National: ‘There is a voter-suppression wing’: An ugly American tradition clouds the 2020 presidential race | James Rainey/Los Angeles Times

A Memphis, Tenn., poll worker turned away people wearing Black Lives Matter T-shirts, saying they couldn’t vote. Robocalls warned thousands of Michigan residents that mail-in voting could put their personal information in the hands of debt collectors and police. In Georgia, officials cut polling places by nearly 10%, even as the number of voters surged by nearly 2 million. The long American tradition of threatening voting access — often for Black people and Latinos — has dramatically resurfaced in 2020, this time buttressed by a record-setting wave of litigation and an embattled president whose reelection campaign is built around a strategy of sowing doubt and confusion. Voting rights activists depict the fights against expanding voter access as a last-ditch effort by President Trump and his allies to disenfranchise citizens who tend to favor Democrats. The administration insists — despite no evidence of a widespread problem — that it must enforce restrictions to prevent voter fraud.“We have an incredibly polarized country and we have a political party whose leader thinks it’s to the party’s advantage to make it harder for people to register to vote and to vote,” said Richard L. Hasen, a UC Irvine law professor and authority on voting. “So that is where we are.”

Michigan’s voter transportation ban upheld by federal appeals panel | Beth LeBlanc/The Detroit Times

A federal appeals court panel has upheld Michigan’s ban on transporting voters to the polls, overturning a Detroit federal district judge in the latest decision from a suit filed last year by a Democratic group seeking to invalidate the law. The voter-transportation law, which was challenged by the Priorities USA super political action committee, bans hiring transportation for a voter who is otherwise physically capable of walking. A violation is a misdemeanor in Michigan and punishable by up to 90 days in jail or a $500 fine.Michigan law also bans third parties from helping to deliver ballot applications unless the person is “affirmatively” asked to provide assistance.

Georgia: Some absentee ballot request forms list wrong return address | Mark Niesse, The/Atlanta Journal-Constitution

About 60,000 Georgia voters recently received absentee ballot request forms with the wrong return mailing or email address. Election officials said Wednesday that the absentee ballot requests will be delivered to their correct destinations, even if voters send them to the erroneous pre-printed addresses.The misprints occurred among absentee ballot request forms mailed to Georgia’s 6.9 million active voters by the secretary of state’s office last week, an effort to encourage voting away from precincts during the coronavirus pandemic.The issue affected voters in Troup County in west Georgia and Dawson County north of Atlanta. In Troup County, the return address for the local elections office listed the post-office box number as the street number, according to the county’s Facebook page. The U.S. Postal Service told the county it will deliver the forms to the correct address.

Texas: Officials Begin Walking Back Allegations About Noncitizen Voters | NPR

Texas officials are taking a step back on their claim they found 95,000 possible noncitizens in the state’s voter rolls. They say it is possible many of the people on their list should not be there. In a statement Tuesday, the Texas Secretary of State’s office said they “are continuing to provide information to the counties to assist them in verifying eligibility of Texas voters.” Last Friday, Texas Secretary of State David Whitley sent an advisory to local registrars asking them to look at their voter rolls. Whitley said his office flagged the names of 95,000 people who at one point in the past 22 years had identified as noncitizens with the Texas Department of Public Safety. In that timespan, officials said, they also registered to vote. Voting rights groups have said the state’s list is likely a list of naturalized citizens who recently got the right to vote.