National

Last week, officials gathered at an Oklahoma City hotel for the annual National Association of State Election Directors conference. Since President Donald Trump took office again, his Justice Department has been sending out letters to states with sweeping requests for information about how they maintain their voter rolls and ensure that only eligible people are registered. Meanwhile, the administration is urging election officials around the country to use an existing federal immigration database called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program for a new purpose: to verify voters’ eligibility. The Department of Homeland Security recently overhauled SAVE to make it easier to search, and free for states to use. Experts have questioned the accuracy and reliability of the data, given how quickly the system changes to SAVE were made this year. They’ve also raised concerns about how the federal government is using data uploaded by states, and whether using the tool outside its intended purpose could put people’ privacy or voting rights at risk. Read Article

National: Federal appeals court restricts who can bring voting rights challenges | Gary Fields/Associated Press

A federal appeals court panel on Monday ruled that private individuals and organizations cannot bring voting rights cases under a section of the law that allows others to assist voters who are blind, have disabilities or are unable to read. It’s the latest ruling from the St. Louis-based 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, saying only the government can bring lawsuits alleging violations of the Voting Rights Act. The findings upend decades of precedent and will likely be headed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The case centered on whether an Arkansas law that limits how many voters can be assisted by one person conflicts with Section 208 of the landmark federal law. The opinion from the three-judge panel followed the reasoning of another 8th Circuit panel in a previous case from 2023. That opinion held that the Arkansas State Conference NAACP and the Arkansas Public Policy Conference could not bring cases under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Read Article

National: Department of Justice Is Said to Plan to Contact All 50 States on Voting Systems | Matt Cohen and Zachary Roth/Democracy Docket

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has said it intends to contact all 50 states about their compliance with federal voting law, a national association of state election officials told Democracy Docket. “As states recently began to receive letters on the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and Help America Vote Act (HAVA) from the U.S. Department of Justice, NASS staff reached out to hopefully provide members with additional information and context,” Maria Benson, a spokesperson for the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) said in a statement. “DOJ staff told NASS staff that all states would be contacted eventually on NVRA and HAVA matters. We passed along this information to members.” Read Article

National: As Federal Support for Elections Evolves, States Adapt to Close Emerging Gaps | Brenna Nelson/NCSL

The decentralization of U.S. election administration leaves many decisions regarding how elections are run to states and localities, which also foot most of the bill. The federal government does support elections, though, even if most ongoing costs fall to states and localities. “We have seen over the last 25 years, more and more federal support for state and local elections officials,” says Lindsey Forson, deputy executive director at the National Association of Secretaries of State and a panelist in a recent NCSL webinar. That could be changing as the Trump administration enacts its election priorities and shifts resources. Read Article

National: Noncitizen voting remains exceedingly rare, new review finds | Miles Parks/NPR

After President Trump and many other Republicans warned that vast numbers of non-U.S. citizens would influence last year's election, states and law enforcement have devoted more resources than ever before to root out those ineligible voters. More than six months into Trump's second term, they haven't found much. New research out Wednesday tracking state government efforts across the country confirms what election experts have said all along: Noncitizen voting occasionally happens but in minuscule numbers, and not in any coordinated way. "Noncitizens are not a large threat to our election system currently," said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR), which conducted the research. "Even states that are looking everywhere to try to amplify the numbers of noncitizens … when they actually look, they find a surprisingly, shockingly small number." Read Article

National: Trump pick moves closer to leading agency that protects election systems | Ali Swenson/Associated Press

A U.S. Senate committee voted Wednesday to advance President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the agency that secures the nation’s critical infrastructure, including election systems. Members of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted 9-6 to recommend Sean Plankey ’s nomination for director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, known as CISA, which sits under the Department of Homeland Security. The agency has been dealing with workforce and funding cuts, as well as criticism from Republicans over some of its election-related activities. Read Article

Opinion: The Fact Checker rose in an era of false claims. Falsehoods are now winning. | Glenn Kessler/The Washington Post

When 400 fact-checkers from around the world gathered in Rio de Janeiro in June for an annual conference, the mood was tense. After years of exponential growth, political fact-checking was in retreat and under fire. And somehow, even as fact-checking surged in the past decade, so had the wave of false claims and narratives swamping the world. Meta, which after 2016 spent more than $100 million to fund 100 fact-checking organizations, ended a partnership with U.S. fact-checkers to highlight false claims and signaled it would cut back across the world. Google announced it would end its ClaimReview program — which I helped foster — that elevated fact checks in search results. Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s abrupt dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development cut off additional funding for fact-checkers in Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America and Asia. The state of the fact-checking field is on my mind as I write my last column for The Washington Post. I am taking a voluntary buyout, ending almost 28 years at the newspaper, including more than 14 as The Fact Checker. Read Article

National: The Supreme Court Is Writing a Slow-Motion Eulogy for One of America’s Greatest Achievements | Maureen Edobor/Slate

Next month marks the 60th anniversary of the passing of the Voting Rights Act—a law often celebrated as the “crown jewel” of the Civil Rights Movement. Signed in 1965 after years of organizing and unimaginable sacrifice, it was meant to realize the constitutional promise that the right to vote would not be denied or abridged on account of race. Yet, as we approach this milestone, we find ourselves not in a moment of reflection or rededication but in a state of legal free fall. The Supreme Court has scheduled arguments next term on Louisiana’s racially gerrymandered congressional map, and the court as early as next week may put on hold and set for argument a case in which the 8th Circuit held that private plaintiffs have no right to sue to enforce Section 2 of the act. These pending decisions threaten to gut what remains of this once powerful statute, which has already been largely hollowed out by the Roberts court over the past decade-plus. Read Article

National: Gabbard claim of anti-Trump conspiracy not backed by declassified documents | Byron Tau and Eric Tucker/Associated Press

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard this month declassified material she claimed proved a “treasonous conspiracy” by the Obama administration in 2016 to politicize U.S. intelligence in service of casting doubt on the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s presidential election victory. As evidence, Gabbard cited newly declassified emails from Obama officials and a 5-year-old classified House report in hopes of undermining the intelligence community’s conclusion Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted to boost Trump and denigrate his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. Russia’s activities during the 2016 election remain some of the most examined events in recent history. The Kremlin’s campaign and the subsequent U.S. government response were the subject of at least five major investigations by the Republican-led House and Senate intelligence committee; two Justice Department special counsels; and the department’s inspector general. Read Article

National: Judge limits a small part of a court order blocking Trump’s election overhaul as lawsuits continue | Ali Swenson and Christina A. Cassidy/Associated Press

A federal judge on Friday modified part of a previous ruling that blocked much of President Donald Trump’s sweeping executive order seeking to overhaul elections in the U.S. The minor change affects just one aspect of a preliminary injunction that U.S. District Court Judge Denise J. Casper granted on June 13 in a case filed by Democratic state attorneys general. The judge said Friday that the part of Trump’s order directing certain federal agencies to assess people’s U.S. citizenship when they ask for voter registration forms will now only be blocked in the 19 states that filed the lawsuit. Election law experts said the modification will have little, if any, practical effect because a judge in a different lawsuit filed against the executive order also blocked the federal agencies from obeying the mandate in all 50 states. Read Article

National: House Republicans endorse stricter state and federal-led voter roll purges despite dearth of evidence on fraud | Derek B. Johnson/CyberScoop

In a congressional hearing on state voter registration practices Tuesday, Republicans on the House Administration Committee were united around common sentiments: It is too easy for citizens to register to vote and too easy for them to stay on voter rolls, states aren’t doing enough to remove ineligible voters, and it’s all led to the country’s elections being vulnerable to mass voter fraud and noncitizen voting. There was little evidence presented to back up most of those claims. Yet, the hearing focused on how states and the federal government could better review voter registration databases, with lawmakers hearing from two conservative nonprofit representatives and a North Carolina voter who was wrongly removed from the state’s voter rolls last year. Read Article

National: Administration Defying Court By Stonewalling on Anti-Voting Order, Plaintiffs Say | Jacob Knutson/Democracy Docket

The Trump administration is defying a court order by refusing to say how federal agencies may be implementing President Donald Trump’s sweeping anti-voting executive order, pro-voting groups and Democrats alleged in a filing Friday. Among the order’s directives that lawyers for the administration have failed to provide answers about: How is the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) allowing its databases to be used to purge voters? How will the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) punish states for continuing to offer a grace period for mail ballots that arrive after Election Day? And how will the U.S. Election Assistance Commission — an independent agency — withhold funds from states that don’t comply with aspects of the order? Read Article

National: U.S. to Curtail Practice of Assessing Fairness of Foreign Elections | Robbie Gramer and Alexander Ward/Wall Street Journal

The U.S. plans to stop commenting on the fairness, integrity and legitimacy of foreign elections, a major shift away from a decadeslong practice of promoting democratic elections abroad. A new instruction, delivered in a Thursday memorandum signed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, orders statements on foreign elections to focus on congratulating the winning candidate and “avoid opining on the fairness or integrity of an electoral process, its legitimacy, or the democratic values of the country in question.” The State Department should only make public statements about foreign elections if “there is a clear and compelling U.S. foreign policy interest to do so,” according to the memo, which cited the “the administration’s emphasis on national sovereignty.” Read Article

National: A State Agenda for Election Security and Resiliency | Derek Tisler and Chris McIsaac/Brennan Center for Justice

The 2024 election was widely regarded as an administrative success. It went off largely without a hitch, with only minor disruptions to voting. And a decisive victory by Donald Trump in the presidential campaign, paired with a prompt concession by Kamala Harris, helped avoid a long and contentious process of determining the winner, which might have eroded the perception of a well-run election. Yet there were serious attempts at disruption, including bomb threats at polling places, cyberattacks on election systems, and destruction of ballot drop boxes. That these incidents failed to have a major impact is a testament to the planning, preparation, and response of election officials and law enforcement. Still, these incidents highlight the need for policymakers to double down on their commitment to the election resiliency policies and practices that made 2024 such a success. Read Article

National: Jan. 6 Rioters Are the New Hot Event in Town for Republicans | James Fanelli/The Wall Street Journal

Former Jan. 6 defendants are the new draw at local Republican fundraisers, helping to fill seats at normally sleepy events while getting a platform to tell their version of the Capitol riot. The Davis County Republican Party in the Salt Lake City suburbs held its annual Abraham Lincoln Day Dinner in March at $75 a plate. One marquee speaker was a pardoned defendant who federal prosecutors said knocked back a shot of Fireball whiskey in the conference room of then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “This was not an insurrection,” the speaker, Treniss Evans, told the crowd. “This was Kent State. This was Tiananmen Square.” It has been nearly six months since President Trump granted pardons and commutations to the roughly 1,500 people criminally charged in the attack on the Capitol. The pardons initially unsettled some Republicans who thought Trump was showing leniency to defendants who attacked law-enforcement officers, but the GOP is increasingly willing to reintegrate these former defendants into the fold. Read Article

National: Justice Department requests voter rolls and election data from states | Patrick Marley and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez/The Washington Post

The Trump administration and its allies have launched a multipronged effort to gather data on voters and inspect voting equipment, sparking concern among local and state election officials about federal interference ahead of the 2026 midterms. The most unusual activity is happening in Colorado — a state that then-candidate Donald Trump lost by 11 points — where a well-connected consultant who says he is working with the White House is asking county clerks whether they will allow the federal government or a third party to physically examine their election equipment. Federal agencies have long offered technical assistance and cybersecurity advice to election officials but have not examined their equipment because election laws tightly limit who has access. Read ArticleRead Article

National: Election Officials Have Been Under Attack For Years. Now The DOJ Wants to Criminally Charge Them | Matt Cohen/Democracy Docket

In recent months, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) sent letters to states including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Arizona, and Colorado, pressing for information about voter roll management, demanding to see state voter rolls, and threatening to sue over alleged voting law violations. But the department’s campaign has gone much further. Criminal prosecutors at DOJ sent separate broad requests for information to election officials in at least two states, people who have seen the requests told Democracy Docket. Those letters were first reported by the New York Times, which added that they’re part of a broader initiative at DOJ, still in its early stages, to look into whether it can bring criminal charges against election officials for not doing enough to protect their voting systems against fraud and illegal voting. Read Article

National: GOP lawmakers try again to change who’s counted in key census numbers | Hansi Lo Wang/NPR

Republicans in Congress are reviving a controversial push to alter a key set of census numbers that are used to determine how presidents and members of the U.S. House of Representatives are elected. Ratified after the Civil War, the 14th Amendment says the "whole number of persons in each state" must be included in what are called apportionment counts, the population numbers based on census results that determine each state's share of House seats and Electoral College votes for a decade. But GOP lawmakers have now released three bills this year that would use the 2030 census to tally residents without U.S. citizenship, and then subtract some or all of them from the apportionment counts. Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee unveiled the latest bill Monday. Read Article

National: Republicans target voting rights of U.S. citizens who have never lived in the country | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

The Republican Party is challenging the voting eligibility of some U.S. citizens who have always lived abroad, in what they’re calling a broader strategy ahead of next year’s midterms to clean up voter rolls and improve voter confidence. But Democrats see the effort as a blatant attempt to disenfranchise eligible Democrats in key swing states. The GOP terms the voters they are targeting as “never residents” because they are U.S. citizens but haven’t lived in the United States. Most frequently, they are children of U.S. citizens who have been in the military, or lived overseas for other reasons. Three-quarters of states have laws on the books allowing such citizens to vote by absentee or mail ballot in the same state where their parents or other relatives last lived or are registered. Read Article

National: Emil Bove declines to rule out 3rd Trump term or denounce Jan. 6 rioters in Senate questionnaire | Scott MacFarlane/CBS

Emil Bove, a top Justice Department official who previously served as President Trump's criminal defense attorney, declined to rule out the possibility of the president running for a third term and did not denounce the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol in a questionnaire submitted to a Senate panel considering his nomination for a lifetime appointment as a federal judge. The Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to vote next week on whether to advance Bove's nomination to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit. CBS News obtained the 165-page questionnaire that Bove submitted to senators in response to their written questions. In his answers, Bove also wrote he does not recall which Jan. 6 criminal cases he helped supervise when he served in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York. In response to the question "Do you denounce the January 6 insurrection?" Bove wrote: "The characterization of the events on January 6 is a matter of significant political debate," and said it would be "inappropriate to address this question" given ongoing litigation over pardons of Jan. 6 defendants. Read Article

National: Senate Democrats seek answers on Trump overhaul of immigrant database to find noncitizen voters | Derek B. Johnson/CyberScoop

As the Department of Homeland Security seeks to transform a federal database for immigrant benefits into a supercharged database to search for noncitizen voters, a trio of Democratic senators are pressing the department for more information. Sens. Gary Peters, D-Mich., Alex Padilla, D-Calif., and Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Tuesday posing a series of questions around the department’s overhaul of the Systemic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database. “States and nonpartisan voter advocacy organizations have expressed concerns with using the SAVE program as a standalone tool to determine voter eligibility without adequate safeguards,” the senators wrote. “In particular, there are concerns that data quality issues may cause state and local officials who rely on the program to receive false positives or incomplete results.” Read Article

National: Amid cuts to federal cyber services, local election officials expect greater state support | Colin Wood/StateScoop

A majority of local election officials are worried about the federal government’s recent moves to pull back support for election security services, according to a report published Thursday by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit public policy institute. The report, which arrives amid numerous cuts to services and staff at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, found that 61% of local election officials polled said they were specifically concerned about election security services cut by CISA. And of the 858 local election officials who responded, 87% said they believe it’s important that state and local governments fill the gaps in support created by the federal government’s cuts under the second Donald Trump administration. Lawrence Norden, a vice president of elections and government at the Brennan Center who helped conduct the survey, said the government landscape is already shifting to ensure election offices can protect their systems and share timely threat information. Read Article

National: CIA declassifies review of intelligence report on 2016 Russia election interference | Dan De Luce and Ken Dilanian/NBC

CIA officials failed in some cases to follow standard procedures in an intelligence analysis of Russian interference efforts in the 2016 election, according to an internal review declassified Wednesday. Intelligence officers were given an unusually short timeline for the analysis, there was “excessive involvement” by senior leaders, and staff members were given uneven access to crucial intelligence about Russia, the “lessons-learned” review said. But the review did not refute the findings of the 2017 intelligence assessment that Russia waged an information warfare campaign designed to undermine Americans’ confidence in the electoral process, damage Hillary Clinton and boost Donald Trump’s prospects in the 2016 election. Read Article

National: Justice Department Explores Using Criminal Charges Against Election Officials | Devlin Barrett and Nick Corasaniti

Senior Justice Department officials are exploring whether they can bring criminal charges against state or local election officials if the Trump administration determines they have not sufficiently safeguarded their computer systems, according to people familiar with the discussions. The department’s effort, which is still in its early stages, is not based on new evidence, data or legal authority, according to the people, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions. Instead, it is driven by the unsubstantiated argument made by many in the Trump administration that American elections are easy prey to voter fraud and foreign manipulation, these people said. Such a path could significantly raise the stakes for federal investigations of state or county officials, thrusting the Justice Department and the threat of criminalization into the election system in a way that has never been done before. Read Article

National: Lawmakers demand CISA explain how it’s supporting election offices | Colin Wood/ StateScoop

In a letter Monday addressed to leaders of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Democratic lawmakers demanded to know why the agency hasn’t responded to their recent inquiries about the level of support it’s providing to state and local election offices. Ranking members Rep. Joseph D. Morelle and Sen. Alex Padilla wrote that they’re seeking “urgent updates” to the status of numerous election security policies and programs offered by CISA under previous administrations. The letter, which is addressed to CISA acting Director Madhu Gottumukkala and Mona Harrington, assistant director of CISA’s National Risk Management Center, demands a “comprehensive briefing” on CISA’s operations and personnel before July 21. “CISA’s repeated failure to respond to our requests for information while undertaking a significant reshaping of the agency’s personnel and mission is unacceptable,” the letter reads. “We remain deeply troubled by the lack of information CISA has provided to congressional oversight committees and the lack of substantive responses to our questions.” Read Article

National: Department of Justice Jumps on SCOTUS Nationwide Injunctions Ruling to Boost Trump’s Anti-Voting Order | Jacob Knutson/Democracy Docket

Citing the Supreme Court’s recent ruling curtailing nationwide injunctions, the Department of Justice (DOJ) asked a federal judge to weaken part of a previous court order against President Donald Trump’s sweeping anti-voting decree. Beyond its potential impact in the battle over the voting order, the filing is also a stark example of how SCOTUS’ ruling in the nationwide injunctions case, Trump v. CASA, could give the administration a boost in other cases challenging Trump’s authoritarian power grab. The DOJ asked District Judge Denise Casper July 3 to amend the portion of her previous court order that barred the government from enforcing Section 2d of Trump’s executive order. Read Article

National: Nearly half of election officials concerned about politically motivated investigations | Aaron Pellish/Politico

Nearly half of local election officials are concerned about politically motivated investigations targeting election workers, according to a new survey from the Brennan Center for Justice. Forty-six percent of local election officials said they were at least somewhat concerned about politically motivated investigations of their work or the work of other election officials. Of that, 18 percent of respondents said they were “very concerned” about potential investigations. Election officials have increasingly become targets of scrutiny in the wake of the 2020 presidential election, when President Donald Trump and his allies touted conspiracy theories about ballot processing to claim the results of the election — which he lost — were rigged. Read Article

National: Trump and GOP target ballots arriving after Election Day that delay counts | Chistina A. Cassidy/Associated Press

President Donald Trump and other Republicans have long criticized states that take weeks to count their ballots after Election Day. This year has seen a flurry of activity to address it. Part of Trump’s executive order on elections, signed in March but held up by lawsuits, takes aim at one of the main reasons for late vote counts: Many states allow mailed ballots to be counted even if they arrive after Election Day. The U.S. Supreme Court last month said it would consider whether a challenge in Illinois can proceed in a case that is among several Republican-backed lawsuits seeking to impose an Election Day deadline for mail ballots. At least three states — Kansas, North Dakota and Utah — passed legislation this year that eliminated a grace period for receiving mailed ballots, saying they now need to be in by Election Day. Read Article

National: The States Decide How Elections Are Run | Grace Olson/NCSL