National: How ‘chain of custody’ helps make elections secure | Hayley Harding/Votebeat

In any given election, a whole lot of people handle the ballots and voting equipment. So how does a ballot stay secure and countable after it’s left the voter’s hands? That’s possible thanks to a critical safeguard in election administration called the chain of custody. The chain of custody is a huge part of why voters can trust that their ballots are counted exactly as they intended. Voters may not give much thought to this process, but if you’re concerned about the security of your ballot and the integrity of your vote, here’s a full explanation of how the chain of custody works. Read Article

Arizona: In ‘uncertain times,’ lawmakers introduce bill to improve voting access, cybersecurity | Colin Wood/StateScoop

Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes on Wednesday announced new legislation that would seek to improve voting access and provide funding to improve the cybersecurity of state and county election systems. During a press conference, Fontes called the legislation, called the Voters First Act, a “research-based, common-sense proposal to modernize, standardize and prioritize the voting process across all 15 counties in Arizona.” The act, which was introduced by Democratic party leaders in both houses Wednesday, includes statewide restoration of Arizona’s permanent early vote list, which allows voters to receive ballots by mail for early voting, and applies the state’s 75-foot “voter protection zone” to ballot drop boxes and voting locations. It would extend the early voting period, allow the state to accept private grant funding to educate the public about the basic facts of statewide elections and allow ballots to be collected and processed continually on election day, for faster results. Read Article

California: This Supreme Court case could strike a major blow to state’s vote-counting system | Bob Egelko/San Francisco Chronicle

The future of mail-in voting — in particular, the power of states like California to count votes that are mailed by Election Day but received afterward — will soon be in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court. It’s the same court that overturned a key section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in 2013 that required states and cities with histories of racial discrimination in voting to obtain federal government approval before changing their election laws. It’s also the court that ruled in 2019 that federal judges cannot interfere with partisan “gerrymandering,” the redrawing of election districts for political purposes. Another ruling in 2021 allowed Arizona to reject ballots that were delivered by someone other than the voter. Read Article

Georgia: Fate of ballot QR codes unclear as deadline for their removal looms | Maya Homan/Georgia Recorder

Election season in Georgia is here, with statewide primary elections less than four months away and the campaigning for those contests well underway. But as Georgians prepare to cast their ballots, a key question remains unclear: Will the state be able to eliminate QR codes from ballots to comply with a 2024 state election law? During the second day of budget hearings at the state Capitol, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger appeared before lawmakers to discuss Gov. Brian Kemp’s proposed budget for his office. The hearings will continue into Thursday, with Attorney General Chris Carr and other law enforcement and public safety-related agency heads scheduled to present. Kemp’s budget proposal for the secretary of state’s office includes $1.8 million for optical character recognition technology that can be used to scan the human-readable text on ballots and $5 million toward a hand count verifying the outcomes of two statewide races during the 2026 cycle, Raffensperger told lawmakers Wednesday. Read Article

Michigan voters say signature gatherers lie about what proposals will do. Lawmakers haven’t fixed it. | Hayley Harding/Votebeat

College students across the state say they have been lied to by petition circulators, who have descended on their campuses to gather signatures in support of requiring Michigan voters to prove their citizenship. In August, Michigan State University freshman Abby Lindley was told the petition would make it easier for immigrants and transgender people to vote, she said. University of Michigan junior Aidan Rozema reported being told in September that it would make voting easier. In October, circulators told MSU freshman Hunter Moore it would expand absentee voting, he said. No law in Michigan requires circulators — often paid per signature — to tell the truth about what’s on a petition, or to show prospective signers the full text. While some states try to ensure accountability by banning per-signature pay or requiring circulators to live in-state, rules across the country are a patchwork. Read Article

North Carolina: ‘Fat-finger mistake’: State, county elections officials tussle over Wilson County sheriff’s race | Will Doran/WRAL

State elections officials voted to allow Bobby Knight to run for Wilson sheriff after his candidacy was challenged by competitors in the upcoming GOP primary. Party affiliation was at the center of the case. Knight has been a registered Republican for years — except for about five hours on the morning of Dec. 1, 2025, when he was a Democrat. An errant tap on his phone while updating his voter registration address accidentally changed his affiliation, he said. State law says someone must be a member of a political party for at least 90 days to run for election as a member of that party. And due to the flub, he didn’t meet that requirement, county officials determined. But the state elections board overruled the county in a 3-2 party-line vote, with the state election board’s Republican majority in favor and the Democratic minority opposed. The decision means Knight will be allowed to run in the Republican Party primary. Read Article

Pennsylvania: Chester County poll book problems on Election Day were due to human error, insufficient oversight, report finds | by Katie Bernard

Independent and unaffiliated voters were left off Chester County’s poll books in November’s election due to human error exacerbated by insufficient training, poor oversight and staffing challenges in the county office, an independent firm has concluded. In November, more than 12,000 Chester County voters were forced to vote by provisional ballot after the county included just registered Democrats and Republicans in the poll books for the general election. Every voter who wanted to was able to cast a ballot, county officials said, but it resulted in a chaotic scene and the county had to issue an unusually high number of provisional ballots — which require more steps to cast and count. Read Article

South Carolina: Governor appoints new head of SC Election Commission after board chairman resigns his lengthy term | Anna Wilder/Post and Courier

The head of the S.C. Election Commission resigned from his seat by saying he’d stayed longer than intended. Dennis Shedd told reporters he wanted his “retirement time back.” The former federal judge’s window of service was supposed to end in June 2025. “As I told you, I just anticipated being in this job for about six or eight months. It just dawned on me that I’m really ready to move on to something else,” Shedd told reporters at the commission’s Jan. 21 meeting. Some of the reasons he decided to stay included issues surrounding top staffers that led to criminal charges and the U.S. Department of Justice’s request for voter information data. Read Article

Texas lawsuit claiming that numbering system threatens ballot secrecy dismissed | Natalia Contreras/The Texas Tribune

A federal judge Tuesday dismissed a lawsuit filed by conservative activists who challenged the use of electronic voting equipment to randomly number ballots in Texas on the grounds that the practice compromised ballot secrecy. Judge David Alan Ezra of U.S. District Court in Austin ruled that the case, filed in 2024 by longtime Texas election activist Laura Pressley and voters from three counties, was moot because the Texas Secretary of State’s Office has since prohibited counties from using electronic pollbooks to generate and print numbers on ballot paper. He also wrote that two of the counties named in the suit, Williamson and Bell, had taken steps to eliminate the use of pollbooks to number ballot paper, and that the third, Llano County, doesn’t use them for that purpose. Read Article

Virginia: Judge rules state violated Reconstruction Era law by disenfranchising certain felons | Courthouse News Service

A federal judge ruled in favor of two disenfranchised Virginia voters Thursday, concluding the state’s broad felon disenfranchisement policy violates a 150-year-old federal statute. “For well over a century, the Commonwealth of Virginia has disobeyed a federal law designed to protect the right of former enslaved people to vote,” U.S. District Judge John Gibney wrote. “Nearly one hundred and twenty-five years after Senator Glass pleaded to ’emancipate Virginia’ from Black voters, a class of would-be voters appears before this court asking for true emancipation at the commonwealth’s ballot boxes.” Gibney, a Barack Obama appointee, granted an injunction barring Virginia from disenfranchising anyone whose convictions stem from felonies created after 1870, when Congress passed the Virginia Readmission Act. Not long after passing the Reconstruction Era law, Virginia lawmakers widened the net of felons they could disenfranchise. Gibney ruled that the act trumps any subsequent constitutions the commonwealth adopted. Read Article

Wisconsin Governor pushes back against Madison argument in absentee ballot lawsuit | Molly Beck/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Gov. Tony Evers is pushing back against arguments Madison city officials made in a recent lawsuit contending they can’t be sued for failing to count nearly 200 mail-in ballots in 2024 because absentee voting is not a right but a privilege. A group of Madison voters represented by the liberal law firm Law Forward sued city and county election officials in March over the city’s failure to count 193 absentee ballots cast during the 2024 presidential election. The voters are accusing the former Madison clerk of disenfranchising their right to vote in a class-action lawsuit. The clerk, Maribeth Witzel-Behl, and city election officials named in the lawsuit argue the voters’ constitutional rights were not violated when city officials failed to count their ballots because of a state law that says: “The legislature finds that voting is a constitutional right, the vigorous exercise of which should be strongly encouraged. In contrast, voting by absentee ballot is a privilege exercised wholly outside the traditional safeguards of the polling place.” Read Article

National: Trump is trying to change how the midterm elections are conducted | Patrick Marley and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez/The Washington Post

Five years ago, President Donald Trump pressured Republican county election officials, state lawmakers and members of Congress to find him votes after he lost his reelection bid. Now, he’s seeking to change the rules before ballots are cast. Trump, openly fearful that a Congress controlled by Democrats could investigate him, impeach him and stymie his agenda, is using every tool he can find to try to influence the 2026 midterm elections and, if his party loses, sow doubt in their validity. Many of these endeavors go far beyond typical political persuasion, challenging long-established democratic norms. They include unprecedented demands that Republican state lawmakers redraw congressional districts before the constitutionally required 10-year schedule, the prosecution of political opponents, a push to toughen voter registration rules and attempts to end the use of voting machines and mail ballots. Read Article

National: New federal ruling is latest defeat to Trump administration’s election agenda | Alexander Shur/Votebeat

A federal judge on Friday became the third one to block key provisions of President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at revising election rules nationwide, ruling that the Constitution gives states and Congress —not the president— the authority to exercise power over elections. The administration signaled it is likely to appeal the decision, the latest blow to Trump’s agenda on elections. His March executive order sought to require proof of citizenship on the federal voter registration form, mostly ban the use of machine-readable codes when tallying ballots, and prohibit the counting of ballots postmarked Election Day but received afterwards. The administration has appealed two earlier rulings in other cases against the executive order. The cases could ultimately reach the U.S. Supreme Court, but election law experts told Votebeat the president faces long odds. Read Article

National: MAGA Thinks Maduro Will Prove Trump Won in 2020 | Yvonne Wingett Sanchez/The Atlantic

In the days after American commandos raided Nicolás Maduro’s compound and whisked him out of Venezuela, Mike Lindell wasn’t ruminating about the dramatic military operation or oil prices—he was reviving a long-dead conspiracy theory. Lindell, better known as the “MyPillow guy,” was celebrating because, in his telling, a possible witness to the theory that Venezuela conspired with election-equipment companies to rig the 2020 presidential election against Donald Trump was now in U.S. custody. “I’m hoping now that Maduro will actually come clean and tell us everything about the machines and how they steal the elections,” Lindell, who has long espoused election falsehoods, told me the day after the Venezuelan dictator’s arraignment. The supposition boils down to this: Venezuela plotted with election-equipment and -technology companies to engineer Trump’s defeat in 2020. There is no credible evidence to support this. But with Maduro in U.S. custody months before the midterms and the Trump administration investigating the 2020 election, an idea that had been disproved by facts and debunked in lawsuits has been revived, with a newsy twist: Now Maduro will prove from a New York jail that Trump defeated Joe Biden. Read Article

 

National: Judge deals blow to the Trump Justice Department’s use of the Civil Rights Act to ‘clean’ voter rolls | Tierney Sneed/CNN

The Trump administration’s sweeping legal effort to obtain Americans’ sensitive data from states’ voter rolls is now almost entirely reliant upon the Civil Rights Act – a Jim Crow-era law passed to protect Black voters from disenfranchisement – a notable shift in how the administration is pressing its demands. The Justice Department says it wants to use the registration records to “help” states “clean” their rolls by comparing it to other data sets held by the government, according to public comments from Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who was appointed by President Donald Trump to head the department’s civil rights division. But Thursday, a federal judge delivered a searing setback, blocking the administration’s bid to obtain confidential information from California, including driver’s license numbers and Social Security numbers. Read Article

National: Supreme Court rules candidates can challenge voting laws | Ashley Lopez/NPR

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that political candidates have the legal standing to challenge election laws before voting or counting starts. The case before the court was brought by Illinois Republican U.S. Rep. Michael Bost and other candidates, who wanted to challenge a state law that allows election officials to count mail ballots that arrive up to two weeks after Election Day, as long as they’re postmarked on time. Many states have laws that offer a buffer, or grace period, to voters to return mail ballots in case there are issues with the postal service, for example. A lower court ruled that Bost did not have standing to challenge the Illinois law. The conservative-majority Supreme Court, in a 7-2 ruling, disagreed. Read Article

National: Election officials say trust with CISA on election security is broken | Jessica Huseman/Votebeat

When the U.S. Department of Homeland Security first declared in January 2017 that election systems were “critical infrastructure,” alarmed state election officials pushed back quickly and loudly, fearing the move could lead to a federal takeover of elections. DHS’s designation came during the final days of the Obama administration, as federal officials scrambled to respond to evidence of Russian interference with the 2016 election. Denise Merrill, a Connecticut Democrat who was then president of the National Association of Secretaries of State, helped lead the opposition. “The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has no authority to interfere with elections, even in the name of national security,” NASS said in a February 2017 bipartisan resolution urging the new administration to rescind the designation. Read Article

National: The Quiet Campaign That Could Rewrite the 2028 Election | David L. Nevins/The Fulcrum

Most Americans are unaware, but a quiet campaign in states across the country is moving toward one of the biggest changes in presidential elections since the nation was founded. A movement called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) is happening mostly out of public view and could soon change how the United States picks its president, possibly as early as 2028. If the compact reaches 270 electoral votes and overcomes likely legal challenges, the national popular vote winner would become president for the first time in U.S. history. Although this effort is not widely known, it could reshape the balance of power for years. So far, 17 states and Washington, D.C., have joined the NPVIC, giving it control of 209 electoral votes. This is about 39% of the Electoral College and 77% of the 270 votes needed for the compact to take effect. Member states include large ones like California, New York, and Illinois, as well as medium-sized states such as Colorado, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Minnesota, and Washington. Smaller members include D.C., Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Rhode Island, and Vermont. Read Article

National: Trump Regrets Not Seizing Voting Machines After 2020 Election | Alan Feuer, Ashley Ahn/The New York Times

President Trump said during an interview with The New York Times that he regretted not ordering the National Guard to seize voting machines in swing states after his loss in the 2020 election, even though he doubted whether the Guard was “sophisticated enough” to carry out the order effectively. The remarks by Mr. Trump in the interview last week harked back to one of the most perilous moments from his first term in office, when he was urged by some advisers to order his national security agencies to take control of machines manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems in an effort to find evidence that they had been hacked to rig the election against him. The statement also came as he has continued his attacks on digital voting machines, saying that he wants to “lead a movement” to get rid of them altogether in advance of this year’s midterm elections. Mr. Trump has long been obsessed with voting machines, particularly those built by Dominion, a company that has figured prominently in conspiracy theories that technology was used to rob him of victory in his race against Joseph R. Biden Jr. Read Article

Alabama: ‘Gives people some peace of mind’: Lovvorn post-election audit requirement bill receives favorable committee report | Austen Shipley/1819news

Following the approval of a minor amendment, State Rep. Joe Lovvorn’s (R-Auburn) post-election audit legislation received a favorable report during Wednesday’s House Ways and Means General Fund meeting. If enacted, Lovvorn’s bill would require each county’s probate judge to conduct a post-election audit after every county and statewide general election to verify the accuracy of the originally reported results. “[State Rep.] Debbie Wood (R-Valley) carried for several years a post-election audit bill that would help make sure we are doing everything we can to make sure we feel comfortable and safe that elections are good,” Lovvorn explained during the meeting. “We do a good job with elections in this state. This just gives us another cog in that wheel to confirm that.” Read Article

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