QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“...needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections.” – Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson regarding the Supreme Court’s conservative majority allowing the Trump administration to proceed with the executive order restricting mail-in ballots.

NOTABLE TRENDS

• SCOTUS Allows Trump’s Mail Voting Executive Order to Proceed: The U.S. Supreme Court issued an emergency opinion Tuesday allowing Trump to proceed with implementing his executive order directing the U.S. Postal Service to help determine which voters receive mail-in ballots. After a federal judge lifted existing blocks to comply with the SCOTUS ruling, Democrats and voting rights groups filed lawsuits, imposing a new freeze on the restrictions. Last week, USPS published final regulations that would restrict mail voting, but said it will not implement them for the 2026 election unless SCOTUS ruled in the Trump administration’s favor.

• Corporate America Resumes Donations to Republican Groups Working to Undermine The VRA: Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft have resumed contributions to Republican political groups that are working to undermine the VRA after briefly pulling back following January 6th, reflecting a broader corporate retreat from accountability.

  • Republican 527 groups are out-raising Democratic counterparts this cycle ($240 million vs. $197 million) with corporations making up 39% of the Republican Attorneys General Association’s (RAGA) fundraising.

  • The donations come as Republican attorneys general have secured major Supreme Court victories, including the Dobbs decision and the Callais ruling that weakened the Voting Rights Act.

STATE ACTIVITY

• California • Shasta County Election Draws Protestors as County Pushes Back on Registrar’s Claims: About 20 demonstrators gathered outside the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office demanding the sheriff seize ballots to investigate claims by Registrar Clint Curtis that June ballots “did not feel or look right” — an action that would violate state law. The sheriff indicated he has no plans to comply with the demonstrators’ demands. In the Redding Elections Office, Registrar Curtis sequestered the primary ballots in a room, sealing the doors with locks, duct tape and red-lettered signs that read: “KEEP OUT PER ROV CLINT CURTIS.”

• Colorado • Confidential Voter Data Exposed: Colorado’s Secretary of State’s office accidentally made information for more than 130,000 confidential voters publicly accessible for over a week because of an error in updating a voter registration tool. Agency staff confirmed that 59 voter profiles were actually accessed during the period, though they believe many of these searches were likely people accessing their own information. This is not the first data breach under SOS Griswold. In 2024, office staff posted online a spreadsheet with partial passwords to parts of the state’s voting systems.

• Georgia • Appeals Court Overturns Black Voters’ Redistricting Win in Georgia, Citing Callais Decision: A federal appeals court overturned a redistricting victory for Black voters in Georgia, citing SCOTUS’ decision in Louisiana v. Callais that significantly weakened the VRA’s protections against racially discriminatory maps.

• North Carolina • New Mail Ballot and Voter ID Rules: A regulatory commission gave final approval to new Republican-backed rules making it easier to disqualify mail-in ballots and tightening voter ID requirements, but the rules appear to have been blocked from taking effect in November after the commission received enough public objection to trigger a mandatory legislative review. State law makers have adjourned and say they do not play to return until after the November election.

• Vermont • 900 Removed From Voter Rolls After 25-Year Motor Voter Error: Vermont election officials removed roughly 900 people from the state’s voter rolls after discovering that the DMV had accidentally sent their names to the SOS’ office over 25 years, despite those individuals having opted out of voter registration. None of the 900 had cast ballots, so no elections were affected. Officials said they first became aware of the issue last winter but did not act until New Jersey’s noncitizen registration scandal prompted a closer scrutiny of motor voter programs nationwide.

• Wisconsin • County District Attorney Drops Election Bribery Charges Against Elon Musk: A special prosecutor declined to charge Elon Musk for promising $1 million checks to voters ahead of the Wisconsin’s 2025 Supreme Court elections, concluding a jury would not convict given that Musk quickly modified his social media post and no money was every given to anyone for voting.

• Wyoming • Governor Pushes Back on “Very Odd” DOJ Election Monitors at Primary Polling Places: Two DOJ monitors visited six polling places during Wyoming’s primary last week, attempting to interview voters and examining voting machines. Gov. Mark Gordon (R) described their behaviors as “very odd” and asked the state attorney general to investigate.

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ANTI-VOTING GROUP ACTIVITY

• Trump Allies Float National Emergency Declaration to Seize Control of Elections: During a July 29th War Room podcast, former Trump strategist Steve Bannon predicted Trump would declare a national security emergency to “protect” elections in late August. Earlier this month, Wayne Allyn Root, a rightwing broadcaster, asked Trump if he would “declare a national security emergency for elections”, Trump notably did not shoot down the idea.

  • Meanwhile, election denier Tina Peters traveled to Washington to pitch Trump administration officials, including Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and DOJ Civil Rights Division Chief Harmeet Dhillon, on a plan to invoke emergency powers and assert unprecedented federal control over election before November.

  • Peters also visited the White House for a private lunch with Trump, who has many of her goals but has not yet endorsed her proposal.

• Mike Lindell Refuses to Pay for Recount, Files Lawsuit Instead: MyPillow founder Mike Lindell backed out of paying $825,000 for a recount of Minnesota’s Republican gubernatorial primary, which he lost by 45,000 votes, after disputing the state’s recount format – which would only record votes cast for him and the winner rather than all seven candidates.

  • Lindell filed lawsuits against SOS’ office and the State Canvassing Board, and separately filed an election contest in district court and a case with the state Supreme Court.

Paid for by Fair Fight Action.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“They don’t work with us, they work against us…Why should I trust them?” – Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes declaring no confidence in CISA's leadership.

NOTABLE TRENDS

• Trump Amplifies Dubious Census Report Claiming 24,000 Noncitizens Voted in 2020: Trump cited an unauthored Census Bureau report to claim more than 24,000 noncitizens voted illegally in the 2020 presidential election, a figure data and election experts say is based on questionable methodology. Even if accurate, the votes would represent less than 0.02% of the roughly 160 million ballots cast. The report has ties to a Trump-aligned think tank, America First Policy Institute, and draws on commercial voter data from a firm that received a federal contract in 2024.

• State Election Officials Confront CISA Over Lack of Support With Midterms 90 Days Away: Tensions boiled over during a CISA election security call Monday when Arizona SOS Adrian Fontes publicly declared he had no confidence in the agency’s leadership, telling CISA officials directly, “I don’t trust you. Your boss came out there and said: We are going to criminalize the work you do. Why should we trust you?’” Participants described the briefing as a generic “cover your a**” session that offered no concrete support for the 2026 midterms, with CISA leadership appearing more focused on the 2028 presidential election.

• Attorney General Vows to Take Voter Roll Fight to Supreme Court Despite Sting of Losses: AG Todd Blanche said on Meet the Press that taking the Trump administration voter roll fight to the Supreme Court is a “possibility” and that the DOJ will not stop pursuing access to state voter rolls despite losing nearly two dozen cases in lower federal courts. Blanche cited a federal statue that he believes gives the DOJ authority to review state voter rolls under the right circumstances.

• DOJ to Deploy 1,000 Election Monitors to Polling Locations for Midterms: Assistant AG Harmeet Dhillon announced the DOJ will send 1,000 election monitors to polling locations for the November midterms. The department has not released its final list of jurisdictions but says it is considering locations with potential language or disability-access issues as well as places where it believes voter fraud may occur.

STATE ACTIVITY

• Arizona Supreme Court Upholds Sweeping GOP Election Ballot Measure: The Arizona Supreme Court ruled that Prop. 144, a Republican-backed constitutional amendment that would require government-issued photo ID for all voters, ban foreign national spending in state elections, and mandate on-site ballot tabulation at polling locations, can remain on the November ballot. The measure was written by Alex Kolodin, the Republican nominee for secretary of state who was sanctioned by the Arizona State Bar in 2023 for filing evidence-free lawsuits challenging the 2020 election.

• California Shasta County Elections Officials Considering Hiring Convicted Election Denier Tina Peters: Shasta County Registrar of Voters Clint Curtis is considering hiring convicted election denier Tina Peters as assistant registrar, as two labor unions representing elections office employees have voted no confidence in Curtis’ leadership and called for his resignation. Curtis has also claimed, without evidence, that ballots from June’s election didn’t “look or feel right” and “didn’t smell right, either.” Thus, locking them in an upstairs room for a potential FBI inspection, though the FBI has not confirmed visiting the office or inspecting any ballots.

• Kentucky Voter Precinct Misassignment Problems Likely Statewide: State lawmakers questioned Jefferson County Clerk David Yates about how hundreds of Louisville voters were assigned to the wrong precincts, and in some cases the wrong county for years. Yates attributed the problem to a conflict between a statewide precinct map published by the Kentucky Board of Elections and data held by local officials. A fellow county clerk warned lawmakers that the issues are likely not limited to Jefferson County, and lawmakers said resolving the problem statewide will be a priority in January.

• Michigan Recall Effort Against Antrim County Clerk Fails For Second Time: The Michigan State Board of Canvassers again rejected a recall petition against Antrim County Clerk Victoria Bishop, who is under investigation for allegedly altering voter registrations outside of her statutory authority. The petition failed because it did not receive approval from at least one member of each party on the board, with Republican members citing insufficiently specific language in the recall petition.

• Missouri Court Blocks Two Voter Petitions From November Ballot: A Missouri circuit court judge upheld SOS Denny Hoskins’ decision to block two voter petitions from the November ballot, ruling that current voters cannot use ballot initiatives to permanently insulate policy preferences from future reconsideration. The case is now headed directly to the Missouri Supreme Court after the state’s high court bypassed the appeals court to take it up directly.

• North Carolina Republicans Accused of Targeting Black Voters Through Sunday Early Voting Cuts: The North Carolina State Board of Elections held a daylong meeting to resolve 20 disputed county early voting plans, with Democrats accusing Republicans of deliberately eliminating Sunday voting hours that are preferred by Black voters. The accusations carry historical weight as Republicans state legislators admitted in a 2013 court filings that they targeted Sunday voting specifically because it was disproportionately used by Black voters. An Anson County Republican invoked religious objections to Sunday voting, comparing it unfavorably to Chick-fil-A’s closure policy. The board voted along party lines to reject most Sunday early voting hours.

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ANTI-VOTING GROUP ACTIVITY

• RNC Appeals to Nebraska Supreme Court Over Overseas Voter Law: The RNC appealed a district court ruling to the Nebraska Supreme Court that upheld a state law allowing certain overseas “never-resident” voters to cast ballots. The lower court found at least one constitutional application for the law so it couldn’t be challenged as unconstitutional on its face. With ballots set to be sent out next month, the clock is ticking for a ruling before the election.

• Mike Lindell Demands Recount After Losing Minnesota GOP Primary by 11 Points: MyPillow founder Mike Lindell says he is willing to pay for a full recount in Minnesota’s Republican gubernatorial primary, which he lost by 11 percentage points, claiming his team found unspecified “irregularities” in the election data linked to electronic voting machines. The Minnesota SOS’ office estimated the cost at $825,000. It remains unclear whether Lindell will follow through.

Paid for by Fair Fight Action.

On our Fair Fight Action Summer Reading List, David Daley’s Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy lays out exactly how that happened. In this live conversation, he walks through how a small group of Republican operatives turned a few dozen state legislative races into a decade of control over national power, without winning a single extra vote to do it. The book came out years ago, but the maps it describes are the maps we are still voting on.

This was the third and final stop on our first-ever Summer Reading List series, where we go live with authors to dig into the history behind today’s attacks on voting rights and elections.

A Heist Disguised as Housekeeping

Daley starts with a plan that looked like paperwork. After Obama’s 2008 win, a handful of operatives studied the map and made a bet: forget the marquee races, and go win the state legislatures that draw the district lines. Citizens United opened the money spigot, the 2010 midterms delivered the chambers, and the census handed the winners a fresh set of maps to draw. By the time most people noticed, the lines were already set for ten years.

The key to it was how boring it looked. No one framed it as a power grab. It was redistricting, a routine that happens every decade, rewired to lock in majorities before the next election was even on the calendar.

When More Votes Isn’t Enough

Here is what those maps bought. In 2012, Democrats won 1.4 million more House votes nationwide, Obama carried Ohio, Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, and Republicans still kept the House 234 to 201. The maps had stopped tracking how people actually voted.

Daley’s point is that this was not a fluke or a bad cycle. It was the design working as intended, and we are still living inside it.

The Voting Rights Act, Turned Against Itself

One of the sharpest threads in the conversation is how a law built to protect Black voters got turned into a weapon against them. In the 1990s, strategists took the Voting Rights Act’s majority-minority requirements and packed Black voters into a handful of districts drawn at 70 to 90 percent, boosting minority representation on paper while bleaching every surrounding district conservative.

That fight is back and moving fast. This past April, the Supreme Court gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, and states are already redrawing to match. Fair Fight’s own research estimates that up to 19 congressional seats are in play heading into 2026 and 2028.

The Courts Step Back

Daley gets into the role of the judiciary, because the courts keep deciding how far this can go. In Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019, the conservative majority ruled that partisan gerrymandering is a “political question” the federal courts will not touch, kicking any check back to state courts, state legislatures, or independent commissions.

Since then, decisions chipping away at the Voting Rights Act have let states challenge and dismantle majority-minority districts. It has already reshaped seats in Tennessee, Alabama, and Louisiana, with Mississippi redistricting plans already underway and Georgia likely next.

Where We Go From Here

His book paints a pretty bleak picture of entrenched political polarization, but Daley doesn’t believe that’s the end of the story. He points to reforms that change the math instead of fighting map by map.

Larger multi-member districts paired with proportional representation would take away the cracking and packing that gerrymandering runs on. Ranked-choice voting would let people vote for who they actually want. And bigger federal reform, in Congress and at the Supreme Court, would stop a single hostile majority from tearing down voting protections every few years. The maps were built by people making choices. They can be rebuilt the same way.

If you missed the live conversation with David Daley, check out the video in this post. It is one of the clearest explanations of gerrymandering you will find: what it is, why it matters, how it changed over time, and what we can still do about it.

In solidarity,

Fair Fight Action Team

Paid for by Fair Fight Action.

Join us Friday, August 21 at 12:00 PM ET for a live conversation with David Daley, journalist, political analyst, and author of Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy.

After Obama’s 2008 win, a small circle of Republican operatives built a plan to hold power without winning more votes. His book traces how these Republican operatives looked at Obama’s victory, targeted a few dozen state legislative districts across the country, and turned them into the levers that would decide national power for a decade.

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The plan worked. The maps they drew after the 2010 census locked in majorities that stopped matching how people actually voted, and we are still living inside the results.

In this interview, we’ll be connecting what Daley documented to what’s happening right now: the dark money that flooded in after Citizens United, the tools that let operatives carve up neighborhoods block by block, and the fresh wave of map-rigging that took off this April, when the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

Daley doesn’t stop at the diagnosis, and neither will we. He has spent years reporting on reforms that could actually pull us back toward fair representation: multi-member districts that break the single-map stranglehold, and legal standards sharp enough that courts can finally name a rigged map when they see one and defend the principle of one person, one vote.

This is the third pick in the Fair Fight Action Book Club, following Ari Berman’s Minority Rule and Carol Anderson’s One Person, No Vote. You don’t need to have read it to follow along.

Come for an inside look at the machinery that decides your representation while presenting as a dull technical process, and leave understanding why rigged maps are one of the load-bearing walls of minority rule.

In solidarity,

Fair Fight Action Team

Paid for by Fair Fight Action.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“They can try all the suppression tactics they want, but we’re still going to vote. Our lives depend on it.” – Deborah Maxwell, president of the NC NAACP, on voters still turning out despite the removal of Sundays from early voting schedules.

NOTABLE TRENDS

• Trump Administration Again Asks Supreme Court to Lift Block on Mail Voting Order: The DOJ filed an emergency request asking SCOTUS to pause a federal judge’s ruling blocking nationwide enforcement of Trump’s mail voting executive order, urging the court to clarify that the ruling covers the most recent decision as well.

  • The administration continues to argue the lawsuits are premature because no concrete actions have been taken that directly harm plaintiffs.

• State Election Officials Confront CISA Over DHS Threats: CISA held a conference call with state election officials to discuss midterm security, but some officials confronted the agency over DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s recent threats to prosecute election officials who don’t cooperate with the Trump administration. One of these election officials on the call said, “why should we trust working with you all as an agency when your boss says that he wants to jail us? Another secretary apparently made a comment that the briefing felt more like security theater than actually helping these election officials.”

STATE ACTIVITY

• Alaska • Billionaires Spend Millions On Ballot Measure to Repeal RCV & Open Primary System: Elon Musk contributed $1.5 million to a campaign seeking to repeal Alaska’s ranked-choice voting and open primary system through Ballot Measure 2, joining other billionaire mega-donors including Dick Uihlein, Jeff Yass, and Timothy Mellon. The measure would revert Alaska to closed partisan primaries and also eliminate campaign finance disclosure laws.

• Arkansas • Secretary of State Rejects Over 108,000 Petition Signatures: Secretary of State Cole Jester rejected all 108,000+ signatures submitted for a citizen-led ballot initiative to strengthen the state’s direct democracy process, citing a minor difference in the measure’s popular name from what the Attorney General approved. The group behind the initiative says Jester had previously approved the exact same name a year ago. Petition signers are now suing, and the group is asking the Arkansas Supreme Court to intervene and provisionally certify the amendment for the November ballot with a 30-day cure period.

• North Carolina • Counties Drop Sunday Early Voting & Sites: The State Board of Elections approved early voting plans for 80 counties with about a dozen dropping Sunday hours they had in 2022. Critics say the elimination of Sunday voting, which is central to Black churches’ Souls to the Polls effort, is part of a deliberate pattern of making voting harder for Black voters.

  • New records reveal that former state auditor elections liaison Dallas Woodhouse recommended that counties eliminate Sunday voting hours and sites, including in Columbus County, and told two county elections chairs what Republicans on the state Board of Elections would or would not approve and what the state GOP wanted.

• Pennsylvania • Bill Would Expand Voter Roll Purge Methods: A Republican-sponsored bill SB 1429 would expand the methods used to remove deceased voters from the rolls, shortening reporting timelines, and broaden the data sources used to identify voters who have moved, including newspaper obituaries and private-sector data providers. Voters whose registrations are canceled would receive notice by mail and have 10 days to appear before their county election commission to have their registration reinstated if removed in error.

• Texas • Appeals Court Restored Several Provisions of Omnibus 2021 Anti-Voting Law: The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals restored several pieces of the omnibus anti-voting law SB 1 (2021) that overhauled mail and assisted voting, including requiring voters to provide an ID number of Social Security number on mail ballot applications and have them match the state’s records. The appeals court overturned a lower court that had blocked the provisions, finding that the plaintiffs lacked standing on most of their complaints.

• Wisconsin • County Absentee Ballot Delay Fuels Election Conspiracy Claim: A human error at Milwaukee’s Central Count delayed roughly 28,000 absentee ballot results for hours during the Tuesday primary, immediately drawing conspiracy claims from right-wing commentators despite election officials confirming the cause was a human error. Milwaukee officials say that the underlying problem stems from under-resource central operations and state law that prevents election staff from processing absentee ballots before Election Day.

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ANTI-VOTING GROUP ACTIVITY

• Conservative Group Targets Pennsylvania Jury Records in “Voter Fraud” Hunt: Early Vote Action led by Trump ally Scott Presler is comparing lists of people disqualified from jury duty with county voter rolls in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, claiming the method can identify noncitizen voters. Election experts note that noncitizenship is just one of several reasons a person may be disqualified from jury duty with others including age, residency, and language ability — meaning the methodology could flag many eligible voters as suspected noncitizens.

Paid for by Fair Fight Action.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“Republican politicians have created a narrative that voter fraud is a threat, so agencies need to be engaged in policies demonstrating they’re doing something about it.” – Mark Jones, a fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, regarding Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services memo for nursing home residents.

NOTABLE TRENDS

• Election Deniers Now Hold Key Local Election Roles in Critical Midterm Counties: A New York Times review of a new Voting Rights Lab database found that 25 county-level elections officials who have taken office since 2024 have publicly aligned with the election denier movement – all in counties with key House, Senate, or statewide midterm races.

  • These officials have either publicly espoused false claims that Trump won the 2020 election, alleged widespread fraud, or taken direct action to support those theories.

  • They add to at least 69 election-skeptic officials already in office nationwide, 41 of whom have taken direct action to interfere with elections, including attempting to delay or deny certification, or have direct ties to activist election denier groups.

• CISA Admits No Election Security Staff Will Be in Place Before Midterms: Despite re-embracing CISA and promising to rebuild its election security workforce, the Trump administration informed the Senate Homeland Security Committee that none of the rehired staff will be in place before the November midterms. CISA says it will rely on a security mechanism used during the World Cup and has promised a public plan.

  • Election officials and non-partisan experts warn it’s too late in the election cycle for any major changes to their security protocols, and they are skeptical that the agency’s hollowed-out workforce can deliver baseline support to the states in time.

• Federal Agency Shifts Nursing Home Voting Guidance Away From Access Toward Fraud Prevention: A July 20 Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services memo rescinded previous voting guidance for nursing home residents, shifting emphasis from ensuring access to preventing voter fraud. Richard Mollot, executive director of the NY-based Long Term Care Community Coalition, said CMS’ deliberate change in emphasis is a worrying sign that voting will suffer even more among a population already facing high obstacles to casting a ballot.

  • “Most nursing homes will do as little as possible; if you’re not affirmatively telling them what to do, they won’t do it,” he said.

• Redistricting Push Continues Post-Callais Decision:

  • Mississippi lawmakers held their first redistricting committee meeting since SCOTUS’ Callais ruling that gutted the Voting Rights Act, scheduling eight public hearings across the state over the next two months. Voting rights activists worry the hearings are a facade and lawmakers have already made up their mind to dismantle majority Black districts.

  • Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins (R) blocked a public referendum on the state’s new congressional map hours before primary polls closed, declaring the petition unconstitutional despite more than 300,000 submitted signatures by People Not Politicians. The decision was immediately challenged in court.

• Ballot and Voting Machine Errors Affect Thousands:

  • In Wyandotte County, Kansas, nearly 3,000 mail-in ballots were printed with an incorrect return address, causing completed ballots to be returned to voters instead of the election office – more than half remain unaccounted for.

  • In Shelby County, Tennessee, a voting machine error left several judicial races off ballots at an early voting location, affecting around 300 voters, the same races that were missing from 700 absentee ballots mailed in early July.

• Thousands Removed From Voter Rolls: More than 600 U.S. citizens were mistakenly flagged as possible noncitizens and removed from Alaska’s active voters list. The flags came after the Alaska Division of Elections compared its citizenship data to DMV records, raising questions about why DMV data was used rather than more reliable annual citizenship data from the Permanent Fund Dividend division, which collects data on citizenship annually.

  • In Nevada, Washoe County Registrar of Voters has moved 8,755 voters to inactive status after they failed to respond to address confirmation notices, meaning they will no longer automatically receive mail ballots.

STATE ACTIVITY

• New Jersey • Registration Error Puts Noncitizens at Risk of Deportation: The roughly 400 noncitizens who cast ballots after being erroneously registered to vote in New Jersey face serious risk of criminal prosecution and deportation under a 1996 immigration law. Critically, even noncitizens who were unknowingly registered but never voted could be deemed “permanently inadmissible” to the United States under the same law.

• North Carolina • State Auditor Liaison Advised GOP Officials on How to Fire Election Directors and Drop Sunday Voting: Newly released public records reveal that Dallas Woodhouse, the state auditor’s former election liaison, sent Republican county board members a step-by-step guide on how to fire their local election directors, including documents templates and instructions for closed sessions, months before his role in influencing early voting plans became public.

  • Records also show Woodhouse explicitly advised multiple county boards to eliminate Sunday early voting, acknowledging the move would cause public backlash but suggested expanded Saturday hours as cover.

  • Twenty North Carolina counties have now failed to reach unanimous early voting agreements, with 15 disagreeing specifically over Sunday voting.

• South Carolina • Voter Registration Probed Uses of IP Addresses: The Trump administration has a new tactic in its “voter fraud” investigations, requesting the IP addresses of voters who registered online. An FBI agent in South Carolina sought the IP address of a voter’s online registration from state and local officials, receiving the data in June.

  • Former senior Justice Department officials called the move atypical and inappropriate, warning it amounts to a fishing expedition into private voter data.

  • With 43 states allowing online voter registration, the implications of the tactic are nationwide.

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ANTI-VOTING GROUP ACTIVITY

• Financial Ties Between Election Denier Cleta Mitchell and DHS Election Official Heather Honey Revealed: Tax filings show that former Trump attorney Cleta Mitchell’s foundation paid election conspiracy theorist Heather Honey, now a DHS election integrity official, more than $72,000 last fiscal year and $121,000 the year prior through Honey’s consulting company.

  • Honey is also listed as a vice president and director of Mitchell’s foundation, revealing that their long track record of spreading false voter fraud claims is also backed by a financial relationship.

  • Honey founded the anti-voting Pennsylvania Fair Elections group, which falls under the Election Integrity Network (EIN) created and run by Mitchell.

• Michigan Partially Grants RNC Request for Poll Worker Personal Information: The Michigan Department of State granted an RNC Freedom of Information Act request for the personal information of prospective poll workers but redacted all identifying information. Democrats warned the request echoed Republican efforts to identify and intimidate poll workers, pointing to similar tactics used in Georgia.

  • This request is the latest in a series of attempts by Republican officials to gain information about and exert control over Michigan’s elections – including a blocked DOJ request for Michigan’s un-redacted voter rolls, a halted executive order from President Donald Trump to challenge states’ control of election administration, and a plan from the DOJ to put federal election monitors in three Michigan cities.

Paid for by Fair Fight Action.

On our Fair Fight Action Summer Reading List, Dr. Carol Anderson’s One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying our Democracy exposes the blueprint – and in this live conversation, she shows how the fight over who gets to vote in America never actually ended.

Now, the tactics just look more procedural and bureaucratic – which makes their impact harder to see. Dr. Anderson wrote the book in 2018, but it reads like it was written for this exact moment.

This conversation is part of our first-ever Summer Reading List series, where we go live with authors to dig into the history behind today’s attacks on voting rights and elections.

A Century-Old Blueprint

Dr. Anderson traces modern voter suppression back to 1890, when Mississippi rolled out poll taxes, literacy tests, and impossible “understanding” clauses. None of the rules named race, but all of them targeted voters by race.

When a Virginia lawmaker named Carter Glass was asked point-blank whether the goal was fraud or discrimination, he admitted it was discrimination, right up to the edge of what the Constitution would allow.

That generation learned to write laws that were brutal in effect but spotless on paper, and when a politician today sells a voting restriction as “security” or “integrity,” Dr. Anderson’s ear catches the same pitch and knows what usually follows it.

When “Show Your ID” Turns Voters Away

Voter ID feels like common sense until you meet the people it stops. Dr. Anderson tells the story of an 86-year-old World War II veteran in Texas whose veteran’s ID was rejected at the polls because it wasn’t on the approved list – a man who served his country, walking away feeling like he wasn’t a citizen anymore.

The rules only sound neutral: North Dakota required a residential street address, which cut out Native voters on reservations who use P.O. boxes, and in Texas a concealed-carry permit counts as valid ID to vote while a state university student ID does not.

The Poll Tax in New Clothes

Courts eventually killed the old poll tax, but Dr. Anderson argues the idea never died, it just changed clothes. Producing the “right” documents still costs money and time: a certified birth certificate or a passport often require taking time off work and potentially a long drive to an office that may be open just two days a week.

The proposed SAVE Act would require documentary proof of citizenship to register, submitted in person, and in the places already testing versions of it, married women whose names don’t match, naturalized citizens, and people who haven’t laid eyes on their birth certificate in decades could be turned away.

Bureaucratic Violence

The chapter Dr. Anderson thinks about most is the one you can barely see. She documents voter-roll purges – like Navy veteran Larry Harmon, erased for not voting often enough – alongside Georgia’s “exact match” system, where a missing hyphen can freeze your registration, and the closure of DMVs and polling places in specific neighborhoods that puts the nearest ballot an hour away with no bus line. Nobody stands in the doorway with a club anymore; the barrier is a database, a form, a typo, an office that closed without notice.

And it hides behind a line that’s hard to argue with out loud: we’re just keeping the rolls clean.

What People Can Do Now

Dr. Anderson doesn’t leave us there. She points to the 2017 U.S. Senate race in Alabama, where the thing that moved the needle wasn’t a giant ad budget, it was people. Neighbors ran clinics to help each other gather the documents they needed to qualify for an ID. A woman named Perman Hardy spent years personally driving dozens of her neighbors to a single polling place. Organizers stopped saying “please vote” and started saying “you’re a voter – that’s who you are,” and they won it door by door.

History keeps pointing to the same answer: a system built to exhaust people gets beaten by people who refuse to be exhausted. So check your voter registration. Help someone in your life gather the documents they’ll need. Show up at your local election board meetings, and hold the people running your elections accountable.

If you missed the live conversation with Dr. Carol Anderson, check out the video in this post. It’s one of the clearest explanations of how modern voter suppression works on paper, in the fine print and what it takes to see it coming and stop it.

In solidarity,

Fair Fight Action Team

Paid for by Fair Fight Action.

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QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“I think they’re attempting to create this idea that these corrections are unusual, widespread or significant in a way that people should be concerned. I don’t share that sentiment.” – New Mexico State Elections Director Mandy Vigil regarding Public Interest Legal Foundation’s lawsuit over voter death error records

NOTABLE TRENDS

• Trump Pressures Senate to Cancel Recess Until SAVE Act Passes: Trump demanded Senate Majority Leader John Thune cancel the chamber’s August recess until the Senate passes the SAVE America Act, and renewed calls to eliminate the filibuster. Republicans hold only a 53-47 majority and lack the votes to advance the bill or change Senate rules, although some GOP senators have said they would support canceling the recess.

• Federal Appeals Court Backs Trump’s Mail Voting Order: The U.S. Court of Appeals for D.C. upheld a lower court ruling that a lawsuit challenging Trump’s mail voting executive order was premature, as the administration has not yet fully implemented it. The ruling contrasts with the First Circuit, which held over the weekends that states’ challenges were timely.

• Undelivered Mail Ballots Strikes Again: More than 1,300 mail-in-ballots in Navajo County Arizona were marked undeliverable before Arizona’s primary, prompting former state Republican Party Chair Gina Swoboda to personally text Trump about the issue. State and federal officials are investigating, with the county recorder pointing to a possible misunderstanding about unpaid postage bills as a factor.

STATE ACTIVITY

• New Jersey • State Weighs Broader IDEMIA Contract Cuts Amid Voter Registration Error: New Jersey has paid IDEMIA approx. $61 million across three contracts, but Gov. Sherrill’s office has so far only moved to terminate the company’s Motor Vehicle Commission contract following the registration error that saw 6,600 noncitizens registered to vote. Republicans are calling for a broader bipartisan legislative investigation, with one assemblywoman arguing it makes no sense to target only the DMV contract while others remain intact.

• North Carolina • State Auditor’s Office Faces Bad Faith Accusations as Senate Advances Controversial Election Bill: American Oversight, a nonprofit watch dog, says the state auditor’s office failed to produce text messages from former elections liaison Dallas Woodhouse, whose texts directing county boards on early voting plans were already reported by news outlets. The auditor’s office claims it can no longer access records on Woodhouse’s personal devices since his resignation, a position the group called “bad faith” given the office knew about the texts since June 6.

  • Meanwhile, the state Senate advanced a scaled-back version of HB 958 while keeping its most contentious provisions: vetting voter rolls against the SAVE database, post-election audits by the same auditor’s office now under scrutiny, and the ability to challenge early voters’ ballots up to three days after an election.

  • The Senate also added a significant new provision cutting the early voting period from 17 to 10 days for primaries, runoffs, and special elections.

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ANTI-VOTING GROUP ACTIVITY

• New Mexico Agrees to Release Voter Death Error Records Following Lawsuit: New Mexico’s Secretary of State agreed to release records related to voters erroneously labeled as deceased, following a lawsuit from the Public Interest Legal Foundation. The settlement requires the state to maintain deceased retraction records for at least two years and release them upon request. The foundation has filed similar lawsuits in Arizona and Oregon over records tied to ERIC, which notifies states of voter deaths through federal Social Security data.

  • The Brennan Center for Justice characterized the foundation as a critic of ERIC and “long a promoter of misleading claims about the breadth of errors on voting rolls.”

  • The Brennan Center also noted the so-called “election integrity” organizations have targeted ERIC in legal challenges intended to destroy it and “replace it with something weaker.”

• RNC Ongoing Challenge With States Over Overseas Voter Law: The RNC is challenging Nebraska and several other states over laws that allow overseas “never-resident” voters to register, despite Nebraska data showing only 116 such voters are currently registered and turnout among them has ranged from just 0.001% to 0.007% of all votes cast.

  • The Nebraska RNC argues the law dilutes Republican votes. A hearing on the state’s motion to expedite the case is set for August 6.

• EIN Expands to California with New State Partner: The Election Integrity Network (EIN) has added California’s Election Integrity Project as its newest state partner, expanding its national coalition pushing for proof of citizenship requirements, strict voter ID, and post-election audits while opposing ranked-choice voting.

  • The expansion into California signals a broader push to build permanent election restriction infrastructure in states beyond Republican strongholds.

Paid for by Fair Fight Action.

Join us Monday, August 3 at 11:30 AM for a live conversation with Dr. Carol Anderson, historian at Emory University and author of One Person, No Vote, on how a new era of voter suppression is being built from old blueprints – and what that means for this moment.

We’ll dig into the long history of efforts to restrict who can vote, from Jim Crow–era poll taxes and “understanding” clauses to modern voter ID rules, proof-of-citizenship requirements, and quiet purges of the voter rolls.

Add to Calendar

We’ll connect the dots between past and present attacks on our elections and rights, showing how today’s fights over “election integrity,” bureaucratic hurdles, and gerrymandered maps are not new – but part of a long project to decide who counts and who doesn’t.

From Mississippi to Georgia and across the Jim Crow South, we’ll explore how laws that look neutral on paper end up closing polling places, erasing registrations, and weakening the power of Black, brown, and young voters – and how that voter suppression sits upstream of everything from wages to health outcomes.

If you want a clear, accessible way to understand what’s happening now – and to hear how books like One Person, No Vote can serve as a lens on today’s attacks on democracy – this conversation is for you.

We’ll move between the big picture and the specifics, highlighting both the machinery of modern voter suppression and the ordinary people who organize, drive neighbors to the polls, and refuse to let anyone quietly decide who counts.

In solidarity,

Fair Fight Action Team

Paid for by Fair Fight Action.

Georgians have gotten used to being told what is impossible. We’ve gotten better at proving the doubters wrong.

In 2018, conventional wisdom held that a Democrat could not come close to winning the governor’s office, that a legislature drawn by politicians who rigged the maps to keep control could not change. Yet, between 2014 and 2020, Democrats added 800,000 Georgians to the process and proved otherwise.

The governor’s office remained elusive, but Democratic candidates for state House delivered eleven new Democratic seats that year, starting from just 64. Democrats picked up three state Senate seats. Organizers, volunteers and regular Georgians ready for change curated that result over years: in living rooms, church basements and parking lots outside grocery stores, long before anyone outside Georgia noticed.

Being a competitive state does not promise victory – it shows a growth curve that portends what can be with sustained effort.

This year, attention will rightly be focused on reelecting U.S. Senator Jon Ossoff and electing Keisha Lance Bottoms as governor, plus picking up statewide offices and expanding our numbers on the Public Service Commission. We can do that – but we must also remember that permanent change needs a foundation and that occurs in the state legislature.

The math is clear. For the first time since 2004, Georgia Democrats have a chance to flip a legislative chamber. Georgia Democrats hold 81 state house seats today. Winning 91 seats gives the speaker’s gavel to a Democrat and changes everything from redistricting to budget decisions that impact communities across our state.

When Stacey became minority leader in 2011, Republicans drew districts to try and secure 124 of 180 seats – 67% of the body. They never got that many, and year after year, we’ve cut their margins.

Ten seats is less than we won in 2018, and we are now in a stronger position.

We’ve won more seats in every election since then, and one more in a 2025 special election.

Look at what’s already happened since 2024. Republicans carried a state House district near Athens by 12 points that year. In a 2025 special election, that district elected a Democrat. A congressional district in northwest Georgia that Trump carried by 37 points in 2024 closed to under 12 points this past April – a 25-point swing.

In last year’s Public Service Commission races, Democratic enthusiasm dwarfed the GOP. While a PSC race is not a 1:1 correlation for a midterm election, we can learn a lot from certain signals.

Democratic margins were strong enough that every house seat we’re targeting this fall could be within reach with investment and engagement. In Columbia and Paulding counties, where Republicans routinely clear 60 percent, Georgia voters put Democrats ahead by 25 points, driven by base turnout, frustrated independents, swing voters – and even some crossover Republicans.

Republican dominance is not absolute.

We have seen changes in who is voting and why, and GOP missteps will only continue to compound. These markers are not absolute proof points, but they are indicators of what is possible.

Our presidential ticket carried five of our most competitive targets in 2024, even as Georgia itself slipped from our column by two points. Beth Fuller is running in one of those districts, where Kamala Harris won 53 percent, while our legislative candidate managed 48 percent. Farooq Mughal is running in another, decided by less than two points, closer than almost any race on the map.

Several other targets have moved double digits toward us since 2016. A four to six point improvement on 2024 closes most of what remains, and a midterm electorate tends to close gaps like that on its own.

Georgia has changed too.

People of color now make up a majority of Georgians, and in the South, race is the strongest predictor of political leanings.

Identity does not guarantee how a person will vote; but we know that communities look for those with shared lived experiences. In Georgia, that has portended a shift from reliably red to consistently competitive. While we must continue to make inroads in rural areas, the growth in racial diversity has been concentrated in suburban counties surrounding Atlanta, where most of this year’s competitive districts sit.

Republicans know this too. It’s why they keep redrawing the voting maps instead of letting the lines catch up to the people living inside them. They aren’t just cynical – they are scared.

That’s why this year, Republicans tried to force a special session to redraw Georgia’s maps again. Except, they were met with nearly 500 protestors who showed up at the Capitol on day one – and they backed down.

No matter how Republicans shift lines on a map, they know the ground keeps shifting beneath it – they can see what’s coming for them in November.

We have never believed in guarantees. Democrats must defend seats that are not easy to hold, including districts where our presidential ticket came up short even as our legislative candidates outperformed it. Some longtime Republican incumbents have survived wave elections before. They could again.

But listen to what voters in these districts are saying. They are worried about what it costs to keep the lights on, to see a doctor, to afford the rent or mortgage, and to send a child to a school with enough teachers and enough books.

They care about being fired for who they love, being denied reproductive choice at the risk of their lives, or being detained by ICE because of the color of their skin. Kitchen tables and community conclaves in Georgia have been trending in one direction for a decade, in numbers that get harder for Republican politicians to explain away.

In 2019, Fair Fight Action was created to do this work: door by door, seat by seat, cycle by cycle. We have watched Georgia trend blue because people keep showing up and engaging, even after the votes are counted.

In 2024, SpeakUP PAC joined the fight to invest in organizations and campaigns that see what’s possible. From closing vote share gaps in rural counties to supporting turnout in the metro, we see opportunity and show up.

Forecasts don’t win legislative races.

Candidates willing to run in places the political pundits have written off do, with the support of volunteers willing to knock on people’s doors that pollsters assume already have their minds made up. Every district on this year’s target list has a candidate ready to make that case.

Georgia has never asked permission to become more competitive. It has simply kept becoming so, one election at a time, while people elsewhere argued about probabilities.

We build the odds, by doing the work piece by piece, until the results predicted by the experts look nothing like the outcome we deliver in November.

Stacey Abrams, a former Georgia House of Representatives minority leader, is an author, producer and founder of Fair Fight Action, Fair Count and the Southern Economic Advancement Project.

Lauren Groh-Wargo is chief executive officer of Fair Fight Action, a Georgia-based voting rights advocacy organization, and a political strategist who managed Stacey Abrams’ campaigns for Georgia governor.

Paid for by Fair Fight, www.FairFight.com, not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

After his address, election experts, elected officials, and media commentators across the country have reached the same conclusion: Trump’s address lays the groundwork for an extraordinary abuse of power heading into the 2026 midterms.

Response from Lauren Groh-Wargo, Fair Fight CEO:

“We just watched a desperate president try to build a case for interfering in an election he’s afraid his party will lose. Every claim he made has been rejected in court, in Congress, by election officials, and at the ballot box. He’s not confused about the facts – he’s manufacturing a reason to abuse his power.

“Trump has thrown everything at the wall to tilt 2026 in the GOP’s favor, and none of it has worked. Now, he wants Americans to believe our elections are broken so he can claim the power to render them moot – along with our right to elect our own leaders.”

Elected Officials

• Virginia Senator Mark Warner: “The greatest danger to our elections right now is false narratives seized upon here at home as a pretext to convince Americans their elections cannot be trusted – or worse, to justify unprecedented federal intervention in elections that the Constitution entrusts to the states.”

• Connecticut Senator Jim Himes: Himes warned, [Donald Trump] was “setting the basis” for federal officers “seizing ballot boxes” in November’s midterms.

• Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse: “Tonight seems to be the ceremonial kickoff of President Trump’s campaign to interfere in the November election.”

• California Rep. Sam Liccardo: “This is the pretext for Trump’s authoritarian takeover of our electoral system [...] It’s that familiar playbook — ask any citizen of Hungary, Russia, etc. Anyone who cooperates in this scheme must be prosecuted for seditious conspiracy.”

• Illinois Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi: “He’s reviving conspiracy theories about mail voting, pushing voter suppression, and laying the groundwork for an unprecedented federal takeover of our elections.”

• Connecticut Rep. Jahana Hayes: “I think the President is trying to preemptively get involved in the upcoming elections.”

• Kentucky Rep. Morgan McGarvey: “To me, this is clearly pretext. He is doing this to try and undermine the faith in our elections in America.”

• New York Rep. Joseph Morelle: “This is a pretext for the president, I think, calling into dispute the 2026 elections”

• Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read: “For more than a year, the federal government has escalated their attempts to interfere with how states administer elections. The president’s speech on Thursday made it unmistakably clear he is once again laying the groundwork to dispute the results of the election if he doesn’t like the outcome.”

Election and Legal Experts

• Ty Cobb, Former White House Attorney: “Well, I think tonight’s speech is intended to add the predicate that he needs to declare an emergency at or about the time of the elections [...] As you know, Steve Bannon and Todd Blanche have suggested that there will be ICE agents at the polls. I think that that’s a virtual certainty.”

• Ari Berman, National Voting Rights Correspondent for Mother Jones: “I am still very concerned that this speech is intended to lay the groundwork for the administration to interfere in the midterms and that his speech is going to ratchet up pressure to interfere in the midterms [...] Trump keeps talking about the 2020 election, A because he’s a petty narcissist who can’t get over his defeat, but B because he wants to create the predicate to interfere in the midterms. And I believe that’s what this speech was ultimately all about.”

• Penny Brown Reynolds, Georgia Democratic secretary of state candidate: “Everything that [President Trump] is doing is a pretext: a pretext to interfere in the upcoming elections … because he knows that he’s losing”

• Ken Martin, Democratic National Committee Chair: “Trump and Republicans continue to lay the groundwork for interfering with the midterm elections in an attempt to cling to power. There’s one simple reason for this brazen power grab: Republicans know they’re going to lose the midterms.”

• Ron Brownstein, Senior Political Analyst: “I mean the backdrop for this speech has been a consistent drumbeat of efforts by the administration on a variety of different fronts to assert unprecedented federal control and interference in the administration of the election. So far, they have been stopped by courts, but I think that last night’s speech was a very clear signal that, in addition to pushing for this legislation in Congress, there’s going to be more unilateral action from the executive branch between now and November, trying to shape the playing field in a way that benefits Republicans.

Remember This

Trump’s address comes after two years of failed efforts to tilt the 2026 election in his party’s favor. The key provisions of his March 2025 and March 2026 executive orders to try and seize control over elections and suppress Americans’ votes were blocked in federal court.

The SAVE Act – the sweeping voter suppression bill Republicans have tried to pass three separate times since September 2024 – has failed on each attempt, most recently in June 2026, even with GOP majorities.

Trump has also personally pressured Republican-controlled states to redraw congressional maps mid-decade to lock in partisan advantage, a push that has faced legal challenges and public backlash. Despite all of it, polling and off-year results continue to show his party without the cushion it needs heading into November.

Our previous post catalogues the specific conspiracy theories – Venezuela-Dominion, voting machine manipulation, foreign interference narratives, and the network of election deniers now placed inside federal agencies – that Trump and his allies repeat ad nauseam.

Don’t get distracted by the noise. Be ready to vote.

Fair Fight Team

Paid for by Fair Fight, www.fairfight.com, not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

On our Fair Fight Action Summer Reading List, Ari Berman’s Minority Rule is the anchor – and in this live conversation, he walks us through how the far-right has spent decades building toward a system where a shrinking minority can dominate the majority.

This event is part of our first‑ever Summer Reading List series, where we go live with authors to dig into the history behind today’s attacks on voting rights and elections.

Weaponizing Government

Ari explains how Trump and his allies have tried to turn basic democratic systems into tools for partisan gain – from the Post Office to the census to immigration policy. Instead of treating these institutions as neutral services for everyone, they’ve looked for ways to rig them so fewer people of color are counted, fewer voters get mail ballots, and more power is locked in for the far-right’s base.

The Logic of Minority Rule

He also connects today’s voter suppression and gerrymandering to a much longer story: a political system built to keep many people out, even while promising equality. Ari explains how the current MAGA project is about blocking the country’s changing demographics from translating into political power, building a kind of fortress designed to preserve white, minority rule against what they see as a coming “siege.”

What People Can Do Now

The conversation ends with what it takes to push back. The discussion closes out on how democracy as an up‑and‑down story that only moves in the right direction when people participate – when people to do simple but concrete things: check their voter registration, show up at local election board meetings, and make sure the people running elections in their communities are held accountable.

If you missed the live conversation with Ari Berman, check out the video in this post. It’s one of the clearest explanations of how minority rule is being built – and what it will take to stop it.

In solidarity,

Fair Fight Action Team

Paid for by Fair Fight Action.

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QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“Voting is a constitutional right…It is not a lunch special. You have a constitutional right to vote; you don’t have a constitutional right to a breadstick or a bowl of pasta.” – Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) on the bizarre comparison between Olive Garden's requirement for a photo ID for Never-ending Pasta and voter ID requirements.

NOTABLE TRENDS

• House Republicans Attempt to Pass SAVE Act Again: The House passed (232-198) the Stop Insider Trading Act along party lines which would bar lawmakers, their spouses and dependent children from buying individual stocks but allow them to keep and sell stocks they already own.

  • The legislation is expected dead-on-arrival in the Senate because House GOP leadership inserted into it an unrelated requirement that voters present photo identification in federal elections, a proposal that is unlikely to gain the needed votes from Senate Democrats.

• DHS Chief Reiterated Trump’s False Claims About Voting Security: Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened state officials with fines and criminal charges last Friday if they do not comply with the administration’s efforts to change election policies, while reiterating many of Trump’s unsubstantiated claims about the security of American elections. Mullin also repeated claims that foreign actors could exploit vulnerabilities identified in election systems to change votes, despite offering no evidence that such a breach has ever occurred.

  • Mullin said DHS had identified more than 250,000 potential non-citizens illegally registered to vote in just four states: California, New Jersey, Nevada, and Pennsylvania.

  • Neither Trump nor Mullin offered any specifics on how they derived those numbers, and officials in California, Pennsylvania, and Nevada quickly pushed back on the claims.

• Voter Registration Error Surfaces Nationwide in Wake of Trump’s Election Interference Address: A software error by DMV vendor IDEMIA registered approximately 6,600 noncitizens to vote in New Jersey while they were obtaining driver’s licenses, with about 400 casting ballots in at least one election. New Jersey cut ties with the vendor on July 21, though IDEMIA pushed back on the characterization of the issues as an error, saying it is the state’s SOS responsibility to verify voter registration accuracy.

  • The DOJ has opened an investigation, and a separate congressional investigation is planned for the fall. The error raised concerns beyond New Jersey as more than half of states use IDEMIA for DMV services.

• Ballot Errors Continue to Affect Thousands of Voters in Washington and Missouri: Spokane County, Washington is sending out thousands of replacement ballots after a boundary line error prevented nearly 6,000 voters from being placed in the correct districts. In Kansas City, Missouri 251 voters cast in-person absentee ballots missing two at-large Jackson County races.

  • It is unclear as to what caused the error with Lauri Ealom, the board’s Democratic director, saying it was too technical to explain and did not want to cause further alarm about the process.

STATE ACTIVITY

• Alaska • Up to 3,500 Purged From Voter Rolls: Alaska removed between 3,000 to 3,500 residents from its active voter list, claiming they may be noncitizens. The scale of the new removals is notable as last year’s inactive voter list showed 541 possible noncitizen registrations. If 3,500 people were added to the inactive list, that would represent a 700% increase.

  • Based on interviews, many of those flagged are naturalized citizens who obtained driver’s licenses before becoming citizens and have not received a new license since.

  • The removals require affected voters to provide extra identity verification or face being purged from the rolls entirely.

• Arizona • Republican Nominee for Secretary of State is a Far-Right Election Denier: Far-right state lawmaker and election attorney Alexander Kolodin won the GOP nomination for Arizona secretary of state. Kolodin was sanctioned by the Arizona State Bar in 2023 for his part in lawsuits challenging the 2020 election that made implausible and evidence-free claims of massive election fraud.

  • Kolodin is a member of the far-right Arizona Freedom Caucus who has backed changes to Arizona election laws that are deeply unpopular with voters, including banning no-excuse vote-by-mail and returning to voting in tiny precincts, which election officials said was logistically impossible.

• North Carolina State Election Board Moves to Restrict Mail Ballots and Campus Early Voting: The North Carolina Board of Elections voted 3-2 along party lines to approve a measure allowing county election boards staff to disqualify absentee ballots with “irregularities.” Examples include not properly sealing a ballot or using the wrong type of envelope. Staff should contact voters, but without appropriate action, the ballots may be tossed. The rules still require approval from a Republican-appointed Rules Commission.

  • Separately, the Guilford County Board of Elections voted to exclude early voting sites at North Carolina A&T and UNC Greensboro, despite repeated student calls to keep in place campus sites used in the 2024 general election.

  • Because the board did not reach a unanimous decision, the final early voting map for Guilford County will be up to the discretion of the State Board of Elections.

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ANTI-VOTING GROUP ACTIVITY

• EIN Brings Model Election Handbook to ALEC Conference: The Election Integrity Network is presenting to state lawmakers at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) conference with their Model Election Laws handbook, offering a policy blueprint focused on voter identity verification, ballot security, and election auditing which was framed as an alternative to what the group calls “California-style elections.”

  • The timing is significant with the Trump administration already pressuring states through funding threats, this handbook gives state lawmakers a ready-made legal and policy framework to rapidly implement voting restrictions.

Paid for by Fair Fight Action.

What if the books you read this summer could completely change how you think about voting, power, and our democracy?

This summer, Fair Fight Action is launching our first-ever Summer Reading List, brought to you by the Fair Fight Book Club!

We’re reading three books that break down what is really happening behind the scenes of our elections.

Our Summer Reading List

• Minority Rule by Ari Berman

• One Person, No Vote by Dr. Carol Anderson

• Ratf**ked by David Daley

For the next several weeks, we’ll be going live on Substack with the authors of our Summer Reading List books to hear more, ask questions, and dig deeper into the history behind the current attacks on voting rights and elections, how it’s all shaping the future of America.

Each book looks at power from a different angle, from voter suppression and gerrymandering to the systems that allow a small group of people to have a huge influence over our democracy – and by extension, the majority of Americans’ lives.

Some of it may surprise you. Some of it may frustrate you. But all of it will give us plenty to talk about, and trust us, we plan to talk about it!

Save the Dates:

• Minority Rule with Ari Berman – Today, July 23 at 1:30 PM ET

• One Person, No Vote with Dr. Carol Anderson – Monday, August 3 at 11:30 AM ET

• Ratf**ked with David Daley – Monday, August 17, at 12:00 PM

You don’t have to be a political expert, or even someone who reads all the time to join us – just come ready for the conversation.

We’ll see you at the book club!

In solidarity,

Fair Fight Action Team

Paid for by Fair Fight Action.

Join us tomorrow, July 23, at 1:30 PM for a live conversation with , author of Minority Rule and national voting rights correspondent at Mother Jones, on how a small but powerful minority has shaped American democracy – and what that means for this moment.

We’ll dig into the long history of efforts to restrict who can vote, from the founding era’s limits on the franchise to modern battles over voter suppression, gerrymandering, and the courts.

Add to your calendar

We’ll connect the dots between past and present attacks on our elections and rights, showing how today’s fights over “election integrity,” voting laws, and representation are not new – but part of a decades-long strategy to lock in minority rule.

From Wisconsin to Georgia and across the South, we’ll explore how dark money, extremist politicians, and captured institutions are reshaping the rules of our democracy – and who those rules are designed to exclude.

If you want a clear, accessible way to understand what’s happening now – and to hear how books like Minority Rule are essential guides to this moment – this conversation is for you.

We’ll move between the big picture and the specifics, highlighting both the architecture of minority rule and the regular people whose voices are being silenced.

Join us live and come away with a deeper understanding of what we’re up against and how we can respond.

In solidarity,

Fair Fight Action Team

Paid for by Fair Fight Action.

The through-line across major outlets is unmistakable: nothing Trump revealed proved votes were changed, machines were manipulated, or a foreign power altered a U.S. election. His own White House’s document release said the opposite.

Trump promised bombshells but delivered just more of the same garbage – and the documents he released undercut his own claims.

• A 2020 CIA report showed China targeted Biden’s campaign, not his.

• A 2021 National Intelligence Council review, already public for five years, found Beijing did not try to influence the 2020 outcome.

Even John Solomon – the operative the White House brought in to release the documents – admitted the intelligence community has zero evidence a foreign power flipped a single vote in 2020, 2022, or 2024.

But this speech from a desperate, deeply unpopular leader is a pretext. It’s the escalation of a two-year effort to manufacture a legal reason to do something drastic and alter the way the 2026 election is administered.

From a national emergency to seize control over elections, to sending ICE or FBI agents to the polls to seize ballots or voting machines – tactics that once felt outlandish or near-impossible must be considered as possibilities as an unhinged, corrupt president becomes increasingly desperate to tip the scales in 2026.

The same people who tried to overturn Trump’s 2020 loss with false claims want to use those false claims to try to seize control of the 2026 midterms.

For more context, check out our post from last week on the origins of Trump’s stolen election myth and the election deniers he’s installed in powerful government positions to move his election policy agenda forward.

What the Documents Actually Showed

• China targeted Biden’s campaign, not Trump’s. Per the Washington Post, a CIA report dated July 2020 said Chinese cyber actors were targeting the campaign of Democrat Joe Biden – the opposite of Trump’s central claim that China intervened to defeat him.

• The Intelligence Community already assessed China did not try to influence 2020. A March 2021 National Intelligence Council review, made public more than five years ago, found Beijing “did not attempt to influence the outcome of the 2020 election,” and that “China does not currently intend to covertly interfere to try to sway the outcome of the election.” Reported by the Washington Post.

• Zero evidence any foreign power flipped a vote. After the speech, conservative journalist John Solomon – who worked with the White House on releasing the documents – acknowledged on CNN’s post-speech coverage that the intelligence community had “zero evidence that a foreign power flipped a vote in 2020, 2022 or 2024.”

• The Venezuela / Dominion claim was already debunked by DOJ and DHS. A 2021 review by the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security concluded that allegations Venezuela owned or controlled U.S. voting systems, or manipulated election infrastructure to change votes, were “unsubstantiated and not credible.” Reported by the Wall Street Journal.

• The “220 million U.S. voter files” claim recycled publicly available data. Per the New York Times, most of the voter data referenced was already publicly available – often sold to political campaigns – and two former senior U.S. officials confirmed there is no evidence Beijing hacked U.S. systems. China “considered modest attempts to influence opinion in the United States, and downloaded publicly available voter rolls from several states, but never manipulated a single voting machine or ballot.”

• The intelligence community concluded U.S. election systems could not be manipulated at scale. Axios reported that documents released by the White House included an early 2020 intelligence assessment that “systems that tabulate, transmit, or display election results are vulnerable to localized exploitation but would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to alter the election outcome.”

• The DHS “278,000 noncitizens” claim was not substantiated. Per the Washington Post, Trump provided “no details on the investigatory process by which these voters were identified and provided no evidence that noncitizen voting has ever been widespread or affected the outcome of an election.”

Even Republicans Said the Speech Fell Short

• Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD): “That election was a closed issue back in 2020. I’m not looking back into the past. I’m looking to the future.” (Washington Post)

• Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE): “I don’t find him to be too concerned about Republicans in the midterms.” (Washington Post)

• Trevor Potter, Republican former FEC chairman: “It does feel a little like Captain Ahab in ‘Moby Dick.’ He is just fixated on his claim that he didn’t lose the 2020 election... it’s clearly become an important part of his psyche and in some ways an important part of this administration.” (New York Times)

• Former Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-VA): “Clearly, there’s nobody in the White House who can say no to him; there’s no adult in the room. They won’t say to him, ‘Mr. President, you lost the damn election. Why are we doing this again?’” (New York Times)

• Doug Heye, longtime Republican operative: “No one did more to help Democrats win Georgia in the 2020 presidential election and the Senate elections than Donald Trump.” (Washington Post)

State Officials and Experts Weigh in on Concerns

• Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY): “The federal government has basically been dismantling all the protections that we’ve come to rely on to protect this core essence of our democracy.” Hochul is concerned the Trump administration will deploy federal immigration agents at polling places during the upcoming November midterms. (X/Twitter)

• Chris Krebs, Former CISA and cybersecurity expert: Says he has a “hard time believing” Trump was not informed about China’s efforts to influence the 2020 election. He says there were “countless memos” distributed to senior officials about the intent of foreign adversaries. (X/Twitter)

• David Becker, Former Senior Trial Attorney for DOJ’s Civil Rights Division: “The total number of election officials who’ve been arrested for wrongdoing is zero, and that’s appropriate because not only have they committed no crime, they’ve actually acted heroically and patriotically to support and facilitate our democracy through a pandemic and in the aftermath, with disinformation.” (X/Twitter)

• The Election Integrity Network is Driving the Emergency-EO Push: The connective tissue behind Thursday’s speech is Cleta Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network (EIN) and the operatives EIN has helped place inside DHS, DOJ, ODNI, and the White House.

The Connective Tissue

For more than a year, EIN leaders – starting with Heather Honey in March 2025 and continuing through Cleta Mitchell, a Michael Flynn-convened February 2026 summit, and Steve Bannon’s June 2026 War Room segments – have publicly laid out a plan to manufacture the legal predicate for a national-emergency executive order over elections.

Thursday’s speech was the next step in that campaign, following Trump’s July 9 purge of the Election Assistance Commission and reporting that the White House, ODNI, and DHS have spent months looking for ways to use emergency powers to force changes to voting machines.

Pay Attention. Share information. Be ready to vote.

Fair Fight Action Team

Paid for by Fair Fight Action.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“I have no fear of anything being released. We already know what happened in the 2020 election. That’s the most scrutinized election in world history...I do have a fear that the White House and the federal government has become perhaps the primary amplifier of disinformation that seeks to delegitimize American democracy in our election process.” – David Becker, former Justice Department voting rights attorney, regarding Trump election task force releasing classified intel documents.

NOTABLE TRENDS

• House Republicans Resurrect SAVE Act: On Wednesday, House Republicans unveiled a $95 billion blueprint for a new spending package that would include $73 billion in new funds for defense and intelligence operations over the next 10 years. The 47-page budget resolution would also authorize decade-long expenditures of $10 billion to incentivize states to implement portions of Trump’s SAVE America Act and $12 billion for agriculture.

  • House Republican leaders hope to use reconciliation to pass portions of the SAVE America Act, a package of election restrictions Democrats strongly oppose. The Republican strategy is to offer states grant money as an ⁠incentive to adopt its measures.

• Ballot Processing Errors Continues:

  • Maryland’s Montgomery County Board of Elections is considering decertifying its primary election results after it noticed processing errors affecting 19 ballots related to the state’s larger 400,000 mail ballot misprint in May.

  • Meanwhile, Tennessee’s Shelby County saw both the Democratic and Republican parties issue a joint statement calling for transparency after a processing error led to hundreds of incomplete absentee ballots being distributed.

• USPS Delivery Failures Plague States: Postal Services delivery failures affected multiple states this week.

  • In Nevada, 34 mail ballots cast before Election Day were delivered to the wrong office and went uncounted, prompting U.S. Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen to demand a formal USPS investigation.

  • In New Jersey, 24 Atlantic County ballots sat undelivered at a USPS facility over a disputed $66,000 bill from 2020. In Utah, nearly 300 registered voters in Utah County reported never receiving their primary ballots.

STATE ACTIVITY

• Illinois • Officials Discuss Foreign Interference and Disinformation: Illinois Governor JB Pritzker’s staff met with governors’ offices to discuss protections against foreign election interference and disinformation, shortly before federal cybersecurity officials warned of efforts by the Russian intelligence branch to gain access to critical systems in Illinois and nationwide. The warning carries added significance given Russia’s infiltration of the Illinois State Board of Elections in July 2016.

• Kentucky • Jefferson County Clerk Faces Scrutiny After Questionable Hires: Jefferson County Clerk David Yates is under scrutiny for hiring his friend and business partner Troy LeBlanc as chief operating officer at $153,000, despite LeBlanc having no prior experience in elections or government IT. The hire followed a no-bid $3,000-a-week consulting contract award to LeBlanc’s mother, who then recommended the COO position. While nothing in the Louisville Metro Code of Ethics prohibits Yates from hiring a business partner, ethics experts say the arrangement raises public trust concerns.

• North Carolina • Officials Attempt To Influence Early Voting Sites: New records show State Auditor Dave Boliek actively pushed for early voting sites in Republican-leaning areas and sought to boost GOP turnout in smaller counties. In Granville County, the elections board again deadlocked 2-2 on an early voting plan with the GOP plan to keep close a library site used by more than 70% of early voters since 2020, a decision critics say will disproportionately affect Black voters and those without transportation. Without a unanimous plan, the state board of elections Republican majority (3-2) will decide the county’s early voting schedule.

• Pennsylvania • 2025 Homeland Security Funds Withheld By Trump Administration: The Trump administration is withholding nearly half of Pennsylvania’s allocated 2025 Homeland Security dollars, with future grants tied to new election-related requirements — a part of a broader federal effort to pressure states on voting procedures.

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ANTI-VOTING GROUP ACTIVITY

• California Voter ID Ballot Measure Backed By Republican Megadonors & Election Deniers: Proposition 39, which would require voters to show proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote, has raised more than $10 million, largely from billionaire donors with Republican ties.

  • The top donor is Richard Uihlein, a Republican megadonor who contributed $4 million and whose backing of candidates promoting false 2020 election claims was documented in a 2022 ProPublica investigation.

  • The fundraising committee is run by Julie Luckey, mother of tech billionaire and Trump supporter Palmer Luckey.

• Election Denier Groups Rally Behind Trump’s Election Interference Claims, Push Save Act: Following Trump’s address on Thursday, election denier Cleta Mitchell and the Election Integrity Network posted statements echoing Trump’s claim on election interference, while the RNC applauded the address and used the moment to renew pressure on Congress to pass the SAVE America Act.

Paid for by Fair Fight Action.

Ahead of Thursday’s Oval Office address, Trump is expected to recycle debunked claims about the 2020 election. ProPublica’s 2022 investigation into the origins of the “Big Lie” found every major fraud claim from 2020 followed an identical pattern:

1) An unvetted claim surfaces

2) So-called experts/investigators tied to “election integrity” activists supporting Trump review it

3) The claim is deemed false or not credible

4) It is promoted anyway as proof Trump didn’t lose

5) When publicly debunked, its promoters move on to the next claim.

That pattern is repeating in 2026 – visible in the FBI’s Fulton County ballot seizure, and, per MS NOW, in the White House meeting held Monday to prepare Thursday’s address, which reportedly focused on “Chinese and Venezuelan government efforts to influence the 2020 election, along with the security of U.S. voting machines” – the same theories the March 2021 National Intelligence Council review deemed “not credible.”

Stay with us. This will be a longer post, by necessity, due to the sheer amount and complexity of the many false claims Trump and his allies have tried to use to advance his stolen election myth.

The bigger picture: Thursday is a desperate escalation

Trump has been trying to seize control over elections since he took office. His March 2025 executive order and March 2026 mail-voting order both attempted to hand the executive branch new authority over voter registration and how states run elections – key provisions of both were blocked in court.

The SAVE Act has faced many setbacks in Congress, failing several times – September 2024, March 2026, and June 2026.

Trump’s push for red states to redraw maps mid-decade hasn’t produced the House cushion Republicans seek, even factoring in Louisiana v. Callais – the Voting Rights Act case that Trump advisors told RNC donors in December 2025 “could be transformational for Republicans and “upend the political map.”

With every institutional lever short of an emergency EO having failed to deliver a safe House map, Thursday’s address reads as the kickoff of the next phase – national-emergency EO, federalized election oversight, or federal agents at the polls. It’s happening because Trump and his allies are desperate and running out of tools to affect the outcome of a free and fair November election.

The culmination of two-year effort advancing an emergency EO

Thursday’s address is the visible escalation of a coordinated campaign – publicly documented – by the Election Integrity Network (EIN) and allied activists to build the legal and political predicate for a national-emergency executive order to takeover state-run elections, working with officials the network has helped place inside DHS, DOJ, ODNI, and the White House.

• March 2025 – Heather Honey, then an EIN leader, tells right-wing activists on a recorded organizing call that the administration could declare a “national emergency” based on an “actual investigation” of 2020 and gain powers to “take these other steps without Congress and… mandate that states do things.” First reported by NYT (Berzon/Corasaniti, Oct. 22, 2025). Honey was appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary for Election Integrity at DHS by August 2025.

• Sept. 2, 2025 – Cleta Mitchell on Washington Watch with Tony Perkins articulates the legal predicate: the president’s authority over elections is limited “except that where there is a threat to the national sovereignty of the United States… then I think maybe the president is thinking that he will exercise some emergency powers to protect the federal elections going forward.” Mediaite writeup.

• Feb. 19, 2026 – 30-person summit convened by Michael Flynn, sponsored by the Gold Institute for International Strategy. Attendees included WH lawyer Kurt Olsen, DHS’s Heather Honey, CISA’s Marci McCarthy, ODNI’s Clay Parikh, former DOJ election-litigation lead Mac Warner, Cleta Mitchell, Peter Ticktin, and Patrick Byrne. Attendees urged Trump to declare a national emergency, ban voting machines, and end mail-in ballots. Organizer Will Huff told ProPublica that Olsen agreed to take the group’s “consensus” back to Trump: “It’s got to be a national emergency.” ProPublica (Feb. 28, 2026).

• Feb. 26, 2026 – WaPo (Arnsdorf) reports on a 17-page draft executive order circulated by pro-Trump activists who “say they are in coordination with the White House.” The draft uses a claim that China interfered in 2020 to declare a national emergency to ban voting machines and “unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting.” ProPublica separately reported summit attendee Peter Ticktin worked on a draft EO along those lines.

• June 29, 2026 – Steve Bannon on War Room (Media Matters): the SAVE Act path is closed, national emergency EO is the only remaining option. Names John Solomon and Bill Pulte as building the “predicate,” says the case would need to be made on national-security grounds – “I think that case can be made.”

• July 9, 2026 – Trump purges the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) so the federal election agency is legally paralyzed four months before the midterms.

• July 11, 2026 – Reuters reports that the White House, ODNI, and DHS spent months looking for ways to bypass the EAC and use emergency powers to force changes to voting machines. As early as fall 2025, ODNI drafted a recommendation for Trump to declare a national emergency and stand up a federal task force that could compel states to “address vulnerabilities in voting systems.”

• July 14, 2026 – MS NOW reports that Monday’s White House prep meeting for Thursday focused on “Chinese and Venezuelan government efforts to influence the 2020 election, along with the security of U.S. voting machines” – the same conspiracy theories the March 2021 National Intelligence Council review deemed “not credible.” The same reporting notes that the White House’s decision not to release the IC’s own conclusions has, over the past several months, kept CISA and other agencies from working with states and localities to remediate real voting-system vulnerabilities.

Venezuela–Dominion lies

A newer strand of the same debunked theory claims Venezuelan officials who rigged elections for Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro are secretly running U.S. voting-machine companies Dominion and Smartmatic. It circulated in denier circles for years, but gained new life after the U.S. military’s January 3 capture of Maduro. Election deniers are now explicitly tying it to DNI’s anticipated report and an expected national-emergency executive order that would invoke Article II “commander-in-chief” powers to bypass courts and states. Despite what is asserted on Thursday, the Trump administration lacks any constitutional authority to unilaterally alter election laws or bypass Congress.

Patrick Byrne and Gary Berntsen (a self-described former CIA officer) reportedly briefed Trump’s team on the theory before the Maduro operation. A September 2025 “Venezuelan whistleblower” declaration filed in Tina Peters’s election-fraud case made similar claims, and a judge threw it out.

Commentators Emerald Robinson and Lara Logan have amplified the claim; Trump himself has shared related posts. Mike Lindell’s “Election Crime Bureau” released a roughly 800-page report in June 2026 repeating the Venezuela claims alongside the debunked Dominion/Smartmatic theories.

The 2020 origin – Leamsy Salazar (ex-Chávez security chief telling Sidney Powell’s team Dominion “purchased” Venezuelan vote-rigging software) – was debunked by Trump’s own campaign staff within a day, which concluded Dominion had no company ties to Venezuela and terminated its contract with Smartmatic in 2012. Central to four Powell lawsuits (AZ, MI, WI, GA) – all failed.

Other recycled claims that may appear Thursday

• Oltmann / “Eric Coomer antifa call” – A Denver podcaster claimed he infiltrated an antifa conference call and heard a Dominion employee, Eric Coomer, say he would make sure Trump lost. Powell’s own investigator called Oltmann “at the very least embellishing.” Coomer filed a defamation suit; in March 2022 the judge fined Oltmann almost $33,000 for failing to appear for a deposition. Used in Powell court filings in GA and MI, and an affidavit in AZ and WI.

• Maras (”Tore Says”) / Foreign Interference Claim – A QAnon influencer supplied an anonymous declaration alleging “unambiguous evidence” of foreign interference tying Dominion to Soros, China, and three presidential administrations. Patrick Byrne’s own investigators determined the source “lies, exaggerates, deflects… we cannot rely on her for anything factual.” Powell filed a declaration in AZ and WI lawsuits based on the anonymous source anyway.

• Edward Solomon / “algorithm” Analysis – A convicted felon with no formal math degree – whom Patrick Byrne called a “renowned mathematician” – claimed software must have used an algorithm to flip Fulton County votes. FactCheck.org quoted experts who said the analysis “shows a basic misunderstanding of how vote counts work”; Chicago and Stanford researchers found the flagged patterns were normal for a fraud-free election.

• Antrim County, Michigan “forensic report” – Allied Security Operations Group claimed Dominion’s system was “intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors.” The report’s own original co-author, Conan James Hayes, said the initial draft found no definitive fraud – the accusation was added after Russell Ramsland rewrote it and stripped the original analysts’ names. Michigan Secretary of State’s independent analysis and a bipartisan Republican-led investigation declared the theories “a complete waste of time to consider.” Flynn, Byrne, Giuliani, and Trump himself all promoted it anyway; the Antrim report was attached to an email from Trump’s personal secretary to the deputy attorney general subject-lined “From POTUS.”

• Hammer and Scorecard / Mike Lindell’s Cyber Symposium – A supposed CIA supercomputer (”Hammer”) used secret software (”Scorecard”) to alter votes nationwide. Lindell’s own “Red Team” texted each other in real time that the data was “NOT PROOF” and could be “from anywhere or even fake.” The key source, Dennis Montgomery, previously stood accused of defrauding the Pentagon of $20 million on unrelated software claims.

The Fulton County precedent – the pattern in real time

The same 2020 Fulton County fraud allegations were revived as justification for the FBI’s January 2026 seizure of 700+ boxes of election materials. Per NYT and ProPublica, the underlying affidavit “relied heavily on claims about ballots that have been widely debunked” – allegations Georgia’s Republican election officials had already investigated and rejected. The referral came from Kurt Olsen, one of the lawyers who tried to overturn 2020, now Trump’s Director of Election Security and Integrity (Politico).

The same network is behind it. Cleta Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network – which worked behind the scenes to push rule changes through Georgia’s State Election Board that a judge later blocked as “illegal“ – appears connected to the information DOJ relied on (Democracy Docket).

The Bureau removed the people who pushed back. Atlanta FBI chief Paul Brown reviewed the evidence, determined it was insufficient, and was forced out; the raid happened anyway. On July 13, 2026, CBS News reported that the FBI had fired two more analysts the week before, after they raised concerns the Fulton probe was thin on evidence and politically motivated – even as the Bureau mobilized 260 analysts nationwide to complete records checks by July 17, three days before Thursday’s address.

Election deniers inside the government

The people who’ve spent years pushing debunked election conspiracy theories and working to help overturn Trump’s 2020 loss are now setting federal election policy (NYT interactive tracker).

• Heather Honey (DHS) – Deputy Assistant Secretary for Election Integrity: Repeatedly pushed debunked Pennsylvania “more votes than voters” claims, was central to Arizona’s 2020 recount, and led inside Cleta Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network. Founded PA Fair Elections (EIN state chapter) and Verity Vote. Honey suggested the administration could declare a “national emergency” to bypass Congress and mandate election rules for state and local governments.

• David Harvilicz (DHS) – Assistant Secretary for Cyber, Infrastructure, Risk and Resilience Policy: Sets policy for securing the country’s election infrastructure – including voting machines. Has done business with James Penrose, who took part in 2020 efforts to seize voting machines, and has called for eliminating voting machines while questioning Democratic wins.

• Kurt Olsen (White House) – Director of Election Security and Integrity: Pro-Trump lawyer, one of the legal figures behind efforts to overturn the 2020 election results and opening the Fulton County investigation. Olsen filed multiple failed swing-state suits alleging fraud based on debunked conspiracy theories; while representing Kari Lake he was hit with sanctions for false and misleading claims. Also pushed the Dominion/Venezuela international-conspiracy theory.

• Clay Parikh (White House) – Special Government Employee (Cybersecurity): Former cybersecurity consultant and election-denial advocate who testified in election challenges in Arizona and Georgia after 2020. Supported claims Dominion systems had been manipulated and pushed for forensic examinations of voting machines despite audits confirming election accuracy.

• Bill Pulte (ODNI) – Acting Director of National Intelligence: Appointed to probe “rigged elections“ and declassify 2020-related materials, with no intelligence background of any kind and reportedly no security-clearance vetting. Built his profile by sending DOJ criminal fraud referrals against Trump’s perceived political opponents (Letitia James, Adam Schiff, Lisa Cook, Fani Willis).

• Kash Patel (FBI) – Director: Overseeing the criminal investigation into supposed 2020 irregularities that produced the Fulton County seizure and a Maricopa County subpoena; sidestepped confirming Trump lost 2020 at his Senate hearing. Promoted the unsubstantiated theory that seized fake driver’s licenses were part of a Chinese plot to help Biden win.

• Jeanine Pirro (DOJ) – U.S. Attorney, Washington, D.C.: Former Fox News host who, after 2020, became one of the most prominent media figures repeatedly amplifying stolen-election claims involving Dominion, ballot fraud, and election manipulation despite a lack of evidence.

• Markwayne Mullin (DHS) – Secretary of Homeland Security: Voted against 2020 certification and signed the Texas amicus brief to invalidate battleground-state results. Now holding $1 billion in Homeland Security Grant Program funds from states that don’t implement new federal “election security” mandates.

• Harmeet K. Dhillon (DOJ) – Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights: Former Kari Lake campaign lawyer and RNLA/RNC leader. Directed DOJ to sue 30 states and D.C. for unredacted voter rolls, and threatened state administrators with federal criminal prosecution.

• Marci McCarthy (DoD) – Director of External Engagement, CIO: Leader in the Georgia chapter of EIN and former CISA Director of Public Affairs. While at CISA, attended a private summit in Washington whose main topic was urging Trump to declare a “national emergency” and seize federal control over the 2026 midterms; also worked with EIN to place activists on DeKalb County’s election board and helped oust a board member who opposed ending mail voting.

• Eric Neff (DOJ) – Acting Chief, Voting Section, Civil Rights Division: Former LA County prosecutor placed on leave after using True the Vote tips to prosecute the CEO of an election-management company; served as a lawyer for Patrick Byrne, who advised the Trump administration to seize voting machines in 2020.

• Christopher Gardner (DOJ) – Trial Attorney, Voting Section: Former attorney for Georgia Republicans who helped file a lawsuit seeking to prevent Georgia from certifying the 2020 election results.

• Joseph Voiland (DOJ) – Trial Attorney, Civil Rights Division: Former attorney for the Trump campaign who worked on 2020 post-election litigation and efforts to invalidate ballots.

The cost of lying about election fraud

Fox News paid Dominion $787.5 million – the largest publicly known media defamation settlement in U.S. history – after a judge ruled its on-air Dominion claims were false. Rudy Giuliani was ordered to pay $148 million to Georgia election workers after conceding in court that his ballot-fraud claims about them were false. Sidney Powell’s lawyers admitted “no reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact.”

The Gateway Pundit settled with Georgia election workers; owner Jim Hoft later admitted there was no widespread fraud in 2020.

Salem Media pulled “2000 Mules” and apologized. Dinesh D’Souza, the fi;m’s director, separately apologized in writing.

Newsmax paid Smartmatic $40 million and One America News (OAN) separately settled (terms undisclosed).

The broader litigation record

Of the roughly 62 lawsuits Trump and his allies filed challenging the 2020 results, 61 were rejected. Per the Just Security tracker, 30 were dismissed after a hearing on the merits; the rest for lack of standing or voluntarily withdrawn. The single win (Pennsylvania) concerned mail-ballot ID curing deadlines, not fraud, and didn’t affect the outcome.

Speak up. Remain vigilant. Be ready to vote.

Fair Fight Action Team

Paid for by Fair Fight Action.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“They will actually harm election security…These are radical changes to election processes.”– David Becker, Executive Director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research on changes to election procedure and FEMA grants”

NOTABLE TRENDS

• Trump Fires Leadership of Key Federal Voting Assistance Commission: President Donald Trump Thursday dismissed all remaining commissioners on the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), a bipartisan federal agency created to help states administer elections. The move leaves the four-commissioner federal agency without leadership just months before the upcoming 2026 election, and raises immediate concerns about what, if anything, the EAC can do without commissioners.

  • The decision to purge the EAC marks the first major dismissals following a landmark Supreme Court ruling last month that shattered decades of precedent and gave the president almost unlimited authority to fire officials at independent federal agencies.

• USPS Appeals Court Order Blocking Trump’s Anti-Mail Voting Executive Order: USPS has asked a federal court to pause its order blocking implementation of Trump’s EO against mail voting while it appeals the ruling. Notably, in a footnote, USPS admitted that DOJ attorneys had acknowledged the voter list may be underinclusive or inaccurate while attempting to argue those concerns are legally inconsequential.

• Trump Administration Moves to Reshape Federal Election Administration: The Trump administration is requiring states to transition to paper ballots, verify citizenship of voters, manual audits of 5 percent of ballots, and make other changes to election procedures; threatening to withholding 20 percent of terrorism-preparedness grants from FEMA’s $1 billion annual program unless states provide proof of compliance. Courts have already blocked similar efforts by the administration, saying the Constitution grants power over elections to states and not the executive branch.

  • Trump also fired all three remaining members of the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) Thursday, effectively disabling the only federal agency devoted solely to election administration. The firings leave the EAC unable to take official action until new members are confirmed.

• Ballot Errors Prompts Investigation: An investigation found that 1,800 Louisville, Kentucky households may have received the wrong ballots during the May primary, in some cases preventing people from voting in local races for years. Officials attributed the errors to redistricting data mistakes in 2022, noting no malicious intent was involved and that similar errors occurred in Virginia and Georgia.

  • Meanwhile, Wisconsin Green Bay City Clerk Celestine Jeffreys was placed on administrative leave Thursday amid investigations into duplicated ballots issued to voters ahead of the spring election and again for the upcoming August primary. This is the third time in four years the Wisconsin Elections Commission has found probable cause that Jeffreys violated election law.

• FBI & White House Taskforce Dig Into 2020 Election: The FBI is increasing resources in support of Director Kash Patel’s “priority” investigation related to the 2020 election in Georgia, authorizing overtime, including weekends and holidays, and pulling 260 FBI intelligence officials from field offices. Each of the intelligence analysts are expected to conduct a total of 708 records checks by July 17 to look for “derogatory information” and “associations between people” to “build a case.”

  • At the same time, White House task force is gathering thousands of pages of documents from U.S. intelligence agencies, including the CIA, FBI, and Office of the Director of National Intelligence, with plans to declassify some of them to amplify claims of fraud about the 2020 election.

  • The task force includes right-wing commentator John Solomon and veterans of Trump’s first administration along with roughly a dozen staff members and lawyers who are reviewing information provided by agencies and departments.

• Vote By Mail Errors Strike Again: Arizona Pinal County officials launched an investigation for printing errors that resulted in incorrect ballots in two precincts. Officials “determined that the vendor for the Secretary of State’s voter registration database had pulled incorrect information.” They found 1,468 ballots had printing errors, and that the errors impacted only precinct committeeman races.

  • Meanwhile, the city of Green Bay, Wisconsin issued duplicate ballots for the second time this year. The error has once again drawn criticism from Republicans, who called for an investigation when the city made the same mistake back in April.

  • Republicans have long been skeptical of how Green Bay administers elections – especially after the city became the target of false claims the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

STATE ACTIVITY

• Arizona Supreme Court Unanimously Sided with Election Denier: The court unanimously sided with Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap in his ongoing dispute with the county board of supervisors over election duties. Heap, who as a legislator backed sweeping changes to state election law rooted in evidence-free fraud claims, now gains unfettered access to voter and IT databases under an interim plan by his attorney.

  • The ruling stops short of disrupting the ongoing primary but sets the stage for a significant shift in election authority toward an official with ties to the election denial movement.

• Florida Judge Orders DHS to Restore Four States’ Access to Immigration Database for Voter Citizenship Checks: Trump appointee U.S. District Judge T. Kent Wetherell II ordered DHS to restore access to the SAVE system for Florida, Ohio, Iowa, and Indiana to check voter citizenship status, despite a D.C.-based judge blocking its nationwide use.

  • The D.C. judge subsequently rejected the Trump administration’s request to pause her ruling, saying that Wetherell “erred in significant ways” and had no authority to make merits determinations about the database’s legality.

• Georgia’s State Election Board Passes Rule Seeking Access to “‘Bunker”’: The State Election Board voted 3-2 to pass a rule granting board members access to the Secretary of State’s election night reporting hub, dubbed the ‘bunker’ by conspiracy theorists who have accused Raffensperger of acting maliciously by refusing observers.

  • The rule was proposed by Salleigh Grubbs, a board member with ties to election denial efforts, and passed despite a warning from the attorney general’s office that it exceeds the board’s authority. Board member Caroly Roddy, who has supported Grubbs’ other measures, framed the push as a transparency measure.

• Louisiana’s Republican Voters Outnumber Democrats, Possibly Due to Inconsistent Voter List Maintenance Practices Across Parties: As of July 1st, Republican voters officially outnumber Democrats for the first time in state history. Over the past 12 months, Republicans gained nearly 15,000 voters while Democrats lost more than 33,000.

  • The Louisiana Democratic Party has questioned whether the voter list maintenance procedures are being applied consistently across parties as Democratic voters have been declared inactive at a 10:1 rate over Republicans.

  • However, the SOS’ office stated that although nearly half-million voters were identified as inactive, none have been removed from the rolls.

• NC State House Passes Omnibus Anti-Voting Bill: A divided North Carolina House passed an HB 958 that clears a path for more voter challenges, election audits, and registration removals. Most notably, State Auditor Dave Boliek (R), who gained oversight of elections after a 2024 law shifted appointment power from the governor to the state auditor, would be able to conduct post-election audits in randomly chosen counties. Critics note he could end up auditing his own re-election results.

  • The bill also allows the State Board of Election to bypass Attorney General Jeff Jackson (D) by hiring private attorneys, and removes the requirement that election lawsuits be heard in Wake County – a change Democrats warn could enable venue shopping.

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ANTI-VOTING GROUP ACTIVITY

• Republican National Committee Expands Litigation Efforts: The RNC says it is now engaged in 160 lawsuits across 36 states over election issues, on pace to be the most litigation in the committee’s history. Last week, the RNC targeted three states in an effort to restrict voting access for U.S. citizens living abroad.

  • This week, New Jersey was also sued for the so-called “never-resident” voters – U.S. citizens born and living abroad who inherit voting rights from their parents or guardians.

• EIN, AFPI, RNC & Other Orgs Pushed for Anti-Voting Legislation, Including the SAVE America Act, In Response to the Watson Decision: Multiple anti-voting organizations, including the Election Integrity Network, America First Policy Institute, Republican National Committee, and Tea Party Patriots, amped up their calls for the SAVE America Act’s passage after the US Supreme Court decided states can accept mail ballots postmarked by Election Day but received after.

  • The Election Integrity Network also pushed their Model Election Laws as the “antidote” for state legislators to use.

• Republican National Committee Sued Three States Over Overseas Voter Policy: In less than a week, the Republican National Committee (RNC) sued Nebraska and Colorado, with Nevada as the latest escalation, in an effort to restrict voting access for U.S. citizens abroad. The GOP’s suit targets so-called “never-resident” voters – U.S. citizens born and living abroad who inherit voting rights from their parents or guardians.

  • Republicans argue the state’s constitution requires voters to have resided in the state before casting a ballot.

  • The RNC has now filed overseas voter lawsuits in Nevada, Colorado, Nebraska, Virginia, Arizona, North Carolina, and Michigan.

Paid for by Fair Fight Action.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“You just cannot build a healthy democracy by catering to people who will just never accept the results of an election if it does not favor them.” – Georgia Rep. Jasmine Clark (D) regarding Georgia Republicans caving to election deniers by adding a hand count provision to a bill during special session.

NOTABLE TRENDS

• States Rushing to Redraw Maps Post-Callais Decision: In Missouri, Secretary of State Denny Hoskins is suing People Not Politicians, the PAC leading a referendum drive against the state’s new congressional map, seeking a court ruling that says he does not have to comply with a Sunshine Law records request about how his office is vetting submitted signatures. People Not Politicians turned in more than 300,000 signatures on Dec. 9 to force a statewide vote on the map, but Hoskins has only forwarded pages with signatures collected after Oct. 14 for validation. Chuck Hatfield, People Not Politicians’ attorney, called the lawsuit itself suspicious, noting the Sunshine Law doesn’t require records to be withheld as agencies simply have discretion to release them. The dispute adds to a pending May lawsuit accusing Hoskins of stalling his decision so the 2026 elections proceed under the new map regardless of the referendum’s outcome.

• Postmaster General Will Comply With Executive Order Targeting Mail Voting: While Trump’s executive order was being blocked in court, Postmaster General David Steiner told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that under a newly proposed rule, the USPS will refuse to deliver mail-in ballots in states that do not hand over a list of approved voters to the Trump administration. Steiner sought to place himself outside the controversy and said, in response to a question, that the Postal Service would adhere to a court order blocking the rule if one were issued. Asked about the legal authority underlying the rule, he said he would “have to defer that to the courts to understand the authority.”

STATE ACTIVITY

• Arkansas: SCOTUS Declines to Revive Voting Rights Act Protection: The Court declined to review Arkansas’s limits on voter assistance at the polls, leaving in place an 8th Circuit ruling that bars individuals and private groups from suing to enforce Section 208 of the Voting Rights Act, the provision letting disabled voters or those who have literacy barriers pick who helps them vote. Advocates say the move erodes another piece of the 1965 law, coming just two months after the Court curtailed how race can factor into legislative map-drawing.

• California’s Federal Prosecutors Get a Call From Trump: Trump acknowledged calling a federal prosecutor in California to probe the state’s primary election results, claiming without evidence that the call is why Republican Steve Hilton advanced to the gubernatorial runoff. Trump didn’t specify which attorney he contacted, but First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli — the top official in the Los Angeles-based Central District of California — announced an investigation into election fraud claims earlier this month.

• Missouri’s Secretary of State Provides DOJ Voter Info: In February, Secretary of State Denny Hoskins (R) said he would not provide the state’s full voter list to federal agencies without a court order. Despite his pledge, Hoskins said he was forced to hand over Missourians’ voter data because fellow Republican state lawmakers did not advance legislation in May that would have given him the power to conduct his own voter fraud investigations.⁠

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ANTI-VOTING GROUP ACTIVITY

• Trump Tanks Housing Bill Over SAVE Act: Trump is making good on a threat he’s held since March to not pass any other legislation until the SAVE Act is passed. On Wednesday, he abruptly canceled a scheduled signing of bipartisan legislation aimed at bringing down housing costs, saying he would only sign it after Congress approved the SAVE America Act. Trump posted on Truth Social that he considers passing the SAVE Act a national emergency. Cleta Mitchell, cofounder and chair of the Election Integrity Network, celebrated Trump’s decision and added she hopes Trump vetoes the bill if Congress does not send the SAVE America Act to him.

• Michigan Anti-Voting Group (Connected to the Election Integrity Network) Says its 2020 Election Report is Headed to DOJ: During a June 4 online meeting, Patrice Johnson, chairwoman of the organization Pure Integrity Michigan Elections, said the group’s nearly 500-page report on what happened in Michigan’s 2020 election is nearly finished and will be sent to the DOJ. Johnson, who is connected to Election Integrity Network’s Cleta Mitchell, didn’t say who requested the report.

Paid for by Fair Fight Action.