National

The United States has launched a war in Iran. Soaring gas prices are pounding an economy that many Americans already considered unaffordable. And the federal department responsible for protecting the homeland ran out of money more than a month ago. Naturally, the Senate is debating none of those things. Instead, Republicans in Congress’s upper chamber are spending this week trying—likely in vain—to pass a bill aimed at addressing President Trump’s yearslong obsession with his 2020 defeat. The proposal, known as the SAVE America Act, would require people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and photo identification when casting their ballot. The legislation is ostensibly designed to toughen enforcement of a core tenet of American democracy that most election experts say is already rigorously enforced: the law that only U.S. citizens are eligible to vote in federal elections. But those same experts, along with Trump himself, view the SAVE America Act as much more far-reaching. If it’s passed, voting-rights experts contend, more than 20 million eligible voters could lose ready access to the polls, including many married women who have changed their name and young people who have moved out of state to attend college. A Serious Senate Debate About an Unserious Bill - The Atlantic

National: Where Trump Has Installed 2020 Election Deniers in Government | Alan Feuer, Nick Corasaniti and Alexandra Berzon/The New York Times

When President Trump sought to overturn his loss in the 2020 election and remain in power, resistance from within his own government helped to stop him. Top Justice Department officials rejected his specious claims that the vote had been marred by widespread fraud. Senior officials at the Department of Homeland Security refused to go along with his outlandish efforts to seize voting machines. Cybersecurity experts praised the count as secure, and the intelligence community sidestepped his requests to declare that foreign nations had interfered in the results. But Mr. Trump’s second term looks very different. The president has filled his administration with people who are sympathetic to his baseless claims that the presidential race more than five years ago was stolen. Read Article

National: Amendment to require photo ID to vote fails in Senate as Democrats object | Caitlin Yilek/CBS

An amendment that would require voters to show photo identification to cast a ballot failed to advance in the Senate on Thursday, despite Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer saying last week that Democrats were not opposed to such a requirement. The amendment to the elections bill needed 60 votes to advance. It was defeated in a 53 to 47 vote. The vote came during the second week of a marathon debate over a controversial elections bill known as the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote and certain forms of photo ID to cast a ballot. The legislation does not have enough support to clear the 60-vote threshold in the upper chamber, but President Trump has dialed up the pressure on Senate Republicans to find a way to force it through. ReaD ARTICLE

National: Some States Already Preparing for Potential Supreme Court Ban on Late Ballots | Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times

Francisco Aguilar, the secretary of state in Nevada, stepped out of the Supreme Court in Washington on Monday, where justices had just heard arguments about the legality of counting mail votes that arrive after Election Day. He immediately called his top deputy. The court’s conservative majority had appeared deeply skeptical of the arguments for continuing the practice. So Mr. Aguilar’s message was urgent, he later said in an interview. He began listing things “we need to start working on and answering.” And in the middle of the midterm election season, they couldn’t wait for a decision to land — perhaps as late as June. “We have to provide a road map for the county clerks,” he said into the phone. Mr. Aguilar, a Democrat, is one of 18 top election officials in states and territories across the country bracing for the possibility that the Supreme Court will require major changes to election law just months before the midterm election in November. Part of the urgency: getting the message out to voters that late-arriving ballots may no longer be counted. Such a decision could affect hundreds of thousands of voters. Read Article

National: On cyber, local elections officials are ‘natural risk managers,’ says former CISA official | Colin Wood/StateScoop

Geoff Hale got his start in defending the nation’s elections infrastructure from cyberattacks in 2016. “I guess I can thank Russia for that,” he said, pointing to his work at the National Protection and Programs Directorate, which was two years later to be transformed into the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the Department of Homeland Security division granted an expansive remit on coordinating and rallying technical and intelligence resources in response to cybersecurity threats, foreign and domestic. He recalled Russia’s successful cyberattacks in 2016 against the Democratic National Committee, but also lesser known cyber activity aimed at state governments. Much has changed over the past decade, including the level of support offered by the federal cyber agency created during Donald Trump’s first presidency. Federal support for state and local governments has been slashed broadly, including for programs that would aid local election officials as they prepare for the midterm elections and the 2028 presidential race. Read Article

National: Republican states are pushing through their own versions of the SAVE America Act | Andrew Howard/Politico

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

March 19, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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