Jim covers election-related matters at the federal level. He previously reported for CQ Roll Call, WHYY and Philadelphia City Paper. Before journalism, Jim misspent some of his youth as a corporate attorney.
The Court clarified one of its most controversial legal doctrines while inadvertently proving one of the primary criticisms of its “shadow docket” practices.
Voters in Pennsylvania have begun casting ballots in the 2026 general election, and they’re doing it under a federal microscope.
Democrats filed a lawsuit late Wednesday asking a federal court to prevent the Trump administration from deploying armed federal agents to voting sites during the midterm elections.
The Trump administration will start using passport records as it hunts for noncitizens on the voter registration rolls, the Department of Justice (DOJ) said in a filing Tuesday evening.
A group of pro-voting and civil rights organizations is asking a federal court to prevent the Trump administration from using federal law enforcement to intimidate voters during the midterm elections.
North Carolina’s second-highest court blessed a Republican power grab Wednesday, ruling that a 2024 law transferring control of the State Board of Elections from the Democratic governor to the Republican state auditor did not violate the state’s constitution.
“We’re glad that the Supreme Court did what was right, but there was also a period where real damage was done in the space of voter confusion, with people losing faith in the process,” said Ben Hovland, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and former commissioner of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, at a press briefing Tuesday.
Across the countless legal filings in the many lawsuits challenging Trump’s order and USPS’s subsequent rules, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has repeatedly failed to provide evidence backing the central claim behind them: that noncitizen voting and mail ballot fraud are real, substantial problems that must be addressed by federal government intervention.
The postal agency rejected Leon County’s envelope because the words “return service requested” and the election office’s return address were only 0.236 inches apart — when there should have been a full quarter-inch between them.
If the Supreme Court lifts the preliminary injunction U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani issued in State of California v. USPS, it may rely on Purcell to rationalize the chaos that decision would unleash. And, in doing so, the justices would prove their critics right by stretching the precedent’s already-overextended precepts far beyond the limits of logic.