National

As the Senate continues to stall on the SAVE America Act, Republicans in a number of states are moving forward with plans to add citizenship requirements to their voting laws. Six states are likely to vote on new measures this fall that echo President Donald Trump’s top legislative priority. Republican lawmakers in Arkansas, Kansas, South Dakota and West Virginia have put various citizenship-related amendments on the ballot. In West Virginia, the most recent state to put a measure on the ballot, the amendment would change the state’s constitution from saying “citizens of the state shall be entitled to vote,” to “only citizens of the state who are citizens of the United States are entitled to vote.” Read Article

National: Trump’s voter crackdown reaches college campuses | Bianca Quilantan/Politico

College campuses are already getting a taste of President Donald Trump’s effort to impose broad, new voting restrictions across the country. While Trump’s push for a partisan elections bill faces several bottlenecks on Capitol Hill, his administration has spent months quietly chipping away at programs designed to boost turnout among a voting bloc Republicans say lean Democratic. Colleges play a critical role in helping students vote in what is often their first chance to cast a ballot. But the Trump administration is barring colleges from using a federal program that employs low-income students to register voters and threatening to investigate schools if they use data from a nonpartisan student voting study to help boost turnout. Read Article

National: Trump said he voted by mail in Florida because he ‘should be’ in D.C. He cast his ballot from Palm Beach. | Irie Sentner/Politico

President Donald Trump — a relentless critic of mail-in voting — said Thursday that he voted by mail in Florida’s special elections this month because he felt he should be in Washington D.C. “instead of being in the beautiful sunshine. Because of the fact that I’m president of the United States, I did a mail-in ballot for elections that took place in Florida, because I felt I should be here instead of being in the beautiful sunshine,” Trump told reporters at the White House during Thursday’s Cabinet meeting. Reminded that he is often in Palm Beach at his Mar-a-Lago estate, Trump responded: “I decided that I was going to vote by mail-in ballot because I couldn’t be there, because I had a lot of different things.” But the president cast his mail-in vote from Palm Beach, records show. Read Article

National: ICE agents have been deployed to airports. Are the polls next? | Gabe Cohen/CNN

The high-profile deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to airports has renewed support on the right and fear on the left about the possibility of ICE going to the polls in November. Steve Bannon is urging President Donald Trump — who surprised officials in his own administration this weekend by ordering ICE agents to airports to help alleviate long lines — to treat that move as a dress rehearsal for the 2026 midterms, arguing the same armed officers should ultimately be positioned around polling places. “We can use this as a test run — a test case — to really perfect ICE’s involvement in the 2026 midterm election,” Bannon, a longtime Trump ally, said Monday on his “War Room” podcast, reiterating his past calls for a law enforcement presence at the polls. While Bannon holds no official role in the administration, his remarks reignited concerns among some election officials and Democratic lawmakers who fear the Trump administration could try to use ICE as a political weapon — intimidating voters and potentially suppressing turnout in November. They argue that kind of presence at polling sites could run afoul of federal law. Read Article

National: Trump’s push for Save America Act could hurt Republicans | Amy B Wang, Scott Clement and Lydia Sidhom/The Washington Post

President Donald Trump has ramped up pressure on Republicans in recent weeks to pass the Save America Act, a bill that would require people to provide proof of citizenship to register to vote and to show photo identification at the polls, among other voting restrictions. Trump has gone so far as to declare that he will not sign any other legislation until Congress passes the bill, and vowed Tuesday never to endorse anyone who voted against what he dubbed “one of the most IMPORTANT & CONSEQUENTIAL pieces of legislation in the history of Congress.” He promised Republican lawmakers last week that passing the bill would “guarantee the midterms” for the GOP. But the bill might not help Republicans as much as Trump thinks. It is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. Requiring Americans to prove they are citizens when they register to vote, in an effort to root out the extremely rare cases of noncitizen voting, would throw up roadblocks to the polls for millions of eligible voters across the political spectrum, and in some cases could hurt Republicans more. Read Article

Why the SAVE America Act . . . Won’t | The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board

For partisan hype, it’s hard to beat the Senate debate this week on the SAVE America Act. President Trump says the legislation is a salvation from mass voter fraud. Sen. Chuck Schumer says it’s an effort at mass voter suppression, “Jim Crow 2.0.” Neither is reality. Also, Republicans don’t have the votes to clear the Senate’s filibuster. And if they bully the bill through anyway, Democrats eyeing the end of the 60-vote rule will quietly celebrate. The House version of the SAVE America Act, which passed last month, has two main planks. First, people registering to vote would be asked to show proof of U.S. citizenship, such as a passport, birth certificate or naturalization document. Many driver’s licenses wouldn’t qualify. While the bill says it would accept a REAL ID “that indicates the applicant is a citizen,” standard license designs often don’t say. Legal immigrants can get REAL IDs, too. “Enhanced” driver’s licenses do show citizenship, and those can be used to cross international borders. But they’re available in only five states that neighbor Canada, according to the Department of Homeland Security. To pick one state, Minnesota says it has issued 782,000 “enhanced” licenses, out of a total 4.7 million active credentials. Read Article

National: ‘It’s laughable’: Election officials pour cold water on MAGA midterm overhaul | Sam Brodey/The Boston Globe

President Trump and his Republican allies in Congress are increasingly intent on a massive overhaul of the country’s elections in time for the 2026 midterms. But an important group of people are warning that’s not possible: the professionals who actually run those elections. Around the country, state and local election administrators have been warily eyeing the proposed changes contained in the Save America Act, as Republicans escalate their effort to pass it. Among its sweeping proposals: mandating voters prove their citizenship in person to register to vote and also show a photo ID to vote at the polls; and ending mail-in ballots for nearly all voters. Combined, those measures could block millions of eligible voters from the polls, according to analysis from voting rights advocates. Read Article

National: In bid for voter data, Trump’s DOJ lays groundwork to undermine confidence in midterms | Jonathan Shorman/Stateline

The U.S. Department of Justice has begun connecting its push to obtain sensitive personal data on millions of voters to whether the upcoming midterm elections will be fair and secure, laying the groundwork for the Trump administration to potentially cast doubt on the results. The Justice Department has sued 29 states and the District of Columbia over their refusal to provide unredacted voter rolls that include the driver’s license and partial Social Security numbers of voters. The department has lost three of those lawsuits so far this year. But as the Justice Department begins appealing the losses, it has filed emergency motions warning the “security and sanctity of elections” would be questioned in those states — California, Michigan and Oregon — without immediate rulings. Read Article

National: The Trump administration is falsely claiming Jimmy Carter was against mail-in voting | Melissa Goldin/Associated Press

The Trump administration is using a 20-year-old report to misrepresent former President Jimmy Carter’s views on mail-in and absentee ballots as it pushes for federal legislation that would impose strict new proof-of-citizenship and photo ID requirements for voting ahead of the midterm elections. There’s no evidence that mail-in voting fraud was rampant then, and it’s not rampant now,” said Mark Lindeman, policy and strategy director at Verified Voting, a nonpartisan group focused on election technology. “Mail voting has become more common and more mature. So, over that period of time, states have learned from each other — best practices for not only avoiding fraud, but just generally administering mail balloting well.” For example, ballot tracking, curing ballots that had initially been rejected, and the ability to identify and address duplicate voter registrations have improved. Read Article

National: Trump’s emergency elections order is ‘being prepared,’ key ally believes | Matt Cohen/Democracy Docket

An anti-voting activist said to be part of a group pushing for President Donald Trump to take control of elections via executive order reiterated his view that the scheme is “being prepared.” “I think Plan A has always been an executive order from President Trump based on the fact that the Chinese penetrated and influenced the 2020 election,” Jerome Corsi — an election denier best known for spreading Barack Obama birtherism conspiracies — said Wednesday on a right-wing podcast. “I believe Donald Trump is resolute on this,” Corsi added. “He’s not going to allow the 2026 midterm elections to be stolen without taking some strong executive action and executive order.” Read Article

Trump’s Gutting of Election Security Fuels Worries for Midterms | Adam Sella/The New York Times

When election officials in Arizona opened their online candidate portal last summer, it was immediately clear that it had been hacked. The photos of aspiring public servants had been replaced by red and black images of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran’s first supreme leader. fter similar episodes in recent years, state officials often contacted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, the primary federal agency responsible for election cybersecurity. The agency, created by President Trump in 2018 to protect critical infrastructure, including elections, from cyberthreats, would have lent resources to stop the attackers and notified other election officials across the country so they could bolster their defenses. But after the hack last summer, Adrian Fontes, Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, decided not to ask for CISA’s help. Arizona officials managed to stop the cyberattack, restore the website and ensure that no sensitive voter data had been compromised, though CISA might have been able to help them work faster and cheaper. nytimes.com

National: Conservative voter fraud hunters pitch new computer programs to state officials | Jane C. Timm/NBC

March 19, 2026

The creators of a controversial program designed to hunt for voter fraud that was promoted by conservative activists are pitching two new programs to state election officials ahead of the midterms. The first election software from Dr. John W. “Rick” Richards Jr. and his son, John W. Richards III, called EagleAI, promised to help officials and activists root out inaccurate voter registrations in the run-up to the 2024 election. The program was embraced by members of the Election Integrity Network, the group founded by Cleta Mitchell, a former election lawyer for President Donald Trump. But it was also criticized as inaccurate by election officials and experts, as well as some of the activists who tried it. Now, the father-son duo is back with two new programs: ELLY and Psephos. They have pitched election officials in Missouri, North Carolina and Rhode Island. Read Article

Trump is undermining the people who run our elections. Here’s how we can fight back | Pamela Smith/Democracy Docket

There is a group of Americans who wake up every day thinking about one thing: making sure your vote counts. They are county clerks, local election directors, state officials — largely nonpartisan, often underpaid, working out of government buildings or strip mall offices you’ve driven past a hundred times without noticing. They are the infrastructure of democracy. And right now, they are under pressure unlike anything most of them have ever seen. In a functioning version of American democracy, the federal government helps election administrators do their job. It funds cybersecurity support. It coordinates the collection and analysis of threat information and helps share it with election officials. But it also respects constitutional boundaries and stays in its lane, because the structure of American elections — decentralized, state-run — exists for a reason. We are not living in that version right now. And none of what has followed is normal. Read Article

National: Thune Is in a Vise as Trump and Far Right Demand Fight on Voter Bill | Carl Hulse/The New York Times

John Thune likes to be liked. So it is a bit uncomfortable for him, as the gregarious Senate majority leader from South Dakota, to be the subject of an outpouring of conservative venom for his resistance to mounting an old-school filibuster to try to force through a voter identification law that President Trump is demanding. Mr. Thune says the votes just aren’t there for the legislation, which is headed to the floor as soon as next week. Unfortunately for Mr. Thune, who finds his Republican majority under increasing midterm threat in the second year of his stewardship, the standard Senate strategy for handling a bill that lacks enough votes to advance — forcing a show vote to put opponents on the record saying no — is not enough to satisfy the president or the bill’s fervid supporters. They have instigated a firestorm of pressure online in an effort to push the majority leader to wage a bigger battle. Read Article

National: Senate Republicans splinter over SAVE America Act’s path as Trump calls for more revisions | Sahil Kapur, Brennan Leach, Fiona Glisson, Ryan Nobles/NBC

The prospects for President Donald Trump’s SAVE America Act grew murkier Monday as divisions deepened among Senate Republicans about how to pass it and whether it's possible to overcome Democratic opposition. Some say they’re convinced a “talking filibuster” under current rules could lead to passage of the sweeping election overhaul bill, even though it hasn’t worked before. Another GOP senator proposed a different path with less support. And the Senate's top Republican emphasized that the path is “unclear” as the 60-vote rule may be too difficult to overcome. “Having studied it and researched it pretty thoroughly, you have to show me how, in the end, it prevails and succeeds. Because I think what has been promised out there is that it would actually, in the end, get an outcome. And I find it very hard to see that based on actual past experience,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters. “We can’t find a piece of legislation in history that’s been passed that way.” Read Article

National: Key 2020 election denier is still working to prove it was stolen — now from inside the White House | Jeremy Herb, Tierney Sneed, Kristen Holmes, Sean Lyngaas and Zachary Cohen/CNN Politics

Kurt Olsen became a key player in some of President Donald Trump’s most far-fetched 2020 election reversal schemes because he believed “that something was not right” in how he saw election officials handle the presidential count in Fulton County, Georgia, and elsewhere.Five years later, he’s back on familiar ground — in Trump’s ear and focused on Fulton County. The man who once described his hunt for voter fraud as an effort to “save the country” now has a direct line to the president, giving him more influence than ever.After Olsen worked alongside some of the most prominent 2020 election deniers while Trump was out of office, the president named him the White House’s director of election security and integrity in October. From his new perch, Olsen drafted the criminal referral to the Justice Department that led to an unprecedented FBI seizure of Fulton County’s 2020 ballots in January. Read Article

National: Democratic states move to protect polling places from federal agents | Morgan Leigh and Susan Haigh/Associated Press

Democratic-led states alarmed by the prospect of federal immigration officers patrolling the polls during this year’s midterm elections are taking steps to counter what they see as a potential tactic to intimidate voters. New Mexico this week became the first state to bar armed agents from polling locations in response to President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, a step being considered in at least a half dozen other Democratic-led states. The moves highlight a deep distrust toward the Trump administration from blue states, which have been the target of his aggressive immigration tactics while threatened with military deployments and deep cuts in federal funding. Their concerns were heightened after the president suggested he wants to nationalize U.S. elections, even though the Constitution says it’s the states that run elections. Read Article

National: White House mulls defunding civil rights election observer program that aims to protect minority voting rights, sources say | Sarah N. Lynch/CBS News

The White House is considering ending funding for a longtime civil rights election program aimed at protecting the rights of minority populations to vote, sources familiar with the matter tell CBS News. The federal observer program, authorized under the Voting Rights Act and launched in 1966, is an Office of Personnel Management operation that partners with the Justice Department to send neutral, third-party observers to monitor election sites to ensure voters don't experience discrimination at the polls — whether it's due to race, language barriers or disabilities. The observers, who are both recruited and trained by the Office of Personnel Management, are expected to watch, listen and take notes without interfering in the voting process. Those observers then turn over their findings to the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. The White House is exploring whether to cut spending for the program, sources say, in a discussion that comes as the country gears up for crucial midterm elections this November that will determine which party controls Congress. Read Article

National: Voting tech company Smartmatic says it’s being targeted by Trump DOJ Aysha Bagchi/USA Today

Smartmatic, a voting technology company that supplied machines in the 2020 election, said in a new court filing that it is being unlawfully targeted by the Justice Department under President Donald Trump for undermining the president's false attacks on the integrity of the race.Smartmatic's parent company was charged in a Florida federal court in October with conspiring to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act by bribing a Philippine government official to get business, and with conspiring to launder money. Those charges against the company were added to a case initially brought against some of its former executives in 2024, during President Joe Biden's term.That timeline is a key part of the argument Smartmatic laid out in its March 10 filing, which is asking the court to dismiss the charges as amounting to unlawfully vindictive against the company. Read Article

National: What Does War with Iran Have to Do with Elections? | Michael Waldman/Brennan Center for Justice

As the war in the Middle East launched by President Trump continues to unfold, the president has yet to appear before Congress to seek approval or even to explain his objectives. As we said over the weekend, the Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power to decide when the nation goes to war. There’s been no deliberation, no vote, no clear justification. The attack on Iran is unconstitutional. Underneath the intense drama, we want to draw attention to something else going on. As President Trump’s polls plummet and his political standing grows shakier, the effort to undermine our elections has been intensifying. Now it looks like operatives and officials may try to claim national security as a rationale to mess with the vote. Indeed, just hours after launching the Iran war, Trump reposted a headline on Truth Social claiming, “Iran tried to interfere in 2020, 2024 elections to stop Trump, and now faces renewed war with United States.” Read Article

National: Trump appears to link Iran attack to his 2020 election loss | Aram Roston/The Guardian

Donald Trump on Saturday appeared to link the massive attack he ordered against Iran to his persistent claims about his 2020 election loss to former president Joe Biden, in a social media post about allegations that Tehran’s government interfered in the US president elections. “Iran tried to interfere in 2020, 2024 elections to stop Trump,” his Truth Social post said, “and now faces renewed war with United States”. Those words, written in the first hours of the bombardment of Iran, repeated the headline of an article to which he linked from Just the News, a Trump-friendly news site. “Iranian intelligence sought to undermine Trump’s re-election bid in 2020 through a variety of election influence efforts,” the article said. It also said Iran worked against him in 2024, when he beat Kamala Harris at the polls. This is the second military operation of the Trump administration where he has alluded to allegations concerning the 2020 election. He made similar comments on social media in January, days after Trump ordered the Delta Force “rendition” of Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro. Trump reposted links that repeated discredited conspiracy allegations that Venezuela interfered in the 2020 election by controlling voting machines. Read Article

National: Trump Officials Attended a Summit of Election Deniers Who Want the President to Take Over the Midterms | Doug Bock Clark/ProPublica

Several high-ranking federal election officials attended a summit last week at which prominent figures who worked to overturn Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election pressed the president to declare a national emergency to take over this year’s midterms. According to videos, photos and social media posts reviewed by ProPublica, the meeting’s participants included Kurt Olsen, a White House lawyer charged with reinvestigating the 2020 election, and Heather Honey, the Department of Homeland Security official in charge of election integrity. The event was convened by Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, and attended by Cleta Mitchell, who directs the Election Integrity Network, a group that has spread false claims about election fraud and noncitizen voting. Election experts say that the meeting reflects an intensifying push to persuade Trump to take unprecedented actions to affect the vote in November. Courts have largely blocked his efforts to reshape elections through an executive order, and legislation has stalled in Congress that would mandate strict voter ID requirements across the country. Read Article

National: GOP’s SAVE America Act would magnify suppression for the disability community | Natalie Hausmann/Democracy Docket

Marc Safman, 56, has been a political junkie since his parents took him to former President Jimmy Carter’s inauguration in 1977. He voted in every election for 38 years, until last year. Safman, who is deafblind, said he was unable to cast his ballot in the 2025 New York City mayoral election because of issues with his polling site’s ballot-marking machine and a “lack of basic awareness” from poll workers. Despite incremental improvements over the past several decades to make voting more accessible, people like Safman with disabilities, who comprise one fourth of the nation’s population, continue to face outsized barriers when casting their ballots. However, the GOP’s SAVE America Act, the most restrictive voting bill in U.S. history, threatens to roll back what progress has been made and set voters with disabilities back by years with new draconian restrictions. Read Article

National: Will Trump try to seize voting machines to disrupt the midterm elections? | George Chidi/The Guardian

After the FBI seized elections materials from Fulton county last month, Donald Trump returned once again to his false claim that he beat Joe Biden in Georgia in the 2020 election. “The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over,’” Trump said to Dan Bongino on the former FBI staffer’s podcast earlier this month . “We should take over the voting in at least – many – 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.” Later that week, it was revealed that the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who was present at the Fulton county raid, led an investigation into Puerto Rico’s voting machines – taking some machines to examine – last May to identify what her office said were potential vulnerabilities in the island’s electronic voting systems. Taken together, Trump’s comments and actions are pointing toward a possibility Democratic voters have until now only contemplated: the federal government seizing voting machines across the country in a way that disrupts voting in the 2026 midterms. If the federal government declared some digital voting machines off-limits at the last minute, it would set off a chain of emergency court hearings, leaving elections directors scrambling to find another way to print and count ballots before those cases resolved. Early voting could crater. Election Day voting could be curtailed. And results might not be ready for weeks. Read Article

National: Blue states push to ban ICE at the polls amid federal voter intimidation fears | Jonathan Shorman/Stateline

Several Democratic states are moving to bar federal immigration agents from being near polling places and other election sites, amid persistent worries that President Donald Trump will use federal law enforcement or the military to disrupt the midterm elections. Measures to restrict federal agents from operating at or near election-related locations have been offered in more than half a dozen states, according to a Stateline count. While the proposals vary, they broadly seek to combat the prospect of chaotic confrontations between federal agents and voters this November. A federal law dating to the end of the Civil War already bans sending the military or other “armed men” to polling places, except to repel armed enemies of the United States. The U.S. Constitution also gives states — not the president or federal government — the responsibility for running elections. Read Article

National: Trump, seeking executive power over elections, is urged to declare emergency | Isaac Arnsdorf/The Washington Post

Pro-Trump activists who say they are in coordination with the White House are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting. Sen. Mark R. Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said there is no national emergency. “We’ve been raising the alarm for weeks about President Trump’s attacks on our elections and now we’re seeing reports that outline how they may be planning to do it,” Warner said in a statement in response to this article. “This is a plot to interfere with the will of voters and undermine both the rule of law and public confidence in our elections.” Read Article

National: The laughable legal memo behind the claim that Trump can declare a national voting emergency | Matt Cohen and Jim Saksa/Democracy Docket

Peter Ticktin, the Florida-based lawyer leading an effort to have President Donald Trump issue an executive order declaring a national emergency to enable a federal takeover of the upcoming midterm elections, shared his reasoning with Democracy Docket Thursday. It was quickly torn to pieces by a leading expert on the president’s emergency powers. Shortly after the Washington Post reported that the White House was taking Ticktin’s plan seriously, legal experts responded with ridicule, noting how blatantly unconstitutional it would be. But Ticktin’s reasoning appears more flawed still, relying on economic sanctions law that conveys no authority whatsoever to block mail-in ballots or seize voting machines. Read Aricle

National: Trump’s push for election power raises fears he will ‘subvert’ midterms | Shane Goldmacher and Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times

Ahead of the midterm elections, an emboldened U.S. President Donald Trump has shown an increased eagerness to leverage the full investigative, prosecutorial and legislative powers of the federal government to bend election mechanics to his will. With his words and deeds, the president — who pushed to overturn his 2020 defeat but declared his 2024 victory legitimate — appears to be undermining Americans’ trust that the midterms will be free and fair. As the political environment darkens for his party, Trump is again warning Republicans that Democrats are going to rig the results. At the same time, he is taking actions that make Democrats fear that Republicans are actually going to subvert the election. Read Article

National: Republican voter ID bill stalls in Senate despite Trump demands | Mary Clare Jalonick/Associated Press

Election-year legislation to impose strict new proof-of-citizenship requirements on voting appears stalled in the Senate, for now, despite President Donald Trump’s call in his State of the Union speech that Republicans in Congress pass the bill “before anything else.” Trump’s push for the bill, backed by House conservatives and his most loyal supporters ahead of the midterm elections, has put new pressure on Senate Majority Leader John Thune as he tries to navigate an effort from inside and outside Congress to bypass normal Senate procedure. Thune has said he supports the legislation and that his GOP conference is still discussing how to pass it. Senate Republicans “aren’t unified on an approach,” Thune said on Wednesday after Trump’s speech. In an effort to get around Democratic opposition, Trump and others have pushed a so-called “talking filibuster,” which would bring the Senate back to the days of the movie “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” when senators talked indefinitely to block legislation. Today, the Senate mostly skips the speeches and votes to end debate, which takes 60 votes in the Senate where Republicans have a 53-47 majority. Read Article

National: Trump’s Favorite Voter-ID Bill Would Probably Backfire | Marc Novicoff/The Atlantic