National

The Trump administration is waging war on voting rights using justice department lawsuits, FBI investigations and an executive order to limit voting by mail, moves mirroring the US president’s false claims he lost the 2020 election due to voting fraud, say election experts and ex-officials. Since Donald Trump began his second term, numerous 2020 election denialists have been installed in key agencies such as the Department of Justice, the FBI and elsewhere to pursue widely discredited claims of fraud, which can intimidate election workers and voters in swing states that Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020. The justice department has also filed lawsuits seeking sensitive voter data from 30 states – even though, by law, states control elections – and the FBI has launched investigations into debunked allegations of voting fraud in Georgia, Wisconsin and a few other swing states that Trump lost in 2020. Trump in late March this year issued an executive order sharply tightening mail-in voting rules, which Trump has long claimed without evidence contribute to fraud. The order gives the United States Postal Service unprecedented powers to issue new rules making voting by mail harder. Read Article

National: Local election officials reel over ‘logistical nightmare’ of Trump’s vote-by-mail order | Jonathan Shorman/News From The States

As election officials across the country steel themselves for the midterm elections in less than five months, President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting voting by mail threatens to upend their preparations. The executive order instructs the U.S. Postal Service to refuse to deliver ballots in states that don’t provide lists of voters or meet other requirements. It has created a sense of deep uncertainty and concern among election officials as they consider how to comply, according to a review of court documents and interviews with election officials and experts on election administration. The March 31 executive order, and a proposed Postal Service rule published June 2 that would put the order’s requirements into effect, raise serious logistical and procedural challenges for those running elections, they say. Rural areas with limited resources are especially at risk, but jurisdictions of all sizes could be forced to scramble. The executive order is the latest step taken by Trump to assert control over state-run elections, along with the stalled SAVE America Act, which would require voters to provide documents proving their citizenship. The Justice Department, under Trump’s control, is also trying to obtain state voter rolls. Read Article

National: Voting officials fear DHS may actually be a threat to elections this year | Miles Parks/NPR

Gary Berntsen is convinced Venezuela stole the 2020 U.S. election. That myth has been debunked numerous times, including as part of Fox News' 2023 $787 million settlement with voting machine company Dominion, but Berntsen, a former CIA operative, has been pushing it for years. "One of the things that we learned is there's 14 different technical ways that you can steal an election," Berntsen explained in an interview in the fall with conservative podcaster Lara Logan. But ahead of the 2024 election, Berntsen says he couldn't get anyone to listen to him. Not the FBI. Not the media. Finally, he went to Congress, where he says he was similarly rebuffed by almost everyone, including Republicans. Except one. "One politician in America was not afraid," Berntsen told Logan. "It was Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma." Allies of Berntsen say Mullin — then a U.S. senator, now the head of the Department of Homeland Security — brokered a meeting at Mar-a-Lago so Berntsen could brief President Trump's team on conspiracy theories about Venezuelan interference in elections. That is just one time of many that Mullin has gone to bat for election denial. DHS could be a threat to midterm elections this year : NPR

National: Trump Pulls Back Intelligence Pick to Pressure Congress on Elections Bill | Michael Gold and Dustin Volz/The New York Times

President Trump said on Wednesday that he was pulling back his own nominee to be the nation’s top intelligence official as he again tried to pressure Congress to pass a strict voter identification law that does not have enough support among Republicans to advance. Mr. Trump announced last week that he would nominate Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, to be the director of national intelligence, after senators in both parties condemned his earlier decision to install Bill Pulte, a loyalist and his top housing official, to the post. Senate leaders had sought to quickly confirm Mr. Clayton, hoping to clear the way for a bipartisan agreement to renew a surveillance law that expired last week. The bill to extend it collapsed amid the furor over Mr. Pulte, who has no national security experience and drew withering bipartisan criticism. And some Democrats had indicated they might be willing to fast-track his confirmation, eager to block Mr. Pulte. Read Article

National: Challenges in Rural Election Administration ‘Exacerbated’ in Runoff Elections | Bridget Goodman/The Daily Yonder

Runoff elections — including Tuesday’s in Alabama and Georgia — stress existing fragilities in rural election administration. “Challenges are exacerbated by the short timeline of a runoff,” said Cameron Wimpy, political science professor and director of the Institute for Rural Initiatives at Arkansas State University. “And then other challenges become exacerbated by the fact that you’re just having to do a whole election again.” More than two-thirds of American elections happen in rural areas, according to Wimpy. Although elections are administered – and often, largely financed – locally, counties must meet state standards. “A lot of things in election administration have to happen the same, whether you’re in a small place or a large place, an urban place or a rural place,” Wimpy said. “Voting machines have to be tested, boxes have to be checked, laws have to be followed, but that’s often being done with less people.” There are 10 states with runoff elections: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Texas. Each state has unique state laws governing how and when those elections occur. Read Article

National: Watch Out for False Voter Fraud Claims Fueled by SAVE Program | Jasleen Singh/Brennan Center for Justice

This year, observers should be wary of voter fraud claims made by government officials and private groups, even if those claims cite federal government data. Many such false or misleading claims promoted over the past year have relied primarily on the flawed Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program, which this article addresses in detail. The second Trump administration has been engaged in a concerted campaign to undermine elections. Part of that involves collecting state voter files and using federal data sources to lend pseudolegitimacy to false claims of widespread fraud. While there may be valid ways to use federal data to support election officials’ efforts to keep voter rolls accurate and up to date, there are notable shortcomings in such data, and it may be misused to spread misinformation. To properly assess any claim of voter fraud based on federal data, it is important to understand the flaws in the data, common analytical pitfalls, and the ways faulty data may be exploited to disenfranchise eligible voters and erode confidence in elections. Read Article

National: Republicans are trying to impose Trump’s voting restrictions at the local level | Yunior Rivas/Democracy Docket

Shasta County, California, recently approved one of the most sweeping local attacks on voting since 2020: a measure that would end most mail-in and early voting, require strict photo ID to register and vote, force election officials to hand count ballots and disconnect the county from California’s statewide voter registration system. The initiative, known as Measure B, passed this month with 56% of the vote in the rural Northern California county, where President Donald Trump received 67% of the vote in 2024. California is suing to block the measure, warning that Shasta County is trying to carve itself out of statewide election protections that apply to all 58 counties. “No city or county gets to unilaterally rewrite our election rules,” Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) said in a statement. But Shasta is not an isolated case. Read Article

Trump Administration Pushes Limits of Election Investigations | Devlin Barrett/The New York Times

The administration is “throwing everything against the wall that they can find, and nothing is sticking,” said David Becker, a former voting rights lawyer at the Justice Department who is now the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research. “Almost all of their work is going back over conspiracy theorists’ allegations that were debunked five years ago,” he added. “They are running out of tools in their toolbox. "Even though the White House has no formal or legal role in administering elections, Mr. Trump installed Kurt Olsen, who tried to help overturn his election loss in 2020, to oversee election integrity and security. Mr. Olsen has since moved to the Justice Department, working in a U.S. attorney office’s in Florida that is investigating what Trump supporters call a “grand conspiracy” against him. Despite the Trump administration’s demands for voter roll data, at least eight federal district judges have turned the administration away. Half of those judges were appointed by Mr. Trump. The administration is appealing the decisions. “I don’t know that the Department of Justice has ever had a zero-for-eight streak,” Mr. Becker said, adding that Mr. Essayli’s comments were likely to make it even harder for a judge to rule in the administration’s favor. Read Article

National: Postal Service won’t deliver mail ballots for states that don’t hand over voter lists, under plan for Trump directive | Tierney Sneed, Jeremy Herb and Gabe Cohen/CNN

State election officials could soon face a stark choice: Hand over voter lists to the Trump administration or risk losing Postal Service delivery for mail-in ballots. That dilemma stems from newly proposed USPS rules that seek to comply with an executive order President Donald Trump signed this spring to crack down on mail-in voting. If courts let the order stand, it would give the federal government an unprecedented role in elections — and could put even more voter data in the hands of Trump officials searching for supposed election fraud. The proposed rules lay out new conditions that states would have to meet to send ballots through the mail, including giving the agency lists of all voters set to receive mail ballots. Read Article

National: Justice Department officials dance around Trump’s unsupported claims of California election fraud | Tierney Sneed, Paula Reid and Hannah Rabinowitz/CNN

When President Donald Trump made claims of Democratic vote-rigging in the Los Angeles election, his top appointed prosecutor in the city took to the cameras to validate those beliefs while hinting his office may never be able prove that kind of grand conspiracy. The Justice Department has launched no new criminal cases connected to how the city administered last week’s contest, according to a source familiar with the matter, even as the president said on social media last week that such an investigation was underway. The playbook is a familiar one — both for Trump, who faced criminal charges for his schemes to overturn the 2020 election, and now for the Justice Department leaders whose standing in the administration depends on keeping the president happy. They have seized on long-standing gripes about how long it takes California officials to report election results. But without providing evidence of a sweeping plot to steal elections from Republicans, DOJ officials are instead hyping singular cases they have prosecuted dealing with illegal voter registration or single-digit noncitizen voting, while accusing Democrats of getting in the way of their investigations. Read Article

National: States step into voting rights void left by federal rulings | News From The States

As the U.S. Supreme Court pulls back from the landmark federal law designed to safeguard the voting rights of minorities, more states are stepping in to prohibit discrimination in state and local elections. State versions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act include some of the federal law’s approaches to fighting discrimination, including prohibitions against voter intimidation and vote dilution — that is, drawing electoral maps that distribute racial minorities across districts in a way that denies them the opportunity to elect their candidates of choice. The state laws also typically require local jurisdictions to get state approval before changing their election maps and policies. Those so-called preclearance provisions matter because its federal counterpart within the Voting Rights Act was rendered unenforceable by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013. Many of the state laws direct courts to consider a variety of ways to solve discriminatory voting policies, and aim to push voters and government officials to work together to head off lawsuits. Read Article

National: How Senate Democrats are planning to push back on potential election interference | Lisa Kashinsky/Politico

Senate Democrats are war-gaming legal maneuvers and messaging strategies to thwart potential efforts by President Donald Trump or foreign actors to influence the results of the midterms. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and nine other Democratic senators huddled with top party election experts last week to drill responses to a range of extreme scenarios — from federal agents at polling locations, to ballot seizures in key battlegrounds, to foreign interference operations — that they fear could become reality pre- and post-Election Day. They game-planned legal injunctions to bar armed federal agents or armed citizens from voting sites, and lawsuits to force the Trump administration to return ballots if they’re confiscated in key contests that could decide control of Congress. They also choreographed communication strategies across elected leaders, campaigns and advocacy groups to combat misinformation and disinformation designed to sow distrust in the results. Read Article

National: Trump administration’s investigations into 2020 voter fraud may be more about the 2026 election | Dion Nissenbaum and Alexander Shur/Votebeat

The FBI agents arrived at David Bolter’s Milwaukee home on a cool, cloudy Wednesday morning in late May. They were armed with a list of questions for the 2020 poll worker, who had raised concerns about the way local officials handled the 2020 election, Bolter told Votebeat. President Donald Trump relied on Bolter’s claims in an unsuccessful 2020 lawsuit that sought to throw out more than 220,000 votes. That would have been more than enough to move Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes from Democrat Joe Biden, who won the state, to Trump. Though courts, several election reviews, and many audits rejected Trump’s claims, the Republican never stopped believing that he was cheated out of the presidency in 2020. That appears to be why, last month, the FBI sent agents back to Milwaukee to question Bolter as part of an expanding national effort by the second Trump administration to investigate long-debunked claims of fraud in the 2020 election. Read Article

American Democracy Wasn’t Designed for This | Jeffrey Rosen/The Atlantic

In 1787, after the Founders signed the Constitution in Philadelphia, Alexander Hamilton wrote in “Federalist No. 1” that there was more at stake than the future of a single country. The American experiment would “decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” The Founders were hopeful, in part because the information environment of the late 18th century was favorable to “reflection and choice.” A flourishing newspaper industry kept Americans informed and fostered vigorous debate. But the number of publications was limited—about 100 total in the 13 states—and the authority of editors and writers meant that a free press didn’t turn into a free-for-all. And at a time when nothing traveled faster than a horse or ship, the sheer size of the new country meant that news spread slowly, an obstacle to impulsive public decisions. Given time for deliberation, passions would cool, and elected representatives could focus on the country’s long-term good rather than short-term gratification. Today, those advantages have disappeared, thanks to a technological revolution the Founders could never have imagined. The internet has turned everyone into a potential publisher, able to instantly spread facts or falsehoods to millions. Most people get information about politics and current events not from newspapers but from social media, which discourages engagement with human beings of different political persuasions. Now the rise of AI is discouraging engagement with any human beings at all; instead, more and more people are forming their views in conversation with a machine that lacks moral sense. As America approaches its 250th anniversary, the biggest question for our democracy is whether a system designed for the communications technologies of the 18th century can survive those of the 21st. Read Article

Pennsylvania House takes another shot at giving election workers more ballot-sorting time | Ethan Young/PennLive

The Pennsylvania House passed a bill Tuesday allowing for the processing of mail-in ballots to begin up to seven days prior to Election Day, an issue that state lawmakers have battled over for years to no avail. The bill modifies Pennsylvania’s Election Code to allow for additional days of pre-canvassing, which involves the opening and inspection of the envelopes containing ballots, but not for the recording or publishing of actual votes. The bill passed by a vote of 103-to-99, with all Democrats in favor and all but one Republican opposed. It remains to be seen if the measure can pass the Republican-controlled state Senate, after previous years’ attempts to make a deal on the issue have stalled. The bill’s author, Rep. Scott Conklin, D-Centre County, said there is “always hope” the bill makes it through the upper chamber. Read Article

SAVE Act, Republicans’ sweeping election overhaul, fails in the Senate | Miles Parks/NPR

The SAVE America Act, a far-reaching Republican election overhaul that President Trump said should be his congressional allies' top priority, has officially failed in the Senate. The measure was voted on Thursday as an amendment as part of lengthy debate over an immigration funding package. The election bill has languished in the Senate for months, after the House passed a version in February on a near party-line vote. The election proposal would have taken effect immediately, even as voting is underway in congressional primaries. Notably, the legislation would have required voters to show a document proving their U.S. citizenship, like a passport or a birth certificate, when they registered to vote. Research has shown millions of Americans don't have easy access to those documents. And experts say such a provision is unnecessary, as noncitizens have never been shown to vote at anything but microscopic numbers in American elections. Read Article

National: Congress weighs cuts to states’ already ‘insufficient’ election security dollars | Jonathan Shorman/News From The States

Ahead of the November midterm elections, President Donald Trump and his Republican allies have demanded Congress pass sweeping voting restrictions, including showing proof of citizenship to register — all in the name of election security. At the same time, the only federal agency dedicated solely to helping states and localities run smooth and secure elections operates on a meager budget. It provides grants for election security far smaller than in the past. And U.S. House Republicans have signaled they want sizable further cuts. The agency, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, sits at the center of a fight playing out in Congress over how to best ensure secure elections. The debate has thrown into sharp relief a yawning gap between GOP rhetoric over election tampering and actual congressional support for election security efforts. Read Article

National: Election threats are focused on campaign systems, not voting machines | Greg Otto/CyberScoop

Cybersecurity threats to the 2026 midterm elections are targeting the accounts and platforms that campaigns, donors and voters use to communicate, according to a security report released Monday by Check Point Software Technologies. So far in this election cycle, threats are not aimed at voting machines or ballot-counting systems. Instead, threat actors are going after the email accounts, websites and fundraising platforms that election organizations depend on. Jeremy Fuchs, a campaign manager for Check Point, told CyberScoop that the report’s core findings reflect a broader trend in cybersecurity: Bad actors are using AI to make their attacks larger and more effective. “The barrier to entry is lower and the quality is so much higher than it was three years ago, 10 years ago, that everything is going to look more realistic and it’s going to be more effective at accomplishing whatever goals [attackers] have,” he said. Read Article

National: Federal judge hears challenge to Trump’s order on voter list | Michael Casey/Associated Press

A federal judge on Tuesday heard from voting rights groups and a coalition of two dozen states that want the courts to halt President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to create a federal voter list and limit who can receive a mail ballot. The plaintiffs argued in two lawsuits that Trump’s order should be found unconstitutional because the states and Congress, not the president, have the power to set election rules. They also told the court that the move imposes a costly burden on state election officials to comply and would spread fear about the possibility of prosecution. “This is going to be a sea change in the way that some states administer their ballots,” said Michael Cohen, who was part of a team representing California, adding that “it will be difficult to overstate the disruption that this will cause.” Trump’s executive order, the second one aimed at elections during his second term, comes as he continues to raise the specter of widespread voting by noncitizens as a reason to change election rules. But states already have detailed processes aimed at keeping their voter rolls accurate, and voting by noncitizens has been shown to be rare. It also is a felony that can be punishable by deportation. Read Article

National: How the Supreme Court is reshaping the US midterm elections | Jan Wolfe/Reuters

The U.S. Supreme Court this year already has given a boost to President Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans in the nationwide battle over redrawing electoral maps. In the coming weeks, it could rule in favor of the Republicans in two more significant cases related to elections ahead of the November elections that will decide control of Congress. In a case from Mississippi, Republican Party officials are seeking to strike down state laws that allow late-arriving mail ballots to be counted as long as they are postmarked by Election Day. Trump has sought to cast doubt on the security of mail-in ballots, though evidence of voter fraud is rare, and Democratic voters tend to use this mode of voting more than Republicans. Read Article

National: Sometimes officials send duplicate ballots. Here’s how security measures prevent double voting. | Alexander Shur/Votebeat

Ahead of the Wisconsin Supreme Court election in April, Green Bay election officials accidentally sent duplicate ballots to 150 voters, prompting an administrative complaint before the Wisconsin Elections Commission and conspiracy theories online. In a slightly different example from this year, some voters in Maryland initially received primary ballots for the wrong party. Election officials then intentionally issued new ballots for the correct party to all voters who had requested a mail ballot, and the original ballots were voided. Nonetheless, President Donald Trump falsely suggested that nobody knew what was happening with the original ballots and that “any Republican running in Maryland doesn’t have a chance” because voters who received them, which were disproportionately Democrats, would be allowed to vote twice. Despite the heightened attention, election officials accidentally sending duplicate ballots — or sending out an erroneous batch before intentionally sending corrected ballots to the same voters — is a rare but well-understood mistake nationwide that hardly ever results in the type of double voting Trump has warned of. “Once any ballot is received and accepted, it locks down that voter’s record, so that a second ballot could not be accepted for that same voter,” said Tammy Patrick, chief programs officer of the National Association of Election Officials. “That’s the way it works everywhere.” Read Article

National: How to Make Sense of the Barcodes on Your Ballot | Luke Belant/NCSL

The way ballots are created and counted has been modernized significantly since the passage of the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002. Accuracy and reliability problems with older equipment, including punch card and lever machines, increased interest in ballot-counting equipment among legislators at the state and federal levels. Hand-counting ballots at scale was time-consuming, expensive and often inaccurate, so machine counting was considered the path forward. The federal government established voluntary voting system guidelines under the newly created Election Assistance Commission, and many states adopted federal standards, in some cases adding their own requirements for voting machines. These standards have been updated over time to adjust to evolving technology. Today’s voting systems tabulate paper ballots and use barcodes for a variety of reasons. Barcodes store information such as the election date and year and the county that produced the ballot. They also tell the voting machine where to look for voter selections on the ballot. The machine-readable format can be read by software programs and then translated for human viewing. Read Article

National: Bang, Bang, Bang: Callais Kills Off the Voting Rights Act | Pamela S. Karlan/Just Security

The authors of the Reconstruction Amendments did not trust the Supreme Court to ensure that Black Americans would be able to participate fully in the political life of the nation. That is why the amendments expressly gave Congress the power to enforce their provisions through additional legislation. It took nearly a century, but as part of the Second Reconstruction, Congress fulfilled that responsibility. It enacted a Voting Rights Act that goes beyond merely restating the constitutional prohibitions contained in the first sections of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The single most important contribution the Court ever made to minority citizens’ voting rights was to uphold and apply those congressionally expanded prohibitions. The current Supreme Court thinks differently. Section 2, as amended by Congress in 1982, was designed, and had been read for decades, to bar not only intentional discrimination but also practices and procedures that resulted in minority voters having less opportunity to elect representatives of their choice. (That “results” language, after all, is what the text explicitly provided.) In Louisiana v. Callais, the Court returned amended section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to a mere restatement of the constitutional prohibition on purposeful vote dilution. We are only just beginning to see how Justice Samuel Alito’s disingenuous opinion for the Court threatens to dismantle a fundamental pillar of the Second Reconstruction. Read Articlea>

National: Ballots Have Been Seized Across the US. No One Knows What Will Happen Next | Kim Zetter/WIRED

As US voters look to the November midterms, the Trump administration is obsessed with looking back to past elections, seizing ballots cast years ago in several states in search, it claims, of fraud or other malfeasance. But experts believe the goal may be more varied. The seizures began in January when FBI agents armed with a warrant raided an election facility in Fulton County, Georgia, and grabbed 600 boxes of ballots from 2020. This was followed in March by the Department of Justice obtaining ballot images from 2020 in Maricopa County, Arizona, and—citing claims about supposed fraud in 2020—demanding ballots from the 2024 election in Wayne County, Michigan. Read Article

National: The Justice Department wants to interview 2020 election workers | Katelyn Polantz and Tierney Sneed/CNN

The Justice Department wants to interview some poll workers and ballot counters who participated in the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia, in a new effort to dig up details about the ballot-processing, prosecutors revealed at a court hearing last week. A prosecutor working with a grand jury in Fulton County told a federal judge on May 19 that once the Justice Department has names and addresses of 2020 election workers in the investigation, federal investigators would try to talk to the workers. The unusual investigative approach could potentially reinflate fraud theories that have been roundly rejected by several voting and law enforcement authorities about the result of the 2020 election, which President Donald Trump continues to want to avenge. Read Article

National: Trump official tried to ban half of US voting machines, citing conspiracy theories | Erin Banco, Jonathan Landay and Alexandra Alper/Reuters

U.S. President Donald Trump’s election-security czar last year sought to ban voting machines used in more than half of U.S. states by asking whether the Commerce Department could declare their components national-security risks, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter. White House adviser Kurt Olsen, a lawyer Trump has tasked with proving widely debunked election-rigging conspiracy theories, pushed the plan to target Dominion Voting Systems machines. The idea emerged, the sources said, as Olsen and other officials brainstormed about how ‌the federal government could take control over elections from U.S. states, an idea Trump publicly aired. Olsen wanted a national system of hand-counted paper ballots, the sources said, a frequent Trump demand some election-security experts say would be less accurate and potentially riskier than the current system of machines with auditable paper trails that almost all cities and states use. The plan to exclude the machines, reported here first, got far enough that in September, Commerce Department officials began exploring what grounds could be invoked to execute it, three additional sources said. It eventually collapsed, however, because Olsen and other administration staffers working with him failed to provide evidence to justify such a move, two of the sources said. The episode is part of a far-reaching Trump administration push to encroach on state and local governments’ authority to run elections – which is granted to them in the U.S. Constitution to prevent the executive branch from seizing power.Read Article

National: Election Officials Warn of Rising Threats As Security Funding Declines Ahead of Midterms | Kaitlin Bender-Thomas/The Fulcrum

Election officials warned lawmakers on Wednesday that threats against election workers and voting systems are escalating even as federal funding for election security remains far below 2020 levels, posing risks ahead of the 2026 midterms. In 2020, Congress allocated $425 million for election security grants, compared to $15 million in 2025 and $45 million this year. The Trump administration has also proposed a $707 million cut to the CyberSecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s fiscal 2027 budget and ended the agency’s election security support for state and local governments. These concerns were raised during a House Subcommittee on Elections hearing on election security. Thomas Hicks, chairman of the Election Assistance Commission, which distributes federal funds to states and territories to improve election administration, said election workers across the country have faced phishing attacks, bomb threats, and swatting incidents — false emergency reports intended to trigger large police responses at polling locations. Read Article

National: Judge refuses to block Trump executive order that limits mail voting | Nicholas Riccarddi/Associated Press

A federal judge has declined to halt President Donald Trump’s executive order creating a federal voter list and limiting mail voting, clearing the way for potential sweeping changes in how American elections are run shortly before this year’s midterm elections. U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee in Washington, late Wednesday rejected the request by Democrats and civil rights groups that had argued Trump’s order would likely be found unconstitutional because the states and Congress, not the president, have the power to set election rules. Nichols agreed with the Republican Trump administration’s contention that it was too early to block the order because it has yet to be implemented. Nichols’ ruling leaves the door open for further challenges when the Trump administration moves to implement the president’s directive. A separate lawsuit seeking to block the executive order is underway in Boston. No matter how rapidly the administration acts, no voting changes are expected during primary elections, which continue into next month. Read Article

National: OpenAI heralds cybersecurity, election interference safeguard plans for 2026 midterms | Tim Sparks/CyberScoop

OpenAI on Wednesday hailed its plans to safeguard information and aid cybersecurity defenders in the 2026 midterm elections, including work to combat deepfakes and other forms of artificial intelligence misuse. The announcement builds on commitments from major tech companies in 2024, including OpenAI, to protect elections from AI-infused election interference — efforts that some thought weren’t enough. Government agencies, non-governmental institutes and others have increasingly warned about AI’s ability to have a negative impact on elections even as they advertise its potential for good. OpenAI’s plan has five planks: spreading reliable information about voting and election results, helping with cybersecurity, watermarking deepfakes, enforcing policies that ban users from deploying its tools for election interference, and weeding out political bias in its models. Read Article

Opinion: Were the Constitution’s Authors a Little Too Optiistic? | Adam Liptak/The New York Times