National

“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

In February, allies of President Trump began circulating a 17-page draft executive order declaring a national emergency and granting the president unprecedented powers over voting — including the power to ban mail ballots, require IDs to vote and other changes. The basis for the order was a claim that China interfered in the 2020 election — an assertion that U.S. intelligence has said is not credible. The president later told reporters he was not considering the executive order, which would have almost certainly become mired in court challenges. President Trump has never conceded defeat in the 2020 election, but investigations have never turned up evidence of widespread fraud or of foreign interference in the technical aspects of the voting process. Still, foreign interference in U.S. elections is a real threat. U.S. intelligence has repeatedly reported that countries like Russia and Iran have attempted to influence U.S. election outcomes. A 2021 intelligence report found that China considered interfering in the 2020 election, but did not follow through. Read Aricle

National: How the Supreme Court could upend the midterm elections | Richard L. Hasen/MS Now

Pending before the Supreme Court are three disparate cases, each with the potential to remake rules on district boundaries, campaign finance and the eligibility of certain mail-in ballots. These rulings, issued in the middle of the election season, could potentially confound voters, scramble overworked and threatened election administrators, and alter campaign strategies in the middle of heated election contests. And depending on how the justices rule, these decisions may have cascading effects including new court challenges, legislative changes and even more uncertainty in the months before the midterms. The justices can avoid this confusion entirely. In June 1964 the court issued a landmark decision in Reynolds v. Sims that helped cement the principle of “one person, one vote.” Yet the ruling made clear that it need not be applied to that fall’s fast-approaching elections. Whatever this court ultimately decides on the merits in these cases, it should apply the same principle. Read Article

National: Supreme Court remade by Trump ushers in historic defeats for civil rights | Justin Jouvenal/The Washington Post

The sharply conservative Supreme Court that President Donald Trump’s three appointees remade is the first since at least the 1950s to reject civil rights claims in a majority of cases involving women and minorities, according to a detailed analysis conducted for The Washington Post. The shift brings to an end a streak of successive courts expanding such protections that began with the dawn of the civil rights era. But the historic nature of the current court is also evident in other key areas of the law over the five terms since the third of Trump’s appointees joined the bench. The analysis shows that in addition to civil rights, the court powered by Trump’s picks — Justices Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — has pushed to the right of any modern court on religious rights and voting issues. The court has also entered a new era of extreme partisanship. None over the past seven decades has been as starkly polarized. Read Article

National: ‘A logistical nightmare.’ Experts explain Trump’s mail-in ballot order | Josh Meyer/USA Today

“The EO is a logistical nightmare and clearly represents magical thinking – leaving aside constitutional issues,” said Charles Stewart III, the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Election Data and Science Lab. “What’s important to note is that the federal system doesn’t have reliable and unique information about people on voter rolls,” Stewart told USA TODAY. To create such a vetted list, he said, would require mashing together many existing federal government databases – including from the Social Security Administration and the notoriously inaccurate Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) – that already have established problems even before anyone tries to combine them. Such an undertaking could take years, Stewart said, and require at the very least establishing pilot programs, creating and “debugging” entire new databases, getting congressional and public input – and, importantly, obtaining and spending a lot of federal funding. “If one were genuinely serious about implementation,” he said, “one would need not just rules but project management, funding streams, intergovernmental agreements, vendor capacity, testing cycles and a hierarchy for resolving conflicts between federal data, state voter files, and local election deadlines.” Read Article

National: Democrats sue to block Trump’s ‘unconstitutional’ mail ballot order | Jonathan Shorman/News From The States

Democrats sued over President Donald Trump’s executive order clamping down on mail ballots on Wednesday, signaling the start of another fight with the White House over elections. The order, which would create a national list of voting-age American citizens and directs the U.S. Postal Service to place limits on mail-in ballots, constitutes an extraordinary and illegal attempt by Trump to intervene in the voting process, election experts said. he order is a "structural inversion” of how mail voting works, said Pamela Smith, president and CEO of Verified Voting, an organization that promotes the responsible use of technology in elections. USPS delivers mail and isn’t involved in distributing ballots, she said.“It is not up to the Postal Service to have this gatekeeping role over ballot delivery,” Smith said. Democrats sue to block Trump’s ‘unconstitutional’ mail ballot order | News From The States

National: The actual danger of Trump’s phony vote-by-mail executive order | Richard L. Hasen/Slate

Sometimes it’s the chaos, not the cruelty, that’s the point. That certainly seems true of President Donald Trump’s second executive order on elections, issued on Tuesday. The order purports, among other things, to direct the United States Department of Homeland Security to create a list of all U.S. citizens over 18, to supply that list to states, and for the United States Postal Service to refuse to accept mailed-in ballots from voters unless that voter’s name appears on a list of the state’s eligible voters that it has given USPS months before the election (a list which presumably the state would have to match with the DHS’ list, though that part—among many others!—is unclear). The order will face multiple court challenges and likely will be found unconstitutional by courts. Even if courts did not intervene before November, the multiple rulemakings and new procedures for DHS, USPS, and state and local election officials envisioned by the order would be impossible to implement before November’s elections. Indeed, the order is so underwhelming that it suggests Trump’s real purpose was not its implementation but to create more confusion and litigation around elections, further undermining voter confidence in the integrity of American elections. The actual danger of Trump’s phony vote-by-mail executive order.

National: Trump signs order directing creation of a national voter list | Seung Min Kim, Ali Swenson, Matt Brown, and Jonathan J. Cooper/Associated Press

President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order to create a nationwide list of verified eligible voters and to restrict mail-in voting, a move that swiftly drew legal threats from state Democratic officials ahead of this year’s midterm elections. The order, which voting law experts say violates the Constitution by attempting to seize states’ power to run elections, is the latest in a torrent of efforts from Trump to interfere with the way Americans vote based on his false allegations of fraud. The president has repeatedly lied about the outcome of the 2020 presidential campaign and the integrity of state-run elections, asserting again Tuesday that he won “three times” and citing accusations of voter fraud that numerous audits, investigations and courts have debunked. The order signed Tuesday calls on the Department of Homeland Security, working in conjunction with the Social Security Administration, to make the list of eligible voters in each state. It also seeks to bar the U.S. Postal Service from sending absentee ballots to those not on each state’s approved list. Trump signs order directing creation of a national voter list | AP NewsRead Article>

National: The Trump Administration’s Strategy for Reshaping Elections | Michael McNulty/Just Security