Inside Trump’s Effort to “Take Over” the Midterm Elections When Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election, the institutional guardrails of American democracy held. But if faced with the same tests today, those barriers — and people who held the line — would l...

Exclusive new details about Trump's effort to 'take over' the midterm elections, in a monthslong investigation from @dougbockclark.bsky.social & me: www.propublica.org/article/trum...

Inside Trump’s Effort to “Take Over” the Midterm Elections When Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election, the institutional guardrails of American democracy held. But if faced with the same tests today, those barriers — and people who held the line — would l...

Read the full story from me and @dougbockclark.bsky.social, with animations by Matt Rota and Henrike Lendowski.

FULL STORY: www.propublica.org/article/trum...

The Trump administration — including the White House, DHS and DOJ — maintains its actions are aimed at making U.S. elections more secure, and to ensure that only American citizens are voting in them. It says its actions are within the law.

We also reveal a previously unreported moment from 2020 that protected the outcome of that election, in which career experts helped Attorney General William Barr realize both the truth of the election and that telling it to the president would almost certainly cost him his job.

. @dougbockclark.bsky.social uncovered new details about their activities, including Trump appointee Kurt Olsen’s involvement in the January FBI raid for 2020 ballots in Georgia. (Olsen did not respond to a request for comment.)

Inside Trump’s Effort to “Take Over” the Midterm Elections When Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election, the institutional guardrails of American democracy held. But if faced with the same tests today, those barriers — and people who held the line — would l...

The people and protocols that held the line in 2020 are gone. In their place are two dozen political appointees in positions that could affect elections: 10 who actively worked to reverse the 2020 vote, and the rest who are associates of such people.

FULL STORY: www.propublica.org/article/trum...

NEW: In 2020, as President Trump tried to overturn his loss to Joe Biden, the institutional guardrails of American democracy held — barely.

A @propublica.org investigation found that, ahead of the midterms, Trump has systematically demolished those guardrails. 🧵

Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson did not respond to a request for comment about the lawsuit.

“Voter purge efforts relying upon faulty citizenship data and conducted outside of the requirements established by Congress risk relegating American citizens born abroad to a second-class status where their right to vote is neither protected nor guaranteed,” the complaint (linked in story) says.

@propublica.org and @texastribune.org found that SAVE is often unable to capture the most recent citizenship status for non-U.S. born citizens, leading to hundreds of voters being inaccurately flagged as noncitizens.

The groups claim that the state’s use of SAVE discriminates against citizens born outside the U.S. by disproportionately and inaccurately flagging them as noncitizens, in some cases leading them to be illegally purged from the voter rolls.

“Not Ready for Prime Time.” A Federal Tool to Check Voter Citizenship Keeps Making Mistakes. The Department of Homeland Security pushed out the revamped tool while it was still adding data. That led to widespread misidentification, particularly for citizens born outside the U.S.

UPDATE: A coalition of minority- and voting-rights organizations have sued the Texas secretary of state to try to halt the use of the federal SAVE tool to identify noncitizens on voter rolls, citing @propublica.org reporting on the tool’s inaccuracies.
www.propublica.org/article/save...

UPDATE: The Arizona Senate has released the federal grand jury subpoena for the records related to the partisan audit of Maricopa County's 2020 election.

Link to full record: www.documentcloud.org/documents/27...

Unsure why they want the records. The subpoena if released should tell us more! I'm still in Phoenix :)

Election Records Handed Over to the FBI in Maricopa County, Arizona, Could Be Fatally Flawed, Experts Say Unlike in Fulton County, Georgia, where actual ballots were seized, a federal grand jury subpoenaed digital data related to a partisan audit of the county’s vote.

A link to the FBI’s property receipt is in the update at the top of this story: www.propublica.org/article/mari...

The list includes around 30 hard drives, eight servers and three video storage systems, which together can hold more than 200 terabytes of data. Just 1 terabyte of storage can typically hold more than 250,000 photos, or 500 hours of video.

The receipt gives us new details. It includes a case number indicating that the case was opened in the FBI’s Phoenix field office. Most of the material collected — including videos, photos and documents — is explicitly attributed to the audit or an audit subcontractor.

Election Records Handed Over to the FBI in Maricopa County, Arizona, Could Be Fatally Flawed, Experts Say Unlike in Fulton County, Georgia, where actual ballots were seized, a federal grand jury subpoenaed digital data related to a partisan audit of the county’s vote.

On Saturday morning, an agent took more than three dozen hard drives and servers containing data from a partisan audit of the 2020 vote in Maricopa County, according to the receipt (link in update in top of story) www.propublica.org/article/mari...

ProPublica has exclusively obtained the FBI property receipt detailing what an agent collected from the Arizona Senate under the federal grand jury subpoena we wrote about yesterday. @propublica.org 🧵

Election Records Handed Over to the FBI in Maricopa County, Arizona, Could Be Fatally Flawed, Experts Say Unlike in Fulton County, Georgia, where actual ballots were seized, a federal grand jury subpoenaed digital data related to a partisan audit of the county’s vote.

NEW: Election Records Handed Over to the FBI in Maricopa County, Arizona, Could Be Fatally Flawed, Experts Say @jenafifield.bsky.social

Even with the errors, DHS officials revealed to state election officials at a conference earlier this month that noncitizens identified by SAVE will be referred to DHS for criminal investigation. More to come.

A DHS official I interviewed acknowledged that the new SAVE tool can’t always find up-to-date citizenship information, and said it’s on states to decide how to use SAVE results. He said it was rushed, but that didn’t mean it was “reckless.”

Our reporting found that, after a Trump executive order, DHS rushed SAVE into use, before all citizenship data had been added. Even now, SAVE still sometimes can’t connect automatically to DHS records, which have the most up-to-date information on citizenship.

Woman with glasses, long brown hair and black shirt looks out window. Photo credit: Shelby Tauber for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune

Also in November, local election clerks in Texas began telling us that flagged voters they had sent letters to were able to prove their citizenship. We collected data and found that 85 flagged voters across 29 counties proved their citizenship. That includes Sofia Minotti:

Woman with colorful hair and a black blazer stands in front of a map. Photo credit: Joe Johnson for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune

We started looking into this in Missouri in November after clerks were sent lists of voters flagged by SAVE. The clerks were concerned to see some people who they recognized as citizens on the lists. The state had told them to make the voters temporarily ineligible to vote.

In Missouri, the tool (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE) incorrectly flagged hundreds of voters as potential noncitizens, according to data we exclusively obtained through public records requests.

“Not Ready for Prime Time.” A Federal Tool to Check Voter Citizenship Keeps Making Mistakes. The Department of Homeland Security pushed out the revamped tool while it was still adding data. That led to widespread misidentification, particularly for citizens born outside the U.S.

NEW: A federal tool meant to find noncitizens on voter rolls is consistently marking citizens as noncitizens, especially if they were born outside the U.S., causing chaos as election clerks try not to disenfranchise voters, @zachdespart.bsky.social and I found. 🧵 www.propublica.org/article/save...

FBI’s Search of Georgia Election Center Is “Dangerous,” Experts Warn The search warrant, which sought 2020 election ballots, tabulator tapes, digital data and voter rolls from Fulton County, marked what experts described as a significant escalation in President Donald ...

“The idea that federal officials would seize ballots in an attempt to prove fraud is especially dangerous in this context when we know … the Georgia 2020 election has been extensively counted, recounted and investigated,” one expert said.

By @dougbockclark.bsky.social @jenafifield.bsky.social

good pt

Election officials say trust with CISA is broken — maybe permanently States once relied on CISA for election security. Now officials say politicization and retreating support have shattered that trust.

"Election officials say trust with CISA is broken — and may not come back," via @jessicahuseman.bsky.social www.votebeat.org/2026/01/15/c...