National

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

Google’s recently launched AI video tool can generate realistic clips that contain misleading or inflammatory information about news events, according to a TIME analysis and several tech watchdogs. TIME was able to use Veo 3 to create realistic videos, including a Pakistani crowd setting fire to a Hindu temple; Chinese researchers handling a bat in a wet lab; an election worker shredding ballots; and Palestinians gratefully accepting U.S. aid in Gaza. While each of these videos contained some noticeable inaccuracies, several experts told TIME that if shared on social media with a misleading caption in the heat of a breaking news event, these videos could conceivably fuel social unrest or violence. Read Article

National: Prove citizenship to vote? For some married women, it might not be so easy. | Patrick Marley and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez/The Washington Post

Some Republican-led states are moving to require voters to prove their citizenship, as Texas advances a controversial measure that could make it harder for eligible voters to get on the rolls because of changed names, mislaid paperwork or database errorsVoting rights advocates and Democrats warn the plans could prove particularly tricky for people who change their names, including women who do so when they get married or divorced, because their legal names don’t match the ones on their birth certificates. The emerging laws are part of a GOP push led by President Donald Trump to tighten requirements to cast ballots. Voting by noncitizens is both illegal and rare, and the attempts to crack down on voting by foreigners could drive down participation from a much larger pool of legitimate voters, according to election experts. Read Article

National: CISA loses nearly all top officials as purge continues | Eric Geller/Cybersecurity Dive

Virtually all of the top officials at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have departed the agency or will do so this month, according to an email obtained by Cybersecurity Dive, further widening a growing void in expertise and leadership at the government’s lead cyber defense force at a time when tensions with foreign adversaries are escalating. Five of CISA’s six operational divisions and six of its 10 regional offices will have lost top leaders by the end of the month, the agency’s new deputy director, Madhu Gottumukkala, informed employees in an email on Thursday. Read Article

National: The Trump Administration’s Dismissal of Voting Rights Lawsuits | Chiraag Bains/Just Security

Congress created the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in 1957 and authorized the federal government to seek court injunctions against efforts to interfere with the right to vote. Further empowered by the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) and other laws, the Division has worked to eliminate racial discrimination and protect the right to vote for almost 70 years. It helped stop North Carolina from implementing restrictions that a court said targeted Black voters “with almost surgical precision” and has compelled jurisdictions from New Jersey to California to provide bilingual ballot materials, among many other interventions over the years. Even with decades of progress, voter suppression persists today, making robust enforcement of these statutes critical to ensuring all eligible voters can participate fully in the political process. Under the Trump Administration, however, the Civil Rights Division has reversed course. On Jan. 22, 2025, Justice Department political appointees reportedly ordered a freeze on all new civil rights cases, stopping even the filing of complaints and settlements that had been approved internally after potentially lengthy investigations and negotiations. They later directed career attorneys to dismiss their pending cases, in most instances reportedly “without meeting with them and offering a rationale.” All but three career attorneys have resigned or been removed from the Division’s Voting Section. Read Article

National: Federal Election Assistance Commission cancels solicitation for PR contract | Noah Zuss/PR Week

The U.S. Election Assistance Commission has canceled a solicitation seeking PR firms to provide comprehensive communications services. The agency search was canceled this month because the sole contracting officer is no longer working for the federal agency, according to solicitation documents from the government. There is no longer a “warranted contracting officer at the agency to process this procurement” as of May 12, the federal government said. The contract was set to run for one year, starting on September 1, according to solicitation documents, which did not include a budget. The contract sought PR and communications services in three sections: strategic media services, foundational collateral and content and social media. The RFP was released on April 24. Read Article

National: Trump administration begins cracking down on federal employees’ use of leave for voting | Eric Katz/Government Executive

With some key primary elections at the state level occurring in the coming weeks, the Trump administration has begun notifying employees they can no longer use paid administrative leave to vote. The reminder, so far sent out at least to various agencies within the Agriculture Department, complies with an executive order President Trump signed on his first day in office. That order revoked a bevy of previously issued presidential actions, including an order President Biden signed early in his term to allow the leave category for federal employees looking to vote. In March, Trump signed another executive order calling on agency heads to “cease all agency actions implementing” Biden’s order and, within 90 days, lay out what steps they have taken to implement the new directive. Read Article

National: Cyberdefense cuts could sap U.S. response to China hacks, insiders say | Joseph Menn/The Washington Post

As senior Trump administration officials say they want to amp up cyberattacks against China and other geopolitical rivals, some government veterans warn that such an approach would set the United States up for retaliation that it is increasingly unprepared to counter. Alexei Bulazel, senior director for cyber at the National Security Council, said earlier this month that he wanted to fight back against China’s aggressive pre-positioning of hacking capabilities within U.S. critical infrastructure and “destigmatize” offensive operations, making their use an open part of U.S. strategy for the first time. Read Article

National: Trump targets ballot barcodes, long a source of misinformation | Charlotte Kramon/Associated Press

President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to overhaul how U.S. elections are run includes a somewhat obscure reference to the way votes are counted. Voting equipment, it says, should not use ballots that include “a barcode or quick-response code.” Those few technical words could have a big impact. Voting machines that give all voters a ballot with one of those codes are used in hundreds of counties across 19 states. Three of them — Georgia, South Carolina and Delaware — use the machines statewide. “I think the problem is super exaggerated,” said Lawrence Norden of the Brennan Center for Justice. Pamela Smith, president of Verified Voting, a group that focuses on election technology and favors ending the use of QR and barcodes said “In the long run, it would be nice if vendors moved away from encoding, but there’s already evidence of them doing that.” Read Article

National: Trump Has Taken a Renewed Interest in the Conspirators Who Infiltrated 2020 Voting Machines | Susan Greenhalgh/Slate

When President Donald Trump pardoned 1,500 people convicted of crimes related to the violent Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol, he used the power of the presidency to protect convicted criminals whom he incited to stop the certification of his electoral defeat in 2020 and the peaceful transfer of power. Recently, in a blunt and ham-fisted attempt to again undermine the rule of law, he used his social media bullhorn to call for the release of Tina Peters. The former Colorado county clerk was last year convicted of crimes committed in 2021 in order to facilitate unauthorized access to Colorado’s voting system. This may be regarded as simply another instance of Trump’s immoral support for those who tried to help him steal an election. But the scheme Peters was involved in—to improperly access voting systems and make unauthorized copies of sensitive voting system software—has serious, ongoing implications for election security. Read Article

National: Attorneys general urge Congress to reject ‘irresponsible’ state AI law moratorium | Keely Quinlan/StateScoop

A letter signed by a group of 40 state attorneys general on Friday called on Congress to reject an “irresponsible” federal measure that would bar states from enforcing their own laws and regulations governing the use of artificial intelligence systems for the next 10 years. The letter from the National Association of Attorneys General said the “broad” state AI moratorium measure rolled into the federal budget reconciliation bill would be “sweeping and wholly destructive of reasonable state efforts to prevent known harms associated with AI.” The AGs, who addressed the letter to majority and minority leaders in the Senate and House of Representatives, along with House Speaker Mike Johnson, said the moratorium would disrupt hundreds of measures being both considered by state legislatures and those that have already passed in states led by Republicans and Democrats. Read Article

National: Justice Department changes to civil rights division spark mass exodus of attorneys | Ryan Lucas/NPR

The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division is in upheaval amid a mass exodus of attorneys as the Trump administration moves to radically reshape the division, shelving its traditional mission and replacing it with one focused on enforcing the president’s executive orders. Some 250 attorneys — or around 70% of the division’s lawyers — have left or will have left the department in the time between President Trump’s inauguration and the end of May, according to current and former officials. It marks a dramatic turn for the storied division, which was created during the civil rights movement and the push to end racial segregation. For almost 70 years, it has sought to combat discrimination and to protect the constitutional rights of all Americans in everything from voting and housing to employment, education and policing. Read Article

National: Political tension and fears of violence may have changed voter turnout in 2024 | Grace Panetta/The 19th

Women and gender-nonconforming people were more likely than men to fear violence and harassment while voting in the 2024 election, and those who expressed concerns about safety were more likely not to vote at all, new research shows. The study, released Monday and shared first with The 19th, was conducted by States United Democracy Center, a nonpartisan organization focused on promoting fair and secure elections and upholding the rule of law. “Tens of millions of Americans ultimately cast their ballots in 2024 without incident,” the report said. “But voting was not straightforward and safe for all Americans. Many were harassed, and a limited number were subjected to physical violence.” Read Article

Opinion | How Will We Know When We Have Lost Our Democracy? | Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way and Daniel Ziblatt/The New York Times

Authoritarianism is harder to recognize than it used to be. Most 21st-century autocrats are elected. Rather than violently suppress opposition like Castro or Pinochet, today’s autocrats convert public institutions into political weapons, using law enforcement, tax and regulatory agencies to punish opponents and bully the media and civil society onto the sidelines. We call this competitive authoritarianism — a system in which parties compete in elections but the systematic abuse of an incumbent’s power tilts the playing field against the opposition. It is how autocrats rule in contemporary Hungary, India, Serbia and Turkey and how Hugo Chávez ruled in Venezuela. The descent into competitive authoritarianism doesn’t always set off alarms. Because governments attack their rivals through nominally legal means like defamation suits, tax audits and politically targeted investigations, citizens are often slow to realize they are succumbing to authoritarian rule. More than a decade into Mr. Chávez’s rule, most Venezuelans still believed they lived in a democracy. Read Article

National: State and local election officials plead with Congress for election security funding | Derek B. Johnson/CyberScoop

As the Trump administration takes a hatchet to the federal government’s election security work and attempts to place conditions on funding to states, state and local election officials are pleading with lawmakers to provide robust support they say is crucial to keeping American elections secure. In a letter sent to leaders on the House and Senate Appropriations committees this week, 150 active and retired officials from across the country asked Congress to set aside $400 million next fiscal year for election security grant funding under the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). “The federal government shares with state and local governments the responsibility to overcome funding shortfalls in the most essential charge our government carries: to ensure safe, secure, and effective elections,” the officials wrote. “Yet, Congress has recently provided inconsistent and insufficient funding to meet these requirements.” Read Article

National: DOJ Voting Section Has Just Three Lawyers Left, Watchdog Estimates | Matt Cohen/Democracy Docket