National

Five years ago, President Donald Trump pressured Republican county election officials, state lawmakers and members of Congress to find him votes after he lost his reelection bid. Now, he’s seeking to change the rules before ballots are cast. Trump, openly fearful that a Congress controlled by Democrats could investigate him, impeach him and stymie his agenda, is using every tool he can find to try to influence the 2026 midterm elections and, if his party loses, sow doubt in their validity. Many of these endeavors go far beyond typical political persuasion, challenging long-established democratic norms. They include unprecedented demands that Republican state lawmakers redraw congressional districts before the constitutionally required 10-year schedule, the prosecution of political opponents, a push to toughen voter registration rules and attempts to end the use of voting machines and mail ballots. Read Article

National: New federal ruling is latest defeat to Trump administration’s election agenda | Alexander Shur/Votebeat

A federal judge on Friday became the third one to block key provisions of President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at revising election rules nationwide, ruling that the Constitution gives states and Congress —not the president— the authority to exercise power over elections. The administration signaled it is likely to appeal the decision, the latest blow to Trump’s agenda on elections. His March executive order sought to require proof of citizenship on the federal voter registration form, mostly ban the use of machine-readable codes when tallying ballots, and prohibit the counting of ballots postmarked Election Day but received afterwards. The administration has appealed two earlier rulings in other cases against the executive order. The cases could ultimately reach the U.S. Supreme Court, but election law experts told Votebeat the president faces long odds. Read Article

National: MAGA Thinks Maduro Will Prove Trump Won in 2020 | Yvonne Wingett Sanchez/The Atlantic

In the days after American commandos raided Nicolás Maduro’s compound and whisked him out of Venezuela, Mike Lindell wasn’t ruminating about the dramatic military operation or oil prices—he was reviving a long-dead conspiracy theory. Lindell, better known as the “MyPillow guy,” was celebrating because, in his telling, a possible witness to the theory that Venezuela conspired with election-equipment companies to rig the 2020 presidential election against Donald Trump was now in U.S. custody. “I’m hoping now that Maduro will actually come clean and tell us everything about the machines and how they steal the elections,” Lindell, who has long espoused election falsehoods, told me the day after the Venezuelan dictator’s arraignment. The supposition boils down to this: Venezuela plotted with election-equipment and -technology companies to engineer Trump’s defeat in 2020. There is no credible evidence to support this. But with Maduro in U.S. custody months before the midterms and the Trump administration investigating the 2020 election, an idea that had been disproved by facts and debunked in lawsuits has been revived, with a newsy twist: Now Maduro will prove from a New York jail that Trump defeated Joe Biden. Read Article

National: Judge deals blow to the Trump Justice Department’s use of the Civil Rights Act to ‘clean’ voter rolls | Tierney Sneed/CNN

The Trump administration’s sweeping legal effort to obtain Americans’ sensitive data from states’ voter rolls is now almost entirely reliant upon the Civil Rights Act – a Jim Crow-era law passed to protect Black voters from disenfranchisement – a notable shift in how the administration is pressing its demands. The Justice Department says it wants to use the registration records to “help” states “clean” their rolls by comparing it to other data sets held by the government, according to public comments from Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who was appointed by President Donald Trump to head the department’s civil rights division. But Thursday, a federal judge delivered a searing setback, blocking the administration’s bid to obtain confidential information from California, including driver’s license numbers and Social Security numbers. Read Article

National: Supreme Court rules candidates can challenge voting laws | Ashley Lopez/NPR

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that political candidates have the legal standing to challenge election laws before voting or counting starts. The case before the court was brought by Illinois Republican U.S. Rep. Michael Bost and other candidates, who wanted to challenge a state law that allows election officials to count mail ballots that arrive up to two weeks after Election Day, as long as they’re postmarked on time. Many states have laws that offer a buffer, or grace period, to voters to return mail ballots in case there are issues with the postal service, for example. A lower court ruled that Bost did not have standing to challenge the Illinois law. The conservative-majority Supreme Court, in a 7-2 ruling, disagreed. Read Article

National: Election officials say trust with CISA on election security is broken | Jessica Huseman/Votebeat

When the U.S. Department of Homeland Security first declared in January 2017 that election systems were “critical infrastructure,” alarmed state election officials pushed back quickly and loudly, fearing the move could lead to a federal takeover of elections. DHS’s designation came during the final days of the Obama administration, as federal officials scrambled to respond to evidence of Russian interference with the 2016 election. Denise Merrill, a Connecticut Democrat who was then president of the National Association of Secretaries of State, helped lead the opposition. “The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has no authority to interfere with elections, even in the name of national security,” NASS said in a February 2017 bipartisan resolution urging the new administration to rescind the designation. Read Article

National: The Quiet Campaign That Could Rewrite the 2028 Election | David L. Nevins/The Fulcrum

Most Americans are unaware, but a quiet campaign in states across the country is moving toward one of the biggest changes in presidential elections since the nation was founded. A movement called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) is happening mostly out of public view and could soon change how the United States picks its president, possibly as early as 2028. If the compact reaches 270 electoral votes and overcomes likely legal challenges, the national popular vote winner would become president for the first time in U.S. history. Although this effort is not widely known, it could reshape the balance of power for years. So far, 17 states and Washington, D.C., have joined the NPVIC, giving it control of 209 electoral votes. This is about 39% of the Electoral College and 77% of the 270 votes needed for the compact to take effect. Member states include large ones like California, New York, and Illinois, as well as medium-sized states such as Colorado, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Minnesota, and Washington. Smaller members include D.C., Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Rhode Island, and Vermont. Read Article

National: Trump Regrets Not Seizing Voting Machines After 2020 Election | Alan Feuer, Ashley Ahn/The New York Times

President Trump said during an interview with The New York Times that he regretted not ordering the National Guard to seize voting machines in swing states after his loss in the 2020 election, even though he doubted whether the Guard was “sophisticated enough” to carry out the order effectively. The remarks by Mr. Trump in the interview last week harked back to one of the most perilous moments from his first term in office, when he was urged by some advisers to order his national security agencies to take control of machines manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems in an effort to find evidence that they had been hacked to rig the election against him. The statement also came as he has continued his attacks on digital voting machines, saying that he wants to “lead a movement” to get rid of them altogether in advance of this year’s midterm elections. Mr. Trump has long been obsessed with voting machines, particularly those built by Dominion, a company that has figured prominently in conspiracy theories that technology was used to rob him of victory in his race against Joseph R. Biden Jr. Read Article

Election Deniers Think the Venezuela Attack Is All About 2020 | David Gilbert/WIRED

Election deniers and MAGA influencers are confident that the US capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro has nothing to do with oil or drug trafficking. Instead, they’re sure it’s all linked to unfounded claims that the Venezuelan government rigged the 2020 election in former president Joe Biden’s favor. President Donald Trump and his administration appear to have boosted these conspiracy theories. In the days after Maduro’s capture on January 3, Trump shared a flurry of posts on his Truth Social platform about election fraud, including ones related to Dominion Voting Systems. Other MAGA influencers posted about Smartmatic, another election company. Read Article

National: U.S. Capitol attack anniversary renews big lie claims, midterm worries | Antonio Fins/Palm Beach Post

The legacy of the mob attack on the U.S. Capitol hovers over the 2026 midterm voting this year, a top elections analyst said on Jan. 6, the insurrection’s fifth anniversary. David Becker, the founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, said the cloud largely exists because of an effort to “rewrite history” about what happened on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021. In reality, Becker said, what occurred was a violent mob was sent to the Capitol by then-President Donald Trump with the aim of stopping the official election of Joe Biden. “And yet, we’re seeing an attempt to rewrite history,” he said. “It’s been going on almost immediately after those attacks, to not just forget about the events of January 6, but completely reinvent a fake mythology around those attacks.” Read Article

National: Pardoned Jan. 6 Rioters Rally and Demand More from Trump | Karoun Demirjian/The New York Times

Five years after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, several dozen rioters, including many who were jailed and later pardoned, gathered in Washington to retrace their steps and vow to keep fighting for payback, even against the Trump administration. The “J6ers,” as they refer to themselves, have been emboldened by President Trump, who pardoned or commuted the sentences of nearly 1,600 people who planned or participated in storming the Capitol to protest the results of the 2020 election. During Tuesday’s anniversary march, they praised Mr. Trump for setting them free, but were critical of his administration for not doing more for them. “Retribution is what we seek,” said Enrique Tarrio, a far-right activist and leader of the Proud Boys, one of the organizers of the Jan. 6, 2021, demonstration and Tuesday’s anniversary event. “Without accountability, there is no justice.” Read Article

National: New USPS postmark rule could affect mail voters | Carter Walker/Votebeat

Mail voters in 18 jurisdictions may need to take extra care to ensure that their ballots aren’t rejected under new guidance from the U.S. Postal Service about how it processes mail. In a notice in the Federal Register that took effect Dec. 24, the Postal Service announced that it may not postmark a piece of mail on the same day that it takes possession of it. The change could affect thousands of people who vote by mail in places that allow mail ballots to be counted if they are received after Election Day but postmarked by Election Day. Those policies are in effect in 14 states — Alaska, California, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and West Virginia — along with the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The new guidance means that, even if a voter delivers their ballot to the Postal Service by Election Day, it may nevertheless be rejected if it is not postmarked that day. Read Article

National: Trump pulls US out of international cyber orgs | Tim starks/CyberScoop

The Trump administration is withdrawing the United States from a handful of international organizations that work to strengthen cybersecurity. As part of a broader pullback from 66 international organizations, the administration is leaving the Global Forum on Cyber Expertise, the Online Freedom Coalition and the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats. Trump’s decision is in line with a president who has expressed hostility toward the existing international order, an approach critics fear creates a leadership power vacuum for U.S. adversaries to fill. Read Article

National: The Supreme Court may leave alone the Voting Rights Act just long enough to keep the GOP from House control in 2026 | Samuel Benson and Andrew Howard/Politico

Republicans want a big Supreme Court redistricting win. They’re losing hope it will help them in the 2026 midterms. The Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais could weaken the Voting Rights Act and open the door to redrawing congressional maps, particularly across the South. Court watchers expect at least a partial win for conservatives that could let the GOP draw more seats for themselves by erasing Black- and Hispanic-majority districts. But while that decision could theoretically come as soon as when the court returns on Friday, many experts think the case is more likely to be resolved with the flurry of decisions the court typically releases in late June. Read Article

National: All eyes on secretary of state races – with 2028 White House at stake | Sam Levine/The Guardian

When Americans go to cast ballots in the midterm elections in 2026, much of the attention is likely to be on races for the US House, Senate and governorships – contests that will serve as a referendum on Donald Trump’s first two years in office and determine the trajectories of the final ones. But further down the ballot, voters will choose secretaries of state in key races that could have a major effect on how elections are run in many US states, including several battleground states that are key to the 2028 presidential race. Twenty-six states are set to choose secretaries of state next year, including the presidential battlegrounds of Nevada, Arizona and Michigan. In many US states, the secretary of state serves as the chief election officer and is responsible for overseeing how elections are run across their state. Many also play an important role in certifying election results in their states. Read Article

National: A court ruling could shrink Black representation in Congress | Hansi Lo Wang/NPR

The United States could be headed toward the largest-ever decline in representation by Black members of Congress, depending on how the Supreme Court rules in a closely watched redistricting case about the Voting Rights Act. For decades, the landmark law that came out of the Civil Rights Movement has protected the collective voting power of racial minorities when political maps are redrawn. Its provisions have also boosted the number of seats in the House of Representatives filled by Black lawmakers. That’s largely because in many Southern states — where voting is often polarized between a Republican-supporting white majority and a Democratic-supporting Black minority — political mapmakers have drawn a certain kind of district to get in line with the Voting Rights Act’s Section 2 provisions. In these districts, racial-minority voters make up a population large enough to have a realistic opportunity of electing their preferred candidates. Read Article

Opinion: Jan. 6 Never Ended | Jamie Raskin/The New York Times

Tuesday is a heavy day for the police officers who fought to put down the bloody insurrection at the Capitol five years ago. It is also a solemn day for the F.B.I. agents and federal prosecutors who worked the largest criminal investigation in American history to bring the members of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers and all the other police-attacking rioters to justice. Five years after Jan. 6, 2021, we are still caught up in a struggle between forces who are willing to use authoritarian violence outside the Constitution to take and wield power and those who stand up nonviolently for our Constitution in the streets and in the polling places. Neither side can claim victory yet. It’s still very much Jan. 6 in America. Read Article

National: Mobile Voting Project’s vote-by-smartphone has real security gaps | Andrew Appel/CITP Blog

December 19, 2025

Bradley Tusk has been pushing the concept of “vote by phone.” Most recently his “Mobile Voting Foundation” put out a press release touting something called “VoteSecure”, claiming that “secure and verifiable mobile voting is within reach.” Based on my analysis of VoteSecure, I can say that secure and verifiable mobile voting is NOT within reach. It’s well known that conventional internet voting (including from smartphones) is fundamentally insecure; fraudulent software in the server could change votes, and malware in the voter’s own phone or computer could also change votes before they’re transmitted (while misleadingly displaying the voter’s original choices in the voter’s app). In an attempt to address this fundamental insecurity, Mr. Tusk has funded a company called Free & Fair to develop a protocol called by which voters could verify that their votes got counted properly. Their so-called “VoteSecure” is a form of “E2E-VIV”, or “End-to-End Verified Internet Voting”, a class of protocols that researchers have been studying for many years. Unfortunately, all known E2E-VIV methods, including VoteSecure, suffer from gaps and impracticalities that make them too insecure for use in public elections. In this article I will pinpoint just a few issues. I base my analysis on the press release of November 14, 2025, and on Free & Fair’s own “Threat Model” analysis and their FAQ. Read Article

National: 2025: The Year Cybersecurity Crossed the AI Rubicon | Dan Lohrmann/Government Technology

“Crossing the Rubicon” means passing a point of no return. The idiom comes from Julius Caesar illegally leading his army across the river Rubicon in 49 B.C., an act that sparked the Roman civil war and ultimately made him dictator for life. But how has cybersecurity crossed the AI Rubicon? Put simply, the integration of AI into both attack and defense has permanently changed the nature of cybersecurity, creating a before-and-after moment in 2025. We are witnessing a great acceleration in the speed and scale of change, with an exponential growth in threats, complexity and the deployment of AI tools that characterized the year. At the same time, cybersecurity has become a geopolitical weapon with a convergence of cyber and real-world conflict. This is a shift from mere data loss to nation-state conflict and hacktivism as the dominant narratives. Read Article

National: Republicans push mail-in voting for the midterms in defiance of Trump | Lisa Kashinsky/Politico

Republicans are making mail-in voting a core part of their midterm battle plans — a sharp contrast with President Donald Trump’s efforts to abolish the practice as they scramble to turn out his base. In Wisconsin, the state party is preparing a full-court press of mailers, emails, phone banks, door knocks and digital ads to get voters to sign up for mail ballots. In Michigan, the Monroe County GOP ran a social media campaign ahead of the fall election urging voters to utilize permanent absentee ballots and is planning an even bigger push next year. In Pennsylvania, where Republicans poured $16 million into boosting the number of GOP voters using mail ballots in 2024, the state party chair called it “a priority” for 2026. The nonprofit Citizens Alliance, which aided efforts to get Republicans to return their mail ballots in Pennsylvania last year, is planning to knock 750,000 doors ahead of the midterms to encourage infrequent voters to embrace the practice. Read Article

National: The Justice Department has now sued 18 states in an effort to access voter data | NPR

The Department of Justice has filed lawsuits against four more states as part of the Trump administration’s attempt to access sensitive voter data. The DOJ is also suing one Georgia county, seeking records from the 2020 election. The department has now filed suit against 18 states — mostly Democratic-led, and all states that President Trump lost in the 2020 election — as part of its far-reaching litigation. For months, the Justice Department has been demanding certain states turn over complete, unredacted copies of their voter registration lists, including any driver’s license numbers and parts of voters’ Social Security numbers. Read Article

National: Congress could try to pass new election laws before the 2026 midterms | Carrie Levine/Votebeat

Republicans, led by President Donald Trump, have had a lot to say about the rules and laws that govern our elections. Changing them, though, is harder. House Republicans are signaling plans for legislation to inscribe at least some of the party’s election-administration wish list into federal law, including changes to the landmark National Voter Registration Act that would make it easier to remove ineligible voters from the rolls. Republicans have long accused states of failing to appropriately clean their voter rolls, and the U.S. Justice Department has filed a host of lawsuits seeking access to unredacted state voter rolls in what government lawyers have said is an effort to make sure states are complying with their obligations under federal law. Trump issued a sweeping executive order on elections in March, and the White House said last month he is working on a second. But major provisions of the March order have so far been halted by the courts after federal judges found the president lacked the constitutional authority to enact them. Read Article

National: Key lawmaker says Congress likely to kick can down road on cyber information sharing law | Tim Starks/CyberScoop

With a little more than a month left before a foundational cyber threat information sharing law expires for a second time, Congress might have to do another short-term extension as negotiations on a longer deal aren’t yet bearing fruit, a key lawmaker said Tuesday. House Homeland Security Chairman Andrew Garbarino, R-N.Y., said the problem with a long-term extension of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015, which provides legal protections to companies to share cyber threat data with the federal government and other companies, is that there are three different views about how to approach it. The Trump administration and some in the Senate want a clean, 10-year reauthorization of the law, which Congress extended last month until Jan. 30 as part of the legislation that ended the government shutdown, after the information sharing law lapsed in October. But a reauthorization without any changes could run into House opposition, Garbarino said. Read Article

National: AI tops cybersecurity in survey of state IT priorities | Colin Wood/StateScoop

In a development that will surprise few who’ve been tracking government, technology or world events more broadly, artificial intelligence has, on average, overtaken all other concerns in state technology offices across the nation. The National Association of State Chief Information Officers, a group that represents state governments’ top IT officials, on Tuesday published its annual list of priorities, which is based on a survey of its membership. In last year’s list, AI was barely edged out for the top slot by cybersecurity, a technical and political concern that has made the list all 20 years since its first edition. But this year, said Doug Robinson, NASCIO’s executive director, AI won and “it wasn’t even close. It’s been a very swift ascension to No. 1.” For state CIOs, generative AI tools represent a means of offsetting workforce shortages that have been slow to repopulate after the COVID-19 pandemic, chatbots to provide residents more personalized experiences when they visit government websites, or a scalpel to shave a few extra hours of work off processing applications for safety-net benefits that will receive less support under the second Donald Trump presidency. Read Article

25 Years After Bush v. Gore, Supreme Court and Election Law Still Feel the Fallout | Stephen Spaulding/Brennan Center for Justice

December 12, 2025

It all started with that infamous ballot. Presidential candidates from major and minor parties appeared on either side of a line of holes down the center of the ballot for voters to punch through with a stylus to indicate their pick. On the left, the first two names were Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore, but confusingly they corresponded to the first and third holes. In addition to the layout problems was an issue with how the ballots recorded votes: Some voters punched cleanly through the card, while others left only dimples that election workers later examined with magnifying glasses to determine voter intent. Some ballots presented the issue of the “hanging chad,” where a piece of the ballot was left clinging by a corner or two. (The Smithsonian also has a bag of these.) Studies indicate that at least 2,000 Palm Beach County voters accidentally selected Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan when they meant to vote for Gore, who lost Florida — and therefore the Electoral College — by just 537 votes. Read Article

National: Republicans in Congress eye more power for states to remove voters | Jonathan Shorman/Stateline

December 12, 2025

Republicans in Congress want to give states more authority to remove ineligible voters — including noncitizens and people who have moved or died — from voter rolls, seeking to reinforce the Trump administration’s own push to scrub the lists. At a U.S. House hearing on Wednesday, lawmakers weighed changing a landmark federal voter registration law, the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, or NVRA, which requires state motor vehicle agencies to offer residents the opportunity to register to vote. Some conservatives say the law makes it too difficult for states to keep their voter rolls up to date. Since President Donald Trump took office, the U.S. Departments of Justice and Homeland Security have ramped up efforts to scoop up data on voters and pressure state officials to conduct more aggressive maintenance of their lists to ensure that everyone on the roll is eligible to vote. Read Article

National: Governors Shapiro (D) and Cox (R) join forces to denounce political violence | Colby Itkowitz and Yasmeen Abutaleb/The Washington Post

Josh Shapiro and Spencer Cox know firsthand what happens when political violence comes home. Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor who is widely expected to run for president in 2028, was asleep with his family when an arsonist set fire to their home. Cox, Utah’s Republican governor, was one of few voices who called for calm and “moral clarity” after the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk was fatally shot onstage at Utah Valley University in September. The two spoke together about rising political violence Tuesday at Washington National Cathedral, a rare bipartisan event in a deeply polarized country. Both criticized their parties for not doing enough to cool partisan tensions and condemn political violence when it affects their opponents. Read Article

National: Trump’s SAVE citizenship tool is flagging U.S. citizen voters | Jude Joffe-Block/NPR

Anthony Nel is the kind of voter who doesn’t like to skip an election. The 29-year-old lives in the Dallas-Forth Worth area and usually votes early, which he did as recently as Texas’ Nov. 4 constitutional election. So he was disturbed last month to open a letter from his local election office in Denton County, calling into question whether he was eligible to vote at all. “We have received information from the Texas Secretary of State reflecting that you might not be a United States citizen,” read the notice. The notice said he needed to provide proof of citizenship — such as a copy of a U.S. passport, birth certificate or naturalization certificate — within 30 days. Otherwise, his registration would be canceled, though it said he could be immediately reinstated if he showed that documentation at a later date. Read Article

National: Voting by mail faces uncertain moment ahead of midterm elections | Jonathan Shorman/Stateline

Derrin Robinson has worked in Oregon elections for more than 30 years, long enough to remember when voters in the state cast their ballots at physical polling sites instead of by mail. As the nonpartisan clerk of Harney County, a vast, rural expanse larger than Massachusetts, Robinson oversees elections with about 6,000 registered voters. Oregon has exclusively conducted elections by mail since 2000, a system he thinks works well, requires fewer staff and doesn’t force voters to travel through treacherous weather to reach a polling place. “As you can tell, I’m not an advocate for going back,” Robinson said. Not everyone agrees. An Oregon Republican lawmaker has introduced legislation to end the state’s mail voting law, and organizers of a ballot measure campaign seeking to ban mail-in voting say they have gathered thousands of signatures. Read Article

National: CISA Left Leaderless as Plankey’s Nomination Stalls in Senate | Emily Hill/The National CIO Review