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
“Everything that they’re doing now is a relitigation of 2020. They’re trying to discredit the entire electoral system in the United States of America so that Donald Trump can finally be able to say, ‘You see, the system was corrupt. My lies were actually the truth.’” – Adrian Fontes, Arizona Secretary of State (D), on the Trump regime’s efforts to charge his political opponents and to acquire voter roll data and voting equipment.
NOTABLE TRENDS
Attacks On Mail Voting Have Continued to Escalate, Including An Executive Order That Could Restrict Mail Voting: White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that the White House is working on an executive order to restrict voting and suggested that the order will target mail voting. Leavitt made the comments after President Trump posted on Truth Social attacking California’s mail voting process. Trump called the universal mail voting system “rigged,” threatening a “legal and criminal review” of mail ballots cast in the election, and to “stay tuned.”
After Election Day Nov 4, Trump repeatedly called for Republicans in the Senate to end the filibuster and pass voting restrictions, including voter ID requirements and mail voting bans. During an American First Policy Institute (AFPI) roundtable event, Rep. Bryan Steil (R-WI), chairman of the House Administration Committee, said that he wants to introduce legislation to ban states from counting mail ballots that arrived after Election Day. In Ohio, the state Senate voted to pass SB 293 to end the 4-day mail ballot grace period and require mail ballots to be received by Election Day to be counted.
Department of Homeland Security “Turbocharged Trump’s Voter Purge Database”: The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) quietly formalized sweeping changes to the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database, a federal immigration database, to turn it into a national “voter verification” tool. A Systems of Records Notice (SORN) was published by the DHS in the Federal Register to redefine how the department and state officials can use the SAVE database, adding voter registration and verification to the database’s official purpose.
The SORN also allowed DHS to share the SAVE data with the Social Security Administration (SSA) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) and explicitly adds natural-born US citizens to the system’s scope, allowing verification through Social Security numbers, passports, and, soon, driver’s licenses.
STATE ACTIVITY
California • Orange County DOJ Election Monitor Was Michael Gates, An Election Conspiracy Theorist Who Questioned The County’s Voting Procedures: The Department of Justice recently announced that it would send monitors to watch California’s elections in specific counties, including Orange County. For Orange County, the DOJ sent Michael Gates, a lawyer who has questioned the county’s voting procedures in the past. Gates previously worked as the city attorney for Huntington Beach, a town in Orange County, where he helped pass a local voter ID law in 2024.
This February, Gates was appointed to be deputy assistant attorney general in the DOJ’s civil rights division, and, shortly after his appointment, the DOJ sued Orange County election officials alleging that noncitizens received mail ballots and voting.
Pennsylvania • Chester County Poll Book Error Forced Independent And Third-Party Voters to Cast a Provisional Ballot: Chester County election officials mistakenly failed to extract third party and unaffiliated voters from the state’s voter registration management database when creating a pollbook file for printing, forcing those voters to cast provisional ballots on Election Day or come back later. There are roughly 75,000 third party or independent voters in Chester County and the county confirmed that voters submitted more than 12,000 provisional ballots, significantly more than in recent elections.
While many counties in the state have switched to electronic pollbooks recently, Chester County still uses physical paper poll books, meaning they have to print new ones if there is an issue. Because of this, it took until 3:45pm on Election Day for all 230 precincts to receive supplemental pollbooks.
ANTI-VOTING GROUP ACTIVITY
Cleta Mitchell And Steve Bannon Pushed For DOJ to Seize Georgia 2020 Election Ballots: During an appearance on Steve Bannon’s podcast, Cleta Mitchell, former Trump lawyer and founder and head of the Election Integrity Network (EIN), discussed the effort to seize Fulton County’s 2020 election ballots, including a recent letter from the Department of Justice to subpoena the ballots while Steve Bannon pushed for the DOJ to issue a warrant to seize the ballots.
Mitchell and Bannon both claimed that the 2020 Georgia election could not have been certified with Mitchell going a step further and claiming that there should have been a new election. Bannon also thanked Mitchell for her and EIN’s work ahead of 2026, but said that they still must investigate the 2020 election.
Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty Complains to the DOJ About Voter Data Management: The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL), a right-wing law firm that has previously filed anti-voting lawsuits and complaints, sent a letter to the Department of Justice claiming that the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) was improperly allowing invalid data entries to remain in the state voter registration database.
WILL complained that the state voter database includes “thousands of active, registered voters in Wisconsin whose voter registration information does not match the information in their DOT records. And WEC appears to be doing nothing about it.” WEC has said that WILL misunderstands how the voter database is used, wrong about what federal law requires, and overstates its claims.
The corruption of this administration and POS is utterly disgusting, unacceptable, shameful actions. It is clearly authoritarian. We must at all levels protect our voting rights!
Thank you for this update on the attacks on voting. It’s just effed up.