The Wisconsin Elections Commission on Thursday ordered an investigation into Green Bay’s city clerk for accidentally sending some voters more than one absentee ballot during April’s spring election and for the upcoming August primary. 

During the spring election, duplicate absentee ballots were issued to at least 152 Green Bay voters. While the complaint about the first incident was pending, the clerk’s office mistakenly sent 244 extra ballots. 

Commissioners were very critical of the clerk, Celestine Jeffreys, for the repeated errors.  Democratic Commissioner Ann Jacobs said it was “unconscionable” that the same mistake could be made in consecutive elections. 

“I am really concerned that, first of all, it happened once, but then for the exact same error to happen a second time weeks later is unconscionable,” Jacobs said. “And we need, I think, as an organization, to investigate exactly what was going on in Green Bay, so we know how this error happened, other than just saying, ‘Well, somebody printed them twice.’ Well, yes, duh, but we need to know why they were able to print it twice, why this wasn’t caught, why it is that they mailed out 300 more ballots, apparently, give or take.” 

A complaint about the duplicate spring ballots was made by the Republican Party of Wisconsin. In its own analysis, the commission’s staff found probable cause that the clerk’s office had violated state election law by sending the duplicate ballots and recommended that the commission order her to “conform her conduct to the law and put procedures in place to prevent issuing duplicate ballots.” The commission decided to investigate the cause of the problem first before taking further action. 

The repeated mistakes were made as the election administration of Wisconsin’s largest cities, including Green Bay, has been under intense scrutiny since the emergence of Republican complaints about the 2020 election. 

Green Bay was one of the main targets of Republican complaints of “Zuckerbucks” — grants to support election administration costs during the COVID-19 pandemic from a nonprofit supported by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg that largely went to Democratic-voting cities. The city was also pulled into a drawn-out legal battle stemming from the actions of Republican officials and a local election conspiracy theorist following the 2020 election. 

During Thursday’s meeting, commissioners noted that the state’s WisVote system has safeguards to prevent this exact error, but that Green Bay used a different process. Wisconsin’s election system gives local election clerks a lot of discretion to decide how elections will be managed. 

“If a municipality is using the WisVote system to print the stickers that go on the outgoing envelopes to voters containing their ballots, if you use that system, you cannot do a duplicate generation of those stickers,” Jacobs said. “You can’t do it. We put in a failsafe, and that failsafe is there specifically to prevent this from happening. And I want everyone to know that that system works and has worked and does work. Where this has happened more than once is where communities have elected to not use the WisVote system to generate their own stickers.” 

Election betting 

The commission on Thursday also discussed a state law that makes it illegal to gamble on the results of a Wisconsin election and vote in that election. The issue has become increasingly relevant due to the rise of prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket. 

Earlier this year, Jacobs warned on social media that betting on an election could result in people losing their right to vote — though there remained questions of how the law could be enforced. 

Commission staff said that the law would be enforced similarly to other rules about voter eligibility, which largely rely on complaints being made to the commission by witnesses. 

“Many voters may not know that they risk making themselves ineligible to vote in Wisconsin if they place a bet on a prediction market for an election-dependent outcome, such as which candidate will win the nomination or the office sought at an election,” WEC attorney Angela O’Brien Sharpe said, noting a gambling voter could be charged with a felony. “If someone has cause to believe that a voter has placed a bet, that would be solved by the same type of challenge as the other voter qualifications. The challenger would initiate the qualification challenge process the same as they would for any qualification issue, the voter would then be asked under oath if they had made any bet or wager depending on the result of the election, and that process would follow the very specific steps that are outlined in our administrative code for how to administer those types of challenges.”

A multifaith group of clergy gathered at the state Capitol  Tuesday to call for protecting voting rights and ensuring all votes are  counted.

“Our theology teaches us and tells us that God created all of us in God’s image,” said Rev. David Hart, pastor of Sherman United Methodist Church in Madison, at a press conference on the Capitol steps, adding that all people  “have this voice that deserves to be heard in the public square.”

The event Tuesday was one of three across Wisconsin, organizers said, and one of 15 similar actions held in nine states.

“We have seen the attacks on our election process,” said Rev. Breanna Illéné, director of Ecumenical Innovation and Justice Initiatives at the Wisconsin Council of Churches. “We are here today to celebrate our local poll workers, the city and county clerks who administer elections here in Wisconsin” — who she added, “are helping make our democracy function.”

The event took place as worries have grown about the possibility that President Donald Trump could deploy armed federal agents to polling places, and as Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers joined other governors in demanding that the Trump administration immediately withdraw a rule restricting the mailing of absentee ballots in states, including Wisconsin, that have refused to turn over sensitive voter data to the federal government.

On Election Day in November, clergy will show up at local polling places as poll chaplains — “a peaceful presence” to ensure voters’ rights are protected, and to bring “calm to the site,” Illéné said in an interview. “They are just another layer of trust that we hope to add to the election process.”

Rev. Christopher Ross of First Congregational United Church of Christ in Watertown cited biblical readings that support an egalitarian view of society, and with it, democratic participation.

Early Christians built a community that they viewed as “an alternative to the ways of empire,” Ross said. Alluding to attempts to make voting harder, however, he added, “But not everyone these days seems to want such a community.”

Other leaders pointed to democracy as a key tenet of their faiths.

“Jewish tradition teaches us that the process of choosing leaders is not a privilege but a collective responsibility,” said Rabbi Jonathan Prosnit of Temple Beth El in Madison.

“It comes down to a core yet simple belief. Democracy is strongest when every vote is counted,” Prosnit said. “Democracy suffers when voters are suppressed.”

For Unitarian Universalists, democracy is “a religious imperative” said Rev. Kelly Asprooth-Jackson, a UU minister. “It’s one of our core values and principles that people who are affected by decisions must be involved in the making of those decisions.”

Raising barriers to voting and reducing the power of some people’s votes “diminishes all of us because it diminishes the practice of democracy upon which all of us depend for our most fundamental rights,” Asprooth-Jackson said.

The participants also promoted a national letter, drawn up and sponsored by Faith in Us, a national multifaith group, opposing federal and state actions organizers say threaten voting rights. The letter calls on elected officials to safeguard voting rights and assure access to the ballot box for all voters.

It also criticizes President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting voting by mail — which a federal judge blocked late last month — and expresses outrage at redistricting actions that produced “rapid gerrymandering of racially discriminatory election maps in many states” after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down key key provisions in the Voting Rights Act.

In a 5-2 decision, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that an activist group does not have the right to obtain the documents that notify election officials when someone is declared incompetent to vote by a circuit court judge. 

The group, Wisconsin Voter Alliance, has been extremely active in the state’s election denial circles since the 2020 presidential election. The organization is run by Ron Heuer, a prominent and vocal 2020 election conspiracy theorist, and Erick Kaardal, an attorney who was heavily involved in former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman’s widely discredited review of the 2020 presidential election. 

Kaardal’s involvement in the Gableman review included conducting videotaped interviews with residents of nursing homes alleged to have voted despite being old that were criticized at the time as exploitative and misleading about the law. 

Following that thread from the Gableman investigation, in 2022 the alliance filed open records requests in a number of counties seeking the notice of voting eligibility forms that circuit courts send to local and state election officials when a judge declares a person incompetent and ineligible to vote. The group then sued to force the release of those documents. 

The statute guiding declarations of incompetency and the process through which a person declared incompetent can lose their voting rights includes a provision that states court records “pertinent to the finding of incompetency” are closed. 

In the majority opinion written by Justice Janet Protasiewicz and joined by the other three liberal justices plus conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn, the Court ruled that the NVE form is created as part of a guardianship case, therefore it’s pertinent to the finding of incompetency and shielded from public disclosure. 

Protasiewicz wrote that the Legislature crafted the guardianship law specifically to prevent information about people who have been declared incompetent from being made public — so it doesn’t make sense to interpret that law in a way that exposes those people’s status and private information. Additionally, the law specifically requires that someone must prove they have a legitimate “need” to find out if a person has been declared incompetent.

“The legislature created a procedure with ‘closed’ hearings and ‘closed’ records,” she wrote. “That provision would ring hollow if the fruits of those proceedings, like NVE forms, were available through public records requests. Even more revealing, a person who demonstrates ‘a need’ may access ‘[t]he fact that an individual has been found incompetent.’ Thus, the Legislature contemplated that even the fact that a person was found incompetent should be protected. We will not interpret the preceding sentence of [the statute] to allow any public records requester access to a form that gives away that very fact.” 

In a dissent, Justice Annette Ziegler, joined by Justice Rebecca Bradley, argued that because a judge determines if someone under guardianship must lose their vote separately from the initial declaration of incompetency and because the information gets communicated to election officials, the NVE is not “pertinent” to the incompetency finding and the public must be given access. 

“Even when an individual is found to be incompetent, a court may or may not be called upon to determine if the ward is ‘incapable of understanding the objective of the elective process,’” Ziegler wrote. “If and when such a determination is separately found, then NVEs are created to notify the WEC that the ward has lost the right to vote. But, the NVEs do not bear on the court’s separate, earlier finding of incompetency. And, as the NVE does not exist at the time of the incompetency finding, it could not be a court record pertinent to the finding of incompetency. Instead, an NVE is generated only after the incompetency finding is made and in response to the separate question of the right to vote.” 

Both Ziegler and Bradley have often sided with Wisconsin’s election deniers — including voting in late 2020 to overturn the results of Wisconsin’s presidential election after former President Joe Biden won in the state over  President Donald Trump. In the dissent, Ziegler echoed frequent right-wing talking points about “the integrity of the election process” and wrote that members of the public have the right to interrogate if their fellow citizens are eligible to vote. 

“The public records law declares that ‘a representative government is dependent upon an informed electorate’ and that the public is entitled to the ‘greatest possible information regarding the affairs of government,’” she wrote. “That policy carries particular force here, where the records at issue bear directly on everyone’s voting rights and its administration. Undoubtedly, the public has a significant interest in ensuring that only those legally qualified to vote participate in elections. Improper ballots not only raise concerns of individual exploitation but also implicate the integrity of the electoral process as a whole.”

Following the decision, voting rights advocates celebrated the majority’s decision to protect voter privacy. 

“Like all Wisconsinites, individuals under guardianship deserve dignity and respect,” Law Forward Legal Fellow Taylor Gilbertson said in a statement. “It should go without saying that any effort to reveal their private voting records would risk a profound injustice. The Court was right to protect them.”

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Sensitive information about individuals who are judged mentally incapable of voting in Wisconsin is not accessible through the state’s public records laws, according to a 5-2 Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling released Tuesday. 

Justice Brian Hagedorn, a frequent swing vote on the court, joined the liberal justices in the majority, which determined that state law shows the Legislature intended to keep Notices of Voting Eligibility closed from public access. The notices are documents the courts send to election officials after a judge concludes a person is found mentally incompetent to cast a ballot. 

“Our decision today is rooted in the legislature’s choice to protect the privacy of individuals subject to guardianship proceedings,” Justice Janet Protasiewicz wrote for the majority. “The legislature said, with limited exceptions, ‘court records pertinent to the finding of incompetency are closed.’” 

In the same opinion, the majority provided specifics on what the court should consider when someone seeks to compel a public official to release public records, which is known as a “writ of mandamus.” The majority determined that the court “should consider only whether the requester has a right to the records,” which can be done through analyzing whether records exist, if there are statutory exceptions and if “the public policy balancing test weighs toward disclosure.” 

Bill Lueders, the president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, said the court’s decision on mandamus actions “discarded an outdated standard for public records cases and reduced barriers to winning these cases in the future.”   

Conservative justices Annette Ziegler and Rebecca Bradley dissented. In her dissent, Ziegler argued that the Notice of Voting Eligibility forms should be released because they are not relevant to incompetency proceedings and are created as “a communication of a finding” after that decision is made.

“The majority’s conclusion fails to recognize this important distinction: A finding of incompetency is distinct from a finding that one has lost the right to vote,” Ziegler wrote. “Instead, it adopts an overbroad and unworkable definition of what records pertain to a finding of incompetency to include NVEs. Holding that NVEs are shielded from the public records law runs counter to the statute’s language, scheme and the presumption of open government.” 

The case was originally brought in 2022 by the conservative Wisconsin Voter Alliance. The group filed lawsuits in 13 counties, arguing that having access to information about individuals who have been judged incompetent to vote would show inconsistencies in the state’s voter rolls. The alliance is led by Ron Heuer, who worked on the state’s partisan review of the 2020 presidential election results conducted by former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman. Heuer did not return phone calls or emails from Wisconsin Watch on Tuesday.

At the request of Wisconsin Watch, the Dane County clerk in 2023 conducted a review that  found 95 individuals who previously cast ballots despite a court finding them unable to do so. Election officials and state lawmakers have previously called for a legally binding process to track adjudicated incompetent voters, but no bill in recent years has made it through the legislative process. 

Disability advocates previously advocated for the information in Notice of Voting Eligibility forms to be kept private over concerns it could make vulnerable individuals more at risk of being scammed or exploited. 

Tuesday’s ruling is part of a complicated legal saga stemming from cases from Wisconsin Voter Alliance cases that have made their way through the state’s court system in recent years.

In 2024, the Madison-based 4th District Court of Appeals and the Waukesha-based 2nd District Court of Appeals issued conflicting opinions on separate but similar cases brought by the alliance. 

Appeals Court Judge Maria Lazar, who ran for the Wisconsin Supreme Court earlier this year, wrote the 2nd District opinion that supported the Wisconsin Voter Alliance’s position on access to the records. That opinion was released after the 4th District decision was published as precedent, but was revised after the Wisconsin Supreme Court issued a ruling in January 2025.  

The high court in that 2025 decision only ruled on the differing Appeals Court opinions but did not reach a decision on whether Notices of Voting Eligibility are public records until Tuesday.

The case also became an attack point in this year’s Wisconsin Supreme Court race. Justice-elect Chris Taylor in a debate before the April election pointed to Lazar’s Appeals Court opinion on access to sensitive records as evidence to claim that Lazar “brought an extreme right-wing political agenda to the bench.”

Wisconsin Supreme Court rejects 2020 election investigator’s attempt to get voting eligibility records is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

President Donald Trump was speaking to supporters at a Pennsylvania rally June 23 when he made an extraordinary admission about an election a continent away.

Trump and his allies had spent several days in June savaging California over its slow vote counting and baselessly alleging its contests were fraudulent. But now the president divulged that his actions went beyond just public criticism.

“I called up the very powerful, very good U.S. attorney in California and I said, ‘Do me a favor, take a look, they’re trying to steal that election, too,’” Trump recounted. 

Over the past six months, the Trump administration has focused the power of federal law enforcement — and even a top U.S. intelligence official  — on elections and discredited grievances over the president’s 2020 loss. 

In January, the FBI raided an elections facility in Fulton County, Georgia, seizing hundreds of boxes of 2020 ballots. FBI agents are probing the 2020 election in Milwaukee and subpoenas have gone out to officials in Arizona. The Department of Justice demanded to see Detroit-area ballots and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence confirmed it took voting machines from Puerto Rico. The FBI searched the offices of an Ohio voting rights group in June.

Democrats, election experts, former federal prosecutors and others say the administration’s actions raise deep concerns about whether the White House will use groundless investigations to disrupt the November midterm elections. They say Trump’s recent acknowledgment that he personally directed a federal prosecutor to examine voting in California only underscores their fears.

“The notion that a president or anybody in the White House calls up the U.S. attorney’s office, certainly on our end, would have been considered, I think, completely inappropriate,” said Stephen McAllister, who served as the U.S. attorney in Kansas during the first Trump administration.

Shattering a norm

After Watergate, the Department of Justice built a reputation for independence from the White House. While presidents nominated DOJ leaders and set broad priorities for the department, they were expected to steer clear of specific investigations. The norm was tested during the first Trump term but didn’t entirely break. 

By contrast, the second term has shattered it, creating a clear path for the president to act on his false claims of stolen elections, according to individuals who have worked in the Justice Department and critics of the Trump administration. Growing evidence, they say, points to Trump personally intervening in federal law enforcement action on elections — or top officials getting the message and acting accordingly.

“I think the focus and the direction is whatever the president wants, and I think this is wrong,” McAllister, now a law professor at the University of Kansas, said of the current Justice Department. 

“The DOJ, especially post-Watergate, there were a lot of things done to try to strengthen it as an institution that could stand up and protect, defend the rule of law,” he said. “And this administration has torn so much of it down.”

The California election shows how quickly the Justice Department can take action after Trump makes his views known.

California’s primary election was Tuesday, June 2, but election officials are allowed to take roughly a month to complete vote counting. The lengthy process is a product of the state’s large population, as well as its reliance on voting by mail. 

While politicians, including Democrats, have called on the state to speed up its count, the sometimes plodding process isn’t evidence of fraud.

Late the night after the primary, Trump posted on Truth Social that Democrats were trying to steal the election. “Here we go with the very late and massive numbers of MAIL IN BALLOTS,” he wrote.

It isn’t clear which U.S. attorney received the call from Trump or when exactly he placed the call or if it actually occurred. California is divided into multiple federal judicial districts, each with their own top federal prosecutor. 

Asked about the call, the White House referred States Newsroom to Trump’s comments and the Justice Department, which didn’t respond to questions.

By the Friday morning after the election, First Assistant U.S Attorney Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, announced that his office had multiple election fraud investigations underway with the FBI. He also dispatched a prosecutor to observe vote counting.

In the days that followed, Essayli gave several interviews with conservative media, including an appearance on commentator Glenn Beck’s show where he predicted criminal cases. “I expect people will be charged,” he said.

After Trump’s comments in Pennsylvania, the office of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat who frequently clashes with Trump, posted on social media that Trump had “just admitted it.”

“The President of the United States is personally directing federal prosecutors to start investigations into his political opponents when his preferred candidate may lose the election,” the post said.

DOJ pursuing 30 lawsuits on voter rolls

Ahead of the midterms, Trump and other administration officials have shown a high level of interest in how elections are administered. 

Last week, the president refused to sign a bipartisan housing bill to pressure the Senate to pass the SAVE America Act, which would implement a nationwide requirement that voters show documents proving their citizenship. In March, he signed an executive order attempting to restrict voting by mail, which a federal judge blocked last week.

The Justice Department has filed 30 lawsuits against states that have refused to turn over their unredacted voter rolls, which include sensitive personal information like driver’s license and Social Security numbers. 

The Department of Homeland Security also overhauled a powerful computer program into a system that can search voter rolls for possible noncitizen voters (a judge recently halted use of the reconfigured system).

“President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement when asked about Trump’s approach to election-related investigations.

Jackson named several federal laws — including the Civil Rights Act, National Voting Rights Act and Help America Vote Act — that she said give the Justice Department “full authority to ensure states comply with federal election laws, which mandate accurate state voter rolls.”

“This campaign pledge from the President is why millions of Americans sent him back to the White House,” Jackson said, noting Trump’s support of the SAVE America Act.

Within the Justice Department, criminal investigations involving elections have traditionally been treated with particular sensitivity, McAllister said. 

Anything touching on elections needed to be coordinated with the Justice Department in Washington, D.C., he said, adding that there was a lot of centralized control to prevent U.S. attorneys “from just poking around where they shouldn’t be.”

The Justice Department has previously published a manual on prosecuting election crimes on its website, but at some point it was removed without explanation. In June, a group of Democratic senators voiced concern its disappearance could presage attempts to interfere in the midterms. They noted that during Trump’s first term the manual was accompanied by a memo outlining the DOJ’s election non-interference policy.

Robert Weiner, who served in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division during the Biden administration, said the government used to enjoy what the legal community calls the presumption of regularity — the belief among judges that it was acting lawfully. He said courts should not extend that presumption now.

Trump may be trying to impair the ability of local election officials to conduct fair elections and “generally create chaos” that could serve as an excuse to seize voting machines and not accept legitimate election results, Weiner said.

“I am very worried,” said Weiner, who is now the director of the Voting Rights Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, an advocacy group. “I think we have to act on the assumption that bad things are going to happen. That’s not saying that they will. We have to be prepared and able to counter.”

US Senate Dems form task force

Some Democratic states — including California, Colorado, Connecticut and others — have passed new limits on federal election interference. At the federal level, Senate Democrats have formed an election protection task force and announced plans to train their staff members as election observers.

“The president of the United States is clearly laying the groundwork to try to interfere with the midterms and try to undermine confidence in any election results that he is not happy about,” Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat, told reporters.

Voting rights advocates fear the FBI’s raid on a Fulton County election facility in January offered a window into what it might look like for federal law enforcement to seize ballots after the November election.

While Trump has long promoted false allegations about voter fraud in Fulton County, which includes Atlanta, the raid shocked election experts in part because the FBI obtained a search warrant, meaning a federal judge found probable cause to believe evidence of federal crimes would be found at the election facility.

Fulton County officials vocally condemned the raid and successfully sued to unseal the affidavit used to support the warrant. The 19-page document included previously investigated claims about the 2020 elections and revealed the investigation originated from a referral by Kurt Olsen, an election denier who Trump last fall made a special government employee to look into the 2020 election. 

Trump appears to have taken a personal interest in the Fulton County raid. Tulsi Gabbard, then the director of national intelligence, was photographed at the scene and later told Congress she was present at Trump’s request. The New York Times reported that she put the president on the phone with FBI agents the next day.

Gabbard left her role in June, but Trump has indicated he wants the new acting director of national intelligence, Bill Pulte, to also look into elections. The director of intelligence, a Cabinet-level position established in the wake of 9/11, is supposed to help lead the U.S. intelligence community and has no formal role in elections.

Pulte, who has no previous intelligence experience and previously led the Federal Housing Finance Agency, is known for antagonizing the president’s perceived opponents, including the former Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell and New York Democratic Attorney General Letitia James.

“He may find out some things about the rigged elections,” Trump told reporters in early June.

Marisa Pyle, senior democracy defense manager at All Voting is Local Georgia, praised Fulton County officials for aggressively pushing back against the raid. 

She said that while she is concerned the search could create a chilling effect among voters and election workers, she has been heartened that it had also motivated some people to sign up to work the polls.

While no one has a crystal ball, Pyle said, she expressed hope that Fulton County’s rejection of federal interference will minimize future attempts.

“I think that’s optimistic,” Pyle said. “I think we prepare as best as we can and we just have to be ready to defend the results.”

A federal judge on Thursday blocked major portions of President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting voting by mail, finding he had exceeded his constitutional authority.

The decision halts, at least until a nearly certain appeal is heard, efforts by the U.S. Postal Service to require states to submit the names of likely mail voters before it delivers ballots. It also stops the U.S. Department of Homeland Security from compiling lists of voting-age citizens in each state.

U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, an appointee of President Barack Obama in Massachusetts, is the first judge to block the March 31 executive order. State and local election officials have raised concerns that its requirements would inject chaos into preparations for the November midterm elections.

Talwani ruled that Trump had asserted too much control over elections in several parts of the order as he directed federal officials to quickly take actions that he argues are needed to prevent noncitizen voting, which rarely occurs.

“The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections,” Talwani wrote.

Order overpowered states

The executive order directed Postmaster General David Steiner to put forward a rule requiring states, at least 90 days before a federal election, notify the Postal Service whether they intended to allow ballots to be sent through the mail. States would then have to submit to USPS a list of voters planning to vote by mail at least 60 days before the election.

Talwani wrote that the Postal Service lacks any authorization by Congress to put forward binding regulations on mail-in voting. The Constitution, she wrote, “reserves the power to determine voter eligibility to the States alone.” 

The executive order also required the Department of Homeland Security, with help from the Social Security Administration, to compile a list of voting-age U.S. citizens living in each state and then provide that information to state officials at least 60 days before each federal election. The order does not tell states how to use the data.

The list of citizens would be drawn from naturalization and Social Security records, according to the order. It would also include data from SAVE, a powerful computer program maintained by Homeland Security that verifies citizenship by checking names against information in federal databases. 

The executive order pointed to no relevant constitutional or legal authority supporting the compilation of the citizenship lists, Talwani wrote. Trump “lacks any authority to compile voter lists for each State,” she wrote.

A day before the decision, Steiner told a U.S. Senate committee that a proposed Postal Service rule to implement the executive order would lead to non-delivery of ballots in states that don’t provide lists of anticipated mail voters — a position condemned by Democrats.

“Today’s decision is a very significant victory for free and fair elections and a defeat for Donald Trump’s vile efforts to make it harder for people to vote,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, said in a statement.

“Once again, the courts have reaffirmed that Trump’s efforts to subvert the election are patently unconstitutional.”

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement that the Trump administration remains confident the executive order will be implemented by the November election.

“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,” Jackson said.

Latest setback

Trump has suffered a series of setbacks in recent days in his efforts to influence the administration of state-run elections. 

A federal appeals court on Wednesday ruled that the Department of Justice wasn’t entitled to state voter rolls. Senators also continues to rebuff the president’s attempts to pressure them into passing the SAVE America Act, which would require voters to show documents proving their citizenship.

Talwani’s decision came in a lawsuit brought by Democratic state attorneys general. It is the second major district court ruling over the executive order, after a judge in Washington, D.C., declined to stop the order because the Trump administration hadn’t taken enough action to implement it.

Under Thursday’s decision, federal officials must notify their employees within a week that sweeping portions of the executive order are void.

And on Monday, a judge blocked the use of SAVE to search for noncitizen voters.

Recent polling from the Democracy Defense Project found that three out of every 10 Wisconsin voters aren’t confident this year’s elections will be conducted accurately. 

U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, the presumptive Republican nominee for governor, has often been a vocal election conspiracy theorist — including voting against the certification of the 2020 presidential election on Jan. 6, 2021 and appearing at events with people who insist that election was stolen. 

Republicans in control of Congress have spent months debating bills to add restrictions to voting while President Donald Trump has signed  executive orders demanding states turn over voter data, sent FBI agents to Democratic cities across the country — including Milwaukee — to investigate the 2020 election and uses the bully pulpit of the White House to rehash the debunked theories that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him and that Democrats are unfairly winning elections because large numbers of immigrants who are ineligible to vote are illegally casting ballots. 

Since Trump’s return to office last year, fears that he will send armed federal agents to polling places have percolated across the country. 

With less than 50 days until Wisconsin’s primaries for governor, congressional and state legislative seat and four months until the Nov. 3 midterm election, the past six years of Republican efforts to reduce faith in the country’s election systems have created a whirlwind of headlines, social media rumors, court rulings and fearmongering.

All of that is set to collide this summer with Wisconsin’s actual election administration system — which involves thousands of clerks, volunteers and state officials managing the polls, counting ballots and certifying the results. 

Ann Jacobs, a Democrat on the Wisconsin Elections Commission, said that getting too worked up about the potential risks can turn people off from voting, even if they wouldn’t have been affected. 

“There’s a lot we can prepare for, and scaring people in advance of the election is the worst thing we can do, because we don’t need to depress our own turnout,” she said.

TR Edwards, staff counsel at the voting rights focused firm Law Forward, told the Wisconsin Examiner that people’s fears often don’t exactly match with what happens on the ground. 

“A lot of it is just fear-based and not necessarily rooted in what’s possible, but that being said, I am understanding of that,” he said. “I recognize why people are concerned, and I do think, particularly with some of the actions the administration has taken over the last six months, that they have every right to be concerned. I just don’t know if the level of concern matches either the level of preparation or the reality on the ground.” 

Edwards said that he and Law Forward are focused on three areas ahead of the elections: the threat of the federal government seizing 2020 election ballots, building trust between election clerks and local law enforcement and working to prevent Trump’s election-related executive orders from taking effect. 

Ballot seizures

The FBI over the last year has been re-investigating long debunked claims of fraud in the 2020 election. Agents have already seized ballots and documents in Fulton County, Georgia and Maricopa County, Arizona. They’ve also been conducting interviews in the Milwaukee area, raising worries that ballots there will also be seized. 

In Milwaukee County, nearly 180,000 absentee ballots from the 2020 election have yet to be destroyed because of ongoing efforts from election deniers to obtain the ballots through the state’s open records law. 

Under normal Wisconsin election law, ballots and other election materials are destroyed 22 months after an election is held. But because of the ongoing litigation, the county’s ballots still exist. 

State officials have raised concerns that the federal government could seize those ballots, revealing how thousands of Milwaukee residents voted up and down the ballot in 2020. 

Don Millis, a Republican member of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, told WISN’s UpFront on Sunday that the ballots need to be destroyed as soon as possible. 

“Those ballots should have been destroyed. No one’s entitled to see those,” he said. “Our Constitution was built on the idea of a secret ballot, and I’m just frustrated that this hasn’t happened. I just wish the decision makers who are in charge of this would see that and move more quickly.”

But the discussion of the 2020 ballots has raised fears that the administration will attempt to do the same with this year’s ballots. 

Jacobs told the Examiner there isn’t much an individual voter can do if that’s what happens — but that local elections officials and voting rights advocates are preparing for the possibility and planning to head off any attempts in the courts. 

“I am thoughtful and cautious about how I talk about things that might affect an election, right, and in part it’s because there’s only certain things we can or cannot affect going into an election,” she said. “You know, ‘Donald Trump’s going to come in and steal all our ballots.’ Well, there’s absolutely nothing a voter can do about that if that’s in fact what’s going to happen, right? An individual voter has nothing they can do about that, so I don’t want them to not vote, thinking that that’s going to happen with me, and so I’m concerned that there’s a certain amount of fearmongering around what might or might not happen in a fall election.” 

She added that with proper planning — having court documents pre-written, knowing which local judge will be on duty to hear a case right away — challenges to these kinds of actions can be made “in minutes instead of hours.” 

Cops and feds 

Edwards pointed to Riverside County, California, where the local sheriff — a Republican candidate for governor — seized ballots and opened an investigation into the state’s recent primary election, as an example of the risk posed by law enforcement intrusion into elections. In Wisconsin, Racine County Sheriff Christopher Schmaling has often been at the center of the state’s election skeptic circles. 

Edwards said that the goal this summer is to build trust between cops, outside groups and local clerks ahead of the election so everyone knows what the law says and where it’s appropriate for law enforcement officers, local, state or federal, to be. 

“We are less concerned about law enforcement being present, as long as they are in compliance with applicable law,” Edwards said. “But I am more concerned with ensuring that voters can cast ballots free from intimidation. Our goal is to make sure clerks and voters understand their rights and that any conduct that violates state or federal law, or could reasonably be viewed as voter intimidation, is identified and addressed appropriately.”

If law enforcement is entering areas of polling places that they shouldn’t be, the remedy would be filing lawsuits to get a judge to remove them. 

Jacobs said this threat again comes down to planning. 

“Certainly I can contemplate the possibility that a goal would be to go into a minority community and essentially stand around with guns and try to intimidate voters,” she said. “Unfortunately, our nation has a history of that, and it wouldn’t be the first time that has happened. That said, we can also plan ahead for that. … if that is something where a person is like, ‘Boy, if that happens, I would be really scared to go to a voting place.’ That person should be encouraged to vote absentee, right?”

In addition to voting by mail, voters can cast absentee ballots in person at drop boxes or at their local clerk’s office.

Executive Orders 

Trump has signed executive orders that aim to require additional proof of citizenship to register to vote, restrict absentee ballot use and more tightly manage how the U.S. Postal Service handles absentee ballots. All of the orders have been hung up in the federal court system. 

At a Senate hearing Wednesday, U.S. Postmaster General David Steiner said that under his agency’s proposed rule, the post office won’t deliver mail-in absentee ballots in states, including Wisconsin, that have refused to comply with Trump’s order to turn over voter data to the federal government.

Since Trump returned to office, his administration has been working to obtain voter registration lists in a number of states, including Wisconsin. So far, the state elections commission has resisted these efforts, arguing the administration is trying to gain access to personal voter data that can’t be released. 

Jacobs said that the executive orders and any proposed rules from the USPS are going to be challenged in the court and are unlikely to be in effect by the fall election. 

Edwards said that Law Forward has filed amicus briefs in the lawsuits against the orders and is working to help overworked local election officials digest information about potential changes. 

“There’s no way [clerks] can keep up with the velocity of everything that’s going on, so we’ve been trying to do what we can to partner with people to help make sure they have all the information they need,” he said.

Seven candidates vying to become governor addressed a large audience in Pewaukee Monday night at a forum organized by WISDOM, a non-partisan organization dedicated to social justice and prison reform. Moderated by James Causey and Mary Spicuzza of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the question and answer session covered policing and incarceration, healthcare, immigration and other issues.  

Republican frontrunner U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany did not attend. Andy Manske, a 26-year-old medical service technician who is running a longshot Republican campaign for governor  joined Democrats Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, Sen. Kelda Roys (D-Madison), Rep. Francesca Hong (D-Madison), former Department of Administration chief Joel Brennan, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley and former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes. 

Below are each candidate’s answers to a handful of key questions from the moderators. 

How would you reduce incarceration while improving public safety?

Manske answered the question by drawing on his personal relationships with people who struggled with addiction and incarceration. He said  he believes that people need not only a path out of prison, but support so they can become healthy and productive citizens. This is especially true for people leaving jail or prison and people living on the street without housing, he said. He added that he supports building a location in Madison where the best professionals could gather “and those who want help can get that help.” 

Roys said she favors following evidence-based practices and expanding treatment and diversions.  “This is not rocket science,” she said, adding that it’s possible to reduce the number of people Wisconsin incarcerates while also saving money and human lives. Addiction and mental health should be treated as medical issues, not with incarceration, Roys said. She connected these medical struggles to her proposal to open up the state employee health insurance plan to all Wisconsinites to get the same health insurance that she enjoys as a state employee. Roys also endorsed ending crimeless revocation, which has increased Wisconsin’s prison and jail population by reincarcerating nonviolent offenders for minor violations of their conditions of release and implementing restorative justice practices.

“Everybody in our state deserves to live a life of dignity, including people who are incarcerated right now,” said Hong. She said that the overcrowded conditions in prisons across the state — especially for incarcerated women — are “abhorrent.” Hong said that some communities are creating local programs the state should support and fund, including  efforts to provide affordable housing, community centers and  mental health resources. “For too long our local governments have been starved of resources due to Robin Vos and the Republicans freezing and not funding our local governments,” said Hong. Many of the problems communities face could be best addressed through increased state support for local organizations that are already doing the work on the ground, she said. 

Brennan said that about one-third of all state employees work for the Department of Corrections, making it the largest state agency. “We have about three times as many people incarcerated in Wisconsin as they do in the state of Minnesota,” Brennan said,  adding that Wisconsin’s  neighboring state spends $100 per capita less than Wisconsin on incarceration. He suggested that  the state could make a profound positive impact by investing  $600 million “on the front-end,” dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline by increasing prevention and education and providing opportunities for job training and re-integration for people leaving prison.  

Crowley said one of his  first jobs after high school was working at Project: Return with formerly incarcerated people, helping them find housing. Under his leadership, Milwaukee County has taken on responsibility for running the Community Re-Intergration Center, formerly called the House of Corrections. He said that government’s focus needs to be directed at “how we invest upstream” to address the root causes of crime. Supporting mental health care, continuing the commutation process started by Evers, decriminalizing cannabis, creating a pathway for expungements and expanding drug courts are among the measures he said he supports. 

Barnes highlighted lack of opportunity as a contributor to Wisconsin’s high incarceration rate. He said he  has known people who’ve made bad decisions because they felt the consequences of their actions were no worse than their living conditions. “That’s something we need to reckon with,” said Barnes. “Right now, we’re doing things totally wrong. We’re spending so much money and the cost is not just in dollars and cents, the cost is in lives.” During his time as a state lawmaker, Barnes visited many prisons around the state and was the ranking Democrat  on the Legislature’s  Corrections Committee. He recalled talking to a boy who’d spent time in Lincoln Hills who said that when he was released, “that he knew for a fact that he was going back in because he did not know what else to do.” Barnes said that people need to be rehabilitated and provided opportunity, not just warehoused. 

Rodriguez connected Wisconsin’s incarceration rate to its “shameful” record of failing to invest in public health. “And so what ends up happening is that people do not get the services that they need,” she said. When she chaired the governor’s healthcare workforce task force, she said, she learned that Wisconsin could double the number of therapists it provides “and it would still not be enough.” She stressed the disproportionate rates of  incarceration of of Black and brown Wisconsinites despite similar rates of drug use and addiction. Like Brennan, Rodriguez pointed to Minnesota’s record reducing incarceration without triggering an increase in crime. Rodriguez said that Wisconsin could look at how other states have tackled the issue. “I am not about re-inventing the wheel,” she said, adding that Wisconsin needs to adopt the best practices from other states.

How would you use the pardon and clemency powers as governor? 

Roys stressed that community safety is “the most important aspect” of decisions about releasing people from prison. Gov. Tony Evers  should have used his power to reduce prison sentences and pardon Wisconsinites  “much more” aggressively. She also said that the governor has significant power to shape how the Department of Corrections operates, and to help provide meaningful pathways to reintegration of incarcerated people. Yet the state continues to incarcerate people who have served such long sentences they have grown old and have aged out of crime. “I actually think that we have a constitutional problem here in Wisconsin,” said Roys. “How long you go away depends on when you committed the crime and when you were sentenced.” The power to pardon should be used “because justice is not always served,” she added. 

Hong also said that the governor should wield executive power more assertively . The conditions of Wisconsin’s prisons could be considered “a state of emergency,” Hong said. “There are executive orders that should have been placed during the Evers administration that I was disappointed not to see happen,” she said. She felt Evers could have been more responsive to  families, formerly incarcerated people, and advocates who are “organizing and demanding justice,” adding that those folks deserve a place at the table when discussing pardons and clemency powers. “It should be the folks who are closest to the problem who are closest to the power,” she said. By listening to these voices, she suggested, Wisconsin can move away from being among the  states with the highest Black incarceration rates and  where women’s prisons are desperately overcrowded. “This is about dignity,” she said. 

Brennan said that Evers’ was dedicated to using his pardon powers to right wrongs. “The pardon process was one where he was emotionally invested in the stories,” Brennan said. He promised to continue that commitment. He expressed optimism that the end of Republican gerrymandering will help create a state where justice and vengeance are not blended together. “We have had a generation in Wisconsin that in some ways we have lost because of that confusion,” he said, adding that pardon and clemency powers need to be used judiciously and that the governor cannot rely solely on those powers to achieve criminal justice reform.

Crowley promoted the idea that anyone and everyone should be able to apply to get their record expunged once they’ve served their time. Pardons need to be reviewed on a case-by-case basis, especially since everyone’s situation is different, he said. He highlighted that his former deputy chief of staff was a four-time felon. “Yes, I hired a four-time felon,“ he said, adding that one of the charges was for child abuse. But what that charge obscures, he said, is that his employee was convicted of child abuse after getting into a fight as an 18-year-old with someone who was 17. “And even though the victim said ‘this is not what we want to do to his life,’ the judge still threw the book at him.” This is why every case needs to be reviewed carefully, and that assumptions should be avoided, Crowley said.

Barnes said that politically polarized positions on pardons and clemency have contributed to problems in Wisconsin. He reiterated that people who find themselves on the wrong side of the law have been blocked from opportunity, which led them to prison in the first place. Non-violent offenders and people suffering from mental illness or addiction and other unique situations are all treated the same under the current system, which needs to change, he said. 

Rodriguez said that she would continue the pardon, commutations and clemency process Evers began. Each case should be viewed individually, she said, but  public safety has to be the first consideration, followed by justice, fairness in sentencing, and finally a demonstrated commitment to integrate back into the community. Rodriguez and Crowley both said  that cannabis needs to be legalized and that convictions based on outdated laws, including cannabis convictions, need to be expunged. 

Manske agreed that cannabis should be legalized “with rules and guidelines,” and cannabis convictions should be expunged. He added that the justice system should treat the powerful no differently than those who are not wealthy or well connected.

How would you make immigrant communities feel safe and reduce labor shortages?

Hong said that no one should have to live in fear in their own communities and described the pain of immigrant workers who are afraid of being arrested by federal agents if they show up for their jobs. Ensuring that people know their rights is important, she said, so they can fight back against wage theft and workplace maltreatment, while also navigating life under the threat of deportation. 

Brennan said he recently toured a Manitowoc foundry where the CEO spoke to employees in Spanish and discussed a recent chilling of the labor market. “For the first time in many months, he found no Spanish speakers at all,” said Brennan. The federal immigration crackdown has harmed the dairy industry and agriculture generally as well as manufacturing and the service industries in Wisconsin, he said. Brennan described it as a joint responsibility to ensure Wisconsin is the state “we thought we were.” He said that means making sure that state resources are not being used for immigration enforcement, ending agreements between local law enforcement and immigration enforcement, and creating a welcoming state where people are treated with respect and can contribute their cultures. 

Crowley said he has been dealing with the federal immigration crackdown directly in Milwaukee, adding that his county has the state’s largest Latino and Muslim populations statewide. Both the state and local governments and the community itself need to step up to protect neighbors, he said. Milwaukee County has created an online resource hub for immigrants and concerned  residents. Crowley stated his position that local law enforcement should not become a tool of a federal immigration agenda. 

Barnes said that Wisconsin grew because people, including immigrants, chose to move here. Being able to access the middle class has become more difficult over time, causing people to point fingers at each other and to blame immigrants, he said. He called scapegoating immigrants unfair, describing immigrant workers as essential to the state’s economy. Fundamentally, Barnes said, there is a broken immigration system that needs to be fixed at the federal level.

Rodriguez recalled when her young child first asked her if Donald Trump won, and whether the president would send  his father — a naturalized citizen — back to Mexico. “And it broke my heart that that man’s words had gotten into my child’s head,” she said. She added that her husband now walks around with his passport card after Trump was elected for a second time. “We have to make sure that immigrants feel safe in Wisconsin,” she said.

Manske said he doesn’t like seeing immigration enforcement going into communities and hurting people. He said two classes of “oligarchic Republicans and corporate Democrats” look at immigrants almost as a “slave caste.” Manske said that it’s heartbreaking that immigrants are facing threats and repression. He added that he wants to see a working legal immigration system, but that communities shouldn’t be lied to and told “they’re safe when they’re not safe.” 

Roys said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) needs to be abolished, a position she has articulated over the last  decade. “I foresaw how it could be used as a paramilitary force,” said Roys. America can have secure borders, a functional immigration system and public safety “without dehumanizing people,” she added. “What is happening now is an abomination,” she said. She highlighted her record of supporting legislation to limit or prohibit state and local cooperation with ICE, and to allow ICE agents to be sued and prosecuted for breaking laws. Roys also added that  she supports raising the minimum wage, providing universal childcare, and providing driver’s license for immigrants as ways to support workers. 

All of the candidates were asked specifically whether they support 287(g) agreements between local law enforcement and ICE. They all said they would not support the agreements except for Manske, who is skeptical that state law can trump federal law in this circumstance. 

What would you do to significantly reduce childhood lead poisoning?

Crowley said he believes the discussion of lead poisoning  plays into the political divide in Wisconsin. “We don’t just talk about clean drinking water,” he said. “We pit lead laterals against PFAS contamination in rural communities … when what we need to be focusing on is “how do we just talk about getting people access to clean water?” He said he wants to  empower the Department of Natural Resources to hold polluters accountable, and work to overcome the daunting barriers to replacing lead laterals across the state, a task challenged by a lack of plumbers and tradespeople trained to do the replacements. 

Barnes said that, although federal funds to address lead are drying up, the state still has a responsibility and an opportunity to step in. He described going into communities and talking to people who got good, union-paying jobs to replace lead laterals, and how the loss of those jobs is another serious problem. Barnes said that besides lead pipes, the state also needs to hold landlords accountable for having lead paint on their properties. 

Rodriguez also pointed to cuts and changes at the federal level, which have frustrated efforts to replace lead laterals. She feels instead of relying on the federal government, neighboring states should collaborate to tackle the lead crisis. 

As a  Republican, Manske said, he doesn’t mind the idea of spending money on issues like this. He doesn’t want Wisconsin communities to deal with a water crisis like Flint Michigan, which seems to never end. Manske said he doesn’t like hearing about people being sick and not being able to pay for the bill. “At the end of the day, whatever it takes,” he said, stressing that investing in people is important. 

Roys said that corporate money in politics is the reason clean water isn’t coming out of every tap in the state. She recounted working to hold corporate polluters accountable for curbing disparities in infant mortality rates, which have environmental components. On the Joint Finance Committee, she fought for funding to clean up water contaminates. “We need to restore environmental law and order in the state,” she said, adding that science needs to be put back “in the driver seats at the DNR.” 

“Delete existing tax exemptions for data centers and the additional subsidies,” said Hong, keeping her remarks brief and pointed. The $2.1 billion the state could recoup from data centers, could be put back into infrastructure to address issues like the lead crisis, she said. 

Brennan said the state could use a clean water loan fund at the local level, and could view the cleanup effort as an opportunity to create good paying jobs. Brennan recalled visiting a woman who lived in a rural PFAS-contaminated community and asking her what she wanted out of state government. Her community had been dependent on bottled water for the last five years. She turned on her tap and told him “I want to be able to use this to cook, to brush my teeth.” Brennan said, “it’s our responsibility to do better.”

What is something you disagree with your party or its leadership on?

Barnes said that “we have to tax the wealthiest in our society” and restore opportunity. The reason people can’t access the middle class is because so much wealth has been concentrated in the hands of just a few people, he said. Allowing money to influence politics has allowed the wealthiest people to control who is elected, “not the voters, not the people.” Barnes said that Democrats need to “reject this level of corporate influence,” hold the wealthiest accountable, and stop profiting from systems that oppress people.

Rodriguez said that people are forced to choose unnecessarily between moderate and progressive Democrats. In reality, there is a lot of agreement across the board, she said. She added that there’s an illusion of difference among Democrats who share the same principles but differ on the right  methods to achieve the same ends. 

Manske said that other Republicans see him as an “enigma.” He believes the government should spend money to help people, he supports a high-speed train from Milwaukee to Green Bay, “if the money would allow it.” He  also supports legalizing cannabis, and is pro-choice even though he is religious. Manske feels that people are unable to afford the families they may want. “The conditions need to change. People choose life if they have hope,”  he said. 

Roys said Wisconsinites value independent thinkers, which is why she’s well suited to take on Tom Tiffany, whom she called a “rubber stamp” for Trump. She’s gone against her party even when it hurt her, she said. “I was one of the first candidates in the country to say that I’m not going to fund my campaigns with corporate money, back in 2011,” said Roys. “You can’t tell me how many rooms I was laughed out of.” She said she believes in public financing, and pushed for fair maps when other Democrats wanted to draw maps that favored themselves. Roys also said she supported bills to put more nurses in rural communities, despite multiple vetoes from Evers. She has also pushed for ending mass incarceration, despite other Democrats not being as enthusiastic, she said. 

Hong said she disagrees with some of the political strategies favored by the Democratic Party. Working class people, especially in rural communities, feel left behind, she said, and the party has a problem with “elitism.” Independents and moderate Republicans should not be seen by Democrats as more important voters than working class people, she said. She pointed to farmers who’ve been crushed by tariffs and big agriculture. Young voters also need to be valued, and issues like childcare and mass incarceration need to be taken seriously, she said. “I think I disagree with who we have been prioritizing, and I think we have an opportunity to course-correct,” she said.

Brennan said he disagreed with Evers on the provision of  Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill that offered a $1,700 tax credit for contributions to school choice programs. Evers said he wouldn’t let Wisconsin opt into the tax credit, but Brennan said taking the money was better than sending it elsewhere. The money, he said, could send a kid to camp at Discovery World — which Brennan led — or could support kids who need opportunities. Brennan added that he believes that every dollar that can be used to support kids in Wisconsin should be used. 

Crowley said that the Democrats are playing “the part of reaction.” All the party has done for the last 12 years is react to what the Republicans and Trump are doing, he said. Doing this allows Trump and the Republicans to “define us, for us,” he argued. No one wins a game if they’re only playing defense, he said. Crowley recalled when Trump said that private equity firms shouldn’t be buying single family homes, something he agrees with and that Democrats had fought for years to achieve. Democrats have forgotten how to be proactive and how to sell a vision of what they want for their communities, he said. 

The Democratic primary will be held on August 11, followed by the general election for governor on Nov. 3. 

This article has been edited to correct that Rep. Francesca Hong referred to $2.1 billion in tax exemptions and subsidies for data centers, not $2.1 million. 

American teens are driving less than in previous decades, prompting civic advocates to warn that fewer young people may register to vote.

Yet at least one state — New Hampshire — offers insight into how civic groups can work around a lack of registration opportunities to ensure young people can register, as well as the challenges that remain.

Since Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act in 1993, nearly all states must allow residents to register to vote at motor vehicle offices. But fewer teens are obtaining driver’s licenses today, translating into fewer trips to the local Department of Motor Vehicles and more missed chances to register.

More than 7.5 million people ages 16 to 18 don’t have a driver’s license, according to data compiled by The Civics Center, a nonpartisan group focused on boosting youth voter registration. Three million of those youth will be old enough to vote this year and all will be eligible by 2028, the organization said in a June research report on how declines in teen driving, spurred in part by the rising cost of obtaining a license, could affect voting.

Young people represent a large pool of potential voters for candidates ahead of the midterm elections this November and the presidential election in 2028. Still, voting advocates worry barriers to registration will keep many of them from the polls.

“Our goal is to help people debunk these myths that it’s somehow young people’s fault that these systems aren’t working well for them,” said Laura Brill, founder and CEO of The Civics Center.

Low registration rates

In recent years about 60% of 18-year-olds have held driver’s licenses, according to the Federal Highway Administration. By contrast, in 1994, the year after the National Voter Registration Act was passed, about 74% had licenses.

Even without declining visits to the DMV, registration rates among the youngest voters are low. During midterm election years, the percentage of 18-year-olds registered to vote typically remains under 30%, according to The Civics Center, compared to about 75% of Americans 45 and older. 

Some civic groups are pushing for more in-person voter registration drives, including in high schools, which may help offset the effects of fewer trips to the DMV. Without significant action, they fear registration rates will dip even lower. 

The League of Women Voters announced a partnership with The Civics Center in April to promote high school voter registration. The groups are offering state-specific training and toolkits to help members of the League, which has hundreds of chapters across the country, help students, teachers and school administrators hold registration drives.

They also want states to provide teens more time to register before they can vote. About half of teens currently live in states that allow voter pre-registration at 16 or earlier, according to The Civics Center. 

These states include California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, Virginia and Washington.

“Young people have a very short window of opportunity,” said Jeanette Senecal, chief of civic learning and impact at the League of Women Voters. “So when we increase that window of opportunity to allow for preregistration at 16 and 17, there’s a much longer kind of runway in order for us to get them registered to vote for that first election.”

The focus on voter registration drives reflects, in part, an acknowledgement that online voter registration isn’t a panacea for fewer in-person DMV visits. Thirty-six states either offer no online voter registration option or allow voter registration only with a driver’s license or state-issued identification, according to information compiled by The Civics Center.

“Paper forms, typically you only need a Social Security number and not a driver’s license. That’s one of the reasons that in-person efforts can be so effective,” Brill said.

SAVE America Act

Voter registration drives are under threat, however. President Donald Trump’s signature election legislation, the SAVE America Act, would effectively prohibit drives held by third-party organizations like the League of Women Voters because it would require individuals to present documents proving their citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, to government officials in person to register to vote. 

The bill has stalled in the U.S. Senate amid opposition from Democrats and a handful of Republican senators. Trump is still urging lawmakers to pass the measure and posted on social media recently that he opposes unrelated foreign surveillance legislation unless it also includes the SAVE America Act.

As of late 2024, 24 states and the District of Columbia placed no restrictions on third-party voter registration drives, according to the Movement Advancement Project, a Colorado-based think tank. An additional 24 states impose some limits, while Wyoming and New Hampshire prohibit them.

What worked in New Hampshire

Because of its voter laws in the early 1990s, New Hampshire is one of six states exempt from the National Voter Registration Act, or NVRA, along with Idaho, Minnesota, North Dakota, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. The exemption means New Hampshire isn’t required to offer voter registration at motor vehicle offices.

In New Hampshire, everyone — teens and older adults alike — registers in person with election officials and can also register at the polls on Election Day.

Open Democracy, a New Hampshire voting rights group, has spent several years working to improve the registration rate among 18-year-olds. 

The organization hired an employee focused on high school voter registration and held 41 high school voter registration drives in 2024, said Olivia Zink, the group’s executive director. To hold the drives, it had to assure election officials were present to accept paperwork.

In December 2023, an election off year, just 9% of New Hampshire 18-year-olds were registered. After the November 2024 election, nearly 64% of 18-year-olds were registered, according to data compiled by The Civics Center. Zink acknowledged that the presidential election was a major motivator, but she emphasized the importance of registering students every year. 

State laws can play a major role. Registrations plummeted last year, Zink said, after state lawmakers removed the ability of residents to sign an affidavit as proof of citizenship. She attributed the drop to students not regularly carrying their birth certificates or other documents proving citizenship with them.

“Even with education and posters that are hung up at school and announcements and letters home to parents — we still saw so many fewer students register to vote in 2025 due to that law,” Zink said.

In May, a federal judge blocked the New Hampshire law after a coalition of voting rights groups, including Open Democracy, challenged the measure. 

As part of her decision, Judge Samantha Elliott, a Biden appointee, found that Open Democracy registered fewer students in 2025 compared to 2023, even though the organization at that time didn’t have a full-time staff member dedicated to high school registration.

 Zink said that even in the first few weeks since the judge’s decision, she had heard of high school students once again registering by signing affidavits. 

Despite persistent barriers, Senecal cast the work of registering young people as critical. Each time someone votes, they’re more likely to vote again, she said.

“So the earlier we can engage those people, we really help create these lifetime habits of voting,” Senecal said.

U.S. Senate Democrats introduced legislation on Thursday to require Congress to sign off on any deployment of federal troops to the polls, as President Donald Trump and his administration refuse to rule out the idea.

Fears of troops or other federal agents at voting sites have long loomed over the approaching midterm elections in November. Democrats and voting rights advocates have grown alarmed in recent months as Trump has publicly entertained the possibility. Other administration officials have mocked or sidestepped questions about possible deployments.

The legislation, the Protect Our Polls Act, would require Congress to pass a resolution approving any deployment beforehand. Federal law prohibits troops and other armed federal personnel from polling places, but contains an exception to “repel armed enemies of the United States” — fueling speculation that Trump could invoke this exception to bypass the ban.

“He is trying to nationalize the elections and he is telling us in his own words what he is trying to do,” Sen. Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat, said at a news conference at the Capitol. “On top of that, Trump’s nominees for his Cabinet positions have come up here and refused to rule out uniformed military or federal law enforcement being sent to the polls on Election Day.”

White House justification

The bill would require the White House, 48 hours before any deployment, to provide Congress with intelligence, legal justifications, deployment plans and evidence that state and local officials are unable to address the threat themselves. 

It also prohibits military personnel from using federal funds to access election records, a provision designed to block troops from seizing ballots.

Slotkin is offering the bill alongside Sens. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, Ruben Gallego and Mark Kelly of Arizona, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Alex Padilla of California, Jacky Rosen of Nevada and Raphael Warnock of Georgia.

“One of the things I’m very proud of is that I served to protect the Constitution of the United States and our democracy,” said Gallego, a Marine veteran. “I swore that oath, and the last thing any Marine, sailor, Army, Coastie, Air Force, spacemen — whatever they call them nowadays — wants to do is to undermine that. We’re here to protect democracy, we’re not here to undermine democracy.”

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement that if Democrats “really cared about securing our elections,” the party would pass the SAVE America Act. 

The legislation would require voters to provide documents, such as a birth certificate or passport, proving their citizenship. The measure has stalled in the Senate amid opposition from Democrats and a handful of Republicans.

In May, Trump told reporters that he would “do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections,” in response to questions about sending National Guard personnel or federal immigration agents to voting locations in November.

Amendments blocked

At a Senate hearing in April, Slotkin pressed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on sending troops to the polls. He called the questions “another gotcha hypothetical.”

The Democratic legislation comes a week after Slotkin said Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee blocked two amendments to ban troops at the polls during work on the National Defense Authorization Act. The committee typically works on the defense spending bill behind closed doors.

The Protect Our Polls Act has virtually no chance of passing the Republican-controlled Congress. Still, its introduction underscores the level of concern among Democrats as Trump’s efforts to influence the midterm elections come into focus.

The Department of Justice has spent a year demanding states turn over unredacted copies of their voter rolls, including sensitive personal data on voters. DOJ officials have said in court that the department wants to share the data with the Department of Homeland Security, which operates a powerful computer program that can identify possible noncitizen voters. 

The DOJ has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia for the data, but no judge has so far ruled in the administration’s favor.

Investigations

The Department of Justice is also engaged in several election-related investigations over past elections. 

The FBI raided a Georgia elections warehouse in January and seized ballots from the 2020 election. Election officials have been subpoenaed in Minneapolis and the FBI last week searched the office of an Ohio voting rights group.

And Trump signed an executive order that restricts voting by mail. It would require states to provide lists of voters to the U.S. Postal Service before using the mail to send ballots and directs Homeland Security to share lists of voting-age citizens with every state. The order remains in effect for now, despite a series of lawsuits challenging it.

“There’s a common theme here,” Padilla said at a Democratic forum on election security on Tuesday. “All of these things are illegal and many unconstitutional.”

The Trump administration U.S. Justice Department has no authority at all to demand Wisconsin voter records that it has sought in federal court, the Wisconsin Justice Department said in federal court papers filed Thursday.

In addition, Attorney General Josh Kaul and assistant AG Charlotte Gibson wrote, the federal government has shown no evidence to justify assertions that a flood of ineligible voters could receive absentee ballots to vote in the coming August primary election and November general election.

Representing officials with the Wisconsin Elections Commission, the Wisconsin DOJ filed a five-page response Thursday with the 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, opposing the U.S. DOJ demand for Wisconsin’s unredacted voter list.

U.S. District Judge James Peterson dismissed the Trump administration’s lawsuit seeking the list May 21. The U.S. DOJ appealed the dismissal more than three weeks later with the 7 th Circuit on June 12, and the appeals court directed Wisconsin to file its response by Thursday.

In his dismissal ruling, Peterson declared that the unredacted voter list the DOJ has demanded isn’t a record the federal justice department can demand under the Civil Rights Act of 1960. The list contains voters’ personal information including birthdays, Social Security numbers and driver’s license details.

The Trump administration filing  asked for “an expedited appeal” in order “to investigate Wisconsin’s compliance with federal law regarding voter registration under the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and the Help America Vote Act (HAVA).”

Wisconsin’s reply Thursday said Congress hasn’t granted the U.S. DOJ the power to “regulate Wisconsin’s voter list” under either the NVRA or HAVA. The feds have no regulatory authority under those two laws, the Wisconsin reply states.

Moreover, where Wisconsin is concerned, “US DOJ has even less to say: Wisconsin is exempt from NVRA’s list maintenance provisions because Wisconsin has offered same-day voter registration since 1994,” the Wisconsin response states.

In its appeal, the U.S. DOJ declared that among the hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots that will be sent to voters for the Nov. 3 elections, “many of those ballots” would go “potentially … to ineligible voters, fraudulent registrants, or other individuals who should not have been registered. Wisconsin voters need to know that their election is secure and that non-citizens, deceased individuals, former residents, non-residents, and voters with multiple records are not registered to vote in that election.”

Wisconsin dismissed that claim as unsubstantiated.

“US DOJ has presented no evidence that Wisconsin is rife with ineligible voters. Its motion asserts that ‘potentially’ ineligible people may vote.” Such “an unsupported, potential harm” doesn’t justify an emergency action such as the feds are seeking, the Wisconsin response declared.

The response said that with only a few months before the election, the U.S. Supreme Court has warned against “modifying election procedures this close to elections” to avoid voter confusion and to avoid discouraging voters from going to the polls.

Groups intervening in the cases responded as well on Thursday.

Law Forward, the Wisconsin democracy-focused nonprofit law firm, said in its response that the U.S. DOJ failed to show “good cause” for its demand.

“And despite the Appellant’s fact-free innuendo,” the U.S. DOJ “does not allege — let alone provide any actual proof of — any supposed ‘ineligible voters remaining on [Wisconsin’s] voter rolls,’” stated Law Forward’s response, representing the nonpartisan voting rights group Common Cause.

A response for the Wisconsin Alliance for Retired Americans and Forward Latino argued that the U.S. “DOJ’s lackadaisical pace in this litigation belies any need to expedite” the case. The groups are represented by Elias Law Group in Washington, D.C., an election- and voting rights-focused firm that works with progressive organizations.

The U.S. DOJ has made “baseless insinuations that upcoming elections will not be ‘secure’ if it does not get unprecedented access to personal voter information,” the response stated. “That unsubstantiated allegation is absurd.”

The federal lawsuit against Wisconsin “is one of 31 similar lawsuits commenced by [U.S.] DOJ as part of its unprecedented campaign to amass personally identifying information about every registered voter in the country,” the interveners’ response stated. “All eight federal courts to address DOJ’s claims to date have dismissed them,” with the dismissals now under appeal.

As election officials across the country steel themselves for the midterm elections in less than five months, President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting voting by mail threatens to upend their preparations.

The executive order instructs the U.S. Postal Service to refuse to deliver ballots in states that don’t provide lists of voters or meet other requirements. It has created a sense of deep uncertainty and concern among election officials as they consider how to comply, according to a review of court documents and interviews with election officials and experts on election administration.

The March 31 executive order, and a proposed Postal Service rule published June 2 that would put the order’s requirements into effect, raise serious logistical and procedural challenges for those running elections, they say. Rural areas with limited resources are especially at risk, but jurisdictions of all sizes could be forced to scramble.

The executive order is the latest step taken by Trump to assert control over state-run elections, along with the stalled SAVE America Act, which would require voters to provide documents proving their citizenship. The Justice Department, under Trump’s control, is also trying to obtain state voter rolls.

“This is just another death by a thousand cuts that clerks have been experiencing since the 2020 elections,” said Barb Byrum, the Democratic clerk of Ingham County, Michigan, which includes Lansing.

First-ever national voter list

The order and the rule require states to provide lists of mail-in voters if they want the Postal Service to deliver ballots, marking the first time the federal government has created a national voter list. 

Mail ballot envelopes must meet certain design standards. And federal agencies have to compile lists of voting-age citizens to share with each state in an effort to root out noncitizen voters.

But Democratic states and voting rights groups argue the executive order — and the accompanying proposed rule — represent an illegal overreach by Trump because states administer elections under the U.S. Constitution. Trump and his Republican allies say the restrictions are necessary for election security and to combat noncitizen voting, which occurs extremely rarely.

The Postal Service didn’t respond to questions from States Newsroom. The agency has said the rule “will facilitate the faithful execution of federal law.”

Multiple lawsuits have been brought against the order, but a federal judge in Washington, D.C., in May declined to halt it, partly because the Trump administration hadn’t taken enough action to implement its requirements. Another federal judge in Massachusetts is weighing a separate request to block the order.

With the executive order still in effect, at least for now, election officials and experts who work with them are taking the ramifications of it and the proposed Postal Service rule seriously.

“We don’t have a national voter registration list. We don’t have, currently, a list of sanctioned, authorized voters to vote by mail at the federal level,” said Tammy Patrick, chief programs officer at Election Center, operated by the National Association of Election Officials.  “That’s a big, big change in the way elections have always been conducted.”

Sweeping changes very quickly

In court papers filed in May, local election officials and local governments representing 26 jurisdictions across the country warned the executive order would “severely disrupt” local election administration and force the implementation of sweeping changes within months. Implementation of the order’s requirements will largely fall on local election officials, they argued.

Byrum was among the officials to sign onto the brief, along with others in Boston, and counties in Pennsylvania, Washington, Wisconsin and elsewhere.

Under the executive order, states that want to send ballots through the mail must provide the Postal Service with lists of voters they intend to provide a mail ballot. Local election officials will play a large role in helping states develop these lists, according to the court papers, and will have primary responsibility to help voters address any errors.

And Trump wants it all in place before November. The executive order’s proposed timelines “present a logistical nightmare for local election officials,” the officials warn.

“The general rule is don’t make changes before a big election because there’s always something you didn’t think about,” said Carolina Lopez, executive director of the Partnership for Large Election Jurisdictions, a nonpartisan organization for election officials in jurisdictions of at least 250,000 people.

The proposed Postal Service rule says the agency would launch a portal where states would submit voter lists and make updates. But a number of questions remain, said Lopez, who previously spent a decade administering elections in Miami-Dade County, Florida.

The portal poses the potential for bottlenecks in the election system and it’s unclear what would happen if it was ever offline. The United States has a decentralized election system, with states each running their own elections. By contrast, the Postal Service portal would create a single point of failure, raising concerns about the security of information on tens of millions of voters.

Additionally, while every state maintains a voter registration list, there is no nationwide standard for the formatting of that data. It’s unclear whether the portal will accept data in a variety of formats — the proposed rule only says the Postal Service wouldn’t alter the data provided by states.

“It looks a little different across the country and therefore normalizing the data will be a process,” Lopez said.

Struggle for small, rural counties

The Department of Justice initially said in a court document that the Department of Homeland Security planned to obtain voter data from the Postal Service before backpedaling a few days later. Still, Homeland Security continues to have “preliminary conversations” about data sharing, the Justice Department said in a subsequent court filing.

DHS operates the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, system that can scan voter data to identify possible noncitizens. The Justice Department has sued 30 states in an effort to force them to turn over their unredacted voter rolls, which include sensitive personal data such as dates of birth, driver’s license and full or partial Social Security numbers, for the purpose of running the information through SAVE.

The proposed Postal Service rule also imposes standards on ballot envelopes that states must meet if they want to send ballots through the mail.

Envelopes must include an election mail logo, be automation compatible and have a bar code that allows for tracking. These are already considered best practices — and many jurisdictions across the country already follow them — but the rule would make them mandatory.

Election offices in small, rural counties may struggle to comply. In many places, a single person is in charge of elections and may not even be on the job full time, Patrick said. 

“There’s rural offices all across the country, some of them don’t have their own computer in their office — they are sharing it with the tax assessor or whatever — they don’t have the ability to generate those serialized tracking codes, intelligent mail bar codes,” Patrick said. “Because they’re physically hand-writing these envelopes out or they’re using a rubber stamp with their address on it.”

Neither the executive order or the proposed Postal Service rule include any federal funding for implementation, something that would likely have to be appropriated by Congress.

Some Republican states have championed the executive order. A dozen GOP state attorneys general filed court documents defending the order and arguing that it “will enhance the security of absentee voting.”

“It is vital to the strength of our republic that we ensure only American citizens vote in our elections and that mail-in and absentee ballots are secure and reliable,” South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson said in a statement earlier this spring.

But Matt Crane, a Republican who is the executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association, said the executive order and the proposed rule mark an overreach by the federal government into duties best left to states and local governments. 

The biggest reaction among Colorado clerks, he said, has been, “why?”

“No offense to our friends at the post office,” Crane said, “but I trust our processes more than I trust theirs.”

California often takes days or even weeks to tally votes after its elections, a product of measures to protect voters and a deluge of mail ballots dropped off on Election Day. Incomplete vote totals reported in the hours after polls close don’t always reflect final results.

None of this is evidence of fraud. But President Donald Trump has spent more than a week baselessly alleging malfeasance in California’s June 2 primary election, in which votes were still being counted as of June 11, offering a window into how he may approach the November midterm elections.

Trump has claimed repeatedly, without evidence, that Democrats are stealing the election, even though the state is a party stronghold. California’s long count is a well-known feature of its elections, with election officials given about a month to process and tally all ballots.

Democrats and experts on elections aren’t surprised by Trump’s statements, saying he is turning to familiar tactics in an effort to discredit unfavorable results.

“Whenever they don’t like the outcome of an election, they spread lies about the election,” said David Becker, president and CEO of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research and a former attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice Voting Rights Section. 

‘The Dumocrats’

After the 2020 election, Trump allies mounted a legal campaign to overturn the president’s losses in key battleground states, citing nonexistent fraud. When that failed, GOP lawmakers raised objections certifying President Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory. Finally, Trump rallied a crowd of supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, that went on to storm the Capitol.

Trump continually cast the election as stolen during that period — a theme he’s returned to in hammering on California.

“The Dumocrats are at it again!” Trump wrote in a social media post on June 3. “They are trying to STEAL THE GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA PRIMARY, AND THE MAYOR OF LOS ANGELES, PRIMARY, AWAY FROM TWO GREAT REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES. Here we go with the very late and massive numbers of MAIL IN BALLOTS.”

The U.S. Department of Justice is following the president’s lead. The top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles has linked suspicions about California’s elections to the state’s refusal to turn over its unredacted voter roll, which includes sensitive personal data on residents.

The Justice Department has sued California and 29 other states to gain access to the data, which it plans to feed into a Department of Homeland Security computer program that can identify possible noncitizen voters. So far, no federal judge has agreed the DOJ is entitled to the information.

Eye on the midterms

The voter roll lawsuits are part of a proactive campaign by the Trump administration to exert influence and control over the midterms before voting begins. 

The president has signed an executive order restricting mail ballots that currently faces multiple lawsuits. And Trump wants Congress to require voters to show documents proving their citizenship, but the legislation has stalled in the Senate.

The stakes of the midterm elections are high for Trump and Republicans. Democrats retaking the House or the Senate or even both would mean the end of his legislative agenda and more aggressive oversight of the administration.

At the same time, Americans’ confidence in elections is declining. Two-thirds of U.S. adults say they are confident or very confident that their state or local government will conduct a fair and accurate election, down from 76% in October 2024, according to a March poll conducted by Marist University.

The 2026 House landscape — and Trump’s past comments — suggest he may direct his ire at additional states in November. 

For instance, of the 18 House races that the nonpartisan Cook Political Report with Amy Walter categorizes as a “toss up”, three are in Pennsylvania, a swing state that Trump alleged was the site of election fraud in 2020 (he won the state in 2024).

California has its own “toss up” House race and an additional three only lean Democratic, meaning they remain competitive. After California, Texas and other states gerrymandered their congressional maps in recent months, control of the House could again run through California.

“It’s been pretty clear to all of us that Republicans are laying the groundwork to do anything, and they will say anything, to hold power,” Rep. Pete Aguilar, a California Democrat, said at a news conference on June 9.

Evidence of fraud?

States Newsroom asked the White House to provide evidence substantiating Trump’s fraud claims in California. White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson responded with a statement that didn’t directly answer the question.

“Countless Americans share the same concerns as President Trump watching the way California conducts its elections, including taking weeks to deliver results,” the statement says in part.

California’s slow vote count dates back years and is driven by multiple factors. California, along with seven other states, sends mail ballots to all voters. In a statewide special election last year, nearly 89% of voters cast their ballot that way.

This creates a flood of ballots arriving at election offices in the days leading up to and on Election Day, along with large numbers of voters who drop off their ballots in person. Voter signatures must be checked on ballot envelopes, adding more behind-the-scenes work that slows down election workers.

Voters with an issue related to their ballot, such as a missing signature or signature mismatch, also have an opportunity to correct the problem. The process, called ballot curing, adds more time.

Additionally, California has a week-long grace period for ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but arrive late, creating a trickle of votes that come into election offices days after polls have closed. 

The U.S. Supreme Court is poised to deliver an opinion soon that could strike down these grace periods nationwide, though such a decision could compound the ballot pileup on Election Day as voters move to get their ballots in sooner.

Need for faster count acknowledged

Evoking an image of a snake digesting a large meal, Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, likened the arrival of ballots on Election Day to “the thing in the python.” Her nonprofit group has long advocated for improvements to the state’s election process, including a faster count. 

“While I am dismayed by the unfair criticism being placed on California, I’m more concerned about voter confidence being undermined, not just by those fraudulent claims but also by the long count itself,” Alexander said.

The demand to know the winners of races on election night has been fueled by modern media, as news services and TV networks declare race winners. But these calls are almost always based on incomplete vote totals, and often rely on mathematical analyses of whether enough votes remain uncounted for other candidates to have a realistic chance of winning.

Candidates are officially declared winners by canvassing boards and other election officials in the days and weeks following the election, depending on each state’s procedures. Often election night vote totals match the actual outcome of a race, but not always — a gap Trump is now exploiting to claim fraud.

Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom in May sent a letter to election officials that almost appeared to anticipate the reaction to the June primary and called for quick and accurate vote tabulation.

“Time is of the essence in preventing election lies from taking hold,” Newsom wrote.

House GOP leaders join criticism

While California’s slow process is normal for the state, Trump allies have latched onto it — conflating the pace of the count with evidence of wrongdoing, even if they aren’t always as explicit as the president in accusing Democrats of trying to steal the election.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, said during an exchange with a CNN reporter on Monday that while he wasn’t saying the election was rigged, it “stinks to high heaven.”

“Whether you can prove fraud or not, it does undermine voter integrity in the vote,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, a Louisiana Republican, said of the slow count at a news conference.

But Rep. Ted Lieu, a California Democrat, analogized the vote counting to a football game. The vote totals available on election night represent the score at half time — but the final score at the end of the game will be different.

“It doesn’t mean there’s fraud, it just means the game was completed,” Lieu told reporters. “That’s what we’re seeing right now, we’re completing the vote count. And then we’re going to see who wins and who loses.”

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

The FBI agents arrived at David Bolter’s Milwaukee home on a cool, cloudy Wednesday morning in late May. They were armed with a list of questions for the 2020 poll worker, who had raised concerns about the way local officials handled the 2020 election, Bolter told Votebeat.

President Donald Trump relied on Bolter’s claims in an unsuccessful 2020 lawsuit that sought to throw out more than 220,000 votes. That would have been more than enough to move Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes from Democrat Joe Biden, who won the state, to Trump. Though courts, several election reviews, and many audits rejected Trump’s claims, the Republican never stopped believing that he was cheated out of the presidency in 2020.

That appears to be why, last month, the FBI sent agents back to Milwaukee to question Bolter as part of an expanding national effort by the second Trump administration to investigate long-debunked claims of fraud in the 2020 election.

The investigation into the 2020 election appears to be relying on already disproven allegations from people like Bolter. Bolter declined to divulge more about his conversation with the FBI, which has not been previously reported, but allegations from Bolter’s 2020 affidavit were central to some conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. For example, he alleged that somebody in Milwaukee’s absentee ballot counting facility announced around midnight on Election Day that a “huge truckload of ballots” was going to be delivered — an accusation for which there has so far appeared to be no additional evidence.

Around the same time Bolter says he talked to the FBI, two plainclothes agents with FBI badges showed up at the apartment of a former Milwaukee resident and 2020 poll worker about an affidavit she submitted, according to the former poll worker, who asked to be identified only by her first name, Christine, to give her the freedom to discuss an ongoing investigation.

Christine had also submitted an affidavit about the 2020 election, saying election workers had been told that all votes were counted, but she then saw workers continuing to count ballots around midnight. That affidavit was the focus of the agents’ questions, Christine told Votebeat.

“I suspected wrongdoing, but I’m not saying that it actually happened,” she said. “I’m just one lowly person that was working there.”

During the interview, she added, an agent showed her a photograph of Claire Woodall, the former Milwaukee election chief, asking her if she recognized the former election official who has been central to false allegations about the 2020 election. She identified her by name. Woodall didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Caroline Clancy, a spokesperson for the FBI’s Milwaukee office, declined to comment.

While investigators seem mainly focused on the 2020 vote, some elections experts believe the Trump administration’s wide-ranging probe is actually designed to create more doubts among Americans about future elections, as Republicans face strong political headwinds that could cost them control of Congress later this year.

“This isn’t about the 2020 election, this is about the 2026 and 2028 elections,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research. “This is about intimidating election officials. This is about creating a stream of disinformation designed to delegitimize an election the president may believe he’s going to lose. This is designed by the president’s underlings to satisfy the unrealistic expectations of a president that still cannot comprehend that he lost an election that he definitely lost, and it’s incredibly destabilizing.”

Wisconsin is the latest known target of the Trump administration’s 2020 investigation. The FBI is looking to interview elections officials and Milwaukee police officers in what some worry could be a precursor to an effort to seize ballots from the 2020 presidential race, as it already has in Georgia.

The Trump administration is revisiting allegations of election fraud that have been repeatedly scrutinized

In January, federal investigators seized 600 boxes of ballots from the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia. The heavily Democratic county, home to Atlanta, was key to Biden’s narrow 2020 victory in the state.

As in Wisconsin, the FBI in Georgia has built its investigation on allegations that have already been repeatedly scrutinized by audits, investigations, and courts without unearthing any evidence of fraud or tampering that could have overturned the results.

The Georgia search represented an unprecedented intervention by the federal government into local administration. Even more unusually, Tulsi Gabbard, who will step down at end of this month as director of national intelligence, personally oversaw the seizure and arranged for Trump to speak directly to the FBI agents via cell phone after they carried out the operation.

The Trump administration investigations stretch from Arizona, where federal officials subpoenaed computerized records of a partisan review state lawmakers conducted of Maricopa County’s 2020 election, to Puerto Rico, where the Office of the Director of National Intelligence procured voting machines to examine for potential security risks.

The administration’s investigations aren’t entirely limited to 2020. The U.S. Department of Justice sent a letter in April to Wayne County, Michigan — home to Detroit — demanding all ballots cast in the 2024 election, which Trump won. But even in that case, to support the request, the Justice Department cited accusations of fraud made after the 2020 election, including a lawsuit that was quickly dismissed after a judge wrote that “plaintiffs’ interpretation of events is incorrect and not credible.” Wayne County never handed over the ballots, because it doesn’t have possession of them.

What do the 2020 elections mean for 2026?

The FBI faces challenges in pursuing cases tied to the 2020 election since the five-year statute of limitations that applies to most of the likely charges expired last year. Law enforcement veterans said it is possible that the Justice Department could pursue broader conspiracy charges in the case, but the prospect remains unclear.

FBI Director Kash Patel suggested in April that the Justice Department would soon announce arrests related to the 2020 election, but that has not yet occurred. Officials with the FBI and Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment.

John Keller, a former acting head of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section who resigned in 2025 after refusing the Trump administration’s demands to drop corruption charges against then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams, said the administration appeared to be trying to normalize federal investigations of state elections to pave the way for future intervention.

“They are using enforcement directed at the 2020 election as a test run for what they can get away with on Election Day this year, or after, to try and delay certification or invalidate an election” if the results don’t go their way, he said.

Injecting federal law enforcement officials into an ongoing election is a more extreme and serious action than investigating a past one, and it could face stiffer opposition. But it’s clear, at least, that the administration is scrutinizing current elections closely.

Trump last week blasted California’s long vote counting process in its primary election and asserted that Democrats were trying to steal the election and federal authorities were investigating. Last month, Trump also said he was ordering the Justice Department to investigate an error that led to some voters in Maryland receiving ballots for the wrong party in the state’s upcoming primary. State officials in both cases have explained the true causes of the issues and that nothing nefarious was behind them.

Any effort to seize ballots in an ongoing election would create unprecedented new issues, such as a breach in the chain of custody over cast ballots, that could prevent election officials from declaring a winner and throw results into uncertainty.

Catherine Engelbrecht, co-founder of the Texas-based conservative group True the Vote, which has promoted debunked theories about the 2020 election, said she understands Trump’s intentions but believes the 2020 election questions should have been resolved “in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election.”

“This is not necessarily the way I would have recommended that it would be handled,” she said. “The fact that it wasn’t addressed has left this lingering void.”

In most cases, however, Trump’s claims of voter fraud were addressed in the wake of the 2020 election. Time and again, courts, state investigations, and even the Justice Department concluded that there was no evidence of problems or fraud that would have changed the results.

Engelbrecht said she views the Trump administration’s ongoing investigations as an effort to dig into long-standing concerns about the voting process it wants to address for future elections.

“The past is prologue,” she said. “If we don’t understand what happened, we are doomed to repeat it.”

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is walking back, for now, a plan to sweep up data on millions of Americans who vote by mail under President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting mail ballots.

In a federal court filing Monday night, the Justice Department significantly hedged the data-sharing plan, pulling back from a position the Trump administration advanced last week. DOJ lawyers now cast the idea as in the early stages and dependent on approval of a new U.S. Postal Service rule for mail ballots, citing a memo that Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin signed earlier Monday.

“The Secretary authorized DHS to continue preliminary conversations with USPS concerning potential data-sharing arrangements, and should USPS finalize its rulemaking process, consider working to advance potential coordination to the extent feasible and consistent with applicable law and privacy protections,” the notice says.

Mullin’s memo, the Monday court filing says, “more accurately reflects the current policy of the Administration with respect to the implementation” of the executive order, reversing a Friday notice that said Homeland Security “contemplates” working to “integrate” the Postal Service’s voter data in an effort to monitor the flow of mail ballots and identify possible fraud. Friday’s filing said Homeland Security would use the information to generate investigative leads.

Trump’s March 31 executive order requires states to submit lists of potential mail voters to the Postal Service if they want ballots delivered and directs Homeland Security to compile lists of voting-age citizens in each state. The order faces several lawsuits ahead of the November midterm elections but so far hasn’t been paused by a federal judge.

Trump signed the executive order amid an ongoing campaign to influence how states administer federal elections. Under the U.S. Constitution, states run elections. While Congress can pass regulations, the president has no unilateral authority over voting. 

Trump has long attacked mail voting and has also promoted the idea that noncitizen voting is rampant. In reality, it’s extremely rare.

Democrats and voting rights groups say the order represents an unconstitutional attempt by Trump to assert authority over elections. They also argue the order endangers the independence of the Postal Service, which is overseen by a Board of Governors, not the president.

Running out the clock

Michael McNulty, the policy director at Issue One, a group focused on protecting American democracy, said the Justice Department’s second notice almost appears to anticipate that a court will block the Postal Service’s new rule, which would require states sending ballots through the mail to provide lists of voters.

“It looks like they definitely walked back the USPS data-sharing language,” McNulty said in an interview.

Downplaying the current effect of the rule could be part of a legal strategy to shield the administration from court challenges.

Despite a series of legal challenges, the Trump administration has urged judges not to block the March order because federal officials haven’t taken major action to implement it — making the lawsuits premature. That argument will become more difficult to maintain as the Postal Service moves forward on the new rule for mail ballots and Homeland Security begins to take action.

David Becker, a former Justice Department Voting Rights Section attorney who leads the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, said that since the beginning of the second Trump administration, the Justice Department has sought to “run the clock out” in legal challenges until it’s too late for courts to act or judicial action would cause chaos.

While Trump and his aides speak publicly about the alleged threat of noncitizen voting, in court the Justice Department seeks to minimize the extent of the actions the federal government has taken to carry out the executive order, Becker indicated.

“So I think this is a case of the government trying to have it both ways,” Becker said. “The government is trying to satisfy an audience of one, the president, while at the same time trying to play this rope-a-dope game with the court so that the court might not rule against them, they might say that a case isn’t ripe yet.”

In response to questions from States Newsroom, Homeland Security said in an unattributed statement that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, an agency within DHS, is “lawfully implementing” the executive order.

“President Trump has been clear: Nothing is more fundamental than the integrity and security of our elections,” the statement said.

Quest for voter rolls

The Trump administration has spent the past year attempting to obtain unredacted state voter rolls to feed into a powerful Homeland Security computer program that can identify potential noncitizen voters. The Justice Department has filed more than 30 lawsuits seeking to force states and the District of Columbia to turn over the information, but so far none have been successful.

Eight states — including heavily Democratic California, Oregon and Washington — have all-mail elections, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. For those states, complying with the executive order would effectively mean turning over the names of all or nearly all their voters to the Postal Service.

It’s unclear if those lists would include voters’ sensitive personal data, like driver’s license and partial Social Security numbers, that the Justice Department has sued to obtain.

In its Monday notice, the Justice Department appeared to suggest Homeland Security had been planning to go beyond the scope of the executive order. 

The executive order does not explicitly direct the Postal Service to share voter and mail ballot data with Homeland Security. Instead, it tells the Postal Service to coordinate with the Justice Department on investigations into suspected election crimes.

Data-sharing arrangements between DHS and the Postal Service “are not directed” by the order, the Monday notice says. Any future sharing would be contingent upon both the Postal Service’s mail ballot rule and “any policy and legal determinations as to the desirability and feasibility of any such data-sharing” — in other words, a decision the Trump administration will make later.

Computer system participation

The Justice Department had also reported Friday that Homeland Security planned to launch a “State Voter Roll Verification” powered by the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, system — the computer program that can flag possible noncitizen voters.

The Friday notice said states would be able to upload their voter rolls to SAVE, but Homeland Security already allows states to voluntarily run this information through the program. Some Republican-led states have previously used SAVE to scan their voter rolls and it’s unclear how the new verification process would have been different.

On Monday, the Justice Department reversed itself on that issue as well. DOJ lawyers wrote in the second notice that the executive order “does not direct that approach, and the new memorandum no longer includes that discussion.”

The Justice Department’s Monday notice makes clear that Homeland Security still plans to create lists of citizens in each state, as mandated under the executive order. The agency plans to have a way for states to obtain citizenship information from federal agencies by June 30, the notice says.

The executive order also requires Homeland Security to allow individuals to access their citizenship-related records and update or correct them ahead of elections. The Justice Department said Monday that Mullin approved a phased plan for a portal accessible to the public.

Monday’s notice, citing Mullin’s memo, says only that those capabilities will be developed and launched later this year after the completion of legal, privacy and technical groundwork. That leaves open the possibility that states will have access to federal citizenship information weeks or months before individual voters will be able to view the same data and call attention to any errors.

Questions linger

What prompted Mullin to sign the memo on Monday is unclear. Homeland Security didn’t respond to a request for a copy of the memo.

Early on Monday evening, lawyers for the League of Women Voters filed a court document in a separate lawsuit challenging Homeland Security’s use of the SAVE system that alerted the judge to the Justice Department’s Friday notice. 

“It remains unclear—from the Implementation Notice or otherwise—what specific legal authority either the USPS or DHS have to share, consolidate, and use data in this way,” the lawyers wrote, referring to the initial data sharing plan between Homeland Security and Postal Service.

The Justice Department responded on Tuesday, saying in a court filing that information was “no longer accurate, as of yesterday evening.”

Also unclear is what role, if any, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has played in Mullin’s decision to change course. Trump’s executive order charges Lutnick with coordinating implementation efforts.

The Commerce Department didn’t respond to States Newsroom’s questions.

Sixteen Democratic senators last week demanded Lutnick halt implementation of the executive order. The letter, led by Sens. Maria Cantwell of Washington, Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico and Alex Padilla of California, urged Lutnick to preserve records related to the development of the order ahead of congressional oversight.

“Vote-by-mail is safe, secure, and convenient, and it has been used successfully across the political spectrum over many election cycles,” the senators wrote.

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This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

The FBI agents arrived at David Bolter’s Milwaukee home on a cool, cloudy Wednesday morning in late May. They were armed with a list of questions for the 2020 poll worker, who had raised concerns about the way local officials handled the 2020 election, Bolter told Votebeat.

President Donald Trump relied on Bolter’s claims in an unsuccessful 2020 lawsuit that sought to throw out more than 220,000 votes. That would have been more than enough to move Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes from Democrat Joe Biden, who won the state, to Trump. Though courts, several election reviews and many audits rejected Trump’s claims, the Republican never stopped believing that he was cheated out of the presidency in 2020.

That appears to be why, last month, the FBI sent agents back to Milwaukee to question Bolter as part of an expanding national effort by the second Trump administration to investigate long-debunked claims of fraud in the 2020 election.

The investigation into the 2020 election appears to be relying on already disproven allegations from people like Bolter. Bolter declined to divulge more about his conversation with the FBI, which has not been previously reported, but allegations from Bolter’s 2020 affidavit were central to some conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. For example, he alleged that somebody in Milwaukee’s absentee ballot counting facility announced around midnight on Election Day that a “huge truckload of ballots” was going to be delivered — an accusation for which there has so far appeared to be no additional evidence.

Around the same time Bolter says he talked to the FBI, two plainclothes agents with FBI badges showed up at the apartment of a former Milwaukee resident and 2020 poll worker about an affidavit she submitted, according to the former poll worker, who asked to be identified only by her first name, Christine, to give her the freedom to discuss an ongoing investigation.

Christine had also submitted an affidavit about the 2020 election, saying election workers had been told that all votes were counted, but she then saw workers continuing to count ballots around midnight. That affidavit was the focus of the agents’ questions, Christine told Votebeat.

“I suspected wrongdoing, but I’m not saying that it actually happened,” she said. “I’m just one lowly person that was working there.”

During the interview, she added, an agent showed her a photograph of Claire Woodall, the former Milwaukee election chief, asking her if she recognized the former election official who has been central to false allegations about the 2020 election. She identified her by name. Woodall didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Caroline Clancy, a spokesperson for the FBI’s Milwaukee office, declined to comment.

While investigators seem mainly focused on the 2020 vote, some elections experts believe the Trump administration’s wide-ranging probe is actually designed to create more doubts among Americans about future elections, as Republicans face strong political headwinds that could cost them control of Congress later this year.

“This isn’t about the 2020 election, this is about the 2026 and 2028 elections,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research. “This is about intimidating election officials. This is about creating a stream of disinformation designed to delegitimize an election the president may believe he’s going to lose. This is designed by the president’s underlings to satisfy the unrealistic expectations of a president that still cannot comprehend that he lost an election that he definitely lost, and it’s incredibly destabilizing.”

Wisconsin is the latest known target of the Trump administration’s 2020 investigation. The FBI is looking to interview elections officials and Milwaukee police officers in what some worry could be a precursor to an effort to seize ballots from the 2020 presidential race, as it already has in Georgia.

The Trump administration is revisiting allegations of election fraud that have been repeatedly scrutinized

In January, federal investigators seized 600 boxes of ballots from the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia. The heavily Democratic county, home to Atlanta, was key to Biden’s narrow 2020 victory in the state.

As in Wisconsin, the FBI in Georgia has built its investigation on allegations that have already been repeatedly scrutinized by audits, investigations, and courts without unearthing any evidence of fraud or tampering that could have overturned the results.

The Georgia search represented an unprecedented intervention by the federal government into local administration. Even more unusually, Tulsi Gabbard, who will step down at end of this month as director of national intelligence, personally oversaw the seizure and arranged for Trump to speak directly to the FBI agents via cell phone after they carried out the operation.

The Trump administration investigations stretch from Arizona, where federal officials subpoenaed computerized records of a partisan review state lawmakers conducted of Maricopa County’s 2020 election, to Puerto Rico, where the Office of the Director of National Intelligence procured voting machines to examine for potential security risks.

The administration’s investigations aren’t entirely limited to 2020. The U.S. Department of Justice sent a letter in April to Wayne County, Michigan — home to Detroit — demanding all ballots cast in the 2024 election, which Trump won. But even in that case, to support the request, the Justice Department cited accusations of fraud made after the 2020 election, including a lawsuit that was quickly dismissed after a judge wrote that “plaintiffs’ interpretation of events is incorrect and not credible.” Wayne County never handed over the ballots, because it doesn’t have possession of them.

What do the 2020 elections mean for 2026?

The FBI faces challenges in pursuing cases tied to the 2020 election since the five-year statute of limitations that applies to most of the likely charges expired last year. Law enforcement veterans said it is possible that the Justice Department could pursue broader conspiracy charges in the case, but the prospect remains unclear.

FBI Director Kash Patel suggested in April that the Justice Department would soon announce arrests related to the 2020 election, but that has not yet occurred. Officials with the FBI and Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment.

John Keller, a former acting head of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section who resigned in 2025 after refusing the Trump administration’s demands to drop corruption charges against then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams, said the administration appeared to be trying to normalize federal investigations of state elections to pave the way for future intervention.

“They are using enforcement directed at the 2020 election as a test run for what they can get away with on Election Day this year, or after, to try and delay certification or invalidate an election” if the results don’t go their way, he said.

Injecting federal law enforcement officials into an ongoing election is a more extreme and serious action than investigating a past one, and it could face stiffer opposition. But it’s clear, at least, that the administration is scrutinizing current elections closely.

Trump last week blasted California’s long vote counting process in its primary election and asserted that Democrats were trying to steal the election and federal authorities were investigating. Last month, Trump also said he was ordering the Justice Department to investigate an error that led to some voters in Maryland receiving ballots for the wrong party in the state’s upcoming primary. State officials in both cases have explained the true causes of the issues and that nothing nefarious was behind them.

Any effort to seize ballots in an ongoing election would create unprecedented new issues, such as a breach in the chain of custody over cast ballots, that could prevent election officials from declaring a winner and throw results into uncertainty.

Catherine Engelbrecht, co-founder of the Texas-based conservative group True the Vote, which has promoted debunked theories about the 2020 election, said she understands Trump’s intentions but believes the 2020 election questions should have been resolved “in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election.”

“This is not necessarily the way I would have recommended that it would be handled,” she said. “The fact that it wasn’t addressed has left this lingering void.”

In most cases, however, Trump’s claims of voter fraud were addressed in the wake of the 2020 election. Time and again, courts, state investigations, and even the Justice Department concluded that there was no evidence of problems or fraud that would have changed the results.

Engelbrecht said she views the Trump administration’s ongoing investigations as an effort to dig into long-standing concerns about the voting process it wants to address for future elections.

“The past is prologue,” she said. “If we don’t understand what happened, we are doomed to repeat it.”

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

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

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

The Trump administration’s multiple investigations of the 2020 election may have more to do with 2026 is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security will allow states to access federal citizenship data by June 30 and plans to monitor the flow of mail ballots for signs of voter fraud, according to a court document.

Amid a series of lawsuits, President Donald Trump’s administration is now moving to carry out a March 31 executive order restricting voting by mail ahead of the November midterm elections.

Democrats and voting rights advocates oppose the directive as unconstitutional election meddling by Trump and have sued to stop him. The president, who has long attacked mail ballots but votes by mail himself, says the additional rules will fight noncitizen voting, a rare phenomenon.

“No president has the authority to unilaterally rewrite election rules or dictate how states administer their elections,” Marcia Johnson, chief of activation and justice at the League of Women Voters, said in a statement last week. The League of Women Voters filed one of at least five lawsuits challenging the order.

Potential disruptions

The order could carry major consequences for the midterm elections. Any new restrictions on mail ballots would risk disrupting how tens of millions of voters cast their ballots. About 30% of voters cast mail ballots in 2024, according to data gathered by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

But despite several legal challenges, the order remains in effect. 

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., in late May ruled against a request by Democratic groups to pause the order, finding that it was too soon to weigh in because federal officials hadn’t taken enough action yet. A second judge in Massachusetts held a hearing last week, but didn’t immediately issue a decision.

“The Trump Administration will continue fighting for the safety and security of American elections,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement shortly after the D.C. judge’s decision.

One portion of the order demands the postmaster general enact new restrictions on mailed ballots and not transmit ballots from states that refuse to provide the names of absentee voters. The U.S. Postal Service, despite its status as an independent corporation, has put forward a proposal in line with the order to require states to submit lists of voters before mailing ballots.

Now, Homeland Security is responding to another part of the order that requires the creation of lists of voting-age citizens in every state, which the Trump administration calls “state citizenship lists.” State election officials would receive the lists, which they could compare to their voter rolls in a search for noncitizen voters.

Homeland Security’s plans for the citizenship lists came into focus on June 5, when the U.S. Department of Justice filed a notice in federal court that briefly outlines the administration’s plans. The notice describes a two-part effort by Homeland Security and its subsidiary agency, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, to comply with the order.

First, Homeland Security will implement a “State Voter Roll Verification” that allows state election officials to submit their voter rolls to the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, system. 

SAVE is a powerful computer program that checks names against citizenship information held in a variety of government databases. It can flag registered voters as possible noncitizens, but faces criticism for incorrect identifications.

For the past year, states have already had the option to upload their voter rolls into SAVE. Some Republican-led states, such as Indiana, Texas and Wyoming, have used the system, while Democratic states have declined. It’s unclear how the State Voter Roll Verification would be different, if at all, from states’ current SAVE access. 

Homeland Security and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services didn’t respond to questions from States Newsroom.

Second, the Justice Department notice says Homeland Security will set up a registry for state election officials to securely access “citizenship-related data” from USCIS, the Social Security Administration and the State Department.

According to the notice, the “underlying data would remain in each agency’s respective system.” No other details were provided.

The notice also outlines Homeland Security’s intention to use the lists of voters that states provide to the Postal Service for investigations. It says DHS wants to “integrate” data on those voters “to monitor mail-in and absentee ballot flows, identify anomalies that may suggest voter fraud or misuse, and generate authorized investigative leads.”

California elections

The notice comes as Trump renews his attacks on mail-in voting. Last week he alleged, without evidence, voter fraud in California, which held primary elections last week. California relies heavily on mail ballots and often counts votes at a slow pace — meaning final results sometimes don’t match election night vote totals.

“Do you know why they’re doing that? Because they’re cheating on the election,” Trump said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

While the executive order already faces a slew of lawsuits, the NAACP on June 3 filed a motion in federal court seeking to specifically block the Postal Service’s proposed regulations of mail ballots. The NAACP alleges the regulations violate a 2021 settlement agreement that requires timely delivery of election mail to all voters. 

The Postal Service has until Thursday to respond.

The American Postal Workers Union in a statement on June 5 denounced the executive order, saying the Postal Service serves all Americans. It is “not a tool for politicians” to pick which Americans receive which benefits, the union said.

“The Executive Order is an unconstitutional attack on the millions of Americans who vote by mail,” the union said, “and another front in an ongoing assault on voting rights in the United States of America.”

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This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

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, who 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, City Clerk Celestine 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 Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.

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.

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The Wisconsin Supreme Court will hear a challenge to the state’s congressional maps on the grounds that they’re an anti-competitive gerrymander, the Court ruled Friday afternoon. 

In an order that again showed the Court’s partisan divide spilling out into the public, the Court’s four liberals voted to accept the case while Justices Rebecca Bradley and Annette Ziegler accused the majority of acting as tools of the Democratic party. 

The lawsuit against the maps was brought last summer by a bipartisan business group, Wisconsin Business Leaders for Democracy Coalition, represented by the progressive nonprofit Law Forward. Rather than challenging the state’s congressional maps on the grounds that they’re an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander — a tactic that has repeatedly failed — the lawsuit argues the maps purposefully protect incumbents from realistic challenges. 

Because of a state law passed by Republicans in 2011, the lawsuit was first heard by a panel of three circuit court judges. In a ruling late last month, the panel dismissed the lawsuit, finding that the claims were essentially the same as those made in a partisan gerrymander challenge and therefore a question for the executive and legislative branches. 

The panel’s ruling was immediately appealed to the Supreme Court because the 2011 law states that appeals of these panel rulings can’t be heard by the Court of Appeals. 

While accepting the case, the Court denied a request that it be heard on an expedited schedule. With candidates for this fall’s midterm elections required to file ballot access signatures by June 1 and ballots are set to be printed shortly after, it’s unlikely the case will be concluded in time to change the state’s maps before November. 

In response to the Court accepting the case, Bradley and Ziegler vehemently objected — arguing that accepting the case is signaling the majority’s intent to redraw the maps. 

“An astonishingly activist court will once again revisit precedent it doesn’t like in order to do the bidding of its political masters,” Bradley wrote. “The Democratic Party bought multiple seats on this court to achieve yet another outcome unobtainable democratically. Like last time, the United States Supreme Court will likely reverse the majority’s unlawful ruling and protect our Republic. No kings. No queens either.”

Bradley, who frequently cites sources from a wide range of non-legal texts, also quoted George Orwell’s “1984” in her dissent. 

Justice Rebecca Dallet wrote a concurrence to the ruling, defending the majority from the conservative justices’ criticisms and calling them “false, inappropriate, and disingenuous.” 

“Deciding to hear a case does not reflect any weighing of the merits of any party’s claims, let alone prejudgment about who will prevail and why,” Dallet wrote. “Instead, we must — as a majority of this court does — stick to our neutral role, and let the parties argue their case before we render judgment. When the time comes to issue our decision, we will follow the law wherever it leads.”

The U.S. Postal Service on Friday took its first major step to carry out President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting voting by mail, proposing a rule that would require states to submit lists of voters before mailing ballots.

But the proposed rule appears to smooth over some of the rougher edges of the executive order, which has been condemned by Democratic state officials as an intrusion on their constitutional authority to administer elections.

“The proposed rule would apply uniform standards for the mailing of absentee ballots to and from voters, which the Postal Service understands will facilitate the faithful execution of federal law,” the Postal Service said in a document posted on the Federal Register website.

The executive order faces at least five lawsuits. Experts on the Postal Service have also warned that Trump’s attempt to assert authority over the agency threatens its decades-long record of independence.

The order remains in effect for now ahead of the November midterm elections. A federal judge on Thursday declined to block it after finding the federal government had taken few steps to implement it. However, with Friday’s proposed rule, that’s beginning to change.

Some exemptions

Trump’s March 31 order directed the postmaster general, who leads the Postal Service, to propose a rule that would block states from sending ballots through the mail except to voters on lists provided by the state to the Postal Service. In effect, states would be blocked from allowing residents to vote by mail unless they provide their names to the federal government.

The proposed rule fulfills that directive, but it exempts overseas and military voters — a concession that wasn’t included in the executive order. Voting by citizens who are abroad and in the military is regulated by the federal Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act. The law sets strict deadlines for states to send ballots.

The rule also doesn’t require states to submit voter lists for primary elections.

“Primary elections largely involve political parties selecting nominees through their chosen procedures, rather than direct election of federal officials, and thus implicate different considerations that bear on the necessity for these provisions,” the Postal Service said in a document outlining the proposed rule.

The Postal Service document emphasizes that states retain full control of who gets to vote by mail or alter the information. 

The proposed rule creates data reporting standards that “can provide information regarding the sending of ballots through the mails that would be available for use by law enforcement,” the document says.

The Postal Service plans to formally publish the rule on June 2.

Noncitizen voting

Trump and administration officials have framed the executive order as a way to combat noncitizen voting, which occurs very rarely. Trump has long attacked mail voting, though he has voted by mail multiple times.

“I think this will help a lot with elections,” Trump said when he signed the order.

But opponents of the executive order say it violates the U.S. Constitution, which gives states the responsibility of running elections and allows Congress to pass regulations. The order represents an attempt by Trump to unilaterally control elections, they say.

After a federal judge in Washington, D.C., declined to block the order, another federal judge in Massachusetts will hold a hearing on June 2 in a separate lawsuit challenging the directive brought by Democratic attorneys general.

“Widespread chaos and confusion is the goal of this executive order,” Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, said in a statement.