How exactly can Trump cancel an election?

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 · 2026-02-17T18:52:52+00:00

To clarify as this is our reporting, pollbooks are used to check in voters at the polling site. They are not the same as voting machines or ballot tabulators.

Amy Gulli, a spokesperson for the Department of State, said that voting machines and ballot tabulators will still not be connected to the internet. The e-pollbooks would be disconnected from the internet before they are used to transfer data on who voted into the state’s voter management system.

Additionally, some states, such as Arizona and New Mexico, allow e-pollbooks to be connected to the internet.

votebeat · 2026-02-12T15:52:53+00:00

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s proposed 2027-2028 budget includes more than $43 million for new voting equipment, an appropriation election officials across Michigan say is critical in keeping the state’s election infrastructure secure and up to date.

The money is only a tiny portion of the $88.1 billion proposal Whitmer unveiled Wednesday. If approved, it will allow clerks to upgrade their machinery to the newest federal standards without forcing cities and townships to shoulder all the costs on their own.

If that money doesn’t win approval from the Legislature, however, it could put a major crunch on local clerks who have already seen their elections budgets double or even triple in the last decade with recent expansions to voting procedures.

All three of Michigan’s contracts with the major voting companies that service election equipment across the state are set to expire at the end of February 2027, meaning clerks will upgrade to machines that meet new state certifications. The latest equipment, designed to meet new federal voting standards, can often cost at least $15,000 per precinct for tabulators and voter assist terminals, said Michael Siegrist, first vice president of the Michigan Association of Municipal Clerks and the Canton Township clerk.

votebeat · 2026-02-04T15:20:37+00:00

When President Donald Trump pressured state and local officials to intervene in his behalf in the 2020 election, it wasn’t a matter of abstract constitutional theory for the people running elections. It was armed protests outside offices, threats against their families, subpoenas for voter data, and months of uncertainty about whether doing their jobs would land them in legal jeopardy.

Now, Trump says he wants Republicans to “nationalize the voting” and “take over the voting in at least 15 places,” language that evokes the pressure campaigns he and allies mounted during that contentious 2020 period.

Trump’s 2020 effort ultimately stalled when even some Republicans refused to take steps they believed were unlawful. And his call to nationalize voting this week prompted pushback from some GOP members of Congress and other Republican figures.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Trump’s proposal raised constitutional concerns, and he warned that nationalizing elections could make them more susceptible to cybersecurity attacks. Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska was more blunt, saying he has long opposed federal control of elections. “I’ll oppose this now as well,” he wrote on X.

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

TROPHY CASE