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voting rights
'We Must Stop Trump’s Authoritarian Power Grab,' Sanders Says of Assault on Mail-In Voting
"The Trump administration is trying to use the United States Postal Service to decide who gets to vote in this year's election. Unacceptable."
Sep 02, 2026
Sen. Bernie Sanders warned Tuesday that President Donald Trump's attempt to leverage the US Postal Service to advance his assault on mail-in voting is part of a broader and intensifying "authoritarian power grab" that poses an existential threat to American democracy.
"The Trump administration is trying to use the United States Postal Service to decide who gets to vote in this year's election. Unacceptable," Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote after an anonymous federal official said in a whistleblower disclosure that USPS systems being hastily implemented at the president's direction—and in possible violation of court orders—could threaten the delivery of millions of ballots in the fast-approaching midterm elections.
Sanders said that Trump's assault on mail-in voting via the Postal Service is "blatantly unconstitutional," noting that the nation's founders empowered states to administer elections "precisely so that no authoritarian in Washington could ever seize that power for himself."
"Trump is trying to seize it anyway—in a blatant attempt to rig the election in his favor," the senator warned. "Trump knows this has nothing to do with the safety of mail-in ballots, because he himself has voted by mail in Florida twice this year. He knows mail-in voting is safe and secure."
"Voter fraud is not the problem," Sanders continued. "Trump's problem is that his agenda is deeply unpopular. He has waged illegal wars the American people did not ask for. He is throwing 15 million Americans off the healthcare they have and has made the largest cuts to education and nutrition assistance in history in order to pay for $1 trillion in tax breaks to the top 1% and his billionaire friends."
"He knows that when people vote, they will reject oligarchy and corporate greed. So instead of changing his policies, he is trying to decide which voters get to participate in elections this November," he added. "Too many Americans have fought and died to defend American democracy. We must stop Trump’s authoritarian power grab—before it is too late."
Trump Must Not Be Allowed to Prevent Millions of Americans from Voting
The Trump administration is trying to use the United States Postal Service to decide who gets to vote in this year's election. Unacceptable. We will not accept Trump’s authoritarianism.
Last month, the…
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) September 1, 2026
Following the USPS whistleblower disclosure, the investigative outlet ProPublica reported on Wednesday that top Postal Service officials have "expressed concerns" during recent internal meetings about how the new policies the agency is implementing in compliance with Trump's March executive order "could delay or block ballots from reaching large swaths of eligible voters for the upcoming midterms."
Days after the Postal Service published its final rule on new mail-in voting requirements, election clerks warned USPS officials that potentially millions of ballots could be impacted, according to ProPublica.
"An example was given of Maricopa County, Arizona, which often sends out more than 2 million ballots at a time in its initial mailing," the outlet reported. "USPS officials confirmed it was possible that one ballot with a bad barcode or wrong voter information within the more than 2 million ballots could delay the entire mailing, according to two people who attended the related committee meeting."
The USPS rule is currently blocked by a federal court, but the Trump administration is working to clear legal hurdles and implement the mail-in ballot restrictions ahead of the midterms.
In a letter to Postmaster General David Steiner on Tuesday, every Democratic member of the House Oversight Committee called for an immediate end to "this irresponsible and illegal scheme to implement the Trump administration’s plan to control our federal elections."
"The right of all Americans to have their votes counted is sacrosanct," the lawmakers wrote. "The Postal Service's current actions are putting clear obstacles in the way of that right."
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Talarico Protests as Texas Swing County Plans to Close 92 Polling Places
“The most powerful people in this county, the most powerful people in this country, don’t want us to be able to vote easily."
Aug 31, 2026
Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico is pushing for one of Texas' most important swing counties to drop plans to close nearly a third of its polling places before November's midterms.
Amid public outcry, the Commissioners Court for Tarrant County—which contains Fort Worth and borders Dallas—plans to hold a vote on Tuesday on whether to shutter 92 of the polling places used in the 2022 election, many of which serve the city's poorer and minority populations.
If Democrats flip the Senate this November, the road to that outcome will almost certainly run through Texas. A Democrat has not won a statewide election there since 1994, but Talarico may be in a position to break the trend—leading Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton in most polls.
Tarrant County narrowly supported then-Rep. Collin Allred, the Democratic challenger to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) in 2024. Talarico said the closure of polling places was meant to suppress turnout and help Republicans cling to their advantage in the state.
“The most powerful people in this county, the most powerful people in this country, don’t want us to be able to vote easily,” Talarico said at a press event Sunday, during which he argued that the closures would result in longer travel for voters and lower turnout, especially in heavily Black and Latino communities.
"We're here fighting for the rights of everybody," Talarico added. "The problem is when we let voting rights become a partisan issue. That's when we walk down a very dangerous path in this country."
Proponents of the closures have described them as a way for the county to save money, rather than a political tactic.
“We’re clearly not trying to suppress the vote,” state Rep. Matt Shaheen (R-66), the chairman of the Texas House Elections Committee, told the Associated Press. “That’s a silly accusation.”
But Republican officials in Tarrant County have, in the past, explicitly tied closures of certain voting locations to partisan aims. In 2024, Republican County Judge Tim O'Hare attempted, unsuccessfully, to remove several early voting sites on college campuses, a move that the county's GOP chairman said would have been "a serious win for Republicans in Tarrant County."
In 2025's off-year elections, Republicans voted 3-2 to reduce the number of polling locations by more than a third and cut funding for free bus rides to the polls for low-income residents. The previous year, they introduced new rules blocking what they derided as "left-wing" groups from registering voters inside county buildings.
At the state level, meanwhile, Texas has carried out unprecedented mid-decade redistricting to hand more US House seats to Republicans at the behest of President Donald Trump. And following Trump's false assertions that his loss in the 2020 election was marred by fraud, Texas introduced several new restrictions on mail-in voting that were found to have significantly reduced turnout.
Tuesday's scheduled vote in Tarrant County comes after commissioners opted to table an earlier proposal that would have shuttered nearly half the county's polling places.
An analysis of that plan showed that the lowest-income third of ZIP codes would lose nearly 58% of their Election Day polling sites, while the highest-income third would lose just under 22%. Majority-minority ZIP codes would have lost nearly 52% of their polling places, while majority-white ones would have lost just a third of theirs.
A similar analysis has not yet been conducted for the new proposal. But civil rights groups still argue that the proposal will disenfranchise many voters.
"Cutting the number of poll sites, especially at such a large scale, will harm Tarrant County voters and their right to participate in the democratic process—and cause particular harm to Black, Latino, and [Asian American and Pacific Islander] voters who already face significant barriers to exercising that fundamental right," wrote groups including the ACLU, the Legal Defense Fund, and the Texas Civil Rights Project, in a letter to the Commissioners' Court on Friday.
They emphasized that the polling places slated to close under the new proposal were clustered in areas such as south and southeast Fort Worth and central and eastern Arlington, which have predominantly nonwhite populations.
Tarrant County Commissioner Alisa Simmons, a Democrat who is running to unseat O'Hare as county judge and spoke alongside Talarico on Sunday, argued that while it was an improvement on the earlier proposal, "dropping 92 Election Day polling places is crazy."
"We should not compare this proposal to the worst proposal," she said. "We should compare it to the access that Tarrant County voters actually had in 2022."
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'Trump Must Keep His Hands Off Our Elections': Judge Again Blocks Attack on Mail-In Voting
US District Judge Indira Talwani said states will "face irreparable harm where they are required to comply with a likely unconstitutional regulation for which compliance is practically impossible as to the 2026 midterm elections," now just two months away.
Aug 28, 2026
A federal judge in Boston on Thursday evening issued a new and complete block on rules recently set forth by the US Postal Service designed to severely restrict mail-in voting nationwide—a ruling that comes just days after the US Supreme Court put a hold on a previous, similar injunction against the rules that stemmed from an executive order issued last year by President Donald Trump.
US District Judge Indira Talwani said the group of Democratic-led states and voting rights group that filed separate legal challenges over the changes to how the USPS would handle mail-in ballots adequately proved that they would "face irreparable harm where they are required to comply with a likely unconstitutional regulation for which compliance is practically impossible as to the 2026 midterm elections, now little more than two months away."
When the Supreme Court ruled Monday on the lawsuit, it lifted a previous injunction ordered by Judge Talwani, ruling not on the legality of the rules themselves but arguing that the states and other plaintiffs did not have proper legal standing at the time because the Postal Service had yet to release the finalized rules stemming from Trump's order at the time the lawsuit was filed.
However, because the USPS did finalize its rules at the end of last week, Talwani's new temporary injunction ordered on Thursday would not fall prey to that dynamic. As the New York Times reports:
[Talwani] wrote that while the Supreme Court had “admonished” her on Monday that the Postal Service had not finalized any changes when the groups sued initially, making court action premature, the stakes had changed since then because of the step the agency took Friday to formalize its plan.
Her ruling marked the third court decision on the issue in less than a week, a whipsaw of action that threatened to confuse voters. But each delay has reduced the administration’s chances of clearing the legal hurdles to execute its logistically complicated mail-in ballot plan before the November election. She blocked the rule from taking effect for 14 days, and she had previously scheduled a hearing to discuss the legality of the rule on Sept. 3.
In her order, Judge Talwani explained that the prospect of the new rule suddenly taking effect carried “significant risk of their members’ disenfranchisement” for voting rights organizations, which had also sued, along with the states.
Counsel and plaintiffs in the lawsuit by voting rights groups—led by the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts—issued a statement welcoming Thursday's decision.
“The Administration previously dismissed plaintiffs’ ongoing harms from the executive order as speculative, but the newly finalized rule confirmed what plaintiffs have been saying all along," the statement read. "The Rule implements the Executive Order’s unprecedented attempt to usurp electoral authority from the states and Congress at the expense of voters. We welcome the court’s order, which recognized the immediate need to protect the entire electorate from the damaging impacts of this unlawful final rule in the lead-up to November’s general elections. This is an important step towards affirming the public’s confidence in the system of mail ballots, which thousands of eligible voters nationwide rely on as a core method of democratic participation.”
After Monday's ruling by the Supreme Court, the group's behind the challenge vowed to keep fighting and introduced a new round of legal challenges.
"USPS’s decision to rush this blatantly unconstitutional rule into effect just weeks before an election is the latest step in a rollout that has sown confusion at every turn and now threatens to disenfranchise voters who did everything right. This is chaos by design, and voters are the ones who will pay for it,” warned Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the ACLU's Voting Rights Project, on Wednesday.
Attorneys General from the coalition of 24 states that had challenged the rule also welcomed Talwani's latest intervention.
“From the beginning, it’s been clear that President Trump doesn’t understand how elections work. He’s repeatedly broken the law, so we’ve repeatedly taken him to court,” said California Attorney General Bonta in a statement. “On Monday, the US Supreme Court issued an order on the emergency docket stating we brought our lawsuit too early but did not address the merits of our challenge to the President’s executive order seeking to impose additional, unlawful restrictions on the ability to vote by mail. Just two days later, consistent with that order, we sued to stop the illegal USPS rule in its tracks. Today, the district court blocked the rule, making it clear that President Trump must keep his hands off our elections. The right to vote is a foundational principle of our democracy, and we’re making sure it remains protected for everyone.”
With the Trump administration almost certain to appeal, the case is likely headed back to the US Supreme Court, likely on a fast track, to decide the legal merits presented by the challengers.
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'Democracy Is Under Attack': Civil Rights Lawsuit Aims to Block Trump Assault on Mail-In Voting
“These mail-in ballot restrictions threaten to disenfranchise millions of eligible voters who rely on mail voting to participate in our democracy," said one advocate.
Aug 27, 2026
A day after a federal judge lifted her injunction on President Donald Trump's executive order targeting mail-in ballots, a quartet of civil rights groups on Thursday filed fresh claims in their lawsuit challenging the administration's weaponization of the US Postal Service to attack the right to vote under the pretense of fighting nearly nonexistent fraud.
The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, NAACP, Common Cause, and Black Voters Matter Fund argued in the US District Court for the District of Columbia that Trump’s March 31 executive order unlawfully attempts to federalize important parts of election administration—especially voter eligibility verification and mail-ballot delivery—by presidential fiat, without authorization from Congress, while creating serious risks of disenfranchisement and misuse of personal data.
The plaintiffs—and many legal experts—argue that the US Constitution gives the states and Congress the authority to regulate federal elections, not the president.
"Our democracy is under attack," NAACP president and CEO Derrick Johnson said Thursday in a statement. "No federal entity should be allowed to implement last-minute rules that disenfranchise voters and override state election laws."
"This new USPS rule is a direct assault on the fundamental freedoms of millions of Americans—particularly Black voters, communities of color, seniors, military members, and rural residents—just weeks before a critical election,” Johnson added, referring to November's pmidterms. "We will not stand idly by while the voices of the people are silenced. We must protect every eligible citizen’s right to cast their ballot.”
Damon Hewitt, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, warned that “these mail-in ballot restrictions threaten to disenfranchise millions of eligible voters who rely on mail voting to participate in our democracy while balancing work, caregiving responsibilities, disabilities, and other realities of daily life."
"The Trump administration is trying to limit access to the ballot, sow confusion at the polls, and to use the ensuing chaos as an excuse to exert power over agencies and processes in a politicized way," Hewitt added. “We will not let this or any administration further undermine our democratic process. We will fight to ensure our elections are free and fair, and that eligible voters are not shut out—especially Black voters and other voters of color, who are frequently targeted by voter suppression schemes.”
Several courts had ruled against Trump's order. But this week, the US Supreme Court cleared the way for the administration to proceed with its plans, and on Wednesday US District Judge Indira Talwani, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, was compelled to lift her injunction on the executive order as a result of the high court's decision.
Also on Wednesday, the groups behind the case before Talwani moved to block the Postal Service rule, as did a coalition of two dozen Democratic state attorneys general, whose initial challenge had resulted in the ruling from the Supreme Court—which found that the AGs filed their first suit prematurely.
Republicans including Trump—who has repeatedly voted by mail—have used fearmongering and disinformation to push the nearly nonexistent “threat” of voter fraud, especially in regard to mailed ballots, and noncitizens voting in US elections.
“Mail-in voting is so safe that even the president has used it twice this year,” Common Cause president and CEO Virginia Kase Solomón said on Thursday. “The Postal Service exists to deliver our mail, not to be weaponized by this administration to silence voters. Common Cause will keep fighting to protect a democracy where people choose their leaders—not the other way around.”
Trump’s March order is part of a broader attack on voting rights that includes pushing an updated version of Republicans’ so-called SAVE America Act, which would mandate proof of citizenship and strict photo ID requirements to register to vote in federal elections. The legislation, which was passed by the House of Representatives in February, is stalled in the narrowly split Senate, where it lacks the support of 60 lawmakers needed to avoid a Democrat filibuster.
"Mail-in voting gives people the freedom and flexibility to participate in our democracy, and we should be honest about what these efforts to restrict it are really doing: creating barriers to the ballot under the guise of election security," Black Voters Matter Fund co-founders Cliff Albright and LaTosha Brown said in a joint statement Thursday. "We are not fooled. This is the same old playbook—manufacture confusion, create unnecessary hurdles, and chip away at voting access."
“When the same politicians who defend their own access to mail-in voting move to restrict that access for others, the hypocrisy is hard to ignore," Albright and Brown continued. "We cannot allow voter suppression to be repackaged as voter protection or allow political interference to determine who gets to participate and whose voice counts."
"This is not about making democracy more secure; it is about reshaping who can fully participate in it," they added. "We will continue to call these efforts what they are and fight for every eligible voter’s freedom to make their voice heard.”
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'I'm Going to Ask Tom': Maine GOP Nominee for Governor Calls for ICE at Polling Stations
"His plan to ask Trump’s border czar to send ICE agents to Maine polling places just weeks before Election Day is not only deeply alarming—it is likely illegal," said the head of the state Democratic Party.
Aug 27, 2026
By letting attendees at a Maine Young Republicans event in on his "secret" plan for the midterm elections, the state's Republican nominee for governor detailed a proposal that, according to one public policy think tank, is wholly illegal.
In an audio clip released Wednesday by the Bangor Daily News, Bobby Charles, a lawyer and former Reagan administration staffer, boasted about his connections to the Trump administration's border czar, Tom Homan, a key figure in President Donald Trump's mass deportation operation.
"Here's my secret. I have a friend named Tom Homan," said Charles, drawing applause from the GOP voters. "I'm going to ask Tom... three or four weeks before the election, maybe three, I'm going to make an appeal for ICE and Marshals to be at our voting booths."
🚨 NEW Audio: Bobby Charles reveals "secret" plan to invite ICE to Maine three weeks before Election Day. pic.twitter.com/nSx2o9yxjJ
— Maine Democrats (@MaineDems) August 26, 2026
Charles was referring to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the US Marshals, both armed federal law enforcement officers whose presence at polling sites to intimidate voters would be against the law, according to the Brennan Center for Justice .
Trump has also alluded to sending ICE and other armed federal agents to polling places during the midterm elections in November, saying in May when he was asked about the idea that he would "do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections."
At the Brennan Center for Justice last month, senior counsel Hayne Yoon wrote that "despite the implied threat, the law is clear."
"Sending armed federal agents, including those from ICE, to election sites is illegal," wrote Yoon. "Federal law and many states’ laws prohibit not only armed federal agents at polling sites, but also interference in elections or voter intimidation by any officials or private citizens. More important, using these tactics would be a flagrant attempt to hold on to power through force and intimidation and an affront to free and fair elections."
In his comments at the Young Republicans event, Charles also asked rhetorically whether “illegals who are being paid money” to vote would "like" the deployment of ICE agents at polling places. The remark made the gubernatorial candidate one of several Republicans to push the baseless claim that undocumented immigrants or noncitizens have committed voter fraud in order to sway elections.
There are no documented reports of immigrants ever being paid to vote, and a 2024 American Immigration Council analysis of data collected by the right-wing Heritage Foundation found only 68 cases of proven noncitizen voting dating back to 2000, "amounting to less than 0.0001% of total votes."
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Hannah Pingree said Wednesday that Charles' comments make clear that he would push Trump's MAGA agenda, despite his recent attempts to distance himself from the president, who is unpopular with Mainers.
"He is begging Trump's ICE to come interfere with our free and fair elections," said Pingree. "I think that conduct speaks for itself and I trust the Maine people to see it for what it is."
Devon Murphy-Anderson, executive director of the Maine Democratic Party, added that Charles "continues to prove that he is a MAGA extremist who will stop at nothing to put himself and his MAGA agenda ahead of Mainers. His plan to ask Trump’s border czar to send ICE agents to Maine polling places just weeks before Election Day is not only deeply alarming—it is likely illegal. This is a blatant attempt to intimidate voters and yet another reason Bobby Charles is too extreme for Maine.”
Charles' comments come six weeks after an ICE agent fatally shot Biddeford, Maine resident Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in an incident that the Trump administration has not appeared to investigate. ICE has made more arrests in Maine so far this year than it did in all of 2024-25 combined, and out of 491 arrests made, 89% of those detained had no criminal convictions.
Homan recently told a Republican state lawmaker that the state would soon "see a lot more enforcement action" due to Trump's decision to end Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians.
The Justice Department announced this month that it would deploy at least 1,000 federal officers to polling places as people vote in the November 3 elections. The administration has suggested the public should not be alarmed by the plan because anyone who is a citizen will not be targeted by the agents, but as the ACLU noted, at least 155 citizens in eight states last year, including 32 children, were detained, targeted, or subjected to misconduct by federal immigration agents.
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'Direct Violation of the Constitution': Democratic States Sue to Stop Trump Assault on Mail-In Voting
"This is yet another example of this administration’s unlawful overreach," said Rhode Island's attorney general.
Aug 26, 2026
A coalition of two dozen Democratic-led states filed a lawsuit on Wednesday challenging President Donald Trump's attempt to use the US Postal Service as a vehicle for his assault on mail-in voting, which he has targeted incessantly during both of his White House terms.
The lawsuit targets a newly finalized USPS rule under which the postal service would not deliver ballots in states that don't provide their voter data to the federal government. Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said in a statement Wednesday that "this is yet another example of this administration’s unlawful overreach and is in direct violation of the Constitution, which makes clear that states have the primary authority to administer elections."
"Voting by mail is a tried-and-true method of exercising our most fundamental right as American citizens," Neronha added. "Indeed, it’s the preferred voting method of the president himself. I am confident that we will succeed here, as we have many times before, thereby protecting the right of American citizens, Donald Trump included, to vote without interference.”
The states' lawsuit comes days after the US Supreme Court, which includes three Trump-nominated justices, stayed a lower-court injunction that had blocked implementation of the president's March executive order instructing the US Postal Service to enact restrictions on mail-in voting to prevent "fraud," which is rare in American elections. On Wednesday, a federal judge in Boston lifted the nationwide injunction on the mail-in voting restrictions following a request from Trump's Justice Department.
The office of New York Attorney General Letitia James, who joined the new lawsuit, emphasized that states "would have just weeks to comply" if the USPS rule is allowed to take effect ahead of the 2026 midterms.
"Election officials will have to redesign ballot envelopes, obtain federal approval, and establish entirely new systems to transmit voter lists to USPS, all while preparing to mail ballots to millions of Americans," James' office warned. "If states or local election officials cannot comply in time, eligible voters could be prevented from receiving or returning their ballots."
The US Constitution does not give the president any power over elections, but Trump has spoken repeatedly of his desire to "take over" and "nationalize" voting in the wake of his 2020 loss.
As part of his scheme, Trump has focused heavily on exerting control over the US Postal Service, which is currently led by David Steiner. The postmaster general, whom Trump boosted for the role, has faced calls to resign for allowing USPS to be used as "a partisan instrument of voter suppression."
Trump is currently pushing to fill four of the five vacancies on the US Postal Service's Board of Governors. All of the president's nominees, which must be confirmed by the Senate, are Republicans. As The New York Times noted on Tuesday, "Trump's selections broke with a longstanding practice of nominating board members in bipartisan pairs."
"The quiet attempt to restructure the leadership of the Postal Service comes as the president and his allies are trying to transform the 251-year-old agency into a central player in their quest to overhaul the nation’s elections," the Times observed.
Last month, as Common Dreams reported, US Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) called for a pause on Trump's postal board nominees, warning that their confirmation would "undermine public confidence in the board’s ability to serve the public interest above any partisan political aims."
"This imbalance in representation would be unprecedented," said Peters.
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The Supreme Court's Mail Voting Ruling Is Manufactured Chaos
On Monday, the Supreme Court made headlines and sowed confusion, but it did not change much. Here’s what you should know.
Aug 26, 2026
A year ago we warned that President Donald Trump had a concerted strategy to undermine the midterm elections.
Here’s news you can use: That effort is failing so far. For every move, there’s a countermove from voting rights groups, local and state governments, and more. In November, we should be able to have elections that are free, fair, and secure. But it will take a lot of work between now and then.
We saw that for sure this week. On Monday, the Supreme Court made headlines and sowed confusion, but it did not change much. Here’s what you should know.
Earlier this year, Trump signed an executive order to upend mail voting. That is the way 1 in 3 Americans vote. Trump purported to order the US Postal Service to refuse to deliver lawfully cast ballots unless the voter is on a list—which doesn’t exist yet—created by each state and sent to the post office for checking against mail ballots. It’s absurd. And, no surprise, it’s illegal.
Trump’s executive order is not in effect. Mail voting continues as before. There have been no changes to the Postal Service practices.
Earlier this summer, in a lawsuit brought by 23 states, a federal court blocked the executive order in part of the country. The judge also blocked the order nationwide in a lawsuit the Brennan Center and others brought on behalf of the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts.
On August 24, the US Supreme Court jumped into the states’ case. It issued an unsigned order holding that the states did not yet have legal standing to sue. In particular, it concluded the states had not suffered an injury, because the Postal Service had not implemented the policy. In other words, the trial court had ruled too early.
This made big news, understandably, but those headlines confused matters a bit.
This was a procedural vote that let the Trump administration continue working on its plan to have the Postal Service decide who receives a ballot.
As the court itself explained, “The Court’s disposition of this application does not mean that any measure taken by the Government to implement the Order will necessarily be lawful.”
And in fact, late last Friday, under pressure from the administration, the Postal Service published a “Final Rule” to implement Trump’s scheme. The agency explained that it had the power to set rules for mail ballot delivery because ballots are like “animal remains” or “replica explosives” and deserve special treatment.
Both the states’ case and the case brought by the Brennan Center and other voting rights groups remain ongoing. The Supreme Court’s Monday ruling is not the final word. Our attorneys are assessing next steps, and things will no doubt move quickly in this complex legal back-and-forth.
But a few things are as true today as they were before the court’s order.
This executive order is still illegal and unconstitutional. The Constitution’s Elections Clause is clear, as courts have ruled over and over: States run elections. Congress has a legitimate role in passing national legislation and can override states. You know who has no role in elections, under the Constitution? The president.
And the Supreme Court? This is the “shadow docket” at work. Rather than letting the legal process unfold, the justices jumped into the litigation to help Trump. Justices like Samuel Alito bristle at the ominous phrase “shadow docket” and complain it should be called an “emergency” order instead. Here, the only “emergency” would be that Trump could not move forward with his push to restrict voting, just weeks before an election.
It’s hard to avoid noticing that, while the order is unsigned, it was backed by the Republican-appointed justices. Democratic-appointed Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote dissents. Trump has repeatedly said, as he wrote in June about the SAVE Act, that without voting restrictions, “The Republican Party will never win another Election.” The Supreme Court, already at record lows in public trust, will further bleed credibility if it is seen as a partisan electoral actor.
And as for voters—what should we know?
This legal fracas is happening so close to the election that, however it turns out, it is highly unlikely that changes will affect voting this year. Federal law requires that the first mail ballots be sent to military voters starting September 4. We cannot let chaos engulf our elections.
All of which means that, in one sense, this is a lot of noise and manufactured chaos. Trump’s executive order is not in effect. Mail voting continues as before. There have been no changes to the Postal Service practices.
You know who knows that? Someone who voted by mail this month from his house in Mar-a-Lago: Donald Trump.
His campaign to undermine the midterm elections is losing. The only way it wins is if people stay home.
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'Painful Setback': Supreme Court Lets Trump Enforce Mailed Ballot Rules—But Punts on Their Legality
“It’s a disgrace that the highest court in the nation is allowing Trump to stab a dagger into the heart of our democracy," said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
Aug 24, 2026
The US Supreme Court on Monday cleared the way for the Trump administration to proceed with sweeping new restrictions on mail-in voting, removing a major legal obstacle just weeks before states begin sending ballots for the 2026 midterm elections and prompting two of the high court's liberal justices to warn that the ruling will sow “chaos and uncertainty."
Contrary to social media posts from supporters of President Donald Trump, the court's right-wing majority did not rule in Trump v. California that the president's March executive order directing several federal agencies to change how elections are administered is constitutional. Instead, the justices concluded in the 6-3 unsigned order that the states challenging the order had not demonstrated sufficient standing to sue at this stage and stayed a lower court injunction blocking its implementation.
Monday's ruling came after the justices' June rejection of a Republican-backed challenge to state laws permitting election officials to count certain mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day.
“The court’s disposition of this application does not mean that any measure taken by the government to implement the order will necessarily be lawful,” the majority wrote in Monday's decision. “On that score, time will tell.”
That was little consolation to Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who penned a dissent joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
“Today’s decision does not address whether the president’s attempts to interfere with states’ administration of the November 2026 elections are lawful,” Sotomayor wrote. Instead, the majority punted the matter even as states face a “concrete and imminent injury” from Trump's executive order.
"This ruling violates well-established precedents concerning this court’s equitable discretion and needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections," the dissenters asserted.
Trump and Republicans have used fearmongering disinformation to amplify the nearly nonexistent "threat" of voter fraud—especially in regard to mailed ballots—and noncitizens voting in US elections. This, even as Trump has repeatedly voted by mail.
The Trump administration is trying to move control over key parts of federal election administration from the states to the federal government. The president's executive order instructs the Department of Homeland Security to create federally verified lists of citizens eligible to vote, requires states to provide voter information to the federal government, and directs United States Postal Service to condition delivery of mail ballots on compliance with its edicts.
Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia sued, arguing that the president cannot unilaterally rewrite their election procedures—especially so close to the 2026 midterms—when the Constitution gives states primary responsibility for administering elections and grants Congress, not the executive branch, authority to set election rules.
“This decision is a painful setback, but it will not be the final word," Democratic New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement. "The right to vote is sacred, and no administration should be allowed to put that right in jeopardy by making it harder for eligible voters to cast their ballots."
“This fight is far from over," she added. "We are exploring our legal options.”
Democratic Association of Secretaries of State chair Cisco Aguilar of Nevada said that "today's news is disappointing, but we will continue challenging this executive order and using every tool available to defend voting rights and the constitutional authority of states to administer elections."
"The Supreme Court should protect those fundamental principles," Aguilar asserted. "Instead, it has allowed a president to reshape the electorate for his own political benefit. Every Republican running for secretary of state should tell voters where they stand: Will they defend the people’s right to choose their leaders, or support Donald Trump’s attempt to choose which Americans get to vote?”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, also a Democrat, said on social media: "Another day, another Trump attempt to rig elections and destroy democracy. We can stop this. VOTE this November."
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said, “It’s a disgrace that the highest court in the nation is allowing Trump to stab a dagger into the heart of our democracy."
“Trump’s effort to turn the Postal Service into a voter suppression machine is blatantly unconstitutional—yet his MAGA Supreme Court is refusing to stop it from going forward," he added. “Trump’s malicious effort to stop mail-in voting is nothing but election interference in broad daylight. He wants to make it harder for Americans to vote so they don’t hold him accountable for the skyrocketing costs, illegal war, and rampant corruption that are a hallmark of his administration."
Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) posted on social media that "Trump is desperately trying to rig the rules for the 2026 election."
"He is rushing through an unconstitutional order to limit mail voting before the midterms and the Supreme Court isn’t stopping him," the senator added. "States—not Trump—run our elections and the rule of law MUST be upheld. This fight is not over."
Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) called the ruling "shameful."
"While Donald Trump votes by mail, his allies on the Supreme Court are letting him take that right away from everyone else," she said. "This far-right majority court is once again complicit in Republicans' assault on our democracy."
Virginia Kase Solomón, president and CEO of the Washington, DC-based watchdog group Common Cause, issued a statement blasting Monday's decision as "an absolute outrage."
"Vote-by-mail isn’t a political bargaining chip—it is a vital lifeline for our seniors, service members, busy parents, rural voters, and voters with disabilities," she said. "Restricting that right is an unacceptable, deliberate power grab designed to manufacture chaos and silence voters."
“The Trump administration can try to override state laws and control our elections, but they do not get the final say—the people do," Kase Solomón added. "We refuse to back down. Common Cause will continue to challenge any illegal attempt to limit vote-by-mail or nationalize elections.”
Trevor Potter, president of the Campaign Legal Center, a litigation and policy advocacy group, lamented "yet another example of the highest court in the country granting the current administration undue latitude to engage in anti-democratic actions."
"However, this decision is purely about the timing of court challenges—not the merits of the president’s case," Potter stressed. "Americans everywhere should know that the president still has no constitutional or legal power to change our election rules, nor does this ruling mean that his second executive order on voting will ultimately be held lawful by the courts."
At the grassroots advocacy group Stand Up America, executive director Christina Harvey argued that “the Supreme Court should be putting limits on executive overreach, not helping Donald Trump push the boundaries of presidential power, undermine the Constitution, and disenfranchise voters."
"With today’s decision," she added, "the MAGA majority on the Supreme Court is bolstering Trump’s scheme to protect his allies in Congress by taking over our elections and restricting how we exercise our freedom to vote."
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Time to Raise Hell: Trump Taking GOP Voter Suppression Efforts to Heights Never Seen
Back in the old days, Nixon and Reagan at least had the decency to commit their treasonous election thefts in secret. Not Trump. He is telling us exactly what he's prepared to do. If we don't stop him, who will?
Aug 21, 2026
Trump and his Republican partners in the destruction of American democracy really don’t want us to vote this fall or in 2028. And there’s a good reason for it, at least in their minds.
Joyce Vance just pointed out that Howard Lutnick, Trump’s morbidly rich crony Commerce Secretary, claimed this week that they’d found over 24,000 noncitizens who’d illegally voted in the 2020 election.
It’s a lie, of course, and a pretty naked one at that, but this will be the foundation for Republicans establishing even more draconian rules to prevent married women, racial minorities, city dwellers, and low-income people from voting this fall and in 2028.
Also this week, the Center for American Progress released an extraordinarily disturbing fact sheet summarizing an investigation they published that documents fifteen separate, interlocking tactics the Trump administration, Republican governors, and GOP members of Congress are engaging in right now to rig this fall’s election.
Their tactics range from firing the bipartisan Election Assistance Commissions’ commissioners to encouraging Red state voter purges to putting ICE agents outside polling places in clear violation of federal law.
The six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court are also deciding, perhaps this week or next, whether to let Trump’s hand-picked Postmaster General have your mailman refuse to deliver your ballot if you’re not on Trump’s approved voter list.
Trump’s executive order to do this has been blocked twice by a federal judge, noting that the Constitution is clear that only states run elections and the executive branch has no authority whatsoever to even try to regulate them. And now it’s in the hands of six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court.
And the plain words of the Constitution — which references the “right to vote” six times, including five Amendments that say, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged…” — have never been an obstacle for Republicans on the Court. Just read the plain text of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments and compare that to ICE’s behavior, which the Court is allowing.
Sadly, we need to be ready for anything, because Republicans now have a 58-year-long record of committing crimes and treason to get their men into the White House.
— Nixon sabotaged LBJ’s Vietnam peace deal just before the election of 1968, an event LBJ and Senate Republican Leader Everett Dirksen called “treason” on a phone call that wasn’t released until decades after Johnson’s death. Because the war continued, Nixon beat Humphrey that year by lying that he had a “secret plan” to end the war, and an additional 20,000+ Americans and over an additional million Vietnamese died.
— Reagan’s campaign cut a deal with the Iranian Ayatollah to hold the 52 hostages they’d taken during Carter’s presidency until after the election. Iran kept the deal destroying Carter’s chance in the 1980 election, and for six years Reagan secretly and illegally sold them American-made weapons in violation of the law. We remember that as the “Iran-Contra Scandal.”
— Florida Governor Jeb Bush had 57,000 mostly Black Floridians purged from the voting rolls just months before the 2000 election, which let his brother George W. Bush squeak by with a 537 vote margin. When the Florida Supreme Court, smelling a rat, ordered a recount, five corrupt Republicans — including Bush’s father’s nominee Clarence Thomas — violated the state’s rights Tenth Amendment and blocked the recount, putting Bush into the White House even though a later recount found that Al Gore had won the election. President Jimmy Carter told me on my radio program: “I don’t think that George W. Bush won the election in 2000, and he probably lost Florida and nationwide…”
— And then there was the GOP’s theft of the 2024 election. Greg Palast, a reporter with a masters’ degree in statistics, went through the official state-by-state statistics and found that 4,776,706 voters were wrongly purged from the rolls: 2,121,000 mail were ballots disqualified by Republican challenges, 1,216,000 provisional ballots were thrown away uncounted, 3.24 million new registrations were rejected or never processed, and 585,000 in-person ballots were “spoiled.”
He found Black voters were four times as likely as white voters to have their mail ballot rejected; Black, Hispanic, and Asian-American voters were more than 3 times as likely as white people to be given provisional ballots that were never counted. Had that voter suppression not worked, he concluded, Kamala Harris would be president and the House and Senate may well be in Democratic hands.
So, here we go again, only this time state-by-state voter suppression — remember when Texas AG Ken Paxton told Steve Bannon on the air that if he hadn’t blocked Houston from sending out mail-in ballots Trump would have lost Texas? — is getting a big boost from the feds under Trump’s control.
— Trump and his lickspittles have fired or pushed out at least 75 career election security officials, gutted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and removed the Election Assistance Commission’s commissioners so the agency is now functionally dead.
— The Civil Rights Division of the DOJ, now run by an apparatchik devoted to undoing civil rights, has threatened election officials in all 50 states with prison if they make even small errors in running their elections. The DOJ itself has sued more than 30 states trying to seize their voter files.
— The FBI raided the Fulton County elections office with Tulsi Gabbard, then the Director of National Intelligence, standing over the process at the personal direction of Trump himself as agents hauled away hundreds of boxes of 2020 ballots.
— Steve Bannon has repeatedly promised — most recently this week — that ICE agents will defy the post-Civil War federal law that bans armed government officials from polling places.
— And Trump has, on multiple occasions, floated declaring a national emergency or state of insurrection to shut down this fall’s elections, either nationwide or in places where Democratic majorities may win.
Back in the old days, Nixon and Reagan at least had the decency to commit their treasonous election thefts in secret.
Trump is now bragging about it, telling Congress that if they pass his voter suppression bill to prevent low-income people and married women from voting, “We’ll never lose a race. For 50 years, we won’t lose a race.”
This is Putin-level corruption, right out in the open, and not a single Republican is pushing back as our national press tries their hardest to avoid discussing it.
We’ve suffered through five illegitimate presidencies in the years since Nixon’s 1968 treason largely because our press has refused to investigate or tell the stories and Democratic leadership has been too timid to bring it up. You know how Republicans would be reacting if the shoe were on the other foot.
This time the press can’t claim they just didn’t realize what was going on, as happened in 1968, 1980, 2000, and 2024: Trump and his cronies are doing all this right out in the open, and his advisors like Bannon are crowing about it on TV.
So it’s time for all of us to raise some hell, letting our friends and neighbors know what’s happening, and demand that our elected officials act now to protect our elections. The number for Congress is 202-224-3121 and don’t forget to check your voter registration at vote.org, particularly if you live in a Red state.
We just have a few weeks to go before early voting starts and we have a hell of a lot of work to do to get out the vote and keep it honest.
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Trump Using Census Bureau Report Full of 'Junk Data Science' to Sell False Claims of 2020 Voter Fraud
One voting rights advocate said the administration "is abusing the Census Bureau data to generate sensational headlines that Trump wants."
Aug 20, 2026
As he gears up to sow doubt about this year's midterms, President Donald Trump is once again attempting to use the government to lend legitimacy to his long-debunked claims that he was cheated out of the 2020 election.
In a Tuesday post to Truth Social, Trump shared a report from the US Census Bureau, which he said "proves that over 24,000 Noncitizens voted illegally" after an analysis of 128 million voter records.
"I WON THE ELECTION," he declared, adding that the bureau would soon analyze the remaining 32 million voting records and that the number of illegitimate votes would "explode."
The report Trump was referring to was real, but highly unusual. The seven-page document posted on the Census Bureau website did not list any authors.
While the use of the "Census Bureau" label implies an air of seriousness and professionalism, Misty Heggeness, a former senior adviser for the Census Bureau, told Democracy Docket that the lack of clear authorship signified that it was "suspect of any integrity or rigor" and said it would be hard to trust unless career bureau staff put their name on it.
Sure enough, NPR reported on Wednesday that "work on the analysis was not conducted by career civil servants at the Census Bureau, and the team behind it included individuals affiliated with the America First Policy Institute," a Trump-aligned think tank that has helped to turn the president's election denial narrative into Republican policy.
The group has helped to push for aggressive voting rights restrictions in states, and its director for "election integrity" policy, Thomas Lane, was involved in the effort to create a slate of fake electors in Arizona, one of several states where Trump claimed to have won in 2020.
Earlier this year, according to CNN, Trump "installed a group of partisan analysts" from AFPI inside the Census Bureau. But their identities have not been publicly disclosed, and other bureau officials who spoke to NPR did not identify which AFPI officials worked on the new report "because they fear retaliation at work."
Bureau officials told CNN that the lack of listed authors suggests that the career employees were "sidelined."
Experts who reviewed the report have identified several "fatal" flaws that make its conclusions difficult to take seriously.
The authors of the report used a commercial voter database and matched its records to those from the Internal Revenue Service, Social Security Administration, State Department, and Department of Homeland Security, and matched noncitizen records to those identified as voters in 2020.
As Yunior Rivas and Jim Saksa of Democracy Docket explained, there are numerous problems with this approach:
Record matching... is fallible. The Census Bureau previously published research in 2014 specifically devoted to measuring false matches in the same identification system...
Census researchers have previously warned that the likelihood of successfully linking administrative records can vary across demographic groups, potentially introducing bias when researchers analyze only records they can confidently match.
That limitation is particularly significant when the result in question is relatively small compared with the enormous volume of records being searched: A mistaken link between an eligible citizen’s voter record and another person’s immigration record could produce a false positive.
The report also does not address another obvious danger: mistaking a naturalized citizen for a noncitizen due to an older immigration record... If evidence of a person’s citizenship is missing or fails to link correctly, the methodology can treat the existing noncitizen record as evidence of the person’s status at the time they voted. The report does not estimate how frequently such a misclassification could occur.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a fellow at the American Immigration Council noted that the system used to find noncitizen voters is "riddled with false positives." According to the Texas Tribune, when states like Texas and Missouri used the tool, it resulted in hundreds of voters being flagged incorrectly.
But even if the Census Bureau report were factually bulletproof, it would be far short of what Trump needs to claim that he "won" the election. The number of supposedly illegitimate votes is not anywhere near enough to swing the result in any of the states where Trump lost to former President Joe Biden, who won the national popular vote by more than 7 million.
The report claims to have found 1,100 noncitizen votes in Arizona, which Biden won by 10,457; 400 noncitizen votes in Georgia, which Biden won by 11,779; and 500 noncitizen votes in Wisconsin, which Biden won by 20,682. Since voting is secret, there is also no basis to assume that all of these votes went to Biden.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, whose department contains the Census Bureau, has said the report was "just the beginning" and that the next one "will likely show tens of thousands of additional illegal voters.”
But the first report says it analyzed the vast majority of those who voted in 2020. Assuming that the remaining 32 million votes had similar match rates, it would only generate about 6,000 more supposedly illegitimate votes.
Even if every single one of those votes went for Biden, which can't be proved, it would still not be enough to swing a single state to Trump, let alone enough for him to declare victory.
Trump used this report to call for Congress to pass his "SAVE America Act," which would abolish most forms of mail-in voting and introduce new proof of citizenship requirements that voting rights experts have warned would lead millions of eligible voters to be wrongly kicked off the rolls.
He has also signed an executive order directing states to verify their voter lists against a federal citizenship verification system that has been found to erroneously flag many eligible voters.
Amanda Carpenter, an editor at the nonpartisan group Protect Democracy, said the Census Bureau report was "nothing but junk data science" and that Lutnick "is abusing the Census Bureau data to generate sensational headlines that Trump wants."
"He has been searching for these massive pots of fraudulent votes for years," Carpenter said. "It is like they are looking for the Loch Ness Monster. It does not exist, but they keep searching, and hoping, and lying and pointing to something shadowy that you kind of have to squint real hard at to pretend is there, but it isn't."
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