National

Less than a year from the midterm elections, state and local voting officials from both major political parties are actively preparing for the possibility of interference by a federal government helmed by President Trump. The problem is, no one knows what might be coming. Steve Simon, the Democratic secretary of state of Minnesota, likened it to planning for natural disasters. “You have to use your imagination to consider and plan for the most extreme scenario,” Simon said. Carly Koppes, the Republican clerk of Weld County in Colorado, said officials in her state are shoring up their relationships with local law enforcement and county and state attorney’s offices, to make sure any effort to interfere with voting is “met with a pretty good force of resistance.””We have to plan for the worst and hope we get the best,” Koppes said. “I think we’re all kind of conditioned at this point to expect anything and everything, and our bingo cards keep getting bigger and bigger with things that we would have never have had on them.” Read Article

National: 60 Attorneys on the Year of Chaos Inside Trump’s Justice Department | Emily Bazelon and Rachel Poser/The New York Times

President Trump’s second term has brought a period of turmoil and controversy unlike any in the history of the Justice Department. Trump and his appointees have blasted through the walls designed to protect the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency from political influence; they have directed the course of criminal investigations, openly flouted ethics rules and caused a breakdown of institutional culture. To date, more than 200 career attorneys have been fired, and thousands more have resigned. What was it like inside this institution as Trump’s officials took control? It’s not an easy question to answer. Justice Department norms dictate that career attorneys, who are generally nonpartisan public servants, rarely speak to the press. And the Trump administration’s attempts to crack down on leaks have made all federal employees fearful of sharing information. But the exodus of lawyers has created an opportunity to understand what’s happening within the agency. We interviewed more than 60 attorneys who recently resigned or were fired from the Justice Department. Much of what they told us is reported here for the first time. Read Article

National: Federal judge questions changes to SAVE database for voter screening | Natalia Contreras andAlexander Shur/Votebeat

A federal judge on Monday declined to order the federal government to undo its overhaul of SAVE, a database that some states are using to check voters’ citizenship status, but said she doubted the legality of the government’s changes. SAVE, which is operated by the Department of Homeland Security, was typically used by states to check residents’ eligibility for public benefits. But the changes the Trump administration introduced in April made SAVE easier to use for screening voters’ citizenship, allowing state election officials to upload voter registration records for verification in bulk, instead of one by one, and search by Social Security number. The League of Women Voters and other plaintiffs in the case claimed that the changes made SAVE less accurate and were illegal, and asked the court for a temporary order that the database revert to how it operated before the overhaul. Read Article

National: Responses in opinion polls may be coming from AI | Eglė Krištopaitytė/Cybernews

Surveys have played a crucial role in the United States’ elections for nearly a century, but their reliability is now threatened by AI tools, according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers from Dartmouth College have developed an autonomous synthetic respondent that operates from a 500-word prompt. In 43,000 tests, the AI tool passed 99.8% of attention checks designed to detect automated responses. It made zero errors in logic and successfully concealed its non-human nature. Moreover, the tool tailored responses according to randomly assigned demographics, such as providing simpler answers when assigned less education. Presidential approval ratings swung from 34% to either 98% or 0%, depending on whether the poll was programmed to favor Democrats or Republicans. Similarly, generic ballot support went from 38% Republican to either 97% or 1%. Read Article

National: Inside the Multimillion-Dollar Plan to Make Mobile Voting Happen | Steven Levy/WIRED

The loudest objections against mobile or internet voting come from cryptographers and security experts, who believe that the safety risks are insurmountable. Take two people who were at the 2017 conference with Kiniry. Ron Rivest is the legendary “R” in the RSA protocol that protects the internet, a winner of the coveted Turing Award, and a former professor at MIT. His view: Mobile voting is far from ready for prime time. “What you can do with mobile phones is interesting, but we’re not there yet, and I haven’t seen anything to make me think otherwise,” he says, “Tusk is driven by trying to make this stuff happen in the real world, which is not the right way to do it. They need to go through the process of writing a peer-reviewed paper. Putting up code doesn’t cut it.” Computer scientist and voting expert David Jefferson is also unimpressed. Though he acknowledges that Kiniry is one of the country’s top voting system experts, he sees Tusk’s effort as doomed. “I’m willing to concede rock-solid cryptography, but it does not weaken the argument about how insecure online voting systems are in general. Open source and perfect cryptography do not address the most serious vulnerabilities.” Read Article

Trump pardons Giuliani, Meadows and others over plot to steal 2020 election | Richard Luscombe/The Guardian

November 14, 2025

Rudy Giuliani and Mark Meadows, both close former political allies of Donald Trump, are among scores of people pardoned by the president over the weekend for their roles in a plot to steal the 2020 election. The maneuver is in effect symbolic, given it only applies in the federal justice system and not in state courts, where Giuliani, Meadows and the others continue facing legal peril. The acts of clemency were announced in a post late on Sunday to X by US pardon attorney Ed Martin, covers 77 people said to have been the architects and agents of the scheme to install fake Republican electors in several battleground states, which would have falsely declared Trump their winner instead of the actual victor: Joe Biden. Those pardoned include Giuliani and Sidney Powell, former lawyers to Trump, and Meadows, who acted as White House chief of staff during his first term of office. Other prominent names include Jenna Ellis and John Eastman, attorneys who advised Trump during and immediately after the election that Biden won to interrupt Trump’s two terms. Read Article

One Year to Defend Elections | Michael Waldman/Brennan Center for Justice

November 14, 2025

On Monday, President Trump pardoned Rudy Giuliani and dozens of others who participated in the effort to overturn the 2020 election. It’s worth remembering exactly what they tried to do: Among those pardoned are the orchestrators of the so-called “fake electors” scheme — the attempt to replace certain states’ representatives in the Electoral College with Trump allies to certify false election results. If successful, it would have ended our country’s history of free and fair elections. Although the recipients can still face state prosecution, these acts of clemency — like the pardons of the January 6 insurrectionists — send a clear message: If you try to steal an election for his team, Donald Trump will have your back. In the states that voted last week, turnout was high and largely without incident, showing the resilience of America’s election system even at a moment of high tension. Next come the midterm elections a year from now, with control of Congress and many statehouses in the balance. Read Article

National: Donald Trump might challenge election results in 2026 | Jack Goldsmith and Bob Bauer/The Economist

On November 3rd 2026 Americans will vote in midterm elections to determine control of Congress. Republicans hold a narrow majority in the House and a firmer grip on the Senate. The House race thus offers Democrats their best shot at putting some brakes on the Trump juggernaut. The midterms will unfold amid long-held public distrust of the electoral process—distrust that Donald Trump has been actively stoking. More ominously, under the banner of defending “honest elections”, he appears to be laying the groundwork to challenge and possibly manipulate them. His words and actions strongly suggest he may use the formidable powers of the presidency—and possibly even the armed forces—to resist 2026 electoral results he dislikes. Mr. Trump has long framed any electoral loss as proof of opponents’ fraud. He engaged in unprecedented efforts at the end of his first presidential term to alter the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. His charges have weakened the once-bipartisan consensus that election administration should be insulated from politics. Read Article

National: CISA’s Cyber Collapse: Politics Gutting America’s Election Shields | Juan Vasquez/WPN

In the shadow of escalating cyber threats, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) finds itself at a crossroads. Once hailed as the nation’s bulwark against digital intrusions, CISA is now reeling from budget cuts, layoffs, and political pressures that have eroded its capacity to safeguard critical infrastructure, including election systems. As the U.S. grapples with foreign adversaries like Russia and China, experts warn that these internal fractures could leave the country vulnerable at a pivotal moment. Recent developments paint a grim picture. According to The Verge, cuts and politicization have made it increasingly difficult for stakeholders to rely on CISA. Published on November 10, 2025, the report highlights how these issues are compromising the agency’s role in protecting elections infrastructure amid a government shutdown. Read Article

National: Trump Loyalists Push ‘Grand Conspiracy’ as New Subpoenas Land | Glenn Thrush, Alan Feuer and Charlie Savage/The New York Times

Far-right influencers have been hinting in recent weeks that they have finally found a venue — Miami — and a federal prosecutor — Jason A. Reding Quiñones — to pursue long-promised charges of a “grand conspiracy” against President Trump’s adversaries. Their theory of the case, still unsupported by the evidence: A cabal of Democrats and “deep-state” operatives, possibly led by former President Barack Obama, has worked to destroy Mr. Trump in a yearslong plot spanning the inquiry into his 2016 campaign to the charges he faced after leaving office. But that narrative, which has been promoted in general terms by Mr. Trump and taken root online, has emerged in a nascent but widening federal investigation. Read Article

National: Federal Judge, Warning of ‘Existential Threat’ to Democracy, Resigns | Mattathias Schwartz/The New York Times

A federal judge warned of an “existential threat to democracy” in a searing first-person essay published on Sunday, saying he had stepped down from the bench to speak out against President Trump. He accused Mr. Trump of “using the law for partisan purposes, targeting his adversaries while sparing his friends and donors from investigation, prosecution, and possible punishment.” The judge, Mark L. Wolf, wrote in The Atlantic magazine that Mr. Trump’s actions were “contrary to everything that I have stood for in my more than 50 years in the Department of Justice and on the bench.” The publication of the essay by Judge Wolf, 78, came two days after an announcement by the Federal District Court for Massachusetts that he was leaving his post as a senior-status judge. Read Article/a>

National: The Supreme Court just took a scary case on Trump’s pet issue. He might not like the outcome. | Richard L. Hasen/Slate

President Donald Trump’s obsession with mail-in balloting reached the Supreme Court on Monday through a bonkers 5th Circuit opinion written by Trump appointee (and Trump Supreme Court auditioner) Andrew Oldham. Disagreeing with plain statutory text, statutory history, Supreme Court precedent, and the practice of many states, Judge Oldham’s opinion held that Mississippi violates federal law when it accepts ballots postmarked by Election Day that arrive within five days of the election. If the Supreme Court upholds the 5th Circuit in Watson v. Republican National Committee, 29 states and the District of Columbia would have to change their laws to require receipt of virtually all ballots by Election Day, aside from a small class of ballots including those from military and overseas voters. Trump has railed against mail-in balloting for years as being rife with fraud, even though he regularly uses it to vote in Florida. He often calls for states to eliminate the practice, even though Republicans for years have used it without problem in states ranging from Arizona to Florida to Utah (which conducts almost all balloting by mail). He has issued an executive order telling the Department of Justice to pursue litigation against other states to push the argument in the 5th Circuit’s Watson decision and he has promised another executive order on mail-in balloting to come. Read Article

National: Lies, damned lies and AI: the newest way to influence elections may be here to stay | Adam Gabbatt/The Guardian

The New York City mayoral election may be remembered for the remarkable win of a young democratic socialist, but it was also marked by something that is likely to permeate future elections: the use of AI-generated campaign videos. Andrew Cuomo, who lost to Zohran Mamdani in last week’s election, took particular interest in sharing deepfake videos of his opponent, including one that sparked accusations of racism, in what is a developing area of electioneering. AI has been used by campaigns before, particularly in using algorithms to target certain voters, and even, in some cases, to write policy proposals. But as AI software develops, it is increasingly being used to produce sometimes misleading photos and videos. Read Article

Judge Permanently Bars Trump From Requiring Proof of Citizenship for Voter Registration | Zach Montague/The New York Times

A federal judge in Washington has permanently barred the Trump administration from requiring proof of citizenship on federal voter registration forms, a change dictated in an executive order President Trump signed in March. The ruling definitively halted the effort to compel the Elections Assistance Commission, an independent body, to adopt nationwide changes to voting procedures at a time when the president has also called for requiring voter identification in elections and ending mail-in voting. For months, voting rights groups have warned that those changes, in tandem with the deployment of the national guard to the streets of Democratic-led cities, resembled steps of a voter-suppression strategy. Read Article

Dems ‘Need the Votes’ of ‘Illegal Citizens,’ Top Federal Election Official Claims in Unhinged Rant | Zachary Roth/Democracy Docket

A top federal voting official is facing a call to step down after accusing Democrats of encouraging “open borders” and widespread voting by “illegal citizens,” because “they need the votes.” The outlandish conspiracy theory is common on the far right. But its embrace by Christy McCormick, a Republican member of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC), part of an unhinged public rant against Democrats, raises serious questions about her ability to help states administer fair and impartial elections, and to retain public trust. “They need the votes. They’re losing ground,” McCormick said Wednesday at a panel discussion on voting at the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute (AFPI), when asked why she thinks the left opposes measures to tighten voting rules. Read Article

National: Threats against public servants increased over 35 times what they were a decade ago, according to new research | Natalie Alms/Nextgov

For three years, Teak Ty Brockbank posted threats across various social media platforms targeting election officials in Colorado and Arizona, threatening to kill top officials. Such violent threats against public servants have increased over the last decade — from just eight stories of such threats recorded in 2015 to 291 recorded in 2025, according to new research. The Public Service Alliance, a nonpartisan network, and the Impact Project, a nonpartisan data and research platform, released the dataset showing that escalation on Tuesday. An associated map lets viewers see incidents of public sector workers being harassed, stalked, doxxed, physically attacked and more. Public servants across the levels of government are being targeted, with elected officials, judges, election workers and law enforcement and military officials among those receiving the most threats, according to the dataset. Read Article

National: Congressional Budget Office hacked, China suspected in breach | Sean Lyngaas/CNN

The Congressional Budget Office has been hacked, potentially exposing its communications with the offices of lawmakers, according to an email sent to congressional staff this week and obtained by CNN. The email from the Senate sergeant at arms did not name a culprit, but a US official briefed on the hack told CNN on Thursday that Chinese state-backed hackers are suspected of being behind the breach. The email said the hacking incident was “ongoing” and that staffers should avoid clicking on links sent from CBO accounts because the accounts may still be compromised. CBO’s economists and analysts provide lawmakers with cost estimates and analysis of legislation in Congress. The office also does long-term projections for the US budget and analyzes the president’s budget — the type of information that could be of interest to foreign intelligence services keeping close tabs on US economic policy. Read Article

National: Five Ways Tuesday’s Results Will Affect Voting Rules and Democracy | Bolts

On Tuesday, mostly in the shadow of the Democratic Party’s headlining triumphs, were a series of state and local elections that carried high stakes for election law and voting rights. Conservatives failed to restrict mail-in voting in a state key to next year’s battle for the U.S. Senate. Voters in two states boosted Democrats’ mid-decade redistricting aspirations. And voters made sure that a plan to unwind one of the nation’s harshest felony disenfranchisement schemes can proceed. Here, we tour these results, and some others, from five states where the rules of elections were most prominently on the line—California, Maine, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Read Article

National: Is a Key Federal Elections Panel Doing Trump’s Bidding on Voting Machines? | Susan Greenhalgh/Democracy Docket

On the eve of the government shutdown, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) quietly posted a press release to its website. While the announcement didn’t spark much notice, it could result in severe consequences for future elections. And it’s causing concern that the commission — a bipartisan body whose mission is to help states administer elections more effectively — is taking its orders from President Donald Trump. That kind of partisanship and capitulation could pose a serious threat to the midterms. Read Article

National: Republicans Reprise Unfounded Claims of Widespread Election Interference | Steven Lee Myers/The New York Times

As voters went to the polls, prominent conservatives latched onto glitches and other problems at polling stations to claim — without presenting evidence — that the results were being rigged. Election machines briefly went down in Cumberland County, N.J., a state where the governor’s race is seen as a bellwether of President Trump’s second term. The problem was quickly resolved and voting resumed, according to an election commission official reached by telephone. A series of bomb threats in the state — a reprise of threats in several states in last year’s presidential election — also turned out to be a hoax. Read Article

National: Trump escalates demands for 2020 election investigations and prosecutions | Isaac Arnsdorf , Patrick Marley and Perry Stein/The Washington Post

President Donald Trump is dialing up pressure on the Justice Department to freshly scrutinize ballots from the 2020 election, raising tensions with administration officials who think their time is better spent examining voter lists for future elections. In recent private meetings, public comments and social media posts, Trump has renewed demands that members of his administration find fraud in the five-year-old defeat that he never accepted. He recently hired at the White House a lawyer who worked on contesting the 2020 results. Administration officials and allies have asked to inspect voting equipment in Colorado and Missouri. Others are seeking mail ballots from Atlanta in 2020, when Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate to lose Georgia since 1992. Read Article

National: DHS Agreement Reveals Risks of Using Social Security Data for Voter Citizenship Checks | Jen Fifield/ProPublica

This year, when states began using an expanded Department of Homeland Security system to check their voter rolls for noncitizens, it was supposed to validate the Trump administration’s push to harness data from across federal agencies to expose illicit voting and stiffen immigration enforcement. DHS had recently incorporated confidential data from the Social Security Administration on hundreds of millions of additional people into the tool, known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, system. The added information allowed the system to perform bulk searches using Social Security numbers for the first time. The initial results, however, didn’t exactly back up President Donald Trump’s contention that noncitizen voting is widespread. Texas identified 2,724 “potential noncitizens” on its rolls, about 0.015% of the state’s 18 million registered voters. Louisiana found 390 among 2.8 million registered voters, a rate of about 0.014%. Read Article

National: Election officials question federal plan for online voter registration form | Carrie Levine/Votebeat

October 31, 2025

State election officials are raising legal and practical concerns about a new Trump administration plan to create a digital version of the existing federal voter registration form. Under the proposal, the federal government would both verify voter identity and check citizenship against a system run by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security before making the applications available to states. The proposal — discussed on recent calls between the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, federal officials working to design the new tool, and state officials — would for the first time allow the federal voter registration form to be filed online. Currently, voters must submit the form on paper. Most states are required to accept the federal registration form, just as they would their own state-specific forms. Read Article

DOJ will send election monitors to two Democratic states, California and New Jersey | Jill Colvin and Michael R. Blood/Associated Press

October 31, 2025

The Department of Justice is preparing to send federal election observers to California and New Jersey next month, targeting two Democratic states holding off-year elections following requests from state Republican parties. The DOJ announced Friday that it is planning to monitor polling sites in Passaic County, New Jersey, and five counties in southern and central California: Los Angeles, Orange, Kern, Riverside and Fresno. The goal, according to the DOJ, is “to ensure transparency, ballot security, and compliance with federal law.” Election monitoring is a routine function of the Justice Department, but the focus on California and New Jersey comes as both states are set to hold closely-watched elections with national consequences on Nov. 4. New Jersey has an open seat for governor and California is holding a special election aimed at redrawing the state’s congressional map to counter Republican gerrymandering efforts elsewhere ahead of the 2026 midterms. Read Article

National: Trump Suggests He Knows He Can’t Run Again: ‘It’s Too Bad’ | Erica L. Green and Katie Rogers/The New York Times

President Trump seemed to concede on Wednesday that he was not eligible to serve a third term, lamenting that it was an unfortunate result of the constitutional prohibition that he has mused about violating for months. Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One en route to South Korea, the last leg of his three-country diplomatic tour across Asia, Mr. Trump said it was “too bad” that he couldn’t run in 2028. “We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had, I have my highest poll numbers that I’ve ever had,” he boasted (his approval rating remains low, at 43 percent, according to a New York Times average). “And, you know, based on what I read, I guess I’m not allowed to run. So we’ll see what happens.” The remarks came after House Speaker Mike Johnson said on Tuesday there was no path around the Constitution’s two-term limit. Read Article

National: Trump’s moves in this year’s election could preview midterms pressure | Nicholas Riccardi/Associated Press

After months of extraordinary steps to ensure his party maintains control of the U.S. House of Representatives in next year’s midterms, President Donald Trump is turning his sights toward the voting process in Tuesday’s elections. That pivot is raising alarm among Democrats and others who warn that he may be testing strategies his administration could use to interfere with elections in 2026 and beyond. Late last week, Trump’s Department of Justice announced it was sending election monitors to observe voting in one county in New Jersey, which features a race for governor that Republican Trump has become deeply invested in, and to five counties in California, where Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom is pushing a ballot measure to counter the president’s own effort to rejigger the congressional map to elect more Republicans. That announcement was followed with a pre-emptive attack by Trump on the legitimacy of California’s elections. The post on his own social media platform echoed the baseless allegations he made about the 2020 presidential election before he and his allies tried to overturn his loss in a campaign that culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Read Article

National: 2020 election deniers and allies amass power, in and out of the Trump administration | Marshall Cohen and Fredreka Schouten/CNN

Inside the red brick walls of the La Vista Correctional Facility in Pueblo, Colorado, Tina Peters has grown impatient. The former Republican clerk of Mesa County, Peters is one year into a nine-year prison term for her role in a scheme with fellow election deniers to breach voting machines in hopes of proving President Donald Trump’s baseless fraud claims. Closely guarded election passwords from her county spilled out onto the Internet as a result, showing up on a QAnon-affiliated messaging channel. Peters is the only person currently in prison for trying to overturn the 2020 election – after Trump pardoned hundreds of convicted January 6 Capitol rioters, including those who planned the attack or were violent that day. She remains locked up on state charges that are immune to a presidential pardon. Even from prison, she’s keeping the 2020 lies alive, through public letters and a jailhouse video interview in her orange prison uniform. Read Article

National: Red states are preparing for an end to the Voting Rights Act | Andrew Howard/Politico