DoJ had demanded that LA county confirm citizenship of people on list in thumb drive, but officials refused

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The US Department of Justice sued California on Thursday, seeking a court order to prevent the state from tabulating certain ballots cast in the midterm elections.

The suit came two days after the department made a specious demand to the state. On Tuesday, the department sent election officials in Los Angeles county a thumb drive with a handwritten password purporting to contain the names of noncitizens registered to vote. The department asked officials to confirm the citizenship of anyone on the list and set aside ballots from those whose status could not be confirmed. It gave the state 48 hours – an extremely narrow window – to take action. It did not provide details on how it came up with the names on the list. In its lawsuit, filed in federal court in the central district of California, the justice department said it had provided the state with more than 20,000 names of likely noncitizens.

Voting registration organizations accuse Texas officials of failing to ensure eligible voters can register properly

Texas election officials are struggling to process a massive backlog of nearly 600,000 voter registration applications after a major state computer system failure, just days before early voting is set to open on Monday and amid concerns about widespread voter suppression.

The disruption has raised serious concerns about the state’s voter registration system, with voting rights organizations accusing Texas officials of failing to ensure that eligible voters could properly register.

Sabrina German, a poll official in Chatham county, details a typical election day, the pressure election workers face, and fallout from 2020 disputes

It’s not that Sabrina German doesn’t have political views. But as the director of voter registration for Chatham county, Georgia, talking politics is like breakdancing in traffic. “I don’t talk politics with anyone,” says German; she knows better.

America’s partisan minefield has trained much of the country – aside from that one uncle you avoid at weddings and funerals – to get pretty good at the art of political diplomacy in polite company.

Judge says justice department policy of checking state voter rolls against a federal immigration database is unlawful

A federal judge ruled on Friday that the US justice department’s policy of collecting states’ unredacted voter rolls to check them against a federal immigration database is unlawful.

The ruling, by the US district judge Sparkle Sooknanan, was a setback for Donald Trump, who has pushed his administration to ramp up investigations into non-citizen voting ahead of the November midterm elections, with control of Congress at stake.

State residents express anger at Republicans who allowed chaotic voting maps saga to unfold ahead of the midterms

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Eric Leventhal knows he’s going to vote for a Democrat in Congress when he goes to the polls in Missouri this November – the problem is he has no idea which candidate is going to be on his ballot.

In the state’s August primary, he voted for Fred Wellman, a Democrat running in the state’s second congressional district. But after a long and complicated legal battle sparked by Donald Trump’s desire to gain every advantage in the upcoming midterm contest, the districts have changed for the general election that will determine which party controls Congress. Leventhal said he lived right near the border of the first and second congressional district, so now he’s not sure which one he’s in.

NAACP files lawsuit after head of DoJ’s civil rights division says she hopes to send election monitors to polls

The Trump administration has been sued over its plans to deploy “a historic number” of election monitors to polling stations during next month’s midterm elections.

The bid “stands to jeopardize” the elections and could “interfere with the right of voters to participate in the election free from intimidation”, according to the NAACP, which filed a lawsuit against Harmeet Dhillon, head of the justice department’s civil rights division, who has said she hopes to send 1,000 monitors to midterm polling sites in November.

Former and current officials who bolstered claims of voter fraud in 2020 make fresh allegations of vulnerabilities

Prominent election deniers have spent recent weeks stoking fears over US election security before next month’s midterms, echoing claims pushed by Donald Trump to justify asserting more control over voting.

On conservative-friendly media outlets, former or current officials who tried to bolster the US president’s false claims of mass voter fraud in 2020 have in recent weeks made fresh allegations of election vulnerabilities.