Our Democracy Was Hanging by a Thread. Here’s the Real Reason It Held. | Richard L. Hasen

Despite legitimate fears that the forces behind Jan. 6 would do their utmost to manipulate our elections, it was clear by Tuesday night that the just-concluded U.S. midterms survived President Donald Trump’s relentless attacks. We are in decent shape not because Trump’s attacks were weak, or because our electoral system is strong, or because we were just lucky—although the huge margins did make things “too big to rig.” The risk that Trump would interfere with our democracy in a way that made 2020 look harmless was quite serious, and it took the laborious efforts of thousands of lawyers and election administrators, along with key parts of civil society, to neutralize the threat from materializing. We should not walk away from 2026 feeling as if the mobilization against the forces of antidemocracy was overkill or unnecessary. We should be proud that, thanks to the efforts of thousands of people, the system held against a powerful barrage. Read Article

National: Trump threatened to interfere in the midterms. On Election Day, confrontation never came. | Jessica Huseman/Votebeat

The Trump administration spent months threatening to intervene in the midterm elections but when Election Day arrived on Tuesday, the extraordinary federal intervention that many election officials had spent months preparing for never came. By the end of the night, no major statewide or national Republican figure had disputed the results, and the process of certifying the election and preparing for a transfer of power appeared to be proceeding without major resistance. President Donald Trump himself told the New York Times he would accept the election results. Pam Smith, president and CEO of Verified Voting, cautioned against treating the absence of federal intervention as permanent. “It’s a welcome pause from the worst threats, but a pause, not a resolution,” she said. “Election officials once could count on the federal government as a partner; at minimum they shouldn’t have to treat it as an adversary.” Smith said the election also demonstrated the importance of the institutions and people responsible for protecting the process, regardless of the outcome. “Continuing to improve how we ensure safe and robust participation and well verified outcomes is what lets us withstand future challenges — even in close contests, not just when the margins are wide.” Read Article

National: ‘Just Another Tuesday’: Election Day Sees No Major Cyber Incidents | Rae D. DeShong/GovTech

Election Day 2026 concluded without any major cybersecurity disruptions, with threat activity limited to minor, localized incidents that were swiftly resolved. Reports from the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC) noted brief public website interruptions, misleading text messages, temporary high HTTP activity, and a handful of non-credible bomb threats, none of which impacted voting integrity or ballot security. Former CISA Director Chris Krebs characterized the day as "just another Tuesday on the internet," highlighting that layered administrative defenses—including universal paper ballot backups, offline tabulators, and manual contingency procedures—ensured smooth operations even during routine technical hiccups. Read Article

National: Trump Tried to Undermine the Nation’s Elections. It Didn’t Work. | Richard Fausset and Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times

Despite months of aggressive federal intervention, executive pressure, and unfounded claims of widespread voting irregularities by the Trump administration following its return to power in 2025, the 2026 midterm elections proceeded with remarkable administrative stability. Federal courts repeatedly struck down attempts to bypass constitutional state authority over elections while decisive Democratic sweeps across congressional and statehouse races produced margins too wide for post-election subversion. Although prominent conservative figures like Cleta Mitchell vxowed that election integrity networks will continue their state-level coalitions, and Department of Justice Civil Rights Division head Harmeet Dhillon resigned amid strategy disputes, election experts and bipartisan administrators credited robust contingency planning and resilient local systems with safeguarding the vote. Read Article

National: Election Deniers Aren’t Contesting Their Massive Losses | David Gilbert/WIRED

Following a historic wave election where Democrats secured majorities in both the House and Senate, prominent election-denying candidates across key state and federal races—including Andy Biggs in Arizona, Mike Rogers in Michigan, Tom Tiffany in Wisconsin, Vivek Ramaswamy in Ohio, and Jim Marchant in Nevada—conceded their losses without contesting the legitimacy of the vote or raising claims of widespread fraud. Concurrently, prominent activist groups and figures within the election integrity network, such as True the Vote, Cleta Mitchell, and Scott Presler, went largely silent or avoided questioning the election outcomes as results became clear. Even former President Trump acknowledged the outcome during a late-night call to Fox News, congratulating Democrats on their victory. Read Article

National: U.S. Finds Subdued Foreign Meddling Operations in Midterm Elections | Dustin Volz and Julian E. Barnes/The New York Times

Foreign interference operations during the 2026 midterm elections remained minimal and subdued, with adversarial nations making little headway in disrupting the democratic process. While Russia and Iran engaged in minor covert and overt influence campaigns—including Russian AI-generated smear videos targeting select Senate races in Texas and Ohio, and Iranian propaganda efforts—their overall footprint was significantly reduced compared to presidential election cycles. Experts and former officials attributed the subdued meddling to several factors, noting that Russia's primary geopolitical goals already align with the Trump administration's posture on Ukraine, Moscow has shifted its primary information operations focus toward France's upcoming spring presidential election, and Iran likely sought to avoid jeopardizing potential diplomatic talks. Read Article

National: Trump threatened ICE agents at the polls. There was historic turnout instead | Alex Woodward/The Independent

Despite pre-election concerns that the Trump administration might deploy Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to polling sites or declare a national emergency, Election Day concluded without federal law enforcement intervention or polling place disruption. A record 124 million voters participated in the 2026 midterms—marking the second-highest turnout rate for a midterm election in modern American history—as state officials and nonpartisan election monitors successfully implemented protective legal measures and voter reassurance efforts. Though the Department of Justice dispatched over 900 monitors nationwide, states such as California deployed their own observers alongside civil rights groups to ensure voting proceeded without intimidation. Read Article

Arizonans vote no on Prop. 144, rejecting significant changes to the state’s voting procedures | Sasha Hupka/Votebeat

Arizonans voted to defeat Proposition 144, a controversial legislatively referred constitutional amendment that sought to impose strict new restrictions on the state's widely popular mail-in voting system. The measure—spearheaded by Republican state Representative Alex Kolodin—would have mandated government-issued identification for mail ballots, required polling sites to provide on-site tabulation for dropped-off mail ballots, and established lower standards of judicial review for future voting regulations. Election officials and voting rights advocates opposed the initiative as an unrealistic burden designed to hobble vote-by-mail access, while opponents celebrated the defeat as a decisive rejection of legislative efforts to alter established voting mechanics. Read Article

Colorado: Election night problems with results website caused by data-gatherers | Seth Klamann/The Denver Post

Brief outages affecting the Colorado Secretary of State’s public-facing election night reporting website were caused by an influx of automated scraping traffic from third-party data aggregators rather than a malicious cyberattack. Vendor SOE Software confirmed that unusually high volumes of automated requests overwhelmed web servers, temporarily limiting public access to live results on Tuesday evening. State officials quickly implemented mitigation protocols to restore full site functionality later in the night, emphasizing that internal vote-tallying operations and core election data remained completely secure throughout the disruption. Read Article

Illinois: Coding error blamed for ballot shortages that kept some Chicago precincts from easily voting | Joe Mahr/Chicago Tribune

A computer coding error by the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners resulted in severe paper ballot shortages across multiple precincts during the midterm elections, forcing some voters to make repeated trips or wait hours to cast their votes. Election officials explained that while the correct overall number of ballots was printed for each precinct, quantities for different ballot styles were transposed in complex "split precincts"—where different blocks belong to different political districts—leaving certain races without sufficient paper forms. Lines quickly swelled as voters were forced onto single touch-screen backup machines or directed to the downtown voting supersite, prompting the board to apologize and deploy emergency ballot deliveries. Read Article

Michigan election watchers celebrate smooth operation in Tuesday’s midterms | Zena Issa/Michigan Public

The nonpartisan Michigan Election Protection Coalition and the ACLU of Michigan celebrated a successful midterm election execution across the state, crediting thousands of trained poll workers and nonpartisan observers for keeping voting secure and transparent. Despite minor tabulator glitches, long lines in certain precincts, and a bomb threat that temporarily evacuated a polling place at Carlson High School in Gibraltar, election workers seamlessly adapted by moving setup to the parking lot so voting could continue uninterrupted until the building was cleared. Local officials praised staff and community partners for running an efficient process, while coalition organizers shifted focus to ballot curing and reminding county boards of canvassers that certifying official vote tallies is a non-discretionary statutory duty. Read Article

Missourians Veto New Gerrymander, and Make It Trickier for GOP to Adopt Another | Camille Squires/Bolts

In a major veto referendum, 62% of Missouri voters rejected a mid-decade congressional map drawn by the Republican-led legislature, ensuring the state retains its 2021 district boundaries. The decision preserved Democratic Representative Emmanuel Cleaver's Kansas City-anchored seat while contributing to Democratic gains in the U.S. House, alongside the retention of Supreme Court Justice Paul Wilson with 63% support after the court blocked the map's pre-election implementation. Concurrently, voters approved Amendment 6, a constitutional measure strengthening direct democracy by requiring an 80% supermajority in the legislature to enact laws "similar in effect" to those vetoed by referendum. Read Article

Mississippi Senate race heads to an extended vote count and possible ballot battle | Bridget Bowman and Gary Grumbach/NBC News

In one of the closest and most unexpected midterm contests, Democrat Scott Colom holds a 65-vote lead over incumbent Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, leaving the Mississippi U.S. Senate race heading toward an extended vote count and an impending legal battle. Thousands of mail-in ballots—eligible if postmarked by Election Day and received by November 10—and an unconfirmed number of affidavit (provisional) ballots remain to be tallied, prompting both national party committees and prominent election law firms to deploy legal teams to the state. The spike in affidavit voting follows systemic administrative hurdles on Election Day, including a temporary crash of the Secretary of State’s online registration portal and widespread voter roll inactivations. Reports indicate that a state contract with credit reporting agency Experian placed tens of thousands of registered voters into "inactive" status prior to the election—including over 15,000 in DeSoto County and nearly 29,000 in Harrison County—forcing long-time voters to cast provisional ballots. Read Article

New York: What Went Wrong With the Ballot Scanners in a Crucial House District? | Dana Rubinstein, Claire Fahy, and Benjamin Oreskes/The New York Times

In a broad swath of suburbs just north of New York City, voters in Westchester County turned up at their polling sites on Election Day to confront an unsettling sight. Across the county, the voting machines that processed the marked ballots were not working. At a New Rochelle polling site, the voting machines rejected ballot after ballot, and a long line began to form. At some point in recent weeks, as New Yorkers across the state were receiving their mail-in ballots, the Westchester County Board of Elections was made aware of a problem. A town justice race in the Village of Ardsley, population 5,000, had been omitted. The county noticed the error in time to correct the digital “ballot definition file,” which lists the races and candidates in the election, according to the state Board of Elections. And the county updated the ballot reading software to account for the new ballot format — but only in Ardsley. The software was not adequately updated in the rest of the county to account for the new ballot file, the state said. For Election Day, many counties, including Westchester, get their ballots printed ahead of time, and the ballots were printed with the corrected information, according to the state. But the machines in Westchester were still programmed to read the old file — except in Ardsley.Read Article

Oklahoma City man accused of sending hundreds of threatening letters with white powder to election officials | Emma Murphy/Oklahoma Voice

Federal law enforcement agents arrested 67-year-old Oklahoma City resident Robin Patrick Martin for allegedly sending more than 700 threatening letters and packages containing white powder to election administrators, lawmakers, pollsters, media outlets, and the FBI across 2024 and 2026. According to an FBI affidavit, the mailings featured invisible ink threats, false return addresses targeting political groups, and powder substances later identified as harmless flour or yeast, culminating in an October evacuation of the Oklahoma State Election Board. Multi-agency investigators, including the FBI and U.S. Postal Inspection Service, tracked Martin's vehicle across post offices in Oklahoma and Texas, linking him to the purchase of materials used for the hoax letters and associated email threats warning voters against participating in the midterms.  Read Article

South Carolina: Here’s why Dorchester County hand-counted over 5,000 ballots | Komlavi Adissem/The Post and Courier

On Election Night, election workers in Dorchester County, South Carolina, were forced to hand-count and rescan over 5,000 early-voting ballots after data from two USB flash drives—retrieved from scanners at the Miles Road Baptist Church and Wescott Park early-voting sites—failed to upload into the central system. Kizzie Scott, director of the county’s Board of Voter Registration and Elections, clarified that the paper ballots themselves were entirely undamaged and valid, explaining that staff manually rescanned the physical forms to generate new data drives and conducted a full hand-count to verify exact totals. The technical delay temporarily paused final updates in South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District, where Democrat Nancy Lacore held a narrow lead over Republican Jenny Costa Honeycutt before Honeycutt conceded. Scott emphasized that rescanning and auditing drive data is a routine backup procedure designed to protect election accuracy, noting that the open audit process concluded transparently ahead of official county certification. Read Article

Virginia voters restore voting rights for ex-offenders Alexandra Hutzler/Democracy Docket

Virginians approved a historic constitutional amendment with nearly 55% of the vote to automatically restore voting rights to individuals with felony convictions upon completion of their sentences. The ballot measure effectively overhauls one of the nation's strictest felony disenfranchisement regimes, which had disproportionately affected Black residents and previously required individual executive clemency petitions to the governor. The amendment also codifies a fundamental right to vote within the state constitution, following earlier federal court rulings that narrowed Virginia's disenfranchising crimes. Supported by Governor Abigail Spanberger, the reform caps a years-long legislative and advocacy push to establish steady, permanent voting access safeguards. Read Article

Wisconsin Democrats will have full government control. Here’s how they want to change election laws | Alexander Shur/Votebeat

After securing full control of Wisconsin's state government for the first time in 17 years, Democrats are preparing to advance sweeping election law reforms, with top legislative leaders prioritizing a longstanding proposal to allow election workers to process absentee ballots on the Monday before Election Day. Democratic Representative Lee Snodgrass and Senator Mark Spreitzer noted that early processing aims to eliminate late-night reporting delays in high-turnout elections, while also outlining plans to expand eligible voter IDs, increase election funding, codify drop box access, and establish automatic voter registration. Republican lawmakers and local clerks expressed openness to bipartisan measures like Monday processing and funding increases, while cautioning against rapid, uncoordinated changes to ensure smooth administrative implementation ahead of future election cycles. Read Article

National: The New Worst-Case Scenario for Election Officials: Federal Interference | Richard Fausset, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, and David W. Chen/The New York Times

For the first time in modern American history, state and local election administrators from both major parties are actively training staff for potential federal interference ahead of Election Day. Scenario planning includes preparing poll workers and local law enforcement for potential ICE activity near voting sites, clarifying legal limits for Department of Justice election monitors, and reviewing protocols in the event federal agencies attempt to seize ballots or voting equipment. Supported by nonpartisan legal and election integrity networks, Secretaries of State and county clerks report that while constitutional checks and state sovereignty remain strong barriers against federal overreach, the need to prepare against potential executive interference marks an unprecedented shift in election administration. Read Article

National: False and misleading voting claims spread ahead of 2026 midterms | Melissa Goldin/Associated Press

False and misleading claims about the voting process are being spread online as voters cast their ballots in the 2026 midterms, with Election Day less than a week away. The posts often focus on alleged election rigging or voter fraud. However, closer scrutiny of the claim typically reveals a logical explanation. “I always like to say, get your facts straight from the source, and the source is your local election official,” said Pamela Smith, president and CEO of Verified Voting, a nonpartisan group focused on election technology. “Not your friends, cousin, uncle, on Facebook.” Smith encouraged voters to seek out information on the websites or social media accounts of those officials. She also suggested asking a poll worker who marks a ballot why they’ve done so if a voter has concerns. Read Article

National: Last minute Trump administration election challenges across country fuel concerns White House may challenge midterm election results | Dion Nissenbaum/Votebeat

The Trump administration has launched a series of late-stage election lawsuits and legal demands in the weeks leading up to the midterms. These include suing California and issuing demands to Washington state to set aside thousands of mail ballots over unverified claims of noncitizen registration, as well as suing Alaska to block certification of a tight U.S. Senate race between incumbent Republican Dan Sullivan and Democrat Mary Peltola based on potential voter confusion caused by a second candidate named Dan Sullivan on the ballot. Federal judges have issued sharp pushbacks—such as Judge David O. Carter affirming state sovereignty in California—while state officials in California and Washington confirmed that DOJ lists were riddled with errors, including listing native-born U.S. citizens. Legal scholars and political scientists warn that these rapid-fire challenges are less likely to succeed on their legal merits than to sow public doubt and lay groundwork for challenging the midterm results. Read Article

National: Election officials brace for federal interference but expect to persevere | Kevin Hardy/Stateline

Despite mounting federal intervention, legal threats, and public pressure, state and local election administrators across both parties express overwhelming confidence in the resilience of the nation's highly decentralized electoral infrastructure. Nonpartisan experts and local election officials emphasize that constitutional checks, judicial oversight, strict statutory protocols, and bipartisan oversight mechanisms leave little room for executive overreach or improper manipulation of election outcomes. From tabletop contingency exercises in rural counties to firm pushbacks against federal demands by Secretaries of State, election workers remain anchored to their constitutional oaths, ensuring that the integrity of vote counting and the rule of law will prevail across all jurisdictions. Read Article

National: Massive Groups of Volunteers Are Ready to Face Down ICE at the Polls | David Gilbert/WIRED

Across key battleground states, grassroots organizations—including Common Cause, the ACLU, Indivisible, and local groups like 614 ICE Watch and NorCal Resist—have built a multi-state volunteer infrastructure to observe polling sites and track potential ICE activity. Utilizing encrypted messaging chats, unlisted heat maps, and de-escalation methods, thousands of trained volunteers aim to document federal immigration enforcement near voting locations and protect immigrant voters against intimidation. While federal officials maintain that ICE does not target polling places, community organizers emphasize that active neighborhood patrols and rapid-response monitoring are necessary safeguards to maintain voter confidence on Election Day. Read Article

National: How Trump and his allies are sowing doubt ahead of the midterms | Laura Meckler, Chris Hacker, and Patrick Marley/The Washington Post

President Trump, the Justice Department, and high-profile right-wing influencers are conducting a coordinated messaging campaign focused on questioning election integrity, priming supporters to doubt the midterm results if Republicans lose. Digital claims questioning election procedures—particularly focusing on noncitizen voting and mail-in ballot fraud—have doubled compared to 2024, largely supplanting past conspiracy theories regarding voting machines. While noncitizen voting remains illegal and documented cases are statistically rare, the administration has used unverified claims to launch preemptive lawsuits in California and Alaska, deploy expanded federal election monitors, and propose cash rewards for fraud reports. In response, Democrats and nonpartisan voting rights coalitions have run tabletop exercises to prepare for 162 potential post-election challenge scenarios—including potential disputes over congressional seating, executive emergency declarations, and attempts to leverage the Department of Justice to block election certifications. Read Article

National: Behind Cleta Mitchell’s Relentless Effort to Overhaul U.S. Elections | Doug Bock Clark/ProPublica

A detailed investigation by ProPublica traces how conservative attorney Cleta Mitchell turned post-2020 election skepticism into a national movement that now heavily influences federal and state election policy. Through her organization, the Election Integrity Network (EIN), Mitchell built a multi-million-dollar coalition of state chapters, researchers, and policy shops dedicated to enacting stricter voting rules, purging voter rolls, and ending private election funding ("Zuckerbucks"). The report highlights her key role in drafting the SAVE Act and SAVE America Act, as well as her influence on White House staffing and executive actions regarding noncitizen voting checks and federal election monitoring. Despite significant administrative and judicial pushback against some of her network's most radical proposals—such as attempting to eliminate the Senate filibuster for voting legislation or invoking emergency executive powers—Mitchell remains a primary architect of conservative election strategy heading into the midterms. Read Article

National: Hackers target US FEC system, disrupting campaign finance disclosures days before midterms | Dawn Kopecki/Reuters

A cyber incident targeting the Federal Election Commission’s website forced the agency to temporarily take its electronic filing system offline days before the midterm elections. While the FEC plays no role in election administration or ballot counting, the outage disrupted mandatory 24-hour and 48-hour spending reports, temporarily obscuring disclosure of massive last-minute expenditures by super PACs and dark money groups in the most expensive election cycle in U.S. history. IT staff and federal cyber officials moved to identify the issue and implement fixes to restore public disclosure access. Read Article

National: The State Officials Defending the Midterms from the President | Barton Gellman/The New Yorker

An extensive profile by Barton Gellman examines how chief state election officers across the country—most notably Utah Lieutenant Governor Deidre Henderson, a Republican—have served as a primary bulwark against federal efforts to reshape midterm administration. Despite escalating pressure from the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security, including threats of criminal prosecution, state officials have consistently refused to surrender unredacted voter rolls or initiate last-minute purges, citing federalist constitutional protections, state privacy laws, and statutory deadlines. With federal courts repeatedly dismissing DOJ voter-roll lawsuits and blocking sweeping executive orders, election administrators and security experts have increasingly turned to crisis scenario planning to safeguard ballot chain of custody and protect local polling operations from potential executive interference on Election Day. Read Article

National: The Limits of Trump’s Midterm Trickery | Quinta Jurecic/The Atlantic

While the Trump administration has deployed an unprecedented array of executive tools—including last-minute lawsuits in California and Alaska, demands for voter rolls, and threats of voter fraud prosecutions—legal scholars and election experts suggest these efforts face structural constraints. Because American elections are highly decentralized across hundreds of distinct local jurisdictions, attempts to disrupt outcomes rely heavily on razor-thin margins in key districts. Polling indicating a potential major surge for Democrats in the House, coupled with a fractured Republican caucus, could render localized disruption or post-election certification standoffs ineffective. Although legal experts remain cautiously optimistic that state-level safeguards and court checks will hold, they note that relying on a "wave" outcome to insulate elections highlights ongoing vulnerabilities in public trust and administrative stability. Read Article

Alaska: Inside Democrats’ Secret Effort to Stack Senate Ballot | Kellen Browning/The New York Times

An investigative report details how operatives aligned with Democratic Senate nominee Mary Peltola and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC)—in an internal initiative dubbed the "ballot composition project"—spent months covertly recruiting candidates, including a retired teacher from the Alaska Panhandle named Dan J. Sullivan, to run against incumbent Republican Senator Dan S. Sullivan. While this specific maneuvering is novel, ballot-stacking tactics and the recruitment of third-party, independent, or "spoiler" candidates in primaries are neither illegal nor uncommon, and have historically been utilized by both political parties in Alaska and nationwide. Furthermore, Alaska's use of a ranked-choice voting system heavily mitigates any purported voter confusion, as voters can distinctly rank their preferences and choices rather than being forced into a strict binary or falling prey to accidental mis-votes. Although campaign officials publicly denied involvement, the effort has fueled fierce pushback, including a Department of Justice lawsuit attempting to block election certification should the incumbent senator lose by a narrow margin attributable to the namesake candidate. Read Article

California: Federal judge denies DOJ request to segregate 20,000 mail ballots, calling demands unreliable and disruptive | Gary Grumbach and Dareh Gregorian/NBC News

U.S. District Judge David O. Carter rejected a Department of Justice lawsuit requesting that California segregate and refrain from counting over 20,000 mail-in ballots cast by individuals the federal government claimed were noncitizens. Ruling that the request violated constitutional principles of state electoral sovereignty and would "wreak havoc" on an ongoing election, Judge Carter emphasized that the administration's claims relied on vague and unreliable methodology—pointing to similar federal lists in Nevada that were debunked after state checks confirmed all flagged individuals were U.S. citizens. State attorneys argued that complying with the last-minute demand would risk widespread voter disenfranchisement, while the DOJ announced an immediate emergency appeal to the 9th Circuit. Read Article