Reporting Highlights

●  Hidden Hand:Conservative attorney Cleta Mitchell has shaped virtually every aspect of the Trump administration’s norm-busting agenda on American elections. 

●  Movement Builder:After working to overturn Trump’s 2020 defeat, Mitchell forged a national grassroots movement to overhaul voting. Some of her allies now hold top administration jobs. 

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The U.S. Department of Justice plans to send election monitors to every state ahead of Election Day, expanding a long-standing practice that’s spurred concern this year among Democrats and voting rights advocates because of President Donald Trump’s push to influence elections.

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As artificial intelligence technologies grow ever more powerful, so do the risks they pose and with them the urgency of regulating AI.

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This year’s statewide ballot measures are written, on average, at a graduate-school reading level, according to a new report.

The readability of 2026’s ballot questions — which ask voters to weigh in on issues as varied as abortion, property taxes, voter ID and firearms — varies by state, political data tracking nonprofit Ballotpedia found in its newest Ballot Measure Readability Report.

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Editor’s Note: Ten years on, Russia’s 2016 interference operation on behalf of Trump, and the Trump administration’s dismantlement of all the U.S. federal government organs dedicated to tracking and analyzing state-sponsored efforts to interfere in U.S. institutions, elections, and society, offer two lessons, Julia Cutler writes. First, a foreign intervention pays off most durably and reliably when its beneficiary has every incentive to hide the intervention sponsor’s hand.

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Documents obtained by Cato via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) reveal that more than a year before the 2026 midterms, the FBI was quietly building two election-related capabilities at once. The first was a set of internal “triggers” that told field agents when they could investigate AI-generated or “synthetic” political content — rules the Bureau is still keeping secret.

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Reporting Highlights

●  An Unusual Request:Political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security wanted the agency that protects election systems to get and hack a voting machine, which shocked staffers.

●  Undermining Election Security: President Donald Trump has said voting is vulnerable even as his administration has undermined the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is supposed to protect it.

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The British government’s search for a way to stop migrants crossing the English Channel in small boats has become a test of its ability to control the country’s borders.

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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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Since September 2025, the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia to demand their unredacted voter rolls.

The rolls contain confidential information on millions of Americans and have historically been managed by states. Now these lists are a major focus of President Donald Trump’s push to take federal control over elections and prosecute alleged noncitizen voters.

To date, there have been final rulings in 26 of the DOJ lawsuits.

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From Alaska to Florida, there once was an important job in government that most Americans rarely thought about: the secretary of state.

That changed after the 2020 presidential election, when secretaries of state in places such as Arizona, Georgia and Michigan were thrust into battles over election results, certification and false claims of widespread fraud.

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Fear of federal interference in the 2026 midterms, from intimidation stoked by armed officials at the polls to seizure of ballots, has been growing in the United States.

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Three weeks before Election Day, the Trump administration’s sprawling project to send sensitive personal information on millions of voters to the Department of Homeland Security has been declared illegal by a federal judge.

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The first piece in this series reviewed the U.S. laws prohibiting election-related domestic deployments. To understand how these laws work in a real-life election scenario, it is worth outlining: 

1. What troops could be ordered to do at each stage of the elections process, and

2. What the repercussions of such orders could be. 

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The Department of Homeland Security obtained tens of millions of unspecified records as part of a sweeping nationwide effort to find voter fraud, according to internal DHS reports, and weighed using undercover agents to investigate voter registration efforts by nonprofit groups.

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On September 28, federal district judge Amir Ali in Washington, DC, ruled unlawful the Department of Homeland Security’s attempt to use funding leverage to get local governments to adopt various election rule changes favored by President Donald Trump but never enacted by Congress. While the ruling is limited in its scope, it still counts as a satisfying win for free and independent elections, federalism, and the separation of powers.

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With the mid-term elections approaching, questions have arisen over whether the Trump administration might attempt to station federal troops at polling places.

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This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

In the run-up to the November election, federal officials have sent conflicting signals about whether law enforcement agents could show up at polling places.

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On Sunday Oct. 4, 2026, Brazilians didn’t just vote against President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. They buried a political project that had been on life support for almost a decade.

That project is the Nova República, the “New Republic”. It was born in the mid-1980s from the debris of a 21-year military dictatorship, and written into the country’s 1988 Constitution. For a generation, Brazilians called it the democratic pact, and it rested on three commitments.

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When Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin declared in September that Immigration and Customs Enforcement could serve warrants on individuals at polling places this fall, officials in Denver, a liberal city where roughly 14% of residents are foreign-born, quickly sued.

“Every day we find new things to be astonished about but I think that we just want residents to not be afraid to vote because that’s ultimately what the president was after,” Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, a Democrat, said in an interview.

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