Try and Stop Us Digest — October 29, 2026

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Judge Shoots Down DOJ's Bid To Set Aside 20,000 California Ballots

A federal judge rejects DOJ's last-minute bid to set aside 20,000 California voters' mail ballots. NBC News: Judge David Carter refused DOJ's request that California segregate mail ballots from voters the administration alleges are noncitizens and not count them until their citizenship is confirmed, writing, "This request violates longstanding constitutional principles mandating that states have control over their elections." He wrote that the relief would "wreak havoc and disrupt the election that is already underway, create a chilling effect on election workers and voters alike, and discount the votes of United States citizens," and that "either party could create chaos for their own political purposes to disrupt the election process." Carter said DOJ already has a "clear remedy" in its prosecutorial tools, and that California has procedures to cancel the registration of anyone proven ineligible. "Where is the evidence?" A 9th Circuit panel had already ruled 2-1 against DOJ, calling its "claimed emergency" at least partly "a self-constructed one.”

Trump's DOJ Is Flooding The Zone Before Election Day And Laying The Groundwork For A Post-Election Fight

Blanche's DOJ is flooding the zone before Election Day, and the sloppy paperwork shows the rush. New York Times: Blanche has ignored the longstanding department policy of delaying nonessential actions involving public figures within 60 days of an election, and he's rolling out a stream of actions against Democrats and Trump critics, including new charges against James Comey unsealed Monday and the indictment of Virginia Democrat L. Louise Lucas. "This is a classic flood-the-zone strategy — run so many plays at once that the defense doesn't know where to look," says Greg Rosen, a former federal prosecutor who led the department's Jan. 6 section. The haste shows in the paperwork: DOJ's Alaska lawsuit omitted the key verb describing what it wanted the court to do, and a letter to Washington State officials misspelled "voter rolls" as "voter roles." The Alaska and California election suits both bear the signatures of two top Blanche aides with White House ties, and people familiar with the matter say civil rights division officials questioned whether the suits were legitimate and viable. Trump said of the Alaska suit, "I'm the one that said do it."

DOJ and DHS keep re-announcing the same noncitizen voting arrests, and legal experts say it's about pre-spinning Republican losses, not law enforcement. Politico: The agencies are announcing charges against alleged noncitizen voters nearly every day, with photos of handcuffed suspects flanked by uniformed agents. A DOJ press release Monday touted 48 alleged illegal-voting cases in five states, but 28 of them, all in California, had already been announced a week earlier, and DHS posted "It happened again!" a week after DOJ announced the same arrests. "Its whole point is to have the theories and the filings in place — and the specter of mischief in the air — before the counting starts so that the results can be attacked if, but only if, they don't come out the 'right' way," Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck wrote. A federal judge agreed the push is also meant to scare lawful voters, barring DHS's "Unlawful Voter Initiative" in nine states and finding that the arrests and its social media campaign "create a reasonable fear of harm to those assisting and mobilizing voters."

Trump's $1 million voter fraud bounty was conspiracy theorist Wayne Allyn Root's idea, and election deniers are already trying to cash in with false claims. Media Matters / Democracy Docket: Root wrote a Gateway Pundit column last week urging Trump to create a "whistleblower reward fund" offering $1 million for voter fraud reports, and four days later Trump posted an offer of $1 million to "anybody reporting Voter Fraud in the past Elections, or the upcoming 2026 Midterm Election." "So proud that my idea from my lips went straight to President Trump and his tweet over at Truth Social literally minutes ago," Root said, and he claims he's "kind of in the middle of everything going on with the White House's attempts to keep Democrats from stealing the election." When Root told Trump in August to "declare a national security emergency for elections," Trump replied, "Let me just say that stranger things have happened, OK? I'll leave it at that." Since the bounty, activist Scott Presler has claimed "there are thousands of non-citizens on the voter rolls in Pennsylvania," based on comparing jury lists with voter rolls, a method election officials have repeatedly said is unreliable, and Jerome Corsi claimed on Steve Bannon's show that he and Peter Ticktin have "a real-time database across 47 states monitoring each registered voter and every mail-in ballot.” Democracy Docket expects the false claims to ramp up as Election Day nears, with the most dangerous conspiracies emerging as states begin certifying votes.

Cleta Mitchell, who helped plot the 2020 challenge, has shaped Trump's election agenda and has close ties to at least 25 of his appointees. ProPublica: Mitchell, who holds no formal administration job, helped draft the SAVE Act and was among the outside attorneys who suggested language for Trump's March 2025 election executive order. Trump's claim of more than 275,000 noncitizens on state voter rolls, since debunked, came from work led by one of her protégés in a top post at DHS. The FBI affidavit justifying the Fulton County raid included material compiled by an election-integrity network researcher and cited network participants as witnesses, and Mitchell was among those who recommended Dan Bishop to take over the case after the prosecutor began to doubt its strength. "She has the president's ear," says Steve Bannon. Frustrated that courts and moderate Senate Republicans have blocked her agenda, Mitchell told Bannon's audience that Trump could use a critical-infrastructure law to impose the SAVE America Act's requirements on his own: "We've got the blueprint. We'll help. We just need someone in authority to say, 'Let's do it.'"

Trump's Power Over The Midterms Has Hard Limits

Federal employees who help Trump interfere in the election could face prison, fines and firing, and a pardon can't shield them from state charges. Center for American Progress: Federal law makes it a crime for any federal official to order, bring or keep troops or armed federal agents at polling places, punishable by up to $250,000 in fines, five years in prison and disqualification from federal office, according to a new analysis by CAP senior fellow Michael Sozan. Most of the related crimes have a five-year statute of limitations, so a future DOJ could bring charges until 2031, and the federal government may refuse to give an employee a lawyer or pay their penalties. State prosecutors act independently of DOJ, and a president can't pardon a state-level conviction. California makes it a crime to hire or arrange for uniformed law enforcement, including federal agents, to be at election-related locations, and local prosecutors across the country formed a coalition this year to support state prosecutions of federal officers who break state laws.

Trump's best shot at messing with the midterms is a razor-thin margin, because every extra seat means more clerks to convince, warrants to secure and court rulings to dodge. The Atlantic / Democracy Docket: Quinta Jurecic lays out the risk: if Democrats are set to win the House by just a few seats, a local election commissioner could refuse to sign off on a narrow Democratic win, or DOJ could seize ballots to delay or upend the count, leaving enough contested seats to deny the should-be majority the votes to elect a speaker on Jan. 3. "If there is a House majority in either direction that is 20, 30 seats, I think the likelihood of an attempt to engage in some kind of shenanigans around January 3 is way less than if the majority is two or three seats," says Jonathan Diaz of the Campaign Legal Center. Even doomed efforts like DOJ's Alaska and California suits help Trump build a narrative about courts blocking him from ensuring a fair election. Speaker Mike Johnson, who played a key role in Trump's effort to subvert the 2020 election, said Tuesday, "Of course we'll have a peaceful transfer of power," and called it "absurd" to suggest the House would refuse to seat new members, while insisting the polls showing big Democratic leads are wrong: "I'm sure that people will be upset with the election outcome on the Democrat side when we beat them on Election Day. But we're going to maintain the majority, I'll be the Speaker of the House administering the oath and we're gonna do it according to the law, as we always do." Jurecic writes, "In a healthy democracy, the opposition party should not have to win by enormous numbers to ensure victory."

The Danger: Unlike in 2020, there's no Bill Barr at DOJ to shoot down Trump's fraud claims if Republicans lose. CNN: Trump ordered DOJ to sue to block certification of Alaska's Senate election if Sen. Dan Sullivan loses, even though the Constitution gives a president no power to administer elections, and CNN's Stephen Collinson says the suit points to a post-election legal campaign if Mary Peltola wins one of the four net seats Democrats need for a Senate majority. Attorney General Bill Barr rebuffed Trump's fraud accusations in 2020, but Attorney General Todd Blanche has said that he will not pledge the department will always act independently of Trump. Collinson warns that Republican officials in key states can expect "withering pressure" from Trump, like his failed bid to force Georgia Republicans to "find" votes in 2020. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries says he assumes Republicans will "try to come up with any diabolical scheme to prevent November 3rd from being a free and fair election."

Project Veritas Founder O'Keefe Is Charged Over A Minnesota Polling Place Stunt

Prosecutors charge right-wing provocateurs James O'Keefe and Cam Higby with voter fraud felonies over a Minneapolis polling place stunt. New York Times: Hennepin County prosecutors charged the two content creators on Wednesday with unlawful voting, which can include trying to get a ballot by impersonating a registered voter, and identity theft, felonies that carry up to five years in prison each. In August, O’Keefe and Higby dressed in mock Islamic attire, used fake accents and spoke with poll workers to attack a Minnesota law that lets a registered voter vouch for up to eight others who recently moved, and prosecutors say O'Keefe impersonated registered voters, though no votes were cast fraudulently. "We have zero tolerance for lying, lawbreaking and disruptions at our polling places," said Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon in a statement in August. The vouching law has been on the books for more than 50 years, and less than 0.6% of voters used it in the 2024 general election.

Russia-Linked Deepfakes Target Two Democratic Senate Candidates

Videos likely from Russia are using real people's names and photos to smear Democratic Senate candidates Sherrod Brown and James Talarico. Associated Press: The videos, believed to be made with AI, target Brown in Ohio with a fake newscast that uses photos of Haya Akbik, who interned for him years ago, and Talarico in Texas with a clip framed as a direct-to-camera confessional from a former student. "It's my name, it's my reputation, making this allegation, and it's just completely false," says Akbik. Clemson media forensics expert Darren Linvill says they're likely products of Storm-1516, the Russian network that targeted Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in 2024, because the accounts sharing them also shared earlier Storm-1516 content. Dartmouth professor Hany Farid says both were likely generated or manipulated with AI, and the Talarico video "is consistent with previous disinformation campaigns released close to Election Day." X took down the original posts and suspended the users, but copies, some with hundreds of shares, are still online.

In The States

ALASKA — Alaskans vote next week on repealing ranked choice voting and the all-party primary, a push backed by Trump, the state GOP and Musk- and Yass-linked money. Politico: Ballot Measure 2 would roll back the 2020 reforms, including the all-party primary and the top-four ranked choice general election that many credit with helping Lisa Murkowski beat a challenger from her right and Mary Peltola win the state's House seat in 2022. Trump, outgoing Gov. Mike Dunleavy and the Alaska Republican Party back repeal, and Trump told a rally, "You go in No. 1, you come out No. 2, No. 3. Nobody knows what they're doing back there." Repeal Now has raised more than $2 million this year from one group backed by Elon Musk and GOP megadonor Jeff Yass. "It seems to me that this repeal is more about controlling the levers of power for the primary," says Ruth Hall, deputy campaign manager for No on 2.

GEORGIA — Nearly 2,900 voters in Democratic-stronghold Cobb County still haven't received the absentee ballots they requested, and a lawsuit blames an out-of-state vendor. Democracy Docket: A Cobb County voter filed suit Tuesday on behalf of the group, asking a judge to order the county election board to overnight their ballots before the Nov. 3 deadline. Voters who applied in the first 10 days of early voting still don't have them, even though the state's voter website says they've been issued, and fewer than 14% of Cobb's absentee ballots have been returned, compared with 44% in Fulton County, 71% in Paulding County and 50% statewide. Gwinnett and DeKalb counties, which have even lower return rates at 12.5% and 8%, hired the same New York-based vendor, Fort Orange Press, which also handled mail ballots in counties with delivery delays in Pennsylvania, Colorado and New York. "The only plausible explanation is a breakdown in the out-of-state private vendor's ability to deliver ballots to voters in a timely fashion in accordance with state law," the complaint reads.

IOWA — Iowans with past felony convictions are stuck in a confusing maze to vote, because the state never told them their rights were restored. Bolts: Gov. Kim Reynolds's 2020 executive order restored voting rights to people who finish their sentences, about 45,000 at once by the Sentencing Project's estimate, but state officials did little public outreach and have collected no data on its effects. Raul Lara, a Stanwood construction worker who finished probation months ago, was turned away when he tried to register because a state database wrongly listed him as still serving a felony sentence, and it took an attorney repeated calls to state and local offices to fix it. "So the default is that if you're not sure, you don't vote," says Alison Guernsey, who directs the University of Iowa's Federal Criminal Defense Clinic. Iowa is one of just three states where the constitution strips anyone with a felony conviction of the vote for life, so whoever wins the governor's race can extend, modify or rescind the order.

WYOMING — Wyoming's attorney general says state law bars DOJ monitors from polling places, and DOJ has agreed to stay 100 yards away. Cowboy State Daily: After DOJ sent monitors to Cheyenne on primary day, Attorney General Keith Kautz wrote in an opinion that DOJ's "general interest in monitoring compliance with federal law does not give it authority to enter a polling place where Wyoming law excludes the general public." Without a court order, settlement agreement or consent decree, he says, county clerks and election judges must exclude DOJ monitors, and disturbing a polling place is a misdemeanor, so the sheriff could get involved. Laramie County Clerk Debra Lee says DOJ told her its monitors will return Nov. 3, and that it agreed to stay 100 yards from the polls and interview only voters who agree. Lee says the monitors found no compliance concerns in her office, and former Secretary of State staffers recalled no such operation "in the last 40 years, if ever."