Steve Bannon suggested that President Donald Trump deployed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to major U.S. airports as part of a “test run” for using them to meddle in upcoming elections.
“We can use this as a test run, as a test case, to really perfect ICE’s involvement in the 2026 midterms,” Bannon, a close Trump ally, said on his War Room podcast Monday.
Experts are calling it “the worst voter suppression bill ever seriously considered by Congress.” As the U.S. Senate prepares to vote on a Trump-backed voter ID bill known as the SAVE Act, millions of citizens who lack easy access to its required forms of documentation are now at risk of disenfranchisement. “Republicans are singularly focused on making it harder to vote and pursuing this MAGA fever dream,” explains Ari Berman, national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones. “It is the overarching goal of the Republican Party now to make it harder to vote.”
COMMENT: NOTHING will be secure about our "homeland" if election denier Markwayne Mullin is confirmed to lead DHS He is unqualified in every way, by temperament, by experience, by contempt for the rule of law. He's a threat to the elections this year. He's a threat to allow terrorists to carry out attacks in the US. He is a threat to the rule of law. Tell your Senators to do everything they can to block Mullin.
Allegra Dengler
The U.S. Senate will take up Tuesday the SAVE America Act, a measure described by election experts as “the most restrictive voting bill ever.” Senate leaders have so far declined to sign on to a procedural maneuver — the “talking filibuster” — that supporters see as the bill’s only hope for getting around a guaranteed Democratic filibuster. That means the bill, which aims to solve the phantom problem of noncitizen voting, is likely doomed to fall far short of the 60-vote threshold it would need to make it to President Donald Trump’s desk.
Times Union: "According to documents Greenhalgh obtained through a Freedom of Information Law request and shared with the Times Union, Clear Ballot told the county Board of Elections that miscounts could have been prevented if results were “verified properly during the logic and accuracy testing of the voting system.””
Dominion has been sold to a Trump associate. Hand counts are essential to verify Trump's vote count! Most counties in New York use the Dominion Voting Machines, our familiar scanners that count paper ballots. The computer generated results are almost never verified by hand counts adequate to confirm the vote count.
Homeland security? We know New York is in Iran's crosshairs. We know terrorism first hand. Remember how they almost took out a dam in Rye, NY with a cyberattack? Iran can target our water, our electricity, our internet, our gas pumps, our elections, whatever critical infrastructure they want. Not from the sky, but from inside our infrastructure.
Now just imagine a world in which the federal government decides not to help protect the Homeland from such attacks. But that’s the world we are in. Today the White House has halted a federal security bulletin warning of a heightened threat to the U.S. in light of the conflict in Iran.
Intercept: “...despite an occasional murmur from Democrats that they are concerned about Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents deploying to polling places around the country, they’re doing almost nothing to stop this nightmare scenario. ...Democrats should not count on getting another chance to stop the Trump administration from stealing an election. DHS is more than an out-of-control law enforcement agency — it is quickly becoming a threat to democracy and national security. They need to act now before it’s too late.”
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.””
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 >>
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