Try and Stop Us Digest — September 28, 2026

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SCOTUS Clears Trump's Voter-Screening Database

The Supreme Court let the Trump administration deploy an expansive federal database for screening voter rolls, over the dissent of its three liberal justices. New York Times: The unsigned emergency ruling revives a system that combines citizenship information, Social Security numbers and other sensitive data on millions of Americans; states aren't required to use it. The majority concluded that Judge Sparkle Sooknanan's June ruling blocking the system was improper, though she had found that agencies rushed to combine records, including citizenship data they knew to be unreliable. In a 12-page dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote: "The harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take."

The ruling isn't expected to trigger widespread voter removals before November, but the system it clears has a record of flagging citizens as noncitizens. New York Times / Votebeat: Federal law bars wide-scale changes to voter rolls within 90 days of an election, but the administration can restart bulk scrutiny of state rolls after Nov. 3. DHS says election officials in 25 states, mostly Republican, have already run their rolls through SAVE. Texas flagged 2,724 people as potential noncitizens and later found at least 578, roughly 20%, were citizens. St. Louis County found that about 35% of roughly 690 people flagged had been registered at naturalization ceremonies, according to Rick Stream, the county's Republican election director. ProPublica found the system has flagged citizens as noncitizens in at least five states.

Show Me Chaos: SCOTUS Says No For The Third Time

The Supreme Court shut down Missouri Republicans' push to use their gerrymandered map for a third time on Friday, so the election proceeds on the 2022 lines. Lawdork / NBC News: The unsigned, five-page order stayed the Eighth Circuit's mandate and the injunctions requiring the 2025 map, which would have eliminated Rep. Emanuel Cleaver's Kansas City seat. The 2022 map keeps six Republican seats and two Democratic seats. The justices told the Eighth Circuit: "Given this Court's two prior orders in this litigation, our conclusion that this was error should come as no surprise." They also said Secretary of State Denny Hoskins "was well aware that conducting the August primary election with the 2025 map carried significant risks." Ballots for military and overseas voters are already out and absentee voting began Tuesday. Cleaver, the Democrat whose seat was targeted: "The manufactured chaos, you know, has at long last ended, been brought to a final state, and we can move on."

Feds Pulled Back On Election Security. Now Comes The Counting Window.

The nation's cybersecurity agency released its midterm election security plan 40 days before Election Day, and election officials say it comes too late. Associated Press: The 13-page CISA plan warns of software vulnerabilities, voter database hacks and physical threats, but names no specific 2026 threat from Russia, Iran or China. The administration cut about 1,000 CISA employees and $10 million from two cybersecurity initiatives, including one for state and local election officials, and the agency has had no Senate-confirmed director all term. Minnesota's secretary of state expects to spend roughly $250,000 on private penetration testing to fill the gap. Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar: "For them to come in five weeks before the election, yeah, nice effort."

Former national security officials warn the administration could use the post-election counting window to seize equipment or ballots by claiming foreign interference. The Guardian: Caitlin Durkovich, a former deputy homeland security adviser, told a Brennan Center briefing last week that "they are going to use the claim of foreign interference at the end of voting days to either seize equipment or to seize ballots, whether they're legally justified to do so or not." Beth Sanner, a former deputy director of national intelligence, said there's no example of a country interfering in the technical vote-counting process: "It didn't happen in 2020." Geoff Hales, a former CISA official, said threat briefings on nation-state adversaries that once happened dozens of times a year now occur "rarely or not at all." The DOJ and FBI, which normally observe a quiet period before elections, aren't doing so this year.

GOP Senate Candidate: Troops At The Polls Are "Fine With Me"

Georgia Republican Senate nominee Mike Collins says he's "fine" with sending federal troops to polling places, even though federal law bars troops and armed agents from them. Democracy Docket: Asked about deploying troops Sunday at a campaign event with Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), Collins said: "The last thing we want is for people to not have confidence in the elections and not show up, so if that's something that they decide they need to look at, then that's fine with me." Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Todd Blanche have all repeatedly suggested federal agents at polling places aren't off the table, and civil rights groups and Democrats have both sued this month to block it.

Fewer Than 100 Charged Nationwide In Non-Citizen Voting Cases, No Organized Scheme Found

The Trump administration has charged 70 people in non-citizen voting cases this year, and a Votebeat review of the cases found no sign of any organized effort to cheat. Votebeat: Votebeat examined 41 recent cases since June 1 and found at least 23 defendants are green card holders and eight are undocumented, ranging in age from 19 to 73 and coming from at least 18 countries; about half of the cases are in Texas and New Jersey. Many involve immigrants who voted years ago while on the path to citizenship, like a 69-year-old Texas grandfather who got his green card in 2022 and is accused of voting in 2024. American University's Joshua Ferrer: "It's likely most of this is the result of confusion on the part of voters or election officials."

In The States

GEORGIA — The RNC and Georgia GOP are pressing the State Election Board to add ballot-shuffling rules before early voting starts Oct. 13, part of a push to cast doubt on the midterms before a single vote is cast. American Doom: Citing a Princeton study that matched ballots to the voters who cast them, the Republicans' letter asks the board to have counties batch and shuffle paper ballots before hand-scanning them, publish a finding on ballot secrecy, and seek federal help upgrading voting equipment. The letter itself says it isn't claiming any altered vote totals, but the changes could slow counting and create errors Republicans can later point to when disputing results. The board's MAGA-aligned majority has separately pushed to replace voting machines with hand counts. The board meets today.

PENNSYLVANIA — DOJ charged four more Pennsylvania residents with noncitizen voting, the second batch this month, while the state still hasn't received the DHS list behind the 14,576 claim. Spotlight PA: Three of the four defendants live in Philadelphia and one in Chester County, and all are accused of voting in the 2022 or 2024 elections. Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter says DOJ has charged 70 people with voting fraud so far this year, compared with 13 in four years under Joe Biden, but nothing suggests the cases are related or that fraud is happening on any coordinated scale. DHS has offered Pennsylvania the full list behind its claim of 14,576 potential noncitizens on the rolls, and as of Friday the state hadn't responded or received it.

SOUTH DAKOTA — South Dakota's Republican secretary of state endorsed a Democrat to succeed her after running elections changed her mind about vote-counting machines. Votebeat: Monae Johnson was elected South Dakota Secretary of State in 2022 with backing from activists who distrusted the machines, declined to acknowledge Joe Biden's 2020 win and floated restricting the machines. Once in office she turned her promised post-election audits into hand counts of 5% of precincts, and the 2024 results repeatedly corroborated the tabulators. Republican convention delegates dumped her for hand-count backer Heather Baxter, 59% to 41%, and Johnson is now backing Democrat Terrence Davis, who says he trusts the current system. She wrote that she now knows "the difference between campaigning for this office and carrying the responsibility of leading it." Former Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar called it "a brave thing to admit" and said she couldn't recall another statewide election official doing so.

TEXAS — Texas's DPS glitch has left at least 200,000 voter registrations unprocessed, some dating to October 2025, with the Oct. 5 registration deadline a week away. Votebeat / Texas Tribune: DPS blames an October 2025 software update by a third-party vendor. Collin County received more than 40,000 additional records and Travis County about 32,000 overnight. Voters who don't appear on the rolls because of the error can cast a provisional ballot, which counts once officials confirm they registered through DPS on time. Republicans, including state Sen. Paul Bettencourt and state Rep. Matt Shaheen, and Democrats are all calling for investigations; Shaheen, who chairs the House Elections Committee, says the problem is dissuading him from supporting online voter registration.

Headlines

Trump's Attacks on Voting

NewsNation: State Department weighs sharing passport records for voter citizenship checks

Democracy Docket: The local prosecutors who fought ICE are ready to combat federal election interference

PBS: How Trump's mail voting claims are affecting voters