Three candidates running for Wisconsin secretary of state in 2026 are seeking an office with duties that have been whittled away over the last several decades.

The Democratic Party candidate, JoCasta Zamarripa, and the Green Party candidate, Pete Karas, both focus on how they would do the work that’s still part of the office.

But the third candidate, Republican Jay Schroeder, has centered his campaign on taking back a power that hasn’t been part of the secretary of state’s job for more than half a century — running Wisconsin’s elections.

JoCasta Zamarripa: Not just ‘ceremonial’

Former Democratic state Assembly member JoCasta Zamarripa seeks to return to state government after having served as a member of the Milwaukee Common Council. Elected to the Assembly in 2010, Zamarripa served five terms, stepping down to run for Milwaukee alder in 2020. She’s now halfway through her second term in that position.

As she’s traveled the state, Zamarripa says, she’s heard from some voters that the secretary of state is a “largely ceremonial” job, but she strongly differs with that assessment.

The role as a member of the Board of Commissioners of Public Lands, which raises revenue from timber sales that go to public school libraries, is important, she says, because “our schools depend on that funding.” The board also provides competitive economic development and public project loans to local communities.

The office provides important services such as authenticating documents for overseas actions, from foreign adoptions to international business deals, Zamarripa says.

As an alder who has had to assist the community members she represents in a variety of contexts, “these are important constituent services that I’m well positioned to take on,” Zamarripa says.

She also favors adding staff and funds to the office.

Zamarripa says she decided to run for secretary of state after learning Gov. Tony Evers would not seek a third term and seeing that “there was going to be some movement” in the Democratic upper echelons of state government.

As the first Latina in the state Legislature and on the Milwaukee Common Council, Zamarripa said she “felt this was an opportunity for me to throw my hat in for a statewide run to galvanize and capture the Latino vote.” She said she believes her presence on the ticket could help curb the drop-off in voting by Latino voters in Wisconsin in the midterms.

“It’s very important that we retain this office in Democratic hands,” Zamarripa says.

Pete Karas: ‘People want more choices’

Long-time Wisconsin Green Party member and activist Pete Karas says he’s joined the race for secretary of state because he believes neither Democrats nor Republicans should have a political monopoly in Wisconsin.

“People are just sick and tired over the same two parties,” Karas says. “People want more choices.”

Karas says he’d actually like to see the job become a nonpartisan office, with its election in the spring along with local county board and common council races.

In the office itself, he favors modernization, noting that the incumbent, Sarah Godlewski, has taken steps to make state records more accessible to the public.

To that end, Karas says he’d support some additional funding, as well as partnerships with libraries, universities and nonprofit organizations who could “step up and help us modernize the records.”

Karas says he opposes a maneuver in the 2025-27 state budget that made an exception for  Milwaukee County from a longstanding state provision requiring counties to pay most of their traffic fine and forfeiture revenue into the Common School Fund, overseen by the Board of Commissioners of Public Lands.

The budget allows the county to use those funds to pay local prosecutors and district attorneys. The provision is now the subject of a lawsuit.

“I would have pushed the Board of Commissioners of Public Lands to file a lawsuit” against the funding carve-out, Karas says.

While Zamarripa says she’s confident she can overcome two opponents in the election, she acknowledges she’s concerned that Karas could pull enough votes that would otherwise go to her, thus enabling Republican Schroeder to get the most votes of the three.

Karas rejects that concern.

“I’m not running to take votes away from anybody,” he says. “The Democrats do not own people’s votes.”

Jay Schroeder: Replace the elections commission

Jay Schroeder won the Republican nomination with a vow to eliminate the Wisconsin Elections Commission and move election administration into the secretary of state’s office — as it is in 37 states.

In the August primary, he got more votes than the candidate who had the party’s endorsement. “I was focused completely on cleaning up the election system — which needs to be done, and that’s why I won,” Schroeder says.

Current and former state elections officials and the other candidates have all rejected the premise of Schroeder’s campaign.

“Those criticisms are more political than anything else,” says Kevin Kennedy, who  served as executive director for two previous Wisconsin election administration agencies before the Republican-led Wisconsin Legislature created the elections commission.

Election administration was separated from the secretary of state’s office in 1974 and handed over to the State Elections Board, an independent agency that operated until 2007, followed by the Government Accountability Board, which the Wisconsin Elections Commission replaced in 2016.

Zamarripa finds Schroeder’s campaign message troubling. “I’m very worried,” she says, predicting that if Schroeder wins, “he will be emboldened and the Republican Party will be emboldened to give him as much latitude as possible” to carry out his agenda.

Karas calls Schroeder’s goal “a ludicrous proposal” — but says he doesn’t think it has any chance of taking effect. “There’s so many holes in what he’s proposing, I cannot believe any Legislature or any governor would sign on to that,” he says.

Schroeder, however, says that if he wins, he expects to make the case to whoever wins the race for governor on the grounds that “my crystal clear platform” focused on taking over election administration delivered his victory.

In that scenario, he doesn’t expect the putative next governor to ignore him. ” I think that’d be kind of hard for them to do that,” he says.

Focus on voter lists

This is Schroeder’s second try for the job as the GOP nominee. He lost the general election in 2018 to long-time Democratic incumbent Doug La Follette. He also ran for the Republican nomination in 2022 but didn’t advance.

Schroeder’s campaign’s central premise is that the Wisconsin Elections Commission is a failed agency, beset by problems that have sowed public mistrust.

The elections commission’s defenders say that’s an unwarranted claim. In 2024, the commission’s executive director, Meagan Wolfe, received awards from two national organizations for public service and for improving its operations.

Schroeder’s criticism emphasizes the state’s practice of preserving the records of people who have been removed from the list of active registered voters.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission maintains a statewide electronic voting database. About 1,850 local clerks across the state register voters and enter their information in the database. When voters die, move away, are found incompetent by a court or are convicted of a felony (preventing them from voting until their sentence is completed), local clerks record that information, too.

Wisconsin law doesn’t allow the elections commission to delete the records of people removed from the active registered list. Instead, their records are switched to “inactive.”

Inactive voters are not included in the lists of registered voters sent to each polling place before Election Day, according to the elections commission.

Inactive voters who qualify — for example, a person who moves out of state and then later returns to Wisconsin — must register again, said Emilee Miklas, the elections commission communications director.

The elections commission staff sends local clerks “Registration Alerts” identifying deceased people, potential duplicate records, and the names of convicted felons to be checked against local registration rolls. The alerts draw on Wisconsin Department of Health Services’ monthly death reports and Wisconsin Department of Corrections daily updates on felony convictions.

The state also gets data from the national Electronic Registration Information Center, which collects it from other states and from federal agencies, including the Social Security Administration. The elections commission staff most recently reported their findings at the commission’s October quarterly meeting.

Records retention suspicion

Wisconsin’s retention of records for inactive voters has been a source of conspiracy claims of widespread voter fraud by some activists. But the elections commission says the practice enables clerks to cross-check a registration against inactive voters — preventing a person registering from impersonating a dead person, for example.

“Basically, you have one database with 7 million records, and there’s a very good reason why we keep records of inactive voter records, deceased voters, because if you got rid of those, you would lose one of your best tools to combat election fraud,” said Don Millis, the commission’s Republican chair, at the Oct. 1 meeting.

Schroeder says he doesn’t see any need to keep the records of people no longer registered.

“There’s more deceased people on the voting rolls than there are alive,” he said in an interview, conflating the records of active voters with the inactive voters whose records are kept separate from the active list. “They don’t need to be in the system.”

Federal laws require all states to retain some records of people struck from the voting rolls, according to Sam Liebert, Wisconsin state director for All Voting Is Local.

Nevertheless, Schroeder says numerous other states are able to produce “clean lists” regularly and that Wisconsin should, too.

“When you’re deceased, you should have nothing to do with any voting system, any recording or anything,” Schroeder says. He calls the idea of using “historical reasons” to maintain a list of inactive voters “a bunch of baloney.”

He suggests that the state could “interface that with Social Security, so when someone’s benefits stop, their name would go off the voting rolls.”

The elections commission already uses Social Security data to identify people who have died and to remove them from the active voter lists, according to the agency.

Schroeder says he first decided to run for secretary of state after reading about Wisconsin’s practice of keeping the records of people no longer registered, then looking up the record for his deceased father and seeing him still listed as registered.

Schroeder says he did not try to contact either the local clerk where his father had lived or the Wisconsin Elections Commission to correct his father’s status, however. 

“I’m like, ‘wait a minute, that’s not right,’” he says, and it triggered his decision to run for secretary of state. Eventually when he looked again for his deceased father’s name, he was no longer listed as an active registered voter.

“All my goal is, why I’m running for this office, is to increase confidence in elections,” he says. “And anything that gets in the way of that in my opinion needs to be changed.”

Incidents including duplicate ballots being sent by the Green Bay clerk to voters two elections in a row and a thumb drive at Milwaukee’s central count in August that had the wrong database loaded on it have convinced him that the system is flawed, Schroeder says.

Both incidents were the subjects of elections commission investigations, and audit logs in the Milwaukee case showed no evidence of tampering, Votebeat reported.   

When Schroeder ran in the Republican primary in 2022 for the office, he told a crowd that he would not have signed “a sheet of paper for the election,” apparently a reference to the certification of electoral votes for Joe Biden, who won Wisconsin in the 2020 presidential election, Bill Lueders reported in a commentary for the Wisconsin Examiner.

In an interview last week, Schroeder didn’t deny the comment but waved it away.

“I think there was other things that maybe could have been checked into,” Schroeder said. “But generally speaking, the system works. Joe Biden [was] the president. I’m not living in the past.”

Before the primary, Schroeder held himself out as an “authentic MAGA activist” and a “MAGA aligned candidate on election integrity.”

Asked Monday about his alignment with the “MAGA” movement associated with President Donald Trump, Schroeder said, “I don’t know that I would. I would try to do what’s right.”

President Donald Trump’s 11th-hour campaign to intervene in California’s vote counting encountered its first resistance from federal courts on Monday, with appellate judges ruling against the effort.

A three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled against a U.S. Department of Justice request for a court order requiring California election officials to segregate and not count the ballots of some 20,000 voters, who federal officials say are suspected noncitizens, until those voters can prove otherwise. The decision, issued Monday, came after rare oral arguments on Sunday.

Two of the three judges sharply questioned a Justice Department lawyer over the demand, as well as the timeline of the agency’s actions. A third judge appeared more sympathetic to the Trump administration’s arguments.

The oral arguments, held virtually, came after the Justice Department said a district court judge hadn’t ruled fast enough on its request for a temporary restraining order to require California officials to set aside the ballots of suspected noncitizens. 

In Monday’s 2-1 decision, the majority wrote that the appeals court lacked jurisdiction over the case because the DOJ “failed to allow the district court adequate opportunity to consider” the request.

One of the appellate judges emphasized on Sunday that the district court judge had swiftly scheduled a hearing, currently set for Tuesday, less than a week after receiving the case.

“I don’t see how we have jurisdiction,” said Judge Mark Bennett, a Trump appointee who often led the skeptical questioning of the DOJ.

Last-minute push

As Election Day approaches, the Trump administration is mounting a furious final bid to assert authority over state and local election officials. 

The Justice Department first demanded immediate action in a last-minute lawsuit that alleges ballots cast by alleged noncitizens in California risk diluting the votes of U.S. citizens. 

It then opened a new front on Friday, preemptively suing Alaska over the future certification of its U.S. Senate race. Democrats and voting rights groups filed a flurry of court papers over the weekend opposing the Alaska lawsuit.

Sunday’s oral arguments in the California case, which lasted nearly two hours, marked the first courtroom showdown in the Trump administration’s new round of preelection legal action. One or both lawsuits could be before the U.S. Supreme Court within days, depending on the speed of lower courts.

An ‘astronomical’ number of ballots

Justice Department attorney Matthew Donnelly told the three-judge panel that the DOJ decided to seek an emergency order after learning how many mail-in ballots election officials were already processing, at least several hundred thousand so far. 

He said the agency hadn’t been aware of what he called the “astronomical” number of ballots as he explained why the DOJ didn’t ask for a temporary restraining order until four days after it first sued California.

“Frankly, we did not appreciate the scale,” Donnelly said, though California is a universal vote-by-mail state that sends a ballot to all voters.

Seth Waxman, a lawyer for Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan, told the court that Donnelly’s assertion was “absurd on its face.” Election officials in California have warned that complying with the Justice Department’s demands so close to Election Day could have catastrophic consequences. 

“The numbers are publicly available,” Waxman said.

Authority over elections

The U.S. Constitution’s Elections Clause places the responsibility for administering elections with the states, with Congress retaining the power to override state regulations. 

Donnelly clashed with Bennett over whether the legal basis for the Justice Department’s demands of California, a federal law that makes it a misdemeanor crime for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, represents an instance of Congress asserting its authority over elections.

Donnelly said the federal law preempts California’s action “here that frustrates its purpose” — in other words, the refusal of state and local officials to set aside the suspected noncitizen ballots. 

But Bennett said California law also bans noncitizen voting, and he argued that what Congress passed doesn’t directly change the rules state lawmakers adopted, which require voters to attest under penalty of perjury that they are qualified to vote.

‘An emergency of their own making’

The Trump administration has said the Department of Homeland Security compiled the list of 20,000 suspected noncitizens based on public California voter data it obtained. 

Judge Gabriel Sanchez, an appointee of President Joe Biden, questioned the reliability of the list, noting that federal officials initially told California this summer they believed the state had potentially more than 190,000 noncitizens on its rolls.

“Somehow the district court was supposed to resolve all this in a matter of hours by noon on October 22?” Sanchez said, referring to the deadline the Justice Department requested for a decision from the district court judge.

Samuel Siegel, a lawyer representing California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, a Democrat, told the appeals court the voter list the Trump administration obtained was “wildly outdated.” He said the 9th Circuit has nothing to decide because U.S. District Court Judge David Carter, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, has yet to rule.

“It is an emergency of their own making,” Siegel said of the Justice Department.

Sanchez and Bennett agreed. In a per curiam majority opinion, they wrote the “United States’s claimed emergency, at least in part, is a self-constructed one.”

Judge Patrick Bumatay, a Trump appointee and the only judge on the panel who at times appeared to agree with the Justice Department’s arguments, pushed Siegel on the consequences of not ordering California to set aside the ballots. Donnelly said repeatedly that once the ballots are processed, it becomes impossible to pull them out, even if it later becomes clear they were fraudulently cast.

“Without an injunction, you’ll never know, correct?” Bumatay asked Siegel, who responded that voters must affirm their citizenship.

Bumatay dissented from Monday’s opinion. He wrote that he would have granted the DOJ request.

“The question—does the federal government have the power to stop this potential attack on the integrity of our elections? Under both federal law and the Constitution, the answer must be ‘yes,’” Bumatay wrote.

Carter has promised to rule promptly after a Tuesday hearing on the Justice Department’s request for a temporary restraining order. A denial could prompt the DOJ to appeal again.

Reading Time: 6 minutes

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

Wisconsin election officials are divided over how to handle the possibility of unarmed federal immigration or law enforcement agents arriving at polling places this November and asking to observe voting.

The disagreement centers on a passage in new Wisconsin Elections Commission guidance intended to help local election officials navigate encounters with law enforcement at the polls. Among other instructions, the guidance says that agents from ICE, the FBI and other federal agencies who want to observe voting must follow the same rules as other election observers.

But officials in Dane County, home to Madison and one of Wisconsin’s most Democratic strongholds, warn that the language could lead poll workers to admit federal agents in violation of federal law. Federal law bans U.S. officials from sending troops or armed agents to the polls except under extremely limited circumstances, and a different law bans voter intimidation.

In an Oct. 15 email to the commission, the county’s attorney argued that the guidance could be read as permitting armed ICE agents to observe voting, despite federal restrictions.

Dane County officials have spent months preparing for the possibility of federal interference in the election. The commission, meanwhile, approved its guidance less than three weeks before Election Day, after receiving what it said were hundreds of questions from local clerks seeking clarity about federal law enforcement at the polls.

Clerks and attorneys interviewed by Votebeat were divided over whether the guidance provides the clarity they need. Some praised it as helpful and others said it came too late or warned that its language could lead election inspectors to misunderstand the limits of federal law.

On page three, the guidance instructs election officials to contact their clerks and the commission if federal agents arrive to observe voting. If federal officials are present “just to observe, they still have to check in like regular observers and are subject to the observer rule,” it states. The guidance does not, at that point, distinguish between armed and unarmed federal agents.

It then discusses circumstances in which armed, uniformed local officers might observe voting.

Only two pages later does the commission explain the federal law restricting armed personnel in federal service from polling places.

The structure of the advice, Dane County attorney David Gault told Votebeat, “creates the implication it’s OK for ICE to be there and observe, and I just don’t think that’s the case.”

“If they’re armed, it’s clearly prohibited,” he said. “If they’re unarmed but still in some kind of a uniform designating them as a federal agent, I think the law is still pretty clear they’re not supposed to be there.”

Dane County officials object to commission guidance

Election officials across Wisconsin have been preparing for months for the possibility of federal law enforcement at the polls, but the concern is particularly acute in the state’s largest, heavily Democratic counties. In Dane County, the state’s second-largest, officials say listening to the commission’s guidance could complicate their efforts to keep federal agents from interfering with voting.

The guidance lays out steps for election officials to take when federal agents appear. Chief inspectors are instructed to immediately notify their municipal clerk, who must then contact the county clerk and commission staff. Agents carrying out legitimate law enforcement duties, rather than observing voting, are treated differently. In those cases, election officials are told to request identification and any warrants, document the encounter and ask officers to conduct their business outside the voting area when possible.

The commission also tells election inspectors they can remove observers if they have a reasonable basis to believe they are, or are about to, intimidate or disrupt voters. In its instructions addressing local law enforcement officers who insist on observing while armed and in uniform, the guidance leaves inspectors to determine whether their presence crosses that line.

Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell took issue in particular with the statement that if federal agents wish to observe, they can check in like regular observers.

“It’s inaccurate,” said McDonell, a Democrat. “It’s confusing. It doesn’t reflect what the law is.”

If a back-office ICE employee who’s unarmed wants to observe, that might be fine, McDonell said. “But that’s not how I think anyone would read that,” he said, saying clerks may assume the sentence is referring to armed federal agents.

Sharing McDonell’s concerns, Gault, the Dane County in-house attorney, sent an email to Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe on Oct. 15, the same day the commission finalized the guidance.

Gault said that while armed ICE agents are clearly banned from the polls under federal law, a separate federal law bars a person acting under the color of law from intimidating voters. Gault argued that it would ban even an unarmed but uniformed ICE agent from observing at the polls.

“There is no legitimate reason for ICE to be at a polling place,” he told Wolfe. “Everyone there is presumptively a U.S. citizen. I don’t think WEC’s guidance should imply that an ICE agent can be a legitimate observer.”

Commission attorney supervisor Angela O’Brien Sharpe disagreed, saying federal law doesn’t address every situation that may bring federal agents to the polls. “If federal law enforcement wishes to observe an election, then they are permitted to do so,” she said, adding that they would be subject to Wisconsin observer rules.

She emphasized that the guidance does not authorize armed federal observers and was intended to help poll workers “manage how to respond to varying situations like these” including deciding whether an officer’s presence constitutes intimidation or a disturbance.

Gault was unsatisfied, calling the guidance “confusing at best.”

“If asked, this office will advise election officials and law enforcement in Dane County that armed federal agents should not be at a polling place under any circumstances,” he wrote. “If they are there legitimately to vote they should at a minimum be unarmed.”

Local attorneys can offer advice to city and county election offices that contradicts the commission’s, Sharpe said.

Little precedent for federal agents observing elections

Federal election monitors from the Justice Department have observed voting for decades, but the prospect of ICE or FBI agents arriving at polling places specifically to monitor voting presents a largely untested legal question.

Justin Levitt, an election law specialist at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who worked in the White House under President Joe Biden on voting rights issues, said the commission’s guidance is “legit and accurate,” adding that it’s “straight down the middle of providing lawful advice without picking a fight.”

“I understand why Dane County wants a different emphasis,” Levitt said. “I don’t think that means they were right and the state was wrong. I think that just means they’ve got different interests here.”

He said the commission and Dane County agree more than they disagree: They both agree that armed agents are banned at the polls and that chief inspectors can kick out anyone intimidating voters.

Had the commission gone further and said ICE was banned from the polls entirely, he said, “That would actually be getting Wisconsin in trouble because you cannot single out federal officials for special treatment.”

Sterling Knoche, a staff attorney at the University of Wisconsin Law School-based State Democracy Research Initiative, similarly said the guidance provides clerks with good instructions for minimizing disruptions at the polling place while instructing them to consult the people who could seek a court injunction if necessary.

Knoche said the commission may not have had a sound legal basis to categorically prohibit unarmed federal agents in uniform from observing. Whether their presence is lawful would depend on their conduct and the circumstances, he said.

In Milwaukee on Monday, Wolfe drew a similar distinction. She said that federal and state law prohibits armed federal agents from showing up at the polls, but said the legality of unarmed agents observing is less clear. In that case, she said, chief inspectors and poll workers must determine whether their presence intimidates or disturbs voters.

How clerks are preparing to apply the guidance

Local officials offered differing assessments of how useful the guidance would be, even as some agreed that federal agents in uniform could intimidate voters.

Marathon County Clerk Kim Trueblood, a Republican, said the guidance was “fine.” She said county clerks have been coordinating with their local sheriffs, who would be their first call if federal agents do show up at the polls. If she were an inspector, she said, she would not allow federal law enforcement agents to register as observers if they’re in uniform, even if they were unarmed.

“We would be on a very strong legal footing to say, ‘You standing there in your FBI vest is intimidating to voters, and so we’re not going to allow that,’” she said.

In an interview, Green Bay Police Chief Chris Davis told Votebeat that the guidance was quite helpful and would be instructive in the unlikely situation that federal agents show up at a city polling place.

“We have to make a decision about what to do fairly quickly,” he said, “so any time we can get guidance like this from an authority, it helps us do that.”

Green County Clerk Arianna Voegeli, a Democrat, said the commission’s guidance came late but was consistent with the guidance that she already had given to local election officials. She agreed that the mere presence of federal officers in uniform could constitute voter intimidation, though she said it’s a legal gray area if they’re unarmed.

“I’m not too concerned about issues here in Green County, just because we’re a smaller county,” she said, though she’s discussed the issue with law enforcement and feels prepared. Larger counties, she said, have likely developed their own plans already.

McDonell, the Dane County clerk, said this guidance might add to the confusion for some clerks instead of taking away from it.

“It would have been better if they hadn’t sent this out,” he said. “It’s at minimum badly worded.”

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.

Can unarmed ICE agents watch voting? In Wisconsin that depends on who you ask 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.

As Election Day approaches, top Democrats on the intelligence committees in Congress are preparing for the possibility that President Donald Trump will allege foreign interference to discredit unfavorable results.

And they want leading U.S. intelligence officials to be immediately reachable if he does.

Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia and Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrats on the Senate and House intelligence committees, outlined the scenario — one of among 50 they say they’ve considered — with reporters on Wednesday, less than two weeks before voting ends in the midterm elections.

“So when the president makes that announcement, you answer your cellphone to give us information about what’s happening,” Himes said the Democrats have told Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton and CIA Director John Ratcliffe.

In recent weeks, the Trump administration has ramped up efforts targeting noncitizen voters, with arrests across the country, and is attempting to block suspected noncitizen voters from having their ballots counted in California. Democrats and voting rights advocates have warned for months that Trump could try to interfere in voting in the midterms.

All of it comes as Trump stares down the possibility that voters will place Democrats in control of Congress — an outcome that could doom his legislative agenda and mire him in investigations.

“We’re making the assumption that the president is not going to accept the results of what looks to be a very challenging election for him and his party,” Himes said.

But amid the highly publicized campaign against noncitizen voting, Democrats have kept an eye on the possibility that Trump could instead invoke a foreign threat to justify an attempt to assert control over elections or undermine the results, even as the Trump administration has cut federal support for election security.

China ‘election meddling’?

When Trump delivered a primetime address on election security in July, he spent a significant portion of the speech describing what he called China’s “sinister election meddling.” He said China had acquired 220 million voter files and the White House released declassified intelligence reports on the vulnerability of voting machines to foreign hacking.

Trump floated the possibility that vote totals could be electronically manipulated or that voting machines could change results. He suggested that election websites, poll books and voter registration databases could be vulnerable to exploitation by foreign adversaries.

“This evidence shows that the election system we have dangerously exposes and really exposes, like levels never thought possible, to hacking, exploitation, and foreign interference,” Trump said in the July speech.

The speech was met with sharp criticism from election security experts, who noted that the United States maintains a decentralized election system that makes any attempt at widespread interference extremely difficult. 

For instance, every state except Louisiana uses paper ballots or generates some form of paper record for each ballot cast, according to data compiled by Verified Voting.

“Can we pre-bunk the notion that he may come up with a fabricated or single piece of intelligence that could be used as a reason to take illegal action?” Warner said, describing the Democrats’ thinking.

As a hypothetical, Himes outlined a scenario in which Trump announces at noon on Election Day that Iran has kicked off an operation to interfere in the election. Himes said he would go on TV and say he has received no briefings and no information, giving him no reason to believe the president’s comments are accurate.

“Now, does that end the crisis? No, but that’s the first step,” Himes said.

Doubts about interference

Warner and Himes belong to the Gang of Eight, a bipartisan group of high-ranking lawmakers who receive classified briefings on matters of intelligence and national security.

The pair drew a sharp distinction between foreign interference — which includes things like messing with voter rolls and attempting to alter results — and foreign efforts to influence elections, such as social media bots spreading certain messages. 

Himes said that, as of now, “we are not seeing either the capability or the intent to interfere.”

He also said lawmakers haven’t received pre-election reports about the election threat landscape required by law. 

In July, Himes, along with Democratic Reps. André Carson of Indiana, Joaquin Castro of Texas and Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois, wrote in a letter to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or ODNI, that the intelligence community had missed a report on election security vulnerabilities and foreign intelligence threats to federal elections that was due on May 7.

The ODNI didn’t respond to questions from States Newsroom on Thursday.

White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis said in a statement that Trump had done more than other previous president to ensure free and fair elections. She said the president is making clear that anyone who votes illegally “will be held accountable.”

“While extreme Democrats and the media continue to dismiss concerns about voter fraud, the Trump Administration is taking decisive action to protect our elections including prosecuting election crimes, strengthening election infrastructure security, and protecting vulnerable voters from fraud and coercion,” Bis said.

Reductions in workforce

The Democrats’ planning for a claim of foreign interference comes as the Trump administration has reduced cybersecurity resources for state and local election officials. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which typically plays a large role in election security efforts, has lost roughly a third of its workforce since Trump began his second term.

Trump has attacked CISA — a component of the Department of Homeland Security — under the leadership of previous director Chris Krebs, who worked to debunk misinformation after the 2020 election. Trump fired Krebs less than a month after the election. DHS has previously proposed eliminating CISA’s election security program, a $39 million initiative. 

Jennifer Morrell, CEO and co-founder of The Elections Group, a nonpartisan organization that provides trainings and other resources to election officials, said the Trump administration “essentially decimated” CISA. Morrell said she had been a contractor for the agency.

“We lost years of work building our cyber and physical security infrastructure,” Morrell said Thursday during a University of Pittsburgh panel discussion on election integrity.

In September, Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat, and Rep. Joseph Morelle, a New York Democrat, wrote in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and CISA Acting Director Nicholas Andersen that CISA hadn’t provided any funding to its Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, despite instructions from Congress to continue funding the program.

Padilla and Morelle noted that the center had for years provided security services to local election offices at no cost before funding was abruptly cut in early 2025. While the center continues to provide some services through a paid membership model, they wrote that it lacks its former reach.

Briefing urged

On Wednesday, Himes and Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, urged Mullin to brief lawmakers on election security efforts. In a letter, they wrote that state and local election officials “are under tremendous pressure this election cycle.”

Homeland Security didn’t answer questions from States Newsroom on Thursday.

In some of the country’s largest jurisdictions, the consequences of the federal pullback have been muted. Big counties, with hundreds of thousands or even millions of residents, often have their own sophisticated cybersecurity programs.

Monica Gordon, the clerk of Cook County, Illinois, which includes Chicago, praised her information technology team. In a call with reporters, the Democratic official said her office was fortunate to have the latest innovations to protect voters’ information.

“We’ve been very fortunate but I am concerned about some of our smaller counties that have less resources,” Gordon said.

Tammy Patrick, chief programs officer at Election Center, an organization overseen by the National Association of Election Officials, said on the same call that states this year are leaning on their own resources because of the changes at CISA. Election officials have also relied more on help from nonprofit groups, she said.

State and local officials have done a great job of finding needed funding to replace some of those services and ensure sensitive systems are protected, said Morrell.

“But state officials and local officials cannot gather intelligence about threats from foreign nation states,” Morrell said, adding that “we’ve lost sort of the ability to be quickly alerted to that type of intelligence.”

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s midterm travel blitz will continue in the coming days, with Election Day on Nov. 3 now less than two weeks out, headlining rallies in several states hosting hard-fought Senate contests seen as toss-ups.  

Trump began his October campaign road trip in GOP-friendly states, but has begun venturing into territory that’s deemed to have become perilous for Republicans.

The GOP is itching to maintain its narrow majority in the U.S. House and Senate, though elections forecasters are offering a far less optimistic outlook for Republicans, as Democrats remain favored to take back the House and more Senate races shift in the party’s favor. 

Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics on Tuesday moved nearly 30 House races toward Democrats.

The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter shifted Senate races in Mississippi and South Carolina toward Democrats on Tuesday. But the elections forecaster also moved a Senate race in Minnesota toward Republicans. 

In the Palmetto State, where South Carolina GOP Sen. Darline Graham faces Democrat Annie Andrews, the Cook Political Report changed its race rating from “likely Republican” to “lean Republican.” 

Trump was scheduled to rally in Clemson, South Carolina, on Wednesday for Graham, who was appointed in July to serve out the remainder of her late brother Lindsey Graham’s term. 

Rush to early voting

More than 16 million Americans have already voted early in the midterm elections as of Wednesday afternoon, according to a tracker from the University of Florida Election Lab. 

Meanwhile, Trump continues to see dismal approval ratings amid the costly war in Iran and its impact at the gas pump. According to AAA, the national average price for a gallon of regular gas stood at $4.26, as of Oct. 21. One year ago, that price stood at about $3.05. 

New polling from The New York Times and CNN offers a snapshot of just how bleak Trump’s approval ratings are with less than two weeks to go until the midterms — hitting record lows in the pair of polls.

In a Times/Siena University national poll, only 36% of likely voters approved of Trump’s performance. Similarly, a CNN/SSRS poll found a 32% approval rating for the president.  

Trump road show

Here’s a closer look at Trump’s travel in the coming days, after recent stops in Georgia, Kentucky, Kansas and North Carolina: 

• The president will head to Sioux City, Iowa, for a rally on Thursday. The Hawkeye State features an open Senate race between Iowa Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson and Democrat Josh Turek that the Cook Political Report has listed as a toss-up.
• Trump will then rally in Fort Myers, Florida, on Friday, where the Sunshine State’s Senate race is described as “solid Republican” by the Cook Political Report. Florida GOP Sen. Ashley Moody faces Democrat Angie Nixon. 
• Trump travels to Perry, Georgia, on Saturday for a rally. The Senate race in Georgia is listed as “likely Democrat” by the Cook Political Report. Georgia Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff is vying for another term against Georgia GOP Rep. Mike Collins. 
• The president will then head north to rally Sunday in Port Huron, Michigan. Republican Mike Rogers and Democrat Abdul El-Sayed are battling it out in an open Senate race the Cook Political Report has dubbed a toss-up. 
• On Monday, Trump will rally in Corinth, Mississippi. In the ruby red state, Mississippi GOP Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith is competing for another term against Democrat Scott Colom in a race that the Cook Political Report moved from “solid Republican” to “likely Republican.”
• On Tuesday, Oct. 27, Trump is set to hold rallies in both Waco and Lubbock, Texas. The Lone Star State features a pivotal Senate race between Texas GOP Attorney General Ken Paxton and Democrat James Talarico that the Cook Political Report declares a toss-up. 
• Trump will then travel to Chillicothe, Ohio, on Wednesday, Oct. 28, for a rally. The Buckeye State is also home to another toss-up Senate race listed by the Cook Political Report between Ohio GOP Sen. Jon Husted and Democratic candidate Sherrod Brown.  

Reading Time: 4 minutes

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

Greenfield resident Nereida Loma planned to vote by mail in November, as she usually does. But the ballot she said she requested never arrived, and city officials had no record of her application.

Rather than risk missing her chance to vote, Loma went to City Hall in the Milwaukee suburb on Tuesday to cast an in-person absentee ballot.

“When you put it in the mail, you don’t know if it’s going to count — if it’s going to come or not,” said Loma, who said she plans to vote in-person from now on.

Loma is among the thousands of Wisconsin voters reconsidering how they cast their ballots amid widely reported issues with the U.S. Postal Service and a continued shift away from mail voting after a pandemic-era peak.

Ahead of the November election, Wisconsin voters have requested about 20% fewer mail ballots than at this point in 2022, and those who have received them are returning them at a slower rate. Election clerks and experts say the trend could reflect concerns about mail delivery, or voters choosing to participate in person despite requesting a ballot.

Several of those voters were at the polls on Tuesday, Wisconsin’s first day of early voting. In Greenfield, Philip Zimmer said that he’s typically an early in-person absentee voter because it’s the easiest option for him. He doesn’t consider mail voting a viable option because of the growing politicization of what was once a standard way to cast a ballot.

“With all this Trump stuff and everything,” he said, “I don’t even bother.”

In New Berlin, a voter who identified herself only as Barb said she typically votes early and not by mail because you “never know if it’s gonna get here.”

In Milwaukee, voter Shan Nelson-Rowe said he has always preferred in-person absentee voting. It’s simpler than mail voting and quicker than voting on Election Day, he said. Plus, he doesn’t trust the Postal Service. He’s noticed others growing wary of it too: His neighbor, who usually mails back his ballot, plans to use a drop box this year because he no longer trusts the mail to deliver it, Nelson-Rowe said.

USPS did not return a request for comment sent Tuesday.

Clerks respond to trend away from mail voting

Clerks are seeing fewer ballot requests and adjusting their advice to voters as concerns about postal delays grow.

Inside the New Berlin City Hall, Clerk Rubina Medina told Votebeat her office is receiving just 25 to 30 mail ballot requests a day, down from 75 to 100 in past elections.

Meanwhile, in-person absentee voting appears to be holding steady. Voters lined up at City Hall on Tuesday morning, and Medina said turnout on the first day of early voting was about as busy as usual.

“The voters are saying they don’t trust the mail,” she said. “We hear that often.”

She said the distrust in the Postal Service is often unwarranted and driven by the media, but that she also does recognize that mail is slower than it used to be.

“We used to advertise a mail-it-back Monday, the week prior to Election Day,” she said. “We now advertise that two weeks prior.”

Election officials across the state have been offering similar advice for months, but the numbers show voters are turning their ballots in more slowly than they have in the past.

As of Tuesday, two weeks before the election, voters had returned 51.5% of the ballots they’ve been sent, down from 55.5% at the same time in 2022. The slowdown is widespread: In 63 of the state’s 72 counties, voters have returned a smaller share of their ballots than they had at this point four years ago.

Across the state, absentee voting is also down so far compared with the November midterm election in 2022. By this time in 2022, voters had returned nearly 259,000 ballots, 26% higher than the current returns of 191,000. The number of sent-out ballots has dropped about 20%, from 466,000 to 372,000.

Clerks and experts respond to what the numbers show

Much of the drop-off in traditional absentee voting can be credited to the passage of time since the pandemic. More voters are simply comfortable voting in person, UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden said. But, he said, trust in the U.S. Postal Service has dropped dramatically too. An NPR/PBS News/Marist poll found that only 58% of Americans are confident about timely election mail delivery, compared with 71% two years ago.

“Voters are looking for ways to get around the Postal Service,” Burden said. “That can mean waiting until in-person voting opens up in one form or another, or getting a ballot by mail but finding another way to get it back to their clerk’s office.”

To a lesser extent, absentee voting has also gone down because more voters have exited Wisconsin’s list of voters who automatically received absentee ballots on a permanent basis and because a series of high-profile errors around the state involving absentee ballots may have deterred some voters from voting absentee, Burden said.

Marathon County Clerk Kim Trueblood, a Republican, agreed voters are now motivated to bypass the mail. She expects many voters who have requested a mailed ballot will ultimately leave it blank and instead vote in-person on Election Day.

Sheboygan County Clerk Jon Dolson, also a Republican, agreed. And Milwaukee election chief Paulina Gutiérrez said more and more voters over the last few elections have been dropping off their ballots on Election Day citing similar concerns. She said Milwaukee anticipates that voters “are more comfortable” dropping their ballots off themselves.

Green County Clerk Arianna Voegeli, a Democrat, said she believes part of the drop-off in the share of returned ballots may be due to mail delays.

Some clerks are experiencing that slowdown firsthand: Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell, a Democrat, said his son studying in Ireland requested a mail ballot in September. It was sent in late September, he said, and his son still hasn’t received it.

Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe said she doesn’t know exactly what’s behind the lower ballot-return rate, but said she has heard a lot of concern from voters about mail delays.

“We’re just trying to get the message out that if people still have a by-mail absentee ballot and they want to return it by mail, they need to do so as soon as possible, she said. ”We really do recommend that if you’re returning your ballot by mail, that you do so at least two weeks in advance of the election.”

That was Oct. 20.

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.

In Wisconsin, voters cast early in-person ballots as distrust in the mail grows 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.

In-person absentee voting for Wisconsin’s elections begins on Tuesday, with hours and locations varying by municipality. 

Elections officials have said ahead of the midterms that they expect early voting to be especially popular this year as concerns mount about the speed and reliability of sending absentee ballots through the U.S. postal system. 

Data from the Wisconsin Elections Commission shows that as of Monday morning, 364,888 absentee ballots have already been requested and 173,164 of those have been returned. Those numbers lag the 2022 election when 438,673 absentee ballots had been requested and 195,287 had been returned by the same point. 

WEC Administrator Meagan Wolfe said the early numbers suggest a surge in popularity for early voting. 

“Although voter behaviors are difficult to forecast, the data so far indicates that local clerks should prepare for higher turnout during in-person absentee voting,” Wolfe said in a Monday news release.

About 2.6 million people voted in Wisconsin in the 2022 midterm elections. Officials expect turnout to be similar to that total this year. 

State election officials have recommended that absentee voters should mail their ballots at least two weeks before the election to give a large enough buffer to ensure they are received by Election Day. With the clock ticking before polls open on Nov. 3, voters can also return their absentee ballots directly to local clerks’ offices or, in municipalities that use them, into ballot drop boxes. 

“If you’re planning to mail your ballot back, you should do so as soon as possible,” Wolfe said. “Your ballot must arrive by 8 p.m. on Election Day to be counted.”

The in-person absentee voting process involves a voter requesting an absentee ballot, completing the ballot and returning it to the clerk all in one stop. Voters will need to provide a voting-eligible photo ID to receive their ballots. 

In-person absentee voting runs through Nov. 1. Local hours and early voting sites can be found at MyVote.WI.gov.

Reading Time: 2 minutes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If Tom Tiffany loses in November, it’s not irrational to think he might try to overturn the election results. On Nov. 4, the day after the election, Tiffany might repeat the same, old, tired argument he made when he tried to overturn the 2020 election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania and said that, if he’d had the chance, he would have voted against certifying the results in Wisconsin. Tiffany might again accuse Dane County election officials as being “unscrupulous.” He might say that Milwaukee County allowed “hundreds of thousands of illegal votes to be cast and counted.” 

Tiffany only recently admitted that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, and has said he supports an FBI probe into the 2020 election results in our state. 

Mayor Cavalier Johnson has offered Tiffany an open-ended invitation to observe Milwaukee’s elections procedures himself. “I invite you to see our election operation, to talk to officials who conduct our elections and scrutinize, first hand the extensive security and accuracy in place.”  Unsurprisingly, Tiffany has not accepted this offer. 

When Tiffany welcomed FBI agents this spring to investigate Milwaukee election officials, it wasn’t just to sow doubts in the 2020 election or to ensure election integrity. The real goal was to set the stage in case he loses in November. Then, he might  ask Donald Trump to help overturn Wisconsin’s election.

When facing this very real impending emergency to November’s election, what are Wisconsinites to do? Noted decent human being Mr. Fred Rogers has this advice.

“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”

So who are our helpers? Let’s start with the people you already know. Once you begin to ask around, you will discover that you know several helpers who volunteer at the polls in every election.  Personally, I attend weekly church services at First Unitarian Society of Milwaukee. A high percentage of our congregants volunteer at the polls. If you ask more than one of them, you hear a consistent story. 

Election volunteers care deeply about ensuring  free and fair elections and they do it year after year. They receive extensive training to carefully follow transparent procedures. They are given advice such as, “It is better to go slow, ask questions and get it right.” Additionally, there are so many people involved at the polls and so much transparency that, once you are a part of it, you have full faith in the integrity of Milwaukee elections. So ask around. Share these helpers’ stories before our city’s integrity is questioned this November. Want to join their ranks? They will gladly put you to work.

But what are we to do on Nov. 4? Luckily, you will always find people who are helping.  This winter, our city faced a real threat from federal ICE immigration agents. Before the victories of everyday helpers in Minneapolis, it was reasonable to believe that level of federal overreach would spread to our city. We know this because of the treatment of our neighbor Yessenia Ruano and the detainment of Elvira Benitez-Suarez and Salah Sarsour. Masked ICE agents detained at least 39 of our neighbors in July.  The ICE Out MKE coalition stood up on those dark days and those Milwaukee helpers are still here. I trust the League of Women Voters of Milwaukee County, Souls to the Polls, Milwaukee Turners, and Voces de la Frontera. Wisconsin has plenty of non-partician, non-for-profit helpers and these are just a few.

Your relationship with the nonpartisan not-for-profits that are working to defend our democracy will need to be deeper than digital. Go to a meeting and find out now which local helpers will be your trusted voice. Empowered with this connection, on the day after the election, your plan should be to listen to follow the guidance from these groups and join the organized, active citizens who are standing up.  

Most importantly, don’t relax into believing that Tiffany and Trump are interested in anything but autocracy. The dance of democracy is not choreographed by a single caller. It is not a solo act. It depends on all of us moving together.

Organizers launched more than 2,500 No Kings events across all 50 states and the District of Columbia Saturday, this time focusing their efforts on the midterm elections.

From roadside rallies to letter-writing campaigns and protest songs, this round of demonstrations aimed to get people to the polls early.  

In the bustling and diverse neighborhood of Jackson Heights, Queens, where Bangladeshi street vendors whip up fuska – crispy, potato-filled shells – and Mexican taquerías serve up al pastor and carne asada, volunteers gathered at a popular local restaurant called The Queensboro. The organizers are part of the Jackson Heights chapter of Indivisible, one of the many grassroots organizations that have made No Kings demonstrations happen. 

Arianne Mayer, 49, cofounded the chapter about two years ago after President Donald Trump was elected to his second term. On this “No Kings: Vote Early Day of Action”, she hands out pens and paper to volunteers to write letters to voters in battleground states, encouraging them to get out and cast their ballots as early as possible. 

“The practice of mobilization of bodies is really helpful, especially in New York City, where you’re trying to mobilize many thousands of people,” Mayer said. “When you see those thousands of marches, you understand people everywhere are not OK with this, but it’s nice to have a different approach for this event. ” 

Mayer, like many people here, said she was deeply frustrated and “disgusted” by the presence of federal immigration agents targeting her neighbors. Many people also said the federal government is implementing increasingly authoritarian policies. 

Since summer 2025, the No Kings movement has held multiple massive demonstrations across thousands of sites around the country, attracting millions of people to protest against what they consider to be an overreach of government under the Trump Administration.

This time around organizers shifted their focus, understanding that the midterm elections  will determine which political party controls Congress. If it’s the Democrats, they could put up roadblocks to Trump’s agenda. Organizers are hoping the day of early voting could not only increase the pool of voters, but also ease the burden on poll workers on Nov. 3, Election Day. 

Voting is in full swing across dozens of states, with over 5 million ballots cast, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab. Trump faces a historic low in approval ratings. 

In Minnesota folk musician Emmett Doyle took to a stage in downtown Minneapolis to perform Lluís Llach’s “L’Estaca,” written in the 1960s in protest of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship in Spain. 

Doyle is one of 15 defendants facing federal felony conspiracy charges stemming from protests against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s crackdown in Minnesota.

“When I was getting pulled out of my truck by federal agents a couple months ago, one of the first things I asked them was, ‘Hey, is this about the songs?’ And they told me, ‘No, it’s about resisting ICE,’” Doyle said to the crowd of about 1,000. “I told them, ‘Well, you’re going to have to arrest all of Minneapolis if you want to hit me for that.’”

Diane Komsky, 67,drove an hour to the No Kings protest in Sioux Falls, South Dakota,because of the “madness in the White House,” she said. 

“I want to give peace a real chance for families in the United States,” she said.

Mark Lyons of Centennial, Colorado, said he hadn’t been involved in much political activism or organizing before last year. Saturday’s protest was his fourth No Kings event.

With the midterms approaching, Lyons is hopeful that Democrats will take control of Congress and “put all kinds of checks and balances” on the Trump administration.

“They’ve been stealing the country blind for the last two years,” he said. “There has to be accountability, and it can’t be business as usual.”

At an event in the nation’s capital, 25-year-old Octavia Clapp said using her right to vote especially matters as Trump attempts to wield authority over voting. The Trump administration has spent more than a year in court battles with dozens of states and voting rights groups seeking to force states to provide sensitive voter data and curb voting by mail.

“I think cracking down on mail-in voting and restricting people’s ability to vote easily is anti-democratic,” said Clapp, of Maryland. “Democracy is really important to me, and freedom is really important to me.”

But the No Kings events were also met with pushback, including directly from Trump’s team. 

“The fact that the ‘No Kings’ organizers are talking about voting in the upcoming election proves they should change their name,” said Lauren Bis, a White House spokesperson. “This November, Americans have a clear choice between President Trump and Republican’s commonsense policies or the extreme Democrats radical socialist, open-border policies.”

In battleground state Virginia, two pro-Trump observers on the outskirts of the crowd in Richmond watched on.

 “I’ve learned that a lot of a lot of folks here tend to be older, toward the baby boomer side,” Jacob Seivers, 20, said of the protesters, whom he called “more courteous than you might expect” and “willing to talk.” 

Seivers, who lives in Bedford County, called the speakers’ rhetoric about Republicans “hilarious” and “nonsense.” He also said he believes Congress will flip blue after November.

Trump supporter John Hess of Centralia, Washington, was outnumbered in Olympia but took that in stride. Hess said he comes to the Capitol every week and didn’t know of the day’s events until Friday. 

“Normally I don’t get this much excitement,” he said 

Back in New York, another local Indivisible organizer, Katherine Scannell, 35, said it’s important to encourage people to exercise their right to vote.  

Scannell and volunteers set up shop at a neighborhood “open streets” event in Astoria, Queens, where residents could walk within the street blocked off from cars, listen to live music, and pick up fresh and locally grown vegetables. 

“Normally it’s a protest, but the No Kings coalition had nationwide calls talking about how we wanted to turn those protests and eyeballs into action,”Scannell said. “Voting early is a great way to protect everyone’s vote, because when you vote early it’s hard to sabotage those numbers.” 

Alyssa Chen and Maya Betti of Minnesota Reformer, Makenzie Huber of South Dakota Searchlight, Chase Woodruff of Colorado Newsline, Andrew Kerley for Virginia Mercury and Baya Burgess for States Newsroom’s D.C. bureau, contributed. 

MADISON – About 1,000 people gathered at 2 p.m. on a sunny Saturday afternoon for a No Kings protest in James Madison park near Lake Monona in downtown Madison. The crowd swelled to about 1,500 as protesters marched to the Capitol in a long line with police stopping traffic at intersections along the way. The Forward Marching Band played “Solidarity Forever” on tubas, horns and drums as marchers carrying signs protesting the Trump administration rounded the square and converged in front of City Hall to listen to speakers who urged everyone to vote early in the 2026 midterm elections.

Gina Idsinga came to the rally from her home in McFarland with a homemade sign that displayed the names of her five grandchildren and the statement: “I need to be able to tell my  grandchildren I did not stay silent.” 

“I feel very strongly about what is going on and we just need to band together and keep community in mind,” she said. “No country is a good country without taking care of its people and this administration is definitely not taking care of its people.”

Beside her, Idsinga’s friend Dee Reid carried a sign that said “No crowns for clowns.” She said she came out to support “all the things that this country has worked hard to keep,” including abortion rights, Social Security and Obamacare. She has been thinking about retiring soon, she said, but the cost of living is making her worry about whether she will be able to stop working. Her kids are also struggling with high costs, she said. “Both have really good careers and can’t buy a house. Interest rates are high, housing is not affordable and things are going in the wrong direction, so we need to focus on what’s good for us and not on starting wars in places we really don’t need to right now.”

Dineen Seymour-Nahn, a retired public school teacher in Madison said, “We have to vote in Crowley and Josh Kaul, and just vote in Democrats up and down the ticket, because really, if we don’t win this, who knows what will happen in 2028? With Tom Tiffany in there, he’ll undo everything we’ve done even in the last two years with some really good Supreme Court races. All that will come back – gerrymandering, anti-abortion laws, so that’s why we’re here.”

Sue Jennik, the president of the  League of Women Voters of Dane County stood behind a table in front of City Hall with information on the candidates running in Wisconsin in 2026, the proposed constitutional amendments voters will see on on their ballots and instructions on how to register, vote early and use a ballot drop box: “Everything people need to know to protect their right to vote,” she said.

“Don’t trust an email that tells you you’re registered to vote if you just moved to Wisconsin,” said Melissa Markquart, a singer in the protest group the Raging Grannies. “We have grannies out registering people to vote, and they’ve had people tell them they got emails that said they were already registered – but there’s no automatic registration in Wisconsin,” she added.

Ajak Johnson, one of the march organizers, ran back and forth along the line directing marchers throughout. “These national events keep happening and we keep organizing things here on the ground,” she said. “I think it’s important for people to come together.” 

Early voting starts in Wisconsin on Oct 20, she added, “and I would just hope that people would leave here with a plan to early vote.”

The Wisconsin Elections Commission voted Thursday to send a memo to clerks across the state with guidance for what they should do if local, state or federal law enforcement shows up at polling places. 

WEC discussed the guidance as fears have risen across the country that President Donald Trump could send armed federal agents to polling places in an effort to intimidate voters. 

The agency’s administrator, Meagan Wolfe, said at the commission’s Thursday morning meeting that “we don’t expect anything unusual at the polls on Election Day.” 

“We expect voters to have the same experience that they’ve had at previous elections, and so by no means are we looking to make anybody feel panicked or anything about this,” Wolfe said. “But clerks are asking very directly for this type of information because they are getting hundreds of emails from voters and from groups asking, ‘Do you have a plan if these sorts of things were to happen?’ And so I see this just like any other contingency planning that we do to assist our clerks.” 

The memo to be sent to clerks notes that unless law enforcement officials are conducting a legitimate law enforcement activity or casting their own ballots, they generally shouldn’t be at the polls. If they are, the memo states, officers are subject to the same rules as any other election observer. Armed federal agents and the military are not allowed at polling places. 

The guidance says that if agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Homeland Security or the FBI show up at the polls, poll workers should immediately notify the municipal and county clerks and WEC staff. 

The commissioners noted that in many communities across the state, local law enforcement regularly checks in with election staff to make sure there aren’t any problems. Commissioner Ann Jacobs said it’s preferable if that’s done by plainclothes officers, because that’s less intimidating than a uniformed officer with a gun and bulletproof vest on. 

Republican Commissioner Robert Spindell said he was worried the guidance would depress turnout. 

“It seems to me that the Democrats are worried about federal agents showing up at some of these polling places, and you know, obviously, to instruct the clerks what to do if they do,” he said. “But I think this guidance is only going to scare away some people from the polls when they, when this law enforcement guidance hits the news. I think it will, and I personally think this guidance is unnecessary, as we have not seemed to have needed this for the last 201 years.”

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Elections officials in battleground Wisconsin on Thursday approved guidance for local clerks to help them know what to do if federal law enforcement officials show up at the polls on Election Day, as some activists fear might happen.

A Republican on the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission cast the lone vote against sending the guidance, saying it “is only going to scare away some people from the polls.” A hotly contested race for governor tops the ballot in Wisconsin.

“I personally think this guidance is unnecessary because we have not seemed to need it the past 201 years,” Republican Commissioner Bob Spindell said.

Clerks have been deluged with questions from voters about what they would do if agents showed up at the polls, Wisconsin elections administrator Meagan Wolfe said. The guidance is intended to explain how to handle it, she said.

“I see this as just like any other contingency planning we do to assist our clerks,” she said.

The memo tells Wisconsin’s roughly 1,800 clerks who administer elections what to do if U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, Department of Homeland Security officials, FBI agents or local law enforcement shows up at the polls.

If officers arrive, the guidance says the head of the polling site should inform the municipal clerk, who should then tell the county clerk and the state elections commission. If the agents are there to observe, they must check in like any other observer and be subject to rules governing them, the guidance says.

Democratic commissioner Ann Jacobs said she was concerned about uniformed officers intimidating voters. The commission agreed to her recommendation that the guidance tell clerks to encourage law enforcement agents planning to come to the polls to be in plain clothes and not uniforms.

“I don’t think we want full flak jacket, whatever, law enforcement three feet from our voters,” Jacobs said. “I think that is much different from an ordinary, quiet observation by somebody in plain clothes.”

Department of Homeland Security officials have said they don’t plan to send immigration enforcement officers en masse to patrol the polls and have dismissed concerns that they plan to do so as “fearmongering.”

Election legal experts say federal law clearly prevents the government from deploying any armed troops, agents or officers to election sites except to “repel armed enemies of the United States” — a high bar to clear.

But organizations that represent Latino, Black and Asian American voters say the rhetoric and ICE’s own activity make them worried at a time the number of immigration arrests is soaring as President Donald Trump carries out his mass deportation agenda.

Wisconsin elections officials have been traveling the state in recent days holding news conferences to discuss the process for casting and counting ballots. They have been saying they don’t anticipate anything unusual at the polls this year.

“I expect this election will go like all other elections,” Republican Don Millis, chair of the elections commission, said Thursday.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup. This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.

Wisconsin election officials issue guidance for handling federal agents at polls 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.

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Businesspeople rarely join lawsuits about reforming and improving our election system. We and our fellow Wisconsin Business Leaders for Democracy are doing precisely that via an amicus brief filed last month in a case that every Wisconsinite should know about.

We’re supporting the lawsuit filed by the fledgling United Wisconsin party (and several voters from across the political spectrum) seeking to overturn the state’s long-standing ban on fusion voting. 

The ban, which has been in effect for more than 100 years, prevents candidates from being nominated by more than one party, consigning minor parties to irrelevance and reinforcing the two-party duopoly. 

So why change now? Because Wisconsin’s fusion ban reduces competition, making elected officials less accountable and less responsive to the issues that matter most to voters and businesses.

Coming from the private sector, we both know how important competition is for keeping us on our toes and doing our best to deliver for customers. Colluding with our top rival to lock every other competitor out of the market might be nice for our bottom lines, but no one would stand for it. Yet Wisconsin politics remain an industry dominated by two entrenched parties that no third party has successfully challenged in well more than a century. 

That’s not because the two parties are widely loved. It’s the rules the major parties set, and they don’t want competition. That lack of competition allows the two major parties to ignore or brush aside many ideas, even those with widespread popular support. We are being forced to buy a product we don’t want and doesn’t meet our needs.

In a properly functioning market, voters would build and support new parties to elevate neglected ideas and issues. Those new parties would then vie with the major parties for support. But this competition is absent today because the ban on parties cross-nominating (or “fusing” with) candidates hobbles minor parties, forcing them to run their own candidates who have little shot of winning. This discourages people from creating new parties and voters from supporting them. The ban’s result? No real challenge to the two major parties in the political marketplace.

If minor parties had more options to compete — if they could choose when to run their own candidates and when to fuse with others to advance shared goals while building their own public profiles and increasing their leverage — our politics might more closely resemble an efficient marketplace. Fusion voting would encourage new entrants, enhance competition, promote voter choice and incentivize innovation.

Letting the two major parties monopolize the political arena has fueled intense partisan polarization that is damaging Wisconsin and the nation. Our current political system has proven unable to identify solutions for the challenges we face, much less implement them. It’s no coincidence that Americans are more unhappy with their government than citizens in almost every other democracy, according to Gallup. On issue after issue — from the cost of living to health care, education to environmental protection, immigration reform to our tax system — our government officials in Washington and Madison alike have struggled to deliver lasting solutions. 

Even where specific policy ideas have broad, bipartisan support, they too often get caught up in hyperpartisan warfare and gridlock.

All of this has practical consequences for business and for individuals. Political stability and predictability are essential conditions for a thriving economy and business environment. As a Brookings Institution study recently noted, entrenched hyper-partisanship and “the uncertainty associated with an erosion of democratic values can generate volatility as well as higher costs of capital, for business as well as for municipal sovereign borrowers.” 

Putting it plainly: The two-party duopoly hobbles our democracy but also risks short- and long-term harm to the state’s economy.

For Wisconsin’s economy to thrive, we all need our democracy to thrive. This is why we’re urging the court to engage with United Wisconsin’s constitutional claims, to strike down the state’s statutory ban on fusion voting and to reinvigorate our proud tradition of innovative, coalitional and competitive politics. Wisconsin can show the nation a better path.

Anoop Prakash is CEO of FR Conversions. Tom Florsheim Jr. is chairman and CEO of Weyco Group Inc. Both are members of Wisconsin Business Leaders for Democracy,  a nonpartisan coalition of business leaders advocating for free, fair, transparent, and nonpartisan elections in Wisconsin.

Guest opinion: End Wisconsin’s ban on fusion voting to expand political choice 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.

WASHINGTON — The No Kings movement that has brought millions to the streets across the United States three times since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term is staging its next event at the polls.

Organizers across hundreds of advocacy groups will pull together thousands of events nationwide Saturday to encourage early voting in this year’s midterm elections. Voting is already underway in dozens of states, and roughly 5.1 million ballots – both in-person and mail – have been cast, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab.

Saturday’s “No Kings: Vote Early Day of Action” events include marches and walks to the polls where early voting is already underway and open on the weekends. Also planned are gatherings that offer live music, food and assistance for voter registration, car pool sign-ups and information on how to become a poll observer.

[image or embed]

— Ashley Murray (@ashleymurray.bsky.social) October 14, 2026 at 10:43 AM

Beatriz Lopez, executive director of Voto Latino, spoke at a press conference about early voting outside the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2026. (Video by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)

“The best way to prevent any funny business from this administration after Election Day is to make sure that our turnout is massive — so clear, and so overwhelming that our victory for democracy is impossible to question,” Alma Couverthie, a senior organizer with the advocacy group Common Cause, said at a Wednesday morning press conference in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Common Cause is one of the nearly 320 organizations coordinating the events under the direction of nine national steering committee groups.

“There is no time to sit on the sidelines. We need everyone. So I urge you, make your plan to vote early. Don’t trust in the way you voted before. Check again. Make sure you know where you’re going, how you’re going, and who you’re bringing with you,” Couverthie said.

This one is different

Ezra Levin, co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible, one of the nine steering committee groups, said Saturday’s events will be distinct from previous No Kings Day rallies in June and October 2025, and March 2026.

“It is different in the sense that No Kings One, Two, and Three were designed to send a message that the American people were not simply going to sacrifice their constitutional rights, that they were willing to stand up,” Levin told States Newsroom during an Oct. 9 interview.

The message of the three marches was “well sent,” he said, as each successive one expanded in numbers. It started with 5 million attendees across 2,100 individual events nationwide on June 14, 2025, to more than 7 million at 2,700 events on Oct. 18, 2025, and then reached 8 million across 3,330 events on March 28, 2026, according to organizers.

With Trump at historic low approval ratings, and with an “electoral wipeout” likely ahead if polls are on target, Levin said No Kings messaging “is largely completed” and that action is the next step.

“The goal of No Kings on October 17 is therefore not just to protest and get attention to the fact that people aren’t afraid to stand up, but to use this tool that is available to us right now in October, and it is a different constitutional right, not just the constitutional right to organize and make your voice heard — but your constitutional right to vote,” Levin said. 

As of Wednesday, more than 2,500 events were scheduled for Saturday in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, according to No Kings organizers.

Deirdre Schifeling, chief political and advocacy officer for the ACLU, said the civil liberties organization has been training thousands of volunteers to assist voters in knowing their rights and what to do if they encounter issues at the polls.

“We know that the best way to protect our freedom is to act free. That means showing up at the polls and making sure that your neighbors can show up too. See you at the polls on Saturday,” Schifeling said at the Wednesday press conference.

Joining forces

Other concerted efforts to do what organizers call “get out the vote” are joining No Kings events Saturday to amplify and strengthen their messages, leaders say.

Bishop William Barber, Repairers of the Breach founder and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, has been organizing 1,000 marches nationwide to the polls in an effort he announced in July as “Love Forward Together.”

So far, Barber’s campaign has organized 652 marches in 428 locations across the United States, according to Repairers of the Breach.

Standing before the U.S. Supreme Court Wednesday alongside No Kings organizers, Barber said the overall goal despite the campaign or group “is about people being conspicuous in their courage and in their commitment.”

“There is no competition. We have one competition. We are competing against a low voter turnout that can no longer exist in this democracy if we are to have a democracy, and if we are to have a democracy that serves all the people,” Barber said. 

The Interfaith Alliance will be more than 10 days into a 15-state “The Vote is Sacred” bus tour Saturday when it stops in Charlotte, North Carolina, to join a “No Kings: Vote Early Day of Action” event.

Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush said the tour is about mobilizing faith communities to be “trained up” to recognize possible illegal interference at polling places.

“Unfortunately, this administration has threatened to disrupt. … We are going to bring the nonviolent spiritual mobilization that has been with us, and we’re going to be trained up all across the country,” Raushenbush said during an Oct. 6 interview with MS NOW’s “The Rachel Maddow Show” after the tour’s stop in Kansas City, Missouri.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment, but referred States Newsroom to a statement from a Republican National Committee spokesperson.

“From Virginia to Louisiana, Democrats have tried to manipulate congressional maps for political gain. Republicans are restoring the rule of law, protecting fair representation, and making it easier to vote and harder to cheat,” according to the statement from Ally Triolo, the RNC’s election integrity communications director.

The U.S. Department of Justice is demanding California not count ballots from voters it says are suspected noncitizens, a move by the Trump administration to apply last-minute pressure as voting begins in the midterm elections.

The Justice Department on Tuesday gave California election officials 48 hours to remove voters on a list contained on a thumb drive provided to Los Angeles County, the most populous county in the country. The DOJ also wants election officials to withhold mail ballots from these voters. 

The demand appeared in letters to the California Secretary of State’s Office and the Los Angeles Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk. The DOJ gave the state until noon Eastern on Thursday to comply, threatening legal action if that deadline is not met.

The letters set the stage for a courtroom confrontation between the Trump administration and the largest state in the country ahead of Election Day. The Justice Department’s demand marks an extraordinary effort to dictate to state officials who will be allowed to cast a ballot even as voting is underway.

“The United States hopes that you share our commitment to ensure that only American citizens participate in our federal elections. Allowing noncitizens to vote cancels citizen votes,” R. Trent McCotter, an acting deputy U.S. attorney general, wrote in a letter to California Democratic Secretary of State Shirley Weber.

Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean C. Logan said in a statement that his office received the thumb drive, along with a handwritten note containing a password. Workers in the office did not seek to open the thumb drive, which would have violated data security protocols, he said.

He said he would work with Weber and the state attorney general to determine next steps.

“Maintaining accurate voter registration records is a fundamental responsibility of our office,” he added. “Federal and state laws are clear on how voter eligibility is established – and any action to remove a voter from eligibility must be based on verifiable information, not assertions of unconfirmed data matching.”

In a statement late Wednesday, Weber said the DOJ’s actions “only serve to cause chaos and fuel public distrust in our elections.”

Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s press account on social media called the Trump administration’s actions “completely unacceptable and inappropriate.” 

Questions linger

It’s not clear whether the Justice Department plans to send letters to additional states. The Justice Department provided copies of the letters to States Newsroom on Wednesday but didn’t answer a question about whether other states would receive them.

In the letters, McCotter asked California election officials to segregate the mail ballots of the suspected noncitizens until their citizenship status is determined. The individuals shouldn’t be sent mail ballots if they haven’t already been sent one, McCotter added, and any returned ballots should not be tabulated until citizenship can be determined.

McCotter did not say how many individuals are on the DOJ’s list or how the federal government came to believe they aren’t citizens. He wrote that the Justice Department would “seek emergency relief” if California didn’t comply. 

Voter roll changes prohibited during election season

Federal law prohibits most states from conducting systematic purges of voters less than 90 days before an election. If the Justice Department sues to force California to remove the suspected noncitizen voters, a judge would likely grapple with whether the DOJ-provided list represents the kind of mass removal that’s not currently allowed.

Voting rights groups and Democratic election officials, as well as some Republicans, have warned that Trump may try to interfere in the midterm elections. If Democrats retake control of the U.S. House or Senate, the final two years of the president’s term could be mired in investigations and legislative gridlock.

Federal courts have uniformly blocked the department’s efforts to force states to turn over their voter rolls, including sensitive personal information such as driver’s license and Social Security numbers. And a federal judge last week ruled against the DOJ’s use of voter data even from states that voluntarily provided the information.

The U.S. Supreme Court also blocked Trump’s attempt to restrict voting by mail through the U.S. Postal Service, leaving the president with few remaining avenues to assert authority over elections, which are administered by the states under the U.S. Constitution.

“Donald Trump’s attempt to invalidate votes in California is an attack on every voter across the country. The president is abusing his position in a callous attempt to take away the power of everyday people, but here in California we’re not going to let him,” Jonathan Paik, a leader with Can’t Stop California, a nonpartisan voter mobilization group, said in a statement.

Trump has long complained about California elections, especially the speed of ballot counting in the state. 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 and doesn’t indicate fraud.

The Justice Department has followed Trump’s lead in scrutinizing California’s elections. 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wisconsin Elections Commission chair Don Millis, a Republican, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

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

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

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact 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.

Wisconsin officials can count ballots that arrive late if officials make errors, judge rules 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.

As President Donald Trump refuses to rule out taking extreme action in the midterm elections, voting rights advocates and civil rights leaders are bolstering their voter protection efforts in anticipation of possible federal interference.

The focus by activists comes amid uncertainty among advocates and election officials over what Trump may do before, during and after Election Day. Some organizations are preparing to deploy volunteers to the polls to help assure voters in places where fear of federal intimidation may run high.

On Tuesday, several groups — including the Save America Movement, the American Federation of Teachers labor union and the National Action Network — launched Vote Safe, an initiative that will put local volunteers at polling locations in areas where they say pressure on Black, Latino and Asian voters is highest. 

The program will include Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Ohio. The volunteers will document any intimidation and serve as a reassuring presence for voters, organizers said.

“The fear is the point and we must do something about it,” Mary Corcoran, executive director of the Save America Movement, a nonpartisan pro-democracy group, said on a call with reporters. “Left unaddressed, fear does the work of keeping people home without a single agent setting foot at a polling place.”

Volunteers will include clergy members, veterans, teachers and others trained to provide clear answers on voters’ rights, Corcoran said.

In Ohio, where Vote Safe will launch on the first day of early voting, Republican Sen. Jon Husted is facing former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown in one of the most closely watched Senate races in the country. Springfield, Ohio, also has a large Haitian immigrant population that has been repeatedly attacked by Trump, who is seeking to deport them.

The Rev. Al Sharpton, a civil rights leader who founded the National Action Network, suggested on Tuesday’s press call that some Americans in Ohio fear they could also be detained or even deported by ICE because of their skin color.

“‘You don’t understand, any Black looks like a Haitian in Ohio,’” Sharpton said, recalling a previous conversation with a journalist in Ohio. “You’ve got to prove you were from Alabama, not Port-au-Prince, after you’re deported.”

ProPublica reported on Tuesday that more than 500 U.S. citizens have been detained by immigration agents during the second Trump administration. About a dozen citizens, mostly children, have been deported.

What Trump has said

Trump, who has long made false claims about stolen elections and voter fraud, has maintained ambiguity surrounding what election-related actions he may take after the U.S. Supreme Court blocked his plan to use the U.S. Postal Service to restrict mail ballots. Congress also didn’t pass the SAVE America Act, a measure he championed that would require voters to offer documentary proof of citizenship.

In a recent TIME magazine interview, Trump said he hadn’t thought of deploying Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, agents to the polls. 

But he also left open the possibility of declaring a national emergency, which legal experts say would give him no power over elections. Under the Constitution, states administer elections, not the federal government.

Earlier this year, Trump told reporters he would “do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections.”

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has said ICE agents can serve warrants at election sites, despite a ban on armed federal personnel at polling places. At the same time, DHS has denied any plans to target polling places.

DOJ election monitors

The Department of Justice’s plans to deploy 1,000 election monitors at polling places has also fueled concern among Democrats and voting rights advocates — and some Republicans. 

While the DOJ regularly dispatches monitors each election cycle, the scope of the effort and Trump’s history of pressuring election officials has led to unease about how the monitors will behave. 

Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon, a Republican, earlier this year expressed reservations about Justice Department monitors, calling their actions “very odd” after DOJ personnel watched voting in the state’s primary election. 

On Monday, the NAACP sued the Justice Department for records about its election monitor program, alleging the DOJ didn’t comply with Freedom of Information Act timelines.

“Americans deserve to know whether the Justice Department is abusing its law enforcement powers to the detriment of voters and the election officials tasked with running our elections,” Kristen Clarke, the NAACP’s general counsel, said in a statement.

Justice Department spokesperson ​​Kiersten Pels wrote in an email to States Newsroom that monitors comply with all legal and ethical requirements. Pels added that they don’t interfere with the voting process and that their work “is consistent with longstanding Department practice of monitoring elections for compliance with federal law.”

U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche dismissed concerns about the monitors in an interview on “Fox News Sunday.” While confirming plans for about 1,000 monitors, he emphasized that the department sends out monitors every federal election.

“They’re not going to Republican states, they’re not going to Democrat states. They’re going to every state to make sure that our elections are carried out legally, fairly and appropriately,” Blanche said.

After Election Day

The preparations by civic groups also include post-election planning for potential disruptions to vote counting or attempts to overturn losses.

The FBI seized ballots from the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia, in January. The then-director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, was present at the raid at Trump’s request, underscoring its importance to the president. 

The Justice Department also spent months seeking information on election workers in Fulton County during the 2020 election before a federal judge quashed the subpoena in July.

The raid raised questions among activists and election experts about whether federal law enforcement would seek search warrants to obtain ballots after Election Day.

Ballot seizures are a point of concern, said Andrew Walchuk, senior policy director and counsel for voting and fair representation at Common Cause, a voting rights group. The raid was “an alert” to election offices that a seizure is something they need to prepare for, Walchuk said.

“It is definitely something that groups across the country are ready for, that we’re watching,” Walchuk told reporters last week.

Like other groups, Common Cause’s election preparations include training a network of volunteers who can help voters and identify potential problems. In Texas alone, more than 400 volunteers are already, said Marliza Marin, Common Cause’s Texas program manager. 

“It’s kind of unheard of to have this many volunteers already trained,” Marin said.

Madison City Clerk Lydia McComas took over her job in September 2025 with the city under heavy scrutiny from state election officials after nearly 200 absentee ballots were lost during the 2024 election. During the April 2026 state Supreme Court election, 23 late arriving absentee ballots nearly weren’t counted after a staff error. 

Ann Jacobs, a Democrat on the Wisconsin Elections Commission, said at a meeting in April that the second error was “absurd.” The two problems made the city of Madison the subject of the first two investigations ever opened by WEC. 

In June, Votebeat reported that McComas told Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway that she would “firmly address the lack of communication” that caused the mistake and the clerk’s office would have more staff in place for the August and November elections. 

But McComas will be on maternity leave during the Nov. 3 election. 

Despite McComas’ absence, city officials say the processes put in place to avoid repeated errors, additional staff and help from other city departments will be enough to smoothly manage the midterm elections and the potential scrutiny that could come from WEC or the Republican Party of Wisconsin —  whose gubernatorial candidate this year, Tom Tiffany, has previously cast doubt on election results from Wisconsin’s largest cities. 

City spokesperson Dylan Brogan said of the recent errors in Madison that the city is “confident these things won’t happen again.” 

“This is a team process that involves 2,000 people,” he said. 

In McComas’ absence, deputy clerk Kaitlyn Bernarde is running the election. Brogan said that other city staff, such as City Attorney Mike Haas, who previously served as the WEC administrator, can help fill in. 

Bernarde spent more than four years as the clerk in Wausau, a credential that convinced WEC the transition wouldn’t be a problem. 

“[McComas] hired a new deputy who was the clerk out of Wausau. Based on that we didn’t have any concerns,” Jacobs told the Wisconsin Examiner. 

In an interview with the Examiner, Bernarde said prior to the August primary elections, the clerk’s office added a staff member who is responsible for managing the thousands of absentee ballots returned to the city, which she believes will prevent any further absentee-related errors. 

“That is one of our major new changes in our office, we implemented an absentee lead position before the August election, and so we have a full time staff member who’s in charge of that, as well as additional hourly staff and other city staff who are helping to ensure that we have checks in place in the system, that we can check in at different points to make sure that we’re on track to get ballots out on time to our AM delivery, our PM delivery, as well as any late deliveries throughout the day so that way some of those similar mistakes don’t happen again.” 

Bernarde also said that the city and election staff are prepared to run the midterms under scrutiny from WEC and outside observers.

“I think Madison always kind of is under scrutiny by the state, our residents and other people who are involved in the process, and so we’ve had experience working under that kind of pressure the last couple elections,” she said. “And we all want a zero [error] election, and so we talk through that with our staff, with our poll workers to ensure that we are trained and that we document any instances that happen. Because elections involve humans and so sometimes mistakes happen but we have processes in place to confront them, minimize them and then also respond to address them appropriately after.”

President Donald Trump wants to sharply curtail mail ballots. He’s called them “inherently corrupt” and baselessly condemned them as a major source of fraud.

But with Republicans falling behind in the polls, the president is now urging his supporters to vote in the midterm elections any way they can, including by mail.

The White House has also sent emails through a government account promoting voter registration in recent days and Trump is continuing a string of campaign rallies in typically conservative states, including Nebraska on Monday night. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has directed that members of the military, who tend to support Republicans, have a day off to vote.

“If your state has early voting, do not wait. Go out and vote. Vote early, vote by mail, or vote in person on Election Day, November 3rd, so we can defeat the radical left ‘Dumocrats’ in a midterm victory that is too big to rig,” Trump said in a social media video over the weekend, using a derogatory term for Democrats.

The about-face by the president is familiar. Trump encouraged his voters to cast their ballots by mail in 2024 and has repeatedly voted by mail himself, despite a long record of attacking the practice.

Republicans battle against loss of majorities

The latest comments — along with the red-state rallies — underscore the political peril that analysts see facing Republicans and Trump. 

If Republicans lose control of either the House or Senate, Democrats are likely to launch investigations into the White House that could complicate the president’s final two years in office. A Democratic House would face pressure from the base to pursue impeachment against Trump or other administration officials.

Democrats enjoy an 11-point advantage over Republicans on the generic congressional ballot, according to a nonpartisan September national poll by Emerson College. The poll also found Democrats more enthusiastic, with 78% “very excited” to vote compared to 66% of Republicans. 

A poll by The New York Times and Siena College, released Saturday, found Democrats ahead or tied in Senate races in several GOP-leaning states, including Alaska, Kansas, Ohio and Texas. 

Several of those same states — including Alaska, Kansas and Ohio — allow voters to cast a ballot by mail without providing an excuse. Iowa also features a highly competitive Senate race and has no-excuse absentee voting, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Vice President JD Vance was visiting Alaska on Monday to campaign for the Republican Senate candidate, while Trump was scheduled to hold a rally in Grand Island, Nebraska, where the incumbent Republican Sen. Pete Ricketts faces a competitive challenge from independent Dan Osborn. 

‘We seem to have no choice’

Republicans are scrambling to find ways to turn out their base voters, said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. The immediate objective for the party is maximizing voter turnout among their supporters, he said, adding that discouraging them from using legal methods to vote would be an obvious electoral disadvantage.

“The overriding concern for the White House is turnout, not consistency,” Rottinghaus said. “The political messaging has been inconsistent on this. But all of that aside, the need to get Republicans to come vote is paramount for Republicans.”

Trump at the White House on Monday said that he prefers voters to cast their ballots in person but that they can “vote by mail if they want because we seem to have no choice.” Without offering evidence, he alleged significant cheating in voting by mail.

Pressed by reporters for evidence, the president pointed to California. The blue state, where all voters receive a ballot in the mail, has drawn his ire in the past for a vote-counting process that can last weeks, in part because of ballots that arrive in the mail after Election Day. But a slow count isn’t evidence of fraud.

When asked about Trump’s shifting stance, the White House referred States Newsroom to the president’s Monday remarks.

Supreme Court blocked Trump

Trump’s decision to again tout voting by mail — while also attacking it — came after he spent months pursuing a high-stakes effort to impose restrictions on mail ballots. 

In August 2025, Trump promised to lead a movement to eliminate mail-in voting. 

Less than a year later, he signed an executive order directing the U.S. Postal Service to require states, at least 90 days before a federal election, to notify the Postal Service whether they intended to allow ballots to be sent through the mail. States would have then had to submit to USPS a list of voters planning to vote by mail at least 60 days before the election.

Postmaster General David Steiner had said that the Postal Service wouldn’t deliver ballots for states that refused to comply with the rule. Democrats and other opponents said it would have given the Postal Service unprecedented and unconstitutional authority over elections, which are administered by the states under the Constitution.

The U.S. Supreme Court blocked the rule from taking effect in a one-paragraph order that upheld a lower court decision halting it. Election officials and voting rights advocates had warned that implementing the requirements so close to the election would have caused chaos.

Trump railed against the decision at the time, calling it a “big loss” for Republicans and alleging it would make cheating by Democrats on mail-in ballots much easier. “And now they have open field to do so,” he wrote on social media when the order was issued in mid-September.

On Monday, League of Women Voters President and CEO Celina Stewart emphasized that the Trump administration had spent months attacking voting by mail. She said in a statement that while Trump sought to impose restrictions through an executive order — which the League sued over — “the President does not have the authority to unilaterally dictate how states administer elections.”

“A shift in rhetoric does not undo those actions, nor does it erase the need for the League to take this fight to court. We will judge this administration by its actions, not by its latest statement,” Stewart said.

Trump’s attacks on voting by mail

Trump’s attacks on voting by mail stretch back to the 2020 election, when mail voting surged amid the pandemic. 

At that time, he characterized mail ballots arriving after Election Day as fraudulent, even though late-arriving ballots must be postmarked on or before Election Day — indicating that voters made their choices before the close of polls. The Supreme Court this year upheld the authority of states to count mailed ballots that arrive after Election Day.

Six years later, mail-in voting remains a major way for Americans to cast their ballots. Nearly a third of U.S. voters cast a ballot by mail in 2024, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. 

This year, nearly 1 million people have already voted by mail in the general election, with more than 52 million mail ballots requested, according to data compiled by the University of Florida Election Lab.

For campaigns, every ballot a supporter casts by mail represents a “bird in the hand,” said Rottinghaus. By contrast, voters who wait until Election Day remain potential voters, with the risk that something will come up that keeps them from voting.

Campaigns build whole persuasion operations around mail voting, he said, adding that demonizing the practice takes away a weapon some campaigns rely on.

“This is a top-down effort from the most vocal and visible Republican that can create a lot of complications for Republicans down ballot who may rely on mail voting for a big part of their strategy,” Rottinghaus said.