Wisconsin Assembly committee debates ‘reality-based’ vs. conspiracy minded solutions to absentee drop boxes | Henry Redman/Wisconsin Examiner

At a public hearing of the Wisconsin Assembly Committee on Campaigns and Elections Tuesday, legislators engaged in an occasionally tense debate over proposed changes to the state election system. In attendance at the hearing were some of Wisconsin’s most prominent election deniers, including former state Rep. Janel Brandtjen and Peter Bernegger, a self-styled elections investigator who has been convicted of mail fraud Bernegger stood in the back of the hearing room with a group of companions, muttering and complaining about assertions by the election clerks and legislators who testified. Read Article

Wyoming lawmakers advance election reform bills despite feasibility warnings | Klark Byrd/Casper Oil City News

The Wyoming Legislature’s Joint Corporations, Elections & Political Subdivisions Committee voted Monday to sponsor a sweeping package of six election reform bills that boost manual ballot counting and expand poll watcher authority. The bills advanced despite stern warnings from county clerks that the changes could prove logistically impossible to implement by the 2026 election cycle. Critics argued the package restricts ballot access and competition for independent candidates. The committee’s action sponsors six working draft measures that focus on shifting the election process toward increased hand counting of ballots and enhanced oversight. Read Article

National: Election officials question federal plan for online voter registration form | Carrie Levine/Votebeat

State election officials are raising legal and practical concerns about a new Trump administration plan to create a digital version of the existing federal voter registration form. Under the proposal, the federal government would both verify voter identity and check citizenship against a system run by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security before making the applications available to states. The proposal — discussed on recent calls between the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, federal officials working to design the new tool, and state officials — would for the first time allow the federal voter registration form to be filed online. Currently, voters must submit the form on paper. Most states are required to accept the federal registration form, just as they would their own state-specific forms. Read Article

DOJ will send election monitors to two Democratic states, California and New Jersey | Jill Colvin and Michael R. Blood/Associated Press

The Department of Justice is preparing to send federal election observers to California and New Jersey next month, targeting two Democratic states holding off-year elections following requests from state Republican parties. The DOJ announced Friday that it is planning to monitor polling sites in Passaic County, New Jersey, and five counties in southern and central California: Los Angeles, Orange, Kern, Riverside and Fresno. The goal, according to the DOJ, is “to ensure transparency, ballot security, and compliance with federal law.” Election monitoring is a routine function of the Justice Department, but the focus on California and New Jersey comes as both states are set to hold closely-watched elections with national consequences on Nov. 4. New Jersey has an open seat for governor and California is holding a special election aimed at redrawing the state’s congressional map to counter Republican gerrymandering efforts elsewhere ahead of the 2026 midterms. Read Article

National: Trump Suggests He Knows He Can’t Run Again: ‘It’s Too Bad’ | Erica L. Green and Katie Rogers/The New York Times

President Trump seemed to concede on Wednesday that he was not eligible to serve a third term, lamenting that it was an unfortunate result of the constitutional prohibition that he has mused about violating for months. Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One en route to South Korea, the last leg of his three-country diplomatic tour across Asia, Mr. Trump said it was “too bad” that he couldn’t run in 2028. “We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had, I have my highest poll numbers that I’ve ever had,” he boasted (his approval rating remains low, at 43 percent, according to a New York Times average). “And, you know, based on what I read, I guess I’m not allowed to run. So we’ll see what happens.” The remarks came after House Speaker Mike Johnson said on Tuesday there was no path around the Constitution’s two-term limit. Read Article

National: Trump’s moves in this year’s election could preview midterms pressure | Nicholas Riccardi/Associated Press

After months of extraordinary steps to ensure his party maintains control of the U.S. House of Representatives in next year’s midterms, President Donald Trump is turning his sights toward the voting process in Tuesday’s elections. That pivot is raising alarm among Democrats and others who warn that he may be testing strategies his administration could use to interfere with elections in 2026 and beyond. Late last week, Trump’s Department of Justice announced it was sending election monitors to observe voting in one county in New Jersey, which features a race for governor that Republican Trump has become deeply invested in, and to five counties in California, where Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom is pushing a ballot measure to counter the president’s own effort to rejigger the congressional map to elect more Republicans. That announcement was followed with a pre-emptive attack by Trump on the legitimacy of California’s elections. The post on his own social media platform echoed the baseless allegations he made about the 2020 presidential election before he and his allies tried to overturn his loss in a campaign that culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Read Article

National: 2020 election deniers and allies amass power, in and out of the Trump administration | Marshall Cohen and Fredreka Schouten/CNN

Inside the red brick walls of the La Vista Correctional Facility in Pueblo, Colorado, Tina Peters has grown impatient. The former Republican clerk of Mesa County, Peters is one year into a nine-year prison term for her role in a scheme with fellow election deniers to breach voting machines in hopes of proving President Donald Trump’s baseless fraud claims. Closely guarded election passwords from her county spilled out onto the Internet as a result, showing up on a QAnon-affiliated messaging channel. Peters is the only person currently in prison for trying to overturn the 2020 election – after Trump pardoned hundreds of convicted January 6 Capitol rioters, including those who planned the attack or were violent that day. She remains locked up on state charges that are immune to a presidential pardon. Even from prison, she’s keeping the 2020 lies alive, through public letters and a jailhouse video interview in her orange prison uniform. Read Article

National: Red states are preparing for an end to the Voting Rights Act | Andrew Howard/Politico

Some Republicans across the south are preparing to redraw their congressional maps to boot Democrats out of office — if the Supreme Court issues a ruling on a case gutting the Voting Rights Act in time for the midterms. While such a decision is no sure thing, some states are nonetheless planning for the scenario. The potential scramble to redraw could completely reshape the midterms, and Democrats are already sounding the alarm. One Democratic group forecasted an ambitious 19 seat pickup for the GOP by dismantling majority Black and other majority-minority districts currently protected by the VRA, though that would be an extreme scenario where every possible state redistricts. The Supreme Court’s looming ruling centers around Section 2 of the VRA, which has long been implemented by creating majority-minority districts. Those districts are almost entirely represented by Democrats, something that Republicans have long claimed gives the party an unfair advantage. Read Article

National: Donald Trump’s Plan to Subvert the Midterms Is Already Under Way | David A. Graham/The Atlantic

Imagine for a moment that it’s late on Election Day, November 3, 2026. Republicans have kept their majority in the Senate, but too many House races are still uncalled to tell who has won that chamber. Control seems like it will come down to two districts in Maricopa County, Arizona. ICE agents and National Guardsmen have been deployed there since that summer, ostensibly in response to criminal immigrants, though crime has been dropping for several years. The county is almost one-third Hispanic or Latino. Voting-rights advocates say the armed presence has depressed turnout, but nonetheless, the races are close. By that evening, the Republican candidates have small leads, but thousands of mail and provisional ballots remain uncounted. Read Article

Arizona: Johnson sets record refusing to swear in Adelita Grijalva for 36 days after she won election | Caitlin Sievers/Arizona Mirror

U.S. Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva unwillingly set a record on Wednesday with her 36-day wait to be sworn in to represent the state’s 7th Congressional District.The Tucson Democrat easily won a Sept. 23 special election in the deep blue southern Arizona district formerly represented by her father Raúl Grijalva, who died of cancer in March. But Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives has refused to swear in Grijalva, using a range of excuses, the most frequent of which is the federal government shutdown, which began Oct. 1. Read Article

California Will Bring In State Election Monitors to Monitor Trump’s Federal Election Monitors | Joe Kukura/SFist

The Trump administration has already declared they’re sending election monitors to California for next week’s Prop 50 vote. But the Gavin Newsom administration just announced they’ll have their own monitors to monitor Trump’s monitors. We are just about a week out from the November 4 California vote on Prop 50, which would redraw California’s congressional districts in hopes of blunting President Trump’s notorious Texas redistricting. Though there is not much suspense around Prop 50, which is up by 20 percentage points in the polls, and will almost certainty be declared a landslide victory for Governor Newsom’s effort about one minute after the polls close next Tuesday at 8 pm PT. Though there was suddenly some controversy around Prop 50 at the end of last week, when Trump’s Justice Department declared they would send election monitors to California polling places for that election, because Trump still genuinely believes his 2020 election conspiracy theories involving Chinese bamboo, evil corrupt voting machines, and whatever else Mike Lindell told him at Four Seasons Total Landscaping. Read Article

Colorado says relocation of Space Command to Alabama is ‘punishment’ for mail-in voting | Matthew Brown/Associated Press

Colorado officials filed a lawsuit Wednesday claiming the relocation of U.S. Space Command to Alabama was illegally motivated by President Donald Trump’s desire to punish Colorado for its mail-in voting system. The litigation announced by Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser asks a federal judge to block the move as unconstitutional. Trump chose Huntsville, Alabama, to house Space Command during the closing days of his first term. But in 2023, then-President Joe Biden announced the command would be permanently located in Colorado Springs, Colorado, which had been serving as its temporary headquarters. Trump in September said Colorado’s mail-in voting system “played a big factor” in moving the headquarters to Alabama. Read Article

Louisiana Secretary of State Nancy Landry’s juggling act of ballots, battles and backlash | Jeremy Alford and David Jacobs/Baton Rouge Business Report

With no small amount of attention or controversy, her office is endeavoring to buy new voting machines. She’s also traveling the state and spreading the word about Louisiana’s new party primary system, while preparing for another round of elections next month. Late last week, meanwhile, she transitioned to 24/7 watch as the Legislature convened a special session to alter her office’s 2026 election calendar. To put it mildly, Secretary of State Nancy Landry has one of the hottest elected seats in the state right now—and political temperatures are only increasing. Pushing the thermostat further, Landry is engaged in a high-stakes disagreement with Attorney General Liz Murrill, who cancelled the secretary of state’s legal counsel over a dispute about Louisiana’s redistricting case before the U.S. Supreme Court. Read Article

Michigan Republicans demand Benson share full voter roll with Trump administration | Hayley Harding/Votebeat

Nearly two dozen Michigan House Republicans have signed on to a resolution calling for Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to share the state’s complete voter rolls with the Trump administration, without redactions of potentially sensitive identifying information. Michigan is one of several states being sued by the U.S. Justice Department over their refusal to share unredacted voter rolls in response to requests from the agency. Benson shared some of Michigan’s voter roll — the parts accessible to any member of the public — but withheld personal identifying information, such as Social Security numbers. The GOP-backed resolution, which was debated at a hearing Tuesday in the House Election Integrity Committee, calls for the secretary of state to share an unredacted copy of Michigan’s computerized statewide voter registration list, also known as the qualified voter file, with federal officials. Read Article

Montana: New law requires election officials to reject mail ballots that aren’t signed with voters’ birth years | Eric Dietrich/Montana Free Press

This fall’s municipal elections will give Montana voters their first encounter with a new requirement to provide their birth year on the back of mail-in ballot envelopes alongside the previously required signature line. The change is a result of a legislative mandate aimed at enhancing mail election security that took effect Oct. 1. Election officials in Montana’s two largest counties, Yellowstone and Missoula, said this week that the change had already forced them to reject hundreds of ballots in early returns — 411 as of Thursday, according to Missoula County Election Administrator Bradley Seaman, and about 440 as of Wednesday, according to Yellowstone County Election Administrator Dayna Causby. Read Article

Ohio: The Long Road to Election Day | Kendall Verhovek/Brennan Center for Justice

Tonya Wichman: We’re a smaller county so we only have two full-time people on staff that work alongside part-time clerks. Our role here is a little bit different than a large county that has departments for everything. But like every other county, we work in bipartisan teams. We can’t even open doors in Ohio without a member of the opposite party. The two of us personally run every aspect of an election. That includes voter registration, programming the ballot and the poll books, working through the new security implementations, setting up polling locations, and more. Throughout the year, we do list maintenance to remove people who pass away. We also process petitions for anyone that wants to be on the ballot, verify signatures for candidate petitions, and go through the legal details with the prosecutor’s office to make sure everything lines up with the state’s election code. We also take continuing education programs to make sure we learn how to make things more efficient and better for our voters. So when people ask, “Do you just work two days a year?” the answer is, “No, we spend the entire year getting ready for the next election.” Even right now, we’re working on next year’s May primary — and we started back in July. Read Article

Pennsylvania criminal case highlights problems with third-party voter registration drives | Carter Walker/Votebeat

In the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, workers with an Arizona-based consulting firm conducting a voter registration drive tried to submit fake registrations in Pennsylvania in an effort to earn more money, the state attorney general is alleging in a criminal complaint filed this month. The case grew out of investigations in a few counties into voter registration applications that prosecutors had flagged as irregular before the election. But election officials across the commonwealth say the problems with these types of third-party voter registration drives aren’t limited to this incident of alleged fraud. Rather, they say, systemic problems with the way third-party voter registration organizations operate often result in street canvassers submitting incomplete or invalid registrations. Read Article

Virginia: Judge indicates support for disenfranchised voters in challenge to felony voting laws | Joe Dodson/Courthouse News Service

A judge signaled that he was likely going to rule in favor of a pair of disenfranchised voters Thursday who argued Virginia’s felony voting law violates a 150-year-old federal statute. U.S. District Judge John Gibney, a Barack Obama appointee, said that while he was leaning toward the plaintiffs, he wanted further briefing on the impact of a favorable ruling. He also indicated support for certifying a class that includes all Virginians who are currently or will be disqualified from voting due to convictions for crimes that were not considered felonies at common law in 1870. “We’re very optimistic about the judge’s comments at the end of the hearing,” attorney Brittany Amadi, partner at Wilmer Cutler, representing the plaintiffs, said in an interview. “Our plaintiffs have been waiting for some, some of them years and years to get their voting rights back, and so we’re very excited about the opportunity for those plaintiffs to restore their rights.” Read Article

Washington: Ballots could now be tossed if voters submit them via U.S. Postal Service due to postmarking delays | By Emry Dinman/The Spokesman-Review

Voters who have not submitted their ballots yet should stop submitting them through the mail due to unprecedented concerns ballots will not be postmarked in time for the election, according to recommendations from the Washington secretary of state. State law allows mail-in ballots to be received and still counted after Election Day, even if they arrive to election workers days later, but only if they are postmarked on Election Day or before. Postal union leadership and election officials say the U.S. Postal Service’s delivery of mail – and, critically for the upcoming election, postmarking – has been significantly delayed by multiple factors stemming from former Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s “10-year plan” to reform the postal service. The Spokane County Elections Office has recommended voters shouldn’t return their ballots via a mailbox any later than Friday, a full four days before the election; the Washington Secretary of State’s Office goes even further, cautioning voters to not use a mailbox within seven to 10 days ahead of the election. Read Article

National: Trump Empowers Election Deniers, Still Fixated on 2020 Grievances | Alexandra Berzon and Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times

Election officials from nearly all 50 states gathered on a call last month with the Homeland Security Department’s point person on “election integrity,” eager to hear how the woman filling a newly created Trump administration position might help safeguard the vote ahead of next year’s midterms. But many of them left alarmed. Rather than offering assurances that the federal government’s election protection programs would continue uninterrupted, the new official, Heather Honey, instead used portions of the meeting to echo rhetoric that has infused the right-wing election activist movement that emerged since President Trump falsely claimed that his 2020 defeat was the result of widespread fraud, according to five people with knowledge of the call. Read Article

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