Welcome to Bad News Weekly, your rundown of key attacks on voting rights and independent elections across the country – it’s a way to keep up with what the opponents of democracy are up to. We’ll highlight some of the worst anti-voter efforts, with a spotlight on the South, the original frontline in the fight for voting rights, and still its fiercest.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“If federal officials can convince the public that something is wrong – even if it’s not true – they can claim they need to take control…If powerful institutions push conspiracy theories, something might break.” – Wendy Weiser, Vice President for Democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice, on the potential use of conspiracy theories to justify election interference in 2026.
NOTABLE TRENDS
DOJ Is Building A “National Voter Roll” – Suing 23 States Over Voter Data: Since May 2025, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has sent letters to at least 43 states and Washington, DC demanding unredacted voter roll data, meaning voter data that includes sensitive information such as Social Security numbers. The DOJ has escalated this effort by suing 23 states who refuse to provide unredacted voter data or any voter data, including two lawsuits filed this week against Arizona and Connecticut.
These lawsuits as well as a few other anti-voting lawsuits the DOJ filed in 2025 make up more than half of all anti-voting lawsuits filed in federal courts in 2025. In a recent amicus brief in the DOJ’s lawsuit against California, 17 former lawyers with the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division warned that the DOJ is building a “national voter roll” aimed at enabling the federal government to “conduct its own list maintenance to discover whether noncitizens or undocumented immigrants are registered to vote.”
USPS Finalized New Rule That Could Put Some Mail Ballots At Risk: On December 24, the United States Postal Service (USPS) finalized a rule they initially proposed in September that clarifies that postmarks are applied at a regional processing facility, not when USPS takes possession of the mail. Postmarks on mail ballots are currently used in 14 states and Washington, DC that have a mail ballot grace period as an indication that ballots have been sent on or before Election Day.
USPS also recently began eliminating evening mail pickups from post offices more than 50 miles away from a regional processing facility, meaning mail sent in rural areas are postmarked and delivered at least one day later than before. These changes will impact roughly 149 million Americans across 70% of U.S. zip codes, with people in rural communities hit the hardest.
Michael Chameides, communications and policy director for the Rural Democracy Initiative, said, “People in rural communities are going to be hit twice — our mail is going to take longer to get there, then the documents that need a postmark are going to show the wrong date, and this is going to lead to a whole lot of people having their votes discounted.”
STATE ACTIVITY
Florida • Gov. DeSantis Called For Special Session to Redraw Congressional Districts In Anticipation of Supreme Court Decision: Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) announced that he plans to call a special legislative session in April to redraw the state’s congressional districts. DeSantis said that he wanted to wait for a ruling from the US Supreme Court in Louisiana v Callais which could determine whether Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which bans racially discriminatory redistricting, is constitutional.
DeSantis expects that “at least one or two” districts could be affected by the court’s ruling but that “it’s a question of what the scope is going to be.”
Georgia • Prominent Anti-Voting Activist Appointed to State Election Board: Lt. Gov. Burt Jones (R), an unindicted 2020 Trump fake elector, appointed Salleigh Grubbs, an election denier and first vice chair of the Georgia Republican Party, to the State Election Board (SEB). Grubbs replaced fellow Republican Rick Jeffares who had resigned after nearly two years on the board.
Grubbs has repeatedly advocated for anti-voting proposals in front of the SEB including a 2024 rule she proposed would have required an undefined “reasonable inquiry” before certification that was passed by the right wing majority of the SEB before being struck down by the courts.
North Carolina • More Than 1 In 3 Counties Seek to Reduce Early Voting In Primaries: Thirty-six of North Carolina’s 100 counties sought to cut access to early voting during the 2026 primaries by eliminating Sunday voting hours or polling places on or near college campuses. On Dec 22, the bipartisan state elections board unanimously approved requests that had also been unanimously approved by bipartisan county boards, including plans that kept early voting access the same or increased it. The State Board of Elections will consider non-unanimous plans in 12 counties on Jan 13 and make a final decision on early voting for those counties.
The efforts to restrict early voting and the approval by the state elections board are some of the first major actions since Republicans took control of county and state election administration in 2025 due to a law passed within days of Josh Stein (D) being elected governor in 2024 that stripped power over elections from the governor’s office.
ANTI-VOTING GROUP ACTIVITY
Anti-Voting Activists Amplified Conspiracy That Venezuela Attack Was Because of Unfounded Claim That Venezuela Officials Rigged 2020 Election: Since the US capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro on Jan 3, many anti-voting activists have shared the unfounded conspiracy theory that the attack was because Venezuelan officials conspired with Dominion and Smartmatic to rig the 2020 election.
Some of the most prominent anti-voting activists who shared this conspiracy are: Sidney Powell, Patrick Byrne, DOJ lawyer Ed Martin, and Trump himself.
The way to get around this new postal regulation is to bring your mail into the post office, all filled out and sealed in the double envelopes, to the window, and ask the clerk to hand cancel it.
When I was a child, I was given some stationary that had designs on the letterheads made of tiny shells, and you had to get the envelopes hand cancelled when you sent a letter.