Votebeat

Texas has a new backlog of voter address updates due to another state error

2026-10-16T18:30:02+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

Update, Friday Oct. 16, 2026, 2:45 p.m.: This story has been updated to include additional information provided post-publication by the Texas Secretary of State’s Office.

Four days before the start of early voting in Texas, county officials said they learned Thursday about another state error that has backlogged thousands of voter registration records.

This error affected address updates submitted through the state’s voter registration name and address change website between Sept. 1 and sometime last week.

That means election officials just receiving the records must quickly determine which were submitted before the Oct. 5 registration deadline and therefore must be updated in time for the start of early voting Monday.

Fifteen thousand affected records were sent to counties, said Alicia Pierce, the spokesperson for the Texas Secretary of State’s Office, but not all counties were impacted.

According to the Texas Association of County Election Officials, Bexar County election officials on Thursday received 3,000 records to process, Travis County received 1,100, Williamson County received 700, and Hays County received 400.

This is the latest in a string of challenges for increasingly hard-pressed local election officials. Earlier this week, county officials said they had cleared a backlog of hundreds of thousands of voter registration records that had piled up for over a year due to a separate state error involving a software update to the Texas Department of Public Safety’s online driver’s license portal. The Texas Secretary of State’s Office has offered counties grants to offset costs such as overtime pay and bringing in additional staff to help. Election officials said the state’s voter registration system, known as TEAM, made the backlog harder to resolve at a critical time.

Now they must contend with a new issue while they prepare voting equipment and supplies and equip poll workers for early voting. On top of that, election officials are also working through ballot-by-mail applications and processing remaining voter registration applications submitted by the deadline.

“Just when most counties were seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, another unexpected backlog is being dropped on county voter registrars,” said Chris McGinn, executive director of the Texas Association of County Election Officials.

“This continued mismanagement at the state level requires action and accountability from the Texas Legislature, because the current unpredictability of the TEAM system is unsustainable for our state’s election system,” McGinn said.

Some counties have reported the new backlogged records are missing necessary address information, McGinn said. The secretary of state’s office is escalating the issue to resolve it, he said.

In a Thursday email to county election officials obtained by Votebeat, Christina Adkins, the state’s elections director, said her office had identified an error with Texas.gov – a website that offers various services such as online updates to vehicle registrations and updates to voter registration records such as name changes and address changes.

The site is managed by the Texas Department of Information Resources and the websites were developed by Deloitte, the same vendor that works with DPS. But officials with the Texas Secretary of State’s office told Votebeat the issue originated with its Louisiana-based vendor, Civix, which runs the TEAM system.

In the email, Adkins said the issue was “an extra address validation with Texas.gov,” and Civix “has rerun all files from September 1 through the present to identify any affected voters. The Texas Online registration updates that were impacted by this will be sent out to the counties today.”

Adkins said not all counties had registrations that were impacted by the error and that “many counties will not see any increase to their Texas Online registrations at this time.“

Voters who have questions about their voter registration should contact their county voter registrar directly. A list of voter registrars by county is available here.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Natalia is based in Corpus Christi. Contact her at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Suspicious letters sent to election officials nationwide weeks before the midterms

2026-10-15T18:36:51+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Update, Oct. 15, 9 p.m.: This story has been updated with the news that a suspicious letter caused an evacuation in Arizona.

Update, Oct. 15, 6:15 p.m.: This story has been updated to reflect that letters were sent to Nebraska and Washington.

Correction, Oct. 15: Due to an editing error, the headline of this story originally stated that more than 100 suspicious letters were sent specifically to election officials. While more than 100 suspicious letters were sent, it is unknown how many went to election officials and how many went to politicians or other recipients.

Update, Oct. 15, 4:40 p.m.: This story has been updated to reflect that letters were sent to several other states and multiple U.S. senators.

Update, Oct. 15, 3:45 p.m.: This story has been updated to reflect that a suspicious letter was sent to Pennsylvania.

Update, Oct. 15, 3 p.m.: This story has been updated to reflect that a suspicious letter was sent to Connecticut.

Correction, Oct. 15: This story has been corrected with the fact that the FBI disclosed its investigation on Thursday, not Friday.

The FBI said Thursday that it is investigating a series of suspicious mailings sent to election officials across the nation, an unusually widespread example of election workers being physically threatened during a highly charged midterm campaign.

Federal officials have been speaking with targeted leaders across the country as they work to get a handle on the scope of the apparent attack. Three election officials briefed on the evolving investigation said they were told more than 100 letters were sent to people and groups across the country. The list includes at least two U.S. senators, Democrats Alex Padilla of California and Chris Murphy of Connecticut, and a polling organization.

Officials in Louisiana and Oklahoma said they received suspicious letters containing a powdery white substance. The Wisconsin Elections Commission said in a statement Thursday that it, too, had received “a suspicious mail piece” containing “an unidentified powdery substance” and that “after a thorough examination, the mail piece was deemed not dangerous.”

Meagan Wolfe, the state’s chief election official and the WEC administrator, said the incident would have no impact on the general election.

“Let this be very clear: this incident will not shake us,” Wolfe said in a statement. “Election officials are fully prepared to handle many challenges, and this will have no impact on our unwavering commitment to deliver a safe and secure election.”

In Arizona, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said his office received a letter filled with white powder on Thursday afternoon, which led to the evacuation of his office as hazmat workers cleared the area.

“This is a sobering moment that highlights the reality of election administration in this country today,” he said in a statement. “We will not be scared out of doing our jobs on behalf of the voters of Arizona.”

Nebraska also received a similar envelope, which staff did not open and turned over to the FBI. In a statement, Nebraska Secretary of State Bob Evnen said this was the second time a suspicious envelope had been delivered to his office — the first envelope arrived in 2024, when a wave of such letters arrived at election offices across the country.“In both instances, swift action was taken to isolate and then investigate the suspicious mailing,” Evnen wrote.

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan, and the office of Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs said that law enforcement had intercepted similar letters bound for their offices, and the Pennsylvania Department of State said the U.S. Postal Service blocked delivery of a suspicious letter on Wednesday.

The FBI also informed the Connecticut secretary of state a letter had been intercepted. The local FBI field office confirmed it had “received multiple interceptions.”

Several other states were also sent letters that were intercepted, including Georgia, Idaho, and South Dakota.

“Election officials should never have to fear for their personal safety while performing their duties, and there is no place in a peaceful democracy for violence, threats or acts of intimidation,” LaRose said. “We have a duty to the citizens of Ohio to deliver secure and accessible elections, and these kinds of cowardly threats will not deter us from that mission.”

The FBI said it could not confirm specific cases, but did say its investigation is expansive.

“The FBI and U.S. Postal Inspection Service are investigating a series of suspicious mailings sent to various addresses nationwide, including Secretary of State offices and their related election offices,” the FBI said. “Some of the letters contained an unknown substance and we are working closely with our law enforcement partners to respond to each incident.”

Attacks on elected officials have been on the rise in recent years. In 2024, suspicious packages were sent to election officials in at least six states.

Hayley Harding, Carrie Levine, Alexander Shur, Carter Walker, and Margery Beck contributed reporting.

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

You’re invited: How to prepare for the midterms

2026-10-15T16:27:51+00:00

The midterm elections are already underway. Elections in the U.S. don’t only happen on Election Day — they happen in the weeks ahead as election officials process voter registrations, mail absentee ballots and administer early voting.

So, how is mail voting going across the country? Or early voting at the polls? And what should Americans know about potential federal interference ahead of Election Day? Check in with election experts and Votebeat on Oct. 27.

Votebeat is a nonprofit newsroom that specializes in explaining how elections work. Each of our reporters and editors spend every day covering voting rules, election administration, misinformation, election lawsuits, local officials, and the systems that determine how ballots are cast and counted.

Questions for the panelists can be submitted with your event registration.

Live event: How to prepare for the midterms

Virtual webinar event
Oct. 27 at 12 p.m. ET
Sign up for free on Eventbrite!

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s Editorial Director. She runs big initiatives for Votebeat, like the Expert Desk, and manages investigations. She was previously the lead elections reporter for ProPublica, and helped manage the Electionland project for three federal election cycles, sharing information and tips with hundreds of newsrooms across the United States.

Bob Page is registrar of voters for Orange County, California, the fifth largest voting jurisdiction in the United States, serving about 1.9 million registered voters. He administers elections, provides access to voter registration, maintains voter registration records, and examines petition signatures. He is also vice president and member of the board of directors for the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials.

Tammy Patrick is a nationally recognized elections expert in the United States. She has been working in the election administration space since 2003. She started her career in elections by spending more than a decade as the federal compliance officer for Maricopa County, Arizona. She works to foster a voter-centric elections system and support election officials across the country.

Michael Alvarez is the Flintridge Foundation professor of political and computational social science at Caltech, and co-director of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project. He is a fellow of the Society for Political Methodology and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received the Career Achievement Award from the Society for Political Methodology.

Join us: RSVP to attend for free!

Experts say the midterms could face challenges, but are less concerned than in the spring

2026-10-15T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

President Donald Trump’s rhetoric about voter fraud, attempts to reshape U.S. election law, and efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election have left plenty of people worried that his administration will try to interfere with the 2026 midterm elections. But what threats are worth taking seriously, and what is just doomerism?

To answer that question with certainty, we’d need a crystal ball — which, unfortunately, is not in our arsenal. But we do have the next best thing: the educated guesses of more than 30 experts in election law and administration.

Last spring, we asked them to assess the likelihood of over two dozen potential scenarios that could upend the midterms — from new voting rules, to troops at the polls, to widespread voter fraud, to an overturned election. Now, with just weeks remaining until the midterms, we recently went back to them and asked for their final answers to the same questions.

In broad strokes, their opinions were unchanged. While they believe the election is likely to face challenges — such as federal agents interfering with the voting process — they ultimately do not expect a significant number of voters to be disenfranchised or the final results to be illegitimate. If anything, fewer things are keeping them up at night now than in the spring.

Experts do not expect election laws to change at this point

One of the least likely midterm scenarios, in the eyes of the experts, is that new voting laws or regulations will be put in place before the election. At least 26 of the 31 experts who filled out the questionnaire said it was unlikely that states would pass laws restricting mail voting, strengthening voter ID requirements, requiring new registrants to prove their citizenship, cutting access to in-person voting, or limiting or eliminating the use of tabulators to tally ballots.

This was a mild shift from the spring, when all of these scenarios (except limiting voting machines) were considered at least somewhat likely by a substantial minority of experts.

The reason for the change is pretty clear: Although some states might have passed new election laws in the spring and summer, by the fall, there was no longer time to enact any new laws. Mitchell Brown, a political science professor at Auburn University who was one of the experts who shifted her answer, explained that most legislatures had adjourned by the time of the second survey. “Unless something extraordinary happened it wouldn’t have been possible” to change the laws, she said.

Likewise, experts thought it was unlikely that the federal government would change election rules in any of those ways. That was largely unchanged from the spring, when our respondents were similarly skeptical that Trump would be able to get Congress or the courts to go along with his proposed election law changes, such as the SAVE America Act or his executive orders on elections.

Experts were much more emphatic about federal action than state action, with at least 24 saying it was not at all likely that federal law would affect four of these five aspects of voting. The exception, though, was mail voting. Twenty-five experts still thought it was unlikely that the federal government would restrict it, but only 11 said it was not at all likely, and four experts thought it was somewhat likely.

This is probably because most of our respondents (23 out of 31) filled out the questionnaire before the Supreme Court blocked the U.S. Postal Service’s proposed rules restricting the delivery of some mail ballots for the 2026 election. In a separate question, 16 of the 23 thought it was unlikely that the courts would allow the Postal Service rules to take effect, but there was plenty of uncertainty: Only eight said it was not at all likely.

With the Postal Service question resolved, though, experts are pretty sure the federal government won’t restrict mail voting in the midterms. Seven of the eight experts who answered that question after the Supreme Court’s ruling said further limits on mail voting were unlikely.

In general, experts are still very aware of the possibility that court rulings could significantly alter election rules shortly before the midterms. Almost half (13) of the 31 people surveyed thought that was at least somewhat likely. Notably, the share of experts saying so was roughly equal before and after the Supreme Court’s mid-September decisions on the Postal Service and Missouri’s congressional map, suggesting that their concerns were broader rather than tied to specific cases pending at the time.

Fewer experts than in the spring expect physical disruption at the polls

One of the biggest questions looming over the midterms is whether federal agents, such as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, will physically disrupt the voting process. It’s illegal to send armed troops to polling places absent a violent threat, but the Trump administration has sent mixed messages about whether it might do so — saying they have no plans to but declining to rule it out entirely.

Experts, though, consider this a serious possibility. Nineteen of the 31 thought it was at least somewhat likely that the federal government would deploy some form of military or law enforcement personnel at or near polling places during the midterms. That said, the share was notably smaller than in the spring; on net, four experts who took the survey both times switched from likely to unlikely.

Pam Smith, the president and CEO of Verified Voting and one of the experts who changed her answer, offered a number of reasons for her reevaluation. She noted that, since the spring, several primaries took place without any armed federal intervention, and several states (such as California) have passed laws to strengthen existing prohibitions on voter intimidation. She added that, paradoxically, the Trump administration’s rhetoric hinting about federal agents at polling places “also has given rise to robust pushback, including several lawsuits seeking to prevent this kind of scenario in advance.”

Brown, the Auburn professor, also switched her answer to this question between the two surveys. “There simply aren’t enough ICE agents out there, nor are there enough National Guard troops, to flood everywhere,” she explained.

Relatedly, a majority of experts (18 of 31) thought it was at least somewhat likely that Trump would ask federal agents to seize voting equipment or ballots after the election. However, that was significantly fewer than in the spring, with six experts, on net, changing their answers from likely to unlikely.

Experts were less concerned about seizures during voting itself. Most experts now think Trump probably will not ask federal agents to seize materials during the election, with only 13 of 31 saying that was likely. In the spring, a majority said that was at least somewhat likely.

Former Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson, a Republican who has broken with Trump on election issues, said he changed his mind on both questions after watching the president over the past few months. “While I am certainly troubled by much of the rhetoric and many actions, the administration has generally respected court decisions,” he wrote in an email. “Also, at key points - such as the President’s much ballyhooed election integrity address in July that ended up being a mostly nothingburger -- they have either stood down, or their actions did not rise to the level of their rhetoric.”

Another expert who changed his mind, Western Carolina University political scientist Christopher Cooper, noted that Republicans are starting to resign themselves to the idea that they will lose seats in the midterms. “It just seems that Trump has moved on,” he said. “After all, there’s an arch to be built.”

In general, experts still believe there will be physical threats to voters or polling places in 2026. Almost three-quarters (22 of 31) thought this was likely, roughly matching their spring responses. But, encouragingly, only nine of the 31 experts thought it was likely that a significant number of voters would decide not to vote in the midterms because of those threats.

Experts anticipate claims of fraud — but don’t think they’ll lead to an overturned election

One thing that hasn’t changed since the spring is our experts’ confidence in the integrity of U.S. elections. Virtually all of them (30 of 31) believe it is unlikely that a significant number of ineligible voters will cast ballots in the midterms, including 27 who believe it is not at all likely. The same number of experts believe it is unlikely that voter fraud could influence the outcome of a 2026 congressional race, including 26 who believe it is not at all likely.

Of course, politicians don’t all share this confidence — and experts expect them to question the election as a result. Three-quarters of experts (23 of 31) said they thought it was at least somewhat likely that a significant number of losing candidates would claim fraud influenced the outcome of the midterms. And every single expert thought it was likely that at least one congressional or statewide election result in 2026 would be legally challenged.

But an election being legally challenged isn’t the same as an election getting overturned — and experts are confident that the final midterm results will reflect the will of the voters. The vast majority (26 of 31) said that it was unlikely that any congressional or statewide election results from 2026 would be overturned.

Overall, our survey found that election experts are cautiously optimistic that the 2026 midterms will be administered fairly — even in the face of significant challenges. But they are also keeping a watchful eye out for a handful of serious and unprecedented threats. And even if the election goes smoothly, they warn not to discount the psychological impact of the perception that democracy is under threat.

Cooper, the Western Carolina University professor, summed up the thoughts of many of his peers. “Even though I think the odds of successfully pulling most of this off is low, the effect on distrust in the system is real and concerning.”

Nathaniel Rakich is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Nathaniel at nrakich@votebeat.org.

Texas election officials clear backlog of thousands of voter registrations

2026-10-14T22:24:46+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

Election officials across Texas appear to have cleared a backlog of hundreds of thousands of voter registration applications and updates that went unprocessed for more than a year due to a state software error.

More than 500,000 voter registration records were caught in what the Texas Department of Public Safety said last month was an error related to a software update for the agency’s online driver’s license portal.

Roughly a month after state officials acknowledged the issue, The Texas Secretary of State’s Office and the Texas Association of County Election Officials both said on Wednesday that they’re not aware of any county still working through the backlog.

Kristin Miles, president of the election officials’ association and the Bastrop County election administrator, said the effort shows county election officials will do whatever it takes to ensure that eligible voters can cast ballots.

“If that means long nights and working weekends, county election officials are not going to fail the voters of Texas,” Miles said. But, she added, the state “should be looking at ways to prevent those things from happening again in the future to ensure that county election officials are not burdened by issues that may arise. Because at the end of the day, it was county election officials who put in the work to get the job done.”

Last month, Votebeat first reported on the backlogged voter registration records, which dated back to October 2025. The news came shortly before the state’s Oct. 5 voter registration deadline, which meant election officials had to scramble to get through backlogged records on top of hundreds of voter registration applications arriving daily.

Voting rights groups have sued the state, saying the backlog breached a 2021 settlement agreement that required Texas to provide a reliable way for people to register to vote through DPS’ online driver’s license portal.

Some better-resourced counties with outside vendors and additional technology, including Dallas, Harris, and Collin counties, were able to get through the backlog within a week. But many election officials said issues with the secretary of state’s voter registration system, known as TEAM, made the backlog harder to resolve during a critical time.

The Texas Secretary of State’s Office said it would offer counties grants to pay for costs related to the backlog, and on Wednesday confirmed it is still offering money to cover overtime and temporary workers.

“Texas counties have worked diligently and have cleared the backlog. We don’t know of any counties with pending applications,” Alicia Pierce, the spokesperson for the secretary of state’s office said in an email Wednesday.

Although the backlog related to the DPS records has been cleared, election officials continue to process voter registration applications they’re receiving by mail and in person ahead of the election. Even if they are processed later, registrations that were postmarked or submitted through DPS’ portal ahead of the Oct. 5 registration deadline will be considered valid for the Nov. 3 election.

Pierce said if a voter registered through the DPS web portal but does not appear on the voter roll, they can cast a provisional ballot and election officials will take additional steps to determine their eligibility so it can be counted.

“Election officials have an established method with DPS to check the transaction. If that voter did register through DPS, the vote will be counted,” she said.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Natalia is based in Corpus Christi. Contact her at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Wisconsin officials call for prompt ballot return after court rules against proposed backup plan

2026-10-14T20:24:03+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Election officials are again urging Wisconsin voters to return their absentee ballots as early as possible after an Oct. 6 court ruling blocked a plan that would have allowed voters with late-arriving mail ballots to cast provisional ballots on Election Day. That decision led officials to double down on their long-standing advice for voters to submit absentee ballots well in advance, whether by mail or through alternative return methods.

Voters should not mail back their ballots if Election Day is less than two weeks away, Rock County Clerk Lisa Tollefson told reporters on a call Tuesday. Instead, she said, “We want them to actually deliver it to the clerk directly, use a drop box, find an alternate method, because if we don’t have it by 8 p.m. we can’t count it.”

Two-thirds of Wisconsin clerks observed issues with absentee ballot mail delivery in the April election, a Wisconsin Elections Commission survey showed. Clerks like Tollefson worry delays could happen again and would be exacerbated by voters mailing ballots late.

So far, clerks haven’t seen many issues with mailing ballots, Chetek City Clerk Mark Eby, the vice president of the Wisconsin Municipal Clerks Association, told reporters Tuesday. Ballots began going out in mid-September, and voters have already returned over 142,000. It’s the late returns clerks worry about.

Mail delays pose a significant risk to Wisconsin voters because it is one of 35 states that do not accept late-arriving mail. Unlike the 15 states that allow ballots postmarked by Election Day to arrive late, Wisconsin requires all absentee ballots to arrive at the polls by 8 p.m. on Election Day to be counted.

The League of Women Voters of Wisconsin filed a lawsuit in July to allow voters whose mail ballots would likely arrive late to cast a provisional ballot in case the mail one doesn’t show. The lawsuit is still pending in Dane County court, but Judge Rhonda Lanford ruled last week against a motion for a temporary injunction that would have allowed the provisional ballot relief in the upcoming election.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Voting rights groups sue Texas over failure to process more than 500,000 voter registrations

2026-10-14T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

What happened?

Voting rights groups are suing the state of Texas after more than 500,000 voter registration applications were submitted through the Texas Department of Public Safety’s web portal but never processed.

The groups are asking a state district judge to enforce a 2021 settlement agreement that required Texas to provide a reliable way for people to register to vote through DPS’ online driver’s license portal.

What’s the dispute?

In 2016, Texas voters and voting rights groups sued the state over its lack of online voter registration. They argued it was a violation of the National Voter Registration Act that voters could not register online while updating their address, driver’s license, or state ID through DPS. A federal judge ruled in their favor in 2018, but an appeals court overturned the ruling in 2019 because the plaintiffs lacked standing.

Voters and voting rights groups sued again in 2020. This time, a federal judge ordered Texas to offer voters the option to register to vote through DPS’ online portal when updating their driver’s license or state ID. In 2021, the state settled the lawsuit, agreeing to permanently maintain the process.

Now, the new lawsuit argues that the recent failures of voter registration systems run by DPS and the Texas Secretary of State’s Office have prevented the state from meeting that obligation.

DPS and the secretary of state’s office last month sent county election officials a backlog of hundreds of thousands of voter registration records and updates delayed by a software update error with the DPS web portal. There were at least 500,000 records dating back to October 2025. Election officials also said issues with the secretary of state’s voter registration system, known as TEAM, have made the backlog harder to resolve during a critical time.

The lawsuit says some voters are still facing problems with their registrations ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm election.

What is the plaintiff asking for?

The lawsuit, filed last week in Bexar County’s 224th District Court, is asking a judge to order both DPS and the Texas Secretary of State’s Office to maintain a functioning registration process, produce records documenting registration failures, and show proof of their compliance to the court within a month.

“Since at least October 2025, Defendants have breached and continue to breach the contract by failing to maintain the procedures that ensure simultaneous online voter registration with driver license renewal or change of address transactions,” the lawsuit says.

They argue that a provision of the 2021 settlement says that the state could be sued again if “data, methodological, or other systemic limitations cause the simultaneous registration procedures outlined herein to fail to permit simultaneous voter registration.”

Who are the plaintiffs?

The suit was filed by the League of Women Voters of Texas and MOVE Texas Civic Fund, a nonprofit organization focused on engaging young Texans and underrepresented communities. Both organizations were also plaintiffs in the 2021 settlement agreement.

“The 2021 settlement agreement paved the way for millions of Texans to register to vote online with just the click of a box,” said Karla Maradiaga of the Texas Civil Rights Project, which is representing the plaintiffs, in a statement. “Now, before a critical midterm election, the state is in denial about issues with the DPS system despite knowing voters have already been impacted, and has refused to be transparent with Texans about why these delays happened and what they will do to remedy this unacceptable breach.”

What happens now?

DPS and the secretary of state’s office are expected to file their responses to the plaintiff’s allegations. A judge will decide whether the registration failures constitute a breach of the state’s 2021 settlement agreement to maintain a reliable voter registration system through DPS’s web portal.

DPS and secretary of state officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Read more Votebeat coverage of Texas’ 2026 failure to process voter registration applications:

Unknown number of Texas voter registrations went unprocessed due to DPS error (Sept. 22, 2026)
Texas counties are receiving tens of thousands of unprocessed voter registration applications due to state error, election association leader said (Sept. 23, 2026)
Key GOP lawmaker says state should have caught error that caused Texas voter registration backlog (Sept. 24, 2026)
Texas’ delayed voter applications highlight registration woes (Sept. 25, 2026)
Texas officials knew of issues with its voter registration web portal in March, records show (Oct. 1, 2026)
Election officials racing to clear Texas registration backlog say state system makes that task even harder (Oct. 5, 2026)

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Natalia is based in Corpus Christi. Contact her at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Department of Justice charges 4 more noncitizens in Pennsylvania with voting in the 2024 election

2026-10-13T21:24:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

What happened?

The Department of Justice announced Monday that four Pennsylvania residents had been charged with noncitizen voting, part of the Trump administration’s nationwide crackdown on election crimes ahead of the 2026 midterms.

In the same announcement, the department said 12 individuals in other states were also charged with noncitizen-voting-related crimes.

There is no evidence the cases are related or that voter fraud is happening on a widespread or coordinated scale.

Who was charged?

Hacina Saadi, 48; Paulo Silva, 54; Jamil Ahmad, 50; and Nighat Jamil, 47, were all charged with one count of voting by an alien during the 2024 election. Silva, Ahmad, and Jamil are all lawful permanent residents, while the Department of Justice said Saadi was residing in the country illegally.

The individuals or their attorneys did not immediately respond to emails seeking comments.

What is the context?

The charges announced Monday bring the total number of individuals charged with noncitizen-voting-related crimes in Pennsylvania to 11 since September.

Election officials contend that while voter fraud, including noncitizen voting, does occasionally happen, it is exceedingly rare.

Votebeat and Spotlight PA analyzed data on election crimes from the Pennsylvania court system, the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, Department of Justice press releases, and news reports dating back to mid-2015. The analysis found 165 allegedly fraudulent ballots have been cast in that time, including the four announced on Monday.

In that time period, more than 67 million votes were cast in Pennsylvania, meaning the rate of alleged fraudulent voting was roughly 0.00024%.

The Trump administration has also claimed that there are thousands of potential noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls. In July, the Department of Homeland Security claimed it had identified 250,000 potential noncitizens registered to vote in four states, including 14,576 in Pennsylvania.

Last month, Votebeat and Spotlight PA obtained an email from the DHS to Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt in which the department laid out its methodology for identifying those potential noncitizens registered to vote and offered to provide the full list to the state. However, as of today, it has not yet shared the list with Pennsylvania officials.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Wisconsin officials can count ballots that arrive late over official errors, judge rules

2026-10-13T19:26:30+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Update, Oct. 14, 9:45 a.m.: This story has been updated to include comments from Wisconsin Elections Commission chair Don Millis.

Wisconsin clerks can count ballots that are in a municipality’s possession by 8 p.m. on Election Day but don’t arrive at polling places until after that time because of election official errors, a Dane County judge ruled Tuesday.

The decision comes months after Dane County Circuit Judge Everett Mitchell first ruled that Madison was correct to count 23 ballots that the city had in its possession before Election Day in April but didn’t reach the polls until after the 8 p.m. deadline, a delay city officials say was caused by election administrator error.

“Where a qualified elector has complied with every statutory requirement, and the ballot was in the custody of the municipal clerk in time for delivery to the polling place, the failure of election officials to deliver it by 8:00 p.m. is not a lawful ground for rejecting the ballot,” Mitchell said in his Tuesday order.

Wisconsin law says that ballots must be “delivered to the polling place no later than 8 p.m.” on Election Day.

The lawsuit was filed by Margaret and Robert Honig, two of the 23 voters whose ballots in the state’s April Supreme Court race were delayed, and whose ballots the Wisconsin Elections Commission ordered not to be counted before Mitchell reversed the agency’s decision in May. It alleges that discounting properly cast votes over election officials’ errors would deprive voters of their constitutional voting rights.

The commission argued that a plain reading of Wisconsin law states that ballots arriving after 8 p.m. may not be counted. Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell disagreed, saying that state law can’t be reasonably interpreted to punish voters over election officials’ mistakes.

Ann Jacobs, a Democratic appointee on the Wisconsin Elections Commission, said she was delighted by the Tuesday decision.

“The errors of the clerk should not be visited upon innocent voters,” she said. “This is the right outcome.”

Don Millis, the Republican chair of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, said he doesn’t believe Mitchell’s decision should be appealed. But he questioned the logistical hurdles and potential liabilities this decision could create for clerks in certain scenarios, like whether a clerk would be responsible if a voter returned a ballot to a clerk’s office — rather than a polling place — just before polls close.

Mitchell clarified that the decision doesn’t extend deadlines for voters who return ballots late, nor does it allow officials to count late-arriving ballots if the voter was even partially responsible for the late arrival.

“Today’s decision is a cause for celebration, a major victory for voting rights in Wisconsin,” said Law Forward staff counsel Scott Thompson, who represents the Madison voters in the case.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

From martial law to banning voting machines, election skeptics urge Trump to take extreme action

2026-10-13T15:08:08+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Clarification, Oct. 14: This story has been updated to clarify what Cleta Mitchell wants the Commerce Department to do and her role in Trump’s 2020 call to the Georgia secretary of state.

Since being released early from prison in June, former Colorado election clerk Tina Peters has been granted extraordinary access to the halls of power in Washington.

Peters said she has traveled to Washington seven times, visited the White House at least twice, and met with senior officials at the Justice and Commerce departments — remarkable access for someone on parole after a 2024 felony conviction for tampering with voting machines in an attempt to show that the 2020 election was rigged against President Donald Trump.

She’s a high-profile example of a group of Trump supporters and conservative activists trying to lay out a roadmap for the president to follow. They are urging him to take more extreme steps to try and influence the outcome of an election that many polls suggest could end Republican control of Congress. But as the election closes in, the activists are now voicing increasing concerns that the president and his administration aren’t going to act on their ideas.

Peters isn’t shy about what she wants. The 71-year-old activist is pushing the Trump administration to use emergency powers before the November election to scrutinize voting machines across America, though that’s something most experts and lawyers say it can’t legally do.

“A lot of people would say that we just need to go rogue and declare this radical emergency and we need to shut everything down,” Peters said last week on an election activist livestream on Rumble. “The encouraging part is that there are already orders and laws in place that allow them to do what they need to do.”

Other conservative activists pushing for changes to election administration include:

Cleta Mitchell, head of the Election Integrity Network and a Trump ally, who is pushing the Commerce Department to require a partial hand count of the election results because of potential national security risks with voting machines.
Mike Lindell, a longtime Trump ally who has spent years promoting claims that voting machines were used to manipulate U.S. elections, who wants Trump to declare a national emergency and prevent the use of electronic voting machines in November.
Peter Ticktin, a Florida attorney representing Peters and longtime Trump friend, who said Trump might have to declare martial law if the election results are in question.
Steve Bannon, a longtime Trump ally and former White House chief strategist who hosts the influential right-wing podcast War Room, who has repeatedly urged Trump to use emergency powers to require voter identification at the polls and send ICE agents to polling places.
James Mills, head of the Georgia State Election Board, who sent a letter last week urging the Trump administration to compel his state to make election software updates before the November election.

A wide array of lawyers, voting rights groups, civil rights leaders, and Democrats have denounced the ideas as an unconstitutional attack on the nation’s electoral process. But such criticisms haven’t deterred Trump from trying to advance a variety of proposals to impose more federal control over elections.

Federal courts have blocked Trump from advancing key pillars of two executive orders that would have transformed the U.S. Postal Service into a ballot regulation agency, eliminated grace periods for ballots arriving after Election Day, and required all people to provide documented proof of citizenship to register to vote.

With most of his efforts at election oversight blocked, Trump has left open the possibility he might heed the calls of supporters urging him to take drastic action before November.

“Let me just say that stranger things have happened, OK?” Trump said in an August interview with Wayne Allyn Root on Real America’s Voice, responding to a question about declaring a national security emergency as a way to assert more authority over elections. “I’ll leave it at that.”

‘Sowing confusion, chaos and distrust’

The Trump administration has laid out an Election Day plan that includes dispatching 1,000 election monitors to look for any problems in key states, establishing FBI command posts across the nation, and military monitoring of potential cyber attacks from hostile nations. Pentagon officials have said they have no plans to send armed forces to polling places on Election Day. But the Trump administration has stopped short of foreclosing the possibility that ICE or armed federal agents could operate near or in polling places, a move that could cross legal lines.

Sean Morales-Doyle, senior director of the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights and Elections Program, said federal laws and precedent make it extremely unlikely that Trump would be able to take any meaningful steps to seize voting machines before the election. And that may not be the ultimate goal, he said.

“The point of this concerted campaign to undermine our elections from this administration is really not about changing the rules, because even they know the president lacks the authority,” said Morales-Doyle. “It is about sowing confusion, chaos and distrust and undermining public trust in our elections.”

Peters appears to be the person who has had the greatest access to Trump administration officials in recent months. Trump had lunch at the White House with Peters and Ticktin in late June, just four weeks after Peters was released from state prison. Peters returned for a second visit last week, Ticktin told Votebeat.

Mitchell and Peters have focused part of their efforts on persuading the Commerce Department to use what they said is existing authority over voting machines, which a letter from Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said introduces a national security risk because they contain parts from other nations, including China.

Mitchell argues that a national emergency declaration that Trump declared in 2019 gives the Commerce Department the power to compel election officials to conduct a partial hand count before certification. Earlier this year, Justice Department official Keith Olsen reportedly tried to get the Commerce Department to classify voting machine components as national security threats, which could lead to them being banned from use in the U.S. But investigators found no evidence to support the claims, Reuters reported, and the idea was scrapped.

Mitchell, in an interview with Votebeat, expressed frustration that the Trump administration has not placed enough importance on the concerns and blamed people working for the president for not doing enough to address election issues.

“I can call the president anytime I want to — and I have,” said Mitchell, who declined to say when she last spoke to Trump. “I told the president this: I wish that the people in your administration knew or cared as much about election integrity as you do.”

Neither the Commerce Department nor the White House responded to requests for comment.

Mitchell said she signs every message to administration officials with the same sign-off: Tick-tock.

That’s the same message Ticktin said he has been trying to convey.

“We are running out of time,” said Ticktin, who characterized the threat from Chinese-made parts in voting machines as akin to an act of war.

“This is getting serious enough and critical enough that it might even require, at some point, martial law,” said Ticktin. “People say: ‘Ticktin’s crazy.’ If I’m not crazy and what I am saying is true that China is attacking us in some way, well then we’re really in a state of belligerence with China and, sooner or later, it’s going to be too late to change things in a peaceful way.”

Ticktin suggested that federal forces could help seize voting machines in places where the count is in question, and potentially hand-count ballots.

Ticktin’s call represents the most extreme — and most unlikely — idea being pushed by election skeptics.

Mitchell, Peters, and others have been urging the administration to take more strategic steps to address their concerns.

A focal point for the group is Georgia, where Mills surprised members of the state elections board by sending off a letter urging the Trump administration to order major changes to the state’s voting equipment before the November election.

The letter asked the Justice Department to force state and county officials to install software updates before the November election. It also asked the Justice Department to prevent QR-code-based tabulation in Georgia and require Georgia to end its use of the codes in six months. But installing new software would require time, money and resources — all of which are in short supply for Georgia in the weeks leading up to the election.

Trump has long focused his ire on Georgia, where he lost the 2020 presidential election by fewer than 12,000 votes — less than 1% of the ballots cast. Mitchell joined Trump on a call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger after the election where the president pressed him to “find” him more than 11,000 votes, enough to change the outcome. Earlier this year, the FBI searched Fulton County’s election hub and seized more than 650 boxes, including ballots, from the 2020 election. The results in Georgia this fall will be pivotal to partisan control of the U.S. Senate.

Beyond Georgia, others like Bannon and Lindell keep pressing the president to issue a new national security declaration to prevent the use of electronic voting machines to tally votes at all.

“The president needs to completely declare a national emergency,” Lindell said. “The president can just make a national argument and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to go paper ballots, hand counting.’”

But making such a declaration wouldn’t allow Trump to ban voting machines or require states to count all ballots by hand. The Constitution grants the president limited control over elections, which are usually handled by state and local officials with direction from Congress.

At the end of the day, said Morales-Doyle, the most important thing voters can do is make plans to cast their ballots in ways they feel safe and secure.

“At this moment, when democracy has come under such unprecedented and pointed attacks, it is more important than ever that people invest in democracy and that do so in defiance of all this,” he said.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

‘Mail early’: Election officials urge people to get ballots in pronto amid Postal Service slowdowns

2026-10-12T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

This news analysis was originally distributed in Votebeat’s free weekly newsletter. Sign up to get future editions, including the latest reporting from Votebeat bureaus and curated news from other publications, delivered to your inbox every Saturday.

The U.S. Postal Service had enough problems even before President Donald Trump tried to transform the agency into a de facto election regulation hub that would have had the power to reject ballots heading to voters this November.

That plan was quashed by the Supreme Court after a tumultuous legal battle. But that hasn’t taken the spotlight off the Postal Service, which is still facing a lot of questions about how prepared it is to handle the massive flow of ballots moving around the country over the next four weeks.

The Postal Service has lost money for decades. Since 2007, the agency has lost $118 billion. Despite a mantra that “neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night” would keep the mail from getting through, the Postal Service is charging customers more and delivering some mail more slowly. Things are so bad that the Postmaster General has warned that the agency could run out of cash early next year.

The problems are a concern for tens of millions of Americans expected to vote by mail in this November’s elections. This year, the challenges could be compounded by belt-tightening measures that could lead to more ballots being rejected if voters aren’t paying attention.

The so-called Regional Transportation Optimization plan the agency rolled out last year has reduced pickup times at more than 15,000 post offices that are more than 50 miles from a regional processing center. That means a ballot could sit in a local post office and not get a postmark until the following day.

For people dropping off their ballots at the last minute, that could mean the difference between their votes being counted or rejected. The problems are likely to have the biggest impact on rural areas, which tend to be more likely to vote for Republicans.

Oregon has been an early case study in how the system works — or doesn’t. Oregon, which was the first state to shift to voting entirely by mail in 1998, was part of the Postal Service pilot project testing the consolidation process. The results were not encouraging. The Postal Service’s own audit found that performance declined and complaints increased.

Most importantly for voters, Oregon has seen an increase in ballots being rejected because they weren’t postmarked as required by Election Day. During the primary election this past May, more than 7,300 ballots that might have been counted when they came in after Election Day were rejected because they didn’t have a proper postmark, amounting to a 13% rejection rate, up from 9.5% in 2024.

That set off some alarm bells in Oregon, which is trying to address the problems and ensure that fewer ballots are rejected this November.

Leading the charge is Secretary of State Tobias Read, a Democrat who has worked to expand the state’s ballot drop box system, which operates independently of the Postal Service. Oregon has more than 320 drop boxes. More than 60% of all Oregon voters used drop boxes in 2024, but it’s much easier for people in urban areas to use them than those in rural areas, where it can take an hour or more to reach one. Read just got state lawmakers to add another 20 for the November election to help expand the system’s reach.

Read is so worried about postal delays that he’s encouraging people to send ballots back a week before the election or instead plan to secure a postmark or vote another way.

“We can’t count on it,” said Read, referring to the Postal Service. “It might work, but I don’t want anyone to be taking a chance with their ballot.”

Voters who send their ballots back close to Election Day should go into the post office and ask workers to manually postmark the ballot, Read said.

“It’s not that the Postal Service is something you should avoid,” he said. “Just do it early if you’re going to use the mail.”

The Postal Service itself is also encouraging voters to send their ballots back well before Election Day to ensure they are counted. The agency has a 90-second public service announcement on its website urging people to “mail early.” For some voters, the agency suggests that people send their ballots in at least a week before the deadline.

In Washington, Secretary of State Steve Hobbs is going further and urging people to send in their ballots 10 days before the deadlines to ensure that they aren’t rejected. The problem with ballots being rejected because of late postmarks skyrocketed in some Washington counties by more than 300% between the 2024 primary and the 2026 primary.

Like Read, Hobbs, a Democrat, is encouraging people to use a drop box to return their ballots - and make sure they make a plan to ensure their vote is counted.

“If you’re going to mail, you better do it right away,” he said. “Don’t wait.”

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Arizona’s secretary of state race pits an election defender against an election skeptic

2026-10-09T20:42:44+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Arizona’s free newsletter here.

Arizonans will soon weigh in on the future of the state’s elections — and once again, they face a choice between a defender or a skeptic.

Democrat Adrian Fontes, a lawyer and former county recorder who has spent years championing the state’s voting system, is seeking a second term as secretary of state in this November’s election. But Republican Alex Kolodin, an attorney and state lawmaker who previously brought a lawsuit that falsely alleged the 2020 election was stolen from President Donald Trump, is also vying for the office.

The race is just the latest manifestation of a yearslong struggle between those who trust the integrity of Arizona elections and those who have cast doubt on it, dating back to conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. The winner of this round will oversee the high-stakes 2028 presidential race in the key swing state.

Fontes and Kolodin have run fiery and, at times, ugly campaigns. Both have repeatedly accused each other of lying. Fontes opened a recent debate by announcing his campaign staff had launched a website to fact-check Kolodin throughout the evening. Later, Kolodin repeatedly referred to Fontes as an attorney for the Sinaloa Cartel, a reference to Fontes’ previous work as a federal public defender.

But their disdain for each other — and willingness to voice it — is about where their similarities end. Here’s what to know about the candidates and how they would shape the state’s elections.

The secretary of state matchup has its roots in the 2020 election

Fontes stepped into his position as secretary of state after one term as a top election official in Maricopa County, the state’s most populous voting jurisdiction. There, in his then-little-known position, he presided over the 2020 election — and was unexpectedly launched into the white-hot political spotlight amid efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn the results of that year’s presidential contest.

Kolodin was one of those allies. Now, he’s a member of the Arizona House, where he’s part of the body’s far-right Freedom Caucus. In the legislature, he has supported bills to ban vote centers, shorten the early voting period, and require voters to recertify their address each election cycle to vote by mail.

He also led the charge to put a measure on the November ballot that would require mail voters to provide ID, among other changes to state election law. That proposal has drawn alarm from Democrats and some Republicans who allege it would cripple the state’s culture of mail voting — a claim that Kolodin denies.

Kolodin, who did not agree to an interview for this story, has repeatedly said on the campaign trail that voters don’t trust elections. In his contested primary race, he heavily criticized election officials and has described the state’s existing election systems as dysfunctional.

But he rejects the “election denier” label — and more recently, he has sought to moderate his image. On the campaign trail, he has noted that several of his election reform bills have passed with bipartisan support, though those largely came out of negotiations around must-pass pieces of legislation. He also has pledged faster election results and dodged questions from journalists on whether he is confident in the results of past elections. And he has attacked Fontes, describing him as overreaching the authority of his office.

“Adrian Fontes doesn’t know how to follow the law,” Kolodin said during a televised debate on Sept. 30.

But Fontes, who is now fighting efforts by Trump to exercise more federal control over elections, has cast Kolodin as a danger to voting rights in Arizona. He also described his opponent as a crisis maker and a “bona fide, found-guilty-of-lying liar” in a recent interview with Votebeat, a reference to the Arizona State Bar’s admonishment of Kolodin for making evidence-free claims of massive voting fraud in cases he brought after the 2020 election.

“It appears as though he despises all institutions and despises all ways that we organize as people,” Fontes said of Kolodin, adding that his opponent had a “let’s just tear it all down” mentality. “That distance from reality is dangerous.”

In response, Kolodin told Votebeat that Fontes was “lying to voters because he doesn’t respect them.” He referenced a handful of recent instances in which the courts ordered Fontes to rewrite ballot measure language and an incident in which Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap, a Republican, accused Fontes of withholding lists of federal felons who aren’t allowed on the county’s voter roll. Fontes’ office said that the holdup was the fault of the U.S. Department of Justice, which wasn’t giving it the information in a usable format.

“His eagerness to look voters in the face and lie is quite frankly disgusting,” Kolodin said. “Let me be crystal clear: I will never lie to the people of Arizona and I will deliver the most transparent secretary of state’s office in the history of Arizona.”

Nuts and bolts: How Fontes and Kolodin would run Arizona’s elections

In Arizona, local officials are in charge of most day-to-day election and voter registration operations in their counties.

But whoever wins the secretary of state post will play a critical role in issuing voluntary guidance to election offices and dictating how voting must be run via the state’s Elections Procedures Manual. They’ll also oversee the state’s voter registration system — called the Arizona Voter Information Database, or AVID — and enjoy a big bully pulpit to suggest election-related changes.

If elected to a second term, Fontes said he would fight for money to build and implement a new statewide voter registration database. The state’s contract for AVID, he said, is at the end of its life and the system itself is unwieldy. He said the state needs a system that will allow officials to “more easily make adjustments” as state law shifts.

Fontes also hopes to get funding to increase salaries for employees in his office, which he said trail other state agencies and are “kind of embarrassing.”

And he intends to again push for the Voters First Act, a series of election changes supported by legislative Democrats. The legislation would require all counties to use vote centers and count early ballots accidentally returned to the wrong jurisdiction, create a new election IT and cybersecurity fund, allow state and county officials to accept privately funded grants supporting elections, and more.

Meanwhile, Kolodin has taken aim at Fontes’ revisions to the Election Procedures Manual, which is reissued every two years and has the force of law in Arizona. At a debate last month, he noted that several of Fontes’ changes to the manual were ultimately struck down in court, including a provision that would have allowed state officials to refuse to include a county’s vote in statewide totals if it failed to certify results on time and a ban on offensive speech at polling places.

But Fontes defended putting those rules into the manual while speaking with reporters after that debate.

“Other courts disagreed on that policy analysis that I had, and that’s it,” he said.

At the capitol, Kolodin previously supported legislation to force a statewide return to precinct-style voting, in which voters are assigned to a polling place instead of casting ballots at any vote center in their counties. He has also sponsored bills to require voters to confirm their address each election cycle to vote by mail and prohibit the state attorney general from prosecuting county supervisors who vote against certifying elections — a response to Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes, who charged two supervisors in Cochise County with election interference for delaying the canvass of its election results in 2022.

Then, there’s his ballot measure. Kolodin said his Prop. 144 will hasten election results by requiring counties to allow voters to have their ballots counted at polling sites.

“We’re going to have election results on election night,” Kolodin said during a debate last month. “That’s what I’m going to deliver for Arizona voters.”

Fontes has said that’s an unrealistic promise, pointing to the state’s razor-thin race margins in recent election cycles. He and others are also concerned that the measure’s broad language could unintentionally give the legislature wide leeway over election laws, independent of the governor and judiciary.

Where Fontes and Kolodin stand on working with the Trump administration

The secretary of state race is unfolding as the Trump administration attempts to exert unprecedented influence on elections across the nation, including in Arizona. Whoever wins will decide how far to let the federal government step into the state’s processes.

Fontes has resisted the federal government’s efforts to scrutinize Arizona’s voting process, such as by refusing to hand over the state’s voter roll to the Department of Justice. He’s also used his bully pulpit, joining other secretaries of state across the country to publicly oppose an executive order from Trump that sought to impose new restrictions on mail ballots.

Fontes said Trump is “going to continue to try” to intervene in election administration.

“A lot of these proposed rules and executive orders and things like this, we still have to fight against,” Fontes said. “So that role will continue, and we will continue to be as robust in our battles as possible.”

In the meantime, he’s also sought to keep county elected officials in check. Fontes and Mayes sent all 15 of the state’s voting jurisdictions a letter earlier this year warning them against handing their full voter rolls to the feds as they probed the 2020 election in Arizona.

“I think my presence in this office is a moderating factor to some of the radical politicians,” Fontes said, adding that “there’s not a ton of them, but there’s a few of them.”

Kolodin said in radio interviews earlier this year that the Trump administration’s request for Arizona’s unredacted voter rolls was “common sense,” and that he would require county recorders to run their full voter lists through a federal data tool known as Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, to check for noncitizens.

“I don’t know why anybody would want to be delaying making sure that we only have U.S. citizens on our voter rolls,” Kolodin said at the time. “That makes no sense to me.”

But at last month’s debate, he changed his tune. Kolodin said wouldn’t simply hand voter information to the feds. Rather, he proposed licensing the SAVE tool so voter information stayed “in-house, here in the great state of Arizona.”

“I understand the system isn’t perfect,” Kolodin said. “You need second checks and balances. But the secretary of state’s responsibility is to make sure that we only have lawful American citizens on the voter rolls.”

After red-meat primary, Kolodin makes his pitch to independent voters

The secretary of state’s race, like most in swing-state Arizona, looks like it will be a competitive one. For now, observers consider Fontes the slight favorite because of Kolodin’s farther-right image and the national political winds favoring Democrats.

Kolodin won the Republican primary 60% to 40% by running to the right of his opponent, former Arizona GOP Chair Gina Swoboda. But since then, he appears to be attempting to moderate his image. In a primary election night statement, he said his campaign was about “protecting every vote, regardless of party.”

“Tonight, Arizona voters spoke up decisively for lawful, transparent, honest, and fair elections,” Kolodin said, adding that he aimed to run “world-class elections that Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike can be proud of.”

Later, he updated his social media presence. On X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, his pre-primary profile description highlighted his affiliation with the Freedom Caucus. His profile picture was a simple headshot, and his banner featured an abbreviated version of a quote by former U.S. Sen. Barry Goldwater: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

That changed in the post-primary period. Kolodin’s new profile description touts him as a “civil rights attorney specializing in Arizona election law.” His profile picture is a professional photo of him and his family, and his banner now advertises his campaign.

Fontes said he and his team had long expected Kolodin to shift gears while attempting to woo general election voters — but he doesn’t expect Kolodin will be successful.

“The only difference between him and the last one is that he’s not wearing a goofy cowboy hat,” Fontes said, referring to his 2022 opponent, Republican Mark Finchem, who was known for his belief that the 2020 election was stolen.

Sasha Hupka is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Sasha at shupka@votebeat.org.

Undisclosed Gmail account raises concerns about Georgia State Election Board transparency settlement

2026-10-09T16:00:52+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

A government accountability group is accusing the Georgia State Election Board of potentially violating a 2025 legal settlement over its use of private email accounts after an undisclosed Gmail account was inadvertently displayed during a public meeting last month.

In a formal demand letter sent Thursday to the Georgia attorney general and the board’s legal counsel, American Oversight called on state officials to explain why the account — gaseb2023@gmail.com — was never disclosed during discovery, and why its records were not produced in response to public records requests.

Last year, the board agreed to pay American Oversight $50,000 to settle a lawsuit alleging that members used personal email accounts and messaging apps to conduct official business and evade Georgia’s public records law. The lawsuit identified six email addresses used for board business, including five personal Gmail accounts tied to specific individuals.

The email account displayed at the September meeting was not included in the lawsuit.

“This raises concerns as to whether the SEB is in compliance with the Agreement, has inappropriately withheld information and records in connection with the lawsuit underlying the Agreement, and is appropriately preserving and disclosing records in compliance with the Georgia Open Records Act (ORA),” wrote Katherine M. Anthony, interim chief counsel for American Oversight.

As part of the 2025 settlement, the board adopted mandatory email and messaging guidelines requiring members and staff to use government-issued email addresses for official communications. The guidelines were finalized in November 2025.

“We took the State Election Board to court and secured a commitment that its members would use official government email accounts for board business. Nearly a year later, an undisclosed, unofficial account appears on screen at a public meeting,” Chioma Chukwu, executive director of American Oversight, said in a statement.

American Oversight has given the Georgia attorney general’s office until Oct. 22 to explain whether records from the account have been preserved and made available under state law.

A spokesperson for the attorney general’s office confirmed receipt of the letter. “We’re looking into it,” she wrote in an email. The election board did not respond to an email requesting comment sent Thursday.

An undisclosed Gmail account

The Gmail account appeared on screen during the board’s Sept. 28 board meeting during a live screen share. An attendee took a picture of the display, showing an open browser logged into gaseb2023@gmail.com.

Courtesy of American Oversight

The photograph, provided to Votebeat, shows an inbox containing at least 486 messages. American Oversight does not know, and the board has not said, which board member or staff member controls the address. It is also not clear what the account is used for.

In a phone interview, Salleigh Grubbs — a board member who is also vice chair of the Georgia Republican Party — said she does not use her personal email for board business and was unaware of the account. She said she suspects the email may be used to log in to YouTube. When asked whether board members received formal training on internal email procedures upon joining, Grubbs, who joined the board in December 2025, answered, “Of course not.”

Grubbs said she was issued an official laptop and email address, and that legal counsel in the attorney general’s office has been responsive to individual questions about email requirements.

Other board members and Executive Director James Mills did not respond to Votebeat’s requests for comment.

A board under scrutiny

The questions about the account come amid heightened scrutiny over the SEB’s actions heading into the November election. Earlier this year, federal court filings revealed that federal agents executed a search warrant at Fulton County’s election hub based in part on sworn statements from state election board members. The move drew criticism from local election officials and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

More recently, the board voted to request federal intervention in Georgia’s voting systems. But Grubbs and board chair John Fervier told Votebeat that Mills, the board’s executive director, subsequently sent letters to federal officials that went well beyond what the board had authorized.

On Friday, the Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials sent a letter to the board asking it to rescind the request for federal intervention and disputing several claims in Mills’ letters.

“Repeated calls telling Georgians their voting system is compromised, days before advance voting, tells them that their vote may not count,” the GAVREO executive board wrote. “Whatever the intent, the only effect now is to suppress turnout on both sides.”

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

After ACLU letter, clerk apologizes for mailing out absentee ballots late

2026-10-09T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Michigan’s free newsletter here.

Update, Oct. 9, 11:02 a.m.: This story has been updated to show Deputy Clerk Dawn Webb posted a letter acknowledging and apologizing for her error to the township’s website.

Correction, Oct. 9: This story has been corrected with the fact that Oct. 5 is seven days after Michigan’s deadline to mail absentee ballots, not six days.

After the ACLU of Michigan sent a letter threatening potential legal action against a small northern Michigan community, its deputy clerk has apologized for her misleading defense of sending out the township’s absentee ballots late.

The letter, viewed by Votebeat and confirmed by the ACLU, accused Tuscarora Township Deputy Clerk Dawn Webb of writing in a community Facebook group that there isn’t a legal deadline for mailing absentee ballots, only for making them available to voters to pick up.

The ACLU contends that’s a fundamental misunderstanding of Michigan election law. State statutes require that absentee ballots be mailed to voters 40 days before the election, which this year was Sept. 24. It’s not uncommon for officials to miss that deadline for reasons out of their control; Votebeat reported last week that printing backlogs and tight election timetables caused absentee ballot delays in a number of Michigan communities.

But Tuscarora Township may have waited too long. According to Webb, Tuscarora Township received its ballots on Sept. 29, but took until Oct. 5 to mail them all to voters — seven working days after the 40-day deadline.

The law requires that clerks must send absentee ballots to voters “immediately” after getting their applications. If the application is in place before the ballots are received by local officials, they must be sent “as soon as the absent voter ballots are received by the clerk.”

“There is no legally cognizable excuse for failing to mail out the ballots until October 5, a full week later,” Phil Mayor, the ACLU of Michigan’s deputy legal director, wrote in the group’s letter.

More than 800 of Tuscarora Township’s roughly 3,000 people are on the permanent absentee voting list, according to state records. The delay in getting ballots to them “unconstitutionally deprived them of several days” of voting time, Mayor’s letter continued.

The ACLU requested that Webb both publicly retract her comments and the township issue a press release “in a prominent and obvious place on its website,” stating that the township will comply with election law by Friday.

If that did not happen, Mayor wrote that the ACLU “will consider all appropriate legal action to ensure that Tuscarora voters are not disenfranchised in future elections.”

As of Friday morning, a lengthy letter from Webb now appears on the township’s website acknowledging her misunderstanding of Michigan election law and apologizing for the delays in the ballot mailings. She said that she wrongly waited to mail out the ballots until she could conduct preliminary testing recommended by the Michigan Bureau of Elections.

“I acknowledge that providing ballots for pickup alone does not satisfy these obligations and I will correct any confusion that I may have caused the community,” she wrote.

A spokesperson for the Michigan Department of State confirmed Wednesday that the Bureau of Elections was looking into the accusations but was unable to provide additional details. The bureau was still attempting to get in touch with Tuscarora Township as of Thursday evening, a spokesperson said. The state previously confirmed to Votebeat that communities aren’t typically penalized for delayed ballots as long as officials are working to get them to voters.

Ann Mullen, the ACLU of Michigan’s communications director, said Thursday that her team is unaware of any clerks who still haven’t sent out their ballots, but noted “this is an issue our team continues to monitor.”

“Our expectation is that clerks follow election laws and send out absentee ballots at the beginning of the 40-day period prior to an election, at least so long as they have printed ballots by that date,” Mullen wrote in an email. “If we hear reports where that has not happened, our legal team addresses them immediately with clerks to ensure ballots are sent quickly and that the clerks understand the law and must follow it.”

The ACLU of Michigan has shown a willingness in the past to take action against election officials who suggested they might operate outside state laws. In 2024, for example, the group preemptively sued a Kalamazoo County canvasser after he said he might not certify the election.

The organization dropped the suit after the canvassers signed a sworn affidavit pledging to fulfill his legal obligation to certify the election.

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

Bucks County sheriff joins movement pledging not to interfere with elections

2026-10-08T10:00:01+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

A movement is brewing to get sheriffs around the county to pledge not to interfere in the 2026 midterm elections, and at least one Pennsylvania sheriff is on board.

Bucks County Sheriff Danny Ceisler, a Democrat, says he signed the pledge to signify that he has no intention of interfering with the electoral process, unlike some sheriffs in other states have done in the past.

“Nowhere are [sheriffs] responsible for seizing ballots and taking it upon ourselves to prove baseless claims of election fraud,” he said. “It is our responsibility to protect elections, to ensure that voters have faith in our electoral system.”

The pledge, which only a handful of sheriffs have signed so far, says the sheriff recognizes that “public confidence in free and fair elections is essential to constitutional government.” Signers promise not to permit “ICE presence” at polling places, intimidate voters, or seize ballots, among other things.

It is part of a campaign from The Workers Circle, a Jewish nonprofit focused on social justice issues.

JJ Briscoe, a national organizer for The Workers Circle, said the campaign grew out of the Disappeared in America coalition, which formed last year to push back against the Trump administration’s immigrant detention and deportation campaign. He said encouraging citizens to talk with their local sheriffs became important as the administration expanded the 287(g) program, which enables local law enforcement to partner with ICE to enforce immigration laws. Some election officials and advocates are worried about the prospect of ICE agents coming to polling locations this fall.

Now, the group is using that infrastructure to encourage citizens to have their sheriffs affirm they will not interfere with elections.

“Having this pledge is a way to get ahead of one of the most, I would say, topical threats,” he said, but “also to just deter election sabotage in general, whether it’s a directive coming from the federal government to seize ballots, or if it’s not ICE, [other] people coming to the polls and potentially trying to intimidate or put the safety of election officials or poll workers at risk.”

The pledge’s organizers are concerned that a rogue sheriff could step beyond their authority and interfere with elections, a hypothetical that has some recent precedent.

Last year, Riverside County, California, Sheriff Chad Bianco, seized more than 650,000 ballots as part of an investigation into alleged irregularities in the state’s 2025 congressional redistricting referendum. Former Johnson County, Kansas, sheriff Calvin Hayden also pursued election fraud investigations to the point of criticism from fellow Republicans before his 2024 primary loss.

Both of those sheriffs were associated with the constitutional sheriffs movement, which, according to the States United Democracy Center, believes that a sheriff’s authority within their county is supreme, superseding that of other law enforcement agents or government officials. Membership in the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association is not public, but leaders have said as many as 10% of the county’s sheriffs are a part of that movement.

Briscoe and Ceisler said the pledge isn’t just about signaling the sheriff won’t participate in efforts that could be perceived as voter intimidation, but also to push back against the constitutional sheriffs movement.

“That really served as the impetus for this pledge to get all sheriffs on board,” Briscoe said. “That is not something they should do, and this whole constitutional sheriffs movement that believes sheriffs have the highest order of the land is not constitutionally sound.”

At least two sheriffs besides Ceisler have signed the pledge so far: Bristol County, Massachusetts, Sheriff Paul Heroux and Alexandria, Virginia, Sheriff Sean Casey. Briscoe declined to say if there were more but said additional information would be coming soon.

Ceisler said he signed the pledge in part because he heard from some voters in Bucks County concerned that what happened in California could happen there as well. He said it’s “not our job” to seize ballots like Bianco did.

“We will proactively protect people’s right to vote,” Ceisler said, adding that the only reason he or his deputies will be at the polls is at the request of election officials. “But we will not be doing the intimidating. Again, our goal is to stay away from the polling places, and if I could go the entire day without needing to respond to anything, that is a good day.”

Ceisler was elected sheriff last year, after a campaign in which he criticized the Republican incumbent’s collaboration with ICE.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Michigan secretary of state candidates weigh in on election transparency, Trump administration, and more

2026-10-08T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Michigan’s free newsletter here.

This November’s election will determine many things, but one of the most important is who will oversee the 2028 presidential election in Michigan.

In just a few weeks, Michigan voters will decide who will serve as their next secretary of state after eight years of Democrat Jocelyn Benson.

Her replacement will have big shoes to fill — the secretary of state is the state’s top election official, as well as the person in charge of making sure Michiganders have driver’s licenses, license plates, and more. It is the third-highest office in state government.

The two main candidates, Republican Anthony Forlini and Democrat Garlin Gilchrist, have both emphasized a need for better transparency in the office and improved vehicle services. Beyond that, they have very different plans for what they hope to accomplish if they take office.

Forlini, currently the Macomb County clerk, stresses that he wants the state to have cleaner voter rolls and better transparency. Gilchrist, the state’s lieutenant governor, wants to protect elections from overreach on the part of the federal government.

Votebeat sat down with both candidates ahead of their debate in Ann Arbor on Oct. 8 to glean their positions on the many issues facing Michigan elections. If you’re interested in hearing more from the candidates, you can stream the debate live on Thursday night at 6:30 p.m. Eastern.

Would secretary of state candidates give the Trump administration Michigan’s voter roll?

The next secretary of state is likely to inherit a year-long legal battle with the U.S. Department of Justice. Last year, the department asked Michigan — and every other state in the country — for lists of their registered voters, including voters’ personal information. However, after much back and forth, Michigan turned over only a redacted version of its voter roll.

The Trump administration wanted more, however, and sued Michigan for access to the unredacted roll. A district court dismissed the case in February, as did an appeals court in June. However, it’s possible the case could ultimately end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Gilchrist was clear: As secretary of state, he would absolutely not turn over the unredacted voter roll.

“When people give their data, their private information, to the government, they expect us to protect it, not fork it over to the president for his priorities,” Gilchrist said.

Forlini would not give a strict yes-or-no answer about turning over the voter roll, even when pushed for one. Instead, he said he sees clean voter rolls as a mutual goal of his and the federal government, regardless of who is in the White House.

“If Joe Biden were to call me to say, ‘Hey, we want to make sure the voting rolls are clean. Can we work together?’ I would say yes,” Forlini said.

He said he had “nothing to hide” and would want to work together with the federal government to find noncitizens on the voter rolls.

Michigan’s previous efforts to reach a mutually agreeable solution with the federal government eventually fell apart, but Forlini insisted that he was “the boss” and would be able to bring the department to the table.

States were previously unable to collaborate with the feds “because everyone’s got their head up their ass,” he said. “Quote me on that.”

Both Forlini and Gilchrist want to improve campaign finance reporting

Both candidates agreed that the state’s often-glitchy campaign finance platform, known as the Michigan Transparency Network or MiTN, needs a major revamp.

Forlini pointed to his efforts in Macomb County to modernize campaign finance reporting. For instance, bringing filings online freed up time for his staff to do other work, he said.

He also wants to see improvements to oversight and the disclosures candidates turn in. He said campaigns need to stop making errors where candidates leave out critical information about donors.

“I’m not going to allow that kind of stuff to happen anymore,” Forlini said. “We got to get our arms around it.”

Gilchrist said he wanted to use his background as a computer engineer to improve MiTN. He’s introduced a plan called “Stand TALL,” a play on his 6′ 8″ height, to address concerns about campaign finance. Each letter stands for a different topic — transparency, accountability, limits, and looking forward, according to his campaign literature.

Secretaries of state cannot write laws, but they can influence legislation, and Gilchrist wants to see dark money donors disclosed before an election and to push for “real-time enforcement” when campaign finance violations happen. Those would be his goals for the first year in office, he said.

“It’s hard for us to deal with dirty and dark money if we can’t see it,” he said. “I want to clean that up. Transparency starts with making sure we can fix that system and have a system that works for people and is easy to use, easy to navigate, and easy to understand.”

Forlini and Gilchrist want to improve election transparency in different ways

Both Forlini and Gilchrist say they want elections to be more transparent. Both want to see more collaboration among local clerks, who do the bulk of the work of running elections in Michigan. Both want to improve communication and build stronger relationships between the Department of State and local officials.

From there, though, their definitions of transparency diverge.

Forlini has been at the front of an effort to demystify elections for ordinary voters. Under his watch, Macomb County introduced an online tool called Ballot Verifier, which posts pictures of every ballot cast for people to view after an election.

He, like many Republicans, wants to change how election records are retained. He alluded to a recent lawsuit filed against Benson over how long certain records should be stored after an election, but he said he would like more data, such as that from electronic pollbooks, to be retained with its chain of custody intact for those who may have questions later.

“I don’t care if you’re a Democrat or a Republican — people are always questioning elections and the outcomes,” Forlini said. “The only way you can end it is through transparency while keeping the confidentiality of people. But you still need to be able to see the process all the way through.”

Gilchrist, meanwhile, said the work starts before an election is conducted. He wants to respond to “conspiracy theorists,” who he said often prey on a lack of knowledge about how election processes work.

To fix that, he suggests introducing “compelling and creative” ways to educate voters on how Michigan elections work, akin to Schoolhouse Rock videos.

“I think people not having clear insight and transparent understanding of that process is what enables the liars and conspiracy theorists and bad actors … to put their lies and misinformation into the world and let it fester,” he said.

Both candidates want better service at state offices

Gilchrist and Forlini would both like to see improvements at the offices where people get their driver’s licenses, car tags, and more.

Gilchrist called them “the front door to Michigan.”

“It’s an office that almost every Michigander has to deal with, so we need to make sure that it sees you, it respects you, respects your time, and treats you like a full human being,” he added.

He wants to see an option for walk-in visits at the Secretary of State Office alongside the appointment system that has been in place for several years. Customers can walk into an office now, but there is no guarantee they’ll be able to get service that day.

Gilchrist also wants to expand the number of stores that the self-service kiosks appear in and expand the mobile secretary of state units, which bring motor vehicle services directly to residents on college campuses or in communities where accessing an office directly may be difficult.

Forlini had similar ideas, including reviewing office processes and cross-training staff. Phones should be answered more reliably, he said, and walk-in access should be available.

It’s work he has already done in his roles in Macomb County, he said, both as clerk and at the county’s public works department.

“You look at processes and you see how you can reduce the amount of time people take at the counter,” he said.

Improvements will take time, Forlini said, but will serve customers well.

Why should Forlini or Gilchrist be elected secretary of state?

Votebeat gave both candidates an opportunity to make a final pitch as to why voters should choose them. Gilchrist highlighted his engineering background as an example of his understanding of how systems work, while Forlini said that, as a county clerk, he was the only candidate in the race already doing much of the work related to being secretary of state.

Forlini said he would work with all constituents, regardless of their political party. He doesn’t mind being called “MAGA,” in reference to President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan, or a “RINO” (Republican in Name Only), as long as he is known as the guy who got things done, he said

“I show up for work, and I represent everybody,” he said.

Gilchrist, meanwhile, said he would stand up to Trump and the federal government. He wants voters to be able to cast ballots with confidence, he said, and know who is funding the politicians making decisions.

“I think we get better outcomes from more participation, and it’s my job to make that more possible in more communities here in the state of Michigan,” he said.

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

What to expect at the polling place amid uncertainty over federal agents

2026-10-07T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

In the run-up to the November election, federal officials have sent conflicting signals about whether law enforcement agents could show up at polling places.

FBI Director Kash Patel declined to rule out deploying FBI agents to voting sites. The Department of Homeland Security has said ICE does not plan to patrol polling places, while leaving open the possibility that agents could respond to threats or serve warrants nearby. The Justice Department, meanwhile, has said it will continue sending federal personnel to polling locations as part of its election-monitoring efforts.

The mixed messages are already shaping preparations around the country: In Wisconsin, election officials are being trained on how to respond if armed federal agents appear at polling places, while in Michigan, the attorney general’s office has prepared agents, state police officials and legal filings to respond quickly to election-related incidents.

The uncertainty has left election officials preparing for scenarios they may never face and voters unsure what federal presence, if any, to expect in November.

A recent University of San Diego poll found that 40% of Americans said they think it’s likely that ICE agents will show up at the polls, and a third said their presence would reduce their trust in elections.

Federal law sharply restricts the deployment of armed federal agents at polling places, and experts say election officials have tools to respond if agents show up in violation of those restrictions.

Federal law prohibits U.S. officials from sending or keeping “troops or armed men at any place where a general or special election is held,” with only narrow exceptions for when those people are voting or if their presence is necessary “to repel armed enemies of the United States.”

Another federal law prohibits voter intimidation, with up to a yearlong prison sentence for anybody who intimidates, threatens, or coerces somebody else with the purpose of interfering with another person’s right to vote.

“It’s low likelihood, and it’s certainly impossible that any sort of federal presence could be there at every polling site in America,” said Aaron Blacksberg, federal policy counsel at the Institute for Responsive Government. “But without knowing for certain, people are concerned.”

Blacksberg said that voters especially worried about the possibility of federal law enforcement at the polls could vote by mail, drop their ballot at a drop box or or use another alternative voting option available in their jurisdiction.

The prohibition on deploying armed federal personnel to polling places is a criminal statute, said Jonathan Diaz, director of voting advocacy and partnerships for the Campaign Legal Center. “The person who orders the agents or officers to the polls also would face criminal liability for doing that,” he said.

In most jurisdictions, Diaz added, election officials are empowered to remove people from the polls if they’re causing a disruption or violating polling place rules, and they can work with local law enforcement to enforce those rules. If a voter sees federal agents at polling places in a manner that may be illegal, Diaz said, they should alert their local election officials.

Federal agents could also end up near a polling place for reasons unrelated to the election.

That happened in May, when a traffic stop led to a car being pulled over near a polling place, and ICE agents showed up to question the driver. Local law enforcement quickly showed up to tell the federal agents to leave the premises. County officials said voters weren’t questioned and polling places ran normally despite the brief ICE presence nearby.

Courts have confronted voter intimidation before

There’s little precedent for the possibility of federal agents at the polls, but courts have addressed other efforts involving law-enforcement personnel at polling places.

For example, in 1981 the Democratic National Committee took the Republican National Committee to court for allegedly seeking to revoke the registrations of minority voters in New Jersey and enlisting off-duty officers to intimidate voters by standing at the polls in heavily Black and Latino precincts. The Republican Party entered a consent decree that lasted over three decades, heavily restricting its planned election security efforts.

The decree is no longer in effect, but it could be cited in future cases “if something really grotesque were to happen in the area of voter intimidation by people looking like law enforcement” said Lorraine Minnite, a Rutgers University political science professor who served as an expert witness in the case.

She also said voters should feel confident that election officials are prepared to respond to federal interference.

Recent Votebeat reporting illustrates that around the country, top state prosecutors, secretaries of state and local election officials are preparing for scenarios like ICE showing up at the polls and preparing legal filings in advance. Some have rehearsed how to respond if federal agents seek access to polling places, ballots or voting equipment, while others are lining up attorneys and law enforcement who could act quickly.

The prospect of federal agents at polling places is already being litigated.

In September, nine groups filed a federal lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and several other agencies and officials over statements the groups say amount to threats to deploy federal agents to polling places. The groups argue such a deployment would violate federal law, including a section of the Voting Rights Act that bans voter intimidation. They are seeking an injunction blocking federal agents from being used in ways that unlawfully intimidate voters.

The Justice Department, which is named as a defendant in the lawsuit, has rejected its premise, arguing that federal officials have never said they would send law enforcement to polling locations. The Department of Homeland Security has said ICE is not planning operations targeting polling places. The case is still in its preliminary stages.

Local police have a different role at polling places.

Unlike federal law enforcement, local police routinely coordinate with election officials around polling place security.

In many cases, Diaz said, local law enforcement are at the polls at the request of election officials, who have received extensive harassment and threats since the 2020 election. Law enforcement often coordinates with election officials to keep officials and voters safe without their presence intimidating voters, he said.

“It’s far more normal for a county official or a state official from a law enforcement agency to be at or near the polls because usually they’re working with election officials, versus federal law enforcement, who have no role in the election process,” he said.

But even a lawful local police presence “can raise concerns about voter intimidation.”

In August, the Sheboygan County Sheriff’s Department in Wisconsin said they would be sending some deputies to polling locations to ensure a safe and secure election. That drew criticism from the ACLU of Wisconsin and other groups. The sheriff responded that deputies had conducted brief and routine polling place visits for years.

A few days later, legal groups sent the sheriff a letter saying that while local law enforcement can play a helpful role in elections, their presence can intimidate voters — and that intimidation may violate state and federal law.

Even when local law enforcement is working with election officials, officers are subject to the same voter intimidation restrictions as anybody else, Diaz said.

“It’s important for them to behave responsibly and transparently with election officials and with the public to reassure voters that they’ll be able to vote safely,” he said, adding that officers should carefully avoid inadvertently creating an intimidating presence for voters.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Pennsylvania proposal to ban law enforcement at polling places reflects activist concerns

2026-10-06T10:00:01+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

As the 2026 midterms near, one question repeatedly comes up in discussions about potential disruptions to election administration.

“‘What if ICE shows up?’ That’s what I’m hearing,” Olivia Hale, the election director in San Joaquin County, California, said on a recent call sponsored by the Partnership for Large Election Jurisdictions.

Federal law already prohibits stationing “troops or armed men at any place where a general or special election is held,” along with other voting protections. But Hale isn’t the only one raising concerns. In Pennsylvania, state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta (D-Philadelphia) says he’s trying to respond by clarifying state law.

Pennsylvania’s election code already prohibits police from being within 100 feet of polling places. Kenyatta has introduced a bill that would expand the language to include federal agents as well.

Currently, the law says “no police officer … shall be within one hundred feet of a polling place” on Election Day. Kenyatta’s proposal would replace “police officer” with the more expansive term “law enforcement officer.”

The prospect of passing any election legislation before the November election is slim — as it has yet to receive a vote in the state House — but Kenyatta says it is important to do so.

“We have become so accustomed to the president blatantly lying about the election, threatening people, using the court process and administrative powers granted to him to try to intimidate voters,” he said. “So there is in my view a real necessity to clarify the law.”

President Donald Trump’s administration hasn’t articulated any specific plans to send ICE to the polls this year.

But the administration’s messaging has been inconsistent on this issue. In February, in response to former Trump advisor Steve Bannon’s comment that “we’re going to have ICE surround the polls,” former White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said she “can’t guarantee” there wouldn’t be ICE agents around the polls in November.

Later that month, however, Heather Honey, a Department of Homeland Security official, told a group of state election officials that any such suggestion was “disinformation” and that “there will be no ICE presence at polling locations for this election.”

In July, Attorney General Todd Blanche didn’t rule out the possibility. In September the Department of Homeland Security said it was not “planning” ICE operations targeting polling places but might conduct “targeted enforcement” actions if there is a public safety threat at a polling location.

In response to a request for comment, a spokesperson for the department reiterated it is not planning any operations targeting polling places. They referred Votebeat and Spotlight PA to remarks from Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s confirmation hearing in March.

“I don’t understand what the concern is about enforcement of immigration at polling places anyways, because honestly if you’re not a citizen, you shouldn’t be voting anyways, so technically there shouldn’t be illegals at the polling spot,” he said. “The only reason why my officers would be there is if there was a specific threat for them to be there, not for intimidation.”

The concern that ICE may come to polling places prompted a coalition of civil rights groups and the City of Denver to sue the Trump administration last month to stop any such action. A similar but separate lawsuit was also filed recently by the NAACP and a coalition of civil rights groups and unions.

Voting rights groups are worried in Pennsylvania as well.

“There are some concerns that immigrant communities or underserved communities have that there could be ICE at the polls,” said Kadida Kenner, CEO of the New Pennsylvania Project. “I think there has been so much chaos at this moment … that I think all of us want to be clear on what the rules are.”

Jasmine Rivera, the executive director of the Pennsylvania Immigrant Coalition, said that increased immigration enforcement under the Trump administration has had a chilling effect on immigrants of all statuses in all aspects of life, not just elections. One in 12 people living in Pennsylvania is an immigrant, Rivera said, and 53% of them are naturalized citizens.

“For all of us in the immigrant rights space, we know that [having ICE at the polls] is a possibility on the table,” she said, although she stressed that it’s not guaranteed either. “It’s better to be safe than sorry.”

She said her coalition is urging eligible immigrant voters to vote by mail “to make sure the vote gets out, but also to keep people safe.”

Jonathan Diaz, the director of voting advocacy and partnerships at the Campaign Legal Center, noted that federal law provides protections beyond the ban on armed troops at polling places.

“Similar federal statutes prevent civilian federal employees from using their official position to influence federal elections,” he said. “There are also federal statutes that make it a crime to intimidate or attempt to intimidate voters in federal elections.”

Deborah Hinchey, the Pennsylvania state director for All Voting is Local, said efforts by “bad faith actors” to discourage in-person voting have not been successful. Her impression is that voters still understand voting is safe and important, particularly in Pennsylvania.

Polls support that contention. A survey this month from Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center found that only 6% of people selected immigration enforcement at the polls as their biggest concern about the election, though Democrats were the most concerned.

But, Hinchey said, Kenyatta’s bill is still worth considering.

“I do think the concern that law enforcement could be at the polling locations is something that we should address legislatively if possible,” she said. “I think the current political moment we are in somewhat requires us to be more prescriptive and be more descriptive about what that means.”

Kenyatta said his bill is intended to block all law enforcement officers, including ICE agents, and prevent any issues their presence at the polls might cause. He pointed to Wyoming’s Republican governor recently complaining about Department of Justice election monitors being “a bit aggressive” during the state’s August primary election. (However, it’s unclear whether the proposed law would apply to those monitors, who have monitored state elections for years without incident and are not generally considered law enforcement.)

“What we must do, in my view, is clarify that in no uncertain terms, that even though the language speaks broadly about law enforcement, about police, we also meant you,” he said. “Sometimes even when we think the law is pretty clear, you have people who don’t read it with the same clarity.”

Votebeat Arizona reporter Sasha Hupka contributed reporting.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Election officials are scrambling to process voter registration backlog using a system they say does not work

2026-10-05T17:45:17+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

At 6 p.m. a few days after the state sent Randall County election administrator Shannon Lackey a backlog of 3,388 of voter registration records, she was still at her desk, processing them after a full day of work.

She planned to stay late and get as much done as she could, then keep working from home. Lackey, whose department has five employees, isn’t expecting overtime pay or compensatory time off to make up for the extra work caused by the state error.

The most frustrating part, she said, was that the state’s voter registration and management system, known as TEAM, was making it harder to get through the backlog.

“I just got a message saying ‘an error occurred’,” Lackey said while on the phone with a Votebeat reporter. “I cannot tell you how many times I get that message, ‘an error occurred,’ so I’m just clicking. Nothing’s happening. I can’t work right now.”

She said her only choice is to push through.

“I have to get this done” she said, but “how are we going to fix it? And if it’s not fixable, where do we go from here? Because this is unacceptable.”

Local election officials across the state have raised concerns about TEAM since the state rolled out a long-awaited upgrade more than a year ago. Now they must use the system to resolve a backlog of hundreds of thousands of voter registration records and updates state officials sent them due to a software error with the Texas Department of Public Safety web portal. Many say the issues with TEAM are making the backlog harder to resolve at a critical time.

State officials discovered the error just weeks before today’s deadline for Texans to register to vote in time for the critical midterm elections. Election officials are already contending with the typical high volume of voter registration applications delivered in person and by mail at the last minute in the coming days.

Some better-resourced and larger county election departments have been able to quickly resolve their backlogs with help from outside vendors, but they’re also still reporting problems interacting with TEAM.

Election officials said it is still difficult to verify voters’ eligibility when processing voter registration applications, and process mail-in ballots in TEAM, among other tasks.

“Based on the direct experiences of county election officials across the state, it has become evident that these problems are the result of fundamental system architecture failures by the state’s voter registration database vendor, Civix,” the Texas Association of County Election Officials said in a statement last week.

With the election just weeks away, the state should “ensure the delivery and maintenance of reliable voter registration database software” before any further payments are made to Civix, which is based in Louisiana, the statement said.

Civix did not respond to a request for comment.

The Texas Secretary of State’s Office said it’s offering counties grants to reimburse their costs to process the backlogged applications.

In an emailed statement, Alicia Pierce, the spokesperson for the secretary of state’s office, said the agency has communicated directly with counties about TEAM “on a continual basis.” Pierce said the agency conducted trainings throughout the state for the rollout and continues to offer webinars. “We send weekly emails with updates on production builds and development work, and we host monthly calls for counties to ask questions,” she wrote.

“Texas has had seven successful elections since the rollout of the newly developed TEAM,” she added. “Additional features addressing county concerns will be rolled out soon as we all prepare for the November election.”

The agency has resolved some functionality issues with TEAM and has improved it some since its July 2025 launch, election officials told Votebeat, but fixes often take months. In other cases, when one problem is resolved, another pops up.

Some voting rights advocates say local election officials have enough burdens without adding technological problems to the mix.

“If I had to log on to a system every day and have no idea if it was going to work today like it worked yesterday, I think I would lose my mind,” said Emily Eby French, policy director at Common Cause Texas. “But we are asking county officials to follow hundreds and hundreds of statutes in the Texas Election Code, keep ballots safe, protect the security of the elections, while not knowing how or if TEAM will work for them.”

Election officials say promises still unmet

In January 2024, at an annual gathering of election officials, the state showed an early video demonstration of new features the upgraded TEAM system would have. They said it would help election officials complete tasks more quickly and efficiently.

Hundreds of election officials clapped and cheered in excitement. They’d been waiting years for such upgrades.

But “those promises are still unmet,” Kristin Miles, the Bastrop County elections administrator and current president of the Texas Association of County Election Officials, said in an interview. “We’re not even at basic functionality, much less bells and whistles that had county election officials excited back then.”

Texas promised to pay Civix $17 million, and up to $36 million if the state renews the contract in October 2027, public records show. The secretary of state’s office said the cost is covered by a mix of state dollars and federal funds earmarked for improving election administration.

Officials in each of the state’s 254 counties interact with the TEAM system on a daily basis to conduct voter list maintenance and manage elections. Roughly 18 counties use state-approved outside vendors to manage their voter registration lists, but must still sync their data with TEAM daily and rely on TEAM for other essential functions.

Three local election officials told Votebeat they are struggling with verifying voters’ eligibility, a key step that must be done in TEAM.

That step confirms a voter’s name, date of birth, and partial Social Security number or driver’s license number matches state records, essentially ensuring that the registrant is who they say they are. It’s an automated process, and the majority of the time it works. But in some cases, election officials said they have waited weeks — up to 60 days — for that verification, and they aren’t sure why.

A long delay risks that the voter doesn’t show up on the rolls when they try to actually vote, said Michelle Allcon, the Smith County elections administrator.

“I can’t tell what that application is missing so we can fix it. It’s just stuck,” Allcon said. She said election administrators first flagged the problem in May. “Then those voters are calling me, asking ‘what’s going on? Why haven’t I gotten my voter registration certificate?’ And we look into it and see that there’s no action.”

Allcon, along with other election officials, said the secretary of state’s office typically confirms creation of an IT ticket to resolve the problem, but isn’t necessarily able to give a timeline for the fix.

Some election officials say they have come up with workarounds. Trudy Hancock, the Brazos County election administrator, said her staff has created a spreadsheet to track which mail ballots have been sent and received, as well as to sort them by voter ID number, name, and date, a feature that TEAM doesn’t have. In TEAM, her staff isn’t able to select a batch of mail-in ballot records at once to mark them as sent or received. Instead, they have to be updated one by one, which is time-consuming. The spreadsheet helps the elections team organize the ballots before marking them in the TEAM system. Her staff is keeping track of more than 1,800 mail ballots, Hancock said last week.

Although no technology rollout is ever perfect, other states have taken early steps to try and avoid problems later.

A 2024 report on four states that launched voter registration systems — Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and Rhode Island — emphasized involving local election officials, who it described as the main users of such systems, from the start.

But in Texas, local election officials say they had little input. Miles, Lackey, Hancock and others say their testing of the system occurred only a couple of months before the TEAM upgrade went live.

Election officials say they’ll figure it out, but worry the public is losing trust

The counties that use outside vendors rely less heavily on TEAM, though they still must use it. But those vendors can be costly, while TEAM is free.

Dallas County’s election department uses an outside vendor. That’s how they were able to quickly get through a backlog of nearly 70,000 records sent to them after the DPS error, Elections Administrator Paul Adams said in an interview.

“There are other counties where either they don’t have that access to vendors or they have limited staff. So for some counties it’s going to be difficult, but everybody has contingency plans,” Adams said.

He said the main concern is what news of the backlog — and the state error that caused it — is doing to voters’ confidence.

“People are already concerned about the election; you start adding additional things onto it, and your voters are now concerned about the process,” he said.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Natalia is based in Corpus Christi. Contact her at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Everything you need to know about voting in Wisconsin’s November election

2026-10-05T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

This story was adapted from an article originally published July 28, 2026.

Wisconsin’s Nov. 3 midterm election is a month away, and absentee voting is already happening.

Voters will choose a governor, members of Congress and the state Legislature, statewide officials and local candidates, while also deciding three proposed constitutional amendments.

Whether you plan to vote early in person, by mail, or on Election Day, here’s everything you need to know about how to make your voice heard in November.

When is Wisconsin’s midterm election?

Election Day across the nation and in Wisconsin is Nov. 3, and polls will be open from 7 a.m. until 8 p.m.

You can also vote early in person beginning as soon as Oct. 20, depending on your jurisdiction.

What offices are on the ballot?

The governor’s office is up for grabs, along with every Wisconsin Assembly and U.S. House district in the state, 17 state Senate seats, attorney general, secretary of state, state treasurer, plenty of local offices and three constitutional amendments.

Click here for a full list of what’s on your ballot.

Who can vote in Wisconsin’s November election?

Any registered voter can cast a vote in the November election. You can click here to find out whether you’re registered.

What if I’m not registered to vote yet? Is it too late?

You still have time.

The deadline to register online or by mail is Oct. 14. After that, you can register at your local clerk’s office or at an early voting location through Friday, Oct. 30.

If you miss that window, you can also register at your polling place on Election Day.

Where is my polling place?

Click here to find your polling place. On Nov. 3, you must vote at the polling place assigned to your address. Your early voting location may be different.

Early voting schedules and locations vary by municipality, and you can contact your municipal clerk here to learn more. The League of Women Voters has also assembled a list of early voting sites in dozens of Wisconsin’s biggest municipalities.

What should I bring to vote?

If you’re already registered to vote, all you need to bring is an acceptable photo ID. That can include a driver’s license, passport, military identification card, a free Wisconsin ID issued for the purposes of voting, and several other options. Click here to view all acceptable IDs.

If you are registering to vote at the polling place, you’ll need to bring a proof of residence showing your name and current mailing address. That could include a Wisconsin driver’s license or other government ID, a residential lease, or a utility bill.

How does early voting work?

In Wisconsin, early voting is technically in-person absentee voting. It allows you to cast an absentee ballot before Election Day at your municipal clerk’s office or another location designated by your municipality.

The availability of early voting varies widely across the state. Some clerks offer it only by appointment. Some cities, including Madison and Milwaukee, operate multiple early voting sites that are open several hours a day. But by law, early voting can’t be offered later than the Sunday before the Nov. 3 election. After that, you must vote on Election Day.

Once you arrive at an early voting site, you must first request an absentee ballot and show an acceptable photo ID. You can then mark your absentee ballot in private. Let an election official know if you require assistance.

Your ballot is sealed in an absentee envelope, which must be signed by the appropriate election official, and is kept until it is counted on Election Day.

Can I vote absentee by mail?

In Wisconsin, you can also request that an absentee ballot be sent to you by mail.

The deadline to request absentee ballots is Oct. 29 by 5 p.m. for regular and overseas voters, and Oct. 30 by 5 p.m. for indefinitely confined and military voters. For your absentee ballot to count, it must arrive back at the clerk’s office by Nov. 3 at 8 p.m.

Don’t request and return your ballot by mail last minute if you have any other options. Mail delays have recently led to hundreds of absentee ballots getting delivered too late to count. If Election Day is approaching, clerks recommend dropping your ballot off at your local election office, a drop box, or an early voting location instead of mailing it.

What if I return my absentee ballot and then wish to change my vote?

Under current guidance from the Wisconsin Elections Commission, you can’t void an absentee ballot after you return it to an election official. That guidance is the subject of an ongoing lawsuit in Dane County Circuit Court, but spoiling remains prohibited in the meantime.

That means — at least for this election — that your absentee votes are final once your ballot is in the hands of election workers. If you make a mistake while casting the ballot, though, or spill something on it, you can request a replacement from an election official prior to submitting it.

Who should I contact if I have trouble voting or have any questions?

Please contact your municipal clerk, whose information you can find here. Votebeat would also like to hear about any problems you notice and answer any questions you have. You can contact us at wisconsin.tips@votebeat.org.

If you have disability-related voting questions or concerns, you can also contact the Disability Rights Wisconsin Voter Hotline at 844-347-8683.

If you run into a problem at the polls on Election Day or during early voting, legal assistance is available at 1-866-OUR-VOTE.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Are Trump’s claims the 2020 election was stolen losing steam?

2026-10-05T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

Sometimes it seems like the 2020 presidential election never ends.

Trying to prove that he actually won that race has been an animating feature of President Donald Trump’s second term, even though audits, investigations, and court cases have all found that he lost to former President Joe Biden.

Trump’s obsession has famously become a litmus test within the Republican Party. But a new analysis shared first with Votebeat suggests that, six years later, the issue may be losing some of its animating power for candidates.

States United Action, a nonpartisan nonprofit that supports state officials in protecting elections, examined the number of people running for statewide office or Congress who backed President Donald Trump’s false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, refused to certify the legitimate results of that election, or attempted to overturn those results. The group categorizes those candidates as “election deniers.”

The group found that the number of such candidates fell by about 30% between 2022 and 2026, dropping from 285 to 197.

The candidates this year on the States United Action list includes contestants for governor in key swing states, attorneys general, U.S. senators, members of the House of Representatives, and, perhaps most importantly, secretaries of state. If they win, it would give them expanded control over the levers of electoral power for what is expected to be a contentious 2028 presidential election.

Right now, according to States United Action, 27 current statewide officeholders on their list have some oversight of elections. This November, 33 candidates for statewide office are on the ballot across the country.

If history is any guide, most of them are likely to lose. Since 2021, according to the group’s analysis, fewer than one in four of such candidates have won a statewide office.

“We know that election denial is a losing campaign strategy and that Americans are tired of hearing the same old lies,” said Joanna Lydgate, CEO of States United Action. But, she added, “the threat they pose to our elections and the rule of law is very real: The candidates who win in 2026 will run our elections in 2028 and serve as a check on Trump’s power in the meantime.”

Such candidates are on the ballot in almost all of the swing states expected to be pivotal to the 2028 presidential race, including Arizona, Nevada, and Wisconsin.

One of the most closely watched races is the one for Arizona secretary of state, where incumbent Democrat Adrian Fontes faces Alexander Kolodin, an attorney who helped bring unsuccessful lawsuits challenging Arizona’s 2020 election results and was later disciplined by the State Bar over election-related litigation.

Kolodin, who did not respond to a request for comment, rejects the “election denier” label. On the campaign trail, he has sought to highlight his work in the Arizona Legislature, noting that several of his election reform bills have passed with bipartisan support, though those largely came out of negotiations around must-pass pieces of legislation.

Meanwhile, Kolodin would not say at a recent debate whether Arizona’s elections were safe and secure.

The persistent attacks on America’s electoral system are starting to take a toll on voter confidence. Recent polls have shown shrinking confidence in the country’s elections. For example, a recent University of California, San Diego survey found that less than half Americans — just 49% — thought the November election would be free and fair.

Pew found less of a partisan gap than in the past, though cautioned that Democrats and Republicans have different reasons for their dwindling confidence.

Thad Kousser, a UC-San Diego political science professor, said that electing election skeptics to office doesn’t necessarily mean that they will throw a wrench into the process.

“The real question is not what people have said about past elections but whether the elections that they run are going to be rooted in reality, informed by the experts in their teams,” he said. “If people come into office and take an open and honest look, that’s going to be very different than if they came in with their mind made up, ignored the evidence and pushed for policies that are not rooted in reality.”

One recent case of that arose in South Dakota, where outgoing Secretary of State Monae Johnson entered office as a skeptic of the electoral office and is leaving as a defender of its integrity. Johnson, a Republican, is endorsing a Democrat to replace her in the fall election after feuding with her party over the issue.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Georgia election board director sent Trump administration demands 2 board members say they never approved

2026-10-04T18:58:33+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Update, Oct. 5, 5 p.m.: This story has been updated to include comment from the Department of Justice.

Last week, the Georgia State Election Board sent letters to the U.S. Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security asking the Trump administration to order major changes to the state’s voting equipment just weeks before the midterm election.

But the board’s chair says its members did not authorize the letters, review them in advance, or know they were being sent.

While the letters have been widely understood as an outgrowth of a Sept. 28 resolution authorizing Executive Director James Mills to seek federal assistance over concerns about Georgia’s voting system, Chair John Fervier told Votebeat that Mills drafted and sent the letters on his own and that they went well beyond what the board had approved in a 3-2 vote two days earlier.

“We have no control over our executive director, and he does whatever the hell he wants to,” Fervier said.

Asked whether that was an ongoing problem, Fervier said, “You have no idea.”

Mills did not respond to a Saturday email or a Sunday voicemail requesting comment.

The episode is the latest escalation in a long-running power struggle over the State Election Board. Since Mills was hired in 2025, he and Fervier have repeatedly clashed over how much authority the executive director can exercise without the chair’s involvement.

Fervier’s account was confirmed by Salleigh Grubbs, the vice chair of the Georgia Republican Party and one of the three members who voted for the resolution, who has generally aligned with the board’s conservative majority.

Grubbs told Votebeat that within hours of the Sept. 28 meeting, she emailed Mills asking him to send the proposed letter to board members before it went out. Democratic member Sara Tindall Ghazal replied to the message, seconding the request. Grubbs said Mills never responded, and she learned of the letters Thursday morning “with everybody else.”

“I really didn’t know it was going to be like, ‘Whoosh!’ and it’s done,” she said.

The resolution also gave Mills broad discretion in carrying out its directives. But Fervier — one of two members who voted against the resolution — said the letters “far exceeded” what the board actually approved. Grubbs agreed.

The resolution urged the Georgia secretary of state to begin implementing recommended software updates, called for forensic copies of certain election-system hard drives before any update, authorized Mills to seek federal assistance concerning the failure to update the software, and directed him to assist existing federal inquiries into QR-code tabulation and voter-data sharing.

Mills’ letters turned these into far more aggressive demands. Mills asked the Justice Department to compel state and county officials to install specific newer software before the November election. The letter also asked the Justice Department to prohibit QR-code-based tabulation entirely and impose a binding six-month deadline for Georgia to move away from it.

The controversy over QR codes dates to the rollout of Georgia’s current voting system in 2020. The state’s touchscreen voting machines print out a paper ballot that lists the voter’s choices but also encodes them in a QR code, which is what’s used in the actual tabulation. Critics have long argued that such a system is not directly verifiable by voters. State officials have defended the system as secure and auditable — and audits show the system tabulates ballots as expected — but critics say hand-marked paper ballots or other changes would improve security and trust.

Grubbs said her vote for the resolution wasn’t meant to authorize the demands in the letters. “I know we don’t have time to do those kinds of updates before November,” she said.

The letters also made allegations against Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, that do not appear in the resolution. They say he “appears to have misled the legislature and the public” about the cost and feasibility of addressing problems with the voting system. They also ask the Justice Department to investigate the alleged alteration, destruction, or withholding of ballot images, cast-vote records, and voter rolls by Raffensperger’s office. Mills also asked federal officials to hold Raffensperger or other responsible officials accountable under federal law.

A spokesperson for Raffensperger’s office has shrugged off the request, telling Georgia Public Broadcasting, “People who are serious about election security don’t inject chaos in the 11th hour.”

Fervier, an appointee of Republican Gov. Brian Kemp who has served on the board for three years, said he views the letters as “a political hit piece against our secretary of state” and an attempt to sow “chaos and confusion” in this year’s midterms.

Federal agencies are already actively scrutinizing Georgia’s elections

Neither the Department of Justice nor the Department of Homeland Security has publicly indicated whether it intends to act on Mills’ requests.

A Homeland Security spokesperson told Votebeat that the agency “responds to official correspondence through official channels” and “is committed to restoring integrity to our election systems and ensuring that American citizens and only American citizens are electing American leaders.”

A Department of Justice spokesperson told Votebeat election integrity is “paramount to the Department,” and said the department was “aware of the letter,” but declined to comment further.

The letters arrive, however, amid several other ongoing election-related federal actions in Georgia. The Justice Department has been battling Raffensperger over access to the state’s unredacted voter roll, while the FBI is conducting a separate criminal investigation into Fulton County’s 2020 election records after agents seized hundreds of boxes of ballots and other materials in January. Homeland Security has also sought Georgia voter records in immigration-related investigations.

The letters themselves are printed on State Election Board letterhead and cite the Sept. 28 resolution as the basis for their requests. They ask federal officials for “prompt consideration” of a series of actions involving Georgia’s voting system, election records, and voter-registration data.

The resolution authorized Mills to seek help from the Justice Department, Homeland Security, and “any quarter” and to take any action he considered “necessary” or “desirable” to advance the resolution’s goals. But that discretion was tied to carrying out the resolution itself, and Mills was required to immediately copy the board on communications related to that work, according to the resolution.

Fervier said the new demands and allegations Mills added to the letters he drafted and sent without copying the board are evidence that he went beyond the authority he was given.

Grubbs also believes Mills exceeded his authority. “In private enterprise, if I told an employee I wanted to see something before it goes and he did this, we’d be having a very different conversation,” Grubbs said. “I thought we were all on the same team.”

A long-running fight over Mills’ authority

Mills, a former Republican state legislator and longtime member of the State Board of Pardons and Paroles, has become a polarizing figure in Georgia election administration in the short time since his appointment.

Conservative activists have praised him as an aggressive advocate willing to pursue questions about voting systems, voter rolls, and the 2020 election that they believe other officials have ignored. His critics — a broad group including voting-rights groups and officials in the secretary of state’s office — have cast him as a destabilizing force whose actions inject politics and confusion into election administration. The divide has surfaced repeatedly in fights over Fulton County’s 2020 records, voter-roll investigations, and the board’s internal management.

At an August 2025 hearing of a Georgia House blue-ribbon committee held only three months after Mills took over as executive director, Mills openly attacked the officials overseeing him. He accused Fervier of excluding members from discussions with the secretary of state’s office, disregarding the wishes of the board majority, and preventing even “simple changes” from being made, telling lawmakers he had “never served under a more dysfunctional, dishonest chairman.”

Mills also urged lawmakers to watch an earlier board meeting as evidence of Fervier’s dishonesty. The confrontation was not isolated: Weeks later, Mills challenged Fervier during a public board meeting to “be a man” and surrender control over posting meeting notices, prompting Fervier to tell him to stop questioning his manhood.

The disputes have ranged from control over staffing and meeting logistics to correspondence sent before formal board approval. Earlier this year, for example, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that then-board member Janice Johnston directed Mills to send letters to Fulton County before the board had voted to authorize them.

The board’s majority has also repeatedly delegated more operational authority to Mills, saying the changes were needed to ensure the majority’s decisions were carried out rather than blocked by Fervier, deepening the divide.

Firing Mills would require votes from three board members, and it is not clear whether that support exists. Grubbs said the letters have troubled her more deeply than her other frustrations with Mills, which she said extend beyond this incident.

“I will make inquiries and I don’t always get a response,” she said, adding that she does not find him timely or responsive. “I would have thought he would have been more willing to work with me.”

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

Thousands of Wayne County voters to get new ballots after printing error

2026-10-02T16:45:16+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Michigan’s free newsletter here.

At least 8,500 voters in Wayne County are getting new mail ballots after officials misprinted their originals.

Belleville, Sumpter Township, and Van Buren Township all sent their ballots out last week, but a county error meant that a candidate running for a partial term on the Belleville Area District Library Board was included in the section for full-term candidates instead.

Wayne County officials noticed the problem earlier this week and notified the affected communities on Sept. 28. New ballots are in the works, but Van Buren Township Deputy Clerk Brittany Beaudry said she didn’t expect to have them before Monday.

Once they arrive, she plans to bring in people who normally work as poll workers to mark the envelopes so voters can distinguish the replacement ballot from the original and return the correct one.

“Everything had gone really smoothly,” Beaudry said Thursday. “I was commenting on it, like, ‘This is great! It went out a day early!’ The process went really well until it didn’t.”

It’s not yet clear who might pay for the additional work needed to get corrected ballots out, Beaudry said. Wayne County has agreed to pay for envelopes and ballots and offered its staff to help, though, she said.

Typically, counties design ballots and send them to cities and townships to review for spelling and accuracy. The system helps catch problems before counties send the ballots to the printers.

In this case, though, Belleville Interim Clerk Michelle Bellingham said that the documents officials received to check the ballot against also had the error.

“We had no way to know,” Bellingham said.

Beaudry estimated that Van Buren Township will have to resend roughly 7,700 ballots. In Belleville, Bellingham estimated it would be just over 800. Sumpter Township officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but state records from the August primary show that 1,824 people requested absentee ballots there.

Those who return the ballot with the error will not be penalized in any way, officials confirmed. Ballots with the faulty race will be duplicated upon receipt — that is, officials will copy the voter’s selections by hand onto a new ballot to ensure it can be tabulated correctly. A voter’s individual selections are not tied to their name or ID, meaning their privacy is maintained even if their ballot needs to be duplicated.

Beaudry said that, depending on the number of faulty ballots received, she may have officials call voters before envelopes are opened and ask if they would like to fill out a new one instead.

“We don’t want to be duplicating ballots for days after the election,” she said.

Dorian Tyus, a spokesperson for the Wayne County clerk’s office, confirmed Thursday that no other offices or proposals were affected.

“In the coming days, affected voters will receive a letter and a new absentee ballot from their local municipal clerk with detailed instructions on how to vote their replacement ballot,” he wrote in an email.

Voters will not be allowed to vote using both ballots. Those who received a ballot with the error are advised to shred it and wait for the new one to arrive.

Ballot errors are rare, but they do happen. Last year, Dearborn had to reprint about 10,000 ballots after the original absentee ballot listed a candidate who had dropped out of a race months prior.

The error, as in the Dearborn case, is usually caught in time to get new ballots printed.

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

Hundreds of Wisconsin election offices not using cybersecurity best practices

2026-10-02T14:45:05+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

When Lac Du Flambeau Town Clerk Susan Schoonover began her job four years ago, the town’s technology infrastructure was in a bygone era.

The 3,500-person town had no official website, and staff used ordinary email accounts for town business. That could have made it easier for someone to impersonate the town, send convincing phishing messages or steer residents to a fake site. Residents had no verified government domain to tell them which messages and websites were real.

A programmer, Schoonover made changing that setup an early priority. The town got a grant to move staff onto government email addresses, she built an official website using a government domain, and she persuaded the town board to keep investing in cybersecurity even as its property tax revenue shrank.

Lac du Flambeau now stands ahead of hundreds of other small towns in Wisconsin that still use non-government domains, which experts say runs afoul of cybersecurity best practices.

A Votebeat analysis of state data found that about one in three Wisconsin clerks still use Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo or other consumer email accounts for election business — and every municipality using one has fewer than 5,000 residents. Most have fewer than 1,000. On the other hand, among municipalities with more than 25,000 residents, not a single clerk uses a consumer account.

It’s a genuine risk not to have government domains, said Trevor Timmons, vice president of the nonpartisan election consultation group Ready for Tuesday. Government sites are “harder to spoof” and “harder to successfully send phishing attacks to,” Timmons said. Phishing is when a scammer sends a link designed to obtain the recipients’ personal information.

The threat isn’t just hypothetical. Hackers tried to breach the emails of election officials in at least nine states in 2021. In November 2016, Russian hackers sent over 120 emails containing malicious software to the email accounts of election officials in Florida. In 2020, the FBI identified dozens of URLs that looked like real election websites, which government officials said could be used to phish or post incorrect election information.

Wisconsin looks relatively typical when viewed statewide. A Bipartisan Policy Center analysis found that about 43% of Wisconsin municipalities and counties with listed websites use government domains, roughly the 44% national average. But that average masks how uneven the technological progress has been: larger jurisdictions have largely modernized, while many of the smallest have not.

“The big difference with .gov is not necessarily that the cybersecurity is so much better, but that your visitors can know that they’re getting information from a trusted, verified government entity,” said William Adler, research director of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Elections Project.

That becomes harder when real election officials use Gmail, Hotmail and similar accounts.

“If you were to tell a voter, ‘Don’t trust any email coming from an election official that’s from a Hotmail.com address,’ they might ignore real election official communications that they need to respond to in order to vote more easily,” Adler said, adding that it will take a while to get to the ideal point where most or all election jurisdictions use government domains.

Wisconsin’s decentralized election system makes closing the gap difficult. The state has 1,850 municipal clerks and 72 county clerks with roles in running elections, many serving tiny jurisdictions with little or no dedicated IT staff.

“Many of these municipalities don’t have much in the way of IT resources, so it’s fairly impressive that Wisconsin has managed to stay on par with the rest of the country,” Adler said.

The state has spent years — and millions of dollars — trying to help local election offices improve election security and move onto government domains. Hundreds have taken advantage of that help. But the jurisdictions still behind are concentrated in the smallest places.

Consumer emails may have been the norm 30 years ago, Schoonover said, but now towns need to modernize or else risk having their systems tampered with or their data wiped out.

“The way the world’s changed, it can’t always be like old times,” she said.

A foggy sunrise in Lac du Flambeau, Wisconsin, which has modernized its digital technology ahead of hundreds of other small Wisconsin towns.

Wisconsin has spent years funding local election cybersecurity

While some small towns manage the cost of hosting government domains, the expense can be significant for rural municipalities with tiny budgets and little or no IT staff.

In Big Bend, a Rusk County town with around 400 residents, the town board is working through its options because its current email provider, Bruce Telephone Company, is cutting off its email hosting services, Town Clerk Sandy Rassbach said. The town is now choosing between a consumer email provider like Gmail, or switching to a government domain, she said.

A couple thousand dollars to maintain a government domain is a big expense for a town, she said.

About 49% of Wisconsin election jurisdictions use government email domains, while another 18% use custom domains tied to their municipality. Those custom addresses can have strong security protections, but unlike .gov addresses, they are not restricted to verified government entities.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission has spent years helping local governments improve election security, including through grants specifically aimed at moving municipalities to government domains. But the federal money supporting the programs is dwindling — and WEC has warned that the state may eventually need to step in if it wants to keep subsidizing local election-security upgrades.

“If the Legislature wants to see elections in large cities and small towns become more uniform, they may wish to provide funding for WEC to continue to administer subgrants or to directly fund elections for municipalities,” the commission stated in July 2026 budget materials outlining the agency’s future funding needs.

Separately, Wisconsin Emergency Management is administering $4.7 million in federal grants to jurisdictions vulnerable to cybersecurity attacks.

Registering a government domain itself is free, Timmons said. The expense comes from services such as email hosting, technical support and security, which can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars a year.

It would be ideal for providers to offer their services at no cost or reduced costs for election officials, he said, “but it hasn’t quite gotten there yet.”

Timmons said it’s hard for small-town clerks working part-time hours with no IT department to switch to government emails.

One way to accelerate the shift, he said, would be for the commission to condition future election-security grants on jurisdictions already having — or agreeing to adopt — government emails.

The commission already conditions grants on certain security requirements. For example, municipalities can only receive the current round of $2,000 election security subgrants if they first use the funds to update operating systems and antivirus software.

Those are critical, Timmons said — and so are government domains.

The elections commission in 2021 told clerks that officials with non-government emails would eventually be cut off from some state services, though that hasn’t come to pass. Many of those services have protections designed to prevent unauthorized access, like multi-factor authentication.

Small towns with little funding likeliest not to have government domains

The disparity is particularly stark in northern Rusk County, a rural county with 14,000 residents spread across 33 municipalities. Twenty-seven of its clerks use consumer email addresses like Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook.

Willard is one of the exceptions. Town deputy treasurer Linda Bentley, who has an IT background, spearheaded the town’s switch to government email domains four years ago after she recognized that officials in the Rusk County town were using multiple consumer email domains, like Gmail and Yahoo.

Before the switch, she said, “you really weren’t sure you were getting to the Willard town clerk.”

Town Clerk Mary Jane Nelson said she is “absolutely” more confident communicating with voters now, and she receives significantly fewer spam emails.

“It’s really been a great move, as far as I’m concerned,” she said.

Making that change has required ongoing spending. The town pays $400 every three years for server space, and Bentley charges $200 a year for email security and design — significantly below market rates. Bentley said other nearby towns spend up to $2,000 a year on server space, maintenance and security.

Not every jurisdiction without a government domain is relying on Gmail or Yahoo. Around 360 municipalities use custom domains unique to their municipality, such as kenosha.org or cityofmiddleton.us. Those addresses can have strong security protections, but unlike .gov, they are not restricted to verified government entities.

Those custom domains span the size spectrum, from Fence in Florence County, with fewer than 200 residents, to Madison, with about 285,000. Kenosha is the largest Wisconsin city without a registered government domain for its email or website. Consumer email accounts, by contrast, are concentrated entirely in small municipalities.

It’s often easier to change to government domains if a municipality already has a paid, custom domain, Timmons said, though the switch still requires some technical expertise.

With the November election approaching, Timmons said jurisdictions shouldn’t make major changes to their email systems now. But they can still contact CISA and begin applying for a government domain to prepare for the change after the election.

“I would encourage people to get the ball rolling on that,” he said.

Bentley is glad the Town of Willard has already taken those steps. The switch gave the town something more basic: a recognizable identity online.

“It’s become our signature,” she said, “our confidence that you know you’re emailing the town clerk for the town of Willard, not some spoofed address.”

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Everything you need to know about how to vote in Arizona’s 2026 election

2026-10-02T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Arizona’s free newsletter here.

This story was adapted from an article originally published June 17, 2026.

Get ready, desert voters — another election is approaching.

It’s a midterm year, which means key congressional seats and top state positions are up for grabs in the upcoming general election. As usual, Arizona is expected to be at the center of the action. Its voters could play an outsized role in shaping the makeup of the U.S. House of Representatives and potentially tilt the balance of national power.

Election Day is Nov. 3, but voting starts on Oct. 7.

We compiled answers to some common questions about the election. Here’s everything you need to know to cast your ballot.

What offices are on the ballot in Arizona?

At the federal level, voters will select members of the House of Representatives. Neither of the state’s U.S. Senate seats is up for election this year.

Voters will also decide all of the state’s top positions, including governor, secretary of state, and attorney general. Every seat in both chambers of the Arizona Legislature is also up for election this year.

Additionally, voters will weigh in on a variety of ballot measures. That includes measures that would require voters to show ID when they vote by mail, bar public institutions from implementing diversity efforts, ban photo traffic enforcement systems, and more.

Finally, a number of local offices will appear on voters’ ballots. In some cases, local candidates may proceed to a runoff election, depending on the results of the vote and the municipality’s rules.

How can I check if I’m registered to vote?

You can check your registration status through My.Arizona.Vote.

To use the site, you’ll need to provide one of the following:

Your driver’s license number
Your tribal identification card number
The last four digits of your Social Security number

How can I register to vote?

You can register to vote online if you have an Arizona driver’s license or state ID.

Otherwise, you’ll need to register with a paper voter registration form. You can return the form to your county recorder by mail or drop it off at their office.

If you register with a paper form, you must provide proof of citizenship to be eligible to vote a full ballot. Remember to include a photocopy of one of these documents:

Your Arizona driver’s license
Your Arizona non-operating identification card
Your birth certificate
The photo identification page of your U.S. passport or passport card
Your naturalization documents
Your alien registration number
Your U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs or tribal identification card

If you do not provide proof of citizenship, you may still be registered to vote but will only be eligible to participate in federal races — not state or local contests.

How can I tell if I’m eligible to vote?

In Arizona, you are qualified to vote if you are a U.S. citizen, at least 18 years old by the date of the election, and a resident of the state for at least 29 days before the election.

You cannot register to vote if you are a convicted felon and your rights have not been restored, or if you have been adjudicated as an incapacitated person.

When is the deadline to register to vote in the election?

The voter registration deadline for the general election is 11:59 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 5. Be sure to check your registration status before the deadline if you wish to participate in the election.

When is the voting period?

Mail ballots go out starting on Wednesday, Oct. 7. That’s also the first day of in-person voting. Election Day is on Tuesday, Nov. 3, and is the last day to vote.

How can I get a ballot in the mail?

If you are signed up for the state’s Active Early Voting List, you will automatically receive a ballot in the mail.

If you’re not on the list but want to vote by mail, you must contact your county election officials to request a one-time mail ballot.

The deadline to request a mail ballot is Oct. 23.

I’m out of town. Will my ballot be forwarded?

No, your ballot will not be automatically sent to your temporary address, even if you’ve set up mail forwarding. State law does not allow the U.S. Postal Service to forward official election materials, such as ballots.

If you need a ballot forwarded, you should contact your county recorder.

Have there been changes to mail voting this year?

No. President Donald Trump tried to put new restrictions on mail voting this year, but the U.S. Supreme Court blocked them from going into effect for the midterms.

Officials have repeatedly sought to assure voters that mail voting remains a safe and secure option. The Pinal County Recorder’s Office said in a Sept. 1 statement that its processes had not changed ahead of the court’s decision and that it was planning to send mail ballots to voters who had requested them.

“Pinal County voters have several secure and convenient ways to cast their ballot,” said Recorder Dana Lewis, a Republican. “Whether voting by mail, using a secure ballot dropbox, voting early in person, or voting on Election Day, we encourage voters to know their options, plan ahead, and choose the method that works best for them.”

Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, said in a Sept. 14 press statement that voting by mail was “not only secure, but one of the easiest ways to expand access to voting, increase participation in our elections, and ensure that every eligible voter in the state can vote.”

“We’re good now,” he said in a separate video posted to social media after the Supreme Court’s ruling.

When is the deadline to return my mail ballot?

Your ballot must be received by 7 p.m. on Election Day, Nov. 3, or else it won’t be counted. To account for possible mail delays, you should put your ballot in the mail seven to 10 days before the election — by Oct. 27 at the latest. Officials generally recommend mailing back your ballot as early as possible, particularly in rural areas.

Postage is prepaid, so your ballot does not require a stamp.

Can I drop off my ballot in person instead?

Yes. Counties typically offer freestanding drop boxes where voters can return their ballots. Check with your local election officials for locations.

Voters can also return their mail ballots at polling sites during the early voting period or on Election Day.

Those who do so can opt to show ID when dropping off their ballots to have them counted sooner. If you choose to show ID, you may have to wait in line at the voting location. Some counties may offer a separate line for voters who are dropping off their mail ballot with their ID. Others may require you to stand in the same line as in-person voters.

If you choose to drop off your ballot without showing ID, you can skip the line at the polls. Your ballot will go through signature verification, a process that safeguards against fraud, before being counted.

I want to vote in person. How can I do that?

All Arizona voters can cast their ballot in person, regardless of whether they were mailed a ballot. You can vote early in person or on Election Day.

If you received a mail ballot, election workers will void that ballot and give you a replacement ballot to vote. If you were not mailed a ballot, you will receive one when you arrive at the polling place.

Some counties assign polling places to voters based on their voting precinct. Others use a vote center model in which voters can go to any polling place in the county to cast their ballot. Check with your county election officials for details.

Polls are open on Election Day from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. Early voting hours vary by location; contact your local election officials for details.

Do I need to bring anything with me to the polls?

ID is required if you vote in person. Acceptable forms of ID include:

Your valid Arizona driver’s license
Your valid state identification card
Your tribal enrollment card
Other government-issued identification
Two items, such as a utility bill and a bank statement, that bear your name and address

Can I track my ballot?

Yes. Maricopa County voters can track their ballot at BeBallotReady.Vote. Pima County voters can track their ballot on the county recorder’s website. Voters in other parts of Arizona can track their ballot via BallotTrax.

I have more questions. How can I contact my local election officials?

The Arizona Secretary of State’s Office provides contact information for election officials by county.

All voters can contact the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office at 1-877-THE-VOTE or 602-542-8683.

If you run into any problems, we want to hear about them!

If you have any other questions or concerns about voting in Arizona, please let us know. We can be reached at az.tips@votebeat.org.

Sasha Hupka is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Sasha at shupka@votebeat.org.

Records show DPS knew of problems with Texas’ online voter registration portal as early as March

2026-10-01T22:47:34+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

Six months before the Texas Department of Public Safety and Secretary of State’s Office were forced to send hundreds of thousands of backlogged voter registration records to local county officials, both agencies were warned that records were getting lost in DPS’s web portal.

A state lawmaker flagged an issue with voter registration records in March, public records show. The agencies said that problem was resolved. But complaints about the portal continued. And in August the agencies realized they had a big issue — at least 500,000 backlogged voter registration records sent to county election officials last week.

Now, county election administrators are scrambling with little time to sort through those records before the critical Nov. 3 midterm election.

State officials said the most recent backlog of records was due to an October 2025 software update by a DPS vendor. Software engineering and election administration experts say the state agencies should have tested updates to their respective systems, including how they worked together, and developed ways to immediately alert state officials of errors.

“To me, it just looks like they did not have the people with the depth of knowledge and maybe experience to make sure that they were testing everything that they needed to test,” said Trevor Timmons, the former chief information technology officer for the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office.

The Texas Secretary of State’s Office confirmed it had tested how a new version of its voter registration management system, known as TEAM, worked with DPS’s portal before launching its system overhaul in July 2025. The Texas Secretary of State’s Office and DPS did not respond to questions about whether they had again tested the systems before the October 2025 DPS update.

DPS acknowledged in March that a “programming change” had prevented the processing of nearly 1,000 voter registration applications and updates Texans submitted through its web portal between December and February, public records show.

The agency assured state Sen. Donna Campbell’s office, which was seeking information on behalf of a constituent, that the error had been resolved, according to a March email. State information technology officials “are monitoring online activity for any unforeseen anomalies. Should they encounter irregularities, they will be notifying the Department immediately,” a DPS official wrote in the email obtained by the Texas Civil Rights Project, a nonprofit that advocates for voting rights, and shared with Votebeat.

DPS officials told Campbell’s office that a programming change made by the Department of Information Resources (DIR), which administers the web portal, and its vendor, Deloitte, caused the issue. The voter registration selections made during online driver’s license and state ID transactions could “not be saved or transmitted to the Department,” DPS said.

Voters who checked the option “yes” to register to vote received a receipt reflecting their selection. But the transaction didn’t go through due to the programming error, DPS said. As a result, voters’ applications and address updates weren’t actually submitted and their records were never sent to the secretary of state. DPS officials said DIR and its vendor were not able to identify the impacted records, so voter registration records were corrected “only when a customer provides a copy of their transaction receipt,” the emails say.

Warnings about the system’s flaws continued. In July, voting rights advocates wrote to both DPS and the Texas Secretary of State’s Office citing similar problems with the web portal.

“As a result, Texas voters showed up to the polls during recent elections believing they had successfully updated their voter registration on DPS’s website, only to discover their registration was not updated,” the Texas Civil Rights Project wrote in the letter shared with Votebeat.

Both agencies responded. DPS told the group that technical issues are promptly resolved. The secretary of state’s office said it receives files of voter registration records daily from DPS and sends them to local election officials, and that it was following state and federal laws.

Despite the assurances, problems with voter registration applications submitted through the portal have continued to surface.

The Texas Secretary of State’s Office did not respond to specific questions for this story. In an emailed statement Thursday, spokesperson Alicia Pierce said the office is “laser-focused on helping counties process these registrations and ensuring all eligible Texans can exercise their right to vote. We will continue to review our processes and procedures to identify areas of improvement and ways to prevent similar issues in the future.”

In a September call with county election officials, Christina Adkins, the secretary of state’s elections division director, described “a little frustration” because, she said, her office had “made inquiries, expressed concerns” to DPS related to complaints about the portal and “had been assured that there were no problems.”

“So when DPS presented this information to us, it was quite the surprise,” she said, according to a recording of the call obtained by Votebeat.

In an emailed statement Wednesday, DPS said the error that led to the backlog announced last week had been resolved and the agency “has not identified any further issues with the transfer of its daily batch reports of voter information.”

“Additional controls are now in place between DPS and the SOS to confirm that complete information has been sent and received, so this cannot be replicated in the future,” the DPS statement said.

The agency did not respond to questions about specific steps taken after the incidents to prevent them from continuing.

Election officials must now process the delayed records and add voters to the rolls just weeks before the midterm election, in a year when some high-profile statewide races could be close. If voters show up at the polls and aren’t listed as registered, they’ll be asked to vote using provisional ballots, which will require extra steps to confirm their eligibility before those ballots can be counted.

Some better-resourced counties, including Dallas, have already been able to get through their backlogs; Dallas had nearly 70,000 records. Others are working long hours to do so.

The news of the backlog sparked bipartisan calls from state lawmakers for an investigation into what went wrong. At least one key GOP legislator said the secretary of state’s office should have caught the problem sooner. Timmons, the former Colorado official who is now vice president of Ready for Tuesday, an organization that provides operational support for election officials, agrees.

“They both should have been staying in touch about system upgrades to make sure everything is still flowing along normally, and just making sure that you had the right people talking to each other,” he said.

‘Technical incompetence’

Voting rights advocates with the Texas Civil Rights Project, the nonprofit group that wrote to DPS and the secretary of state in July, are skeptical the problems are fixed.

Although the magnitude of the most recent problem is unlike what officials and advocates have seen before, election officials, voters, and the Texas Secretary of State’s Office have long said that voters’ attempts to register via DPS — in person and through its web portal — don’t always work. That has led to some voters having to cast provisional ballots in past elections, as Votebeat previously reported.

Karla Maradiaga, a voting rights attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project, said the years-long problems signal a lack of oversight.

“They say they have checks in place,” Maradiaga said. “Either that’s not true or whatever checks they have in place are not working.”

William Furney, 29, a voter from North Texas, believes he may have been one of the voters whose registration was never sent to county officials.

In October 2025, after he moved from Collin to Dallas County, he used DPS’s web portal.

“I checked the option to register to vote. I thought everything was good, I got the receipt, I got the driver’s license in the mail, I thought everything had transferred over fine,” Furney said.

But on Election Day for the March primary he found out it hadn’t worked. He was told he wasn’t on the list of registered voters and offered a provisional ballot.

Furney told the poll worker he’d updated his address and had registered through the DPS web portal, “and the immediate response I got from him was something like, ‘oh I can’t believe this is happening again,’ like he had seen this happening before,” Furney said.

Furney said he spent about an hour at the polling site to cast his provisional ballot. Weeks later, he got a notice from the county saying his ballot was not accepted, he said.

“It was so frustrating to have to go through all that process just to be told my vote wouldn’t count because I wasn’t registered,” Furney said. “It just kind of illustrates the technical incompetence of Texas state government. If DPS isn’t capable of delivering these registration changes in time, like, why even offer the service?”

Lawmakers promise investigations into the problem

Two key GOP lawmakers have promised investigations into what went wrong. State Rep. Matt Shaheen, the chair of the Texas House Elections Committee, previously told Votebeat he has spoken directly with DPS officials and is “going to personally make sure whoever is responsible for the mistake is held accountable.”

Still, Shaheen, a Republican from North Texas who has a background in technology and software management, said questions about whether the agencies adequately tested how the systems work together are “speculation.”

“A lot of different things can happen when you’re working with these systems,” he said.

But state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Republican from Houston, said this is a “two-agency snafu that could have easily been resolved with some better programming.” He previously said the Texas Secretary of State’s Office should have flagged the problem sooner. “If something stops happening, you either have to ring the alarm bell, or you have to have somebody looking at the data that realizes that something’s wrong,” he said.

The public records show there were multiple complaints about the DPS portal.

A staff member for Campbell’s office first reached out to DPS officials on March 9 about a constituent who had tried to update her address via the state agency’s web portal. The change had not been made. “Please advise if anyone can figure out what happened,” Campbell’s office wrote.

DPS officials responded the next day.

“The Department recently became aware of an issue affecting voter registration information collected through the online driver’s license feature,” the email response says. “The issue impacted transactions completed between December 6, 2025 and February 26, 2026.”

The agency said it immediately alerted the secretary of state’s office to the problem and the programming error was resolved.

In an email on March 12, in summarizing transactions made using the web portal during the March Primary election, DPS officials said 992 transactions were conducted during the period affected by the programming issue.

“We also responded to 53 election officials to provide an online receipt because the voter claimed they had selected “yes” during the DIR programming issue,” a DPS official wrote. “And four records were changed to “yes” because we received their online receipt.”

Then, in July, the Texas Civil Rights Project and the League of Women Voters wrote to DPS and the secretary of state’s office to say that the portal appeared to be failing. The organizations said they received complaints from at least three voters who selected the voter registration option on DPS’s web portal but later found that their registration had never been updated.

The groups argued that the problems could violate a 2021 legal settlement that directed the state agencies to maintain a system that allows voters to register online while updating their driver’s license or state ID, and could be in violation of federal law.

“As with any complex data-transfer system, occasional technical issues may arise,” D. Phillip Adkins, DPS’s general counsel, responded on Aug. 6, according to the records. “When they do, the Department works promptly to identify and resolve them in close coordination with the secretary of state.”

The secretary of state’s general counsel, Adam Bitter, responded too.

“Your reliance on three purported instances across the State — out of more than 18 million registrants — is sorely misguided,” he wrote. “Indeed, nothing in your letter establishes—or even suggests — that the Secretary of State or DPS has failed to comply” with the settlement or federal or state law, he wrote, adding, “should you choose to proceed with litigation on this matter, we stand ready to vigorously contest your allegations.”

State officials say they worked quickly to resolve the problem

Both agencies have said that an October 2025 software update to the DPS portal by vendor Deloitte, caused the current massive backlog.

DPS in its statement Wednesday said the update “caused three pieces of data to be omitted from the daily file” sent to the secretary of state that has information from online driver’s license and state ID transactions.

DPS said that in late August, “the department identified the missing data fields issue” and immediately worked with the secretary of state’s office and their third-party vendor, Civix, to resolve it.

The issue was resolved as of Sept. 13, DPS said.

On Sept. 23, Adkins, the secretary of state’s elections division director, acknowledged in the call with county officials that voters and county officials had reported problems with DPS voter registration applications to her agency. She said her office had asked DPS about them.

“We noticed that we were missing some daily files from DPS,” Adkins said. “This is something that happens and has happened from time to time over the years, where we don’t get a file posted for our system to pull down and automatically process.”

She said the office reached out to DPS to investigate. About a week later, DPS said that “there were some bigger issues that were going on that they needed to alert us to,” Adkins said.

Adkins said that because the records were missing key data points, the automated process didn’t match records and push the data to counties as it typically did. Adkins told county officials she and her staff did not know at first exactly how many records they’d be receiving.

“We had some kind of broad ideas from what they were telling us, but we’re not given any kind of specific numbers,” Adkins said. “So when we got the records on the 14th, they were pretty large files, pretty substantial records, and we knew there was going to be quite a bit of data there.”

Adkins added that DPS requested that both agencies work together “over the next couple of weeks to do some manual verifications on a daily basis. They want to ensure that the modifications that they have made to their system to address this issue are in place and working as they should be, and not impacting files going forward,” she said.

Adkins told county officials that her office would be conducting “additional manual verifications going forward, especially through this very critical early voter registration timeframe leading up to the November election.”

She said her staff is now having “some bigger discussions about other safeguards” to prevent such problems.

“I think our obligation right now is really to our voters, to make sure that these voters are not impacted and that they can vote a regular ballot in November, as they should be able to,” Adkins told county election officials.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Natalia is based in Corpus Christi. Contact her at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Voters in multiple Michigan counties still don’t have absentee ballots after clerks miss mailing deadline

2026-09-29T23:17:15+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Michigan’s free newsletter here.

Several Michigan clerks missed the deadline to mail absentee ballots, despite state laws that require them to be sent to voters at least 40 days before the election — which, for the 2026 midterms, was Sept. 24.

As of Tuesday, voters in Antrim and Presque Isle counties are still waiting on their ballots, officials in both counties confirmed. A number of other communities also missed the deadline but have since gotten their ballots mailed. Waterford Township and Grayling, for example, mailed their ballots Sept. 25, while Farmington Hills, Commerce Township, Chocolay Township, and Klacking Township had ballots available for pickup by the deadline but did not begin mailing them until this week.

In Michigan, counties are in charge of getting ballots printed and distributing them to municipal clerks, who then work with their staffs to get the ballots into the hands of voters.

It’s not unheard of for counties to miss the 40-day deadline, state officials said. Typically, there is no penalty if counties have a plan in place to get ballots to voters as soon as possible.

Antrim County Deputy Clerk Annette Marcus told Votebeat on Monday that her county started getting ballots to municipal clerks on Tuesday, then the clerks will send them out to voters. In Presque Isle County’s Ocqueoc Township, Clerk Pamela Shaedig said Tuesday that she expected to receive her ballots Wednesday.

Those with outstanding ballots blamed printers and the tight deadlines to turn ballots around. There are a limited number of print companies approved to produce ballots for Michigan’s elections, and all clerks typically send their final orders within a relatively short window.

“I don’t know how, honestly, to get it out any faster,” Marcus said.

She said it would be helpful if the August primary, in which candidates for partisan races are selected for the November ballot, were held earlier. Antrim County finalized its primary results only about a week before Marcus was preparing to send ballots to the printer, she said.

The state legislature would have to approve moving the primary date. It has been considered in the past, but the Senate and House have been unable to agree on a new date.

Other election officials agreed the 40-day deadline is “hard to meet,” in the words of Trena Somers, the Alcona County deputy clerk.

In Grand Traverse County, Clerk Sam Gedman said his ballots came in from the printers on Sept. 23. His team was able to get them to municipal clerks in time for them to make the state deadline, but “it was stressful,” he said.

“We’re fortunate to be able to get them out by the deadline,” he said. “Everybody works real hard to make it happen, and it’s just a hurry. We always rush, no matter how prepared we are, and it’s frustrating, but that’s just part of the gig, I guess.”

Jennifer Morrell, CEO and co-founder of The Elections Group, noted that the popularity of absentee voting in Michigan is a new phenomenon compared with most other states with mail voting options. Michigan’s no-excuse absentee voting system as it currently exists only came into effect after voters approved it via constitutional amendment in 2018. It skyrocketed in popularity particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, and now more than 1.9 million voters are on the state’s permanent mail ballot list.

It makes sense, Morrell said, that there are still some hiccups to work through — particularly when compared to states that have voted primarily by mail for years, like a number of Western states. Those states have more experience, but the lessons they have learned could be useful to officials in Michigan.

“If I were advising counties… I would want to see their absentee ballot production plan,” said Morrell, who has served as an elections official in both Colorado and Utah. “What tasks are being done? Who’s doing them, and by what date? If you don’t have a plan, well, there you go. That’s where you start.”

Having dedicated plans won’t eliminate every problem, she said, but it can help. For example, it can show officials when vendors may be overpromising or where in-house inefficiencies are wasting time.

Sometimes, though, the factors that delay ballots are completely out of a clerk’s control. Hamlin Township, in Mason County, was set to meet the state’s deadline but is getting its ballots reprinted after the death of a trustee who was facing recall, according to a notice from the township. Reprinted Hamlin ballots will be mailed starting Oct. 1.

Clerks who missed the state’s deadline were instructed to notify voters, and many did through social media and township pages. The majority, though, appeared to have gotten their ballots into the hands of voters on time.

The work is hard, but getting absentee ballots on time “is a commitment we make to the voters,” Gedman said. “We don’t want to break that.”

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

Bill to allow unaffiliated voters to vote in Pennsylvania primaries passes state House

2026-09-29T22:25:58+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

For the first time in recent memory, a bill to open up Pennsylvania’s primary elections to unaffiliated voters has passed the state House.

The bill still faces tough odds of becoming law, particularly since there are only two months left in the 2025-2026 legislative session. But the bill’s passage in the lower chamber represents a milestone for advocates.

“There’s nothing more foundational to our democracy, to build institutional accountability, than ensuring everyone has a right to vote and a voice in the democratic process,” state Rep. Jared Solomon (D., Philadelphia), the bill’s prime sponsor, said. He said the bill would “open up the process, get new voices in, lower the political temperature, lower the extremism we see in our politics, and make sure that these voices have a stake and a say in the democratic process in Pennsylvania.”

House Bill 280 passed 115-88, with most Democrats voting in favor as well as some Republicans.

The bill would allow registered voters with no political party affiliation to select which party’s primary election they would like to vote in. However, it would not allow them to vote in a party’s internal elections, such as for committee seats, which had been one of opponents’ chief concerns.

Pennsylvania has had closed primaries for nearly 100 years and is one of the last states in the nation to bar unaffiliated voters from participating in them. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, only seven other states have closed primaries.

“For too long, independent Pennsylvanians have helped pay for primary elections while being denied the opportunity to participate in them,” David Thornburgh, a longtime open primaries advocate and chair of Ballot PA Action, said in a statement. “Today’s bipartisan vote moves Pennsylvania closer to a more fair and more representative election system — one where all voters matter and all votes count.”

Solomon’s bill would transition the state to a “semi-open” system in which unaffiliated voters could participate in the primary of their choice, but a Democrat could not choose to vote in a Republican primary or vice versa.

Unaffiliated voters are the fastest-growing segment of Pennsylvania’s electorate. Since the 2024 election, both the Democratic and Republican parties have lost voters, but the share of voters registered with no party has increased by 7 percentage points; they now make up more than 13% of the state’s electorate.

Proponents of open primaries have argued that it’s unfair for unaffiliated voters to be locked out of primaries when their tax dollars pay for them. Plus, in many areas of the state, the primary election is effectively the actual election, because one-party dominance makes victory in the primary a near-certain path to victory in November.

Opponents, on the other hand, have argued opening up participation to non-party members would dilute the purpose of a primary and is unnecessary.

“Every voter already has an option to vote in the primary if they choose,” said state Rep. Wendy Fink (R., York), referring to the option for a voter to switch their registration to affiliate with a party. She also argued that primaries are not elections in the strictest sense, but rather nominating contests for parties.

The change would also create a new administrative burden for election officials. It would require them to create multiple new ballot types for certain elections, which would take additional staff resources to proofread and could potentially increase the risk of errors.

For example, in a primary in which Democratic candidates are on the ballot for local offices as well as for party committee positions, two types of ballots would be required: one for Democratic voters who can vote for the committee candidates and one for unaffiliated voters who cannot.

Sean Drasher, the Lebanon County election director, said it would require more training for poll workers.

“It will absolutely increase the risk of error,” he said. “We’re working so, so hard to eliminate any mistakes to begin with. … So it’s frustrating, but we’ll do our best to train around it, and I’m sure with time we’ll get it under control.”

The bill faces long odds in the state Senate. Republicans, who control the upper chamber, have been adamant that any election legislation be paired with expanded voter ID requirements, preferably in the form of a constitutional amendment. They repeated that sentiment after Tuesday’s vote.

“House Democrats’ continual unwillingness to include advancement of commonsense Voter ID is an impediment to the discussion of additional voting reforms,” Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman (R., Indiana), said in an emailed statement.

Solomon, however, expressed optimism that the bill could still pass the upper chamber, noting that state Senate Republicans passed a similar bill by a wide margin in 2019.

A representative for Gov. Josh Shapiro declined to comment on whether he was supportive of the bill.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Everything you need to know about voting in Michigan in 2026

2026-09-28T22:59:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Michigan’s free newsletter here.

This story was adapted from an article originally published June 25, 2026.

It’s time to vote once again, Michigan.

The 2026 midterms may feel millennia away, but it’s only a few short weeks. Ballots are already in the hands of voters around the state, and they’re chock-full of critical races — the kind that will decide what Michigan looks like for years to come.

Here’s everything you need to know about how to vote.

When is Election Day?

The general election in Michigan (and every other state) is Nov. 3. Polls will be open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. local time.

But you can vote earlier if you choose. Absentee ballots are already available and can be returned anytime before 8 p.m. on Election Day. Your community is also required to offer early in-person voting — you can check when and where that will be for your city or township at the Michigan Voter Information Center, which is maintained by the state.

Who can vote in the midterm elections?

All registered voters are eligible to vote. To register to vote in Michigan, you need to be 18, a U.S. citizen, and a resident of the state.

How do I check if I’m registered to vote?

Some communities may send you a notice with your polling place and districts on it, but the fastest and most efficient way is to look yourself up with the Michigan Voter Information Center. There, you can see if you’re registered — and if you’re on the list to automatically receive an absentee ballot by mail.

How do I register to vote in Michigan?

Registering to vote in Michigan is relatively easy and very quick.

If you have a Michigan driver’s license, the fastest way to do it is to register online. You’ll need to affirm you’re a U.S. citizen, a Michigan resident, and at least 18 years old (although those 16 or older can pre-register to vote). You’ll need to authorize the secretary of state’s office to use your stored signature — usually in the system from when you got your driver’s license — for your registration.

From there, the hardest part is pulling out your wallet to input your driver’s license number. You’ll affirm your information as it appears on your license, input the last four digits of your Social Security number, and then answer a few more questions.

Any eligible voters can also register by mail by printing and mailing in the forms here, which are available in a variety of languages. And finally, you can register in person by bringing a photo ID to your local clerk’s office. You can look up your local clerk here.

The deadline to register online or by mail is 15 days before the election — which, for the upcoming general election, is Oct. 19. But you can still register in person at your clerk’s office after that as late as Election Day itself.

Where is my polling place?

Your polling place may have moved since you last voted. A number of communities have consolidated their precincts in recent years in response to changes in state law.

You can look up where to go on the Michigan Voter Information Center. It will have the addresses and hours of your polling place, as well as all of your early voting locations and mail ballot drop boxes.

What offices are on my ballot?

This ballot is a long one, so don’t be concerned if it takes you a little while to fill it out. A complete list of what’s on your ballot, including candidate names, parties, and related Votebeat coverage, is available here.

To check specifically what’s on your ballot, visit the Michigan Voter Information Center, click “What’s on the ballot?” and then put in your jurisdiction. You can also see it on your own voter information page, which you can access by putting in your driver’s license number or other identifying information at this link.

Unlike in the primary election, you can vote for multiple parties in the general election. You have a constitutional right to a private ballot in Michigan, and no one will know how you voted.

What should I bring to vote?

If you choose to vote in person, the process will go fastest if you bring a photo ID. That can be a driver’s license, a passport, a tribal card with photos, or a student ID — a number of things can work as long as the identification comes from a government institution and has a photo attached. You can find a list of acceptable IDs here.

But photo ID is not required to vote in Michigan if you don’t have one or forget to bring it with you. State law allows you to instead fill out an affidavit confirming your identity. On that form, you’ll confirm your name and address. Lying on the form is considered perjury, which comes with the potential for fines or jail time.

If you need help voting, you have a right to bring someone along. That person cannot be your employer or someone acting on the behalf of your union, but otherwise they can help you cast your ballot.

Can I vote early in person in Michigan?

Yes! State law requires that any election with federal or statewide races — think U.S. senators or the governor — has at least nine consecutive days of early in-person voting, starting on the second Saturday before the election (which, for this year’s election, is Oct. 24).

Communities are also allowed to offer additional days of early voting, although not all of them do. Early voting requires money and staff resources that are difficult for some smaller communities to wrangle.

This year is the first that communities across the state are allowed to offer early voting on the Monday before the election. Detroit, Lansing, and a number of other cities will be taking advantage. Other communities, such as Ann Arbor, will go even further — voters there will be able to vote early starting Oct. 21 at the city’s satellite voting centers. Grand Rapids voters can start casting early in-person ballots starting Oct. 20.

You can check your community’s specific hours and locations by putting in your information here.

How do I vote by mail in Michigan?

In Michigan, any voter can choose to vote by mail, for any reason, by requesting an absentee ballot. You can do so online here. Voters with disabilities can request an accessible ballot here.

Michigan voters have the right to be on what is referred to as the permanent absentee list, which means their local clerks will automatically send them a ballot for every election. If you’re on that list, your clerk should have already mailed your ballot no later than Sept. 24. You can check if you’re on the permanent absentee list by putting your information in here — look for a box in the top corner labeled “Absentee Ballot.” You can check your status by seeing if it says “yes” or “no” under “Permanent Ballot List.” If you’re not already on the list, you can request to be added to it when you request your absentee ballot.

The deadline to request an absentee ballot is 5 p.m. on the Friday before the election, which for this election is Oct. 30. Your clerk’s office will do their best to get it to you by Tuesday, but if it doesn’t arrive in time, you can still show up to your polling place on Election Day, ask them to cancel the absentee ballot, and vote in person.

In order for your absentee ballot to count, it must be received by 8 p.m. on Election Day; postmarks don’t count. If you’re returning it by mail, most experts recommend putting it in the mail no later than a week before the election to give it time to make it back to your clerk. If you’re running later than that (or want to ensure it arrives in time), it’s recommended to use a drop box instead. Each community is required to set up drop boxes where voters can return their absentee ballots. You can look up drop box locations by putting your information in here.

It’s worth noting that drop boxes don’t function like mail boxes — you can’t drop your ballot just anywhere and expect it to make it to your clerk. Make sure you return it in a drop box designated for your specific city or township.

Are there new rules around mail voting this year?

President Donald Trump did try to put new restrictions on voting by mail this year, but the U.S. Supreme Court blocked them from going into effect for the midterms. The Michigan Association of Municipal Clerks has gotten notices from the U.S. Postal Service confirming that “USPS processes and procedures will remain consistent with previous election cycles,” as MAMC President Michael Siegrist wrote in an email to members. Election mail is expected to be “business as usual.”

Who can I ask if I have more questions on voting in Michigan?

Your first stop is probably your clerk’s office. Your clerk and their staff are extensively trained in election administration, and they can probably answer your questions. You can find your clerk here.

You can also reach out to Votebeat if you see something strange or run into problems. We’d love to hear from you — reach out at mich.tips@votebeat.org.

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

Maricopa County investigated 60 suspected noncitizen voters. 52 are citizens, 8 are not.

2026-09-28T21:19:19+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Arizona’s free newsletter here.

Update, Sept. 28, 5 p.m. MST: This story has been updated with a statement from Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap.

Most Maricopa County voters flagged as potential noncitizens by an error-prone federal system are citizens after all, according to county detectives.

Rachel Mitchell, the county’s top prosecutor, said on Monday her office had completed a monthslong investigation into 60 suspected noncitizens who had cast ballots in prior elections.

Of those, she said 52 were citizens, and eight were not. Mitchell, a Republican, said all but one of the noncitizen voters appeared to have been erroneously registered while renewing their driver’s licenses.

It’s unclear whether those individuals could face formal criminal charges. Mitchell did not announce charges on Monday, but wouldn’t rule out doing so.

Her announcement comes after Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap, a Republican, referred 207 individuals to county and state prosecutors for review in the spring. He identified the potential noncitizens on the county’s voter roll while attempting to confirm the citizenship status of 61,681 voters impacted by a longstanding state record-keeping error.

The database that flagged the voters as noncitizens — called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE — has repeatedly proven to be unreliable. Maintained by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, SAVE was originally used to check immigrants’ eligibility for public benefits but was revamped and expanded last year to be used as a mass voter verification tool. However, it has produced false positives in several states.

In June, a federal judge blocked the use of the overhauled tool over concerns that it threatened both privacy and voting rights, but the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for election officials to resume using the system in a decision last week. However, the ruling is unlikely to have a significant impact on the midterm elections because federal law bars election officials from removing voters en masse in the 90 days leading up to an election.

Heap has never directly addressed whether he attempted to confirm the 207 voters’ citizenship before forwarding them to prosecutors. In a statement on Monday afternoon, he said the county attorney’s findings represented “a win for the integrity of our voter rolls and an example of the process working exactly as it should.” He added that his office could not verify the voters’ citizenship status “using the federal SAVE database or other records we have access to.”

So far, Mitchell has only looked at 60 of the 207 voters referred by Heap. The remaining 147 voters are still being investigated by her office and the Arizona Attorney General’s Office.

But her investigation’s preliminary results appear to further confirm research and audits that have consistently shown that voting fraud is extremely rare.

It also represents the continued fallout of the state driver’s license system’s longstanding problem tracking voters’ citizenship. Mitchell called that a “systemic flaw” and urged election officials, policymakers, and legislators to take steps to fix the issue.

“Though our findings today would not change the outcome of any past election, every ineligible voter dilutes the vote of a citizen,” she said. “It’s crucial that we fix this going forward so that there are no doubts cast on the security and the results of our elections.”

Who are the noncitizens identified by the county attorney’s office?

Mitchell said five of the noncitizen voters registered without affiliating with a political party. Two others registered as Republicans, and one registered as a Democrat.

She said the voters had cast ballots sporadically in general elections dating back to 2012. Two voters also cast GOP ballots during the 2020 and 2022 state primaries, and two voters cast ballots in Glendale’s 2025 special election.

Mitchell said she found no evidence that those voters were attempting to sway a specific election.

Of the eight noncitizens identified through county prosecutors’ investigation, Mitchell said seven were registered to vote while updating their driver’s licenses. She said the remaining noncitizen voter registered via a paper form. The individual had marked that they were not a citizen, she said, and it’s unclear why they were registered to vote.

Mitchell called for better training for clerks with the Arizona Department of Transportation’s Motor Vehicles Division.

“They should be asking someone if they want to register to vote before any form is filled out,” she said, adding that the voters interviewed by detectives had no recollection of registering to vote or being asked whether they wanted to do so. “The workers need to make it crystal clear that the information that they are gathering is for voter registration, and that the person must be a U.S. citizen.”

Mitchell said most of the noncitizen voters had been registered to vote while visiting an MVD office in person, but noted investigators couldn’t tell whether that location was an official MVD location or a third-party one. In Arizona, the state contracts with private companies to provide motor vehicle services, including issuing, renewing, and replacing driver’s licenses.

She suggested that lawmakers could help close the loophole in the state’s driver’s license and voter registration databases by requiring a record of who registers each voter — whether that be an MVD clerk, a worker at a third-party site, or a volunteer with a voter registration organization.

Mitchell also noted that officials could try to more strongly bifurcate MVD records from voter registration records. Federal and state law require voters to have the opportunity to register to vote at the same time as they obtain a driver’s license, she said, but statute doesn’t require “that there be an overlapping of data.”

What’s next for the investigated voters?

After using the SAVE tool to identify the 207 voters as potential noncitizens, Heap placed them in “not eligible” status earlier this year. Voters in that status remain on the rolls, but they may not receive mail ballots and are required to show proof that they are a U.S. citizen before being allowed to vote.

In moving the voters to that status, Heap appeared to be using a process outlined in the state’s election rulebook that applies to new registrants suspected of being noncitizens, rather than following requirements in a state law that lays out how to notify and remove potential noncitizens who are already on the voter rolls.

Several election experts and lawyers previously told Votebeat that his use of that process was questionable and may not meet legal requirements for notifying voters.

Since then, records suggest those voters have remained in “not eligible” status. Janine Petty, senior director of voter registration at the county recorder’s office, wrote in an email on Aug. 28 that the voters had been designated as “not eligible” and would remain there pending review by state and county prosecutors, unless they provided documents proving their citizenship.

Heap’s office did not respond to a question from Votebeat on how it would handle the 60 voters already investigated by Mitchell. Heap said in a statement that “no final action” was taken regarding the voters’ registration status prior to the completion of the investigation, seemingly suggesting that the citizen voters could be restored to full, active status on the county’s rolls.

Other states, including Texas, have scrambled to reinstate voters in the wake of discovering that citizens were incorrectly flagged by the SAVE system.

It’s unclear which process Heap will use to cancel the eight noncitizen voters identified by Mitchell’s review. The process that led him to put the voters into “not eligible” status requires him to keep them in that status until the November election, and cancel them thereafter if they don’t show proof of citizenship. But the process outlined in state law — the correct one for voters already on the rolls — would require him to send them a notice, wait 35 days for a response, and, if none came, cancel their registration.

Meanwhile, the remaining 147 voters Heap referred to prosecutors are still under investigation.

Mitchell said she split the pool of voters referred for review with Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat. The county has about 20 individuals to investigate in addition to the 60 voters it has already reviewed, she said. The rest are being handled by state prosecutors.

A source familiar with Mayes’ investigation told Votebeat that it is close to finished — and so far, state investigators are finding lots of citizens, similar to the county attorney’s office.

Sasha Hupka is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Sasha at shupka@votebeat.org.

Monae Johnson questioned vote-counting machines. Running elections changed her mind.

2026-09-28T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

Four years after far-right Republicans helped elect Monae Johnson as South Dakota secretary of state, she’s backing a Democrat to replace her.

The cross-party endorsement is unusual. But the more interesting story is how Johnson got to this point.

Johnson ousted a GOP incumbent in 2022 with support from activists who distrusted electronic vote-counting machines and wanted South Dakota to rely more heavily — or entirely — on hand-counting. Her own rhetoric was plenty skeptical too.

In a fundraising letter that spring, Johnson wrote that “all across America we’ve seen questionable results in national, state, and local elections.” Asked that fall whether Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 election, she would not say yes: “I’m not going to acknowledge that.” After she won, she said “anything can be hacked,” citing warnings from “IT people, military people,” and floated restricting the use of vote-counting machines.

But once Johnson became responsible for running elections herself, her views started to change. By 2024, she was publicly expressing confidence in tabulators and saying South Dakota’s election system had safeguards “built in throughout the process.” And this summer, Johnson told Republican convention delegates, “I trust the county auditors to do their jobs, and I fully support the use of secure, tested ballot tabulators.”

Former Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, a Democrat, said she has seen the same evolution play out among poll workers and county officials: People sometimes get involved in elections because they are skeptical of how they work. Then they discover that the problems they expected to find are not there and that some of the fixes they imagined are not workable.

“It’s a brave thing to admit,” Boockvar said. She said she could not recall another example of a statewide election official doing so.

More common are local versions of the same story.

For example, Michelle Burchill — a Republican and supporter of President Donald Trump — went to work for Yavapai County, Arizona, in 2020 after absorbing many of Trump’s claims about rigged elections. On her first day, she watched workers stop when two parts of the operation were off by a single ballot, then search until they found two ballots stuck together. “I was an election skeptic, for sure,” she told Governing Magazine last month. Watching the process “very humbly woke” her up. Today, she serves as one of the county’s top election officials.

In Pennsylvania, registered Republican Jay Schneider signed up to work elections after 2020, still suspicious that there had been “shenanigans.” After serving as a poll worker and training to become a judge of elections, he told Votebeat that seeing the safeguards firsthand changed his view.

In California’s Shasta County, Tom Toller took over an elections office that had spent years at the center of post-2020 conspiracy fights. He arrived with no election experience, skeptical of voting machines and willing to consider hand-counting — or even undertake a legal fight with the state over it. Four months later, after “getting underneath the hood” of the system, he said his views had changed: Hand-counting was slow and expensive, while properly run machines were fast and accurate.

These stories are not about people changing their politics. They are about what happens when a campaign promise becomes an administrative problem.

Johnson appears to have confronted that gap early.

One of Johnson’s first major projects was turning her campaign promise of post-election audits into something counties could actually carry out. She chose Jennifer Morrell, who runs The Elections Group, to help lead the work, despite criticism from some of the conservative activists who had helped put Johnson in office.

Johnson also assembled a team of people who had already taken opposing sides on election policy. For example, activist Vicky Buhr had testified in favor of banning ranked-choice voting, while Democratic state Rep. Kameron Nelson was one of just five House members who voted against the ban. Over three meetings, the group worked out how the audits would function and eventually conducted a mock audit.

The system they helped implement required counties to hand count ballots in 5% of precincts and compare them with machine results. When counties carried out those audits in 2024, the results repeatedly corroborated the tabulators. “The accuracy and transparency demonstrated by this process highlight the strength of our election system,” Johnson said in a statement announcing the results.

Hand-counting had become a way to corroborate the machines rather than an argument for eliminating them.

Many of the activists who helped elect Johnson in 2022 remained unconvinced. This summer, they backed state Rep. Heather Baxter, whose campaign had called for hand-counted paper ballots and eliminating machines, for secretary of state instead. Republican convention delegates chose Baxter over Johnson, 59% to 41%. Johnson is now backing Democrat Terrence Davis in the general election, who says he trusts South Dakota’s current election system and opposes statewide hand-counting as the primary method of tallying ballots.

In explaining her endorsement, Johnson wrote that she now knows “the difference between campaigning for this office and carrying the responsibility of leading it.” The job, she wrote, requires “the humility to listen to professionals” and “a willingness to review new information and change course when the evidence supports doing so.”

Nearly 200 candidates who have promoted false or unsupported claims about elections are on the ballot this fall for Congress or statewide office, reports Wired. Some are seeking jobs that would put them much closer to the machinery of elections themselves.

Johnson’s story suggests that proximity can do something an argument sometimes cannot: replace assumptions with the tedious, technical reality of how elections actually work.

We’re about to get more chances to see whether others will be as willing to change course when the evidence demands it.

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

Delayed voter applications highlight the difficulties of registering in Texas, experts say

2026-09-26T00:29:10+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

Texas’ backlog of at least 200,000 voter registration applications and updates, which election officials must now process in the weeks before the critical midterm elections due to state error, is highlighting just how difficult it can be to register to vote in Texas, voting rights experts said.

Texas is one of just eight states that doesn’t have universal online voter registration and it severely restricts voter registration efforts. Texans with driver’s licenses can use the state Department of Public Safety’s web portal to register to vote or update their voter registration. But that’s the only online option for registration — and it was ordered by a judge after a six-year long legal battle. More than 6 million voters have used the portal since it launched in 2020.

But Votebeat and the Texas Tribune reported an untimely flaw in that system earlier this week: DPS failed to send counties thousands of voter registration applications and updates submitted through that web portal, dating back to October 2025. The agency blamed the error on a software update. The problem has sparked bipartisan calls for an investigation into what went wrong, and state officials so far have provided few details.

“We live in a system that has been designed to make things harder for voters,” said Sarah Chen, the senior supervising attorney at Texas Civil Rights Project. “We don’t have online voter registration, except for this teeny little carveout, and because of the teeny little carveout, now we have these technical glitches resulting in this backlog.”

On top of the backlog of unprocessed applications, county election officials will also have to process hundreds of applications submitted in person and mailed in between now and Oct. 5, the voter registration deadline. Officials have promised every record will be processed, but advocates such as Chen are worried some voters could be disenfranchised if they aren’t added to the rolls in time.

On Friday, the Texas Secretary of State’s Office told counties it would offer grants to reimburse “costs incurred above your routine operational expenses related specifically to the increased number of DPS voter registration applications,” though it isn’t clear how much money is available or where the funds come from.

Some local election officials say they had noticed a slowdown in the flow of applications from DPS and flagged it to the Texas Secretary of State’s Office over the summer but weren’t sure of the cause. Trudy Hancock, the elections administrator in Brazos County, said her staff noticed they’d receive a handful of applications through the state system one day, none for a couple of days, and then several the next.

It didn’t make sense, Hancock said, “especially those days when we wouldn’t get any applications. Our local DPS office has a line of people out the door every day, so how come there were days where we weren’t getting any applications from DPS?”

The Texas Secretary of State’s Office did not respond to a request for comment.

Affected voters ‘did everything right’

When asked whether he was concerned about the error or whether he had offered DPS specific direction on how to handle it, Gov. Greg Abbott’s office referred questions to the agency and the Texas Secretary of State’s Office. At a press conference Thursday, he said DPS had told his office the issue was “fully resolved.” He also said county election officials were already working to process the applications.

In an emailed statement Thursday night, DPS said it proactively noticed the problem, investigated and found that the issue was connected to an October 2025 software update by “a third-party vendor, whose software handles these batch transactions.”

Emily French, Texas Policy Director at Common Cause, said the state should find a way to reach out to all impacted voters, especially since several statewide races on the Nov. 3 ballot are expected to be close.

“That should be step one,” French said. “Tell every affected voter you’re eligible, you did everything right. You will be registered to vote — tell every affected voter they can vote a provisional ballot.”

State officials said voters who don’t appear on the rolls because of this error can still ask to cast a provisional ballot, and election officials will count it once they confirm the voter had registered via DPS by the appropriate deadline.

But there are concerns that having to fill out a provisional ballot unexpectedly will cause confusion at polls, which members of the Texas Senate Democratic Caucus highlighted in a Friday letter to Abbott.

State senators sent the governor a list of questions, including “What safeguards failed?” and “What support will the state provide to counties?” They also want to know how many of the applications and updates that languished were submitted before the March primary.

State Rep. Mihaela Plesa, a Democrat who sits on the House Elections Committee said that she’s going to push for tighter protocols in the upcoming legislative session to ensure that future errors are caught earlier.

“I’m going to be looking at ways to require fast alerts and repairs,” Plesa said. “Notify the secretary of state of any affected county, notify applicants about what’s going on, and definitely protect the voters’ original submission.”

Members of Congress, including U.S. Rep. Julie Johnson of Texas and U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla of California, both Democrats, have also called for investigations. So have key Texas Republicans, including state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, who has championed legislation on election administration and voter list maintenance for years, and state Rep. Matt Shaheen, the chair of the Texas House Elections Committee.

Shaheen said he has spoken with DPS officials and is investigating what exactly went wrong to ensure it does not happen again.

“I’m going to personally make sure whoever is responsible for the mistake is held accountable,” he said. But Shaheen said the problem is dissuading him from supporting online voter registration.

Election officials cite ongoing technical challenges

Texans who submitted voter registration applications or updates via the DPS portal had no way of knowing something was wrong unless they checked their voter registration status.

County election officials who flagged an issue, including Hancock, told Votebeat they initially assumed the problem was related to issues with the state’s voter registration and election management system, which is known as TEAM.

The state in July 2025 overhauled its voter registration system using Louisiana-based election technology vendor, Civix. Election officials have since raised ongoing concerns about how the system works.

Kristin Miles, the Bastrop County elections administrator and current president of the Texas Association of County Election Officials, told Votebeat the way TEAM works is making it harder for officials to get through the backlog of voter registration records.

For instance, TEAM only allows county officials to see 30 records at a time on their screen, and they have to be sorted through one by one, before officials can see additional records. Miles and her staff of four are working through more than 2,200 records.

This week the secretary of state’s office told election officials they’re trying to prioritize a fix for that issue.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Natalia is based in Corpus Christi. Contact her at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Colleen DeGuzman is a reporter for the Texas Tribune. She is based in Houston. Contact her at colleen.deguzman@texastribune.org.

Department of Justice charges more Pennsylvania residents with noncitizen voting amid crackdown

2026-09-25T19:49:13+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

The U.S. Department of Justice has charged four additional noncitizens with crimes related to registering to vote and voting in the 2022 or 2024 elections in Pennsylvania.

The charges come amid a nationwide crackdown by President Donald Trump’s administration on alleged noncitizen voters just weeks before the midterm elections.

“Our sovereignty as a nation belongs to the American people and no one else,” David Metcalf, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, said in a press release Thursday evening. “Anyone, including illegal aliens, who votes illegally in our elections will be prosecuted for corrupting our democracy.”

Three of the four defendants reside in Philadelphia. Sade Guppy, 37, and Eduardo Gallardo Maldonado, 66, were charged with voting in the November 2022 and November 2024 elections, respectively. Cliff Sanon, 39, is charged with one count of submitting a fraudulent voter registration application in 2026, but the department alleges that he also voted in November 2022.

The fourth person accused is Dilea Ochoa-Perez, 43, a resident of Coatesville in Chester County. She is charged with voting in the November 2022 and November 2024 elections.

Attempts to contact the four defendants were unsuccessful.

It is the second time this month that the Justice Department has charged Pennsylvania residents with crimes related to noncitizen voting.

On Sept. 4, the department announced that a U.S. citizen and his noncitizen wife, both from Carlisle, had been charged with crimes related to registering and voting in the November 2024 election. In a separate case, a Harrisburg resident was charged with crimes related to voting in that same election.

The Trump administration has been stepping up its prosecution of illegal voting across the country in recent weeks. Last month, CNN reported that the Department of Homeland Security was planning to launch a surge of voter fraud investigations.

Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter recently said that the Department of Justice has charged 70 people with voting fraud so far this year, compared with 13 in four years under former President Joe Biden. However, there is nothing to suggest the cases are related or that the fraud is happening on any coordinated scale.

The push comes as the Department of Homeland Security claims there are thousands of potential noncitizens on state voter rolls.

In July, the department claimed it had identified 250,000 potential noncitizens on the voter rolls in four states, including 14,576 in Pennsylvania.

Last week, Votebeat and Spotlight PA obtained an email from the department to Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt in which the department laid out its methodology for identifying those potential noncitizens registered to vote and offered to provide the full list to the state.

As of Friday, Pennsylvania had not yet responded to the email or offer and had not received the list.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Effort to recall Antrim County Clerk gets go-ahead from state board

2026-09-25T19:42:35+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Michigan’s free newsletter here.

Correction, Oct. 16: A previous version of this story said that Bishop sent letters to more than 1,800 Antrim County voters. While an estimated 1,800 voters had their statuses questioned, only about 1,600 actually received notices.

LANSING, Mich. — Embattled Antrim County Clerk Victoria Bishop, who lost access to the state’s voter roll after state officials said she unilaterally changed and canceled voter registrations, could face a recall election next spring.

The Board of State Canvassers on Friday approved language for a recall petition against Bishop, formally starting the process for organizers to gather signatures.

It was the third time organizers brought the effort before the board. At previous meetings, the canvassers said the petition language wasn’t specific enough in describing Bishop’s alleged misconduct. On Friday, canvassers approved three of the four proposals for signature gathering with instructions to only use one.

“This was pretty cut and dry,” Ashley Areeda, a spokesperson for the Committee to Recall Victoria Bishop, told Votebeat on Friday after the meeting. “Now, we have three pretty good options.”

Organizers will need more than 3,500 signatures from Antrim County’s less-than-25,000 full-time residents if they want to recall Bishop. They’ll have 180 days from Friday to collect signatures, although only signatures gathered during the most recent 60 days can count, per the state’s election official manual.

If the effort succeeds, the committee — which describes itself as a bipartisan group of concerned Antrim residents who have followed Bishop’s actions closely — hopes to have the recall question on the May ballot.

Now that the Board of State Canvassers has approved the petition language, Bishop has the right to appeal. She has 10 calendar days to do so, and her lawyer, former attorney general candidate Kevin Kijewski, said in a text message statement that Bishop is “reviewing the decision and all her options.”

“In the meantime she will continue serving the people of Antrim County,” the statement continued. “A recall is ultimately decided by the voters, and if it reaches them, she looks forward to making her case directly to them.”

The board’s approval is the latest development — but far from the last — in a saga that has irritated voters and township clerks alike in the northern Michigan community.

Voting concerns in Antrim County

Antrim County earned national attention during the 2020 presidential election after a human error in how a tabulator was set up led initial election results to incorrectly show Joe Biden leading Donald Trump in the conservative county. The error was corrected soon after it was discovered, but damage was done — people sued challenging the results and a number of people still believe the final result was in some way fraudulent.

Then-County Clerk Sheryl Guy, a Republican, was set to retire after the 2024 election, leading to a five-way Republican primary in August 2024. Bishop won 37% of that vote and ran without a Democratic opponent that November. Guy then changed her mind and ran a write-in campaign, but lost.

One of Bishop’s major campaign promises, as posted on her bright yellow campaign signs, was that she would “restore election integrity” in the county.

The way Bishop went about keeping that promise now has led to the recall effort. County clerks have little power over how elections are administered in Michigan.

Under state law, managing voters’ registration statuses falls to local clerks, such as city and township officials, rather than county clerks. But according to a letter the Bureau of Elections sent to Bishop in April, Bishop changed voters’ status and sent them cancellation notices.

Bishop’s actions — including letters sent to almost 1,600 voters in the small county — fell outside the scope of her job, according to the Bureau of Elections. State Election Director Jonathan Brater sent Bishop a number of letters asking her to explain her actions.

Bishop did not, leading to the suspension of her access to the state’s Qualified Voter File. A letter the Bureau of Elections sent Bishop on Sept. 18 indicates that she has done part of the work required to restore her access but has not yet completed it.

One of the missing pieces, according to the letter: Bishop has not completed a section of training called “QVF Manual Chapter 4 — Voter Status Changes and Notices.”

“Less than one minute was spent on this training when it was marked completed in May 2025, reflecting how much time was spent reviewing the material,” Brater wrote in his most recent letter.

How do recall elections work in Michigan?

If Bishop’s recall makes it to the ballot, it will follow a number of rules set by state guidelines. In many cases, the county clerk runs a recall, but because Bishop is the official organizers are looking to recall, filings will instead go to the Bureau of Elections.

Organizers plan to start gathering signatures as soon as possible to avoid the worst of northern Michigan’s notoriously cold weather. Areeda told Votebeat that organizers are planning to host signing parties at people’s homes and even host drive-through events if needed.

Only registered Antrim County voters will be able to sign the petitions, per state law, but anyone — even those who don’t live in Michigan — are allowed to circulate the petitions.

If the election is held, voters won’t simply vote yes or no on whether Bishop should stay. Instead, Antrim County voters will choose between Bishop, who would be considered the incumbent, and any other candidates contending for the office. Whoever gets the most votes gets the job for the remainder of the term.

Areeda said the committee has a few people in mind but is looking for “someone who fairly runs elections,” regardless of political party.

“We’re just happy to have a chance to get started,” Areeda said. “Antrim County voters can finally have a say in this matter.”

If a recall election fails, no other recall can be filed against Bishop for the remainder of her term. Her term ends at the end of 2028.

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

Supreme Court OKs use of federal citizenship tool to vet voters, but midterm impact will be limited

2026-09-25T19:17:05+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

The Supreme Court cleared the way Friday for election officials to resume using a federal immigration status verification system to check voter rolls for potential noncitizens — a significant victory for President Donald Trump’s administration, but one that’s likely to have little impact on the November midterm elections.

The unsigned opinion hit pause on a lower court’s ruling from June while the case works its way through the appeals process. The lower court had found that the Department of Homeland Security had violated voter privacy by expanding the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, better known as SAVE, so that states could run their voter rolls through it to check for any noncitizens.

Friday’s ruling is not expected to lead to any widespread removal of voters before the November election because federal law prohibits election officials from systematically unregistering voters within 90 days of an election.

However, as a result of the ruling, the Trump administration will be able to restart use of the SAVE system to scrutinize state voter rolls after the election, and election officials will be able to use the SAVE system to check the citizenship of individual voters in the meantime as well.

The Department of Homeland Security has maintained the SAVE system for decades to check immigrants’ eligibility for public benefits. But in 2025, the Trump administration revamped the tool to allow election officials to check voter rolls in bulk against federal citizenship and immigration records and to search using Social Security numbers, making it far easier to screen registered voters for potential noncitizens.

The case against the expanded SAVE was brought by a coalition of groups, including the League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, that argued that the Trump administration violated Americans’ privacy by expanding how the system is used.

“Today’s decision is profoundly disappointing, as it puts Americans at risk of being unlawfully targeted by the administration’s unreliable voter purge database weeks before the midterm elections,” Abigail Kunkler, an attorney for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said in a statement on behalf of the plaintiffs.

She said the case “is not over” and noted the lower court had ruled that the expanded SAVE violates multiple laws. “We will be doing everything in our power to protect Americans’ voting and privacy rights by ensuring that the district court decision stands.”

Trump administration officials celebrated the court victory.

“Yes, you read that right. We had to file an emergency petition in the Supreme Court just so we could use government data to help states stop noncitizens from illegally voting,” James Percival, the Department of Homeland Security’s general counsel, said on X in reaction to the decision.

The Department of Homeland Security has said that election officials in 25 states, mostly Republicans, have run their voter rolls through the SAVE system. Some of those officials praised SAVE as a valuable tool for weeding out ineligible voters, but others have found it to be unreliable.

A ProPublica investigation from earlier this year found that the Trump administration’s rush to turn the system into a voter verification tool made it prone to false positives. In at least five different states, the system has flagged people as noncitizens who were actually citizens.

In Texas, Votebeat reported that the system flagged hundreds of people who had registered to vote through the state Department of Public Safety, which requires proof of citizenship from any prospective registrants. State and local election officials have confirmed that several of those people are indeed eligible to vote.

In a dissent to Friday’s opinion, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson cited the problems in Texas as a main reason she opposed the Trump administration’s use of the SAVE system to check voter rolls. Jackson noted that one plaintiff in the case had her voter registration revoked without her knowledge and that two others had to provide proof of citizenship to remain on voter rolls.

“The harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the Government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take,” she wrote.

Jackson was joined in her dissent by the court’s two other liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

The ruling was a rare victory for Trump in his effort to impose more federal control over the country’s electoral system. Federal courts have dismissed 25 Department of Justice lawsuits seeking states’ unredacted voter rolls, with the federal government yet to prevail in a single one.

The president has also failed to get the SAVE Act or SAVE America Act through Congress, two bills that would have required Americans to prove their citizenship before registering to vote. (Despite their names, they are not related to the Department of Homeland Security’s SAVE system.) And earlier this month, the Supreme Court ruled that proposed Trump administration rules that would have given the U.S. Postal Service the ability to restrict the delivery of mail ballots could not go into effect for the 2026 election.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Alleged noncitizen voters targeted by feds are from at least 18 different countries and are mostly green card holders

2026-09-25T14:53:12+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

For years, Khalwinder Singh Bhengura lived an unassuming life in Arlington, Texas, where the 69-year-old Indian immigrant works a graveyard shift preparing passenger meals for an airline catering company.

Bhengura moved to the U.S. and spent 18 years working toward becoming a legal resident, securing his green card in 2022. It was a cause for celebration in the Bhengura family. Then things took an unexpected turn.

In 2024, according to a federal indictment, Bhengura registered to vote and cast a ballot in the November presidential election, even though he’s not allowed to do so without being an American citizen.

Bhengura’s case is part of a Trump administration campaign to prioritize prosecuting noncitizen voters.

On Sept. 10, federal authorities arrested Bhengura and charged him with voting as an alien in a federal election and making a false statement about being a U.S. citizen in order to register to vote. That makes him one of 70 people the Trump administration has charged in voting fraud cases this year, according to Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter.

The list includes noncitizens from all corners of the globe, residing in all corners of the U.S. It features everyone from a 20-year-old college student from the Philippines accused of voting in Hawaii to a 39-year-old New Jersey restaurant owner from France. And an examination of the defendants and the filings in their cases found no sign of any organized efforts to cheat the American electoral system.

Votebeat reviewed Justice Department press releases and news accounts since June 1st and identified 41 recent cases involving noncitizens accused of voting. At least 23 defendants are legal residents holding green cards. Those charged range in age from 19 to 73 and come from at least 18 different countries, including Russia, Mexico, Australia, Israel, and Nigeria. Eight of the cases involved undocumented immigrants. About half of the cases come from Texas and New Jersey, with others popping up in a dozen other states, from Alaska to Louisiana.

Lawyers for most of the defendants did not respond to requests for comment. The list contains an eclectic assortment of alleged voter fraud cases. For example, one suspect in Massachusetts is accused of falsely impersonating his landlord to vote as part of a long-running feud between the two Chinese nationals.

The Justice Department has also charged American citizens in connection with the crackdown on fraudulent voting. One Pennsylvania man is accused of voting in both Alaska and Pennsylvania in the November 2024 presidential election. A city manager in Oklahoma is accused of signing voter registration forms for 11 residents.

But most of the cases involve immigrants like Bhengura who were on the pathway to U.S. citizenship when they voted in elections over the past decade. Bhengura’s lawyer says he acknowledged voting, but many of the cases involve nonresidents who secured their green cards, voted in elections, and then denied doing so when they were filling out paperwork or doing interviews to get their American citizenship, according to the legal filings.

Joshua Ferrer, an assistant professor of government at American University, said many legal residents charged with improperly voting don’t realize they weren’t supposed to do so.

“It’s likely most of this is the result of confusion on the part of voters or election officials,” Ferrer said.

The fact that there are no indications that these voters were connected as part of any larger scheme “is another sign that the president’s claims of widespread voter fraud aren’t true,” he added.

Bhengura’s case raises a number of unanswered questions. Federal prosecutors said Bhengura registered to vote in 2024 when he applied for a driver’s license. But Texas law requires proof of citizenship or lawful presence to get a license, so it’s unclear how he could have been registered to vote if he had provided the documentation.

Nicole Knox, Bhengura’s attorney, defended him as “an honest, hard-working taxpayer and proud U.S. resident. He is terrified to face the government of the same nation that promised liberty and freedom. He prays that justice will prevail.”

Carol Lam, who served as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of California under President George W. Bush, questioned the Justice Department’s choice to prosecute these people. In her opinion, the government shouldn’t try to deport green card holders who didn’t know they couldn’t vote until they became American citizens.

“Our justice system was not created to terrorize people,” she said. “I think voting in national elections when you are not a citizen is a bad thing, but how you deal with these things is the question. If there is good evidence that the person didn’t intend to vote, that would be a slap-on-the-wrist kind of situation, and it’s instead being used to leverage people to be deported.”

Lam acknowledged that every administration has the leeway to decide what crimes to prioritize. But she questioned the Trump administration’s decision to devote so much time and energy to cases like Bhengura’s.

“Taking a 69-year-old grandfather with a green card with no apparent intent to violate the law who may have voted based on bad information and using it as a jumping-off point to deport a person would be at the bottom of my pile,” she said. “We had suspects who actually committed acts of violence, so there were so many more cases where life and limb were actually at stake.”

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Everything you need to know about how to vote in Pennsylvania in 2026

2026-09-25T10:00:01+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

Election Day isn’t until Nov. 3, but the 2026 election is officially underway in Pennsylvania: The first ballots are starting to hit voters’ mailboxes.

Voters around the state will weigh in on everything from control of the U.S. Congress to the commonwealth’s next governor.

Here is everything you need to know about voting in Pennsylvania in the 2026 midterm election.

How do I register to vote?

To be able to vote, you first must be registered. The last day to register to vote in the 2026 election in Pennsylvania is Oct. 19.

Current or prospective voters can check their registration status online here.

To register to vote, you must be a U.S. citizen for at least 30 days prior to the election, be at least 18 years old by Election Day, and have lived in Pennsylvania for 30 days prior to the election.

Voters can register online through the Department of State’s website, by mail using this form, or in person at their county election office.

What offices are on my ballot?

Voters across the state will have congressional races, state House races, and the gubernatorial race on their ballot, and some will also have state Senate races and possibly other contests or ballot questions.

Nonpartisan groups such as the Committee of Seventy, Vote411, and Ballotpedia provide free sample ballots online based on voters’ addresses.

County election offices also provide sample ballots. You can look up your county website here.

How do I request a mail ballot?

Voting at a polling place on Election Day is not your only option. Mail voting is available to all registered voters in Pennsylvania and voters are not required to provide a reason for requesting a mail ballot.

The deadline to apply for a mail ballot is 5 p.m. on Oct. 27.

Voters can apply online here, by mailing this form to their county elections office, or by visiting their county elections office in person.

When filling out your mail ballot application, you’ll have the option to provide your email address. If you do, you will receive updates from your county on when they received your ballot and if there are any issues that could prevent it from being counted.

You can also track your mail ballot here.

I missed the deadline to apply for a mail ballot. What are my options if I can’t vote in person on Election Day?

If a voter has not applied for a mail ballot by Oct. 27 and some unexpected circumstance prevents them from voting in person on Nov. 3, they can apply for an emergency absentee ballot at any point before 8 p.m. on Election Day. Applications can be found here.

How do I return my mail ballot?

Mail voters can return their ballots through the U.S. Postal Service; just make sure you do it several days before Election Day to make sure it has plenty of time to arrive. Ballots can also be returned directly to your county election office or, if offered by the county, through a designated ballot dropbox or satellite voting location.

A list of drop boxes and satellite voting locations can be found here.

Once you have made your selections on the ballot — remember to check both sides — the ballot must first be placed in the secrecy envelope and sealed. Once it is placed in the secrecy envelope, place it in the outer return envelope and seal that as well. Finally, sign and date the declaration on the outer envelope, using the current date. Do not write on any other portion of the return or secrecy envelope.

Can I vote early in person in Pennsylvania?

Pennsylvania does not technically have early in-person voting like many other states. But registered voters can simulate the experience by visiting their county elections office anytime before Oct. 27 and applying for a mail ballot, filling it out, and handing it back to an election official all in one fell swoop.

Some counties also offer this option at satellite voting offices. Visit the Department of State website here to find out if this is available to you.

When and where can I vote on Election Day?

You can find your polling location here.

Polls will be open on Nov. 3 from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. As long as you are in line by 8 p.m., you will be allowed to vote.

What should I bring to vote?

If it is your first time voting at a new polling place, or your first time voting in Pennsylvania, you will be required to show ID. Acceptable forms of ID include a driver’s license, passport, utility bill with name and address, or paycheck with name and address, among other things. A full list can be found here. If you’ve voted at your polling place before, you shouldn’t need to bring anything.

I applied for a mail ballot. Can I still vote in person?

If you applied for a mail ballot and instead decided you would like to vote in person, you still can. Bring the entire mail ballot package, including the ballot and both envelopes, to your polling place and surrender them to the poll workers.

If you never received, forgot, or lost your mail ballot, you will have to vote a provisional ballot.

What is a provisional ballot?

Provisional ballots are used when there is some question about a voter’s eligibility, ranging from whether they are in fact registered to vote to whether they already returned a mail ballot. Provisional ballots allow these voters to cast a ballot on a conditional basis — if their eligibility is later confirmed, it will be included in the final count; if not, it will be excluded.

Voting a provisional ballot is very similar to voting a mail ballot. After the ballot itself is completed, it is placed in a secrecy envelope, then an outer envelope.

Unlike a mail ballot, there are two places provisional voters must sign. First, they must fill out their information in the Voter Information section of the outer envelope and sign the affidavit. After compiling the ballot and sealing it in the envelopes, the voter must also sign the Voter Signature section in front of the poll workers. Be sure the poll worker also fills out the portions they are responsible for, and keep the provisional ballot identification receipt given to you by the poll worker in a safe place.

Who can I contact if I have trouble voting or have any questions?

Voters who encounter any issues or have questions should contact their county election officials. Their contact information can be found here.

The Pennsylvania Department of State also runs a hotline for election issues, which can be reached at 1-877-868-3772.

If you experience something newsworthy while voting, we’d also like to hear about it. You can email us at pa.tips@votebeat.org.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Key GOP lawmaker says state should have caught error that caused Texas voter registration backlog

2026-09-24T22:54:19+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

A key Texas Republican lawmaker says state officials must be held accountable for an error that led to a backlog of at least 178,000 voter registration applications from the Texas Department of Public Safety.

Votebeat reported earlier this week that DPS failed to send counties thousands of voter registration applications and updates submitted through its online driver’s license portal. Some of those date back at least a year, and counties are now being hit with a deluge of applications to process in the weeks leading up to November’s midterm election.

State Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Republican from Houston who has championed election administration legislation for years, told Votebeat on Thursday that although a DPS failure is at the heart of the problem, the Texas Secretary of State’s office should have caught the issue because it oversees the system the counties use to receive the files from DPS.

“If the files were received, pulled, or not, that should have been noticeable,” Bettencourt said. “They should have caught it.”

When asked whether he was concerned about the error or whether he had offered DPS specific direction on how to handle it, Gov. Greg Abbott referred questions to the agency and the Texas Secretary of State’s Office.

DPS has said only that the error has been resolved, but has not offered details on how it was fixed or responded to further questions about the cause.

The backlogged voter registration records go back at least as far as October 2025. They could include new registrations or simply updates to voters’ existing records, like a change in address.

The exact number of outstanding applications statewide is still unknown, but officials in seven of Texas’ 254 counties have confirmed receiving more than a combined 178,000 records. Some of the people whose applications were delayed may have since registered another way.

Bettencourt said he spoke directly with Texas Secretary of State Robert Howden about the error after Votebeat first reported it earlier this week. Howden, who took office in July, recognized the DPS error has to be fixed and the backlog addressed as soon as possible, Bettencourt said. A spokeswoman for the Texas Secretary of State’s Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Texas Democrats have called for investigations, as well. The error surfaced just weeks before a hotly contested midterm election in which Democrats are hoping to be competitive for statewide offices, including a closely watched U.S. Senate contest.

Bettencourt also brought up ongoing issues with TEAM, the state’s voter registration system, which was overhauled last summer by the secretary of state’s office. The majority of counties in the state rely on the system to manage elections and to maintain voter registration lists, and election officials quickly began highlighting problems both before and after the July 2025 launch.

For more than a year, county election officials have been asking for fixes to functionality issues with TEAM that prevent them from completing essential tasks, such as easily sorting through voter registration applications by date. Some of the problems have been resolved, but others — such as the system operating very slowly — are ongoing, election officials say.

In June, Bettencourt publicly asked the secretary of state’s office for assurances that TEAM would be fixed before November’s election and questioned whether the Louisiana-based vendor that developed the system, Civix, was the correct choice.

On Thursday, Bettencourt said he still has concerns. TEAM’s functionality is “basic to rudimentary from what they need in voter registration in a modern sense,” he said.

The secretary of state’s office is well-regarded for its expertise in election law, he said, but he criticized their operational efficiency.

“They’re gonna have to shift from being a legal-driven response organization to an operationally excellent organization,” he said. “They’re going to have to do both.”

DPS error leaves officials scrambling

Texas’ largest counties have received tens of thousands of backlogged voter registration applications and updates after the DPS debacle.

Dallas County on Thursday confirmed receiving more than 68,000, and Williamson County has received 18,000. Lubbock County confirmed receiving 7,400, Hays County received 8,200, and Cameron County confirmed 4,500. Votebeat reported Wednesday that Collin County confirmed receiving 40,000, and Travis County 32,000.

The secretary of state’s office has said it learned of the backlogged voter registration applications last week, after county election officials flagged that they’d noticed a surge in “older” voter registration applications and updates coming from DPS. Those applications and updates are sent from DPS to counties via TEAM.

State officials said the affected transactions involved incomplete voter registration records, which were withheld instead of being transmitted to county registrars.

Officials have not said what information was missing, what caused the records to be incomplete, how many voters were affected, why incomplete information would have prevented the transmission, or exactly when the problem began.

It’s not clear how many registrations were new versus address updates for already-registered voters, or whether the error prevented any voter from casting a ballot in the March primary election.

Bettencourt said election officials across the state have been working nonstop to get through the thousands of applications that have dropped in their laps. He described the task as monumental, but said county officials would get it done.

“What I am impressed with is how much the counties are working to fix all of this in bipartisan unanimity,” Bettencourt said.

Texas Tribune reporter Colleen DeGuzman contributed reporting.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Natalia is based in Corpus Christi. Contact her at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Across the country, election officials are preparing for the possibility of federal intervention

2026-09-24T16:36:17+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Each year, election officials prepare for the worst: A bomb threat at a polling place, power outages, natural disasters.

But this year, they are wrestling a potential threat they have never before considered: the possibility that the federal government might disrupt the administration of November’s elections.

It’s not clear what action, if any, the Trump administration may take to interfere with the 2026 midterms, but election officials from jurisdictions large and small are preparing for everything from immigration officers at the polls to federal attempts to seize ballots. They’re also acknowledging that most standoffs with the federal government would likely end in court, and they’re talking to lawyers and preparing legal filings in case they prove necessary.

Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, head of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, said he is assembling “the Mad Libs of legal filings” in preparation for any and all election problems.

“You leave the plaintiff and the defendant blank, and the jurisdiction blank,” he said. “But as soon as we have a real situation, we can immediately put the information in there and file in the courts at a moment’s notice.”

President Donald Trump has repeatedly attempted to assert unprecedented authority over election administration, though many of his initiatives have stalled in the courts or in Congress. His administration is actively investigating the 2020 election, which he continues to falsely assert he won, and has seized years-old ballots and election materials from Fulton County, Georgia. Trump has also said he regrets not sending the National Guard to seize voting equipment after the 2020 election.

And he is carrying those sentiments forward into the 2026 midterm elections.

Last year, Trump said Republicans should take over running elections in some heavily Democratic jurisdictions. Senior members of his administration have stopped short of saying they would not send federal agents to polling places, though experts warn that would break federal and state laws. And Trump delivered a rare primetime address to the nation in July where he warned of a “crisis in election security” and said the nation’s systems fell “catastrophically short” of ensuring free and fair elections.

All of that has contributed to the growing concerns of election officials, especially in Democratic or closely contested jurisdictions.

“The only limit is our imagination,” said Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat. “To some extent, all of us are really shadowboxing here. We don’t know when – or if – the blow is going to land from whom, or under what circumstances.”

Lauren Bis, a White House spokesperson, said that Democrats are conjuring up irrational concerns that are undermining efforts to improve election security.

“The only ‘fears’ Americans have about our elections are being fueled by extreme liberal Democrats who refuse to support commonsense legislation that ensures Americans, and Americans only, decide our elections,” Bis said.

Aggressive federal actions spark local concern

It’s not just top state officials like Aguilar who are making sure their legal ducks are in a row. Around the country, local election administrators are working with experts, their attorneys, and one another to plan for a possible visit from the feds.

Earlier this month, county election directors from around South Carolina gathered in the Charleston County elections building, tucked away in a marsh next to the Ashley River, to game out responses to any scenario that could threaten a smooth midterm election.

Disruptive social media influencers could show up. Election officials might have to contend with bomb threats, like the more than 200 called into polling places in 2024, or cybersecurity attacks. What to do about drones buzzing over polling places on Election Day?

“Pull,” one director joked in response to the drone scenario, referencing the signal to release a clay pigeon at a shotgun range. He earned laughs from some of the dozens of other county election officials clustered in the training room.

But the conference wasn’t limited to preparing for the type of disruptions which have, unfortunately, become somewhat routine. The officials also heard from experts on preparing for and responding to federal investigations.

“The big thing that we wanted them to take away from this is that they need to contact their local government attorney and start that conversation now,” said Brenda Cabrera, a former election director in Virginia and one of the presenters.

County lawyers often handle a wide range of legal issues and may need to lean on the expertise of local elections officials, she said.

Gary Restaino, a former US attorney in Arizona, suggested having legal motions “already sketched out” in the event that the county officials get served a subpoena.

Restaino said election directors asked him whether counties must comply with search warrants, even if they believe a warrant goes beyond what is allowed under law. The answer, Restaino said, is yes — at least until a court intervenes.

“Sticking your head in the sand like the proverbial ostrich and hoping that none of those things are going to happen, that’s just not realistic,” Amy Sams, a former educator turned election director for Pickens County, South Carolina said. “But waiting until you hit a crisis point to say ‘Oh, hi, by the way I’m the director of elections. I understand you’re the county attorney. Let’s work together on this crisis situation’ is really not a feasible plan either.”

Sams said she knows her county, nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains on the North Carolina border and home to roughly 80,000 mostly Republican voters, is less likely to face subpoenas or other challenges from the federal government than larger, more diverse jurisdictions. But she said she’d be “remiss” if she didn’t prepare.

“I can’t say never because you just don’t know,” she said.

All hands on deck

Preparations to take the Trump administration to court if it tries to interfere in the election are taking place at all levels of government.

In the past two weeks, two separate lawsuits — one filed by the city of Denver and voting rights groups, the other by unions and civil rights groups — have targeted the Trump administration in federal court, seeking to block it from deploying federal agents at voting locations.

Local district attorneys and state attorneys general are also preparing and coordinating with each other and local election officials.

“We have known this was going to be a legal fight from the beginning,” said Jose Garza, the district attorney in Travis County, Texas, home to the state capital, Austin.

“It’s going to be a fight about whether or not the legal framework that has fostered peace in this country for the last 150 years, relatively, still holds up under a Trump administration that is eager to shed all the legal standards and protections that we’ve come to rely on.”

Garza said he is working closely with local elections officials to prepare for any legal action that may be needed. He recently took part in a countywide exercise to strategize a coordinated response to a variety of potential problems that could arise in November.

Local prosecutors, district attorneys, and county attorneys “have not historically been accustomed to needing to challenge federal orders on behalf of their community, but we are, routinely at this point,” said Laura Conover, the attorney for Pima County, Arizona.

Congressional Democrats are also preparing to push back.

U.S. Sen. and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, (D-N.Y.) launched the Senate Democrats’ Election Protection Task Force, which has held a series of simulated election scenarios that have wrestled with many of the most extraordinary fears: National Guard troops intimidating voters at polling places, federal officials seizing ballots, foreign countries carrying out disruptive disinformation campaigns.

Tina Barton, co-chair of the Committee for Safe and Secure Elections and a former Michigan election official, has been leading tabletop exercises like the one in Charleston for months. By the end of the year, she will have visited more than 40 states, some more than once.

She said that the prospect of “external interference” from entities such as the federal government is a concern that some jurisdictions, particularly large, diverse cities, have brought up and wanted to practice.

Barton said election officials are most concerned about the prospect of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents showing up at polling places, and the potential for voter intimidation should that happen.

“We’re walking through what does that look like for voter intimidation, what does that look like for your law enforcement, how do you get your county attorneys involved in that moment, and what types of decisions are they going to need to make,” she said.

At an event in Washington, D.C. this week sponsored by the liberal think tank Center for American Progress, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, said her office will have special agents, as well as state police officials, well-versed in election law prepared to respond to any incident.

Like Aguilar, she said, she has briefs prepared “for virtually every set of circumstance we could think of. Except the zombie apocalypse. I don’t have that down yet.”

County election officials on the front line

County election officials control polling places and possess the physical ballots and equipment that would likely be at the center of any court dispute.

TJ Pyche, the vice president of Ready for Tuesday, a nonpartisan group that has conducted dozens of simulated election scenario exercises across the country this election cycle, said his goal is to help those elections officials prepare without creating unnecessary alarm.

“Most of the scenarios that we go through are not going to happen to all of the jurisdictions,” said Pyche, who worked for several years as an elections official in Florida. “We’re sensitive to the fact that we’re not there to scare them; we’re there to help them get prepared.”

In the group’s scenarios, Ready for Tuesday sometimes presents this dilemma: Two individuals identifying themselves as investigators with a federal agency arrive at the central count facility and say they have credible evidence of voting irregularities. They request immediate access to observe what’s happening inside. How do you respond?

Michael Siegrist, Canton Township clerk and president of the Michigan Association of Municipal Clerks, said he is prepared to fight any attempt to seize voting equipment or ballots.

“Nobody is taking possession of any voting equipment,” said Siegrist, who expressed confidence that the courts would reject any illegitimate efforts to disrupt voting.

Of course, officials aren’t just worried about federal agents accessing equipment. In 2021 Republican commissioners concerned about fraud in Fulton County, Pennsylvania, allowed third party groups to access voting equipment, which the state later decertified.

In response to that incident, the Pennsylvania Department of State issued a new directive making clear that no federal, state or local officials should be given access to county voting equipment without a valid judicial warrant.

Elections officials in Texas are also seeking guidance about what to do if federal officials try to interfere with the election.

Celia Israel, the voter registrar in Travis County, described the prospect of federal intervention as “the biggest concern in my community” at a summer conference of election officials.

“How will you advise the secretary of state on if the federal government, who is threatening us as county officials, on whether and how you will engage with them should the outcome of the election not be what they want?” she asked Chuck Pinney, the legal director for the Texas Secretary of State’s Office.

Pinney said state law has specific procedures in place for election challenges.

But he didn’t directly say what his office would do if counties face federal pressure. His advice? Talk to your lawyer.

Votebeat reporters Sasha Hupka, Natalia Contreras, Alex Shur, and Hayley Harding contributed reporting.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Texas counties are receiving tens of thousands of unprocessed voter registration applications due to state error

2026-09-23T20:09:12+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

Update, Sept. 23, 3:58 p.m. CT: This story has been updated to include comment from the Texas Department of Public Safety and Collin County.

Update, Sept. 23, 5:18 p.m. CT: This story has been updated to include comment from Travis County.

Tens of thousands of voter registration applications, some dating back at least a year, are caught in a backlog and have yet to be processed due to an error by the Texas Department of Public Safety, the leader of an association of county election officials said Wednesday.

Texas Democrats, who are fiercely contesting key offices in closely watched races this year, are calling on Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, to investigate the problem, which was first reported by Votebeat.

Some voter registration applications and updates submitted through DPS’s online driver’s license portal were never sent to county voter registrars, the state told county election officials.

In an emailed statement Wednesday, DPS said “the system issue has been resolved” and the agency worked with the secretary of state’s office “to identify incomplete records to backfill incomplete information.”

DPS did not respond to questions about what caused the issue or the exact scope of the problem. The state began delivering the unsent registrations to county officials Tuesday night.

Chris McGinn, executive director of the Texas Association of County Election Officials, said the organization is still gathering numbers from its members but that he expects large counties to be hit the hardest with additional applications.

Voter registrars have told the association they’ve received anywhere from a few hundred voter registration applications to process in small counties to tens of thousands of applications and updates in the most populous counties, McGinn said in a statement Wednesday.

“We cannot provide specific numbers of these records for specific counties, because by the time I send this e-mail the numbers will have gone up — and will continue to go up throughout the day today,” he wrote.

In Collin County, officials are analyzing more than 40,000 additional records they’ve received as of Wednesday. Election workers are trying to identify how many of those could be duplicates of existing records, as well as how many are new voter registration applications versus updates to an existing voter registration, said Kaleb Breaux, the county’s elections administrator.

That data analysis alone is going to be time-consuming, he said.

“I have seven full-time voter registration staff and we have brought in 10 temporary workers since Labor Day to help out with applications,” Breaux said. “Depending on what our final numbers are, and how long it takes to process these records, we may have to bring on more.”

In Travis County, Voter Registrar Celia Israel said in an email that her office received “approximately 32,000 applications from Texas DPS overnight,” bringing their total to 35,000 records to process.

“While I am deeply disappointed in our state partner, the Texas Department of Public Safety, I have the utmost confidence in the Travis County team to carry out our mission for eligible voters,” Israel said.

The secretary of state’s office became aware of the problem last week, when election officials flagged that they’d noticed a surge in “older” voter registration applications coming from DPS in TEAM, the state’s voter registration system. Votebeat previously reported that state officials said the affected transactions produced incomplete voter registration records, which prevented them from being transmitted to county registrars. Officials have not said what information was missing, what caused the records to be incomplete, how many voters were affected, or exactly when the problem began.

These records go back as far as October 2025, which means counties are now dealing with nearly a year of backlogged voter registration tasks to process. They could include new registrations or simply updates to voters’ existing records, like a change in address.

It’s not clear how many registrations were new versus address updates, or whether the error prevented any voter from casting a ballot in the March primary election.

The issue has “increased the administrative burden on officials who have been kind of staying on top of things,” McGinn said during a webinar for reporters Wednesday. Smaller jurisdictions will have to try to work fast with fewer resources, he said.

“There’s going to be a lot of counties that are paying a lot of overtime,” he said.

State Rep. John Bucy, a Democrat from Austin, and vice chair of the Texas House Elections Committee, on Wednesday called on Abbott to “immediately commit whatever state resources and funding counties need to process every one of these applications accurately and on time.”

“It is absolutely outrageous that, in the run-up to one of the most consequential midterm elections in decades, Texans have had their voter registrations impacted by a failure at the Texas Department of Public Safety,” Bucy said in a statement responding to Votebeat’s initial reporting.

“County election officials are now being asked to clean up the state’s mess at one of the busiest times of the election season. They have to process this backlog on top of the surge in registrations we always see before the deadline, while ensuring older DPS records don’t overwrite more recent voter information.”

In an email, Abbott’s office referred inquiries to DPS and the secretary of state’s office.

James Talarico, a Democrat running against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton for U.S. Senate, encouraged Texans to check their voter registration. “Texans follow the rules, register to vote before the deadline, and still risk losing their God-given right to the ballot box because their government failed to do its job,” he said.

To check the status of your voter registration contact your county election official. You can find a list by county here.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Natalia is based in Corpus Christi. Contact her at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Unknown number of Texas voter registrations went unprocessed due to DPS error

2026-09-22T23:32:49+00:00

For more information, please read Texas counties are receiving tens of thousands of unprocessed voter registration applications due to state error.

Just weeks before the pivotal midterm elections, Texas election officials have discovered that an unknown number of voter registration applications have not been processed due to an error by the Texas Department of Public Safety.

DPS failed to send the applications, which were submitted by voters through its online driver’s license portal, to county voter registrars for processing, according to an email sent to county officials and provided to Votebeat. The state confirmed to Votebeat that it would begin delivering the unsent registrations to county officials overnight.

State officials said the affected transactions produced incomplete voter registration records, which prevented them from being transmitted to county registrars. Officials have not said what information was missing, what caused the records to be incomplete, how many voters were affected, or exactly when the problem began.

The DPS portal is a major voter registration channel in Texas. From 2020 through 2024, about 6 million Texans used it to register to vote, according to testimony DPS officials provided to state lawmakers in 2025. Texas has more than 18 million registered voters.

The Texas Association of County Election Officials is collecting information from its members to determine the scale of the issue. DPS officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

The problem comes less than two weeks before the Oct. 5 voter registration deadline, and the sudden arrival of older applications from DPS is likely to add to counties’ voter registration processing backlogs at one of the busiest points in the election calendar.

Voters whose registrations were affected by this issue can still have their ballots counted as long as they submitted their registration before the Oct. 5 deadline, said Alicia Pierce, a spokesperson for the secretary of state’s office.

“A voter who registered through DPS online services but does not appear on the rolls can cast a provisional ballot,” Pierce said in an email to Votebeat. “Election officials have an established method with DPS to check the transaction. If that voter did register, the provisional vote will be counted.”

Texas does not have online voter registration, but since September 2020, after voting rights groups sued the state and DPS, eligible Texans who renew their driver’s license and state ID or update their address online can also choose to register to vote through that same online portal.

In an email to county election officials sent after the discovery and obtained by Votebeat, state elections director Christina Adkins said the agency was “actively investigating this issue to determine the source of these historical records.” She said the agency asked Civix, the voter registration vendor that developed the latest version of TEAM, to “temporarily remove the files from county dashboards while we work to address this issue.”

In a second email sent Tuesday, Adkins said DPS had determined that some voter registration records from its online transactions were incomplete, which prevented them from being sent to counties. She said the state and DPS had identified the affected records and that the state was “working with DPS to ensure that the modifications they made to their system to address this issue are not impacting daily files going forward,” Adkins said.

Counties will now have to process the older registrations while making sure they do not overwrite more recent updates submitted by the same voters. For counties that work directly in TEAM, the state said it was able to identify voters with newer registration information and would withhold the older DPS record, Adkins wrote.

The task will be more complicated for counties that use their own voter registration software rather than working directly in TEAM. The state cannot perform the same check for those counties, so they will receive all of the affected DPS records and will have to determine whether individual voters subsequently submitted newer registration information. Adkins said the state said it would send those records in batches and work with the counties’ voter registration vendors to process them.

This is a developing story.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Feds charge 16 people across the U.S. with noncitizen voting

2026-09-21T21:38:22+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Federal officials have charged 16 alleged noncitizen voters across the U.S. in recent weeks as President Donald Trump’s administration looks to crack down on potential illegal voting with the midterm elections just weeks away.

Those charged include voters in key swing states, such as Michigan, Wisconsin, and Texas. Several were already known, but the U.S. Department of Justice announced a number of new cases last Friday evening.

Noncitizen voting is very rare, but rooting it out has become a key focus for Republicans across the U.S. in Trump’s second term. When it is uncovered, it is typically investigated and prosecuted.

The alleged noncitizen voters are from several countries and live all across the U.S. There is no suggestion the cases are related.

Michigan

In Michigan, Victoria Viktorivna Aquilina, 43, was charged with illegally voting in the 2024 general election. Aquilina came to the U.S. in 2005 through an au pair program, according to court documents. She never became a citizen.

She’s the seventh person to be publicly charged with noncitizen voting in Michigan’s 2024 election. One person, Haoxiang Gao, fled the country after being charged. Others are still making their way through the court system.

An attorney was not listed for Aquilina in court records.

Wisconsin

Julieta Engelstad, 53, a lawful permanent resident living in Wisconsin, was charged with falsely claiming citizenship when registering to vote in the 2022 election, according to court records.

She is at least the second person to be charged with crimes connected to Wisconsin’s 2022 election in the last few weeks.

Attorneys for Engelstad did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Texas

In Texas, Monica Carzoli, 46, was charged with registering to vote and voting in the 2024 election. Carzoli has been a teacher for the past 28 years, according to court documents, and has been a lawful permanent resident of the U.S. since 2023. Her attorney did not have any additional comment Monday.

Seven other Texans were also charged last week in connection with alleged noncitizen voting, all in Tarrant County.

Georgia

Three people are also facing charges in Georgia. Pauline Lewis, 65, allegedly used a falsified U.S. Virgin Islands birth certificate to get a passport and register to vote, according to court records. Lewis is accused of voting twice in 2020 and at least once in 2024.

Gabriel Covarrubias, 44, is accused of voting in the 2024 general election under a false name. He is also charged with making a false statement in a U.S. passport application. According to court records, Covarrubias claimed to be born in Puerto Rico to get a U.S. passport.

Analiea Milliscent Eccles is accused of voting in elections in 2008, 2012, 2020, 2022, and 2024. Eccles is out on $10,000 bond.

Attorneys for the three people charged in Georgia did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

New Jersey

One person was charged in New Jersey: Sanata Coulibaly allegedly falsely attested that she was a citizen when registering to vote in 2016 and then voted in 2018, 2020, and 2024.

She is further accused of making fraudulent statements in applications for naturalization. According to court records, Coulibaly, a lawful permanent resident, has lived in the U.S. since 1993. Her attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Idaho

In Idaho, one person, Fredy Avila Gomez, is accused of falsely claiming U.S. citizenship when registering to vote and then voting in 2022 and 2024. Court records show he was indicted on a number of charges, including making a false statement of citizenship in order to vote, voting as an alien, and unlawfully possessing a firearm. An attorney for Gomez did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday.

Massachusetts

Finally, in Massachusetts, Gladys Adaeze Okafor was charged with allegedly voting in elections in 2022 and 2024. Court records show Okafor has been a lawful permanent resident since December 2022.

Court documents include two separate applications Okafor allegedly filled out to vote in Massachusetts, including one in which she appears to have checked “yes” in response to the question, “Are you a citizen of the United States of America?”

Records show she has been released. Her attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

Election officials played key role in Supreme Court mail ballot decision

2026-09-21T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

Election officials exhaled when the Supreme Court on Monday night ended months of uncertainty by blocking the Trump administration from restricting mail ballots this November.

The Supreme Court decision clears the way for millions of Americans to vote by mail, just as they have in previous elections, though availability ranges widely from state to state.

“It’s a relief and it’s palpable,” said Marybeth Kuznik, the elections director for Pennsylvania’s Fayette County. “I honestly don’t know how we could have complied with (the Postal Service’s restrictions) at this point in the election cycle.”

But the administration’s efforts to tighten access and the chaotic legal battle that ensued left voters worrying that voting by mail could be disrupted or unreliable.

Now election officials are working to reassure them.

For months, people across the political spectrum voiced concerns about the new proposed U.S. Postal Service rules pushed by President Donald Trump. Election officials from both major political parties played a central role in the Supreme Court debate. More than 80 of them, including Kuznik, signed onto a brief warning that they wouldn’t have time to meet the new requirements before the November election. Several Republican secretaries of state, including officials from Kentucky, Georgia, and Kansas, urged the court to freeze the plans because of the chaos they would create for an election now less than 50 days away.

Those pleas appear to have been decisive for at least one justice, Brett Kavanaugh, who wrote a concurring opinion saying he thought there was a fair chance the rules would hold up to legal scrutiny, but applying them in the 2026 elections would be “arbitrary and capricious” because “state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule.”

Now, election officials who have been for months raising concerns about an entirely new vote by mail system have to communicate to voters that the old one is safe to use, even as Trump continues to denounce it. Despite voting by mail himself last month in Florida, Trump attacked the process on social media as a “disaster” and “Nation Destroying SCAM” that made America the “laughing stock all over the World.”

Some election officials and experts said they are seeing fewer absentee ballot requests than expected.

“It has already caused all sorts of voter confusion, and even though the rule is not in place for this election, that’s not to say that there won’t be some voters that think that it is,” said Tammy Patrick, the chief program officer at the Election Center, a national nonprofit association for election administrators. “So it’s going to be incumbent on all of us to make sure that we just keep up the mantra that nothing has changed as a result of the rule.”

Patrick, who filed an expert declaration in the court cases challenging the Postal Service rules, said the best thing voters can do is get their ballots in as early as possible.

Dana Lewis, the recorder who oversees elections in Arizona’s Pinal County, joked that she wears six-inch heels so she can pivot on a dime, something that gave her the dexterity to keep up with this topsy-turvy election season.

Lewis, a Republican, has invested heavily in her county’s drop box system, which includes 24/7 video monitoring and GPS-locked ballot boxes for tighter security, something she believes should give voters confidence that their ballots will be kept safe. Roughly three-quarters of Arizona’s voters cast mail ballots in 2024, federal data show.

“Trust the system,” Lewis said.

But not everyone does. The court ruling came in parallel with a new poll showing a precipitous decline in public confidence in the nation’s electoral system. The University of California, San Diego survey found that just 55% of respondents trust that the vote would be counted fairly, compared to 71% in 2024.

The poll also found just 49% of Americans expect the upcoming election to be free and fair.

That’s in line with other polling, including a recent Pew Research Center survey in which 55% of respondents said they thought the upcoming election would be free and fair, an historic low for the question they have asked over the past six years.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Wisconsin election laws could change under a Republican or Democratic trifecta

2026-09-17T19:21:47+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Over the past several years, gridlock between the Republican Legislature and Democratic governor’s office means election legislation in Wisconsin has hardly seen the light of day.

Though Republican lawmakers have pushed for stricter voting rules, Gov. Tony Evers has blocked those efforts at several turns during his eight years in office, leaving election policy changes in a stalemate of bills and vetoes. Instead, courts have increasingly become the primary venue for election rules to be challenged and changed.

That dynamic could change after November’s elections. Democrats hope to retain the governor’s office and win control of both legislative chambers. Republicans are vying to hold the Legislature and flip the governor’s office. Either outcome would give one party unified control of state government — a so-called trifecta — and a much clearer path to enacting its election priorities.

The results could shape election rules over the next several years, including how voters cast ballots and have them counted in the 2028 presidential election.

Still, unified control would not necessarily produce dramatic changes to Wisconsin election policy. Some major election policies are now written into the state Constitution, and Republicans have already achieved many of their goals.

“I don’t see big changes coming in state law, almost regardless of what partisan configuration the state ends up with after the election,” said UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden, who runs the school’s Elections Research Center. Republicans, he said, took advantage of a political trifecta from 2011 to 2018 to implement their biggest priorities.

Democrats would have difficulty undoing some of those policies, like voter ID and a ban on private funding for election administration, which are now enshrined in the state Constitution, making them harder to roll back.

Democrats would have limited room to change policy

If Democrats were to win a trifecta, Burden said, Republicans’ past success in putting major election policies into the state Constitution wouldn’t leave them much room to maneuver.

They could try to make the state’s voter ID law more accommodating, but eliminating it altogether would be difficult, he said. Democrats could turn toward other priorities, like enacting automatic voter registration and potentially allowing people with felonies to vote if they’re on parole.

Sen. Mark Spreitzer, a Democrat from Beloit, said that if Democrats win a trifecta they would immediately try to pass legislation allowing election officials to process ballots on the Monday before an election. That measure would give officials an extra day to process ballots, likely speeding up unofficial results at the end of the night.

Other priorities, he said, include codifying the legality of absentee ballot drop boxes, expanding absentee ballot tracking for voters, allowing voters to spoil an absentee ballot, creating standards for fixing mistakes on absentee ballots, and removing a requirement for officials to put numbers on certain absentee ballots that can risk the voters’ anonymity.

“These are very low hanging fruit that either Republicans were interested in but didn’t have unanimity on, or, in a couple of these cases like drop boxes and curing, we have a different perspective than they do,” Spreitzer said.

Democratic gubernatorial nominee David Crowley, the Milwaukee County executive, told Votebeat he would prioritize the Monday processing proposal.

“This common-sense change would help election workers process ballots more efficiently and reduce delays in reporting results, while maintaining the security and integrity of the election process in Wisconsin,” he said.

Crowley also said he would support better funding for local election officials, which has long been a concern for municipal and county clerks in Wisconsin. Spreitzer agreed.

Democrats could also revive some of the bills that have stalled under GOP leadership, including shortening the state’s residency requirement, banning firearms near polling places and establishing automatic voter registration.

Crowley himself was the lead author on an automatic voter registration bill during his brief tenure in the Legislature. Like most Democratic election bills under the GOP Legislature, his bill didn’t receive a public hearing or floor vote.

Republicans could prioritize noncitizen voting legislation

Republicans would also have limited room for broad policies if they won a trifecta, Burden said, largely because they enacted most of their policy priorities during their previous period of unified control. That includes one of the nation’s strictest voter ID laws and a requirement to reject absentee ballots missing a witness address.

One area where they could go further is citizenship verification. Republicans could pursue requirements that voters provide documentary proof of citizenship, Burden said, or revive efforts to audit the state’s voter rolls for potential noncitizens.

“That has just been a drumbeat coming out of the Trump administration: executive orders, lawsuits, DOJ actions, requests for data from the state, and other things,” he said. “So Republicans in the state will feel pressure, if nothing else, from the Trump administration to do something more about citizenship in such a key battleground state.”

Republican lawmakers have already pursued such measures. Earlier this year, Evers vetoed a bill that would have required a noncitizen voter audit. During legislative testimony in January, Rep. Dave Maxey, the GOP chair of the Assembly Elections Committee, said that he would prefer IDs used for voting to also clarify a person’s citizenship status. Maxey didn’t respond to Votebeat’s request for comment.

Republicans could also revive other election bills Evers vetoed, including legislation that would have banned those with felonies from voting until they paid certain court fees, and a proposal to eliminate the voter ID exemption for people who are indefinitely confined because of age or a disability.

Republican gubernatorial nominee Tom Tiffany, a U.S. representative from northern Wisconsin, has also supported several election policies that could become relevant under unified GOP control. In Congress, he voted for the federal SAVE Act, which would have required people registering to vote in federal elections to provide documentary proof of citizenship. In his time in the state Legislature, Tiffany co-authored the bill that led to the state’s voter ID requirement.

Tiffany told Votebeat that he would approve legislation to identify ineligible voters by comparing Department of Transportation records with the statewide registration database, along with other “election integrity reforms that Governor Evers vetoed that I believe deserve another look.”

Tiffany tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election, which President Donald Trump lost. He told Wisconsin Watch recently that he thinks President Joe Biden won the race but welcomes investigations into the election.

He acknowledged the Monday ballot processing bill at a press conference in August, but didn’t signal whether he supported it. This specific policy priority may have more of a chance, Burden said, because it has broad support across the spectrum despite some GOP dissension.

Stalemate likely to continue under divided government

The stalemate that has been the status quo since 2018 would likely continue under any form of divided government, Burden said. Even if Republicans win a trifecta, Democrats have a backstop in the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which has a 5-2 liberal majority, Burden said. Republicans, meanwhile, could challenge Democratic priorities in federal court, where they may have the upper hand.

“With Evers and Republicans in power the last eight years, it’s been mostly stalemate: lots of vetoes, and very little actual lawmaking around elections,” Burden said. “If things were to flip with Tiffany in office and Democrats were to win both chambers — I think that’s unlikely — I would expect more stalemate.”

Spreitzer, the Democratic senator, said some proposals, like the Monday processing bill and deleting poll list numbers from the back of absentee ballots may still be viable under split control.

“Those are things we could very easily get done and demand in a split-government situation,” he said.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Trump administration explains how it identified potential noncitizen voters, says it will provide list to Pennsylvania

2026-09-16T21:57:07+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

Update, Sept. 16, 7 p.m.: This story has been updated to include comments from the Pennsylvania Department of State.

Update, Sept. 16, 8 p.m.: This story has been updated to include comments from the Department of Homeland Security.

Update, Sept. 16, 9:50 p.m.: This story has been updated to reflect that as of Sept. 16, the Department of State has not yet received the list of potential noncitizen voters.

New records provide the most detail so far about the previously opaque process by which the federal government concluded that thousands of potential noncitizens are registered to vote in Pennsylvania.

On July 16, the day President Donald Trump delivered a high-profile speech on election security, the Department of Homeland Security said it had found more than 250,000 potential noncitizens registered to vote in California, Nevada, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The states, though, called into question the accuracy of that number and asked for more information on how it was calculated.

DHS answered Pennsylvania’s query on Sept. 9, according to an email to Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt obtained by Votebeat and Spotlight PA. The department said the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate identified the potential noncitizens by comparing the state’s publicly available voter roll to internal DHS databases.

The email broke nearly two months of silence from the Trump administration over exactly how it arrived at the numbers Trump referenced in his July speech.

When DHS first informed Pennsylvania about the potential noncitizen registered voters in July, it told the Pennsylvania Department of State that Social Security numbers had been used in some of the matches. However, this led to confusion given that Pennsylvania has not provided the Trump administration with a list of registered voters that includes Social Security numbers.

But the Sept. 9 email, signed only by the DHS Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, said that DHS had not used “federal enumerators” like Social Security numbers to perform the matching. Instead, it said it used fields such as first name, last name, date of birth, phone number, and address.

A statement from DHS, which is attributed to an unnamed spokesperson, did not address the discrepancy.

“FDNS explained the methodology and has offered to continue to address questions and correct their misunderstanding of the information provided during the meeting,” the emailed statement said. “DHS and DOJ are laser focused on prosecuting and removing aliens who vote and preventing the dilution of the votes of U.S. citizens. We need state and local election officials to do their part.”

The Sept. 9 email also said that some of the 14,576 registered voters it flagged in Pennsylvania were firmer matches than others. “The more attributes from the individual registered voter that match an individual in DHS immigration records, the higher the confidence level of the match,” the email said.

“The highest confidence level of matching indicators, for example, first name, last name, middle name, date of birth, address, and phone number would be a 6-attribute match. If an individual did not have the same phone number or the same address, this would be a lower confidence match but likely still the same individual.”

The email went on to say that if matches were not made on all six main criteria, other indicators may have been used, such as previous addresses or spousal information.

In the email, DHS said it would send Pennsylvania officials a list of the potential noncitizens it identified. “Each one of the 14,576 individuals identified should be carefully reviewed by your state to determine eligibility for voting in a federal election,” it wrote.

The email offered Pennsylvania the choice of sending the registered voters’ federal enumerators to DHS to confirm or deny their citizenship, or conducting its own analysis.

It’s unclear whether the department has sent Pennsylvania the list of alleged noncitizens registered to vote since sending the email last week. As of Wednesday, the Department of State has not yet received the list.

Pennsylvania, as well as Nevada, recently called into question DHS’ confidence in its own numbers.

In Nevada, staff in the secretary of state’s office recorded an August call in which DHS officials said the original figure of potential noncitizens it had identified represented “the ceiling” of how many noncitizens were actually on the rolls.

In a letter recapping an August call with DHS representatives, Schmidt said that “DHS representatives explained that they did not have high confidence” in the figures they were presenting.

In its Sept. 9 email, the department disputed Schmidt’s framing, calling it a “blatant mischaracterization.”

A spokesperson for the Department of State said its characterization of the call was accurate, and that the state would only use “credible” information to maintain its voter rolls.

“Voters can be confident that eligible Pennsylvania citizens will not be disenfranchised by faulty methodology or unreliable data,” Matt Heckel, the Department of State spokesperson, said in an email.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

A complete guide to everything on Michigan’s ballot this November

2026-09-16T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Michigan’s free newsletter here.

The November 2026 midterm elections are rapidly approaching, and they will be incredibly important to the future of Michigan.

The state will elect a new governor after eight years of Democrat Gretchen Whitmer, and a new U.S. senator after 12 years of Democrat Gary Peters. The state’s several competitive congressional races will help determine which party controls the U.S. House, and control of the state legislature in Lansing is also up in the air. And that’s before you even get to multiple key ballot measures and less well-known, but highly influential, offices like the Michigan Supreme Court.

How to vote in Michigan in 2026

Below is a guide to everything on the Michigan ballot this fall, with links to Votebeat’s and Bridge Michigan’s coverage:

Governor

The governor’s race this fall is between Democrat Jocelyn Benson and Republican John James. Minor party candidates include Donna Brandenburg of the U.S. Taxpayers Party, Douglas Campbell of the Green Party, and Anthony Hudson of the Libertarian Party.

Benson has served two terms as Michigan secretary of state, the state’s highest election official. James, meanwhile, has spent two terms as the representative for Michigan’s 10th Congressional District, based in Macomb County. He previously ran unsuccessfully for U.S. Senate in 2018 and 2020.

Secretary of state

Michigan’s next secretary of state will likely be either Republican Anthony Forlini, currently the Macomb County clerk, or Democrat Garlin Gilchrist, who has served for two terms as lieutenant governor. Minor party candidates include Scott E. Aughney of the U.S. Taxpayers Party, Eric Borregard of the Green Party, and Christine Sloan of the Libertarian Party.

The secretary of state is responsible for managing statewide elections and the state’s voter roll.

Attorney general

The attorney general is Michigan’s top law enforcement official and lawyer. Incumbent Dana Nessel, a Democrat, can’t run again due to term limits, so the office is open. Republican Doug Lloyd, the Eaton County prosecutor, is squaring off with Democrat Eli Savitz, the Washtenaw County prosecutor.

Minor party candidates include Doug Dern of the Natural Law Party, Jason Dye of the Libertarian Party, John Perry Ludtke Jr. of the U.S. Taxpayers Party, and Jeff Polonowski of the Green Party.

U.S. Senate

Michigan this year will elect a new U.S. senator to a six-year term after Peters declined to run for reelection. Republican Mike Rogers, a former U.S. representative, will face Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, the former director of Wayne County’s Department of Health, Human, and Veteran Services.

Minor party candidates include Lydia Christensen of the Libertarian Party, Walter P. Kristy of the Natural Law Party, Tim Long of the U.S. Taxpayers Party, and Douglas P. Marsh of the Green Party.

National analysts expect this race to be one of a handful that will determine which party controls the Senate next year.

U.S. House

Every member of the U.S. House is up for election this fall. You can find your current representative here, and the candidates who will appear on your ballot here.

Michigan Legislature

Every seat in both the Michigan Senate and the Michigan House is up for election this year. Currently, Democrats control the state Senate and Republicans control the state House, but both chambers are considered at risk of flipping.

You can look up your local senator here and your local representative here. You can find the candidates on your ballot here.

State Board of Education

Two of the eight members of the Michigan State Board of Education, which is in charge of public education throughout the state, are also up for election. The board currently has a 6-2 Democratic majority, but that could change to a 4-4 tie if Republicans win both seats.

The major party candidates are Democratic incumbents Judith Pritchett and Tiffany Tilley and Republican challengers Bree Moeggenberg and Terence Collins. Minor party candidates include Charles Essner of the Libertarian Party, William Mohr II and Christine C. Schwartz of the U.S. Taxpayers Party, Wissam Charafeddine of the Green Party, Mary Anne Hering of the Working Class Party, and Kelli Monroe of the Natural Law Party.

You can vote for any two candidates.

University leaders

Michigan elects the members of three university governing boards. For the University of Michigan, voters select two regents. For Michigan State University, voters select two trustees. Finally, for Wayne State University, voters select two governors. All are elected statewide.

The two elected candidates will go on to join a team of eight leaders at each school. The University of Michigan and Michigan State University boards both have a 6-2 Democratic majority, while Wayne State University has a 5-3 Democratic majority.

You can find the candidates on your ballot here.

Michigan Supreme Court and other judges

Two Michigan Supreme Court justices, Megan Cavanagh and Noah Hood, are up for reelection this year. These races are officially nonpartisan, but the candidates are nominated at party conventions. Cavanagh and Hood were nominated at the Democratic convention, and their opponents, Casandra Morse-Bills and Michael D. Warren Jr., were nominated at the Republican convention.

Morse-Bills is presiding judge in Oscoda County Circuit Court, while Warren is a judge in Michigan’s 6th Circuit Court.

A number of intermediate appellate court judges will also be on the ballot, but the specifics will depend on where you live. You can look up the specifics in the Michigan Voter Information Center.

Local elections and questions

Depending on where you live, you might have local races for city council, local courts, or county executives, on your ballot. You may also see a number of local ballot measures, such as whether local elections should be moved to even-numbered years, as East Lansing is considering, or bonds for school facilities, like in Royal Oak.

You can check the local races and issues on your ballot in the Michigan Voter Information Center.

Proposal 1 (constitutional convention)

Michiganders will also vote on two statewide ballot measures this year, starting with whether Michigan should hold a constitutional convention — colloquially known as a “con-con” — to revise the state’s fundamental governing document. This question is required to be on the ballot every 16 years.

The language on the ballot will read:

A proposal to convene a constitutional convention for the purpose of drafting a general revision of the state constitution. Shall a convention of elected delegates be convened in 2027 to draft a general revision of the state constitution for presentation to the state’s voters for their approval or rejection?

Voters will get to choose yes or no.

A yes vote is one in favor of starting the process of rewriting the state’s constitution. The entire document would be rewritten over a period of months (or longer) by representatives chosen by voters across the state.

Even if voters approve a convention, that is not a guarantee the constitution would change. The final document would go before voters when it is completed for another yes-or-no vote. Only if it is approved would it replace the current constitution.

No official campaigns have filed paperwork with the state in support of a constitutional convention. That said, a number of prominent Republican legislators have suggested their support for it.

A no vote is one in favor of leaving the state’s constitution as written.

There is money and lobbying power behind an effort to encourage voters to vote no on the convention. The group Protect MI Constitution From Special Interests, made up of a multitude of business groups, voting rights groups, and more, has raised more than $860,000 to oppose the convention effort, according to state campaign finance reports.

A number of candidates running for office this fall from both major parties also are against a convention.

More on what a constitutional convention could look like in Michigan:

Michigan could approve a constitutional convention this year. What would that mean? (July 9)

Proposal 2 (Michiganders for Money Out of Politics)

The second ballot measure is known as Michiganders for Money Out of Politics (often abbreviated as MMOP). This is a proposed law — not a constitutional amendment — that would stop utility companies and large government contractors from donating to political campaigns for officials who could impact their contracts.

The language on the ballot will read:

A proposed initiated law to prohibit campaign contributions from certain regulated utilities and government contractors and apply campaign finance laws and regulations to additional types of political communications.

The proposal would:

Prohibit regulated electric and gas utilities, contractors with over $250,000 annually in government contracts, and people and organizations with substantial connections to these utilities/contractors from making direct or indirect campaign contributions to those who run for or hold offices that impact them.
Expand laws regulating spending on political communications, including those requiring disclosing donor information, to apply to communications clearly identifying candidates or ballot questions, even if they do not expressly advocate voting for/against them.
Expressly apply the law requiring disclosure of who paid for political communications to internet political communications.

Should this proposal be adopted?

A yes vote is one in favor of making the proposal law in Michigan — no governor signature required. It would be more difficult to overturn than a typical law, requiring three-quarters of each chamber to vote to amend or overturn it.

The committee pushing MMOP has raised more than $7.3 million, according to campaign finance filings. Its largest donors included progressive groups such as the Massachusetts-based All Hands on Deck Network (which donated more than $3 million) and the Washington, D.C.-based Sixteen Thirty Fund (which donated $700,000).

A no vote is one against putting the proposal into state law.

MMOP is opposed by a group called Protect MI Free Speech, which has raised more than $570,000, largely from business groups. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, Comcast Financial Agency Corp., CMS Energy (best known by its subsidiary, Consumers Energy), and a number of other prominent business groups all gave at least $65,000 to oppose MMOP. Michigan Energy First, a group heavily linked to DTE Energy, also gave $50,000, according to campaign finance filings.

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

Texas and federal officials announce charges against 7 related to noncitizen voting

2026-09-15T23:31:25+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

Update, Sept. 21, 6 p.m.: On Friday, Sept. 19, the U.S. Department of Justice announced an additional arrest made in Texas. Mexican national Monica Carzoli, 46, a lawful permanent resident, “admitted to registering to vote and then voting in the November 2024 election. Carzoli was arrested on criminal charges in Del Rio,” according to a news release by federal officials.

State and federal officials on Tuesday announced charges against seven people accused of voting in federal elections while not eligible citizens.

The Texas Secretary of State’s Office separately said it had referred 117 cases of potential noncitizen voting to the Texas Attorney General’s Office for investigation. It also confirmed that 578 other registered voters flagged last year as potential noncitizens by a federal database are, in fact, U.S. citizens.

The criminal charges announced Tuesday, all in Tarrant County, are the result of a collaboration between the Texas Attorney General’s Office, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas, the FBI, and Homeland Security Investigations, a division of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, according to a press release from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican. Six of the accused were indicted last week, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas said, and the seventh person was charged in a criminal complaint.

Those charged include Mexican citizen Carlos Salas Barrios, who was arrested for voting in the 2024 election, though his ballot was ultimately rejected, according to a statement from the U.S. Department of Justice. Also charged was Nigerian national Joshua Nmelichukwu Akpom, who was arrested for making false statements in relation to naturalization, according to the release. Akpom voted illegally in the 2018 general election, but was not charged in relation to that due to the statute of limitations, according to the U.S. Department of Justice statement.

Nigerian national Helen Mayen Adams, Indian citizen Khalwinder Singh Bhengura, Mexican citizen Moises Anwar Arellano-Alba, Democratic Republic of the Congo national Celestin Katubadi, and Mexican citizen Rocio Thrasher were all charged with illegally voting in the 2024 election and false statements of citizenship to register to vote. Katubadi cast a provisional ballot that was ultimately rejected, the U.S. Department of Justice statement said.

Paxton’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, and no additional details were immediately available.

Votebeat on Tuesday could not immediately find reliable contact information for the people charged.

There are more than 18 million registered voters in Texas, and more than 11 million cast ballots in the November 2024 general election. Seven people make up a tiny fraction of that number.

Nonetheless, the charges come as President Donald Trump’s administration has sought to crack down on what it has asserted is an increase of noncitizens registered to vote in the country. His administration has reportedly surged resources into investigations connected to potential cases of voter fraud and noncitizen voting.

Earlier this month, the Justice Department charged five people in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and New Jersey with voting-related crimes.

State confirms citizenship for more than 500 flagged voters

In a separate news release Tuesday, the Texas Secretary of State’s Office said it had referred 117 potential cases of noncitizen voting to the Office of the Attorney General for investigation. The cases are not tied to a specific election. The referrals are part of “a larger update on Texas’ ongoing efforts to review voter citizenship ahead of the Nov. 3 election,” the news release said.

Texas officials last October sent counties a list of 2,724 potential noncitizens generated by checking the state’s voter roll of more than 18 million registered voters against a federal program used to verify citizenship, known as SAVE.

Soon after the state transmitted the names, counties began to investigate the flagged registrants, and quickly confirmed that at least some were citizens. In addition, county officials found that hundreds of the flagged voters had registered through the state Department of Public Safety, which requires proof of citizenship, such as a passport, and keeps copies of such documents on file.

The Texas Secretary of State’s Office told Votebeat and the Texas Tribune that it did not initially check the registrants flagged as potential noncitizens against DPS records before sending the list to county election officials to investigate. That decision prompted a March lawsuit from voting rights groups and some Texas voters who said the state should have done so. The lawsuit is still pending in federal court.

In May, state officials confirmed they would check the DPS records. In July, Christina Adkins, the state elections director, told county officials the state had been able to confirm some of the flagged voters were citizens, and said county officials should immediately reinstate any incorrectly flagged voters who had been removed from the voter roll.

The Tuesday news release said officials were able to confirm citizenship for 578 voters, and of those, 506 were flagged because their passport information was not added to the federal SAVE program until after Texas had initially checked its list.

County voter registrars in Texas received a directive to reinstate the incorrectly flagged voters Tuesday, Kristin Miles, president of the Texas Association of County Election Officials, said in a statement. Miles said the registrars “are grateful that due diligence performed at the state level has brought resolution for impacted voters.”

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Natalia is based in Corpus Christi. Contact her at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

In blow to Trump, Supreme Court blocks mail ballot restrictions from taking effect in 2026

2026-09-15T00:45:05+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday night blocked the U.S. Postal Service from imposing new restrictions on voting by mail this November, delivering a fatal blow to President Donald Trump’s attempts to inject more White House control over the midterm election.

In a brief, unsigned ruling, the court kept in place a lower court’s freeze on the restrictions. “The Government is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge” to the lower court’s ruling, the justices wrote.

Under the proposed restrictions, the Postal Service would have been able to block delivery of ballots that weren’t on a prereviewed list or met specific design requirements. But as a result of Monday’s decision, mail voting in the 2026 election will largely function the same way it has in previous elections.

The ruling leaves open the question of whether the restrictions are legal overall and can be implemented in future elections. But the structure of the decision suggests that a majority of the justices are skeptical. Only two justices — Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas — joined a dissent arguing that the rules were likely to be upheld and should be allowed to proceed for the upcoming election.

In a concurrence with the main decision, Justice Brett Kavanaugh also wrote that “there is at least a fair prospect that the final rule falls within the Postal Service’s statutory authority” but that “state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections.”

How we got here

The Supreme Court ruling marked the culmination of a frenzied, monthslong legal battle over Trump’s effort to impose tighter restrictions on American elections, even though some states have already sent out mail ballots and people have begun to return them.

It began in March, when Trump issued an executive order meant to restrict mail voting. Trump’s order directed the U.S. Postal Service to set up a new system that would allow the agency to block delivery of mail ballots to voters not on a list presubmitted by state election officials.

It quickly prompted a slew of lawsuits by 23 Democrat-led states, voting rights groups, and Democratic organizations that temporarily put the brakes on the effort.

In June, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani found that some of the order’s key provisions were unconstitutional and blocked them from going into effect for this year’s elections. The Trump administration fought Talwani’s decision and brought the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In late August, the Supreme Court lifted Talwani’s injunction against the order on narrow procedural grounds, finding it had been issued prematurely because the Postal Service had not yet issued the final rules when she blocked the agency from enacting its plan.

But shortly before the Supreme Court justices ruled, the Postal Service unveiled its final rules in a 95-page plan. The court’s order meant it would quickly go into effect, creating widespread confusion among election officials. But Talwani again put the Postal Service plans on hold.

The Postal Service rules require states to use a new online federal government system to send it a list of all voters who should receive mail ballots, though that portal is not yet available. The Postal Service would refuse to send ballots to anyone not on the list. Ballot envelopes would also have to meet new design standards, including unique barcodes that have to be checked by the Postal Service.

A bipartisan group of elections officials across the country have warned that they have neither the time nor money and resources to comply with the new rules if they were to be put in place for the November election. Some states said their laws would prevent them from following the Postal Service rules. Others said they didn’t have the time to redesign their ballot envelopes.

In court filings, the Trump administration argued that the Postal Service plan was a legal effort by the federal government to prevent voter fraud in the election.

The Postal Service defended its efforts as a nonpartisan attempt to ensure people could vote by mail if they wanted to this fall.

“Regardless of political party or perspective, we share a common goal: ensuring that Americans can have confidence that their election mail will be handled securely and delivered reliably should their election officials choose to use the mail for ballot delivery,” the Postal Service said in a statement.

A USPS whistleblower warns of disenfranchisement

The Trump administration rules created significant unease within the Postal Service. In early September, an anonymous whistleblower within the agency came forward to describe the system as “secretive, rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed.”

The whistleblower warned that the Postal Service had not done proper testing on the system and that it could prevent millions of Americans from receiving mail ballots this November.

One of the biggest concerns raised by the whistleblower was the possibility that the Postal Service system could reject millions of mail ballots from reaching voters.

As planned, the Postal Service system would take a random sample of bulk mail ballots going to voters to make sure the envelopes all contained required information, including special bar codes tied to each voter. If the computers found that one ballot failed the check, even if it was a mistake, the Postal Service system would reject all the ballots in the mailing and send them back to the state.

That, the whistleblower account warned, could lead to a “catastrophic failure” that prevents millions of Americans from voting.

Voting rights groups and the coalition of states and the District of Columbia renewed their legal fight in Talwani’s court after the Postal Service issued its final rules at the end of August, arguing that the president had no authority to try and regulate mail ballots.

Talwani agreed. In her 11-page decision, she concluded that Trump’s proposals were an unconstitutional attempt to usurp powers from the states over elections.

“The court is unaware of, and no party has proffered, any delegation Congress has made that would permit the USPS to regulate election mail,” Talwani wrote.

Read more Votebeat coverage of Trump’s executive order on elections:

Trump issues second executive order on elections, giving U.S. Postal Service unprecedented control over mail voting, March 31, 2026
Trump administration sued by states over mail voting executive order, April 3, 2026
One line in Trump’s order would reshape how long states have to store election records, April 6, 2026
We still have questions about Trump’s new executive order on elections, April 6, 2026
USPS proposal to carry out Trump’s executive order could create new barriers to mail voting, May 29, 2026
Trump’s moves to erect voting hurdles face race against the clock, June 15, 2026
Federal judge blocks key pillars of Trump executive order restricting mail voting in 2026 election, June 25, 2026
Trump administration asks federal judge to quickly lift ban on planned mail voting restrictions, July 2, 2026
Trump is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to allow new mail ballot restrictions in the 2026 midterms, Aug. 3, 2026
Federal judge blocks Trump’s efforts to restrict mail-in voting nationwide, Aug. 11, 2026
Supreme Court lifts 1 of 2 blocks on Trump’s mail-voting executive order, Aug. 24, 2026
Election officials wrestle with uncertainty amid legal battles over Trump mail ballot restrictions, Aug. 26, 2026

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Update: Supreme Court blocks Trump administration’s proposed mail-ballot rules for 2026 elections

2026-09-15T00:00:12+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Update, Sept. 14, 8:48 p.m.: The U.S. Supreme Court Monday night upheld a court order blocking the U.S. Postal Service’s proposed restrictions on mail ballots from going into effect for the November election. The brief unsigned ruling in response to an emergency appeal should be the final word in a legal battle that has raged for months across multiple federal courts. It found the Trump administration “is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge.”

Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a brief concurrence saying he thought there was a “fair prospect” the agency has the authority to put such rules in place, but “state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections.” Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented.

Read Votebeat’s full article on the decision here.

Update, Sept. 14, 9:47 a.m.: A second federal judge has blocked the U.S. Postal Service’s proposed restrictions on mail ballots from going into effect for the November election. U.S. Judge Carl Nichols of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, ruling in response to cases brought by Democratic political organizations and nonprofit groups, found the agency had no authority to impose the new rules.

As detailed below, the restrictions had already been blocked by a federal judge in Boston as part of a separate case. The Trump administration has appealed the previous order, which is still pending before the U.S. Supreme Court. The government could also appeal Nichols’ order.

Update, Sept. 6, 12:04 p.m.: The U.S. Justice Department has appealed the preliminary injunction against the Trump administration’s new mail-voting rules to the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court. This appeal replaces the previous appeal that had been pending before both courts.

The Supreme Court’s ruling on this appeal will determine whether the U.S. Postal Service’s proposed restrictions on mail ballots will go into effect for the November election. It’s unclear when the court will make a decision.

Update, Sept. 4, 5:54 p.m.: Judge Talwani issued a preliminary injunction preventing the U.S. Postal Service from making its new rules mandatory. The injunction replaced her earlier temporary restraining order, which would have expired after 14 days.

The Trump administration had previously appealed the temporary restraining order to the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court, neither of which has yet acted. Plaintiffs had previously argued that those appeals would be moot if Talwani replaced it with a preliminary injunction, but the government can appeal the new order.

Original post, Aug. 27, 11:27 p.m.: A federal judge on Thursday imposed a new freeze on President Donald Trump’s mail-ballot restrictions, the latest move in a back-and-forth legal battle playing out just weeks before the November elections.

U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani blocked the U.S. Postal Service from moving ahead with plans to regulate mail ballots for at least 14 days while she weighs a more permanent ban on the agency’s new rules.

The temporary restraining order comes just four days after the U.S. Supreme Court lifted Talwani’s previous injunction against the order on narrow procedural grounds. However, voting rights groups and a coalition of two dozen states and the District of Columbia kept pressing their case against the order, arguing that the president had no authority to try and regulate mail ballots.

In her 11-page decision, Talwani agreed and concluded that Trump’s proposals were an unconstitutional attempt to usurp powers from the states over elections.

“The court is unaware of, and no party has proffered, any delegation Congress has made that would permit the USPS to regulate election mail,” Talwani wrote.

Talwani set a hearing for Sept. 3 on the request for a permanent injunction. The Trump administration is likely to quickly appeal her order, a move that will probably propel the case back before the Supreme Court.

In court filings opposing the temporary restraining order, the Trump administration argued that the Postal Service plan was an effort by the federal government to help ensure elections were run smoothly and that the agency was acting within its legal authority.

The monthslong, multicourt legal battle over Trump’s executive order restricting mail voting is taking on increasing urgency as the November election nears. Election officials preparing to send out ballots are faced with a whipsaw of directives.

Trump’s order, issued in March, directed the U.S. Postal Service to set up a new system that would allow the agency to block delivery of mail ballots to voters not on a list presubmitted by state election officials.

It quickly prompted a slew of lawsuits. In June, Talwani found that some of the order’s key provisions were unconstitutional and blocked them from going into effect for this year’s elections.

The Trump administration appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, whose Aug. 24 ruling paved the way for the U.S. Postal Service to roll out the new restrictions. But the Supreme Court’s ruling dealt only with the question of whether the injunction was premature, with the justices themselves acknowledging it didn’t address the legality or constitutionality of the plan. That set off a new and increasingly complex round of legal wrangling.

Earlier in August, the U.S. Postal Service unveiled its proposal to implement the administration’s mail-ballot restrictions in a 95-page plan that created widespread confusion among election officials.

The Postal Service rules require states to use a new online federal government system to send it a list of all voters who should receive mail ballots. The Postal Service would refuse to send ballots to anyone not on the list. Ballot envelopes would also have to meet new design standards, including unique barcodes that have to be checked by the Postal Service.

The states challenging the rules warned that they would not have the time, money, or people needed to comply in the short time between now and November. Talwani agreed and wrote that the Trump administration’s filings “offer no reply to Plaintiff States’ assertion that compliance for the 2026 midterm elections will be impossible for many of them.”

Democratic leaders across the nation have vowed a fierce fight to ensure that all voters that want to vote by mail are able to do so.

“Over my dead body is that rule going to go into effect,” Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes said earlier this week, before Talwani’s latest order. “We are going to fight this tooth and nail in the courts.”

Read more Votebeat coverage of Trump’s executive order on elections:

Trump issues second executive order on elections, giving U.S. Postal Service unprecedented control over mail voting, March 31, 2026
Trump administration sued by states over mail voting executive order, April 3, 2026
One line in Trump’s order would reshape how long states have to store election records, April 6, 2026
We still have questions about Trump’s new executive order on elections, April 6, 2026
USPS proposal to carry out Trump’s executive order could create new barriers to mail voting, May 29, 2026
Trump’s moves to erect voting hurdles face race against the clock, June 15, 2026
Federal judge blocks key pillars of Trump executive order restricting mail voting in 2026 election, June 25, 2026
Trump administration asks federal judge to quickly lift ban on planned mail voting restrictions, July 2, 2026
Trump is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to allow new mail ballot restrictions in the 2026 midterms, Aug. 3, 2026
Federal judge blocks Trump’s efforts to restrict mail-in voting nationwide, Aug. 11, 2026
Supreme Court lifts 1 of 2 blocks on Trump’s mail-voting executive order, Aug. 24, 2026
Election officials wrestle with uncertainty amid legal battles over Trump mail ballot restrictions, Aug. 26, 2026

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Are hotels people too? In this Delaware town, local businesses can cast ballots.

2026-09-14T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

FENWICK ISLAND, Del. — The Fenwick Shores hotel on the Delaware coast carries a stamp of unusual privilege.

It’s not because the 65-room hotel claims to be Fenwick Island’s first upscale getaway, where the best suites can cost $2,000 per night during peak summer season. It’s not because the heated rooftop pool hosts Mermaid Tasha, one of the best known professional mermaids in the area.

Fenwick Shores is elite because it is a hotel with the right to vote.

The retreat a block from the beach is one of about 200 “artificial entities” — corporations, limited liability companies, trusts, and partnerships — allowed by the town charter to cast votes in local elections.

Delaware law has for decades given businesses more voting rights than any other state. Even by Delaware standards, the tiny town of Fenwick Island chooses to offer them to an unusually broad swath of business entities. It is one of a small group of municipalities that allows businesses to vote for local elected leaders and not just ballot referendums.

That has put the summer resort town at the epicenter of a debate over who — and what — should be allowed to exercise fundamental American democratic rights. The fight over whether a hotel should be allowed to cast a ballot is drawing new pushback as President Donald Trump campaigns to tighten voting access for other groups across the country.

Delaware lawmakers are considering a constitutional amendment that would eliminate business voting rights across the state. At the same time, the American Civil Liberties Union is asking the state Supreme Court to nullify Fenwick Island’s generous voting rights and declare the practice unconstitutional. And even residents of Fenwick Island are divided over which kinds of corporations should be allowed to vote in which elections.

“I think it’s important that they allow entities that own properties to vote,” said Spiro Buas, the owner of Fenwick Shores, who votes on behalf of the Hilton Hotel franchise. “People that own property in town have a vested interest” in what happens in the town, he said.

While many longtime Fenwick Island homeowners support the town’s expansive voting privileges, some think the rules should be more narrowly tailored to include nonresidents and families with vacation homes in trusts, not businesses like Fenwick Shores.

“I don’t agree that the businesses should have a vote,” Lisa Ryan, who lives and votes in Dallas, said one recent afternoon while sitting on her screened-in porch in Fenwick Island a few blocks from the beach. “I’m a business owner in Dallas, and I don’t get an extra vote.”

Dael Norwood, an associate professor of history at the University of Delaware, argues Delaware’s corporate voting policies have “damaged the legitimacy of government” and “turned away from democracy.”

“It’s undermining the fundamental legitimacy of governments by removing popular human sovereignty,” Norwood said.

Property rights and voting have been tied together since the country’s founding, and many states at one point restricted voting to property owners. It would take generations for America to broadly extend the franchise to women, most Black citizens, Native Americans and people that didn’t own property.

The debate over extending voting rights to corporations “may be disorienting,” but is not clear-cut, said Adam Winkler, a UCLA law school professor and author of “We The Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights.”

“There is an argument that these are stakeholders just like everybody else and to exclude them from voting means that people will be harmed because they have a stake in an outcome,” he said.

But voting rights for non-humans, Winkler said, should still have narrow guardrails.

“Corporations have a very narrow perspective,” he said. “They are focused on what will help enhance the bottom line and we think voters have a greater diversity of interests and a more balanced set of policy goals.”

Oligarchy or democracy?

Fenwick Island is a tiny town just down the coast from better-known Delaware beach resorts like Rehoboth and Bethany. With fewer than 400 permanent residents, it prides itself on being one of the “Quiet Resorts” in the area, away from the crowded boardwalks. It has building, alcohol, and noise restrictions meant to maintain the local reputation as a more family-oriented getaway spot. The mile-long main drag through town features a Viking-themed miniature golf course, a shipwreck museum, and a go-kart track.

It is one of just three towns in Delaware that offer the most expansive rights for corporations to cast ballots for local elected leaders. About 70 percent of the state’s cities and towns allow corporations to vote in more limited circumstances, for things like bond referendums or annexation issues, according to Norwood.

A town sign in Fenwick Island, Delaware. The town allows "artificial entities" to vote in local elections.

Delaware, one of the most business-friendly states in the nation, is perhaps best known now as the home of former President Joe Biden. In 1976, the state General Assembly gave corporations in the beach town of Rehoboth Beach a limited right to vote in special elections. (The town, now home to Biden’s summer retreat, revoked the right in 2019.)

It remains the only state that permits corporations to cast a ballot in public municipal elections, expressing their preferences for mayor or city council, though municipalities have the right to decide whether to exercise the option in their boundaries — with approval from the state legislature. A few others, including California and Florida, allow corporations to vote in very limited instances, such as in special districts.

Fenwick Island first expanded voting rights to nonresident property owners when the town was founded in 1953. In 2008, Fenwick Island became just the second Delaware town to expressly authorize in its charter voting by corporations and other artificial entities in regular municipal elections. The majority of entities that exercise the right are tied to families with deep roots in the town that put their summer vacation homes in trusts, said Mayor Natalie Magdeburger.

“We believe that it is important that all of our residents have a voice, or at least vote,” she said. “They are taxed and they are subject to our ordinances.”

Fenwick Island has about 960 registered voters. About 22% of them — 214 — are so-called artificial voters. The majority of those are family trusts; fewer than a dozen, Magdeburger said, are businesses like the Fenwick Shores hotel. In the 2024 election for town council, 109 of the 474 votes cast were from trusts, corporations, or LLCs — about 23%.

Artificial entities cast ballots only for local issues, not for state or federal races. Their leaders choose one person to physically cast a vote on their behalf. Voters who represent the businesses are typically registered elsewhere in more typical fashion, and cast those ballots in other places.

Fenwick Island cancelled its most recent local election, which had been scheduled for August, because there were only two candidates for three seats on the seven-member town council.

“Frankly, taking away the rights of our LLC or trusts, you’re trying to disenfranchise 200 voters for an election that has 900 on a good day,” Magdeburger said. “To me, it’s the antithesis of democracy, with a little ‘d.’”

Norwood called that defense “insultingly unserious” and a distortion of democratic values, pointing out the agents casting ballots on behalf of business entities also typically vote elsewhere on their own behalf.

“If you are insisting that every vacation home you own gives you voting rights you are insisting on oligarchy,” he said. “In some ways, it’s useful for people to just be bald-faced about it and say that, because I am wealthy, I deserve more say in government than anyone else, and I deserve more say than the people who live here.”

The practice is also ripe for abuse, Norwood said. The most problematic example came in 2018, when Newark, Delaware held a vote to approve a $27.6 million bond measure to fund parks, anti-flooding projects and other city development. At the time, the city allowed business owners to cast votes for each property they owned in the city. Eight developers cast 71 votes, including one who cast 31 ballots.

The measures sailed through, but the revelation about the developers’ votes prompted Newark to quickly revise its laws and end corporate voting there.

Voting laws create challenges

Fenwick Island’s decision to expand the vote has run into complications, challenges and questions.

Take the Hunter family. Four of them share a family summer home on Fenwick Island, and its ownership is split between two people and two trusts.

The town tried to restrict the family members to one vote because they collectively own only one property. But the family convinced Fenwick Island officials that the laws allowed all four of them to take part in local elections, said Gary Hunter, a retired highway construction engineer who lives in Tucson, Arizona, and is one of the owners.

“During elections, we’ve assumed all four owners were entitled to one vote each, as specified by the town charter,” Hunter said. “The two Fenwick Island attorneys claimed our assumption was wrong, until we encouraged them to read the charter.”

Magdeburger said the Hunter family home was a unique situation, but the case is emblematic of the concerns raised by the ACLU lawsuit now before the state Supreme Court.

Jim Simpson, a member of Fenwick Island's town council, on July 27, 2026.

Jim Simpson, one of the town’s newest council members, criticized the ACLU, which brought the lawsuit challenging Fenwick Island’s voting rules pending before the state Supreme Court, and Democrats, who are proposing the constitutional amendment, for trying to constrict voting rights in Delaware. Simpson compared it to attempts by Republicans, especially President Donald Trump and his allies, to put stricter voting requirements in place.

“In this case it’s the opposite party in this state taking away voting rights,” he said one recent afternoon while sitting on his screened in porch overlooking the Atlantic Coast beach.

Andrew Bernstein, one of the ACLU lawyers leading the case, said it would be possible to rewrite the law to address the concerns of property owners without extending voting to companies.

“I think there is a way to capture the legitimate interests of summer vacationers who might own a property without creating this kind of broad-based scheme,” he said.

2026: Election Odyssey

The debate over corporate voting rights in Delaware has ebbed and flowed over the years. It flared again in 2023 when the town of Seaford (population: 8,000) looked at expanding voting rights to mirror those in Fenwick Island. Local opposition derailed the effort and it stalled in the state legislature but the debate caught the attention of the ACLU.

Last December, the ACLU sued Fenwick Island over its voting rules, the case that is now before the Delaware Supreme Court. Fenwick Island won the first round in May when Delaware Superior Court Judge Craig Karsnitz dismissed the ACLU lawsuit and said the group failed to prove the town’s voting laws were a problem.

Karsnitz cited the infamous computer system HAL that seizes control of a space ship in the 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

“Visions of faceless large corporations, or even HAL, controlling a small town are frightening and the stuff of science fiction,” Karsnitz wrote in his ruling. “However, plaintiff has not demonstrated that this policy violates the principle of one person/entity/one vote.”

Bernstein said the group is working to make sure the practice does not become more widespread across Delaware.

“It’s kind of frightening to think about the precedent that could be set if this continues to march forward,” he said. “It’s easy to imagine it spiraling into other types of elections.”

Delaware lawmakers have had to approve every city and town provision that granted the rights in the first place. But they, too, are having doubts.

In June, state lawmakers took the first step towards outlawing the practice by approving plans for a constitutional amendment that would ban cities and towns from allowing businesses to vote. The state legislature has to approve the measure again next year before it becomes part of the constitution. Passage is far from assured.

“A vote is fundamental to our democracy,” said House Majority Leader Kerri Evelyn Harris, a Democrat and the bill’s sponsor. “Some communities have fought and died for the right to do so, whether it’s based on race, or gender, or even income. The ability to vote, the right to vote, is something that should be protected at all costs and should not be watered down in any way just because a person might have more money to start a business.”

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Homeland Security secretary steps to forefront of Trump’s election battles

2026-09-14T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin isn’t one to shy away from a fight.

The former professional mixed martial arts fighter once challenged the Teamsters president to a brawl in the middle of a Senate hearing and clashed with U.S. officials while unsuccessfully trying to mount his own rescue mission to Afghanistan during the chaotic 2021 American withdrawal.

Now Mullin is stepping to the forefront of the Trump administration’s battle to exert more control over the fast-approaching November elections.

Mullin has threatened to lock up elections officials and withhold federal dollars from states that don’t adopt the election security measures dictated by his agency. He’s suggested that ICE officers might enter polling places on Election Day if they are trying to arrest a suspect. And he’s directed agents to step up voter fraud investigations in nine states.

The cascade of tough talk has propelled Mullin into the heart of the Trump administration’s expansive efforts to remake America’s electoral system in President Donald Trump’s vision.

Justin Levitt, an election law specialist at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who worked in the White House under President Joe Biden on voting rights issues, said Mullin appeared to be driven by one overriding ambition: “Please the boss.”

“When the fourth grade soccer coach decides that everybody runs to the ball, everybody runs to the ball,” he said. “Regardless of what your actual job is.”

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment.

Mullin took over as secretary in March after the tumultuous 14-month tenure of Kristi Noem, who was forced out by Trump after a series of controversies, notably on immigration enforcement.

“My goal in six months is that we’re not in the lead story every single day,” Mullin said during a confirmation hearing in March that barely touched on election issues.

Mullin emerged as a prominent public face of the Trump administration’s election overhaul in July when the president delivered a primetime address attacking the integrity of the nation’s voting system.

The next day, Mullin held a press conference at the White House complex, where he claimed his agency had found more than 250,000 noncitizen voters on the rolls in four states, challenged the integrity of voting machines, and threatened to jail election officials who didn’t do enough to prevent voter fraud. States have pushed back on those numbers.

Since then, Mullin has shifted more focus onto elections, declaring that “election security is national security.”

Last week, news broke that Mullin had directed hundreds of agents to focus their efforts on hunting down noncitizens on voting rolls across the country, even though there is no evidence of a widespread problem with noncitizens voting in U.S. elections.

Mullin also told reporters that he might send ICE agents into polling places on Election Day if they get reports of undocumented immigrants inside they are trying to arrest. That stirred up renewed concerns that the Trump administration would try to use federal forces to intimidate and deter voters from casting ballots — a federal crime, Levitt and others said.

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson tried to calm fears by saying that “ICE is not planning operations targeting polling locations,” but that did little to assuage concerns.

“We have to respond in a very calm, collected way” to the Trump administration, said Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar, who leads the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State. “We cannot respond in a chaotic manner that creates angst among the voters because we already know the administration is creating enough chaos.”

So far, Mullin’s efforts have had a limited impact. The Department of Homeland Security has quietly walked back its claims of 250,000 noncitizens on voter rolls. In Nevada, for instance, the agency scaled back its estimate from 16,000 to 185.

The federal campaign to root out alleged noncitizen voting over the past month has led to the arrest of at least six noncitizens accused of voting.

Mullin has also asked the Justice Department to pursue an investigation into some voting equipment.

Levitt said Trump’s biggest leverage is the perception that he might seize ballots or send troops to polling places on Election Day, not that he would actually do so.

“My real fear is that people change their own behavior in response to the noise, rather than taking a breath and looking around and recognizing that the world outside their door doesn’t actually look like the communications world he’s trying to construct,” he said.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Milwaukee audit logs show no evidence of election fraud, experts say

2026-09-11T21:02:39+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

It took mere minutes for conspiracy theorists to seize on a Milwaukee election error after the August primary, when officials initially forgot to extract election results from five of the city’s nine absentee ballot tabulators. They lobbed baseless accusations that election officials had switched votes or otherwise tampered with the results.

But audit logs from those five tabulators show no evidence of tampering between the time officials initially left the facility and returned again to correctly extract results, experts told Votebeat.

“I don’t see a ‘there’ there,” said Duncan Buell, a chair emeritus of computer science and engineering at the University of South Carolina who has been analyzing election data and voting systems since 2010.

Ryan Macias, an election consultant who previously worked for the arm of the Election Assistance Commission that certifies voting machines, agreed there were “no signs or evidence that anything was done outside the norm” between the initial error and the successful extraction of the results.

More than three weeks after the primary election, city officials released audit logs from all nine tabulators to the Wisconsin Elections Commission and the public on Sept. 4. The files detail every action on the nine Milwaukee tabulators used to count absentee ballots for the Aug. 11 election.

On each of the five affected tabulators, the logs tell the same story: Officials mistakenly selected “export audit log” instead of “export files” during the initial extraction, which happened between 10:15 p.m. and about 10:40 p.m. Then, officials locked the machines.

Officials began turning the machines back on at around 11:30 p.m., after they realized they had made a mistake. They extracted the correct files shortly after midnight. The audit logs show no ballots being scanned, votes being deleted, or that the data contained on the tabulators was manipulated in any way.

The error didn’t change the vote count at all. It just delayed election results by a couple hours.

When Macias first learned of the issue, he assumed that the problem was human error and would be resolved.

“Now, looking at the audit log, I can tell you with a 100% fact that what I assumed happened [is what] happened,” he said.

Other experts agreed.

Jennifer Morrell, CEO of The Elections Group, said she reviewed the audit logs with her team of experienced election experts.

“From what I see, those logs match the public account exactly,” she said.

“In the roughly two hours between those two exports, there’s no scanning or counting activity recorded in the logs on any of those five machines,” she said. “And just as importantly, the ballot counts on every machine match the officially reported.”

Conspiracy theories percolated well before Milwaukee released audit logs

Conspiracy theories about what may have transpired in Milwaukee on Election Day began circulating almost immediately after Milwaukee officials announced the mistake. Popular social media accounts questioned the credibility of election officials and others suggested that officials were directly involved in fraud.

Three days after the election, Votebeat requested the audit logs — the records that could show exactly what happened on the tabulators during the period conspiracy theorists were questioning. Milwaukee did not release them until Sept. 4, more than three weeks later, and after the Wisconsin Elections Commission also asked the city to make them public.

Experts said that delay was not unusual.

“Releasing audit logs — these machine logs — that’s not a typical part of the documentation that election offices normally produce,” Morrell said, adding that it’s likely that Milwaukee would have needed legal approval before releasing the logs. “The fact that they did make them public, I think that’s a responsible process — not a cover up.”

More important, she said, is that the officials retained the records in the first place.

“The fact that the log is there, the fact that these things are recorded should be seen as a positive even though it was slow for them,” she said. “I think the more concerning thing would be if the log just didn’t exist at all.”

Milwaukee plans better documentation for the future

In response to the error, Milwaukee election chief Paulina Gutiérrez outlined several changes meant to prevent similar problems.

Written instructions for extracting results will now include images showing election officials which options to select on screen, Gutiérrez said in a letter to the Wisconsin Elections Commission. Those instructions will also be made available to observers at the city’s absentee ballot facility.

Before the results are downloaded, she said, the extraction teams will be briefed on the process. As workers move through the steps, they will verbally identify each selection they make so other members of the team can confirm they have followed the correct procedure.

“In this instance, an error occurred during the results-download process,” she told the commission. “At the same time, the safeguards surrounding the election worked as intended: the discrepancy was identified, the underlying election results remained intact, the correct files were retrieved, and Milwaukee’s accurate election results were ultimately reported.”

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Supreme Court ends Missouri map uncertainty as election deadlines close in

2026-09-11T16:58:48+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

For two days this week, Missouri election officials faced an extraordinary problem: The state supreme court had ordered them to prepare November’s congressional election using one map, while a federal judge ordered them to use another.

The U.S. Supreme Court ended that uncertainty Thursday with unusual speed, acting less than a day after being asked to intervene and just over a week before ballots must begin going to military and overseas voters. The ruling cleared the way for Missouri election officials to use the 2022 congressional map, under which Republicans hold six of the state’s eight U.S. House seats, instead of the Republican-drawn 2025 map designed to make seven districts strongly Republican.

Ruth Greenwood, director of the Election Law Clinic at Harvard Law School, said she saw Thursday’s ruling as one hopeful sign that the justices understand the importance of making speedy decisions on election issues as November approaches.

“I hope the Supreme Court appreciates that they really do need to have paramount in their mind what is going to be the most straightforward thing for election administrators and voters,” she said.

Interviews with Missouri election officials suggest that the mechanical work of switching between those maps was not necessarily the hardest part. The state had prepared both configurations months ago. The more serious problem was not knowing which map officials would ultimately be required to use — uncertainty that could have forced counties to redo ballot programming and testing, resend ballots to military and overseas voters, or account for ballots already issued in the wrong congressional districts.

The Kafkaesque week was the culmination of a yearlong dispute over the Show-Me State’s congressional lines.

Last September, heeding President Donald Trump’s call for Republican-controlled states to redistrict, Missouri’s legislature and governor enacted a new U.S. House map designed to flip the Kansas City-based 5th Congressional District from blue to red. But opponents quickly mobilized a veto referendum campaign against the map, and in December they submitted enough signatures to qualify it for the November ballot.

Under the Missouri Constitution, laws subject to veto referenda are not supposed to take effect until voters weigh in. But Denny Hoskins, Missouri’s Republican secretary of state, repeatedly tried to get around that. First, he waited until the last possible day — indeed, the last possible hour — to determine whether the referendum had enough signatures to qualify. Then, when that deadline came, he said he wasn’t putting the referendum on the ballot anyway because he claimed it violated the Missouri Constitution.

Referendum supporters immediately sued in state court, and on Sept. 3, the Missouri Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Hoskins was wrong: The referendum was valid, and the gerrymandered congressional map was not. Republicans made a last-ditch appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, but Justice Brett Kavanaugh rejected their case Tuesday at 4:30 p.m. Central time.

Half an hour later, though, Judge Stephen Clark of the Eastern District of Missouri ruled the opposite: Missouri should use the 2025 gerrymandered map in November because it had used it in the primary. That ruling came in a separate federal lawsuit that Republican congressional candidates (who argued they were injured by having to run under the old map) had filed the day after the Missouri Supreme Court’s decision.

Confusion reigned. State officials first directed local election authorities to use the 2022 map, then reversed course after Clark’s order and told them to use the newer map instead.

How Missouri election officials handled dueling maps

The legal whiplash came amid starkly different claims about how difficult another map change would be for affected areas.

Hoskins and Republican litigants argued in court that reverting to the 2022 lines risked serious disruption. They pointed to ballots that had already been tested and printed, the approaching deadline for military and overseas ballots, and testimony from a former Jackson County election official that changing the maps at that stage would be “impossible.”

Boone County Clerk Brianna Lennon, an elected Democrat whose county is affected by the shifting boundaries, disputed that characterization. “It does not cause logistical problems for us at all,” she said in an interview with Votebeat before the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling. “[Both maps are] available, we just need to know which one to check the box for. It’s very simple; we just need a decision by the court.”

Lennon said election officials had already grappled with the difficult logistical work in May, when the state was wrestling with which map to use. In an affidavit filed in the litigation, she explained that creating the new districts required counties to tie precincts and voters to the new congressional boundaries. But the 2022 districts were never overwritten, meaning both configurations remained available in Missouri’s centralized voter registration system.

Republican Allen Seabaugh, the Scott County clerk and president of the Missouri Association of County Clerks and Election Authorities, said election officials across the state spent the last week “watching and trying to plan for whatever could happen, so that whenever a final decision is made we can act fast.”

Scott County remains in the same congressional district under either map. But Seabaugh said counties use different vendors and face different operational obstacles, making the uncertainty difficult to assess and manage statewide.“There’s a lot of unknown, but we still have to do it accurately,” he said.The longer the legal uncertainty continued, he said, the greater the risk that it would collide with voting. If officials sent ballots under one congressional map and were later ordered to use another, counties could have to account for and resend ballots issued under the wrong district assignments.

The real pressure came from the calendar

Missouri election officials had built technical workarounds for this uncertainty, but they could not eliminate the consequences of changing the rules while an election is underway, Seabaugh said.

“The unknown can create uncertainty but it can also create errors,” Seabaugh said, adding that, in many Missouri counties, clerks handle responsibilities far beyond elections. “The more chaos and unknown you bring can leave you neglecting other things.”

Missouri election officials now know which map will govern the November election. But the broader concern extends well beyond Missouri. As Election Day approaches nationwide, Greenwood said, courts have less room to make changes without disrupting election preparations already underway across the country.

“I am just hoping at this point that the Supreme Court would like an election to happen without complete chaos,” said Greenwood. “I would hope they would want the least chaotic version of an election going forward and to that end would make decisions that support that.”

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Nathaniel Rakich is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Nathaniel at nrakich@votebeat.org.

Attorney faces possible discipline over conduct in 2020 Fulton County election lawsuit

2026-09-08T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

An attorney who represented a Pennsylvania county as it attempted to investigate the 2020 election is facing possible suspension or disbarment.

Thomas Carroll, an attorney from the Lehigh Valley, represented Fulton County in a long-running dispute the county had with the Pennsylvania Department of State and a voting equipment manufacturer.

Now, the Pennsylvania Disciplinary Board, which regulates lawyers’ conduct, says Carroll should face consequences for the “bad faith” way in which he represented the county.

“[Carroll] used means that had no substantial purpose other than to delay and burden the parties, the Special Master, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, and the courts,” the March complaint from the Office of Disciplinary Council alleges.

Carroll told Votebeat he was confident he would prevail against the charges at trial.

“My clients were weaponized against for exposing national security evidence,” he wrote in an email. “The special master referred me in part to the bar for seeking a continuance due to breaking a rib and being on prescribed narcotics as a result. The truth will prevail.”

After the 2020 election, which was won by Democrat Joe Biden, two Republican Fulton County commissioners began trying to investigate the results following a push from allies of President Donald Trump. As part of that investigation, they allowed an outside company to examine and download data from the county’s voting equipment.

The Pennsylvania Department of State, alarmed that a third party had accessed the county’s equipment, decertified it and sought an order from the state Supreme Court to prevent the county from allowing any other outside entities to examine the equipment. The court granted the order.

After that order was issued in early 2022, the county brought on Carroll as an attorney in the ongoing dispute. That summer, the county allowed another company to examine its equipment. As a result of that and the county’s overall conduct during the case, the state Supreme Court imposed substantial fines and issued a strong rebuke against both the county and Carroll.

“Despite being given every opportunity to participate in good faith in the proceeding, Attorney Carroll incessantly transgressed the bounds of zealous but ethical advocacy,” Justice David Wecht wrote for the court’s majority in 2023.

Justice Kevin Dougherty went a step further in his concurring opinion and specifically recommended the Pennsylvania Disciplinary Board investigate Carroll’s conduct, which he called “especially concerning and problematic.”

In its complaint, the disciplinary board alleges several actions by Carroll that it says violate rules Pennsylvania attorneys are bound by.

For example, despite being hired by the county in April 2022, Carroll filed a motion in late July of that year after the county had missed the deadline to file a brief, saying he had “just appeared in this case.” He asked for an extension, which was granted, but he also missed that deadline.

That fall, when the Department of State was seeking to have the county held in contempt for allowing a second inspection of its equipment, the disciplinary board alleges Carroll repeatedly made “frivolous” filings and failed to inform the courts, or his clients, of relevant information.

The complaint also alleges that on Nov. 7, the day the county commissioners were scheduled to give depositions, Carroll filed a motion to delay those depositions. He argued that an outage in the state’s election management system would prevent the commissioners from testifying — even though the issue had occurred three days prior and had already been resolved.

When that request was rejected, Carroll told the Department of State the commissioners could not appear for the depositions or a hearing two days later. He explained in a subsequent filing that was in part because of their responsibilities running the 2022 election, even though they knew the election’s date when the depositions were agreed to.

The state Supreme Court also noted that Carroll did not notify the Democratic commissioner of her scheduled deposition, which “exposed her to sanctions and even arrest.”

The disciplinary board alleges that Carroll violated 11 different parts of the professional rules of conduct, including sections that involve making false statements and intentionally disrupting proceedings.

Carroll, in a response filed by his attorneys, denied the allegations and said he was not acting in “bad faith,” as the court alleged, but rather “zealously” representing his clients. He also noted the long period between when the Supreme Court recommended the disciplinary board seek sanctions against him and when they were actually filed.

“The unreasonable delay in prosecution of this matter has caused actual, concrete prejudice to Respondent’s ability to defend himself against the 241 factual averments in the Petition, which concern fast-paced events that occurred in 2022 and 2023,” Carroll’s attorneys wrote. “Respondent has been forced to practice law for nearly three years under the cloud of an unresolved disciplinary referral, which constitutes an unadjudicated sanction in itself and has caused significant personal, emotional, and professional harm.”

Bob Davis Jr., a Harrisburg-based ethics attorney who has practiced before the Pennsylvania Disciplinary Board, said the fact that the disciplinary proceeding was prompted by a rebuke directly from the state Supreme Court is significant.

“I think if the Supreme Court says that, I think you can very likely expect there is a case there,” he said.

Davis said a panel of three lawyers from Carroll’s part of the state will consider the case and present a finding to the disciplinary board, which will make recommendations on discipline to the Supreme Court. If Carroll is found to have violated any of the professional rules of conduct the disciplinary board is alleging he violated, Davis said he expects the recommended disciplinary action would range from suspension to possibly even disbarment.

A hearing on the allegations is scheduled for Feb. 25, 2027.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Department of Justice charges 5 in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and New Jersey with crimes related to noncitizen voting

2026-09-04T21:33:49+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Update, Sept. 4, 6:45 p.m.: This story has been updated to include comments from the Pennsylvania Department of State.

The U.S. Department of Justice has charged five individuals in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and New Jersey with voting-related crimes.

The department contends that four noncitizens voted illegally in the 2022 and 2024 elections and charged one U.S. citizen with allegedly participating in his wife’s illegal voting.

“The crime of illegal voting undermines the integrity of our elections and harms citizens by stealing the power of our votes,” said U.S. Attorney Brian Miller for the Middle District of Pennsylvania in a press release. “Illegal voting is not a victimless crime but a serious affront to the principles of our democratic republic.”

The charges come as President Donald Trump’s administration seeks to crack down on what it contends is an influx of noncitizens registered to vote in the country.

According to the department, a federal grand jury indicted Thomas Holtzman, 68, and his wife Marisol Guzman, 50, both of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in connection with Guzman, a non-U.S. citizen, allegedly voting in the 2024 election. Guzman was charged with illegal voting, and Holtzman, a U.S. citizen, was charged with one count of making a false statement of citizenship and with aiding and abetting another to make a false statement of citizenship, as well as one count of submitting a false voter registration and with aiding and abetting another to submit a false voter registration.

A third Pennsylvania resident, Katya Rodriguez, 30, of Harrisburg, whom the Justice Department said is not a U.S. citizen, was charged with making a false statement of citizenship in order to vote, fraudulent registration, and illegally voting in the 2024 election.

In Wisconsin, Jesus Javier Jurado Garcia, 25, was charged with illegally voting in the November 2022 election. According to the department, Garcia is a noncitizen residing in Beloit.

Finally, the department also charged Mercedes Alexandra Cardoso, of Union County, New Jersey, for allegedly voting in the June 2024 presidential primary at a time when she was living in the U.S. on a B-2 visa.

Holtzman and Rodriguez declined to comment. Guzman did not respond to a call placed to a number associated with her voter registration information. Reliable contact information for Cardoso and Garcia could not immediately be located.

The Pennsylvania Department of State said the U.S. Department of Justice notified it of the investigation in May 2025.

“The Department [of State] cooperated with law enforcement, as it does with all credible allegations of criminal activity,” spokesperson Matt Heckle said in an email. “Noncitizen voting is extremely rare across the country, including in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania election officials will deliver another free, fair, safe, and secure election this November.”

Election officials in the New Jersey and Wisconsin did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The department said the cases in Pennsylvania and New Jersey were investigated with the help of Homeland Security Investigations, a division of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. On Monday, CNN reported Homeland Security was planning to launch a surge of voter fraud investigations this week.

In July, Homeland Security also claimed it had identified 250,000 potential noncitizens on the voter rolls in four states, including Pennsylvania and New Jersey along with California and Nevada. The department has yet to release lists of those voters to the states or provide details on how it identified them.

Officials in Pennsylvania and Nevada have said that Homeland Security officials have expressed far less confidence in the agency’s findings in meetings since that announcement.

While election officials say noncitizens do sometimes register to vote, it’s still a rare occurrence. The largest examples of noncitizens registering to vote typically happen because of software malfunctions or administrative errors at state agencies.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Proof-of-citizenship amendment won’t be on Michigan’s November ballot

2026-09-04T16:26:18+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Michigan’s free newsletter here.

A proposed constitutional amendment to require Michigan voters to prove their citizenship is dead for 2026 after the state’s Supreme Court declined to put it on the November ballot.

The Michigan Supreme Court late Thursday denied Americans for Citizen Voting’s request to order a state board to certify its effort for the ballot. A last-ditch appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was also rejected earlier in the day.

It’s an abrupt demise for an effort that began with a lot of optimism early last year, when Republicans took control of the Michigan House of Representatives. But supporters expect it’s far from the end of the larger movement to require newly registering voters to prove their American citizenship in Michigan and across the U.S.

“For these voters, this was never an abstract legal argument,” Paul Jacob, chairman of ACV, said of the more than 700,000 people who signed the group’s petition. Jacob is also president of the Liberty Initiative Fund, the libertarian group behind ACV.

Organizers submitted signatures earlier this year to get the proof-of-citizenship proposal on the November ballot. In order to make the ballot, the measure required 446,198 signatures from registered Michigan voters, as verified by the state’s Bureau of Elections.

In a lengthy meeting last week, though, the Board of State Canvassers — the entity that certifies statewide ballot issues and constitutional amendments — did not agree that ACV had enough valid signatures. The two Republicans on the bipartisan board voted to put the amendment on the ballot, while the two Democratic members voted against. The tie meant no action was taken, so the proposed amendment was not put on the ballot.

In its 16-page ruling, the Michigan Supreme Court determined that decision was within the canvassers’ discretion. There is no strict ministerial duty to certify the effort for the ballot, the court determined, so it could not force the canvassers to certify.

Instead, justices suggested that the state Legislature pass new laws clarifying the signature verification process to prevent such concerns from popping up again — for instance, setting new deadlines that make judicial review more practical.

Michigan voters could get the chance to weigh in on a proof-of-citizenship amendment in a future election. ACV leaders said in statements Thursday that they intend to try again in 2028.

For the 2026 election, though, the decision means Michigan will have only two proposals on the ballot. The first is a constitutional convention, which automatically appears on the ballot every 16 years. The second, known as Michiganders for Money Out of Politics, seeks to limit the donations that utilities and state contractors can make to politicians.

Noncitizen voting is a major concern for Michigan Republicans

Being a citizen is already a legal requirement to vote in Michigan, as well as to vote in federal elections anywhere in the country. But fears that significant numbers of noncitizens are voting anyway have gained purchase in recent years, particularly as President Donald Trump has spread false and unsupported claims about rigged elections.

Investigations and audits have found noncitizen voting is extremely rare. Of the more than 5.7 million Michigan voters in the 2024 election, officials have publicly charged six — 0.0001% of the electorate — with voting despite a lack of citizenship.

But proponents of proof-of-citizenship requirements argue that even a single noncitizen vote serves to disenfranchise those who are rightfully voting. Opponents, meanwhile, argue that the hoops people would have to jump through to verify their citizenship could themselves disenfranchise large numbers of rightful voters.

The push for a proof-of-citizenship requirement in Michigan specifically began in earnest during the 2024 presidential election, when a University of Michigan student was allegedly able to register and vote despite not being a U.S. citizen.

Republican leaders, including now-Michigan House Speaker Matt Hall, highlighted that incident to advocate for the SAVE Act — a federal proof-of-citizenship bill that has languished in the U.S. Senate. State Rep. Bryan Posthumus went a step further, introducing a proposal shortly after Republicans regained the state House to amend the Michigan constitution to require verification of citizenship.

The effort in the House failed along party lines last spring. Around the same time, though, Americans for Citizen Voting began its push to qualify a similar amendment for the ballot by collecting signatures from voters. The effort raised millions, according to state campaign finance records, and spent more than $3 million for “petition management,” a category that includes paid signature gathering.

ACV organizers collected signatures through the fall and winter before ultimately filing what the group estimated to be more than 750,000 signatures in March. Supporters said at the time that the huge number was a sign that Michigan voters supported a proof-of-citizenship requirement.

“This level of support shows that Michigan voters are paying attention and expect accountability,” state Sen. Ruth Johnson, a Republican who previously served as Michigan’s secretary of state, said in March.

A random sample of signatures analyzed by the Bureau of Elections and then challenged by an outside group ultimately found that not enough of the signatures came from registered voters or otherwise had problems with how they were submitted. A few signatures from ACV were added back in after additional information was provided, but not enough for the overall total to hit the threshold needed.

Voting rights groups and election administrators, though, were concerned about the amendment, which would have required both newly registering voters to prove their citizenship and existing voters to prove their citizenship if the state couldn’t independently verify it. The result would have been two separate voter rolls — one for those whose citizenship had been verified, allowing them to vote in all elections, and one for those whose citizenship was still up in the air, allowing for much more limited ballot access.

Michael Siegrist, the clerk of Canton Township and president of the Michigan Association of Municipal Clerks, said Friday that clerks across the state are dedicated to making sure that voters are rightfully registered, but that many had concerns about how ACV’s proposed changes could have affected the work they do.

“We were really concerned about the impact to the overall election administration system,” he said. “If something like that were to pass, there’s a substantial amount of unintended consequences regarding the bifurcated election system, where you would have double the ballot styles, [have] two separate lists of registered voters.”

He hopes that election officials are more involved in future conversations about shaping what a proof-of-citizenship requirement could look like in the state.

“If they want to create a situation where we ensure there are only citizens voting, do it in a way that doesn’t ... [drop] a bomb in the system,” he said.

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

Thousands of Arizona voters received letters asking if they’d moved. Here’s why.

2026-09-03T22:30:00+00:00

This story was co-published with the Arizona Mirror, an independent, nonprofit news outlet that covers Arizona politics and government and is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization. Sign up for the Arizona Mirror’s free newsletter here.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Arizona’s free newsletter here.

Kimberly Dorris wasn’t expecting to see a letter from the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office in her mailbox on Monday.

Dorris, 59, had just voted by mail in Arizona’s July 21 primary election from her Scottsdale address. So she was surprised to open the notice and read “HAVE YOU MOVED?” at the top. The letter went on to inform her that county officials had received information suggesting her address may no longer be current.

Dorris wasn’t alone. Thousands of Arizonans have received similar notices in recent days, even though many have not moved. More than a dozen told Votebeat and the Arizona Mirror that they were longtime voters who had lived in their homes for years or even decades.

Officials said the notices generally do not cancel a voter’s registration or impact voting eligibility. But anyone who received one should check to make sure their address is correct.

If it is, nothing needs to be done. If it isn’t, you should get in touch with local election officials to correct it.

The confusing mailing appears to have stemmed from flaws in state and some county officials’ implementation of a new state law. Here’s what to know.

What does the new state law say?

The law requires Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, to compare the state’s voter registration database to the state’s driver’s license database each month. His staffers are then required to inform county recorders if they find discrepancies in a voter’s residential address or citizenship status.

Supporters of the law, which passed as House Bill 2243 in 2022, said its purpose is to improve maintenance of the voter rolls and catch ineligible voters, including people who had moved to a new address. In a May 2022 letter to then-Gov. Doug Ducey, a coalition of conservative groups wrote that the law would ensure it was “easy to vote, and hard to cheat” in Arizona.

But opponents worried it could disenfranchise some voters and noted that the state already had voter list maintenance measures in place.

Ducey, a Republican, ultimately vetoed an early iteration of the bill, saying the wording was too vague and could lead to “bad actors” attempting to disqualify voters for discriminatory reasons. But a second attempt, penned by then-Rep. Jake Hoffman of Queen Creek, earned his signature at the very end of the 2022 legislative session. Hoffman, a Republican and a leader of the state legislature’s far-right Freedom Caucus, is now a state senator.

Democrats said the underlying bill was still “very problematic.” Several voting rights groups immediately challenged it in court, delaying its implementation until earlier this year.

I haven’t moved. Why did I receive a letter?

The issue comes down to what counts as a discrepancy between the state’s voter registration and driver’s license databases.

When staff at the secretary of state’s office compared the two data sets, the voter registration database flagged minor variations in voters’ addresses as potential changes that needed to be reported to local election officials.

For instance, a voter might have an address that includes an apartment or unit number. If that’s listed in one database as “Unit 1,” and in another as “# 1,” that voter would be flagged. Many voters whose addresses had not changed were therefore included in the report that the secretary’s office sent to county recorders.

Thousands of Arizona voters recently received notices such as this one, dated July 31, 2026. Some of the letters, which are linked to a new state law, went to voters who hadn’t moved because of flaws in state officials’ address comparison process, sparking confusion.

Judy Keane, a spokesperson for the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office, said the report also caught voters with small address differences, such as “lane” versus “LN,” and abbreviated street directional prefixes, such as “N” versus “North.”

“The notices were not sent in error, nor were they the result of a mistake by the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office,” she said in a statement. Keane added that her office, headed by Recorder Justin Heap, a Republican, does not have access to the Motor Vehicle Division’s records and relies on the secretary’s office to provide address comparison information.

How many people got this notice?

At least 149,776 voters statewide received the letters, according to data gathered by Votebeat and the Arizona Mirror.

Nearly all of those notices were sent to voters by the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office. Keane said the letters were mailed to voters in the county between July 31 and Aug. 15.

Mohave, Greenlee, Graham, and Navajo counties said they had also recently mailed similar notices to voters. Graham and Navajo sent 33 and 114 letters, respectively. Mohave and Greenlee did not immediately provide counts.

Some other jurisdictions, including Gila County, said they were actively “processing” the data but had not sent out notices yet.

I got this notice. What should I do?

Keane said the notices generally will not impact a voter’s eligibility or cause their registration to be canceled.

“It simply advises the voter of the information provided to us so they can verify it and update their registration if necessary,” she said.

Voters should check the notice they received. Notices mailed as a result of the state law should be labeled “Confirmation Notice — MVD — In State Mover” in the bottom-right corner. (If you received a different notice, you might have different instructions to follow.)

Then, make sure your address is correct. If it is, no response is required. If not, you should contact your local election officials to update your address in your voter record.

Sometimes, election mail is marked undeliverable by the U.S. Postal Service. Keane said that can lead officials to initiate the lengthy voter removal process. But if that happens to you, local officials will send another notice attempting to confirm your address before taking steps to alter your registration status.

If you’re concerned about your registration status, be sure to double-check it at My.Arizona.Vote by Oct. 5. That’s the state’s voter registration deadline for the general election.

If you have additional questions, reach out to your local election officials. Votebeat and the Arizona Mirror may also be able to help if you run into an issue. Reach us at aztips@votebeat.org and info@azmirror.com.

Were there ways around this problem?

Keane said her office sent the notices in two batches. About 142,000 notices went out between July 31 and Aug. 1, she said. Roughly 7,500 more were mailed on Aug. 14 and 15.

That second batch, she said, was “significantly reduced due to filtering performed by our office for that month.” But it’s unclear whether her office took steps to filter the first batch, too. Keane said in a statement that her office had generally “taken proactive steps to reduce unnecessary notices by removing repeats and false positives where we are able to identify them.” But she did not directly respond to questions about what that filtering process looked like or whether it was applied to the first, larger batch of notices.

The Arizona Mirror and Votebeat also reached out to counties across the state to gather information about how they handled the report from the secretary’s office. Those that responded largely said they had combed through the list to remove false positives or held off on sending notices at all because they lacked the bandwidth and staffing to do so ahead of the November election.

Yavapai County was among those that did not plan to immediately mail letters. Recorder Michelle Burchill, a Republican, said her office needed to manually compare the address discrepancies flagged by state officials before sending out the notices. She added that one of her staffers spent a whole day exclusively going over the 30,000-line spreadsheet from Fontes’ office and “got through about 10% of it.” A preliminary review of the list suggested that about half of the address changes reported to her office were false positives.

“This may end up being a useful endeavor, but initially it is a heavy lift for the counties,” Burchill said.

Keane said counties were “required” to send notices to voters on the list provided by the secretary’s office. But there’s no requirement in state law that the county recorders do anything with the address data. Still, Burchill said officials statewide would likely want to use it to ensure “good list maintenance.” Her office planned to process the report after the election, once it received “a workable list,” she said.

Gila County Recorder Wendy Mannigel-Smith, a Republican, said in an email that her office needed to “physically investigate each voter record.” She said recorders statewide felt they should be able to work with the state to “come up with a more efficient way of handling the data.”

Calli Jones, a spokesperson for the secretary’s office, said in a statement that recorders had specifically requested a “straight look” at the address changes, without any additional coding. After counties received their first report from the secretary’s office in May, she said, many began requesting improvements to the address comparison process, including Maricopa County.

Jones said her office had yet to make changes to the state’s voter registration database that could produce a more detailed and accurate report. But she noted that “most” counties were not processing the reports provided by her office before the general election — and, in a phone call, said it was “up to them” and “entirely” their decision whether to do so before improvements could be made.

“This is a new report and another possible source for list maintenance, but it is messy and counties need to work to come to [a] consensus about what they want the report to say and how they want it delivered to them,” she said.

Sasha Hupka is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Sasha at shupka@votebeat.org.

Jerod MacDonald-Evoy is a reporter for the Arizona Mirror based in Phoenix. Contact Jerod at JerodMacEvoy@AzMirror.com.

His model was built to detect voter fraud. Now it’s testing the limits of election trust.

2026-09-03T18:15:04+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

In April 2025, the Election Truth Alliance was a three-month-old Nevada nonprofit with a growing audience in anti-Trump online spaces and a claim that something about the 2024 presidential election did not add up.

The group had released an analysis of the results in Pennsylvania and sent letters to officials there and in Wisconsin asking them to hand-check the results of multiple elections. Now, it wanted to work with Walter Mebane Jr., a tenured University of Michigan political scientist and one of the few academics who had spent decades trying to detect the statistical fingerprints of election fraud.

Mebane was skeptical.

“The name of the group didn’t really inspire confidence,” he told Votebeat. “I was thinking, ‘Oh my god, truthers.’” But Mebane thought the data would be useful for his students and a book he was working on, and by early May, he had produced a working paper analyzing Pennsylvania’s 2024 presidential results. In a note, he credited the ETA for providing the data.

His findings estimated the number of potentially fraudulent votes exceeded President Donald Trump’s margin of victory in Pennsylvania. In the working paper, Mebane noted his findings could also be attributed to factors other than intentional fraud.

The ETA has described Mebane’s work as a “collaboration” that confirmed its conclusions. Mebane described it differently: He said he had no interest in the group’s advocacy and engaged because he believed it had unique data on Pennsylvania. He told Votebeat he did not know the same data was available from the state.

A mail in ballot and envelope.

“He is kind of the go-to guy for election forensics in the U.S. He’s the leading expert,” ETA co-founder Nathan Taylor said in a video posted in May 2025 announcing the findings validated their Pennsylvania concerns. Toward the end of the video, a QR code to the group’s donation page flashed on screen. The ETA urged supporters to contact Pennsylvania officials and advocate for hand-count audits, and they heeded the call, sending state and local officials emails that cited Mebane’s work to allege the results were flawed.

In a June 2025 press release, the ETA said Mebane’s findings corroborated its own. “BREAKING,” the group wrote. “Election Forensics Expert Finds Vote Manipulation Concerns in Pennsylvania.

In November, the ETA filed a lawsuit against the Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and three counties questioning the 2024 count and asking the district court to require the counties to “hand count physical ballots.” The group cited its own analysis but relied on Mebane’s findings to suggest abnormalities in Allegheny County.

The ETA’s leaders acknowledge that statistical analysis alone can’t prove fraud. But they say the anomalies they raise warrant independent validation of the election results.

The Pennsylvania paper Mebane gave the ETA did not fully explain the statistical model he used to identify potentially fraudulent votes, which he calls “eforensics.” Mebane later told Votebeat he had “decided not to write it in a way that would make it self contained” and instead referred the ETA to his past work for details on his methodology.

The ETA’s promotion of Mebane’s original working paper and his credentials caught the attention of a network of statisticians and political scientists accustomed to dense models, technical assumptions, and arguments over what statistical analysis of election data can really show.

Justin Grimmer, a Stanford political scientist whose 2021 peer-reviewed paper debunked statistical fraud claims about the 2020 election, said Mebane’s work has been used by the ETA in ways that give unusual weight to its claims about elections, which could otherwise be more easily dismissed as fringe. The result, he added, is a “perfect storm” — a motivated interest group armed with a professor’s academic credentials.

He said giving the original analysis to the ETA was like “handing someone a stick of dynamite and being surprised when you walk away and it detonates.”

As the ETA’s profile rose and its supporters trumpeted Mebane’s findings, Votebeat consulted 10 election and statistics experts about his original Pennsylvania working paper and the statistical model Mebane terms “eforensics.” All said they doubt the model can accurately detect fraud in U.S. elections.

A different kind of election denial

Claims of election fraud and statistical anomalies are now a regular feature of American elections — often blending data, analysis by citizen researchers, and the raw emotions of voters who do not want to believe their candidate truly lost. After 2020, when Trump and his allies waged an unprecedented effort to overturn the results, such efforts became closely associated with the political right.

The ETA, which was formed as a nonpartisan nonprofit, has tried to distinguish itself from those movements. “This is not election denial. This is election integrity and auditing,” the ETA’s Taylor told David Pakman, host of the progressive online program The David Pakman Show, which has more than 3.6 million YouTube subscribers. Pakman described the 2025 segment as “one of the most requested interviews” in months.

Mebane’s work has fueled public questions about elections before: In South Korea, politicians and activists cited his analysis to allege possible election fraud in 2020. Political scientists later found such claims were flawed and damaged voter confidence.

A Warning From Korea

How an American professor’s contested work was used to fuel election doubts in South Korea.

Read the story →

Now, the ETA is using his work to raise questions about election results in the U.S. In addition to Pennsylvania, the group posted a summary of an unpublished analysis by Mebane of 2024 results in North Carolina, and it has asserted that the fact that his analysis corroborated its findings in Pennsylvania validates its analyses of other states.

“In collaboration with ETA, Dr. Walter Mebane analyzed Pennsylvania vote data for the 2024 November Election and found evidence of potential election fraud, confirming ETA’s analysis of the same Pennsylvania vote data,” an attorney for the ETA wrote in an analysis sent to California election officials, threatening litigation if the state refused to act.

“Consistent with techniques used to analyze Pennsylvania’s vote data,” the ETA said it had identified “evidence consistent with vote manipulation, including ballot-stuffing, deleting votes, and using algorithms to alter tabulator vote counts” in some California counties.

ETA leaders later told Votebeat the group’s lawyer’s use of “confirming” in the letter was “less nuanced” than their own statements, but that they stood by their use of “corroborates,” since, they said, both analyses reached similar conclusions.

The ETA has also sent letters to officials in at least six states, including Minnesota, Michigan and Kentucky, suggesting it has found abnormalities in the 2024 election results or in subsequent ones.

The letters urge election officials to take steps, such as investigating technology used in the elections and conducting hand counts, to verify the results. As of Sept. 2, Pennsylvania is so far the only state where the ETA has sued. A judge recently dismissed the case but left the door open for it to be refiled. When the group resubmitted its complaint in August, it made no mention of Mebane or his analysis. In an interview with Votebeat in April, Taylor said the ETA planned to file suit in Florida next.

The nonprofit is run by three people who came together on Reddit after the 2024 election, none of whom have an apparent background in U.S. elections. Taylor, 27, has a background in information technology; his two co-founders are a U.K.-trained financial professional now living in Arizona and a Canadian policy analyst with experience coordinating resources for British Columbia’s election authority.

The group raises money to support its work, including through donations and selling merchandise such as a “The Math Ain’t Math’n” T-shirt and a women’s sleep shirt reading “Vote Once, Count Twice, Sleep Tight.” Public records show it reported raising more than $422,000 in 2025.

While Mebane said he worked with the group, he told Votebeat that he hasn’t spoken with its founders in months. He told Votebeat that he saw “many, many things” in the ETA’s explanations that he “didn’t think were sound interpretations” of his work. But he said he didn’t want to get into a public debate with them, nor would he detail his specific concerns to Votebeat. He said fact-checking online claims is a distraction from his primary professional focus, a long-gestating book on his eforensics work.

Mebane stands by his model as valid but also said he does not see it as his responsibility to ensure the public understands his work. He stressed that his work has been done transparently and in public through working papers that can be revised.

At the same time, he dismisses the criticism from other academics, saying the experts consulted by Votebeat lack key components he has “deliberately not shown.” Grimmer and University of Pennsylvania political scientist Marc Meredith produced written reviews of Mebane’s 2024 Pennsylvania working paper at Votebeat’s request. Mebane described Grimmer’s critique as “just wrong” because “these views that you’ve solicited here are not based on the whole case that I’m making.” In response to questions, he frequently cited his planned book, saying the answers will ultimately be found there.

From butterfly ballots to eforensics

Mebane described his childhood as that of an inquisitive Black boy coming of age in the Civil Rights Era South, in a household where his parents, both Tuskegee graduates, emphasized the importance of social justice.

“That’s why I cared about elections,” Mebane, 67, said in an April interview on the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus. It seemed to him to be “the one way that wasn’t violent” that could “change who has control of some levers of how decisions get made.”

When he spoke with Votebeat, he sat in a sparsely furnished office at the university’s Institute for Social Research — a space he uses for meetings. He described his primary workspace as “grimy” and packed with books. He wore a faded T-shirt featuring a tarot-style image labeled “The Wanderer,” a symbol of a lone traveler.

Dr. Walter Mebane Jr. at the University of Michigan in April 2026.

Mebane said he has always been drawn to questions about human behavior. At 8, while grocery shopping with his mother, he remembers searching the cereal aisle for hidden cameras, convinced companies must be tracking what people bought to measure the effectiveness of advertisements.

Mebane, who earned his undergraduate degree at Harvard and his doctorate at Yale, was teaching government at Cornell and studying elections in 2000 when the presidential race became too close to call, plunging the country into uncertainty.

He traveled to Florida as part of a team of academic experts working pro bono on a lawsuit challenging Palm Beach County’s butterfly ballot, a confusing two-page design that led some voters to accidentally select the wrong presidential candidate. His team published their findings in the American Political Science Review.

That work was straightforward: Mebane and his colleagues started with a known irregularity — the butterfly ballots — and worked outward, estimating how many votes it may have affected. There was a specific, identifiable problem. His job was to measure it.

His approach to Pennsylvania’s 2024 election works differently.

In the eforensics framework, Mebane starts not with a known problem but with the election results themselves. He compares total votes, votes for the leading candidate, and the number of eligible voters or registrants. Using those inputs, the model looks for patterns Mebane says could be produced by fraud.

Elections are shaped by a wide range of forces, from socioeconomic conditions and demographic differences to weather, campaign spending, and the quirks of individual races. Mebane’s Pennsylvania model does not directly account for those factors, though it does adjust for broad differences in turnout and voting patterns across counties. Instead, using precinct-level vote returns, it classifies precincts as having no fraud, incremental fraud, or extreme fraud — terms Mebane says are not meant to imply intentional wrongdoing.

Critics say that is where the trouble begins. The model flags innocent variations — caused by anything from strong canvassing efforts to hurricanes — as readily as deliberate manipulation.

Mebane recognizes that the model can be affected by other factors. He says his model is unable to account for “lost votes” — votes that were never cast because voters stayed home, for example. The model also sometimes flags strategic behavior — such as a voter intentionally casting their ballot for a party they don’t typically vote for — in the same way as fraud. Critics say such phenomena are commonplace in American elections, making the model a bad fit for the U.S.

“My project is a scientific mission to see whether this estimator and this approach can measure election frauds,” Mebane told Votebeat. “I think it measures frauds in a valid way, but it’s imperfect.”

Experts dispute findings and raise questions about false positives

Michael Alvarez, a political science professor at the California Institute of Technology, tested Mebane’s model with Grimmer and Meredith using simulated data built to contain no fraud. The model still found fraud at levels similar to Mebane’s Pennsylvania working paper.

Grimmer and Meredith said this kind of simulation is a basic way to pressure-test any model. They, along with Alvarez, were surprised Mebane had not done it.

In Mebane’s book manuscript, a partial copy of which he provided to Votebeat, he said he has not used simulated data tests because his preferred test is to compare the model’s results with real elections. He points to examples from France and Mexico, where courts or election authorities later annulled results or otherwise identified serious problems, and his model also found anomalies.

Had Mebane pressure-tested the model with simulated data, Meredith, Grimmer, and Alvarez said, he would have seen that the model could flag fraud even when none existed.

“Mebane’s eforensics model labels precincts as fraudulent when they show just a combination of this disproportionately high turnout and support for the winning candidate,” Meredith said at a recent academic conference. That combination was common across the country in precincts that favored Trump.

Mebane responded that such a result was “no surprise,” because an election simulated to contain no intentional fraud may still effectively simulate high mobilization or strategic behavior — forces his model may flag as eforensics frauds.

All three criticized Mebane’s use of the word “fraud,” with Meredith calling it “very irresponsible” and “frankly, not defensible.”

In his book manuscript, Mebane defines fraud as “malevolent distortions of electors’ intentions that change or potentially can change election outcomes,” even if the distortions aren’t the result of malicious or improper activity. Pressed on his use of the word “fraud,” Mebane defended it.

“I have an imperfect measure of fraud.”

If the anomalies may not be due to fraud, why use the term at all?

“Because it’s eforensics frauds.”

Why not call it an anomaly instead?

“Because it measures frauds.”

Alvarez, who co-edited a foundational academic book on election fraud, took issue with Mebane’s definition. “No one else thinks that’s what the word fraud means,” he said.

Mebane’s eforensics model has not been published in a peer-reviewed paper. He submitted an early version of his eforensics work to the American Political Science Review in 2020. It was rejected, and he said he does not recall the specific critique.

Nevertheless, in a press release announcing Mebane’s findings, the ETA said the model “has been validated in professional scientific publications.” The group did not specify which publications. Many political scientists, who reviewed the model at Votebeat’s request, told Votebeat that it cannot be used to support the claims the ETA is making.

Pennsylvania, a swing state that has long been the subject of voter fraud conspiracy theories, draws intense scrutiny in every election. In 2024, the state had a chief election official appointed by the losing party, bipartisan boards in nearly every county, risk-limiting audits, and smaller spot-check audits.

Meredith questions whether thousands of manufactured or stolen votes could really have slipped through all that scrutiny.

“I am concerned that the model uses fraud as the mechanism to make the model fit the data better,” Meredith wrote.

In Pennsylvania in 2024, Republican registrants turned out at higher rates than Democratic registrants in nearly every county, a pattern Meredith said is more readily explained by partisan enthusiasm than ballot stuffing.

Mebane’s working paper acknowledges this possibility, albeit seven pages in. After repeatedly asserting that his findings of fraud may exceed the 2024 margin in Pennsylvania, Mebane writes that the state is a “key battleground into which extensive and intensive campaigning and mobilization efforts were directed,” adding, “maybe most or almost all of the incremental manufactured votes are false positives prompted by electors’ strategic behaviors.”

The most conservative version of his model puts the number of estimated illegitimate votes well below Trump’s margin of victory in Pennsylvania.

In the version of the working paper provided to the ETA, Mebane described the narrower estimate as “a not negligible proportion” of Trump’s margin. Mebane has since updated that paper for his book and deleted that language, according to a revised version he provided to Votebeat in July.

Mebane also provided Votebeat with a written response to the reviews of his model from his academic peers, which highlight this limitation. In that, he says that when both malevolent distortions and strategic behaviors happen in the same election, “nothing about the model per se” can distinguish between the two.

Experts were also critical of a number of choices Mebane made in his analysis. The working paper, for example, skips steps typically standard for claims of this magnitude. It does not rigorously engage with alternative explanations, address the fact that Pennsylvania’s election results were audited, or show through simulation that the model can return a no-fraud result in a setting like Pennsylvania’s.

The Pennsylvania analysis also relies on data Mebane obtained via the ETA, even though that data was also publicly available from the state. Mebane said he did not check the data with election officials before publishing his findings, something Grimmer characterizes as a basic precaution before drawing conclusions from any model.

Grimmer and the other experts said taking that step would have helped Mebane understand and account for obvious data issues that instead distorted his findings. Votebeat separately found additional data interpretation errors in Mebane’s work. After Votebeat raised its discovery with Mebane, he acknowledged it and revised his findings of precincts labeled as “extreme frauds.”

Mebane’s updated Pennsylvania analysis also changes which counties he identifies as having significant levels of “malevolent distortions.” His original paper focused on Philadelphia and Huntingdon. The revised version provided to Votebeat instead focuses on Philadelphia and Bradford.

The new paper does not explain the change, and the earlier version — accusing Huntingdon of having high levels of fraud — remains on Mebane’s website.

‘There is an element of faith’

The ETA stressed in an email to Votebeat that its claims do not rely solely on Mebane’s working paper or model, noting that it ran multiple statistical tests “to avoid putting too much weight on any one individual method.” But some of those other tests are variations on the same basic idea as Mebane’s eforensics model.

For instance, in Pennsylvania, the group used a method developed by a Russian physicist that treats precincts with both high turnout and high support for the leading candidate as potentially fraudulent — a pattern colloquially known as a “Russian tail.” Grimmer said that kind of approach runs into the same barrier as Mebane’s model: The pattern it flags may be real, but the model cannot say why it exists.

A political methodologist and researcher at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, Kirill Kalinin, told Votebeat that he spoke with the ETA last year and warned the group its methods could produce false positives.

The ETA’s founders also spoke with Votebeat and answered additional questions, but they did not answer a final list of questions about their methods, claims, and organization. They also did not directly respond to Grimmer and Meredith’s written critiques of Mebane’s work.

“Our team remains open to transparent, unbiased data analysis, including amending and correcting errors when they are discovered or brought to our attention,” they said in an email. “We welcome and encourage constructive criticism of our methodologies or our characterization of others’ work as we seek to ensure the accuracy and integrity of election results, and to bridge the gap between academia and the general public.”

An absentee ballot goes into a ballot drop box.

But by both sides’ accounts, the group and the professor are no longer working together, with Mebane voicing doubts about how the group is using his work. The ETA said it repeatedly reached out to Mebane to ask if it had accurately characterized his work or should adjust its framing of it but received no response.

The ETA’s founders — Taylor, Emily Barner, and Clive Griffiths — said they are not the full extent of the ETA’s team, describing a wider network that includes members with advanced statistics training and doctorates in relevant fields, but declined to name most of them.

Barner, who goes by Lilli McGregor in her work for the ETA — which she told Votebeat is a combination of a nickname and her married name — said the group is trying to protect those members from reprisal and that supporters will ultimately have to take them at their word.

“There is an element of faith,” she said.

At least one of the founders has expressed strong views about the 2024 election. Griffiths — who goes by the nickname Jive online — said on X before the election that it was “about to be stolen.” The day after the election, he posted that “we are gonna prove” Trump cheated. After Votebeat asked about the posts, the account became private.

Mebane confirmed he also analyzed North Carolina data given to him by the group which published a summary of his findings that claims he found more than 200,000 potentially fraudulent votes. However, Mebane said he asked the ETA not to publish his full paper, leaving that summary the only public account of his findings.

Mebane said he raised his objections explicitly in “a couple of Zoom meetings.” The group disputes that, saying it only learned of his concerns secondhand, around the time of an article in The Atlantic reporting that he did not endorse their claims.

The group has also contacted other academics, including Kalinin, who was advised by Mebane as a University of Michigan doctoral student. Before graduating in 2017, Kalinin worked with Mebane on election forensics methods. Kalinin said the ETA first contacted him over the summer of 2025 and later scheduled a roughly three-hour call in October.

Over the course of the call, Kalinin said, it became clear the group was seeking advice on how to restore its relationship with Mebane following his comments to The Atlantic. He told the ETA members on the call they’d have to reach out to Mebane directly. It was in that conversation, he said, that he cautioned them about false positives.

“These are just anomalies, these are not election fraud,” he said he told them, stressing that “you need to prove it.” Without ruling out alternative explanations, he said, such patterns cannot establish wrongdoing, particularly in democratic elections where normal political behavior can produce similar signals.

Mebane told Votebeat he doesn’t have time to argue with everyone on the internet, pointing to this meme. But his reluctance to publicly address the use of his work has left a vacuum.

For example, in a July 2025 video with more than 650,000 views titled “Yes, There’s Evidence Trump Hacked the 2024 Election,” independent journalist Scott Carney cited the ETA’s interpretation of Mebane’s working paper as evidence the election may have been stolen. He acknowledged he could not fully understand the math and said Mebane didn’t answer his emailed questions.

“C’mon, Mebane!” he said. “You can’t just drop a bombshell like that and then walk away like nothing happened.”

The accountability gap

As the ETA used Mebane’s working paper for advocacy and fundraising, it reached Andrew Gelman, a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University and a leading authority on statistical methods. It had already baffled another technically sophisticated reader, who sent it to Gelman hoping he could make sense of it.

Gelman read both the Pennsylvania working paper and the underlying eforensics methodology but found the work too opaque to fully evaluate. The only reason anyone was engaging with it, he wrote, was Mebane’s reputation. “Without his name attached to them I don’t think we’d be reading them at all.”

That combination of technical opacity and academic authority is what makes work like this hard to dislodge once it spreads, said Grimmer. Debunking work like Mebane’s requires readers to follow complex assumptions and unfamiliar methods.

Kalinin, who has spent much of his career studying elections in authoritarian countries, defended Mebane’s caveats, calling the original Pennsylvania working paper “balanced.” At the same time, he said, methods like eforensics work “well on autocracies. I’m not so sure about democracies.”

Kalinin said that he has come to believe the ETA was pursuing its own political goals and using the work of academics “as the instrument” to achieve them.

“No amount of academic caution can entirely prevent a motivated organization from stripping away those caveats to advance a specific agenda,” Kalinin said in an email. “ETA is entirely responsible for its own actions. They are clearly exploiting election forensics research for strategic or political gain -- something that I cautioned them against during our private conversation.”

“It does not surprise me that ETA may have mischaracterized my work, because that’s what I initially observed them doing to others’ work,” Mebane said in an email. “I take responsibility for what I say, not for what they or anyone else may say.”

Other researchers Votebeat spoke with agreed that the ETA had stripped away important caveats. But they were less willing to separate the ETA’s use of the work from Mebane’s own choices — including the claims he published, the authority his name carried, and his decision to remain largely silent as those claims spread. Academia offers few clear mechanisms for addressing those concerns.

Keith Whittington, a Yale Law School professor who studies academic freedom, said universities are reluctant to police what professors research or say because ideas once dismissed can later prove correct. What responsibility any individual scholar has over how their work is used, he said, is “not at all obvious.”

Ivan Oransky, co-founder of Retraction Watch — a news organization that reports on academic corrections and retractions — said the issue is not whether preliminary or unconventional work can have value. It can, he said. But scholarship is supposed to be iterative, he said: Researchers should revise work in response to criticism and publicize those revisions. Mebane’s website does not indicate whether or how his Pennsylvania analysis has changed in response to the criticism it has received.

Without subjecting your work to that process, Oransky said, “I’m not sure you’re really doing scholarship.”

What makes this different from the dozens of other statistical analyses of the 2020 or 2024 elections he’s reviewed and found flawed, Grimmer said, is who it’s coming from. Claims like these usually come from the political fringe. It is far rarer to see them come from a tenured professor at a major university.

That distinction carries weight, especially in a political climate already primed for suspicion.

“You can see how something like this takes off,” Grimmer said. People tend to put too much stock in credentials when doing so supports their position, and “when they don’t understand, people default to the conclusion they want to reach.”

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

A warning from Korea

2026-09-03T16:30:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

This article is part of Votebeat’s reporting into the use of Walter Mebane’s work to question the result of the 2024 election. Click here to read our main story.

Shortly after the 2020 election in South Korea, University of Michigan political scientist Walter Mebane Jr. published his first version of a working paper estimating that a significant share of votes for the winning party may have been “fraudulent.” Mebane’s election forensics model pointed to statistical anomalies that it found could reflect votes being “manufactured” from nonvoters or “stolen” from opposing parties.

Local politicians and online commentators used the study to support their contention that the election was fraudulent.

There was just one problem: The election wasn’t fraudulent. An investigation by the country’s Supreme Court found no evidence of misconduct.

Mebane included cautions. “‘Frauds’ according to the eforensics model may or may not be results of malfeasance and bad actions,” he wrote, adding that statistical findings alone “cannot stand as definitive evidence about what happened in an election.”

But in South Korea, Mebane’s use of the term “fraud” was widely interpreted not merely as a technical classification, but as evidence of deliberate electoral manipulation, said Inbok Rhee, an assistant professor of political science at Yonsei University, in an email.

Korean terms used to discuss the analysis — including bujeong seongeo (부정선거), jojak (조작), and sometimes sagi (사기) — carry strong connotations of intentional wrongdoing, manipulation, or deception, Rhee said, adding that the framing helped the analysis gain traction in partisan online spaces.

To reach his conclusions, Mebane relied on data from what he called a “secret person” — an anonymous user associated with a Proton Mail address — that, he wrote at the time, appeared to be “missing about 100,000 votes and one entire constituency.” Local politicians and academics also said Mebane’s initial analysis misunderstood how the country reports election results.

Mebane said he did not gather the underlying data himself or confirm his understanding of South Korean elections with local election officials, citing his inability to speak Korean.

A 2024 study by Rhee and other political scientists later suggested that academic claims about election fraud can carry consequences even when they are not definitive. Rhee said the paper, which was modeled on the controversy surrounding Mebane’s analysis and similar claims, found that hypothetical claims of a substantial likelihood of fraud by a prominent foreign academic increased Korean voters’ belief that fraud had occurred, reduced confidence in the election, and increased support for an investigation.

Staff count ballots at a vote-counting station in Seoul, South Korea, April 15, 2020. In South Korea, politicians and commentators used an American professor’s work to feed doubts about an election.

The study was published in Public Opinion Quarterly, a peer-reviewed journal. In an interview, Rhee said Mebane’s analysis functioned as validation: People who already suspected something was wrong with the election, he said, were primed to accept it when an expert appeared to confirm their beliefs.

More than 30,000 people signed a national petition calling for a full recount, and election authorities chose to hand-count ballots in the 2024 election in part to address those concerns.

The South Korea working paper once appeared on Mebane’s University of Michigan website but has since been removed without acknowledgment. Asked about it, Mebane said in an email he recognized it contained some errors and, instead of taking the time to fix them, opted to take the paper down. He is aware the paper is still circulating online.

“It’s been years. I don’t really care,” he said in an interview. “It’s just a working paper.”

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

Yeonseung Kim is a freelance reporter based in Seoul.

Watchdog releases review of Michigan registered voters

2026-09-02T10:00:01+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Michigan’s free newsletter here.

With the high-stakes 2026 midterm election fast approaching, Michigan has conducted an independent review of its voter roll.

A report released Friday by the Office of the Auditor General found that the Michigan Department of State generally does a good job making sure only eligible people are registered to vote. But it also identified a small number of possible noncitizens, dead voters, and voters with inaccurate or ineligible birthdates.

The report could become a political football in the fall campaign. Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson is the Democratic nominee for governor, and Republicans have been banging the drum for years about alleged fraudulent voting under her watch.

The report helps put those claims in perspective. The auditor general — who is nonpartisan — found that 99.99% of the 8.3 million voters on the state’s Qualified Voter File, known as the QVF, had complete and valid personal data (such as address and birthdate) on file as required by state law.

The report confirmed that state and local election officials are conducting routine checks of the voter file to keep it up to date. It found that between Jan. 1, 2022, and March 30, 2026, nearly 1 million voter registrations were canceled for permissible reasons, including that the voter had died or moved away.

However, the audit also found that 403 registrations were canceled or rejected for reasons of citizenship during that period. This includes people who were registered despite checking the box on the registration form indicating they were noncitizens. It also includes people whose citizenship could not be confirmed — either because they did not check the citizen or noncitizen box on the form, or because they did not respond to election officials’ inquiries when their citizenship was challenged.

According to the report, 347 additional registrations from 2022 to 2026 were canceled because the voter “registered in error” for any reason, including being a noncitizen. It isn’t clear how many of those 347 registrations involved noncitizens.

A spokesperson for the Department of State defended the agency’s work, noting that these numbers represent a small fraction of Michigan voters. “This actually shows that election officials (state and local) are being proactive about maintaining the voter rolls – it is not evidence of a problem.”

The auditor general did not say whether any registrants flagged as potential noncitizens had voted in any elections. Last month, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, charged five noncitizens for allegedly voting illegally in the 2024 election.

The report also compared voting records to death records from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services to ascertain whether dead people were casting ballots.

It found that voters who, according to state health records, had died before Election Day cast 2,582 ballots in elections since 2022. But 2,561 of those were early or absentee ballots cast by people who had died within 40 days of the election — the period during which people are allowed to vote absentee.

That suggests most of these votes were legitimately cast by living people who later died before Election Day. In 2024, an average of 281 people died in Michigan per day.

Michigan law states that election officials “shall make [their] best effort” to void absentee ballots cast by people who they learn have died before Election Day. However, the auditor’s report notes, “Because of delays between the dates of a person’s death, death certification, and formal removal from QVF, election workers may not identify and reject the absentee ballot of an elector with a date of death close to an election date.”

Other sections of the report found that 653 registered voters in Michigan have birthdates indicating they are older than 122 years old, and 73 are younger than 17 and a half. The Department of State told Votebeat there could be several reasons for that, including that birth years can sometimes be misentered in the system.

Some voters who registered before the system went digital may not have provided birthdates at all, the department said. When transferring these voters into the electronic system, where birthdate is a required field, election officials may have input their birth year as 1900 as a placeholder — a common practice in large datasets because it makes those entries easy to separate.

In one last notable finding, the auditor general discovered an error in monthly reports posted to the Department of State’s website: They significantly overreported the number of people automatically registered to vote when obtaining or updating their driver’s license or state ID card.

The Department of State acknowledged the error and corrected it. A spokesperson told Votebeat that the problem was with the script the department used to generate the reports, not with the underlying data.

Nathaniel Rakich is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Nathaniel at nrakich@votebeat.org.

USPS whistleblower alleges rushed mail ballot systems could disenfranchise voters

2026-09-01T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

A U.S. Postal Service whistleblower is warning that the agency’s efforts to develop systems to restrict mail ballot delivery for the November election have been rushed through testing, are unreliable, and could prevent millions of Americans from receiving mail ballots this November.

The anonymous whistleblower’s concerns were detailed in a 20-page complaint released by Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s (D-Conn.) office Tuesday that describes the Postal Service plans, which have been temporarily frozen by a court order, as “secretive, rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed.”

Where does the case on the proposed USPS rules stand? Get live updates here.

Problems with the system have become so widespread, the letter detailing the whistleblower’s complaint said, that a number of Postal Service officials have described development of a planned election mail ballot IT system as “a shit show.”

Blumenthal characterized the Postal Service efforts as a deliberate attempt by the Trump administration to suppress the vote and undermine the ability of Americans to vote by mail.

“This is not just incompetence, it is designed malfunction,” he said in a conference call with reporters about the whistleblower complaint. “And it is malign, designed malfunction in a way that clearly reveals a political purpose: depressing the vote.”

In a letter to the Postal Service, Blumenthal described the whistleblower complaint as “alarming” and asked the agency to explain its actions by Friday.

“Taken together they present a clear picture of a fatally flawed process that cannot and will not protect American voters,” Blumenthal wrote. “Put plainly: this process will likely lead to chaos, confusion, and the inability of many Americans to have their vote counted.”

A Postal Service spokesperson, who had not seen the whistleblower complaint, declined Monday to comment.

At issue is an effort by the Trump administration to use the Postal Service to place new restrictions on the delivery of mail ballots this November.

President Donald Trump released an executive order in March directing the Postal Service to set up the new rules, which prompted a tangle of rapid lawsuits from voting rights groups, nearly two dozen Democrat-led states, and Democratic political organizations.

Under the agency’s plan, states would have to use a new online portal to send the Postal Service a list of all voters that should receive mail ballots. The Postal Service would refuse to send ballots to anyone not on the list. The envelopes would have to meet new design standards, including unique barcodes that have to be checked by the Postal Service. The plan has caused confusion among election officials unsure if they need to comply with it, or when the portal will be available.

One federal judge in June declared the effort an unconstitutional effort by the federal government to usurp state authority over elections and blocked the Postal Service from moving ahead with the effort for this November’s election. The Postal Service plan has been at the center of a complex back-and-forth legal battle that is likely to eventually be settled by the U.S. Supreme Court.

At the moment, the Postal Service plans are frozen by a temporary injunction imposed by U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani, a federal judge in Massachusetts, who will decide in the coming days whether to issue a permanent ban on enacting the system for this election. On Monday, she declined to stay her temporary injunction, but allowed the Postal Service to continue its work developing the portal; more appeals are a near-certainty.

The account was relayed by the organization Whistleblower Aid, which said it represents the anonymous whistleblower. The complaint said that the Postal Service violated an earlier Talwani order blocking the agency from working on the system while the matter worked its way through the courts. Instead, the whistleblower said, work on the project resumed in July, about a month after Talwani issued her order ordering the Postal Service to halt development of the plans. Postal Service staff were rushing to meet an internal Sept. 1 deadline to get the system up-and-running, according to the whistleblower’s account.

Talwani, in a ruling last week, criticized the Postal Service for resuming work on the project.

The whistleblower account described the continued work as “slapdash.” The person warned the process “deviates dangerously” from normal practices and could cause “catastrophic disruption to our coming nationwide elections based on the reckless pursuit of readying a new, insufficiently tested, poorly planned mail-in ballot screening system.”

Whistleblower warns opportunity for error is high

The biggest concern raised by the whistleblower’s account was the prospect that a poorly tested Postal Service system would reject millions of mail ballots from reaching voters this November.

That, the whistleblower account warned, could lead to a “catastrophic failure” that prevents millions of Americans from voting this November.

“The election ballot mail IT system systems were rapidly built and minimally tested,” according to the complaint prepared by Whistleblower Aid. “Accordingly, the opportunity for error and other failure with this new IT system comparing a batch manifest with the new statewide list is high.”

The whistleblower account detailed a series of problems with development and testing of the new computer system, which the person said can take nine months to a year to debug.

“USPS leadership, it appears, has discarded all best practices as they speed the project to be ready for a September 1 implementation - raising questions about whether catastrophic failure would be a feature rather than a bug,” according to the whistleblower complaint.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Here’s what you need to know about Texas’ voter suspense list

2026-08-31T18:37:37+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

Multiple headlines recently have fueled confusion among Texas voters who have been placed on the state’s suspense list.

Voters on the suspense list can still vote. Despite its name, being placed on the suspense list does not mean a voter’s registration was suspended, canceled, or that the voter was removed from the voter roll.

The list is made up of registered voters whose local election officials have reason to believe they may no longer live at the address they used to register to vote. Texas voters move every day, and they often don’t update their address on their voter registration record.

Alicia Pierce, a spokesperson with the Texas Secretary of State’s Office, said the number of voters on the suspense list now — 1.2 million out of more than 18 million registered voters — is consistent with what the state has seen in previous election cycles.

Voters on the suspense list can confirm their address by contacting their local voter registrar ahead of the Oct. 5 voter registration deadline and filling out a new voter registration form with their updated address. Voters can also update their address at the polls.

Here’s what you need to know about Texas’ suspense list and what to do if you’re on it:

What is the suspense list?

It’s an address verification list. By law, if a county voter registrar “has reason to believe that a voter’s current residence is different from that indicated on the registration records,” the voter registrar “shall deliver to the voter a written confirmation notice requesting confirmation of the voter’s current residence,” according to the secretary of state’s office guidance.

How are voters placed on it?

Every two years, each county voter registrar mails a new voter registration certificate to all active voters, a move required by law to keep the voter roll up to date.

If the U.S. Postal Service returns the certificate as nondeliverable, the voter registrar must then confirm that the voter still lives at that address.

That’s when a voter is added to the suspense list.

A voter registrar mails a notice of address confirmation to voters when:

The voter’s registration certificate has been returned as nondeliverable.
A jury summons or any mailing sent to the voter was returned as nondeliverable.
The voter registrar has received information indicating the voter no longer resides at the address on file. For example, parents can notify their voter registrar if their children have moved, or a voter themselves can call the voter registrar to say they no longer live at that address.

Although some county election officials had trouble mailing voter registration certificates in December due to issues with the state’s voter registration and management system, the certificates were mailed out ahead of the primary election earlier this year.

How can I check my voter registration status?

You can check your voter registration status at VoteTexas.gov. But county voter registration lists are managed by county election officials, who have the most up-to-date information about your voter registration record. When in doubt, contact your county voter registrar directly. You can find a list and contact information by county here.

I’m on the suspense list; can I still vote?

Yes, you can still vote. Just make sure you update your address before the Oct. 5 voter registration deadline.

How do I update my address on my voter registration record?

Fill out a voter registration application before the Oct. 5 deadline. You can find a form here. Print it, sign it, and mail it to your local voter registrar or turn it in in person.

If you have a state ID or a driver’s license, you can also update your information online here.

If you have questions, contact your local voter registrar — the election official in charge of your county’s voter registration list. You can find a list of voter registrars by county here.

What if I didn’t update my address before the Oct. 5 voter registration deadline?

That depends on where you’ve moved.

If you moved to a different county, you may be able to vote using a limited ballot — which may include only state and federal races, but no local races — during early voting. A poll worker will instruct you on how to obtain one at the county’s main early voting polling place. On Election Day, however, limited ballots are not available for voters who moved from a different county and did not update their registration on time.

If you moved within the same county, you can vote during early voting and on Election Day by filling out a statement of residence form to update your address. If on Election Day, your county does not use the countywide polling place program, which allows voters to cast their ballot at any polling location in the county, you may be asked to go to your assigned precinct to update your address and cast your ballot there.

If you’re running into further voter registration issues, we want to hear from you. Please send us an email at community@votebeat.org.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Natalia is based in Corpus Christi. Contact her at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Trump’s mail voting restrictions would create logistical nightmare for midterm elections

2026-08-31T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

It has been a dizzying week of legal challenges and rulings that have scrambled plans for the November election. The end result is… more uncertainty!

The legal drama spanned three different courts and created a legal tilt-a-whirl that ultimately ended up right where we started: a freeze on the Trump administration’s efforts to impose new restrictions on voting by mail and a likely Supreme Court showdown fast approaching.

The U.S. Supreme Court kicked things off on Monday with a narrow procedural ruling that gave the Trump administration hopes it could move ahead with its plans for the November election. New rules briefly went into effect midweek, but the ruling triggered a new round of legal maneuvering that led U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani to impose a new 14-day freeze on the plans while she considers a permanent ban on putting them in place for this election. The Trump administration has already appealed the temporary order.

The whiplash is creating headaches for election officials with the first mail ballots for the November election set to go out to voters in less than a week and more court action the only certainty.

Since the U.S. Postal Service this month unveiled its proposal to implement the administration’s mail ballot restrictions in a 95-page plan, election officials have been scratching their heads as they try to figure out whether, and how, they’ll have to follow the guidelines.

Tammy Patrick, the chief program officer at the Election Center, a national nonprofit association for election administrators, said there was no way that states would be able to successfully shift to the new system in time for the November election.

Patrick said the rules have created widespread confusion among elections officials who have to rush to meet what seems like an impossible timeline to comply with the regulations.

“The U.S. Postal Service has been a very collaborative partner in delivering democracy,” she said. “This rule is a dramatic shift in both how election officials conduct elections and how the Postal Service delivers democracy.”

The first challenge for election officials are rules that require them to follow new uniform mail ballot envelope design standards. The envelope going to the voter and the one the voter returns each have to have unique barcodes that link the mail to the person casting the ballot. The envelope designs first have to be reviewed by the Postal Service, something Patrick said seems logistically impossible to do before November’s election.

“We have more than 10,000 election jurisdictions and there are 40 mail design analysts at the Postal Service for the entire country,” she said. “They would not be able to accommodate everybody redesigning the envelopes.”

This change could potentially have the biggest impact on rural counties with small teams of elections officials that sometimes hand-write names and addresses on mail ballot envelopes. Finding a company that could quickly design and produce the new ballot envelopes at this late date seems implausible, Patrick said.

The first mail ballots are set to go out to North Carolina voters this Friday, and a host of other states will also begin sending them out in the coming weeks. And it’s unclear how the federal government would treat ballots that don’t comply with the new requirements but are sent out before the new system is up and running.

During the short window when the Trump plan was in place, North Carolina said that it rushed to comply by submitting its envelopes to the Postal Service for “review and approval.”

“Our office is confident that the county boards of elections plan to send out absentee ballots to North Carolina voters who have requested them for this election, starting September 4, as required by state law, will happen flawlessly and smoothly,” said Jason Tyson, director of external affairs for the North Carolina State Board of Elections.

The U.S. Postal Service did not respond to a request for comment on specific questions about how the new processes will work this year and pointed to an online FAQ that provides broad guidance about how the system is intended to work.

If and when election officials clear the envelope design hurdle, they would then have to compile a list of everyone who wants a mail ballot and help create a statewide list with detailed information — down to the barcode — for everyone eligible to vote by mail. The Postal Service says it will refuse to deliver a ballot to anyone who is not on the list.

Each state would have to submit its list to the Postal Service via a new online portal, and the rule says that would preferably be done 30 days ahead of the election, though that’s not a hard-and-fast deadline. The Postal Service has yet to unveil the new online portal.

Then, things get even more complicated. If a state sends out a large batch of mail ballots and one of them is sent to a voter who’s not on the list reviewed by the Postal Service, the Postal Service could reject all of the ballots in that batch, Patrick said. That could mean that one error might delay the processing of a huge number of ballots and create extra work for election officials. She emphasized that election offices in big counties routinely send out millions of ballots at a time. Election officials would have to check the rejected mail ballots and resend them once they address the problems.

On top of that, she said, the time it would take for the Postal Service to scan each barcode could overwhelm its staff as a flood of mail ballots come through the system.

“This is very, very difficult,” Patrick said. “All of this is untenable.”

The Trump executive order signed in March envisioned a much longer rollout period for the new system. But the legal challenges put the plans on hold until now, giving the Postal Service very little time to put the system into place. The Postal Service has expressed confidence that it can smoothly roll out the plans, but election officials are skeptical and wary.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Proof-of-citizenship amendment fails to make November ballot, for now

2026-08-27T21:55:13+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Michigan’s free newsletter here.

Update, Aug. 27, 5:55 p.m.: Americans for Citizen Voting has formally asked the Michigan Supreme Court to place its proposed amendment on the November ballot.

The Michigan Board of State Canvassers has denied ballot access to a state constitutional amendment that would require Michigan voters to prove they are U.S. citizens.

A long, tense meeting on Monday ended in a deadlock, meaning the effort won’t make the ballot without intervention from the Michigan Supreme Court. The decision — or lack thereof — means that despite the massive numbers of signatures the amendment’s supporters turned in, it will likely be the court that decides whether it makes the November ballot.

In March, the group Americans for Citizen Voting submitted 709,841 signatures to the state in support of the amendment — significantly more than the 446,198 valid signatures required to get on the ballot. To estimate whether the group surpassed that threshold, the Board of State Canvassers checked the validity of a random sample of 1,000 of the submitted signatures.

At least 629 of them needed to be valid to certify the proposal for the ballot. The board found 626 were valid, though it had not ruled one way or the other on a decisive number of the signatures by the end of the meeting.

Mary Ellen Gurewitz, a Democrat and the vice chair of the board, called the petition drive “sloppy,” saying that it put the board in a “bad position.” Paul Cordes, a Republican on the board, said he felt that if all signatures were considered, there would be more than enough to certify the effort for the ballot.

The bipartisan Board of State Canvassers isn’t allowed to approve or reject certification based on whether board members like the subject matter of the petition. Instead, they have an obligation to act only based on whether the number of signatures is valid.

It wasn’t entirely clear what the board would do after the Bureau of Elections released a report last week recommending denial. The board makes its decision independently of the bureau, but the two work in tandem on ballot measures, election results, and more.

In its analysis of the 1,000 signatures, the Bureau said that the effort had only 612 valid signatures. After a weekend of back-and-forths between Americans for Citizen Voting and Promote The Vote Action — a voting rights group that challenged some of the signatures — the number was 624. Much of Monday’s meeting was spent going through individual petition sheets to see if others should be added.

That effort ended when the board ran out of time and took a 2-2 vote along party lines both to certify the effort and to find it insufficient, falling short of the decisive majority needed to certify and put the amendment on the ballot.

Amendment’s rejection to be appealed

Americans for Citizen Voting doesn’t plan to let the canvassers’ decision go unchallenged, particularly given the narrow margin between certification and rejection.

Paul Jacob, president of Liberty Initiative Fund, the group behind Americans for Citizen Voting, called the meeting’s outcome a “travesty” based on partisan politics rather than the will of Michigan voters.

“People deserve a vote on this issue, and they’re going to get one,” Jacob said after the decision. “We’re going to go to every court we’ve got to go to. We’ll go to the Supreme Court of Michigan. We’ll go to the U.S. Supreme Court, wherever we have to go.”

According to Michigan law, organizers have seven business days — in other words, until Sept. 2 — to file their appeal, which will go straight to the Michigan Supreme Court.

The group spent more than a year building support for its effort, and in March it claimed to have submitted more than 750,000 signatures to the state. State Sen. Ruth Johnson, a former Republican secretary of state and a supporter of the amendment, said at the time that that number spoke to the popularity of the effort. Jacob reiterated that Monday, saying it was a sign that Michigan supported proof of citizenship.”

“You can’t cheat the people of Michigan and get away with it,” Jacob, who lives in Virginia, told reporters. “We’re going to be back.”

The Supreme Court will be up against a tight deadline: The earliest ballots go out to military and overseas voters by Sept. 19, and all absentees must be available for distribution no later than Sept. 24. That means the contents of the ballots need to be finalized ASAP to ensure clerks have time to print them.

What’s in the Americans for Citizenship Voting proposal?

If the proposed amendment does ultimately make the ballot, Michiganders would be weighing in on one of the strictest proof-of-citizenship requirements in the U.S.

New voters would have to prove their citizenship when registering, a requirement currently in place in four states. But the amendment would also require existing voters to prove their citizenship if the state can’t independently verify it. The ultimate result would be an Arizona-style system in which Michigan is required to maintain two voter rolls — one for voters who have proven their citizenship and can vote in all elections and a second for those who have not and who can only vote in federal elections.

It would also remove the option for voters without a valid photo ID to instead sign an affidavit verifying their identity under the penalty of perjury. It would instead implement a “hardship program” funded by the state to allow those who aren’t able to afford identification documents to get them for free.

Those who vote without their citizenship verified would have to vote a provisional ballot. They would then have six days after an election to show their documents to election administrators or else their vote will not be counted.

Proof-of-citizenship requirements enjoy broad public support; a YouGov/CBS News poll from earlier this year found that 66% of Americans support requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote. Being a U.S. citizen is already a federal requirement to vote in U.S. elections, however, and opponents say putting up additional barriers would just serve to disenfranchise people who are citizens but lack the paper trail to prove it.

Noncitizen voting is extremely rare in Michigan and in the U.S. When it does happen, it is typically prosecuted. Six people have been publicly charged across the state for casting a ballot in the 2024 general election despite not having U.S. citizenship, a tiny fraction of the more than 5.6 million ballots cast in Michigan.

The topic has remained at the forefront of conservative talking points, though. President Donald Trump said without evidence last month that more than 270,000 noncitizens appear on voter rolls across the country. He has made a federal proof-of-citizenship requirement a priority, repeatedly pressuring Republicans in Congress to pass the SAVE America Act. The bill, however, lacks the support in the U.S. Senate to pass.

If the Michigan proposal makes the November ballot, it would need only a majority of the state’s voters to vote yes in order to be enshrined in the state constitution.

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

Election officials wrestle with uncertainty amid legal battles over Trump mail ballot restrictions

2026-08-26T16:00:19+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Update, August 26, 1:27 p.m.: This story has been updated with the fact that, shortly after publication, a federal judge lifted an order that was blocking the U.S. Postal Service from putting new rules on mail ballots in place for the November election.

Monday’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling in favor of President Donald Trump’s attempt to restrict mail ballots via executive order is procedural and narrow, but it’s fueling broad confusion and uncertainty as the November election grows inexorably closer.

On Wednesday, in response to the high court decision, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani removed the last legal block preventing the U.S. Postal Service from finalizing its proposed changes for the 2026 elections, even though she warned that the move could create “chaos” as the election closes in.

On Wednesday, a coalition of Democratic states at the forefront of the fight filed a new federal lawsuit against the Postal Service asking the court to block the changes, a move that will likely put them on a fast track back to the Supreme Court and leave election officials contending with messy legal rulings for some time to come.

“Across the country, states are already deep into preparations for the 2026 elections,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said in announcing the lawsuit. “Now, at the last moment, the federal government is attempting to meddle in those preparations and potentially threaten countless Americans’ right to vote.”

In a separate case, voting rights groups and Democratic leaders on Tuesday also asked federal courts to block the changes from going into effect for this November’s election.

“The 2026 election has already begun, and this is sowing chaos,” said Paul Gronke, a political science professor at Reed College in Oregon and a founder of the Elections & Voting Information Center.

Meanwhile, as the fight rages over how the U.S. Postal Service will handle mail ballots, North Carolina is preparing to send the first ones out next week.

Jason Tyson, director of external affairs for the North Carolina State Board of Elections, said the state is still planning to send out its ballots as expected.

“At this time, with so much left unresolved, we cannot comment on hypotheticals about what may or may not happen with the USPS and the executive order in the courts, as the situation is uncertain,” he said. “If it becomes necessary, we will do our best to comply with any court decisions.”

Monday’s high court ruling added to a messy snarl of court cases over Trump’s March executive order that sought to allow the U.S. Postal Service to reject delivery of mail ballots to voters in states that don’t meet new federal requirements.

The justices, who split along ideological lines, ruled only on a narrow legal argument and stressed their decision didn’t speak to the merits of Trump’s plan. While the case was pending, the Postal Service last week moved to finalize the new rules, action that a federal judge ruled Tuesday had violated a court order.

The Postal Service rules require states to use a new online federal government system to send it a list of all voters that should receive mail ballots. The Postal Service would refuse to send ballots to anyone not on the list. The envelopes would have to meet new design standards, including unique barcodes that have to be checked by the Postal Service.

Is it too late for changes?

While the matter works its way through the courts, states across the nation have already designed, ordered, and paid for ballots that don’t necessarily comply with the new design guidelines (though North Carolina’s Tyson says theirs do).

North Carolina’s ballots start going out Sept. 4. Seven other states, including New York, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, can start sending out their ballots the following week.

“I don’t know of a single state where this could be adopted and rolled out quickly, and that I think is a real problem,” she said.

Trump supporters who have been cheering his push to assert more control over elections hailed the court ruling but expressed concern that time was running out to set up the system for the November election.

Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of the conservative, Texas-based anti-voter-fraud group True the Vote, said she supports the effort but acknowledged the Trump administration faces a daunting challenge in trying to set up the new system with fewer than 70 days to go before Election Day.

“It’s a tall hill to climb, but somebody’s got to do it,” she said.

Even if the courts block the Trump administration from moving ahead with the new plan for November, some voting rights advocates predicted that the president would still look for other ways to impose his policies.

Jared Davidson, an election law attorney at Protect Democracy, said that the Trump administration continues to face legal setbacks in its efforts to impose federal regulations on elections because the Constitution gives states primary responsibility for running elections.

“In the days and weeks ahead I think we can all expect that this administration will throw all kinds of spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks,” said Davidson. “But the law could not be clearer that this is an effort to take control over elections by an executive where there is no authority to do that whatsoever.”

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Hundreds of thousands of Arizonans could be removed from the mail voting list in 2027

2026-08-26T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Arizona’s free newsletter here.

Arizona could remove hundreds of thousands of voters from its automatic mail ballot list under the provisions of a state law coming to bear next year.

The 2027 removals will be the first under the law, signed in 2021 by former Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican. The statute requires county recorders to remove voters from the early voting list if they don’t cast their mail ballot in federal, state, or certain municipal elections for two consecutive cycles — a four-year period.

That means a voter who didn’t mail or drop off their early ballot in 2023, 2024, or 2025 could be at risk of being removed if they again don’t do so this year, even if they voted in person in one or more elections. But that clock restarts if they choose to cast a mail ballot this November.

The Arizona Secretary of State’s Office was unable to provide an estimate of how many voters statewide could be kicked off the list. Spokesperson Calli Jones said the office was working with INEXL Consulting, the developer behind the state’s voter registration database, to develop coding that would allow them to come up with a list of impacted voters, but did not expect the project to be complete before the general election.

A 2022 study from the Brennan Center for Justice found that about 340,000 Arizonans could have faced removal if the law were implemented at that time. That’s about 12% of the voters who were on the early voting list in 2021. The study also found that nonwhite voters were at higher risk of being removed.

There’s a difference between a voter being removed from Active Early Voting List, or AEVL, and having their registration canceled entirely. Those impacted by the new law will still be able to vote, and they can stay on the list by responding to notices sent by officials in advance of their removal.

Those who don’t take those steps and are ultimately removed from the state’s early voting list would no longer automatically receive a mail ballot for each election, although they still may request to rejoin the list, or make ad hoc asks for mail ballots in future elections.

But research suggests that similar laws in other states have caused voters to turn to other methods of voting, or to stop voting entirely.

For example, Texas’ Senate Bill 1, a sweeping voting law enacted in 2021 that made it harder for voters to apply to receive a mail ballot, changed voting patterns in the next election cycle, according to a report last year from the Brennan Center. In Arizona, where the vast majority of voters cast ballots by mail, those impacts could be amplified, potentially shifting more people to in-person voting and putting additional strain on election infrastructure.

“A policy like this is going to have those sorts of effects on voters, and it’s rooted in misinformation about the prevalence of mail voting fraud,” said Kevin Morris of the Brennan Center, adding that research and audits have consistently shown that voting fraud is extremely rare. “It is really troubling.”

Meanwhile, the law is also posing communications challenges for local election officials. Pima County Recorder Gabriella Cázares-Kelly said it’s complicated to explain to voters that the law won’t remove them from the rolls.

“That is something that I think people are scared of,” said Cázares-Kelly, a Democrat, adding that some are referring to the early voting list removals as a “purge,” which is “creating more fear.”

How Arizona changed its early voting list

Arizona established its mail voting list — initially called the Permanent Early Voting List, or PEVL — in 2007.

As the name suggested, once on the list, voters generally stayed there unless they requested removal. Officials could also scratch them off if they moved, died, or their registration was moved to inactive status or canceled.

Then, Arizona Republicans began pushing for a plethora of election policy changes in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, which President Donald Trump falsely alleged was rigged. The law that changed PEVL to AEVL — Senate Bill 1485 — was introduced by former Sen. Michelle Ugenti-Rita of Scottsdale, who said it would help prevent fraud by reducing the number of mail ballots sent to people who had moved, died, or didn’t want them.

In Arizona, there are several other ways to ensure voter lists stay clean. Officials use information from the U.S. Postal Service, the Arizona Department of Health Services, and other agencies to flag voters who have moved or died, keeping the rolls up-to-date.

Still, Ducey, who signed the bill into law about an hour after the Arizona Senate passed it on a party-line vote, called it a matter of “election integrity.”

“Let’s be clear — despite all the deceptive and heated rhetoric being used by some partisan activists to lobby against this reform, not a single Arizona voter will lose their right to vote as a result of this new law,” he said in a video on May 11, 2021.

Meanwhile, Democrats described the law as a voter suppression tactic. Then-House Minority Leader Reginald Bolding of Phoenix called it “reprehensible” in a letter to the NFL, which he hoped would commit to pulling the 2023 Super Bowl from Arizona.

The move had been inspired by an incident in Georgia — after Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, signed a law that imposed several new voting restrictions, the MLB withdrew its All-Star Game from Atlanta.

What will happen to voters removed from the list?

Under the law, voters won’t be removed from the state’s early voting list without notice.

In odd-numbered years, county officials are required to send impacted voters a letter to inform them that they could be removed from the list. In 2027, that notice must be sent to voters on or before Jan. 15.

Officials can also opt to also try reaching voters by phone, text, and email, but are not required to do so. Cázares-Kelly said it was “the common understanding that everyone is going to send a notice to their voters,” but that she hadn’t determined whether her office would attempt any other outreach to individual voters impacted by the law.

“We’re focused on the upcoming election,” she said, adding that her staff were also creating “plain language resources” about the law to share broadly next year.

Once the mandated letters are sent, voters have 90 days to confirm in writing if they wish to remain on the list. To do so, they’ll also need to sign a form with their address and date of birth. If they don’t, they’ll be removed.

Still, Morris said there will almost certainly be voters who don’t notice that they’ve been removed from the mail voting list. Some may find out during the following election cycle, when their mail ballot doesn’t show up as usual. Others, he said, may not realize at all.

In Texas, officials were also required to send voters notice if their mail ballot application was rejected under SB 1. But Morris said those messages are “easy to miss in the mail.” His research found that many Texans didn’t reapply for a mail ballot in the general election that fall. He said those effects could be amplified in Arizona.

“The pool of voters that could be impacted by this is an order of magnitude larger than in some of the other states, where maybe only 10% of people are casting a ballot by mail,” Morris said.

He added that the law could ultimately have “downstream effects” at the polls.

“If all of these people suddenly aren’t getting the mail that they were expecting, they are going to start showing up at the vote centers,” Morris said, noting that could cause longer lines, voting materials shortages, and other complications that officials will have to handle moving forward.

Cázares-Kelly said she opposed the law as it made its way through the Arizona Legislature. But she said the version that resulted wasn’t “as terrible as most people think.” When asked if she would’ve opposed the law in its current form, she hesitated.

“I don’t know,” she said, adding that her “kneejerk reaction” was that she’d still be against it. As a voter, she said she’d want to receive her mail ballot “every time, whether or not I choose to use it by mail or if I vote in person.” A mail ballot, she said, also gives voters a chance to review contests in a simpler format than a sample ballot.

To give a fuller answer, Cázares-Kelly said she would need to see how many people the law could impact in Pima County and calculate its financial impact.

“We’re just going to have to wait and see what those numbers look like,” she said.

Sasha Hupka is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Sasha at shupka@votebeat.org.

What we know about Galveston County’s redistricting and what it means for voters

2026-08-25T09:44:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

Update, Sept. 11, 1:22 p.m.: The Texas Supreme Court on Friday blocked Galveston County from using newly approved precinct maps that changed some boundaries between the primary and general elections, ruling that the county must use the same maps it used in the March primary for the November election.

Galveston County’s decision to redraw local precinct lines this year between the primary and general elections means some voters could cast general election ballots in contests where they had no say in the primary, unless the courts intervene.

Election experts say they’re not aware of any prior instance where this has happened. Galveston County’s latest round of changes is adding new complications to a long-running lawsuit over the maps the county had adopted in 2021, and voting rights advocates say the new maps could further dilute Black and Latino voting power in the county.

When the county redistricted in 2021, county leaders openly said their goal was to draw lines that would be friendly to electing a commissioners court with a Republican majority. Voting rights groups and the U.S. Department of Justice subsequently filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of Galveston County voters, claiming the map was unconstitutional and violated the Voting Rights Act because it eliminated the only majority-minority commissioners court precinct. The challenge before the court now alleges the county intentionally dismantled that precinct because of race. That case is still pending.

Then, this past June, commissioners voted to redraw precinct boundaries throughout the county for commissioners, constables, and justices of the peace — once again citing partisan aims behind the change. Voting rights advocates again sued, this time on behalf of three county residents in Texas state courts, saying the move to redistrict between a primary and a general election violates state and federal laws. That case is now pending before the Texas Supreme Court.

Here’s what we know:

Why are Galveston County commissioners redrawing lines now?

Galveston County Judge Mark Henry in June told the Houston Chronicle that the latest map accomplishes his goal of turning Galveston County Republican. Henry did not respond to a request for comment from Votebeat.

But the unusually timed change could serve another purpose for the county too, coming as it continues to argue against legal challenges to the 2021 map. A day after Galveston County commissioners approved the newest map, the county told the federal judge overseeing the federal case over the 2021 map that the changes rendered the lawsuit over that map moot, according to court documents.

“This Court no longer has jurisdiction to consider declaratory or injunctive relief relating to implementation of the 2021 Map,” Galveston County lawyers said in their court filing.

Earlier this month, U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey Brown of the Southern District of Texas rejected that argument. In an order that effectively kept the 2021 challenge alive, he described the timing of the new maps as “highly suspicious.” Brown noted that the county could have redrawn lines to accomplish their partisan aims at any time since the 2021 map was issued, but chose to do so between the 2026 primary and general elections even though the change was unlikely to shift partisan outcomes until the 2028 election.

“If the defendants really cared about improving Republican partisan performance, they would have changed the 2021 map before the primary election to encourage a Republican to run for Justice of the Peace in that now-Republican-leaning precinct in 2026,” he wrote.

Is the commissioners’ move to redraw precinct lines after a primary election and about 70 days ahead of the November midterm election legal?

That question is now before the Texas Supreme Court. The plaintiffs say that it isn’t legal, but Galveston County officials argue that it is.

What do the Galveston County residents suing the county argue?

Plaintiffs argue that the county cannot hold the March primary under one set of precinct boundaries and then conduct the November midterm election under another.

The plaintiffs say the county should be required to hold a new primary because otherwise, some voters who can vote for an office in November would never have had the chance to vote for that same office in the primary election. In addition, they argue some candidates would not have had the chance to run for office because they weren’t in the correct precinct at the time of the primary. Plaintiffs say moving forward with the new map violates state and federal laws requiring all voters to be treated equally and fairly.

“This is a matter of federal equal protection. You have to run your elections in a manner that allows equal access to them,” said Mark Gaber, Campaign Legal Center’s senior director of redistricting litigation. “Galveston County is just dispensing with that part of the process and just deciding who the candidates are.”

What do Galveston County leaders say?

Galveston County officials did not respond to a request for comment.

But in an Aug. 10 filing with the Texas Supreme Court, the county argued that state law does give them the authority to redraw precinct lines between a primary and a general election. They also argue that redrawing the lines doesn’t mean that the county must conduct a new primary in order for voters to cast ballots in November. County attorneys in the filings said that state law does not “freeze precinct boundaries in place once a primary occurs.”

What’s the status of the lawsuit?

The latest case filed in state court has followed a convoluted legal route, but is now pending a decision in the Texas Supreme Court. The court could request additional information, or rule based on the existing record.

What are the implications for voters?

The shifting boundaries have confused voters who aren’t sure who their candidates are or which district they’ll belong to come November, said Sarah Chen, senior supervising attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project. And depending on how the court rules, they could shift again.

“I think people are still even trying to understand what the impact is because it happened so quickly and so just like out of the blue,” Chen said.

Which Galveston County communities are most affected?

Under the 2021 redistricting, county commissioners redrew Precinct 3, historically a predominantly Black and Latino district that was the county’s only majority-minority district, significantly but did not change the justice of the peace and constable boundary lines within it. The 2026 map does, and likely eliminates the only remaining majority-minority justice of the peace and constable districts that remained.

Brown, the federal judge overseeing the 2021 case, in his order described that as “the primary partisan change under the new map,” but said it likely wouldn’t kick in until the 2028 election.

“People in our community are enraged. It doesn’t make any sense why they keep doing this to Precinct 3,” Lucille McGaskey, a resident of the precinct who isn’t one of the plaintiffs in either lawsuit, told Votebeat in an interview. “For years we’ve built a coalition of Black and Latino voters to have a seat at the table, and now it feels like we can’t even have that. We only have this precinct, Precinct 3.”

Administratively, is redrawing precinct lines now doable for election officials?

Galveston County Clerk Dwight Sullivan, who oversees the county’s elections, did not respond to a request for comment. But other Texas election officials have told Votebeat that redistricting is a time-consuming task that requires a lot of attention to detail to make sure that voters’ addresses are aligned with the correct boundaries. Redistricting now, in the midst of ongoing legal challenges and on a tight timeline, could create more opportunities for errors — a concern Texas election officials are already familiar with, as the state’s mid-cycle congressional redistricting and ensuing legal challenges left them scrambling.

The first deadline election officials are up against ahead of the November election is coming up on Sept. 19, when ballots must be mailed to military and overseas voters who have already requested them. By then, election officials must know which precincts voters will be assigned to.

Has this been done before?

Gaber and Chen said they had never heard of something like this happening anywhere else, and if allowed to go ahead, it could set a new precedent.

“I think it’s such a dangerous precedent for something far worse than just gerrymandering. It’s like changing the rules in the middle of the election to discard the votes of the voters and to prevent candidates from running,” Gaber said.

Could other places also decide to redraw lines before the November election?

Yes, it’s a possibility, if the courts don’t step in.

Chen pointed to the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that weakened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Prior to the decision, plaintiffs could prove a claim under Section 2 by showing evidence of a disparate impact on minority voters, regardless of whether the mapmakers intended it. Now, they must be able to show a “strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred,” the high court’s conservative majority declared, a much higher bar.

Earlier this year when the ruling came out, experts warned that it could undo decades of progress that expanded the voting power of Black and Latino voters in Texas and elsewhere.

“We all knew there was going to be this wave of local redistricting,” following Louisiana v. Callais, Chen said. “And we’re preparing for that. We just didn’t expect it to happen so soon. It is like, mindfully disruptive and illogical according to the norms of our democracy to try to redistrict in June and after a primary election.”

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Natalia is based in Corpus Christi. Contact her at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Supreme Court lifts 1 of 2 blocks on Trump’s mail-voting executive order

2026-08-24T22:37:11+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

What happened?

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday lifted one of two injunctions against President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting mail voting, but additional legal hurdles and practical considerations could make it difficult to implement it in time for the quickly approaching November elections.

The unsigned ruling, which cut along ideological lines, focused on a relatively narrow legal question: whether the lower court’s injunction was premature. The majority made it clear that it was not deciding on the legality of Trump’s order as a whole, which is certain to be quickly challenged again in court as the administration moves to put its provisions in place.

“The court’s disposition of this application does not mean that any measure taken by the government to implement the order will necessarily be lawful,” the majority wrote. “On that score, time will tell.”

The ruling, made in response to an emergency request, didn’t specify which justices had joined it. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who dissented, warned that the ruling would create a “Kafkaesque nightmare” that “needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a separate dissent, joined by Justice Elena Kagan.

What’s the dispute?

Shortly after Trump issued his executive order in March, states, nonprofit organizations, and Democratic Party committees filed multiple lawsuits seeking to block it. In June, in the case brought by states, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani found that some key provisions of the order were unconstitutional and blocked them from going into effect for this year’s elections.

Talwani issued an injunction specifically preventing the federal government from enforcing those provisions of the order against the 24 jurisdictions (23 states and the District of Columbia) whose attorneys general and governors brought the lawsuit. The list included most Democratic-led and swing states, including Arizona, California, Michigan, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

The Trump administration appealed, arguing the judge’s order was issued prematurely, before the Postal Service and other relevant agencies had finalized their plans to carry out the order’s provisions. The administration also argued that the injunction prevented it from implementing the order in the unaffected states because of the logistical impossibility of a bifurcated mail-voting system.

The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Talwani’s order in late July, prompting the administration to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to lift the order and allow the agencies to act in time for the November election. In filings, the states warned that “the consequences of allowing such transformative changes to take effect so close to this fall’s elections would be extreme” and would disenfranchise voters.

On Aug. 11, Talwani issued a separate injunction against the order in the lawsuit brought by nonprofit groups, led by the League of Women Voters. The decision made it clear that her ban on implementing the law extended to all states, not just the 24 jurisdictions that brought the other lawsuit. That ruling again rejected the Trump administration argument that it was too soon to address the underlying issues.

The Trump administration again asked the Supreme Court to issue a ruling and make it clear that it would also apply to the Aug. 11 court order. If not, Solicitor General D. John Sauer warned in a court filing, it would require prolonged legal battles that would “effectively run out the clock” on the government’s ability to implement its plans.

On Friday, while the administration’s request was still pending before the Supreme Court, the Postal Service issued its final rules for implementing the order, which it said it would not put into effect for this November’s election unless and until the Supreme Court cleared the way.

The Supreme Court’s ruling addressed neither the second injunction nor the fact that the Postal Service had issued final rules, leaving observers to wonder about how those developments might affect what happens next.

“I expect that the trial court will now amend [the second] injunction and issue a new injunction that will stop USPS from implementing its now final rule. And that too may end up at the Supreme Court within a week,” wrote Rick Hasen, an election law professor at UCLA, on the Election Law Blog shortly after the ruling.

What happens now?

The Supreme Court’s ruling Monday will not be the final word on Trump’s executive order. The question before the Supreme Court was a relatively narrow one about whether Talwani issued her order prematurely, before the government had taken final action to carry out the executive order. The states and voting rights groups are likely to go back to court quickly to challenge the Postal Service and the final rules it issued last week.

Talwani has also not yet ruled on whether the order can go into effect for future elections, which she found would be premature. A parallel case involving consolidated challenges brought by nonprofit groups and Democratic Party committees is pending in federal court in Washington, D.C.

Should Trump’s executive order go into effect, it would mandate the creation of a series of lists. The Department of Homeland Security would be required to send each state a list of citizens over the age of 18. States using mail ballots would be required to send the federal government a list of all registered voters to whom they are sending mail-in and absentee ballots in key federal elections. The Postal Service’s final rule states that it will decline to deliver mail-in ballots in states that do not provide that list.

The order would also create new design standards and ballot-tracking requirements for mail ballots. Creating such a complicated process before November presents a huge challenge for the cash-strapped Postal Service.

Read more Votebeat coverage of Trump’s executive order on elections:

Trump issues second executive order on elections, giving U.S. Postal Service unprecedented control over mail voting, March 31, 2026
Trump administration sued by states over mail voting executive order, April 3, 2026
One line in Trump’s order would reshape how long states have to store election records, April 6, 2026
We still have questions about Trump’s new executive order on elections, April 6, 2026
Two reminders that the rules of the 2026 election are still in flux, May 11, 2026
Federal judge refuses to block Trump executive order on mail voting — for now, May 28, 2026
USPS proposal to carry out Trump’s executive order could create new barriers to mail voting, May 29, 2026
Trump’s moves to erect voting hurdles face race against the clock, June 15, 2026
Federal judge blocks key pillars of Trump executive order restricting mail voting in 2026 election, June 25, 2026
Trump administration asks federal judge to quickly lift ban on planned mail voting restrictions, July 2, 2026
Trump is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to allow new mail ballot restrictions in the 2026 midterms, Aug. 3, 2026
Federal judge blocks Trump’s efforts to restrict mail-in voting nationwide, Aug. 11, 2026

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Votebeat’s Expert Desk is back for the 2026 midterms. Journalists can sign up now.

2026-08-24T16:38:17+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Election reporting gets complicated fast. A breaking story can suddenly require a working knowledge of an obscure state law, a county’s ballot-handling procedures or a voting system you’ve never encountered before — and the person who knows the answer may not be someone you already know how to reach.

That’s why Votebeat is bringing back the Expert Desk for the 2026 midterms.

The Expert Desk is completely free and entirely on the record. It gives journalists covering elections direct access to roughly 100 vetted experts in election administration, election law, voting technology, misinformation, and related fields. Reporters can ask questions in Slack, get help finding the right source, check their understanding of unfamiliar processes, and pressure-test reporting before publication.

We first tried this in 2024. The Desk ultimately brought together 471 journalists from 56 newsrooms and 93 experts. Reporters asked everything from urgent questions about voting-machine problems to highly specific questions about polling-place rules, mail ballots, and state election procedures. Experts could answer directly, point reporters toward someone better suited to help, or build on one another’s responses.

The return of the Desk comes as a relief for Tory Wegerski, an investigative producer for KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh. She said the venture was crucial to her election coverage in 2024.

“The Expert Desk kept me from losing my mind and I am deeply glad they’re back,” Wegerski wrote in a text message.

She wrote the Expert Desk was “indispensable” because the 2024 election in Pennsylvania was hectic and constantly changing. The Expert Desk provided access to people who could help her coverage.

“From the former Secretary of State who could answer my questions about the mail-in ballot law because she’d helped write it, to other journalists from Pennsylvania and beyond who provided sanity checks, the Expert Desk connected me with incredible resources for my reporting and I was able to keep my viewers up to date and informed thanks to them,” Wegerski wrote.

Aidan Hughes, a data journalist and faculty member at the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism within the University of Maryland, also joined the effort in 2024. He wrote in an email that the Expert Desk was a valuable resource when he covered Maryland’s congressional races for the first time.

“It was a relief to know that if a niche question came up during my reporting that was important to get just right, there was a supportive community of experts and other journalists eager to point me in the right direction,” Hughes wrote.

Hughes wrote that he’ll be turning to the Expert Desk again alongside his students as he teaches a journalism course in the fall that focuses on election data.

A University of Washington study of the 2024 Desk found that participating journalists valued the speed of responses to their questions, access to hard-to-find local and specialized expertise, and the ability to gut-check their reporting.

The researchers found that the Desk increased the “speed and credibility” of journalists during important moments.

“In journalism, particularly in public-interest and misinformation contexts, these findings suggest a promising path toward strengthening the infrastructures that help support a more informed public,” they wrote.

Reporters also learned by watching other journalists ask questions and reading the answers they received. Participants gave the Desk an average recommendation score of 8.8 out of 10. The study has been accepted for publication in “Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction.”

How to use the Desk

Using the Desk is simple: Journalists post questions in Slack, where Votebeat community editor Zack Newman will help route them to the experts best positioned to answer. Responses in the Desk are on the record and visible to all participating journalists, so reporters can benefit not only from their own questions but from conversations happening across the network.

This year, the Desk will also include a separate AI-powered research tool designed to help reporters search election codes and related source material. It will answer questions using a curated library of documents and provide citations so reporters can check the underlying material themselves. The AI tool will remain clearly separate from the human Expert Desk: Its responses are a research aid, not a quotable source, while experts will remain available to interpret the material, answer follow-up questions and provide on-the-record guidance.

We’re also investing more in the human side of the Desk this year. Zack will monitor questions, connect reporters with the right experts, and help keep conversations moving as election coverage intensifies.

You don’t need to be an election specialist to join. You don’t need to know much of anything: In fact, the Desk may be most useful when you suddenly find yourself covering an election question you’ve never encountered before.

If you’re a journalist covering the 2026 elections, sign up for the Expert Desk here. We’d be honored to help make this hectic season a little bit easier.

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

Zack Newman is the Expert Desk’s community editor and is based in Denver. Contact Zack at znewman@votebeat.org.

A state election law in Minnesota faces a surreal test

2026-08-24T11:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

Can Hamas members from the Gaza Strip walk in and vote in Minnesota elections?

A group of disguised conservative activists armed with hidden cameras set out to test that claim during the state’s recent primary election. The Election Day exploit put a spotlight on Minnesota’s election laws, and has now triggered investigations.

The furor centers on a Minnesota law allowing what is often referred to as “vouching.” It permits a registered voter to clear the way for up to eight other eligible voters to register and cast ballots on Election Day by signing a sworn statement affirming that those people live in their precinct.

The rarely used law has been on the books in Minnesota since 1973. It’s most typically used for residents of nursing homes who have moved out of their longtime houses but haven’t yet changed their addresses.

The activists decided to test the law at Minneapolis polling places during the August 11 primary.

One of the men, Cam Higby, dressed as a conservative Muslim woman with his face hidden by a black veil and said he misrepresented himself as a registered voter to see if he could game the vouching system. Another, James O’Keefe, dressed in traditional Muslim clothing, appeared to impersonate at least two registered voters at different polling places, and said he wanted to vouch for prospective voters. Another activist, Anthony Rubin, walked into a polling place saying he wanted to vouch for several people he claimed were newly arrived Hamas members from the Gaza Strip.

None of the activists said they went so far as to try to cast a ballot in the election. But they did release a series of carefully edited videos suggesting that the Minnesota vouching system is so lax that it makes it possible for virtually anyone to vote in an American election, creating a furor on social media.

What is vouching and how does it work?

So, how does the Minnesota law work, and is it unusual? To use the system, the person doing the vouching has to be either a registered voter in the precinct or an employee of a residential facility — such as a nursing home — vouching for a resident of that facility. That person must sign a sworn statement saying that they know that the people they are vouching for live in the precinct. This can serve as proof of residency for eligible voters looking to register to vote on Election Day, in lieu of documentation such as a state ID or utility bill.

The person being vouched for doesn’t have to show a physical ID to verify their identity, but must still fill out the standard voter registration application, which requires them to affirm that they are a U.S. citizen and eligible to vote in Minnesota. It also asks them to provide a Minnesota driver’s license number, a state ID number, or the last four digits of their Social Security number. That information is checked later by elections officials to make sure it’s legit. Lying on a voter registration form is a felony carrying a penalty of up to five years in prison and $10,000 in fines.

In Minnesota’s 2024 general election, about 19,000 voters used the vouching system, about 0.6% of the 3.2 million people who cast ballots that year. Of that 19,000, the vast majority were already registered voters updating existing registrations on Election Day with information such as a new address. Around 5,500 people were voting for the first time.

Minnesota’s vouching law has become a prime target for conservative activists who say the process exposes the vulnerabilities of a system that doesn’t require voters to show an ID. A registered voter can vouch for up to eight people. Someone working in a nursing home can vouch for an unlimited number of residents.

“With tens of thousands of voters registering through vouching across recent cycles, without basic verification safeguards, the vouching policies and practices leave Minnesota’s elections vulnerable and risk Americans’ votes being canceled by fraudulently registered voters,” Will Scolinos, an attorney at conservative nonprofit America First Legal, said in May.

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon has publicly defended the law. In a letter earlier this year to the U.S. Department of Justice, he pointed out that other states also allow some forms of vouching. For example, Alaska allows state voter identification requirements to be waived if the election official knows the identity of the voter, Iowa allows registered voters to vouch for someone from the same precinct without documentation on Election Day, and Arkansas permits staff members to vouch for residents of long-term or residential care facilities.

Simon denounced the activists’ Election Day operation as “outrageous and totally unacceptable.”

The videotaped incidents were reported by poll workers on Election Day and are under investigation by elections officials and local law enforcement, Simon said.

“The conduct was disturbing,” Simon told Votebeat. Simon said the law has long had bipartisan support in the state as a way to expand voter access, especially for elderly residents.

“This is America,” he added. “Do what you want. If you want to dress up as someone, look no further than Borat and Sacha Baron Cohen. But we have to draw the line.”

Could those people claiming to be newly arrived Hamas members from the Gaza Strip have voted?

To do so, the prospective voucher would have had to break several laws by impersonating a registered voter and signing an affidavit falsely claiming that the other people lived in the precinct. Then the fake Hamas members would have had to break the law by providing false information about their identity and their eligibility to vote in Minnesota.

It is unclear from the videos released by the activists if the poll workers detailed the other steps they would have to go through before they could vote. Anthony Rubin declined to comment or release the raw footage from the incidents. O’Keefe did not respond to a request for comment.

Higby said the group was trying to expose shortfalls in the state election system.

“The goal was never to vote, it was never to touch a ballot, it was never to obtain a ballot,” Higby told Votebeat. “It was simply to test the system and see if poll workers would be prepared to allow me to vote.”

But Simon said in his 11 years as Minnesota’s top elections official, he’d never seen a single case of someone trying to game the vouching system to illegally vote.

“Could someone scam the system?” he asked. “Anything is possible. But you have to look at what is probable.”

Simon said he’d also never before seen a case of someone impersonating a voter.

“There is no end to the creativity of people who are looking to do wrong,” he said. “You have to look at the track record and the incentive structure. There’s a high likelihood that someone is going to get caught.”

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

The SAVE system isn’t reliable, but it still might be useful. One Arizona county’s experience shows how.

2026-08-22T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Arizona’s free newsletter here.

Recorder Michelle Burchill was intrigued when she first learned about a newly expanded federal tool for checking voters’ citizenship.

She had helped run elections in bright-red Yavapai County, Arizona, for about six years — and while she entered the field as an elections skeptic, she had gained trust in election systems during her time with the county. Still, Burchill, a Republican, wanted to confidently tell her voters, neighbors, and friends that her county’s voter roll was free of any noncitizen voters.

So, earlier this year, she began running her county’s voter list through the expanded tool, called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE.

That system, maintained by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, was originally built to check immigrants’ eligibility for public benefits. Under President Donald Trump’s administration, it has been transformed into a mass voter verification tool — and a political lightning rod. Trump and his allies have used its findings to claim that there are thousands of noncitizens registered to vote across the country; Democrats have decried it as a voter suppression tool after it was found to have falsely flagged eligible voters as noncitizens.

Burchill, who spent months running her county’s voter rolls through the system, also saw false positives. But she said the system helped her confirm the citizenship status of hundreds of voters who hadn’t submitted a birth certificate, passport, or other documents required by Arizona law to vote a full ballot.

She also found the tool useful for identifying voters who had died and needed to be removed from the rolls, as well as vulnerabilities in the state’s aging voter registration system. And in the process, she found 30 noncitizens on her voter list, representing about 0.01% of her county’s total voters. She reached that number only after using other methods and databases to double-check the citizenship status of voters that the SAVE system initially flagged as ineligible.

Nationwide, virtually every election official aims to maintain a clean voter roll. The politicization of SAVE — which, after a series of court decisions, is now in legal limbo — has problematized its use for routine, nonpartisan maintenance. But Burchill’s experience shows that the system could be helpful — when used responsibly. Her county is now among the first jurisdictions in the country to demonstrate the system’s broader potential as a voter roll maintenance tool.

“The SAVE database is not the only useful tool on which we should rely for voter registration purposes,” Burchill wrote in an Aug. 7 report summarizing her findings, “but in my view, it has been by far the most valuable.”

Nationally, SAVE has made headlines for false positives

Burchill’s experiment stands in stark contrast to the vast majority of jurisdictions nationwide. States and counties that have run their data through SAVE — which tend to be run by Republicans — have largely used it to confirm their suspicions that the rolls are laden with noncitizens. Most Democratic-run jurisdictions, by contrast, have not even used it at all.

Until last year, the tool had a fairly limited use. It could confirm citizenship for certain voters, but only if election officials had specific immigration and naturalization identification numbers issued by the Department of Homeland Security.

But then, in March 2025, Trump issued a sweeping executive order that required the agency to make federal citizenship data available to state and local election officials and provide them with free access to federal systems for verifying voters’ eligibility.

So, late last year, the Trump administration upgraded the system to allow election officials to upload their voter lists to it to scan for noncitizens. And initially, the system indicated thousands of noncitizens were present on their voter rolls. As of June, the Department of Homeland Security said that states had run 60 million voter records through the system — about a third of all registered voters in the U.S. — and 24,000 were flagged as potential noncitizens.

But as election officials began investigating individual cases, they quickly realized that the tool was returning false positives.

In Missouri, the program wrongly flagged hundreds of voters as noncitizens. Officials didn’t attempt to confirm that information before limiting voters’ ability to cast ballots.

In Texas, the system said more than 2,000 of the state’s roughly 18 million voters were noncitizens. County election officials have since determined some of the flagged voters were citizens, though it isn’t clear exactly how many.

In Arizona, just one other county — Maricopa, the state’s most populous — has said it’s used the tool. There, Recorder Justin Heap, a Republican, announced in February that his office had identified 137 potential noncitizens registered to vote. But Heap didn’t answer questions about whether he vetted the SAVE system’s results. Later, he said that he intended to change the registration status of the flagged voters, though experts questioned whether he’d followed the appropriate steps to notify them before doing so.

Prosecutors continue to investigate the voters referred by Heap. They have yet to issue information about whether the voters are noncitizens and whether they could be charged with illegally voting.

Meanwhile, several other jurisdictions, including counties in Texas, have ended up reinstating some voters who were incorrectly flagged as potential noncitizens by the SAVE system.

How Yavapai County ran its voter rolls through SAVE

Burchill began her experiment with the SAVE tool on a small scale — by examining her county’s roughly 300 federal-only voters.

Arizona requires people to submit documents proving their citizenship when registering to vote — a step beyond most states and the federal government, which only require voters to attest to their citizenship under the penalty of perjury. Arizonans who register with a federal form but don’t submit such documents are allowed to vote in federal contests, but not state ones. As such, the state has thousands of federal-only voters — people who haven’t proven citizenship, but are still allowed to vote in presidential and congressional races.

Burchill wondered whether the SAVE system could confirm citizenship for any of them. If so, they could be registered as full-ballot voters, expanding voting access.

Her idea worked. The tool confirmed the citizenship of 255 federal-only voters — all of whom can now vote full ballots. A handful came back as deceased, and several dozen came back with no determination. No noncitizens were found, backing analyses that have suggested most federal-only voters are students, homeless, or born on tribal lands, where birth certificates were not commonly issued for decades.

Burchill then used SAVE to check a list of 6,781 voters impacted by a longstanding state coding error. The coding issue made it difficult to determine whether those individuals had provided proof of citizenship when they registered.

The results surprised her. Several active voters were flagged as deceased, suggesting that there could be significantly more dead voters on the county’s rolls than previously known. Nationally, many states share death information with one another — but not all of them. That means local election officials aren’t necessarily automatically notified when a voter dies.

Another 10 voters — one of whom had previously cast a ballot — were flagged as noncitizens and ultimately had their registrations cancelled.

Before doing so, though, Burchill took additional steps to try to confirm whether these voters actually were deceased or noncitizens. The group of suspected noncitizens were sent formal notices requesting they submit documents proving their status, as prescribed by state law, and given 35 days to respond. Burchill, keeping in mind SAVE’s spotty track record, also personally called, emailed, and mailed letters to those flagged by the tool.

Finally, Burchill decided to run her county’s full voter roll through SAVE. The system confirmed citizenship for the vast majority of voters. It identified 39 as noncitizens, but through further vetting, Burchill said she was able to track down citizenship documents for 28 of them. The other 11 were removed from the voter rolls after the requisite notification and waiting period.

In the process of running the checks, Burchill also discovered nine other noncitizen voters — and a potential glitch in the state’s systems.

In total, she used SAVE to confirm the citizenship of 193,114 voters — 99.8% of those on her county’s roll. Burchill ultimately identified and cancelled the registrations of 30 individuals flagged as noncitizens, four of whom had previously voted.

The takeaways

Burchill’s report concluded the SAVE system, while flawed, can be used to constructively clean voter rolls and build confidence in elections, provided that its data is vetted carefully.

Hers is the most detailed, but not only, example.

Officials in Florida used the tool to help investigate specific voters after receiving information that they might be noncitizens. In a Jan. 15 report, they said they had looked into more than 835 voters and, after vetting them with the SAVE system and other tools, found that about 200 were ineligible to vote.

In Utah, Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican, wrote in a May 27 report that while SAVE could not reliably determine whether a voter was not a citizen without crosschecks, it reliably identified people who were citizens. She said the tool helped “identify and fix potential vulnerabilities in our voter registration processes while also protecting the rights of eligible voters.”

Burchill said her experiment also raised new questions about Arizona’s election laws and systems. For instance, some voters were flagged by the SAVE system as having no record or determination of citizenship. She was able to confirm most of those voters’ citizenship statuses in the Arizona Voter Information Database, the state’s voter registration system — but not all. That means some remain in limbo.

“These voters may very well be citizens, but we don’t have proof of either status,” Burchill wrote, adding that the voters would remain on the rolls under existing Arizona laws.

Burchill said the experiment also raised potential concerns with AVID that state and local officials are still working to fully understand. While attempting to confirm noncitizens flagged by the SAVE system, she discovered that several had seen their citizenship status change in motor vehicle records — without any notification to election officials.

Calli Jones, a spokesperson for the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office, which administers AVID, said officials were looking into the changes described by Burchill. Jones added that her office “does not register voters, nor do we change voter information,” calling the issue “an outstanding question for our office as well.”

And Burchill questioned what election officials should do if they become aware of a potential noncitizen on the rolls within 90 days of an election. Under federal law, officials are barred from conducting systematic removals of ineligible voters during that period.

“This topic has not been addressed in the past but is now something that needs to be addressed in law,” Burchill wrote, adding that the SAVE system created an “uncomfortable” tension with the mandated pause.

SAVE is currently mired in lawsuits. In June, a federal judge blocked the use of the expanded tool, ruling that it violated citizens’ privacy and voting rights. That ruling prompted the Department of Homeland Security to pause certain features in the SAVE system to comply. Last month, a different federal judge ordered the agency to restore access to the revamped system for four states — Florida, Ohio, Iowa, and Indiana — due to an earlier settlement agreement.

Burchill said her use of the SAVE system didn’t infringe on any voters’ privacy. The only information she ran through SAVE was voters’ names, dates of birth, and the last four digits of their Social Security numbers. That information, she said, is already on record in the system.

“I’ve never understood why people keep saying there’s privacy concerns when we are just matching our info to what the database has,” she told Votebeat in a text message. “The whole point is for them to respond and say, ‘Yes, the information is correct and matches.’”

She said she thought it was unfortunate that the courts had limited SAVE’s use and believes the tool can still be valuable.

“I am more confident in our voter roll today than ever before, and that has always been my goal,” she wrote in her report.

Sasha Hupka is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Sasha at shupka@votebeat.org.

A new Trump administration analysis claims noncitizens voted in 2020. Experts are questioning its validity.

2026-08-20T12:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

President Donald Trump this week unveiled another effort by his administration to raise questions about the outcome of the 2020 election he lost: an unusual U.S. Census Bureau analysis concluding with “high confidence” that 24,000 noncitizens illegally voted in the 2020 election.

Trump touted the finding on social media and wrote that it supports his long-running false claims that he actually won the 2020 election.

But experts said there are substantial questions about the Census Bureau study’s methodology and validity. And even if 24,000 noncitizens had voted in 2020, it wouldn’t have been enough to change the election’s outcome.

The seven-page Census Bureau report said researchers examined more than 128 million voters in the 2020 presidential election and determined with “high confidence” that more than 24,000 of them were noncitizens. If so, that number would be less than 0.019% of the sample.

Trump said census researchers are still analyzing another 32 million voters and predicted that the number of illegal noncitizen votes would “explode” after that was done.

The Census Bureau did not respond to a request for comment. But experts said some aspects of the bureau’s release raise fundamental questions.

Most Census Bureau reports identify the authors of the report and detail the reliability of the data they are using. This analysis did neither.

“A properly done Census report would have had that information and the fact that it is missing is glaring and makes me think that they are hiding something,” said Beth Jarosz, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Massive Data Institute who has worked as a contractor on Census Bureau reports.

Terri Ann Lowenthal, who served as staff director for the U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee overseeing the Census Bureau from 1987 to 1994, said the report’s minimal methodological information raised questions about the accuracy of the results.

Lowenthal said the report was “beneath the Census Bureau’s stellar reputation.” The failure to include the names of any career staff members, she said, suggested that the work may have been done by someone with a political agenda “and may not reflect the sound, reputable analysis for which the Census Bureau is known.”

Trump administration searches for noncitizen voters

Trump has focused the efforts of his second administration on rooting out voter fraud, especially any instance of illegal voting by noncitizens, which audits, investigations, and studies have found happens only rarely. But the federal government doesn’t possess a comprehensive database of citizens, and efforts to match different data sets have so far yielded inaccurate results.

The administration pushed states to run millions of records of registered voters through a revamped federal data tool to check if they were citizens. But election officials found the system, which cross-referenced federal records from various federal agencies, in some cases erroneously flagged citizens. In June, a federal judge blocked the use of the overhauled tool, finding it threatened privacy and voting rights.

In a televised primetime speech on July 16, Trump said his administration had found more than 250,000 noncitizen voters on the voter rolls of just four states: New Jersey, California, Pennsylvania, and Nevada. Officials in all four states pushed back on Trump’s claims and said they didn’t understand how the administration arrived at those numbers. The Trump administration has yet to provide any detail on its methodology in that case either.

The president has lobbied for federal legislation to require people registering to vote to prove their citizenship, and he repeated that call when releasing the Census Bureau findings Tuesday, describing it as his highest legislative priority. But the effort has stalled in the U.S. Senate. He has also released two sweeping executive orders on elections, but their major provisions have been so far blocked by federal courts.

Questions surround Trump administration’s data analysis

The voting data used in the analysis was provided by Data-Clear, a business in Virginia that secured an $885,000 Census Bureau contract from former President Joe Biden’s administration in 2024. Carolyn Carlson, Data-Clear’s president and founder, said she provided nationwide voting data to the bureau that year as part of a project to try and prevent an undercount of minority voters in the 2030 census.

Carlson said she was surprised to see the data she provided used in the new review of noncitizen voters.

The report says the Census Bureau matched the Data-Clear voter files with federal immigration records to determine if people were citizens and eligible to vote. The report offers only general descriptions of how and when it was able to match verifiable information.

Justin Levitt, an election law specialist at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who worked in the Biden White House on voting rights issues, said a typical analysis would include caveats around the possible margin of error, and the 24,000 figure for noncitizen voters could be within it. However, the Census Bureau report doesn’t specify one.

“In most statistical exercises, it’s not unthinkable that there might be 0.019% false positives – and if that were the case here, that would turn the total conclusions to zero,” he said.

Should the analysis hold up to scrutiny, the underlying numbers showed that they would not involve enough voters to change the result of the 2020 election. The report said it found 500 noncitizens illegally cast ballots in Wisconsin, which Trump lost to Biden by more than 20,000 votes. The survey said it identified 1,100 noncitizens who cast ballots in Arizona, which Trump lost by more than 10,000 votes. And the report cannot say whether those voters supported Trump or Biden.

In response to questions about whether the release supported the president’s assertion, the White House responded with a link to a social media post by U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

How Josh Shapiro and Stacy Garrity stack up on election issues

2026-08-20T10:00:01+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

Two candidates with vastly different visions for elections are competing for Pennsylvania’s governorship this year.

On one side, incumbent Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro has staked many of his policy stances on elections in opposition to President Donald Trump, while struggling to pass new election laws through the state legislature. On the other hand, state treasurer Stacy Garrity, Shapiro’s Republican challenger, has indicated she would defer to Trump’s election priorities, but her state-level legislative priorities are less clear.

And in the background, questions about Garrity’s views on the legitimacy of the 2020 election still loom.

Garrity has walked a fine line on the 2020 election

Garrity was first elected as state treasurer in November 2020, when Trump lost his first reelection bid and falsely claimed the contest was marred by fraud. Garrity went on to echo that rhetoric.

“The election from this November is tarnished forever,” she said at a Jan. 5, 2021, rally at the state capitol.

At a 2022 rally with Trump and Mehmet Oz, who was then a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, Garrity was more direct.

“We know that he won,” she said, referring to Trump’s 2020 race.

Since then, Garrity has attempted to walk back those and other comments, but she hasn’t ever fully refuted Trump’s claim that he lost the election due to fraud or acknowledged that Joe Biden was the legitimate winner.

When she was up for reelection in 2024, a campaign spokesperson said her January 2021 comments were not about Trump’s election, but rather only about “inconsistent application of ballot counting rules that directly affected the outcome of a state senate race in the 45th District.” However, rally organizers told reporters at the time that the purpose of the event was to ask state legislators to decertify Pennsylvania’s November 2020 votes.

As for her 2022 comments, Garrity said earlier this year those remarks were made at a Trump rally, which are “kind of fun things” that are “easy to get caught up in.”

During a recent sitdown interview with Dennis Owens, the ABC27 anchor asked Garrity if she believes Trump lost the 2020 election.

“Yeah, I mean, I won, and that’s what I’m most concerned about,” Garrity responded, though she added there were “irregularities” in the election.

In an interview with Spotlight PA earlier this month, Garrity said that her use of the word “irregularities” referred “very specifically” to guidance issued by then-Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar in 2020.

While Garrity told Spotlight PA she is “painfully aware” Biden was the president after the 2020 election and that she “agree[s] that he was the elected president,” Garrity has not said Biden won legitimately.

Did Shapiro keep his 2022 campaign promises?

When he first ran for governor in 2022, Shapiro put a heavy emphasis on democracy and voting issues, and the first policy plan his campaign released was focused on those subjects. It laid out a wide range of policy ideas he said he would pursue, including new legislation and administrative changes.

During his first term, Shapiro has successfully enacted some of those plans, but not others.

In September 2023, he unilaterally brought automatic voter registration to the state, directing PennDOT to change its voter registration process from one where prospective voters had to affirmatively opt in to one where they are automatically taken through the process unless they opt out. State data shows the switch has achieved its goal of registering more voters.

Shapiro also promised to appoint a secretary of the commonwealth who would “run elections fairly and uphold democracy.” That appointment would fall to Al Schmidt, a Republican and the former Philadelphia city commissioner who stood up to Trump’s claims of election fraud in 2020.

Under Schmidt, the Department of State has redesigned mail ballot return envelopes and provisional ballot envelopes to reduce the number of ballots rejected for technical errors. Analysis from Votebeat and Spotlight PA found that both of those changes have achieved their goals.

In keeping with Shapiro’s promise to “make more resources available in different languages so that every eligible voter can make their voices heard,” in 2023 the Department of State created Spanish and Chinese versions of its website. During Shapiro’s term, the department has also translated voter registration and mail ballot application forms into additional languages.

But there are some promises Shapiro hasn’t delivered on. For instance, his 2022 plan said he would create a centralized website where election results for all races, including local races, could be found. But the state’s current project to upgrade its Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors, or SURE, program, which includes a revamp of its election night reporting system, does not include a plan to have it also display local results.

Additionally, he said he would “provide funds in his first budget” so that all counties could participate in a risk-limiting audit of elections, a type of statistical test done to ensure the accuracy of results. By the time Shapiro entered office, all counties were already participating in the risk-limiting audit, and his first budget kept funding for county election expenses flat. Counties are not currently reimbursed for the costs of these audits.

This, and other policy struggles also reflect the reality of Pennsylvania’s divided legislature.

A divided legislature impedes election lawmaking

Shapiro made many other promises during the 2022 campaign that required the legislature’s help to pass. Those included allowing people to register to vote on Election Day, preregistering 16-year-olds to vote, establishing true early in-person voting, and allowing counties more time to process mail ballots ahead of Election Day.

But election legislation of all types has effectively ground to a halt during Shapiro’s term. The Republican-controlled state Senate has said any election legislation needs to be paired with expanded voter ID requirements, which they prefer in the form of a hard-to-pass — and hard-to-challenge legally — constitutional amendment.

But Shapiro himself has also been relatively quiet on election legislation. He has issued few statements urging passage of specific proposals, even those that he touted during that 2022 campaign.

In 2024, when the state House passed a bill that would have provided more time for counties to prepare mail ballots for counting, he urged the state Senate to do the same and send it to him to sign. But in other instances, Shapiro has not responded to questions on specific election legislation, and he has avoided weighing in or declined to comment on competing proposals, even when he has supported the underlying policy.

Last year, when a comprehensive election reform package supported by Democratic state House Speaker Joanna McClinton passed the lower chamber, a spokesperson for Shapiro did not directly answer a question on whether he supported the bill, which included some elements he campaigned on. Recently, his campaign also did not respond to questions on what his election priorities would be if Democrats were to win full control of state government this fall.

Shapiro has also failed to appoint several members to a state board meant to advise the legislature on election policy, which has contributed to the board now sitting idle.

Manuel Bonder, a spokesperson for Shapiro’s campaign, defended his record on elections and noted that the fact that control of the legislature is split between parties makes it more difficult to pass legislation. “Governor Shapiro has a long record of protecting our democracy – from standing up to Trump and his allies when they try to undermine it, to implementing commonsense reforms to protect and improve our free, fair, safe, secure elections,” he said in an email.

Beyond voter ID, Garrity’s election priorities are unclear

If Garrity is elected governor, she could have tremendous influence over election policy in the state. But she hasn’t released an elections policy plan of her own, and her campaign has not responded to several requests for an interview on the subject. What is known about her stance on election issues comes from the few questions she has answered on the campaign trail and in more broadly-focused interviews with Spotlight PA.

First and foremost, Garrity would be able to appoint a new secretary of the commonwealth, who can influence how elections run through approving what equipment can be used and making sometimes binding guidance on issues of state law. It’s not clear who, if anyone, Garrity has in mind for this position.

Garrity could also make, or direct her cabinet members to make, administrative decisions that would impact voting.

For example, several Republican-led states have recently withdrawn from the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, a data-sharing consortium of states that works to identify inaccurate or duplicate voter registration records. The program has faced attacks from conservatives in recent years. Garrity has not said how she would handle ERIC.

Both state Republicans and President Trump have also heavily criticized Shapiro’s implementation of automatic voter registration. As governor, Garrity would be able to reverse the policy, but she has not said whether she would.

One point on which Garrity has been more definitive is that she would like to require more voters to show identification at the polls.

Currently, voters are required to show ID only when voting for the first time or when voting at a new polling location. Republicans in the state have for years been trying to expand those requirements.

During the recent interview with Spotlight PA, Garrity said she supported implementing enhanced voter ID requirements in the state.

“That’s where I would start,” she said. “You have to have an ID to do anything.”

Garrity did not specify what forms of identification would be acceptable, or other details such as whether she would be open to exceptions. For instance, some other states have an affidavit system where someone else can vouch for a voter’s identity if they do not have ID with them at the polls.

Shapiro has also indicated an openness to voter ID, though no proposals made it to his desk during his first term.

Shapiro, Garrity would handle Trump differently

Apart from their policy differences at the state level, Shapiro and Garrity would bring very different approaches to Pennsylvania’s relationship with the federal government, including as it pertains to elections.

As state attorney general in 2020, Shapiro represented Pennsylvania in numerous lawsuits involving Trump’s election fraud claims, a fact he still makes note of even today.

“Every time Donald Trump and his enablers have been forced to produce evidence to back up these ridiculous claims, they’ve failed,” Shapiro said in response to Trump’s July primetime address on elections. “And in 2020, when they took us to court and tried to undermine the will of the people here in Pennsylvania — I went 43-0, Trump went 0-43.”

This year alone, Shapiro has joined two lawsuits against the Trump administration in his capacity as governor. The first, from April, challenged Trump’s executive order directing the U.S. Postal Service to only deliver ballots to individuals on preapproved lists provided by the states.

In July, he also joined a suit challenging the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s withholding of grant funds, which the plaintiffs argue is being done to coerce the states into compliance with the administration’s preferred elections and immigration policies.

By contrast, Garrity is likely to cooperate with the federal government on election policies. In response to Trump’s call this past February to nationalize elections, Garrity said she would “work with the Trump administration” to “turn our state around.”

The Shapiro administration has also rebuffed the U.S. Department of Justice’s demand for a version of the state’s voter roll that includes driver’s license and partial Social Security numbers.

By contrast, Garrity has said she would provide the records.

“If we think there’s not voter fraud, then why not hand over the rolls and prove him wrong?” she told ABC27.

Clarification, Aug. 20: This article has been updated to specify that Garrity has not acknowledged that Joe Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election.

Katie Meyer of Spotlight PA contributed reporting.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Issues with modem-based systems held up election results reporting in two Wisconsin counties

2026-08-20T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Systems used to transmit unofficial election-night results broke down in Green and Winnebago counties during Wisconsin’s August primary, causing problems processing and posting results.

The issues had no bearing on the official results that counties across the state are still certifying. But those breakdowns come as national experts have encouraged a move away from transmitting results over modems and toward physically delivering them. Many other states and election jurisdictions have shifted away from transmitting results by modem, but it remains common in Wisconsin.

Much of the concern about sending results over modems has related to cybersecurity. But experts say there are additional reasons to avoid the use of modems, and the recent issues in Wisconsin are one example. There’s no indication that the Election Day issues in Green and Winnebago counties, which both use Liberty Vote election technology, had anything to do with a hack.

Pam Smith, the president and CEO of Verified Voting, an elections technology organization, said election security is not only about preventing incorrect results or cyberattacks. It also means making sure the systems that election officials rely on are available and functioning when they need them.

A breakdown in transmitting unofficial results may not change the outcome of an election, she said, but it can still disrupt election-night operations and consume significant staff time.

“It matters because it’s a time suck for the county, and everybody trying to deal with it,” she said.

In a statement, a Liberty Vote spokesperson said they have “every confidence these isolated issues will not occur in future elections.”

Green County changing results reporting process for November

The results transmission failure caused the most significant delay in Green County, where officials did not fully shift to a backup method for collecting results from municipalities until the next morning.

Officials there and their vendor, Liberty Vote, are still trying to understand what went wrong after county staff were unable to process the results that municipalities sent over via fax modems, Green County Clerk Arianna Voegeli told Votebeat.

When municipalities in Green County send their unofficial results to the county clerk’s office, they appear as encrypted files on a so-called listener server set up to receive the transmissions, said Voegeli, a Democrat. Normally, a different software called a results workstation pulls those files and uploads the results to the county’s unofficial results reporting system, but that process broke down on Election Day, she said.

County staff tried to troubleshoot the issue with Liberty Vote after discovering the issue at 9 p.m. on election night but couldn’t find a solution. That meant they had to turn to alternative methods to get the results from municipalities, and didn’t have them all until the next morning — far later than most counties.

Voegeli said she consulted with the Wisconsin Elections Commission at the time to discuss what to do. The commission, she said, encouraged her to get municipal results as quickly as possible.

“Their recommendation was, at that point, to do my due diligence and do the best I can with trying to contact people [that] night to get those results in,” she said.

She opted not to use sheriff’s deputies to wake clerks that night, she said. Instead, she called all 24 of them; most didn’t return her call until early the following morning, but the few who responded delivered results over the phone. She got back to work at 6:30 a.m. on Wednesday to finish processing results as municipal officials either came in person to deliver the unofficial results or told Voegeli the results over the phone. All the results were uploaded by 11:30 a.m. on Wednesday.

Had it been November, she said, she would have employed sheriff’s deputies to wake up clerks. She opted not to do it this time around, Voegeli said, in part because the Wisconsin Elections Commission didn’t give hard guidance, and she didn’t feel she’d save meaningful time by waking them.

As of Monday, she said, officials still had not determined what caused the failure. But Green County is changing its approach for the November election.

Voegeli said nearby municipalities will drive to the county office to physically deliver unofficial results, and the faraway ones will verbally transmit results via telephone.

“Even if we determine what the cause of this issue is, I think we’re still going to plan on that for the general election,” she said. “We really want to make sure that we’re getting those results out in a timely manner.”

Winnebago County shifted gears on Election Day

Winnebago County, which also uses Liberty Vote systems, also had trouble transmitting unofficial results by modem, but officials there shifted to a backup plan that same night.

After polls closed, municipal clerks were initially unable to send unofficial election results over a cellular modem. County officials and Liberty Vote are still trying to understand what went wrong, County Clerk Julie Barthels said. After noticing the error, Barthels instructed municipal clerks in the county to drive in the results and hand them over physically. The last one arrived around 10:30 p.m. on Election Day.

The city resolved the results-reporting issue by 9 p.m., said Barthels, a Republican. But by then, municipal officials were already on their way to the county and Barthels said she didn’t want to turn the municipal officials around again to deliver them via modem.

Winnebago County isn’t planning for any shift in results-reporting for November. But she said she’ll work with Liberty Vote, to understand what went wrong.

“They’ve promised me this will not happen in November,” Barthels said about Liberty Vote. “We’re going to get to the bottom of what happened. I so trust our system. But it’s like any other computer. One day it works, and the next day it doesn’t.”

Some election security experts warn against modeming results

Smith, the Verified Voting CEO, said any method that requires election equipment to communicate with other devices — whether that’s through a secure cellular network or a physical phone line — introduces additional vulnerabilities.

“It’d be great if they would move towards a safer operation of not not having that connectivity,” she said

But Geoff Hale, a visiting fellow for election security at the Center for Democracy & Technology, said transmitting unofficial results via modem does not pose a major technical risk as long as the official results are protected through testing and audits of paper ballots. Every method for transmitting results has trade-offs, he said: Driving a USB stick for an hour may have fewer vulnerabilities than an internet-connected method, but it also takes far longer.

The more important safeguard, Hale said, is for election officials to stay involved throughout the process, validating results and checking for errors — especially when verifying the official count. Hale previously worked for a decade at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

In this case, he said, Winnebago and Green County responded appropriately by having backup plans in case their initial systems failed.

“This one doesn’t concern me quite as much as some other things I’ve seen,” he said.

Noah Praetz, president of Ready For Tuesday and a longtime election administration and security consultant, said jurisdictions embraced reporting results via modems in the 2000s and 2010s.

That momentum stalled around 2016, he said, amid Russian attempts to interfere with U.S. elections and after Ukraine’s results reporting system in 2014 was successfully hacked. After that, Praetz said, following responses from the FBI and CISA, and the designation of elections as critical infrastructure by the Secretary of Homeland Security, election officials began recognizing that results in transit over modems posed a risk, even if the results were unofficial.

But a major benefit of using modems is speed, and Praetz emphasized the downsides of slower alternatives, as delays in reporting results can create openings for bad actors — including foreign governments — to sow distrust.

“People want to get results out of their hands,” he said. “They want to satisfy their voters.”

That was evident in Milwaukee on Aug. 11, when a human error in exporting results caused a 90-minute delay that exasperated election watchers and prompted widespread conspiracy theories about what had gone wrong.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Over 1,300 ballots never made it to voters in Navajo County. That isn’t unusual.

2026-08-19T18:13:36+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Arizona’s free newsletter here.

At least 50,000 mail ballots never made it to voters during Arizona’s July 21 primary election.

That number, based on information gathered by Votebeat from 11 of the state’s 15 counties, isn’t out of the ordinary. In fact, it appears roughly in line with that of prior major elections. About 71,000 mail ballots went undelivered statewide during the 2024 general election, according to data from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission that represented all of the state’s counties.

Every year, some ballots that are mailed out to voters are returned to election officials because the voter’s address is incorrect or the voter has a forwarding address on file. (In Arizona, ballots legally can’t be forwarded.)

Their return does not necessarily mean those voters were disenfranchised, as they could have voted in person instead. But slowdowns in mail processing and President Donald Trump’s invections against mail voting put voters and advocates nationwide on edge about the U.S. Postal Service’s role in elections. Anxiety is especially acute in Arizona, where the vast majority of voters cast ballots by mail. That has put more attention on the state’s undeliverable ballots.

Those fears were on full display last month in Navajo County, a rural county in the northeast quadrant of the state where Recorder David Marshall said just before the primary that his office was experiencing “an issue” with the U.S. Postal Service.

“We have received over 900 returned ballots — over 900,” Marshall, a Republican who was recently appointed to his post, said in a public meeting on July 14. “Why? Don’t know.”

Later, the number of undelivered ballots in the county rose to more than 1,300 — a figure that continues to tick slightly upward as delayed returns from the Postal Service trickle in. The news quickly spread, drawing extensive media coverage and the attention of Trump himself.

This year, more ballots than usual statewide might have been undeliverable because voters were out of town. Some county recorders told Votebeat that they noticed a slightly higher number of ballots returned with postal codes indicating that the intended recipients were temporarily away. Most chalked that up to the state’s earlier-than-usual primary date. In February, state lawmakers shifted the primary from Aug. 4 to July 21.

But in the Navajo County case, data and records suggest nothing nefarious, or even all that unusual, was afoot.

What data and records show about undeliverable ballots in Navajo County

Votebeat found that Navajo County’s rate of undeliverable ballots was indeed higher than that of other jurisdictions across Arizona during this year’s primary. As of Aug. 12, county officials said 1,377 ballots went undelivered in the rural county, or about 3.9% of the total number of ballots mailed out. By contrast, across the other 10 counties where Votebeat was able to collect data, only 2.3% of ballots were returned undelivered.

But data from the EAC shows Navajo County’s undeliverable ballot rate isn’t unheard of historically in Arizona. During the 2024 general election, for instance, La Paz County saw about 4.4% of its mail ballots returned as undeliverable. In 2022, Coconino and Pinal each received thousands of undeliverable ballots from the Postal Service — about 5.5% and 3.8% of the total number of mail ballots sent to voters by officials, respectively. Statewide, undeliverable ballot rates rose as high as 4.7% in the 2016 general election.

Furthermore, undeliverable ballot rates can vary widely from year to year. Navajo County, for instance, has seen its rate fluctuate from as low as 0.6% to as high as 3.3% in recent general elections.

The data isn’t perfect. Some counties told Votebeat they counted undeliverable ballots in the primary election slightly differently than other counties. The EAC collects data on undeliverable ballots after each general election, but not for primary elections. And in some years, not all counties reported undeliverable ballot data to the EAC.

But records obtained by Votebeat also suggest that Navajo County’s high rate of returned ballots wasn’t because something went wrong with their delivery. Following Marshall’s remarks, county officials asked the Postal Service to examine a sampling of the undeliverable ballots. When the Postal Service did so, it found that nine of the 10 ballots submitted by the county had a valid reason for being returned. The remaining ballot required further investigation.

Officials appear to be backing away from undeliverable ballot fears

Federal, state, and local officials have been working to tease out whether there was an identifiable issue connected to the undelivered ballots in Navajo County — or if the number, while not ideal, came from processes operating as usual.

Initially, some officials — including Marshall in his remarks at the public meeting — appeared to suggest that something may have gone awry. But in recent weeks, the county’s tone has gradually shifted.

For instance, the Navajo County Recorder’s Office said in a July 24 statement that it was working with the Postal Service to “identify any issues that may have occurred during the mailing process.”

Later, on July 31, the office issued an updated statement. It said it had sent an expanded sample of 200 undeliverable ballot envelopes to the Postal Service for review. Of those, the Postal Service found that 66% were returned because the recipient had some type of change-of-address order on file. Others were marked undeliverable because they were addressed to vacant homes or closed postal boxes.

“Returns of ballots occurred in other Arizona counties, demonstrating that this is a routine part of election administration statewide,” the statement read.

Calli Jones, a spokesperson for the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office, told Votebeat on July 30 that her office was working to set up meetings with the Postal Service to “learn more about this situation on their end.” And on Aug. 14, Richie Taylor of the Arizona Attorney General’s Office said his office believed the undeliverable ballots were normal after looking into the matter.

“We’ve spoken to the recorder in Navajo County and they’ve verified that the rejection rate is in line with historical rejection rates, so we don’t believe there’s anything nefarious going on there,” Taylor told Votebeat.

Meanwhile, Cathy Purcell, a spokesperson for the Postal Service, told Votebeat on July 24 that mail carriers returned the ballots to the county “in accordance with proper protocol.”

Can Arizona reduce its undeliverable ballots?

Some number of undeliverable ballots may be normal and a sign that the system is working as intended. Still, undeliverable ballots are far from ideal, and officials in Navajo County say they will work to reduce them in the future.

In a statement, officials said they would begin taking more proactive steps to clean up the county’s voter rolls ahead of November. When ballots are returned as undeliverable, the Navajo County Recorder’s Office will begin sending affected voters a mailed notice that can be forwarded by the Postal Service to their current address, if available.

The office will also seek to email, call, and text voters if their contact information is available in their voter record.

“This additional step will provide multiple ways for voters to receive information, respond, and update their registration,” officials said on July 31.

Sasha Hupka is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Sasha at shupka@votebeat.org.

Complaint alleges conservative activist Scott Presler violated campaign finance law

2026-08-18T19:36:12+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

A watchdog group has filed a complaint alleging conservative activist Scott Presler and his political action committee may have violated state campaign finance law in Pennsylvania.

Presler is based in Pennsylvania and has gained a national profile for voter registration work and ongoing searches for noncitizen voters. The complaint alleges that despite his extensive campaigning in the state in 2025 urging voters not to retain three state Supreme Court judges, Presler and his organization, Early Vote Action, did not disclose sources of revenue or detailed expenditures as required.

“Presler has every right to conduct such political activities, but lawmakers and voters also have every right to know who is paying how much to influence their political choices,” Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen, which filed the complaint, said via email. Public Citizen is a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit focused on democracy and corporate power issues.

Presler did not respond to requests for comment.

According to Pennsylvania campaign finance law, political action committees are required to report expenses, as well as the names of all contributors who give more than $50, when their spending exceeds $250. While Early Vote Action is registered with the Federal Election Commission, a search of the state’s campaign finance database shows that the organization has never registered as a political action committee or submitted reports in Pennsylvania.

Fines for late filings in the state are relatively minimal. Failure to file is more serious, and can result in fines of up to $5,000 and jail time for a candidate or the treasurer of a political action committee, but charges for this are exceedingly rare.

Enforcement of Pennsylvania campaign finance law violations is lax, and Presler isn’t the first activist to face questions over whether expenses were properly reported in recent elections.

The new complaint against Presler focuses on his activism in the 2025 election. That year, three state Supreme Court judges, who were originally elected as Democrats, were on the ballot for retention, a type of election where voters select “yes” or “no” to indicate whether they would like the judge to serve another 10-year term.

Republicans, including Presler, were campaigning to unseat the judges in the hopes of opening the court up for an ideological shift during the 2027 municipal election.

“If we defeat even 1 of these democrat Supreme Court Justices this November, we will go down in Pennsylvania history,” Presler said in a September 2025 post on the social media site X, which showed him placing Early Vote Action-branded “Vote No” signs along a roadway.

Public Citizen said in its complaint that according to press reports, during the campaign, Early Vote Action used paid staff, engaged in voter outreach, and purchased digital and print media — all expenditures which should have been detailed in campaign finance reports.

The complaint was lodged with the Pennsylvania Department of State, which oversees the state’s campaign finance law. A spokesperson for the department confirmed the state had received the complaint but said that it does not comment on investigations.

This is not the first time Public Citizen has filed a complaint against Presler. In March the group filed a complaint with both chambers of Congress alleging Presler was not registered as a lobbyist as he should be, given his work pressing members of Congress to pass the SAVE America Act. Front Line Government Relations, a firm representing Presler Persistence, LLC, subsequently registered and filed disclosures.

(Neither entity has ever registered as a PAC with the state.)

Presler has also been gaining national attention in recent weeks for his request to Pennsylvania counties for lists of individuals who were rejected for jury duty due to their lack of U.S. citizenship, which he says he will cross check against the state’s vote roll for evidence of illegitimately registered voters.

Presler’s social media posts citing the numbers of noncitizens who were rejected from jury lists attracted the attention of U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick, a Republican, who said it was evidence of a “badly broken” system. Those posts also prompted a direct rebuke from the Pennsylvania Department of State, which clarified online that inclusion on a jury rejection list doesn’t mean a person is registered to vote.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Live event replay: Will the midterms happen? Your election questions, answered, Part 2

2026-08-18T09:05:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Will the 2026 midterms happen? Short answer: Yes.

Long answer: Elections happen because thousands of local officials follow state and local laws requiring them to happen — and history shows they’ve done so before, even under immense pressure. The greater danger isn’t no election, but one that’s chaotic, unfairly challenged, or deliberately cast as illegitimate after the fact.

Got more questions about the midterms? Email us at community@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit newsroom specialized in explaining how elections work. Each of our reporters and editors spend every day covering voting rules, election administration, misinformation, election lawsuits, local officials, and the systems that determine how ballots are cast and counted.

Watch the full event recording below:

Watch the recording of our previous Q&A event here.

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s Editorial Director. She runs big initiatives for Votebeat, like our experts desk, and manages our investigations. She was previously the lead elections reporter for ProPublica, and helped manage the Electionland project for three federal election cycles, sharing information and tips with hundreds of newsrooms across the United States.

Alexander Shur is Votebeat’s Wisconsin reporter. He previously covered politics, policy, and the fallout of the 2020 presidential election for the Wisconsin State Journal. Prior to that he covered the criminal justice system for the Jackson Hole News & Guide, where he investigated the impact of voting laws on people with felonies and how the criminal justice system treats people with mental illnesses. He is originally from Michigan, and has degrees from Northern Michigan University and Northwestern University.

Hayley Harding is Votebeat’s Michigan reporter. Hayley Harding is a Detroit-based reporter who has covered government and elections at all levels. Most recently, she was a data journalist on The Detroit News’ investigations team, where she covered population trends, social problems, and more. She has worked for the Idaho Statesman in Boise and for the Salisbury Daily Times in Salisbury, Maryland. A Michigander by birth, Hayley graduated from Ohio University.

Sasha Hupka is Votebeat’s Arizona reporter. She is based in Phoenix and has long covered politics, business, and democracy issues in the Southwest. Most recently, she was a watchdog reporter at The Arizona Republic, where her stories won several awards. She has also worked for The Los Angeles Times, Politifact, and other news outlets. She is originally from New York, and holds degrees from Binghamton University and the University of California, Berkeley.

13 Detroit voters disenfranchised in primary because their absentee ballots were mishandled

2026-08-17T20:06:32+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Michigan’s free newsletter here.

Thirteen Detroit voters did not get their ballots counted in Michigan’s hotly contested primary because of an oversight by election officials.

The absentee ballots were delivered to the city clerk’s office before the deadline of 8 p.m. on Election Day, Daniel Baxter, chief of operations for Detroit elections, told the Wayne County Board of Canvassers during its meeting Monday. But the ballots were “left behind” and not taken to the city’s Department of Elections, a necessary step before they are tabulated.

Instead, the ballots were discovered at the clerk’s office the day after the election, Baxter said. They were then sealed and held securely before being delivered to the canvassers Monday, nearly two weeks after Election Day.

The identity of the voters who were disenfranchised remains unknown. None of the races that were on the primary ballot in Detroit were decided by 13 votes or fewer, meaning that the exclusion of the ballots will not affect the outcome of any elections. However, the Aug. 4 election featured several contentious races that voters were eager to weigh in on, such as the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate.

It’s the second time in less than a year that the Wayne County Board of Canvassers, the body that certifies elections in Michigan’s most populous county, has had to decide whether improperly handled ballots could still be considered.

In last year’s municipal elections, the canvassers opted not to count 37 ballots from Hamtramck that were left in their opened envelopes in the city clerk’s office but never tabulated. The concern there was that non-election officials had walked into the clerk’s office while the ballots were there, breaking their chain of custody.

Becki Carmargo, assistant corporate counsel for Wayne County, told canvassers Monday that Detroit’s situation was different. Because the ballots were not delivered to the city’s elections department until after Election Day, Detroit never entered the 13 ballots in question into the Qualified Voter File, the statewide voter database in which absentee ballots are logged before they are counted — meaning they “basically don’t exist” in the eyes of the law. Carmargo advised the board against tabulating the ballots.

“We don’t know that they were received timely,” Carmargo told the board, referring to the fact that ballots have to be returned by 8 p.m. on Election Day.

Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey told canvassers the ballots were “absolutely” received before 8 p.m.

Baxter also argued the ballots’ chain of custody was maintained because the ballots were eventually delivered to the elections office by the deputy clerk, who documented the process throughout. He said that adding the ballots to the QVF when they were discovered would have led to their rejection. Officials confirmed that special permission would have to be granted from the state for those ballots to be entered after the deadline.

“I believe that we should ... fall on the side of the voter and not penalize them for the error that the department has made,” Baxter continued.

Democrat Richard Preuss, the chair of the board of canvassers, agreed.

“There’s no malice involved,” he said. Although Preuss noted no election was close enough for the 13 ballots to change the results, he still wanted to “make sure that ... people are voting and that their faith in the process is still solid moving forward.”

Republican Lisa Capatina, the vice chair of the board, chastised the city for waiting until Monday to turn the ballots over to the county and not properly advocating for the 13 voters in previous meetings.

She said that while she respected the amount of work Detroit has to do during elections, “there is a process that also has to go along to ensure accountability and accuracy for all the voters in Detroit and Wayne County.”

A motion was made to accept the ballots, but it was not seconded. The failed motion meant the ballots won’t be included in the official primary results. The board will meet again on Tuesday to certify those results and send them to the state.

However, advocates for the disenfranchised voters could still try to go to court to get the ballots counted.

Last year’s decision not to count the ballots in Hamtramck set off a nine-month legal battle that was largely resolved just last week, when the Michigan Supreme Court opted not to take up an appeal in the case, meaning the state’s Court of Appeals’ decision that the ballots should be counted will stand. That tabulation, which could happen in as soon as a few weeks, could change the results of a tight mayoral election decided by only 11 votes.

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

‘I don’t trust you’: Tensions reach boiling point on election security call for state leaders hosted by Trump administration

2026-08-17T11:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Tensions between state election officials and the Trump administration are rising as we head into the heart of the midterm election season. Frustrations boiled over on Monday during a rare election security call hosted by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency for state officials. During the call, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes unloaded on the agency.

CISA used to be a go-to shop for many states looking for help ensuring that their elections weren’t hacked, targeted, or undermined by cyberattacks or foreign interference. CISA provided states with classified security briefings on threats, helped ensure that state voting equipment wasn’t vulnerable to cyberattacks, and worked with election leaders to game out potential risks.

All that changed when Donald Trump returned to the White House last year. The second Trump administration scaled back its support for states, cut back CISA staff, and launched an investigation of its former leader, whom Trump accused of disloyalty because he pushed back on the president’s false claims that the 2020 election was rigged. CISA has not had a permanent director since the start of Trump’s second term.

Changes at CISA have paired with the president’s broad focus on controlling how elections are run. The federal government is threatening to arrest election officials if they allow noncitizens to vote. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has vowed to withhold federal funds from states that don’t implement Trump administration election overhaul proposals. A coalition of Democratic states and officials has sued the Department of Homeland Security in a suit that accuses the Trump administration of withholding Federal Emergency Management Agency funding in an attempt to coerce states into enacting disputed election changes.

With all that as backdrop, CISA organized this week’s call – and things didn’t go too well.

After more than a year of near silence, elections officials wondered if CISA would step up to offer classified intelligence briefings on emerging cyber threats from hostile countries, specialized testing of election equipment, or training on how to prepare for potential problems on Election Day.

Instead, CISA leaders provided what one participant characterized as a generic “CYA” (cover your a**) briefing that offered state officials few assurances that the federal government would help thwart threats this November.

Participants said acting CISA Director Nick Andersen and Jim Harrell, the assistant director for integrated operations, offered no concrete support for the 2026 election, which is less than 90 days away. Instead, the participants said, CISA leadership seemed more focused on the 2028 presidential election.

When they were done, according to participants, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, lashed out at the CISA officials. Fontes blasted the Trump administration for threatening state election officials and made it clear he had no confidence in their leadership, they said.

“Fontes got testy with them,” said one participant on the call who asked not to be identified. “‘I don’t trust you,’ [Fontes told the CISA officials.] ‘Your boss came out there and said: We are going to criminalize the work you do. Why should we trust you?’”

When asked about the call, Fontes confirmed that he’d made those comments and expanded on his frustrations

“They don’t work with us, they work against us,” Fontes told Votebeat. “Why should I trust them?”

Fontes said it was difficult for state and local elections officials to have confidence they would get support from the federal government when the administration treats them like an adversary rather than a partner. He and others on the call said CISA leaders offered few assurances they would provide much support in the coming weeks.

“They just wholly and completely abandoned their duties and threatened prosecution,” Fontes said. “If they want to apologize for threatening us and ruining perfectly good systems, that’s a good start.”

CISA did not respond to requests for comment on the call.

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, also a Democrat, echoed Fontes’s frustrations.

“It’s unhelpful to have political leaders, including the secretary of Homeland Security, hinting at imprisoning election administrators who don’t do what they want,” Simon told Votebeat. “That’s just not helpful.”

Simon said Minnesota and other states have spent months working to fill the gaps left by the drop-off in CISA support.

“It’s pretty clear states are almost entirely on their own this election cycle and cannot rely on the federal government for election assistance,” said Simon.

Not everyone on the call came away with a sour taste in their mouth, though. Some participants described it as a tentative move that could help repair the strained relationship between state and federal leaders working on elections.

Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, also a Democrat, described the call as a “positive step” in rebuilding relations between CISA and state election officials.

“While this engagement is encouraging, CISA and our other federal partners must focus on continuing to rebuild trust with election officials,” Hobbs said. “Over the last two years, we have watched this administration systematically dismantle many of the election security resources in place at the federal level.”

With the November election fast approaching, he said, “election officials need sustained commitment to supporting local elections, not renewed attention only as major elections approach. Meaningful support will do more to rebuild relationships than words alone.”

37 Hamtramck ballots could flip mayoral race after Michigan Supreme Court declines appeal

2026-08-14T21:20:53+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Michigan’s free newsletter here.

Update, 9:55 p.m.: This story has been updated to include comment from Hamtramck Mayor Adam Alharbi.

A tiny Michigan city must count 37 additional ballots more than nine months after the election in question, potentially flipping an election eight months after the announced winner took office.

The Michigan Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from the city of Hamtramck, the Wayne County Board of Canvassers and current Hamtramck Mayor Adam Alharbi, leaving in place a March decision from the Michigan Court of Appeals that ordered the ballots counted. The parties could appeal to federal courts, but such a challenge would face significant expenses, not to mention legal hurdles.

These 37 ballots weren’t counted on Election Day after mistakenly being left in their opened envelopes and returned to the clerk’s office. They were later discovered there, but only after outside officials had entered the office — allegedly to address punching bags bearing candidates’ faces that had been left inside — thus breaking the ballots’ chain of custody.

The Wayne County Board of Canvassers deadlocked over whether to include the ballots in the final count because of concerns about the chain of custody, leaving the votes uncounted.

Those 37 ballots could now decide the mayoral race months after Alharbi — who beat his opponent Muhith Mahmood by only 11 votes — took office.

The identities of the 37 voters have not been made public.

“This is a great victory for democracy and for the rights of voters to have their votes counted,” Mark Brewer, Mahmood’s attorney, said in an email Friday afternoon.

He emphasized that counting the ballots will change the final vote totals, but it won’t be clear who the final winner is until after all 37 ballots are counted.

It is not clear when the Wayne County Board of Canvassers may consider the ballots in question. Questions sent to several canvassers weren’t immediately returned Friday.

While such a decision is atypical, there are plenty of examples of election results remaining unresolved for months, Justin Levitt, a constitutional law expert at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, told Votebeat.

In 2008, for example, the Minnesota Senate race was decided by only a few hundred votes, and Sen. Al Franken wasn’t sworn in until the July following his election after a series of legal challenges.

“It takes time to get it right, and sometimes that means months,” Levitt said. “It’s very unusual, but it’s not unheard of, and frankly, I think the citizens benefit by making sure that these things are closely examined by the courts.”

It’s just the latest in a tumultuous saga in Hamtramck, a city of less than 28,000 people that has been racked by a number of election-related scandals. Last week, Mohammed Hassan, a city councilman who is also the city’s mayor pro tem, was sentenced to a year of probation after he was found guilty of forging someone’s signature on an absentee ballot. Another council member, Muhtasin Sadman, pleaded guilty to election fraud charges earlier this year.

Alharbi said in an email Friday that he wasn’t worried about his seat but rather “the future of our city,” pointing to at least one additional ballot that turned up later.

“The integrity of the process is fundamentally compromised,” he wrote.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel requested an independent prosecutor investigate a number of members of the council last year, alleging that six people “conspired to receive unvoted absentee ballots that had been signed by recently naturalized citizens, and to then fill in the candidates of their choosing” in the city’s 2023 election. No other charges related to that request have been made public.

Rana Faraj, the city’s clerk during last year’s election, was replaced by city officials in part for the envelope mixup, officials said. She sued the city late last year, alleging officials retaliated against her for trying to whistleblow “ongoing election integrity issues.” Court records show a review hearing is scheduled in that case for October.

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

Michigan charges 5 noncitizens for allegedly voting in 2024 election

2026-08-13T23:28:49+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Michigan’s free newsletter here.

Michigan’s attorney general announced Thursday she was charging five noncitizens for allegedly voting in the 2024 general election, plus one U.S. citizen accused of registering their noncitizen spouse to vote.

Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, made the announcement more than a year after her office announced she was investigating 13 potential noncitizen voters referred by the Michigan Department of State. Thursday’s announcement encompassed those referrals as well as 25 other people referred more recently on similar allegations.

In addition to the six who were charged, 10 of those cases have been closed without charges, and 22 remain under investigation. In addition, the voter registration of every identified noncitizen — including several who were not charged — has been canceled.

“We’re upholding election integrity by investigating all claims of non-citizen voters, as rare as they are, and holding bad actors accountable when they refuse to abide by the laws that keep our elections safe and secure,” Nessel said in a news release announcing the charges. “These charges reflect the severity of the allegations, the sanctity of our democracy, and the tremendous consequences of voting illegally— whether that’s done to try and ‘test’ security measures or to make an unlawful vote count.”

Noncitizen voting has been a top concern of conservative lawmakers and activists across the U.S. for several years, with a renewed emphasis during President Donald Trump’s second term. It is extremely rare in Michigan and across the U.S.

6 people charged in connection with noncitizen voting in Michigan

The six people were each arraigned between April and earlier this week, according to Nessel’s office. Of the six, three live in the U.S. as lawful permanent residents, while a fourth is a limited-term alien resident. Only U.S. citizens — not lawful permanent residents or noncitizens with any other residency status — can vote in state and federal elections.

Michael Akioya is accused of registering to vote in Inkster in 2016 and voting in the 2024 election in Oak Park via absentee ballot. He is a lawful permanent resident, Nessel’s office said, but not a citizen. He is charged with making false statements on an absentee ballot application and envelope.

Harumi Michael is accused of registering and voting in person in 2024 in Commerce Township despite being only a lawful permanent resident. She is charged with two counts of election law forgery, one count of making a false statement when registering to vote, and one count of being an unqualified elector attempting to vote.

Robert Piva, another lawful permanent resident, registered to vote online in September 2024 and voted early in Roseville the next month, according to the attorney general’s office. He “claimed his vote was an experiment concerning voter fraud,” according to the news release. He is charged with one count each of election law perjury, fraudulent registration, and being an unqualified elector attempting to vote.

Alondra Harker, a limited-term alien resident, allegedly registered and voted in person in the 2024 general election in Three Rivers. She is charged with fraudulently registering to vote.

Kimberly DiDonato, an American citizen, allegedly posed as her husband, a lawful permanent resident, and registered him to vote in 2024 while claiming he was a citizen. According to the news release, DiDonato “claimed her intent was to test the registration system for vulnerabilities to unqualified voter registrants” and she canceled the registration a month later. She has been charged with election law forgery and using a computer to commit a crime.

Her attorney, former Republican attorney general candidate Kevin Kijewski, noted that DiDonato’s case was lumped together with a number of “very different” cases.

“No ballot was cast, and the registration was canceled in May 2024 after it was brought to the township clerk’s attention,” he said in a text message Thursday.

The final person announced Thursday, Basanth Sadasivian, is a noncitizen residing in the U.K. who allegedly registered to vote by email using the Federal Post Card Application — which allows military personnel and other U.S. citizens living abroad to register and vote — using a Bloomfield Hills address. He voted in the general election in 2024 through that same system, according to Nessel’s office, and is charged with one count of being an unqualified elector attempting to vote.

Michael’s and Harker’s attorneys did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday. Attorneys could not be immediately located for Akioya, Piva, and Sadasivian.

“This is how the system works under the law. The same process that produced these investigations and criminal charges is the process we use every time we receive allegations of illegal voter activity,” Deputy Secretary of State Aghogho Edevbie said in a statement Thursday. “The people of Michigan deserve to know that each case is thoroughly investigated, those investigations are pursued based on evidence, and that anyone found to have broken the law is held accountable.”

He further encouraged people not to “test the system,” noting that people who break the law in order to do so will be held accountable.

Others investigated as part of ongoing efforts

The attorney general’s office also announced that 10 people who had been under investigation for noncitizen voting or “adjacent conduct” would not be charged. Of those, two were found to be citizens, while another was “subject to a complicated international adoption” and is presumed to be a citizen. A fourth person, while not fully considered a citizen, is federally recognized as an American Indian born in Canada; such individuals are often referred to as “dual citizens” in their paperwork, according to the release.

Nessel’s office also declined to charge five legal permanent residents who had voted — some of them in several different elections — as well as one noncitizen with authorization to work in the U.S., because it felt there was not enough proof to do so. To secure a prosecution, the government must prove these people knew they were unqualified to vote and that they weren’t encouraged to register by the government itself.

Nessel’s investigations aren’t the only ones ongoing in the state. Anthony Forlini, the Macomb County clerk and the Republican candidate for secretary of state this fall, has been using jury pools to try to find noncitizens on the voter rolls for much of the year, despite warnings against that from the Department of State.

Forlini applauded Nessel on Thursday.

“Good elections are a non-partisan topic and both parties need to take this seriously,” he said in a statement shared on social media Thursday. “This is just the beginning of what I am uncovering. This is not a small matter. This is an infrastructure issue that needs to be fixed.”

Noncitizen voting a staple of political conversation in Michigan

Previously, only one person — a University of Michigan student from China — was publicly charged with voting in the 2024 election in Michigan despite not being a U.S. citizen. That student, Haoxiang Gao, was later charged with fleeing the country.

Despite its rarity, noncitizen voting has remained a focus of Republican elected officials. Rep. Bryan Posthumus, a Republican from Rockford, began the state legislative session last year by introducing an amendment to the Michigan Constitution that would require would-be voters to prove their citizenship. That ultimately failed to move forward in the legislature, but proponents are hoping to put a similar constitutional amendment before voters this fall.

The group Americans for Citizen Voting submitted more than 750,000 signatures in March in support of that effort. The Board of State Canvassers will decide later this month whether it will make the November ballot.

It’s not just Michigan where that’s a focus. Trump has made implementing a federal proof-of-citizenship requirement one of his top priorities, repeatedly calling on Congress to pass the SAVE America Act (the bill, though, lacks the votes to pass the Senate). In an effort to root out noncitizens on the voter rolls, the Department of Justice has also requested unredacted information on voters from every state; Michigan is one of 30 that have refused to comply and is locked in a legal battle with the federal government over the issue.

The Trump administration last month also sent letters to every state’s top election official warning that they could face criminal prosecution if they knowingly allow noncitizens to vote or be registered to vote.

Trump has claimed for years that noncitizen voting is a widespread problem in the U.S., even though election officials and independent audits have found no more than a handful of examples. Most recently, Trump said last month during a primetime speech that there are more than 270,000 noncitizens registered to vote nationwide, although he provided no evidence or details about how he arrived at that number.

Rep. Rachelle Smit, a Republican from Martin and the chair of the House Election Integrity Committee, said in a statement that she “truly believe[s] Michigan is the epicenter of the problem.”

“The charges filed today are just the tip of the iceberg, and further underscore exactly why the U.S. Senate must approve the SAVE Act to safeguard our elections and ensure only U.S. citizens are voting in our elections,” she said.

Danny Wimmer, a spokesperson for the Michigan attorney general’s office, said the investigations and ultimate charges were “not impacted by any external focus appearing in recent weeks or months.”

In fact, in her release, Nessel criticized the Trump administration for making it harder to identify the noncitizen voters. “The federal government has not always provided easy or open access to certain necessary citizenship records,” she said, noting that this delayed her investigation.

“While the question of whether any given resident is a citizen may feel simple, some cases are nuanced in unexpected ways,” Nessel said.

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

Texas’ mail ballot ID requirements restored by federal appeals court

2026-08-13T21:30:32+00:00

This story was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday restored several pieces of a 2021 Texas election law that overhauled mail-in and assisted voting, overturning a lower court’s block on those provisions.

Five years ago, Texas passed Senate Bill 1, a wide-reaching election law that changed the way local officials administer elections and how some Texans vote, particularly aimed at initiatives Harris County implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic. The law was denounced by voter advocacy groups, civil rights organizations, and Democratic lawmakers, who broke quorum in an attempt to stifle the bill.

After several lawsuits over accessibility concerns created by the new law were consolidated into a single suit, a district judge in March 2025 struck down nine of its provisions. Those blocked provisions included requiring Texans to provide an identification number or Social Security number on mail-in ballot applications and have them match the state’s records. The judge also blocked provisions that create processes for curing defective ballots and require voters and those who assist them in filling out their ballot to sign an oath swearing they did not coerce the voter and disclose how they’re related.

The plaintiffs who sued argued the provisions were overly cumbersome and restrictive for voters with disabilities, and the district judge agreed, ruling they violated the Americans with Disabilities Act. Texas allows voters who are over the age of 65 and those with certain disabilities, among others, to vote by mail.

Wednesday’s 11-page ruling from the 5th Circuit reverses the district judge’s ruling in its entirety, finding that the plaintiffs lacked standing on most of their complaints. The written opinion strongly rebuked the lower courts’ decisions in the suit, noting that appellate judges have “reversed the district court on everything” through the suit’s five years of litigation.

“The bulk of the plaintiffs’ claims fail for lack of standing. One fails on the merits. But none justifies interference with the State Legislature’s efforts to prevent voter fraud and to protect election integrity,” Judge Andrew Oldham wrote in the opinion.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is a defendant in the suit, described the ruling as a “major victory” in a social media post.

The ruling also asserts that mail-in ballots have “long been established” as prone to fraud, and notes that the number of mail-in application or mail-in ballot rejections caused by identification numbers errors dropped from 11% to 2.7% after the law’s implementation. A 2022 study found that 1 in 7 voters who requested a mail ballot in the 2022 primary had their applications or ballots rejected in the wake of SB 1.

New secretary of state will continue to defend Texas’ open primaries against GOP lawsuit

2026-08-12T21:26:34+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

Robert Howden, the new Texas secretary of state, said in a legal filing Monday that he would continue to defend the state’s open primary system, putting him at odds with the Texas GOP in the lawsuit filed by the party last year.

“The only thing that has changed in this case is the name of the defendant,” lawyers for the state agency wrote, emphasizing that the secretary would “gladly implement statutory changes” if passed by the Legislature.

Republicans in Texas, worried about the moderating influence of Democrats and independents crossing over to GOP races, want to require voters to register with a party before they’re allowed to participate in primaries.

Last year, the Texas GOP sued to strike down the current open primary system, under which eligible Texans register to vote without declaring a party affiliation. Attorney General Ken Paxton sided with the party, leaving then-Secretary of State Jane Nelson to find her own legal representation for the agency. Nelson, a Republican and former state senator, said in legal filings at the time that this was a decision best left to the Legislature.

In the months since, this idea spawned by the conservative grassroots has garnered widespread support from state leaders. At the Texas Republican Convention in June, Gov. Greg Abbott addressed the issue to a cheering crowd, saying he wants to “make clear that in the future, only Republicans vote in Republican primaries.” He later told Texas Scorecard that this was an issue for lawmakers, who “can and should be more responsive to Republicans than a judge may be.”

A spokesperson for Abbott, who appoints the secretary of state, did not respond to a request for comment.

Many in the party celebrated Nelson’s retirement last month as an opportunity for the agency to change its position in the lawsuit. But Howden, Abbott’s former legislative director, is staying the course.

“This issue can and will be resolved by the Legislature in the coming months,” he said in the filing, noting that the Legislature is the right venue for “thoughtfully crafting the detailed scheme that would govern it.”

The lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in Amarillo, has been a major financial weight on the party. After the convention, the new chair, D’rinda Randall, reported that the party’s largest unpaid debt was to cover the legal fees associated with this lawsuit.

The Texas GOP did not respond to a request for comment.

An election night error overshadowed Milwaukee’s improvements at processing absentee ballots

2026-08-12T16:59:27+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Milwaukee election officials spent Tuesday trying to prove they had a better way to count absentee ballots — faster, smoother, and with less reason for anyone to doubt the process.

Then, after 15 hours of nearly flawless work, a few minutes of human error blew up the plan.

At around 11:10 p.m. on Tuesday night, city officials left their central count facility without exporting results from five of its nine tabulators, forcing them to race back under police escort and delaying Milwaukee’s results by about 90 minutes. It was the third time in recent years that a significant tabulator-related mistake had disrupted the city’s heavily scrutinized absentee-ballot operation.

So, right around midnight, chief Milwaukee election official Paulina Gutiérrez and other city officials climbed into a white van under police escort and headed back along the Milwaukee River to the central count facility they thought they had shut down about an hour earlier.

There was ample evidence of what had gone wrong — and no evidence of tampering or any sign the results were affected.

“We’re all human, and humans can make errors,” Gutiérrez told Votebeat, just past 12:30 a.m. on Wednesday, after she and several other city officials shuffled from tabulator to tabulator to export the results they had failed to retrieve the first time.

By then, the warehouse-like room was largely empty. Temporary workers had gone home. Election observers, believing the night was over, had left too. Gutiérrez, wearing a white blazer and pants and maintaining an even-keeled expression as reporters surrounded her, said the results were secure, and that the city would determine how the error occurred and how to prevent it from happening in the future.

City of Milwaukee Election Commision executive director Paulina Gutiérrez speaks to the media on election night. She assured reporters later in the night that the city error didn't jeopardize ballot security.

Her explanation did little to slow the criticism.

Within minutes, Dan Eastman, a right-wing lawyer who has filed election-related cases in Wisconsin, wrote on social media that there was no way central count could work for Milwaukee. Loomer Unleashed, a podcast hosted by right-wing pundit Laura Loomer, was more explicit: “Yeah, they cheated!”

Others, including Democrats, criticized the city without alleging wrongdoing.

“What an inauspicious ending to an otherwise quiet day,” said Ann Jacobs, a Democratic appointee on the Wisconsin Elections Commission and a regular observer at the city’s absentee ballot counting operation.

Mistakes add up for the state’s most scrutinized election operation

In November 2020, after arriving at the county clerk’s office to transmit Milwaukee’s election results, then-city election chief Claire Woodall realized that she forgot one of the facility’s 12 flash drives containing vote results at central count, a mistake some conservatives seized on as a flagrant oversight. That led her to create a checklist that the city has since used to avoid similar errors, outlining over two dozen steps for extracting, securing, and transmitting election results.

Four years later, at the next presidential election, Milwaukee election officials made the extraordinary decision to count 31,000 absentee ballots all over again because some staff didn’t lock tabulator doors in the early morning. Those panel doors, which cover the on/off switch and sometimes a slot for USB drives, were supposed to have been locked during counting.

The process Woodall created to prevent future such errors included a single official extracting results from each tabulator while accompanied by other staff. Officials appeared to have followed that process in November 2024, but not this time. Instead, different staff members downloaded the files from different tabulators and did so inconsistently, not realizing that results were not properly exported from five of the tabulators.

At the time, it appeared to take officials around 10 minutes to extract results from some tabulators, and only three minutes from others. In hindsight, the mistake was clear to Gutiérrez: Downloading results from tabulators takes more than three minutes, she told Votebeat.

“The fact that this happened five times seems more like a training issue,” Woodall told Votebeat. “Was this person trained on how to export results? Are they familiar with the machines and how you export results?”

But she also cautioned people not to get too carried away by a human error that wasn’t indicative of any fraud or fatal flaw in the election system.

Just after 1:15 a.m. Wednesday, Milwaukee County Clerk George Christenson stood beneath the bright fluorescent lights outside his courthouse office, facing roughly a dozen reporters who had stayed well past midnight waiting for the city’s results. Nearly two hours had passed since Christenson first expected those results to arrive.

Now, with the mistake finally corrected and the long election night stretching on, he told the assembled media that Milwaukee operates under constant scrutiny — and that people make mistakes.

“At the end of the day,” he continued, “what’s important is that we’re transparent, that the results are secure, and that we’re open and honest. And that’s what the City of Milwaukee election director did. She came up here and she explained it, went back, got the results, brought it back to us, and we got everything right.”

Errors undermine city efforts to build trust, lobby for policy change

Milwaukee officials have long argued that state law and limited resources make the city’s massive absentee-ballot operation harder than it needs to be. But the string of high-profile mistakes at Milwaukee’s central count operation has complicated their efforts to persuade lawmakers to give them more flexibility.

Wisconsin law prohibits municipalities from processing ballots before 7 a.m. on Election Day. That leaves Milwaukee — home to the biggest central count operation in the state — to open envelopes, verify signatures and witness addresses, and prepare tens of thousands of ballots for counting in a single day.

For years, election officials have pushed for legislation allowing municipalities to begin that process before election day. The proposal has been repeatedly stalled by the Republican-controlled legislature, largely on the basis that Milwaukee cannot be trusted with additional time. That’s despite state Rep. Scott Krug, a high-ranking Republican, having spent years behind the scenes trying to gather support for the policy.

As liberals on Tuesday suggested the pre-processing law would have helped stave off mistakes, Krug said that the city wasn’t helping its cause.

“Complete incompetence at the facility isn’t helping anything here,” he said on social media. “This was human error that could have easily been double checked before leaving the facility. More than one answer to the problem not one silver bullet.”

How officials, experts think central count operation can improve

Allowing Milwaukee to start processing absentee ballots earlier would relieve some of the pressure on Election Day. But election experts say it would not solve all the other weaknesses in an operation handling more absentee ballots than any other in the state.

Jennifer Morrell, CEO of the Elections Group, said a successful central count operation depends on three things: experienced staff, a space designed for the work, and the right equipment. Milwaukee, she said, falls short in each area compared with similarly sized cities that have invested more heavily in election administration.

The city election commission never had enough full-time staff to begin with, Morrell said, and currently has a small handful of vacancies. While central count relies on temporary employees, she added, it still needs enough experienced full-time staff to run an operation of that size.

The city also has no permanent home for its central count, meaning officials must adapt the operation to spaces that were not necessarily designed for processing tens of thousands of absentee ballots. Morrell also said the city lacks equipment that other cities of similar sizes have invested in, like a mail sorting machine. That means Milwaukee election workers sort tens of thousands of mail ballots — sometimes more than 100,000 — by hand. Madison’s sorting machine, by comparison, allows the city to sort hundreds of ballots in minutes.

Gretchen Macht, the founder of the Engineering for Democracy Institute and an associate professor of industrial and systems engineering at the University of Rhode Island, has spent the past few years assisting Gutiérrez to find more efficient ways to conduct its central count. In an interview with Votebeat, Macht invoked an old saying in both election administration and engineering: You can have something fast, accurate, or cheap, but you can only pick two.

For Milwaukee officials, sacrificing accuracy is an obvious nonstarter.

“Our number one priority is efficiency and accuracy,” Gutiérrez said, adding that she’ll never sacrifice election operations just to improve speed.

But without more money or changes to state law, there is only so much faster the city can go.

Just before midnight on Tuesday, that consequence was playing out on national television.

With more than 90% of the state’s unofficial results in and Milwaukee’s absentee ballots poised to determine the outcome of the Democratic gubernatorial primary, NBC News election analyst Steve Kornacki was waiting for the city’s numbers to arrive.

He stood flabbergasted — hands on his knees, mouth agape, eyebrows raised — in his studio as he learned about the snafu with the USB sticks.

“Are you serious?” he said.

“We’re kind of indefinitely waiting for them to get their act together here,” he said. “We waited 90 minutes for them. They did this whole procession, and then we find out there’s nothing on the sticks.”

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Federal judge blocks Trump’s efforts to restrict mail-in voting nationwide

2026-08-12T00:36:58+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Update, Aug. 12, 11:26 a.m.: This story has been updated to include comment from the Justice Department.

What happened?

A federal judge delivered another setback on Tuesday to President Donald Trump’s efforts to restrict mail-in voting during the 2026 midterms, blocking the U.S. Postal Service from taking steps to implement his election-related executive order from earlier this year.

It’s the second legal hold on the order, the first of which is currently pending before the U.S. Supreme Court. Tuesday’s ruling makes it even less likely that the executive order will be in effect for the November election.

What’s the dispute?

Trump issued an executive order in March that called on the Postal Service to create a new system to regulate who could vote by mail and directed states to create special lists of who could request absentee ballots.

The order immediately drew several lawsuits challenging the executive order as unconstitutional. The League of Women Voters and a cross-section of states filed lawsuits in early April. The Postal Service unveiled draft rules to carry out the order in May, but U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani blocked key pillars of the executive order in June as part of the case brought by the states.

At the time, Talwani issued an injunction specifically preventing the federal government from enforcing those provisions of the order against the 24 jurisdictions (23 states and the District of Columbia) that brought the lawsuit. The list includes most Democratic-led and swing states, including Arizona, California, Michigan, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

On Tuesday, Talwani issued an injunction in the separate lawsuit brought by the League of Women Voters and other nonpartisan voting groups — this one blocking the Postal Service from restricting absentee voting across the nation.

Talwani rejected the Trump administration’s argument that courts could not rule on the legality of the Postal Service process since the government has not yet set up the system.

“The court finds it prudent to review the EO now, where less than 90 days pending before the midterms and the millions of citizens who rely on mail voting require clarity as to how or whether they will vote in November,” Talwani wrote in her 27-page ruling.

“The EO—even in the absence of a final rule—is thus causing irreparable harm to Plaintiff Organizations’ members through the confusion it has engendered as to how they may vote in the fast-approaching midterm elections,” the judge wrote.

“This ruling reinforces the clear language of our Constitution: The president plays no role in our elections and he cannot turn the U.S. Postal Service into a tool for disenfranchising voters,” attorneys for the League of Women Voters said in a statement. “Millions of citizens rely on mail voting, and USPS has no authority to determine which of them should receive ballots.”

The White House also responded to the decision on Tuesday. “The entire Trump Administration will continue lawfully enacting the agenda President Trump was elected to enact – which includes the safety and security of American elections,” said spokesperson Lauren Bis.

What happens now?

The ruling throws another wrench in the Trump administration’s efforts to constrain absentee voting.

On July 27, Trump asked the U.S. Supreme Court to lift Talwani’s June injunction by arguing that the lawsuit brought by the collection of Democratic states was premature. The high court is expected to rule on that question any day now, but Tuesday’s decision lowers the stakes of that decision. Even if the Supreme Court lifts the previous injunction, the newer one will still prevent the Postal Service from implementing the executive order, at least for the time being.

The Trump administration could appeal Tuesday’s ruling, just as it did the June one. On Wednesday, the Justice Department said it was “reviewing all options” and did not say how it would respond. “We disagree with the court’s ruling,” the department said in a statement. “The Department remains confident that President Trump’s order to secure federal elections will ultimately be upheld.”

But an appeal would burn precious time. There is already less than two months left before voters start casting absentee ballots — a nearly impossible time frame for the government and elections officials to set up the new system. Appealing Tuesday’s decision to the Supreme Court could take weeks off that ticking clock.

Read more Votebeat coverage of the issue here:

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Here’s when to expect results in Wisconsin’s primary election

2026-08-10T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Tuesday, Aug. 11 is Election Day in Wisconsin, and we will soon learn the results of the closely watched Democratic primary for governor and other important primary races. But how soon, exactly?

The unofficial winners of some close races may not be known until late Tuesday, or even early on Wednesday.

But results coming in late at night aren’t indicative of problems.

Over the past several years, Wisconsin voters have come to rely more and more on absentee voting. Absentee ballots take more time to process on Election Day than in-person ballots because they have to be removed from their envelopes and officials need to check that they have valid signatures and a witness address. That can add hours to poll workers’ nights on Tuesday, especially because election officials can’t process absentee ballots until Election Day.

Here are the answers to some common questions about when to expect primary election results.

When do polls close?

Wisconsin polls open at 7 a.m. on Election Day and close at 8 p.m. Absentee votes must be received by election officials by that 8 p.m. deadline. But election officials aren’t done working when the polls close.

In-person polling sites will stay open past that time if any voters who were in line before 8 p.m. still have yet to vote. Additionally, election officials often process and count absentee ballots for hours after polls close.

When will results be released?

Municipalities start releasing vote totals shortly after polls close and continue to count throughout the night. How long it takes them to finish can depend on factors like how many ballots they have to count and how well staffed they are.

Many municipalities should be able to finish counting by around 9 p.m. But it’s common for some municipalities — like Milwaukee, the state’s largest election jurisdiction — to take a few more hours to count all their ballots and transmit their results.

Why do Wisconsin election results sometimes arrive late at night?

Wisconsin is one of only six states that don’t allow absentee ballots to be pre-processed. While other states’ officials may spend days before Election Day processing and verifying absentee ballots, Wisconsin officials have to do all of that on Election Day.

As of Friday, 235,000 absentee ballots were already returned statewide, and that number will surely grow by Tuesday. That’s a ton of ballots to go through in just one business day. So the count often has to stretch late into the night.

In addition, some municipalities, including Milwaukee, upload their absentee ballot results all at once, at the end of the night. Those tens of thousands of votes are sometimes enough to affect preliminary statewide vote totals. They’re sometimes critically referred to as “late-night ballot dumps,” but despite the lateness of when they’re reported, it’s important to remember that all those ballots were legitimately received before 8 p.m.

Where can I find Wisconsin election results?

Wisconsin’s elections are run at the municipal level, so it takes compiling votes from each of the state’s 1,850 municipalities to have a full accounting of results.

There’s no statewide system for reporting results on election night, but counties are required to post unofficial results on their websites. You can either navigate webpages county by county, or use media outlets like the Associated Press, which typically have landing pages with aggregated election results.

But regardless of what source you use, just remember that the data you see on Election Day is unofficial. It takes weeks to finalize an election.

When will election results be final?

Wisconsin has a multi-step process to certify elections. Municipalities certify their results and send them to the county. Then counties certify their results and send them to the state.

Those steps allow for weeks of double-checking: making sure the count is accurate and that the number of votes cast is equal to the number of checked-in voters.

Aug. 21 is the deadline for county clerks to send primary election results to the Wisconsin Elections Commission. The commission chair must then certify the results by Aug. 26.

When should I expect to know the winners?

Several media outlets, like the Associated Press, may project race winners on election night. That may happen even before all votes are tabulated. Those calls are based on what the outlets know about the votes cast, the political makeup of the places where votes haven’t yet been reported, and more.

Don’t confuse those race calls with official results. Only government officials can officially declare winners, and that only happens weeks afterward. But reputable media outlets’ race calls are typically an accurate projection of the eventual winner.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Prediction markets place odds on election results. Officials say they could erode public trust.

2026-08-10T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

A 2004 paper on the history of presidential election betting markets kicks off with a partial quote from the transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau’s 19th-century essay “Civil Disobedience”: “All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it.”

Not everyone agrees with that last part. And the rapid rise of online prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket are bringing that tension to the fore.

Prediction markets are websites that sell contracts that allow users to wager on event outcomes. Political examples could include which party will control the U.S. House or Senate after the midterms, for example. Typically, there are fixed payouts and the price of the contract reflects the market’s expectation of the odds of the outcome.

It isn’t yet entirely clear who regulates prediction markets and how, and markets have regularly clashed with state officials trying to rein them in. When it comes to elections, most states have laws prohibiting election betting in some form or fashion, according to a Pew Research Center analysis released in June. But many such laws predate modern prediction markets and haven’t necessarily been tested in court recently.

Kalshi recently pushed back on Wisconsin election officials after they issued an advisory about a state law dating back to the 19th century that says voters can’t cast ballots in races they’ve bet on. A Kalshi staffer said on social media the Wisconsin advisory meant election officials were engaged in “active voter suppression.”

However the legal situation shakes out, betting on elections is happening. An NBC News analysis found nearly $200 million in trading volume on midterm election outcomes on prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket, and election officials say they are concerned about how the odds on such sites could influence public trust in election outcomes — particularly when election results differ from those the markets had favored — and about creating incentives for manipulation.

“I think it is something that we are going to have to wrestle with going into the November election and forward,” said Dean Logan, the registrar-recorder and county clerk for Los Angeles County, California, the country’s single most populous election jurisdiction, during a webinar organized by the Partnership for Large Election Jurisdictions this month.

Logan said in the Los Angeles mayoral primary in June, “early election returns differed from market expectations, and that resulted in suspicion and questioning of normal ballot processing and canvassing procedures in California.” The bottom line, he said, is that “elections administration right now is very much affected by perception and misinformation, and in our field we have to be prepared to respond to that.”

‘This is all bad’

Prediction markets say their odds reflect the wisdom of the crowds and can be more accurate than polling. And these markets have been pretty good at predicting elections in the past. For example, the 2004 paper that quoted Thoreau, by economics professors Paul Rhode and Koleman Strumpf, analyzed data on election gambling between 1868 and 1940 and found that the historical markets “did a remarkable job forecasting elections in an era before scientific polling.”

But prediction markets differ from polls in important ways. Polls are representative samples of just the voters who live in the state or district in question; prediction markets are open to anyone, and the more money a person bets, the more influence they have on the odds.

And election officials, already worried about low public trust in elections, are concerned the odds on these markets could be manipulated to influence public perception of a contest or create new financial incentives to shape outcomes. Kalshi and Polymarket did not respond to requests for comment.

Jim Allen, the elections director of Delaware County, Pennsylvania, which had already banned election workers from directly betting on elections, earlier this year added a ban on using prediction markets to do so. He likened it to referees betting on the outcome of a basketball game.

The new language, he said during the PLEJ webinar, “kicked off a conversation at our poll worker training. There was one person out of 383 precincts, one person who stood up and they said, ‘Well, what if we just want to make a minor bet on what turnout will be? That’ll keep things interesting.’ And we said, ‘No, this is all bad.’”

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Green Bay clerk resigns amid investigations into duplicate ballot incidents

2026-08-07T16:27:45+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Green Bay Clerk Celestine Jeffreys has resigned amid a state investigation into how her office sent duplicate ballots to voters two elections in a row, the city announced Friday.

Jeffreys had been on administrative leave since July 9. Her resignation came shortly after the first stage of a Wisconsin Elections Commission investigation showed just how central Jeffreys was to the city sending out 152 duplicate ballots in the April election and an undisclosed number ahead of the August primary.

“We wish her the best in her future endeavors,” the city said in a brief, two-sentence statement, declining to comment further on the matter.

Stacy Menke, previously the city’s deputy clerk, is serving as interim clerk for the August primary election. The job of picking a permanent replacement will fall to Mayor Eric Genrich, although his nominee must be confirmed by the city council.

Like all municipal clerk positions in Wisconsin, the Green Bay clerk’s office is nonpartisan.

Previously the mayor’s chief of staff, Jeffreys became city clerk in January 2021. Her tenure was marked by extensive scrutiny, and it followed a turbulent year for the city’s elections.

When she entered the role, the city was under fire, especially from Republicans, for allegedly giving an election consultant too much authority over its operations during the November 2020 election. The Wisconsin Elections Commission found no wrongdoing. But that incident, in part, led to a statewide ban on outside election assistance and a particular focus from conservatives on Green Bay’s election operations.

Jeffreys’ practices repeatedly drew criticism even before the duplicate ballot incidents.

The commission in late 2023 said Jeffreys’ policy of letting a third party return absentee ballots for someone who’s sick but not disabled likely broke state law.

The following year, she admitted that for several elections, she hadn’t followed the state law requiring clerks to deactivate certain voter registrations. The law applies when postcards sent to Election Day registrants at their stated mailing addresses are returned as undeliverable. She didn’t follow that law because she wasn’t aware of it, a city attorney said on her behalf.

As officials began to probe her recent duplicate ballot mistakes, former Brown County Clerk Sandy Juno, a Republican, told the city to consider moving on from Jeffreys.

“I would hope that when you go through this process, you really evaluate how things are done, because you may not have the right person in that job,” she said.

Sam Liebert, the Wisconsin state director of All Voting is Local and a former municipal clerk, said voters need not worry about the transition coming amid the midterm elections.

“Green Bay has experienced leadership transitions before, and the systems in place are designed to ensure continuity regardless of personnel changes,” he said. “Voters in Green Bay can still vote with confidence, knowing election workers across the city remain committed to conducting free and democratic elections.”

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Antrim County clerk and her husband cleared of ‘criminal wrongdoing’ in computer case

2026-08-06T22:52:46+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Michigan’s free newsletter here.

Embattled Antrim County Clerk Victoria Bishop and her husband, a conservative talk radio host best known as Trucker Randy, won’t face charges after she left him alone with her government computer.

In February, a county maintenance worker reported that Randy Bishop was sitting in the clerk’s office unsupervised watching a public video stream of a county commission meeting on the office computer. This led to concerns that he could have used the computer to access sensitive information, including the Qualified Voter File, the central database that contains Michigan’s voter roll and can only be accessed by election officials.

Attorney General Dana Nessel said in a news release Thursday that her office found “no evidence of criminal wrongdoing” or that anyone had tried to access the QVF from that computer at that time.

The investigation found that the clerk likely did allow her husband to use her computer — which matches what they later told the Michigan State Police — but that no sensitive county files were touched, either.

Regardless, Nessel said the case “surely represents a clear misstep from adequate practices and prudent policy.”

The Bishops could not immediately be reached for comment Thursday, but their attorney, Kevin Kijewski, said via text message that “the allegations against Clerk Bishop collapsed under scrutiny.”

“Clerk Bishop remains focused on serving the people of Antrim County,” he added.

Nessel’s finding puts to bed one piece of a series of controversies that has followed Victoria Bishop for several months. Some local activists are looking to recall Bishop from office after she allegedly changed a number of voters’ statuses in the QVF earlier this year, despite that being outside of what a county clerk is permitted to do. She then lost access to the QVF entirely in June after failing to adequately respond to questions from the Michigan Bureau of Elections about her actions.

The recall effort was initially denied in its first attempt to win approval for signature gathering last month. Organizers have resubmitted their effort, though, and it is next scheduled to go before the Board of State Canvassers on Aug. 17, according to filings organizers shared with Votebeat.

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

Fracas over reducing Tarrant County polling locations highlights public distrust over how the county runs elections

2026-08-06T09:45:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

Tuesday’s chaotic public meeting over the number of voting sites in Tarrant County for the upcoming November election highlighted public distrust in election administration decisions and the people making them in the state’s most populous purple county, experts and voting rights advocates said.

Hundreds of people showed up at the Tarrant County Commissioners Court meeting to oppose a proposal to significantly reduce the number of polling sites on Election Day, from 316 used in the 2022 midterm elections to 176. At least one person, a former Democratic state representative, was arrested after Tim O’Hare, the county’s executive and a Republican, kicked everyone out of the chambers, saying that people clapping and speaking loudly were disruptive.

O’Hare also called multiple recesses during the meeting, prolonging it as people waited to speak.

Speaker after speaker described the effort to reduce the number of locations as the latest in a series of efforts by O’Hare and the majority-Republican commissioners’ court to make it harder for residents to vote, something commissioners said wasn’t true. O’Hare and Commissioner Manny Ramirez, also a Republican, are both on the ballot in November.

“People are suspicious. We don’t trust them to perform their duties in a way that is helping the voters or serving the voters of Tarrant County,” said Janet Mattern, president of the League of Women Voters of Tarrant County. “We see them more as self-serving of themselves and trying to keep themselves in power.”

However, the commissioners —– both Republicans and Democrats — said at the meeting that they didn’t suggest the plan.

“The notion or the idea that this is some conspiracy … is utter and complete and total nonsense,” O’Hare, who did not respond to requests for comment, said.

The proposal came from Tarrant County’s elections administrator, Clint Ludwig, whose role is nonpartisan, and who said the reduction in locations was aimed at increasing efficiency and saving money, since the county now lets voters go to any polling location rather than a single assigned site. Ludwig, who didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, said at the meeting the proposal would let him eliminate some sites that serve very few people. “Instead of having two polling locations, now you can have one,” he said.

The commissioners court ultimately tabled the vote, telling Ludwig the number of voting sites he proposed was too low and to return after revising the proposal to include a larger number of sites.

Especially with critical U.S. Senate and gubernatorial races on the ballot in Texas this November, the political stakes are extraordinarily high in swing counties like Tarrant, and this week’s fracas over the number of voting sites shows how closely residents — and politicians — are monitoring election administration plans there.

Democratic lawmakers, state Rep. Vikki Goodwin , who is running for lieutenant governor, and state Sen. Nathan Johnson, who is running for Texas attorney general, hosted a rally Tuesday ahead of the meeting to speak against the county’s proposal to reduce the voting sites. After the commissioners court meeting, Goodwin sent out a fundraising email about it. “Tarrant is the third largest (and most competitive) county in Texas,” she wrote. “The GOP knows their days are numbered, so they decided holding power was worth more than your ballot.”

Some experts say what happened in Tarrant on Tuesday shows how politicized the environment has become in Texas, and why the role of nonpartisan election administrators is key.

But that faith in independent election administration “sometimes falls away when you have this hyperpartisan environment where people aren’t sure if they can trust that the elections are going to be fairly run if it’s run by a party that is in power and is on the other side of that voter’s preferences,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston.

Tarrant County officials have been accused of partisan motives for election administration decisions

One by one over six hours on Tuesday, people went up to the microphone, many addressing O’Hare directly.

“You could be honest. You could just go ahead and say that you are closing these election polling locations because you don’t want people to vote. It’s not about saving money,” one resident said.

Others carried signs that read “We will vote u out!”

This was the latest in a series of controversial election administration issues in Tarrant. In 2024, O’Hare unsuccessfully pushed to close polling locations on college campuses, again drawing allegations of partisanship. That same year, O’Hare and the three other Republican commissioners on the court also cut funding to provide free bus rides to the polls for low-income residents.

Last summer, the commissioners, led by O’Hare, voted along party lines to redraw county precinct lines midcycle, a rare move that followed state Republicans’ choice to also redraw congressional district lines mid-decade. O’Hare said the goal of the redrawn precinct maps was to benefit Republican candidates. And in the fall, the court also voted along party lines to reduce the number of available polling locations.

“The decisions the commissioners have made over the past two years have really eroded that sense of trust from the community,” said Nina Oishi, a voting rights attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project. Oishi also raised concerns about the way the commissioners court has handled public meetings, such as restricting people’s speaking time to one minute, kicking people out of the chambers, and arrests.

“They are the residents. They are supposed to be the ones getting to make their voices heard, and it just never feels that way there.”

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Natalia is based in Corpus Christi. Contact her at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Despite concerns, Department of Justice monitors kept a low profile in Michigan primary

2026-08-05T05:30:13+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Michigan’s free newsletter here.

Despite fears that federal monitors from the U.S. Department of Justice might in some way disrupt Michigan’s primary election, officials from around the state say things went smoothly.

Federal monitors — who are typically attorneys employed by the U.S. Department of Justice — were stationed in Detroit, Lansing, East Lansing, and Hamtramck on Tuesday.

The Department of Justice, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, has routinely sent observers to monitor elections in Michigan and other states to ensure voters are able to cast ballots freely. However, many people were more suspicious of their motives this year given President Donald Trump’s preoccupation with election administration and Michigan Republicans’ calls for “comprehensive oversight” of the state’s elections.

According to Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, the monitors’ mandate this year was to root out “problems with the integrity of elections.” If they found any, it wasn’t immediately clear Tuesday.

Instead, election officials said monitors were polite and unobtrusive as they moved from one polling place to the next, asking a few questions about assistance technology designs for voters with disabilities and provisional ballots. Importantly, officials Votebeat spoke with on Tuesday said monitors did not interfere with election proceedings.

“There were no real issues, and we were pleased,” Daniel Baxter, Detroit’s director of elections, said after polls closed.

Two monitors, seen at Detroit’s Bagley Elementary School on Tuesday afternoon, declined to take questions from Votebeat. They sat in the middle of a small gymnasium that held multiple precincts and watched the room silently before politely saying goodbye to poll workers on their way out.

Other polling places visited by federal monitors had similar experiences. Pamela Phelps, chair of a precinct in Hamtramck, told Votebeat that the monitors who visited her polling place earlier in the day were “really nice.”

“They introduced themselves and told us they were from Washington,” Phelps said. “They sat back there in their spots, and they had no problems.”

Ingham County Clerk Barb Byrum said that, when the monitors were first announced, no one was quite sure what to expect.

The Department of Justice’s letters informing Detroit, Lansing, and East Lansing about the monitors also requested documents such as such as precinct lists, training materials, and maps from them and alleged that the cities did not comply with federal election law during the 2024 presidential election, leading to long lines. Officials from those communities have denied the allegations.

“The fact that the DOJ felt it was necessary in the first place, it served to cast doubt,” Byrum said of the monitors in her county, which includes parts of Lansing and East Lansing. “Now, tomorrow, they can speak with authority having been here — is that going to lend credit to future claims, even when they’re nonsense?”

Other officials, though, were reassured by how uneventful the primary was. Kim Bush, a spokesperson for the Michigan attorney general’s office, said that, as the state looks ahead to the November election, she didn’t “see any concerns” based on monitors’ behavior Tuesday.

Michigan was not the only state to be visited by federal monitors this summer. The Department of Justice also sent monitors to observe Arizona’s primary, which took place on July 21. They visited three counties in the state, including Maricopa — a key swing jurisdiction that encompasses Phoenix, the state’s most populous city.

There, like in Michigan, the visits from federal monitors were uneventful.

Perhaps most importantly, voters and poll workers said the monitors didn’t appear to scare anyone away. Bill Hunts, a voter on Detroit’s west side, said that he had heard about the monitors but still showed up to vote because he wanted his voice heard.

“I need a say,” he said. “And I like voting.”

Sasha Hupka contributed reporting.

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

Nonpartisan groups can resume registering newly naturalized citizens to vote at USCIS sites

2026-08-04T20:28:37+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

What happened?

A federal judge on Monday temporarily blocked a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services rule that had prohibited the League of Women Voters and other groups from registering voters at naturalization ceremonies held at the agency’s offices.

In his ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Adam Abelson said the government’s ban was a potential free speech violation under the First Amendment and that it likely had a discriminatory intent that breaches Fifth Amendment protections.

In a statement, League of Women Voters CEO Celina Stewart celebrated the decision and emphasized the organization’s history of supporting new citizens as they prepared to vote.

“Today’s ruling protects that fundamental democratic principle, and we will continue fighting to ensure every eligible voter can participate freely and fully in our democracy,” she said.

What’s the dispute?

USCIS announced in August 2025 that only state and local election officials can register new citizens to vote at ceremonies held at the agency’s facilities. In issuing the ban, the agency cited the “administrative burden” it faced in making sure that nongovernmental organizations providing those services were truly nonpartisan.

The League of Women Voters and several of its local chapters, along with the Greater New Orleans chapter of the National Council of Jewish Women, filed a lawsuit in November 2025, alleging that the federal rule violated their constitutional rights and a federal law related to agency rulemaking.

The USCIS rule doesn’t apply to naturalization ceremonies held at federal courthouses, so much of the LWV’s work has continued. But the ban on registering people at USCIS facilities caused the voting rights group to cancel 166 planned events where members and volunteers “planned to register roughly 10,000 new voters,” according to the November complaint.

The LWV said in court filings that it has registered more people at naturalization ceremonies than any other organization.

In the complaint, the LWV points out that many state and local election officials — who would still be allowed to register voters at USCIS facilities under the ban — are elected in partisan races, and that the government hasn’t shown any evidence of the group being partisan.

But the group’s core argument is that the ban violates its First Amendment rights to free speech and freedom of assembly in public places. It also claims that the USCIS violated a federal law by creating the rule without an opportunity for public comment, and that the rule itself is “arbitrary and capricious.”

The League “made a very strong showing” that it’ll prevail on the merits of its argument that the ban unconstitutionally restricts its free speech rights, Abelson wrote in the ruling.

Separately, the National Council of Jewish Women argued that the ban was a Fifth Amendment violation because it was put in place with discriminatory intent.

Highlighting federal officials’ recent critical statements about immigration and the USCIS decision to replace the term “naturalization candidate” with “alien” in its materials, Abelson said that a discriminatory intent was likely a motivating factor for the ban.

What happens now?

The court case is likely to continue. The Monday ruling was preliminary, and the federal government could appeal. A USCIS spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Read more Votebeat coverage about the ban on voter registration at some naturalization ceremonies here:

Some of America’s newest citizens may face an extra barrier to the ballot box Sept. 15, 2025

Clarification, Aug. 5: This article has been updated to specify that USCIS announced its ban on nonprofit groups at naturalization ceremonies held at the agency’s facilities last August.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Here’s when to expect results in Michigan’s primary election

2026-08-04T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Michigan’s free newsletter here.

With primary races for the U.S. Senate, governor, and more going down to the wire, everyone is going to be watching Michigan on Tuesday.

But it might take a while to know the actual winners, particularly in close races.

Michigan counts its ballots as fast or faster than a lot of other swing states. And the state has done a lot in recent years to count even faster — for instance, by allowing people to vote early in person and letting election officials process absentee ballots before Election Day.

Despite concerns, Department of Justice monitors kept a low profile in Michigan primary

Slowdowns in reporting election results can give rise to unfounded speculation about improprieties in the count. Taking time to release results, though, isn’t a sign that anything is wrong — it’s a byproduct of the fact that running elections is complicated and involves many steps, which often take time to get right.

Here’s what to know about when to expect results from Michigan’s primary election.

When do polls close?

Polls open at 7 a.m. and close at 8 p.m. local time. The vast majority of Michigan voters are in the Eastern Time Zone, but four counties in the Upper Peninsula use Central Time instead.

Those counties — Dickinson, Gogebic, Iron, and Menominee — will not finish voting until 9 p.m. Eastern Time. Those counties have only a few thousand voters, but no statewide winners will be declared until they’ve had a chance to weigh in.

When do they start counting ballots?

Ballots are actually already being processed, although no numbers will be run until polls close.

Michigan law allows election officials to pre-process absentee ballots — basically, do everything needed to verify them and prepare them for counting — before election night. Officials can verify that the signature on the ballot envelope matches what’s on file, open the envelope, verify they have the correct ballot, and even put the ballot into a tabulator where it will eventually be counted. The key is that they can’t actually hit the button to tabulate until after polls close.

Small towns can pre-process absentee ballots starting the Monday before the election, while larger communities — anywhere with more than 5,000 people — can start eight days before the election.

Pre-processing allows clerks to get a handle on their ballots before the stressors of Election Day while also allowing more absentee ballots to be included in initial vote reports. That can help prevent large quantities of absentee ballots getting reported late in the evening, which can significantly change candidates’ vote totals. In the past, these types of “ballot dumps” have led to inaccurate claims of ballot box stuffing.

Lots of people still turn in their absentee ballots on Election Day, so not all of them can be processed ahead of time. And not every clerk chooses to pre-process ballots, as some communities don’t have the manpower to do that on top of administering early voting. But where it happens, it does give clerks a head start. For example, during the 2024 primary, Detroit was able to report results from more than 80% of its absentee ballots by 10:30 p.m. on Election Day.

Where do I find Michigan election results?

The secretary of state’s office will post election results on its website on Tuesday night as it receives them. However, this will probably be one of the slowest ways to get results.

Michigan’s elections are highly decentralized, meaning each township and city clerk (all 1,600 of them across the state) is running their own election. Each of those municipal clerks reports their community’s results to a county clerk, who aggregates the information and passes it on to the state.

But the state doesn’t get any information from a county until all that county’s precincts are in and fully reported, meaning the state’s results page is the last to get updated.

Some local clerks will post their results on their websites, and many of the bigger counties will as well. Speed can vary widely on those updates, though. Some clerks prefer to upload all their results at once, while others might start uploading on a regular schedule and slow down as the evening goes on.

Lots of media outlets will also aggregate election results from around the state. Those results, based on what local and county officials have shared, are usually the fastest, but they are far from the final word.

When will election results be final?

Official results in local races come when the election is certified by county groups known as boards of canvassers. Each county board is made up of two Democrats and two Republicans.

They review pollbooks and other materials from the election, tabulate write-in votes, and verify the final numbers are accurate. The deadline for local canvassers to finish that work is two weeks after the election, which for the primary is Aug. 18.

For statewide and federal races, the Board of State Canvassers does much of the same work. Their deadline for the primary is Aug. 24.

All canvassers, regardless of what level they work at, are obligated by law to confirm the results of the election. If they don’t, they open themselves to potential criminal penalties and even civil lawsuits.

When should I expect to know the winners?

Media outlets may call winners in many races on election night. Reputable outlets, such as the Associated Press, make calls based on what they know about where results haven’t come in yet, the voting histories from counties outstanding, and more.

However, media calls don’t have the force of law; winners aren’t truly winners until election results are made official by the canvassers. Media outlets will also sometimes decline to call races if they are extremely tight. As a general rule of thumb, the closer an election is, the longer it will take to call.

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

Green Bay explains how voters got sent multiple absentee ballots in two straight elections

2026-08-03T19:49:50+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Green Bay Clerk Celestine Jeffreys sent some voters multiple ballots for the August primary after she reprinted absentee envelope labels that she mistakenly thought were missing from an outgoing batch of ballots, the city said in a Friday email to the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

The email was the first of two sets of documents that the commission ordered the city to provide after the city sent duplicate ballots to voters two elections in a row. The commission also asked the city for an explanation by Aug. 14 on how it will prevent sending duplicate ballots in the future.

The document sheds light on how the city sent out duplicate ballots in both the April Supreme Court election and the August partisan primary. City officials had already detailed the breakdowns that led to the first error, but until now it was unclear just how central Jeffreys was to the mistake.

Still, the explanations fell short to at least one member of WEC.

“I don’t know that it answers the questions of how on earth this happened.” Ann Jacobs, a Democratic commissioner, told Votebeat.

Jeffreys, whose position is nonpartisan, was placed on administrative leave on July 9. Stacy Menke, previously the city’s deputy clerk, is serving as interim clerk for the August election. City spokesperson Michael Bergman said city officials won’t be providing additional comments on the documents at this time.

Green Bay sent first duplicate ballots in March

The first time Green Bay sent out duplicate absentee ballots was in March, when 152 voters received multiple absentee ballots for the April 7 state Supreme Court election. Although the incident sparked concerns about double voting, only one voter returned two ballots, and the city voided them.

City officials largely explained the causes of this error in response to an administrative complaint filed in April with the election commission. But Friday’s email revealed Jeffreys’ central role.

Typically, after mailing labels — featuring voters’ names and addresses — are placed on absentee envelopes, Green Bay election officials put a copy of regular paper with the same label information in a folder to be retained for recordkeeping purposes, Logan Wood, an attorney for Jeffreys, said in an April response to the complaint.

In March, Jeffreys photocopied a printed batch from regular paper copies to sheet labels and then gave them to a staff member to be placed into a ballot packet assembly, City Attorney Lacey Cochart wrote in Friday’s email.

But for the duplicated batch of labels, Jeffreys either failed to clip the original printing and the sheet labels together before giving it to the staff member, resulting in the paper copy of the labels not being filed in the right place, or for some reason reprinted the entire batch without inquiring with staff, Cochart said.

She then passed the duplicate labels for the second time to another staff member, Cochart said.

The April explanation of the error, which Wood filed on behalf of Jeffreys, said an election worker thought the batch hadn’t been completed and duplicated it. The latest explanation makes clear that Jeffreys was that election worker.

Jacobs said she didn’t understand why city officials were printing labels onto regular paper and then photocopying them rather than printing them directly onto labels.

Second error resulted from another Jeffreys oversight

The second error happened after Green Bay officials, preparing to send out absentee ballots for the Aug. 11 primary, sent a document containing the mailing labels for 1,734 voters to a printing shop in late June. After Jeffreys reviewed the labels the shop sent back, she came to believe some were missing Cochart said.

It’s unclear why Jeffreys thought the labels were missing or whether any actually were. But, either way, she reprinted the labels she believed to be missing directly from the PDF that was sent to the printing shop. That reprinting was the source of the duplicate ballots, Cochart said.

It remains unknown how many voters received duplicate ballots as a result of the second error. Jeffreys didn’t respond to a request for comment.

In both March and June, Jeffreys appeared to sidestep safeguards built into WisVote, the state’s voter registration database and election management system, to prevent the sending of duplicate ballots. WisVote does not allow officials to generate duplicate labels, but it doesn’t prevent someone from copying or reprinting an already-generated physical or digital label sheet. Cochart’s email confirmed that WisVote was the only software used to generate the labels.

Asked whether the latest batch of documents reveal that the city was using WisVote in a way it was not intended to be used, Jacobs said, “It’s hard to say because it’s really not clear what they’re saying.”

Don Millis, the Republican chair of WEC, had asked the city for a plan detailing how it will ensure that the voters mailed duplicate ballots won’t vote twice. The city’s response to that request was relatively brief. It outlined that election officials should contact the clerk and the voter if they discover a duplicate ballot.

Millis didn’t respond to a request for comment on Friday.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Trump is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to allow new mail ballot restrictions in the 2026 midterms

2026-08-03T11:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Elections are back before the U.S. Supreme Court: The Trump administration is asking the justices to quickly lift an order blocking its efforts to put new restrictions on mail-in voting for the fast-approaching midterm elections.

It’s unclear how the justices will rule, but the case focuses on a narrow question of whether or not the lower courts issued premature rulings rather than the broader questions about the legality of the executive order.

But no matter what the court decides this time, a series of practical and legal challenges make it increasingly unlikely that the federal government can impose new rules giving the U.S. Postal Service the power to block Americans from voting by mail in November’s elections.

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the justice designated to handle emergency appeals from the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, ordered the plaintiff states to respond by Monday to the Trump administration’s filing, and a decision could come any time after that. But there are already fewer than 100 days left until the election, and the U.S. Postal Service itself said in July court filings that it is running out of time to carry out the changes the president is demanding in time for this election.

The heart of the matter is President Donald Trump’s March 2026 executive order, which attempts to restrict mail-in voting by requiring creation of a series of lists of people eligible to vote, including one it requires the U.S. Postal Service to secure from states listing all voters eligible to use mail ballots. The order attempts to give the postal service unprecedented new power to prevent delivery of mail ballots to anyone who is not on these lists.

States, nonprofit groups, and Democratic party committees quickly sued over the order, which they argued was unconstitutional because the president has no authority over elections. Federal courts have since issued conflicting orders on the question of whether blocking major provisions would be premature because government agencies hadn’t yet taken final action to carry out Trump’s orders.

A judge in federal court in Washington, D.C. declined to block the challenged provisions, but last month, in a case brought by states, a federal judge in Massachusetts prevented the Trump administration from moving ahead with the plans, putting the whole issue on hold. Separate appeals courts have now upheld both rulings, leaving the Massachusetts injunction in place for now, which is what prompted the Trump administration to file its emergency appeal last week with the Supreme Court.

Still, “I think everyone agrees that it’s not going to be implemented for 2026,” said Derek Muller, an elections specialist at the University of Notre Dame Law School. “The logistics are so horrific.”

To be clear, the issue the court is now being asked to decide isn’t about the legal merits of the executive order itself, or whether Trump has the authority to issue it. The Trump administration is arguing that the federal courts blocked the executive order prematurely because the government is still drafting the rules, which haven’t been finalized. Until the rules are final, the Trump administration argues, the states can’t prove that there is any harm that should be blocked by the courts, or that agencies won’t carry out the order in a way that complies with the law.

The Massachusetts court’s injunction “is especially indefensible because the agencies are still deliberating over how (if at all) to implement the Order, yet the district court preemptively decided that whatever the agencies may choose to do will necessarily be unlawful,” the Trump administration argued in its 116-page filing.

That’s essentially what the other panel of judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia concluded in a ruling Tuesday when it upheld a lower court’s decision not to block the executive order — though the plaintiffs in that case are nonprofit groups and party committees rather than states.

“The scope of the issues at play” before the Supreme Court “are really, really narrow,” said Danielle Lang, vice president for voting rights and rule of law at the Campaign Legal Center, one of the lawyers involved in bringing the Washington, D.C. case.

And like Muller, Lang said it appears unlikely that the government would have the time to push through the changes before November.

“The kinds of dramatic changes they are asking for in election administration are not the kinds of things that you get done in a few months’ time,” Lang said. “As a practical reality, I don’t think they can do this in any non-chaotic way.”

If the Supreme Court were to side with the Trump administration this time, an army of lawyers across the country is prepared to again ask the courts to step in as soon as the new rules are finalized.

Even the appeals court judges in Washington that agreed the legal challenges were premature also suggested that they had some qualms about the executive order.

“Plaintiffs have identified a number of serious questions concerning the lawfulness of proposed actions if implemented on the threshold of the upcoming federal election,” the court said in its ruling.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Texas confirms some flagged as potential noncitizens on voter rolls had provided DPS proof of citizenship

2026-07-30T19:11:21+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

Election officials across the state should immediately reinstate some voters who were incorrectly flagged as potential noncitizens through a federal program, the Texas Secretary of State’s Office told county officials Wednesday.

Christina Adkins, the state elections director, told county officials the state had reviewed Texas Department of Public Safety records confirming the citizenship of some of the 2,724 registered voters who were flagged as potential noncitizens, according to an audio recording of her comments obtained by Votebeat and The Texas Tribune, as well as election officials who heard them. The voters were flagged after the state checked its voter roll through a federal program called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, used to verify the citizenship of people registered to vote.

Adkins said the state is still working through the data and that she couldn’t yet say how many of the 2,724 people had provided proof of citizenship to DPS and should thus be reinstated if they were already removed from the voter roll. She characterized SAVE as having “some inaccurate information” but added that “most of the data that we got out of SAVE was consistent with what DPS had.”

According to election officials, the secretary of state’s office said it plans in the coming days to send voter registrars additional information from DPS showing some of the flagged registered voters had in fact provided proof of citizenship to DPS while registering to vote or obtaining a driver’s license or state ID.

There isn’t yet an exact number of how many U.S. citizens’ registrations were actually canceled or how many were canceled in total by counties after being flagged by SAVE, said Kristin Miles, the Bastrop County elections administrator and president of the Texas Association of County Election Officials.

“Counties are following appropriate list maintenance procedures under Texas law, and will ensure eligible voters whose registrations were cancelled are reinstated, and that only U.S. citizens remain on the voter rolls,” Miles said in an emailed statement.

The Texas Secretary of State’s Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

According to the audio recording of the meeting with election officials, Adkins told election officials that once they receive the new information and review it, the state believes reinstating voters who had provided proof is “a very important thing to do to make sure that these individuals are not further impacted now that we have more information at our disposal.”

The state used a federal tool to flag potential noncitizens on the voter rolls

Texas officials last fall sent counties information on the 2,724 potential noncitizens generated by checking the state’s voter roll of more than 18 million registered voters through SAVE, something the Trump administration has vigorously urged all states to do since it overhauled SAVE shortly after Trump came back into office last January.

Counties mailed notices asking those registrants to provide documented proof of citizenship.

Some voters responded to the letters from voter registrars and confirmed they were U.S. citizens, although a total number of how many is not yet available. The registrations of voters who did not respond to notices within 30 days were canceled. It isn’t clear how many were confirmed to be noncitizens. In some counties, officials said some people on the list had submitted an application to their local county voter registrar that accurately noted they were not U.S. citizens but were nonetheless added to the voter roll in error by county officials, and those have since been removed.

Under state law, if a voter’s registration is canceled for failing to respond to a request for proof of citizenship, their registration can be immediately reinstated by providing proof of U.S. citizenship to an elections office or at a polling location. The new information by DPS would immediately trigger the reinstatement without requiring further action from the voter.

Through their investigations, election officials also found that hundreds of the flagged voters had registered through DPS. The agency requires proof of citizenship or proof of lawful presence, such as a work visa or green card, to obtain a state driver’s license or state ID, and keeps copies of such documentation on file.

The Texas Secretary of State’s Office in December told Votebeat and the Tribune that it did not initially check the registrants flagged as potential noncitizens against DPS’ records before sending the list to county election officials to investigate. That decision prompted a March lawsuit from voting rights groups and some Texas voters who said the state should have done so. The lawsuit is still pending in federal court.

Votebeat reported that the secretary of state’s office later asked DPS to check the list of 2,724 potential noncitizens flagged by the SAVE program against its records to verify whether any of them had already provided proof of citizenship. Email communications between secretary of state and DPS officials obtained by Votebeat via a public records request show the secretary of state’s office made the request on May 4, with DPS completing its review June 16.

Election officials in multiple states have raised questions about SAVE’s accuracy

Experts and election officials have raised concerns about the SAVE program’s accuracy, and officials in multiple states have said it incorrectly flagged at least some citizens.

In April, former Secretary of State Jane Nelson sent a letter to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services raising concerns about the accuracy of the SAVE program after county election officials found citizens had been wrongly flagged as noncitizens. Adkins in May also told county officials that her office had found “discrepancies” with the data, though she stressed that it was generally fairly accurate.

States’ use of the revamped SAVE tool is currently in limbo in the wake of multiple court rulings. In June, a federal judge blocked the overhaul of the SAVE program, saying it violated privacy and voting rights. That ruling prompted the Trump administration to pause certain features in the SAVE system to comply. However, last month a different federal judge ordered Homeland Security to restore access to the revamped system for four states — Florida, Ohio, Iowa and Indiana — due to an earlier settlement agreement.

The rulings also do not prevent Texas or other states that previously used the revamped program from continuing to investigate the status of any potential noncitizens it flagged on the voter roll.

The Trump administration has focused intently on searching for noncitizen voters. The Department of Justice asked all 50 states to turn over their voter rolls, seeking discrepancies and ineligible voters, and sued 30 states that declined to do so. Federal judges have so far ruled against the department in 18 of those cases.

Texas, though, is among the states that voluntarily agreed to share its unredacted list of more than 18 million registered voters, including personal information such as dates of birth, driver license numbers and partial Social Security numbers.

In April, at least three Texas counties received subpoenas from DOJ seeking individuals’ voter registration information and voting history.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Natalia is based in Corpus Christi. Contact her at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Pennsylvania asks Trump admin how it identified potential noncitizens registered to vote

2026-07-30T15:47:22+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

Update, July 31, 8:52 a.m.: This story has been updated to include comment from the Department of Homeland Security.

Pennsylvania state officials are pushing back on the Trump administration’s claim that there may be more than 14,000 potential noncitizens registered to vote in the state.

In a letter sent Wednesday to U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt said the federal government has not disclosed the methodology or data source it used to identify the noncitizens.

Schmidt also pointed out gaps in a program that the Department of Homeland Security uses to identify noncitizens.

“As you know, past analyses of voter lists have relied on faulty methodologies that can lead to inaccurate results and false claims about the citizenship status of eligible voters,” Schmidt wrote. “In fact, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services official who oversees [the program] has ‘acknowledged that the system can’t always find the most current citizenship information for people not born in the U.S.’”

Earlier this month, President Donald Trump gave a primetime address in which he made several allegations of foreign election interference and issues with the nation’s voting systems. One of his claims was that the Department of Homeland Security had identified more than 250,000 noncitizens on the voter rolls of California, New Jersey, Nevada, and Pennsylvania.

In a letter to Schmidt the same day, Mullin wrote that a “preliminary review” had revealed “there may be as many as 14,576 non-citizens registered to vote in Pennsylvania.” A spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Department of State said Thursday that the federal government still has not shared the actual list of those people.

The Department of Homeland Security has not publicly disclosed, or disclosed to the other three states, precisely how it identified the potential noncitizen registrants. Letters to the states said the department used publicly available information but matched some of the potential noncitizens using Social Security numbers. All four states have refused to give the federal government versions of their voter rolls containing that information, saying state law prohibits them from disclosing it.

In a statement to Votebeat, the Department of Homeland Security declined to explain its methods but offered a pointed response to Schmidt’s letter. “If there are doubts, these officials should pick up the phone, not run to the press. Our offer to help them verify their voter rolls still stands,” a spokesperson said. “We look forward to working with them to ensure only Americans are electing America’s leaders.”

The system Schmidt was referring to — the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, program — has erroneously flagged some citizens as ineligible to vote. A judge recently blocked an overhaul of the program, citing in part the accuracy issues.

Dion Nissenbaum contributed reporting.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

New ballot drop-off option proves popular in primary, potentially leading to faster election results

2026-07-30T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Arizona’s free newsletter here.

Correction, July 31: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that poll workers in Pima County had to sift through mail ballots on primary night to separate ID-verified ones from those in need of signature verification. The story has been updated to reflect that staffers had to do so during early voting, not on primary night.

When Arizonans went to the polls last week for the state primary election, they made their preferences clear about more than just the candidates: They also really liked the option to get their mail ballots counted faster by showing identification.

More than 6,000 voters used the new, optional procedure in Pima County — about half of the voters who dropped off their ballots at the polls on Election Day, per county records. In Maricopa County, the state’s most populous, officials said about 23,000 voters, or 30% of those who dropped off ballots on Election Day, opted to show ID to verify their mail ballots.

Those numbers represent a successful debut for the procedure, which Republicans have pushed as a way to speed up election results. Indeed, Maricopa County finished counting mail ballots significantly faster than usual, which officials credited in part to the change.

But it remains to be seen whether ID verification is a long-term fix for Arizona’s relatively slow vote count. Officials in at least one county, Pima, said kinks remained to be worked out with the process. Plus, it’s unclear whether the option will be as popular in November.

How the new option leads to faster election results

Arizona voters have long had the option of dropping off their mail ballots at polling places. But unlike voters who cast ballots in person, they don’t have to show an ID to verify their identity or wait in line at the polls.

Instead, they just have to sign their ballot envelope and place it in a secure box at the polling place. Election officials later compare that signature to signatures the voter has on file before counting their vote.

But that process can be time-consuming. As a result, it often takes days to verify and count the thousands of mail ballots — often called “late earlies” — that are dropped off on or shortly before Election Day. The wait has caused increasing consternation as the state has morphed into a key election battleground, with major races sometimes separated by just hundreds of votes.

So, in 2024, as state lawmakers sought to find compromise on legislation to adjust election dates, Republicans pushed to require county officials to offer a new option. Now, voters can wait in line and show a driver’s license, passport, or similar form of ID when dropping off their ballots, allowing them to bypass the signature verification process.

Last week’s primary was the first big test of the new option, and with fewer ballots needing to be signature-verified, that process took less time than usual. Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap, a Republican, announced around 8 a.m. on Wednesday, July 22 — just 13 hours after polls closed — that his staff had completed signature verification. His office said in a statement that it marked “an unprecedented milestone” and set “a new benchmark for the speed and efficiency of signature verification during a primary election.”

The statement attributed the improvement to “enhanced processes, technology improvements, and the dedication of our trained staff.” But Republican Kate Brophy McGee, chair of the county’s board of supervisors, said the ID-verify option also helped speed things up.

“This significantly reduced the number of early ballots requiring signature verification in the days after the election,” she said in a statement.

The county’s elections department also closely coordinated its ballot preparation and tabulation processes, and was fully done counting 99% of ballots as of Wednesday evening. Plus, the primary saw relatively low turnout statewide.

Judy Keane, a spokesperson for Heap, declined to respond to questions from Votebeat about how the ID-verify option contributed to the faster-than-usual signature verification. She said signature verification metrics would be available following the county’s canvass of election results on Aug. 3.

In Pima County, Democratic Recorder Gabriella Cázares-Kelly said in a statement to Votebeat that workers are capable of verifying about 2,500 to 3,500 signatures in an hour, depending on staffing levels. In last week’s primary, her office finished signature verification at about 2 p.m. on Wednesday. She estimated that it would have taken staff an additional hour and a half to signature-verify ballots from voters who opted into the ID-verify process on Election Day.

Cázares-Kelly said the number of ID-verified ballots in the primary wasn’t significant enough to truly impact her office, adding that the new procedure also slowed some ballot intake processes.

But her county saw more than 44,000 late early ballots in the 2022 general election. If that number — and the ID-verify option’s popularity — holds true this year, the new process could stand to save her team up to nine hours of signature verification. The potential time savings is much larger in Maricopa County, which saw a record 290,000 late earlies dropped at the polls in 2022.

Election official says there are still kinks to work out

Despite the numbers, Cázares-Kelly raised a host of concerns with the ID verification process for mail ballots.

She said the procedure, created without “meaningful input” from election officials across the state, created additional steps that delayed ballot processing and ultimately did not save her office time. For instance, because Pima County offered just one ballot drop box per polling place for mail ballots during early voting, workers had to sift through those ballots to separate ID-verified ones from those in need of signature verification.

Cázares-Kelly declined to respond to questions from Votebeat about how much time workers lost to that task and whether the issue could be mitigated by implementing a second ballot drop box for ID-verified ballots at the polls.

Cázares-Kelly said the new process also created training and communication challenges. She said her office received many complaints when poll workers began approaching voters about the ID-verify option in small, local elections earlier in the year.

“Some felt singled out, discriminated against,” she said, adding that her team eventually created signage and directed workers not to proactively talk to voters about the new option. “Some voters wondered why they were asked, while others were allowed to simply drop off their ballots. Some said they were made to feel as if it were mandatory; several alleged racial discrimination.”

Meanwhile, other staffers were confused when voters came into the polls requesting that they “signature-verify” their ballots.

“This is a specific process, which is only conducted by our highly trained signature verification staff,” Cázares-Kelly said. “We will be training staff to interpret that language as a request to ID-verify in the next election cycle.”

Will ID verification be as popular in November?

There are also questions about whether the new option’s popularity in the primary will translate to the general election.

Lines were minimal to nonexistent at the polls during last week’s primary. But in higher-turnout elections, lines of up to an hour are not uncommon at polling locations in the state’s largest cities. It’s unclear whether voters will be as enthusiastic about ID-verifying their ballots if they have to wait in long lines to do so.

State Rep. Alex Kolodin, one of the lead architects of the new option and the GOP nominee for secretary of state, did not respond to requests for comment on the process’ primary debut and how it might perform in the fall.

But Republican Stephen Richer, Maricopa County’s former recorder, was doubtful. “Remains to be seen if it will be easy in November when more people vote and lines will be longer,” he wrote in an email.

Primary data suggests voter interest in the option may also hinge on decisions by county officials. In Pima County, where a significantly larger share of voters opted to ID-verify their ballots, officials offered two separate lines at the polls on Election Day — one for in-person voters, and one for those ID-verifying their mail ballots. Maricopa County offered only one line for all voters on Election Day, though officials there used on-site tabulators to count ID-verified ballots immediately.

Still, Richer said if the option remained popular in November, it could help “materially” with speeding up counting and race calls — although he noted voters and politicos will still have to wait if races are exceptionally close.

“The statistical models used by the networks are quicker to call results the more ballots they have in,” wrote Richer, now an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. “So the sooner you get to 80, 85, 90, 95 percent, the sooner you can call races, even closer ones.”

Sasha Hupka is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Sasha at shupka@votebeat.org.

Amid USPS delays, Wisconsin officials tell voters to mail their ballots ASAP and voters sue for more options

2026-07-28T09:30:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Ahead of the 2026 midterms, Wisconsin elections officials are planning for the potential of mail ballot delivery delays by encouraging voters to mail back absentee ballots as soon as possible or return them some other way.

And on Friday, the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin sued the Wisconsin Elections Commission, arguing voters should be able to cast provisional ballots on Election Day if they don’t think their mail ballot will arrive on time.

Unlike many other states, which allow ballots to be counted if they arrive after Election Day as long as they’re postmarked by that day and arrive by a set cutoff time, Wisconsin requires mail ballots to arrive by 8 p.m. on Election Day to be counted.

Historically, the USPS and Wisconsin Elections Commission advised voters that mailing back a ballot a week ahead of Election Day would suffice. Now, the commission and municipal clerks are calling on voters to allow more time.

Milwaukee election chief Paulina Gutiérrez reported receiving only 20 mail ballots on Election Day in April’s Wisconsin Supreme Court election — a low number even for a small election — but more than 269 late ballots on the day after, which Gutiérrez said was a high number for an election of that size. Seeking to avoid such a high number of late-arriving ballots in the future, Gutiérrez told Votebeat that for the upcoming August election, the city opened its ballot drop boxes four weeks sooner than it would have in the past.

“We are encouraging voters to use our dropboxes or drop off their absentee ballot at [early in-person voting sites],” she said.

If they’re unable to do either, Gutiérrez said voters should mail back their ballots at least two weeks ahead of Election Day.

In Madison, which received more than 100 late ballots in April — also more than what’s typical — City Clerk Lydia McComas told Votebeat that drop boxes open three weeks ahead of the August election.

“We emphasize this is a convenient and far faster option than returning an absentee ballot via USPS,” she said.

Many election officials observe mail delays

These concerns are shared by election officials across the state.

In a recent survey, two-thirds of Wisconsin election officials said they observed problems with absentee ballot mail delivery in the April election. About one-third of officials said voters had complained to them about mail delays.

Nearly 40% said that mail performance in the election was somewhat or much worse than mail performance in past elections.

That experience isn’t universal. Vernon County Clerk Jerry Pedretti, who’s also clerk of the separate town and village of Genoa, told Votebeat that rural USPS workers recognize absentee ballots from the envelopes and make “every effort to make sure that they’re getting them delivered.”

Similarly, Buffalo County Clerk Lisa Schmitt said a couple of ballots arrived after Election Day in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election but problems weren’t major. That was likely a result of postmasters keeping the mail local rather than sending it out via Minnesota for processing, which she said is the typical procedure for non-election mail.

Nonetheless,commissioners at the Wisconsin Elections Commission are concerned about the delays. On MyVote, a website for voters to request ballots, the commission still includes the USPS recommendation for voters to return mail ballots at least seven days before Election Day. But in June, the commission’s new election manual and guidance to voters went further, suggesting at least 10 days before Election Day.

At a meeting in early July, commissioners discussed this updated guidance. “I’m concerned about us just saying 10 days is enough,” Democratic commissioner Mark Thomsen said at the meeting.

USPS spokesperson Desai Abdul-Razzaaq said that he is confident the Postal Service will perform well in the upcoming elections. While he said the USPS takes officials’ concerns from the April election seriously, he said “the overwhelming majority of Election Mail was processed and delivered within established service standards.”

Voters sue for ability to cast provisional ballots

Amid these delays, voters are challenging commission guidance prohibiting voters from casting in-person ballots on Election Day if they think their mail ballot might arrive too late to be counted.

The League of Women Voters of Wisconsin said the commission’s guidance violates the right to vote enshrined in the Wisconsin Constitution, and is calling on a Dane County Circuit Court judge to allow voters to cast provisional ballots if they think their ballots might arrive late.

Unlike standard in-person ballots, which generally go directly from the person casting them to a tabulator, provisional ballots are segregated and verified and counted later on, once election officials determine they are validly cast. The league is asking for mail voters to be able to cast provisional ballots, and only have them counted if their mail ballots don’t arrive on time.

State law says that a voter who mails or delivers an absentee ballot to a clerk isn’t permitted to vote in person in the same election on Election Day. But the league said the commission is too narrowly interpreting that law in its rule prohibiting voters from casting ballots if they suspect their ballot will arrive late.

“This rule risks denying Impacted Voters their right to vote — the right most preservative of all others,” the lawsuit states.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Everything you need to know about how to vote in the Wisconsin primary

2026-07-28T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Wisconsin’s primary election is two weeks away, and early voting is already underway in municipalities across the state.

Whether you plan to vote early in person, by mail, or on Election Day, here’s everything you need to know about how to make your voice heard in the upcoming election.

When is Wisconsin’s primary election?

Election Day is Aug. 11, and polls will be open from 7 a.m. until 8 p.m. that day. You can also vote early in person beginning July 28.

What offices are on the ballot?

The Democratic primary for governor is perhaps the highest-profile race for the August primary, but depending on your district, there may also be competitive congressional, legislative, and other primary elections. Click here for a full list of what’s on your ballot.

Who can vote in the Wisconsin primary?

Any registered voter can cast a vote in the primary. You can click here to find out whether you’re registered.

Wisconsin has an open primary system, so you don’t need to be registered with a political party to vote a certain way. But you can only vote within one party. If you’re choosing a Republican congressional candidate, for example, you can’t select a Democrat anywhere else on your ballot.

What if I’m not registered to vote yet? Is it too late?

The deadline to register to vote online or by mail was July 22, but you can still register in person.

You can register at your local clerk’s office or at an early voting location through Friday, Aug. 7. If you miss that window, you can also register at your polling place on Election Day itself.

Where is my polling place?

You can find your polling place here. On Election Day, you can only vote in person at your designated polling location. However, your early in-person voting location may differ from your Election Day polling place. You can contact your municipal clerk here to learn more early voting details specific to your community. The League of Women Voters has also assembled a list of early voting sites in dozens of Wisconsin’s biggest municipalities.

What should I bring to vote?

If you are registering to vote at the polling place, you’ll need to bring a proof of residence that includes your name and current mailing address, which could include a driver’s license or other government ID, a residential lease, or a utility bill.

What is early voting?

Early voting, often called in-person absentee voting, allows voters to go to their municipal clerk’s office or a designated early voting location to cast a ballot up to two weeks before Election Day. That ballot is then stored by the city and counted on Election Day.

The availability of early voting varies widely across the state. Some clerks do it by appointment only. Some cities, including Madison and Milwaukee, operate multiple early voting sites that are open multiple hours each day. But by law, early voting can’t be offered later than the Sunday before the election; after that, you must vote on Election Day.

How does early voting work?

Once you arrive at an early voting site, you must first request an absentee ballot. Election officials will also check that you have an acceptable photo ID before issuing you a ballot.

Election officials should then let you mark your absentee ballot in private, but let them know if you require assistance. Clerks or designated officials will also have to sign the envelope that you put your absentee ballot in.

Can I vote absentee by mail?

In Wisconsin, you can also request that an absentee ballot be sent to you by mail. The deadline to request absentee ballots is Aug. 6 by 5 p.m. for regular and overseas voters, but Aug. 7 by 5 p.m. for indefinitely confined and military voters. For your absentee ballot to count, it must arrive back at the clerk’s office by primary day, Aug. 11.

However, if you want to vote this way, you should request and return your ballot as soon as possible; mail delays have recently led to some absentee ballots getting delivered too late to count. To avoid this, consider dropping your ballot off at the clerk’s office, a drop box, or an early voting location instead of mailing it.

What if I vote absentee and then my preferred candidate drops out?

That means — for now — that your absentee votes are final once you return the ballot to the clerk. If you make a mistake while casting the ballot, though, or spill something on your ballot, you can request a replacement from an election official.

Who should I contact if I have trouble voting or have any questions?

Please contact your municipal clerk, whose information you can find here. We at Votebeat would also like to hear about any problems you notice. You can contact us at wisconsin.tips@votebeat.org.

If you have disability-related voting questions or concerns, you can also contact the Disability Rights Wisconsin Voter Hotline at 844-347-8683.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.