National: The new threat election officials fear: Trump’s federal government | Patrick Marley and Laura Meckler/The Washington Post

The activists staking out the ballot drop boxes in suburban Phoenix wore body armor and face coverings. With guns at their sides, they recorded residents as they deposited their votes during the last midterm elections. Voting-rights groups sued, and a federal judge put a stop to them, ruling they had to stay at least 250 feet away while armed to ensure voters were not intimidated. Four years later and 100 miles to the south, Pima County Attorney Laura Conover is treating the 2022 incident as a lesson on the importance of moving quickly this fall if anyone — including Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents — tries to interfere with the election’s administration. For her county along the U.S.-Mexico border, Conover has drawn up court papers so she can immediately file litigation to protect the vote. “When it comes to preparing for elections, we are on overdrive,” she said. Read Article

National: Supreme Court rejects Trump’s mail ballot limits before elections | Lindsay Whitehurst/Associated Press

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected President Donald Trump’s bid to restrict mail ballots for the midterm elections, capping a flurry of last-minute legal action with voting already underway. The decision allows states to continue sending out mail ballots under the same processes they’ve used for years and have accounted for nearly a third of votes cast. It represented a stark defeat for Trump on an issue he consistently has emphasized as vital to ensuring election integrity even though there is virtually no evidence of fraud with mail ballots. The Supreme Court majority wrote that the administration’s push to implement the restrictions this year is likely to lose in court, though the brief emergency order didn’t detail its reasoning. Two justices, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, publicly dissented. Read Article

National: Whistle-Blower: Federal Agents May Have Broken State Laws in Search for Voter Fraud | Nick Corasaniti and Hamed Aleaziz/The New York Times

Investigators may have broken state laws under the direction of top Homeland Security leaders by posing as voters as part of an expansive effort to find noncitizens on the nation’s voter rolls, according to a federal whistle-blower’s account released on Monday. The authorities also required agents to meet quotas, which afforded them a mere 12 minutes to review each voter record. The effort has relied on questionable data, and has likely improperly flagged U.S. citizens who are eligible to vote, the whistle-blower said in a nearly 30-page report. The whistle-blower report, provided to Senators Chuck Schumer and Alex Padilla, both Democrats, offers an inside view of the “Unlawful Voter Initiative.” The New York Times revealed last month the existence of the operation, which has deployed hundreds of federal agents to scour voter rolls managed by the states in a widespread hunt for evidence of voter fraud. The investigation stems from President Trump’s longstanding fixation on noncitizen voting, despite decades of research showing the practice is vanishingly rare. Read Article

National: Trump’s Effort to Assert Control Over Elections Continues, Despite Court Loss | Zolan Kanno-Youngs/The New York Times

The Supreme Court on Monday dealt President Trump a major blow when it blocked his executive order to restrict mail ballots. But Mr. Trump’s battle to assert control over the election process is far from finished. The stymied attempt to have the U.S. Postal Service screen mail ballots was just one piece of a broader effort involving the full power of the federal government to take more control of state-run elections. Just days before the Supreme Court blocked Mr. Trump’s mail ballot order, the Justice Department sent threatening letters to at least 30 top election officials across the country, escalating a fight to gain access to private voter data and election records. Federal agents are scouring voter rolls managed by states for noncitizens, despite a lack of evidence of widespread fraud. Mr. Trump’s homeland security secretary recently pushed for an investigation into whether a commonly used voting machine can be trusted, casting doubt on digital voting systems. “This is far from over,” said Benjamin Hovland, who was ousted from the independent, bipartisan Election Assistance Commission by the Trump administration this year. Mr. Hovland acknowledged that the Supreme Court’s decision mitigated “real-world impact” on voters and election workers, particularly since voters in some states had already begun to mail in their ballots. But he said Mr. Trump’s actions were alarming. Read Article

Minnesota Supreme Court sides with city in voter roster debate | Sarah Ritter/The Minnesota Star Tribune

The city of Oak Grove is allowed to use paper voter rosters in the upcoming November election despite serious objections from Anoka County, the Minnesota Supreme Court has ruled. The state’s highest court on Friday decided that the northern suburb has the authority to choose whether to check in voters with paper rosters during the general election. Anoka County switched over to tablets in 2018, and argued that all precincts within its jurisdiction must use the electronic poll pads. “This is a major victory for local election authority and the rule of law,” said Doug Seaton, founder of the Upper Midwest Law Center, a conservative legal group that represented the city at no cost. “Oak Grove made a lawful decision for its own precincts, and the Minnesota Supreme Court confirmed that state and county officials cannot rewrite the statute simply because they prefer a different system.” Read Article

California: ‘I did not find them’: GOP chairman makes rare apology for election fraud claim | Anabel Sosa/SF Gate

As voter fraud allegations run rampant within the Republican Party, the head of Marin County’s party made an unexpected apology last week for claims he made about dead people voting in the county last year. John Turnacliff, the chairman of the Marin County Republicans, claimed in February that dozens of dead people voted on Proposition 50, last year’s redistricting measure, and he requested that the county’s registrar of voters investigate. But during an open comment period during a county meeting last Tuesday, Turnacliff admitted that he was wrong after no election fraud was found. “I’m here today to retract that statement that I made a few months ago as far as those voters being on the roll. I did not find them,” he said. “I apologize to the Board of Supervisors and to the registrar’s office and to the registrar for any angst and consternation that could have put on you since then.” Read Article

National: Hundreds of Election Deniers Will Be on the Ballot This November | David Gibert/WIRED

On November 3, when voters across the US go to the polls, almost 200 election deniers will be on the ballot. Many of them have repeatedly undermined the very process they are participating in, and they will be looking to win some of the most powerful elected positions in the country—positions that would help determine how voting goes in future elections. These numbers include a sitting US congressman who voted against certifying the 2020 election results; a former state representative who integrated QAnon conspiracy theories into election denialism; and local election officials who have actively sought to undermine election results by pushing baseless conspiracy theories about noncitizen voting. But for election experts and officials, one of the biggest concerns ahead of the midterms is the possibility that these election deniers could obtain oversight of the 2028 presidential election process. The data shows there are already 27 election deniers in 20 states who hold a statewide office with election oversight, like secretary of state or attorney general—positions that allow the holder to set voting rules or prosecute those they believe are cheating at the ballots. In November, 33 election deniers will seek to secure similar positions in states across the country. Read Article

Virginia Attorney General: D.H.S. May Have Broken State Laws in Voter Fraud Investigation | Nick Corasaniti and Hamed Aleaziz/The New York Times

The attorney general of Virginia sent a letter on Thursday warning Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, that the department’s hunt for evidence of election fraud “potentially violates several Virginia laws” and demanding that the investigation cease immediately. The New York Times previously reported that hundreds of Homeland Security agents have been assigned to an intensive, weekslong hunt for noncitizens among the nation’s registered voters despite an absence of evidence of widespread fraud. The Times also reported this week that, according to a whistle-blower report, the agents may have broken state laws by effectively posing as voters on public-facing state websites to gain access to individual voting records. Read Artice

National: Ballot seizures seemed impossible. But judges and officials are prepping for them now | Miles Parks/NPR

The idea of federal law enforcement seizing ballots in the middle of an active election would have once been considered impossible. Now, as President Trump continues his unprecedented hunt for voter fraud, ballot seizures and search warrants are scenarios voting officials and the legal community are actively preparing for. One state election official, who did not have permission to speak publicly, told NPR their office has led three separate statewide trainings this year to prepare for the possibility of law enforcement seeking to take possession of ballots or election materials while the election is ongoing. And UCLA’s Safeguarding Democracy Project released a guide Wednesday, shared first with NPR, to help judges navigate search warrant affidavits related to the voting process. “Lots of things that were off the table are now on the table,” said Rick Hasen, the director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project, and the guide’s lead author. Read Article

Manufactured Chaos: How a Rushed USPS IT System Threatens the Midterms | Alexa Raad/Verified Voting

A serious operational hazard recently brought forward by a whistleblower reveals a critical flaw in election readiness: mandating a brand-new federal tracking portal and rigid ballot envelope intake standards across thousands of decentralized county election offices weeks before an election violates fundamental principles of sound systems engineering. In large-scale IT and logistics systems, the most damaging failures rarely announce themselves with sudden, dramatic crashes. They happen quietly at the seams—where two independent databases fail to sync, an unhandled exception drops a queue of records, or an intake scanner misreads an address and halts delivery without triggering a clear alert. While national attention has focused on the constitutional tug-of-war over Executive Order 14399—culminating in a federal preliminary injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani and an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court—the immediate crisis is not purely legal. It is an operational hazard that would disenfranchise a significant number of voters and throw the midterms into disarray. Read Article

National: Trump’s War on Mail-In Ballots Has Voters Baffled. That May Be the Point. | Anna Griffin, Rebecca Fairley Raney, Kendal Asbury and David Iverson/The New York Times

President Trump’s legal and rhetorical assault on voting by mail — and the flurry of contradictory court decisions around it — has left voters confused and local officials scrambling just eight weeks before November’s critical midterm elections. The contortions have county registrars dusting off Election Day contingency plans developed for natural disasters like floods and wildfires. They have struggled to make it through planning meetings before the latest version of the rules change, and many are encouraging voters to avoid the U.S. Postal Service all together. Among voters, confusion abounds. Read Aricle

National: Justice Department directs states to preserve 2024 election records | Josh Kelety, Alanna Durkin and Gary Fields/Associated Press

The Trump administration is ordering officials in more than two dozen states to preserve records from the 2024 election as part of a campaign to force states to turn over detailed voter records despite repeated court losses. The preservation demand could set the stage for the Justice Department to seek access to the states’ election records as part of the administration’s hunt for fraud. The FBI has already obtained records or election equipment related to either the 2020 or 2024 elections from the most populous counties in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia and Michigan without saying what it was searching for. The letters escalate a fight between the Trump administration over access to the sensitive voter information. Federal officials have said they need the voter data to ensure that states are complying with federal election laws related to maintaining voter registration lists, even though states already have detailed processes to do that. Read Article

National: Postal Service Failed to Properly Handle Some Primary Election Ballots, Audit Finds | Jen Fifield/ProPublica

This year’s primary elections, according to a new audit from the agency’s Office of Inspector General. Election experts say the findings call into question the agency’s ability to meet even greater demands for the November election that are under consideration by the U.S. Supreme Court. The audit, which is dated Sept. 4 but has not been previously reported, found a lack of training for post office staff on how to properly and expeditiously handle mail ballots, deficiencies in how ballots were tracked and errors leading to delays, all of which risked ballots having incorrect postmarks or otherwise arriving late to election officials, which could lead to their rejection. The identified failures increase “the risk that Election and Political Mail is not handled, documented, monitored, and reported in accordance with Postal Service policy,” the audit said, though it noted that “most facilities we visited generally adhered to Postal Service’s election-related policies and procedures” and that nearly 99% of ballots reached election officials in a timely manner. Read Article

National: D.O.J. Escalates Threats to States in Battle for Election Records | Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times

The Department of Justice sent threatening letters to at least 30 top election officials across the country, expanding its efforts to gain access to private voter data and election records. The letters warned states not to destroy any records related to the 2024 election, explaining that their chief election officials “are currently under investigation” and subject to “ongoing litigation.” The notices come amid a barrage of efforts by President Trump and his administration, which have been fruitless so far, to find evidence of widespread voter fraud. It is not clear what the department is investigating, nor whether its probe is criminal or civil in nature. The letters do not cite any criminal statutes. Instead, they point to some of the same claims made previously as part of the administration’s ongoing effort to identify fraud in the nation’s elections, including machine anomalies and noncitizen voting. In court, the Justice Department has tried to force states to hand over unredacted voter lists, including personal information like driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers. The Justice Department has sued 30 different states for this data. They’ve lost 23 of those cases and have won none. Decisions are pending in the rest. Read Article

National: Voters Are Turning to AI for Election Help. The Answers Aren’t Always Right | Naomi Nix/Time Magazine

After years of Google restricting Gemini’s ability to answer users’ questions about major elections, the tech giant is shifting tactics. Google announced Wednesday that the company would add credible election information about the upcoming midterms—including details about where and how to vote—to its Gemini app, along with AI-generated responses in its search products. The company said it would share information on polling locations and voter registration instructions from state and local governments and the voting information group, Democracy Works, along with race results from The Associated Press. As Gemini wades deeper into politics, the risk of the chatbot giving voters misleading, biased, or outdated election information will only grow. A Pew Research Center study earlier this year found about half of adults under 50 rely on chatbots to search for information, while a smaller share use them to read news. “We know that voters are going to turn to chatbots more and more,” said Valeria de la Fuente, a digital research analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue who recently co-authored a report on election-related misinformation from chatbots. “So the quality of the responses that we found is concerning.” Read Article

National: Trump’s Commerce Secretary under pressure to use his powers to block voting machines | Gabe Cohen, Jeremy Herb, Sean Lyngaas, Phil Mattingly/CNN

President Donald Trump’s election fraud crusade has an unlikely new vehicle: the Commerce Department. Long known for more mundane work like promoting economic growth, shaping trade policy and producing federal statistics, under Secretary Howard Lutnick, Commerce is proving to be a useful ally in Trump’s efforts to reshape the country’s election systems ahead of the November midterms. In recent months, the department has produced disputed Census Bureau findings on noncitizen voting and pressed the US Postal Service to adopt stringent new mail-ballot rules. Sources tell CNN that Commerce officials worked quietly behind the scenes to advance both initiatives, and that Lutnick has become a key partner in the White House’s election agenda. Now, prominent Trump allies — including some inside the administration — are pressing Lutnick to use his department’s sweeping authorities over supply chains to ban certain voting machines, arguing that Chinese-made components could leave them vulnerable to hackers. Some have invoked those concerns to push Trump to declare a national emergency and seize greater federal control over November’s midterm elections. Read Article

National: The Election Deniers’ Long Game | Toluse Olorunnipa/The Atlantic

In the anxious days following President Trump’s 2020 election loss—before his supporters stormed the Capitol, before his vengeful return to the White House, before the mass pardons for cop beaters—some Republican figures sought to cast his attempt to overturn the results as nothing more than a coping mechanism.Trump was merely blowing off steam, people close to the president told me and other reporters. “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?” one asked, suggesting that in the end, his antics would amount to no more than a footnote in the annals of presidential history. The January 6 insurrection a few weeks later would, of course, turn those predictions into punch lines. Nearly six years on, they look worse still: The election denialism that inspired Trump’s MAGA loyalists to attack the Capitol has metastasized into an animating feature of Republican Party politics. Read Article

Alaska appeals court dismisses noncitizen voting case against American Samoan | James Brooks/Alaska Beacon

A three-judge panel of the Alaska Court of Appeals ruled Friday that state prosecutors misled grand jurors who indicted a Whittier resident for allegedly voting illegally.Had jurors received accurate information, the court said, “the grand jury likely would have declined to indict.” Tupe Smith, the plaintiff behind Friday’s decision, is one of 11 people — all American Samoans — whom the state of Alaska has accused of criminally violating state law. Smith had filed a motion to dismiss the case against her, but a state superior court judge ruled against that motion. In Friday’s 20-page ruling, the three-judge panel reversed the lower court’s rejection and in the process, it also defined a high standard that prosecutors must meet in order to convict someone of voting illegally in Alaska. Read Article

California: Becerra joins voting rights group in urging Shasta County grand jury to remove Registrar of Voters Clint Curtis – Shasta Scout

California gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra, along with a state voting rights group, is urging the Shasta County Grand Jury to do its “duty” to initiate the process to remove Registrar of Voters Clint Curtis. The UCLA Voting Rights Project, a group for which Becerra is the senior legal advisor, wrote a letter today to the grand jury, board of supervisors and district attorney that outlined what they said is the jury and county officials’ responsibility to remove Curtis for “willful or corrupt misconduct in office.” Curtis, who was appointed to his role, is slated to hold his seat through early January. He responded to news of the letter by saying he “would love to go to court.” A press release by the voting rights group noted that despite certifying the results of the June primary election, one in which he lost to former Assistant ROV Joanna Francescut, Curtis has since raised unsubstantiated concerns about ballots and locked them in the elections office in hopes federal officials would investigate them. Read Article

Florida: Postal Service rejects Florida county mail ballots. Here’s why | Jeff Burlew/Tallahassee Democrat

The U.S. Postal Service — which President Donald Trump hopes to deploy to restrict mail voting in the November election — recently rejected the Leon County Supervisor of Elections’ outgoing mail ballot envelopes over a tiny technical issue. Supervisor of Elections Mark Earley is vowing to press on regardless, hoping that the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately blocks late-in-the-game Trump proposals that are going back and forth in the courts as Florida and other states are set to start sending out mail ballots to voters. However, Earley, who signed on to court briefs opposing the restrictions, and voting rights advocates are concerned that the damage will be done even if the proposals don’t go anywhere. “The chaos factor is the real problem,” Earley said in an interview with the Democrat. “I’ve had voters tell me ‘I don’t trust anything anymore, so I’m just not going to vote.’ And so I say the only way that your vote doesn’t get counted is if you don’t try and vote.” Read Article

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