National: Jack Smith Says He Expects to Be Prosecuted Under Trump | Sadie Gurman/The Wall Street Journal

Former special counsel Jack Smith told lawmakers Thursday that he thought Trump-era Justice Department officials would “do everything in their power” to prosecute him “because they have been ordered to by the president.” Shortly after the congressional hearing wrapped up, Trump said he wanted just that. During the daylong hearing, Smith’s first public appearance on Capitol Hill, the former prosecutor issued his strongest defense yet of the two criminal cases he brought against Trump in the lead-up to the November 2024 election. One alleged Trump unlawfully retained classified documents after his first term, and another focused on Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss. Both were brought in 2023, ahead of the 2024 election. Neither went to trial, as Smith dropped both after Trump was re-elected, citing longstanding Justice Department policy prohibiting the prosecution of a sitting president. Read Article

National: Alarm as Trump DoJ pushes for voter information on millions of Americans | US voting rights | Sam Levine/The Guardian

The justice department is undertaking an unprecedented effort to collect sensitive voter information about tens of millions of Americans, a push that relies on thin legal reasoning and which could be aimed at sowing doubt about the midterm election results this year. The department has asked at least 43 states for their comprehensive information on voters, including the last four digits of their social security numbers, full dates of birth and addresses, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Eight states have voluntarily turned over the information, according to the Brennan Center, and the department has sued 23 states and the District of Columbia for the information. Many of the states have faced lawsuits after refusing to turn over the information, citing state privacy laws. Some of the states have provided the justice department with voter lists that have sensitive personal information redacted, only to find themselves sued by the department. Nearly every state the justice department has sued is led by Democratic election officials. Read Article

National: Trump administration concedes DOGE team may have misused Social Security data | Kyle Cheney/Politico

Two members of Elon Musk’s DOGE team working at the Social Security Administration were secretly in touch with an advocacy group seeking to “overturn election results in certain states,” and one signed an agreement that may have involved using Social Security data to match state voter rolls, the Justice Department revealed in newly disclosed court papers. Elizabeth Shapiro, a top Justice Department official, said SSA referred both DOGE employees for potential violations of the Hatch Act, which bars government employees from using their official positions for political purposes. Shapiro’s previously unreported disclosure, dated Friday, came as part of a list of “corrections” to testimony by top SSA officials during last year’s legal battles over DOGE’s access to Social Security data. They revealed that DOGE team members shared data on unapproved “third-party” servers and may have accessed private information that had been ruled off-limits by a court at the time. Read Article

National: DHS’s Data Grab Is Getting Citizens Kicked Off Voter Rolls, New Complaint Says | Vittoria Elliott/WIRED

Even before winning reelection, President Donald Trump and his supporters put immigration at the center of their messaging. In addition to other conspiracy theories, the right-wing went all in on the false claim that immigrants were voting illegally in large numbers. The Trump administration has since poured billions of dollars into immigration enforcement, and in March, Trump issued an executive order requiring the Department of Homeland Security to ensure that states have “access to appropriate systems for verifying the citizenship or immigration status of individuals registering to vote or who are already registered.” In May, DHS began encouraging states to check their voter rolls against immigration data with the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program, run by US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). SAVE now has access to data from across the federal government, not just on immigrants but on citizens as well. Experts have warned that using disparate sources of data—all collected for different purposes–could lead to errors, including identifying US citizens as noncitizens. According to the plaintiffs in a new legal complaint, it appears that it’s already happening. Read Article

National: Congressional appropriators move to extend information-sharing law, fund CISA | Tim Starks/CyberScoop

Congressional appropriators announced funding legislation this week that extends an expiring cyber threat information-sharing law and provides $2.6 billion for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), including money for election security and directives on staffing levels. The latest so-called “minibus” package of several spending bills to keep the government funded past a Jan. 30 deadline would extend the Cybersecurity and Information Sharing Act of 2015 through the end of the current fiscal year, Sept. 30. Industry and the Trump administration have been seeking a 10-year extension of a law that provides legal protections for sharing cyber threat data between companies and the government, but a deal on Capitol Hill has proven elusive. The package, announced Tuesday, also would extend the expiring State and Local Cybersecurity Grants Program through the end of fiscal 2026. Both laws temporarily expired during the government shutdown before being included in broader government funding legislation that extended them through Jan. 30. The House Homeland Security Committee has approved legislation on a long-term extension of the grants program, but the Senate hasn’t taken any action on it. Read ‘Article

National: How ‘chain of custody’ helps make elections secure | Hayley Harding/Votebeat

In any given election, a whole lot of people handle the ballots and voting equipment. So how does a ballot stay secure and countable after it’s left the voter’s hands? That’s possible thanks to a critical safeguard in election administration called the chain of custody. The chain of custody is a huge part of why voters can trust that their ballots are counted exactly as they intended. Voters may not give much thought to this process, but if you’re concerned about the security of your ballot and the integrity of your vote, here’s a full explanation of how the chain of custody works. Read Article

Arizona: In ‘uncertain times,’ lawmakers introduce bill to improve voting access, cybersecurity | Colin Wood/StateScoop

Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes on Wednesday announced new legislation that would seek to improve voting access and provide funding to improve the cybersecurity of state and county election systems. During a press conference, Fontes called the legislation, called the Voters First Act, a “research-based, common-sense proposal to modernize, standardize and prioritize the voting process across all 15 counties in Arizona.” The act, which was introduced by Democratic party leaders in both houses Wednesday, includes statewide restoration of Arizona’s permanent early vote list, which allows voters to receive ballots by mail for early voting, and applies the state’s 75-foot “voter protection zone” to ballot drop boxes and voting locations. It would extend the early voting period, allow the state to accept private grant funding to educate the public about the basic facts of statewide elections and allow ballots to be collected and processed continually on election day, for faster results. Read Article

California: This Supreme Court case could strike a major blow to state’s vote-counting system | Bob Egelko/San Francisco Chronicle

The future of mail-in voting — in particular, the power of states like California to count votes that are mailed by Election Day but received afterward — will soon be in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court. It’s the same court that overturned a key section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in 2013 that required states and cities with histories of racial discrimination in voting to obtain federal government approval before changing their election laws. It’s also the court that ruled in 2019 that federal judges cannot interfere with partisan “gerrymandering,” the redrawing of election districts for political purposes. Another ruling in 2021 allowed Arizona to reject ballots that were delivered by someone other than the voter. Read Article

Georgia: Fate of ballot QR codes unclear as deadline for their removal looms | Maya Homan/Georgia Recorder

Election season in Georgia is here, with statewide primary elections less than four months away and the campaigning for those contests well underway. But as Georgians prepare to cast their ballots, a key question remains unclear: Will the state be able to eliminate QR codes from ballots to comply with a 2024 state election law? During the second day of budget hearings at the state Capitol, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger appeared before lawmakers to discuss Gov. Brian Kemp’s proposed budget for his office. The hearings will continue into Thursday, with Attorney General Chris Carr and other law enforcement and public safety-related agency heads scheduled to present. Kemp’s budget proposal for the secretary of state’s office includes $1.8 million for optical character recognition technology that can be used to scan the human-readable text on ballots and $5 million toward a hand count verifying the outcomes of two statewide races during the 2026 cycle, Raffensperger told lawmakers Wednesday. Read Article

Michigan voters say signature gatherers lie about what proposals will do. Lawmakers haven’t fixed it. | Hayley Harding/Votebeat

College students across the state say they have been lied to by petition circulators, who have descended on their campuses to gather signatures in support of requiring Michigan voters to prove their citizenship. In August, Michigan State University freshman Abby Lindley was told the petition would make it easier for immigrants and transgender people to vote, she said. University of Michigan junior Aidan Rozema reported being told in September that it would make voting easier. In October, circulators told MSU freshman Hunter Moore it would expand absentee voting, he said. No law in Michigan requires circulators — often paid per signature — to tell the truth about what’s on a petition, or to show prospective signers the full text. While some states try to ensure accountability by banning per-signature pay or requiring circulators to live in-state, rules across the country are a patchwork. Read Article

North Carolina: ‘Fat-finger mistake’: State, county elections officials tussle over Wilson County sheriff’s race | Will Doran/WRAL

State elections officials voted to allow Bobby Knight to run for Wilson sheriff after his candidacy was challenged by competitors in the upcoming GOP primary. Party affiliation was at the center of the case. Knight has been a registered Republican for years — except for about five hours on the morning of Dec. 1, 2025, when he was a Democrat. An errant tap on his phone while updating his voter registration address accidentally changed his affiliation, he said. State law says someone must be a member of a political party for at least 90 days to run for election as a member of that party. And due to the flub, he didn’t meet that requirement, county officials determined. But the state elections board overruled the county in a 3-2 party-line vote, with the state election board’s Republican majority in favor and the Democratic minority opposed. The decision means Knight will be allowed to run in the Republican Party primary. Read Article

Pennsylvania: Chester County poll book problems on Election Day were due to human error, insufficient oversight, report finds | by Katie Bernard

Independent and unaffiliated voters were left off Chester County’s poll books in November’s election due to human error exacerbated by insufficient training, poor oversight and staffing challenges in the county office, an independent firm has concluded. In November, more than 12,000 Chester County voters were forced to vote by provisional ballot after the county included just registered Democrats and Republicans in the poll books for the general election. Every voter who wanted to was able to cast a ballot, county officials said, but it resulted in a chaotic scene and the county had to issue an unusually high number of provisional ballots — which require more steps to cast and count. Read Article

South Carolina: Governor appoints new head of SC Election Commission after board chairman resigns his lengthy term | Anna Wilder/Post and Courier

The head of the S.C. Election Commission resigned from his seat by saying he’d stayed longer than intended. Dennis Shedd told reporters he wanted his “retirement time back.” The former federal judge’s window of service was supposed to end in June 2025. “As I told you, I just anticipated being in this job for about six or eight months. It just dawned on me that I’m really ready to move on to something else,” Shedd told reporters at the commission’s Jan. 21 meeting. Some of the reasons he decided to stay included issues surrounding top staffers that led to criminal charges and the U.S. Department of Justice’s request for voter information data. Read Article

Texas lawsuit claiming that numbering system threatens ballot secrecy dismissed | Natalia Contreras/The Texas Tribune

A federal judge Tuesday dismissed a lawsuit filed by conservative activists who challenged the use of electronic voting equipment to randomly number ballots in Texas on the grounds that the practice compromised ballot secrecy. Judge David Alan Ezra of U.S. District Court in Austin ruled that the case, filed in 2024 by longtime Texas election activist Laura Pressley and voters from three counties, was moot because the Texas Secretary of State’s Office has since prohibited counties from using electronic pollbooks to generate and print numbers on ballot paper. He also wrote that two of the counties named in the suit, Williamson and Bell, had taken steps to eliminate the use of pollbooks to number ballot paper, and that the third, Llano County, doesn’t use them for that purpose. Read Article

Virginia: Judge rules state violated Reconstruction Era law by disenfranchising certain felons | Courthouse News Service

A federal judge ruled in favor of two disenfranchised Virginia voters Thursday, concluding the state’s broad felon disenfranchisement policy violates a 150-year-old federal statute. “For well over a century, the Commonwealth of Virginia has disobeyed a federal law designed to protect the right of former enslaved people to vote,” U.S. District Judge John Gibney wrote. “Nearly one hundred and twenty-five years after Senator Glass pleaded to ’emancipate Virginia’ from Black voters, a class of would-be voters appears before this court asking for true emancipation at the commonwealth’s ballot boxes.” Gibney, a Barack Obama appointee, granted an injunction barring Virginia from disenfranchising anyone whose convictions stem from felonies created after 1870, when Congress passed the Virginia Readmission Act. Not long after passing the Reconstruction Era law, Virginia lawmakers widened the net of felons they could disenfranchise. Gibney ruled that the act trumps any subsequent constitutions the commonwealth adopted. Read Article

Wisconsin Governor pushes back against Madison argument in absentee ballot lawsuit | Molly Beck/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Gov. Tony Evers is pushing back against arguments Madison city officials made in a recent lawsuit contending they can’t be sued for failing to count nearly 200 mail-in ballots in 2024 because absentee voting is not a right but a privilege. A group of Madison voters represented by the liberal law firm Law Forward sued city and county election officials in March over the city’s failure to count 193 absentee ballots cast during the 2024 presidential election. The voters are accusing the former Madison clerk of disenfranchising their right to vote in a class-action lawsuit. The clerk, Maribeth Witzel-Behl, and city election officials named in the lawsuit argue the voters’ constitutional rights were not violated when city officials failed to count their ballots because of a state law that says: “The legislature finds that voting is a constitutional right, the vigorous exercise of which should be strongly encouraged. In contrast, voting by absentee ballot is a privilege exercised wholly outside the traditional safeguards of the polling place.” Read Article

National: Trump is trying to change how the midterm elections are conducted | Patrick Marley and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez/The Washington Post

Five years ago, President Donald Trump pressured Republican county election officials, state lawmakers and members of Congress to find him votes after he lost his reelection bid. Now, he’s seeking to change the rules before ballots are cast. Trump, openly fearful that a Congress controlled by Democrats could investigate him, impeach him and stymie his agenda, is using every tool he can find to try to influence the 2026 midterm elections and, if his party loses, sow doubt in their validity. Many of these endeavors go far beyond typical political persuasion, challenging long-established democratic norms. They include unprecedented demands that Republican state lawmakers redraw congressional districts before the constitutionally required 10-year schedule, the prosecution of political opponents, a push to toughen voter registration rules and attempts to end the use of voting machines and mail ballots. Read Article

National: New federal ruling is latest defeat to Trump administration’s election agenda | Alexander Shur/Votebeat

A federal judge on Friday became the third one to block key provisions of President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at revising election rules nationwide, ruling that the Constitution gives states and Congress —not the president— the authority to exercise power over elections. The administration signaled it is likely to appeal the decision, the latest blow to Trump’s agenda on elections. His March executive order sought to require proof of citizenship on the federal voter registration form, mostly ban the use of machine-readable codes when tallying ballots, and prohibit the counting of ballots postmarked Election Day but received afterwards. The administration has appealed two earlier rulings in other cases against the executive order. The cases could ultimately reach the U.S. Supreme Court, but election law experts told Votebeat the president faces long odds. Read Article

National: MAGA Thinks Maduro Will Prove Trump Won in 2020 | Yvonne Wingett Sanchez/The Atlantic

In the days after American commandos raided Nicolás Maduro’s compound and whisked him out of Venezuela, Mike Lindell wasn’t ruminating about the dramatic military operation or oil prices—he was reviving a long-dead conspiracy theory. Lindell, better known as the “MyPillow guy,” was celebrating because, in his telling, a possible witness to the theory that Venezuela conspired with election-equipment companies to rig the 2020 presidential election against Donald Trump was now in U.S. custody. “I’m hoping now that Maduro will actually come clean and tell us everything about the machines and how they steal the elections,” Lindell, who has long espoused election falsehoods, told me the day after the Venezuelan dictator’s arraignment. The supposition boils down to this: Venezuela plotted with election-equipment and -technology companies to engineer Trump’s defeat in 2020. There is no credible evidence to support this. But with Maduro in U.S. custody months before the midterms and the Trump administration investigating the 2020 election, an idea that had been disproved by facts and debunked in lawsuits has been revived, with a newsy twist: Now Maduro will prove from a New York jail that Trump defeated Joe Biden. Read Article

 

National: Judge deals blow to the Trump Justice Department’s use of the Civil Rights Act to ‘clean’ voter rolls | Tierney Sneed/CNN

The Trump administration’s sweeping legal effort to obtain Americans’ sensitive data from states’ voter rolls is now almost entirely reliant upon the Civil Rights Act – a Jim Crow-era law passed to protect Black voters from disenfranchisement – a notable shift in how the administration is pressing its demands. The Justice Department says it wants to use the registration records to “help” states “clean” their rolls by comparing it to other data sets held by the government, according to public comments from Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who was appointed by President Donald Trump to head the department’s civil rights division. But Thursday, a federal judge delivered a searing setback, blocking the administration’s bid to obtain confidential information from California, including driver’s license numbers and Social Security numbers. Read Article

National: Supreme Court rules candidates can challenge voting laws | Ashley Lopez/NPR

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that political candidates have the legal standing to challenge election laws before voting or counting starts. The case before the court was brought by Illinois Republican U.S. Rep. Michael Bost and other candidates, who wanted to challenge a state law that allows election officials to count mail ballots that arrive up to two weeks after Election Day, as long as they’re postmarked on time. Many states have laws that offer a buffer, or grace period, to voters to return mail ballots in case there are issues with the postal service, for example. A lower court ruled that Bost did not have standing to challenge the Illinois law. The conservative-majority Supreme Court, in a 7-2 ruling, disagreed. Read Article

National: Election officials say trust with CISA on election security is broken | Jessica Huseman/Votebeat

When the U.S. Department of Homeland Security first declared in January 2017 that election systems were “critical infrastructure,” alarmed state election officials pushed back quickly and loudly, fearing the move could lead to a federal takeover of elections. DHS’s designation came during the final days of the Obama administration, as federal officials scrambled to respond to evidence of Russian interference with the 2016 election. Denise Merrill, a Connecticut Democrat who was then president of the National Association of Secretaries of State, helped lead the opposition. “The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has no authority to interfere with elections, even in the name of national security,” NASS said in a February 2017 bipartisan resolution urging the new administration to rescind the designation. Read Article

National: The Quiet Campaign That Could Rewrite the 2028 Election | David L. Nevins/The Fulcrum

Most Americans are unaware, but a quiet campaign in states across the country is moving toward one of the biggest changes in presidential elections since the nation was founded. A movement called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) is happening mostly out of public view and could soon change how the United States picks its president, possibly as early as 2028. If the compact reaches 270 electoral votes and overcomes likely legal challenges, the national popular vote winner would become president for the first time in U.S. history. Although this effort is not widely known, it could reshape the balance of power for years. So far, 17 states and Washington, D.C., have joined the NPVIC, giving it control of 209 electoral votes. This is about 39% of the Electoral College and 77% of the 270 votes needed for the compact to take effect. Member states include large ones like California, New York, and Illinois, as well as medium-sized states such as Colorado, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Minnesota, and Washington. Smaller members include D.C., Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Rhode Island, and Vermont. Read Article

National: Trump Regrets Not Seizing Voting Machines After 2020 Election | Alan Feuer, Ashley Ahn/The New York Times

President Trump said during an interview with The New York Times that he regretted not ordering the National Guard to seize voting machines in swing states after his loss in the 2020 election, even though he doubted whether the Guard was “sophisticated enough” to carry out the order effectively. The remarks by Mr. Trump in the interview last week harked back to one of the most perilous moments from his first term in office, when he was urged by some advisers to order his national security agencies to take control of machines manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems in an effort to find evidence that they had been hacked to rig the election against him. The statement also came as he has continued his attacks on digital voting machines, saying that he wants to “lead a movement” to get rid of them altogether in advance of this year’s midterm elections. Mr. Trump has long been obsessed with voting machines, particularly those built by Dominion, a company that has figured prominently in conspiracy theories that technology was used to rob him of victory in his race against Joseph R. Biden Jr. Read Article

Alabama: ‘Gives people some peace of mind’: Lovvorn post-election audit requirement bill receives favorable committee report | Austen Shipley/1819news

Following the approval of a minor amendment, State Rep. Joe Lovvorn’s (R-Auburn) post-election audit legislation received a favorable report during Wednesday’s House Ways and Means General Fund meeting. If enacted, Lovvorn’s bill would require each county’s probate judge to conduct a post-election audit after every county and statewide general election to verify the accuracy of the originally reported results. “[State Rep.] Debbie Wood (R-Valley) carried for several years a post-election audit bill that would help make sure we are doing everything we can to make sure we feel comfortable and safe that elections are good,” Lovvorn explained during the meeting. “We do a good job with elections in this state. This just gives us another cog in that wheel to confirm that.” Read Article

Arizona Democrats say election transparency bills will jeopardize security | Joe Duhownik/Courthouse News Service

Arizona’s Senate Elections Committee moved to support a handful of bills that would increase public access to voter records, though Democrats say the measures would lead to safety concerns by publishing personal voter information. The elections committee, chaired by Flagstaff Republican Wendy Rogers, voted 4-2 to pass two bills that Republicans say will increase transparency. Senate Bill 1038 would require a county recorder to make publicly available the full, unredacted vote cast record after an election. Senate Bill 1040 would require the full, unredacted voter registration roll to be made downloadable via an internet portal. In July, a state judge ruled that full vote cast records are not public records according to current law. Read Article

Colorado appeals panel skeptical of former election clerk’s sentencing | Colleen Slevin/Associated Press

A Colorado appeals panel on Wednesday seemed skeptical that a judge could use former county clerk Tina Peters’ insistence on spreading election conspiracy theories as part of the reason to sentence her to nine years in prison for orchestrating a data breach of election equipment. The three-judge panel was dismissive of many of the arguments made by Peters’ attorneys. But they grilled the state’s lawyer over the trial judge reciting Peters’ false statements about elections in handing down her sentence. “The court cannot punish her for her First Amendment rights,” Appeals Judge Craig Welling said. The remarks are significant because President Donald Trump has embraced Peters, who was trying to find evidence of the fraud that he continues to claim, without evidence, caused him to lose the 2020 presidential election. He’s threatened Colorado with “harsh measures” if it does not release her and even issued a pardon of her last month, although she was convicted on state crimes that he cannot erase. Read Article

California: Trump administration’s demands for voter rolls, including Social Security numbers, rejected by federal judge | Kevin Rector/Los Angeles Times

A federal judge on Thursday dismissed a U.S. Justice Department lawsuit demanding California turn over its voter rolls, calling the request “unprecedented and illegal” and accusing the federal government of trying to “abridge the right of many Americans to cast their ballots.” U.S. District Judge David O. Carter, a Clinton appointee based in Santa Ana, questioned the Justice Department’s motivations and called its lawsuit demanding voter data from California Secretary of State Shirley Weber not just an overreach into state-run elections, but a threat to American democracy. “The centralization of this information by the federal government would have a chilling effect on voter registration which would inevitably lead to decreasing voter turnout as voters fear that their information is being used for some inappropriate or unlawful purpose,” Carter wrote. “This risk threatens the right to vote which is the cornerstone of American democracy.” Read Article

Georgia: Official says law Trump is using to seek legal fees in election case likely unconstitutional | Kate Brumback/Associated Press

The head of a nonpartisan group that supports Georgia prosecutors said the new state law that President Donald Trump and others charged in an election interference case are using to seek millions in attorney fees and costs from the Fulton County district attorney’s office is likely unconstitutional. The law has “serious and potentially unconstitutional deficiencies,” notably because it denies county governments any sort of due process when defendants in a case request reimbursement, Georgia Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council Executive Director Pete Skandalakis wrote in a court filing Wednesday. Georgia state legislators last year passed a law that says that if a prosecutor is disqualified from a case because of their own improper conduct and the case is then dismissed, anyone charged in that case is entitled to request “all reasonable attorney’s fees and costs incurred” in their defense. The judge overseeing the case then is responsible for reviewing the request and awarding the fees and costs, which are to be paid from the budget of the prosecutor’s office. Read Article

New Hampshire: Citing security, Republicans push to exclude student ID cards from voting verification | Ethan DeWitt/New Hampshire Bulletin

Weeks before a lawsuit against a recent New Hampshire voting law goes to trial in federal court, state lawmakers are pushing to tighten voting requirements further. The House passed a bill this month that would eliminate the ability for high school or college students to use their student identification cards to vote. Instead, under the proposed law, those students would be required to present an ID issued by the federal government or any U.S. state, such as a driver’s license, government ID card, or passport. It’s a contention at the heart of the yearslong partisan war over elections. Democrats and voting rights groups say the instances of voter fraud are vanishingly small and that the affidavit system still allowed for the prosecution of illegal voters. Imposing stricter requirements, on the other hand, could bar otherwise eligible voters from being able to vote, impeding on their rights, they argue. Read Article