California: ‘I did not find them’: GOP chairman makes rare apology for election fraud claim | Anabel Sosa/SF Gate

As voter fraud allegations run rampant within the Republican Party, the head of Marin County’s party made an unexpected apology last week for claims he made about dead people voting in the county last year. John Turnacliff, the chairman of the Marin County Republicans, claimed in February that dozens of dead people voted on Proposition 50, last year’s redistricting measure, and he requested that the county’s registrar of voters investigate. But during an open comment period during a county meeting last Tuesday, Turnacliff admitted that he was wrong after no election fraud was found. “I’m here today to retract that statement that I made a few months ago as far as those voters being on the roll. I did not find them,” he said. “I apologize to the Board of Supervisors and to the registrar’s office and to the registrar for any angst and consternation that could have put on you since then.” Read Article

Georgia: ‘It’s really embarrassing that this is still a possibility’ — AI could exploit a flaw in voting equipment and match voters to their ballots | AP News

Security researchers say rapid advances in artificial intelligence are making it more critical to address a flaw in Georgia’s voting equipment that can allow voters to be matched to their ballots after they have been cast. The system’s vulnerability has been drawing increased attention, with election security advocates criticizing state election officials for failing to fix it before the November elections. Georgia election officials say they have taken steps to address the potential harm, but some advocates say the state is not going far enough. Other jurisdictions across the country use the same voting equipment made by Dominion Voting Systems, a company that has since been sold and renamed Liberty Vote. But many have applied a software update to fix the flaw, and some other states do not allow the public release of records that are needed to exploit it, said Mark Lindeman, policy and strategy director at Verified Voting, a nonpartisan group focused on election technology. Georgia, a presidential battleground with one of the nation’s most closely watched U.S. Senate races this year, is the only place where the system is used statewide. Lindeman said that, combined with an open records law that has allowed access to key documents, creates a “perfect storm. It’s really embarrassing that this is still a possibility,” Lindeman said. Read Article

Minnesota Supreme Court sides with city in voter roster debate | Sarah Ritter/The Minnesota Star Tribune

The city of Oak Grove is allowed to use paper voter rosters in the upcoming November election despite serious objections from Anoka County, the Minnesota Supreme Court has ruled. The state’s highest court on Friday decided that the northern suburb has the authority to choose whether to check in voters with paper rosters during the general election. Anoka County switched over to tablets in 2018, and argued that all precincts within its jurisdiction must use the electronic poll pads. “This is a major victory for local election authority and the rule of law,” said Doug Seaton, founder of the Upper Midwest Law Center, a conservative legal group that represented the city at no cost. “Oak Grove made a lawful decision for its own precincts, and the Minnesota Supreme Court confirmed that state and county officials cannot rewrite the statute simply because they prefer a different system.” Read Article

Nebraska launches new voter registration system ahead of 2026 midterms | Sophia Fox-Sowell/StateScoop

Nebraska is rolling out a new online voter registration system as states continue to modernize election technology ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. Secretary of State Bob Evnen unveiled the platform Tuesday, National Voter Registration Day, combining the state’s voter registration and voter information services into a single online system. The site allows Nebraskans to register to vote, update registration information, change party affiliation, check the status of early or provisional ballots and locate their polling place. “Americans are fortunate to have the right to make our voices heard at the ballot box,” Evnen said in a statement Tuesday. “We’re proud to unveil this new online voter registration system to make it simpler than ever to fulfill our civic duty. I encourage every eligible Nebraskan to verify they are registered and vote on November 3.” The modernization effort comes as election officials across the country face pressure to update election systems while maintaining reliable and secure voting processes, including cybersecurity concerns surrounding voter databases. Read Article

North Carolina: Politically divided court panel upholds GOP takeover of state elections board | Will Doran/WRAL

A shift in political control of North Carolina's elections administration can remain in place, the state Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday, in a major win for Republicans as the 2026 midterm approach. The 2-1 ruling divided the court's three-judge panel along party lines, with Republicans in favor and the lone Democrat writing a dissent. For more than 100 years, until now, elections have been controlled by the governor in North Carolina. Republican state lawmakers tried multiple times to seize power for themselves under former Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, but those efforts were shot down in court as unconstitutional and then, later, at the ballot box when voters in 2018 rejected a proposed constitutional amendment to let the changes happen. Read Article

Pennsyvania: Trump administration explains how it flagged potential noncitizen voters | Carter Walker/Votebeat

New records provide the most detail so far about the previously opaque process by which the federal government concluded that thousands of potential noncitizens are registered to vote in Pennsylvania. On July 16, the day President Donald Trump delivered a high-profile speech on election security, the Department of Homeland Security said it had found more than 250,000 potential noncitizens registered to vote in California, Nevada, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The states, though, called into question the accuracy of that number and asked for more information on how it was calculated. DHS answered Pennsylvania’s query on Sept. 9, according to an email to Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt obtained by Votebeat and Spotlight PA. The department said the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate identified the potential noncitizens by comparing the state’s publicly available voter roll to internal DHS databases. Read Article

Virginia Attorney General: D.H.S. May Have Broken State Laws in Voter Fraud Investigation | Nick Corasaniti and Hamed Aleaziz/The New York Times

The attorney general of Virginia sent a letter on Thursday warning Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, that the department’s hunt for evidence of election fraud “potentially violates several Virginia laws” and demanding that the investigation cease immediately. The New York Times previously reported that hundreds of Homeland Security agents have been assigned to an intensive, weekslong hunt for noncitizens among the nation’s registered voters despite an absence of evidence of widespread fraud. The Times also reported this week that, according to a whistle-blower report, the agents may have broken state laws by effectively posing as voters on public-facing state websites to gain access to individual voting records. Read Artice

Wisconsin; Milwaukee voting machine logs reveal nothing askew despite election conspiracy theories | Alexander Shur/Votebeat

It took mere minutes for conspiracy theorists to seize on a Milwaukee election error after the August primary, when officials initially forgot to extract election results from five of the city’s nine absentee ballot tabulators. They lobbed baseless accusations that election officials had switched votes or otherwise tampered with the results. But audit logs from those five tabulators show no evidence of tampering between the time officials initially left the facility and returned again to correctly extract results. “I don’t see a ‘there’ there,” said Duncan Buell, a chair emeritus of computer science and engineering at the University of South Carolina who has been analyzing election data and voting systems since 2010. Read Article

National: Ballot seizures seemed impossible. But judges and officials are prepping for them now | Miles Parks/NPR

The idea of federal law enforcement seizing ballots in the middle of an active election would have once been considered impossible. Now, as President Trump continues his unprecedented hunt for voter fraud, ballot seizures and search warrants are scenarios voting officials and the legal community are actively preparing for. One state election official, who did not have permission to speak publicly, told NPR their office has led three separate statewide trainings this year to prepare for the possibility of law enforcement seeking to take possession of ballots or election materials while the election is ongoing. And UCLA's Safeguarding Democracy Project released a guide Wednesday, shared first with NPR, to help judges navigate search warrant affidavits related to the voting process. "Lots of things that were off the table are now on the table," said Rick Hasen, the director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project, and the guide's lead author. Read Article

Manufactured Chaos: How a Rushed USPS IT System Threatens the Midterms | Alexa Raad/Verified Voting

A serious operational hazard recently brought forward by a whistleblower reveals a critical flaw in election readiness: mandating a brand-new federal tracking portal and rigid ballot envelope intake standards across thousands of decentralized county election offices weeks before an election violates fundamental principles of sound systems engineering. In large-scale IT and logistics systems, the most damaging failures rarely announce themselves with sudden, dramatic crashes. They happen quietly at the seams—where two independent databases fail to sync, an unhandled exception drops a queue of records, or an intake scanner misreads an address and halts delivery without triggering a clear alert. While national attention has focused on the constitutional tug-of-war over Executive Order 14399—culminating in a federal preliminary injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani and an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court—the immediate crisis is not purely legal. It is an operational hazard that would disenfranchise a significant number of voters and throw the midterms into disarray. Read Article

National: Trump’s War on Mail-In Ballots Has Voters Baffled. That May Be the Point. | Anna Griffin, Rebecca Fairley Raney, Kendal Asbury and David Iverson/The New York Times

President Trump’s legal and rhetorical assault on voting by mail — and the flurry of contradictory court decisions around it — has left voters confused and local officials scrambling just eight weeks before November’s critical midterm elections. The contortions have county registrars dusting off Election Day contingency plans developed for natural disasters like floods and wildfires. They have struggled to make it through planning meetings before the latest version of the rules change, and many are encouraging voters to avoid the U.S. Postal Service all together. Among voters, confusion abounds. Read Aricle

National: Justice Department directs states to preserve 2024 election records | Josh Kelety, Alanna Durkin and Gary Fields/Associated Press

The Trump administration is ordering officials in more than two dozen states to preserve records from the 2024 election as part of a campaign to force states to turn over detailed voter records despite repeated court losses. The preservation demand could set the stage for the Justice Department to seek access to the states’ election records as part of the administration’s hunt for fraud. The FBI has already obtained records or election equipment related to either the 2020 or 2024 elections from the most populous counties in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia and Michigan without saying what it was searching for. The letters escalate a fight between the Trump administration over access to the sensitive voter information. Federal officials have said they need the voter data to ensure that states are complying with federal election laws related to maintaining voter registration lists, even though states already have detailed processes to do that. Read Article

National: Postal Service Failed to Properly Handle Some Primary Election Ballots, Audit Finds | Jen Fifield/ProPublica

This year’s primary elections, according to a new audit from the agency’s Office of Inspector General. Election experts say the findings call into question the agency’s ability to meet even greater demands for the November election that are under consideration by the U.S. Supreme Court. The audit, which is dated Sept. 4 but has not been previously reported, found a lack of training for post office staff on how to properly and expeditiously handle mail ballots, deficiencies in how ballots were tracked and errors leading to delays, all of which risked ballots having incorrect postmarks or otherwise arriving late to election officials, which could lead to their rejection. The identified failures increase “the risk that Election and Political Mail is not handled, documented, monitored, and reported in accordance with Postal Service policy,” the audit said, though it noted that “most facilities we visited generally adhered to Postal Service’s election-related policies and procedures” and that nearly 99% of ballots reached election officials in a timely manner. Read Article

National: D.O.J. Escalates Threats to States in Battle for Election Records | Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times

The Department of Justice sent threatening letters to at least 30 top election officials across the country, expanding its efforts to gain access to private voter data and election records. The letters warned states not to destroy any records related to the 2024 election, explaining that their chief election officials “are currently under investigation” and subject to “ongoing litigation.” The notices come amid a barrage of efforts by President Trump and his administration, which have been fruitless so far, to find evidence of widespread voter fraud. It is not clear what the department is investigating, nor whether its probe is criminal or civil in nature. The letters do not cite any criminal statutes. Instead, they point to some of the same claims made previously as part of the administration’s ongoing effort to identify fraud in the nation’s elections, including machine anomalies and noncitizen voting. In court, the Justice Department has tried to force states to hand over unredacted voter lists, including personal information like driver's license numbers and partial Social Security numbers. The Justice Department has sued 30 different states for this data. They’ve lost 23 of those cases and have won none. Decisions are pending in the rest. Read Article

National: Voters Are Turning to AI for Election Help. The Answers Aren’t Always Right | Naomi Nix/Time Magazine

After years of Google restricting Gemini’s ability to answer users’ questions about major elections, the tech giant is shifting tactics. Google announced Wednesday that the company would add credible election information about the upcoming midterms—including details about where and how to vote—to its Gemini app, along with AI-generated responses in its search products. The company said it would share information on polling locations and voter registration instructions from state and local governments and the voting information group, Democracy Works, along with race results from The Associated Press. As Gemini wades deeper into politics, the risk of the chatbot giving voters misleading, biased, or outdated election information will only grow. A Pew Research Center study earlier this year found about half of adults under 50 rely on chatbots to search for information, while a smaller share use them to read news. “We know that voters are going to turn to chatbots more and more,” said Valeria de la Fuente, a digital research analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue who recently co-authored a report on election-related misinformation from chatbots. “So the quality of the responses that we found is concerning.” Read Article

National: Trump’s Commerce Secretary under pressure to use his powers to block voting machines | Gabe Cohen, Jeremy Herb, Sean Lyngaas, Phil Mattingly/CNN

President Donald Trump’s election fraud crusade has an unlikely new vehicle: the Commerce Department. Long known for more mundane work like promoting economic growth, shaping trade policy and producing federal statistics, under Secretary Howard Lutnick, Commerce is proving to be a useful ally in Trump’s efforts to reshape the country’s election systems ahead of the November midterms. In recent months, the department has produced disputed Census Bureau findings on noncitizen voting and pressed the US Postal Service to adopt stringent new mail-ballot rules. Sources tell CNN that Commerce officials worked quietly behind the scenes to advance both initiatives, and that Lutnick has become a key partner in the White House’s election agenda. Now, prominent Trump allies — including some inside the administration — are pressing Lutnick to use his department’s sweeping authorities over supply chains to ban certain voting machines, arguing that Chinese-made components could leave them vulnerable to hackers. Some have invoked those concerns to push Trump to declare a national emergency and seize greater federal control over November’s midterm elections. Read Article

National: The Election Deniers’ Long Game | Toluse Olorunnipa/The Atlantic

In the anxious days following President Trump’s 2020 election loss—before his supporters stormed the Capitol, before his vengeful return to the White House, before the mass pardons for cop beaters—some Republican figures sought to cast his attempt to overturn the results as nothing more than a coping mechanism.Trump was merely blowing off steam, people close to the president told me and other reporters. “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?” one asked, suggesting that in the end, his antics would amount to no more than a footnote in the annals of presidential history. The January 6 insurrection a few weeks later would, of course, turn those predictions into punch lines. Nearly six years on, they look worse still: The election denialism that inspired Trump’s MAGA loyalists to attack the Capitol has metastasized into an animating feature of Republican Party politics. Read Article

Alaska appeals court dismisses noncitizen voting case against American Samoan | James Brooks/Alaska Beacon

A three-judge panel of the Alaska Court of Appeals ruled Friday that state prosecutors misled grand jurors who indicted a Whittier resident for allegedly voting illegally.Had jurors received accurate information, the court said, “the grand jury likely would have declined to indict.” Tupe Smith, the plaintiff behind Friday’s decision, is one of 11 people — all American Samoans — whom the state of Alaska has accused of criminally violating state law. Smith had filed a motion to dismiss the case against her, but a state superior court judge ruled against that motion. In Friday’s 20-page ruling, the three-judge panel reversed the lower court’s rejection and in the process, it also defined a high standard that prosecutors must meet in order to convict someone of voting illegally in Alaska. Read Article

California: Becerra joins voting rights group in urging Shasta County grand jury to remove Registrar of Voters Clint Curtis – Shasta Scout

California gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra, along with a state voting rights group, is urging the Shasta County Grand Jury to do its “duty” to initiate the process to remove Registrar of Voters Clint Curtis. The UCLA Voting Rights Project, a group for which Becerra is the senior legal advisor, wrote a letter today to the grand jury, board of supervisors and district attorney that outlined what they said is the jury and county officials’ responsibility to remove Curtis for “willful or corrupt misconduct in office.” Curtis, who was appointed to his role, is slated to hold his seat through early January. He responded to news of the letter by saying he “would love to go to court.” A press release by the voting rights group noted that despite certifying the results of the June primary election, one in which he lost to former Assistant ROV Joanna Francescut, Curtis has since raised unsubstantiated concerns about ballots and locked them in the elections office in hopes federal officials would investigate them. Read Article

Florida: Postal Service rejects Florida county mail ballots. Here’s why | Jeff Burlew/Tallahassee Democrat

The U.S. Postal Service — which President Donald Trump hopes to deploy to restrict mail voting in the November election — recently rejected the Leon County Supervisor of Elections’ outgoing mail ballot envelopes over a tiny technical issue. Supervisor of Elections Mark Earley is vowing to press on regardless, hoping that the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately blocks late-in-the-game Trump proposals that are going back and forth in the courts as Florida and other states are set to start sending out mail ballots to voters. However, Earley, who signed on to court briefs opposing the restrictions, and voting rights advocates are concerned that the damage will be done even if the proposals don’t go anywhere. “The chaos factor is the real problem,” Earley said in an interview with the Democrat. “I’ve had voters tell me ‘I don’t trust anything anymore, so I’m just not going to vote.’ And so I say the only way that your vote doesn’t get counted is if you don’t try and vote.” Read Article

Georgia: What the Fulton County election warehouse raid did (and did not) accomplish | Caleb Groves/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

So far, the raid has failed to deliver new revelations or the indictments some Trump supporters had hoped for. But it demonstrated how far the administration would go to settle the president’s 2020 grievances and breathe new life into doubts about elections ahead of high-stakes elections in November. Now, some Democrats and election officials are concerned that it could be an omen of what’s on the horizon for future seizures in 2026 or even 2028. Last month, the Democratic National Committee filed a lawsuit in a federal district court in Washington, D.C., over records it sought from the government for any planned seizures of election records or voting machines. Read Article

Minnesota city urges state Supreme Court to allow return to paper voter rosters | Ryan LuetkemeyerCourthouse News

Whether an outer-ring municipality in the Twin Cities metro area can reject electronic voter books and return to paper rosters for the upcoming election came before the Minnesota Supreme Court Tuesday. At issue is whether individual municipalities like the city of Oak Grove retain statutory authority to choose their poll book formats for statewide elections, or whether county and state attempts at electronic uniformity override local decisions. Oak Grove contends that, because cities bear the primary responsibility for operating polling places in their precincts, they hold final say over voter roster formats, while state and county officials argue authority goes to the county auditor for federal, state and countywide elections. Read Article

Missouri set to use old congressional map after Supreme Court rejects Trump-backed one | David A. Lieb and Lindsay Whitehurst/Associated Press

Missouri is poised to hold its November election with congressional districts passed after the last census, after the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday again rejected a new map backed by President Donald Trump that Republicans hoped could help them win an additional seat in the pivotal midterms. The Supreme Court’s decision marked a defining moment in a pitched legal battle that has lasted nearly a year and caused confusion for voters. Citing the court’s latest action, Missouri’s chief election official directed local authorities to use U.S. House districts passed in 2022, as the state’s highest court had ordered. Trump wanted courts to allow the use of his preferred map, which lawmakers approved last year at his urging. The decision means Missouri could run the November general election with different U.S. House districts than were used in the August primary — an extremely rare situation that could switch the candidate choices for more than a million potential voters, or nearly 1 in 4 voters statewide, according to an Associated Press estimate. Read Article

North Carolina Board of Elections approves new mail-in ballot guidelines before voting | Kyle Ingram/Raleigh News & Observer

In a split vote, the North Carolina State Board of Elections approved new guidelines for mail-in ballots on Friday, just hours before those ballots were sent to voters. The new policies do not change how ballots are delivered to voters who have requested them, but they do alter the standards by which election officials decide whether to count a returned mail-in ballot. A major point of contention among the board was a provision that directs county officials to “spoil” a mail-in ballot if the inner envelope containing the ballot is not properly sealed. In this scenario, the returned ballot would not be counted, but the affected voter would be contacted and sent a new one. They could also still vote in-person. Read Article

Pennsylvania attorney faces possible discipline over conduct in 2020 Fulton County election lawsuit | Carter Walker/Spotlight PA

An attorney who represented a Pennsylvania county as it attempted to investigate the 2020 election is facing possible suspension or disbarment. Thomas Carroll, an attorney from the Lehigh Valley, represented Fulton County in a long-running dispute the county had with the Pennsylvania Department of State and a voting equipment manufacturer. Now, the Pennsylvania Disciplinary Board, which regulates lawyers’ conduct, says Carroll should face consequences for the “bad faith” way in which he represented the county. “[Carroll] used means that had no substantial purpose other than to delay and burden the parties, the Special Master, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, and the courts,” the March complaint from the Office of Disciplinary Council alleges. Read Article

South Carolina absentee voting unchanged as courts weigh mail rules | The State

President Donald Trump wants to change mail-in voting procedures before November’s general election, and federal judges deemed a South Carolina absentee voting rule to be unconstitutional and age-discriminatory. At this point, neither means absentee voting policies will change in South Carolina ahead of the general election, according to Sydni Bain, a spokesperson for the state Election Commission. Pending U.S. Postal Service rules for absentee voting, prompted by a Trump executive order, have been put on hold by a federal judge. The administration appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court Sunday. More than 250 former and current members of congress, including U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn, asked the high court to oppose the plan. Read Article

National: Whistle-Blower Says Trump Officials Are Defying Court Orders on Voting by Mail | Chris Cameron/The New York Times

A U.S. Postal Service official has alleged that the agency is moving forward with a “secretive, rushed” effort to carry out President Trump’s order exerting federal control over mail voting, despite a court order blocking those plans. The official filed a whistle-blower report, published on Tuesday morning by the office of Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, asserting that the “risky and haphazard” implementation of Mr. Trump’s order could lead to a “catastrophic failure” in the mail ballot system ahead of this year’s midterm elections. The report said that the agency had planned to complete the new digital system overseeing mail ballots by Sept. 1. “Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all,” the official said in the report, which was prepared with the assistance of Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit group that represents people seeking to expose potential lawbreaking. Speaking to reporters by phone on Monday, Mr. Blumenthal said of the report that “the main takeaway for me is that the Postal Service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions of Americans. One-third of all Americans cast their ballots by mail, and the U.S.P.S. puts all of their votes at risk.” Read Article

National: Trump Administration Withholds $39.6M Election Security Funds Congress Mandated in April | Clayton Lewis/Tech Times

Eight weeks before Americans cast their midterm ballots, more than $39.6 million in congressionally mandated election security money is sitting unused at the Department of Homeland Security — unspent even as foreign adversaries ramp up cyberattacks on American infrastructure and military commanders have testified that those adversaries specifically plan to target the 2026 elections. Sen. Alex Padilla of California and Rep. Joseph Morelle of New York sent a letter Wednesday to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Nick Anderson, the acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, demanding the agency distribute the funds as directed by the fiscal year 2026 DHS Appropriations bill, which Congress passed in April. The lawmakers — the top Democrats on the Senate and House committees with jurisdiction over federal elections — wrote that they share "grave concern that time is running out" — in the words of their letter to Mullin and Anderson — to assist state and local election officials in protecting elections from cyber and disinformation threats. Read Article

National: Trump administration asks Supreme Court to allow mail-in ballot restrictions | Justin Jouvenal and Patrick Marley/The Washington Post

The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to immediately allow new restrictions on mail-in balloting, potentially setting up a major legal clash that could affect millions of voters for November’s midterm elections. The fight could possibly upend election procedures just as states begin to send out mail-in ballots in pivotal contests that will determine control of the U.S. House and Senate. Some communities in Wisconsin mailed ballots to voters this week, North Carolina is set to send them to voters Friday and other states will follow suit in coming days and weeks.. Read Article

National: Judge Presses for Clarity in Lawsuit Over Mail-In Voting Rules | Zach Montague/The New York Times

A federal judge on Thursday expressed concern that if she allowed the Trump administration to move ahead with plans to restrict mail-in ballots ahead of the November election, it could cause so much chaos that states would experience “major disenfranchisement.” During a winding two-hour hearing in Federal District Court in Boston, Judge Indira Talwani asked sharp questions of attorneys from the Justice Department and a coalition of Republican states about how they believed they could implement the new rule on the eve of early voting across many states. The hearing highlighted concerns raised by a broad coalition of nonprofits and Democratic states that, if allowed to forge ahead with the new rule, the Postal Service could haphazardly reject thousands of valid ballots. Judge Talwani last week blocked the Postal Service from implementing the plan for 14 days, a period that expires Sept. 10. Thursday’s hearing was intended to help her decide whether to extend her injunction indefinitely. The Trump administration has already appealed her temporary restraining order and the issue is likely to be settled by the Supreme Court. Read Article