Trump fires Election Assistance Commission members, leaving agency unable to act | Jessica Huseman/Votebeat

President Donald Trump fired all three remaining members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission on Thursday, abruptly disabling the only federal agency devoted solely to election administration at a moment when Trump has sought to reshape federal voting rules. The two Democratic commissioners, Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland, were notified by email. “On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as Commissioner of the Election Assistance Commission is terminated, effective immediately. Thank you for your service,” the email said. It was signed by Morgan DeWitt Snow, deputy director of presidential personnel in the Executive Office of the President. The third commissioner, Republican Christy McCormick, was allowed to resign, according to three sources within the agency. McCormick declined to comment when reached by phone. The agency’s fourth commissioner, Republican Donald Palmer, voluntarily departed the agency earlier this year to join the Heritage Foundation. Read Article

National: Trump administration ramps up pressure on state election officials | Geoff ulvihill and Marc Levy/Associated Press

President Donald Trump’s administration is threatening to withhold some federal funding from states that don’t make changes to voting practices and is warning state election officials that they face arrest if they don’t remove noncitizens from voter rolls. Letters to states and grant application details are the latest in a line of actions by Trump’s administration to shape details of running elections that have long been the job of states. Courts have largely rejected the administration’s previous efforts, which reflect untrue claims about widespread voting fraud and come less than four months ahead of crucial midterm elections where Democrats seek to take control of one or both chambers of Congress and check Trump’s power. “The overall point is that Trump is trying to use whatever levers of power and persuasive power that he might have to try to interfere with how states and localities are going to conduct the 2026 election,” said Rick Hasen, a UCLA law professor and the director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project. “Some of this is aimed at changing how the rules are conducted. Some of it appears to be aimed at undermining voter confidence in the integrity of the election process.” Read Article

National: Justice Department Threatens Top Election Officials Over Noncitizen Voting | Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times

The Justice Department sent letters to at least 10 states on Tuesday threatening criminal prosecution of top election officials if ballots cast by noncitizens were counted in upcoming elections. The letters arrived in the midst of an ongoing campaign by President Trump and his allies to tighten election rules to prevent a problem that doesn’t exist: widespread noncitizen voting in American elections. The effort has, however, continued to sow doubt and distrust in the electoral process, most notably among the president’s base of supporters. And his proposals could have the effect of making it more difficult for eligible voters to cast their ballots — an outcome that many voting-right activists say is the president’s real goal. The letters sent on Tuesday came from Harmeet Dhillon, who runs the Justice Department’s civil rights division. They are largely identical, according to multiple copies obtained by The New York Times. The seven-page letters detail a host of federal election laws that prohibit noncitizens from voting in elections — laws that have been clear for decades. Read Article

National: States will shape America’s future as nation confronts a pivotal choice | Jonathan Shorman and Kevin Hardy/News From The States

A quarter millennium after its founding, the United States faces a stark choice that will define its future. In the years ahead, the country can continue to follow the path blazed by President Donald Trump, who is attempting to bring states under the authority of a more powerful federal government led by him. Or it can move in a different direction, one where states become a heavier counterweight to an aggressive White House and rebalance the relationship between the states and the federal government. The United States’ foundations are undergoing a significant stress test, experts say, raising questions about whether a radical reconception of the nation lies ahead. The federalism that has helped bind the states — and therefore, the nation — together is fraying, pulled apart by a president who demonstrates little regard for many of the nation’s core principles. Read Article

National: Federal law that protects voters from last-minute removal is at the center of Trump’s anti-voting war | Yunior Rivas/Democracy Docket

If the Supreme Court weakens the quiet period, that protection could be replaced by a dangerous rule under which last-minute purges are barred only when states call them purges. The 90-day quiet period exists because elections require stability, not chaos, in the run-up to Election Day. Congress recognized that if eligible voters are swept up in a large removal program shortly before an election, many won’t have enough time to discover the mistake and get it corrected,” Pamela Smith, president and CEO of the pro-voting nonprofit Verified Voting, told Democracy Docket. “Removing the 90-day buffer takes away the only structural safeguard between a bad data match and eligible voters’ ability to participate. That doesn’t mean voter registration lists stop being maintained. Election officials update them year-round, and individualized changes still happen during the quiet period — whether that’s processing a voter’s own request to cancel their registration, recording a death, or making other routine corrections permitted under state and federal law,” Smith said. “What the quiet period restricts is a systematic effort to remove a broad class of voters based on shared criteria. Calling a large-scale removal effort ‘individualized’ doesn’t change how it functions if the same criteria are being applied across thousands of records. County election officials already routinely review and maintain voter registrations on an individual basis throughout the year,” Smith added. “Labeling a bulk removal program as a case-by-case review just before an election doesn’t change its substance. Doing so would still undermine the period’s purpose and risk disenfranchising those who have every right to cast their ballot.” Explainer: Federal law that protects voters from last-minute removal is at the center of Trump’s anti-voting war - Democracy Docket

National: Threat of Foreign Influence on U.S. Elections Remain as Federal Defenses Recede | Kate Lurie and Zarine Kharazian/Brennan Center for Justice

Foreign influence is a persistent threat to U.S. elections, and three countries — China, Iran, and Russia — are poised to attempt to influence the 2026 midterms. Though their behavior is not new, this year, their access to sophisticated artificial intelligence tools and the lack of federal governmental pushback against them will likely require additional diligence from voters to ensure that they have accurate information. The Trump administration has degraded the federal infrastructure for detecting and countering foreign election threats, leaving states to prepare for these threats largely on their own for the first time since 2016. The rapid advances in artificial intelligence tools have increased both the capabilities of existing actors and made the influence campaigns more believable. Further, domestic actors, including the Trump administration, are using the real threat of foreign influence — mixed with promotion of unsubstantiated rumors of foreign interference, meaning the technical targeting of voting machines or other hardware — to advance their political goals. Read Article

National: US Postal Service cannot carry out Trump order on mail ballot delivery, judge rules | Tierney Sneed/CNN

A federal judge blocked the US Postal Service from carrying out its plan for President Donald Trump’s mail ballot executive order, finding that the proposal violated a settlement in a 2020 lawsuit against the agency. Trump had directed USPS to only transmit ballots for states that submit to the agency lists of their mail-in voters and that meet other requirements for their mail voting programs. Previously, a judge in Boston had halted the Postal Service from implementing the order for two-dozen states that challenged it in court. But the new ruling from US District Judge Emmet Sullivan, who sits in Washington DC, blocks the directives nationwide. If courts let Trump’s order from March 2026 stand, it would give the federal government an unprecedented role in elections — and could put even more voter data in the hands of Trump officials searching for supposed election fraud. Read Article

National: Trump Is Getting Tired of Losing Election Cases | Toluse Olorunnipa/The Atlantic

Earlier this year, President Trump claimed a new area of expertise: election law. “I have searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject,” Trump wrote on social media, and found an “irrefutable one” that he would soon present. He suggested that it would allow him to bypass Congress and gain approval from the courts to impose his will on the nation’s locally run election system, including requiring voters to show identification while casting ballots in the upcoming midterms. It was a heady time for a man who obsesses over voting policy and is seeking to prove that the 2020 election was stolen out from under him. Two weeks before Trump claimed in his February 13 post to have broken new legal ground, the FBI had conducted a raid of an election warehouse in Fulton County, Georgia. Officials made off with more than 650 boxes of ballots as part of a criminal investigation stemming from Trump’s 2020 defeat, an unprecedented action that the president hailed as a major advance for his unsubstantiated claim that the contest was riddled with fraud. The House of Representatives had just passed the SAVE America Act, a bill that would force people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and to show photo identification when casting a ballot. Read Article

Opinion: The Roberts court is leading America backward on race | David H. Gans/Slate

Over a century ago, when the Supreme Court helped usher in Jim Crow, Justice John Marshall Harlan took his colleagues to task for betraying the promise of Reconstruction. Dissenting in Plessy v. Ferguson, Harlan insisted that “in view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” In the Supreme Court term that just ended, the Roberts court turned Harlan’s anti-caste reading on its head. This court read the 14th Amendment, time and again, as the justification to lock in racial subordination and to immunize bias and prejudice from scrutiny. A big part of the story of the term that just ended is that this conservative supermajority will give the Reconstruction Amendments the stingiest reading possible. Read Article

Arizona: The War Over Who Controls Elections in a Key Midterm Battleground | Eliza Collins/The Wall Street Journal

Maricopa County was the locus of baseless allegations that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. Just four months before this November’s pivotal midterm elections, the issue is far from settled. In videos released this summer by Maricopa County, two election staff—one of them a top aide to the Maricopa County recorder—removed a ballot envelope scanner and provisional ballot envelopes from a secure location while votes for a special election were still being tallied. They returned the equipment within an hour. The incident is the latest flashpoint in an increasingly bitter fight between the mostly Republican elected officials who run elections in Arizona’s biggest county. The clash has rekindled a debate many Arizona voters had hoped to move on from. Read Article

Colorado Governor Jared Polis fires clemency board members who spoke out about Tina Peters decision | Nick Coltrain/The Denver Post

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis fired two members of his clemency advisory board Wednesday for publicly speaking against his decision to free Tina Peters after she was convicted of election-related crimes. Polis removed Hannah Seigel Proff and Azra Taslimi from the advisory board because they “breached the required duty of confidentiality by publicly divulging board members’ votes,” according to letters from Polis reported Wednesday afternoon by the New York Times, which was first to break the news. Following the 2020 election, Peters, then the Mesa County clerk and recorder, gave a person associated with election-denier Mike Lindell access to Mesa County’s voting system. She was found guilty of four felonies and sentenced in October 2024 to nine years in prison for the crimes. Gov. Polis fires clemency board members for speaking about Tina Peters

Georgia: Judge rejects DOJ attempt to get names of 2020 Fulton County election workers | Kate Brumback/Associated Press

The U.S. Department of Justice cannot have the names and personal contact information for every person who worked during the 2020 election in Georgia’s Fulton County, a federal judge ruled Tuesday. The Justice Department served a grand jury subpoena in April seeking the names and personal contact information of county employees and volunteer poll workers. President Donald Trump has long claimed without evidence that widespread voter fraud in Georgia’s most populous county, a Democratic stronghold, cost him victory in the state in 2020. Fulton County asked a judge to quash the subpoena, arguing it was meant to “target, harass and punish the President’s perceived political opponents” and that it was “grossly over broad and untethered to any reasonable need.” Read Article

Georgia: A last-minute change to ballot QR code bill could steer voting in a new direction | Maya Homan/Georgia Recorder

At least five different U.S.-based companies, including Liberty Vote, offer on-demand ballot printing, according to Verified Voting, a nonprofit organization that tracks election equipment across the country. The state does currently rely on paper ballots to tally the official results, though only absentee and provisional ballots are marked by hand. Georgia is also one of the few states that uses one type of election equipment statewide, meaning that a shift in the vendor who supplies the results would impact all of the state’s 159 counties. Mark Lindeman, Verified Voting’s policy and strategy director, said Fleming’s amendment largely aligns with the organization’s recommendation that most voters use ballots marked by hand and counted by machines, which they see as having the fewest risks and ensures that election officials can verify the outcome of an election. Precincts will still be required to have a certain number of ballot-marking devices to fulfill federal accessibility requirements though. “I think it’s a good path for Georgia to adopt for 2028,” Lindeman said, noting that the extended deadline was crucial to give state and local officials time to switch over to the new system. “There have been proposals to try to roll this out somehow this year, and I just didn’t see how any of those could work. There just wasn’t enough time to put it together.”  Read Article

Maryland delays approval of new $109M voting system after rise of transparency concerns | Sarah Petrowich/WYPR

The Maryland Board of Public Works has delayed approving a $109 million voting system overhaul after advocates and state lawmakers brought up concerns around the contract’s transparency and price tag. The State Board of Elections (SBE) is seeking approval of a five-year contract with Election Systems and Software (ES&S) to implement a new statewide voting system, which includes ballot marking devices, scanners and tabulators. “We have a system that is currently 11 and a half years old, and we were scheduled to purchase new equipment for the 2028 election so that we can then gear up for the 2030 redistricting effort,” State Administrator of Elections Jared DeMarinis told WYPR. The contract is part of a larger effort to revamp Maryland’s entire elections system. Read Article

Michigan: DOJ says it will monitor primary elections | Craig Mauger/The Detroit News

President Donald Trump's Department of Justice has informed Michigan officials it intends to send election monitors to three cities in the battleground state for the Aug. 4 primary. Letters from the federal department about the plans have mentioned Detroit, Lansing and East Lansing, said two sources who had knowledge of the messages but spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss them publicly. All three cities are Democratic strongholds. Detroit is Michigan's largest city. Lansing and East Lansing, which is home to Michigan State University, are located in the swing 7th U.S. House District, where Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Barrett of Charlotte is seeking a second term in November but faces no primary opponent. Read Article

Feds leave Minnesota to fend for itself on election security | Briana Bierschbach/The Minnesota Star Tribune

By this point in a typical election year, federal intelligence officials would have briefed Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon and other election officials on emerging threats to the November election. Simon would have joined federal agencies in rehearsing responses to worst-case scenarios, from foreign cyberattacks and bomb threats to severe weather on Election Day. Instead, with four months until voters head to the polls, Simon said those briefings and trainings never happened. Now, some of the worst-case scenarios election officials are preparing for involve the Trump administration. “The federal government itself is now the potential obstacle — or even the instigator,” Simon said. “That’s what’s different this time.” Read Article

North Carolina House passes its controversial elections bill with only GOP votes | Lynn Bonner/NC Newsline

A divided state House approved an elections bill Tuesday that clears a path for more ballot challenges, election audits, and registration removals. Democrats roundly criticized House Bill 958, saying it will make unfounded voter challenges more likely, sow confusion, inject partisanship into election administration, and make it harder for eligible voters to have their votes count. “You don’t know the fear of having a government agency coming in and turning your life upside down,” said House Democratic Leader Robert Reives (D-Chatham). The House approved the bill in a party-line 66-47 vote. It now goes to the Senate for consideration. Rep. Phil Rubin (D-Wake) argued the bill is based on the false premise that the voter rolls are overrun with ineligible voters, when study after study has shown that isn’t the case.“This bill legislates a fantasy, and it chases ghosts,” he said. NC House passes its controversial elections bill with only GOP votes • NC Newsline

Texas Attorney General’s voter registration may violate Texas election law | Zach Despart/The Texas Tribune

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton appears to have used an address where he did not live while voting in six elections in the past two years, including in May’s runoff that made him the Republican nominee for U.S. senator. State Sen. Angela Paxton said in a 2025 divorce filing that Paxton, whom she accused of adultery, moved out of their Collin County home a year earlier. But Paxton continues to list the home’s address in the northern Dallas suburb on his voter registration. Angela Paxton declined to be interviewed. A source close to the Paxtons said the attorney general has not moved back into the home since leaving. It is unclear where Paxton has lived for the past two years, but reporting by ProPublica and the Tribune has linked him to a home in neighboring Denton County since February. Read Article

Wisconsin: Green Bay city clerk on leave after state calls for investigation into duplicate ballots | Joe Schulz/WPR

The Green Bay City Clerk is on administrative leave, pending an internal review from the city and a state investigation into how her office issued duplicate ballots in two elections this year. Green Bay Mayor Eric Genrich issued a statement Thursday afternoon, saying City Clerk Celestine Jeffreys had been placed on leave. It came the same day the Wisconsin Elections Commission voted unanimously to investigate how Green Bay issued duplicate ballots in both the April election and the August primary. “Elections are a critical piece of the work we perform at the City,” Genrich stated. “While we have no concerns with the security or propriety of the electoral process, these errors in the Clerk’s Office are unacceptable.” Read Article

Wisconsin municipality disenfranchised voters using controversial absentee ballot policy | Alexander ShurVotebeat

For years, Mequon election workers employed an unusually strict standard for judging the validity of witness addresses on absentee ballot envelopes — a standard not apparently used elsewhere in Wisconsin and that the Wisconsin Elections Commission has now said is illegal. Under that standard, Mequon officials rejected absentee ballots if the witness address did not include a state or ZIP code and the municipality name was not unique nationwide. That’s despite the fact that Wisconsin’s absentee ballot envelope no longer specifically asks witnesses to provide the information Mequon treated as essential: a state or ZIP code. But a Votebeat review of hundreds of April 2026 absentee ballot envelopes, the dozens of ballots Mequon at least initially rejected since 2024, and scores of city records found that the city’s strict standard was applied unevenly — and, in some cases, resulted in the initial rejection of ballots that did not appear ambiguous at all. Read Article