After reviewing state voter rolls going back to the 1980s, Louisiana’s Republican secretary of state announced this month that “non-citizens illegally registering or voting is not a systemic problem in Louisiana.” That finding aligns with years of research showing that, with vanishingly rare exceptions, only American citizens vote in American elections.
As part of what Secretary Nancy Landry called an ongoing investigation of potential noncitizen voting, officials ran the state’s voter files through the SAVE program, a federal tool that checks individuals’ citizenship status. In voting records dating back to the 1980s, Landry’s office identified up to 390 registered voters who could be noncitizens. Of those, 79 voted at least once during that more than 40-year period. However, list-matching alone — whether with SAVE or any other database, all of which contain flaws — isn’t enough to identify ineligible voters, let alone voter fraud. That’s why Landry has rightly acknowledged that the actual number could be even lower, as some of the potential noncitizen voter registrations flagged by the SAVE program could be the result of outdated or inaccurate data.
To put that number in perspective, we estimate that at least 74 million votes have been cast in Louisiana since the 1980s — and that estimate is a significant undercount due to data limitations. In other words, out of tens of millions of ballots cast in Louisiana over more than 40 years, only a tiny fraction of them were possibly cast by noncitizens, and even those cases are unconfirmed….
Category Archives: election administration
I Spoke to NPR’s Fresh Air: “An election law expert weighs in on Trump’s effort to reshape our democracy” (Link to Audio)
Had a great conversation with Tonya Mosley for NPR’s Fresh Air: “Before 2026’s midterms, President Trump wants to ban mail-in ballots and electronic voting machines, and change voting rules. Legal expert Richard Hasen discusses the future of free and fair elections.”
Register for Free Sept. 16 Webinar from Safeguarding Democracy Project: “The Risk of Federal Interference in the 2026 Midterm Elections”
The Risk of Federal Interference in the 2026 Midterm Elections
Tuesday, September 16, 12:15pm-1:15pm PT, Webinar
Register here.
Ben Haiman, UVA Center for Public Safety and Justice, Liz Howard, NYU Law Brennan Center for Justice, and Stephen Richer, Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, Harvard Kennedy School
Richard L. Hasen, moderator (Director, Safeguarding Democracy Project, UCLA)
UCLA School of Law is a State Bar of California approved MCLE provider. This session is approved for 1 hour of MCLE credit.
“Gabriel Sterling joins Republican race for Georgia elections chief”
Gabriel Sterling, a leading defender of Georgia’s voting system who famously called for President Donald Trump to condemn election threats in 2020, entered the Republican race for secretary of state on Thursday.
Sterling, 54, immediately becomes the most well-known candidate in the race to succeed Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, his former boss….
Sterling garnered the national spotlight in December 2020, when he stood at the steps of the Georgia Capitol and told Trump to speak against threats to election workers.
“Someone’s going to get hurt. Someone’s going to get killed. Mr. President, you have not condemned these actions or this language,” Sterling said Dec. 1, 2020. “This has to stop. We need you to step up.”
Five weeks later, on Jan. 6, 2021, a pro-Trump riot at the U.S. Capitol turned deadly.
Sterling, who was chief operating officer for the secretary of state’s office until he resigned this summer, is a lifelong Republican but became the target of conservatives who distrust Georgia’s election equipment….
Georgia: “Republican lawmakers push for hand-marked ballots in November election”
Key Georgia lawmakers Tuesday called for a rapid test-run of hand-marked paper ballots in this year’s elections, switching from touchscreens in some polling places.
The rush to try paper ballots filled out by hand follows mounting pressure from President Donald Trump, conservatives and election security activists who oppose electronic voting touchscreens.
A switch would comply with part of a state law passed last year requiring the elimination of computerized QR codes from ballots by July 1, 2026.ExploreGeorgia’s next voting system? Senators seek paper ballots filled out by hand
Two House Republican committee chairmen stressed “the urgency of the matter” in a letter to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
“It is imperative to begin testing viable alternativesto the continued use of QR-coded ballots,” wrote House Governmental Affairs Chairman Victor Anderson, R-Cornelia, and House elections study committee Chairman Tim Fleming, R-Covington.
Under their proposal, Raffensperger would ask counties and cities to voluntarily participate in the trial of hand-marked paper ballots during the election for Public Service Commission on Nov. 4.
Raffensperger has defended the security and accuracy of Georgia’s voting system, saying audits repeatedly show Georgia’s vote counts are correct. But he didn’t immediately comment Tuesday on the lawmakers’ request….
Walter Olson: “CIS kicks voter registration groups out of naturalization ceremonies”
Walter at his Substack:
An Aug. 29 policy statement from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the federal agency, says the agency will from now on bar nonpartisan groups such as the League of Women Voters from offering voter registration services at the end of CIS-hosted naturalization ceremonies.
The League of Women Voters, deploring the move, says it’s been offering voter registration at naturalization ceremonies “for decades.”
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If CIS has alleged that this process has been abused in some way, I’ve missed it.
Under the new policy, CIS will still invite state and local election agencies — and only them — to offer voter registration after ceremonies. The League, however, says those agencies often lack capacity to send personnel to the events and have been grateful for the help….
The new policy applies to so-called administrative naturalization ceremonies in which CIS officials are present. That includes not only those held at CIS facilities but also, so far as I can see, those at off-site locations that civic or government groups have made available for the occasion, such as civic centers and other public buildings, military bases, sporting events, fairs and so forth. CIS can and does place extensive conditions on the government and civic groups that make these venues available, so I assume it can probably impose its policy, or something close, in off-site locations that are not on CIS’s own property.
On the other hand, if I’m reading the newly revised CIS policy manual correctly, the new policy does not extend (see Footnote 1) to “judicial” naturalizations in which a federal, state, or local judge administers the oath of allegiance at a courthouse or elsewhere. If so, nonprofits can still register voters at those venues with host permission….
Announcing the Safeguarding Democracy Project’s Fall Lineup of Events and Webinars, Focused on the Fairness and Integrity of the 2026 Midterms
The Risk of Federal Interference in the 2026 Midterm Elections
Tuesday, September 16, 12:15pm-1:15pm PT, Webinar
Register here.
Ben Haiman, UVA Center for Public Safety and Justice, Liz Howard, NYU Law Brennan Center for Justice, and Stephen Richer, Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, Harvard Kennedy School
Richard L. Hasen, moderator (Director, Safeguarding Democracy Project, UCLA)
UCLA School of Law is a State Bar of California approved MCLE provider. This session is approved for 1 hour of MCLE credit.
Lessons from the 2024 Elections for 2026 and Beyond: A Conversation with Nate Persily
Tuesday, October 7, 12:15pm-1:15pm PT, Room 1337 UCLA Law and online
Register here for in-person. Lunch will be provided.
Register here for Webinar.
Richard L. Hasen, Director, Safeguarding Democracy Project, UCLA and Nate Persily, Stanford Law School
UCLA School of Law is a State Bar of California approved MCLE provider. This session is approved for 1 hour of MCLE credit.
Redistricting and Re-Redistricting Controversies and the 2026 Elections
Thursday, October 16, 12:15pm-1:15pm PT, Webinar
Register here.
Guy-Uriel Charles, Harvard Law School, Moon Duchin, Director, Data and Democracy Research Initiative, University of Chicago, Michael Li, NYU Law Brennan Center for Justice, and Nicholas Stephanopoulos, Harvard Law School.
Richard L. Hasen, moderator (Director, Safeguarding Democracy Project, UCLA)
UCLA School of Law is a State Bar of California approved MCLE provider. This session is approved for 1 hour of MCLE credit.
Media, Social Media, and the Changing Election Information Environment in 2026
Thursday, October 30, 12:15pm-1:15pm PT, Webinar
Register here.
Co-sponsored by the Institute for Technology, Law & Policy
Danielle Citron, UVA Law School, Brendan Nyhan, Dartmouth College, and Amy Wilentz, UCI Emerita
Richard L. Hasen, moderator (Director, Safeguarding Democracy Project, UCLA)
UCLA School of Law is a State Bar of California approved MCLE provider. This session is approved for 1 hour of MCLE credit.
The Supreme Court, the Voting Rights Act, and the 2026 Elections
Tuesday, November 18, 12:15pm-1:15pm, PT, Webinar
Register here.
Ellen Katz, University of Michigan Law School, Lenny Powell, Native American Rights Fund, and Deuel Ross, Legal Defense Fund
Richard L. Hasen, moderator (Director, Safeguarding Democracy Project, UCLA)
UCLA School of Law is a State Bar of California approved MCLE provider. This session is approved for 1 hour of MCLE credit.
“Trump Says He Will Sign Executive Order Mandating Voter I.D.” (And No, He Doesn’t Have the Power to Mandate Voter ID)
President Trump said late Saturday that he would issue an executive order to require voter identification for all U.S. elections, a continuation of his efforts to overhaul the nation’s election laws, which he has long attacked and falsely blamed for his 2020 election loss.
In a post on Truth Social, Mr. Trump said, “Voter I.D. Must Be Part of Every Single Vote. NO EXCEPTIONS! I Will Be Doing An Executive Order To That End!!!” He did not provide further details about the order.
He also reiterated his intention to restrict mail-in voting except for those who are very ill or serving far away in the military, as well as his opposition to voting machines.
The announcement signals Mr. Trump’s latest effort to influence election laws using an executive order, something that he has dubious authority to do. The Constitution gives the president no explicit authority to regulate elections. Rather, it gives states the power to decide the rules of elections, oversee voting and try to prevent fraud. It gives Congress the ability to override state laws on voting. Any executive order from the president regarding elections is likely to see immediate legal challenges….
“What to Expect Next in the Trump Administration’s Strategy to Meddle with the Vote”
Last Monday, President Trump posted on social media that he would sign an executive order aimed at eliminating mail voting. It would be his second executive order on elections, following a March executive order that, among other things, sought to implement a show-your-papers rule requiring Americans to present a passport or similar document to register to vote. Since then, the White House has seemingly walked back its threat for a new elections executive order. But that doesn’t mean the president’s attempt to undermine upcoming elections is now over.
In fact, as the Brennan Center recently explained in The Trump Administration’s Campaign to Undermine the Next Election, there is a concerted White House effort to interfere in future elections. In our previous report, we laid out everything the administration has done thus far and explained how these actions can be seen as part of a bigger strategy. But what additional steps can we expect in the coming months, even without a new executive order?
If we dig into the details of the March order, we can see the drumbeat of actions that are likely to come: from the spread of misleading claims and reports by federal agencies, to the instigation of spurious investigations and prosecutions, to attempts to meddle with vote counting. Laying out this strategy gives state and local governments, pro-democracy civil society, and voters time to prepare and ensure that we have free and fair elections this November, in 2026, and in 2028….
Unanimous Third Circuit Panel Holds Unconstitutional Pennsylvania Requirement to Discard Timely Received Mail-in Ballots That Have Wrong or Missing Dates
It’s an interesting case that finds only a minimal burden under the Anderson-Burdick balancing test but still finds the state law unconstitutional. Here, the date requirement on timely received ballots was found to serve no government interest.
I expect the RNC will seek U.S. Supreme Court review.
“A Texas County Cuts Over 100 Polling Sites as Trump Attacks Mail-In Voting Nationally”
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.”…
I Spoke to the PBS News Hour Weekend About Trump’s Threats to the Integrity of the 2026 Midterm Elections
“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].”…
Bob Bauer Sounds the Alarm: “Donald Trump’s Plan for ‘Honest’ Mid-Term Elections”
Bob Bauer writes, very much in line with what I wrote in the NYT yesterday:
On August 18, Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that he would sign another executive order, following one issued in March, to “help bring honesty” to elections and to the 2026 mid-term elections in particular. According to Trump, its aims are to end to mail-in voting and to replace voting machines in favor of “watermark paper” ballots. Trump claims the legal authority to do this because it is “good for the country.” The president has no such authority, but it appears that his plans may include exploiting a particular feature of the American electoral process. That process is entrusted to election officials and administrators selected through partisan processes, and Trump is evidently seeking to make Republican state and local official support for “honest elections” a litmus test of party loyalty….
Trump could certainly call on Republican-controlled state legislatures to pass bills that support in various ways this drive against mail-in voting and voting machines. But he has other ways to apply partisan pressure in achieving these goals. As the Presidential Commission on Election Administration noted in its 2014 Report: “The United States runs its elections unlike any other country in the world,” and one of [its] distinguishing features…is the choosing of election officials and administrators through a partisan process. Some are appointed and others elected, but almost all are selected on a partisan basis.” It is complex, decentralized system run by local officials in more than 8,000 individual jurisdictions. In the last years since the “stop the steal movement” gelled, the vast majority of these officials across the country and the political divide have held firm against pressures to follow the president in his claims about “rigged” elections.
There have been a small but notable number of exceptions. Officials declined to certify lawful vote tallies until courts intervened or sought a change in the rules to give them broad discretion to do so. In one case in Colorado, Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters arranged to give unlawful access to county voting equipment to conspiracy theorists seeking to support Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election. She was prosecuted on state law charges, convicted and sentenced to nine years in prison.
These are only a few examples of how the American system of elections is vulnerable to partisan political pressure directed by a zealously committed president. The way it can all go from here under intensifying pressure from Trump can be seen in the ongoing tale of the Colorado prosecution. Trump has denounced the prosecution of Peters as a “Communist prosecution by the Radical Left Democrats to cover up their Election crimes and misdeeds in 2020.” At Trump’s direction, the Department of Justice sought to have a state court release Peters. An administration working with its party to undermine confidence in the integrity of the mid-terms can both demand Republican official support and offer protection in return. While a president cannot issue pardons for state crimes, he can ensure that the Department of Justice takes other action to aid in applying pressure to election officials. DOJ has reportedly started going down that path, exploring the options for criminally prosecuting election officials for not meeting the administration’s expectations for computer security protocols.
In broadcasting his conclusion that “VOTING MACHINES… ARE A COMPLETE AND TOTAL DISASTER” and that mail-in voting is a “SCAM,” the president is leaving no doubt that Republican election officials should share his view as members of the “Republican party” partnering with him in what he terms a “movement.” The President tried in his challenge to the 2020 election to have the department seize voting machinery to support his allegations of fraud, but while such an order was prepared, senior DOJ officials at the time successfully resisted. Those officials are now gone and those taking their places are far less likely to put up a fight in the Oval Office when the time comes. State and local election officials will likely now also face pressure to support in 2026 actions like the seizure of voting machines he could not achieve 6 years ago. The attacks on the 2020 election have already resulted in an extraordinary turnover of election officials who had enough of the “challenges, burnout, threats and harassment that [they have been] facing.”
It is impossible to identify every possible challenge to the process we may see in the months ahead. Federal and state courts will be called upon to respond as defenses are mounted under federal and state constitutional and statutory law. The success of any such legal defense will depend on the particular case and the forum in which it is presented. It is more certain that a well-coordinated attack would enable the president to seize at least the initial advantage, leaving the courts to catch up with severely destabilizing moves the administration may take, such as machine or ballot seizures and threats or actions to prosecute election officials who won’t get on the program.
Over the years, as well as at the present time, I have met and worked on a nonpartisan basis with election officials around the country, both Democrats and Republicans, who have been elected or appointed to discharge these responsibilities. I have never failed to be impressed with their professionalism. The vast majority from both parties—in red, blue, and purple states—do their jobs exceptionally well and without regard to partisan pressures. But it does appear that Donald Trump is preparing to subject them, and through them the system with its built-in partisan features, to severe pressure, and he will have federal law enforcement at his command for this purpose. The electoral process will be tested in unprecedented ways….