Try and Stop Us Digest — August 20, 2026

Must Read

NYT Raises Alarm On Trump's Election Meddling

The New York Times editorial board just moved the country one notch closer to autocracy on the measure that tracks a governing party rewriting the rules to keep power. The New York Times: The board's index scores 12 markers of democratic erosion from 0 to 10, where ten is a true autocracy like China, Iran or Russia. In its fourth edition, it raised "manipulating the law to stay in power" to Level 3, citing the push for new Republican gerrymanders, legislation that could keep eligible voters from voting, and signals that federal power may be used to throw out legitimate ballots this fall. The board estimates the gerrymandering campaign has already tilted the fight for the House at least 2.5 percentage points toward Republicans.

Trump Has Next-To-Nothing To Show For His Noncitizen Voter Hunt

Federal agents chased tens of thousands of leads and charged 41 people. ProPublica: Homeland Security Investigations, built to pursue cartels and human trafficking, was turned onto state voter rolls, and between January 2025 and May 2026 fewer than 150 alleged noncitizen voters were referred for prosecution. Minnesota produced a single referral; Ohio, which handed its unredacted rolls to the Justice Department, produced two and no charges at all. The second-in-command at Minnesota's U.S. attorney's office told Washington the whole process had been "dysfunctional."

Trump's Newest "Stolen Election" Claim Falls Apart Again As Former Census Officials Trash Report

Trump says Census data found 24,000 illegal votes in 2020. The Census Bureau's former chief scientist says the finding is too small to tell apart from ordinary matching errors. CNN: John M. Abowd, who held the post from 2016 to 2022, said the 24,000 matches amount to about 0.019% of the 128 million records analyzed, and that no professional researcher he worked with at the bureau would present that as proof of anything. The voter file came from Data-Clear, a Virginia firm paid $649,500 under a 2024 federal contract, and included birth dates but no Social Security numbers, the identifiers needed to guard against false matches. For scale, Biden carried Arizona by 10,457 votes against 1,100 alleged noncitizen votes, Georgia by 11,779 against 400, and Wisconsin by 20,682 against 500.

Nobody's name is on the report cited by Trump, and the team behind it included people tied to a Trump-aligned think tank. NPR: Work on the analysis was not done by career Census Bureau staff, according to a bureau employee who spoke anonymously out of fear of retaliation at work. Former officials say publishing without a named author departs from the layered review the agency normally applies. The America First Policy Institute promoted the analysis publicly the same day Trump did.

Minnesota Election Denier Mike Lindell Won't Accept Losing By 11 Points

Trump's endorsed candidate lost the Minnesota governor's primary by about 45,000 votes and is now personally paying for a statewide hand recount. CBS Minnesota / KSTP: Lindell finished a distant second to House Speaker Lisa Demuth in the Aug. 11 Republican primary, roughly 11 points back and far outside the 0.25% margin at which Minnesota pays for a recount automatically. He is citing anomalies he says he found in election-night reporting data, including vote totals that moved backward, synchronized totals across all seven Republican candidates, and counties reporting more votes than cast, though there have been no official findings of fraud or irregularity in the results. Lindell said that even if the recount does not overturn the outcome, it is a "gateway to get rid of election voting machines."

In The States

GEORGIA — A federal judge threw out the lawsuit trying to limit what the Trump administration can do with the Fulton County election records the FBI seized in January. Democracy Docket: U.S. District Judge J.P. Boulee granted the Justice Department's motion to dismiss the case, brought by the NAACP, its Georgia and Atlanta affiliates, the Georgia Coalition for the People's Agenda and two Fulton County voters, who had asked the court to bar the government from using more than 600 boxes of records for voter purges or immigration enforcement. Boulee ruled that the procedural rule they invoked applies only when someone is also asking for seized property back. The dismissal was without prejudice, and he did not rule that the government may use the records for those purposes.

WISCONSIN — A right-wing group with a national record of voter purge lawsuits lost its bid for the state's voter registration lists, and all three judges who rejected it were appointed by Republican presidents. Democracy Docket: The Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal of a 2024 suit by the Public Interest Legal Foundation challenging Wisconsin's exemption from the National Voter Registration Act provision requiring public inspection of voter list maintenance records. Wisconsin is exempt because it offers same-day registration at the polls. The panel said the foundation had advanced two novel theories resting on the rights of states while aiming them squarely against Wisconsin's own interests.

What Experts Are Saying

The Census Bureau director who resigned as Trump returned to office says the report is a White House product wearing the agency's name. "It is clearly a product of White House and Department of Commerce analysts." — Robert Santos, former Director, U.S. Census Bureau, CNN

A former Census official says the administration is treating data glitches as crimes. "...even if they observed anomalies in the data, those anomalies aren't necessarily fraud." — Amy O'Hara, Director, Georgetown University's Massive Data Institute, and former chief of the Census Bureau's Center for Administrative Records Research and Applications, NPR

Headlines

Courts

Democracy Docket: Missouri judge sides with GOP, blocks voters from challenging gerrymander

In The States

Washington Post: What it means that Democrats are winning special elections in Trump country