National: Understanding SAVE immigration database as a tool for election officials | Natalia Contreras/Votebeat

Last week, officials gathered at an Oklahoma City hotel for the annual National Association of State Election Directors conference. Since President Donald Trump took office again, his Justice Department has been sending out letters to states with sweeping requests for information about how they maintain their voter rolls and ensure that only eligible people are registered. Meanwhile, the administration is urging election officials around the country to use an existing federal immigration database called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program for a new purpose: to verify voters’ eligibility. The Department of Homeland Security recently overhauled SAVE to make it easier to search, and free for states to use. Experts have questioned the accuracy and reliability of the data, given how quickly the system changes to SAVE were made this year. They’ve also raised concerns about how the federal government is using data uploaded by states, and whether using the tool outside its intended purpose could put people’ privacy or voting rights at risk. Read Article

National: Federal appeals court restricts who can bring voting rights challenges | Gary Fields/Associated Press

A federal appeals court panel on Monday ruled that private individuals and organizations cannot bring voting rights cases under a section of the law that allows others to assist voters who are blind, have disabilities or are unable to read. It’s the latest ruling from the St. Louis-based 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, saying only the government can bring lawsuits alleging violations of the Voting Rights Act. The findings upend decades of precedent and will likely be headed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The case centered on whether an Arkansas law that limits how many voters can be assisted by one person conflicts with Section 208 of the landmark federal law. The opinion from the three-judge panel followed the reasoning of another 8th Circuit panel in a previous case from 2023. That opinion held that the Arkansas State Conference NAACP and the Arkansas Public Policy Conference could not bring cases under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Read Article

National: Department of Justice Is Said to Plan to Contact All 50 States on Voting Systems | Matt Cohen and Zachary Roth/Democracy Docket

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has said it intends to contact all 50 states about their compliance with federal voting law, a national association of state election officials told Democracy Docket. “As states recently began to receive letters on the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and Help America Vote Act (HAVA) from the U.S.…

National: As Federal Support for Elections Evolves, States Adapt to Close Emerging Gaps | Brenna Nelson/NCSL

The decentralization of U.S. election administration leaves many decisions regarding how elections are run to states and localities, which also foot most of the bill. The federal government does support elections, though, even if most ongoing costs fall to states and localities. “We have seen over the last 25 years, more and more federal support for state and local elections officials,” says Lindsey Forson, deputy executive director at the National Association of Secretaries of State and a panelist in a recent NCSL webinar. That could be changing as the Trump administration enacts its election priorities and shifts resources. Read Article

National: Noncitizen voting remains exceedingly rare, new review finds | Miles Parks/NPR

After President Trump and many other Republicans warned that vast numbers of non-U.S. citizens would influence last year’s election, states and law enforcement have devoted more resources than ever before to root out those ineligible voters. More than six months into Trump’s second term, they haven’t found much. New research out Wednesday tracking state government efforts across the country confirms what election experts have said all along: Noncitizen voting occasionally happens but in minuscule numbers, and not in any coordinated way. “Noncitizens are not a large threat to our election system currently,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR), which conducted the research. “Even states that are looking everywhere to try to amplify the numbers of noncitizens … when they actually look, they find a surprisingly, shockingly small number.” Read Article

National: Trump pick moves closer to leading agency that protects election systems | Ali Swenson/Associated Press

A U.S. Senate committee voted Wednesday to advance President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the agency that secures the nation’s critical infrastructure, including election systems. Members of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted 9-6 to recommend Sean Plankey ’s nomination for director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, known as CISA, which sits under the Department of Homeland Security. The agency has been dealing with workforce and funding cuts, as well as criticism from Republicans over some of its election-related activities. Read Article

Opinion: The Fact Checker rose in an era of false claims. Falsehoods are now winning. | Glenn Kessler/The Washington Post

When 400 fact-checkers from around the world gathered in Rio de Janeiro in June for an annual conference, the mood was tense. After years of exponential growth, political fact-checking was in retreat and under fire. And somehow, even as fact-checking surged in the past decade, so had the wave of false claims and narratives swamping the world. Meta, which after 2016 spent more than $100 million to fund 100 fact-checking organizations, ended a partnership with U.S. fact-checkers to highlight false claims and signaled it would cut back across the world. Google announced it would end its ClaimReview program — which I helped foster — that elevated fact checks in search results. Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s abrupt dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development cut off additional funding for fact-checkers in Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America and Asia. The state of the fact-checking field is on my mind as I write my last column for The Washington Post. I am taking a voluntary buyout, ending almost 28 years at the newspaper, including more than 14 as The Fact Checker. Read Article

Arizona: Maricopa County recorder privately lobbied supervisors for election control | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap privately pleaded with two county supervisors to support his bid for more power over the county’s elections, text messages obtained by Votebeat show. The messages, which county supervisors provided to Votebeat in response to a public-records request, include previously unreported behind-the-scenes conversations and confrontations as Heap negotiated with the supervisors board early this year over how to divide election duties in the closely watched swing county. “I really thought you guys would come through for me,” Heap wrote to Supervisor Mark Stewart, a fellow Republican, in March after a counterproposal from the supervisors. “This was the last straw for me, Mark.” Heap sued supervisors in June after the negotiations over an agreement governing the division of election duties fell apart. County supervisors countersued this month, and the lawsuit is pending in county court. The breakdown means that as the time to start preparing for next year’s midterm elections approaches, the division of duties between the recorder and supervisors remains in dispute. Read Article

California: Was a dog sent a ballot? Inside the DOJ’s strange lawsuit seeking state voter data | Sara Libby/San Francisco Chronicle

When the Department of Justice sued Orange County last month amid a squabble over election integrity, some legal experts were perplexed. Republicans have long pushed thin arguments that voter fraud has buoyed Democrats. But why was the Trump administration seeking information that the county considered clearly private — including the Social Security numbers and voting preferences of people whose registration had been canceled? The answer, in part, may rest upon who wrote the lawsuit: Michael Gates, the deputy assistant U.S. attorney general for civil rights. Gates was until February the city attorney in Huntington Beach, where he made it his mission to antagonize the state’s liberal leaders. Read Article

Georgia Election Board seeks DOJ aid to again investigate 2020 election | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Three right-wing members of the State Election Board revived a fight over the 2020 presidential election Wednesday and called for President Donald Trump’s Justice Department to intervene. The surprise move by the Republican board members — the same three praised by Trump as “pit bulls” during a campaign rally last fall — gives new life to skepticism of the president’s narrow loss in Georgia in 2020. While many elected Republicans in Georgia have said they want to move on from 2020 after Trump’s undisputed win last year, the State Election Board remains focused on its questions about Fulton County’s handling of the 2020 recount. Although multiple recounts, state investigations and court cases upheld the 2020 election, Trump’s supporters continue to make unproven allegations of fraud. Read Article

Michigan is consolidating election precincts. Will voters face longer lines? | Hayley Harding/Bridge Michigan

Across Michigan, thousands of voters are getting new precincts — and in some cases new polling places — as officials redraw their maps to take advantage of a new state law that allows for more consolidation of precincts. The new law, which increased the maximum size of a precinct from 2,999 to 4,999 voters, is a consequence of recent voter-approved initiatives to expand access to early and absentee voting, which Michiganders have embraced. The law went into effect early last year, and some communities put changes into effect before the 2024 general election. Others, including Livonia in Wayne County, will run their newly consolidated precincts for the first time next week during local primaries. The shift could eventually save communities a lot of money, experts say. But realizing those savings will take some time, and voters could encounter challenges as they get reassigned to renumbered precincts, different precincts, or new polling places, especially if clerks don’t equip consolidated polling sites to handle a larger pool of voters. Read Article

North Carolina: All-GOP Appeals Court panel ruled against Stein in elections board dispute | The Carolina Journal

Three Republican members of the North Carolina Court of Appeals issued the April order that blocked a lower court ruling favoring Democratic Gov. Josh Stein in a dispute over state elections board appointments. Appeals Court rules blocked release of the names of participating judges for 90 days. Now the court has revealed that Judges Julee Flood, Michael Stading, and Tom Murry issued the April 30 order. All three are Republicans. Republicans outnumber Democrats, 12-3, on the state’s second-highest court. The Appeals Court’s action paved the way for State Auditor Dave Boliek to make new appointments to state and county elections boards. The state Supreme Court later split, 5-2, in upholding appellate judges’ decision. Read Article

Oklahoma: Textbook Publishers Reveal How They Incorporated Controversial New Standards | Jennifer Palmer/Oklahoma Watch

The state’s social studies standards, ideologically aligned with conservative values, American exceptionalism and Christianity, will guide a committee’s review of dozens of textbooks and materials for use in Oklahoma classrooms. The social studies standards call for high school students to study the 2020 elections by looking into election fraud theories such as batch dumps and mail-in balloting risks using graphs and other information. Most made little effort to embrace the controversial aspects of the new standards, an Oklahoma Watch review of submitted materials found. Some made minor adjustments. And a few refused to do business with Oklahoma altogether. Read Article

South Dakota election office publishes voter list labeling thousands as public assistance applicants | Makenzie Huber/South Dakota Searchlight

Thousands of South Dakotans have been publicly labeled as applicants for government assistance and thousands more have had their email address and phone number exposed, due to a new state law and the way the state’s election office is implementing it. Although the legislation creating the law received some Democratic votes, it’s a product of the Republican-dominated Legislature. Republican Gov. Larry Rhoden signed it into law and Republican Secretary of State Monae Johnson is carrying out its provisions. Several legislators, both Democrats and Republicans, are now telling South Dakota Searchlight they did not intend for the law to expose sensitive information — especially the identity of public assistance applicants. Read Article

Texas Senate once again tries to give the attorney general authority to prosecute election crimes | Eleanor Klibanoff/The Texas Tribune

The Texas Senate voted 17-12 Wednesday to preliminarily approve a bill that would allow the attorney general to independently prosecute election crimes without waiting to be invited by a local district attorney, a long-standing priority for the office’s GOP incumbent, Ken Paxton. A similar proposal stalled out just before the finish line during the regular session, with the House and Senate unable to agree on how quickly the attorney general should be allowed to take the case from local authorities. This time around, both chambers are starting from the same spot on that issue, directing the attorney general to immediately step in and take over election fraud cases. But a potential new line of disagreement has opened. In setting the agenda for the Legislature’s ongoing special session, Gov. Greg Abbott asked lawmakers to grant this authority to the attorney general with a constitutional amendment, after Texas’ highest criminal court ruled in 2021 that the state constitution bars the agency from unilaterally inserting itself into criminal cases. Read Article

Wisconsin election officials wary of internet-linked e-pollbook options | Alexander Shur/Votebeat

More jurisdictions around the country are using commercial electronic pollbooks to check in voters, but many Wisconsin officials say they’re reluctant to give data to outside companies — and especially worried about using products that connect to the internet. Currently, the only e-pollbook option Wisconsin allows is Badger Book, which about 400 municipalities use. The product was designed by the Wisconsin Elections Commission and doesn’t connect to the internet. But it’s expensive and has limited features, clerks say, and officials in the largest jurisdictions, such as Madison, worry they wouldn’t get enough tech support if they used Badger Book. The worst-case scenarios for e-pollbooks getting hacked would be somebody stealing voters’ personal information, deactivating voter records, or making it look like a person had already voted, said Megan Maier, the deputy director of research and partnerships at Verified Voting. Meier and other experts said there is no known case of that happening. That risk would be mitigated, Maier said, if polling sites all had paper pollbooks printed out in addition to e-pollbooks. Read Article

National: The Supreme Court Is Writing a Slow-Motion Eulogy for One of America’s Greatest Achievements | Maureen Edobor/Slate

Next month marks the 60th anniversary of the passing of the Voting Rights Act—a law often celebrated as the “crown jewel” of the Civil Rights Movement. Signed in 1965 after years of organizing and unimaginable sacrifice, it was meant to realize the constitutional promise that the right to vote would not be denied or abridged on account of race. Yet, as we approach this milestone, we find ourselves not in a moment of reflection or rededication but in a state of legal free fall. The Supreme Court has scheduled arguments next term on Louisiana’s racially gerrymandered congressional map, and the court as early as next week may put on hold and set for argument a case in which the 8th Circuit held that private plaintiffs have no right to sue to enforce Section 2 of the act. These pending decisions threaten to gut what remains of this once powerful statute, which has already been largely hollowed out by the Roberts court over the past decade-plus. Read Article

Arizona election officials unload on Trump’s CISA after website hack | Derek B. Johnson/CyberScoop

Arizona election officials say a hack targeting a statewide online portal for political candidates resulted in the defacement and replacement of multiple candidate photos with the late Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. While officials say the threat is contained and the vulnerability has been fixed, they also blasted the lack of support they’ve received from the federal government, claiming the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is no longer a reliable partner in election security under the Trump administration. Michael Moore, the chief information security officer for Arizona’s Secretary of State, told CyberScoop that his office first became aware that something odd was happening on June 23, while many officials were at a conference. One user managing the candidate portal noticed that one of the candidate images uploaded to the site didn’t “make sense” because it appeared to be a picture of Khomeini. The next day they were notified that candidate profiles going back years had also been defaced with the same picture. Read Article

North Carolina elections board OKs changes to military, overseas voting | Theresa Opeka/The Carolina Journal

The North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE) voted unanimously on several items at its meeting Monday morning, including changes to voting for military and overseas voters. The changes stem from protests by Republican Justice Jefferson Griffin, who challenged Democratic candidate Justice Allison Riggs for a seat on the state Supreme Court. In a legal dispute that moved through state and federal court, Griffin challenged more than 65,000 ballots cast in November’s General Election. After months of litigation, Griffin conceded to Riggs six months after the election, but not before changes were made to the way overseas and military ballots were counted. The Court of Appeals ruled that military and overseas voters must comply with the photo ID requirement when voting absentee in state and local nonfederal contests. Also, “never residents,” those with a family connection to North Carolina, for example, their parents lived here before moving overseas, are not eligible to vote in state and local elections, but can vote in federal elections. Read Article

National: Gabbard claim of anti-Trump conspiracy not backed by declassified documents | Byron Tau and Eric Tucker/Associated Press

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard this month declassified material she claimed proved a “treasonous conspiracy” by the Obama administration in 2016 to politicize U.S. intelligence in service of casting doubt on the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s presidential election victory. As evidence, Gabbard cited newly declassified emails from Obama officials and a 5-year-old classified House report in hopes of undermining the intelligence community’s conclusion Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted to boost Trump and denigrate his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. Russia’s activities during the 2016 election remain some of the most examined events in recent history. The Kremlin’s campaign and the subsequent U.S. government response were the subject of at least five major investigations by the Republican-led House and Senate intelligence committee; two Justice Department special counsels; and the department’s inspector general. Read Article

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