Warren Stewart – Page 8 – The Voting News

The Board of Public Works approved a multimillion-dollar contract Wednesday for a new voting system for the 2028 election, despite objections from critics that the system lacks some state and federal certifications. The board — with Comptroller Brooke Lierman absent Wednesday — voted to approve a nearly $85 million base contract with Election Systems and Software for a new voting system. The contract approved by the two remaining board members, Gov. Wes Moore and state Treasurer Dereck Davis, calls for Omaha-based ES&S to be paid nearly $85 million for an initial five-year term, with two optional two-year renewals that could bring the total contract to nine years and more than $109 million. Maryland State Elections Administrator Jared DeMarinis told the board that the time has come to replace the state’s current system, which is more than a decade old. Read Article

Michigan: Trump resurrects debunked Muskegon voter fraud allegations after prior investigations | Katherine Dailey/Michigan Advance

In the middle of President Donald Trump’s primetime speech on Thursday, he pointed to Muskegon to demonstrate what he called “evidence of alleged fraud by a large-scale voter registration operation in Michigan” during the 2020 election cycle. The allegations, which Trump called “pay, play and cheat,” were investigated by both state-level agencies and the FBI, and local officials have repeatedly confirmed that it did not result in any illegal ballots being sent out or illegal votes being cast. The allegations surround a number of voter registrations received by the Muskegon City Clerk’s Office in October 2020, which were flagged as fraudulent based on non-existent addresses, invalid telephone numbers or signatures that did not match records. That was referred to and investigated by the Michigan State Police, Muskegon Police Department and Michigan Department of the Attorney General, who then reported it to the FBI office in Detroit. Read Article

New Jersey governor’s disclosure of noncitizens on voter rolls fuels nationwide debate over how frequently that happens | Dion Nissenbaum/Votebeat

New Jersey stepped to the forefront of the national debate over noncitizen voting this week when the governor announced that a software glitch had allowed nearly 400 noncitizens to vote in elections since 2023 — a revelation that emerged just as President Donald Trump put a target on the state’s back over the issue. Now, New Jersey is scrambling to explain what happened, how officials addressed it, and why it took so long to tell the public. The federal government has sued a majority of states, including New Jersey, for access to unredacted versions of their voter rolls containing voters’ personal information, though so far, federal judges have ruled against the government in more than half of those cases. A top U.S. Department of Justice official — who recently threatened to criminally prosecute election officials who knowingly allowed noncitizens to remain on voter rolls — has also demanded that the state turn over information on the noncitizens involved and said the government intends to prosecute them. Read Article

North Carolina: Mail-in ballots could be more easily thrown out, under new proposal | Will Doran/WRAL

Local elections officials around North Carolina would have more ability to throw out people’s mail-in ballots in the 2026 midterms and in future elections, under a new rule approved by the State Board of Elections on Monday. The tense debate over the rules Monday broke down in a party-line dispute. It came on the heels of a similar meeting last week, where the board also voted along party lines to give local elections officials more power to kick people out of polling places, and to more easily throw out ballots cast by people who lacked voter photo identification. While state law requires voter ID, it also allows for exemptions — such as for people with religious objections to being photographed, or whose ID was stolen shortly before the election. While those exemptions can only currently be denied in a unanimous and bipartisan vote by local elections officials, the proposed new rule would instead allow them to be thrown out in strictly party-line votes — in other words, people could be stopped from voting even if some local officials believed they were legitimate voters who should be allowed to cast a ballot. Read Article

Texas: Robert Howden, Abbott aide, to succeed Jane Nelson as top election official | Eleanor Klibanoff/The Texas Tribune

Robert Howden, a senior adviser to Gov. Greg Abbott, will be Texas’ interim secretary of state, Abbott announced Friday. Howden is a longtime Texas politico who worked for GOP governors going back to Bill Clements, serving as Abbott’s legislative director since 2024. Howden is replacing Jane Nelson, who left her post Friday as Texas’ top election official after three and a half years. Nelson’s resignation, announced in early June, set off a flurry of speculation about why she was leaving and who would replace her ahead of the contentious midterm elections in November. Howden will need to be confirmed by the Texas Senate when the Legislature returns in January, but can serve until then without legislative approval. Nelson’s three immediate predecessors in the role resigned before the Senate got a chance to approve them. Read Article

Wisconsin Democrats sue election commission to OK absentee ballot revotes | Molly Beck/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

A trio of Dane County voters backed by the state Democratic Party is suing the Wisconsin Elections Commission over guidance the panel issued earlier this month that bars absentee voters who have returned their ballots from requesting a new one if their preferred candidate drops out. The lawsuit, filed in Dane County Circuit Court on July 23, asks the judge overseeing the case to block the commission from distributing the guidance and to instead tell local election clerks voters may request a new ballot in this scenario. The court action could upend election rules less than three weeks from the Aug. 11 primary election when voters are set to decide which Democratic candidate for governor they want to face Republican candidate Tom Tiffany in the general election. Read Article

‘Zero new facts’: Teased as a bombshell, Trump election speech underwhelms election officials | Votebeat

After days of speculation among election officials and experts about what President Donald Trump might say in a heavily hyped primetime speech on elections, Trump on Thursday night delivered a mix of familiar claims, grievances, and assertions about election security that stopped short of alleging that votes had been altered or that results had been changed. Instead, Trump revived years-old evidence that China attempted to gather American voter data and that election systems are vulnerable to hacking, information that has long been public and that election officials said they have taken steps to mitigaate. He also claimed to have identified 270,000 noncitizens on the voter rolls — election officials said they weren’t sure how that number was arrived at — and resurfaced old fraud allegations related to voter registration in Michigan. In conjunction with Trump’s speech, his administration released newly declassified documents related to election integrity — some still heavily redacted — that in many cases did not fully back up the president’s claims. Read Article

National: ‘Death by a thousand cuts’: Inside Trump’s remaking of American elections | Maggie Miller, Gregory Svirnovskiy and Aaron Pellish/Politico

President Donald Trump seemingly has a plan for the nation’s election apparatus: Dismantle the existing system with a series of cuts, firings and threats, rather than a sledgehammer blow. Just last week Trump eviscerated the relatively obscure Election Assistance Commission, alarming state election officials across the country who warned it could undermine cybersecurity resources for states and localities. That was just one of the moves the White House has made since Trump returned to office. The president has repeatedly tried to change American election policy via executive order, only to be rebuffed by the courts. And he continues to squeeze congressional Republicans to pass legislation that would force voters to show proof of citizenship at the polls. Read Article

National: What Trump’s newly declassified documents do – and don’t – tell us about threats to US elections | Marshall Cohen and Kevin Liptak/CNN

President Donald Trump in his primetime speech on Thursday is alleging vulnerabilities exist in American election systems, using a large trove of newly declassified documents as evidence to suggest future elections could be at risk of foreign interference, particularly by China. Though the documents are newly declassified, they largely discuss vulnerabilities that have been known for years and election officials around the country have tried to address. None of the declassified information supports the claim that any previous election results — including the 2020 presidential contest that Trump lost — were manipulated by foreign interference or fraud in a way that would’ve changed the outcome. Read Article

National: Democrats call ‘bull—-‘ on Trump’s election interference claims | Sarah Davis/The Hill

Democrats raised alarm after President Trump’s revived his unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election during a Thursday evening address. “You have to be a special kind of stupid to believe this bull—-,” Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), the top Democrat on the House Rules Committee, said in a statement shared on social media ahead of the president’s speech. Trump doubled down on his claims that this election was “stolen” from him and placed blame on the People’s Republic of China and Democratic-led states during his evening address. All 24 Democratic governors called Trump’s claims “deeply alarming” in a joint statement released on Thursday evening. “No amount of lies and conspiracy theories can change the fact that our country’s elections have repeatedly been proven to be safe and secure,” they said. “These attacks are intended to intimidate and silence voters.” Read Article

National: States are building their own election defense networks as federal support evaporates | Derek B. Johnson/CyberScoop

The Trump administration’s abrupt firing of Election Assistance Commission commissioners last week and a Department of Justice warning threatening states with criminal prosecution have created new legal peril for officials who run, administer and secure elections. The EAC is an obscure but important agency that oversees testing and standards for voting machines, including around security. While federal certification is voluntary, states have until now relied upon their stamp of approval when purchasing voting machines. On July 10, Democratic Commissioners Ben Hovland and Thomas Hicks were fired by the White House, while reports indicate that a third Commissioner, Republican Christy McCormick, resigned. While Congress mandated the commission be bipartisan, the Supreme Court has recently given the President broad authority to fire executive branch officials at will. In an interview with NPR, Hovland said he worried the firings would further erode trust that the commission was working in a bipartisan manner. Read Article

National: Voting System Vulnerabilities and How They Can Be Weaponized | Geoff Hale/Electionline Weekly

Vulnerabilities in voting systems are real and worth fixing. At the same time, the manner in which they are used to fearmonger does not reflect the actual security of elections. Security researchers do find real weaknesses embedded in the code and operations of U.S. voting systems, just like they do with power grids, banks, and telecommunications, all of which share the same “critical infrastructure” designation as elections. Finding a flaw and fixing it is a sign of a mature system, not a sign it’s broken. But claiming that vulnerabilities in voting systems exist is different from claiming that vulnerabilities in voting systems have been exploited, and even further distinct from claiming that vulnerabilities in voting systems have been exploited during live election operations in a manner to have rigged past elections, flipped votes, and determined outcomes. Each one of those concepts relies on a distinct body of evidence to be proven true. Public discourse that intentionally conflates the evidence for one to equate the outcomes of another is deceptive and can be disproven. The evidentiary record does not support claims that voting system vulnerabilities have been exploited to rig recent elections such as the 2020 presidential election in the United States. Read Article

National: FBI Has Looked at Using Questionable AI Tech to Review Signatures on Seized Mail-In Ballots | Jeremy Kohler and Doug Bock Clark/ProPublica

The FBI has explored using artificial intelligence to assess the validity of signatures on tens of thousands of mail-in ballot envelopes seized from Fulton County, Georgia, the latest push in the Trump administration’s unprecedented reinvestigation of the 2020 vote. The effort, according to internal communications reviewed by ProPublica and an agency tech specialist familiar with the work, focuses on comparing signatures on ballot envelopes with signatures on other election documents, such as registration forms. President Donald Trump has long claimed, without evidence, that the 2020 election was stolen from him. In particular, he has repeatedly claimed that there was voter fraud in Georgia, where he lost to Joe Biden by just 11,779 votes. In January, the FBI raided Fulton County, a Democratic stronghold, collecting about 700 boxes of election materials, including about 150,000 mail-in ballots, of which roughly 116,000 went for Biden. Trump is set to deliver a speech Thursday about national election security and voting machine vulnerabilities, but it is unclear whether he will address the Fulton County investigation. Read Article

Opinion: Trump Just Did More Damage to American Elections Than China | Tom Nichols/The Atlantic

President Trump addressed the American people tonight and told them that their elections are at the mercy of foreign actors—especially China. He called the current situation a “crisis” and vowed to prevent any future elections from being “stolen.” He directed the public to a website where people can peruse documents that he says prove not only that bad actors have influenced U.S. elections, but that all of this was kept from him by “deep state” malefactors during his first term. Foreign powers do, in fact, try to influence American elections, but that was about all that the president—who seems shocked that other nations have preferences about who wins elected office in the United States—got right. The rest was a mishmash: Much of the previously classified material that Trump just splattered on the internet does not support his accusations, and in some cases, these declassified documents actually undermine and refute his charges. Trump Just Did More Damage to American Elections Than China - The Atlantic

Arizona: Maricopa County’s election dispute is finally over — at least on paper | Sasha Hupka/Votebeat

Officials in one of the nation’s biggest swing counties huddled in separate, windowless jury chambers at a courthouse Monday. Outside, a summer monsoon storm unleashed dust, wind, rain, and lightning over Phoenix. Inside, long after business hours, a local judge hurried back and forth, carrying proposed terms from one room to the other. Around 10 p.m., they reached a consensus. Maricopa County finally had a plan for running its elections, and its board of supervisors enacted it in a 3-1 vote at a hastily scheduled emergency meeting Tuesday. Read Article

Colorado: ‘Administrative nightmare’ faces elections if Trump attack on mail ballots succeeds | Lindsey Toomer/Colorado Newsline

A U.S. Postal Service rule proposed as a result of a President Donald Trump’s executive order to limit voting by mail would upend the ability of Coloradans to easily access their ballots ahead of November’s general election. Colorado is a universal mail-in ballot state, and the vast majority of residents choose to vote by mail. Drastic changes to that system in the same year as a general election would be a massive logistical challenge, election experts say. While they don’t anticipate the executive order will survive legal challenges, election officials and voter advocates have considered how to respond if they do. The executive order called on the Postal Service to create a rule that requires states to notify the agency if they intend to allow ballots to be sent through the mail. States would have to submit a list of voters planning to vote by mail. The Postal Service would not deliver ballots in states that refuse to submit a list. It would also require that ballot envelopes have a unique barcode that allows the Postal Service to identify which voter mailed the ballot. Read Article

Georgia’s Senators Ridicule Trump’s Election Fraud Claims | Carl Hulse/The New York Times

Georgia’s two Democratic senators didn’t wait for President Trump to try to undermine their legitimacy with false claims about their crucial election victories in 2020 that propelled Democrats to the Senate majority. In interviews and social media posts, Senators Raphael Warnock and John Ossoff have aggressively countered a potential presidential claim that they did not win their seats fairly. They acted after reports that the president would use a speech scheduled for Thursday evening to take aim at them, alleging widespread fraud in Georgia voting six years ago despite multiple inquiries that produced no evidence of wrongdoing. The two senators and their Democratic allies have ridiculed the president’s fixation on his loss in 2020 and the accompanying Democratic victories as driven by the president’s fragile ego, his efforts to sow distrust about the coming election results and to pressure congressional Republicans to pass new voting restrictions.Read Article

Kansas judge issues injunction temporarily blocking repeal of voters’ 3-day grace period | Tim Carpenter/Kansas Reflector

A Douglas County District Court judge issued a temporary injunction Thursday keeping in place a 2017 state law allowing the counting of advance mail ballots postmarked by Election Day but arriving at county offices up to three days after polls closed. Judge Carl Folsom’s order placed a hold on a 2025 law that required rejection of advance mail-in ballots not received by county election officials by 7 p.m. on Election Day. The lawsuit by Kansas Appleseed, Loud Light, the Disability Rights Center of Kansas and three Kansas voters asserted repeal of the three-day grace period was a “deliberate and unconstitutional assault on Kansans’ fundamental right to vote.” The plaintiffs filed the suit against Secretary of State Scott Schwab and Douglas County Clerk Jamie Shew. “After considering the extensive briefing and evidence submitted on this issue, the court grants the temporary injunction requested by plaintiffs,” the judge’s order says. “The deadline for the receipt by mail of the advance voting ballots by the office of the county election officer shall be the last delivery of mail by the United States Postal Service on the third day following the date of the election.” Read Article

Michigan: Trump cites suspect 2020 Muskegon voter registrations in election security speech | Todd Spangler/Detroit Free Press

Addressing the nation on the subject of election security, President Donald Trump suggested an FBI investigation into alleged voter registration fraud in Muskegon in 2020 was "buried and covered up" and instructed his administration to take it back up six years later. But documents the Trump administration itself declassified as the president was speaking on Thursday, July 16, seemed to indicate that federal officials continued to look into the case for years while Trump was out of office, interviewing witnesses and comparing applications with state records. It was only in September 2025 − eight months after Trump's second, nonconsecutive term began − that the Grand Rapids field office concluded that "no criminal violation or priority threat to national security" had been identified. Those documents also seemed to suggest that no voters had been paid to register to vote but that an employee or employees of a voter registration firm may have submitted falsely completed applications. If they did so, the documents suggested, it likely occurred not as a rampant scam to alter an election outcome but as an attempt by the employee or employees to appear more productive than they otherwise may have been and perhaps receive a bonus. Read Article

Nevada senators blame USPS for mail ballots that arrived at wrong office | Ricardo Torres-Cortez/Las Vegas Review-Journal

U.S. Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen are demanding the U.S. Postal Service explain how 34 Nevada mail ballots from June’s primary elections arrived at the wrong location weeks after Election Day, leading to the cancellation of those votes. The Democrats requested a formal investigation in a Thursday letter addressed to Postmaster General David Steiner and USPS Inspector General Tammy Hull. “To ensure these issues are corrected before the November midterm elections, we urge USPS to immediately initiate this investigation and share its results with Congress,” the letter said. “We also urge USPS Office of the Inspector General (OIG) to evaluate whether an independent OIG investigation is warranted.” The senators gave the postal service and the inspector general’s office August deadlines to brief them. Read Article

New Jersey: GOP suit claims overseas voting law is unconstitutional | Nikita Biryukov/New Jersey Monitor

A GOP congressional candidate and state and national Republican committees are seeking to overturn a 2022 law that allows citizen children born abroad to New Jerseyans to vote in the state’s federal elections. In a lawsuit filed Thursday in Mercer County Superior Court, Michael McGuire, who is running for the 3rd District House seat, and the RNC alleged the law runs afoul of provisions in New Jersey’s Constitution that require residents live in their state and county for 30 days to be eligible to vote there. The Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act allows Americans living abroad to vote in federal U.S. elections if they would be eligible to do so in the last state they lived in before departing the country. Read Article

North Carolina: ‘We’re supporting a lie’: Elections Board votes to throw out ballots more easily | Will Doran/WRAL

It could soon be easier for North Carolina elections officials to throw out people’s ballots during the 2026 midterm elections and beyond, under new rules approved Thursday by the State Board of Elections. The new changes, backed by the Republican majority on the State Board of Elections and opposed by the board's Democratic minority, make it easier for elections officials to reject people’s excuses for not having required voter identification. They'd also make it easier to kick people out of polling places, in addition to other changes. The board also plans to vote Monday on similar rules making it easier to throw out mail-in ballots. The rules aren't immediately official. After approval by the elections board they must also be approved by the state's Rules Review Commission — which also has a Republican majority and which one of the election board's Republican members said Thursday will likely also sign off on the changes. Read Article

Pennsylvania says it will not hand over voter rolls to federal government in reply to DOJ letter | Andrea Padilla/The Philadelphia Inquirer

Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt stressed that the state was not in violation of any voting regulations in a response letter to a Department of Justice inquiry that threatened criminal charges over suspicions of noncitizen voting. The letter, sent Monday, pushed back against the Trump administration’s insistence that allowing federal assistance in inspecting voter rolls was the best way to avoid criminal prosecution for “aiding and abetting the violation” of federal voting laws. The Trump administration’s letter, sent July 7, was addressed to voting officials in all 50 states and requested a reply within the week. Schmidt’s reply made it clear that Pennsylvania would not hand over voter rolls to the federal government and reiterated that voting regulations were followed meticulously. Read Article

Texas secretary of state raised concerns about federal SAVE program used to verify voters’ citizenship | Natalia Contreras/Votebeat

The Texas Secretary of State’s Office used a controversial federal data tool to flag more than 2,000 potential noncitizens on the state’s voter roll last year. But in an April letter to federal immigration officials, Secretary of State Jane Nelson raised concerns about its accuracy. In that letter to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials, obtained as part of a public records request by Democracy Forward — a nonprofit legal organization advocating for democracy through litigation and public policy — and shared with Votebeat, Nelson said her office wanted “to make sure that you are using the most accurate data,” and asked agency officials to notify her office if they are able to “confirm the citizenship of any individuals previously identified as non-citizens” in the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, system. Alicia Pierce, a spokesperson for the secretary of state’s office, said the agency has not yet received a response from USCIS. Nelson resigned from her role last month. Her last day is July 17, and the governor has not yet appointed a replacement.. Read Article

Wisconsin board says Elon Musk likely broke the law by promising voters $1 million payouts | Scott Bauer/Associated Press

Billionaire Elon Musk likely broke Wisconsin law when he promised to hand out $1 million checks to voters in the 2025 state Supreme Court election, a bipartisan panel has found. The Wisconsin Elections Commission last week referred two complaints to the Brown County district attorney’s office, which can choose to bring criminal charges over violating the state law against election bribery. Prosecutors have 40 days to report back to the commission. Musk, the founder of SpaceX and CEO of Tesla, was deeply involved in the effort to flip majority control of the highest court in battleground Wisconsin. The tech titan and groups he supported spent at least $20 million on the candidate backed by Republicans, Brad Schimel. However, he lost by 10 percentage points to Democratic-backed candidate Susan Crawford. Read Article

Trump fires Election Assistance Commission members, leaving agency unable to act | Jessica Huseman/Votebeat

President Donald Trump fired all three remaining members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission on Thursday, abruptly disabling the only federal agency devoted solely to election administration at a moment when Trump has sought to reshape federal voting rules. The two Democratic commissioners, Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland, were notified by email. “On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as Commissioner of the Election Assistance Commission is terminated, effective immediately. Thank you for your service,” the email said. It was signed by Morgan DeWitt Snow, deputy director of presidential personnel in the Executive Office of the President. The third commissioner, Republican Christy McCormick, was allowed to resign, according to three sources within the agency. McCormick declined to comment when reached by phone. The agency’s fourth commissioner, Republican Donald Palmer, voluntarily departed the agency earlier this year to join the Heritage Foundation. Read Article

National: Trump administration ramps up pressure on state election officials | Geoff ulvihill and Marc Levy/Associated Press

President Donald Trump’s administration is threatening to withhold some federal funding from states that don’t make changes to voting practices and is warning state election officials that they face arrest if they don’t remove noncitizens from voter rolls. Letters to states and grant application details are the latest in a line of actions by Trump’s administration to shape details of running elections that have long been the job of states. Courts have largely rejected the administration’s previous efforts, which reflect untrue claims about widespread voting fraud and come less than four months ahead of crucial midterm elections where Democrats seek to take control of one or both chambers of Congress and check Trump’s power. “The overall point is that Trump is trying to use whatever levers of power and persuasive power that he might have to try to interfere with how states and localities are going to conduct the 2026 election,” said Rick Hasen, a UCLA law professor and the director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project. “Some of this is aimed at changing how the rules are conducted. Some of it appears to be aimed at undermining voter confidence in the integrity of the election process.” Read Article

National: Justice Department Threatens Top Election Officials Over Noncitizen Voting | Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times

The Justice Department sent letters to at least 10 states on Tuesday threatening criminal prosecution of top election officials if ballots cast by noncitizens were counted in upcoming elections. The letters arrived in the midst of an ongoing campaign by President Trump and his allies to tighten election rules to prevent a problem that doesn’t exist: widespread noncitizen voting in American elections. The effort has, however, continued to sow doubt and distrust in the electoral process, most notably among the president’s base of supporters. And his proposals could have the effect of making it more difficult for eligible voters to cast their ballots — an outcome that many voting-right activists say is the president’s real goal. The letters sent on Tuesday came from Harmeet Dhillon, who runs the Justice Department’s civil rights division. They are largely identical, according to multiple copies obtained by The New York Times. The seven-page letters detail a host of federal election laws that prohibit noncitizens from voting in elections — laws that have been clear for decades. Read Article

National: States will shape America’s future as nation confronts a pivotal choice | Jonathan Shorman and Kevin Hardy/News From The States

A quarter millennium after its founding, the United States faces a stark choice that will define its future. In the years ahead, the country can continue to follow the path blazed by President Donald Trump, who is attempting to bring states under the authority of a more powerful federal government led by him. Or it can move in a different direction, one where states become a heavier counterweight to an aggressive White House and rebalance the relationship between the states and the federal government. The United States’ foundations are undergoing a significant stress test, experts say, raising questions about whether a radical reconception of the nation lies ahead. The federalism that has helped bind the states — and therefore, the nation — together is fraying, pulled apart by a president who demonstrates little regard for many of the nation’s core principles. Read Article

National: Federal law that protects voters from last-minute removal is at the center of Trump’s anti-voting war | Yunior Rivas/Democracy Docket