National: The GOP Is Attacking the VRA From All Angles — and Could Soon Make it All But Useless | Jim Saksa/Democracy Docket

It took nearly a century for Congress to enact legislation to enforce the 15th Amendment. It may take conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court only a little more than a decade to fully eviscerate that law — the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA). After a 2013 ruling neutered the strongest plank of the VRA, it now faces an unprecedented and multi-pronged legal attack that could leave the landmark civil rights law all but useless for stopping racial discrimination in voting. A raft of lawsuits aimed at narrowing the VRA, or gutting its most powerful remaining section completely, are either now before the court or waiting in the wings. Read Article

Arizona counties defy attorney general opinion on voters caught in proof-of-citizenship error | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Thousands of Arizona voters caught up in a state record-keeping error will lose at least some voting rights if they don’t prove their citizenship, despite a recent opinion from the state attorney general saying they should remain fully eligible to vote. In Maricopa County, affected voters who don’t provide documentary proof of citizenship in time will be allowed to vote only in federal elections, according to public records obtained by Votebeat. And neighboring Pinal County will continue to suspend the registration of any voters affected by the error if they try to change their address or otherwise update their record without providing citizenship documentation, the county recorder’s office confirmed. Read Article

Georgia: Judge rejects challenge to election law provisions related to absentee ballots | Kate Brumback/Associated Press

A judge has rejected a challenge to two provisions of a Georgia election law related to absentee ballot applications. The provisions were part of a sweeping elections overhaul passed by Republican state lawmakers in Georgia in 2021, months after President Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden. Advocacy groups and the Department of Justice under Biden sued to challenge various aspects of the law. The ruling Monday by U.S. District Judge J.P. Boulee focused on the two absentee ballot provisions that were challenged by nonprofit groups devoted to increasing voter turnout. One of the provisions prohibits sending voters absentee ballot applications with the voter’s required information already filled in. The other bars the sending of an absentee ballot to anyone who has already requested one. Read Article

Michigan Republican budget proposal would cut funds for local election support | Hayley Harding/Votebeat

Michigan House Republicans have put more than $10 million in state election support on the chopping block in their proposed budget for the coming fiscal year. The $10 million hit is a tiny portion of a huge budget battle that may lead to a shutdown of Michigan’s government next month. But in a state that has over 1,600 election officials and dozens of local elections scheduled for November, it represents the slashing of a critical resource. In the 2024-25 fiscal year, the Department of State’s budget was about $292 million. Proposals from the Senate, which is controlled by Democrats, and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s office would both boost it to about $296.5 million, while the latest budget proposed by House Republicans would cut it down to $222.5 million. Read Article

Ohio: Cuyahoga County elections machines damaged by leaky garage at new headquarters; ballots safe | Kaitlin Durbin/Cleveland Plain Dealer

The Cuyahoga County Board of Elections just settled into its new headquarters this summer, but it has already encountered a serious problem: rainwater and crumbling cement in the parking garage damaged two expensive machines that process mail-in ballots. First, the water and debris damaged a sensor and the control arms on one of the machines, which sorts ballots by municipality and precinct while capturing voters’ signatures for verification. That machine now has to be sent out for repairs, costing an estimated $20,000-26,000, Deputy Director Anthony Kaloger told BOE Board members during a Monday meeting. Then, cement flakes and water infiltrated the second machine over Labor Day weekend, despite staff attempting to cover the machines with carport tents. The leaks didn’t interfere with voting in Tuesday’s Primary Election, thanks to staff workarounds and relatively low turnout, Kaloger assured: “Not one ballot was damaged. Not one voter was disenfranchised,” he said. But he said staff also doesn’t want to risk equipment failures during busier elections. Even if the garage could be repaired to assure “reasonable dryness,” Kaloger said, that’s not enough to safeguard the ballots and the county’s investment in the machines, which each cost about $250,000. “At this point we had seen enough,” Kaloger said. “You can’t park a Jaguar in a barn.” Read Article

Pennsylvania: What to know about the poll worker positions on the 2025 election ballot | Carter Walker/Votebeat

More than 27,000 poll worker positions will be on ballots across Pennsylvania this November, allowing voters to select who will be in charge of their precincts during the 2026 and 2028 election cycles. Only Pennsylvanians are voting for these positions. No other state still elects its poll workers, and these contests are usually riddled with vacancies. That makes elections for poll workers more complicated than most. Read Article

South Dakota Legislative board approves rules for challenging voting rights based on residency, voting history | Makenzie Huber/South Dakota Searchlight

Legislators finalized rules this week allowing additional grounds for challenging a person’s right to vote in South Dakota. The rules, approved Tuesday by the Interim Rules Review Committee, are a result of Senate Bill 185, which was signed into law in March. It expanded the justifications for challenging voter rights to include claims that a registered voter has died, is not a legal resident of the state or has voted or registered in another state. Previously, state law allowed challenges based on a person’s identity, a felony conviction or mental incompetency. Those challenges are still allowed. Read Article

Washington counties to join multistate election cybersecurity group | Laurel Demkovich/Cascade PBS

The Washington Secretary of State’s Office is funding memberships for all counties to join a multistate election-security program after federal money for election cybersecurity was cut, the Secretary of State Office announced Tuesday. All 39 counties will be members of the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center, a nonprofit that provides cybersecurity threat prevention and response support to 18,000 government organizations across the country. Membership in the organization includes access to cyberthreat intelligence, incident response support and real-time information sharing, according to the Secretary of State’s Office. Read Article

Wisconsin: What to know about the investigations into the Wausau absentee ballot drop box saga | Anna Kleiber/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Nearly a year after Wausau Mayor Doug Diny’s removal of the city’s sole absentee ballot drop box located outside of city hall, investigations into the drop box, its removal and return continue. In its May 27 ruling, the commission found that city officials did not violate the law or abuse their discretion in establishing and operating the drop box. The commission found the drop box acceptable as officials properly secured the box to the ground throughout its use and there were no allegations that ballots deposited in the drop box were not properly accounted for and processed on Election Day. Additionally, the commission rejected allegations related to security measures for the drop box, noting there were clear camera views of the drop box and adequate lighting illuminating the area surrounding it. The ruling also stated the city correctly labeled the drop box with an 8 p.m. deadline on Election Day. Read Article

Election Officials Must Guard Their Systems — Including from Federal Overreach | Pamela Smith/Democracy Docket

State and local officials are the stewards of our democracy. Elections are run by these trusted professionals in our communities, not by the federal government. They register voters, count ballots and certify the results. And when it comes to safeguarding equipment, they simply cannot allow unauthorized access — even if that request comes directly from the White House.Right now, these barriers are being tested. In Colorado, the U.S. Department of Justice recently made a sweeping and unprecedented demand for access to state voter information. A political consultant, claiming to be working on behalf of the White House, also called several county clerks to gain access to their voting equipment. Read Article

 

Trump canceling elections? Democrats increasingly sound alarm bells. | Aaron Blake/CNN

When President Donald Trump sat down with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last month, the topic was the weighty issue of ending Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But at one point, Trump took a provocative diversion into domestic politics. Zelensky noted that, in his country, the law doesn’t allow for elections during periods of martial law. “So you say during the war, you can’t have elections,” Trump responded. “So let me just say, three and a half years from now – so you mean, if we happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections? Oh, that’s good.” Laughter ensued. Trump wondered aloud what the “fake news” would do with his comment. Read Article

National: No, Trump Can’t Legally Federalize US Elections | Lily Hay Newman/WIRED

“It’s right there in the Constitution from the very beginning, Article One, that the states set the time, place, and manner of elections. The states run the elections; Congress can add rules, but the president has no role,” says Lawrence Norden of the Brennan Center at New York University School of Law. “Trump makes all these pronouncements that he’s going to end mail voting, that voting machines can’t be trusted, but he can’t do that. He certainly has the bully pulpit, though, to mislead and confuse the public—and the power to intimidate.” Pamela Smith, president of Verified Voting, a nonpartisan nonprofit that promotes election system integrity, emphasizes that it is very difficult to unpack and disentangle the concerns the administration is raising from the inherently inappropriate use of the presidency as a vehicle for attempting to dictate election requirements. “It’s really hard to talk about all of this when the context is just wrong,” Smith says. “It’s not up to the White House to say to the Election Assistance Commission, ‘You should change how you do voting machine certification and decertification.’” Read Article

National: DHS to states: Follow our voting rules or lose out on election security money | Miles Parks and Stephen Fowler/NPR

The Trump administration has indicated it may withhold tens of millions of dollars in election security funding if states don’t comply with its voting policy goals. The money comes from a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) grant program, and voting officials say new requirements from the administration will make the money inaccessible for most of the country. About $28 million — or 3% of the overall Homeland Security Grant Program — is devoted to election security and now at risk, though some officials and experts worry that the new requirements could also endanger hundreds of millions of dollars in other grants for law enforcement. Voting officials say the amount of money at risk won’t make or break the country’s election security. But the potential withholding of funds over policy differences — combined with other recent election security cuts — has many wondering whether the Trump administration is prioritizing election security the way it claims it is. Read Article

National: Trump faces a hurdle in banning mail-in voting: His own party | Matt Dixon and Henry J. Gomez/NBC

“My view on vote-by-mail is that I think it should be permissible,” Michigan state House Majority Leader Bryan Posthumus, a Republican who endorsed Trump last year, said in an interview with NBC News. “But I also believe that currently, the way it exists, specifically in Michigan, it is the highest risk for fraud.” Posthumus’ perspective was echoed by nearly a dozen other GOP officials across the country who sympathized with Trump’s grievances and agreed that changes to mail-in balloting are necessary. But they question whether Trump could — or should — legally enact a ban. Some also worry a ban could create issues for members of the military who vote overseas and for Republican candidates in states where voting by mail is popular. “As Trump often does, sometimes he overstates his case,” said Paul Dame, chair of the Vermont Republican Party. “I don’t think anyone supports a complete elimination. That would disenfranchise men and women overseas. I’m sure that’s not his intention.” Read Article

National: Trump administration demands state voter data, including partial Social Security numbers | Fredreka Schouten/CNN

The Trump administration has stepped up efforts to obtain personal information about tens of millions of voters across the country, including seeking sensitive data such as partial Social Security numbers. The push, overseen by the Department of Justice, comes as President Donald Trump asserts a larger federal role in elections ahead of next year’s midterms, which are set to determine which party controls Congress during his last two years in the White House. In recent weeks, state election officials have received letters from Harmeet Dhillon, who oversees the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, seeking unredacted copies of states’ voter registration databases. The information includes voters’ names, birthdates, addresses, and driver’s license numbers or the last four digits of their Social Security numbers. Read Article

National: Voter registration groups blocked from naturalization events | Ashley Lopez/NPR

Nongovernmental groups are now barred from registering new voters at naturalization ceremonies, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has announced. The policy, which was issued Friday, says “that only state and local election officials will be permitted to offer voter registration services at the end of administrative naturalization ceremonies.” Groups like the League of Women Voters criticized the decision. They often partner with local and state election officials or supplement their work to administer registration services — and that includes during naturalization ceremonies. Read Article

National: Understanding the debate over efforts to clean up ‘dirty’ voter rolls – Jen Fifield and Carter Walker/Votebeat

The federal government’s demands that states turn over their voter rolls and related information highlights longstanding conflicts over how to ensure that only eligible voters are registered without endangering voting rights. The U.S. Justice Department has sent letters to several states — and plans to send many more — asking them for copies of their voter lists and for detailed information about how they maintain them. The department has said it’s seeking to enforce requirements in federal law that President Donald Trump has ordered it to prioritize. It has already sued North Carolina, alleging that the state has not been properly verifying voter identity, and sued Orange County, California, for refusing to provide full records for 17 people who have been removed from the rolls in connection with a probe of potential noncitizen voting. And it has threatened to sue or withhold federal funding from other states if they do not comply with their requests for information. Read Article

National: House Republicans form new subcommittee to probe Jan. 6 | Kadia Goba and Paul Kane/The Washington Post

House Republicans voted on Wednesday to establish a new subcommittee to reinvestigate the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, moving to reopen one of the most polarizing chapters in American politics. Lawmakers slipped a resolution into a rule on the House floor that would establish the subcommittee, which is likely to be headed by Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Georgia). Republicans have complained that the original probe, which was led by Democrats, was biased against President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly denied he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden. Loudermilk has already helmed one inquiry into Jan. 6: He used a subcommittee of the House Administration Committee to conduct a follow-up to the Democratic-led investigation after Republicans retook control of the House in 2023. Read Article

Opinion: The Trump Administration’s Arguments About the National Guard Threaten the 2026 Elections | Richard Bernstein/Society for the Rule of Law

Yesterday, federal District Judge Charles Breyer ruled that the Trump Administration’s federalization of the National Guard in Los Angeles to assist in immigration law enforcement violated the Posse Comitatus Act, which is 18 U.S.C. section 1385. The Posse Comitatus Act bars use of the military for law enforcement, “except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress.” The Trump Administration argued that the National Guard authorization statute on which it relied—10 U.S.C. section 12406(3)—is an express exception. Judge Breyer’s ruling to the contrary, at pages 26-32 of his decision, was his core holding. Although the Los Angeles deployment was not about elections, if an appellate court adopts certain arguments made by the Trump Administration in that case, such a decision could set our country on a path to military interference in the 2026 elections. Read Article

Arizona’s Cochise County, known for election turmoil, may challenge state laws again ahead of 2026 | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

When the Cochise County supervisors sat down to talk about elections in August, they were well aware of what happened the last time the county’s leaders tried to test the limits of state law. The rural Arizona county on the Mexican border is where, during the 2022 midterm election, two Republicans on the Board of Supervisors devised a plan to ditch the machines used for elections and instead hand-count votes, before a judge foiled their plan. They then delayed the vote to finalize the county’s results until the same judge ordered them to certify them. Supervisor Tom Crosby, who was re-elected last year, is awaiting a criminal trial on charges related to his actions during that election. And the county’s two new supervisors, also both Republicans, know his story well, and have been warned by the secretary of state about the election rules they must follow. Read Article

Colorado: Trump says he’s moving Space Command HQ to Alabama because of Colorado’s mail-in voting system | Rebecca Shabad/NBC

President Donald Trump announced Tuesday that U.S. Space Command’s headquarters will move to Alabama from Colorado, reversing a Biden administration decision. In remarks at the White House, Trump said he was making the shift in part because of Colorado’s use of mail-in voting. “The problem I have with Colorado, one of the big problems, they do mail-in voting, they went to all mail-in voting, so they have automatically crooked elections,” Trump said in the Oval Office. Colorado allows for in-person elections, but every voter automatically receives a ballot in the mail. According to Colorado’s secretary of state, about 92% of the ballots cast in last November’s election were a mail ballot, with about 8% voting in person. Read Article

Georgia Republican lawmakers push for hand-marked ballots in November election | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Key Georgia lawmakers Tuesday called for a rapid test-run of hand-marked paper ballots in this year’s elections, switching from touchscreens in some polling places. The rush to try paper ballots filled out by hand follows mounting pressure from President Donald Trump, conservatives and election security activists who oppose electronic voting touchscreens. A switch would comply with part of a state law passed last year requiring the elimination of computerized QR codes from ballots by July 1, 2026. Under their proposal, Raffensperger would ask counties and cities to voluntarily participate in the trial of hand-marked paper ballots during the election for Public Service Commission on Nov. 4. Raffensperger has defended the security and accuracy of Georgia’s voting system, saying audits repeatedly show Georgia’s vote counts are correct. But he didn’t immediately comment Tuesday on the lawmakers’ request. Read Article

Louisiana begins public demonstrations of new voting systems | Alyse Pfeil/New Orleans Times-Picayune

For more than three decades, Louisianans have pushed buttons on the same voting machines when casting ballots for everything from local school board members to president of the United States. But Louisiana is now in the process of selecting an entirely new voting system, and it could look very different than the current one that state leaders for years have decried as woefully out-of-date. On Tuesday, the secretary of state’s office held the first of six public demonstrations by companies that hope to compete for the contract for the new voting system. While each is different, they all must comply with requirements state lawmakers established in 2021 — and that includes the use of paper ballots. Read Article

Missouri: Trump’s DOJ seeks voting equipment ahead of 2026 election | Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Patrick Marley/The Washington Post

A top official in President Donald Trump’s Justice Department recently sought access to voting equipment used by two Republican clerks in Missouri during the 2020 election, an unusual request from federal officials amid continued efforts by the president to malign the integrity of the nation’s voting systems. Trump overwhelmingly won each of his three elections in Missouri, yet many of his supporters there and elsewhere continue to champion the president’s false claim that voting equipment was rigged against him in 2020 and that ballots should be tallied by hand. The Trump administration, working with an intermediary, previously sought access to voting equipment in Colorado, but the effort in Missouri appears to originate directly from the Justice Department. Read Article

Ohio’s anti-tech rural counties work to ban voting machines for “Flintstones” hand-counting | Cleveland Plain Dealer

A growing movement in rural Ohio counties is pushing to abandon modern voting technology in favor of hand-counted paper ballots, sparking criticism of those who would debilitate election security and accuracy. Friday’s episode of Today in Ohio blasted the idea. “It would be a disaster if we let idiots start to set policy. People who don’t understand science, so they just want to reject it,” said Chris Quinn during the discussion. “This is a backward way of thinking. And really, I wish we had a time machine so we could ship them back to the Middle Ages, which is where they want to be.” The push is coming from a group calling themselves the “Coalition of Concerned Voters” in Monroe and Seneca counties, who are fighting to get a local referendum on the ballot that would replace electronic voting machines with hand-counted paper ballots. Their argument? Ohioans never really had a say in adopting machines in the first place, and they don’t trust the audit process that samples approximately 5 percent of ballots. Read Article

Pennsylvania: A federal appeals court affirmed state can’t throw out misdated mail ballots. What could happen next? | Lindsay Shachnow/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

In Pennsylvania, absentee and mail ballots must be received by county elections offices by 8 p.m. on Election Day. So requiring voters to date their ballots didn’t seem to serve much of a purpose, said Justin Levitt, an election law expert and law professor at Loyola Marymount University’s Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. “Why are you throwing out something as important as somebody’s vote for something that isn’t important at all?” he said. “It’s like throwing somebody’s ballot out if they use black pen rather than blue pen.” Last week, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed. The federal court ordered Pennsylvania to stop throwing out mail ballots that are incorrectly dated by voters, affirming earlier court rulings. But the legal fight is unlikely to end there. Read Article

Pennsylvania nuns who stood up to claims of election fraud win national award | Carter Walker/Votebeat

As the 2024 presidential election approached, tensions were high, and activists were, once again, hunting for fraud. Cliff Maloney, a Republican activist working to get GOP voters to return their mail ballots, said on the social network X that one of his door-to-door canvassers had discovered an address in Erie, Pennsylvania, that had no residents but 53 voters registered to it. “Turns out it’s the Benedictine Sisters of Erie and NO ONE lives there,” he wrote in a post that went viral, adding that he would not let “Dems count illegal votes.” But that wasn’t true. And Maloney found himself being called out by the nuns, who didn’t appreciate being accused of fraud. “We do live at Mount Saint Benedict Monastery and a simple web search would alert him to our active presence in a number of ministries in Erie,” Sister Stephanie Schmidt, of the Benedictine Sisters of Erie, said in a statement, calling Maloney’s post “blatantly false.” Read Article

Some Texas counties replace touchscreen voting machines after Trump order | Natalia Contreras/The Texas Tribune

After years of using a touchscreen machine to mark their ballots, voters in at least three Texas counties will be asked instead to make their selections directly on the paper ballots, by hand, starting in November. Election officials in Collin, Williamson, and Bastrop counties said they’re proactively changing their voting procedures and equipment in response to an executive order from President Donald Trump in March that sought to mostly ban voting equipment that uses barcodes or QR codes on paper ballots to speed up vote counting. Some other provisions in the executive order have been blocked by the courts, but this one has not. The order instructed the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, which crafts the certification guidelines that most states rely on for their voting equipment, to amend the guidelines to prohibit such systems and “take appropriate action” to review and rescind previously issued certifications based on prior standards. Read Article

White House changes course after Trump vows executive order to ‘end’ mail-in voting | John T. Bennett/Roll Call

The White House has abruptly altered course on President Donald Trump’s vow to have an elite legal team craft an executive order that would end mail-in voting, with a top aide saying the administration would instead forge a legislative path. “We’re going to start with an executive order that’s being written right now by the best lawyers in the country to end mail-in ballots because they’re corrupt,” he told reporters. But White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Tuesday, just over 24 hours later, signaled that the administration had ditched the president’s approach. Asked what changed so quickly, and whether Trump had received a legal ruling from within the administration that his office lacked the authority to make such a dramatic election change, a White House spokesman merely lobbed accusations at Democrats and repeated Trump’s 2024 campaign platform on the issue. Read Article

National: Voting officials are leaving their jobs at the highest rate in decades | Miles Parks/NPR

Turnover among the country’s election officials has continued to increase — now nearly five years after Donald Trump’s failed attempt to overturn the 2020 contest led to voting officials facing more pressure and harassment. Some 2 in 5 of all the local officials who administered the 2020 election left their jobs before the 2024 cycle, according to research out Tuesday from the Bipartisan Policy Center. The trend was especially pronounced in large jurisdictions, where the Trump campaign’s misinformation about voting often focused. “This is in alignment with the challenges, burnout, threats and harassment that election officials are facing,” said Rachel Orey, who oversees the center’s Elections Project. Read Article