast ballots in bowling alley precincts, while pool players called the corner pocket and at the neighborhood laundromat, state election officials were on the lookout for Russian intruders. A few months earlier, in the summer of 2016 at the State Board of Elections in Springfield, Illinois’ voter registration database was broken into from afar. According to a Justice Department report -prepared by special counsel Robert Mueller – in “June 2016, the GRU (Russian Military Intelligence) compromised the computer network of the Illinois State Board of Elections…exploiting a vulnerability in the SBOE’s website.” The Russian GRU “then gained access to a database containing information on millions of registered Illinois voters.” Illinois election officials say Russian hackers viewed voters’ personal information – but that no data left the building. Read Article

Why the SAVE America Act . . . Won’t | The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board

For partisan hype, it’s hard to beat the Senate debate this week on the SAVE America Act. President Trump says the legislation is a salvation from mass voter fraud. Sen. Chuck Schumer says it’s an effort at mass voter suppression, “Jim Crow 2.0.” Neither is reality. Also, Republicans don’t have the votes to clear the Senate’s filibuster. And if they bully the bill through anyway, Democrats eyeing the end of the 60-vote rule will quietly celebrate. The House version of the SAVE America Act, which passed last month, has two main planks. First, people registering to vote would be asked to show proof of U.S. citizenship, such as a passport, birth certificate or naturalization document. Many driver’s licenses wouldn’t qualify. While the bill says it would accept a REAL ID “that indicates the applicant is a citizen,” standard license designs often don’t say. Legal immigrants can get REAL IDs, too. “Enhanced” driver’s licenses do show citizenship, and those can be used to cross international borders. But they’re available in only five states that neighbor Canada, according to the Department of Homeland Security. To pick one state, Minnesota says it has issued 782,000 “enhanced” licenses, out of a total 4.7 million active credentials. Read Article

Texas: Dallas County GOP will OK countywide voting sites for May 26 runoff | Natalia Contreras/The Texas Tribune

Dallas County Republicans will agree to allow voters to cast ballots at countywide voting sites for the May 26 runoff election after a switch to precinct-based voting sites caused chaos, the county party chair said Tuesday. Dallas County Republican Chair Allen West supported the use of precinct-based sites earlier this month, but said using precincts again for the runoff would expose the county party to “increased risk and voter confusion” because the county is planning to use countywide sites for upcoming municipal elections and early voting. “To then shift for the one day runoff election to precincts would bring about large scale disruption,” West said in a statement. That’s what critics say resulted from the Dallas GOP’s decision to use precinct sites on Election Day for the primary on March 3. Dallas GOP will OK countywide voting sites for May 26 runoff

Georgia State Election Board urges faster shift away from ballot QR codes | Maya Homan/Georgia Recorder

Georgia’s State Election Board unanimously passed a resolution Wednesday urging state lawmakers to hasten a switch to hand-marked paper ballots, just a day after legislators unveiled a proposal to delay overhauling Georgia’s election system until after the 2026 midterms. The resolution, introduced by board member Salleigh Grubbs, requests that Georgia implement hand-marked paper ballots “as soon as practicable,” arguing that the state’s current system of using QR codes to tally ballots does not allow voters to fully proof their ballots before casting them. “I think this is an emergency in Georgia,” Grubbs said at a board meeting Wednesday. “I think a voting emergency should be declared.” Precisely what “practicable” means, though, is a matter of debate. House lawmakers unveiled a plan Tuesday to make the switch in time for the 2028 presidential election. Rep. Victor Anderson, a Cornelia Republican who is sponsoring the bill in the House, said lawmakers had hoped to remove the QR codes by the original deadline of July, but “very quickly and very abruptly began to realize that the practicality of that happening without causing a severe upset in our election system, it just wasn’t gonna happen. It wasn’t possible.” Read Article

National: Conservative voter fraud hunters pitch new computer programs to state officials | Jane C. Timm/NBC

The creators of a controversial program designed to hunt for voter fraud that was promoted by conservative activists are pitching two new programs to state election officials ahead of the midterms. The first election software from Dr. John W. “Rick” Richards Jr. and his son, John W. Richards III, called EagleAI, promised to help officials and activists root out inaccurate voter registrations in the run-up to the 2024 election. The program was embraced by members of the Election Integrity Network, the group founded by Cleta Mitchell, a former election lawyer for President Donald Trump. But it was also criticized as inaccurate by election officials and experts, as well as some of the activists who tried it. Now, the father-son duo is back with two new programs: ELLY and Psephos. They have pitched election officials in Missouri, North Carolina and Rhode Island. Read Article

National: Trump’s push for Save America Act could hurt Republicans | Amy B Wang, Scott Clement and Lydia Sidhom/The Washington Post

President Donald Trump has ramped up pressure on Republicans in recent weeks to pass the Save America Act, a bill that would require people to provide proof of citizenship to register to vote and to show photo identification at the polls, among other voting restrictions. Trump has gone so far as to declare that he will not sign any other legislation until Congress passes the bill, and vowed Tuesday never to endorse anyone who voted against what he dubbed “one of the most IMPORTANT & CONSEQUENTIAL pieces of legislation in the history of Congress.” He promised Republican lawmakers last week that passing the bill would “guarantee the midterms” for the GOP. But the bill might not help Republicans as much as Trump thinks. It is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. Requiring Americans to prove they are citizens when they register to vote, in an effort to root out the extremely rare cases of noncitizen voting, would throw up roadblocks to the polls for millions of eligible voters across the political spectrum, and in some cases could hurt Republicans more. Read Article

National: Trump’s emergency elections order is ‘being prepared,’ key ally believes | Matt Cohen/Democracy Docket

An anti-voting activist said to be part of a group pushing for President Donald Trump to take control of elections via executive order reiterated his view that the scheme is “being prepared.” “I think Plan A has always been an executive order from President Trump based on the fact that the Chinese penetrated and influenced the 2020 election,” Jerome Corsi — an election denier best known for spreading Barack Obama birtherism conspiracies — said Wednesday on a right-wing podcast. “I believe Donald Trump is resolute on this,” Corsi added. “He’s not going to allow the 2026 midterm elections to be stolen without taking some strong executive action and executive order.” Read Article

Trump is undermining the people who run our elections. Here’s how we can fight back | Pamela Smith/Democracy Docket

There is a group of Americans who wake up every day thinking about one thing: making sure your vote counts. They are county clerks, local election directors, state officials — largely nonpartisan, often underpaid, working out of government buildings or strip mall offices you’ve driven past a hundred times without noticing. They are the infrastructure of democracy. And right now, they are under pressure unlike anything most of them have ever seen. In a functioning version of American democracy, the federal government helps election administrators do their job. It funds cybersecurity support. It coordinates the collection and analysis of threat information and helps share it with election officials. But it also respects constitutional boundaries and stays in its lane, because the structure of American elections — decentralized, state-run — exists for a reason. We are not living in that version right now. And none of what has followed is normal. Read Article

Georgia Republicans Are Setting Up Their Midterm Elections to Fail | Justin Glawe/The New Republic

Republicans in Georgia’s election-denial movement, along with their allies on the State Election Board and in the GOP-controlled state legislature, have been pushing for a complete prohibition on voting machines since President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden—a loss they falsely attribute to voting fraud, of course. These efforts culminated with the passage in May 2024 of Senate Bill 189, which prohibits Q.R. codes from being used to tabulate votes. That ban goes into effect on July 1. But state legislators, whose 2026 session ends a month from now, have yet to put forth a practical replacement system. Instead, Republican lawmakers have introduced three bills that seem expressly designed to cause chaos, if they could even be implemented in time for the fall elections; two of them call for poll workers—often low-paid temporary workers or retirees—to hand-count paper ballots in some or all cases. “It’s silly to imagine that people can hand-tally all those votes, get all the right totals in all the right places, and report accurate results by precinct in every contest—much less that they can do it quickly,” said Mark Lindeman of Verified Voting, a nonprofit organization that works with bipartisan election officials to advocate for secure election equipment. “For anyone who craves more controversy and conflict after elections, full hand counts are a great idea—but for voters overall, absolutely not.” Read Article

National: Thune Is in a Vise as Trump and Far Right Demand Fight on Voter Bill | Carl Hulse/The New York Times

John Thune likes to be liked. So it is a bit uncomfortable for him, as the gregarious Senate majority leader from South Dakota, to be the subject of an outpouring of conservative venom for his resistance to mounting an old-school filibuster to try to force through a voter identification law that President Trump is demanding. Mr. Thune says the votes just aren’t there for the legislation, which is headed to the floor as soon as next week. Unfortunately for Mr. Thune, who finds his Republican majority under increasing midterm threat in the second year of his stewardship, the standard Senate strategy for handling a bill that lacks enough votes to advance — forcing a show vote to put opponents on the record saying no — is not enough to satisfy the president or the bill’s fervid supporters. They have instigated a firestorm of pressure online in an effort to push the majority leader to wage a bigger battle. Read Article

National: Senate Republicans splinter over SAVE America Act’s path as Trump calls for more revisions | Sahil Kapur, Brennan Leach, Fiona Glisson, Ryan Nobles/NBC

The prospects for President Donald Trump’s SAVE America Act grew murkier Monday as divisions deepened among Senate Republicans about how to pass it and whether it’s possible to overcome Democratic opposition. Some say they’re convinced a “talking filibuster” under current rules could lead to passage of the sweeping election overhaul bill, even though it hasn’t worked before. Another GOP senator proposed a different path with less support. And the Senate’s top Republican emphasized that the path is “unclear” as the 60-vote rule may be too difficult to overcome. “Having studied it and researched it pretty thoroughly, you have to show me how, in the end, it prevails and succeeds. Because I think what has been promised out there is that it would actually, in the end, get an outcome. And I find it very hard to see that based on actual past experience,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters. “We can’t find a piece of legislation in history that’s been passed that way.” Read Article

National: Key 2020 election denier is still working to prove it was stolen — now from inside the White House | Jeremy Herb, Tierney Sneed, Kristen Holmes, Sean Lyngaas and Zachary Cohen/CNN Politics

Kurt Olsen became a key player in some of President Donald Trump’s most far-fetched 2020 election reversal schemes because he believed “that something was not right” in how he saw election officials handle the presidential count in Fulton County, Georgia, and elsewhere.Five years later, he’s back on familiar ground — in Trump’s ear and focused on Fulton County. The man who once described his hunt for voter fraud as an effort to “save the country” now has a direct line to the president, giving him more influence than ever.After Olsen worked alongside some of the most prominent 2020 election deniers while Trump was out of office, the president named him the White House’s director of election security and integrity in October. From his new perch, Olsen drafted the criminal referral to the Justice Department that led to an unprecedented FBI seizure of Fulton County’s 2020 ballots in January. Read Article

National: Democratic states move to protect polling places from federal agents | Morgan Leigh and Susan Haigh/Associated Press

Democratic-led states alarmed by the prospect of federal immigration officers patrolling the polls during this year’s midterm elections are taking steps to counter what they see as a potential tactic to intimidate voters. New Mexico this week became the first state to bar armed agents from polling locations in response to President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, a step being considered in at least a half dozen other Democratic-led states. The moves highlight a deep distrust toward the Trump administration from blue states, which have been the target of his aggressive immigration tactics while threatened with military deployments and deep cuts in federal funding. Their concerns were heightened after the president suggested he wants to nationalize U.S. elections, even though the Constitution says it’s the states that run elections. Read Article

National: White House mulls defunding civil rights election observer program that aims to protect minority voting rights, sources say | Sarah N. Lynch/CBS News

The White House is considering ending funding for a longtime civil rights election program aimed at protecting the rights of minority populations to vote, sources familiar with the matter tell CBS News. The federal observer program, authorized under the Voting Rights Act and launched in 1966, is an Office of Personnel Management operation that partners with the Justice Department to send neutral, third-party observers to monitor election sites to ensure voters don’t experience discrimination at the polls — whether it’s due to race, language barriers or disabilities. The observers, who are both recruited and trained by the Office of Personnel Management, are expected to watch, listen and take notes without interfering in the voting process. Those observers then turn over their findings to the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. The White House is exploring whether to cut spending for the program, sources say, in a discussion that comes as the country gears up for crucial midterm elections this November that will determine which party controls Congress. Read Article

National: Voting tech company Smartmatic says it’s being targeted by Trump DOJ Aysha Bagchi/USA Today

Smartmatic, a voting technology company that supplied machines in the 2020 election, said in a new court filing that it is being unlawfully targeted by the Justice Department under President Donald Trump for undermining the president’s false attacks on the integrity of the race.Smartmatic’s parent company was charged in a Florida federal court in October with conspiring to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act by bribing a Philippine government official to get business, and with conspiring to launder money. Those charges against the company were added to a case initially brought against some of its former executives in 2024, during President Joe Biden’s term.That timeline is a key part of the argument Smartmatic laid out in its March 10 filing, which is asking the court to dismiss the charges as amounting to unlawfully vindictive against the company. Read Article

Arizona Is Now at the Center of Election Investigations | Yvonne Wingett Sanchez, Sarah Fitzpatrick, and Nick Miroff/The Atlantic

Kristi Noem was fighting to keep her job, she held an election-security event at a Homeland Security Investigations field office in Scottsdale, Arizona. In the past, she said, the state had been an “absolute disaster on elections,” and ensuring the security of election equipment was her responsibility. She also urged Congress to pass President Trump’s voter-ID bill. The message was less surprising than the location. HSI, the agency’s investigative branch, devotes most of its efforts to going after transnational drug cartels and human-trafficking networks, not to securing domestic elections.A week after the event, Arizona’s acting special agent in charge for HSI, Matthew Murphy, told the state attorney general’s office that his office was now probing the 2020 election in Arizona, according to a person familiar with the details of the meeting. A state investigator asked why the government was scrutinizing the results, given that they had already been litigated and investigated. Murphy made clear that he was acting on “direction from D.C.,” the person told us, speaking on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. The HSI investigation in Arizona, which has not previously been reported, comes as the FBI has embarked on a separate election probe in the state. “This is not a joint investigation” with HSI, a person familiar with the FBI investigation told us. HSI headquarters and the Office of the Deputy Attorney General at the Department of Justice are coordinating the investigation, which is focused on identifying alleged voter-fraud activity and related potential enforcement actions, according to a person familiar with the effort. Read Article

Arizona officials want county recorders to tell them if they get a subpoena amid ongoing federal probes of state’s elections | Sasha Hupka/Votebeat

Arizona’s top law enforcement official and chief election officer are warning county officials not to hand over full, unredacted voter files to the federal government amid probes by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security into the state’s 2020 election. Attorney General Kris Mayes and Secretary of State Adrian Fontes — both Democrats — wrote in a joint letter to county recorders that disclosure of such materials to the U.S Department of Justice would “violate both federal and state law.” They urged the recorders, who control voter registration data, to “fulfill your oath by declining any such illegal demands.” Mayes and Fontes stopped short of promising litigation against anyone who gave voter information to the federal agencies, though they hinted at it. “Our offices are committed to upholding the sanctity of Arizona’s elections and democratic process,” the letter read. “We will pursue to the fullest extent of the law all possible remedies to ensure the integrity of Arizona’s elections and the privacy rights of its citizens.” Read Article

Florida lawmakers pass new voter ID law, sparking debate | James Call/Tallahassee Democrat

Florida lawmakers will send Gov. Ron DeSantis voter identification requirements that supporters say protect the integrity of elections, even as Democrats dubbed the measure the “Show Me Your Papers Act.” Sen. Erin Grall, R-Vero Beach, had shepherded the bill (SB 1334) through the committee process, then on the Senate floor offered what’s called a “strike-all amendment” to substitute a House bill (HB 991) for hers. It was that measure that the Senate passed March 12 on a 27–12 vote. It returned to the House that evening, where it passed a final time 77–28. The two proposals largely mirror each other but differ on effective dates, and whether university student IDs are acceptable identification. The House wanted a January 2027 effective date and rejected student IDs, while the Senate preferred a July 2026 effective date and was silent on student IDs. Read Article

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