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      Justice department asked California to give details of non-citizens on voter rolls

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      The Department of Justice has asked several large California counties to provide detailed personal information of non-citizens who got on to the state voter rolls, an unusual request that comes as the Trump administration has asked about a dozen states to provide wide swaths of information about voters and election practices.The justice department’s voting section sent identical letters to local election officials in Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego on 9 July. The request asks the officials to provide the total number of non-citizens who had their voter registrations cancelled since 2020 as well as a copy of their voter registration records, voting history, date of birth, driver’s license numbers, and the last four digits of a social security number. The department sent a similar request to Orange county last month and then sued the county after officials redacted some information.“It’s deeply troubling,” said David Becker, the executive director for the Center for Election Innovation & Research. “It reflects a pretty shocking misunderstanding of federal law regarding list maintenance.”The request for information on non-citizens comes as the Trump administration has arrested and moved to deport thousands of immigrants. Submitting a voter registration form while ineligible to vote is a crime so non-citizens that do so could be prosecuted and potentially deported. This kind of voter fraud, however, is extremely rare.All three counties said they were reviewing the justice department’s request. The justice department did not return a request for comment.The justice department’s voting section has sent out extensive requests for information to nearly a dozen states recently, many of them focused on how states are removing people from the rolls and suggesting that states are not doing enough to cancel voter registrations of people who are ineligible to cast a ballot. It has also asked many states to turn over all of their voter registration records. At least two states, New Hampshire and Minnesota, have refused so far. “The Department of Justice did not, however, identify any legal basis in its June 25 letter that would entitle it to Minnesota’s voter registration list. Nor did it explain how this information would be used, stored, and secured,” a lawyer for the Minnesota secretary of state’s office wrote on 25 July.It is a focus that underscores how the justice department’s voting section is shifting away from enforcing anti-discrimination in voting laws and instead hunting for voter fraud.“For years now, we’ve seen suits from those conservative groups saying that jurisdictions aren’t purging enough folks from their rolls and claiming that they’ve identified non-citizens on the rolls and that kind of thing. And now we’re seeing the Department of Justice do something very similar,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the voting rights and elections program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “This is a civil rights division and a voting section in particular that are very focused on trying to prove some kind of fraud.”Federal law requires states to regularly check their rolls for people who are ineligible because they have moved or died, with safeguards in place to ensure that eligible voters are not erroneously moved. Republicans have long complained that states are not aggressive enough in removing voters, while Democrats have pointed to errors states have made to justify the continued existence of the safeguards.Trump has often repeated the false claim that non-citizens are voting in significant numbers in US elections, including last month when he said Los Angeles and other Democratic-leaning cities were using “Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base” and “cheat in elections”. A provision in Trump’s March executive order on elections instructs the attorney general to prioritize enforcing laws that prevent non-citizen voting. Numerous studies have shown that non-citizen voting is exceedingly rare.“This refocus is troubling in part because it means taking away focus from actually enforcing the legal protections for voting rights that the voting rights section has historically been enforcing,” Morales-Doyle said. “It seems to be investing a bunch of resources in going after a problem that is infinitesimally rare.”There have been isolated instances of non-citizens becoming registered in recent years, but it is often due to confusion about their eligibility. In 2018, for example, a federal prosecutor in North Carolina charged 20 non-citizens with illegally voting and several of them said they had no idea they were ineligible.Last month, election officials in Orange county, California, told the justice department that 17 non-citizens had become registered to vote since 2020. Sixteen of those people self-reported they were non-citizens, according to the Los Angeles Times.The election officials provided the information in June after justice department officials made a similar request to the one submitted to Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego. While election officials turned over the names and dates of birth of those who registered, they redacted their social security and driver’s license numbers, citing state privacy laws, the Los Angeles Times reported. When Orange county officials offered to work on a confidentiality agreement under which they could provide the records, justice department responded by suing the county for the records.“These efforts make it clear President Trump is preparing to use the power of his office to interfere in the 2026 election,” said Samantha Tarazi, CEO and co-founder of Voting Rights Lab, a non-profit that is tracking the justice department’s outreach to states. “What started as an unconstitutional executive order – marching orders for state action regardless of its fate in court – has grown into a full federal mobilization to seize power over our elections.To justify its request for records to the California counties, the justice department pointed to two federal laws, the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and Help America Vote Act (Hava) that set requirements for how states must maintain their voter rolls. Neither statute requires states to continually search for non-citizens on their voter rolls, Becker said.“There is literally nothing in federal law anywhere that requires states to continually search for non-citizens on their voter lists,” he said. “States can do this if they choose to. But the federal government plays absolutely no role in that unless a state affirmatively asks them to.”The justice department cited a provision of the NVRA that requires states to come up with a general program for removing voters from the rolls because they have either died or moved. It also cited a provision of Hava that requires states to have a system for removing ineligible voters from the rolls and not to accept a federal voter registration application unless voters provide a driver’s license number or the last four digits of their social security number.“I don’t understand how having the name and [personal identifying information] of any voter tells you anything about whether a county is or isn’t complying with the NVRA and Hava,” Levitt said. “The civil rights division hasn’t really established a legitimate need for the information they’re demanding. Which means they’re not really entitled to the information.” More

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      Newsom threatens to redraw California House maps in protest at Texas plan

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      Seeking to offset a Republican plan to pick up congressional seats in Texas, California Democrats say they are prepared to redraw the state’s 52 congressional districts in a longshot and controversial effort to pick up Democratic seats.Governor Gavin Newsom, seen as a likely presidential candidate in 2028, has been leading the threat in recent days. And Democratic members of California’s delegation in the US House appear to be on board.“We want our gavels back,” Representative Mark Takano, a California Democrat, told Punchbowl News. “That’s what this is about.” Democrats hold 43 of California’s 52 seats and reportedly believe they can pick up an additional five to seven seats by drawing new maps.Newsom is pushing the plan as Texas Republicans are poised to redraw its 38 congressional districts in a special session that begins next week. Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, put redistricting on the agenda at the request of Donald Trump, who wants Republicans to add five seats in Texas as he seeks to stave off a loss in congressional seats next year. The effort has been widely criticized by Democrats as an anti-democratic ploy to make Republicans unaccountable to their voters.Newsom’s plan in California is unlikely to succeed. More than a decade ago, California voters approved a constitutional amendment that stripped lawmakers of their ability to draw congressional districts and gave it to an independent redistricting commission. Newsom has only offered vague ideas for how to get around that requirement. He has suggested the legislature could call a quick voter referendum to potentially strip the commission of its power. He also said on Wednesday there was a possibility of the legislature trying to enact new maps on its own – a novel legal theory.“It’s not lawful in any way,” said Dan Vicuña, a redistricting expert at the watchdog group Common Cause. “It was clear that this was meant to be done one time after the census, through a public and transparent process that centers community feedback, and then to be not touched again until the next decade.”He added: “It’s not an invitation to them to circumvent the independent process and gerrymander maps in the middle of a decade. That would completely undermine the purpose of the independent process voters approved.”California’s independent commission has long been considered a model for making the process of drawing district lines fairer. There has been a bipartisan push in recent years to get more states to adopt commissions such as California’s, where ordinary citizens – Democrats, Republicans and unaffiliated – have the power to draw district lines. After the 2020 census, four states – California, Arizona, Michigan and Colorado – used independent commissions. Democrats sought to require all states to use independent redistricting commissions in federal legislation that stalled in the US Senate during Joe Biden’s presidency.Russell Yee, a Republican who served on California’s commission, said that while he understood Newsom’s frustration, the only solution is redistricting reform at the federal level.“To abandon a commitment to fair and equitable election districts for partisan advantage is to sell family treasures at a pawn shop for a wad of quickly spent cash,” he said.Newsom has noted he supported creating the commission, but frames his willingness to redraw maps as the type of hardball Democrats should be more willing to play as Trump and Republicans have openly defied the law.“They’re playing by a different set of rules. They can’t win by the traditional game so they want to change the game,” Newsom said on Wednesday. “We can act holier than thou. We can sit on the sidelines, talk about the way the world should be. Or we can recognize the existential nature that is this moment.”Alex Lee, a state assemblyman who chairs his chamber’s progressive caucus, rejected that argument. “CA independent citizen redistricting (imperfect) is model for the nation,” he wrote in a post on X. “[Republicans] resort to cheating to win. We win by running clear platform for the working class and delivering.”Trying to push through a redrawing of California’s map could also undermine efforts by Democrats to convince voters of the grave dangers of Trump’s attacks on the rule of law. More

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      A risky bet? Texas Republicans poised to redraw congressional map on Trump’s orders

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      At the behest of Donald Trump, Texas Republicans are poised to redraw their state’s congressional map to try and gain as many as five congressional seats, a move that is likely to further weaken the influence of the state’s fast-growing non-white population and could wind up backfiring on the party.The effort to redraw the map represents a blunt and undemocratic effort by Republican lawmakers to pick the voters who elect them, and comes at a time when many of the party’s positions are unpopular. The US president and national Republicans are making the push because the GOP holds a 220-212 advantage in the US House (there are three Democratic vacancies) and Trump’s party typically loses seats in the midterm elections, which will happen next year.But it’s a risky bet. Twenty-five of Texas’s 38 congressional districts are currently represented by Republicans, a result that was carefully engineered when lawmakers redrew the state’s congressional map in 2021. During that process, mapmakers focused on shoring up Republican seats instead of trying to pick up Democratic ones.In order to pick up new seats, Republicans will have to spread their voters from safe Republican ones into Democratic districts. It could allow them to pick up more seats, but also makes the Republican districts more competitive and potentially winnable by Democrats in a strong year.The number of seats Republicans are able to pick up “depends on how much risk Republicans want to take,” said David Wasserman, an analyst at the Cook Political Report who closely follows US House races. “Republicans could probably target three Democratic seats very easily, but once it gets to four or five, that could put additional Republican seats at risk.”When Republicans drew the existing map, they blunted the political influence of non-white voters in the state, who accounted for 95% of the state’s population growth over the last decade. The new maps could further weaken their ability to elect their preferred candidates.“The current maps are already blatantly racist and discriminate against voters of color, communities of color, all over the state,” said Anthony Gutierrez, the executive director of the Texas chapter of Common Cause, a watchdog group. “There would be absolutely no way you get to five more Republican districts without just completely trampling on minority voting rights.”Two Democratic seats likely to be targeted are the ones in south Texas currently held by representatives Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez, Wasserman said. Trump won both districts in 2024 and Republicans could easily tweak their boundaries to make them winnable. Democrats also represent four districts in the Houston area, and Republicans could shift the boundaries to try and pick up one or two districts depending on how aggressive they want to be.The Republican push to redraw the map comes as the state is still reeling from deadly floods that left at least 134 people dead with more than 100 people still missing. Democrats in the Texas legislature are reportedly considering walking out of the special session in order to deny Republicans a quorum needed to pass the maps. Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, has said he will assist in “hunting down” members who walk out and compel them back to the capitol.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTo justify redrawing the maps, Texas governor Greg Abbott pointed to a 7 July letter from the justice department claiming lawmakers had impermissibly sorted voters based on their race. Both the letter’s argument, and Abbott’s quick acceptance of it, raised eyebrows because Texas officials have said for years they did not consider race at all when they drew the maps.“My jaw dropped when I saw that letter,” said Mark Gaber, an attorney at the Campaign Legal Center, who is representing some of the plaintiffs suing Texas over the maps already in place. “Either the witnesses were not telling the truth or the entire premise of this special session and the mid-decade redistricting is false.”In its letter, the justice department pointed to four districts where it claimed voters had been unconstitutionally sorted by race. In two of those districts, two different groups of minority voters constitute a majority that can elect their preferred candidates. Another district is majority Hispanic. The final district it raised issue with was drawn after judges found intentional discrimination in a previous district.Several legal experts said those claims were highly questionable.“The DoJ letter is completely concocted and it reflects a complete misunderstanding of the law, but that’s not what they’re interested in,” said Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which is representing some of the plaintiffs challenging the current congressional map.“If I were them, I would be consulting legal counsel about the possibility of being found guilty of perjury in what they testified to under oath,” he added.Mapmakers may want to keep communities who share common interests together for reasons that have nothing to do with their race, said Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice.Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School who worked on voting rights issues at both the justice department and White House said the letter was “nonsense”.“What they appear to articulate in the letters is the notion that any time there happens to be multiple minorities in a district, that’s a constitutional violation. And that’s like seven different versions of wrong,” he said. More

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      The other winner in New York’s mayoral contest: ranked-choice voting | David Daley

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      The polls did not look good for New York progressives this winter when the Working Families party began making its endorsements for city elections. An early February poll from Emerson College showed Andrew Cuomo with a 23-point lead in a hypothetical Democratic primary matchup. None of the four leading progressives even approached double-digit support – including the then unknown assemblyman Zohran Mamdani. He polled at 1%.In the days before ranked-choice voting, the Working Families party’s endorsement process might have looked quite different. Like-minded candidates would have drawn sharp distinctions between each other. Party officials might have looked to nudge candidates toward the exits, behind closed doors. Before any votes had been cast in the primary, the party would consolidate behind just one choice. It would have been bloody and left a bitter taste for everyone.Instead, the opposite happened. Working Families, knowing that majorities rule and that no one can spoil a ranked-choice race, endorsed four candidates. Instead of a single endorsement that served as a kiss of death for other progressives, they backed a slate, allowing voters time to tune in and for candidates to make their pitches. Now Mamdani is the Democratic nominee and the overwhelming favorite to go from 1% all the way to Gracie Mansion.There are many reasons why this 33-year-old pulled off a seemingly unthinkable upset and soared from obscurity to the most talked about Democrat in the nation overnight. He energized young people, reached voters where they are on social media and built an unstoppable coalition. He and his volunteers talked to everyone, everywhere.Ranked-choice voting (RCV) encouraged and incentivized that joyous, barnstorming approach. And while Mamdani ultimately would have won a plurality contest or a ranked-choice one, his super-long-shot candidacy might have been squelched at the very beginning under the old system with its different electoral incentives. His victory shows how much more real power voters have under ranked-choice voting.To be clear: RCV is a party-neutral and candidate-neutral tool. Its job is to produce a majority winner with the widest and deepest support from any field of more than two candidates. It puts an end to spoilers and to the impossible, wish-and-a-prayer calculation that voters otherwise have to make when faced with multiple candidates, some of whom they really like and some of whom they do not. Liberals, conservatives, independents and moderates have run and won under RCV, from coast to coast.But while RCV might be strictly non-partisan, it is decidedly pro-voter – and almost always produces a more positive, issue-focused campaign that looks to drive up turnout and appeal to as many people as possible. A ranked-choice campaign rewards engagement and encourages coalitions; it’s a race where instead of tearing down opponents, candidates point out areas of agreement and ask to be a voter’s second choice.Voters love RCV and find it easy to use. According to a new SurveyUSA poll of New York voters, 96% said their ballot was easy to fill out. More than three-quarters of voters want to keep or expand RCV. And 82% said they had taken advantage of RCV and ranked at least two candidates. (These numbers are similar across RCV elections, and a powerful rejoinder to critics who insist, despite evidence to the contrary, that it’s too confusing.)A remarkable number of New Yorkers saw first-hand how RCV makes our votes more powerful – they had the freedom to express themselves and rank a long-shot first, but still had their vote count for either Mamdani or Cuomo in the ranked choice tally.Perhaps the high marks are of little surprise: voters received a campaign unlike most any other. The tone remained positive and issue-based. Instead of cutting each other down, candidates lifted each other up: Mamdani and Brad Lander cross-endorsed each other, cutting joint ads, riding bicycles together to shared events, sharing the couch on Stephen Colbert, and even sharing a stage at Mamdani’s victory party. Jessica Ramos and Whitney Tilson endorsed Cuomo and said that they would rank him second. Mamdani helped Adrienne Adams with fundraising.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionVoters always say that they want more choice at the polls, candidates who engage with them, and a genuine, issue-based campaign. They got exactly that in New York City because of ranked choice. And the historic turnout levels – more than 1 million New Yorkers cast ballots, the highest number since the 1980s – shows that when voters get that kind of elevated, engaging campaign, they show up and get involved.When voters have the opportunity to consider new candidates campaigning in creative new ways, the frontrunner with the early name recognition and largest donors can be eclipsed by a newcomer who started at 1%. And instead of going scorched-earth on each other before the general election, even some of the “losers” seem to have had their status elevated: Lander finished third, and instead of being an asterisk, he has now expanded his base and likability for a future campaign.The majority winner in this race was Zohran Mamdani. But it’s also easy to suggest the real winner might be ranked-choice voting. In a moment when so many of our elections are fraught and polarized, all of us looking for a more unified and hopeful path forward – the “politics of the future”, as Mamdani called it when he declared victory – should take a close look at what just happened in New York as proof that stronger elections are truly possible.What’s giving me hope nowOutside of Washington, cities and states are becoming laboratories of democracy once again. New York’s adoption of ranked-choice voting led to just the kind of campaign our politics so desperately needs: a giant field of candidates presenting their vision of the future, building coalitions, without any time squandered on “spoilers” or anyone pushed to drop out and consolidate early. In Portland, Oregon, meanwhile, voters modernized government and moved to proportional representation to elect the city council, broadening representation to groups and neighborhoods that have never before had a seat at the table. When voters make these changes, they like them, defend them, and expand them, as we have seen in New York, Maine and Alaska. And it won’t take long for people to ask why they can’t have ranked choice and proportionality in all their elections.

      David Daley is the author of Antidemocratic: Inside the Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections as well as Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count More

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      Will a disputed North Carolina race push defeated candidates to contest results?

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      A disputed North Carolina state supreme court race that took nearly six months to resolve revealed a playbook for future candidates who lose elections to retroactively challenge votes, observers warn, but its ultimate resolution sent a signal that federal courts are unlikely to support an effort to overturn the results of an election.Democrat Allison Riggs defeated Republican Jefferson Griffin by 734 votes last November out of about 5.5m cast. But for months afterwards, Griffin waged an aggressive legal fight to get 65,000 votes thrown out after the election, even though those voters followed all of the rules election officials had set in advance.The effort was largely seen as a long shot until the North Carolina court of appeals accepted the challenge and said more than 60,000 voters had to prove their eligibility, months after the election, or have their votes thrown out. The Republican-controlled North Carolina supreme court significantly narrowed the number of people who had to prove their eligibility, but still left the door open to more than 1,000 votes being tossed.However, Judge Richard Myers II, a conservative federal judge appointed by Donald Trump, halted that effort on 5 May and ordered the North Carolina state board of elections to certify the race. “You establish the rules before the game. You don’t change them after the game is done,” he wrote in his ruling. Griffin shortly after said he would not appeal against the election and conceded the race.The North Carolina episode marked the most aggressive push by a Republican to overturn an election since Donald Trump’s blunt push to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential race. While both efforts were unsuccessful, the North Carolina state court’s embrace of such a brazen effort to disenfranchise voters after an election could set the stage for another candidate to try the same thing.“The damage to future North Carolina elections has already been done,” Bryan Anderson, a North Carolina reporter who authors the Substack newsletter Anderson Alerts, warned.View image in fullscreenThe North Carolina judges who had ruled in favor of Griffin, Anderson wrote, “have issued decisions paving the way for retroactive voter challenges. It’s a view that can’t be put back in a box and stands to create little incentive for candidates to concede defeat in close elections going forward.“There’s now also precedent for wrongly challenging voters who followed all rules in place at the time of an election and leaving them without any means to address concerns with their ballots,” he added.Although the North Carolina state board of elections was not willing to entertain Griffin’s challenges in the future this time around, North Carolina Republicans wrestled control of the state elections board from Democrats, and might be more willing to entertain efforts to disenfranchise voters.Richard Hasen, an election law scholar at the University of California Los Angeles said the episode sent “two conflicting signals, and it’s hard to know which one is going to dominate”.On the one hand, he said Donald Trump has created an atmosphere in which Republicans are “increasingly willing to believe” elections are being stolen and embrace efforts to overturn them.“On the other hand, the fact that you have pushback, at least from the federal courts, should give some people pause,” he said.Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the voting rights and elections program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said he believed the saga “closed the door” to similar challenges in the future.“Certainly it is a shame that it took six months to get here, but the end result here is a reaffirmation of the fact that the federal courts aren’t going to stand for changing the rules for an election after it’s been run,” he said. “Will other people try this? Maybe. But I think the lesson that should be learned from this is actually this won’t work.”But Griffin’s efforts may have “only failed because the federal courts that oversee North Carolina happen to be free of partisan corruption”, Mark Stern, a legal reporter, wrote in Slate.“But what if a Republican candidate loses by a hair in, say, Texas, where state and federal courts are badly tainted by GOP bias,” he wrote. “Griffin has laid out the blueprint for an election heist in such a scenario, with Scotus standing as the lone bulwark against an assault on democracy.”Although Republicans have been responsible for bringing election denialism into the mainstream in recent years, Benjamin Ginsberg, a well-respected Republican election lawyer who worked on George W Bush’s team during the Florida recount in 2000, said the legal strategy Griffin deployed was essentially what Al Gore tried to do.“That strategy has not worked, which is not to say somebody won’t try it again. Because history would teach you that candidates who lose narrow races, try everything. Throw it on the wall and see what sticks,” he said. More

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      Federal judge blocks Trump order that could disenfranchise millions of voters

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      A federal judge on Thursday blocked Donald Trump’s efforts to add a proof of citizenship requirement to the federal voter registration form, a change that voting rights advocates warned would have disenfranchised millions of voters.The president sought to unilaterally add the requirement in a 25 March executive orders. The Democratic party, as well as a slew of civil rights groups, challenged that order, arguing the president does not have the power to set the rules for federal elections.US district judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the federal district court in Washington, agreed with that argument on Thursday.“Our Constitution entrusts Congress and the States – not the President – with the authority to regulate federal elections,” she wrote in a 120-page opinion. “No statutory delegation of authority to the Executive Branch permits the President to short-circuit Congress’s deliberative process by executive order.”Kollar-Kotelly also blocked a portion of the executive order that required federal agencies to assess the citizenship of individuals applying to vote at a public assistance agency before they offered them a chance to vote.The order would have made it significantly harder to register to vote, even for eligible voters. Nearly 10% of eligible voters lack easy access to documents, such as a US passport or birth certificate, that would be required to prove their citizenship, a 2024 survey found.“No president has the authority to dictate our election systems and processes,” Danielle Lang, a voting rights attorney at watchdog group Campaign Legal Center, said in a statement. “The Constitution gives the states and Congress the express power to regulate our elections. We are happy to see that the Constitution’s core principle of separation of powers has been upheld in this instance, and we look forward to continuing our challenge so everyday Americans can make their voices heard without unnecessary barriers.”Republicans in the US House have passed a similar bill that would require proof of citizenship to vote, but it almost certainly will not pass in the US Senate. Several states have also passed statutes to require proof of citizenship to vote.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionKollar-Kotelly left in place, for now, portions of the order that instructed the Department of Homeland Security to share information with states and to work with the so-called “department of government efficiency” to find non-citizens on the rolls. She also left in place a portion of the order that sought to punish states that allow mail-in ballots to arrive after election day, saying the plaintiffs had not established legal harm. She left the door open to the challengers returning to court later to bring claims against those portions. More

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      ‘Bad for democracy’: North Carolina could throw out valid ballots in tight election

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      More than five months after the 2024 election, a swath of voters in North Carolina are still unsure whether their votes will count in an unprecedented effort to overturn a valid US election.Democrat Allison Riggs defeated Republican Jefferson Griffin in a contest for the state supreme court. But after the election, Griffin challenged the eligibility of tens of thousands of voters. A ruling from the North Carolina supreme court on Friday paved the way for as many as 1,675 voters to have their ballots thrown out in the election – more than double Riggs’s margin of victory.The challenged voters include someone who grew up in the state, a professor who was there for two decades, a lifelong resident studying abroad, and someone who still owns a home there and plans to move back, according to Guardian interviews.But Griffin claims they are “never-residents”, people who voted in North Carolina who had no previous residency in or attachments to the state.The Guardian spoke with several voters, first identified by the publication Anderson Alerts with their list later expanded upon by Popular Information, who were all living overseas when they cast their ballots in the North Carolina state supreme court race.At risk are two groups: 1,409 overseas voters from Guilford county, a Democratic-leaning area, who voted without showing photo ID – something that the law allows. Then, there are 266 overseas voters whom Griffin alleges have never lived in North Carolina, according to the North Carolina state board of elections.View image in fullscreenThe court gave 30 days for elections officials to get more information from the overseas voters. It said that the 266 voters suspected of never being residents in the state should have their ballots thrown out.That would mean that the vote cast by Josey Wright, a 25-year-old PhD student studying in the UK, wouldn’t count.Wright lived in North Carolina from early childhood until age 18. Her parents still live there, and she visits most years, typically spending summers there. She voted from abroad using a web portal available to US citizens who now live overseas, as she has done in several local and national elections since she moved to the UK to study.She found out her vote may not be counted after a reporter contacted her in recent days.“It’s a bit frustrating because it’s already a bit more difficult, I think, to vote as an overseas voter,” Wright said. “You have to be paying attention to US elections and also submit quite a bit of paperwork in order to get your ballot and to sign up for the portal. It’s a bit disheartening that, after all that effort, my vote actually might not be counted.”The legal battle has drawn attention nationwide and protests locally because the courts could potentially overturn Riggs’s victory by changing the rules of election procedure after the election happened. It’s a road map that election challengers in other states, and in much bigger contests, could use in the future, if it’s successful. If Trump had lost North Carolina, he was expected to make similar arguments.The ruling also set off a scramble to figure out next steps for the unprecedented election challenge. There’s confusion over how to find these voters, how to cure their ballots, and what next steps will look like.The state board of elections said in a court filing yesterday that these voters would be reviewed by elections officials to see whether they have claims of residency in North Carolina, and whether, if they were found to be one-time residents and otherwise valid, their ballots would count.Multiple lawsuits have been filed in federal court to stop the ruling from taking effect. Plaintiffs in one of the cases include a military spouse living in Italy who was born and raised in North Carolina; a lifelong resident who moved to Switzerland for her husband’s PhD program who is in the process of moving back to the state; a North Carolinian teaching English abroad on a one-year contract and a teacher at an air force base in Japan who lived in the state until last year.A federal court in North Carolina said elections officials should begin the ballot curing process but otherwise hold off on certifying any results pending the court process. The judge in that case, a Trump appointee, would not issue a stay of the case.State law has long allowed overseas voters who claim North Carolina residency to vote in the state.But in interviews, several of those voters said they actually had lived in the US and were confused about the challenge to their eligibility and unsure how, or whether, they could fix it.Josiah Young, 20, was studying abroad in Spain when he cast an absentee ballot online, voting in his first presidential election. He is a freshman at American University in Washington DC, but a lifelong North Carolinian. He voted in his home state, which he still has listed as his permanent residence.Young found out his vote had been challenged a couple of months ago, after one of his father’s colleagues shared a PDF that included voters challenged by Jefferson Griffin in a lawsuit. “Lo and behold, at the bottom of the list is a couple pages dedicated just to me. I was definitely surprised,” he said.“It’s pretty disappointing. As a first-time voter, I feel like I pretty much did everything that I was supposed to do. I cast my ballot legally, and then just to find out that someone, or anyone, is challenging my vote is pretty disappointing,” Young said.He believes he accidentally checked a box that said he had never lived in the US and didn’t plan on returning. He’s not sure there’s any way to remedy the situation and get his vote counted. He has not been notified about his inclusion on the list by any elections officials or challengers, he said. He could have remedied the problem quickly, as he voted early, so he wishes he had known.One North Carolina voter who requested to speak anonymously said they believed they had accidentally checked the wrong box on the form to request a ballot. Instead of saying that they intended to return to the US or were uncertain whether they would return, the voter said they had never lived in the US.The voter, who was abroad for six years but has since returned to the US, first learned about the challenge last fall and tried to notify their local election office, but never heard back. “I’m really upset that he would try to change the rules after losing the election,” the voter said. “I think that’s just very bad form for democracy.”Another challenged voter, Neil McWilliam, taught at Duke University for two decades before moving to France with his family in 2023. Originally from the UK, McWilliam, his wife and his son were naturalized in 2013, and he has voted in every state and federal election since. He is a Democrat, and his wife is registered as an independent. His vote was challenged, and hers was not.“Political operatives like Griffin hope to instill cynicism and hopelessness in those who oppose them,” McWilliam said. “The answer is not to reject voting as a waste of time, but to redouble efforts to ensure that everybody who is eligible can and does vote in fair elections free from partisan manipulation.”David Eberhard, also challenged by Griffin, is a former North Carolina resident who moved to Italy for his son’s education but still owns his home in the state and intends to return. He voted while living in Italy in 2024 using the online forms provided by local officials, he said. He found out he had been challenged in January, has no idea why, and updated his information with North Carolina local officials. He’s unsure of exactly what he’s supposed to do.“If I am supposed to present my credentials to a local official in person, I will have to travel at considerable expense and inconvenience, just because Griffin couldn’t bother with the inconvenience of ensuring that the names on his list were in fact improperly registered,” he said. More

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      These Tennessee lawmakers love the unborn. After birth? Not so much

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      Think of the children? NahYou’ve probably seen this quote from an Alabama pastor called Dave Barnhart. It goes viral all the time. But I’m resurfacing the quote because it is another day that ends with “y” in America, which means it is relevant once again.“The unborn are a convenient group of people to advocate for,” Barnhart said back in 2018, remarking wryly on the movement’s priorities. “They never make demands of you … They don’t need money, education or childcare … They allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn.”Over in Tennessee, there are a lot of lawmakers who are very proud of how much they advocate for unborn children. In 2022, as soon as Roe was overturned, the state passed one of the nation’s strictest abortion bans – one without explicit exceptions to save the life of a pregnant person. The ban also made performing or attempting to perform an abortion a class C felony – akin to aggravated assault – which means aiding in an abortion can land you prison time and a hefty fine. That ban has been continuously challenged in court but the bottom line is that getting an abortion in Tennessee is almost impossible.Those Tennessee lawmakers who love unborn children? Surprise, surprise, they’re not so keen on the born ones. Particularly if those kids are immigrants. On Thursday, the GOP-dominated state senate approved a bill that lets public schools check the citizenship or legal immigration status of every student. Undocumented children can be denied enrollment at these public schools or forced to pay tuition. In other words: Tennessee wants to make it legal to deny undocumented kids an education. By requiring school systems to check legal immigrant status, they’re also turning what should be safe spaces into immigration enforcement centers.All of which, to be clear, is blatantly unconstitutional. In 1982, the supreme court decision in Plyler v Doe found states cannot deny students a free public education over their immigration status. The Tennessee bill is not law yet, and if the Tennessee governor does sign it, it will almost certainly face legal challenges. But even if it eventually gets struck down, there is a chance it will stay on the books as a “zombie law” – ready to rise again when circumstances allow.Perhaps you are wondering why all these fierce advocates for the rights of unborn children are so keen on denying kids an education? According to lawmakers who voted for the measure, it’s not because they’re hateful racists who want to punish kids, it’s because they are being fiscally responsible. Their argument is that the state simply doesn’t have enough money for education for undocumented kids, particularly since some will require English language learner classes.There’s a small possibility – just throwing it out there – that one of the reasons Tennessee is finding it hard to find money for education is because its regressive tax policies are heavily weighted towards extracting money from the poor rather than making the rich pay their fair share. Tennessee is one of the nine states in the US that doesn’t have an income tax. It also doesn’t have inheritance tax and has very low business tax. Residents (including undocumented immigrants) pay sales tax, property tax and a grocery tax. Undocumented immigrants are putting money into the system and getting very little out of it. Pretending that this attack on undocumented children is about money is disingenuous. Deep down, I’m sure even the people voting for the bill know that investing in children pays dividends to society.Still, while it is disheartening that a bill like this got as far as it did, it’s also important to note that it faced a lot of opposition. Nearly half of the senate’s members spoke on the bill – many of them, including some Republicans, in passionate disagreement. There were tears and a lot of Bible verses quoted about compassion for children. As the US becomes increasingly dystopian, it’s important that we don’t lose sight of just how much opposition there is to the extremist policies and legislation a hate-filled minority are pushing through. Donald Trump likes to say that winning the popular vote gave him and his cronies a mandate to do whatever they like; that all the policies getting passed have the support of the people. This simply isn’t true. Only around 32% of eligible voters actually voted for Trump.While we must not minimize the amount of misogyny and racism there is in the US (and there is a lot!), we should also take heart from the fact that a sizable number of Americans do not want to live in an authoritarian dystopia where women have no rights and undocumented kids get no education. Sixty-three percent of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases according to Pew research from 2024. Most Americans say undocumented immigrants should have a way to stay in the country legally if certain requirements are met. Increasingly, the actions of the American government don’t reflect the views of the American people.Which, of course, is why the Trump administration is so obsessed with undermining education as a whole. From trying to stop undocumented immigrants from going to school, to tightly controlling how Ivy League universities operate, to attempting to eliminate the US Department of Education, Republicans are waging a war on critical thinking.The US just made it harder for married women to voteOn Thursday the US House approved the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (Save) Act, which requires people to prove they are citizens when they vote. If you changed your birth name – as around 80% of women in opposite-sex marriages in the US have – you will have to show a lot more paperwork to vote.Mickey Rourke tells JoJo Siwa he will tie her up and make her straightI had to look up who Rourke is because he hasn’t been relevant for a while. Now, however, he is making headlines for being misogynistic and homophobic on Celebrity Big Brother UK. Rourke, 72, recently told JoJo Siwa (a gay singer and social media personality) that he’d turn her straight. “If I stay [in the Big Brother house] longer than four days, you won’t be gay any more,” Rourke said to Siwa in a clip from Wednesday. “I’ll tie you up,” he added. Rourke got a warning from producers for his language but his comments were not censored. This is in stark contrast to a Big Brother “controversy” last year, when ITV, the broadcaster, edited an episode of the show to remove shots of a T-shirt worn by one of the contestants featuring a watermelon, which is a symbol of Palestinian solidarity.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhite House says it will ignore reporters with gender pronouns in email signatureThe amount of time these people spend obsessing over pronouns boggles the mind. Get a hobby! Get therapy! Try thinking about literally anything else!Student found guilty of rape goes unpunished because of promising future in gynecologyA criminal court in Leuven, Belgium, recently found a 24-year-old medical student, who was training as a gynaecologist, guilty of rape but suspended his sentence because of his lack of prior offences and his “promising future”. This has sparked a lot of anger in Belgium and many commentators have drawn parallels to the Brock Turner case in the US.Does sitting behind a screen turn you into a woman?Fox News’s Jesse Watters, who sits behind a screen all day, seems to think so. This profundity comes after he declared public soup consumption unmanly and said that real men “don’t wave simultaneously with two hands”.The week in pawtriarchyRemember those tariffs Trump imposed on Heard Island and McDonald Islands, inhabited only by penguins? Those penguins now have their own social media account, @PenguinsAgainstTrump. “What are you going to do, deport us?” one post reads. “We’ve been dealing with ICE for centuries.” More