National: SAVE Act would create ‘chaos’ for election offices | Keely Quinlan/StateScoop

Advancing legislation that would require Americans to show proof of citizenship to register to vote could create chaos for state and local election offices, a state election official and a voting expert told StateScoop. The House of Representatives last Thursday passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE, Act, a bill that has received strong support from congressional Republicans who’ve deemed the measure necessary to ensure that only citizens vote in U.S. elections. The concern arrives amid mostly unfounded fears that large swaths of immigrants and undocumented individuals are participating in and influencing elections. Introduced this year by Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, following a failed attempt last year, the legislation would require state and local election offices to conduct additional audits of their voter databases to weed out noncitizens. Read Article

National: Trump Is Already Undermining the Next Election | Paul Rosenzweig/The Atlantic

An unfortunate reality now confronts Americans who value the rule of law: The court system has limited capability to act as a guardrail against Trumpist authoritarianism. And so elections matter—vitally. The final and most powerful check on Donald Trump has always been, and will always be, the ballot box. The president knows this, and that is why he has now turned his attention to the election system. His recent executive order on election “integrity” is nothing less than an attempt to disenfranchise his opponents and forestall electoral defeat. Some of that effort is rather technical in nature, but the fundamentals of Trump’s challenge to free and fair elections are easy to understand. This is an attempt to completely rework the constitutional rules that structure the American election system. Read Article

National: State Department eliminates key office tasked with fighting foreign disinformation | Maggie Miller/Politico

Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday announced the closure of the agency’s hub for fighting foreign disinformation campaigns — the final nail in a yearslong effort to shut down the office accused by GOP lawmakers of censoring conservative voices. The center came under fire from leading Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee last year for allegedly silencing conservative voices through its efforts to clear up disinformation and misinformation online. Elon Musk, who now heads up the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, described the office in 2023 as “the worst offender in U.S. government censorship.” But the center’s supporters, including Sens. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas), have asserted that it plays a critical role in combating Russian and Chinese disinformation. Read Article

National: Former cyber official targeted by Trump quits company over move | Kevin Collier/NBC

Chris Krebs, the former senior cybersecurity official whom President Donald Trump fired for affirming the 2020 presidential election was secure, is leaving his private sector cybersecurity job after he and the company were targeted by Trump last week. Krebs, who led the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency during Trump’s first term, is a popular figure at his former agency and in the cybersecurity industry, and the target of ire for proponents of Trump’s false claims that fraud cost him the 2020 election. On April 9, Trump directed the Justice Department to investigate Krebs and to strip his security clearance and the clearances held by any other SentinelOne employees. In his resignation email, which SentinelOne has published on its blog, Krebs said: “I don’t shy away from tough fights. But I also know this is one I need to take on fully — outside of SentinelOne. This will require my complete focus and energy. It’s a fight for democracy, for freedom of speech, and for the rule of law.” “Never forget what’s right, and what you stand for,” he said. Read Article

National: How the Federal Government Is Undermining Election Security | Lawrence Norden and LaTasha Hill/Brennan Center for Justice

President Donald Trump’s March executive order on elections has made headlines and drawn legal challenges, including from the Brennan Center. But the order is only part of his administration’s harmful election-related actions, and most of them are flying under the radar. Since taking office, the president has made a concerted, far-reaching effort to dismantle much of the federal support, funding, and infrastructure that has been built over the last decade to help states protect our elections from attack. Just last week, the president ordered the Department of Justice to review the actions of Christopher Krebs, who Trump appointed to lead the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) in 2018. Krebs successfully oversaw the agency’s work to secure the 2020 election, but the president’s new memorandum now accuses him of misconduct for denying the false claims that the election was rigged. This targeting of an individual for criminal investigation sets a dangerous precedent for government officials who seek to do their jobs free from partisan considerations and who may need to push back against false election denial claims in the future. Read Article

Opinion: We can’t afford to defund election security | Pamela Smith/The Contrarian

As voters head to the polls in state and local elections across the country, a quiet but consequential threat is growing—one that transcends party lines and strikes at the heart of our nation’s most fundamental right: the ability to vote in free, fair, and secure elections. That threat is the weakening of our elections’ cybersecurity. When cyber-attacks are becoming more sophisticated than ever, the federal government is making cuts to the very agencies and programs designed to help state and local election officials defend against them. Chief among these is the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). CISA was created in the aftermath of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Since then, the agency has worked with election officials to combat cyber, physical, and other dangers—monitoring threats, testing systems’ vulnerabilities, providing training on best practices, and supporting rapid response to incidents involving elections at every level. But in February, 130 employees at CISA were fired and over a dozen more were put on leave. That’s only the beginning—the agency plans to cut as many as 1,300 additional employees of about 3,300 in the coming weeks. With these experts removed and installed in their place a teenage hacker, the call is now coming from inside the house. Read Article

Arizona: Fox News report feeds false claim about 50,000 noncitizens on voter rolls | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Arizona has not identified up to 50,000 noncitizens on its voter rolls, nor have counties begun canceling any voter registrations, despite news reports over the weekend suggesting otherwise. The misleading claims showed up in reports by Fox News and other outlets that mischaracterized a recent legal settlement between Arizona counties and the grassroots organization Strong Communities Foundation of Arizona, known as EZAZ.org. Sunday’s Fox News story carried the headline “Arizona to begin removing as many as 50K noncitizens from voter rolls following lawsuit.” It said that the settlement led to all counties beginning “the process of verifying and removing noncitizens from their voter rolls, including nearly 50,000 registrants who did not provide proof of U.S. citizenship.” Read Article

Iowa is changing when candidates can request a recount — and who conducts them | Stephen Gruber-Miller/Des Moines Register

Iowa will tighten the rules for when political candidates can request election recounts and give county auditors and their staff control over the recount process under a bill heading to Gov. Kim Reynolds. One of the biggest changes the bill makes is putting county auditors and their staff of election workers in charge of conducting recounts. That’s a change from Iowa’s current system, which uses a recount board with members appointed by the leading and trailing political candidates, as well as a third agreed-upon member. Sen. Sarah Trone Garriott, D-West Des Moines, has been through two recounts following elections for her Senate seat. She said candidates’ ability to name a representative to the recount board helps them trust that someone is representing their interests. Read Article

Massachusetts appoints receiver to oversee Boston elections department | Niki Griswold/The Boston Globe

Massachusetts Secretary of State William F. Galvin has appointed Michael J. Sullivan, the former head of the state’s campaign finance regulatory agency, to oversee the Boston elections department through 2026, Mayor Michelle Wu announced in a letter to the city council Thursday. Sullivan served as the director of the Massachusetts Office of Campaign and Political Finance for 25 years before retiring at the end of 2019. Galvin earlier this year placed the city’s Elections Commission into state receivership after his office investigated and confirmed reports of widespread problems during last November’s election, including ballot shortages at polling locations across the city. The state probe also found that poll workers and residents made nearly 1,700 calls to the department to report the shortages and voting machine failures on Election Day, but the vast majority went unanswered. Read Article

New York: Blockchain for election integrity bill resurfaces | Colin Wood/StateScoop

For the fifth straight legislative term in New York, state assembly member Clyde Vanel has introduced a bill that would order the state to study whether using distributed ledger technology, better known as blockchain, could “protect” voter records and election results. Identical bills introduced in sessions dating back to 2017 haven’t found traction. Mark Lindeman, policy and strategy director with the nonprofit Verified Voting, said he was unsure what problem related to elections that blockchain, a technology made famous for underpinning cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, could solve. “For the vast majority of us, who do not live in the world of bitcoin and really don’t want to, it’s really hard for me to imagine a situation in which I could feel better about election results knowing that they’re on a distributed ledger somewhere,” Lindeman said. Read Article

North Carolina Supreme Court election could be determined by which ballots are subject to court orders | Gary D. Robertson/Associated Press

North Carolina’s Supreme Court decided last week that ballots from two categories should have been left out of the tally of an unresolved November election for a seat on the court because state laws otherwise makes the voters ineligible. But there is still legal friction about the number of ballots that state courts say must be scrutinized by election officials tasked with removing them from the count and giving voters the chance to provide additional information so their votes can remain. The universe of potential ballots is critical because Democratic Associate Justice Allison Riggs leads Republican challenger Jefferson Griffin by just 734 votes from more than 5.5 million ballots cast in what is the nation’s last undecided race from the 2024 general election. Read Article

Editorial: We’re Getting Dangerously Close to a Losing North Carolina Candidate Being Declared the Winner | Richard L. Hasen/Slate

In a preliminary order issued over the weekend likely designed to split the baby, a federal district court in North Carolina has told North Carolina election officials that they should follow a state court’s ruling to figure out which of thousands of military and overseas ballots cast by North Carolina voters should be thrown out in a dispute over the winner of a November state Supreme Court election. But the federal court also told election officials not to certify the winner of that election until it can decide if the state court–ordered remedy is unconstitutional. This is a recipe for disaster. The federal court should have heeded the advice of Justice Antonin Scalia in the 2000 Bush v. Gore case about not allowing a questionable redo of vote totals to be announced before there’s been a ruling on the legality of the redo. The judge’s order in North Carolina could well lead people to believe the state Supreme Court election was stolen no matter what happens. Read Article

North Dakota governor signs bill doing away with Fargo’s unusual voting system | Jack Dura/Associated Press

North Dakota’s governor signed a bill Wednesday to prohibit the unusual voting system used by his state’s largest city. The bill signed by Republican Gov. Kelly Armstrong bans ranked-choice and approval voting. Ranked-choice voting, in which voters rank their preferred candidates, is used in Alaska and Maine and various cities, but not in North Dakota. Voters select as many candidates as they want under approval voting; the top vote-getters win. Fargo adopted approval voting via ballot initiative in 2018 and uses the system for electing the mayor and four city commissioners. The measure came after previous elections in which candidates won commission seats with just slivers of the overall vote in crowded races. Read Article

Pennsylvania: Provisional ballots are increasingly being rejected for technical errors | Carter Walker/Votebeat

Provisional ballots are meant to be a fail-safe for voters, to be used when there are questions about eligibility or whether someone has already voted. They give election officials a chance to verify the ballot should be counted before they’re added to the tally. But in Pennsylvania, that fail-safe is failing more often. Between 2016 and 2024, the percentage of provisional ballots rejected due to technical errors on the outer envelope have increased from .95% to 4.92%. In that time, the commonwealth added no-excuse mail voting, a major change that dramatically increased the number of mail ballots counties receive and led to a related increase in the use of provisional ballots. Read Article

Utah: Audit finds some elections offices stored passwords in plain sight, other security issues | Bridger Beal-Cvetko/KSL

Auditors are recommending several changes to ensure the cybersecurity of Utah’s elections after finding a handful of potential “vulnerabilities” with password management and improperly stored election computers. While the report from the Office of the Legislative Auditor General found that election computers were not connected to the internet, as required by state law, it said an election server in one county had hardware that could be used to connect to the internet. The report also advised election officials to fix other issues after finding that some election workers in small counties stored usernames and passwords on paper notes next to computers and that two election computers in a pair of smaller counties were stored “in unsecured locations to which members of the public had regular access.” Because election equipment cannot be connected to the internet, hackers would need physical access to breach any of the computers, which is why auditors said it’s risky to have that equipment accessible to the general public. Read Article

Wisconsin: Shouting match erupts at Elections Commission over Milwaukee ballot shortages | Molly Beck/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

A routine meeting of the Wisconsin Elections Commission erupted into a shouting match Thursday after one member attempted to discuss Milwaukee officials temporarily running out of ballots during the April 1 election. Commission chairwoman Ann Jacobs, a Democrat, threatened to eject Republican commissioner Bob Spindell for bringing up a topic that was not on the meeting’s agenda and refusing to stop after she ruled the comment out of order. Spindell ignored Jacobs’ order to cease discussing the matter, triggering an explosive back-and-forth with shouting and gavel pounding. The outburst took place during a rare in-person meeting of the commission in Madison. Commission administrator Meagan Wolfe and vice-chairman Don Millis, who were sitting next to the arguing commissioners, stared straight ahead during the spat without showing any emotion. Read Article

‘The Most Extraordinary Attack on Voting Rights in American History’: How the SAVE Act Upends Over a Century and a Half of Protecting Voting | Matt Cohen, and Jacob Knutson/Democracy Docket

The 15th Amendment banned racial discrimination in voting. The Voting Rights Act, a century later, finally made the amendment’s promise a reality for Black and Brown voters across the South. The 1993 Motor Voter law helped get millions of Americans onto the rolls and established the government’s responsibility to make registration accessible to all. For over a century and a half, the U.S. government has largely acted as a force to protect and expand voting rights — often in opposition to efforts by state or local officials to limit them. Until now, neither house of Congress had ever passed legislation to significantly restrict access to the ballot — except for rare symbolic measures, as when the House passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act last year despite Democratic control of the Senate and then-President Joe Biden’s pledge that he would veto it. But with the House’s approval of the same measure Thursday, that’s changed. Read Article

National: Challenges to Trump’s order on elections rest on a simple premise: the Constitution | Jessica Huseman/Votebeat

I have been reading federal lawsuits about voting for the better part of a decade, and I am used to being buried in references to things like 52 U.S. Code § 20507(b)(2) or parsing whatever the Supreme Court recently decided Purcell v. Gonzalez means in practice for this election cycle. This week was different. Within days of President Donald Trump’s executive order to overhaul election administration, three lawsuits were filed in federal court to challenge it (a multistate coalition filed a fourth lawsuit on Thursday). And unlike the usual dense filings packed with obscure statutory citations, these complaints are startlingly simple. Think “Constitution 101” simple. These lawsuits quote the Constitution directly — no bells, no whistles. We’re talking Article I and II, with a heavy assist from the 10th Amendment. These are the kind of things that I used to teach high school debate students, who could argue them with more clarity than some members of Congress. No offense. (Some offense.) Read Article

National: House passes bill to require proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections | Rebecca Shabad and Kyle Stewart/NBC

The House passed a bill Thursday that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections in an effort to codify one of President Donald Trump’s executive actions in his second term. Lawmakers approved the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act in a 220-208 vote, with four Democrats — Reps. Ed Case of Hawaii, Henry Cuellar of Texas, Jared Golden of Maine and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington — joining every Republican present in support of the measure. Election officials, voting rights advocates and Democrats have warned that the SAVE Act could disenfranchise millions of eligible voters who don’t have easy access to identification documents, in addition to women who changed their last names after marriage. Read Article

National: Trump targets Dominion lawyers on same day judge finds Newsmax defamed voting software company | Justin Baragona/The Independent

On the same day a Delaware judge ruled that MAGA cable channel Newsmax had made false and defamatory statements about Dominion Voting Systems following the 2020 election, President Donald Trump signed an executive order targeting the law firm representing the voting software company. Having already helped Dominion grab a landmark $787.5m settlement from Fox News over its election lies, Susman Godfrey is just the latest firm singled out for punishment by the president for assisting or employing Trump’s political rivals. In an executive order Trump signed at the Oval Office on Wednesday, the president is seeking to revoke the security clearances of the firm’s attorneys, slash federal contracts and limit their access to government buildings, making it extremely difficult for the agency to represent clients with any claims or business with the federal government. Read Article

National: Trump is dismantling election security networks. State officials are alarmed | Bob Ortega/CNN

Misha Pride, then the mayor of South Portland, Maine, was greeting voters early on Election Day when police cars suddenly swarmed outside the city’s community center with lights flashing. “Possible shooting,” the city manager texted Pride. Officers locked down the center. Authorities quickly determined the call to police was a hoax, one of hundreds of threats and cyberattacks last November aimed at disrupting the presidential election – some pushed by partisan zealots, others perpetrated by foreign state actors including Russia and China. Voting at the community center was delayed by only ten minutes. The attacks in Maine, and elsewhere across the US, had minimal impact because of strong preparation and quick work by an information-sharing and analysis network of hundreds of federal, state and local election, cybersecurity and law-enforcement officials. But now key parts of this network, much of it built over the past eight years, are being systematically dismantled by the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, a CNN investigation has found – leaving election offices across the country scrambling to protect against future threats. Read Article

‘Hands Off!’ protesters rally against President Donald Trump and Elon Musk | Alaa Elassar, Shania Shelton and Mina Allen/CNN

Over 1,400 “Hands Off!” mass-action protests were held at state capitols, federal buildings, congressional offices, Social Security’s headquarters, parks and city halls throughout the entire country – anywhere “we can make sure they hear us,” organizers said. “Hands Off!” demands “an end to this billionaire power grab.” “Whether you are mobilized by the attacks on our democracy, the slashing of jobs, the invasion of privacy, or the assault on our services – this moment is for you,” the event flyers state. “We are setting out to build a massive, visible, national rejection of this crisis.” Read Article

National: Election officials alarmed as Trump orders probe of former cybersecurity chief​ | Jessica Huseman/Votebeat

President Trump issued a presidential memorandum Wednesday demanding an investigation by the Justice and Homeland Security departments into his former top cybersecurity official, escalating a campaign of retribution aimed at those who contradicted his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. The memo directly names Christopher Krebs, former Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency director; a second memo named Miles Taylor, a former Homeland Security official during Trump’s first term. Trump’s move shocked many who work in elections. While some current and former officials brushed off the order as political theater, others are taking it far more seriously — for example, hiring an attorney, scrubbing social media, and warning their spouse. The range of reactions reflects both the extraordinary nature of Trump’s use of executive authority to target individuals and a deep uncertainty about how far it might go. Read Article

Arizona voter citizenship rulings lead to disparate treatment for voters across state | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Arizona voters who haven’t proven their citizenship are being treated differently across the state as they try to update their voter registration, in some cases seeing their registration suspended entirely until they provide proof, Votebeat has found. The disparate treatment across county lines comes as election officials decide how to comply with recent court rulings on state laws governing proof of citizenship, according to the responses nine out of 15 county recorder offices provided to Votebeat. The confusion over how to treat these voter updates is the latest complication arising from Arizona’s unique laws, which require voters to document their citizenship in order to vote in state and local elections. Read Article

Colorado lawmakers back new election process for appointed legislators | Seth Klamann/The Denver Post

Colorado lawmakers on Monday backed a pair of bills to reform the much-maligned process that helped seat nearly a quarter of the legislature, while rejecting a competing proposal that would’ve required changing the state constitution. The two favored bills, which cleared an initial House committee, are essentially a package aimed at changing the vacancy-filling process: House Bill 1315 would allow lawmakers appointed via a vacancy committee to serve no more than a full session in the Capitol before standing for an election, while House Bill 1319 would enact similar election parameters for vacancy-appointed commissioners in large counties. Both bills are bipartisan, and they passed the House’s State, Civic, Military and Veteran Affairs Committee in succession. The often-criticized vacancy committee process is used when an elected official leaves office early. That official’s party then convenes a committee of party officials and volunteers to elect a new representative. Read Article

Georgia elections bill dies, leaving absentee ballot drop off before Election Day intact | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The Georgia House let an elections overhaul bill die Friday night, failing to take a vote on proposals that would have withdrawn the state from a voter registration accuracy organization and banned absentee ballot drop-off the weekend before Election Day. The bill’s defeat marks the first year since Donald Trump’s narrow loss in 2020 that Georgia Republicans haven’t changed state election laws. House leaders never called the bill up for a vote before the General Assembly ended this year’s legislative session. Instead, the House created a study committee to review Georgia’s touchscreen voting equipment, a possible switch to hand-marked paper ballots and voter registration accuracy. Read Article

Michigan: With Trump’s executive order, thousands of military voters could see their rights curtailed | Hayley Harding/Votebeat

Thousands of Michigan voters — including scores of military members and their families — could see their voting rights curtailed if President Donald Trump’s recent executive order on voting is allowed to take effect. The order, issued late last month, introduces major changes to how elections would be run. Among its most concerning provisions for those who serve in the military or live outside the U.S.: a requirement that all voters submit proof of citizenship and that all ballots, including those coming from abroad, must arrive by the close of polls on Election Day to be counted. Voters who live overseas or serve in the military are largely protected by the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, known as UOCAVA. It guarantees that those living away from their home states or around the world can still cast their ballots. Reaqd Article

New Jersey: Territorialism, poorly trained poll workers contributed to Burlington County’s 2024 election ‘failures,’ report says | Alfred Lubrano/The Philadelphia Inquirer

In a pointed report released Thursday, a North Jersey law firm found numerous problems with how Burlington County conducted the 2024 election last November, which was characterized by “unacceptable” long lines and voting delays. The report, written by Connell Foley LLP, a law firm in Roseland, Essex County, outlines findings of “a culture of territorialism,” “partisan tension,” and “personality conflicts” among countywide election offices. The report also cited poll workers who refused to accept delivery of a new voting machine that would have alleviated delays; poorly trained poll workers who did not understand the voting process; and election officials who would “not work together at all,” among other problems. Read Article

Nevada: Federal appeals court dismisses lawsuit challenging election worker protection law | Gabby Birenbaum and Eric Neugeboren/The Nevada Independent

The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has dismissed a challenge to a Nevada law to protect election workers, likely ending the effort to decriminalize their harassment. In a unanimous opinion released Monday, the three-member panel of judges unanimously dismissed the suit brought by four former poll and ballot counting observers, who were represented in the case by Sigal Chattah, the new interim U.S. attorney for the District of Nevada, the state’s highest federal law enforcement officer. The ruling comes one year after federal Judge Cristina Silva blocked the lawsuit over a lack of standing. Chattah appealed the decision one month later. Read Article

North Carolina Supreme Court Halts Voter Eligibility Review in Contested Judicial Race | Nick Corasaniti and Eduardo Medina/The New York Times

The North Carolina Supreme Court temporarily blocked a lower court’s order from taking effect on Monday that would have required tens of thousands of people who voted in 2024 to verify their eligibility. The higher court stayed that order while it considers an appeal in a long-running dispute over the election. The ruling on Monday is the latest twist in a five-month battle over a seat on the very same State Supreme Court. Justice Allison Riggs, the Democratic incumbent, won the election in November over Judge Jefferson Griffin, the Republican challenger, by 734 votes. Judge Griffin has challenged the result, seeking to dismiss the ballots cast by roughly 65,000 people. He has argued that a majority of them were ineligible to vote because they did not supply certain required identification data when they registered — though the omission was because of administrative errors and no fault of the voters. The race is the last 2024 statewide election in the nation that remains uncertified. Read Article