National: Election officials across the country prepare to fight any Trump administration interference in the 2026 midterms | Carter Walker and Dion Nissenbaum/Votebeat

Each year, election officials prepare for the worst: A bomb threat at a polling place, power outages, natural disasters. But this year, they are wrestling a potential threat they have never before considered: the possibility that the federal government might disrupt the administration of November’s elections. It’s not clear what action, if any, the Trump administration may take to interfere with the 2026 midterms, but election officials from jurisdictions large and small are preparing for everything from immigration officers at the polls to federal attempts to seize ballots. They’re also acknowledging that most standoffs with the federal government would likely end in court, and they’re talking to lawyers and preparing legal filings in case they prove necessary. Read Article

Wisconsin: Plans in place if servers falter on election night | Wisconsin Law Journal

Milwaukee wasn’t the only place in Wisconsin with election-night issues during the Aug. 11 primary that prolonged the reporting of unofficial results in an extremely close Democratic race for governor. Green and Winnebago counties experienced server issues that delayed the time the two county clerks were able to upload results to their websites, though the problems didn’t affect the accuracy of the results. A new report from the Wisconsin Elections Commission shows the bipartisan agency’s staff met after the election with officials in those two counties and Liberty Vote, the counties’ voting equipment vendor, about a “small number of equipment-related concerns” on Election Day. In a statement to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, a spokesperson for Liberty Vote, formerly known as Dominion Voting Systems, said “no votes were lost, altered, or miscounted. The review identified a configuration setting governing the format in which unofficial results are transmitted from municipal locations to the county reporting system. The setting has been corrected in both counties. In Winnebago County, Liberty Vote separately identified a hardware fault in the county’s server and replaced the unit within two weeks of the primary,” the spokesperson said. . Read Article

Ohio: Court reinstates law requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration | Ashley Ahn/Politico

An appeals court on Wednesday reinstated an Ohio law requiring people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote at motor vehicles offices, a win for Republicans seeking to tighten voter requirements nationwide. A panel of three judges on the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 to block a lower court ruling that had granted a preliminary injunction against the voter ID law in August. The majority argued that the advocacy groups that brought the suit failed to demonstrate that the law would likely prevent people from registering to vote. Red Wine & Blue and Ohio Alliance for Retired Americans sought to block the Ohio law. They argued that it conflicted with the National Voter Registration Act, which requires “the minimum amount of information necessary” required by the law to complete a voter registration. Read Aerticle

Texas GOP lawmaker says state should have caught error that delayed at least 178,000 voter registrations | Natalia Contreras/The Texas Tribune

A key Texas Republican lawmaker says state officials must be held accountable for an error that led to a backlog of at least 178,000 voter registration applications from the Texas Department of Public Safety. Votebeat reported earlier this week that DPS failed to send counties thousands of voter registration applications and updates submitted through its online driver’s license portal. Some of those date back at least a year, and counties are now being hit with a deluge of applications to process in the weeks leading up to November’s midterm election. State Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Republican from Houston who has championed election administration legislation for years, told Votebeat on Thursday that although a DPS failure is at the heart of the problem, the Texas Secretary of State’s office should have caught the issue because it oversees the system the counties use to receive the files from DPS. “If the files were received, pulled, or not, that should have been noticeable,” Bettencourt said. “They should have caught it.” Read Article