u/siwibot

I'm a bit confused by this news! VERY IMPORTANT!! "Vote-by-mail ballots must be at a supervisor of elections office by 7 p.m. on Election Day."

Snippet:

• Florida voters won't be affected by Monday's Supreme Court ruling on mail-in ballots. The court ruled 5-4 to uphold Mississippi's law that allows mail-in ballots to be counted as long as they are postmarked and received within five days of Election Day.
• Florida law only allows late ballots from voters who are overseas, and only if they are returned by mail, explained Paul Lux, supervisor of elections for Okaloosa County.
• "To be perfectly candid, in Florida, our laws have been very clear," said Paul Lux. "They are given an extra 10 days only in presidential preference primaries and general elections."
• Nothing will change in Florida as a result of the ruling, Lux said. Vote-by-mail ballots must be at a supervisor of elections office by 7 p.m. on Election Day.

July 3, 2026 - Excerpt

Donald Trump’s presidency is facing investigations and corruption charges from a key House Democrat and ex-prosecutors, involving political and personal abuses of power, which legal experts predict will get heavy scrutiny if Democrats win the House majority in the midterms.

Legal critics call the scandals dogging the president “target rich” for investigations that Democrats will have a “field day” investigating if they win the House majority. Critics cite, for instance, Trump’s damaging the rule of law by weaponizing the Department of Justice (DoJ) to exact revenge on political foes and protect himself from federal investigations, plus Trump moves to profit in radical ways from his presidency with lucrative and new cryptocurrency ventures.

Among the scandals plaguing Trump are a proposed $1.8bn “anti-weaponization” slush fund to help “Maga” allies charged with crimes and deter IRS investigations of Trump’s taxes, the weaponization of DoJ to prosecute Trump enemies and help friends, the escalating private and public costs of his prized White House ballroom, and Trump’s backing of cryptocurrency policies that coincided with his earning a whopping $1.4bn from his crypto ventures in 2025.

In the House, Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the judiciary committee, has already spearheaded Democratic inquiries by the panel and is expected to assume the top post and lead key investigations if Democrats take back the House.

In Raskin’s eyes, the stakes are high for the rule of law and democracy.

“The political and financial corruption driving the Trump presidency is a civic emergency,” Raskin said in a statement. “Congress has a responsibility to confront all this corruption directly – to expose it and take all steps necessary to crush it as quickly as possible.

“Democrats may not yet hold the gavels, but we are already pursuing a broad range of investigations using every tool available to us. That work includes scrutiny of, and opposition to, the $1.8bn convicted criminal slush fund and super pardon for the Trumps,” which he has noted gives them total and permanent immunity from all tax and legal matters.

(continued)

July 4, 2026 - Fulltext

Mia Taylor looked down at her Los Angeles County election ballot a few weeks ago and felt a familiar mix of duty and dread. How could she possibly know the best choices in the dozens of local contests she was asked to vote in? Partly on a lark, she turned to a newly ubiquitous tool: Claude.

Ms. Taylor snapped a picture of her ballot and asked: “So, who do I vote for here?”

Claude, an A.I. chatbot developed by Anthropic to analyze data and hold natural conversations, initially declined to answer. Like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, other widely used tools, Claude is trained to avoid answering political questions that could expose biases.

So Ms. Taylor, a self-described liberal Democrat, sharpened her question, asking it to find links to well-regarded progressive groups and help her come up with strategic voting options.

“Here are some sources you can look at,” it replied, linking to voter guides and describing each race in detail. Ms. Taylor was especially torn about her vote for mayor, wondering how she could help stop Spencer Pratt, the Republican who momentarily looked likely to win one of the top two spots in the open primary. Claude’s advice: Vote for the incumbent, Karen Bass, not Nithya Raman, a member of the City Council. (Mr. Pratt later lost the race, while Ms. Bass and Ms. Raman advanced to the general election.)

It was probably only a matter of time before voters began to use artificial intelligence to help guide their choices. The 2026 midterms may be the first American elections in which voters are using A.I. in meaningful numbers.

Voters are turning to new A.I. tools to serve as nonpartisan researchers, viewing them as a viable alternative to traditional news coverage, voter guides or social media. They provide an appealing and seemingly efficient way to learn about campaigns and ballot measures, allowing users to bypass the sometimes dizzying array of political literature, advertising and commentary coming their way. But some experts warn that the tools are far from foolproof: The results they produce can be marred by factual errors or shaped by flawed assumptions.

Chris Johnson, a 58-year-old resident of Atlanta, appreciates both the allure of relying on A.I. to choose candidates and the worry about its accuracy.

Mr. Johnson, a registered Republican who considers himself a libertarian, has voted in every Georgia election for the past 40 years. When he prepared to vote in the state primary in May, he asked ChatGPT to tell him which of the candidates was the most libertarian. Initially, the system resisted answering directly, so Mr. Johnson asked it to rely on the candidates’ voting history. The chatbot suggested Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state who was running for governor in the Republican primary but ultimately lost the race.

Mr. Johnson felt chagrined by how easy it was. He recalled that for years he read the print edition of the local newspaper to come up with his own sense of which candidates most closely matched his values.

“I felt a bit lazy for not doing more,” he said. “It felt easier, but I am not sure that everything was correct.”

The appeal of artificial intelligence tools, also referred to as large language models, lies in their simplicity: Users often find the information they produce more straightforward and understandable than data from a more traditional internet search. And many welcome the interaction. Researchers and A.I. companies are already envisioning a time when political campaigns create their own chatbots, enabling voters to question them directly.

“There is a reason these models are persuasive: They come up with facts or factual claims and are just good clear explainers,” said David G. Rand, a professor of information science, marketing and psychology at Cornell University who has done extensive research on the effectiveness of artificial intelligence in political persuasion.

Earlier this year, before voting in a local school board election, Mr. Rand turned to artificial intelligence for help. He uploaded an hourlong video of a campaign forum and then asked which of the candidates most closely matched his values. He used this research to make his choices. And when he ran his picks by friends who were more involved in local politics, they endorsed his reasoning.

Still, Mr. Rand noted, the output is only as good as the input: A.I. tends to reaffirm and mirror users’ biases, framing candidates’ views through the voters’ lens, rather than objective facts.

Anthropic, the parent company of Claude, has said users asking about political topics “should get comprehensive, accurate, and balanced responses — responses that help them reach their own conclusions rather than steer them toward a particular viewpoint.” In a lengthy statement earlier this year, the company said Claude is trained to “treat different political viewpoints with equal depth, engagement, and analytical rigor.”

Jeremiah Hain, a 42-year-old psychotherapist in Los Angeles who has used ChatGPT routinely for other small tasks, recently employed it to help him choose candidates in races for mayor and various other offices.

“I don’t have the time, nor did I want to do the same kind of research I have done in the past,” he said. “This was very intuitive, and I actually respect its intelligence, I guess.”

He was so enamored by the process that he posted a video on TikTok encouraging other voters to do the same. (And because he knows his videos get more engagement when he is shirtless, Mr. Hain filmed himself bare-chested. “I wanted to do this as a thirst trap on purpose,” he said.)

But that sense of efficiency may mask the risks of turning over the democratic process to technology, some experts warn. Because most chatbots produce answers that sound confident and authoritative, users may not make the time to check the underlying claims.

Ideally, A.I. tools for election help would rely on a curated and verified database of political information and policy platforms to help voters, rather than pulling data from across the internet, as the existing tools do, said Yamil Velez, a political science professor at Columbia University who has researched the effectiveness of A.I. in convincing voters. But he was reluctant to completely dismiss the usefulness of A.I. in election decisions. “It is important to think about what is the alternative,” he said. After all, he added, most voters are unlikely to spend hours in the county clerk’s office researching their election options.

A year ago, Mr. Velez added, he would have said that voters would be better off relying on an internet search, but the A.I. tools are becoming increasingly accurateNonetheless, he cautioned, the current tools likely benefit candidates who are more vocal in the local press and on social media, making their views easier to find. Campaign strategists are keenly aware that voters are using these tools and have begun looking for ways to get more favorable results by publishing more material online in formats that chatbots prefer, such as using bullet points.

Still, in interviews, people who had used A.I. to research election choices said it allowed them to vote with more confidence.

Robert Siebelink, a 54-year-old Democrat who lives in Corona, Calif., turned to Claude after feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of researching the 61 candidates running for governor in his state, not to mention the candidates in less high-profile races. He uploaded his ballot and asked Claude to suggest candidates who most aligned with his values.

Eventually, he had narrowed down his choice for governor to two Democrats, Xavier Becerra and Tom Steyer, and asked Claude how to strategize.

In less than half an hour, he had filled out his ballot and chosen Mr. Becerra.

“I just felt so refreshed,” Mr. Siebelink said. “That’s the most informed voting that I have ever done.”

“It felt like some political expert that knew all of the research and we just sat down over coffee and chatted and they took notes,” he said.

Similarly, Rikki Powers, a 31-year-old Democrat who lives in Baltimore, took a photograph of his ballot before the recent Maryland primary and asked Claude to provide bullet points for each candidate. He said he was looking for a broader perspective than what he could get from candidate campaign websites. After checking some of the links for accuracy and to “make sure that I truly like the candidates I am voting for,” he used the summary to fill out his ballot on the spot.

“The last time I voted, I spent probably 20 hours researching,” he said. “This time was an hour.”

Still, Mr. Powers said, there are limits: While he had no hesitation uploading a blank ballot, he would never tell A.I. how he voted.

July 3, 2026 - Fulltext

At first glance, the Trump administration’s deployment of more than 200 F.B.I. analysts to Georgia this week seems to be another stubborn assault on a fact that has refused to budge: Despite the president’s baseless claims, no evidence of fraud in the 2020 election has ever surfaced there.

But critics contend that it is just one piece of a broader effort to sow doubt about the electoral process itself and the integrity of elections to come. And no matter how often President Trump loses in court, he continues to use the machinery of the federal government to investigate or try to overhaul the nation’s election infrastructure to his benefit.

The assigning of 260 investigative analysts from the F.B.I. to a “priority” investigation in Fulton County, Ga., came days after the Supreme Court ruled that states could count mail ballots that arrive after Election Day, rejecting Mr. Trump’s plans. And just last week, a federal judge permanently barred Mr. Trump from carrying out an early executive order that would have required people to show documentary proof of citizenship when they register to vote.

“It is incredibly concerning,” said Marisa Pyle, a senior staffer with All Voting Is Local, a nonpartisan advocacy organization. “We’re heading toward very consequential elections and they, whether intentionally or not, are using this both as a tool for relitigating past grievances and trying to undermine people’s confidence in the system to keep people from voting.”

As with the prosecutions of Mr. Trump’s political enemies, again front and center is the Justice Department, which has traditionally carried out investigations independent of a president’s wishes and grudges.

The Justice Department continues to conduct a criminal investigation into the 2020 election in Georgia. In January, the F.B.I. raided an election warehouse in Fulton County, seizing more than 600 boxes of election materials — including original ballots from the 2020 election.

That raid relied heavily on debunked claims about ballot anomalies in 2020, according to an unsealed affidavit, that have been revived by Kurt Olsen, an election denier who works in the Trump administration. In June, federal agents conducted searches on a group in Ohio that conducts voter registration drives.

Mr. Trump has also gutted the homeland security agency tasked with supporting states on election security, while officials across the federal government have undertaken dozens of actions aimed at insulating Republicans from potential losses in November.

As Mr. Trump’s popularity dips and as the primary season has ramped up, Mr. Trump has continued to amplify his rhetoric of rigged elections. He has tried to force Congress to pass legislationthat codifies parts of his executive orders meant to change national elections, often justifying the legislation, again, with false claims of fraud.

Last month, he repeatedly attacked California’s slow counting of votes as evidence of fraud, even though voters in the state have long relied on mail-in balloting. (The president himself votes by mail.)

“I called up the very powerful, very good U.S. attorney in California and I said, ‘Do me a favor, take a look, they’re trying to steal that election, too,’” Mr. Trump said in an extraordinary admission during a Pennsylvania rally last month.

Richard L. Hasen, the director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at the U.C.L.A. School of Law, said the totality of Mr. Trump’s actions had sent a “double whammy” effect on how two separate voting blocs view elections.

“The first thing he does is to try and convince his supporters that there’s fraud,” Mr. Hasen said. “And then by taking actions, whether that’s a lawsuit or an F.B.I. investigation, it convinces Democrats that he’s trying to steal the election. And so it actually undermines confidence in both sides.”

“So the public doesn’t believe elections are free and fair; they think that there’s problems,” Mr. Hasen added. “Public confidence in the elections has been volatile and plummeting.”

Abigail Jackson, a spokeswoman for the White House, said Mr. Trump was “committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered noncitizen voters.”

“This campaign pledge from the president is why millions of Americans sent him back to the White House,” she added.

In the more than five years since the 2020 election, Mr. Trump’s false claims about election workers and his pushing of conspiracy theories have been investigated and debunked. But polling has shown that voter confidence in the election has diminished.

A PBS News-NPR-Marist poll from earlier this year found that the percentage of Americans who are confident their state and local government would run a fair and accurate election had dropped to its lowest since at least 2020.

The actions by the administration have raised alarm not just about voter confidence, but also about added pressure on election workers.

On Thursday, Jack Smith, the special counsel who indicted Mr. Trump over efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, expressed concern for those working to protect elections.

“I’m very concerned about what’s going to happen in the next election, absolutely,” Mr. Smith said in an interview with MS NOW.

Vanita Gupta, who was the associate attorney general in the Biden administration, said in an interview that Mr. Trump had a “need to redeem the false narrative that he won the 2020 election that is rooted in his retribution campaign.”

But she was also concerned about the effect his actions would have on the future.

“The collateral goal is to cast doubt in voters’ minds about the legitimacy of future election results,” Ms. Gupta said. “But folks are onto this playbook and preparing to ensure eligible voters can cast their votes and have their votes counted, as the law requires.”

July 4, 2026 - Fulltext

Earlier this year, President Trump claimed a new area of expertise: election law. “I have searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject,” Trump wrote on social media, and found an “irrefutable one” that he would soon present. He suggested that it would allow him to bypass Congress and gain approval from the courts to impose his will on the nation’s locally run election system, including requiring voters to show identification while casting ballots in the upcoming midterms.

It was a heady time for a man who obsesses over voting policy and is seeking to prove that the 2020 election was stolen out from under him. Two weeks before Trump claimed in his February 13 post to have broken new legal ground, the FBI had conducted a raid of an election warehouse in Fulton County, Georgia. Officials made off with more than 650 boxes of ballots as part of a criminal investigation stemming from Trump’s 2020 defeat, an unprecedented action that the president hailed as a major advance for his unsubstantiated claim that the contest was riddled with fraud. The House of Representatives had just passed the SAVE America Act, a bill that would force people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and to show photo identification when casting a ballot.

Now a sense of gloom has replaced the hope that Trump and his allies had when they thought they were on the verge of making good on his election promises, which also included eliminating most voting by mail and conducting mass purges of voter rolls. The SAVE America Act is doomed to fail in Congress, and Trump is at war with his own party over it. Nothing, so far, has come of the Fulton County case. And the president’s legal arguments are a lot more refutable than he claimed. Trump is consistently being rebuffed in court; the Justice Department has lost at least a dozen election lawsuits. Some changes to the election system that Trump laid out in a March executive order have been blocked by judges. The president is running out of time and low on options to change the country’s voting policies—which he has denigrated as “rigged” and reminiscent of developing nations’—because the courts, Congress, and the Constitution seem to keep getting in the way.

District-level judges have, over the past two weeks, ruled against Trump’s most significant executive orders on voting, blocked efforts by his administration to compel states to hand their voter rolls over to the Justice Department, and outlawed the Department of Homeland Security’s modified Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system. The administration has expanded the SAVE database, which previously focused on noncitizens, by adding Social Security records and other data from native-born Americans to conduct checks of people’s voter eligibility. A judge said that the expanded system “knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.” Other judges are undercutting Trump’s assertion that he can remake the election system—which is administered by state and local officials—as he sees fit.

“The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections,” U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani wrote in blocking much of Trump’s March executive order that aimed to give the U.S. Postal Service new authority to determine which Americans could vote by mail. She underlined the words does not for extra emphasis.

The administration’s “efforts have been rebuked by every court to consider them,” Cathy Bissoon, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for Western Pennsylvania, wrote in a ruling that blocked the Department of Justice’s push to obtain voter data from the state. Bissoon noted that 10 courts had already blocked similar efforts in other states, before punctuating her comments with a footnote: “The administration’s demands have yielded one unexpected benefit, namely, bipartisan agreement. Five of the district judges are Trump appointees.”

They include U.S. District Court Judge Stephanie Gallagher, whom Trump nominated to the bench in 2019. She dismissed a DOJ lawsuit against Maryland seeking its voting records. “The Court joins every court to have addressed this issue,” Gallagher wrote in determining that an unredacted voter file is not something a state is compelled to give to the federal government. Trump has also lost in the Supreme Court that he helped reshape: Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote on Monday that states could allow mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day, essentially dismissing the president’s argument that such late-arriving votes fuel fraud and distrust.

David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, told reporters on Monday that the Trump administration’s cold streak is remarkable. “It is losing literally every single case it’s involved in,” Becker said. “I was a former voting section attorney in the DOJ, and I can’t remember the DOJ or any administration losing more than one or two trial-court cases a year, at the most. We are well into the double digits with this administration, and the year is not even half over yet.”

A Justice Department spokesperson told me that the Trump administration is “devoting significant resources” to continue the legal battle, including through its “litigation to ensure voter roll maintenance and a clear focus on ensuring that American elections are decided solely by American citizens.”

Publicly, the White House is shrugging off the legal setbacks. “President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, told me in a statement, asserting that existing laws give the Justice Department what it needs to compel states to maintain clean voter rolls. “This campaign pledge from the President is why millions of Americans sent him back to the White House.”

But the president has done little to hide his frustration over his inability to make good on that pledge. The stalled SAVE America Act has led to shouting matches and standoffs over strategy with Republican lawmakers, leaving Congress in a legislative quagmire. And this year’s losing streak is a continuation of the president’s dismal record in the courts when it comes to voting cases. After Trump’s 2020-election loss, the president and his allies filed dozens of lawsuits in an effort to overturn the results. In the end, they lost almost every case. A Washington Post review of court cases a month after Joe Biden’s victory found that 86 judges had ruled against Trump or his supporters.

This is not to say that Trump has not had success influencing America’s electoral system, particularly in the past year. The president has elevated MAGA-friendly election deniers into the federal government, sicced the Justice Department on his political enemies, and drafted multiple agencies into his relentless hunt to substantiate his broad claims of voter fraud. The Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais ruling in April gutted the Voting Rights Act and cleared the way for several Republican-led states to redraw congressional maps and eliminate Democrat-leaning districts with large portions of minority voters. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court rolled back campaign-finance restrictions on political parties, which Trump hailed as “A BIG WIN FOR REPUBLICANS.” At the state level, pro-Trump lawmakers have implemented miniature versions of the SAVE America Act or found other ways to support the president’s vision for voting. At least 10 states have voluntarily turned over the personal information of millions of voters to the Justice Department.

“They’re trying to appease Trump in these ways and implement his will in the states,” Gréta Bedekovics, the former director of democracy at the Center for American Progress, told me. In a report released Monday, Bedekovics and her co-author, Devon Ombres, found that at least 12 states have passed laws requiring documentary proof of citizenship for people registering to vote or mandating citizenship-verification checks for voters since 2024.

The setbacks that Trump has faced in court and Congress increase the likelihood that the midterm elections will proceed as election officials have intended, even though the president has, with little evidence, continued to denigrate the system as rife with fraud. On Monday, he lamented the “tremendous loss in the Supreme Court” on late-arriving mail-in ballots and said “it is more important than ever to pass THE SAVE AMERICA ACT.”

The president’s growing desperation over election policy has begun to bleed into other parts of his agenda. Last month, he abruptly canceled a signing ceremony for a bipartisan housing bill, suggesting that it was a “yawn” compared with legislation on elections. He has likewise encouraged Congress to block other bills, including national-security legislation, if the SAVE America Act—which Trump has deemed a “National Emergency”—is not attached. Congress left town this week mired in disagreement over how to balance the president’s election obsession with other pressing priorities, including the annual defense-spending bill.

Time is running out. Judges generally frown on any major actions to change voting laws in the weeks before an election. Early voting for the midterms will begin as soon as September in some states.

With Congress gridlocked and the courts repeatedly brushing back Trump, there is growing fear among election officials that the president may try to influence election policy in unprecedented ways, such as seizing voting machines—something Trump has said he regrets having not ordered the National Guard to do in 2020—and deploying federal agents to polling places.

The courts have proved to be a solid bulwark against Trump’s push to disrupt the midterm elections. But the president is nothing if not persistent when it comes to trying to bend the rules in his favor. As a result, the sanctity of the vote could rely on whether other government institutions and, ultimately, the citizenry can also mount a stand against the president’s worst impulses.