National

Democratic state officials are ramping up their preparations to protect against what they view as a new threat to election security: the federal government. At a meeting in Milwaukee in May, staff members from the offices of every Democratic attorney general and about a dozen Democratic secretaries of state held tabletop exercises to prepare for hypothetical scenarios in the November midterm elections. In those “war rooms,” said Nick Brown, the Democratic attorney general of the state of Washington, state officials discussed how they would handle a variety of scenarios. What might happen if the F.B.I. showed up, demanding election materials or equipment? What if federal troops or agents were deployed in the country in ways that could intimidate voters or disrupt the election? What if President Trump tried to declare an election-related national emergency? Read Article

National: Trump’s claims of election interference in doubt after release of declassified intelligence | Isaac Arnsdorf and Patrick Marley/The Washington Post

State officials said federal authorities never notified them of a Chinese hack affecting their voter registration systems, casting doubt on President Donald Trump’s claims of vulnerabilities in U.S. elections. Officials in 12 of the 15 states named in intelligence reports released by the White House as having voter rolls “compromised” by China said officials never notified them of a data breach, a standard step for federal law enforcement when hacks are discovered. The other three states and Washington, D.C., did not respond. Trump alleged in a July 16 prime-time speech that the data had been “bought, stolen or hacked.” The states’ responses and newly declassified intelligence reports suggest China obtained voter data from other sources, such as political parties or companies that compile and combine it with other information to target voters or consumers. Experts said the effort appeared aimed at collecting data on Americans for intelligence purposes, not interfering with voting. Read Article

National: Appeals court upholds halt to Trump’s executive order to create voter list | Russ Bynum/Associated Press

A federal appeals court has upheld a ruling that in nearly half of U.S. states halted President Donald Trump’s executive order to create a federal list of eligible voters and limit delivery of mail ballots only to people on that list. The ruling Saturday by judges of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the Trump administration’s effort to move forward with the mail-in voting restrictions in 23 U.S. states that sued ahead of November’s midterm elections. Trump issued an executive order in March for the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the commissioner of the Social Security Administration to create a “state citizenship list” of eligible voters. It also ordered the U.S. Postal Service to deliver mail ballots only to people on that list. While Trump touted the proposed changes as safeguards to keep non-U.S. citizens from voting, state election officials argued they were ripe for abuse and could cause chaos. Read Article

National: Trump’s attacks on mail balloting and concerns over delays turn midterms spotlight on Postal Service | John Hanna/Associated Press

Roughly six weeks before the first midterm ballots are mailed out, the U.S. Postal Service is emerging as a pivotal player in an election season that will determine control of Congress. President Donald Trump is seeking greater control over mail balloting through an executive order while a change to how the agency processes mail is leading to criticism that it’s failing to deliver ballots on time. Democratic officials have raised concerns over the past week about how quickly the Postal Service will process ballots after tens of thousands of them in California and hundreds in Wisconsin arrived at local election offices too late to be counted in elections earlier this year. The top election offices in Kansas and Michigan are urging voters who want to cast their ballots early to avoid the mail and instead drop them off in person. Read Article

National: Thune says no to filibuster changes even after Trump’s threats about SAVE America Act | Allison Pecorin/ABC News

Senate Majority Leader John Thune on Monday reiterated that there would not be changes to Senate rules in order to pass a Republican-led election reform bill that President Donald Trump has demanded be sent to his desk. "Yeah, that's not going to happen," Thune said when asked by ABC News about whether Senate rules requiring 60 votes to advance most legislative matters could be altered in light of Trump's new pressure campaign to pass the SAVE America Act, which would change voter ID requirements ahead of November's midterm elections. Read Article

National: Trump’s document ‘cherry-pick’ doesn’t show a cover-up of Chinese election intelligence, ex-officials say | Sean Lyngaas/CNN

President Donald Trump and his allies touted spy reports and emails that he declassified this month as showing a “cover-up” of intelligence about China’s efforts to harm Trump’s re-election prospects in 2020, part of the president’s push to undermine confidence in the integrity of US elections. But there was no cover-up, according to a CNN review of the documents and interviews with former senior intelligence officials familiar with election security efforts in 2020. Instead, the documents show a messy disagreement over intelligence among officials, the kind of discussion that isn’t unusual as experts weigh the value of both raw information and finished intelligence they receive, the former officials said. The declassified material — and the context behind it — also show a stubbornness by some China-focused analysts to fully consider alternative theories about China’s intentions toward the 2020 election, the sources added. “This was an analytic disagreement, not a cover-up,” said one of the former officials who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. The disclosures don’t change what the majority of the intelligence community concluded after an exhaustive review of intelligence: China considered trying to influence the outcome of the 2020 election but chose not to out of fear of upsetting US-China relations. Read Article

National: Trump’s EAC firings threaten access for voters with disabilities, experts warn | Natalie Hausmann/Democracy Docket

Diane Golden helped secure accessible voting equipment when the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) passed in 2002, ensuring the right for people with disabilities to vote privately and independently. Today, she’s concerned that right is at risk. HAVA led to the widespread use of voting machines, which can include anything from ballot-marking devices to barcodes. It provided ways for people who cannot use a hand-marked paper ballot to vote. But President Donald Trump has long questioned the security of the voting systems that provide access to one-sixth of all voters. He called them “terrible machines,” “dishonest, almost all,” “vulnerable” and “easily compromised” in a recent address to the nation. Read Article

National: How Trump could undermine the midterms | US midterm elections 2026 | George Chidi/The Guardian

When Donald Trump commandeered primetime US television last Thursday, he delivered a familiar, but still extraordinary, message. The president argued once again that the results of the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden, were illegitimate. US elections are “vulnerable to being rigged and stolen”, Trump alleged, claiming that “the trust of the American people was lost” when he was defeated. Historically, incumbent parties underperform in midterm elections and with the president’s popularity sagging – he has an approval rating of just 37% – Republicans appear on course to lose seats in the US Senate and House of Representatives, as well as in state and local elections, in November. Trump’s latest intervention, in which he accused China of interfering with the 2020 election, is viewed by US voting rights activists as just the latest escalation of an effort by the White House to influence, and potentially alter, the results of the 2026 midterm elections. “The number one threat facing American elections is the continued lies coming out of the White House,” said the Arizona secretary of state, Adrian Fontes, the official responsible for overseeing the state’s elections. Read Article

Why American elections are so complicated — and secure | Ali Swenson/Associated Press

America’s highly decentralized system of voting exists because the nation’s Founding Fathers gave authority over elections to the states, rather than the federal government. While Congress has the power to regulate elections — and has used that authority to pass such laws as the Voting Rights Act — the Constitution makes clear that states have primary authority to set the “times, places and manner” for elections. There also is no national election agency that administers the presidential contest, something that’s different from many other countries. And when it comes to doing the day-to-day work of running an election, the responsibility falls to officials at the local level — usually a clerk or election supervisor — with help from staff and volunteers. While differences in election laws can get confusing, election security experts say this structure is a strength. That’s because to pull off stealing a presidential election — as Trump falsely claims was done to him in 2020 — it would require large numbers of election workers in the most competitive counties across the country who are willing to risk prosecution, prison time and fines while working with officials from both parties willing to look the other way. And everyone somehow would have to keep quiet — a highly unlikely scenario. Read Article

National: CISA Report on US Election Cybersecurity Draws Bipartisan Plaudits | Shaun Waterman/GovInfo Security

Amid the partisan clamor surrounding U.S. President Donald Trump's false claims last week of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, one little-noticed document is garnering widespread welcome, even from critics of the administration. A newly declassified report from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on election security - the president cherry-picked to try and make his case - that slipped out in the deluge of documents appears to be that rare beast among administration policies these days: one that enjoys bipartisan support. "It's pretty reasonable," said Nick Leiserson, who served in the Biden-administration White House Office of the National Cyber Director. "It's sensible advice. So, that's good." The report is based on data gathered from 2019 through 2024 via voluntary security assessments conducted by CISA career staff, including static and dynamic code analysis conducted at the Idaho National Laboratory, penetration testing and incident response. Read Article

National: ‘Got to be kidding me’: GOP officials pan Trump’s claims of shocking new election threats | CNN Politics

Four days after President Donald Trump declared that his administration uncovered “shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure,” dozens of state election officials from across the country gathered in Boston. But they weren’t there for an emergency summit to tackle the supposed crisis, even though the midterm elections are only 15 weeks away. Instead, these election officials from 37 states met for a long-scheduled professional conference that struck a strikingly business-as-usual tone. In fact, Trump and his primetime address hardly came up. In interviews with CNN, more than a dozen election officials from both parties said Trump’s address surfaced little new in terms of evidence. Several GOP officials even scoffed at his presentation, pointing to the data that the administration released to try to bolster its case that there are massive numbers of non-citizens voting in US elections. Matt Crane, a Republican who runs the Colorado County Clerks Association, said his text chat with a bipartisan group of colleagues was filled with “a lot of laughing emojis, and like, ‘you got to be kidding me?’ that this was all it was.” Read Article

National: Declassified documents touted by Trump say election systems ‘would be difficult to manipulate’ | Peter Charalambous/ABC

Newly-declassified documents touted by President Donald Trump during his address on election security Thursday cast doubt on some of his claims about "shocking vulnerabilities" in the country's election infrastructure. While Trump claimed during his address that the nation's election systems are vulnerable to "hacking, exploitation, and foreign interference," the intelligence reports released by the White House concluded overall that the main infrastructure used to conduct elections in the United States "would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to alter the election outcome." Read Article

National: More than 24 states sue Trump administration after it put conditions on receiving disaster funding | Michael Casey/Associated Press

More than two dozen states on Thursday sued the Trump administration for requiring them to comply with election and immigration conditions to receive billions of dollars in federal funding for disasters. The lawsuit, filed in Rhode Island and challenging Federal Emergency Management Agency and Department of Homeland Security policies, argued that the administration is requiring states to change their elections systems and help DHS with immigration enforcement. The conditions would also allow DHS to terminate grants at any time and for any reason. “Once again, the Trump Administration is threatening to jeopardize public safety by unlawfully withholding billions in critical funding and once again, they won’t get away with it,” Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said. “This Administration is using the safety of Americans as collateral by attempting to bully the states into relinquishing their constitutional right to enact policies and laws that best serve their residents.” Read Article

National: No, Trump Can’t Withhold Anti-Terrorism Funds to Pressure States to Change Their Election Rules | Reed Shaw/Just Security

TThe first reason these grant conditions are unlawful is a simple one: federal agencies are “creatures of statute,” and there is no law that authorizes FEMA to weaponize its terrorism-prevention funding in this way. The only statute FEMA cites as authority for the NOFO is 6 U.S.C. § 603, the provision of the Homeland Security Act that creates the umbrella grant program. That provision does little more than direct FEMA to run the program’s two main components—the grants to states and the grants to high-risk urban areas—according to rules Congress spelled out in neighboring sections of the statute. Nothing in any of those provisions says a word about election administration, let alone authorizes conditions like these. Nor does Section 2007 of the Homeland Security Act (codified at 6 U.S.C. § 608), which establishes the factors that FEMA must consider when allocating funds under any of the terrorism-prevention grant programs, authorize these conditions. To the contrary, the statute directs FEMA to consider things like a state or metropolitan area’s “relative threat, vulnerability, and consequences from acts of terrorism, including” factors like their population, history of threats, and the proximity to an international border or waters. Although it doesn’t explicitly state as much, FEMA would likely argue that its election-administration conditions are authorized by § 608’s consideration of threats to “critical infrastructure”—which, as of 2017, includes election infrastructure—and buttressed by two “catchall” provisions that confer some amount of discretion on the Administrator to consider “other factors” and “other types of threat” when allocating funding. Read Article

National: Trump’s Distorted Venezuela Elections Claim | Robert Farley/FactCheck.org

In claiming that American voting machines are vulnerable to manipulation, President Donald Trump provided an incomplete and distorted summary of the CIA’s reporting about Venezuelan efforts to manipulate electronic voting machines in that country. “Today, we are releasing documents that show the CIA obtained reporting of a specific plot to do a big number in favor of the corrupt Maduro regime in Venezuela,” Trump said in his primetime address to the nation on July 16, referring to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. “And that’s exactly what happened. “And that’s exactly what happened." he documents the Trump administration released don’t say “that’s exactly what happened,” as Trump said. One of the documents released prior to Trump’s address was a recent CIA report, “Summary of Select Intelligence Reporting from 2004-2020 on Venezuela’s Electronic Voting Manipulation Capabilities,” that concluded Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and his successor, Maduro, “developed sustained interest and likely some capability” to manipulate voting machines. But the CIA’s assessment about the ways in which Venezuela could accomplish such manipulation was more of a “theoretical” exercise, and the report stopped short of alleging Venezuela actually carried out plans to alter voting machine tallies. Read Article

National: House intel bill includes provisions on state and local threat intelligence, election security, AI | Tim Starks/CyberScoop

An annual spy policy bill would authorize a cyberthreat intelligence sharing pilot program for state and local governments, and order an outside assessment of how intelligence agencies are currently sharing that information with those jurisdictions. The House Intelligence Committee approved fiscal 2027 intelligence authorization legislation Monday that also includes provisions on election security and that are meant to boost intelligence community (IC) usage of artificial intelligence for cyber and other purposes. The measure’s language on state and local information sharing come amid widespread frustration with Trump administration cutbacks on such aid from the federal government, with the president taking explicit action to shift more responsibility for cyber defenses to the local level. Under the pilot program, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) would pick one state to receive monthly briefings from the ODNI, Department of Homeland Security, FBI and others to receive monthly briefings on “timely, specific, and actionable information regarding cyber threats” in unclassified form. After a year, the ODNI would then provide a report on the viability of a wider briefing program for state and local governments. Read Article

National: Trump’s Plan for November Is Failing | David A. Graham/The Atlantic

Last week President Trump delivered a rare prime-time speech, but his address fell well short of the hype. Purportedly, the president was going to make a major statement about election integrity, but in reality, the speech was dense and hoarsely delivered. As my colleagues report, he provided no evidence to back up his long-standing lie that the 2020 election was stolen. The White House also released four tranches of documents meant to support the speech, but Trump’s claims were a farrago of recycled information, misrepresentations of evidence, and tendentious claims based on materials too heavily redacted to parse. Major news networks, apparently concerned that Trump would mislead, declined to air the address live. So why even deliver it? The speech was a sign of desperation. Trump spoke now not only to distract from his sputtering Iran war and its effects on the economy, but also because his attempts to concretely interfere with the 2026 election thus far have almost all failed. As his opportunities to change the rules of the game before November slip away from him, the president is falling back on one of the few tools he has left: attempting to sow chaos and doubt among Americans. Read Article

‘Zero new facts’: Teased as a bombshell, Trump election speech underwhelms election officials | Votebeat

After days of speculation among election officials and experts about what President Donald Trump might say in a heavily hyped primetime speech on elections, Trump on Thursday night delivered a mix of familiar claims, grievances, and assertions about election security that stopped short of alleging that votes had been altered or that results had been changed. Instead, Trump revived years-old evidence that China attempted to gather American voter data and that election systems are vulnerable to hacking, information that has long been public and that election officials said they have taken steps to mitigaate. He also claimed to have identified 270,000 noncitizens on the voter rolls — election officials said they weren’t sure how that number was arrived at — and resurfaced old fraud allegations related to voter registration in Michigan. In conjunction with Trump’s speech, his administration released newly declassified documents related to election integrity — some still heavily redacted — that in many cases did not fully back up the president’s claims. Read Article

National: ‘Death by a thousand cuts’: Inside Trump’s remaking of American elections | Maggie Miller, Gregory Svirnovskiy and Aaron Pellish/Politico

President Donald Trump seemingly has a plan for the nation’s election apparatus: Dismantle the existing system with a series of cuts, firings and threats, rather than a sledgehammer blow. Just last week Trump eviscerated the relatively obscure Election Assistance Commission, alarming state election officials across the country who warned it could undermine cybersecurity resources for states and localities. That was just one of the moves the White House has made since Trump returned to office. The president has repeatedly tried to change American election policy via executive order, only to be rebuffed by the courts. And he continues to squeeze congressional Republicans to pass legislation that would force voters to show proof of citizenship at the polls. Read Article

National: What Trump’s newly declassified documents do – and don’t – tell us about threats to US elections | Marshall Cohen and Kevin Liptak/CNN

President Donald Trump in his primetime speech on Thursday is alleging vulnerabilities exist in American election systems, using a large trove of newly declassified documents as evidence to suggest future elections could be at risk of foreign interference, particularly by China. Though the documents are newly declassified, they largely discuss vulnerabilities that have been known for years and election officials around the country have tried to address. None of the declassified information supports the claim that any previous election results — including the 2020 presidential contest that Trump lost — were manipulated by foreign interference or fraud in a way that would’ve changed the outcome. Read Article

National: Democrats call ‘bull—-‘ on Trump’s election interference claims | Sarah Davis/The Hill

Democrats raised alarm after President Trump’s revived his unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election during a Thursday evening address. “You have to be a special kind of stupid to believe this bull—-,” Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), the top Democrat on the House Rules Committee, said in a statement shared on social media ahead of the president’s speech. Trump doubled down on his claims that this election was “stolen” from him and placed blame on the People’s Republic of China and Democratic-led states during his evening address. All 24 Democratic governors called Trump’s claims “deeply alarming” in a joint statement released on Thursday evening. “No amount of lies and conspiracy theories can change the fact that our country’s elections have repeatedly been proven to be safe and secure,” they said. “These attacks are intended to intimidate and silence voters.” Read Article

National: States are building their own election defense networks as federal support evaporates | Derek B. Johnson/CyberScoop

The Trump administration’s abrupt firing of Election Assistance Commission commissioners last week and a Department of Justice warning threatening states with criminal prosecution have created new legal peril for officials who run, administer and secure elections. The EAC is an obscure but important agency that oversees testing and standards for voting machines, including around security. While federal certification is voluntary, states have until now relied upon their stamp of approval when purchasing voting machines. On July 10, Democratic Commissioners Ben Hovland and Thomas Hicks were fired by the White House, while reports indicate that a third Commissioner, Republican Christy McCormick, resigned. While Congress mandated the commission be bipartisan, the Supreme Court has recently given the President broad authority to fire executive branch officials at will. In an interview with NPR, Hovland said he worried the firings would further erode trust that the commission was working in a bipartisan manner. Read Article

National: Voting System Vulnerabilities and How They Can Be Weaponized | Geoff Hale/Electionline Weekly

Vulnerabilities in voting systems are real and worth fixing. At the same time, the manner in which they are used to fearmonger does not reflect the actual security of elections. Security researchers do find real weaknesses embedded in the code and operations of U.S. voting systems, just like they do with power grids, banks, and telecommunications, all of which share the same “critical infrastructure” designation as elections. Finding a flaw and fixing it is a sign of a mature system, not a sign it’s broken. But claiming that vulnerabilities in voting systems exist is different from claiming that vulnerabilities in voting systems have been exploited, and even further distinct from claiming that vulnerabilities in voting systems have been exploited during live election operations in a manner to have rigged past elections, flipped votes, and determined outcomes. Each one of those concepts relies on a distinct body of evidence to be proven true. Public discourse that intentionally conflates the evidence for one to equate the outcomes of another is deceptive and can be disproven. The evidentiary record does not support claims that voting system vulnerabilities have been exploited to rig recent elections such as the 2020 presidential election in the United States. Read Article

National: FBI Has Looked at Using Questionable AI Tech to Review Signatures on Seized Mail-In Ballots | Jeremy Kohler and Doug Bock Clark/ProPublica

The FBI has explored using artificial intelligence to assess the validity of signatures on tens of thousands of mail-in ballot envelopes seized from Fulton County, Georgia, the latest push in the Trump administration’s unprecedented reinvestigation of the 2020 vote. The effort, according to internal communications reviewed by ProPublica and an agency tech specialist familiar with the work, focuses on comparing signatures on ballot envelopes with signatures on other election documents, such as registration forms. President Donald Trump has long claimed, without evidence, that the 2020 election was stolen from him. In particular, he has repeatedly claimed that there was voter fraud in Georgia, where he lost to Joe Biden by just 11,779 votes. In January, the FBI raided Fulton County, a Democratic stronghold, collecting about 700 boxes of election materials, including about 150,000 mail-in ballots, of which roughly 116,000 went for Biden. Trump is set to deliver a speech Thursday about national election security and voting machine vulnerabilities, but it is unclear whether he will address the Fulton County investigation. Read Article

Opinion: Trump Just Did More Damage to American Elections Than China | Tom Nichols/The Atlantic