National: Trump appears to link Iran attack to his 2020 election loss | Aram Roston/The Guardian

Donald Trump on Saturday appeared to link the massive attack he ordered against Iran to his persistent claims about his 2020 election loss to former president Joe Biden, in a social media post about allegations that Tehran’s government interfered in the US president elections. “Iran tried to interfere in 2020, 2024 elections to stop Trump,” his Truth Social post said, “and now faces renewed war with United States”. Those words, written in the first hours of the bombardment of Iran, repeated the headline of an article to which he linked from Just the News, a Trump-friendly news site. “Iranian intelligence sought to undermine Trump’s re-election bid in 2020 through a variety of election influence efforts,” the article said. It also said Iran worked against him in 2024, when he beat Kamala Harris at the polls. This is the second military operation of the Trump administration where he has alluded to allegations concerning the 2020 election. He made similar comments on social media in January, days after Trump ordered the Delta Force “rendition” of Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro. Trump reposted links that repeated discredited conspiracy allegations that Venezuela interfered in the 2020 election by controlling voting machines. Read Article

National: Trump Officials Attended a Summit of Election Deniers Who Want the President to Take Over the Midterms | Doug Bock Clark/ProPublica

Several high-ranking federal election officials attended a summit last week at which prominent figures who worked to overturn Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election pressed the president to declare a national emergency to take over this year’s midterms. According to videos, photos and social media posts reviewed by ProPublica, the meeting’s participants included Kurt Olsen, a White House lawyer charged with reinvestigating the 2020 election, and Heather Honey, the Department of Homeland Security official in charge of election integrity. The event was convened by Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, and attended by Cleta Mitchell, who directs the Election Integrity Network, a group that has spread false claims about election fraud and noncitizen voting. Election experts say that the meeting reflects an intensifying push to persuade Trump to take unprecedented actions to affect the vote in November. Courts have largely blocked his efforts to reshape elections through an executive order, and legislation has stalled in Congress that would mandate strict voter ID requirements across the country. Read Article

National: GOP’s SAVE America Act would magnify suppression for the disability community | Natalie Hausmann/Democracy Docket

Marc Safman, 56, has been a political junkie since his parents took him to former President Jimmy Carter’s inauguration in 1977. He voted in every election for 38 years, until last year. Safman, who is deafblind, said he was unable to cast his ballot in the 2025 New York City mayoral election because of issues with his polling site’s ballot-marking machine and a “lack of basic awareness” from poll workers. Despite incremental improvements over the past several decades to make voting more accessible, people like Safman with disabilities, who comprise one fourth of the nation’s population, continue to face outsized barriers when casting their ballots. However, the GOP’s SAVE America Act, the most restrictive voting bill in U.S. history, threatens to roll back what progress has been made and set voters with disabilities back by years with new draconian restrictions. Read Article

National: Will Trump try to seize voting machines to disrupt the midterm elections? | George Chidi/The Guardian

After the FBI seized elections materials from Fulton county last month, Donald Trump returned once again to his false claim that he beat Joe Biden in Georgia in the 2020 election. “The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over,’” Trump said to Dan Bongino on the former FBI staffer’s podcast earlier this month . “We should take over the voting in at least – many – 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.” Later that week, it was revealed that the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who was present at the Fulton county raid, led an investigation into Puerto Rico’s voting machines – taking some machines to examine – last May to identify what her office said were potential vulnerabilities in the island’s electronic voting systems. Taken together, Trump’s comments and actions are pointing toward a possibility Democratic voters have until now only contemplated: the federal government seizing voting machines across the country in a way that disrupts voting in the 2026 midterms. If the federal government declared some digital voting machines off-limits at the last minute, it would set off a chain of emergency court hearings, leaving elections directors scrambling to find another way to print and count ballots before those cases resolved. Early voting could crater. Election Day voting could be curtailed. And results might not be ready for weeks. Read Article

National: Blue states push to ban ICE at the polls amid federal voter intimidation fears | Jonathan Shorman/Stateline

Several Democratic states are moving to bar federal immigration agents from being near polling places and other election sites, amid persistent worries that President Donald Trump will use federal law enforcement or the military to disrupt the midterm elections. Measures to restrict federal agents from operating at or near election-related locations have been offered in more than half a dozen states, according to a Stateline count. While the proposals vary, they broadly seek to combat the prospect of chaotic confrontations between federal agents and voters this November. A federal law dating to the end of the Civil War already bans sending the military or other “armed men” to polling places, except to repel armed enemies of the United States. The U.S. Constitution also gives states — not the president or federal government — the responsibility for running elections. Read Article

Alaska Lawmakers question decision to turn over confidential voter data to DOJ | Eric Stone/Alaska Public Media

State lawmakers had some sharp questions on Monday for Alaska’s Division of Elections about its decision to share the state’s full, unredacted voter list with the Department of Justice. The state turned over the voter list to the federal government in December after a series of requests from the Department of Justice. At first, in August, the Division of Elections shared only the public, commercially available list. The DOJ followed up later that month demanding the full list, including a range of information designated by state law as confidential: voters’ date of birth, their driver’s license or partial social security number, a status code, and their address, even if the voter marked it confidential. Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom, who oversees the Division of Elections, announced the state had transferred the list shortly before Christmas. Read Article

Arizona: Cochise County asks feds to investigate disputed claims about voting machine testing — again | Sasha Hupka/Votebeat

Four years after a conservative southeastern Arizona county tried to defy election laws, it may be gearing up to do so again. The Cochise County Board of Supervisors voted on Feb. 24 to send a letter to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard asking her to investigate whether the laboratories charged with testing voting machines nationwide were properly accredited ahead of recent elections. Cochise County officials have doubted the laboratories for years, despite the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s reassurances that they were properly accredited. Those doubts were part of what prompted two of the county’s supervisors to vote to delay the certification of its election results past the legal deadline in November 2022. A judge ultimately ordered the supervisors to certify the midterm election results, but their doubts about the laboratories — and the voting machines they test — have apparently persisted. The board sent an identical message to the U.S. Department of Justice less than six months ago. Read Article

California Senator Padilla preps for Trump trying to control elections via emergency order | Kevin Rector/Los Angeles Times

Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) is preparing for President Trump to declare a national emergency in order to seize control of this year’s midterm elections from the states, including by bracing his Senate colleagues for a vote in which they would be forced to either co-sign on the power grab or resist it. In the wake of reporting last week that conservative activists with connections to the White House were circulating such an order, Padilla sent a letter to his Senate colleagues Friday stating that any such order would be “wildly illegal and unconstitutional,” and would no doubt face “extremely strict scrutiny” in the courts. “Nevertheless, if the President does escalate his unprecedented assault on our democracy by declaring an election-related emergency, I will swiftly introduce a privileged resolution [and] force a vote in the Senate to terminate the fake emergency,” wrote Padilla, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration. Read Article

Colorado Governor Signals He’ll Commute Sentence of Election Denier | By Jack Healy, Nick Corasaniti and Alan Feuer/The New York Times

Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado offered the clearest signal yet late on Tuesday that he might commute the nine-year sentence of Tina Peters, the last high-profile Trump ally still in prison for crimes stemming from President Trump’s 2020 election loss. Mr. Trump has waged an all-out assault on Colorado while pressuring Mr. Polis, a Democrat, to free Ms. Peters. He has blocked hundreds of millions of dollars in federal money from the Democratic-led state, moved the headquarters of U.S. Space Command from Colorado Springs to Alabama, promised to shutter a federal atmospheric research center in Boulder and vetoed an urgently needed water pipeline for rural Colorado. Commuting Ms. Peters’s sentence now might appease Mr. Trump and stop those attacks, but it would set off a furious backlash among Democrats and imperil Mr. Polis’s political future. Democrats and some moderate Republicans in Colorado have spent months urging the governor to resist the pressure from Mr. Trump. But on Tuesday night Mr. Polis wrote a social-media post that suggested he believed that Ms. Peters, a Republican former county clerk, had received too harsh a sentence when she was convicted of tampering with voting machines in a failed effort to show that the 2020 vote had been rigged against Mr. Trump. Read Article

Georgia election bill SB 568 could change early voting rules, voting machines as debate over 2020 election and Trump claims continues | Zachary Bynum/CBS Atlanta

A proposed Georgia election bill could significantly reshape how voters cast ballots, how counties manage voter records, and how election equipment is used across the state — all as political debates tied to the 2020 election continue to influence policy in Georgia. Senate Bill 568 would introduce several changes to Georgia’s election system, including new standards for voting machines, new rules for early voting locations, and requirements for counties to publish voter lists. Dr. Andra Gillespie, a political science professor at Emory University, said the legislation builds on a series of election reforms Georgia lawmakers passed after the 2020 election. Read Article

New Louisiana voting machines will cost $100 million | Izzy Wollfarth/Beauregard News

Secretary of State Nancy Landry said this week that $25 million more is needed to cover the $100 million cost of replacing Louisiana’s 35-year-old ballot machines. The system would consist of new touchscreen voting machines that print paper ballots and have climate-controlled facilities for storage. Additional expenses would maintain cybersecurity protections and allow for risk-limiting audits, which are considered the top standard for voter integrity. “Louisiana voters have consistently indicated that they want a system that combines the speed of modern technology with the security of a voter-verifiable paper ballot, as required by state law,” Landry told the Senate Finance Committee Monday. The paper ballots will allow voters to verify their choices before casting. Read Article

Michigan: US Supreme Court declines to hear twice-dismissed case on Michigan voter rolls | Kyle Davidson/Michigan Advance

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a case against Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, challenging the state’s process for canceling the voter registration for dead individuals. The suit was filed by the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a conservative law firm which has filed suits in several states aimed at pushing election officials to aggressively purge their voter rolls. The group has previously made false claims about voter fraud in the U.S. In its suit against the Michigan Department of State, the group argued that the state does not properly maintain its voter rolls under the National Voter Registration Act, allowing thousands of deceased voters to remain on file. However, a U.S. District Court judge dismissed the suit, noting “the record demonstrates that deceased voters are removed from Michigan’s voter rolls on a regular and ongoing basis.” The decision was upheld by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, prior to the group’s appeal to the Supreme Court. Read Article

Nevadans gear up to protect election from federal interference | Matthew Mondschein/Nevada Current

The Trump administration’s threat to take control of elections in several states and its refusal to rule out immigration agents at polling stations not only threatens the integrity of this year’s elections, but also amounts to voter suppression and intimidation, election advocates say. Silver State Voices, the ACLU of Nevada, All Voting is Local, and Nevada Immigrant Coalition are sounding the alarm about overtures coming from Washington, which Silver State Voices Executive Director Emily Persaud-Zamora said are “designed to suppress and discourage us from participating actively in democracy.” All Voting is Local Nevada State Director Kerry Durmick said White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s refusal during a Feb. 5 press briefing to guarantee that Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) agents won’t be at polling stations spurred the groups to action. Read Article

New Hampshire Republicans vote to end use of school IDs for elections | Todd Bookman/New Hampshire Public Radio

College and high school students would no longer be able to use photo identification cards issued by their schools to obtain a ballot, under a proposal that cleared the New Hampshire Senate on Thursday on a 16-8 vote. The New Hampshire House, on a near-party line vote, previously approved HB 323, which will now head to Gov. Kelly Ayotte’s desk. Republicans argue that ending the use of school-issued ID cards will strengthen election integrity and create more uniformity across polling locations. Sen. Rebecca Perkins Kwoka, a Democrat from Portsmouth, said the measure unfairly targets young voters who are otherwise qualified to participate in New Hampshire elections. “What this bill really does, in effect, is restrict the ability for college students to vote,” she said. Read Article

Texas: Eastland County’s hand count of Republican primary ballots stretched into Wednesday as residents waited on results | Natalia Contreras/Votebeat

Just after midnight, as Election Day became Wednesday, workers at a polling place in the city of Rising Star called Eastland County election administrator Temi Nichols with a problem. They told Nichols some workers tasked with hand counting the GOP ballots cast at that location had decided to call it quits, she told a reporter afterwards, and she tried to talk those on the phone out of joining them “Please don’t load up and take off,” Nichols said. The workers on the other end of the phone said they weren’t sure how to read the tally sheets the other workers had left behind or fill out the required paperwork, among other things, according to Nichols. They asked her if they could go home and finish counting in the morning. Read Article

Wisconsin Senate lags on election bills without dedicated committee | Alexander Shur/Votebeat

When this legislative session began, Wisconsin Senate leaders made the unusual decision not to create a committee dedicated to election policy for the first time in nearly two decades. That choice has had a measurable consequence: The Senate has taken up far fewer election bills than the Assembly, and several measures that cleared the lower chamber are now stalled with no clear path forward. Of the 19 election bills that Votebeat has tracked this legislative session, 18 have gotten at least a public committee hearing in the Assembly, compared with nine in the Senate. Fourteen of those bills passed the Assembly, compared with six in the Senate. Even in a session when the Senate has generally moved more slowly than the Assembly on many issues — as of Feb. 25, the Assembly has passed 439 bills since the start of the current two-year session, while the Senate has passed 276 — the disparity is especially stark on elections. Read Article

Wyoming: “Hands On Everything”: Clerk Warns Of Tampering Risk As Voting Machine Bill Passes | David Madison/Cowboy State Daily

During a conference committee hearing Wednesday on Senate File 28, Fremont County Clerk Julie Freese told lawmakers about a previous public testing of voting equipment in the state where observers crossed a line. “They had their hands on everything and had stuff with them,” Freese said, without identifying the county. The account underscored her central argument: that county clerks must retain discretion to control who enters secure election spaces and how many people can be present during mandatory pre-election equipment tests. In a follow-up interview after the hearing, Freese provided a fuller picture of the incident, which she said was relayed to her by another clerk. The testing had taken place in a room that also contained boxes of county records — a common reality in Wyoming’s smaller courthouses. Read Article