National: These cases could give the Supreme Court an opening to reshape election law | Carrie Levine/Votebeat

Election officials and voters preparing for next year’s midterm elections face disruptions on multiple fronts, including President Donald Trump’s efforts to influence voting procedures, a rare midcycle redistricting push in several state legislatures, and activity in the U.S. Supreme Court, whose election-related docket could have a big impact. This month, the justices heard arguments in two cases with potentially profound implications for elections and redistricting — and at least two more significant election-related cases are seeking a spot on the court’s docket. The highest-profile case, Louisiana v. Callais, was before the justices this week for a rare reargument. It’s a complex and long-running dispute over political maps in Louisiana, and voting rights advocates have warned it could allow the conservative majority to erode or strike down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, further limiting the use of race as a factor in redistricting as a remedy for past discrimination. Read Article

National: Voting Rights Act faces a near-death experience at US Supreme Court | Jan Wolfe/Reuters

The Voting Rights Act, a landmark law barring discrimination in voting, was a product of the U.S. civil rights era, sought by Nobel Peace Prize recipient Martin Luther King, passed by Congress and signed by Democratic President Lyndon Johnson in 1965. Six decades later, it faces its greatest threat, with the U.S. Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, looking poised to hollow out one key section after gutting a different one in 2013. The court is expected to rule in the coming months in a case argued on Wednesday concerning a map delineating U.S. House of Representatives districts in Louisiana. The conservative justices signaled they could undercut the law’s Section 2, which bars voting maps that would result in diluting the voting power of minorities, even without direct proof of racist intent. In doing so, the court would not be striking down the Voting Rights Act. But the question is what will be left of the law after the court issues its decision. Read Article

National: Supreme Court appears poised to weaken key pillar of Voting Rights Act | Sam Levine/The Guardian

The conservative majority on the US supreme court appeared poised to weaken a key pillar of the Voting Rights Act after a lengthy oral argument on Wednesday, paving the way for a significant upheaval in American civil rights law. After hearing arguments from lawyers for nearly two and a half hours, it seemed clear there was a majority on the court in favor of narrowing section two of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racially discriminatory electoral practices, as it applies to redistricting. The only remaining question in the case, Louisiana v Callais, appeared to be how far the court was willing to go. A ruling narrowing section two would strip minority voters of a tool to challenge discrimination. For decades, voting rights lawyers have turned to section two to challenge district lines – from congressional districts to school boards – that dilute the influence of minority voters. Supreme court precedent requires plaintiffs to clear a series of challenging hurdles in order to strike down an existing district. Read Article

National: One Republican Now Controls a Huge Chunk of US Election Infrastructure | Kim Zetter/WIRED

Former GOP operative Scott Leiendecker just bought Dominion Voting Systems, giving him ownership of voting systems used in 27 states. Election experts have concerns. With the Dominion acquisition, Leiendecker gains control of election equipment in more than half of the states. Dominion equipment is used across 26 states plus Puerto Rico. Knowink electronic pollbooks, which replace traditional paper pollbooks used to verify the eligibility of voters when they sign in at precincts, are used in 29 states plus the District of Columbia. But there are jurisdictions across 14 states, covering 20 million registered voters, that use both Dominion and Knowink systems. This gives companies that Leiendecker controls ownership of equipment that covers the entire election process in those jurisdictions—from the verification of registered voters to the casting of ballots and tabulation of results. Read Article

National: Layoffs, reassignments further deplete CISA | Eric Geller/Cybersecurity Dive

The Trump administration is pursuing twin strategies to shrink the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, laying off staffers and ordering others to either take new jobs elsewhere or leave the government. The layoffs and forced relocations are the latest phase of the White House’s massive downsizing of CISA, which experts warn could further deplete the U.S.’s already weakened cyber-defense force. While the full consequences of the staff reductions remain unclear, they could include diminished support for critical infrastructure organizations and a reduced readiness to counter evolving nation-state and criminal threats. Read Article

National: Hands Off Our Elections: States and Congress, Not Presidents, Set the Rules | Michael Mcnulty/The Fulcrum

Trust in elections is fragile – and once lost, it is extraordinarily difficult to rebuild. While Democrats and Republicans disagree on many election policies, there is broad bipartisan agreement on one point: executive branch interference in elections undermines the constitutional authority of states and Congress to determine how elections are run. Recent executive branch actions threaten to upend this constitutional balance, and Congress must act before it’s too late. To be clear – this is not just about the current president. Keeping the executive branch out of elections is a crucial safeguard against power grabs by any future president, Democrat or Republican. The Constitution is clear: Congress and states make the rules for federal elections, not presidents. Article 1, Section 4, the “Elections Clause,” gives states primary responsibility for administering elections and Congress the authority to “make or alter” those rules. The framers intentionally excluded the executive branch from this power, because they knew the grave risks of letting the president decide the rules of the game. Their foresight has protected our republic from the kinds of authoritarian power grabs that have undermined democracies around the world. Read Article

National: Democrats introduce bill to halt mass voter roll purges  | Derek B. Johnson/CyberScoop

Since President Donald Trump took office in January, the Department of Justice has made an ambitious effort to collect sensitive voter data from all 50 states, including information that one election expert described as “the holy trinity” of identity theft: Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers and dates of birth. In states where Trump’s party or allies control the levers of government, this information is handed over willingly. In states where they do not, the DOJ has formally asked, then threatened and then sued states that refuse. The department has also claimed many of these reluctant states are failing to properly maintain their voter registration rolls, and has pushed states to more aggressively remove potentially ineligible voters. This week, Democrats in the House and Senate introduced new legislation that seeks to defang those efforts by raising the legal bar for states to purge voters based on several factors, such as inactivity or changing residency within the same state. Read Article

National: Midterm elections will likely see increased effects of misinformation, reduced federal security activity, experts say | Paige Gross/News From The States

A year after the 2024 presidential election, technologists and election experts are wrestling with their new reality; tech-aided misinformation and disinformation campaigns are and will continue to be a part of the United States’ democratic process. Technology has always played a role in information dissemination in elections, said Daniel Trielli, an assistant professor of media and democracy at the University of Maryland. Mass use of the internet in the early 2000s gave everyday people the ability to be “publishers,” which increased the amount of misinformation, he said. But the rise of social media platforms and the evolving technologies, like generative artificial intelligence, in the last five years have brought it to new levels. “We have had much more volume of misinformation, disinformation grabbing the attention of the electorate,” Trielli said. “And quickly following through that, we see a professionalization of disinformation … The active use of these social media platforms to spread disinformation.” Read Article

Dominion, Company at Center of False 2020 Voting Conspiracies, Is Sold | Nick Corasaniti and Jim Rutenberg/The New York Times

Dominion Voting Systems, one of the largest manufacturers of election machines that were at the center of multiple false accusations and conspiracy theories after the 2020 election, has been sold to Liberty Vote, a new group run by a former local election director. Liberty Vote announced the acquisition in a brief news release that proclaimed the mission of the new company would be “to restore public confidence in the electoral process.” It featured language favored by conservatives, professing to “improve election integrity in America” and “leveraging hand-marked paper ballots enabling compliance with President Trump’s executive order,” a reference to the president’s effort in March to overhaul electoral processes that has been largely blocked by courts. The founder of Liberty Vote, Scott Leiendecker, is a former Republican election official from St. Louis with years of experience in elections. He also is the chief executive officer of KNOWiNK, a company that produces electronic poll books, digital devices that are used across the country to help election workers upload and maintain voter rolls at voting sites. In July, KNOWiNK announced that its Poll Pad “was the first electronic poll book to earn certification from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.” Read Article.com

National: ‘The stakes are quite large’: US supreme court case could gut Voting Rights Act | Sam Levine/The Guardian

The US supreme court is set to hear a case this month that could gut what remains of the Voting Rights Act, effectively killing one of the crown jewels of the civil rights movement and the nation’s most powerful statute to prevent discrimination in voting. The court is considering the constitutionality of the most powerful remaining provision of the Voting Rights Act: section two. The measure outlaws election practices that are racially discriminatory and has been the tool that minority voters and voting rights advocates have frequently turned to challenge redistricting plans – from congressional districts to county commissions and school boards – that group voters in such a way to dilute the political influence of a minority group. Read Article

National: Congress hears pleas for more election funding. Will it respond? | Carrie Levine/Votebeat

On the eve of a government shutdown Tuesday, dozens of local election officials from around the country wandered the labyrinth of office buildings adjacent to the U.S. Capitol, lobbying members of Congress for more federal funding of elections. In some ways, the local election officials were among the only people in the Capitol complex who didn’t really have to worry about the pending shutdown: The $15 million in election security grants that Congress appropriated for the states this year has already been doled out. But that amount helps explain why they were on Capitol Hill. States and local jurisdictions are primarily responsible for running elections, and bear most of the costs. But elections have become increasingly complex and expensive, because of changes to state laws and cybersecurity concerns, and they’re under unprecedented scrutiny, from ordinary voters right up to the president. Read Article

National: Voting groups ask court for immediate halt to Trump admin’s SAVE database overhaul | Derek B. Johnson/CyberScoop

Voting rights groups are asking a court to block an ongoing Trump administration effort to merge disparate federal and state voter data into a massive citizenship and voter fraud database. Last week, the League of Women Voters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and five individuals sued the federal government in D.C. District Court, saying it was ignoring decades of federal privacy law to create enormous “national data banks” of personal information on Americans. On Tuesday, the coalition, represented by Democracy Forward Foundation, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), and Fair Elections Center, asked the court for an emergency injunction to halt the Trump administration’s efforts to transform the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements into an immense technological tool to track potential noncitizens registered to vote. Until this year, SAVE was an incomplete and limited federal database meant to track immigrants seeking federal benefits. Read Article

National: Supreme court appears open to Republican challenge over Illinois mail-in ballot law | George Chidi/The Guardian

The US supreme court appeared sympathetic on Wednesday to a challenge brought by a Republican congressman to an Illinois law governing how the state counts mail-in absentee ballots received after election day. The lawsuit challenging Illinois’ election law from Mike Bost, a Republican representative from Illinois, is viewed by Trump-aligned conservatives as an avenue to continue attacks on mail-in voting. Bost filed the suit to argue that the Illinois law allowing ballots to be counted up to two weeks after election day if they are postmarked by the deadline unconstitutionally allows an extension of the election period. Arguments center on whether a federal candidate has standing to challenge the law, not whether the practice itself is constitutionally valid. Justices asked questions about whether they should view a political candidate as an “object” of the law – an entity for whom a regulation bears a direct consequence, and whether the odds of mail-in ballots tipping an election had bearing on whether a candidate had a right to challenge the law. Read Article

National: Smartmatic scores win against Fox in election machine defamation case  | Nina Pullano/Courthouse News Service

A New York judge said court documents from a Murdoch family trust dispute are fair game for discovery in election technology company Smartmatic’s defamation case against Fox News. Ruling from the bench at a two-hour hearing on a slate of motions from both parties, Judge David Cohen tossed a judicial hearing officer’s finding that the material from court proceedings in Nevada was not relevant to Smartmatic’s case. Smartmatic sued Fox Corporation and its right-wing news network in early 2021 over broadcasts that falsely claimed the company interfered in the 2020 election. Read Article

National: Does Donald Trump really believe he can be president again? | obin Abcarian/Los Angeles Times

On Tuesday, in the middle of a meeting between President Trump and Democratic leaders over the impending government shutdown, red “Trump 2028” baseball caps suddenly appeared on the Resolute Desk. “It was the strangest thing ever,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told CNN. Not really. Trump teasing a third term is getting to be, well, old hat at this point. Last March, he told Kristen Welker, host of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” that he would not rule out pursuing an unconstitutional third White House stint. But is he serious? “Some of this is trolling,” said Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan. “But the man has the largest ego of any person out there and he will do whatever it takes to be the center of attention.” Read Article

America’s underfunded elections: a national security risk we can’t ignore | Adam Hinds/CommonWealth Beacon

Imagine the US government declared part of our critical national security infrastructure at risk — then offered barely $1 million per state last year to protect it. That’s not a hypothetical. That’s the reality of how we fund elections in America. Our elections are the backbone of our democracy. They’ve been formally designated as critical infrastructure, alongside our power grid and water supply. Yet we treat them as an afterthought in our budgets. The system we rely on to uphold the will of the people — to choose presidents, governors, mayors — operates on shoestring funding, especially at the local level where the work of democracy actually happens. American elections are intentionally decentralized, with local governments playing the central role. This design keeps elections close to voters and makes large-scale interference harder. But decentralized doesn’t need to mean underfunded. We can have locally run elections and provide the consistent, predictable funding needed to ensure they are free, fair, and secure. Read Article

National: CISA confirms it’s ending MS-ISAC support | Colin Wood/StateScoop

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on Monday announced that its cooperative agreement with the Center for Internet Security, the Upstate New York nonprofit that runs the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center, will conclude Tuesday. The federal cybersecurity agency said that the end of the agreement, which had been planned for the end of the fiscal year at the close of the month Tuesday, marks a transition to “a new model” of supporting state and local government agencies in protecting their systems against digital threats. “CISA is supporting our SLTT partners with access to grant funding, no-cost tools, and cybersecurity expertise to be resilient and lead at the local level,” CISA’s announcement reads. Read Article

National: GOP push to restrict overseas and military voting continues | Hansi Lo Wang/NPR

For many American citizens living abroad, making sure their ballots are returned correctly and on time hundreds or thousands of miles away, back in the United States, can be tough. But with the 2026 midterm election approaching, U.S. expatriates and their advocates say voting faces more uncertainty than usual, as Republican officials continue a push for more restrictions on overseas voters, including U.S. military members stationed abroad. Some 2.8 million U.S. adult citizens living abroad were eligible to vote in 2022, the latest year for federal estimates. And with turnout for overseas voters long trailing that of domestic voters (3.4% compared to 62.5% in 2022), voting rights advocates fear GOP-led lawsuits and proposals could drive down participation even further. Read Article

National: In Dangerous Attack on Left-Leaning Nonprofits, Trump Orders Government to Go After ‘Domestic Terrorism Networks’  | Jacob Knutson/Democracy Docket

President Donald Trump signed a memorandum Thursday directing the federal government to investigate and dismantle “domestic terrorism networks.” The move appears targeted at left-leaning progressive nonprofit groups, which Trump days ago vowed to dismantle, falsely claiming they fund and support political violence and terrorism in the U.S. The memo directs the FBI’s National Joint Terrorism Task Force, the Department of Justice, the Department of the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to go after “anti-fascist” movements in the U.S. Read Article

National: Lawsuit seeks to block Trump’s personal data merging | Jude Joffe-Block/NPR

The Trump administration’s unprecedented efforts to aggregate the personal data of Americans are facing a new legal challenge. A class action federal lawsuit filed Tuesday argues the Trump administration’s actions that aggregated personal data on hundreds of millions of Americans from various federal agencies violated federal privacy laws and the U.S. Constitution, put sensitive data at risk of security breaches, and could lead to the disenfranchisement of eligible voters. The suit argues that the Department of Homeland Security, along with the Department of Government Efficiency team, is “working rapidly to create precisely the type of ‘national data banks’ the American people and Congress have consistently resisted, and the Privacy Act was designed to prevent.” –read Article

National: MyPillow founder Mike Lindell defamed Smartmatic, federal judge rules | Steve Karnowski/Associated Press

MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, an ally of President Trump, defamed the election technology company Smartmatic with false statements that its voting machines helped rig the 2020 presidential election, a federal judge in Minnesota ruled last week. But U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Bryan deferred until future proceedings the question of whether Lindell — one of the country’s most prominent propagators of false claims that the 2020 election was a fraud — acted with the “actual malice” that Smartmatic still needs to prove to collect any damages. The judge said there are “genuine fact disputes” as to whether Lindell’s statements were made “with knowledge that they were false or made with reckless disregard to their falsity.” He noted that the defense says Lindell has an “unwavering belief” that his statements were truthful. Read Article

National: Rudy Giuliani and Dominion settle $1.3bn defamation suit over election lies | Rudy Giuliani | Richard Luscombe/The Guardian

Rudy Giuliani and Dominion settle $1.3bn defamation suit over election lies. Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor and personal lawyer to Donald Trump, has settled a long-running defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems over lies he told about the result of the 2020 presidential election. Details of the settlement, revealed in federal court in Washington DC in a filing late on Friday, are confidential. The Colorado-based voting machine manufacturer sued Giuliani for $1.3bn in 2021, citing more than 50 instances in which he made false or defamatory statements insisting the election was rigged against Trump, with the integrity of Dominion’s machinery at the heart of the conspiracy theory. Representatives for Giuliani and Dominion confirmed the resolution on Saturday but declined further comment when approached by CBS News. “The parties have agreed to a confidential settlement to this matter,” a Dominion spokesperson said in a short statement. Read Article

National: How House Republicans plan to rewrite history of Jan. 6 | Hailey Fuchs and Kyle Cheney/Politico

A new House panel will re-investigate the Jan. 6 Capitol attack with an eye toward recasting the narrative about the events in Washington that day. It’s the latest sign that the deadly riot remains a wound on Congress that might never fully heal amid ferocious partisan sparring. Retribution, not reconciliation, appears to be the prime motivation behind the new probe, with the Republicans behind it still bitter over the work of the panel’s previous iteration, which was largely led by Democrats and concluded President Donald Trump was singularly to blame for the violence inflicted by his supporters. One GOP member of the new panel, Louisiana Rep. Clay Higgins, did not rule out questioning members of the prior committee. Read Article

National: American Democracy Might Be Stronger Than Donald Trump | Jonathan Schlefer/Politico

For the last 10 years, we’ve been hearing that President Donald Trump will preside over the end of democracy in America. In liberal circles, that assertion is often accepted as fact. For many, the proof is in the evidence from other countries’ democratic declines. A whole genre of American political writing is issuing this warning. But the United States is different from many of the countries that feature prominently in the “death of democracy” literature. And for Americans concerned about what Trump will do in his second term, the ways other democracies have died isn’t the central concern. Those accounts are a bit like detailing how Covid can kill people but not assessing the chances, depending on age and risk factors, that the disease will kill you. Read Article

Opinion: America’s Zombie Democracy – Its trappings remain, but authoritarianism and AI are hollowing out our humanity | George Packer/The Atlantic

We are living in an authoritarian state. It didn’t feel that way this morning, when I took my dog for his usual walk in the park and dew from the grass glittered on my boots in the rising sunlight. It doesn’t feel that way when you’re ordering an iced mocha latte at Starbucks or watching the Patriots lose to the Steelers. The persistent normality of daily life is disorienting, even paralyzing. Yet it’s true. We have in our heads specific images of authoritarianism that come from the 20th century: uniformed men goose-stepping in jackboots, masses of people chanting party slogans, streets lined with giant portraits of the leader, secret opposition meetings in basements, interrogations under naked light bulbs, executions by firing squad. Similar things still happen—in China, North Korea, Iran. But I’d be surprised if this essay got me hauled off to prison in America. Authoritarianism in the 21st century looks different, because it is different. Political scientists have tried to find a new term for it: illiberal democracy, competitive authoritarianism, right-wing populism. In countries such as Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela, and India, democracies aren’t overthrown, nor do they collapse all at once. Instead, they erode. Opposition parties, the judiciary, the press, and civil-society groups aren’t destroyed, but over time they lose their life, staggering on like zombie institutions, giving the impression that democracy is still alive.Source: Your access has been blocked – The Atlantic

National: Justice Department Sues Six States Seeking Private Voter Data | Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times

The Department of Justice sued six states, including Pennsylvania, the nation’s biggest presidential battleground, on Thursday as the Trump administration escalates its efforts to obtain the personal and private information of voters. The lawsuits, filed against California, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, follow similar suits that the department brought against Maine and Oregon, two Democratic-controlled states. All of those states have rebuffed previous demands from the Justice Department to gain access to statewide voter rolls that include sensitive information, such as drivers license numbers and partial Social Security numbers. The six lawsuits are the latest, and most aggressive, step in the Justice Department’s quest to amass the largest set of national voter roll data it has ever collected, buttressing an effort by President Trump and his supporters to make false and unsubstantiated claims that droves of undocumented immigrants have voted illegally. Read Article

 

National: DOJ Urges SCOTUS to End Key VRA Protection for Minority Voters | Yunior Rivas/Democracy Docket

The U.S. Department of Justice filed an amicus brief Wednesday in Louisiana’s ongoing redistricting case, arguing that the U.S. Supreme Court should significantly weaken the power of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) to block racial gerrymanders. Though not unexpected, the brief carries major symbolic weight. For decades, the Justice Department has been at the forefront of efforts to use Section 2 of the VRA to protect minority voting rights, most frequently in the redistricting process. Under President Donald Trump, it now argues for a radically narrowed interpretation of Section 2, which could make it all but useless in stopping racially motivated gerrymanders. Read Article

National: YouTube to bring back creators banned for COVID and election misinformation | Ali Swenson/Associated Press

YouTube will offer creators a way to rejoin the streaming platform if they were banned for violating COVID-19 and election misinformation policies that are no longer in effect, its parent company Alphabet said Tuesday. In a letter submitted in response to subpoenas from the House Judiciary Committee, attorneys for Alphabet said the decision to bring back banned accounts reflected the company’s commitment to free speech. It said the company values conservative voices on its platform and recognizes their reach and important role in civic discourse. “No matter the political atmosphere, YouTube will continue to enable free expression on its platform, particularly as it relates to issues subject to political debate,” the letter read. Read Article

National: The People Who Are Still Convinced Kamala Won | David A. Graham/The Atlantic

Stop me if you’ve heard this story before: Partisan claims of fraud in the presidential election. Elaborate statistical analyses. Reports of shadowy, closed-door doings. All of this, they say, points to one conclusion: The results were compromised, and the real winner was kept out of the White House. That sounds like the aftermath of the 2020 election, but it’s also what’s happening right now. Kamala Harris’s loss in last November’s presidential election produced few prominent claims of fraud, and nothing like the concerted effort, using both lawsuits and force, to keep President Donald Trump in office that followed his defeat nearly five years ago. In the past few months, however, spurious allegations that fraud helped Trump win back the White House have been flourishing more online, elections experts told me, though why they’re so popular right now—other than the left’s compounding anger with the Trump administration—is not clear. Read Article

National: How do we build public trust in elections? | Hayley Harding/Votebeat

Public trust in elections is the key to turning out voters — and to accepting the results when an election is done. So how do you build it? Votebeat this week sat down with election expert and Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Charles Stewart; Philadelphia City Commissioner Seth Bluestein; and Karen Brinson Bell, the former executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections to talk about the factors that drive trust in elections. The conversation and online forum were moderated by Votebeat Editorial Director Jessica Huseman. Read Article