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Hello, and welcome back to The Franchise!
Last week, a coalition of officials from 25 Democratic-led states and Washington D.C. filed a federal lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, arguing that the administration is coercing states into complying with new unlawful election changes by withholding billions of dollars in disaster relief funding and homeland security grants if the states do not bend to President Trump’s demands around election administration.
Specifically, the lawsuit argues that the Trump administration is coercing the states into adopting a number of new election procedures that it is trying to unconstitutionally force on state election officials. That apparently includes demands to transition to a paper ballot system and a requirement for states to run their voter rolls through an unrelated and unsecure database, the Federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system, to check voter rolls, among other things.
“Last year, DHS and FEMA embarked on an unprecedented campaign to leverage the billions of dollars in federal funding that they administer to coerce States into adopting the Administration’s preferred policies,” the lawsuit states.
The SAVE system, as TPM has reported, has been co-opted by the Trump administration and used as a way to purge alleged non-citizens from the voter rolls. The issue, however, is that there is evidence to suggest that the system has actually been removing eligible voters from the rolls, the states outline in their complaint.
It’s worth noting too that the use of the SAVE system to purge voters from the rolls was blocked by a federal judge just last month.
“Congress never gave DHS or FEMA authority to rewrite state election law, require cooperation with federal immigration agents, or terminate federal funding streams at any time and for any reason,” the lawsuit says.
“The Constitution grants the States the power to administer and set the rules governing federal elections, and pursuant to that grant of authority the States have adopted a range of systems for ensuring that votes are counted fairly and accurately. Defendants, however, seek to upend those laws and policies and—using hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds as a cudgel—impose the current Administration’s preferred policies in their place,” the plaintiffs argue.
We’ll keep you updated as this challenge progresses. As always, there’s a lot more to unpack into this week, so let’s dive in.
Making Sense of the 150,000 Rejected California Mail Ballots
Close to 150,000 mail ballots were rejected in California’s primary last month — the highest number of rejected ballots in recent years. According to data from the California Secretary of State’s office, a total of 148,241 mail-in ballots were rejected, which is 1.7 percent of all the mail-in-ballots cast.
The majority of the rejected ballots — 93,497 to be more precise — were scrapped due to reportedly not being received on time. In California, all mail-in ballots need to be postmarked on or before Election Day, and they need to be received up to seven days after Election Day in order to be counted. Another 52,000 ballots were rejected due to signature verification issues, meaning either there was no signature on the ballot or there was an issue with non-matching signatures.
“I believe we saw an increase in the number of ballots rejected for being too late to count due primarily to voters holding on to their ballots longer than they might otherwise because of the volatile nature of the race for Governor and many groups encouraging voters to wait,” Kim Alexander, president of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation said in an email to TPM.
And while this is a larger number of rejected ballots than usual, “it’s a comparatively small percentage,” Justin Levitt, professor of law at Loyola Marymount University told me.
“People keep forgetting, California is huge,” he said.
And Levitt said the incident actually provides evidence that election integrity is alive and well in California — despite what the Trump administration and election deniers might want you to believe.
“It, to me, is part of the evidence that California takes the integrity of its election incredibly seriously,” he said. “California puts a thumb on the scale for bending over backward in its legal rules to help ballots get counted. But if you’re outside of those legal rules, it’s not going to count the ballots.”
DOJ Uses New Jersey Noncitizen Voter Episode to Bolster Its Demand for Unredacted Voter Data
Democratic New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill is pushing back on the DOJ’s demand to hand over the names of close to 6,600 noncitizens who were reportedly accidentally added to the state’s voter rolls due to a software error in the state’s automatic voter registration program in 2023 and 2024.
Last week, Sherrill announced the error which originated at the state’s Motor Vehicle Commission. As a result of the glitch, 400 noncitizens voted in at least one election since 2023. And although Sherrill has said that these noncitizens were removed from the voter rolls and that these ineligible votes did not impact the results of the elections in which they participated, it’s been good news for the Trump administration’s years-long quest to find evidence of any kind to support the myth that non citizens are voting in our elections.
In response to this revelation, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Harmeet Dhillon, sent a letter to Sherrill last week demanding that she hand over data (including names and addresses) on all these noncitizens. Sherrill, however, is refusing to comply with this demand.
“We are not in the practice of turning over this kind of personally identifying data over to the federal government because we have seen them weaponize it, I’ve seen it personally,” she said last week. “They are working to weaponize personal data, and they don’t have a reputation for keeping it private either.”
Of course, this whole unfortunate episode is now being used by the Trump administration as a way to help bolster its failing campaign to seize sensitive voter data from the states. The DOJ has, for months now, been demanding unredacted voter files from at least 44 states and Washington, D.C. Few states have complied, and the DOJ has sued in response — and it has lost every single case that has gone to court.
On the same day that it sent the letter to Sherril, the DOJ also filed a notice of additional basis in court to help its New Jersey voter roll case, arguing that the incident is evidence that the DOJ truly does need the state’s unredacted voter rolls.
“The Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice sent Defendant the Additional Basis Letter because the Civil Rights Division learned of Governor Mikie Sherrill’s announcement on X on July 21, 2026, that ‘roughly 6,600 people who indicated that they were not U.S. citizens between June 2023 and June 2024’ were in fact ‘registered … anyway’ by New Jersey election processes—and roughly 400 of those people voted,” the notice reads.
In Other Election News
TPM: Jay Clayton Confirmed As DNI — A Position Trump Warped to Feed His Election Conspiracy Theories
Democracy Docket: Trump DOJ said some states ‘cooperated’ with voter roll grab by providing public information. It sued other states for doing the same
AP: Trump’s attacks on mail balloting and concerns over delays turn midterms spotlight on Postal Service
