National

The Trump administration is ordering officials in more than two dozen states to preserve records from the 2024 election as part of a campaign to force states to turn over detailed voter records despite repeated court losses. The preservation demand could set the stage for the Justice Department to seek access to the states’ election records as part of the administration’s hunt for fraud. The FBI has already obtained records or election equipment related to either the 2020 or 2024 elections from the most populous counties in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia and Michigan without saying what it was searching for. The letters escalate a fight between the Trump administration over access to the sensitive voter information. Federal officials have said they need the voter data to ensure that states are complying with federal election laws related to maintaining voter registration lists, even though states already have detailed processes to do that. Read Article

National: Postal Service Failed to Properly Handle Some Primary Election Ballots, Audit Finds | Jen Fifield/ProPublica

This year’s primary elections, according to a new audit from the agency’s Office of Inspector General. Election experts say the findings call into question the agency’s ability to meet even greater demands for the November election that are under consideration by the U.S. Supreme Court. The audit, which is dated Sept. 4 but has not been previously reported, found a lack of training for post office staff on how to properly and expeditiously handle mail ballots, deficiencies in how ballots were tracked and errors leading to delays, all of which risked ballots having incorrect postmarks or otherwise arriving late to election officials, which could lead to their rejection. The identified failures increase “the risk that Election and Political Mail is not handled, documented, monitored, and reported in accordance with Postal Service policy,” the audit said, though it noted that “most facilities we visited generally adhered to Postal Service’s election-related policies and procedures” and that nearly 99% of ballots reached election officials in a timely manner. Read Article

National: D.O.J. Escalates Threats to States in Battle for Election Records | Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times

The Department of Justice sent threatening letters to at least 30 top election officials across the country, expanding its efforts to gain access to private voter data and election records. The letters warned states not to destroy any records related to the 2024 election, explaining that their chief election officials “are currently under investigation” and subject to “ongoing litigation.” The notices come amid a barrage of efforts by President Trump and his administration, which have been fruitless so far, to find evidence of widespread voter fraud. It is not clear what the department is investigating, nor whether its probe is criminal or civil in nature. The letters do not cite any criminal statutes. Instead, they point to some of the same claims made previously as part of the administration’s ongoing effort to identify fraud in the nation’s elections, including machine anomalies and noncitizen voting. In court, the Justice Department has tried to force states to hand over unredacted voter lists, including personal information like driver's license numbers and partial Social Security numbers. The Justice Department has sued 30 different states for this data. They’ve lost 23 of those cases and have won none. Decisions are pending in the rest. Read Article

National: Voters Are Turning to AI for Election Help. The Answers Aren’t Always Right | Naomi Nix/Time Magazine

After years of Google restricting Gemini’s ability to answer users’ questions about major elections, the tech giant is shifting tactics. Google announced Wednesday that the company would add credible election information about the upcoming midterms—including details about where and how to vote—to its Gemini app, along with AI-generated responses in its search products. The company said it would share information on polling locations and voter registration instructions from state and local governments and the voting information group, Democracy Works, along with race results from The Associated Press. As Gemini wades deeper into politics, the risk of the chatbot giving voters misleading, biased, or outdated election information will only grow. A Pew Research Center study earlier this year found about half of adults under 50 rely on chatbots to search for information, while a smaller share use them to read news. “We know that voters are going to turn to chatbots more and more,” said Valeria de la Fuente, a digital research analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue who recently co-authored a report on election-related misinformation from chatbots. “So the quality of the responses that we found is concerning.” Read Article

National: Trump’s Commerce Secretary under pressure to use his powers to block voting machines | Gabe Cohen, Jeremy Herb, Sean Lyngaas, Phil Mattingly/CNN

President Donald Trump’s election fraud crusade has an unlikely new vehicle: the Commerce Department. Long known for more mundane work like promoting economic growth, shaping trade policy and producing federal statistics, under Secretary Howard Lutnick, Commerce is proving to be a useful ally in Trump’s efforts to reshape the country’s election systems ahead of the November midterms. In recent months, the department has produced disputed Census Bureau findings on noncitizen voting and pressed the US Postal Service to adopt stringent new mail-ballot rules. Sources tell CNN that Commerce officials worked quietly behind the scenes to advance both initiatives, and that Lutnick has become a key partner in the White House’s election agenda. Now, prominent Trump allies — including some inside the administration — are pressing Lutnick to use his department’s sweeping authorities over supply chains to ban certain voting machines, arguing that Chinese-made components could leave them vulnerable to hackers. Some have invoked those concerns to push Trump to declare a national emergency and seize greater federal control over November’s midterm elections. Read Article

National: The Election Deniers’ Long Game | Toluse Olorunnipa/The Atlantic

In the anxious days following President Trump’s 2020 election loss—before his supporters stormed the Capitol, before his vengeful return to the White House, before the mass pardons for cop beaters—some Republican figures sought to cast his attempt to overturn the results as nothing more than a coping mechanism.Trump was merely blowing off steam, people close to the president told me and other reporters. “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?” one asked, suggesting that in the end, his antics would amount to no more than a footnote in the annals of presidential history. The January 6 insurrection a few weeks later would, of course, turn those predictions into punch lines. Nearly six years on, they look worse still: The election denialism that inspired Trump’s MAGA loyalists to attack the Capitol has metastasized into an animating feature of Republican Party politics. Read Article

National: Whistle-Blower Says Trump Officials Are Defying Court Orders on Voting by Mail | Chris Cameron/The New York Times

A U.S. Postal Service official has alleged that the agency is moving forward with a “secretive, rushed” effort to carry out President Trump’s order exerting federal control over mail voting, despite a court order blocking those plans. The official filed a whistle-blower report, published on Tuesday morning by the office of Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, asserting that the “risky and haphazard” implementation of Mr. Trump’s order could lead to a “catastrophic failure” in the mail ballot system ahead of this year’s midterm elections. The report said that the agency had planned to complete the new digital system overseeing mail ballots by Sept. 1. “Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all,” the official said in the report, which was prepared with the assistance of Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit group that represents people seeking to expose potential lawbreaking. Speaking to reporters by phone on Monday, Mr. Blumenthal said of the report that “the main takeaway for me is that the Postal Service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions of Americans. One-third of all Americans cast their ballots by mail, and the U.S.P.S. puts all of their votes at risk.” Read Article

National: Trump Administration Withholds $39.6M Election Security Funds Congress Mandated in April | Clayton Lewis/Tech Times

Eight weeks before Americans cast their midterm ballots, more than $39.6 million in congressionally mandated election security money is sitting unused at the Department of Homeland Security — unspent even as foreign adversaries ramp up cyberattacks on American infrastructure and military commanders have testified that those adversaries specifically plan to target the 2026 elections. Sen. Alex Padilla of California and Rep. Joseph Morelle of New York sent a letter Wednesday to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Nick Anderson, the acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, demanding the agency distribute the funds as directed by the fiscal year 2026 DHS Appropriations bill, which Congress passed in April. The lawmakers — the top Democrats on the Senate and House committees with jurisdiction over federal elections — wrote that they share "grave concern that time is running out" — in the words of their letter to Mullin and Anderson — to assist state and local election officials in protecting elections from cyber and disinformation threats. Read Article

National: Trump administration asks Supreme Court to allow mail-in ballot restrictions | Justin Jouvenal and Patrick Marley/The Washington Post

The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to immediately allow new restrictions on mail-in balloting, potentially setting up a major legal clash that could affect millions of voters for November’s midterm elections. The fight could possibly upend election procedures just as states begin to send out mail-in ballots in pivotal contests that will determine control of the U.S. House and Senate. Some communities in Wisconsin mailed ballots to voters this week, North Carolina is set to send them to voters Friday and other states will follow suit in coming days and weeks.. Read Article

National: Judge Presses for Clarity in Lawsuit Over Mail-In Voting Rules | Zach Montague/The New York Times

A federal judge on Thursday expressed concern that if she allowed the Trump administration to move ahead with plans to restrict mail-in ballots ahead of the November election, it could cause so much chaos that states would experience “major disenfranchisement.” During a winding two-hour hearing in Federal District Court in Boston, Judge Indira Talwani asked sharp questions of attorneys from the Justice Department and a coalition of Republican states about how they believed they could implement the new rule on the eve of early voting across many states. The hearing highlighted concerns raised by a broad coalition of nonprofits and Democratic states that, if allowed to forge ahead with the new rule, the Postal Service could haphazardly reject thousands of valid ballots. Judge Talwani last week blocked the Postal Service from implementing the plan for 14 days, a period that expires Sept. 10. Thursday’s hearing was intended to help her decide whether to extend her injunction indefinitely. The Trump administration has already appealed her temporary restraining order and the issue is likely to be settled by the Supreme Court. Read Article

National: Election experts see few legal options for Trump to meddle with polling places | Jennifer Shutt/News From The States

President Donald Trump said earlier this year he’d “do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections” this fall, declining to rule out sending the National Guard or federal law enforcement officers to polling locations throughout the country. Those comments came a few months after Trump casually and briefly mentioned canceling the midterm elections that will determine control of Congress. Any such actions would lie outside the bounds of presidential power and the law, according to experts interviewed by States Newsroom. Nonetheless, one Democratic U.S. senator is sending letters to numerous members of the administration asking for commitments troops won’t be sent to the polls, and state officials are readying plans to keep voting secure. “The president can say whatever he wants, but his powers are extraordinarily limited in this way,” said Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows. With two months until voting ends on Nov. 3, the administration’s only publicly disclosed plan to monitor elections is a decades-old Justice Department program that sends federal workers throughout the country. Read Article

National: Mullin says DHS could deploy to polling sites for ‘specific’ threats, arrests | Eric Bazail-Eimil/Politico

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin provided more details Tuesday about the kinds of operations which would see immigration agents enter polling places, as Democrats have worried the Department of Homeland Security could seek to interfere in November’s midterm elections. Speaking to reporters in New York City, the Homeland Security secretary said that “ICE isn’t there to patrol the polling places. We’re there to enforce specific threats.” He added, however, that reports of specific undocumented immigrants at a location could be a reason for ICE to deploy. “The only reason why we would be at polling places is if there is a threat to that polling place or we’re serving a warrant on someone that we have been actively tracking down,” he said. “ICE’s job is immigration, customs enforcement. That’s their job … if we’re serving a warrant we will be where we need to be.” Read Article

National: Trump Administration Begins Blitz to Find Elusive Voter Fraud Ahead of Midterms | Nick Corasaniti and Hamed Aleaziz/The New York Times

Hundreds of federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security have been assigned to an intensive, weekslong hunt for noncitizens among the nation’s registered voters despite an absence of evidence of widespread fraud, according to documents and training videos reviewed by The New York Times. Agents are scouring voter rolls managed by the states, and are using personally identifiable information about individual voters, such as their dates of birth and partial Social Security numbers, to look them up on those rolls, according to the documents. In some cases, investigators are effectively posing as individual voters by plugging their names and personal information into public-facing websites run by the top election official in each state. Some of these sites declare they are meant for individual use, potentially raising privacy concerns. The extraordinary operation reveals the extent to which the Trump administration is searching for evidence of fraud ahead of the November elections. The government is privately calling the effort the Unlawful Voter Initiative and is pulling agents from their normal duties, which include investigating such serious crimes as human trafficking and terrorism. Read Article

National: Will Trump interfere in the midterms? Democrats and their allies are preparing | Kevin Rector and Justine McDaniel/Los Angeles Times

Big-city mayors are giving poll workers panic buttons in case election skeptics question their work. County and state officials are gaming out responses to immigration raids near voting centers. Lawyers for Democratic states and civic groups are pre-writing legal challenges to ballot seizures. And Democratic aides in Washington are preparing members of Congress to push back in the court of public opinion against any baseless claims of voter fraud in competitive districts. Across California and the nation, civic organizations, voting rights advocates and Democratic leaders are preparing for a raft of potential actions by the Trump administration to interfere in, subvert or deny November’s midterm vote. Read Article

Federal judge places new freeze on Trump mail-ballot rules, setting up likely Supreme Court showdown | Dion Nissenbaum/Votebeat

A federal judge on Thursday imposed a new freeze on President Donald Trump’s mail-ballot restrictions, the latest move in a back-and-forth legal battle playing out just weeks before the November elections. U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani blocked the U.S. Postal Service from moving ahead with plans to regulate mail ballots for at least 14 days while she weighs a more permanent ban on the agency’s new rules. The temporary restraining order comes just four days after the U.S. Supreme Court lifted Talwani’s previous injunction against the order on narrow procedural grounds. However, voting rights groups and a coalition of two dozen states and the District of Columbia kept pressing their case against the order, arguing that the president had no authority to try and regulate mail ballots. Read Article

National: ‘Trump ultimately wants the chaos’: States can’t implement anti-mail voting order before midterms, experts warn | Alexandra Hutzler/Democracy Docket

“We are way too close to an election for any major changes,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D) told Democracy Docket after the Supreme Court allowed the administration to move forward, for now, with President Donald Trump’s anti-mail voting executive order. But, with 68 days until Election Day and some ballots being mailed as soon as next week, major changes are exactly what a new U.S. Postal Service rule imposing restrictions on a voting method one-third of Americans used in 2024 would require of election administrators. “I would argue that it’s already functionally impossible to implement. We’re well past that date,” said Pamela Smith, the president and CEO of Verified Voting, a nonprofit that promotes the responsible use of technology in elections. You don’t upend something that’s centuries old on a whim.” Read Article

National: Nothing changes yet with the Supreme Court’s order on elections. But it could open door to ‘chaos’ | Nicholas Riccardi/Associated Press

The Supreme Court’s decision giving preliminary approval for President Donald Trump’s order restricting mail voting may not lead to a single election procedure changing during the November midterms, but it has already thrown into uncertainty the method that nearly one-third of the country uses to vote. Rather than saying that Trump’s order is legal, the high court said Monday it was too early for Democratic-run states to challenge it in June, when they convinced a federal judge in Boston to freeze the order for November’s election. That effectively restarts the legal fight over the order in an incredibly compressed timeline, with initial ballots scheduled to be sent to North Carolina’s overseas and military voters in just over a week, on Sept. 4. A second injunction barring the U.S. Postal Service from making changes to comply with Trump’s directive remains in effect. Still, the administration late Monday filed a motion asking that the second hold be removed, and has posted new regulations from the Postal Service that would go into effect Tuesday if the legal pathway is fully cleared. Read Article

National: Voting rights experts skeptical over Trump pledge of 1,000 election monitors | Rachel Leingang and Sam Levine/The Guardian

Former officials and voting rights experts have expressed skepticism over a pledge by the Trump administration to dispatch 1,000 monitors across the country to scrutinize November’s US midterm elections. While the Department of Justice (DoJ) has expressed hope that the operation will be the largest in its history, its plan raised questions over its ability to recruit so many people – and what they would do. The US president has repeatedly denied the results of election defeats, including his 2020 loss in the presidential election to Joe Biden, and in recent months has escalated concerns that he will seek to meddle in November’s elections. Read Article

National: Census report does not prove Trump’s claim about 2020 noncitizen voting | Melissa Goldin/Associated Press

Trump’s Truth Social post on Tuesday referenced a report published by the U.S. Census Bureau that he said checked “Voter Records from 2020 against their Citizenship Records,” finding 24,000 noncitizens voted illegally in just its initial search. The report is described as a “beginning analysis.”But experts say its methodology is flawed and could have created many false positives. “This is the weakest methodology description I’ve ever seen in a Census Bureau publication,” said Mark Lindeman, policy and strategy director at Verified Voting, a nonpartisan group focused on election technology. “This document doesn’t tell us anything about elections. It just shows that the Census Bureau has gone off the rails.” He added that the Census Bureau is not clear about which databases it used in its analysis, which he said “exists essentially as a propaganda offering,” and that it does not explain likely sources of errors. Read Article

Opinion: Trump’s Election Interference Is Eroding American Democracy | The New York Times Editorial Board

The surest sign of democratic collapse is the unwillingness of an elected political party to leave office. The party rewrites laws and changes election rules to prevent its opponents from gaining power. The shift often starts slowly but can ultimately end in autocracy. President Trump has taken worrisome steps down this path since returning to office in January 2025. He has directed Republican-run states to enact newly gerrymandered maps to increase the chances that Republicans maintain control of Congress even if they receive fewer votes this year. He has tried to pass legislation that could keep many eligible voters from voting. And he has sent signals that he may use the power of the federal government to disallow legitimate ballots this fall. On July 16, Mr. Trump took the remarkable step of giving a prime-time White House address devoted to lies and misleading statements about voter fraud. Read Article

National: Trump can’t stop, won’t stop (undermining the 2026 elections) | Shirin Ali/Slate

President Donald Trump’s attempt to nationalize America’s voting system suffered another loss in court this week, just the latest in a lengthy series of defeats over Trump’s blatantly unlawful executive orders around voting. This time was a bit more dramatic, though, with a judge bluntly calling out the Justice Department for using a lawsuit against Minnesota as a “fishing expedition” to help it find a violation of federal law. U.S. District Court Judge Katherine Menendez dismissed the case, ultimately finding that Congress never authorized the attorney general to access voting records and documents that state officials create themselves. These continued losses won’t end the story, though. Newly confirmed Attorney General Todd Blanche announced this week that he’s considering asking the Supreme Court to intervene in the dozens of lawsuits his DOJ has filed against states that, like Minnesota, refused to hand over their voter rolls. Trump and Blanche are attempting to bully states into submission over “election integrity,” but it’s obvious what the real endgame is: Complete control over U.S. elections. Read Article

National: Trump Boasts of Declassifying Secrets, but Withholds Key Election Files From Public | Dustin Volz/The New York Times

The White House in recent weeks has made public a steady drip of previously classified intelligence about foreign threats to elections and other matters, offering President Trump and his allies ammunition for baseless conspiracy theories about potential vote rigging. But one crucial document has not been among the releases, despite a congressional requirement for it to be: the assessment by U.S. intelligence agencies of foreign meddling efforts during the 2024 election. The document would provide the public with a holistic look at foreign attempts to influence voters and sow division around the presidential contest and other federal races that year. The 2020 version of the assessment, released during the early weeks of the Biden administration, highlighted Russia’s efforts to boost Mr. Trump, Iran’s push to harm his candidacy and analytic judgments about actions China considered but largely refrained from taking. It also included a dissenting minority view that China took “at least some steps” intended to undermine Mr. Trump. The omission of the report on the 2024 election shows the highly selective nature of the Trump White House’s approach to declassification. It is just one example of many where the administration has ignored bipartisan pressure from Congress, including legal requirements, by withholding certain documents from public view even as it publishes hundreds of pages of material it has promised will reveal deep-state coverups of foreign meddling efforts. Read Article

National: Justice Department plans to send about 1,000 monitors to the polls this fall | Patrick Marley/The Washington Post

The Justice Department plans to dispatch about 1,000 monitors to the polls this fall — probably the largest number under a Republican president, according to a top assistant attorney general. The Justice Department routinely sends monitors to polling places to ensure election laws are followed and voters’ rights are protected. In the past — including during primaries this month — they have limited their involvement to observation, but Democrats have raised concerns about what they could do this fall because President Donald Trump this year said Republicans should “nationalize the voting” and “take over the voting.” Harmeet K. Dhillon, the assistant attorney general who leads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, told Bloomberg News that the deployment of about 1,000 poll monitors is “probably going to be a historic number for a Republican administration.” She did not say where they would go in an interview that was published Monday. Read Article

National: Democrats sue DOJ over midterm ballot seizure plans | Ryan Knappenberger/Courthouse News Service

The Democratic National Committee sued the Justice Department on Thursday over its refusal to turn over documents related to any plans to seize ballots, voting machines and other election materials within a month of any federal primary and general election during the midterms. The DNC filed the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, after the FBI declined to turn over such documents as requested in a Feb. 6, request brought in the wake of the FBI raid on the Fulton County election office on Jan. 28. “Following the seizure of archived ballots from Fulton County, Georgia — and seeking to ensure that the Trump administration does not attempt unprecedented abuses of criminal law enforcement tools to undermine upcoming elections — the Democratic National Committee sent requests for records under the Freedom of Information Act, to components of the Department of Justice concerning any planned seizure of ballots, voting machines and other voting systems components,” the DNC says in its complaint. Read Article

National: ‘I don’t trust you’:Tensions were high in an election security call for state leaders hosted by CISA | Dion Nissenbaum/Votebeat

Tensions between state election officials and the Trump administration are rising as we head into the heart of the midterm election season. Frustrations boiled over on Monday during a rare election security call hosted by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency for state officials. During the call, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes unloaded on the agency. CISA used to be a go-to shop for many states looking for help ensuring that their elections weren’t hacked, targeted, or undermined by cyberattacks or foreign interference. CISA provided states with classified security briefings on threats, helped ensure that state voting equipment wasn’t vulnerable to cyberattacks, and worked with election leaders to game out potential risks. All that changed when Donald Trump returned to the White House last year. The second Trump administration scaled back its support for states, cut back CISA staff, and launched an investigation of its former leader, whom Trump accused of disloyalty because he pushed back on the president’s false claims that the 2020 election was rigged. CISA has not had a permanent director since the start of Trump’s second term. Read Article

National: Experts slam Trump’s unusual new census report as a ‘hijack by the White House’ | Gabe Cohen and Fredreka Schouten/CNN

Former Census Bureau leaders, statisticians and voting-rights advocates are raising alarms about an unusual, unsigned new report posted on the agency’s website that claims tens of thousands of noncitizens voted in the 2020 presidential election. President Donald Trump touted the results Tuesday on Truth Social, saying the bureau had proved that more than 24,000 noncitizens illegally voted in 2020 after analyzing 128 million individual voter records. Even if the report is accurate, 24,000 votes would amount to less than 0.02% of the roughly 160 million ballots cast in 2020. Joe Biden won the national popular vote by more than 7 million votes. Read Article

National: Trump election demands spark suit over DHS anti-terrorism funding | Sarah D. Wire/USA Today

A group of prominent cities and counties are suing the Trump administration for withholding tens of millions of dollars in anti-terrorism funding unless states and local governments agree to change how they conduct elections. Harris County and El Paso County in Texas; Nashville, Tennessee, and Columbus, Ohio are participating in the suit. The lawsuit challenges the Federal Emergency Management Agency's June 2026 decision to hold back 20% or even all Homeland Security Grant Program grants unless the jurisdictions comply with five election administration orders. Read Article

National: How Trump Left America Vulnerable to Cyberattacks | Nick Miroff and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez/The Atlantic