National

A pull-back from federal foreign-influence tracking initiatives, combined with federal workforce departures, has significantly weakened cross-sector information-sharing channels between government agencies, social media platforms, and non-governmental researchers ahead of the midterm elections. State and local election directors report receiving fewer election-specific intelligence briefings, even as foreign actors leverage advanced artificial intelligence tools to automate, scale, and refine target selection for covert messaging campaigns. While federal officials emphasize that intelligence monitoring and infrastructure support through the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency continue, civil society researchers note that the disbanding or restructuring of key federal interagency task forces has created noticeable gaps in real-time threat coordination. Read Article

National: FBI says election officials were targets of suspicious letters containing ‘unknown substance’ | Jessica Husemann and Dion Nissenbaum/Votebeat

he FBI and U.S. Postal Inspection Service have launched a nationwide investigation into a series of suspicious letters—some containing an unidentified white powder—sent to election offices, U.S. senators, and political organizations across more than a dozen states. While postal authorities intercepted many of the mailings prior to delivery, several state election headquarters experienced temporary evacuations or hazardous material responses before tests confirmed the substances were harmless. State election directors emphasized that the physical intimidation tactics will not disrupt ongoing voting operations or delay administrative preparations ahead of the midterm elections. Read Article

Opinion: Publish the Poll Tapes | Andrew Appel/CITP Blog

For well over 100 years, from before 1900 to into the 21st century, political parties sent volunteers to witness the in-the-precinct results at the close of the polls on election night. They did that just in case there were slip-ups (to put it politely) in the transmission and aggregation of the precinct results into district-wide election results. Before there were computerized voting machines, there were mechanical voting machines that displayed the totals on little odometers that were uncovered at the end of election day, that you had to copy down by hand—those were witnessed too. And before the mechanical machines, people counted paper ballots by hand, in the precinct, and announced the per-precinct totals to witnesses in the polling place. Read Article

Book Review: The Plot to Delete Democracy | Sue Halpern/The New York Review of Books

Chances are you already know some random things about the Silicon Valley technology billionaires who have embraced—and been embraced by—the Trump administration: that, for example, Peter Thiel’s data mining company, Palantir, supplies surveillance software to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, that the recent public stock offering for SpaceX briefly made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire, or that the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, a former Democratic Party stalwart, turned to Trump after he saw, he said, the most successful people sending “their kids to the most politically radical institutions, which teach them how to be America-hating communists.” You may even know that Thiel, in contrast to most of his Silicon Valley peers, supported Trump’s 2016 campaign, or that during the 2024 campaign Musk was Trump’s largest individual donor, giving $239 million to his pro-Trump America PAC and around $50 million to other Trump-aligned groups, or that Andreessen helped staff the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Musk’s predatory duchy within Trump’s second administration. Government by Silicon Valley | Sue Halpern | The New York Review of Books

National: With threats to midterms, states say Trump administration isn’t helping | Joshua Yang and Warren P. Strobel/The Washington Post

U.S. intelligence assessments indicate that while foreign adversaries like Russia, China, and Iran continue digital disinformation efforts to undermine public confidence, there is no evidence of direct interference with voting machines or vote counts. However, state election administrators report significant communication and resource gaps due to federal structural changes, including staff layoffs at CISA, the dissolution of the Foreign Malign Influence Center, and leadership vacancies on the Election Assistance Commission. While CISA recently issued an updated security plan for the midterms, former officials and state administrators argue that late-stage federal guidance offers limited utility with voting already underway. Consequently, state leaders—including several Republican election officials—express growing frustration with federal posture, noting that administrative friction and lack of timely intelligence sharing present greater operational hurdles than foreign cyber threats. Read Article

National: Election officials push voters to ‘use the drop box rather than the mailbox’ | Jeremy Herb and Gabe Cohen/CNN

Election officials across the country are actively encouraging voters to return mail ballots via designated drop boxes rather than traditional postal mail to avoid potential delivery delays. Operational changes within the U.S. Postal Service, including reduced local transit trips and centralized postmarking hubs, have contributed to a noticeable rise in late-arriving ballots during recent primary contests. In response, local election offices have invested heavily in retrofitting drop boxes with advanced heat sensors, automatic fire suppression devices, physical tamper resistance, and digital audit tracking. Despite these infrastructure enhancements, drop box availability remains politically polarized, with several states imposing strict bans or limits while others expand drop box networks to ensure timely ballot returns. Read Article

National: Trump administration sued over plans to send election monitors to voting sites | Adam Gabbatt/The Guardian

The NAACP has filed a lawsuit against the Department of Justice over plans to deploy roughly 1,000 federal election monitors to polling places across all 50 states during the upcoming midterm elections. The complaint targets Civil Rights Division head Harmeet Dhillon and seeks to compel the immediate release of Freedom of Information Act records regarding the monitors' deployment. Civil rights advocates argue that the unannounced, aggressive presence of federal personnel, exemplified by an August incident where monitors attempted to inspect voting machines during Wyoming's primary, lacks statutory authority and threatens voter intimidation. Read Article

National: Lawmakers Want Colleagues to Promise They Will Accept Midterm Election Results | Louise Radnofsky/Wall Street Journal

A bipartisan coalition led by Representatives Don Bacon and Josh Gottheimer is circulating a public commitment letter calling on House leadership and colleagues to respect state election certifications for the upcoming midterms. The pledge directly opposes parliamentary maneuvers aimed at refusing or delaying the seating of certified members-elect when the 120th Congress convenes in January. The effort emerges amid heightened concerns that conservative groups and party leadership might attempt to invoke Article I powers to judge member qualifications as a pretext to deny representation to states with contested voting procedures or absent voter identification laws. Read Article

National: Are Trump’s claims the 2020 election was stolen losing steam? | Dion Nissenbaum/Votebeat

An analysis from States United Action indicates that candidate embrace of false claims regarding the 2020 election has declined significantly, dropping nearly 30% among congressional and statewide contenders since 2022. Historical trends show that fewer than a quarter of statewide candidates running on election denial platforms have prevailed in recent cycles, suggesting that such rhetoric continues to prove electorally disadvantageous. Nevertheless, dozens of candidates who questioned past election results remain on the ballot across critical swing states for positions overseeing election administration, including secretary of state contests in Arizona, Nevada, and Wisconsin. Read Article

National: Election deniers stoke Trump-driven ballot security fears before midterms | Ariana Baio/The Guardian

Prominent election deniers and conservative figures are amplifying claims of election vulnerabilities across media outlets to justify expanding federal oversight of state voting procedures ahead of the midterm elections. High-profile activists have cited technical privacy concerns with voting machine barcode tabulations in Georgia, alleged foreign supply-chain compromises in voting hardware, and dismissed polls showing potential Democratic gains as psychological operations meant to depress conservative turnout. Read Article

Opinion: How Trump can—and cannot—still mess with the midterms | Richard L. Hasen/Slate

A year ago, I warned that President Donald Trump was poised to marshal federal government forces to subvert the 2026 midterm elections, just as he attempted to do after losing the 2020 U.S. presidential election to Joe Biden. True to form, Trump and his administration have since been relentless in attacking election integrity. He directed the United States Postal Service to issue a rule that would have completely shut down mail balloting nationwide for the 2026 midterm elections. His former national intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard, ordered government seizure of Dominion voting machines from Puerto Rico in an apparent gambit to concoct a new election-rigging conspiracy theory. Trump’s Department of Justice seized Fulton County, Georgia’s 2020 presidential election ballots, sued 30 states and D.C. to obtain their unredacted lists of voter information, and threatened election officials with federal prosecution if they did not hunt for voter fraud to the administration’s satisfaction. Read Article

National: Judge Blocks FEMA From Tying Antiterrorism Grants to Election Changes | Scott Dance/The New York Times

A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from conditioning annual counterterrorism and emergency preparedness grants on states altering their voting procedures. U.S. District Judge Amir H. Ali ruled that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) exceeded its legal authority when it warned local governments that up to 20 percent of their $1 billion in annual preparedness funding would be withheld unless they moved toward paper ballots or implemented citizenship verification checks. Prompted by a lawsuit from local governments in Tennessee, Texas, and Ohio, the court ordered FEMA to strike the election-related prerequisites from its grant application process, rejecting the administration's attempt to use counterterrorism funding to compel local election changes aligned with President Trump's voter fraud claims. nytimes.com

National: Democrats sue over Pentagon’s changes to voter forms for Americans overseas | Maegan Vazquez/The Washington Post

The Democratic National Committee has filed a lawsuit against the Pentagon and the Office of Management and Budget over last-minute, emergency changes to the primary voter-registration form used by service members and citizens living abroad. The lawsuit challenges the Trump administration's sudden removal of a key registration option for overseas citizens who have never resided in the U.S., such as adult children of American expats, which forces them off the standardized federal form and onto state-specific application processes. Voting rights advocates and election administrators condemned the administration for manufacturing a fake "emergency" to bypass public comment periods and push restrictive ID updates weeks before the midterms, warning that altering the Federal Post Card Application on such short notice will trigger severe confusion and disenfranchise eligible voters overseas.Read Article

National: Renewed CISA support comes too late for midterm prep, some election officials say | David DiMolfetta/Nextgov/FCW

State and local election officials are warning that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) newly renewed election security offerings are arriving too late to meaningfully assist with midterm preparations. Following drastic staff cutbacks and budget slashes driven by Trump administration spending cuts and long-standing political grievances over the agency's 2020 anti-disinformation efforts, local administrators say crucial advisory relationships were severed and cannot simply be rebooted weeks before voting begins. Read Article

National: The Untold Origins of Trump’s Plan to Sharply Restrict Mail-In Voting | Jen Fifield and Peter Elkind/ProPublica

A behind-the-scenes White House pressure campaign sought to restrict mail-in voting by leveraging the United States Postal Service. For nearly a year, White House officials pressed the postal agency to implement strict regulatory conditions, including a proposal to reject mail ballots from states that refuse to share their complete voter registration files with federal authorities. While postal leadership initially resisted acting as an enforcement mechanism for state election laws, warning that filtering mail exceeded the agency's core operational mission, executive negotiations ultimately produced modified regulations. Although federal court actions halted the rules ahead of the midterm elections, postal labor representatives and legal experts criticized agency leadership for failing to reject the executive pressure more forcefully, leaving a framework that could be revived in future election cycles. Read Article

National: Inside Trump’s plan for the ‘biggest DOJ election observer effort in history’ | Gabe Cohen and Tierney Sneed/CNN

CNN reports that President Donald Trump and his allies inside and outside his administration are aiming to blanket polling places with an expanding network of party and federal election monitors this November, intensifying scrutiny of the nuts and bolts of voting as Trump hunts for what he claims, without evidence, is widespread cheating and fraud in US elections. The Justice Department plans to dispatch over 1,000 monitors including newly hired political appointees who previously helped challenge Trump’s 2020 election defeat or, in one case, pleaded guilty to illeagally accessing a county election website. Concurrently, secret RNC training materials reveal a nationwide pilot program deploying "special monitors" specifically instructed to inspect voting machine serial numbers, photograph results tapes, and feed potential discrepancies directly to a legal hotline. Election administrators and voting rights advocates warn that aggressive federal and partisan surveillance is designed to amplify minor technical errors into grounds for contesting unfavorable election results. Read Article

National: Judge finds law criminalizing noncitizen voting unconstitutional | Tom Hals/Reuters

A Federal jusdge has dismissed a federal criminal case against a Jamaican national accused of voting illegally in 2020, ruling that the 1996 federal law criminalizing noncitizen voting is unconstitutional. The decision delivered a direct setback to the Trump administration's DOJ crackdown on noncitizen voting, which has served as a centerpiece of its campaign messaging heading into the midterms. While the ruling applies strictly to the specific case, defence lawyers argued that regulating noncitizen qualifications remains a state responsibility rather than a federal crime. Legal observers note that the opinion could prove persuasive in approximately 45 similar federal prosecutions pending nationwide as judges evaluate whether Congress exceeded its authority under the statute. Read Article

National: Second Prosecutor Quits Trump’s ‘Grand Conspiracy’ Case | Alan Feuer/The New York Times

Senior prosecutor Kurt Olsen has resigned from the Justice Department's "grand conspiracy" investigation, marking the second high-profile prosecutor to quit the probe in less than a month. Olsen, a Trump loyalist with no prior prosecutorial experience who previously pushed to overturn the 2020 election results, stepped down following security clearance complications that hindered his access to classified materials relevant to the inquiry. His departure follows the sudden exit three weeks prior of lead prosecutor Joseph diGenova, who resigned after DOJ leadership grew impatient with his delay in bringing charges, as well as the departure of a lead FBI investigator and the earlier removal of a career prosecutor who found insufficient evidence for charges. Read Article

National: This White House Plan Threatens Funding for Disabled Voters | Lisa Song/ProPublica

A proposed Office of Management and Budget (OMB) rule would prohibit organizations from using federal grant money for voter registration drives or related non-partisan registration activities. Spearheaded by OMB Director Russell Vought, the administrative policy change targets federal grants, including accessibility funding awarded under the Help America Vote Act that non-profit advocacy groups rely on to assist disabled and elderly voters at nursing homes and care facilities. Read Article

National: As AI images become common, the threat to elections draws alarm: ‘How will voters know what’s true?’ | George Chidi/The Guardian

Political strategists, advocates, and lawmakers warn that the proliferation of hyper-realistic digital fabrications is fostering a pervasive environment of skepticism where voters struggle to distinguish authentic news from computer-generated disinformation. Compounding the challenge, patchwork state regulations governing AI disclaimers face serious enforcement hurdles and First Amendment legal challenges, such as a federal judge halting Montana’s deepfake law, leaving federal regulatory vacuums that allow deceptive campaign materials to spread across digital platforms virtually unchecked. Read Article

Texas officials knew of issues with its voter registration web portal in March, records show | Natalia Contreras/Votebeat

Texas state officials were warned as early as March 2026 about severe defects in the Department of Public Safety's (DPS) online voter registration portal, long before a massive backlog of at least 500,000 delayed voter records was dumped on local county election administrators right before the November midterm election. Despite DPS's assurances in March that a programming error had been resolved, warnings from voting rights groups continued through the summer, revealing that software updates to DPS systems were dropping critical registration data and leaving many voters unknowingly unregistered when they attempted to cast ballots. With county officials now scrambling to manually process the backlogged records to avoid forcing affected voters onto provisional ballots, state lawmakers from both parties are launching inquiries into the communication breakdowns and lack of system testing between DPS and the Texas Secretary of State's Office. Read Article

National: Election officials across the country prepare to fight any Trump administration interference in the 2026 midterms | Carter Walker and Dion Nissenbaum/Votebeat

Each year, election officials prepare for the worst: A bomb threat at a polling place, power outages, natural disasters. But this year, they are wrestling a potential threat they have never before considered: the possibility that the federal government might disrupt the administration of November’s elections. It’s not clear what action, if any, the Trump administration may take to interfere with the 2026 midterms, but election officials from jurisdictions large and small are preparing for everything from immigration officers at the polls to federal attempts to seize ballots. They’re also acknowledging that most standoffs with the federal government would likely end in court, and they’re talking to lawyers and preparing legal filings in case they prove necessary. Read Article

National: Russia Aims to Inject Chaos Into Elections, U.S. Intelligence Finds | Dustin Volz, Julian E. Barnes and Steven Lee Myers/The New York Times

The Russian government has been targeting Americans with covert online disinformation operations seeking to undermine public confidence in November’s midterm elections, using a familiar playbook in an attempt to inject chaos into the voting season, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter. Classified U.S. intelligence assessments from recent months have determined that the Kremlin has again authorized a digital influence campaign to peddle content across social media in hopes of seeding or amplifying domestic divisions around the election season, the officials said. The assessments did not find evidence of attempts to take aim at voting machinery in a way that could compromise the actual voting process, the officials added. The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss classified information, did not specify the efforts to influence attitudes online. But experts in Russian disinformation have spotted some social media campaigns in recent weeks that use artificial intelligence to create fake videos of Hollywood celebrities talking about key battleground Senate races. Read Article

National: Civil Rights Groups Sue to Keep Armed Agents Away From Voting Sites | Amy Qin/The New York Times

Civil rights groups and labor unions sued the Trump administration on Friday, asserting that its aggressive immigration enforcement and suggestions that it could send armed agents to polling sites amounted to voter intimidation and violated the Voting Rights Act. Brought by a coalition of Black, Asian and Latino civil rights groups and unions, including the N.A.A.C.P. and the Service Employees International Union, the lawsuit seeks to block any effort by the Trump administration to deploy federal agents at voting locations, which the groups contend can deter citizens trying to legally vote. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, argues that President Trump, Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin and other members of the administration had created a climate in which “voters, especially voters of color, are intimidated and fearful of engaging in the democratic process.” The White House and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to requests for comment sent on Friday morning. But in the past, Mr. Mullin has said that opponents were fear-mongering and that ICE was not patrolling polling places. “The only reason why we would be at polling places is if there is a threat to that polling place,” he said, “or we’re serving a warrant.” Read Article

National: 40 days to midterms, election officials say new US cyber plan comes too late | Ali Swenson/Associated Press

The nation’s cybersecurity agency on Thursday released an election infrastructure security plan 40 days before November’s midterms, laying out potential threats to election systems and listing services it would offer to election officials to protect the vote. Election officials said the plan is both inadequate and belated after the administration gutted the agency’s election security work last year, prompting the officials to pay for private services to ensure they were prepared for the upcoming elections. “For them to come in five weeks before the election, yeah, nice effort,” said Nevada’s Democratic Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, who added that he would have liked to see the federal government provide more funding for cybersecurity, rather than Nevada taxpayers having to pay for it. Read Article

National: CISA pledges election security support after cuts weakened ties with states | David DiMolfetta/Nextgov/FCW

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is pledging to strengthen threat sharing and coordination with election officials ahead of the midterms, following administration cuts that state officials say weakened those relationships and their access to federal cybersecurity expertise. The 2026 Election Infrastructure Security Plan, released Thursday, identifies CISA’s 10 regional directors as election security advisers and describes a free information-sharing platform connecting election officials, state intelligence hubs and federal partners. The document offers one of the clearest public accounts to date of how the second Trump administration intends to support election security. But its emphasis on sustained cooperation comes after staffing and program reductions disrupted the federal support network, and as the administration has proposed eliminating dedicated election security funding and adviser positions. Read Article

National: A new DHS email raises questions about Trump election plans | Miles Parks, Jude Joffe-Block and Ximena Bustillo/NPR

An internal Department of Homeland Security email raises new questions about the agency's efforts to hunt for non-U.S. citizens who may be on state voter rolls or have cast ballots in the past. In the email — which was sent last year, but is newly acquired by NPR — DHS personnel shared a 78-page document listing counties and states that offer election materials and ballots in non-English languages. The list of jurisdictions was attached alongside a Department of Justice criminal checklist outlining requirements for prosecution of voter-related charges. The email was released as part of a tranche of materials after the Democratic National Committee filed suit over a public records request, and was then shared with NPR. Democrats fear that the Trump administration's efforts to root out noncitizen voters will entangle or intimidate eligible voters and dampen turnout in this year's midterms. DHS has surged resources to investigate noncitizen voting, even as prior audits have found such fraud to be extremely rare. Read Article

National: Voting groups sound alarm on funding shortfalls that they say could affect midterm turnout | Matt Brown/Associated Press

Several of the nation’s largest left-leaning voter engagement and racial justice organizations are facing steep funding shortfalls and staffing cutbacks just as voting is getting underway in an election that will determine control of Congress for the final two years of President Donald Trump’s term. The shortfalls are setting off alarms among Democratic strategists, who are betting on high turnout and robust voter protection efforts to boost the party’s chances this fall. They are worried that many grassroots groups will not be able to mount effective registration and get-out-the-vote efforts, much less protect against the possibility of election interference from the Republican administration. America Votes, a coordinating hub for more than 400 progressive groups, has fallen “well below” the level of funding it had during the 2022 midterms, Daria Dawson, America Votes’ executive director, said in a statement to The Associated Press. America Votes has acted as a nerve center for the voter mobilization efforts of groups such as the NAACP, Planned Parenthood, the League of Conservation Voters, the AFL-CIO and SEIU labor unions, as well as local groups focused on racial justice, climate and civil liberties. Read Article

National: Trump Quietly Dumps Longtime Election Observer Group | Edith Olmsted/The New Republic

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, or OSCE, which has sent observers to monitor every U.S. federal election for the past two decades, has yet to receive an invitation from the Trump administration, the group told Democracy Docket Thursday. The group typically plans a “needs assessment mission” in order to evaluate the environment, preparations, and electoral processes ahead of an upcoming federal election in the United States. With less than a month before early voting begins in some states, the organization says it’s still waiting for a call. “The Office sends a needs assessment mission upon receiving an invitation from the OSCE participating State where the elections are occurring,” a spokesperson for the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights said in a statement. “We are currently waiting on that invitation from the United States.” Read Article

National: The Supporters Urging Trump to Declare Martial Law for the Midterms | Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Michelle Sherer/The Atlantic