Election Policy Roundup #32: The Growing Risks to Midterm Election Security

Walter Olson

Number 32 in our series of occasional roundups on election law and policy, this time focusing on threats to the security of the upcoming midterm election: 

• “‘Mail early’: Election officials urge people to get ballots in pronto amid Postal Service slowdowns.” [Dion Nissenbaum, VoteBeat] One analysis of Democratic-leaning voters in four states finds them requesting mail ballots less often and returning them more quickly, both rational responses to declining reliability of delivery, whether you attribute that to budget-cutting or otherwise. [Michael Morse and Marc Meredith, NBC News] 
• Election-law expert Justin Levitt argues that Trump has almost uniformly failed in his attempts to interfere with the 2026 election and that chances are good that states and localities can withstand whatever further interference he comes up with. [NYU Law Democracy Project] 
• Last term’s Trump v. Illinois, in which the Supreme Court struck down the president’s use of a federalized National Guard to make a show of force in opposition-run cities, foreshadows some of the legal issues that would arise should he use the military to intervene in the forthcoming elections. [Claire Finkelstein and Brenner Fissell, NYU Law Democracy Project] Watch the “counting window.” [George Chidi, The Guardian] 
• Delay in reporting results is a prime incubator of public suspicion and false rumor, and the state of California has made itself one of the worst offenders by taking weeks to resolve some key House races. [my earlier, more, N.Y. Times via ELB, L.A. Times via ELB] The California Voter Foundation has offered “Ten Recommendations to Accelerate California’s Vote Count,” from shortening the current 22-day (!) signature cure period to urging voters to return mail ballots before the last minute, and this year the state legislature embraced a few cautious steps to speed things up a bit [e.g., “Sign, Scan, and Go” in-person handoff of mail ballots].
• Notwithstanding the alarms it raised this summer over China’s collection of (apparently publicly available) voter data, the administration has “gutted or dismantled” the various federal offices assigned to shield US elections from outside meddling, namely “CISA’s election security mission, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s Foreign Malign Influence Center, and the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force” [Julia Curlee, Lawfare; Jen Fifield, VoteBeat, last year on CISA cuts]. It’s also ignored a congressional requirement to disclose an internal report on foreign meddling in the 2024 election. [Dustin Volz, New York Times] “Numerous local election officials, across the political spectrum, have told NPR they are avoiding sharing voter data or other security information [emphasis added] with the federal government for fear that information could be used against them in some way.” [Miles Parks, NPR] 
• Julia Curlee, in the Lawfare article cited above, also writes, “The administration has turned an unfixable fact—Chinese parts in nearly every US voting machine—into a license to contest any election it loses,” among recent rumblings, laying the groundwork for potential federal interference in the upcoming midterm elections. This coming Friday, I’m set to quiz Curlee about those and other topics in a streaming online interview for Cato, with Stephen Richer joining us. It’s the first in an anticipated series of online interviews and panels on midterm security. Watch for details this week!