‘I Would Underscore the Seriousness Of the Violation Here’

Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco’s election meddling scheme was declared unlawful by the California Supreme Court, which just issued unanimous decisions in two cases focused on Bianco’s seizure of 650,000 ballots in California this spring.

I’ll unpack Bianco’s extremist background and ties to the far-right constitutional sheriff’s movement a bit more below, but, crucially, Bianco seized ballots in April that were cast in the state’s 2025 special election — when voters approved Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to conduct redistricting mid-cycle. As you’ll recall, Newsom put forward Proposition 50 in an attempt to offset the damage of President Trump’s nationwide gerrymandering crusade.

Prop 50 was placed on the California ballot specifically in response to Texas’ redrawing of its congressional district lines, which is expected to net five seats for Republicans in the U.S. House in the midterms. Newsom was one of several Democratic officials across the U.S. who worked to combat Trump’s gerrymandering blitz, a bullying campaign Trump launched last summer in an attempt to pressure Republican-controlled state legislatures nationwide to redraw their district maps mid-cycle to help Republicans hold the House this fall. Texas was the first to act on Trump’s demands, followed by Missouri, North Carolina, Florida and others. Enough Republicans in Indiana’s state Senate bucked Trump to quash the effort there. Trump endorsed primary challengers for those who refused to bend the knee, and most of those who stood up to Trump lost their primary elections in May.

Anyway, back to California and the MAGA sheriff seizing ballots. California voters approved Prop 50 — which amended the state constitution so that state officials could, temporarily, bypass normal protocol for redistricting and approved new maps that gave Democrats an additional five seats in the House — with a 64% vote in November 2025. Shortly thereafter, Bianco seized the ballots from election officials as part of what he claimed to be an investigation into complaints from Riverside County activists (i.e. election conspiracy theorists) who claimed the vote count did not match the number of ballots election officials received.

The California Supreme Court ordered Bianco to halt his investigation back in April while the case challenging his seizure played out in court. The state’s highest court ruled on Thursday that Bianco did not have the authority to take the ballots, issuing unanimous decisions in two separate cases brought against the sheriff — one by Riverside County voters and another by California Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta. The Supreme Court declared that Bianco’s actions threatened election integrity in the state of California. An excerpt from the ruling in the case brought by voters:

We hold that the seizure of the ballots was unlawful. California law long has recognized that voted ballots require special care and handling to safeguard them from alteration or tampering. Consistent with this principle, the Elections Code narrowly limits the circumstances in which a court may order the production of ballots for inspection, and even in those narrow circumstances, requires that ballots remain in the physical custody of the responsible elections official.

“I would underscore the seriousness of the violation here. This is not a case involving a few documents,” Associate Justice Goodwin H. Liu said in a concurrent opinion. “It involves the unlawful removal and handling by armed deputies of over 1,000 boxes of documents — and not just any documents, but the most precious documents of the citizenry in a democracy: their votes.”

Hello, and Welcome Back to the Franchise

Just over a week since the Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s effort to take over and/or break mail-in voting, I still don’t think the magnitude of the president’s loss has been recognized.

‘Years’ to Send Out Mail-in Ballots

Election experts are examining the new U.S. Postal Service rules for mailed ballots, and finding that under them, getting ballots in the mail could take weeks — or even years — rendering the program unworkable for an actual election.

“If it took one minute to verify each piece in the mailing, it would take about 4.9 years of continuous scanning to verify the whole mailing,” wrote Tammy Patrick, Chief Programs Officer of the National Association of Election Officials and a former elections official for Maricopa County, in a declaration as part of one of the legal challenges to the rule.

“If it only took only a second to scan each mailpiece, it would take 30 days,” she continued. “Even if it took only one tenth of a second to scan each mailpiece, it would take a little over 72 hours.”

Maricopa County, Patrick said, will send out 2.6 million ballots on the first day of early voting. Patrick wrote that under the new USPS rules, a single error could lead to the entire batch being rejected.

That squares with what a whistleblower from inside USPS alleged: a single error — which, the whistleblower underscored, could be human or technical — could lead to the entire batch of 10,000 ballots being sent back to election officials to be resubmitted.

Ann Jacobs, a former chair of the Wisconsin Election Commission, wrote on X that getting Milwaukee’s 33,567 primary election mailed ballots out could take more than two months. “At a minute each, that’s 559.45 hours or 69.94 work days,” she wrote. “At 30 seconds each, that’s 279.73 hours or 34.97 work days. A month of days of someone standing at a post office, watching a scanner. Heck, at 10 seconds each, it’s 93.25 hrs.”

“Not to put too fine a point on it, but ballots go out 9/17/26 in Wisconsin – we don’t have 35 work days,” she continued. “This is true across the nation.”

Indeed. In fact, North Carolina — a state with some 7 million registered voters and some important races in November — begins sending out absentee ballots today.

The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court yesterday to immediately allow it to implement the USPS rule, despite a lower court injunction on it that is still working its way up to the Supreme Court.

Hat tip to NOTUS for flagging some of these former election officials’ comments.

Missouri Secretary of State’s Games Lead to Republican Gerrymander Being Blocked (at Least for Now)

The Missouri Supreme Court blocked an aggressive Republican gerrymander from being used in the November election.

• It’s a (late-breaking) loss for Republicans’ efforts to gerrymander Democrats out of political power after the Supreme Court knocked down a significant portion of the Voting Rights Act last spring.
• This President Donald Trump-backed map redrew a district in the Kansas City area, attempting to flip one of Missouri’s two Democratic congressional districts.
• The state Supreme Court held yesterday evening that some procedural hijinks meant November’s elections must be held under the old map, and that voters must be given a chance to vote on the new maps on the November ballot.
• The hijinks include a wild maneuver by Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins: Opponents of the new map submitted hundreds of thousands of petition signatures, more than enough to put the maps on the November ballot. Missouri law says that voters can hold a referendum on any act of the state legislature.
• But Hoskins waited until voting in the primary election — under the new maps — was underway to reject the petition, concluding that the state constitution did not empower voters to challenge redistricting.
• The state Supreme Court rejected that interpretation, and his broader gambit, finding redistricting was indeed an act of the state legislature.
• This all will likely end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Tabs

• Layla A. Jones has a fantastic piece for TPM probing how a baseless, right-wing freakout about an obscure data privacy technique used by the Census Bureau has culminated in claims that bureaucrats used the survey to steal congressional seats for Democrats. This fringe contention is now shaping Census Bureau policy.
• The Wall Street Journal paints a rough portrait of John Fetterman, concluding from an investigation that “the first-term senator shows little interest in doing the job beyond cultivating relationships with conservative media figures and advocating for Israel, according to interviews with more than a dozen former staffers and lawmakers, as well as text messages and other internal records.”

Woman of the Hour

It’s conspiracy theorizing television host Maria Bartiromo, ousted from her job at Fox Business for mysterious reasons. One report claims that she shared with the White House internal guidance about Fox’s decision to limit coverage of Trump’s July speech that attempted, again, to sow doubt in the 2020 election.

Are We at War?

JD Vance tackled the White House press briefing yesterday. “I wouldn’t call it a war. Right now, there is no active shooting,” the vice president said, before acknowledging “Iranians are shooting at commercial shipping.” The remarks, however, did not openly acknowledge the United States’ retaliation for what Vance described as “flare ups.”

Hello, and welcome back to The Franchise!

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. 

Another Lawsuit Challenging Trump’s Dystopian Citizenship Lists

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.”

Another Roadblock for Maryland’s Redistricting Proposal

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.”

In Other Election News

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