Arizona: Thousands of voters received letters asking if they’d moved. Here’s why. | Sasha Hupka and Jerod McDonald-Evoy/ Votebeat

Thousands of Arizonans have received similar notices in recent days, even though many have not moved. The confusing mailing appears to have stemmed from flaws in state and some county officials’ implementation of a new state law. Here’s what to know. The law requires Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, to compare the state’s voter registration database to the state’s driver’s license database each month. His staffers are then required to inform county recorders if they find discrepancies in a voter’s residential address or citizenship status. Supporters of the law, which passed as House Bill 2243 in 2022, said its purpose is to improve maintenance of the voter rolls and catch ineligible voters, including people who had moved to a new address. In a May 2022 letter to then-Gov. Doug Ducey, a coalition of conservative groups wrote that the law would ensure it was “easy to vote, and hard to cheat” in Arizona. But opponents worried it could disenfranchise some voters and noted that the state already had voter list maintenance measures in place. Read Article

California: Convicted MAGA election denier declines job in Shasta County amid pressure from Newsom | Hailey Branson-Potts/Los Angeles Times

Tina Peters, who served prison time for tampering with voting machines on behalf of the MAGA movement, has declined a job offer helping to oversee elections in a conservative Northern California county. “She declined the offer because she’s running around the country right now trying to secure the elections,” Clint Curtis, the Shasta County registrar of voters, said in an interview Tuesday. “Shasta County lost out.” Last month, Curtis set off alarm bells across California by telling reporters he planned to hire Peters, a former county clerk in Colorado who was released early from prison this summer amid a pressure campaign by President Trump. Curtis, himself a longtime election denier, told The Times he had planned to hire Peters as a consultant “to assist with supervision of the November election.” Peters’ attorney, Peter Ticktin, said in an interview Tuesday that she had given serious consideration to the job offer but that he had not discussed it with her in recent days. It would “not have been a full-time position,” because she is so busy, he said. Read Article

Georgia lawmakers consider how to protect voting access for people with disabilities, non-English speakers | Maya Homan/Georgia Recorder

Accessibility advocates are urging state leaders to prioritize access for voters with disabilities and those who require language assistance as lawmakers prepare to overhaul Georgia’s election equipment ahead of 2028. Thanks to a bill passed during the June special session, state leaders appear likely to select hand-marked paper ballots as the state’s primary voting method ahead of 2028. The shift away from the state’s current, machine-marked ballot system will likely come as a relief to some critics of the current voting equipment, who have repeatedly cited fears over machine tampering and called for ballots to be counted based on text that can be deciphered by humans. But Georgia residents likely won’t see voting machines vanish completely. Under federal accessibility laws, every polling place is required to have at least one voting machine on hand for voters with disabilities, even in jurisdictions where most voters mark ballots by hand. Read Article

Michigan: US Supreme Court refuses to put proof-of-citizenship amendment on ballot | Kelsey Reichmann/Courthouse News Service

The Supreme Court refused to take emergency action Thursday to put a proof-of-citizenship amendment on Michigan ballots for the midterm elections. Americans for Citizen Voting asked the justices to intervene after the Michigan Board of State Canvassers invalidated its proposal despite surpassing the signature threshold. The group also asked the Supreme Court to act before the state’s highest court weighed in, to meet the quickly approaching deadline to make ballot changes. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a Donald Trump appointee, denied the application without referring the appeal to the full court. He did not explain his decision. “If respondents’ decision to keep ACVM’s petition off the ballot stands, then Michigan voters will never have a chance to vote on the petition, regardless of whether it should or should not have been placed on the ballot,” Americans for Citizen Voting wrote. “On the other hand, if ACVM’s petition is placed on the ballot and ACVM’s arguments ultimately fail, there will be no harm. The choice is thus between irreparable harm and no harm at all.” Read Article

Minnesota’s top court rejects Mike Lindell’s bid for primary recount | Kyeland Jackson/The Minnesota Star Tribune

Minnesota Supreme Court justices denied requests for a primary election recount by MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, effectively confirming his loss to Lisa Demuth as the Republican nominee for Minnesota governor. Chief Justice Natalie Hudson on Saturday signed the order denying Lindell’s request. Hudson wrote that Lindell had declined to cover the $825,000 needed to fund a recount, and he missed an Aug. 24 deadline to file assurances that he could cover those costs. “Lindell instead sent documentation to the Secretary of State to reflect wire transfer readiness, and he filed this section 204B.44 petition,” Hudson’s order read. Read Article

The North Carolina elections rules that aren’t quite rules yet | Sarah Michels/Carolina Public Press

Absentee voting begins this week, and early voting isn’t far off. But North Carolina voters won’t have to worry about recently proposed changes to absentee voting, photo ID exception forms or voting site conduct rules until next year because of a quirk in the law. The State Board of Elections spent the summer drafting, reviewing and approving 15 sets of rules that would impact which absentee ballots are counted, how election officials deal with photo ID exception forms and what level of noise is allowed outside voting sites, among other issues. Last week, the Rules Review Commission approved those rules, but in each case, more than 10 people formally requested legislative review. When that happens, there’s a delay in implementation to give state lawmakers time to review and potentially reject the rule changes. Read Article

Pennsylvania: The invisible volunteers who help keep democracy running | Daniel Pearson/The Philadelphia Inquirer

They’ve been called the “most important people in running an election” by Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt, yet even as interest in election security has skyrocketed after Donald Trump’s persistent false claims of voter fraud, their jobs seem to be hidden in plain sight. Unlike the grifters and sycophants who help feed the president’s Big Lie and earn millions of social media followers, make frequent TV appearances, and are showered with adulation by the White House, the roughly 45,000 volunteers across Pennsylvania who are essential to ensuring elections happen fairly, smoothly, and efficiently are rarely recognized for the work they do. No wonder poll workers are in short supply — in the commonwealth and across the nation. A Brookings Institution report said that about half of all election officials found it either very or somewhat difficult to find enough workers. Read Article

Texas: Tarrant County removes 92 polling sites ahead of November election | Cecilia Lenzen/The Texas Tribune

Tarrant County commissioners voted 3-2 Tuesday to approve a list of polling sites for the November elections that included 92 fewer sites than the 2022 midterms. The approval came after commissioners heard testimony from more than 100 speakers, the majority of whom were opposed to the site cuts, during a meeting that lasted over eight hours. Voting rights advocates and representatives of 30 civic groups rallied outside the county courthouse Tuesday morning, demanding that commissioners approve a list with the same number of sites as the 2022 midterms. The adopted list includes 224 sites for Election Day and 47 for early voting. The 2022 list included 316 Election Day sites and 50 for early voting. Read Article

Wisconsin Elections Commission says new mail-in voting rule won’t apply to Wisconsin clerks | Molly Beck/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Wisconsin election clerks are not required to comply with the requirements of a new rule governing mail-in ballots that has been blocked by a federal judge under new guidance from the state's top election officials. Members of the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission voted unanimously during a meeting Monday to issue new guidance surrounding the legal battle over rules issued by the U.S. Postal Service that aim to restrict mail-in voting. President Trump's effort to place new restrictions on voting ahead of the 2026 midterm elections has been caught in a legal back-and-forth since he signed an executive order in March that would put mail-in voting under the Postal Service's oversight. Read Article

Wyoming Clerk Warns Other Red States Of “Aggressive” DOJ Action At Elections | Clair McFarland/Cowboy State Daily

After Wyoming’s Republican governor called for the state attorney general to investigate legal issues around what he called “aggressive” federal agents monitoring the primary election, Laramie County Clerk Debra Lee praised the governor’s strong response. Lee also warned other county clerks, and officials in other “red” states, that what happened in her county could happen in theirs. “I share Governor (Mark) Gordon’s concerns about the ‘surprise’ visit of the Department of Justice (DOJ) election monitors during Wyoming’s Primary Election and support his inquiry into the matter,” said Lee in a Friday statement. “His inquiry is grounded in the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of constitutional authority over our own elections.” Lee called the DOJ’s monitoring mission “far from transparent” and said the federal agents didn’t coordinate with her, as the county’s chief election official. Read Article

National: Will Trump interfere in the midterms? Democrats and their allies are preparing | Kevin Rector and Justine McDaniel/Los Angeles Times

Big-city mayors are giving poll workers panic buttons in case election skeptics question their work. County and state officials are gaming out responses to immigration raids near voting centers. Lawyers for Democratic states and civic groups are pre-writing legal challenges to ballot seizures. And Democratic aides in Washington are preparing members of Congress to push back in the court of public opinion against any baseless claims of voter fraud in competitive districts. Across California and the nation, civic organizations, voting rights advocates and Democratic leaders are preparing for a raft of potential actions by the Trump administration to interfere in, subvert or deny November’s midterm vote. Read Article

Federal judge places new freeze on Trump mail-ballot rules, setting up likely Supreme Court showdown | Dion Nissenbaum/Votebeat

A federal judge on Thursday imposed a new freeze on President Donald Trump’s mail-ballot restrictions, the latest move in a back-and-forth legal battle playing out just weeks before the November elections. U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani blocked the U.S. Postal Service from moving ahead with plans to regulate mail ballots for at least 14 days while she weighs a more permanent ban on the agency’s new rules. The temporary restraining order comes just four days after the U.S. Supreme Court lifted Talwani’s previous injunction against the order on narrow procedural grounds. However, voting rights groups and a coalition of two dozen states and the District of Columbia kept pressing their case against the order, arguing that the president had no authority to try and regulate mail ballots. Read Article

National: ‘Trump ultimately wants the chaos’: States can’t implement anti-mail voting order before midterms, experts warn | Alexandra Hutzler/Democracy Docket

“We are way too close to an election for any major changes,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D) told Democracy Docket after the Supreme Court allowed the administration to move forward, for now, with President Donald Trump’s anti-mail voting executive order. But, with 68 days until Election Day and some ballots being mailed as soon as next week, major changes are exactly what a new U.S. Postal Service rule imposing restrictions on a voting method one-third of Americans used in 2024 would require of election administrators. “I would argue that it’s already functionally impossible to implement. We’re well past that date,” said Pamela Smith, the president and CEO of Verified Voting, a nonprofit that promotes the responsible use of technology in elections. You don’t upend something that’s centuries old on a whim.” Read Article

National: Nothing changes yet with the Supreme Court’s order on elections. But it could open door to ‘chaos’ | Nicholas Riccardi/Associated Press

The Supreme Court’s decision giving preliminary approval for President Donald Trump’s order restricting mail voting may not lead to a single election procedure changing during the November midterms, but it has already thrown into uncertainty the method that nearly one-third of the country uses to vote. Rather than saying that Trump’s order is legal, the high court said Monday it was too early for Democratic-run states to challenge it in June, when they convinced a federal judge in Boston to freeze the order for November’s election. That effectively restarts the legal fight over the order in an incredibly compressed timeline, with initial ballots scheduled to be sent to North Carolina’s overseas and military voters in just over a week, on Sept. 4. A second injunction barring the U.S. Postal Service from making changes to comply with Trump’s directive remains in effect. Still, the administration late Monday filed a motion asking that the second hold be removed, and has posted new regulations from the Postal Service that would go into effect Tuesday if the legal pathway is fully cleared. Read Article

National: Voting rights experts skeptical over Trump pledge of 1,000 election monitors | Rachel Leingang and Sam Levine/The Guardian

Former officials and voting rights experts have expressed skepticism over a pledge by the Trump administration to dispatch 1,000 monitors across the country to scrutinize November’s US midterm elections. While the Department of Justice (DoJ) has expressed hope that the operation will be the largest in its history, its plan raised questions over its ability to recruit so many people – and what they would do. The US president has repeatedly denied the results of election defeats, including his 2020 loss in the presidential election to Joe Biden, and in recent months has escalated concerns that he will seek to meddle in November’s elections. Read Article

National: Census report does not prove Trump’s claim about 2020 noncitizen voting | Melissa Goldin/Associated Press

Trump’s Truth Social post on Tuesday referenced a report published by the U.S. Census Bureau that he said checked “Voter Records from 2020 against their Citizenship Records,” finding 24,000 noncitizens voted illegally in just its initial search. The report is described as a “beginning analysis.”But experts say its methodology is flawed and could have created many false positives. “This is the weakest methodology description I’ve ever seen in a Census Bureau publication,” said Mark Lindeman, policy and strategy director at Verified Voting, a nonpartisan group focused on election technology. “This document doesn’t tell us anything about elections. It just shows that the Census Bureau has gone off the rails.” He added that the Census Bureau is not clear about which databases it used in its analysis, which he said “exists essentially as a propaganda offering,” and that it does not explain likely sources of errors. Read Article

Opinion: Trump’s Election Interference Is Eroding American Democracy | The New York Times Editorial Board

The surest sign of democratic collapse is the unwillingness of an elected political party to leave office. The party rewrites laws and changes election rules to prevent its opponents from gaining power. The shift often starts slowly but can ultimately end in autocracy. President Trump has taken worrisome steps down this path since returning to office in January 2025. He has directed Republican-run states to enact newly gerrymandered maps to increase the chances that Republicans maintain control of Congress even if they receive fewer votes this year. He has tried to pass legislation that could keep many eligible voters from voting. And he has sent signals that he may use the power of the federal government to disallow legitimate ballots this fall. On July 16, Mr. Trump took the remarkable step of giving a prime-time White House address devoted to lies and misleading statements about voter fraud. Read Article

An Arizona Official’s Road From Election Skeptic to Election Defender | Carl Smith/Governing

One day. That’s how long it took to turn Michelle Burchill’s ideas about election administration upside down. In 2020, Burchill took a voter registration job in the recorder’s office in Yavapai County, a rural jurisdiction in Arizona. A Republican and Donald Trump supporter, she didn’t like the way social media platforms were censoring his speech. She’d encountered plenty of claims about “rigged elections” and Russian collusion. “I was an election skeptic, for sure,” she says. Her first day on the job, March 17, was a presidential preference election day, in which Democratic voters would choose their preferred presidential nominee. Burchill had never worked in election administration, and her boss told her to just come “soak it all in.” Watch. Listen. Learn. Read Article

California county’s election drama worsens as official locks up ballots | Hailey Branson-Potts/Los Angeles Times

Days after the top elections official in Shasta County announced that he planned to hire an election denier who served prison time for tampering with voting machines, county leaders there made an extraordinary plea to state and federal authorities: Please come investigate. A statement released by the county Tuesday afternoon said Clint Curtis, the registrar of voters, had made “frivolous” claims and “unproven statements” about the June primary election, which he administered and certified. “The County condemns the conduct of the Clerk-Registrar of Voters and invites all relevant state and federal agencies to review the allegations he has made and to proactively investigate his official actions and practices as Shasta County’s elections official,” read the statement released by Stewart Buettell, the county’s deputy chief executive. Read Article

Iowa Secretary of State says election losses aren’t proof of fraud as midterms near | Nick El Hajj/Des Moines Register

Before a breakfast crowd of conservative activists, Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate invoked Ronald Reagan’s "big tent" and declined to validate claims that Democrats would try to "cheat" in the November midterm elections. The questions came as Pate, a Republican seeking a fifth overall term, made his pitch to the Westside Conservative Club at the Machine Shed in Urbandale. He faces Democrat Ryan Peterman, a former Navy pilot from Davenport, on Nov. 3. With no presidential race atop the ballot this year, Pate moved between his two roles throughout the morning: candidate and Iowa’s chief election official. "To be very candid, I’m concerned about voter participation this time around," Pate said. "And now I’m wearing my candidate hat for a moment here." Read Article

Minnesota election officials: Mike Lindell recount request too late, warn of ballot delays | MPR News

Minnesota's Secretary of State's Office warns that it's too late to start a recount of the governor's race primary and complete it before ballots need to be prepared for the general election. A filing Wednesday with the state Supreme Court seeks dismissal of Republican candidate Mike Lindell's bid for a hand recount. Lindell failed to formally request and pay for a recount by a Monday deadline. He went to the high court to seek a more-expansive recount than a state-approved plan. He objected to the structure in which only votes for him and Lisa Demuth would be counted by name and all others would be combined in a third pile. The brief on behalf of the Secretary of State’s Office and the Canvassing Board said the ballot printing process begins Sept. 3 for early voting that starts on Sept. 18. If the court grants Lindell what he wants, the recount might not start immediately because new procedures would need to be finalized and new cost estimates would be required, the state argues. Read Article

Nevada: Trump admin quietly walks back claim of 16K noncitizens voting | Tabitha Mueller/The Nevada Independent

Federal officials have been unable to back up their allegations that nearly 16,000 noncitizens could be registered to vote in Nevada, telling the Nevada Secretary of State's Office in a private call that they were still reviewing thousands of names on the list after President Donald Trump (R) made sweeping allegations last month about noncitizens voting. Email records and a recording of an Aug. 13 meeting between the secretary of state's office and representatives from the Department of Homeland Security obtained via a public records request indicate that federal officials have only been able to identify 185 potential noncitizen voters so far, and the 15,903 number they originally gave was a "ceiling. The 15,000 would have been the preliminary," Kimberley Vogt, the fraud division chief in the fraud detection and national security directorate at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said during the meeting. "And then the manual review once we are done and confirm that we have a high degree of confidence … that would be what we would send." Read Article

North Carolina governor pushes to block new rules targeting mail-in ballots, voter ID | Kyle Ingram/Raleigh News & Observer

Democratic Gov. Josh Stein on Wednesday urged officials to delay the adoption of new election rules that would set new conditions on mail-in ballots and make it easier to throw out ballots cast by voters who don’t provide photo ID. “Our state’s elections administrators should seek to make it easier — not harder — for eligible North Carolinians to lawfully make their voice heard at the ballot box and have confidence their vote will be respected,” Stein wrote in a letter shared with The News & Observer. “Unfortunately, the ... proposed rules undercut those core democratic principles, and implementing such changes so close to an election invites confusion and undermines faith in our democratic process.” The proposed rules, which passed the Republican-majority State Board of Elections in party-line votes last month, are set to be heard by the state’s Rules Review Commission on Thursday. Read Article

Ohio: Court halts proof-of-citizenship requirement at motor vehicle offices | Laura Meckler/The Washington Post

A federal judge temporarily blocked Ohio from requiring proof of citizenship when registering to vote at motor vehicle offices, a setback for conservative efforts to tighten voter registration rules ahead of the November midterms. Ohio’s law requiring proof of citizenship at Bureau of Motor Vehicles’ offices conflicts with the federal National Voter Registration Act, the court said. A preliminary injunction was granted on Tuesday. The Ohio rules were challenged by Red Wine & Blue, a liberal activist group centered on suburban women, and the Ohio Alliance for Retired Americans. “Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act to reduce barriers for eligible Americans seeking to register to vote,” Ben Stafford, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs, said in a statement. He said Ohio’s “burdensome” proof-of-citizenship requirement “is exactly the type of government-imposed barrier that the NVRA exists to prevent.” Read Article

Pennsylvania Secretary of State tells Trump admin: Show us your proof of noncitizen voting here | Michelle Baruchman/The Philadelphia Inquirer

Pennsylvania’s top election official contended in a letter to a cabinet secretary this week that the Trump administration’s own staff does not have “high confidence” in its claims of thousands of noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls. In a letter to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, Secretary of State Al Schmidt said the Department of Homeland Security has still not fulfilled a promise to provide a written copy of its methodology “with a list of specific data sources” for its calculation that there are more than 14,500 noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls — a claim Schmidt and other Pennsylvania officials dispute. “We await this information,” Schmidt said in the letter, citing a virtual Aug. 13 meeting with DHS staff. Schmidt, a Republican appointed by Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro, told Mullin that during that meeting “DHS representatives explained that they did not have high confidence that the 14,576 individuals... were, in fact, non-citizens who had improperly registered to vote in Pennsylvania.” Read Article

Wisconsin commissioners want answers on Milwaukee election night gaffe | Molly Beck and Jessie Opolen/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

State election commissioners are asking Milwaukee officials to explain how workers there failed to download election results in a timely manner, leading to lengthy delays in ballot counting during the Aug. 11 primary. Members of the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission plan to discuss sending a letter seeking additional information from Milwaukee election officials during the commission's Aug. 31 meeting. "Fair or unfair, the eyes of the nation are often on Milwaukee and providing transparency into the system, especially when a mistake occurs, is a critical service to the voters of our state," the letter reads. Read Article

Wyoming’s Republican governor raises concerns over ‘aggressive’ DOJ election monitors | Adam Edelman/NBC

Wyoming Republican Gov. Mark Gordon expressed concern Wednesday over how election monitors from the U.S. Justice Department observed the state’s primaries last week, saying it was “aggressive” and “irregular.” “It sounded like the behavior of the observers was a bit aggressive,” he said at a state canvassing board meeting Wednesday. “It just was irregular and I have asked the attorney general to start looking into, you know, kind of the nature of the visits and all that sort of stuff,” Gordon added. He said that state and local officials had not been told ahead of time of the DOJ’s plans. He added that while he was not “objecting to the observers,” their “behavior seemed to exceed what the authority that Congress had given them was.” Read Article

National: Trump can’t stop, won’t stop (undermining the 2026 elections) | Shirin Ali/Slate

President Donald Trump’s attempt to nationalize America’s voting system suffered another loss in court this week, just the latest in a lengthy series of defeats over Trump’s blatantly unlawful executive orders around voting. This time was a bit more dramatic, though, with a judge bluntly calling out the Justice Department for using a lawsuit against Minnesota as a “fishing expedition” to help it find a violation of federal law. U.S. District Court Judge Katherine Menendez dismissed the case, ultimately finding that Congress never authorized the attorney general to access voting records and documents that state officials create themselves. These continued losses won’t end the story, though. Newly confirmed Attorney General Todd Blanche announced this week that he’s considering asking the Supreme Court to intervene in the dozens of lawsuits his DOJ has filed against states that, like Minnesota, refused to hand over their voter rolls. Trump and Blanche are attempting to bully states into submission over “election integrity,” but it’s obvious what the real endgame is: Complete control over U.S. elections. Read Article

National: Trump Boasts of Declassifying Secrets, but Withholds Key Election Files From Public | Dustin Volz/The New York Times

The White House in recent weeks has made public a steady drip of previously classified intelligence about foreign threats to elections and other matters, offering President Trump and his allies ammunition for baseless conspiracy theories about potential vote rigging. But one crucial document has not been among the releases, despite a congressional requirement for it to be: the assessment by U.S. intelligence agencies of foreign meddling efforts during the 2024 election. The document would provide the public with a holistic look at foreign attempts to influence voters and sow division around the presidential contest and other federal races that year. The 2020 version of the assessment, released during the early weeks of the Biden administration, highlighted Russia’s efforts to boost Mr. Trump, Iran’s push to harm his candidacy and analytic judgments about actions China considered but largely refrained from taking. It also included a dissenting minority view that China took “at least some steps” intended to undermine Mr. Trump. The omission of the report on the 2024 election shows the highly selective nature of the Trump White House’s approach to declassification. It is just one example of many where the administration has ignored bipartisan pressure from Congress, including legal requirements, by withholding certain documents from public view even as it publishes hundreds of pages of material it has promised will reveal deep-state coverups of foreign meddling efforts. Read Article

National: Justice Department plans to send about 1,000 monitors to the polls this fall | Patrick Marley/The Washington Post

The Justice Department plans to dispatch about 1,000 monitors to the polls this fall — probably the largest number under a Republican president, according to a top assistant attorney general. The Justice Department routinely sends monitors to polling places to ensure election laws are followed and voters’ rights are protected. In the past — including during primaries this month — they have limited their involvement to observation, but Democrats have raised concerns about what they could do this fall because President Donald Trump this year said Republicans should “nationalize the voting” and “take over the voting.” Harmeet K. Dhillon, the assistant attorney general who leads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, told Bloomberg News that the deployment of about 1,000 poll monitors is “probably going to be a historic number for a Republican administration.” She did not say where they would go in an interview that was published Monday. Read Article