A mother in New York State who claims to oppose vaccines because of her Catholic faith lost an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) this week—though Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch said they would have granted her application. For now, the woman’s kindergarten-aged son must be vaccinated to attend school. 

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Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution provides that the legislature of each state shall prescribe the “times, places and manners” of holding elections for the U.S. Congress, “but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations.” Congress has long used its override powers sparingly, and Republicans in particular have warned against both micromanaging how states do their job and the specter of a federal takeover. That remains the correct position, for reasons of practicality, election integrity and the safeguarding of the nation’s liberty.

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Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson, dissenting from the Supreme Court’s decision to stay a preliminary injunction against implementation of President Trump’s executive order on mail-in voting, wrote that allowing the plan to proceed could “foment chaos” ahead of the upcoming midterm elections. You’ll never guess what happened next.

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President Donald Trump said earlier this year he’d “do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections” this fall, declining to rule out sending the National Guard or federal law enforcement officers to polling locations throughout the country.

Those comments came a few months after Trump casually and briefly mentioned canceling the midterm elections that will determine control of Congress. 

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Over the “strongest possible” objections from the federal prosecutor handling the case, leaders at the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., quashed plans to bring civil rights charges against an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent accused of shooting a Venezuelan immigrant and then lying about it. 

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President Donald Trump’s executive order placing new restrictions on mail-in voting would assign state officials a Herculean task to reach compliance before the crucial midterm elections.

The order directed the U.S. Postal Service to strictly regulate the envelope design of mail-in ballots and to collect voter data from each state through an online portal, among other things. 

The Postal Service has argued in court that its rule is not an election regulation, but is within the agency’s purview as a standard for a specific type of mail.

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Looks like someone has leaked details to the New York Post about a plan led by appointees of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to go after the tax exemptions of major nonprofits perceived as being at ideological odds with the Trump administration.

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The morning brings news of whistleblower allegations concerning the US Postal Service and its response to President Donald Trump’s executive order on mail voting, key provisions of which are 

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ADL (the Anti-Defamation League) today released a new report, “Antisemitism in U.S. Teachers Unions,” documenting alarming levels of anti-Jewish conduct, hostile rhetoric and institutional failure that Jewish K-12 employees have experienced in teachers unions across the country. Based on a mixed-methods study combining focus groups and a survey of 307 Jewish members of U.S.

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The date Jan. 6 has outsize significance in the United States for the worst reasons. Jan. 3, however, most Americans have never heard of. Ideally, it will stay that way.

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A federal judge froze for two weeks a Trump administration regulation to restrict mail voting late Thursday, calling the U.S. Postal Service rule a violation of states’ power to administer elections.

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In the 20th century, the United States built the world’s dominant manufacturing powerhouse. A thriving middle class grew, well into the 1970s. The U.S. was a beacon of democracy, defeating fascism in World War II and beating back communism and other forms of authoritarianism during the Cold War. 

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I was glad to read, in The Federalist, Daniel Brubaker’s recent piece, “Why Sharia Law Is Incompatible with the American Way of Life,” which took up on an earlier piece of mine in Al Hurra: “Why Sharia Courts Have a Place in Israel.” I was also humbled that Dr.

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Yesterday, the Supreme Court granted the Trump administration’s request to stay a lower court injunction that had barred the federal government from taking action on Trump’s second executive order from March 2026 (“Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections”).

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This story was originally published by The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. Sign up for its newsletters here.

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Right-leaning Canadians’ trust in the bodies that manage Canadian elections has declined significantly since 2019, a McGill-led research team has found.

Their research draws on data collected between 2008 to 2021 by the Canadian Election Study (with about 72,000 respondents), as well as information gathered by the Media Ecosystem Observatory after the 2021 Canadian federal election (with nearly 3,000 respondents) and the Quebec election of 2022 (with approximately 1,500 respondents).

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State Democratic officials are preparing for chaos at the polls this November, as President Donald Trump casts doubt on election security and pushes for more federal involvement in local voting. 

“We’re no longer talking about hypothetical situations,” said Nick Brown, Washington state’s Democratic attorney general, noting the president’s push to nationalize election administration and to question the integrity of upcoming elections.

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Reporting Highlights

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President Trump’s pet legislation—the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE America Act—would require Americans to provide documented proof of citizenship upon registering to vote, usually a passport or birth certificate. This, the act’s proponents argue, would prevent noncitizen actors from illegally registering and participating in American elections. The recently revealed registration mishap in New Jersey has led to renewed advocacy for the act.

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My colleague Stephen Richer has already weighed in with observations on the New Jersey voter registration fiasco, in which a software error mistakenly registered roughly 6,600 persons to vote between June 12, 2023, and June 25, 2024, even though they had affirmed they were not US citizens. Of these, somewhat fewer than 400 later voted. 

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