Vote Beat
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an 1 26
Earlier this month, President Donald Trump floated the idea of canceling the 2026 midterm elections, drawing widespread attention and concern even as White House officials later dismissed the remarks as facetious.
*This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.]
But election experts consistently agree that Trump has neither the legal authority nor the practical ability to cancel elections. And state and local election officials consistently say they will carry out the elections they’re legally required to run.
The election system is under real strain, and bad-faith efforts to undermine it are serious. But after talking with local election officials, lawyers, and administrators across the country, I don’t see evidence that upcoming elections are at realistic risk of not happening at all. Elections happen because thousands of local officials follow state and local law that mandates them — and history shows they’ve done so before, even under immense pressure. The greater danger isn’t no election, but one that’s chaotic, unfairly challenged, or deliberately cast as illegitimate after the fact.
Stephen Richer, the Republican former recorder in Maricopa County, Arizona, said the idea that a president could simply halt or meaningfully cancel an election misunderstands how elections function on the ground. The system, he said, is “made up of so many disparate actors” — thousands of local officials, courts, vendors, and administrators operating under different authorities and timelines. Even if there were a coordinated attempt to get these people not to go through with the election, “you’ve got to figure at least half of those people aren’t big fans of the president, and many of the rest are on autopilot regardless of what they think of the president.”
Some election processes are fixed by law and timing. Military and overseas ballots, for example, must be sent on a specific schedule — a deadline Richer described as “an immutable deadline, like gravity.” Any attempt to disrupt that selectively would quickly become obvious. “How absurd would it be that one county got ballots and the next one didn’t?” he said, predicting “a gazillion lawsuits” and court orders compelling officials to move forward.
Richer also pointed to the scale of U.S. election administration: more than 9,000 jurisdictions and more than 90,000 polling locations nationwide. “You are not going around and shutting those down,” he said. He noted that even voter-intimidation efforts would face immediate legal challenges and injunctions, while plenty of voters would have cast ballots via other means (e.g., early or mail voting) anyway.
That assessment is echoed by David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, who speaks regularly with local election officials. (When we spoke, he was driving to a conference for Colorado election officials — and had just come from a conference of 300 officials in Texas.) Becker said nearly 1,500 local officials across 47 states have participated in his monthly informational sessions, which he’s held since Trump put out his executive order last March, and none of them have suggested canceling the election or violating state law.
“Every single one of them is committed to putting on the best election they possibly can,” Becker said. Even under pressure, officials aren’t signaling they’ll stop. “They are getting it done,” he said, adding that if support doesn’t come from the state, “they will band together and do it themselves.”
But state election officials aren’t backing down, either. Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, a Democrat, says elections will proceed as planned regardless of what Trump might say. The academics and media stars gaining popularity and attention for saying otherwise are being “disingenuous” and “dangerous,” he said.
Courts have also played a critical role when local officials have threatened to overstep their authority. In 2020, even light suggestions that Trump might delay the election to accommodate COVID were met with outrage. After the 2020 election, judges made clearthat certification is not discretionary and ordered officials to follow election law and move the process forward, even amid intense political pressure.
Those same state and local laws remain in place today. Courts and election offices are also better positioned than they were four years ago, with legal strategies drafted, training in place, and judges already familiar with these arguments. Across the country, clerks and secretaries of state describe updating contingency plans, consulting attorneys, and stress-testing procedures much as they would for a natural disaster or cyberattack.
If you’re worried about what lies ahead, election officials say there are meaningful ways to respond — and that spreading fear isn’t one of them. Richer said the bigger danger now is renewed distrust of election results. That distrust makes it easier for those in power to make bad-faith attempts to twist the math after votes are cast.
His advice is straightforward: “Continue being a repository for facts and truth about election administration, and kindly and sensitively inject those into conversations that you are a part of if you hear something you know to be wrong.” He added, “Don’t be dismissive. It never works.” And, he said, “you are responsible for the false information you spread.”
Aguilar said that academic voices predicting doom “don’t understand the nuances” of state and local law and that voters should be skeptical of them. Those who want better information should go to their local and state elections offices.
There’s also a risk that continually framing elections as likely not to happen — or as already lost — could have the opposite of the intended effect, discouraging participation rather than protecting democracy. If you’re concerned about what might happen in your county, there are concrete ways to help now: sign up to be a poll worker, volunteer to help register voters, offer your business or community space as a polling location, or donate to organizations preparing to defend election laws and certification in court.
Elections don’t happen just because people assume they will. They happen because people — especially at the local level — show up and do the work.
*Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica atjhuseman@votebeat.org.
Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.
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AN 6 25
Donald Trump’s second term is shaping up to be just as much about the past as the future. Not the past as it unfolded, but the version of events as he wants them remembered.
*This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.
There are a few troubling examples of how the president and his allies are actively attempting to reshape public views of the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection — and how these efforts are starting to affect real people and real institutions.
Take Oklahoma. Teachers there are now facing updated social studies standards that instruct students to “identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results” — not to examine election systems or to discuss voter confidence, but to presume that the election was flawed.This language is a quiet but profound distortion: It accepts Trump’s false narrative of fraud and requires educators to teach that falsehood as fact.
This illustrates the insidious consequences of partisan narratives hardening into policy. Oklahoma’s education chief, Ryan Walters, has aligned himself with efforts to eliminate so-called left-wing indoctrination in schools. But he’s supporting these new standards, which contradict the facts made plain in every credible post-election review, from Trump’s own first-term Department of Justice to GOP-led audits. Courts, including those with Trump-nominated judges, rejected dozens of spurious legal challenges, and officials in every state certified the results.
These facts have been sidelined in shaping what schoolchildren learn, which has long-term implications for public trust in elections.
Or consider the protests against aggressive immigration raids in Los Angeles. Trump has called the demonstrators there “insurrectionists” and is moving military forces into the city.
And what about the convicted insurrectionists who participated in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol? Trump issued them pardons and commutations as one of the first acts of his second term, erasing the crimes and violence of that day — including threats to execute his vice president — from the historical record. (A plaque honoring law enforcement officials who defended the Capitol that day still hasn’t been installed, despite pleas to House Speaker Mike Johnson.)
Trump’s administration is also reportedly developing a plan to pardon the “fake electors” and other Trump allies charged or convicted in connection with attempts to overturn the election, as well as the plot to kidnap Michigan’s Democratic governor, as part of a broader effort to shield MAGA supporters from legal consequences, and perhaps convey the sense that these events never happened.
That is, the president is using both his immense influence and his constitutional authority to bend justice, public education, and public memory toward a false understanding of the past. And his allies are bending to his will.
What does this tell us about Trump’s capacity to reshape perceptions in the face of actual facts? And can anything stand in his way?
Some answers may come from a federal courtroom in Denver, where one of the more surreal chapters of the 2020 fallout is still playing out. That’s where the defamation trial against Trump ally and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell — brought by former Dominion Voting Systems executive Eric Coomer — is underway.
Lindell, who has claimed that Dominion and Coomer were part of a scheme to steal the election from Trump, once promised that this trial would prove him right. But his lawyers seem to be arguing now that he’s so erratic, so impulsive, that nothing he says could be taken seriously enough to count as defamation.
“It’s just words,” said Lindell’s attorney, according to a Denver reporter covering the trial. “All Mike Lindell did was talk.”
That’s a hell of a defense, and itself a rewriting of history. The problem with it is that millions of people did believe Lindell, and still do.
Coomer may get to clear his name in the case against Lindell, but the broader effort to rewrite the past is gaining ground where it matters most: in classrooms, in Congress, and in the minds of voters. Juries and the judiciary can punish lies, but they can’t reach every classroom or undo every pardon.
With so many institutional guardrails already buckling under pressure, the remaining checks are public memory, a free press, and a willingness — from enough of us — to keep insisting on saying what actually happened.
Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica atjhuseman@votebeat.org.}:
Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.
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A conservative activist is claiming that Pennsylvania has “tens of thousands” of voters improperly registered, but state officials say he’s misrepresenting a normal, legal part of the voter registration system.
*This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.
The commonwealth regularly cleans its voter rolls to eliminate names of people who have moved out of the state or otherwise become ineligible. This process isn’t immediate. It can take several years, as counties are required to send voters notices to make sure they’re not improperly disenfranchised.
All of this is regulated by federal and state law.
But that hasn’t stopped Scott Presler from using these routine lags to suggest that something is wrong with voter registrations, Democratic ones in particular.
Presler, who has been among Donald Trump most vocal supporters in Pennsylvania, says he has used an unnamed artificial intelligence tool to identify voters registered in multiple states simultaneously. Presler suggested those registrations were fraudulent and said he would refer them to law enforcement, though he said he hasn’t done so yet.
But multiple registrations themselves aren’t a sign of fraud or illegal voting. In fact, they can be a sign of the law working as intended to protect voters’ rights.
How federal and state law affects timing of removals
In states around the country, people can remain on the voter rolls for years after moving to another state. A federal law, theNational Voter Registration Act of 1993, governs how voters can be removed from the rolls.
In cases where election officials learn someone may have moved out of their jurisdiction, such as from change-of-address data provided by the U.S. Postal Service, the law requires that election officials provide notice to the voter of their intent to remove them. If the voter doesn’t confirm the move, they may have to confirm their address before they can vote in their original jurisdiction. But they can’t be removed until they’ve missed voting in two consecutive general elections after being notified. That could be as long as four years.
Under Pennsylvania law, those notices are also sent to any voters who have not participated in an election for five years or updated their registration. That means it can take as long as eight or nine years to remove a voter who has moved, if the NVRA removal process begins after that. According to a 2024 report from the Department of State, in 2023 counties sent out 4,320 notices of duplicate voter registrations and more than 44,000 notices to voters believed to have moved out of state.
Actually voting in two separate jurisdictions in the same election is illegal. Election officials refer such double-voting cases for prosecution, and studies have found it to be very rare.
As for duplicate registrations, states have long shared data to try and identify and resolve them promptly.
Much of this work is done through the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, a bipartisan multi-state data-sharing compact aimed at addressing this exact issue.
ERIC compares data from member states, along with other sources such as the U.S. Postal Service’s National Change of Address database, to identify cross-state movers, so that states can start removing those names. ERIC says it has identifiedmore than 13 million cross-state moves since its inception in 2013.
But several Republican-led states abandoned ERIC in recent years after it became the target of misinformation, undercutting efforts at cross-state collaboration.
Pennsylvania changes are part of routine voter roll maintenance
Presler’s misleading claims go beyond the notion that the duplicate registrations indicate fraud. In his public comments and in an interview with Votebeat and Spotlight PA, he has suggested that his claims led the Pennsylvania Department of State to shift more than 10,000 Democratic voters from active to inactive — although it is counties, not the state, that manage voter registrations.
In the week between Feb. 3 and Feb. 10 Pennsylvania’s weekly voter roll statistics showed that about 14,500 registered Democrats moved from active to inactive status. But the Department of State said those shifts had nothing to do with Presler.
“All voter cancellations this week — like any other week — are the result of counties performing routine voter roll maintenance in accordance with the law, as they do consistently year-round,” State Department spokesperson Amy Gulli said in an email. “To our knowledge, zero cancellations have resulted from Presler’s ‘research.’”
About 2,000 Republicans and 3,300 unaffiliated or third party voters also shifted from active to inactive that same week.
A review of weekly data since the beginning of 2024 also shows that while 14,500 voters shifting status is relatively high for one week, similar shifts happened in at least seven other instances during that year.
Most of the registration changes happened in Philadelphia, which Presler has specifically called out on social media. Philadelphia’s history of election fraud has helped feed conspiracy theories and unfounded allegations targeting the city.
But Seth Bluestein, a Republican city commissioner in Philadelphia, said the number of status changes in the city is both normal and unrelated to Presler. Philadelphia is by far the state’s largest city, and predominantly Democratic.
Bluestein said that last Tuesday, before Presler began posting about duplicate voters in the city, city workers had processed a large backlog of national change-of-address and returned-mail data, which accounts for the increase in status changes. All three city commissioners’ offices confirmed Presler had not contacted them.
Federal law restricts systematic cleaning of voter rolls in the 90-day period leading up federal elections, so it is normal for more of that work to take place in the months after the election. In January 2024, for instance, Philadelphia moved roughly 17,000 Democrats from active to inactive status in one week.
Presler’s efforts aren’t strictly aimed at voter roll integrity. He has linked his campaign for removing duplicate registrations to his goal of flipping the state from a plurality of registered Democrats to a plurality of Republicans.
The commonwealth currently has 185,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans.
Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter atcwalker@votebeat.org.
Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.
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an 12 24
Key Texas lawmakers are reviving legislation that would require election officials to respond within set time frames to requests to explain “election irregularities” from certain party officials and election workers.
*This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.
If the complainants aren’t satisfied, the bill would let them take their requests to the Texas Secretary of State’s Office, which would have to decide whether to investigate further and conduct an audit.
State Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Houston Republican who authored the bill, said it will help clear up “any misunderstanding” about elections.
But experts and local election officials said Texas already has policies in place that have increased election transparency and security.
The bill, they said, could instead undermine voters’ trust if election officials have to prioritize an influx of meritless complaints. The measure would also add to the burdens on election officials who are already contending with a flood of public records requests, questions from residents worried about election integrity, and voter challenges, while also trying to comply with strict election deadlines set by state and federal laws, experts said.
“It’s difficult to see how this is anything other than just a really cumbersome administrative process that’s just going to in a lot of ways throw sand in the gears of election administration,” said Daniel Griffith, senior director of policy at Secure Democracy, a nonprofit organization that produces research and analysis focused on voting and elections.
Bettencourt first filed a similar bill in 2021 and reintroduced it in 2023. Both times, it passed in the Senate but not the House. Senate Bill 505, which he filed last month, is identical to his 2023 legislation.
The bill would allow candidates, county party chairs, election or alternate judges — election judges are tasked with supervising polling locations — and leaders of political action committees to request that election officials “provide an explanation to election irregularities or violations of the law and to provide supporting documentation” of such.
Bettencourt said problems during Harris County’s November 2022 election prove such a measure is needed.
The county, home to Houston, is the state’s most populous. During that election, the county’s elections department failed to provide sufficient paper to two dozen of the county’s more than 700 polling locations. There were also reports of malfunctioning equipment at various locations, long lines and polling locations that had late openings.
Citing the problems, multiple losing Republican candidates challenged the results of that election. A judge ordered a redo of the election for one race. After that election, Bettencourt championed legislation that abolished the Harris elections administration department and returned election duties to the county clerk, an elected official.
Bettencourt said that for months after that election, county election officials “refused to answer questions.” The bill would help prevent that, he said. He also pointed to more recent incidents in Dallas County, another Democratic stronghold, involving false claims by Dallas County Republican leaders who said that the voting equipment had not been certified by state officials. Bettencourt said “miscommunication” between the party and the elections office fueled the problems, and he thinks his bill would help in situations like that.
“This sets up an organized structure for people to ask questions, get answers, and then if the answers aren’t suitable or not getting any answers they can go to the secretary of state,” Bettencourt said.
The latest bill is part of a legislative package — which includes other election measures, such as penalties for election officials who fail to comply with election laws and one that would prevent the distribution of unsolicited voter registration cards — supported and written by seven other Republican senators: Brandon Creighton, Joan Huffman, Lois Kolkhorst, Mayes Middleton, Tan Parker, Angela Paxton, and Charles Perry. Several have been members of the Senate State Affairs Committee.
The committee discusses and helps decide which election legislation moves forward in the Senate chamber.
Bill requires election audits, fines in certain cases
According to the legislation, once party officials or election workers submit a request, election officials would have 20 days to respond. If that person isn’t satisfied with the response, the bill states, they can ask for more information. The election official at that point would have 10 additional days to respond further.
Then, if a requester is still not satisfied, they “may issue a request to the secretary of state for an audit of the issue.” Such a request for an audit must include copies of communications and responses provided by the election official.
The secretary of state will then determine if the information provided “sufficiently explains the irregularity identified,” the bill says. If the secretary of state concludes it isn’t, that office must “immediately begin an audit of the identified irregularity at the expense of the county or other authority conducting the election.”
The secretary of state’s office is already required to audit the elections of four counties that are randomly selected every two years. Elections in Harris County have been audited twice recently by the agency.
The Secretary of State’s Office declined to comment on the legislation.
In a fiscal note about Bettencourt’s 2023 bill, the Secretary of State’s Office anticipated multiple audits would require “substantial document review and analysis, labor intensive work, and travel to the applicable locations.” In addition, according to the fiscal note, the office would need six additional full-time employees.
Bettencourt told Votebeat a new cost analysis would have to be done next year as the bill moves through the legislative process.
There would also be additional costs to county taxpayers if the secretary of state finds violations of election law. In such cases, the office would then be permitted to appoint a conservator to oversee elections in the county, at the county’s expense. And if county election officials do not remedy the violations, they could incur fines starting at $500 per violation, the bill states.
How Bettencourt’s bill would impact election officials
Election officials are already required to keep detailed documentation for nearly every step of the election process. Human error, technical problems, and minor irregularities occur during every election in some form, and officials are required to identify the issues and respond.
Election administrators answer to bipartisan election boards and commissions. They have to respond to questions from members of the counties’ commissioners court, who set the budgets for election departments. Election officials respond to public records requests submitted by members of the public, which also have to be fulfilled within a specific time frame by law.
And the law already allows the Texas secretary of state, who is the chief election officer, to report any legitimate evidence of illegality or malfeasance to the Texas Attorney General’s Office for investigation.
Nonetheless, in recent years, election officials across the state report contending with streams of requests from organized conservative activists who have claimed laws aren’t being followed, or the process is flawed. No matter what information they provide, they said they are sometimes unable to satisfy people.
That’s why some election officials said, as it stands now, the bill’s effort to increase transparency would instead create additional hardships.
During the March 5 primary election, Bruce Sherbet, the Collin County elections administrator, was also preparing for a city school district election happening in May and the primary runoff election that same month. The county had another election looming in June.
Sherbet said he can’t fathom how election officials could handle more requests for information in the midst of such election preparations.
He added that depending on the type and timing of requests, some documentation may not be available for public inspection, may need redactions, or simply may not exist.
“I can see it as an invitation for abuse and both parties could be a part of that abuse,” Sherbet said. “Where does it stop? And where do you have time to do the job that you have to do?”
For his part, Bettencourt said his intent is not to create more work for election officials. He said that’s why the bill limits who can submit the requests to individuals involved with the election, including election judges and alternate judges. Those are the individuals responsible for supervising polling locations.
Those categories, though, still include substantial numbers of people. During the Nov. 5 election 117 judges and 117 alternate judges worked in Collin County. The bill would allow all of them to submit requests at any point during the election, Sherbet said. “It’s going to cause bigger mistakes to happen, or noncompliance,” he said.
He’s also concerned that this could further undermine trust in the process. The complaints and requests made to election officials would also become public record. Voters would have access to all of them whether or not they have merit.
“It’s not building confidence at all. What it’s doing is further harming the confidence of the election that we’re trying to turn a corner and get back on track again from the 2020 election,” Sherbet said.
Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. She is based in Corpus Christi. Contact Natalia at[ncontreras@votebeat.or (mailto:ncontreras@votebeat.org)
Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.
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