MAGA Report Cards — Election Denial

Bob Onder Asked for a Map That Handed Him All of St. Charles County. Now That Missourians Get to Vote on It, He's Suing to Stop Them.

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 07:19:10 +0000

More than 300,000 Missourians signed a petition to put their state's new congressional map to a public vote. On Thursday, September 3, 2026, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled unanimously that they are entitled to that vote — and that because the referendum qualified, the 2025 map never legally took effect. November's election has to be run under the old lines.

The next day, Bob Onder sued in federal court to take that away.

Onder, state Senator Rick Brattin and two Missouri voters filed suit on Friday, September 4 against Secretary of State Denny Hoskins in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, ABC 17 News reported. They want November's election held under the 2025 map instead. Their lawyer, Marc Ellinger, argues that letting Missourians vote on their own congressional districts violates the U.S. Constitution's elections clause and the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection.

The state's attorney general, Catherine Hanaway, filed a separate emergency appeal at the U.S. Supreme Court asking Justice Brett Kavanaugh to put the state court ruling on hold.

He is the man who asked for this map

This is not a bystander objecting to chaos. Onder had been pushing for a seven-Republican-seat map since 2022, when he was a state senator, and was one of four Missouri Republicans in the U.S. House who backed the 2025 redraw.

In August 2025 he told St. Louis Public Radio that the legislature should redraw the lines mid-decade:

"We are a Republican state. Republicans have supermajorities in the Missouri House and the Missouri Senate. Republicans hold all of our statewide elected offices, including, of course, governor. And I believe that we should pass a congressional map that reflects the values of the state of Missouri."

Asked whether the plan might backfire, he said the arithmetic was simple: "we have seats that have wide enough margins that I think it's pretty straightforward math to draw seven very safe Republican seats."

He got what he asked for. The 2025 map moved all of St. Charles County into his 3rd District — a long-running goal for Republicans there. We wrote about the redraw and the four Missouri Republicans who backed it in August.

Now the state's highest court has said Missourians get to vote on the same map, and Onder is in federal court arguing they should not.

The argument he is making

The case rests on the idea that Onder and Brattin are the ones being harmed. Brattin, who is running in the 5th District currently held by Democrat Emanuel Cleaver, put it this way:

"When you put in all this blood, sweat, tears, the time, all of this campaigning, yeah, it's really disenfranchising when you've done all that, and those people have believed in you and trusted you and cast their vote for you, to then say they're going to go to the ballot box and be voting in a completely different district."

Read that again with the actual sequence in mind. Republicans redrew the districts in 2025 to move voters between them. Citizens gathered 300,000 signatures to object. A unanimous court said the objection was valid and the old lines still stand. And the word for the inconvenience of campaigning in the wrong district, according to the candidate who lobbied for the redraw, is "disenfranchising."

Onder's brief makes the same move on behalf of two voters, Pat Thomas and Debra Havens, who say they are harmed because they must now "educate themselves about new candidates and issues."

Whose delay caused the mess

Missouri's own Supreme Court has already assigned responsibility for the confusion, and it did not point at the people who signed the petition.

People Not Politicians turned in more than 300,000 signatures in December 2025. Hoskins had the authority to rule the petition unconstitutional the moment it landed, and he had already made exactly that argument in federal court that same month. Instead he sent hundreds of thousands of signatures out for verification — asking local election officials to check every single one rather than use the random sample state law allows, which pushed the deadline from February to the end of July.

Then, at about 4 p.m. on August 4, 2026, roughly an hour before his legal deadline and while voters were casting primary ballots, Hoskins declared the referendum unconstitutional.

Judge Ginger Gooch, writing for the court, said in a footnote that his complaints about cost and confusion were "particularly misplaced given the secretary's delay created the confusion, expense, and practical difficulties of which he complains" — a sequence the Missouri Independent's Jason Hancock laid out in a commentary piece. All but two of the judges on that court were appointed by Republican governors, and the ruling was unanimous.

The pattern in one state

Missourians voted to expand Medicaid in 2020. They put abortion rights in the state constitution in 2024. They approved a minimum wage increase and paid sick leave the same year, and the legislature repealed the sick leave.

On August 4, 2026, they rejected Amendment 4 — which would have let a single congressional district veto future citizen initiatives — by 80 percent to 20.

The referendum on the gerrymander is the next thing they are supposed to get to vote on. Onder is asking a federal court to make sure it does not count this year.

What the record shows

Bob Onder publicly lobbied Missouri's legislature to redraw its congressional map mid-decade, said the goal was seven safe Republican seats, and ended up with all of St. Charles County in his own district. When 300,000 Missourians forced a referendum on that map and a unanimous state Supreme Court ruled they were entitled to it, Onder went to federal court on September 4, 2026 to have November's election run under the map anyway. The harm he alleges is that he campaigned in the wrong districts.

Source

Congressional candidates Onder, Brattin seek to overturn Missouri Supreme Court map decision by Alison Patton, ABC 17 News, September 5, 2026.

Twelve Republican Attorneys General Fought for a Rule That Would Let the Post Office Refuse to Deliver Their Own Voters' Ballots. Eleven Filed Nothing Saying Their States Could Comply.

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 07:29:12 +0000

There is a rule on the books that would let the U.S. Postal Service stop delivering your ballot.

It works like this. Before a state can mail out ballots, it has to send the design of its ballot envelopes to the Postal Service for approval, with a unique barcode on each one. It also has to upload the name and address of every single voter who asked for a mail ballot into a federal computer system. If the state doesn't get the approval, or doesn't upload the list, mail carriers won't deliver its ballots.

On Friday, September 4, 2026 — 60 days before the midterms — a federal judge blocked that rule from taking effect this fall.

Twelve Republican attorneys general were in that courtroom arguing the other way.

What the judge found

U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Massachusetts issued a 49-page preliminary injunction. She ruled the Postal Service had no power to write the rule in the first place:

"Unauthorized by the Elections Clause, the Final Rule clashes with Congress's statutory scheme, and is unconstitutional where it intrudes not only on Congress's Elections Clause powers but also that power left to the States."

Then she weighed the harm on each side. On one side, she wrote, "immediate implementation of the Final Rule issued less than seventy days before the November 2026 election threatens disenfranchisement of millions of United States citizens who seek to vote by mail." On the other side, she found, "the record includes no evidence relating to fraudulent mail voting to support the rushed implementation of the Final Rule."

That is the whole case in two clauses. Millions of people could lose their ballots. Nobody put any evidence of the fraud in front of her.

She was blunt about what the rule would do to real people: "any minor malfunction will result in the denial of mail ballots," which made disenfranchisement for the plaintiffs' members "practically inevitable."

Twelve Republican states asked to be the test case

Back on April 21, 2026, Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway announced that she was leading a coalition of 12 states into the case to defend President Trump's March executive order. Her press release names them: "Attorneys General from the following states joined the Missouri-led filing: Alabama, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Texas."

"We thank President Trump for issuing a vital, protective executive order," Hanaway said. The coalition told the courts the order simply gave states "optional resources."

It stopped being optional. By last week the Postal Service had turned it into a binding rule, and at Thursday's hearing the twelve states' lawyer, Missouri Solicitor General Louis J. Capozzi III, made a specific request: if the judge was going to block the rule, she should at least not block it in their states. Letting states like Texas and Missouri go ahead, he argued, would show how the system works in the real world.

Talwani did not take that well.

"So, we're going to do a test run on this election?"

"In some states," Capozzi answered.

"We're not talking about an intellectual puzzle game. We're talking about people's right to vote."

She pressed him on what his own states would actually get out of it. According to CBS News, she asked: "How does USPS holding up the ballots help you? You want the voters in your state to be disenfranchised?"

She refused the request. Had she granted it, the Postal Service could have refused to deliver ballots in those twelve states if they fell short of the new requirements.

Eleven of them wouldn't put it in writing

Here is the part that gives the game away.

Twelve states went to court to say this rule is workable. Between them, they filed one piece of sworn evidence saying so — a single page from the Missouri Secretary of State.

Davin Rosborough, the ACLU lawyer for the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts, laid it out after the hearing:

"The only evidence that the states who intervened on the defendant's side put in [the record] was a single one-page declaration from the Missouri Secretary of State saying, in vague terms, 'I think we can comply.' Alabama, Texas, none of the other states put in anything…"

"I think the failure to put anything in writing — and under penalty of perjury — speaks volumes," he added.

A court declaration is signed under penalty of perjury. Eleven attorneys general were willing to argue in court that their states could handle this. Not one of them was willing to swear to it.

Texas argued for it. Texas election officials swore against it.

Texas is one of the twelve. Its attorney general is Ken Paxton, who is also running for the U.S. Senate this year.

While his office was on the side defending the rule, local election officials from Texas's own Travis and Harris counties — home to Austin and Houston — filed sworn declarations telling the judge the rule would result in disenfranchised voters. Talwani pointed that out from the bench.

This is the same attorney general who has spent years telling Texans that people who shouldn't be voting are voting. He spent more than a year hunting for noncitizens on the rolls, and NBC News found the whole effort produced three prosecutions statewide — only one of them from the list of 53 names his office was handed. At least five people on that list of 53 had already been listed as American citizens in earlier court records. In August he also won back a Texas mail-ballot ID rule that got the application or ballot of roughly one in seven mail voters thrown out in the 2022 primary, and called it a "major win."

So Texas's top lawyer fought in federal court for a rule his own counties' election administrators had sworn would cost voters their ballots — and filed nothing under oath saying his state could run it.

The fraud isn't there

The Justice Department and the Postal Service say the rule standardizes election mail and stops noncitizens from voting. The judge looked at what they actually submitted and found no evidence of mail voting fraud in the record. CBS News reports flatly that the administration "has not put forth evidence of widespread voter fraud."

President Trump has voted by mail in Florida this year.

What happens next

The Justice Department appealed to the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals the same day the injunction came down, and this is widely expected to reach the Supreme Court again. It already went there once: on August 24 the justices lifted an earlier block on procedural grounds, saying the states had sued before the rule was final. The Postal Service had issued that final rule three days earlier, on August 21 — which Talwani found violated her earlier order, though she declined to hold anyone in contempt given the Supreme Court's ruling.

Her new order carries teeth. It requires the government's lawyers to give written notice to Postal Service officials and to tell them they will be held in contempt if they violate it.

Meanwhile, a federal official inside the Postal Service has told Congress the ballot system the agency built to run all this was assembled so badly it could "derail the midterm elections". At Thursday's hearing, the government's declaration about the system's readiness didn't address that warning at all. "We've seen no denial from the Postal Service that the whistleblower said anything that was inaccurate," said David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation & Research.

Even Republican election administrators want no part of it. "Election officials across the country from both parties are holding our breath today," said Utah Lt. Gov. Deirdre Henderson, a Republican and her state's chief election officer. "It's hard to describe the level of chaos, confusion, and uncertainty we experienced during the 36 hours the rule was briefly in effect last week."

What the record shows

Twelve Republican attorneys general, including Texas's Ken Paxton, intervened in federal court to defend a rule that would let the Postal Service refuse to deliver mail ballots in states that don't comply — and asked the judge to let it run in their own states as a test 60 days before an election. Eleven of the twelve filed no sworn statement that their state could comply. The judge found the record contained no evidence of mail voting fraud, and found that putting the rule into effect now would disenfranchise millions of Americans.

Source

Jacob Knutson and Jim Saksa, "In major win for voters, judge blocks Trump's mail voting restrictions for midterms," Democracy Docket, September 4, 2026. Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images.

Americans Say Groceries Are Their Biggest Money Worry. House Republicans Spent the Evening of September 1 Voting to Condemn Socialism.

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 07:14:18 +0000

At 5:47 on the evening of Tuesday, September 1, the U.S. House of Representatives stopped what it was doing and voted on socialism.

The vote was 220 to 192, with two members voting present. Every single Republican who cast a vote — 211 of them — voted yes. Not one voted no. Eight Democrats crossed over.

The measure was H.Res. 1490, introduced five days earlier by Jeff Crank of Colorado. CBS News called it what it was: a political messaging exercise ahead of the November elections.

A House resolution is not a law. It does not go to the Senate. It does not go to the President. It cannot lower a grocery bill, cover a prescription, or hire an inspector. It is the House talking to itself, on the record, using floor time that belongs to the rest of us.

Four of its five demands are words. The fifth one isn't.

Read the resolution and you find it asks the House to do five things. It condemns socialism. It reaffirms support for free and fair elections. It reiterates that American elections are for citizens. It recommits itself to the Constitution.

Then comes number five, and it is the only part with an object in the real world. The House "calls for enactment of the SAVE America Act."

That is the whole trick. Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar said Democrats had offered their own version of a socialism resolution with that clause taken out. "We're capitalists. We believe in a capitalist system and rules and laws," he said. "But what Republicans are seeking to do here is to just add in another talking point where they can talk about the SAVE Act."

Majority Leader Steve Scalise did not pretend otherwise. "Not only do we denounce socialism, but also the idea of people that aren't American citizens voting in our elections, because that's part of their platform," he said.

What the SAVE America Act would actually do to voters

The House passed the SAVE America Act in February with the support of all 217 House Republicans and one Democrat. It has sat in the Senate ever since, short of the votes.

It would require every person registering to vote in a federal election to hand over a document proving citizenship. Today a new registrant swears to it under penalty of perjury. Under this bill you bring a passport, a birth certificate, or a naturalization certificate — in person. It would also require photo identification to vote, and force states to run their voter rolls through a Department of Homeland Security database. Every provision takes effect immediately on enactment.

Three states currently require new registrants to prove citizenship. Twenty-seven states do not require photo ID to vote. And a 2023 survey by SSRS for the University of Maryland and three voting-rights groups found that 9% of voting-age citizens do not have easy access to a document proving their citizenship. Because the proof has to be presented in person, the bill would also effectively end registering by mail or online.

We already know what this looks like, because a state tried it. After Kansas began requiring proof of citizenship in 2013, 31,089 people could not register because they could not produce the document — 12% of everyone who tried to register in that period. Over the previous 14 years, Kansas had identified 39 confirmed noncitizens on its rolls. A court struck the law down in 2018.

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon put it plainly: "This is bad for voters, but this will be a nightmare for election administrators." In Orange County, California, the registrar calculated what it would have taken to verify citizenship for the 633,568 people who registered or updated a registration in 2024. The answer was 59 more staff and $6 million.

The emergency the resolution describes

The resolution's own evidence is thin enough to read in full.

It cites New Jersey, where roughly 6,600 noncitizens ended up on the voter rolls. That happened because of a motor vehicle software error that mislabeled people who had truthfully answered that they were not citizens. Fewer than 400 of them voted, and Governor Mikie Sherrill said there was "no evidence at this time that any elections were swayed" as a result.

It cites a federal investigation that charged four people.

That is the case for rebuilding voter registration for every American.

What was actually in front of them that week

The same afternoon, a group of Republican hardliners voted against their own party's procedural rule to protest a short-term government funding bill. The federal fiscal year ends September 30. Funding the government is the one job the Constitution actually assigns the House.

Outside the chamber:

A survey of 30,000 Americans by the McKinsey Institute for Economic Mobility and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation found that 90% named groceries and food prices as a top cost concern — ahead of housing, ahead of healthcare. Food-at-home prices are up about 25% over five years. Nearly one in ten adults has used a buy-now-pay-later loan to buy groceries.
Health insurers have proposed a median premium increase of 15% for 2027 across 276 companies in all 50 states and D.C. That is the second straight year of double-digit increases. Insurers themselves attribute roughly 4 percentage points of it to Congress letting the enhanced premium tax credits die — which these same members voted to do.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said he would vote no because of the SAVE America Act clause. "House Republicans continue to desperately push toxic voter suppression legislation instead of working to make life more affordable for everyday Americans in the midst of a searing cost-of-living crisis."

In their own words

The Republican Study Committee put out a press release collecting what its members had to say about the evening. Not one of the quotes mentions a grocery bill or an insurance premium. The one that mentions a paycheck is about the government taking more of it.

Jeff Crank, who wrote it: "This evening's vote showed who stands for freedom, and others who stand with socialism."

August Pfluger, who chairs the committee: "Today's vote puts the Left on the record and removes any doubt about where my colleagues on the other side of the aisle stand."

Riley Moore of West Virginia: "Socialism has no place in America. It is driven by envy and resentment... America is a Christian nation and we must never accept socialism."

Lance Gooden of Texas: "With the enemy already inside our gates, we must reject this failed ideology wherever it exists."

Harriet Hageman of Wyoming: "We will never succumb to ideologies behind history's worst episodes of destruction and despair."

Robert Aderholt of Alabama, Nicole Malliotakis of New York, Warren Davidson of Ohio, Tim Walberg of Michigan, Jack Bergman of Michigan, William Timmons of South Carolina, Stephanie Bice of Oklahoma, Sheri Biggs of South Carolina, James Gallagher of California, Addison McDowell of North Carolina, Troy Nehls of Texas, Matt Van Epps of Tennessee, Nick Langworthy of New York and Mike Kennedy of Utah all added statements of their own.

That is the work product. A resolution that becomes nothing, a demand for a bill that is going nowhere, and a press release.

The 189 who voted yes

These are the members who voted for H.Res. 1490 and have a report card on this site.

Alabama — Barry Moore, Dale Strong, Gary Palmer, Mike Rogers, Robert Aderholt

Alaska — Nick Begich

Arizona — Abraham Hamadeh, Andy Biggs, David Schweikert, Eli Crane, Juan Ciscomani, Paul Gosar

Arkansas — Bruce Westerman, French Hill, Rick Crawford, Steve Womack

California — David Valadao, James Gallagher, Ken Calvert, Kevin Kiley, Tom McClintock, Vince Fong, Young Kim

Colorado — Gabe Evans, Jeff Crank, Jeff Hurd, Lauren Boebert

Florida — Aaron Bean, Anna Paulina Luna, Brian Mast, Carlos Gimenez, Greg Steube, Gus Bilirakis, Jimmy Patronis, John Rutherford, Kat Cammack, Laurel Lee, Maria Elvira Salazar, Mario Diaz-Balart, Mike Haridopolos, Randy Fine, Scott Franklin

Georgia — Andrew Clyde, Austin Scott, Brian Jack, Clay Fuller, Mike Collins, Rich McCormick, Rick Allen

Idaho — Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois — Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

Indiana — Erin Houchin, Jefferson Shreve, Jim Baird, Mark Messmer, Marlin Stutzman, Rudy Yakym, Victoria Spartz

Iowa — Ashley Hinson, Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Zach Nunn

Kansas — Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

Kentucky — Andy Barr, Brett Guthrie, Hal Rogers, James Comer

Louisiana — Clay Higgins, Julia Letlow, Mike Johnson, Steve Scalise

Maryland — Andy Harris

Michigan — Bill Huizenga, Jack Bergman, John James, John Moolenaar, Lisa McClain, Tim Walberg, Tom Barrett

Minnesota — Brad Finstad, Michelle Fischbach, Pete Stauber, Tom Emmer

Mississippi — Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

Missouri — Ann Wagner, Bob Onder, Eric Burlison, Jason Smith, Mark Alford

Montana — Troy Downing

Nebraska — Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

New Jersey — Chris Smith, Jeff Van Drew

New York — Andrew Garbarino, Claudia Tenney, Mike Lawler, Nick LaLota, Nick Langworthy, Nicole Malliotakis

North Carolina — Addison McDowell, Brad Knott, Chuck Edwards, David Rouzer, Greg Murphy, Mark Harris, Pat Harrigan, Richard Hudson, Tim Moore, Virginia Foxx

North Dakota — Julie Fedorchak

Ohio — Bob Latta, David Joyce, David Taylor, Jim Jordan, Max Miller, Michael Rulli, Mike Carey, Mike Turner, Troy Balderson, Warren Davidson

Oklahoma — Frank Lucas, Josh Brecheen, Kevin Hern, Stephanie Bice, Tom Cole

Oregon — Cliff Bentz

Pennsylvania — Brian Fitzpatrick, Dan Meuser, Glenn Thompson, Guy Reschenthaler, John Joyce, Lloyd Smucker, Mike Kelly, Rob Bresnahan, Ryan Mackenzie, Scott Perry

South Carolina — Joe Wilson, Ralph Norman, Russell Fry, Sheri Biggs, William Timmons

Tennessee — Chuck Fleischmann, David Kustoff, Diana Harshbarger, John Rose, Matt Van Epps, Scott DesJarlais, Tim Burchett

Texas — August Pfluger, Beth Van Duyne, Brandon Gill, Brian Babin, Craig Goldman, Jake Ellzey, John Carter, Keith Self, Lance Gooden, Michael Cloud, Monica De La Cruz, Nathaniel Moran, Pat Fallon, Pete Sessions, Randy Weber, Roger Williams, Ronny Jackson

Utah — Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

Virginia — Ben Cline, Jen Kiggans, John McGuire, Morgan Griffith, Rob Wittman

Washington — Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia — Carol Miller, Riley Moore

Wisconsin — Bryan Steil, Derrick Van Orden, Glenn Grothman, Scott Fitzgerald, Tom Tiffany, Tony Wied

Wyoming — Harriet Hageman

How they voted

Roll Call 289, H.Res. 1490 — Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives (September 1, 2026)
Full text of H.Res. 1490

Susan Collins Voted to Convict Trump Over January 6. Her Campaign Made a Man From the Oath Keepers' Membership Rolls a Town Chair.

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 06:46:11 +0000

On February 13, 2021, Susan Collins was one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict Donald Trump for inciting the January 6 attack on the Capitol. It is the vote her allies reach for whenever anyone calls her a rubber stamp.

In June of this year, her campaign named Wayne Erkkinen its town chair in Greenville. The Anti-Defamation League had already identified Erkkinen, four years earlier, as one of the Mainers on the Oath Keepers' membership rolls.

Who Erkkinen is, and how he was identified

Erkkinen, 81, is a Piscataquis County commissioner. As town chair, he is responsible for grassroots organizing and voter outreach in Greenville — the kind of job that puts a person in front of neighbors, at doors, on phones, for a campaign that is fighting for its life.

His name surfaced in 2022. The Portland Press Herald reported that the ADL's Center on Extremism had gone through a five-gigabyte cache of Oath Keepers emails, chat logs, and membership data leaked by the transparency group Distributed Denial of Secrets. The rolls held 38,000 names. Nationwide, the ADL found more than 370 members of law enforcement, more than 100 military members, and more than 80 elected officials. In Maine, 215 people had at some point been paying members.

The ADL released Erkkinen's name at the Press Herald's request, along with that of a Gorham town councilor. It withheld the names of a Maine police officer and two first-responders it had also identified, saying the report was not meant to "unmask" rank-and-file personnel.

Erkkinen did not respond to a phone message left at his home in Greenville Junction in 2022.

What the group was

This matters because of what the Oath Keepers actually did.

Its founder, Stewart Rhodes, was indicted for seditious conspiracy against the United States for his role in planning the January 6 assault. Seventeen members faced federal charges over the attack. Rhodes was convicted and sentenced to 18 years in prison in May 2023 — the longest sentence handed down over January 6, and the first to carry a terrorism enhancement. Trump released him on his first day back in office.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks violent extremist groups, describes the Oath Keepers as an anti-government organization built on the belief that federal authorities are conspiring to impose martial law, confiscate weapons, and herd opponents into camps.

That is the group. Not a veterans' club with a bad news cycle.

What Erkkinen says now

Asked about it this week, Erkkinen told the Daily Beast he joined in 2010 thinking it was an organization for law enforcement and military veterans who had sworn to defend the Constitution. He said he quit "years ago," before January 6, because he didn't want to be part of something violent.

"It wasn't what I thought it would be," he said.

Take him at his word. It changes nothing about the decision Collins' campaign made. A national organization had published his name in 2022, a Maine newspaper had printed it, and four years later her campaign handed him a job running voter outreach.

Collins' campaign, per the Daily Beast, argued that it cannot be expected to keep tabs on every grassroots volunteer on its books.

The vetting she says she does

This is a campaign that has spent 2026 telling Mainers that Collins is different from the rest of her party — a senator, in the Daily Beast's words, "who claims to be right in the weeds of Maine's issues." She has represented Maine in the Senate since 1997.

A town chair is not a stranger who signed up on a website. It is a named appointment the campaign announces. Someone chose him and someone published it.

And the January 6 vote is the whole argument for her independence. If that vote meant what she says it meant, the people who show up in her name in Maine towns are exactly where it should be visible.

The pattern this fits

It is not the first time this year that what Collins does has diverged from what her January 6 vote is supposed to prove. On July 28 she voted to confirm a director of national intelligence who would not say Joe Biden won the 2020 election.

Her deciding-vote record tells a related story. Collins has cast 200 deciding votes in the Senate. The Maine Democratic Party counts 19 of them as confirming Trump nominees, and none as stopping one.

The short version

Susan Collins voted to convict Trump for inciting January 6. In June 2026, her Senate campaign named as its Greenville town chair a man the Anti-Defamation League had publicly identified in 2022 as one of 215 Mainers on the Oath Keepers' leaked membership rolls — the group whose founder was convicted of seditious conspiracy for planning that same attack. Her campaign's answer is that it cannot keep tabs on every volunteer.

Source

Thomas Kika, "Collins Re-Election Bid Stumbles Over 'Oath Keeper' On Campaign Staff", The National Memo, September 2, 2026, reporting on the Daily Beast's story; and Matt Byrne, "Gorham councilor, Piscataquis County commissioner appear on Oath Keepers member lists", Portland Press Herald, September 7, 2022. Photo: official Senate portrait.

Marlin Stutzman Told CNN That Mail Ballots Are 'Where Most of the Fraud Takes Place.' There Is No Evidence of Widespread Fraud in Recent Elections.

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 06:43:57 +0000

On September 1, a federal official inside the U.S. Postal Service told Congress that the system the agency was rushing to switch on that very day — the one that has to clear your mail ballot before it gets delivered — was built so badly it could "derail the midterm elections."

That evening, Marlin Stutzman went on CNN and said he agrees with the plan.

What the whistleblower said

The disclosure, released by Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, describes an agency that "discarded all best practices" racing to meet a September 1 deadline. Postal Service IT teams would get less than a week to test the finished system. "For a system that manages something as important as handling voting and ballots, four days of user testing is entirely unreasonable," the whistleblower wrote. Some officials inside the agency reportedly called the process a "shit show."

The mechanics are the part that should worry anyone who votes by mail. Under the rule, when election officials bring a batch of ballots to the post office, the envelopes get scanned against a federal portal. If a single envelope in the batch doesn't match, the Postal Service refuses to deliver the whole batch while the discrepancy gets sorted out.

North Carolina begins mailing ballots on Friday, September 4. Other states follow this month. Courts are still fighting over whether the rule is even legal.

What Stutzman said about it

CNN's Phil Mattingly asked Stutzman for his reaction. Stutzman's answer never engaged with the whistleblower's warning:

"We want to make sure that the voter rolls match up with those ballots that are coming in through the U.S. Postal Service. And there has to be accountability there."

He then reached for a number: that in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, California, and Nevada, "250,000 names were on the voter rolls that should not have been."

Mattingly pushed back. Officials at the Department of Homeland Security, he said, had privately told state officials that the Nevada figure was off dramatically — they had confirmed only about 600 of the names on Nevada's list. Why, he asked, should anyone believe a number published with no methodology behind it?

Stutzman did not withdraw it. "Well, there should be follow up," he said. "Let's be sure that we know for sure that the voter rolls are as clean as possible."

The claim at the center of it

Mattingly pressed him on the practical risk to his own constituents: a voter does everything right, one barcode in the batch doesn't match, the clerk has to haul the ballots back and resubmit them, and Indiana gives no grace period for late-arriving ballots.

Stutzman said he wanted those ballots counted. Then he said this:

"I understand and I agree with the decision that the President made regarding the matching of the names on voter rolls and the USPS, because that's where most of the fraud takes place."

That last clause is the whole argument, and it is not true. CNN's own framing of the segment stated the plain finding: experts say there is no evidence that widespread voter fraud has occurred in recent elections.

Stutzman offered no source for "most of the fraud." He offered a memory instead: his son, voting for the first time in 2024, had to cast a provisional ballot because the address on his driver's license didn't match his registration. That is a story about a young man being made to jump an extra hurdle. Stutzman told it in defense of adding more hurdles.

Indiana is not the problem he says it is

Mattingly made a point worth repeating, because it undercuts the whole appearance. Indiana already does everything the administration says it wants: you need an excuse to vote by mail, you need to apply, and you need to supply an ID number. Indiana is not the target of the new rule. Its voters get nothing out of it.

What they can get is the failure mode — a clerk's batch bounced back over one mismatch, close to a deadline with no grace period, in a state that counts nothing that arrives late.

Stutzman's answer to that was to pitch legislation. He named the SAVE America Act, which would require people to show documentary proof of citizenship — a passport, a birth certificate — to register to vote in federal elections. He allowed that it might not be in place for this election.

He is already on that bill. Chip Roy introduced it on January 30, 2026, Stutzman cosponsored it ten days later, and it has sat in the House Administration committee ever since. He had already voted for its predecessor, the SAVE Act, on April 10, 2025, when the House passed it 220-208. Voting-rights groups have warned for two years that the documents it requires are exactly the ones millions of married women, older Americans, and rural voters do not have on hand — a problem we have written about again and again.

What was actually asked, and what he actually answered

Strip the interview down and the shape is clear. He was asked about a whistleblower's specific, mechanical warning that whole batches of ballots could be refused. He answered with voter rolls. He was told his headline number had been walked back by the administration's own officials. He said there should be follow-up. He was asked whether his own constituents might lose their votes. He said mail ballots are where most of the fraud takes place.

What the record shows

Hours after a federal whistleblower told Congress the new Postal Service ballot system could derail the midterms and reject entire batches of ballots over one mismatched scan, Marlin Stutzman went on national television and endorsed it, telling viewers mail ballots are "where most of the fraud takes place" — a claim experts and CNN's own reporting say the evidence does not support. Told on air that the government had confirmed only about 600 of the names behind his 250,000 figure, he did not withdraw it.

Source

"Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-IN), Is Interviewed About USPS Whistleblower: New Ballot System Could Fail, Hamper Midterms", The Lead, CNN, September 1, 2026. Photo: official congressional portrait, 119th Congress.

The Postal Service Built a New Ballot-Verification System in Months and Raced to Switch It On by September 1. A Whistleblower Says One Bad Barcode Rejects All 10,000 Ballots in the Batch.

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 06:53:35 +0000

A federal official inside the U.S. Postal Service has told Congress that the system the agency has been racing to switch on to verify mail-in ballots was built so badly it could "derail the midterm elections."

The disclosure was prepared by the nonprofit legal group Whistleblower Aid and is dated August 29, 2026. Sen. Richard Blumenthal's office released it on September 1, attached to a letter to Postmaster General David Steiner dated August 31. It went to members of Congress and to the House Oversight Committee.

Its central warning is that if the rule survives its court fight, "potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all."

What the system does

Trump's March 2026 executive order, "Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections," is what set this in motion. To carry it out, the Postal Service built a chain of checks that every batch of mail ballots would have to pass.

State election officials would have to enter voter information into a new Federal Ballot Mail Portal, then upload batch manifests into a separate older system. The Postal Service compares the manifest against the state's list. Only if there is a 100% match does the batch move on to barcode scanning.

Then comes the part the whistleblower flags:

"As presently designed, if even one bar code on one single ballot in a bulk-mailing of 10,000 ballots fails to properly scan during the verification process, the entire batch is rejected and sent back to the state — effectively stopping the ballots from being mailed to voters."

Ten thousand ballots. One scanning error. All of them stopped.

That is not a design that degrades gracefully under stress. It is a design in which a single smudge, misprint or scanner hiccup takes out an entire county's mailing.

How it was built

The disclosure describes a project rushed to meet a deadline rather than built to work.

USPS leadership, it says, "has discarded all best practices as they speed the project to be ready for a September 1 implementation." It quotes multiple USPS officials describing the ballot-mail IT development process as "a shit show." It warns the system could crash outright during rollout.

And it raises the possibility that the failure is not accidental — "raising questions about whether catastrophic failure would be a feature rather than a bug."

That is a federal employee, through counsel, telling Congress that the people running the Postal Service may not mind if the ballots do not go out.

Blumenthal has demanded answers from Postmaster General David Steiner, Trump's pick to run the agency, by September 4.

The order has been in and out of court all year

None of this is happening in a vacuum. Trump's mail-voting order has been in and out of federal court all year, and the courts have repeatedly told the White House it does not have this power.

On June 25, a federal judge blocked major parts of the order in the twenty-three states and the District of Columbia that had sued, after the administration told the Postal Service to stop delivering mail ballots in states that would not hand over their voter lists. The First Circuit affirmed her ruling on July 25.
On July 27, with 99 days left before the election, the administration asked the Supreme Court to let the restrictions take effect anyway — backed by twelve Republican state attorneys general — after two courts had ruled the Constitution gives states, not presidents, the power to run elections.
Last week, the Postal Service published its mail-ballot rule while a court order blocked it, and the Supreme Court's conservative majority then lifted one of the two injunctions against it, 71 days before the election, leaving the other standing.
A judge issued another temporary restraining order on August 27.

That order halted all work on the portal for 14 days, and it was still in force on September 1. The whistleblower says USPS kept building through the earlier orders; the first question in Blumenthal's letter is whether it has stopped now.

Why this is worse than a normal government IT failure

Federal software projects fail all the time, and usually the cost is money and delay. This one has an Election Day it cannot move.

Ballots start going out to voters this week. North Carolina begins mailing some on Friday, and several more states follow around mid-September. There is no version of this where a broken portal gets patched in the spring. If a state's batch is rejected in October, those voters do not get a second election.

The people most affected are the ones who vote by mail because they cannot easily vote any other way: rural voters far from a polling place, older voters, people with disabilities, deployed service members, and anyone who works a shift that does not end before the polls close.

What we know

A whistleblower disclosure filed with Congress and released September 1, 2026 says the Postal Service raced to launch a new mail-ballot verification system by that date, "discarded all best practices" building it, and designed it so that a single unreadable barcode rejects an entire 10,000-ballot batch. The filing warns that potentially millions of voters may not receive a ballot in time, or at all, and asks whether that outcome is a feature rather than a bug. The system exists to carry out a Trump executive order that federal courts have blocked repeatedly since June, and a temporary restraining order barring work on the portal was in force on September 1.

Source

"Postal Service Whistleblower Warns Trump Assault on Mail-In Voting Could 'Derail the Midterm Elections'", Common Dreams, September 1, 2026, and "'A Shit Show': Postal Service Whistleblower Warns That New Project Will Sow Chaos in Election", Talking Points Memo, September 1, 2026. The disclosure itself, and Blumenthal's August 31 letter to the Postmaster General, are published here.

Rick Jackson Told a Supporter That Brian Kemp Will 'Get the National Guard' for Georgia's Election. The Governor's Office Indicated There Are No Plans For It.

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 11:41:22 +0000

On August 13, 2026, at a campaign rally in Columbus, a man in the crowd told Georgia's Republican nominee for governor that he was worried Democrats would cheat in November. Then he asked for soldiers.

"Trump's got federal troops," the supporter said. "Can you call up and get some federal troops from Trump?"

Rick Jackson did not tell him that no one is cheating. He did not tell him that troops do not belong at a polling place. He gave him a better offer.

"We'll get National Guard — Governor Kemp is going to watch it for us," Jackson said.

"Is that right?" the man asked.

"Yes," Jackson said. "He's going to get the National Guard."

The exchange was captured on audio obtained by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and it put the sitting governor's office in the position of being asked whether any of it was true.

Kemp's office indicated there is no such plan

Governor Brian Kemp's spokesman was asked about the possibility of the state deploying the National Guard in the 2026 election. He did not confirm any such plan. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that he indicated there are no plans for a deployment.

"We've proven for multiple cycles now that it's easy to vote and hard to cheat in Georgia elections," the spokesman said in a statement. "The same will be true this cycle. We are approaching this upcoming election the exact same way we have in the past."

That is a sitting Republican governor's office declining, in public, to back up what the Republican nominee to replace him told his supporters.

Jackson's campaign now says he "never suggested deploying troops at polling places," and points to Georgia's record of making it "easier to vote and harder to cheat." Read the transcript again. The question he was answering was a request for federal troops to stop cheating at the election. His answer was that the National Guard was coming. If that is not suggesting troops at the election, it is hard to say what he thought the man was asking for.

The Center Square says it was unsuccessful in getting comment from Jackson before publishing.

The thing the man actually asked for is a federal crime

The supporter's specific request — call Trump and get federal troops — runs into a statute that has been on the books since the 1800s. 18 U.S.C. § 592 makes it a crime for anyone in the civil or military service of the United States to order, bring, or keep "any troops or armed men at any place where a general or special election is held." The only carve-out is if armed force is genuinely needed to fight off an armed attack on the country.

The penalty is a fine, up to five years in prison, or both — plus being disqualified from holding any office of honor, profit, or trust under the United States.

Georgia has its own rule for the ground itself. Under O.C.G.A. § 21-2-413, nobody may carry a firearm within 150 feet of a polling place except peace officers regularly employed by a government and certified security guards. Guardsmen are neither.

So the version the supporter wanted is illegal, and the version Jackson offered him would run into a state law written specifically to keep armed men away from voters.

This is not the first time this year a Republican running for governor has promised armed federal personnel at the polls. Eleven days ago in Maine, Bobby Charles told a room of young Republicans he would call Trump's border czar and ask for ICE agents and marshals at Maine's voting booths — the same statute, the same problem.

The premise nobody in the room questioned

Georgia has been the country's stress test for this argument since 2020, when Trump lost the state and then called Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to say, on a recording, "I just want to find 11,780 votes."

That fight is not over. The FBI raided the Fulton County Elections Office in January. The Justice Department has since subpoenaed the county for the personal information of the people who worked the 2020 election. Those are the same poll workers — ordinary Georgians who counted ballots — that Trump's allies spent years accusing of fraud.

None of it has produced a case that Georgia's elections are being stolen. Raffensperger, a Republican, has now stood up a bipartisan election integrity task force whose stated job is to "push back" on election misinformation. Its members include two former Republican officeholders, two former Democratic ones, the head of the Georgia Sheriffs' Association, and county election directors.

Rick Jackson is running to be governor of that state. When a supporter handed him the fraud premise and asked for troops, he could have done what Kemp's office did and say Georgia's elections are secure. Instead he confirmed the man's fear and told him help was coming.

His Democratic opponent, Keisha Lance Bottoms, put it this way: "Rick Jackson is once again telling Georgians how he will be Trump's favorite governor — this time by spreading election lies and threatening our elections."

The "favorite governor" line is not Bottoms's. It is Jackson's. Standing on a stage beside Trump after the endorsement, pointing at him, Jackson said he was "going to be this man's favorite governor" — an endorsement Trump publicly said came after Jackson gave him "a couple of" million dollars.

What soldiers at the polls actually do

There is no version of this where armed troops at a polling place make an election more accurate. Ballots are counted by machines and by people, and a soldier standing in the parking lot does not check anyone's math.

What soldiers do is change who decides to walk in. That is the entire reason the 1800s statute exists, and it is why Georgia drew a 150-foot line around the door.

It is also part of a broader push. Trump's Homeland Security Secretary has threatened election officials with prison and fines if their states won't hand over voter data for federal "scrubbing" — over a fraud problem the government has never been able to document at any meaningful scale.

The bottom line

Asked at an August 13 rally in Columbus to get federal troops from Trump to stop Democrats from cheating, Rick Jackson told his supporter that Governor Brian Kemp would "get the National Guard" for Georgia's election. Kemp's office indicated there are no such plans and said the state is running this election exactly as it has run the last several. Federal law makes bringing troops to a polling place a crime punishable by up to five years in prison, and Georgia law bars anyone but police and certified guards from carrying a gun within 150 feet of one. Jackson's campaign now says he never suggested troops at polling places — an answer that does not survive listening to the question he was asked.

Sources

Jackson suggests Kemp will use National Guard to monitor election — Greg Bluestein, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, updated August 25, 2026. The AJC obtained the rally audio.

Rick Jackson wants the National Guard to monitor Georgia's election. Will Brian Kemp do it? — Kim Jarrett, The Center Square / The Georgia Sun, August 30, 2026. Photo: Rick Jackson at a Georgia Association of Manufacturers candidate forum in Atlanta, April 21, 2026 (Matthew Pearson/WABE via AP).

Claudia Tenney Told CNN 'We Don't Know If It Was Stolen or Not.' Her New Election Plan Is Built on the Doubt She Helped Spread.

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 07:34:51 +0000

On August 28, 2026, Claudia Tenney stood in Oswego and unveiled what she calls her "Make Voting Great Again" plan — a package of bills she says will make elections "easy to vote and hard to cheat."

Read what's actually in it and that slogan falls apart. Almost every item makes voting harder for someone. None of them catches a cheater, because the cheating she's protecting against barely exists.

What the plan would do to a voter in New York's 24th

Tenney's own issue page lists the bills. Here is what they do, in plain terms:

Require proof of citizenship to register — the SAVE Act, which she cosponsored and voted for. Not a driver's license. A passport or a birth certificate, presented in person. When a fellow New York Republican went on Fox News to defend that bill, she used a snow-shovel program's photo ID requirement as her example — and the SAVE Act wouldn't accept a photo ID either.
Require photo ID and citizenship verification to vote in national elections — H.R. 7300, the "Make Elections Great Again Act," which she cosponsored.
Throw out ballots that arrive after Election Day. Same bill. That is a rule about the mail, not about fraud.
Ban ranked choice voting — H.R. 2561, which she co-led. New York City uses ranked choice voting in its primaries. Her bill would take it away from federal races nationwide.
Restrict "ballot harvesting" — also H.R. 7300. It makes it unlawful to possess a ballot that is not your own, a family member's, or that of someone you are a caregiver for. Dropping off someone else's ballot is how a lot of homebound and disabled voters actually vote.
Bar states from taking private money to run elections — H.R. 723, which she cosponsored. A state could not accept a donation for election administration, "including any programs with respect to voter education, voter outreach, and voter registration."
Defund voter registration drives on federal property — H.R. 4823, which she introduced.
Bar charitable nonprofits from funding any election activity — H.R. 4943, which she introduced.
Amend the Constitution to bar noncitizens from voting at any level — H.J.Res. 107, which she introduced.

Not one of those makes it easier for an eligible American to cast a ballot. Several of them are simply a list of ways a legitimate vote can now be rejected: wrong document, wrong ID, arrived a day late, dropped off by a neighbor.

The problem she's solving does not exist at the scale she implies

The load-bearing claim under all of it is that noncitizens are voting. Tenney's constitutional amendment, her SAVE Act support, her letters to the Justice Department — all of it rests on that.

The measurements keep coming back the same way. When another House Republican made the same argument to Minnesota's election chief, a University of St. Thomas professor's 10-year study had found three cases out of 13.3 million votes cast. Voting as a noncitizen is already a federal felony and a deportable offense. It is one of the worst risk-reward propositions in American life, which is why almost nobody does it.

Tenney's response to that gap is to go looking. She has asked the IRS to investigate more than 650 New York nonprofits. She has asked the Justice Department to investigate a New York State Senate bill — S88A, which would automatically register Medicaid applicants to vote unless they opt out. Not a fraud, not a case, a state legislature's bill she does not like.

She said the quiet part about how they plan to pass it

The SAVE Act has passed the House twice and died in the Senate both times without ever getting a vote, because it needs 60 to break a filibuster. Tenney's page explains, in her own words, what Republicans are doing about that.

She voted for a budget resolution, H.Con.Res. 113, that sets up a fast-track process carrying $10 billion for "election integrity measures." Her reasoning, verbatim from her own website:

"While legislation, such as the SAVE America Act, is subject to the 60-vote cloture threshold allowing Democrats to prevent its passage, budget reconciliation can pass by a simple majority vote in the Senate."

That is a member of Congress writing down that the point of the maneuver is to get around the 60-vote threshold that has kept the bill she cosponsored from ever reaching the Senate floor. We wrote about this route when it first appeared: House Republicans trying to move voter suppression through the budget back door. Tenney is not hiding it. She is advertising it.

Her own election was decided by 109 votes

Here is what makes Tenney a strange messenger for "restoring faith" in elections.

Tenney was not in Congress on January 6, 2021. Her own race against Anthony Brindisi was still being counted. It went through three months of court hearings over disputed and mishandled ballots, and was certified in her favor by 109 votes in February 2021.

She accepted that result. She did not call it rigged. A slow, contested, court-supervised count is what handed her the seat.

Then, in May 2021 — months after every state had certified the presidential results and dozens of courts had thrown out the fraud claims — she told CNN this about the 2020 election:

"We don't know if it was stolen or not, (Cheney) doesn't know, I don't know, the President doesn't know."

She also voted against establishing an independent, bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6 attack, and against creating the select committee that ultimately did.

That is the loop. Tenney's plan says "many Americans have lost confidence in the fairness of elections." Five years ago she was one of the people telling them there was reason to doubt — while sitting in a seat that a careful count had just given her by 109 votes.

What the record shows

Claudia Tenney's "Make Voting Great Again" plan is eight bills, and not one of them makes it easier for an eligible American to cast a ballot. Most add a document a voter must produce, remove a way a ballot can be counted, or defund someone who helps people register. Its central justification — noncitizens voting — is a crime a decade-long Minnesota study measured in single digits out of millions of votes. She has written on her own congressional website that the plan for passing it is a budget maneuver designed to avoid the Senate vote threshold it cannot meet. And the member selling it is the one who said in May 2021 that nobody could know whether the last presidential election was stolen, after a three-month contested count awarded her her own seat by 109 votes.

Source

Congresswoman Tenney Unveils her 2026 "Make Voting Great Again" Plan to Strengthen Election Integrity, Office of Rep. Claudia Tenney, August 28, 2026, and the plan's full text. Photo: official congressional portrait.

Andy Biggs Says He Never Commented on the January 6 Pardons. Two Months Before Them, His Account Demanded Trump Pardon 'All J6 Political Prisoners.'

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 07:12:31 +0000

Andy Biggs is the Republican nominee for governor of Arizona. On Tuesday, August 25, 2026, he and Governor Katie Hobbs both took questions at the Arizona Police Association's public safety forum at Arizona State University's downtown Phoenix campus. Forum rules kept them apart — Biggs answered first and left the room before Hobbs spoke, and the two never shared the stage.

Hobbs used her turn to go after his record on January 6. Biggs answered afterward, in a press scrum, and what he denied was the last of her charges — that he had gone to a Washington, D.C. jail to greet pardoned rioters.

"Well, what she said is that I stood outside a DC jail to greet J-6ers who'd received a pardon. That's what she said. That is an absolute lie. It is a fabrication. It's about as nutty as I've heard from her this campaign."

Asked whether he had supported the pardons Trump issued to people convicted over the Capitol attack, he said:

"I never made comment on the pardon. Some of them deserved it, some of them didn't, but that was his decision to make, not mine."

Arizona Public Media went and looked. On November 26, 2024, Biggs' own X account posted: "President Trump must pardon all J6 political prisoners."

That is a comment on the pardons. It is also a demand for them, made nearly two months before they happened, using the phrase Hobbs said he used.

What Hobbs actually accused him of

Hobbs' charge at the forum had three parts: that Biggs voted against Congressional Gold Medals for the Capitol Police, that he has called January 6 defendants "political prisoners," and that he was outside a Washington, D.C. jail greeting their supporters when the pardons came down.

The first is a matter of public record, and it happened twice. In March 2021 Biggs was one of just 12 House Republicans to vote against awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to the officers who defended the Capitol. In June 2021 he was one of 21.

The second is the November 2024 post above.

The third is the one he actually denied, and it is genuinely contested. NBC4 Washington reported that "Republican Rep. Andy Biggs, Rep. Lauren Boebert and Rep. Chip Roy were outside the jail" on January 21, 2025 as pardoned defendants were released, and KJZZ reported that NBC News said the same thing live that day. But Arizona Public Media, which called it a possible case of mistaken identity, points out that The New York Times described the same scene without him: "Three Republican members of Congress stopped by — Representatives Eli Crane of Arizona, Chip Roy of Texas and Lauren Boebert of Colorado." AZPM found no photograph of Biggs there either, in the video NBC posted or on Getty.

So Biggs aimed "an absolute lie" and "a fabrication" at the jail claim alone. The two charges he did not call a lie are documented in his own voting record and on his own X account. On the one he did deny, two NBC outlets put him there and the Times put someone else.

The rest of the record he's denying

The Gold Medal votes are not the whole of it. Biggs' record on the 2020 election and the attack that followed is one of the longest of anyone on this site.

He was one of the 34 Republican members of Congress who exchanged texts with White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows about overturning the election result, before and after January 6.
Stop the Steal organizer Ali Alexander said Biggs was one of "the four guys who came up with a January 6 event", along with Paul Gosar and Mo Brooks.
Arizona's Republican House Speaker Rusty Bowers testified that Biggs called him on the morning of January 6, 2021 asking him to back decertifying Arizona's electors. Bowers refused.
He voted to reject Biden's win, objecting to the electors of both Arizona and Pennsylvania.
He voted against impeaching Trump for inciting the mob, and against creating an independent bipartisan commission to investigate the attack.
When the January 6 committee subpoenaed him, he refused to comply. In December 2022 it referred him to the House Ethics Committee for sanctions, one of four Republicans it named.

Why a police forum is the wrong room for this

Hobbs' line at the forum was short:

"I will never stand with folks who assault officers. I will stand with officers every single day."

Biggs had just spent that forum in front of a room of police chiefs and officers in a race for governor, and told reporters on his way out that Hobbs' account of his January 6 record was a fabrication. He had voted twice against giving those officers a medal, and once against creating the commission that would have examined what happened to them.

He is not the only Republican on this year's ballot with a January 6 pardon problem. In North Carolina, Michael Whatley defended the January 6 pardons — including the ones that freed men later charged with child sex crimes.

What the record shows

Andy Biggs told reporters at a public safety forum that Katie Hobbs' claim he went to the D.C. jail was "an absolute lie," and that he had never commented on Trump's pardons. His X account had demanded, on November 26, 2024, that Trump "pardon all J6 political prisoners." He voted twice against awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to the police who defended the Capitol, in a group of 12 and then a group of 21. Two NBC outlets reported he was outside the D.C. jail as pardoned defendants were released; The New York Times named a different Arizona Republican.

Source

Arizona Public Media: "Biggs denies support for pardoning J6ers, but the evidence is complicated" (August 27, 2026), and KTAR: "Katie Hobbs, Andy Biggs clash over Jan. 6 at police forum" (August 26, 2026), and KJZZ: "Hobbs, Biggs spar at a public safety forum over his record on Jan. 6 rioters" (August 26, 2026).

Greg Abbott Said Texas Caught 6,500 Noncitizens on Its Voter Rolls. His Own Office Had Confirmed 581.

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 07:07:11 +0000

More than 1.2 million Texans are on something called the voter suspense list. That is more than 6% of the state's 18 million registered voters, and it is happening barely two months before the November 3 election.

The Dallas Morning News first reported the number, and it is not evenly spread. Dallas County has more than 129,000 suspended voters. Tarrant County has more than 73,000. Collin County and Denton County have nearly 56,000 each.

Many of the people on that list have no idea they are on it.

What "suspense" actually means

Being on the suspense list is not the same as being removed from the rolls. Here is the honest version.

Your county puts you on suspense when it cannot confirm your address. Usually that happens because a voter registration card or a jury summons came back in the mail marked undeliverable. New registration cards go out every two years to whatever address the county has on file. If you moved, or if the mail carrier got it wrong, or if you live somewhere the post office has trouble with, you can end up on the list without doing anything at all.

You can still vote while you are on it. You fill out a form called a statement of residence at the polling place. If you moved to a different county, it gets harder — you may have to vote in your old county or cast a provisional ballot that only counts if officials can find you on the rolls.

But the list is also the front end of a pipeline. Stay on suspense through two general elections without voting or updating your address, and you get cancelled.

The deadline to fix it is October 5. That is the same day registration closes for the November election. You can check and update your registration on the Texas Secretary of State's website, by mail, or in person at your county elections office. You will need your driver's license or ID number, your Social Security number, and your voter ID number.

If you live in Texas, stop reading and go check. Then come back, because the rest of this is about the two Republicans on the November ballot and what they have done with lists exactly like this one.

Greg Abbott turned removals into a press release

In August 2024, Greg Abbott put out a news release announcing that Texas had removed more than a million people from its voter rolls since he signed the state's 2021 election law. He listed the categories. The biggest single category in it was the suspense list — the same list 1.2 million Texans are sitting on right now. More than 463,000 of the removals he counted were people on that list.

The first item on his list was 6,500 noncitizens.

That is not what his own office had found. A joint investigation by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and Votebeat obtained the report the secretary of state's office actually gave the governor. That report identified 581 people as noncitizens — not 6,500.

So where did the rest come from? The secretary of state's office had separately told the governor's office how many people were dropped for not answering a letter asking about their citizenship. Abbott's release added the two numbers together and called the total noncitizens. By subtraction, roughly 5,900 of the 6,500 were people who never responded to a piece of mail.

Two days after the release went out, Abbott's office quietly edited it to insert the word "potential" in front of "noncitizens." The original number was already everywhere by then.

At least nine of them were American citizens

The reporters did not stop at the arithmetic. They tried to reach more than 70 of the people caught in the sweep, and confirmed at least nine U.S. citizens in three Texas counties who were wrongly labeled noncitizens or dropped from the rolls.

Jakylah Ockleberry, 21, of Travis County, was born in Texas. She produced her birth certificate and asked the reporters, "How would something like that happen?"
Justin Comer, 29, was born in Harris County and grew up in Montgomery County. He got flagged in 2023 by a jury-summons response that recorded him as not a citizen; he assumes he clicked the wrong button answering it online. "I've lived in Texas my whole life," he said. "It was never a question for me."
Diana Colon of El Paso County was born in Puerto Rico, which makes her a U.S. citizen by birth. She was removed after she apparently failed to answer a question about her citizenship. Her reaction: "That's crazy."

Nobody in this story committed fraud. They got mail they didn't answer, or a clerk checked a wrong box. That is the same kind of mix-up that puts people on the suspense list — an address the state can't confirm, a letter that didn't come back.

Ken Paxton spent a decade hunting the same problem and barely found it

The other man on the ballot in November is Ken Paxton, the attorney general running for U.S. Senate. He has built his career on chasing voter fraud.

The numbers on that career are thin. Paxton's office spent more than 22,000 staff hours on voter fraud in 2020 and resolved 16 prosecutions. Every one was a Harris County resident who put a false address on a registration form. Not one of them went to jail.

The ACLU of Texas found that at least 72% of the prosecutions his unit brought since 2015 appear to have been against Black and Latinx Texans, and at least 45% against Black and Latina women.

And Paxton has said out loud what he thinks is going on. In August 2024 he told a radio show: "There's a reason Joe Biden brought people here illegally. I'm convinced that that's how they're going to do it this time, they're going to use the illegal vote." He also claimed immigrants were being handed Social Security numbers at the border. There is no evidence of that, and no evidence that noncitizens cast ballots in any significant numbers.

What that looked like at one woman's front door

On the morning of August 20, 2024, Paxton's office executed search warrants in Frio, Atascosa and Bexar counties. One of them was served on Lidia Martinez, 87, a San Antonio native and a LULAC volunteer of 35 years who registers seniors to vote.

Up early as usual to water her plants, she answered a knock at her door at 6 a.m. She said nine officers with badges, riot shields and a warrant came in. She asked to change out of her nightgown and was told to sit in her dining room instead, with two officers standing over her, while the rest went through her house for four hours.

"They searched everything. My underwear, my brassieres, my nightgowns, everything. They went into my garage. They opened up my car. They went through my whole car, my whole garage, my refrigerator, my kitchen cabinets, everything."

For about half an hour she was made to stand outside where her neighbors could see her, still in her nightgown. Nobody would tell her what they were looking for.

They left with her appointment book, her cellphone, her laptop, her blank voter registration cards, and her certificate for completing a voter registration course.

Her family asked her to quit volunteering, because they were afraid she would go to jail.

"They're trying to stop us from registering voters, and helping, especially the seniors. If I don't go out there, and their voter registration is expired, some of them are in wheelchairs. They don't have a way to be going to the elections office."

The warrant on her home authorized seizing every electronic device in the house, opening election-related documents, and swabbing for DNA. At another home that morning, officers woke a family with two young daughters and searched for seven hours, leaving with nearly 65 cellphones and 41 computers and storage devices.

Paxton is also the man who voted six times from a Collin County address he appears to have moved out of, while running a tip line for Texans to report suspicious voting. Collin County, where he is registered, has nearly 56,000 people on the suspense list. Denton County, where reporting places his actual home, has nearly 56,000 more.

Then Texas handed the whole list to Washington

On December 23, 2025, the Texas Secretary of State's office gave the U.S. Justice Department the state's entire voter registration file — roughly 18.4 million voters, with dates of birth, driver's license numbers and the last four digits of Social Security numbers.

The Justice Department had asked all 50 states. Thirteen agreed to hand the data over voluntarily. Texas was one of them. The department has sued 23 states and Washington, D.C. for refusing. The stated purpose is to help states find and remove ineligible voters.

Texas is not alone in volunteering. In Pennsylvania, state treasurer Stacy Garrity would not say Trump lost in 2020 and said she would "absolutely" be more cooperative with the federal request for that state's rolls. And the same Justice Department has been warning local election officials they could face criminal prosecution over noncitizen voters — a problem research shows is vanishingly rare.

Why this election, specifically

Paxton is on the November ballot against Democratic state Representative James Talarico, and The New Republic notes Talarico holds a narrow polling edge. Abbott is on the same ballot, running for another term as governor.

A suspense list is not a purge, and 1.2 million suspended registrations are not 1.2 million lost votes. Most of those people can still vote if they show up and fill out a form. But every extra step is a place where someone gives up, and the two Republicans on the ballot have spent years showing what they do with a list of names the state says it cannot verify.

What the record shows

Greg Abbott announced that Texas had cut more than a million people from its voter rolls, and told the public 6,500 of them were noncitizens when his own office had confirmed 581 — a number he corrected only after it had circulated for two days. Reporters found at least nine American citizens among the people swept up. Ken Paxton's office burned 22,000 staff hours in 2020 to resolve 16 address cases, sent officers to search an 87-year-old volunteer's house for four hours, and he is now registered to vote at an address he appears to have moved out of. Texas gave 18.4 million voters' personal data to the Justice Department in December. And 1.2 million Texans have until October 5 to make sure their registration is in order.

Source

Reporting from the San Antonio Current by Stephanie Koithan and The New Republic. Photo: San Antonio Current.

Bobby Charles Says He'll Ask Trump's Border Czar to Put ICE Agents at Maine's Voting Booths. Federal Law Makes That a Crime.

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 16:09:41 +0000

On Thursday, August 20, Bobby Charles stood in front of a room of young Republicans in Arundel and told them what he plans to do about Maine's election in November.

He plans to call the White House border czar and ask him to send federal agents to where you vote.

"I'm going to ask Tom — three or four weeks before the election, maybe three — I'm going to make an appeal for ICE and marshals to be at our voting booths."

Then he added a punchline for the room:

"Do you think the illegals who are being paid money are going to like that?"

The audio was obtained exclusively by the Bangor Daily News. The "Tom" is Tom Homan, Trump's border czar, who Charles described to the room as an old friend from their years together on Fox News.

There is no evidence that anyone is being paid to vote in Maine. Charles offered none.

And the thing he says he's going to ask for is against the law.

The law is not ambiguous, and it is not new

There is a federal statute on the books — 18 U.S.C. § 592, written in the 1800s — that makes it a crime for any federal officer to bring or keep "troops or armed men at any place where a general or special election is held." The only exception is if armed force is genuinely needed to fight off an attack on the United States.

The punishment is spelled out in the same paragraph: a fine, or up to five years in prison, or both — plus being "disqualified from holding any office of honor, profit, or trust."

The Brennan Center for Justice looked at exactly this question last month and put it in one sentence: "Sending armed federal agents, including those from ICE, to election sites is illegal." The statute covers any "person in the civil, military, or naval service of the United States," not just soldiers — which is what makes it reach federal law enforcement.

Maine's Secretary of State, Shenna Bellows, was blunter.

"ICE and federal law enforcement are prohibited from being at the polls on Election Day. Bobby Charles can call whoever he wants, but he can't change the Constitution or the law."

Even the Trump administration isn't claiming it can do this. The Department of Homeland Security pointed a reporter back to what Secretary Markwayne Mullin said at his confirmation hearing in March: agents would go to a polling place only in response to a specific threat, and never for "intimidation."

Charles's campaign did not deny he said it. His campaign manager, Dale Crafts Jr., said Charles "will do everything legally possible to prevent illegal voting in Maine." That answer skips the actual problem. The thing Charles described is not legally possible. That's the whole story.

The same day, in a different town, he said he doesn't even know Trump

Here is what makes this more than a bad answer at a small event.

August 20 was a busy day for Bobby Charles. In Arundel, in front of a room of party activists, he said he'd personally phone Trump's border czar and get ICE to Maine's polling places.

That same day, at a campaign stop in Gorham, he made a point of telling reporters that the governor's race is "not about national politics." And he said this:

"I do not know President Trump. I have never met him. But, I will work with him. I will also stand up against him if he opposes something Maine needs. I am running to serve one group of people: the people of Maine."

Four days later, Vice President JD Vance came to Brewer and told the crowd to vote for Charles. Charles didn't go. His spokesperson said he was already booked to meet with people in Maine's addiction and recovery community, and had no plans to see Vance at any point during the trip.

So the version of Bobby Charles that reporters got is a man who has never met the president, doesn't want to talk about national politics, and can't make it to a rally being held for him. The version the Young Republicans got, the same calendar day, is a man on a first-name basis with the border czar who intends to ask him for a favor involving Maine's polling places.

One of those two men is the one asking Mainers for their vote.

Homan was already here

The favor may not even have been necessary.

Homan was in Maine on August 18 — two days before the Arundel event — eating dinner in Presque Isle, about 15 miles from the nearest Canadian border crossing. Earlier that day he told a border seminar in New York that he was heading to Maine to "find out what the hell is going on up there."

In a video that a Maine Republican state representative posted himself, Homan promised "a lot more enforcement action" in Maine, and turned to the people here on Temporary Protected Status — a program that lets people stay when war or disaster makes going home unsafe.

"A lot of TPS people in Maine. They're not going to be there much longer either now that the Supreme Court said we can end TPS."

There are 715 people with that status in Maine, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data. That is the entire population Homan was calling "a lot." Nationwide the figure is about 1.3 million.

This is the same national push Charles has been cheering for a year. Last summer he posted that Florida's Everglades detention camp deserved "kudos" and that "We need our own version in Maine", then ran a petition on it. Florida shut that camp down in June, less than a year after it opened, having spent $1.2 billion on it. He also wants to repeal Maine's law keeping state law enforcement out of federal immigration operations. And he has spent his campaign insisting a Somali-born Maine legislator isn't really American, which is where a lot of this started.

The fraud he keeps describing has never shown up

Charles's pitch rests on a claim: that noncitizens are voting in Maine in numbers that matter. He has been making it for a year.

In an August 2025 column he wrote that Maine's elections were battered by "proven allegations of double voter cards, illegals with driver's licenses and permits," accused Democrats of trying "to legalize voting by illegal aliens," and said the voter ID referendum had been "fraudulently interfered with by the shameless Mills Mafia." He urged Mainers to "send a message to the corrupt Democrat Machine in Augusta" by voting for that referendum. They didn't. It failed 64% to 36% — 315,008 votes against, 175,751 for — losing in Portland and in rural western Maine alike.

The evidence has not improved since. Bellows said this week:

"Despite many allegations from multiple sources, no one has presented me with evidence that there is a specific non-citizen on Maine's voting rolls that has voted illegally."

The national picture is the same. The Brennan Center's review of the actual cases found election officials referred about 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting out of 23.5 million votes counted — 0.0001 percent. A New York Times survey of the 2016 election turned up two possible instances out of 137.7 million voters. Florida screened a list of 180,000 suspected noncitizens and ended up removing 85 names and convicting one person.

The one real recent case cuts against him too. In New Jersey, about 6,600 noncitizens were wrongly registered between June 2023 and June 2024 — because of a software error in the state's motor vehicle system, which was found and fixed in June 2024. Fewer than 400 of them cast a ballot in three years of elections. As Keith Ingram, Texas's former elections director, put it: "noncitizen voting is a very small problem, if it's a problem at all, and this doesn't change that opinion at all."

A software bug is not a conspiracy, and it is certainly not people "being paid money."

We went through the administration's own best evidence earlier this month — a seven-page Census Bureau report with no named authors, claiming 24,000 noncitizen votes in 2020. That works out to less than 0.019 percent of the voters it checked, and the report has no way to know who any of them voted for.

What armed agents at a polling place actually do

Set aside whether anyone is voting illegally. Ask what the proposal accomplishes.

An ICE agent posted outside a polling place cannot tell who is a citizen by looking. What that agent can do is change who walks in the door. A green-card holder with a citizen spouse. A naturalized citizen who remembers January's ICE surge in southern Maine. A grandmother who doesn't want a scene. None of them are voting illegally. All of them would think twice.

That is not a side effect of the plan. Charles said so himself in Arundel — the point, in his telling, is that certain people won't "like that." Scaring people away from the polls isn't a flaw in this idea. It's how it would work.

Maine isn't the only place this is being tried. In New Hampshire, federal officials are set to monitor polls in the state's two largest cities this fall, and Gov. Kelly Ayotte said she'd "welcome anyone" — in the same press conference where she vowed to fight the national Democratic Party for bumping New Hampshire out of its first-in-the-nation primary slot.

The bottom line

Bobby Charles told supporters on August 20 that he intends to ask Trump's border czar for ICE agents and federal marshals at Maine's voting booths — something a federal law has made a crime, punishable by up to five years in prison, since the 1800s. He justified it with a claim that people are being paid to vote illegally, for which he offered no evidence and none exists. Maine's Secretary of State says that in all the years of allegations, nobody has ever shown her a single noncitizen on Maine's rolls who cast a ballot. The same day Charles said it, he told reporters he doesn't know Donald Trump and has never met him.

Source

Michael Shepherd, "Bobby Charles said he'll ask Donald Trump's border czar to send ICE to Maine polls," Bangor Daily News, August 26, 2026. Photo: Linda Coan O'Kresik / BDN.

Trump's Postal Service Issued Its Mail-Ballot Rule While a Court Order Blocked It. Then the Supreme Court Lifted One of the Two Blocks.

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 07:02:00 +0000

Ballots start going out to voters in a few weeks. This week, the rules for how they get printed, addressed, and mailed were thrown open again.

On Monday, August 24, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court lifted the pause on President Trump's executive order rewriting how the Postal Service handles mail-in ballots. Two separate injunctions had frozen it. The Court lifted one of them — the June order in the 23 states' case — and said nothing at all about the other.

That is the headline. The part underneath it is worse.

The Postal Service published the rule while a judge's order said it couldn't

On August 11, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani issued a preliminary injunction barring the federal government from changing states' mail-in voting rules before the November 3 midterms.

On August 21 — ten days later — the Postal Service issued its final rule doing exactly that. A 95-page notice set out federal requirements for states to redesign ballot envelopes and hand over lists of the names and addresses of people getting mail ballots. The rule took effect that Friday, with publication in the Federal Register set for August 26.

The government did not appeal Talwani's order first. It did not ask anyone to pause it. Talwani said so herself, in a brief order on the docket that Sunday:

"Defendants did not file an appeal and did not seek, let alone obtain, a stay of the preliminary injunction. Nonetheless, on August 21, 2026, USPS issued its Final Rule, with an anticipated publication date in the Federal Register of August 26, 2026."

Talwani was appointed to the bench in 2013 and confirmed by the Senate unanimously.

The administration's answer was that the rule wouldn't really do anything while the injunction stood — the rule contains a provision saying it won't apply to this year's elections if her order is still in place. The judge wasn't persuaded. She wrote that the government asserted the rule would "have no effect on the rules themselves while the injunctions are in place, while ignoring the confusion that the publication will engender."

Then, on Monday, the Supreme Court took up a different order in the same fight, and made its future somebody else's problem.

What the Court actually said

The ruling came on the emergency docket — unsigned, from the conservative majority, with no full argument. The majority wrote that the administration is likely to win its argument that the 23 Democratic-led states challenging the order do not have standing to sue over it, and that the lower court's injunction is "causing irreparable harm."

The Court was careful not to bless the order itself:

"The Court's disposition of this application does not mean that any measure taken by the Government to implement the Order will necessarily be lawful. On that score, time will tell."

Time will tell. Ballots go out in weeks.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented. Jackson wrote that the ruling "needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections," called the situation a "Kafkaesque nightmare," and said the principle that courts shouldn't rewrite voting rules right before an election had been eroded.

"States administering elections and the voting public that relies on them to do so deserve clarity, not caginess or confusion."

Whether Talwani's June injunction survives is now up to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. Her August 11 injunction — the one the Postal Service issued its rule in the teeth of, and the one that reaches every state rather than only the 23 that sued — the Court did not address at all.

What the order does

Trump signed the executive order on March 31. It:

directs the Postal Service to order mail-ballot envelopes redesigned, including adding a unique barcode;
asks the Postal Service to collect voters' names and addresses from state election officials.

And it directs the Justice Department to investigate and prosecute state officials who don't comply.

That last piece is the one to sit with. Running elections is a state job. The order tells federal prosecutors to go after the state officials who do it their own way.

We wrote up the earlier stages of this fight when a federal judge first blocked the order in June — that ruling found the Postal Service has no authorization from Congress to write binding rules about mail-in voting, and that the Constitution "reserves the power to determine voter eligibility to the States alone." And we covered the moment the administration took it to the Supreme Court in late July, 99 days out from the election. Monday is the answer to that filing.

The Solicitor General calls it modest

Solicitor General D. John Sauer — who previously worked as Trump's personal defense attorney — filed a supplemental brief to the justices on Monday arguing the Postal Service's rule "underscores the need for relief from the district court's improper, unripe injunction."

His description of the rule:

"The Postal Service's final rule imposes only modest requirements for preparation and envelope design for federal ballot mail — requirements that fall well within its traditional authorities to impose mailing standards for particularly sensitive types of mail."

A demand that every state redesign its ballot envelopes and turn over a list of its mail voters, ten weeks before an election, is not a mailing standard.

Who is on which side

Democratic officials in 23 states — California, Massachusetts, Nevada, Washington, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — plus the District of Columbia brought the challenge.

Twelve states with Republican attorneys general joined the appeal on the federal government's side: Alabama, Missouri, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota and Texas.

Twelve states' top lawyers went to court to argue for federal control over how their own states run elections.

Meanwhile the voting rights groups who brought the separate Massachusetts case — led by the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts — filed an emergency motion that Saturday asking Talwani to enforce her own injunction quickly. Their filing noted there were "only 73 days before the November 2026 election, and far fewer before mail ballots begin to go out."

Why this matters to you

Trump has claimed since losing in 2020 that voting by mail is riddled with fraud. It isn't. But the claim is the engine for all of this, and the practical effect of the order is the same whether or not anyone believes the claim:

If your state can't get its envelopes redesigned in time, your ballot's status is unclear.
If your state won't hand over the list of people getting mail ballots, its ballots are the ones at risk.
If your state's election officials decide the order is unconstitutional and act accordingly, the order tells the Justice Department to come after them.

None of that requires a single fraudulent ballot to exist.

What the record shows

On August 11 a federal judge barred the government from changing states' mail-voting rules before the November 3 election. On August 21 the Postal Service published the rule anyway, without appealing the order or asking for it to be paused. On August 24 the Supreme Court's conservative majority lifted one of the two injunctions against Trump's executive order, over three dissents, while explicitly declining to say the order is lawful — and left the second, which covers every state, untouched. Twelve Republican attorneys general argued for it. Voters get their ballots in a few weeks.

Source

U.S. Supreme Court lifts pause on Trump mail-ballot order — Ashley Murray, States Newsroom D.C. Bureau, August 25, 2026. Photo by Allison Joyce/Getty Images.

Supreme Court lifts 1 of 2 blocks on Trump’s mail-voting executive order — Dion Nissenbaum and Carrie Levine, Votebeat, August 24, 2026.

The Census Bureau Just Claimed 24,000 Noncitizens Voted in 2020. It Won't Say Who Wrote the Report or How Sure They Are.

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 07:59:16 +0000

Last week the Trump administration put out a document that says exactly what the president has been saying for six years.

The U.S. Census Bureau released a seven-page report concluding "with high confidence" that more than 24,000 noncitizens voted illegally in the 2020 election. Trump posted it on social media and wrote that it backs up his claim that he actually won.

Then people who know how Census Bureau reports are written started reading it. And the questions started.

Start with the number the White House isn't repeating

The report says researchers looked at more than 128 million voters from 2020.

Out of those 128 million, they say 24,000 were noncitizens.

That is less than 0.019 percent. Nineteen thousandths of one percent — about one voter in every 5,300.

Now compare it to the margins Trump lost by. The report itself says it found 500 noncitizen ballots in Wisconsin — a state Trump lost by more than 20,000 votes. It says 1,100 in Arizona, which Trump lost by more than 10,000.

And the report cannot say who any of those people voted for. Not one of them. It has no way to know.

So even taken entirely at face value, the administration's own document does not come close to changing the 2020 result. Trump's answer to that was to say census researchers are still working through another 32 million voters, and to predict the number will "explode."

That is a promise about a report that doesn't exist yet, offered to cover a report that does.

The report has no authors

Here is the part that made career statisticians stop.

Most Census Bureau reports name the people who wrote them and spell out how reliable the underlying data is. This one does neither.

"A properly done Census report would have had that information and the fact that it is missing is glaring and makes me think that they are hiding something," said Beth Jarosz, a senior fellow at Georgetown University's Massive Data Institute who has worked as a contractor on Census Bureau reports.

Terri Ann Lowenthal spent seven years, from 1987 to 1994, as staff director of the U.S. House subcommittee that oversaw the Census Bureau. She said the report was "beneath the Census Bureau's stellar reputation." Leaving out the names of career staff, she said, suggested the work may have been done by someone with a political agenda "and may not reflect the sound, reputable analysis for which the Census Bureau is known."

The Census Bureau did not respond to a request for comment.

There's no margin of error — and the margin of error is the whole story

Every serious statistical analysis says how wrong it might be. This one doesn't.

Justin Levitt, an election law specialist at Loyola Law School who worked on voting rights in the Biden White House, explained why that matters here more than usual:

"In most statistical exercises, it's not unthinkable that there might be 0.019% false positives — and if that were the case here, that would turn the total conclusions to zero."

Read that again. The claimed finding is 0.019%. A false-positive rate of that same size, Levitt says, is not unthinkable.

Which means the report's entire result could be the noise. And the Census Bureau did not print the one number that would tell you.

Where the data came from — and the woman who's surprised it was used this way

The voter records behind the analysis came from Data-Clear, a Virginia company that won an $885,000 Census Bureau contract in 2024, under the Biden administration.

That contract was for something else entirely. Carolyn Carlson, Data-Clear's president and founder, said she gave the bureau nationwide voting data as part of a project meant to prevent an undercount of minority voters in the 2030 census.

She said she was surprised to see the data she provided turn up in a hunt for noncitizen voters.

The bureau then matched those voter files against federal immigration records to guess at citizenship. The report describes how it did that only in general terms.

This is the fourth time, and the pattern never changes

The 24,000 figure isn't the administration's first swing at this. It's the latest in a run of claims that all break the same way: a big number, a thin method, and no receipts when anyone asks.

The citizenship-checking tool. The administration pushed states to run millions of voter records through a revamped federal database. Election officials found it wrongly flagged actual citizens. In June, a federal judge blocked its use, finding it threatened privacy and voting rights.

The primetime speech. On July 16, Trump said in a televised address that his administration had found more than 250,000 noncitizen voters on the rolls of just four states — New Jersey, California, Pennsylvania and Nevada. Officials in all four pushed back and said they could not figure out where the numbers came from. The administration has still not explained its method.

The prosecutions. The Justice Department has been threatening election officials with jail over a problem that audits, investigations and studies keep finding is vanishingly rare.

And now the Census Bureau. Same shape. Big headline number, no authors, no error bars, no explanation.

When the White House was asked whether this report actually supports what the president said about it, it replied with a link to a social media post by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

What it's actually for

None of this is really about 2020. It's about the paperwork you'll need next time you register to vote.

Trump said when he released the Census findings that a federal law requiring documented proof of citizenship to register is his highest legislative priority. That's the SAVE Act — a bill that would require a passport or birth certificate to register, documents that millions of American citizens don't have on hand, and that married women who changed their names often can't match.

It has stalled in the Senate. Trump's two executive orders on elections have had their major provisions blocked in federal court.

So the administration needs a number. A seven-page report with nobody's name on it, claiming a rate of 0.019 percent that experts say could just as easily be zero, is the number.

The cost of getting this wrong is not symmetrical. If 24,000 noncitizens really did vote out of 128 million, the 2020 result stands and nothing changes. If Congress passes a documents requirement based on it, millions of citizens who have voted their whole lives find out at the registration desk that they can't anymore.

In summary

The administration published an unsigned seven-page report with no margin of error, claiming a noncitizen voting rate of 0.019% that experts say could just as easily be zero — and is using it to push a registration law that would require documents millions of American citizens do not have.

Source

Dion Nissenbaum, "Experts skewer new Trump administration analysis claiming 24,000 noncitizens voted in 2020", Votebeat, republished by the Ohio Capital Journal, August 24, 2026. Photo: Official White House Photo by Andrea Hanks.

Nicole Malliotakis Sold a Voting Bill on Photo ID. Its Other Half Asks for Your Birth Certificate, in Person.

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 07:55:30 +0000

Nicole Malliotakis went to Fox News Digital last week with an argument that sounds like plain common sense.

New York City's mayor, she said, requires photo ID to use a city-run supermarket program, and more than one form of identification for a city snow-shoveling program — but his party will not require any ID to vote.

"Sadly, you see the hypocrisy when you see programs like Mayor Mamdani wanting to require photo ID to utilize a government-run supermarket or when he wanted you to use a photo ID, not just one, but multiple IDs for a snow shoveling program."

Her conclusion was that the Senate should pass the bill sitting in front of it. "We've passed it out of the House now four times and is up to the Senate to get the job done," she said. She added that "over 80% of America wants it," and that the only holdouts "are the Democrats who are in Congress right now."

Then she named the bill and described it in the same breath:

"If you want people to be confident in the outcome of the election, then we need to pass the Save America Act. We need to require voter ID."

That much is accurate. The bill does require voter ID. But requiring voter ID is one of two things it does, and she never mentioned the other one — which is the half that will cost people a registration.

Two halves, and she talked about one

The SAVE America Act is not last year's SAVE Act. It is a newer bill, and the House moved it by taking an unrelated Senate measure — a veterans bill numbered S. 1383 — and replacing its entire text with its own. As FactCheck.org put it when the Senate began debate, "Unlike last year's SAVE Act, the bill also would require voters to present photo identification before casting a vote, whether by mail or in person."

What came out of the House has two operating sections.

One is the photo ID requirement. An election official "may not provide a ballot" to a person voting in person "unless the individual presents to the official a valid physical photo identification." Someone voting by mail has to send a copy of one, or the last four digits of a Social Security number along with a sworn statement that they could not get a copy. Miss it at the polls and you cast a provisional ballot that does not count unless, within three days, you come back with the card or swear you have a religious objection to being photographed.

The list of cards that qualify is five items long: a state driver's license, a state ID card issued by a motor vehicle agency, a U.S. passport, a military ID, and a Tribal ID. Nothing a city issues is on it.

The other is the part she left out. Before anyone votes, they have to be registered, and this is where the bill does its real work. To register — or to change a registration you already have — you must hand over documents proving you are a citizen. FactCheck.org's summary is exact: the bill "would require people to present citizenship documents in person to election officials, even if they are registering by mail."

What counts as proof

The statute's list here is five items too, and only one of them is a single card an ordinary person is likely to be carrying:

A REAL ID that states on its face that you are a citizen. Five states issue an "enhanced" license that does.
A valid U.S. passport. About 53% of Americans have one.
A military ID, together with a service record showing you were born in the United States.
A government photo ID that shows a U.S. birthplace.
Any other government photo ID — but only if handed over together with a certified birth certificate, a hospital record of birth, an adoption decree, a consular report of birth abroad, a naturalization certificate, or an American Indian Card.

So for almost everyone it comes down to a passport, or a driver's license and a birth certificate carried to a government office during business hours. A Social Security card will not do it. Neither will a utility bill, a benefits card, or the photo ID you would show at a city grocery counter.

We've written before about what that requirement does to people who cannot put their hands on the documents. The numbers behind it:

The Bipartisan Policy Center, analyzing the 2024 Survey on the Performance of American Elections, found that 12% of registered voters have neither a passport nor a birth certificate paired with a government photo ID.
A 2023 survey by the Brennan Center and other groups found that 21.3 million Americans of voting age, more than 9%, did not have easy access to citizenship documents — they could not quickly find them if they had to show them tomorrow.
84% of women who marry change their surname — as many as 69 million American women whose birth certificate no longer carries their legal name. The bill says nothing about marriage certificates or change-of-name papers.

And this does not stop at first-time registrants. Nobody has to re-register just because the law passed, but anyone who re-registers for an ordinary reason walks into it. The legal director of VoteRiders told FactCheck the statute "is drafted broadly enough to encompass all changes to registration." David Becker, of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, said proof would be needed "any time you conduct what we call a registration transaction, which usually comes from a life event, a move or a change of name."

Malliotakis represents Staten Island and part of southern Brooklyn. For anyone there who has married and changed her name, moved between boroughs, or never had a reason to hold a passport, that is an errand with original documents, in person, during the working day.

Her "over 80%" is close for one half and high for the bill

Her figure is roughly right about the popular part, and the polling shows exactly where the popularity stops.

A Harvard CAPS/Harris poll of 1,999 registered voters, conducted February 25 and 26, found 71% support for the SAVE America Act as the pollster described it. Taken apart, the pieces polled higher: voter ID at 81%, removing noncitizens from the rolls at 80%, proof of citizenship to register at 75%, and sharing voter rolls with the Department of Homeland Security at 61%. Gallup in October 2024 found 84% support for photo ID at the polling place and 83% for requiring people registering for the first time to prove citizenship. A Pew Research Center poll found 83% support for showing government-issued photo ID before voting.

So "over 80%" describes voter ID well. It overstates the bill.

More to the point, none of those questions is the bill. Gallup asked about first-time registrants; this bill reaches the woman who married last year and the family that moved across the borough line. No pollster has asked whether a citizen should have to carry a birth certificate to a government office to keep a registration she has had for thirty years.

Becker made the same point about how the question is put: "If you just ask the regular question in polls, do you support voter ID, you do see vast majorities of Americans say yes, including majorities of Democrats. If you ask people, should eligible voters without voter IDs be disenfranchised, you get very different responses." The Harvard poll tested that directly. Asked which mattered more, 54% chose doing everything possible to stop fraud and noncitizen voting, and 46% chose making sure eligible citizens are not denied the ability to vote.

Selling the whole bill on the half that polls at 81% is a choice. South Carolina's new senator made the same one when she compared this bill to showing a card to check out a library book. A card at a counter is the polling-place half. The registration half has no counterpart in any city program, library, or supermarket.

She voted for it. Here is the record.

The House has taken four votes on this bill and its predecessors.

July 10, 2024 — H.R. 8281 passed 221 to 198. Malliotakis voted Aye.
September 18, 2024 — a stopgap spending bill carrying the SAVE Act failed 202 to 220. Malliotakis is recorded as not voting.
April 10, 2025 — H.R. 22 passed 220 to 208. Malliotakis voted Yea.
February 11, 2026 — S. 1383, rewritten as the SAVE America Act, passed 218 to 213. Malliotakis voted Yea.

She told Fox the House has passed it four times. The House voted four times and passed it three. She was there for all three.

She is entitled to those votes. What she is not entitled to is describing the bill to constituents as a photo ID law and stopping there, when the rest of it is what they would meet at the registration desk.

What the Senate has actually done

Her charge is that the Senate is sitting on it. The Senate took it up. On March 17 it agreed to proceed by 51 to 48 and spent ten days on it. Then, on March 26, a cloture vote fell short, 53 to 47 — sixty are needed to break a filibuster. That is the last thing the Senate has done with the bill. It has never voted on whether to pass it.

The problem the bill claims to solve

Malliotakis's stated reason is confidence in election outcomes.

Noncitizen voting in federal elections is already a federal crime, and it is already almost nonexistent. When the Brennan Center surveyed election administrators who together tabulated 23.5 million votes in the 2016 election, those officials had referred roughly 30 suspected incidents of noncitizen voting for investigation — 0.0001 percent of ballots. In the study itself, forty of the forty-two jurisdictions reported no known incidents at all.

The bill would not remove a single illegal vote that isn't already illegal. It would add a documents requirement that falls on married women, seniors, renters who move, and people who work hourly shifts.

On confidence in elections, specifically

If Malliotakis's concern is that Americans trust election outcomes, there is a more direct place to look than voter registration paperwork.

On January 9, 2025 she became one of twelve members of Congress to sign a resolution expunging Donald Trump's impeachment for inciting the attack on the Capitol — an attack aimed at stopping the certification of an election. Twelve days later she went on CNN and said of those who assaulted police officers that day, "those do need to serve the time."

You cannot spend one week arguing that the 2020 result should never have been contested and the next arguing it should be erased from the record. Confidence in elections is not damaged by citizens registering to vote. It is damaged by elected officials who treat the outcome as negotiable when they lose.

Where constituents could ask her about this

They can't, in person. Staten Islanders have been showing up outside her district office on Mondays — including with cupcakes for Medicare and Medicaid's 61st birthday — and she still has not held a town hall. The Joint Economic Committee's district table puts 39,380 people in her district on track to lose Medicaid coverage from the budget bill she voted for.

A town hall is exactly where someone would get to ask the simple question: Congresswoman, I've been registered here for thirty years and I changed my name when I got married. What do I bring, and where do I bring it?

Her Fox News answer, which she gave to a national audience instead, was that citizens need to hold senators accountable.

The senators are not the ones who described it to New Yorkers as a photo ID law.

Sources

Fox News, "New York City's lone Republican in Congress accuses Mamdani, Schumer of 'hypocrisy' in voter ID fight" by Robert McGreevy (August 14, 2026). Photo by Seth Wenig-Pool/Getty Images.
FactCheck.org, "Q&A on the SAVE America Act" by Lori Robertson and D'Angelo Gore (March 18, 2026) — the source for the photo ID comparison, the in-person requirement, the document list, the Bipartisan Policy Center and Brennan Center figures, and the Harvard CAPS/Harris, Gallup and Pew polling.
The text of the bill as it passed the House: S. 1383, Engrossed Amendment House, February 11, 2026.
Center for American Progress, "The SAVE Act: Overview and Facts."
Brennan Center for Justice, "Noncitizen Voting: The Missing Millions."
Joint Economic Committee, "District-Level Impacts of Health Care Cuts."

"It's the SAVE Act, SAVE Act, SAVE Act": Ralph Norman Says Making It Harder to Register Is His Whole Agenda

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 07:49:20 +0000

South Carolina votes again on August 25. It's a runoff for the Republican nomination to the U.S. Senate seat that opened when Lindsey Graham died in July, and Ralph Norman is one of the two people on the ballot.

On Saturday he went on Breitbart News Saturday and was asked, in effect, what he'd do with the job. He gave a straight answer:

"I'll be a loud voice for one, the constitution, and two, I'm asked all the time, what's my agenda It's the SAVE Act, SAVE Act, SAVE Act. If we don't have safe and secure elections we don't have a republic."

Not grocery prices. Not the hospitals. Not flooding. His agenda, said three times in one breath, is a bill that would require every American to produce a passport or a birth certificate, in person, just to register to vote or update a registration.

He's entitled to run on that. Voters are entitled to know two things about it.

He has already told us what he thinks saving the republic requires

"If we don't have safe and secure elections we don't have a republic" is a strange sentence coming from Ralph Norman.

On January 17, 2021 — eleven days after the Capitol was attacked, three days before the inauguration — Norman texted White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows:

"Mark, in seeing what's happening so quickly, and reading about the Dominion law suits attempting to stop any meaningful investigation we are at a point of – no return – in saving our Republic !! Our LAST HOPE is invoking Marshall Law!! PLEASE URGE TO PRESIDENT TO DO SO!!"

He meant martial law — the military replacing civilian government — to stop the transfer of power after an election he had publicly said he accepted. Five days before he sent that text, he had told his own constituents on official letterhead that the country "should place our focus on ensuring a peaceful transition."

Asked years later on CNN whether he regretted it, he said the only thing he regrets is the spelling.

So when Norman says elections have to be secure or we lose the republic, he has a documented record of what he does when an election's outcome is one he doesn't like. He asked for troops.

That is the man now offering himself as the Senate's leading champion of election integrity.

What the SAVE Act actually does

The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act — the SAVE America Act, the version Norman and his opponent both name — passed the House in February 2026. It requires documentary proof of citizenship — a passport or a birth certificate — presented in person, to register to vote or to update an existing registration.

An ordinary driver's license doesn't satisfy it. Neither does a Social Security card, a utility bill, or a voter ID card. We've laid out the full picture before; here is the short version.

More than 21 million Americans of voting age don't have ready access to documentary proof of citizenship.
84% of women who marry change their surname. Their birth certificate no longer matches their legal name, so it can no longer serve as their proof of citizenship.
Everything happens in person, during business hours. That's a trip and a day's pay for people who work hourly, don't drive, or live an hour from the county office.

And the problem it claims to solve — noncitizens voting in federal elections — is already a federal crime, and already vanishingly rare. When the Brennan Center surveyed election administrators who together counted 23.5 million votes in 2016, they had referred about 30 suspected incidents of noncitizen voting for investigation. That is 0.0001 percent. Forty of the 42 jurisdictions studied reported none at all.

The bill doesn't remove a single fraudulent vote that isn't already illegal. What it does is add a paperwork requirement that lands hardest on married women, rural voters, seniors, and working people.

Norman calls that "safe and secure elections." It is a fee and a bureaucratic errand attached to a right.

His agenda is a bill his opponent already cosponsored

Here is the part that makes the whole pitch collapse.

Norman's runoff opponent is Senator Darline Graham Nordone, appointed to the seat after her brother's death. And the SAVE Act is the first bill she cosponsored — she said so in a Fox News op-ed, and offered to cancel the Senate's August recess to get it passed.

So Norman's entire stated agenda is a bill the person he's running against already put her name on, days into the job, and volunteered to give up her vacation for.

There is no policy disagreement here. Norman is not offering South Carolina a different position on voting. He is arguing that he would fight harder for the identical bill — which is why the interview kept coming back to endorsements and ratings rather than to anything he'd actually do differently.

He listed his backers: Rick Scott, Mike Lee, Jim DeMint, Mark Meadows. A 100 percent Heritage Action rating this term, 98 percent lifetime. Then he named the disqualifying endorsement on the other side:

"she's got Lisa Murkowski, who I'm sorry, is the first Republican who opposed the SAVE Act."

That's the tell. Not a disagreement about the debt or health care or trade. The one Republican name Norman brought up as damning is a senator who declined to vote to make registration harder.

What he didn't put on the list

Norman did name one other problem facing the country in that interview: "a socialist/communist crisis coming our way." He also said the country has "a financial crisis" and that nobody's talking about the debt.

He didn't mention that his own companies took four pandemic loans worth $608,500 that the government forgave — before he signed a letter calling student debt relief "an act of highway robbery," and told a fact-checker it takes "a special kind of idiocy" to compare the two. Debt is a crisis when other people owe it.

For a candidate whose closing argument is "my record is my resume," it's worth noticing which parts of the resume come up unprompted and which don't.

The stakes on August 25

President Trump has endorsed Graham Nordone and reiterated it on Friday, telling voters she has his "complete and total endorsement." Representative Russell Fry, who finished third in Tuesday's primary, endorsed her too.

So this runoff is not a fight over whether the Republican nominee will push the SAVE Act. Both of them will. That is already decided.

The question voters get to answer is narrower and worse: whether the nomination goes to a man who, the last time an election didn't go his way, wrote to the White House that the military was the country's last hope — and who, five years on, will tell you the only thing he'd change is a typo.

Norman opened his pitch by saying he'd be "a loud voice for one, the constitution." The constitution he has already once asked the President to suspend.

Source

Breitbart News, "Exclusive — Ralph Norman: South Carolina Senate Runoff About Who Will Fight for SAVE America Act" by Matt Mercer (August 15, 2026)

South Carolina Is Voting Today for a Senator Who Asked the White House to Impose Martial Law. He Says He Wouldn't Take It Back.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 18:01:34 +0000

Polls in South Carolina are open until 7 p.m. today. Ten Republicans are on the ballot in the special primary to replace the late Senator Lindsey Graham, and nobody is expected to clear 50%, so the top two go to a runoff on August 25.

One of the men who could be in that runoff is Ralph Norman, who has represented South Carolina's 5th District since 2017.

Five years ago, Norman asked the White House to have the President use the United States military to stop the transfer of power to the winner of a presidential election. He put it in writing. When a reporter asked him three years later whether he regretted it, he said the only thing he regrets is that he spelled a word wrong.

That is not an exaggeration. Here is the record.

What he wrote in private

On January 17, 2021 — eleven days after the Capitol was attacked, three days before Joe Biden was sworn in — Norman texted White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows:

"Mark, in seeing what's happening so quickly, and reading about the Dominion law suits attempting to stop any meaningful investigation we are at a point of – no return – in saving our Republic !! Our LAST HOPE is invoking Marshall Law!! PLEASE URGE TO PRESIDENT TO DO SO!!"

He meant martial law. Martial law means the military takes over from civilian government. A sitting member of Congress was telling the President's chief of staff that ordering troops into American streets to stop an inauguration was the country's last hope.

The message only became public on December 12, 2022, when Talking Points Memo reported it out of the trove of texts Meadows turned over to the House January 6 committee. That was more than a month after Norman had been comfortably re-elected. Nobody in South Carolina got to weigh it before voting.

What he said in public, five days earlier

This is the part that should decide how you read the text.

On January 12, 2021 — five days before he sent it — Norman put out an official statement on his congressional website explaining why he opposed impeaching Donald Trump. Here is what he told his constituents, in his own words, on his own letterhead:

"With the inauguration of Joe Biden just a few short days away, we should place our focus on ensuring a peaceful transition. These Articles will not do that."

Peaceful transition. That is what he said in public on January 12. On January 17 he privately asked for the military.

And it wasn't the first time the public version and the private version didn't match. On November 7, 2020, the day the networks called the race, Norman texted Meadows:

"Bottom line, it's time we FIGHT FOR THE ONE PERSON WHO HAS CHANGED THIS COUNTRY!! WAY TOO SOON TO GIVE IN NOW!!"

He asked for a conference call and "concrete plans of action." Three days later, on November 10, 2020, at a news conference in the South Carolina Statehouse lobby, a reporter asked Norman whether he accepted the results of the 2020 election.

"Oh absolutely," he said. "I do not hate Joe Biden. I do not like his policies. But that being said, yes we will accept."

He said "yes we will accept" in front of cameras three days after writing "WAY TOO SOON TO GIVE IN NOW" in a text nobody was supposed to see.

He had a chance to walk it back. Twice.

December 2022. When the texts came out, Norman's office put out a statement saying: "Obviously, Martial Law was never warranted. That text message came from a source of frustration." The York County Democratic Party called on him to resign. Its chairman said Norman was "a traitor to our highest ideals." Norman's office declined to comment on the resignation calls, and did not answer the Post and Courier's follow-up question about whether his concerns over the 2020 results had been resolved.

January 2024. CNN's Kaitlan Collins put it to him directly on The Source. She noted that the text went out three days before the inauguration and that "you were urging the White House to use the U.S. military to prevent the peaceful transfer of power," then asked whether he regretted it.

Norman's answer:

"The only thing I regret, I misspelled martial law. I misspelled that. No, I didn't– I didn't– Look, everything happened so quick in that election."

Collins pressed him on what questions still lingered, noting that in CNN's exit polls half of Republican voters didn't believe Joe Biden legitimately won — which he did. Norman went further:

"The bottom line is we've got to have secure elections and whatever that takes. There are a lot of questions that still exist. You know, you've seen the lawsuits that were there. But no, I wouldn't take it back. I misspelled it, I should have taken the time– I was in a hurry, but no, I would not– I don't regret that."

Collins told him plainly that the lawsuits were thrown out and none of them amounted to anything, and that the one recount that found a miscount found more votes for Biden. Then she closed the segment: "Congressman, it is striking to hear you say that you stand by asking for martial law to be declared."

That was 2024. He has not said anything different since.

"Questions that still exist" — after five years and nothing

Norman's whole defense, then and now, is that there were questions. So look at what happened when other Republicans who voted the same way were asked to name the evidence.

In Mississippi, Michael Guest — an eleven-year district attorney — voted to throw out Arizona's and Pennsylvania's electoral votes, and then told a Jackson TV station a month later that no one ever showed him evidence substantial enough to overturn anything. That's the honest version of Norman's position, said out loud by someone who had the same information.

Norman had the same information too. He signed the November 6, 2020 letter from 39 Republicans to Attorney General Bill Barr claiming "widespread reports of irregularities." He signed a second letter to Barr on December 1 demanding subpoenas and the impounding of voting machines. He put his name to the Supreme Court brief signed by 126 House Republicans asking the Court to throw out the results in four states he doesn't represent. Every one of those channels came up empty — as Collins put it to him on air, the lawsuits "were all thrown out; none of them amounted to anything."

Five years on, the questions are still "lingering" because nothing was ever found. That's not an open question. That's a closed one he won't accept the answer to.

Then he voted against every attempt to find out what happened

If Norman genuinely wanted answers, there were votes for that. He took the other side of all of them.

Voted against impeaching Trump for inciting the insurrection.
Voted against the independent, bipartisan commission to investigate January 6.
Voted against creating the House Select Committee on January 6 after the commission was blocked.
Voted against awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to the police officers who defended the Capitol — one of only 21 members of the entire House to do so.

That last one is worth sitting with. The Capitol Police held the building on January 6. Norman was inside it. He voted against giving them a medal.

This is the pattern we documented on his impeachment record: in 2021 he put his name on five separate resolutions to impeach four Biden officials in 45 days, including one against Kamala Harris that drew only two cosponsors in the whole House. Aimed at the other party, his appetite for accountability was bottomless. Aimed at his own, it disappeared.

What the job actually is

Norman is asking for a six-year term in the United States Senate. The Senate is the chamber that certifies presidential electoral votes alongside the House. It is the chamber that would vote on the confirmation of a Defense Secretary. It is the chamber that holds impeachment trials.

He is not hiding what he thinks. He said it on national television, unprompted, with a chance to take it back: no, I wouldn't take it back.

He has real support in this race. His endorsers include Rep. Nancy Mace, state Freedom Caucus legislators, and former Senator Jim DeMint. He's running against an appointed senator with Trump's endorsement, against Russell Fry, who filed for the Senate seat and his House seat at the same time, and against former Governor Mark Sanford.

Whatever you think of the rest of that field, this much is documented, in his own words, on his own website and in his own text messages: Ralph Norman told the public he wanted a peaceful transition, and five days later privately asked the White House to send in the military instead. He says he wouldn't take it back.

A man who asked for a military takeover when his side lost an election should not be handed six years in the United States Senate. We deserve better.

Sources

1 month after Lindsey Graham's death, voters go to the polls to choose his replacement — Seanna Adcox, SC Daily Gazette, August 11, 2026. Photo of Rep. Ralph Norman at the U.S. Senate Stump Stop in Lexington, S.C., August 1, 2026, by Jessica Holdman/SC Daily Gazette.
SC's Ralph Norman faces calls to resign over martial law text message to Mark Meadows — Caitlin Byrd, The Post and Courier, December 13, 2022.
Leaked 2021 text from SC Rep. Ralph Norman calls for martial law — South Carolina Public Radio, December 13, 2022.
Statement on Articles of Impeachment — norman.house.gov, January 12, 2021.

Georgia Counted Its Ballots Three Times. Days Later, Austin Scott Signed a Brief Calling Them Unconstitutional.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 17:33:11 +0000

There is a document with Austin Scott's name on it, filed at the Supreme Court of the United States, and you can read it yourself. It has a table of contents. Section III is titled, in full:

"THE USURPATION OF LEGISLATIVE POWER IN GEORGIA PRODUCED UNCONSTITUTIONAL BALLOTS."

Georgia. Not Pennsylvania, not Michigan, not Wisconsin — those got their own sections. Section III is about the state Austin Scott was elected to represent, and about the ballots his own constituents in Georgia's 8th District had filled out five weeks earlier.

Scott has been in Congress since 2011 and is the most senior Republican in Georgia's entire congressional delegation. The brief lists him individually, by name and district: "Amicus U.S. Representative Austin Scott represents the Eighth Congressional District of Georgia in the United States House of Representatives."

What Georgia had already done by the time he signed

This is the part that matters most, because it establishes what Scott knew when he signed.

November 19–20, 2020. Georgia completed a full hand tally of roughly five million ballots — an audit required under a new state law, not a response to any suspected problem. It affirmed Biden's lead, and the state certified the result.

December 2–3, 2020. A second recount — a full statewide machine recount, this one requested by the Trump campaign — ran to its midnight deadline.

December 6, 2020. Georgia's Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, went on ABC's This Week and told George Stephanopoulos: "We've never found systemic fraud — not enough to overturn the election."

The same day, Georgia's Republican governor, Brian Kemp, and Republican lieutenant governor, Geoff Duncan, refused Trump's demand that they call a special legislative session to appoint a different slate of electors. Their joint statement: "The judicial system remains the only viable — and quickest — option in disputing the results of the November 3rd election in Georgia."

December 7, 2020. Raffensperger recertified. Biden won Georgia by 11,779 votes. As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that day, Raffensperger said: "We have now counted legally cast ballots three times, and the results remain unchanged."

December 10–11, 2020. Austin Scott signed the brief.

Three days after his own state's Republican election chief announced the third count had changed nothing, Scott put his name on a filing asking the Supreme Court to treat Georgia's ballots as unconstitutional.

The brief names Georgia's Republican secretary of state as the violator

This wasn't vague hand-waving about "irregularities." The document Scott signed makes a specific accusation against a specific Georgia Republican:

"Georgia's Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, violated Article II of the U.S. Constitution when he usurped legislative power by purporting to issue procedures that were in direct conflict with Georgia's Legislative Acts governing the choosing of electors."

That is the sitting secretary of state of Scott's own state, elected as a Republican, accused in a Supreme Court filing of violating the Constitution — by a Georgia congressman of the same party, four days after that same official said under questioning on national television that there was no systemic fraud.

The lawsuit Scott was supporting was brought by the state of Texas against Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Read that again: a Georgia member of Congress signed a brief supporting another state's lawsuit against Georgia.

The Supreme Court threw it out on December 11, 2020, the day after it landed, holding that Texas lacked standing — it had no legally recognizable interest in how other states run their elections.

The letter he signed a month later says the quiet part

Scott's usual defense is that he didn't join the January 6 objections to the electoral count, and that's true. On January 5, 2021, he signed a letter to House leadership — hosted on his own congressional website — laying out why Congress had no role:

"Congress has only a narrow role in the presidential election process. Its job is to count the electors submitted by the states, not to determine which electors the states should have sent."

Credit where it's due: that is the correct constitutional reading, and it took some nerve to write it down on January 5, 2021.

But read the rest of the letter, because it does not say the election was fine. It opens by declaring the signers "outraged at the significant abuses in our election system resulting from the reckless adoption of mail-in ballots," says the elections in six battleground states "raise profound questions," and complains that Congress had held only one hearing on election integrity.

And then it points at a different door:

"Of the six states as to which questions have been raised, five have legislatures that are controlled by Republicans, and they all have the power to send a new slate of electoral votes to Congress if they deem such action appropriate under state law."

Georgia is one of those states, and Georgia's legislature is Republican-controlled. So the letter isn't a defense of Georgia's result. It's an argument that Congress shouldn't overturn it — combined with a note that Republican state legislatures still could.

Scott signed that on January 5. Georgia's Republican governor and lieutenant governor had publicly said one month earlier that a legislature retroactively naming its own electors would be unconstitutional and immediately blocked by the courts. Scott's letter treats it as an open option anyway.

He isn't the only one, but those were Georgia's ballots

126 House Republicans signed that brief, and this site has written about several of them. Mississippi's Michael Guest signed it, voted to reject two states' electors, and then told a Jackson TV station in February 2021 that "we were never presented evidence to show that the voter irregularity, the voter fraud was substantial enough that the elections should be overturned" — after he'd already voted to throw those states' ballots out.

What separates Scott from most of the 126 is whose votes he was asking the Court to void. A congressman from Alabama or Tennessee signing that brief was asking the Court to throw out someone else's ballots. Austin Scott was asking it to throw out Georgia's — the same ballots his own constituents had cast in the same election that returned him to Congress. He asked a court to declare his own voters' ballots unconstitutional, and he did it after his own party's state officials had counted them three times and told him they were fine.

There is nowhere to ask him about it

If a voter in Warner Robins wanted to ask Austin Scott why he signed a brief attacking Georgia's ballots, there is no room to do it in.

Scott hasn't held a public town hall in his district since 2015 — and that one was only for veterans. In March 2025, close to 200 constituents came to his district office anyway, put a blue blazer on an empty folding chair, and asked their questions to it. Nobody from his office came outside.

He is now running for a ninth term.

Every piece of this is on the public record, in his own filings, on his own website. The brief is on the Supreme Court's docket. The letter is on austinscott.house.gov. The counts are certified by a Republican secretary of state who said out loud, three days before Scott signed, that nothing had changed.

Georgia voters counted their ballots three times. Their most senior Republican congressman signed a document calling them unconstitutional anyway. He has never had to answer a single question about it from the people who cast them.

Source

The primary documents: Texas v. Pennsylvania — amicus brief of 126 House Republicans, including Austin Scott (U.S. Supreme Court, December 2020), and the January 5, 2021 letter to House leadership posted on Scott's own House website. Photo: official House portrait via Wikimedia Commons.

A Convicted January 6 Rioter Asked Mike Collins if Taxpayers Should Pay Him. Collins Said "That's Easy. Yes."

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:24:55 +0000

At a breakfast event in Savannah on August 11, a man convicted of two felonies for his part in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol stood up, introduced himself as a "non-violent Jan. 6-er from here in Savannah" and asked Georgia's Republican Senate nominee whether he would back the compensation fund, or some other form of relief, for himself and for anyone else harmed by a "weaponized political system."

Mike Collins answered without hesitation.

"When the federal government harms you, then yes, they have a liability too. That's easy. Yes."

The exchange was recorded and posted by the man who asked it, Dominic Box, on the morning of August 11. It spread from there. The Lincoln Project put the video in front of a national audience within hours.

Let it be known, Georgia GOP Senate candidate @MikeCollinsGA proudly supports Trump's $1.8 billion "weaponization" slush fund for January 6th insurrectionists. When asked if he supports it Mike says "that's easy, yes".

Share this with a Georgia voter you know today. pic.twitter.com/ZtVrasvfKA
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) August 11, 2026

The next day his campaign attempted to clarify it. Spokesperson Meyer Siegfried said Collins "fully supports holding the government accountable when federal agencies abuse their power and believes Americans who've been wronged by their government ought to have a path to seek justice," and added: "He does not support a blank-check fund or automatic taxpayer-funded payouts to anyone simply because they were prosecuted for January 6."

Read that carefully, because of what it doesn't do. It doesn't dispute a word of what Collins said. It denies support for a fund — and the fund had been formally killed eight days before he spoke. The payouts that are actually moving don't come from a fund. They come from the Judgment Fund and from claims filed one at a time, which is the machinery laid out below, and which a "blank-check fund" denial leaves entirely intact.

Jon Ossoff, the senator whose seat Collins is running for, wanted more than a clarification. "Yesterday, we heard Congressman Mike Collins unacceptably and disgustingly call for taxpayer-funded payouts to the violent thugs who ransacked the United States Capitol to try to overturn the 2020 election," he said. "Congressman Collins needs to immediately come out and publicly retract his support for these taxpayer-funded payouts to violent insurrectionists." What he got instead was a campaign that rejected Ossoff's framing — not the words Collins said.

Two things about that answer are worth slowing down for. The first is who was asking. The second is that Collins called "easy" a question that has torn his own party apart for three months.

The man asking the question stands to get paid

Dominic Box is not a curious voter who wandered into a town hall. He is a Savannah man who was convicted in October 2024 on two felony counts of civil disorder and four misdemeanors for what he did at the Capitol. He waived his right to a jury trial, turned down a plea deal, and was found guilty by U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly. Federal surveillance images placed him on the Capitol's east stairs; he entered through the Senate wing door.

"Civil disorder" — the felony he was convicted of twice — is the federal crime of acting "to obstruct, impede, or interfere with any fireman or law enforcement officer lawfully engaged in the lawful performance of his official duties incident to and during the commission of a civil disorder." It carries up to five years in prison.

He remains proud of it. In an August 2024 update, he wrote: "To this day, I remain fully confident and proud of my decision to attend the events of that day…" His X biography today reads "Guerrilla Journalist" and "J6 Survivor." In his own post about the Savannah exchange, he described himself in the third person as the "Savannah Insurrectionist."

So when Collins said the government "has a liability," he was saying it to a man who would personally collect. Box understood exactly what he had gotten. He called the moment "HISTORIC" and claimed Collins had become the first U.S. Senate candidate to go on the record backing payouts — his characterization, not a verified fact, but he was clear about what he thought he'd won: "Now the pressure is on every other candidate."

What Collins actually said yes to

The "liability" Collins was talking about is real money, and it comes with a story most Georgians haven't heard.

Trump sued the IRS for $10 billion over a 2019 leak of his tax information. He then settled that lawsuit — a lawsuit against the federal government — with officials he had appointed himself. In exchange for dropping the claim, the government created a $1.776 billion "anti-weaponization" fund, a number chosen to echo 1776. The settlement also handed Trump, his sons Don Jr. and Eric, and the Trump Organization immunity from tax audits and enforcement tied to that leaked information. A federal judge in Florida said in a July 13 order that the arrangement amounted to using the presidency to "manipulate" the courts. We laid the whole thing out when it blew up in Washington a week before Collins spoke.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told Congress in June that the Justice Department was "not moving forward" with the fund, after Republicans balked and refused to vote on an unrelated ICE and Border Patrol funding bill until it was dealt with. Trump said that same week that he didn't know whether the fund was dead or just on hold, but called it "a beautiful thing" that he loved.

And killing the fund doesn't kill the payouts. The Justice Department still has the Judgment Fund — a bottomless pot of Treasury money for settling claims against the government, with no appropriation from Congress required. Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, the department's number three official, said publicly that he already had the authority "to settle any claim that is brought against the United States of America."

The line is forming. Roughly 400 pardoned January 6 participants are already seeking compensation from the federal government, most asking for $1 million to $10 million each. One Florida attorney told ABC News he has already filed claims for about 200 clients and expects to file for 200 more. The government has already paid just under $5 million to the family of Ashli Babbitt.

That's the bill Collins says Georgians have a "liability" for.

"That's easy" — except it wasn't easy for anyone else in his party

Here is the part that should stick with Georgia voters. Mike Collins is describing as obvious a question that Republicans in Washington have been fighting over since May.

Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina called it "stupid on stilts," and Rep. Mike Flood of Nebraska said in the same reporting: "I do not think one penny of any fund should ever go to any January 6 insurrectionist that was in the Capitol on January 6, 2021."
Sen. John Cornyn of Texas joined Tillis in refusing to advance Blanche's nomination for attorney general until the fund was formally ended in writing — stalling Trump's pick to run the Justice Department over exactly this question. The two of them got that order on August 3, 2026, eight days before Collins spoke in Savannah.
Sen. Susan Collins of Maine spent a May 19 Justice Department budget hearing pressing Blanche on whether any of it was even legal, asking what "the legal basis for those decisions" would be and whether the claims would ever be publicly reported.
On the Senate floor, Democrats tried to pass the No Rewards for January 6 Rioters Act by unanimous consent on May 21. Sen. Tommy Tuberville objected, and it went nowhere.

Senators in both parties spent three months treating this as one of the hardest questions in front of them — hard enough to stall an attorney general and jam up an immigration bill. A Republican Senate nominee looked at the same question and said it took no thought at all.

The people who don't get a check

More than 140 police officers were injured defending the Capitol on January 6. Former Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell was dragged into the crowd by his shoulder straps and nearly suffocated, and still has shoulder and foot injuries. Metropolitan Police Officer Daniel Hodges was crushed between heavy doors and beaten in the head while calling for help.

Hodges is one of the officers suing the Trump administration to stop the fund, alongside former Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn.

Former Capitol Police Officer Winston Pingeon, who was attacked and knocked to the ground that day, put it simply: "The pardons erased what little justice there was."

Nobody has proposed a fund for them.

Collins has been rewriting January 6 for years

None of this came out of nowhere. On the fourth anniversary of the attack, Collins posted that "thousands of peaceful grandmothers gathered in Washington, D.C., to take a self-guided, albeit unauthorized, tour of the U.S. Capitol building." He called the rioters "peaceful protestors" who had been "hunted down, arrested, held in solitary confinement, and treated unjustly."

His 2022 campaign ad had him running through debunked Georgia voter-fraud claims with an AR-15 before shooting a ballot drop box to pieces.

Saying the rioters deserve money is not a departure for him. It is the logical last step of a story he has been telling for four years: that nothing bad happened, and the only real victims were the people who did it.

He is not alone in the whitewashing. Rep. Pat Harrigan of North Carolina, a former Green Beret, called Trump's pardon of 1,500 January 6 defendants "leadership rooted in honesty and accountability". What Collins added in Savannah was the invoice.

Georgia has 42 people in this line

Federal prosecutors charged 42 Georgians in connection with the Capitol attack. Trump's clemency covered all of them.

If the payouts go forward at the numbers lawyers are asking for, a share of that money goes to Georgians — paid for by every other Georgian. Collins wants to represent all of them in the U.S. Senate. In Savannah, he told one of them, on camera, that the money should flow.

He didn't ask a follow-up question. He didn't distinguish between people who wandered in and people who beat police officers. He didn't mention the officers at all.

He said it was easy.

It isn't. And a senator who thinks it is has told us exactly who he plans to work for. We deserve better.

Source

Dominic Box, posted video and account of the exchange, X, August 11, 2026; video also circulated by The Lincoln Project. Reporting from the event and the reaction to it by Ross Williams, "'That's easy': Collins tells pardoned Jan. 6 defendant that government should pay wronged Americans," Georgia Recorder (August 12, 2026). Photo: official congressional portrait, 118th Congress, via Wikimedia Commons.

Russ Fulcher Flew to Budapest to Speak at Viktor Orbán's Rally. Ten Days After Hungarians Threw Orbán Out, He Posted Praise for Him.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:19:22 +0000

On March 21, 2026, a conservative conference called CPAC Hungary was held in Budapest. Viktor Orbán gave the keynote. Hungary's national election was three weeks away.

Two American members of Congress were on the speaker list. The Hungarian outlet that announced the lineup described them this way: "Congressmen Russ Fulcher of Idaho and Andy Harris of Maryland will be representing the United States government."

Three weeks later, on April 12, Hungarians voted Orbán out.

It wasn't close. On the final count, Péter Magyar's Tisza party took 141 of the 199 seats in parliament on 53.18% of the party-list vote, against 52 for Orbán's Fidesz — a two-thirds supermajority. Turnout was a record 79.6%, the highest since the end of Communism. After 16 years in power, Orbán called his opponent to concede and told his supporters, "The responsibility and possibility of governing was not given to us."

Ten days after that, Fulcher went on Facebook and wrote this:

"Hungary became the tip of the spear in the fight against globalism under Viktor Orbán, and an invaluable ally to the United States."

What Fulcher went to Budapest to celebrate

Orbán is the leader other leaders study when they want to know how to stay in power without technically stealing an election.

Political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, quoted in the column that flagged Fulcher's post, describe him as the modern world's most successful autocrat — a man who used the trappings of constitutional government to hollow it out. He changed how judges were appointed in order to pack the judiciary. Public media was "restructured" to cut coverage of his opponents in favor of party messaging; thousands of journalists lost their jobs and private outlets were harassed and fined. Universities were punished for programs that didn't toe the line. And he reworked the electoral process itself to keep his party in office.

Fulcher went anyway, and spoke — he confirmed the trip in his own words afterward, writing that he'd had "the honor to meet with Hungary's leadership" — and came home describing the relationship as one that "perpetuates freedom of speech."

The Facebook post is the part that matters

Anyone can attend a conference. What makes this Fulcher's story rather than a scheduling item is what he wrote after the votes were counted.

On April 22, 2026, ten days after the landslide, he posted:

"Recently, I had the honor to meet with Hungary's leadership and discuss Orbán's successful pillars of Peace, Sovereignty, Freedom, and Security. It's my hope that their new leadership will see the value in maintaining these principles."

And:

"In Congress, I will continue to support a strong, enduring U.S.-Hungary relationship that perpetuates freedom of speech and sovereignty of nations."

Read what he's actually saying. Hungarian voters had just delivered the largest mandate any party has received in the history of democratic Hungary, explicitly to end Orbán's rule. Fulcher's message to them was that he hopes their new government keeps doing what the man they just fired was doing.

That is not a foreign policy position. It's a statement that the election result was the wrong answer.

Which is a thing Russ Fulcher has said before, about his own country

This is where it stops being about Hungary.

On the morning of January 6, 2021 — hours before the Capitol was attacked — Fulcher went on Fox & Friends to promote his plan to object to certifying the presidential election, saying "there are tens of millions of people who want to see some action on this."

A month earlier he had signed an amicus brief joined by 126 members of Congress asking the Supreme Court to throw out the results in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin over what it called "unconstitutional ballots."

That night, after the mob had been cleared out of the building, he voted to reject the certified electoral votes of Arizona and then Pennsylvania. He voted against impeaching Trump for inciting the attack. He voted against creating an independent, bipartisan commission to investigate it. And he voted against the Presidential Election Reform Act, the bill that made the vice president's role in counting electoral votes explicitly "ministerial" so no future president could lean on it.

At home in Idaho, he is pushing the SAVE America Act — the bill requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register and a photo ID to vote. On a telephone town hall he told constituents he expects it to pass through a fast-track budget process that needs only a simple majority in the Senate, because it can't get 60 votes the normal way.

Six years of the same instinct: when the count doesn't go your way, the count was the problem.

What Idahoans get out of this

Nothing. That's the point worth sitting with.

Idaho's First District has real problems — pregnant patients being flown out of state because doctors are afraid to treat them, public land his own constituents want to keep federal, the cost of groceries. None of that was on the agenda in Budapest.

Former Idaho attorney general Jim Jones, writing in the Idaho Capital Sun, calls Fulcher "the most subservient member of Idaho's MAGA delegation." The Budapest trip is what subservience looks like when it needs a passport.

The bottom line

A sitting American congressman appeared at a rally for a foreign leader three weeks before that country's election, billed as representing the United States government. That leader lost by the widest margin in his country's democratic history.

Ten days later, Russ Fulcher told the winners he hoped they'd govern like the man they'd just removed.

He is on Idaho's ballot in November.

Sources

MANY THINGS CONSIDERED: One Congressman's Viktor Orbán Mind Meld — Marc C. Johnson, Tillamook County Pioneer (also published by the Lewiston Tribune, May 1, 2026)
CPAC Hungary 2026 Speakers Revealed — Hungarian Conservative, March 18, 2026
CPAC Hungary: Global Far-Right Leaders Show Solidarity with Orban — Balkan Insight, March 23, 2026
CPAC 2026: Tom Van Grieken, Russ Fulcher és Stefano Forte is méltatta a miniszterelnököt — Origo, March 21, 2026 (in Hungarian; reports that Fulcher spoke at the conference)
Final Hungarian election results confirm supermajority for Tisza — bne IntelliNews, April 20, 2026

Nicole Malliotakis Is One of Twelve Members of Congress Trying to Erase Trump's January 6 Impeachment. Twelve Days Later She Said the Rioters Should Serve Their Time.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:13:51 +0000

The House of Representatives has 435 voting members and six non-voting delegates. Twelve of them put their names on a resolution to expunge Donald Trump's impeachment for inciting the attack on the Capitol — to strike it from the record as though the House never voted on it.

Nicole Malliotakis is one of the twelve.

She is not a backbench bomb-thrower. She represents Staten Island and south Brooklyn, until recently served as vice chair of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, and is scored as a centrist by GovTrack based on her legislative record. This is the moderate.

The resolutions

Marjorie Taylor Greene introduced H.Res.25 on January 9, 2025 — the opening days of the new Congress. Its entire purpose is to expunge the January 13, 2021 impeachment of Donald Trump, the one for incitement of insurrection. She filed H.Res.24 the same day to expunge his first impeachment.

Eleven members signed on as cosponsors. Malliotakis signed both on day one.

The full list of names on the January 6 expungement, besides Greene and Malliotakis: Mary Miller, Randy Weber, Mike Collins, Eli Crane, James Moylan, Troy Nehls, Anna Paulina Luna, Jefferson Van Drew, Diana Harshbarger and Elise Stefanik.

That's the company. Twelve people out of 441 — eleven representatives and Guam's delegate.

What she said twelve days later

On January 20, 2025, Trump pardoned more than 1,500 January 6 defendants, including people convicted of assaulting police officers.

The next day, Malliotakis went on CNN. Boris Sanchez read her own tweet from January 6, 2021 back to her — the one she posted after Capitol Police moved her to a secure location: "Everyone who is responsible for this violence and lawlessness must stop. This is absolutely unacceptable and un-American." Then he asked whether Trump did the right thing pardoning rioters who assaulted police.

Her answer, as she gave it:

"Well, I do have an issue with those who assaulted police officers. And I think that those do need to serve the time. That is unacceptable."

And when Sanchez asked what her message was to the Capitol Police officers who were injured that day:

"Certainly I stand with our Capitol Police and all our law enforcement. I'm very proud to be one of the few individuals here in Congress that actually in the past has received the endorsement of the Capitol Police union, and we have to support our law enforcement. We need to hold those who injure them and kill them accountable."

Twelve days earlier she had signed her name to a document whose only purpose is to erase the one time Congress held the man at the top of that day accountable.

About 140 police officers were injured on January 6.

This is not one bad week

The expungement signature is the end of a five-year line, not a departure from it. Malliotakis has voted against every mechanism anyone proposed for establishing what happened that day:

January 6, 2021 — after the Capitol was cleared, she voted to reject Arizona's electoral votes. She had told a radio show two days before, "I don't see a situation in which I don't object to at least some of these states."
January 7, 2021 — the morning after the riot, she voted to reject Pennsylvania's too, telling Fox News there were "a number of irregularities, a number of changes made, that many people believe led to fraud."
January 13, 2021 — voted against impeachment. She was the only member of Brooklyn's congressional delegation to vote no.
May 19, 2021 — voted against creating an independent, bipartisan commission to investigate the attack, the kind of body used after 9/11.
June 30, 2021 — voted against creating the select committee that ended up doing the investigating instead.
January 9, 2025 — signed on to erase the impeachment from the record.

Every door: closed. No commission, no committee, no impeachment, and now no record of the impeachment.

Republican Accountability, a group of anti-Trump Republicans, grades her democracy record "F" — "Very Poor."

The two Malliotakises

She wants both of these things to be true at once, and they can't be.

In January 2026 she put out a press release announcing federal money she'd secured for the NYPD, and said: "I will always support our brave men and women in law enforcement and remain committed to ensuring they have the tools and resources they need to do their jobs safely and effectively."

That's the version her district sees — cameras, license plate readers, vests for the K-9 unit, more than $9 million for the NYPD since she took office. It's real, and she's earned the credit she takes for it.

Then there's the version in the Congressional Record: a name on a resolution to unwrite the House's only formal finding that the president bore responsibility for the day 140 officers were hurt defending the building she works in.

She was there. Capitol Police moved her to safety. She tweeted that it was "absolutely unacceptable and un-American." Then she voted against every attempt to find out how it happened, and four years later signed her name to a piece of paper saying the impeachment should never have existed.

To be fair to her: she did break with Trump on the pardons, and she said it on camera on a national network, which most of her conference would not do. It just makes the signature harder to explain, not easier. If the people who beat police officers should serve their time, then the finding that the president incited them belongs in the record — not scrubbed out of it.

The bottom line

H.Res.24 and H.Res.25 went to the Judiciary Committee in January 2025 and have not moved since. They will probably never get a vote. That's not really the point.

Twelve members of Congress decided this was worth signing. Nicole Malliotakis — the moderate, the Problem Solvers vice chair, the one who wouldn't hold an in-person town hall while constituents rallied outside her office — was one of them, on day one, before anyone asked.

Trump's own administration spent months trying to move nearly $1.8 billion of public money toward paying January 6 defendants, and dropped the plan only on August 3, 2026, when two retiring Republican senators held up the attorney general's confirmation until he killed it in writing. The record of what happened is the only thing standing in the way of the story being rewritten entirely. Malliotakis put her name on erasing part of it.

Sources

H.Res.25 — Expunging the January 13, 2021 impeachment of Donald John Trump (cosponsors) — congress.gov
House Republican Rips Trump's 'Unacceptable' Pardons of Violent J6 Convicts — Mediaite, January 21, 2025 (CNN News Central interview with Boris Sanchez)

Greg Murphy Voted Against Throwing Out Arizona's Votes. Then He Voted to Throw Out Pennsylvania's. Four Weeks Earlier He'd Asked the Supreme Court to Do It for Him.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:45:03 +0000

There's a version of the January 6 story where every Republican did the same thing, and so no individual is really responsible for any of it. Greg Murphy doesn't fit that version, which is why his record is worth reading closely.

He voted against one of the two objections. That is unusual. It also makes the rest of what he did harder to explain, not easier.

Here is the record, from the primary sources.

December 1, 2020: the letter to the Attorney General

Murphy signed a letter to Attorney General Bill Barr — his signature is on page two, second name in the block — complaining about "the shocking lack of action from the Justice Department" a month after the election.

The letter said there were "a number of anomalies, statistical improbabilities and accusations of fraud that bring the election results in several states into question." Then it made a demand:

"More than enough evidence has been presented to warrant the issuing of subpoenas, search warrants and the impounding of ballot materials and election devices for forensic analysis."

Members of Congress asked the Justice Department to seize voting machines. Here is the thing about the date on that letter. On that same day, December 1, 2020, Barr told the Associated Press that "to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election" — and said specifically that the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security had looked into the claim that voting machines were programmed to skew results and found nothing to substantiate it.

Trump's own Attorney General had checked the voting machines. The letter asked him to impound them anyway.

December 10, 2020: the Supreme Court brief

Nine days later, Murphy put his name on the amicus brief of 126 House Republicans supporting Texas v. Pennsylvania — the lawsuit asking the Supreme Court to void the presidential results in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin.

He is listed by name: "Amicus U.S. Representative Gregory Murphy, M.D. represents the Third Congressional District" of North Carolina.

That's the part worth holding onto. Four weeks before the electoral count, Murphy had already asked the highest court in the country to throw out Pennsylvania's votes. The Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

January 6 and 7, 2021: the split

Then came the count itself, and the mob.

On the night of January 6, after the Capitol was cleared, the House voted on the objection to Arizona's electoral votes. It failed 121–303, and Murphy voted Nay — with the majority, against the objection.

The next day, on the objection to Pennsylvania's electoral votes, eighteen members who had voted no the night before switched to yes; one of the Arizona yes votes was absent, so the total rose by seventeen. Murphy was one of the eighteen. He voted Yea. That objection failed too, 138–282.

So he was not swept along. He made a distinction. He looked at two states and picked one.

And the one he picked was the one he'd already gone to the Supreme Court about.

What the objection would have done

Strip away the procedure. A successful objection to Pennsylvania would have discarded every ballot cast in that state — millions of them, counted, certified by the state, and already litigated to a dead end in court after court.

Murphy's own constituents in eastern North Carolina voted in the same election, under the same federal law, with their votes certified the same way. He did not propose throwing those out.

Then he voted against finding out what happened

Everything after this is about whether the country would be permitted to investigate.

January 13, 2021 — the House impeached Trump for inciting the attack. Murphy was recorded as Not Voting; he was in North Carolina caring for his wife after back surgery. He issued a statement opposing impeachment anyway: "The President has committed to a smooth transfer of power. We should let that happen and work on uniting the country rather than dividing it further. I strongly oppose this action taken by the House today."
May 19, 2021 — the House voted to create an independent, bipartisan commission to investigate January 6, modeled on the 9/11 Commission. Murphy voted Nay.
June 30, 2021 — after Senate Republicans killed the independent commission, the House created a select committee instead. Murphy voted Nay.

He voted against both ways of investigating it. There was no third option he was holding out for.

What he said on the anniversary

On January 6, 2022, Murphy put out a statement calling the attack "shameful" and "a terrible, yet avoidable, security failure," and said those who entered the Capitol unlawfully should be held accountable.

The rest of it was about Democrats. He accused House leadership of "exploiting the tragic events of January 6th for political gain" instead of supporting Capitol security upgrades.

A security failure is a story about doors and staffing. It is not a story about why several thousand people came to Washington believing the election had been stolen, or about the members of Congress who spent December telling them so in letters and legal briefs.

Murphy was one of those members. His statement does not mention that.

The part that isn't in the past

Murphy is running for re-election in 2026 against Democrat Raymond Smith Jr., who won the March primary. Murphy's district was redrawn ahead of this cycle.

There is no public record of him retracting the December letter, and nothing he has said explains why Pennsylvania's voters were different from Arizona's. His own announcement the day before the count said only that he would object to "certain Electoral College votes". He was, in the end, a little more careful than most of his colleagues on that first vote — which means he thought about it, and then did it anyway.

We've written about the rest of his record: what he says about health insurers versus how he votes on coverage, and three other things worth knowing.

Sources

Letter to Attorney General William Barr, December 1, 2020 (Murphy's signature, p. 2)
Texas v. Pennsylvania — Amicus Brief of 126 Members of the U.S. House of Representatives, Supreme Court of the United States
House Roll Call votes 10, 11, 17, 154 and 197, Office of the Clerk

Michael Guest Voted to Throw Out Two States' Electoral Votes. A Month Later He Admitted Nobody Ever Showed Him Evidence.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 07:43:59 +0000

Before he came to Congress, Michael Guest spent, by his own campaign's account, "11 years as District Attorney for Madison and Rankin Counties." That's a career built on one skill: deciding whether the evidence in front of you is enough to take away someone's rights.

In December 2020 and January 2021, he made a different call.

What he actually did

December 10, 2020. Guest was one of 126 House Republicans who signed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting Texas's lawsuit asking the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out the presidential results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The Court refused to hear it.

January 6, 2021. After a mob stormed the Capitol and the House came back into session that night, the chamber voted on whether to reject Arizona's electoral votes. Guest voted yes. The objection failed.

January 7, 2021. The same vote on Pennsylvania. Guest voted yes again. That objection failed too.

January 13, 2021. The House impeached Donald Trump for inciting the insurrection. Guest voted no.

Then he sat down with a Jackson TV station

On February 4, 2021, Guest gave an interview to WLBT in Jackson. Asked about his votes, he said this:

"I thought that there were voter irregularities, that there was probably voter fraud... But we were never presented evidence to show that the voter irregularity, the voter fraud was substantial enough that the elections should be overturned."

That is a career prosecutor saying, on the record, that nobody ever met the burden of proof.

He voted to overturn them anyway. He explained that his votes weren't really about fraud at all:

"I did not vote to challenge those states based on election fraud or election irregularity. I believe that the will of the legislature was violated by the court system and, in Pennsylvania, by the Secretary of State."

So the theory is: state courts and a state's chief election officer interpreted their own state's election rules in a way Guest disagreed with, and that was reason enough for a congressman from Mississippi to vote to discard the ballots of millions of people in Arizona and Pennsylvania.

Notice what that argument does. It doesn't need evidence — that's the point of it. Fraud claims can be checked and thrown out in court, and they were, over and over. "The will of the legislature was violated" can't be checked. It's a position, not a finding. It lets you cast the same vote the fraud crowd cast while telling your hometown station you're the reasonable one.

The word he used about the man who sent them

In the same interview, Guest said he agreed with a statement Kevin McCarthy had made, and added:

"I think there's a lot of blame to go around. I think the President could have chosen his words better there at the rally..."

Could have chosen his words better. That's how he described the speech that preceded a mob breaking into the building where he works. Guest was in the House chamber when Capitol Police locked it down. He was escorted to the Rayburn building and sheltered there for hours.

He voted for the investigation. Then he voted against it.

Here's the part that's genuinely his own, and it doesn't fit the usual script.

On May 19, 2021, the House voted on H.R. 3233, to create an independent commission to investigate the January 6 attack. It came out of bipartisan negotiations between Mississippi's own Bennie Thompson, then chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, and that committee's top Republican, John Katko of New York. House Republican leadership recommended a no vote. Guest voted yes anyway — one of only 35 Republicans who did.

He gave Mississippi Today a statement explaining why:

"We need answers to questions surrounding the events of Jan. 6."

The bill passed the House 252–175 and died in the Senate.

Six weeks later, on June 30, 2021, the House voted on H. Res. 503 to create a select committee to do the same job — the only route left after the bipartisan commission was blocked. Guest voted no.

You can construct an argument for that. The select committee was structured differently and Republicans complained about it. But strip the procedure away and look at the outcome: the man who said "we need answers" voted for the investigation that couldn't happen, and against the one that could.

Why this still matters in 2026

Guest now chairs the House Ethics Committee — the panel that judges whether other members of Congress meet the standards of the institution. He also broke the STOCK Act himself and paid a $200 fee for it.

And he has never walked any of it back. The watchdog group Republican Accountability grades congressional Republicans on their record toward democratic institutions. It gives Guest an F.

The record is short and it is not in dispute, because most of it is his own voice:

He signed a brief asking the Supreme Court to void four states' results.
He voted twice to reject other states' electors.
He said a month later that nobody ever showed him evidence that would justify overturning an election.
He voted against impeaching the man he said "could have chosen his words better."
He voted for a January 6 commission that couldn't pass, and against the committee that could.

He ran a district attorney's office for eleven years. He knows exactly what it means to act without evidence.

Source

In Conversation: Michael Guest talks Trump, impeachment and Marjorie Taylor Greene — WLBT, February 4, 2021. Photo: WLBT.

Bryan Steil Runs the Committee That Oversees American Elections. He's Using It to Chase Trump's Debunked Fraud Claims — And He Hired a Fake Elector to Run Its Election Investigation.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 22:24:00 +0000

There is one committee in the House of Representatives with broad jurisdiction over how American elections are run. It's called the Committee on House Administration. On the day Congress certifies a presidential election, its chairman sits at the dais and helps read the electoral votes.

Bryan Steil of Wisconsin is that chairman.

On July 31, 2026, Democracy Docket reported that Steil had sent three letters demanding classified briefings and documents about President Trump's claims of noncitizen voting and foreign interference in American elections.

The letters went to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, FBI Director Kash Patel, and acting Director of National Intelligence William Pulte.

Steil's stated reason:

"Reports of non-citizens casting illegal ballots continue to emerge, undermining election integrity and public confidence in American elections."

Read that sentence closely. It's doing something clever. It doesn't claim noncitizens are voting in any meaningful number. It claims reports keep emerging, and that those reports undermine confidence.

He is the one emerging the reports.

The number at the center of it

The specific Trump claim Steil's letters chase is that 250,000 noncitizens are registered to vote.

Where does that number come from? According to Democracy Docket, Steil conflated it with a software glitch in New Jersey that led to errors registering about 6,000 noncitizens — an issue the state had already addressed.

Six thousand errors from a software bug is not 250,000 illegal voters. It isn't the same order of magnitude, and a registration error is not a cast ballot.

David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, whom Democracy Docket describes as one of the nation's leading election experts, was blunt about the 250,000 figure. "I suspect that 250,000 number is just their wild, highest possible number," he said, adding that it was a "vastly inflated number that is completely noncredible."

Meanwhile the Justice Department's own attempts to seize state voter rolls keep failing in court. Its most recent loss came in New Jersey — the same state Steil pointed to — and it was the department's 18th loss nationwide.

Eighteen losses is not a record that suggests the courts are finding hidden fraud. It's a record that suggests there isn't any.

We've documented how thin this genre gets when anyone checks. When Minnesota's Brad Finstad wrote his own letter about noncitizens voting, a University of St. Thomas professor's ten-year study had turned up three cases out of 13.3 million votes. Voting as a noncitizen is already a federal felony and a deportable offense. It is a spectacularly bad crime to commit and a spectacularly rare one.

Who he hired

Now the part that makes Steil's investigations different from a random member's press release.

In October 2024, CNN reported that Steil's committee had hired two former Trump officials involved in the 2020 fake electors scheme.

One of them was Thomas Lane, who served as a backup fake elector in Arizona in 2020 and was hired to lead the committee's investigation into elections. CNN reported he was then listed on committee records as Elections Counsel & Director of Elections Coalition. He left the committee in February 2025 and now runs election integrity at the America First Policy Institute, a Trump-aligned think tank. Emails obtained by CNN show Lane helped plan who would serve as Arizona's fake electors, collecting contact information and discussing where they'd meet. He was subpoenaed by the Justice Department as part of the federal investigation into the plot to overturn the 2020 election.

On December 12, 2020, in an email chain with Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro and then-Arizona GOP chair Kelli Ward about fake elector logistics, Lane wrote:

"I'm here to do everything I can to make this work."

The other hire was Joshua Findlay, a former Trump campaign lawyer brought on as a consultant on election law. Findlay participated in fake-elector calls and meetings, particularly regarding Georgia, and circulated draft "voting instructions, ballots, and Certificates of Vote" for the alternate slates.

Here's the twist worth sitting with. Findlay later told the House committee investigating January 6 that he'd never actually found the fraud:

"I think there were a lot of justifiable complaints about election administration generally. But, you know, the big complaints that you would hear about, you know, massive vote flips and things like that, we just didn't ever – at least in Georgia, we did not ever find any evidence of that."

The man hired to advise the elections committee had already looked for the stolen election, under oath, and reported back that it wasn't there.

Asked about the hires, a committee spokesman told CNN: "Chairman Bryan Steil is committed to strengthening our nation's election integrity and increasing Americans' confidence in our elections."

"For you"

Steil voted to certify the 2020 election. That's to his credit, and it's worth saying plainly.

But watch what he did with the committee afterward.

In October 2024, praising Trump, Steil described handing his panel's investigation of ActBlue — the Democratic online fundraising platform — to five Republican attorneys general. Then he addressed Trump directly:

"They're digging into this information, Mr. Trump. I think they're going to find a lot of answers very soon for you."

For you.

That is the chairman of the committee that oversees American elections telling a candidate for president that an investigation will produce answers on his behalf. Not for the public. Not for the House. For him.

At a Wisconsin rally that month, Trump returned the favor, saying of Steil: "he's on a committee and it's a very important committee, and he's studying fraud and the fraud within the Democrat Party and what they're doing in terms of campaign contributions."

Why this matters more than a letter

It would be easy to file this under ordinary partisanship. It isn't, for three reasons.

First, he has real power. House Administration writes election rules, and its chairman has a formal role on the day Congress certifies a presidential election. When that chairman spends the run-up chasing debunked fraud numbers, he's building the record someone else may cite later.

Second, he is spending public money and classified access on it. These letters don't ask for opinions. They demand classified briefings from the FBI, DHS, and the intelligence community — finite resources, aimed at a claim experts describe as completely noncredible.

Third, the confidence he says he's protecting is the thing he's spending. Public trust in elections doesn't fall because noncitizens vote — three cases in 13.3 million doesn't move anyone's confidence. It falls because officials with titles keep announcing investigations into it. Steil cites eroding confidence as the reason for the investigations, and the investigations are what erode the confidence. He's holding the hose and pointing at the water.

Steil is on the ballot again this November in Wisconsin's 1st District. The job he's asking voters to return him to includes deciding, in part, how their next presidential election gets certified.

Sources

Democracy Docket: House GOP Committee requests classified briefings on Trump's election fraud claims (Natalie Hausmann, July 31, 2026)
CNN: House GOP committee that oversees elections hired two former Trump officials involved in 2020 fake elector scheme (October 24, 2024)

Russell Fry's Whole Career Started by Firing the Republican Who Voted to Impeach Trump. Tomorrow He Asks South Carolina for a Promotion.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 19:25:33 +0000

Tomorrow, August 11, 2026, South Carolina Republicans pick a nominee for the U.S. Senate seat Lindsey Graham held until his death in July. Russell Fry is on that ballot.

It's worth remembering how he got to Congress in the first place, because it is the single most important fact about him — and it is not a policy position. It's a job he was hired to do.

The seat he took

Tom Rice represented South Carolina's 7th District for five terms. He was, by his own account and by his voting record, a conservative who backed Trump's agenda.

On January 13, 2021, he was one of ten House Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump over January 6.

Rice never took it back. He explained it this way:

"I'm all about Trump's policy. But absolute pledge of loyalty, to a man that is willing to sack the Capitol to keep his hold on power is more than I can stomach."

And, on the eve of the primary that ended his career, more simply: "Republicans are supposed to protect the Constitution. We take an oath to protect the Constitution, not a man."

The job Fry was hired for

On February 1, 2022, Trump endorsed Fry with a statement that named the assignment out loud:

"Congressman Tom Rice…the coward who abandoned his constituents by caving to Nancy Pelosi and the Radical Left, and who actually voted against me on Impeachment Hoax #2, must be thrown out of office ASAP."

Fry's response was not "here is my agenda for the Pee Dee." It was:

"Radical Leftists, enabled by RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) like Tom Rice, are trying to erase President Trump's legacy and move America towards socialism."

He was also candid about what the race was actually about. He told Fox News: "the impeachment is the big elephant in the room and the voters are incredibly frustrated by that."

He was right about that. On June 14, 2022, Fry beat Rice 51% to 24% — clearing the field outright, no runoff needed. He won every precinct in the district.

Fry became the first Trump-endorsed challenger of that cycle to unseat a Republican incumbent who had crossed him.

Trump took the credit himself, posting that Fry "beat Impeach Master Tom Rice with a Vote of more than 51%, therefore WINNING OUTRIGHT with no need for a run-off." Matt Moore, a former chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party who was a senior adviser to the Fry campaign, agreed: "Donald Trump powered Russell Fry to victory. There was no doubt about it."

Dr. David White, a political scientist at Francis Marion University, watched the returns and summarized the race in a sentence: "So, this was about Donald Trump and Tom Rice."

Rice's own last word on it, on election night: "I know I did the right thing," he said. "I know I defended the Constitution."

Why it still matters four years later

Congress works on a simple incentive. A member decides whether to check a president partly by asking what happens to members who do.

Tom Rice is the answer everyone in the House Republican conference learned. He voted his oath, said so out loud, refused to walk it back, and was removed by his own party's voters with a 27-point margin in a race his replacement openly described as being about the impeachment.

Russell Fry is not a bystander to that lesson. He is the instrument of it. His seat in Congress is the reward for administering it.

That's not an inference — it's the campaign he ran and the endorsement he sought.

What he does with the seat

The record since is what you'd expect from someone who got the job that way.

He voted for the budget blueprint ordering $880 billion in cuts from the committee that runs Medicaid, and then for final passage of the bill that made them law — which the Joint Economic Committee's House Democrats project will cost 37,124 people in his own district their health insurance by 2034, counting both the law's Medicaid cuts and the Affordable Care Act tax credits Republicans then let lapse. That is the most of any district in South Carolina. He then told constituents on a telephone town hall that "there are a lot of people who are on it who quite frankly shouldn't be."

He voted twice to cancel spending Congress had already approved, at the president's request — in June 2025, when the $9.4 billion package passed by two votes, and again in July, when the Senate's trimmed version came back.

He would not attend a constituent-organized town hall in Myrtle Beach, his office telling the local ABC station it was a "sham 'town hall'" run by "a partisan, liberal organization." When constituents heckled him at a March 2025 wildfire press conference, he accused them of being funded by George Soros.

And this summer he filed for the Senate while also filing to keep his House seat — an arrangement under which he cannot lose his job, and his district could lose its congressman until May.

He is not the only one

The party spent four years turning those ten votes into a cautionary tale — and the accounting for January 6 got buried along with them.

In Florida, Scott Franklin said a week after the attack that Trump bore "some responsibility" and called for a bipartisan investigation, then voted against creating one four months later. In Alabama, Robert Aderholt voted to throw out two states' electoral votes hours after the Capitol was cleared, and then voted twice against investigating why it was attacked.

Those are members who moved with the current. Fry is something else: a candidate recruited to punish the man who didn't.

Tom Rice is out of Congress. Russell Fry is running for the Senate.

Tomorrow

Fry goes into the primary in third place. An Emerson College poll taken July 28–29 had Ralph Norman at 22%, interim Sen. Darline Graham at 19%, and Fry at 12%, with a quarter of voters undecided.

Whatever happens, the record stands. Four years ago, South Carolina's 7th District had a congressman who said an oath outranked a man. It replaced him with one whose entire path to Washington ran through proving otherwise.

We deserve better.

Source

Split decision for Trump in high profile South Carolina GOP congressional primaries — Fox News, June 2022; Tom Rice's impeachment vote draws Trump-endorsed primary challenger — Ballotpedia News, May 24, 2022; and "This was about Donald Trump and Tom Rice": Professor says Fry won from Trump endorsement — Emma Parkhouse, WPDE ABC 15, June 15, 2022, republished on ABC News 4. Photo: ABC News 4.

A Pardoned Jan. 6 Rioter Heckled Nathaniel Moran at His Town Hall. Moran Told the Room Some Jan. 6 Prisoners Were Treated Unfairly.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:10:40 +0000

On the evening of April 22, 2025, Nathaniel Moran held a town hall at a hotel in Tyler. KLTV's report the next morning opened with a line that says most of it: "His voice was rarely the only one in the room."

One man was asked to leave by hotel staff after repeatedly yelling expletives at another attendee. People stood outside with signs, worried about their 401(k)s and Social Security. And in the middle of it, a man named Ryan Nichols interrupted the congressman.

Nichols had a complaint about due process:

"Four years for January 6, there's no due process in this country, and he doesn't care."

Then, per KLTV's account, Moran later told the crowd that some Jan. 6 prisoners were treated unfairly.

It's worth knowing who he said that about.

Who Ryan Nichols is

Ryan Nichols is from Longview, in Moran's district. In November 2023 he pleaded guilty to two felonies: obstruction of an official proceeding, and assaulting, resisting or impeding certain officers.

At his sentencing on May 2, 2024, prosecutors played videos for Judge Royce Lamberth. In one, Nichols waved a crowbar and urged the crowd on: "You need to get your weapons." In another, the government summed him up for the court: "So if you want to know where Ryan Nichols stands? Ryan Nichols stands for violence."

Court documents laid out the planning. Nichols traveled to Washington with a friend from Carthage because they believed the 2020 election was stolen. In the days before, he texted his friend a photo of body armor with prices, noting what bullets it would stop. In another message he wrote:

"Dad and I are building a gun container in the truck today. Just know I have intel that Washington will be a warzone. Big possibility that actual battle goes down."

Lamberth sentenced him to 63 months in prison and fined him $200,000. His lawyers had asked for release, citing his years of hurricane rescue work and his service as a Marine Corps veteran with PTSD.

Then Trump pardoned him, and by April 2025 he was standing in a Tyler hotel ballroom telling a congressman there is no due process in this country.

There was due process. It ran for three years. It included a guilty plea entered by Nichols himself, a federal judge, and video evidence. What ended it was a pardon.

What Moran chose to say

A member of Congress who had just been heckled by a man convicted of assaulting police officers had a wide range of accurate things available to say.

He could have said the man in front of him pleaded guilty to attacking officers. He could have said the courts worked. He could have said nothing.

What KLTV reported is that he told the crowd some Jan. 6 prisoners were treated unfairly — and afterward, told the station: "I wasn't able to hear what he said from the back of the room. We answered some January 6 questions tonight. It's unfortunate he took that tactic."

Note what's missing from that reaction. Not one word about the officers.

Moran was not in Congress on January 6, 2021 — he took office in 2023. He has no certification vote to defend. This was a choice he made in front of his own constituents, four years later, with no vote on the line at all.

He is also one of five Republicans on the House Committee on Ethics — the panel that judges the conduct of members. That is the standard-setting seat in the House.

This has become the party's default

Moran is not an outlier here, which is the point.

Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of roughly 1,500 Jan. 6 defendants. Rep. Pat Harrigan — a Green Beret — called that decision "leadership rooted in honesty and accountability" in the same statement in which he said Joe Biden's pardons undermined trust and integrity in leadership. The difference between the two sets: many of the people Trump freed had attacked police.

That is the frame Moran adopted in miniature at a hotel in Tyler. Not a defense of the whole riot — just a gentle "some of them were treated unfairly," offered to a room that included a man who had brought a crowbar to the Capitol.

The other thing that happened that night

The rest of the town hall was, by the reporting, mostly noise: shouting, one man asked to leave, and a congressman telling reporters afterward that "some folks showed up tonight just wanting to scream and fight and yell."

He also said this, and we should hold him to it:

"I think it's a responsibility to the constituents to do those face-to-face town halls to engage to be transparent, and I expected some emotion tonight and that's what we saw."

Good. Face-to-face town halls are a responsibility — he's right about that, and plenty of his colleagues only do them by telephone, which isn't the same thing.

So here's the follow-up question for East Texas, and it isn't rhetorical: at the next one, will Nathaniel Moran say plainly whether he thinks a man who pleaded guilty to assaulting police officers was treated unfairly?

The people in that room deserve a straight answer. We deserve better.

Sources

JD Conte, "'We want to hear him': Shouts, chaotic questions engulf Moran town hall," KLTV, April 23, 2025. Photo: KLTV.
Brendan Cullerton and KLTV Digital Media Staff, "Longview man gets prison sentence, 6-figure fine for involvement in Jan. 6 riot," KLTV, May 2, 2024.

The Bill to Repair the Capitol Passed by One Vote. John Carter Meant to Kill It — His Colleague Forgot to Cast His No.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:28:26 +0000

On May 20, 2021, the House voted on a bill to pay for the damage done to the Capitol on January 6.

It passed 213 to 212.

One member of the House who was recorded as "Not Voting" that day was John Carter of Texas. He had not decided to sit it out. He had handed his proxy to a colleague and told him how to vote, and that colleague had been casting Carter's votes all week — including thirty-three minutes earlier, on the motion to recommit this same bill. On final passage he forgot.

Carter's office confirmed afterward that he would have voted no.

A tie fails in the House. If that one vote had been submitted the way Carter wanted it submitted, the bill would have died 213–213.

What the bill actually paid for

H.R. 3237 was called the Emergency Security Supplemental to Respond to January 6th Appropriations Act. It was $1.9 billion, and Congress's own summary of it is not complicated. The money went to:

repairing the parts of the Capitol that the mob broke
the U.S. Capitol Police
reimbursing the National Guard for the cost of responding
a quick reaction force in the D.C. National Guard to back up the Capitol Police
support for the prosecutions

One provision in the bill carried a rule instead of a dollar figure. Section 103 said every uniformed Capitol Police officer whose duties include dealing with the public "shall utilize a body-worn camera and ensure that the body-worn camera is activated while on duty."

Reasonable people can argue about a spending bill. But this is what Carter's vote was going to be against: fixing the broken doors, paying back the Guard troops who slept on the marble floor, and putting cameras on the officers who defended the building.

This wasn't a one-off

The uncast proxy is a story about a staffer's mistake. Carter's record is not.

He voted to reject the Electoral College results from Arizona and Pennsylvania — hours after the mob had been cleared out of the very building the $1.9 billion would go on to repair.

He voted against impeaching Donald Trump for inciting it.

Six weeks after the security funding vote, on June 30, 2021, he voted against even creating the House committee to investigate what happened.

So: don't count the electors, don't impeach the president, don't investigate the attack, and — but for a clerical error — don't pay to fix the building or reimburse the troops. That's four for four.

How the proxy failed

Proxy voting existed in 2021 because of COVID. A member who couldn't be in Washington could file a letter designating another member to cast their vote, and had to instruct that member in writing exactly how to vote.

Carter's proxy was held by Rep. Ken Calvert of California. Calvert's spokesperson gave a blunt explanation: "Rep. Calvert made a mistake and simply forgot to cast Rep. Carter's vote."

That is the whole reason the Capitol security bill left the House alive.

It is worth being precise about what this does and does not show. Carter did not sneak a vote. He did not lie about where he was — unlike Greg Steube, who told the House clerk a "public health emergency" kept him from voting while he was at CPAC in Orlando. Carter's intent was on the record and his office confirmed it. The point is what the intent was.

A man who is often not in the room

Carter has been in Congress since 2003 — 23 years. Over that span, GovTrack's tally shows he has missed 806 of 15,135 roll call votes, or 5.3% — more than double the 2.0% median for representatives currently serving.

Some quarters are far worse than the average. In July through September of 2023 he missed 114 of 224 votes — more than half of everything the House voted on for three months, putting him in the 99th percentile of absences among his colleagues.

Missing a vote because you're ill is human. Missing a one-vote decision because nobody cast the vote is a different kind of failure — and it happened on one of only two votes the House decided by a single vote all year. When the margin is one, showing up is the job.

We have written about a farm bill that died in committee by one vote because a senator was at the markup but not in the room for the final tally. The pattern repeats because the incentives never change: the vote you skip is the one nobody can pin on you.

Carter is 84, has served 23 years, and is running again in Texas's 31st District — the district that contains Fort Hood. He chairs the Appropriations subcommittee that writes the military construction and veterans budget. The bill he meant to sink would have reimbursed National Guard troops for the cost of defending the Capitol.

We deserve better.

Sources

GOP congressman's proxy vote that would have killed $1.9B security spending was never cast — Nicholas Ballasy, Just the News, May 21, 2021. Vote record: House Roll Call 156, May 20, 2021. Photo: official U.S. House portrait.

Before He Was a Congressman, Brian Jack Made the Call That Put Mo Brooks on the January 6 Stage

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 11:25:01 +0000

Brian Jack is a first-term congressman from Georgia's 3rd District who is very good at Washington. Speaker Mike Johnson put him on the Rules Committee as a freshman. His own class elected him to the Republican Steering Committee. Profiles describe him as a rising utility player.

Before all that, he was Assistant to the President and White House Political Director. And on January 5, 2021, he was the person who called Congressman Mo Brooks to tell him the President wanted him on stage at the Ellipse the next morning.

We know this in detail, because the House committee investigating the attack subpoenaed Jack in December 2021 as one of six people who helped plan the January 5 and 6 rallies, and deposed him under oath on February 11, 2022. The full 51-page transcript is published by the Government Publishing Office.

Most voters in GA-03 have never read it. Here is what's in it.

The list

The deposition walks Jack through his own text messages, which he produced to the committee.

On January 4, 2021, Megan Powers — a former Trump campaign operations director working on the rally — sent Jack a list of six members of Congress: Representatives Devin Nunes, Jim Jordan and Mo Brooks, and Senators Josh Hawley, Marsha Blackburn and Ted Cruz. She told him where it came from: "Just received from Katrina," meaning Katrina Pierson.

Her next message, read into the record by committee counsel:

"This is who the President wants to be invited to speak for 3 minutes each on Weds."

Jack liked the message. Asked whether he understood "Weds" to mean the January 6 rally where Trump would appear, he answered: "At the time, I suspect that I did understand that to be in reference to the rally at which the President would appear."

Committee counsel asked whether he understood those six to be the members who had announced they would object to certifying the election. Jack's answer:

"I did not at the time, to the best of my recollection, understand any specific position that they had, but I did understand them to be allies of the President."

When counsel pressed on whether Jack had talked to any of those six about their plans to object, his attorney — Stanley Woodward — objected that the question was outside the scope of the subpoena, and the deposition went off the record for a conference between lawyer and client. It came back a few minutes later with Woodward saying "he's going to answer the question," and Jack answered it name by name. He did not recall a specific conversation with Brooks about the plans, and did not recall speaking to Nunes, Jordan, Hawley, Blackburn or Cruz about them before January 4.

He tried to hand it off. Then he did it himself.

Jack's first instinct, in writing, was to push the assignment away. He texted Powers back: "Do we (OPA) need to coordinate?" — the White House Office of Political Affairs, his shop. Then: "Seems like it would be OLA" — the Office of Legislative Affairs, which handles Congress.

Asked why, Jack testified: "at the time, my office was not involved with the event on January 6th at all, so I suspect that I did not want to -- I suspect at the time I did not want to engage, you know, in an event that I was not yet involved in."

The next morning, January 5, Powers followed up: "Were you able to discuss on the plane?" Counsel then put it plainly:

"Okay. Well, I mean, you know you did help, right? You end up reaching out to Representative Brooks. Is there a reason why you took this on, as opposed to OLA?"

Jack: "I suspect it was because Megan Powers is a friend, and I knew that I could quickly reach out to some of these Members or their staffs to assist her."

The four-minute phone call

Jack texted Brooks, then called him. He told the committee the call ran about four minutes and that he chronicled it at the time. In his words:

"I recall informing him that the President was amenable to his participation, though understanding if he was unable to participate. And I recall, you know, conveying to him that if he were interested, there's a point of contact with the organizers with whom he or his staff could speak."

Brooks' reaction: "I recall him being honored, or something to that effect."

At 12:50 that afternoon, Jack texted the organizers: "we've handed over Brooks."

He did not stop there. The transcript covers a parallel exchange with Maggie Mulvaney — "we're working on Hawley, Cruz, and Blackburn." He also received a text from Vernon Jones, then a Georgia Democrat, asking Jack to "get the word to President Trump about my announcement tomorrow at the White House rally with Stop the Steal." Jones spoke at the rally the next day.

Brooks confirmed the call independently, and on the record, in a 2021 statement from his own congressional office:

"Per my cell phone records, on Tuesday morning, January 5, I had a telephone call with Brian Jack, White House Political Director. He asked me to speak at the Trump rally the next day."

What Brooks did with the invitation

Standing at the Ellipse the next morning, Brooks told the crowd that "today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass." He was wearing body armor under a windbreaker, a fact he volunteered to Slate months later: "That's why I was wearing that nice little windbreaker. To cover up the body armor." He has since said the "kicking ass" line was about beating Democrats in future elections.

Whatever Brooks meant, he showed up to a rally he had been personally invited to by the White House expecting enough danger to wear a vest. Within hours the Capitol was breached.

What Jack says he did that day

Counsel asked Jack to walk through January 6. He had been up late — one of the Georgia Senate runoffs was called around 3 or 4 a.m. — so he slept in and went to his office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building sometime that afternoon.

Q: "Before you arrived, were you aware of any violence at the Capitol?" A: "I suspect at the time I saw Twitter reports or news reports, but I don't specifically recall exactly what I was aware of when I entered the White House grounds."

Q: "So what do you -- as best you can, how do you remember learning of the violence starting at the Capitol? You think it was through Twitter?" A: "Either through Twitter or watching the -- watching the news at home."

He testified he did not go to the West Wing that day, did not see or speak to the President, does not recall speaking to Mark Meadows, had no input into Trump's tweets, and saw the 4:17 p.m. "go home" video only after it went out.

Why this still matters

Take Jack's testimony entirely at face value. Believe that he didn't know the six names on the list were the members planning to object. Believe that he only made the calls because a friend asked. Believe he learned about the attack from Twitter.

What is left is still this: the President's political director personally called a sitting congressman, told him the President wanted him on that stage, and handed his contact to the rally organizers. That call was one of the last links in the chain that assembled the program at the Ellipse — the program that ended with a crowd walking to the Capitol.

Jack has never had to answer for it in front of the people he now represents. He has not held an in-person town hall in the district. Constituents in Newnan organized their own in March 2025 after his office told them there were no dates set, and a petition asking him to hold one went up in May 2026.

The transcript is free. It is 51 pages. Anyone who wants to ask him about it now has the page numbers.

We deserve better.

Source

Transcribed Interview of Brian Jack, February 11, 2022 — Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, published by the U.S. Government Publishing Office. Subpoena reporting: "Jan. 6 rally organizers issued subpoenas," Roll Call, December 10, 2021. Photo: official congressional portrait via Wikimedia Commons.

Stacy Garrity Says Trump Lost the 2020 Election. She Also Says 'We Know There Were Irregularities' She Can't Describe.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 07:31:30 +0000

It is a simple question, and it has a simple answer. Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?

Stacy Garrity — Pennsylvania's treasurer and the Republican nominee for governor — was asked exactly that on abc27's This Week in Pennsylvania with Dennis Owens. Her answer opened with the word "Yeah," which Democracy Docket reported as a concession that Trump lost. Every sentence after it went the other way:

"Yeah, I mean, I won, and that's what I'm most concerned about," Garrity said, citing her upset win in the 2020 state treasurer's race. "But we know there were irregularities. We know there were, I just can't tell you to what extent. But the president seems, you know, he's very convinced that there was a lot there. And it seems like more information comes out all the time. But I'd rather look forward."

Read that again. The concession is one word long. Then she answers a question about Trump by talking about her own race for treasurer. She asserts "irregularities" and in the same breath admits she can't say what they were. She hands the question to Trump's opinion of it. And then she closes the door: I'd rather look forward.

Six years on, the woman asking Pennsylvanians to put her in charge of their state is still telling them the last presidential election was dirty, and still cannot say how.

"Why not hand over the rolls?"

The more consequential part of the interview came next.

The Department of Homeland Security has asked Pennsylvania to turn over its voter rolls, claiming noncitizens are voting in the state. Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt — a Republican, picked by Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro precisely because he stood up to Trump in 2020 — questioned the administration's methodology and asked DHS to produce the numbers behind its claim. It isn't clear the administration ever did.

Garrity said she would "absolutely" be more cooperative with the federal government than that. Her reasoning:

"If we think there's not voter fraud, then why not hand over the rolls and prove him wrong?"

That is a striking thing for a candidate for governor to say about her constituents' personal data — and it inverts how this is supposed to work. The federal government is the one making the accusation. Garrity's answer is that Pennsylvania should hand over its voters' records to prove the accusation wrong.

Pennsylvania has already beaten one of these demands. The Justice Department sued Schmidt for the same unredacted voter files, and in June 2026 a federal judge threw the case out, writing that the government's purpose was "to create a nationwide voter-database, for potential weaponization in future elections." It was the tenth straight loss for the department in cases like it. The department has appealed.

Her willingness isn't new either. In February 2026, after Trump called for Republicans to "nationalize" elections, Garrity said she "would work with the Trump administration, obviously" on running Pennsylvania's elections. Weeks before that she had already said she would comply with the effort to obtain Pennsylvania voters' personal information.

The evidence Garrity reached for tells you how thin the case is. She cited a recent finding that 6,600 noncitizens had been registered to vote in New Jersey after an error in that state's motor vehicle system. New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill said fewer than 400 of them were ever able to cast a ballot — and the cause was a motor vehicle agency error, not a conspiracy. Garrity used a DMV glitch in another state as her reason to open Pennsylvania's files.

This is the same playbook we've watched all year: manufacture a noncitizen-voting crisis, then use it as the reason federal officials need control of state elections. The Justice Department has already sent letters threatening election officials in at least 14 states with criminal prosecution over the same barely-existent problem.

Garrity did not "look forward" in 2020. She sued.

The "I'd rather look forward" line only works if you don't know her record. Garrity was not a bystander to the 2020 fight. She was a participant.

Within days of the 2020 election, Garrity's own campaign committee signed on to Trump's petition to throw out 2,177 Bucks County mail-in ballots over envelope technicalities. The petitioners stipulated in court that they did "not allege, and there is no evidence of, any fraud." On November 19, 2020, the judge denied the petition and ordered every ballot counted.
On January 5, 2021 — the day before the Capitol attack — Garrity spoke at a rally at the Pennsylvania Capitol whose organizer said the point was to get lawmakers to decertify the state's presidential results. She told the crowd, "The election from this November is tarnished forever."
On January 6, she replied from her personal Facebook account to a commenter defending the rioters: "I am proud of our Patriots."
At a May 2022 rally with Trump in Greensburg, she said of him, "We know that he won." Pressed on it in January 2026, she explained that "that was at a Trump rally and those are kind of fun things" — and added that "after the 2020 election, I know Joe Biden was the president."

So when Garrity says "we know there were irregularities," she is not reporting something she discovered. She is repeating something she has been saying since November 2020 — through a court case that collapsed, through recounts, through audits, and through her own party's investigations.

There is a pattern in how she handles being asked about it, and it depends on the room. At a Harrisburg press club luncheon in January 2026, in front of reporters, she said Joe Biden was president and called the Trump rally line a bit of fun. Her campaign told the Capital-Star in 2024 that she accepts the 2020 result, and that she "has previously stated that Joe Biden is the duly elected president of the United States." On television in August 2026, asked the same question, that answer lasted one word.

Pennsylvania's 2020 result was affirmed by multiple lawsuits and independent reviews. Joe Biden carried the state by more than 80,000 votes. There is no "extent" left to determine.

She is not the only Republican doing this. Michigan's Tom Barrett has spent years calling the 2020 election "an unknowable thing" — 15 months after his own Republican colleagues in the Michigan Senate investigated it for seven months and found nothing. Neither of them will say what they think happened. Both keep telling voters that something did.

The rest of the interview

Two other things Garrity said in the same sitting are worth writing down.

She described herself as "pretty much aligned" with Trump — but acknowledged she would have handled tariffs "differently." That is a quiet reversal. In April 2025, days after Trump's tariff announcement set off the worst week for the stock market since the pandemic, Garrity told a conservative conference that his tariff policy, along with the rest of his agenda, amounted to "common sense measures" that were good for the American people. In a separate interview that month she said of the tariffs, "It's a very short-term pain but with a very long-term gain." By February 2026, an analysis by Trade Partnership Worldwide found they had cost Pennsylvanians $4 billion in a single year.

She backed the tariffs when they were popular with her party and Pennsylvanians hadn't yet felt them. Now that the bill has come due, she would have done it "differently."

And asked whether she blamed Trump for high costs, Garrity said she would blame Gov. Josh Shapiro and his predecessor Tom Wolf instead — not the tariffs she herself now says she'd have handled another way.

What's at stake

Governors don't just talk about elections. In Pennsylvania, the secretary of the commonwealth — the state's top election official — is a member of the governor's cabinet, appointed by the governor — the job Schmidt holds now, and the office currently pushing back on the federal demand for voter data.

Garrity is asking for the power to appoint that person. She has told Pennsylvanians she would be more cooperative with the administration making the demand, that she'd "rather look forward" when asked about the last contested presidential election here, and that she still believes in "irregularities" she cannot describe.

Election Day is November 3, 2026. Pennsylvanians can register to vote until October 19 and request a mail-in or absentee ballot until October 27.

Source

Garrity on Trump's election fraud claims: "I'd rather look forward" — abc27 (WHTM), This Week in Pennsylvania with Dennis Owens. Photo: Getty Images.

In 2021 Julia Letlow Backed Censuring Bill Cassidy for Convicting Trump. In 2026 She Ended His Senate Career.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 16:20:06 +0000

On February 13, 2021, Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana voted to convict Donald Trump at his second impeachment trial, for inciting the mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6. He was one of seven Republicans who did. The executive committee of the Republican Party of Louisiana voted unanimously to censure him the same day.

Five weeks later, in March 2021, a first-time candidate named Julia Letlow sat for an interview with CNN before winning the special election for Louisiana's 5th District. CNN's account of what she said:

"Letlow told CNN she would have joined the majority of the House Republican Conference in objecting to the certification of the presidential election on January 6, and she supports her state party's decision to censure GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy for his vote to convict Trump in his impeachment trial earlier this year."

She had not yet cast a single vote in Congress. She had already taken a position on both: she'd have voted to throw out certified electoral votes, and the senator who voted to hold Trump accountable deserved to be punished by his own party.

Five years later, she finished the job

In January 2026, Trump recruited Letlow to run against Cassidy. The reason wasn't a secret. As CNN put it, "The president's bid for vengeance in Louisiana came after Cassidy voted in 2021 to convict Trump during his second impeachment trial."

In the May 16 primary, Letlow took nearly 45%. Fleming, the state treasurer, took 28%. Cassidy finished third with almost 25% and was eliminated — a two-term incumbent senator knocked out before the runoff.

On June 27, Letlow beat John Fleming in the runoff, 56.9% to 43.1% — 180,002 votes to 136,591, with every parish and every precinct counted. The general election is November 3, and in a state Trump has carried by more than 18 points three times, that nomination is effectively the seat.

Cassidy is one of two Republican senators Trump beat in a primary this spring, along with Texas's John Cornyn. Both keep their seats until January.

What she said when she won

Letlow's victory speech thanked Trump for his endorsement and called him "the greatest president this country has ever had."

Trump had held a telephone rally for her two nights earlier. In it, he praised her vote for his tax and spending bill, praised her support for his immigration enforcement, and told Louisiana voters she would back his elections bill — the one that would broadly ban mail-in voting and impose new voter identification requirements nationally.

That is the thing worth sitting with. The through-line from March 2021 to June 2026 is not that Letlow changed. It's that she didn't. She endorsed censuring a senator for an impeachment vote before she was sworn in, and she is running for the Senate having promised to vote for a national rollback of mail voting.

What this means for Louisiana

Senators are supposed to be the check. The Senate's specific constitutional jobs — confirming nominees, ratifying treaties, trying impeachments — exist because the framers assumed a chamber willing to tell a president no.

Cassidy told a president no once, on the narrow question of whether inciting an attack on Congress was an impeachable offense. That vote, and essentially that vote alone, is why he will not be a senator after January. Letlow's own stated position, from the beginning, was that he should have been punished for it.

Her record in the House is consistent with that. She voted to block the bipartisan effort to release the Jeffrey Epstein files in July 2025 — the 211–210 procedural vote — and only voted for release in November, after Trump gave House Republicans permission. She voted for the Rescissions Act locking in DOGE's first round of cuts, which passed 214 to 212. On the votes where a single Republican defection would have changed the outcome, she was never the defection.

Louisiana is trading a senator who broke with Trump once for one who has never broken with him at all, and who said so out loud before she'd been sworn into anything.

We deserve better.

Sources

Eric Bradner, "Trump-backed Julia Letlow wins Louisiana GOP Senate runoff, completing president's revenge plot against Bill Cassidy" — CNN, June 27, 2026
"Replacing husband who died from Covid-19, Julia Letlow hopes to bring her own experience to Congress" — CNN, March 19, 2021
House Roll Call 168 (Rescissions Act, June 2025) and Roll Call 194 (the motion that blocked the Epstein amendment, July 2025)
Official results, June 27, 2026 Republican Senate runoff — Louisiana Secretary of State
Photo: Bryan Tarnowski / Bloomberg / Getty Images, via CNN

"This Act of Insurrection Cannot Go Unpunished," William Timmons Wrote. Then He Voted Against Every Single Investigation.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:44:41 +0000

William Timmons spent four years as an assistant solicitor in Greenville, prosecuting murder, white-collar crime, and domestic abuse. He knows what the words mean.

So read what he wrote on his official House website, days after the Capitol was attacked:

"The actions yesterday by those who breached the U.S. Capitol are the very definition of domestic terrorism. There are no excuses for attacking law enforcement, breaking barricades, shattering windows, and busting down doors to gain entry. Anyone who was complicit in these acts of domestic terrorism should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. This act of insurrection cannot go unpunished."

And then, three paragraphs later:

"This assault on our Capitol should have never happened. We need a thorough investigation of how and why it did."

That's his statement, on his own congressional website, still posted today.

Now here is the record of what he did about it. Every item below is a roll call on the House Clerk's website — public, permanent, and not in dispute.

The five votes

January 6, 2021 — the Arizona objection. Hours after the building was cleared, Timmons voted Yea on the objection to Arizona's electoral votes. Roll call 10. It failed.

January 7, 2021 — the Pennsylvania objection. The next day, he voted Yea again, this time to reject Pennsylvania's electors. Roll call 11. It failed too.

January 13, 2021 — impeachment. Five days after writing that the insurrection "cannot go unpunished," he voted Nay on impeaching Trump for inciting it. Roll call 17.

May 19, 2021 — the independent commission. The House voted to create a 9/11-style, evenly split, bipartisan commission to investigate the attack. That is, quite literally, the "thorough investigation of how and why it did" that Timmons had asked for. He voted Nay. Roll call 154. The bill passed the House and died in the Senate.

June 30, 2021 — the select committee. With the commission dead, the House created a select committee to do the work instead. He voted Nay again. Roll call 197.

Two votes to throw out other states' electors. Three votes against every mechanism for holding anyone accountable. That is the whole record.

The 4,000-word objection

Timmons did not just quietly vote with his party on January 6. Four days earlier, he published a long, lawyerly statement announcing that he would object — and it is worth reading closely, because it undercuts itself.

His argument was that in several swing states, courts had changed election rules that only state legislatures are allowed to set:

"Unfortunately, in the months preceding the November election, a group of big money funded, special interest, liberal elites intentionally and systematically sought to use state and federal judges to manipulate the election laws in swing states..."

Then he spent several paragraphs explaining what happened when somebody tried that in South Carolina. A federal district judge struck down the state's witness requirement for absentee ballots. South Carolina appealed. And the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the judge, in Andino v. Middleton. Timmons quoted Justice Kavanaugh's concurrence at length and wrote:

"Thankfully, South Carolina was ready to defend our state's election laws and through an expedited appeals process obtained a ruling on October 5, 2020 from the United States Supreme Court overturning the district judge's order."

So: the system he said was broken worked. In his own state. Before the election. Through the courts, exactly as designed.

His response was not to say the process works. It was to vote to throw out the electoral votes of states where the same challenges were brought and lost on the merits or on timing — because, he wrote, "the fact that other states were not able to obtain relief from these attacks so close to the election does not make the conduct proper."

He was careful never to allege actual fraud. He wrote only that these rulings "may have enabled widespread fraud that could have altered the results of the election." May have. Could have. He voted to discard millions of real votes on that.

A month before all this, in December 2020, he had already put his name on a Supreme Court brief. Timmons was one of 126 House Republicans who signed the amicus brief backing Texas's lawsuit against Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — the four states that decided the election. The Court threw it out, ruling that Texas had no business challenging how another state runs its elections.

The sentence that gives it away

Near the end of the January 2 statement, Timmons wrote this:

"The American people are right to look to Congress for answers and action, but to date, Congress has failed to launch any meaningful investigation or oversight into anything that relates to election integrity. This is unacceptable at a time when tens of millions of Americans feel disenfranchised."

Congress failing to investigate was unacceptable — on January 2.

By May 19, when the House voted on a bipartisan commission to investigate an actual attack on the actual Capitol, with actual injured police officers, he voted no. By June 30, when the House tried again, he voted no again.

He also wrote, in that same statement, that he looked forward "to working with my colleagues to establish standards and ensure this does not happen again."

What "unpunished" ended up meaning

On January 20, 2025, Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of roughly 1,500 people charged over the attack, including people convicted of assaulting police officers and the leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers.

"Prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law," the former prosecutor had written. Four years later, the prosecutions were erased.

He is not the only one

This pattern — appalled in January, opposed to investigating by May — shows up again and again in the roll calls. Florida's Scott Franklin called for a bipartisan investigation a week after the attack, then voted against one four months later. Arkansas's Bruce Westerman hid from the mob with a ceremonial sword and then voted twice against investigating it. Alabama's Robert Aderholt cast the same five votes Timmons did.

What makes Timmons's version sting is that he wrote it all down himself, in full sentences, on government letterhead. Nobody has to characterize his position. He published it — and then he voted the other way, five times.

Both statements are still up on his House website. You can read them yourself.

Sources

Rep. William Timmons, "Timmons Statement on Domestic Terrorism at the U.S. Capitol" and "Timmons to Object to Electoral College Certification on January 6" — timmons.house.gov, January 2021. Roll call votes from clerk.house.gov.