Try and Stop Us Digest — September 23, 2026

Must Read

Show Me Chaos: Missouri Map Is Back For Round Three At SCOTUS

Redistricting opponents filed an emergency appeal Tuesday night asking the Supreme Court to block the 8th Circuit's surprise order reviving Missouri's GOP gerrymander — and Kavanaugh wants an answer from the state by 2pm today. Politico: The Supreme Court has already ruled against the GOP map twice in the past two weeks; the 8th Circuit ordered its use anyway on Monday, despite a unanimous Missouri Supreme Court ruling that the map never legally took effect.

Trump Ramps Up Assault On Voting Six Weeks Out From Election Day

Trump plots a wave of new arrests and prosecutions over alleged noncitizen voting between now and Election Day. Axios: DHS has opened 1,600 fraud cases and made 160 arrests so far; DOJ has charged 24 immigrants this year. A DOJ official called it a "tier one priority" and said prosecutions will "rise significantly each week" through November — even as staff normally assigned to smuggling and trafficking cases get pulled onto the hunt, and a former senior DOJ official calls the whole approach "not typical" and "not appropriate."

DOJ is using a Utah mail carrier who dumped 300 ballots out of “laziness” to justify its mail-voting crackdown . Salt Lake Tribune / Politico: At a Washington press conference, Acting Deputy AG Trent McCotter pointed to the case as proof that Trump's blocked mail-ballot tracking order was necessary — while telling reporters only that "a judge in Massachusetts" had blocked it, skipping any mention that it was the Supreme Court that actually kept the block in place last week. The carrier, Damon Seei, told investigators he dumped the mail out of "laziness," not politics, and has no criminal history. Prosecutors didn't seek his detention and he was released the same day. Utah's own legislative auditors found no signs of "significant fraud" in the state's elections last week.

Harmeet Dhillon is now calling DOJ's 1,000 election monitors "observers" — a title with far more legal power than she's actually authorized to deploy. Democracy Docket: Observers can currently only be deployed by court order in three counties nationwide; Dhillon, who has spent years training people as poll watchers, would know the difference. Another DOJ official used the correct term, "monitors," at a press conference the same day.

DOJ Now 0-25 Trying To Seize Voter Rolls

A federal judge in Washington state dismissed DOJ's lawsuit demanding the state hand over every voter's unredacted personal data. KREM: DOJ has now lost all 25 of these cases nationwide, seeking birthdates, driver's license numbers, and partial Social Security numbers under an anti-fraud initiative launched in September 2025. Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs: "The DOJ has now lost 25 of these cases. Baseless demands for state voter rolls are part of a broader pattern of federal overreach." Attorney General Nick Brown called it "the likeliest of victories for democracy."

RNC: Mail Voting For Me, Not For Thee

The RNC has sued across the country to restrict mail ballots, but it also paid for a get-out-the-vote website and emails urging Republican voters to "request your mail-in ballot now." Democracy Docket: The RNC's "Swamp the Vote" site advertises absentee deadlines in states, including New York, where the party has sued to restrict the exact same voting method. Campaign Legal Center's Jonathan Diaz: "If the campaigns want people who support them to vote by mail, then there isn't actually a problem with vote by mail. They just don't want their opponents to be able to use it." MIT's Charles Stewart III said the dual approach is "not surprising at all," since mail voting is "really valuable" for any campaign regardless of party.

GOP Candidates Still Won't Quit 2020 Election Denial

Republican nominees in several of this year's most competitive Senate races, including Georgia's Mike Collins and Michigan's Mike Rogers, are still echoing Trump's false 2020 election claims, even as some GOP voters say they're tired of it. NPR: Just 1% of voters called election integrity their top issue in a recent NYT/Siena poll. Georgia election official Gabe Sterling, who defended the state's 2020 results and lost his own secretary of state primary this year: "Regular humans have given this up a long time ago." Sterling suspects Trump keeps pushing the claims now partly to set up an excuse if Republicans lose in November.

Bright Spot: Half A Million Voters Registered In A Day

National Voter Registration Day drove at least 550,000 new or updated registrations on Sept. 15 . Democracy Docket: The drive ran over 3,500 events with help from celebrities and pro sports teams, even as Republican officials have escalated pressure on registration groups — including an FBI raid this summer on the Ohio Organizing Collaborative over unsubstantiated fraud allegations. Campaign director Chyann Sapp says voters are showing up because they're seeing the impact of policy "at the gas station" and "on their grocery bill."

In The States

COLORADO — The Colorado Supreme Court declined to hear Tina Peters' appeal of her election-tampering conviction. Colorado Public Radio: Peters was originally sentenced to nearly nine years for permitting unauthorized access to Mesa County's voting equipment. She will remain a convicted felon even after Gov. Jared Polis controversially commuted her prison sentence earlier this year.

DELAWARE — Delaware's Supreme Court upheld the state's permanent absentee ballot law just in time for the midterms. Democracy Docket: The law lets voters who can't vote in person — due to disability, illness, religious observance, or work — automatically receive a ballot each election; one of the Republican candidates who sued actually co-sponsored the law himself 16 years ago.

NORTH CAROLINA — Voting rights groups sued North Carolina Tuesday, arguing new last-minute absentee ballot restrictions the State Board of Elections rushed through will cause "arbitrary disenfranchisement." Democracy Docket: The board voted along party lines to require signature verification on inner ballot envelopes and to limit who can help a voter return their ballot to just a "near relative or legal guardian" — changes made the same day ballots started going out, skipping the usual legislative review process.

TEXAS — An unknown number of Texas voter registration applications never reached county election officials because of a state DPS system error, surfacing less than two weeks before the Oct. 5 registration deadline. Texas Tribune: The DPS online portal is a major registration channel — about 6 million Texans have used it since 2020 — and officials don't yet know how many records were affected or what caused the failure. Affected voters can still cast a provisional ballot that will count once officials verify they registered in time.