North Carolina’s elections overhaul raises national alarm bells | Paige Masten/Charlotte Observer

North Carolina is once again getting the worst kind of national attention, thanks to our Republican legislators. A new report from The New York Times identified North Carolina as one of several potential targets for President Donald Trump’s goal to “take over” voting procedures in parts of the country. The report said that North Carolina Republicans have overseen “what may be the most consequential reconfiguration of an electoral system of any swing state.” or nearly 10 years, Republican lawmakers fought to take away election appointment power away from Democratic governors. In 2024, they finally succeeded, passing a bill that wrested control of election administration from the newly elected governor (a Democrat) and placed it in the hands of the newly elected state auditor (a Republican). North Carolina is the only state in the country where the auditor oversees election administration. Now, the State Board of Elections has a Republican majority, as do the elections boards in all 100 counties. Read Article

Georgia: Hand-marked paper ballot bill fails ahead of deadline for changing elections | Mark Niesse/The Augusta Press

Georgia senators shot down a bill Friday that would have switched the state’s voting method to paper ballots filled out by hand before this November’s elections.The bill’s defeat sets up a scramble for Georgia lawmakers to find a way to remove computer QR codes from ballots this year, as required by a state law passed two years ago.The Senate voted 27-21 on the bill, two votes short of the majority needed for legislation to pass in the 56-member Senate. Seven senators skipped the vote following warnings of election “chaos” if it passed.“We’re at an impasse,” said Sen. Max Burns, R-Sylvania. “If we ignore it again, we’re just going to kick the can. Sooner or later, folks, you have to pay the piper, and it’s time to remove the QR codes.” 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: 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

Wisconsin: FBI action could reveal how Milwaukeeans voted in the 2020 election | Molly Beck/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

How nearly 180,000 Milwaukee residents voted in the 2020 presidential election could be at risk of becoming public if the FBI compels election officials to hand over voting data here in its pursuit to relitigate President Donald Trump’s election loss in key battleground states. State and local election officials in the Badger State were on alert Monday after the FBI issued a grand jury subpoena for voting information in Maricopa County, Arizona − the second battleground state where federal authorities have compelled the release of records related to the 2020 election. There has not been any movement in Wisconsin, but if federal authorities expanded their probe to include the pursuit of voting data in Milwaukee, where Trump has leveled baseless claims of fraud in the 2020 election, poll books and around 176,000 absentee ballots with an attached ID number could be turned over. 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

New York: Government advocacy groups slam handling of botched ballot count in Rensselaer CountyTyler A. McNeil/Albany Times-Union

A trio of government advocacy groups wants the state attorney general’s office to investigate since-corrected ballot miscounts in Rensselaer County. In a letter to the attorney general’s office sent Monday, Common Cause New York, the Rensselaer County League of Women Voters and Free Speech For People scrutinized the county Board of Elections, which initially stood by the dramatically inaccurate 528-60 results of a Stephentown Memorial Library budget vote in November. A countywide recount revealed formatting errors — ovals improperly juxtaposed over text — that showed the proposition actually passed 540-279. Totals for a proposal to end an East Greenbush volunteer ambulance service program shifted from a 517-505 approval to a 2,381 to 2,250 defeat. And the approval of a state ballot proposition shifted by a few hundred votes countywide. 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

Texas: Calhoun County GOP missed deadline to report primary election results after choosing to hand-count ballots | Natalia Contreras/The Texas Tribune

<p>Calhoun County finished submitting its primary election results to the state Friday morning after county Republicans, who hand counted their primary ballots, missed a deadline in state law requiring them to submit early-voting and Election Day results to the county no later than 24 hours after polls closed, a county election official said. Mary Ann Orta, the elections administrator in the South Texas county, which includes Victoria and Port Lavaca, and the Texas Secretary of State’s Office both confirmed the county GOP missed the deadline and its results were submitted to the state Friday morning. The results for county Democrats, who used electronic voting equipment to tabulate ballots, were submitted to the state not long after the polls closed on Tuesday night, Orta said. In Texas, political parties decide at the county level how their primaries will be administered, and Calhoun Republicans chose to hand count ballots this year, including those cast early and at 11 Republican precincts on Election Day, a labor-intensive process. <a href=”https://www.texastribune.org/2026/03/06/texas-counties-hand-count-ballots-deadline/” data-type=”link” data-id=”https://www.texastribune.org/2026/03/06/texas-counties-hand-count-ballots-deadline/”>Read Article</a></p>

National: What Does War with Iran Have to Do with Elections? | Michael Waldman/Brennan Center for Justice

As the war in the Middle East launched by President Trump continues to unfold, the president has yet to appear before Congress to seek approval or even to explain his objectives. As we said over the weekend, the Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power to decide when the nation goes to war. There’s been no deliberation, no vote, no clear justification. The attack on Iran is unconstitutional. Underneath the intense drama, we want to draw attention to something else going on. As President Trump’s polls plummet and his political standing grows shakier, the effort to undermine our elections has been intensifying. Now it looks like operatives and officials may try to claim national security as a rationale to mess with the vote. Indeed, just hours after launching the Iran war, Trump reposted a headline on Truth Social claiming, “Iran tried to interfere in 2020, 2024 elections to stop Trump, and now faces renewed war with United States.” Read Article

Texas: In Dallas County, frustration and confusion after GOP forces switch to precinct-based voting | Camilo Diaz Jr. and Jessica Huseman/The Texas Tribune

Veronica Anderson walked 2 ½ miles Tuesday afternoon to the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center because she wanted to vote. When she arrived, election workers told her she was at the wrong polling place and would need to cast her ballot at a different precinct — one she said she had never heard of. Unsure where it was or how to get there, she stood outside trying to sort out her options. Anderson was one of hundreds of voters across Dallas County on Tuesday who went to the wrong voting location as they tried to cast ballots in the state’s high-turnout primaries, with closely watched contests for U.S. Senate at the top of the ticket. Under state law, political parties have wide authority to decide how to run county primaries. The confusion stemmed from a decision by the Dallas County Republican Party to abandon the use of countywide vote centers — which allow voters to cast a ballot at any location — and return to a system of precinct-based assigned polling places for Election Day. That decision forced Dallas Democrats to do the same. Voters were still able to cast ballots at countywide sites during early voting. Read Article

National: Trump appears to link Iran attack to his 2020 election loss | Aram Roston/The Guardian

Donald Trump on Saturday appeared to link the massive attack he ordered against Iran to his persistent claims about his 2020 election loss to former president Joe Biden, in a social media post about allegations that Tehran’s government interfered in the US president elections. “Iran tried to interfere in 2020, 2024 elections to stop Trump,” his Truth Social post said, “and now faces renewed war with United States”. Those words, written in the first hours of the bombardment of Iran, repeated the headline of an article to which he linked from Just the News, a Trump-friendly news site. “Iranian intelligence sought to undermine Trump’s re-election bid in 2020 through a variety of election influence efforts,” the article said. It also said Iran worked against him in 2024, when he beat Kamala Harris at the polls. This is the second military operation of the Trump administration where he has alluded to allegations concerning the 2020 election. He made similar comments on social media in January, days after Trump ordered the Delta Force “rendition” of Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro. Trump reposted links that repeated discredited conspiracy allegations that Venezuela interfered in the 2020 election by controlling voting machines. Read Article

National: Trump Officials Attended a Summit of Election Deniers Who Want the President to Take Over the Midterms | Doug Bock Clark/ProPublica

Several high-ranking federal election officials attended a summit last week at which prominent figures who worked to overturn Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election pressed the president to declare a national emergency to take over this year’s midterms. According to videos, photos and social media posts reviewed by ProPublica, the meeting’s participants included Kurt Olsen, a White House lawyer charged with reinvestigating the 2020 election, and Heather Honey, the Department of Homeland Security official in charge of election integrity. The event was convened by Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, and attended by Cleta Mitchell, who directs the Election Integrity Network, a group that has spread false claims about election fraud and noncitizen voting. Election experts say that the meeting reflects an intensifying push to persuade Trump to take unprecedented actions to affect the vote in November. Courts have largely blocked his efforts to reshape elections through an executive order, and legislation has stalled in Congress that would mandate strict voter ID requirements across the country. Read Article

National: GOP’s SAVE America Act would magnify suppression for the disability community | Natalie Hausmann/Democracy Docket

Marc Safman, 56, has been a political junkie since his parents took him to former President Jimmy Carter’s inauguration in 1977. He voted in every election for 38 years, until last year. Safman, who is deafblind, said he was unable to cast his ballot in the 2025 New York City mayoral election because of issues with his polling site’s ballot-marking machine and a “lack of basic awareness” from poll workers. Despite incremental improvements over the past several decades to make voting more accessible, people like Safman with disabilities, who comprise one fourth of the nation’s population, continue to face outsized barriers when casting their ballots. However, the GOP’s SAVE America Act, the most restrictive voting bill in U.S. history, threatens to roll back what progress has been made and set voters with disabilities back by years with new draconian restrictions. Read Article

National: Will Trump try to seize voting machines to disrupt the midterm elections? | George Chidi/The Guardian

After the FBI seized elections materials from Fulton county last month, Donald Trump returned once again to his false claim that he beat Joe Biden in Georgia in the 2020 election. “The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over,’” Trump said to Dan Bongino on the former FBI staffer’s podcast earlier this month . “We should take over the voting in at least – many – 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.” Later that week, it was revealed that the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who was present at the Fulton county raid, led an investigation into Puerto Rico’s voting machines – taking some machines to examine – last May to identify what her office said were potential vulnerabilities in the island’s electronic voting systems. Taken together, Trump’s comments and actions are pointing toward a possibility Democratic voters have until now only contemplated: the federal government seizing voting machines across the country in a way that disrupts voting in the 2026 midterms. If the federal government declared some digital voting machines off-limits at the last minute, it would set off a chain of emergency court hearings, leaving elections directors scrambling to find another way to print and count ballots before those cases resolved. Early voting could crater. Election Day voting could be curtailed. And results might not be ready for weeks. Read Article

National: Blue states push to ban ICE at the polls amid federal voter intimidation fears | Jonathan Shorman/Stateline

Several Democratic states are moving to bar federal immigration agents from being near polling places and other election sites, amid persistent worries that President Donald Trump will use federal law enforcement or the military to disrupt the midterm elections. Measures to restrict federal agents from operating at or near election-related locations have been offered in more than half a dozen states, according to a Stateline count. While the proposals vary, they broadly seek to combat the prospect of chaotic confrontations between federal agents and voters this November. A federal law dating to the end of the Civil War already bans sending the military or other “armed men” to polling places, except to repel armed enemies of the United States. The U.S. Constitution also gives states — not the president or federal government — the responsibility for running elections. Read Article

Alaska Lawmakers question decision to turn over confidential voter data to DOJ | Eric Stone/Alaska Public Media

State lawmakers had some sharp questions on Monday for Alaska’s Division of Elections about its decision to share the state’s full, unredacted voter list with the Department of Justice. The state turned over the voter list to the federal government in December after a series of requests from the Department of Justice. At first, in August, the Division of Elections shared only the public, commercially available list. The DOJ followed up later that month demanding the full list, including a range of information designated by state law as confidential: voters’ date of birth, their driver’s license or partial social security number, a status code, and their address, even if the voter marked it confidential. Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom, who oversees the Division of Elections, announced the state had transferred the list shortly before Christmas. Read Article

Arizona: Cochise County asks feds to investigate disputed claims about voting machine testing — again | Sasha Hupka/Votebeat

Four years after a conservative southeastern Arizona county tried to defy election laws, it may be gearing up to do so again. The Cochise County Board of Supervisors voted on Feb. 24 to send a letter to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard asking her to investigate whether the laboratories charged with testing voting machines nationwide were properly accredited ahead of recent elections. Cochise County officials have doubted the laboratories for years, despite the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s reassurances that they were properly accredited. Those doubts were part of what prompted two of the county’s supervisors to vote to delay the certification of its election results past the legal deadline in November 2022. A judge ultimately ordered the supervisors to certify the midterm election results, but their doubts about the laboratories — and the voting machines they test — have apparently persisted. The board sent an identical message to the U.S. Department of Justice less than six months ago. Read Article

California Senator Padilla preps for Trump trying to control elections via emergency order | Kevin Rector/Los Angeles Times

Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) is preparing for President Trump to declare a national emergency in order to seize control of this year’s midterm elections from the states, including by bracing his Senate colleagues for a vote in which they would be forced to either co-sign on the power grab or resist it. In the wake of reporting last week that conservative activists with connections to the White House were circulating such an order, Padilla sent a letter to his Senate colleagues Friday stating that any such order would be “wildly illegal and unconstitutional,” and would no doubt face “extremely strict scrutiny” in the courts. “Nevertheless, if the President does escalate his unprecedented assault on our democracy by declaring an election-related emergency, I will swiftly introduce a privileged resolution [and] force a vote in the Senate to terminate the fake emergency,” wrote Padilla, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration. Read Article

Colorado Governor Signals He’ll Commute Sentence of Election Denier | By Jack Healy, Nick Corasaniti and Alan Feuer/The New York Times

Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado offered the clearest signal yet late on Tuesday that he might commute the nine-year sentence of Tina Peters, the last high-profile Trump ally still in prison for crimes stemming from President Trump’s 2020 election loss. Mr. Trump has waged an all-out assault on Colorado while pressuring Mr. Polis, a Democrat, to free Ms. Peters. He has blocked hundreds of millions of dollars in federal money from the Democratic-led state, moved the headquarters of U.S. Space Command from Colorado Springs to Alabama, promised to shutter a federal atmospheric research center in Boulder and vetoed an urgently needed water pipeline for rural Colorado. Commuting Ms. Peters’s sentence now might appease Mr. Trump and stop those attacks, but it would set off a furious backlash among Democrats and imperil Mr. Polis’s political future. Democrats and some moderate Republicans in Colorado have spent months urging the governor to resist the pressure from Mr. Trump. But on Tuesday night Mr. Polis wrote a social-media post that suggested he believed that Ms. Peters, a Republican former county clerk, had received too harsh a sentence when she was convicted of tampering with voting machines in a failed effort to show that the 2020 vote had been rigged against Mr. Trump. Read Article

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