National: Blue states push to ban ICE at the polls amid federal voter intimidation fears | Jonathan Shorman/Stateline
Several Democratic states are moving to bar federal immigration agents from being near polling places and other election sites, amid persistent worries that President Donald Trump will use federal law enforcement or the military to disrupt the midterm elections. Measures to restrict federal agents from operating at or near election-related locations have been offered in more than half a dozen states, according to a Stateline count. While the proposals vary, they broadly seek to combat the prospect of chaotic confrontations between federal agents and voters this November. A federal law dating to the end of the Civil War already bans sending the military or other “armed men” to polling places, except to repel armed enemies of the United States. The U.S. Constitution also gives states — not the president or federal government — the responsibility for running elections. Read ArticleAlaska Lawmakers question decision to turn over confidential voter data to DOJ | Eric Stone/Alaska Public Media
State lawmakers had some sharp questions on Monday for Alaska’s Division of Elections about its decision to share the state’s full, unredacted voter list with the Department of Justice. The state turned over the voter list to the federal government in December after a series of requests from the Department of Justice. At first, in August, the Division of Elections shared only the public, commercially available list. The DOJ followed up later that month demanding the full list, including a range of information designated by state law as confidential: voters’ date of birth, their driver’s license or partial social security number, a status code, and their address, even if the voter marked it confidential. Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom, who oversees the Division of Elections, announced the state had transferred the list shortly before Christmas. Read ArticleArizona: Cochise County asks feds to investigate disputed claims about voting machine testing — again | Sasha Hupka/Votebeat
Four years after a conservative southeastern Arizona county tried to defy election laws, it may be gearing up to do so again. The Cochise County Board of Supervisors voted on Feb. 24 to send a letter to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard asking her to investigate whether the laboratories charged with testing voting machines nationwide were properly accredited ahead of recent elections. Cochise County officials have doubted the laboratories for years, despite the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s reassurances that they were properly accredited. Those doubts were part of what prompted two of the county’s supervisors to vote to delay the certification of its election results past the legal deadline in November 2022. A judge ultimately ordered the supervisors to certify the midterm election results, but their doubts about the laboratories — and the voting machines they test — have apparently persisted. The board sent an identical message to the U.S. Department of Justice less than six months ago. Read ArticleCalifornia Senator Padilla preps for Trump trying to control elections via emergency order | Kevin Rector/Los Angeles Times
Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) is preparing for President Trump to declare a national emergency in order to seize control of this year’s midterm elections from the states, including by bracing his Senate colleagues for a vote in which they would be forced to either co-sign on the power grab or resist it. In the wake of reporting last week that conservative activists with connections to the White House were circulating such an order, Padilla sent a letter to his Senate colleagues Friday stating that any such order would be “wildly illegal and unconstitutional,” and would no doubt face “extremely strict scrutiny” in the courts. “Nevertheless, if the President does escalate his unprecedented assault on our democracy by declaring an election-related emergency, I will swiftly introduce a privileged resolution [and] force a vote in the Senate to terminate the fake emergency,” wrote Padilla, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration. Read ArticleColorado Governor Signals He’ll Commute Sentence of Election Denier | By Jack Healy, Nick Corasaniti and Alan Feuer/The New York Times
Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado offered the clearest signal yet late on Tuesday that he might commute the nine-year sentence of Tina Peters, the last high-profile Trump ally still in prison for crimes stemming from President Trump’s 2020 election loss. Mr. Trump has waged an all-out assault on Colorado while pressuring Mr. Polis, a Democrat, to free Ms. Peters. He has blocked hundreds of millions of dollars in federal money from the Democratic-led state, moved the headquarters of U.S. Space Command from Colorado Springs to Alabama, promised to shutter a federal atmospheric research center in Boulder and vetoed an urgently needed water pipeline for rural Colorado. Commuting Ms. Peters’s sentence now might appease Mr. Trump and stop those attacks, but it would set off a furious backlash among Democrats and imperil Mr. Polis’s political future. Democrats and some moderate Republicans in Colorado have spent months urging the governor to resist the pressure from Mr. Trump. But on Tuesday night Mr. Polis wrote a social-media post that suggested he believed that Ms. Peters, a Republican former county clerk, had received too harsh a sentence when she was convicted of tampering with voting machines in a failed effort to show that the 2020 vote had been rigged against Mr. Trump. Read ArticleGeorgia election bill SB 568 could change early voting rules, voting machines as debate over 2020 election and Trump claims continues | Zachary Bynum/CBS Atlanta
A proposed Georgia election bill could significantly reshape how voters cast ballots, how counties manage voter records, and how election equipment is used across the state — all as political debates tied to the 2020 election continue to influence policy in Georgia. Senate Bill 568 would introduce several changes to Georgia's election system, including new standards for voting machines, new rules for early voting locations, and requirements for counties to publish voter lists. Dr. Andra Gillespie, a political science professor at Emory University, said the legislation builds on a series of election reforms Georgia lawmakers passed after the 2020 election. Read ArticleNew Louisiana voting machines will cost $100 million | Izzy Wollfarth/Beauregard News
Secretary of State Nancy Landry said this week that $25 million more is needed to cover the $100 million cost of replacing Louisiana’s 35-year-old ballot machines. The system would consist of new touchscreen voting machines that print paper ballots and have climate-controlled facilities for storage. Additional expenses would maintain cybersecurity protections and allow for risk-limiting audits, which are considered the top standard for voter integrity. “Louisiana voters have consistently indicated that they want a system that combines the speed of modern technology with the security of a voter-verifiable paper ballot, as required by state law,” Landry told the Senate Finance Committee Monday. The paper ballots will allow voters to verify their choices before casting. Read ArticleMichigan: US Supreme Court declines to hear twice-dismissed case on Michigan voter rolls | Kyle Davidson/Michigan Advance
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a case against Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, challenging the state’s process for canceling the voter registration for dead individuals. The suit was filed by the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a conservative law firm which has filed suits in several states aimed at pushing election officials to aggressively purge their voter rolls. The group has previously made false claims about voter fraud in the U.S. In its suit against the Michigan Department of State, the group argued that the state does not properly maintain its voter rolls under the National Voter Registration Act, allowing thousands of deceased voters to remain on file. However, a U.S. District Court judge dismissed the suit, noting “the record demonstrates that deceased voters are removed from Michigan’s voter rolls on a regular and ongoing basis.” The decision was upheld by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, prior to the group’s appeal to the Supreme Court. Read ArticleNevadans gear up to protect election from federal interference | Matthew Mondschein/Nevada Current
The Trump administration’s threat to take control of elections in several states and its refusal to rule out immigration agents at polling stations not only threatens the integrity of this year’s elections, but also amounts to voter suppression and intimidation, election advocates say. Silver State Voices, the ACLU of Nevada, All Voting is Local, and Nevada Immigrant Coalition are sounding the alarm about overtures coming from Washington, which Silver State Voices Executive Director Emily Persaud-Zamora said are “designed to suppress and discourage us from participating actively in democracy.” All Voting is Local Nevada State Director Kerry Durmick said White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s refusal during a Feb. 5 press briefing to guarantee that Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) agents won’t be at polling stations spurred the groups to action. Read ArticleNew Hampshire Republicans vote to end use of school IDs for elections | Todd Bookman/New Hampshire Public Radio
College and high school students would no longer be able to use photo identification cards issued by their schools to obtain a ballot, under a proposal that cleared the New Hampshire Senate on Thursday on a 16-8 vote. The New Hampshire House, on a near-party line vote, previously approved HB 323, which will now head to Gov. Kelly Ayotte’s desk. Republicans argue that ending the use of school-issued ID cards will strengthen election integrity and create more uniformity across polling locations. Sen. Rebecca Perkins Kwoka, a Democrat from Portsmouth, said the measure unfairly targets young voters who are otherwise qualified to participate in New Hampshire elections. “What this bill really does, in effect, is restrict the ability for college students to vote,” she said. Read ArticleTexas: Eastland County’s hand count of Republican primary ballots stretched into Wednesday as residents waited on results | Natalia Contreras/Votebeat
Just after midnight, as Election Day became Wednesday, workers at a polling place in the city of Rising Star called Eastland County election administrator Temi Nichols with a problem. They told Nichols some workers tasked with hand counting the GOP ballots cast at that location had decided to call it quits, she told a reporter afterwards, and she tried to talk those on the phone out of joining them “Please don’t load up and take off,” Nichols said. The workers on the other end of the phone said they weren’t sure how to read the tally sheets the other workers had left behind or fill out the required paperwork, among other things, according to Nichols. They asked her if they could go home and finish counting in the morning. Read ArticleWisconsin Senate lags on election bills without dedicated committee | Alexander Shur/Votebeat
When this legislative session began, Wisconsin Senate leaders made the unusual decision not to create a committee dedicated to election policy for the first time in nearly two decades. That choice has had a measurable consequence: The Senate has taken up far fewer election bills than the Assembly, and several measures that cleared the lower chamber are now stalled with no clear path forward. Of the 19 election bills that Votebeat has tracked this legislative session, 18 have gotten at least a public committee hearing in the Assembly, compared with nine in the Senate. Fourteen of those bills passed the Assembly, compared with six in the Senate. Even in a session when the Senate has generally moved more slowly than the Assembly on many issues — as of Feb. 25, the Assembly has passed 439 bills since the start of the current two-year session, while the Senate has passed 276 — the disparity is especially stark on elections. Read ArticleWyoming: “Hands On Everything”: Clerk Warns Of Tampering Risk As Voting Machine Bill Passes | David Madison/Cowboy State Daily
During a conference committee hearing Wednesday on Senate File 28, Fremont County Clerk Julie Freese told lawmakers about a previous public testing of voting equipment in the state where observers crossed a line. “They had their hands on everything and had stuff with them,” Freese said, without identifying the county. The account underscored her central argument: that county clerks must retain discretion to control who enters secure election spaces and how many people can be present during mandatory pre-election equipment tests. In a follow-up interview after the hearing, Freese provided a fuller picture of the incident, which she said was relayed to her by another clerk. The testing had taken place in a room that also contained boxes of county records — a common reality in Wyoming’s smaller courthouses. Read ArticleNational: Trump, seeking executive power over elections, is urged to declare emergency | Isaac Arnsdorf/The Washington Post
Pro-Trump activists who say they are in coordination with the White House are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting. Sen. Mark R. Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said there is no national emergency. “We’ve been raising the alarm for weeks about President Trump’s attacks on our elections and now we’re seeing reports that outline how they may be planning to do it,” Warner said in a statement in response to this article. “This is a plot to interfere with the will of voters and undermine both the rule of law and public confidence in our elections.” Read ArticleNational: The laughable legal memo behind the claim that Trump can declare a national voting emergency | Matt Cohen and Jim Saksa/Democracy Docket
Peter Ticktin, the Florida-based lawyer leading an effort to have President Donald Trump issue an executive order declaring a national emergency to enable a federal takeover of the upcoming midterm elections, shared his reasoning with Democracy Docket Thursday. It was quickly torn to pieces by a leading expert on the president’s emergency powers. Shortly after the Washington Post reported that the White House was taking Ticktin’s plan seriously, legal experts responded with ridicule, noting how blatantly unconstitutional it would be. But Ticktin’s reasoning appears more flawed still, relying on economic sanctions law that conveys no authority whatsoever to block mail-in ballots or seize voting machines. Read AricleNational: Trump’s push for election power raises fears he will ‘subvert’ midterms | Shane Goldmacher and Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times
Ahead of the midterm elections, an emboldened U.S. President Donald Trump has shown an increased eagerness to leverage the full investigative, prosecutorial and legislative powers of the federal government to bend election mechanics to his will. With his words and deeds, the president — who pushed to overturn his 2020 defeat but declared his 2024 victory legitimate — appears to be undermining Americans’ trust that the midterms will be free and fair. As the political environment darkens for his party, Trump is again warning Republicans that Democrats are going to rig the results. At the same time, he is taking actions that make Democrats fear that Republicans are actually going to subvert the election. Read ArticleNational: Republican voter ID bill stalls in Senate despite Trump demands | Mary Clare Jalonick/Associated Press
Election-year legislation to impose strict new proof-of-citizenship requirements on voting appears stalled in the Senate, for now, despite President Donald Trump’s call in his State of the Union speech that Republicans in Congress pass the bill “before anything else.” Trump’s push for the bill, backed by House conservatives and his most loyal supporters ahead of the midterm elections, has put new pressure on Senate Majority Leader John Thune as he tries to navigate an effort from inside and outside Congress to bypass normal Senate procedure. Thune has said he supports the legislation and that his GOP conference is still discussing how to pass it. Senate Republicans “aren’t unified on an approach,” Thune said on Wednesday after Trump’s speech. In an effort to get around Democratic opposition, Trump and others have pushed a so-called “talking filibuster,” which would bring the Senate back to the days of the movie “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” when senators talked indefinitely to block legislation. Today, the Senate mostly skips the speeches and votes to end debate, which takes 60 votes in the Senate where Republicans have a 53-47 majority. Read ArticleNational: Trump’s Favorite Voter-ID Bill Would Probably Backfire | Marc Novicoff/The Atlantic
On the surface, the debate over the SAVE America Act is familiar, even predictable. At Donald Trump’s urging, Republicans are pushing yet another voter-ID bill, ostensibly to prevent fraud and noncitizen voting. Democrats are opposing the bill on the grounds that voter fraud is negligible and that the law is really meant to disenfranchise their supporters. But upon closer inspection, something very strange is going on. For decades, the politics of voter-ID battles were based on a simple premise: The voters most likely to be screened out by such restrictions were probably Democrats. In 2024, however, that fact stopped being true. Trump beat Kamala Harris among voters who didn’t regularly participate in elections. In the low-turnout, off-cycle elections that have happened since then, Democrats have overperformed dramatically, suggesting that their advantage with the most educated, plugged-in voters remains strong. In other words, the politics of voter ID have not caught up to its new partisan implications. Making voting more difficult would most likely hurt Republicans’ chances, yet they’re pushing hard to make that happen; meanwhile, Democrats, who insist that Trump and a MAGA Congress are existential threats to American democracy, refuse on principle to help Republicans sabotage themselves. Read ArticleNational: Democratic Attorneys General plot to thwart Trump election interference | Lisa Kashinsky/Politico
Democratic attorneys general are bracing for President Donald Trump to interfere in the midterm elections — and war-gaming how to stop him. The party’s top prosecutors have been strategizing for months about how to counter a series of increasingly extreme scenarios they fear could play out this fall. They have huddled in hotel conference rooms and over Zoom meetings to run tabletop exercises anticipating the president’s moves and choreographing responses. They’re preparing for the administration to potentially confiscate ballots and voting machines, strip resources from the postal service to disrupt the delivery of mail ballots, and send military members and immigration agents to polling locations to intimidate voters. They’re readying motions for temporary restraining orders to preserve election materials and remove armed forces from voting sites. Read ArticleNational: In an Intense Election Year, New Post Office Rules Could Trip Up Voter Registration | Pascal Sabino/Bolts
The U.S. Postal Service began piloting a cost-cutting plan in 2023 to remove the machines that sort and postmark mail from local offices and instead consolidate mail processing in regional centers. As they rolled out the program nationwide, Jeremy Schilling, president of a local chapter of the American Postal Workers Union in Oregon, was one of those who spoke out about the adverse effects. His union organized demonstrations against the consolidation plan and blew the whistle on election mail that fell through the cracks due to the slowdown amid the 2024 presidential race. Election mail that people leave at their local post office in Southern Oregon, where Schilling is based, typically sits overnight until it is collected in the morning since evening dispatches were slashed nationwide at the end of last year. The mail is then trucked nearly 300 miles to a Portland facility that processes mail for most of the state, where it is postmarked, then sent back to the local post office for delivery. “Any mail that’s getting dropped into a blue box is not getting postmarked on the same day, and likely not on the day after either,” Schilling said. “The mail is so slow that it is an unreasonable amount of lead time that the normal person wouldn’t expect.” Read ArticleNational: DHS official promises election officials that ICE will not be at polling places | Andrew Howard and Erin Doherty/Politico
A top Department of Homeland Security official vowed during a private call with election officials Wednesday that immigration officers will not be stationed at polling places in November amid Democratic warnings about interference in the midterms by the federal government. Heather Honey, the department’s deputy assistant secretary for election integrity, dismissed as “disinformation” any fears that officers from Immigration Customs and Enforcement would be deployed to the polls as part of President Donald Trump’s ongoing mass deportation campaign. “Any suggestion that ICE is going to be present at polling places is simply disinformation,” Honey said, according to four people on the call who were granted anonymity to discuss it. “There will be no ICE presence at polling locations.” Read ArticleOpinion: How can the Supreme Court protect electoral integrity? | Edward Foley/SCOTUSblog
The court has already confronted cases concerning the midterms, like the efforts to re-gerrymander already gerrymandered congressional districts for even more partisan advantage. And undoubtedly, the court will face many more issues before ballots are cast in the upcoming fall. But there is one specific possibility that I want to consider now because it’s especially crucial that the court be prepared to act proactively, so as to avoid electoral subversion that can’t be remedied after it has occurred. The threat is that President Donald Trump will order FBI, or perhaps other federal officers, to seize ballots in key congressional districts, so that the results of those elections cannot be certified before Jan. 3, 2027, when the new Congress is scheduled to meet and elect the Speaker of the House. Indeed, federal seizure of ballots potentially could irrevocably destroy the essential chain-of-custody of those ballots, preventing those elections from ever being certified and requiring instead another round of voting in those districts. But meanwhile the House Speakership election would go forward without Members-elect from the affected districts, potentially determining which political party controls the House of Representatives without the input from all of America’s voters – a deliberate denial of democracy if ever there was one. Read ArticleArizona’s ICE-at-polls bill is dead for now, but backers can revive it | Caitlin Sievers/Arizona Mirror
People packed into an Arizona Senate Committee room on Friday, waiting hours to protest a Republican plan to station federal immigration officers at Arizona polling places in November. But those protestors were disappointed when the measure was suddenly spiked at the end of the six-hour meeting because its sponsor was ill, according to Senate Judiciary and Elections Committee Chairwoman Wendy Rogers. The failure to hear the bill in the committee on Friday likely kills the specific piece of legislation, though the idea is likely to be resurrected. Friday was the deadline for legislative committees to consider legislation in its chamber of origin. But there are parliamentary moves that allow proposals that failed to be revived. Read ArticleColorado secretary of state says feds have ‘lost credibility’ on elections after FBI call | Chase Woodruff/Colorado Newsline
Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold said President Donald Trump’s administration has “lost credibility” on election security issues after a Wednesday call between top state elections officials and federal law enforcement agencies. Griswold, a Democrat who is also a 2026 candidate for Colorado attorney general, echoed concerns from other Democratic secretaries of state over what they characterized as administration officials’ refusal to acknowledge states’ constitutional role in overseeing U.S. elections. Staff from Griswold’s office participated in the call, which was organized earlier this month by FBI election executive Kellie Hardiman. It included representatives from the FBI, Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Postal Inspection Service and Election Assistance Commission. “Unfortunately, there’s just not a lot of confidence or trust at this point with previously important federal relationships,” Griswold said. Read ArticleFlorida plan to verify citizenship could snare lawful registered voters in bureaucratic morass | Anthony Man/South Florida Sun Sentinel
An effort in the Florida Legislature sounds simple and straightforward: ensure that only U.S. citizens vote in state elections. Republicans who control the state Senate and House of Representatives are advancing legislation they say would do just that, brushing aside warnings that they are about to create a logistical and bureaucratic morass — that could result in thousands of citizens losing their ability to vote. They envision a far-reaching effort, with two central components. Registered voters who change their party affiliation; their address; or their name after marriage, divorce or some other reason would have to produce documentation proving their citizenship to a county elections office. All existing registered voters would be checked against the state’s driver license database to flag anyone who hasn’t previously produced proof of citizenship, a process that depends on the technology working — even though sponsors aren’t allocating money for tech upgrades. Read ArticleGeorgia: Election skeptics convinced criminal charges coming in Fulton County election case | David Wickert/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Voting integrity advocates who believe the 2020 election was rife with fraud have been jubilant since the FBI seized Fulton County’s ballots last month. They’ve been hailed as heroes for keeping the issue alive until the FBI intervened. And they’re convinced that prosecutions of election officials, politicians and even judges are coming. Election and legal experts who reviewed the evidence used to obtain the FBI search warrant have reached a different conclusion. They doubt the investigation will lead to successful prosecutions. They say the evidence of a crime is scant and the legal obstacles to prosecution are steep. “There is absolutely nothing in here that makes me believe — even if everything they said in the affidavit is true — that they could successfully prosecute anyone,” said Justin Levitt, a former Justice Department attorney and law professor at Loyola Marymount University. Read Article