Hello, and welcome back to The Franchise! We are starting off with some good news for a change — and, potentially, the end of one of the Trump Justice Department’s egregious overreach campaigns. For now.
Hello, and welcome back to The Franchise!
With just weeks until the midterm elections, the Trump administration is, unsurprisingly, still hard at work seeking evidence of widespread non-citizen voting. And it is still not finding it.
We got new details this week about exactly what the administration has been up to thanks to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. Over the past year, ICE has reviewed millions of records and investigated hundreds of nonprofits suspected of helping noncitizens register to vote, according to internal records that were obtained by the nonprofit Democracy Forward. “The information revealed in the documents should concern all Americans and is further evidence of an alarming attempt by the executive branch to undermine our elections,” Skye Perryman, President and CEO of Democracy Forward, said in a statement.
The records note that these investigations were, in part, meant “to identify specific organizations that may be predatory in nature, particularly those suspected of illegal registration and voter encouragement.”
For years now, the Trump administration has been pushing the false narrative that non-citizens are voting en masse for Democrats. There is no evidence of any kind to suggest this is the case. The lack of evidence, however, has not stopped President Trump from pushing forward this lie on a near-daily basis and using the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to investigate the conspiracy theory. It functions as another way to drum up fear and distrust in our election system just in time for the midterm elections.
The newly released records reveal that “48.4 million records were obtained by [DHS deputy assistant secretary for election integrity] Heather Honey through independent sources of information” as part of what is described as a “strategic line of effort” to investigate instances of supposed non-citizen voting. DHS Investigators also looked at 50.6 million records from the DOJ, the documents say; those records, CNN reported, could include unredacted voter data from some states.
The records also indicate that Homeland Security Investigation (HSI), an investigative unit within ICE, watched recent primary elections “to identify emerging trends, vulnerabilities, or indicators that may impact election integrity.”
“DHS has been incredibly transparent about the acquisition and the analysis of publicly available voter files conducted by the Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate of USCIS,” the Department told CNN. “DHS and DOJ are laser focused on prosecuting and removing aliens who vote and preventing the dilution of the votes of US citizens.”
The documents also reveal that HSI considered deploying undercover agents to investigate certain non-profits that the administration suspected of having helped register non-citizens to vote, and named New Jersey and Pennsylvania as specific “areas of focus.”
The records indicate that HSI specifically investigated a branch of CAIR, The Council on American-Islamic Relations in Pennsylvania as well as the clothing company Zumiez, which were both, per the documents, “flagged for further investigation.”
As always, we have a lot more to unpack this week, so let’s dig in.
There are by one tally a staggering 197 election deniers on the midterm ballots next month, according to newly released research from States United Action.
We have previously highlighted some of the most prominent election deniers hoping to win elections this fall. For example, Jim Marchant is a big time election conspiracy theorist and is currently running as the Republican candidate for secretary of state in Nevada. Marchant, who has consistently repeated lies about the 2020 election for years now, also won the GOP nomination for secretary of state back in 2022, and was the founding member of America First Secretary of State Coalition. The coalition was a group of election deniers all running for secretary of state positions on 2020 election conspiracy theory platforms, intent on somehow overturning the results of that election. Marchant lost to Democrat Cisco Aguilar in 2022, and, at the time, told NBC News that if he was secretary of state he would not have certified the 2020 election results in favor of Joe Biden.
Marchant, however, is just one of many election deniers on the ballot. More specifically, and most concerning, there are, per States United Action, at least 33 election deniers in 21 states on the ballot running for positions that would play a role in overseeing elections, including 17 election deniers running for governor, 7 election deniers running for secretary of state, and nine election deniers running for attorney general.
“Our 2026 research shows how deeply embedded the election denial movement is, even as fewer Election Deniers are running for office than we saw in 2022,” Kelly Rader, Research Director at States United Action, said in a press release this week. “The election denial movement is showing up across every facet of our democracy — from the ballot box to the White House.”
Attorney General Todd Blanche is defending the DOJ’s decision to send 1,000 election monitors to various polling locations throughout the country for the midterm elections.
To jog your memory, we noted back in August that Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Harmeet Dhillon confirmed to Bloomberg News that the DOJ planned to dispatch close to 1,000 election monitors next month as a way to, as the DOJ claimed, secure the midterm elections.
State and local election administrators have a different concern: that this onslaught of federal election monitors will be intimidating for voters.
Dhillon has sought to play it down as business-as-usual. “The United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division has sent monitors to election hot spots, polling places to increase voter confidence to troubleshoot problems and we are doing that now. We just did it in the primary,” Dhillon said at the time. “We’re going to do it to the tune of approximately a thousand election monitors in the November election, and this is just something that DOJ does.”
More recently, on Sunday, Blanche told Fox News’s Shannon Bream that the administration’s decision to send federal election monitors to polling sites is simply to make sure “that federal law is being enforced appropriately.”
“They’re not going to Republican states, they’re not going to Democrat states,” Blanche said.”They are going to every state to make sure our elections are carried out legally, fairly and appropriately.”
Blanche also shut down speculation that armed federal agents would be deployed at polling stations, calling the claim “completely false.”
Relatedly, the NAACP filed a federal lawsuit against Dhillon only days before Blanche’s comments, demanding records about the DOJ’s plan to deploy 1,000 election monitors for the midterm elections.
“This unprecedented deployment of federal officials stands to jeopardize the election and interfere with the right of voters to participate in the election free from intimidation,” the lawsuit reads. “Courts have recognized that unnecessary law enforcement and government presence at polling sites can cause fear, create confusion, impose burdens on election officials, and have a chilling or coercive effect on the electorate.”
CNN: Inside Democrats’ efforts to secure Election Day and respond to fears of Trump interference
ABC News:Trump sows doubt about mail-in voting while encouraging it, as midterms approach
Colorado Newsline: Tina Peters met with Trump to discuss election plans, former Trump administration attorney says
Hello, and welcome back to The Franchise!
Democrats released another damning whistleblower disclosure this week. This one alleges some disturbing, and potentially illegal, activity from the Department of Homeland Security’s ongoing effort to access state voter rolls as part of the Trump administration’s relentless campaign to unearth proof of President Trump’s conspiracy theories about noncitizens voters.
Hello, and welcome back to The Franchise!
Despite the fact that the U.S. has entered the “quiet period” — the 90 day window before an election during which state election officials are federally barred from “systematically” removing people from voter rolls — the Trump administration is going full steam ahead in its crusade to control election administration and try to purge voters from the voter rolls.
Democrats are sounding the alarm and demanding investigations in the wake of a recent whistleblower complaint released by the office of Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) earlier this week. The report warns that the Postal Service’s new mail-in ballot policies that are being implemented to comply with President Trump’s March executive order to restrict mail-in voting, were made hastily and have been through very little testing. The whistleblower’s report, which my colleague John Light unpacks in depth here, warns that the new USPS rules could be disastrous for the midterms.
It goes on to say that the planned changes to the verification process for mailing a ballot are “rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed,” and will pose serious issues if implemented ahead of the upcoming midterm elections. One former election official has even estimated that it could take more than four years in some major counties for each ballot to be verified and sent out under the new USPS rule.
The whistleblower alleged that the new ballot mailing system was, at times, produced in violation of court orders.
“The whistleblower’s allegations make clear that USPS lacks the technical or operational capability needed to effectively implement the EO’s provisions in a way that safeguards every citizen’s right to vote in the upcoming midterm elections,” Blumenthal wrote in a letter to Postmaster General David Steiner on Monday.
Democratic leadership and other congressional Democrats are joining Blumenthal in righteous outrage over the report’s very ominous warnings.
House Oversight Committee Ranking Member Robert Garcia (D-CA) in a statement this week said the “new secret tracking system at the US Postal Service is faulty, untested, and threatens to totally disrupt ballot delivery for millions of American citizens.”
“We are fighting in court to protect the right to vote by mail for all and will continue to investigate. This unconstitutional and dangerous power grab must be permanently and immediately blocked,” he added.
“A whistleblower is warning of a ‘catastrophic failure’ in our mail-ballot system—all because Trump is turning USPS into a voter suppression machine,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) similarly said in a post on X. “Vote-by-mail is safe and secure. Trump himself voted by mail just last month. He knows he’s failing the American people, so he’s doing everything he can to rig the midterms.”
House Democrats sent a letter to USPS Inspector General Tammy Hull this week demanding an investigation into what they described as “the Postal Service’s reckless actions, which undermine the foundation of our nation’s democracy and violate the basic principle that all citizens have the right to have their vote counted.”
“The Postal Service’s current actions are putting clear obstacles in the way of exercising that right,” the letter adds. “Therefore, to protect the sanctity of our elections, and ensure that every American’s vote is counted, you must immediately investigate this whistleblower’s allegations, report any attempt to block your investigation, and disclose whatever wrongdoing you discover.”
As always, there is a lot more to catch up on this week. Let’s dive in.
The nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed a lawsuit this week challenging the Trump administration’s attempts to create a national voter database. In the same March executive order I mentioned above, President Trump directed the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department and the Social Security Administration to use private data from their agencies to create citizenship lists for each state. The supposed citizenship lists would then be sent to each state and the Trump administration executive order demands that states cross reference their voter rolls with the “State Citizenship Lists” to, presumably, determine who can and can’t vote. The order also seeks to restrict mail-in voting and calls for the USPS to police who is and is not permitted to receive a ballot. The executive order, and the rules being written to implement it, have been challenged repeatedly in court.
Last month, the Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration temporarily in an unsigned order that allowed the administration to, for now, move forward with implementing new rules to carry out Trump’s executive order. SCOTUS did not rule on the merit of the executive order itself, but may do so before the midterms, once the case makes its way back to the high court.
In a press release on Tuesday, EPIC described the executive order as an “unprecedented and illegal effort to interfere in the 2026 midterms by using unreliable databases for reasons totally unrelated to their intended purpose to create lists of ‘citizens’ in every state for determining who can and cannot vote.”
In its lawsuit this week, EPIC argues that the administration’s attempts to centralize private data from multiple federal agencies in order to create the citizenship lists violates federal privacy laws, and is an attempt to disenfranchise eligible voters.
“No statute authorizes Defendants to share and centralize vast volumes of Americans’ sensitive personal data across government agencies to create and disclose the ‘State Citizenship Lists,” the complaint says. “And in doing so, Defendants are running roughshod over critical safeguards of the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”), and the constitutional separation of powers.”
“Building a database containing the identities, social security numbers, addresses, and citizenship information of every U.S. citizen is an extraordinary illegal overreach by the federal government,” John Davisson, deputy director and director of enforcement at EPIC said in a statement this week. “This is precisely the nightmare ‘Big Brother’ scenario that the Privacy Act exists to prevent. We hope the court will block this effort immediately and protect every American’s fundamental right to privacy.”
The Democratic-led Maryland redistricting proposal faces another roadblock as a second judge blocked the measure from appearing on November’s ballot. The proposal, which was introduced as a way to counteract the Trump administration’s ongoing gerrymandering blitz, was approved during a special session earlier this month.
Republicans, however, immediately challenged the ballot proposal, and on Friday, a Dorchester County Circuit Court, S. James Sarbanes, sided with Republicans, ruling that the lawmakers failed to follow proper procedures. The judge specifically noted there were issues with the ballot language and the process, saying voters did not get proper notice and that the language of the proposal is confusing for voters.
“The practical effect of HB 2100 is to remove all Maryland Constitutional standards and protections from congressional districting plans,” Sarbanes said in his ruling. “That is not clear from the ballot question.”
“The Court finds that the ballot language and the General Assembly’s failure to abide by the Election Law Article has resulted in voters not being provided with adequate notice of the purpose and effect of the ballot question so they can make an informed vote,” he added.
Sabanes paused the effect of the ruling until the state Supreme Court rules on the matter on Thursday.
In a statement earlier this month, Democratic Gov. Wes Moore defended the proposal.
“For over a year, I have warned that Donald Trump and Republicans across the country are working to rig the system, weaken voting rights, and make this pain permanent.” he said. “I am proud that today we united and took action. I continue to believe that our country needs national redistricting reform.”
The New York Times: More Mail Ballots Are Arriving Late This Cycle, and They’re Getting Tossed
CNN: DHS plans to launch voter fraud investigation surge Tuesday
Politico: Florida Republicans worry they won’t capture big redistricting gains
NOTUS: Democrats Cry Foul at Texas County’s Plan to Slash Polling Sites
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