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

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

Federal judge places new freeze on Trump mail-ballot rules, setting up likely Supreme Court showdown | Dion Nissenbaum/Votebeat

A federal judge on Thursday imposed a new freeze on President Donald Trump’s mail-ballot restrictions, the latest move in a back-and-forth legal battle playing out just weeks before the November elections. U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani blocked the U.S. Postal Service from moving ahead with plans to regulate mail ballots for at least 14 days while she weighs a more permanent ban on the agency’s new rules. The temporary restraining order comes just four days after the U.S. Supreme Court lifted Talwani’s previous injunction against the order on narrow procedural grounds. However, voting rights groups and a coalition of two dozen states and the District of Columbia kept pressing their case against the order, arguing that the president had no authority to try and regulate mail ballots. 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: 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

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

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

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

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

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

Minnesota election officials: Mike Lindell recount request too late, warn of ballot delays | MPR News

Minnesota's Secretary of State's Office warns that it's too late to start a recount of the governor's race primary and complete it before ballots need to be prepared for the general election. A filing Wednesday with the state Supreme Court seeks dismissal of Republican candidate Mike Lindell's bid for a hand recount. Lindell failed to formally request and pay for a recount by a Monday deadline. He went to the high court to seek a more-expansive recount than a state-approved plan. He objected to the structure in which only votes for him and Lisa Demuth would be counted by name and all others would be combined in a third pile. The brief on behalf of the Secretary of State’s Office and the Canvassing Board said the ballot printing process begins Sept. 3 for early voting that starts on Sept. 18. If the court grants Lindell what he wants, the recount might not start immediately because new procedures would need to be finalized and new cost estimates would be required, the state argues. 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

North Carolina governor pushes 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

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

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

Wisconsin commissioners want answers on Milwaukee election night gaffe | Molly Beck and Jessie Opolen/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

State election commissioners are asking Milwaukee officials to explain how workers there failed to download election results in a timely manner, leading to lengthy delays in ballot counting during the Aug. 11 primary. Members of the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission plan to discuss sending a letter seeking additional information from Milwaukee election officials during the commission's Aug. 31 meeting. "Fair or unfair, the eyes of the nation are often on Milwaukee and providing transparency into the system, especially when a mistake occurs, is a critical service to the voters of our state," the letter reads. 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

National: Trump can’t stop, won’t stop (undermining the 2026 elections) | Shirin Ali/Slate

President Donald Trump’s attempt to nationalize America’s voting system suffered another loss in court this week, just the latest in a lengthy series of defeats over Trump’s blatantly unlawful executive orders around voting. This time was a bit more dramatic, though, with a judge bluntly calling out the Justice Department for using a lawsuit against Minnesota as a “fishing expedition” to help it find a violation of federal law. U.S. District Court Judge Katherine Menendez dismissed the case, ultimately finding that Congress never authorized the attorney general to access voting records and documents that state officials create themselves. These continued losses won’t end the story, though. Newly confirmed Attorney General Todd Blanche announced this week that he’s considering asking the Supreme Court to intervene in the dozens of lawsuits his DOJ has filed against states that, like Minnesota, refused to hand over their voter rolls. Trump and Blanche are attempting to bully states into submission over “election integrity,” but it’s obvious what the real endgame is: Complete control over U.S. elections. Read Article

National: Trump Boasts of Declassifying Secrets, but Withholds Key Election Files From Public | Dustin Volz/The New York Times

The White House in recent weeks has made public a steady drip of previously classified intelligence about foreign threats to elections and other matters, offering President Trump and his allies ammunition for baseless conspiracy theories about potential vote rigging. But one crucial document has not been among the releases, despite a congressional requirement for it to be: the assessment by U.S. intelligence agencies of foreign meddling efforts during the 2024 election. The document would provide the public with a holistic look at foreign attempts to influence voters and sow division around the presidential contest and other federal races that year. The 2020 version of the assessment, released during the early weeks of the Biden administration, highlighted Russia’s efforts to boost Mr. Trump, Iran’s push to harm his candidacy and analytic judgments about actions China considered but largely refrained from taking. It also included a dissenting minority view that China took “at least some steps” intended to undermine Mr. Trump. The omission of the report on the 2024 election shows the highly selective nature of the Trump White House’s approach to declassification. It is just one example of many where the administration has ignored bipartisan pressure from Congress, including legal requirements, by withholding certain documents from public view even as it publishes hundreds of pages of material it has promised will reveal deep-state coverups of foreign meddling efforts. Read Article

National: Justice Department plans to send about 1,000 monitors to the polls this fall | Patrick Marley/The Washington Post

The Justice Department plans to dispatch about 1,000 monitors to the polls this fall — probably the largest number under a Republican president, according to a top assistant attorney general. The Justice Department routinely sends monitors to polling places to ensure election laws are followed and voters’ rights are protected. In the past — including during primaries this month — they have limited their involvement to observation, but Democrats have raised concerns about what they could do this fall because President Donald Trump this year said Republicans should “nationalize the voting” and “take over the voting.” Harmeet K. Dhillon, the assistant attorney general who leads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, told Bloomberg News that the deployment of about 1,000 poll monitors is “probably going to be a historic number for a Republican administration.” She did not say where they would go in an interview that was published Monday. Read Article

National: Democrats sue DOJ over midterm ballot seizure plans | Ryan Knappenberger/Courthouse News Service

The Democratic National Committee sued the Justice Department on Thursday over its refusal to turn over documents related to any plans to seize ballots, voting machines and other election materials within a month of any federal primary and general election during the midterms. The DNC filed the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, after the FBI declined to turn over such documents as requested in a Feb. 6, request brought in the wake of the FBI raid on the Fulton County election office on Jan. 28. “Following the seizure of archived ballots from Fulton County, Georgia — and seeking to ensure that the Trump administration does not attempt unprecedented abuses of criminal law enforcement tools to undermine upcoming elections — the Democratic National Committee sent requests for records under the Freedom of Information Act, to components of the Department of Justice concerning any planned seizure of ballots, voting machines and other voting systems components,” the DNC says in its complaint. Read Article

National: ‘I don’t trust you’:Tensions were high in an election security call for state leaders hosted by CISA | Dion Nissenbaum/Votebeat

Tensions between state election officials and the Trump administration are rising as we head into the heart of the midterm election season. Frustrations boiled over on Monday during a rare election security call hosted by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency for state officials. During the call, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes unloaded on the agency. CISA used to be a go-to shop for many states looking for help ensuring that their elections weren’t hacked, targeted, or undermined by cyberattacks or foreign interference. CISA provided states with classified security briefings on threats, helped ensure that state voting equipment wasn’t vulnerable to cyberattacks, and worked with election leaders to game out potential risks. All that changed when Donald Trump returned to the White House last year. The second Trump administration scaled back its support for states, cut back CISA staff, and launched an investigation of its former leader, whom Trump accused of disloyalty because he pushed back on the president’s false claims that the 2020 election was rigged. CISA has not had a permanent director since the start of Trump’s second term. Read Article

National: Experts slam Trump’s unusual new census report as a ‘hijack by the White House’ | Gabe Cohen and Fredreka Schouten/CNN

Former Census Bureau leaders, statisticians and voting-rights advocates are raising alarms about an unusual, unsigned new report posted on the agency’s website that claims tens of thousands of noncitizens voted in the 2020 presidential election. President Donald Trump touted the results Tuesday on Truth Social, saying the bureau had proved that more than 24,000 noncitizens illegally voted in 2020 after analyzing 128 million individual voter records. Even if the report is accurate, 24,000 votes would amount to less than 0.02% of the roughly 160 million ballots cast in 2020. Joe Biden won the national popular vote by more than 7 million votes. Read Article

National: Trump election demands spark suit over DHS anti-terrorism funding | Sarah D. Wire/USA Today

A group of prominent cities and counties are suing the Trump administration for withholding tens of millions of dollars in anti-terrorism funding unless states and local governments agree to change how they conduct elections. Harris County and El Paso County in Texas; Nashville, Tennessee, and Columbus, Ohio are participating in the suit. The lawsuit challenges the Federal Emergency Management Agency's June 2026 decision to hold back 20% or even all Homeland Security Grant Program grants unless the jurisdictions comply with five election administration orders. Read Article

National: How Trump Left America Vulnerable to Cyberattacks | Nick Miroff and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez/The Atlantic

During her January 2025 confirmation hearing to be secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem was asked how she would strengthen the nation’s cyberdefenses. Noem told senators that she would make the department’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency “smaller” and “more nimble.” President Trump had created CISA as a stand-alone agency within the Department of Homeland Security during his first term to give cybersecurity more institutional heft, and it had grown quickly with support from lawmakers of both parties. But after CISA declared the 2020 presidential election to be “the most secure in American history” and the agency’s director, Christopher Krebs, refused to back Trump’s claims that the vote had been stolen, Krebs became a target for the president’s fury and a seething grudge. During the DOGE fever of the first few months of Trump’s return, CISA’s budget was reduced and its staff cut by one-third. The agency hasn’t had a permanent, Senate-confirmed director since Trump retook office. In April, the White House proposed deeper cuts to CISA’s budget, but Republican lawmakers have raised concerns that critical U.S. infrastructure is already too vulnerable. Read Article

Alaska: DOJ issues grand jury subpoenas in probe of Dan J. Sullivan’s US Senate candidacy | Mark Sabbatini/Juneau Independent

With national media already focusing on Alaska’s U.S. Senate race during the state’s primary election on Tuesday, a new flurry of stories surfaced during the afternoon about the U.S. Department of Justice ​issuing grand jury subpoenas in its investigation of Dan J. Sullivan’s candidacy. Sullivan, a retired Petersburg teacher, is running as a Republican against namesake incumbent Sen. Dan S. Sullivan. Republican party officials, as well as the Alaska Division of Elections, have accused Dan J. Sullivan of being a sham candidate trying to confuse voters. The subpoenas were first reported by NBC News, citing "a law enforcement official" and noting the issuance of them last week "to compel information from witnesses linked to the campaign of Dan J. Sullivan" has not been previously reported. Other news agencies including Reuters published subsequent reports, also citing unnamed sources. Read Article

Arizona: Over 1,300 mail ballots were undelivered in Navajo County. Data suggests that’s not unusual. | Sasha Hupka/Votebeat

At least 50,000 mail ballots never made it to voters duriAt least 50,000 mail ballots never made it to voters during Arizona’s July 21 primary election. That number, based on information gathered by Votebeat from 11 of the state’s 15 counties, isn’t out of the ordinary. In fact, it appears roughly in line with that of prior major elections. About 71,000 mail ballots went undelivered statewide during the 2024 general election, according to data from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission that represented all of the state’s counties. Every year, some ballots that are mailed out to voters are returned to election officials because the voter’s address is incorrect or the voter has a forwarding address on file. (In Arizona, ballots legally can’t be forwarded.) Read Article

California: Tina Peters, pro-Trump election denier, went to prison. Now, Shasta County might hire her | Hailey Branson-Potts/Los Angeles Times

Tina Peters, the former Colorado elections official convicted of tampering with voting machines, was recently released early from prison amid a pressure campaign from President Trump. Now the top elections official in a conservative California county with a long history of voting controversies is seeking to hire her to help run elections there. Clint Curtis, the registrar of voters in Shasta County, said on a local radio show Sunday that he planned to hire Peters as the assistant registrar next month, just weeks ahead of the November election. Peters, the former clerk in Mesa County, Colo., was convicted in 2024 and sentenced to nine years behind bars for breaching her county’s voting machines as part of a scheme to show that the 2020 election was rigged against Trump — a claim that has been repeatedly debunked. Read Article