Try and Stop Us Digest — September 2, 2026

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The Light Is Blinking Red On Trump Messing With The 2026 Election

DHS Is Already Surging Fraud Investigations. A Whistleblower Says USPS Already Broke A Court Order. This Isn't A Future Threat — It's Happening Now. CNN: The federal government typically avoids "overt" investigatory actions this close to an election, precisely because unproven allegations can influence the outcome. That's a feature, not a bug, for Trump: his fraud claims have failed to hold up for a decade, from a first-term commission that folded to a 2020 post-election search that found nothing. Wyoming's Republican governor accused DOJ election monitors of "aggressive" behavior during his own state's primary: "I don't like the federal government coming in and taking our votes."

USPS Built A Mail-Ballot System It Knew Could Disenfranchise Millions — Then Rushed It Out Anyway

Top USPS officials raised the exact same disenfranchisement concerns internally that a whistleblower later made public. They moved forward anyway. ProPublica / Democracy Docket :If even one barcode fails to scan in a bulk mailing of 10,000 ballots, the whole batch gets rejected. In internal USPS meetings about how to comply with Trump's order, some officials recommended not rejecting entire batches — the directive moved forward anyway. "It is hard to imagine the USPS potentially disenfranchising all of those legal voters over a minor clerical error," said David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation & Research.

Election officials say the USPS rule can't be implemented in time — not because they won't, but because they physically can't. CNN: Washington's elections director says reprinting envelopes alone would cost nearly $2 million, and none of the state's vendors can even confirm they could do it in time. "We're weeks away from ballots going out and USPS still can't answer basic questions about how this is going to work," said Colorado's Amanda Gonzalez. Arizona's Adrian Fontes warned the new portal likely can't even handle a bulk upload from Maricopa County's 2.5 million voters.

Campaigns in both parties say they're "flying blind" on whether to even keep encouraging voters to use the mail because nobody knows if those ballots will count. Time: "That's the 8 million-vote question," one Republican consultant said. Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center urged calm: "I'm annoyed, but not freaked out... For voters, so far, nothing has changed—and is unlikely to before Election Day."

The Trump Administration Is Building A Nationwide Voter Surveillance System

ICE is paying up to $5 million to a contractor to comb through every state's voter data. A new lawsuit says the underlying database itself is illegal. FedScoop / Democracy Docket: No national voter list has ever existed because U.S. elections are run at the state level, not the federal level. "Building a database containing the identities, Social Security numbers, addresses, and citizenship information of every U.S. citizen is an extraordinary illegal overreach," said EPIC's John Davisson, who filed suit this week. DHS itself has admitted the underlying data will be riddled with inaccuracies.

DOJ wants 1,000 election monitors this November — nearly 40% more than were deployed for the entire 2024 presidential election. NOTUS: A former DOJ Civil Rights Division attorney who used to run these deployments said the scale doesn't add up to the division's traditional mission: "There would not be this free-floating search for fraud that Harmeet Dhillon is citing for sending out this exaggeratedly large number of monitors." Nearly all of the division's experienced voting-law attorneys have left since Trump returned to office.

DHS Secretary Mullin Refuses To Rule Out ICE At Polling Place. Politico: "The only reason why we would be at polling places is if there is a threat to that polling place or we're serving a warrant on someone that we have been actively tracking down," Mullin said. DHS separately confirmed that includes carrying out an arrest if "an active public safety threat endangered a polling location" — leaving wide latitude for what counts as a threat.

In The States

CALIFORNIA — Tina Peters turned down a Shasta County elections job after Gov. Newsom publicly vowed to block her. LA Times: "A convicted MAGA election tamperer working in an elections office. What could possibly go wrong?" Newsom posted, adding in all caps: "TINA, NOT IN CALIFORNIA!" Registrar Clint Curtis, who offered Peters the job, called the governor "crazy."

NEW HAMPSHIRE — The state is asking a federal appeals court to swiftly toss out DOJ's appeal of its own voter-roll lawsuit loss. Democracy Docket: New Hampshire's motion argues DOJ isn't just wrong about the law — it's doing "a bad job making its case." A district court already dismissed the underlying case in June.

TEXAS — Tarrant County commissioners voted 3-2 to cut nearly a third of the county's polling locations, over three hours of public testimony and after hundreds of protesters packed the courthouse. MS Now: Sites will drop from 316 to 224. "If it looks like voter suppression, if it sounds like voter suppression, it is voter suppression," said state Rep. Vikki Goodwin. A former Democratic state representative was arrested at a prior hearing on the same proposal for refusing to put down a microphone.

What Experts Are Saying

The head of a national election officials' group says the confusion caused by Trump's mail-voting order may not be an accident. "Confusion is, in some instances, I think the goal." — Tammy Patrick, Chief Programs Officer, National Association of Election Officials, CNN