Taken for Granted

Trump administration cannot tie grants to state voting policies, judge rules
A federal judge barred the U.S. Department of Homeland Security from withholding disaster relief, anti-terrorism, and other grants from states until they adopted the Trump administration’s preferred election policies. Local governments in Ohio, Tennessee, and Texas brought the case, arguing the agency’s threat to withhold 20% or more of federal grants was an unlawful way to coerce states.

➡️ MORE: Sharing the Facts About Coercive Funding Demands

“Congress did not cede this important power”
Late last week, the Trump administration announced it would cancel nearly $1 billion in federal funding for education, health research, and other essential programs. The move is the administration’s latest attempt to use a maneuver called a “pocket rescission” to cancel funding already approved by Congress. Multiple lawsuits have already been filed against the cancellation, including one by a group of states.

No president has tried to use pocket rescissions in more than 40 years—and never at this scale. The Government Accountability Office has repeatedly said the maneuver is illegal, since it attempts to give the executive branch power that the Constitution delegates to Congress.

➡️ MORE: Sharing the Facts About Last-Minute Funding Cuts

The federal investigation into Trump’s enemies loses steam
Kurt Olsen, an Election Denier working on the Justice Department’s wide-ranging investigation into former officials who investigated or prosecuted Trump, resigned from his role. The prosecutor leading the investigation resigned earlier this month, while others working on it have also reportedly been reassigned to other work. According to NBC News, Justice Department leaders pressured investigators bring charges before the midterm elections.

➡️ MORE: How Politicized Prosecutions Undermine the Rule of Law

White House modifies its AI chatbot’s answers
Shortly after the federal government released its new AI chatbot, users found that it contradicted many of Trump’s claims about elections and democracy: It said that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, that there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud, and that police officers were assaulted during the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

Hours later, the chatbot began giving different answers. When asked those same questions, it instead said it could not provide “political commentary.”

In Arizona, Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell announced that an investigation into 207 registered voters flagged by Recorder Justin Heap found just eight noncitizens who voted. Mitchell noted seven of the eight were mistakenly registered to vote due to a system error in the Motor Vehicle Division, five had no party affiliation, and all eight have lawful immigration status.

Heap referred the voters to Mitchell after using a federal program to check the county’s voter registration lists for noncitizens. Mitchell’s office found just 60 of the 207 voted, and 52 of the 60 were U.S. citizens—an 87% error rate.

The program—called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE)—was originally designed to verify the citizenship status of people applying for benefits like food stamps and Medicaid, but the Trump administration expanded it last year to be used to conduct bulk checks of voters’ citizenship. SAVE has proven to be unreliable. Earlier this month, it yielded a 21% error rate in Texas, and in some cases, its use has resulted in Americans being deregistered to vote. However, last week, the U.S. Supreme Court granted the administration’s request to let states use it in the lead-up to the November elections.

➡️ MORE: About the SAVE program

In Georgia, the executive director of the state election board sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche, asking him to open an investigation into Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and compel him to implement changes to the state’s voting system before the November elections.

A spokesperson for Raffensperger criticized the move. “People who are serious about election security don’t inject chaos in the 11th hour,” he said.

Separately, a federal judge dismissed the Trump administration’s lawsuit against Raffensperger that sought Georgia voters’ private data, the 26th such case to be dismissed. The Justice Department brought 31 lawsuits seeking voter data; it has yet to win any of them.

“Georgia has worked with our federal partners and will continue to do so, but cooperation does not mean ignoring the law or surrendering the privacy rights of Georgia voters,” Raffensperger said in a statement.

➡️ MORE: Sharing the Facts About Federal Efforts to Compile State Voter Data

In Maryland, the Justice Department sued the state and two counties over a state law limiting when federal agents and law enforcement officers are allowed to wear masks while on duty.

“We don’t comment on ongoing litigation, but Governor Moore has been clear that an untrained, unqualified, and unaccountable ICE is unacceptable,” a spokesperson for Gov. Wes Moore said in a statement. “Maryland will always defend transparency, accountability and due process.”

The Justice Department has brought similar cases against California, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Virginia, and other jurisdictions.

In Minnesota, the Justice Department filed complaints against federal judges who spoke to The New York Times about the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement operations in the state.

A spokesperson for the court and one of the judges both said their comments fell within ethical bounds for judges, including that judges may speak “on core judiciary matters such as advocacy for the rule of law.”

In Texas, the state’s highest criminal court dismissed the state’s case against Crystal Mason, a Tarrant County woman convicted of illegal voting in 2016. The dismissal likely finalizes Mason’s acquittal.

Mason voted in 2016 using a provisional ballot because she wasn’t sure if she was eligible. Provisional ballots allow those with questions about their eligibility to vote while election officials determine if they are eligible. (More than 67,000 Texans voted using provisional ballots in 2016.) If officials determine the voter is eligible, their provisional ballot is counted like any other. If the voter is found to be ineligible, it is not.

After Mason cast her ballot, election officials determined she was ineligible because, at the time, she was on supervised release for a federal conviction. Accordingly, her ballot was not counted. State prosecutors charged her with voter fraud anyway. She was convicted in 2018 and sentenced to five years in prison.

An appeals court overturned her conviction in 2024, and the Tarrant County district attorney appealed to the state’s highest criminal court. That court dismissed the case this week.

States United, Cooley LLP, and Susman Godfrey LLP represented a group of former state and federal prosecutors in filing three friend-of-the-court briefs as the case progressed, urging courts to reverse Mason’s conviction. The prosecutors argued Texas’ provisional ballot system worked exactly as intended, and prosecuting Mason nonetheless “chills others from exercising their fundamental right to vote through the provisional ballot system.”

➡️ MORE: About the briefs

In Washington state, a federal judge ruled that Trump didn’t have the power to fire a court-appointed prosecutor, a rebuke of the administration’s strategy to hand-pick federal prosecutors across the country.

Roger Rogoff was unanimously appointed by a panel of federal judges to be the top U.S. attorney for the Seattle area. But less than an hour after he was sworn in, he received notice from the Trump administration that he had been fired—leaving the administration’s preferred prosecutor in charge of the office.

The judge this week reinstated Rogoff as U.S. attorney and barred the administration from attempting to remove him again. The Justice Department said it would appeal the decision.

The Trump administration has attempted to use similar strategies to keep its preferred prosecutors leading U.S. attorney’s offices across the country. Federal judges have repeatedly disqualified those prosecutors, ruling the administration’s strategy violates federal law and the Constitution.

The New Yorker: Should I Stay or Should I Go?

Samantha Trepel, a former prosecutor at the Civil Rights Division, led the investigation into the death of George Floyd, which resulted in the conviction of four Minneapolis police officers, in 2022. Trepel ultimately came to believe that staying in her job served little purpose. “Cases were getting dismissed, people were being removed,” she said. Within a few months, for example, the Civil Rights Division abruptly closed lawsuits or investigations related to eight police departments that the D.O.J. had previously determined were engaging in discriminatory policing and using unconstitutional force. “The conclusion I was coming to was that I was not going to be very effective in my priorities—to protect the work, to protect the people under me, and to protect the institution,” Trepel said. “The D.O.J. left me. I didn’t leave the D.O.J.”

Trepel also believed that her legal skills could be put to better use outside the department. She is now a program director at the States United Democracy Center, a nonprofit that aims to safeguard elections and defend the rule of law from federal overreach. In her final months at the D.O.J., everything she did felt “defensive,” she told me, as her section tried to keep Title VI and environmental-justice investigations from being dismissed. Now she is actively assisting states that are seeking protection from federal investigations that she considers baseless, and from unlawful deployments of federal law enforcement. “That felt so much better to me,” she said.

AL.com: Alabama loses $3B in federal funding, and here’s what it covered

Alabama has lost $3 billion in federal funding that has been cut or frozen during President Donald Trump’s second term.

That’s according to a new tracker tool from the States United Democracy Center and Grant Witness. “Lost Funds” is an interactive catalog of federal grants that have been cancelled, frozen or delayed based on award amounts from USAspending.

In a new piece for the New York University School of Law’s Democracy Project, States United CEO Joanna Lydgate writes about how state and local officials, the news media, philanthropists, and others can help restore Americans’ trust in elections.

“Building confidence in elections means building on the trust that already exists in our communities, not starting from scratch,” she writes.

Lydgate also spoke with Luis Lozada, CEO of Democracy Works, about how AI platforms can improve to give voters accurate election information. You can read their full conversation here.