The Blockade Brief — July 29, 2026

North Carolina Republicans aren't hiding what this is anymore. On Tuesday, the state Senate rammed through a bill on a straight 28-13 party-line vote that cuts early voting for primaries, primary runoffs, and special elections from 17 days down to 10. The same bill hands Republican State Auditor Dave Boliek even more control over how elections get scrutinized after the fact, ordering him to run post-election audits of county election systems he already oversees. Every single amendment Democrats offered got voted down, including one that would've required voters flagged as “dead” by an unreliable federal database to actually be notified before getting purged from the rolls.

This is the same auditor Republicans already installed to run the State Board of Elections and every county board in the state, taking that power away from a governor voters elected to do that job. Now they're giving him more.

Meanwhile in New Jersey, the story Trump's DOJ has spent a week weaponizing just fell apart. Gov. Mikie Sherrill's office revealed Tuesday that more than 2,000 of the people flagged in a Motor Vehicle Commission software error as “noncitizen voters” may actually be citizens after all. That didn't stop Vice President Vance, DOJ, and Trump himself from spending the last week using the original, smaller number to demand New Jersey's entire unredacted voter file and push the SAVE America Act nationwide. The DOJ lawsuit is still active. The SAVE Act push hasn't stopped. And the number they built the whole case on just shrank.

Abhi Rahman, Try and Stop Us Chief Spokesperson: “This is another week of Republican bullshit dressed up as election integrity. North Carolina Republicans just voted to give themselves more time to comb through your ballot and less time for you to cast it. In New Jersey, Trump's DOJ spent a week demanding an entire state's voter data and pushing a national voter suppression bill off the back of a software glitch, and it turns out thousands of the people they pointed to are citizens after all. None of this was ever about fraud. It's about exploiting every glitch, every audit, every clerical error they can find to rig the game and hold onto power because they can't win a fair fight.”

Try and Stop Us is an organization fighting to defend elections in 2026 and beyond. As Donald Trump and his allies work to rig the game and sow distrust in our elections because they can't win a fair fight, Try and Stop Us moves quickly to amplify the work of organizers and local leaders — helping their voices reach further, faster, as one unified story.