Votebeat

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

‘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.

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.

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.

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’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 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?

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 as of July 27 the court hasn’t ruled in the case.

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.

The noncitizen voter mystery: New Trump numbers raise more questions than answers

2026-07-27T09:00:00+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.

The polarizing debate over noncitizen voters escalated last week when New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill announced that an apparent software glitch had led to the unintended registration of 6,600 noncitizens between June 2023 and June 2024, 400 of whom voted in recent elections.

In a hastily called press conference, Sherrill placed the blame on her predecessor, fellow Democrat Phil Murphy, and said she was taking immediate steps to fix the problems.

Sherrill’s 20-minute briefing raised as many questions as it provided answers. How did a software glitch at the state’s motor vehicles agency lead to adding people who said they weren’t citizens to the state’s voter rolls? Who discovered the problem back in 2024? Why didn’t state officials alert the public when they first learned about the mistake? And what did state officials do about the people who were improperly registered at the time?

Sherrill, who took office in January and said she learned about the problems the week of July 13, said she’s ordered an independent investigation. That’s not good enough for Republicans in Washington and Trenton.

The U.S. Department of Justice is demanding that New Jersey hand over the names of the 6,600 people by Tuesday. New Jersey Republicans question Sherrill’s software glitch explanation and are calling for a legislative investigation.

The New Jersey issue isn’t coming in a vacuum. President Donald Trump has long argued that ineligible noncitizen voters cost him the 2020 election, though no evidence has emerged to support that. His second administration has been focused on rooting out any noncitizen voting, and his top legislative priority is election legislation that he says will block it.

In a televised primetime speech on July 16, Trump said his administration had found 250,000 noncitizen voters on the voter rolls of 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.

Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar called the numbers “wildly speculative.” Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt said that “all evidence has shown that noncitizen voting is extremely rare across the country.” Even in New Jersey, the 6,600 noncitizen voters discovered by the state did not come close to the 35,152 that the Trump administration claimed to have found in the state. “Do I think that the latest round that he has put out is in some way an attempt to undermine our elections in this country? Yes I do,” Sherrill said at her press conference.

How did the Homeland Security Department come up with the estimates? The Trump administration isn’t saying. But the letters the Department of Homeland Security sent to the four states to notify them of the findings provide some interesting clues.

For instance, the letters qualify the numbers in ways that Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin did not in their public statements.

“We’ve identified 250,000 noncitizens registered to vote in just four states,” Mullin said in a briefing the day after Trump’s speech.

But the letters are more careful in making that claim.

In California, for example, the letter from Mullin said there “may be as many as 190,832 non-citizens registered to vote in California.” The letter then went on to say that the government found 81,336 registered voters in California’s public voter registration database with names, dates of birth, addresses and Social Security numbers that match those of noncitizens in federal files. That’s less than half the overall estimate; the letter doesn’t explain where the extra 109,496 came from.

In Pennsylvania, Mullin’s letter said the government matched the data of 8,594 registrants to a noncitizen, out of a total of 14,576 potential noncitizens it identified. Nevada’s letter said there were 8,576 matches out of 15,903 potential noncitizens. And according to the Shore News Network, New Jersey’s letter said there were 19,497 matches out of 35,152 potential noncitizens.

Altogether, these numbers in Mullin’s letters say the department has matches for just 118,003 of the 256,463 noncitizens the government is asserting have registered to vote.

The letters specify that Trump officials relied on each state’s public data files. All four of these states are among the 30 that have gone to court to block the federal government from getting access to unredacted versions of their voter rolls, which would include sensitive personal information, such as driver’s license numbers and Social Security numbers.

The public versions of the voter rolls only include basic information about individual voters, such as their names and addresses, so it’s unclear how the government could have matched individuals based on social security numbers as it says it did.

It’s likely that even the 118,003 number is too high. States that have audited their own voter rolls for noncitizens or checked them against federal databases by using the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, program have found noncitizen totals that are far less concerning.

Upon further investigation, several states have also found that SAVE — which works similarly to the methodology that Mullin apparently used — overestimated the number of noncitizens on their rolls, leading experts and elections officials to warn that the system was unreliable.

Aaron Blacksberg, federal policy counsel at the Institute for Responsive Government, called the 250,000 estimate “puzzling and concerning” and said there was no reason to believe the number of noncitizens on the voter rolls is actually that high.

“There are all sorts of reasons why you would get a huge number of false positives,” he said. “There is no reason to trust anything in the order of that 250,000 number. That will absolutely fall apart under any scrutiny.”

Correction, July 31: An earlier version of this story misstated the date of President Donald Trump’s primetime address on election issues. It was on July 16.

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

Can Wisconsin voters void a returned absentee ballot? Issue heads back to court

2026-07-21T09:00:00+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.

Update, July 29, 3:00 p.m.: A Dane County Circuit judge upheld the Wisconsin Elections Commission guidance banning absentee spoiling after voters already returned their ballots, saying state law was unambiguous in prohibiting the practice.

Update, July 23, 1:30 p.m.: This story has been updated to incorporate a new lawsuit filed by three voters against the Wisconsin Elections Commission over its absentee ballot guidance.

Wisconsin election officials have reignited a legal battle over absentee voting with July guidance stating that voters cannot void a returned absentee ballot and cast a new one, even if Election Day is weeks away or the candidate they supported has dropped out.

Three Democratic residents in Dane County on Thursday sued the Wisconsin Elections Commission over the guidance, which was adopted by the commission on July 9, calling it an unconstitutional violation of the state’s absentee voting laws. All three plaintiffs voted for a gubernatorial candidate who have since dropped out of the primary, and under the commission guidance they cannot change their votes, even though those votes have not yet been counted. The legality of spoiling ballots just to change a vote has long been disputed.

The lawsuit says WEC’s guidance means the plaintiffs “will all be disenfranchised from meaningfully participating in this August election unless this Court steps in.”

Thursday’s lawsuit is the latest development in a legal dispute that began in 2022 and was reopened by an appeals court decision earlier this year. It was filed two days after the Democratic Party of Wisconsin sent the commission a letter urging it to rescind the guidance. The letter raised many of the same concerns later cited in the suit, including that the policy could disenfranchise voters and was adopted after early voting in the primary had already begun.

The July 9 guideline for clerks reverses the Wisconsin Elections Commission’s previous position and Attorney General Josh Kaul’s legal arguments on the agency’s behalf that voters should be allowed to replace absentee ballots they have already returned as long as they comply with statutory deadlines.

The WEC spent years arguing in court in favor of that broader definition of ballot spoiling, but its latest guidance effectively restores the rule imposed by a 2022 court ruling that banned the practice.

The commission adopted the guidance after clerks had already mailed ballots for the August 11 primary and, notably, after multiple candidates in the crowded Democratic gubernatorial race dropped their bids.

“It seems to me exceedingly likely that this is something that people are going to keep fighting about,” Jeff Mandell, founder of the liberal law firm Law Forward, said ahead of the lawsuit.

He added that the timing of the guidance was unusual: Typically courts are skeptical of efforts to change rules close to an election. Some absentee voters in this election cycle probably cast their ballots under the assumption that they could spoil their ballot and cast a new one if their preferred candidate dropped out or they just wanted to change their vote, Mandell said.

Even if the commission’s guidance is in line with Wisconsin law, it creates a clear discrepancy between in-person Election Day and absentee voters, said Sam Liebert, the Wisconsin state director of All Voting is Local and a former municipal clerk.

Election Day voters can receive up to three ballots at the polls if they make a mistake, he pointed out. On the other hand, he said, absentee voters now get no second chance once they return their ballots, even if Election Day hasn’t arrived yet.

“The inconsistency is hard to ignore,” he said, and it presents a policy question for the Legislature — or maybe the courts.

Spoiling controversy blew up amid similar political dynamics in the 2022 primary

The WEC’s more permissive August 2022 guidance on ballot spoiling was prompted by similar dynamics as that of the present: highly contested primaries with candidates dropping out throughout the race and at the last minute.

In September 2022, GOP voter Nancy Kormanik sued over that guidance allowing absentee ballot spoiling, arguing that clerks can only reissue an absentee ballot if a voter returns their absentee ballot in a “spoiled or damaged” condition. Voiding a ballot that’s already been submitted and getting a new one over a voter’s own mistake or a candidate dropping out didn’t fall under that category, she argued.

Kaul, the state’s Democratic attorney general, saw the issue differently. A few different laws allow ballot spoiling, he said in a court filing, and “none requires the elector to explain how or why the ballot is ‘spoiled.’”

Siding with Kormanik, a lower court banned the practice of spoiling absentee ballots in October.

The ban stood until February of this year, when an appeals court vacated the lower court ruling. But the new ruling wasn’t on the merits of the case. Rather, it came because the court said Kormanik didn’t properly serve documents to a legislative committee at the start of the suit.

After the February ruling, clerks sought the commission’s updated guidance about how to deal with spoiling. They didn’t receive it in time for the Wisconsin Supreme Court election in April, and some municipalities offered instructions on how to spoil ballots. But with midterm primaries coming up — and particularly as rumors of gubernatorial candidates dropping out swirled — clerks were especially eager to know if the commission planned to stand by its earlier interpretation of the law and allow absentee ballot spoiling again.

On July 9, the commission provided an answer: It voted 4-2 that absentee ballot spoiling is prohibited after a voter returns an absentee ballot. Democratic commissioner Carrie Riepl, a former clerk, voted with the three Republicans in favor of the guidance. Democratic commissioners Mark Thomsen and Ann Jacobs voted against it.

The guidance came just one day after Democratic gubernatorial candidate David Crowley, the Milwaukee County executive, dropped out of the race and endorsed Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez for governor. Just over a week later, Rodriguez dropped out of the race and Crowley reentered.

Over 36,000 Wisconsin voters had already returned ballots by the day the commission issued its guidance, commission data shows. Voters had returned nearly 68,000 ballots by the time Rodriguez dropped out.

At the July meeting, commission chair Don Millis, a Republican, argued that voters should only be able to void — or spoil — ballots before they return them to the clerk.

“Once you’ve turned your ballot in, that’s it,” he said.

Meanwhile, Thomsen noted that in-person voters on Election Day can mark a ballot and receive a replacement ballot if they make an error, as long as the first ballot isn’t tabulated yet. But under the new guidance, an absentee voter couldn’t spoil a returned ballot even if it’s weeks from being tabulated.

“Why are we treating people that use mail differently than me if I show up?” he said.

On one hand, voters can argue that the inability to spoil ballots effectively disenfranchises them if they vote for a candidate that has since dropped out, said Bryna Godar, a staff attorney at the University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative.

On the other hand, she said, others can cite the Wisconsin law calling absentee voting a privilege, not a right, and argue that voters who exercise that right accept some risk in casting an absentee vote that can’t be taken back.

“The issue of whether ballot spoiling is or is not allowed under Wisconsin statutes hasn’t been definitively resolved,” she said.

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

Trump move to neutralize election administration agency creates chilling effect, but its impact may be muted

2026-07-13T15:04:46+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 abrupt removal Thursday of the three remaining members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission leaves the agency unable to make key policy decisions, but is unlikely to disrupt preparations for the November elections, according to former staff members and election analysts.

Still, even though Trump’s move won’t bring the agency to a halt, it has created concerns that the president might take further steps to weaken the agency that distributes congressionally-apportioned election funding to states and certifies voting equipment.

The White House declined on Friday to give more detail on its reasons for dismissing the commissioners or explain what the president hoped to achieve by stripping the election oversight agency of its ability to enact changes to policy and voting system guidelines. But the move came at a time of rising concern over how the Trump administration could attempt to influence the outcome of November’s midterm elections.

Benjamin Hovland, one of the two Democratic commissioners fired by Trump, said it would be “challenging to operate without commissioners or a quorum.” Because the agency is small and lightly funded, commissioners play a much larger hands-on role than they do at many other federal agencies, he added. Still, he said, “There is a great team there and they’ll keep doing this work.”

Hovland was sitting at an airport waiting for a cancelled flight on Thursday when he got an unexpected two-sentence email from the White House letting him know he had been fired. Hovland said no one from the Trump administration had been in touch with him since they took control in 2025.

When the U.S. Supreme Court last month gave the president unprecedented new power to fire leaders of independent agencies, Hovland said he figured he would be dismissed “sooner rather than later.”

What the EAC can still do

Ryan Macias, an election technology expert who oversaw federal certification of voting systems at the EAC from 2016 to 2019, said the dismissals were likely to have little or no impact on the day-to-day business at the commission.

States are still expected to get federal election funding already in the pipeline for the November election, which is disbursed according to already-set formulas. While many states rely on the EAC’s federal certification of voting systems, the testing and certification of voting systems does not require action by the commissioners, meaning voting systems can continue to be tested, updated and certified to the standards commissioners had previously adopted, Macias said. Three commissioners would have to approve any updates or changes to the current guidelines.

Commissioners do play a role in some parts of the certification process, at least theoretically. If a voting system vendor disputes the outcome or process of a certification decision, commissioners would hear the appeal. But, Macias said, that’s never happened.

Trump’s actions could also renew debate in Congress over shutting down the EAC, which has been the target of repeated closure efforts, though those have quieted in recent years.

The EAC was created by Congress in response to the disputed, chaotic 2000 presidential election, whose outcome was ultimately decided by a Supreme Court ruling. The agency provides support to states by distributing federal election funds, maintaining the national mail voter registration form, testing and certifying voting systems, and offering best practices and guidance to state and local election officials.

The agency has a four-member commission split between Democrats and Republicans, and most major decisions require an affirmative vote from at least three. Commissioners are nominated by the president and must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate. Hovland’s nomination process took around 9 months, and was on the shorter side. Even if Trump moves quickly to nominate replacements, the agency appears unlikely to regain a quorum before the November election.

This is not the first time the EAC has operated without a quorum, though it is the first time it has been left with no commissioners at all. Between 2010 and 2015, the agency lacked enough commissioners to take official action after the Senate stopped confirming nominees — and some congressional leaders stopped recommending them — as lawmakers debated whether the agency should continue to exist. That prolonged vacancy delayed updates to the federal voting system guidelines and left the commission unable to take many policy actions.

Election officials see little immediate disruption

For election officials, the consensus is that the firings are unlikely to disrupt this year’s elections. But several said the longer-term implications are harder to forecast, particularly if the administration takes additional steps to reshape or weaken the agency.

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat who is a member of the EAC Board of Advisors, called the agency a valuable partner since it was created in 2002.

“I do not expect the changes at the EAC to have any immediate impact on the administration of elections in Minnesota or across the country,” he said. “Yet, the loss of the entire EAC leadership is another canary in the coal mine – and I urge Americans to take notice.”

Aaron Blacksberg, federal policy counsel at the Institute for Responsive Government, said Trump’s moves might not have a major impact on the upcoming elections, but suggested that they should be seen in the broader context of Trump’s widespread efforts to eliminate government election integrity programs and cast doubt on elections where Democrats fare well.

“In the short term, it’s another chilling effect,” Blacksberg said. “I don’t think there’s going to be an end to or a deescalation to these actions as the election gets closer.”

Hovland, who served seven years on the commission, defended the agency’s work.

“We weren’t perfect, and we weren’t a silver bullet, but we were someone in the federal government that was still trying to help,” he said. “I am so proud of the team and the agency.” He added, “I feel like people lose sight of why Congress created the EAC.”

Jessica Huseman contributed reporting.

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

Michigan could approve a constitutional convention this year. What would that mean?

2026-07-09T09:00:00+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.

As Michigan works out who (and what) will be on ballots this fall, one proposal is already set in stone: Should the state “convene a constitutional convention?”

Proposal 1, as it will be known, pops up every 16 years and gives Michigan voters the chance to rewrite the state’s governing document.

On its face, the proposed convention — sometimes referred to as a “con-con” — could functionally reset everything about Michigan’s laws. But what would it look like? And what would a yes vote actually do?

Here’s everything you need to know about Proposal 1 in Michigan.

What is a constitutional convention?

A constitutional convention is exactly what it sounds like — a group of people convene to rewrite the state’s constitution.

If voters were to approve Proposal 1, it wouldn’t immediately mean the Michigan Constitution is thrown in the trash. Instead, it would simply mean that a group of people get together to draft a new document that could one day, if approved by voters, serve as the new state constitution.

How would a constitutional convention work in Michigan?

In many ways, it would function a lot like the constitutional conventions from centuries ago that you learned about in history class (although probably fewer horses). A group of delegates would get together starting in 2027 and write a new draft of the state’s constitution. They would then present the draft to voters in another statewide election for their approval or rejection. If voters vote down the new constitution, the old one would simply stay in effect.

Each state Senate and House district would send one delegate to the convention. Those delegates would be elected within six months of the certification of the 2026 election results (meaning campaigns would probably begin almost immediately). They would then convene on the first Tuesday in October — Oct. 5, 2027 — in Lansing.

From there, delegates would set most of the rules on how things will work, including who is in charge of the convention and how much assistants get paid. Nothing can go to the voters without majority approval from the convention, and anything that is approved will have to go before voters “not less than 90 days” after the convention is over.

There is no deadline for when the convention has to end. The last constitutional convention in Michigan — which started in 1962 — took nearly 10 months.

A convention would put every part of the constitution in limbo. Voters have for many years approved smaller constitutional changes via ballot measure, but a convention would likely mean changing the whole thing.

Why are we voting on this?

The current Michigan Constitution, which was passed by voters in 1963 and put into effect in 1964, requires voters to weigh in on whether to call a constitutional convention every 16 years — a requirement that’s been in each state constitution since the very first in 1850.

The current constitution is the fourth in Michigan’s history.

Michigan isn’t the only state with the option for a constitutional convention. Across the country, 14 states have it appear on the ballot automatically like Michigan. Some others allow their legislature to put a constitutional convention on the ballot, while a few others allow residents to petition for one. Only eight states have no mechanism for a convention.

Do constitutional convention ballot measures usually pass?

No. In fact, since 2000, no state has passed a constitutional convention ballot measure. That includes Michigan’s most recent, in 2010, which failed 67% to 33%.

Who is supporting it?

Two key Republican legislators have gone on the record in support of the convention. State House Speaker Matt Hall said during last year’s Mackinac Policy Conference “they stuff so many things in this constitution,” referring to voter-approved measures such as marijuana legalization and the independent redistricting commission, which both passed in 2018.

“Some of those proposals sounded good, but then had intentions that the public is frustrated about,” Hall said at the time.

State Senate Minority Leader Aric Nesbitt also said there was a lot he wanted to update in the constitution, such as changing how university boards are selected.

However, according to state campaign finance records, there aren’t yet any official campaigns to support the ballot measure.

Who is against it?

A group known as Protect MI Constitution from Special Interests has formed to oppose a constitutional convention.

The coalition comprises a number of voting rights groups, including Voters Not Politicians, the League of Women Voters of Michigan, and the American Civil Liberties UnionACLU of Michigan. It also includes unions (such as the Michigan AFL-CIO and Michigan Council of Carpenters & Millwrights), a number of business groups (including the Detroit Regional Chamber, Michigan Chamber of Commerce, and West Michigan Policy Forum), and the Michigan League of Conservation Voters.

The group says that a full convention “opens a Pandora’s Box” that could have “potentially devastating consequences for Michigan citizens for decades to come.”

As of late April, the campaign had raised more than $680,000, according to campaign finance reports. That includes $385,000 from The Fairness Project, a Washington, D.C.-based group “dedicated to advancing social and economic justice,” according to its website.

What would a constitutional convention mean for voting in Michigan?

It could mean any number of things, and the exact impacts are hard to predict before a new constitution has been proposed (and before any delegates are even selected).

The first change could be fewer measures on Michiganders’ ballots. Many of the biggest changes to Michigan’s laws in the last few decades have been through constitutional amendment — including changes to legalize recreational marijuana, establish environmental conservation funds, codify access to abortion, and update election laws. A new constitution might not offer voters the chance to amend it as easily.

It is also possible that Michigan’s fairly liberal election laws would change. Michiganders have voted repeatedly over the last decade to expand voting access, voting in 2018 to let people register to vote on Election Day and vote absentee without an excuse and in 2022 for early voting and the creation of a permanent absentee voter list. Those rights could be protected under a new constitution, or they could go away entirely.

That is the tricky part of potentially reworking the constitution — it would be the entire document up for grabs, not just certain parts. It would, in many ways, depend on who controls the convention, which could be different from the makeup of the state legislature.

A Republican-controlled convention would likely try to enshrine GOP priorities such as eliminating no-excuse absentee voting — a bill proposed by five Republicans in late June — and requiring documentary proof of citizenship in order to register to vote.

A Democratic-controlled convention, meanwhile, might codify the Michigan Voting Rights Act into the new constitution. That proposal aims to fill in the gaps left by the federal Voting Rights Act, blocking laws that could discriminate against voters based on race and requiring ballot materials to be made available in languages other than English.

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

Pennsylvania elections could look very different if Democrats win full control of state government in 2026

2026-07-08T10:00:00+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.

The movement to change voting laws in Pennsylvania is all but dead.

Despite bipartisan support for changes in Harrisburg, no major election bill has become law since the state implemented no-excuse mail voting in 2020. The issue has become deeply partisan since then. Bills routinely pass either the GOP-controlled state Senate or Democratic-controlled state House, then wither in the other chamber. And a board meant to advise the legislature on bipartisan solutions sits idle.

But could that change if Democrats win a state government trifecta — control of the state Senate, state House, and governorship — this fall? And what policies would they prioritize?

Republicans have controlled all three for stretches in recent decades, most recently from 2011 to 2014. During that period, they passed a major voter ID requirement that was ultimately overturned in court. Democrats in Pennsylvania, meanwhile, haven’t held both chambers and the governorship since 1993. Even then, the trifecta lasted just one year.

But a path, though difficult, exists for Democrats to regain unified control in November’s midterm elections.

Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro leads state Treasurer Stacy Garrity, his Republican challenger, by more than 20 points in several recent polls.

Democrats would also have to maintain their narrow majority in the House and flip the Senate, where Republicans currently hold a 27-23 majority. That would require them to retain a seat they flipped in Lancaster County last year and pick up new ones in potentially vulnerable districts in the Lehigh Valley and Philadelphia suburbs.

Democrats have reason to think those seats are within reach. Conventional political wisdom holds that when a sitting president has low approval ratings, the opposing political party tends to have a good year in the midterms.

If Democrats succeed, they could have an easier time passing election law changes that have eluded them in recent years.

They may also face political pressure from their base to go further and pursue the kind of partisan mid-decade redistricting that other states under single-party control, like Texas and California, have recently undertaken.

Pennsylvania Democrats showed their election priorities this legislative session

Democrats have made it clear during this legislative session where their election priorities lie.

Last May, the state House passed an omnibus election bill sponsored by Democratic Speaker Joanna McClinton that would have significantly reshaped Pennsylvania elections.

The bill would have established true in-person early voting, instead of the current, time-consuming process of requesting and casting a mail ballot at a local election office; mandated at least two mail ballot drop boxes in every county; and required counties to adopt electronic pollbooks by 2027.

It also would have given counties more time to prepare mail ballots for counting before Election Day. Advocates say this preparation, known as pre-canvassing, leads to faster election results. The state House also recently passed pre-canvassing as a stand-alone bill.

Earlier this month, at a rally for voting rights in the state capitol, McClinton again called on the state Senate to consider her omnibus bill.

“We’ll have everything necessary so that we can continue to lift up our voices in this democracy,” she said of how things would look if her bill passed.

State Sen. Jay Costa, the Senate minority leader, responded to McClinton’s call on X, saying Senate Democrats were ready to take up the bill. But the bill hasn’t come up for a vote in the Republican-controlled Senate because GOP leaders have insisted that any election legislation include expanded voter ID requirements.

Asked how the election policy conversation would change under a Democratic-led Senate, Costa highlighted many of the issues covered in McClinton’s bill as well as other Democratic priorities: pre-canvassing, drop boxes, electronic pollbooks, preregistering voters who will be 18 by Election Day, early voting, and same-day voter registration.

He also mentioned opening up Pennsylvania’s primaries to independent and third-party voters. It’s a proposal that has been gaining some bipartisan traction in recent years.

“We want to make it easier for people to vote, but also have a system that has integrity,” Costa said.

Costa added that if Democrats pass these proposals next session, they would also try to provide counties with funding to implement them.

McClinton’s bill also included funding to help counties implement the changes. It would authorize up to $60 million in bonds for new equipment, provide $2 million for electronic pollbook vetting and approval, and designate about $100,000 annually, plus benefits, to pay a new staffer.

Would election changes be a priority for Democrats?

Should Democrats win a trifecta, they would surely have a lot of things other than election policy on their wish list. But Kyler Miller, a former Democratic Senate staffer who now works as a policy advocate with the nonpartisan group Protect Democracy, thinks that election legislation would be fairly close to the top — perhaps even in the top three.

Miller said President Donald Trump’s attacks on voting have elevated the issue for Democrats, pointing to the Department of Justice’s attempts to obtain election materials and voter rolls, as well as threats to reject unfavorable election results.

“That playbook that is being deployed against American elections is very much a top issue for the Dems and their electorate,” he said. “People have fought for years for the right to vote, and it’s being slowly eroded over time by the administration and the Supreme Court.”

Miller agreed that a Democratic trifecta would likely focus on passing priorities they’ve already identified, such as pre-canvassing and codifying certain court rulings.

State courts in recent years have required counties to use a system that notifies mail voters if election officials determine their ballots will be rejected due to a fixable error. They have also affirmed voters’ right to have a provisional ballot counted if their mail ballot is rejected. Voting rights advocates cheered both decisions, but both advocates and jurists have expressed frustration that the legislature did not clarify those ambiguities itself.

Miller also said the state should provide more funding for election officials’ safety and training, given the exodus of experienced local officials in recent years.

Could Democrats try to redraw Pennsylvania’s congressional map?

With full control over state government, Democrats would also have the ability to redraw Pennsylvania’s congressional map to better advantage their party.

The current map, selected by the state Supreme Court in 2022 after a partisan deadlock in the legislature, elected 10 Republican representatives and seven Democrats to Congress in 2024. However, it’s possible to draw a map with as many as 12 or 13 safely Democratic seats.

Over the past year, several other states, including Texas and California, have redrawn their congressional lines as part of an unprecedented spate of mid-decade gerrymandering.

Last year, Shapiro said he was not pursuing mid-decade redistricting and called Texas’s redraw “shameful.”

A spokesperson for Shapiro’s campaign didn’t respond to questions about whether Shapiro would pursue partisan redistricting if Democrats won a trifecta or what specific election law priorities he would pursue. But press secretary Sam Reposa said in a statement that the Republican grip on power has been an impediment to election law changes more broadly.

“For over 30 years in the majority, Senate Republicans have stood in the way of more progress we could be making in the Commonwealth,” Reposa said, specifically citing “passing key reforms to protect our democracy.”

Erica Clayton-Wright, a spokesperson for state Senate President Pro Tempore Kim Ward, responded in an email that Senate Republicans are the “last line of defense” protecting taxpayers on a variety of issues, including “safeguarding elections.”

“Pennsylvanians know [Democratic] policies are detrimental to positioning our Commonwealth for growth, which will prevent a trifecta in Pennsylvania,” she said.

Even if a Democratic trifecta did redraw Pennsylvania’s congressional map, it would likely face a court challenge. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that partisan gerrymandering violated the state constitution when it threw out a GOP-drawn congressional map.

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

How inconsistent standards led to dozens of disenfranchised voters in a Wisconsin city

2026-07-06T10:00:00+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.

For years, Mequon election workers employed an unusually strict standard for judging the validity of witness addresses on absentee ballot envelopes — a standard not apparently used elsewhere in Wisconsin and that the Wisconsin Elections Commission has now said is illegal.

Under that standard, Mequon officials rejected absentee ballots if the witness address did not include a state or ZIP code and the municipality name was not unique nationwide. That’s despite the fact that Wisconsin’s absentee ballot envelope no longer specifically asks witnesses to provide the information Mequon treated as essential: a state or ZIP code.

But a Votebeat review of hundreds of April 2026 absentee ballot envelopes, the dozens of ballots Mequon at least initially rejected since 2024, and scores of city records found that the city’s strict standard was applied unevenly — and, in some cases, resulted in the initial rejection of ballots that did not appear ambiguous at all.

In April, election workers accepted several ballots with the same missing witness-address information as ballots they moved to the reject pile. In one case, poll workers appeared to override the city’s own recommendation to reject a ballot. And of the ballots Mequon rejected because officials said the witness address listed a municipality name shared by other places in the country, about a third were actually from uniquely named municipalities. All the rest had unique combinations of street number, street name, and municipality, even without a state or ZIP code.

Across several recent elections between 2024 and 2026, the city rejected at least 27 absentee ballots while allowing others with the same missing witness-address information to count. In the Wisconsin Supreme Court election this April, Mequon initially intended to reject five more ballots before the commission ordered city officials to count them — and to stop applying the unusual standard in elections moving forward.

Mequon followed the commission’s order to count the votes in April. But when Votebeat asked whether the city would abandon its practice in future elections, the city attorney was less definitive, leaving open the possibility that it could return.

Mequon officials have defended the rejections by saying voters are responsible for following the rules. Nancy Martin, a chief inspector at a Mequon polling place, said that she is unequivocally supportive of the city’s witness-address policy. She invoked a state law calling absentee voting a privilege, not a right.

Because of that law, she said, “you need to make sure that you’re doing your job as a voter, and I don’t think that sending incomplete information is doing a complete job as a voter.”

How Mequon’s standard clashed with state practice

Wisconsin law requires absentee voters to have a witness sign the ballot envelope and provide an address. But state law does not define how complete that address must be. In a lawsuit filed by Rise, Inc., a nonprofit advocacy organization, a court in 2024 sided with the group’s more lenient view, ruling that an address is sufficient as long as a clerk can reasonably discern where the witness lives.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission has since said that means clerks should not reject ballots simply because the witness address does not include a state or ZIP code. In fact, the WEC-approved state absentee ballot envelope doesn’t specifically designate spaces for a witness to provide their state or ZIP code. Mequon has taken a stricter view than WEC in rejecting ballots that do not provide that information.

Around August 2024, Mequon officials discussed the state commission’s witness-address standard at a training for chief inspectors. City records pertaining to that meeting show that City Attorney Brian Sajdak expressed that he disagreed with the commission on what constitutes a valid address. Since then, the city has repeatedly rejected ballots the commission deemed properly witnessed.

Sam Liebert, the Wisconsin state director of All Voting is Local and a former municipal clerk, said it’s normal for city attorneys to be in touch with clerks to decide or interpret election policies.

“But in Mequon, it is pretty alarming and jarring that an attorney would so blatantly not be in agreement with WEC’s interpretation of the Rise ruling,” he said.

Sajdak and Mequon City Clerk Caroline Fochs didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment about who came up with the controversial policy, though a letter from a chief inspector endorsing the policy says they both played a part.

Inconsistencies within polling places that rejected ballots

The unevenness showed up even within the same polling places.

Mequon officials at the same polling places who initially rejected the five ballots from the April election counted six others in that same election — three from Cedarburg, one from Waukesha, one from Rib Lake, and another from Shorewood — even though their witness addresses were also missing ZIP codes and states, and the municipality names were not unique nationwide.

In this rare instance, Mequon poll workers appeared to override a suggestion to reject a ballot.

In one instance, poll workers even appeared to override a city official’s instructions to reject a ballot from Shorewood that didn’t list a ZIP code or state. It arrived at the precinct with a handwritten note affixed to it saying “Reject — multiple ‘Shorewoods’ in US.” There is a Shorewood near Mequon and others in Illinois and Minnesota.

In different handwriting, an election worker wrote that the street name listed on the address, Farwell Avenue, was in the nearby Shorewood, and accepted the ballot.

Mequon’s controversial practice came to light in April 2026 as a result of a letter to Fochs from Law Forward, a liberal law firm, warning that the city’s policy may be wrongfully disenfranchising absentee voters.

In response, Sajdak said the city’s ballot rejection practice is a “policy of last resort utilized only when all other reasonable attempts have failed.”

But it appears that city officials did not use simple techniques that would have shown that the witness address provided on each of the rejected ballots was unique.

All rejected ballots did have unique address

Of the 32 ballots Mequon initially rejected in recent elections, about a third did not meet even the city’s own standard for rejection: They came from uniquely named municipalities, like Fox Point and Chicago.

All the rest were also traceable to unique addresses. Even without a state or ZIP code: The street number and street name on those ballot envelopes pointed to only one location in the United States, even though the municipality name wasn’t unique.

Votebeat sought to better understand the process by which Mequon officials rejected those ballots, which the city has described as extensive. But the city has provided little transparency about what specific steps are actually taken to verify witness addresses.

In response to a records request for election workers’ online searches, Mequon initially said it had no responsive records. After Votebeat explained how to export browser history, the city produced records showing that Mequon officials searched Google on April 6 and 7 — Election Day and the day before it — for whether there were multiple cities in the United States named Baltimore and Verona.

The records do not show that the searches went further. Had city officials entered the complete street names and numbers, they would have found that both addresses were unique to just one of those cities. Ballots from both cities were rejected before the commission ordered Mequon to count them.

Fochs did not answer follow-up questions about whether she took other steps to determine whether the addresses were sufficient.

“I do what I can, and we do go through a lot of hoops,” Fochs said in an earlier April interview, saying the clerk’s office contacts voters with insufficient witness addresses when time allows.

But Liebert, from All Voting Is Local, saw it differently: “It does seem sort of just like a lack of due diligence.”

Mequon election workers appear split on city policy

Alisha Campbell, who was an assistant chief inspector at a Mequon polling place in April, said that every absentee ballot went through the clerk’s office before being delivered to an individual ward. The general instruction from her chief inspector, Campbell said, was to reject the ballots that the clerk’s office suggested rejecting.

She also said she was told by her chief inspector that ZIP codes were paramount, and that if a ballot is missing a ZIP and the municipality name isn’t unique, poll workers could not count it. While Votebeat found instances in which pollworkers overrode a decision by the central election offices, Campbell said most were generally just following the instructions of the city clerk’s office rather than making decisions on the fly.

Campbell would not say whether she agreed with the city policy.

“What you think independently isn’t always what you are told to do,” Campbell said. “I will leave that at that.”

Martin, the Mequon chief inspector who defended the city’s policy, took a different view. In her letter supporting the policy, which five other Mequon chief inspectors signed, Martin expressed hope that the election commission would “correct their position” by calling for a state and ZIP code in the witness address field.

Instead, the commission did the opposite. In its new manual, published in June, the commission said using the same witness address standard that Mequon employed would constitute “an abuse of discretion.”

Martin said she was disappointed in the commission’s new language and plans to write to her local legislators asking them to change the law to require ZIP and state. She was noncommittal on how she would handle the address standard moving forward, but said she will largely rely on the clerk’s office’s guidance.

Liebert questioned whether other cities and towns in Wisconsin were implementing policies that don’t follow state law or court decisions. Wisconsin has the most decentralized election system in the nation, with 1,850 municipalities each running elections at the local level.

But he said the commission’s intervention in Mequon this year shows a silver lining. While Mequon had rejected ballots against WEC guidance in several recent elections, the commission went further by ordering the city to count the initially rejected ballots from the April election. All five were included in the final results.

“It’s disappointing what happened in Mequon, but I think also at the end of the day, the system shows that it works,” Liebert said, adding that the commission vote to count those ballots was bipartisan. “That should give voters confidence in the system and that people are looking out for them.”

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

What 250 years of voting rights battles tell us about today

2026-07-04T12:00:00+00:00

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

Happy Fourth of July, on this 250th anniversary of the United States. We’re living through extraordinary times in American democracy, as President Trump presses for greater federal control over elections and redistricting slips loose from its once-a-decade rhythm. As always, Votebeat is focused on an essential part of it: who gets to vote, who makes the rules, and what those votes are worth.

That question has loomed over the nation from the beginning. Voting history is often framed as a steady expansion from white male landowners to everyone else. The truth is messier. States have always experimented with expanding the franchise, retracting it, and expanding it again.

Voting rights have long varied from state to state

The Constitution has never contained a broad, affirmative right to vote, which helps explain why voting in America has always depended so much on where you live.

Some states expanded the vote earlier than we typically remember. Vermont, for example, adopted a broad franchise before the federal Constitution existed. Others expanded the franchise and later narrowed it: Revolutionary Pennsylvania extended voting rights to taxpaying men before limiting the vote to white men in 1838. Taken together, these examples show that American voting rights have never moved in one direction for everyone at once.

Let’s start with Vermont, one of the earliest examples of a state taking an unusually expansive view of who should have the vote. In 1777, before the federal Constitution existed, Vermont adopted its own, eliminating both property and taxpaying requirements for voting. Why? Because of a man whose name you’ve probably heard before: Ethan Allen.

A painting depicts Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys demanding the surrender of British forces at Fort Ticonderoga on May 10, 1775. Allen’s militia is better remembered for its Revolutionary War exploits, but its fight against New York’s authority also helped create the breakaway political community that adopted Vermont’s unusually broad early voting rules.

Allen led what historian Alexander Keyssar describes in his book “The Right to Vote” as an “unruly political—and military—process” involving his militia group, the Green Mountain Boys. Allen’s men roamed what ultimately became Vermont back when New York still claimed the territory, resisting New York’s authority by stopping sheriffs, intimidating New York-backed settlers, burning buildings, and sometimes flogging opponents.

Their campaign was not specifically about expanding the franchise. It began as a fight over land, sovereignty, and New York’s authority in the territory that became Vermont. But by helping create a breakaway political community outside New York’s control, the Green Mountain Boys also helped create the conditions for a very different constitution — one that rejected New York’s property-based voting system and allowed any adult man who took the Freeman’s Oath to vote.

Then came the U.S. Constitution. The 1787 document did not grant anyone the right to vote, instead deferring to states to determine the makeup of their own electorate. Whoever a state allowed to vote for its own legislature could also vote for members of Congress from that state. States, not the federal government, were left to decide who “the people” were. Vermont, therefore, could continue to coexist with neighboring New York despite radically different approaches to the franchise.

That flexibility produced inconsistency. In 1780, Massachusetts dropped racial exclusions for voting but kept property ownership at the center of political rights. That meant a free Black man who met the property requirement could vote while a poor white man who did not meet it could not. Property, race, gender, dependency, and local law interacted unevenly in the early American electorate.

Some states also gave voting rights and then took them away. In New Jersey, the state’s 1776 Constitution and a 1790 election law allowed some property-owning women and Black men to vote. That changed in 1807, when the Legislature limited voting to “free, white male” citizens.

An 1808 article in the Trenton Federalist said the new law “restricted all that has made our elections disagreeable, contentious and corrupt; all Females and Negroes being now deprived of a vote, who, not being eligible to nor much acquainted with the affairs of government, need not any longer be made use of to answer a party purpose.”

The same state-by-state experimentation complicates another assumption we often make now: that citizenship and voting have always been inseparable.

For much of American history, they were not. Some territories and newer western states used the franchise as an inducement to settlers. If they wanted people to move west, build towns, work land, pay taxes, and bind their futures to a new place, the vote was often part of the offer.

Wisconsin became the clearest example. In 1848, it allowed immigrants to vote if they had lived in the United States for two years and filed papers declaring their intent to become citizens. Michigan and Indiana soon followed, as did the Oregon and Minnesota territories. Later, similar rules spread across parts of the South and West.

But here, too, societal pressures prompted change. States began repealing noncitizen voting laws in the late 19th century. The backlash accelerated around World War I, amid rising xenophobia and suspicion of immigrants’ loyalty. Arkansas was the last state to end the practice, doing so in 1926.

Which brings us to the arguments over voting that Votebeat covers now.

Today, the fight for voting rights revolves around equal representation

For much of American history, the central question around voting rights was who could get through the door: who could register, who could cast a ballot, and who was excluded by law. But there is another question on the other side of the franchise. In 1976, legal scholar Gerhard Casper argued that American debates had long focused on “the right to be a voter,” rather than the harder problem of representation. Voting, he wrote, “is supposedly performed with a goal in mind — representation; but voting does not in itself necessarily entail representation.”

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 tried to answer both problems. It gave federal force to the principle that citizens could not be denied the ballot because of race, and Section 2 later became one of the main tools for challenging election rules and maps that diluted minority voters’ ability to turn votes into representation.

That issue is at the core of the modern fights over gerrymandering. A voter can be eligible, registered, and able to cast a ballot, and still live under maps that weaken the political power of that vote.

Louisiana is the latest example. After years of litigation over whether Black voters in the state had a fair opportunity to elect candidates of their choice, the Supreme Court’s Callais decision struck down Louisiana’s second majority-Black congressional district and narrowed how Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act applies to redistricting. Many voting rights scholars and advocates have described the decision as a major rollback — not because it removes anyone from the voter rolls, but because it changes what legal protection remains when votes are diluted by district lines.

That is not the same thing as states limiting or even taking away voting rights based on property requirements, gender, or citizenship status. But it belongs in the same history. The rules change. The line moves. And sometimes, as American history keeps reminding us, it moves backward.

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

Trump administration asks federal judge to quickly lift ban on planned mail voting restrictions

2026-07-02T17:29:31+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 Trump administration is asking a federal judge to quickly lift her recent ruling against major provisions of a presidential executive order on elections, arguing in an appeal that the court’s action will effectively prevent the government from putting new voting restrictions in place before the November election.

Last week, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani halted President Donald Trump’s efforts to create centralized lists of adult citizens and give the U.S. Postal Service unprecedented authority over who can vote by mail. Her 37-page ruling concluded that the president did not have the constitutional authority to regulate state elections, as his March executive order tried to do.

The executive order directed the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Social Security Administration to create a nationwide list of verified U.S. citizens over 18, and thus presumably eligible to vote in federal elections. It also called on the U.S. Postal Service to create a system to handle and accept mail-in ballots only from voters on preapproved lists.

Talwani’s order prevents 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 in federal court in Massachusetts. The list includes most Democratic-led and swing states, including Arizona, California, Michigan, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

This week, the Trump administration appealed Talwani’s ruling to the First Circuit Court of Appeals and said it is still proceeding with its efforts to set up the new system for the rest of the states. But it warned that the judge’s order will make it impossible for the U.S. Postal Service to create a bifurcated system for the November election, even if the administration ultimately prevails on appeal. Government attorneys asked Talwani to lift her ban by Monday.

The request for a quick decision suggests that the Trump administration may be trying to speed things up so the case reaches the U.S. Supreme Court as soon as possible.

“Operationally, it would not be possible for us to put a two-tiered system in place where one set of rules apply to the ballot mail of the Plaintiff States, and another applies to the remaining states,” Steven Monteith, the Postal Service’s chief customer and marketing officer and executive vice president, said in a court filing. “Doing so would cause operational confusion and significantly increase the complexity and efficiency of implementing any final rule.”

But the Trump administration’s nationwide efforts to use the Postal Service to regulate who gets ballots also hit a separate legal roadblock this week when another federal judge in Washington, D.C., ruled that the executive order violates a years-old agreement requiring the federal government to ensure voters who request mail-in ballots get them in time to ensure they can be counted.

U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan concluded that the Trump administration’s plans to send ballots only to voters on preapproved lists breached a 2021 agreement between the Postal Service and the NAACP meant to ensure that the agency prioritized ballot delivery. In contrast to Talwani’s ruling, Sullivan’s decision applies nationwide.

“These proposed rules directly undermine commitments that the Postal Service made to ensure mail-in ballots are delivered and counted,” said Anthony Ashton, senior associate general counsel for the NAACP, in a statement.

The U.S. Postal Service and Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment.

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

Supreme Court allows states to accept mail ballots after Election Day, rejecting Republican challenge to voting access

2026-06-29T16:38:52+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.

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that states can count mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day, as long as they are properly postmarked — a key victory for voting rights advocates and another setback to President Donald Trump’s efforts to crack down on absentee voting.

In an uncommon 5-4 ruling, the justices found that nothing in federal law prevents states from enacting grace periods for absentee ballots to be received, as long as they are actually cast and mailed by Election Day. Fourteen states and the District of Columbia currently have such grace periods.

The case, Watson v. Republican National Committee, centered on a Mississippi law that allowed ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted as long as they arrived up to five business days later. The national and state Republican parties challenged the law in 2024, arguing that, because Election Day is set by federal law, states should not be about to count ballots received after it.

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A federal judge initially upheld Mississippi’s law, but an appeals court sided with the Republicans who challenged the ballot rules. Mississippi then brought its case to the Supreme Court in March.

The high court eventually sided with Mississippi. “The electorate’s choice is made when voting is complete, not when ballots are received,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in the majority opinion. “The election-day statutes say nothing about ballot receipt, and we cannot add to the words Congress chose.”

The ruling crossed ideological lines, with conservatives Barrett and Chief Justice John Roberts joining liberal Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor in the majority.

The status-quo ruling was good news for those who worried that eliminating the absentee-ballot grace period would disenfranchise voters. A Votebeat analysis of data from 11 of the 15 jurisdictions with grace periods found that more than 745,000 absentee ballots arrived after Election Day in 2024, representing no more than roughly 3 percent of the total vote in any state.

“The Court’s decision is a direct message to all voters who rely on mail ballots, including military and overseas voters, rural voters, seniors, and people with disabilities: Your voices matter equally to voters who can easily access a polling place,” said Pamela Smith, president of Verified Voting, a nonpartisan voting security group. “This ruling ensures that a postal delay outside of any voter’s control does not erase a lawfully cast ballot and supports election officials’ ability to capture the will of voters.”

Carolina Lopez, executive director of the Partnership for Large Election Jurisdictions, said she was pleasantly surprised by the court ruling. She said the decision would come as a relief to election administrators who weren’t sure when the absentee ballot receipt deadlines would be in their states.

“For election offices, this clarity matters,” she said.

Republicans, however, criticized the ruling. “Democrats are inviting chaos at the ballot box by allowing elections to drag on for days and weeks after voters cast their ballots,” Joe Gruters, chairman of the RNC, said in a statement. “Republicans are not going to be deterred by this decision, and the RNC will keep fighting to have elections end on Election Day as Americans want.”

In a post on social media, Trump called the ruling a “tremendous loss” and said it should be a catalyst for Congress to pass his long-stalled election overhaul, the SAVE America Act.

“There is only one reason to oppose — CHEATING!” Trump wrote. Studies show that mail voting fraud is exceedingly rare, accounting for only 0.000043% of total mail ballots cast, on average, in the 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022 general elections.

Trump has long criticized mail-in ballots, blaming them for delayed election results and arguing unsuccessfully in court that they cost him the 2020 presidential election.

“We should know the result of the election on Nov. 3, the evening of Nov. 3,” Trump said on the campaign trail in 2020. “That’s the way it’s been and that’s the way it should be.”

As post-Election Day vote tallies in key states that year showed a swing toward Democrat Joe Biden, Trump called for a halt to counting ballots. The late swing reflected timing, not fraud: Studies show misinformation made Republicans more wary of mail voting in 2020, so later-counted mail ballots skewed Democratic.

“STOP THE COUNT!” Trump wrote on social media two days after Election Day. “ANY VOTE THAT CAME IN AFTER ELECTION DAY WILL NOT BE COUNTED!”

Last year, Trump issued an executive order that gave the federal government power to withhold federal funding to states that allowed ballots to be counted if they arrived after Election Day. Several states sued over the order, and federal courts have largely blocked it from taking effect.

On Monday, conservative Justice Samuel Alito embraced Trump’s arguments in his dissent. Alito argued that the ruling “creates a serious risk of further undermining public confidence in our elections and our system of self-government.”

In the wake of the ruling, Mississippi’s Republican attorney general urged the state legislature to eliminate the state’s grace period anyway.

“I am hopeful that the Mississippi Legislature will take this opportunity to amend the law and require absentee ballots be received on the same day ballots are cast at the polling place,” said Attorney General Lynn Fitch. “President Trump is right to prioritize improving public trust in our elections.”

During two hours of oral arguments in March, some conservative Supreme Court justices pressed the lawyers about whether late-arriving ballots could create the perception of voter fraud. At the time, Alito asked whether “confidence in outcomes can be seriously undermined if the apparent outcome of the election on the day after the polls close is radically flipped by the acceptance later of a big stash of ballots that flip the election.”

“We don’t have Election Day anymore,” Alito said. “We have election month, or we have election months.”

The more liberal justices questioned the impact that nullifying Mississippi’s law could have on voting by Americans and soldiers living overseas.

“You believe that absentee voting by the military and overseas voters, the… federal laws under which states have proceeded with respect to those votes are illegal?” asked Sotomayor.

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

Legal ruling blocking Trump hunt for noncitizen voters may not help those already flagged

2026-06-29T09:00:00+00:00

A few days ago, a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s use of a revamped immigration database to identify noncitizens who have registered to vote across the country.

The pointed 75-page ruling from U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle Sooknanan said the federal government’s actions threatened Americans’ privacy and voting rights.

But what does it mean for the estimated 24,000 registered voters that the Department of Homeland Security said it has already identified for further investigation using the revamped system that’s now been deemed a threat to Americans’ privacy?

Sooknanan’s ruling doesn’t put a halt to any of the investigations that have been carried out in more than two dozen states that used the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, better known as SAVE, over the past year to identify potential noncitizens on their voter rolls.

“The ruling turns the spigot off of a broken system, but it doesn’t go backwards in time,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project. “The reality is that the thousands of people that are caught up now in the system are still at risk.”

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Texas, for example, flagged more than 2,700 people as potential noncitizens using the SAVE database. Last fall, the Texas Secretary of State’s Office said it had sent lists to county elections officials and asked them to investigate. As Votebeat previously reported, hundreds of the voters flagged for investigation had likely already proven their citizenship when registering to vote.

Chris McGinn, executive director of the Texas Association of County Election Officials, said most Texas counties had already completed their investigations. County officials sent out letters to those on the list and gave people 30 days to provide proof they were eligible to vote.

“Most of our jurisdictions went through the process and, I hate to say, kind of wiped their hands of it,” McGinn said. “As far as the counties are concerned, they completed their part of the process.”

While the exact number of people removed from voter rolls because of the check has not been made public, McGinn estimated that 75% to 80% of those in smaller counties have already been taken off the lists because they did not respond within the 30 days.

“Candidly, I think it was more political than practical in Texas,” he said. “You have 19 million registered voters in Texas and 2,700 is a small percentage. We still can’t consistently find evidence that ineligible voters are having an impact on elections, which speaks to how secure our elections process is.”

Dan Vicuña, the senior policy director for voting and fair representation at Common Cause, which filed a legal brief in support of the League of Women Voters’ lawsuit, said the judge’s ruling would at least give people who had been improperly removed from voter registration lists because of states’ use of SAVE a chance to challenge the decisions.

“It will provide some strong avenues for people who have been tossed to challenge that,” he said. “Obviously it would have been better if they had never had to deal with it in the first place.”

Vicuña said other lawsuits could provide more help to individual voters. Common Cause is currently suing several Texas counties that removed voters from their rolls based on the revamped SAVE system.

Other states using SAVE so far have flagged much smaller numbers of potential noncitizens registered. Louisiana said it identified about 400 potential noncitizen voters on its rolls (out of nearly 3 million registered voters) and found 83 who had voted in at least one election since the 1980s. In 2024, Georgia identified 20 potential noncitizen voters on its rolls (out of more than 8 million registered voters).

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger said in a statement that he was disappointed with the judge’s ruling and said he was still proceeding with a new check of its voter rolls to ensure no noncitizens were on the lists.

A top election official in Arizona’s Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, recently referred more than 200 cases of potential noncitizen voters to the state and local prosecutors for potential prosecution.

Initially, Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap said in February that his office had used SAVE to identify 137 potential noncitizens on the rolls and found 60 of those had voted in prior elections. That’s about 0.2% of the 60,000 voters it ran through the system, and a tiny fraction of the county’s total 2.5 million voters. Heap’s office and the state attorney general’s office did not respond to requests for comment on how the legal ruling might impact ongoing investigations.

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

Federal judge blocks key pillars of Trump executive order restricting mail voting in 2026 election

2026-06-25T15:14:37+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.

Update, June 25, 2:05 p.m.: This story has been updated to include comments responding to the ruling.

A federal judge on Thursday blocked key pillars of President Donald Trump’s efforts to overhaul the 2026 elections, declaring unconstitutional his attempts to create centralized lists of adult citizens and giving the U.S. Postal Service unprecedented authority over who can vote by mail.

The 37-page ruling by U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani concluded that the president did not have the constitutional authority to regulate state elections as he tried to do in a March executive order.

Live event: Will the midterms happen? Your election questions, answered

Talwani’s decision came one day after the head of the Postal Service said the agency would refuse to deliver mail-in ballots to voters that were not on lists approved by the federal government, making explicit what the agency’s proposed new rules had previously implied.

In her ruling, Talwani said that the federal government could not use the postal system to regulate who gets ballots.

“No law enacted by Congress delegates authority to control mail-in voting to USPS,” Talwani wrote.

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 includes most Democratic-led and swing states, including Arizona, California, Michigan, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

However, the injunction applies only to this year’s elections. Talwani granted the Trump administration’s motion to dismiss the plaintiffs’ legal challenges to the executive order as not yet ripe when it comes to future elections.

The White House implied that it would appeal the ruling. In a statement, Abigail Jackson, a spokeswoman, said the administration is “confident that we will ultimately prevail.” The U.S. Postal Service didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Some Democratic secretaries of state who brought the case hailed the ruling as a major victory for voters.

“Trump will not be able to use the Postal Service to control which voters receive a mail ballot, and cannot use the DOJ to intimidate election officials into following his unlawful order,” said Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold. “The Constitution is clear: States run elections, not Trump. This is a major victory for American democracy.”

The ruling is the latest in a series of judicial rebukes to Trump’s efforts to impose federal control over American elections, something that the Constitution leaves to Congress and the states.

The executive order is the second election-related one issued by Trump. The first one, issued in March 2025, sought to require prospective voters to prove their citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections and impose restrictions on states accepting mail-in ballots after Election Day. Federal courts have so far blocked major portions of the first executive order, including the effort to require documented proof of citizenship when registering to vote.

During the hearing in the case over the second order, in early June, Talwani expressed concerns about the executive order.

“What’s the harm if I say no one can use this list for the November election?” Talwani asked.

The Trump administration has cast the president’s efforts as an attempt to compel federal agencies to enforce existing laws barring noncitizens from voting in elections.

Trump has consistently targeted America’s electoral system and, without evidence, accused Democrats across the nation of “rigging” elections.

The president has repeatedly claimed that he was cheated out of the presidency in 2020 when he lost to Democrat Joe Biden, even though federal judges, state elections officials, and independent investigations have repeatedly debunked those allegations.

Before Thursday’s ruling, the Trump administration had been forging ahead with implementing the executive order.

A different federal judge declined in late May to block major parts of the executive order, arguing that the issue was premature because the U.S. Postal Service had yet to take any steps to set up the new system. The following day, the Postal Service unveiled its proposed rules, which would give the agency the power to block delivery of mail-in ballots to Americans across the nation unless they were on a verified list of voters.

And in early June, the Trump administration said that it was taking steps to create a new nationwide mechanism aimed at verifying voter citizenship, per the executive order.

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

Appeals court rules against Trump administration in Michigan voter roll dispute

2026-06-24T21:10:24+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.

What happened?

A federal appeals court has ruled that Michigan does not have to turn over its unredacted voter roll to the Department of Justice, dealing the Trump administration its highest-profile loss yet in its quest to obtain voter data from states ahead of the 2026 midterms.

What’s the dispute?

Since last year, the Department of Justice has demanded lists of registered voters from virtually every state, including Michigan in July. The state turned over the public version of its voter file but refused to turn over personally identifying information such as partial Social Security numbers.

In response, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Michigan in September but lost in district court in February after a judge dismissed the case, arguing that none of the laws cited by the department required the disclosure. The department then appealed the case to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, which agreed with the lower court’s reasoning.

In addition to Michigan, the department has sued 29 other states and Washington, D.C., to compel them to share their voter rolls. (Seventeen states have complied voluntarily.) So far, lower courts have dismissed several of those lawsuits, with none finding in favor of the Department of Justice.

What is the plaintiff asking for?

The Department of Justice has argued that a number of federal laws, including the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act, entitle it to access to the unredacted voter rolls, including voters’ personal information. Many states have declined to provide that information, arguing that it would pose privacy concerns and violate state law. Federal officials have not provided an official reason for their requests, but they appear to be looking for noncitizen voters on the rolls.

What happens now?

Michigan’s case is the first to be heard, and be ruled on, at the appellate level. The next step up would be to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, but Department of Justice officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment Wednesday.

Even if the case is taken up by the country’s highest court, a resolution — particularly one that could be meaningfully implemented — before the midterm elections is unlikely. Absentee ballots for the Michigan primary election start going out Thursday.

Read more Votebeat coverage of the DOJ’s fight for access to voting rolls:

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

To accommodate overseas voters, Michigan changes start dates for local officials

2026-06-23T19:28:11+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 first election legislation of the 2025-26 session has made it over the finish line — and more voters could see their ballots counted as a result.

On Monday, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed four bills into law that would delay the start of some local officials’ terms. The laws are designed to ensure that people don’t take office until every vote is counted in their elections.

In many communities, local officials previously took office almost immediately after Election Day, meaning ballots counted later might not be considered at all. That functionally disenfranchised military voters or those voting from overseas, whose ballots can be counted as long as they arrive within six days of an election.

In November 2024, for instance, 1,440 ballots were returned in that six-day window — 303 from military voters and 1,137 from civilians overseas.

Under the new laws, elected officers for cities, townships, and villages — supervisors, trustees, clerks, and so on — won’t be able to start their job any sooner than noon on the first day of the month following their election, which for many positions means Dec. 1. And no one will be able to start until the election is certified by the appropriate canvassers.

“We must take the … step to ensure our local elected officials are not sworn in before the election results are certified,” Sen. Jeremy Moss, a Democrat from Bloomfield who sponsored two of the bills, said in a news release. “This bipartisan solution sets a uniform date for local oaths of office to take place and gives our community leaders a firm expectation of when to prepare for their new roles.”

Voting legislation has not found much success in Michigan since the 2024 election, when Republicans took control of the House but Democrats kept control of the Senate. Numerous bills have made it through one chamber but have gone untouched in the other.

The four bills enacted Monday, however, had support from both major parties. Moss’ bills had the co-sponsorship of Republican Sens. Ed McBroom, of Waucedah Township, and Ruth Johnson, the former secretary of state from Holly. The two others, introduced by Republican Reps. Mike Hoadley, of Au Gres, and Pat Outman, of Six Lakes, had a number of members of both parties sponsoring them.

Hoadley said in a release that the change “protects the will of the voters,” while Outman said his bill “gives local communities more flexibility and helps ensure continuity in local government.”

The bills take effect immediately.

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

Bipartisan election board languishing as governor fails to appoint new members

2026-06-18T16:00:07+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.

In 2020, Pennsylvania’s elections were facing a major crisis. The presidential primary was set for April 28, but the COVID-19 pandemic was in full swing, restricting travel and complicating in-person activities — such as voting.

So the state legislature came up with a solution. In a unanimous vote in both chambers, the primary was moved to June and, simultaneously, the state created a new bipartisan body meant to review and recommend changes to Pennsylvania’s near-century-old election law.

The Election Law Advisory Board, as it is called, was heralded at the time as a way to thoughtfully reform the state’s elections. But six years later, the board has fallen into a state of disuse, in part because Gov. Josh Shapiro has so far failed to fill seven seats he’s responsible for. The board has not met in nearly three years, even as county election officials are still clamoring for changes to the state’s outdated, contradictory election code.

The Election Law Advisory Board initially seemed promising

The idea of a board to advise the legislature on Pennsylvania election law was first born out of a 2017 report on the state’s aging voting equipment. When Republican state Sen. Elder Vogel introduced the bill that was signed in 2020, he told the Beaver County Times that the board was designed to provide the legislature with a road map to enacting election reform.

The board was designed to be bipartisan, bicameral, and representative of the entire state, and to include critical voices in the voting space, such as advocates and county officials. It is composed of majority and minority members from each legislative chamber, a representative from the Pennsylvania Department of State, and one member from each federal congressional district appointed by the governor.

The board met a dozen times in its first two and a half years, discussing everything from processing mail ballots to standardizing training for election workers.

“Back three years ago, when we were getting together and working, we were coming up with bipartisan solutions,” Joe Kantz, a Republican county commissioner and the current vice chair of the board, said.

To be sure, Kantz said, there was disagreement between the members on the issues, “but we found ways to work together in a time when we often see Harrisburg not working together.”

The yearly reports produced by the board offered tangible solutions to election law issues. For example, after the 2020 election, the state took several days to report unofficial results due to counties’ inability to pre-canvass, or prepare mail ballots for counting beforehand. The board’s first report recommended 14 days of pre-canvassing and provided language for the legislature to pass.

“The amendments would allow election results to be known within hours, rather than days, of the conclusion of in-person voting on election day,” the report said.

In 2022, the board suggested amending state law so that sources other than the Pennsylvania Department of Health or obituaries could be used to remove dead voters from the rolls; the following year, it recommended prohibiting counties from rejecting mail ballots for lacking a date on the exterior envelope, a requirement that has tripped up many voters and remains mired in litigation.

Shapiro has left 7 Election Law Advisory Board seats vacant

While statutorily mandated yearly reports are still being produced, the Election Law Advisory Board hasn’t met since September 2023. Part of the reason is that seven congressional districts are lacking a gubernatorial appointee.

According to emails obtained by Votebeat and Spotlight PA, in October 2024, Kantz emailed an official from the Joint State Government Commission, which oversees the board, to inquire about the status of the appointments and express his dismay that the board wasn’t meeting in a presidential election year.

“We have done all we can on our end to remind the Governor’s Office that we are awaiting the appointment of new members,” Yvonne Hursh, the commission’s counsel, wrote back. She added that the executive nominations calendar, which tracks gubernatorial appointments awaiting Senate confirmation, had “placeholder names” in the open positions.

Many of those same placeholder nominees remain on the current calendar, and others listed as Election Law Advisory Board nominees are also nominated to several other positions, suggesting they may also be placeholders.

Kantz said that the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania also raised the issue directly with Shapiro in a meeting earlier this year.

“I know what it’s like to make appointments,” Kantz said. “I know it’s not easy to find people that want to be on a board, but I don’t think that’s an issue here. I think there is some level of prestige, pride in being on a board that’s been created by the [legislature] to do what we do. Everyone knows how important it is.”

Hursh said her understanding is that the governor is “actively seeking new appointees.”

A spokesperson for the governor’s office did not answer a question about the status of finding appointees, but said the Department of State works closely with stakeholders to provide guidance and make improvements to the voting process.

“The Shapiro Administration is constantly engaging with and listening to election stakeholders and has a team of experienced professionals who work full-time to ensure elections in Pennsylvania are free, fair, safe, and secure,” Rosie Lapowsky, the governor’s press secretary, said.

According to Hursh, the vacancies have made it difficult for the board to convene. Board meetings require a quorum of at least 11 members, she said, and although 15 members are currently active, that doesn’t leave much room for absences.

“All of our members are busy people, and it is always difficult to find [a] date where we can be sure of enough attendance,” she said via email. “We have been very uncomfortable with trying to schedule a meeting, rearranging people’s schedules and prepping materials for a meeting that may fall apart due to a lack of a quorum at the last minute.”

The law that established the board says that a quorum is a “majority of appointed members,” raising the possibility that a majority of sitting board members would be sufficient. But Hursh said that the board follows a legislative rule which says the “majority of the membership” constitutes a quorum.

“The majority definition that would not count vacancies would give 8 out of 22 positions the power to convene meetings and make decisions,” she said in an email. “We do not believe that outcome was the intent of the legislature, given that the overall intent of requiring a quorum is to ensure that a body’s decisions are not made by a small, potentially unrepresentative group.”

The board has also said in recent reports that the missing members aren’t just a concern for forming a quorum, but also because they feel it is “unwise” to convene and debate issues with so many parts of the state not represented.

Christina Iacono, a Democrat appointed to the board from the 5th Congressional District and a former poll worker coordinator for Delaware County, agreed that the board was doing good work and was frustrated that the board hasn’t met recently.

Even though the legislature hasn’t passed any of the board’s recommendations, Iacono said it still has value in informing the proposals lawmakers do introduce and providing non-legislative readers, like judges, with detailed information on how elections work directly from officials involved in making them happen.

“I would hope the legislature will eventually look at what we have created,” she said. “Everyone in government has a tough job, and I do think partisanship gets in the way of many things getting done, but I think overall having a group that gets together that puts together guidance is a good thing.”

Hursh said the Joint State Government Commission is “uncomfortable with the amount of time that has elapsed since the group last met” and is hoping to schedule a meeting for the fall, but so far it hasn’t been able to find a date that works for the remaining members.

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

Why the GOP wants closed primaries in Texas, and what that could mean for voters

2026-06-18T09:45:00+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.

During the Texas Republican Convention last week, Gov. Greg Abbott publicly backed a push to close primaries and require voters to register with a party.

“We are going to make clear that in the future, only Republicans vote in Republican primaries,” he said Friday, addressing the convention in Houston.

After an unsuccessful legislative push last year to close the primary elections, when voters choose a party’s nominees for the November general elections, state Republicans sued to make it happen. That litigation is still pending in federal court, but Abbott wants state lawmakers to try again. Lawmakers “can and should be more responsive to Republicans than a judge may be,” Abbott told the Texas Scorecard, a conservative news outlet.

During the convention, Abbott noted that closing the primary will require a “thoughtful process” laying out “how we’re going to make sure we get all Republicans registered to vote and identified as Republicans.” Abbott’s comments were received with cheers and applause. The party also made closing the primaries one of its top legislative priorities for next year’s legislative session.

Here’s what you need to know about the GOP’s push to close the primaries:

When did the recent push to close Texas primaries begin?

For years, Republicans in Texas have made closing primaries a top legislative priority, but haven’t gotten anywhere. The push intensified in 2024 when two incumbent state representatives viewed as moderates, former House Speaker Dade Phelan and Gary VanDeaver, held off challengers in their primary races by fewer than 800 votes.

Some Republican leaders claimed Phelan and VanDeaver only won because they’d received votes from Democratic- and independent-leaning voters — which is allowed under the state’s open primary system that doesn’t require party registration and allows any voter to cast a ballot in whichever primary they want.

That same year, more than 70% of voters in the Republican primary supported a nonbinding proposition calling for closed primaries.

How do primaries work in Texas?

Texas’ open primary system has been in use since the early 1990s, when the state moved away from using party conventions to nominate candidates.

Eligible voters in Texas do not have to select a party affiliation when registering to vote, and may choose to vote in any one party’s primary during a given election cycle.

Unlike most other states, where county and state officials are responsible for managing the primary election, Texas gives the political parties a lot of authority. On primary Election Day, the parties have discretion to choose where and how voters cast ballots and how the votes are counted. The state then reimburses them for many expenses and administrative costs.

Why did closing the primaries become such a hot topic?

The issue heated up last fall, when the Texas Republican Party sued Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson, a Republican, arguing that the state’s open primary system is a violation of their freedom of association rights under the First Amendment. Then, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sided with the GOP in asking a federal judge to strike down parts of the election code that allow for open primaries. Paxton’s office gave Nelson less than an hour’s notice of his filing.

Nelson, who earlier this month announced she’d be stepping down as secretary of state, opposed Paxton’s motion and argued that it’s up to the state Legislature to make changes to election law. This sparked backlash among some Republicans, and scattered calls on social media for Abbott to fire her.

The lawsuit is still pending in federal court.

What would it actually take to close the primaries?

The law would have to change. Republican lawmakers’ proposals to close the primaries haven’t been successful so far, but Abbott’s recently declared support could push the proposal forward during next year’s legislative session.

Alternatively, the federal judge presiding over the GOP’s lawsuit could also at some point rule the current state law unconstitutional, which would also force a change.

What would closing the primaries in Texas mean for voters?

Administratively, changing the state’s current system could be complicated because the state’s more than 18 million registered voters have never had to declare a party affiliation. And the state’s voter registration system is not designed to accommodate that.

In its lawsuit, the GOP suggested that if the judge were to rule in their favor, the party could maintain its own voter registration lists, “develop its own verification procedures,” and work with county election officials to provide them with access to the GOP’s system. Under that model, Democrats would presumably need to take similar action.

But the change could also require administrative action by the state. Election policy experts are wondering whether switching to closed primaries would mean requiring all voters to re-register with a party affiliation. That could be a big lift not just for voters but for the state, which would have to redesign its forms and software to allow for voters to list a party affiliation. It’s not yet clear how long that would take and how much it could cost.

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.

Alleged Wisconsin fake elector accomplices plead not guilty as Trump seeks to rewrite 2020 election

2026-06-15T18:34:53+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.

As three alleged planners of Wisconsin’s fake elector scheme pleaded not guilty Tuesday to eleven forgery-related criminal charges in Dane County court, the criminal charges against them are moving forward in a national legal and political landscape that looks dramatically different from the one in which they were filed.

When Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul filed the charges in June 2024, Joe Biden was president, Donald Trump was battling a criminal case brought by the U.S. Department of Justice over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and state prosecutors in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, and Nevada were bringing criminal cases tied to the fake elector scheme.

That scheme arose in the aftermath of the 2020 election, when Trump allies tried to keep him in power despite his loss. Those allies, who became known as fake or false electors, attempted to cast electoral votes for Trump in multiple states he lost and submit those certificates to Congress.

Now, as the three defendants in the Wisconsin case await trial , the case enters what is expected to be a lengthy legal process. It will unfold as Trump has regained the presidency, and he and his allies are undertaking extensive efforts to rewrite what happened in the 2020 election.

Since returning to office, Trump has issued a federal pardon to those involved in the 2020 scheme, and his administration has sent the FBI to investigate the 2020 election in Wisconsin and elsewhere.

The federal criminal case against Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election has been dismissed. And, until recently, his administration had plans to allocate $1.8 billion to compensate people it claimed had been unfairly prosecuted by the federal government, raising questions about whether participants in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot and those involved in the fake elector schemes could receive taxpayer funds.

Other state cases have also faltered. Georgia’s election interference case has been dismissed, though not before the prosecution secured some guilty pleas from Trump’s allies. Michigan’s false elector case has also been dismissed. Arizona’s remains unresolved after a major setback for the prosecution, and Nevada’s just resumed after its Supreme Court revived charges that a lower court had thrown out.

Kaul faced criticism for filing his charges so late — it was the last criminal case to be filed regarding the fake electors. But two years later, that timing has left Wisconsin’s as one of the last cases standing in the broader, mostly failed effort to prosecute Trump and his allies for their attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

“The direction of activity has completely flipped, from prosecuting the people who were disrupting the election or inhibiting the normal flow of events to now going after Trump’s adversaries,” said Barry Burden, a UW-Madison political science professor who founded the Elections Research Center.

The Trump administration’s new investigation into the 2020 election in Wisconsin and elsewhere, Burden said, “seems to be a targeted effort at people who were mostly upholding the law and trying to administer an election in a very difficult environment.”

Amid the federal government’s current activity, and nearly six years removed from the 2020 election, Burden said any guilty finding in the Wisconsin fake elector case would likely have a muted effect.

“If we wanted the public to believe that there were ramifications for that kind of unlawful behavior, it would have to happen quickly and publicly, and feel like it was an immediate response to what people had done after the 2020 election,” he said. “But that’s not where we are six years later.”

‘Shocking’ if there are no ramifications in Wisconsin

The Wisconsin criminal case is still in its preliminary stages. Although it was filed two years ago, a number of motions and an appeal have set the case back significantly.

The defendants — former Dane County Judge Jim Troupis, who was Trump’s Wisconsin campaign attorney in 2020; attorney Kenneth Chesebro, who advised Trump on legal matters; and former Trump aide Mike Roman — each face 11 felony charges for his part in allegedly guiding Wisconsin’s 10 fake electors to send documents to the U.S. Capitol falsely stating that Trump had won Wisconsin in the 2020 election.

All entered not-guilty pleas on Tuesday during a brief proceeding attended by a couple dozen people in attendance in the several pews in the back of the courtroom.

Chesebro and Roman appeared virtually. Troupis, who briefly worked in the same courthouse where he was arraigned, was there in-person. He showed little emotion during the quick arraignment but smiled as he greeted supporters afterward. He told the press after the proceeding that he didn’t have anything to say.

The 10 false electors from 2020 aren’t defendants in the current case, but they separately settled a civil lawsuit in Wisconsin by acknowledging that Biden won the 2020 election and pledging not to violate election laws in the future.

Chesebro and Troupis separately reached a settlement in that case, turning over a trove of documents outlining their role in 2020 and agreeing not to participate in similar schemes in future elections.

Text messages and emails show that Chesebro was a primary architect behind the 2020 plan to have Wisconsin’s GOP electors attest that Trump won the state while Trump’s court challenges seeking to overturn the election were still ongoing. Troupis discussed that plan with the Trump campaign, and Roman helped craft the language of the documents Republicans planned to send to the Capitol from states that Biden won.

Troupis has since asked the federal government to reimburse him $3.2 million from the proposed $1.8 billion fund, saying his life has been a “nightmare” since he stepped up to represent Trump.

“My experience is a poster-child for what weaponization can do,” he wrote in a letter to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, adding that “the entire legal system is at risk if compensation is not paid.”

Attorneys for Chesebro and Roman didn’t respond to requests for comment, and Troupis’ attorney declined to comment.

Burden said it is striking that the case is still ongoing nearly six years after the election, but he said the conduct at issue remains extraordinary.

“These were among the most serious challenges to elections we’ve seen in modern times,” Burden said.

“To think that there might be no ramifications of that really would be shocking,” he said, “and, I think, at odds with how the American criminal justice system has typically operated.”

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

Trump’s moves to erect voting hurdles face race against the clock

2026-06-15T09:00:00+00:00

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

President Donald Trump is in a race against time.

Since returning to office last year, Trump has repeatedly tried to remake American elections, including by issuing two executive orders that would erect new federal rules and restrictions on voting and various aspects of elections. Voting rights advocates and a variety of states have filed lawsuits that have already frozen key tentpoles of Trump’s first executive order on voting and could do the same for the second. If Trump wants to see these measures impact this November’s elections, his administration has to move fast.

In recent days, the Trump administration has taken new steps to erect the architecture it would need to implement key pieces of the president’s most recent election executive order, which called in March for the Department of Homeland Security to create “State Citizenship Lists” of all U.S. citizens who are over 18.

In response to the order, the Department of Homeland Security unveiled plans to set up a special system by the end of this month — then revised its plans just days later, showing how quickly the administration is moving to try and put these measures in place.

The executive order also calls on the U.S. Postal Service to set up a new process where it could block voters from receiving mail-in ballots if they are not on a vetted list provided to the federal government 60 days before an election, and the agency has proposed new rules to do so. Many election officials say the move could cause chaos, and is beyond the president’s authority.

Setting aside the constitutional questions around the efforts, voting rights advocates say that it could be practically very difficult for the agencies involved to create a workable system before the November election.

“Elections are like a battleship, it’s not like you can turn them around on the fly,” said Rick Hasen, a UCLA political science professor and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project. “It seems exceedingly unlikely that any of this will be in place by November.”

The administration’s court filings hint at some of the difficulties.

On Friday, June 5, the Trump administration filed a four-paragraph notice to a court in Boston overseeing a legal challenge to the March executive order. In that notice, the Department of Homeland Security said it was moving ahead with plans to allow states to check voter eligibility by submitting their entire voter lists to a federal database known as Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE.

It also said the department would create a portal that would allow state election officials to “securely access citizenship-related data” from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, the Social Security Administration, and the U.S. Department of State — by June 30.

But three days later, this past Monday, the Trump administration changed plans and filed a new notice with the court, outlining a new memorandum rescinding the previously stated policies. Per the notice, that memo walks back some of the specifics of the earlier implementation plan, promising only to provide by June 30 “a mechanism for States to receive secure, state-focused citizenship-related information from each agency.”

The previously mentioned portal would come sometime later this year, the revised notice said, and the new memo also rescinded the proposal that would let states submit their voter rolls to SAVE because, the notice said, that approach wasn’t specifically called for in the executive order.

Some states have already used the system — which was previously used to verify immigrants’ eligibility for benefits — to check voter eligibility after the administration revamped the database and vigorously encouraged states to do so, but others have questioned the accuracy of the SAVE system and declined to use it.

The initial notice also said that the Homeland Security department “contemplates working with” the U.S. Postal Service to access its data on mail ballots and use it to “monitor mail-in and absentee ballot flows, identify anomalies that may suggest voter fraud or misuse, and generate authorized investigative leads.”

In the second notice, the administration instead told the court the two agencies were having “preliminary conversations” on potential data-sharing, and decisions would be contingent on final legal and policy determinations.

Beyond the logistical challenges, the proposals are facing legal challenges that could block them from taking effect. A coalition of Democratic party committees and some nonprofit groups have challenged the Trump executive order as unconstitutional. And while a federal judge in Washington, D.C. declined to immediately halt major provisions in that case, a federal judge in Boston could still do so. That judge expressed concerns last month during a hearing on a separate case brought by Democratic officials from twenty-three states, the District of Columbia, and a different group of nonprofits, and is expected to rule soon.

John Davisson, deputy director at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, called the latest Trump administration move “a five-alarm fire for the protection of privacy and voting rights” across the country.

“Building a citizenship registry is beyond the federal government’s power, illegal under the Privacy Act, impossible to construct without introducing catastrophic error, and guaranteed to cause untold numbers of perfectly legal voters to be denied their right to vote if implemented,” he said.

The Trump administration says its efforts are a way to integrate federal systems to help ensure there is no fraud in the country’s electoral system.

The Department of Homeland Security didn’t respond to a request for comment. In April, Lauren Bis, a spokesperson, said SAVE “is a critical tool for state and local governments to safeguard the integrity of elections across the country.” The Trump administration has sued a majority of U.S. states in an effort to secure access to their voter registration databases.

Votebeat Brunch: Is your election rigged? Separating fact from fiction.

California’s primary election set off a new wave of unsubstantiated allegations — including from Trump — that the vote was rigged. To separate fact from fiction, Votebeat spoke to Renee DiResta, an associate research professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy and an expert in disinformation. DiResta served for five years as technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory and co-led a nonpartisan Election Integrity Partnership that studied misinformation during the 2020 election. The interview was conducted in writing and has been lightly edited for clarity, brevity, and style.

Q: The California election has triggered a new flood of unsupported allegations that the vote is rigged. What advice do you have for voters trying to separate fact from fiction?

Many election rumors spread because they are emotionally compelling, not because they’re supported by facts. When people encounter a claim that an election was “rigged,” they should ask a few questions:

- What is the original source of the claim?

- Is there any evidence, or just screenshots, anecdotes, or speculation? “It just seems weird” isn’t evidence.

- Have election officials, courts, or independent observers said anything?

- Do multiple credible sources support the claim?

People should also be careful about treating isolated irregularities as proof of widespread fraud. Every election has some mistakes, and administrative errors. Those are not automatically evidence that they were manipulated. Officials will often explain what happened quickly, but you sometimes have to go check because their posts generally don’t go viral. A useful rule of thumb is: The stronger the claim, the stronger the evidence must be.

Q: What are some tools people can use to get reliable information amid a flood of misinformation?

A good starting point is official election information from state and local election offices, since they can provide direct information about procedures, vote counting, and certification, and they know the local rules better than anyone else. Fact checks are helpful as well. Keep in mind that getting answers takes time. Asking an AI for facts isn’t going to get you an immediate answer in most cases because it has to work with what’s out there, too. Asking Grok or another AI can help, but it’s sometimes dependent on how recent or specific the issue is. Be wary and double check, or check again later.

Q: Is there more state and federal officials should be doing to address election misinformation?

Election officials who communicate quickly and responsively about voting procedures, counting, audits, and certification tend to leave less room for rumors to thrive. Communicating in advance can help, too. And strengthening influencer disclosure rules would go a long way toward shifting incentives.

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

Republican legislators put measure to change voting procedures on November ballot

2026-06-13T16:57:48+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.

In a contentious late-night vote, the Republican-controlled Arizona Legislature on Friday placed a measure on the November ballot that, if passed by voters, would significantly alter voting in the state.

The measure, HCR 2001, would make various changes to voting procedures, most notably requiring all voters, even those who vote by mail, to provide “valid government-issued proof of identity.” If voters approve the measure, it would take effect in 2028.

State lawmakers voted along party lines to pass the referral, also known as the Fast, Accurate, Secure, Transparent Election Results Act. In Arizona, legislators can refer measures to the ballot with a simple majority vote in both chambers, bypassing Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs’ veto pen.

State law already mandates that voters casting ballots in person show photo ID or two non-photo documents bearing their name and address, such as a utility bill. But the vast majority of the state’s voters cast ballots by mail. State law currently does not require these voters to provide ID, although they do have to provide identification upon registering to vote and sign their ballot envelopes when voting. Those signatures are then compared against their signatures on file to safeguard against voter fraud.

It’s unclear exactly how mail voters might prove their identity should the measure pass in November. State Rep. Alex Kolodin, a Scottsdale Republican who sponsored the legislation in the Arizona House and is running for secretary of state, told members of the Senate Judiciary and Election Committee in March that there were “many potential options,” including a system by which county recorders would issue each voter a unique identification number and require them to write the last four digits of it on their ballot envelope.

He suggested state lawmakers should revisit the topic next year if voters approve the measure.

The measure is part of a national movement by Republicans to restrict voting by mail. Earlier this week, the GOP-controlled Ohio legislature passed a similar photo ID requirement for mail voters, sending it to Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine for his signature. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump issued an executive order in March giving the U.S. Postal Service unprecedented oversight over mail voting. That order has been challenged in court, and it remains to be seen if it will be implemented for the 2026 election.

“For years, the people of Arizona have been calling out for real election reform,” Kolodin said in March, adding that tightening voter ID requirements was also a priority of the Trump administration. “This measure gives them the opportunity to take it into their own hands.”

Voter ID measure aims to speed up vote-counting

Among the other changes the measure would make is the one that inspired its acronym, the FAST Election Results Act.

It would require counties to give voters who drop off their mail ballot at a polling place on Election Day the option to have their ballot counted on site, rather than transported back to a central location for tabulation. That could speed up the reporting of election results without “even a minor inconvenience” to voters, per Kolodin.

A similar law, passed in 2024, just took effect this year. That law gives mail voters the option to show ID when dropping off their ballot, eliminating the need to check their signature later.

But unlike state lawmakers’ proposal, that law does not require counties to physically count those ballots at voting sites. Most counties currently transport all ballots back to a central election office after voting ends to tabulate them.

Jen Marson, executive director of the Arizona Association of Counties, said in March that the measure would pose huge financial and logistical challenges for those counties. At the time, the measure would have taken effect immediately after passage, giving counties little to no time to adjust.

The version of the measure that ultimately passed, however, is not effective until 2028 and includes a provision requiring the state to fund new equipment and other costs associated with its implementation.

Marson did not immediately respond to a request for comment late Friday.

The legislation would also prohibit noncitizens from contributing money to influence state elections and prohibit any candidates from knowingly accepting such contributions. Additionally, it contains a provision asserting that the state’s elections “shall be decided solely by the votes of eligible citizen voters.”

Some other provisions of the measure are already in state and federal law, including that only U.S. citizens are eligible to register to vote. Still, Republicans said on the floor that the legislation addressed many concerns their constituents have about the integrity of the state’s elections, despite no evidence of widespread voter fraud or a rigged vote.

“These reforms are necessary,” Rep. Neal Carter, a Republican from San Tan Valley, said on Friday. “They really are.”

But Democrats in both chambers viewed it differently. On Friday, they repeatedly described it as an attack on mail voting, which is wildly popular in Arizona.

“The intention of this is to eliminate early voting,” said Sen. Analise Ortiz, a Democrat from Phoenix. “We shouldn’t be tiptoeing around the impact of this, because what it means is that senior citizens, rural voters, tribal voters, people with disabilities, people who work multiple jobs and can’t wait in long lines, are going to lose their access to vote by mail. That is shameful.”

Voting-rights advocates propose counterinitiative

The measure may not be the only voting-related question on the November ballot.

A group called Protect the Vote Arizona is collecting signatures to qualify a different ballot initiative that would counteract the Republican-supported one.

That measure, the Free, Fair and Secure Elections Act, would enshrine a fundamental right to vote in person at countywide polling places or by early ballot in the state constitution.

It would further prescribe that voters who sign up to get a ballot by mail keep getting one until they move, die, or opt out — canceling out a state law scheduled to take effect next year that would remove voters from the early voting list if they haven’t voted using a mail ballot in more than two years. And it would codify the state’s current rules around voter ID in the state constitution to prevent new mandates from being placed on mail voters.

In Arizona, if two measures with conflicting provisions both pass, whichever one receives more votes takes effect.

It’s unclear exactly who is funding the group behind the initiative. Protect the Vote Arizona’s officers have a history of working with left-leaning politicians and causes. But Stacy Pearson of Lumen Strategies, which is helping manage the campaign, said the effort was “grassroots.”

“We didn’t start with big funders telling us what to do,” Pearson said. “We started with, there’s an opportunity here in Arizona to protect what works.”

The organization had not received any donations as of March 31, according to a campaign finance report. It will file its next report on July 15.

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

Michigan revokes Antrim County clerk’s access to voter roll after unauthorized cancellations

2026-06-12T22:13:55+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 Michigan Bureau of Elections revoked Antrim County Clerk Victoria Bishop’s access to Michigan’s voter roll Friday, the latest salvo in the dispute between the state and the controversial Republican election official.

Jonathan Brater, Michigan’s director of elections, said in a letter to Bishop that she is “taking actions ... that do not comply with the Michigan Election Law and fall outside the scope of your statutory authority” after she allegedly changed or even canceled some voters’ registrations earlier this year.

Under Michigan law, maintaining the Qualified Voter File — the state’s central database of registered voters — is the job of city and township clerks, not county clerks. Brater noted in his letter that Bishop does “not have authority to alter QVF records except in certain situations,” including to flag voters who have died.

However, Brater wrote, the state’s review of Bishop’s QVF activity found that that was not what she was doing. He also reprimanded her for sending notices to voters about the cancellations that were insufficiently complete, based on unreliable information, and also supposed to be sent only by city and township clerks.

“Based upon your actions, it appears there is a lack of understanding regarding your responsibilities and authority as it relates to voter registration, list maintenance, and use of QVF,” Brater wrote. He concluded by notifying her that her QVF access has been suspended until she completes a series of trainings on QVF security, promises to comply with Michigan’s election law in the future, and responds adequately to the state’s initial inquiries on whose voter registrations were changed and why.

Bishop did not immediately respond to requests for comment Friday afternoon on the suspension. However, she has previously argued she has a “mandate” from voters to “rectify long-standing vulnerabilities in the county’s registration data” after Antrim County elected her on promises she would clean up the county’s rolls.

Bishop has been in hot water with the state since April, when Votebeat first reported that she had been altering people’s voter registrations. Interlochen Public Radio later reported that she had sent notices of confirmation or cancellation to some 1,800 voters in the county of about 25,000 people, confusing voters and irritating township clerks who had to deal with the fallout.

After Bishop failed to correctly respond to the state — she initially sent her response to an incorrect email address and did not answer a number of questions — the Department of State formally demanded she stop. Bishop and her husband, a radio host best known as Trucker Randy, threatened their own legal action against the state. They raised a few hundred dollars for the effort before ultimately unpublishing their fundraiser. It does not appear a suit was filed.

Michigan State Police also investigated the Bishops after it came to light that her husband was alone in the clerk’s office using her computer in February. The Bishops told investigators that he was using the computer to watch a public county meeting as he was waiting for a phone call. The attorney general’s office confirmed Friday that investigation is ongoing.

Voters should not see services interrupted by Bishop’s lack of access to the QVF, as her deputy clerk, Annette Marcus, will still have access, and the bulk of work in the QVF is done by city and township clerks.

The county’s next elections are the primaries in August.

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

The state has taken over elections in a Texas county. It’s not the one everyone expected.

2026-06-12T09:45:00+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.

Three years ago, Texas Republicans approved a state law that was designed to allow unprecedented state oversight of elections in Harris County, a Democratic stronghold that is also the state’s most populous county and includes most of Houston.

State Republican lawmakers said at the time they were responding to problems and irregularities with Harris County’s elections, while some election and policy experts decried the partisan overtones of the new law and said it amounted to an intrusion on local control of elections.

But the law also said the state could take control of elections in smaller counties, if it found problems there when conducting state-required random audits. Now, the state is using the law for the first time — but not to take over in Harris County.

Instead, the state has assumed administrative oversight of voter registration in Val Verde County, which sits along the Rio Grande west of San Antonio and has around 30,000 registered voters. The county voted Republican in the past two presidential elections.

The county’s tax assessor-collector and voter registration officials, who are responsible for voter registration duties, have repeatedly failed to maintain accurate voter registration records despite on-site training and help from officials with the Texas Secretary of State’s Office, according to the agency’s preliminary audit of the county, released last year.

“A recurring pattern of problems with election administration and voter registration exists and the problems impede the free exercise of citizens’ voting rights,” the preliminary audit report from the state said.

The findings prompted the state to take control, the first time it has used that provision of the 2023 law. The agency did not answer questions about how long the county will remain under administrative oversight but in an emailed statement, said a full report with details on the parameters of the state’s oversight is expected in July.

The law’s author, state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Republican from Houston, said the bill’s application beyond Harris aims to address lingering voter registration and election administration issues that some election officials may be failing to resolve.

“This is an example of how we’re just trying to make sure that we’re following the law and it’s not specific to just one county,” Bettencourt said. “We need to make sure that if there are problems, that they’re followed up on, and that they stay fixed.”

A state audit finds problems

In 2022, Harris County, under the leadership of newly appointed election officials, had to extend voting for an hour after various polling places had malfunctioning voting machines, paper ballot shortages, and long waiting periods. Losing Republican candidates filed more than 20 lawsuits against the county, citing those problems and seeking a redo of the election. All but one of those lawsuits was dismissed. A judge ordered a new election in one race, though it never happened because the previously elected candidate resigned before it could be held.

During the 2023 legislative session, Bettencourt said the county’s election woes inspired him to craft a bill granting the Texas secretary of state the authority to investigate election “irregularities” after complaints are filed specifically in counties with more than 4 million people, a category that includes only Harris County.

The bill was later amended before passage to also apply to any counties that are selected at random for a state-required biennial audit of elections. In 2024, Val Verde was among the counties selected from a drawing to be audited.

This law gives state officials the ability to follow through and help county officials resolve ongoing problems uncovered by the audits when necessary, Bettencourt said.

The secretary of state’s office, until now, has had less rule-making authority over counties’ election procedures than nearly any other state’s chief election authority. But under this law, secretary of state officials can remove a county election administrator or file a petition to remove an elected county officer overseeing elections — such as a county clerk or a tax assessor-collector overseeing voter registration duties — if “a recurring pattern of problems” isn’t resolved.

That’s what ultimately happened in Val Verde. According to the preliminary audit report, the state found that Val Verde’s tax assessor-collector and voter registration office had no written voter registration policies. It found that staff created new voter registration records instead of updating existing ones, which resulted in duplicates. The staff could not explain how voter registration accuracy was verified, and provisional ballots were not processed promptly.

According to the preliminary audit report, state officials said the voter registrar’s failures led to some voters being assigned to the wrong jurisdiction and receiving the wrong ballot style, as well as voters often having to cast provisional ballots, which are at more risk of not ultimately counting. Due to these consistent issues coming up at polling locations across the county, the county clerk requested additional help from the secretary of state during the audit process.

In 2023 and 2024, the secretary of state sent teams to Val Verde County to provide “in-depth training” on voter registration and redistricting processes. “The state team worked with all offices to ensure that the jurisdictional boundaries were accurately reflected in the statewide system. However, the audit revealed that Val Verde County has not consistently updated this information since the Secretary of State provided assistance last year,” the preliminary audit report says.

The county’s tax assessor-collector and voter registrar, Elodia Garcia, said in an email that her staff has since reviewed its list of registered voters to merge duplicates, though some are still pending, and that they have resolved the issues with jurisdiction boundaries by visiting the addresses of affected voters and double-checking street numbers. She also noted that her office has now implemented a policy manual for voter registration, that voter registration data is entered in a timely manner, and that they now use time stamps to have proof of dates on records.

When Bettencourt’s bill was first proposed, election policy experts raised concerns about how punitive it would be and the unprecedented authority it gave the state over local elections.

But the state’s implementation of the law in Val Verde indicates the state is so far using the law to resolve ongoing issues, not to punish local officials or make sweeping changes to local policies. Daniel Griffith, senior policy director for Secure Democracy Foundation, one of the experts who initially voiced concern, said that he’s interested to see whether the state oversight could lead to improvements in Val Verde and set guardrails for all 254 counties.

“If that is something that is enhanced by this or is a benefit that can be realized, then that’s definitely a good thing, and something that I think most election observers would certainly be in favor of,” Griffith said.

‘We gotta fix it’

Val Varde County Judge Lewis Owens, a Democrat, said the county welcomed the audit and findings from the state.

“You can’t fix what you don’t know is broke. So, with them coming in and giving us the detailed report like they did and pointing out exactly what needs to be fixed, we gotta do it,” Owens said, adding, “We gotta fix it.”

Owens said he expects another report from the state in August detailing the county’s progress. If the issues aren’t fixed by then, he said, the Val Verde County Commissioners Court will decide whether it needs to create a county elections administration position and appoint an official whose sole responsibility will be election administration and voter registration.

“It’s good that they’re holding our feet to the fire. We gotta do a better job,” Owens said. “We can’t afford for a person to go in to go vote, and they’re having to vote provisional because we screwed up.”

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.

Special prosecutor investigating latest election-control disagreement in Maricopa County

2026-06-09T19:37:32+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.

With mere weeks until voting begins in a high-stakes primary election, a long-standing disagreement over election control in Maricopa County is only getting more combative.

In a new twist of the feud, a special prosecutor is looking into whether employees in the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office broke the law by allegedly removing a scanner and provisional ballot envelopes from the county’s vote tabulation headquarters amid a local election earlier this year.

Recorder Justin Heap, a Republican, said in a recent legal filing that he wanted possession of the scanner, which he said belongs to his office — a claim that the county’s mostly-GOP board of supervisors disputed.

He also requested a court order barring any criminal prosecution of his employees related to the incident, which occurred as votes were being tallied in the March 10 election for three seats on the Tempe City Council.

Heap’s latest filing in his lawsuit with the board of supervisors raises further questions about top officials’ ability to work together to administer this year’s midterm election in the key swing county. It comes less than two months before the state primary on July 21 — and as the special prosecutor looking into the scanner incident draws close to completing his investigation.

Former Pinal County Attorney Kent Volkmer, a Republican, told Votebeat that he was tapped by the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office to investigate the matter in April. He said he’d hired an off-duty, reserve deputy with the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office to assist with the case, and that the investigation was “wrapping up.”

Erin Pellett, a spokesperson for Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell, said in a statement that Mitchell had appointed special counsel after receiving an “allegation” and determining a conflict of interest was present. As the county’s top prosecutor, Mitchell, a Republican, represents both the recorder’s office and the board of supervisors.

Volkmer declined to share many details of the investigation, noting that it still remained active. But he said the investigation wasn’t initiated to target specific employees in the recorder’s office. Rather, Volkmer said he was looking into the incident to determine “whether there was, in fact, criminal behavior.”

“This wasn’t, ‘Hey, go look at this person,’” he said. “That’s not how this came about.”

Volkmer added that it is standard practice for investigators to attempt to contact individuals who could have knowledge of a potential criminal matter.

“I would say you’re not doing your job if you don’t try,” he said, adding that he believed his investigator would be “thorough” in examining the incident.

What happened with Maricopa County Recorder’s Office employees and the disputed scanner?

Heap said in his court motion that multiple employees from the recorder’s office had attempted to “retrieve” a scanner from the election center in March, with the intent of repurposing it to scan inbound provisional ballot envelopes.

He said the scanner belonged to his office. Heap noted it was purchased with funds from the recorder’s office and was never “lawfully transferred” to the county elections department, which is overseen by the board of supervisors. He added that the scanners were acquired specifically for early voting services, “a function under the sole authority of the recorder.”

But the board saw it differently. In a statement, Supervisors Kate Brophy McGee and Debbie Lesko said two workers — including Chief Information Officer Brian Colby, who is named in court filings as one of the employees who was later approached by an investigator — were caught on security cameras loading the piece of equipment into the back of an unmarked pickup truck on March 12. The supervisors said it appeared to be a personal vehicle.

The supervisors called the machine a “pre-tabulation” scanner and said it was controlled by the board. Furthermore, they said Colby had been notified on “at least one occasion, in an inter-office message on March 5,” that the scanner was the property of the board.

Brophy McGee and Lesko, both Republicans, said the workers returned the scanner about an hour later, after elections department staff contacted the recorder’s office about the matter.

But they said Colby also appeared to take envelopes that potentially contained live provisional ballots, creating “grave chain-of-custody concerns.” They added that a count the following day confirmed that all ballots were accounted for, and that a human resources investigation substantiated their accounting of the incident.

Later, Heap said his employees were approached at their homes by “Pinal County Sheriff’s deputies.” He said Colby was specifically told he was under investigation for theft.

Filing comes as Maricopa County elections dispute continues to escalate

The filing adds fuel to the flames of a long-running feud within county government.

Heap has long contended that county supervisors usurped much of his power in a deal they struck with his predecessor months before he took office. He sued over the matter last year — and after months of back-and-forth in court, a court ruled largely in his favor on April 16, ordering the board to return control of several election-related functions and information technology staffers to Heap’s office.

The board unsuccessfully moved to stay that ruling, arguing it was too close to the primary to implement the court’s directives without risking a tumultuous election. Later, they filed for an appeal, which is still pending.

In the meantime, the officials have continued to butt heads.

During a May 19 local election, they argued over how to communicate a new voting option at polling sites. Emails show the recorder’s office and the board’s elections department disagreed over whether poll workers should verbally inform voters that they could opt to show identification at voting sites to have their mailed ballot counted faster.

Then, another scuffle erupted last month over ballot drop box locations for the upcoming primary. The board has set such sites for years under a provision of the state’s election rulebook, and it planned to approve the locations at a May 20 meeting. But just before the supervisors met to do so, Heap sent a letter to the board citing state statutes that he said granted his office authority over ballot drop boxes. He also warned that election workers who handle ballots deposited in “unauthorized” receptacles could face criminal penalties.

The suggestion that election workers could be charged with felonies drew strong condemnation from the supervisors. One, Democratic Supervisor Steve Gallardo, accused Heap of attempting to sabotage election operations. Ultimately, the board unanimously approved a slate of voting locations — including the drop box sites — for the primary.

Later, Heap asked a judge to hold the county board in civil contempt of court, accusing supervisors of flouting the April ruling. If supervisors failed to quickly adhere to the recent decision, he asked that the court levy substantial fines and give the money to his office.

Heap reiterated that request in his most recent filing, asking the court to set an expedited hearing on the issue in light of “these new factual developments.”

He also said the board was targeting his employees and doing “exactly what it had falsely accused the recorder of doing” amid the drop box saga last month.

“It has actively initiated a criminal referral against a Recorder’s Office staff member for doing something entirely lawful, in the middle of active litigation, just over two weeks before early ballots are scheduled to be mailed to voters,” Heap wrote in the filing.

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

Here’s why California’s election results take time

2026-06-08T09:00:00+00:00

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

President Donald Trump, a Republican, quickly took to social media after California’s primary on Tuesday to accuse Democrats in late-night posts of trying to steal the election, pointing to the state’s long timeline for counting votes and large share of mail-in ballots. He asserted that the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles was investigating. On Friday, Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor for Los Angeles, said he is overseeing “multiple election fraud investigations” in California.

“We will follow the evidence wherever it leads and prosecute any violations of federal election law to the fullest extent,” he wrote on X. “My office will not look the other way. We will investigate and prosecute. Every legal vote deserves to be counted. Every illegal vote cancels one out.” For their part, multiple California officials said — again — that the state’s long counting time doesn’t mean anything is wrong.

Why does it take so long for California to count votes and declare winners? The question has dogged the Golden State for years and drawn additional scrutiny because of a partisan divide in voting methods. Republicans have long lamented that their candidates lead in early results and watch their advantage vanish as mail-in ballots are counted in the days and weeks after Election Day. But while Republicans claim this is evidence of fraud, it actually reflects the fact that Republicans are more likely to vote in person and Democrats more likely to vote by mail — meaning more Democratic votes get counted later in the process.

By Friday afternoon, California voters still didn’t know which candidates for governor and Los Angeles mayor would be on the November ballot.

California is one of eight states that sends mail-in ballots to all registered voters. And a majority of California voters — nearly 90% in last year’s special election — use them. The Catch-22 is that it takes elections officials a lot longer to verify mail-in ballots than it takes to confirm in-person voting, creating long delays while they make sure there is no fraud.

And in California, a large number of voters drop off their mail-in ballots on or right before election day, creating a huge bottleneck of ballots that have to go through a signature check and other steps to make sure the vote can be counted.

Kim Alexander, founder and president of the California Voter Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group, refers to it as the “pig in the python” problem.

“The truth is we are taking extra steps to ensure the voting process is accessible and the vote count is accurate and reliable, and that’s why it takes a long time,” said Alexander.

Delays are compounded by state laws that allow elections officials to accept ballots postmarked by Election Day that arrive up to seven days later, and a lengthy process that requires counties to inform voters if there are problems with their mail-in ballots — such as missing signatures — that they usually have several weeks to fix.

Jesse Salinas, the voter registrar, assessor, and clerk-recorder of California’s Yolo County who serves as president of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials, said there is a tradeoff between speed and security.

“If you want speed, not as many people’s votes are going to be counted that could legitimately be counted,” he said. “So this tension exists between accessibility and speed.”

California leaders admit there is a problem. “We wish the votes were counted faster, too,” Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, wrote on social media.

Two decades ago, California used to count 80% of its ballots within the first two days after an election, according to a California Voter Foundation analysis. That fell to 50% in 2022. The state has gone some ways toward reversing the decline, with the figure rising to 66% in November 2024.

More resources could speed things up

One unique factor for California is its size. California is home to 23 million registered voters, far more than any other state. (Texas comes closest, with about 18.7 million registered voters.)

Last year, Newsom signed a law that requires California counties to count most votes within 13 days of the election. This is the first election where we will see whether that speeds things up. Counties can ask for an extension, and they still have up to 30 days to certify the results, so the law only goes so far.

Local election officials and voter advocates say another major issue is funding, and the state doesn’t provide counties with the money they need to speed up counting.

“If I have more space, more equipment, and more staffing, things could be done quicker,” Salinas said.

Voting rights advocates like Alexander worry that the long vote counts, and the persistent criticism coming from the White House and others, are taking a toll on American confidence in the electoral system. One recent study found that Americans’ trust in elections fell from about 67% to 60% when people heard about unexplained delays in results. Another study found that voter trust that votes will be accurately counted in the upcoming election fell from 77% in 2024 to 60% this year.

“I do see voter confidence eroding and the long vote count doesn’t help restore it,” said Alexander. “Even people who aren’t buying into those myths and disinformation, people who trust the process, ask why we have to wait so long for the vote count. It allows lies to spread and conspiracy theories to grow, and we need to minimize the opportunity for nefarious actors to cast doubt on the reliability of our results.”

Mindy Romero, director of the Center for Inclusive Democracy in California, challenged the narrative that California has a problem and suggested that people should look at the issue from a different perspective.

“We don’t have a vote counting problem. We have a lot of votes,” she said.

Along with more money for counties and expanded voter education efforts, Romero suggested steps to shorten the California timeline for certifying results.

“Anything structurally will be considered voter suppression by voters,” she said, “and you have to think about weighing the size of the problem that you’re trying to fix.”

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

Madison former deputy clerk removed from election tasks after misplacing 23 Supreme Court race ballots

2026-06-04T19:49:06+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.

The former Madison deputy clerk who claimed responsibility for the 23 late-arriving ballots in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election has been reassigned within the clerk’s office to non-election tasks.

Jim Verbick — the election office’s former second-in-command who was previously scrutinized and sued for the clerk’s office losing 200 ballots in the 2024 election — admitted to losing track of the absentee ballots that didn’t end up arriving at several polling places until after 8 p.m. on Election Day in April, according to public records obtained by Votebeat.

He told Votebeat that he’s only partially to blame, that understaffing and a lack of communication led to the mistake, and that it’s unfair that he got reassigned away from elections. Verbick is now the city clerk’s office’s lead worker for licensing.

“I do admit that I had forgotten about the ballots I secured when I left the post office,” he said, adding that he said the error was exacerbated by unexpected absences and mistakes made by others.

The issue went to court after the Wisconsin Elections Commission ordered Madison not to count the ballots because they arrived after the 8 p.m. deadline in Wisconsin law. A court reversed the commission’s decision, and the ballots were counted in the final canvass.

Verbick’s reassignment was part of a set of personnel changes designed to improve how the clerk’s office manages “the many logistical tasks of administering elections,” Madison Clerk Lydia McComas said in a statement. The city is also hiring two new deputy clerks and a lead employee for absentee voting. But this move doesn’t amount to a net gain of three election positions because one election staff member recently left the office and Verbick was reassigned.

Madison officials said after the election that the clerk’s office — not voters — was responsible for the ballots’ late arrival. Election officials had received and sorted the ballots in time to be delivered: They arrived on the Monday before Election Day and were sorted that same evening, then put on a shelf to be delivered in the afternoon of the following day, records show.

Emails, spreadsheets and Microsoft Teams messages obtained by Votebeat show that Verbick was in charge of absentee ballots and accepted some blame for their late arrival.

Around 4 p.m., Verbick sent a message on Microsoft Teams that he realized he sent out officials to deliver ballots that afternoon without the batch of absentee ballots including the 23 votes that would end up arriving late, former clerk’s office staff member Bonnie Chang said in an email to McComas.

Per that same email, Chang said that about an hour later, she scanned a spreadsheet that showed polling sites were still missing absentee ballots. She then contacted Verbick to find out how many ballots were in the late-discovered bin and whether he needed help delivering them. She wrote that he wouldn’t say how many ballots were found or whether more staff were needed to deliver ballots.

At around 6 p.m., Chang said, the clerk’s office sent additional staff to help deliver the ballots as early as possible. She said most got reassigned to other tasks.

By the time that additional help arrived, Verbick told Votebeat, the ballots had already been sent out for delivery. He said he didn’t think the couriers who were already dispatched to deliver the ballots would have trouble delivering them on-time.

In hindsight, Verbick said, he would have used those additional staff to lighten their load. But he also said he could have planned for the additional staff better had anybody told them that they were en route to help him out.

That night, Verbick sent an email to McComas taking blame for not putting the batch containing the 23 ballots on the planned afternoon drop-offs to polling places.

“Missing the bin of envelopes with the initial afternoon route is my fault,” he emailed McComas at about 10:45 p.m. on Election Day. “I had all of them reviewed this morning and ready to be run with the mail delivery.”

Verbick told Votebeat he forgot about the ballots because election workers in the clerk’s office hadn’t told him about a planned USPS delivery around noon that Tuesday. Believing the delivery had not happened, he went to the post office to investigate.

Before leaving, he said, he moved the batch of ballots that later arrived late into a secure area because there were no other full-time clerk’s office staffers available to watch them while he was gone. It was there that he forgot the ballots.

The error, Verbick told Votebeat, reflected chronic understaffing in the clerk’s office — a problem exacerbated by the increase in absentee voting since the 2020 election.

In an email to McComas, Verbick said he didn’t get additional staff that he thought would help process ballots, and that he didn’t intentionally ignore messages from office staff.

Relying on hourly and temporary workers to fill those gaps is not enough, he told Votebeat.

In an email to Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway sent the night of the incident, McComas said that she would “firmly address the lack of communication” and would have more staff in August and November, including the new deputy to oversee absentee ballots.

Wisconsin Elections Commission chair Ann Jacobs called the latest error “absurd” at a commission meeting in late April. The commission voted to investigate Madison over the error, meaning the agency’s first two authorized investigations in its history both center on Madison: one for the 2024 ballot snafu and one for the latest one.

Ultimately, the votes affected by this year’s error were counted. Officials said these 23 ballots were correctly, legally cast, counted and checked into the pollbooks just like any other valid absentee ballots — the only problem was that they were delivered and counted after polls formally closed. The Wisconsin Elections Commission voted that the city and county erred in counting the ballots since state law held that ballots must be delivered to polling places “no later than 8 p.m. on election day.”

A Dane County judge, however, reversed that order, ruling that the ballots should be counted because they were properly cast, and precedent held that voters shouldn’t be disenfranchised because of clerk errors.

Verbick scrutinized for 2024 election snafu

This was the second time in about two years that Verbick has faced scrutiny over allegations that he failed to act decisively when absentee ballots were at risk of being left uncounted.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission previously scrutinized Verbick for his inaction after the 2024 presidential election, when nearly 200 voters were disenfranchised.

When Maribeth Witzel-Behl, the clerk at the time, was on vacation after the election, Verbick was in charge of the office, Witzel-Behl told the commission in a deposition.

Verbick, on the other hand, “testified that he is generally in charge when Clerk Witzel-Behl is not in the office, but that he is ‘not always the point person on everything in the office,’” and wasn’t sure who the point person would have been, according to the commission investigation.

The commission stated that Verbick’s involvement was “minimal” by his own account, and that nobody took responsibility for those ballots: “It was always someone else’s job.”

After learning about the ballots, the commission stated, Verbick “did not instruct anyone to determine how to get the ballots counted.”

Verbick was sued in his personal capacity for his role in the error, and declined to comment about the 2024 snafu. The case is ongoing, and the plaintiffs are demanding financial damages for being disenfranchised.

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

Arizona Supreme Court declines to review fake electors case, leaving prosecution in limbo

2026-06-04T18:51:42+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.

The Arizona Supreme Court won’t review lower court rulings that crippled Attorney General Kris Mayes’ fake electors case, leaving the prosecution of 18 people who attempted to overturn the state’s 2020 election results in limbo.

The case is one of several that arose in the aftermath of the 2020 election when allies of President Donald Trump, who lost the election, tried to install him anyway. Those people, who became known as fake or false electors, attempted to cast electoral votes for Trump in multiple states he lost and submit those certificates of votes to Congress.

In Arizona, those people — alongside other Trump allies — were later indicted on felony charges of fraud, conspiracy, and forgery. Their case has been on pause since Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Sam Myers sent it back to a grand jury last year, ruling that prosecutors had failed to provide a full copy of the relevant federal election law before the original jurors handed down their indictments in April 2024.

Mayes, a Democrat, unsuccessfully appealed the decision, which would have effectively forced a re-do of the case. Then, she asked the state’s top court to take up the matter.

In the wake of the Arizona Supreme Court’s ruling, Richie Taylor, a spokesperson for Mayes, said in a statement that her office would “return this case to the grand jury.”

But the high court’s decision suggests that case is now likely to stretch into 2027 or 2028. Mayes faces reelection this year. Her GOP opponents — Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen and military attorney Rodney Glassman — have both pledged to drop the case if they take the attorney general’s office.

The ruling comes as similar cases in other key swing states also flounder. In Georgia, prosecutors dropped their fake electors case last year. In Michigan, Attorney General Dana Nessel announced in March that she wouldn’t appeal a ruling dismissing her state’s fake electors case. In Nevada, a judge is set to issue a decision on a fake electors case later this month, but seemed skeptical of the charges during court hearings.

Meanwhile, Wisconsin’s fake electors case is moving forward. Attorneys who represented fake electors there are set to be arraigned later this month.

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

A dispute over Missouri’s congressional map could snowball into a legal and logistical elections crisis

2026-06-01T09:00:00+00:00

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

It was another week of on-and-off redistricting drama: In case you missed it, it’s on in Florida and off in Alabama and South Carolina. But there’s one state where a legal and logistical crisis is brewing over the fact that election officials can’t agree on whether redistricting is on or off. Call it Schrödinger’s map.

Missouri was one of the first states to heed President Donald Trump’s call for Republican-controlled states to redraw their congressional lines. But unlike the others that have done so, Missouri allows residents who don’t like a law passed by the legislature to gather signatures to put that law to a statewide vote. Opponents of the new Republican gerrymander did just that, and in December they submitted more than 305,000 signatures to the secretary of state — almost three times as many as are required to make the ballot.

Crucially, under the Missouri Constitution, a law that is referred to a public vote isn’t supposed to take effect unless and until voters approve it — meaning the mere existence of a referendum on the map should have been enough to prevent it from being used in the 2026 election. But, breaking from precedent, Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins took the position that merely submitting the signatures wasn’t enough to put the map on hold. Instead, he said, the map would remain good law until his office officially verified all the signatures and certified the referendum for the ballot. That decision was legally challenged, but the Missouri Supreme Court sided with Hoskins.

As things stand today, the referendum still is not officially certified. Hoskins has until Aug. 4 to make a final determination. The problem is, Aug. 4 is also the date of the Missouri primary — and local election officials have to plan to hold that election under one map or the other. They have to assign voters to the appropriate districts in their computer systems as soon as possible and send out the first ballots to overseas and military voters by mid-June.

With the Republican gerrymander still technically on the books, Hoskins is telling county clerks to plan for the primary to take place under the new map — even though it’s very likely that the referendum got enough signatures to qualify.

At least one clerk is not yet doing that.

Boone County Clerk Brianna Lennon, a Democrat, initially said she would not update voters’ information to reflect the new map while the referendum remained uncertified. She has since gained the ability to load both the old and new congressional lines into the state voter registration system and toggle between them, but she still has not decided which map to use for the August primary.

Boone County Clerk Brianna Lennon, a Democrat

“We’re trying to look down the timeline building up to August 4 and figure out what the least likely damage will result from,” Lennon told Votebeat. In theory, Lennon said, her office could create two sets of ballots, include both possible congressional districts on a single ballot, or go “full bore” into the old congressional map and hope that it turns out to be the right one. Those were the kinds of questions she said clerks had hoped to have answered “well before we started setting up for the election.”

For Lennon, the uncertainty is not just technical. She is worried “about the validity of the results of the August primary.” Candidates have already filed to run under the new congressional map. But if Hoskins certifies the referendum, the Missouri Supreme Court has confirmed the map would be paused until voters decide whether to approve it. “And if that’s the case, does that mean we’ve just run a primary election on a set of maps that are no longer valid?” Lennon said.

The logistical burden is concentrated in just a handful of places. Most Missouri counties either are not affected by the new map or would move wholesale from one congressional district to another, making the change relatively simple. But four counties — Boone, Jackson, St. Charles, and St. Louis — have voters who must be reassigned at a more granular level because the new map changes the lines within the county. For those clerks, the uncertainty is not just which map is legally correct, but how much time they have to build ballots and voter records around it.

“Right now it’s every county for themselves and not everyone will make the same decision,” Lennon said.

That frustration is shared by Clinton Jenkins, the Republican Miller County clerk who serves as president of the Missouri Association of County Clerks and Election Authorities.

Jenkins has described communication with Hoskins’ office as poor since Hoskins took office last year, telling the Missouri Independent in mid-May that Hoskins had failed to provide guidance on the switch, and that Jenkins’ efforts to build a relationship between clerks and the secretary of state’s office “just never materialized.”

After the Missouri Independent article was published, Jenkins said, Hoskins asked for a meeting and accused Jenkins of being “a liar” over his claims of poor communication. In that meeting, Jenkins said, Hoskins also told him he was committed to “hold firm” to the Aug. 4 deadline for a final answer on certifying the referendum — the same day as the primary.

“He said we were in uncharted waters,” said Jenkins. “At least this has meant more communication with clerks.”

But more communication has not brought more clarity. Hoskins has told clerks to prepare to use the new map because, for now, it remains in effect. But Jenkins said he has not told them what to do if the referendum is certified on or near Aug. 4, suspending that same map just as voters are using it. Instead, Jenkins said, Hoskins has told clerks only that he expects them to comply with whatever map is in effect.

Hoskins’ office did not respond to a request for comment.

Hoskins’ critics are also worried his stance could provoke a constitutional crisis. It’s possible that Hoskins announces the referendum has made the ballot — legally blocking the use of the new congressional districts — on the same day that voters are actively voting in those new districts. That could throw the legitimacy of the primary into doubt — it’s even possible the results could be thrown out in court, said Lennon.

No one can say with confidence what would happen next. Lennon said she expects litigation after the primary “no matter what,” because candidates would likely have standing to challenge the outcome if the election is held under a map that is later suspended. The question then would move from election offices to the courts: whether the primary results still count, whether Missouri must somehow redo part of the election before November, or whether it is too late in the cycle to change course. For now, Lennon said, all of those outcomes seem possible.

Practically speaking, though, August is too late in the summer to order and pull off a whole new primary election under different lines before November. So realistically, whatever congressional map is used on Aug. 4 is also going to be used in the general election — even if it’s the map that is legally not supposed to be in force.

That’s certainly Hoskins’ position. “I would say that it’s too far along in the election in order to change the maps for 2026,” Hoskins told St. Louis Public Radio earlier this month. Of course, that’s a convenient truth for Republicans, who are eager to use the new map because it increases their chance of holding onto the House in 2026. Indeed, the maps’ opponents and local clerks argue this was Hoskins’ plan all along: drag his feet on certifying the referendum so as to leave election officials with no choice but to implement the gerrymander.

If that was the plan, and if it works, House Republicans will have Hoskins personally to thank for almost certainly adding one member to their ranks next year. But if a court rules after the primary that Missouri just held an election under an illegal map, well, it could be a very chaotic few months for the state’s top election official.

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

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

USPS proposal to carry out Trump’s executive order could create new barriers to mail voting

2026-05-29T23:25:16+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. Postal Service proposed new rules Friday that detail in part how the Trump administration intends to carry out its contested mail-ballot executive order — revealing a plan that, if it survives legal challenges, would create new barriers for mail voting and new burdens for election officials.

Under the proposal, all states would be required to send the federal government a list of all registered voters to which they are sending mail-in and absentee ballots in key federal elections. The proposal appears to give the postal service new power to block delivery of ballots to people that are not on the list and allow the agency to refuse delivery of ballots that do not meet new federal standards outlined in the proposed rule.

Jennifer Morrell, CEO of The Elections Group and a former Colorado election administrator, said that the proposal would create onerous new regulations that could be difficult and costly for local elections officials to follow, especially in rural counties which do not currently have the technology to produce the required barcodes. Such systems cost thousands of dollars.

Morrell said the rules represent an unnecessarily broad attempt to crack down on extremely rare examples of voter fraud.

“This proposal would fundamentally change the rules to address a problem that is extraordinarily rare,” she said. “This is adding significant complexity and new administrative burdens that can add additional costs with little-to-no evidence the current system is failing.”

Release of the proposed rules created widespread confusion among local elections officials unsure how they would work, and sparked broad condemnation from voting rights advocates and Democratic leaders who accused the Trump administration of trying to take unconstitutional steps to deny Americans their right to vote.

“Tens of millions of eligible voters could be prevented from voting by mail if states do not fully submit to this new federal mandate being rushed ahead of the 2026 election,” said U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla, a Democrat who previously served as California’s secretary of state. “Serious and consequential questions remain over how this new list will work with the Trump Administration’s ongoing illegal effort to create a national voter list.”

Friday’s proposed regulations, which require a 30-day comment period before moving forward, are the latest step by the Trump administration to overhaul election rules and impose unprecedented new federal oversight on the voting process.

Since returning to the White House last year, President Donald Trump has directed his administration to take sweeping new steps to alter an election system he has accused, without evidence, of cheating him out of the 2020 election. The Federal Bureau of Investigation in January seized ballots in Fulton County, Georgia as part of a probe of the 2020 election. He has issued two executive orders that attempt to assert broad presidential control over elections, though the Constitution gives authority over elections to the states and Congress. Both orders were quickly challenged in the courts, which froze major provisions of the first order, ruling the president exceeded his authority.

Release of the rules came one day after federal judge refused to block the most recent executive order on mail-in ballots because the Postal Service had not yet released its proposed new regulations. Another challenge to the order is pending in Boston, where a federal judge is scheduled to hear arguments June 2 in cases brought by voting-rights groups and a coalition of states.

Counties face steep compliance questions

Local election officials and experts said the proposal raised urgent operational questions about whether existing ballot envelopes comply with the new standards, whether counties and vendors can produce unique barcodes for outgoing and return ballots, and whether USPS could reject ballot mailings if voter data is missing, late, or mismatched.

“I don’t know how the states would potentially interpret what they need to do in order to comply, and what happens if the state doesn’t?” said Tammy Patrick, chief programs officer for the Election Center, which represents state and local election officials. “Does that mean the postal service will reject the ballots? I don’t think so. The postal service will deliver any mail provided to them so what happens if a state doesn’t do it?”

In addition, Patrick added, “I haven’t seen much here that is giving me much confidence this can be done by the fall without creating a lot of confusion and potential chaos.”

Patrick said many of the Postal Service’s proposed standards are best election-mail practices, many of which she worked on for years. But turning them into federal mandates could collide with state laws and leave local officials with no clear way — or funding — to comply.

“Some of these things are actually really good,” Patrick said, though election officials have been unable to adopt them in the past, and there’s no funding in the executive order to help.“Who is going to pay for it?”

Kathy Boockvar, a former Pennsylvania secretary of state, said implementing the changes before the 2026 midterms would place another burden on election officials who are already underfunded and understaffed.

“Especially in situations like this, where there is no funding being provided and no time for election officials and voters to absorb the required changes, this means that voters will bear the brunt of a poorly planned, last minute attempt to upend electoral processes,” said Boockvar, a Democrat. “You can’t just snap your fingers and change how elections are run overnight.”

A technical rule with major implications

Among the most concerning pieces of the 20-page proposal, voting rights advocates and election officials said, is a new requirement that every ballot envelope — both the one sent to the voter and the one used to return the ballot — carry a unique Postal Service barcode.

Election officials would have to send those barcodes to USPS along with voters’ names and addresses, allowing the agency to check whether outbound ballot mailings match the state-submitted list before accepting them. The postal service said the new rules wouldn’t apply to primary elections or to military and overseas ballots, but critics said it could force some jurisdictions to redesign envelopes, update vendor contracts, and build new ballot-tracking systems before the next federal election in November.

That could be difficult. For example, Thad Hall, the election director in Pennsylvania’s Mercer County, said that while some of his outgoing mail envelopes have intelligent barcodes, not all do. Officials in other Pennsylvania counties have in the past said their vendors do not use intelligent barcodes.

Gideon Cohn-Postar, director of federal affairs at the Institute for Responsive Government, a nonpartisan think tank, characterized the proposal as a confusing attempt to comply with Trump’s recent executive order.

“The executive order they are trying to fulfill is incoherent in and of itself,” he said.

Cohn-Postar said the proposals could have the biggest impact on small jurisdictions that may not have the funding to comply. In a small jurisdiction of about 2,500 voters, ordering new envelopes costs about $10,000 — a significant expense that requires them to learn entirely new technology.

For those jurisdictions, he said, the proposal could be a “big change.”

“Right now, in the heat of the midterm election cycle, election officials should be given the space and resources to focus on critical work like improving cyber and physical security,” he said. “More bureaucracy only pulls them away from those mission-critical priorities.”

Correction, May 29: An earlier version of this story incorrectly attributed a quotation to Mercer County Election Director Thad Hall.

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

Sometimes officials send duplicate ballots. Here’s how security measures prevent double voting.

2026-05-29T14:37:38+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 Wisconsin Supreme Court election in April, Green Bay election officials accidentally sent duplicate ballots to 150 voters, prompting an administrative complaint before the Wisconsin Elections Commission and conspiracy theories online.

In a slightly different example from this year, some voters in Maryland initially received primary ballots for the wrong party. Election officials then intentionally issued new ballots for the correct party to all voters who had requested a mail ballot, and the original ballots were voided. Nonetheless, President Donald Trump falsely suggested that nobody knew what was happening with the original ballots and that “any Republican running in Maryland doesn’t have a chance” because voters who received them, which were disproportionately Democrats, would be allowed to vote twice.

Despite the heightened attention, election officials accidentally sending duplicate ballots — or sending out an erroneous batch before intentionally sending corrected ballots to the same voters — is a rare but well-understood mistake nationwide that hardly ever results in the type of double voting Trump has warned of.

“Once any ballot is received and accepted, it locks down that voter’s record, so that a second ballot could not be accepted for that same voter,” said Tammy Patrick, chief programs officer of the National Association of Election Officials. “That’s the way it works everywhere.”

Two primary mechanisms keep these accidental duplicate ballots from getting counted: proper record-keeping and deterrence, said David Levine, an election security expert and the election director in Richmond, Virginia. Generally, that record-keeping is done by putting unique barcodes on absentee ballot envelopes, which prevent people from voting more than once.

“It’s usually not an issue because, one, election officials are pretty good about contingency planning and having procedures in place, so if something like this happens, they know how to either void ballots or segregate them appropriately, so that they’re not going to be counted,” Levine said.

Second, he added, most voters understand that double-voting is a crime, and it’s not a practice they want to engage in. A study of 2012 election results found that, at most, one in 4,000 votes cast could be a double vote, but that clerical errors in marking turnout records — not actual double voting — may account for most if not all of that number.

Some of the attention on these mistakes comes from people who are genuinely unaware of the protections that keep double votes from being counted, Levine said. But, he said, there’s also scrutiny from people who are familiar or should be familiar with those safeguards but “choose to try and make a lot of hay out of something that’s largely much ado about nothing.”

Why do duplicate ballots get sent out?

Simply put, election season is an extraordinarily busy time for clerks and the vendors that print their ballots. Sometimes amid their multitasking, they mistakenly send two batches of absentee ballots to the same group of voters, or send an incorrect batch and have to send a second, correct one.

In the Green Bay instance, Jeffreys said election officials were scrambling because a mid-March blizzard closed much of the city, and her staff faced a time-crunch to send ballots out on time. The city sent notices to the 152 affected voters before Election Day. Ultimately, just one voter returned two ballots, and both were voided after Green Bay officials alerted the voter about it.

In Maryland, the State Board of Elections said the initial batch of ballots was erroneous because of a coding error with the board’s mail ballot vendor. Since the vendor couldn’t identify which voters received the wrong ballots, the board decided to send new ballots to everyone who had requested a mail ballot in that election and void the old ones in the state’s registration database, so they wouldn’t count even if voters returned them.

Similar errors have happened around the state and country. Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, Madison, Wisconsin, officials sent around 2,200 duplicate ballots because of a data processing error. In Racine, Wisconsin, this year, election officials intentionally sent voters a second batch of ballots because the first set left off a municipal race. Other incidents have happened in Pennsylvania and California.

What keeps those erroneous ballots from getting counted?

One of the best tools election officials in Wisconsin and elsewhere have at their disposal are unique barcodes printed on the absentee ballot certificates that voters receive.

Those barcodes in Wisconsin connect to the statewide voter registration database and are unique to each voter. Other states have similar systems, with unique identifiers tying an absentee ballot to each voter. If an election official scans a duplicate ballot, the system shows that the voter already returned one, and one of the ballots is rejected.

That’s a “very, very established process,” Wisconsin Elections Commission administrator Meagan Wolfe said after the Green Bay incident.

In examples like Racine, when voters receive a ballot missing a race or containing another error that can be corrected before Election Day, officials will intentionally send another, correct ballot to the voter. The first ballot becomes known as the “A” ballot and the second one is known as the “B” ballot.

If a voter returns just one ballot, that vote will count — including only valid votes from the erroneous ballot, if that’s the one submitted. If a voter returns both ballots, officials will scrap the “A” ballot and count the “B” since the latter is the correct form.

That’s different from Maryland, where election officials voided all of the original ballots and reissued new ones.

How specific instances of duplicate ballots get resolved — whether that’s canceling out all the original ballots or planning for “A” and “B” ballots like in Racine — can depend on state laws, officials’ discretion and court rulings, Patrick said. How close the error is to election day and the jurisdiction’s budget can also influence how election officials handle duplicate ballots, she added.

Patrick also drew a distinction between officials sending out duplicate absentee ballots and the rare but occasional instances of double voting.

“More often than not, the rare instances where we see it, it’s an individual voting in two different jurisdictions or two different states,” she said. “It’s not so much that a single person is voting in the same election, in the same jurisdiction, under the same name.”

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

Federal judge refuses to block Trump executive order on mail voting — for now

2026-05-28T13:28:23+00:00

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

This is a breaking story.

What happened? A federal court judge Thursday declined, for now, to halt two major provisions of President Donald Trump’s second executive order on elections, which would give the U.S. Postal Service sweeping new authority to regulate mail ballots and would force major changes to the administration of the midterm elections.

Judge Carl Nichols found that the U.S. Postal Service has not yet acted to implement the president’s order, and until it does, the nonprofit groups and Democratic Party committees that brought the legal challenge cannot show they had been harmed in a way that merited the court’s immediate intervention. He also declined to block a second provision that requires the U.S. Homeland Security Department to create lists of citizens eligible to vote in each state, saying it wasn’t yet clear the department would carry out the president’s order in a way that violated federal law.

But Nichols, a Trump appointee, signaled that once the agencies do act, the outcome in court could be different. “The Court recognizes that the Postal Service may ultimately issue a final rule that directly affects Plaintiffs or their members, or that the Government may develop State Citizenship Lists that omit specific individuals due to particularized flaws,” Nichols wrote. “Plaintiffs may, of course, renew their motions if and when those future actions occur.”

What’s the dispute? Multiple nonprofit groups, Democratic Party committees, and states sued Trump, the U.S. Postal Service, and other federal agencies over the president’s March 31 executive order on elections, which give the U.S. Postal Service unprecedented control over mail ballots. Some of those cases were consolidated before Nichols in federal court in Washington, D.C., and he is the first federal judge to address the order.

The plaintiffs argue the Constitution doesn’t give the president authority over elections.

The executive order works by requiring or asking for the creation of multiple lists of eligible citizens and voters who can use mail ballots, though it’s not always clear how the lists intersect. First, the order requires the U.S. Homeland Security Department to create lists of citizens eligible to vote in each state that, plaintiffs argue, cannot be assembled without violating federal privacy laws.

The order also says states may also create lists of voters and provide them to the U.S. Postal Service, which in turn would only be authorized to deliver ballots from people on a third list, to which states would be allowed “to routinely supplement and provide suggested modifications or amendments.”

Plaintiffs argued the DHS lists would inherently be inaccurate and unreliable, and that no federal law allows the U.S. Postal Service the ability to regulate mail-in voting. At a hearing before Nichols earlier this month, U.S. Justice Department lawyer Stephen M. Pezzi acknowledged that “no list is ever going to be perfect,” but said that states acting responsibly wouldn’t throw voters off the rolls just because they weren’t on the list provided by the federal government.

Pezzi argued that federal agencies have yet to take action on the order, and that their eventual actions could comply with federal law. Danielle Lang, a lawyer for the nonprofit watchdog group Campaign Legal Center who is representing some of the nonprofits, argued that the order’s timing, with primary elections underway, will cause chaos. And although the order does not require states to use the lists they receive from DHS, Lang said at least some will certainly feel pressure to do so.

The March 31 executive order is Trump’s second attempt to exercise oversight of federal elections. Federal courts blocked many provisions of Trump’s first executive order on elections.

What happens now?

The lawsuit remains pending before Nichols, and a separate case is pending in federal court in Boston. The executive order instructed the U.S. Postal Service to initiate a rulemaking on how it would carry out the order within 60 days of when it was issued, a deadline which falls at the end of May.

Read more Votebeat coverage of Trump’s March 31 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

We still have questions about Trump’s new executive order on elections, April 6, 2026

What are Democrats’ and Republicans’ election priorities if they win control of Michigan state government?

2026-05-27T09:00:00+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.

It hasn’t been the most productive couple of years for election legislation in Michigan.

Democrats in control of the state Senate have introduced bills that would amend rules for signature gathering and move up the state’s primary election from August to May. Over in the House, the Republican majority has proposed requiring people registering to vote to prove their citizenship, banning ranked choice voting, and preventing foreign nationals from spending money on ballot measure campaigns.

Bills have occasionally been sent from one chamber to the other, but time and time again, they never again see the light of day. Only two election bills, both bipartisan efforts, have made it out of committee in a second chamber. None have been signed into law.

That’s not a huge surprise given that different parties run the two chambers, particularly given how contentious election policy has become. But it does make the November election — in which Michigan voters will select a new governor as well as an entirely new legislature — that much more important. State House seats in Michigan are up every two years, while state Senate seats, like the governorship, are up every four.

The potential that one party could win a trifecta — i.e., control of the Senate, House, and governorship — is enticing to legislators who want to see Michigan as the home base for their party’s election goals. Michigan Democrats last held a trifecta in 2024, while Republicans last had one in 2018.

Unsurprisingly, though, the two parties have very different visions for the state’s elections if they take it all this fall. Democrats want to bolster voting rights, while Republicans want to improve security in the state’s elections.

Here are some specific proposals that each party is focusing on.

Democrats want to expand voting rights in Michigan

Sen. Jeremy Moss, the Senate president pro tempore and a Democrat from Southfield, noted that Democrats in the state have already passed much of their elections agenda. Moss has been chair of the Senate Elections Committee since 2023, and in that time, he said Democrats have “achieved a lot.”

“One of the biggest stories” out of the 2023-24 session, when Democrats held their first trifecta in nearly 40 years, “was how much we improved elections here in the state of Michigan,” said Moss, who is retiring from the legislature this year to seek a U.S. House seat.

But there’s more work to be done, he said. If Democrats win the trifecta back, he expects to see the Michigan Voting Rights Act finally become law. The MVRA, which is made up of four bills, aims to fill in the gaps of the federal Voting Rights Act, which has been weakened by a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions in recent years. It was introduced last session but ultimately failed to make it through the chaotic final month of the session. Senators introduced it again earlier this month.

Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination for governor, has supported the MVRA and called for its passage late last month after the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais further eroded the federal version. That has left Democrats with what Sen. Darrin Camilleri, a Democrat from Trenton, called “an obligation to take action” during a hearing on the bills last week.

“Whether you’re an independent or Republican or Democrat, these bills are good for you,” Camilleri said. “They protect your vote and your voice no matter who you support.”

The bills, reintroduced this session as Senate Bills 961-964, passed out of committee last week in a 4-1 party-line vote, clearing the way for a vote by the full Senate. However, they are expected to languish in the Republican-controlled House.

Michigan Republicans are focused on preventing noncitizen voting

On the other hand, if Republicans win a trifecta, party leaders promise to focus on election security measures, especially a proof-of-citizenship requirement.

Rep. Rachelle Smit, speaker pro tempore of the Michigan House and a Republican from Martin, held a press conference last week slamming Senate Democrats for failing to take up Republicans’ election bills, including her own proposal to ban foreign nationals from spending money on ballot measure campaigns in the state.

She also criticized the MVRA, calling it “fear-mongering.”

“The most important thing that we could be doing to preserve and protect our voting rights is pass Representative [Jason] Woolford’s bill, which would be requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote,” Smit said.

Proof of citizenship has been a major priority for Republicans this session, beyond just Woolford’s bill. Rep. Bryan Posthumus, a Republican from Rockford, introduced a state constitutional amendment to require proof of citizenship when someone registers to vote, although that ultimately did not pass the House. It’s possible a proof-of-citizenship amendment will be directly on the ballot this fall, though, after a similar effort from Americans for Citizens Voting submitted more than 750,000 signatures to the Bureau of Elections earlier this year.

“Proof of citizenship is a critical one,” Anthony Forlini, the Macomb County clerk and GOP candidate for secretary of state, told Votebeat when sharing his own list of what he would like to see happen if Republicans win big this fall.

Secretary of state is not considered part of the trifecta, but if Forlini wins, he’ll be expected to work with the legislature to enact voting legislation. His wish list right now includes “accountability” in how absentee ballots are handled and improvements to the state’s campaign finance laws.

“I’d like to see more transparency across the board as it revolves around election integrity,” he said, pointing to some of his own efforts in Macomb County to improve transparency.

He suggested a stronger monitoring system for ballot drop boxes to verify who drops off ballots at them. State law already requires video monitoring, but Forlini said some videos have captured people dropping off a significant number of ballots, possibly in violation of the law (in Michigan, people can only return ballots on behalf of family or members of their household). Such a video came out in Hamtramck last summer, but Forlini said he was aware of videos in other communities as well, although he didn’t name them.

“These are things that need to be looked at,” he said. “It’s not voter suppression. You’re suppressing votes by allowing these things to happen.”

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

Lawsuit seeks to require Wisconsin clerks to let voters fix problems with their absentee ballots

2026-05-26T17:01:43+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.

The League of Women Voters of Wisconsin is challenging the state’s law governing voters’ ability to fix missing information on their absentee ballots, alleging that the law violates the Wisconsin Constitution by giving clerks a vast amount of discretion over whether to reject ballots.

The group is asking a Dane County judge to require all clerks to provide voters notice when an absentee ballot certificate is lacking necessary information — such as a signature or the address of a voter or the person who witnessed the ballot’s casting — and give them an opportunity to add that information before rejecting the ballot, a process known as “curing” the ballot.

Right now, the law tells clerks that they “may” return incomplete absentee ballots to voters. That results in some municipal clerks sending voters prompt notice about faulty ballots, while other clerks put those ballots in the rejected pile without informing the voter at all, the lawsuit states. Municipalities also treat absentee ballots differently depending on when they receive them, the lawsuit alleges, and those that arrive closer to Election Day often have a lesser chance of getting cured.

The lawsuit, which names the Wisconsin Elections Commission as the defendant, argues that, without a blanket curing requirement, “mail-in absentee ballots are jeopardized by the lack of mandatory notice and curing opportunities across the state.”

This case, which comes a few months ahead of Wisconsin’s 2026 primary election, is the latest in a long line of lawsuits over what to do when information is missing on absentee ballot certificates. In recent years, courts have allowed clerks to use their discretion to determine what constitutes a proper witness address but taken away their ability to fix missing information on the address form.

“Right now, we have ballots that come in weeks ahead of the election, and they’re being set aside for rejection with no attempt by the clerk to contact the voter,” Debra Cronmiller, executive director of the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin, told Votebeat.

“If even one clerk is not curing ballots, that’s one clerk too many in a democratic system where voting is an absolute right,” Cronmiller said, adding that the number of clerks who fail to follow the practice could reach into the hundreds.

While the lack of uniformity could create legal issues, clerks say a blanket curing requirement could be difficult to implement if courts maintain the state’s 8 p.m. Election Day deadline for receiving ballots as the deadline to cure those ballots, too.

In 2024, Milwaukee received about 150 mail ballots just minutes before polls closed. At that late hour, it would have been virtually impossible for officials to notify those voters about any deficiencies with their ballots — much less give them a chance to cure them before the polls closed.

Size and resource disparities between Wisconsin’s many municipalities would also present challenges to a uniform curing system.

A part-time clerk working from home in a small rural town operates with dramatically fewer resources than election officials in Milwaukee, where thousands of absentee ballots can arrive on Election Day. Resources in both settings would be stretched by a uniform curing requirement, depending on how courts ultimately require it to be implemented. If courts grant the league some version of the relief it is seeking, questions about how the process would work in practice could also be settled in court.

Marathon County Clerk Kim Trueblood, a Republican, said another complicating factor for clerks is that Wisconsin’s voter registration form doesn’t require registrants to provide their email addresses and phone numbers.

Trueblood said she already tells the 60 municipal clerks in the county to try to cure ballots, but that process is harder when voters don’t provide contact information or when ballots are returned on Election Day. Requiring voters to provide their contact information would make a curing requirement a lot easier to comply with, she said.

If such a requirement were imposed ahead of this year’s midterms, Trueblood said, bigger villages and cities would likely have the staff and resources to contact every voter, but for town clerks who work a different full-time job and spend just a few hours working as a clerk on weekends and evenings, “it could be a little more challenging.”

Curing lawsuits play out in Wisconsin and across the nation

Ballot curing practices vary widely across the country. Some states don’t allow curing at all. Others allow voters to cure absentee ballots well after Election Day if they’re missing a date, signature, address or something else. As arguments over voting practices increasingly head to court, lawsuits over ballot curing have played out across the nation.

In Pennsylvania, for example, ballot curing is neither required nor prohibited under state law. Similar to Wisconsin, different counties have different curing practices — some allow voters to cure their ballots, while others don’t.

In North Carolina, a robust curing process was created as the result of a lawsuit that mirrors the one in Wisconsin. It was brought by the League of Women Voters of North Carolina, among other groups, and relied on a similar allegation: that the lack of a statewide-mandated procedure to cure absentee ballots amounted to a denial of voters’ right to due process under the U.S. Constitution.

The lawsuit resulted in a settlement that created a curing requirement in every county. Now, voters have up to three days after Election Day to cure issues on their ballot.

The ballot rejection rate has dropped dramatically as a result of the case, said Joselle Torres, a spokesperson for Democracy North Carolina, a voting rights group that joined the state’s league chapter in the case. But she added that state and local funding is crucial to educate poll workers, voters, and other election officials about the changes — “and that’s no small fee.”

Marc Meredith, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania who researched ballot curing in North Carolina in the wake of the settlement, said he had initially expected under 50% of voters to fix their ballot or vote a new one. But ultimately, about 82% of the 26,000 voters eligible to cure their ballots did so. Many opted to vote a new ballot in person rather than fix their old one, he said.

Curing has potential benefits but also challenges in Wisconsin

The drastic increase in the number of voters curing their ballots in North Carolina may not be replicated in Wisconsin, where many municipalities already have curing notifications and procedures in place.

Another difference is that North Carolina has 100 counties running elections, whereas Wisconsin has about 1,850 municipalities doing so. That could complicate implementation, Meredith said, because the same procedures would need to work in places ranging from Milwaukee to towns with 100 residents.

“In the places that aren’t currently curing,” he added. “I would expect lots of voters would take opportunities to make corrections.”

That issue of municipalities not curing ballots is especially pronounced in rural Wisconsin, Cronmiller said. There, part-time clerks don’t always have the bandwidth to return ballots to voters ahead of Election Day, she said. If courts call for a more stringent curing requirement, Cronmiller added, “it would force all municipalities to give resources sufficient to their clerks so they could do this work.”

A requirement for clerks to tell voters can create practical issues in bigger cities, too, especially those that can receive thousands of ballots on Election Day.

To get every last ballot cured, Wisconsin would likely have to implement a cure deadline after Election Day, Meredith said.

“You don’t want to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, is my opinion on these things,” Meredith said. “There are going to be some things that will slip through the cracks, but … don’t let the fact that a few might slip through the cracks prevent you from putting that system in that way that would help the rest.”

At the highest level, the League of Women Voters is seeking a declaration that Wisconsin’s discretionary ballot-curing law violates the state constitution, said Nina Beck, a counsel at the Fair Elections Center, which represents the league in Wisconsin and also represented the North Carolina league chapter in its lawsuit to create ballot-curing there.

What’s required under the due process clause of the Wisconsin Constitution, Beck said, is adequate notice and the ability to cure a defect if clerks are otherwise denying people their fundamental right to vote. Instead, right now, clerks are dealing with curing in many different ways and may even be treating voters within the same municipality differently, she said. “That’s fundamentally unfair.”

If the court sides with the league, the group will ask the court to set a uniform procedure for all clerks to follow, Beck said, adding that the current system is “kind of a free-for-all.”

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

Primary voters could pick nominees for Michigan secretary of state and attorney general under new proposals

2026-05-26T09:00:00+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.

When Republicans and Democrats head to the polls in August for the Michigan primary, they’ll vote on nominees for U.S. Senate, governor, and several other offices.

But they won’t have a say in who will be each party’s standard bearer for the important posts of attorney general and secretary of state. That will already have been decided, months ahead of time, by a narrow group of party insiders.

Michigan is one of the only states where candidates for those positions are chosen by delegates at party conventions, not by voters in primary elections. But two new bipartisan proposals are looking to change that.

On Thursday, Republican Rep. Greg Markkanen and Democratic Rep. Joe Tate introduced a proposed state constitutional amendment that would move the selection of attorney general and secretary of state nominees to primary elections starting in 2027. It would also eliminate elections for board members of the state’s three major public universities, giving the governor power to appoint those officials instead. A sister effort will be introduced by Republican Sen. Ed McBroom when the Senate next reconvenes.

“Voters will get to know the candidates and what they stand for during the primary, and parties will be able to nominate candidates who can handle the rigors of a statewide campaign,” McBroom said in a statement Friday.

Separately, two former party leaders have also teamed up to promote a similar effort. Jason Cabel Roe, the former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party, and Lon Johnson, the former chair of the Michigan Democratic Party, are launching a campaign to amend the Michigan Constitution to nominate attorney general and secretary of state candidates in primary elections, not at conventions.

Getting either effort passed won’t be easy. First, two-thirds of each chamber of the legislature must vote to put the amendment before voters. Then, a majority of voters must approve the amendment in this November’s election. It’s technically still possible that it could go before voters in the August primary, but that’s unlikely because it would require the amendment to pass the legislature before June 5, less than two weeks away.

It’s unknown if either proposal will attract enough support to pass. Some legislators have already come out in favor of the idea, such as Democratic Rep. Noah Arbit, while others appear against it, such as Republican Rep. Matt Maddock.

Roe and Johnson say they are optimistic after their conversations with leaders in the legislature, but on Wednesday, state House Speaker Matt Hall said he was “focusing on other things.”

“This is not a divisive issue,” Johnson told Votebeat on Thursday. “This is something that both sides, across all spectrums of both parties, [are] looking to have done.”

The change would benefit both major parties, Roe agreed. He laid the groundwork for the change back in 2022, the year Republicans selected Kristina Karamo as their secretary of state candidate and Matt DePerno as their attorney general candidate.

Karamo’s and DePerno’s extremely far-right views — including a false belief that the 2020 election in the state was fraudulent — appealed to Republican convention delegates, but not general election voters. Karamo and DePerno lost to Democrats Jocelyn Benson and Dana Nessel by 14 and 9 percentage points, respectively.

“I was talking to Democrats around the state [in 2022] and they agreed with it, were interested in pursuing a change,” Roe said. “Then, after kicking our ass in the ’22 election, they decided it was a uniquely Republican problem and they were not all that excited to help us save us from ourselves.”

But this year’s Democratic convention got a lot of Democrats interested again, he said. That convention left many delegates frustrated after problems with the website on which they voted caused the convention to run hours longer than expected. There are also concerns from establishment Democrats about whether the candidates selected at this year’s convention, who tended to be farther left, will face their own electability challenges.

In the time since, the convention has gotten even more bad press, with some delegates reporting they broke party rules by voting in the convention remotely and others raising concerns that their votes weren’t counted properly — or perhaps at all.

“All of a sudden my phone started ringing, and people were interested in revisiting it,” Roe said.

Now, Roe, Johnson, and others are working with lawmakers to bring a proposed amendment to the legislature floor. They’re tight-lipped about who specifically might sponsor their own effort, saying they don’t want to get ahead of internal politics.

This week, during the Mackinac Policy Conference, they intend to gather more support from not just political leaders, but other attendees, including business and nonprofit leaders.

Roe and Johnson said they might later turn their attention to other offices whose candidates are also chosen at conventions — Michigan Supreme Court seats, for example, or university trustees — but for now, they’re focused on moving the races they consider most critical.

“We can’t boil the ocean here,” Johnson said. “We’ve got to move very deliberately, and we cannot have a ballot that’s too long and complicated. Reform doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time.”

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

Judge dismisses federal government’s lawsuit over Wisconsin voter records

2026-05-21T20:11:12+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.

A federal judge on Thursday rejected the U.S. Justice Department’s demand for Wisconsin’s unredacted voter list, the latest defeat for President Donald Trump’s administration in its quest to obtain more information about voters around the country.

In his 10-page ruling, U.S. District Judge James D. Peterson said the department’s allegation that the Wisconsin Elections Commission violated the Civil Rights Act by not turning over the state’s voter roll “fails as a matter of law.”

The Department of Justice has requested voter rolls with unredacted information — including voters’ full birthdates, full or partial Social Security numbers, and driver’s license information — from at least 48 states, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. At least 15 states have provided or said they will provide the data, but most have not, prompting the department to file suit against 30 states plus Washington, D.C.

Federal judges have so far dismissed those lawsuits in seven other states, including Michigan, Oregon, California, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Arizona. The Department of Justice’s lawsuit against Maine was also dismissed on Thursday.

The department has so far appealed three of those dismissals, the ones in Michigan, Oregon, and California.

The Justice Department has said it is entitled to the voter rolls under federal law and needs the data to enforce requirements in federal statutes. Officials in both Republican- and Democratic-led states have pushed back on the Justice Department’s request for unredacted voter data, saying it could put voters at risk. They also say the department hasn’t provided enough information on how the data would be used.

The federal government requested Wisconsin’s unredacted voter rolls late last year, and the Wisconsin Elections Commission argued that state law explicitly bans election officials from disclosing information like driver’s license numbers to most people who aren’t election officials. That led to the lawsuit.

The Justice Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

“This ruling protects against federal intrusions into Wisconsin’s election system,” said ACLU of Wisconsin legal director Ryan Cox, adding that it “ensures private voter data is safe from abuse, and prevents the Trump administration from playing politics with our right to vote.”

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

Tina Peters’ commutation has left election officials feeling betrayed

2026-05-19T09:00:00+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.

When Colorado Gov. Jared Polis first signaled that he was considering clemency or a commutation for Tina Peters, a former county clerk who was convicted for helping to breach her county’s election systems in an effort to uncover fraud in the 2020 election, election officials urged him against it.

Pam Anderson, another former county clerk who defeated Peters in the 2022 Republican primary for secretary of state, in January accused Polis of “enabl[ing] violent, lying, bullying criminals” by considering clemency. Caleb Thornton, a lawyer for the Colorado secretary of state’s office who testified at Peters’ trial, wrote in February that the possibility of a commutation was “a slap in the face to all election officials around the country.”

Their pleas didn’t work. On Friday, Polis, a Democrat, said he would commute Peters’ sentence; she is expected to be freed on parole June 1. In a commutation letter and press interviews, Polis said he believed her sentence of nearly nine years in prison was too harsh for a first-time nonviolent offender, and that the severity of her sentence was based in part on what he said was her incorrect belief in conspiracy theories about election fraud — not solely her illegal actions.

Now, many Colorado election officials who have spent years working to convince the public that they run free and fair elections feel betrayed by the governor’s decision and don’t believe Peters has shown enough remorse to merit relief.

“We needed the governor to hold the line, and he let us down,” said Lori Mitchell, the clerk and recorder in Chaffee County. “We protected everything, and basically he’s saying the one woman who betrayed that trust for the public — she deserved to go home early. It’s just hard to even explain to my staff.”

In a social media post Friday, Peters said she had “made mistakes,” and “going forward I will make sure that my actions always follow the law.”

Polis’ decision came as election officials remain under pressure, preparing for what promises to be fraught midterm elections this year. President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly advocated for Peters’ freedom, continues to suggest elections are rigged. His administration is again investigating previously debunked allegations about the 2020 election, and some activists who supported his claims in 2020 now hold official positions in the federal government.

Mitchell, a Democrat who is not running for reelection as clerk, said that she believes Polis gave in to Trump’s campaign to free Peters. She predicted that those who promote conspiracy theories about elections and consider Peters a martyr will see this as a victory. “She is going to be on the pedestal, and I think that’s really bad for elections in this country,” she said.

Election officials feel abandoned

In 2024, a jury convicted Peters of multiple charges in connection with a 2021 breach of her county’s election equipment that forced the county to eventually replace it. Her case became a cause celebre among those who believe the 2020 election was rigged, and Trump even issued her a federal pardon, though it had no legal effect (she was convicted of state crimes, not federal ones). Colorado officials and others linked Trump’s campaign for her freedom to his administration’s withholding of unrelated federal funds from Colorado.

A Colorado appeals court in April upheld Peters’ conviction but threw out her sentence, finding the trial court judge’s criticism of her beliefs during the sentencing went too far. The panel ordered her resentenced but did not free her from prison. The court had not yet resentenced her.

Election officials have for months warily parsed Polis’ signals that he was considering taking action in the Peters case and didn’t hold back once they learned of it.

“A clear message is being sent to those willing to break the law and attack our democracy for the president that they very likely will not face consequences for their actions,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, said in a press call shortly after the news broke Friday.

During the same call, Matt Crane, the executive director of the Colorado Clerks Association, said the group was “furious, disgusted, and deeply disappointed” by Polis’ decision.

Later that day, in an interview with Votebeat, Crane said that “election officials just feel very alone right now.”

Jessica Huseman contributed reporting.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

The FBI is contacting Wisconsin election officials. Here’s what we know.

2026-05-15T18:50:27+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.

The federal government’s probe into the 2020 election has reached Wisconsin, with several current and former election officials, including multiple people in Milwaukee, confirming they have been interviewed or approached by the FBI.

The exact nature of the investigation remains unclear, though it appears to be at least somewhat centered around the 2020 election. The agency’s election investigations elsewhere in the country have featured subpoenas for ballots and other election records, but legal experts still say it won’t be easy for the federal government to convince a court to give it access to ballots.

Milwaukee County officials are nonetheless preparing for that possibility, in part because they still retain ballots from the 2020 election, though they declined to discuss those preparations or comment on the record. Those ballots contain identifying information that could, in some cases, allow otherwise unidentifiable absentee ballots to be matched to the voters who cast them. Milwaukee is one of the few jurisdictions in Wisconsin that still has ballots from that election, and the city has long been a target of voter-fraud accusations and related attacks from the political right.

Elsewhere in Wisconsin — in communities whose elections have faced less scrutiny and in the vast majority of municipalities where 2020 ballots were destroyed according to the standard retention schedules in state law — election officials are less alarmed and are instead focused on preparing for the midterm elections.

Still, news of the FBI interest has created confusion and some fear on the part of voters and election officials.

What happened?

So far, the FBI has contacted multiple current and former election officials in Wisconsin.

The FBI interviewed Wisconsin Elections Commission deputy administrator Robert Kehoe within the last few weeks. The news of the interview was first reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The interview focused on the 2020 election, with agents asking Kehoe to explain how Wisconsin elections operate.

The agency has also attempted to contact Milwaukee County Election Director Michelle Hawley. An agent left a business card at Hawley’s home when she was not there. Milwaukee County Clerk George Christensen criticized the agency for approaching Hawley at her home rather than through the county.

“While we cooperate with all legitimate law enforcement actions, we will defend against any attack on our democracy and will defend the rights of voters of Milwaukee County,” Christensen said in a statement.

Agents also left a card for, called, and texted a former Milwaukee election official, who confirmed the contact to Votebeat but requested anonymity because of personal safety concerns. That official declined to say whether they responded to the FBI.

Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson confirmed the FBI has reached out to city employees about the probe.

“The president for whatever reason cannot seem to let it go that he lost an election,” Johnson told a WISN 12 reporter.

Wisconsin Elections Commission spokeswoman Emilee Miklas declined to comment for this story. Other officials declined to speak on the record, and an FBI spokesperson didn’t answer Votebeat questions about the probe.

David Becker, the executive director of the nonpartisan nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research and a former Justice Department voting section attorney, said the federal government’s actions appeared more to be aimed at intimidating election officials than producing actionable criminal cases.

He pointed to FBI Director Kash Patel’s public statements in April suggesting arrests related to the 2020 election were coming, as well as federal officials discussing potential cases on social media before they’re brought before courts.

“If you think you’re going to bring charges and prosecute individuals, you don’t do anything that the federal government has done over the last few months,” he said.

Becker also noted that any potential federal crimes connected to the 2020 election are “well beyond the statute of limitations for any potential federal jurisdiction or crimes,” adding, “This is a problem for any investigation relating to 2020.”

Even so, Becker said election officials’ worries were justified. He said the Election Official Legal Defense Network, which he leads, has received more requests for legal assistance from election officials than ever before “even though all of these efforts indicate that the federal government knows it’s got nothing.”

How do the events in Wisconsin relate to probes elsewhere?

It’s unclear how the FBI interviews in Wisconsin relate to the agency’s scrutiny of the 2020 election in other states.

In January the FBI raided a Fulton County, Georgia, election office seeking records tied to the 2020 election. About a month later, the agency subpoenaed records related to the audit of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, Arizona, which includes Phoenix.

Separately, the U.S. Justice Department has sought access to 2024 ballots in Wayne County, Michigan, home to Detroit.

Those jurisdictions share several characteristics with Milwaukee County. All are located in highly competitive swing states won by former President Joe Biden in 2020, and all became central targets of President Donald Trump, who repeatedly challenged the election results despite court rulings, audits, and reviews repeatedly reaffirming his loss.

Fulton, Wayne, Maricopa, and Milwaukee County are the largest and most heavily scrutinized election jurisdictions in their respective states. Each has been the subject of persistent conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, many of which remain prevalent on social media, even after extensive investigations found no evidence of widespread fraud.

“What’s really disconcerting,” said former longtime Wisconsin election chief Kevin Kennedy, “is the fact that there is a clear pattern here to try and continue to stir up issues that were resolved in every single opportunity there was to review them, whether it was a court case, an independent audit or the actual certification and review process that exists.”

What comes next?

The short answer is that nobody really knows.

Officials have been considering the possibility that the federal government may seize the city’s 2020 ballots, which contain personally identifiable information.

Kennedy said recent actions by the Trump administration offer “no reason to think that information that should be protected is going to be protected.”

Kennedy said Wisconsin’s decentralized election system was intentionally designed to distribute authority among local jurisdictions — both to keep election administration accountable at the community level and to limit the amount of sensitive voter information concentrated in any one place.

“You put that at the national level,” he said, “and it only takes one bad actor — and we’ve got evidence there’s more than one of those already in the federal government — to totally disrupt the process when you consolidate that kind of information that’s protected through the various state and local laws and practices.”

Becker said it will be an uphill battle for the federal government to successfully obtain Milwaukee’s ballots. But he said the mere possibility that federal officials could theoretically identify how individual people voted is deeply troubling.

“That is not the way a democratic society works,” he said. “Now, I don’t think they’re likely going to be able to do that. I think that’s going to be incredibly difficult. It’s not impossible, but the fact that they seem to engender this fear is troubling enough.”

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

23 late-arriving Madison absentee ballots must be counted, judge rules

2026-05-14T23:32:37+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.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission was wrong to order Madison to remove 23 late-arriving absentee ballots from its count, a Dane County judge ruled Thursday, ordering the city to count them in the soon-to-be-certified Wisconsin Supreme Court race.

The ruling comes in response to a lawsuit brought by two of those 23 voters, who alleged that the Wisconsin Elections Commission unconstitutionally ordered Madison not to count the ballots. The absentee ballots at issue arrived at the polls after 8 p.m., a delay city officials say was caused by election administrator error. State law requires that absentee ballots be “delivered to the polling place no later than 8 p.m.” on Election Day, but the lawsuit alleged that it would be illegal to disenfranchise properly cast votes over election officials’ errors.

“Voters who comply with every element that is required for them to vote a special absentee vote, and then not being allowed to have the votes count, is contrary to what good law in Wisconsin has been,” Dane County Judge Everett Mitchell said from the bench.

The ruling came after an hour-long back-and-forth between attorneys for the Wisconsin Elections Commission and the plaintiffs over the rights of voters when election officials commit errors.

In briefs and in court, lawyers for Law Forward, who represent the plaintiffs, referenced several past rulings in the state that they say established a long-running precedent that voters can’t be deprived of their constitutional voting rights due to election officials’ errors.

In court, Charlotte Gibson, a Wisconsin Department of Justice lawyer representing the Wisconsin Elections Commission, argued that the precedent wasn’t that simple — and that the onus was on both voters and election officials to ensure ballots are counted on time.

In ordering Madison and Dane County not to count the ballots weeks after the election, the Wisconsin Elections Commission argued that state law simply does not permit late-arriving ballots to count, even as some commissioners expressed ambivalence about that rule and reluctance about disenfranchising voters in the process.

Wisconsin Elections Commission Chair Ann Jacobs, a Democrat, said in a statement after the ruling that she was pleased Mitchell reversed the WEC decision and ordered the ballots counted. Jacobs had voted to exclude the ballots, arguing the commission was bound by state law, but said at the time that she hoped a court would overturn the decision.

“As I have indicated previously, as an administrative agency we are bound by the language of the state statutes which precluded counting those ballots,” Jacobs said in a statement. “That said, it has been my firm belief that voters should not be penalized by the actions of a clerk as these 23 voters were. The right to vote should not be predicated on a clerk failing to deliver properly and timely submitted ballots.”

Mitchell’s decision means the votes removed in response to the WEC order will now be added back to the count. Those aren’t necessarily the exact 23 ballots that were delivered late, though. Due to poll workers not heeding Madison Clerk Lydia McComas’ request to uniformly mark the late-arriving ballots, Madison officials conducted what’s known as a drawdown to remove 23 random voters’ ballots from the count.

It remains unclear why there was such a delay between the ballots’ arrival at the elections office on Monday and their delivery to the precincts for counting.

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

Two reminders that the rules of the 2026 election are still in flux

2026-05-11T09:00:00+00:00

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

With less than six months until the general election, and state primaries already well underway, you’d think that the rules of engagement for the 2026 midterms would be set by now. But two developments last week should quickly disabuse you of that notion.

Redistricting risks confusing voters and costing states millions

First up: Multiple states are plowing ahead with redrawing their congressional districts in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais. As we reported in last week’s newsletter, the flurry of mid-decade redistricting has already diluted the voting power of millions of people. But there’s another consequence to redrawing maps specifically at this late juncture: It will throw primary elections that are actively underway into disarray, confusing voters, forcing election officials to scramble, and costing taxpayers millions of dollars.

For example, after the Callais decision ruled Louisiana’s congressional map unconstitutional, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, quickly issued an emergency executive order suspending the state’s May 16 congressional primary for U.S. House candidates — even though voting had already started. Approximately 42,000 voters had already cast absentee ballots with those races on them.

Under Landry’s order, the rest of the primary will go ahead, but votes in those U.S. House races won’t count.

Legal challenges to his order are still pending, voters are confuzzled, and election officials are warning that adding a second primary election just for U.S. House elections will be expensive. “This election cost about $212,000 to $215,000, and so if we still go forward … and have to add the other closed party primary, that’s going to be more money,” Louis Perret, the Lafayette Parish clerk of court, said in an interview with KADN-TV. Perret estimated the statewide cost at around $8 million.

In Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed a new map on May 4, county election supervisors say they’re preparing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars sending voters updated information about their new districts and clarifying where they’ll be voting. Alabama has petitioned courts to let it use a previous version of its congressional map, which would require new primary elections this summer, and a state fiscal note attached to the legislation estimates that could cost $4.5 million over two fiscal years.

Tennessee, which enacted a new map on Thursday, also enacted a law that eliminated the requirement for counties to notify voters by mail when their precincts and polling places change, according to the Tennessee Coalition for Open Government, though counties can still get reimbursed by the state if they choose to send the mailings. This would save money but leave voters responsible for figuring that out themselves. “When polling places or precincts are changed, more effort should be made to reach affected voters, not less,” the coalition wrote.

In Virginia, the state Supreme Court on Friday overturned the congressional map voters passed in a referendum late last month, citing problems with the process lawmakers followed in putting it on the ballot. That means the millions of dollars the state spent on the election was essentially for naught.

It does also mean that state and local election officials will avoid the “very, very time-consuming, incredibly detailed process” of assigning voters to the new districts while preparing to administer the upcoming August primary election, said Chris Piper, who was Virginia’s chief election official until 2022.

“In order to make those changes, it takes quite a lot of work,” he said.

The feds aren’t sure what to do with Trump’s mail voting executive order

Redistricting isn’t the only thing that could turn the midterms on their head. On March 31, President Donald Trump issued a second executive order on elections that would have given the U.S. Postal Service unprecedented control over mail ballots, which immediately drew legal challenges.

Democrats, voting rights groups, and states all filed lawsuits challenging the order. In a May 1 filing in a lawsuit consolidating some of those challenges, the U.S. Department of Justice asked a federal judge to dismiss the lawsuits and not issue a preliminary injunction blocking the order. That was no surprise, but more notable was their reasoning for it: The department argued that the lawsuits were premature because federal agencies haven’t even started to implement the order yet.

The order called for the creation of three separate lists of potential voters, including a list of citizens over age 18 residing in each state. But as Votebeat reported, it didn’t specify what any of these lists had to do with each other or, really, anything about how the order was supposed to work.

In statements accompanying the filing, leaders at the U.S. Postal Service and Social Security Administration basically said they were still figuring out what the order means for them. And the DOJ essentially agreed with many of the order’s critics who had pointed out that the order provided no direction on what to do with the lists it created.

“The Order does not specify any particular purpose or intended use for the State Citizenship Lists,” the department wrote in the filing, “and (other than their creation by the Department of Homeland Security … and transmission to States) does not require anyone inside or outside of the federal government to do anything with those lists.”

The administration’s inaction on implementing Trump’s executive order at least makes it less likely it will change anything for voters or election officials in the 2026 election, even if the courts decline to block it. But if there’s one thing we learned this week, it’s that politicians aren’t afraid to upend election administration if their motivations are strong enough, so the status of the order’s implementation bears watching into the summer and fall.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Wisconsin Elections Commission faces lawsuit, criticism over order not to count late-arriving Madison ballots

2026-05-06T22:38:02+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.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission is facing criticism from local officials and a lawsuit filed Wednesday after it ordered Madison not to count 23 absentee ballots that arrived late to the polls in the state’s recent Supreme Court race, a delay city officials say was caused by election administrator error. City officials also say the commission initially offered little guidance but later faulted them for making the wrong decision.

As Madison officials discussed what to do with the late-arriving ballots the day after Election Day, Madison City Attorney Mike Haas reached out to Wisconsin Elections Commission administrator Meagan Wolfe for advice. Wolfe sent the relevant statute the following day, and told Madison officials to “decide, within their statutory discretion” whether the 23 ballots should be counted. Madison decided to count them.

Three weeks later, WEC’s commissioners decided Madison made the wrong choice, ordering them to remove the 23 affected ballots from the count. The commissioners didn’t mince words. Chair Ann Jacobs, a Democrat, said Madison committed an “absurd error,” and GOP commissioner Don Millis called it an “epic failure.”

The dispute has exposed a breakdown between state and local election officials with consequences beyond the 23 ballots at issue. Madison officials say they followed guidance from the commission when they chose to count the votes, only to be publicly rebuked and overruled weeks later. Now, a lawsuit argues that not counting the votes would disenfranchise voters whose ballots were delayed by election officials — and local clerks warn the episode could make them less likely to act decisively when problems arise in future elections.

Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell, a Democrat, said the turnaround from the commission was puzzling and could demoralize clerks.

“Why would anybody ask WEC for an opinion about how to handle a situation?” he said. “Here they are attacking clerks for having to make a decision because they couldn’t get advice.”

Commission administrator Meagan Wolfe said that the agency was limited in how much advice it can provide for local election officials, but said the commission remains “dedicated to supporting their efforts within the scope of our administrative role.”

Lawsuit alleges removing the 23 votes would be unconstitutional

The liberal law firm Law Forward’s lawsuit in Dane County Circuit Court alleges that the commission illegally ordered Madison not to count 23 absentee ballots that arrived at the polls after 8 p.m.

The group says the two voters it’s representing — Margaret and Robert Honig — along with the other voters, would be unconstitutionally disenfranchised “through no fault of their own” and asks the court to strike down the WEC order not to count the ballots.

The lawsuit references several past rulings in the state as establishing a precedent that voters can’t be deprived of their constitutional voting rights due to election officials’ errors.

This is the second recent Law Forward lawsuit involving Madison’s failure to count ballots due to administrative error. The legal group sued the city for disenfranchising 193 voters in the 2024 presidential election for a separate series of failures.

It remains unclear why there was such a delay between the ballots’ arrival at the elections office and their delivery to the precincts for counting. State law requires they be “delivered to the polling place no later than 8 p.m.” in order to be tallied.

Dane County authorized a separate lawsuit on Tuesday, and then filed it Wednesday early evening, as county election officials said they want clarity in the future on whether late-arriving ballots can count if they were only delayed because of election official error.

That same day, Madison complied with WEC’s demand to remove the ballots from the count, but instead of removing the specific ballots at issue, the city selected 20 ballots at random and removed those. Called a “drawdown,” the controversial practice was necessary because poll workers apparently failed to follow Madison Clerk Lydia McComas’ instructions to clearly mark the late-arriving ballots so they could be identified if necessary. Only three were appropriately marked.

Officials criticize the election commission for lack of direction

Local election officials say the Wisconsin Elections Commission has become less willing to provide clear guidance in difficult situations — a practice that commissioners and staff say reflects the limits of the agency’s role.

Haas, the Madison city attorney, has firsthand experience on the commission: He preceded Wolfe as the commission’s administrator. Her initial response to the city’s request for advice on how to handle the late-arriving ballots — which provided little direction — was in line with the commission’s tendency in recent years to “intentionally avoid giving definitive responses to specific questions,” Haas wrote in a May 6 letter to the commission obtained by Votebeat.

“This has caused local clerks and their legal counsel to feel frustrated that the WEC is abdicating its responsibility under the Statutes to administer the election laws and provide guidance and advice to local election officials,” he continued.

Haas also questioned why Wolfe’s response and the commissioners’ eventual order were so out of step with one another. The city relied on Wolfe’s initial guidance, Haas said, only to have the commission “contradict its Administrator without even an acknowledgment of her guidance.”

That dynamic, he added, discourages local election officials from being transparent with the agency and damages the commission’s credibility.

He also said that the commissioners were contradicting themselves. In its investigation into the 193 ballots that went missing in Madison until several days after the November 2024 election, the commission concluded that the missing ballots never arrived at the polling places but still could have been counted.

Haas said it was “difficult to sustain” the commission’s conclusions that “a municipality should count ballots that are discovered in the Clerk’s Office days after the election but not ballots that were delivered minutes after the 8:00 p.m. deadline.”

To McDonell, the Democratic Dane County clerk, the commission’s “real reticence to give advice” is undermining election officials’ trust in the state election agency.

McDonell said that in the past he used to get specific advice from the commission, but now “we get a game of ‘gotcha’ instead.”

In a statement, Wolfe told Votebeat that the commission provides guidance to clerks when the issues are clear. But when state law is ambiguous or unprecedented situations arise, she said, “it’s been our long-established policy to direct clerks to their respective legal counsel for interpretation.”

The Wisconsin Elections Commission has six commissioners, three Democrats and three Republicans. Decisions must be made by a majority of the commission, needing at minimum a 4-2 vote. Although Wolfe — whose role as administrator is nonpartisan — is often referred to as Wisconsin’s top election official, she does not have a vote.

Wolfe added that the commission can exercise its authority to issue determinations on election matters and that it’s her role to adhere to those directives, “even when I don’t always agree with those decisions.”

Jacobs, the commission chair, said the commission provides clerks plenty of help, from designing election manuals and creating administrative rules to adjudicating administrative complaints.

“We are doing everything we can to provide guidance to clerks on how to do things right,” she said. “We are not their 1-800-GET-HELP number for individual clerks’ every single legal need.”

One of the other reasons the commission can’t provide specific legal advice, Jacobs said, is that the commission acts as a judicial body that could ultimately evaluate whether election officials comply with the law.

“If you’ve got a court case, a personal injury lawsuit on a car accident, you don’t get to call the judge up and say, ‘Hey, am I doing this right?’” she said. “It cannot be our job to do their jobs for them.”

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

Mequon includes ‘incorrectly rejected’ votes in state-ordered certification redo

2026-05-05T21:01:41+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.

MEQUON, Wisc. — The Mequon canvassing board on Tuesday complied with a Wisconsin Elections Commission order to count five absentee ballots from the April state Supreme Court election that City Clerk Caroline Fochs had initially rejected using an unusually strict standard for assessing the validity of a witness address.

But City Attorney Brian Sajdak stopped short of committing to abiding by the commission’s additional order to stop employing that standard in the future, saying the city was still considering its options.

The city’s decision to count the ballots that the commission said were “improperly rejected” came one day after the Ozaukee County Board of Canvassers on Monday ordered the city to revise its totals, and several days after the commission said Fochs’ standard for judging the validity of absentee ballots was illegal.

A Wisconsin court ruled in 2024 that a witness address is valid so long as the clerk can reasonably assess where the witness lives. Fochs previously told Votebeat that she thinks the courts need to revisit the ruling.

WEC has instructed clerks to count ballots even if the witness address lists only street name, number, and municipality. The envelope that a witness fills out and signs does not specifically designate spaces for state or zip code.

Despite that, Fochs has for several elections applied a standard of not counting ballots that didn’t include the state or ZIP code unless the municipality was uniquely named nationwide — a policy that the election commission said is not legal.

The commission told Fochs that if she applies requirements beyond the normal standard of accepting ballots that provide only a street name, number, and municipality, she must evaluate the validity of the address based on the full address, not just whether the municipality is unique.

The street name and number in three of the rejected ballots were unique to just one of the municipalities with the same name, a Votebeat analysis found. The other two were from Fox Point, which is a uniquely named municipality despite Mequon election officials’ claims otherwise.

In Tuesday’s meeting, Fochs continued to describe Fox Point as not uniquely named, despite Votebeat reporting that it is.

During the Board of Canvassers meeting on Tuesday, one of the three board members appeared confused by absentee rules, asking whether out-of-state residents could serve as witnesses. Fochs confirmed that they can. The question arose over a ballot whose witness listed a Baltimore address. Though there are a few Baltimores across the country, the street name and number are unique to the one in Maryland.

City still weighing options for future elections, attorney says

Although the city canvassing board decided to count the five disputed ballots in this instance, Sajdak, the city attorney, said the city won’t necessarily follow the more lenient standard suggested by WEC in future elections.

At the same time, he said it’s “not likely” that the city will appeal the current WEC order in court.

The battle over what constitutes a proper witness address has been playing out in courts for years. State law requires witnesses to include an address on the absentee form but doesn’t clarify the details Republicans have argued in court that an address must include a street name, number, municipality, ZIP code, and state, but that argument was rejected by the court in 2024.

The current standard allows a witness address to be considered valid if the clerk can reasonably assess where the witness lives. In the past, Fochs told Votebeat that standard leads to different outcomes in different places.

Sajdak reiterated that concern on Tuesday, saying “the problem” was that every community can weigh ballots differently.

“It should be a consistent standard for everybody,” he said. “All of this rigmarole and hassle could be easily solved by the Legislature or WEC adopting an administrative rule or changing the statute.”

Sajdak added that while Mequon complied with WEC this time, “Whether we continue to do that in future elections, we’re still weighing what that looks like and how that’s going to play out.”

Ann Jacobs, the Democratic chair of the elections commission, said that if the city disagrees with the order, they should appeal it rather than ignore it. If they appeal it, she said, “then we’ve got to sue them, and I don’t know that the taxpayers of Mequon want to pay to defend a lawsuit that tells them to conform their conduct to applicable law.”

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

Dane County to appeal Wisconsin Elections Commission order not to count late ballots

2026-05-05T19:32:30+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, May 5, 5:40 p.m: This story has been updated with additional information.

Dane County on Tuesday voted to appeal in court a Wisconsin Elections Commission order directing the county to remove 23 late-arriving Madison votes from its election certification of the recent state Supreme Court race after the commission said initially counting those votes was an illegal abuse of discretion.

The Madison Board of Canvassers also voted Tuesday to remove 23 ballots from the count. But instead of identifying and discarding the specific late-arriving ballots, officials in most cases carried out what’s known as a “drawdown,” randomly selecting ballots to remove.

Records obtained by Votebeat show that while Madison Clerk Lydia McComas instructed poll workers on Election Day to mark late-arriving ballots with a uniform identifier, that directive was issued late, and was not consistently followed. As a result, officials were unable to identify all of the late-arriving ballots. In 20 of the 23 cases, the ballots removed were likely not the ones that were delivered after the deadline.

That’s in line with the state’s controversial drawdown law, which calls for election officials to remove random ballots when there are more ballots than properly documented voters, or when absentee ballots outnumber correctly completed “ballot certificates” — the information on the envelope affirming a voter’s and witness’s identity.

The conflict between the county and election commission centers on 23 Madison absentee ballots that city officials didn’t deliver to the polls until after 8 p.m. on Election Day, even though those ballots arrived at the city’s election office on the Monday before the election. Those ballots were initially counted by the city and county despite a state law requiring that absentee ballots be “delivered to the polling place no later than 8 p.m.” in order to be tallied.

Madison argued that counting those late-arriving ballots was in line with past court decisions holding that voters shouldn’t be disenfranchised solely for clerks’ mistakes. The Dane County Board of Canvassers sided with the city at the time, voting 2-1 to count the ballots the week after the election.

Then the state election commission last week said that the 8 p.m. deadline is not flexible — even if election officials’ errors are the only reason votes arrived that late. Commissioners ultimately voted 5-1 last Thursday to order Dane County and Madison not to count the 23 ballots, though one of the commissioners who voted in favor, Democratic Chair Ann Jacobs, said at the time that she hoped Madison or Dane would appeal the commission’s order in court.

“Like so many, I am unhappy that the law requires that the actions of the clerk penalize a lawful, proper voter, and I think our judiciary needs to address that conflict,” Jacobs told Votebeat after the Dane County vote on Tuesday. “I wish it was within the province of the commission to do so. I don’t think it is, so I am hopeful the judiciary will see and address this conflict.”

The county decided to appeal the order largely because the statute stipulating that ballots must be delivered by 8 p.m. “specifically addresses what should happen if the ballot is returned to the clerk on election day,” a legal memo from Dane County corporation counsel David Gault states. Because Madison received the ballots on the Monday before Election Day — not on Election Day itself — that statute doesn’t apply, he said.

In any case, Gault wrote, that law “should not be construed to disenfranchise an elector who has strictly complied with all statutory requirements to cast an absentee ballot. Such a construction would, in my opinion, be unconstitutional as applied to the facts of this case.”

While voting to appeal, the Dane County Board of Canvassers also ordered Madison to redo its certification without counting those 23 votes — in line with the commission order. Madison redid its canvass late Tuesday morning without those 23 votes. Madison City Attorney Mike Haas said the city has 30 days to appeal the commission decision and hasn’t decided yet whether to do so.

Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell, a Democrat, told Votebeat that he hopes the Board of Canvasser’s appeal can be filed and ruled on quickly enough to reinstate those votes. But because the exclusion of those votes didn’t affect the outcome of any race and a ruling before the May 15 state deadline to canvass is unlikely, he said his focus is more on how courts say these situations should play out going forward for voters.

“They should not be penalized by a clerk error and have their constitutional right to vote taken away,” he said.

Drawdown appears to stem from breakdown in communication

As it appeared increasingly likely that some ballots would arrive after 8 p.m., McComas sent a Microsoft Teams message around 7 p.m. on Election Day that “if folks get courier delivered ballots after 8pm, please mark on the ballot something uniform, like a circle, and then count them,” according to documents obtained by Votebeat.

But that instruction appears to have been followed for just three of the 23 ballots — one from Ward 77 and two from Ward 132. In the other instances, election officials “could not determine” which ballots were delivered late. As a result, officials turned to the remedy in the law and conducted a drawdown, randomly removing 20 ballots from the count.

It remains unclear why the marking instructions were not followed. In an email to the Wisconsin Election Commission on Monday, McCommas said it was possible the chief inspectors didn’t follow her instructions, but did not explain further.

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

The Supreme Court’s voting rights decision could reshape local government across Texas

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

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

Guillermo Ramos remembers seeing few elected leaders who looked like him while he was growing up in the 1980s in Farmers Branch, a fast-growing affluent suburb northwest of Dallas.

Over the years, Latino representation continued to lag, he said. In 2015, after he had become a lawyer, he decided to do something about it.

Ramos stepped forward as the plaintiff in a lawsuit against the Carrollton-Farmers Branch Independent School District, alleging that its at-large system of electing board members violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by denying Latino voters the right to elect representatives of their choice. At the time, Latino voters made up 56% of the district, but every Latino school board candidate had lost since at least 1995, the lawsuit said.

The case settled, and as part of the agreement, Ramos was appointed as the board’s first Latino trustee. The settlement also replaced the at-large system — in which every seat was filled by districtwide vote — with what’s known as cumulative voting. The new system lets voters cast as many votes as there are seats on the board, but allows them to stack their votes on a single candidate or spread them across multiple candidates.

Ramos, now 51, won the next election to keep his spot on the board, which he said created a ripple effect that drew in more Latino candidates.

“They felt at this point that if they throw their hat in the ring, that they’re going to have actually a shot at getting elected. And that’s what happened,” Ramos said.

Changes like those in the Carrollton-Farmers Branch School District played out over decades on local governing bodies all over Texas, enabling representation of Latino and Black voters. Those changes were a direct result of claims brought under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting practices or electoral maps that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or language minority status.

But a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision last week weakened that key provision, and Ramos and others say it could make it harder and more uncertain for other candidates of color to follow the path he took to local office.

The effects of the decision, which struck down Louisiana’s congressional map, are reverberating around the country and setting off a new cycle of redistricting for partisan advantage. Experts say there is still a lot of uncertainty about how the decision will play out, especially at the local level and when it comes to nonpartisan local governmental bodies such as Texas school boards and city councils.

“The judges in the opinion are discussing congressional elections, not school board elections, even though that’s where Section Two has been applied probably more frequently,” said Christian Grose, director of the Democracy and Fair Elections Lab at the University of Southern California.

But whether it’s after the 2030 Census or sooner, he added, “I do think there are going to be challenges, even in nonpartisan elections, saying that Section 2 doesn’t need to be enforced anymore.”

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.

With the court having previously authorized maps to be drawn for partisan aims, dissenting Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the new standard under Louisiana v. Callais gives plaintiffs virtually no recourse under Section 2, as long as a mapmaker declares a partisan motive and leaves “no smoking-gun evidence of a race-based motive.”

FARMERS BRANCH, TX - NOVEMBER 13: Elizabeth Villafranca (L) speaks to a crowd of protesters outside the city hall November 13, 2006 in Farmers Branch, Texas. Later in the evening, council members unanimously voted to pass the legislation that would make English the official language of the city and approving fines for landlords and businesses who do business with illegal immigrants. (Photo by Brian Harkin/Getty Images)

Going back in time

The decision could quickly become a factor in ongoing litigation.

Though most local elections in Texas are nonpartisan, county commissioners courts are an exception, and last week’s opinion will likely give a boost to counties that are already citing partisan motives in defending their maps. Last year, for example, the Republican-majority commissioners court in Tarrant County redrew its district lines, prompting a challenge from a group of voters who alleged the new map illegally diluted the power of Black and Latino voters by packing them into a single precinct. But Republican commissioners argued they’d drawn the lines for partisan gain, and earlier this year, the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the maps.

But Bill Brewer, the Dallas lawyer whose firm handled Ramos’ case in Farmers Branch, said he believes the ruling could actually help advocates win some challenges involving nonpartisan races.

Brewer, whose firm has filed at least 18 lawsuits against school districts and city councils in Texas under the Voting Rights Act, is representing a parent who sued the Keller Independent School District under Section 2, claiming the school district’s at-large system dilutes the votes of Latinos. The lawsuit was dismissed earlier this year and Brewer filed an appeal hours after the ruling to renew his push for a switch to cumulative voting. Brewer said the Callais ruling’s emphasis on intentional discrimination strengthens his claim for access to emails, meeting recordings and other evidence that could show intent.

“If they’re refusing to change because they intend to dilute opportunities for Hispanics or Blacks or Asians at the voting box, well, then you still have a claim under Section 2,” he said.

Keller ISD did not respond to a request for comment.

Ramos’ suit against the school board wasn’t the only Section 2 case brought in Farmers Branch. Its city council, too, was forced to switch from at-large to single-member districts in 2012, and the first Latino council member was elected in 2013. Council Member Elizabeth Villafranca, who was first elected last year, eventually became one of many Latino candidates to win a seat. The impact of the Voting Rights Act in the city has been “immeasurable,” she said.

But after the decision from last week, “I’m just horrified at the thought of having to go back in time,” Villafranca said. Still, she believes the community has come too far to revert to its old system. “You can see the incredible pride that there is when our residents see someone that looks like them, that speaks like them, that can represent them, and ultimately, that benefits everyone.”

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.

How the Voting Rights Act reshaped Texas’ electoral maps

2026-05-04T19:28:03+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.

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In 2002, U.S. Rep. Henry Bonilla, a Republican, nearly lost his South Texas seat to Democrat Henry Cuellar. So when the GOP used its newfound majority in the state Legislature to redraw the voting maps the next year, they sawed through Cuellar’s hometown of Laredo and scattered Latino voters, who tended to vote Democratic, into other districts.

Latino advocacy groups sued under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the cornerstone provision of the law that prevents government bodies from diluting the voting power of specific groups. The Supreme Court found Texas lawmakers had taken away Latino voting power “because they were about to exercise it.”

“Latino voters were poised to elect their candidate of choice,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority. “The State not only made fruitless the Latinos’ mobilization efforts but also acted against those Latinos who were becoming most politically active.”

Bonilla’s 23rd Congressional District was redrawn, and he lost to a Democrat. Just five years later, Latino voters flipped it back to Republican control; the seat was held most recently by GOP Rep. Tony Gonzales, who resigned last month.

Nina Perales, who argued that case at the Supreme Court, sees that district as an enduring testament to the power of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

“A lot of the districts that we see in the map today were created to make sure that minority communities were not accidentally chopped up, and that minority communities could have a voice in some parts of the state,” Perales said. “In CD-23, when a majority of Latino voters support Gonzales, they get to elect Gonzales, and it’s irrelevant what Gonzales’ political party is.”

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court gutted Section 2, raising the bar for voter dilution claims so high as to make the statute a “dead letter,” as Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent. Partisan gerrymandering, like the type used to try to keep Bonilla in power, is a defense against allegations of vote dilution, the conservative majority ruled. Under the new standard, plaintiffs will have to prove mapmakers intentionally set out to discriminate against voters on the basis of their race.

Even as it diminishes in power, the legacy of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is deeply woven into Texas’ political maps, reflected in districts carefully drawn to ensure voters of color could have a say. The landmark 1965 law also gave rise to a new generation of leaders, elected from Black, Hispanic and Asian communities. From that point on, both parties would have to look out for voters of color when drawing their maps — and if they didn’t, voters would have legal recourse.

Rep. Marc Veasey, D-Fort Worth, said his career has been “defined” by the Voting Rights Act. As a young Black state representative, he was elected in 2012 to a congressional district drawn to right what a court found to be a legislative wrong: Texas had divided communities of color in North Texas across multiple majority-white seats designed to elect Republicans. Fourteen years later, Veasey is now departing Congress after GOP lawmakers redrew the district out from under him last summer.

With Section 2 of the VRA now significantly weakened, it will be harder to make the legal case that this redraw had an improper racial, rather than partisan, intent.

The recent hollowing out of the Voting Rights Act created a disconcerting full circle moment for Veasey, who recalled that his district was originally drawn for Willow Park GOP Rep. Roger Williams. Under the new lines, Veasey noted, Williams “will end up representing my neighborhood after all.”

How Section 2 remade Texas’ maps

In 1965, when Texas’ favorite son, President Lyndon B. Johnson, signed the Voting Rights Act into law, he said the vote “is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice.”

The law included two pillars with significant implications for Texas — Section 2, which prohibits voter discrimination based on race, and Section 5, which requires jurisdictions with histories of racial discrimination to get preapproval from the Department of Justice for any voting changes, including new electoral maps.

Before the law went into effect, Texas had just two people of color in its congressional delegation — Reps. Henry Gonzalez of San Antonio and Kika De La Garza from the Rio Grande Valley, both of whom were Mexican-American. They each voted for the Voting Rights Act that would enable the ranks of Hispanic lawmakers to swell significantly.

In the 1970s, Barbara Jordan became the first Black member of Congress from Texas. As a state senator, Jordan helped draw the district she would soon be elected to, a seat that provides Black Houstonians the opportunity to elect their candidate of choice to this day. Three new representatives of color joined Texas’ congressional delegation in the 1980s. By the 1990s, there were 13 members of color who served at any point during the decade. With two more election cycles to go, the 2020s have already reached a peak of 22 members of color, some of whom have represented white-majority districts.

During her sophomore term, in 1975, Jordan got Texas added to the list of states that needed preclearance for its maps. In 1982, Congress reinforced the law with an amendment that said maps ran afoul of the law if they had the effect of diluting racial or ethnic groups’ vote, even if that wasn’t the intent. These new provisions, the second of which overruled a Supreme Court decision to the contrary, opened the floodgates to litigation against Texas’ maps, at every level of government.

In each decade since the law’s passage, at least one of Texas’ maps has been found to have violated the law, and courts have ordered at least one new district to be drawn. The maps drawn in 2021 and 2025 are still under active litigation.

In the 1980s, plaintiffs successfully sued over the congressional, state Senate and state House maps under the Voting Rights Act, compelling redraws of legislative seats that were found to have diluted Black and Hispanic voting strength through packing them into just a few districts in the state’s urban counties — and into a single district in South Texas. Through preclearance, the Department of Justice also ordered Texas to redraw districts that diluted Black and Hispanic voters’ strength. The effects of those redraws can still be seen in today’s maps.

“You had charges and claims against the South Texas district, because they were packed down against the border,” said Matt Angle, a Democratic strategist and founder of the Lone Star Project who has been involved in Texas redistricting cases for decades. “That’s why now, you see South Texas districts running north and south instead of along the bottom. It’s because [of] the court rulings under the Voting Rights Act, that you couldn’t pack those districts down against the border.”

More subtle, but just as important, was the way the Voting Rights Act pushed Texas lawmakers to proactively consider voters of color when drawing their electoral maps, Perales said. In the 1990s, for example, the majority-Hispanic 28th and 29th Congressional Districts “were born out of an understanding that the state needed to comply with Section 2,” she said.

Having grasped that it would be better to comply on the front end than be hauled into court later, the Legislature used to bring MALDEF and other groups in around the decennial census to train legislators on how to draw maps that met the law’s requirements.

“Part of that legal training was always on the obligation to avoid discriminating against minority voters under Section 2 the Voting Rights Act,” she said. “The guidance was, don’t inadvertently chop up minority communities when you’re drawing lines, because even if it’s inadvertent, it could be a legal problem.”

In 2013, the Supreme Court eliminated preclearance for most jurisdictions, including Texas. The state immediately reinstated a voter ID law that had been caught up under Section 5. The decision also freed Texas’ 2011 electoral maps from preclearance, though some parts of the map were later redrawn over Section 2 violations.

“A pre-1965 posture”

The centerpiece of the court’s redrawn map was the new 33rd Congressional District, crafted to allow voters of color to elect their preferred candidate in fast-growing Dallas and Tarrant county. The new lines were later upheld after a trial, in which the court concluded that lawmakers had “acted at least in part with a racially discriminatory motive … with regard to the districts in DFW in particular.”

Veasey was a state representative planning to run for reelection — and on his way to see a pre-Thanksgiving movie with his family — when he got a call that changed his career.

“I heard, hey, they’re gonna draw a new map, and there’s probably going to be an opportunity for you to run,” Veasey said. “You’ve got to make up your mind quick over whether you’re going to do it.”

He ran, and won, giving him a chance to represent a district that was as diverse as the state of Texas — one that would last about a decade and a half before falling victim to the GOP’s mid-decade redistricting.

Several other congressional districts that were shaped by the Voting Rights Act were subsequently dismantled by Republicans last summer. Among them are Hispanic-opportunity districts in South Texas, such as the 28th District represented by Cuellar, who rebounded from his loss to Bonilla to become one of Texas’ longest-tenured members of Congress.

The VRA also helped create Houston’s 9th Congressional District, where more than four in five residents are Black or Hispanic.

Last summer, lawmakers redrew it to a “bare majority” — 50.3% Hispanic — as they did several other districts.

Early last week, the Supreme Court allowed that map to go into effect while a trial proceeds. Just two days later, the court ruled in Louisiana v. Callais that the results-based test that had been used for decades should be replaced with a new, higher bar that allows for an easier partisan defense.

Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, said lower courts had applied Section 2 “in a way that forces States to engage in the very race-based discrimination that the Constitution forbids.” Under the new framework Alito laid out in the decision, a Section 2 claim must prove that the state “intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race.”

Angle said Texas’ most recent rounds of redistricting demonstrate what a post-Section 2 future may look like.

“You’ve got a situation in which a state that’s over 60% people of color is only going to have somewhere between 20% and 30% of the districts where voters of color’s vote matters at all,” Angle said.

State Rep. Matt Shaheen, a Republican from Plano, said the U.S. had a long history of vote suppression that made the Voting Rights Act necessary.

“But we’ve moved on from that, clearly, and I think people recognize minority voters are entitled to equal representation but not certain election outcomes,” Shaheen said. “It really is more of a colorblind society, and elections are very much driven now by principles and policies, and not so much on skin color.”

Shaheen is among several GOP lawmakers who say they hope Texas takes up redistricting anew during the 2027 legislative session, this time with a focus on the state House and Senate lines.

Perales agrees that the Voting Rights Act is not about specific electoral outcomes. But she disagrees that the country is ready to move on from ensuring racial and ethnic voters have the opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice, regardless of political party or the ethnicity of the candidate.

“As much as Justice Alito wanted to make it seem like a case about partisanship, it isn’t,” she said. “It’s about dismantling something much more historic and much more deeply needed in our country, which is equal opportunity for everybody.”

For Veasey, the ruling was not a surprise. But now that his district has been chopped up and the VRA’s core provision has been kneecapped, the retiring congressman sees a bleak future for the representation of Black and brown voters.

“It’s going to go back to a pre-1965 posture,” he said. “We just won’t have nearly as many voices pushing. It’s just be [like] when we had one or two voices that were pushing back before the VRA was passed — that’s what it’s going to be like now.

Here’s where redistricting stands after Florida’s new congressional map and the Supreme Court’s Callais decision

2026-05-04T13:52:00+00:00

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

If you love redistricting, boy, was it the week for you.

The Florida Legislature convened in a special session to pass a new congressional map that could net Republicans up to four seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. And on Wednesday morning, literally as legislators were debating the map in Tallahassee, the U.S. Supreme Court defanged Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in its opinion in Louisiana v. Callais, a long-anticipated decision that could inspire several other states to join the redistricting fray.

Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, had cited the looming decision in Callais as a reason that Florida’s congressional map needed to be redrawn. But the maneuver is widely understood to be part of the nationwide epidemic of mid-decade redistricting that started last summer. To shore up Republicans’ chances of holding the House in the midterms, President Donald Trump urged Texas, Missouri, and North Carolina to draw new congressional maps that created more safe seats for Republicans. In retaliation, Democrats in California and Virginia successfully passed ballot measures that instituted Democratic gerrymanders of their own.

Once DeSantis officially signs the map, Florida will become the sixth state to voluntarily enact a new congressional map this cycle, and the eighth state overall. (Ohio and Utah also got new congressional maps this cycle for unrelated reasons.) Both of those numbers are modern records for election cycles not immediately following a census (when redistricting normally takes place).

The losers of this cartographical arms race have been the voters. There’s no set definition of what makes a political map gerrymandered, but one measure of a map’s partisan bias is a statistic called efficiency gap, or the difference between how many votes the map “wastes” for one party versus the other. (Any vote cast for the losing party in a district, or cast for the winning party after it already won a majority, is considered wasted.)

An ideal efficiency gap is 0, meaning the number of wasted votes is perfectly balanced between the parties. But based on the results of the 2024 presidential election, all but one of the new maps has an efficiency gap of 20 percentage points or greater in favor of the party that drew it. And all but two got less fair.

The maps also have a lot fewer swing seats — meaning fewer competitive elections and a House that is less responsive to changes in voters’ preferences. In 2024, these eight states had 28 districts that voted for either Trump or former Vice President Kamala Harris by 8 points or less. Under their new maps, though, they have just 13.

Ironically, the one thing mid-decade redistricting doesn’t seem to have done — at least, at this point — is give Republicans the upper hand they were looking for. When Trump kicked off the redistricting race, he likely didn’t anticipate that California and Virginia would be able to amend their state constitutions and implement such brutal Democratic gerrymanders, with the result that Democrats have actually been able to neutralize all of Republicans’ gains. According to redistricting expert Jonathan Cervas, who used past election results to estimate how the eight new maps would perform in a variety of political environments, the new maps actually produce an average net Democratic gain of 2.69 seats.

A map of the estimated partisan impact of 2025-26 redistricting.

At least so far. Thanks to Louisiana v. Callais, we’re not quite done with 2025-26 redistricting. On Thursday, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry announced that he was postponing the Pelican State’s May 16 primary for U.S. House contests — in which voting was already underway — in order to redraw Louisiana’s congressional districts to comply with the Supreme Court’s decision. That should result in a net gain of at least one, and possibly two, seats for Republicans.

Trump also said Thursday he had talked to Gov. Bill Lee about redrawing Tennessee’s congressional lines to target the state’s lone Democratic representative. While redistricting this late in an election year would present hurdles for any state, they might be surmountable in Tennessee, whose primary isn’t until Aug. 6. (It would still have to reopen its candidate filing period, which closed on March 10.)

In addition, Alabama asked the Supreme Court to strike down its congressional map in light of the Callais decision and has called a special session to reschedule its May 19 primary if that happens. Republicans in South Carolina, including Gov. Henry McMaster, and Mississippi have also urged their legislatures to draw new lines. Each of those states has one Democratic-held seat that Republicans would like to eliminate.

Meanwhile, Gov. Brian Kemp has announced that Georgia won’t redraw its lines before the 2026 election, although it may do so for 2028.

Adding to the chaos, state courts could still block some of the new maps that have already taken effect. The Virginia Supreme Court is hearing a procedural challenge to the referendum that passed its new map. Voting-rights groups have vowed to sue over Florida’s new map once it’s official. And a lawsuit is ongoing over whether Missouri’s new map can go into effect before a ballot initiative challenging it qualifies for the ballot.

Basically, we’ve entered a world where redistricting isn’t a once-in-a-decade occurrence — it’s all around us, all at once. If you don’t love redistricting, well, it might be time to get used to it.

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

Wisconsin Elections Commission overruled ballot-counting decisions in Madison and Mequon

2026-04-30T23:03:37+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.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission on Thursday overruled controversial ballot-counting decisions in Mequon and Madison, ordering the cities to revise final tallies in their Wisconsin Supreme Court election results.

Madison counted 23 late-arriving ballots that the commission voted should not have been included, while Mequon threw out five ballots the commission said should have been counted. The commission voted 6-0 to investigate both city clerks’ offices and ordered changes to the counts — voting 5-1 to require Madison and Dane County to exclude the 23 ballots, and 6-0 to require Mequon and Ozaukee County to count the five.

The deadline for the state to certify the election is May 15, but some commissioners acknowledged the likelihood that lawsuits over today’s decisions could come before then.

In Madison, poll workers on Election Day counted 23 absentee ballots that arrived at four polling places after 8 p.m. Tuesday, despite a state law requiring that absentee ballots be “delivered to the polling place no later than 8 p.m.” in order to be tallied.

There was some debate ahead of the Madison vote because Commission Chair Ann Jacobs and Commissioner Mark Thomsen, both Democrats, said they felt uncomfortable disenfranchising the 23 voters. But Jacobs said she was following the law in ordering Madison to redo its count, adding that she hoped “those voters will perhaps appeal this decision.”

“We’re going to disenfranchise 23 people,” said Thomsen, the lone no vote. “I don’t think the law requires us to do that.”

Voting in favor, Don Millis, a Republican commissioner, said the commission is bound by state law not to count those ballots.

“There has to be some accountability,” he added, “for the failure to get these ballots to the polling places in a timely manner.”

Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell, a Democrat, told Votebeat that he’s considering suing over the agency’s order. McDonell previously voted to count the late-arriving ballots during the county’s canvass.

“It’s disappointing that the Wisconsin Election Commission’s directive is to reject ballots that were properly cast by voters,” Madison Clerk Lydia McComas said in a statement.

This marks the second significant error from the Madison clerk’s office in recent elections. In 2024, officials didn’t count 193 ballots that arrived at the city well ahead of Election Day, leading to investigations and a lawsuit.

Mequon redo comes amid confusion over clerk’s standard

The decision to investigate Mequon came after City Clerk Caroline Fochs decided not to count five ballots under an unusually strict standard for the witness address field on absentee ballot envelopes. Commissioners and staff found that decision to be an abuse of discretion.

For years, Fochs has used a standard contrary to the commission’s guidance, which is to consider a witness address valid if it includes a street name, number, and municipality.

Instead, if a witness lists a municipality that shares a name with another elsewhere in the country and does not include a ZIP code or state — even though the absentee envelope doesn’t call for them — Fochs told Votebeat she does not count the ballot. If the municipality name is unique, she will count it without a ZIP code or state.

In this latest election, those municipalities were Baltimore, Fox Point, Verona and Houston.

“The idea that someone would Google to find out whether or not there’s multiple Veronas in the United States, but not Google the witness’s address to confirm where they were located just strikes me as an odd choice, and contrary to the applicable law,” Jacobs said.

A Votebeat review of Mequon ballots rejected since 2024 found that Fochs in some cases appeared to have misapplied her own standard — rejecting ballots from municipalities that didn’t share a name with any other city, like Chicago and Fox Point.

Referencing Votebeat’s reporting, Jacobs said those people’s votes “were not counted for any good reason.”

Fochs and her city attorney have defended the city’s standard as a proper use of discretion despite coming under fire for it. Fochs didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Speaking with Votebeat after the votes, Millis said that although mistakes happen from time to time, clerks need to understand that there can be consequences for errors “if you don’t follow the law and take reasonable efforts to make sure that all ballots are counted.”

Pointing out that he was a Republican commissioner, Millis said he also has a partisan interest in making sure votes in Mequon, a traditionally GOP city, are counted.

“We shouldn’t be doing things to make it difficult for anyone to vote, but here, from just even a partisan standpoint, on average, it’s hurting Republicans more than Democrats,”

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

The Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act. It may change how maps are drawn in Arizona.

2026-04-30T19:02:02+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.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to weaken a key section of the Voting Rights Act could change how election boundaries are drawn in Arizona — most immediately through a potential lawsuit to challenge its existing state legislative maps.

Several experts who spoke with Votebeat within hours of the high court’s decision said any such challenge would likely face an uphill legal battle. But the recent ruling, which affects Section 2 of the Civil Rights Era law, also stands to ripple into the battleground state’s next redistricting cycle. Its full implications for the state’s voting maps remain unclear.

Section 2 has long been used to require mapmakers to consider whether district lines give minority voters an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. Under the court’s decision, the law still remains intact, but it now applies in significantly narrowed circumstances, making it much harder to challenge political maps for being racially discriminatory.

The decision is likely to result in quick, mid-decade redistricting action in certain GOP-led states where that process is controlled by politicians. In Arizona, where an independent commission conducts redistricting every decade, GOP leaders praised the decision, and one said he was likely to file a lawsuit to challenge the state’s legislative map.

But experts said the ruling is most likely to affect mapmaking at the end of the decade, when the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, or IRC, reconvenes to draft new congressional and legislative boundaries. In the meantime, it could also shape districts at the local level, which are controlled directly by city councils and county boards.

“They’ll have more free rein to draw lines, regardless of the impact on racial minority groups’ opportunity to elect representatives of their own choice,” said Bo Dul, a former state election official and lawyer who specializes in election and political litigation at Coppersmith Brockelman in Phoenix.

GOP legislators could challenge existing voting map

Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen, a Republican, said in a social media post on Wednesday that he was “very likely” to challenge the state’s existing legislative boundaries in the wake of the high court’s decision.

In a separate statement, he told Votebeat that he was reviewing options to challenge “any unconstitutionally drawn districts.”

“For years, Democrats have pushed racial gerrymandering under the [guise] of Voting Rights Act compliance,” he said. “Arizonans deserve maps based on communities of interest, not race.”

If Petersen brought a successful lawsuit, it could force mid-decade changes to the state’s voting map. But legal experts said he’d need to produce strong evidence that the mapmakers relied on race while drafting existing boundaries.

Otherwise, the IRC could easily defend its maps by pointing to other legally recognized factors, such as partisan competitiveness, jurisdictional boundaries, or communities of interest — all criteria it must consider while developing the state’s voting maps. Those maps, while not completely without controversy, are widely considered to be among the fairest in the country.

“The legislative leaders who bring that suit would have to show that those districts were in fact drawn with a motivation that is unconstitutional,” said Tom Collins, a former assistant attorney general and executive director of the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission. “The IRC would defend that by saying something like, ‘We have these other reasons for doing it.’”

Collins added that it would be “very difficult” for any lawsuit to change the state’s maps before the upcoming midterm election.

“It’s very hard to get these things resolved within an existing cycle,” he said.

Experts did say that local elected seats, which aren’t drawn by the IRC, could be redrawn before the end of the decade if there was political will to do so.

“They perhaps might be a little more vulnerable on a sooner timeline,” said DJ Quinlan, a political consultant with Radar Strategies. He led the Arizona Democratic Party’s redistricting efforts in 2011 and 2012.

Dul said county boards of supervisors could feel the biggest impact. Those bodies are partisan, which means they could lean on arguments for partisan competitiveness to draw lines during redistricting that split minority groups’ voting power. They also aren’t subject to the IRC’s criteria in the state constitution, which directs that its mapmaking should comply with the Voting Rights Act and take communities of interest into account when practicable.

“There’s a reasonable argument that basically all of the guardrails have come down in that context,” Dul said.

But she said racial discrimination claims might be easier to prove regarding city seats. In Arizona, almost all city councils are nonpartisan, making it harder for them to claim they were considering partisan competitiveness while drawing their maps.

“I think it’ll still be hard,” she said. “But at least map drawers in those contexts won’t be able to lean entirely on partisan motives to justify what they did.”

Quinlan said he suspects the biggest impacts of the ruling will come at the turn of the decade.

“At the end of the day, this is going to be a really big story for Arizona in 2031,” he said.

What does the court’s decision mean for future maps?

All of the experts who spoke to Votebeat said the high court’s decision is likely to affect how maps are drawn in Arizona, but were less aligned on how far-reaching the impact could be and exactly which districts could see changes.

“I think there’s a lot that remains to be seen about what that actually looks like, and it will definitely be dependent on what the composition of the commission looks like at that point,” Quinlan said. The IRC will next meet at the turn of the decade. Barring a court order, it cannot convene earlier.

Danny Ortega, a longtime attorney and community activist in Phoenix, said the future “does not look good for people of color being able to have maps drawn that would give them an opportunity to elect members of their community.”

He specifically referenced Arizona’s two minority-majority congressional districts — the 3rd Congressional District, which encompasses south and west Phoenix, and the 7th Congressional District, which spans from Tucson to Yuma. The former is currently represented by Democratic Rep. Yassamin Ansari, and the latter by Democratic Rep. Adelita Grijalva.

“Now, that district, when redistricting starts, can literally be done away with,” said Ortega, who is known for his work with farmworker, immigrant, and Spanish-speaking clients. “So, Arizona’s going to be affected.”

But Collins pointed out that having a minority-majority district isn’t necessarily unconstitutional under the court’s ruling. Rather, the question is whether the district was drawn in a way where race predominated over other considerations.

He questioned whether either of these two districts would look dramatically different if mapmakers were “trying to account for competitiveness and trying to account for the other factors that are there.” He said the same of the state’s 6th legislative district, where more than 60% of residents are Native American. The district covers nine distinct tribal communities, including Navajo Nation.

“I’m not a demographic expert, but I’d be surprised if you ended up with a situation where there was no Native American community representation in the legislature,” Collins said.

Some Republicans said the high court’s decision might offer upshots for Democrats in Arizona, too. Brian Murray, a political consultant with Cornerstone Public Affairs and former executive director of the Arizona GOP, said in a social media post that Section 2 had long “worked to GOP advantage” in the state’s congressional maps by packing heavily Democratic areas into the 3rd and 7th districts, rather than dividing portions of them into other surrounding districts that are more closely split along partisan lines.

Dul added that the ruling could have been worse in terms of how it might upend redistricting Arizona. She said it is effectively “the final nail in the coffin” of Section 2 and will have “devastating” effects nationally. But if the Supreme Court had outright held that the section was unconstitutional, she said it could have put the entire framework of the IRC at risk, because the state constitution directly says the body must comply with the Voting Rights Act.

“I think from the perspective of Arizona, it could have been worse,” she said.

Still, Dul said the ruling effectively means that the IRC will face tighter limits on when it can consider race while drawing lines. And Collins said there will be more pressure on the system to be partisan as redistricting becomes “more zero sum than it ever has been” nationwide.

In Arizona, that pressure quickly emerged on Wednesday as political leaders digested the court’s decision.

State Senate Democratic Leader Priya Sundareshan said in a statement that the ruling would have “real consequences” and limit the IRC’s ability to “draw maps that truly reflect our state’s diversity and risks diminishing minority and tribal representation at every level of government.”

“Fair maps are the foundation of a healthy democracy, and this decision moves us in the wrong direction,” she said. “Arizona Senate Democrats remain committed to fighting for fair maps, free elections, and a democracy that truly represents all people. The right to vote is fundamental and we will not stop working to protect it.”

Meanwhile, Arizona GOP Chair Sergio Arellano said in a social media post that the court’s decision sent a clear message to the IRC.

“Maps should not be drawn to engineer outcomes, but to reflect fair, constitutional principles where every voter counts the same,” he said, adding that the ruling was about “restoring trust.”

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

U.S. Supreme Court restricts Voting Right Act, but effect on Pennsylvania likely limited

2026-04-30T14:17:39+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. Supreme Court’s decision in a Louisiana voting rights case will make it harder to challenge political maps as being racially discriminatory, but the ruling will likely have limited effect on statewide district maps in Pennsylvania, where the state constitution provides stronger protections against gerrymandering.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a 6-3 decision split along ideological lines that raises the bar for proving illegal racial gerrymandering.

The case revolved around Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, a Civil Rights era protection that prohibits racial discrimination in voting and has historically been used to challenge how voting districts are drawn and require that members of a racial minority have an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. In the most recent round of redistricting, Louisiana’s legislature drew a map that would create a second congressional district that was majority-Black, instead of the single majority-Black district it had previously. The new map was challenged on the grounds that it explicitly used race as the basis in determining the districts.

“Allowing race to play any part in government decisionmaking represents a departure from the constitutional rule that applies in almost every other context,” conservative Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority. He argued that compliance with Section 2 “could not justify the state’s use of race-based redistricting here.”

Election law experts in Pennsylvania have said in the past that Section 2 hasn’t had much of an impact in the state.

Chris Fowler, a geography professor at Penn State University, said that’s because there hasn’t been a clear advantage for mapmakers of either party in drawing majority-minority districts.

Most of the people of color in Pennsylvania are concentrated in its major cities. Minority voters in Philadelphia, a heavily Black city, are generally already concentrated in districts where their numbers allow them to elect preferred candidates. Meanwhile, Pittsburgh has a smaller minority population, and Black communities in the city tend to be geographically intermixed with communities of other races. More racially mixed communities and less consistent racial bloc voting make claims under Section 2 harder to bring in Pennsylvania than in the South.

So while the Voting Rights Act remains relevant in the state and communities of color exist, Fowler said there are “very idiosyncratic reasons that it would be hard to win a case” on those grounds in Pennsylvania.

”It’s not necessary to draw a racially gerrymandered district to gain advantage,” he said. “I think both parties sort of know it and they come up with maps that are pretty bland when it comes to racial gerrymandering.”

Ben Geffen, a lawyer at the Philadelphia-based nonprofit Public Interest Law Center, agreed that Section 2’s relevance in Pennsylvania has been limited, aside from the general background rule it created — that you cannot discriminate racially when drawing districts — and the implications it has had for the growing Latino population in the northeast part of the state.

Section 2 has been invoked at the local level. Toward the end of President Joe Biden’s administration, his Department of Justice brought a case against Hazleton, alleging that its at-large method of electing city council members was diluting the power of Hispanic voters. Donald Trump’s Justice Department dropped that case. The Hazleton Area School District is currently facing a similar accusation that its at-large elections lock Hispanic voters out “from electing candidates of their choice.”

But Geffen has concerns about the Callais decision that extend beyond Pennsylvania. Namely, that more states may turn to drawing partisan gerrymanders, which the Supreme Court ruled in 2019 in Rucho v. Common Cause that federal courts cannot review. He worries the overlap of racial and partisan voting trends could produce similar maps that are harder to challenge.

Pennsylvania, however, has dealt with partisan gerrymandered maps several times in recent years, and the state’s Supreme Court has struck them down. Geffen said that’s because rules about fairness are much stronger in state law than they are federally.

“Our [state] Supreme Court has said the [state] constitution prohibits partisan gerrymandering, so state lawmakers can’t brazenly draw maps for partisan gains,” he said. “I think that has put important boundaries on what map makers do here that helps avoid the excesses we see in other parts of the country.”

Marian Schneider, an adjunct professor of law at Villanova University, said that in her two decades practicing election law in the state she has only pursued one case related to Section 2. She agreed state law protections are stronger, and said there may be a path to bring the types of arguments in state court that a plaintiff might have previously made in federal court under Section 2.

But Schneider said that regardless of Section 2’s historically limited role in Pennsylvania, Wednesday’s ruling will have an effect on the state’s voters.

“Knowing that other states could engage in suppression of minority voters, we are all affected by that, because if they are not truly electing people that reflect the voters, what happens in Congress affects all of us,” she said.

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

Supreme Court weakens Voting Rights Act, making it harder to challenge political maps for being racially discriminatory

2026-04-29T19:26:56+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 Wednesday issued a landmark decision significantly weakening the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Era law designed to limit racial discrimination in voting. While the ruling’s long-term impacts could be profound, it probably won’t change much for the 2026 midterms.

The immediate impact of the opinion in Louisiana v. Callais is to throw out Louisiana’s congressional map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. But the ruling, written by Justice Samuel Alito, will also make it harder to use the Voting Rights Act to get political maps thrown out for being racially discriminatory going forward.

The decision broke down 6-3 along ideological lines, with the court’s Republican-appointed justices in favor and Democratic-appointed justices against.

While the court did not outright strike down the act, as many voting-rights advocates had feared, it reinterpreted it to apply only in significantly narrowed circumstances. Previously, a map only had to have the effect of discriminating against minority voters, but under the new interpretation, the act outlaws only intentional discrimination in redistricting.

The part of the act at issue, Section 2, is violated “only when the evidence supports a strong inference that the State intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race,” Alito wrote.

In a dissent joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Justice Elena Kagan argued that this heightened standard would make it nearly impossible to get maps struck down under the Voting Rights Act.

“Under the Court’s new view of Section 2, a State can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power,” she wrote. “Today’s decision renders Section 2 all but a dead letter.”

Redistricting experts agreed that the decision weakens one of voting-rights advocates’ best tools for forcing states to draw political maps that prioritize nonwhite representation.

“It’s a devastating decision that will make it much harder to use Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, and in many cases impossible,” said Michael Li, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice. “In a lot of ways, it sort of completes the cycle of attacks on the Voting Rights Act … There’s stuff that’s still left, but it really is quite devastating and breathtaking in its sweep.”

“If you’re an advocate for minority representation in Congress, you have to be happy that the Voting Rights Act isn’t gone,” said Sean Trende, a senior elections analyst for RealClearPolitics. “But in some ways that’s a bit of cold comfort, because the test that the majority put in place is really hard to meet in most circumstances.”

The Voting Rights Act has created more districts for nonwhite voters

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act has been revised and reinterpreted multiple times since its initial passage in 1965, but at its core, it says that members of a racial minority must have an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. This has historically meant that, wherever possible, states must draw districts in which nonwhite voters are the dominant voting bloc, subject to a few conditions.

These conditions, known as the Gingles test after the 1986 Supreme Court decision that set them forth, include the fact that voting preferences must be polarized by race, meaning the minority group votes cohesively for one party and the majority group votes cohesively against that party. The minority group must also be large enough to constitute a majority in a relatively compact district. (Confusingly, a district didn’t have to be majority-minority to comply with Section 2 — it just had to be possible to draw it that way.)

This standard forced several states, especially in the South, to draw predominantly nonwhite districts, which tended to elect candidates of color and Democrats. The effect was felt at every level of government. For instance, the number of nonwhite U.S. representatives increased from 26 in 1983 to 90 in 2023 as the number of majority-minority House districts increased from 35 to 131.

“Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act … has been a major engine of creating districts that represent Blacks and Latinos and Native Americans and, in some settings, Asians,” said Nate Persily, a professor at Stanford Law School who has served as a special master and court-appointed expert in a long list of redistricting cases. “You cannot overstate the significance of the Voting Rights Act in creating districts in which minorities would have a real opportunity to elect their candidates of choice.”

As recently as 2023, the Supreme Court used the Voting Rights Act to compel states to draw new Black-opportunity seats in states like Alabama — and Louisiana. But the debate over Louisiana’s map was what led to Wednesday’s decision. After a court compelled the state to add a second predominantly Black congressional district, the Republican-controlled legislature responded by drawing an awkwardly shaped 6th District that zigzagged across the state (even though it was possible to draw a more compact, majority-Black seat along the Mississippi River). A group describing themselves as “non-African American” voters sued, arguing that the new 6th District violated the Constitution because it was drawn with race as the primary consideration.

The Supreme Court heard arguments about the district in spring 2025 but, in an unusual move, decided that they wanted to hear the case again — this time with arguments more broadly addressing the constitutionality of the requirement to draw minority-opportunity districts. That reargument led to Wednesday’s decision.

Callais decision could lead to more gerrymandering

Louisiana v. Callais is the latest in a line of Supreme Court cases that has made it harder for voting-rights groups to get gerrymandered political maps struck down in court. Most notably, the court ruled in Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019 that partisan gerrymandering — the process of drawing maps for partisan gain — was permissible under federal law.

Rebecca Green, a law professor at the William & Mary Law School who co-directs the Election Law Program there, said the Callais decision opens the door for mapmakers to use partisan motives as a shield against claims that they were discriminating based on race.

If racial voting patterns “can be explained by partisanship, then that’s your out. That’s the explanation,” she said.

“If you can prove that partisanship is motivating line drawing, then you don’t have a Section 2 case,” she said of Alito’s opinion. “He’s basically just giving the legislature the benefit of the doubt by saying their intent was partisan.”

Multiple experts said they were struck by the opinion’s embrace of partisan gerrymandering. Citing the Rucho decision, the Callais opinion updated the criteria for proving a Voting Rights Act violation to include the fact that any remedial maps must also achieve the map-drawer’s “specified political goals,” such as partisan gain. Li called this “nonsense.”

Mark Gaber, senior director of redistricting for the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, pointed out that the court’s decision in Rucho treated partisan gerrymandering as undesirable, but something federal courts didn’t have jurisdiction to address. In Alito’s Callais opinion, though, “it’s the opposite, and it’s like some protected right that legislatures have,” Gaber said. Alito “elevated it in importance over a statute Congress actually passed, pursuant to its constitutional authority, to prohibit racial discrimination in voting.”

The implications of the decision will take time to play out, and it doesn’t necessarily mean there are no longer any guardrails in redistricting. Partisan gerrymandering is still illegal under some state constitutions, and some states have independent redistricting commissions whose goal is to draw fairer political maps.

But efforts to depoliticize the map-drawing process, which Green noted had been gaining steam in the past couple decades, have hit a major roadblock with states’ 2025-26 decisions to redraw their congressional maps for partisan gain.

However, opponents of partisan redistricting are not entirely out of options. “This decision leaves some room for Congress — not much, but some — to correct the court’s understanding, to readjust the Voting Rights Act, and that will be an imperative,” said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School.

Most states probably won’t redraw congressional maps for 2026 election

Wednesday’s decision could embolden states to gerrymander even more aggressively. For instance, Republicans control the redistricting process in several Southern states, including Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee, that have predominantly nonwhite, safely Democratic seats that were thought to be protected by the Voting Rights Act. Those states could attempt to eliminate those seats, arguing they were doing so for partisan, not racial, reasons. Some Republicans began calling for them to do so within hours of the court’s ruling.

However, that is more likely to happen for the 2028 election, not 2026. It would be, practically speaking, very difficult for most states to redraw their maps at this stage. Mississippi, for instance, has already held its primary under the old lines, and Georgia’s primary is in just a few weeks. And the deadline for candidates to file to run has already passed in most states, including South Carolina and Tennessee.

With no Callais today, an update on what the primary landscape will look like by the end of next week. pic.twitter.com/aQKDXBJbEc
— Michael Li 李之樸 (@mcpli) April 22, 2026

States could decide to postpone their filing deadlines or primaries, but they have very little time to do so. “In states with an August primary, you could probably make it work,” said Trende. “But I don’t think you’re going to see much [redrawing] this cycle.”

Louisiana is in the trickiest position. It is scheduled to hold its primary — for congressional districts just struck down as unconstitutional — on May 16, and mail voting has already begun. When a local reporter asked Gov. Jeff Landry on Wednesday whether the Louisiana Legislature would draw a new map for 2026, he said it was too early to say. If so, the state would need to reschedule the primary.

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

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Political parties in Texas choose how to run their primaries. Here’s how that causes headaches for voters.

2026-04-29T14:00:00+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.

By all accounts, the administration of the 2026 primary election in Williamson County was calamitous.

Voters did not know where to vote. Lines were long and chaotic. Election workers made errors and misplaced ballots.

Nearly everyone seems to agree on who’s to blame: the Williamson County Republican Party, which last fall decided to eliminate countywide voting and, for the first time in more than a decade, force all voters to cast ballots at assigned precincts instead. Republicans in Dallas and Eastland counties made the same decision.

The moves set off a chain reaction of problems.

“It was a mess, and I’m not going to deny that it was a mess,” said Michelle Evans, the chair of the Williamson County GOP, at a county commissioners court meeting days after the March election, though she said Republicans weren’t the only ones responsible. The meeting, inside the county courthouse in downtown Georgetown, an affluent suburb of Austin, was packed with upset voters and poll workers, who applauded a line of unhappy speakers.

“I think that the constituents of this county deserve free and fair elections. I’m actually just kind of upset. I can’t believe that I have to sit here and say these things,” one speaker said. “I think we all deserve better.”

Russ Boles, a Republican county commissioner, said neighbors and friends reached out on Election Day, frustrated and frantic because they couldn’t vote.

“I tried explaining to them that this was the parties’ election,” not a decision made by the county, he said during the meeting, still confounded.

“They don’t buy it.”

Believe it or not, it’s true. Texas is the rare state that still gives county political parties the authority to administer primary elections more or less as they please, with taxpayers paying for it. Although early voting is administered by county governments, on Election Day, the parties, under state law, are allowed to decide where voters cast ballots, how they cast them, and how those ballots are counted.

That means that when the executive committee of the Williamson County GOP decided to go back to precinct-based voting, county election officials who saw problems coming could and did warn them — but couldn’t stop them.

Party control of primaries has been the law in Texas for more than 100 years. But experts and officials say it’s caused more problems lately, including the ones that marred last month’s election. They point to changes demanded by some Republicans, influenced by unfounded conspiracies about election technology and practices. Some of those changes, they say, have made elections in some counties less secure, results less accurate, or conditions worse for voters. And those voters have few options to hold the parties accountable.

Residents walk out of Jaycee Zaragoza Recreation Center on primary Election Day in Dallas. During early voting, the site was a vote center where anyone in Dallas County could vote, regardless of address or party. But on Election Day, only voters assigned to that site could cast ballots there, and many people showed up only to learn that they would need to travel elsewhere to vote.

In Dallas County, where Republicans also forced a switch back to precincts, at least 12,674 confused voters went to the wrong precinct, creating chaos on Election Day. Dozens of voters in Eastland County were also confused by the switch to precincts, and some complained about the party’s decision to switch to hand-marked paper ballots. Meanwhile, hand-counting GOP primary results in Eastland took until deep into the day after the election, and Calhoun County Republicans missed a state-mandated deadline to report results.

Republicans’ decision to count primary results by hand and to eliminate all use of electronic election equipment in Gillespie County has led to errors, and at least two instances where the county’s elections administrator believes some people were permitted to vote twice. And within the past five years, county party officials from both major parties have been charged with misusing the money allocated to them by the state to pay for election costs.

Republicans, though, are pressing for even more power over Texas primaries. In late 2025, they sued the state’s top election official, Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson, seeking to close the primary and even to create their own voter registration system.

Lawmakers unlikely to intervene in party control

Party control of primaries is enshrined in state law, and only Texas lawmakers can change it. But it’s unlikely that they will. “I’d rather see the parties learn from their mistakes than have the state come in and take any decision-making away from them,” said State Rep. Matt Shaheen, a Republican from North Texas who chairs the House elections committee.

State Rep. John Bucy, an Austin Democrat and the vice chair of the committee, said he is planning legislation that would let each party make independent decisions about countywide voting, so one party can’t force the other into precinct voting against their will.

Taking primary election administration decisions away from the county parties “is a much harder hurdle,” Bucy said. “I’m not saying we shouldn’t have those conversations moving forward so that this doesn’t happen again, but in most counties, both parties work well together and get this done efficiently.”

The current system was created as a response to Jim Crow-era efforts to keep Black Texans from voting in wholly party-controlled primaries. Those efforts ultimately led to three U.S. Supreme Court decisions ruling that primaries are not private activities, but instead, public functions, and therefore, keeping Black voters from participating in them was unconstitutional.

After those rulings, party and county officials began to run the primaries together. For years, parties paid for the costs of the primary with funds from candidate filing fees. Years later, the state began allocating some public money, and by the 1990s, it was paying up to 60% of the costs, with the rest coming from filing fees. In the handful of other states where state law permits parties to run their own primaries, they rarely do it because the laws also require the parties to also pay the expenses if they do.

Danielle Diaz Clark, right, running for Judge of the 301st Family District Court, talks through the assigned precinct locations to electioneers and a voter that was turned away from Disciple Central Community Church in Dallas on March 3, 2026.

But in Texas, state law continues to describe primary elections as party-run elections, even as they are now mostly funded by the public. Under this system, lawmakers allocate funding and parties must follow state-mandated requirements, such as providing the required number of workers at polling locations and turning in results no later than 24 hours after polls close.

Outside of this, parties have wide leeway for how to run their elections. Parties can choose whether to run a joint primary with the opposing political party or not. They can also choose whether to contract with the county elections department to run the election, or some aspects of it, or run it entirely on their own.

In a state with 254 counties, that means that by law, on Election Day, the primary can be administered up to 508 different ways across the state.

For a long time, local officials were happy to let the parties take on the chore of running the primaries, particularly as it represented yet another task for county clerks until the 1980s, when a new law allowed counties to create election departments, said Glen Maxey, a former Democratic state lawmaker and lobbyist. These days, more counties have hired professional election administrators, but whether or not they handle administering the primary elections is still up to the parties to decide.

Maxey in the early 2000s helped craft legislation creating the state’s countywide polling place program, which allows voters to cast their ballot at any polling location in the county. The polling locations used under the program are also known as vote centers, and can reduce election costs and staffing needs while offering voters more flexibility in where they can cast ballots.

In order to use the countywide polling place program for the primary, both political parties have to agree, a compromise Maxey said was necessary for the legislation to pass. Otherwise, by law, both parties must use the assigned precinct locations on Election Day.

That’s why, when Republican parties this year in Dallas, Williamson, and Eastland counties rejected countywide polling places after years of using them, Democrats, too, were forced into assigned precincts, sparking mass voter confusion.

Still, “I don’t think there’s any way in hell” state lawmakers will change party control of primaries, Maxey said.

“It would take somebody at the top, the governor, or somebody asking for election reform, or it would take one of their races being affected by a hand count or something,” he said.

Republicans in all three counties have since said they’ll use countywide voting for the May 26 runoff election. But in Dallas County, the decision to switch back sparked a messy backlash that led to the resignation of the party chair and a lawsuit — which was dismissed by the courts — to try to avert the switch.

Ultimately, GOP party chairs said they believe Texas should keep the current system of party control, though some want a few tweaks.

Two election workers transfer early voting ballots from Eastland County Courthouse to the Judge Scott Bailey Event Center to be counted by hand on March 3, 2026.

Evans, the GOP chair in Williamson County, took responsibility for the problems there, but also told Votebeat that county election offices should have been more prepared to contend with any choice the county parties make, since they’re within their legal rights to make them.

The GOP chair in Gillespie, Bruce Campbell, also said he believes parties should keep control. But he wants the Legislature to require an audit for hand counts. Under current state law, only machine counts must be audited.

For their part, some Democratic leaders also say the parties should remain involved in their candidates’ nominations and in how primary elections are administered. But Kardal Coleman, the Democratic chair in Dallas County, said he’s open to improvements and learning from other states.

“Everything we do should be for the benefit of voters and to make the process more seamless and easier for them to participate in,” Coleman said.

Parties’ changes have risked election security

Republicans have repeatedly said their election administration choices are aimed at making elections more secure. But it doesn’t always work out that way.

In Gillespie County, home to Fredericksburg in the Texas Hill Country, where Republicans have now chosen to count ballots by hand in the past two primaries, county officials found that some voters cast ballots twice in 2024.

Jim Riley, the county elections administrator, had tried for months ahead of the 2024 primary election to convince Republicans that the county’s electronic voting equipment was secure.

But Republicans didn’t want to use it. And in addition to declining to use the tabulation equipment, the party asked Riley to assemble paper poll books, a substitute for the electronic poll books the county typically uses.

In June, not long after the 2024 runoff election, Riley was manually updating the voting history of voters who’d cast ballots in the election, as required by law.

He saw something that didn’t look right. He paused when he noticed that a voter on one of the lists had been marked as having voted in both the Democratic and Republican primaries on Election Day. Then, he found another one. He also spotted one who’d voted in the Democratic primary and subsequently cast a ballot in the Republican runoff, which is prohibited under state law.

“It should have all been caught,” Riley told Votebeat. But it wasn’t, because Republicans were not using electronic poll books — the equipment that election officials use to quickly check whether a voter has already voted or not. Instead, they were relying on the more cumbersome paper system.

Riley reported what he found to the county sheriff’s office and the county’s district attorney’s office. The sheriff’s office said its investigation is still ongoing.

This year, when Republicans changed longtime election practices in Williamson and Eastland counties, it led to misplacement of some ballots and tally sheets that are necessary to complete election results. In both instances, a court order was necessary to resolve the issue and finish reporting election results.

Public dollars, party choices

Texas taxpayers spend millions on the primaries. The Legislature in 2025 allocated about $21 million in funding for the 2026 primary, and the state expected an additional $5 million from candidate filing fees that would also go toward the costs.

As recently as a decade ago, the state reimbursed party chairs for primary expenses with very little oversight. In 2017, lawmakers approved a change in state law meant to prevent party chairs’ misuse of state funds intended for administering primary elections.

The state now has more oversight over the expenses parties get reimbursed for, such as ballot printing costs, election supplies, polling location rental fees, election worker pay. When the parties choose to contract with county election officials to administer the primary, the state pays the county and voting equipment vendors directly. If the parties choose to handle it themselves, the state pays the party directly. Both county officials and county party chairs are required to submit expense reports with receipts and invoices for state approval.

Still, in recent years, party officials have been accused of stealing thousands of dollars from their party’s primary accounts.

And even funds used for election activities can add up. Gillespie County Republicans’ choice to hand count ballots in 2024 meant that primary cost more than double the 2020 primary, according to public records obtained by Votebeat. That year on Election Day, county Republicans paid more than $40,000 for 355 workers who spent nearly 24 hours hand counting. In the 2020 primary, when the party used the county’s voting equipment to tabulate results, the party employed 45 workers and spent less than $7,000.

The Texas Secretary of State’s Office last year warned party officials multiple times that it wouldn’t cover higher-than-normal costs for the 2026 primary compared with previous years.

Campaign greeters look up as birds fly over the voting center at Oak Lawn Brach Library on primary Election Day in Dallas on March 3, 2026.

Frustrations, but no veto power

At that March meeting in Williamson County, poll worker after poll worker said they were embarrassed and frustrated on Election Day as voters from both parties showed up at the wrong polling location and had to be turned away. Some are now worried that the problems will affect upcoming elections in the county.

“I know how difficult it is to recruit poll workers, and this chaos just made future elections that much more difficult to staff,” one told commissioners at the meeting.

Another demanded answers from county leaders, “Why was the option given to the parties for single-precinct voting? Could the commissioners have stopped it or vetoed it?”

The answer is no.

Michelle Evans, Williamson County Republican Party Chair addresses the county commissioners court during a meeting on Tuesday, March 24, 2026, inside the county courthouse about the March 3 primary election.

Shaheen, the chair for the House Elections Committee, said he doesn’t want the state to step in, though he told Votebeat he expects the push by some local GOP parties to eliminate countywide voting and to get rid of voting machines to count ballots by hand won’t last much longer.

Some of those county parties, he said, “are experiencing the pain of some of their decisions and they’re going to learn their lessons.”

“What we need to do is do a better job of explaining to people that our elections in Texas are secure,” he said. “If this is because people are concerned about election integrity, then we need to do a better job at addressing that.”

The Dallas Free Press contributed photos to this article. Visit their site 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.

Judge dismisses Justice Department lawsuit over Arizona’s voter rolls

2026-04-28T22:29:31+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.

A federal judge has dismissed the U.S. Department of Justice’s lawsuit against Arizona over the state’s refusal to turn over an unredacted version of its voter roll, finding that the state isn’t required by federal law to provide it.

U.S. District Judge Susan Brnovich’s ruling comes after President Donald Trump’s administration sued Arizona last year, alleging that the state was interfering with the federal government’s ability to exercise oversight and enforce federal election laws. It sought to compel the state to hand over its full, unredacted voter list, which includes sensitive information such as voters’ full birthdates and Social Security numbers.

The DOJ has requested similar data from virtually every state, part of what it says is an effort to make sure states are maintaining their voter rolls and removing ineligible voters in compliance with federal law. At least 12 states have voluntarily shared the data, but most have declined, citing state and federal laws that officials argued precluded doing so.

In response, the Justice Department has so far sued 30 states and the District of Columbia, but its arguments have been repeatedly rejected by federal courts. Five of the lawsuits — not counting the one against Arizona — had previously been dismissed, and the Justice Department has yet to secure a favorable ruling in any of the cases.

Brnovich, like other federal judges in Michigan, Oregon, California, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, said that none of the three laws that federal prosecutors used to justify their request — the Civil Rights Act of 1960, the National Voter Registration Act, and the Help America Vote Act — required the disclosure of the data.

Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes and Attorney General Kris Mayes, both Democrats, applauded Brnovich’s decision in a statement. They said she “rightfully dismissed” the lawsuit.

The pair previously urged local election officials not to give full voter files to the federal government, writing in a letter to county recorders, who control voter registration data, that disclosure of such materials to the DOJ would “violate both federal and state law” and they must “fulfill [their] oath by declining any such illegal demands.”

“Arizona acted correctly in refusing this request, and today’s ruling vindicates that decision,” their statement on the ruling read. “Our offices will continue to defend the privacy of Arizona voters against federal overreach.”

It’s unknown whether the Justice Department will appeal the decision. A spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It has so far appealed the dismissals in Michigan, Oregon, and California.

Read more Votebeat coverage of the DOJ’s lawsuits and requests seeking state voter rolls:

Voting rights groups sue Trump administration to stop collection of voter data (April 21, 2026)
Texas counties receive subpoenas for voters’ records from Department of Homeland Security (April 10, 2026)
In fight with DOJ over voting roll access, Michigan may be poised to go the distance (March 14, 2026)
Top Arizona officials urge counties to withhold voter data as FBI, DHS relitigate state’s elections (March 11, 2026)
Judge dismisses Trump administration lawsuit over Michigan’s voter rolls (Feb. 10, 2026)
Texas shares entire voter registration list with the Trump administration (Jan. 9, 2026)
U.S. Justice Department sues Arizona, Connecticut for access to unredacted state voter rolls (Jan. 6, 2026)
U.S. Justice Department sues WEC for not providing unredacted voter list (Dec. 18, 2025)
U.S. sues Michigan, Pennsylvania and four other states over request for voter rolls (Sept. 25, 2025)
A guide to understanding the debate over keeping voter rolls ‘clean’ (Sept. 4, 2025)

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

Wisconsin clerk rejects five absentee ballots over address info, raising legal questions

2026-04-28T19:57:04+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.

Mequon City Clerk Caroline Fochs rejected five absentee ballots in April because they did not include a ZIP code or state in the witness address — information that is not specifically requested in the address field on the ballot or specified as a necessary component by the Wisconsin Elections Commission. Her approach, which differs from how other clerks interpret the rules, has drawn intense internal scrutiny and could ultimately be tested in court.

Two weeks ago, Ozaukee County canvassing officials declined to reverse course, leaving the ballots uncounted in the recent Wisconsin Supreme Court election. Republican Party attorneys told county officials they lacked the authority to overturn a local official’s judgment call, while the liberal election law firm Law Forward said rejecting the ballots may have disenfranchised voters who had followed all requirements.

Even the county clerk, a Republican, said she believed the ballots should have been counted.

The ballots listed a street name, number, and municipality in the witness address field, but no ZIP code or state. The Wisconsin Elections Commission instructs clerks that a street name, number, and municipality are sufficient. Under state law, absentee ballots must be signed by a witness who is a U.S. citizen and not a candidate on the ballot.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission redesigned the absentee ballot certificates in August 2023, during litigation about what constitutes a valid witness address, removing any reference to ZIP code and state in the witness address field. Now, the certificate only explicitly asks for street number, name and municipality.

Fochs rejected the ballots anyway, using her own system for deciding when a witness address is clear enough.

Fochs has served as clerk since 2016 in the traditionally GOP city, which has become more liberal in the Donald Trump era — emblematic of the leftward political changes in other nearby Milwaukee suburbs in Waukesha, Washington and Ozaukee counties.

The dispute in Mequon didn’t have the potential to swing any race. But it highlights two unresolved questions that election lawyers say are all but certain to land back in court sooner than later: how much latitude clerks have to impose their own standards on absentee ballots, and whether county canvassing boards can intervene when they think a municipal clerk got it wrong.

Situations like the one playing out in Mequon often arise when there’s a flexible rule rather than a bright-line rule, said Rick Hasen, an election law professor at UCLA. Flexibility, he said, can result in disparate treatment for voters. “Maybe the legislature needs to change the law,” he said.

“It can tend to be more enfranchising to have a rule that gives discretion, but there’s a flip side to that,” he said. “These are things that courts and legislatures have to consider when they write their rules or interpret the rules.”

Statewide races in Wisconsin can sometimes be decided by several thousand votes or less, and the outcome of this conflict could have implications for the midterms in the event of a close race.

Ballots at issue had elements requested on absentee form

The battle over what constitutes a proper witness address has been debated in court for years. In 2024, a circuit court rejected Republicans’ push to require witnesses to list their ZIP code and state. The current standard allows a witness address to be considered valid if the clerk can reasonably assess where the witness lives, but the underlying lawsuit is ongoing.

Fochs said that’s not a workable standard.

Clerks across the state are “obviously doing things differently,” she said. “We don’t agree that it’s been decided. You can’t, on one hand, tell me it’s up to me to discern and then tell me exactly what I’m going to discern.”

Rather than following WEC instructions in the Election Day manual, Fochs for the past several elections has adopted her own system. She compiled a list of municipalities witnesses have used in their address fields in recent years, identifying which names are unique nationwide and which are shared.

If a witness lists a municipality that shares a name with another elsewhere in the country and does not include a ZIP code or state, Fochs said she does not count the ballot. If the municipality name is unique, she will count it even without a ZIP code or state.

She said she typically sends absentee ballots with insufficient witness addresses back to the voter for correction. But this time, she said, the five ballots in question arrived too late to be sent back, corrected, and returned in time for tabulation.

Two of the rejected ballots were from Fox Point. Despite a handwritten note on the rejected ballots saying there are multiple municipalities named Fox Point in the United States, there appears to be just one: the municipality just a couple miles away from Mequon.

Told there appears to be only one municipality named Fox Point in the United States, Fochs said her Google search showed multiple results. She said that even if only one exists, she does not believe the ballots were wrongfully rejected because “the search” indicated otherwise, though she declined to explain what that search includes. “If the search came up with multiple Fox Points, then we reject it,” she said.

The three other rejected ballots came from Baltimore, Houston, and Verona. Although there are multiple municipalities with each of those names, the street names and numbers are unique only to one such named municipality in the United States.

Though a court established the current standard in 2024, Fochs said she believes the issue needs to be taken up again. “There has to be an answer to this,” she said.

Jeff Mandell, founder and general counsel of Law Forward, said that Fochs should have at least checked to see whether the street addresses used in the witness address form were unique to one of the multiple municipalities with the same name before deciding what to do about the ballots. He said she was wrongfully disenfranchising voters.

But Fochs said she shouldn’t have to jump through multiple hoops to figure out where a witness lives.

“If you give me incomplete information, that’s not my fault, and it’s not up to me to correct it,” she said.

In Rock County, on the other hand, County Clerk Lisa Tollefson, a Democrat, gives municipal clerks a help sheet to determine whether a signature is sufficient. Similar to the election commission’s manual, the sheet says a street number, name and municipality is sufficient — without stipulating whether a municipality is uniquely named.

County decides not to count ballots amid GOP urging

When the fight moved up to the county, it split in two. Ozaukee County officials had to decide not only whether the five ballots should have counted — but whether they had any authority to do anything about it.

Ozaukee County Clerk Kellie Kretlow, a Republican, said the ballots should have been counted by the city. “I, in no way, want any voter to ever feel like we’re disenfranchising them,” she told Votebeat.

Kretlow said that the Wisconsin Elections Commission told her that, if the county canvassing board determines that the disregarded ballots make the election return defective, she may send the “arguably defective” election results back to Mequon for the city to correct, according to emails obtained by Votebeat that outline her communications to attorneys for the Wisconsin Republican Party.

That position seems to align with the more liberal stance on the issue. For example, Law Forward said the county does have the power to count the votes or instruct Mequon officials to do so, under a statute that allows counties to return results to a municipality if its election returns are “so informal or defective that the board cannot intelligently canvass them.”

Republican attorneys disagreed. Nicholas Boerke, counsel for the state GOP, told Kretlow the county had no authority to send the ballots back or count them itself without a recount, and warned that doing so would set a “dangerous precedent.” The GOP lawyers did not weigh in on whether Fochs was right to reject the ballots in the first place. Boerke declined to comment for this story.

In the end, Kretlow said, she decided not to count the ballots — not necessarily because she agreed with the Republican lawyers on the legal question, but because the five votes wouldn’t have changed the outcome of any race.

Issues of discretion unsolved going into November midterms

Barring a lawsuit and a quick judgment, the question over how much discretion municipal clerks and county canvassing boards have may go unanswered ahead of the midterms. Some election officials said that discretion can pose a danger if it’s abused, but others said that latitude can come in handy.

“I believe that things can be vague, but they’re vague for a reason,” Kretlow said, saying that while she wished the ballots were counted in this latest instance, more open-ended rules give clerks wiggle room for scenarios that nobody foresees.

Recent court rulings in election lawsuits have started to define the scope of clerks’ discretion over standards for accepting absentee ballots, potentially shaping how future cases will be decided.

One appeals court judgment in July 2024 gave an open-ended definition of what constitutes a proper witness address, saying that the standard “involves the perspective of each local, municipal clerk performing their duties in a reasonable manner,” and acknowledging that clerks have discretion in some of the many tasks they perform in administering elections.

A July 2024 Wisconsin Supreme Court judgment, which led to the legalization of drop boxes, said that giving clerks discretion on many local matters is “consistent with the statutory scheme as a whole, under which Wisconsin’s 1,850 municipal clerks serve the ‘primary role’ in running elections via our ‘decentralized’ system.”

TR Edwards, a staff counsel at Law Forward who attended the Ozaukee County canvass board meeting, said those court cases were right in giving clerks latitude, but they should have clarified that the discretion should be used “to affect the will of the voter, not to craft their own policy for disenfranchising people — stuff like this.”

Mandell, the founder of Law Forward, said the group was still evaluating its options and did not commit to a lawsuit.

But Wisconsin courts have been hearing a growing number of election law disputes. Whether it’s over the most recent dispute in Mequon or a similar incident in another election, disputes like these are all but certain to end up in court.

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

Organizer pleads guilty in Pennsylvania voter registration fraud case

2026-04-27T20:32:36+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 man who was accused of orchestrating a fraudulent voter registration scheme in Pennsylvania ahead of the 2024 presidential election has pleaded guilty.

In October 2024, district attorneys in multiple counties announced they had received thousands of voter registration applications that did not appear to be legitimate. The announcements made national news, and the incidents were eventually turned over to Attorney General Dave Sunday for prosecution.

Guillermo Sainz, who was in charge of the operation, pleaded guilty Monday to three misdemeanor counts of soliciting voter registrations and will face 30 days in jail, along with a $1,000 fine and 11 months probation.

Sainz was an organizer for the Arizona-based campaign firm Field+Media Corps, which conducted voter registration drives in Pennsylvania ahead of the 2024 election. According to criminal complaints filed against Sainz and six street canvassers, canvassers were paid based on how many registration forms they submitted. That’s illegal in Pennsylvania.

“The Office of Attorney General determined that the crimes were not motivated by efforts to sway any election or voter rolls for any specific party or candidate,” Sunday’s office said in a statement. “Rather, the charged defendants were motivated to maintain employment and income by reaching quotas.”

According to affidavits in the case, one canvasser who was eventually fired for not meeting her quota told investigators that, on some days, she would “make up names and information to meet the quota, due to fear of losing her job.”

Local election officials in Berks, Lancaster, and York counties started taking note of the defective forms and referring them to law enforcement. According to county officials, none of the suspicious applications ever led to someone getting fraudulently registered. Nevertheless, now-President Donald Trump referenced the scheme during his 2024 campaign, falsely claiming fake ballots had been found in Pennsylvania.

Charges against the six canvassers, some of whom face felony counts of tampering with public records, are still pending.

A spokesperson for the attorney general’s office did not immediately respond to a request for an update on those cases.

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

Pennsylvania Supreme Court considering challenge to Department of State’s interpretation of voter registration laws

2026-04-23T19:04:54+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.

Should voter registration applications be rejected if voters’ personal information doesn’t match government databases?

The Pennsylvania Department of State said in 2018 that the answer should be no. But in a case currently pending before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, Potter County Commissioner Robert Rossman is arguing the department is misinterpreting the law.

If Rossman’s challenge is successful, it could result in more voter applications being rejected.

In 2018, the Department of State issued a directive stating that, based on state and federal law, counties can’t reject voter applications solely because the driver’s license number or last four digits of the voter’s Social Security number don’t match state or federal databases, as could happen if the voter makes a mistake when filling out the application.

“Counties must ensure their procedures comply with state and federal law, which means that if there are no independent grounds to reject a voter registration application other than a nonmatch, the application may not be rejected and must be processed like all other applications,” the directive reads. Instead, the state argues the mismatches must be investigated.

At any given time, thousands of applications are in a “pending” status while these investigations occur, according to an affidavit in the case from Deputy Secretary Jonathan Marks. A spokesperson for the department said applicants with mismatched information are not able to vote until the mismatch is reconciled.

But Rossman says the directive is preventing him from keeping his county’s voter roll clean, and he’s asking the court to do away with it.

County commissioners are tasked with overseeing voter registration in their county, and the laws governing those duties say that, if an application isn’t “properly completed,” then it must be rejected. Rossman is arguing that when the applicant’s personal data is mismatched, it means the application wasn’t properly completed — and therefore must be rejected.

Rossman is a Republican with hardline conservative views on election security and other issues. He has said in the past that the 2020 election was a “fraud” and “statistically impossible.”

Rossman first filed his case in the state’s Commonwealth Court shortly after the 2024 election. He is being represented by local attorneys working alongside Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections, a right-leaning nonprofit focused on election issues. A three-judge panel dismissed his complaint in December, but Rossman appealed to the state Supreme Court in January.

The Department of State’s directive “impedes his ability to identify duplicate registrations” by cross-checking the ID numbers on new registration applications with those of voters already on the voter roll, Rossman’s attorneys argued in his original court complaint. “The fact that Commissioner Rossman has been precluded, on pain of criminal penalty, from conducting the required examination of voter applications also undermines faith in the integrity of the election process.”

The Department of State, for its part, argues that while federal law requires voter applications to have a space for driver’s licence and Social Security numbers, it doesn’t require applications to be rejected if those numbers don’t match and neither does state law. The state also argues that state law requires mismatches to be investigated, but not outright rejected unless there is another disqualifying factor. If the investigation can’t resolve the mismatch, then the application can be rejected, the state says.

“In short, the fundamental disagreement in this case is not truly about what the law allows or requires, but rather is rooted in Commissioner Rossman’s insistence on ignoring what the Directive and the [Commonwealth Court] opinion actually say,” the state wrote in its brief.

Rossman said in an interview that the department is trying to recast in court what the plain text of the directive says. He agrees an investigation needs to be done to determine if the mismatches are a mistake and that the applications shouldn’t be rejected outright. But, he said, the directive still requires counties to accept the applications even once the investigations are done.

If the state’s argument is that the applications should be rejected if the investigation fails to resolve the mismatch, he argued, then the state should amend its directive.

“This is the pattern with the Department of State — they put out vague directives,” Rossman said. “They just keep making things up as they go along. If that’s what they actually meant to say, it would literally take them 10 minutes” to amend it.

Rossman’s case is not the first to challenge the directive. Conservative activist Heather Honey challenged it in 2023, but the Commonwealth Court rejected that lawsuit last May. Honey is now a deputy assistant secretary for election integrity in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Rossman’s case raises different legal questions.

Rossman said he had no contact with Honey about her case.

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

Antrim County voters confused after clerk attempts to cancel hundreds of voter registrations

2026-04-23T18:38:26+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, April 27, 10:30 a.m.: This story has been updated to reflect that Bishop did not respond to the state by the deadline.

Hundreds of voters have reportedly been affected by Antrim County Clerk Victoria Bishop’s attempt to cancel voter registrations in the small northern county, leaving voters confused and local clerks frustrated.

The Michigan Bureau of Elections sent a letter to Bishop last week accusing her of improperly changing and canceling voter registrations. Such changes “fall outside the scope” of her authority as a county clerk, the bureau wrote, and failed “to comply with the law.” Michigan law puts municipal clerks, not county clerks, in charge of voter list maintenance.

Bishop did not meet the Thursday deadline to respond to the state with an explanation of why she made the changes and lists of the affected voters.

Antrim County voters confused about cancellation notices

Meanwhile, the affected voters are left to wonder why they were targeted for deregistration. Barbara Mullaly, a voter in Elk Rapids, received a notice in mid-March from Bishop’s office informing her that her registration was at risk of being canceled.

Such notices are supposed to be sent only when a municipal clerk receives reliable information that a voter has moved. But Mullaly said she’s voted from the same address for years, missing only a single small election.

“Yes, voting is a privilege and a right, but I do not have to vote,” Mullaly said. “If I don’t want to vote for four years, that shouldn’t negate my voter registration.”

The notice of cancellation she received said that if she didn’t vote “by the second November general election following this notice,” her registration would be canceled. It also included a postcard that Mullaly was supposed to send back to Bishop confirming her personal information, such as her driver’s license number.

Mullaly called Bishop to ask why she’d received the card and was told she hadn’t voted in the past two elections.

“I said, ‘Well, obviously you have this information wrong,’” Mullaly told Votebeat. “The arrogance was pretty astounding.”

Mullaly said she didn’t feel comfortable sending the card back to Bishop, so she turned it in to her township clerk instead.

“If she wants it, she can get it from my local clerk,” Mullaly said.

Mullaly is far from the only voter who received such notices in Antrim County. The deeply conservative county on the shores of Lake Michigan has about 24,700 people living in it, but each of the individual townships and villages within it have only a few thousand people at most.

That’s why it was a surprise that 250 voters in Banks Township received notices that their registrations were on the line — 19% of the township’s 1,300 registered voters. Banks Township Clerk Julie Chellis told Interlochen Public Radio that a number of those people were 18-year-olds who hadn’t voted in previous elections because they weren’t old enough to be eligible.

She told IPR it was “more frustrating than anything” and created more work for her as she tried to ensure voters’ registrations didn’t get canceled.

It’s unclear if cancellation notices went out to voters in every community in Antrim County or if some were unaffected. Mancelona Township Clerk Mike Biehl and Central Lake Township Clerk Judy Kosloski both told Votebeat on Wednesday that they hadn’t heard of any of their voters getting such notifications.

The first Biehl had heard of the concerns at all, he said, was seeing it reported on the news Wednesday morning.

“I try to stay away from all that,” he said.

Janet Beebe, Milton Township clerk, said Thursday she proactively asked Bishop to not send any notifications to her voters after hearing they were going out to other communities. Bishop seemed to respect that, Beebe said.

She first learned about the notifications in conversations with fellow clerks. County clerks aren’t always particularly close with their local counterparts, Beebe said, but Bishop’s predecessor would have at least given her a heads up, she said.

“We were blindsided,” Beebe said of the notifications going out across the county. She’s been looking for patterns in which voters received notifications, but there don’t appear to be any. In some cases, people in other communities who had cast ballots as recently as last year got the notices, Beebe said.

She hasn’t heard anything from her voters, but she’s not sure if that will remain the case. At the end of March, Bishop promised to send Beebe a list of voters in Milton Township that Bishop was considering notifying. Beebe has asked repeatedly for that list and not yet received it, she said.

Bishop argues Antrim County voter roll is bloated

Bishop has not responded to multiple requests from Votebeat to respond to the state’s letter or the concerns of voters. Her office, however, put out a public statement earlier this week that called her actions a “corrective audit” based on federal laws such as the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act.

“In a high-stakes administrative environment, the risk of an over-inclusive and inaccurate voter roll poses a greater threat to public confidence than the risk of aggressive verification,” Bishop’s release said.

The release argues that she was “addressing local-level inaction” for local officials who didn’t have the money or staff required to maintain the rolls. It also disputes the state’s assertion that she should have independently verified voters’ statuses before sending the notices, arguing instead that the notices are “the trigger for verification.”

Bishop’s actions — which could lead to criminal penalties, according to the state’s letter — come after her 2024 campaign, in which she promised to clean up the county’s voter rolls. She is associated with the wing of the Republican Party that claims the 2020 election was stolen from President Donald Trump.

Bishop’s statement suggested she did not feel chastened by the Bureau of Elections’ letter. The statement argued her election “represented a decisive directive from the electorate to prioritize the stewardship and accuracy of the democratic process.”

“Victoria Bishop will ensure the 2026 electoral cycle is governed by a voter roll that is both accurate and beyond reproach after forwarding the information discovered to her local clerks for their review, determination, and final actions,” the release said.

Angela Benander, a spokesperson for the Michigan Department of State, said on Wednesday that they did not consider the statement a response to the state’s letter. Bishop did not meet the state-imposed deadline, a state official confirmed Monday morning. What comes next will be up to the Bureau of Elections.

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

Voting rights groups sue Trump administration to stop collection of voter data

2026-04-21T15:19:26+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?

On Tuesday, a coalition of voting rights groups filed suit against the U.S. Department of Justice to block the Trump administration from collecting voters’ personal data in order to create what they argue is a national voter list.

What’s the dispute?

Last fall, the DOJ began asking states for their voter rolls — massive lists containing significant identifying information on every registered voter in each state, including partial Social Security numbers — and other election-related data. The DOJ has said the effort is central to enforcing federal election law requiring states to regularly maintain voter lists by searching for and removing ineligible voters.

At least 12 states, including Alaska, Arkansas, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming, have voluntarily complied.

The DOJ has sued 30 states and Washington, D.C., for refusing to turn over their full voter lists. Federal courts have dismissed those cases in five states, although the administration has been appealing those decisions.

In the lawsuit, plaintiffs argue the DOJ’s efforts are an attempt to take over voter list maintenance from the states, violating privacy laws and risking wrongful voter removals.

“No federal statute authorizes DOJ’s sprawling new voter surveillance, data consolidation, and purging operation. In taking these actions, DOJ is usurping powers that the Constitution and federal statutes vest in the States,” the lawsuit says.

Who are the plaintiffs?

Voters from Texas and Nebraska and voting advocacy organization Common Cause. The plaintiffs are represented by organizations such as Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the American Civil Liberties Union, Protect Democracy, the American Civil Liberties Union of the District of Columbia, and the Democracy and Rule of Law Clinic at Harvard Law School.

What are the plaintiffs asking for?

The plaintiffs are asking a federal judge in Washington, D.C., to halt the DOJ’s efforts to collect the data and to order the data to be deleted. In addition, they want the courts to prevent the DOJ from “disclosing any confidential voter list data internally and to non-DOJ personnel, including to other federal agencies, state agencies, or private contractors,” the lawsuit says.

What happens now?

The DOJ did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

At least one other lawsuit filed in federal court is also challenging the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s use of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE — the database used to check the citizenship of registered voters. The database was revamped by the Trump administration last year to enable states to run their entire voter rolls through it.

Trump administration demands 2024 ballots from Wayne County

2026-04-20T17:26:40+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 U.S. Department of Justice is demanding that Wayne County — Michigan’s most populous county and the home of Detroit — turn over all ballots, receipts, and envelopes from the 2024 election.

It’s the latest push by the Trump administration to assert federal oversight over how elections are administered in a critical swing state. It’s also the first known instance of the Justice Department demanding ballots and other materials from the 2024 election, which President Donald Trump won. It highlights the continued interest in Detroit, a city Trump has repeatedly said saw massive fraud during the 2020, though such claims have been repeatedly debunked.

But there are some key questions that remain to be answered. For one, the Justice Department is demanding the ballots from the county, which doesn’t have them. In Michigan, it is local officials — not the county — who administer elections and maintain custody of the ballots afterward.

To support the request, the Justice Department’s letter cites three cases, all from after the 2020 election, in which Wayne County voters were accused of fraud. It also cites a lawsuit from 2020 that accused Wayne County and Detroit of allowing election workers to commit fraud by counting ballots from voters who weren’t on the rolls, instructing poll workers to backdate absentee ballots, and to process ballots that came in late. However, that suit was dismissed quickly, with a judge writing that the “plaintiffs’ interpretation of events is incorrect and not credible.”

The Justice Department’s letter, dated April 14 and signed by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, asks the records be produced “based on this history of fraud convictions and other allegations concerning the election procedures in Wayne County.” None of the examples given were from 2024, the election being probed.

The letter instructed the county to produce the records within 14 days, and said if it does not, the administration could seek a court order for them.

The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment, and a spokesperson for Wayne County declined to comment Monday morning. But Michigan officials — including the governor, attorney general, and secretary of state, all Democrats — released both the letter from the DOJ and statements of their own.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer called the Justice Department demand a “poorly disguised attempt to justify more doubt and misinformation about our elections.” Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, who ran both the 2020 and 2024 elections as the state’s top election official, called it “the Trump administration’s latest attempt to interfere in our elections.”

Attorney General Dana Nessel sent her own letter back to Dhillon, saying that “Michigan stands ready to defend against these claims and any attempt to interfere in Michigan’s elections.” People have analyzed Michigan’s elections relentlessly, she said, including ongoing efforts from a number of conservative-leaning organizations — and “it is more than likely that any alleged errors will be based on previously debunked theories and provide no credible grounds for further questioning of Detroit’s election.”

“Even if your letter sufficiently states a demand, which it does not, the records are in possession of the 43 local clerks in Wayne County,” she wrote. “The scant and localized facts you cite do not merit a demand to all 43 jurisdictions.”

She goes on to say that clerks are preparing for future elections and don’t have the time to produce the records.

“These records could have been requested at almost any time in 2025,” she writes. “There is no reasonable explanation for your delay given the demand is not based on recent events but rather those occurring in 2020 or shortly thereafter.”

This is not the federal government’s first attempt to involve itself in Michigan’s elections. The DOJ last year asked the state for its voter roll, and when the state shared only the redacted, publicly available version, the federal government sued the state. That case is working its way through an appeal, with arguments scheduled for May. The Justice Department has so far filed similar lawsuits against 30 states and the District of Columbia, So far, federal courts have ruled against them in five of the lawsuits, with decisions pending in the others.

Republicans in the state Legislature have signed on to a resolution asking for Michigan’s rolls to be released in full. Some Republicans also asked the Justice Department last year to provide “comprehensive oversight” of the state’s 2026 elections, although it remains unclear what such oversight might look like.

Trump, for his part, has suggested that the federal government should “nationalize” voting, naming Detroit as one of the places he would like to “take over.”

Michigan is the third state in which the DOJ has attempted to obtain records from past elections. The FBI seized hundreds of boxes of ballots from the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia — home of Atlanta — in a raid in January, and in March the FBI subpoenaed records from a partisan review of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, Arizona — a major swing county that is home to Phoenix. FBI Director Kash Patel said Sunday that the DOJ was continuing to probe past elections and could soon make arrests.

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

Legal case over access to sensitive voter data returns to Wisconsin Supreme Court

2026-04-20T11:00:00+00:00

This story was produced and originally published by Wisconsin Watch, a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. It was made possible by donors like you.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments Tuesday in a case brought by a conservative group that could determine whether sensitive information about people judged mentally incapable of voting is a public record.

It’s the second time justices will hear arguments in this case, which previously had been caught up in conflicting opinions issued by two of the state’s appeals court districts. It also became an attack point used by liberal Appeals Court Judge Chris Taylor in the most recent Wisconsin Supreme Court election, which she won by 20 points. Her opponent, Appeals Court Judge Maria Lazar, wrote an opinion supportive of the conservative group’s position, which was unusual because it contradicted another appeals court ruling in a separate case on the same issue.

The key question before justices on Tuesday is whether the information in Notices of Voting Eligibility should be publicly accessible. Courts send those forms to election officials after a judge in a guardianship case determines someone is not competent to cast a ballot. State law says “the fact that an individual has been found incompetent … is accessible to any person who demonstrates to the custodian of the records a need for that information.”.

The Wisconsin Voter Alliance is a conservative group led by Ron Heuer, who worked on the state’s partisan review of the 2020 presidential election results conducted by former Justice Michael Gableman. The alliance filed lawsuits in 13 counties arguing that access to the information about voters who have been judged incompetent would show inconsistencies with the state’s voter rolls. Gableman’s investigation ended ignominiously, and he’s now facing a three-year suspension of his law license for his unprofessional conduct.

Heuer said he “never expected” the high court to take the case back on appeal.

“We are well within our bounds here to have access to that data,” he said.

In 2023, a review conducted by the Dane County clerk at the request of Wisconsin Watch found 95 individuals who previously cast ballots despite a court declaring them unable to do so, though administrative error and people moving to different municipalities explained many of those cases, rather than any kind of intentional voter fraud. Election officials and state lawmakers previously identified a need for a legally binding process to track adjudicated incompetent voters, though no bill has passed to fix the holes in the system.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission also conducted a review of adjudicated incompetent voters, which was completed in 2023, and communicated with local register in probate offices to make sure records were accurate ahead of the 2024 elections, said spokesperson Emilee Miklas.

Miklas declined to comment on the Wisconsin Voter Alliance case, but noted the commission has previously asked for legislative changes to better track those voters.

Republicans this session proposed a bill that would have required circuit courts to notify the Wisconsin Elections Commission by email about a determination of voter incompetency and then the commission would have had three business days to update that person’s voter status and notify a local clerk. The bill passed the Assembly in November, but died after it did not receive a hearing in the Senate. Gov. Tony Evers vetoed a bill with similar language and other provisions during the 2023 legislative session because other elements in the bill could cause ballots with minor errors to be discarded.

Disability advocates remain concerned that the details on Notices of Voting Eligibility forms, if made public, can put already vulnerable populations at risk of exploitations or scams. The forms sought by the WVA can include a person’s name, address and date of birth.

“We already know more about them from the fact that they’ve been found incompetent than you know about the average person you pass on the street,” said Polly Shoemaker, an attorney with the Wisconsin Guardianship Support Center. “So there’s that, and then there’s the fact that it’s these folks who can be very easily taken advantage of.”

How we got here

The high court last held oral arguments in September 2024 following conflicting opinions issued in separate but similar cases in the Madison-based 4th District Court of Appeals and the Waukesha-based 2nd District.

Justices in January 2025 only reached an opinion on the 2nd District’s decision, which was released after the 4th District’s ruling was published as precedent. The high court did not rule last year on whether the Notices of Voting Eligibility are accessible as public records.

The 4th District in November 2023 affirmed a Juneau County decision that the sensitive information about those voters is not open for public disclosure. A judicial committee on Dec. 21, 2023, published the 4th District’s opinion as precedent.

Then, on Dec. 27, 2023, the 2nd District ruled that the WVA had a right to the records, overturning a Walworth County court’s decision and clashing with the precedent set in the 4th District case. Lazar and Appeals Court Judge Shelley Grogan made up the majority with liberal Judge Lisa Neubauer dissenting.

The 2nd District revised the appeals decision in March 2025 after the state Supreme Court’s opinion, and the WVA petitioned for justices to hear the case again.

But the 2nd District opinion, written by Lazar, became a point of attack in the 2026 Wisconsin Supreme Court race. In the only debate ahead of the election, Taylor used the case to support her claim that Lazar “brought an extreme right-wing agenda to the bench.”

“She has refused to follow precedent,” Taylor said. “She ruled to release personal, private voting information to a right-wing group that tried to overturn our election. Thank goodness she was reversed by the state Supreme Court.”

In addition to the Wisconsin Voter Alliance case, the high court is also hearing oral arguments on Tuesday in another case on whether a child who was injured during birth has the right to pursue legal action against a doctor.

New voting requirements? Troops at the polls? We asked 37 election experts what could disrupt the 2026 elections.

2026-04-17T09:00:00+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.

There are always unanswered questions heading into any election. But usually those questions are more along the lines of “who’s going to win?” and less “will the federal government interfere with the election?”

But here in 2026, President Donald Trump’s broadsides against the legitimacy of U.S. elections and efforts to overhaul election laws have generated lots of uncertainty — and anxiety — about whether this will be a normal election year. Election officials and voters alike are left to wonder whether there will be new requirements for voters, physical interventions at the polls, or attempts to overturn results after the fact.

Despite seemingly endless speculation, no one knows for sure how likely any of these things is. But to get the most well-informed assessments, we turned to the people who spend the most time thinking about elections.

We asked 37 experts in the field of election administration — academics, lawyers, former election officials, etc. — to answer 26 questions about the likelihood of various scenarios coming to pass in the 2026 midterms.

Their answers reflect a general sense of cautious optimism about the most dire scenarios — such as an election getting overturned — and skepticism that the federal government will successfully change voting rules. But they also still believe the election will face serious challenges, including federal agents potentially showing up at polling places.

Election experts say new federal laws are unlikely, but split on state laws and court intervention

Since retaking office in 2025, Trump has pushed aggressively for the federal government to set more rules around how elections are run, promoting legislation that would require registering voters to prove their citizenship with documentation and issuing two election-related executive orders. (The first executive order has largely been blocked in court, though the administration has appealed. The second is currently under litigation, and the conventional wisdom is that it will be halted as well.)

However, experts were skeptical that these measures would ever take effect. Thirty-four of our 37 respondents said it was unlikely that the federal government would successfully require new registrants to prove their citizenship for the midterms, and 32 said it was unlikely that the federal government would successfully require all voters to show an ID or restrict the use of no-excuse absentee or mail ballots. (They provided their answers before Trump issued his second executive order, which sought to regulate mail voting through the U.S. Postal Service.)

Likewise, virtually all respondents thought it was unlikely that the federal government would restrict the hours or locations of in-person voting or limit or eliminate the use of voting machines to tally ballots in the midterms.

However, experts were more open to the possibility that some of these policies could take effect in individual states. Although none thought it was likely that a significant number of states would limit or eliminate the use of voting machines, about a quarter of respondents thought it was at least somewhat likely that a significant number of states would restrict the use of no-excuse absentee or mail ballots in the midterms. About one-third thought it was at least somewhat likely that a significant number of states would strengthen their voter ID requirements or restrict the hours or locations of in-person voting.

Even more respondents, 15 of the 37, thought it was at least somewhat likely that a significant number of states would pass proof-of-citizenship requirements before the election — perhaps unsurprisingly, given that such laws were working their way through several state legislatures at the time. Those laws have since passed in Florida, Mississippi, South Dakota, and Utah, although Florida’s does not take effect until 2027 and Mississippi’s is limited in scope.

Overall, though, most experts didn’t expect states to significantly change their election laws this year. Derek Muller, an election law professor at the University of Notre Dame, pointed out that many states have part-time legislatures that won’t be in session between now and the election. “I expect new legislation in the months ahead that might affect the 2026 election to be negligible,” Muller said.

If there are going to be major election-law changes before the midterms, experts expect them to come from the third branch of government: the judiciary. Seventeen experts said it was at least somewhat likely that pre-election court rulings would significantly alter election rules shortly before the midterms, although 19 still said that was unlikely.

In follow-up interviews, those who thought this was likely said that they were keeping an eye both on currently pending cases — such as a U.S. Supreme Court case that could require all mail ballots to arrive by Election Day — and those that have not yet been filed. That said, a Supreme Court ruling earlier this year will probably encourage litigants to bring any cases challenging election rules well before the election, making last-minute rule changes less likely.

Experts expect federal agents to disrupt the 2026 election

For many election officials and voting advocates, the nightmare scenario for the 2026 midterms is if federal agents, such as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, attempt to disrupt voting or the counting of ballots. It’s already illegal for armed troops to visit voting locations, and the Trump administration has repeatedly said that it will not send ICE agents to polling places this year. However, new Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin has declined to absolutely rule it out, and a majority of the experts we surveyed expected something like this to happen.

Twenty-seven of the 37 respondents said it was at least somewhat likely that the federal government would deploy some form of military or law enforcement at or near polling places in the midterms. A slight majority said it was likely that Trump would ask the National Guard or federal agents to seize voting equipment during the election, and over three-quarters said it was likely that Trump would ask them to seize voting equipment after the election. (It’s worth noting that respondents gave these answers just a few weeks after the FBI raided an election office in Fulton County, Georgia, and Trump said that he regretted not asking the National Guard to seize voting machines after the 2020 election.)

Multiple respondents told Votebeat that the seizure of voting equipment was more likely after the election because the election results will be known at that time. “Before the election, no one will know where seizing equipment or ballots could shift pivotal races,” said Christopher Mann, the research director at the Center for Election Innovation and Research. “After the election, a bad actor will have a better picture of where seizing voting equipment or ballots can shift the overall outcome.”

Twenty-eight experts said it was at least somewhat likely that there would be physical threats to voters or polling places in the midterms, including 11 who said it was very likely. (They were perhaps recalling 2024, when a string of bomb threats forced some polling places to close temporarily, though election officials were able to minimize disruptions to voting.) However, experts were divided on whether these threats would deter people from voting. Twenty-one experts said it was unlikely that a significant number of voters would decide not to vote because of threats or physical intimidation, while 16 said that was likely.

Notably, experts were not very confident about their predictions about armed intervention in the midterms. Some also pointed out that, even if it’s likely that Trump might order federal agents to interfere in the election, that doesn’t mean they will succeed. “Election officials, courts, and other state and local officials are going to stop any attempt to seize voting equipment or ballots,” Mann predicted.

And some experts emphasized that even if there are incidents at specific polling places, they expect the election overall to run smoothly. “I’m an optimist, which probably led to many of my answers,” admitted Jeff Greenburg, a retired election official in Pennsylvania and a senior adviser at the Committee of Seventy, a Philadelphia-based government watchdog group. But Greenburg said he doesn’t expect that physical threats to voting “will significantly impact elections nationwide. I have faith and trust in our election officials, as well as the rule of law, and believe in the end every vote cast will be counted.”

Losers may claim fraud, but it’s unlikely an election gets overturned

Election experts of all stripes are confident that U.S. elections are secure. All 37 respondents said it was unlikely that a significant number of ineligible voters would cast ballots in the midterms, including 35 who said it was not at all likely. Experts also unanimously said that it was unlikely that voter fraud would influence the outcome of a 2026 congressional race.

However, that isn’t expected to stop candidates from questioning the election results. Almost three-quarters of experts thought it was at least somewhat likely that a significant number of losing candidates would claim fraud influenced the outcome of the election. All 37 thought it was likely that at least one congressional or statewide election would be legally challenged, with 30 calling it very likely.

At the same time, though, most experts don’t expect those challenges to succeed. Thirty-one of the 37 respondents thought it was unlikely that any congressional or statewide elections would be successfully overturned.

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

Wisconsin GOP advised officials not to count late-arriving ballots, raising possibility of legal challenge

2026-04-14T13:28:15+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.

An attorney for the Republican Party of Wisconsin told local officials ahead of a key vote last week that Madison should not count 23 absentee ballots from last week’s Supreme Court election that arrived at polling places after they had closed — a dispute that could set up a legal challenge.

The GOP weighed in hours before the Madison Board of Canvassers voted unanimously on Friday to count the affected ballots. On Monday, the Dane County Board of Canvassers followed suit, voting 2-1 to count the ballots.

Election officials make these judgment calls all the time, and, historically, courts have allowed them. Officials are routinely called upon to address whether a witness address is complete, whether a damaged ballot can still be counted, or the like. These issues are usually resolved locally and without controversy.

But disputes like this — over how to interpret the law and whether late-arriving ballots should count — are harder to contain. Experts say leaving those decisions to individual counties risks inconsistent outcomes across Wisconsin, especially in a high-stakes election season.

Rick Hasen, an election law professor at UCLA, said that kind of patchwork approach is a recipe for conflict.

“This is not tenable in the current political atmosphere,” Hasen said.

Dane County votes to count ballots despite GOP opposition

The kind of disagreement worrying Hasen was on full display at Monday’s meeting of the Dane County Board of Canvassers. Two canvassers said there was a clear answer about what to do with the ballots — but they arrived at different ones.“I don’t think this is hard,” Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell said.

“I don’t either,” said canvasser Mike Willett, a former Dane County supervisor and a Republican appointee on the board.

McDonell voted to count the ballots, while Willett voted against it, saying the board had previously rejected late-arriving ballots and he didn’t want to create exceptions.

Erik Paulson, the other Democrat on the board, sided with McDonell to count the ballots.

Republican opposition was already taking shape before the vote. Emails obtained by Votebeat show that Nicholas Boerke, an outside attorney for the Wisconsin GOP, urged city and county officials on Friday not to count the ballots.

“We recognize this situation may have resulted from an unfortunate logistical failure. However, administrative error does not create statutory authority that otherwise does not exist,” he wrote.

“Voting absentee is a privilege granted by the Legislature that comes with inherent risks and the election day deadline for the receipt, processing, tabulation, and counting is mandatory,” he continued.

The canvass, Boerke told officials, was a “ministerial process, not a vehicle for processing absentee ballots” that weren’t received by the time dictated in law, “nor a mechanism to conduct an unauthorized recount.”

Amber McReynolds, an assistant attorney for Madison, responded that counting the ballots was in line with court decisions and past Wisconsin Elections Commission recommendations.

Boerke responded, telling officials the GOP maintains “that the statutory language is clear—absentee ballots that are not timely delivered to polling locations before 8 p.m. may not be counted.”

Boerke didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about whether the GOP would sue Madison.

Error led to 23 Madison absentee ballots arriving late

The ballots at issue arrived at the city clerk’s office on Monday, April 6. The absentee ballot courier carrying the ballots left a city facility at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 7, to deliver ballots to 17 different polling places, but the courier did not make it to the last few polling places until after the 8 p.m. deadline.

Officials said these 23 ballots were correctly, legally cast and checked into the pollbooks just like any other absentee ballot — the only problem was that that happened after polls formally closed.

Madison Clerk Lydia McComas said it was a critical error to put just one person in charge of delivering ballots to so many polling places. Madison is the largest city in Wisconsin that still chooses to count absentee ballots at individual precincts rather than at a central location — a decision that requires ballots to be transported across the city on Election Day.

It remains unclear, however, why the ballots departed from the city’s facility so late in the day. Across the state, clerks design their Election Day logistics to ensure ballots are delivered by that cutoff. McComas said it was her and her staff’s understanding that the law required ballots to be delivered to polling places by 8 p.m.

There appears to be little appetite among clerks to formally extend that deadline.

“I do not plan to take advantage of whatever ruling comes here tonight,” McComas said ahead of the county vote, implying that she wouldn’t take advantage of the canvassing board’s leniency and plan for future late deliveries accordingly.

McDonell said rejecting the ballots would penalize voters for something outside their control. “And I think that’s very problematic,” he said.

Disagreement over Wisconsin election law is ripe for legal challenges

The statute at issue in this situation says ballots must be returned so that they’re delivered to polling places “no later than 8 p.m. on election day.”

“If the municipal clerk receives an absentee ballot on election day,” the law continues, “the clerk shall secure the ballot and cause the ballot to be delivered to the polling place serving the elector’s residence before 8 p.m. Any ballot not mailed or delivered as provided in this subsection may not be counted.”

At the county-level meeting on Monday, county attorney David Gault, arguing that the ballots should be counted, took the position that the law does not apply here because the ballots were received before Election Day.

“The clear intent of everything in the statutes,” he said, is not to punish the voter for mistakes made by election officials.

“That’s certainly an interpretation,” said Willett, the conservative member of the county canvassing board. “When we start making these exceptions, these exceptions just grow.”

What’s clear to Bryna Godar — a staff attorney at the University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative — is that the statute is “ambiguous about this type of situation.” She said one part of the law appears to govern voters returning ballots on time, while another addresses ballots received on Election Day — leaving situations like this unclear.

“Because there is no voter fault here from what we know so far, there would be good reason to still count those ballots,” she said, adding that rejecting them could raise constitutional concerns.

At the city meeting on Friday, McReynolds noted that courts ruled in the 1970s and 1980s that ballots should be counted as long as there’s “substantial compliance” with election laws and no evidence of “connivance, fraud, or undue influence.”

In 1985, however, the Legislature passed a law emphasizing that absentee voting is a privilege exercised outside the usual safeguards of the polling place and that ballots not meeting legal requirements “may not be counted.”

Boerke cited that law in his exchange with the city and county, as conservatives have done repeatedly in issues of absentee ballot missteps and controversies.

Still, the courts have continued to show flexibility. In a 2004 dispute, the Wisconsin Supreme Court held that “the failure on the part of the election officials to perform their duties should not deprive the voters of their constitutional right to vote.”

Lawyers often say that it’s more important for a law to be certain than for it to be right, said Hasen, the UCLA professor. Uncertainty — especially when there are good-faith arguments on either side — is one of the most dangerous situations in election law.

“That just creates all kinds of issues of equal protection and due process and election fairness,” he said. “So the more that these issues can be resolved one way or the other, not in the heat of a very close election, the better it is.”

If an election hinges on ballots like these, he said, a lawsuit is all but inevitable.

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

Can Madison count some ballots delivered after an 8 p.m. deadline?

2026-04-10T00:40:42+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, April 10, 4:45 p.m.: The Madison canvassing board on Friday unanimously voted to count the 23 ballots that arrived after 8 p.m. on Election Day. Assistant City Attorney Amber McReynolds said the error was made by the city clerk’s staff, not voters, and that past precedent supports counting the ballots. The county canvass begins Monday.

Madison poll workers on Election Day counted 23 absentee ballots that arrived at four polling places after 8 p.m. Tuesday, despite a state law requiring that absentee ballots be “delivered to the polling place no later than 8 p.m.” in order to be tallied.

The law provides no clear exception to that deadline and says ballots not delivered on time “may not be counted.” But court rulings have given boards of canvassers broad discretion in these cases, allowing them to count ballots as long as there’s “substantial compliance” with election laws and no evidence of “connivance, fraud, or undue influence.”

A past Wisconsin Supreme Court case held that election statutes don’t need to be fully complied with, so long as election officials preserve the will of the voter.

City election officials instructed poll workers to count and mark the affected ballots — which all arrived by the end of the night on Monday, the day before Election Day — in case the city, county, or state decides to exclude them.

It is unclear why the ballots — which had been in the city’s possession for several hours before the deadline — were so delayed in arriving at the polling places.

The late delivery marks another potentially significant error in how the city handles its ballots, after it faced extensive public scrutiny and a state investigation for disenfranchising 193 voters whose ballots were misplaced in the November 2024 election.

It’s the first high-turnout election run by City Clerk Lydia McComas, hired to replace the clerk who oversaw the 2024 ballot snafu. McComas said her office had informed the Wisconsin Elections Commission of the situation.

Ballots left the city late and got to polls after deadline

Those ballots were in the hands of a ballot courier, who left a city election facility around 6:30 p.m. to deliver ballots to the polls. The courier arrived at those final four polling locations after 8 p.m., reaching the final one at about 8:30 p.m, delivering a combined 23 ballots to all of them, according to a statement from the city.

“Due to a longer-than-usual delivery time, the very last few ballots arrived at four polling places shortly after polls closed,” McComas said.

When similar incidents happened in the past, the county board of canvassers didn’t count those votes in the final canvass based on legal advice, Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell said. He said he’s waiting for more details before deciding how to proceed with these ballots at Monday’s county canvass meeting.

In those past incidents, the county board decided that not counting the ballots in the final county tally “was an obvious choice based on the way the statute’s written,” McDonell said. “The statute isn’t vague.”

Given the ballots’ timely arrival, McDonell said, “they should have gotten out to the polls and should have been counted on time.”

Other municipalities have counted ballots discovered late

Other election officials have at times decided to count ballots discovered after the 8 p.m. deadline, but the rules for municipalities are different depending on their procedures for counting absentee ballots.

In November 2020, Milwaukee workers discovered nearly 400 uncounted ballots during a recount. A campaign representative for President Donald Trump objected to those ballots being included, but the municipal canvassing board unanimously decided that they should count.

At the February 2022 election, Wauwatosa election officials discovered 58 unopened ballots. After consulting the Wisconsin Elections Commission and the city attorney for advice, the city clerk convened the Wauwatosa Board of Canvassers, which included the missing ballots in the totals.

But the rules that allowed Milwaukee and Wauwatosa to count those ballots may not apply to Madison. In both of those cities, absentee ballots are counted in a central location. In Madison, absentee ballots are counted at the polling locations where the registered voter would have voted in person.

In cities like Madison, election workers must deliver absentee ballots to polling places by 8 p.m. For central count municipalities, by comparison, state law only says election officials there shall count ballots received by the clerk by 8 p.m., without clarifying that they must be in a certain place by that point.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission has said the 193 ballots Madison missed in 2024 could have been counted had the city made the appropriate notifications to state authorities. But those ballots were likely already at polling places on Election Day — unlike the 23 ballots here, which arrived after the deadline.

Correction, April 10: Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell was misspelled in an earlier version of this article. It has been corrected.

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

New Wisconsin law seeks to prevent another election certification mess

2026-04-09T19:50:18+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 Gov. Tony Evers on Wednesday signed a bill bringing Wisconsin in line with a federal law seeking to prevent the kind of post-election chaos that President Donald Trump and his allies sowed after the 2020 election.

The Democrat also vetoed a Republican-authored bill that would have required the state election commission to hear administrative complaints against itself alleging violations of the federal Help America Vote Act, in line with a U.S. Justice Department demand for the state. That vetoed bill also would have required the state’s Legislative Audit Bureau to conduct audits for potential noncitizen voters.

The bill Evers signed updates Wisconsin’s deadlines for certifying presidential election results and casting electoral votes to match federal timelines set by Congress in 2022, after President Donald Trump claimed to have won the 2020 election and hundreds of individuals stormed the U.S. Capitol to prevent certification of President Joe Biden’s victory.

The mismatch led to a lawsuit in the 2024 presidential election, when the state’s Republican electors were uncertain which day to cast their Electoral College votes because state and federal law set the dates one day apart. The new law resolves that discrepancy.

The measure passed the Senate last session but stalled in the Assembly. With its passage, Wisconsin is among more than 20 states to update their laws to align with the Electoral Count Reform Act.

Vetoed bill would have imposed U.S. DOJ demand

The HAVA bill that Evers vetoed followed a U.S. Justice Department letter sent to the Wisconsin Elections Commission last year. It claimed the WEC was violating the law by declining to hear complaints filed against it.

Under HAVA, a 2002 law that overhauled voter registration and election administration, any state receiving federal election funding must also establish an administrative process for complaints about alleged violations of the law. If a violation is found, the state must provide a remedy; if not, it can dismiss the complaint.

In recent years, however, the WEC has dismissed HAVA complaints related to its own actions, citing a Wisconsin Supreme Court opinion saying it would be “nonsensical” for the agency to adjudicate a complaint against itself.

For example, the commission dismissed a complaint against the agency filed by a Democratic voter seeking to bar Trump from the ballot, and has repeatedly dismissed complaints filed by election conspiracy theorist Peter Bernegger that allege various kinds of election mismanagement.

“If a person has a complaint about the legality of the conduct of the commission, that person should file suit in court,” Evers said in his veto message Wednesday.

The vetoed bill also would have required the state to undertake audits of its voter registration list to identify potential noncitizen voters.

Evers said he objected to the “additional burden that could be placed on citizens to provide documentary proof of citizenship after they have already been lawfully registered to vote.”

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

After ‘false elector’ charges cleared, Michigan clerk can once again run his township’s elections

2026-04-09T09:00:00+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.

Stan Grot is once again in charge of Shelby Township’s elections.

Grot, the Shelby Township Clerk, was one of 16 people charged with a number of felonies connected to their role as so-called “false electors” for President Donald Trump in 2020. As a result, the state stripped Grot of his ability to run the community’s elections in 2023.

Those charges — against Grot and the others accused — were dropped in September. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel last month announced she wouldn’t appeal the dismissal of charges, after determining that her chances of success on appeal were limited.

And now, the Michigan Department of State confirms Grot is once again leading elections in his Macomb County community. The state notified Grot of the change in January, according to spokesperson Angela Benander.

The reinstatement came three years after Director of Elections Jonathan Brater wrote in a letter that Grot was to stop administering elections “to ensure public trust and confidence in the integrity and security of elections.” His deputy, an unelected official named Craig Cowper, was tasked with the work in his absence.

Grot did not respond to requests for comment from Votebeat. He had previously described the experience of facing charges as “pure hell” and said he “did nothing wrong.” Elections are a “very small” part of the job, he told The Detroit News in 2024.

He and his attorney maintained his innocence. They said party officials told Grot the document he signed — which falsely certified the state’s electoral votes for Trump — was a contingency, signed in case President Joe Biden’s victory in Michigan in 2020 was overturned. Biden ultimately won the state by more than 150,000 votes.

Grot has been the clerk in Shelby Township since 2012, and has often run unopposed by Democrats in the city of about 80,000. He won re-election multiple times, including in 2024, during the time he was barred from running elections.

Nessel has maintained that the slate of “false electors” committed crimes including election law forgery and several counts of conspiracy, going so far as to release a 110-page report laying out the argument. The charges against Grot and the others were dismissed when a judge ruled last year that prosecutors had not sufficiently proven that the people in question had criminal intent.

“The dismissal of the false slate charges does not change the facts, and it does not change history,” Nessel’s report read. “What Michigan’s false slate did was wrong.”

Shelby Township’s next election is in August.

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

We still have questions about Trump’s new executive order on elections

2026-04-06T09:00:00+00:00

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

When reviewing President Donald Trump’s executive order on mail voting on Tuesday evening, election lawyer Aaron Blacksberg noticed something odd.

The order provides for the creation of not one, not two, but three separate lists:

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security must use various federal databases to compile a list of citizens over age 18 residing in each state and send it to the chief election official in that state.
States are invited to send the U.S. Postal Service a list of eligible voters to whom the state intends to provide a mail-in or absentee ballot.
The U.S. Postal Service must provide each state with a list of people “who are enrolled with the USPS” to get their ballots delivered by the Postal Service in that state. The Postal Service would not be allowed to deliver any ballots from people not on this list.

But Blacksberg, the federal policy counsel for the Institute for Responsive Government, noticed that the order doesn’t specifically say what, if anything, these three lists have to do with one another.

“This executive order doesn’t make clear how the administration will even do what they say they’re doing, which is limiting mail-in voting based on who they say are citizens and eligible voters,” Blacksberg said.

Blacksberg’s guess is that the U.S. Postal Service will take List 2 (the list of mail voters provided by the states) and cross-reference it with List 1 (the list of adult citizens, though the order says Homeland Security is providing that to states, not USPS) to generate List 3 (the list of people allowed to vote by mail).

But the order doesn’t actually specify any of that.

Blacksberg noted that the order directs the U.S. Postal Service to propose rules by May 30 governing the process of creating List 3, so we may get more clarity then. But as of right now, the first two lists aren’t explicitly required to be used for anything at all. They just … exist.

Of course, many experts and state officials say the president doesn’t have the authority to mandate the steps outlined in the executive order anyway, and multiple federal lawsuits challenging it have already been filed. But the Case of the Three Lists is only one of several mysteries about how the order would actually work, should courts allow it to go into effect.

The White House also released a fact sheet on Tuesday that aimed to summarize the order and make it easier to understand — but it ended up muddling at least one key provision instead.

As mentioned, the executive order decrees that the Postal Service “shall not transmit mail-in or absentee ballots from any individual” (emphasis ours) who isn’t on List 3. But the fact sheet says, “The Order requires the USPS to transmit ballots only to individuals” on List 3. Those, of course, are different things.

Presumably the language in the executive order, not the fact sheet, is what’s operative. But the error in the fact sheet raises questions about what the White House thinks its own order does.

One thing that’s clearer in the order is how Homeland Security should assemble the list of citizens over 18 residing in each state. It calls for the list to be “derived from Federal citizenship and naturalization records, [Social Security Administration] records, SAVE data, and other relevant Federal databases.” SAVE is a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services database the Trump administration overhauled last year and has been urging election officials to use to verify voter citizenship.

But that specificity doesn’t mean the process will be straightforward. “It’s not a feasible thing to do with any accuracy for every citizen in the country over 18,” said John Davisson, deputy director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit that advocates on privacy rights.

He said that while, in theory, multiple federal databases could be combined to verify residency, in practice there is “no reliable way” to integrate systems that weren’t designed to communicate with one another, or for this purpose.

Doing so would almost certainly result in incomplete or inaccurate results, Davisson said. In addition, the order notes the need to comply with all applicable federal laws, including the Privacy Act. That law, Davisson said, places strict limits on the government’s ability to acquire and use personal data, but how those restrictions would apply here is unclear, since the agencies’ plans for compiling the lists will depend on rulemaking that has not yet been developed.

Votebeat this week sent the White House a list of questions about the executive order and how it would work, including to ask how the different lists it calls for would interact with each other and about the differences between the language in the order and the White House fact sheet.

A White House spokeswoman, Abigail Jackson, responded with a general statement saying, in part, “Election integrity has always been a top priority for President Trump.”

But Jackson did not respond to any of our specific questions.

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

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Trump administration sued by states over mail voting executive order

2026-04-03T20:11:05+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.

A coalition of Democratic officials from 23 states, including Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and the attorneys general of California, Massachusetts, Nevada, and Washington, are suing the federal government over President Donald Trump’s new executive order to regulate mail voting.

The lawsuit, which is being filed in Massachusetts, says the order violates the U.S. Constitution by usurping the states’ power to administer their own elections. The Constitution delegates states the primary authority to run elections, subject to rules set by Congress, but gives the president no role.

“The U.S. Constitution makes clear that elections are to be run by the states, and here in Pennsylvania, we believe that the administration of elections should be nonpartisan,” Shapiro said in a statement.

Trump has long claimed, without evidence, that mail voting is rife with fraud and has sought to curtail it. On Tuesday, he signed an executive order that directs the U.S. Postal Service not to deliver mail ballots from any voter not on a pre-approved list of voters who will receive mail ballots and requires each authorized mail voter’s envelope to have a unique barcode.

The order also directs the Department of Homeland Security to create a list of adult citizens residing in each state and provide that list to states 60 days before a federal election.

The order isn’t Trump’s first attempt to push into how states run elections. Last March, he issued an executive order that, among other things, tried to require proof of citizenship when registering to vote. States sued over that order on similar legal grounds, and courts have so far blocked most of that order’s major provisions.

This week’s lawsuit named Trump, the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Social Security Administration, the U.S. Postal Service, and several federal officials as defendants.

“The President’s latest attempt to interfere with the States’ administration of their elections is as unprecedented as it is unconstitutional,” the lawsuit said. “Neither the Constitution nor any act of Congress confers upon the President the authority to mandate sweeping changes to States’ electoral systems or procedures.”

The lawsuit is at least the fourth that has been filed against the executive order since Trump signed it late Tuesday. Two separate coalitions of voting-rights advocacy groups sued Thursday, with one filing a lawsuit in federal court in Massachusetts and the other in Washington, D.C. Democratic Party groups filed the first lawsuit in Washington, D.C., Wednesday.

“Only Democrat politicians and operatives would be upset about lawful efforts to secure American elections and ensure only eligible American citizens are casting ballots,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said. “President Trump campaigned on securing our elections and the American people sent him back to the White House to get the job done.”

Shapiro, along with Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt, a Republican, had immediately decried the order when it was signed on Tuesday and signaled legal action was forthcoming.

Shapiro joined the lawsuit in his capacity as governor, rather than on behalf of the state. Suing on behalf of a state is a responsibility that generally falls to the attorney general, and Pennsylvania’s current attorney general Republican Dave Sunday.

The attorneys general who joined the suit represent Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin, as well as the District of Columbia.

The new lawsuit is only the latest judiciary clash between the Trump administration and the states over election issues. The U.S. Department of Justice has sued 30 states, including Pennsylvania, plus the District of Columbia over their refusal to turn over complete versions of their voter rolls. The Pennsylvania Department of State argues turning over the data would be illegal because it contains private information.

Pennsylvania’s motion to dismiss that case is currently pending.

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

Votebeat editor-in-chief Carrie Levine contributed.

Arizona officials prep for new mail-ballot dropoff procedures that aims to speed up counting

2026-04-02T21:04:55+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.

Alexandra Flahive approached the “polling place” with a mail ballot in hand.

But upon entering, she opted not to drop it off and have the signature on its envelope checked, as hundreds of thousands of Arizonans typically do on Election Day. Instead, she waited in line, checked in on an electronic pollbook, and presented a voter ID.

Then, she handed the ballot to a poll worker, who stamped it with a message in bright-red ink: “ID verified.” At the end of another line, a worker slashed open the ballot envelope. Flahive removed the ballot, feeding it into a vote-counting machine.

Thus, her vote was cast. Or, at least, it would have been, if this had been a real election.

Flahive, communications and outreach manager at the Maricopa County Elections Department, was one of a few hundred people helping the county conduct a test run of this year’s election, which will feature a brand-new voting option.

Arizona voters can now show ID when dropping off mail ballots, avoiding signature verification

In Arizona, voters have long had the option of dropping off their mail ballots at polling places. Under state law, voters must show identification to cast ballots in person, but those dropping off ballots are allowed to skip that step — as well as any associated lines at the polls.

Instead, they just have to sign the envelope that contains their ballot and place it in a secure box at the polling site. Trained staff later compare that signature to signatures the voter has on file before counting their vote.

That process, called signature verification, is a key safeguard against fraud. But it also takes time — and as the state has morphed into a key electoral battleground, there has been increasing consternation with how long it takes to count so-called “late early” ballots dropped off in the final hours of voting.

In 2024, state lawmakers passed legislation requiring election officials to offer a new option. Like Flahive, voters in the upcoming midterm election will have the option to wait in line and show a driver’s license, passport, or similar form of identification, instead of dropping their ballot off to go through signature verification. This option would allow their votes to be processed sooner and counted more quickly.

The mock election, held at the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center in Phoenix, represented one of the first tests of that new process. Officials from several other counties — including Coconino, Pima, Pinal, and La Paz — traveled to watch it in action.

It appeared to run relatively smoothly. About 300 mock voters moved through the simulation in an hour and a half — less than the two hours that officials had designated for the exercise.

Jennifer Liewer, the deputy elections director of Maricopa County, said the simulation represented a high-turnout scenario at one of the county’s vote centers on Election Day, with “pretty much every possible issue that we could think of occurring.”

“It was really about stress-testing the system,” she said, adding that officials also use the mock election to “look at the little things” that could save voters time and improve their experience at the polls. “We want to try to figure out what could go wrong, so we kind of threw everything possible at the poll workers and at the system to see where there were breaking points.”

She rattled off some of officials’ main takeaways. They’re exploring the best pathways for voters who come to drop off their ballots to move throughout polling places, an effort to minimize crowds and lines. For now, they’re anticipating adding three extra poll workers to each site to assist voters utilizing the new option. And, while training those staffers, officials intend to focus heavily on different things that could go wrong with the new process.

“We’re going to be tabulating ballots that people have brought from home, and we feel like we’re going to see a higher likelihood of torn ballots or erroneous marks or overvoting,” Liewer said. “So, we’re just really focusing on ensuring that those tabulation clerks are extremely comfortable and knowledgeable with how the tabulators operate.”

But one key question remains unanswered. In the simulation, one out of every three voters used the new process to cast their mail ballot. It’s unclear how many will choose to do so in the state’s upcoming primary and general elections — and, as a result, how much the new process will actually speed up the count.

Tammy Patrick, a former election official in Maricopa County and chief programs officer at the Election Center, said some likely will choose to participate, even though it adds another step for them at the polls. Voters, she said, are increasingly being told that “they shouldn’t trust the system” and that their vote could be “negated or rejected.”

“The question is, would it increase the number of ballots counted and included in that first initial count on election night?” Patrick said. She theorized that the new process might lead to a slight increase in that number, but that still would likely represent a “small” percentage of total voters.

“In most cases, providing voters with more options is a good idea,” she said. “But the question remains, to what extent and to what expense.”

Lines may deter voters from using the new process

One factor likely to influence how many voters participate in the new process is how long lines are at the polls.

Liewer said there are rarely lines during the primary, but they sometimes occur during the general election. In Maricopa County, the state’s most populous, she said lines typically max out at 30 to 40 minutes long.

But most counties are bracing for a lengthy ballot in the November election as state lawmakers consider sending dozens of proposals to voters for approval. That could mean that voters see slightly longer waiting times this year — particularly on Election Day.

This year, voters who opt to ID-verify their mail ballot will be in the same lines as other voters in most counties. Liewer said Maricopa County will offer only one line for all voters at its polling sites. Elections Director Eslir Musta of Coconino County, located about 100 miles north of Phoenix, said he plans to do the same.

Officials said the decision largely comes down to logistics. Most voting sites don’t have room to accommodate two lines. Additionally, officials worry that separate queues would confuse voters. Plus, it would require completely separate pollbook stations and make it harder for poll workers to report accurate wait times.

Alexandra Flahive, communications and outreach manager at the Maricopa County Elections Department, works during a mock election on Wed., April 1, 2026 in Phoenix, Arizona. Officials aimed to test out a new process that would require voters to show ID to have their mail ballots counted sooner, avoiding signature verification. It is intended to speed up election results.

“We have limitations with our staff and equipment,” Liewer said.

But as usual, voters dropping off mail ballots for signature verification will be able to skip the line at the polls. That raises questions about how many will be willing to wait to get their IDs verified.

“We want to be realistic with people,” Liewer said. “We’re prepared for you, but we don’t know how many will take advantage of it.”

Change means new costs for local election officials

One thing is clear: The new voting option stands to cost counties a significant chunk of change.

In Maricopa County, the price tag is expected to come to at least $1.07 million — a number that encompasses the cost of new tabulators and new full-time staffers to manage additional machines and poll workers.

That figure doesn’t include the expense of adding three poll workers at each voting site, which officials said is still being calculated as they prepare to present a budget for the upcoming midterm election to county leaders.

The total cost of the change will likely be lower in other counties.

Maricopa County uses on-site tabulation on Election Day, meaning that voters insert their ballots into counting machines located at each polling site. That required it to purchase 550 new tabulators to use specifically for mail ballots at the polls — two per site, in case one breaks down.

Most other counties use a central count model in which ballots are placed into secure boxes and transported back to election offices for counting after the polls close.

“It’s a slightly different process — more simple, and not as involved with all these moving parts,” said Musta, of Coconino County.

Still, he said counties will need to segregate ID-verified mail ballots into a separate container and add new poll workers to help voters through the process.

“There’s a lot of new information for poll workers and a lot of training,” he added.

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

Why ballot curing is a potential secret weapon for Michigan campaigns

2026-04-01T09:00:00+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.

When Hamtramck voted for its new mayor and council this past November, something stuck out in the final results: an exceptional number of cured ballots.

In a city of less than 28,000 people, with only 4,747 ballots cast, 120 voters worked with the city clerk’s office after the election to fix, or “cure,” issues with their signatures on their absentee ballot envelopes. In the same election, the much larger city of Detroit — which was also electing a new mayor and council — had only 72 voters cure their ballots out of more than 115,000 ballots cast.

But the massive number of cured ballots in Hamtramck wasn’t prompted by anything nefarious. Instead, it was simply an effective effort from enthusiastic mayoral campaigns to ensure every vote counted, relying on the close-knit immigrant networks of the city. Several voters told Votebeat they cured their ballots not after hearing from city officials, but after hearing from an uncle, a brother, or a neighbor that their vote had not yet counted — and that it wouldn’t, unless they fixed their signature.

“I think the campaigns were calling old ladies out of their beds,” Abe Siblani, Hamtramck’s deputy city clerk, joked in December about the incredible number of voters who cured their ballots. Wayne County election data shows that in elections from February 2024 through August 2025, just a single Hamtramck voter had cured their ballot, back in August 2024.

The ability to cure ballots with missing or mismatched signatures is relatively new in Michigan, brought into existence by the passage of 2022’s Ballot Proposal 2. If election workers decide that the signature on an absentee ballot envelope doesn’t match what’s on file for that voter, that voter has until 5 p.m. on the Friday following the election to fix it and have their vote counted.

But the idea of campaigns, political organizations, or even state parties encouraging voters to cure their ballots is anything but new. Part of the effort comes from a noble idea that every vote should count. But much of it is because those groups want to win — and that means squeezing every last vote out of their supporters.

It’s a lot of work, but it makes a difference, Charlene Fernandez, chair of the Arizona Democratic Party, told Votebeat.

“Every vote matters, and it can change an election,” she said, pointing to the 2022 attorney general race in her state as the perfect example. Democrats there worked to cure thousands of ballots in the race, and Democrat Kris Mayes won by just 511 votes.

“It was a matter of hundreds,” Fernandez said. “Not thousands. They all mattered.”

What does ballot curing look like?

The need for ballots to sometimes be cured stems from the fact that absentee voters must sign their ballot envelopes. Those signatures are then checked against the ones election officials have on file as a deterrent against fraud.

When election officials determine that the signature on a ballot envelope doesn’t match what is on file (or that the voter forgot to sign the envelope altogether), Michigan clerks have an obligation to notify that voter immediately.

For some voters, that notification will prompt them to go to their clerk’s office and cure their signature. But overwhelmingly, campaigns find that’s not quite enough for every voter. If a voter doesn’t fix their signature within the proper timeline, their vote won’t count.

In the Hamtramck mayoral election — which was decided by just 11 votes (although the outcome is being disputed in court) — candidate Muhith Mahmood said his campaign started calling people after the city released a list of voters whose ballots would be rejected unless they were cured.

“We knocked doors, we called people. If somebody knows that person, they call them, they knock on their door,” Mahmood said, noting that cured ballots ultimately ended up helping his opponent, now-Mayor Adam Alharbi, more than they helped him in the race. “I just tried to do the right thing, to make sure people are heard.”

Curing in Michigan requires voters to fill out a form supplying their signature and return it to their clerk in person or via mail or email. If their signature doesn’t match what’s on file, they can check a box affirming that their signature has changed over time.

In many states, curing has been a standard practice for years. In Arizona, for example, parties — and sometimes outside groups with a particular interest in certain races — have worked for more than a decade to get voters to cure their ballots after an election. Arizona requires election officials to make “reasonable efforts” to contact a voter, but Fernandez said that cure operations run by the campaigns, developed and perfected over years, are often more efficient.

Volunteers work to get the list of voters whose ballots need to be cured, she said, and then they start reaching out to them.

“You can’t bring in your normal volunteers that canvas or do phone-banking or text-banking,” Fernandez said. “This has to be a group of people that understand what curing is, how to make those phone calls and how to follow up.”

Curing can be tricky, because it’s something the voter has to do for themselves.

“You really have to train people to understand how important it is and impart that information to people they’re calling,” she said.

Some Republicans oppose ballot curing

Not everyone thinks that curing is a great idea. In a number of states, it’s not allowed — if your signature doesn’t match, your vote won’t be counted. But some believe that cured ballots can be ripe for abuse.

Former Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill, a Republican, said it was critical that states that allow ballot curing ensure it is applied evenly across the board by local officials. He warned that there is a perception that curing can be used by “decision makers” to target certain voters more likely to support their preferred candidate to boost their odds.

“There is a perception that they use this opportunity to get those ballots turned in after the election for their candidate to either catch up or extend their lead,” Merrill said. Alabama does not have a curing process, and he said he did not advocate for it while secretary.

Part of the reason why is the argument, made by Merrill and Republicans across the country, that elections should end on Election Day.

Curing, the argument goes, allows voting to continue. Although Michigan’s cured ballots arrive before the close of voting on Election Day, they are cured — i.e., voters are given a second chance to provide a valid signature — on the Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday after. Cured ballots are tabulated separately from undisputed ones, and they can sway particularly close elections, as they almost did in Hamtramck.

What’s next for ballot curing in Michigan?

It’s likely that, going forward, more Michigan voters will hear from outside groups urging them to cure their ballots. The lists of voters whose ballots need to be cured are public, and interested groups are taking note.

Michigan GOP Chair Jim Runestad didn’t answer questions about whether his party has launched or is considering launching curing operations, although other state Republican parties have them. Michigan Democrats, however, say they have an operation in full swing.

Curtis Hertel, chair of the Michigan Democratic Party, said he sees the party’s curing efforts as a logical next step to its voter protection efforts. MDP’s efforts are focused within certain geographic areas, sometimes driven by where volunteers are available to knock on doors.

It’s not clear if there has been any tangible difference in an election’s outcome because of MDP’s efforts, Hertel told Votebeat, but he said the reception from voters has been warm.

“I think everyone, especially with the Trump administration coming out and saying they’re going to try to take over elections in Michigan, knowing that someone is on their side … to make sure their vote is counted is incredibly important to people,” he said. “It’s really hard to convince somebody to be a part of the process if they think their vote is not going to count.”

It’s not a secret that a huge impetus behind this work is how it can help win elections. Hertel emphasized that the MDP believes that it will win any election that is “free and fair,” making it important that people are heard.

But party officials say large-scale curing initiatives are a matter of ensuring voters get heard. Even when people hear their ballots may not count if they don’t fix them, it can take a few reminders to ensure a person actually does so.

“Both parties care about that. They want their voice heard,” Fernandez said. “It’s important to everyone that every ballot runs its course and is counted.”

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

Disenfranchised Madison voters sound off on city, lawsuit

2026-04-01T09:00:00+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.

Months before becoming one of the nearly 200 Madison voters in 2024 whose absentee ballots were never counted, Nathan Haimowitz did what he thought he was supposed to do.

As a journalist living in Spain and out of the habit of voting, the 26-year-old former poll worker said he wanted the 2024 presidential election to “be the thing that would spur me to vote more consistently.” To make sure everything was in order, he emailed Madison officials to confirm they had received his absentee ballot application. They told him they had, so he filled out his ballot, sent it in, and assumed his vote would be counted.

It wasn’t.

The mistake that disenfranchised Haimowitz and nearly 200 other voters set off a chain of consequences: the longtime city clerk resigned, state and local officials launched investigations, a lawsuit was filed, and the city began overhauling its voting procedures.

Haimowitz hasn’t cast a ballot since.

“It was definitely a deterrence,” he said. “I didn’t know why my vote hadn’t been counted.”

Nathan Haimowitz

Early signs suggest the error is already reshaping how many of the disenfranchised voters engage with elections — pushing some away from absentee voting and, in some cases, out of the electorate altogether. Interviews with affected voters also reveal a broader disconnect: Many say they are dissatisfied both with how the city handled the mistake and with the high-profile lawsuit filed in its wake to seek damages for the disenfranchised voters. The city, they say, has not been appropriately responsive and the lawsuit does not reflect their values.

Until now, the public conversation has largely reflected the perspectives of the eight voters who joined the lawsuit as named plaintiffs. But others Votebeat spoke with described a different perspective — one that questions whether financial compensation is the right remedy at all.

Mark Ediger, a recently retired chemistry professor at UW-Madison, for example, said he found the lawsuit “pretty bewildering,” adding that as a Madison taxpayer, it would be people like him footing the bill.

The 193 voters range from dozens of students who are only in Madison for a few years to some of their professors and other long-time city residents. Their responses to the error are just as varied.

Some, like Haimowitz, stopped voting entirely. Others, like Ediger, say the incident was a one-off mistake that hasn’t impacted their voting behavior. Notably, Ediger is the only voter among the disenfranchised group who has voted absentee in both of the two elections following the error, according to election data obtained by Votebeat.

“It was definitely a deterrence,” said Nathan Haimowitz, one of the disenfranchised voters. “I didn't know why my vote hadn't been counted.”

“The incident has not diminished my trust in elections,” Ediger told Votebeat, adding that he’s satisfied the city has appropriately addressed its cause. “I don’t see how this should change my voting behavior moving forward.”

But other voters said their experience will change how they vote in future elections. “I’m definitely going to prioritize in-person voting,” Joanne Fairbotham, one of the disenfranchised voters, told Votebeat.

“There’s growing evidence that when someone tries to vote and they are prevented from doing so for one reason or another, it makes them less likely to vote in the future, and it can change their behavior,” said Kevin Morris, a senior research fellow and voting policy scholar with the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program. “You can lose a lot of trust very easily, and it can be very difficult to build that trust.”

All of the disenfranchised voters cast absentee ballots in the 2024 presidential election. But, among the 22 who cast ballots in the February 2025 primary for state superintendent and city council, nearly all did so in person. Two months later, two-thirds of the 132 who voted in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race did so at the polls, a share similar to how the same group voted in previous April elections.

Disenfranchised voters question city follow-up

Shortly after learning that her ballot hadn’t been counted, Fairbotham — a 35-year-old medical coder who lives in Madison — wrote to City Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl, saying the error was “beyond devastating as an American who prides herself in voting in every election.”

“This is how people lose faith in their government that their rights will be protected,” she said in the letter, calling on Witzel-Behl to resign.

Fairbotham said she never received a response from Witzel-Behl, who has since resigned — or anyone else employed by the city.

“Not hearing a peep,” she said, is the most frustrating part. Fairbotham’s vote in the 2024 presidential election was the first time she cast an absentee ballot since the peak of the pandemic in 2020. She has only cast in-person votes since, and said the incident “still makes her angry.”

Madison City Attorney Mike Haas disputed the characterization that the city didn’t communicate the seriousness of the error, pointing to a city and state investigation and a public apology from the mayor.

Still, some voters said the city’s outreach fell short after such a significant error. Haimowitz, for example, didn’t hear from the city when most of the voters did — a separate oversight by city officials meant overseas voters did not receive the same notice as those living locally. Until speaking with Votebeat, Haimowitz said, he didn’t know whether the mistake that kept his ballot from being counted was his or the city’s, nor what steps officials had taken to prevent it from happening again.

An absentee ballot goes into a ballot drop box.

Election administration experts say direct, proactive communication can be critical in rebuilding trust. After a mistake like the one in Madison, jurisdictions should reach out to affected voters, review what went wrong, and clearly explain how it will be prevented in the future, said Jennifer Morrell, CEO of The Elections Group and a former Colorado election administrator.

The city has completed the first two steps, Morrell said, but it did not fully follow through on the third.

After sending an initial notice telling voters they could reach out with questions, the city held no further public hearings, said Haas, a longtime election lawyer and former administrator of the Wisconsin Elections Commission. Few of the disenfranchised voters followed up, he added.

Some disenfranchised voters find lawsuit ‘bewildering’

The divide among disenfranchised voters extends to the lawsuit filed in the aftermath of the error.

Last March, the liberal group Law Forward filed a claim seeking $34 million from the city and Dane County over the error, later turning it into a lawsuit. In February, a circuit court judge ruled that the city could be held liable for monetary damages.

A small group of affected voters has joined the case, arguing it’s one of the only ways to hold the city accountable for failing to count their ballots.

But others see it differently. “In an era where the reliability of elections is being challenged by some groups in completely spurious ways, it seems to me that this lawsuit just adds to that noise,” Ediger said.

Lawsuits seeking monetary damages for disenfranchisement are now rare, but were more common in the late 1800s and 1900s, when Black voters were intentionally and repeatedly disenfranchised by election workers. Then, the fines forced the government to think twice, said Ediger. But there’s no similar pattern of errors or intentionality here in Madison, he added, which makes him doubt the lawsuit’s purpose.

Haimowitz said he also opposed the lawsuit, despite how much it has shaken his confidence.

“I’m not sure that the city should pay such a heavy price for this,” Haimowitz said, adding that at a time when some Republicans are peddling “Stop the Steal” narratives and casting doubt on election integrity, especially in battleground states like Wisconsin, the Law Forward letter unnerved him.

“That kind of money could be debilitating to a city elections board that is already under immense scrutiny and pressure to get it all right,” he said.

Law Forward staff attorney Scott Thompson pushed back on comparisons between the case and post-2020 lawsuits filed by Republicans, including one that sought to throw out over 200,000 absentee ballots in Wisconsin.

“That cavalier attitude towards votes that we saw in 2020 is simply unacceptable, and not compatible with democracy,” he said. “And so what do we do with that? Well, I can tell you what we will not do: We will not stand idly by if hundreds of people in a community lose the right to vote because their ballot simply wasn’t counted.”

He said that lawsuits often make people uneasy, but that their perspective may change when a fundamental right is taken away. He declined to directly comment on some of the disenfranchised voters’ issues with the case.

For some disenfranchised voters, financial damages are part of accountability. Precious Ayodabo, a named plaintiff, wrote in a Cap Times column that her disenfranchised absentee vote “is worth enough” to warrant compensation.

“It’s worth enough that I waited for hours in line to cast it. It’s worth enough that politicians spend millions of dollars to receive it. It’s worth enough that people have put their lives on the line and died to protect it,” she wrote.

Thompson declined to make Ayodabo and the other plaintiffs available for interviews. Of the 193 voters, eight are plaintiffs in the case, he said.

Others who support the lawsuit say it’s less about personal payment and more about forcing systemic change. Fairbotham said she’s grateful the case is pushing the city to take the error seriously, particularly after the Wisconsin Elections Commission found the city violated state law.

Thompson said the lawsuit isn’t about making sure the government knows “every single jot and tittle” of absentee voting procedure, but to ensure election officials count every vote, which he defined as “the absolute most basic obligation.”

Still, some election experts warn the case could have unintended consequences. Morrell said the lawsuit could become one of many elements that dissuade election officials from staying in administrative roles.

“If we’re setting an unrealistic expectation that any mistake made by an election administrator opens you up to a lawsuit, that feels like an impossible situation to be in,” she said. “Election administrators take this so seriously and do everything they can to ensure mistakes don’t happen,” she added, “but they do.”

For Haimowitz — a voter who has helped others register to vote and served as a poll worker — the question isn’t just whether the city fixes the problem. It’s whether he can move past having his ballot go uncounted.

“It was something that made me think it’s clearly not that easy to vote,” he said.

Trump issues second executive order on elections, giving U.S. Postal Service unprecedented control over mail voting

2026-04-01T00:43:36+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 story has been updated.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday issued a second executive order on elections, this one giving the U.S. Postal Service unprecedented oversight over who is voting by mail, a move experts and state election officials said will quickly draw legal challenges.

The order, titled “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections,” says that states can send the U.S. Postal Service a list of voters “to whom the State intends to provide a mail-in or absentee ballot” 60 days before any federal election, and directs the Postal Service to create “unique ballot envelope identifiers, such as bar codes” for those voters.

The Postal Service would only be authorized to deliver ballots from people on an approved list, which states would be allowed “to routinely supplement and provide suggested modifications or amendments” to.

Separately, the executive order also directs the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to work with the Social Security Administration and use other federal databases to create a list of all adult citizens residing in each state and send it to the state’s chief election official, though it noted that voters would still be required to register to vote in accordance with state law.

While signing the executive order Tuesday evening, Trump told reporters at the White House that the order was about ensuring voter integrity. “We want to have honest voting in our country, because if you don’t have honest voting, you can’t have, really, a nation.”

Experts say executive order is legally and logistically dubious

Experts said the order will be immediately challenged and that, practically speaking, even if it weren’t, it would be difficult to implement before the November election.

“The president has no power to direct the creation of any of these lists or to restrict the delivery of mail ballots to any given list,” said Danielle Lang, vice president for voting rights at the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, which represented plaintiffs suing over Trump’s first executive order on elections.

Trump issued that order just over a year ago. Among other things, it attempted to require registering voters to provide documented proof of citizenship and prohibit the counting of mail ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but arrive afterward. However, federal courts have repeatedly ruled the president lacks the authority to rewrite election law and have so far blocked the order’s major provisions.

Lang said those court rulings “provide a clear roadmap” for challenges to this one.

Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution gives states and Congress the power to make laws governing elections, not the president. Despite that, the White House has promised for months that a second executive order on elections was forthcoming, sparking widespread speculation about what it would include. The order Trump issued Tuesday was less sweeping than some had expected.

Rick Hasen — a professor of election law at the University of California Los Angeles — said the executive order is “pretty mild, given what could have been, but it’s still unconstitutional and not something that could really be implemented in time.”

Asked whether the U.S. Postal Service and Department of Homeland Security could realistically implement the changes in time for the November election, Hasen was blunt: “No way.” He added that if the administration attempted to move forward anyway, “courts would stop it.”

A spokesperson for the U.S. Postal Service, Jeffery Adams, reached by phone, did not immediately respond to questions about whether the agency would, or could, comply with the executive order. “We’re reviewing the executive order right now,” he said.

Even in the absence of immediate court intervention, Hasen warned the effort “is going to conflict with all kinds of state laws that provide for a late sending of mail-in ballots to newly eligible voters and to voters who simply put in a late request.”

More fundamentally, Hasen emphasized that the proposal misunderstands the constitutional structure of election administration. “The fundamental point is that the Constitution doesn’t give DHS any power over elections,” he said. “The power to run state elections rests with the states. The power to run federal elections rests with the states,” except where Congress chooses to act — and, he noted, “the president is not Congress.”

Small changes, big consequences for ballot design

To facilitate much of the tracking envisioned in Trump’s new order, it mandates that all mail ballots use official election envelopes with Postal Service intelligent mail barcodes, whose design would have to be approved by the Postal Service.

Tammy Patrick, chief programs officer at The Election Center, a nonprofit association of election officials, noted the order draws on a ballot-tracking barcode system she helped develop with the Postal Service. She said barcodes and official election mail logos are legitimate best practices — but that the executive order misapplies them without providing funding or a path to implementation.

The system was designed to help the Postal Service identify and prioritize ballots, not to serve as a universal mandate — and many local election offices lack the capacity to implement it, she said.

Patrick also said the proposal conflicts with state laws and voting timelines. “The vast majority of states” allow absentee ballot requests much closer to Election Day, in some cases as late as the “Monday before Tuesday elections,” meaning the changes could disenfranchise voters, including “conceivably tens of thousands” who move shortly before an election.

Patrick said ballot envelope design is “way more complicated than one would ever believe it to be.” Even small changes — like folding ballots for machine processing — can affect how they’re tabulated. She noted that resources to implement barcodes and automation vary widely across jurisdictions, and many states have strict legal requirements limiting changes.

“More than a third of our election offices don’t have a full-time employee. Some of our election offices don’t have a designated computer,” she said. Given those constraints, she believes it will be impossible for many offices to comply.

State election officials express alarm about the order

State election officials agreed that the order would upend the way they do their jobs and, were it to go into effect, would be extremely challenging to implement. Multiple state officials, including those in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Minnesota, Oregon, and Wisconsin, also signaled that they plan to sue.

Wisconsin Elections Commission chair Ann Jacobs, a Democrat, said she was most concerned by the requirement that states provide the Postal Service with a list of mail voters at least 60 days before an election, noting that Wisconsin law allows voters to request mail ballots far closer to Election Day. Jacobs said she was not reassured by the fact that the executive order allows states to suggest additions to the list. “What if the federal government says no? What happens to those voters?”

The executive order also holds that states violating it would forfeit their federal funding. It’s not clear if the order threatens to withhold just federal money designated for elections, or further federal funds beyond that. Jacobs said Wisconsin wasn’t counting on getting additional federal funds for elections but that it would be “rather extreme” for the state to lose additional federal funding.

The executive order also appears to authorize the U.S. attorney general to prosecute election officials who send ballots to ineligible voters, even unknowingly. Jacobs called that measure a “great way to make sure nobody wants to work in elections.”

Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, called the executive order “a disgusting overreach from the federal government.” He said it would upend the state’s voting, which is predominantly conducted by mail, and pledged to fight it in court.

“This move is nothing more than a push to weaponize the sensitive personal information of voters in this country, an effort my office will continue to fight unrelentingly,” he said in a statement.

Arizona’s mailed ballots also already have tracking barcodes on the outer envelope. Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, said the state’s existing vote-by-mail system has “been used safely and securely for decades” and accused Trump of “trying to control who gets to vote.”

“We will use every legal tool available to defend Arizona’s elections, Arizona’s voters, and Arizona’s constitutional right to run its own elections,” she said.

In Colorado, a state where nearly everyone votes by mail, Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, said elections officials are “already in conversations with our attorneys general.”

“We look forward to this unconstitutional overreach being stopped by the judiciary,” she said.

Other officials similarly expressed confidence that the order would not stand up in court.

“It’s just an empty threat,” said Scott McDonell, the clerk of Dane County, Wisconsin, adding that his attorneys had told him not to even worry about it.

“The courts will strike it down faster than a cheetah on meth,” he said.

Trump is still pushing other election law changes

Trump has tried passing his election agenda through legislative means, but so far he hasn’t had much success. Two bills that would require documented proof of citizenship to register to vote, the SAVE Act and the SAVE America Act, have passed the House but stalled in the Senate, where the filibuster rule effectively means legislation needs 60 votes to pass. The president has repeatedly called on Republican senators to eliminate the filibuster and pass the legislation, which he has said is his top priority, but they’ve so far been reluctant to do so.

Republicans have had a bit more luck changing election law in GOP-led states, multiple of which have passed proof-of-citizenship requirements and moved mail-ballot receipt deadlines up to Election Day.

But Trump, who has long railed against mail voting, has repeatedly signaled that piecemeal action would not be enough. He has previously posted on social media that he would “lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS” and said in February that “Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”

The executive order does not address other items from Trump’s elections wish list, but at the signing ceremony, Trump hinted he may not be done trying to change election policies. “We’d like to have voter ID, we’d like to have proof of citizenship,” he said. “That’ll be another subject for another time. We’re working on that.”

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

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

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

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

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Can you change your mind after you mail in your ballot? It depends.

2026-03-31T09:00:00+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.

When the U.S. Supreme Court last week took up the question of late-arriving mail ballots, the discussion turned to something more basic: when a vote becomes final.

Justice Neil Gorsuch raised a hypothetical — whether a voter who has already mailed a ballot could change their mind and have a postal carrier cancel their delivery after learning new information about a candidate, even after Election Day.

For Mississippi, the plaintiff in the case before the court, the answer was clear. The state’s Solicitor General Scott G. Stewart told the court that’s not possible there. Once a ballot is cast, it stays cast.

The justices also spent significant time on the broader question of finality — whether voters ever get a second chance, or at least a way to undo a vote made too soon.

In most states, they don’t, especially after a ballot has been received by election officials and tabulated.

“I’ve never heard of a state allowing you to, after Election Day, go in and cancel your vote,” said John Lindback, a fellow at the Institute for Responsive Government and former executive director of the Electronic Registration Information Center, a multistate coalition dedicated to cleaning voter rolls. Lindback and other election officials filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Supreme Court case arguing against the federal government regulating mail ballot deadlines.

Lindback similarly said he’d never heard of voters recalling their ballots through the mail after Election Day.

In most states, Lindback said, a ballot is considered final once it’s cast, including by mail, though he said all states have laws outlining how to replace ballots.

The USPS allows for package recall, but election officials told Votebeat that it’s highly unlikely that canceling ballots happens in any large quantity, especially after Election Day. Outside of this process, voters in a handful of states can void and replace a ballot they’ve already returned by mail through a process often called ballot spoiling — but only under limited conditions and within narrow timeframes before Election Day.

In Wisconsin, for example, the legality of spoiling a returned ballot has gone back and forth in the courts. The issue gained prominence in 2022, after several Democratic U.S. Senate candidates — for whom voters had already cast ballots — dropped out of the primary. Ultimately, those ballots were counted as they were cast unless voters spoiled them within the set deadline, canceling their vote altogether or casting a new one.

Days before the primary election, the Wisconsin Elections Commission issued guidance outlining the process for ballot spoiling, which required voters to contact their clerk about it at least two days ahead of Election Day. Courts then banned the practice in early October 2022, after the primary election but after clerks started sending out ballots for the general.

Most recently, an appeals court in February rejected the case that challenged the practice on procedural grounds, meaning ballot spoiling is once again allowed. Even so, the state requires mail ballots to be received by 8 p.m. on Election Day to be counted, placing a firm cutoff well before the scenario raised at the Supreme Court.

Michigan law more clearly defines the limits. Voters who return an absentee ballot by mail can request to spoil their absentee ballots by the second Friday before the election. Ballots that have already been tabulated can’t be spoiled.

Minnesota sets an even earlier deadline: Voters can ask to cancel their returned ballot until the close of business 19 days before Election Day.

Together, these laws point in the same direction. While some states allow voters to void and replace a mailed ballot, they do so only within narrow, pre-election windows and before ballots are processed or counted. None allows a voter to retrieve or cancel a ballot after Election Day, once it has been accepted by election officials.

In general, every voter can get a new ballot if a dog eats their old one or if they accidentally throw their ballot away, said Tammy Patrick, chief programs officer of the National Association of Election Officials. But across the board, she added, nobody gets to vote more than once, and nobody votes after the polls close.

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

Secretaries of state discuss how the Trump administration could impact the 2026 midterms

2026-03-30T09:00:00+00:00

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

Election administration isn’t what it used to be.

When Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon first took office in 2015, he used to have to explain to people what the duties of his office were.

Not anymore, he says, thanks in large part to President Donald Trump.

Simon, a Democrat, and former Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill, a Republican, joined Votebeat editor-in-chief Carrie Levine Wednesday to discuss the ways the Trump administration has been reshaping elections and what impact it could have on the 2026 midterms.

If you missed it, you can catch a rerun of it here, but one of the main takeaways was that, while ordinary citizens know a lot more about elections than they used to, the nuances of how they work — including the laws surrounding them, and the balance of priorities that running them well requires — aren’t at the forefront of the conversation as much as they should be.

“That’s the most important thing that has happened, is that the president has brought what many had considered a mundane, almost perfunctory task into light,” Merrill said.

Trump’s second term began much in the way his first term ended: with the president intent on reshaping electoral procedures to his liking. This time around, that’s taken the shape of his March 2025 executive order and his aggressive push to get Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which seeks to implement aspects of the executive order that courts have halted, like requiring registering voters to provide proof of citizenship.

Simon said Minnesota was one of a number of states that sued over the proof-of-citizenship requirement in the president’s executive order, and the states won by pointing out that — merits of the policy aside — the Constitution simply doesn’t give the president authority over elections.

“Our Founding Fathers delegated the authority for elections at the state level to our individual member states,” Merrill said. “That’s where it should remain.”

However, it may be that the White House understood the executive order was on shaky legal ground, Simon speculated, but is trying to test the limits of election law and the Constitution through these actions.

And the executive order is not the only way the administration is trying to involve itself in how states are administering elections. The Justice Department has sued 29 states, including Minnesota, for unredacted versions of their voter rolls, ostensibly to see if the states are properly complying with the Help America Vote Act, a 2002 law that overhauled voter registration and election administration.

Many states, like Minnesota, are arguing that privacy laws prevent them from handing over the records. So far, no court has ordered a state to turn over its voter rolls, although one state (Oklahoma) last week consented to handing over the data as part of a settlement agreement. Three of the cases have been dismissed, although appeals are working their way up the court system.

The day after the Votebeat event, CBS News also reported that Simon’s office had received a subpoena from the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security ordering it to turn over the records of more than 125 Minnesota voters.

But regardless of whether a proof-of-citizenship requirement is ultimately enacted or the Justice Department succeeds in its lawsuits, the federal government is already leaving its mark on how the 2026 midterm elections will be administered. States have followed Trump’s lead and passed their own proof of citizenship requirements (a new state, South Dakota, joined the rapidly growing list last week) and rolled back mail voting options. (Simon also noted that a lawsuit over the legality of mail ballots that arrive after Election Day, which the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in last Monday, shared a lot of DNA with Trump’s executive order.)

States are also girding themselves for other ways the Trump administration may try to interfere in elections in ways that go beyond lobbying for the president’s preferred policies. Simon said election officials are always preparing themselves for a myriad of possible disruptive scenarios that may never materialize — everything from bomb threats to weather events. Now, part of that list is federal agents showing up at voting locations, a scenario he said had a “nonzero chance” of happening.

“We’re gaming out what in our heads could that look like,” Simon said, adding that his office has been reviewing Minnesota laws regarding law enforcement at polling places and whether they apply to federal agents.

“We believe the answer is yes and we’re prepared to enforce that.”

He isn’t alone. Responding to those same concerns, New Mexico recently passed a law outright barring federal law enforcement from voting locations.

But, as Simon noted, election officials are having to thread a needle. How do they prepare for this possible interference, and inform the public, without being alarmist and discouraging them from voting?

“We want to call it out and name it and not avoid it but in the same breath tell people what the workarounds are,” he said.

In general, it’s a positive that as a result of Trump more people are paying attention to election administration issues, Merrill said. But what’s missing from that conversation is knowledge.

Merrill expressed frustration that some of the loudest voices weighing in on election administration issues have had no interaction with the electoral system other than as a voter.

“They’ve never worked in the polls and they’ve never been part of the process and understanding how it’s set up, how it’s broken down, what the individual procedures are.”

To fix that, people should contact their local officials and see the process for themselves, Merrill said. He’s found that, when people do that, they often see how well the system runs.

There’s certainly no lack of need for election workers, and perhaps if more people followed Merrill’s advice, there would be less friction in the wheels of democracy.

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

Despite the SAVE America Act stalling, Trump is reshaping election policy in many states

2026-03-30T09:00:00+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.

Presidents have no constitutional authority to oversee elections or dictate how they are run.

That hasn’t stopped President Donald Trump from a sweeping effort to reshape elections during his second term in office. Legislation on Trump’s election priorities has so far stalled in the U.S. Senate, and federal courts have for now blocked key provisions of an executive order on elections he signed last year.

But his efforts are affecting laws at the state level.

Since Trump resumed office last January, at least 10 states have passed legislation reflecting one or more of his preferred election policies, including Florida’s passage of a proof-of-citizenship registration requirement earlier this month. In total, at least one-third of state legislatures have seriously considered bills that align with, or seek to counter, Trump’s aggressive push to reshape the nation’s electoral system.

This all comes as Trump attempts to exercise his influence over elections in practically every way possible, from encouraging states to use a newly overhauled — but unreliable — federal database to identify noncitizens on voter rolls, to appointing officials who have repeatedly questioned election results or attempted to overturn them — not to mention his efforts to tip election outcomes in his party’s favor by pushing for partisan redistricting.

His influence is not without limits: No state has so far adopted his calls to nearly eliminate mail voting and passed a law to that effect.

Still, lawmakers in the states that have passed or advanced legislation aligned with the president’s preferred election policies have often cited him as the reason, or taken action following statements he’s made. In some cases, such as Texas’ midcycle redrawing of political maps, state lawmakers were responding to direct pressure from Trump.

“The process of spreading legislative ideas is one that always takes place in any administration, any political environment,” said Gideon Cohn-Postar, director of federal affairs at the nonpartisan Institute for Responsive Government and a historian of election law. “This one has been far more explicit.”

And to a lesser extent, some blue-state legislatures are aiming to counter Trump’s push into state election policy through, in one example, a new law that would block federal troops at voting locations.

Trump speaks, states follow

The president has sought to impose new documentary proof-of-citizenship requirements for registering to vote, end post-election grace periods for mail ballots and severely restrict their use, and redraw congressional maps. He’s often lobbied state officials directly, including at a gathering of governors last month, pushing election policy to the forefront of legislative agendas.

A Votebeat analysis of legislation found that since January 2025, when Trump took office for his second term, at least 13 states have advanced legislation out of at least one chamber that aligns with an election administration policy Trump has expressly demanded.

For example, in 2023, very few states introduced bills to require documentary proof of citizenship from voters, compared to nearly half in 2025, according to Chris Diaz, director of legislative tracking at the Voting Rights Lab, a nonprofit group that tracks all state legislation on voting and elections.

For years, Arizona for years was the only state that required documented proof of citizenship, though New Hampshire and Louisiana passed new requirements in 2024. But since the beginning of Trump’s second term, as he has relentlessly promoted concerns about potential noncitizen voting, Wyoming, South Dakota, and Utah passed a proof of citizenship requirement, and bills are currently headed to governors’ desks in Florida and Mississippi. Iowa’s legislature is also considering a similar bill.

Proponents of the bills have openly said they are acting to carry out the president’s wishes. Jenna Persons-Mulicka, a Republican state representative in Florida who sponsored the proof-of-citizenship bill there, said it “fully answers the president’s call” when she initially introduced it. Chuck Gray, Wyoming’s secretary of state, said in a statement that state’s measure was “key in supporting President Trump’s pivotal work to have proof of citizenship for registering to vote.”

And while states aren’t introducing as many mail voting-related bills compared to the 2021-2022 period, Diaz said the one area many states are still legislating on is accepting mail ballots postmarked by Election Day but received afterwards.

“I think you can really trace that and the rise in proof of citizenship legislation back to the president’s executive order last March,” he said.

During the 2024 election, 18 states and the District of Columbia allowed mail ballots to be counted if they arrived within a legal grace period and were postmarked by Election Day. The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in a case over the legality of that practice this week, but some states aren’t waiting for a ruling. Five Republican-controlled states have moved to eliminate their grace periods for late-arriving mail ballots, with four of those doing so after Trump directly called for its end in his March 2025 executive order.

In Ohio, one of the primary sponsors of a bill to end the state’s four-day grace period explicitly cited the executive order.

Presidential pressure on redistricting, voter rolls

In some cases, Trump, and his appointees in the federal government, have pressured state officials even more directly.

Last year, Trump pushed reportedly reluctant Texas Republicans into redrawing its congressional districts, setting off a midcycle redistricting war amongst the states, arguably Trump’s most profound influence on election policy. He tried the move again, unsuccessfully, in Indiana, calling out state legislators by name and promising to support primary opponents if lawmakers didn’t do as he wished.

Micah Beckwith, the Republican lieutenant governor of Indiana, also said unnamed members of Trump’s administration threatened the state’s federal funding if it didn’t redistrict.

And as tensions rose earlier this year over immigration enforcement in Minneapolis, Attorney General Pam Bondi suggested in a letter that the state should hand over its unredacted voter rolls to the U.S. Justice Department, which has sued for access to them. State officials said they perceived her letter as a demand made in exchange for potentially withdrawing ICE agents from the city.

Cohn-Postar, from the Institute for Responsive Government, said while it isn’t uncommon for presidents to push for federal election policy or even comment on state laws, as Biden did with a controversial election bill in Georgia in 2021, it is unusual for them to directly call on states to take specific action. But what sets Trump’s actions apart, he said, is the direct calls for change coming from the president and the speed at which states seem willing to change their laws in response.

Utah, for example, has had universal mail voting since 2012, meaning that counties could conduct their elections entirely by mail by sending all registered voters a mail ballot. By 2019, all counties in the state had adopted this system, and more than 80 percent of voters in 2024 were very or somewhat confident that their votes were being counted accurately. But last year, the state nevertheless opted to move to an opt-in mail voting system starting in 2029.

“These states have taken policy decisions that they might not have in another political environment,” Cohn-Postar said. “I think that’s not coming from inside the house. That’s coming from outside the house.”

Blue states push back

Meanwhile, a handful of states led by Democrats are taking steps explicitly aimed at preventing Trump from interfering with elections, as well as countering his redistricting push.

Trump’s calls to nationalize elections and the federal seizure of 2020 election records in Fulton County, Georgia, and Arizona, among other moves, have heightened concerns that Trump may try to interfere in the 2026 midterm elections, including by deploying federal troops or ICE agents to polling places.

While some members of his administration have said it won’t happen, Sen. Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat from Michigan, asked Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin the question during his confirmation hearing last week, and he did not absolutely rule out the possibility. Steve Bannon, who was an adviser to Trump during his first term in office, has said the recent deployments of ICE to airports could be used as a “test run … to really perfect ICE’s involvement in the 2026 midterm elections.”

In anticipation, some states are considering steps to strengthen restrictions on federal law enforcement at voting locations, including New Mexico, which in February passed a bill making it a felony for federal troops or armed law enforcement to be at polls.

Democratic attorneys general are also coordinating on what possible actions they could take should Trump attempt to interfere in the midterms.

Last month, Colorado went a step further, becoming the ninth state — and first in Trump’s second term — to pass its own version of the Voting Rights Act, in part as a reaction to concerns that the federal statute faces threats from the current administration.

Changes could prompt voter confusion

A risk of all this new legislation, and the potential litigation that could follow, is that it confuses voters.

“They hear that this law gets passed and then signed by their governors, and then it gets challenged, and then there’s a temporary restraining order,” said Jessica Jones Capparell, director of government affairs at the League of Women Voters, which has sued over Trump’s executive order.

“And so they have to figure out what’s going on, what they have to bring with them when they go to vote, what do they need to do to register, update their voter registration.”

The biggest question is what happens in the few months before the November election, Diaz, from the Voting Rights Lab, said. Legislative sessions are still underway in some states, and he pointed to Florida as a potential barometer for where laws on election administration might go in the months and years ahead.

“These next few weeks especially will be really important to watch what happens,” he said. “Their legislative session is probably gonna wrap up pretty soon, and I think that will sort of be a big sign of how serious are legislators taking this as a policy goal versus a talking point. I think if Florida did enact a proof-of-citizenship bill this year, I think that could be something that really sets a tone for other states to start doing it.”

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

37 disputed ballots in Hamtramck election should be counted, court rules, potentially leading to new mayor

2026-03-27T19:01:47+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.

In the latest twist in the dramatic and contested election for Hamtramck mayor, the Michigan Court of Appeals has ruled that 37 disputed ballots should be counted, potentially reversing the outcome of the election almost three months into the new mayor’s term.

Adam Alharbi narrowly won the November 2025 election for mayor of the small Detroit suburb by just 11 votes and has been serving as the city’s mayor since January. He beat Muhith Mahmood, a former council member, in the nonpartisan race.

But Alharbi’s win was anything but straightforward. Three days after the election, 37 uncounted absentee ballots were discovered, opened but still in their envelopes, in the city clerk’s office. The clerk delivered the ballots to the county, but it was later revealed that unauthorized city officials had entered the clerk’s office while the ballots were there — in part because of a punching bag with Mahmood’s face on it. This broke the ballots’ chain of custody, raising questions about whether they should be counted.

The Wayne County Board of Canvassers deadlocked on whether to count the ballots, leaving the election results as they stood without the ballots’ inclusion. Mahmood sued over that decision on behalf of himself and the 37 disenfranchised voters, whose identities remain unknown.

A lower court ruled in December that the board of canvassers was within its rights to exclude the ballots. But in a 2-1 decision Friday, Court of Appeals judges said that excluding the ballots “effectively denied 37 voters their fundamental right to vote” under the state constitution and that, under state law, “mistakes made by election officials must not result in the rejection of a ballot cast by an eligible voter.”

The decision compared the Hamtramck incident to a 1989 case known as Gracey v. Grosse Pointe Farms Clerk, in which a candidate’s wife illegally delivered other people’s absentee ballots to the clerk’s office. In that case, as in Hamtramck, the ballots’ chain of custody was broken, but there was no evidence that the ballots were tampered with. Accordingly, a court at the time ruled that a “timely cast absentee voter ballot is not to be invalidated solely because the delivery to the clerk was not in compliance.”

By the Gracey standard, the Court of Appeals said, the ballots should have been treated as challenged but still counted.

“We find that plaintiff and the 37 voters who cast their ballots had a clear legal right to have them appropriately considered under the Michigan Election Law,” reads the opinion, signed by judges Stephen Borrello and Randy Wallace.

The judges sent the case back to the trial court with instructions to consider its opinion in a new decision.

From left, Wayne County Director of Elections, Greg Mahar, Toni Sellars, Lisa Capatina, Richard Preuss and Edward Keelean in a meeting on Fri., Nov. 14, 2025 in Detroit, Michigan.

“This is a victory not only for the 37 Hamtramck voters but for all voters who have the right to have their ballots counted and cannot have that right taken away by the mistakes of election officials,” Mark Brewer, Mahmood’s attorney, said in an email.

But the new decision now throws the entire mayoral election back into doubt. It was not immediately clear when the 37 ballots will be counted and what would happen if they put Mahmood ahead in the revised count. Members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

This may not be the last word on the case, either. Alharbi told Votebeat on Friday that the city would be filing for a stay and would appeal the decision to the Michigan Supreme Court. (The Supreme Court was asked to rule on the case during the initial appeal but sent it back to the Court of Appeals.)

The Court of Appeals “obviously made the wrong decision, because they’re compromised ballots,” Alharbi said. “They were open and they lack a chain of custody.”

He and the city don’t feel that the 37 ballots in question “are valid votes,” he continued.

Asked how he felt about his victory potentially being overturned, Alharbi said that he doesn’t think the ballots will ultimately be counted.

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

2026 Wisconsin Supreme Court race pivotal for future election policy

2026-03-26T20:52:00+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 under two weeks, voters will head to the polls to select a new Wisconsin Supreme Court justice. The winner will likely play a role in how voters cast ballots for the subsequent decade.

That’s because the Wisconsin Supreme Court plays a key role in settling voting disputes, particularly when state government is divided between a Democratic governor and a Republican-controlled Legislature.

In the past few years, the court has issued a series of high-stakes rulings on election administration — banning and then unbanning ballot drop boxes, ordering new legislative maps, limiting who can bring voting-related lawsuits, and allowing the state’s top election official to remain in her role.

While the Wisconsin Supreme Court race is officially nonpartisan, candidates have become increasingly willing to embrace partisan views and often campaign on their records as liberals or conservatives. In this race, Appeals Court judges Maria Lazar and Chris Taylor are squaring off. Taylor is a former Democratic member in the state Assembly, while Lazar is a member of the conservative Federalist Society.

Although there are exceptions, justices’ votes on election cases often align with their ideological backgrounds.

Unlike the past two Wisconsin Supreme Court races, though, this contest won’t determine ideological control of the court. Liberals already hold a 4-3 majority, and the outcome will either preserve the liberal majority or expand it to 5-2 by replacing retiring conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley. As a result, the race has drawn significantly less attention and spending than the last two contests, which decided the court’s ideological balance.

Even so, the winning candidate in their upcoming 10-year term is likely to weigh in on a range of voting battles currently playing out in lower courts. Those may include cases over whether voters with disabilities can cast electronic ballots, the legality of Wisconsin’s membership in the multistate Electronic Registration Information Center, a demand for the Wisconsin Elections Commission to audit the citizenship of registered voters, and whether voters can spoil a ballot that they’ve already returned and cast a new one.

Critically, the winning justice will also be a member of the court for the 2028 presidential election, when voting disputes often intensify and escalate to court challenges.

“There’s a lot of importance just because of the length of the term,” said UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden, who noted that the Wisconsin Supreme Court in the past 10 years has weighed in on absentee voting rules, the legality of postponing elections because of the pandemic and President Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Because Wisconsin is a consistent battleground state, Burden said, the court becomes a frequent venue for efforts to change election rules for national races. Some of those potential lawsuits may be hard to predict, he added, because developments in technology and AI in campaigns over the next decade may require new rules or changes to current laws.

Although liberals have a firm hold on the court now, Burden said, they shouldn’t take that for granted. Ten years ago, conservatives had a clear court majority, so much so that liberals didn’t even field a candidate in the 2017 race. Now, liberals have a hold on the court and could extend it with a win.

With Wisconsin politics frequently switching from one side of the aisle to the other, he said, this election may be pivotal for the balance of power down the road.

Candidates’ pasts reveal stark contrast on elections

The candidates’ records — from their rulings, prior public-facing jobs, and campaign positions — reveal sharp divides in how they each approach election law.

For example, as an assistant attorney general for the state under GOP Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen, Lazar defended Wisconsin’s voter ID law and Republican-drawn legislative maps, which critics have described as among the most gerrymandered in the country.

Taylor took the opposite stances on both issues. During her time in the legislature, she called for repealing the voter ID law, which has since been enshrined in the Wisconsin Constitution. She also derided the Republican redistricting effort as a means to do “whatever it takes to amass and protect their power.”

More recently, Lazar was involved in an unusual case in which two state appeals courts issued conflicting opinions on the same election issue: In November 2023, one court found that a conservative group wasn’t entitled to obtain information related to people deemed by judges to be incapable of voting. The next month, Lazar joined the majority in a second court that reached the opposite conclusion — despite a Wisconsin Supreme Court precedent stating that only the high court can overturn appellate decisions.

That case is now before the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Both candidates have also played pivotal roles in more recent elections rulings.

In one case involving absentee ballots, Taylor wrote the majority opinion rejecting the Legislature’s argument that an absentee voter’s address must include a street number, name, and municipality. Instead, she adopted a more lenient standard for an address, requiring voters to provide enough information for a clerk to reasonably identify where a voter lives.

In a separate case, Lazar joined a panel rejecting a lower court opinion that voters with disabilities should be allowed to have electronic ballots sent to them electronically.

Cases on the Wisconsin Supreme Court horizon

Only a small fraction of cases heard in circuit and appeals courts ultimately come before the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The high court issued just 23 opinions in its 2024-25 term, and it’s hard to predict which cases will be taken up. At present, only one election law case is currently before the court.

That number may remain low following a 2025 Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling restricting who can file lawsuits over election rules and policies. Writing for the majority, liberal Justice Jill Karofsky said people must be personally “aggrieved” to bring election lawsuits.

In dissent, outgoing conservative justice Bradley wrote that the majority’s ruling “guts the People’s right of access to the courts in election law matters.”

Among the issues likely to reach the court in coming years are challenges to the state’s congressional boundaries, which liberals are trying to redraw ahead of the typical 10-year cycle. One such case is currently slated for a jury trial before a three-judge panel in April 2027.

The court could also be asked to decide whether election officials can be sued for failing to count votes, a central issue in the ongoing lawsuit over whether Madison should be forced to pay out millions for disenfranchising nearly 200 voters whose ballots were misplaced in the 2024 presidential election .

Ultimately, the most consequential case the next justice could face may come in 2028, the next presidential election year. In 2020, the Wisconsin Supreme Court narrowly halted Trump’s attempt to throw out enough Democratic votes to change the outcome of the race. The 2024 election wasn’t extensively litigated in Wisconsin courts, but the potential for court challenges remains in future presidential contests.

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