Connecticut’s voter rights law, the strongest in the nation, finally got funded | Colin Wood/ StateScoop

Upon announcing this week that he’d signed into law a “balanced, sensible budget” for next two years, Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont was also signaling that he’d authorized funding for the most comprehensive voting rights act in the nation. The Connecticut Voting Rights Act, which became law in 2023 after the NAACP Legal Defense Fund introduced the legislation and accompanied it to enactment, had sat without funding until Monday. Now the act, which the civil rights group says needs roughly $1 million each year it operates, has the dollars it needs to implement its numerous protections, like legal tools to fight discriminatory voting rules in court, expanded language assistance for voters who struggle with English and a data portal to host all of the state’s election results and demographic information. Read Article

Georgia election results must be certified, Court of Appeals rules | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Election board members are required to certify election results, even if they distrust the outcome, according to a Georgia Court of Appeals decision. The decision resolves a dispute that overshadowed the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, when the State Election Board passed rules calling for an “inquiry” and more documents before signing off on results. The Georgia Supreme Court recently rejected the board’s rules. The unanimous order, issued last week by a three-judge panel, says Georgia law demands that election boards make results official. Any doubts about fraud or irregularities can then be reported to prosecutors, the appeals court ruled. The decision confirms a Fulton County judge’s ruling last October that election boards have a duty to approve the votes of the people. Read Article

Illinois: Cook County trying a ‘smart’ ballot drop box for primary election | Sophie Levenson/Chicago Tribune

Cook County Clerk Monica Gordon unveiled a new “smart” ballot drop box on Tuesday, stating she intends to use it for the March 2026 primary election and see if it can be implemented on a larger scale for future elections. The $15,000 tamper-proof drop box features a surveillance camera to record who drops off ballots, an electronic screen to confirm successful deposits and a scanner to record the outside envelopes of the ballots. Clerk officials described it as the first of its kind nationally. During the primary election, the new ballot box is expected to be located at the county’s primary election site at 69 W. Washington St., according to a report from the clerk. The box’s scanning feature is expected to save clerk employees from having to manually scan envelopes when they are received, while automatically updating the online status of ballots for voters. The envelopes are still transported and processed — taken out of the envelope where votes are scanned and counted — by clerk employees. Read Article

Michigan clerks speak up in support of bill to preserve local authority over voting machine testing | Kyle Davidson/Michigan Advance

Election clerks from across the state spoke up before the House Election Integrity Committee last week, offering their support for a piece of legislation aimed at preserving their say in pre-election testing of voting machines. Committee Chair Rachelle Smit (R-Martin), a former election clerk, told her colleagues that for years, local clerks have successfully conducted logic and accuracy testing of their machines by working with vendors of their choosing. However, Smit raised concerns that a recent contract acquired by the Michigan Secretary of State could require clerks to use only their contracted vendor to generate test decks. “This represents a fundamental shift from our local control to state mandated centralization, a shift that raises concerns about the integrity, transparency and fiscal responsibility. The bill before us today provides very clear, common sense protections that preserve local autonomy while ensuring proper standards. Specifically it protects local choice,” Smit said. Read Article

New Jersey: How a voter’s mistake threw an entire election into months of legal chaos | Colleen Murphy | NJ.com

A single write-in vote has prompted a New Jersey appeals court to order a runoff election in a Toms River fire district. The election, which originally took place in February 2025, ended in a tie, followed by a vote reversal, and a legal battle over ballot counting. In a ruling issued Monday, the Appellate Division ordered a new election between Michael Hopson and Anthony Cirz, who are competing for one of two open seats on the Toms River Fire District No. 1 Board of Commissioners. The original results showed a tie between Hopson and Cirz, which was certified and publicly posted, but days later, election officials revised the results. They discovered that one voter had used the voting machine’s write-in option to vote for Cirz and another candidate, James Golden, even though both names were already printed on the ballot. Those write-in votes were then added to the candidates’ official totals, giving Cirz a one-vote lead over Hopson. Read Article

North Dakota: Appeals court rules against tribes in voting rights case that could go to Supreme Court | Jack Dura and Steve Karnowski/Associated Press

A federal appeals court won’t reconsider its decision in a redistricting case that went against two Native American tribes that challenged North Dakota’s legislative redistricting map, and the dispute could be headed for the U.S. Supreme Court. The case has drawn national interest because of a 2-1 ruling issued in May by a three-judge panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that erased a path through the federal Voting Rights Act for people in seven states to sue under a key provision of the landmark federal civil rights law. The tribes argued that the 2021 map violated the act by diluting their voting strength and ability to elect their own candidates. The panel said only the U.S. Department of Justice can bring such lawsuits. That followed a 2023 ruling out of Arkansas in the same circuit that also said private individuals can’t sue under Section 2 of the law. Read Article

Ohio: Electronic poll pads will be back for November election | Mary Ann Grier/ Morning Journal

The Columbiana County Board of Elections will be back to using the electronic poll pads to check voter signatures against IDs during the Nov. 4 general election. County Board of Elections Director Kim Fusco reported during the election board meeting on Tuesday that during the recent elections conference in Columbus, which board members also attended, they learned the reason why they couldn’t use the electronic poll pads for the May 2025 primary. She said state officials explained that it was due to some possible security breach in another county, Perry County, saying it sounded to her like they were saying it could have been a hacker, an electrical short in the poll pads or a ghost. Read Article

Pennsylvania: Department of Justice presses for answers on how it manages voter rolls | Carter Walker/Spotlight PA

The U.S. Department of Justice is asking Pennsylvania for a wide range of information on how it manages voter registration and voter rolls, as part of what it calls “nationwide efforts” to monitor compliance with a key federal voting statute. In a June 23 letter to Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt, the department asked for 14 categories of information on the state’s voter registration activities, including how voters are added to and removed from the voter rolls, and how the state prevents unauthorized access to its system. The letter is the latest in a series of requests the Civil Rights Division has sent to states involving their compliance with federal voting statutes. This one specifically cites the Help America Vote Act, or HAVA, a 2002 law that overhauled voter registration and election administration. Read Article

Wisconsin election officials to consider expanding e-pollbook options | Alexander Shur/Votebeat

When Madison residents went to vote in a special election this month, they didn’t have to stand in line according to their last name or wait for poll workers to flip through paper lists to find their names. For the first time, election officials there used electronic pollbooks to check voters in, allowing them to search for voters’ names and collect signatures on digital pads. They could also use the e-pollbooks to process absentee ballots, register new voters, and issue voter numbers, just as they did with paper poll books, but with less chance of error. The pilot program in the state capital offered a glimpse of both the technology’s potential — and its current limitations. Poll workers praised the state’s in-house e-pollbook system, known as Badger Book, for its speed and accuracy. But its high costs, limited vendor options, and a lack of state funding for support staff have stalled broader adoption, especially in large cities. Read Article

A.I. Is Starting to Wear Down Democracy | Steven Lee Myers and Stuart A. Thompson/The New York Times

Artificial intelligence has long threatened to transform elections around the world. Now there is evidence from at least 50 countries that it already has. Since the explosion of generative artificial intelligence over the last two years, the technology has demeaned or defamed opponents and, for the first time, officials and experts said, begun to have an impact on election results. As the technology improves, officials and experts warn, it is undermining faith in electoral integrity and eroding the political consensus necessary for democratic societies to function. Read Article

National: Red States Struggle to Build New Systems to Share Voter Data | Yunior Rivas/Democracy Docket

Back in 2023, a host of Republican-led states left a successful inter-state compact for sharing voter registration data and keeping their rolls up to date. Falsely portraying the pact as a progressive plot, several states vowed to create better systems of their own. Two years later, those efforts appear largely to have failed. The most prominent new initiative, built by Alabama, lacks anything close to the sophistication of the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), the system the red states rejected, experts said. In fact, it isn’t even designed to allow multiple states to share data with each other — the core purpose that ERIC serves. Read Article

National: Trump calls for special prosecutor to investigate 2020 election Biden won | Eric Tucker/Associated Press

President Donald Trump on Friday called for the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the 2020 election won by Democrat Joe Biden, repeating his baseless claim that the contest was marred by widespread fraud. Trump’s post is part of an amped-up effort by him to undermine the legitimacy of Biden’s presidency. Earlier this month, Trump directed his administration to investigate Biden’s actions as president, alleging aides masked his predecessor’s “cognitive decline.” Biden has dismissed the investigation as “a mere distraction.” Read Article

National: More cities try extending voting rights to younger teens | Jessica Huseman/Votebeat

Amid all the worries about the perennially elusive youth vote, there’s a promising trend to talk about: In a growing number of towns and cities across the U.S., 16- and 17-year-olds are gaining the right to vote. The numbers are still small, but the momentum is real. Advocates say it’s about nurturing lifelong voters. Take Newark, New Jersey, which allowed 16- and 17-year-olds to vote in its school board election in April. Teen turnout was only about 3%. But that was better than the adults managed. Besides, as Sam Novey from the University of Maryland’s Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement puts it, the city “started from nothing.” Indeed, adding younger teens to the voter rolls involves building a lot of things from scratch. After Newark passed its ordinance last year allowing youth voting, officials had to rewire voter registration systems and launch a full-scale education campaign. It was about 14 months before 16- and 17-year-olds could cast their first ballots. Read Article

National: The SAVE database was already a headache for states. Now it’s fueling Trump’s voter fraud allegations. | Derek B. Johnson/CyberScoop

Just under three weeks after being elected to his first term as president of the United States, Donald Trump took to Twitter to claim he’d been cheated. While he had won the office through his strength in the electoral college, Trump wanted to make something clear: he also believed he’d won the popular vote “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” This rhetoric — that dark forces were conspiring to rig democratic outcomes against him — has endured through Trump’s two subsequent presidential campaigns, bolstered by persistent belief among Republicans that election fraud is rampant. Trump’s attacks eventually sharpened into the more specific charge that illegal immigrants were casting millions of fraudulent ballots for his Democratic opponents across the country. But over the past decade, these political attacks have always crashed headlong into an uncomfortable reality: the facts are not in his favor. All the data we have tells us that non-citizen voting is rare. Read Article

National: The Importance of Letting Voters Defend Their Rights in Court  | Kendall Verhovek/Brennan Center for Justice

Since the dawn of the Voting Rights Act, federal courts heard Section 2 claims brought by voters. Without this ability to sue, many, if not most, of the claims against racially discriminatory voting policies would have gone unheard, leaving in place a far more unjust and imperfect electoral process. This right was tacitly affirmed in Brown v. Post and accepted again and again in every one of the hundreds of Section 2 cases brought by individuals and organizations and heard by federal courts. Until 2021. In a concurring opinion in a major Voting Rights Act ruling, Justice Neil Gorsuch called Section 2’s private right of action “an open question” — undercutting decades of judicial consensus. This invitation was accepted in 2022, when a district court, followed by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2023, fully embraced this radical theory. The courts concluded that impacted voters and organizations can’t bring lawsuits under Section 2. Last month, a second ruling by a panel of the Eighth Circuit narrowed enforcement power further, preventing voters from suing for Section 2 offenses under another federal law that broadly protects against government violation of civil rights. Read Article

Alabama to add invisible security emblems to ballots | Colin Wood/StateScoop

Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen on Tuesday announced his latest effort to improve the security of his state’s elections — new security emblems that will be attached to all ballots starting next year. In a press release, Allen said the emblems are invisible to the human eye and can only be detected by specialized equipment provided to election administrators in each of Alabama’s 67 counties. According to his office, it will be the first in the nation to use the technology. Read Article

Proposed Arizona settlement recommends more warnings for voters coming off early-voting list | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Arizona election officials would be instructed to provide more notice to voters who are at risk of being removed from the state’s early-voting list, under a conditional legal settlement with voting rights groups. The settlement, which was filed in court Monday and is still subject to final approval, would resolve a longstanding challenge to a 2021 law that eliminated the state’s Permanent Early Voting List. The agreement says voters who face removal should be notified two additional times before they are taken off the list, and once afterward. The agreement does not appear to impose any new notification requirements on county recorders, who manage county voter rolls. What it would do is provide suggested best practices for how the recorders should implement the law, including the schedule of notices. Because the additional notices wouldn’t be required, voters across the state could face unequal treatment as recorders begin implementing the law for the first time in 2027. Read Article

California: Justice Department sues O.C. registrar for noncitizen voting records | Salvador Hernandez and Laura J. Nelson/Los Angeles Times

Federal authorities sued Orange County’s top elections official Wednesday, alleging the county registrar violated federal law by refusing to disclose detailed information about people who were removed from the voter rolls because they were not citizens. The lawsuit, filed in federal court, alleges that Orange County Registrar Bob Page is “concealing the unlawful registration of ineligible, non-citizen voters” by withholding sensitive personal information such as Social Security and driver’s license numbers. The 10-page lawsuit does not allege that any noncitizens voted in Orange County. Read Article

Georgia: Running a low-turnout runoff election could cost $100 per vote | Jeff Amy/Associated Press

Miller County Election Supervisor Jerry Calhoun says he’s not sure anyone will vote in an upcoming Democratic primary runoff. After all, the southwest Georgia county only recorded one vote in the June 17 Democratic primary for the state Public Service Commission among candidates Keisha Waites, Peter Hubbard and Robert Jones. Statewide turnout for the primary on June 17 reached just 2.8% of Georgia’s 7.4 million active registered voters. That includes more than 15,000 people who likely voted for Blackman and didn’t have their votes counted. But the Democratic runoff might struggle to reach 1% turnout statewide. And counties could spend $10 million statewide to hold the election, based on a sampling of some county spending. That could be more than $100 per vote. Read Article

Michigan: What Benson vs. GOP election-manual fight is really about | Hayley Harding/Votebeat

Michigan’s top election official is locked in a clamorous legal battle with Republican lawmakers over access to election training materials, a conflict that likely has less to do with policy than politics — and the coming race for governor. And if the battle continues at its current volume, voter trust in Michigan’s elections could take a beating. On one side is Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, who won her 2022 re-election race by nearly 14 percentage points and is now a leading Democratic candidate for governor. Since 2019, she has been a key part of the Democratic power structure in the executive branch and the face of election oversight in a swing state that became a target of heavy scrutiny and conspiracy theories after Donald Trump’s 2020 loss. On the other side is the Michigan state House, back under Republican control since January, which has subpoenaed her, sued her, and even made moves to impeach her. Read Article

Minnesota assassination prompts many lawmakers to wonder: Is service worth the danger? | Alex Brown and Robbie Sequeira/Stateline

A year into her first term in office, New Jersey Assemblywoman Sadaf Jaffer decided not to run for reelection. The political world saw her as a rising star in 2023; Jaffer, a Democrat, previously served as the nation’s first female Muslim mayor. But rampant harassment from online commenters and other politicians about her religion, as well as high-profile acts of violence against other public officials, made her reconsider her political future. “I was concerned about my family,” Jaffer said in an interview. “They didn’t sign up for this. I didn’t want to put them in harm’s way.” In the wake of the assassination of Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, as well as the wounding of state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, more public officials across the country are taking stock of their safety. Some say death threats have become part of the job. They fear that violence — real attacks and constant threats — will scare potential candidates away from seeking public office. Read Article

How Nevada’s elections will change with new 2025 laws | Jessica Hill/Las Vegas Review-Journal

New laws from the 2025 legislative session aim to increase accessibility to Nevada’s elections and improve voters’ experiences. Election reform was a major focus in Carson City, though bills that sought to drastically change Nevada’s elections were blocked by the governor, including legislation to implement voter ID requirements and to allow nonpartisan voters to participate in primaries. Other bills seeking changes were successful, from requiring that sample ballots be sent before official mail ballots to disclosing campaign advertisements made with artificial intelligence. “Everything we tried to do this session has been focused on the voter experience and the voter perspective,” said Democratic Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar. Read Article

North Carolina county elections boards shift from Democratic to GOP control | Lynn Bonner/NC Newsline

North Carolina’s elections shakeup extended to all 100 counties Tuesday as local boards flipped from Democratic to GOP control and State Auditor Dave Boliek appointed Republican chairs to lead them. The changes expand GOP control of elections to the local level. Last month, Boliek appointed a Republican majority state elections board under a new law that took appointment power away from Democratic Gov. Josh Stein. Stein has sued over the law, but state appellate courts have allowed it to go into effect. Historically, the governor’s party has held majorities on the state and county boards. Local boards of election are the on-the-ground decision makers that pick polling locations, set early voting schedules and hours, and decide whether provisional ballots should be accepted. Read Article

South Carolina: Voters beware: 25 states restrict AI in elections. South Carolina is in the other half. | Shaun Chornobroff/SC Daily Gazette

South Carolina enters the 2026 campaign season without any state laws preventing political candidates from using artificial intelligence to make unfounded attacks against their opponents. Twenty-five states now require disclosures when using AI in campaign materials or banned its use altogether, with a number of them passing their laws ahead of the 2024 election, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In the last presidential election cycle, GOP hopeful Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ campaign shared AI-generated images of President Donald Trump hugging Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and one-time chief medical adviser to the president, who is loathed by much of Trump’s base. Read Article

Pennsylvania House unanimously passes bill to crack down on deepfakes in politi | Jaxon White/WITF

House lawmakers Monday approved legislation to combat artificial intelligence that is used to mislead voters by impersonating political candidates. The bill, passed in a unanimous vote, would require campaigns to disclose when they use AI-generated deepfakes that mimic a candidate’s appearance or voice. Under the bill, political campaigns and organizations that do not disclose their use of a deepfake in an advertisement could be fined every day the ad runs. That daily fine would be up to $15,000 in municipal elections, $50,000 in state elections and $250,000 in federal elections. Read Article

Texas lawmakers failed to pass a proof of citizenship law but made other changes to elections | Natalia Contreras/The Texas Tribune

After considering a number of bills that would significantly reshape election administration and voting access in the state, Texas lawmakers ultimately approved only a few, including legislation that would alter the schedule of the 12-day early-voting period to increase access. They also passed measures aimed at reducing rejections of mail-voting applications and ballots, and added new restrictions on curbside voting, but held off on some more controversial proposals. Among the bills that didn’t advance were Senate Bill 16, one of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s priority bills, which would have imposed a strict requirement for voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship, and a measure that would have given state Attorney General Ken Paxton more authority to prosecute election crimes. Bills that would have permitted online voter registration, audits of hand-count results, and guns in polling sites also stalled. Read Article

Wisconsin approves new rule for election observers | Wisconsin Law Journal

The Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) voted to publish a new administrative rule addressing the conduct of election observers and their interactions with election officials after more than two years of bipartisan collaboration. On June 19, WEC commissioners voted 5-1 to approve the rule that intends to offer clarity and uniformity to election observation for the benefit of voters, election officials, and observers. The rule will take effect on Aug. 1 after it has been added to the administrative code as EL 4 and published in the Administrative Register at the end of July. The final rule order, which took more than two years to develop, specifies who can observe elections, defines the rights and limitations of what election observers may do, differentiates election observers from election inspectors, and creates a more streamlined and accessible set of instructions for election observers to follow during the election process. Read Article

‘I’m just so scared’: Lawmakers reckon with safety after Minnesota slayings | Patrick Marley, Yvonne Wingett Sanchez, Holly Bailey and Kyle Melnick/The Washington Post

Minnesota lawmakers, terrified by predawn attacks on two of their own, turned to each other on a group text for comfort. A colleague had been killed and another had been shot, and the accused gunman was still on the loose. The 20 Democrats grieved and shared prayers — and began exchanging safety tips as they learned some of them were on the suspect’s list of targets. “I’m hunkered down,” one wrote Saturday morning after learning that authorities said the suspect had assembled a list of dozens of Democratic targets across the Midwest. “Will stay put. But I feel so sick.” Read Article

Arizona tries again to ensure that manual audits of election results get done | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

In Arizona, where distrust in elections runs high, many people agree that a manual check of election results could help boost confidence. And state law requires counties to do such audits. Yet they aren’t always happening. That’s because state law has strict conditions on who appoints the workers, who participates, and when it happens. If those conditions can’t be met, the elections director cancels the audit. Lawmakers have tried to change state law before to make sure the audits — which examine votes cast on a certain percentage of ballots in a set number of races — actually happen in each county. This year, they are trying again. Read Article

National: Justice Department’s early moves on voting and elections signal a shift from its traditional role | Christina A. Cassidy and Scott Bauer/Associated Press

In North Carolina, it was a lawsuit over the state’s voter registration records. In Arizona and Wisconsin, it was a letter to state election officials warning of potential administrative violations. And in Colorado, it was a demand for election records going back to 2020. Those actions in recent weeks by the U.S. Department of Justice’s voting section may seem focused on the technical machinery of how elections are run but signal deeper changes when combined with the departures of career attorneys and decisions to drop various voting rights cases. They represent a shift away from the division’s traditional role of protecting access to the ballot box. Instead, the actions address concerns that have been raised by a host of conservative activists following years of false claims surrounding elections in the U.S. Some voting rights and election experts also note that by targeting certain states — presidential battlegrounds or those controlled by Democrats — the moves could be foreshadowing an expanded role for the department in future elections. Read Article