Trump’s election order creates much confusion before the next federal election in 2026 | Christina A. Cassidy/Associated Press

President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to change how U.S. elections are run is creating uncertainty for state and local election officials and worries about voter confusion before the next federal election, the 2026 midterms. Trump’s order also targets voting systems in a way that could require some counties to change machines without offering additional money to help them pay for it. It directs the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, an independent and bipartisan agency created by Congress, to amend voluntary standards for voting systems to prohibit devices that use a barcode or QR code on ballots, with an exception for ones designated for voters with disabilities. While there are voting systems that do not use barcodes, the process for states to replace equipment takes time, said Mark Lindeman, policy and strategy director with Verified Voting. Election offices must get approval to spend for new voting systems, go through a procurement process, wait for manufacturers to deliver the equipment and eventually train workers on how to use it. “It’s hard for any state to procure and obtain and test new voting systems, and if there was some mad rush for many states to replace their voting systems at once, we don’t know how many systems manufacturers could supply,” Lindeman said. Read Article

National: Democratic attorneys general from 19 states sue Trump over his executive order on elections | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Democratic attorneys general in 19 states are together suing Trump over his sweeping executive order on elections, saying that it is an illegal attempt to usurp state control of elections that “would cause imminent and irreparable harm” if the courts don’t intervene. The March 25 order, which Trump wrote would protect the integrity of elections, would require people to prove their citizenship when registering to vote. It would also set a national mail ballot receipt deadline of Election Day, require the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to rewrite voting machine certification standards, withhold federal funds from states that don’t use compliant machines, and require states to share their voter rolls with federal agencies. The order “sows confusion and sets the stage for chaos in Plaintiff States’ election systems, together with the threat of disenfranchisement,” the states wrote in the complaint, which was filed in the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts on Thursday. The attorneys general emphasized that Congress has never required proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections and that states have the authority to dictate the deadline for mail ballots. Read Article

National: Democrats Sue to Block Trump Bid to Control Elections | Jacob Knutson/Democracy Docket

The Democratic Party is suing President Donald Trump over his sweeping executive order last week that attempted to wrest control of elections from the states. Filed Monday by Elias Law Group on behalf of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), and four national Democratic committees – the DNC, DGA, DSCC and DCCC – the lawsuit alleges Trump’s order is an illegal attempt to control how elections are administered, a power the Constitution grants to the states and Congress. “In the United States of America, the President does not get to dictate the rules of our elections,” the lawsuit reads. “Although the Order extensively reflects the President’s personal grievances, conspiratorial beliefs, and election denialism, nowhere does it (nor could it) identify any legal authority he possesses to impose such sweeping changes upon how Americans vote.” Read Article

National: Lawmakers to vote on bill targeting noncitizen voting: ‘There would be extensive uncertainty’ | Rachel Leingang/The Guardian

The myth that noncitizens are voting in large numbers in US elections wasn’t quashed with Donald Trump’s victory last year. Instead, a Republican bill that would make voting more difficult for millions of eligible US voters based on this false premise is expected to come up for a vote in the coming weeks. The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility act, or Save act, is aimed at eliminating rare instances of noncitizens voting in US elections. It could disenfranchise swaths of eligible voters – including people who changed their names in marriage, young voters, naturalized citizens and tribal residents – by requiring onerous identification to vote. The bill comes after the US president signed an executive order on 25 March calling for requiring documentary proof of citizenship to be added to federal voter registration forms. If states don’t comply, they face federal funding cuts. Will Scharf, the White House staff secretary, called the order “the farthest-reaching executive action taken” in the country’s history. Lawsuits are expected – several states have said the order is an unconstitutional federal overreach. Read Article

19 states sue over Trump’s voting executive order | Jude Joffe-Block/NPR

Nineteen states are suing over President Donald Trump’s sweeping executive order on voting that he signed last week, saying it is “an unconstitutional attempt to seize control of elections” that will create barriers to voting that could disenfranchise millions. The lawsuit, which is the fourth legal challenge so far against the executive order, calls on a federal district court in Massachusetts to block several provisions of the executive order, which the attorneys general argue “usurps the States’ constitutional power and seeks to amend election law by fiat.” “We are a democracy — not a monarchy — and this Executive Order is an authoritarian power grab,” said New York Attorney General Letitia James in a statement. “With this Order, this President is prioritizing his own quest for unchecked power above the rights and will of the public.” Read Article

National: Experts urge Congress to reauthorize state and local cyber grant program | Sophia Fox-Sowell/StateScoop

Cyber experts urged lawmakers on the Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection to reauthorize funding for the State and Local Cybersecurity Grant Program during a Tuesday hearing, calling it an “essential part of the country’s national security strategy.” In recent months, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has questioned the efficacy of the grant program, especially as the Trump administration looks for ways to curb government spending. During her tenure as governor of North Dakota, Noem was one of only two governors in the country to refuse funding for state cybersecurity grants in 2022 and 2023, calling it “wasteful spending.” With the grants on the chopping block, four cybersecurity experts, including Alan Fuller, chief information officer of Utah, argued before the subcommittee that the program allows municipalities with limited resources to implement a whole-of-state cybersecurity policy, strengthens relationships between state and local governments through information-sharing, and is a cost-effective prevention measure against the growing landscape of cybersecurity threats. Read Article

National: The Trump admin cut election security funds. Now officials fear future elections may be ‘less secure.’ | Maggie Miller/POLITICO

The Trump administration’s recent efforts to gut funding and personnel that support state and local election security efforts have left officials deeply concerned about their ability to guarantee physical and cyber security during the voting process. This swift overhauling of funds means that states could lose access to information on emerging threats and election officials may be left without funding for key security services, which could leave certain states and localities more vulnerable to interference efforts than others. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s programs for securing elections — everything from scanning election system networks for safety to sharing data with the public on potential threats — have been put on hold pending a review by the Department of Homeland Security, with no guarantee they will start up again. Read Article

Arizona: Longtime voters receive letters asking for proof of their citizenship | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Arizona counties are starting to send letters to some longtime voters telling them that they must provide documentation proving their citizenship before they vote again, prompting annoyance and confusion across the state. Around 200,000 longtime residents, or roughly 5% of the state’s voter roll, will eventually get such letters because they were caught up in a decades-long state error tracking proof of citizenship. Affected voters will need to provide a birth certificate, passport, or other documents proving their citizenship. If they don’t, they’ll eventually be restricted to voting only in federal elections, or be kicked off the voter rolls entirely. Some of these voters have been registered for decades. Read Article

Georgia Senate GOP muscles through election overhaul to allow hand-marked paper ballots | Stanley Dunlap/Georgia Recorder

A pair of election bills the Georgia Senate passed Wednesday propose new State Election Board powers, remove Georgia from multi-state voter rolls sharing databases and allow voters to request hand-marked paper ballots. The Senate voted along party lines Wednesday for the sweeping voting rules changes proposed in House Bill 397 as well as Senate Bill 214, which aims to encourage voters to use pencils or pens to complete ballots instead of electronic voting machines as is the primary option now. Sen. Sally Harrell, an Atlanta Democrat, cautioned against rushing through a significant change in the state’s election system at this late stage in the legislative process, which could result in further financial mismanagement. Friday is the last day of the 2025 Georgia General Assembly. Harrell wondered aloud why Republican senators rejected her amendment proposing hand-marked paper ballots when lawmakers voted in 2019 to switch to an electronic voting system. The state has spent more than $107 million on the Dominion Voting Systems that have been used in statewide elections since 2020. Read Article

 

Indiana: ‘They are a threat:’ House votes to ban student IDs at polls | Kayla Dwyer/Indianapolis Star

Senate Bill 10 would specifically banish state university-issued IDs from being acceptible forms of photo identification used at the voting booth, seemingly to address fears about non-residents voting in Indiana elections, even though this part of the law has nothing to do with address verification. “What’s not being said here is ‘We don’t want people to actually come out and vote,” said Wade Arvizu, a student at IU Indianapolis, “and I think that’s the reality.” Rep. Renee Pack, D-Indianapolis, made the implication more explicit on the House floor Tuesday. “Who are these students voting for?” she said. “I’m just going to be truthful, they are a threat. They are threat to Republicans in this state. They’re powerful. And it seems like we just don’t like powerful groups.” Read Article

Mississippi: Early voting dies in Legislature. Concerns arose over new voting program, likely veto | Grant McLaughlin/Mississippi Clarion Ledger

The Legislature had passed a measure on Tuesday to allow folks to more easily vote prior to an election day, but lawmakers held the motion back on a parliamentary motion to reconsider and then failed to vote on that motion before ending the 2025 Legislative Session on Thursday. On Tuesday, both the House and Senate passed a bill that created a 22-day excused early voting program, which allowed folks to go to their circuit clerk’s office and vote and have the ballot counted into a voting machine if they had one of several excused reasons for not voting on election day. However, both chambers held the bill’s passage back, and while the House on Wednesday before gaveling out the session had tabled that motion, the Senate did not, leaving the bill on the cutting-room floor. Read Article

Ohio Secretary of State orders investigation of Perry County electronic pollbook | Perry County Tribune

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose has announced the investigation of a voter check-in tablet purchased by the Perry County Board of Elections. County Elections Board Director Jamie Snider told The Perry County Tribune that her office noticed some “irregular activity that we needed to report, and that was done immediately when we were advised it was happening.” She said the devices “were fresh out of the box, brand new. We just purchased them in December, received them in February, and as we were unboxing them, we noticed some things on them that were out of the norm. So we reported it to the state like we should have.” Read Article

Oregon: Controversial proposal to take away vote by mail results in heated debate | Carlos Fuentes/The Oregonian

A controversial bill that could repeal Oregon’s vote by mail system resulted in a heated public hearing Monday afternoon, as dozens of individuals argued for and against scrapping the state’s first-in-nation voting system. Senate Bill 210, sponsored by Republican Sens. David Brock Smith and Kim Thatcher, would ask voters to decide in November 2026 whether to retain Oregon’s vote by mail system, which has been in place for more than two decades. The proposed measure would also require voters to present a government-issued ID when voting in person and would limit mail-in voting to citizens who are unable to vote in person. Read Article

Pennsylvania can’t reject improperly dated ballots, federal court rules | Carter Walker/Votebeat

Pennsylvania counties can’t reject a voter’s mail ballot solely because they forgot to put the date on the return envelope or put a wrong date on it, a federal judge wrote Monday in a ruling that likely applies to the upcoming primary. The ruling is the latest — and likely not the last — in a long-running legal battle over enforcing the date requirement that has bounced around state and federal courts. U.S. District Judge Susan Baxter of the Western District of Pennsylvania ruled Monday that rejecting mail ballots for issues with the date on the outer envelope violates voters’ First Amendment rights, since voting is considered an expression of free speech. Misdated mail ballots are ones where a voter writes a date on the envelope that is outside of the range between when the county can first send the ballot and the day of the election. Read Article

Texas bill requiring proof of citizenship to vote advances | Natalia Contreras/The Texas Tribune

In a quick vote after little debate, the Texas Senate approved a bill that would require voters to provide proof of citizenship before registering and would restrict them to voting in congressional races only if they do not. The bill, a Republican legislative priority, still needs approval in the state House before it can become law. It would cost state officials nearly $2 million over the next five years to implement, according to the bill’s fiscal note, which doesn’t include any costs expected to be borne by local election officials. Read Article

How Wisconsin’s Washington County helped its municipalities expand early-voting hours | Alexander Shur/Votebeat

Absentee voting didn’t used to be popular in Addison, a rural town of 3,300 in southeast Wisconsin. A few days before the last Supreme Court election in 2023, only about 60 residents had cast absentee ballots in person. This year, at the same point in the election cycle, that number was over 300. The sharp increase is due partly to Republicans’ recent embrace of absentee voting, especially in the nearly two-week period before Election Day when voters can cast absentee ballots in person. Washington County, where Addison is located, is one of the state’s most Republican counties, and one of many Republican-dominated areas across Wisconsin where early voting rates have surged. Read Article

Trump orders an overhaul of how elections are run, inviting a likely legal challenge | Jessica Huseman, Carrie Levine, Jen Fifield, Carter Walker, Alexander Shur, Hayley Harding and Natalia Contreras/Votebeat

President Donald Trump issued a sweeping executive order Tuesday that would dramatically change the administration of U.S. elections, including requiring people to prove their citizenship when registering to vote, but experts and voting rights advocates said they expect the order to face quick legal challenges. The order, titled “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections,” also would change the certification standards for voting systems, potentially forcing states to rapidly replace millions of dollars in voting equipment, and it would prohibit the counting of ballots postmarked by Election Day but received afterwards, which 18 states and Washington, D.C., currently permit. Voting rights advocates and legal experts said the bulk of the executive order will certainly be challenged in court, as the Constitution grants authority over elections to states and to Congress, not the president. Should it take effect, they say, millions of voters could be disenfranchised. Read Article

Election Security Is at Risk Amid Federal Government Actions | Paul Rosenzweig, Pamela Smith and Adam Ambrogi/Newsweek

American democracy is under attack—from cybercriminals and foreign adversaries seeking to undermine trust in our elections. As members and support staff of The National Task Force on Election Crises, we have seen firsthand how the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has helped build a crucial line of defense, protecting our election infrastructure from cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, and physical threats. Yet, at a time when these threats are escalating, the federal government is pulling back its support, putting the integrity of our elections at greater risk. CISA was established to help secure critical infrastructure, including elections, against cyber threats and foreign interference. Its work has been instrumental in ensuring election officials on all levels have the resources, intelligence, and technical support needed to combat an increasingly sophisticated landscape of threats. It is deeply troubling that the current administration appears to be dismantling key efforts to combat election threats that we cannot afford to lose. Read Article

National: Trump Is Trying to Gain More Power Over Elections. Is His Effort Legal? | Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times

President Trump pushed on Tuesday to hand the executive branch unprecedented influence over how federal elections are run, signing a far-reaching and legally dubious order to change U.S. voting rules. The executive order, which seeks to require proof of citizenship to register to vote as well as the return of all mail ballots by Election Day, is an attempt to upend centuries of settled election law and federal-state relations. The Constitution gives the president no explicit authority to regulate elections. Instead, it gives states the power to set the “times, places and manner” of elections, leaving them to decide the rules, oversee voting and try to prevent fraud. Congress can also pass election laws or override state legislation, as it did with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Read Article

National: Trump’s executive order on elections is far-reaching. But will it actually stick? | Associated Press

President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking broad changes to how elections are run in the U.S. is vast in scope and holds the potential to reorder the voting landscape across the country, even as it faces almost certain litigation. He wants to require voters to show proof that they are U.S. citizens before they can register for federal elections, count only mail or absentee ballots received by Election Day, set new rules for voting equipment and prohibit non-U.S. citizens from being able to donate in certain elections. A basic question underlying the sweeping actions he signed Tuesday: Can he do it, given that the Constitution gives wide leeway to the states to develop their own election procedures? Read Article

National: Trump’s voting rights order targets anybody who’s ‘not white,’ advocates say | Trevor Hughes Deborah Barfield Berry/USA Today

President Donald Trump’s new executive order aimed at tightening up election administration has triggered a wave of concern among voting-rights advocates who say it will likely make casting a ballot harder for millions of American citizens. Liberal-leaning advocates are also concerned Trump’s order gives the federal government unusually broad power to dictate how elections are managed, a process that’s typically run by county-level officials and overseen by secretaries of state. Conservative activists welcomed Trump’s order as a necessary step to ensuring the sanctity of American elections, though studies have consistently shown that very few non-citizens cast illegal ballots. Read Article

National: Supreme Court confronts another challenge to the Voting Rights Act | Nina Totenberg/NPR

Race and politics were front and center at the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday as the justices took up a voting rights case involving Louisiana’s congressional redistricting after the 2020 Census. The case is nearly identical to a case the Supreme Court ruled on two years ago from Alabama, though the outcome could make it more difficult for minorities to prevail in redistricting cases. Louisiana’s population is roughly 30% Black, but after the 2020 Census, the state legislature drew new congressional district lines that provided for only one majority-Black district in a state that has six congressional seats. That’s the same thing Alabama did after the Census, only to be slapped down by the Supreme Court two years ago when a narrow court majority ruled that the state had illegally diluted the Black vote in violation of the Voting Rights Act. Read Article

National: Republican National Committee asks states for details about their voter files, part of a larger effort to question elections | Christine Fernando and Christina A. Cassidy/Associated Press

The Republican National Committee on Tuesday launched a massive effort to probe voter registration lists nationwide amid a broader strategy to seize on voter rolls to question the integrity of elections. RNC sent public records requests asking for documents related to voter roll list maintenance to the top election officials in 48 states and the District of Columbia, asserting that the public should know how states are removing ineligible people from voter rolls, including dead people and non-citizens. The move came the same day President Donald Trump took sweeping executive action seeking major changes to U.S. elections, including requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. It also coincides with common misinformation narratives about non-citizens and dead people voting, cases of which are exceedingly rare and are largely caught and prosecuted when it does occur. Read Article

National: Trump Anti-Voting Order Draws Furious Pushback | Matt Cohen/Democracy Docket

After President Donald Trump issued an executive order Tuesday that experts said could potentially disenfranchise millions, Democratic election officials and voting rights advocates swiftly vowed to fight it. “This is not a statute. This is an edict by fiat from the executive branch, and so every piece of it can be challenged through the regular judicial process,” Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes (D) said in an interview with Democracy Docket. Fontes called Trump’s order a “cheap substitute” for the SAVE Act — the GOP’s nationwide proof of citizenship bill — that he doesn’t think will pass through the Senate, but also offered a particularly nefarious reading of its true purpose: setting up a way to cancel the 2026 midterm elections. Read Article

Opinion: Stop gutting America’s cyber defense agency | Mark Montgomery and Johanna Yang/The Hill

The Trump administration’s cuts in cyber programs are putting national security at risk. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem defended such cuts in her confirmation hearing, saying that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency needed to be “smaller, more nimble to really fulfill their mission.” She is mistaken. Over the past three weeks, the agency has reduced staff, slashed budgets and terminated programs, with the administration suggesting that these cuts will “eliminate redundancies” and focus its work on “mission critical areas.” However, the cuts, imposed by the Department of Homeland Security, are in fact undercutting the agency’s core mission areas, weakening U.S. national resilience and casting doubt on America’s ability to repel, thwart and deter attacks in cyberspace. Read Article

Arizona Secretary of State says Trump’s election order is a ‘power grab’ | Mary Jo Pitzl/Arizona Republic

President Donald Trump has issued a wide-ranging executive order that would wrest the ability of states to control federal elections, arguing the country has a “patchwork of voting methods” that his order seeks to streamline. The March 25 order sparked alarm among voting rights groups, with Democratic attorney Marc Elias promising an imminent legal challenge. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes called it a “power grab,” and predicted it could derail the mid-term elections of 2026. “(I)t appears as though this is another one of the administration’s building blocks in an attempt to avoid having to face the voters in 2026,” Fontes told Democracy Docket, an organization Elias founded that tracks election litigation. Read Article

Georgia Republicans backtrack on some election rules after sharp criticism | Jeff Amy/Associated Press

Georgia lawmakers are retreating from election proposals that could have allowed a Donald Trump-aligned state board to strike thousands of challenged voters from the rolls and would have required polling officials to count the number of ballots by hand. House Bill 397 was rewritten to remove those provisions before it was passed Thursday by the Senate Ethics Committee, sending it to the full Senate for more debate. The bill still seeks to force the state to leave the Electronic Records Information Center. Some question the funding and motives of that multistate group, which tries to maintain accurate voter rolls. But Georgia now would not be required to exit until mid-2027 instead of within months, as was earlier proposed. Read Article

Georgia is planning one of the largest cancellations of voter registrations in U.S. history | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Georgia election officials plan to cancel about 455,000 inactive voter registrations this summer, one of the largest registration removals in U.S. history. More than half the registrations scheduled for cancellation were identified by a 24-state organization called ERIC, which reports when a voter has moved and is no longer eligible to vote in Georgia. The mass cancellation by the Georgia secretary of state’s office arrives as conservative critics of the state’s voter registration list allege it’s inaccurate and vulnerable to voter fraud. They say ERIC hasn’t been effective in finding outdated registrations among the state’s 8.3 million registered voters. Read Article

Iowa House passes bills on voter roll verification, election recounts | Robin Opsahl/Iowa Capital Dispatch

The Iowa House passed two bills making changes to state election laws Tuesday, including a measure introduced by Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate on noncitizen voting. House File 954, approved by the House 65-31, contains multiple changes to state election law, including a prohibition on ranked choice voting and increasing the requirement for candidates of a party to receive at least 10% of the general election vote to gain “political party” status. It also has language introduced by Pate ahead of the 2025 legislative session to allow the Secretary of State’s office to contract with federal and state agencies, as well as private entities, for verification and maintenance of the state’s voter rolls. Read Article

Kansas has among the shortest windows for voting by mail in the US. It will get shorter next year | John Hanna/Associated Press

Republican legislators in Kansas on Tuesday shrunk what already was among the nation’s shortest windows for voting by mail, arguing that problems with the U.S. Postal Service’s handling of ballots required the move. Critics called it voter suppression. The GOP-supermajority Legislature overrode Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto of a bill eliminating an extra three days after Election Day for voters to return mail ballots that are postmarked by Election Day. The change will take effect in 2026. It is not clear how much the change will affect election outcomes. About 11% of registered Democrats cast mail ballots in Kansas in November, compared with 6% for Republicans. But the Kansas secretary of state’s office said only 2,110 of the more than 1.3 million ballots counted arrived during the grace period. Read Article