National: Whistle-Blower Says Trump Officials Are Defying Court Orders on Voting by Mail | Chris Cameron/The New York Times

A U.S. Postal Service official has alleged that the agency is moving forward with a “secretive, rushed” effort to carry out President Trump’s order exerting federal control over mail voting, despite a court order blocking those plans. The official filed a whistle-blower report, published on Tuesday morning by the office of Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, asserting that the “risky and haphazard” implementation of Mr. Trump’s order could lead to a “catastrophic failure” in the mail ballot system ahead of this year’s midterm elections. The report said that the agency had planned to complete the new digital system overseeing mail ballots by Sept. 1. “Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all,” the official said in the report, which was prepared with the assistance of Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit group that represents people seeking to expose potential lawbreaking. Speaking to reporters by phone on Monday, Mr. Blumenthal said of the report that “the main takeaway for me is that the Postal Service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions of Americans. One-third of all Americans cast their ballots by mail, and the U.S.P.S. puts all of their votes at risk.” Read Article

National: Trump Administration Withholds $39.6M Election Security Funds Congress Mandated in April | Clayton Lewis/Tech Times

Eight weeks before Americans cast their midterm ballots, more than $39.6 million in congressionally mandated election security money is sitting unused at the Department of Homeland Security — unspent even as foreign adversaries ramp up cyberattacks on American infrastructure and military commanders have testified that those adversaries specifically plan to target the 2026 elections. Sen. Alex Padilla of California and Rep. Joseph Morelle of New York sent a letter Wednesday to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Nick Anderson, the acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, demanding the agency distribute the funds as directed by the fiscal year 2026 DHS Appropriations bill, which Congress passed in April. The lawmakers — the top Democrats on the Senate and House committees with jurisdiction over federal elections — wrote that they share "grave concern that time is running out" — in the words of their letter to Mullin and Anderson — to assist state and local election officials in protecting elections from cyber and disinformation threats. Read Article

National: Trump administration asks Supreme Court to allow mail-in ballot restrictions | Justin Jouvenal and Patrick Marley/The Washington Post

The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to immediately allow new restrictions on mail-in balloting, potentially setting up a major legal clash that could affect millions of voters for November’s midterm elections. The fight could possibly upend election procedures just as states begin to send out mail-in ballots in pivotal contests that will determine control of the U.S. House and Senate. Some communities in Wisconsin mailed ballots to voters this week, North Carolina is set to send them to voters Friday and other states will follow suit in coming days and weeks.. Read Article

National: Judge Presses for Clarity in Lawsuit Over Mail-In Voting Rules | Zach Montague/The New York Times

A federal judge on Thursday expressed concern that if she allowed the Trump administration to move ahead with plans to restrict mail-in ballots ahead of the November election, it could cause so much chaos that states would experience “major disenfranchisement.” During a winding two-hour hearing in Federal District Court in Boston, Judge Indira Talwani asked sharp questions of attorneys from the Justice Department and a coalition of Republican states about how they believed they could implement the new rule on the eve of early voting across many states. The hearing highlighted concerns raised by a broad coalition of nonprofits and Democratic states that, if allowed to forge ahead with the new rule, the Postal Service could haphazardly reject thousands of valid ballots. Judge Talwani last week blocked the Postal Service from implementing the plan for 14 days, a period that expires Sept. 10. Thursday’s hearing was intended to help her decide whether to extend her injunction indefinitely. The Trump administration has already appealed her temporary restraining order and the issue is likely to be settled by the Supreme Court. Read Article

National: Election experts see few legal options for Trump to meddle with polling places | Jennifer Shutt/News From The States

President Donald Trump said earlier this year he’d “do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections” this fall, declining to rule out sending the National Guard or federal law enforcement officers to polling locations throughout the country. Those comments came a few months after Trump casually and briefly mentioned canceling the midterm elections that will determine control of Congress. Any such actions would lie outside the bounds of presidential power and the law, according to experts interviewed by States Newsroom. Nonetheless, one Democratic U.S. senator is sending letters to numerous members of the administration asking for commitments troops won’t be sent to the polls, and state officials are readying plans to keep voting secure. “The president can say whatever he wants, but his powers are extraordinarily limited in this way,” said Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows. With two months until voting ends on Nov. 3, the administration’s only publicly disclosed plan to monitor elections is a decades-old Justice Department program that sends federal workers throughout the country. Read Article

National: Mullin says DHS could deploy to polling sites for ‘specific’ threats, arrests | Eric Bazail-Eimil/Politico

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin provided more details Tuesday about the kinds of operations which would see immigration agents enter polling places, as Democrats have worried the Department of Homeland Security could seek to interfere in November’s midterm elections. Speaking to reporters in New York City, the Homeland Security secretary said that “ICE isn’t there to patrol the polling places. We’re there to enforce specific threats.” He added, however, that reports of specific undocumented immigrants at a location could be a reason for ICE to deploy. “The only reason why we would be at polling places is if there is a threat to that polling place or we’re serving a warrant on someone that we have been actively tracking down,” he said. “ICE’s job is immigration, customs enforcement. That’s their job … if we’re serving a warrant we will be where we need to be.” Read Article

National: Trump Administration Begins Blitz to Find Elusive Voter Fraud Ahead of Midterms | Nick Corasaniti and Hamed Aleaziz/The New York Times

Hundreds of federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security have been assigned to an intensive, weekslong hunt for noncitizens among the nation’s registered voters despite an absence of evidence of widespread fraud, according to documents and training videos reviewed by The New York Times. Agents are scouring voter rolls managed by the states, and are using personally identifiable information about individual voters, such as their dates of birth and partial Social Security numbers, to look them up on those rolls, according to the documents. In some cases, investigators are effectively posing as individual voters by plugging their names and personal information into public-facing websites run by the top election official in each state. Some of these sites declare they are meant for individual use, potentially raising privacy concerns. The extraordinary operation reveals the extent to which the Trump administration is searching for evidence of fraud ahead of the November elections. The government is privately calling the effort the Unlawful Voter Initiative and is pulling agents from their normal duties, which include investigating such serious crimes as human trafficking and terrorism. Read Article

Arizona: Thousands of voters received letters asking if they’d moved. Here’s why. | Sasha Hupka and Jerod McDonald-Evoy/ Votebeat

Thousands of Arizonans have received similar notices in recent days, even though many have not moved. The confusing mailing appears to have stemmed from flaws in state and some county officials’ implementation of a new state law. Here’s what to know. The law requires Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, to compare the state’s voter registration database to the state’s driver’s license database each month. His staffers are then required to inform county recorders if they find discrepancies in a voter’s residential address or citizenship status. Supporters of the law, which passed as House Bill 2243 in 2022, said its purpose is to improve maintenance of the voter rolls and catch ineligible voters, including people who had moved to a new address. In a May 2022 letter to then-Gov. Doug Ducey, a coalition of conservative groups wrote that the law would ensure it was “easy to vote, and hard to cheat” in Arizona. But opponents worried it could disenfranchise some voters and noted that the state already had voter list maintenance measures in place. Read Article

California: Convicted MAGA election denier declines job in Shasta County amid pressure from Newsom | Hailey Branson-Potts/Los Angeles Times

Tina Peters, who served prison time for tampering with voting machines on behalf of the MAGA movement, has declined a job offer helping to oversee elections in a conservative Northern California county. “She declined the offer because she’s running around the country right now trying to secure the elections,” Clint Curtis, the Shasta County registrar of voters, said in an interview Tuesday. “Shasta County lost out.” Last month, Curtis set off alarm bells across California by telling reporters he planned to hire Peters, a former county clerk in Colorado who was released early from prison this summer amid a pressure campaign by President Trump. Curtis, himself a longtime election denier, told The Times he had planned to hire Peters as a consultant “to assist with supervision of the November election.” Peters’ attorney, Peter Ticktin, said in an interview Tuesday that she had given serious consideration to the job offer but that he had not discussed it with her in recent days. It would “not have been a full-time position,” because she is so busy, he said. Read Article

Georgia lawmakers consider how to protect voting access for people with disabilities, non-English speakers | Maya Homan/Georgia Recorder

Accessibility advocates are urging state leaders to prioritize access for voters with disabilities and those who require language assistance as lawmakers prepare to overhaul Georgia’s election equipment ahead of 2028. Thanks to a bill passed during the June special session, state leaders appear likely to select hand-marked paper ballots as the state’s primary voting method ahead of 2028. The shift away from the state’s current, machine-marked ballot system will likely come as a relief to some critics of the current voting equipment, who have repeatedly cited fears over machine tampering and called for ballots to be counted based on text that can be deciphered by humans. But Georgia residents likely won’t see voting machines vanish completely. Under federal accessibility laws, every polling place is required to have at least one voting machine on hand for voters with disabilities, even in jurisdictions where most voters mark ballots by hand. Read Article

Michigan: US Supreme Court refuses to put proof-of-citizenship amendment on ballot | Kelsey Reichmann/Courthouse News Service

The Supreme Court refused to take emergency action Thursday to put a proof-of-citizenship amendment on Michigan ballots for the midterm elections. Americans for Citizen Voting asked the justices to intervene after the Michigan Board of State Canvassers invalidated its proposal despite surpassing the signature threshold. The group also asked the Supreme Court to act before the state’s highest court weighed in, to meet the quickly approaching deadline to make ballot changes. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a Donald Trump appointee, denied the application without referring the appeal to the full court. He did not explain his decision. “If respondents’ decision to keep ACVM’s petition off the ballot stands, then Michigan voters will never have a chance to vote on the petition, regardless of whether it should or should not have been placed on the ballot,” Americans for Citizen Voting wrote. “On the other hand, if ACVM’s petition is placed on the ballot and ACVM’s arguments ultimately fail, there will be no harm. The choice is thus between irreparable harm and no harm at all.” Read Article

Minnesota’s top court rejects Mike Lindell’s bid for primary recount | Kyeland Jackson/The Minnesota Star Tribune

Minnesota Supreme Court justices denied requests for a primary election recount by MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, effectively confirming his loss to Lisa Demuth as the Republican nominee for Minnesota governor. Chief Justice Natalie Hudson on Saturday signed the order denying Lindell’s request. Hudson wrote that Lindell had declined to cover the $825,000 needed to fund a recount, and he missed an Aug. 24 deadline to file assurances that he could cover those costs. “Lindell instead sent documentation to the Secretary of State to reflect wire transfer readiness, and he filed this section 204B.44 petition,” Hudson’s order read. Read Article

The North Carolina elections rules that aren’t quite rules yet | Sarah Michels/Carolina Public Press

Absentee voting begins this week, and early voting isn’t far off. But North Carolina voters won’t have to worry about recently proposed changes to absentee voting, photo ID exception forms or voting site conduct rules until next year because of a quirk in the law. The State Board of Elections spent the summer drafting, reviewing and approving 15 sets of rules that would impact which absentee ballots are counted, how election officials deal with photo ID exception forms and what level of noise is allowed outside voting sites, among other issues. Last week, the Rules Review Commission approved those rules, but in each case, more than 10 people formally requested legislative review. When that happens, there’s a delay in implementation to give state lawmakers time to review and potentially reject the rule changes. Read Article

Pennsylvania: The invisible volunteers who help keep democracy running | Daniel Pearson/The Philadelphia Inquirer

They’ve been called the “most important people in running an election” by Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt, yet even as interest in election security has skyrocketed after Donald Trump’s persistent false claims of voter fraud, their jobs seem to be hidden in plain sight. Unlike the grifters and sycophants who help feed the president’s Big Lie and earn millions of social media followers, make frequent TV appearances, and are showered with adulation by the White House, the roughly 45,000 volunteers across Pennsylvania who are essential to ensuring elections happen fairly, smoothly, and efficiently are rarely recognized for the work they do. No wonder poll workers are in short supply — in the commonwealth and across the nation. A Brookings Institution report said that about half of all election officials found it either very or somewhat difficult to find enough workers. Read Article

Texas: Tarrant County removes 92 polling sites ahead of November election | Cecilia Lenzen/The Texas Tribune

Tarrant County commissioners voted 3-2 Tuesday to approve a list of polling sites for the November elections that included 92 fewer sites than the 2022 midterms. The approval came after commissioners heard testimony from more than 100 speakers, the majority of whom were opposed to the site cuts, during a meeting that lasted over eight hours. Voting rights advocates and representatives of 30 civic groups rallied outside the county courthouse Tuesday morning, demanding that commissioners approve a list with the same number of sites as the 2022 midterms. The adopted list includes 224 sites for Election Day and 47 for early voting. The 2022 list included 316 Election Day sites and 50 for early voting. Read Article

Wisconsin Elections Commission says new mail-in voting rule won’t apply to Wisconsin clerks | Molly Beck/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Wisconsin election clerks are not required to comply with the requirements of a new rule governing mail-in ballots that has been blocked by a federal judge under new guidance from the state's top election officials. Members of the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission voted unanimously during a meeting Monday to issue new guidance surrounding the legal battle over rules issued by the U.S. Postal Service that aim to restrict mail-in voting. President Trump's effort to place new restrictions on voting ahead of the 2026 midterm elections has been caught in a legal back-and-forth since he signed an executive order in March that would put mail-in voting under the Postal Service's oversight. Read Article

Wyoming Clerk Warns Other Red States Of “Aggressive” DOJ Action At Elections | Clair McFarland/Cowboy State Daily

After Wyoming’s Republican governor called for the state attorney general to investigate legal issues around what he called “aggressive” federal agents monitoring the primary election, Laramie County Clerk Debra Lee praised the governor’s strong response. Lee also warned other county clerks, and officials in other “red” states, that what happened in her county could happen in theirs. “I share Governor (Mark) Gordon’s concerns about the ‘surprise’ visit of the Department of Justice (DOJ) election monitors during Wyoming’s Primary Election and support his inquiry into the matter,” said Lee in a Friday statement. “His inquiry is grounded in the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of constitutional authority over our own elections.” Lee called the DOJ’s monitoring mission “far from transparent” and said the federal agents didn’t coordinate with her, as the county’s chief election official. Read Article

National: Will Trump interfere in the midterms? Democrats and their allies are preparing | Kevin Rector and Justine McDaniel/Los Angeles Times

Big-city mayors are giving poll workers panic buttons in case election skeptics question their work. County and state officials are gaming out responses to immigration raids near voting centers. Lawyers for Democratic states and civic groups are pre-writing legal challenges to ballot seizures. And Democratic aides in Washington are preparing members of Congress to push back in the court of public opinion against any baseless claims of voter fraud in competitive districts. Across California and the nation, civic organizations, voting rights advocates and Democratic leaders are preparing for a raft of potential actions by the Trump administration to interfere in, subvert or deny November’s midterm vote. Read Article

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

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

National: ‘Trump ultimately wants the chaos’: States can’t implement anti-mail voting order before midterms, experts warn | Alexandra Hutzler/Democracy Docket

“We are way too close to an election for any major changes,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D) told Democracy Docket after the Supreme Court allowed the administration to move forward, for now, with President Donald Trump’s anti-mail voting executive order. But, with 68 days until Election Day and some ballots being mailed as soon as next week, major changes are exactly what a new U.S. Postal Service rule imposing restrictions on a voting method one-third of Americans used in 2024 would require of election administrators. “I would argue that it’s already functionally impossible to implement. We’re well past that date,” said Pamela Smith, the president and CEO of Verified Voting, a nonprofit that promotes the responsible use of technology in elections. You don’t upend something that’s centuries old on a whim.” Read Article

National: Nothing changes yet with the Supreme Court’s order on elections. But it could open door to ‘chaos’ | Nicholas Riccardi/Associated Press

The Supreme Court’s decision giving preliminary approval for President Donald Trump’s order restricting mail voting may not lead to a single election procedure changing during the November midterms, but it has already thrown into uncertainty the method that nearly one-third of the country uses to vote. Rather than saying that Trump’s order is legal, the high court said Monday it was too early for Democratic-run states to challenge it in June, when they convinced a federal judge in Boston to freeze the order for November’s election. That effectively restarts the legal fight over the order in an incredibly compressed timeline, with initial ballots scheduled to be sent to North Carolina’s overseas and military voters in just over a week, on Sept. 4. A second injunction barring the U.S. Postal Service from making changes to comply with Trump’s directive remains in effect. Still, the administration late Monday filed a motion asking that the second hold be removed, and has posted new regulations from the Postal Service that would go into effect Tuesday if the legal pathway is fully cleared. Read Article

National: Voting rights experts skeptical over Trump pledge of 1,000 election monitors | Rachel Leingang and Sam Levine/The Guardian

Former officials and voting rights experts have expressed skepticism over a pledge by the Trump administration to dispatch 1,000 monitors across the country to scrutinize November’s US midterm elections. While the Department of Justice (DoJ) has expressed hope that the operation will be the largest in its history, its plan raised questions over its ability to recruit so many people – and what they would do. The US president has repeatedly denied the results of election defeats, including his 2020 loss in the presidential election to Joe Biden, and in recent months has escalated concerns that he will seek to meddle in November’s elections. Read Article

National: Census report does not prove Trump’s claim about 2020 noncitizen voting | Melissa Goldin/Associated Press

Trump’s Truth Social post on Tuesday referenced a report published by the U.S. Census Bureau that he said checked “Voter Records from 2020 against their Citizenship Records,” finding 24,000 noncitizens voted illegally in just its initial search. The report is described as a “beginning analysis.”But experts say its methodology is flawed and could have created many false positives. “This is the weakest methodology description I’ve ever seen in a Census Bureau publication,” said Mark Lindeman, policy and strategy director at Verified Voting, a nonpartisan group focused on election technology. “This document doesn’t tell us anything about elections. It just shows that the Census Bureau has gone off the rails.” He added that the Census Bureau is not clear about which databases it used in its analysis, which he said “exists essentially as a propaganda offering,” and that it does not explain likely sources of errors. Read Article

Opinion: Trump’s Election Interference Is Eroding American Democracy | The New York Times Editorial Board

The surest sign of democratic collapse is the unwillingness of an elected political party to leave office. The party rewrites laws and changes election rules to prevent its opponents from gaining power. The shift often starts slowly but can ultimately end in autocracy. President Trump has taken worrisome steps down this path since returning to office in January 2025. He has directed Republican-run states to enact newly gerrymandered maps to increase the chances that Republicans maintain control of Congress even if they receive fewer votes this year. He has tried to pass legislation that could keep many eligible voters from voting. And he has sent signals that he may use the power of the federal government to disallow legitimate ballots this fall. On July 16, Mr. Trump took the remarkable step of giving a prime-time White House address devoted to lies and misleading statements about voter fraud. Read Article

An Arizona Official’s Road From Election Skeptic to Election Defender | Carl Smith/Governing

One day. That’s how long it took to turn Michelle Burchill’s ideas about election administration upside down. In 2020, Burchill took a voter registration job in the recorder’s office in Yavapai County, a rural jurisdiction in Arizona. A Republican and Donald Trump supporter, she didn’t like the way social media platforms were censoring his speech. She’d encountered plenty of claims about “rigged elections” and Russian collusion. “I was an election skeptic, for sure,” she says. Her first day on the job, March 17, was a presidential preference election day, in which Democratic voters would choose their preferred presidential nominee. Burchill had never worked in election administration, and her boss told her to just come “soak it all in.” Watch. Listen. Learn. Read Article

California county’s election drama worsens as official locks up ballots | Hailey Branson-Potts/Los Angeles Times

Days after the top elections official in Shasta County announced that he planned to hire an election denier who served prison time for tampering with voting machines, county leaders there made an extraordinary plea to state and federal authorities: Please come investigate. A statement released by the county Tuesday afternoon said Clint Curtis, the registrar of voters, had made “frivolous” claims and “unproven statements” about the June primary election, which he administered and certified. “The County condemns the conduct of the Clerk-Registrar of Voters and invites all relevant state and federal agencies to review the allegations he has made and to proactively investigate his official actions and practices as Shasta County’s elections official,” read the statement released by Stewart Buettell, the county’s deputy chief executive. Read Article

Iowa Secretary of State says election losses aren’t proof of fraud as midterms near | Nick El Hajj/Des Moines Register

Before a breakfast crowd of conservative activists, Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate invoked Ronald Reagan’s "big tent" and declined to validate claims that Democrats would try to "cheat" in the November midterm elections. The questions came as Pate, a Republican seeking a fifth overall term, made his pitch to the Westside Conservative Club at the Machine Shed in Urbandale. He faces Democrat Ryan Peterman, a former Navy pilot from Davenport, on Nov. 3. With no presidential race atop the ballot this year, Pate moved between his two roles throughout the morning: candidate and Iowa’s chief election official. "To be very candid, I’m concerned about voter participation this time around," Pate said. "And now I’m wearing my candidate hat for a moment here." Read Article

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

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

Nevada: Trump admin quietly walks back claim of 16K noncitizens voting | Tabitha Mueller/The Nevada Independent

Federal officials have been unable to back up their allegations that nearly 16,000 noncitizens could be registered to vote in Nevada, telling the Nevada Secretary of State's Office in a private call that they were still reviewing thousands of names on the list after President Donald Trump (R) made sweeping allegations last month about noncitizens voting. Email records and a recording of an Aug. 13 meeting between the secretary of state's office and representatives from the Department of Homeland Security obtained via a public records request indicate that federal officials have only been able to identify 185 potential noncitizen voters so far, and the 15,903 number they originally gave was a "ceiling. The 15,000 would have been the preliminary," Kimberley Vogt, the fraud division chief in the fraud detection and national security directorate at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said during the meeting. "And then the manual review once we are done and confirm that we have a high degree of confidence … that would be what we would send." Read Article

North Carolina governor pushes to block new rules targeting mail-in ballots, voter ID | Kyle Ingram/Raleigh News & Observer

Democratic Gov. Josh Stein on Wednesday urged officials to delay the adoption of new election rules that would set new conditions on mail-in ballots and make it easier to throw out ballots cast by voters who don’t provide photo ID. “Our state’s elections administrators should seek to make it easier — not harder — for eligible North Carolinians to lawfully make their voice heard at the ballot box and have confidence their vote will be respected,” Stein wrote in a letter shared with The News & Observer. “Unfortunately, the ... proposed rules undercut those core democratic principles, and implementing such changes so close to an election invites confusion and undermines faith in our democratic process.” The proposed rules, which passed the Republican-majority State Board of Elections in party-line votes last month, are set to be heard by the state’s Rules Review Commission on Thursday. Read Article