Try and Stop Us Digest — August 12, 2026

CNN: Federal agents are being pulled off trafficking and drug cases to chase Trump's “noncitizen voter” leads that dissolve on contact. “This looks like DHS scraping the bottom of the barrel,” said Brendan Fischer of the Campaign Legal Center, after internal emails showed agents chasing down leads that turned out to be nothing — including one “fraud” case that was just a father and son sharing a name. One Homeland Security Investigations agent admitted in writing: “Voter fraud investigations aren't typically what HSI works.”

New York Times: Green card holders and grandmothers are now facing deportation over DMV paperwork mistakes they didn't even know they made. In the past, DHS didn't pursue the small number of accidental registrants who never cast a ballot. Now green card holders are losing citizenship applications and being placed in removal proceedings over decade-old DMV errors. Abdullah Emre Basar was denied citizenship and placed in removal proceedings after being told at his citizenship interview that he was registered to vote — a mistake from a decade-old DMV visit he never knew about. Altagracia White, a New Jersey grandmother married to a U.S. citizen, is fighting deportation over the same kind of error: “I never thought they were telling me to sign to vote or anything like that. At that time, I didn't even know how to say yes in English.”

CNN: Trump flirts with tearing up the Constitution so Republicans can stay in power. Far-right host Wayne Allyn Root pitched Trump directly on using a national emergency to bypass Congress and the courts entirely to impose voting restrictions. Trump wouldn't say no: “Let me just say that stranger things have happened, OK? I'll leave it at that.”

AP: USPS is barred from taking any steps to implement Trump's order restricting mail-in ballots. Judge Indira Talwani faulted the administration for refusing to even defend the order's constitutionality. “The executive branch has no authority to regulate elections,” the judge wrote, rejecting Trump's order for the second time this year.

Talking Points Memo: The draft would exclude noncitizens from the count that determines how many House seats each state gets — and eliminate race and ethnicity data entirely, making it nearly impossible to prove racial gerrymandering in court. “This feels like an attack against the American public,” said demographer Beth Jarosz. No census has ever excluded race and ethnicity data since the first one in 1790. Experts say the change would gut future Voting Rights Act claims by removing the very data plaintiffs need to prove discrimination.

Democracy Docket: Election denier Tom Tiffany is now Wisconsin's GOP nominee for governor; pillow-hawking conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell just lost his bid in Minnesota. Asked directly if Biden won in 2020, Tiffany said only: “Who was president on January 20, 2021, to January 20, 2025? It was Joe Biden. He was the president. That's how I always addressed him.” If elected governor, he'd control who runs Wisconsin's elections. Lindell's campaign collapsed under legal debt, a potential campaign finance violation for handing out free pillows, and a muddled message — he's now free to return full-time to spreading election conspiracy theories on his own media network.

Democracy Docket: A conservative group behind the debunked “2,000 Mules” film is prepping a new documentary claiming Michigan's top election officials have been stealing votes in Detroit since 2017. The claims already failed in court once, dismissed for lack of evidence. Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey pushed back on separate DOJ claims of voting irregularities: “What makes me suspicious is that you say things that you can't back up… It's never happened.”

Missouri Independent: The state Supreme Court is demanding lower courts move fast on a case that will decide whether voters even get a say on the state's gerrymandered map. State law bars adding anything to the ballot after Sept. 8, creating a hard deadline. If the court rules against the referendum, Missourians would permanently lose the ability to challenge a gerrymandered map at the ballot box.

Democracy Docket: A county admitted that it's swapping voting maps after the primary specifically to help Republicans win in November. Galveston County argued it's within its rights to redraw maps “to increase partisan performance (as here).” A Trump-appointed federal judge separately called the timing of the switch “highly suspicious.”

Media Matters: On LindellTV, Patrick Byrne criticizes “completely incompetent” Trump for his “very tepid little weak tea” election interference speech

Fox News: New midterm battleground takes shape as parties build election armies