National: Americans’ increased belief in voter fraud is a scary prospect in 2026 | Aaron Blake/CNN

President Donald Trump messing with the 2026 midterms beforehand — as he’s trying to do by sharply restricting mail ballots — is only part of the potential threat he’s posing to US elections. The other is his demonstrated tendency for claiming elections have been stolen after the fact, which resulted in the largest attack on the US Capitol in 200 years. New polling suggests Trump has kept that soil fertilized with a large portion of the country. Indeed, the president on Friday posted on social media the 5-year-old video of him telling January 6, 2021, rioters to go home and repeating his false claim that he won in 2020. And amid his repeated claims of widespread voter fraud, the polling suggests that soil might be even more fertile than its been in recent years, which is a scary prospect. Read Article

Wisconsin; Milwaukee voting machine logs reveal nothing askew despite election conspiracy theories | Alexander Shur/Votebeat

It took mere minutes for conspiracy theorists to seize on a Milwaukee election error after the August primary, when officials initially forgot to extract election results from five of the city’s nine absentee ballot tabulators. They lobbed baseless accusations that election officials had switched votes or otherwise tampered with the results. But audit logs from those five tabulators show no evidence of tampering between the time officials initially left the facility and returned again to correctly extract results. “I don’t see a ‘there’ there,” said Duncan Buell, a chair emeritus of computer science and engineering at the University of South Carolina who has been analyzing election data and voting systems since 2010. Milwaukee voting machine logs reveal nothing askew despite election conspiracy theories - Votebeat

Pennsyvania: Trump administration explains how it flagged potential noncitizen voters | Carter Walker/Votebeat

New records provide the most detail so far about the previously opaque process by which the federal government concluded that thousands of potential noncitizens are registered to vote in Pennsylvania. On July 16, the day President Donald Trump delivered a high-profile speech on election security, the Department of Homeland Security said it had found more than 250,000 potential noncitizens registered to vote in California, Nevada, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The states, though, called into question the accuracy of that number and asked for more information on how it was calculated. DHS answered Pennsylvania’s query on Sept. 9, according to an email to Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt obtained by Votebeat and Spotlight PA. The department said the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate identified the potential noncitizens by comparing the state’s publicly available voter roll to internal DHS databases. Read Article

North Carolina: Politically divided court panel upholds GOP takeover of state elections board | Will Doran/WRAL

A shift in political control of North Carolina's elections administration can remain in place, the state Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday, in a major win for Republicans as the 2026 midterm approach. The 2-1 ruling divided the court's three-judge panel along party lines, with Republicans in favor and the lone Democrat writing a dissent. For more than 100 years, until now, elections have been controlled by the governor in North Carolina. Republican state lawmakers tried multiple times to seize power for themselves under former Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, but those efforts were shot down in court as unconstitutional and then, later, at the ballot box when voters in 2018 rejected a proposed constitutional amendment to let the changes happen. Read Article

National: The new threat election officials fear: Trump’s federal government | Patrick Marley and Laura Meckler/The Washington Post

The activists staking out the ballot drop boxes in suburban Phoenix wore body armor and face coverings. With guns at their sides, they recorded residents as they deposited their votes during the last midterm elections. Voting-rights groups sued, and a federal judge put a stop to them, ruling they had to stay at least 250 feet away while armed to ensure voters were not intimidated. Four years later and 100 miles to the south, Pima County Attorney Laura Conover is treating the 2022 incident as a lesson on the importance of moving quickly this fall if anyone — including Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents — tries to interfere with the election’s administration. For her county along the U.S.-Mexico border, Conover has drawn up court papers so she can immediately file litigation to protect the vote. “When it comes to preparing for elections, we are on overdrive,” she said. Read Article

National: Supreme Court rejects Trump’s mail ballot limits before elections | Lindsay Whitehurst/Associated Press

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected President Donald Trump’s bid to restrict mail ballots for the midterm elections, capping a flurry of last-minute legal action with voting already underway. The decision allows states to continue sending out mail ballots under the same processes they’ve used for years and have accounted for nearly a third of votes cast. It represented a stark defeat for Trump on an issue he consistently has emphasized as vital to ensuring election integrity even though there is virtually no evidence of fraud with mail ballots. The Supreme Court majority wrote that the administration’s push to implement the restrictions this year is likely to lose in court, though the brief emergency order didn’t detail its reasoning. Two justices, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, publicly dissented. Read Article

National: Whistle-Blower: Federal Agents May Have Broken State Laws in Search for Voter Fraud | Nick Corasaniti and Hamed Aleaziz/The New York Times

Investigators may have broken state laws under the direction of top Homeland Security leaders by posing as voters as part of an expansive effort to find noncitizens on the nation’s voter rolls, according to a federal whistle-blower’s account released on Monday. The authorities also required agents to meet quotas, which afforded them a mere 12 minutes to review each voter record. The effort has relied on questionable data, and has likely improperly flagged U.S. citizens who are eligible to vote, the whistle-blower said in a nearly 30-page report. The whistle-blower report, provided to Senators Chuck Schumer and Alex Padilla, both Democrats, offers an inside view of the “Unlawful Voter Initiative.” The New York Times revealed last month the existence of the operation, which has deployed hundreds of federal agents to scour voter rolls managed by the states in a widespread hunt for evidence of voter fraud. The investigation stems from President Trump’s longstanding fixation on noncitizen voting, despite decades of research showing the practice is vanishingly rare. Read Article

National: Trump’s Effort to Assert Control Over Elections Continues, Despite Court Loss | Zolan Kanno-Youngs/The New York Times

The Supreme Court on Monday dealt President Trump a major blow when it blocked his executive order to restrict mail ballots. But Mr. Trump’s battle to assert control over the election process is far from finished. The stymied attempt to have the U.S. Postal Service screen mail ballots was just one piece of a broader effort involving the full power of the federal government to take more control of state-run elections. Just days before the Supreme Court blocked Mr. Trump’s mail ballot order, the Justice Department sent threatening letters to at least 30 top election officials across the country, escalating a fight to gain access to private voter data and election records. Federal agents are scouring voter rolls managed by states for noncitizens, despite a lack of evidence of widespread fraud. Mr. Trump’s homeland security secretary recently pushed for an investigation into whether a commonly used voting machine can be trusted, casting doubt on digital voting systems. “This is far from over,” said Benjamin Hovland, who was ousted from the independent, bipartisan Election Assistance Commission by the Trump administration this year. Mr. Hovland acknowledged that the Supreme Court’s decision mitigated “real-world impact” on voters and election workers, particularly since voters in some states had already begun to mail in their ballots. But he said Mr. Trump’s actions were alarming. Read Article

Minnesota Supreme Court sides with city in voter roster debate | Sarah Ritter/The Minnesota Star Tribune

The city of Oak Grove is allowed to use paper voter rosters in the upcoming November election despite serious objections from Anoka County, the Minnesota Supreme Court has ruled. The state’s highest court on Friday decided that the northern suburb has the authority to choose whether to check in voters with paper rosters during the general election. Anoka County switched over to tablets in 2018, and argued that all precincts within its jurisdiction must use the electronic poll pads. “This is a major victory for local election authority and the rule of law,” said Doug Seaton, founder of the Upper Midwest Law Center, a conservative legal group that represented the city at no cost. “Oak Grove made a lawful decision for its own precincts, and the Minnesota Supreme Court confirmed that state and county officials cannot rewrite the statute simply because they prefer a different system.” Read Article

California: ‘I did not find them’: GOP chairman makes rare apology for election fraud claim | Anabel Sosa/SF Gate

As voter fraud allegations run rampant within the Republican Party, the head of Marin County’s party made an unexpected apology last week for claims he made about dead people voting in the county last year. John Turnacliff, the chairman of the Marin County Republicans, claimed in February that dozens of dead people voted on Proposition 50, last year’s redistricting measure, and he requested that the county’s registrar of voters investigate. But during an open comment period during a county meeting last Tuesday, Turnacliff admitted that he was wrong after no election fraud was found. “I’m here today to retract that statement that I made a few months ago as far as those voters being on the roll. I did not find them,” he said. “I apologize to the Board of Supervisors and to the registrar’s office and to the registrar for any angst and consternation that could have put on you since then.” Read Article

National: Hundreds of Election Deniers Will Be on the Ballot This November | David Gibert/WIRED

On November 3, when voters across the US go to the polls, almost 200 election deniers will be on the ballot. Many of them have repeatedly undermined the very process they are participating in, and they will be looking to win some of the most powerful elected positions in the country—positions that would help determine how voting goes in future elections. These numbers include a sitting US congressman who voted against certifying the 2020 election results; a former state representative who integrated QAnon conspiracy theories into election denialism; and local election officials who have actively sought to undermine election results by pushing baseless conspiracy theories about noncitizen voting. But for election experts and officials, one of the biggest concerns ahead of the midterms is the possibility that these election deniers could obtain oversight of the 2028 presidential election process. The data shows there are already 27 election deniers in 20 states who hold a statewide office with election oversight, like secretary of state or attorney general—positions that allow the holder to set voting rules or prosecute those they believe are cheating at the ballots. In November, 33 election deniers will seek to secure similar positions in states across the country. Read Article