Try and Stop Us Digest — October 19, 2026

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Trump And DOJ Threaten California Officials With Prosecution Over A "Data Dump" Of Alleged Noncitizens

DOJ threatened California election officials with prosecution, and Trump says they will all go to jail. Associated Press / Newsweek: A Friday letter from acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter warned that officials who tabulate ballots cast by people federal agencies have identified as noncitizens “risk becoming aiders and abettors to a federal crime.” It went to the L.A. County Counsel, with copies to Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Registrar Dean Logan, a day after DOJ sued to block the ballots. Trump weighed in late Friday on Truth Social, writing: “They will all go to jail for a long period of time!!!” UCLA’s Rick Hasen said the letter “ups the ante by threatening election officials with potential criminal prosecution,” and former DOJ official Justin Levitt said “Courts haven’t been buying what DOJ has been selling.”

DOJ’s 20,000-name “noncitizen” list is so sloppy California officials say they can’t verify it. New York Times / Democracy Docket: DOJ sued to bar California from counting mail ballots from the 20,000 people on the list, and Secretary of State Shirley Weber said its demands “threaten thousands of Californians’ right to vote.” L.A. County registrar’s office spokesman Mike Sanchez called the list “basically a data dump,” with no Social Security numbers and addresses outside the county’s jurisdiction, and Registrar Dean Logan said it has “no indication of the source, methodology, or verification of any information provided.” DOJ sent their list only to L.A. County, which has no jurisdiction over voters in the state’s 57 other counties, and when asked why it sued L.A. over people registered elsewhere, said only: “They are statewide.” A similar DHS claim in Nevada shrank from 15,903 possible noncitizens to 185 to zero.

"No Kings" Turns Out For Early Voting While Meta Suspends Its Instagram Account

“No Kings” held nearly 3,000 “Vote Early” events in all 50 states, and Meta locked the movement out of its main Instagram account for hours on the big day. New York Times / Newsweek: Saturday’s rallies, marches, voter-information drives and organized trips to the polls were aimed at getting people to vote early. Organizers, a coalition of about 200 groups including the ACLU and the League of Women Voters said the goal was to build the capacity to meet efforts to undermine the midterms with “overwhelming nonviolent people power.” While the events were underway, Meta suspended the coalition’s main Instagram account for about 90 minutes, and organizers say they were still unable to post or communicate with supporters for roughly four more hours calling the suspension “unjustified.” Meta blamed an automated system triggered by very high posting frequency, and spokesperson Andy Stone apologized, saying the action “was clearly taken in error.” Democrats, including Sens. Chris Murphy and Chris Van Hollen are demanding an investigation.

Every Judge To Rule Has Thrown Out Trump's Voter Data Lawsuits. DOJ Is Pressing Ahead Anyway.

DOJ has lost all 26 rulings in its voter-roll lawsuits, and wants a court to let it keep collecting the data anyway. ProPublica / Democracy Docket: DOJ asked a federal court Friday night to pause D.C. Judge Sparkle Sooknanan's Oct. 9 order blocking its program of collecting state voter data and running it against federal databases, insisting "There is no such policy." Every judge to rule on its demands for states' unredacted voter rolls, including eight appointed by Trump, has rejected them. Judge Cathy Bissoon wrote that officials' own statements reveal an intent "to create a nationwide voter-database, for potential weaponization in future elections."

Trump’s DHS is building a national voter registry, and DOJ won’t say whether it will release it before November. Democracy Docket: Under Trump’s March executive order, DHS is compiling state-by-state “State Citizenship Lists” of people eligible to vote from citizenship, Social Security and SAVE data, and has said they’re “coming soon.” No court has blocked the effort. Because no federal agency tracks real-time residency, eligible voters could be left off the lists, which could then be used to challenge their registrations and ballots, setting off mass voter challenges. SAVE has a record of errors: Texas’s check flagged 2,724 people as potential noncitizens, and county officials later confirmed at least 578 were citizens.

Trump Revives His 2020 Election Lies, This Time With The Federal Government Behind Them

Trump’s 2020 conspiracy theories have become government action, and advocates fear the goal is to delegitimize the midterms. New York Times: Some of Trump’s 2020 conspiracy theories now carry the force of the executive branch behind them. His false claim of “thousands and thousands” of “crooked votes” in nursing homes appears to have inspired a Medicare agency memo warning facility workers about “inappropriate coercion or other violations of residents’ rights.” Hundreds of federal investigators are hunting for noncitizen voters and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin asked DOJ to look into whether voting machines can be trusted. The fear is that the administration will use the federal government to cast doubt on the election, discourage participation or, in a worst-case scenario, try to delegitimize the results, including by pointing to officials’ refusal to act on dubious concerns about voter rolls or machines to argue after the election that the results aren’t valid.

At a Georgia rally, Trump again falsely claimed Sen. Jon Ossoff’s election was illegitimate. The Guardian / MS NOW: Campaigning in Dalton for Senate candidate Rep. Mike Collins, Trump told the crowd that Ossoff does not represent Georgia’s values: “And he was never elected.” He again claimed Georgia’s 2020 election was fraudulent, with early voting underway in a state that has long been the focus of his fraud claims. Georgians cast more than 190,000 ballots on the first day, a record for an off-year election, and Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said the turnout shows voters “have confidence in the integrity of our elections.” Meanwhile, the State Election Board, whose majority is Trump allies, has urged DOJ and DHS to intervene in the state’s voting machinery.

Trump's "election fraud" task force has found no fraud. It's using the "election integrity" label to build a public case against the officials who investigated him. Washington Post: Led by pro-Trump journalist John Solomon, the White House task force has released 113 documents in 14 batches from the Mueller and Smith investigations and filed them on the White House website under "election integrity." Trump allies see the records as evidence for the Justice Department's Florida case against past officials, which has produced many subpoenas but no indictments, while legal experts and former law enforcement officials say the files show investigators following "normal, court-authorized procedures."

GOP Officials Are Making It Harder To Vote In The Senate Battlegrounds

Republican lawmakers and local boards are making it harder to vote in the states that will decide Congress. CNN: Voters in at least 22 states face new hurdles compared with 2024, according to the Brennan Center, from stricter ID and registration rules to fewer early voting sites, polling places and drop boxes. The changes have drawn less attention than Trump’s attacks on mail voting and voter rolls, but they could have just as big an impact on turnout in competitive Senate races in Iowa, Ohio, North Carolina and Texas. League of Women Voters CEO Celina Stewart said: “In 17 years of working on voting rights, I have never seen such a widespread and coordinated effort to restrict access to the ballot.” Ohio now has one of the nation’s strictest photo ID laws and one drop box per county, including for Cuyahoga’s more than a million people, while Texas’s Tarrant County cut polling sites by nearly 30 percent on a 3-2 party-line vote and North Carolina boards eliminated Sunday early voting in 23 counties.

Trump's Allies Are Openly Pushing Martial Law And Ballot Seizures. Senate Democrats Want DOJ To Rule It Out.

Trump allies are openly calling for martial law and the “commandeering of ballots” if they decide the midterms are “rigged.” Axios: On a Sept. 30 call for MAGA election activists streamed on Rumble, Peter Ticktin, Trump’s childhood friend and the attorney for Tina Peters, said “there would have to be martial law in the event... [of] another rigged election,” and later told Axios there would “probably need to be commandeering of ballots and election equipment.” Another participant, Gregory Stenstrom, said he most wanted the election paused, or for Trump to invoke the National Emergencies Act to force states to change how they run elections. Peters, who met with Trump again this month after visiting the White House with Ticktin in June, is promoting a plan to switch to hand-marked paper ballots and recount votes by hand, and Ticktin summed it up: “Her plan is secure the paper ballots and recount by hand.” The call’s host urges viewers to sign up through the Republican Party to become poll workers and observers in November.

Three Senate Democrats are demanding that DOJ promise not to seize ballots or voting equipment before the midterms are certified. NBC News: Sens. Alex Padilla, Dick Durbin and Sheldon Whitehouse asked Attorney General Todd Blanche to "immediately reaffirm that the Department will forgo any actions that would interfere with the lawful administration of the 2026 elections, including the seizure of ballots, election materials, or election equipment." They warned that "Any DOJ action that could spoil an election would be one of the most serious constitutional violations imaginable," and want written answers by Oct. 29.

In The States

FLORIDA — NAACP youth chapters sued to block Florida's ban on using student IDs to vote. Democracy Docket: HB 991 expressly excludes IDs from public educational institutions, and Secretary of State Cord Byrd and the election supervisors of all 67 counties are named defendants. The law doesn't take effect until Jan. 1, 2027, so it won't touch this year's midterms. The suit cites data showing more than 1.4 million Floridians aged 18 to 24, about a quarter of that age group, lacked a driver's license in 2024.

TEXAS — Texas has another state-caused registration backlog: about 15,000 address updates counties must process as early voting begins today. Votebeat: Updates submitted from Sept. 1 until last week were hit, and officials must work out which came in before the Oct. 5 registration deadline. Bexar County got 3,000 records, Travis 1,100, Williamson 700 and Hays 400. The state blamed an extra address validation with Texas.gov and its vendor, Civix, and the glitch follows an earlier driver's license portal error that stranded hundreds of thousands of registrations.