Officials in a large North Texas county decided this week to cut more than 100 Election Day polling sites and reduce the number of early voting locations, amid growing concern about GOP efforts to limit voting access ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
The 3-2 vote on Tuesday by commissioners in Tarrant County, which includes Fort Worth, came one day after President Donald Trump vowed to end the use of mail-in ballots. The president lacks the unilateral power to decide how individual states run elections, but his declaration speaks to long-brewing and unfounded claims by some conservatives that the country’s electoral system is insecure and vulnerable to widespread fraud. Trump has repeatedly and falsely asserted that he won the 2020 presidential election instead of Joe Biden.
Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare, who heads up the commissioners court, has also raised numerous questions about the security of local elections, helping to launch an electoral integrity unit in the county after he became judge in 2022. As of last summer, however, the unit had received fewer than 100 allegations of voter fraud. He and fellow Republican commissioners also cut funding to provide free bus rides to the polls for low-income residents. “I don’t believe it’s the county government’s responsibility to try to get more people out to the polls,” O’Hare said at the time. And commissioners prohibited outside organizations from registering voters inside county buildings after Tarrant County GOP leaders raised concerns about what they said were left-leaning groups holding registration drives. (ProPublica and The Texas Tribune have previously written about O’Hare’s political influence in North Texas.)
On Tuesday, O’Hare voted with the two Republican commissioners on the court to reduce the number of polling sites in the county to 216, down from 331 in 2023. The decision also cut down the number of early voting sites.
County officials said the move was to save money, as they historically see low voter turnout in nonpresidential elections.
Throughout the meeting, O’Hare repeatedly emphasized that the cuts were intended to make the election more efficient. He argued that both the switch to county-wide voting in 2019, which allows voters to cast a ballot at any polling site in the county, and the expected low turnout made the cuts appropriate….
This is not the first time Tarrant County has been at the forefront of changing political headwinds. Earlier this summer, the commissioners, led by O’Hare, voted along party lines to redraw the county precincts; such changes usually happen after the decennial census rather than in the middle of the decade. O’Hare admitted the goal of the redrawn maps was to favor Republican candidates.
“This is about Republican versus Democrat, period,” O’Hare told Dallas television station WFAA ahead of the commissioners’ June 3 vote. “If it passes with one of the maps that I would want to see pass, it’s a very strong likelihood that we will have three Republicans on the Commissioners Court.”…
All posts by Rick Hasen
“Reframing Jan. 6: After the Pardons, the Purge”
The lawyer took the elevator 32 floors to the U.S. attorney’s office, where for eight years he had worked as a highly regarded prosecutor. He had a container of homemade chocolate chip cookies to share and some thoughts to keep to himself.
“You have to be polite,” the lawyer, Michael Gordon, explained as the elevator rose. “But I don’t want to minimize it, or make it seem like everything’s OK. It’s not.”
Mr. Gordon was heading up on this steaming late July day in Tampa, Fla., to collect his things and say goodbye. Three weeks earlier, and just two days after receiving yet another outstanding performance review, he had been interviewing a witness online when a grim-faced colleague interrupted to hand him a letter. It said he was being “removed from federal service effective immediately” — as in, now.
Although the brief letter, signed by Attorney General Pam Bondi, provided no justification, Mr. Gordon knew the likely reason: Jan. 6, 2021.
He was being fired for successfully prosecuting people who had stormed the United States Capitol that day — assaulting police officers, vandalizing a national landmark and disrupting that sacrosanct moment in a democracy, the transfer of presidential power.
He was being fired for doing his job.
The letter did more than inform Mr. Gordon, a 47-year-old father of two, that he was unemployed. It confirmed for him his view that the Justice Department he had been honored to work for was now helping to whitewash a traumatic event in American history, supporting President Trump’s reframing of its violence as patriotic — and those who had prosecuted rioters in the name of justice as villains, perhaps even traitors….
In the seven months since Mr. Trump, newly returned to the White House, granted clemency to nearly 1,600 people charged in the largest criminal investigation in Justice Department history, his administration has turned the agency upside down….
To date, the Justice Department has fired or demoted more than two dozen prosecutors who were assigned to hold the rioters accountable — roughly a quarter of the complement. Some were junior prosecutors, like Sara Levine, who had secured a guilty plea from a rioter who had grabbed a police officer. Others were veterans, including Greg Rosen, who had led the department’s Jan. 6 task force. Scores more prosecutors, involved in these and other cases, have left, either in fear of where the ax might next fall or out of sheer disgust.
The Justice Department declined to comment for this article, but a White House spokesman, Harrison Fields, described the agency during the Biden administration as “a cabal of anti-Trump sycophants” engaged in a “relentless pursuit to throw the book at President Trump and his allies.” By “uprooting the foot soldiers,” Mr. Fields added, Mr. Trump’s attorney general, Ms. Bondi, “is restoring the integrity of the department.”
And so Mr. Gordon. As the elevator climbed, he braced himself. In an interview the day before, he had talked about what had happened to him and many of his colleagues from the Justice Department’s once-vital and now-defunct Capitol Siege Section. Disbelief colored his every word.
“When you stand up in court and say, ‘Mike Gordon for the United States,’ you don’t say, ‘Mike Gordon for Donald Trump,’” he had said, adding: “I’m standing up there, and I’m speaking for the government. For all the people of the country.”…
“Red vs. Blue: Who’s Next in the Redistricting Fight”
While both Texas and California are seeking to flip five seats, other states have fewer seats to target. Shawn Donahue, a political-science professor at the University at Buffalo, predicts Republicans would pick up four to six of House seats nationwide if a tit-for-tat redistricting fight were to break out. They currently have a 219-212 majority.
“If it’s a real dogfight for control of the House in 2026, that could make the difference,” he said….
Bart Gellman: “Trump’s Stunning Power Grab on Elections”
To begin with, the surprise announcement and the sudden, if ambiguous, turnabout suggested once again that Mr. Trump is governing in his second term without advisers who can or even try to help him discipline his impulses. The episode exposes, as well, his renewed obsession with exerting control over election machinery. And it offers a vivid glimpse of his inclination to regard his powers as all but limitless.
No competent lawyer could have counseled Mr. Trump in good faith that “the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes,” as the president asserted in his post. Nor would such a lawyer have dreamed of advising him that state election officials “must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.”
Who, if anyone, told Mr. Trump that he could take command of state elections this way? Possibly he made up the authority himself. Some former Trump staff members believe he may not engage at all with questions about whether something he wants to do is lawful or something he wants to say is true. Those questions, they tell me, do not even occur to him.
Others who have worked for Mr. Trump say he seems to believe sincerely, if that is the word for it, that anything is permitted to him. Still others insist that he knows very well when he is crossing a line but presses on until obliged by an opposing force to stop.
Whatever the origins, Mr. Trump has now staked out a fundamentally illegitimate claim to authority over the conduct of American elections. He has yet to repudiate it. If he continues to press the claim, then the foundational mechanisms of our democracy may be in genuine danger. It is more than hypothetically possible that Mr. Trump, when frustrated, will try to compel the obedience of state election officials by throwing the weight of the executive branch against them.
Mr. Trump’s deployment of the National Guard in Washington and active duty Marines in Los Angeles, accompanied by threats that he might do the same in other Democratic urban strongholds, suggests another risk. Could he use some pretext to take control of voting machinery? If he dispatches troops or federal law enforcement agents to disrupt blue-city voting or ballot counting in swing states — Atlanta, say, or Milwaukee or Philadelphia — the midterm elections could be in real peril.
With or without the deployment of force, Mr. Trump’s fusillade of baseless claims about election fraud shakes public confidence in the integrity of the vote — and provides excuses for his dishonest efforts to delegitimize the outcomes. For all his political life, he has waged war against the proposition that he or his party could ever lose a legitimate election. He and his allies are preparing the ground for their next battle, in 2026….
Bart concludes with a note very consistent with my NYT oped on this topic earlier this week:
The ultimate safeguard of constitutional government is the great mass of citizen voters who decide by the tens of millions what kind of government they want. We hold the power, whatever our partisan preferences, to defend checks and balances and the rule of law. We cannot lose that power unless we surrender it.
I Spoke to the PBS News Hour Weekend About Trump’s Threats to the Integrity of the 2026 Midterm Elections
“Florida election law dealt blow as judge rules noncitizen petition ban unconstitutional”
In a victory for immigrants and advocacy groups, a federal judge has provisionally blocked enforcement of a Florida elections law that prohibited noncitizens from collecting signatures for citizen-led ballot initiatives.
U.S. District Judge Mark Walker, in a 28-page ruling, temporarily struck down part of a controversial measure Republicans pushed to passage this year (HB 1205) that empowered state officials to enforce citizenship requirements on ballot initiative collectors.
Walker’s decision, a preliminary injunction order, stops Florida’s 20 State Attorneys from prosecuting Smart & Safe Florida, the organization behind last year’s failed Amendment 3 effort to legalize recreational cannabis, and its non-resident petition circulators.
Essentially, Smart & Safe’s hundreds of non-resident workers can resume collecting signatures for its current cannabis legalization ballot initiative without fear of criminal charges.
The Thursday ruling also blocked enforcement of the citizenship ban against Washington-based nonprofit Poder Latinx, the organization’s noncitizen members and two lawful permanent residents, Yivian Lopez Garcia and Humberto Orjuela Prieto….
“DHS to states: Follow our voting rules or lose out on election security money”
The Trump administration has indicated it may withhold tens of millions of dollars in election security funding if states don’t comply with its voting policy goals.
The money comes from a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) grant program, and voting officials say new requirements from the administration will make the money inaccessible for most of the country.
NPR is the first news outlet to report on the changes.
About $28 million — or 3% of the overall Homeland Security Grant Program — is devoted to election security and now at risk, though some officials and experts worry that the new requirements could also endanger hundreds of millions of dollars in other grants for law enforcement.
Voting officials say the amount of money at risk won’t make or break the country’s election security. But the potential withholding of funds over policy differences — combined with other recent election security cuts — has many wondering whether the Trump administration is prioritizing election security the way it claims it is.
“Despite the rhetoric, there’s been [a] serious cutback to election security support that is being offered to the states,” said Larry Norden, an elections expert at the Brennan Center for Justice, which is broadly critical of President Trump’s policies. “And this is going to be one more cut for a lot of states because most states are not going to allow the president to decide [how their elections work].”…
“Trump seeks to ban the mail voting system that Republicans built in Arizona to boost turnout”
The vast majority of Arizonans who voted for President Donald Trump in 2016, 2020 and 2024 cast their ballot by mail — a system ushered into existence and expanded by Republican lawmakers in the Grand Canyon State. Trump says he wants to ban it nationwide.
Despite calls to ban it from far-right lawmakers, political candidates and their supporters, casting a ballot by mail is the most popular way to vote in Arizona — and has been for decades. In the 2024 presidential election, around 75% of voters in the state cast their ballot by mail, even after Trump urged them to head to the polls instead. The number of Trump voters in Arizona who mailed their ballots outstripped those who showed up to the polls on Election Day 2024 by more than 4.5 times, according to data from the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office.
On Monday, Trump posted on his social media site Truth Social that he planned to rid the country of voting by mail and the machines that count ballots before the 2026 midterms. Later that day, he promised to issue an executive order banning no-excuse mail-in ballots, which he called “corrupt.”
“And it’s time that the Republicans get tough and stop it because the Democrats want it,” Trump said. “It’s the only way they can get elected.”…
In 1991, it was Republicans who brought no-excuse vote by mail to Arizona, in part as a way to increase turnout when voter apathy was at an all-time high. And the move worked: turnout in the 1988 presidential election in Arizona was 67%, but in jumped to 77% in 1992.
Republican Gov. Fife Symington signed the bill into law in July 1991 that allowed voters to request an early ballot without having to provide an excuse. The Republican-controlled Arizona House of Representatives approved the bill 53-0 and the Senate, which had a rare Democratic majority, voted for it 21-9, with opposition from conservative Republicans.
Then-Republican National Committeeman Mike Hellon told the Pima County Rotary Club that their vote-by-mail outreach in the 1992 presidential election was so bad that he considered it “criminal negligence,” according to a Nov. 15, 1992 article in the Arizona Daily Star.
He said he particularly resented that Democrats “cleaned our clock” because “it’s our program.”
The state’s Republican-controlled legislature continued to vote to expand no-excuse vote by mail over the next two decades, including with the creation of the active early voting list in 2007.
The push to eliminate voting by mail is new, and It is only in the past 10 years that far-right Republicans began a true campaign to rid the state of no-excuse voting by mail. And while heading to the polls to cast a ballot in person has become more popular for Republicans during the past two election cycles, the effort to nix early voting by mail has failed to garner mainstream support due to its popularity among Democrat, Republican and independent voters.
The most extreme Republicans in the Arizona legislature have tried to pass laws banning no-excuse mail voting since 2020, after Trump falsely claimed that it was rife with fraud and blamed it for his loss that year to Joe Biden. So far those efforts, including a lawsuit from Arizona’s most infamous election deniers Kari Lake and Mark Finchem, and bills to change voting laws proposed by members of the far-right Arizona Freedom Caucus, have failed.
Trump-backed candidates who lost their elections for statewide office in 2022 were quick to praise Trump’s demonization of voting-by-mail on Monday.
“This is the best news I’ve heard in years!” Lake, who lost her bid for governor in 2022 and was defeated in the U.S. Senate contest in 2024, posted on the social media site X, formerly Twitter. “The people demand honest elections.”
Lake spent the two years following her narrow 2022 loss to Katie Hobbs attempting to convince Arizona courts to overturn the results.
“President Trump is going to fix our broken election system and I will be there to help all the way,” U.S. Rep. Abe Hamadeh posted on X. Hamadeh lost the race for Arizona Attorney General in 2022 to Democrat Kris Mayes by fewer than 400 votes. He also attempted to overturn the results with a legal challenge.
Bryan Blehm, a Scottsdale divorce attorney who represented Lake in her court challenges, and Shelby Busch, an election conspiracy theorist who testified during them, heaped praise on Trump for his demonization of no-excuse voting by mail during a livestream on X Monday.
“We’ve been talking for years about the danger of mail-in ballots,” said Busch, the first vice chairman of the Maricopa County Republican Committee.
Blehm, who was suspended from practicing law for two months last year for lying to the Arizona Supreme Court on Lake’s behalf, went on to claim — without evidence — that COVID-19 was intentionally released prior to an election year to force more voting by mail. ….
“Advocates File Immediate Legal Challenge to Texas Gerrymander “
Hours after Texas lawmakers approved a new gerrymandered congressional map Saturday morning, Texans asked a court to block it.
The plaintiffs*, a group of Black and Latino Texans, filed an amended complaint in an ongoing challenge to the electoral districts Texas drew in 2021. The amended complaint alleges that the new map violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and the 14th Amendment by diluting the voting power of Black and Latino communities.
It also argues that the redistricting violates the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause “because it unnecessarily and unjustifiably considers racial and partisan demographics as part of a voluntary, mid-cycle redistricting,” and because it is “malapportioned” in violation of the principle of one person, one vote.In addition, the plaintiffs argue that the new redistricting “intentionally destroy[ed] majority-minority districts and replac[ed] them with majority-Anglo districts.” This was done, the plaintiffs charge, “explicitly because of the racial composition of those districts.”
Lawyers’ Committee statement:
Robert Weiner, the voting rights project director at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which represents the Texas NAACP in the ongoing lawsuit against Texas for racial gerrymandering, issued the following statement regarding the new redistricting law:
“This map is illegal. The architects of this racially discriminatory plan clearly targeted minority voters. The legislators bulldozed important majority minority districts. It eliminates opportunities of Black and Brown people to elect their preferred candidates in multiple Congressional districts.
“We are still in the midst of an ongoing lawsuit against the state of Texas because the existing maps dilute the votes of people of color. This new map increases discrimination. The legislators supercharged their efforts to undercut the voting strength of minority voters after the Department of Justice–misstating the law and abusing its power–told Texas to do that. This plan cannot stand.”
“As part of the ongoing case that we and others are challenging the 2021 maps, the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas in El Paso will hold a hearing on Wednesday, August 27th, to consider the schedule for litigation concerning Texas’s redistricting efforts.
“Doggett won’t seek reelection to Congress if new district is upheld by courts, paving way for Casar”
“These states could redistrict before the 2026 midterms”
WaPo goes down the list.
“Red Envelopes With Cash Are Changing Hands at Adams Campaign Rallies”
NYT:
In July, New York Times reporters witnessed other Adams supporters handing out red envelopes with cash at three separate campaign events: one in Flushing, Queens; another in Manhattan’s Chinatown; and a third in Sunset Park in Brooklyn. At those events, Mr. Adams picked up support from leaders of influential Chinese community groups, including several with close ties to the Chinese government.
Ms. Greco, a top Adams fund-raiser whose homes were raided last year by federal investigators looking for evidence of Chinese interference in the 2021 mayor’s race, was present at all three of the rallies….
The Adams campaign said it was unaware of any payments to reporters and had not approved them.
“Mayor Adams had absolutely no knowledge of this and does not condone it,” Todd Shapiro, his spokesman, said. “He has never — and would never — authorize anyone to hand out cash or gifts to reporters. Any such behavior is inappropriate and unacceptable.”
At the event in Flushing on July 13, dozens of Chinese American leaders gathered outside a public library branch to offer their support for Mr. Adams, giving him a needed boost as he trailed badly in polls. Mr. Adams, a registered Democrat who took office in 2022, is running a long-shot bid for re-election as an independent in November as his mayoralty has been tarnished by federal investigations and scandals.
The event, organized by four influential community leaders, buzzed with dozens of fervent backers, proudly wearing shirts adorned with Mr. Adams’s face and energetically waving U.S. flags as they chanted and called for his re-election.
One of the organizers, Steven Tin, the director of Better Chinatown USA, which hosts the Lunar New Year parades in Manhattan’s Chinatown, was seen by The Times holding $50 bills and handing out red envelopes to reporters from Chinese-language news organizations.
At the event, Mr. Tin said that it is a common practice in Chinese culture to give cash to “reporters, YouTubers, photographers” as a “thank you for coming” gift.
Reached by phone on Thursday, Mr. Tin said that the payments to reporters were small and were made not to ensure coverage, but rather as a “courtesy.” He said he would ask the Adams campaign to cover the cost of water and banners for the event, but that he had not yet discussed whether it would reimburse him for the cash payments.
Mr. Shapiro, the Adams campaign spokesman, ruled that out.
“We do not provide it, we do not direct it and we do not authorize anyone to distribute it,” Mr. Shapiro said. “Any suggestion otherwise is false and misleading.”…
“California voters will decide redistricting in November, escalating battle with Trump and Texas”
Ratcheting up the pressure in the escalating national fight over control of Congress, the California Legislature on Thursday approved a November special election to ask voters to redraw the state’s electoral lines to favor Democrats and thwart President Trump’s far-right policy agenda.
The ballot measure, pushed by Gov. Gavin Newsom and other state and national Democratic leaders, is the latest volley in a national political brawl over electoral maps that could alter the outcome of the 2026 midterm elections and the balance of power in the U.S. House of Representatives.
If voters approve the redrawn lines on Nov. 4, Democrats in the Golden State would see the odds tilted further in their favor, while the number of California Republicans in the House could be halved.
Newsom initially said that new electoral districts in California would only take effect if another state redrew its lines before 2031. But after Texas moved toward approving its own maps this week that could give the GOP five more House seats, Democrats stripped the so-called “trigger” language from the amendment — meaning that if voters approve the measure, the new lines would take effect no matter what.
The ballot measure language, which asks California voters to override the power of the independent redistricting commission, was approved by most Democrats in the Assembly and the Senate, where they hold supermajorities.
California lawmakers have the power to place constitutional amendments on the statewide ballot without the approval of the governor. Newsom, however, is expected later Thursday to sign two separate bills that fund the special election and spell out the lines for the new congressional districts.,,,
Federal Government Files Supreme Court Brief in NRSC Case Arguing That an Aspect of Federal Campaign Finance Law Violates the First Amendment
You can find the government’s brief on the merits here. You can find the brief of the Republican Party making similar arguments here. Because the government has taken the unusual position in attacking the constitutionality of a law passed by Congress, the Court appointed an amicus to argue in favor of the law’s constitutionality. The Democratic Party also intervened to defend the law. Their briefs will be filed later.
The Republican Party brief cites a blog post by Rick Pildes and Bob Bauer, The Supreme Court, the Political Parties, and the SuperPACs, ELECTION LAW BLOG (June 24, 2025).