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This Week in Democracy

• The Trump administration asked the U.S. Supreme Court to allow the U.S. Postal Service to implement new restrictions on mail ballots for the November elections. The administration’s request came after a federal judge in Massachusetts issued an order permanently blocking the restrictions from being implemented. The administration also asked an appeals court to lift that order, but the appeals court declined.

  In a friend-of-the-court brief, a bipartisan group of current and former election officials—including the current top election officials of seven states, all Republicans—urged the Supreme Court to reject the administration’s request, arguing that implementing new election rules so close to November would create confusion and prevent eligible voters from voting.

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

• The U.S. Department of Justice sent notices to election officials in at least 29 states, telling them that they are under investigation and instructing them to retain records from the 2024 election.

  Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, the state’s chief election official, said the Justice Department notified her that she was being investigated because she refused to hand over her state’s voters’ private data. The administration sued 30 states and the District of Columbia for similar data; it has not yet won any of those cases.

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

  According to Bloomberg Law, Justice Department leaders are also pressuring federal prosecutors to increase prosecutions related to alleged voting by noncitizens—even though there continues to be no evidence to back up President Trump’s claims of widespread noncitizen voting.

  ➡️ MORE: What’s Breaking Through About False Claims of Noncitizen Voting

• Election denial activists are urging Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to use his department’s powers to ban certain voting machines, according to documents obtained by American Oversight. (Any action to ban voting machines would be illegal.)

  The push is rooted in conspiracy theories about foreign interference with machines. But States United surveys show that Americans continue to have high levels of trust in voting machines when it comes to casting and counting their votes.

  ➡️ MORE: Sharing the Facts About Voting Machines

• The Department of Homeland Security asked the U.S. Supreme Court to allow it to use a faulty program to verify voters’ citizenship. A federal judge blocked the agency from using the database in June, and an appeals court denied the Trump administration’s appeal last week.

  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 administration overhauled it last year to check voters’ citizenship. SAVE has proven to be unreliable, flagging eligible voters as potential noncitizens and, in some cases, resulting in Americans being deregistered to vote.

  ➡️ MORE: About the SAVE program

• The unusual report from the U.S. Census Bureau that Trump cited last month, which purported to show that thousands of noncitizens voted in 2020, used flawed data and reached faulty conclusions. According to Wired and NPR, affiliates of a Trump-aligned think tank were involved in creating the report.

State of the States

In Colorado, civil rights groups and officials representing Denver sued the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, asking a federal judge to block the agency from deploying federal immigration agents to polling sites in November.

It is illegal under federal and state law for armed troops or agents to be at the polls. A recent States United survey also showed that nearly half of Americans would disapprove of immigration enforcement officers being stationed at voting locations.

The Denver officials wrote in the lawsuit that the city clerk, Paul López, has already begun training election judges and election staff on how to respond if federal agents are present at the polls. “Nobody has the right to interfere between you and your vote and making sure that you can vote in an election,” Lopez said in an interview.

➡️ MORE: Americans Oppose ICE at Polling Places

In Nevada, following an appeals court’s ruling that Sigal Chattah was serving as the state’s top federal prosecutor unlawfully, the Justice Department appealed to the Supreme Court.

The Trump administration used a series of unlawful maneuvers to install Chattah and other federal prosecutors indefinitely, circumventing the Senate’s role in confirming U.S. attorneys. Federal judges have repeatedly ruled that the administration’s strategy is illegal. This is the first time that the nation’s high court will weigh in on the issue.