August 19, 2026 - Fulltext

Mike Lindell, the MyPillow founder who finished a distant second to Minnesota House Speaker Lisa Demuth in the Aug. 11 Republican primary for governor, announced Wednesday that he will personally pay for a hand recount and audit of every paper ballot cast in that race, at an estimated cost of $825,000.

Lindell said the effort is grounded in a right Minnesota law affords to candidates to request a full hand count of ballots even outside the narrow margin that triggers a state-funded recount.

"One of the few good election laws Minnesota does have is that as a candidate, I have the right to completely audit and hand count every ballot in the state," Lindell said in the announcement, adding that he intends to use that right "to the full extent of the law."

The move follows a lopsided loss, with the House speaker beating Lindell by roughly 11 percentage points. That gap is far outside the 0.25% threshold at which Minnesota pays for a recount automatically. A wider margin would mean that any recount would have to be requested and paid for by the candidate.

Minnesota law states that "an apparent losing candidate must submit a request for a discretionary recount along with the funds to cover the cost of the recount within five days of the canvass of a primary election."

In an Aug. 18 letter to Lindell, Secretary of State General Counsel Lauren Bethke estimated the price of a full recount of the governor and lieutenant governor races at roughly $825,000. To move forward, Lindell would need to submit an official recount request along with a bond, cash, or surety covering that full amount. Bethke's letter sets a deadline of Monday, Aug. 24, for that request and payment to reach the Secretary of State's office. 

The Secretary of State's office also released a contingency plan spelling out exactly how a statewide hand recount would be run if Lindell posts the bond by Monday's deadline. According to those documents, Paul Linnell, the office's Director of Elections, would serve as State Recount Official, with authority to appoint deputy and assistant deputy officials to oversee counting at sites across the state. Under the plan, the recount would be open to the public and media. 

There have been no official findings of fraud or irregularity in the Minnesota primary results. Nonetheless, on primary night, Lindell told reporters he would not concede until every vote was counted and that his team had spotted "anomalies" it needed time to review, though he offered no evidence at the time.

Lindell became a national figure after the 2020 election by promoting unproven claims that voting-machine companies had manipulated results for President Trump. Those claims led to costly legal fallout: Lindell settled a defamation suit with Dominion Voting Systems last month, and a judge separately found he had defamed Smartmatic, another voting-technology company, though damages in that case have not yet been determined.

Demuth is scheduled to face Sen. Amy Klobuchar in the Nov. 3 general election to succeed retiring Gov. Tim Walz. In a statement to WCCO, Demuth said she is "laser focused on connecting with voters across Minnesota over the next 11 weeks," and outlined her campaign priorities of ending fraud, lowering taxes, improving education and "making our business economy competitive again."

August 19, 2026 - Fulltext

Foreign interference in the 2026 midterms is positioned to be the most extensive in American history, and its full extent will likely never be known, because the Trump regime has made it clear that interference in their favor is invited, our resources largely undefended, violations to help the GOP will go unpunished, and will likely be rewarded through favorable trade and diplomatic treatment.

Further, the portion independent researchers have been able to identify has doubled in a year while the instruments that would have measured greater scale of interferencehave been thoroughly shuttered and defunded, while those who previously identified election interference that benefitted the GOP now find themselves facing weaponization of the criminal justice system and being treated as enemies of the Trump regime’s purged federal law enforcement apparatus.

This report documents the operations still visible to independent researchers and uses the remaining indicators to estimate the total.

In the first quarter of 2026, narratives from Storm-1516, a Russian operation run through a former Florida deputy sheriff granted asylum in Russia, more than doubled compared with the same period the year before, reaching near-daily output by spring. The count comes from Bloomberg, which identified the operation’s output using signature characteristics published by Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub and the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center.

Finding 1: Documented foreign influence operations increased substantially through the 2026 election cycle

The Vice President of the United States has repeated a fabrication manufactured by Russian military intelligence. In November 2023, Storm-1516 published a false report that Zelensky’s associates had bought two yachts worth $75 million with money stolen from Western military aid; the brokers involved denied it. Then-Senator JD Vance repeated the claim publicly when explaining his opposition to continued U.S. support for Ukraine. Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene shared it as well.

The documented operations running against American audiences right now:

Storm-1516, also tracked as CopyCop. Recorded Future reported that since March 2025 the network created “at least 200 new fictional media websites targeting the United States, France, and Canada,” on top of earlier waves, using uncensored variants of open-source language models and more than 1,000 fake journalist personas.

Spamouflage, a Chinese state-linked operation. The Clemson Media Forensics Hubdocumented the campaign’s targeting of then-Senator Marco Rubio, and Graphika reported in July that the network distributed manipulated event flyers to disrupt gatherings critical of the Chinese government in the United States and Europe.

A domestic artificial intelligence bot network. Clemson researchers identified at least 686 X accounts that posted more than 130,000 times, posing as conservative voters and working four Senate races and two primaries, and assessed the network as “an American political operation, rather than one run by a foreign government.”

Party-produced deepfakes. The National Republican Senatorial Committee published a deepfake of James Talarico, a Democratic Senate candidate in Texas, on March 11: an artificial version of the candidate speaking to camera for over a minute, the first of its kind per CNN, with a disclosure label rendered in small, fading text. CNN reportedthe ad was the latest in a series of AI-generated products from the committee.

These operations demonstrate that the techniques are normalized, the tools are cheap, and disclosure requirements are minimal where they exist at all.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin measured what targeting like this does to turnout. Publishing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in January 2026, they tracked every digital ad seen by 10,441 people representative of the voting-age population for the six weeks before the 2016 election and matched each person’s exposure to their verified turnout record.

The researchers estimated that roughly 4.7 million people who would otherwise have voted were successfully influenced not to. Nonwhite voters in minority-majority counties in battleground states received the messages at four times the rate of their white neighbors, and the operators used “Martin Luther King Jr.” as a targeting keyword to identify nonwhite voters for suppression.

Lead author Young Mie Kim said the Russian operation was not about mobilizing people but about demobilizing certain groups of people, and that 17 percent of the campaigns studied were tied to Russian operations. Trump won the presidency that year on battleground margins under one percent, including Wisconsin by fewer than 23,000 votes.

The prohibition those advertisers violated is one the Federal Election Commission has lacked the votes to enforce since May 2025.

Finding 2: The Trump administration has dismantled seven federal safeguards against foreign election interference.

The federal defenses against foreign election interference took nearly ninety years to build. Dismantling them began in February 2025 and has not stopped. The defenses had different architects across different decades. Congress wrote the Foreign Agents Registration Act in 1938 and created the Federal Election Commission in 1974. After Russia’s 2016 operation, the Federal Bureau of Investigation created its Foreign Influence Task Force in 2017, Congress established the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in 2018, the intelligence community established its Foreign Malign Influence Center in 2022 to track election interference by Russia and other adversaries, and the State Department ran a counter-disinformation office. The current administration has disabled every one of them since February 2025:

February 5, 2025. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi disbanded the FBI Foreign Influence Task Force on her first day, writing that the move would “free resources to address more pressing priorities.”

The same memo limited criminal prosecution under the Foreign Agents Registration Act to “instances of alleged conduct similar to more traditional espionage by foreign government actors.” Enforcement was narrowed, not ended; the act remains law.

December 2024 through April 2025. The State Department’s Global Engagement Center closed in December 2024, Secretary of State Marco Rubio shut its successor office on April 16, and by September the department had halted “all frameworks” for countering foreign disinformation.

February through March 2025. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency froze its election security work and ended funding for the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, telling states in an internal email that the work “no longer supports Department priorities.” Support ended fully on September 30, 2025.

May 1, 2025. The Federal Election Commission lost its quorum and with the quorum lost the legal ability to open investigations, issue penalties, or make rules. Chair Shana Broussard told NOTUS the agency is “hobbled.”

Through 2025. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence terminated 500 staff, a 30 percent reduction, with cuts announced to reach 40 percent of personnel by the end of 2025, and folded core functions of the Foreign Malign Influence Center into other offices. The Brennan Center for Justice noted that the Director of National Intelligence omitted foreign election threats from her worldwide threats testimony, unlike prior cycles.

July 9, 2026. Trump fired the three remaining commissioners of the Election Assistance Commission, the bipartisan agency that certifies voting equipment and administers federal election funding, leaving it without a quorum months before the midterms. With CISA’s election work halted, the commission was one of the few remaining federal entities providing election security support to states.

Those offices produced indictments, sanctions, domain seizures, and critical warnings to states and campaigns.

The center found that federal support for election security is “notably absent this cycle,” the first such absence since election infrastructure was designated critical infrastructure in 2017. Election officials told MS NOW they have received no intelligence briefings on possible foreign threats and have no access to regional cybersecurity advisers, and the Department of Homeland Security did not respondwhen asked about it. Sens. Alex Padilla and Mark Warner have demanded intelligence briefings on foreign election threats ahead of the midterms and report that the intelligence office failed to respond to their previous request.

The 2026 midterms will be the first federal election since Russia’s 2016 attack in which none of the defenses built in response are still functioning, and enforcement under the older laws has stopped as well.

Finding 3: Republicans have opened a working channel to the Kremlin and plan to continue using it through the election

In the same period, House Republicans hosted the first Kremlin parliamentary delegation on American soil in twelve years, over written Senate warnings that the visitors came to collect intelligence, with a reciprocal Moscow trip planned for the weeks around the election.

On March 26, 2026, a delegation of Russian State Duma lawmakers arrived in Washington, D.C., the first such visit since relations collapsed over the invasion of Ukraine, led by Vyacheslav Nikonov of the United Russia party and hosted on Capitol Hill by four House Republicans and one Democrat, led by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL). Every member of the delegation was under United States sanctions. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Democrats wrote to the administration on April 3: “The delegation came onto U.S. soil for one purpose: to advance the Kremlin’s strategic aims—including gathering additional useful intelligence.”

Rep. Luna told the Russian state news agency TASS in July that members of Congress plan to visit Moscow this fall or winter, that administration officials will travel as well, and that an announcement involving Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Secretary of State Marco Rubio may be coming.

The most senior travel already scheduled is FBI Director Kash Patel’s, who is planning a trip to Russia in October, reported by Politico, with the FSB, Russia’s security service, likely hosting. The agenda is undisclosed, and the Kremlin has declined to confirm the trip. The bureau that stopped investigating Russian influence operations is sending its director to meet the Russian security service one month before the election.

Finding 4: There is no longer an agency able to investigate and penalize illegal foreign campaign contributions

Federal law bars foreign nationals from contributing to American elections, and the Federal Election Commission is the agency that enforces it. It entered 2026 with roughly 195 enforcement matters pending and no authority to act on any of them. Nothing moves until the Senate confirms the commissioners nominated in February.

What that means in practice is visible in a complaint the commission received in February. Campaign Legal Center, an advocacy organization, asked the commission to investigate Venezuelan billionaire Julio Herrera Velutini. The complaint alleges he used his daughter Isabela Herrera, whose only prior federal political gift was $20, to move “prohibited foreign contributions in the name of another totaling $3.5 million” into MAGA Inc., the leading pro-Trump super PAC, while he sought clemency in a federal bribery case. President Donald Trump pardoned him in that case on January 16, 2026, a month before the complaint was filed. The center’s Saurav Ghosh said the sequence suggests Herrera Velutini “flouted the law to corruptly seek presidential clemency.”

When we look at the totality of the circumstances as we approach the midterm elections, we can see that the Trump administration and its allies in Congress have invited foreign interference in their favor, removed the guardrails built to stop it, and rewarded those who provide it. What that means for November is that the operations documented here will be at full operational scale from America’s enemies, and hyper-targeted to convince people to vote MAGA or not show up.

Suppressing turnout remains among the most effective tools these operations have, which is why researchers estimate 4.7 million Americans stayed home in 2016 because of ads aimed at them, and it is the tool that fails when people show up anyway.

Beyond November, the work is electing representatives at the city and state level who are prepared to fight back from a serious oppositional posture. The states retain authority over their own elections, and they can ban what the federal government now permits, fund what it has defunded, and prosecute what it declines to. That is achievable and within reach, so long as we arm ourselves with the knowledge and organize well enough to use it.

Let’s get after it.

Your state can stand up its own single payer healthcare system, arrest ICE agents who break the law, and even create New Deal style jobs programs. There are tremendous options available to us at the state level that are largely untapped. 

August 19, 2026 - Fulltext

NEW YORK (AP) — Locked in a competitive reelection race, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass declared on social media last week that a new poll was evidence that her campaign was “gaining momentum.”

Just a few days later, the truth emerged: The poll was fabricated.

The California results were among at least three “polls” across three states posted online this month by Median Strategies, a previously unknown organization that admitted to the Los Angeles Times on Monday that the purported results were fake. The company wrote before shuttering its website this week that it “was created as a short-term social experiment examining how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification.”

The post offered no explanation of who was behind the “experiment” or for what purpose.

The trajectory of the California poll offers a cautionary tale about the perils of trusting unvetted polling. While high-quality independent polls still exist, they appear amid a slew of other surveys produced by outside groups, campaigns or super PACs or using undisclosed or questionable methodologies. It can be a struggle to make sense of the findings — and as the latest episode shows, even campaigns may end up falling for falsified data.

“This is much bigger than one fake poll,” said Chris Wilson, a veteran Republican pollster who now leads the public opinion firm EyesOver. “It’s never been easier to make invented numbers look legitimate, and campaigns and outside groups have every incentive to amplify anything favorable before anyone verifies it.”

The Median Strategies fake polls, none of which appeared in Associated Press coverage, claimed to evaluate support in the Democratic primary for governor in Wisconsin, the gubernatorial race in Nevada, and the mayoral race in Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles poll, which purported to show Bass, an incumbent Democrat, leading councilmember Nithya Raman, a progressive Democrat, by about 12 percentage points in the mayoral race, was shared by the Bass campaign on social media and covered by the California Post before it was revealed to be bogus.

The Bass campaign has since deleted its social media post promoting the poll, but defended itself by saying that it “was reported on by multiple news outlets.”

“Any bad faith attempts to influence elections should be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” Bass campaign spokesman Alex Stack said.

Transparency is critical for evaluating poll findings

Median’s “findings” were shared by polling aggregation accounts on social media. They were not, however, included in the databases of major independent aggregators, including The New York Times, Real Clear Politics or FiftyPlusOne. 

The New York Times and FiftyPlusOne noted that the polls were released without basic information that was needed for vetting, such as who was running the firm. When they reached out, Median Strategies did not respond to requests for more information.

“When the poll was released, it lacked basic information about how it was conducted and who was behind it,” Will Davis, director of Election Data Analytics at The New York Times, wrote in an email to the AP. “Releasing this type of information is standard practice for pollsters, and because that information was not provided, we did not include it.”

Mary Radcliffe, Head of Research at FiftyPlusOne, also thought the methodology statement for the Wisconsin poll was missing key details, including the source for the voter file the company claimed to have used and the vendor who fielded part of the sample.

Median did not respond to her questions, so the polls were not included in FiftyPlusOne’s database. But Radcliffe noted that her method for screening polls is not infallible.

“There is a universe where they could have come up with plausible answers to my questions,” she said. “This is an industry built on trust. I have to trust that people are answering my questions in good faith.”

While admissions of falsified polling data are rare, they are not without precedent. 

In 2010, for instance, the left-leaning blog Daily Kos said that polling for its website, conducted by a firm called Research 2000, was fraudulent.

But it’s common for pollsters to release polls with minimal information about how the survey was conducted, what questions were asked, or who was behind it. Higher-quality polls rely on expensive methodologies, such as randomized sampling, so many pollsters opt for cheaper solutions. In addition, many election polls are conducted by campaigns or super political action committees with a stake in the outcome of the race. This can leave few — if any — reliable and independent polls to evaluate in contests like midterm primaries.

Before writing about any poll, AP verifies that it meets high standards of transparency and methodological rigor. But even high-quality polls have some amount of error, which underscores the importance of examining each finding with caution.

Prediction markets introduce more complexity

The introduction of prediction market platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket gives polls a different significance for people betting on election outcomes. 

The posts about Wisconsin and Nevada drew little reaction and were not accompanied by any discernible movement on the two prediction markets when they were released, but there were some shifts on both platforms after Bass shared the false Median Strategies numbers.

On Kalshi, the price of a “yes” contract on Bass winning the Los Angeles mayoral election rose two cents, from about 63 cents to about 65 cents, within fifteen minutes of Median’s post. On Polymarket, roughly twenty separate accounts traded thousands of contracts in Bass’s favor six minutes after the tweet. 

In the days leading up to Bass’s post about Median, trading on the LA mayoral election had been thin, with a typical trade over that week being under $10. 

While the price movements were small, the concentration of trading on both platforms shortly after the release of Median’s fake poll was not.

Before it was taken down, the Median Strategies website included a statement claiming that “no individual involved held or traded any position in an election prediction market, betting market, or other financial instrument tied to the races covered by Median Strategies.”

Motivations for the fake data remain unclear

More than a week after the firm began sharing “results,” it remains unclear who is behind Median Strategies.

No one responded to AP’s questions sent to an email address listed on its website, which was created little more than a week ago. Before it was taken offline, the only content on the site was a statement indicating that the firm “has concluded its polling project and will not publish additional polls.”

“All previously published polling releases have been withdrawn and should not be cited or treated as genuine polling data,” it wrote.

The firm highlighted what it called “a credibility problem” in its first social media post earlier in the month.

“Polling has a credibility problem. Ours is the fix: no partisan clients, no campaign or party money, numbers that go wherever the data takes them even when it’s inconvenient. Trustworthy polling, rebuilt,” it wrote.

August 18, 2026 - Fulltext

A federal judge refused to throw out a fraud lawsuit accusing Elon Musk of rigging a $1 million voter payout he publicly promised would be random.

U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman in Austin denied the Tesla and SpaceX CEO's bid Tuesday to have the case thrown out before trial — a motion called summary judgment — on the fraud claim, according to his order filed Monday.

The ruling allows an Arizona voter's proposed class action lawsuit, which could represent more than 1 million petition signers, to move toward trial.

Musk launched the daily giveaway at an October 2024 rally in Pennsylvania, telling the crowd he would pay $1 million every day to registered voters in swing states who signed America PAC's petition supporting free speech and gun rights.

America PAC, the super PAC Musk founded to support President Donald Trump's 2024 presidential run, amplified the promise on X within hours of the rally.

"We're gonna be awarding a million dollars, randomly, every day from now until the election," Musk said at the event, according to the America PAC post.

But days before the Texas lawsuit was filed, Musk's own lawyer admitted in a Philadelphia court that the winners were not chosen at random.

"The $1 million recipients are not chosen by chance," the lawyer told a Philadelphia judge on Nov. 4, 2024, according to the complaint. "We know exactly who will be announced as the $1 million recipient today and tomorrow."

Pitman was unpersuaded by Musk's argument that the word "randomly" was too vague to be proven true or false.

"This argument warrants little analysis," the order said.

"A jury could surely conclude that America PAC's process of reviewing a 'vetting document' to make the 'best selection of someone who ideologically aligned with America PAC' — which included 'everything from criminal background history to age, marital status, children' and social media content — was far from random," Pitman wrote.

The order also found that Musk himself was deeply involved in the program, undercutting his claim that he did not know the selection was not random.

Musk "participated in high-level discussions about establishing America PAC" and "participated in high-level discussions with Young and certain America PAC independent contractors about America PAC's projects," the order said.

The Texas ruling is the latest in a string of legal setbacks for Musk over the giveaways.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission voted 5-1 in July to refer Musk to a local prosecutor for possible election bribery charges over similar cash giveaways during Wisconsin's April 2025 Supreme Court race, CBS News reported.

August 18, 2026 - Fulltext

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon is calling on administration officials to issue a national emergency declaration regarding election integrity, including a policy to allow the presence of federal immigration agents at polling booths during the upcoming midterms.

Bannon, 72, forcefully floated the idea Tuesday during an episode of Real America's Voice, suggesting that an "up-armored ICE presence" at voting booths in November is critical toward ensuring election integrity. The former White House chief strategist said President Donald Trump should take the bold approach rather than focusing on the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, which contains plans for voter ID and limits mail-in ballots.

"It's not going to happen," Bannon told conservative commentator Jack Posobiec. "You know why it's not going to happen? Because John Thune and the donors don't want it to happen. They think it's racist, they think it's nativist."

Bannon said many senators, including Thune, treat Trump like a "lame duck" while publicly urging the administration to act.

"This is why we need a national emergency proclamation, a national emergency memo, about the upcoming elections," Bannon continued. "You're going to have to have a forcing function to get to ID. You're going to have to have a forcing function not to have the phony mail-in ballots."

Bannon also called for an "up-armored ICE presence" at polling booths, which critics will say amounts to intimidation, he acknowledged.

"Well, it ain't intimidation if you're a United States citizen," Bannon said. "It's an intimidation if you're a foreigner and here illegally and not eligible to vote. It should be intimidating; we don't want you there. We don't want you near a voting booth. We certainly don't want your votes."

A message seeking comment from the White House was not immediately returned Tuesday afternoon.

Trump, meanwhile, has remained tight-lipped regarding any plans to declare a national emergency ahead of the midterm elections. He spoke to Wayne Allyn Root last week on Real America's Voice, with the host asking him directly about his intentions.

"Stranger things have happened," Trump said. "I'll leave it at that."

Trump has repeatedly said voter ID and other measures included in the bill, which the Senate has yet to pass, are essential to both election integrity and Republican chances to win in November.

Critics of the proposal say it would block thousands of Americans from voting booths due to lack of identification, including passports. A national emergency declaration linked to elections could also lead to results being challenged or overturned, other detractors insist.

"Donald Trump wants to take over American elections," Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer posted on X last week. "Senate Democrats are prepared to combat his unprecedented, illegal efforts at every turn. Your vote belongs to you. We will ensure it stays that way."

A national emergency declaration would not automatically allow the president to rewrite state election laws or impose new voter qualifications unilaterally, election-law experts have said. The U.S. Constitution assigns primary responsibility for election administration to states, while Congress holds significant authority over federal election rules.

Last year, reports surfaced of a draft executive order allowing the president to invoke foreign election interference as justification for emergency measures, but critics say any attempt to impose nationwide voting rules via emergency actions would face significant court challenges.

Jeffrey Toobin, CNN's chief legal analyst, previously told Newsweek's The 1600podcast about the ways in which Trump could intervene in the midterms, saying his efforts to curb mail-in voting could hurt Republicans just as much as, or worse than, Democrats.

"To this day, it's unclear which party is helped by mail-in voting," Toobin said. "Going back a decade or two, it was Republicans who all wanted mail-in voting, and some people still think Republicans benefit more by mail-in voting. So some of this stuff is not only pernicious, it is just mysterious."

Former White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt shot down the possibility of immigration agents at polling stations during a briefing in February following an earlier call by Bannon.

"That's not something I've ever heard the president consider," Leavitt told reporters.

Pressed further, Leavitt said she couldn't guarantee that ICE agents wouldn't be present at polls in the fall.

"I mean, that's frankly a very silly hypothetical question," she said. "But what I can tell you is I haven't heard the president discuss any formal plans to put ICE outside of polling locations. It's a disingenuous question."

August 18, 2026 - Fulltext

A South Carolina law that lets anyone 65 years old and above vote by mail but requires younger people to provide an excuse to cast absentee ballots violates the Constitution’s prohibition on abridging voting rights based on age, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday. 

President Donald Trump has repeatedly demanded an end to mail voting, and the Fourth Circuit’s decision creates a split with the Fifth and Seventh Circuits, which had previously upheld similar age restrictions for mail-in ballots. That could invite the Supreme Court to weigh in. 

The three-judge panel — one Barack Obama appointee, one Donald Trump appointee and one George W. Bush appointee — unanimously held that preventing younger voters from enjoying the same range of ballot-casting options afforded to older voters ran afoul of the 26th Amendment.

“Construing the Twenty-Sixth Amendment in harmony with the Constitution’s other voting rights amendments, we find that the unequal allocation of voting access based on age constitutes an abridgement of Plaintiffs’ right to vote,” the judges wrote. 

The appellate court sent the case down to the district court to determine the remedy, which could either benefit voters or make casting ballots harder for South Carolinians. The lower court has two options, the panel held: “either extending the benefit of ‘no excuse’ absentee-by-mail voting to voters under age sixty-five, or removing the benefit provided to voters age sixty-five and older.”

The lawsuit began in 2023, when five South Carolina voters under 65 sued the state’s election commission, arguing that the state’s absentee ballot law violated the 26th, 14th and 1st Amendments. While voters over 65 can vote by mail without an excuse, younger South Carolinians must first show that they are somehow indisposed — that they’re physically disabled or caring for someone who is, plan on being out of state on Election Day, or are simply too busy with work (with an employer’s note confirming) to vote in person. After the district court denied those claims and granted summary judgment to the election commissioners, the plaintiffs appealed to the Fourth Circuit. 

Like the other voting rights amendments to the Constitution, the 26th says the right to vote “shall not be denied or abridged” on the basis of age (except for minors under 18 years old).

The Fifth Circuit considered a challenge to similar Texas voting law in 2020 and came out the other way, holding that allowing no-excuse mail voting for people over 65 did not infringe on the voting rights of younger Texans. And the Seventh Circuit likewise upheld an Indiana absentee voting law in 2023. The circuit split increases the potential that the U.S. Supreme Court might take on the matter, should the election commissioners appeal. 

In Tuesday’s decision, the Fourth Circuit explicitly rejected the other appellate courts’ interpretation of the 26th Amendment as merely preventing active discrimination against younger voters. “[T]he better reading, we conclude, understands ‘what the right to vote ought to be’ to required equal treatment in voting.” 

Critically, the 4th Circuit framed the question as an age-based restriction on voting generally, and not just a limit on no-excuse absentee voting. Thus, South Carolina’s law wasn’t just conveying a benefit on a specific group — which is how the other circuit courts viewed the question — but abridging the right of younger voters to partake in alternative means of voting available to voters over 65. 

“Under this framework, even if a regulation does not make voting more burdensome for plaintiffs than it was before — that is, relative to the status quo ante — it may still ‘abridge’ their voting rights… if it imposes burdens on them because of a protected characteristic,” the judges wrote.

Younger voters have many more bureaucratic hoops to jump through if they want to vote absentee — and aren’t assured to meet them in the event that an emergency crops up after the ballot request deadlines.

“These additional conditions, barriers, and unequal prerequisites make it meaningfully harder for Plaintiffs to vote as compared to voters aged sixty-five and older, and they are more than sufficient to constitute an abridgment that violates the Twenty-Sixth Amendment,” the judges concluded.

August 18, 2026 - Fulltext

A South Carolina law that places restrictions on voters under 65 years old who wish to vote by mail is unconstitutional, the Fourth Circuit ruled Tuesday.

The law impermissibly gives benefits to older voters while not affording the same ones to younger people, a three-judge panel said. This runs afoul of the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age to 18 in 1971, Judge Roger L. Gregory wrote.

“As Defendants themselves recognize, having the option to cast an absentee-by-mail ballot increases the convenience and ease of voting,” Gregory said. “That means voting is harder for voters under age sixty-five than those age sixty-five and older — which constitutes an abridgement of the right to vote on the basis of age and contravenes the Twenty-Sixth Amendment.”

The US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit notes that the Fifth and Seventh Circuits came to different conclusions, but “we think those decisions reached the wrong results by applying the wrong analysis.”

The panel reversed a 2025 summary judgment ruling from a trial judge and sent the case back to him to determine how to fix the issue, either by extending the “no excuse” benefits to people younger than 65 or by making it harder for older people to cast absentee ballots. However, the timing of such a remedy was left up to the judge since the appeals court’s ruling was made close to the November midterms.

South Carolina’s election laws say certain groups of people are given unfettered permission to vote absentee, including by mail, and that includes people over 65. For most people younger than the threshold, they either must have their employer certify that they won’t be available to vote on Election Day, be attending to a sick or disabled person, they are jailed, or will be out of the county where they live. They must also return their absentee ballot application to county officials 11 days before an election.

Five voters under 65 sued to overturn the law in 2023. The Fourth Circuit also said the voters’ equal protection claim was properly shot down.

South Carolina election officials made several arguments to defend the law, including “administrability and election integrity,” the opinion noted. While those interests are “legitimate,” the 26th Amendment “unconditionally removes age-based allocation of voting opportunity from the set of permissible means without consideration of the state’s interests.

“A state may pursue those interests lawfully — through age-neutral rules, or by limiting absentee-by-mail voting altogether,” Gregory wrote. “What it may not do is grant one class of adult citizens unconditional access to a voting method while denying it to another solely because of age.”

Judges Pamela A. Harris and Julius N. Richardson also sat on the panel.

The voters are represented by Pamela S. Karlan of Stanford Law School, Derfner & Altman, and Brazil & Dunn LLP. Defendant-appellee the South Carolina Election Commission is represented by Burr & Forman LLP and in-house. Defendant-appellee the Charleston County Board of Elections and Voter Registration is represented by John E. Robinson of Charleston, S.C.

The case is Grant v. Belangia, 4th Cir., No. 25-1413, 8/18/26.