National: Federal judge questions changes to SAVE database for voter screening | Natalia Contreras andAlexander Shur/Votebeat

A federal judge on Monday declined to order the federal government to undo its overhaul of SAVE, a database that some states are using to check voters’ citizenship status, but said she doubted the legality of the government’s changes. SAVE, which is operated by the Department of Homeland Security, was typically used by states to check residents’ eligibility for public benefits. But the changes the Trump administration introduced in April made SAVE easier to use for screening voters’ citizenship, allowing state election officials to upload voter registration records for verification in bulk, instead of one by one, and search by Social Security number. The League of Women Voters and other plaintiffs in the case claimed that the changes made SAVE less accurate and were illegal, and asked the court for a temporary order that the database revert to how it operated before the overhaul. Read Article

National: Responses in opinion polls may be coming from AI​ | Eglė Krištopaitytė/Cybernews

Surveys have played a crucial role in the United States’ elections for nearly a century, but their reliability is now threatened by AI tools, according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. ​Researchers from Dartmouth College have developed an autonomous synthetic respondent that operates from a 500-word prompt. In 43,000 tests, the AI tool passed 99.8% of attention checks designed to detect automated responses. It made zero errors in logic and successfully concealed its non-human nature. Moreover, the tool tailored responses according to randomly assigned demographics, such as providing simpler answers when assigned less education. Presidential approval ratings swung from 34% to either 98% or 0%, depending on whether the poll was programmed to favor Democrats or Republicans. Similarly, generic ballot support went from 38% Republican to either 97% or 1%. Read Article

National: Inside the Multimillion-Dollar Plan to Make Mobile Voting Happen | Steven Levy/WIRED

The loudest objections against mobile or internet voting come from cryptographers and security experts, who believe that the safety risks are insurmountable. Take two people who were at the 2017 conference with Kiniry. Ron Rivest is the legendary “R” in the RSA protocol that protects the internet, a winner of the coveted Turing Award, and a former professor at MIT. His view: Mobile voting is far from ready for prime time. “What you can do with mobile phones is interesting, but we’re not there yet, and I haven’t seen anything to make me think otherwise,” he says, “Tusk is driven by trying to make this stuff happen in the real world, which is not the right way to do it. They need to go through the process of writing a peer-reviewed paper. Putting up code doesn’t cut it.” Computer scientist and voting expert David Jefferson is also unimpressed. Though he acknowledges that Kiniry is one of the country’s top voting system experts, he sees Tusk’s effort as doomed. “I’m willing to concede rock-solid cryptography, but it does not weaken the argument about how insecure online voting systems are in general. Open source and perfect cryptography do not address the most serious vulnerabilities.” Read Article

Alaska: Anchorage officials clarify role of electronic voting in city’s mail elections after report | Bella Biondini and Sabrina Bodon/Anchorage Daily News

After the publication of a report this week on the city’s remote voting options, Anchorage officials sought to clarify its offerings, which they say were mischaracterized in a national news story. Among the options to vote in Anchorage’s by-mail local elections, voters can choose to cast their ballots electronically, an option the municipality has offered since 2018. In the last year, the city established a “secure document portal” that gives registered voters, no matter where they are, the ability to vote electronically with preapproval without having to email or fax their paper ballot. Municipal Clerk Jamie Heinz, in a statement Thursday responding to a New York Times article on the city’s use of electronic voting, called the story an “egregious misrepresentation of MOA Elections. The article claims a new ‘experiment’ will allow all voters to cast ballots from their smartphones. This is factually inaccurate,“ Heinz said. Read Article

Arizona proposal would end automatic mail ballots for early-voter list | Gary Grado/Votebeat

A Republican state lawmaker who is also running for secretary of state has introduced a proposed ballot measure that would overhaul early voting in Arizona by eliminating the early-voter list, shortening the time to cast early ballots, and requiring proof of citizenship to receive an early ballot. State Rep. Alex Kolodin, who as a lawmaker and a former lawyer for the Arizona Republican Party has pushed to abolish the state’s early-voter list, said in a press release that he’s pushing legislation to put the measure on the ballot because “Arizonans are tired of excuses and chaos on Election Day.” Some provisions of his proposed measure are already in state law, including a poll closing time of 7 p.m. on Election Day and a voter ID requirement. Read Article

Colorado: Trump administration moves to take custody of imprisoned elections clerk Tina Peters | Colleen Slevin/Associated Press

The Trump administration is seeking a transfer from state prison to federal custody of a former Colorado county clerk who has become a hero to election conspiracy theorists, the state and one of her lawyers said Friday. The Colorado Department of Corrections said Friday that it received a letter from the federal Bureau of Prisons regarding Tina Peters on Wednesday. Neither the department nor the Bureau of Prisons immediately responded to a request to provide a copy of the letter but a corrections department spokesperson, Alondra Gonzalez, confirmed the letter was a request to move Peters to federal custody. A member of Peters’ legal team, Peter Ticktin, said he had seen the letter and also described it as a request to move her to a federal prison to serve out her sentence there. “It is not to have her released,” he said. Read Article

Georgia lawmakers weigh seismic changes to voting equipment | Maya Homan/Georgia Recorder

Ahead of the momentous 2020 presidential election, Georgia’s state leaders faced a choice. The state’s voting system prior to that year consisted of 27,000 electronic voting machines that had been in use since 2002, which were reaching the end of their life and needed to be replaced. Legislators at the time voted for Georgia’s new election system largely along party lines, with Democrats largely favoring hand-marked paper ballots that require voters to fill out ballots with pencils or pens, and Republicans supporting ballot-marking devices, which still required voters to make selections on a machine but produced a paper ballot that would be scanned to tabulate the results. The new machines, purchased for $107 million and manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems, were used statewide in Georgia for the first time during the 2020 election. But nearly six years later, Democrats and Republicans have seemingly found themselves on opposite ends of a similar debate. Some GOP lawmakers are now leading a push to replace ballot-marking devices with hand-marked paper ballots, and there are Democrats who are cautioning against abandoning Georgia’s current ballot-marking device system before the end of the state’s 10-year contract in 2029. Read Article

Idaho: Elmore County reports hundreds of uncounted ballots, prompting election review | Julie Luchetta/Boise State Public Radio

About 300 ballots in Elmore County were not counted in the results of the Nov. 4 election. The Elmore County clerk notified the Secretary of State’s office of the discrepancy last Friday, kicking off an investigation into what happened. Secretary of State Phil McGrane said there is no indication of foul play, but called the situation very concerning. On Tuesday, McGrane’s office sent a team to Elmore County to review their process. He said the county used new business processes and equipment, but it’s unclear where things went wrong. Discrepancies were found in several precincts. Read Article

New Indiana election laws face court challenges over their constitutionality | Cameron Shaw/The Indiana Lawyer

Two Indiana election laws that went into effect this summer are being challenged in federal court, with voting-rights advocates arguing that they disenfranchise young and naturalized voters. One federal judge already has given some hope to the plaintiffs in a case against Senate Enrolled Act 10, which was passed this spring and bars the use of state-issued student IDs as a proof of identification at polling locations, something that had been allowed for 20 years in Indiana. The court dismissed Indiana Secretary of State Diego Morales and Indiana Election Commission Chair Paul Okeson’s motion for dismissal last month, saying the plaintiffs—several voting rights organizations and an Indiana University student—had provided a plausible argument that SEA 10 could discriminately burden young people from voting. Read Article

Michigan: Ballot custody questions complicate aftermath of Hamtramck election | Hayley Harding/Votebeat

Sometime in the hours after last week’s election in Hamtramck, officials who weren’t involved in elections walked into the city clerk’s office, a space that’s supposed to be a secure place to keep ballots. That revelation has thrown the outcome of the Michigan city’s entire election into doubt, including an exceedingly close mayoral race. A total of 37 absentee ballots were initially unaccounted for on election night but were later discovered in the clerk’s office, opened but not yet tabulated. But since those ballots were not secured and could have been accessed by others, it’s currently up in the air whether they will be included in the election’s final totals. Read Article

New York: Formatting errors lead to recount of all Rensselaer County ballots | Tyler A. McNeil/Albany Times-Union

All ballots will be recounted in Rensselaer County after formatting errors were discovered during the recanvassing process. Every contest in the county will be retabulated. Ovals juxtaposed over text on the second side of the ballot may have also generated incorrect results for propositions in some municipalities, according to the Rensselaer County Board of Elections. The full extent of the issue is not yet clear. With the expansive rehashing of about 40,000 ballots underway, the BOE’s Republican Commissioner Henry F. Zwack expects that it could take until the first week of December to get sorted out. Read Article

North Carolina: Turnover in Board of Elections staff follows shift in control | Sarah Michels/Carolina Public Press

A recent wave of staffing changes at the State Board of Elections began with a bill originally intended to make the Moravian star North Carolina’s state star. But as is often the case at the legislature, the final product ended up entirely different. After the state House gave its stamp of approval, the state Senate stripped House Bill 125’s original Moravian star language and replaced it with various budgetary allocations and adjustments. The State Board of Elections, newly helmed by Executive Director Sam Hayes, won big. The agency received $15 million to finish modernization of the state’s outdated election system, $1.5 million for litigation costs and $1.1 million to pay for seven new election board positions. Read Article

Ohio’s mail-in absentee ballot grace period on the chopping block following Senate vote | Avery Kreemer/Dayton Daily News

The Ohio House is set to consider a GOP-backed bill that would eliminate the state’s four-day, post-election grace period for mail-in absentee ballots to get delivered, a period that allowed hundreds of Miami Valley ballots to be counted in the 2024 presidential election. Senate Bill 293, set to be evaluated by the House General Government Committee after easily clearing the Senate with near-unanimous Republican support, would require domestic absentee ballots in future elections be delivered to local boards of elections by the time polls close. Current law allows absentee ballots to be delivered by mail up to four days after election day, as long as those ballots were postmarked on the eve of the election, at least. Ohio’s grace period used to be 10 days before it was pared down. Read Article

Pennsylvania: Chester County commissioners vote to count challenged provisional ballots after poll book error | Katie Bernard/The Philadelphia Inquirer

The Chester County Board of Elections rejected Republican challenges to provisional ballots Monday as the board prepares to launch an investigation into a poll book error that forced thousands of independent and third-party voters to cast provisional ballots during this month’s election. In a nearly six-hour meeting, the Democratic-led board heard from dozens of voters and poll workers who described the chaos they endured on Nov. 4 during the high-turnout municipal election. The election resulted in more than 12,000 provisional ballots being cast primarily by independent and third-party voters blocked from voting on machines — an unusually high amount. Read Article

Texas Republicans in some counties are pushing to count ballots by hand in next year’s primary | Jane C. Timm/NBC

Republicans in at least a half-dozen counties in Texas are considering or have made plans to count ballots by hand in next March’s primary elections, a move that’s financially costly and could inject uncertainty into key contests. Texas Republicans who are pushing for the shift argue that voting machines that normally handle the process are unreliable, a position President Donald Trump and his allies have been pushing for years, despite a lack of evidence. But voting experts and Democrats warn that hand-counting could result in errors, delays in final results and post-election litigation. Texas tasks political parties, rather than local governments, with running Election Day voting in primaries, giving partisan officials unusual say over election administration. Democrats and Republicans in the state often administer elections jointly, outsourcing the job to the county election officials, and their expenses are reimbursed by the secretary of state. Read Articled

Wisconsin election reform proposals stalled by GOP infighting | Alexander Shur/Votebeat

A Republican lawmaker’s plan to regulate drop boxes and give Wisconsin’s clerks more time to process absentee ballots ran into obstacles last week, including skepticism from fellow Republicans and a rival GOP bill to ban drop boxes entirely. The cool reception for Rep. Scott Krug’s ideas, especially to let clerks process ballots on the Monday before an election, underscores the GOP’s persistent internal divide over election policy in Wisconsin, with advocates of reforms long sought by election officials of both parties running into distrust fueled by conspiracy theories and misinformation. Last week, the resistance appeared strong enough to stall or complicate efforts by Republicans who aim to address clerks’ needs and craft workable policy that can gain Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ support. That split was on full display at a Nov. 4 hearing of the Assembly Elections Committee, chaired by Rep. Dave Maxey. Read Article

Trump pardons Giuliani, Meadows and others over plot to steal 2020 election | Richard Luscombe/The Guardian

Rudy Giuliani and Mark Meadows, both close former political allies of Donald Trump, are among scores of people pardoned by the president over the weekend for their roles in a plot to steal the 2020 election. The maneuver is in effect symbolic, given it only applies in the federal justice system and not in state courts, where Giuliani, Meadows and the others continue facing legal peril. The acts of clemency were announced in a post late on Sunday to X by US pardon attorney Ed Martin, covers 77 people said to have been the architects and agents of the scheme to install fake Republican electors in several battleground states, which would have falsely declared Trump their winner instead of the actual victor: Joe Biden. Those pardoned include Giuliani and Sidney Powell, former lawyers to Trump, and Meadows, who acted as White House chief of staff during his first term of office. Other prominent names include Jenna Ellis and John Eastman, attorneys who advised Trump during and immediately after the election that Biden won to interrupt Trump’s two terms. Read Article

One Year to Defend Elections | Michael Waldman/Brennan Center for Justice

On Monday, President Trump pardoned Rudy Giuliani and dozens of others who participated in the effort to overturn the 2020 election. It’s worth remembering exactly what they tried to do: Among those pardoned are the orchestrators of the so-called “fake electors” scheme — the attempt to replace certain states’ representatives in the Electoral College with Trump allies to certify false election results. If successful, it would have ended our country’s history of free and fair elections. Although the recipients can still face state prosecution, these acts of clemency — like the pardons of the January 6 insurrectionists — send a clear message: If you try to steal an election for his team, Donald Trump will have your back. In the states that voted last week, turnout was high and largely without incident, showing the resilience of America’s election system even at a moment of high tension. Next come the midterm elections a year from now, with control of Congress and many statehouses in the balance. Read Article

National: Donald Trump might challenge election results in 2026 | Jack Goldsmith and Bob Bauer/The Economist

On November 3rd 2026 Americans will vote in midterm elections to determine control of Congress. Republicans hold a narrow majority in the House and a firmer grip on the Senate. The House race thus offers Democrats their best shot at putting some brakes on the Trump juggernaut. The midterms will unfold amid long-held public distrust of the electoral process—distrust that Donald Trump has been actively stoking. More ominously, under the banner of defending “honest elections”, he appears to be laying the groundwork to challenge and possibly manipulate them. His words and actions strongly suggest he may use the formidable powers of the presidency—and possibly even the armed forces—to resist 2026 electoral results he dislikes. Mr. Trump has long framed any electoral loss as proof of opponents’ fraud. He engaged in unprecedented efforts at the end of his first presidential term to alter the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. His charges have weakened the once-bipartisan consensus that election administration should be insulated from politics. Read Article

National: CISA’s Cyber Collapse: Politics Gutting America’s Election Shields | Juan Vasquez/WPN

In the shadow of escalating cyber threats, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) finds itself at a crossroads. Once hailed as the nation’s bulwark against digital intrusions, CISA is now reeling from budget cuts, layoffs, and political pressures that have eroded its capacity to safeguard critical infrastructure, including election systems. As the U.S. grapples with foreign adversaries like Russia and China, experts warn that these internal fractures could leave the country vulnerable at a pivotal moment. Recent developments paint a grim picture. According to The Verge, cuts and politicization have made it increasingly difficult for stakeholders to rely on CISA. Published on November 10, 2025, the report highlights how these issues are compromising the agency’s role in protecting elections infrastructure amid a government shutdown. Read Article

National: Trump Loyalists Push ‘Grand Conspiracy’ as New Subpoenas Land | Glenn Thrush, Alan Feuer and Charlie Savage/The New York Times

Far-right influencers have been hinting in recent weeks that they have finally found a venue — Miami — and a federal prosecutor — Jason A. Reding Quiñones — to pursue long-promised charges of a “grand conspiracy” against President Trump’s adversaries. Their theory of the case, still unsupported by the evidence: A cabal of Democrats and “deep-state” operatives, possibly led by former President Barack Obama, has worked to destroy Mr. Trump in a yearslong plot spanning the inquiry into his 2016 campaign to the charges he faced after leaving office. But that narrative, which has been promoted in general terms by Mr. Trump and taken root online, has emerged in a nascent but widening federal investigation. Read Article

National: Federal Judge, Warning of ‘Existential Threat’ to Democracy, Resigns | Mattathias Schwartz/The New York Times

A federal judge warned of an “existential threat to democracy” in a searing first-person essay published on Sunday, saying he had stepped down from the bench to speak out against President Trump. He accused Mr. Trump of “using the law for partisan purposes, targeting his adversaries while sparing his friends and donors from investigation, prosecution, and possible punishment.” The judge, Mark L. Wolf, wrote in The Atlantic magazine that Mr. Trump’s actions were “contrary to everything that I have stood for in my more than 50 years in the Department of Justice and on the bench.” The publication of the essay by Judge Wolf, 78, came two days after an announcement by the Federal District Court for Massachusetts that he was leaving his post as a senior-status judge. Read Article/a>

 

National: The Supreme Court just took a scary case on Trump’s pet issue. He might not like the outcome. | Richard L. Hasen/Slate

President Donald Trump’s obsession with mail-in balloting reached the Supreme Court on Monday through a bonkers 5th Circuit opinion written by Trump appointee (and Trump Supreme Court auditioner) Andrew Oldham. Disagreeing with plain statutory text, statutory history, Supreme Court precedent, and the practice of many states, Judge Oldham’s opinion held that Mississippi violates federal law when it accepts ballots postmarked by Election Day that arrive within five days of the election. If the Supreme Court upholds the 5th Circuit in Watson v. Republican National Committee, 29 states and the District of Columbia would have to change their laws to require receipt of virtually all ballots by Election Day, aside from a small class of ballots including those from military and overseas voters. Trump has railed against mail-in balloting for years as being rife with fraud, even though he regularly uses it to vote in Florida. He often calls for states to eliminate the practice, even though Republicans for years have used it without problem in states ranging from Arizona to Florida to Utah (which conducts almost all balloting by mail). He has issued an executive order telling the Department of Justice to pursue litigation against other states to push the argument in the 5th Circuit’s Watson decision and he has promised another executive order on mail-in balloting to come. Read Article

National: Lies, damned lies and AI: the newest way to influence elections may be here to stay | Adam Gabbatt/The Guardian

The New York City mayoral election may be remembered for the remarkable win of a young democratic socialist, but it was also marked by something that is likely to permeate future elections: the use of AI-generated campaign videos. Andrew Cuomo, who lost to Zohran Mamdani in last week’s election, took particular interest in sharing deepfake videos of his opponent, including one that sparked accusations of racism, in what is a developing area of electioneering. AI has been used by campaigns before, particularly in using algorithms to target certain voters, and even, in some cases, to write policy proposals. But as AI software develops, it is increasingly being used to produce sometimes misleading photos and videos. Read Article

Alaska: Will People Trust Voting by Phone? Anchorage Is Going to Find Out. | Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times

The largest city in Alaska is about to undertake an experiment that feels both inevitable and impossibly futuristic in an era of pervasive mistrust toward elections: allowing all voters to cast ballots from their smartphones. Anchorage, home to about 240,000 registered voters, is starting small. Mail and in-person voting will still exist, but voters will also be able to open a link on their phones to cast a ballot in municipal races in April, when six city assembly seats and two school board seats are up for election. The change will not apply to higher-profile races later in the year for state legislature, governor and federal offices. But even at the local level, the trial run of phone voting — the first of its scale in the nation — could offer a blueprint for expanded use in future elections beyond Alaska.S Read Article

Arizona: Johnson to Seat Grijalva, Seven Weeks After She Was Elected | Anushka Patil/ The New York Times

Speaker Mike Johnson plans to swear in Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva of Arizona as a member of Congress on Wednesday, according to his office, 50 days after her election, as the House returns from an extended recess. Ms. Grijalva, a Democrat, won a special election on Sept. 23 for the Arizona seat left vacant by the death of her father, Representative Raúl Grijalva. Mr. Johnson had since refused to seat her, despite several opportunities to do so, public pleas, a Democratic pressure campaign and, eventually, a federal lawsuit brought by Ms. Grijalva and the attorney general of Arizona that argued that Mr. Johnson had no authority to continue to stall. The delay prevented Ms. Grijalva from freely entering and moving about the Capitol complex, or having access to the budget or the materials she needed to do her job. As recently as Tuesday afternoon, she told NPR that she had not heard directly from Mr. Johnson’s office about the swearing-in and that she was “90 percent” confident it would happen at last. She said on social media on Monday that she was traveling to Washington after hearing from news reports and Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the minority leader, that she could soon be seated. Read Article

California: Republican challenge to voting map appears hamstrung by Supreme Court precedent | Edvard Pettersson/Courthouse News Service

The California Republican Party’s lawsuit to block the state’s new, voter-approved congressional district map may be doomed by the unwillingness of the the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority to get involved in partisan gerrymandering. In their complaint — filed the day after California voters approved Prop 50 and joined Thursday by the U.S. Department of Justice — Republican politicians and voters argue that the state’s Democratic lawmakers engaged in unlawful racial gerrymandering to benefit Latino voters. “California’s redistricting scheme is a brazen power grab that tramples on civil rights and mocks the democratic process,” U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a statement announcing the Trump administration’s request to join the California lawsuit as a plaintiff. “Governor Newsom’s attempt to entrench one-party rule and silence millions of Californians will not stand.” Read Article

Georgia Settlement Forces Transparency from Election Deniers on State Election Board | Yunior Rivas/Democracy Docket

Georgia’s election board has agreed to stop conducting its business in secret after a settlement with a government watchdog group. The deal represents a major win for transparency as Republican election deniers on the board ramp up efforts to restrict voting ahead of the 2026 elections. The State Election Board (SEB) ended a year-long lawsuit by American Oversight Wednesday after the group had exposed how board members used private emails and messaging apps to discuss election rules in violation of the state’s Open Records and Open Meetings Acts. Read Article

Michigan: Ballot custody questions complicate Hamtramck election | Hayley Harding/Votebeat

Sometime in the hours after last week’s election in Hamtramck, officials who weren’t involved in elections walked into the city clerk’s office, a space that’s supposed to be a secure place to keep ballots. That revelation has thrown the outcome of the Michigan city’s entire election into doubt, including an exceedingly close mayoral race. A total of 37 absentee ballots were initially unaccounted for on election night but were later discovered in the clerk’s office, opened but not yet tabulated. But since those ballots were not secured and could have been accessed by others, it’s currently up in the air whether they will be included in the election’s final totals. Read Article

Montana: Thousands of ballots rejected due to new birth year law | Micah Drew/Daily Montanan

Voters who did not follow a new Montana law requiring electors write their birth year on the envelope of an absentee ballot had the chance to fix the issue if they responded to a call, mailed notice or email from their local election department, but thousands of ballots still ended up in the rejected pile when all the counting was finalized. According to the Secretary of State’s office, “only one percent” of ballots were rejected due to a missing or mismatched birth year. However, some counties had rejection rates significantly higher than one percent, and almost all large counties saw higher rates than previous elections. The Secretary of State’s office did not provide any aggregate data showing the statewide rejection rate, and did not respond to several questions from the Daily Montanan about the new process, including specifics about cases of potential fraud the office said were prevented due the new law. Read Article