Arizona: US Supreme Court turns away Kari Lake lawyer’s challenge to sanctions in Arizona voting machine lawsuit | Sophie Brams/The Hill

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from an attorney sanctioned for filing a frivolous 2022 lawsuit on behalf of former Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem. The underlying lawsuit, which sought to prohibit electronic voting machines in Maricopa and Pima counties, was dismissed for lack of standing before a federal judge ordered $122,200 in sanctions against Lake's legal team for making false and misleading statements. By letting the sanction order stand without comment, the high court upheld lower court rulings finding that monetary penalties were necessary to deter attorneys from filing baseless claims that undermine confidence in election infrastructure. Read Article

National: Election activists press Trump to ban voting machines or even declare martial law if November results are in question | Dion Nissenbaum/Votebeat

A coalition of conservative activists and high-profile Trump allies is pressing the administration to utilize federal emergency powers to restrict or ban electronic voting machines ahead of the midterm elections. Figures including Tina Peters, Cleta Mitchell, and Mike Lindell have petitioned the White House and federal agencies to mandate hand-counted paper ballots, invoke national security declarations over alleged foreign hardware vulnerabilities, or deploy federal agents to polling places. Legal scholars, election officials, and civil rights advocates emphasize that the president lacks the constitutional authority to unilaterally alter state-administered voting methods, noting that courts have repeatedly struck down executive actions attempting to assert federal control over election procedures. Read Article

South Dakota’s federal-only voter list grows to nearly 6,000, surprising some who are on it | Makenzie Huber/South Dakota Searchlight

South Dakota's list of "federal-only" voters has nearly quadrupled to 5,735 following new state laws requiring documentary proof of U.S. citizenship and strict physical residency verification for voter registration. Under the dual-track system, registrants who lack compliant identification—such as older driver's licenses predating citizenship indicators—or who utilize commercial mail-forwarding addresses are restricted to voting solely in congressional races, excluding them from state executive, legislative, and ballot initiative contests. Voting rights advocates and legal filings highlight that administrative implementation errors and insufficient voter notification have left many eligible citizens unaware of their restricted status ahead of the registration deadline, sparking an active federal lawsuit over state voter disenfranchisement. Read Article

North Carolina elections board to notify 1,392 voters flagged as potential noncitizens | Ahmed Jallow/NC Newsline

The North Carolina State Board of Elections is issuing notices to 1,392 registered voters flagged as potential noncitizens following cross-referencing with the federal Systemic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database. Because the SAVE system tracks historical immigration records, critics highlight that it frequently produces outdated matches by flagging naturalized U.S. citizens who obtained citizenship after their initial license or federal applications. Relying on this database places an unjustified burden on lawful U.S. citizens to affirmatively locate and submit official proof of citizenship, such as passports or birth certificates, to maintain their active voting status ahead of the election. Read Article

California threatened by Justice Department over claim of noncitizen voters | Safiyah Riddle and Eric Tucker/Associated Press

The U.S. Department of Justice has threatened California state and local election authorities with emergency federal litigation if they do not review and act within 48 hours on a list of alleged noncitizen voters. Federal officials delivered the flagged names to Los Angeles County on a password-protected thumb drive, demanding that local registrars segregate mail ballots for any individuals whose citizenship cannot be immediately confirmed. California state officials and election clerks pushed back against the demand, calling the 48-hour deadline unreasonable and noting that federal agencies have repeatedly refused to share the underlying methodology or data sources used to generate the list. Read Article

Book Review: The Plot to Delete Democracy | Sue Halpern/The New York Review of Books

Chances are you already know some random things about the Silicon Valley technology billionaires who have embraced—and been embraced by—the Trump administration: that, for example, Peter Thiel’s data mining company, Palantir, supplies surveillance software to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, that the recent public stock offering for SpaceX briefly made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire, or that the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, a former Democratic Party stalwart, turned to Trump after he saw, he said, the most successful people sending “their kids to the most politically radical institutions, which teach them how to be America-hating communists.” You may even know that Thiel, in contrast to most of his Silicon Valley peers, supported Trump’s 2016 campaign, or that during the 2024 campaign Musk was Trump’s largest individual donor, giving $239 million to his pro-Trump America PAC and around $50 million to other Trump-aligned groups, or that Andreessen helped staff the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Musk’s predatory duchy within Trump’s second administration. Government by Silicon Valley | Sue Halpern | The New York Review of Books

Opinion: Publish the Poll Tapes | Andrew Appel/CITP Blog

For well over 100 years, from before 1900 to into the 21st century, political parties sent volunteers to witness the in-the-precinct results at the close of the polls on election night. They did that just in case there were slip-ups (to put it politely) in the transmission and aggregation of the precinct results into district-wide election results. Before there were computerized voting machines, there were mechanical voting machines that displayed the totals on little odometers that were uncovered at the end of election day, that you had to copy down by hand—those were witnessed too. And before the mechanical machines, people counted paper ballots by hand, in the precinct, and announced the per-precinct totals to witnesses in the polling place. Read Article

Texas: Glitch Delays 600,000 Voter Registrations as Early Voting Looms | John Yoon /The New York Times

A software programming error within a Department of Public Safety driver’s license portal created a backlog of nearly 600,000 voter registration applications across Texas, forcing county election administrators into late-stage processing scrambles ahead of early voting. The glitch—traced to a system upgrade by vendor Deloitte—failed to record voter registration requests submitted between December 2025 and February 2026, leading state authorities to dump bulk files onto local clerks just weeks before registration deadlines. Voting rights groups filed suit in Bexar County seeking to ensure system reliability under a 2021 online registration settlement. While county workers cleared the vast majority of pending records using overtime and state-reimbursed temporary staff, state officials advised any voters missing from local rolls to cast provisional ballots. Read Article

National: FBI says election officials were targets of suspicious letters containing ‘unknown substance’ | Jessica Husemann and Dion Nissenbaum/Votebeat

he FBI and U.S. Postal Inspection Service have launched a nationwide investigation into a series of suspicious letters—some containing an unidentified white powder—sent to election offices, U.S. senators, and political organizations across more than a dozen states. While postal authorities intercepted many of the mailings prior to delivery, several state election headquarters experienced temporary evacuations or hazardous material responses before tests confirmed the substances were harmless. State election directors emphasized that the physical intimidation tactics will not disrupt ongoing voting operations or delay administrative preparations ahead of the midterm elections. Read Article

National: Trump’s Attacks on Voting Raise Fears He Will Try to Challenge Midterm Results | Zolan Kanno-Youngs/The New York Times

State and local election officials express growing concern that ongoing executive attacks on election integrity are laying the groundwork to contest adverse midterm results. While judicial decisions have repeatedly blocked attempts to directly assert federal authority over state-administered voting, federal departments have intensified efforts to investigate voter rolls, deploy nationwide polling place monitors, and circulate unsubstantiated claims of voting machine vulnerabilities and noncitizen registration. In response, state administrators across party lines are developing contingency plans to defend local election procedures against potential federal overreach or unannounced law enforcement interventions at polling locations. Read Article