election

WASHINGTON — The Senate in an overnight vote Saturday approved a short-term measure to fund federal agencies into early December and avoid a potentially chaotic government shutdown during the middle of campaign season.

The late-summer action on a funding fix is unusual. Normally, Congress waits until the final days or hours of a funding deadline to pass short-term patches, but this time senators acted nearly two months before the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30.

The 90-6 vote showed lawmakers are still smarting from the two historic shutdowns in the last year and want to avoid another before voters go to the polls.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) wanted the funding dealt with before senators went home for the next five weeks to focus on their reelection campaigns and other matters. It got caught up with other issues that pushed votes into the night, but the bill had broad bipartisan support. The House will also have to approve the measure when members return from their August recess before it can go to President Trump’s desk for his signature.

The bill generally funds the federal government at current levels through Dec. 11, but includes a variety of exceptions that senators negotiated with the White House.

Democrats secured language to ensure no money could be transferred to the Border Patrol. They also rejected the White House’s request of $1 billion for early work on a new “Trump-class” battleship that the administration announced Dec. 22.

“The only person who wants these golden ships is Donald Trump so he can slap his name on them,” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said.

Hemp provision

The bill also includes language delaying a national ban on most intoxicating hemp products. That one-month delay prompted outrage from some Senate Republicans who say that too many such products are falling into the hands of unsuspecting children. The packaging of the products often relies on bright colors and intentionally mimics popular snack brands to attract consumers.

Sen. Ted Budd (R-N.C.) said that since 2017 there has been nearly a tenfold increase in cannabis-related emergency room visits by minors in his home state.

“This is a public health crisis that deserves this Senate’s immediate attention,” Budd said. “Our children should never be the testing ground for an industry willing to exploit a loophole in federal law for profit.”

But the hemp industry said the delay buys time for Congress to craft legislation that protects hemp farmers and businesses while also putting in place safeguards to protect children.

Trump himself has called Budd to discuss the issue, though the president did not specifically ask the senator to drop his effort, Budd’s spokesman said.

“Sen. Budd had a friendly phone call with President Trump discussing the legislative efforts regarding THC,” said spokesman Christian McMullen. He said the senator outlined his concerns about “any delay to closing the hemp loophole.”

Budd tried to strip the hemp delay from the bill, but the Senate turned aside his effort.

Trump rule on grants delayed

Democratic lawmakers, along with Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), also got language in the bill that would block, for the duration of the funding patch, new regulations on federal grants. The regulations would require a senior political appointee to review grants before they are awarded to ensure, among other things, that they advance the president’s policy priorities. Democrats say it’s an effort to kill grants destined for Democratic-leaning states. The Trump administration recently admitted in a court filing denying clean-energy grants to California and other blue states based only on politics.

“They are not interested in making our tax dollars work better — they just want them to work for Donald Trump,” said Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee.

The White House Office of Management and Budget says its effort is about improving accountability to ensure taxpayer dollars aren’t wasted or misused. The issue is sure to be a topic of future negotiations on a full-year spending measure.

But Collins said the vast majority of the nearly 500,000 people and groups weighing in on the rule are opposed to it.

“I don’t think in my time that I’ve been privileged to serve in the Senate that I have ever seen a proposed rule generate that many negative comments,” Collins said.

Freking and Mascaro write for the Associated Press.

As Israel gears up to hold elections in October, a dramatic surge in settlement activity has heightened concerns that the settler movement is stepping up efforts to cement its grip on the occupied West Bank, in stark defiance of international law.

Last week, the United Nations warned that attacks by Israeli settlers – often carried out alongside Israeli forces – and the creation of illegal settlements and outposts had hit “an all-time high”.

The uptick comes as members of Israel’s hard right seek to ratchet up the political temperature ahead of the crucial polls. It also follows a parliamentary term during which Israel moved to entrench control over the West Bank deeper within the machinery of the state, shifting authority from military administration to civilian institutions, accelerating settlement planning and expanding infrastructure.

However, the Religious Zionist Party of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich – the man widely credited as pushing the settler project to the forefront of Israeli political debate – is suggested by numerous opinion polls to be far from certain to even meet the electoral threshold for the post-election Knesset.

This has prompted what analysts describe as a desperate scramble to promote the settlement mission while consolidating the support of the settler minority that Smotrich grew up within.

Speaking at a meeting of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud Party in late July, Israel’s Defence Minister Israel Katz boasted that, under the governing coalition and Smotrich’s supervision, Israel had approved the establishment of 104 illegal settlements and some 160 settlement farms in the West Bank since coming to power in 2022, according to Israeli media.

In August of last year, Smotrich announced the creation of the E1 settlement project, linking occupied East Jerusalem with the existing settlement of Maale Adumim, located several kilometres to the east – a proposal which, Smotrich bragged, “buries the idea of a Palestinian state”.

The race to settle

Smotrich, who made increased administrative control over the West Bank a condition for supporting Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition in 2022, has undertaken a series of measures to expand the influence of settlers within policymaking.

In 2023, he established his influential Settlements Administration agency within the Ministry of Defence – which oversees the West Bank’s occupation. And last month, he legally embedded the agency within the ministry, making it harder to reverse any of the decisions taken under its watch.

Israeli political analyst Nimrod Flaschenberg said it is “hard to imagine” that Netanyahu “won’t come up with some kind of imaginative ploy to keep him and the far right on the ticket”, referring to Smotrich.

“He has very strong support within the settlements and the ideological far-right,” Flaschenberg added, “but that might not be enough in and of itself to get him securely past the threshold. He’s being squeezed between the populism of [far-right Israeli National Security Minister Itamar] Ben-Gvir and what many people in the lower middle class see as the security of Netanyahu.”

Keeping the hard right

Allied to Smotrich is a prime minister who observers describe as facing not simply an electoral battle, but an existential battle for both his freedom – as a consequence of his long-running corruption trial – and legacy, should the independent inquiry into his failings ahead of the Hamas-led attack of 2023 go ahead.

Given the stakes, some analysts have suggested the incumbent was far from ready to gamble on losing the support of Israel’s hard right and settler movement by condemning the increasing levels of violence in the West Bank.

“We saw him come out on US TV and concede that there may have been a few incidents in the West Bank, but nothing serious,” Chatham House’s Yossi Mekelberg said of Netanyahu’s response to the widespread violence that has swept the West Bank in recent weeks.

“He needs the hard right and settlers’ support, if not for him individually, then at least for his bloc.”

While Netanyahu may feel he has room to manoeuvre over the hugely controversial issue of ultra-Orthodox conscription, no such margin existed within the hard right and settlers. Ultra-Orthodox parties, a key component in the 2022 coalition government, have made the exemption of their constituents from the draft – which almost all Israeli adults are eligible for – a pillar of their political campaigning in recent years.

“Netanyahu knows that the ultra-Orthodox will likely stay with him,” added Mekelberg. “The settlers are more binary. You’re either for them or against,” he said.

Cresting the wave

Irrespective of electoral tactics, the consequences for people living in the occupied West Bank have been catastrophic. In July alone, according to the Palestinian Authority’s Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission, there were 2,256 attacks against Palestinians and their property: 1,458 by the Israeli army and 798 by settlers.

After Yair Golan, leader of the opposition Democrats party, offered a rare criticism of the settler “extremism” which triggered the latest round of violence, Katz accused him of spreading a “blood libel”.

According to leaks of the same meeting in Hebrew-language media, other ministers present called for a harsher response to any resistance from Palestinians, and for the military to be given even greater freedom to shoot at them.

“As the election gets closer, we’re seeing an even greater increase in the violence that’s been escalating ever since October 2023,” said Yair Dvir, of the Israeli rights group B’Tselem.

“It’s important to add this isn’t just the scale of the violence, but also its brutality and the participation of the Israeli state – both the soldiers and the political support they’re receiving.”

Israelis head to the polls in October for the country’s first election since the war on Gaza began. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces mounting pressure over the October 7 attacks, corruption charges, international isolation, and divisions within his coalition.

SACRAMENTO — Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton is pressuring his Democratic rival, Xavier Becerra, to participate in a series of debates in the weeks leading up the Nov. 3 election to determine California’s next governor.

In a video shared by his campaign Friday, Hilton listed six debate invitations he has received from cable broadcaster CNN and television news stations around the state, beginning in late September.

“I have accepted every single one of these debates,” said Hilton, standing behind a debate-style podium and gesturing at an empty one beside him with Becerra’s name on it . “This guy, Xavier Becerra, has not accepted any of them. That is completely outrageous. We have to have a debate in this governor’s race. So come on, Xavier.”

The video shows Hilton walk out of frame and return with a cardboard cutout of Becerra, which he plunks behind the second podium while urging the candidate to “man up and show up.”

Becerra’s campaign said he will debate Hilton and blasted the Republican for “chasing” publicity.

“Snowflake Steve is melting faster than he can plan another press conference. While he’s there chasing media and doing Donald Trump’s bidding, Xavier Becerra is building a coalition of Californians ready to elect a governor who won’t bring Trump’s chaos to their front door,” Becerra spokesman Jonathan Underland said in a statement to The Times.

Hilton, a British immigrant who once advised a U.K. prime minister, is endorsed by President Donald Trump and finished second in the June open-party primary election with 24.6% of the vote.

Years of hosting a weekly show on Fox News has made Hilton comfortable on camera and the debate stage; he appeared at-ease during a series of debates earlier this year while lobbing attacks at his Democratic opponents and blaming the party for the state’s long list of problems.

Becerra served as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services during the Biden administration. Before that, he spent four years battling the first Trump administration as California attorney general and more than two decades representing a Los Angeles congressional district.

The longtime Democratic politician became the come-from-behind winner of the primary, finishing with 28.1% of the vote after polling near the middle or bottom of a crowded field for months. His meteoric rise came after another front-runner, former Rep. Eric Swalwell, dropped out after a former staffer and other women accused him of sexual assault and misconduct.

Becerra has kept a relatively low profile since the election with few public appearances.

Hilton has held several campaign events in recent weeks to court independent and Latino voters. As a Trump-endorsed Republican, he faces a steep climb in California, where the president is deeply unpopular and a GOP candidate has not won a statewide election since 2006.

Last week he accused Democratic leaders of “abandoning” residents in Boyle Heights, where flies, rats and the stench of rotting food have lingered weeks after a frozen food warehouse was damaged by fire.

Hilton also recently took out full-page ads in The Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle to make the case to voters who dislike Trump but are dissatisfied with the status quo in California.

WASHINGTON — With three months remaining until election day, there is now little the Trump administration can do to bring relief to Americans battered by years of stagnant wages and steep inflation before they hit the polls, experts say — complicating midterm campaigning for Republicans and sharpening the opportunity for Democrats to win back some control in Washington.

That’s in part because the Trump administration has very few levers to turn the tide in such a short period, and has shown little interest in using those it does have, experts said. Rather, President Trump has persisted in waging war in Iran and pushed forward with new tariffs on trade partners despite both contributing to soaring costs for food, gas and other basic necessities.

Other options, such as issuing rebate checks for consumers or releasing strategic oil reserves, would be costly in the long run, experts said.

“There isn’t much available on a 14-week clock that doesn’t cost more later than it delivers now,” said Patrick Harker, professor at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School and former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.

The Federal Reserve on Wednesday also declined to use its primary tool for reducing inflation — increasing interest rates — by instead holding rates steady. Trump had not supported a rate increase, instead pressuring the central bank to lower rates, which can lower borrowing costs but increase inflation.

Some factors driving up costs are virtually impossible to resolve in the near term, such as damage to oil refining capabilities in the Middle East as a result of the war in Iran. Others are already baked into pricing to come as a result of tariffs and fuel costs, including for groceries, experts said.

Incumbent parties often suffer midterm losses when voters are broadly pessimistic about the economy, as they are now despite remarkable resilience in the U.S. labor market and strong stock returns.

Consumer prices declined in June for the first time in six years, largely thanks to a decline in gas prices as the Iran war appeared headed toward a resolution — which is no longer the case.

New data Thursday showed the U.S. economy growing at a sluggish 1.5% pace from April through June. It also showed consumer spending and inflation slowing down. But slowing inflation has not meant lower costs.

As the Iran war entered its sixth month this week, average gas prices nationally climbed back above $4 a gallon. On Wednesday, the price of Brent crude oil rose to $90 a barrel as the U.S. and Iran carried out new strikes.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment. However, Trump asserted Wednesday that the economy is strong — citing in part new U.S. automobile plants as evidence — while slamming the Federal Reserve’s decision to leave interest rates unchanged.

“They want to keep rates up, but we will fight through this,” Trump told reporters at an Oval Office event. “We have things that are going on in our country in the likes of which no one has ever seen.”

As Democrats have seized on the economy as the midterms’ defining issue, Trump has promised improvements but also called affordability concerns a “hoax.” Last week, he rejected the notion that he should rethink his unpopular Iran strategy because of the looming midterms.

“No, the election — I can’t think about that having to do with this,” he said before renewing attacks last week. “I think people are very impressed.”

Jonathan Nagler, a New York University professor who studies how the economy shapes politics, said it is impossible to predict how voters will feel about the economy three months from now, because there are so many variables.

But data make clear that “the better the economy is, the better the incumbent does,” and voters will blame Trump and his party for their economic woes if they persist, Nagler said — particularly with gas prices, which are “a non-trivial expense” that is “super directly tied to Trump.”

“Democrats can draw a very straight line from a decision by Trump to go to war with Iran, and gas prices rising. That is just very, very easy to explain to people in a pretty convincing way,” Nagler said. “Democrats can try to say, ‘Hey, there should be some accountability here.’”

Diane Swonk, chief economist at KPMG, said inflation has compounded for years “to make the level of prices too high for too many,” and is clearly the biggest economic issue facing many Americans.

“And that’s not likely to change in the next few months, where you still not only have some of the spillover effects of the war in Iran to play out — most notably in terms of the fall harvest and food prices, which will go well into 2027 — but also just the on-again, off-again truces and the damages to refining capacities,” she said.

All of that is adding to “simmering” service sector inflation and Trump’s latest tariffs, which mean “more paperwork, more costs, and another bump in prices in the pipeline,” Swonk said.

Harker said the administration has no good options for bringing down prices by November. Reducing tariffs takes time to filter down to shelf prices, so that can’t offer a quick fix even if Trump were to decide to cut them, he said.

The biggest variable between now and November is energy, Harker said, and no economic tool allows the administration to control what happens in the Persian Gulf. Even if Trump’s war with Iran were to end, economists say it would take a significant amount of time for gas prices to come down.

The Fed could decide to raise rates in September, but Harker said that would take time to filter through the economy and would do “nothing” ahead of November.

On the campaign trail, Trump promised to immediately “reverse the disastrous effects of [President] Biden’s inflation and rebuild the greatest economy in the history of the world,” one where “incomes will skyrocket, inflation will vanish completely, jobs will come roaring back, and the middle class will prosper like never, ever before.”

A recent CNN poll found that 65% of Americans believe Trump’s policies have worsened economic conditions in the country, while less than a quarter — 22% — said they had improved conditions, and that 67% believe Trump’s choices in Iran hurt the U.S.

The poll found Trump had a 34% approval rating, matching a career low from the end of his first term, and that his support fell even lower on key issues: to 28% on Iran, 25% on inflation and 21% on gas prices.

A recent Pew Research Center survey found most Americans aren’t feeling great about the economy — with 24% rating economic conditions as excellent or good, 41% rating them as “only fair,” and 35% rating them as poor. It also found that voters want candidates running for Congress in November to talk about economic issues.

Democrats see the poll numbers as an opportunity to win over swing voters, which becomes more urgent as the campaign enters its fall stretch.

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) last week placed blame for rising costs squarely on Trump‘s tariffs, his “reckless war of choice” in Iran, and cuts to healthcare made in last year’s federal spending package.

Vidhya Jeyadev, a spokesperson for Majority Democrats, which is focused on growing the party, said Democrats now have an opportunity to bring in Republican voters disillusioned with the president’s handling of the economy.

“We need to tie what people are feeling day to day — rising rent, groceries, utility costs — directly to the choices that Trump and Republicans have made,” Jeyadev said.

Many Republican leaders have acknowledged economic challenges while defending Trump’s policy decisions.

They have broadly backed the war in Iran as a necessary step to halt Iran’s nuclear ambitions. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) recently defended Trump’s tariffs, too, acknowledging some sectors have experienced “challenges” as a result, but saying “all that’s settling out as we go into this election cycle.”

Swonk said some economic indicators do show a surprisingly strong economy that benefits the rich.

However, “there’s a reason people are upset, and that’s because inflation, much like stock returns, has compounded — but not everybody has stock returns. Everybody feels inflation. And that drives a larger wedge between the haves and the have-nots,” she said.

“What anyone really cares about is the prices that went up didn’t come back down, and their wages didn’t keep up with it,” Swonk said. “It doesn’t feel like you can do as many things as you once did. And that’s hard.”

Roughly six weeks before the first midterm ballots are mailed out, the U.S. Postal Service is emerging as a pivotal player in an election season that will determine control of Congress.

President Trump is seeking greater control over mail balloting through an executive order while a change to how the agency processes mail is leading to criticism that it’s failing to deliver ballots on time.

Democratic officials have raised concerns over the past week about how quickly the Postal Service will process ballots after tens of thousands of them in California and hundreds in Wisconsin arrived at local election offices too late to be counted in elections earlier this year. The top election offices in Kansas and Michigan are urging voters who want to cast their ballots early to avoid the mail and instead drop them off in person.

The Postal Service replied to those concerns by saying it remains “committed to fulfilling our role in the electoral process.”

“We provide a secure, efficient, and effective way for citizens to participate when policymakers decide to use mail as part of their elections,” it said in a statement Tuesday.

Trump’s order puts more focus on mail ballots

The Postal Service faced similar questions about mail delivery in 2024, but the scrutiny this year is heightened because of an executive order Trump issued in March that seeks to create a national voter list to guide the Postal Service in deciding who gets a mail ballot.

The order has sparked multiple lawsuits and federal court orders, leading to a case now before the U.S. Supreme Court in which the administration is asking the justices to allow it to impose its restrictions on mail balloting.

Trump has lied for years about voter fraud to try to explain away his loss to Democrat Joe Biden in 2020, and mail balloting is a favorite target, even though he has used the method himself. During a recent stop in Michigan, he falsely characterized mail balloting as “inherently corrupt” and added, “Hopefully there will be no mail-in ballots.”

A 2025 report from the research group Brookings identified about four cases of fraud for every 10 million mail ballots cast.

Despite Trump’s attacks, the method remains popular with voters of both major parties. In 2024, nearly 30% of U.S. voters cast their ballots by mail, according to federal data. In Michigan, where competitive U.S. House and Senate races could help determine the balance of power in Congress, the state said it has sent out more than 2 million absentee ballots for the state’s Aug. 4 primary.

“We want to keep vote by mail. We want to protect it. We want to expand it,” said Jonathan Smith, president of the 200,000-member American Postal Workers Union, which launched a campaign in April promoting it and is opposed to turning the Postal Service into an election administrator. “Why? Because it works.”

Legal battles intensify over Trump’s order

The Postal Service proposed a rule in June in line with Trump’s executive order that would create a national list of eligible voters, based on databases kept by other federal agencies. Only those on the list would be eligible to receive mail ballots.

Democratic officials in nearly two dozen states filed a federal lawsuit in Massachusetts. A federal judge there blocked Trump’s order last month, and an appeals court upheld that ruling, prompting Trump’s appeal to the Supreme Court. But the appeals court for the District of Columbia refused Tuesday to block the order in a separate case, calling a legal challenge premature.

Democratic senators and governors have written to the Postal Service urging it to abandon efforts to implement Trump’s order.

“Donald Trump has shown he’ll stop at nothing to meddle in our upcoming elections,” Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin said in a statement to The Associated Press. “At best, this new push will exacerbate already severe delays for mail-in voters and at worst, it will stop eligible Americans from casting their ballots.”

In a letter to Democratic senators earlier this month, the heads of the Postal Service said they were abiding by the court rulings that had halted the executive order. But Smith, of the postal workers union, told the AP on Tuesday that USPS information technology staffers who are union members are working on a planned portal for the list of eligible voters “behind the scenes.”

The Postal Service declined to respond to Smith’s statements and said it could not comment about whether it’s moving forward with work related to Trump’s order because of the litigation.

The postal workers’ union opposes the plan for a portal, a national list of eligible voters and using that list to determine who can receive a mail ballot. Smith said it shouldn’t be postal workers’ responsibility “to decide who can vote and who can’t vote.”

A plan to consolidate mail processing centers upsets officials

The Postal Service has been under financial stress for years and has been consolidating mail processing into fewer regional centers. Mail travels an average of 139 miles to reach one and sometimes 500 miles, according to a recent Brookings report.

In January, a group of mostly Democratic senators said it was concerned about a decision to end twice-daily mail dispatches from local post offices to regional processing centers. The result is that mail arriving after the only daily dispatch would go out the next day.

California officials said the change was a factor in the state rejecting more than 148,000 ballots from its June primary, with 63% of them arriving too late despite a seven-day grace period. Officials worried that some ballots were postmarked at processing facilities the day after they were dropped off at a post office, possibly invalidating them. Wisconsin officials also said hundreds of ballots from an election in April arrived late.

The Postal Service said postmarks generally are being applied with automated equipment at processing centers, “in the same manner and to the same extent as before.” It said someone who wants to make sure their ballot envelope gets a timely postmark can get a free one applied by a postal worker.

A report on the 2024 election by the USPS Office of Inspector General said the Postal Service handled more than 59 million pieces of ballot mail from Sept. 1 to Nov. 15 that year and that 97.3% arrived on time.

Some state election officials advise voters to avoid the mail

The Michigan secretary of state’s office is advising voters to hand-deliver ballots to their local clerk’s office or a drop box.

“We’ve seen these issues over a number of election cycles now — they’re always concerning, and that’s why we’ve put out that guidance,” said Deputy Secretary of State Aghogho Edevbie.

The Postal Service said its Michigan centers are not seeing processing delays.

In Kansas, concerns about late ballot deliveries in the state’s 2024 primary election prompted a quip on the social platform X from Secretary of State Scott Schwab, a Republican: “The Pony Express is more efficient at this point.” Asked his view now, spokesperson Whitney Tempel said Schwab still believes “keeping your ballot out of the hands of the federal government is best.”

Jamie Shew, a Democrat elected to oversee elections in Douglas County, home to the main University of Kansas campus, said his office is trying to change voters’ perceptions.

“I think voters are used to, you can drop it off on Friday and we’re going to receive it by Election Day,” Shew said Tuesday. “That’s just not the reality.”

California’s state budget includes $10 million for social media campaigns and other efforts to discourage last-minute ballot mailings.

And the Postal Service said it hasn’t changed its own longstanding advice for voters: They should get their ballots in the mail at least a week before their state’s deadline for receiving them.

Hanna writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Scott Bauer in Madison, Wis., Michael R. Blood in Los Angeles, Michael Casey in Boston, and Jacqueline GaNun in Lansing, Mich., contributed to this report.

Israel will head to national elections on October 27, marking the country’s first vote since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack that triggered the Gaza war and later expanded into conflicts with Lebanon and Iran. The election is widely seen as a defining moment for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose political future faces its toughest test in years.

Although opinion polls suggest Netanyahu is heading toward defeat, Israel’s fragmented parliamentary system means election outcomes often depend on coalition negotiations rather than outright victories, leaving several possible paths to power.

Polls Signal Trouble for Netanyahu

Recent surveys indicate declining public confidence in Netanyahu, whose long standing reputation as Israel’s security leader suffered after the October 7 attack.

While many Israelis have supported military operations against Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, dissatisfaction has grown over the government’s handling of domestic issues, including the relationship between religion and the state.

Despite the unfavorable polling, Netanyahu remains one of Israel’s most experienced political figures and has repeatedly returned to power after seemingly insurmountable political setbacks.

Who Are Netanyahu’s Main Challengers?

Several political figures are seeking to capitalize on Netanyahu’s weakened position.

Former military chief Gadi Eisenkot has emerged as one of the strongest contenders. Having lost his son during the Gaza conflict, Eisenkot has built a reputation as a respected security figure while portraying himself as an honest alternative to the current leadership.

Former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid have reunited politically after previously forming the coalition that briefly removed Netanyahu from office in 2021. Their earlier government brought together parties from across Israel’s political spectrum, although it lasted only 18 months.

Another challenger is former Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, once a close Netanyahu ally. Lieberman later became one of his fiercest critics, accusing him of failing to adopt a sufficiently tough security policy.

How Israel’s Election System Works

Israel elects its 120 member Knesset through a nationwide system of proportional representation.

Rather than voting directly for a prime minister, citizens vote for political parties. Seats are distributed according to each party’s share of the national vote, provided they receive at least 3.25 percent, the equivalent of four parliamentary seats.

Because no party has ever secured an outright majority, governments are always formed through coalition negotiations among multiple parties.

This coalition system gives smaller parties significant influence over government formation and policymaking, often making them decisive kingmakers after elections.

Why Coalition Politics Matter

Coalition governments have become a defining feature of Israeli politics.

Since 2019, repeated political deadlock produced multiple elections before Netanyahu returned to power in 2022 with the country’s most right wing coalition to date.

His governing alliance has relied heavily on ultra Orthodox Jewish parties, whose demands, particularly regarding exemptions from compulsory military service, have generated growing public controversy during wartime.

Following disagreements, some coalition partners have already left the government, although they have continued providing parliamentary support on key votes.

The Main Parties in the Election

Netanyahu’s coalition includes:

• Likud
• Religious Zionism
• Jewish Power

The opposition currently consists of:

• Yashar, led by Gadi Eisenkot
• Together, the alliance between Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid
• Israel Our Home, led by Avigdor Lieberman
• Arab parties including Hadash, Taal, Raam, and Balad
• The left wing Democrats, headed by former general Yair Golan

The political landscape could still change before candidate registration closes, as parties may merge, split, or withdraw from the race.

Why This Election Matters

The October election will shape Israel’s political direction at a time when the country remains engaged in multiple regional conflicts and faces mounting domestic challenges. While polls currently favor opposition forces, Israel’s coalition based electoral system means the final outcome will depend less on which party wins the most votes and more on which leader can assemble a governing majority in parliament.

Analysis

The 2026 Israeli election is not simply a referendum on Benjamin Netanyahu but a broader test of whether Israeli voters want continuity or political renewal after years of conflict and instability. Netanyahu enters the race weakened by security failures linked to the October 7 attacks and growing public frustration over domestic governance, yet his long record of coalition building means he cannot be discounted. Even if his Likud party falls short, post election negotiations could still determine his political survival.

For the opposition, electoral success alone may not be enough. Parties ranging from centrists to left wing and Arab factions must overcome ideological divisions to build a stable coalition, a challenge that has repeatedly undermined previous governments. The election therefore highlights a recurring feature of Israeli politics: governments are decided not only at the ballot box but also through complex coalition bargaining that can reshape leadership long after votes are counted.

With information from Reuters.

Islamabad, Pakistan – Pakistan-administered Kashmir, formally known as Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), has spent the summer under an unofficial state of emergency.

Since early June, nearly 40 people have been killed in clashes between protesters and security forces, with sit-ins and road blockades regular features in the region over this period.

Banks remained shut for two weeks. Mobile and internet services remain suspended across most of the territory. Poonch division, which borders India and has been the epicentre of the unrest, was effectively sealed off for weeks, disrupting the supply of flour and other essentials to a region that depends heavily on them.

The Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC), the movement behind the protests, was banned by the local government on June 5, days before a planned demonstration.

Its leadership has since been arrested, has gone underground or has continued organising from sit-in camps in Rawalakot, the administrative headquarters of Poonch division.

Its demands, once centred on subsidised flour and cheaper electricity, have expanded to 38 points, chief among them the abolition of 12 assembly seats reserved for Kashmiri refugees.

All of this is unfolding as the region prepares to vote. Elections for the 45-seat Legislative Assembly, originally scheduled for July 27, have been split across three dates.

Mirpur division votes as planned, Muzaffarabad division and the 12 seats reserved for Kashmiri refugees follow on August 2, while Poonch division, where tensions remain highest, goes to the polls on August 10.

JAAC’s leadership is not on the ballot and has urged supporters to boycott the vote.

Of all the movement’s demands, one issue has proved impossible to resolve: the 12 refugee seats. The government says they cannot be touched without a constitutional amendment. JAAC wants them abolished outright.

Between those two positions lies a legal argument stretching back nearly a century, and a more fundamental question: who gets to decide who governs Muzaffarabad?

A dozen seats, one dispute

Of the AJK Legislative Assembly’s 45 elected seats, 33 are filled from constituencies within the territory.

The remaining 12 are reserved for refugees from Indian-administered Kashmir who now live in different parts of Pakistan.

The arrangement traces its roots to electoral arrangements introduced in 1960, reinforced through laws in 1964 and 1970, before being formalised in AJK’s 1974 Interim Constitution and reaffirmed by the constitution’s 13th Amendment in 2018.

Chaudhry Muhammad Ibrahim Zia, a former chief justice of the AJK Supreme Court, said the basis for the seats goes back further still, to the AJK government’s founding declaration of October 24, 1947, which he said reflected “the collective will of the people of the State of Jammu and Kashmir”.

Refugee representation, he told Al Jazeera, has “a firm historical basis” rooted in that document. He rejects any suggestion that the seats are unconstitutional.

“They have both historical grounding and constitutional support,” he said. “These seats cannot be described as unconstitutional.”

Pakistan-administered Kashmir’s electorate has grown from 3.2 million voters in 2021 to more than 3.8 million this year, according to Election Commission figures.

Within that, the 12 refugee constituencies account for roughly 439,000 registered voters, scattered across cities including Lahore, Rawalpindi and Sialkot, rather than concentrated in a single geographical area like AJK’s territorial constituencies.

And that’s a problem, says Kashif Abbasi, a JAAC committee member.

“This election is meant for people who actually live in AJK,” he told Al Jazeera. “These 12 seats sit outside AJK’s jurisdiction. This doesn’t happen anywhere else.”

From flour to the assembly floor

JAAC’s demands were not always centred on the refugee seats. Its original charter was almost entirely economic, focusing on subsidised flour, electricity at cost price, and a share in the benefits from the Mangla and Neelum-Jhelum hydropower projects.

The refugee seats first appeared in the group’s expanded charter, submitted in October 2025.

Even then, JAAC did not initially seek their outright abolition. In written proposals submitted on May 30 this year, the group offered two alternatives.

It proposed retaining symbolic refugee representation until the Kashmir dispute is permanently resolved or replacing the 12 assembly seats with four seats in the AJK Council, the Islamabad-chaired body that exercises legislative authority over AJK’s federal-facing affairs.

The 14-member council, chaired by Pakistan’s prime minister, oversees subjects including electricity, banking and parts of taxation, areas that largely fall outside the AJK assembly’s authority. The territory has no representation in Pakistan’s national parliament.

“Our suggestion was that these seat-holders should instead be given representation on the Kashmir Council, and that their assembly seats be eliminated, with that money used elsewhere in the territory,” Khawaja Mehran, a member of JAAC’s core committee, told Al Jazeera recently.

Both proposals were rejected at an All-Parties Conference in Muzaffarabad on June 3.

Constitutional barrier

In June, the AJK Supreme Court addressed the issue directly.

The court held that the seats are protected under AJK’s constitution and can only be abolished through a formal constitutional amendment. They cannot be removed through executive action or public pressure.

A constitutional amendment, the judges wrote, is “a solemn constitutional act, not a concession to be wrested from a government under duress”.

Zia, the former AJK chief justice, said the opinion changed little about the existing legal position.

“These seats simply cannot be abolished without a proper constitutional process,” he told Al Jazeera, adding that, with the outgoing assembly’s term having ended, no such process is possible until a new legislature is elected.

The government’s account

Abdul Majid Khan, AJK’s former finance minister and himself from a refugee family, rejects the idea that the seat holders form an unaccountable political bloc.

He points instead to the size of the territory’s budget. AJK’s roughly 310 billion rupees (about $1.1bn) budget last year, he said, far exceeds the development funds allocated to the 12 refugee constituencies – nowhere near enough, in his view, to make them the powerful bloc JAAC describes.

“These are people who migrated for a larger cause,” Khan told Al Jazeera, referring to Kashmiris who fled Jammu, across the border, during the violence of 1947 following the partition of the subcontinent and settled across Pakistan in the decades that followed.

Refugee representation, he said, has existed since AJK’s first parliamentary election in 1975, when the territory’s first prime minister was himself from a refugee family.

At the June 3 conference that rejected JAAC’s proposals, AJK Prime Minister Faisal Mumtaz Rathore said any decision on the seats “can only be taken by the elected representatives in the House”, adding that most of JAAC’s other demands had already been met.

Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khawaja Asif told the National Assembly on June 11 that the future of the 12 refugee seats should be decided by voters, not under pressure from street protests.

He urged JAAC to contest the issue in the election rather than demand its resolution beforehand, asking: “How could you exclude them from the electoral process?”

A senior government official in Poonch, whose division has witnessed the worst of the unrest, took an even harder line.

“This is no longer a rights movement,” the official told Al Jazeera, requesting anonymity since he was not allowed to speak to the media, adding that the protesters were not only “challenging the authority of the state”, but also provoking the public through “inflammatory speeches and actions”.

Who holds power?

In mid-July, JAAC leader Umar Nazir Kashmiri told supporters at a sit-in in Rawalakot, Poonch division, that the group had written directly to army chief Field Marshal Asim Munir after concluding that its concerns were not reaching him “through official channels”.

He thanked Munir by name for “understanding the grievances of the people of Kashmir”.

Shaheen was more direct. “We believe real authority currently sits with Rawalpindi,” he told Al Jazeera, referring to Pakistan’s military establishment rather than the civilian government. “That’s why we’re forced to negotiate through that channel, since nobody else actually holds the authority.”

Ershad Mahmud, a Canada-based researcher on Kashmiri displacement and politics, said that “Islamabad’s bureaucracy, military and intelligence establishment have reduced AJK’s elected leadership to a largely symbolic role”.

The current crisis, he told Al Jazeera, has once again shown that the local leadership “lacks the authority to negotiate a political settlement with its own people”.

Unmet promise?

The dispute over the refugee seats is unfolding within a framework that predates Pakistan-administered Kashmir itself.

Under a United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan resolution adopted on January 5, 1949, and endorsed by the UN Security Council, Kashmir’s final status was to be determined “through the democratic method of a free and impartial plebiscite”.

Nearly 80 years later, that has yet to happen on either side of the Line of Control.

Mahmud, who is also the author of Poonch: Identity, Politics and Resistance, argues the refugee seats endure partly because they continue to serve Islamabad’s interests.

“They let Pakistan maintain its position that AJK represents the entire former State of Jammu and Kashmir, not merely the territory it administers,” he told Al Jazeera. “And allows Pakistan-based political parties to influence government formation in Muzaffarabad.”

Islamabad, he said, treats the seats “as an instrument of its Kashmir policy and political influence”.

Hassan Kamal Wattoo, a Lahore-based constitutional lawyer, argues that giving greater autonomy to AJK “strengthens Pakistan’s case on the international stage”.

“There is no tension between real autonomy for AJK and an eventual plebiscite,” he told Al Jazeera.

Anam Zakaria, a historian and author of Between the Great Divide: A Journey into Pakistan-Administered Kashmir, however, argued that there was a deeper contradiction within AJK’s constitutional framework.

On the one hand lies India’s “longstanding and ongoing systemic violence and human rights abuses in [Indian-administered] Kashmir”, she said, arguing that nothing Pakistan has done or does in the part of Kashmir it administers can be compared with what’s happened in Indian-administered Kashmir, where tens of thousands of people have been killed in violence involving armed rebels and security forces since 1989.

At the same time, she pointed out, candidates seeking public office in Pakistan-administered Kashmir must first swear allegiance to AJK’s accession to Pakistan.

That requirement, she told Al Jazeera, also “in itself contradicts the right to self-determination” and sidelines Kashmiris who hold a different vision for the region’s future.

Muzaffarabad, Pakistan-administered Kashmir: The traffic crawled beneath densely strung election bunting.

Overhead hung the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz’s (PMLN) green tigers. Further down, Pakistan Peoples Party’s (PPP) red and black flags bearing the party’s arrow encircled the clock tower at Lal Chowk, a square near Muzaffarabad’s main market, built to honour the original Lal Chowk across the Line of Control in Indian-administered Kashmir’s Srinagar.

Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, does not look like a city in the grip of a crisis. It looks like a city preparing for an election.

Both are true.

Since early June, the territory has witnessed weeks of protests and sit-ins that have killed dozens. The protests are tied to elections for the region’s provincial legislature that were scheduled for July 27, but that on Monday were divided into voting now to be held on three separate days. Voting in the region’s Mirpur division will continue as planned on July 27. Elections in Poonch division, which has been the hotbed of protests, will now be held on August 10.

Voting in Muzaffarabad and for 12 other seats reserved for refugees from Indian-administered Kashmir who now live elsewhere in Pakistan will be held on August 2, the region’s Chief Election Commissioner Justice (retired) Ghulam Mustafa Mughal told Al Jazeera, citing security concerns arising from the unrest as the reason for the changed schedule.

It is those reserved seats for refugees that are at the heart of the agitation, with protesters demanding that they be scrapped, arguing that only those living in Pakistan-administered Kashmir should now be eligible to contest in elections to the regional legislature.

And it is in the backdrop of those tensions that the region is now readying to vote.

“I have never joined them, I never participated in their protest,” a 60-year-old driver, bespectacled and bearded, said of the Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee (JKJAAC), commonly known as JAAC, the movement whose protests have dominated the politics of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, particularly Poonch division, in recent months.

“But my only reason to support them is that all the people in this movement are poor people, my sympathies are with them. They are the ones fighting and demanding for my rights,” the driver, who requested anonymity, told Al Jazeera, as he finished his lunch at a roadside hotel in Muzaffarabad on July 20.

When it came to the election, however, he was unequivocal: he would not vote.

“We should be part of the democratic process, but the person you want to vote for isn’t allowed on the ballot,” he said, referring to the JAAC, which was banned in June. “A vote is a responsibility, and it should only be given to those who deserve it. Right now the candidates on offer are all corrupt, and I will not be giving my vote.”

An election amid unrest

The Kashmir region, a scenic but disputed Himalayan territory, has been at the centre of multiple wars between Pakistan and India since both gained independence from British rule in 1947.

While both countries claim the region in full, they administer separate parts of it.

Home to more than four million people, Pakistan-administered Kashmir, locally known as Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), has a semi-autonomous government with its own president, prime minister and Supreme Court.

The election was always going to be shaped by the latest crisis, JAAC’s fifth major mobilisation since the movement was founded in September 2023.

But Mughal, AJK’s chief election commissioner, said Poonch was the only division where, he said, “we have a bit of security-related concern”.

He is not the only official insisting the electoral process remains on track.

In Muzaffarabad, Deputy Commissioner Munir Qureshi pointed to bustling markets, heavy traffic and an active campaign trail as evidence that daily life continues largely uninterrupted.

“It is not our job to tell people to go and vote,” he said. “If they decide, for whatever reason, not to show up, it is their democratic right.”

The city, he added, has five constituencies and 890 polling stations, with additional security personnel requested ahead of polling day.

What neither official addressed directly, however, is the absent party hanging over the election.

The banned JAAC is absent from the ballot in any form. Some of its members who attempted to contest as independents had their nomination papers rejected.

The movement’s sit-ins have entered their second month across Rawalakot, Sudhnoti and other parts of Poonch division, closer to the Indian border, while its leadership has openly urged the public to boycott the vote.

How the region votes – or not – will tell whether the election carries legitimacy in the eyes of the people of AJK.

A movement outside the ballot box

The protests that have shaped this election began more than two years ago over prices.

JAAC was formed in 2023 around 10 demands, including subsidised wheat, cheaper electricity, and a government commitment to curb the perks and pensions enjoyed by AJK officials and elected representatives.

The Pakistani government intervened in May 2024, agreeing to provide subsidies, while a charter of demands signed by the AJK government in October that year was intended to resolve most of the movement’s concerns.

By this June, however, JAAC’s focus had shifted to the 12 assembly seats reserved for Kashmiri refugees settled in Pakistan, which it wants abolished.

The group argues the seats give outsiders influence over AJK’s governance and budget, while residents themselves have no say over who occupies them.

On June 5, the AJK government declared JAAC a proscribed organisation under anti-terrorism legislation ahead of a planned June 9 protest, just weeks before the election.

Within days, police had arrested dozens of JAAC members and supporters, including the movement’s leader and public face, Shaukat Nawaz Mir.

What followed was the deadliest period of unrest AJK has witnessed in years.

The death toll remains disputed by JAAC and the authorities, but even conservative estimates place it at nearly 30 people since early June, including protesters and law enforcement personnel.

Access to Pakistan-administered Kashmir was also restricted, with entry into Poonch division almost entirely blocked for weeks, disrupting supplies of flour and other essential goods to a region dependent on routes from Muzaffarabad and Mirpur.

Banks remained closed for two weeks, leaving residents without access to cash. Mobile and fibre internet services have also remained suspended across almost the entire territory, with exceptions only for banks and a handful of government offices, including district administrations and the Election Commission.

And the Election Commission itself has become an institution whose role faces questions from the JAAC.

Sardar Amanullah, a JAAC member from Sudhnoti district in Poonch division, more than 155km (96 miles) south of Muzaffarabad, said he had submitted nomination papers as an independent candidate, only for them to be rejected.

“I don’t think these are free and fair elections,” he said. “When you cannot let people’s representation out there, the government keeps finding ways to reject our papers,” he told Al Jazeera.

Chief Election Commissioner Mughal offered a different account.

“There were only two or three people who submitted their nomination papers, who claim to be affiliated with JAAC, and their papers were rejected by the returning officer since their names were mentioned in FIRs and the Fourth Schedule,” he said, referring to police reports and Pakistan’s anti-terrorism watchlist.

Abid Shaheen, a JAAC core committee member from Bagh district, was more blunt. With the group now proscribed, he described the vote as “a selection, not an election”.

A dozen seats, one dispute

Of the AJK Legislative Assembly’s 45 general seats, 12 are reserved for Kashmiri refugees who settled in Pakistan after 1947: six linked to Jammu and six to the Kashmir Valley.

The arrangement dates back to legislation introduced in the 1960s and was later entrenched in AJK’s 1974 Interim Constitution.

In June, the AJK Supreme Court, ruling on a presidential reference, held that the seats could only be abolished through a formal constitutional amendment passed by the assembly, not through public protest.

AJK’s electorate has grown from just over 3.2 million in 2021 to more than 3.8 million this year, according to Election Commission figures.

Within that, the 12 refugee constituencies alone have expanded from about 405,000 voters to nearly 439,000. JAAC argues that the increase has further amplified the influence of seats that were never intended to carry such political weight.

Since AJK adopted its current parliamentary system in 1975, all 10 general elections have produced governments aligned with the party in power in Islamabad.

Zulfiqar Ali, a Muzaffarabad-based political analyst, argued that the seats themselves have rarely determined who governs AJK.

“Across all the governments AJK has had, these 12 seats have played no significant role in actually making or breaking a government,” he said. “That role has always belonged to native AJK politicians, or whichever party holds federal power in Islamabad.”

Islamabad, meanwhile, has shown little interest in rethinking the refugee seats.

Defence Minister Khawaja Asif told the National Assembly last month that abolishing the seats under pressure from street protests would amount to “sabotaging the electoral process”.

The campaign that resumed late

For the parties actually on the ballot, the crisis all but wiped out campaigning in June.

“Frankly speaking, the campaigning was dead due to the protests all June,” said Iftikhar Gillani, a PMLN candidate contesting from Muzaffarabad.

“The campaign only picked up in the last few days,” Gillani told Al Jazeera after meeting supporters at a polling station on July 20, where government officials were casting advance ballots.

Dressed in a white shalwar kameez and repeatedly wiping his face with a tissue on a severely humid Monday afternoon, Gillani argued that many Kashmiris distinguish between supporting JAAC and participating in the election, even if some committed supporters may stay away from the polls.

“People here are cognisant of the importance of the election and understand that they don’t have to mix their support for JAAC with their responsibility to participate in the polls,” he said. “But there is obviously no denying that there is a chunk of the population which fully believes in JAAC, and they might not cast their votes.”

A 28-year-old PMLN activist, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, said the internet shutdown had forced campaign workers to abandon social media in favour of door-to-door canvassing and loudspeakers mounted on vehicles to publicise the party’s manifesto.

But, he added, the election had also exposed social divisions unlike any he had witnessed before, fuelled by the JAAC-led protests.

“Families are divided over this,” he said. “Those who don’t support JAAC are being called supporters of our oppressors.”

The PPP, which currently governs Pakistan-administered Kashmir, has maintained the more visible street presence.

Its flags dominate Lal Chowk, and a Saturday night corner meeting near the square drew a crowd of supporters waving the party’s arrow banner close to midnight.

But Sardar Mukhtar, a PPP candidate in Muzaffarabad, acknowledged the changed mood.

“The campaign environment is not like previously. I personally feel that turnout might not be as strong as in the past,” he told Al Jazeera from his camp office, where party workers crowded in to catch a glimpse of the candidate.

The party’s clearest position has come from its chairman.

In a letter to JAAC’s negotiating committee last week, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari proposed establishing a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to “examine the present situation, establish the relevant facts, consider the grievances and positions of all sides”.

He also urged JAAC to suspend its protest once such a commission was agreed, while calling on the state to halt further action pending its findings.

Bilawal is scheduled to address a public rally in Muzaffarabad on July 24.

AJK’s Prime Minister Faisal Mumtaz Rathore, the PPP’s most senior leader in the territory, has been more measured on the campaign trail, telling reporters after the revised election schedule was announced only that “the current environment is not suitable for the state” and that “problems can only be solved through dialogue”.

In the region’s legislature, he has previously said that the JAAC bears “the primary responsibility for this situation,” while conceding that “we have not absolved ourselves of responsibility as a government”.

What the election can’t fix

For Ali, the Muzaffarabad-based political analyst, the real issue lies not in the vote itself but in everything that has unfolded over the past few years.

He pointed to commitments the government made to JAAC in October 2024 that remain unfulfilled, including promises to devolve development budgets to local councillors and eliminate the perks and privileges enjoyed by politicians.

“However, people will vote,” he told Al Jazeera. “Because the entire system is designed in a certain way, tying government jobs and small favours to elected representatives. So turnout will be fine, but it will not resolve people’s fury and anger.”

Ershad Mahmud, a Canada-based researcher and author of Poonch: Identity, Politics and Resistance, sees the problem differently, arguing that the election is diminished by who is missing from the ballot.

“PTI did win last time, and they have significant following, as well as JAAC,” he said, referring to Imran Khan-founded Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, which ruled Pakistan from 2018 to 2022 before being ousted through a vote of no confidence.

PTI also formed the AJK government after the 2021 election, but since 2023 the territory has had four prime ministers.

Mahmud argued that with two major democratic forces absent from the contest, many voters will stay away as well.

“I don’t think this election will be seen as legitimate. The distance from Muzaffarabad to Islamabad is more than 120km [75 miles]. But the mental distance is now 1,000km [621 miles],” he told Al Jazeera.

An uncertain verdict

However, not everyone has reached the same conclusion.

Muhammad Ramzan, a property dealer from Mirpur division in the south of the territory, supported JAAC when its demands centred on subsidised wheat and lower electricity prices.

His support cooled once the movement shifted its focus to abolishing the 12 refugee seats, a campaign he considers disconnected from the concerns of residents and his own livelihood.

“Even I am curious,” he said. “Earlier they asked for roads or electricity or school, but now that they have changed their focus to 12 seats, I am flabbergasted why would they do that.”

He intends to vote, although he expects turnout to fall, with much of the boycott driven by younger voters aged between 18 and 35 who remain committed to JAAC.

“There are a lot of people like me,” he said, describing his gradual drift away from the movement.

But he remains doubtful that the election will resolve the crisis.

“I fear that things will go bad,” he said quietly.

Political analyst Eric Ham argues President Donald Trump’s renewed focus on election security and his push for the SAVE Act are attempts to expand federal authority over US elections ahead of November’s midterms.

WASHINGTON — President Trump and his allies escalated attacks on U.S. elections on Friday, after the president’s prime-time effort to convince Americans that that the nation’s voting systems are fundamentally flawed, and threatened to punish California and other Democratic states that refuse the administration’s demands for voter data.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened local election officials with fines and prison if they don’t turn over voter rolls to federal officials seeking to root out purported illegal voting by non-citizens.

“Try us,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote on X in response to Mullin’s threats. He added that “California has free, fair, and secure elections” and that the state “will fight for them.”

The administration’s threats — made less than four months before the November midterm elections — are a continuation of an aggressive Trump-led campaign to use the federal government to attempt to overhaul the nation’s voting systems and sow public mistrust in elections.

The administration has tried for months to compel Democrat-led states into handing over sensitive voter data to the federal government, but the efforts have run into resistance in courts, in part out of concern for privacy laws. The courts have also reaffirmed in many cases that the Constitution gives states — not the federal government — primary authority over elections.

On Friday, Mullin said his agency has found “as many as” 190,832 possible non-citizens registered to vote in California, along with more in three other Democratic-led states. He said Homeland Security arrived at those numbers by checking the four states’ public voter records.

He vowed to withhold federal election security grants from states until they agree to the administration’s demands, including having their voter registration lists “scrubbed” and their election security systems updated.

“If these states want a grant and they want to be reimbursed to run federal elections, they are going to have to implement security measures,” Mullin said at a news conference. “We need to make sure that individuals who are legally able to vote are voting.”

Newsom said the state had “no idea” where that claim came from. The administration has not made its methodology public, and the system Mullin’s department has used to check for non-citizens in the past has inaccurately flagged some citizens as non-citizens. Past election reviews have found non-citizen voting is rare.

“There is plenty of reason to be suspicious of the claims from the administration,” said Brendan Fisher, director of strategic investigations at the Campaign Legal Center, “and every reason for voters to have confidence in our elections.”

Mullin’s remarks came the day after Trump delivered a prime-time address about vulnerabilities in the election system, claims that largely were not backed up by the evidence he provided. The White House released a trove of declassified documents that fell short of showing that any American election had been affected by fraud or foreign interference.

The White House dug in on the strategy Friday morning, deploying agency heads to continue amplifying the idea of election vulnerabilities, even after fact-checks showed most of his claims were exaggerated and had been previously known, investigated or debunked.

“SAVE OUR ELECTIONS,” the White House said on X.

Trump also used his address to pressure Congress to pass legislation that would tighten voting restrictions and could make it harder for millions to register to vote and cast ballots. While hardline Republicans applauded him, others in the party have rebuffed his request.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said Friday that he did not understand why Trump is focusing on a past election when Republicans should focus on what is ahead.

“I think historically the midterms for the party in power are really tough,” Cornyn said. “So, yeah, I am concerned about it. We ought to be talking about things looking forward that our constituents are most concerned about.”

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) said the nation’s electoral systems are safe, and while he thinks election officials need to be “vigilant,” he said he is more concerned about economic issues ahead of the midterms..

Discussing the legislation ahead of the speech Thursday, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said it would be “impossible” to carry out changes to the nation’s voting laws in time for the midterms.

“The only thing that will occur is an undermining of the integrity of our elections right now,” Tillis said on the Senate floor.

David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, called Mullin’s threats “laughable.”

“There is no significant pool of federal grant money appropriated, so this threat has no teeth for any state. None of them are expecting any significant federal funds for elections,” Becker said.

Mullin told reporters Friday the federal government plans to use public records requests to try to obtain the voter roll information in order to investigate whether non-citizens have voted. Any member of the public can make a public records request; the move signals that the government has few remaining avenues to force the state to turn over voter data.

But Mullin appeared to acknowledge the limitations, saying: “I obviously can’t force the states.” He later threatened to levy fines, penalties or criminal charges against elections officials in states that don’t comply with the government’s demand.

If their behavior wasn’t criminal, Mullin said he would make sure state and county officials — who do not work for the federal government — would “never work for the federal government again.”

More than a dozen courts have ruled against the Justice Department’s highly unusual demand for state voter rolls. The federal government is not entitled to the data under federal law, Becker said.

He said previous government investigations into non-citizen voting have found that most people flagged against DHS’ database were either citizens or non-citizens who had never registered themselves to vote.

The Trump administration has used a database from an immigration verification system to flag possible non-citizen voters, but election officials have found that method misidentified some voters. Even with citizens mistakenly included in the count, the number of possible ineligible voters was extremely low — in Texas, 0.0001% of voters.

Data indicate that voting by non-citizens is rare. A study of the 2016 election by the Brennan Center for Justice found that officials referred about 30 cases of suspected non-citizen voting for investigation or prosecution. A 2024 review by the American Immigration Council of the right-wing Heritage Foundation‘s database turned up 68 cases of noncitizen voting since the 1980s.

While Trump’s speech prompted warnings from his critics that he could be laying the groundwork to take further steps to interfere with or tighten restrictions on elections, experts said he was running out of moves.

Becker predicted that Trump would not actually attempt to cancel elections or send officers to the polls and that courts would block the president if he declared a national emergency to exert control over elections.

“But I think there are people in the administration, including the president himself, who would like us all to think this is possible,” he said.

Fisher said Trump may be trying to lay the groundwork to dispute the midterm results if he doesn’t like the outcome, but said his powers to do so are limited.

“There’s safeguards and laws in place to protect the freedom to vote,” Fisher said, “and voters should tune out the noise and continue to participate in our democracy.”

Thirty years ago this fall, a Republican politician cried electoral fraud after losing a close race.

Orange County Rep. Bob Dornan couldn’t accept the most logical explanations for why Loretta Sanchez beat him in a historic upset: that voters had tired of his polarizing politics. That his Latino-majority district wanted one of their own to represent them. That he was an ideologue who never brought anything back from D.C. for his constituents.

Instead, Dornan and his supporters settled on the craziest excuse of them all: Illegal immigrants.

California voters were passing anti-immigrant laws by the boatful, so Dornan’s fevered tales about nonprofits registering noncitizens to vote and take him down landed with Republicans. A compliant Congress investigated Dornan’s claims, while local lawmakers proposed bills that would force voters to show government-issued identification every time they cast a ballot — a voter suppression tactic going back to the segregationist South.

The congressional investigation flopped like a soccer player fishing to draw a red card, finally concluding in 1998. Yes, noncitizens did vote for Sanchez, but only an infinitesimal number — less than 1% of the total votes tallied and not enough to overturn the results. No one was charged for illegally voting on purpose or improperly registering noncitizens to vote.

When Dornan ran again in 1998, with volunteers vowing to pursue any election irregularities, Sanchez walloped him, and he was swept into the dustbin of political history.

I teach this episode in my O.C. history college classes as a case study in what happens when political parties succumb to the spell of a vindictive demagogue who blames everyone for their failures except themselves. I also point out that Dornan had the last laugh: the idea that illegal immigrants regularly vote in elections, throwing them toward Democrats, has become gospel for many Republicans.

And here we are.

Republican U.S. Congressional candidate Bob Dornan speaks to a group of young adults at the Orange County Conservation Corps. in Anaheim, California in 1998. He was seeking to regain his old seat from Democratic incumbent Loretta Sanchez, who beat him in a historic 1996 upset.

(John Hayes/Associated Press)

On Thursday, President Trump’s obsession over losing to Joe Biden in 2020 reached a phlegmatic nadir with a speech on debunked election fraud theories that weaved in everything from communist China to deposed Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro to — who else? — alleged noncitizen voters.

The tirade was so pathetic and noneventful that most networks didn’t bother to air it. Even Fox News host Sean Hannity — whose tongue is probably two parts shoe polish after spending the last decade as Trump’s personal spit shine — moved on just minutes after Trump finished.

The president insisted that the U.S. Senate pass a bill ahead of this November’s midterms, mandating in the name of election integrity that voters show proof of citizenship before casting a ballot.

In California, a clown car of MAGA loyalists — state Assemblymember Carl DeMaio, state Senator Tony Strickland, wannabe Southern California U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli — are pushing something similar. Proposition 39 would require California election officials to verify the citizenship of registered voters and require voters to show government-issued identification when they cast a ballot.

By law, voters in federal elections must be U.S. citizens. Only a handful of municipalities allow noncitizens to vote in local elections. Despite Trump’s trumpeting of supposed evidence that 278,000 noncitizens are registered to vote in California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Nevada, actual instances of them casting a ballot are as rare today as in Dornan’s time.

That hasn’t stopped Trump and his lackeys from claiming, as Dornan and his supporters did, that they are trying to restore faith in a system corrupted by liberals and their undocumented puppets. But, just like back then, this amounts to a dog whistle for people freaked out about changing demographics and massive GOP midterm losses.

It’s the last, most dangerous gasp of a wheezing political movement whose supporters are clinging to power at all costs and just can’t understand why more and more voters are tired of Trump’s flailing foreign policy and failing economy.

These people are so delusional that they point to last month’s California primaries as proof of election fraud, arguing that the results in two prominent races should have been different.

No Republican has won a statewide election in 20 years, so it’s not surprising that Republican Steve Hilton finished second to Democrat Xavier Becerra in the gubernatorial primary, with both advancing to the general election. Nor was it a shock that in the primary for Los Angeles mayor, progressive incumbent Karen Bass and democratic socialist City Councilmember Nithya Raman finished first and second over Republican reality television star Spencer Pratt.

That didn’t stop Trump from insisting that both Republicans should have won outright and crying conspiracy when they didn’t. The president continued his laughable tune in his White House speech.

“Took a month to count the votes,” he whined about California’s sloth-like approach to counting ballots. “I wonder what they were doing. This is worse than any third world country. There’s no third world country that has elections like we have.”

Actually, many third world countries elect despots like Trump — but that’s neither here nor there.

A May poll by the Public Policy Institute of California found that Prop. 39 was in a statistical dead heat, with 49% of voters favoring it and 51% opposed. All Prop. 39’s opponents have to do is cite Trump’s stark-raving mad comments about electoral fraud, and support for the ballot initiative will melt faster than the Sierra snowpack.

The Republican crusade against imaginary noncitizen voters may pay off in the short run but will inevitably, spectacularly backfire.

Look at what happened in my native Orange County. Sanchez’s victory was the first ripple in a blue wave that eventually turned O.C. purple. Our once-mighty GOP is now increasingly isolated to wealthier pockets of the county and no longer commands national attention — hell, they couldn’t even deliver O.C. to Trump in any of his elections.

The crazy thing is, when Republicans put in the work to appeal to immigrant and Latino voters instead of obsessing about how they’re supposedly anti-democracy invaders, it pays off. Just look at 2024, when a record number of Latino GOP legislators won seats in California and Trump won a larger share of the national Latino electorate than any Republican presidential candidate ever had.

That happened because the party largely stayed quiet on noncitizen voting and focused on what swing voters wanted to hear: a promise to clamp down on unchecked migration and too much wokeness, while fattening average Americans’ pocketbooks.

Trump’s success with Latino voters seemed to represent a tectonic shift in American politics. Now, it feels like an aberration.

Trump still doesn’t seem to get how desperate the situation is for Republicans, just four months before Election Day, and how much of it is of his own making.

Near the end of his speech, he sputtered, “The only reason you wouldn’t do [mandated voter ID] is you want to cheat because your policies are so bad, and your candidates are so pathetic that you can’t get away or can’t get elected any other way.”

Paging Bob Dornan …

July 17 (UPI) — The Department of Homeland Security on Friday ramped up the Trump administration’s efforts to address what the president claims are lapses in election security, threatening state officials with prison time if they don’t comply with federal demands.

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin told reporters in Washington he would apply “maximum pressure” against states that refuse to work with his department.

The Trump administration has focused on noncitizens allegedly casting ballots, which experts say is extremely rare, and the possibility that voting machines can be hacked — although they are, by design, never connected to the internet.

“If the election officials, once we gave them the information they need to secure their elections, and they chose not to, then those individuals can also be held accountable by fines, by penalties, and even, depending on how far it goes, prison time,” Mullin told reporters.

Mullin’s remarks come a day after President Donald Trump, in a primetime address, enumerated a series of debunked claims that the U.S. elections are rigged or have been influenced by foreign governments.

“Our elections were left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen, and the trust of the American people was lost,” Trump said Thursday. “This cannot be allowed to continue.”

Mullin said DHS has found more than 250,000 noncitizens registered to vote in four states — California, Nevada, New Jersey and Pennsylvania — and sent letters to their respective secretaries of state seeking answers.

“Before and after the election, we will scrub all election records looking for illegal aliens and those who are ineligible to vote, including those that somehow voted yet they were deceased,” Mullin said. “If you’re illegal and attempted to vote, or you tried to vote illegally for someone else, we will find you and we will charge you.”

In its letters, DHS did not accuse any of the noncitizens of having actually voted.

“We will pursue maximum pressure on this,” Mullin told reporters. “To let you know, we will be proactively looking at early voting, and then after post-election, we will continue to scrub all those that did vote.”

Al Schmidt, the Republican secretary of state in Pennsylvania, said, “All evidence has shown that noncitizen voting is extremely rare across the country,” including in his state.

“In Pennsylvania, every voter must take steps to verify their identity before they cast a ballot, including providing proper identification every time they register to vote, vote by mail, or vote at a new polling place,” Schmidt told The Hill.

In Nevada, Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar, a Democrat, said the administration’s efforts are intended to undermine elections.

“The administration lacks a fundamental understanding of how elections work,” Aguilar said in a statement. “They just want to cause chaos and doubt ahead of the midterms.”

United States President Donald Trump has delivered an extraordinary primetime speech, alleging government “cover-ups” and “vulnerability” in the nation’s electoral system.

But experts were quick to point out that Trump failed to present any conclusive evidence that past presidential elections had been swayed by malfeasance.

In many ways, Trump’s speech on Thursday revisited any themes familiar to the Republican leader.

He made broad accusations about a “deep state” conspiracy involving his Democratic predecessors, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and he lashed out at familiar foes, including the news media and China.

For years, Trump has spread baseless claims that his loss in the 2020 presidential election was “rigged” and “stolen”.

Trump stopped short of repeating his false claim that he had, in fact, won that race. But in his remarks, he sought to raise suspicion about the election’s outcome, pointing to declassified government documents.

Those files, however, painted a more nuanced picture than Trump portrayed, and they failed to substantiate his claims of a conspiracy.

After the speech, Democrats criticised Trump for attempting to mislead the public and reduce confidence in US electoral systems, with months to go until the November midterm election.

Here are the key takeaways from his address:

Trump claims China compromised election data

One of the biggest accusations of the night was levied against China, the US’s geopolitical rival.

“Starting during the 2020 election cycle, the People’s Republic of China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history,” Trump said near the outset of his speech.

He claimed that Beijing, through “illicit” means, had acquired 220 million US voter files, including names, addresses and party preferences.

“Think of that: Tens of millions of voters’ data in 18 states have been bought, stolen or hacked by China,” Trump said.

A spokesperson for China’s embassy denied such claims, saying the country “has never and will never interfere in the presidential elections of the US”.

Trump, however, did not say that the information had been used to influence any election.

But critics pointed out that such voter information is already publicly available. Some states even sell that public data, for prices ranging from $0 to $37,000, as the US Election Assistance Commission explained in a 2020 report.

The documents declassified by the White House also appeared to indicate Beijing was, at least in part, drawing from publicly available data. It did, however, express curiosity at China’s increasing interest in such information.

“While the PRC [People’s Republic of China] government has historically demonstrated interest in US elections, this is a newly-identified interest for this individual actor,” a heavily redacted assessment said.

“The US voter registration information is available for public download, with 2021 voter registration information available for some states.”

Trump claims a ‘deep state’ cover-up, vows retribution

In Thursday’s speech, Trump returned to a conspiracy theory that helped define his first successful bid for public office in 2016: that so-called “deep state” actors had sought to undermine his presidency.

He claimed there was a “shadow government” with “rogue bureaucrats” who attempted to cover up Chinese efforts to influence the 2020 vote.

They even sought to suppress information from his daily presidential brief, Trump alleged.

“ These were briefings I would get almost every day. Everything was kept out that was of importance,” he said.

Experts, however, have noted that presidential briefs are usually heavily curated to contain intelligence perceived to be of high importance.

An intelligence community report compiled in January 2021 assessed with “high confidence” that China had considered launching an influence campaign in 2020 — but that it eventually decided against it.

The report was declassified in March 2021. It contained a minority opinion that indicated China “took at least some steps” to undermine Trump’s re-election chances “primarily through social media and official public statements and media”.

The publication of the report would appear to contradict Trump’s claims of a “cover-up”.

Still, in his speech, Trump said he had instructed his top law enforcement officials to “fire those involved in the cover-up and to file criminal charges, if appropriate, against these people”.

Trump says public ‘blatantly lied to’ about election security

Critics had warned that Trump could use Thursday’s speech to undermine confidence in US elections by spreading falsehoods.

Some television news outlets, including ABC, NBC and CNN, even opted not to air the speech in full on their main broadcast channels.

The timing of the speech is significant, as it comes less four months ahead of the midterm elections, which decide control of Congress.

Trump did indeed spend part of his speech voicing allegations that American voters had been deceived by the same “deep state” actors he accused of targeting him.

“For many years, Americans were blatantly lied to about the security of our election infrastructure, including voting machines and ballot counting systems,” Trump said.

“They’re vulnerable, and they’re easily compromised, and people within our government knew that.”

But the declassified documents released by the White House did not appear to contain any major revelations about such claims. Potential vulnerabilities have long been known, and local and federal officials have sought to address them.

The fact that elections are administered on the state and local level has also been cited as a barrier against any widespread tampering.

Given the decentralised nature of US election administration, the US intelligence community has long assessed that large-scale voting manipulation would be all but impossible.

After Trump’s speech, Democrats dismissed Trump’s remarks as distortions designed to disincentivise voters from participating in elections.

“President Donald Trump continues to lie, distort the truth to try to sow doubt and suppress the 2026 election,” US Representative Jason Crow said in a video statement. “He doesn’t want Americans to vote. He doesn’t want their voice to be heard.”

Trump rehashes Michigan investigation

Trump made a gesture at unity in Thursday’s speech, arguing that election security should not be a “partisan issue”.

“It should cause to unite us, not to divide us,” he said at one point.

But the Republican leader fired off dubious claims against targets big and small.

He called for broadcasters that did not air his speech to lose their licenses. He berated California as “worse than any third world country”. And he rehashed a incident in the swing state of Michigan that took place well before the 2020 election.

The case involved allegations of fake voter registration forms. But the forms were not processed and did not have any bearing on that year’s election; they were flagged months before the vote took place.

The state Attorney General’s Office probed the incident, as did the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Neither found evidence that fraud had been successfully committed. It is believed that the forms were not part of an election scam but rather an attempt to meet workplace quotas.

Still, Trump portrayed the incident as a significant breach in Thursday’s speech.

“It was pay, play, and cheat,” he alleged, proceeding to blame former President Biden for failing to pursue the case. “The Biden Department of Justice slow-walked the investigation and killed it.”

He added that he had instructed the FBI to re-open its investigation, although the declassified documents the White House released did not appear to provide new evidence in the case.

Speech sought to cast doubt, but contained few revelations

Trump’s speech had been hyped as a major moment in the president’s second term.

On Tuesday, when the primetime address was first announced, Trump said it would contain “really big news”. His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, warned reporters earlier in the day that the speech would “shock”.

But Democrats and election experts have argued that the speech was underwhelming — and would mostly serve to fire up Trump’s Republican base.

Indeed, Trump opened his remarks on Thursday with a resume of his second-term accomplishments, from border security to efforts to combat crime.

And he closed his speech with an appeal to pass the SAVE America Act, a piece of legislation he has repeatedly championed to heighten voter requirements.

The bill would increase voter identification standards, requiring proof of citizenship in the form of documents like birth certificates and passports that some US citizens may not have.

Rights groups have argued the requirements could disenfranchise some citizens.

Speaking to Al Jazeera, political analyst Eric Ham said the speech was yet another push in Trump’s effort to bring elections under federal control.

“This is something that the president has had an ambition of doing for quite some time, and I think what we saw tonight was another shot across the bow at trying to fundamentally change elections,” Ham said.

Hakeem Jeffries, the top Democrat in the House of Representatives, also decried the speech as a distraction from Trump’s political woes ahead of the midterms.

“Donald Trump is a feeble, unhinged conspiracy-peddling 80-year old failed President,” Jeffries wrote on social media. “The economy is a disaster under this guy and the American people know it.”

July 16 (UPI) — President Donald Trump on Thursday made sweeping, largely unsupported claims of widespread problems with U.S. elections, many of which have been debunked or overstated, as he called on Congress to pass legislation he says would protect the electoral system but critics describe as voter suppression.

During his roughly 25-minute prime-time speech to the nation, Trump attempted to make his case for measures needed to address the alleged vulnerabilities, stating, “Our elections were left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen, and the trust of the American people was lost.”

“This cannot be allowed to continue,” he said.

The speech was delivered only months before November’s midterm elections, on which Trump has increasing focused, having repeatedly warned that if Republicans lose their slim majority in the House to Democrats, impeachment proceedings and investigations will follow.

Democrats and other critics have accused the president of attempting to sow confusion and distrust ahead of the midterms while pushing the election SAVE American Act, which would require photo identification to vote, documentary proof of citizenship to register and restrict mail voting to certain eligible groups. Opponents say those requirements would disproportionately burden Black and other minority voters and prevent some otherwise eligible citizens from voting.

This is a developing story.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Thursday convened leaders from more than 60 countries to take part in the Trump administration’s latest effort to quell what it calls “left-wing” political terrorism, a marquee issue for Republicans heading into the midterm elections.

This focus comes even as studies show that there are very few reported cases of such incidents in the U.S., especially compared to historically higher levels of far-right violence.

With sweeping statements about the “alarming rise” of political violence by the left, Rubio and other U.S. officials painted a dark image of the future if the “communists and Marxists” perpetrating these supposed acts are not defeated. He urged officials in attendance — mostly from European and Latin American countries — to unite to address the issue, which he says has been a “blind spot” in counterterrorism doctrine.

“So many people in positions of power have repeatedly dismissed acts of violence and even terrorism as legitimate forms of political expression, so long as they served a left-wing cause,” Rubio said in opening remarks. “A bomb planted by a neo-Nazi group was ‘a nefarious and murderous act of evil.’ It is, but a bomb planted by a Marxist revolutionary, well, that’s just merely a tragic excess of idealism.”

A report published last year by the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that left-wing terrorism attacks as of July 4, 2025, had surpassed those from the far right for the first time in more than 30 years. However, a closer look at the data reveals that the uptick reflects a very low starting level and a concurrent drop on the far right.

There was an average of 0.6 left-wing incidents annually from 1994 through 2000, compared with an average of 20.6 on the right, the report shows. From 2016 to 2024, there was an average of four per year on the left and 22.7 per year on the right. Those numbers had dropped dramatically on the right as of early July 2025, with only one incident. Meanwhile, there had been five from the left.

But the report’s authors note that right-wing terrorism could easily return to elevated levels and that it is important to fight terrorism on both sides of the political spectrum.

President Trump and his allies have prioritized talking points against the far left ahead of the congressional elections this November. Trump has repeatedly stated that the Democratic Party’s ascendant left are communists who want to “completely destroy the traditional American way of life” and even engage in assassinations.

Vice President JD Vance has similarly called out communism as a political shift that is “something we haven’t seen in the U.S.” House Speaker Mike Johnson has decried “radical candidates” who are “self-described, self-identifying Marxists.”

For Rubio, his worldview on this issue has been largely shaped by his own history: he is the son of Cuban immigrants who arrived in Miami in May 1956, a few years before communist leader Fidel Castro rose to power in Havana. The former Florida senator said Thursday that it was that same government’s sprawling intelligence and ideological network that “helped to build the far left in our country and in our hemisphere.”

Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff and main architect of the administration’s immigration policy, followed Rubio’s remarks, aiming to drive home the immediacy of the perceived threats he saw to American institutions coming from the left, and what response is needed in return.

“If your civilization is your home, you must defend it with the same passion and force as if an enemy intruder is inside your own house where your family lives,” Miller said. “That is the level of dedication and urgency that is required.”

This ideological focus has repeatedly conflated democratic socialism — which often centers on securing universal healthcare, higher taxes on the wealthy and stricter corporate regulation — with communism, under which private ownership is largely eliminated.

It has only intensified in the last year, after the election of democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani to become New York City mayor and several of his proteges who won their New York City congressional primaries last month, beating out incumbents.

One of the ways the administration has started to target left-wing efforts is through sanctions. In November, the State Department designated four antifa or anti-fascist groups in Europe as foreign terrorist organizations. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in his remarks Thursday that targeting these entities’ financial networks is the best way to circumvent their efforts.

“We have spent decades developing the world’s most sophisticated financial counterterrorism capabilities, and now we are mobilizing some of the same tools that we have deployed against terrorists abroad to confront this emerging threat here at home,” he told the conference.

Amiri and Kinnard write for the Associated Press. Amiri reported from New York and Kinnard from Columbia, S.C. AP writer Melissa Goldin in New York contributed to this report.

PHOENIX — Election officials in Arizona’s most populous county reached an agreement this week on how to jointly oversee the vote, ending a prolonged legal battle.

Republican Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap sued the predominantly GOP board of supervisors in June 2025, alleging it illegally took control of certain aspects of election administration. The board called the lawsuit frivolous and said Heap was wasting taxpayer money.

They reached a settlement this week to resolve the lawsuit after mediated negotiations, and the board approved it.

“This deal gets us out of the courtroom,” board Chair Kate Brophy McGee, said after Tuesday’s vote. “I’m sick of drama. We are done with being on the front page going forward.”

Heap said his objective was simple: to ensure his office’s statutory responsibilities are carried out lawfully.

“I am pleased we have reached an agreement that, when implemented, will restore those responsibilities and establish a clear framework for administering elections moving forward,” Heap said in a statement jointly released with the board.

Under the agreement, an interim plan proposed by Heap and approved by the Arizona Supreme Court will govern the July 21 primary. Early voting began in late June.

Heap will oversee much of early voting, selection of ballot drop box locations and other duties. The board will handle other areas, including Election Day voting, ballot tabulation and voting location equipment maintenance. The board also will fund a new $15 million information technology system and related positions for the recorder.

Heap was backed in the lawsuit by America First Legal, a conservative public interest group founded by Stephen Miller, a deputy chief of staff in the White House. Heap had claimed the board transferred funding, IT staff and some key functions — including management of drop boxes and establishment of early voting sites — away from his office through an agreement negotiated with his predecessor.

Heap defeated incumbent recorder Stephen Richer, in a GOP primary, and won the 2024 general election.

The two were at odds over election administration in Maricopa County. In the past, Heap has stopped short of repeating false claims that the 2020 and 2022 elections were stolen. But he has said voters don’t trust the state’s voting system and that it is poorly run. Richer, also a Republican, relentlessly defended the legitimacy of the vote.

Supervisor Steve Gallardo, a Democrat, did not vote to approve the settlement and criticized Heap during Tuesday’s board meeting.

“Honestly, I don’t think he wants to have an election that is conducted transparent or even an election that’s not compromised,” Gallardo said. “Now, with this, he owns it.”

Kelety writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — President Trump appeared poised to question the security of U.S. elections with a planned prime-time speech Thursday night, eliciting fears from Democrats and voting rights advocates that he is planning yet another play for federal control over voting in November’s midterms.

The exact reason for the speech has not been disclosed by the White House, with Trump only characterizing it to reporters this week as “really, really big news.” He confirmed it would have to do with “free and fair elections.”

The Washington Post reported, citing sources, that Trump planned to argue that there are vulnerabilities in the nation’s election infrastructure and claim that China had accessed U.S. voter data. The White House declined to confirm any such details Wednesday.

The announcement of the speech set off concerns among the president’s political opponents, as well as elections experts and voting rights advocates, that Trump could again escalate claims that the nation’s voting system is vulnerable to domestic fraud and foreign attacks.

He has previously said that Republicans should “nationalize” election administration, a job that falls to the states under the Constitution, and has pressured his party to tighten federal voting rules.

“We don’t know anything about what he might say … or what he might try to do with his very limited powers, as the president, over elections,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research. “I expect we’re going to hear a lot of rehashed and debunked claims.”

The president could potentially use new claims to argue that the nation is facing an emergency in upcoming elections that necessitates further federal intervention into voting, Rep. Joseph Morelle of New York, the ranking Democrat on the House Administration Committee, which has oversight of elections, said in an interview with The Times.

“This is going to be the rationale for declaring a national emergency,” Morelle said. “It’s transparent that he is creating the emergency and he’s creating the evidence out of whole cloth to suggest there is an emergency.”

Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the Senate Rules Committee, which oversees federal elections, told The Times on Wednesday that Trump was using a known playbook to “[sow] doubt about the outcome before a single vote has been cast.”

“All signs show that tomorrow’s speech will be more of the same: debunked conspiracy theories offered up not because they’re true, but because chaos and doubt are the only cards he has left to play,” Padilla said.

The speech, which Trump announced on social media Monday, comes four months ahead of midterm elections that will determine whether his party retains legislative control in Washington.

White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt dismissed news reports about what Trump might say in the 6 p.m. PDT speech as speculation, and said “nobody knows yet what President Trump will ultimately say.”

The address also comes as Trump’s ceasefire with Iran has fallen apart, renewing expectations for increased gas prices, and his approval rating on the economy has steadily dropped. On Tuesday, it also became public that Trump had paid $5.6 million to the writer E. Jean Carroll, as ordered by a jury that in 2023 found Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming her.

“What we’re going to be talking about Thursday is, it doesn’t get bigger,” Trump told reporters who asked Tuesday about the speech. “Because without free and fair elections you don’t have a country.”

Trump has spread baseless claims of widespread election fraud for years. But his prioritization of his claims about the voting system — even as much of the nation’s attention is on cost-of-living issues — has been on particularly clear display in recent days.

He has aggressively lobbied reluctant Republican senators to pass his voter ID legislation, refusing to sign a bipartisan housing bill over it; he fired all remaining members of the bipartisan U.S. Elections Assistance Commission; and his Justice Department said it would send election monitors to six states.

Since the midterm primaries began, Trump has also sown doubt about election security — chiefly in California, where he suggested Democrats had cheated or attempted to in the gubernatorial and Los Angeles mayoral primaries.

Georgia Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff, whose state was often at the center of Trump’s 2020 fraud claims, said the president’s speech posed a threat to voting rights.

“I expect him to use whatever he puts out there on Thursday as a pretext, either for some attempted unconstitutional use of federal power to interfere in the election,” Ossoff said Tuesday on MS Now, “or to give his proxies and loyalists in state and local jurisdictions some cover for whatever they might attempt, or to lay the groundwork for challenging the result.”

Any effort to federalize or take over elections would face serious legal obstacles, said Nahal Kazemi, a Chapman University law professor. Although Congress can pass laws regarding election administration, as it did with the Voting Rights Act, the executive branch doesn’t play a role in running elections.

“You run into essentially a brick wall that is the Constitution, which makes very plain that states run elections,” Kazemi said.

When it comes to concerns about foreign interference, experts say there is little evidence of other countries attempting to hack systems or change votes. Instead, foreign actors have largely operated via disinformation campaigns, as the U.S. determined had occurred in the 2016 and 2020 elections.

“Of the information that is available to us now, there’s no reason to be alarmed about the possibility that a foreign adversary is going to take over election systems,” said Kazemi, who has studied foreign election interference.

One of the things that helps make American elections generally secure, she said, is that they are not centralized but are run by thousands of counties. Hacking into so many voting systems would be extraordinarily difficult for a foreign adversary, she said.

Jenny Farrell, executive director of the League of Women Voters of California, said California “takes elections security extremely seriously” and has one of the most secure systems in the country, subject to strict voter verification measures and intense chain of custody and auditing procedures.

Democrats have worked with elections experts in recent months on attempts to assure the public that U.S. elections are safe and secure. They have also tried to counter claims by Trump that mail ballots and voting machines are unreliable.

A slew of 2020 election reviews, including by Trump’s first administration, concluded that Trump lost and Biden won. Election experts say there is no evidence that widespread fraud determined the outcome of the election.

A judge also found that claims pushed by Trump and his attorneys that the company Dominion Voting Systems manipulated votes cast through its machines in favor of Biden were untrue.

US President Donald Trump’s nominee to serve as the nation’s top intelligence official, Jay Clayton, evaded directly stating that Trump lost the 2020 election. During his Senate confirmation hearing Clayton said only that Biden had been ‘certified’ as president, adding ‘I am not an election denier’.

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s pick to head the nation’s intelligence agencies struggled to win Democratic support in a contentious confirmation hearing Wednesday where he clashed repeatedly with them over the 2020 election.

Democrats asked Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and a former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, over and over again whether former President Biden won the election and defeated Trump. Echoing many of Trump’s nominees, Clayton said many times that the election was “certified” for Biden, declining to say outright that the Democrat won.

“I’m not going to get into this with you,” Clayton told Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff, the last of several Democrats on the committee to grill Clayton on the 2020 election. Clayton appeared frustrated and flustered as Ossoff repeated the question several times. “I’ve answered it,” he said.

Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, who had praised Clayton’s nomination when Trump picked him for the role last month, expressed exasperation with him at the end of the hearing. Democrats say they are concerned that Trump will try to direct intelligence agencies to influence U.S. elections as the president has repeated his false claims that the 2020 contest was stolen.

“I’ve known Mr. Clayton for some time, I worked with him closely when he was at the SEC,” said Warner, the top Democrat on the intelligence panel. “But I am bitterly disappointed.”

While Clayton has broad support among Republicans, the acrimony with Democrats could be a blow to GOP leaders who had hoped to gain their consent for a quick vote to replace temporary intelligence director Bill Pulte, a former housing official with no known intelligence experience and who used his previous administration perch to target perceived adversaries of the president.

Senators in both parties have criticized Pulte, and Republicans had hoped to confirm Clayton immediately after he was nominated in June so Pulte did not take over when Gabbard left office. But Trump delayed Clayton’s nomination, allowing Pulte to take the job temporarily.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said the committee will vote on Clayton’s nomination next week.

Clayton emphasizes national security experience

Clayton did not mention Pulte in the hearing. But he emphasized his own government and national security experience, attempting to assuage senators in both parties.

“I saw firsthand how a strong national security apparatus depends on decisive judgment, discipline, integrity, and effective communication and cooperation across different branches of the government,” Clayton said in his opening statement. “If confirmed as Director of National Intelligence, I will commit to upholding these principles every day.”

Cotton expressed frustration last month when the hearing was delayed. He said in his opening statement Wednesday that Clayton has a reputation for operating with “morality, decency and integrity” in his previous positions and that he hopes his nomination will win bipartisan support.

Democrats press Clayton on Gabbard’s election activities

Democrats also pressed Clayton on former National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard’s visit to a Georgia election office earlier this year during an FBI search related to the 2020 election. Trump administration officials have given varying explanations for Gabbard’s involvement in the search, which appeared to be outside of her intelligence role.

Clayton declined to say whether Gabbard’s visit was appropriate or how he would handle the same situation. At one point he said he wasn’t aware of Gabbard’s visit before this week, then later appeared to backtrack, saying “it wasn’t something on my mind” before he started to prepare for the hearing.

Warner said it “strains credibility” that Clayton wasn’t aware of Gabbard’s election activities.

Democrats also asked Clayton about Trump’s announcement that he will deliver a primetime address on Thursday with a focus on elections, after the president suggested he could revisit long-debunked conspiracy theories about his 2020 defeat. Clayton said he had has no involvement with that speech.

As U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Clayton oversees vast portfolio

Clayton is currently the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, one of the most prestigious of the Justice Department’s prosecution offices. His cases have ranged from terrorism and espionage cases to security fraud and public corruption.

Democrats pressed Clayton on subpoenas of four New York Times journalists after they reported on security concerns involving the new, Qatari-gifted Air Force One. The Committee to Protect Journalists has called the subpoenas “an extraordinary escalation in President Trump’s efforts to threaten and intimidate independent news organizations and have a chilling effect on the work of journalists across the country.”

Clayton said he was not able to discuss the details of the subpoenas and declined to elaborate on whether he spoke to the White House before they were issued. He said he is “confident in procedures we have in place to protect freedom of press.”

Under Clayton, the office also facilitated the unsealing of thousands of pages of court records from the prosecutions of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell — documents that were made public as part of the Justice Department’s release of records related to the late sex offender and his longtime confidant.

Clayton has also overseen the prosecution of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and Maduro’s wife, Cilia Flores, on drug trafficking charges.

Confirmation vote could unlock renewal of surveillance authority

Clayton’s confirmation could potentially clear the way for bipartisan legislation to renew Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which stalled last month when Democrats had said they would not provide the necessary votes to pass the bill unless Pulte’s temporary appointment was withdrawn.

The law, which aims to prevent terrorist attacks by monitoring the communications of targeted foreigners located outside the United States, expired in June.

Even if Democrats relent, it is unclear if Trump would sign the bill. He said in his June social media post delaying Clayton’s nomination that he would not sign the FISA renewal without his legislation to require proof of citizenship for all voters. The voting bill does not have enough support to pass the Senate.

Jalonick writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Eric Tucker contributed to this report.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, the prominent Republican from South Carolina who served in the Senate for more than two decades, died after suffering an aortic dissection, his office said Sunday.

Graham died unexpectedly Saturday night, his office announced, shortly after he had returned to Washington after a trip to Ukraine.

In a statement, his spokesperson said a preliminary report from the medical examiner for the District of Columbia found that the 71-year-old senator died of aortic dissection due to arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease. With aortic dissection, a tear occurs in the wall of the aorta.

According to the Mayo Clinic, aortic dissection is not very common, and its symptoms may be mistakenly attributed to other health conditions. It usually affects men in their 60s and 70s. If the blood from the dissection travels outside the artery, the condition is often fatal.

A former military lawyer who reached the rank of colonel in the Air Force, Graham ran for the Republican nomination for president in 2016. Initially a cutting, vocal critic of then-candidate Donald Trump during the election, Graham became one of the president’s staunchest allies after Trump’s election.

“Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the greatest people and Senators I have ever known, is dead!” Trump posted on his social media platform, Truth, on Sunday. “He was always working, and was a true American Patriot.”

Graham was known as a C student in high school, and was the first member of his family to attend college. His mother died while he attended the University of South Carolina, and his father died of a heart attack during Graham’s first semester of law school.

He served as a judge advocate in the Air Force, eventually becoming the chief prosecutor for the Air Force in Europe.

He was first elected to serve as senator for South Carolina in November 2002.

In a social media post on X, Vice President JD Vance described Graham as one of the most powerful lawmakers, and recalled an incident where he and Graham got into a shouting match over a funding bill for the war in Ukraine.

Later the same day, he wrote in the post, Graham was advocating for rail legislation that Vance supported.

“That was Lindsey Graham,” he wrote. “He fought like hell for the things he believed in, and he was just as willing to go to bat for you when it counted.”

Graham had been scheduled to appear on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday to discuss his trip to Ukraine. Instead, President Trump appeared in his stead, where he said the senator had been “like a member of the family.”

Trump called into several Sunday news programs to discuss Graham’s death, and said he had spoken to Graham on Saturday evening.

Trump told CNN’s Jake Tapper that the South Carolina senator had said he was “tired.”

The dismissals leave the federal election body vacant as Trump presses for broader changes to US voting rules.

President Donald Trump has removed the last remaining members of an independent federal commission that helps support United States elections, leaving the bipartisan body with no sitting commissioners.

The White House confirmed the news on Friday, with only months to spare before November’s midterm elections.

“The President, and head of the Executive Branch, reserves the right to remove individuals that may not be totally aligned with the important task of securing America’s elections,” the White House said in a statement.

It added that the administration had been “working across all agencies and local partners to safeguard elections from fraud and abuse” in the run-up to the midterms.

The decision concerns the Election Assistance Commission (ECA), an independence office created by Congress in 2002 to support state and local election officials. Among its duties are creating non-binding election guidelines, certifying voting systems and maintaining the national mail voter registration form.

Four commissioners typically helm the agency. But on Thursday, the two Democratic appointees — Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland — were fired by email, according to the news agency Reuters.

The lone remaining Republican, Christy McCormick, resigned. A fourth commissioner, Republican appointee Donald Palmer, had already left in April.

The commission is required by law to be made up evenly of Democrats and Republicans, and it was put in place to help after the disputed 2000 presidential election.

Trump’s decision to fire the remaining commissioners has further raised concerns that he may seek to intervene in the upcoming midterm elections, which will decide control of Congress for the rest of his term.

Under the US Constitution, election administration is the responsibility of the state, not the federal government.

The Election Assistance Commission had previously declined to implement part of Trump’s March 2025 executive order that called upon it to require proof of citizenship on the national mail voter registration form.

A federal judge later blocked that part of that executive order, ruling the president had exceeded his authority. Trump has appealed the ruling.

Voters are already required to affirm their citizenship before voting, as non-citizen voting is illegal in the US. Instances of non-citizen voting are rare.

The firings are the latest in a broader effort by the president to reshape how elections are conducted.

The Trump administration has pushed to tighten vote-by-mail rules and threatened to withhold some federal funding from states that refuse to adopt new election requirements. Many of those efforts have been challenged in court.

Earlier this week, the administration also sent out letters warning election officials that they could face prosecution if they fail to remove noncitizens from voter rolls.

Trump has defended the actions as necessary to protect election integrity. He has repeatedly claimed that his loss to Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 election was the result of fraud, a claim not backed by evidence.

The latest firings come after the US Supreme Court last month expanded the president’s power to fire members of independent agencies, even without cause.

The court ruled six to three in Trump’s favour, arguing that “neither Congress nor the courts may saddle” the president with executive-branch leaders he does not approve of.

The president is allowed by law to appoint replacements to the commission. It is not yet clear whether Trump plans to nominate replacements or leave the seats vacant.