MAGA Report Cards — Voting Rights

Bryan Steil Runs the Committee That Oversees American Elections. He's Using It to Chase Trump's Debunked Fraud Claims — With a Fake Elector on Staff.

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 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.

Election experts quoted in the report were blunt about the 250,000 figure. One called it a "vastly inflated number that is completely noncredible," and said: "I suspect that 250,000 number is just their wild, highest possible number."

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, the state's ten-year review 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 works for him

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 is 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 is listed on committee records as Elections Counsel & Director of Elections Coalition. 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."

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)

Michael Baumgartner Told CNN You Have to Prove Citizenship to Board a Plane. You Don't. The Anchor Corrected Him on Air.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 19:09:39 +0000

On Friday, July 31, 2026, Michael Baumgartner sat down for a live CNN interview with guest anchor Pamela Brown. It did not go the way he planned.

Baumgartner has represented Washington's 5th District since January 2025. Brown asked him about the Republican push for the SAVE America Act, the bill that would add photo ID and documentary proof-of-citizenship requirements for registering to vote. Here is what he said, as Raw Story transcribed it:

"It's extremely important that we restore trust in America's elections. It shouldn't be that difficult to make the same requirement to get on an airplane as the requirement to vote. You know, we've seen non-citizens voting in places like New Jersey, and we need to restore that trust to make sure the American people have confidence. So we voted for the SAVE America Act, I think at least four times in the House."

Brown didn't let it stand.

"You don't have to show you're a U.S. citizen to get on an airplane."

He tried to argue. She cut in again:

"You have to show ID that's different from U.S. citizen."

She's right, and it isn't a close call. To fly domestically you show a driver's license or another accepted ID that proves you are who you say you are. Nothing at the TSA podium asks whether you're a citizen. Millions of green-card holders, students on visas, and tourists board American planes every week.

That distinction — between proving your identity and proving your citizenship — is the entire fight over this bill, and Baumgartner erased it in a single sentence.

Why the distinction matters

The SAVE Act doesn't ask for a driver's license. It asks for documentary proof of citizenship: a passport, a birth certificate, or a naturalization certificate, produced at the moment you register.

We've laid out who that shuts out in The SAVE Act: A Solution to a Problem That Doesn't Exist: more than 21 million Americans of voting age don't have ready access to proof of citizenship, and about 80% of women change their last name when they marry, which leaves their birth certificate no longer matching their legal name.

The airplane comparison isn't a slip of the tongue. It's the sales pitch. Baumgartner's colleagues have been running the same play with a different prop — Steve Scalise, Virginia Foxx and Bryan Steil compared registering to vote to buying an Olive Garden pasta pass. Each analogy works by swapping the hard requirement (a birth certificate) for an easy one everybody already has (a driver's license, a credit card). The trick only works if nobody says the quiet part out loud.

Brown said it out loud.

The New Jersey example argues against him

Baumgartner reached for New Jersey as his evidence. It's worth actually looking at what happened there, because it cuts the other way.

On July 21, 2026, New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill announced that roughly 6,600 noncitizens had been registered to vote between June 2023 and June 2024, and that about 400 of them cast ballots. Here's the part Baumgartner left out, in Sherrill's own words:

"These individuals answered 'no' when asked on a keypad whether they were a U.S. citizen when applying for drivers' licenses and identification cards, but through no fault of their own, the system registered them anyway."

They told the state they were not citizens. The state registered them anyway, because of what Sherrill called "a serious software error" at the Motor Vehicle Commission.

A proof-of-citizenship requirement aimed at the person filling out the form does nothing about a government computer that ignores the answer that person already gave. The New Jersey failure was a state IT failure, and New Jersey caught it, is removing the names, and replaced the vendor. Sherrill said there was "no evidence at this time that any elections were swayed."

That is Baumgartner's best available example of noncitizen voting — and in it, the noncitizens told the truth and the government made the mistake.

Then he blamed Biden for the economy, then said presidents shouldn't be blamed for the economy

The voting exchange wasn't the only part of the interview that fell apart.

Brown opened by citing new CNN polling showing 70% of Americans disapprove of Trump's handling of the economy and 72% disapprove of his handling of the Iran war, then asked whether Trump was hurting Republicans heading into the midterms.

Baumgartner's answer, per AlterNet's account of the segment: Trump is "putting America on a pathway to very strong economic growth" with "the largest tax reduction in American history," and "I think we're going to do very well in these upcoming elections."

Brown pressed on the people who aren't feeling it. He answered:

"Well, you know, it is true that that there was inflation left over from the Biden administration."

Brown: "This is Trump's economy." Then, again: "But you do agree that this is Trump's economy, right?"

At which point Baumgartner reversed himself:

"Well, it's the presidents who always take too much credit and too much blame for the economy. You know, the economy has multiple factors."

Both things cannot be true. Either the president owns the economy — in which case the inflation people are living through now belongs to Trump, eighteen months in — or presidents don't own the economy, in which case Biden didn't cause it either and Trump can't claim credit for fixing it. Baumgartner took both positions in the space of about ninety seconds, in whichever order was convenient.

He has done this on tariffs, too

This is a pattern, not a bad night.

In March 2025, Baumgartner co-wrote an op-ed with Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories founder Edmund O. Schweitzer titled "Tariffs are taxes", arguing that Trump's tariffs were a tax hike hitting Washington farmers and manufacturers.

In February 2026, when the House actually voted on whether to end Trump's tariffs on Canada, Baumgartner voted to keep them — while fellow Washington Republican Dan Newhouse voted the other way.

Say the tariffs are taxes. Vote to keep the taxes. Say the president owns the economy. Say he doesn't. Say voting should be as easy as boarding a plane, while pushing a bill that would make it considerably harder than boarding a plane.

Baumgartner came out of Washington's August 4, 2026 top-two primary in first place and will face Democrat Carmela Conroy in November, a rematch of 2024. Voters in the 5th District have three months to decide which version of him they're voting for.

Source

"Frustrated MAGA lawmaker squirms when fact-checked to his face on CNN", Raw Story, July 31, 2026, and "CNN anchor stomps GOP lawmaker's denial cold — to his face", AlterNet, July 31, 2026. Image: CNN/screenshot via Raw Story.

Laurel Lee Wants to Amend the Constitution to Ban Something That's Already a Federal Crime

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 18:26:05 +0000

On March 19, 2026, Rep. Laurel Lee of Florida introduced a constitutional amendment.

Amending the U.S. Constitution is the hardest thing you can do in American politics. It takes two-thirds of the House, two-thirds of the Senate, and ratification by 38 state legislatures. It has been done 27 times, ever. The last brand-new amendment to make it through was in 1971.

What Lee wants to spend that machinery on is a rule that already exists.

Her amendment would put into the Constitution that only U.S. citizens may vote for president, vice president and members of Congress. Here is the part of her own press release announcing it that gives away the game:

"Under current law, federal statute (18 U.S.C. § 611) prohibits non-citizens from voting in federal elections."

It's already illegal. It has been since 1996. It is a federal crime that also gets you deported.

Lee's argument for doing it anyway is that a statute "can be repealed, weakened, or challenged." That's true of every law on the books. We do not amend the Constitution every time a law might theoretically be repealed by some future Congress that does not exist and shows no sign of existing.

How often does the thing she's amending the Constitution over actually happen?

This is the number that matters, and it is not close.

The Brennan Center for Justice surveyed election officials who oversaw the counting of 23.5 million votes in the 2016 general election. Those officials referred about 30 suspected incidents of noncitizen voting for investigation — roughly 0.0001% of the ballots they handled. Forty of the 42 jurisdictions studied reported no known incidents at all.

Thirty. Out of 23.5 million.

Lee knows what the real numbers look like better than almost anyone in Congress. She ran a state's elections.

She was Florida's Secretary of State — and she knows the system worked

From 2019 to 2022, Lee was Florida's Secretary of State, appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis — the state's chief elections officer, responsible for how every ballot in Florida gets cast and counted. If noncitizens were voting in meaningful numbers anywhere, that is the job where you would have seen it.

Then she came to Congress and got the gavel. Lee is now Vice Chair of the Committee on House Administration and Chair of its Subcommittee on Elections — the panel with jurisdiction over federal election law. She is not a backbencher filing a message bill. She is the member who decides what election legislation gets a hearing.

And the direction she has pointed that authority is not toward making it easier for eligible Americans to vote.

The pattern goes back further than this bill

This isn't a new instinct. It's the through line of her whole public career.

In May 2021, DeSantis signed SB 90, a Florida law restricting mail ballots and drop boxes. Civil rights groups sued nine minutes after he signed it, calling it a voter suppression bill. Lee, as Secretary of State, was a defendant. She asked the judge to throw the case out and argued she shouldn't even be a party to it. The court disagreed, ruling she was "a proper party" because her office enforced the drop-box penalties.

A year later, her office's attorneys went to court to defend the DeSantis-drawn congressional map that dismantled North Florida's District 5 — a district drawn so Black voters could elect a candidate of their choice, and held at the time by a Black Democrat. Her filing accused the people challenging it of wanting to "revert to some racially gerrymandered" map.

Restrict the ballot. Defend the map. Now: amend the Constitution over a crime that happens 30 times in 23.5 million votes.

Why this isn't harmless

Someone will read all this and think: fine, it's redundant, but what's the harm in saying out loud that only citizens vote?

The harm is what comes attached to it. Proof-of-citizenship rules are the operative half of this agenda, and they don't screen out noncitizens — there aren't any to screen out. They screen out citizens who can't produce the right paperwork: married women whose birth certificates don't match their current names, people who lost documents in a hurricane, older Americans born at home, anyone who can't afford $30 and a day off work to replace a passport. We laid that out in detail when Republicans pushed the SAVE Act, a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

Lee's amendment gives that project constitutional cover. It converts a manufactured fear into founding-document text, so that every future fight over proof-of-citizenship requirements starts from the premise that noncitizen voting is a real and pressing danger to the Republic.

It isn't. Her own press release says so, in the fine print, while the headline says the opposite.

What she isn't spending that gavel on

Lee chairs the subcommittee with authority over federal elections. Things she could be using it for: making sure hurricane-displaced Floridians can still vote, protecting election workers who now get death threats, funding county supervisors who run elections on shoestring budgets, or shortening the lines in the precincts with the longest waits.

Instead, the marquee item is a constitutional amendment to re-ban something already banned — introduced alongside Reps. Lance Gooden, Mike Haridopolos, Julia Letlow, Wesley Hunt and Russell Fry, and blessed by Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan as "a common sense proposal."

Voters in Florida's 15th District have real problems. Noncitizens voting in Hillsborough County is not one of them, and the woman who used to run Florida's elections knows it better than anybody.

Sources

Rep. Laurel Lee Introduces Constitutional Amendment to Ensure Only U.S. Citizens Vote in Federal Elections — Office of Rep. Laurel Lee, March 19, 2026
Noncitizen Voting Is Vanishingly Rare — Brennan Center for Justice

Asked If Trump Lost in 2020, Stacy Garrity Said She'd 'Rather Look Forward.' Then She Offered Him Pennsylvania's Voter Rolls.

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. Here is what she said:

"Yeah, I mean, I won, and that's what I'm most concerned about. 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. She answered a question about Trump by talking about her own 2020 race for treasurer. She asserted "irregularities" and immediately admitted she can't say what they were. She passed the question to Trump's opinion of it. And then she closed the door: I'd rather look forward.

Six years later, the woman asking Pennsylvanians to put her in charge of their state still will not say who won.

"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 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 is currently fighting the request in court.

It also isn't new. 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."
As the Capitol was being attacked the next day, she replied from her personal Facebook account to commenters 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."

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.

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 running this play. 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. The refusal to answer is the answer.

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 volunteered that 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 the tariffs were "common sense measures" that were good for the American people. She called the damage "a very short-term pain but with a very long-term gain." By February 2026, an analysis by Trade Partnership Worldwide found Trump's tariffs 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" than say plainly who won the last contested presidential election here, and that she still believes in unspecified "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.

Sheri Biggs Says South Carolina's 'Values' Mean Zero Democratic Seats. Four Out of Ten Voters There Disagree.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 22:07:55 +0000

In May 2026, at President Trump's urging, South Carolina's governor called a special session of the legislature to redraw the state's congressional map. The target was not a secret. It was the 6th District — the majority-Black seat that Rep. Jim Clyburn has held for 34 years, and the only Democratic-held congressional seat in South Carolina.

Sheri Biggs went on Newsmax to explain why the state should have none.

"South Carolina is very red. We're very strong in our beliefs and I think our map should reflect that."

And then, more plainly:

"Right now, we have one congressman that's Democrat. And I think a 7 and 0 would definitely reflect our values."

HuffPost's Kelby Vera reported the remarks on May 28, 2026.

"Our values"

Start with the phrase, because it's the whole argument.

Biggs isn't saying the current map is drawn wrong, or that the district lines split a county, or that the 6th is malapportioned. She's saying that a state whose people mostly vote Republican should have a delegation that is entirely Republican — that any seat held by the other party is a mismatch with what South Carolina believes.

That's not how representation works. It's how a one-party state works.

South Carolina is a red state. It is not a unanimous one. In 2024, Trump carried South Carolina with 58.2% — and 40.4% of the state voted for Kamala Harris. In three of the state's seven congressional districts that same night, the Democratic candidate took between 37% and 42% of the vote.

Under Biggs's standard, all of those voters should end up with zero representatives in Washington, on the grounds that their views are not the state's "values."

The people whose votes she's describing as un-South-Carolinian are, disproportionately, the Black voters who make up the majority of the 6th District.

What the plan would have done

The redistricting push came after a Supreme Court ruling weakening Voting Rights Act protections for minority districts, and Trump pressed for it directly, as the Associated Press reported on May 18, 2026. Gov. Henry McMaster's stated reason was to maximize Republican seats so Democrats couldn't take the House and try to impeach Trump.

Clyburn's response:

"It ain't about Jim Clyburn's district ... This is about turning the clock back to Jim Crow 2.0."

Republicans in her own state killed it

Here is the part that puts Biggs's position in relief.

The plan failed — and it failed because South Carolina Republicans wouldn't do it.

On May 26, 2026, state senators declined to advance the map, NPR's Sam Gringlas reported. Early voting for the June primary had already begun. State Sen. Richard Cash, a Republican, gave his reason:

"Neither my conscience or common sense is going to let me stop an election that is already underway."

Clyburn's read on it: "A critical number of Republicans did not believe in putting a man over the law."

So the line Biggs drew — that a 7-0 map would "reflect our values" — was rejected as a matter of conscience by Republican legislators in her own state. Cash's state Senate district covers northern Anderson County, inside the congressional district Biggs represents.

It's a pattern, not a soundbite

A month after the map died, Biggs went further in the same direction.

On June 25, 2026, she became one of eight original cosponsors of a constitutional amendment to repeal the 17th Amendment — the amendment that lets voters elect their own U.S. senators. Under that resolution, South Carolinians would never cast a Senate ballot again; state legislators would choose.

She also backs the SAVE Act, which would require documentary proof of citizenship — a passport or birth certificate, in person — just to register to vote.

Erase the opposition's one seat. End direct election of senators. Add a paperwork barrier to registering.

Every one of those moves takes a decision away from voters and gives it to people already holding power. When Biggs says a 7-0 map would reflect South Carolina's values, she is being straightforward about which values she means.

The thing about safe seats

There's a practical argument here too, and it should land with Republicans.

Biggs's own seat is already about as safe as a seat gets: she won SC-03 in 2024 with 71.8% of the vote. A 7-0 map doesn't just silence Democrats — it makes every Republican in the delegation answerable to a primary electorate and to nobody else, permanently.

That is a system where the only voters a member has to worry about are the ones who already agree with her. It is also a system in which a member never has much reason to hold an in-person town hall. Biggs takes constituent questions by telephone, in a format where staff decide which callers get through.

The map she wanted would have made that the whole state's arrangement.

Source

Kelby Vera, "Rep. Says South Carolina 'Values' Should Mean 0 Dem Seats," HuffPost, May 28, 2026. Photo: official congressional portrait via Wikimedia Commons.

South Carolinians Vote for a Senator on Tuesday. Sheri Biggs Signed On to a Plan to Take That Vote Away.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 22:06:01 +0000

On Tuesday, August 11, South Carolina Republicans go to the polls in a special primary to choose a nominee for the U.S. Senate seat left open when Lindsey Graham died in July.

Six weeks before that, Sheri Biggs put her name on a resolution that would make elections like that one illegal.

On June 25, 2026, Biggs became one of eight original cosponsors of H.J. Res. 198, introduced by Rep. Keith Self of Texas. Its stated purpose is one sentence: "Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to repeal the seventeenth article of amendment."

The 17th Amendment is the one that lets you vote for your senator.

What the 17th Amendment did

Before 1913, U.S. senators were not elected by the people. State legislatures picked them.

By the Senate's own official history, that system broke down over and over. Nine bribery cases came before the Senate between 1866 and 1906. Forty-five deadlocks happened in 20 states between 1891 and 1905, delaying the seating of senators. In one case, problems electing a senator in Delaware were so bad that the state legislature sent nobody to Washington for four years.

Reformers pushed for decades, and in 1913 the states ratified the 17th Amendment, which says senators shall be "elected by the people thereof."

H.J. Res. 198 would undo that. Senators would once again be chosen by state legislators, and voters would have no direct say.

The other original cosponsors are Eric Burlison, Andrew Clyde, Paul Gosar, Andy Harris, Scott Perry, Clay Higgins, and Michael Cloud. Victoria Spartz signed on four days later.

The timing, in South Carolina, is remarkable

Consider where Biggs's state actually is right now.

Lindsey Graham won the June 9 Republican primary and died on July 11. Gov. Henry McMaster appointed Graham's sister, Darline Graham, to hold the seat until January 2027. No South Carolina voter chose her. She has since made her first legislative priority a bill that would make registering to vote harder.

So South Carolina at this moment has one senator that nobody elected — and a special primary on Tuesday to fill the seat properly.

Biggs's answer to that situation is a constitutional amendment that would make being chosen by politicians the permanent way it works. Under H.J. Res. 198, South Carolinians would never again cast a ballot for a U.S. senator. The choice would belong to the members of the South Carolina General Assembly.

Who this actually empowers

The argument for repeal is that it restores federalism — that senators would answer to their states rather than to national donors.

Look at what it does in practice.

Right now, to win a Senate seat in South Carolina you have to persuade a statewide electorate. Under H.J. Res. 198, you'd have to persuade a majority of a few hundred state legislators — people who run in districts drawn by their own colleagues, and many of whom face no serious general-election competition at all.

That is not a transfer of power from Washington to the people. It's a transfer from the people to the smallest, most gerrymandered, most lobbyable body in state government — the one where a handful of well-placed donors can reach every decision-maker in a single afternoon.

The historical record on this is not ambiguous. It is the reason the 17th Amendment exists.

It fits her record

This isn't an isolated signature. Biggs's approach to who gets to vote, and whose votes count, is consistent.

She backs the SAVE Act, which would require documentary proof of citizenship — a passport or a birth certificate, presented in person — just to register to vote or update a registration. A driver's license doesn't count.

And in May 2026, appearing on Newsmax, Biggs argued South Carolina's congressional map should be redrawn to erase the state's only Democratic-held seat: "I think a 7 and 0 would definitely reflect our values."

Proof-of-citizenship to register. A map with no seats for the other side. And a constitutional amendment ending the direct election of senators.

Each one moves in the same direction: fewer people deciding, and the deciding done further from the voter.

Will it pass?

No. Repealing a constitutional amendment takes two-thirds of both chambers of Congress and ratification by 38 states. H.J. Res. 198 has nine cosponsors and sits in the House Judiciary Committee.

But a member of Congress doesn't become an original cosponsor of a constitutional amendment by accident. It's a deliberate, public statement of what she thinks the country should look like.

Sheri Biggs thinks South Carolinians should not get to vote for their senators.

South Carolinians get to vote on Tuesday. It's worth knowing what she'd do with that if she could.

Source

The resolution's official record, H.J. Res. 198 (119th Congress), introduced June 25, 2026 by Rep. Keith Self, with Rep. Sheri Biggs listed as an original cosponsor in the Library of Congress bill status record. Photo: official congressional portrait via Wikimedia Commons.

In 2021 Julia Letlow Backed Censuring Bill Cassidy for Convicting Trump. In 2026 She Took His Seat.

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. In a state Trump has carried by more than 18 points three times, that nomination is the seat.

Cassidy is one of two Republican senators Trump drove out of office this spring, along with Texas's John Cornyn.

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 three 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 going to 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 is no longer a senator. 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 just traded a senator who broke with Trump once for a senator 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)
Photo: Bryan Tarnowski / Bloomberg / Getty Images, via CNN

A Congressional Election Was Thrown Out Over Ballot Fraud in 2019. It Was Mark Harris's. Now He's Lecturing Us on Election Integrity.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:40:59 +0000

On February 11, 2026, Mark Harris stood on the floor of the House of Representatives and gave a speech about election integrity.

"What do airplanes, Costco, alcohol, tobacco, entering a nightclub, and opening a checking account all have in common? You have to show your ID! We require identification for everyday activities. Why on earth would we not require it for something as sacred as determining the future of this republic?"

He was arguing for the SAVE America Act, which would require documentary proof of U.S. citizenship and a government-issued photo ID to register and vote in federal elections. He told the Senate to "use every tool at your disposal — including the filibuster" to get it to Trump's desk.

Seven years ago, a race for Congress was thrown out and run over again because of ballot fraud.

It was his.

What actually happened in 2018

In November 2018, Harris appeared to win North Carolina's 9th District by about 900 votes over Democrat Dan McCready. He went to Washington for freshman orientation.

He never got sworn in. The North Carolina State Board of Elections refused to certify the result, and after a week of hearings in February 2019 it ordered the entire election run again.

The reason was an absentee ballot operation run on Harris's behalf in Bladen County by a political operative named Leslie McCrae Dowless.

Dowless's workers testified about what they'd been told to do: collect blank or incomplete absentee ballots from voters' homes, forge signatures, and fill in votes on down-ballot races. Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman ultimately charged Dowless with two counts of felony obstruction of justice, perjury, solicitation to commit perjury, conspiracy to obstruct justice, and illegal possession of absentee ballots — and that was his second set of charges that year. He was indicted alongside seven alleged co-conspirators, accused of directing them to sign certifications falsely swearing they'd watched voters fill out their ballots.

At the hearing, Harris agreed a new election was needed. He did not run in it, citing serious health problems. The Wake County DA declined to prosecute him, and Harris has always said he did not know Dowless was doing anything improper.

But he was warned. As WUNC has reported, Harris's own son John — a federal prosecutor — told his father not to hire Dowless. Harris hired him anyway. John Harris testified at the state board hearing, against his own father.

Harris ran again in 2024, won, and now represents North Carolina's 8th District. He sits on the House Judiciary Committee — the committee with jurisdiction over federal election law.

Voter ID would not have stopped any of it

This is the part that matters, and it isn't a matter of opinion about Harris's character. It's about what the bill does.

The SAVE America Act, as Harris described it on the floor, does two things: it requires documentary proof of citizenship to register, and photo ID to vote.

Now go back through the Bladen County scheme and find the step either of those would have caught.

The voters were real, registered, eligible North Carolinians. Proof of citizenship at registration: no effect.
The ballots were real absentee ballots, lawfully requested. Photo ID at a polling place: no effect, because nobody went to a polling place.
The fraud happened after the ballot left the elections office — in the collecting, the forging of witness signatures, and the filling in of blank races. Neither requirement touches that moment.

The one documented case of election fraud big enough to void a seat in Congress ran entirely through the part of the system the SAVE Act does not regulate. Harris of all people knows this, because he lost a seat to it.

What the bill would actually do

What proof-of-citizenship requirements do reliably is knock eligible citizens off the rolls. More than 21 million Americans of voting age don't have ready access to a passport or birth certificate. Roughly 80% of women change their last name when they marry, so their birth certificate no longer matches their legal name — and a mismatch can be enough to stop a registration cold. And under the bill it all has to be done in person, during business hours.

That's not a hypothetical objection. We wrote about Brad Finstad demanding answers about noncitizens voting in Minnesota, where a ten-year state study turned up three cases out of 13.3 million votes cast. And we wrote about South Carolina's newest senator making the SAVE Act her very first bill — using, almost word for word, the same "you show ID for a library book" argument Harris used for Costco and nightclubs.

It's a good line. It's just not an answer to the question of how ballots got forged in Bladen County.

The July version

Harris didn't stop in February. In July 2026, after the White House released claims about foreign election interference, he said the findings "should deeply disturb every American, Republican or Democrat, and demonstrate the undeniable need for stronger safeguards in our elections," adding that "the integrity of our elections and the American people's confidence in them depend on it."

Confidence in elections is a real thing worth protecting. Harris is right about that much.

He is also the reason North Carolina's 9th District went most of a year with nobody representing it in Congress — because the campaign he ran hired the man who broke the election. He has spent the years since building a career on telling other people they're the threat.

We deserve better.

Source

Rep. Mark Harris Fights to SAVE America's Elections — Office of Rep. Mark Harris, February 11, 2026. Photo: Official congressional portrait, 119th Congress.

Rogers Says Michigan Stole His Election. He Never Asked for a Recount — He Asked for Donations.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:34:23 +0000

There is a process in Michigan for a candidate who thinks an election was stolen from him. You can request a recount. You can file a lawsuit. Both cost money and both put you in front of a judge who will ask what evidence you have.

Rogers, the Republican running for Michigan's open U.S. Senate seat, did neither one.

The spokeswoman for the Michigan Secretary of State told The New York Times this week that he never formally raised concerns about the 2024 results — no recount request, no court challenge. She described the state's elections as "safe, secure."

What he did instead was tell rooms full of Republicans that a van full of ballots in Detroit "swung the election" on him. And when the president said the same thing out loud, Rogers put it in a fundraising appeal.

That's the whole story. A claim serious enough to raise money on, but not serious enough to take to a judge.

He knew better, and he said so in writing

This is the part that separates Rogers from most of the people saying these things.

He didn't stumble into 2020 confused. He was a paid CNN commentator with fourteen years in Congress behind him, including four as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee — a job whose entire purpose is telling the difference between evidence and noise.

And he used it. On January 5, 2021 — the day before the Capitol was attacked — he published a column in the Washington Post arguing that the election was over and Republicans should get back to governing. He wrote that Trump sounded "more gangster than presidential" leaning on Georgia's top election official to overturn a race Trump had lost, and he called that election free and fair. We've written before about what he put in that op-ed and what he says now.

He kept going after that. He said Trump's efforts to undermine the results were cause for concern and alarm. On Trump's responsibility for January 6, he said: "You're damn right you had responsibility for this." In 2022, while sniffing around a presidential run of his own, he called the tactics "clearly destructive" and said Trump's time had passed.

Then he decided he wanted the Senate seat.

The moment he stopped answering

The pivot has a date on it.

In June 2024, the Detroit Free Press editorial board asked Rogers a question with one true answer: did Joe Biden win the 2020 election?

He didn't answer. Asked again, he said this instead:

"Having an argument about is or isn't the guy who has been president for four years — my argument is it's been pretty much a disaster."

The board endorsed Justin Amash over him and wrote that his transactional approach to politics, his ideological inconsistency, and his obeisance to Trump made him a poor fit for the seat.

Notice the technique, because he uses it every time. He does not say the election was stolen. He declines to say it wasn't, and lets the audience fill in the rest. Two months after that interview he won the primary. Then he lost the general to Elissa Slotkin by 19,006 votes — while Trump carried Michigan on the exact same ballots.

No recount. No lawsuit. A fundraising appeal.

A year after conceding without a word about fraud, Rogers started telling Republican audiences about the van.

Christopher Thomas, who ran Michigan's elections for more than three decades and now advises Detroit's election officials, told the Times that Rogers "knows better" — that no one stole the election from him in 2024, and no one stole 2020 from Trump either. Thomas has said before that a morning batch of drop-box and Election Day registration ballots is completely routine, and that Republicans had a full complement of challengers watching Detroit's count in 2024.

Even Rogers' own supporters can't keep the story straight. Linda Lee Tarver, a Republican activist who is serving on his campaign's coalition of religious leaders and who backed the 2020 effort to overturn Michigan's results, told the Times that Rogers had opposed those efforts six years ago only because "he didn't have all the information."

That is the kindest possible reading, and it still says the man who chaired the House Intelligence Committee was the last person in the room to figure out what was going on.

Here is what he has never done, in the two years since: produce a name, a document, a sworn complaint, or a filing. His campaign didn't give the Times any evidence either. His spokeswoman changed the subject to Democrats undermining faith in elections.

What he's actually promising to do about it

This is where it stops being a grievance and starts being a policy.

When Rogers campaigned with Trump in Michigan last month, he told the crowd that if he's elected to the Senate he would help pass the president's voting legislation: nationwide voter ID, a documentary proof-of-citizenship requirement to register, and new limits on voting by mail.

Every piece of that has a cost, and it doesn't land on the people committing imaginary fraud.

Proof of citizenship. The SAVE Act would require documentary proof to register to vote. More than 21 million Americans of voting age don't have ready access to it. Married women whose current name doesn't match their birth certificate get swept in too. We broke that bill down here.
Limits on mail voting. Trump has already tried this by executive order, and two courts blocked it, pointing out that the Constitution gives states — not presidents — the power to run elections.
The fraud it's meant to stop. Trump's primetime claim that hundreds of thousands of noncitizens are registered to vote didn't hold up. We went through the numbers: noncitizen voting is already illegal and already vanishingly rare, and Republicans spent years breaking the one federal tool that could have measured it.

Rogers isn't proposing to fix a problem he documented. He's proposing to change the rules over a story he told.

Trump says it for him, and Rogers cashes it

The president has now claimed Rogers' 2024 loss was rigged at least three separate times.

At the Detroit Economic Club on January 13, standing in the city Rogers blames, Trump said it directly: "I'll be honest with you, Mike. They rigged the election on you. Mine was too big to rig. You won, I'm telling you, you won." Rogers posted the remarks on X and worked them into a fund-raising appeal.

He said it again on stage with Rogers in Michigan last month. And this past Friday, in an interview with Punchbowl News, he said it once more: "I happen to think he won." Asked to explain, he added, "No, no, I think it was a rigged deal. I think they rigged him out of it."

Trump won Michigan by 1.4 points on the same day Rogers lost it by 0.34. For the theory to work, the fraud had to be precise enough to steal a Senate seat and leave the presidential race alone.

That kind of arithmetic doesn't seem to trouble Michigan Republicans. At the same rally, John James told the crowd Trump had won Michigan "three times" — a state Trump lost in 2020 by more than 154,000 votes.

Two campaigns, running at the same time

Rogers is not actually betting on election denial to win in November. He's betting it gets him through the base while he sells something else to everyone else.

On Friday he posted a video aimed straight at Democrats — housing, education, taxes. "You have a home with us," he said.

Fred Upton, the former Michigan Republican congressman who served with Rogers and still calls him a friend, described the trajectory bluntly: "Now he's toeing the MAGA line." Upton also predicted the swerve back to the middle is coming, because that's what winning a swing state takes — voters, he said, will see "the old" Rogers again.

He has reason to think so. Epic-MRA polling in June put Trump's job approval in Michigan at 33%, with 63% disapproving — the lowest of either of his terms in the state.

So which Rogers shows up on the ballot? Michigan voters have already seen the pattern this month. Days after winning the primary, he claimed his Democratic opponent "believes America deserved 9/11" — words spoken by a Twitch streamer in 2019, not by Abdul El-Sayed, who had said the opposite on Fox News. PolitiFact rated it Pants on Fire, their worst rating.

There's a simple test for whether someone believes an election was stolen: they go to court. Rogers went to a donor list.

Source

In Michigan, a Former Trump Critic Shifts Toward Election Skepticism — Beth Reinhard, The New York Times, August 9, 2026. Photo: Brittany Greeson for The New York Times.

Virginia Foxx Wrote the Rule That Welded Voter ID Onto the Stock Trading Ban — Then Voted for a Ban That Lets Her Keep Her Coal Stock

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:30:17 +0000

There is a committee in the House of Representatives most people have never heard of, and it decides almost everything.

The Rules Committee doesn't write laws about health care or taxes. It writes the terms on which every other bill reaches the floor: how long members may debate, which amendments they may offer, and — increasingly — what text is simply deemed to have been adopted without anybody voting on it separately.

Virginia Foxx chairs that committee. Speaker Mike Johnson gave her the gavel in 2025.

In July 2026, she used it to do something worth understanding, because it explains a lot about how Congress actually works now.

Two bills go into a room. One bill comes out.

Two separate bills were sitting in the House Committee on House Administration.

One was the Stop Insider Trading Act, H.R. 7008 — the congressional stock-trading bill, the one members had spent a year promising voters they'd pass.

The other was the Voter ID Act, H.R. 9368 — a bill introduced by Rep. Bryan Steil in June 2026 that would bar election officials from handing a federal ballot to anyone who doesn't present a narrow list of government photo IDs.

They have nothing to do with each other. One is about members of Congress buying stock. The other is about whether you get to vote.

On Monday, July 20, 2026, Foxx's Rules Committee met in H-313 of the Capitol and made them one bill.

The committee's own record for H.R. 7008 lays it out plainly. It produced Rules Committee Print 119-38, described on the committee's page as "Showing the text of H.R. 7008, as reported by the Committee on House Administration with modifications, and H.R. 9368, as reported by the Committee on House Administration with modifications."

Then the rule they wrote — H. Res. 1438 — did three things to that merged text:

"Closed rule for H.R. 7008." No amendments. Not one. Nobody on the floor could move to strike the voting provisions out of the stock bill.
The merged text "shall be considered as adopted" — meaning the House never took a separate vote on whether to attach a voter-ID mandate to an ethics bill. It was simply deemed done.
"Waives all points of order" against the bill, so nobody could even object on procedural grounds.

The Rules Committee approved it by a record vote of 8-4 the same day. And the committee's page names the two members who managed the resolution on the House floor: "MANAGERS: Foxx/McGovern." She didn't just preside over the committee that wrote it. She stood on the floor and argued for it.

The rule passed the House 214-211 on July 21. Foxx voted Aye.

What the merged bill actually does

The next day, July 22, the combined bill passed 232-198. Foxx voted Yes.

Here's the part that matters. The "ban" is not a ban.

The Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan group that works on government ethics, wrote to every House member the same day the Rules Committee met, urging a NO vote on both bills. Their objection to the stock half was blunt:

"SITA does not actually ban congressional stock trading... The legislation continues to permit lawmakers to sell stocks they own, subject to a negligible public notice period."

And:

"SITA does nothing to limit lawmakers' ability to use their official actions to benefit the stocks they own, even if no trading occurs. This is because the bill allows members of Congress to keep and continue profiting from their existing assets, rather than requiring divestment."

So: members can't buy new individual stocks. They keep everything they already own. They can still sell. And the exceptions, the letter says, "swallow the rule" — cryptocurrency, commodities, bonds, and industry-specific exchange-traded funds all stay fair game.

Roll Call reported that the bill also doesn't cover the president or vice president at all.

A bill that lets you keep what you have, sell what you want, and buy sector funds instead is not a divestment law. It is a press release.

Why the voter ID half kills it

Attaching the Voter ID Act didn't make the package stronger. It made it dead.

Bolting a photo-ID voting mandate onto an ethics bill guaranteed the Senate would stall it. Republicans said so themselves. Texas Republican Chip Roy, who called the underlying measure a "good bill," told Roll Call during the debate:

"Obviously, voter ID is attached to it, so I'm not sure what that means for getting it through the Senate. I wish we hadn't done that."

The ranking Democrat on House Administration, Joseph D. Morelle of New York, called the voter ID provision a "poison pill" on the floor and said Republicans had "corrupted their so-called stock-trading bill with a decaying piece of the SAVE America Act corpse."

Foxx's committee is where that pill was inserted, behind a closed rule that made it impossible to remove.

Meanwhile the voting provisions themselves are not minor. The Campaign Legal Center's letter says the Voter ID Act's list of acceptable documents is "unreasonably narrow — and significantly more restrictive than almost every state voter ID law currently in place." It excludes student IDs, employee IDs, and public-assistance IDs. It requires Tribal IDs to carry a photo and an expiration date, which most don't, because Tribal citizenship doesn't expire. And if you show up without qualifying ID, your provisional ballot only counts if you come back within three days — or sign an affidavit that covers exactly one excuse, a religious objection to being photographed.

Citing an analysis by the Institute for Responsive Government, the letter says the requirements would force at least 35 states that already have photo-ID rules to change their election laws, and 14 states plus D.C. to overhaul their procedures entirely — with no money and no time provided, months before the 2026 midterms.

We've written before about how Foxx sells this policy in public. The day before the floor vote on the rule, she and Steil were comparing voting to buying an unlimited-pasta pass at Olive Garden. That pitch was made at the very Rules Committee hearing where the two bills were fused together.

And then there's her portfolio

A member who writes the rule for an ethics bill invites an obvious question: what does the bill do to her?

Foxx's own filings with the Clerk of the House answer it.

Her 2025 annual financial disclosure, signed May 15, 2026, lists holdings in Alliance Resource Partners — a coal producer — valued at $15,001 to $50,000, which paid her between $15,001 and $50,000 in capital gains and partnership distributions that year alone. The same filing lists Energy Transfer, Pembina Pipeline, FLEX LNG, American Electric Power and Duke Energy.

Schedule B of that filing shows she wasn't holding those coal units quietly. She traded them: bought in February 2025, sold part in March, bought again in May, again in August, sold part in September, bought twice more in November.

She kept going into 2026. A periodic transaction report she signed on June 2, 2026 discloses a purchase of Alliance Resource Partners units on May 15, 2026. A second report, signed July 10, discloses a partial sale of those units on June 18, 2026, worth $15,001 to $50,000, with capital gains over $200.

That sale was 34 days before she voted for the bill she'd written the rule for. Under that bill, everything she already owns stays hers, and selling remains permitted.

Foxx has a 0% score from the League of Conservation Voters for 2025 and a 4% lifetime score. She votes the way a coal shareholder would vote. She is, per her own filings, a coal shareholder.

WRAL, which analyzed the North Carolina delegation's trading for its coverage of the July vote, found Foxx's disclosed ranges implied potential 2025 profits of up to $107,000. It also reported that she did not respond to its questions about her position on the bill or whether she would voluntarily follow a stricter standard.

None of this is illegal. That's the point. The bill she helped push through the House is designed so that none of it would need to change.

The pattern

Foxx is not the only member who voted for a stock-trading bill that wouldn't have touched their own conduct. Rob Bresnahan took a victory lap on the same vote after dumping Medicaid stock and then voting to cut Medicaid. Blake Moore broke the stock disclosure law more than 70 times in his first six months and paid a $200 fine.

What makes Foxx's case different is the gavel.

Every other member could only vote on the package they were handed. Foxx chairs the committee that decided what was in it, decided nobody could amend it, decided the merger would be "considered as adopted" without a vote of its own — and then went to the floor to manage it.

She has represented North Carolina's 5th District since 2005. She has not held an in-person town hall since 2010, and told Fox News in 2025 that town halls are "just an opportunity for people to yell at their member of Congress."

So there is no room in her schedule to be asked about any of this. There is, apparently, room to trade coal.

We deserve better.

Source

House Committee on Rules, H.R. 7008 – Stop Insider Trading Act (rule text, committee action, and managers), with roll call votes from the Office of the Clerk and financial disclosures from the Clerk of the House. Photo: official congressional portrait via Wikimedia Commons.

Brad Finstad Wrote to Minnesota's Election Chief About Noncitizens Voting. A 10-Year Study Found Three Cases Out of 13.3 Million Votes.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 08:26:05 +0000

On Friday, Brad Finstad sent a letter to Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon about the "potential of people who are not legally eligible to vote registering and casting ballots in Minnesota elections, including people illegally in the United States."

According to KAAL, Finstad singled out Minnesota's Driver's License for All law, which lets all Minnesota residents get a standard Class D license or ID card without proving their immigration status. He asked Simon for more information about what his office is doing to keep Minnesota's elections secure.

Minnesota already has an answer. It's been public for a while, and it comes with numbers.

The number

In October 2025, Simon addressed exactly this claim. He pointed to a University of St. Thomas study covering a decade of Minnesota elections.

Out of 13.3 million votes cast over ten years, the study turned up three examples of noncitizens attempting to vote in Minnesota.

And Simon added one more detail:

"And by the way, none of the three were here in this country illegally."

None of them. Not one of the three cases involved a person in the country illegally — which is the specific thing Finstad's letter raises.

Simon's summary of the problem:

"This is just not something that happens more than very, very occasionally and for good reason."

The "for good reason" part

The reason is that noncitizen voting is already a serious federal crime, and Minnesota already checks.

Simon has pointed out that a noncitizen voting is a deportable felony. A person without permanent legal status who casts a ballot risks being removed from the country — to cast one vote, out of millions, in an election that one vote will not decide.

Minnesota also runs post-election reviews that identify noncitizens on the rolls, and refers those cases to county attorneys. That is how anyone knows the number is three. The system Finstad is writing letters about is the same system that produced the data showing there is no problem.

And having a driver's license does not make someone a registered voter. That's the gap Finstad's letter treats as a pipeline, and it's the gap Simon's numbers say isn't being used.

Finstad is not first, and this is not new

The Republican effort to tie Minnesota's driver's license law to voter fraud has been running for a while. The House Administration Committee sent Simon an oversight letter on January 22, 2026 on election integrity, and Simon testified before a House committee in April 2026.

So Simon has already been asked, in writing and under oath, by a committee of Congress. Finstad's letter in August asks him again.

That's the tell. When a question has been asked and answered with data, and it keeps getting asked anyway, the asking is the point.

What "election integrity" letters actually do

Letters like this don't change election law. They do three things.

They generate a headline. Finstad's office put out a press release about the letter. Local TV picked it up. The story that lands in a voter's head is "congressman raises concerns about noncitizens voting" — not "study finds three cases in ten years."

They build the case for restrictions. The through-line from "we're concerned noncitizens might be voting" to "everyone must produce a passport or birth certificate to register" is short and well-worn. That's the SAVE Act, and we've written about how the talking points travel and what it would actually do to voters — including married women whose current legal name doesn't match their birth certificate.

They put a target on an immigrant community. Driver's License for All exists so that people who are going to drive to work anyway do it with a license, insurance, and a road test. Tying it to voter fraud isn't an argument about ballots. It's an argument about who belongs.

The problems Minnesota's 1st District actually has

Finstad represents southern Minnesota — farm country. His constituents have been living through a genuine crisis, and it isn't at the polls.

We've written before about Finstad and the tariffs that hit his own farmers. The farm bill just failed in the Senate Agriculture Committee, leaving growers without a reauthorized farm bill since 2018.

Those are real, expensive, unresolved problems in his district right now.

The letter he sent on Friday was about three people over ten years, none of whom were in the country illegally.

Source

"Rep. Brad Finstad sends letter expressing concern over Minnesota election security," KAAL/ABC 6 News. Simon's remarks: "Sec State Simon: driver's license doesn't mean non-citizens vote," WCCO Radio, October 2025. Photo: KAAL.

Blake Moore Helped Launch Utah's Anti-Gerrymandering Movement. When a Judge Finally Enforced It, He Turned On It.

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 15:20:06 +0000

In 2017, before he ever ran for office, Blake Moore was one of the original Republican co-chairs of Better Boundaries — the Utah group formed to take congressional map-drawing away from politicians. He was one of the original signatories on the application to gather signatures putting Proposition 4 on the ballot.

Utah voters passed it in 2018. It created an independent redistricting commission and standards for fair maps.

Then the Legislature replaced it with a version of its own and drew a map splitting Salt Lake County four ways. Activist groups sued in 2022. Last November a judge sided with them and adopted the plaintiffs' map — which cut Utah's solid Republican seats from four to three and created a Democratic-leaning district covering most of Salt Lake County.

The reform Moore helped start finally worked. And Moore, by then the fifth-ranking Republican in the U.S. House, criticized the ruling and called on Better Boundaries to stand down.

What he says now

Moore has not renounced Prop 4 outright. Asked about it, he says: "I don't regret taking a principled position. I think every state should reckon with this."

But look at what he has actually done since the map came down:

He publicly opposed the court rulings, arguing the judge should have sent the map back to the Legislature to redraw rather than adopt the plaintiffs' version.
He called on Better Boundaries to stop its campaign — the campaign to block a Republican effort to repeal Prop 4.
He now says he intends to be "the most credible voice" on a future constitutional amendment clarifying that ballot initiatives cannot override lawmakers' policy authority.

That last one is the tell. Proposition 4 was a ballot initiative overriding lawmakers' policy authority. That is the entire mechanism. Moore is not just unhappy with one judge's map — he wants to amend the state constitution so that the tool he used in 2017 cannot be used the same way again.

You can hold the position that courts overstepped. You cannot simultaneously claim you don't regret the principled position while working to disarm the instrument that made it real.

His proposed fix for gerrymandering is not a fix

In May 2026, Moore sat with the KSL and Deseret News editorial boards and said he wants to end the national redistricting arms race. His words:

"I think the American people are seeing how much of a race to the bottom that constant gerrymandering every two years will do to us, and I want to be a part of it not existing."

Then he was asked how. His answer:

"I think all 50 governors in 2030 should get together and say: 'Enough's enough. We're all going to stick to some very basic standards in place.'"

Fifty governors. Voluntarily. In four years. Of both parties, in the middle of the most aggressive redistricting war in modern American history, with no enforcement mechanism and nothing binding anyone to anything.

Moore is a member of the United States House of Representatives — the one institution that could actually set national standards for how congressional districts are drawn. He is not a bystander to it. He is the House Republican Conference Vice Chair, the fifth-ranking Republican in the chamber. And his proposal is that somebody else handle it, later, on the honor system.

To be fair: he did break with his party once

Moore's record here is not uniformly bad, and it should be said plainly.

When Texas Republicans moved to redraw their map mid-decade in August 2025 at Trump's urging, Moore put out a statement against it: "It undermines established norms and gives blue states a glaring green light to do the same. Partisan gerrymandering is clearly done by both sides, but to allow this wildfire to spread mid-decade is a step too far."

He was right, and almost nobody in his party said it. He has also called out his own side's double standard — noting how "ironic and even frustrating" it is that Republicans cheered a Virginia court for stepping into a map fight there while blasting the Utah court for doing the same thing here.

That is a real observation, honestly made. It also makes the rest harder to explain, not easier. He can see the double standard clearly enough to name it in an interview. He just lands on the side of it anyway when it is his own map, his own state, and his own primary.

Which is where the primary comes in

State Rep. Karianne Lisonbee challenged Moore in the June 2026 Republican primary and made his Better Boundaries history the centerpiece, pinning the new Democratic seat on him personally. Utah Republican delegates then rejected him at the state convention on April 25, giving Lisonbee 61.5% to Moore's 33.7%. The fifth-ranking Republican in the House lost his own party's convention vote and only reached the ballot because he had gathered signatures.

He won the June primary anyway.

He survived. But the sequence tells you what the pressure was, and which direction it pushed him: away from the reform, toward an amendment that would neuter citizen initiatives, and toward a national "solution" that requires nothing of him.

Utah is not the only place where this has played out. In Missouri this month, voters rejected by 80% a measure to hand one congressional district veto power over citizen initiatives — the same instinct, put directly to voters, and buried. Voters like being able to override the legislature. Legislators, and the members of Congress they produce, keep trying to take it back.

The bottom line

Blake Moore in 2017: helped launch the movement to stop politicians from drawing their own districts.

Blake Moore in 2026: opposes the ruling that enforced it, asks the group he co-founded to stand down, wants to amend the constitution so initiatives can't override legislators, and offers as his gerrymandering fix a voluntary 2030 handshake among fifty governors.

The principle didn't change when the facts did. It changed when the map did.

Source

Blake Moore says it's up to states to stop 'race to the bottom' on gerrymandering — KSL, May 12, 2026. Photo: Kristin Murphy, Deseret News.
New Utah map creates primary challenge for House GOP leader Moore — Deseret News, April 20, 2026

Darline Graham Was Appointed to Honor Her Brother's Legacy. Her First Big Move Was to Break With Him — to Make Voting Harder.

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 14:04:00 +0000

Darline Graham has never held elective office. She was appointed to the U.S. Senate by South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster two days after her brother Lindsey Graham died, at President Trump's urging.

On Tuesday, August 11, 2026, South Carolina Republicans decide whether she keeps the seat for a full six-year term. She needs more than 50% to avoid an August 25 runoff, and she's running against nine challengers — including U.S. Reps. Ralph Norman and Russell Fry, and former governor Mark Sanford.

She has largely avoided the press. So the small number of things she has said publicly are worth reading closely, because they're nearly the entire record.

The ad

Graham's 30-second introductory ad is the first thing most South Carolinians will learn about her. Here it is, essentially in full:

"I'm honored to serve South Carolina and grateful for President Trump's endorsement, and I'll work hard every day to earn it. I'm a conservative Republican, and I believe this: every life is precious. Men don't belong in women's sports, and only American citizens should vote in our elections."

That's the whole pitch. Not the ports, not Medicaid, not hurricane recovery, not the cost of groceries. An abortion line, a line about transgender athletes, and a line implying noncitizens are voting.

Noncitizens are already barred from voting in state, federal, and almost all local elections. It has been illegal the entire time.

She made the connection between the two explicit on X, writing: "Democrats refuse to protect our elections or our children from the transgender agenda."

Those are two unrelated things welded into one sentence. There is no version of the SAVE America Act that has anything to do with transgender people. The link isn't policy — it's just two applause lines stapled together, aimed at the most reliable primary voters she can find.

Breaking with her brother, on purpose

The more revealing moment came at the Republican Senate debate in Columbia on Monday, August 3 — her first real public display of policy views since joining Congress.

She was asked how Republicans should pass the SAVE America Act. Her answer:

"One of the first things I did was co-sponsor the SAVE America Act. As I said earlier, I'm willing to stay through recess to get it done. What's up with recess anyway? Who gets a month off from work? I think we should stay up there and work and get it done."

Then this:

"This is where I differ from my brother, getting rid of the filibuster to get this done. Because eventually the Democrats are going to get rid of it anyway."

Sit with the shape of that. Trump's stated reason for wanting her in the seat was that "there would be nobody better to honor the legacy of her beloved brother, Lindsey." Within about three weeks, her signature position was a public break with him.

And she picked the one to break on that Lindsey Graham had been most explicit about. Earlier this year he said: "Filibuster changes, I think, change the Senate. It may happen one day, but I don't think it's a good idea."

Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Sen. John Cornyn have also strongly opposed abolishing the filibuster. Trump wants it gone as a pathway to the SAVE Act. Graham chose Trump. She said flatly that she is "100 percent behind" the president.

She repeated it on X: "If the filibuster is the only thing standing in the way of passing the SAVE America Act, then I'm a YES vote to end it. There's too much at stake."

So a senator who has held office for a matter of weeks, and never won an election, is prepared to permanently rewrite how the Senate works — in order to pass a bill making it harder to register and vote.

This is the whole job so far

The SAVE Act isn't an afterthought for her. It's the through line.

Days into the job, the first bill she cosponsored was the SAVE Act — and the argument she made for it got the bill wrong.

Then, at 4:36 in the morning on Saturday, August 8, she was one of 52 Republicans who voted to advance a photo ID requirement for federal elections. That measure failed, 52 to 46.

She also inherited her brother's leadership PAC — the money apparatus he spent decades building — without having run a single campaign of her own.

Appointed to the seat. Handed the PAC. Endorsed by the president. And the agenda she chose with all of it is a bill that could keep millions of eligible citizens from voting.

What South Carolina isn't hearing about

The SAVE America Act would require documentary proof of citizenship to register and a photo ID to vote. A national survey by the Brennan Center and its partners found that 21.3 million American citizens of voting age don't have ready access to a document proving citizenship.

Those are the people the bill actually touches. Not noncitizens — citizens whose birth certificate is in a box somewhere, or whose married name doesn't match it.

Graham hasn't made a public case for why that tradeoff is worth it. She hasn't had to. She's shied away from the press, ridden a presidential endorsement, and put two culture-war lines in an ad.

If she gets to 50% on Tuesday, that's the campaign that earned a six-year term.

Source

"Darline Graham Embraces Anti-Trans Attacks in Senate Bid" by John Riley, Metro Weekly, August 6, 2026. Debate and filibuster quotes from "Darline Graham breaks with brother on nuking filibuster" by Ashleigh Fields, The Hill, August 4, 2026.

A Judge Found Trump's Voter Database Was Flagging Real Citizens. Abe Hamadeh's Answer Was to Try to Remove Her.

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 13:59:11 +0000

On June 22, 2026, a federal judge in Washington read 75 pages' worth of evidence and shut down a Trump administration program that was flagging American citizens as noncitizens and getting them dropped from voter rolls.

Fifteen days later, Arizona's congressman for the 8th District moved to throw her off the bench.

What the judge actually found

Judge Sparkle Sooknanan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia blocked the administration's 2025 overhaul of a federal system called SAVE — the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database, built back in 1986 to check immigration status for government benefits, not to screen voters.

What changed in 2025 is the part that matters. Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency bolted Social Security data onto the system and added a bulk-search option, so states could run their entire voter rolls through it at once.

Sooknanan found that the government had "haphazardly" combined and repurposed "the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable," and had flunked compliance with the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act. Her summary of it:

"The federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote."

This was not a hypothetical. In Texas, 2,724 people were flagged as potential noncitizens in October 2025. In Travis County alone, 97 were flagged — and officials confirmed that at least 11 of them were, in fact, U.S. citizens. The League of Women Voters and other voting groups brought the case because their own members had been wrongly labeled noncitizens and had their registrations cancelled.

That is what Hamadeh calls a "direct assault on election integrity."

What Hamadeh filed

Abraham Hamadeh announced on July 7, 2026 that he had introduced a resolution to remove Sooknanan from the federal bench.

His statement:

"Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan's egregious overreaching ruling blocking President Trump's common-sense effort to verify the citizenship of those who want to vote in our elections was the final straw. This is a blatant and unlawful subversion of the President's executive authority and a direct assault on election integrity."

"Judges who weaponize their bench to interfere with the President's constitutional duties must be held accountable."

Notice what's missing. Nowhere in the press release, and nowhere in the excerpt of the resolution his own office published, does Hamadeh address the actual finding — that the database was labeling citizens as noncitizens and costing them their registrations. He doesn't dispute it. He doesn't mention it.

The closest his resolution comes is a strange, hedged phrase: the judge obstructed "a program intended by its supporters to strengthen election integrity." Even his own paperwork won't claim the program worked.

The line about her passport

There's one more sentence in Hamadeh's press release worth reading closely. Right after the quotes, his office added:

"Sooknanan, who holds dual citizenship in the United States and Trinidad and Tobago, is an appointee to the bench by President Joe Biden."

Her dual citizenship has nothing to do with whether the SAVE database violated the Privacy Act. It has nothing to do with any charge in the articles of impeachment. It's in there for one reason: to suggest a federal judge is not really one of us.

This is a man who knows exactly how that works. When Hamadeh ran in the 2024 Republican primary for this seat, a group backing his rival Blake Masters ran an ad that said: "Dishonest Abe claims that 'America was founded on Islamic principles,' not the Judeo-Christian values that made America great. We have enough terrorist sympathizers in Congress." The campaign materials paired that line with a photo of Hamadeh in Mecca on his Hajj pilgrimage — on street signs.

Hamadeh knows exactly what it feels like to have his loyalty questioned because of his family's faith and where they came from. He put a line about a judge's second passport in a press release anyway.

He wants the database and the law

Two weeks after moving to impeach the judge who stopped the database, Hamadeh pressed the Senate to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act — the bill that would require every American to show proof of citizenship and a photo ID to register, and would largely wipe out mail-in voting.

Read how his own office describes the way that bill got this far: the House "advanced it by attaching its key provisions to both the NDAA and Budget Resolutions." That's not a clean up-or-down vote on making voting harder. That's bolting it onto a military spending bill and a budget bill — exactly the back-door maneuver we've documented before.

So the plan is both halves at once: a federal database that has already mislabeled citizens, and a federal law that puts new paperwork between you and the ballot. We've laid out what that bill would actually do — it's a solution to a problem that doesn't exist, and it could keep millions of eligible citizens from registering.

In his own county, the numbers didn't hold up

Hamadeh's district sits inside Maricopa County. So does the clearest Arizona example of the database he's defending.

Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap started running voter rolls through the expanded SAVE system in August 2025. In February 2026 he announced he'd identified 137 potential noncitizens, including 60 who had previously voted. As Cronkite News reported in July, his office has not said whether any of them were confirmed to be noncitizens.

Heap also used the tool on more than 61,000 Arizona voters whose registrations got caught up in a 2004-era driver's-license records mix-up — a paperwork problem, not a fraud problem.

The head of Arizona's Clean Elections Commission, Thomas Collins, put the real risk plainly: "I think the biggest risk is preventing a qualified voter from voting." He added that he doubts limits on the SAVE tool will change much, because there's no evidence noncitizens have registered in significant numbers.

And Hamadeh has been in Heap's corner throughout. In February 2026 he issued a statement attacking the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors over its handling of the recorder's office.

He's not going to win, and he knows it

Removing a federal judge takes a majority in the House and then two-thirds of the Senate. That is not going to happen. Hamadeh's resolution isn't a plan — it's a press release with a bill number.

It's also becoming a house style. His fellow Arizona Republican Eli Crane moved to impeach the judge who blocked DOGE from Americans' Treasury records — and then Elon Musk wrote him a maximum campaign check. In Tennessee, Andy Ogles filed articles against a judge whose spokesman's own words gave away the reason: she was trying to "subvert the will of the President". Hamadeh's resolution uses almost the same language — a judge "substituting the judgment of a single unelected judge for that of the duly elected Executive Branch."

That's not a constitutional argument. That's a complaint that courts are allowed to tell a president no.

Why this should worry Arizonans specifically

Arizona voters approved a proof-of-citizenship requirement in 2004, and state officials have leaned on the SAVE database ever since. Arizona has also been the epicenter of false claims about the 2020 election.

Hamadeh is part of that history, not a bystander to it. After losing the 2022 Attorney General's race by 280 votes, he filed lawsuit after lawsuit trying to reverse it, and lost every one. The Arizona Supreme Court sanctioned him and the Republican National Committee for "misrepresenting facts to the court" and ordered him to pay over $55,000 toward his opponents' legal bills.

A judge told him his claims weren't supported by evidence. He responded by attacking the court. A judge has now told the Trump administration its voter database wasn't supported by reliable data. He is responding the same way.

The people who lose in this fight aren't judges. They're the citizens who show up to vote and find out a database decided they weren't citizens.

We deserve better.

Source

Abe Hamadeh moves to impeach Judge Sparkle Sooknanan after SAVE ruling — Kaelan Deese, Washington Examiner, July 7, 2026. Arizona reporting: "Federal SAVE database in limbo, disrupting Arizona voter citizenship checks" — Katie O'Shaughnessy, Cronkite News, July 9, 2026 (linked above).

At 4:36 in the Morning, 52 Republican Senators Voted to Put a New Hurdle Between You and the Ballot Box

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 13:55:00 +0000

The U.S. Senate stayed up all night on Friday. Then, at 4:36 in the morning on Saturday, August 8, 2026, it took a vote on whether Americans should have to show a photo ID to vote in a federal election.

The vote failed, 52 to 46. It needed 60. Every Democrat who was there voted no.

Then the senators went home for a month.

That's the part worth sitting with. The Senate pulled an all-nighter, confirmed a new attorney general, passed a bill to keep the government's lights on — and squeezed in one more vote on making it harder to cast a ballot. Then everyone left for August recess.

The bill was three days old

The measure was S. 5271, and it is about as fresh as legislation gets. According to the official record at Congress.gov, it was introduced on August 5, 2026 — three days before the Senate voted on it. Its full official title is "A bill to amend the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to require voters to provide photo identification."

The sponsor was Jon Husted, the Republican senator from Ohio.

It picked up exactly two cosponsors, both on August 7 — the day before the vote. They were Ashley Moody of Florida and Dan Sullivan of Alaska.

So: a bill written by one senator, signed onto by two more, introduced on a Wednesday, and voted on before dawn on a Saturday. That is not how you pass a law. That is how you stage a vote.

What "show your ID" actually means for millions of people

Here's the thing about a photo ID requirement. It sounds like nothing. Most of us have a driver's license in our wallet right now. So what's the problem?

The problem is the people who don't — and the people whose ID doesn't match.

A national study from the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement at the University of Maryland found that about 2.6 million U.S. citizens over 18 have no government-issued photo ID of any kind.

And the bigger number is the one nobody talks about. That same study estimated that 34.5 million people don't have a driver's license or state ID card with their current name and address on it.

Think about who that is. Someone who just moved. Someone who got married and changed their name. A college student. A young person who's lived at three addresses in two years. An older widow who never updated her license. None of them committed fraud. All of them could get turned away.

Noncitizens, meanwhile, are already barred from voting in state, federal and almost all local elections. That has been true this whole time.

This is the same fight, wearing a different hat

Husted's photo ID bill isn't a standalone idea. It's a piece broken off from the SAVE America Act — the bigger Republican bill that would require voters to show documentary proof of citizenship when they register and a photo ID when they vote.

We've written about that bill a lot, because Republicans keep bringing it back. The SAVE Act is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist — and the citizenship-document half of it is even harsher than the ID half. The Brennan Center and its partners found that 21.3 million American citizens of voting age don't have ready access to a document proving citizenship.

President Trump has pushed hard for it. He wanted the Senate to skip its recess and stay in Washington until it passed. Republican leaders told him repeatedly that the votes aren't there — and Saturday morning proved them right.

Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, one of the loudest voices for the bill, wasn't discouraged. "This fight's not over," he said afterward. "We're just getting started."

Believe him. Republicans have tried to attach voter restrictions to an affordable housing bill and to a party-line budget bill. When the front door is locked, they try the windows.

The fifteen we track

Fifteen of the Republicans on this site voted yes on Saturday morning. Here they are, with what we already knew about each one.

Jon Husted wrote the bill. This is the same senator whose state lost more Obamacare coverage than any other in America — a man with plenty of real problems back home who chose to spend his August writing a new voting restriction instead.

Ashley Moody and Dan Sullivan put their names on it as cosponsors the day before the vote.

Darline Graham of South Carolina was sworn in only days ago to fill her late brother's seat — and the very first bill she cosponsored was the SAVE Act. Her South Carolina primary is Tuesday, August 11.

Roger Marshall of Kansas spent the week before this vote demanding a floor vote on the SAVE Act on Fox News while describing it to Kansans as a simple "voter ID" bill. It isn't, and this week's separate photo ID vote makes that plain: if the SAVE Act were just voter ID, Husted wouldn't have needed to write a voter ID bill.

Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, now running for governor, has his own history of repeating SAVE Act talking points that don't survive contact with the bill text.

And the rest voted yes without much comment: Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Susan Collins of Maine, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi, Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, Jim Risch of Idaho, and Mike Rounds of South Dakota.

Two senators didn't vote at all: Republican Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who is recovering from a health issue, and Democrat Peter Welch of Vermont.

What they didn't do before they left

It's worth naming what else was on the table that week, because it tells you what the Senate treats as urgent.

The Senate did pass a stopgap funding bill, 90 to 6, to keep the government running through December 11 — though the House passed a different version, so that isn't settled. It confirmed Todd Blanche as attorney general, with Collins and Sen. Lisa Murkowski voting no. It passed a Russia sanctions package, 86 to 11.

What it did not do was lower anyone's grocery bill, or their rent, or their electric bill, or their premiums.

It did find time, at 4:36 a.m., to vote on making people prove who they are at the polls.

Fifty-two Republicans thought that was worth staying up for.

Source

Reporting by Shauneen Miranda for States Newsroom: "US Senate leaves town for recess after passing stopgap spending bill, blocking photo ID for voting" (Michigan Advance, August 7, 2026). Photo by Jennifer Shutt/States Newsroom. Roll call details from Senate vote #231.

Gregg Hull Wants Voter ID Across New Mexico — the State That Wrote the First Native American Voting Rights Act

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 18:30:00 +0000

New Mexico's Secretary of State answers the voter ID question in one sentence: "You do not have to present identification to vote in a statewide election."

There is one exception the state itself flags. Some New Mexico cities require ID in their own municipal elections — and the example the Secretary of State names is Rio Rancho.

Which is where Gregg Hull was mayor for twelve years, and it's the model he wants to take statewide.

What his campaign says

Hull's "Election Integrity" page is unusually direct for a candidate who has been famously vague on almost everything else. It says, in his own words:

"I support Voter ID. New Mexicans deserve election laws that protect legally registered voters, strengthen confidence in the process, and make it clear that every eligible vote is counted accurately and fairly. Voter ID is a common-sense safeguard that should be applied in a fair, consistent, and accessible way across the state."

And on his record:

"As Mayor of Rio Rancho, I stood up for our community's voter-approved election protections, including photo identification requirements in city elections. When efforts were made to move Rio Rancho's local elections into a statewide system that would have weakened local control and removed local Voter ID protections, I opposed that change."

Then the operative promise:

"I will work to support uniform enforcement of voter identification requirements, absentee ballot handling, ballot security, and election procedures statewide."

Read together, that's a plan: New Mexico currently has no statewide voter ID requirement, and Hull says the rules should be uniform statewide and that he supports voter ID. There is only one direction that goes.

Why New Mexico, specifically, is a bad place to try this

Most states debating voter ID are arguing about DMV lines. New Mexico's debate is about something else, and the state has already worked through it.

In 2023 New Mexico passed House Bill 4, the New Mexico Voting Rights Act. Inside it was the first Native American Voting Rights Act written into any state's election code. It exists because of a specific, documented problem: in rural New Mexico, many Native residents have what the law calls noncity-style mailing addresses — a highway number, a P.O. box, or a description of where a house sits. Those addresses get rejected by systems built for a street address and a ZIP code.

So HB 4 let government buildings serve as mailing addresses for voter registration, let tribes designate alternate registration locations on tribal land, and protected polling places on tribal lands from being eliminated or consolidated without the written agreement of the nation, tribe, or pueblo.

That is the state legislature identifying an ID-and-address barrier and legislating around it — three years ago.

New Mexico's existing rules already accommodate this. When ID is required — for a first-time voter who registered by mail without providing one — the acceptable list is broad: a photo ID, or a utility bill, bank statement, government check, paycheck, student ID, or a government document including a tribal ID showing name and address.

A "uniform" statewide photo ID requirement doesn't add a safeguard to that system. It removes the flexibility that was built into it on purpose.

The problem it solves

Hull's page frames voter ID as being about confidence: election laws that "strengthen confidence in the process."

Notice what's not in there. There's no claim of fraud in New Mexico, no case, no number. The argument is that people feel uncertain, and that the fix for that feeling is a new requirement on every voter in the state.

That's the same argument being made everywhere. We've traced where it leads. The SAVE Act — the national push to require documentary proof of citizenship in person just to register — could block tens of millions of eligible Americans, starting with the roughly 80% of women whose last name no longer matches their birth certificate. It's the same structure: a documentation requirement sold as reassurance, paid for by whoever can't produce the document.

He wouldn't answer the direct question

Here's the part that makes this worth writing about.

When iVoterGuide sent Hull a 34-question candidate survey, one of the questions was: "People should be able to vote without photo identification."

He declined to answer it — along with all 33 others, covering abortion, health care, immigration, education, guns, and more. His answer to every single one is recorded as "Did not answer."

So the position is on his website, where his supporters will find it, and absent from the questionnaire where a skeptical voter might. That's not an oversight. That's a choice about who gets to know what.

It fits a pattern we've already documented on his page: when he entered the race, the Santa Fe New Mexican noted that his campaign website "makes no mention he is a Republican."

"Local control" cuts both ways

There's one more thing worth pointing out, because Hull makes an argument on his own page that undercuts his conclusion.

He defends Rio Rancho's photo ID rule on local control grounds: "Communities should not have their voter-approved election safeguards stripped away by state overreach... state policy should respect the will of those voters instead of forcing one-size-fits-all changes."

That's a coherent principle. It's just the exact opposite of "uniform enforcement of voter identification requirements... statewide."

If Rio Rancho's voters get to decide their own election rules, so do the voters of every other community in New Mexico — including the pueblos and nations whose polling places HB 4 specifically protects from being changed without their written consent. You can have local control or you can have a statewide mandate. Hull's page asks for both, one paragraph apart.

New Mexico built its election law around the people hardest to reach, and it did that on purpose. Gregg Hull wants to standardize that away, and he'd rather you read it on his website than hear him say it. We deserve better.

Sources

Gregg Hull for Governor — Election Integrity — his own campaign's stated position
Voting FAQs — New Mexico Secretary of State, on current ID requirements
The New Mexico Voting Rights Act Unpacked — Caroline Sullivan, Democracy Docket, March 22, 2023. Photo: Source New Mexico.

In the Middle of a Pandemic, James Gallagher Went to Court to Stop California From Mailing Every Voter a Ballot. The Case Carries His Name.

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 18:14:00 +0000

In 2020, with COVID-19 spreading and polling places closing, Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered that every registered voter in California be mailed a ballot. The point was simple: nobody should have to choose between their health and their vote.

James Gallagher, then a state assemblyman, went to court to stop it.

He and fellow assemblyman Kevin Kiley sued the governor, calling the order an "illegal power grab." The case is named Gallagher v. Newsom.

What happened in court

Gallagher won the first round. In November 2020, a Sutter County judge ruled that Newsom had exceeded his emergency authority, finding that the California Emergency Services Act does not let a governor amend statutes or write new ones. The ruling did not change the results of the 2020 election.

He did not get to keep the win. On May 5, 2021, California's Third District Court of Appeal struck down that injunction and upheld the governor's broad authority to issue emergency orders during the COVID-19 emergency.

It's worth being precise about what the case was and wasn't. It was a separation-of-powers argument — who gets to make California law, the governor by decree or the Legislature — and it is a real constitutional question that a trial judge agreed with him on. It was not, on its face, an argument that Californians shouldn't be allowed to vote.

But the thing he was asking a court to stop was ballots going to voters. In a pandemic. That was the practical relief sought, whatever the legal theory.

The part that grew

The lawsuit didn't stay narrow. It started as a challenge to the vote-by-mail order and expanded into an attack on the governor's power to issue emergency orders at all — the same authority behind the state's entire pandemic response.

That fits the rest of his record from those years. When California considered removing the personal belief exemption for the COVID vaccine in schools, Gallagher called it "wrong and an unconscionable overreach into the family over a virus that poses very minimal threat to young children."

He runs on it

Gallagher has spent years telling voters he is the man who fought vote-by-mail, and he's right about that. It is one of the things his name is known for in California Republican politics. The case literally bears it.

That's worth sitting with, because most politicians would rather be known for what they built. Gallagher's signature legal achievement is a lawsuit to stop ballots from being mailed during a public health emergency — one that was ultimately reversed on appeal.

Where it points now

The instinct in that case was to find a forum that would override a decision he'd lost politically. In 2020 that forum was a California court, arguing the California Legislature held the power.

Now he's in Congress, and the forum has changed. Last month he put an amendment on the House floor asking the federal government to study how it could "preempt or otherwise mitigate" state fuel policies — Washington overriding Sacramento. It failed by four votes.

Different venue, same move: when California's own institutions produce an outcome he doesn't like, go somewhere else and ask them to undo it.

Why it matters

Gallagher is now a member of Congress at a moment when access to the ballot is under sustained pressure nationally — new documentary proof-of-citizenship requirements, purges, and fights over mail voting in state after state.

His record on the question is not a guess. He sued to stop a state from mailing ballots to its own registered voters during the deadliest public health emergency in a century, and he tells voters about it on purpose.

Californians deserve a representative who makes voting easier, not one whose best-known case made it harder. We deserve better.

Source

"Republicans sue California Governor Gavin Newsom, claim his vote-by-mail order is an 'illegal power grab'" — CBS News, 2020. Trial ruling via KRCR; appellate reversal in Gallagher v. Newsom, Third District Court of Appeal, May 5, 2021. Official portrait, 119th Congress.

Christine Drazan Wrote the Bill to End Oregon's Vote-by-Mail. She Describes It Very Differently.

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 17:35:00 +0000

Oregon has voted by mail for a quarter century. Voters chose it themselves. In November 1998, Ballot Measure 60 passed 757,204 to 334,021 — better than two to one — making Oregon the first state in the country to run all its elections by mail. By the 2000 presidential election, turnout hit 79 percent.

Christine Drazan wants to undo it.

In the 2025 legislative session, she was the lead sponsor of House Bill 3872. Her name is first on the bill: "Sponsored by Representatives DRAZAN, RESCHKE, HELFRICH, BOICE, YUNKER."

What the bill actually says

You don't have to take anyone's characterization of this. The Legislature publishes the bill's own digest. Here it is, in full:

"Makes in-person voting on the date of an election the standard method for conducting an election. Allows an elector to request a ballot that may be voted by mail if the elector is unable to vote in person on the date of the election. Retains vote by mail as the primary method for conducting elections for military and overseas electors and for electors who have a mailing address outside of Oregon. Requires electors to present valid government-issued identification when appearing in-person to vote or when requesting a ballot be sent by mail. Requires all ballots to be returned by the date of an election. Removes a requirement that the state pay postage for ballots returned by mail."

Break that into what it does to an actual Oregon voter:

Mail voting stops being the default. If you want to vote by mail, you have to be "unable to vote in person on the date of the election" and request a ballot.
You need a government-issued photo ID — not just to vote in person, but even to request a mail ballot.
Ballots must be back by Election Day. Oregon currently counts ballots that arrive up to seven days late as long as they were postmarked on time. That grace period disappears.
The state stops paying your return postage. Voting by mail would cost you a stamp again.
It refers the whole thing to voters at the next general election.

Now here's how she describes it

Asked about vote-by-mail by the Statesman Journal in May 2026, Drazan summarized her own bill this way:

"I had legislation that would have created an opportunity for in-person voting while protecting access to the absentee ballot."

Compare that sentence to the digest above.

"Created an opportunity for in-person voting" makes it sound like an addition. It isn't. What the bill changes is the default: in-person on Election Day becomes the standard method, and mail voting becomes the exception you have to qualify for.

"Protecting access to the absentee ballot" — the bill conditions that access on presenting a government-issued ID and on being unable to vote in person, then makes you pay the postage and get it back by Election Day or it doesn't count.

That's not protection. That's four new obstacles described as a courtesy.

She also told the paper that "Oregon's system to determine voter eligibility needs improvement" — the standard framing for a problem nobody has demonstrated.

Who each of those changes hits

Every item on that list falls hardest on a specific kind of Oregonian.

The photo ID requirement is only an inconvenience if you have one. It's a barrier if you don't drive, don't travel, or let a license lapse.
Election Day as the deadline matters most to whoever's mail runs slowest — which is not the people who live nearest the post office.
Paying your own postage is a small amount of money. That's the point. Small costs are exactly the kind that change who bothers.
In-person on a Tuesday as the default is easy if your schedule is your own. It isn't if you work a shift, need childcare, don't have a car, or are sick that day.

None of that requires a study. It's just reading the bill line by line and asking who each line makes it harder for.

Oregon already told the Legislature what it thought

Drazan's House bill wasn't the only measure of its kind that session. A similar Senate bill, SB 210, would have asked Oregon voters in November 2026 whether to end mail-in voting entirely and move to polling places with mandatory photo ID.

The public response was so large it crashed the Legislature's own website. More than 9,000 pieces of testimony were submitted and over 150 people signed up to speak. Sen. David Brock-Smith called it "the bill that broke OLIS."

House Speaker Julie Fahey's response was short: "Vote by mail is not going anywhere."

Neither bill advanced. But Drazan is now the Republican nominee for governor, and a governor doesn't need a bill to pass to shape elections policy — she signs and vetoes them, and she appoints and pressures.

This is a pattern among Republicans, not a one-off

Oregon isn't alone. In California, Republican James Gallagher went to court in 2020 to stop the state from mailing every registered voter a ballot in the middle of the pandemic, calling it an "illegal power grab." He won at trial, lost on appeal, and has campaigned on it since.

The specific vehicle changes — a lawsuit in one state, a bill in another — but the target is the same: the method that makes voting easiest.

What we already know about her and democracy

This isn't the first time Christine Drazan has decided that when the process isn't going her way, the process should stop. In February 2020, as House Republican Leader, she led her caucus out of the Capitol to deny the chamber the two-thirds quorum Oregon's constitution requires, killing a climate bill and taking bills on homelessness, wildfire preparedness and flood relief down with it. OPB reported the session ended "without a single meaningful bill reaching the governor's desk."

She couldn't win the vote, so she made sure nobody could vote.

Six years later, she put her name first on a bill to change how every Oregonian casts a ballot in the first place.

Oregonians voted for vote-by-mail two to one and have used it for 25 years. Christine Drazan wants to make it the exception instead of the rule, and she won't say so plainly. We deserve better.

Sources

House Bill 3872 (2025 Regular Session) — Oregon Legislative Information System: sponsors and full bill digest
What leading GOP candidates for Oregon governor say about vote-by-mail — Anastasia Mason, Salem Statesman Journal, May 11, 2026. Photo: Central Oregon Daily.
Bill to end vote-by-mail slows Oregon legislative website to a crawl — Dirk VanderHart, OPB, March 31, 2025

Tommy Tuberville Wants to Build a 30-Foot Wall Around Alabama

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 10:15:00 +0000

On Wednesday, August 5, 2026, Tommy Tuberville went on The Charlie Kirk Show and floated building a wall around the state of Alabama.

Not the southern border. Alabama. The state that borders Tennessee, Georgia, Florida and Mississippi.

"I'm going to go back to Alabama and, hey, we might build a 30-foot wall around our state, because I know what's coming. I can see it coming, I can hear it coming. You can just smell it out there, that they want to take this country over."

He is running for governor. This is the office he'd hold when the wall got built.

Who is "they"?

Tuberville didn't say on the podcast. His office did.

A spokesperson told AL.com the senator was referring to "radical Islamic terrorists who want to destroy America."

That clarification arrived the same day Tuberville called Abdul El-Sayed — the Democratic nominee for Michigan's open Senate seat — a "radical Islamist." El-Sayed is a Muslim American, a physician, and a former public health director for the city of Detroit. His offense, as far as anyone can tell from the record, is being critical of the Israeli government.

So the sequence is: call a Muslim candidate for Senate a radical Islamist in the morning, warn on a podcast that night that "they want to take this country over," and have your staff confirm afterward that "they" means Muslims.

This is not new for him. We wrote in July about Tuberville demanding that New York's mayor be handcuffed and shipped to Guantanamo Bay for a crime he admitted hadn't happened yet. He is part of a broader pattern on this site: Florida's Randy Fine went on Newsmax and said "a Muslim terrorist runs the city of New York"; Wisconsin's Derrick Van Orden has a documented habit of amplifying anti-Muslim claims online.

The difference here is that Tuberville is proposing infrastructure.

The voting claim underneath it

The wall line came at the end of a warning about elections. Here's the setup:

"If we don't straighten out this country's voting, if we don't straighten out this country's immigration system, we're not going to make it. It's going to be over with."

Immigrants voting in American elections. That's the threat he's describing.

Alabama's own record says otherwise. As AL.com noted, Alabama and other states have identified very small numbers of immigrants who fraudulently tried to vote — and Alabama already has strict voter ID laws. Election experts have found no evidence of widespread problems with American elections.

Tuberville has been on this for a while. Last week he threw his own party's talking points in the trash because Senate Republican leadership wanted members to change the subject away from the stalled SAVE America Act, and he wanted to keep pushing it. He claimed 80 to 90 percent of Americans support it. They don't.

So the pattern is consistent: name a problem the evidence says isn't happening, then propose something drastic to solve it.

What a governor of Alabama actually controls

Here's the practical problem with a wall around Alabama.

Governors don't run immigration policy. They don't control the border. A wall along Alabama's state lines — a state with no international border, surrounded on all sides by other U.S. states — would stop Georgians. It would stop trucks on I-65 and I-20. It would stop the tourists driving down to Gulf Shores.

There is no version of this that does the thing he says it would do. Which suggests it was never a plan. It was a signal.

And that's the part worth sitting with. The senator running to govern Alabama chose, on a national podcast, to tell his voters that an unnamed "they" is coming, that he can "smell it out there," and that the response might be to seal the state off. Then his office named the group.

What Alabama actually needs from a governor

While Tuberville was on a podcast talking about walls, here's what was happening in his state.

Alabama Power customers are facing rate pressure from the data-center boom — Tuberville himself has called on Alabama Power to freeze rates further into the future. Alabama ranks near the bottom of the country on the measures that decide whether people's lives are good: health outcomes, poverty, life expectancy. We laid that out in detail in what Alabama's Republicans are costing it.

None of that gets fixed by a wall. All of it gets ignored while we talk about one.

The people Tuberville is warning Alabama about are not the reason Alabamians can't afford their power bill, or their insulin, or a hospital within driving distance. He is the sitting United States senator. He has had six years of votes to do something about those things.

He'd rather build a wall around Georgia.

Source

AL.com, "Tuberville says 'we might build a 30-foot wall around' Alabama" by Ruth Serven Smith, and Raw Story's coverage of the same podcast appearance.

South Carolina's New Senator Has Been in Office Days. Her First Bill Would Make It Harder for Millions of Citizens to Vote.

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 10:00:00 +0000

Darline Graham was appointed to the U.S. Senate weeks ago, after her brother Lindsey Graham died in July. She had, by her own account, "never had any desire to be a politician."

She has now been a senator for a matter of days. And she has already told South Carolina what she wants to spend that time on.

"I believe that if you have to show an ID to check out a library book, you should have to show one to vote. That's why the first bill I co-sponsored was the SAVE America Act. I am prepared to cancel the Senate's August recess and stay in Washington to get it passed and sent to President Trump's desk."

That's from an op-ed she published in Fox News on August 5. She repeated the priority in an interview with WYFF the same week.

Out of everything a brand-new senator could pick — health care, grocery prices, the flooding, the hospitals — the first bill she put her name on is a bill that would make it harder for eligible Americans to register to vote. And she's willing to cancel the Senate's vacation to do it.

Her argument for it isn't about the bill she cosponsored

Start with the library card.

Graham's case is a voter ID argument: show a card, prove you're you. That's a familiar debate, and South Carolina already has voter ID at the polls.

The SAVE Act is not that. The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act requires documentary proof of citizenship — a passport or a birth certificate — presented in person, just to register to vote or to update an existing registration. A driver's license doesn't do it. Neither does a library card, or a Social Security card, or a utility bill, or any of the things most people can actually put their hands on.

So the analogy she used to sell the bill describes a different bill. Whether that's a misunderstanding or a talking point, the effect is the same: South Carolinians hearing "show an ID like at the library" are not being told what they'd actually have to produce.

Who this locks out

We've written before about what the SAVE Act does in practice. The numbers haven't changed.

More than 21 million Americans of voting age don't have ready access to documentary proof of citizenship.
Roughly 80% of women change their last name when they marry — so their birth certificate no longer matches their legal name, and a mismatch can be enough to stop a registration cold.
Everything has to happen in person. That's a trip, during business hours, for people who work hourly jobs, don't drive, or live far from a registration office.

Graham is South Carolina's first woman senator. The bill she chose as her first cosponsorship is the one that hits married women hardest.

She also wrote, in the same op-ed, that she's "a mother, a grandmother and a wife" who knows "how to bargain shop" and bought her Capitol shoes "off the clearance rack at the Shoe Warehouse." A woman who took her husband's name and shops clearance racks is exactly the voter the SAVE Act's paperwork trips up — a replacement birth certificate costs money and weeks, and the government will not be mailing her one.

The problem it claims to solve

The pitch for the SAVE Act is that noncitizens are voting. In the same op-ed, Graham tied it directly to immigration: "I believe Joe Biden let 12 million illegal immigrants walk into our country, and President Trump and I are going to walk them right back out."

Noncitizen voting in federal elections is already a federal crime, and it is already vanishingly rare — repeated studies and audits, including ones run by Republican election officials, have turned up a handful of cases out of many millions of ballots. The SAVE Act doesn't add a penalty for something that isn't happening. It adds a paperwork wall in front of tens of millions of citizens who are.

That trade — block a lot of real voters to stop a problem that barely exists — is the whole design. It's why the bill keeps getting pushed, and why it keeps stalling in the Senate.

"Cancel the recess"

The line that ought to stick is the offer to cancel August recess.

The Senate's summer break is when members go home and meet the people who sent them. Graham has been in the job a few weeks. She has not yet held a town hall as a senator. Her offer is to skip the going-home part in order to stay in Washington and pass a voting restriction.

That's a statement of priorities, and it's hers, in her own words, in her own op-ed. Not a vote she can explain away later. Not something an opponent said about her. The first thing she told South Carolina she'd fight for was a bill that makes voting harder — and the reason she gave for it described a different bill entirely.

South Carolina votes in a special election on August 11.

Source

Darline Graham's op-ed in Fox News, August 5, 2026 (photo: Fox News), and WYFF 4's interview.

Dan Meuser Won't Debate His Opponent. He Will Spend an Hour Explaining to a Closed Meeting Why He Rejected Pennsylvania's Own Votes.

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 10:05:00 +0000

On August 3, Dan Meuser spoke for over an hour to about 40 members of the Lycoming County Patriots — a conservative group whose meetings open with a prayer and a group recitation of a confidentiality pledge.

He took questions on elections, immigration, Social Security, and guns. He explained, five and a half years later, why he voted against counting Pennsylvania's own electoral votes.

He has still not agreed to debate the woman running against him.

What he told the room about 2020

Here is Meuser's explanation, in his own words, for why he refused to certify the electors chosen by the voters of his own state:

"They changed the rules weeks before the election. They allowed curative ballots. They said signatures don't need to match. They put drop boxes out there. There was ballot harvesting taking place, which was completely illegal to the tune of tens of thousands. There were significant irregularities."

The reporter who covered the meeting added the necessary correction directly beneath the quote: no court, no state review, and no bipartisan election audit has ever substantiated fraud on anything like that scale in Pennsylvania's 2020 results — results that were certified and upheld through litigation.

That is not a matter of interpretation. Pennsylvania's 2020 election was litigated exhaustively, in state and federal court, and the outcome held every time.

The vote itself

This is not a hypothetical. The record is public.

On January 7, 2021 — hours after the Capitol was cleared — the House voted on whether to sustain the objection to Pennsylvania's electoral votes. Roll Call 11 shows Meuser voted Yea.

Two things about that vote are worth sitting with.

First, he was voting to throw out the votes of the people he represents. Pennsylvania's electors reflected the ballots cast by Pennsylvanians, including his own constituents in the 9th District.

Second, he did not have to. The objection failed 138 to 282, and 64 Republicans voted against it — among them Brian Fitzpatrick, the one Pennsylvania Republican who voted Nay. Voting no was available. Meuser chose Yea.

The claim he could not answer

One attendee asked Meuser whether Trump might declare a national emergency over election administration before the midterms and have "the military take over the election in November to require paper ballots."

Meuser said he didn't know.

He did not say the question was absurd. He did not say the military does not run American elections. He offered that Trump "follows the law. He follows the Constitution. He follows the courts" — and then added that the courts are "biased."

A member of Congress was asked, in plain language, whether the U.S. military might take over an election in three months, and the answer from a sitting representative was that he wasn't sure.

What he wants to change

Meuser was clear about the policies he supports, and they all point the same direction.

He called Pennsylvania's mail-in voting law an "unbelievably terrible, unconstitutional piece of legislation."
He backs the federal SAVE Act, which would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote — a requirement that stops married women whose current name doesn't match their birth certificate, and the millions of Americans who don't hold a passport. Republicans have been pushing this bill hard; Tommy Tuberville threw out his own leadership's talking points because they weren't pushing it aggressively enough.
On photo ID at the polls, he said Pennsylvania "requires absolutely nothing" and that "it's absolutely ridiculous not requiring it."
He complained that other states have tightened their election laws while "we've done absolutely nothing."

He also told the group Republicans need roughly a two-to-one advantage over Democrats in mail-in turnout to feel safe in November — a candid acknowledgment that the mail voting he calls unconstitutional is something his own party is now counting on.

The SNAP number he got wrong

Meuser also attacked Gov. Josh Shapiro over food assistance, telling the room: "He has a 13% fraud rate right now, and he's going to get penalized."

There is no such thing as a state SNAP "fraud rate." What USDA publishes is a payment error rate, and the Congressional Research Service could not be clearer about what that is:

"Errors are not the same as fraud. Fraud is intentional activity that breaks federal and/or state laws, while errors are mistakes."

And on the payment error rate specifically, CRS states flatly: "This rate is not a measure of fraud."

The rate counts overpayments and underpayments — meaning a state gets dinged when a family is given too little food assistance. CRS also notes that "SNAP fraud is rare, according to available data and reports."

Meuser took a number that measures paperwork mistakes in both directions and told a room of constituents it was fraud by the governor. That is how a state gets painted as a den of thieves and how cuts to food assistance get sold.

"The Muslim problem"

One member of the audience asked Meuser about what he called "the Muslim problem in this country," saying it "keeps me up at night" and citing fear of Muslims "wanting to take over and do us in."

Meuser's answer began with a disclaimer and ended with agreement:

"None of us want to classify a group. None of us want to do anything like that. But we judge people on their actions, right? Nothing else. Their actions and their words, to an extent. I'm not going to disagree with you. We're seeing what's happening in Europe. There are those — not just necessarily Muslims — that come to our country that do not want to assimilate, that do not want to be Americans."

A constituent described an entire religion as a "problem" that might "do us in," and his congressman told him he wouldn't disagree.

He went on to say the 14th Amendment's citizenship clause has been "misinterpreted from the very beginning," and that Trump "does have a plan for revisiting it."

Who gets to ask him questions

The through-line here isn't any single quote. It's the venue.

Meuser gave an hour of his time, took open questions, and spoke candidly — to a private organization whose members recite a confidentiality pledge before the meeting starts.

Meanwhile, constituents in his district have protested every Monday for more than a year asking him to hold an open town hall. He has refused, saying he doesn't want to be a "piñata" and dismissing the protesters as "the same 40 people."

He was in a room of about 40 people on August 3. He just picked which 40.

And when his opponent Rachel Wallace — whom Meuser refused to name at the meeting — called for debates, and when WVIA and WGAL both invited the two of them, she accepted both invitations. As of August 5, Meuser had agreed to neither.

His explanation for why he tried to discard Pennsylvania's electoral votes is apparently available. You just have to be in the right room to hear it.

Source

Meuser explains his 'no' vote to certify 2020 Pa. election results ahead of midterms — Laura Ulrich, NorthcentralPa.com. Photo: Laura Ulrich / NorthcentralPa.com.

In 2021 Mike Rogers Called Trump's Election Lies 'Third World Dictatorship' Behavior. Now He Tells Them Himself.

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 09:40:00 +0000

On Tuesday, Republicans in Michigan picked their nominee for an open U.S. Senate seat. Rogers won, and he'll face Democrat Abdul El-Sayed in November for the seat being vacated by Sen. Gary Peters. It is one of a handful of races that will decide control of the Senate.

Five years ago, Rogers was one of the Republicans willing to say out loud that Donald Trump was trying to steal an election.

Today he is the one making things up about vans.

What he wrote in January 2021

On January 5, 2021 — the day before the Capitol was attacked — Rogers published an op-ed in the Washington Post titled "The election is over. Let's get back to governing."

He did not hedge:

"This behavior from the administration is seen in Third World dictatorships, not the leading democracy in the world. This needs to end. Our current challenges are too great. We must have a unified effort to tackle the problems we face."

That is about as clear as a Republican statement got in that moment. Rogers had served in the House from 2001 to 2015 and chaired the Intelligence Committee. He knew exactly what he was describing.

What he says now

Rogers ran for Senate in 2024 and lost to Elissa Slotkin. It was close — 48.6% to 48.3%, a margin of about 19,000 votes. He conceded. He made no allegations of fraud at the time.

Then he decided to run again. And the story changed.

At a speech last year he told an audience this:

"Now, there were some ballots that showed up at 5:30 — I wish I were kidding — in a van. And that swung the election on us. And it happened to be here in Detroit. We ended up losing that thing by about 17,000 votes."

The Detroit News reviewed video of two such appearances. At an October 17 event in Muskegon, he described a van "showing up" in Detroit at about 5:30 in the morning after Election Day — and made air quotes with his fingers when he said the word "ballots."

When the Detroit News asked his campaign for any evidence at all, a spokeswoman did not respond.

There isn't any. Rogers has never produced a name, a document, a complaint, or a court filing — just a story about a van, told to rooms of supporters. He couldn't even keep his own margin straight: he says 17,000, and the actual number is roughly 19,000.

He also didn't say any of this in 2024, when he might have been asked to prove it. He said it in 2025, when he needed a primary electorate.

Then he endorsed the 2020 lie too

Last month Trump gave a primetime speech reviving debunked conspiracy theories about 2020, including claims of voter fraud in Michigan. Rogers — the man who once compared this behavior to a Third World dictatorship — responded approvingly:

"The news coming out of the White House tonight is deeply troubling — especially that of a voter fraud scheme right here in Michigan. As we learn more in the days to come, one thing remains clear: If our nation does not have security and confidence of our elections, then we do not have much of a nation at all."

Democracy Docket reported that the Michigan "fraud" cited in that speech had no impact on any votes.

Note the construction of Rogers' statement. He never claims the fraud is real. He says the news is "deeply troubling" and that "as we learn more" we should worry about confidence in elections. It is engineered so that when the claim collapses, he never technically said it.

That is the whole trick. He gets the benefit of the lie without owning it.

This isn't just talk — it's a plan for Detroit

Election denial has a practical purpose in a campaign, and Rogers has been open about his.

Democracy Docket previously reported that his campaign has been recruiting off-duty and retired police officers to serve as poll watchers in Detroit — the city he has repeatedly named as the source of his imaginary van.

Put those two facts next to each other. He tells supporters that Detroit stole an election from him. Then he sends men who look like police to stand in Detroit's polling places and watch people vote.

If he wins in November, he'd also be another Senate vote for the SAVE America Act, the stalled bill that would require documentary proof of citizenship to register — a requirement that would sweep in married women whose names don't match their birth certificates and millions of Americans who don't have a passport handy.

The Trump endorsement, and what it cost

Trump endorsed Rogers at a rally at the General Motors Proving Ground in Milford on July 27, weeks before the primary.

"He is one of the best candidates we have anywhere," Trump said. "He's smart. He's tough. He's fair."

This is the same president whose conduct Rogers described in 2021 as something you see in dictatorships. The price of the endorsement was the position.

Rogers is not alone in this. Michigan Republicans have made peace with saying things about their own state's elections that are simply not true — John James told a Trump rally that the president had won Michigan "three times," a state Trump lost in 2020 by more than 154,000 votes.

What Michigan voters should ask

Rogers has already answered the important question — twice, in opposite directions.

In 2021, when he had nothing to gain, he said Trump's attack on the election was the behavior of a dictatorship and it needed to end.

In 2025 and 2026, when he needed a Republican primary, he became the thing he'd condemned.

Only one of those two men was telling the truth. Voters get to decide which one is on the November ballot.

Source

Mike Rogers, GOP convert to election denial, wins Michigan GOP Senate primary — Matt Cohen, Democracy Docket, August 5, 2026. Photo: AP Photo/Paul Sancya.

Missourians Crushed Amendments 4 and 5 by 80 and 83 Percent. Their Congressmen Helped Build the Gerrymander Behind One of Them.

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 08:23:15 +0000

On Tuesday, August 4, Missouri voters did something you almost never see. They took two constitutional amendments put on the ballot by their own Republican supermajority and buried them.

Amendment 4 lost 80% to 20%. Amendment 5 lost 83% to 16%. Every single one of Missouri's eight congressional districts voted no on both.

That last detail is the joke. Amendment 4's whole purpose was to give any one of those eight districts a veto over what the rest of the state wants. It lost in all eight.

What Amendment 4 was actually for

Right now, if Missourians gather signatures and put a constitutional amendment on the ballot, it passes with a simple statewide majority. One person, one vote.

Amendment 4 would have changed that. A citizen-led amendment would have needed a majority statewide and a majority in each of the eight congressional districts. Win the state. Win seven of eight districts. Lose the eighth by one vote, and you lose.

Here's the part they didn't put on the yard signs: the new rule applied only to amendments citizens put on the ballot. Amendments the legislature sends to voters — including Amendment 4 itself — would still pass with a simple statewide majority. Politicians kept the easy rule. Citizens got the hard one.

The Missouri Independent reviewed certified election returns and found Amendment 4 would have blocked every citizen-led constitutional amendment Missouri voters have approved since 2020. Medicaid expansion in 2020. Recreational marijuana in 2022. Sports betting and abortion rights in 2024. All passed statewide. None carried all eight districts.

No other state in the country requires a ballot measure to win in every congressional district. Not one.

And Gov. Mike Kehoe didn't leave the timing to chance. He moved Amendment 4 off the November ballot and onto the August primary, when turnout is smaller and more Republican. Missourians turned out anyway and beat it four to one.

The eight districts were drawn by Republicans, for Republicans

This is where Missouri's congressmen come in.

The districts Amendment 4 would have handed veto power to are not neutral lines on a map. They were redrawn in a special legislative session in September 2025 — at the behest of President Donald Trump, who spent last year prodding Republican-run states to redraw their maps before the 2026 midterms. The same special session produced Amendment 4.

The map's target was Rep. Emanuel Cleaver's Kansas City–based 5th District, the seat held by the first Black mayor of Kansas City. The plan chopped it up, tied a piece of it to rural counties, and scattered the rest of Kansas City into neighboring districts. The Missouri House passed it 89–63.

Four of the five Republicans this site tracks in Missouri's U.S. House delegation lined up behind that redraw.

Bob Onder was the loudest. A state senator during the failed 2022 push for the same 7-1 map, Onder told St. Louis Public Radio in August 2025 that he wanted it done:

"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 mid-decade redistricting might backfire, Onder said the math was easy: "we have seats that have wide enough margins that I think it's pretty straightforward math to draw seven very safe Republican seats."

He also got exactly what he asked for. The new map put all of St. Charles County into Onder's 3rd District — a long-standing goal for Republicans there.

Ann Wagner, Jason Smith and Eric Burlison joined Onder in supporting the redraw. Wagner's 2nd District picked up part of Jefferson County plus all of Washington, Gasconade and Crawford counties.

Mark Alford was the outlier, and only barely. He told St. Louis Public Radio he was neutral on whether to redraw the map — while conceding his own district would likely become more competitive as a result. The map handed him a chunk of Kansas City.

So: Missouri Republicans drew themselves a map at a president's request, then asked voters to make that same map the gatekeeper for every future citizen initiative. Missourians said no by 60 points.

Then they blocked the vote on the map itself

Missourians never got to vote on the gerrymander. Not because they didn't try.

A group called People Not Politicians turned in more than 300,000 signatures in December to force a referendum on the new map. Local election authorities spent hundreds of hours checking whether the signers were registered voters.

On Tuesday afternoon — a few hours before the polls closed, on the last legal day he had to decide — Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins declared the whole petition unconstitutional. He refused to tell reporters whether it had enough valid signatures.

"Whether they had one signature or 500 million signatures doesn't really matter because they are unconstitutional," Hoskins said.

He rejected a second citizen petition the same day, one that would have limited the legislature's power to rewrite measures voters had already passed.

Missouri House Democratic Leader Ashley Aune called Hoskins a partisan rather than an election official, saying he "has engaged in obstruction and dishonesty to stop Missourians from exercising their constitutional right" to vote on the gerrymander.

People Not Politicians sued that night. And there's a live question hanging over Tuesday's results: in a May ruling, Missouri Supreme Court Judge Ginger Gooch noted that if the referendum power does apply to redistricting, the 2025 map would never have taken effect at all — meaning Tuesday's primary was run in district lines that were never legal.

Amendment 5: a tax cut for the top, paid for by everyone else

Amendment 5 was the other half of the ask. It would have phased out Missouri's individual income tax and handed the legislature the power to raise and expand sales taxes to replace it.

The income tax is about 64 percent of Missouri's general fund — the money that pays for schools, roads, health care and public safety. Neither the legislature nor the governor explained how they'd replace it. Voters were asked to approve the swap first and find out later.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy ran the numbers on who wins and who pays:

The top 1 percent would get an average tax cut of almost $40,000.
Middle-class Missourians making roughly $50,000 to $80,000 would pay about $535 more per year.
Seniors would take a net tax increase of about $335 million, averaging $365 more each — because Social Security benefits, active-duty military pay and military pensions are already exempt from Missouri income tax. Cut a tax they don't pay, raise one they do, and they just lose. For a middle-income senior earning between $49,100 and $79,700, ITEP put the hit at $1,600 a year.

Amendment 5's backers had the money. Missouri Promise PAC — funded entirely by groups that do not disclose their donors — outspent the opposition by more than 2-to-1 overall and nearly 4-to-1 on broadcast ads, and doubled its ad spending in many markets in the final week. It lost 83-16.

Kehoe's response to being outvoted five to one was to promise he'd keep going. "I believe our work is far from over," he posted after the results came in.

Missouri keeps voting. Republicans keep overriding.

None of this is new in Missouri. It's the pattern.

Voters expanded Medicaid in 2020. Voters passed Amendment 3 in 2024 to put abortion rights in the state constitution — and Republicans moved immediately to override them, with the Missouri Supreme Court reinstating the ban in May 2025. Voters approved a minimum wage increase and paid sick leave in 2024, and lawmakers repealed the sick leave part.

Amendment 4 was the logical endpoint of that pattern: stop losing the arguments by making it nearly impossible for voters to have them.

Meanwhile, the same delegation that backed the map has been busy in Washington. An estimated 160,000 more Missourians are projected to be uninsured by 2034 under Trump's budget bill — the Medicaid coverage Missourians voted themselves in 2020, now being taken back by the people they sent to Congress. Jason Smith, who chairs the House's tax-writing committee, used that same bill to bury a doubled prison sentence for leaking billionaires' tax returns on page 1,081. Eric Burlison, told by hundreds of his own constituents that they opposed a local data center, wrote a letter supporting it anyway.

The through-line is simple. When Missourians get a direct say, they use it — and Republicans keep trying to take the say away. Amendment 4 was that attempt written into the constitution. It's the same instinct driving the manufactured "voter fraud" panic nationally: if you can't win the vote, change who gets to count.

On Tuesday, Missourians got one clean shot at it and hit 80-20. The referendum on the gerrymander itself is now in court, where the people who drew the map would very much like it to stay.

Source

Rudi Keller, Missouri voters reject income tax phaseout, initiative petition changes, Missouri Independent, Aug. 4, 2026. Photo: Gov. Mike Kehoe votes in Jefferson City (Rudi Keller/Missouri Independent).

Tom Barrett's Campaign Ran a Full-Page Ad in a Black-Owned Paper Telling Readers to Vote the Day After Election Day

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 11:12:00 +0000

There is one thing every campaign ad in America has to get right. Not the slogan. Not the photo. The date.

In October 2024, a full-page ad paid for by the campaign of Tom Barrett got it wrong — in a Black-owned newspaper in Lansing, five weeks before a race he would go on to win by less than four points.

The ad ran across the back page of The Michigan Bulletin, a free Black-owned weekly that had been publishing in the Lansing area for 30 years. In a black box at the center of the page it said:

"On November 6 VOTE FOR TOM BARRETT"

Election Day was November 5. At the bottom of the page, in small type: "Paid for by Tom Barrett for Congress."

The paper next door got the right date

Here is the part that makes this more than a typo.

Barrett's campaign placed a nearly identical ad in the Lansing City Pulse, a free alternative weekly in the same town, around the same time. That version told readers "On November 5 Vote For Tom Barrett" — the correct date.

Why the difference? Because City Pulse caught it. Publisher Berl Schwartz said his paper spotted the wrong date and had the campaign change it in the file before it went to print.

So the campaign was told. Someone at Barrett for Congress was handed a corrected date and fixed the file for one Lansing paper. Then the uncorrected version — the one with November 6 on it — is the one that went to the Black-owned paper.

The campaign's own spokesman confirmed exactly that sequence. Jason Cabel Roe told WKAR that the original City Pulse version also carried the wrong date and was caught before print, and that when it came time to reformat the ad for The Michigan Bulletin and its Black readership, the designer pulled the wrong file:

"We were working with that previous version that had the wrong date. And the proofer just missed the date on that. And so, it got through without us noticing that it still had the wrong date on it from a previous version."

Meanwhile, on the page right before Barrett's ad in that same issue of the Bulletin, a full-page ad from Republican U.S. Senate candidate Mike Rogers (MI) ran with the correct Election Day printed on it.

"I'm not in the business of misinforming my readers"

The Bulletin's publisher, Marcus Jefferson, said the file came straight from the Barrett campaign and was supposed to be print-ready.

"I've been in newspapers for most of my life. I'm not in the business of misinforming my readers," Jefferson said.

By the time anyone raised it publicly, the ad had been out in Lansing for more than a week. As of that Sunday — more than a week after publication — the campaign still had not run a correction.

Black lawmakers asked for an investigation

On Sunday, October 13, the Michigan Legislative Black Caucus filed a complaint with the Michigan Attorney General and the Ingham County prosecutor, asking them to look into whether the campaign "intentionally distributed false information about the election process."

State Senator Sarah Anthony of Lansing, the caucus vice chair, didn't buy the explanation:

"For the amount of ads and flyers and robocalls that they are putting forward in the Black community, you would think that they would also use that intentional push to also make sure that Black voters have the correct date."

Barrett's campaign called it "nothing but a proofing error." Roe went further and suggested Democrats were making noise because they were worried about losing Black voters: "I understand that they are very nervous that a group of voters who have pledged their loyalty to the party and gotten very little in return are looking elsewhere."

Anthony's answer to that was short. "Any and everyone is welcome to campaign for our vote. But they also have to stand by their record. And that's what I judge people on. Not by these performative measures."

The Attorney General ordered them to stop

Two days after the complaint, on October 15, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel's office sent the Barrett campaign a cease-and-desist notice. It was not gentle:

"The Department finds the allegations deeply troubling; therefore, you are hereby ordered to cease and desist the dissemination of inaccurate or misleading information about the upcoming General Election and to correct the inaccurate and misleading information already disseminated."

The notice added that the office would keep watching to make sure the promised correction actually ran, and that going forward it expected the campaign "to comply with the law and only provide factually correct information regarding Election Day 2024."

Nessel's office was not being paranoid. Four years earlier, in the 2020 election, her office filed felony charges against two political operatives who sent robocalls to nearly 12,000 Detroit-area phone numbers pushing lies designed to scare Black voters away from voting by mail. Both men eventually pleaded no contest and were sentenced in December 2025. Nessel called the scheme a use of "every racist dog whistle" to steal "the most fundamental right that we often take for granted: the right to vote."

That's the history a wrong election date lands in when it shows up in a Black-owned paper in Michigan. Whether or not you believe the campaign's explanation, it's history any competent campaign in this state should have had in mind before sending a file to the printer.

The margin was 16,763 votes

Three weeks later, Barrett beat Curtis Hertel 50.3% to 46.6% — 226,722 votes to 209,959. A margin of 16,763 out of more than 450,000 cast.

Nobody can say how many people saw that ad, wrote November 6 on a calendar, and showed up a day late. That's exactly the problem. As the Black Caucus's executive director, Chris Jackson, put it: if even one person has that page on their refrigerator with the wrong date on it, there's a problem.

What he did once he got there

You would think a member of Congress who got a cease-and-desist over confusing voters would spend his first term making voting easier.

He did the opposite. On April 10, 2025, Barrett voted for the SAVE Act, which passed the House 220 to 208. The bill would force every American to show documentary proof of citizenship — a passport or a birth certificate — in person, just to register to vote or update a registration. Research has found that more than 21 million Americans of voting age don't have ready access to those documents. And because 84% of women who marry change their surname, a birth certificate that no longer matches a legal name can be enough to stop a registration cold. We wrote about the bill in more detail here.

So the record now reads like this. In 2024, his campaign put the wrong election date in front of Black voters and called it a proofing error. In 2025, he voted for a bill that would put a paperwork wall between millions of citizens and the ballot box, on purpose.

We deserve a representative who fights for every voter — not one whose campaign runs ads that confuse them, and who then votes to make voting harder. We deserve better.

Source

Michigan Republican Blames 'Proofing Error' for Misleading Ad in Black-Owned Newspaper — The New York Times, October 14, 2024. Additional reporting from WKAR, Lansing City Pulse / MIRS, and WILX. Photo of the ad: MIRS, via Lansing City Pulse.

Tom Barrett Called the 2020 Election "An Unknowable Thing" — 15 Months After His Own Party Investigated and Found Nothing

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 10:58:12 +0000

In September 2022, WXYZ in Detroit did something simple. With the midterms a few weeks out, reporter Max White went to Michigan's candidates with one question: will you accept the results of this election?

Most people can answer that in one word.

Rep. Elissa Slotkin, running in the 7th District, called it "non-negotiable." Her exact words: "anyone running for elected office must make clear that they'll accept the results of the election—full stop. Saying anything else is harmful to our country, our politics, and our very democracy."

Her opponent was a state senator named Tom Barrett. WXYZ emailed his campaign. The campaign didn't write back.

But the Detroit Free Press had already gotten an answer out of him about the last election, and WXYZ printed it:

"It's an unknowable thing. How many people mailed in absentee ballots that were ineligible to participate in the election? We can't know for sure what effect that had. That's why we have to stop it before it happens."

That's the man who now represents mid-Michigan in Congress, saying he cannot know whether the 2020 election was fair.

Here's the problem with "unknowable." Somebody had already gone and found out. They were Republicans. And Barrett was a member of the same chamber that did it.

His own party spent seven months looking. They found nothing.

After the 2020 election, the Republican-controlled Michigan Senate opened an investigation into the fraud claims people were making about Michigan's vote. It was not a quick look. The Senate Oversight Committee took more than 28 hours of testimony from nearly 90 people across nine hearings, reviewed thousands of pages of subpoenaed documents, and burned "hundreds of hours of Senate staff investigation" time.

In June 2021, the committee's chairman — Republican Sen. Ed McBroom — released a 35-page report. Bridge Michigan covered it. The findings were not ambiguous:

"There is no evidence presented at this time to prove either significant acts of fraud or that an organized, wide-scale effort to commit fraudulent activity was perpetrated in order to subvert the will of Michigan voters."

And:

"Our clear finding is that citizens should be confident the results represent the true results of the ballots cast by the people of Michigan."

The report knocked down the dead-voter claims. It knocked down the "fractional voting" claims. It knocked down the Detroit ballot dump. It knocked down the idea that any precinct had over 100% turnout. It called the Antrim County conspiracy theory "indefensible" and said the committee was "appalled" at the willful ignorance of the people still pushing it. Joe Biden won Michigan by 154,188 votes.

McBroom's summary of the whole business, to Bridge Michigan: "The claims have become so ludicrous when compared to the actual facts."

Barrett was a sitting Michigan state senator when his own party's committee published that. Fifteen months later, asked whether the election was fair, his answer was that it's "an unknowable thing."

It was knowable. Republicans knew it. He just didn't want to say it out loud in front of a primary electorate.

He was there at the beginning, too

Go back further, to the night before the Capitol was stormed.

On January 5, 2021, eleven Michigan Republican state senators sent a letter to Congress. Here is how the Detroit News described it at the time: the senators wanted Wednesday's joint session of Congress to "pursue every available option" to examine claims of wrongdoing in the election.

Tom Barrett's name was on it.

There were actually two versions floating around. As Bridge Michigan reported, the letter "originally asked Congress to delay certification of the 2020 presidential election due to unsubstantiated allegations of election fraud," and was then revised to strip that part out. Barrett said his signature had been added to that original version "without his consent."

Fine. Take him at his word on the draft. What matters is what he said after he watched a mob attack the Capitol over the exact claims his letter was demanding Congress chase.

He had no regrets about signing the final version. And this is what he told Bridge Michigan the day of the riot:

"Are we not allowed to look into election concerns? Does looking into concerns make us violent?"

That's a man watching the consequences arrive and deciding they belong to somebody else.

"Unknowable" is not a doubt. It's a tactic.

Notice what Barrett didn't say in that answer. He didn't say the election was stolen. He didn't name a single fraud he could prove. That's the smart play — a specific claim can be fact-checked and blown up, the way McBroom's committee blew up every specific claim it was handed.

So instead you say it's unknowable. You can't be fact-checked on a shrug.

And then you look at the second half of the quote, which is where the shrug stops being harmless: "That's why we have to stop it before it happens."

Stop what, exactly? Absentee voting. The thing his own party's seven-month investigation found no fraud in. The doubt isn't the goal. The doubt is the excuse for making it harder to vote.

He kept going after he got the job

This isn't a 2022 problem Barrett grew out of. It's the through-line of his career.

In October 2024, a full-page ad paid for by his campaign ran in The Michigan Bulletin, a Black-owned Lansing weekly, telling readers to vote for him on November 6 — the day after Election Day. A near-identical ad his campaign ran in another Lansing paper had the correct date. The Michigan Legislative Black Caucus filed a complaint accusing the campaign of intentionally giving Black voters false information. His campaign called it "much ado about nothing" and got a cease-and-desist notice from the Michigan Attorney General's office.

In Congress, he voted for the SAVE Act on April 10, 2025, which passed the House 220 to 208. That bill would make every American show proof of citizenship in person — a passport or a birth certificate — every time they register or update a registration. Sean Morales-Doyle of the nonpartisan Brennan Center told NPR that about 21.3 million American citizens don't have those documents readily available, on top of the millions more whose documents don't match their current name — "women who've been married and have changed their name recently." His summary of the bill: "This is not a voter ID law. This is not a show-your-driver's-license when you go to vote. This is a show-your-papers law."

And on February 4, 2026, Barrett led the entire Michigan Republican House delegation — Jack Bergman, John Moolenaar, Bill Huizenga, Tim Walberg, Lisa McClain and John James all signed — in a letter to Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson accusing her of eroding public confidence in Michigan elections. The letter's evidence was a Macomb County clerk's claim about noncitizens on the voter rolls.

Six days earlier, Votebeat had reported that the clerk's estimate was too high — the state reviewed the people he flagged and found citizens mixed in with noncitizens, and registrations that had already been cancelled years ago. The clerk in question, Anthony Forlini, is himself a Republican candidate for secretary of state.

As for the statewide number Barrett's letter leaned on: Michigan's Department of State compared more than 7.9 million driving records against over 7.2 million registered voters and found 15 credible cases of an apparent noncitizen casting a ballot in the 2024 general election. Thirteen were referred to the Attorney General for possible charges. Those cases, plus one more found in October 2024, come to 0.00028% of the more than 5.7 million votes Michiganders cast — about one ballot in every 350,000.

That's what Barrett wants Michiganders to believe their elections can't be trusted over.

We deserve better

Barrett has never had to prove a single thing. He didn't have to prove fraud in 2020 — he just signed a letter asking Congress to go looking. He didn't have to prove it in 2022 — he just called the answer unknowable. He doesn't have to prove it in 2026 — he just demands "answers" about a number that works out to one ballot in 350,000.

Every step of the way, somebody else does the real work of checking. Republican senators in Lansing. Election clerks. State investigators. And every time they come back and say the elections are sound, Barrett moves on to the next thing he can't quite know for sure.

The people of Michigan's 7th District cast real ballots and deserve a representative who will say plainly that those ballots get counted. Barrett has had more than five years and a lot of chances to say it. He still won't.

Source

Max White, "Will Michigan candidates accept the results of the 2022 election? Here's what they said," WXYZ Detroit, September 27, 2022. Photo: official congressional portrait, 119th Congress, via Wikimedia Commons.

Roger Marshall Wants to Force a Vote on the SAVE Act. He Won't Tell Kansans What's Actually in It.

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 10:15:00 +0000

There's a tell in how politicians describe a bill they're pushing. If the honest description would lose the argument, they reach for a friendlier one.

On August 3, 2026, Roger Marshall went on The FOX News Rundown and demanded that Senate leadership put the SAVE America Act on the floor. His office put the whole interview out as a press release, so this isn't a gotcha — it's what he wants Kansans to hear.

Here's what he said:

"At least we need to get it on the floor somehow, some way, and get the Democrats on the record. That's what Americans want to see: why can't we get 10 Democrats to vote in favor of voter ID?"

Read that last part again. Voter ID.

That's not what the bill does

The SAVE Act is not a voter ID bill. Voter ID laws are about what you show at the polling place on Election Day. The SAVE Act is about something else entirely, and something much harder.

The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, which passed the House in February 2026, would require every American to show documentary proof of citizenship — a passport, a birth certificate — in person, just to register to vote or to update an existing registration.

Not a driver's license. Not a state ID. Citizenship papers, delivered in person, to a government office.

That distinction is the entire ballgame, and Marshall skipped right past it.

Who can't clear that bar

If you assume every American has a passport or a birth certificate in a drawer, the bill sounds like housekeeping. Most people don't.

More than 21 million voting-age Americans don't have ready access to proof of citizenship.
Roughly 80% of women change their last name when they marry. Their birth certificate no longer matches their legal name — and under the SAVE Act, that mismatch alone can stop a registration cold.
Replacing a lost birth certificate costs money and takes weeks. Getting to a registration office in person means taking time off work, finding a ride, and arriving during business hours.

That is a cost — in dollars, in hours, in paperwork — attached to the right to vote. We've seen this design before, and we know exactly who it filters out first: working people, rural voters without a nearby office, older Americans, students, and married women.

The problem it claims to solve doesn't exist

Marshall's framing assumes there's a flood of noncitizens voting that needs stopping.

There isn't. Noncitizen voting in federal elections is already a federal crime, and it is already vanishingly rare. Study after study — including audits run by Republican election officials — has turned up a handful of cases out of many millions of ballots.

So the bill doesn't stop meaningful fraud, because there isn't meaningful fraud to stop. What it stops is registrations by eligible citizens who can't produce the paperwork on demand. That's not a side effect. That's the only effect it has.

"Get the Democrats on the record"

Notice what Marshall said the goal is. Not "pass the bill." Not "protect elections."

"At least we need to get it on the floor somehow, some way, and get the Democrats on the record."

He's describing a political exercise. He wants a vote to use in ads — a vote he can mislabel as "voter ID" and then run against people for opposing. The fact that the bill itself could keep millions of citizens from registering is not, in his telling, the point.

That's the same playbook we saw when Trump lost at the Supreme Court in June. The Court ruled 5 to 4 that states may count mail ballots postmarked by Election Day, rejecting a Republican challenge — and the immediate response wasn't to accept it, but to push harder on the SAVE Act. One door closes, try the next one. We wrote about that push at the time.

What Kansans actually told him they care about

The strangest thing about the interview is that Marshall answers this himself, later in the same conversation.

Asked what the top issue is for Kansans, he doesn't hesitate:

"Oh, without a doubt, it's the cost of living. It's the cost of gas and groceries. … everyday families are still struggling to put food on the table. Many have maxed out their credit cards just trying to make ends meet."

He also says Senate Republicans "need to stay focused on the cost of living."

And yet the headline he chose for this interview — the thing his own office pushed out to reporters — is about forcing a floor vote on a voter registration bill. In the same conversation he devotes several long answers to Anthony Fauci's diary, to demanding a special counsel investigation of the pandemic, and to how Fauci will "go down as a modern-day Dr. Frankenstein."

Kansas families maxing out credit cards to buy groceries did not ask for a special counsel on a five-year-old virus. They asked for lower prices.

The pattern on his record

This is not a one-off for Marshall. On his report card we've already documented that he went more than 500 days without holding a public town hall — which is to say, more than 500 days without standing in a room where a Kansan could ask him about any of this directly.

It's easier to tell Fox News that the SAVE Act is a voter ID bill than to tell a constituent in Salina that her mother's registration could be blocked because her birth certificate says her maiden name.

What to take from this

A senator who believed the SAVE Act was good for Kansas would describe it accurately and defend it. Marshall renamed it.

When a politician has to relabel a bill to sell it, the honest label is the one worth reading. This one says: bring citizenship papers in person, or don't register.

That's not election security. That's a toll booth on the right to vote — and our senator is trying to get it to the floor while telling us it's something else.

Source

Senator Marshall's own press release and interview transcript, August 3, 2026.

Tommy Tuberville Threw His Own Party's Talking Points in the Trash — Because They Weren't Pushing Voter Suppression Hard Enough

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 14:40:00 +0000

Senate Republican leadership had a problem. Their election bill was stuck. So they did what parties do: they sent members a set of talking points telling them how to handle questions about it.

The instruction was to change the subject. Asked about the stalled election bill, pivot to the economy.

Tommy Tuberville did not care for that.

"I just wadded them up and threw them in the trash. I don't work for the Senate. I work for the American people and the people of Alabama, and I am going to do what is best for them."

That's what he told One America News on Wednesday.

Now — before anyone mistakes this for an act of independence — understand what he was fighting for.

The bill he wants passed

The legislation is the SAVE America Act. It would impose new citizenship and ID checks on voters in federal elections.

In practice, it would require every American to produce documentary proof of citizenship — a passport, a birth certificate — in person, just to register to vote or update a registration.

We've written about what that does. The short version:

More than 21 million Americans of voting age don't have ready access to proof of citizenship.
Roughly 80% of women change their last name when they marry, so their birth certificate no longer matches their legal name — and a mismatch can stop a registration cold.
Noncitizen voting in federal elections is already illegal and already vanishingly rare. The bill solves a problem that doesn't exist, by creating one that will.

So Tuberville's act of rebellion is that his party isn't making it hard enough to vote, fast enough.

The number he made up

Here's his argument for why the Senate should stay in session and force it through:

"When 80% to 90% of the people across the country say they want this bill passed, I think we should pass it. I don't think there is any doubt, but we have people that don't like President Trump or they got big egos."

Eighty to ninety percent.

Polling on the actual proposal doesn't look like that. When Americans are asked about requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register, the result is a slight majority — not 80%, and nowhere near 90%.

There's a reason Tuberville can float a number that big without blinking. "Should you have to prove you're a citizen to vote?" polls well, because it sounds like common sense and most people assume it costs them nothing. "Should a married woman have to produce a birth certificate that doesn't match her name, in person, during business hours, before she can register?" polls very differently.

Tuberville is quoting the first question's number to sell the second question's bill.

What he's actually mad about

Republican Senate leaders aren't blocking the SAVE America Act because they oppose it. They're saying it can't overcome a Democratic filibuster, and that cancelling the August recess won't change the arithmetic.

That's a factual claim about vote counting. Tuberville's answer to it:

"All the talking points they want to send to me, all I want to do is tell them back, 'Let's not try to survive; let's try to win.'"

And on why the bill hasn't moved: "we have people that don't like President Trump or they got big egos."

Note who the villains are in Tuberville's story. Not the millions of citizens who'd struggle to produce a birth certificate. Not the women whose names changed. The obstacles are Republicans with insufficient loyalty to Donald Trump.

This is the same guy

Two weeks earlier, Tuberville went on Newsmax and claimed "four or five" sitting U.S. senators "didn't legally win" their seats. He offered no evidence, because there is none.

Put the two together and the through-line is obvious. He tells Alabamians that American elections are being stolen by illegal votes, and then argues that the fix is a law making it harder for legal voters to register. The false premise justifies the real restriction. That's the whole machine.

And he is not a backbencher grumbling on cable. Tommy Tuberville is the Republican nominee for governor of Alabama — the office that oversees how Alabama runs its elections.

What Alabama should take from this

A man asking to run Alabama's government just told a national audience that:

His party's leaders have "big egos" for saying a bill can't pass a filibuster,
Eighty to ninety percent of Americans back a bill that a bare majority supports,
And his instinct, when handed guidance from his own leadership, is to throw it away and go louder.

He framed it as working for the people of Alabama. But nothing in the SAVE America Act helps a single Alabamian afford groceries, see a doctor, or keep a job. What it does is add a document requirement between ordinary citizens and the ballot — and the citizens most likely to get caught by it are the ones with the least time and money to fix it.

Tuberville threw away the talking points. He should have thrown away the bill.

We deserve better.

Source

Alex Swoyer, Tuberville trashes GOP's election bill talking points, literally, The Washington Times, August 1, 2026.

Victoria Spartz Signed On to Take Away Your Vote for U.S. Senator

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 11:20:00 +0000

Every two years, Hoosiers get to vote for a United States senator. It's been that way since 1913. Before that, Indiana's senators were picked by politicians in the Statehouse, and ordinary people had no say at all.

Victoria Spartz wants to go back.

On June 29, 2026, Spartz signed on as a cosponsor of H.J.Res.198 — a proposed constitutional amendment "to repeal the seventeenth article of amendment." In plain English: end the direct election of U.S. senators and give the power back to state legislatures.

The Herald Bulletin's senior reporter Ken de la Bastide opened his August 1 column on it with one line: if there was ever an issue that should be dead on arrival, this is it.

What the resolution actually does

The resolution was introduced on June 25, 2026 by Texas Republican Keith Self and has been referred to the House Judiciary Committee. Nine House Republicans have signed on: Eric Burlison, Andrew Clyde, Paul Gosar, Andy Harris, Scott Perry, Clay Higgins, Sheri Biggs, Michael Cloud — and Victoria Spartz.

Note the dates. The other eight signed the day it was introduced. Spartz joined four days later. Nobody put her name on this by accident. She read it and asked to be added.

If it ever passed and was ratified, here's what would change for you: nothing about your right to vote for president, or for your House member. But the two people who represent Indiana in the U.S. Senate — the ones who confirm Supreme Court justices, ratify treaties, and vote on every federal judge — would be chosen by state legislators in Indianapolis instead of by you.

Self's argument, from his press release, is about state power:

"Our Founding Fathers designed the Senate to protect state sovereignty and act as a check on federal overreach. If senators are supposed to represent their states, then the states should choose them."

Read that again, slowly. "The states should choose them." Not the people of the states. The states — meaning the legislature.

Spartz's office isn't waiting for the Constitution

Here's the part that should worry Hoosiers most, and it comes from Spartz's own office.

Amending the Constitution is close to impossible. It has to clear Congress and then be ratified by three-fourths of the states. Only one amendment has ever been repealed — Prohibition. So you might think this is a symbolic gesture with no real-world consequence.

Spartz's spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation otherwise. Until the 17th Amendment is repealed, they said, "states can begin moving primaries to their state legislatures, party conventions, or a combination of both."

That is not a constitutional theory. That's a roadmap. It means: while we work on taking your general-election vote, states can start taking your primary vote right now — no amendment needed, no ratification, no three-fourths of anything. Just a state legislature deciding that party insiders in a convention hall will narrow the field instead of voters.

In a state where one party dominates, the primary is often the election that actually decides who wins. Handing that to a legislature or a convention isn't a technical adjustment. It's the whole ballgame.

We already ran this experiment. It failed.

The country didn't adopt the 17th Amendment on a whim. It adopted it after living with the alternative for 124 years.

Under the old system, state legislatures deadlocked. When a state's House and Senate were held by different parties, they simply couldn't agree — and the seat sat empty. Delaware went almost two years without one of its senators after a stalemate in the 1890s.

Worse, the seats were for sale. Political machines that controlled state legislatures installed senators widely regarded as their "puppets," and the Senate itself earned a nickname: the "millionaire's club," serving powerful private interests.

By 1912 — a year before ratification — 29 states had already given up and set up their own versions of direct election, because the legislative system was that broken. Congress passed the amendment only after at least 287 separate proposals for direct election had been introduced over the decades.

This is the system Victoria Spartz signed her name to bring back.

The "big money" argument doesn't survive contact with the facts

Some cosponsors argue the change would clean up campaign money. Rep. Clay Higgins told the Daily Caller the 17th Amendment is "arguably the most injurious amendment in history" because "big money has twisted our Senate races into circus acts."

Set aside whether that's true. Ask the obvious follow-up: if money corrupts an election with millions of voters, what does it do to an election decided by one room of state legislators?

That's the exact failure mode that produced the 17th Amendment in the first place. Buying a statewide electorate is expensive and hard. Buying a state legislature is neither. The reform being proposed here is a return to the system that got replaced because of corruption.

Consider the source

There's one more thing Hoosiers should weigh: who's asking.

Spartz has spent her time in Congress being, in the words of Indiana Capital Chronicle columnist Michael Leppert, "simply unreliable, and that's the kindest description available." She announced she was retiring, then reversed and filed for reelection days before the deadline — after nine other Republicans had already filed for her seat. In December 2024 she announced she would stop attending committee meetings and the Republican caucus altogether, saying she didn't "need to be involved in circuses."

A member of Congress who won't show up to her own committees now wants to redesign the Constitution so fewer people get a vote.

What this comes down to

Politicians who want to make it harder for you to vote never say that's what they're doing. They talk about federalism, or original intent, or the Founders. Strip the language away and look at the mechanism, because the mechanism is the whole point.

The mechanism here is simple: today, you pick Indiana's senators. Under H.J.Res.198, politicians do.

Victoria Spartz put her name on that. In an election year. Four days after she didn't have to.

We deserve better.

Source

Ken de la Bastide, Spartz's amendment on election of U.S. Senators a bad proposal, The Herald Bulletin, August 1, 2026.

Trump Is Sending Federal Monitors Into Manchester and Nashua Polls. Kelly Ayotte Says Come On In.

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 19:10:00 +0000

Trump administration officials are set to monitor polling places in Manchester and Nashua this fall — New Hampshire's two largest cities.

At a press briefing after the Executive Council meeting in Nashua on Wednesday, July 29, Gov. Kelly Ayotte was asked about it. Here is her answer:

"I would welcome anyone that wants to come to New Hampshire and see how we do elections. I think we do them well. And so, if they want to come and observe how we do elections here in New Hampshire I think they will see that we conduct our elections in a fair, transparent way."

Anyone. Including the Justice Department of a president who has spent six years insisting American elections are stolen.

The obvious question she didn't answer

Nobody asked whether New Hampshire runs clean elections. Everyone agrees it does — that's Ayotte's whole point, and she's right about it.

The question is why the federal government is sending people to watch.

Former Executive Councilor Andru Volinsky raised it in an InDepthNH opinion piece published that same day: "With depleted resources, you might think the Trump DOJ would focus its efforts to protect voting in places where there have been problems before. You'd be wrong in that belief."

That's the part Ayotte glided past. If New Hampshire's elections are, by her own account, fair and transparent and well run — then there is no election-integrity reason to station federal officials in its polling places. Something else is going on, and the governor of the state declined to ask what.

Volinsky's read was blunter: "Trump is sending his thugs to interfere with our primary and general elections this year in an effort to prevent Democrats from taking Congress and, just maybe, the US Senate." You don't have to accept his framing to notice that of all the places in New Hampshire, the two chosen are its two biggest cities — in a year when control of Congress is on the line.

The contradiction inside the same press conference

Here's the thing that makes this more than a shrug.

In the same briefing, Ayotte was fired up about a different outside body trying to influence New Hampshire's elections. The DNC had just picked South Carolina to go first in the Democratic presidential primary, bumping New Hampshire.

She was, in her words, "beyond disappointed" and "very upset." She talked about the tools the Secretary of State has in state law. She said:

"I think we have the tools to beat this back and New Hampshire is going to be first."

Beat this back. That's the language she used — about a political party's scheduling decision.

One press conference, two outside institutions, two completely different reactions:

Who wants a say in NH elections	Ayotte's response
The Democratic National Committee, on primary dates	"Beat this back." We have the tools. I'm very upset.
The Trump Justice Department, inside polling places	"I would welcome anyone."

One of those is a party calendar. The other is federal officials standing where people cast ballots. She's fighting the first and welcoming the second.

Her Democratic opponent, former Executive Councilor Cinde Warmington, put it this way: "How New Hampshire conducts its elections is up to Granite State election officials, not Donald Trump or his Department of Justice… It's time New Hampshire had a governor who has the backbone to stand up to Trump and gross federal overreach."

She has already made it harder to vote here

Warmington's other line — that Ayotte "has only made it harder for Granite Staters to vote" — is not campaign spin. It's her signing record.

In August 2025, Ayotte signed Senate Bill 218, which requires absentee voters registering by affidavit to submit documents proving citizenship, age, domicile, and identity. The New Hampshire Bulletin covered it at the time.

That extended to absentee voters the same documentary rules that already applied in person under a 2024 law — rules that made New Hampshire's voter registration the strictest in the country.

We know what those rules do, because New Hampshire ran the experiment. In the spring 2025 town meeting season, at least 96 people were turned away from the polls because they couldn't produce a passport or birth certificate, according to a tally by the New Hampshire Campaign for Voting Rights.

Ninety-six qualified voters. In town elections. Turned away.

Disability rights advocates warned that pushing the same requirements onto absentee ballots would hit their community hardest. "Our office is concerned about legislation that would make it more difficult," said Karen Rosenberg of the Disability Rights Center New Hampshire. "I hope that people will figure out work arounds and ways to get what they need to vote, but I think it's going to be very challenging."

To be fair to Ayotte, she signed a good bill the same week — House Bill 67, requiring accessible voting machines in all New Hampshire elections, including purely local ones. That was a genuine bipartisan win, and she vetoed an attempt to carve exemptions out of it. Credit where it's due.

But the pattern is hard to miss. The barriers get higher. And when the federal government announces it's putting people inside Manchester and Nashua polling places, the governor's answer is that they're welcome.

What she could have said

She had an easy option available, and it wasn't partisan.

She could have said: New Hampshire runs its own elections. Our Secretary of State handles it. Observers are welcome under our rules, and our rules only, and I'll be watching to make sure nobody interferes with a Granite Stater trying to vote.

That's a states-rights answer. It's the same answer she gave the DNC, in a stronger voice.

She didn't give it. Not because she doesn't know how — she made exactly that argument about the primary calendar, in the same room, on the same day.

Source

Paula Tracy, "Ayotte Said She Welcomes Trump Administration Observation Of NH Elections", InDepthNH via Patch, July 30, 2026. Photo: Paula Tracy.

Jeff Van Drew Wants to Subpoena New Jersey Over a Voter Registration Law He Voted For

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 09:05:00 +0000

Jeff Van Drew has found the issue he wants to run on. New Jersey mistakenly registered about 6,600 noncitizens to vote, and Van Drew — who chairs the House Judiciary Committee's oversight subcommittee — plans fall hearings and told POLITICO he is "absolutely exploring" the use of congressional subpoenas.

He sent Gov. Mikie Sherrill a letter with 12 questions and a deadline of August 21. If the answers don't come, he says, subpoenas are on the table.

There's a detail buried in that same story that changes how the whole thing reads.

He voted for the law that created the problem

The mistaken registrations trace back to New Jersey's 2018 "motor voter" law. That law let people applying for a driver's license or state ID register to vote automatically. Noncitizens are supposed to be screened out of that process. During a stretch in 2023 and 2024, they weren't.

In 2018, Jeff Van Drew was a Democrat in the New Jersey state Senate. He voted for that bill.

Asked about it by POLITICO, he said he has no regrets, and put the blame on the agency running the system: "How was I to assume that the agency would break the law?"

That's a convenient standard. When a program he voted for fails, the failure belongs to the bureaucrats. When it's time to investigate that failure, the investigation belongs to him.

What actually happened, according to the state

The facts as the governor's office has laid them out are narrower than the outrage suggests:

About 6,600 noncitizens were added to the rolls between June 2023 and June 2024 — more than a year before Sherrill took office.
Around 400 of them cast ballots in later elections.
Sherrill has said she does not believe any of those ballots swayed an election.
Responsibility is still disputed. State officials and the France-based vendor IDEMIA are each pointing at the other.

Sherrill has also commissioned an independent outside review, which is not yet finished. New Jersey legislative Democrats have said they want to see that review before acting. Van Drew isn't waiting for it.

Meanwhile the Trump administration has demanded that New Jersey hand over names, addresses, and other records on those individuals. Sherrill has been cool to that: "We are not in the practice of turning this kind of personally identifying data over to the federal government."

Asked about deporting people, he left the door open

Top Trump administration officials have floated prosecuting or deporting the noncitizens who cast ballots. POLITICO asked Van Drew where he stands. He didn't rule it out:

"It depends on the case, and what the intent was."

He went on to wonder aloud how many of the registered or voting noncitizens "possibly could have been felons or criminals," and concluded, "We don't know. There's some homework to be done."

That's the shape of it: an admitted absence of evidence, paired with a public suggestion that criminals might be involved. He is the one who would do the homework, and he is talking about consequences before he's done it.

Why he is the wrong man to lead this

Van Drew is not a neutral referee arriving at a question about election administration. He has a documented record of trying to overturn an election result he didn't like.

He signed onto the Supreme Court amicus brief asking the justices to throw out millions of votes in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and hand the 2020 election to Trump.
In a December 2020 op-ed, he announced he'd vote against certifying the election, calling it "a rejection of the status quo and a no confidence vote in the politicians, corporate special interests, and legacy media establishment."
Hours after the Capitol was attacked, he voted to reject Biden's Electoral College win — the only member of New Jersey's entire congressional delegation to do so. POLITICO noted that fact in its story too.
He then voted against impeaching Trump for inciting the mob, against an independent bipartisan commission to investigate January 6, and against the House select committee that eventually did.

A member who voted to discard the certified votes of four states is now the one deciding what an "election integrity" investigation looks like. Whatever this inquiry produces, that history is going to be attached to it.

It's also worth remembering how he handles claims that turn out to be shaky. In 2024, during a stretch of unexplained drone sightings, Van Drew claimed Iran had parked a "drone mothership" off the New Jersey coast. The Pentagon publicly disputed it.

What his constituents actually asked him about

Here's the other thing about Van Drew's sudden appetite for hearings and subpoenas: his constituents have been trying to get his attention on something else entirely.

He refuses to hold in-person town halls, saying they just draw "the same 50 or 100 people who just don't like you." In March 2025, an estimated 600 people lined Tilton Road outside his Northfield office asking him to protect Medicaid, Social Security, and Medicare. His office was closed.

They had reason to show up. Van Drew voted for Trump's budget bill, and the Joint Economic Committee projects 30,460 people in his district will lose health coverage as a result. More than 36,000 households in NJ-02 rely on SNAP for groceries, and he voted for the largest SNAP cut in history.

No hearings on any of that. No subpoenas. No town hall.

The bottom line

Roughly 400 improper ballots, in elections nobody claims were changed by them, caused by a registration system Jeff Van Drew himself voted to create — and his response is fall hearings, a subpoena threat, and an open door on deportations.

Thirty thousand of his own constituents are losing health coverage because of a vote he cast last year. That one he's in no hurry to investigate. We deserve better.

Source

This post is based on reporting by POLITICO: Jeff Van Drew says he's 'absolutely exploring' subpoenas in NJ noncitizen voter fiasco by Joey Fox (Photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP).