Judge Permanently Bars Trump From Requiring Proof of Citizenship for Voter Registration | Zach Montague/The New York Times

A federal judge in Washington has permanently barred the Trump administration from requiring proof of citizenship on federal voter registration forms, a change dictated in an executive order President Trump signed in March. The ruling definitively halted the effort to compel the Elections Assistance Commission, an independent body, to adopt nationwide changes to voting procedures at a time when the president has also called for requiring voter identification in elections and ending mail-in voting. For months, voting rights groups have warned that those changes, in tandem with the deployment of the national guard to the streets of Democratic-led cities, resembled steps of a voter-suppression strategy. Read Article

Dems ‘Need the Votes’ of ‘Illegal Citizens,’ Top Federal Election Official Claims in Unhinged Rant | Zachary Roth/Democracy Docket

A top federal voting official is facing a call to step down after accusing Democrats of encouraging “open borders” and widespread voting by “illegal citizens,” because “they need the votes.” The outlandish conspiracy theory is common on the far right. But its embrace by Christy McCormick, a Republican member of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC), part of an unhinged public rant against Democrats, raises serious questions about her ability to help states administer fair and impartial elections, and to retain public trust. “They need the votes. They’re losing ground,” McCormick said Wednesday at a panel discussion on voting at the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute (AFPI), when asked why she thinks the left opposes measures to tighten voting rules. Read Article

National: Threats against public servants increased over 35 times what they were a decade ago, according to new research | Natalie Alms/Nextgov

For three years, Teak Ty Brockbank posted threats across various social media platforms targeting election officials in Colorado and Arizona, threatening to kill top officials. Such violent threats against public servants have increased over the last decade — from just eight stories of such threats recorded in 2015 to 291 recorded in 2025, according to new research. The Public Service Alliance, a nonpartisan network, and the Impact Project, a nonpartisan data and research platform, released the dataset showing that escalation on Tuesday. An associated map lets viewers see incidents of public sector workers being harassed, stalked, doxxed, physically attacked and more. Public servants across the levels of government are being targeted, with elected officials, judges, election workers and law enforcement and military officials among those receiving the most threats, according to the dataset. Read Article

National: Congressional Budget Office hacked, China suspected in breach | Sean Lyngaas/CNN

The Congressional Budget Office has been hacked, potentially exposing its communications with the offices of lawmakers, according to an email sent to congressional staff this week and obtained by CNN. The email from the Senate sergeant at arms did not name a culprit, but a US official briefed on the hack told CNN on Thursday that Chinese state-backed hackers are suspected of being behind the breach. The email said the hacking incident was “ongoing” and that staffers should avoid clicking on links sent from CBO accounts because the accounts may still be compromised. CBO’s economists and analysts provide lawmakers with cost estimates and analysis of legislation in Congress. The office also does long-term projections for the US budget and analyzes the president’s budget — the type of information that could be of interest to foreign intelligence services keeping close tabs on US economic policy. Read Article

National: Five Ways Tuesday’s Results Will Affect Voting Rules and Democracy | Bolts

On Tuesday, mostly in the shadow of the Democratic Party’s headlining triumphs, were a series of state and local elections that carried high stakes for election law and voting rights. Conservatives failed to restrict mail-in voting in a state key to next year’s battle for the U.S. Senate. Voters in two states boosted Democrats’ mid-decade redistricting aspirations. And voters made sure that a plan to unwind one of the nation’s harshest felony disenfranchisement schemes can proceed. Here, we tour these results, and some others, from five states where the rules of elections were most prominently on the line—California, Maine, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Read Article

National: Is a Key Federal Elections Panel Doing Trump’s Bidding on Voting Machines? | Susan Greenhalgh/Democracy Docket

On the eve of the government shutdown, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) quietly posted a press release to its website. While the announcement didn’t spark much notice, it could result in severe consequences for future elections. And it’s causing concern that the commission — a bipartisan body whose mission is to help states administer elections more effectively — is taking its orders from President Donald Trump. That kind of partisanship and capitulation could pose a serious threat to the midterms. Read Article

 

National: Republicans Reprise Unfounded Claims of Widespread Election Interference | Steven Lee Myers/The New York Times

As voters went to the polls, prominent conservatives latched onto glitches and other problems at polling stations to claim — without presenting evidence — that the results were being rigged. Election machines briefly went down in Cumberland County, N.J., a state where the governor’s race is seen as a bellwether of President Trump’s second term. The problem was quickly resolved and voting resumed, according to an election commission official reached by telephone. A series of bomb threats in the state — a reprise of threats in several states in last year’s presidential election — also turned out to be a hoax. Read Article

National: Trump escalates demands for 2020 election investigations and prosecutions | Isaac Arnsdorf , Patrick Marley and Perry Stein/The Washington Post

President Donald Trump is dialing up pressure on the Justice Department to freshly scrutinize ballots from the 2020 election, raising tensions with administration officials who think their time is better spent examining voter lists for future elections. In recent private meetings, public comments and social media posts, Trump has renewed demands that members of his administration find fraud in the five-year-old defeat that he never accepted. He recently hired at the White House a lawyer who worked on contesting the 2020 results. Administration officials and allies have asked to inspect voting equipment in Colorado and Missouri. Others are seeking mail ballots from Atlanta in 2020, when Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate to lose Georgia since 1992. Read Article

National: DHS Agreement Reveals Risks of Using Social Security Data for Voter Citizenship Checks | Jen Fifield/ProPublica

This year, when states began using an expanded Department of Homeland Security system to check their voter rolls for noncitizens, it was supposed to validate the Trump administration’s push to harness data from across federal agencies to expose illicit voting and stiffen immigration enforcement. DHS had recently incorporated confidential data from the Social Security Administration on hundreds of millions of additional people into the tool, known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, system. The added information allowed the system to perform bulk searches using Social Security numbers for the first time. The initial results, however, didn’t exactly back up President Donald Trump’s contention that noncitizen voting is widespread. Texas identified 2,724 “potential noncitizens” on its rolls, about 0.015% of the state’s 18 million registered voters. Louisiana found 390 among 2.8 million registered voters, a rate of about 0.014%. Read Article

Arizona: Judge won’t halt audit of Maricopa County voter registration system | Gary Grado/Votebeat

A Maricopa County Superior Court judge on Thursday rejected Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap’s request to halt an audit of the county’s voter registration system and election technology.Judge Scott Blaney wrote that he was initially concerned voters’ personal information would be at risk, but was “credibly informed” that the county and vendor had a comprehensive nondisclosure agreement and the vendor’s personnel had undergone background checks. Blaney also found “that the Recorder has not established that the Board’s actions with regard to the assessment violate any Arizona statute.”What’s the dispute? The emergency hearing over the audit of the voter registration system on Monday was one part of a larger legal fight between Heap and the county Board of Supervisors over how election duties and authority should be divided between them. Read Article

California Prop 50: Gavin Newsom Sued By Republicans 50 Hours After Election | Gabe Whisnant/Newsweek

California Republicans filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday seeking to block a newly approved U.S. House map that voters passed as Proposition 50 in Tuesday’s election. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, claims the new map illegally uses race as a factor to favor Hispanic voters and violates the Constitution’s equal protection and voting rights guarantees. The measure, backed by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, redraws congressional boundaries in ways analysts say could help Democrats flip as many as five House seats in next year’s midterm elections. Read Article

California is voting on redistricting. An election skeptic runs the process in one county | Dani Anguiano/The Guardian

When Clint Curtis was appointed to oversee voting in California’s Shasta county earlier this year, the Florida-based lawyer and election skeptic pledged to “fix” the voting process. Curtis had never before administered an election and didn’t live in this rural northern California region. But he was well-known to followers of the US election denialism movement, who believe the voting system is not secure and that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election. Curtis, a former congressional candidate, described himself as an expert in elections law and had long argued that voting machines could be hacked and that the government could manipulate the results of elections. The ultra-conservative majority on Shasta county’s board of supervisors was hopeful he could overhaul their elections and set an example for the rest of the US. Now, that vision is being put to the test. Read Article

Georgia: Trump justice department seeks 2020 election records from Fulton County | Sam Levine/The Guardian

The justice department on Thursday asked election officials in Fulton county, Georgia, to turn over records related to the 2020 election, a request that underscores how the administration is trying to revive one of the president’s biggest falsehoods about the election he lost five years ago. Investigators have cleared Fulton county of malfeasance in 2020. Nonetheless, a Republican majority on the board voted to reopen the investigation last year. On the night of the 2024 presidential election, the board voted to subpoena a slew of documents. This summer, the board passed a resolution asking the justice department to intervene and help them get the documents. The subpoenas issued last year seek records related to voter lists, chain of custody forms, ballot images, security seals and ballot scanner paperwork. Read Article

Michigan House committee targets foreign meddling in ballot measures, election oversight | Katherine Dailey/Michigan Advance

The Michigan House Election Integrity Committee debated three bills Tuesday related to foreign interference in state elections — in funding for ballot initiatives and election administration, and in the physical parts of election machines. Testimony on both bills related to funding centered on the ability of foreign citizens to donate to 501(c)(4) organizations, nonprofits that are not required to disclose their donors — which can turn them into so-called “dark money” groups that donate to political activities without identifying where the money is coming from. Read Article

New Jersey polling places receive threats similar to ones that disrupted voting last year | Julie Carr Smyth/The Independent

Law enforcement and election officials in New Jersey acted swiftly Tuesday to secure polling places following a series of bomb threats later determined to be unfounded. Lieutenant Governor Tahesha Way, who also serves as the state’s top election official, said the threats had been emailed to seven counties, including Passaic, a key swing county where the Department of Justice had sent election monitors. “Law enforcement has determined that there are no credible threats at this time,” Way said. “We are doing everything in our power to protect voters and poll workers and coordinate closely with state, local and federal partners to ensure a smooth and safe election.” Read Article

Pennsylvania: What happened with Chester County’s pollbook printing problem? | Carter Walker/Votebeat

An error that affected the ability of tens of thousands of Chester County voters to cast regular ballots on Election Day happened after county officials mistakenly failed to extract third party and unaffiliated voters from the state’s voter registration management database when creating a pollbook file for printing. State officials say the county only extracted Republican and Democrat voters when the county prepared its pollbooks, leaving out the third party and unaffiliated voters. Pollbooks are lists of registered voters that workers use to check them in at voting locations. “That is something that you sometimes see counties do, correctly, in a primary election,” Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt said, referring to the fact that third party and unaffiliated voters can’t participate in Pennsylvania primaries. “It appears that Chester did that pollbook extract and only included major party voters.” Read Article

Wisconsin: Monday absentee ballot processing bill stalls again due to lack of GOP support | Rich Kremer/WPR

Despite past bipartisan backing, a Republican state lawmaker says he has to “punt” an initiative to let election clerks process absentee ballots before election day because it doesn’t have enough GOP support. In September, Republicans and Democrats in the state Assembly stood side-by-side and unveiled a series of bills to update Wisconsin’s election laws. One of those initiatives is known as early processing or Monday processing. Requested by clerks, it would let them process absentee ballots the day before an election so that results can be released sooner once the polls close. The Monday process concept has been unable to clear the Legislature for several years. It was last introduced in 2023. Read Article

Wisconsin Assembly committee debates ‘reality-based’ vs. conspiracy minded solutions to absentee drop boxes | Henry Redman/Wisconsin Examiner

At a public hearing of the Wisconsin Assembly Committee on Campaigns and Elections Tuesday, legislators engaged in an occasionally tense debate over proposed changes to the state election system. In attendance at the hearing were some of Wisconsin’s most prominent election deniers, including former state Rep. Janel Brandtjen and Peter Bernegger, a self-styled elections investigator who has been convicted of mail fraud Bernegger stood in the back of the hearing room with a group of companions, muttering and complaining about assertions by the election clerks and legislators who testified. Read Article

Wyoming lawmakers advance election reform bills despite feasibility warnings | Klark Byrd/Casper Oil City News

The Wyoming Legislature’s Joint Corporations, Elections & Political Subdivisions Committee voted Monday to sponsor a sweeping package of six election reform bills that boost manual ballot counting and expand poll watcher authority. The bills advanced despite stern warnings from county clerks that the changes could prove logistically impossible to implement by the 2026 election cycle. Critics argued the package restricts ballot access and competition for independent candidates. The committee’s action sponsors six working draft measures that focus on shifting the election process toward increased hand counting of ballots and enhanced oversight. Read Article