National

President Donald Trump’s attempt to nationalize America’s voting system suffered another loss in court this week, just the latest in a lengthy series of defeats over Trump’s blatantly unlawful executive orders around voting. This time was a bit more dramatic, though, with a judge bluntly calling out the Justice Department for using a lawsuit against Minnesota as a “fishing expedition” to help it find a violation of federal law. U.S. District Court Judge Katherine Menendez dismissed the case, ultimately finding that Congress never authorized the attorney general to access voting records and documents that state officials create themselves. These continued losses won’t end the story, though. Newly confirmed Attorney General Todd Blanche announced this week that he’s considering asking the Supreme Court to intervene in the dozens of lawsuits his DOJ has filed against states that, like Minnesota, refused to hand over their voter rolls. Trump and Blanche are attempting to bully states into submission over “election integrity,” but it’s obvious what the real endgame is: Complete control over U.S. elections. Read Article

National: Trump Boasts of Declassifying Secrets, but Withholds Key Election Files From Public | Dustin Volz/The New York Times

The White House in recent weeks has made public a steady drip of previously classified intelligence about foreign threats to elections and other matters, offering President Trump and his allies ammunition for baseless conspiracy theories about potential vote rigging. But one crucial document has not been among the releases, despite a congressional requirement for it to be: the assessment by U.S. intelligence agencies of foreign meddling efforts during the 2024 election. The document would provide the public with a holistic look at foreign attempts to influence voters and sow division around the presidential contest and other federal races that year. The 2020 version of the assessment, released during the early weeks of the Biden administration, highlighted Russia’s efforts to boost Mr. Trump, Iran’s push to harm his candidacy and analytic judgments about actions China considered but largely refrained from taking. It also included a dissenting minority view that China took “at least some steps” intended to undermine Mr. Trump. The omission of the report on the 2024 election shows the highly selective nature of the Trump White House’s approach to declassification. It is just one example of many where the administration has ignored bipartisan pressure from Congress, including legal requirements, by withholding certain documents from public view even as it publishes hundreds of pages of material it has promised will reveal deep-state coverups of foreign meddling efforts. Read Article

National: Justice Department plans to send about 1,000 monitors to the polls this fall | Patrick Marley/The Washington Post

The Justice Department plans to dispatch about 1,000 monitors to the polls this fall — probably the largest number under a Republican president, according to a top assistant attorney general. The Justice Department routinely sends monitors to polling places to ensure election laws are followed and voters’ rights are protected. In the past — including during primaries this month — they have limited their involvement to observation, but Democrats have raised concerns about what they could do this fall because President Donald Trump this year said Republicans should “nationalize the voting” and “take over the voting.” Harmeet K. Dhillon, the assistant attorney general who leads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, told Bloomberg News that the deployment of about 1,000 poll monitors is “probably going to be a historic number for a Republican administration.” She did not say where they would go in an interview that was published Monday. Read Article

National: Democrats sue DOJ over midterm ballot seizure plans | Ryan Knappenberger/Courthouse News Service

The Democratic National Committee sued the Justice Department on Thursday over its refusal to turn over documents related to any plans to seize ballots, voting machines and other election materials within a month of any federal primary and general election during the midterms. The DNC filed the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, after the FBI declined to turn over such documents as requested in a Feb. 6, request brought in the wake of the FBI raid on the Fulton County election office on Jan. 28. “Following the seizure of archived ballots from Fulton County, Georgia — and seeking to ensure that the Trump administration does not attempt unprecedented abuses of criminal law enforcement tools to undermine upcoming elections — the Democratic National Committee sent requests for records under the Freedom of Information Act, to components of the Department of Justice concerning any planned seizure of ballots, voting machines and other voting systems components,” the DNC says in its complaint. Read Article

National: ‘I don’t trust you’:Tensions were high in an election security call for state leaders hosted by CISA | Dion Nissenbaum/Votebeat

Tensions between state election officials and the Trump administration are rising as we head into the heart of the midterm election season. Frustrations boiled over on Monday during a rare election security call hosted by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency for state officials. During the call, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes unloaded on the agency. CISA used to be a go-to shop for many states looking for help ensuring that their elections weren’t hacked, targeted, or undermined by cyberattacks or foreign interference. CISA provided states with classified security briefings on threats, helped ensure that state voting equipment wasn’t vulnerable to cyberattacks, and worked with election leaders to game out potential risks. All that changed when Donald Trump returned to the White House last year. The second Trump administration scaled back its support for states, cut back CISA staff, and launched an investigation of its former leader, whom Trump accused of disloyalty because he pushed back on the president’s false claims that the 2020 election was rigged. CISA has not had a permanent director since the start of Trump’s second term. Read Article

National: Experts slam Trump’s unusual new census report as a ‘hijack by the White House’ | Gabe Cohen and Fredreka Schouten/CNN

Former Census Bureau leaders, statisticians and voting-rights advocates are raising alarms about an unusual, unsigned new report posted on the agency’s website that claims tens of thousands of noncitizens voted in the 2020 presidential election. President Donald Trump touted the results Tuesday on Truth Social, saying the bureau had proved that more than 24,000 noncitizens illegally voted in 2020 after analyzing 128 million individual voter records. Even if the report is accurate, 24,000 votes would amount to less than 0.02% of the roughly 160 million ballots cast in 2020. Joe Biden won the national popular vote by more than 7 million votes. Read Article

National: Trump election demands spark suit over DHS anti-terrorism funding | Sarah D. Wire/USA Today

A group of prominent cities and counties are suing the Trump administration for withholding tens of millions of dollars in anti-terrorism funding unless states and local governments agree to change how they conduct elections. Harris County and El Paso County in Texas; Nashville, Tennessee, and Columbus, Ohio are participating in the suit. The lawsuit challenges the Federal Emergency Management Agency's June 2026 decision to hold back 20% or even all Homeland Security Grant Program grants unless the jurisdictions comply with five election administration orders. Read Article

National: How Trump Left America Vulnerable to Cyberattacks | Nick Miroff and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez/The Atlantic

During her January 2025 confirmation hearing to be secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem was asked how she would strengthen the nation’s cyberdefenses. Noem told senators that she would make the department’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency “smaller” and “more nimble.” President Trump had created CISA as a stand-alone agency within the Department of Homeland Security during his first term to give cybersecurity more institutional heft, and it had grown quickly with support from lawmakers of both parties. But after CISA declared the 2020 presidential election to be “the most secure in American history” and the agency’s director, Christopher Krebs, refused to back Trump’s claims that the vote had been stolen, Krebs became a target for the president’s fury and a seething grudge. During the DOGE fever of the first few months of Trump’s return, CISA’s budget was reduced and its staff cut by one-third. The agency hasn’t had a permanent, Senate-confirmed director since Trump retook office. In April, the White House proposed deeper cuts to CISA’s budget, but Republican lawmakers have raised concerns that critical U.S. infrastructure is already too vulnerable. Read Article

National: Voting machines have real security issues. Researchers worry they could be weaponized by election deniers. | Dana Nickel/Politico

Last spring, the Trump administration asked a small cybersecurity firm based in Virginia to scrutinize electronic voting systems the federal government had seized from Puerto Rico. The task before the company, Mojave Research, was nominally simple: to determine whether the machines had any major security flaws that could have affected the results of the 2024 presidential election. The company ultimately discovered numerous security gaps in these machines, made by election giant Dominion Voting Systems, including weak or recycled passwords used across networks and other vulnerabilities that had previously been identified but remained unpatched. But according to Jason Wareham — the chief executive of Mojave Research who presented the findings of this investigation for the first time publicly last Friday at the DEF CON cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas — they had no reason to suspect that these security issues had any material impact on the results of the election. Read Article

National: Judge halts Trump order to expand Postal Service role in elections | Michael Casey and Nicholas Riccardi/Associated Press

A federal judge on Tuesday ruled against President Donald Trump’s executive order that sought to create a federal voter list and directly involve the U.S. Postal Service in election operations in a way that would limit mail voting. U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani had already halted the order Trump signed in March, his second one attempting to set national election rules. On June 25, she sided with Democratic state attorneys general in granting summary judgment, preventing the core parts of Trump’s order from taking effect. Tuesday’s ruling creates another legal hurdle for the Trump administration to overcome should it get the initial injunction lifted by the U.S. Supreme Court. “That it is now less than 90 days before the November 3, 2026 midterm elections underscores the critical need for an injunction to prevent Defendants from changing election rules on the eve of the election,” she wrote. Read Article

National: No more ‘hypothetical situations’: States move to fortify elections against Trump | Kevin Hardy/Stateline

State Democratic officials are preparing for chaos at the polls this November, as President Donald Trump casts doubt on election security and pushes for more federal involvement in local voting. “We’re no longer talking about hypothetical situations,” said Nick Brown, Washington state’s Democratic attorney general, noting the president’s push to nationalize election administration and to question the integrity of upcoming elections. Brown is among the many Democratic state officials raising alarms over how Trump may seek to interfere with or challenge the results of November’s midterms. At stake is not only whether Republicans will maintain their grip on Congress, but also the control of state legislatures across the country. Democratic gains at either the state or national levels could provide a new check on Trump, who has sought to significantly expand executive power in his second term. Read Article

National: What happens if election deniers run elections? | Zack Beauchamp/Vox

Tom Tiffany, the new Republican nominee for governor in Wisconsin, is not just a passive supporter of President Donald Trump's lies about the 2020 presidential election. He is an active promoter of them. In December 2020, when he was a member of Congress, he signed on to a Texas lawsuit seeking to invalidate Joe Biden's victory. On January 6, 2021, he voted against certifying the results in Pennsylvania and Texas just hours after rioters threatened to kill his colleagues. He has stated he would have overturned Wisconsin's results too, and just this year endorsed an FBI investigation into the state's elections. And though the national climate in 2026 favors Democrats, Wisconsin is a closely divided state: Tiffany could beat the odds and win the general. There is, in short, a very real chance that someone who doesn't believe American elections are legitimate may soon be supervising them in one of the 2028 presidential cycle's most important swing states. Read Article

National: Voting machine researchers say federal work abruptly ended after Trump ally pushed back on their findings | David DiMolfetta/Nextgov/FCW

After spending roughly six weeks analyzing Dominion voting systems used in Puerto Rico’s 2024 elections, Mojave Research came back to the Trump administration with findings that startled its researchers. The systems contained at least a dozen high- or critical-severity software vulnerabilities. Passwords were reused, firewalls were disabled and basic cryptographic protections were poorly implemented. And in Puerto Rico, active cellular hardware modems opened additional pathways into underlying software that was thought to be isolated. But the small cybersecurity firm found no evidence that any of those weaknesses had actually been exploited, or that votes had been changed. The company still wanted more time to be certain. Federal officials initially seemed willing to give them considerably more of it. The company was asked to grow the team working on the effort from roughly 10 people to about 60, according to CEO Jason Wareham. Read Article

National: Top Democrats simulate election threats as Trump continues assault on voting | George Chidi/The Guardian

In a Washington DC conference room last month, some of the most senior Democrats in the US Senate gathered to plan for a prospect that only recently would have felt more akin to science fiction: they started to wargame democracy. Chuck Schumer, the US Senate minority leader, and senators including Alex Padilla, Adam Schiff, Mark Warner, Elissa Slotkin and Raphael Warnock were among those in the room as a team of legal experts offered scenarios. The first: realistic deepfake videos, created with artificial intelligence, showing “evidence” of widespread election fraud, spreading through social media a few weeks before voting begins. Forensic experts discredit the videos quickly as synthetic in the given scenario, but rightwing media – and the US president – amplify the claims, nonetheless. Election workers begin receiving death threats. Armed men start appearing at polls. If you’re a Democratic senator, what would you do? Read Article

National: How the DMV Became Ground Zero in the Election Integrity Fight | Louise Radnofsky, Eliza Collins, Joseph De Avila and Corinne Ramey/Wall Street Journal

In President Trump’s prime-time address last month declaring U.S. elections vulnerable, his centerpiece claim was that more than 250,000 noncitizens were registered to vote. A day later, the Department of Homeland Security said the striking number covered just four states. New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill already knew her state had a problem but nothing of that scale. The day before Trump’s speech, the Democrat learned from her state attorney general’s office that under the previous governor, the state had accidentally put thousands of noncitizens on its voter rolls. Even worse, hundreds of them appeared to have cast ballots. The governor and her advisers quickly realized they needed to acknowledge the errors. On July 21, Sherrill said 6,600 noncitizens had been added to New Jersey’s voter rolls from June 2023 to June 2024, blaming a software glitch at the motor vehicle commission, which automatically registers eligible people to vote. While applying for a driver’s license, these people selected “no” when asked if they were U.S. citizens, Sherrill said, but “the system registered them anyway.” Read Article

National: Trump loses 21 straight court battles for state voter rolls as midterms near | Luc Cohen/Reuters

The Trump administration's streak of courtroom defeats in its effort to obtain state voter rolls reached 21 this year when a judge ruled this week that states are not required to share the records with the federal government. With President Donald Trump's Republicans defending slim majorities in both chambers of Congress, his administration has mounted an aggressive effort to expand federal oversight of elections ahead of the November 3 midterms. A Reuters investigation found that just 129 people have been prosecuted for noncitizen voting since a law criminalizing it was passed in 1996, and that most of those cases stemmed from voter confusion or miscommunication with election officials rather than any conspiracy. Read Article

National: How a Counterintelligence Inquiry Into Trump’s Russia Ties Was Derailed | Michael S. Schmidt/The New York Times

For the last year, the Trump administration’s efforts to seek retribution against intelligence officials and F.B.I. agents who investigated Russia’s 2016 election meddling have been spearheaded by federal prosecutors in South Florida trying to build a criminal case. But in recent weeks, the White House has added a dimension to its push to rewrite the history of the Russia investigation, releasing a trove of previously classified F.B.I. memos that it says back up President Trump’s claims that a so-called deep state was out to get him. There is little new of substance in the documents, and nothing that fundamentally undercuts the F.B.I.’s rationale for pursuing the Russia investigation. But the material does shed new light on an often overlooked aspect of the swirl of events surrounding Mr. Trump in his first months in office in 2017: the bureau’s remarkable decision to open a separate counterintelligence investigation into the president of the United States, and how that inquiry was sidetracked before it had much of a chance to get going. Mr. Trump has always dismissed as baseless smears suggestions that he was a Russian asset or had extensive financial ties to Russia. And no publicly known investigation into Mr. Trump ever demonstrated that he was acting at the behest of the Russians. Read Article

National: A Growing Number of Election Deniers Hold Key Local Roles in Midterms | Nick Corasaniti and Alexandra Berzon/The New York Times

A significant number of local officials who have publicly questioned the integrity of past elections are now in positions that allow them to oversee or administer upcoming midterm elections. This trend is particularly notable in counties across the nation that are slated to host competitive House and Senate races, contests that will ultimately decide control of Congress. The presence of these individuals in key administrative roles raises concerns for voters and election integrity advocates. Tammy Patrick, chief programs officer for the National Association of Election Officials, said these officials’ roles risked lending legitimacy to false theories. At worst, they could try to interfere directly with results. “What we’re seeing now is the sort of thing that people have long worried about,” Ms. Patrick said. Still, she added, such election interference is rare. Read Article

National: Trump admin tries to rebuild election security infrastructure it gutted as midterms near | Tierney Sneed, Sean Lyngaas and Evan Perez/CNN

After dismantling the federal system designed to protect US elections, the Trump administration now says it has a plan to rebuild it — less than 100 days before Election Day and just weeks before ballots begin going out in the mail. A year after forcing out many of its most experienced election-security specialists, a key federal cyber agency is now reassigning remaining staff into new roles. The agency says the new liaisons are expected to “build trusted relationships” with state and local elected officials, according to an internal summary of the administration’s plans. But election officials and non-partisan experts warn it’s too deep into the election cycle for any major changes to their security protocols, and they are skeptical that the agency’s hollowed-out workforce can deliver even the baseline support to states before the midterms. Trump admin tries to rebuild election security infrastructure it gutted as midterms near | CNN Politics

National: States challenging executive order on mail-in voting ask justices to leave in place limits on its implementation | Amy Howe/SCOTUSblog

Lawyers for a group of 23 states and the District of Columbia on Monday afternoon urged the Supreme Court to leave in place an order by a federal court in Boston that barred the federal government from applying provisions of an executive order on mail-in voting to those states in the November elections. In a 45-page filing, the challengers told the justices that granting a request to pause the lower court’s order “would allow the federal government to rush out an unprecedented, legally indefensible voter-verification and ballot-interception program that would, among other things, give the U.S. Postal Service far-reaching new powers and responsibilities.” President Donald Trump issued the executive order on March 31, 2026. The provisions at the center of the dispute now before the court require several different government agencies to take action. One provision instructs the Department of Homeland Security to create lists of the adult U.S. citizens in each state and to send those lists to states at least 60 days before a federal election. Another provision directs the U.S. attorney general to “prioritize the investigation and, as appropriate, the prosecution of State and local officials … who issue Federal ballots to individuals not eligible to vote in a Federal election.” And a third provision requires states that want to use mail ballots to give the USPS a list of eligible voters to whom the states intend to send mail ballots, and it bars the USPS from transmitting ballots for voters not on the lists of “enrolled” voters that the USPS will create. Read Article

National: Democrats Mobilize Over Fears Trump Will Deploy Troops to Polls | Joe Gould and Kadia Goba/NOTUS

President Donald Trump hasn’t ruled out deploying troops or federal agents to polling places in November. Democrats are preparing for how to respond in case that happens. Democratic lawmakers, wary of various potential disruptions to the midterm elections, conducted closed-door tabletop exercises last week that included the possibility of armed federal personnel dispatched near polling places. Sen. Alex Padilla (D-California), who participated in the exercises led by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, said Democrats are preparing to challenge the administration over any “pretext they would make for this type of deployment — because they would be lies — before those deployments even happen.” The comments reflect an atmosphere of distrust and a sharp partisan split on election security ahead of a midterm election that will determine which party controls the House and Senate — as the Trump administration has pushed aggressively on election system overhauls. Read Article

National: Court blocks Trump ban on voter registration help for new citizens, finding likely intentional discrimination | Yunior Rivas/Democracy Docket

A federal judge Monday blocked the Trump administration’s ban on nonpartisan groups helping newly naturalized U.S. citizens register to vote — finding the ban was likely driven by intentional discrimination against new citizens. U.S. District Judge Adam B. Abelson temporarily paused an August 2025 policy from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) that allowed only state and local election officials to offer voter registration services at naturalization ceremonies. Pro-voting groups such as the League of Women Voters and National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW) were banned from providing voter assistance under the policy. Read Article

National: AI is getting better at election facts, but voters shouldn’t rely on it | Derek B. Johnson/CyberScoop

Like seemingly everything else these days, artificial intelligence will re-shape the way voters gather information on candidates running in the 2026 midterm elections. In some ways, this is already the reality. Voters are increasingly turning to AI chatbots for information instead of Google. Political campaigns are deploying deepfakes of their opponents. And AI systems have been developed to carry out increasingly complex hacks. Since the last major U.S. election in 2024, major tech companies have embedded AI into their products while hundreds of millions of people have adopted the tools, either by purchasing subscriptions to commercial models or using open-source models. Yet both research and experts state that while AI systems have gotten better at handling basic facts, they’re nowhere near reliable enough to be a main source of accurate or complete information. While chatbots are becoming a primary way that voters gather information on local races, candidates, issues, and voting information, they are not substitutes for more authoritative sources, like a voter’s state or local election office. Read Article

National: For Trump, the Year Is Always 2020 | Katie Rogers/The New York Times

What year is it again? Over the past few days, President Trump has been living in the year 2020, claiming that he defied his advisers to reopen the country during the coronavirus pandemic, saying that one of them, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, was the one with all the “crazy ideas.” He has revisited his near-daily falsehood that he won the 2020 election and that it was rigged, a belief held by a large swath of his political base. And, on Friday, he said that his supporters who ransacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, were simply on an “innocent journey.” Four people died that day. Mr. Trump is not so much a student of history as a rewriter of it. In his second term, he is so set on avenging his election loss and pursuing retribution against his political enemies that he has Americans looking backward when many have signaled they would rather he explain why the country is at war with Iran, or help them afford groceries now, in the year 2026. Neither his falling poll numbers nor the concerns among Republicans about the midterms seem to be modulating his insistence on revisiting much of what happened six years ago. “I don’t think his ego allows him to accept the fact that someone he perceives as so weak as Joe Biden was able to beat him,” said Sarah Matthews, who was a deputy press secretary in the first Trump administration and resigned amid the Jan. 6 attacks. Read Article

Opinion: How Americans can defend their right to vote | Pam Fessler/Los Angeles Times