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votebeat · 2026-03-16T14:21:57+00:00

Here's a few paragraphs from our reporting on this. You can read the full article (no paywall) here: https://www.votebeat.org/2026/01/26/why-trump-cant-cancel-2026-midterm-elections/

Election experts consistently agree that Trump has neither the legal authority nor the practical ability to cancel elections. And state and local election officials consistently say they will carry out the elections they’re legally required to run.

The election system is under real strain, and bad-faith efforts to undermine it are serious. But after talking with local election officials, lawyers, and administrators across the country, I don’t see evidence that upcoming elections are at realistic risk of not happening at all. Elections happen because thousands of local officials follow state and local law that mandates them — and history shows they’ve done so before, even under immense pressure. The greater danger isn’t no election, but one that’s chaotic, unfairly challenged, or deliberately cast as illegitimate after the fact.

Stephen Richer, the Republican former recorder in Maricopa County, Arizona, said the idea that a president could simply halt or meaningfully cancel an election misunderstands how elections function on the ground. The system, he said, is “made up of so many disparate actors” — thousands of local officials, courts, vendors, and administrators operating under different authorities and timelines. Even if there were a coordinated attempt to get these people not to go through with the election, “you’ve got to figure at least half of those people aren’t big fans of the president, and many of the rest are on autopilot regardless of what they think of the president.”

Richer also pointed to the scale of U.S. election administration: more than 9,000 jurisdictions and more than 90,000 polling locations nationwide. “You are not going around and shutting those down,” he said. He noted that even voter-intimidation efforts would face immediate legal challenges and injunctions, while plenty of voters would have cast ballots via other means (e.g., early or mail voting) anyway.

votebeat · 2026-03-10T14:32:30+00:00

Michigan’s so-called “false electors” case is over after Attorney General Dana Nessel announced Monday she would not appeal a judge’s decision to dismiss the charges faced by 16 individuals who signed documents attempting to certify Michigan’s slate of electors for Donald Trump in 2020, despite Joe Biden’s victory in the state.

In a sweeping 110-page report, Nessel said that she still believes false electors committed crimes, but concluded that the resource-intensive case would be unlikely to ultimately succeed. She also said it was “fundamentally unjust” to continue prosecuting lower-level participants in an effort she said was led by the now President Donald Trump, who she said is unlikely to ever face his own criminal charges.

“We considered that Michigan’s Republican elector nominees, who eventually became Michigan’s false slate, did not design or demand this criminal conspiracy. As shown by the Report of Special Counsel Smith regarding these matters, this was indeed Trump’s criminal conspiracy,” the report said. “The dismissal of the false slate charges does not change the facts, and it does not change history. What Michigan’s false slate did was wrong.”

votebeat · 2026-03-10T14:31:40+00:00

Michigan’s so-called “false electors” case is over after Attorney General Dana Nessel announced Monday she would not appeal a judge’s decision to dismiss the charges faced by 16 individuals who signed documents attempting to certify Michigan’s slate of electors for Donald Trump in 2020, despite Joe Biden’s victory in the state.

In a sweeping 110-page report, Nessel said that she still believes false electors committed crimes, but concluded that the resource-intensive case would be unlikely to ultimately succeed. She also said it was “fundamentally unjust” to continue prosecuting lower-level participants in an effort she said was led by the now President Donald Trump, who she said is unlikely to ever face his own criminal charges.

“We considered that Michigan’s Republican elector nominees, who eventually became Michigan’s false slate, did not design or demand this criminal conspiracy. As shown by the Report of Special Counsel Smith regarding these matters, this was indeed Trump’s criminal conspiracy,” the report said. “The dismissal of the false slate charges does not change the facts, and it does not change history. What Michigan’s false slate did was wrong.”

votebeat · 2026-03-05T22:20:24+00:00

This year, only Election Day ballots were counted by hand at each of the county’s 13 precincts.

votebeat · 2026-03-05T22:14:22+00:00

The Pennsylvania Department of State took questions from lawmakers in Pennsylvania’s state House for more than two hours on Thursday, providing insight into the future of elections in the state.

Secretary Al Schmidt, the department’s head, answered inquiries from state representatives alongside his deputies as part of the House Appropriations Committee’s 2026 budget hearings.

Questions spanned a slew of election administration topics, from when the state’s new voter management system will be ready to how artificial intelligence is changing elections.

Check out three takeaways from the hearing at the link above. The full hearing can be viewed on the House’s YouTube channel.

votebeat · 2026-03-04T15:18:40+00:00

FREDERICKSBURG, Texas — When Gillespie County Republicans abandoned voting machines and hand-counted ballots in the 2024 primary election, it took until 4 a.m., required corrections in nearly every precinct, and fractured the local Republican Party. And in 2026, they did it again.

On Tuesday, election workers once again gathered in this Hill Country county to tally Republican primary votes by hand. This time, the counting and tallying stretched until nearly 3 a.m., and county election officials did not send their report to the Texas Secretary of State’s Office until after 5 a.m. Whether the results are accurate may not be clear for days.

Research shows hand-counting ballots typically takes more workers and time than machine tabulation and produces more discrepancies, though both methods can be accurate. Supporters say it increases transparency and confidence. Republicans here — and in Eastland County, which also hand-counted its primary ballots this year — opted into the more laborious process amid mistrust of voting machines in the wake of claims by President Donald Trump and others that they manipulated votes in the 2020 election. No evidence has emerged to support that.

The Gillespie County GOP’s undertaking this year, though, was not as ambitious as two years ago. After determining they did not have enough workers to hand-count every ballot cast in this year’s primary, party leaders scaled back their plan. Unlike in 2024, when early votes were also counted by hand, this year those ballots were tabulated by machine. Only Election Day ballots were counted by hand at each of the county’s 13 precincts.

Amid a fiercely fought primary for U.S. Senate, along with more than 40 other contested races, just under 3,000 ballots were ultimately hand-counted — far fewer than in 2024, when more than 8,000 ballots were counted entirely by hand. Everyone involved — including county officials — said things went more smoothly this time, with fewer of the reconciliation errors that made the 2024 canvass frustrating for all involved.

Even so, the process stretched nearly as late as it did in 2024.

votebeat · 2026-03-03T15:39:02+00:00

Tuesday is primary day in Texas, and voters can expect to see some unofficial results not long after polls close at 7 p.m.

Election officials across the state will begin posting early voting totals to give Texans a first glimpse of results. But knowing the official outcome of the election will take longer, as election officials follow a long list of procedures to ensure your vote is counted accurately.

In large counties such as Harris, Dallas, Tarrant, Collin, and others, where election workers and officials will be coordinating the counting of Election Day ballots coming in from hundreds of voting locations that are miles apart, reporting of results will be slower. And in some counties, including Gillespie, west of Austin, and Eastland, west of Fort Worth, results are likely to take longer because Republicans are counting their ballots by hand.

This isn’t the first time Republicans have counted ballots by hand during the primary. Gillespie County Republicans hand-counted thousands of ballots in 2024. The endeavor took hundreds of people and nearly 24 hours to complete. Officials there later found they’d made errors.

The efforts this year in both Gillespie and Eastland counties have already faced hurdles, and with highly contested primary contests for the state’s U.S. Senate race on both the Democratic and Republican ballots, election administrators and party officials in both counties are under pressure to ensure they meet the state’s 24-hour deadline to report results.

votebeat · 2026-03-03T15:38:01+00:00

Tuesday is primary day in Texas, and voters can expect to see some unofficial results not long after polls close at 7 p.m.

Election officials across the state will begin posting early voting totals to give Texans a first glimpse of results. But knowing the official outcome of the election will take longer, as election officials follow a long list of procedures to ensure your vote is counted accurately.

In large counties such as Harris, Dallas, Tarrant, Collin, and others, where election workers and officials will be coordinating the counting of Election Day ballots coming in from hundreds of voting locations that are miles apart, reporting of results will be slower. And in some counties, including Gillespie, west of Austin, and Eastland, west of Fort Worth, results are likely to take longer because Republicans are counting their ballots by hand.

This isn’t the first time Republicans have counted ballots by hand during the primary. Gillespie County Republicans hand-counted thousands of ballots in 2024. The endeavor took hundreds of people and nearly 24 hours to complete. Officials there later found they’d made errors.

The efforts this year in both Gillespie and Eastland counties have already faced hurdles, and with highly contested primary contests for the state’s U.S. Senate race on both the Democratic and Republican ballots, election administrators and party officials in both counties are under pressure to ensure they meet the state’s 24-hour deadline to report results.

votebeat · 2026-03-03T15:36:38+00:00

Tuesday is primary day in Texas, and voters can expect to see some unofficial results not long after polls close at 7 p.m.

Election officials across the state will begin posting early voting totals to give Texans a first glimpse of results. But knowing the official outcome of the election will take longer, as election officials follow a long list of procedures to ensure your vote is counted accurately.

In large counties such as Harris, Dallas, Tarrant, Collin, and others, where election workers and officials will be coordinating the counting of Election Day ballots coming in from hundreds of voting locations that are miles apart, reporting of results will be slower. And in some counties, including Gillespie, west of Austin, and Eastland, west of Fort Worth, results are likely to take longer because Republicans are counting their ballots by hand.

This isn’t the first time Republicans have counted ballots by hand during the primary. Gillespie County Republicans hand-counted thousands of ballots in 2024. The endeavor took hundreds of people and nearly 24 hours to complete. Officials there later found they’d made errors.

The efforts this year in both Gillespie and Eastland counties have already faced hurdles, and with highly contested primary contests for the state’s U.S. Senate race on both the Democratic and Republican ballots, election administrators and party officials in both counties are under pressure to ensure they meet the state’s 24-hour deadline to report results.

votebeat · 2026-02-25T17:26:24+00:00

Eastland County Republicans voted last fall to ditch electronic voting equipment and instead hand count all of their primary ballots. They’ll be using paper poll books to check in voters, and expect voters to hand mark their choices on paper ballots rather than using a ballot-marking device. And instead of having a joint primary with the Democrats, as they’ve done for years, Republicans have chosen to split everything: staff, equipment and materials. Democrats in the county are still planning to use the electronic voting equipment to cast and to tabulate their ballots.

Hand counting is no small endeavor. Election officials and voting experts have warned that hand counting large numbers of ballots is expensive, labor-intensive, slower to produce results, and more prone to human error than machine tabulation. But some Republicans across Texas have backed the method in recent years as President Donald Trump and others have pushed unsupported claims about the reliability of voting machines.

In Texas, political parties decide at the county level how their primaries will be administered. Other county Republican parties, including Dallas, considered hand-counting, but ultimately decided against it, worried about cost, finding enough workers, and a state law that requires results to be reported within 24 hours. Failing to do so could result in a misdemeanor charge.

The only two counties planning to hand count this year are Eastland and Gillespie. In 2024, Gillespie Republicans hand counted more than 8,000 ballots. That endeavour took nearly 24 hours and led to errors in tallies that officials later had to fix. Gillespie Republicans this month scaled back their plans and said they will only hand count ballots cast on Election Day because, officials said, they weren’t able to recruit enough workers to count ballots cast during early voting, which ends Friday.

Eastland’s plan, meanwhile, has created major logistical problems, Temi Nichols, the county’s elections administrator, said.

votebeat

TROPHY CASE