National

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

As with many voters on Maui, Joshua Kamalo thought the race for president wasn’t the only big contest on the November ballot. He also was focused on a hotly contested seat for the local governing board. He made sure to return his ballot in the virtually all vote-by-mail state early, doing so two weeks before Election Day. A week later, he received a letter telling him the county couldn’t verify his signature on the return envelope, jeopardizing his vote. And he wasn’t the only one. Two other people at the biodiesel company where he works also had their ballots rejected, as did his daughter. In each case, the county said their signatures didn’t match the ones on file. Read Article

National: Vote-swapping campaign for 2024 fell short of its aims | Meghnad Bose and Uzma Afreen/Votebeat

Progressives determined to defeat Donald Trump but unsatisfied with Kamala Harris’s position on the war in Gaza were offered an 11th-hour voting option this year: In October, a group called Swap Your Vote began offering to match voters in politically “safe” states with those in swing states. The idea was that a prospective Democratic voter in a reliably blue state could instead cast a protest vote for a third-party candidate on behalf of their match in the swing state. The swing-state voter would feel like, through the trade, they were voting their conscience without putting their broader election aims at risk. Read Article

National: State Department sanctions Russian, Iranian groups for election interference | Derek B. Johnson/CyberScoop

The U.S. State Department has sanctioned two foreign organizations and one individual who it alleges worked on behalf of Russian and Iranian intelligence agencies to interfere in the 2024 U.S. general election. “These actors sought to stoke sociopolitical tensions and undermine our election institutions during the 2024 U.S. general election,” said State Department Press Secretary Matthew Miller in a statement. “Today’s sanctions build on numerous previous U.S. government actions that have disrupted Iran’s attempts to undermine confidence in our democratic institutions and Russia’s global malign influence campaigns and illicit cyber activities.” Read Article

National: Why Democrats’ Version of ‘Stop the Steal’ Isn’t Taking Off | Stuart A. Thompson, Kaleigh Rogers and Steven Lee Myers/The New York Times

The 2024 presidential election has set off a new wave of election denialism online — only this time, it is coming from voters on the left. Much as many supporters of President-elect Donald J. Trump did after the 2020 election, some supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris are demanding recounts in key states in a bid to verify or even overturn the result. They are scrutinizing election results for signs of tampering, questioning whether election machines flipped votes and wondering whether digital technology could have injected fake votes. Read Article

National: 13 accused of being ‘fake electors’ cast Electoral College votes for Trump | Oren Oppenheim, Brittany Shepherd, Laura Romero, and Peter Charalambous/ABC

More than a dozen Republican officials accused of signing false certifications claiming Donald Trump had won their states’ electoral votes in the 2020 election served as electors Tuesday, this time casting real votes for the president-elect. Thirteen alleged “fake electors” cast Electoral College votes in Pennsylvania, Nevada and Michigan despite some of the officials still facing criminal charges from the last election. All have pleaded not guilty. Read Article

National: The 2024 election increased public trust in elections, but is it only temporary? | Carrie Levine/Votebeat

The presidential election this year had a quick and decisive result. In its wake, survey after survey is finding that a majority of the public believes the election was fair and the results are accurate. The polling is finding a significant uptick in Republicans’ belief in the results, which is driving the increase. A majority of the public asserting they have faith in elections is, by any measure, good news. But after the past few years, it’s also fair to ask whether the results would be different if Donald Trump had lost the presidential election — and whether that faith will hold when elections turn out differently. It’s too early to answer the second question with any degree of certainty. But at a summit on elections held by the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C. earlier this month, election officials said they continue to worry — about whether the public will continue to believe in elections, about what comes next, about their own personal safety. Read Article

National: Trump Has Little Power to Make Drastic Voting Changes | Joshua A. Douglas/Washington Monthly

Donald Trump has bold ideas for changing our elections. While most of his proposals would make our voting rules worse, there’s a silver lining. Given the decentralized nature of our election system, he has little official power to implement the new rules he supports. At an event on December 7, Trump stated, “We want to have paper ballots, one-day voting, voter ID, and proof of citizenship.” This statement echoed one of the priorities he listed on his campaign website: “Secure our elections, including same day voting, voter identification, paper ballots, and proof of citizenship.” But as president, Trump does not have the authority to administer elections. The U.S. Constitution says that state legislatures determine the “times, places, and manner of holding elections” for Congress, though Congress can step in to “make or alter” those rules. The Constitution gives the president no power over voting beyond signing or vetoing congressional laws. States scrupulously guard their constitutional authority to regulate elections, often opposing federal statutes that dictate rules for administering elections. Read Article

National: States Must Take the Lead on Election Security | Derek Tisler/Brennan Center for Justice

American elections face increasingly complex cyber and physical security threats from foreign adversaries, emerging technology, and escalating risks of political violence. Fortifying election systems against these threats is essential. Historically, state and local governments have been responsible for ensuring the integrity of our electoral system, and that remains true. Decentralized election administration has been a significant source of strength for election security. But over the past decade, federal support has increased as Congress and federal agencies provided state and local officials with funding and expertise and facilitated information sharing on the threat landscape. As security threats continue to evolve and with election officials now operating as frontline national security figures, that support has helped make U.S. election systems more resilient than ever. Read Articled

National: The Top Cybersecurity Agency in the US Is Bracing for Donald Trump | Eric Geller/WIRED

Donald Trump helped create the US government’s cybersecurity agency during his first term as president. Six years later, employees of that agency are afraid of what he’ll do with it once he retakes office. Trump’s alliances with libertarian-minded billionaires like Elon Musk and his promises to cut government spending and corporate oversight have alarmed staffers at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the component of the Department of Homeland Security that defends US government computer systems from hackers and helps state and local governments, private companies, and nonprofit groups protect themselves. CISA, which the Trump administration and Congress created in 2018 by reorganizing an existing DHS wing, became a target of right-wing vitriol after its Trump-appointed director rebuffed the president’s election conspiracy theories in 2020 (prompting Trump to fire him) and after it worked with tech companies to combat online misinformation during the 2022 election. Read Article

National: ‘Not the AI election’: Why artificial intelligence did not define the 2024 campaign | Loreben Tuquero/PolitiFact

Days after New Hampshire voters received a robocall with an artificially generated voice that resembled President Joe Biden’s, the Federal Communications Commission banned using AI-generated voices in robocalls. It was a flashpoint. The 2024 election would be the first to unfold amid wide public access to AI generators, which let people create images, audio and video — some for nefarious purposes. But the anticipated avalanche of AI-driven misinformation never materialized. As Election Day came and went, viral misinformation played a starring role, misleading about vote counting, mail-in ballots and voting machines. But this chicanery leaned largely on old, familiar techniques, including text-based social media claims and video or out-of-context images. Read Article

National: Collaboration was key to nation’s most ‘cyber-secure’ election to date | Keely Quinlan/StateScoop

It’s been a little over a month since 2024’s general election, and directors at the nonprofit Center for Internet Security told StateScoop that it was collaboration between local election officials and law enforcement agencies that allowed for the most “cyber-secure” election to date. Leaders at CIS, which operates the federally funded Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, said that while there were threats reported on Election Day — including cyberattack attempts, text message disinformation campaigns and bomb threats — none succeeded in seriously impacting voting operations. While CIS’s Albert network monitoring sensors and its Malicious Domain Blocking and Reporting technologies helped thwart these attempts, the directors said collaboration among CIS, law enforcement and election officials leading up to Election Day were perhaps most critical. Read Article

National: Prosecutors in Three States Press Ahead with Election Interference Cases | Danny Hakim and Dan Simmons/The New York Times

In a flurry of moves on Thursday, state prosecutors made clear that they are pressing forward with criminal cases against Donald J. Trump and his allies related to interference in the 2020 election. In Wisconsin, three of President-elect Donald J. Trump’s former advisers, who are facing numerous felony charges, appeared before a judge for the first time. In Nevada, the state attorney general, Aaron D. Ford, filed new charges in an effort to revive a case against six Republicans who acted as fake electors for Mr. Trump in 2020, in spite of his loss at the polls there. Read Article

National: Election confidence jumps among Trump voters after his win | Miles Parks/NPR

New data shows that the vast majority of Americans felt this year’s general election was administered well, a stark contrast to perceptions in 2020 and a reflection of how Republican voters specifically have come around on election security in a year when their preferred presidential candidate won. Almost 9 in 10 U.S. voters felt the November election was run very well or somewhat well, according to data out Wednesday from the Pew Research Center, which surveyed people’s opinions starting a week after voting ended. That number is about 30 percentage points higher than it was at a similar point in 2020. The increase in voting confidence was driven exclusively by Republican voters. Read Article

National: Some states are working to undermine 2024 Election results | Gary Fields/Associated Press

While the election was over a month ago, voters in some parts of the country are discovering that having their say at the ballot box is not necessarily the final word. Lawmakers in several states have already initiated or indicated plans to alter or nullify certain results. Republican lawmakers in North Carolina are moving to undercut the authority of the incoming Democratic governor, Republicans in Missouri are taking initial steps to reverse voter-approved abortion protections, and Democrats in Massachusetts are watering down an attempt by voters to hold the Legislature more accountable. The actions following the Nov. 5 election continue a pattern that has accelerated in recent years and has been characterized by critics as undemocratic. Read Article

National: ‘Polarization’ is Merriam-Webster’s 2024 word of the year | Anna Furman/Associated Press