Try and Stop Us Digest — September 25, 2026

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From 16,000 to 185 to Zero: Nevada Exposes Trump's Fake "Noncitizen Voter" Numbers

Nevada election officials told DHS this week that every one of the 185 people it flagged as supposed noncitizen voters is actually a citizen — the final collapse of a number that started at over 15,000. New York Times: DHS and Trump first claimed 15,903 noncitizens on Nevada's rolls in July. Within weeks DHS admitted the number never got a full review and quietly shrank it to 185, then called Nevada's finding that even those were citizens "false." DHS never actually gave Nevada a list of 15,903 names — it sent about 6,000 "voter case numbers" with no names, birthdates, or addresses, identifiers that can match more than one voter under the state's new registration system. Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar: DHS "continue[s] their attempts to intimidate election officials into compliance and deter voters with huge claims of fraud with no evidence. Repeating unsupported claims does not make them true."

Show Me Chaos: Missouri Tells Voters To Hold Off While SCOTUS Decides — Again

Missouri election officials are now advising voters to delay casting ballots until the Supreme Court rules on the map fight for a third time, since a late map switch could invalidate already-cast votes. Politico: Boone County Clerk Brianna Lennon says a map change could affect 40% of her county's voters and require reprinting ballots on what would be "a weekend project" Jackson County's entire electorate would shift districts. Absentee voting has already started under the 2022 map while the Supreme Court decision looms.

California's Supreme Court Just Ended The Bianco Ballot Saga

California's Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco broke the law when he seized roughly 650,000 ballots from a 2025 special election, and ordered them returned immediately. New York Times / Democracy Docket: Justice Goodwin Liu wrote the seizure involved "the unlawful removal and handling by armed deputies of over 1,000 boxes of documents... the most precious documents of the citizenry in a democracy: their votes." Bianco, who was running for governor when he launched the investigation, maintains he acted lawfully. California Attorney General Rob Bonta says Bianco now faces "legal consequences," pointing to a new state law — passed specifically in response to Bianco's conduct — that makes this kind of seizure a crime going forward.

Democrats And State Officials Are Building Their Defenses Against Agents At The Polls

Congressional Democratic leaders sued the Trump administration over threats to send armed federal agents to polling places. The Hill: Schumer, Jeffries, and the parties' campaign committees argue DHS's own statements — that agents would show up for a "threat" or to serve a warrant — effectively confirm a policy of permitting armed officers at active polling sites. It's at least the third such lawsuit, following one from a coalition of civil rights groups last week.

Top state officials in Democratic-led states are actively preparing to fight back if federal agents show up at the polls, and Congress is joining the fight too. Democracy Docket / Democracy Docket: Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows says she's training clerks and coordinating with law enforcement so no local official has to "throw their body in front of ICE" alone; Michigan AG Dana Nessel says she'll have special agents on call to respond to any incident. Sen. Tammy Baldwin has introduced a bill to keep federal agents a quarter-mile from polling places, and California's new election-safeguard law similarly bans most arrests within 200 feet of a polling site.

The White House Is Pushing DHS To Speed Up Its Voter Purge Hunt

The White House has directly pressured DHS to accelerate its review of at least 47 states' voter rolls, even buying private data to fill gaps in the states that refuse to comply. Reuters: An internal email shows a DHS official offered to escalate to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles if the effort didn't move faster; the agency is buying supplemental data from a commercial broker called Accurint to fill in redacted state rolls. Officers were given a target of vetting five names an hour — a target they rarely hit — and the effort has mistakenly swept up citizens born abroad and people who merely share a name with an immigrant. DHS's Markwayne Mullin says 1,620 cases are "moving right now... and that list grows every single day."

DOJ is asking a federal judge today not to block DHS from building lists of eligible voters nationwide, even as the administration's parallel push to seize state voter rolls has now lost 25 straight court cases. Reuters: Privacy advocates argue the plan violates federal privacy law by pulling citizen data from agencies like the Social Security Administration; voting rights lawyer Marc Elias put it bluntly: "You can't do mass disenfranchisement without a voter file." The federal government has never compiled a list like this before — election administration is constitutionally a state function.

Arizona's attorney general and secretary of state asked the U.S. attorney to investigate whether DHS misused the state's voter data in violation of a federal court order. KTAR: Kris Mayes and Adrian Fontes cited a whistleblower complaint alleging DHS diverted fraud-detection staff to an "Unlawful Voter Initiative" without the legally required public notice and comment. They're asking federal prosecutors to confirm the data didn't come from Arizona's own voter rolls, including a 2020 Maricopa County file the U.S. attorney's office may have obtained via a state Senate subpoena.

In The States

CALIFORNIA — FBI agents inspected a room full of ballots in ultra-conservative Shasta County last week after the county's elections chief — an election denier who lost his June race — claimed some mail ballots looked and smelled like counterfeits. CalMatters: Clint Curtis padlocked the ballot room himself in anticipation of federal interest and has openly courted the Trump administration's attention; other Shasta County officials, by contrast, asked the state and federal government to investigate Curtis's own conduct. Election security experts call his fraud claims "nonsense" given the safeguards already built into ballot verification.

FLORIDA — Florida charged 20 people with voter fraud Thursday, mostly noncitizens who registered while attesting they were citizens. New York Times: Gov. Ron DeSantis used the announcement to contrast Florida's approach with Democratic-led states like California. One case highlighted was Cyntia Canales, a 62-year-old legal resident from Chile who registered in 2012 and says she never realized it was a problem; her attorney says she "was shocked she was charged."

MICHIGAN — Antrim County's clerk made 128 unauthorized changes to the state's voter file, and Barry County's sheriff and the Secretary of State's office are now accusing each other of misconduct over a noncitizen-voting probe. Interlochen Public Radio / WOOD: Antrim's Victoria Bishop, whose access to the voter file was revoked in June, canceled 58 registrations without authorization and has completed only two of the four trainings the state requires to restore her access; six recall petitions have been filed against her, four getting a hearing Sept. 25. In Barry County, the Secretary of State's office says Sheriff Dar Leaf harassed branch staff and demanded personal information without legal authority; Leaf says he's referring the office's chief legal director to federal authorities for "obstruction of justice." Leaf has investigated voter fraud claims since 2020 without ever producing a case that led to charges.

PENNSYLVANIA — Pennsylvania's top election official says the midterms will proceed as normal even as the state remains one of the administration's top targets, with nearly a million mail ballot applications already approved. Pennsylvania Capital-Star / Democracy Docket: Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt says a redesigned ballot envelope and a year of voter education have cut mail-ballot rejection rates by nearly 60%. Trump singled out Pennsylvania this summer with a false claim of 15,000 noncitizens on its rolls, but a state audit later found just one improperly registered noncitizen — whose registration was already canceled and who never voted. DOJ's separate lawsuit for the state's unredacted voter rolls was thrown out in June

TEXAS — A GOP state senator says Texas should have caught a DPS error that's delayed at least 178,000 voter registrations weeks before the election. Texas Tribune: Sen. Paul Bettencourt says the office overseeing the system counties use to receive DPS files "should have caught it"; Dallas County alone has received more than 68,000 backlogged applications, and Gov. Greg Abbott has not commented.

TEXAS – Texas's highest criminal court let stand a ruling that overturned Crystal Mason's five-year sentence for casting an uncounted provisional ballot. Texas Tribune: The court's majority gave no explanation for declining to reinstate her conviction, prompting a sharp dissent from one judge who said Texans "are owed some explanation." Mason, who always maintained she didn't know she was ineligible to vote while on supervised release, said she's relieved to "move on" after nearly a decade of legal fighting.