Iowa Secretary of State says election losses aren’t proof of fraud as midterms near | Nick El Hajj/Des Moines Register

Before a breakfast crowd of conservative activists, Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate invoked Ronald Reagan’s "big tent" and declined to validate claims that Democrats would try to "cheat" in the November midterm elections. The questions came as Pate, a Republican seeking a fifth overall term, made his pitch to the Westside Conservative Club at the Machine Shed in Urbandale. He faces Democrat Ryan Peterman, a former Navy pilot from Davenport, on Nov. 3. With no presidential race atop the ballot this year, Pate moved between his two roles throughout the morning: candidate and Iowa’s chief election official. "To be very candid, I’m concerned about voter participation this time around," Pate said. "And now I’m wearing my candidate hat for a moment here." Read Article

Pennsylvania Secretary of State tells Trump admin: Show us your proof of noncitizen voting here | Michelle Baruchman/The Philadelphia Inquirer

Pennsylvania’s top election official contended in a letter to a cabinet secretary this week that the Trump administration’s own staff does not have “high confidence” in its claims of thousands of noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls. In a letter to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, Secretary of State Al Schmidt said the Department of Homeland Security has still not fulfilled a promise to provide a written copy of its methodology “with a list of specific data sources” for its calculation that there are more than 14,500 noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls — a claim Schmidt and other Pennsylvania officials dispute. “We await this information,” Schmidt said in the letter, citing a virtual Aug. 13 meeting with DHS staff. Schmidt, a Republican appointed by Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro, told Mullin that during that meeting “DHS representatives explained that they did not have high confidence that the 14,576 individuals... were, in fact, non-citizens who had improperly registered to vote in Pennsylvania.” Read Article

National: ‘Trump ultimately wants the chaos’: States can’t implement anti-mail voting order before midterms, experts warn | Alexandra Hutzler/Democracy Docket

“We are way too close to an election for any major changes,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D) told Democracy Docket after the Supreme Court allowed the administration to move forward, for now, with President Donald Trump’s anti-mail voting executive order. But, with 68 days until Election Day and some ballots being mailed as soon as next week, major changes are exactly what a new U.S. Postal Service rule imposing restrictions on a voting method one-third of Americans used in 2024 would require of election administrators. “I would argue that it’s already functionally impossible to implement. We’re well past that date,” said Pamela Smith, the president and CEO of Verified Voting, a nonprofit that promotes the responsible use of technology in elections. You don’t upend something that’s centuries old on a whim.” Read Article

National: Census report does not prove Trump’s claim about 2020 noncitizen voting | Melissa Goldin/Associated Press

Trump’s Truth Social post on Tuesday referenced a report published by the U.S. Census Bureau that he said checked “Voter Records from 2020 against their Citizenship Records,” finding 24,000 noncitizens voted illegally in just its initial search. The report is described as a “beginning analysis.”But experts say its methodology is flawed and could have created many false positives. “This is the weakest methodology description I’ve ever seen in a Census Bureau publication,” said Mark Lindeman, policy and strategy director at Verified Voting, a nonpartisan group focused on election technology. “This document doesn’t tell us anything about elections. It just shows that the Census Bureau has gone off the rails.” He added that the Census Bureau is not clear about which databases it used in its analysis, which he said “exists essentially as a propaganda offering,” and that it does not explain likely sources of errors. Read Article

National: Voting rights experts skeptical over Trump pledge of 1,000 election monitors | Rachel Leingang and Sam Levine/The Guardian

Former officials and voting rights experts have expressed skepticism over a pledge by the Trump administration to dispatch 1,000 monitors across the country to scrutinize November’s US midterm elections. While the Department of Justice (DoJ) has expressed hope that the operation will be the largest in its history, its plan raised questions over its ability to recruit so many people – and what they would do. The US president has repeatedly denied the results of election defeats, including his 2020 loss in the presidential election to Joe Biden, and in recent months has escalated concerns that he will seek to meddle in November’s elections. Read Article

Opinion: Trump’s Election Interference Is Eroding American Democracy | The New York Times Editorial Board

The surest sign of democratic collapse is the unwillingness of an elected political party to leave office. The party rewrites laws and changes election rules to prevent its opponents from gaining power. The shift often starts slowly but can ultimately end in autocracy. President Trump has taken worrisome steps down this path since returning to office in January 2025. He has directed Republican-run states to enact newly gerrymandered maps to increase the chances that Republicans maintain control of Congress even if they receive fewer votes this year. He has tried to pass legislation that could keep many eligible voters from voting. And he has sent signals that he may use the power of the federal government to disallow legitimate ballots this fall. On July 16, Mr. Trump took the remarkable step of giving a prime-time White House address devoted to lies and misleading statements about voter fraud. Read Article

An Arizona Official’s Road From Election Skeptic to Election Defender | Carl Smith/Governing

One day. That’s how long it took to turn Michelle Burchill’s ideas about election administration upside down. In 2020, Burchill took a voter registration job in the recorder’s office in Yavapai County, a rural jurisdiction in Arizona. A Republican and Donald Trump supporter, she didn’t like the way social media platforms were censoring his speech. She’d encountered plenty of claims about “rigged elections” and Russian collusion. “I was an election skeptic, for sure,” she says. Her first day on the job, March 17, was a presidential preference election day, in which Democratic voters would choose their preferred presidential nominee. Burchill had never worked in election administration, and her boss told her to just come “soak it all in.” Watch. Listen. Learn. Read Article

Nevada: Trump admin quietly walks back claim of 16K noncitizens voting | Tabitha Mueller/The Nevada Independent

Federal officials have been unable to back up their allegations that nearly 16,000 noncitizens could be registered to vote in Nevada, telling the Nevada Secretary of State's Office in a private call that they were still reviewing thousands of names on the list after President Donald Trump (R) made sweeping allegations last month about noncitizens voting. Email records and a recording of an Aug. 13 meeting between the secretary of state's office and representatives from the Department of Homeland Security obtained via a public records request indicate that federal officials have only been able to identify 185 potential noncitizen voters so far, and the 15,903 number they originally gave was a "ceiling. The 15,000 would have been the preliminary," Kimberley Vogt, the fraud division chief in the fraud detection and national security directorate at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said during the meeting. "And then the manual review once we are done and confirm that we have a high degree of confidence … that would be what we would send." Read Article

National: Will Trump interfere in the midterms? Democrats and their allies are preparing | Kevin Rector and Justine McDaniel/Los Angeles Times

Big-city mayors are giving poll workers panic buttons in case election skeptics question their work. County and state officials are gaming out responses to immigration raids near voting centers. Lawyers for Democratic states and civic groups are pre-writing legal challenges to ballot seizures. And Democratic aides in Washington are preparing members of Congress to push back in the court of public opinion against any baseless claims of voter fraud in competitive districts. Across California and the nation, civic organizations, voting rights advocates and Democratic leaders are preparing for a raft of potential actions by the Trump administration to interfere in, subvert or deny November’s midterm vote. Read Article

Ohio: Court halts proof-of-citizenship requirement at motor vehicle offices | Laura Meckler/The Washington Post

A federal judge temporarily blocked Ohio from requiring proof of citizenship when registering to vote at motor vehicle offices, a setback for conservative efforts to tighten voter registration rules ahead of the November midterms. Ohio’s law requiring proof of citizenship at Bureau of Motor Vehicles’ offices conflicts with the federal National Voter Registration Act, the court said. A preliminary injunction was granted on Tuesday. The Ohio rules were challenged by Red Wine & Blue, a liberal activist group centered on suburban women, and the Ohio Alliance for Retired Americans. “Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act to reduce barriers for eligible Americans seeking to register to vote,” Ben Stafford, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs, said in a statement. He said Ohio’s “burdensome” proof-of-citizenship requirement “is exactly the type of government-imposed barrier that the NVRA exists to prevent.” Read Article

National: Nothing changes yet with the Supreme Court’s order on elections. But it could open door to ‘chaos’ | Nicholas Riccardi/Associated Press

The Supreme Court’s decision giving preliminary approval for President Donald Trump’s order restricting mail voting may not lead to a single election procedure changing during the November midterms, but it has already thrown into uncertainty the method that nearly one-third of the country uses to vote. Rather than saying that Trump’s order is legal, the high court said Monday it was too early for Democratic-run states to challenge it in June, when they convinced a federal judge in Boston to freeze the order for November’s election. That effectively restarts the legal fight over the order in an incredibly compressed timeline, with initial ballots scheduled to be sent to North Carolina’s overseas and military voters in just over a week, on Sept. 4. A second injunction barring the U.S. Postal Service from making changes to comply with Trump’s directive remains in effect. Still, the administration late Monday filed a motion asking that the second hold be removed, and has posted new regulations from the Postal Service that would go into effect Tuesday if the legal pathway is fully cleared. Read Article

California county’s election drama worsens as official locks up ballots | Hailey Branson-Potts/Los Angeles Times

Days after the top elections official in Shasta County announced that he planned to hire an election denier who served prison time for tampering with voting machines, county leaders there made an extraordinary plea to state and federal authorities: Please come investigate. A statement released by the county Tuesday afternoon said Clint Curtis, the registrar of voters, had made “frivolous” claims and “unproven statements” about the June primary election, which he administered and certified. “The County condemns the conduct of the Clerk-Registrar of Voters and invites all relevant state and federal agencies to review the allegations he has made and to proactively investigate his official actions and practices as Shasta County’s elections official,” read the statement released by Stewart Buettell, the county’s deputy chief executive. Read Article

North Carolina governorpushes to block new rules targeting mail-in ballots, voter ID | Kyle Ingram/Raleigh News & Observer

Democratic Gov. Josh Stein on Wednesday urged officials to delay the adoption of new election rules that would set new conditions on mail-in ballots and make it easier to throw out ballots cast by voters who don’t provide photo ID. “Our state’s elections administrators should seek to make it easier — not harder — for eligible North Carolinians to lawfully make their voice heard at the ballot box and have confidence their vote will be respected,” Stein wrote in a letter shared with The News & Observer. “Unfortunately, the ... proposed rules undercut those core democratic principles, and implementing such changes so close to an election invites confusion and undermines faith in our democratic process.” The proposed rules, which passed the Republican-majority State Board of Elections in party-line votes last month, are set to be heard by the state’s Rules Review Commission on Thursday. Read Article

National: Judge issues new block on Trump’s sweeping restrictions on mail-in voting | Justin Jouvenal/The Washington Post

A federal judge in Massachusetts on Thursday once again blocked major pieces of the Trump administration’s plan to impose sweeping restrictions on mail-in voting for November’s elections, but the legal fight will continue. U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani issued a temporary restraining order halting parts of the effort that would bar the U.S. Postal Service from delivering mail-in ballots to voters not on a list of citizens created by federal agencies. It also requires mail-in ballot envelopes to have barcodes to thwart fraud. The judge’s move continues a week of intense legal action over the controversial executive order on mail-in voting issued by President Donald Trump. It is the subject of multiple legal challenges. Read Article

Wyoming’s Republican governor raises concerns over ‘aggressive’ DOJ election monitors | Adam Edelman/NBC

Wyoming Republican Gov. Mark Gordon expressed concern Wednesday over how election monitors from the U.S. Justice Department observed the state’s primaries last week, saying it was “aggressive” and “irregular.” “It sounded like the behavior of the observers was a bit aggressive,” he said at a state canvassing board meeting Wednesday. “It just was irregular and I have asked the attorney general to start looking into, you know, kind of the nature of the visits and all that sort of stuff,” Gordon added. He said that state and local officials had not been told ahead of time of the DOJ’s plans. He added that while he was not “objecting to the observers,” their “behavior seemed to exceed what the authority that Congress had given them was.” Read Article