National: Trump can’t stop, won’t stop (undermining the 2026 elections) | Shirin Ali/Slate

President Donald Trump’s attempt to nationalize America’s voting system suffered another loss in court this week, just the latest in a lengthy series of defeats over Trump’s blatantly unlawful executive orders around voting. This time was a bit more dramatic, though, with a judge bluntly calling out the Justice Department for using a lawsuit against Minnesota as a “fishing expedition” to help it find a violation of federal law. U.S. District Court Judge Katherine Menendez dismissed the case, ultimately finding that Congress never authorized the attorney general to access voting records and documents that state officials create themselves. These continued losses won’t end the story, though. Newly confirmed Attorney General Todd Blanche announced this week that he’s considering asking the Supreme Court to intervene in the dozens of lawsuits his DOJ has filed against states that, like Minnesota, refused to hand over their voter rolls. Trump and Blanche are attempting to bully states into submission over “election integrity,” but it’s obvious what the real endgame is: Complete control over U.S. elections. Read Article

National: Trump Boasts of Declassifying Secrets, but Withholds Key Election Files From Public | Dustin Volz/The New York Times

The White House in recent weeks has made public a steady drip of previously classified intelligence about foreign threats to elections and other matters, offering President Trump and his allies ammunition for baseless conspiracy theories about potential vote rigging. But one crucial document has not been among the releases, despite a congressional requirement for it to be: the assessment by U.S. intelligence agencies of foreign meddling efforts during the 2024 election. The document would provide the public with a holistic look at foreign attempts to influence voters and sow division around the presidential contest and other federal races that year. The 2020 version of the assessment, released during the early weeks of the Biden administration, highlighted Russia’s efforts to boost Mr. Trump, Iran’s push to harm his candidacy and analytic judgments about actions China considered but largely refrained from taking. It also included a dissenting minority view that China took “at least some steps” intended to undermine Mr. Trump. The omission of the report on the 2024 election shows the highly selective nature of the Trump White House’s approach to declassification. It is just one example of many where the administration has ignored bipartisan pressure from Congress, including legal requirements, by withholding certain documents from public view even as it publishes hundreds of pages of material it has promised will reveal deep-state coverups of foreign meddling efforts. Read Article

National: Justice Department plans to send about 1,000 monitors to the polls this fall | Patrick Marley/The Washington Post

The Justice Department plans to dispatch about 1,000 monitors to the polls this fall — probably the largest number under a Republican president, according to a top assistant attorney general. The Justice Department routinely sends monitors to polling places to ensure election laws are followed and voters’ rights are protected. In the past — including during primaries this month — they have limited their involvement to observation, but Democrats have raised concerns about what they could do this fall because President Donald Trump this year said Republicans should “nationalize the voting” and “take over the voting.” Harmeet K. Dhillon, the assistant attorney general who leads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, told Bloomberg News that the deployment of about 1,000 poll monitors is “probably going to be a historic number for a Republican administration.” She did not say where they would go in an interview that was published Monday. Read Article

National: Democrats sue DOJ over midterm ballot seizure plans | Ryan Knappenberger/Courthouse News Service

The Democratic National Committee sued the Justice Department on Thursday over its refusal to turn over documents related to any plans to seize ballots, voting machines and other election materials within a month of any federal primary and general election during the midterms. The DNC filed the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, after the FBI declined to turn over such documents as requested in a Feb. 6, request brought in the wake of the FBI raid on the Fulton County election office on Jan. 28. “Following the seizure of archived ballots from Fulton County, Georgia — and seeking to ensure that the Trump administration does not attempt unprecedented abuses of criminal law enforcement tools to undermine upcoming elections — the Democratic National Committee sent requests for records under the Freedom of Information Act, to components of the Department of Justice concerning any planned seizure of ballots, voting machines and other voting systems components,” the DNC says in its complaint. Read Article

National: ‘I don’t trust you’:Tensions were high in an election security call for state leaders hosted by CISA | Dion Nissenbaum/Votebeat

Tensions between state election officials and the Trump administration are rising as we head into the heart of the midterm election season. Frustrations boiled over on Monday during a rare election security call hosted by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency for state officials. During the call, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes unloaded on the agency. CISA used to be a go-to shop for many states looking for help ensuring that their elections weren’t hacked, targeted, or undermined by cyberattacks or foreign interference. CISA provided states with classified security briefings on threats, helped ensure that state voting equipment wasn’t vulnerable to cyberattacks, and worked with election leaders to game out potential risks. All that changed when Donald Trump returned to the White House last year. The second Trump administration scaled back its support for states, cut back CISA staff, and launched an investigation of its former leader, whom Trump accused of disloyalty because he pushed back on the president’s false claims that the 2020 election was rigged. CISA has not had a permanent director since the start of Trump’s second term. Read Article

National: Experts slam Trump’s unusual new census report as a ‘hijack by the White House’ | Gabe Cohen and Fredreka Schouten/CNN

Former Census Bureau leaders, statisticians and voting-rights advocates are raising alarms about an unusual, unsigned new report posted on the agency’s website that claims tens of thousands of noncitizens voted in the 2020 presidential election. President Donald Trump touted the results Tuesday on Truth Social, saying the bureau had proved that more than 24,000 noncitizens illegally voted in 2020 after analyzing 128 million individual voter records. Even if the report is accurate, 24,000 votes would amount to less than 0.02% of the roughly 160 million ballots cast in 2020. Joe Biden won the national popular vote by more than 7 million votes. Read Article

National: Trump election demands spark suit over DHS anti-terrorism funding | Sarah D. Wire/USA Today

A group of prominent cities and counties are suing the Trump administration for withholding tens of millions of dollars in anti-terrorism funding unless states and local governments agree to change how they conduct elections. Harris County and El Paso County in Texas; Nashville, Tennessee, and Columbus, Ohio are participating in the suit. The lawsuit challenges the Federal Emergency Management Agency's June 2026 decision to hold back 20% or even all Homeland Security Grant Program grants unless the jurisdictions comply with five election administration orders. Read Article

National: How Trump Left America Vulnerable to Cyberattacks | Nick Miroff and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez/The Atlantic

During her January 2025 confirmation hearing to be secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem was asked how she would strengthen the nation’s cyberdefenses. Noem told senators that she would make the department’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency “smaller” and “more nimble.” President Trump had created CISA as a stand-alone agency within the Department of Homeland Security during his first term to give cybersecurity more institutional heft, and it had grown quickly with support from lawmakers of both parties. But after CISA declared the 2020 presidential election to be “the most secure in American history” and the agency’s director, Christopher Krebs, refused to back Trump’s claims that the vote had been stolen, Krebs became a target for the president’s fury and a seething grudge. During the DOGE fever of the first few months of Trump’s return, CISA’s budget was reduced and its staff cut by one-third. The agency hasn’t had a permanent, Senate-confirmed director since Trump retook office. In April, the White House proposed deeper cuts to CISA’s budget, but Republican lawmakers have raised concerns that critical U.S. infrastructure is already too vulnerable. Read Article

Alaska: DOJ issues grand jury subpoenas in probe of Dan J. Sullivan’s US Senate candidacy | Mark Sabbatini/Juneau Independent

With national media already focusing on Alaska’s U.S. Senate race during the state’s primary election on Tuesday, a new flurry of stories surfaced during the afternoon about the U.S. Department of Justice ​issuing grand jury subpoenas in its investigation of Dan J. Sullivan’s candidacy. Sullivan, a retired Petersburg teacher, is running as a Republican against namesake incumbent Sen. Dan S. Sullivan. Republican party officials, as well as the Alaska Division of Elections, have accused Dan J. Sullivan of being a sham candidate trying to confuse voters. The subpoenas were first reported by NBC News, citing "a law enforcement official" and noting the issuance of them last week "to compel information from witnesses linked to the campaign of Dan J. Sullivan" has not been previously reported. Other news agencies including Reuters published subsequent reports, also citing unnamed sources. Read Article

Arizona: Over 1,300 mail ballots were undelivered in Navajo County. Data suggests that’s not unusual. | Sasha Hupka/Votebeat

At least 50,000 mail ballots never made it to voters duriAt least 50,000 mail ballots never made it to voters during Arizona’s July 21 primary election. That number, based on information gathered by Votebeat from 11 of the state’s 15 counties, isn’t out of the ordinary. In fact, it appears roughly in line with that of prior major elections. About 71,000 mail ballots went undelivered statewide during the 2024 general election, according to data from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission that represented all of the state’s counties. Every year, some ballots that are mailed out to voters are returned to election officials because the voter’s address is incorrect or the voter has a forwarding address on file. (In Arizona, ballots legally can’t be forwarded.) Read Article

California: Tina Peters, pro-Trump election denier, went to prison. Now, Shasta County might hire her | Hailey Branson-Potts/Los Angeles Times

Tina Peters, the former Colorado elections official convicted of tampering with voting machines, was recently released early from prison amid a pressure campaign from President Trump. Now the top elections official in a conservative California county with a long history of voting controversies is seeking to hire her to help run elections there. Clint Curtis, the registrar of voters in Shasta County, said on a local radio show Sunday that he planned to hire Peters as the assistant registrar next month, just weeks ahead of the November election. Peters, the former clerk in Mesa County, Colo., was convicted in 2024 and sentenced to nine years behind bars for breaching her county’s voting machines as part of a scheme to show that the 2020 election was rigged against Trump — a claim that has been repeatedly debunked. Read Article

Georgia passed on election upgrades. A Princeton researcher exploited weaknesses in system. | Caleb Groves/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Using artificial intelligence to scan public databases, a Princeton University researcher has exploited a known weakness in Georgia’s voting system to identify, with fair certainty, how more than 2,200 people voted in Cherokee and Heard counties in the May primaries. Georgia election officials have known about the problem since 2022, but they have not updated the software for Georgia’s voting system since it was first purchased back in 2019. “Somehow, Georgia has not incorporated that sort of vulnerability patching into the maintenance of its election system,” said Alex Halderman, a computer science professor at the University of Michigan who was one of the security researchers to first flag the issue in 2022. Read Article

Maryland preps for multibillion-dollar shortfalls, approves $109.4M voting machine buy | Gary Collins/The Baltimore Sun

Maryland is preparing to spend up to $109.4 million on a new statewide voting system, setting up a costly election overhaul that uses similar machines as the state continues to confront large structural budget gaps for the rest of the decade. This large-scale purchase would mark nearly a quarter of a billion dollars in taxpayer expenditures on state election equipment since 2002. The Maryland Board of Public Works approved the contract on July 22 with Omaha-based Election Systems & Software (ES&S). The initial award is approximately $84.9 million, with two two-year renewal options that could increase the total to roughly $109.4 million over nine years. The equipment is intended to be ready for the 2028 presidential election. Procurement documents reviewed by Spotlight on Maryland show eight vendors were solicited, four submitted proposals, and ES&S received the highest overall technical ranking from the evaluation committee in a unanimous final decision. Read Article

Minnesota: Mike Lindell says he’ll pay for recount in 45,000-vote primary loss | Walker Orenstein/The Minnesota Star Tribune

MyPillow founder Mike Lindell is challenging the results of the Minnesota Republican primary for governor and says he will pay for a recount despite losing by more than 45,000 votes. The recount is Lindell’s latest effort to cast doubt on the security of elections after he became one of the country’s most prominent supporters of President Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Minnesota’s Secretary of State has not received an official request for a recount, said office spokesman Peter Bartz-Gallagher. Lindell would need to make that request, along with a bond, cash, or surety for the full estimated cost of $825,000 by Monday. Read Article

Nevada: Homeland Security Made a Big Claim About Noncitizen Voting. Now It Can’t Prove It. | Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times

A month after the Trump administration declared without evidence that thousands of noncitizens had illegally registered to vote in Nevada, officials with the Department of Homeland Security were unable to substantiate the claim. The administration claimed to have identified 278,000 noncitizens registered to vote in four states, including an exact number of 15,903 in Nevada. But during a meeting last week with state election administrators, Homeland Security officials said they had identified just 185 potential noncitizens in the state so far, according to emails as well as recordings of the meeting obtained by The New York Times. The federal officials said they were still considering 14,000 names for further review, according to one of the emails. In the virtual meeting, federal officials told Nevada that the nearly 16,000 they had originally identified represented “the ceiling” of potential noncitizens. But the list the Homeland Security Department shared with Nevada is incomplete — it doesn’t even include names — and is nearly impossible to verify, according to files released by the secretary of state’s office. Nevada officials have requested more information, but the department has not yet offered it. Read Article

North Carolina Democratic Governor vetoes Republican-backed ‘anti-voter’ North Carolina elections bill | Christine Zhu/NC Newsline

North Carolina Democratic Gov. Josh Stein vetoed a controversial elections law bill on Monday, saying the veto was necessary to defend voting rights. House Bill 958 includes provisions that would reduce early voting periods during primaries and special elections, require state Auditor Dave Boliek to conduct post-election audits of county election systems, and use federal databases with known problems to identify people who have died but remain on the voter rolls. “Our right to vote is precious. It’s the fundamental right that underpins every other right that we possess,” Stein said during a ceremony at the executive mansion, flanked by Democratic state lawmakers. “That’s why I will always protect you and your right to vote, and that’s why I am vetoing this anti-voter law today.” Read Article

Texas appeals court won’t block GOP-led county from changing voting maps after primary | Yunior Rivas/Democracy Docket

A Texas appeals court Thursday denied an emergency effort to stop Galveston County from using new voting districts in the November election, allowing the GOP-led county’s post-primary map change to move forward for now as the general election approaches. The 14th Court of Appeals rejected a petition from pro-voting plaintiffs who asked the court to block Galveston County from implementing district boundaries adopted after the March 2026 primaries. The plaintiffs argued that county officials should not be allowed to hold primary elections under one set of district lines and then use different boundaries for the general election just months later. Read Article

Wisconsin’s Green and Winnebago counties faced election result system errors in the August midterm primaries | Alexander Shur/Votebeat

Systems used to transmit unofficial election-night results broke down in Green and Winnebago counties during Wisconsin’s August primary, causing problems processing and posting results. The issues had no bearing on the official results that counties across the state are still certifying. But those breakdowns come as national experts have encouraged a move away from transmitting results over modems and toward physically delivering them. Many other states and election jurisdictions have shifted away from transmitting results by modem, but it remains common in Wisconsin. Pam Smith, the president and CEO of Verified Voting, an elections technology organization, said election security is not only about preventing incorrect results or cyberattacks. It also means making sure the systems that election officials rely on are available and functioning when they need them. A breakdown in transmitting unofficial results may not change the outcome of an election, she said, but it can still disrupt election-night operations and consume significant staff time. “It matters because it’s a time suck for the county, and everybody trying to deal with it,” she said.Read Article