Democracy Won
Plus: How Election Deniers fared on Tuesday. 🗳️
Whether the candidates you voted for on Tuesday won or lost, every American should celebrate our democratic process working.
That’s no accident. For months, state and local election officials prepared for every possible scenario, coordinating with law enforcement, their counterparts in other states, and organizations dedicated to free and fair elections. Thanks to those preparations, Americans across the country voted safely in record numbers. It may sound simple, but it’s not easy to administer and protect elections for tens of millions of voters.
All year, the federal government laid the groundwork to interfere in our elections through executive orders, demands for voter data, threats to election officials, the weaponization of agencies, federal deployments and more. States and their partners fought back in court and in the court of public opinion, winning time and time again to block the overreach and uphold states’ constitutional authority to run our elections. Despite all of the real threats and attempts by the federal government to interfere, states did their job under immense pressure.
Their work isn’t done. Officials are still counting ballots, conducting audits, and certifying results in the weeks ahead. Then they’ll turn around to prepare for elections in 2027 and 2028, all while defending their authority against continued federal interference. Powering a democracy as big and as diverse as ours requires careful planning and constant vigilance. It’s not always glamorous, but it’s essential.
So, to election officials and poll workers across this country: Thank you. Because of you, democracy didn’t just survive on Tuesday. It shined.
This Week in Democracy
What comes next
As we wrote in this newsletter earlier this month, casting a ballot is just the beginning of the voting process. Now that many initial counts are done, election officials will conduct post-election audits, recount ballots when necessary, resolve any discrepancies, and certify the results.
All of this happens through established, careful procedures. Those processes ensure that the results are accurate, and that Americans can trust them—but they take time and require hard work.
➡️ MORE: Election Night Is Not the Finish Line
Major losses for Election Deniers
Heading into Tuesday’s elections, Election Deniers were on the ballot for statewide or congressional office in nearly 200 races across 43 states. As of last night, they will hold at least 41 fewer offices in 2027 than they did this year, according to States United Action. So far, Election Deniers have lost 70% of races for governor; 56% of races for state attorney general; and 83% of races for secretary of state—the state offices with power over how elections are run.
“Election denial didn’t define election night—voters did,” Kelly Rader, States United Action’s Research Director, said in a statement. “After months of reckless, unsubstantiated claims to undermine trust in our elections, Trump said he’ll respect the results. That’s thanks to the free, fair, secure election run by our state and local officials, and the decisive margins that came with millions of Americans making their voices heard.”
➡️ MORE: ElectionDeniers.org
States keep federal election monitors in check
The Justice Department’s election monitoring effort was the most expansive in its history, covering all 50 states. But it was also largely uneventful. In a few instances, state officials reported that federal observers were asking unusual questions or acting outside of their legal authority. Since election observers are required to abide by state law, state officials reached out to the Justice Department directly when they stepped out of bounds.
➡️ MORE: Sharing the Facts About Election Monitors
The Supreme Court denies DOJ’s request to set aside ballots
After a judge blocked the Trump administration’s effort to prevent California election officials from counting more than 20,000 ballots, the Justice Department appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The same day, the justices rejected DOJ’s request—with no noted dissents—allowing California election officials to do their jobs unimpeded.
“This latest decision should put an end to the Administration’s attempt to disrupt California’s elections through emergency court orders,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement. “But our work is not over. We will remain vigilant and keep fighting back against federal efforts to undermine our democracy.”
➡️ MORE: Sharing the Facts About Federal Interference in the 2026 Election
Former election officials urge court: Stop Trump administration’s threats against election workers
A bipartisan group of 18 former election officials represented by States United filed a friend-of-the-court brief, urging an appeals court to ensure that the Trump administration ceases threatening election officials with prosecution in the midst of the election. The group argued that the administration’s demands of election officials in California and Washington state would disrupt the administration of the midterms by diverting their time, resources, and energy during their busiest time.
“In our collective experience as election officials, we have never seen such a concerted fixation by the federal government on election workers through letters, subpoenas, press conferences, and social media posts, threatening them with imprisonment if they do not accede to certain demands,” the officials wrote.
In a separate case, a federal judge ordered the Justice Department to temporarily halt its demands that Washington officials set aside hundreds of ballots.
➡️ MORE: About the brief
Key DOJ officials resign
Harmeet Dhillon, the top official in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, resigned on Thursday. As the head of the division, Dhillon refocused its mission to align with President Trump’s political priorities and led the Trump administration’s efforts to obtain voters’ private data from states.
On Friday, U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones, whose office oversaw the wide-ranging investigation into former federal officials who investigated or prosecuted the president, also resigned.
State of the States
In Alaska, a federal judge dismissed the Justice Department’s lawsuit that sought to block the certification of Alaska’s U.S. Senate election if incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan loses. The judge wrote that the Trump administration’s requests “certainly involve the time, place, and manner of Alaska’s election, which are the responsibilities of the State, not the executive branch of the federal government.” The Justice Department is appealing.
Winners have yet to be declared in most of Alaska’s elections. Election officials in Alaska are continuing to count votes, since some mail ballots have yet to be returned to election offices. (State law allows officials to count mail ballots that arrive up to 15 days after Election Day, as long as they were postmarked by Nov. 3.) Sen. Sullivan said that he would accept the election results, even if he lost.
In Rhode Island, a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration could not condition federal funding for states based on their cooperation with federal immigration enforcement efforts. The administration attempted to hold back more than $1 billion in funding to support victims of crime to pressure states into complying, but the attorneys general of 20 states and the District of Columbia sued in August to block it from doing so.
The attorneys general wrote in their lawsuit that the administration’s funding conditions faced them with an “impossible dilemma: either forego control over use of their own law enforcement resources and allow the federal government to invade their sovereign right to determine how best to exercise state police power, or forego hundreds of millions in critical federal funds that are necessary to sustain ongoing state victim-services programs.”
In the News
The Atlantic: The Election Deniers Are in Retreat (gift link)
Many GOP candidates seem to realize that to stand a chance, they need their voters to trust the system and cast their ballot. Political strategists and election experts told us that there are diminishing returns for the GOP in trying to persuade Americans to care about Trump’s six-year-old fraud claims. The system worked well enough to reelect Trump, and the president has failed to produce credible evidence that voter fraud is a threat to the midterms. “Saying that elections are rigged in this country, saying that Donald Trump really won the 2020 election, is not something that appeals to voters in general elections,” Kelly Rader, a research director for States United Action, a nonpartisan election-protection group, told us. Rader and her colleagues, who maintain a database of election deniers seeking office, found that fewer are running this year compared with four years ago. She was not surprised that the ones who are have been downplaying their election skepticism.
ProPublica: “Chaos” in the Air: Five Ways Voting Could Be Disrupted on Election Day
Sam Trepel is Rule of Law program director at States United Democracy Center and a former attorney for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. She said the agency’s actions involving California and Washington were a “disturbing use of prosecutorial authority.”
Trepel worries that the DOJ may try to seize ballots cast by voters identified as likely noncitizens, before or after the election, which would “put their votes at risk and undermine trust more broadly.”
Political instability can hurt a country’s economy, research suggests. One potential path for democratic erosion to harm business: A breakdown of the rule of law can scare off investors looking to deploy capital or build new companies, Princeton University political scientist Layna Mosley found in a July 2023 report published by nonpartisan organizations The Brookings Institution and States United Democracy Center.