Try and Stop Us Digest — October 9, 2026

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Election Deniers Are Mining Records To Manufacture Fraud Claims

A Georgia GOP election task force member is projecting 31,000 illegal votes in November, from numbers Georgia's Republican secretary of state says aren't accurate. The Center Square: Mark Davis, a longtime data analyst who sits on the Georgia Republican Party's Election Confidence Task Force and is a contributing writer to The Federalist, ran the projections for the right-leaning outlet by matching voter rolls against Postal Service change-of-address filings. He claims nearly 31,000 voters who moved could cast ballots in their old counties in November and that more than 36,000 did in 2024. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said Davis's numbers aren't accurate. Sara Tindall Ghazal, the lone Democrat on the State Election Board, said post office records are about mail, not residency, and that proving illegal voting would take individual investigation of every flagged voter. After the 2020 election, Davis worked with a former FBI agent to challenge Georgia voters' eligibility before the January 2021 Senate runoffs.

Election deniers are using public records requests to build fraud claims in California, and law enforcement is acting on them. CalMatters: CalMatters obtained request logs from 13 counties. True the Vote says it has filed 250 requests nationally, including in Fresno, Orange, Riverside and Sacramento counties. FBI and other federal agents visited Shasta County's Clint Curtis in his Redding office in September and inspected ballots after he questioned the June primary. In Riverside County, the sheriff's office seized 650,000 ballots after relying on an activist group's findings. Another activist, Shiloh Marx, has filed at least five lawsuits against California counties over inactive and duplicate voters.

ICE Blacks Out Its Answer On Arresting People At The Polls

ICE redacted its own talking points on whether it will arrest people at polling places, even after being sued for the records. Democracy Docket: Democracy Forward filed its FOIA request in April, sued when ICE ignored it, and published the first 166 pages ICE produced; up to 4,500 more are due. The records include a memo preparing an unnamed official for a meeting with members of Congress on "ICE's Role in Elections and at Polling Facilities." The proposed answers on whether ICE will arrest people at polling places and whether it would comply with an order to send personnel there are blacked out under an exemption for law enforcement techniques. Redactions also hide the name of an agency task force and the number of voter-fraud arrests by Homeland Security Investigations. An undated letter from then-acting director Todd Lyons to Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, who asked whether ICE would be at 2026 voting locations, says HSI "will continue" investigating voter fraud. Trump and other officials have suggested immigration agents or federal troops could be sent to voting sites, and Democracy Forward expects more litigation.

Election Deniers Led Trump's Revenge Probe. Now It's A Mess.

Kurt Olsen, a longtime election denier who helped lead Trump's "grand conspiracy" investigation, failed a polygraph about his contacts with foreigners, which imperiled his security clearance. New York Times: Olsen quit soon after Joseph diGenova, the 81-year-old Trump defender who embraced unsubstantiated claims about the 2020 election, resigned last month as the probe's leader after a blowup with Attorney General Todd Blanche. Olsen had no experience working on criminal cases. The team also included an FBI agent who had investigated a conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was hacked by Italian satellites, part of a special team assembled by FBI Director Kash Patel. Most prosecutors on the case are military lawyers or were dispatched from other offices, because few career prosecutors would join. The Southern District of Florida office, once more than 200 lawyers, is now slightly more than half that size. The probe is now overseen directly by Blanche deputy Aakash Singh, and the dozen prosecutors still on it are fast-tracking narrower cases against chief targets.

In The States

GEORGIA — Republicans are asking the judge who just threw out their Gwinnett County suit to block the county's mail ballot return policy anyway. Democracy Docket: Judge Warren Davis dismissed the case Wednesday, holding that Georgia law allows counties to designate additional places for voters to return absentee ballots. On Thursday, the RNC, the Gwinnett County Republican Party and secretary of state candidate Tim Fleming filed an emergency motion to stop the county from letting voters hand-deliver mail ballots at early voting sites without drop boxes, along with a notice of appeal. They argue the appeal could become moot if voters return ballots under the policy before an appeals court acts. At those sites, voters hand completed ballots to trained poll managers, who log the time of receipt and secure the ballots for transport to the county elections office. Early voting begins Oct. 13. The DSCC and Jon Ossoff's Senate campaign are intervenors.

MICHIGAN — The ACLU is threatening to sue a Michigan township that mailed absentee ballots six working days late. Votebeat: State law required ballots to be mailed 40 days before the election, which was Sept. 24. Tuscarora Township mailed 240 on Oct. 3, and the ACLU says the rest went out by Oct. 5. More than 800 of the township's roughly 3,000 residents are on the permanent absentee list. The ACLU wants Deputy Clerk Dawn Webb to retract a now-deleted Facebook post claiming Michigan has no legal deadline for mailing absentee ballots, only for making them available, and to publicly commit to following election law. As of Thursday, no correction had been issued, and the clerk and deputy clerk did not respond to requests for comment. The state Bureau of Elections is looking into the matter.

NEW HAMPSHIRE — New Hampshire is appealing a federal ruling that students' IDs can still count as evidence of identity when registering to vote. WVNY: Judge Joseph Laplante ruled last Friday that Secretary of State David Scanlan's office misread HB 323, the law Gov. Kelly Ayotte signed in April, when it told officials student IDs couldn't be considered in any part of the election process. HB 323 requires a driver's license, nondriver ID, armed services ID or passport to get a ballot but doesn't cover registration, and the judge found Scanlan's guidance contradicts an earlier state law letting voters prove identity with "any other evidence that reasonably establishes that it is more likely than not that the person is who they claim to be." Scanlan must now issue new guidance. The state has now appealed to the First Circuit, and with less than a month until Election Day, students without a government-issued ID remain in limbo.

WISCONSIN — A Wisconsin judge refused to let voters who fear postal delays cast provisional ballots in person on Election Day. Democracy Docket: The League of Women Voters of Wisconsin and a Dane County voter challenged a Wisconsin Elections Commission policy, arguing it forbids Wisconsinites from exercising their right to vote. Mail ballots must arrive by 8 p.m. on Nov. 3, with no grace period for mail delays. The judge denied emergency relief, and a ruling on summary judgment would likely come after the midterms. The Postal Service is slowing pickup and delivery nationwide through new cost-cutting measures, and a commission survey found 67% of clerks saw mail travel-time problems in April's local elections. In Milwaukee, 336 absentee ballots arrived the day after the spring election and were all rejected, and more than 100 arrived late in Fond du Lac and weren't counted.