National: A court ruling could shrink Black representation in Congress | Hansi Lo Wang/NPR

The United States could be headed toward the largest-ever decline in representation by Black members of Congress, depending on how the Supreme Court rules in a closely watched redistricting case about the Voting Rights Act. For decades, the landmark law that came out of the Civil Rights Movement has protected the collective voting power of racial minorities when political maps are redrawn. Its provisions have also boosted the number of seats in the House of Representatives filled by Black lawmakers. That’s largely because in many Southern states — where voting is often polarized between a Republican-supporting white majority and a Democratic-supporting Black minority — political mapmakers have drawn a certain kind of district to get in line with the Voting Rights Act’s Section 2 provisions. In these districts, racial-minority voters make up a population large enough to have a realistic opportunity of electing their preferred candidates. Read Article

Opinion: Jan. 6 Never Ended | Jamie Raskin/The New York Times

Tuesday is a heavy day for the police officers who fought to put down the bloody insurrection at the Capitol five years ago. It is also a solemn day for the F.B.I. agents and federal prosecutors who worked the largest criminal investigation in American history to bring the members of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers and all the other police-attacking rioters to justice. Five years after Jan. 6, 2021, we are still caught up in a struggle between forces who are willing to use authoritarian violence outside the Constitution to take and wield power and those who stand up nonviolently for our Constitution in the streets and in the polling places. Neither side can claim victory yet. It’s still very much Jan. 6 in America. Read Article

American Samoa: Americans by Name, Punished for Believing It | Alex Burness/Bolts

They arrived in a pair on November 30, 2023, traveling a stretch of highway that starts in Anchorage but quickly becomes quite rural. They drove past a ski resort and a small shopping center, then turned off through a forested valley with no cell service, until they reached the entrance to the longest highway tunnel in the country: the portal to Whittier, Alaska. The one-lane tunnel, which carves 2.5 dark, musty, bumpy miles through a glacial mountain, opens for two 15-minute periods every hour, once for each direction; the troopers caught the 10 a.m. window heading east. On the other side, Whittier’s punishing microclimate—more snow than Aspen, Amazon-level rainfall, and almost nonstop wind—greeted them with cold, wet bluster. This small port town was built by the military during World War II, as the U.S. warred with Japan. In the 1950s during the Cold War, the military constructed two gigantic housing structures, one of which is still in use: The 14-story complex, set back a few blocks from the waterfront, houses nearly all of Whittier’s roughly 300 residents. Inside this tower, people shop for groceries, get mail, attend church, exercise, and gather in community. The officers parked their Ford Explorer outside the complex. Read Article

Arizona Legislature scrutinizes new elections manual, potential for litigation looms | Kiera Riley/Arizona Capitol Times

With the 2025 Elections Procedures Manual in effect, the Legislature is now taking a fine-toothed comb to each provision, potentially teeing up another round of litigation. Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, Attorney General Kris Mayes and Gov. Katie Hobbs all signed off on the 2025 Elections Procedures Manual on Dec. 23, bringing to a close the odd-year process of promulgating a playbook for election workers and officials. But as the 2025 EPM takes effect, ongoing litigation over the prior draft puts some provisions in limbo, and a new set of eyes could spark another round of legal challenges. Per state law, the secretary of state, in consultation with county election officials, must draft a new manual every odd-numbered year and seal it with a final sign-off from the governor and attorney general. Read Article

Meet Georgia’s most influential conspiracy theorist | David Wickert/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Garland Favorito has said the U.S. government covered up the truth about the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He’s said the Israeli government — not Osama bin Laden — may have been responsible for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. And he’s echoed an antisemitic claim that Jewish-controlled media have concealed grand conspiracies against the American people.Now the 75-year-old Roswell resident has become a leader among conservatives who say the 2020 presidential election in Georgia was rife with fraud. Favorito has spent five years in court seeking to review Fulton County’s 2020 ballots. He believes it will show counterfeit ballots cost President Donald Trump the election here — though he doesn’t know who orchestrated the scheme. “We don’t know (who did it). We haven’t seen the ballots,” Favorito said in a recent interview. “As long as the ballots remain secret, the cover-up continues.” Investigators found numerous problems with Fulton County’s handling of the election, but no intentional misconduct. Joe Biden’s victory was confirmed by two recounts — including a computer count and a hand count of every ballot cast.Favorito is not deterred. He’s filed multiple lawsuits seeking to scan and inspect the 2020 ballots. And he’s not fighting alone. Read Article

North Carolina: Inside the GOP’s Decade-Long Push to Seize Power From the State’s Democratic Governors | Doug Bock Clark/ProPublica

In November 2024, Democrat Josh Stein scored an emphatic victory in the race to become North Carolina’s governor, drubbing his Republican opponent by almost 15 percentage points. His honeymoon didn’t last long, however. Two weeks after his win, the North Carolina legislature’s Republican supermajority fast-tracked a bill that would transform the balance of power in the state. Its authors portrayed the 131-page proposal, released publicly only an hour before debate began, as a disaster relief measure for victims of Hurricane Helene. But much of it stripped powers from the state’s governor, taking away authority over everything from the highway patrol to the utilities commission. Most importantly, the bill eliminated the governor’s control over appointments to the state elections board, which sets voting rules and settles disputes in the swing state’s often close elections. Read Article

New Ohio Election Integrity Commission begins to take shape | Nick Evans/Ohio Capital Journal

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose has tapped leadership for the new Ohio Election Integrity Commission. As part of last summer’s budget, state lawmakers axed the state’s existing independent campaign watchdog and replaced it with a new office under the secretary’s control. As of Jan. 1, the Ohio Elections Commission hands the reins to the Ohio Election Integrity Commission. The board’s membership shrinks from seven to five, and instead of a bipartisan panel selecting a nonpartisan colleague, all commissioners will be chosen by state leaders. To start, former Ohio Supreme Court Justice Terrence O’Donnell will lead the commission on an interim basis, after which former U.S. Attorney D. Michael Crites will take over. Crites previously chaired the Ohio Elections Commission after getting appointed to the panel by Gov. Jon Kasich. Read Article

Oregon’s secretary of state expands online voter registration eligibility to all residents | Keely Quinlan/StateScoop

Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read announced Tuesday that all eligible residents can register to vote online using a digital form, even if they do not have a state-issued driver’s license. Previously, only Oregonians with driver’s license numbers could register to vote online. Now they can register to vote online by providing the last four digits of a Social Security number and a signature, just as they would on a paper voter registration form, the office said. The office said the online voter registration form maintains the security of Oregon’s voter registration system while expanding access. According to an announcement, elections officials will carefully verify the Social Security numbers and signatures submitted before registering voters. Read Article

Pennsylvania disputes claim that it’s in talks to share voter rolls with Ohio | Carter Walker/Votebeat

Pennsylvania officials say they’re not in discussions to hand over private voter information to Ohio, where officials are trying to identify voters who are double-registered following the state’s departure from a bipartisan voter data sharing program. In December, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, announced a “multi-state election integrity network” called EleXa that will share its voter rolls with 10 other states to “identify people who try to vote illegally, often by having more than one active voter registration and then casting multiple ballots in the same election.” The press release also said that Pennsylvania was “finalizing an agreement” to join the program. But officials in Pennsylvania say that is not the case. Amy Gulli, a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Department of State, said the two state agencies spoke last summer about a possible information-sharing agreement, but the conversation ultimately fizzled out. Read Article

Texas: Republicans in two counties ditch plans to hand-count ballots | Jane C. Timm/NBC

Texas Republicans in two counties who were pushing to count ballots by hand in their March primaries are abandoning their plans, citing logistical concerns. The Dallas County Republican Party said it called off its efforts after it struggled to recruit enough volunteers and stay on budget. And the Hays County Republican Party said it ran into issues around complying with federal voting laws. Republicans in both counties will use ballot-counting machines, as they have in the past, for the March 3 primary, which features contests for the Senate, the House, governor and other down-ballot offices. In Texas, political parties, not local governments, are in charge of Election Day voting in primaries, a process that gives partisan officials unusual authority over election administration. Democrats and Republicans in the state often administer elections jointly and outsource the tasks to county election officials, so their expenses can be reimbursed by the Texas secretary of state. Read Article

Wisconsin case raises a question: Do absentee votes count less than other votes?’ | Alexander Shur/Votebeat

The city of Madison, Wisconsin, and its former clerk are arguing in court that they can’t be sued for failing to count 193 absentee ballots in the 2024 presidential election, in part because a Wisconsin law calls absentee voting a privilege, not a constitutional right. That legal argument raises questions about how much protection absentee voters have against the risk of disenfranchisement — and could reignite a recent debate over whether the law calling absentee voting a privilege is itself unconstitutional. That law, which appears to be uncommon outside of Wisconsin, has been cited repeatedly in recent years in attempts to impose more requirements and restrictions on absentee voting, and, at times, disqualify absentee ballots on which the voters have made errors. It does not appear to have been invoked to absolve election officials for errors in handling correctly cast ballots. Read Article

National: Mobile Voting Project’s vote-by-smartphone has real security gaps | Andrew Appel/CITP Blog

Bradley Tusk has been pushing the concept of “vote by phone.” Most recently his “Mobile Voting Foundation” put out a press release touting something called “VoteSecure”, claiming that “secure and verifiable mobile voting is within reach.” Based on my analysis of VoteSecure, I can say that secure and verifiable mobile voting is NOT within reach. It’s well known that conventional internet voting (including from smartphones) is fundamentally insecure; fraudulent software in the server could change votes, and malware in the voter’s own phone or computer could also change votes before they’re transmitted (while misleadingly displaying the voter’s original choices in the voter’s app). In an attempt to address this fundamental insecurity, Mr. Tusk has funded a company called Free & Fair to develop a protocol called by which voters could verify that their votes got counted properly. Their so-called “VoteSecure” is a form of “E2E-VIV”, or “End-to-End Verified Internet Voting”, a class of protocols that researchers have been studying for many years. Unfortunately, all known E2E-VIV methods, including VoteSecure, suffer from gaps and impracticalities that make them too insecure for use in public elections. In this article I will pinpoint just a few issues. I base my analysis on the press release of November 14, 2025, and on Free & Fair’s own “Threat Model” analysis and their FAQ. Read Article

The Last MAGA Prisoner | Yvonne Wingett Sanchez/The Atlantic

Tina Peters is supposed to spend the next eight years of her life in prison. The former Colorado county clerk was convicted last year of charges tied to tampering with voting equipment under her control in 2020. President Donald Trump has repeatedly called for Peters’s release, warning of “harsh measures” if she remains incarcerated. But even a president obsessed with retribution, who granted blanket clemency to people convicted of federal offenses connected to the January 6, 2021, attacks on the Capitol, can’t erase Peters’s sentence. Her state-level conviction is beyond the reach of his federal pardon power. And so she sits in a Colorado prison, the most prominent MAGA prisoner still behind bars. The sprawling campaign to “Free Tina Peters” is testing Colorado’s authority to enforce its own laws without interference from a federal government that wants to undo a conviction handed down by a jury. Trump—aided by the Justice Department, the Bureau of Prisons, White House counsel, and MAGA activists—is seeking to unravel her punishment in multiple ways, with the hope that one might work: a transfer into federal custody, a full pardon, or a release before the end of her sentence. Read Article

National: 2025: The Year Cybersecurity Crossed the AI Rubicon | Dan Lohrmann/Government Technology

“Crossing the Rubicon” means passing a point of no return. The idiom comes from Julius Caesar illegally leading his army across the river Rubicon in 49 B.C., an act that sparked the Roman civil war and ultimately made him dictator for life. But how has cybersecurity crossed the AI Rubicon? Put simply, the integration of AI into both attack and defense has permanently changed the nature of cybersecurity, creating a before-and-after moment in 2025. We are witnessing a great acceleration in the speed and scale of change, with an exponential growth in threats, complexity and the deployment of AI tools that characterized the year. At the same time, cybersecurity has become a geopolitical weapon with a convergence of cyber and real-world conflict. This is a shift from mere data loss to nation-state conflict and hacktivism as the dominant narratives. Read Article

National: Republicans push mail-in voting for the midterms in defiance of Trump | Lisa Kashinsky/Politico

Republicans are making mail-in voting a core part of their midterm battle plans — a sharp contrast with President Donald Trump’s efforts to abolish the practice as they scramble to turn out his base. In Wisconsin, the state party is preparing a full-court press of mailers, emails, phone banks, door knocks and digital ads to get voters to sign up for mail ballots. In Michigan, the Monroe County GOP ran a social media campaign ahead of the fall election urging voters to utilize permanent absentee ballots and is planning an even bigger push next year. In Pennsylvania, where Republicans poured $16 million into boosting the number of GOP voters using mail ballots in 2024, the state party chair called it “a priority” for 2026. The nonprofit Citizens Alliance, which aided efforts to get Republicans to return their mail ballots in Pennsylvania last year, is planning to knock 750,000 doors ahead of the midterms to encourage infrequent voters to embrace the practice. Read Article

National: The Justice Department has now sued 18 states in an effort to access voter data | NPR

The Department of Justice has filed lawsuits against four more states as part of the Trump administration’s attempt to access sensitive voter data. The DOJ is also suing one Georgia county, seeking records from the 2020 election. The department has now filed suit against 18 states — mostly Democratic-led, and all states that President Trump lost in the 2020 election — as part of its far-reaching litigation. For months, the Justice Department has been demanding certain states turn over complete, unredacted copies of their voter registration lists, including any driver’s license numbers and parts of voters’ Social Security numbers. Read Article

National: Congress could try to pass new election laws before the 2026 midterms | Carrie Levine/Votebeat

Republicans, led by President Donald Trump, have had a lot to say about the rules and laws that govern our elections. Changing them, though, is harder. House Republicans are signaling plans for legislation to inscribe at least some of the party’s election-administration wish list into federal law, including changes to the landmark National Voter Registration Act that would make it easier to remove ineligible voters from the rolls. Republicans have long accused states of failing to appropriately clean their voter rolls, and the U.S. Justice Department has filed a host of lawsuits seeking access to unredacted state voter rolls in what government lawyers have said is an effort to make sure states are complying with their obligations under federal law. Trump issued a sweeping executive order on elections in March, and the White House said last month he is working on a second. But major provisions of the March order have so far been halted by the courts after federal judges found the president lacked the constitutional authority to enact them. Read Article

National: Key lawmaker says Congress likely to kick can down road on cyber information sharing law | Tim Starks/CyberScoop

With a little more than a month left before a foundational cyber threat information sharing law expires for a second time, Congress might have to do another short-term extension as negotiations on a longer deal aren’t yet bearing fruit, a key lawmaker said Tuesday. House Homeland Security Chairman Andrew Garbarino, R-N.Y., said the problem with a long-term extension of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015, which provides legal protections to companies to share cyber threat data with the federal government and other companies, is that there are three different views about how to approach it. The Trump administration and some in the Senate want a clean, 10-year reauthorization of the law, which Congress extended last month until Jan. 30 as part of the legislation that ended the government shutdown, after the information sharing law lapsed in October. But a reauthorization without any changes could run into House opposition, Garbarino said. Read Article

National: AI tops cybersecurity in survey of state IT priorities | Colin Wood/StateScoop

In a development that will surprise few who’ve been tracking government, technology or world events more broadly, artificial intelligence has, on average, overtaken all other concerns in state technology offices across the nation. The National Association of State Chief Information Officers, a group that represents state governments’ top IT officials, on Tuesday published its annual list of priorities, which is based on a survey of its membership. In last year’s list, AI was barely edged out for the top slot by cybersecurity, a technical and political concern that has made the list all 20 years since its first edition. But this year, said Doug Robinson, NASCIO’s executive director, AI won and “it wasn’t even close. It’s been a very swift ascension to No. 1.” For state CIOs, generative AI tools represent a means of offsetting workforce shortages that have been slow to repopulate after the COVID-19 pandemic, chatbots to provide residents more personalized experiences when they visit government websites, or a scalpel to shave a few extra hours of work off processing applications for safety-net benefits that will receive less support under the second Donald Trump presidency. Read Article

Colorado Officials Reject Trump’s ‘Pardon’ of a Convicted Election Denier | Jack Healy/The New York Times

President Trump’s pledge to pardon Tina Peters, a former Colorado county clerk convicted of tampering with voting machines, touched off a new battle on Friday over the fate of perhaps the last high-profile 2020 election denier still behind bars. Democratic leaders in Colorado dismissed the pardon as an empty attempt to bully a Democratic state into freeing one of the president’s political allies. They argued that Mr. Trump had no legal power to overturn Ms. Peters’s conviction in state court. Ms. Peters, the former clerk in conservative-leaning Mesa County, a ranching and oil-and-gas region on the western edge of the state, was sentenced to nine years in prison last year after being found guilty of interfering with voting machines in an effort to prove falsehoods that they had been used to rig the 2020 election against Mr. Trump. Read Article

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