National

In January, the Franklin County Board of Elections in Ohio received a surprising call. The man on the line said he was an agent at the Department of Homeland Security – and he needed immediate access to voter records. Franklin County has a large population of Democrats and has long been a focal point of Republican skepticism about urban voting centers in Ohio. In the weeks that followed, the requests multiplied. According to emails reviewed by Reuters, the agent asked for voter registration forms and voting histories for dozens of voters – records that include driver's license numbers and other confidential data. He pressed for information about local voter‑registration groups, describing the request as an “investigation” and “very time sensitive.” But he offered no explanation for what prompted his probe or where it was headed. The requests were a bolt from the blue for Franklin County election officials. Under the U.S. Constitution, elections – even for national offices such as the presidency – are run by states, not the federal government. Adding to the confusion, DHS’s mission has traditionally focused largely on counterterrorism, border security and immigration enforcement. Read Article

National: Voters Can Be Disenfranchised Now – Just Say It’s Because They’re Democrats | Adam Serwer/The Atlantic

For the conservative editor and columnist James Jackson Kilpatrick, the Supreme Court decision outlawing school segregation was an atrocity. Brown v. Board of Education, he wrote in the 1950s, was a “revolutionary act by a judicial junta which simply seized power.” He warned in 1963 that the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act would destroy “the whole basis of individual liberty.” And in a 1965 National Review cover story, he argued that in order to “give the Negro the vote,” the Voting Rights Act would repeal the Constitution. Kilpatrick did not hide the basis of his beliefs: In an article that was spiked after the 1963 Birmingham Baptist Church bombing, titled “The Hell He Is Equal,” he insisted that “the Negro race, as a race, is in fact an inferior race.” As the historian Nancy MacLean wrote in Freedom Is Not Enough, by the 1970s, this segregationist had refashioned himself as an opponent of racial discrimination, a champion of color-blindness. Liberal egalitarians supporting race-conscious remedies, he argued, were “worse racists—much worse racists—than the old Southern bigots.” His transformation was so complete, he joked, that he was like the convert who “became more Catholic than the Pope.” Read Aticle

National: ‘I have the right to vote.’ States and the DOJ are fighting over personal data | Bart Jansen/USA Today

Dozens of legal battles are being waged nationwide over federal access to personal information about voters, as President Donald Trump's administration seeks to weed out immigrants who are in the country illegally, while civil rights advocates fight for privacy. By determining who gets dropped from voter registration lists, the results of the cases will help determine who casts ballots in November midterm elections that will decide who leads the narrowly divided Congress. The Department of Justice has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia for voter lists, which include driver’s license and Social Security numbers, in the hunt for fraud by ineligible voters. The department has argued that courts shouldn't second-guess the reasons for searching the voter rolls. Read Article

National: US cyber team hasn’t been activated yet to protect midterm elections from foreign meddling | Sean Lyngaas/CNN

F For the first election cycle in years, US military and intelligence officials have not yet activated a specialized team dedicated to detecting and thwarting foreign threats to elections, according to comments from those agencies to Congress and CNN, alarming some lawmakers and former officials who have served on the team. A failure to activate the team would be a “major national security mistake and I hope that they will correct it in the weeks to come,” Senator Angus King of Maine, an independent who sits on the armed services committee, told CNN. For every general and midterm election since the 2020 election, the Election Security Group (ESG) has been a hub for officials from the National Security Agency, the code-breaking and signals intelligence agency, and US Cyber Command, the military’s hackers, to share intelligence and launch counter attacks against trolls from Russia, Iran and elsewhere who were trying to undermine US elections. Read Article

National: Federal drawdown of election support ‘destroyed’ ongoing relationships, experts say | David DiMolfetta/Nextgov/FCW

Efforts under President Donald Trump to scale back the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and its election security resources have strained relationships with state and local officials, raising concerns that jurisdictions may be far less prepared to counter threats to the November midterms, officials in Michigan and Georgia said Tuesday. The warnings, delivered by state officials and other experts at a hearing hosted by Democrats on the House Homeland Security Committee, come as the Trump administration has sought to expand the federal role in election administration through executive orders and the growing involvement of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard in election-related matters, including an FBI raid on a Fulton County, Georgia elections office. The drawdown of CISA election resources over the last year has “been very damaging,” said Aghogho Edevbie, Michigan’s deputy secretary of state. Read Article

National: Election Officials Have Been Preparing for AI Cyberattacks | Derek Tisler/Brennan Center for Justice

Since ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence systems first became widely available, the Brennan Center and other experts have warned that this technology may lead to more cyberattacks on elections and other critical infrastructure. Reports that Anthropic’s new AI model, Claude Mythos, can pinpoint software vulnerabilities that even the most experienced human experts would miss underline the urgency of those risks. Fortunately, election officials have been preparing for cyberattacks and have made significant progress in securing their systems over the past decade, incorporating improved cybersecurity practices at every step of the election process. Anthropic claims that its new model can autonomously scan for vulnerabilities in software more effectively than even expert security researchers. If given access to this new model, amateurs would theoretically be capable of identifying and exploiting vulnerabilities in a way that previously only sophisticated actors, such as nation-states, could do. For this reason, Anthropic chose not to release the Mythos model publicly. Instead, under an initiative Anthropic is calling Project Glasswing, it has offered access to Mythos to a number of high-profile tech firms and critical infrastructure operators so that these companies can proactively identify and address vulnerabilities in their own systems. Although Anthropic is currently controlling access to its model to prevent misuse, experts believe it is only a matter of time before tools advertising similar capabilities are broadly available. Read Article

Opinion: The Supreme Court’s Conservatives Just Issued the Worst Ruling in a Century | Richard L. Hasen/Slate

Wednesday’s 6–3 party-line decision in Louisiana v. Callais will go down in history as one of the most pernicious and damaging Supreme Court decisions of the past century. All six Republican-appointed justices on the court signed onto Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion gutting what remained of the Voting Rights Act protections for minority voters, while pretending they were merely making technical tweaks to the act. This decision will bleach the halls of Congress, state legislatures, and local bodies like city councils, by ending the protections of Section 2 of the act, which had provided a pathway to assure that voters of color would have some rudimentary fair representation. It’s the culmination of the life’s work of Chief Justice John Roberts and Samuel Alito, who have shown persistent resistance to the idea of the United States as a multiracial democracy, and a brazen willingness to reject Congress’ judgment that fair representation for minority voters sometimes requires race-conscious legislation. It gives the green light to further partisan gerrymandering. It protects Alito’s core constituency: aggrieved white Republican voters. It’s a disaster for American democracy. Read Article

National: Might Donald Trump try to rig the midterms? | The Economist

“Basically we just sort of rack our brains,” says Joe Morelle. “What would happen if this happened? Usually the answer is, well, that’s never happened before—but this is what we would do.” Mr Morelle is the top-ranking Democrat on the House Committee on House Administration. In normal times his team oversees matters of great importance to Congress, such as who gets a parking permit in the House garage. This being an election year, he is preoccupied with an even more existential question. What if Donald Trump tries to steal the midterms? Mr Morelle’s committee is in charge of adjudicating disputed elections in the House of Representatives. He has spent months doing tabletop exercises and dreaming up worst-case scenarios. His list of finagles that Mr Trump might attempt is 150 items long. His what-ifs include the president ordering immigration agents to the polls, declaring that postal votes are invalid and seizing ballot boxes. “I’m looking at things that are high, medium and low probability and then asking what’s the impact” and what is the Democrats’ response, says Mr Morelle. It is a group effort: he has been conferring with lawyers across the country, state attorneys-general and secretaries of state (ie, the top election officials in each state). Come November, Mr Morelle and his colleagues will have been war-gaming for more than a year.Read Article

National: Preparing for Law Enforcement Demands for Election Materials | Gary Restaino/Brennan Center for Justice

Already this year, law enforcement agencies have demanded sensitive election materials in at least four jurisdictions. In January, the FBI seized materials related to the 2020 federal election from Fulton County, Georgia. In February, the sheriff of Riverside County, California, seized ballots from the special redistricting election the state held last year. In March, the FBI served a federal grand jury subpoena to the president of the Arizona Senate, requiring records from independent contractor Cyber Ninjas’ discredited “audit” of the 2020 federal election. And this month, the Justice Department demanded 2024 ballots and other materials from Wayne County, Michigan. Using criminal investigative tools to challenge election results is unprecedented in America, and it appears to be part of this administration’s campaign to undermine elections. This pattern is troubling for democracy and diminishes voters’ confidence in elections. It is also inconsistent with the professional standards expected of law enforcement. Election officials, grand jurors, law enforcement, and judges should be prepared to keep sensitive materials secure in the face of any improper demands for election materials, and they should carefully scrutinize warrants and subpoenas that intrude on election security. Read Article

National: Trump administration blocking appointments to key panel overseeing voting machines, officials say | Jacob Knutson/Democracy Docket

Election officials across the country this week voiced concerns that the Trump administration is blocking appointments to a key federal committee that helps create standards for voting equipment used in U.S. elections.The unexplained rejections are keeping qualified experts in the creation of secure and accessible voting equipment off the Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC) — a body made up of technical experts and federal officials that helps develop guidelines to certify voting equipment. That could ultimately lead to the certification of voting machines that shouldn’t be in use — because they’re vulnerable to security breaches, inaccessible for certain types of voters, or otherwise flawed. And it represents the latest Trump administration bid to assert control over elections. Read Article

National: The National Guard ‘follows the Constitution,’ general says of troops possibly deployed to polls | Jonathan Shorman/News From The States

The National Guard’s top general told Congress on Friday that it would follow the Constitution and the law when he was asked about the possibility President Donald Trump would order troops to polling places for the midterm elections. The remarks at a U.S. House Appropriations subcommittee hearing came as Democratic lawmakers also voiced unease over the continuing deployment of nearly 2,500 National Guard members in Washington, D.C. Rep. Joe Morelle, a New York Democrat, asked Gen. Steven Nordhaus, chief of the National Guard Bureau, what assurances he could provide to Americans concerned about the deployment of troops at the polls. “The National Guard, obviously, always follows the Constitution, law, policy and guidance, both at the federal and the state level,” Nordhaus said. Federal law prohibits the deployment of the military to polling places unless necessary “to repel armed enemies of the United States” and violations are punishable by up to five years in prison. Read Article

National: Internal documents shed light on Trump’s crusade to vet state voter rolls | Tierney Sneed/CNN

The Trump administration has been working for nearly a year on an effort to weed out noncitizens from voter rolls using a faulty data system while keeping those plans hidden from courts and Democratic election officials, internal Justice Department communications obtained by CNN show. The White House was kept in the loop on the Justice Department’s progress, as it struggled to get cooperation from states in its sprawling requests for unredacted voter registration information, ultimately bringing lawsuits against 31 election chiefs. Only last month did the DOJ’s top voting lawyer acknowledge in the litigation that the department wanted to run the data through a citizenship verification system operated by the Department of Homeland Security. Internal emails cited in a new lawsuit filed Tuesday by a voter advocacy group challenging President Donald Trump’s sprawling voter data-collection and review project shed new light on the effort. Read Article

National: Trump, aides chase vote-rigging claims even after latest probe finds nothing | Jonathan Landay, Erin Banco and Phil Stewart/Reuters

Late last summer, Kurt Olsen’s patience had run out. U.S. President Donald Trump had enlisted Olsen months earlier to seek evidence of foreign interference in U.S. elections and re-investigate Trump’s 2020 loss. A prominent election-denier, attorney and former Navy SEAL, Olsen aimed to prove the discredited conspiracy theory that Dominion Voting Systems machines had been infected with malicious code controlled by Venezuela, according to three sources familiar with the matter. But a secret federal investigation of Puerto Rico’s Dominion machines had found no trace of hacking after the administration seized the machines in May and directed a cybersecurity contractor to scour them for months. Confronted with the results, Olsen turned on the contractor, Virginia-based Mojave Research Inc. in a September message to Trump, the three sources said. Infuriated, Olsen accused the firm of blocking his work, serving the “deep state” and secretly taking money from billionaire George Soros, a Democratic donor and frequent right-wing target, they said. Read Article

National: Trump Justice Department Curbs Efforts to Safeguard States From Election Crimes | Ben Penn/Bloomberg Law

The Justice Department is curtailing election year coordination aimed at protecting state-run voting processes, increasing risks of the Trump administration interfering in the November midterms or unwittingly exposing precincts to threats, said multiple state officials and former DOJ election crime lawyers. Ahead of an election that will determine whether Republicans retain control of Congress, DOJ leaders have eliminated a centralized command post, discontinued mandatory election law training for prosecutors, and restricted access to threat briefings for state officials, said people briefed on the situation. To attorneys steeped in federal-state election law enforcement norms, DOJ’s information-sharing pullback is a subtler form of undermining the election integrity principles that this administration touts as a priority. It coincides with the department’s escalating push to seize state voting records and FBI Director Kash Patel’s promise of imminent arrests tied to the 2020 presidential election. President Donald Trump has also hinted at stripping states’ constitutional authority over election administration. Read Article

National: Trump Doesn’t Have the Power to Enact His Latest Elections Scheme | David A. Graham/The Atlantic

Anxiety among election officials and experts had been building for months before Donald Trump issued his latest executive order purporting to ensure election integrity late last month. When the actual text emerged, the reaction wasn’t relief exactly—but a definite sense that things could have been much worse. Americans have many reasons to be worried about whether the midterm elections will be free and fair. As I laid out in a cover story last fall, the president’s plan to subvert the 2026 election is multifaceted and already in swing. But last month’s order and the dismissive reaction it’s received from experts—along with this weekend’s decisive defeat of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, which shows how the competitive-authoritarian playbook that Trump has imitated can be beaten—also point to the reasons to resist doomerism. Trump Doesn’t Have the Power to Enact His Latest Elections Scheme - The Atlantic

National: As a supreme court ruling looms, the US is dismantling Black voting power | Carol Anderson/The Guardian

There are moments in American history when the stakes are unmistakable. This is one of them. The forthcoming decision in Louisiana v Callais will not just be another supreme court ruling in a long line of voting cases. This time the issue is whether the Voting Rights Act (VRA) can still require states to draw electoral maps that give Black voters a meaningful chance to elect representatives. The challenge to the VRA is the latest brick in a wall that has been under construction for more than a decade, a wall designed to silence Black voters and an attempt to contain, carve up and cancel out the voices of minority communities to once again cement one party rule. Let’s be honest about what is happening. After the civil war, Reconstruction cracked open the door to a multiracial democracy. Black Americans registered. Black Americans voted. Black Americans held office. For a brief moment, the promise of the 15th amendment felt real. That progress was met with terror and violence – and then Jim Crow laws that choked off political power for nearly a century. As a supreme court ruling looms, the US is dismantling Black voting power | Carol Anderson | The Guardian

National: Department of Justice moves to undo Jan. 6 rioters’ convictions for seditious conspiracy | Salvador Rizzo, Jeremy Roebuck and Perry Stein/The Washington Post

Federal prosecutors are seeking to wipe out the seditious conspiracy convictions of 12 members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who helped plan the Jan. 6, 2021, riots and led the charge into the U.S. Capitol, according to court documents filed Tuesday. The request, from U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro of D.C., is likely to be granted because prosecutors have broad discretion to pursue or drop criminal charges, even after defendants have been convicted. Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers and a lead organizer behind the riots, is among those whose convictions Pirro is seeking to erase. The move to undo the most serious convictions stemming from the assault on the Capitol marks the latest step in President Donald Trump’s quest to rewrite the event’s violent history. A mob of Trump supporters gathered in D.C. and disrupted Congress’s certification of Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 presidential race, echoing Trump’s false claims that the election had been stolen. If Pirro’s request is approved by the courts, it will wipe out the last remaining convictions related to the Jan. 6 assault. DOJ moves to undo Jan. 6 rioters’ convictions for seditious conspiracy - The Washington Post

National: US Postal Service union launches ad campaign promoting mail voting | Susan Haigh/Associated Press

A major U.S. Postal Service union is launching a national TV ad campaign promoting voting by mail, stepping into a politically charged debate as skepticism about mail-in ballots has been raised by President Donald Trump and others. The 30-second message features a variety of voters, among them a busy farmer and a flight attendant, explaining why they cast their ballots by mail. Sponsored by the 200,000-member American Postal Workers Union, the advertising campaign announced Tuesday will begin airing this week in Ohio, where Union Army soldiers during the Civil War cast the first mail ballots in 1864. It will then move to other states. The ad ends with the message: “Vote by mail — keep it, protect it, expand it.” It comes two weeks after Trump signed an executive order that seeks to create a nationwide list of verified eligible voters and subsequently bar postal workers from sending absentee ballots to those who are not on each state’s approved list. Read Article

National: Local election officials fear retribution ahead of fall midterms | Gregory Svirnovskiy/Politico

Local election officials are expressing grave concerns about federal interference into their work, as the fall midterms kick into high gear and experts fret over President Donald Trump’s push to assert greater control over voting. Fifty percent of local election officials are either somewhat or very worried about political leaders interfering with their work, according to a survey by the Brennan Center for Justice published on Monday, with just 28 percent saying they have no concerns about the prospect. And 45 percent of respondents expressed concern with being targeted by politically motivated investigations. The numbers aren’t all that surprising, said Lawrence Norden, the Brennan Center’s vice president of elections and government. “I think since at least 2020, when you had threats against election officials reach unprecedented levels and a lot of controversy around being able to address Covid and of course, Jan. 6 — after that, I think this is just a reality that election officials have been living with,” he said. “So unfortunately, I’m not really surprised by those numbers.” Read Article

National: Ballots become battlegrounds for voting rules, redistricting, election power | Anna Claire Vollers/Stateline

More than a third of state ballot measures that voters will be asked to consider this year relate to democracy, with questions on voting rights, election processes, redistricting and similar issues. “It’s the redistricting fights that are really getting heated after the Trump administration began pressuring Republican-led states to shore up the GOP majority in Congress in preparation for the midterm election,” said Quentin Savwoir, director of programs and strategy at the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, a progressive policy organization that tracks ballot initiatives. For example, next week Virginians will be asked whether they want to temporarily allow the state to redraw its congressional districts, in response to aggressive congressional map changes in other states that have been encouraged by President Donald Trump. If approved, the proposal could create four Democrat-leaning districts and affect the balance of power in the U.S. House of Representatives. Read Article

National: Top federal election official says her conspiratorial rant against Democrats is being investigated | Jacob Knutson/Democracy Docket

Christy McCormick, the Republican vice-chair of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC), told Democracy Docket Wednesday that her inflammatory comments against Democrats last year are under “investigation.” During a panel discussion in October with the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute (AFPI), McCormick falsely claimed that Democrats actively promote and rely on voting by “illegal citizens” to win elections. “They need the votes. They’re losing ground,” McCormick said when asked why she thinks the “left” opposes measures to tighten voting rules. “Everybody is seeing how people are going toward the right. They need open borders, they need illegal citizens to increase their votes,” she continued. “And this is why they’re fighting so adamantly against us.” At the time, McCormick was appearing on the panel in her official capacity as a commissioner of the EAC, an independent agency that helps all states — including those led by Democrats — administer fair and impartial elections. Read Article

National: Inside Trump’s Effort to “Take Over” the Midterm Elections | Doug Bock Clark and Jen Fifield/ProPublica

In mid-December 2020, federal officials responsible for protecting American elections from fraud converged in a windowless, dim, fortified room at the Justice Department’s downtown Washington, D.C., headquarters. They had been summoned by Attorney General William Barr. Over the preceding weeks, Donald Trump’s claims that the presidential election had been stolen from him had reached a crescendo. He’d become obsessed with a conspiracy theory that voting machines in Antrim County, Michigan, had switched votes from him to Joe Biden. With each day, Trump ratcheted up the pressure to unleash the might of the federal government to undo his defeat. Barr interrogated experts from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, crammed in beside top FBI officials around a cheap table. He needed the group of around 10 to answer a crucial question: Was it really possible the 2020 presidential vote had been hacked? Read Article

National: The Fight to Protect the Midterms | Michael Waldman/Brennan Center for Justice

Last week, President Trump signed an executive order purporting to upend mail voting. It’s jarring that the administration would target something so popular. According to a Pew Research Center poll, more than one in three voters cast ballots by mail in 2024. Trump himself votes that way. As Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-MT) put it, “The reality is in a state like Montana, like Alaska, like other rural states, most of our people vote by mail. And they like it, and they trust it.” The order instructs the U.S. Postal Service to refuse to deliver ballots unless the voters are on a list of approved citizens that would be created by the executive branch. Such federal databases are out of date and unreliable, so this risks mass disenfranchisement of eligible citizens. The order is also illegal. The Constitution is clear: States run elections. Congress can pass national legislation. Presidents have no lawful role. Read Article

Trump’s election order, SAVE Act, rely on ‘flawed’ system | Joe Fisher/UPI

President Donald Trump's multipronged plan for ensuring only eligible citizens vote in elections leans on a system that experts say is flawed. Pamela Smith, CEO and president of Verified Voting, told UPI the SAVE system's errors were frequent enough to potentially impact some election results. "Some researchers found that more than 5% of the voters that the SAVE database had identified as noncitizens were actually citizens," Smith said of SAVE errors in Texas. "Five percent is a big number. That's well over the margin of victory in lots of situations. In some of the smaller counties that percentage became much higher." Trump's election order, SAVE Act, rely on 'flawed' system - UPI.com

National: At Los Angeles ‘shadow hearing’ on elections, House Democrats join experts to defend voting systems | Kevin Rector/Los Angeles Times

House Democrats and a panel of elections experts expressed unwavering confidence in state voting systems and dismissed Trump administration claims of widespread fraud and other vulnerabilities during a special “shadow hearing” in Los Angeles on Tuesday. They accused President Trump and his Republican allies of pushing sweeping federal reforms — including stricter voter ID laws and new restrictions on voting by mail — that would disenfranchise millions of eligible Americans, especially low-income, rural and elderly voters, as well as voters of color and those with disabilities. “They are taking us backward, and not to a good place,” said Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), who helped lead the hearing at the Daniel K. Inouye National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in Little Tokyo. Read Article

National: Trump is trying to build a massive voter database. Election officials are afraid of what he’ll do with it | Gabe Cohen, Tierney Sneed, Jeremy Herb and Fredreka Schouten/CNN

The Trump administration is intensifying its campaign against alleged voter fraud, taking new steps toward building a national citizen database and ramping up its hunt for suspected noncitizen voters — all under the banner of “election integrity.” The latest escalation — including an executive order, a newly empowered prosecutor and a growing raft of lawsuits — has drawn fresh warnings from critics who say the administration’s push to amass vast troves of voter data from across the country could be used to block eligible Americans from voting and stoke fresh doubts about the legitimacy of the 2026 midterm elections. The Justice Department has finalized a deal with the Department of Homeland Security to give DHS sensitive voter-roll data the administration has demanded from states to be checked against a citizenship verification program that has been criticized for its inaccuracies. Trump officials last week floated a new potential pressure tactic on states that so far have refused to hand over their full voter rolls: Conditioning hundreds of millions of dollars in homeland security grants on sharing voter data, requiring states to run their registration rolls through the federal immigration records system or lose the funding. Read Article

National: Trump proposes cutting CISA election security program in FY27 budget | David DiMolfetta/Nextgov/FCW

TThe Trump administration is hoping to eliminate roughly $700 million in programs across the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in fiscal year 2027, a sweeping set of cuts that translate to a net reduction of about $360 million after accounting for internal transfers and other adjustments, according to a detailed budget justification. The proposal targets election security, workforce development, stakeholder engagement and a range of infrastructure protection efforts, marking one of the most significant overhauls of the nation’s civilian cyber defense agency since its creation. The budget would notably eliminate CISA’s election security program entirely, including cutting funding for information-sharing support to state and local officials and removing dedicated election security advisors across the country. The proposal would also end CISA’s support for the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, or EI-ISAC, a key hub for sharing threat intelligence, cyber alerts and incident response resources with state and local election officials. Read Article

National: Preparing for the Real Risks of Election Interference | Carl Smith/Governing