National

President Trump seemed to concede on Wednesday that he was not eligible to serve a third term, lamenting that it was an unfortunate result of the constitutional prohibition that he has mused about violating for months. Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One en route to South Korea, the last leg of his three-country diplomatic tour across Asia, Mr. Trump said it was “too bad” that he couldn’t run in 2028. “We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had, I have my highest poll numbers that I’ve ever had,” he boasted (his approval rating remains low, at 43 percent, according to a New York Times average). “And, you know, based on what I read, I guess I’m not allowed to run. So we’ll see what happens.” The remarks came after House Speaker Mike Johnson said on Tuesday there was no path around the Constitution’s two-term limit. Read Article

National: Trump’s moves in this year’s election could preview midterms pressure | Nicholas Riccardi/Associated Press

After months of extraordinary steps to ensure his party maintains control of the U.S. House of Representatives in next year’s midterms, President Donald Trump is turning his sights toward the voting process in Tuesday’s elections. That pivot is raising alarm among Democrats and others who warn that he may be testing strategies his administration could use to interfere with elections in 2026 and beyond. Late last week, Trump’s Department of Justice announced it was sending election monitors to observe voting in one county in New Jersey, which features a race for governor that Republican Trump has become deeply invested in, and to five counties in California, where Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom is pushing a ballot measure to counter the president’s own effort to rejigger the congressional map to elect more Republicans. That announcement was followed with a pre-emptive attack by Trump on the legitimacy of California’s elections. The post on his own social media platform echoed the baseless allegations he made about the 2020 presidential election before he and his allies tried to overturn his loss in a campaign that culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Read Article

National: 2020 election deniers and allies amass power, in and out of the Trump administration | Marshall Cohen and Fredreka Schouten/CNN

Inside the red brick walls of the La Vista Correctional Facility in Pueblo, Colorado, Tina Peters has grown impatient. The former Republican clerk of Mesa County, Peters is one year into a nine-year prison term for her role in a scheme with fellow election deniers to breach voting machines in hopes of proving President Donald Trump’s baseless fraud claims. Closely guarded election passwords from her county spilled out onto the Internet as a result, showing up on a QAnon-affiliated messaging channel. Peters is the only person currently in prison for trying to overturn the 2020 election – after Trump pardoned hundreds of convicted January 6 Capitol rioters, including those who planned the attack or were violent that day. She remains locked up on state charges that are immune to a presidential pardon. Even from prison, she’s keeping the 2020 lies alive, through public letters and a jailhouse video interview in her orange prison uniform. Read Article

National: Red states are preparing for an end to the Voting Rights Act | Andrew Howard/Politico

Some Republicans across the south are preparing to redraw their congressional maps to boot Democrats out of office — if the Supreme Court issues a ruling on a case gutting the Voting Rights Act in time for the midterms. While such a decision is no sure thing, some states are nonetheless planning for the scenario. The potential scramble to redraw could completely reshape the midterms, and Democrats are already sounding the alarm. One Democratic group forecasted an ambitious 19 seat pickup for the GOP by dismantling majority Black and other majority-minority districts currently protected by the VRA, though that would be an extreme scenario where every possible state redistricts. The Supreme Court’s looming ruling centers around Section 2 of the VRA, which has long been implemented by creating majority-minority districts. Those districts are almost entirely represented by Democrats, something that Republicans have long claimed gives the party an unfair advantage. Read Article

National: Donald Trump’s Plan to Subvert the Midterms Is Already Under Way | David A. Graham/The Atlantic

Imagine for a moment that it’s late on Election Day, November 3, 2026. Republicans have kept their majority in the Senate, but too many House races are still uncalled to tell who has won that chamber. Control seems like it will come down to two districts in Maricopa County, Arizona. ICE agents and National Guardsmen have been deployed there since that summer, ostensibly in response to criminal immigrants, though crime has been dropping for several years. The county is almost one-third Hispanic or Latino. Voting-rights advocates say the armed presence has depressed turnout, but nonetheless, the races are close. By that evening, the Republican candidates have small leads, but thousands of mail and provisional ballots remain uncounted. Read Article

National: Trump Empowers Election Deniers, Still Fixated on 2020 Grievances | Alexandra Berzon and Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times

October 24, 2025

Election officials from nearly all 50 states gathered on a call last month with the Homeland Security Department’s point person on “election integrity,” eager to hear how the woman filling a newly created Trump administration position might help safeguard the vote ahead of next year’s midterms. But many of them left alarmed. Rather than offering assurances that the federal government’s election protection programs would continue uninterrupted, the new official, Heather Honey, instead used portions of the meeting to echo rhetoric that has infused the right-wing election activist movement that emerged since President Trump falsely claimed that his 2020 defeat was the result of widespread fraud, according to five people with knowledge of the call. Read Article

National: Trump’s Most Reviled Voting Company Sold to a GOP Official. That’s Not the Worst of It. | Susan Greenhalgh/Slate

October 24, 2025

Earlier this month, news broke that Dominion Voting Systems had been sold to a former Republican election official.The announcement that the second-largest U.S. voting system vendor would be in the hands of a self-declared partisan sparked concerns and speculation on blogs and social media. Should a former Republican official be charged with providing and programming the voting machines to count more than a quarter of all U.S. ballots?As someone who has studied election systems and the election industry for 20 years, I’ve gotten questions from family and friends wanting to know if this is something to be worried about.My response has been: Not particularly. But don’t misunderstand the nonchalance—it’s not because it’s not wildly inappropriate and troubling for a declared partisan to control voting equipment. It’s because the partisan ownership of an election supplier is merely one aspect of the badly broken, opaque, and corrupted election system industry that we’ve been subjected to for decades. Read Arrticle

National: Dominion voting machines owner rebrands, treads carefully with Trump – Yvonne Wingett Sanchez, Patrick Marley and Sarah Ellison/The Washington Post

When a Republican businessman announced this month that he had purchased a voting equipment company at the center of MAGA conspiracy theories, he rebranded the company in a way that seemed designed to appease critics who falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen from President Donald Trump. But behind the scenes, the new owner of Dominion Voting Systems is sounding skeptical of those conspiracy theories and voicing disagreement with parts of the president’s executive order that could upend how voting is conducted, according to election officials who have spoken with him. The discordant messages from the new owner reflect the near-impossible task that election technology companies are facing after a barrage of false claims from Trump and his allies resulted in damaged reputations, lost business and threats against employees. As they head into the 2026 midterm elections, they are trying to ward off similar attacks that could hamper their ability to sell equipment and get contracts with local and state governments. Read Article

National: Does the sale of Dominion Voting Systems mean a transformation? Depends who’s asking | Miles Parks and Bente Birkeland/NPR

When Scott Leiendecker announced he was buying Dominion Voting Systems — the elections technology company at the heart of countless 2020 election conspiracy theories — he teased a transformation. “As of today, Dominion is gone,” read the first line of a press release that seemed to many readers to lean into the unfounded rumors that have swirled around the company (and led to hundreds of millions of dollars in defamation settlements) since Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential election. “We are turning the page and beginning the vital work of restoring faith in American elections,” Leiendecker wrote in a public letter posted on the website for his new company, Liberty Vote. But in private, when speaking to the company’s county election official customers, the messaging has been different, raising the question of how much the company plans to change. Read Article

National: White House Hires ‘Stop the Steal’ Lawyer to Investigate 2020 Election Claims | Josh Dawsey, Eliza Collins and Ryan Barber/The Wall Street Journal

A former Trump campaign lawyer who worked on the effort to overturn the 2020 election results has joined the administration to investigate that year’s election and voting-related issues, according to people familiar with the matter. Kurt Olsen, a lawyer who unsuccessfully pushed claims of voter fraud, has joined the administration as a “special government employee,” some of the people said. The appointment gives Olsen 130 days to work from within the White House without giving up any private business interests. He is talking directly with President Trump, the people said. Trump asked Olsen to join the administration to work on election issues important to him, a senior administration official said. Olsen started his job in the past month, some of the people said, and has told others he wants to examine election machines. Read Article

National: Your ballot or other mail may not get postmarked by USPS the day it’s dropped off | Hansi Lo Wang/NPR

Changes at the U.S. Postal Service are forcing people who rely on postmarks when voting, filing taxes or mailing legal documents to be extra careful when cutting it close to deadlines. Postmarks include the dates that USPS stamps on envelopes, and those are often used to determine whether a piece of first-class mail was sent on time. But the Postal Service has proposed revising its mailing standards to say that postmark date “does not inherently or necessarily align” with the date that a mail piece was first accepted by a letter carrier or dropped off at a post office or collection box. “In other words, the date on a machine-applied postmark may reflect the date on which the mailpiece was first accepted by the Postal Service, but that is not definitively the case,” USPS said in a recent Federal Register notice. Read Article

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

October 17, 2025

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

October 17, 2025

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