National

Cybersecurity experts told StateScoop that state and local governments should brace themselves for changes to the Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency under Kristi Noem, former governor of South Dakota, who was sworn in last weekend as the 8th secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Pamela Smith, CEO of Verified Voting, an organization that studies how technology impacts the administration of U.S. elections, said the loss of verified information monitoring may impact election security, which is managed by local government agencies. “CISA has a coordinating function. Their ability to monitor for mis- and disinformation campaigns that may be coming from outside the country, is probably greater than other agencies,” Smith told StateScoop in a recent interview. “It puts more pressure on the entities that have to deal with this, the election officials themselves, to monitor and quickly provide information.” Read Article

National: Attorney General Bondi ends FBI effort to combat foreign influence in U.S. politics | Ken Dilanian/NBC

In a little-noticed directive on her first day in office, Attorney General Pam Bondi ordered a halt to a years-old federal law enforcement effort to combat secret influence campaigns by China, Russia and other adversaries that try to curry favor and sow chaos in American politics. Buried on the fourth page of one of 14 policy memos Bondi issued Wednesday, the order disbands the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force and pares back enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, despite years of warnings by U.S. intelligence agencies that foreign malign influence operations involving disinformation were a growing and dangerous threat. Read Article

National: Federal Election Commission Chair Says Trump Has Moved to Fire Her | Chris Cameron/The New York Times

Ellen L. Weintraub, the chairwoman of the Federal Election Commission, said on Thursday that President Trump had moved to fire her. Ms. Weintraub, who has served as a Democratic commissioner on the bipartisan panel since 2002, posted a short letter signed by Mr. Trump on social media that said she was “hereby removed” from the commission effective immediately. She said in an interview that she did not see the president’s move as legally valid, and that she was considering her options on how to respond. “There’s a perfectly legal way for him to replace me,” Ms. Weintraub said on Thursday evening. “But just flat-out firing me, that is not it.” Read Article

National: Alarmed by Chinese hacks, Republicans mute attacks on cybersecurity agency | Joseph Menn/The Washington Post

President Donald Trump named the first director of the new Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in 2018 and fired him two years later, after he declared that Trump’s loss in the 2020 election wasn’t down to fraud. Ever since, Republicans have targeted the top U.S. cyberdefense agency for downgrades or deep cuts. In November, Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who now leads the Senate committee overseeing CISA, even mused about killing it altogether. But with Trump back in office, the direst fates appear off the table. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem, who oversees the agency, and other Republicans now say they see an essential mission in CISA protecting critical infrastructure from mounting ransomware and nation-state hacking attacks, especially those from the Chinese military and spies. Read Article

National: DOJ disbands foreign influence task force, limits scope of FARA prosecutions | Derek B. Johnson/CyberScoop

One of the first acts taken by Pam Bondi after being sworn in as attorney general was to disband an FBI task force that countered the influence of adversarial foreign governments on American politics. In a memo issued Wednesday, Bondi wrote that the Department of Justice would be shifting resources in its National Security Division, including disbanding the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, “to free resources to address more pressing priorities, and end risks of further weaponization and abuses of prosecutorial discretion.” Bondi’s memo also states that the Department of Justice will now only refer criminal charges under the Foreign Agents Registration Act if they “alleged conduct similar to more traditional espionage by foreign government actors.” Read Article

National: Key Trump Cabinet members refuse to acknowledge Trump lost in 2020 | Patrick Marley and Colby Itkowitz/The Washington Post

Two of President Donald Trump’s top law enforcement nominees have been taking a new tack when talking about the 2020 presidential election: They’re not claiming Trump won that year, but they’re not saying he lost, either. Joe Biden was “duly sworn in” after the 2020 election, Trump’s nominee for attorney general, Pam Bondi, told senators at her confirmation hearing. “President Joe Biden’s election was certified, he was sworn in, and he served as the president of the United States,” Kash Patel, who has been tapped to lead the FBI, said at his confirmation hearing. Neither would say that Biden defeated Trump, despite dozens of court rulings that upheld the results. Read Article

National: CISA staffers offered deferred resignations with just hours to decide | Jenna McLaughlin/NPR

Employees at the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, were initially excluded from broader government offers to take deferred resignation offers, in part due to their role in national security and defending critical infrastructure. However, on Wednesday, some CISA staffers were given the offer and just hours to decide whether to accept it, according to three sources who spoke to NPR on condition of anonymity. Read Article

Voting rights groups are concerned about priorities shifting under Trump’s Justice Department | Christina A. Cassidy/Associated Press

The Justice Department appears poised to take a very different approach to investigating voting and elections. Conservative calls to overhaul the department by removing career employees, increasing federal voter fraud cases and investigating the 2020 election are raising concerns among voting rights groups about the future of the agency under Pam Bondi, a longtime ally of President Donald Trump who will face a confirmation vote later this week. Bondi supported Trump’s legal efforts to overturn the 2020 Pennsylvania election results, has reiterated his false claims about his loss that year and during her Senate confirmation hearing refused to directly state that former President Joe Biden won, saying only that she accepted the results. She pledged to remain independent. Read Article

National: Job satisfaction among election administrators continues to sink, survey shows | Jessica Huseman/Votebeat

The vast majority of America’s local election administrators would not encourage their children to do the same job, and a shrinking share of them say they would be proud to tell others about their work. The findings come from a survey conducted every federal election year by the Elections & Voting Information Center, an academic research group. While it contains small bright spots — election administrators largely find the job personally rewarding, for example — the number willing to encourage their children to follow in their footsteps has decreased by nearly half in the past two election cycles. In 2020, 41% said they would do so. In 2024, that number dropped to 22%. Read Article

National: Trump’s quick executive actions could redefine who counts in our democracy | Carrie Levine/Votebeat

The tense final days of President Joe Biden’s administration and the frenetic early hours of President Donald Trump’s second term muddied the waters on critical issues that could reshape our democracy. First, Biden. News of his final days in office centered on his use of presidential pardon power and his announcement that he considered the Equal Rights Amendment to have been ratified by the states, a legally controversial opinion that still requires more steps before it goes into effect. Then Trump came into office, and immediately raised his own set of constitutional questions. He issued sweeping pardons to people charged or convicted in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. He also rescinded a raft of Biden’s executive orders, including one related to the census, signaling that he may revisit an abortive effort from his first term to alter the scope of the decennial count. Read Article

National: Trump’s perceived enemies brace for retribution with plans, dark humor | Yvonne Wingett Sanchez , Sarah Ellison , Patrick Marley and Holly Bailey/The Washington Post

Sitting in front of a fireplace on New Year’s Eve, a battleground state official asked a relative to consider a grave question before they kicked off their celebrations. Would she be willing, the official asked, to take care of her child if authorities or allies of President Donald Trump detained her? “You can’t be serious,” the family member responded. The official wished she wasn’t. But, like others around the country who have crossed Trump, she was preparing for dire scenarios. She was meeting with a private lawyer and security officers and was visiting a shooting range so she could begin carrying a firearm should Trump’s supporters take matters into their own hands. She had already lined up rides home from school for her child. Read Article

National: No, Trump can’t cancel the 2028 election. But he could still weaken democracy. – Nathaniel Rakich/538/ABC

Political scientists who have studied the erosion of democracy in other countries emphasize that it’s a gradual, even subtle process that often leaves the trappings of democracy in place. In fact, those experts say, U.S. democracy was already eroded under Trump’s first term — and the most serious danger is that his second will see more of the same. Let’s get one thing out of the way: No, Trump cannot run for a third term or cancel the 2028 election. The 22nd Amendment to the Constitution says, “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice,” and even if Trump tries to defy that, he would almost certainly be universally rebuffed by the courts and election officials. Read Article

National: US cybersecurity agency’s future role in elections remains murky under the Trump administration | Christina A. Cassidy/Associated Press

The nation’s cybersecurity agency has played a critical role in helping states shore up the defenses of their voting systems, but its election mission appears uncertain amid sustained criticism from Republicans and key figures in the Trump administration. President Donald Trump has not named a new head of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and for the first time since it was formed, there are no plans for anyone in its leadership to address the main annual gathering of the nation’s secretaries of state, which was being held this week in Washington. On Thursday, a panel on cyberthreats included an update from an FBI official who said the threats remained consistent. Read Article

National: A need for speed: Several states are looking for ways to count votes faster | Ashley Lopez/NPR

Legislators in California and several other states — including Arizona, Nevada, Utah and Wisconsin — have signaled interest in tackling vote-counting rules in an effort to speed up the process. It’s a mix of states, led by Democrats or Republicans or with divided government, and one key question is whether lawmakers can quicken results without sacrificing access to the ballot. Pamela Smith — president and CEO of Verified Voting, a nonpartisan group focused on technology in elections — said many states that take more time often do so to give voters more opportunities to cast a ballot. “I think what’s important to think about is the balance between how fast we get results reported out and how well voters are supported for their participation,” Smith said. “So, for example, if you reduce the time for voters to cure a signature problem on a ballot so that it can be counted or determined to be not countable, are you disenfranchising them in the name of ‘we have to know immediately’?” Read Article

National: Special Counsel Report Says Trump Would Have Been Convicted in Election Case | Alan Feuer and Charlie Savage/The New York Times

Jack Smith, the special counsel who indicted President-elect Donald J. Trump on charges of illegally seeking to cling to power after losing the 2020 election, said in a final report released early Tuesday that the evidence would have been sufficient to convict Mr. Trump in a trial, had his 2024 election victory not made it impossible for the prosecution to continue. “The department’s view that the Constitution prohibits the continued indictment and prosecution of a president is categorical and does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the government’s proof or the merits of the prosecution, which the office stands fully behind,” Mr. Smith wrote. He continued: “Indeed, but for Mr. Trump’s election and imminent return to the presidency, the office assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial.” Read Article

National: Biden warns of the rise of a new American ‘oligarchy’ | Toluse Olorunnipa and Cleve R. Wootson Jr./The Washington Post

President Joe Biden used his final address from the Oval Office to deliver a somber warning about the threat posed by the “dangerous concentration of power” in the hands of wealthy and well-connected individuals, a thinly veiled reference to billionaire technology executives who have been increasingly signaling their desire to work closely with President-elect Donald Trump. “Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead,” Biden said during his farewell speech, days before he steps down from a four-year presidency and a lifetime in public office. “We see the consequences all across America, and we’ve seen it before.” Read Article

National: Despite Trump’s win, ‘election integrity’ activists still seek sweeping voting changes | Miles Parks/NPR

For Donald Trump and his supporters, concerns about election administration quickly dissipated once it became clear he would win the 2024 presidential election, and in surveys since, most Republican voters say the election was run well. But for the wing of the Republican Party that has been pushing sweeping election reform since the 2020 contest, the work continues. On Jan. 3, the day the new Republican-led Congress was sworn in, Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, reintroduced legislation aimed at stopping noncitizens from voting in federal elections — something that is already illegal and which research has universally shown rarely happens. Read Article

National: Civil servants are being asked who they voted for in 2024 election | Aamer Madhani and Zeke Miller/The Independent

Incoming senior Trump administration officials have begun questioning career civil servants who work on the White House National Security Council about who they voted for in the 2024 election, their political contributions and whether they have made social media posts that could be considered incriminating by President-elect Donald Trump’s team, according to a U.S. official familiar with the matter. At least some of these nonpolitical employees have begun packing up their belongings since being asked about their loyalty to Trump — after they had earlier been given indications that they would be asked to stay on at the NSC in the new administration, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters. Read Article

National: Head of US cybersecurity agency says she hopes it keeps up election work under Trump | Ali Swenson/Associated Press

Jen Easterly, the outgoing head of the U.S. government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said Wednesday she hopes her agency is allowed to continue its election-related work under new leadership despite “contentiousness” around that part of its mission. “I really, really hope that we can continue to support those state and local election officials,” she said during an event in Washington, D.C., with the nonprofit Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “I think they’ve benefited by the resources that we’ve brought. I think they would say that.” CISA is responsible for protecting critical infrastructure, including the nation’s dams, banks and nuclear power plants. Voting systems were added after the 2016 election and Russia’s multipronged election-meddling effort. Read Article

Appeals court denies bid to block public release of special counsel’s report on Trump Jan. 6 probe | Eric Tucker and Alanna Durkin Richer/Associated Press

A federal appeals court on Thursday denied a bid to block the public release of special counsel Jack Smith’s report on President-elect Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss. The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals turned down a emergency challenge aimed at keeping under wraps the report expected to detail unflattering revelations about Trump’s failed effort to cling to power in the election he lost to President Joe Biden. Even with the appeals court ruling, though, the election interference report will not immediately be released, and there’s no guarantee it will be as more legal wrangling is expected. Read Article

‘Evangelist for democracy’: Carter started election observation and fought fraud | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Once the victim of his own stolen election, Jimmy Carter later launched an international election observation operation that continues to watch for fair and democratic results. Part of the former president’s lasting legacy, the Carter Center’s election monitoring work started in 1989 with missions to Central American nations and later expanded within the United States after the 2020 election. Carter saw a need for greater accountability through election observation efforts to help ensure the results reflect the will of the voters, said David Carroll, director for the Carter Center’s Democracy Program. Read Article

National: Trump promised pardons for January 6 rioters in ‘first hour’ of his second term. What might this mean? | Martin Pengelly/The Guardian

As Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House, politicians, legal observers and even sitting federal judges are expressing alarm about his stated intention to pardon or offer commutations to supporters who attacked the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 and were then convicted of crimes. Clemency for those who sought to block certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory “would undermine the US judiciary and criminal justice system and send a message to Americans that attacking US democratic institutions is appropriate and justifiable”, said a spokesperson for the Society for the Rule of Law. The group of conservative attorneys, academics, and former federal officials and judges also quoted sitting judges Royce Lamberth (“We cannot condone the normalization of the January 6 US Capitol riot”) and Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee who said “blanket pardons for all January 6 defendants or anything close would be beyond frustrating and disappointing”. Read Article

National: ‘A Day of Love’: How Trump Inverted the Violent History of Jan. 6 | Dan Barry and Alan Feuer/The New York Times

In two weeks, Donald J. Trump is to emerge from an arched portal of the United States Capitol to once again take the presidential oath of office. As the Inauguration Day ritual conveying the peaceful transfer of power unfolds, he will stand where the worst of the mayhem of Jan. 6, 2021, took place, largely in his name. Directly behind Mr. Trump will be the metal-and-glass doors where protesters, inflamed by his lie that the 2020 election had been stolen from him, stormed the Capitol with clubs, chemical irritants and other weapons. To his left, the spot where roaring rioters and outnumbered police officers fought hand to hand. To his right, where the prostrate body of a dying woman was jostled in the bloody fray. Read Article

National: Fears grow for voting rights as Trump plots to reshape US justice department | Sam Levine/The Guardian

Donald Trump could use a second term atop the justice department to gut enforcement of US federal voting laws and deploy an agency that is supposed to protect the right to vote to undermine it, experts have warned. Trump has made no secret of his intention to punish his political enemies and subvert the American voting system. His control of the justice department could allow him to amplify misleading claims of voter fraud by non-citizens and others, as well as investigate local election officials. It could also cause the department’s voting section to largely scale back its enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, returning it to the approach that it took under Trump’s first term. Read Article

National: Fox loses appeal to duck $2.7 billion Smartmatic defamation suit | Griffin Eckstein/Salon

A New York appeals court has rejected Fox Corp.’s request to toss a $2.7 billion defamation suit from voting machine manufacturer Smartmatic. Smartmatic alleged in a suit that the Fox News parent company “effectively endorsed and participated in” a campaign suggesting that the voting machine company participated in election fraud by manipulating the results of the 2020 presidential election. In the ruling from the New York Supreme Court First Appellate Department, a five-judge panel cited a Delaware court decision against Fox Corporation for defaming Dominion Voting Systems as precedent for implicating the Fox News parent company. Fox Corp. agreed to pay $787 million to Dominion in 2023. Read Article

National: What to watch for in 2025, according to election experts | Jessica Huseman/Votebeat

As we move beyond the long, anxious 2024 election cycle, we’re entering the 2026 and 2028 cycles with a largely unshaped landscape for elections. To help develop an outlook, we’ve decided to turn our first newsletter of the year over to people who are smarter than us: folks who participated in the experts desk Votebeat ran this past election cycle. Their expectations provide a first guess about what election debates will look like over the next several months. “What will it take to have justifiable confidence in the trustworthiness of our elections every time, no matter who wins?” asked Pamela Smith, CEO and president of Verified Voting. “We are closely monitoring any attempts disguised as election security legislation that will instead disenfranchise voters and dismantle voting rights.” Read Article

Jimmy Carter sought to expand democracy worldwide long after he left the White House | Farai Mutsaka and Christina A. Cassidy/Associated Press

Amid everything else on his desk — the Iran hostage crisis, domestic economic turmoil, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and a grueling 1980 reelection fight — President Jimmy Carter elevated the independence of a country in southern Africa as a top agenda item. Carter hosted then-Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe at the White House soon after his country achieved independence and later described Zimbabwe’s adoption of democracy as “our greatest single success.” Three decades later, Carter, who was long out of office, found the door slammed shut when he and other dignitaries sought to visit Zimbabwe on a humanitarian mission to observe reported human rights abuses after a violent disputed election in 2008. He had become a critic of Mugabe’s regime and was denied a visa. Read Article

National: What did US election officials learn about our democracy from 2024’s vote? | Sam Levine/The Guardian

Until the 2020 election, local election officials worked in obscurity and anonymity, ensuring that the election was fairly administered and complied with state and federal laws. But ever since the president-elect’s loss in 2020, they have borne the brunt of his efforts to sow doubt about the integrity of US elections. They have faced vicious harassment campaigns, been bombarded with public records requests, and been on the frontlines combating misinformation about voting. A number left the profession altogether. Many election officials had been preparing for an intense period of uncertainty after election day, concerned that, as in the 2020 election, the winner of the presidential election would be uncertain and they would face immense pressure as Trump and his allies sought to subvert the election results. But when the race was called fairly quickly for Trump, the results were widely accepted, with few questions about who won. Read Article

National: The Year of the AI Election Wasn’t Quite What Everyone Expected | Vittoria Elliott/WIRED

In the spring, the US saw what was likely its first AI candidate. In a brief campaign for the mayor of Wyoming, virtual integrated citizen (VIC), a ChatGPT-based bot created by real human Victor Miller, promised to govern entirely by AI. At the outset of 2024, many suggested that even if not winning office, generative AI would play a pivotal role in—and pose significant risks to—democratic elections, as more than 2 billion people voted in more than 60 countries. But now, experts and analysts have changed their tune, saying that generative AI likely had little to no effect at all. So were all those prognostications that 2024 would be the AI election year wrong? The truth is … not really. Experts who spoke to WIRED say that this might have still been the “AI election”—just not in the way many expected. Read Article

National: The rise in mail voting comes with a price, as mismatched signatures lead to ballot rejections | Audrey McAvoy and Ayanna Alexander/Associated Press