July 17, 2026 - Transcript

News Anchor: Wisconsin lawmakers and voting rights groups are turning up the pressure on Brown County's district attorney to charge Elon Musk over million-dollar payments tied to the 2025 state Supreme Court election. This comes after the Wisconsin Elections Commission voted 5-1 that there's probable cause Musk violated the state's election bribery law by offering 1 million dollars to people who voted.

State Rep. Amaad Rivera-Wagner: It is unprecedented for a trillionaire to try to buy an election by offering million-dollar payouts.That has never happened in American history and it happened here in Green Bay. And one of the things I've learned about this community is that it's a working-class community that believes in hard work. You are supposed to work hard in your democracy or your job to get the outcomes you want and no one should be able to take a shortcut.

News Anchor: Supporters say they're not asking for any special treatment just that the DA apply the law the same way to Musk as to local groups he's questioned before. The DA now has 40 days from the referral to decide whether to file any charges or close this case.

Source: https://www.wbay.com/video/2026/07/17/wisconsin-lawmakers-push-brown-county-da-charge-elon-musk-over-voter-payments/

July 22, 2026 - Excerpt

President Donald Trump took a step closer to slaying his white whale Wednesday and enacting the SAVE America Act, a sweeping voter suppression measure that the Senate has repeatedly refused to pass.

The House voted 216-214 on a budget reconciliation framework that includes $10 billion worth of election-related grants over a 10-year period for coaxing states into adopting anti-voting measures like those in Trump’s pet proposal. The $95 billion package also includes funding for the Iran war and bailouts for farmers hurt by Trump’s tariffs.

It’s still unclear what will be in the final reconciliation bill; now that the budget resolution has been approved, individual House committees will go about drafting the legislation. The reconciliation process allows Senate Republicans to bypass the filibuster’s 60-vote threshold and pass legislation with a simple majority.

Separately, the House passed a ban on members of Congress trading stocks that also included a provision requiring voters to provide photo identification in order to cast a ballot — though Democrats broadly viewed the bill as a partisan messaging stunt.  

Despite Republican control of the Senate, it is unlikely that Trump will see any version of SAVE enacted ahead of the midterms.

Legislation passed through reconciliation must be budgetary in nature. The Senate parliamentarian, the chamber’s procedural umpire, ruled last month that the SAVE America provisions did not fit the bill, leading Trump to call for her ouster. 

Even if these new, still-unknown provisions aren’t removed procedurally, the last time the Senate voted on the SAVE America Act, four Republicans voted against it, meaning it failed to receive even a majority’s support.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) has also downplayed the proposal’s chances amid legislative strategy differences with Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.). While the House passed a short-term stopgap funding bill Tuesday to avoid a government shutdown when the current fiscal year ends Sept. 30, Thune prefers a different spending package that he hopes to strongarm Democrats into supporting by threatening to use reconciliation if they don’t. 

Johnson’s whip team had to overcome some last-minute opposition from within their own party to enact the budget resolution, with some conservatives objecting to the framework’s lack of offsetting cuts to pay for the spending. 

Time waits for no man… or politician

Still, time is running out for Republicans. Without a stopgap funding bill in place by the end of September, the federal government would shut down, and the party in charge of both chambers of Congress and the White House could expect the lion’s share of the blame. 

(continued)

July 21, 2026 - Transcript

Desi Lydic: Trump gave a primetime address from the White House to offer his solution to fix our elections.

Trump: Congress must pass the Save America Act. This landmark bill requires that all voters must show photo voter ID. How simple is that? Could I have your photo, please? Photo voter ID.

Desi Lydic: Even he sounds exhausted by his own election bullshit. Hey, hey, once you turn 80, it is harder to maintain an insurrection.

Happens to a lot of guys. Oh. Oh.Oh. Oh.

Now, if you didn't watch this speech, Trump unveiled a devastating set of documents that conclusively prove the 2020 election was stolen in a deep state conspiracy.

I'm just fucking with you. He released a bunch of documents that were old news and didn't prove jack shit. And at one point, he even started to glitch.

Trump: In light of the brand new and irrefutable information I have revealed tonight, my administration is in the "¿process?" of notifying the states.

Desi Lydic: It's what I'm always saying. You've got to trust the pross-off.... Trust it.

Now, normally after Trump gives a speech, all his fans at Fox News amplify his message and repeat his lies verbatim. There's just one problem.

Trump's talking about election fraud. Remember how this went the last time?

NBC Nightly News: Fox agreeing to pay Dominion more than $787 million over the network's unsupported claims that the 2020 presidential election was rigged.

Desi Lydic: Fox does not want to pay another $787 million.They need that money for settling sexual harassment lawsuits.

Sean Hannity, you're live after Trump's speech. Let's see you try to cover this story without tripping over $787 million.

Sean Hannity: President Donald J. Trump from the East Room at the White House, he had a lot to say tonight. Now, the president, if you go to Whitehouse dot gov, has and will, is now releasing what he believes is all the corroboration that you would ever need.

What is pretty remarkable, what he says are in these documents. I'm sure that anybody that cares about truth will want to do a deep dive into all of this.

Desi Lydic: Well, what he said was, so it was a little, you know what, let's move on to a bigger story. Why does Mamdani want to convert Jimothy the raccoon to Islam?

July 22, 2026 - Fulltext

Strictly speaking, the House of Representatives is not voting this week on President Trump’s long-demanded federal elections overhaul that would impose nationwide voter identification and proof of citizenship requirements and limit voting by mail. 

Lawmakers are scheduled instead to vote on Wednesday on the annual defense policy bill, which authorizes more than $1 trillion in military spending; a $95 billion budget plan to pay for the war in Iran; and legislation that would impose restrictions on stock trading by lawmakers.

But Republicans have tied all three of those measures to pieces of the SAVE America Act, the elections bill Mr. Trump has called his top priority. The tactic is aimed at forcing action in the Senate, where the bill is stalled amid bipartisan opposition. 

The moves are the latest sign that the G.O.P. has subjugated its entire legislative agenda, months before midterm elections in which its congressional majorities are in peril, to the president’s obsession with cracking down on election fraud that he claims, despite evidence to the contrary, is rampant.

Under a complex maneuver the G.O.P. engineered on Tuesday, if the defense bill passes, it will be merged with major pieces of the voting restriction legislation, which the House passed in February, before being sent to the Senate. The budget plan includes $10 billion that could be used for enforcing new voting requirements, which is aimed at allowing Republicans to try to include the SAVE Act in a party-line, filibuster-proof budget measure they want to push through Congress. And the stock trading bill includes an unrelated provision requiring photo identification when casting a ballot in person or by mail.

The convergence of the SAVE America Act with unrelated measures springs from Speaker Mike Johnson’s efforts to placate Mr. Trump and far-right House Republicans who are furious that the voting restriction bill has run aground in the Senate. The moves are unlikely to budge Senate Republicans; they consider the bill dead, given that it cannot draw the 60 votes needed to move forward in that chamber.

But Mr. Johnson had to try. Republican hard-liners had blockaded the House floor over the matter, refusing to move on any legislation until the SAVE Act advanced.

So he agreed to use an arcane procedural tactic that appends a version of the SAVE America Act to all major bills the House considers before sending them to the Senate. The appended version does not include Mr. Trump’s desired restrictions on voting by mail, which are opposed by a significant number of Republicans.

If the defense bill passes, attached provisions would require Americans to show documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote and to show specific forms of photo identification at the polls. The House also attached those measures last week to a bill that funds the State Department and foreign aid programs.

These moves are largely symbolic. The Senate has its own versions of the defense policy bill and the foreign affairs spending measure and is not expected to adopt the House’s bills.

The budget plan, the first step in a special legislative process known as reconciliation that would allow senators to bypass the filibuster and Democratic opposition, includes $10 billion for the House Administration Committee. That panel handles federal elections legislation, and the money would go toward making changes in laws under its jurisdiction. 

But it is not clear whether that measure has sufficient support in the Senate, where many Republicans are skeptical of the effort. And it is equally unclear whether reconciliation can be used for pieces of the elections bill, since the process has strict rules requiring that all provisions make direct changes to spending or revenue.

Republicans also added voting measures to the stock trading bill, which would bar members of Congress from buying individual stocks but allow them to keep and sell existing ones. The added measures would require Americans to show certain forms of photo ID in order to vote, including if they were voting by mail.

Democrats are solidly opposed to the elections legislation, which they argue would suppress voting by making it more difficult for eligible voters to gain access to the polls.

Though many Democrats back the stock-trading limits for lawmakers, most are expected to oppose the bill on Wednesday, on the ground that the voter identification restrictions Republicans inserted have made the measure unacceptable.

July 21, 2026 - Fulltext

The online gambling platform Kalshi publicly condemned Wisconsin election officials for simply reminding voters that it is illegal under state law to wager on elections they are voting in.

In a statement, Meagan Wolfe of the Wisconsin Elections Commission issued a warning. 

"We want voters to understand that they cannot legally make a bet on an election and cast a ballot in that same election," Wolfe said. "We are not able to police someone placing a bet on these platforms, but it's important for voters to understand the consequences if they bet on an election outcome."

Betting on elections in Wisconsin is not inherently illegal, but voting in the same election you have placed a bet on is.

In response, Kalshi's elections division head Benjamin Freeman lashed out at state officials on X.

"THIS IS INSANE," he wrote. "The Commission is implying they will literally disenfranchise voters who use Kalshi to trade elections. This is blatantly unconstitutional and illegal. This is also pretty scary because Kalshi has hundreds of thousands of users in Wisconsin alone... Not only is the Commission's statement illegal and dishonest, it's active voter suppression!"

"I hope the Commission understands their mistake and retracts their statement, because this is really dangerous for democracy," Freeman fumed. "It's dystopian frankly. I'm still having a hard time processing how insane and harmful this rhetoric is."

Kalshi, which is predominantly used for sports betting but also allows people to bet on elections and a variety of other world and day-to-day events, bills itself as a "prediction market" where bets made on the site are "futures" akin to commodities trades. The Trump administration endorses this position, classifying Kalshi and its competitors in a way that seeks to exempt it from state gambling laws.

These platforms are believed to be rife with insider trading; the White House has had to scramble to prevent aides from betting on inside information about administration policy, and even President Donald Trump's teleprompter operator allegedly tried to pocket $100,000 off illegal bets on words Trump would say during his speeches.

July 22, 2026 - Excerpt

President Trump says he’s worried about foreign interference in U.S. elections. That was the reason he gave when he released declassified intelligence documents last week which ended up undercutting his own baseless claims about “rigged” elections.

In his primetime address on July 16, Trump said the U.S. “must take urgent action” to protect voting infrastructure against foreign actors. But shortly after taking office last year, Trump gutted a key agency designed to protect America’s elections from exactly that. 

It’s called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — an agency created during Trump’s first term. CISA is one of the main federal partners for states on election security, sharing intelligence on potential threats to voting infrastructure and providing quick, regional support. 

After Trump returned to office, the cyber agency housed under the Department of Homeland Security took a major hit. Elon Musk’s DOGE fired more than 100 workers, including election security advisers. More than 600 others were placed on administrative leave, were reassigned or took buy-outs. 

Now, the Trump administration is telling states that they will only receive resources if they hand over voter rolls to be screened through a new federal database that a judge recently deemed unlawful in its current form. 

That database is known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE), which experts and a federal judge are concerned has a high error rate that could disenfranchise voters. 

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said CISA will release an “election infrastructure plan” in the next 30 days — barely three months out from the midterms that will determine which party controls Congress.

“If they participate in the SAVE program, we’ll provide the resources and training to support state election integrity,” Mullin said last week. “We’re not trying to change the outcome.”

‘They’re flying blind’

Multiple current and former senior election and national security officials told MS NOW that they could not recall a time when the federal government held back resources and money meant to secure America’s elections. 

And multiple state election officials have said they are not receiving any briefings on possible foreign threats to election security from the federal government. Such briefings were once a regular occurrence, they said.

During the first Trump administration, “we were collaborative — carrots rather than sticks,” the former official said. The second Trump administration is “very much focused on sticks.”

One election official in a swing state said the difference from 2024 is stark, saying “it’s every state for themselves.” The official spoke on the condition of anonymity over concerns about retaliation from federal officials. Last cycle the state official had a regional federal cybersecurity expert “on speed dial” who could “see the whole puzzle.”

That doesn’t exist anymore and without it, the state election official said, “we’re less informed on the pattern of the attackers and are slower to respond.” 

“I’ve literally never heard anybody effectively say ‘to keep you safe,’ you have to give me what I want,’” said the swing-state election official, referring to DHS threats to withhold resources if states don’t hand over sensitive voter data. 

The risks compound at the local level. “Does [a clerk’s] laptop have the IT infrastructure to defend against an attack from Iran? That’s what keeps me up at night.”

Cait Conley, a West Point graduate and combat veteran who served as the Senior Adviser to the Director of CISA during the Biden administration, accused Trump of gutting the agency and sowing doubt about the security of U.S. elections in his speech last week. 

“If Donald Trump were truly concerned about election security, he would not have fired hundreds of federal workers whose jobs were to secure our elections,” said Conley, who is now running for Congress in New York as a Democrat. 

“His lies and misrepresentations are very clearly trying to lay the groundwork for calling this November’s election results into question when his party loses,” Conley said.

When asked about election officials telling MS NOW that they’ve received no intelligence briefings on possible foreign threats to election security, and have no access to regional cyber security advisers, DHS did not respond. They also did not respond directly to questions about the agency withholding resources unless states hand over voter data.

Instead, they provided a statement from acting CISA Director Nick Andersen, which said CISA “works with critical infrastructure owners and operators to assist them in securing both the physical security and cybersecurity of the systems and assets that support the nation’s elections.”

(continued)

July 22, 2026 - Fulltext

A top lawyer for Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) defended the state’s election procedures in a message to the Department of Justice (DOJ), after it threatened to target election officials with criminal prosecutions over possible noncitizen voting. 

In a letter dated July 13, which Democracy Docket received from a source, Charlene McGowan, Raffensperger’s general counsel, said Georgia already has several different mechanisms to ensure all registered voters in the state are verified U.S. citizens.

“Georgia is a recognized leader in citizenship verification that ensures only U.S. citizens vote in our elections,” the letter reads. “State law requires proof of citizenship to vote, and any application for voter registration must be accompanied by documentation of U.S. citizenship.”

The letter from Raffensperger’s office marks the latest instance of state officials pushing back on the DOJ Civil Rights Division’s warning that election officials could be prosecuted if they knowingly retain noncitizens on the rolls or allow them to receive and cast ballots.

In an extraordinary rebuke last week, Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador’s office told DOJ Civil Rights Division chief Harmeet Dhillon that her threat was unnecessary and improper while demanding that she stop contacting Secretary of State Phil McGrane (R).

Utah officials also criticized Dhillon’s warning in a letter.

McGowan’s letter was more restrained, at times praising Trump’s “commitment to citizenship verification” and “applaud[ing] the administration’s efforts to provide states the necessary tools at the federal level to verify that only U.S. citizens are registered to vote.”

In 2020, Raffensperger refused President Donald Trump’s request to “find 11,780 votes” and help him steal the presidential election, earning him plaudits among some Democrats and Trump opponents. But Raffensperger has also regularly supported GOP-backed measures that make it harder to vote in Georgia.

In the letter to the DOJ, McGowan touted these actions. In particular, she highlighted his support for the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database, which Trump has retrofitted into a flawed tool for checking the citizenship status of registered voters. 

“Raffensperger was the first Secretary of State in the nation to conduct full citizenship audits of the state’s voter list using the Department of Homeland Security’s SAVE database, the first of which was completed prior to the 2024 presidential election and the most recent in 2026,” McGowan wrote. 

“In addition to the citizenship audits, Georgia also utilizes SAVE to verify the citizenship status of people who have been identified as potential non-citizens at any point,” she added.

July 21, 2026 - Excerpt

Arizona voters on Tuesday chose their nominees for governor, Congress and other top offices, setting up a fall campaign that will test whether Republicans can reverse some of the Trump-era losses they suffered in a premier battleground state.

Andy Biggs, the hard-right congressman endorsed by Donald Trump, easily won the Republican nomination to challenge the incumbent Democrat, governor Katie Hobbs.

The race is expected to be among the most fiercely contested in the country, with control of the governor’s office carrying outsized national significance in a state that became “ground zero” for election denialism after Trump’s narrow loss there in 2020.

Biggs, a former chair of the House freedom caucus who was a central figure in the effort to overturn Trump’s election defeat, trounced fellow congressman David Schweikert, by appealing to the party’s deeply conservative base.

Alex Kolodin, a Republican state representative and attorney who helped lead failed legal efforts to overturn Arizona’s 2020 and 2022 election results, also won the party’s primary to become its secretary of state: Arizona’s top election official.

Kolodin will face the Democratic secretary of state, Adrian Fontes, in November for the office that will oversee elections in a swing state during the 2028 presidential race. Fontes has cast himself as a bulwark against Trump’s election denialism, while overseeing elections in one of the nation’s most closely watched battleground states.

Throughout the Republican gubernatorial campaign, Biggs and Schweikertoffered constrasting visions for reclaiming the governorship. Schweikert, who gave up his toss-up congressional seat to run for governor after eight terms, argued that Biggs’ hard-right politics and unswerving embrace of the president had allowed Democrats to make gains in once-ruby-red Arizona.

(continued)

July 21, 2026 - Fulltext

President Trump’s prime-time speech last Thursday was intended to shore up his tenacious lies that the 2020 election was stolen from him and leaned heavily on recycled claims that the Chinese government tried to tip the scales against him.

But a trove of intelligence documents that Mr. Trump declassified in hopes that they would bolster his assertions arguably made a stronger case that a different country — Russia — had meddled in the race.

Mr. Trump, nonetheless, barely mentioned Russia during his 25-minute address, in keeping with his longstanding aversion to admitting what criminal and congressional investigators have said for years: Senior Russian officials, including Vladimir V. Putin, the country’s president, worked to undermine Mr. Trump’s opponents in both his 2016 and 2020 campaigns.

“He forgets or just omits that the biggest country that tries to influence on every election is Russia,” Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on Sunday during an appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “We’ve documented that time and again.”

The prominence of Russia in the newly declassified documents — and Mr. Trump’s relative silence about the country during his address — was only the latest reminder of how the president has often sought to twist U.S. intelligence to support his falsehoods about elections he has run in. Those efforts have become more worrisome now that Mr. Trump has installed inexperienced loyalists and given them oversight of U.S. intelligence agencies. Bill Pulte, a housing official, is serving as the acting director of national intelligence until Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, is confirmed.

The documents that Mr. Trump declassified last week were not the first to highlight efforts by the Russians to influence American elections. In many cases, the new files reflect information that was made public five or six years ago, either in previous disclosures by U.S. intelligence agencies or public statements by senior officials in the first Trump administration.

Most of the allegations about Russian election meddling in the 2020 election were contained in an analysis by the National Intelligence Council dated Aug. 19 that year, less than three months before Mr. Trump lost to Joseph R. Biden Jr. in a defeat that even now he refuses to acknowledge.

The analysis maintained that Mr. Putin and senior officials in his government oversaw efforts to damage Mr. Biden’s campaign.

Moreover, it said, the Russians conspired with officials and “other prominent persons” in the United States to “orchestrate a high-profile corruption scandal” implicating Mr. Biden and the Democratic Party at the peak of the campaign. Republicans have accused Mr. Biden of being involved, while vice president, in corrupt business dealings with his son Hunter and the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma.

“Their aim is to defeat the former vice president” — Mr. Biden — “and ensure the president’s victory,” the intelligence council concluded, referring to Mr. Trump.

The same assessment also made clear that Iran had taken some clumsier but still fairly aggressive efforts to harm Mr. Trump’s electoral prospects, actions that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, had most likely ordered. But Mr. Trump had little to say on Thursday night about Iranian election meddling, even though the United States is still at war with Iran. He instead highlighted China’s relatively muted actions, which he asserted had been hidden from him and the American people.

The claims surrounding Burisma are among the longest-lasting efforts to smear Mr. Biden. They center on accusations that while serving in the White House under President Barack Obama, he used his power to derail a corruption inquiry into the company to protect Hunter Biden, who sat on its board of directors.

At one point, an F.B.I. informant, Alexander Smirnov, claimed that the oligarch owner of Burisma had paid $5 million to both Mr. Biden and his son. But Mr. Smirnov was ultimately charged with lying about the purported bribes and admitted that he had been fed information by Russian intelligence.

A U.S. intelligence community analysis from March 2021 found that proxies linked to Russian intelligence had promoted false stories about the Biden family “to U.S. media organizations, U.S. officials and prominent U.S. individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration.”

Federal prosecutors also undertook an expansive investigation into whether Ukrainian officials had helped orchestrate a plan to damage Mr. Biden’s 2020 campaign, including by using Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s onetime personal lawyer, to help spread their misleading claims. Mr. Giuliani was never charged in the inquiry.

Russia’s disinformation campaigns, U.S. officials maintain, have included promoting accusations of corruption between the Biden family and Ukraine — as well as a conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton.

Russia-aligned operatives met with people tied to the Trump administration to further seed these narratives. And that dynamic played a role in Mr. Trump’s first impeachment when he urged the newly elected Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to investigate the Bidens and then later withheld military funding the country needed in its ongoing conflict with Russian-backed separatists.

Even after Mr. Trump left office in 2021, his congressional allies continued examining the allegations about Mr. Biden and Ukraine but eventually came up empty. In 2023, House Republicans acknowledged that they had not uncovered incriminating materialabout Mr. Biden, despite their frequent insinuations that he and his family had been involved in criminal conduct and corruption.

Senator Angus King, the Maine independent, seemed to scratch his head about why Mr. Trump had given short shrift to Russian interference during his speech in an opinion article he wrote over the weekend.

“Amazingly,” Mr. King wrote, “Russia was barely mentioned in the speech, even though Russia has consistently been the most aggressive foreign meddler in our elections over the past decade.”

July 21, 2026 - Transcript

Reporter Jillian Frankel: What do you make of hearing politicians talk about 2020 fraud claims?

Voter 1: It's bullshit. I think, I mean, we can count the vote and we should allow everybody to vote and make sure everything is counted honestly and I don't believe in rigged. 

Voter 2: You know, get over it. You know, you lost. Get over it. You're like a child.

Voter 3: It's like, come on, that's foolishness and no, that's just a waste of time and I don't like that. 

Voter 4: It's sad that someone that doesn't win just claims that it was all a sham. But if he would have won, would he have also claimed it was a sham? Probably not.

July 22, 2026 - Fulltext

• Legislation introduced Wednesday, and shared first with CNBC, is intended to bar foreign-owned or influenced U.S. companies from making political contributions that have been allowed since the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision.
• Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., introduced the bill, which would set foreign ownership thresholds to determine which corporations should be prohibited from contributions to elections.
• The bill comes as foreign equity in U.S. companies has increased in recent decades and on the heels of a recent Supreme Court decision that struck down limits on political party spending on campaigns.

Congressional Democrats are looking to close what they characterize as loopholes created by the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision that allow foreign entities to funnel money into U.S. elections.

The bill, led by Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., and shared first with CNBC, would establish foreign ownership thresholds to determine which U.S. corporations should be barred from contributing to campaigns, ballot initiatives and referendums.

“The Roberts Court’s reckless decision in Citizens United continues to spell disaster for American democracy, allowing oligarchs and autocrats around the world to wield their influence over our elections and undermine our institutions,” Raskin said in a statement, referring to Chief Justice John Roberts and the ruling that enabled corporations and outside groups to spend unlimited sums on U.S. elections.

The proposal would “root out corruption and make sure our elections are decided by the American people, not the foreign oligarchs,” Raskin said. Dubbed the Get Foreign Money out of U.S. Elections Act, it had more than 65 Democratic cosponsors in the House and 11 in the Senate upon introduction on Wednesday. It faces an unlikely path to passage this Congress with Republicans in control of both chambers. 

The bill comes as foreign equity in U.S. companies has shot up since the 1990s. And it follows the Supreme Court’s June decision to strike down limits on the amount political parties can spend in coordination with candidates for office.

It’s already illegal for foreign nationals to contribute to U.S. elections, but Raskin and Whitehouse’s proposal would extend existing laws to some companies registered in the U.S. with foreign ownership over certain thresholds.

For example, business entities located outside the U.S. in which 50% of voting shares, total equity or membership units are owned by foreign nationals would be banned from making political contributions, as would those located within the U.S. in which a single foreign national outside the U.S. owns or controls 1% of voting shares, total equity, or membership units, among others.

Raskin and Whitehouse led a nearly identical bill in the 118th Congress,though it didn’t get a vote in either chamber.

“Thanks to the disastrous Citizens United decision, foreign actors can exploit the same corrupting dark money channels that allow unlimited corporate spending,” Whitehouse said in a statement. “We should get rid of the damned stuff entirely, but this bill would at least safeguard our democracy from foreign adversaries influencing American elections from the shadows.” 

The proposal comes on the heels of House passage earlier this month of a bipartisan bill, led by Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., and Jared Golden, D-Maine, that seeks to prohibit foreign contributions in flooding local ballot initiatives, referendums and recall elections. The Senate has not yet voted on the measure.

“The ballot is the instrument by which a free people govern themselves. No foreign government, foreign national, or foreign interest should have a hand in deciding the laws Americans live under,” Fitzpatrick said in a statement after passage.

May 5, 2026 - Transcript

The SAVE Act is not about election security. It is about disenfranchisement. It is about taking away the ability for people to vote, putting up barriers between Americans and their ballots, wrapping voter suppression in the language of patriotism, and hoping no one reads the fine print.

The SAVE Act would prevent millions of Americans from exercising their constitutional right to vote. The damage would be enormous. You likely registered to vote online or by mail.

This bill would require every person registering to vote to show up in person at an election office with documentary proof of citizenship. What that means is you've got to have a passport or a certified birth certificate. A driver's license alone wouldn't be enough because it doesn't include any information about your citizenship status.

If you don't have those documents in hand, you don't get to register, period. And thousands of residents here in San Diego County don't have access to those documents. This is a military community, a university community, a border community, and a working class community all at once.

And this bill tells all of them, if you can't produce the right paperwork, if you don't have a passport, if you can't take time off of work to track down a certified birth certificate and then make a separate trip to an election office, then you don't get to vote. Not because you're not a citizen, not because you've done anything wrong, but because you simply didn't have the right piece of paper in your filing cabinet. There are hundreds of thousands of seniors, roughly 35% of whom live below 200% of the federal poverty level.

Some of them were born in an era before hospitals issued standardized birth certificates. Some of them have voted in every election since Eisenhower. And now Washington wants to tell them they have to prove who they are and they have to prove they belong here.

This community has families where both parents are working two jobs, where taking a Tuesday afternoon off to stand in line at a government office is not an inconvenience. It's lost wages that they can't afford. We have students at UCSD and San Diego State and community colleges who are registering to vote for the very first time.

Young people who are participating in civic life because we told them their voices matter. And now this bill says actually your voice has a cover charge. We have service members and military families at Camp Pendleton and Naval Base San Diego who've dedicated their lives to defending this country.

Men and women who've deployed overseas to protect the right to vote and who may come home to find that right behind their vote will be a bureaucratic obstacle course that they did not expect. San Diego County runs great elections, secure elections. Our registrar has a proven track record.

They verify citizenship through existing federal and state databases. They audit results. They are transparent.

We should be making it easier for all eligible citizens to participate in our elections, not harder.

July 21, 2026 - Fulltext

Democrats on Capitol Hill and voting rights advocates on Tuesday sounded the alarm about Republicans in the House of Representatives trying to push through voter suppression legislation under cover of passing a ban on congressional stock trading.

According to a Tuesday report from Roll Call, House GOP leaders recently added “unrelated language” to what was a bipartisan bill banning congressional stock trading that would “require voters to produce photo ID at the polls, a signature issue for President Donald Trump.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) hammered Republicans for what she said were underhanded tactics that are undermining what had been a serious bipartisan effort to halt congressional stock trading.

“Republicans are trying to pull a trick this week,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote in a social media post. “They say we are voting on an ‘insider trading’ bill, but have snuck in massive SAVE Act-style voter suppression measures to it. This is a GOP effort to sabotage national mail-in voting, disguised as a trading ban. I’m voting NO.”

Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-NY), chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, said that the caucus was opposing the GOP’s legislation not just for its attacks on voting rights, but because it only forces congresspeople to stop making new stock trades, while not requiring them to divest of their current holdings.

“House Republicans are not serious about enacting a meaningful congressional stock trading ban,” said Clarke. “The combined Stop Insider Trading Act and Voter ID Act... would allow members of Congress to continue owning, selling, and, in some cases, purchasing individual stocks while simultaneously imposing stricter voter ID requirements that would make it harder for millions of eligible Americans to vote.”

“This bill is a Trojan horse,” Clarke added, “using the premise of congressional ethics reform to advance a broader effort to restrict access to the ballot box.”

The Campaign Legal Center (CLC) on Monday sent lawmakers a letter opposing the GOP-backed legislation, which it said would “impose onerous new requirements on voting.”

Among other things, the group said the proposed legislation would “demand Americans provide ID to cast a ballot but only accept an unreasonably narrow list of acceptable types of documentation,” excluding the kind of “widely held and reliable forms of ID that young people and voters of color disproportionally rely on.”

The CLC also said the bill doesn’t provide “sufficient safeguards” for voters wrongly deemed ineligible to prove they are legally allowed to participate in US elections.

A page on congressional contact portal 5 Calls recommended users oppose the GOP-backed bill, which it described as “partisan legislation” that “uses the guise of much-needed ethics reform to sneak through an unpopular and unrelated attack on voting rights.”

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July 21, 2026 - Fulltext

About a month ago, Donald Trump abruptly ended a “Meet the Press” interview when NBC News’ Kristen Welker asked the president whether he had evidence to support his election conspiracy theories. “You’re either crooked or you’re stupid,” the Republican told the host instead of answering the question like an adult who wasn’t making stuff up.

A few days later, Trump returned to the subject at an unrelated White House event, telling reporters, “They rigged the election. … We have things that you won’t believe. When we release the full files, you’re not going to believe how crooked the second, the 2020 election was.”

A month later, the president had an opportunity to back that up in a primetime address to the nation and a documents dump of declassified materials. It was a predictable debacle in which the Republican recycled already discredited nonsense and failed entirely to substantiate his conspiracy theories.

But there was also a practical consideration to consider: Trump wrapped up his unfortunate remarks with a call to Congress to approve his preferred voter-suppression proposal, which the White House has labeled the SAVE America Act. From the president’s perspective, the case he laid out would not only shore up GOP backing for the anti-voting legislation, but it would also pressure Democrats to support new voting restrictions.

None of this happened. Democrats immediately recognized Trump’s address as an embarrassing dud, and Republicans who were skeptical of the administration’s voter-suppression measure before his speech were just as unmoved after watching his rather pitiful presentation.

The New York Times reported last week that his legislative plea, “which Mr. Trump implied was the reason behind the Thursday night speech, appeared to have landed with a whimper among Republicans on Capitol Hill and in campaigns around the country.” NBC News published a related report as this week got underway:

When NBC News asked Republican Sen. Thom Tillis whether Trump’s speech helped the legislation’s prospects, the North Carolinian replied, “Not at all. There’s no way you get this implemented in time for this election. I think people are being led to believe that that’s the case, and that’s just wrong.”

The report comes just days after Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, one of the more consistent GOP critics of the president’s voter-suppression package, wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, explaining in some detail why she would continue to oppose the bill, even after having heard Trump’s pitch. The senator, among other things, called the plan “draconian.”

In other words, over the course of roughly 25 minutes, the president failed to present credible evidence of his conspiracy theories andfailed to persuade anyone to support his wildly regressive anti-voting bill, generating a fresh round of questions about the point of this foolish endeavor

Source: https://www.ms.now/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-conspiratorial-speech-voter-suppression-bill

July 21, 2026 - Excerpt

On the sidelines of a gathering of election officials, state leaders from both parties told ABC News they are making preparations in case the federal government tries to interfere with how they run elections in November.

"Just as we always plan for things like a weather event or a bomb threat or a gas leak or a power outage -- this time, we're adding to that list of hazards: we're adding the possibility that the federal government might do something that directly or indirectly affects the election in a negative way," Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a member of the state's Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party, told ABC News at the National Association of Secretaries of State summer conference last week.

State officials like Simon have raised the possibility that the federal government will try to interfere with them conducting the midterm elections, pointing to the government's pursuit of personal voter data and rhetoric on mail-in voting as examples of how it is trying to have more sway, while the White House has said it wants to partner with states to fix any vulnerabilities or remove ineligible voters. States are constitutionally responsible for the conducting of elections.

On the sidelines of a gathering of election officials, state leaders from both parties told ABC News they are making preparations in case the federal government tries to interfere with how they run elections in November.

"Just as we always plan for things like a weather event or a bomb threat or a gas leak or a power outage -- this time, we're adding to that list of hazards: we're adding the possibility that the federal government might do something that directly or indirectly affects the election in a negative way," Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a member of the state's Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party, told ABC News at the National Association of Secretaries of State summer conference last week.

State officials like Simon have raised the possibility that the federal government will try to interfere with them conducting the midterm elections, pointing to the government's pursuit of personal voter data and rhetoric on mail-in voting as examples of how it is trying to have more sway, while the White House has said it wants to partner with states to fix any vulnerabilities or remove ineligible voters. States are constitutionally responsible for the conducting of elections.

The meeting, which convened election officials from around the country, coincided by chance with President Donald Trump's speech on Thursday in which he announced he had declassified a slew of documents that he claimed reveal vulnerabilities in America's elections systems, though state elections have generally been considered secure.

But the heavily redacted documents released by the White House don't appear to back up those claims, many of which Trump has been baselessly pushing since he lost the 2020 presidential election by 7 million votes. Trump has never provided evidence that the results of the election he lost were altered by fraud. 

His speech also came the week after the White House forced out the three remaining members of the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission, which helps election officials improve the administration of elections. Some state officials criticized the move as adding unneeded instability and uncertainty to running elections.

Election officials spoke with ABC News before Trump's remarks, which came after the conference had mostly concluded.

Game-planning and 'a Plan B or a Plan C'

Simon told ABC News that Minnesota has been taking actions such as backfilling some of the services and partnerships they usually get from the federal government, and "actively gaming out" potential scenarios of how "there might be some level of interference coming from the federal government. It's not a prediction, but it is a precaution we're taking." 

(continued)

July 21, 2026 - Video Transcript

So I just got off the phone with Mike Lindell, who most folks will remember as the MyPillow CEO, the election denier, conspiracy theorist who has traveled the country supporting Donald Trump and claims that Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election.

Well, he's actually now running forgovernor of the state of Minnesota, is a Republican, and the folks over at the Minnesota Star Tribune were the first to report that he actually isn't even registered to vote in the state of Minnesota despite running for governor there. And in my phone conversation I just had with him, he said that he is actively on his way back to Minnesota and could maybe even register to vote as soon as tomorrow morning.

But this weekend, he actually was in New Jersey at Trump's Bedminster Golf Club, where he was holding a fundraiser for his campaign. And the president, Donald Trump himself stopped by. You see in this video him taking the microphone, endorsing Mike Lindell for governor of Minnesota.

Now, Lindell has been almost solely focused on the idea that voting machine systems in the U.S. have been hacked by foreign adversaries in past elections and that that's how Donald Trumpactually lost the 2020 election. Again, though, no intelligence shows that this has happened in past elections. Yet, you see Mike Lindell running for governor and a close ally of Trump continuing to make this case.

July 21, 2026 - Fulltext

The Trump Department of Justice (DOJ) opened a federal probe Tuesday into New Jersey’s voter registration software failure and said it will use the disclosure as “an additional basis” to demand the state’s unredacted voter rolls, including sensitive data.

In a letter to New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill (D), Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon gave the state five business days to provide extensive personal information about roughly 6,600 people who were improperly registered after telling the Motor Vehicle Commission they were not U.S. citizens.

DOJ requested their full names, dates of birth, nationalities, residential addresses and registration dates and locations. For the fewer than 400 affected people who subsequently voted, the department also demanded information about when and where they voted, along with certifications and signatures attached to any mail-in ballots.

The known New Jersey failure involved a specific software defect that allegedly disregarded applicants’ answers. DOJ did not explained how federal possession of sensitive information belonging to millions of eligible voters would have prevented that error.

Dhillon also said DOJ will notify the federal court hearing its pending lawsuit against New Jersey of the disclosure. The department claims the incident provides further support for its attempt to obtain an electronic copy of the state’s entire voter registration list.

But DOJ’s nationwide voter roll campaign has been rejected repeatedly in court. The department has lost 16 straight district court cases and its first appeal, with no judge ordering a state to surrender its unredacted statewide voter file.

Still, the department directed New Jersey to preserve all records related to the state’s disclosure.

“Ensuring that U.S. citizens’ votes are not illegally diluted by noncitizens’ votes is of paramount importance,” Dhillon wrote. “We therefore write to formally request additional information to assess New Jersey’s compliance with various federal statutes.”

Sherrill said Tuesday that officials currently have no evidence that the error changed the result of any election. The state’s preliminary investigation found that the affected people were registered across party affiliations, with most unaffiliated, and were scattered throughout New Jersey.