Wisconsin Senate lags on election bills without dedicated committee | Alexander Shur/Votebeat

When this legislative session began, Wisconsin Senate leaders made the unusual decision not to create a committee dedicated to election policy for the first time in nearly two decades. That choice has had a measurable consequence: The Senate has taken up far fewer election bills than the Assembly, and several measures that cleared the lower chamber are now stalled with no clear path forward. Of the 19 election bills that Votebeat has tracked this legislative session, 18 have gotten at least a public committee hearing in the Assembly, compared with nine in the Senate. Fourteen of those bills passed the Assembly, compared with six in the Senate. Even in a session when the Senate has generally moved more slowly than the Assembly on many issues — as of Feb. 25, the Assembly has passed 439 bills since the start of the current two-year session, while the Senate has passed 276 — the disparity is especially stark on elections. Read Article

Wyoming: “Hands On Everything”: Clerk Warns Of Tampering Risk As Voting Machine Bill Passes | David Madison/Cowboy State Daily

During a conference committee hearing Wednesday on Senate File 28, Fremont County Clerk Julie Freese told lawmakers about a previous public testing of voting equipment in the state where observers crossed a line. “They had their hands on everything and had stuff with them,” Freese said, without identifying the county. The account underscored her central argument: that county clerks must retain discretion to control who enters secure election spaces and how many people can be present during mandatory pre-election equipment tests. In a follow-up interview after the hearing, Freese provided a fuller picture of the incident, which she said was relayed to her by another clerk. The testing had taken place in a room that also contained boxes of county records — a common reality in Wyoming’s smaller courthouses. Read Article

National: Trump, seeking executive power over elections, is urged to declare emergency | Isaac Arnsdorf/The Washington Post

Pro-Trump activists who say they are in coordination with the White House are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting. Sen. Mark R. Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said there is no national emergency. “We’ve been raising the alarm for weeks about President Trump’s attacks on our elections and now we’re seeing reports that outline how they may be planning to do it,” Warner said in a statement in response to this article. “This is a plot to interfere with the will of voters and undermine both the rule of law and public confidence in our elections.” Read Article

National: The laughable legal memo behind the claim that Trump can declare a national voting emergency | Matt Cohen and Jim Saksa/Democracy Docket

Peter Ticktin, the Florida-based lawyer leading an effort to have President Donald Trump issue an executive order declaring a national emergency to enable a federal takeover of the upcoming midterm elections, shared his reasoning with Democracy Docket Thursday. It was quickly torn to pieces by a leading expert on the president’s emergency powers. Shortly after the Washington Post reported that the White House was taking Ticktin’s plan seriously, legal experts responded with ridicule, noting how blatantly unconstitutional it would be. But Ticktin’s reasoning appears more flawed still, relying on economic sanctions law that conveys no authority whatsoever to block mail-in ballots or seize voting machines. Read Aricle

National: Trump’s push for election power raises fears he will ‘subvert’ midterms | Shane Goldmacher and Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times

Ahead of the midterm elections, an emboldened U.S. President
Donald Trump has shown an increased eagerness to leverage the full investigative, prosecutorial and legislative powers of the federal government to bend election mechanics to his will. With his words and deeds, the president — who pushed to overturn his 2020 defeat but declared his 2024 victory legitimate — appears to be undermining Americans’ trust that the midterms will be free and fair. As the political environment darkens for his party, Trump is again warning Republicans that Democrats are going to rig the results. At the same time, he is taking actions that make Democrats fear that Republicans are actually going to subvert the election. Read Article

National: Republican voter ID bill stalls in Senate despite Trump demands | Mary Clare Jalonick/Associated Press

Election-year legislation to impose strict new proof-of-citizenship requirements on voting appears stalled in the Senate, for now, despite President Donald Trump’s call in his State of the Union speech that Republicans in Congress pass the bill “before anything else.” Trump’s push for the bill, backed by House conservatives and his most loyal supporters ahead of the midterm elections, has put new pressure on Senate Majority Leader John Thune as he tries to navigate an effort from inside and outside Congress to bypass normal Senate procedure. Thune has said he supports the legislation and that his GOP conference is still discussing how to pass it. Senate Republicans “aren’t unified on an approach,” Thune said on Wednesday after Trump’s speech. In an effort to get around Democratic opposition, Trump and others have pushed a so-called “talking filibuster,” which would bring the Senate back to the days of the movie “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” when senators talked indefinitely to block legislation. Today, the Senate mostly skips the speeches and votes to end debate, which takes 60 votes in the Senate where Republicans have a 53-47 majority. Read Article

National: Trump’s Favorite Voter-ID Bill Would Probably Backfire | Marc Novicoff/The Atlantic

On the surface, the debate over the SAVE America Act is familiar, even predictable. At Donald Trump’s urging, Republicans are pushing yet another voter-ID bill, ostensibly to prevent fraud and noncitizen voting. Democrats are opposing the bill on the grounds that voter fraud is negligible and that the law is really meant to disenfranchise their supporters. But upon closer inspection, something very strange is going on. For decades, the politics of voter-ID battles were based on a simple premise: The voters most likely to be screened out by such restrictions were probably Democrats. In 2024, however, that fact stopped being true. Trump beat Kamala Harris among voters who didn’t regularly participate in elections. In the low-turnout, off-cycle elections that have happened since then, Democrats have overperformed dramatically, suggesting that their advantage with the most educated, plugged-in voters remains strong. In other words, the politics of voter ID have not caught up to its new partisan implications. Making voting more difficult would most likely hurt Republicans’ chances, yet they’re pushing hard to make that happen; meanwhile, Democrats, who insist that Trump and a MAGA Congress are existential threats to American democracy, refuse on principle to help Republicans sabotage themselves. Read Article

National: Democratic Attorneys General plot to thwart Trump election interference | Lisa Kashinsky/Politico

Democratic attorneys general are bracing for President Donald Trump to interfere in the midterm elections — and war-gaming how to stop him. The party’s top prosecutors have been strategizing for months about how to counter a series of increasingly extreme scenarios they fear could play out this fall. They have huddled in hotel conference rooms and over Zoom meetings to run tabletop exercises anticipating the president’s moves and choreographing responses. They’re preparing for the administration to potentially confiscate ballots and voting machines, strip resources from the postal service to disrupt the delivery of mail ballots, and send military members and immigration agents to polling locations to intimidate voters. They’re readying motions for temporary restraining orders to preserve election materials and remove armed forces from voting sites. Read Article

National: In an Intense Election Year, New Post Office Rules Could Trip Up Voter Registration | Pascal Sabino/Bolts

The U.S. Postal Service began piloting a cost-cutting plan in 2023 to remove the machines that sort and postmark mail from local offices and instead consolidate mail processing in regional centers. As they rolled out the program nationwide, Jeremy Schilling, president of a local chapter of the American Postal Workers Union in Oregon, was one of those who spoke out about the adverse effects. His union organized demonstrations against the consolidation plan and blew the whistle on election mail that fell through the cracks due to the slowdown amid the 2024 presidential race. Election mail that people leave at their local post office in Southern Oregon, where Schilling is based, typically sits overnight until it is collected in the morning since evening dispatches were slashed nationwide at the end of last year. The mail is then trucked nearly 300 miles to a Portland facility that processes mail for most of the state, where it is postmarked, then sent back to the local post office for delivery. “Any mail that’s getting dropped into a blue box is not getting postmarked on the same day, and likely not on the day after either,” Schilling said. “The mail is so slow that it is an unreasonable amount of lead time that the normal person wouldn’t expect.” Read Article

National: DHS official promises election officials that ICE will not be at polling places | Andrew Howard and Erin Doherty/Politico

A top Department of Homeland Security official vowed during a private call with election officials Wednesday that immigration officers will not be stationed at polling places in November amid Democratic warnings about interference in the midterms by the federal government. Heather Honey, the department’s deputy assistant secretary for election integrity, dismissed as “disinformation” any fears that officers from Immigration Customs and Enforcement would be deployed to the polls as part of President Donald Trump’s ongoing mass deportation campaign. “Any suggestion that ICE is going to be present at polling places is simply disinformation,” Honey said, according to four people on the call who were granted anonymity to discuss it. “There will be no ICE presence at polling locations.” Read Article

Opinion: How can the Supreme Court protect electoral integrity? | Edward Foley/SCOTUSblog

The court has already confronted cases concerning the midterms, like the efforts to re-gerrymander already gerrymandered congressional districts for even more partisan advantage. And undoubtedly, the court will face many more issues before ballots are cast in the upcoming fall. But there is one specific possibility that I want to consider now because it’s especially crucial that the court be prepared to act proactively, so as to avoid electoral subversion that can’t be remedied after it has occurred. The threat is that President Donald Trump will order FBI, or perhaps other federal officers, to seize ballots in key congressional districts, so that the results of those elections cannot be certified before Jan. 3, 2027, when the new Congress is scheduled to meet and elect the Speaker of the House. Indeed, federal seizure of ballots potentially could irrevocably destroy the essential chain-of-custody of those ballots, preventing those elections from ever being certified and requiring instead another round of voting in those districts. But meanwhile the House Speakership election would go forward without Members-elect from the affected districts, potentially determining which political party controls the House of Representatives without the input from all of America’s voters – a deliberate denial of democracy if ever there was one. Read Article

Arizona’s ICE-at-polls bill is dead for now, but backers can revive it | Caitlin Sievers/Arizona Mirror

People packed into an Arizona Senate Committee room on Friday, waiting hours to protest a Republican plan to station federal immigration officers at Arizona polling places in November. But those protestors were disappointed when the measure was suddenly spiked at the end of the six-hour meeting because its sponsor was ill, according to Senate Judiciary and Elections Committee Chairwoman Wendy Rogers. The failure to hear the bill in the committee on Friday likely kills the specific piece of legislation, though the idea is likely to be resurrected. Friday was the deadline for legislative committees to consider legislation in its chamber of origin. But there are parliamentary moves that allow proposals that failed to be revived. Read Article

Colorado secretary of state says feds have ‘lost credibility’ on elections after FBI call  | Chase Woodruff/Colorado Newsline

Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold said President Donald Trump’s administration has “lost credibility” on election security issues after a Wednesday call between top state elections officials and federal law enforcement agencies. Griswold, a Democrat who is also a 2026 candidate for Colorado attorney general, echoed concerns from other Democratic secretaries of state over what they characterized as administration officials’ refusal to acknowledge states’ constitutional role in overseeing U.S. elections. Staff from Griswold’s office participated in the call, which was organized earlier this month by FBI election executive Kellie Hardiman. It included representatives from the FBI, Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Postal Inspection Service and Election Assistance Commission. “Unfortunately, there’s just not a lot of confidence or trust at this point with previously important federal relationships,” Griswold said. Read Article

Florida plan to verify citizenship could snare lawful registered voters in bureaucratic morass | Anthony Man/South Florida Sun Sentinel

An effort in the Florida Legislature sounds simple and straightforward: ensure that only U.S. citizens vote in state elections. Republicans who control the state Senate and House of Representatives are advancing legislation they say would do just that, brushing aside warnings that they are about to create a logistical and bureaucratic morass — that could result in thousands of citizens losing their ability to vote. They envision a far-reaching effort, with two central components. Registered voters who change their party affiliation; their address; or their name after marriage, divorce or some other reason would have to produce documentation proving their citizenship to a county elections office. All existing registered voters would be checked against the state’s driver license database to flag anyone who hasn’t previously produced proof of citizenship, a process that depends on the technology working — even though sponsors aren’t allocating money for tech upgrades. Read Article

Georgia: Election skeptics convinced criminal charges coming in Fulton County election case | David Wickert/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Voting integrity advocates who believe the 2020 election was rife with fraud have been jubilant since the FBI seized Fulton County’s ballots last month. They’ve been hailed as heroes for keeping the issue alive until the FBI intervened. And they’re convinced that prosecutions of election officials, politicians and even judges are coming. Election and legal…

Indiana election bill would undermine secret ballots for early voters | Jessica Huseman/Votebeat

For more than a century, American elections have operated around a simple promise: who you voted for is a secret. But a bill moving through the Indiana legislature would undermine that promise — at least for people who vote early. House Bill 1359 would let counties have early voters feed their completed ballots directly into a scanning machine instead of placing them in a sealed secrecy envelope. It would then allow those ballots to be scanned starting on the first day of early voting, rather than waiting until closer to Election Day. On its own, that process isn’t unusual — it’s similar to how ballots are handled at in-person polling places on Election Day. But the bill also authorizes counties to generate a unique identifier connected to each voter during early voting, print that number on the voter’s ballot, and allow officials to retract a scanned ballot if its voter is later found ineligible. That combination weakens the traditional separation between a voter’s identity and the ballot they cast. Read Article

Kansas Court of Appeals examines arguments on constitutionality of state ban on ‘fusion voting’ | Tim Carpenter/Kansas Reflector

Members of a three-judge Kansas Court of Appeals panel on Tuesday pushed a United Kansas Party attorney to explain why they didn’t take their fight to the Legislature to change a state law banning multi-party nominations of the same candidate. Saline County District Judge Jared Johnson last year tossed United Kansas Party’s lawsuit seeking to allow “fusion voting” by deciding the state made a strong argument that nomination of a candidate by more than one party in the same election cycle could undermine competition while elevating voter confusion and weakening voter confidence in elections. United Kansas Party appealed its First Amendment case to the state Court of Appeals by arguing the case should be sent back to district court for reconsideration under standards more favorable to the idea of striking down the law. Read Article

Michigan: Uncertainties facing election officials mount ahead of key election | Craig Mauger/The Detroit News

Michigan election officials are facing increasing scrutiny from some politicians and a presidential threat of federal intervention, which some expect to be attempted in the coming months, to begin the pivotal 2026 campaign year. Republican President Donald Trump has floated the idea of having federal officials take over local responsibilities for administering elections. He’s also used social media to promote five-year-old and dubious claims of voter fraud centered on Michigan. A spokeswoman for Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said Friday that Michigan leaders were preparing for a “range of potential threats.” Despite the array of pressures — including a push for funding for new equipment and a petition campaign on voter eligibility — some of the clerks who administer elections in Michigan’s largest cities said they’ll continue to be focused on ensuring the law is followed. “They will not betray their oath because of any type of effort by any elected official, whether it be Donald Trump or anyone else,” said Michael Siegrist, the clerk in Wayne County’s Canton Township. Read Article

North Carolina State Board of Elections names director of election security ahead of primary | Theresa Opeka/The Carolina Journal

With a little over a week to go before the state’s primary elections, Mount Olive native Ron Herring has been named as the director of election security and enforcement for the North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE), effective immediately. State board Executive Director Sam Hayes made the announcement on Monday. As director of election security and enforcement, Herring will oversee investigative operations; support election security initiatives; and work with federal, state, and local partners to protect the integrity of North Carolina’s elections. Read Article

Pennsylvania special elections come with high financial and logistical costs | Carter Walker/Votebeat

If it feels like Pennsylvania voters are constantly going to the polls, it’s not your imagination. According to data from Ballotpedia, a nonpartisan online political encyclopedia, Pennsylvania has held 47 special elections for vacant state legislative and congressional seats since 2017, including two being held Tuesday for state House seats in Allegheny and Lehigh counties. That’s more than in any other state over that period. It’s not clear why Pennsylvania has had so many special elections, though observers have pointed to the state’s large full-time legislature as a possible factor. But what’s more clear is the cost. Many of those special elections were held on different days from normal primary or general elections, increasing the burden for administrators and costing taxpayers millions of extra dollars. Read Article

South Carolina ‘wasted’ more than $30M on new voting machines, Senator says | Lucy Valeski/The State

After taking out more than $30 million in loans for new voting equipment before the 2024 general election, the new ballot scanners work similarly to the former machines, state Election Commission executive director Jenny Wooten told lawmakers Tuesday. The state Election Commission agreed to pay more than $28 million for ballot scanners and other new voting equipment in late 2024. With additional sales tax and interest, the cost ballooned to nearly $32 million, Wooten said Tuesday. Former executive director Howard Knapp, who was fired by the commission in September, signed off on the requests. The new ballot scanners work similarly to the old machines, Wooten told a Senate Finance panel Tuesday. The subcommittee is in the process of vetting agency budget requests for next fiscal year. Read Article

Texas: Eastland County Republicans scramble as hand-count of primary ballots looms | Natalia Contreras/The Texas Tribune

On Monday, a group of four people spent more than an hour at a table inside a Realtor’s office, hand-counting the results of two races on 100 sample ballots. It was only a week before Tuesday’s primary election, and for this small group, it was their first time practicing to tally votes by hand. They counted in batches of 25 and used different colored markers to keep track of where one counted batch ended and a new one began. They also used laminated tally sheets, which allowed them to erase and remark them if they made any errors. The group twice marked a vote for the wrong candidate, an error that meant they had to go back and start over and correct their laminated sheets. But on Election Day, “you won’t be able to erase the errors on the sheet. That’s why we practice,” said Robin Hayes, the county’s GOP chair, who was training the group. Hayes hasn’t yet participated in an official hand-count herself, but said she’s attended trainings to learn how to do it and has been preparing and training other volunteers for months. Read Article

Wisconsin: Who will run the next election in small-town Wisconsin? No one knows. | Alexander Shur |Votebeat

Inside the mostly empty town hall on County Road Z last week, a handful of voters cast ballots in wooden booths for a school board race. The biggest question on the minds of local election officials wasn’t who would win — it was who would run elections next year. After two clerks left within a year, longtime town supervisor Sharon Hunter stepped in because no one else would. Hunter’s term ends next April. Nomination papers for a potential successor are due in January 2027, but local officials still don’t know who comes next. “Sharon’s not going to do 29 years,” Deputy Clerk Amy Meyer said, referring to the long tenure of the clerk who resigned in late 2024, setting off the cascade of brief replacements. Hunter, 72, laughed. “I’d be over 100 years old,” she said. “I don’t think you want me here with my walker.” Read Article

National: Trump says Republicans will ‘never lose a race’ if Congress restricts voting | Jacob Knutson/Democracy Docket

During a rambling rehash of false assertions of voter fraud, President Donald Trump claimed that Republicans will never lose an election “for 50 years” if his allies in Congress pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE) America Act, which critics have called the most restrictive anti-voting law in U.S. history. “I tell you what, Republicans have to win this one,” Trump said during a speech at a steel facility in Rome, Georgia. “We’ll never lose a race. For 50 years, we won’t lose a race.” Trump’s remarks Thursday were just his latest alarming comments calling into question the security of American elections — and pressuring Congress to suppress the vote to benefit Republicans. Read Article

National: Meet the election denier now heading White House election security | Josh Meyer/USA Today

As President Donald Trump ramps up his interest in taking federal control of the November 2026 elections, he’s tapped one of the lawyers who worked on his efforts to overturn the 2020 election to be his administration’s “director of election security and integrity.” That’s Kurt Olsen, a conservative lawyer who has been hit with ethics complaints and a legal sanction for spreading “unequivocally false” claims about Trump’s 2020 loss to former President Joe Biden and Kari Lake’s 2022 gubernatorial loss in Arizona. Olsen, a 63-year-old former Navy SEAL, quietly joined the Trump White House in October as a special government employee. Since then, he’s been working with law enforcement and intelligence officials to re-investigate Trump’s debunked allegations about 2020, including that he lost Georgia because of voter fraud and that states used “COVID to cheat” via mail-in ballots. Read Article

National: What if everyone had to prove their citizenship to register to vote? | Nathaniel Rakich/Votebeat

Presidents’ Day is always the hardest holiday to shop for; it’s hard to know what to get the president in your life. But the U.S. House of Representatives got President Donald Trump exactly what he wanted when it passed the SAVE America Act on Wednesday. The act, which passed with the support of all 217 House Republicans but only one Democrat, is a centerpiece of Trump’s agenda to exercise more federal oversight over elections and prevent illegal voting, which is already very rare. It’s essentially version 2.0 of the SAVE Act, which passed the House last year. Like its predecessor, the SAVE America Act would require people who are registering to vote to provide proof of their U.S. citizenship. (Currently, new registrants only have to attest under penalty of perjury that they are citizens.) This version of the bill also adds a photo ID requirement for voters and requires states to run their voter rolls through the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database to scan for noncitizens. All provisions of the bill would take effect immediately upon enactment. Read Article

National: Trump vows voter ID requirements for the midterms, ‘whether approved by Congress or not’ | Kyla Guilfoil/NBC

Trump has called for Republicans to “nationalize” and “take over” the administration of elections. While Congress can pass federal regulations, the Constitution states that “the times, places, and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof.” Nate Persily, a law professor at Stanford University, said that an executive order mandating changes to elections would be unconstitutional. “The Constitution is clear on this. There are a lot of things where it’s ambiguous, but it doesn’t give unilateral regulatory authority for election to the president,” Persily said. He said the only way for state procedures to be overridden would be if Congress passes a law, like the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Read Article

National: Even Republican election officials are balking at Trump Justice Department’s voter roll crusade | Tierney Sneed/CNN

As the Trump administration has sued 25 mostly Democratic state election chiefs for their voter rolls, it has also encountered quieter resistance from Republican officials who have balked at the Justice Department’s demands for confidential voter registration information. At least a half-dozen Republican-led state election offices have declined the Justice Department’s request for non-public voter data, which can include a voter’s Social Security number, driver license ID number or current residence, according to interviews, local media reporting and records obtained by CNN and by the Brennan Center, a left-leaning think tank that researches election issues. “They can have the voter rolls. They’re gonna pay for it like everybody else,” West Virginia Secretary of State Kris Warner told CNN last month, referring to the public list that can be purchased in his state for $500. “They’re not going to get our personal information.” Read Article

National: Republicans are eyeing major election changes. Trump’s mail voting crackdown isn’t one of them. | Mia McCarthy/Politico

President Donald Trump is pushing Congress to end mail voting as Americans have come to know it. So far, Republican lawmakers aren’t heeding his calls. Trump has long railed against the expansion of vote-by-mail, arguing despite scant evidence that it is rife with fraud and suggesting it was responsible in part for his 2020 election loss. Since retaking office, he has repeatedly called for action — most recently Monday night to reporters on Air Force One. “Why would you want mail-in ballots if you know it’s corrupt?” Trump said. “It’s a corrupt system.” But other Republicans don’t see it that way — many of their own voters have voted by mail consistently for decades. So far, the type of blanket ban on mail voting Trump wants has not gained traction on Capitol Hill as GOP lawmakers counsel for a more targeted approach. Read Article

National: Democracy nonprofit launches project to aid elections officials on cybersecurity | Colin Wood/StateScoop

The nonprofit advocacy group Center for Democracy and Technology on Friday announced a new initiative to provide local elections administrators with additional support as they attempt to defend their infrastructure from cyberattacks. The work is to be led by Geoff Hale, a former election-security associate director at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. According to the group’s press materials, the new project aims to “strengthen mechanisms that provide timely, actionable research and analysis to support the cybersecurity and resilience of vital election processes.” Alexandra Reeve Givens, the nonprofit’s president and chief executive, said in a press release that elections officials “deserve top-notch technical support” to protect their systems, particularly when the nation is so contentiously divided along political lines. Read Article