National: The Fight to Protect the Midterms | Michael Waldman/Brennan Center for Justice

Last week, President Trump signed an executive order purporting to upend mail voting. It’s jarring that the administration would target something so popular. According to a Pew Research Center poll, more than one in three voters cast ballots by mail in 2024. Trump himself votes that way. As Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-MT) put it, “The reality is in a state like Montana, like Alaska, like other rural states, most of our people vote by mail. And they like it, and they trust it.” The order instructs the U.S. Postal Service to refuse to deliver ballots unless the voters are on a list of approved citizens that would be created by the executive branch. Such federal databases are out of date and unreliable, so this risks mass disenfranchisement of eligible citizens. The order is also illegal. The Constitution is clear: States run elections. Congress can pass national legislation. Presidents have no lawful role. Read Article

Trump’s election order, SAVE Act, rely on ‘flawed’ system | Joe Fisher/UPI

President Donald Trump’s multipronged plan for ensuring only eligible citizens vote in elections leans on a system that experts say is flawed. Pamela Smith, CEO and president of Verified Voting, told UPI the SAVE system’s errors were frequent enough to potentially impact some election results. “Some researchers found that more than 5% of the voters that the SAVE database had identified as noncitizens were actually citizens,” Smith said of SAVE errors in Texas. “Five percent is a big number. That’s well over the margin of victory in lots of situations. In some of the smaller counties that percentage became much higher.” Trump’s election order, SAVE Act, rely on ‘flawed’ system – UPI.com

National: At Los Angeles ‘shadow hearing’ on elections, House Democrats join experts to defend voting systems | Kevin Rector/Los Angeles Times

House Democrats and a panel of elections experts expressed unwavering confidence in state voting systems and dismissed Trump administration claims of widespread fraud and other vulnerabilities during a special “shadow hearing” in Los Angeles on Tuesday. They accused President Trump and his Republican allies of pushing sweeping federal reforms — including stricter voter ID laws and new restrictions on voting by mail — that would disenfranchise millions of eligible Americans, especially low-income, rural and elderly voters, as well as voters of color and those with disabilities. “They are taking us backward, and not to a good place,” said Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), who helped lead the hearing at the Daniel K. Inouye National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in Little Tokyo. Read Article

National: Trump is trying to build a massive voter database. Election officials are afraid of what he’ll do with it | Gabe Cohen, Tierney Sneed, Jeremy Herb and Fredreka Schouten/CNN

The Trump administration is intensifying its campaign against alleged voter fraud, taking new steps toward building a national citizen database and ramping up its hunt for suspected noncitizen voters — all under the banner of “election integrity.” The latest escalation — including an executive order, a newly empowered prosecutor and a growing raft of lawsuits — has drawn fresh warnings from critics who say the administration’s push to amass vast troves of voter data from across the country could be used to block eligible Americans from voting and stoke fresh doubts about the legitimacy of the 2026 midterm elections. The Justice Department has finalized a deal with the Department of Homeland Security to give DHS sensitive voter-roll data the administration has demanded from states to be checked against a citizenship verification program that has been criticized for its inaccuracies. Trump officials last week floated a new potential pressure tactic on states that so far have refused to hand over their full voter rolls: Conditioning hundreds of millions of dollars in homeland security grants on sharing voter data, requiring states to run their registration rolls through the federal immigration records system or lose the funding. Read Article

National: Trump proposes cutting CISA election security program in FY27 budget | David DiMolfetta/Nextgov/FCW

TThe Trump administration is hoping to eliminate roughly $700 million in programs across the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in fiscal year 2027, a sweeping set of cuts that translate to a net reduction of about $360 million after accounting for internal transfers and other adjustments, according to a detailed budget justification. The proposal targets election security, workforce development, stakeholder engagement and a range of infrastructure protection efforts, marking one of the most significant overhauls of the nation’s civilian cyber defense agency since its creation. The budget would notably eliminate CISA’s election security program entirely, including cutting funding for information-sharing support to state and local officials and removing dedicated election security advisors across the country. The proposal would also end CISA’s support for the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, or EI-ISAC, a key hub for sharing threat intelligence, cyber alerts and incident response resources with state and local election officials. Read Article

National: Preparing for the Real Risks of Election Interference | Carl Smith/Governing

In February, allies of President Trump began circulating a 17-page draft executive order declaring a national emergency and granting the president unprecedented powers over voting — including the power to ban mail ballots, require IDs to vote and other changes. The basis for the order was a claim that China interfered in the 2020 election — an assertion that U.S. intelligence has said is not credible. The president later told reporters he was not considering the executive order, which would have almost certainly become mired in court challenges. President Trump has never conceded defeat in the 2020 election, but investigations have never turned up evidence of widespread fraud or of foreign interference in the technical aspects of the voting process. Still, foreign interference in U.S. elections is a real threat. U.S. intelligence has repeatedly reported that countries like Russia and Iran have attempted to influence U.S. election outcomes. A 2021 intelligence report found that China considered interfering in the 2020 election, but did not follow through. Read Aricle

National: How the Supreme Court could upend the midterm elections | Richard L. Hasen/MS Now

Pending before the Supreme Court are three disparate cases, each with the potential to remake rules on district boundaries, campaign finance and the eligibility of certain mail-in ballots. These rulings, issued in the middle of the election season, could potentially confound voters, scramble overworked and threatened election administrators, and alter campaign strategies in the middle of heated election contests. And depending on how the justices rule, these decisions may have cascading effects including new court challenges, legislative changes and even more uncertainty in the months before the midterms. The justices can avoid this confusion entirely. In June 1964 the court issued a landmark decision in Reynolds v. Sims that helped cement the principle of “one person, one vote.” Yet the ruling made clear that it need not be applied to that fall’s fast-approaching elections. Whatever this court ultimately decides on the merits in these cases, it should apply the same principle. Read Article

National: Supreme Court remade by Trump ushers in historic defeats for civil rights | Justin Jouvenal/The Washington Post

The sharply conservative Supreme Court that President Donald Trump’s three appointees remade is the first since at least the 1950s to reject civil rights claims in a majority of cases involving women and minorities, according to a detailed analysis conducted for The Washington Post. The shift brings to an end a streak of successive courts expanding such protections that began with the dawn of the civil rights era. But the historic nature of the current court is also evident in other key areas of the law over the five terms since the third of Trump’s appointees joined the bench. The analysis shows that in addition to civil rights, the court powered by Trump’s picks — Justices Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — has pushed to the right of any modern court on religious rights and voting issues. The court has also entered a new era of extreme partisanship. None over the past seven decades has been as starkly polarized. Read Article

National: ‘A logistical nightmare.’ Experts explain Trump’s mail-in ballot order | Josh Meyer/USA Today

“The EO is a logistical nightmare and clearly represents magical thinking – leaving aside constitutional issues,” said Charles Stewart III, the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Election Data and Science Lab. “What’s important to note is that the federal system doesn’t have reliable and unique information about people on voter rolls,” Stewart told USA TODAY. To create such a vetted list, he said, would require mashing together many existing federal government databases – including from the Social Security Administration and the notoriously inaccurate Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) – that already have established problems even before anyone tries to combine them. Such an undertaking could take years, Stewart said, and require at the very least establishing pilot programs, creating and “debugging” entire new databases, getting congressional and public input – and, importantly, obtaining and spending a lot of federal funding. “If one were genuinely serious about implementation,” he said, “one would need not just rules but project management, funding streams, intergovernmental agreements, vendor capacity, testing cycles and a hierarchy for resolving conflicts between federal data, state voter files, and local election deadlines.” Read Article

Alaska: Anchorage election officials push back on ‘misleading’ claims about its mobile voting system | Sabrina Bodon and Bella Biondini/Anchorage Daily News

A company that’s been touting Anchorage’s mobile voting use has been told to stop. The Municipality of Anchorage in March sent a cease-and-desist letter to the Mobile Voting Project and its founder, Bradley Tusk, asserting the company has misrepresented the city’s mobile voting. As the municipality prepares for its April 7 election, it has had to contend with what its attorneys have called “false and misleading statements about the Municipality’s voting technology that risk undermining voter confidence in the integrity of our elections,” according to the cease-and-desist letter dated March 11. The New York Times on Nov. 13 published an article titled “Will People Trust Voting by Phone? Alaska Is Going to Find Out,” referring to Anchorage’s use of mobile voting as an “experiment with internet voting in local elections, betting that its ease and security will win over voters even in an era of election conspiracy theories.” The article prominently featured venture capitalist Tusk and the Mobile Voting Project. Municipal Clerk Jamie Heinz released a swift response to the article that evening, saying it was “an egregious misrepresentation of MOA Elections.” Heinz said the article made it seem like voting options had changed and that the municipality mainly uses mobile voting. Read Article

Arizona: Apache County will use vote center model after years of concern over ballot rejections on Navajo Nation | Sasha Hupka/Votebeat

After years of lobbying by tribal officials, Apache County will move to a new voting model for the upcoming midterm election, a shift expected to reduce the number of tribal voters’ ballots rejected because they were cast in the wrong precinct. The county, located in the remote, northeastern corner of Arizona, oversees voting in large swaths of the Navajo Nation and the Fort Apache Indian Reservation. For years, it has used a precinct-based model in which voters are assigned polling places based on the voting district, or precinct, in which they reside. But tribal voters often don’t have standard street addresses, and county, precinct, and reservation lines often crisscross. That means a voters’ assigned polling place may not be the closest or most intuitive location, and the vast distances and lack of transportation on tribal land mean it often isn’t easy to redirect voters to the correct site. Read Article

California Supreme Court halts GOP sheriff’s voter fraud investigation | Jane C. Timm/NBC

The California Supreme Court on Wednesday ordered Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco to pause his investigation into alleged fraud in last year’s special election. “To permit further consideration of this petition for review, real parties, their agents, employees, and anyone acting on their behalf are hereby ordered to pause the investigation into the November 2025 special election and preserve all seized items,” the court wrote, while agreeing to review the case itself. Bianco, a Republican who is running for governor in California, seized more than 650,000 ballots from election officials last month, saying he was investigating potential fraud in the special election. The sheriff said at the time that a group of citizens said they believed they’d found irregularities after they conducted their own “audit” of the results in Riverside County. Read Article

Georgia lawmakers end annual session without settling conflict on voting machines | Charlotte Kramon and Jeff Amy/Associated Press

The Georgia General Assembly ended its annual session early Friday without a plan for new equipment to overhaul the state’s voting system by a July deadline, plunging into doubt the future of elections in the political battleground. The lawmakers’ failure to offer a solution after months of debate raises uncertainty about how Georgians will vote in November and leaves confusion that could end in the courts or a special legislative session. “They’ve abdicated their responsibility,” Democratic state Rep. Saira Draper said of inaction by Republicans who control the legislature. Currently, voters make their choices on Dominion Voting machines, which then print ballots with a QR code that scanners read to tally votes. Those machines have been repeatedly targeted by President Donald Trump following his 2020 election loss, and Trump’s Georgia supporters responded by enacting a law in 2024 that bans using barcodes to count votes. Read Article

Kansas: A New Law Voids IDs of Transgender Kansans. It Also Threatens Their Voting Access. | Alex Burness/Bolts

Almost as soon as Kansas lawmakers passed a new law targeting transgender people in late February, state officials started invalidating some people’s driver’s licenses without warning. The law, which makes it illegal for people to use public restrooms that don’t match their assigned sex at birth, also prohibits people from changing the gender marker on their licenses—and retroactively cancels the licenses of some 1,700 trans Kansans who had already made the change following a long legal fight to obtain state IDs that matched their identity. Nearly overnight, the law became a new threat for trans Kansans in public spaces while also nullifying their freedom to drive, and thus their ability to legally participate in many aspects of daily life. It also threatens to impede or even outright block their access to another key aspect of democratic society: elections. Kansas has one of the narrowest voter ID laws in the U.S., requiring those voting in person or by mail to prove their identity, under a limited list of accepted documents. The state’s swift implementation of Senate Bill 244, which Republican lawmakers hastily passed with a provision to take effect almost immediately (unlike most other bills), left a large number of trans people suddenly without a valid ID to use at the polls. Read Article

Nevada: Storey County clerk-treasurer cracks top 10 in ‘most dangerous election deniers’ list | Matthew Mondschein/Nevada Current

Election denier and Storey County Clerk-Treasurer Jim Hindle placed eighth in a “America’s Top 10 Most Dangerous Election Deniers” list published by All Voting is Local, a nonpartisan organization that advocates for free and fair elections. Hindle, alongside Nevada State Republican Party Chairman Michael McDonald, James DeGraffenreid, Jesse Law, Shawn Meehan and Eileen Rice were indicted by Nevada Democratic Attorney General Aaron Ford in 2023 for their role in Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election which he lost. The case was dismissed over jurisdictional issues, but then revived on appeal, and another evidentiary hearing is scheduled for April 10. All six have pleaded not guilty. Storey County voted for Trump in the 2016, 2020 and 2024 presidential elections, each by generous margins. Hindle was elected as clerk-treasurer in the county in June, 2022. As an elected official in charge of overseeing elections, Hindle must be “duty-bound to his constituents first and follow the Constitution and state law, not the whims and conspiracy theories of the president,” said Kerry Durmick, Nevada State Director of All Voting is Local. Read Article

New Hampshire: Student IDs no longer valid for voting under new law | Charlotte Matherly/Concord Monitor

College students in New Hampshire will no longer be able to use their student identification cards to vote, according to a new law signed by Gov. Kelly Ayotte. Championed by State House Republicans, House Bill 323 allows residents to vote only with a government-issued ID, building on a growing number of voting restrictions enacted over the past few years. College students with a U.S. passport or state-issued driver’s license will still be able to vote, but out-of-state students who consider the state their primary residence but lack official forms of ID won’t be able to cast ballots. Voting rights advocates decried the change, saying students who attend college here should have a say in who governs them. Read Article

Wisconsin updates election certification law; Evers vetoes HAVA complaint bill | Alexander Shur/Votebeat

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers on Wednesday signed a bill bringing Wisconsin in line with a federal law seeking to prevent the kind of post-election chaos that President Donald Trump and his allies sowed after the 2020 election. The Democrat also vetoed a Republican-authored bill that would have required the state election commission to hear administrative complaints against itself alleging violations of the federal Help America Vote Act, in line with a U.S. Justice Department demand for the state. That vetoed bill also would have required the state’s Legislative Audit Bureau to conduct audits for potential noncitizen voters. The bill Evers signed updates Wisconsin’s deadlines for certifying presidential election results and casting electoral votes to match federal timelines set by Congress in 2022, after President Donald Trump claimed to have won the 2020 election and hundreds of individuals stormed the U.S. Capitol to prevent certification of President Joe Biden’s victory. Read Articlea>

Wyoming: Weston County Clerk Arrested On Felony Election-Related Charges | Clair McFarland/Cowboy State Daily

Weston County Clerk Becky Hadlock was arrested Wednesday on felony charges, the local jail has confirmed. Her attorney, Ryan Semerad of Casper-based Fuller and Semerad LLC, also confirmed she’d been arrested Wednesday morning. She also had an initial appearance in court Wednesday, after which she was released on a $3,000 signature bond, a jail deputy said. The Newcastle Circiut Court confirmed those details. Hadlock faces two felony charges, Weston County Sheriff Bryan Colvard told Cowboy State Daily on Wednesday. One is violation of the election code by an official, and the other is falsifying election documents. Each is punishable by up to five years in prison and $10,000 in fines. Her case is ongoing. Read Article

National: Democrats sue to block Trump’s ‘unconstitutional’ mail ballot order | Jonathan Shorman/News From The States

Democrats sued over President Donald Trump’s executive order clamping down on mail ballots on Wednesday, signaling the start of another fight with the White House over elections. The order, which would create a national list of voting-age American citizens and directs the U.S. Postal Service to place limits on mail-in ballots, constitutes an extraordinary and illegal attempt by Trump to intervene in the voting process, election experts said. he order is a “structural inversion” of how mail voting works, said Pamela Smith, president and CEO of Verified Voting, an organization that promotes the responsible use of technology in elections. USPS delivers mail and isn’t involved in distributing ballots, she said.“It is not up to the Postal Service to have this gatekeeping role over ballot delivery,” Smith said. Democrats sue to block Trump’s ‘unconstitutional’ mail ballot order | News From The States

National: The actual danger of Trump’s phony vote-by-mail executive order | Richard L. Hasen/Slate

Sometimes it’s the chaos, not the cruelty, that’s the point. That certainly seems true of President Donald Trump’s second executive order on elections, issued on Tuesday. The order purports, among other things, to direct the United States Department of Homeland Security to create a list of all U.S. citizens over 18, to supply that list to states, and for the United States Postal Service to refuse to accept mailed-in ballots from voters unless that voter’s name appears on a list of the state’s eligible voters that it has given USPS months before the election (a list which presumably the state would have to match with the DHS’ list, though that part—among many others!—is unclear). The order will face multiple court challenges and likely will be found unconstitutional by courts. Even if courts did not intervene before November, the multiple rulemakings and new procedures for DHS, USPS, and state and local election officials envisioned by the order would be impossible to implement before November’s elections. Indeed, the order is so underwhelming that it suggests Trump’s real purpose was not its implementation but to create more confusion and litigation around elections, further undermining voter confidence in the integrity of American elections. The actual danger of Trump’s phony vote-by-mail executive order.

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