In Arizona, Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell announced that an investigation into 207 registered voters flagged by Recorder Justin Heap found just eight noncitizens who voted. Mitchell noted seven of the eight were mistakenly registered to vote due to a system error in the Motor Vehicle Division, five had no party affiliation, and all eight have lawful immigration status.
Heap referred the voters to Mitchell after using a federal program to check the county’s voter registration lists for noncitizens. Mitchell’s office found just 60 of the 207 voted, and 52 of the 60 were U.S. citizens—an 87% error rate.
The program—called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE)—was originally designed to verify the citizenship status of people applying for benefits like food stamps and Medicaid, but the Trump administration expanded it last year to be used to conduct bulk checks of voters’ citizenship. SAVE has proven to be unreliable. Earlier this month, it yielded a 21% error rate in Texas, and in some cases, its use has resulted in Americans being deregistered to vote. However, last weekthe U.S. Supreme Court granted the administration’s request to let states use it in the lead-up to the November elections.
➡️ MORE: About the SAVE program
In Georgia, the executive director of the state election board sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche, asking him to open an investigation into Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and compel him to implement changes to the state’s voting system before the November elections.
A spokesperson for Raffensperger criticized the move. “People who are serious about election security don’t inject chaos in the 11th hour,” he said.
Separately, a federal judge dismissed the Trump administration’s lawsuit against Raffensperger that sought Georgia voters’ private data, the 26th such case to be dismissed. The Justice Department brought 31 lawsuits seeking voter data; it has yet to win any of them.
“Georgia has worked with our federal partners and will continue to do so, but cooperation does not mean ignoring the law or surrendering the privacy rights of Georgia voters,” Raffensperger said in a statement.
➡️ MORE: Sharing the Facts About Federal Efforts to Compile State Voter Data
In Maryland, the Justice Department sued the state and two counties over a state law limiting when federal agents and law enforcement officers are allowed to wear masks while on duty.
“We don’t comment on ongoing litigation, but Governor Moore has been clear that an untrained, unqualified, and unaccountable ICE is unacceptable,” a spokesperson for Gov. Wes Moore said in a statement. “Maryland will always defend transparency, accountability and due process.”
The Justice Department has brought similar cases against California, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Virginiaand other jurisdictions.
In Minnesota, the Justice Department filed complaints against federal judges who spoke to The New York Times about the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement operations in the state.
A spokesperson for the court and one of the judges both said their comments fell within ethical bounds for judges, including that judges may speak “on core judiciary matters such as advocacy for the rule of law.”
In Texas, the state’s highest criminal court dismissed the state’s case against Crystal Mason, a Tarrant County woman convicted of illegal voting in 2016. The dismissal likely finalizes Mason’s acquittal.
Mason voted in 2016 using a provisional ballot because she wasn’t sure if she was eligible. Provisional ballots allow those with questions about their eligibility to vote while election officials determine if they are eligible. (More than 67,000 Texans voted using provisional ballots in 2016.) If officials determine the voter is eligible, their provisional ballot is counted like any other. If the voter is found to be ineligible, it is not.
After Mason cast her ballot, election officials determined she was ineligible because, at the time, she was on supervised release for a federal conviction. Accordingly, her ballot was not counted. State prosecutors charged her with voter fraud anyway. She was convicted in 2018 and sentenced to five years in prison.
An appeals court overturned her conviction in 2024, and the Tarrant County district attorney appealed to the state’s highest criminal court. That court dismissed the case this week.
States United, Cooley LLP, and Susman Godfrey LLP represented a group of former state and federal prosecutors in filing three friend-of-the-court briefs as the case progressed, urging courts to reverse Mason’s conviction. The prosecutors argued Texas’ provisional ballot system worked exactly as intended, and prosecuting Mason nonetheless “chills others from exercising their fundamental right to vote through the provisional ballot system.”
➡️ MORE: About the briefs
In Washington state, a federal judge ruled that Trump didn’t have the power to fire a court-appointed prosecutor, a rebuke of the administration’s strategy to hand-pick federal prosecutors across the country.
Roger Rogoff was unanimously appointed by a panel of federal judges to be the top U.S. attorney for the Seattle area. But less than an hour after he was sworn in, he received notice from the Trump administration that he had been fired—leaving the administration’s preferred prosecutor in charge of the office.
The judge this week reinstated Rogoff as U.S. attorney and barred the administration from attempting to remove him again. The Justice Department said it would appeal the decision.
The Trump administration has attempted to use similar strategies to keep its preferred prosecutors leading U.S. attorney’s offices across the country. Federal judges have repeatedly disqualified those prosecutors, ruling the administration’s strategy violates federal law and the Constitution.
Source: statesunited.org
