Wisconsin judge rules that paper absentee ballots violates rights of disabled people | Scott Bauer/Associated Press

Absentee voting in Wisconsin discriminates against disabled voters, a judge ruled Tuesday, siding with groups that are seeking to force election officials to allow for electronic casting of ballots. But Dane County Circuit Judge Everett Mitchell stopped short of ordering electronic voting, setting up a trial on that issue later. It almost certainly will not be resolved before the November election. Disability Rights Wisconsin, the League of Women Voters and four disabled voters brought the lawsuit in 2024. They argued that the lack of an electronic absentee voting option violated their right to independence and privacy and the protections of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The Republican-controlled Legislature is fighting the lawsuit. Read Article

National: Democrats Prepare for Possible Election Clashes With Federal Government | Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times

Democratic state officials are ramping up their preparations to protect against what they view as a new threat to election security: the federal government. At a meeting in Milwaukee in May, staff members from the offices of every Democratic attorney general and about a dozen Democratic secretaries of state held tabletop exercises to prepare for hypothetical scenarios in the November midterm elections. In those “war rooms,” said Nick Brown, the Democratic attorney general of the state of Washington, state officials discussed how they would handle a variety of scenarios. What might happen if the F.B.I. showed up, demanding election materials or equipment? What if federal troops or agents were deployed in the country in ways that could intimidate voters or disrupt the election? What if President Trump tried to declare an election-related national emergency? Read Article

National: Trump’s claims of election interference in doubt after release of declassified intelligence | Isaac Arnsdorf and Patrick Marley/The Washington Post

State officials said federal authorities never notified them of a Chinese hack affecting their voter registration systems, casting doubt on President Donald Trump’s claims of vulnerabilities in U.S. elections. Officials in 12 of the 15 states named in intelligence reports released by the White House as having voter rolls “compromised” by China said officials never notified them of a data breach, a standard step for federal law enforcement when hacks are discovered. The other three states and Washington, D.C., did not respond. Trump alleged in a July 16 prime-time speech that the data had been “bought, stolen or hacked.” The states’ responses and newly declassified intelligence reports suggest China obtained voter data from other sources, such as political parties or companies that compile and combine it with other information to target voters or consumers. Experts said the effort appeared aimed at collecting data on Americans for intelligence purposes, not interfering with voting. Read Article

National: Appeals court upholds halt to Trump’s executive order to create voter list | Russ Bynum/Associated Press

A federal appeals court has upheld a ruling that in nearly half of U.S. states halted President Donald Trump’s executive order to create a federal list of eligible voters and limit delivery of mail ballots only to people on that list. The ruling Saturday by judges of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the Trump administration’s effort to move forward with the mail-in voting restrictions in 23 U.S. states that sued ahead of November’s midterm elections. Trump issued an executive order in March for the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the commissioner of the Social Security Administration to create a “state citizenship list” of eligible voters. It also ordered the U.S. Postal Service to deliver mail ballots only to people on that list. While Trump touted the proposed changes as safeguards to keep non-U.S. citizens from voting, state election officials argued they were ripe for abuse and could cause chaos. Read Article

National: Trump’s attacks on mail balloting and concerns over delays turn midterms spotlight on Postal Service | John Hanna/Associated Press

Roughly six weeks before the first midterm ballots are mailed out, the U.S. Postal Service is emerging as a pivotal player in an election season that will determine control of Congress. President Donald Trump is seeking greater control over mail balloting through an executive order while a change to how the agency processes mail is leading to criticism that it’s failing to deliver ballots on time. Democratic officials have raised concerns over the past week about how quickly the Postal Service will process ballots after tens of thousands of them in California and hundreds in Wisconsin arrived at local election offices too late to be counted in elections earlier this year. The top election offices in Kansas and Michigan are urging voters who want to cast their ballots early to avoid the mail and instead drop them off in person. Read Article

National: Thune says no to filibuster changes even after Trump’s threats about SAVE America Act | Allison Pecorin/ABC News

Senate Majority Leader John Thune on Monday reiterated that there would not be changes to Senate rules in order to pass a Republican-led election reform bill that President Donald Trump has demanded be sent to his desk. "Yeah, that's not going to happen," Thune said when asked by ABC News about whether Senate rules requiring 60 votes to advance most legislative matters could be altered in light of Trump's new pressure campaign to pass the SAVE America Act, which would change voter ID requirements ahead of November's midterm elections. Read Article

National: Trump’s document ‘cherry-pick’ doesn’t show a cover-up of Chinese election intelligence, ex-officials say | Sean Lyngaas/CNN

President Donald Trump and his allies touted spy reports and emails that he declassified this month as showing a “cover-up” of intelligence about China’s efforts to harm Trump’s re-election prospects in 2020, part of the president’s push to undermine confidence in the integrity of US elections. But there was no cover-up, according to a CNN review of the documents and interviews with former senior intelligence officials familiar with election security efforts in 2020. Instead, the documents show a messy disagreement over intelligence among officials, the kind of discussion that isn’t unusual as experts weigh the value of both raw information and finished intelligence they receive, the former officials said. The declassified material — and the context behind it — also show a stubbornness by some China-focused analysts to fully consider alternative theories about China’s intentions toward the 2020 election, the sources added. “This was an analytic disagreement, not a cover-up,” said one of the former officials who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. The disclosures don’t change what the majority of the intelligence community concluded after an exhaustive review of intelligence: China considered trying to influence the outcome of the 2020 election but chose not to out of fear of upsetting US-China relations. Read Article

National: Trump’s EAC firings threaten access for voters with disabilities, experts warn | Natalie Hausmann/Democracy Docket

Diane Golden helped secure accessible voting equipment when the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) passed in 2002, ensuring the right for people with disabilities to vote privately and independently. Today, she’s concerned that right is at risk. HAVA led to the widespread use of voting machines, which can include anything from ballot-marking devices to barcodes. It provided ways for people who cannot use a hand-marked paper ballot to vote. But President Donald Trump has long questioned the security of the voting systems that provide access to one-sixth of all voters. He called them “terrible machines,” “dishonest, almost all,” “vulnerable” and “easily compromised” in a recent address to the nation. Read Article

National: How Trump could undermine the midterms | US midterm elections 2026 | George Chidi/The Guardian

When Donald Trump commandeered primetime US television last Thursday, he delivered a familiar, but still extraordinary, message. The president argued once again that the results of the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden, were illegitimate. US elections are “vulnerable to being rigged and stolen”, Trump alleged, claiming that “the trust of the American people was lost” when he was defeated. Historically, incumbent parties underperform in midterm elections and with the president’s popularity sagging – he has an approval rating of just 37% – Republicans appear on course to lose seats in the US Senate and House of Representatives, as well as in state and local elections, in November. Trump’s latest intervention, in which he accused China of interfering with the 2020 election, is viewed by US voting rights activists as just the latest escalation of an effort by the White House to influence, and potentially alter, the results of the 2026 midterm elections. “The number one threat facing American elections is the continued lies coming out of the White House,” said the Arizona secretary of state, Adrian Fontes, the official responsible for overseeing the state’s elections. Read Article

Alaska: Questions about state’s handling of election grow as 3,500 registered voters asked to verify citizenship | Mark Sabbatini/Juneau Independent

A legislative hearing scrutinizing unprecedented actions by state elections officials against U.S. Senate candidate Dan J. Sullivan escalated into a new controversy Wednesday with the revelation that 3,500 people have been removed from active voter rolls and asked to verify they are U.S. citizens. Letters sent to those people from the Alaska Division of Elections state it has "received information from the Alaska Department of Motor Vehicles that you may not be a citizen." Carol Beecher, the division’s director, told legislators the people notified have been placed on an inactive list and told they need to confirm their citizenship. The notifications are part of a quarterly voter maintenance process in collaboration with DMV that typically results in about 200 notifications, Beecher said. However, DMV, in a memo issued Thursday, stated the elections division made a "a non-routine request" in March specifically for citizenship information involving 15,200 driver’s license and identification applicants. Read Article

Arizona’s new ballot drop-off option proves popular in primary, potentially leading to faster election results | Sasha Hupka/Votebeat

When Arizonans went to the polls last week for the state primary election, they made their preferences clear about more than just the candidates: They also really liked the option to get their mail ballots counted faster by showing identification.More than 6,000 voters used the new, optional procedure in Pima County — about half of the voters who dropped off their ballots at the polls on Election Day, per county records. In Maricopa County, the state’s most populous, officials said about 23,000 voters, or 30% of those who dropped off ballots on Election Day, opted to show ID to verify their mail ballots. Those numbers represent a successful debut for the procedure, which Republicans have pushed as a way to speed up election results. Indeed, Maricopa County finished counting mail ballots significantly faster than usual, which officials credited in part to the change. Read Article

California: Voter ID backers sue attorney general over ballot description | Dakota Smith/Los Angeles Times

Backers of a November ballot measure that would require Californians to verify their identity when voting sued state officials on Monday, alleging bias in how the ballot’s summary is written. A group led by California Assemblymember Carl DeMaio (R-San Diego) allege in a 10-page lawsuit filed in Sacramento Superior Court that Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta violated election laws that require the “impartial” labeling of a measure’s purpose. The summary language now states that the measure: “Prohibits citizens from voting unless they present government-issued identification. Invalidates mail ballots that do not have last four digits of designated government-issued identification number written on envelope. Prohibits in-person voting without presenting government-issued identification.” Read Article

Georgia: GOP-heavy panel to shape next voting system | Greg Bluestein/The Atlanta Journal Constitution

Georgia’s next statewide voting system will be shaped by a nine-member committee with a decidedly Republican tilt. The panel is set to meet next Friday after lawmakers created it during a June special session. That same law pushed back a prohibition on using QR codes printed by Georgia’s current touchscreen system to tally votes until 2028. Now, the awkwardly named Election Equipment Specifications and Standards Committee must recommend a new system based on hand-marked paper ballots printed on demand. Its report is due by Jan. 31, 2027 — presumably to give whoever is elected secretary of state in November time to prepare for a rollout during the 2028 election cycle. The panel includes Republican state Rep. Tim Fleming, the GOP nominee for secretary of state. If he wins in November, Fleming could end up certifying a system he helped shape. Read Article

Maryland to pay $85 millions for voting system yet to be upgraded | Tinashe Chingarande/The Baltimore Sun

Maryland taxpayers will pay nearly $85 million for a new voting system that state officials acknowledge currently meets only 20-year-old federal standards — and whose planned security upgrades have not yet received federal approval. The Election Systems & Software (ES&S) machines will be used beginning with the 2028 elections and are scheduled for a software upgrade by 2030, Maryland Elections Administrator Jared DeMarinis told The Baltimore Sun. The State Board of Elections said it could impose contractual penalties if the company fails to deliver the promised upgrades. When The Sun asked DeMarinis why the state is waiting four years to use the latest technology, he said the software had been developed but wasn’t yet functional when the election board invited vendors to bid for a contract to provide voting machines. Read Article

North Carolina Senate splits massive elections bill into 2, sends them back to House with changes | Sarah Michels/Carolina Public Press

State senators divided the wide-ranging bill into two separate election bills. While most of the provisions are the same, senators made one major addition: one of the Senate bills would cut the early voting period from 17 to 10 days for primary, runoff and special elections. A few provisions in the House election bill also were missing from the Senate’s bills. They include a proposed second try at a signature verification pilot program, restrictions on foreign nationals’ financial involvement in elections and an explicit ban on so-called Never Residents’ ability to vote in federal elections in North Carolina. Never Residents are U.S. citizens who inherited citizenship from their parents or guardians who last lived in North Carolina, despite never having lived in the state themselves. Recent state court rulings prohibit them from voting in state and local contests. Read Article

Pennsylvania asks Trump administration how exactly it identified potential noncitizen voters | Carter Walker/Votebeat

Pennsylvania state officials are pushing back on the Trump administration’s claim that there may be more than 14,000 potential noncitizens registered to vote in the state. In a letter sent Wednesday to U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt said the federal government has not disclosed the methodology or data source it used to identify the noncitizens. Schmidt also pointed out gaps in a program that the Department of Homeland Security uses to identify noncitizens. “As you know, past analyses of voter lists have relied on faulty methodologies that can lead to inaccurate results and false claims about the citizenship status of eligible voters,” Schmidt wrote. “In fact, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services official who oversees [the program] has ‘acknowledged that the system can’t always find the most current citizenship information for people not born in the U.S.’” Pennsylvania responds to Trump administration claim about noncitizen voters - Votebeat

Texas officials confirm that some registered voters flagged as potential noncitizens by SAVE had already provided proof of citizenship | Natalia Contreras/Votebeat

Election officials across the state should immediately reinstate some voters who were incorrectly flagged as potential noncitizens through a federal program, the Texas Secretary of State’s Office told county officials Wednesday. Christina Adkins, the state elections director, told county officials the state had reviewed Texas Department of Public Safety records confirming the citizenship of some of the 2,724 registered voters who were flagged as potential noncitizens, according to an audio recording of her comments obtained by Votebeat and The Texas Tribune, as well as election officials who heard them. The voters were flagged after the state checked its voter roll through a federal program called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, used to verify the citizenship of people registered to vote. Read Article

Wisconsin judge rejects attempt to let absentee voters recast ballots | Rich Kremer/WPR

A last-minute attempt to let absentee voters change their ballots because their candidate has dropped out of the race has been rejected by a Dane County judge. For now, that means more than 112,000 absentee ballots returned in the chaotic Democratic primary for governor are locked in ahead of the August 11 election. A lawsuit filed last week by three Democratic voters sought to overturn recent guidance from the Wisconsin Elections Commission specifying that absentee voters cannot “spoil” their ballots and request new ones because they have changed their minds or their first-choice candidate dropped out of the race. The voters behind the suit cast absentee ballots for Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez before she dropped out of the race for the Democratic nomination following a campaign implosion. Read Article

Wisconsin guidance banning absentee ballot spoiling reignites legal battle | Alexander Shur/Votebeat

Wisconsin election officials have reignited a legal battle over absentee voting with July guidance stating that voters cannot void a returned absentee ballot and cast a new one, even if Election Day is weeks away or the candidate they supported has dropped out. Three Democratic residents in Dane County on Thursday sued the Wisconsin Elections Commission over the guidance, which was adopted by the commission on July 9, calling it an unconstitutional violation of the state’s absentee voting laws. All three plaintiffs voted for a gubernatorial candidate who have since dropped out of the primary, and under the commission guidance they cannot change their votes, even though those votes have not yet been counted. The legality of spoiling ballots just to change a vote has long been disputed. The lawsuit says WEC’s guidance means the plaintiffs “will all be disenfranchised from meaningfully participating in this August election unless this Court steps in.” Read Article

Why American elections are so complicated — and secure | Ali Swenson/Associated Press

America’s highly decentralized system of voting exists because the nation’s Founding Fathers gave authority over elections to the states, rather than the federal government. While Congress has the power to regulate elections — and has used that authority to pass such laws as the Voting Rights Act — the Constitution makes clear that states have primary authority to set the “times, places and manner” for elections. There also is no national election agency that administers the presidential contest, something that’s different from many other countries. And when it comes to doing the day-to-day work of running an election, the responsibility falls to officials at the local level — usually a clerk or election supervisor — with help from staff and volunteers. While differences in election laws can get confusing, election security experts say this structure is a strength. That’s because to pull off stealing a presidential election — as Trump falsely claims was done to him in 2020 — it would require large numbers of election workers in the most competitive counties across the country who are willing to risk prosecution, prison time and fines while working with officials from both parties willing to look the other way. And everyone somehow would have to keep quiet — a highly unlikely scenario. Read Article

National: CISA Report on US Election Cybersecurity Draws Bipartisan Plaudits | Shaun Waterman/GovInfo Security

Amid the partisan clamor surrounding U.S. President Donald Trump's false claims last week of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, one little-noticed document is garnering widespread welcome, even from critics of the administration. A newly declassified report from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on election security - the president cherry-picked to try and make his case - that slipped out in the deluge of documents appears to be that rare beast among administration policies these days: one that enjoys bipartisan support. "It's pretty reasonable," said Nick Leiserson, who served in the Biden-administration White House Office of the National Cyber Director. "It's sensible advice. So, that's good." The report is based on data gathered from 2019 through 2024 via voluntary security assessments conducted by CISA career staff, including static and dynamic code analysis conducted at the Idaho National Laboratory, penetration testing and incident response. Read Article

National: ‘Got to be kidding me’: GOP officials pan Trump’s claims of shocking new election threats | CNN Politics

Four days after President Donald Trump declared that his administration uncovered “shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure,” dozens of state election officials from across the country gathered in Boston. But they weren’t there for an emergency summit to tackle the supposed crisis, even though the midterm elections are only 15 weeks away. Instead, these election officials from 37 states met for a long-scheduled professional conference that struck a strikingly business-as-usual tone. In fact, Trump and his primetime address hardly came up. In interviews with CNN, more than a dozen election officials from both parties said Trump’s address surfaced little new in terms of evidence. Several GOP officials even scoffed at his presentation, pointing to the data that the administration released to try to bolster its case that there are massive numbers of non-citizens voting in US elections. Matt Crane, a Republican who runs the Colorado County Clerks Association, said his text chat with a bipartisan group of colleagues was filled with “a lot of laughing emojis, and like, ‘you got to be kidding me?’ that this was all it was.” Read Article

National: Declassified documents touted by Trump say election systems ‘would be difficult to manipulate’ | Peter Charalambous/ABC

Newly-declassified documents touted by President Donald Trump during his address on election security Thursday cast doubt on some of his claims about "shocking vulnerabilities" in the country's election infrastructure. While Trump claimed during his address that the nation's election systems are vulnerable to "hacking, exploitation, and foreign interference," the intelligence reports released by the White House concluded overall that the main infrastructure used to conduct elections in the United States "would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to alter the election outcome." Read Article

National: More than 24 states sue Trump administration after it put conditions on receiving disaster funding | Michael Casey/Associated Press

More than two dozen states on Thursday sued the Trump administration for requiring them to comply with election and immigration conditions to receive billions of dollars in federal funding for disasters. The lawsuit, filed in Rhode Island and challenging Federal Emergency Management Agency and Department of Homeland Security policies, argued that the administration is requiring states to change their elections systems and help DHS with immigration enforcement. The conditions would also allow DHS to terminate grants at any time and for any reason. “Once again, the Trump Administration is threatening to jeopardize public safety by unlawfully withholding billions in critical funding and once again, they won’t get away with it,” Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said. “This Administration is using the safety of Americans as collateral by attempting to bully the states into relinquishing their constitutional right to enact policies and laws that best serve their residents.” Read Article

National: No, Trump Can’t Withhold Anti-Terrorism Funds to Pressure States to Change Their Election Rules | Reed Shaw/Just Security

TThe first reason these grant conditions are unlawful is a simple one: federal agencies are “creatures of statute,” and there is no law that authorizes FEMA to weaponize its terrorism-prevention funding in this way. The only statute FEMA cites as authority for the NOFO is 6 U.S.C. § 603, the provision of the Homeland Security Act that creates the umbrella grant program. That provision does little more than direct FEMA to run the program’s two main components—the grants to states and the grants to high-risk urban areas—according to rules Congress spelled out in neighboring sections of the statute. Nothing in any of those provisions says a word about election administration, let alone authorizes conditions like these. Nor does Section 2007 of the Homeland Security Act (codified at 6 U.S.C. § 608), which establishes the factors that FEMA must consider when allocating funds under any of the terrorism-prevention grant programs, authorize these conditions. To the contrary, the statute directs FEMA to consider things like a state or metropolitan area’s “relative threat, vulnerability, and consequences from acts of terrorism, including” factors like their population, history of threats, and the proximity to an international border or waters. Although it doesn’t explicitly state as much, FEMA would likely argue that its election-administration conditions are authorized by § 608’s consideration of threats to “critical infrastructure”—which, as of 2017, includes election infrastructure—and buttressed by two “catchall” provisions that confer some amount of discretion on the Administrator to consider “other factors” and “other types of threat” when allocating funding. Read Article

National: Trump’s Distorted Venezuela Elections Claim | Robert Farley/FactCheck.org

In claiming that American voting machines are vulnerable to manipulation, President Donald Trump provided an incomplete and distorted summary of the CIA’s reporting about Venezuelan efforts to manipulate electronic voting machines in that country. “Today, we are releasing documents that show the CIA obtained reporting of a specific plot to do a big number in favor of the corrupt Maduro regime in Venezuela,” Trump said in his primetime address to the nation on July 16, referring to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. “And that’s exactly what happened. “And that’s exactly what happened." he documents the Trump administration released don’t say “that’s exactly what happened,” as Trump said. One of the documents released prior to Trump’s address was a recent CIA report, “Summary of Select Intelligence Reporting from 2004-2020 on Venezuela’s Electronic Voting Manipulation Capabilities,” that concluded Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and his successor, Maduro, “developed sustained interest and likely some capability” to manipulate voting machines. But the CIA’s assessment about the ways in which Venezuela could accomplish such manipulation was more of a “theoretical” exercise, and the report stopped short of alleging Venezuela actually carried out plans to alter voting machine tallies. Read Article

National: House intel bill includes provisions on state and local threat intelligence, election security, AI | Tim Starks/CyberScoop

An annual spy policy bill would authorize a cyberthreat intelligence sharing pilot program for state and local governments, and order an outside assessment of how intelligence agencies are currently sharing that information with those jurisdictions. The House Intelligence Committee approved fiscal 2027 intelligence authorization legislation Monday that also includes provisions on election security and that are meant to boost intelligence community (IC) usage of artificial intelligence for cyber and other purposes. The measure’s language on state and local information sharing come amid widespread frustration with Trump administration cutbacks on such aid from the federal government, with the president taking explicit action to shift more responsibility for cyber defenses to the local level. Under the pilot program, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) would pick one state to receive monthly briefings from the ODNI, Department of Homeland Security, FBI and others to receive monthly briefings on “timely, specific, and actionable information regarding cyber threats” in unclassified form. After a year, the ODNI would then provide a report on the viability of a wider briefing program for state and local governments. Read Article

National: Trump’s Plan for November Is Failing | David A. Graham/The Atlantic

Last week President Trump delivered a rare prime-time speech, but his address fell well short of the hype. Purportedly, the president was going to make a major statement about election integrity, but in reality, the speech was dense and hoarsely delivered. As my colleagues report, he provided no evidence to back up his long-standing lie that the 2020 election was stolen. The White House also released four tranches of documents meant to support the speech, but Trump’s claims were a farrago of recycled information, misrepresentations of evidence, and tendentious claims based on materials too heavily redacted to parse. Major news networks, apparently concerned that Trump would mislead, declined to air the address live. So why even deliver it? The speech was a sign of desperation. Trump spoke now not only to distract from his sputtering Iran war and its effects on the economy, but also because his attempts to concretely interfere with the 2026 election thus far have almost all failed. As his opportunities to change the rules of the game before November slip away from him, the president is falling back on one of the few tools he has left: attempting to sow chaos and doubt among Americans. Read Article

Opinion: Trump clearly doesn’t know how elections are run in US | Chris Brennan/USA Today

It didn't take long for President Donald Trump's latest conspiracy rant about elections, this time dressed up like a national address on July 16, to start falling apart. Trump's claims about China meddling in American elections flopped, even as the documents he declassified inadvertently confirmed that Russia tried to influence our presidential elections in his favor. Ultimately, Trump offered zero proof that any votes had been changed in the 2016, 2020 or 2024 elections. But what really stood out is just how much Trump showed us he doesn't know about how elections are run in America. And this, too, matters – he doesn't seem at all interested in learning the ins and outs of elections, even as he has spent a decade trying to destabilize America's confidence in how we vote. David Becker, a former Department of Justice lawyer who founded The Center for Election Innovation & Research, told me the president's allegations in his speech were "remarkably flimsy." For Becker, a big takeaway was Trump's obvious, and maybe intentional, ignorance. "We've known for some time that the president just doesn't understand how elections are run and is resistant to learning," Becker said. "He has no clue about any of this stuff." Read Article

Alaska removes thousands from state’s active voter list, erroneously flagging some citizens | James Brooks and Corinne Smith/Alaska Beacon

The state of Alaska has removed an estimated 3,000 to 3,500 Alaskans from the state’s active voter list, claiming they may be noncitizens. The removals leave those residents able to vote only if they provide extra identity information, and removal puts them on track to be purged from the state’s voter roll altogether. Only U.S. citizens may vote in Alaska, according to state and federal law, but many of the removals appear to have affected citizens who were erroneously flagged by the Alaska Division of Motor Vehicles. Carol Beecher, director of the Alaska Division of Elections, told state lawmakers on Wednesday that the removals were the result of “old data” given to the division from the DMV, and she isn’t sure why so many Alaskans were flagged as possible noncitizens. Read Article