Wisconsin Elections Commission sued for telling Madison not to count late-arriving absentee ballots | Alexander Shur/Votebeat

The Wisconsin Elections Commission is facing criticism from local officials and a lawsuit filed Wednesday after it ordered Madison not to count 23 absentee ballots that arrived late to the polls in the state’s recent Supreme Court race, a delay city officials say was caused by election administrator error. City officials also say the commission initially offered little guidance but later faulted them for making the wrong decision. As Madison officials discussed what to do with the late-arriving ballots the day after Election Day, Madison City Attorney Mike Haas reached out to Wisconsin Elections Commission administrator Meagan Wolfe for advice. Wolfe sent the relevant statute the following day, and told Madison officials to “decide, within their statutory discretion” whether the 23 ballots should be counted. Madison decided to count them. Three weeks later, WEC’s commissioners decided Madison made the wrong choice, ordering them to remove the 23 affected ballots from the count. The commissioners didn’t mince words. Chair Ann Jacobs, a Democrat, said Madison committed an “absurd error,” and GOP commissioner Don Millis called it an “epic failure.” Read Article

National: How Trump is moving to control U.S. elections, one state at a time | Ned Parker and Peter Eisler/Reuters

In January, the Franklin County Board of Elections in Ohio received a surprising call. The man on the line said he was an agent at the Department of Homeland Security – and he needed immediate access to voter records. Franklin County has a large population of Democrats and has long been a focal point of Republican skepticism about urban voting centers in Ohio. In the weeks that followed, the requests multiplied. According to emails reviewed by Reuters, the agent asked for voter registration forms and voting histories for dozens of voters – records that include driver's license numbers and other confidential data. He pressed for information about local voter‑registration groups, describing the request as an “investigation” and “very time sensitive.” But he offered no explanation for what prompted his probe or where it was headed. The requests were a bolt from the blue for Franklin County election officials. Under the U.S. Constitution, elections – even for national offices such as the presidency – are run by states, not the federal government. Adding to the confusion, DHS’s mission has traditionally focused largely on counterterrorism, border security and immigration enforcement. Read Article

National: Voters Can Be Disenfranchised Now – Just Say It’s Because They’re Democrats | Adam Serwer/The Atlantic

For the conservative editor and columnist James Jackson Kilpatrick, the Supreme Court decision outlawing school segregation was an atrocity. Brown v. Board of Education, he wrote in the 1950s, was a “revolutionary act by a judicial junta which simply seized power.” He warned in 1963 that the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act would destroy “the whole basis of individual liberty.” And in a 1965 National Review cover story, he argued that in order to “give the Negro the vote,” the Voting Rights Act would repeal the Constitution. Kilpatrick did not hide the basis of his beliefs: In an article that was spiked after the 1963 Birmingham Baptist Church bombing, titled “The Hell He Is Equal,” he insisted that “the Negro race, as a race, is in fact an inferior race.” As the historian Nancy MacLean wrote in Freedom Is Not Enough, by the 1970s, this segregationist had refashioned himself as an opponent of racial discrimination, a champion of color-blindness. Liberal egalitarians supporting race-conscious remedies, he argued, were “worse racists—much worse racists—than the old Southern bigots.” His transformation was so complete, he joked, that he was like the convert who “became more Catholic than the Pope.” Read Aticle

National: ‘I have the right to vote.’ States and the DOJ are fighting over personal data | Bart Jansen/USA Today

Dozens of legal battles are being waged nationwide over federal access to personal information about voters, as President Donald Trump's administration seeks to weed out immigrants who are in the country illegally, while civil rights advocates fight for privacy. By determining who gets dropped from voter registration lists, the results of the cases will help determine who casts ballots in November midterm elections that will decide who leads the narrowly divided Congress. The Department of Justice has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia for voter lists, which include driver’s license and Social Security numbers, in the hunt for fraud by ineligible voters. The department has argued that courts shouldn't second-guess the reasons for searching the voter rolls. Read Article

National: US cyber team hasn’t been activated yet to protect midterm elections from foreign meddling | Sean Lyngaas/CNN

F For the first election cycle in years, US military and intelligence officials have not yet activated a specialized team dedicated to detecting and thwarting foreign threats to elections, according to comments from those agencies to Congress and CNN, alarming some lawmakers and former officials who have served on the team. A failure to activate the team would be a “major national security mistake and I hope that they will correct it in the weeks to come,” Senator Angus King of Maine, an independent who sits on the armed services committee, told CNN. For every general and midterm election since the 2020 election, the Election Security Group (ESG) has been a hub for officials from the National Security Agency, the code-breaking and signals intelligence agency, and US Cyber Command, the military’s hackers, to share intelligence and launch counter attacks against trolls from Russia, Iran and elsewhere who were trying to undermine US elections. Read Article

National: Federal drawdown of election support ‘destroyed’ ongoing relationships, experts say | David DiMolfetta/Nextgov/FCW

Efforts under President Donald Trump to scale back the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and its election security resources have strained relationships with state and local officials, raising concerns that jurisdictions may be far less prepared to counter threats to the November midterms, officials in Michigan and Georgia said Tuesday. The warnings, delivered by state officials and other experts at a hearing hosted by Democrats on the House Homeland Security Committee, come as the Trump administration has sought to expand the federal role in election administration through executive orders and the growing involvement of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard in election-related matters, including an FBI raid on a Fulton County, Georgia elections office. The drawdown of CISA election resources over the last year has “been very damaging,” said Aghogho Edevbie, Michigan’s deputy secretary of state. Read Article

National: Election Officials Have Been Preparing for AI Cyberattacks | Derek Tisler/Brennan Center for Justice

Since ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence systems first became widely available, the Brennan Center and other experts have warned that this technology may lead to more cyberattacks on elections and other critical infrastructure. Reports that Anthropic’s new AI model, Claude Mythos, can pinpoint software vulnerabilities that even the most experienced human experts would miss underline the urgency of those risks. Fortunately, election officials have been preparing for cyberattacks and have made significant progress in securing their systems over the past decade, incorporating improved cybersecurity practices at every step of the election process. Anthropic claims that its new model can autonomously scan for vulnerabilities in software more effectively than even expert security researchers. If given access to this new model, amateurs would theoretically be capable of identifying and exploiting vulnerabilities in a way that previously only sophisticated actors, such as nation-states, could do. For this reason, Anthropic chose not to release the Mythos model publicly. Instead, under an initiative Anthropic is calling Project Glasswing, it has offered access to Mythos to a number of high-profile tech firms and critical infrastructure operators so that these companies can proactively identify and address vulnerabilities in their own systems. Although Anthropic is currently controlling access to its model to prevent misuse, experts believe it is only a matter of time before tools advertising similar capabilities are broadly available. Read Article

Opinion: The Supreme Court’s Conservatives Just Issued the Worst Ruling in a Century | Richard L. Hasen/Slate

Wednesday’s 6–3 party-line decision in Louisiana v. Callais will go down in history as one of the most pernicious and damaging Supreme Court decisions of the past century. All six Republican-appointed justices on the court signed onto Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion gutting what remained of the Voting Rights Act protections for minority voters, while pretending they were merely making technical tweaks to the act. This decision will bleach the halls of Congress, state legislatures, and local bodies like city councils, by ending the protections of Section 2 of the act, which had provided a pathway to assure that voters of color would have some rudimentary fair representation. It’s the culmination of the life’s work of Chief Justice John Roberts and Samuel Alito, who have shown persistent resistance to the idea of the United States as a multiracial democracy, and a brazen willingness to reject Congress’ judgment that fair representation for minority voters sometimes requires race-conscious legislation. It gives the green light to further partisan gerrymandering. It protects Alito’s core constituency: aggrieved white Republican voters. It’s a disaster for American democracy. Read Article

Alaska Governor vetoes bipartisan elections reform bill | Corinne Smith/Alaska Beacon

Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed a bipartisan bill aimed at streamlining the state’s elections process on Thursday, just seven months ahead of high-stakes state and federal elections in November. Leaders with the multipartisan House Majority caucus said there will be a joint legislative veto override vote within the next few days. In a prepared statement announcing the veto, Dunleavy said while there are many provisions in the bills he supports, the bill contained “legal and operational challenges and could jeopardize the election process.” He told lawmakers his two main issues with the bill are related to when it would go into effect and voters’ signature verification. “The Division of Elections warns such changes would be extremely difficult if not impossible, to implement securely and reliably in advance of the 2026 elections,” he wrote in a transmittal letter to the Legislature. He said the Division needs sufficient time to make necessary changes. Read Article

Arizona: Judge thwarts Trump administration’s attempt to access voter rolls | Gabrielle Canon/The Guardian

An attempt by the Trump administration to gain access to Arizona’s detailed voter records was thwarted by the courts on Tuesday, when a federal judge dismissed the US justice department’s lawsuit against the state. The ruling marks the latest legal setback in an unprecedented nationwide effort by the administration before the midterm elections to collect sensitive information about tens of millions of Americans. The justice department has sued at least 30 states and the District of Columbia seeking to force release of the data, which includes dates of birth, addresses, driver’s license numbers and partial social security numbers. The US district judge Susan Brnovich, a Trump appointee, ruled that Arizona’s statewide voter registration list was “not a document subject to request by the Attorney General” under federal law. The judge dismissed the lawsuit with prejudice because, she wrote, “amendment would be legally futile”. Read Article

California election officials face false choice: count votes quickly or count them right | Maya C. Miller/CalMatters

Political persecution, threats of violence and the seizure of sensitive documents might sound like a plot line for a heist or thriller movie. For California election officials tasked with enabling participatory democracy, these are now everyday realities — from Riverside County, where Sheriff Chad Bianco seized more than 650,000 ballots from his own county’s registrar of voters, to Shasta County, where threats of violence forced the longtime registrar to retire early. The integrity of the state’s voting systems will be under intense scrutiny this year with control of the U.S. House on the line, as Californians could play a decisive role in which party wins the majority. Yet while timely and decisive results are more crucial than ever, California is famous for its ploddingly slow vote count. That lengthy wait has increasingly sown distrust in the accuracy of California’s results, especially among Republicans, and particularly in races where a candidate leading on election day falls behind as more ballots are processed in subsequent days. Read Article

Georgia voting machine deadline leaves counties with no way to run the 2026 election | Jessica Huseman/Votebeat

The state of Georgia’s elections right now is anything but peachy. In abouThe state of Georgia’s elections right now is anything but peachy. In about 10 weeks, county election officials are required to stop using their current voting system — but the state hasn’t told them what to replace it with. Right now, Georgia voters make their selections on touchscreen ballot-marking devices manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems (recently purchased and rebranded as Liberty Vote). Georgia rolled the machines out just before the 2020 election, as part of a sweeping and expensive statewide modernization effort — spurred in part by a 2019 federal court ruling that barred continued use of the paperless touchscreen systems the state had relied on since the early 2000s. The newer machines print a paper ballot listing the voter’s choices in plain English next to a QR code encoding the same choices. When ballots are tabulated, the scanners read the QR code — not the printed text beside it — to count the vote. That design has long drawn fire from both Republicans and Democrats, who argue voters can’t actually verify what a QR code says, only the text next to it. Read Article

Louisiana governor postpones U.S. House primary elections after Supreme Court ruling | Piper Hutchinson/Louisiana Illuminator

Republican Gov. Jeff Landry suspended the May 16 primary elections for Louisiana’s six U.S. House seats Thursday, the day after the U.S. Supreme Court declared the state’s existing congressional map unconstitutional. “Allowing elections to proceed under an unconstitutional map would undermine the integrity of our system and violate the rights of our voters,” Landry said in a written statement. “This executive order ensures we uphold the rule of law while giving the Legislature the time it needs to pass a fair and lawful congressional map.” Absentee voting in the U.S. House races had already begun, and early voting was scheduled to start Saturday. But postponing the election allows Landry and the Louisiana Legislature to pass a new map that eliminates one or both of Louisiana’s two majority-Black congressional districts. Read Article

Michigan court tosses Republican suit challenging overseas voting for military spouses and children | Kyle Davidson/Michigan Advance

Michigan Court of Claims Judge Sima Patel on Wednesday dismissed a challenge to Michigan election law brought by the Republican National Committee and the Michigan Republican Party against Michigan’s secretary of state and director of elections. While the suit aimed to invalidate a state law that allowed the spouses and dependents of Michigan voters who are living abroad to cast a ballot in Michigan elections, Patel concluded that the law remains in line with the Michigan Constitution. The suit was one of many cases that Republicans have filed against Benson, with the Michigan Court of Appeals rejecting a similar case in 2025, centered on the same rules within the state Election Officials Manual. While the law does not require a servicemember’s spouse or child to have lived in Michigan in order to cast their ballot there, the RNC argued that the law stood at odds with language in the state’s governing document that states, “every citizen of the United States who has attained the age of 21 years, who has resided in this state six months, and who meets the requirements of local residence provided by law, shall be an elector and qualified to vote in any election except as otherwise provided in this constitution.” Read Article

Montana: Even after reminder, voters struggling with new law requiring birth year on ballot envelope | Darrell Ehrlick/Daily Montanan

Even as election officials throughout the state reminded residents last month of changes to Montana’s election laws and how ballots should be marked, Montana’s largest county, Yellowstone, said that it is working with nearly 1,000 residents to fix rejected ballots before the school board elections on May 5. On Monday afternoon, Yellowstone County Elections Administrator Dayna Causby said that 960 ballots had been rejected largely because most failed to include the elector’s birth year, which is now required by state law. That new requirement caused a higher percentage of Montana ballots to be rejected in 2025, but election officials are worried because there are several different elections in 2026, including primaries in June as well as the general election in November. Read Article

North Carolina elections board considers new rules for photo ID, polling places | Lynn Bonner/NC Newsline

A new proposal would make it easier for North Carolina county boards of election to throw out ballots of people who don’t show photo ID when they vote. Under the proposal, county boards would no longer have to agree unanimously that voters lied about the reasons they didn’t have ID. A majority on the county boards, on which Republicans currently hold three of five seats, could determine that voters were lying and reject their ballots. The changes to the rejection threshold are part of a list of proposed election rules governing absentee ballots and conduct at polling places. The state Board of Elections took its first step Wednesday to advance the proposals, voting 3-2 to put them out for public comment. The board’s two Democratic members were opposed. After the 60-day comment period, the board would vote on any revisions. The Rules Review Commission would have to approve. Read Article

Pennsylvania court grants public access to voting data in dispute from 2020 election’s aftermath | Mark Scolforo/Associated Press

Pennsylvania’s high court ruled Tuesday that spreadsheets of raw data associated with every ballot are public records, providing access to the “cast vote records” that had been requested by an election researcher hired by the Trump Administration last year. The Democratic-majority Supreme Court said its unanimous decision was a way to “satisfy the voting public that our elections are safe, secure and accurate” while preserving the state constitution’s requirement that votes remain secret. The Lycoming County elections director in Williamsport had denied Heather Honey’s request for digital copies from the 2020 presidential election, saying that would amount to letting her review the contents of a ballot box, one vote at a time. Cast vote records are created when a voter’s choices are made electronically or scanned. Read Article

South Dakota: Confusion emerges over new voter ID requirements | Alexander Rifaat/South Daskota News Watch

County auditors in South Dakota are, in certain cases, deciding how to implement new voter ID rules on their own due to uncertainty over guidelines issued by the state's secretary of state, as early and absentee voting for the primary election is well underway. Senate Bill 175, passed in the 2026 legislative session, requires new voters to provide proof of citizenship as part of the registration process. The bill was enacted with an emergency clause, which allows the regulations to take effect for the upcoming primary ballot on June 2. The secretary of state's website outlines various documents first-time registrants can provide as a photocopy to show proof of citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate. But confusion has emerged as to whether eligible South Dakota driver's licenses, which identify a person's citizenship status, can also be provided as a photocopy or have to be shown in person. Read Article

In Texas political parties choose how to run their primaries. Here’s how that causes headaches for voters. | Natalia Contreras/Dallas Free Press

By all accounts, the administration of the 2026 primary election in Williamson County was calamitous. Voters did not know where to vote. Lines were long and chaotic. Election workers made errors and misplaced ballots. Nearly everyone seems to agree on who’s to blame: the Williamson County Republican Party, which last fall decided to eliminate countywide voting and, for the first time in more than a decade, force all voters to cast ballots at assigned precincts instead. Republicans in Dallas and Eastland counties made the same decision. The moves set off a chain reaction of problems. “It was a mess, and I’m not going to deny that it was a mess,” said Michelle Evans, the chair of the Williamson County GOP, at a county commissioners court meeting days after the March election, though she said Republicans weren’t the only ones responsible. The meeting, inside the county courthouse in downtown Georgetown, an affluent suburb of Austin, was packed with upset voters and poll workers, who applauded a line of unhappy speakers. Read Article

Texas appeals court rejects Dallas County Republican’s move to force precincts in runoff | Tracey McManus/The Dallas Morning News

One month before the primary runoff, a Texas appeals court has rejected a Republican precinct chair’s emergency effort to force the Dallas County elections chief to reinstate precinct-based voting. he ruling leaves countywide voting in place for the May 26 runoff, but the conflict may not be over, with GOP leaders weighing next legal steps as Democrats cheered the decision as a win for voter access. In a petition filed last week, Barry Wernick alleged that former Dallas County Republican chair Allen West’s amendment to the party’s contract with the county that scrapped precincts for the runoff was invalid because he did not have authorization from the party’s executive committee. Read Article

Wisconsin orders Madison, Mequon to revise election tallies over disputed ballots | Alexander Shur/Votebeat

The Wisconsin Elections Commission on Thursday overruled controversial ballot-counting decisions in Mequon and Madison, ordering the cities to revise final tallies in their Wisconsin Supreme Court election results. Madison counted 23 late-arriving ballots that the commission voted should not have been included, while Mequon threw out five ballots the commission said should have been counted. The commission voted 6-0 to investigate both city clerks’ offices and ordered changes to the counts — voting 5-1 to require Madison and Dane County to exclude the 23 ballots, and 6-0 to require Mequon and Ozaukee County to count the five. The deadline for the state to certify the election is May 15, but some commissioners acknowledged the likelihood that lawsuits over today’s decisions could come before then. Read Article

National: Might Donald Trump try to rig the midterms? | The Economist

“Basically we just sort of rack our brains,” says Joe Morelle. “What would happen if this happened? Usually the answer is, well, that’s never happened before—but this is what we would do.” Mr Morelle is the top-ranking Democrat on the House Committee on House Administration. In normal times his team oversees matters of great importance to Congress, such as who gets a parking permit in the House garage. This being an election year, he is preoccupied with an even more existential question. What if Donald Trump tries to steal the midterms? Mr Morelle’s committee is in charge of adjudicating disputed elections in the House of Representatives. He has spent months doing tabletop exercises and dreaming up worst-case scenarios. His list of finagles that Mr Trump might attempt is 150 items long. His what-ifs include the president ordering immigration agents to the polls, declaring that postal votes are invalid and seizing ballot boxes. “I’m looking at things that are high, medium and low probability and then asking what’s the impact” and what is the Democrats’ response, says Mr Morelle. It is a group effort: he has been conferring with lawyers across the country, state attorneys-general and secretaries of state (ie, the top election officials in each state). Come November, Mr Morelle and his colleagues will have been war-gaming for more than a year.Read Article

National: Preparing for Law Enforcement Demands for Election Materials | Gary Restaino/Brennan Center for Justice

Already this year, law enforcement agencies have demanded sensitive election materials in at least four jurisdictions. In January, the FBI seized materials related to the 2020 federal election from Fulton County, Georgia. In February, the sheriff of Riverside County, California, seized ballots from the special redistricting election the state held last year. In March, the FBI served a federal grand jury subpoena to the president of the Arizona Senate, requiring records from independent contractor Cyber Ninjas’ discredited “audit” of the 2020 federal election. And this month, the Justice Department demanded 2024 ballots and other materials from Wayne County, Michigan. Using criminal investigative tools to challenge election results is unprecedented in America, and it appears to be part of this administration’s campaign to undermine elections. This pattern is troubling for democracy and diminishes voters’ confidence in elections. It is also inconsistent with the professional standards expected of law enforcement. Election officials, grand jurors, law enforcement, and judges should be prepared to keep sensitive materials secure in the face of any improper demands for election materials, and they should carefully scrutinize warrants and subpoenas that intrude on election security. Read Article

National: Trump administration blocking appointments to key panel overseeing voting machines, officials say | Jacob Knutson/Democracy Docket

Election officials across the country this week voiced concerns that the Trump administration is blocking appointments to a key federal committee that helps create standards for voting equipment used in U.S. elections.The unexplained rejections are keeping qualified experts in the creation of secure and accessible voting equipment off the Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC) — a body made up of technical experts and federal officials that helps develop guidelines to certify voting equipment. That could ultimately lead to the certification of voting machines that shouldn’t be in use — because they’re vulnerable to security breaches, inaccessible for certain types of voters, or otherwise flawed. And it represents the latest Trump administration bid to assert control over elections. Read Article

National: The National Guard ‘follows the Constitution,’ general says of troops possibly deployed to polls | Jonathan Shorman/News From The States

The National Guard’s top general told Congress on Friday that it would follow the Constitution and the law when he was asked about the possibility President Donald Trump would order troops to polling places for the midterm elections. The remarks at a U.S. House Appropriations subcommittee hearing came as Democratic lawmakers also voiced unease over the continuing deployment of nearly 2,500 National Guard members in Washington, D.C. Rep. Joe Morelle, a New York Democrat, asked Gen. Steven Nordhaus, chief of the National Guard Bureau, what assurances he could provide to Americans concerned about the deployment of troops at the polls. “The National Guard, obviously, always follows the Constitution, law, policy and guidance, both at the federal and the state level,” Nordhaus said. Federal law prohibits the deployment of the military to polling places unless necessary “to repel armed enemies of the United States” and violations are punishable by up to five years in prison. Read Article

National: Internal documents shed light on Trump’s crusade to vet state voter rolls | Tierney Sneed/CNN

The Trump administration has been working for nearly a year on an effort to weed out noncitizens from voter rolls using a faulty data system while keeping those plans hidden from courts and Democratic election officials, internal Justice Department communications obtained by CNN show. The White House was kept in the loop on the Justice Department’s progress, as it struggled to get cooperation from states in its sprawling requests for unredacted voter registration information, ultimately bringing lawsuits against 31 election chiefs. Only last month did the DOJ’s top voting lawyer acknowledge in the litigation that the department wanted to run the data through a citizenship verification system operated by the Department of Homeland Security. Internal emails cited in a new lawsuit filed Tuesday by a voter advocacy group challenging President Donald Trump’s sprawling voter data-collection and review project shed new light on the effort. Read Article

National: Trump, aides chase vote-rigging claims even after latest probe finds nothing | Jonathan Landay, Erin Banco and Phil Stewart/Reuters

Late last summer, Kurt Olsen’s patience had run out. U.S. President Donald Trump had enlisted Olsen months earlier to seek evidence of foreign interference in U.S. elections and re-investigate Trump’s 2020 loss. A prominent election-denier, attorney and former Navy SEAL, Olsen aimed to prove the discredited conspiracy theory that Dominion Voting Systems machines had been infected with malicious code controlled by Venezuela, according to three sources familiar with the matter. But a secret federal investigation of Puerto Rico’s Dominion machines had found no trace of hacking after the administration seized the machines in May and directed a cybersecurity contractor to scour them for months. Confronted with the results, Olsen turned on the contractor, Virginia-based Mojave ​Research Inc. in a September message to Trump, the three sources said. Infuriated, Olsen accused the firm of blocking his work, serving the “deep state” and secretly taking money from billionaire George Soros, a Democratic donor and frequent right-wing target, they said. Read Article

National: Trump Justice Department Curbs Efforts to Safeguard States From Election Crimes | Ben Penn/Bloomberg Law

The Justice Department is curtailing election year coordination aimed at protecting state-run voting processes, increasing risks of the Trump administration interfering in the November midterms or unwittingly exposing precincts to threats, said multiple state officials and former DOJ election crime lawyers. Ahead of an election that will determine whether Republicans retain control of Congress, DOJ leaders have eliminated a centralized command post, discontinued mandatory election law training for prosecutors, and restricted access to threat briefings for state officials, said people briefed on the situation. To attorneys steeped in federal-state election law enforcement norms, DOJ’s information-sharing pullback is a subtler form of undermining the election integrity principles that this administration touts as a priority. It coincides with the department’s escalating push to seize state voting records and FBI Director Kash Patel’s promise of imminent arrests tied to the 2020 presidential election. President Donald Trump has also hinted at stripping states’ constitutional authority over election administration. Read Article

Alabama elections now subject to audit, but bill sponsor wants some changes | Anna Barrett/News From The States

The sponsor of a new law requiring audits of general elections in Alabama said Monday he wants to make some changes in the future. HB 95, sponsored by Rep. Joe Lovvorn, R-Auburn, requires probate judges to conduct a post-election audit of every ballot in one precinct after every county and statewide general election. An executive amendment from Gov. Kay Ivey added to the legislation in the final days of the 2026 legislative session removed a requirement that the audited precinct be randomly selected. Lovvorn said in a phone interview Monday was the same amendment that was adopted in a Senate committee in February, but later tabled on the Senate floor in late March. Read Article

Arizona: Conservative groups lose appeal of election overhaul lawsuit | Caitlin Sievers/Arizona Mirror

An appeals court has dismissed a lawsuit from conservative groups that challenged how Arizona counties verify early ballot signatures and run ballot drop-boxes, among other things. Brought by the America First Legal Foundation and the Strong Communities Foundation of Arizona on behalf of a group of voters, the lawsuit rehashed numerous claims that election deniers have made unsuccessfully in court for years. The conservative groups argued that Maricopa, Yavapai and Coconino counties illegally used unstaffed ballot drop boxes, canceled voter registrations and used improper procedures to verify voter signatures on vote-by-mail ballot envelopes. The America First Legal Foundation was created by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, the architect of Project 2025 and one of President Donald Trump’s closest advisors. The Strong Communities Foundation of Arizona, which mostly operates under the name EZAZ, is run by conservative political operative Merissa Caldwell, formerly Merissa Hamilton. The Arizona Court of Appeals on Wednesday affirmed a Yavapai County Superior Court judge’s 2025 decision to dismiss the case. Read Article