Intelligence Gaps

This Week in Democracy

• The attorneys general of 23 states and the District of Columbia urged the U.S. Supreme Court to keep a lower court order in place that blocks the implementation of key parts of President Trump’s second election-focused executive order. The administration is asking the high court to lift that block and allow the executive order to take effect.Among other things, the president’s order would put restrictions on which voters the U.S. Postal Service could deliver mail ballots to. “The consequences of allowing such transformative changes to take effect so close to this fall’s elections would be extreme,” the attorneys general wrote in their brief.

  ➡️ MORE: Sharing the Facts About Trump’s Second Executive Order on Elections

• Officials from 25 states sued the Trump administration over the president’s new tariffs, calling them an attempt to effectively revive the taxes that the Supreme Court struck down earlier this year.“Despite losing every step of the way, Trump is trying yet again to inflict more chaos on working families and homegrown Oregon businesses,” said Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield, who co-led the lawsuit. “We’re all paying the price for these unlawful tariffs, not foreign governments.”

  ➡️ MORE: Americans Widely Believe Tariffs Will Drive Up Costs

• The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee approved Todd Blanche’s nomination to be the next U.S. attorney general, setting up a final confirmation vote before the full Senate.Blanche, currently the acting attorney general, struck a deal with two senators to formally rescind the Justice Department’s $1.8 billion fund to pay Trump’s allies in exchange for their votes in committee. Trump said that he would push for federal legislation that would restore the fund if Blanche was not confirmed.
• Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, Tennessee, Virginia, and Washington held primary elections this week, and Election Deniers advanced to the November general elections in each state.States United Action continues to track candidates running for office who have denied the results of the 2020 presidential election at ElectionDeniers.org.

  ➡️ EXPLORE: ElectionDeniers.org

Intelligence Gaps

Artificial intelligence platforms have become a regular part of the information landscape that voters navigate to learn about elections. During this year’s midterm elections, millions of Americans are likely to ask platforms like ChatGPT and Google’s AI about how to participate in the voting process.

To understand how voters are served when they ask AI platforms about elections, States United conducted an empirical study. We examined how well AI platforms answer routine election questions—about voter registration, voting locations, election dates, mail voting, candidates running for office, and how election results are counted—and analyzed whether these platforms reliably direct voters to their state’s official election website.

The bottom line is that AI tools are advancing, but should be seen as a complement to, rather than a replacement for, official voter information. The platforms are slow to capture rapidly changing candidate information, vulnerable to format changes driven in part by commercial pressure, and potentially shaped by users’ account histories. And, importantly, voters are inconsistently directed to authoritative information on their state’s official election website.

For more, read CyberScoop’s exclusive coverage of our research or the full report.

State of the States

In Colorado, D.C., and Illinois, federal judges dismissed the Justice Department’s lawsuits seeking voters’ private data, the 19th, 20th, and 21st such cases to be thrown out. The department brought 31 lawsuits in total seeking voter data; it has not yet won any of them.