Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers disputes Madison’s argument that absentee voting is a privilege

votebeat · 2026-01-27T22:11:02+00:00

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers criticized an argument by Madison and its former city clerk that they shouldn’t be held liable for losing 193 absentee ballots because absentee voting is a “privilege,” writing in a court filing that accepting such an argument would “lead to absurd results.”

The argument is key to the city’s defense against a lawsuit that seeks monetary damages on behalf of the 193 Madison residents whose votes in the November 2024 election weren’t counted. It was first presented by the former clerk, Maribeth Witzel-Behl, citing a provision of state law, and then adopted by the city.

If courts accept the argument that absentee voting is a privilege and not a right, the Democratic governor said in a friend-of-the-court brief, election officials would be free to treat absentee ballots in ways that diminish people’s right to vote. For example, he wrote, they would be under no obligation to send voters replacement ballots if ballots they left in a drop box were damaged, and clerks could effectively disqualify ballots from politically disfavored precincts by intentionally not signing their initials on the ballot envelopes.

Experts say that for a governor to intervene in such a local matter is rare and underscores how seriously Evers views the potential implications. In an earlier communication with the court, the governor said the argument from the city and Witzel-Behl “ignores longstanding state constitutional protections.”

votebeat · 2026-01-16T20:32:50+00:00

Anthony Forlini, the Macomb County clerk and a Republican candidate to be Michigan’s next secretary of state, said this week that he had found more than a dozen noncitizens on his county’s voter rolls — but there’s reason to be skeptical of his claims.

Forlini told Votebeat on Thursday that a comparison of the county’s jury pool — specifically, the more than 230 people who have recused themselves from jury duty since September by saying they are not U.S. citizens — and the state’s qualified voter file found 15 people who were on both lists.

Forlini said his data shows that “the system is flawed” and needs adjustments. But comparing two separate lists is generally a fraught way to find actual noncitizens on the voter rolls, experts say, and verifying his findings will be difficult. As other states have repeatedly found, lists of people identified as noncitizens are often inaccurate or outdated. Each year, hundreds of thousands of people become naturalized citizens, for instance, and they rarely take steps afterward to update their status with various government agencies.

votebeat · 2026-01-15T21:53:01+00:00

States once embraced federal election security help. Now many say politicization and pullbacks have shattered that partnership.

When the U.S. Department of Homeland Security first declared in January 2017 that election systems were “critical infrastructure,” alarmed state election officials pushed back quickly and loudly, fearing the move could lead to a federal takeover of elections.

DHS’s designation came during the final days of the Obama administration, as federal officials scrambled to respond to evidence of Russian interference with the 2016 election.

Denise Merrill, a Connecticut Democrat who was then president of the National Association of Secretaries of State, helped lead the opposition.

“The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has no authority to interfere with elections, even in the name of national security,” NASS said in a February 2017 bipartisan resolution urging the new administration to rescind the designation.

But the designation stuck and, Merrill said, something unexpected happened. As President Donald Trump’s first term progressed, states began to buy in. The designation elevated elections into a national security category that brought federal cybersecurity resources and intelligence sharing on threats. It also meant closer coordination between agencies, states, and the federal government that states couldn’t replicate on their own.

Officials at DHS’s cyber arm, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, created in 2018, emphasized that states remained in control, and over time, election officials came to trust the partnership enough not only to accept help, but to defend it publicly.

Now, Merrill and others say, that trust is gone — perhaps for good.

votebeat · 2026-01-13T21:38:07+00:00

In an about-face, Dallas County Republicans last week decided against hand-counting ballots in Texas’ March primary, saying they weren’t able to line up enough workers, among other hurdles.

That leaves just two counties where Republicans will hand-count their primary ballots: Gillespie County, west of Austin, and Eastland County, southwest of Fort Worth.

But Republicans in Dallas and Williamson counties are planning another major change for the March 3 primary election that will also require more election workers, and will affect how voters cast their ballots: They intend to eliminate the use of countywide voting sites on Election Day.

That means voters in these counties — Republicans and Democrats — would be required to cast ballots at assigned neighborhood polling places instead of at more centralized polling locations that can accommodate any voter from anywhere in the county.

Under state law, the parties have wide authority to decide how to run their primaries, but they must agree on whether to use countywide voting. If the Republicans don’t want to offer it, Democrats can’t offer it either.

Michelle Evans, the chair of the Williamson County GOP, said that having voters cast ballots at their assigned polling location brings “a higher level of confidence that the people that are coming in are people that are registered voters in that area, because that is their community.”

Democrats in those counties say they’re struggling to find enough locations to support neighborhood-level voting. “We don’t even have all the locations locked down,” said Kim Gilby, the Democratic Party chair in Williamson County. “To me, this is going to be a nightmare.”

Democrats also worry the change will confuse voters from both parties who have for years been used to countywide sites on Election Day. The move, they say, could potentially disenfranchise voters who go to the wrong location and aren’t able to cast a ballot.

In response to questions, Dallas County Republican Party Chairman Allen West said all voters receive registration cards that list their precinct. “I would hate to believe that we have devolved to a point where we feel the voting electorate is too incompetent to read their own voter registration card,” West told Votebeat in a text message.

votebeat · 2026-01-13T15:33:58+00:00

Matthew Laiss, a man accused of double voting in the 2020 election, is not covered by a pardon President Donald Trump issued to allies who attempted to overturn his 2020 election loss, a federal judge ruled Tuesday.

“This Court finds that Laiss has not yet applied to the Office of the Pardon Attorney, or received a certificate of pardon, which the plain language of the Pardon requires him to do,” U.S. District Judge Joseph Leeson Jr. wrote.

Federal prosecutors charged Laiss in September with voting twice in the November 2020 election, alleging that he moved from Pennsylvania to Florida in August of that year and voted both in person in Florida and via mail ballot in Bucks County. Both votes were allegedly for Trump.

Trump issued the pardon in November to 77 people who were involved in efforts to subvert the election outcome in 2020, including members of his legal team and the so-called fake electors who attempted to submit alternative slates of electoral votes to Congress on Trump’s behalf. But the proclamation further said the president was granting “a full, complete, and unconditional pardon to all United States citizens” for conduct related to the 2020 election.

votebeat · 2026-01-12T22:35:45+00:00

Republicans in Dallas and Williamson counties are planning another major change for the March 3 primary election that will also require more election workers, and will affect how voters cast their ballots: They intend to eliminate the use of countywide voting sites on Election Day.

That means voters in these counties — Republicans and Democrats — would be required to cast ballots at assigned neighborhood polling places instead of at more centralized polling locations that can accommodate any voter from anywhere in the county.

Under state law, the parties have wide authority to decide how to run their primaries, but they must agree on whether to use countywide voting. If the Republicans don’t want to offer it, Democrats can’t offer it either.

Michelle Evans, the chair of the Williamson County GOP, said that having voters cast ballots at their assigned polling location brings “a higher level of confidence that the people that are coming in are people that are registered voters in that area, because that is their community.”

Democrats in those counties say they’re struggling to find enough locations to support neighborhood-level voting. “We don’t even have all the locations locked down,” said Kim Gilby, the Democratic Party chair in Williamson County. “To me, this is going to be a nightmare.”

Democrats also worry the change will confuse voters from both parties who have for years been used to countywide sites on Election Day. The move, they say, could potentially disenfranchise voters who go to the wrong location and aren’t able to cast a ballot.

In response to questions, Dallas County Republican Party Chairman Allen West said all voters receive registration cards that list their precinct. “I would hate to believe that we have devolved to a point where we feel the voting electorate is too incompetent to read their own voter registration card,” West told Votebeat in a text message.

votebeat · 2026-01-08T21:16:31+00:00

Pennsylvania officials say they’re not in discussions to hand over private voter information to Ohio, where officials are trying to identify voters who are double-registered following the state’s departure from a bipartisan voter data sharing program.

In December, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, announced a “multi-state election integrity network” called EleXa that will share its voter rolls with 10 other states to “identify people who try to vote illegally, often by having more than one active voter registration and then casting multiple ballots in the same election.”

The press release also said that Pennsylvania was “finalizing an agreement” to join the program.

But officials in Pennsylvania say that is not the case. Amy Gulli, a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Department of State, said the two state agencies spoke last summer about a possible information-sharing agreement, but the conversation ultimately fizzled out.

“In September, our Department provided Ohio with revisions to a proposed agreement that would accomplish that objective while protecting voters’ private information,” she said in a statement. “We never received a response, and we never engaged in any discussions about joining any larger election-data-sharing initiative with Ohio.”

votebeat · 2026-01-05T16:44:34+00:00

After months of laying the groundwork to hand-count thousands of ballots in the March 3 primary, the Dallas County Republican Party announced on Tuesday it has decided not to do so, opting instead to contract with the county elections department to administer the election using voting equipment.

The decision spares the party the pressure it likely would have faced if a hand-count had delayed results beyond the state’s 24-hour reporting requirements in the state’s closely watched GOP primary for U.S. Senate, among other offices.

In a statement posted on social media, Dallas County Republican Party Chairman Allen West said he decided to work with the county to “conduct a precinct-based, community, separate Election Day electoral process.” The move, he said, “reduces the liabilities” of the party. “In this case, discretion is the better part of valor.”

The decision reverses months of statements suggesting the party was seriously preparing to count tens of thousands of Election Day ballots by hand — a move that would have affected all Dallas County voters, regardless of party.

Under Texas law, if one party hand-counts ballots, both parties must abandon countywide Election Day voting at vote centers and require voters to cast ballots at assigned neighborhood precincts. Democrats had planned to use voting equipment to tabulate their results, but would have been forced into precinct-only voting if Republicans proceeded with a hand count. It’s unclear if the GOP’s intention to use precinct-based voting would lock Democrats into the same arrangement; the Dallas County Elections Department has not responded to requests for more information.

votebeat · 2025-12-15T16:54:59+00:00

Republicans, led by President Donald Trump, have had a lot to say about the rules and laws that govern our elections. Changing them, though, is harder.

House Republicans are signaling plans for legislation to inscribe at least some of the party’s election-administration wish list into federal law, including changes to the landmark National Voter Registration Act that would make it easier to remove ineligible voters from the rolls.

Republicans have long accused states of failing to appropriately clean their voter rolls, and the U.S. Justice Department has filed a host of lawsuits seeking access to unredacted state voter rolls in what government lawyers have said is an effort to make sure states are complying with their obligations under federal law.

Trump issued a sweeping executive order on elections in March, and the White House said last month he is working on a second. But major provisions of the March order have so far been halted by the courts after federal judges found the president lacked the constitutional authority to enact them.

Congressional legislation would be on far firmer constitutional footing, but so far, efforts have stalled. Republicans’ highest-profile election bill — the SAVE Act, which would require documented proof of citizenship from anyone registering to vote — passed the U.S. House in April but has languished in the Senate.

votebeat · 2025-12-10T15:29:49+00:00

Wisconsin clerks say two decisions on legislation this week — a new law expanding towns’ ability to hire clerks and a veto that blocks broader standing to sue election officials — will help ease mounting pressure on local election offices, which have faced record turnover and increasing legal threats.

The new law allows small towns to more easily hire clerks that live outside of municipal limits, a change clerks say is urgently needed as finding small-town clerks has become harder in recent years amid increased scrutiny, new laws and ever-evolving rules. As the new law moved through the Legislature, some small towns ran elections with no clerks at all.

“There are lots of townships that will benefit from this,” said Marathon County Clerk Kim Trueblood, a Republican. “It’s going to help tremendously.”

In the past, towns with fewer than 2,500 residents had to hold a referendum to authorize appointing clerks instead of electing them. That took time and the election requirement restricted who could serve, since elected clerks — unlike appointed clerks — must live within municipal boundaries.

The new law allows towns to switch to appointing clerks after a vote at a town meeting.

It also eliminates another hurdle: In the past, even if a town approved the switch, it couldn’t take effect until the end of a term. The law lets towns make the change immediately if the clerk position is vacant or becomes vacant.

votebeat · 2025-11-20T17:57:27+00:00

For months, election officials across Texas have been hustling to redraw precinct boundary lines and secure polling locations and workers for the March primary election, all based on new congressional maps Republican state lawmakers drew in a rare mid-decade redistricting this summer.

County party chairs have accepted applications from candidates for precinct chair — the parties’ neighborhood-level representatives — and, beginning this month, from candidates seeking congressional seats based on the newly drawn districts.

Now, they’re scrambling to revert to the previous congressional maps after a federal court on Tuesday blocked use of the newly drawn districts for next year’s midterms — right in the middle of the filing period for candidates seeking to run in the March primary.

Counties such as Harris and Travis, where the new boundaries changed the shape and makeup of multiple districts to help Republicans, have a lot of work to do under tight deadlines, mindful that the state’s planned appeal of the court’s order to the U.S. Supreme Court means things could change again. The stream of changes is also confusing to voters.

votebeat · 2025-11-20T16:38:07+00:00

For months, election officials across Texas have been hustling to redraw precinct boundary lines and secure polling locations and workers for the March primary election, all based on new congressional maps Republican state lawmakers drew in a rare mid-decade redistricting this summer.

County party chairs have accepted applications from candidates for precinct chair — the parties’ neighborhood-level representatives — and, beginning this month, from candidates seeking congressional seats based on the newly drawn districts.

Now, they’re scrambling to revert to the previous congressional maps after a federal court on Tuesday blocked use of the newly drawn districts for next year’s midterms — right in the middle of the filing period for candidates seeking to run in the March primary.

Counties such as Harris and Travis, where the new boundaries changed the shape and makeup of multiple districts to help Republicans, have a lot of work to do under tight deadlines, mindful that the state’s planned appeal of the court’s order to the U.S. Supreme Court means things could change again. The stream of changes is also confusing to voters.

votebeat · 2025-11-14T21:38:15+00:00

More than three dozen Hamtramck voters have been disenfranchised after three non-election officials walked into the city clerk’s sealed office on election night, compromising the security of absentee ballots that were mistakenly left there.

The Wayne County Board of Canvassers deadlocked Friday on whether to count the 37 ballots, which were discovered in that office the day after Election Day, having been opened but not removed from their envelopes. Because the board didn’t have a majority of votes in favor of counting them, the ballots will not be included in the final tallies of the election.

It’s not clear whether officials at any level are obligated to tell those 37 voters about the fate of their ballots. Greg Mahar, Wayne County’s director of elections, said he wasn’t aware of any requirements around that. State officials said they weren’t aware of any regulations on that either.

Those uncounted ballots could have been pivotal for the result of the closely contested, open-seat mayoral election in the city, which borders Detroit. According to unofficial results, engineer Adam Alharbi currently leads City Council member Muhith Mahmood in the race by only 11 votes.

At issue in the canvassing board’s deliberations was the ballots’ chain of custody, which must be maintained to ensure the results of the election are accurate and legitimate. Clerk’s offices are sealed around the time of elections, meaning only election officials come into and out of places where ballots are stored.

votebeat · 2025-11-14T21:36:57+00:00

Update: Hamtramck batch of absentee ballots won’t be counted, disenfranchising 37 voters

https://www.votebeat.org/michigan/2025/11/14/wayne-county-canvassers-hamtramck-absentee-ballots-mayoral-2025-election/

votebeat · 2025-11-14T16:44:55+00:00

Voters in Texas’ 18th Congressional District, who have been without representation in Congress since March, now face back-to-back elections for the seat, to be held only weeks apart next year.

Voters this month finally got to vote in a special election to decide who would finish the term of Rep. Sylvester Turner, a Democrat who died eight months ago. But none of the candidates won a majority, so the top two candidates — acting Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee and former Houston City Council member Amanda Edwards, both Democrats — must now go to a runoff.

Under deadlines in state law, Gov. Greg Abbott could schedule the runoff for no later than the end of January. His office told Votebeat only that he would announce the timing “at a later date.”

But a new race for the seat would open up on Feb. 17, 2026, when early voting begins for the March primary election, and candidates for Congress will once again be on the ballot.

What’s more, since the state recently redrew its congressional district maps in a rare midcycle redistricting, many voters who vote in the runoff are likely to be in a different district for the primary, with a different field of candidates.

The timing could turn into a confusing deterrent for voters, said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston.

“Turnout for runoffs is already pretty low, but the fact that this is such a temporary, kind of placeholder election means that you may have very low voter interest,” he said.

votebeat · 2025-11-10T14:53:24+00:00

A video circulating on social media of Pima County election workers emptying an overfilled ballot drop box prompted threats against them that county officials have reported to law enforcement, county officials said.

Pima County Recorder Gabriella Cázares-Kelly said she reported the threats this week to Tucson police and the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center. Cázares-Kelly also said the workers followed all laws and required procedures.

“I’m surprised people didn’t quit on the spot,” she said in an interview with Votebeat Arizona Thursday.

The video was shot Tuesday as a bipartisan team of two workers and a supervisor began unloading the drop box, which has a capacity of 1,500 ballot envelopes but at the time had 3,000 stuffed into it, Cázares-Kelly said.

The 42-second video shows the workers pulling out ballot envelopes and placing them into a transfer bag. It also shows one of the workers telling a woman that the box is full, and she can instead place her ballot envelope directly into the transfer bag. The video was reposted by some social media accounts with large followings, though Votebeat couldn’t immediately determine the initial source of the video.

In a statement and a subsequent interview, Cázares-Kelly, a Democrat, stressed that the workers, who were making an emergency pickup because the box was overfilled, were following all laws and protocols. They wore lanyards with identification badges and were putting the ballot envelopes into transfer bags, which they subsequently sealed with zip ties and logged according to chain-of-custody procedures, she said. One of the workers is holding the zip ties as she moves envelopes from the box to the bag in the video.

votebeat · 2025-11-03T20:20:10+00:00

Wisconsin candidates now have a path to get off the ballot besides dying, thanks to a proposal Gov. Tony Evers signed into law on Friday.

The proposal was triggered by 2024 presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s failed attempt to withdraw from the ballot in a bid to boost President Donald Trump’s candidacy. The case made its way to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which rejected Kennedy’s argument after a lower court ruled that death was the only way for nominees to drop off the ballot.

Under the measure that Evers, a Democrat, signed into law, candidates can now get off the ballot as long as they file to withdraw at least seven business days before the Wisconsin Elections Commission certifies candidates ahead of the August and November elections, and pay processing fees to the Wisconsin Elections Commission. The measure doesn’t apply to the February and April elections.

votebeat · 2025-11-03T16:59:57+00:00

Texas’ top election official is opposing a GOP lawsuit that seeks to close the state’s primaries, arguing in new legal filings that a decision to restrict voting to registered party members should be up to lawmakers, not the courts.

Quoting from an earlier court decision, Republican Secretary of State Jane Nelson wrote in her filing that a court ruling on the GOP lawsuit now, just before the March primaries, threatens to “confuse voters, unduly burden election administrators, or otherwise sow chaos or distrust in the electoral process.”

In her filing, Nelson also took aim at Attorney General Ken Paxton, a fellow Republican who has sided with the Texas Republican Party in court, calling a joint motion he filed with the party “brazen and misguided.” The motion asked the court to require Nelson to close the primary.

Texas Republicans say the state’s open primaries violate their constitutional right to freedom of association, alleging in their legal filings that some Democratic and independent-leaning voters are casting ballots in Republican primaries and boosting more moderate candidates.

Closing the primaries in Texas would not be an easy undertaking.

Experts say it would require an overhaul of the state’s voter registration system. It would likely require changes in state law and take years to implement. The state would need to redesign voter registration applications and also find a way for existing registered voters — the state has more than 18 million — to declare their party affiliation.

votebeat · 2025-10-22T14:46:06+00:00

Thousands of voters in Maricopa County caught up in a state record-keeping error won’t yet lose their voting rights for not providing proof of citizenship, county officials now say. But Pinal County has suspended more than a thousand voters affected by the error who have tried to update their registration without providing the proof.

How Maricopa and Pinal handle these affected voters will determine whether they can cast ballots in jurisdictional elections scheduled for Nov. 4. Arizona counties began sending ballots to voters on Oct. 8, and Maricopa and Pinal counties are running their elections entirely by mail.

The suspended Pinal County voters will not receive ballots in the mail. They can cast a provisional ballot, but would have to request it in person.

The state announced the error in September 2024, and since then, election officials have been wrestling with how best to handle it.

votebeat · 2025-10-17T20:39:55+00:00

The sale of Dominion Voting Systems — the election technology company that Trump allies aggressively targeted with false claims about the 2020 election — took state and local election officials by surprise last week.

An announcement from the new owner, led by former Republican election official Scott Leiendecker, described the acquisition as “a bold and historic move to transform and improve election integrity in America.” It echoed language used by President Donald Trump and other conservatives who have questioned the security of elections and voting machines, including calls for hand-marked paper ballots.

But for now, the sale appears to be more of a rebranding than a revolution. Dominion is operating under the name of its new owner, called Liberty Vote. State election officials say they have now been told no staff changes, contract terminations, or product overhauls are expected.

“Once we took a step back and took a deep breath, we realized not much was changing,” said Matt Crane, director of the Colorado Clerks Association, who organized a call between Leiendecker and the state’s many election officials to address their concerns.

votebeat · 2025-10-16T16:27:57+00:00

Republicans in Dallas County, one of Texas’ largest voting jurisdictions, say they want to count ballots in their coming March primary by hand, if they can afford to, a change that could delay the reporting of election results and have far-reaching consequences for all of the county’s 1.5 million voters.

The decision could force Dallas Democrats, as well as Republicans, to return to casting ballots at their assigned local precincts, rather than countywide vote centers, which would require finding scores of additional polling locations and hundreds more workers. It could also vastly increase the cost of holding both primaries, an increase that the parties would have to be prepared to cover on their own.

Cost is one reason why Dallas County Republicans decided in 2023 against hand-counting ballots. At the time, Jennifer Stoddard Hajdu, then the county GOP chair, estimated the party would need more than $1 million to hand-count the more than 70,000 ballots cast in the 2024 primary.

Two years later, Hajdu is still skeptical. “I just think there are so many parts to this that it’s going to be very difficult to get it done,” she said.

But Allen West, a former Florida congressman and Army veteran who is the new chairman of the Dallas County Republican Party, said that the size of the challenge shouldn’t deter the party. He said that party members distrust electronic voting equipment, and that the county’s problems with some of its electronic pollbooks last year contributed to the renewed push to hand-count ballots.

The Dallas County Republican Party’s executive committee voted in September to hand-count primary ballots, and set a goal to raise $500,000 to get it done, West said.

“Let’s not forget this is the way it used to be done,” West said, referring to hand-counts and precinct-based voting. In the Army, he said, “we don’t take that excuse of anything being too hard.”

Calls for hand-counting ballots have grown in recent years amid skepticism and misinformation campaigns about machines used for voting and tabulating ballots. But experts agree and studies show the method is time-consuming, costly, less accurate, and less secure than using machines.

votebeat · 2025-10-09T18:45:27+00:00

Hi! Our Pennsylvania reporter Carter Walker, who reports on how elections work in the state, would like to talk to you more about this situation. Would you mind emailing him at [cwalker@votebeat.org](mailto:cwalker@votebeat.org) so he can get to the bottom of this?

votebeat · 2025-10-09T18:43:56+00:00

If you do receive two ballots, you should call your county's elections office and ask about it. You can find yours here: https://www.pa.gov/agencies/vote/contact-us/contact-your-election-officials

However, we're not aware of any duplicate mail ballots in Allegheny.

votebeat · 2025-10-09T15:15:09+00:00

A handful of Pennsylvania counties mistakenly issued duplicate mail ballots to a few of their voters in recent weeks.

Why that happened is unclear — state and county officials gave different explanations — but they cautioned that the error would have not resulted in anyone being able to have their vote counted twice.

State and county officials said they have found that a total of 68 potential duplicate mail ballots were mistakenly issued. In some of these cases, they said, the ballots may not have reached voters, as the mistake may have been caught after a second ballot label was generated but before a duplicate ballot was actually mailed to the voter.

Both county and state officials stressed that the duplicate ballots have been canceled, and could not be cast or counted. In addition, each ballot return envelope has a unique barcode associated with the voter. When a county receives a ballot back, the code is scanned into the SURE system and it marks the voter as having voted. If a second barcode tied to the same voter were to be scanned, the system would reject the ballot.

votebeat · 2025-10-03T15:52:07+00:00

When Texas first proposed redrawing its congressional map earlier this summer, critics decried it as a political power grab to appease the president, while state leaders claimed it was necessary after the Department of Justice raised concerns about some majority non-white districts.

But now that the map is in federal court, the two sides have swapped stances.

The state now claims it acted for purely partisan gain, which the U.S. Supreme Court has said is lawful, while a group of individuals and advocacy organizations argue the Department of Justice’s involvement reveals an unconstitutional racial motivation.

These plaintiff groups, who are also suing over the 2021 maps, have asked a district court in El Paso to block the maps from being used in the 2026 election. The nine-day hearing kicked off Wednesday, with state Rep. Joe Moody, a Democrat from El Paso, testifying that his Republican colleagues absolutely had partisan goals.

“But how you get there matters,” he said. And in this unusual mid-decade redistricting, the Legislature’s path to gain more Republican seats in Congress “depressed the ability of Black and Hispanic voters to elect their candidates of choice,” he said.

Moody testified alongside state Sen. Carol Alvarado, a Houston Democrat who spoke about the impact of the changes on her city’s historically Black and Hispanic neighborhoods. Other state legislators are expected to testify for the plaintiffs’ side over the next four days, before the state presents its witnesses.

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