Wisconsin Elections Commission plans order designed to stop repeat of Madison ballot snafu | Sarah Lehr/Wisconsin Public Radio

Wisconsin’s Elections Commission will work with Madison officials on an order designed to improve city policies and procedures, so that a recent snafu involving nearly 200 uncounted ballots doesn’t happen again. The commission learned in December that 193 absentee ballots from the city of Madison went uncounted in the Nov. 5 election. Those ballots would not have changed the outcome of any race or referendum at the local, state or national level. In January, the bipartisan commission voted to launch its own investigation into how the problem occurred and why it took more than a month for it to be reported to the agency. As part of that investigation, Wisconsin Elections Commission Chair Ann Jacobs, a Democrat, and Don Millis, a Republican, took depositions from more than a dozen city and county staff members. Read Article

Wyoming: Judge Dismisses Challenge to Proof of Citizenship Law, Leaving Barriers for Voters in Place | Yunior Rivas/Democracy Docket

A federal judge dismissed a major lawsuit challenging Wyoming’s new proof of citizenship voter registration law. In an order issued Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Scott Skavdahl, appointed by former President Barack Obama, ruled the plaintiffs in the case failed to show they would be personally harmed by the law, which took effect earlier this month. The law requires voters to present documentary proof of U.S. citizenship, such as a passport, birth certificate or naturalization papers, in order to register to vote. Voting rights advocates have warned it could disenfranchise eligible voters who don’t have matching or ready access to those documents including women, rural and low-income voters. Read Article

National: Jan. 6 Rioters Are the New Hot Event in Town for Republicans | James Fanelli/The Wall Street Journal

Former Jan. 6 defendants are the new draw at local Republican fundraisers, helping to fill seats at normally sleepy events while getting a platform to tell their version of the Capitol riot. The Davis County Republican Party in the Salt Lake City suburbs held its annual Abraham Lincoln Day Dinner in March at $75 a plate. One marquee speaker was a pardoned defendant who federal prosecutors said knocked back a shot of Fireball whiskey in the conference room of then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “This was not an insurrection,” the speaker, Treniss Evans, told the crowd. “This was Kent State. This was Tiananmen Square.” It has been nearly six months since President Trump granted pardons and commutations to the roughly 1,500 people criminally charged in the attack on the Capitol. The pardons initially unsettled some Republicans who thought Trump was showing leniency to defendants who attacked law-enforcement officers, but the GOP is increasingly willing to reintegrate these former defendants into the fold. Read Article

National: Justice Department requests voter rolls and election data from states | Patrick Marley and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez/The Washington Post

The Trump administration and its allies have launched a multipronged effort to gather data on voters and inspect voting equipment, sparking concern among local and state election officials about federal interference ahead of the 2026 midterms. The most unusual activity is happening in Colorado — a state that then-candidate Donald Trump lost by 11 points — where a well-connected consultant who says he is working with the White House is asking county clerks whether they will allow the federal government or a third party to physically examine their election equipment. Federal agencies have long offered technical assistance and cybersecurity advice to election officials but have not examined their equipment because election laws tightly limit who has access. Read ArticleRead Article

National: Election Officials Have Been Under Attack For Years. Now The DOJ Wants to Criminally Charge Them | Matt Cohen/Democracy Docket

In recent months, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) sent letters to states including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Arizona, and Colorado, pressing for information about voter roll management, demanding to see state voter rolls, and threatening to sue over alleged voting law violations. But the department’s campaign has gone much further. Criminal prosecutors at DOJ sent separate broad requests for information to election officials in at least two states, people who have seen the requests told Democracy Docket. Those letters were first reported by the New York Times, which added that they’re part of a broader initiative at DOJ, still in its early stages, to look into whether it can bring criminal charges against election officials for not doing enough to protect their voting systems against fraud and illegal voting. Read Article

National: GOP lawmakers try again to change who’s counted in key census numbers | Hansi Lo Wang/NPR

Republicans in Congress are reviving a controversial push to alter a key set of census numbers that are used to determine how presidents and members of the U.S. House of Representatives are elected. Ratified after the Civil War, the 14th Amendment says the “whole number of persons in each state” must be included in what are called apportionment counts, the population numbers based on census results that determine each state’s share of House seats and Electoral College votes for a decade. But GOP lawmakers have now released three bills this year that would use the 2030 census to tally residents without U.S. citizenship, and then subtract some or all of them from the apportionment counts. Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee unveiled the latest bill Monday. Read Article

National: Republicans target voting rights of U.S. citizens who have never lived in the country | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

The Republican Party is challenging the voting eligibility of some U.S. citizens who have always lived abroad, in what they’re calling a broader strategy ahead of next year’s midterms to clean up voter rolls and improve voter confidence. But Democrats see the effort as a blatant attempt to disenfranchise eligible Democrats in key swing states. The GOP terms the voters they are targeting as “never residents” because they are U.S. citizens but haven’t lived in the United States. Most frequently, they are children of U.S. citizens who have been in the military, or lived overseas for other reasons. Three-quarters of states have laws on the books allowing such citizens to vote by absentee or mail ballot in the same state where their parents or other relatives last lived or are registered. Read Article

National: Emil Bove declines to rule out 3rd Trump term or denounce Jan. 6 rioters in Senate questionnaire | Scott MacFarlane/CBS

Emil Bove, a top Justice Department official who previously served as President Trump’s criminal defense attorney, declined to rule out the possibility of the president running for a third term and did not denounce the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol in a questionnaire submitted to a Senate panel considering his nomination for a lifetime appointment as a federal judge. The Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to vote next week on whether to advance Bove’s nomination to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit. CBS News obtained the 165-page questionnaire that Bove submitted to senators in response to their written questions. In his answers, Bove also wrote he does not recall which Jan. 6 criminal cases he helped supervise when he served in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. In response to the question “Do you denounce the January 6 insurrection?” Bove wrote: “The characterization of the events on January 6 is a matter of significant political debate,” and said it would be “inappropriate to address this question” given ongoing litigation over pardons of Jan. 6 defendants. Read Article

National: Senate Democrats seek answers on Trump overhaul of immigrant database to find noncitizen voters | Derek B. Johnson/CyberScoop

As the Department of Homeland Security seeks to transform a federal database for immigrant benefits into a supercharged database to search for noncitizen voters, a trio of Democratic senators are pressing the department for more information. Sens. Gary Peters, D-Mich., Alex Padilla, D-Calif., and Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Tuesday posing a series of questions around the department’s overhaul of the Systemic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database. “States and nonpartisan voter advocacy organizations have expressed concerns with using the SAVE program as a standalone tool to determine voter eligibility without adequate safeguards,” the senators wrote. “In particular, there are concerns that data quality issues may cause state and local officials who rely on the program to receive false positives or incomplete results.” Read Article

Arizona: Hacker breaks into election website with candidate profiles –  Jen Fifield/Votebeat

A hacker gained access to the web portal Arizona candidates use to upload information about themselves and changed candidate profile photos that were live on the election results website, just three weeks before the special congressional primary election, Votebeat has learned. The Secretary of State’s Office realized the system had been breached, shut down the candidate portal the week of June 23, and kept it offline for a week, according to JP Martin, an office spokesperson. Martin said officials flagged the problem upon noticing unusual activity. He said he did not know what kinds of photographs had been improperly posted, or which candidate photos were changed. Read Article

Colorado: Consultant, claiming White House backing, called clerks to gain access to voting machines | Seth Klamann/The Denver Post

A consultant claiming to work for the White House called several Republican county clerks in Colorado last week, seeking “third-party” access to secure voting equipment, election officials told The Denver Post. At least 10 Republican clerks were contacted by consultant Jeff Small, officials said Wednesday. Small, who has Colorado political connections, told the clerks that he was working on the project for the White House and the U.S. departments of Justice and Homeland Security, and he said he wanted the clerks to let an outside party access voting equipment to identify “gaps.” He also requested access because President Donald Trump’s administration was frustrated with the slow rollout of an executive order issued earlier this year. Trump’s order sought greater federal control over elections, though a federal court last month blocked it. Read Article

Georgia lawmakers consider more election changes ahead of 2026 | Mark Niesse and Michelle Baruchman/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The 2026 elections may seem like a long way away, but that’s not how state lawmakers see it. Plans — from new voting machines to even more new voting laws — are already underway as a special legislative committee dominated by Republican lawmakers met for the first time Tuesday. Members of the House Study Committee on Election Procedures are considering replacing Georgia’s touchscreen voting system, reviewing voter registration accuracy and complying with a state law that requires removal of inscrutable QR codes from ballots by July 1. Meanwhile, several legislators angling for higher office are looking to boost their resumes — including committee Chairman Tim Fleming, who recently filed paperwork to begin raising money to run for secretary of state. Read Article

Michigan: GOP election conspiracist given platform in House committee to rail against Democrats | Ben Solis/Michigan Advance

A former Republican lawmaker, gubernatorial candidate and election conspiracy theorist on Tuesday asked a Michigan House of Representatives committee to request federal investigations against three of Michigan’s top ranking Democrats, whom he has repeatedly accused of fraud and other crimes, including bribery. Pat Colbeck, who served in the Michigan Senate from 2011 to 2019 and sought the Republican nomination for governor in 2018, presented a laundry list of election integrity concerns to the House Election Integrity Committee, chaired by state Rep. Rachelle Smit (R-Martin). The three officials Colbeck asked to be investigated include Attorney General Dana Nessel, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and Supreme Court Justice Kyra Harris Bolden. Nessel spokesperson Danny Wimmer, in a statement to Michigan Advance, dismissed Colbeck’s claims and accusations as “unhinged.” Read Article

Minnesota: A Month After Shootings, We’re Normalizing Political Violence | Joshua A. Douglas/Washington Monthly

It’s been a month since the assassinations, yet hardly anyone seems to remember they occurred. On June 14, an assassin murdered the leader of the Minnesota House Democratic Caucus, Melissa Hortman, and her husband in the middle of the night at their home in suburban Minneapolis. The perpetrator also shot and wounded State Senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette. Thankfully, Hoffman is now out of the ICU, though he has a long recovery ahead of him. The murderer, Vance Boelter, had a “hit list” of 45 targets, all of whom were Democrats. The politically motivated attack, however, barely made a blip in the national consciousness. People expressed shock the day it happened, but the country swiftly moved on. Similarly, almost no one is still discussing the April break-in and arson of the Pennsylvania Governor’s mansion, with the perpetrator’s goal of beating Governor Josh Shapiro with a hammer. That attack echoed a 2022 incident in which an individual broke into the home of Nancy Pelosi and assaulted her husband with a hammer. In 2020, several men plotted to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer to start a civil war; two were convicted. Read Article

New Hampshire Secretary of State rebuffs Trump administration request for state’s voter roll | Todd Bookman/NHPR

New Hampshire is among the states targeted by the U.S. Department of Justice seeking information about its voting system, including a request for a complete copy of the state’s voter registration list. The inquiry for sensitive voter information comes as the Trump administration continues to make false claims about the validity of election results. In a June 25 letter, officials from the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division asked New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan for information about a range of election policies, including how the state registers voters, removes deceased residents from voter rolls, and identifies non-citizens who may seek to register. The letter also requests a copy of New Hampshire’s statewide voter registration list: “Please include both active and inactive voters,” the letter says. State officials were given 30 days to comply with the request. Read Article

New York: What the election case in Rockland County tells us about the tide of voter mistrust | Jessica Huseman/ Votebeat

Donald Trump is leaving little doubt about who’s president right now, but in one corner of the country, a lawsuit is helping to fan skepticism about the results of the 2024 general election. The case against Rockland County, New York, claims that there were irregularities in the county’s vote tallies, judging in part by what the plaintiffs characterize as statistical anomalies — notably the mismatch in support between Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and the person at the top of the party’s ticket, Vice President Kamala Harris. Gillibrand won the suburban county by about 8,000 votes, while Harris lost to Trump by more than 17,000. The plaintiffs say it’s a suspicious pattern of ticket-splitting that suggests vote-rigging or errors, an echo of the spurious claims made by Trump allies when he lost several swing states in 2020. They want the court to invalidate the Senate and presidential election results and order the county to redo the election. Read Article

North Carolina Launches Voter Roll Program That Could Disenfranchise Tens of Thousands | Jen Rice/Democracy Docket

North Carolina formally launched a project Thursday that could disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters, despite pushback from national Democrats. The plan, conceived by a former top GOP legislative aide, would create a two-tiered system for some voters with missing information — allowing them to vote in federal elections, where legal protections for voters are stronger, but not in state and local contests. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) sued North Carolina last month, alleging that the state failed to collect information from voters required by the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). In response, the North Carolina State Board of Elections released a plan that requires voters with missing information to vote a provisional ballot unless they respond to mail notifications by providing the additional information. Read Article

Pennsylvania redesigns provisional-ballot envelope to help cut rejections | Carter Walker/Votebeat

Pennsylvania election officials on Monday announced a redesigned provisional-ballot envelope that they hope will lead to fewer ballots being rejected for technical errors. “Improvements to envelope design might seem like a small thing, but it has a huge impact on the ability for Pennsylvanians across the commonwealth to have their votes counted,” said Seth Bluestein, a Republican city commissioner for Philadelphia, which worked with the Department of State on the new design. Philadelphia plans to use the new design in its November municipal elections. The state also consulted election officials from Berks, Greene, Butler, and Mercer counties. Read Article

Texas Attorney General Ken investigating “potential” noncitizen voters | Natalia Contreras/The Texas Tribune

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said Tuesday that he is investigating “more than 100 potential noncitizens” suspected of casting more than 200 ballots during the 2020 and 2022 election cycles. Paxton’s news release said most of the cases involve Harris County voters. His office is also investigating possible instances in Guadalupe, Cameron, and Eastland counties, using information obtained from the Texas Secretary of State, the news release said. In Texas, about 11 million voters cast ballots in Texas in the November 2020 presidential election, and more than 8 million in the November 2022 general election. The more than 200 ballots Paxton cited for the two full election cycles would amount to around one-thousandth of 1% of the ballots cast in just the two general elections combined. Read Article

Wisconsin: US Appeals Court rules against town that removed voting machines last year | Rich Kremer/WPR

A northern Wisconsin town sued by the U.S. Department of Justice last year for not providing electronic voting machines to people with disabilities has lost its federal appeal. Thornapple’s town board passed a resolution to stop the use of electronic voting machines in June 2023. Court documents show the town’s former clerk Suzanne Pinnow cited “the controversial nature of electronic voting machines” as part of its justification. The DOJ sued Thornapple and the Rusk County Town of Lawrence for removing access to voting machines designed for people with disabilities. They said the decisions violated the federal Help America Vote Act, or HAVA. Officials in Lawrence negotiated a settlement and agreed to make at least one accessible machine available in future elections. Read Article

National: Amid cuts to federal cyber services, local election officials expect greater state support | Colin Wood/StateScoop

A majority of local election officials are worried about the federal government’s recent moves to pull back support for election security services, according to a report published Thursday by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit public policy institute. The report, which arrives amid numerous cuts to services and staff at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, found that 61% of local election officials polled said they were specifically concerned about election security services cut by CISA. And of the 858 local election officials who responded, 87% said they believe it’s important that state and local governments fill the gaps in support created by the federal government’s cuts under the second Donald Trump administration. Lawrence Norden, a vice president of elections and government at the Brennan Center who helped conduct the survey, said the government landscape is already shifting to ensure election offices can protect their systems and share timely threat information. Read Article

National: CIA declassifies review of intelligence report on 2016 Russia election interference | Dan De Luce and Ken Dilanian/NBC

CIA officials failed in some cases to follow standard procedures in an intelligence analysis of Russian interference efforts in the 2016 election, according to an internal review declassified Wednesday. Intelligence officers were given an unusually short timeline for the analysis, there was “excessive involvement” by senior leaders, and staff members were given uneven access to crucial intelligence about Russia, the “lessons-learned” review said. But the review did not refute the findings of the 2017 intelligence assessment that Russia waged an information warfare campaign designed to undermine Americans’ confidence in the electoral process, damage Hillary Clinton and boost Donald Trump’s prospects in the 2016 election. Read Article

National: Justice Department Explores Using Criminal Charges Against Election Officials | Devlin Barrett and Nick Corasaniti

Senior Justice Department officials are exploring whether they can bring criminal charges against state or local election officials if the Trump administration determines they have not sufficiently safeguarded their computer systems, according to people familiar with the discussions. The department’s effort, which is still in its early stages, is not based on new evidence, data or legal authority, according to the people, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions. Instead, it is driven by the unsubstantiated argument made by many in the Trump administration that American elections are easy prey to voter fraud and foreign manipulation, these people said. Such a path could significantly raise the stakes for federal investigations of state or county officials, thrusting the Justice Department and the threat of criminalization into the election system in a way that has never been done before. Read Article

National: Lawmakers demand CISA explain how it’s supporting election offices | Colin Wood/ StateScoop

In a letter Monday addressed to leaders of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Democratic lawmakers demanded to know why the agency hasn’t responded to their recent inquiries about the level of support it’s providing to state and local election offices. Ranking members Rep. Joseph D. Morelle and Sen. Alex Padilla wrote that they’re seeking “urgent updates” to the status of numerous election security policies and programs offered by CISA under previous administrations. The letter, which is addressed to CISA acting Director Madhu Gottumukkala and Mona Harrington, assistant director of CISA’s National Risk Management Center, demands a “comprehensive briefing” on CISA’s operations and personnel before July 21. “CISA’s repeated failure to respond to our requests for information while undertaking a significant reshaping of the agency’s personnel and mission is unacceptable,” the letter reads. “We remain deeply troubled by the lack of information CISA has provided to congressional oversight committees and the lack of substantive responses to our questions.” Read Article

National: Department of Justice Jumps on SCOTUS Nationwide Injunctions Ruling to Boost Trump’s Anti-Voting Order | Jacob Knutson/Democracy Docket

Citing the Supreme Court’s recent ruling curtailing nationwide injunctions, the Department of Justice (DOJ) asked a federal judge to weaken part of a previous court order against President Donald Trump’s sweeping anti-voting decree. Beyond its potential impact in the battle over the voting order, the filing is also a stark example of how SCOTUS’ ruling in the nationwide injunctions case, Trump v. CASA, could give the administration a boost in other cases challenging Trump’s authoritarian power grab. The DOJ asked District Judge Denise Casper July 3 to amend the portion of her previous court order that barred the government from enforcing Section 2d of Trump’s executive order. Read Article

National: Nearly half of election officials concerned about politically motivated investigations | Aaron Pellish/Politico

Nearly half of local election officials are concerned about politically motivated investigations targeting election workers, according to a new survey from the Brennan Center for Justice. Forty-six percent of local election officials said they were at least somewhat concerned about politically motivated investigations of their work or the work of other election officials. Of that, 18 percent of respondents said they were “very concerned” about potential investigations. Election officials have increasingly become targets of scrutiny in the wake of the 2020 presidential election, when President Donald Trump and his allies touted conspiracy theories about ballot processing to claim the results of the election — which he lost — were rigged. Read Article

National: Trump and GOP target ballots arriving after Election Day that delay counts | Chistina A. Cassidy/Associated Press

President Donald Trump and other Republicans have long criticized states that take weeks to count their ballots after Election Day. This year has seen a flurry of activity to address it. Part of Trump’s executive order on elections, signed in March but held up by lawsuits, takes aim at one of the main reasons for late vote counts: Many states allow mailed ballots to be counted even if they arrive after Election Day. The U.S. Supreme Court last month said it would consider whether a challenge in Illinois can proceed in a case that is among several Republican-backed lawsuits seeking to impose an Election Day deadline for mail ballots. At least three states — Kansas, North Dakota and Utah — passed legislation this year that eliminated a grace period for receiving mailed ballots, saying they now need to be in by Election Day. Read Article

National: The States Decide How Elections Are Run | Grace Olson/NCSL

After every major election, we see headlines fly about election policies. Recent hot topics include mail-in ballots, proof of citizenship for voter registration and the type of identification needed to vote. Although several pieces of federal legislation and U.S. Supreme Court decisions have established rules governing voting, the primary responsibility for facilitating federal elections lies with the states. Nate Persily, a Stanford University law professor, told a recent NCSL webinar on federalism and U.S. election law that when the Founding Fathers authored the U.S. Constitution, they did so with a heavy focus on the states, allowing each state to handle elections as it saw fit. Despite the states having considerable power in federal elections, Persily says that voting is the most amended topic in the Constitution. The most notable revisions, he says, are the 14th and 15th Amendments, which protect U.S. citizens from discrimination based on race. The 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote, and the 26th Amendment lowered the voting age to 18. Read Article

Arizona’s Democracy Shield, Secretary of State’s Office Fights Off | Taylor Johnson/Hoodline

Arizona’s Secretary of State’s office recently managed a cybersecurity skirmish, fending off what it described as a “malicious adversary” that had eyes on the state’s election-related systems. According to an official statement released by the office and obtained by AZ SOS, the attempted incursion focused on the website, specifically the Candidate Portal, which required temporary offline measures to beef up security protocols. The attack hit home the message that threats to election integrity are not just hypothetical but pressing and immediate. The state’s top election official, Secretary Adrian Fontes, laid out a stark picture of the digital battlefield where Arizona’s voter registration database remained unscathed during the cyber assault, noting, “Since day one, I’ve warned that foreign adversaries, particularly Iran, are actively targeting our election infrastructure and political systems.” Read Article

Colorado Supreme Court committee advances election-related change, goes back to work on magistrate rules | Michael Karlik/Colorado Politics

The Colorado Supreme Court’s civil rules committee approved a procedural change for court challenges to presidential electors, a move that complies with legislation passed this year. The committee also heard from the Supreme Court that it must perform further work on proposed changes to the rules governing magistrates, after the justices heard criticism from some judges and attorneys this week. State lawmakers enacted Senate Bill 210 during the 2024 legislative session, addressing a wide range of elections topics. One provision added new language for legal challenges to presidential electors, requiring filings in the Supreme Court within 24 days of Election Day and obligating the court to prioritize such challenges “over all regular business.” Read Article