Wisconsin guidance banning absentee ballot spoiling reignites legal battle | Alexander Shur/Votebeat

Wisconsin election officials have reignited a legal battle over absentee voting with July guidance stating that voters cannot void a returned absentee ballot and cast a new one, even if Election Day is weeks away or the candidate they supported has dropped out. Three Democratic residents in Dane County on Thursday sued the Wisconsin Elections Commission over the guidance, which was adopted by the commission on July 9, calling it an unconstitutional violation of the state’s absentee voting laws. All three plaintiffs voted for a gubernatorial candidate who have since dropped out of the primary, and under the commission guidance they cannot change their votes, even though those votes have not yet been counted. The legality of spoiling ballots just to change a vote has long been disputed. The lawsuit says WEC’s guidance means the plaintiffs “will all be disenfranchised from meaningfully participating in this August election unless this Court steps in.” Read Article

Why American elections are so complicated — and secure | Ali Swenson/Associated Press

America’s highly decentralized system of voting exists because the nation’s Founding Fathers gave authority over elections to the states, rather than the federal government. While Congress has the power to regulate elections — and has used that authority to pass such laws as the Voting Rights Act — the Constitution makes clear that states have primary authority to set the “times, places and manner” for elections. There also is no national election agency that administers the presidential contest, something that’s different from many other countries. And when it comes to doing the day-to-day work of running an election, the responsibility falls to officials at the local level — usually a clerk or election supervisor — with help from staff and volunteers. While differences in election laws can get confusing, election security experts say this structure is a strength. That’s because to pull off stealing a presidential election — as Trump falsely claims was done to him in 2020 — it would require large numbers of election workers in the most competitive counties across the country who are willing to risk prosecution, prison time and fines while working with officials from both parties willing to look the other way. And everyone somehow would have to keep quiet — a highly unlikely scenario. Read Article

National: CISA Report on US Election Cybersecurity Draws Bipartisan Plaudits | Shaun Waterman/GovInfo Security

Amid the partisan clamor surrounding U.S. President Donald Trump’s false claims last week of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, one little-noticed document is garnering widespread welcome, even from critics of the administration. A newly declassified report from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on election security – the president cherry-picked to try and make his case – that slipped out in the deluge of documents appears to be that rare beast among administration policies these days: one that enjoys bipartisan support. “It’s pretty reasonable,” said Nick Leiserson, who served in the Biden-administration White House Office of the National Cyber Director. “It’s sensible advice. So, that’s good.” The report is based on data gathered from 2019 through 2024 via voluntary security assessments conducted by CISA career staff, including static and dynamic code analysis conducted at the Idaho National Laboratory, penetration testing and incident response. Read Article

National: ‘Got to be kidding me’: GOP officials pan Trump’s claims of shocking new election threats | CNN Politics

Four days after President Donald Trump declared that his administration uncovered “shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure,” dozens of state election officials from across the country gathered in Boston. But they weren’t there for an emergency summit to tackle the supposed crisis, even though the midterm elections are only 15 weeks away. Instead, these election officials from 37 states met for a long-scheduled professional conference that struck a strikingly business-as-usual tone. In fact, Trump and his primetime address hardly came up. In interviews with CNN, more than a dozen election officials from both parties said Trump’s address surfaced little new in terms of evidence. Several GOP officials even scoffed at his presentation, pointing to the data that the administration released to try to bolster its case that there are massive numbers of non-citizens voting in US elections. Matt Crane, a Republican who runs the Colorado County Clerks Association, said his text chat with a bipartisan group of colleagues was filled with “a lot of laughing emojis, and like, ‘you got to be kidding me?’ that this was all it was.” Read Article

National: Declassified documents touted by Trump say election systems ‘would be difficult to manipulate’ | Peter Charalambous/ABC

Newly-declassified documents touted by President Donald Trump during his address on election security Thursday cast doubt on some of his claims about “shocking vulnerabilities” in the country’s election infrastructure. While Trump claimed during his address that the nation’s election systems are vulnerable to “hacking, exploitation, and foreign interference,” the intelligence reports released by the White House concluded overall that the main infrastructure used to conduct elections in the United States “would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to alter the election outcome.” Read Article

National: More than 24 states sue Trump administration after it put conditions on receiving disaster funding | Michael Casey/Associated Press

More than two dozen states on Thursday sued the Trump administration for requiring them to comply with election and immigration conditions to receive billions of dollars in federal funding for disasters. The lawsuit, filed in Rhode Island and challenging Federal Emergency Management Agency and Department of Homeland Security policies, argued that the administration is requiring states to change their elections systems and help DHS with immigration enforcement. The conditions would also allow DHS to terminate grants at any time and for any reason. “Once again, the Trump Administration is threatening to jeopardize public safety by unlawfully withholding billions in critical funding and once again, they won’t get away with it,” Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said. “This Administration is using the safety of Americans as collateral by attempting to bully the states into relinquishing their constitutional right to enact policies and laws that best serve their residents.” Read Article

National: No, Trump Can’t Withhold Anti-Terrorism Funds to Pressure States to Change Their Election Rules | Reed Shaw/Just Security

TThe first reason these grant conditions are unlawful is a simple one: federal agencies are “creatures of statute,” and there is no law that authorizes FEMA to weaponize its terrorism-prevention funding in this way. The only statute FEMA cites as authority for the NOFO is 6 U.S.C. § 603, the provision of the Homeland Security Act that creates the umbrella grant program. That provision does little more than direct FEMA to run the program’s two main components—the grants to states and the grants to high-risk urban areas—according to rules Congress spelled out in neighboring sections of the statute. Nothing in any of those provisions says a word about election administration, let alone authorizes conditions like these. Nor does Section 2007 of the Homeland Security Act (codified at 6 U.S.C. § 608), which establishes the factors that FEMA must consider when allocating funds under any of the terrorism-prevention grant programs, authorize these conditions. To the contrary, the statute directs FEMA to consider things like a state or metropolitan area’s “relative threat, vulnerability, and consequences from acts of terrorism, including” factors like their population, history of threats, and the proximity to an international border or waters. Although it doesn’t explicitly state as much, FEMA would likely argue that its election-administration conditions are authorized by § 608’s consideration of threats to “critical infrastructure”—which, as of 2017, includes election infrastructure—and buttressed by two “catchall” provisions that confer some amount of discretion on the Administrator to consider “other factors” and “other types of threat” when allocating funding. Read Article

National: Trump’s Distorted Venezuela Elections Claim | Robert Farley/FactCheck.org

In claiming that American voting machines are vulnerable to manipulation, President Donald Trump provided an incomplete and distorted summary of the CIA’s reporting about Venezuelan efforts to manipulate electronic voting machines in that country. “Today, we are releasing documents that show the CIA obtained reporting of a specific plot to do a big number in favor of the corrupt Maduro regime in Venezuela,” Trump said in his primetime address to the nation on July 16, referring to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. “And that’s exactly what happened. “And that’s exactly what happened.” he documents the Trump administration released don’t say “that’s exactly what happened,” as Trump said. One of the documents released prior to Trump’s address was a recent CIA report, “Summary of Select Intelligence Reporting from 2004-2020 on Venezuela’s Electronic Voting Manipulation Capabilities,” that concluded Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and his successor, Maduro, “developed sustained interest and likely some capability” to manipulate voting machines. But the CIA’s assessment about the ways in which Venezuela could accomplish such manipulation was more of a “theoretical” exercise, and the report stopped short of alleging Venezuela actually carried out plans to alter voting machine tallies. Read Article

National: House intel bill includes provisions on state and local threat intelligence, election security, AI | Tim Starks/CyberScoop

An annual spy policy bill would authorize a cyberthreat intelligence sharing pilot program for state and local governments, and order an outside assessment of how intelligence agencies are currently sharing that information with those jurisdictions. The House Intelligence Committee approved fiscal 2027 intelligence authorization legislation Monday that also includes provisions on election security and that are meant to boost intelligence community (IC) usage of artificial intelligence for cyber and other purposes. The measure’s language on state and local information sharing come amid widespread frustration with Trump administration cutbacks on such aid from the federal government, with the president taking explicit action to shift more responsibility for cyber defenses to the local level. Under the pilot program, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) would pick one state to receive monthly briefings from the ODNI, Department of Homeland Security, FBI and others to receive monthly briefings on “timely, specific, and actionable information regarding cyber threats” in unclassified form. After a year, the ODNI would then provide a report on the viability of a wider briefing program for state and local governments. Read Article

National: Trump’s Plan for November Is Failing | David A. Graham/The Atlantic

Last week President Trump delivered a rare prime-time speech, but his address fell well short of the hype. Purportedly, the president was going to make a major statement about election integrity, but in reality, the speech was dense and hoarsely delivered. As my colleagues report, he provided no evidence to back up his long-standing lie that the 2020 election was stolen. The White House also released four tranches of documents meant to support the speech, but Trump’s claims were a farrago of recycled information, misrepresentations of evidence, and tendentious claims based on materials too heavily redacted to parse. Major news networks, apparently concerned that Trump would mislead, declined to air the address live. So why even deliver it? The speech was a sign of desperation. Trump spoke now not only to distract from his sputtering Iran war and its effects on the economy, but also because his attempts to concretely interfere with the 2026 election thus far have almost all failed. As his opportunities to change the rules of the game before November slip away from him, the president is falling back on one of the few tools he has left: attempting to sow chaos and doubt among Americans. Read Article

Opinion: Trump clearly doesn’t know how elections are run in US | Chris Brennan/USA Today

It didn’t take long for President Donald Trump’s latest conspiracy rant about elections, this time dressed up like a national address on July 16, to start falling apart. Trump’s claims about China meddling in American elections flopped, even as the documents he declassified inadvertently confirmed that Russia tried to influence our presidential elections in his favor. Ultimately, Trump offered zero proof that any votes had been changed in the 2016, 2020 or 2024 elections. But what really stood out is just how much Trump showed us he doesn’t know about how elections are run in America. And this, too, matters – he doesn’t seem at all interested in learning the ins and outs of elections, even as he has spent a decade trying to destabilize America’s confidence in how we vote. David Becker, a former Department of Justice lawyer who founded The Center for Election Innovation & Research, told me the president’s allegations in his speech were “remarkably flimsy.” For Becker, a big takeaway was Trump’s obvious, and maybe intentional, ignorance. “We’ve known for some time that the president just doesn’t understand how elections are run and is resistant to learning,” Becker said. “He has no clue about any of this stuff.” Read Article

Alaska removes thousands from state’s active voter list, erroneously flagging some citizens | James Brooks and Corinne Smith/Alaska Beacon

The state of Alaska has removed an estimated 3,000 to 3,500 Alaskans from the state’s active voter list, claiming they may be noncitizens. The removals leave those residents able to vote only if they provide extra identity information, and removal puts them on track to be purged from the state’s voter roll altogether. Only U.S. citizens may vote in Alaska, according to state and federal law, but many of the removals appear to have affected citizens who were erroneously flagged by the Alaska Division of Motor Vehicles. Carol Beecher, director of the Alaska Division of Elections, told state lawmakers on Wednesday that the removals were the result of “old data” given to the division from the DMV, and she isn’t sure why so many Alaskans were flagged as possible noncitizens. Read Article

California: Nearly 150,000 mail ballots rejected in primary despite efforts to count every vote | Michael R. Blood/Associated Press

Nearly 150,000 California voters had their mail-in ballots rejected for the state’s June primary, a spike from recent elections even as the state attempts to make voting easier with the goal of boosting participation and counting every ballot. California has become notorious for its ponderously slow vote counts that can drag on for weeks and sometimes longer, largely the result of multiple changes over the years that were intended to increase turnout but have done little to achieve that. Among the changes: Every voter receives a mail-in ballot that can arrive at an election office seven days late and still be counted, provided the envelope is postmarked by Election Day. Yet even with that generous weeklong window, the primary driver of the higher rejection numbers is late-arriving ballots, according to data compiled by the secretary of state’s office. Voting experts suspect the main problem is postmarks on ballots that came after Election Day, making them ineligible to be counted. The culprit could be U.S. Postal Service changes that might affect the timing of when postmarks are applied. Read Article

Georgia election board promotes new voter-roll tool ahead of midterms | Caleb Groves/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The creator of a controversial software used by conservative activists to challenge voter registrations they view as suspect is pitching a new program ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.Rick Richards, a retired doctor from Augusta and creator of the program ELLY, frames it as a neutral, data-driven tool for identifying discrepancies in voter rolls and ineligible registrants. Election officials say the program is prone to errors, but it is being promoted by people who have cast doubts about the 2020 election, including staffers of the Georgia State Election Board.In an unusual move last month, State Election Board Investigator Larry Duckworth sent the Chatham County Board of Registrars spreadsheets of about 220 voter registrations identified by ELLY that Duckworth deemed questionable. Read Article

Maryland approves $109 million voting machine contract with ES&S despite concerns | Bryan P. Sears/Maryland Matters

The Board of Public Works approved a multimillion-dollar contract Wednesday for a new voting system for the 2028 election, despite objections from critics that the system lacks some state and federal certifications. The board — with Comptroller Brooke Lierman absent Wednesday — voted to approve a nearly $85 million base contract with Election Systems and Software for a new voting system. The contract approved by the two remaining board members, Gov. Wes Moore and state Treasurer Dereck Davis, calls for Omaha-based ES&S to be paid nearly $85 million for an initial five-year term, with two optional two-year renewals that could bring the total contract to nine years and more than $109 million. Maryland State Elections Administrator Jared DeMarinis told the board that the time has come to replace the state’s current system, which is more than a decade old. Read Article

Michigan: Trump resurrects debunked Muskegon voter fraud allegations after prior investigations | Katherine Dailey/Michigan Advance

In the middle of President Donald Trump’s primetime speech on Thursday, he pointed to Muskegon to demonstrate what he called “evidence of alleged fraud by a large-scale voter registration operation in Michigan” during the 2020 election cycle. The allegations, which Trump called “pay, play and cheat,” were investigated by both state-level agencies and the FBI, and local officials have repeatedly confirmed that it did not result in any illegal ballots being sent out or illegal votes being cast. The allegations surround a number of voter registrations received by the Muskegon City Clerk’s Office in October 2020, which were flagged as fraudulent based on non-existent addresses, invalid telephone numbers or signatures that did not match records. That was referred to and investigated by the Michigan State Police, Muskegon Police Department and Michigan Department of the Attorney General, who then reported it to the FBI office in Detroit. Read Article

New Jersey governor’s disclosure of noncitizens on voter rolls fuels nationwide debate over how frequently that happens | Dion Nissenbaum/Votebeat

New Jersey stepped to the forefront of the national debate over noncitizen voting this week when the governor announced that a software glitch had allowed nearly 400 noncitizens to vote in elections since 2023 — a revelation that emerged just as President Donald Trump put a target on the state’s back over the issue. Now, New Jersey is scrambling to explain what happened, how officials addressed it, and why it took so long to tell the public. The federal government has sued a majority of states, including New Jersey, for access to unredacted versions of their voter rolls containing voters’ personal information, though so far, federal judges have ruled against the government in more than half of those cases. A top U.S. Department of Justice official — who recently threatened to criminally prosecute election officials who knowingly allowed noncitizens to remain on voter rolls — has also demanded that the state turn over information on the noncitizens involved and said the government intends to prosecute them. Read Article

North Carolina: Mail-in ballots could be more easily thrown out, under new proposal | Will Doran/WRAL

Local elections officials around North Carolina would have more ability to throw out people’s mail-in ballots in the 2026 midterms and in future elections, under a new rule approved by the State Board of Elections on Monday. The tense debate over the rules Monday broke down in a party-line dispute. It came on the heels of a similar meeting last week, where the board also voted along party lines to give local elections officials more power to kick people out of polling places, and to more easily throw out ballots cast by people who lacked voter photo identification. While state law requires voter ID, it also allows for exemptions — such as for people with religious objections to being photographed, or whose ID was stolen shortly before the election. While those exemptions can only currently be denied in a unanimous and bipartisan vote by local elections officials, the proposed new rule would instead allow them to be thrown out in strictly party-line votes — in other words, people could be stopped from voting even if some local officials believed they were legitimate voters who should be allowed to cast a ballot. Read Article

Texas: Robert Howden, Abbott aide, to succeed Jane Nelson as top election official | Eleanor Klibanoff/The Texas Tribune

Robert Howden, a senior adviser to Gov. Greg Abbott, will be Texas’ interim secretary of state, Abbott announced Friday. Howden is a longtime Texas politico who worked for GOP governors going back to Bill Clements, serving as Abbott’s legislative director since 2024. Howden is replacing Jane Nelson, who left her post Friday as Texas’ top election official after three and a half years. Nelson’s resignation, announced in early June, set off a flurry of speculation about why she was leaving and who would replace her ahead of the contentious midterm elections in November. Howden will need to be confirmed by the Texas Senate when the Legislature returns in January, but can serve until then without legislative approval. Nelson’s three immediate predecessors in the role resigned before the Senate got a chance to approve them. Read Article

Wisconsin Democrats sue election commission to OK absentee ballot revotes | Molly Beck/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

A trio of Dane County voters backed by the state Democratic Party is suing the Wisconsin Elections Commission over guidance the panel issued earlier this month that bars absentee voters who have returned their ballots from requesting a new one if their preferred candidate drops out. The lawsuit, filed in Dane County Circuit Court on July 23, asks the judge overseeing the case to block the commission from distributing the guidance and to instead tell local election clerks voters may request a new ballot in this scenario. The court action could upend election rules less than three weeks from the Aug. 11 primary election when voters are set to decide which Democratic candidate for governor they want to face Republican candidate Tom Tiffany in the general election. Read Article

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