Texas secretary of state raised concerns about federal SAVE program used to verify voters’ citizenship | Natalia Contreras/Votebeat

The Texas Secretary of State’s Office used a controversial federal data tool to flag more than 2,000 potential noncitizens on the state’s voter roll last year. But in an April letter to federal immigration officials, Secretary of State Jane Nelson raised concerns about its accuracy. In that letter to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials, obtained as part of a public records request by Democracy Forward — a nonprofit legal organization advocating for democracy through litigation and public policy — and shared with Votebeat, Nelson said her office wanted “to make sure that you are using the most accurate data,” and asked agency officials to notify her office if they are able to “confirm the citizenship of any individuals previously identified as non-citizens” in the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, system. Alicia Pierce, a spokesperson for the secretary of state’s office, said the agency has not yet received a response from USCIS. Nelson resigned from her role last month. Her last day is July 17, and the governor has not yet appointed a replacement.. Read Article

National: Democrats call ‘bull—-‘ on Trump’s election interference claims | Sarah Davis/The Hill

Democrats raised alarm after President Trump’s revived his unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election during a Thursday evening address. “You have to be a special kind of stupid to believe this bull—-,” Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), the top Democrat on the House Rules Committee, said in a statement shared on social media ahead of the president’s speech. Trump doubled down on his claims that this election was “stolen” from him and placed blame on the People’s Republic of China and Democratic-led states during his evening address. All 24 Democratic governors called Trump’s claims “deeply alarming” in a joint statement released on Thursday evening. “No amount of lies and conspiracy theories can change the fact that our country’s elections have repeatedly been proven to be safe and secure,” they said. “These attacks are intended to intimidate and silence voters.” Read Article

Pennsylvania says it will not hand over voter rolls to federal government in reply to DOJ letter | Andrea Padilla/The Philadelphia Inquirer

Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt stressed that the state was not in violation of any voting regulations in a response letter to a Department of Justice inquiry that threatened criminal charges over suspicions of noncitizen voting. The letter, sent Monday, pushed back against the Trump administration’s insistence that allowing federal assistance in inspecting voter rolls was the best way to avoid criminal prosecution for “aiding and abetting the violation” of federal voting laws. The Trump administration’s letter, sent July 7, was addressed to voting officials in all 50 states and requested a reply within the week. Schmidt’s reply made it clear that Pennsylvania would not hand over voter rolls to the federal government and reiterated that voting regulations were followed meticulously. Read Article

Michigan: Trump cites suspect 2020 Muskegon voter registrations in election security speech | Todd Spangler/Detroit Free Press

Addressing the nation on the subject of election security, President Donald Trump suggested an FBI investigation into alleged voter registration fraud in Muskegon in 2020 was "buried and covered up" and instructed his administration to take it back up six years later. But documents the Trump administration itself declassified as the president was speaking on Thursday, July 16, seemed to indicate that federal officials continued to look into the case for years while Trump was out of office, interviewing witnesses and comparing applications with state records. It was only in September 2025 − eight months after Trump's second, nonconsecutive term began − that the Grand Rapids field office concluded that "no criminal violation or priority threat to national security" had been identified. Those documents also seemed to suggest that no voters had been paid to register to vote but that an employee or employees of a voter registration firm may have submitted falsely completed applications. If they did so, the documents suggested, it likely occurred not as a rampant scam to alter an election outcome but as an attempt by the employee or employees to appear more productive than they otherwise may have been and perhaps receive a bonus. Read Article

National: Voting System Vulnerabilities and How They Can Be Weaponized | Geoff Hale/Electionline Weekly

Vulnerabilities in voting systems are real and worth fixing. At the same time, the manner in which they are used to fearmonger does not reflect the actual security of elections. Security researchers do find real weaknesses embedded in the code and operations of U.S. voting systems, just like they do with power grids, banks, and telecommunications, all of which share the same “critical infrastructure” designation as elections. Finding a flaw and fixing it is a sign of a mature system, not a sign it’s broken. But claiming that vulnerabilities in voting systems exist is different from claiming that vulnerabilities in voting systems have been exploited, and even further distinct from claiming that vulnerabilities in voting systems have been exploited during live election operations in a manner to have rigged past elections, flipped votes, and determined outcomes. Each one of those concepts relies on a distinct body of evidence to be proven true. Public discourse that intentionally conflates the evidence for one to equate the outcomes of another is deceptive and can be disproven. The evidentiary record does not support claims that voting system vulnerabilities have been exploited to rig recent elections such as the 2020 presidential election in the United States. Read Article

Wisconsin board says Elon Musk likely broke the law by promising voters $1 million payouts | Scott Bauer/Associated Press

Billionaire Elon Musk likely broke Wisconsin law when he promised to hand out $1 million checks to voters in the 2025 state Supreme Court election, a bipartisan panel has found. The Wisconsin Elections Commission last week referred two complaints to the Brown County district attorney’s office, which can choose to bring criminal charges over violating the state law against election bribery. Prosecutors have 40 days to report back to the commission. Musk, the founder of SpaceX and CEO of Tesla, was deeply involved in the effort to flip majority control of the highest court in battleground Wisconsin. The tech titan and groups he supported spent at least $20 million on the candidate backed by Republicans, Brad Schimel. However, he lost by 10 percentage points to Democratic-backed candidate Susan Crawford. Read Article

New Jersey: GOP suit claims overseas voting law is unconstitutional | Nikita Biryukov/New Jersey Monitor

A GOP congressional candidate and state and national Republican committees are seeking to overturn a 2022 law that allows citizen children born abroad to New Jerseyans to vote in the state’s federal elections. In a lawsuit filed Thursday in Mercer County Superior Court, Michael McGuire, who is running for the 3rd District House seat, and the RNC alleged the law runs afoul of provisions in New Jersey’s Constitution that require residents live in their state and county for 30 days to be eligible to vote there. The Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act allows Americans living abroad to vote in federal U.S. elections if they would be eligible to do so in the last state they lived in before departing the country. Read Article

National: FBI Has Looked at Using Questionable AI Tech to Review Signatures on Seized Mail-In Ballots | Jeremy Kohler and Doug Bock Clark/ProPublica

The FBI has explored using artificial intelligence to assess the validity of signatures on tens of thousands of mail-in ballot envelopes seized from Fulton County, Georgia, the latest push in the Trump administration’s unprecedented reinvestigation of the 2020 vote. The effort, according to internal communications reviewed by ProPublica and an agency tech specialist familiar with the work, focuses on comparing signatures on ballot envelopes with signatures on other election documents, such as registration forms. President Donald Trump has long claimed, without evidence, that the 2020 election was stolen from him. In particular, he has repeatedly claimed that there was voter fraud in Georgia, where he lost to Joe Biden by just 11,779 votes. In January, the FBI raided Fulton County, a Democratic stronghold, collecting about 700 boxes of election materials, including about 150,000 mail-in ballots, of which roughly 116,000 went for Biden. Trump is set to deliver a speech Thursday about national election security and voting machine vulnerabilities, but it is unclear whether he will address the Fulton County investigation. Read Article

Arizona: Maricopa County’s election dispute is finally over — at least on paper | Sasha Hupka/Votebeat

Officials in one of the nation’s biggest swing counties huddled in separate, windowless jury chambers at a courthouse Monday. Outside, a summer monsoon storm unleashed dust, wind, rain, and lightning over Phoenix. Inside, long after business hours, a local judge hurried back and forth, carrying proposed terms from one room to the other. Around 10 p.m., they reached a consensus. Maricopa County finally had a plan for running its elections, and its board of supervisors enacted it in a 3-1 vote at a hastily scheduled emergency meeting Tuesday. Read Article

National: States are building their own election defense networks as federal support evaporates | Derek B. Johnson/CyberScoop

The Trump administration’s abrupt firing of Election Assistance Commission commissioners last week and a Department of Justice warning threatening states with criminal prosecution have created new legal peril for officials who run, administer and secure elections. The EAC is an obscure but important agency that oversees testing and standards for voting machines, including around security. While federal certification is voluntary, states have until now relied upon their stamp of approval when purchasing voting machines. On July 10, Democratic Commissioners Ben Hovland and Thomas Hicks were fired by the White House, while reports indicate that a third Commissioner, Republican Christy McCormick, resigned. While Congress mandated the commission be bipartisan, the Supreme Court has recently given the President broad authority to fire executive branch officials at will. In an interview with NPR, Hovland said he worried the firings would further erode trust that the commission was working in a bipartisan manner. Read Article

North Carolina: ‘We’re supporting a lie’: Elections Board votes to throw out ballots more easily | Will Doran/WRAL

It could soon be easier for North Carolina elections officials to throw out people’s ballots during the 2026 midterm elections and beyond, under new rules approved Thursday by the State Board of Elections. The new changes, backed by the Republican majority on the State Board of Elections and opposed by the board's Democratic minority, make it easier for elections officials to reject people’s excuses for not having required voter identification. They'd also make it easier to kick people out of polling places, in addition to other changes. The board also plans to vote Monday on similar rules making it easier to throw out mail-in ballots. The rules aren't immediately official. After approval by the elections board they must also be approved by the state's Rules Review Commission — which also has a Republican majority and which one of the election board's Republican members said Thursday will likely also sign off on the changes. Read Article

National: What Trump’s newly declassified documents do – and don’t – tell us about threats to US elections | Marshall Cohen and Kevin Liptak/CNN

President Donald Trump in his primetime speech on Thursday is alleging vulnerabilities exist in American election systems, using a large trove of newly declassified documents as evidence to suggest future elections could be at risk of foreign interference, particularly by China. Though the documents are newly declassified, they largely discuss vulnerabilities that have been known for years and election officials around the country have tried to address. None of the declassified information supports the claim that any previous election results — including the 2020 presidential contest that Trump lost — were manipulated by foreign interference or fraud in a way that would’ve changed the outcome. Read Article

Georgia’s Senators Ridicule Trump’s Election Fraud Claims | Carl Hulse/The New York Times

Georgia’s two Democratic senators didn’t wait for President Trump to try to undermine their legitimacy with false claims about their crucial election victories in 2020 that propelled Democrats to the Senate majority. In interviews and social media posts, Senators Raphael Warnock and John Ossoff have aggressively countered a potential presidential claim that they did not win their seats fairly. They acted after reports that the president would use a speech scheduled for Thursday evening to take aim at them, alleging widespread fraud in Georgia voting six years ago despite multiple inquiries that produced no evidence of wrongdoing. The two senators and their Democratic allies have ridiculed the president’s fixation on his loss in 2020 and the accompanying Democratic victories as driven by the president’s fragile ego, his efforts to sow distrust about the coming election results and to pressure congressional Republicans to pass new voting restrictions.Read Article

‘Zero new facts’: Teased as a bombshell, Trump election speech underwhelms election officials | Votebeat

After days of speculation among election officials and experts about what President Donald Trump might say in a heavily hyped primetime speech on elections, Trump on Thursday night delivered a mix of familiar claims, grievances, and assertions about election security that stopped short of alleging that votes had been altered or that results had been changed. Instead, Trump revived years-old evidence that China attempted to gather American voter data and that election systems are vulnerable to hacking, information that has long been public and that election officials said they have taken steps to mitigaate. He also claimed to have identified 270,000 noncitizens on the voter rolls — election officials said they weren’t sure how that number was arrived at — and resurfaced old fraud allegations related to voter registration in Michigan. In conjunction with Trump’s speech, his administration released newly declassified documents related to election integrity — some still heavily redacted — that in many cases did not fully back up the president’s claims. Read Article

Trump fires Election Assistance Commission members, leaving agency unable to act | Jessica Huseman/Votebeat

President Donald Trump fired all three remaining members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission on Thursday, abruptly disabling the only federal agency devoted solely to election administration at a moment when Trump has sought to reshape federal voting rules. The two Democratic commissioners, Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland, were notified by email. “On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as Commissioner of the Election Assistance Commission is terminated, effective immediately. Thank you for your service,” the email said. It was signed by Morgan DeWitt Snow, deputy director of presidential personnel in the Executive Office of the President. The third commissioner, Republican Christy McCormick, was allowed to resign, according to three sources within the agency. McCormick declined to comment when reached by phone. The agency’s fourth commissioner, Republican Donald Palmer, voluntarily departed the agency earlier this year to join the Heritage Foundation. Read Article

National: Trump administration ramps up pressure on state election officials | Geoff ulvihill and Marc Levy/Associated Press

President Donald Trump’s administration is threatening to withhold some federal funding from states that don’t make changes to voting practices and is warning state election officials that they face arrest if they don’t remove noncitizens from voter rolls. Letters to states and grant application details are the latest in a line of actions by Trump’s administration to shape details of running elections that have long been the job of states. Courts have largely rejected the administration’s previous efforts, which reflect untrue claims about widespread voting fraud and come less than four months ahead of crucial midterm elections where Democrats seek to take control of one or both chambers of Congress and check Trump’s power. “The overall point is that Trump is trying to use whatever levers of power and persuasive power that he might have to try to interfere with how states and localities are going to conduct the 2026 election,” said Rick Hasen, a UCLA law professor and the director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project. “Some of this is aimed at changing how the rules are conducted. Some of it appears to be aimed at undermining voter confidence in the integrity of the election process.” Read Article

National: Justice Department Threatens Top Election Officials Over Noncitizen Voting | Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times

The Justice Department sent letters to at least 10 states on Tuesday threatening criminal prosecution of top election officials if ballots cast by noncitizens were counted in upcoming elections. The letters arrived in the midst of an ongoing campaign by President Trump and his allies to tighten election rules to prevent a problem that doesn’t exist: widespread noncitizen voting in American elections. The effort has, however, continued to sow doubt and distrust in the electoral process, most notably among the president’s base of supporters. And his proposals could have the effect of making it more difficult for eligible voters to cast their ballots — an outcome that many voting-right activists say is the president’s real goal. The letters sent on Tuesday came from Harmeet Dhillon, who runs the Justice Department’s civil rights division. They are largely identical, according to multiple copies obtained by The New York Times. The seven-page letters detail a host of federal election laws that prohibit noncitizens from voting in elections — laws that have been clear for decades. Read Article

National: States will shape America’s future as nation confronts a pivotal choice | Jonathan Shorman and Kevin Hardy/News From The States

A quarter millennium after its founding, the United States faces a stark choice that will define its future. In the years ahead, the country can continue to follow the path blazed by President Donald Trump, who is attempting to bring states under the authority of a more powerful federal government led by him. Or it can move in a different direction, one where states become a heavier counterweight to an aggressive White House and rebalance the relationship between the states and the federal government. The United States’ foundations are undergoing a significant stress test, experts say, raising questions about whether a radical reconception of the nation lies ahead. The federalism that has helped bind the states — and therefore, the nation — together is fraying, pulled apart by a president who demonstrates little regard for many of the nation’s core principles. Read Article

National: Federal law that protects voters from last-minute removal is at the center of Trump’s anti-voting war | Yunior Rivas/Democracy Docket

If the Supreme Court weakens the quiet period, that protection could be replaced by a dangerous rule under which last-minute purges are barred only when states call them purges. The 90-day quiet period exists because elections require stability, not chaos, in the run-up to Election Day. Congress recognized that if eligible voters are swept up in a large removal program shortly before an election, many won’t have enough time to discover the mistake and get it corrected,” Pamela Smith, president and CEO of the pro-voting nonprofit Verified Voting, told Democracy Docket. “Removing the 90-day buffer takes away the only structural safeguard between a bad data match and eligible voters’ ability to participate. That doesn’t mean voter registration lists stop being maintained. Election officials update them year-round, and individualized changes still happen during the quiet period — whether that’s processing a voter’s own request to cancel their registration, recording a death, or making other routine corrections permitted under state and federal law,” Smith said. “What the quiet period restricts is a systematic effort to remove a broad class of voters based on shared criteria. Calling a large-scale removal effort ‘individualized’ doesn’t change how it functions if the same criteria are being applied across thousands of records. County election officials already routinely review and maintain voter registrations on an individual basis throughout the year,” Smith added. “Labeling a bulk removal program as a case-by-case review just before an election doesn’t change its substance. Doing so would still undermine the period’s purpose and risk disenfranchising those who have every right to cast their ballot.” Explainer: Federal law that protects voters from last-minute removal is at the center of Trump’s anti-voting war - Democracy Docket

National: Threat of Foreign Influence on U.S. Elections Remain as Federal Defenses Recede | Kate Lurie and Zarine Kharazian/Brennan Center for Justice

Foreign influence is a persistent threat to U.S. elections, and three countries — China, Iran, and Russia — are poised to attempt to influence the 2026 midterms. Though their behavior is not new, this year, their access to sophisticated artificial intelligence tools and the lack of federal governmental pushback against them will likely require additional diligence from voters to ensure that they have accurate information. The Trump administration has degraded the federal infrastructure for detecting and countering foreign election threats, leaving states to prepare for these threats largely on their own for the first time since 2016. The rapid advances in artificial intelligence tools have increased both the capabilities of existing actors and made the influence campaigns more believable. Further, domestic actors, including the Trump administration, are using the real threat of foreign influence — mixed with promotion of unsubstantiated rumors of foreign interference, meaning the technical targeting of voting machines or other hardware — to advance their political goals. Read Article

National: US Postal Service cannot carry out Trump order on mail ballot delivery, judge rules | Tierney Sneed/CNN

A federal judge blocked the US Postal Service from carrying out its plan for President Donald Trump’s mail ballot executive order, finding that the proposal violated a settlement in a 2020 lawsuit against the agency. Trump had directed USPS to only transmit ballots for states that submit to the agency lists of their mail-in voters and that meet other requirements for their mail voting programs. Previously, a judge in Boston had halted the Postal Service from implementing the order for two-dozen states that challenged it in court. But the new ruling from US District Judge Emmet Sullivan, who sits in Washington DC, blocks the directives nationwide. If courts let Trump’s order from March 2026 stand, it would give the federal government an unprecedented role in elections — and could put even more voter data in the hands of Trump officials searching for supposed election fraud. Read Article

National: Trump Is Getting Tired of Losing Election Cases | Toluse Olorunnipa/The Atlantic

Earlier this year, President Trump claimed a new area of expertise: election law. “I have searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject,” Trump wrote on social media, and found an “irrefutable one” that he would soon present. He suggested that it would allow him to bypass Congress and gain approval from the courts to impose his will on the nation’s locally run election system, including requiring voters to show identification while casting ballots in the upcoming midterms. It was a heady time for a man who obsesses over voting policy and is seeking to prove that the 2020 election was stolen out from under him. Two weeks before Trump claimed in his February 13 post to have broken new legal ground, the FBI had conducted a raid of an election warehouse in Fulton County, Georgia. Officials made off with more than 650 boxes of ballots as part of a criminal investigation stemming from Trump’s 2020 defeat, an unprecedented action that the president hailed as a major advance for his unsubstantiated claim that the contest was riddled with fraud. The House of Representatives had just passed the SAVE America Act, a bill that would force people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and to show photo identification when casting a ballot. Read Article

Opinion: The Roberts court is leading America backward on race | David H. Gans/Slate

Over a century ago, when the Supreme Court helped usher in Jim Crow, Justice John Marshall Harlan took his colleagues to task for betraying the promise of Reconstruction. Dissenting in Plessy v. Ferguson, Harlan insisted that “in view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” In the Supreme Court term that just ended, the Roberts court turned Harlan’s anti-caste reading on its head. This court read the 14th Amendment, time and again, as the justification to lock in racial subordination and to immunize bias and prejudice from scrutiny. A big part of the story of the term that just ended is that this conservative supermajority will give the Reconstruction Amendments the stingiest reading possible. Read Article

Arizona: The War Over Who Controls Elections in a Key Midterm Battleground | Eliza Collins/The Wall Street Journal

Maricopa County was the locus of baseless allegations that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. Just four months before this November’s pivotal midterm elections, the issue is far from settled. In videos released this summer by Maricopa County, two election staff—one of them a top aide to the Maricopa County recorder—removed a ballot envelope scanner and provisional ballot envelopes from a secure location while votes for a special election were still being tallied. They returned the equipment within an hour. The incident is the latest flashpoint in an increasingly bitter fight between the mostly Republican elected officials who run elections in Arizona’s biggest county. The clash has rekindled a debate many Arizona voters had hoped to move on from. Read Article

Colorado Governor Jared Polis fires clemency board members who spoke out about Tina Peters decision | Nick Coltrain/The Denver Post

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis fired two members of his clemency advisory board Wednesday for publicly speaking against his decision to free Tina Peters after she was convicted of election-related crimes. Polis removed Hannah Seigel Proff and Azra Taslimi from the advisory board because they “breached the required duty of confidentiality by publicly divulging board members’ votes,” according to letters from Polis reported Wednesday afternoon by the New York Times, which was first to break the news. Following the 2020 election, Peters, then the Mesa County clerk and recorder, gave a person associated with election-denier Mike Lindell access to Mesa County’s voting system. She was found guilty of four felonies and sentenced in October 2024 to nine years in prison for the crimes. Gov. Polis fires clemency board members for speaking about Tina Peters

Georgia: Judge rejects DOJ attempt to get names of 2020 Fulton County election workers | Kate Brumback/Associated Press

The U.S. Department of Justice cannot have the names and personal contact information for every person who worked during the 2020 election in Georgia’s Fulton County, a federal judge ruled Tuesday. The Justice Department served a grand jury subpoena in April seeking the names and personal contact information of county employees and volunteer poll workers. President Donald Trump has long claimed without evidence that widespread voter fraud in Georgia’s most populous county, a Democratic stronghold, cost him victory in the state in 2020. Fulton County asked a judge to quash the subpoena, arguing it was meant to “target, harass and punish the President’s perceived political opponents” and that it was “grossly over broad and untethered to any reasonable need.” Read Article

Georgia: A last-minute change to ballot QR code bill could steer voting in a new direction | Maya Homan/Georgia Recorder

At least five different U.S.-based companies, including Liberty Vote, offer on-demand ballot printing, according to Verified Voting, a nonprofit organization that tracks election equipment across the country. The state does currently rely on paper ballots to tally the official results, though only absentee and provisional ballots are marked by hand. Georgia is also one of the few states that uses one type of election equipment statewide, meaning that a shift in the vendor who supplies the results would impact all of the state’s 159 counties. Mark Lindeman, Verified Voting’s policy and strategy director, said Fleming’s amendment largely aligns with the organization’s recommendation that most voters use ballots marked by hand and counted by machines, which they see as having the fewest risks and ensures that election officials can verify the outcome of an election. Precincts will still be required to have a certain number of ballot-marking devices to fulfill federal accessibility requirements though. “I think it’s a good path for Georgia to adopt for 2028,” Lindeman said, noting that the extended deadline was crucial to give state and local officials time to switch over to the new system. “There have been proposals to try to roll this out somehow this year, and I just didn’t see how any of those could work. There just wasn’t enough time to put it together.”  Read Article

Maryland delays approval of new $109M voting system after rise of transparency concerns | Sarah Petrowich/WYPR

The Maryland Board of Public Works has delayed approving a $109 million voting system overhaul after advocates and state lawmakers brought up concerns around the contract’s transparency and price tag. The State Board of Elections (SBE) is seeking approval of a five-year contract with Election Systems and Software (ES&S) to implement a new statewide voting system, which includes ballot marking devices, scanners and tabulators. “We have a system that is currently 11 and a half years old, and we were scheduled to purchase new equipment for the 2028 election so that we can then gear up for the 2030 redistricting effort,” State Administrator of Elections Jared DeMarinis told WYPR. The contract is part of a larger effort to revamp Maryland’s entire elections system. Read Article

Michigan: DOJ says it will monitor primary elections | Craig Mauger/The Detroit News

President Donald Trump's Department of Justice has informed Michigan officials it intends to send election monitors to three cities in the battleground state for the Aug. 4 primary. Letters from the federal department about the plans have mentioned Detroit, Lansing and East Lansing, said two sources who had knowledge of the messages but spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss them publicly. All three cities are Democratic strongholds. Detroit is Michigan's largest city. Lansing and East Lansing, which is home to Michigan State University, are located in the swing 7th U.S. House District, where Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Barrett of Charlotte is seeking a second term in November but faces no primary opponent. Read Article

Feds leave Minnesota to fend for itself on election security | Briana Bierschbach/The Minnesota Star Tribune

By this point in a typical election year, federal intelligence officials would have briefed Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon and other election officials on emerging threats to the November election. Simon would have joined federal agencies in rehearsing responses to worst-case scenarios, from foreign cyberattacks and bomb threats to severe weather on Election Day. Instead, with four months until voters head to the polls, Simon said those briefings and trainings never happened. Now, some of the worst-case scenarios election officials are preparing for involve the Trump administration. “The federal government itself is now the potential obstacle — or even the instigator,” Simon said. “That’s what’s different this time.” Read Article