The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has said it intends to contact all 50 states about their compliance with federal voting law, a national association of state election officials told Democracy Docket. “As states recently began to receive letters on the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and Help America Vote Act (HAVA) from the U.S.…
The decentralization of U.S. election administration leaves many decisions regarding how elections are run to states and localities, which also foot most of the bill. The federal government does support elections, though, even if most ongoing costs fall to states and localities. “We have seen over the last 25 years, more and more federal support for state and local elections officials,” says Lindsey Forson, deputy executive director at the National Association of Secretaries of State and a panelist in a recent NCSL webinar. That could be changing as the Trump administration enacts its election priorities and shifts resources. Read Article
After President Trump and many other Republicans warned that vast numbers of non-U.S. citizens would influence last year’s election, states and law enforcement have devoted more resources than ever before to root out those ineligible voters. More than six months into Trump’s second term, they haven’t found much. New research out Wednesday tracking state government efforts across the country confirms what election experts have said all along: Noncitizen voting occasionally happens but in minuscule numbers, and not in any coordinated way. “Noncitizens are not a large threat to our election system currently,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR), which conducted the research. “Even states that are looking everywhere to try to amplify the numbers of noncitizens … when they actually look, they find a surprisingly, shockingly small number.” Read Article
A U.S. Senate committee voted Wednesday to advance President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the agency that secures the nation’s critical infrastructure, including election systems. Members of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted 9-6 to recommend Sean Plankey ’s nomination for director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, known as CISA, which sits under the Department of Homeland Security. The agency has been dealing with workforce and funding cuts, as well as criticism from Republicans over some of its election-related activities. Read Article
When 400 fact-checkers from around the world gathered in Rio de Janeiro in June for an annual conference, the mood was tense. After years of exponential growth, political fact-checking was in retreat and under fire. And somehow, even as fact-checking surged in the past decade, so had the wave of false claims and narratives swamping the world. Meta, which after 2016 spent more than $100 million to fund 100 fact-checking organizations, ended a partnership with U.S. fact-checkers to highlight false claims and signaled it would cut back across the world. Google announced it would end its ClaimReview program — which I helped foster — that elevated fact checks in search results. Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s abrupt dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development cut off additional funding for fact-checkers in Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America and Asia. The state of the fact-checking field is on my mind as I write my last column for The Washington Post. I am taking a voluntary buyout, ending almost 28 years at the newspaper, including more than 14 as The Fact Checker. Read Article
Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap privately pleaded with two county supervisors to support his bid for more power over the county’s elections, text messages obtained by Votebeat show. The messages, which county supervisors provided to Votebeat in response to a public-records request, include previously unreported behind-the-scenes conversations and confrontations as Heap negotiated with the supervisors board early this year over how to divide election duties in the closely watched swing county. “I really thought you guys would come through for me,” Heap wrote to Supervisor Mark Stewart, a fellow Republican, in March after a counterproposal from the supervisors. “This was the last straw for me, Mark.” Heap sued supervisors in June after the negotiations over an agreement governing the division of election duties fell apart. County supervisors countersued this month, and the lawsuit is pending in county court. The breakdown means that as the time to start preparing for next year’s midterm elections approaches, the division of duties between the recorder and supervisors remains in dispute. Read Article
When the Department of Justice sued Orange County last month amid a squabble over election integrity, some legal experts were perplexed. Republicans have long pushed thin arguments that voter fraud has buoyed Democrats. But why was the Trump administration seeking information that the county considered clearly private — including the Social Security numbers and voting preferences of people whose registration had been canceled? The answer, in part, may rest upon who wrote the lawsuit: Michael Gates, the deputy assistant U.S. attorney general for civil rights. Gates was until February the city attorney in Huntington Beach, where he made it his mission to antagonize the state’s liberal leaders. Read Article
Three right-wing members of the State Election Board revived a fight over the 2020 presidential election Wednesday and called for President Donald Trump’s Justice Department to intervene. The surprise move by the Republican board members — the same three praised by Trump as “pit bulls” during a campaign rally last fall — gives new life to skepticism of the president’s narrow loss in Georgia in 2020. While many elected Republicans in Georgia have said they want to move on from 2020 after Trump’s undisputed win last year, the State Election Board remains focused on its questions about Fulton County’s handling of the 2020 recount. Although multiple recounts, state investigations and court cases upheld the 2020 election, Trump’s supporters continue to make unproven allegations of fraud. Read Article
Across Michigan, thousands of voters are getting new precincts — and in some cases new polling places — as officials redraw their maps to take advantage of a new state law that allows for more consolidation of precincts. The new law, which increased the maximum size of a precinct from 2,999 to 4,999 voters, is a consequence of recent voter-approved initiatives to expand access to early and absentee voting, which Michiganders have embraced. The law went into effect early last year, and some communities put changes into effect before the 2024 general election. Others, including Livonia in Wayne County, will run their newly consolidated precincts for the first time next week during local primaries. The shift could eventually save communities a lot of money, experts say. But realizing those savings will take some time, and voters could encounter challenges as they get reassigned to renumbered precincts, different precincts, or new polling places, especially if clerks don’t equip consolidated polling sites to handle a larger pool of voters. Read Article
Three Republican members of the North Carolina Court of Appeals issued the April order that blocked a lower court ruling favoring Democratic Gov. Josh Stein in a dispute over state elections board appointments. Appeals Court rules blocked release of the names of participating judges for 90 days. Now the court has revealed that Judges Julee Flood, Michael Stading, and Tom Murry issued the April 30 order. All three are Republicans. Republicans outnumber Democrats, 12-3, on the state’s second-highest court. The Appeals Court’s action paved the way for State Auditor Dave Boliek to make new appointments to state and county elections boards. The state Supreme Court later split, 5-2, in upholding appellate judges’ decision. Read Article
The state’s social studies standards, ideologically aligned with conservative values, American exceptionalism and Christianity, will guide a committee’s review of dozens of textbooks and materials for use in Oklahoma classrooms. The social studies standards call for high school students to study the 2020 elections by looking into election fraud theories such as batch dumps and mail-in balloting risks using graphs and other information. Most made little effort to embrace the controversial aspects of the new standards, an Oklahoma Watch review of submitted materials found. Some made minor adjustments. And a few refused to do business with Oklahoma altogether. Read Article
Thousands of South Dakotans have been publicly labeled as applicants for government assistance and thousands more have had their email address and phone number exposed, due to a new state law and the way the state’s election office is implementing it. Although the legislation creating the law received some Democratic votes, it’s a product of the Republican-dominated Legislature. Republican Gov. Larry Rhoden signed it into law and Republican Secretary of State Monae Johnson is carrying out its provisions. Several legislators, both Democrats and Republicans, are now telling South Dakota Searchlight they did not intend for the law to expose sensitive information — especially the identity of public assistance applicants. Read Article
The Texas Senate voted 17-12 Wednesday to preliminarily approve a bill that would allow the attorney general to independently prosecute election crimes without waiting to be invited by a local district attorney, a long-standing priority for the office’s GOP incumbent, Ken Paxton. A similar proposal stalled out just before the finish line during the regular session, with the House and Senate unable to agree on how quickly the attorney general should be allowed to take the case from local authorities. This time around, both chambers are starting from the same spot on that issue, directing the attorney general to immediately step in and take over election fraud cases. But a potential new line of disagreement has opened. In setting the agenda for the Legislature’s ongoing special session, Gov. Greg Abbott asked lawmakers to grant this authority to the attorney general with a constitutional amendment, after Texas’ highest criminal court ruled in 2021 that the state constitution bars the agency from unilaterally inserting itself into criminal cases. Read Article
More jurisdictions around the country are using commercial electronic pollbooks to check in voters, but many Wisconsin officials say they’re reluctant to give data to outside companies — and especially worried about using products that connect to the internet. Currently, the only e-pollbook option Wisconsin allows is Badger Book, which about 400 municipalities use. The product was designed by the Wisconsin Elections Commission and doesn’t connect to the internet. But it’s expensive and has limited features, clerks say, and officials in the largest jurisdictions, such as Madison, worry they wouldn’t get enough tech support if they used Badger Book. The worst-case scenarios for e-pollbooks getting hacked would be somebody stealing voters’ personal information, deactivating voter records, or making it look like a person had already voted, said Megan Maier, the deputy director of research and partnerships at Verified Voting. Meier and other experts said there is no known case of that happening. That risk would be mitigated, Maier said, if polling sites all had paper pollbooks printed out in addition to e-pollbooks. Read Article
Next month marks the 60th anniversary of the passing of the Voting Rights Act—a law often celebrated as the “crown jewel” of the Civil Rights Movement. Signed in 1965 after years of organizing and unimaginable sacrifice, it was meant to realize the constitutional promise that the right to vote would not be denied or abridged on account of race. Yet, as we approach this milestone, we find ourselves not in a moment of reflection or rededication but in a state of legal free fall. The Supreme Court has scheduled arguments next term on Louisiana’s racially gerrymandered congressional map, and the court as early as next week may put on hold and set for argument a case in which the 8th Circuit held that private plaintiffs have no right to sue to enforce Section 2 of the act. These pending decisions threaten to gut what remains of this once powerful statute, which has already been largely hollowed out by the Roberts court over the past decade-plus. Read Article
Arizona election officials say a hack targeting a statewide online portal for political candidates resulted in the defacement and replacement of multiple candidate photos with the late Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. While officials say the threat is contained and the vulnerability has been fixed, they also blasted the lack of support they’ve received from the federal government, claiming the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is no longer a reliable partner in election security under the Trump administration. Michael Moore, the chief information security officer for Arizona’s Secretary of State, told CyberScoop that his office first became aware that something odd was happening on June 23, while many officials were at a conference. One user managing the candidate portal noticed that one of the candidate images uploaded to the site didn’t “make sense” because it appeared to be a picture of Khomeini. The next day they were notified that candidate profiles going back years had also been defaced with the same picture. Read Article
The North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE) voted unanimously on several items at its meeting Monday morning, including changes to voting for military and overseas voters. The changes stem from protests by Republican Justice Jefferson Griffin, who challenged Democratic candidate Justice Allison Riggs for a seat on the state Supreme Court. In a legal dispute that moved through state and federal court, Griffin challenged more than 65,000 ballots cast in November’s General Election. After months of litigation, Griffin conceded to Riggs six months after the election, but not before changes were made to the way overseas and military ballots were counted. The Court of Appeals ruled that military and overseas voters must comply with the photo ID requirement when voting absentee in state and local nonfederal contests. Also, “never residents,” those with a family connection to North Carolina, for example, their parents lived here before moving overseas, are not eligible to vote in state and local elections, but can vote in federal elections. Read Article
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard this month declassified material she claimed proved a “treasonous conspiracy” by the Obama administration in 2016 to politicize U.S. intelligence in service of casting doubt on the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s presidential election victory. As evidence, Gabbard cited newly declassified emails from Obama officials and a 5-year-old classified House report in hopes of undermining the intelligence community’s conclusion Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted to boost Trump and denigrate his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. Russia’s activities during the 2016 election remain some of the most examined events in recent history. The Kremlin’s campaign and the subsequent U.S. government response were the subject of at least five major investigations by the Republican-led House and Senate intelligence committee; two Justice Department special counsels; and the department’s inspector general. Read Article
A federal judge on Friday modified part of a previous ruling that blocked much of President Donald Trump’s sweeping executive order seeking to overhaul elections in the U.S. The minor change affects just one aspect of a preliminary injunction that U.S. District Court Judge Denise J. Casper granted on June 13 in a case filed by Democratic state attorneys general. The judge said Friday that the part of Trump’s order directing certain federal agencies to assess people’s U.S. citizenship when they ask for voter registration forms will now only be blocked in the 19 states that filed the lawsuit. Election law experts said the modification will have little, if any, practical effect because a judge in a different lawsuit filed against the executive order also blocked the federal agencies from obeying the mandate in all 50 states. Read Article
In a congressional hearing on state voter registration practices Tuesday, Republicans on the House Administration Committee were united around common sentiments: It is too easy for citizens to register to vote and too easy for them to stay on voter rolls, states aren’t doing enough to remove ineligible voters, and it’s all led to the country’s elections being vulnerable to mass voter fraud and noncitizen voting. There was little evidence presented to back up most of those claims. Yet, the hearing focused on how states and the federal government could better review voter registration databases, with lawmakers hearing from two conservative nonprofit representatives and a North Carolina voter who was wrongly removed from the state’s voter rolls last year. Read Article
The Trump administration is defying a court order by refusing to say how federal agencies may be implementing President Donald Trump’s sweeping anti-voting executive order, pro-voting groups and Democrats alleged in a filing Friday. Among the order’s directives that lawyers for the administration have failed to provide answers about: How is the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) allowing its databases to be used to purge voters? How will the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) punish states for continuing to offer a grace period for mail ballots that arrive after Election Day? And how will the U.S. Election Assistance Commission — an independent agency — withhold funds from states that don’t comply with aspects of the order? Read Article
The U.S. plans to stop commenting on the fairness, integrity and legitimacy of foreign elections, a major shift away from a decadeslong practice of promoting democratic elections abroad. A new instruction, delivered in a Thursday memorandum signed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, orders statements on foreign elections to focus on congratulating the winning candidate and “avoid opining on the fairness or integrity of an electoral process, its legitimacy, or the democratic values of the country in question.” The State Department should only make public statements about foreign elections if “there is a clear and compelling U.S. foreign policy interest to do so,” according to the memo, which cited the “the administration’s emphasis on national sovereignty.” Read Article
The 2024 election was widely regarded as an administrative success. It went off largely without a hitch, with only minor disruptions to voting. And a decisive victory by Donald Trump in the presidential campaign, paired with a prompt concession by Kamala Harris, helped avoid a long and contentious process of determining the winner, which might have eroded the perception of a well-run election. Yet there were serious attempts at disruption, including bomb threats at polling places, cyberattacks on election systems, and destruction of ballot drop boxes. That these incidents failed to have a major impact is a testament to the planning, preparation, and response of election officials and law enforcement. Still, these incidents highlight the need for policymakers to double down on their commitment to the election resiliency policies and practices that made 2024 such a success. Read Article
Arizona officials say they have “moderate confidence” that the Iranian government or its affiliates are responsible for a cyberattack that breached the state’s candidate web portal last month, and say the same actors attempted to breach servers for other agencies in Arizona and elsewhere. The hacker gained access to a server at the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office on June 23 and began changing candidate profile photos that appear on the state’s election results website, according to office officials. The hacker changed all of the photos to the same image — a red and black image of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of the 1979 revolution that established Iran as an Islamic republic. Read Article
Last Saturday, less than a thousand people cast votes on an issue they hope will soon determine the fate of 40 million Californians. New California State (NCS), a movement attempting to separate from California to form its own state, held the July 12 election in order to approve a provisional constitution. According to NCS, participants representing more than 50 of California’s 58 counties voted, with some making long drives to reach one of the 26 NCS precincts. In Shasta County, ballots were cast in an unassuming conference room at the Redding Red Lion Hotel. One especially noteworthy voter was Shasta County Clerk and Registrar of Voters (ROV) Clint Curtis, the public official tasked with running the county’s official California election process. Many of the same local activists who have consistently cast doubt on the integrity of the Shasta Election Office over the last several years helped administer the event. Read Article
A longtime critic of voting machines and local government has been charged with arson for allegedly throwing a Molotov cocktail-like device into the office holding the voting equipment in his Colorado mountain community. William Wayne Bryant, in a brief court appearance Wednesday, was advised of the charges presented against him in the June 12 firebombing of a county building in Pagosa Springs. The overnight attack sparked a fire that damaged Dominion Voting Systems equipment in the county clerk’s office and damaged the assessor’s office upstairs, police said. Court documents show Bryant faces two counts of arson and one count of using an explosive or incendiary device. Read Article
A federal court ruling permanently blocked a 2021 Kansas law that banned groups from sending advance ballot applications to voters, finding that state lawmakers tried to suppress free speech. The case focused on the prefilled, mailed ballots that voting organizations sent to hundreds of thousands of Kansans leading up to the 2020 presidential election, which was rife with false accusations of illegitimate results nationwide. Danielle Lang, senior director for voting rights at the Campaign Legal Center, said in a statement the recent court decision affirms that encouraging voter participation is protected under the First Amendment. The center was one of three attorney groups arguing against the ban. Read Article
The U.S. Justice Department is asking Michigan for a copy of its voter rolls and information about how the state maintains them, as well as a series of questions about its high levels of voter registration. In its letter to Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, dated July 21 and obtained by Votebeat, the Justice Department also said it has received a complaint about the state’s compliance with a provision in federal law requiring all voters to be assigned unique identifiers. It is the latest in a series of letters the Justice Department has sent to states about their management of voter rolls, following directives in President Donald Trump’s March executive order on elections. Read Article
The Supreme Court on Thursday blocked an appeals court ruling that would gut a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. The decision grants an application brought by Native American tribes, putting on hold the decision by the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Justice Brett Kavanaugh had temporarily blocked the lower court ruling a day before it was due to go into effect, giving the justices more time to decide what next steps to take. The brief, unsigned order noted that three conservative justices, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, would have denied the application. Read Article
Texas election officials are praising a revamped federal immigration database that they’ve begun using to validate the citizenship of registered voters. Texas is one of the earliest states to start using the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ overhauled SAVE database to check voters’ eligibility. That comes after the Trump administration, in its campaign to eliminate the risk of noncitizen voting, made the database free for states to use and easier to search. But some experts and watchdogs warn that the changes haven’t necessarily made the system more reliable. They say the administration hasn’t publicly released enough information about it, which makes it difficult to assess how complete and accurate the search results are, and whether there are enough safeguards to protect people’s privacy and voting rights. Read Article