NewYorker: “... the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, was asked about Bannon’s idea to send ICE to polling places, she specifically refused to rule it out, and told reporters that, in fact, she “can’t guarantee” that armed federal militia would not be swarming around election sites this fall. We should take her at her word. The President has already told us in the most explicit possible terms that he intends to go after the 2026 elections. Plans are being made, even if we don’t exactly know what form Trump’s attempt to follow through on his rhetoric will take. Maybe it will be ICE, maybe it will be something else. ...The question at this point is not if—it’s how"

WAPO:   "The measures listed in the 2025 draft of the proposed executive order include requiring hand-marked and hand-counted paper ballots, requiring voters to register anew for the 2026 midterms with proof of citizenship, and restricting mail ballots to limited circumstances. The draft also proposes authorizing the Justice Department, U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services, the Social Security Administration and the Postal Service to have a role in identifying ineligible voters….Warner said in a statement in response to this article. “This is a plot to interfere with the will of voters and undermine both the rule of law and public confidence in our elections.””

COMMENT: Things have only gotten worse with computerized vote counting in the US since this list was assembled in 2022.  Not only are our votes counted by computers, post election audits in most states, including New York, provide scant evidence to confirm election outcomes.        Allegra Dengler

Democracy Docket  "Democratic state election chiefs have for months been meeting privately for planning exercises, including tabletop simulations, gaming out their response to expected election interference by President Donald Trump and his administration…. the potential nightmare scenarios being envisaged range from Trump sending armed federal agents to polling places, to efforts to disrupt mail-in voting via the U.S. Postal Service, to attempts to meddle with voting machines or to block election certification.“

Democracy Docket: "The court relied on trial evidence, including data showing racially polarized voting and historical patterns of discrimination. It grounded its decision in the New York Constitution — which the court said provides broader protections against vote dilution than federal law….The U.S. Supreme Court generally does not overturn state court rulings that rest on independent state constitutional grounds unless there is a clear federal constitutional violation.”

The House is voting on a new version of the SAVE Act – the GOP's latest attempt to trick you into giving up YOUR right to vote.

Here’s the simple truth: the SAVE Act would block millions of eligible voters from casting a ballot by adding unnecessary, costly, and confusing barriers to the ballot box.

If you agree that's wrong, Congress needs to hear from you today. Take action now >>

This week, President Donald Trump and the GOP kicked their intertwined anti-voting crusades — promoting lies about the 2020 election, and restricting voting in 2026 and beyond — into high gear. And we tracked them every step of the way.

The Atlantic:  "Instead of “partners,” some state authorities now view federal officials involved in election efforts with deep suspicion.“The trust,” Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows told us, “has been absolutely destroyed.” The sentiment is not confined to Democrats. Some state-level Republican election officials…also said that federal officials’ activities involving elections have become so unusual that they are starting to question the federal officials’ competency and motives. These state officials wonder whether the feds are trying to do what Trump has accused others of doing: rig an election.”

The Atlantic: “Trump:... “The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over’—we should take over the voting in at least, many, 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting. We have states that are so crooked, and they’re counting votes. We have states that I won that show I didn’t win.”

Guardian:  "As one of Fulton county’s election officials put it: “All of this is about disrupting the elections in November. All this is about Fulton – the most important County in Georgia and maybe even the nation …””

Comment: What are the odds that very soon the FBI will “count the votes” and find that Trump really did “win" Fulton County?  The chain of custody has been broken wide open.  In a quote widely contributed to Stalin:  “It’s not who votes that counts, it’s who counts the votes.”  Allegra Dengler

Huffpost: "Before Bondi, Noem and Gabbard canceled, it looked as though they were going to appear before the officials as a show of force as the administration works to force through an unprecedented effort to seize control of the nation’s elections ahead of the 2026 midterms.”

The Atlantic: “What they’re saying is ‘Buckle up, buttercup,’ because they’re coming after us,” Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, told us. “We’ve got to do our damndest to get ready.”...In Michigan, Ottawa County Clerk Justin Roebuck, a Republican, told us he couldn’t help but take the actions in Georgia personally. The FBI search, he said, “should invite extraordinary scrutiny.”...“I think about what that would mean when it comes to defending our elections from any and all threats,” he told us. “And we would never want that threat to be our own federal government.”

The Guardian "Donald Trump lost Georgia in the 2020 election, and his false claims about voter fraud in Fulton county, home to Atlanta, were central to his efforts to try to overturn the election. “

Democracy Docket Marc Elias interview with Senator Jeff Merkley:   Senator Merkley: "Well, you can steal the purse, but we can hopefully get that back. You can put in loyalists, but hopefully we can have a different administration that doesn't have loyalists. But the things that entrench it are the weaponization of the Department of Justice that's going after political enemies, and in particular, the ability to put troops in the street to suppress dissent. But the scariest piece of all is the rigging of the next election."

"Unfortunately, the 2026 midterms will be easier for Trump to steal than the 2020 election...To start, there is no Electoral College to contend with and no need to pressure state legislatures. In addition, Trump and his team are more experienced, more confident and more ruthless. Sadly, our election systems are weaker than ever, having suffered never-ending attacks from election deniers since 2020.”

Ray Lutz:  "Paper Ballots Only Protect Elections If We Look at Them...Significant effort goes into securing paper ballots: controlled ballot stock, chain-of-custody procedures, sealed containers, and retention requirements. But these safeguards only matter if ballots are actually examined.”

Times Union: "Paramount to our democracy is a ballot system that works and can be trusted by voters. That’s why the problems with Rensselaer County’s November election ballots are deeply troubling….The commissioners' initial reluctance to acknowledge that a technological failure might have occurred gives us pause."

New York Times "Bomb threats in particular have become a common Election Day disruption. In 2024, at least seven states — Georgia, Maine, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio — faced such threats.“It absolutely is the new normal,” said Tina Barton, a co-chair of the Committee for Safe and Secure Elections, a nonpartisan group. She cited a surge “over the last five to six years” of swatting, bomb threats and physical intimidation surrounding elections. “The unfortunate part is that it’s really easy to do, to send an email and do it in mass quantities.”

Eric Neff, a Republican attorney with a web of ties to election-conspiracy theorists, is the new acting chief of the voting section at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), according to the department’s website. 

Neff replaces Maureen Riordan, who spent almost two decades in the department’s voting section from 2000 to 2017. In 2021, Riordan served as litigation counsel at the anti-voting legal group the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) before she returned to DOJ when President Donald Trump returned to the White House. 

A Dec. 2 legal filing identified Riordan as a “senior counsel” in the voting section. A DOJ spokesperson did not immediately respond to an inquiry about her current role.

Times Union: "Peabody and supporters of the institution pushed for a recount shortly after the election. But that request wasn’t entertained until county election officials discovered that some results from a separate state referendum that had been printed on the back of the ballot could have been impacted by ovals improperly juxtaposed over text….Based on the document count and the discovery of a machine processing error, election officials originally agreed to digitally retabulate the contest before eventually opting for a manual recount.”

Comment: Kudos to this local Board of Elections for agreeing to a recount and then opting that the recount of the ballots be by hand.  Under current law, they didn’t have to.  They could have just run them through a different scanner that may have had the same problem with the apparently misprinted ballots.  Ask your legislators to support Amy Paulin’s bill 01918 which requires audits by hand recount . Allegra Dengler