This week at Democracy Docket: Mail voting is safe for the midterms — but the fight for a fair election isn’t over

This week saw the defeat of President Donald Trump’s most dangerous scheme to suppress voting and rig the 2026 election. And Democracy Docket surrounded the story from all angles. 

Oh, and we also found time to break some news, too — all while our News and Research teams gathered in Washington, D.C. for some last-minute planning sessions ahead of the midterms.

Late Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to lift a lower court block on the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) rule implementing Trump’s anti-mail voting order. 

Alexandra Hutzler reported the news within minutes, while Jen Rice brought you the celebratory response from Democrats and voting advocates. And Matt Cohen covered the other side: the angry response from Trump and his supporters, some of whom called on the president to declare a national emergency to take over elections.

Meanwhile, Senior Legal Editor Andrew Childers dug into Justice Samuel Alito’s dissent, which was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas. Alito went along with the government’s argument that the USPS rule — which would have forced states to overhaul their mail voting systems weeks before the elections and could have led millions of voters to not receive a mail ballot — was well within USPS’ authority to impose.

Alexandra also took a close look at the dissent, noting that Alito accepted the Trump administration’s claims about the threat of mass voter fraud, despite no evidence whatsoever being offered to support them.

We also looked at what comes next. Jim Saksa reported on how election officials plan to restore faith in mail voting, which was badly damaged by the fight over Trump’s order. Alexandra reminded us that, although the order won’t affect the midterms, the legal battle is far from over, with the administration still pushing for it to be in effect for 2028. And she covered a new lawsuit filed by a watchdog group to obtain records on how USPS created its rule — a process a whistleblower described as “rushed” and “haphazard.”

Still, the fight to protect the midterms goes on — and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has emerged as a center of the administration’s suppression efforts. 

Jacob Knutson has led our coverage here. He reported this week on claims from another whistleblower — this one at DHS — that the department is ordering agents to illegally access state voter records as part of its hunt for noncitizens. 

Then, Jacob followed up by noting that the Trump administration — in a new brief filed in a lawsuit aiming to block its use of the SAVE database to purge state voter rolls — partially confirmed the whistleblower’s claims, admitting that DHS agents accessed Social Security data to “help determine whether illegal voting may have occurred.”

And Jacob was first to report on a call by top Senate Democrats for DHS’s inspector general to launch a probe into the episode.

In another ominous sign, Matt Cohen scooped the news that an international security organization that has sent observers to monitor every U.S. federal election for two decades hasn’t received an invitation from the administration to monitor the midterms. The news adds to concerns that Trump wants to remove any potential roadblocks to its ability to interfere with the vote.

We also saw democracy defenders take two important steps to protect the vote from Trump this week. 

On Friday, as Matt and Jim reported, civil rights groups filed a federal lawsuit aiming to block the administration from sending law enforcement agents to the polls to intimidate voters. The next day, Yunior Rivas brought us the news that Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) of California — one of the states that’s most likely to be in the administration’s crosshairs — has signed a package of election measures, including one making it a felony to seize ballots, election records, or voting technology before an election has started.

But we didn’t forget about Missouri — because Republicans there still haven’t given up on their gerrymandered map, despite twice being smacked down by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Jen has been tracking the latest news. First, she reported, state officials asked a federal court to nullify the referendum that will give voters a voice on the gerrymander this fall — their latest effort to deny voters a say. Then they went further, telling an appeals court Thursday it’s still not too late to use the gerrymander for the midterms — even though the state’s deadline for sending military and overseas ballots was the next day. 

The appeals court could rule any time — though at this point, as Brentin Mock reported Saturday, ballots have already gone out, meaning a last-second switch to the gerrymander would cause all kinds of chaos.

Despite the flood of urgent news affecting the midterms, we also found time to bring you this troubling, deeply reported story from Iowa. As Matt recounted, an election worker there was recently charged, and now faces prison time, over a disagreement with local election officials back in 2024, involving his attempt to protect voter privacy. 

Why now? Likely because, as Matt explained, Republican prosecutors, taking their cues from the Trump administration, are scraping the bottom of the barrel to dig up election prosecutions wherever they can find them. And it probably doesn’t help that the election worker comes from a prominent family of Iowa Democrats.

In other words, it’s another product of Trump’s relentless crusade to create fear and intimidation around voting. And you can expect that crusade to ramp up further in the weeks before Election Day.