Alaska appeals court dismisses noncitizen voting case against American Samoan | James Brooks/Alaska Beacon

A three-judge panel of the Alaska Court of Appeals ruled Friday that state prosecutors misled grand jurors who indicted a Whittier resident for allegedly voting illegally.Had jurors received accurate information, the court said, “the grand jury likely would have declined to indict.” Tupe Smith, the plaintiff behind Friday’s decision, is one of 11 people — all American Samoans — whom the state of Alaska has accused of criminally violating state law. Smith had filed a motion to dismiss the case against her, but a state superior court judge ruled against that motion. In Friday’s 20-page ruling, the three-judge panel reversed the lower court’s rejection and in the process, it also defined a high standard that prosecutors must meet in order to convict someone of voting illegally in Alaska. Read Article

California: Becerra joins voting rights group in urging Shasta County grand jury to remove Registrar of Voters Clint Curtis – Shasta Scout

California gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra, along with a state voting rights group, is urging the Shasta County Grand Jury to do its “duty” to initiate the process to remove Registrar of Voters Clint Curtis. The UCLA Voting Rights Project, a group for which Becerra is the senior legal advisor, wrote a letter today to the grand jury, board of supervisors and district attorney that outlined what they said is the jury and county officials’ responsibility to remove Curtis for “willful or corrupt misconduct in office.” Curtis, who was appointed to his role, is slated to hold his seat through early January. He responded to news of the letter by saying he “would love to go to court.” A press release by the voting rights group noted that despite certifying the results of the June primary election, one in which he lost to former Assistant ROV Joanna Francescut, Curtis has since raised unsubstantiated concerns about ballots and locked them in the elections office in hopes federal officials would investigate them. Read Article

Florida: Postal Service rejects Florida county mail ballots. Here’s why | Jeff Burlew/Tallahassee Democrat

The U.S. Postal Service — which President Donald Trump hopes to deploy to restrict mail voting in the November election — recently rejected the Leon County Supervisor of Elections’ outgoing mail ballot envelopes over a tiny technical issue. Supervisor of Elections Mark Earley is vowing to press on regardless, hoping that the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately blocks late-in-the-game Trump proposals that are going back and forth in the courts as Florida and other states are set to start sending out mail ballots to voters. However, Earley, who signed on to court briefs opposing the restrictions, and voting rights advocates are concerned that the damage will be done even if the proposals don’t go anywhere. “The chaos factor is the real problem,” Earley said in an interview with the Democrat. “I’ve had voters tell me ‘I don’t trust anything anymore, so I’m just not going to vote.’ And so I say the only way that your vote doesn’t get counted is if you don’t try and vote.” Read Article

Georgia: What the Fulton County election warehouse raid did (and did not) accomplish | Caleb Groves/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

So far, the raid has failed to deliver new revelations or the indictments some Trump supporters had hoped for. But it demonstrated how far the administration would go to settle the president’s 2020 grievances and breathe new life into doubts about elections ahead of high-stakes elections in November. Now, some Democrats and election officials are concerned that it could be an omen of what’s on the horizon for future seizures in 2026 or even 2028. Last month, the Democratic National Committee filed a lawsuit in a federal district court in Washington, D.C., over records it sought from the government for any planned seizures of election records or voting machines. Read Article

Minnesota city urges state Supreme Court to allow return to paper voter rosters | Ryan LuetkemeyerCourthouse News

Whether an outer-ring municipality in the Twin Cities metro area can reject electronic voter books and return to paper rosters for the upcoming election came before the Minnesota Supreme Court Tuesday. At issue is whether individual municipalities like the city of Oak Grove retain statutory authority to choose their poll book formats for statewide elections, or whether county and state attempts at electronic uniformity override local decisions. Oak Grove contends that, because cities bear the primary responsibility for operating polling places in their precincts, they hold final say over voter roster formats, while state and county officials argue authority goes to the county auditor for federal, state and countywide elections. Read Article

Missouri set to use old congressional map after Supreme Court rejects Trump-backed one | David A. Lieb and Lindsay Whitehurst/Associated Press

Missouri is poised to hold its November election with congressional districts passed after the last census, after the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday again rejected a new map backed by President Donald Trump that Republicans hoped could help them win an additional seat in the pivotal midterms. The Supreme Court’s decision marked a defining moment in a pitched legal battle that has lasted nearly a year and caused confusion for voters. Citing the court’s latest action, Missouri’s chief election official directed local authorities to use U.S. House districts passed in 2022, as the state’s highest court had ordered. Trump wanted courts to allow the use of his preferred map, which lawmakers approved last year at his urging. The decision means Missouri could run the November general election with different U.S. House districts than were used in the August primary — an extremely rare situation that could switch the candidate choices for more than a million potential voters, or nearly 1 in 4 voters statewide, according to an Associated Press estimate. Read Article

North Carolina Board of Elections approves new mail-in ballot guidelines before voting | Kyle Ingram/Raleigh News & Observer

In a split vote, the North Carolina State Board of Elections approved new guidelines for mail-in ballots on Friday, just hours before those ballots were sent to voters. The new policies do not change how ballots are delivered to voters who have requested them, but they do alter the standards by which election officials decide whether to count a returned mail-in ballot. A major point of contention among the board was a provision that directs county officials to “spoil” a mail-in ballot if the inner envelope containing the ballot is not properly sealed. In this scenario, the returned ballot would not be counted, but the affected voter would be contacted and sent a new one. They could also still vote in-person. Read Article

Pennsylvania attorney faces possible discipline over conduct in 2020 Fulton County election lawsuit | Carter Walker/Spotlight PA

An attorney who represented a Pennsylvania county as it attempted to investigate the 2020 election is facing possible suspension or disbarment. Thomas Carroll, an attorney from the Lehigh Valley, represented Fulton County in a long-running dispute the county had with the Pennsylvania Department of State and a voting equipment manufacturer. Now, the Pennsylvania Disciplinary Board, which regulates lawyers’ conduct, says Carroll should face consequences for the “bad faith” way in which he represented the county. “[Carroll] used means that had no substantial purpose other than to delay and burden the parties, the Special Master, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, and the courts,” the March complaint from the Office of Disciplinary Council alleges. Read Article

South Carolina absentee voting unchanged as courts weigh mail rules | The State

President Donald Trump wants to change mail-in voting procedures before November’s general election, and federal judges deemed a South Carolina absentee voting rule to be unconstitutional and age-discriminatory. At this point, neither means absentee voting policies will change in South Carolina ahead of the general election, according to Sydni Bain, a spokesperson for the state Election Commission. Pending U.S. Postal Service rules for absentee voting, prompted by a Trump executive order, have been put on hold by a federal judge. The administration appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court Sunday. More than 250 former and current members of congress, including U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn, asked the high court to oppose the plan. Read Article

National: Whistle-Blower Says Trump Officials Are Defying Court Orders on Voting by Mail | Chris Cameron/The New York Times

A U.S. Postal Service official has alleged that the agency is moving forward with a “secretive, rushed” effort to carry out President Trump’s order exerting federal control over mail voting, despite a court order blocking those plans. The official filed a whistle-blower report, published on Tuesday morning by the office of Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, asserting that the “risky and haphazard” implementation of Mr. Trump’s order could lead to a “catastrophic failure” in the mail ballot system ahead of this year’s midterm elections. The report said that the agency had planned to complete the new digital system overseeing mail ballots by Sept. 1. “Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all,” the official said in the report, which was prepared with the assistance of Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit group that represents people seeking to expose potential lawbreaking. Speaking to reporters by phone on Monday, Mr. Blumenthal said of the report that “the main takeaway for me is that the Postal Service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions of Americans. One-third of all Americans cast their ballots by mail, and the U.S.P.S. puts all of their votes at risk.” Read Article

National: Trump Administration Withholds $39.6M Election Security Funds Congress Mandated in April | Clayton Lewis/Tech Times

Eight weeks before Americans cast their midterm ballots, more than $39.6 million in congressionally mandated election security money is sitting unused at the Department of Homeland Security — unspent even as foreign adversaries ramp up cyberattacks on American infrastructure and military commanders have testified that those adversaries specifically plan to target the 2026 elections. Sen. Alex Padilla of California and Rep. Joseph Morelle of New York sent a letter Wednesday to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Nick Anderson, the acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, demanding the agency distribute the funds as directed by the fiscal year 2026 DHS Appropriations bill, which Congress passed in April. The lawmakers — the top Democrats on the Senate and House committees with jurisdiction over federal elections — wrote that they share "grave concern that time is running out" — in the words of their letter to Mullin and Anderson — to assist state and local election officials in protecting elections from cyber and disinformation threats. Read Article

National: Trump administration asks Supreme Court to allow mail-in ballot restrictions | Justin Jouvenal and Patrick Marley/The Washington Post

The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to immediately allow new restrictions on mail-in balloting, potentially setting up a major legal clash that could affect millions of voters for November’s midterm elections. The fight could possibly upend election procedures just as states begin to send out mail-in ballots in pivotal contests that will determine control of the U.S. House and Senate. Some communities in Wisconsin mailed ballots to voters this week, North Carolina is set to send them to voters Friday and other states will follow suit in coming days and weeks.. Read Article

National: Judge Presses for Clarity in Lawsuit Over Mail-In Voting Rules | Zach Montague/The New York Times

A federal judge on Thursday expressed concern that if she allowed the Trump administration to move ahead with plans to restrict mail-in ballots ahead of the November election, it could cause so much chaos that states would experience “major disenfranchisement.” During a winding two-hour hearing in Federal District Court in Boston, Judge Indira Talwani asked sharp questions of attorneys from the Justice Department and a coalition of Republican states about how they believed they could implement the new rule on the eve of early voting across many states. The hearing highlighted concerns raised by a broad coalition of nonprofits and Democratic states that, if allowed to forge ahead with the new rule, the Postal Service could haphazardly reject thousands of valid ballots. Judge Talwani last week blocked the Postal Service from implementing the plan for 14 days, a period that expires Sept. 10. Thursday’s hearing was intended to help her decide whether to extend her injunction indefinitely. The Trump administration has already appealed her temporary restraining order and the issue is likely to be settled by the Supreme Court. Read Article

National: Election experts see few legal options for Trump to meddle with polling places | Jennifer Shutt/News From The States

President Donald Trump said earlier this year he’d “do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections” this fall, declining to rule out sending the National Guard or federal law enforcement officers to polling locations throughout the country. Those comments came a few months after Trump casually and briefly mentioned canceling the midterm elections that will determine control of Congress. Any such actions would lie outside the bounds of presidential power and the law, according to experts interviewed by States Newsroom. Nonetheless, one Democratic U.S. senator is sending letters to numerous members of the administration asking for commitments troops won’t be sent to the polls, and state officials are readying plans to keep voting secure. “The president can say whatever he wants, but his powers are extraordinarily limited in this way,” said Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows. With two months until voting ends on Nov. 3, the administration’s only publicly disclosed plan to monitor elections is a decades-old Justice Department program that sends federal workers throughout the country. Read Article

National: Mullin says DHS could deploy to polling sites for ‘specific’ threats, arrests | Eric Bazail-Eimil/Politico

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin provided more details Tuesday about the kinds of operations which would see immigration agents enter polling places, as Democrats have worried the Department of Homeland Security could seek to interfere in November’s midterm elections. Speaking to reporters in New York City, the Homeland Security secretary said that “ICE isn’t there to patrol the polling places. We’re there to enforce specific threats.” He added, however, that reports of specific undocumented immigrants at a location could be a reason for ICE to deploy. “The only reason why we would be at polling places is if there is a threat to that polling place or we’re serving a warrant on someone that we have been actively tracking down,” he said. “ICE’s job is immigration, customs enforcement. That’s their job … if we’re serving a warrant we will be where we need to be.” Read Article

National: Trump Administration Begins Blitz to Find Elusive Voter Fraud Ahead of Midterms | Nick Corasaniti and Hamed Aleaziz/The New York Times

Hundreds of federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security have been assigned to an intensive, weekslong hunt for noncitizens among the nation’s registered voters despite an absence of evidence of widespread fraud, according to documents and training videos reviewed by The New York Times. Agents are scouring voter rolls managed by the states, and are using personally identifiable information about individual voters, such as their dates of birth and partial Social Security numbers, to look them up on those rolls, according to the documents. In some cases, investigators are effectively posing as individual voters by plugging their names and personal information into public-facing websites run by the top election official in each state. Some of these sites declare they are meant for individual use, potentially raising privacy concerns. The extraordinary operation reveals the extent to which the Trump administration is searching for evidence of fraud ahead of the November elections. The government is privately calling the effort the Unlawful Voter Initiative and is pulling agents from their normal duties, which include investigating such serious crimes as human trafficking and terrorism. Read Article

Arizona: Thousands of voters received letters asking if they’d moved. Here’s why. | Sasha Hupka and Jerod McDonald-Evoy/ Votebeat

Thousands of Arizonans have received similar notices in recent days, even though many have not moved. The confusing mailing appears to have stemmed from flaws in state and some county officials’ implementation of a new state law. Here’s what to know. The law requires Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, to compare the state’s voter registration database to the state’s driver’s license database each month. His staffers are then required to inform county recorders if they find discrepancies in a voter’s residential address or citizenship status. Supporters of the law, which passed as House Bill 2243 in 2022, said its purpose is to improve maintenance of the voter rolls and catch ineligible voters, including people who had moved to a new address. In a May 2022 letter to then-Gov. Doug Ducey, a coalition of conservative groups wrote that the law would ensure it was “easy to vote, and hard to cheat” in Arizona. But opponents worried it could disenfranchise some voters and noted that the state already had voter list maintenance measures in place. Read Article

California: Convicted MAGA election denier declines job in Shasta County amid pressure from Newsom | Hailey Branson-Potts/Los Angeles Times

Tina Peters, who served prison time for tampering with voting machines on behalf of the MAGA movement, has declined a job offer helping to oversee elections in a conservative Northern California county. “She declined the offer because she’s running around the country right now trying to secure the elections,” Clint Curtis, the Shasta County registrar of voters, said in an interview Tuesday. “Shasta County lost out.” Last month, Curtis set off alarm bells across California by telling reporters he planned to hire Peters, a former county clerk in Colorado who was released early from prison this summer amid a pressure campaign by President Trump. Curtis, himself a longtime election denier, told The Times he had planned to hire Peters as a consultant “to assist with supervision of the November election.” Peters’ attorney, Peter Ticktin, said in an interview Tuesday that she had given serious consideration to the job offer but that he had not discussed it with her in recent days. It would “not have been a full-time position,” because she is so busy, he said. Read Article

Georgia lawmakers consider how to protect voting access for people with disabilities, non-English speakers | Maya Homan/Georgia Recorder

Accessibility advocates are urging state leaders to prioritize access for voters with disabilities and those who require language assistance as lawmakers prepare to overhaul Georgia’s election equipment ahead of 2028. Thanks to a bill passed during the June special session, state leaders appear likely to select hand-marked paper ballots as the state’s primary voting method ahead of 2028. The shift away from the state’s current, machine-marked ballot system will likely come as a relief to some critics of the current voting equipment, who have repeatedly cited fears over machine tampering and called for ballots to be counted based on text that can be deciphered by humans. But Georgia residents likely won’t see voting machines vanish completely. Under federal accessibility laws, every polling place is required to have at least one voting machine on hand for voters with disabilities, even in jurisdictions where most voters mark ballots by hand. Read Article

Michigan: US Supreme Court refuses to put proof-of-citizenship amendment on ballot | Kelsey Reichmann/Courthouse News Service

The Supreme Court refused to take emergency action Thursday to put a proof-of-citizenship amendment on Michigan ballots for the midterm elections. Americans for Citizen Voting asked the justices to intervene after the Michigan Board of State Canvassers invalidated its proposal despite surpassing the signature threshold. The group also asked the Supreme Court to act before the state’s highest court weighed in, to meet the quickly approaching deadline to make ballot changes. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a Donald Trump appointee, denied the application without referring the appeal to the full court. He did not explain his decision. “If respondents’ decision to keep ACVM’s petition off the ballot stands, then Michigan voters will never have a chance to vote on the petition, regardless of whether it should or should not have been placed on the ballot,” Americans for Citizen Voting wrote. “On the other hand, if ACVM’s petition is placed on the ballot and ACVM’s arguments ultimately fail, there will be no harm. The choice is thus between irreparable harm and no harm at all.” Read Article

Minnesota’s top court rejects Mike Lindell’s bid for primary recount | Kyeland Jackson/The Minnesota Star Tribune

Minnesota Supreme Court justices denied requests for a primary election recount by MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, effectively confirming his loss to Lisa Demuth as the Republican nominee for Minnesota governor. Chief Justice Natalie Hudson on Saturday signed the order denying Lindell’s request. Hudson wrote that Lindell had declined to cover the $825,000 needed to fund a recount, and he missed an Aug. 24 deadline to file assurances that he could cover those costs. “Lindell instead sent documentation to the Secretary of State to reflect wire transfer readiness, and he filed this section 204B.44 petition,” Hudson’s order read. Read Article

The North Carolina elections rules that aren’t quite rules yet | Sarah Michels/Carolina Public Press

Absentee voting begins this week, and early voting isn’t far off. But North Carolina voters won’t have to worry about recently proposed changes to absentee voting, photo ID exception forms or voting site conduct rules until next year because of a quirk in the law. The State Board of Elections spent the summer drafting, reviewing and approving 15 sets of rules that would impact which absentee ballots are counted, how election officials deal with photo ID exception forms and what level of noise is allowed outside voting sites, among other issues. Last week, the Rules Review Commission approved those rules, but in each case, more than 10 people formally requested legislative review. When that happens, there’s a delay in implementation to give state lawmakers time to review and potentially reject the rule changes. Read Article

Pennsylvania: The invisible volunteers who help keep democracy running | Daniel Pearson/The Philadelphia Inquirer

They’ve been called the “most important people in running an election” by Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt, yet even as interest in election security has skyrocketed after Donald Trump’s persistent false claims of voter fraud, their jobs seem to be hidden in plain sight. Unlike the grifters and sycophants who help feed the president’s Big Lie and earn millions of social media followers, make frequent TV appearances, and are showered with adulation by the White House, the roughly 45,000 volunteers across Pennsylvania who are essential to ensuring elections happen fairly, smoothly, and efficiently are rarely recognized for the work they do. No wonder poll workers are in short supply — in the commonwealth and across the nation. A Brookings Institution report said that about half of all election officials found it either very or somewhat difficult to find enough workers. Read Article

Texas: Tarrant County removes 92 polling sites ahead of November election | Cecilia Lenzen/The Texas Tribune

Tarrant County commissioners voted 3-2 Tuesday to approve a list of polling sites for the November elections that included 92 fewer sites than the 2022 midterms. The approval came after commissioners heard testimony from more than 100 speakers, the majority of whom were opposed to the site cuts, during a meeting that lasted over eight hours. Voting rights advocates and representatives of 30 civic groups rallied outside the county courthouse Tuesday morning, demanding that commissioners approve a list with the same number of sites as the 2022 midterms. The adopted list includes 224 sites for Election Day and 47 for early voting. The 2022 list included 316 Election Day sites and 50 for early voting. Read Article

Wisconsin Elections Commission says new mail-in voting rule won’t apply to Wisconsin clerks | Molly Beck/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Wisconsin election clerks are not required to comply with the requirements of a new rule governing mail-in ballots that has been blocked by a federal judge under new guidance from the state's top election officials. Members of the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission voted unanimously during a meeting Monday to issue new guidance surrounding the legal battle over rules issued by the U.S. Postal Service that aim to restrict mail-in voting. President Trump's effort to place new restrictions on voting ahead of the 2026 midterm elections has been caught in a legal back-and-forth since he signed an executive order in March that would put mail-in voting under the Postal Service's oversight. Read Article

Wyoming Clerk Warns Other Red States Of “Aggressive” DOJ Action At Elections | Clair McFarland/Cowboy State Daily

After Wyoming’s Republican governor called for the state attorney general to investigate legal issues around what he called “aggressive” federal agents monitoring the primary election, Laramie County Clerk Debra Lee praised the governor’s strong response. Lee also warned other county clerks, and officials in other “red” states, that what happened in her county could happen in theirs. “I share Governor (Mark) Gordon’s concerns about the ‘surprise’ visit of the Department of Justice (DOJ) election monitors during Wyoming’s Primary Election and support his inquiry into the matter,” said Lee in a Friday statement. “His inquiry is grounded in the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of constitutional authority over our own elections.” Lee called the DOJ’s monitoring mission “far from transparent” and said the federal agents didn’t coordinate with her, as the county’s chief election official. Read Article