National

Citing the Supreme Court’s recent ruling curtailing nationwide injunctions, the Department of Justice (DOJ) asked a federal judge to weaken part of a previous court order against President Donald Trump’s sweeping anti-voting decree. Beyond its potential impact in the battle over the voting order, the filing is also a stark example of how SCOTUS’ ruling in the nationwide injunctions case, Trump v. CASA, could give the administration a boost in other cases challenging Trump’s authoritarian power grab. The DOJ asked District Judge Denise Casper July 3 to amend the portion of her previous court order that barred the government from enforcing Section 2d of Trump’s executive order. Read Article

National: Nearly half of election officials concerned about politically motivated investigations | Aaron Pellish/Politico

Nearly half of local election officials are concerned about politically motivated investigations targeting election workers, according to a new survey from the Brennan Center for Justice. Forty-six percent of local election officials said they were at least somewhat concerned about politically motivated investigations of their work or the work of other election officials. Of that, 18 percent of respondents said they were “very concerned” about potential investigations. Election officials have increasingly become targets of scrutiny in the wake of the 2020 presidential election, when President Donald Trump and his allies touted conspiracy theories about ballot processing to claim the results of the election — which he lost — were rigged. Read Article

National: Trump and GOP target ballots arriving after Election Day that delay counts | Chistina A. Cassidy/Associated Press

President Donald Trump and other Republicans have long criticized states that take weeks to count their ballots after Election Day. This year has seen a flurry of activity to address it. Part of Trump’s executive order on elections, signed in March but held up by lawsuits, takes aim at one of the main reasons for late vote counts: Many states allow mailed ballots to be counted even if they arrive after Election Day. The U.S. Supreme Court last month said it would consider whether a challenge in Illinois can proceed in a case that is among several Republican-backed lawsuits seeking to impose an Election Day deadline for mail ballots. At least three states — Kansas, North Dakota and Utah — passed legislation this year that eliminated a grace period for receiving mailed ballots, saying they now need to be in by Election Day. Read Article

National: The States Decide How Elections Are Run | Grace Olson/NCSL

After every major election, we see headlines fly about election policies. Recent hot topics include mail-in ballots, proof of citizenship for voter registration and the type of identification needed to vote. Although several pieces of federal legislation and U.S. Supreme Court decisions have established rules governing voting, the primary responsibility for facilitating federal elections lies with the states. Nate Persily, a Stanford University law professor, told a recent NCSL webinar on federalism and U.S. election law that when the Founding Fathers authored the U.S. Constitution, they did so with a heavy focus on the states, allowing each state to handle elections as it saw fit. Despite the states having considerable power in federal elections, Persily says that voting is the most amended topic in the Constitution. The most notable revisions, he says, are the 14th and 15th Amendments, which protect U.S. citizens from discrimination based on race. The 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote, and the 26th Amendment lowered the voting age to 18. Read Article

A.I. Is Starting to Wear Down Democracy | Steven Lee Myers and Stuart A. Thompson/The New York Times

Artificial intelligence has long threatened to transform elections around the world. Now there is evidence from at least 50 countries that it already has. Since the explosion of generative artificial intelligence over the last two years, the technology has demeaned or defamed opponents and, for the first time, officials and experts said, begun to have an impact on election results. As the technology improves, officials and experts warn, it is undermining faith in electoral integrity and eroding the political consensus necessary for democratic societies to function. Read Article

National: Red States Struggle to Build New Systems to Share Voter Data | Yunior Rivas/Democracy Docket

Back in 2023, a host of Republican-led states left a successful inter-state compact for sharing voter registration data and keeping their rolls up to date. Falsely portraying the pact as a progressive plot, several states vowed to create better systems of their own. Two years later, those efforts appear largely to have failed. The most prominent new initiative, built by Alabama, lacks anything close to the sophistication of the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), the system the red states rejected, experts said. In fact, it isn’t even designed to allow multiple states to share data with each other — the core purpose that ERIC serves. Read Article

National: Trump calls for special prosecutor to investigate 2020 election Biden won | Eric Tucker/Associated Press

President Donald Trump on Friday called for the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the 2020 election won by Democrat Joe Biden, repeating his baseless claim that the contest was marred by widespread fraud. Trump’s post is part of an amped-up effort by him to undermine the legitimacy of Biden’s presidency. Earlier this month, Trump directed his administration to investigate Biden’s actions as president, alleging aides masked his predecessor’s “cognitive decline.” Biden has dismissed the investigation as “a mere distraction.” Read Article

National: More cities try extending voting rights to younger teens | Jessica Huseman/Votebeat

Amid all the worries about the perennially elusive youth vote, there’s a promising trend to talk about: In a growing number of towns and cities across the U.S., 16- and 17-year-olds are gaining the right to vote. The numbers are still small, but the momentum is real. Advocates say it’s about nurturing lifelong voters. Take Newark, New Jersey, which allowed 16- and 17-year-olds to vote in its school board election in April. Teen turnout was only about 3%. But that was better than the adults managed. Besides, as Sam Novey from the University of Maryland’s Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement puts it, the city “started from nothing.” Indeed, adding younger teens to the voter rolls involves building a lot of things from scratch. After Newark passed its ordinance last year allowing youth voting, officials had to rewire voter registration systems and launch a full-scale education campaign. It was about 14 months before 16- and 17-year-olds could cast their first ballots. Read Article

National: The SAVE database was already a headache for states. Now it’s fueling Trump’s voter fraud allegations. | Derek B. Johnson/CyberScoop

Just under three weeks after being elected to his first term as president of the United States, Donald Trump took to Twitter to claim he’d been cheated. While he had won the office through his strength in the electoral college, Trump wanted to make something clear: he also believed he’d won the popular vote “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” This rhetoric — that dark forces were conspiring to rig democratic outcomes against him — has endured through Trump’s two subsequent presidential campaigns, bolstered by persistent belief among Republicans that election fraud is rampant. Trump’s attacks eventually sharpened into the more specific charge that illegal immigrants were casting millions of fraudulent ballots for his Democratic opponents across the country. But over the past decade, these political attacks have always crashed headlong into an uncomfortable reality: the facts are not in his favor. All the data we have tells us that non-citizen voting is rare. Read Article

National: The Importance of Letting Voters Defend Their Rights in Court | Kendall Verhovek/Brennan Center for Justice

Since the dawn of the Voting Rights Act, federal courts heard Section 2 claims brought by voters. Without this ability to sue, many, if not most, of the claims against racially discriminatory voting policies would have gone unheard, leaving in place a far more unjust and imperfect electoral process. This right was tacitly affirmed in Brown v. Post and accepted again and again in every one of the hundreds of Section 2 cases brought by individuals and organizations and heard by federal courts. Until 2021. In a concurring opinion in a major Voting Rights Act ruling, Justice Neil Gorsuch called Section 2’s private right of action “an open question” — undercutting decades of judicial consensus. This invitation was accepted in 2022, when a district court, followed by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2023, fully embraced this radical theory. The courts concluded that impacted voters and organizations can’t bring lawsuits under Section 2. Last month, a second ruling by a panel of the Eighth Circuit narrowed enforcement power further, preventing voters from suing for Section 2 offenses under another federal law that broadly protects against government violation of civil rights. Read Article

National: Justice Department’s early moves on voting and elections signal a shift from its traditional role | Christina A. Cassidy and Scott Bauer/Associated Press

In North Carolina, it was a lawsuit over the state’s voter registration records. In Arizona and Wisconsin, it was a letter to state election officials warning of potential administrative violations. And in Colorado, it was a demand for election records going back to 2020. Those actions in recent weeks by the U.S. Department of Justice’s voting section may seem focused on the technical machinery of how elections are run but signal deeper changes when combined with the departures of career attorneys and decisions to drop various voting rights cases. They represent a shift away from the division’s traditional role of protecting access to the ballot box. Instead, the actions address concerns that have been raised by a host of conservative activists following years of false claims surrounding elections in the U.S. Some voting rights and election experts also note that by targeting certain states — presidential battlegrounds or those controlled by Democrats — the moves could be foreshadowing an expanded role for the department in future elections. Read Article

National: A second federal judge partially blocks Trump’s executive order on elections | Carrie Levine/Votebeat

A federal judge has issued a second preliminary injunction blocking some provisions of the sweeping executive order on elections that President Donald Trump signed in March. Judge Denise Casper blocked provisions ordering the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to take steps to require documentary proof of citizenship from people registering to vote and requiring federal voter registration agencies to “assess” the citizenship of individuals who receive public assistance before providing them a voter registration form. Those provisions were also blocked by a federal judge in Washington D.C. last month in a separate case. Casper also blocked parts of the order telling the U.S. Justice Department to enforce a ballot receipt deadline of Election Day and ordering the EAC to withhold federal funds from states that did not comply with it. Casper wrote that the states challenging the provisions had “shown the risk of irreparable harm” if they were permitted to go into force, and the provisions would require the costly and difficult process of revamping states’ voter registration processes, as well as hampering “the registration of eligible voters, many of whom lack ready access to documentary evidence of citizenship.” Read Article

National: FBI Director Kash Patel feeds 2020 election conspiracy theories with documents about unverified tip | Ryan J. Reilly and David Rohde/NBC

FBI Director Kash Patel said this week the bureau had shared “alarming” — but unsubstantiated — allegations about manipulation of the 2020 election with a Republican member of Congress. The unsubstantiated claim promoted by Patel, which an unidentified confidential human source gave to the FBI in 2020, during President Donald Trump’s first term, asserts that the Chinese mass-produced driver’s licenses to be used in a mail-in ballot scheme. Patel linked to an article written by John Solomon, whom Trump appointed alongside Patel in 2022 to represent him before the National Archives and Records Administration on matters related to his presidential records. The article Patel promoted mentioned that U.S. Customs and Border Protection has seized fake licenses that were arriving mostly from China and Hong Kong around the time the FBI received the tip about the election plot. According to a 2020 news release from CBP, most of the seized licenses “were for college-age students,” a population that has historically sought licenses with fake birthdays so underage students can get into bars and purchase alcohol. No evidence of widespread or systemic voter fraud affecting the 2020 election has been found, despite allegations promoted by Trump and his allies since he lost that year’s presidential race. Read Article

National: Trump uses his power to cement a false history of the 2020 election | Jessica Huseman/Votebeat

Donald Trump’s second term is shaping up to be just as much about the past as the future. Not the past as it unfolded, but the version of events as he wants them remembered. There are a few troubling examples of how the president and his allies are actively attempting to reshape public views of the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection — and how these efforts are starting to affect real people and real institutions. Take Oklahoma. Teachers there are now facing updated social studies standards that instruct students to “identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results” — not to examine election systems or to discuss voter confidence, but to presume that the election was flawed. This language is a quiet but profound distortion: It accepts Trump’s false narrative of fraud and requires educators to teach that falsehood as fact. Read Article

Election Certification – Stronger safeguards can ensure that the process cannot be exploited to disrupt elections | Lauren Miller Karalunas/Brennan Center for Justice

Since the 2020 election, the election denial movement has led rogue local officials to refuse to fulfill their mandatory duty to certify election results. Efforts to interfere with certification persisted throughout the 2024 election cycle, becoming untethered from the presidential election outcome and focused instead on local disagreements over downballot races. States should strengthen their statutory frameworks ahead of the 2026 midterms to prevent and more efficiently resolve future certification disputes. Read Article

National: Federal judge appears open to blocking Trump’s election overhaul order | Nate Raymond/Reuters

A federal judge appeared open to blocking enforcement of U.S. President Donald Trump’s sweeping executive order overhauling elections that calls for requiring voters to prove they are U.S. citizens and barring states from counting mail-in ballots received after Election Day. At a hearing in Boston before U.S. District Judge Denise Casper, a lawyer for the Trump administration argued the Republican president’s order was lawful and that any request by 19 Democratic-led states challenging it was premature. But Casper said those states were under pressure to comply with Trump’s order before voting begins in the 2026 federal election cycle and that 13 of them that accept mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day say they could be sued by the U.S. Department of Justice unless she issues an injunction. Read Article

National: House committee sets CISA budget cut at $135M, not Trump’s $495M | Tim Starks/CyberScoop

A House panel approved a fiscal 2026 funding bill Monday that would cut the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency by $135 million from fiscal 2025, significantly less than the Trump administration’s proposed $495 million. The chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, Rep. Mark Amodei, said the annual Department of Homeland Security funding measure “responsibly trimmed” the CISA budget. But Illinois Rep. Lauren Underwood, the top Democrat on his panel, said the legislation “fails to address the catastrophic cybersecurity threats facing our critical infrastructure.” The subcommittee approved the bill by a vote of 8-4. CISA would get $2.7 billion under the measure, according to a committee fact sheet, or $134.8 million less than the prior year. Read Article

National: How Trump Upended Biden’s Successful Push For Federal Agencies to Register Voters | Matt Cohen/Democracy Docket

In March, 2021, then-President Joe Biden became the first president to make it clear: Federal agencies should be registering voters. An executive order issued by Biden that month led to unprecedented voter registration efforts by federal agencies that were lauded by voting rights advocates: The Department of the Interior worked with several states to make Tribal institutions voter registration centers. The Department of Veterans Affairs created a pilot voter registration program with Kentucky, Michigan and Pennsylvania. And the Small Business Administration started registering voters at local entrepreneur events in Michigan. That was just the start. But Republicans went ballistic, filing lawsuits and launching congressional probes into the order. They described the move as federal overreach, and warned, without evidence, that it would lead to non-citizens getting on the rolls. Read Article

National: Trump executive order takes steps to protect domestic hackers from blowback | Maggie Miller and John Sakellariadis/Politico

The Trump administration announced Friday it is amending “problematic elements” of two landmark cybersecurity executive orders — though the extent of the changes in many cases appears modest. The modifications are part of a new executive order signed Friday by President Donald Trump. The full text of the EO was released Friday afternoon, and the Trump administration first outlined details of the order in a White House fact sheet. The order outlines a potentially weighty change: the new EO would change the Obama-era order — which allows for sanctions on individuals behind cyberattacks on U.S. critical infrastructure — by limiting it “only to foreign malicious actors” and clarifying “that sanctions do not apply to election-related activities. Read Article

National: States are picking sides as competing election integrity efforts move ahead | Colin Wood/StateScoop

Two events last week offered a glimpse of the growing weight of politics in the nation’s elections process. Alabama’s secretary of state, Wes Allen, announced that Virginia had become the tenth state to join his voter integrity database, called AVID, an increasingly popular alternative to a larger bipartisan voter integrity coalition used by half of the nation’s state governments. And the New York State Assembly approved legislation permitting the state to join the more popular bipartisan system, called the Electronic Registration Information Center. With 26 members, ERIC is still the most popular way for states of all political persuasions to verify the accuracy of their voter rolls, but the Alabama Voter Integrity Database is proving an enticing, if less sophisticated, option for some secretaries of state, particularly in conservative regions where claims of noncitizen voting and a multitude of unfounded conspiracies of ERIC’s shadowy dealings abound. Read Article

National: Federal vs. state power at issue in a hearing over Trump’s election overhaul executive order | AP News

Democratic state attorneys general and government lawyers argued Friday over the implications of President Donald Trump’s proposed overhaul of U.S. elections and whether the changes could be made in time for next year’s midterm elections, how much it would cost the states and, more broadly, whether the president has a right to do any of it in the first place. The top law enforcement officials from 19 states filed a federal lawsuit after the Republican president signed the executive order in March, saying its provisions would step on states’ power to set their own election rules. During a hearing in U.S. District Court in Boston, lawyers for the states told Judge Denise J. Casper that the changes outlined in the order would be costly and could not be implemented quickly. Updating the voter registration database just in California would cost the state more than $1 million and take up to a year, said the states’ lead attorney, Kevin Quade, a deputy attorney general with the California Department of Justice. Read Article

National: CISA’s executive director is leaving the agency | Natalie Alms/Nextgov/FCW

Bridget Bean, the executive director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, is retiring, the agency confirmed with Nextgov/FCW Tuesday evening. Bean had been serving as the acting director of the government’s cybersecurity agency as of early May when she testified before Congress, although currently, the agency lists its deputy director, Madhu Gottumukkala, as its acting director. Gottumukkala joined CISA in late April. “I am honored to represent CISA’s work supporting our mission to understand, manage and reduce risk to our nation’s cyber and physical infrastructure,” Bean told lawmakers in early May. “The risks we face are complex, geographically dispersed and affect a diverse array of our stakeholders and, ultimately, the American people.” Read Article

Why stricter voting laws no longer help Republicans but the party is pushing tougher requirements anyway | The Economist

“The Republicans should pray for rain”—the title of a paper published by a trio of political scientists in 2007—has been an axiom of American elections for years. The logic was straightforward: each inch of election-day showers, the study found, dampened turnout by 1%. Lower turnout gave Republicans an edge because the party’s affluent electorate had the resources to vote even when it was inconvenient. Their opponents, less so. Yet Mr Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party has scrambled the voting coalitions that underpinned the pray-for-rain logic. Rich people used to vote Republican and poor people Democrat. Read Article

National: Trump budget proposal would slash more than 1,000 CISA jobs | Tim Starks/CyberScoop

The fiscal 2026 budget proposal President Donald Trump unveiled last week would make deep cuts to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency workforce, with a goal of eliminating 1,083 positions and chopping its budget by $495 million, to $2.4 billion. That’s a slightly deeper total cut than an earlier budget outline forecast. And a new document produced by the Department of Homeland Security details where those CISA personnel reductions would come from, alongside other documents that show planned decreases to other cybersecurity programs in the federal government. The latest budget documents still don’t offer a full picture of Trump’s plans, as the administration hasn’t produced a full Defense Department budget blueprint, and Congress is awaiting delivery of a rescission package that would allow it to cement some of the federal funding cuts by the Department of Government Efficiency. Read Article

National: Inside Trump’s gutting of the DOJ unit that enforces voting laws | Tierney Sneed and Hannah Rabinowitz/CNN

The Justice Department’s unit tasked with enforcing federal voting laws is down from roughly 30 attorneys to about a half-dozen, as most of its career staff has departed in the face of escalating pressure tactics from the Trump administration. The mass exodus that has whittled the voting section down to a fifth of its normal size came after a relentless campaign by the department’s political leaders to smear the work of the longtime attorneys, dismiss noncontroversial cases, and reassign career supervisors. During President Donald Trump’s first term, DOJ officials forced voting section attorneys to abandon the more high-profile work that had often been opposed by conservatives. But the gutting of the section during Trump’s second administration goes far beyond that, according to former department attorneys and outside voter advocates. Read Article

National: DOJ’s New Top Voting Lawyer Worked for Leading Anti-Voting Law Firm | Yunior Rivas/Democracy Docket

The new top voting lawyer at the Department of Justice was until recently an attorney and activist for a leading anti-voting legal group that has worked for years to spread fear about illegal voting and press election officials to tighten voting rules. The lawyer, Maureen Riordan, also has appeared with Cleta Mitchell — the right-wing activist who played a key role in President Donald Trump’s failed bid to subvert the results of the 2020 election — backing Mitchell’s pledge to “reclaim our election systems from the left.” Riordan’s appointment, which has not been formally announced by the DOJ, underscores the sharp reverse the department and its voting section have undergone under Trump — from their previous role as a largely consistent defender of voting rights to instead working actively to undermine them. Read Article

National: What the REAL ID saga tells us about proof-of-citizenship requirements | Jessica Huseman/Votebeat

You know the REAL ID that you need to have if you want to board a plane? The deadline to get one was supposed to be May 7. But just days before that, the Department of Homeland Security hit pause, again. Twenty years after Congress passed the REAL ID Act, too many people still didn’t have the right kind of ID, so enforcement was delayed — as it has been multiple times. It’s easy to see why. In states like Kentucky, residents seeking a REAL ID faced long lines, limited DMV appointments, and widespread confusion over which documents to bring. In Illinois, hundreds of complaints poured in from residents who were denied IDs despite having paperwork they thought would qualify. Some were turned away because of paperwork errors, others because staff misinterpreted the rules. Meanwhile, nationwide, millions of Americans still lack a REAL ID, and once the law takes effect, they would face added hurdles if they wanted to travel by plane. So what does this have to do with voting? Read Article

National: Google’s New AI Tool Generates Convincing Deepfakes of Riots, Conflict, and Election Fraud | Andrew R. Chow and Billy Perrigo/Time Magazine