state

The Trump administration has cut or frozen up to $177 billion in federal grants since the president took office for his second term, according to a tracking tool released Wednesday by a pro-democracy nonprofit and a group of researchers and scientists.

The cuts affected all 50 states and the District of Columbia, with health, nutrition, the environment and disaster relief making up the largest share of cuts, the States United Democracy Center and Grant Witness organization found.

Among the grants that were eliminated, frozen or delayed were ones related to maternal health in Michigan, education research in Mississippi and assistance to minority farmers in Iowa, the researchers found. California, Texas, New York, Illinois and North Carolina saw the highest amounts of interrupted grant money. The tracking tool is called Lost Funds.

“By bringing thousands of funding disruptions from the Trump administration together in a publicly accessible, verified database, Lost Funds puts the magnitude of their impact on full display,” Scott Delaney, co-founder of Grant Witness, said in a statement.

The $177 billion finding represents nearly 10% of federal discretionary spending, the groups said.

The tracker’s organizers said the disrupted grants were beyond the kind of cuts that typically happen when administrations change.

“Lost Funds shows the extraordinary scale and real human impact of these disruptions, and how states are once again on the front lines protecting their residents,” said Kelly Rader, States United Democracy Center’s research director.

In some cases, courts have ruled against the administration’s grant funding cuts.

The new tool, which is being made available for public use, relies on data from USASpending.gov, an open data source of federal spending information, according to the groups’ methodology. They said the tracker would be updated regularly as the administration takes new action and lawsuits move through the courts.

States United bills itself as a nonpartisan group dedicated to the rule of law and free, fair, secure elections. It was co-founded by Norm Eisen, an attorney who has been involved in prominent lawsuits against the Trump administration, including over the Kennedy Center. Eisen left States United in 2021.

Grant Witness is a group of scientists, researchers and attorneys who document how funding is changing under President Trump’s administration.

A message seeking comment on the analysis was sent to the White House.

Catalini writes for the Associated Press.

Californians are deeply frustrated with the length of the November ballot, which includes 14 statewide propositions, and gloomy about the direction of the state and the nation, according to a Public Policy Institute of California poll published Tuesday night.

They “are feeling very pessimistic,” said Mark Baldassare, PPIC’s statewide survey director. “You know that comes out not just in the questions we ask about the economy, but generally about the direction of the state and the nation. This just indicates the level of negativity that people have going into this final stage before people cast their ballots this November.”

More than half of the state’s likely voters believe that California is headed in the wrong direction, and 73% predict sour economic times in the state next year. Less than a quarter of likely voters believe the nation is headed in the right direction.

President Trump has an approval rating of 27% of likely voters, but that’s better than Congress, which has a 16% approval rating. Majorities do not have confidence in either major political party’s ability to solve problems.

Ballots will begin arriving in 23.2 million voters’ mailboxes in a little over two weeks. Nearly 80% of likely voters are frustrated by the length of the ballot, which includes 14 propositions as well as statewide, congressional and local elections. This a rare consensus among Democratic, Republican and independent voters.

“This year, there are more propositions on the ballot than we’ve seen for a decade,” Baldassare said. “Overwhelming majorities of Californians say that there are too many propositions on the ballot, too many things for them to decide. And many Californians feel that the wording of ballot initiatives makes it very hard for them to understand what happens if one passes.”

The proposal to tax the assets of billionaires to make up for federal government healthcare cuts, Proposition 40, has a slim lead in the poll, with 52% of likely voters saying they support the one-time 5% levy.

However, there are two ballot measures, Propositions 41 and 42, that would nullify the wealth tax if one is approved and gets more votes than Proposition 40. Narrow majorities support both of these proposals, creating a quandary for wealth tax supporters: ensuring their proposal receives the support of a majority of voters while also tamping down support for the competing efforts.

Findings about the proposal to require showing government-issued identification to vote and the governor’s race show less competitive contests that break along predictable partisan lines in a state where registered Democratic voters outnumber Republicans nearly 2 to 1.

The voter ID measure is opposed by 55% of likely voters. In the race to succeed termed-out Gov. Gavin Newsom, 60% of likely voters support Democrat Xavier Becerra, and 38% support Republican Steve Hilton. The other 2% were undecided or do not plan to vote on the race.

The poll of 1,745 adult Californians was conducted Sept. 4-10, and has a margin of error of about 3 percentage points in either direction, and 3.8 percentage points among the 1,103 likely voters.

NEW YORK — A last-ditch Trump administration effort to hunt for noncitizen voters ahead of November’s elections is requiring federal employees to misrepresent themselves on voter lookup tools in a way that likely violates state laws, according to a federal whistleblower’s statement released Monday.

The Department of Homeland Security probe known as the “Unlawful Voter Initiative” also asks employees to create federal law enforcement records about voters based on unreliable data, the account warns. That could potentially wrongly implicate U.S. citizens in official documentation that could spur further investigation.

The anonymous, nearly 30-page disclosure was published Monday by Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla of California, the ranking member of a Senate committee overseeing federal elections.

It features screenshots and transcripts of a DHS training for a group of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services staffers, who it says were forced in late August to drop their other work, complete a less than two-hour training session and begin running DHS-provided lists of individuals through state voter registration systems to find “unlawful voters.”

The whistleblower contends that agents have been asked to review 40 individuals per day, giving them about 12 minutes to determine whether each person is a legal voter and create federal records of anyone who is not.

Padilla and Schumer said Monday the initiative was an example of President Trump attempting to interfere in elections and the short timelines would impede officials from conducting proper investigations. They noted that the data DHS has on voters can be unreliable and differ from state records, making any federal findings based on that data potentially problematic.

“We just got more proof of Trump’s vile schemes to rig our elections,” Schumer told reporters in a news conference. “The lengths Trump will go to cheat, lie and steal in this upcoming election are simply beyond the pale.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Trump administration has been targeting noncitizen voting to allege it could be a source of significant fraud during the midterm elections, even as research shows voting by people who are not citizens is extremely rare. Trump has been pushing for the U.S. Postal Service to send mail ballots only to voters verified as U.S. citizens, and his Justice Department has sued to force the release of detailed voter data in 30 states and the District of Columbia, though it has not yet succeeded in those cases.

The whistleblower report details an effort by the federal government to work around a lack of data from the states by directing Citizenship and Immigration Services employees to pose as individual voters to access their state voter records.

Some states, such as Virginia, explicitly limit their voter lookup tools to individuals who attest under penalty of law that they are looking up their own records. In other states, like California, personally identifiable information such as a driver’s license number or partial Social Security number is needed to look up individual voter records.

The whistleblower said that when officers raised concerns about liability for searching the tools against state guidance, agency leaders told them to proceed with the searches anyway.

Schumer and Padilla on Sunday sent a letter to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin requesting more information about the initiative and demanding that it be stopped.

Asked about the whistleblower report, a DHS spokesperson said it is “laser focused on prosecuting and removing aliens who vote and preventing the dilution of the votes of U.S. citizens.”

“The department accessed publicly available data from states’ voter rolls and cross referenced them with known aliens in our systems,” the spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “It’s not rocket science; it’s an easy step to secure our elections.”

In response to complaints about the timing, limited training and quotas for agents, the spokesperson said that “far from being rushed or untrained, these investigative efforts are conducted diligently and professionally.”

The New York Times first reported on the DHS initiative in early September.

The whistleblower account released Monday was produced by the watchdog group Democracy Defenders Fund. The group, which said it represents the whistleblower as a client, said the person is anonymous because of “an extreme fear of retaliation but they feel an obligation to speak up about the misconduct and gross mismanagement they have witnessed.”

Swenson writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court has blocked President Trump’s plan to restrict voting by mail, ruling it is too late to impose new postal service rules for the November election.

The justices on Monday turned down an emergency appeal from Trump’s lawyers, who argued the government needed a new and untested system of unique bar codes to track all the ballots of the tens of millions of people who vote by mail.

Instead, the justices left in place a judge’s order that prevents the U.S. Postal Service from enforcing the new rules for the midterm elections.

Concurring, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh agreed it was too late to enforce the new rules for this election.

Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Clarence Thomas dissented.

The decision in USPS vs. California is a victory for California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and the attorneys general for 22 other Democratic-led states who sued to block the new rules.

Last week, they warned there would be chaos and confusion if Trump’s rules were put in effect now.

Bonta cheered the decision late Monday, calling it “a victory for our democracy and a powerful affirmation of the rule of law” in a case where the stakes “could not have been higher.”

“Voting is the fundamental right from which all other rights flow, and all 50 states allow ballots to be cast by mail in some form. In California and several other states, mail voting is the primary way elections are conducted,” Bonta said. “Had this rule been allowed to take effect, the consequences would have been catastrophic.”

He said his office “will remain vigilant in safeguarding our elections,” and urged voters to make their voices heard.

Under the proposed rules, state and county election officials across the nation would be required to enroll each voter with a unique bar code and submit this data to a new online portal that, as of last week, was not yet functioning.

Without the individualized bar codes, states could not send ballots through the mail. In California, that would mean election officials would have to enroll 23 million voters with new bar codes before state ballots could be mailed.

“Compliance with the USPS’ rule would be impossible ahead of the midterms, meaning that millions of voters would be unable to vote by mail and some would not be able to vote at all,” the state attorneys general told the court last week.

The impact would not be limited to Democratic-leaning states. Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson said it would be “an unmitigated disaster” if the new rules were put into effect now. About 30% of the nation’s voters — and 80% of Californians — cast ballots by mail in 2024.

But Trump has maintained, without providing evidence, that voting by mail leads to widespread cheating and fraud.

In March, he issued an executive order that called on the postal service to do more to “enhance election integrity.”

“Unique ballot envelope identifiers, such as bar codes, enable confirmation that only citizens receive and cast ballots,” he said.

Elections experts say there is no evidence of such widespread fraud, despite robust audits and other searches for it.

State attorneys general argued that the Constitution entrusts states, not federal officials, to conduct elections. While Congress may impose new rules, it is not done to limit voting by mail or to empower the postal service to do so, they said.

Trump and his lawyers maintained the administration had a duty to combat fraud, including in elections.

Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer described the new rules as “modest measures that will help prevent and restrain potential gross abuses of the mails to perpetrate a fraud on the Nation.”

And he said the federal government, the states and the voting public would face irreparable harm if the new Postal Service rules were not allowed to be applied to the coming election.

But U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, in Boston, ruled the postal service may not put its new regulations into effect for the Nov. 3 election. She found the Trump administration had presented no evidence to the court of widespread fraud existing, while the states had presented ample evidence that implementing such a system on such a fast timeline posed tremendous risk.

The 1st Circuit Court affirmed her order and said the administration’s lawyers “have not even seriously challenged the … detailed findings about the chaos and widespread disenfranchisement that would occur between now and November 3 should the USPS rule take immediate effect.”

On Sunday, U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols — a Trump appointee — also blocked the new Postal Service rules from being implemented in separate cases brought by the NAACP and Democratic groups, finding they clearly exceeding the Postal Service’s authority in elections.

What the future will hold is unclear. The courts did not declare the new rules to be illegal or unconstitutional, though multiple lower courts have suggested that parts of the plan likely would be — including by exceeding the Postal Service’s authority to intervene in elections.

Much of the debate before the appellate and high court related to the rushed timeline under which the Postal Service was seeking to implement the changes. With that set aside by the Supreme Court’s ruling that the rules will not apply this election, the debate in the lower courts may shift focus to whether the new regulations can be applied to the 2028 elections.

Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, chair of the Democratic Assn. of Secretaries of State, said the high court’s ruling was a clear loss for Trump, and that state election officials are ready to continue their fight to protect U.S. elections if necessary.

“This ruling affirms what our Constitution has always held: Elections belong to the American people, not a desperate man in Washington,” he said.

California and other Democratic-led states and localities filed a pair of lawsuits Monday challenging new Trump administration rules giving immigration officials more power to deny green cards to applicants whose families have relied on public assistance programs in the past.

The challenge mirrors another by a similar coalition that successfully halted such changes during the first Trump administration.

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, whose office is helping lead the states’ challenge, said the rule changes seek to “rewrite more than 100 years of law” by making even brief use of public benefits in years past grounds for the federal government to deny a person’s application for legal permanent residency in the future — which he said was clearly illegal and would push tremendous costs onto states, counties and cities.

“No family should have to choose between accessing healthcare and nutrition assistance today — or protecting their pathway to a green card tomorrow,” Bonta said. “We’re going to court on behalf of the millions of immigrants who call this state home — and we will fight to get this unlawful rule undone.”

San Francisco City Atty. David Chiu, whose office is helping lead a separate challenge from Democratic-led cities and counties, said in a statement that the new Trump administration policies are “a blatant attempt to sow fear and confusion in our immigrant communities and coerce people into withdrawing from critical government services” — which he also said would shift millions in costs to local governments.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which promulgated the new rules, said the lawsuits were proof that immigrants are unlawfully tapping into benefits programs intended for U.S. citizens.

“Sanctuary states are terrified they will lose federal funds because hundreds of thousands of illegals and noncitizens might remove themselves from American welfare programs,” the spokesperson said. “This is the ideological contortion required by left-wing leaders to justify their defrauding of the American taxpayer at the hands of illegal criminals.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

President Trump won office on a promise to rein in illegal immigration. Since taking office, his administration has launched a mass crackdown that has targeted both undocumented and documented immigrants. It has done so in part by targeting federal and state programs that offer immigrant assistance — which Trump has derided as diverting resources away from U.S. citizens.

In their lawsuit, the states acknowledge that federal law enacted by Congress in 1882 allows the U.S. to deny noncitizens entry to the country if they would be a “public charge,” or someone who is unable to support themselves and must rely on the government for assistance.

However, the states argue that Congress, the courts and federal government agencies have for “over 140 years” understood the term “public charge” to mean a person “who has become, or is likely to become, primarily dependent on the government for long-term subsistence” — not someone who has ever taken public assistance of any kind in the past, even in the short term.

And yet, the new policy promulgated by Homeland Security and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services gives immigration officers “unprecedented, sweeping new discretion to deny admission” to families that have tapped any number of public assistance programs for which both Congress and individual states have chosen to make them eligible, the states wrote.

The lawsuit, joined by Bonta, the attorneys general of 19 other states and the District of Columbia, and the governor of Pennsylvania, was filed in federal court in New York.

A separate lawsuit was filed in the same court by San Francisco and Santa Clara County in California, as well as New York City, Chicago, and Seattle and surrounding King County, Wash.

In a morning news conference, Bonta said the Trump administration’s new rules target families in unprecedented ways.

As one example, he said the new rules would potentially allow immigration officials to deny permanent residency to immigrant parents based on their U.S. citizen children accessing public benefits that they are clearly entitled to under the law.

As another, he said the new rules could penalize immigrant families for accessing basic, preventative healthcare that actually helps control the broader public cost of illness to localities and states.

Chiu said federal limits on residency for those who would be a “public charge” have in the past been applied in a “narrow and consistent way,” focusing on certain cash assistance and long-term medical needs. The new rules, he said, make “almost any” kind of government assistance grounds for residency denial.

The states’ lawsuit — California’s 92nd against the current Trump administration — revises a policy battle that began during Trump’s first administration, when it attempted in 2019 to implement similar policies, was sued by California, San Francisco and Santa Clara County, and lost.

The Biden administration later dropped the plans to change the rules.

Tony LoPresti, county counsel for Santa Clara County — which has per capita one of the largest foreign-born populations in the country — said that it was “déjà vu all over again.” and that the Trump administration will lose again because the new “public charge” policy is “outright illegal.”

It “bullies our community members into dropping health insurance, bypassing food assistance and turning their back on critical services out of fear” and constitutes “a wealth test for residents who are lawfully seeking status,” LoPresti said.

Byron Sher, a Stanford law professor-turned California legislator who wrote some of the state’s most far-reaching environmental laws, died Saturday. He was 98.

Cerebral and soft-spoken, Sher was the antithesis of politicians nowadays. He rarely issued press releases, didn’t convene news conferences, and disliked raising campaign money.

But he left an indelible mark on the environment, authoring legislation offering incentives to recycle, limiting advertisers’ inflated claims about products’ environmental benefits and combating water and air pollution.

He helped lead the effort to preserve ancient redwoods in Headwaters Forest in Humboldt County in 1999, pushing the state and federal government to buy it from Texas financier Charles Hurwitz, who owned Pacific Lumber Co. and was preparing to log it.

A decade earlier, in 1988, Sher authored legislation requiring that California take stock of the sources of greenhouse gases. It was the first time the legislature in California — or any other state — embedded the term “global warming” into a state law, and became the foundation for bills in later decades to combat climate change.

“The heat is on,’’ Sher said presciently, as quoted by the Sacramento Bee on May 5, 1989. “The state can either ignore what science is telling us, or we can respond to this challenge in a responsible way.’’

Because of his legislation, manufacturers today sell more products in spray bottles rather than aerosol cans, people can more easily dispose of televisions and other electronic waste, and underground gasoline storage tanks rarely leak and foul groundwater.

“Byron Sher built the legal and research foundation for California’s climate change regime and by extension helped shape how the world has tried to handle climate change,” said Joe Mathews, a Berggruen Institute fellow who is working on a book about the state’s legislative efforts to confront global warming.

Today, Sher’s 1989 legislation creating state wild and scenic rivers is a barrier to President Trump’s proposal to raise Shasta Dam north of Redding to increase water storage, an idea backed by Central Valley farming interests. His legislation protects the McCloud River, which feeds Shasta Reservoir. Raising the dam would inundate habitat along the McCloud.

That Sher placed such ideas into law reflected his ability to persuade and compromise. Gov. George Deukmejian, a Republican, signed the wild rivers legislation, and Sher’s Clean Air Act, which helped shape federal clean air legislation signed in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush.

Their partisan differences aside, Deukmejian viewed Sher as having “great personal integrity,” said Steve Merksamer, who was Deukmejian’s chief of staff.

“When Byron Sher wanted to come into the office and had the bill, would he get in? Absolutely. Would the governor listen to him? Yes,” Merksamer said.

Sher did fall short of convincing Deukmejian to sign one of his bills — a whimsical measure inspired by a Camp Fire girls and boys troop to proclaim the banana slug to be the official state mollusk. Deukmejian vetoed the bill, though Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation in 2024 designating the slimy yellow creature as the official state slug.

Sher was born in St. Louis in 1928, graduated from Harvard Law School in 1952, and joined the Stanford Law School faculty in 1957. He served on the Palo Alto City Council in the 1960s, got recalled in 1967 over his opposition to development and won back his seat in the 1970s. Sher was Palo Alto mayor in 1980 when he won an Assembly seat. He remained in the Assembly until 1996 when he was elected to the state Senate, serving until 2004 when term limits forced him to step aside.

Among the students who passed through his Stanford classrooms was Newsom’s father, William Newsom, who became a state court of appeals justice.

Sher and his aide and friend Kip Lipper attended a 2010 banquet in San Francisco at which the California League of Conservation Voters honored Justice Newsom with the Byron Sher Lifetime Achievement Award. In his acceptance speech, Newsom recalled that Sher was the only Sanford professor who gave him a C. When Lipper asked whether the story was true, Sher deadpanned, “He deserved it.”

“There aren’t a lot of tales to tell about Byron Sher,” said Bill Lockyer, who was Senate leader when Sher won a state seat in 1996. “He went home at night and tended not to get into the Capitol gossip.”

In 1996, Lockyer entrusted Sher to serve on a joint Assembly-Senate conference committee that produced landmark legislation that sought to deregulate California’s electricity system.

Sher added provisions expanding requirements that the state use renewable sources of electricity and called the legislation “an extraordinary result” given the issue’s complexity. Lockyer said Sher’s additions, while important, were “the cherry on top of the toxic sundae.”

The legislation was blamed for California’s electricity crisis in 2000 and 2001 when swashbuckling energy traders manipulated the markets, causing prices to spike, resulting in rolling blackouts, and fueling the 2003 recall of Gov. Gray Davis.

Sher was notable for measures he refused to support. With a few other liberal Democrats, nicknamed the Grizzlies, Sher would pick through turgid language of legislation looking for provisions that reflected the undue influence of special interests.

Sher voted against 1986 legislation that purported to open the way for a shrimp processing facility in West Sacramento. The bill turned out to be part of an elaborate FBI sting that resulted in 14 legislators, lobbyists and others being sent to prison.

“He wasn’t a comfortable politician,” said San Mateo County Supervisor Jackie Speier, a former Democratic congresswoman who served in the Legislature with Sher. “He didn’t speak up a lot. So, when he did, people listened.”

He displayed partisan side in 1994 when Republicans took a 41-seat majority in the 80-seat Assembly, and Republican Assemblyman Jim Brulte was in line to be elected speaker. But Democratic Speaker Willie Brown had a Republican supporter, Paul Horcher, who voted to retain Brown as speaker, plunging the two parties into a yearlong fight for control.

To wrest control from Republicans, Brown asked the professorial Sher to challenge one Republican’s right to remain in the Assembly. That Republican, Richard Mountjoy of the San Gabriel Valley, won two elections that November — one to the Assembly and the other in a special state Senate election to fill the seat vacated when the incumbent, Frank Hill, was sentenced to prison in the corruption scandal.

Sher reasoned that Mountjoy had to make up his mind — stay in the Assembly or move to the Senate. Facing term limits in the Assembly, Mountjoy joined the Senate in January 1995. The partisan battle went on all that year.

Brulte, who never did become speaker, was elected to the Senate in 1996, as was Sher. On Sunday, he called Sher “a wonderful man.”

“Everything in politics today is personal. It wasn’t personal,” Brulte said of Sher’s role in the speakership battle. “Somebody may have taken it personally, but I certainly didn’t.”

Sher retired to a pear orchard in the Sierra Nevada foothills and served on Tahoe Regional Planning Agency and Sierra Nevada Conservancy.

His wife of 62 years, Linda Bowser Sher, died in 2014. He is survived by three children, five grandchildren and a great-granddaughter.

Morain is a former Los Angeles Times reporter.

The race for California’s next superintendent of public instruction is meant to be nonpartisan. Still, the two candidates — both school board presidents — are pushing decidedly political campaigns, one aligning with liberal Democrats and the other with pro-Trump Republicans as they present dueling visions for how the state’s children should be taught.

Democrat Richard Barrera, the favorite, beat out six other Democrats with his background in union organizing and liberal politics — and with more than $5 million from the California Teachers Assn. Republican Sonja Shaw rode a wave of support from a conservative education movement she helped build alongside MAGA organizations, Christian nationalists and anti-LGBTQ+ groups, while also consolidating mainstream Republicans behind her.

Although Democratic state lawmakers recently stripped many of the powers from the superintendent, the race remains a bellwether for how Californians feel about the public education of about 5.7 million children — as the Trump administration aggressively targets the state over its progressive policies.

Candidates’ disparate visions

Taking the California Democratic Party convention stage in February, Barrera, president of the San Diego Unified Board of Education, gave a quick shout-out to the California Teachers Assn. for backing his bid.

He then promoted his work in San Diego to improve student performance, raise teacher salaries and construct “environmentally sustainable schools built by union workers.” He blasted “downtown Republican business interests” for trying to privatize schools, and President Trump’s immigration policies, which he said terrify many California students who fear losing their undocumented parents.

“It’s time for us to organize, stand up to Trump, abolish ICE and create the schools our students are worthy of,” Barrera said.

Two months later, Shaw, president of the Chino Valley Unified School District Board of Education, introduced herself at an event as a mom and a “fighter” who isn’t afraid to “look the enemy in the eye” because God protects her.

She described her opponents as California liberals who pushed school closures and mask policies during the COVID-19 pandemic and now advocate for the rights of transgender students at the expense of other students.

Shaw said she entered politics inspired by the MAGA-aligned group Moms for Liberty, which campaigns against teaching about ongoing systemic racism, opposes diversity programs as discriminatory and has fought against classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity.

Shaw also described being called a year prior and encouraged to run for superintendent by then-state Assemblymember Bill Essayli, who is now the lead federal prosecutor in Los Angeles and one of Trump’s strongest local allies.

“And I kind of laughed,” she said. “Ha ha. Me? The soccer mom? Really?” She said she told Essayli that she had to talk to God and her family. Essayli urged her to decide quickly.

Despite her humble, “who, me?” persona on the campaign trail, Shaw argues that her message resonates with parents in both parties. Shaw said she would use the superintendent position as a bully pulpit to expand that base beyond party lines and fight what she sees as the state’s failed liberal schooling policies from within. She also would challenge in court the new state law that transferred most of the post’s authority to an appointee of the governor.

Morgan Polikoff, a USC education professor, said that to win, Shaw would have to “dramatically broaden her base, inviting people who aren’t animated primarily by anti-LGBTQ animus to vote for her.”

Barrera, meanwhile, a senior aide to current state Supt. Tony Thurmond, represented the California Department of Education at a recent event held by the statewide LGBTQ+ group Equality California, where school districts were rated on their LGBTQ+ policies and resources. San Diego Unified received a high rating, while Chino Valley did not participate in the voluntary analysis.

Tony Hoang, executive director of Equality California, has described Shaw as a threat to LGBTQ+ students and endorsed Barrera as a candidate who has spent his career “advancing policies that make schools safer and more inclusive.”

Lance Christensen, of the conservative California Policy Center, disagreed. He said Barrera “will continue to be the servant and mouthpiece of the CTA,” while Shaw “represents a return to common sense, or better yet, good sense — because she’s speaking to basic issues of education policy that have been ignored for far too long.”

Barrera acknowledged his primary win over the other Democratic challengers was largely thanks to the CTA, which he said “made all the difference.” But he also credited a “long partnership” with San Diego educators and a record of believing in public education.

Shaw consolidated conservative Republican support in the primary, in which she finished first, with her campaign raising $399,000.

Barrera’s campaign collected $274,000 in primary contributions. Since the primary, Barrera’s campaign has raised at least $340,000, compared with $104,000 for Shaw.

However, it is in independent expenditures — spending by outside groups on behalf of political candidates — that Barrera has the financial leg up on Shaw. Already considered the likely fall winner because he no longer will be splitting the state’s sizable liberal vote with other Democratic candidates, Barrera also has benefited from the CTA’s massive spending covering the cost of mailers, text message campaigns and TV, radio, newspaper and digital ads, among other things.

Shaw: Soccer mom to MAGA warrior

Shaw, a 44-year-old Chino native and mother who has worked in fitness training and photography, said pandemic school closures and mask and vaccine mandates she opposed prompted her to show up to school board meetings, confront officials and challenge school policies in court. “I’m relentless. I don’t let go,” she said.

In November 2022, she was elected to the Chino Valley Unified school board, part of a small wave of evangelical Christians and far-right candidates to win seats across the state that cycle, and quickly became a go-to conservative voice on education issues.

Shaw has sidestepped concerns about immigration agents targeting schools as an issue outside of a school district’s jurisdiction. She also has derided the influence of unions in the education sector. And she lambasted efforts by California Democrats to oppose “school choice,” calling charter schools, homeschooling and other “alternative learning models” critical “lifelines” for families.

Shaw also became laser-focused on LGBTQ+ issues, challenging state laws that allow transgender students to participate in athletics and use school facilities in line with their gender identity. She also fought a state privacy policy that dissuaded school administrators from informing the parents of children who change their gender presentation or pronouns at school, and backed bans on library books with passages deemed sexually obscene. Critics have said the policy targets LGBTQ+ books, which Shaw denied.

Separately, Shaw has rallied her followers online to protest transgender teen athletes, including Jurupa Valley High School track star AB Hernandez. Shaw has showed up at track meets to protest Hernandez’s participation — which Hernandez’s mother has called threatening.

Shaw also has filed federal civil rights complaints on behalf of and helped draft complaints for cisgender high school athletes — including some of Hernandez’s teammates — who, she said, told her they were unhappy with sharing races, podiums and athletic facilities with transgender peers.

Shaw said she did not consult with Essayli on his recent unsuccessful lawsuit challenging the state’s transgender sports policies, which was based on the participation of some of the same high school athletes Shaw has protested. However, she said she would be in touch with federal authorities about such issues were she to win.

“You don’t think I’ll be calling, in my position, to the federal government?” she said. Essayli did not respond to a request for comment.

Barrera: Built by labor

Barrera, a 59-year-old father of grown children and member of the San Diego Unified school board since 2008, has been a union organizer for decades.

He never has been a teacher — nor has Shaw — but said his organizing experience makes him a natural fit as the chosen candidate of the teachers union and other labor groups, where he said he believes “the educator voice comes out most powerfully.”

“For me, the unions are a partner and will always be a core … voice in influencing the way that I make decisions,” he said.

In the 2000s, Barrera served as a regional organizer for the United Domestic Workers and United Healthcare Workers, then helped start the Chula Vista chapter of ACORN, a liberal pro-labor group.

Barrera rejects the assertion that California’s public schools are failing and wants to help “create a different narrative,” that students are “capable of anything” and educators are “capable of bringing out the best in our young people.”

Barrera helped turn the San Diego school board from a conservative-dominated body to a liberal, union-allied one. He once joined a five-day hunger strike in support of hotel workers.

Barrera has long subsidized his school board pay — a stipend of about $20,000 a year plus health benefits — with outside union work. In 2013, he was appointed secretary-treasurer of the San Diego and Imperial Counties Labor Council, earning about $110,000 per year. The council includes the San Diego Unified employee unions, which critics considered a clear conflict of interest because as a school board member, Barrera was on the opposite side of the negotiation table from unions that were helping pay his Labor Council salary.

In 2016, Barrera switched to a lower-profile role as secretary-treasurer of UFCW Local 135, holding the No. 2 position in the San Diego area’s largest private-sector union representing grocery, pharmacy, casino and factory workers but not school employees.

During that period, Barrera’s direct supervisor, Mickey Kasparian, was accused of sexual harassment, which Kasparian denied. Three accusers were paid settlements with no admission of wrongdoing. Barrera was not accused of sexual misconduct but was swept out of office alongside Kasparian in 2018.

The subsequent union leadership, which is still in place, opposes Barrera for superintendent, arguing that he should have taken a stand against Kasparian. Barrera dismissed these criticisms as part of a “decade-old internal union leadership fight.”

In 2021, as officials debated when and how to reopen campuses closed during the pandemic, Barrera was aligned with the local teachers union, and his school board approved a vaccine mandate for all district employees and conditioned the return to in-person instruction on educators having the opportunity to be fully vaccinated.

Today, Barrera is in near lock-step with the CTA when it comes to policy. His only critique is that CTA lobbying in Sacramento should be better connected to ground-level demands, a goal that CTA leadership has been working toward, he said.

Paramount Skydance Chief Executive David Ellison faces a pivotal decision: Should he uproot his Hollywood studio — the birthplace of such film classics as “Sunset Boulevard,” “The Godfather” and “Beverly Hills Cop”?

Paramount floated shifting its home base to Tennessee or Texas in July, hoping to deter California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta from waging a legal battle to block Paramount’s $111-billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.

Bonta rejected the tactic, calling it “blackmail.” His antitrust lawsuit, filed in collaboration with 11 other Democratic state attorneys general, has since stalled the largest Hollywood merger in decades and put Ellison in a jam.

The 43-year-old tech scion — a film aficionado who has spent two decades building his career in Hollywood — has told associates he doesn’t want to leave L.A. But he has signaled that he’s prepared to sell the historic studio lots and move Paramount’s and Warner Bros.’ operations from California if the merger isn’t finalized by next month, according to people familiar with the situation who were not authorized to comment.

The prospect has rattled a region already reeling from steep declines in film production, heavy job losses, empty soundstages and shuttered small businesses.

“It would be devastating,” Assemblymember Rick Chavez Zbur, who represents a district that includes the Melrose Avenue movie lot and neighborhoods near Warner Bros. in Burbank, said of a Paramount move. “We need to do everything we can to protect these important jobs in California’s iconic industry.”

Paramount declined to comment.

Ellison is frustrated after securing approvals from more than 65 regulators worldwide for the mammoth merger that would bring HBO, CNN, CBS, Comedy Central, MTV and TBS under the same roof.

Bonta’s lawsuit stands in the way.

“California is the fourth-largest economy in the world and the best place to do business,” a spokesman from Bonta’s office said. “Strong antitrust enforcement is essential so everyone can benefit from a vibrant economy.”

A federal judge in Oakland temporarily blocked the deal, prompting Paramount to agree not to finalize the acquisition until after a trial or June 1, whichever comes first. Settlement talks collapsed in late August after Bonta accused Paramount of leaking and misrepresenting their discussions.

Paramount has plenty at stake. U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín set the trial for March, but the company urgently needs the valuable Warner assets to better compete against tech behemoths. And beginning Oct. 1, Paramount must increase its payout to Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders by $7 million a day, so-called ticking fees that will heap more debt onto the highly leveraged transaction.

Paramount asked the judge to require California and other plaintiff states, including Nevada, Oregon and New York, along with the Writers Guild of America (which also sued) to post a $1.88-billion bond that could compensate Paramount for ticking fee costs. A hearing is set for Sept. 24.

For weeks, Paramount’s most potent weapon has been its in-the-works plan to leave L.A.

Lobbying has been intense, prompting a parade of politicians led by Gov. Gavin Newsom, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and gubernatorial nominee Xavier Becerra to urge the two sides to settle the lawsuit.

“It’s a game of chicken,” Kevin Klowden, an economist and managing director at the Melcene Advisory firm, said in an interview. “But I’m not dismissing the threat because it is very real.”

Relocating from Los Angeles would allow Ellison’s cash-hungry media company to qualify for lucrative tax incentives offered by another state. Ellison’s short list includes Tennessee, Texas and Georgia. But leaving its longtime home would be costly for Paramount too, given how much of the talent and deal-making remains concentrated around L.A.

Tennessee’s Department of Economic and Community Development declined to discuss its negotiations with Paramount, but in a statement a spokesperson said the state “remains committed to working with companies across a wide range of industries that are exploring opportunities to invest and grow in Tennessee.”

Early this month, a pro-merger group was set to hold a news conference outside Paramount, but it moved its gathering to a warehouse a few blocks away after anti-merger activists planned a counterprotest.

The pro-merger organization, Neighbors for Strong Communities, was incorporated in Washington, D.C., in June and has lobbed text messages to Californians urging them to press Bonta to drop the case.

Speakers were concerned with just one issue: What would happen should Paramount pull out?

“What are we going to do with all these people who have invested their lives and many generations into building something here?” asked Keyla Wood, who moved from Mexico to L.A. about a decade ago after getting her start in Spanish-language soap operas.

“It’s been one thing after the other: The pandemic, the strikes and then it was the fires,” said Wood, who has worked as a stand-in for Eva Longoria and Salma Hayek. “So many people never work again.”

David Ellison is deciding whether to leave Hollywood.

(Bloomberg via Getty Images)

L.A.’s very identity is at stake, added Daniela Kelly, an actor and dancer who arrived from Brazil two decades ago.

“Everyone in the world sees Los Angeles and Hollywood as the platform for their dreams,” Kelly said. “Imagine if a huge studio with 100 years of history here just leaves? What will we be?”

Businesses like Kelly’s small Kreashen Studios USA, which provides video and podcasting space in Marina del Rey, depends on the region’s entertainment economy.

“It’s difficult financially right now to keep open,” she said. “So I’m pro having Paramount stay because this is the center, the heart of Hollywood.”

But deal opponents and some experts say the merger would actually worsen L.A.’s already bleak production picture.

Paramount has promised to cut $6 billion in expenses — a figure that doesn’t factor in the cost of ticking fees, which would add $650 million each quarter to the $81 billion that Paramount had anticipated paying Warner shareholders.

“We’ve seen from previous mergers that jobs have been lost,” L.A. City Councilmember Adrin Nazarian said at a City Hall event recently.

Combining Paramount and Warner could result in the elimination of nearly 4,500 positions over three years and put at risk an additional 5,865 jobs within businesses that serve the studios, according to an August report by the Los Angeles County Department of Economic Opportunity.

“When you look at the economic impact, it’s pretty staggering,” Kelly LoBianco, the department director, said in a recent interview. “An estimated $4 billion in economic output lost, and another $550 million lost in tax revenue at the local, state and federal level.”

The merger also could erase $79 million in tax revenue to Los Angeles County even if Paramount stays in L.A., she said.

But state and county tax revenue would plummet further should Paramount dispatch hundreds of its workers to Tennessee or some other state, Klowden said.

“If Ellison moves all the management out and all of the productions out, you’re talking about potentially tens of thousands of jobs,” Klowden said. “That, bluntly, isn’t just devastating to L.A. That becomes devastating to everybody.”

A report commissioned by Paramount from Los Angeles Economic Development Corp. predicted even steeper losses of at least 28,000 jobs should the studio move its entire operation out of state, according to a draft report given to Politico.

Under a less dire scenario, Paramount could shift its corporate headquarters to another state to qualify for incentives but still maintain large staffs in the creative hubs of Los Angeles and New York, where the company has its legal headquarters.

When the Ellison family acquired Paramount from the Sumner Redstone family last year, Ellison shifted operations to L.A., where he and other key executives work on the Melrose Avenue lot.

The threat to pull up stakes has created a disconnect after Ellison has spent more than a year touting how his family’s growing collection of media properties would strengthen traditional Hollywood.

The relocation campaign echoes a tactic used by software giant Oracle Corp., co-founded by Ellison’s billionaire father, Larry Ellison. For three decades, Oracle thrived in Redwood City, Calif., but in 2020, the company moved its headquarters to Austin, Texas, joining other California tech firms leaving in protest of the state’s high taxes.

The elder Ellison announced in 2024 that Oracle would be moving again, this time to Nashville, although that relocation hasn’t been finalized.

Paramount would risk leaving behind a skilled talent pool filled with experienced production workers and entertainment executives, Klowden said.

Fleeing L.A. could prompt “a talent bleed-out,” Klowden said. “Creative types are like: ‘Would I feel comfortable moving there?’ And, ‘What if I move there and something goes wrong? There would be nowhere else for me to go.’”

He pointed to Nissan’s 2006 U.S. headquarters move to the Nashville area from Gardena in L.A.’s South Bay, which dramatically reset the automaker’s workforce as fewer than half of its Southern California employees made the trek to Tennessee.

On Friday, a magistrate judge told both sides to identify dates in late October to meet for court-ordered settlement talks.

Each has motivations to settle — including avoiding a years-long court fight. Bonta has said Paramount must be willing to part with assets to alleviate market concentration, which could lead to a sale of Warner’s New Line Cinema, which has rights to “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Conjuring” franchises, and potentially cable channels such as CNN, Food Network or Cartoon Network.

Paramount, as part of a settlement, could abandon plans to leave L.A.

“All of the parties need to understand what this [issue] means to workers and small businesses,” Zbur, the local Assembly member, said. “I’m hopeful for a settlement that assures that Paramount and Warner Bros. will maintain their operations and remain a significant economic and employment force in Los Angeles.”

Times staff writer Cerys Davies contributed to this report.

Evelina Fernández’s “Antigone: In the Language of Kings” receives a theatrically entrancing staging at the Getty Villa’s Outdoor Theater in a production co-produced with Latino Theater Company.

The adaptation resets Sophocles’ tragedy to Aztec culture in a transposition that is both visually and musically enlivening. If the drama is oversimplified, it nonetheless makes for a gripping spectacle.

It’s not easy to find analogies that can reanimate the importance of burial rites to a modern audience. The production’s creative team, led by the inexhaustibly inventive director José Luis Valenzuela, returns us to a world where the dead are owed sacred duties and the living are fearful to renege on this basic human responsibility.

The incense-filled production — conducted in English, Spanish and Nahuatl (the language of the Aztecs), with English and Spanish supertitles — proceeds like a pageant. Headdress-clad warriors clash on the battlefield. A masked chorus, moving with the coordination of a Broadway musical ensemble, gives voice to the anxiety and grief of the collective. A statuesque figure of death, trailing black fabric, sweeps up the casualties of war with the efficiency of a human vacuum.

In Sophocles, Antigone, Oedipus’ headstrong daughter, defies the edict issued by her uncle Creon, the newly deputized king, declaring that her slain brother Polynices is an enemy of the state and therefore ineligible for burial. For Antigone this is an imposition of political power over divine law, and she puts her life on the line to uphold her obligation to her family and faith.

The ensemble of “Antigone: In the Language of Kings” at the Getty Villa Museum Outdoor Classical Theater.

(Cassia Davis / © 2026 J. Paul Getty Trust)

The German philosopher Hegel considered Sophocles’ “Antigone” the high-water mark of tragedy for the way it dramatizes the collision between two equally justified moral positions. Creon, representing the claims of the polis over the clan, cannot be dismissed outright. Nor can Antigone, whose all-consuming identification with her cause renders her indifferent to other obligations, be adopted as a user-friendly hero.

Tragedy arises from the one-sidedness of their claims. Antigone loses her life and Creon, for all intents and purposes, destroys his own, suffering the deaths of his most cherished loved ones.

Hegel’s reading of “Antigone” illustrates his thesis-antithesis-synthesis view of dialectical progress. Sophocles, it can be surmised from the other plays in his Oedipus cycle, likely conceived “Antigone” with a larger metaphysical design. But even if Hegel’s interpretation would have seemed off the mark to him, Antigone and Creon are too complex to reduce to a schematic argument.

Fernández simplifies these antagonists. Her Antíkona (a formidable Esperanza América) reveals her softer side even when rejecting her sister, Ixmene (Alexis B. Santiago), for not having the courage to zealously join her fight.

Tlahtoani Klion (Cástulo Guerra), Emperor of Tenochtitlan, is a ruler so intoxicated with his own authority that he’s clearly courting rebuke from the gods. It’s only a matter of time before his hubris is slapped down.

The acting is theatrically robust, though not always subtle. I wondered if ambiguity had been outlawed along with the funeral rites of Antíkona’s warrior brother Polynices. The bold clarity of the performances was energizing, but the wailing sometimes sounded like parody grief.

The outsize nature of the production invites overacting. And Ric Salinas, who plays Chachalacani, humorously obliges, bringing his Culture Clash vaudeville skills to the role of the sentry who’s caught between the rock of Klion’s tyranny and his fellow feeling for Antíkona’s sympathetic cause.

Strong performances are elicited from José Eduardo Moreno, who plays Klion’s son Hemon, Antíkona’s fiancé, and Zilah Mendoza, who plays Cihuatlahtoani Euridice, Klion’s wife. Their portrayals, mixing ferocious strength with stark vulnerability, make the tragedy’s pileup of bodies at the end all the more piercing.

The ensemble of “Antigone: In the Language of Kings” at the Getty Villa Museum Outdoor Classical Theater.

(Cassia Davis / © 2026 J. Paul Getty Trust)

América’s Antíkona is as unyielding as any Antigone I’ve seen. It’s a commanding portrayal, but I wish the production didn’t shrink from its protagonist’s fierceness. The obdurate side of the character is lessened with a gesture Antíkona bestows on Ixmene — a reassurance that even though she’s a revolutionary, she’s still an affectionate sister.

Sophocles is made of harsher stuff. Fernández’s adaptation is anxious to turn tragedy into a sermon, offering theatergoers moral solace where Sophocles leaves his audience in a contemplative state of stunned silence.

But the staging makes up for the dramatic shortfall. Valenzuela masterly orchestrates the mise-en-scène. The majestic costumes of Catarina Copelli, invoking a rich brocaded world on the brink of disappearance, might be the real superstar.

François-Pierre Couture’s scenic design is mesmerizing without ever being overbearing. “Lee” Xinyuan Li’s lighting heightens the sense of theatrical foreboding. Yee Eun Nam’s projections inject into this transient world a welcome subtlety.

Urbanie Lucero’s choreography and movement direction maintain the production’s graceful poise. The musicians, discreetly performing at the back of the stage under the guidance of Mesoamerican instruments director Christopher García, charge the air with percussive Indigenous wonder.

“Antigone: In the Language of Kings” marks the Getty Villa’s 20th anniversary of reinventing classical tragedy for our time. This gorgeous staging makes me ardently wish that the theater extends the tradition for at least another 20 years.

ATLANTA — Security researchers say rapid advances in artificial intelligence are making it more critical to address a flaw in Georgia’s voting equipment that can allow voters to be matched to their ballots after they have been cast.

The system’s vulnerability has been drawing increased attention, with election security advocates criticizing state election officials for failing to fix it before the November elections. Georgia election officials say they have taken steps to address the potential harm, but some advocates say the state is not going far enough.

The vulnerability does not allow votes to be changed or cast doubt on election results, but it could let someone see how others voted. That is important because ballot secrecy is a fundamental right under the state constitution, and violations could create an opening for legal challenges.

The development comes in an election season of uncertainty, as President Trump threatens to interfere with the midterms, and he has long demanded that states turn over voter rolls. Georgia has been a particular focus, as Trump continues to deny he lost the state in 2020 to Joe Biden. Earlier this year, the FBI seized ballots cast in that election from a Fulton County election hub.

While the flaw in Georgia has been known for a few years, the widespread adoption of AI tools and the blistering pace of its sophistication have election security experts raising alarms.

This is “a bit of a wake-up call because it illustrates how much more easily vulnerabilities can be exploited now that AI can do all of the technical work for you,” said J. Alex Halderman, a voting technology specialist at the University of Michigan who was part of the team that exposed the flaw.

Other jurisdictions across the country use the same voting equipment made by Liberty Vote, which was known as Dominion Voting Systems before the company was sold. But many have applied a software update to fix the flaw, and some other states do not allow the public release of records that are needed to exploit it, said Mark Lindeman, policy and strategy director at Verified Voting, a nonpartisan group focused on election technology.

Georgia, a presidential battleground with one of the nation’s most closely watched U.S. Senate races this year, is the only place where the system is used statewide. Lindeman said that, combined with an open records law that has allowed access to key documents, creates a “perfect storm.”

“It’s really embarrassing that this is still a possibility,” Lindeman said.

How does voting work in Georgia?

Georgia voters make their selections on touchscreen voting machines that print paper ballots voters insert into scanners to tally the votes.

Such cast-vote records detail the votes from each ballot. Those records and electronic ballot images created by the scanners are randomized. But the software flaw allows them to be put back in the order they were cast, according to a report by researchers who discovered it in 2022.

Along with other publicly available data, that information could be used to match voters to their ballots, the researchers wrote.

Max Springer, a Princeton University researcher who was not involved in the original research and studies AI, said he gave a publicly available AI assistant that research. He said it was able to reverse the shuffling of electronic ballot records from Georgia’s May primary and then tell him what other records it would need to match names to ballots.

He then gave the AI assistant the early voting list for the counties he examined and the cast-vote record file, which could be obtained through a public records request. It was able to create “buckets of ballots and potential voters,” he wrote in a blog post. In many instances, that made it possible to match voters to their ballots.

In cases where ambiguity remained, he wrote, he got the public audit log for the ballot scanners and precinct check-in records and was able to match most ballots to specific voters.

“AI coding tools are essentially supercharging laymen people to exploit vulnerabilities,” Springer said in an interview.

Why does ballot secrecy matter?

Georgia’s Constitution says elections “shall be by secret ballot,” and state law requires voting machines to “permit voting in absolute secrecy so that no person can see or know any other elector’s votes.”

A lack of ballot secrecy can make it easier to buy or sell votes and increase the danger of coercion to vote a certain way by family members, political organizations, employers or government officials. It also is information that could be invaluable to political campaigns.

Gabriel Sterling, special projects manager in the secretary of state’s office, pushed back on the concerns. He said it would be easier to use mail ballots if vote-buying or coercion was the goal and that it probably would be cheaper for campaigns to just increase outreach to voters who fit a certain profile than try to identify voters this way.

State Election Board member Salleigh Grubbs proposed a rule during the board’s August meeting that would have required the secretary of state’s office to apply the software update recommended by the manufacturer by Tuesday.

“Each [voter] has one vote, and no one is entitled to know how it was cast,” Grubbs said. “That privacy protects more than the individual voter. It protects the integrity of the entire election.”

In a letter to the election board, an agency lawyer argued that the update has not been certified by the secretary of state, the implementation would take months, and the Legislature has not provided necessary funding. The board rejected Grubbs’ proposal. Some members said they did not believe they had the authority to order the secretary of state to act and they raised concerns about the short timeline before the November midterms.

Board member Sara Tindall Ghazal, who voted against the proposal, said it is “intensely frustrating” that the software update has not been applied. But she pointed out that it is a felony to reveal how someone voted, which should serve as a deterrent.

“I hate the fact that it’s even physically possible, but there are very, very severe penalties if somebody were to actually do this,” she said.

What’s being done?

The secretary of state’s office sent guidance to county election officials instructing them to refer open records requests for certain records to the secretary of state’s office. It will release them with the problematic information blacked out and decline to release other information and documents.

Sterling said the office is working with a vendor to scramble the original order of ballot images and cast-vote records before they are made public. Halderman said that precaution would be necessary to keep someone from reconstructing the order.

While some other jurisdictions have applied the software update that reportedly fixes the problem, some have done what Georgia is now trying to do by restricting public access to the records needed to exploit the flaw.

Marilyn Marks is executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance, which advocates for election transparency and security and raised the alarm about the vulnerability. She argued that withholding documents is not the solution and that steps need to be taken to ensure ballots cannot be traced to voters in the first place.

“When Georgia’s election records contain identifiers that can be used to trace ballots to voters, the only legal and acceptable answer is to stop recording that information — not restrict public access to sensitive unlawful information to insiders and commercial vendors,” she said.

With time growing short before the elections, Marks said a workable interim solution would be to collect ballots in locked boxes at precincts and then shuffle and scan them at a central tabulating center.

Brumback writes for the Associated Press.

California prison towns made a grim bargain decades ago.

They built their economies around an industry that relied on an ever-growing prison population, mostly from California’s major metropolitan areas. Then, about 15 years ago, legislators changed sentencing laws in ways that caused the prison population to drop, and the prisons started going away.

Gov. Jerry Brown oversaw massive reductions in California’s prison population in the 2010s. Gov. Gavin Newsom has closed five prisons since taking office in 2019. Now, some of those towns face difficult choices if they’re going to survive. One prison town is still fighting the closure, one is betting on businesses to make up its losses and a third — the town of Susanville — is remote, isolated and in deeper trouble than the rest.

Perched on one of the last major stops before Reno and the desert deep in the Lassen National Forest, Susanville has always been the kind of place California puts the things it doesn’t want to see, hear, smell or really even think about.

“Prisons in communities are not popular, so they tend to be located in areas that are desperate economically,” said Dan Newton, who worked for the city of Susanville for 20 years and was its city manager until recently. “That would describe this area.”

The city’s management was informed in 2021 that the prison was scheduled for closure. They went to court to challenge the closure, arguing the state’s environmental review process hadn’t taken into account the prison closure’s impact on the town. Newsom had a solution: A budget bill that exempted correctional facility closures from the environmental review process.

“There was initially a lot of panic,” said Susanville Mayor Mendy Schuster. “Houses went on the market. People left town. State jobs are good jobs with a good income, and they were going to leave.”

Since the closure announcement, the population of Susanville has fallen from a peak of about 16,000 in 2021, the year Newsom announced the prison would close, to 14,000 in 2024, the last year for which American Community Survey data were available.

Not all of the 1,100 former prison employees left town. Some transferred to a nearby prison, and some retired and stayed in the area. The elementary school lost 10% of its enrolled students between 2021 and the 2025-2026 school year.

The town’s remoteness is also one of its attractions. The surrounding area offers some of the most stunning vistas in far Northern California, sweeping views from highway lookout points over miles of desert rimmed by the mountains of the Cascade Range where it meets the Sierra Nevada.

The history of this area is one of the state or federal government telling its residents that it needs them — to mine for gold, to cut down trees for timber, to guard all the people they sent to prison — and then coming along later to tell residents that their services are no longer needed.

Susanville, the spot on the map, is an immutable intermingling of unique geologic formations. Susanville, the incorporated city, is running out of time.

“We’re heading toward insolvency,” Newton said before he resigned as city manager to take a position in Tehama County government.

The prison building boom

When the state’s three-strikes law still imposed mandatory life sentences on anyone with two or more prior convictions for violent felonies, California needed places like Susanville to put its skyrocketing prison population.

According to Brown University’s Prison Proliferation Project, states and the federal government operated 511 prisons in 1970. By the end of the prison building boom in 2000, that number had risen to 1,663.

The prison guards who lived in Susanville coached Little League and bought bread at the bakery downtown. They had steady jobs with top-tier health and retirement benefits; today experienced correctional officers earn $9,650 a month in base pay.

The town benefited from carceral policies that pulled prisoners hundreds of miles from their families, even as Lassen County counted those inmates as residents until 2022 and built around a prison boom that showed no signs of ending.

Until, of course, it did.

In 2006, overcrowding forced some of the state’s 170,000 prisoners to sleep in hallways and multipurpose rooms. But sentencing policies changed in the early 2010s to put more people in jail than prisons, and when people went to prison, they went for shorter sentences. Now, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is down to 90,000 prisoners, and has 8,000 more beds available than it has people in custody.

An emergent field of research in the last 15 years has focused on the era of the “prison bust,” when prison closures have outnumbered prison openings. Criminal justice policy researchers have found that the proposed economic benefits of prisons to small, rural communities were probably overstated to begin with.

“A large portion of prison jobs (were) filled by residents of neighboring towns,” wrote the authors of a 2024 article in the journal Punishment & Society. “Even those who moved to the area for prison jobs often settled in adjacent communities, providing little direct benefit to the local economy.”

Not only might prisons not be engines of economic growth, according to a seminal 2010 study from researchers at Washington State University, they might have stymied the development of other industries warded off by the presence of the prison.

Brown University associate sociology professor John Eason, whose book “Big House on the Prairie” focused on a prison in the rural South, found that the economic fate of prison towns is most closely correlated to when they were built, more than where they were built.

“Towns that adopted prisons earlier in the prison boom received a short-term boon compared to those that did not build, but the effects were not lasting,” Eason wrote.

Towns that built a prison early in the boom saw increased median home values and median income, Eason wrote, with reduced poverty and unemployment, but those effects did not last longer than a decade, which he called “a decay effect.”

But the residents and leadership of the city of Blythe, where the shuttered Chuckwalla Valley State Prison was built in 1987, are certain that their economic problems began and ended on the day in 2022 when the prison closed down.

Desert town tried to keep prison open

“We still haven’t got nothing from the state,” said Blythe Mayor Joseph DeConinck. “I hate to say it, but Blythe’s in the middle of nowhere, we’re the furthest from Sacramento, I just hate to say it again, we’re only a few votes out here.”

The mayor of the small desert city in Riverside County near the Arizona border watched the failed lawsuit over the Susanville prison closure and decided against filing their own litigation after Newsom ordered the Blythe prison closed just before Christmas 2022.

Instead, Blythe chose honey over vinegar and launched a lobbying effort to convince state legislators and the governor that the town needed some kind of economic rescue.

It has, so far, failed to produce results.

“We took these prisons when nobody else wanted them,” DeConinck said. “And we adapted to them because they became a strong economic generator for our area.”

Blythe’s population of 18,000 in 2022 had fallen to 17,400 by 2024, the last year for which census statistics are available. A drop of just 3% of the population might not sound drastic, but Blythe was in trouble long before the prison closed.

The population has been dropping since a peak of about 20,000 in 2010. A Riverside County civil investigation in June 2022 found that the city can’t pay its bills, its population is fleeing to Phoenix or the Coachella Valley, and neither the city nor its residents have bright prospects.

Six months after that investigation, Newsom announced the prison closure.

DeConinck said city leadership flew to Sacramento and tried, in vain, to get any traction. He recalled one meeting between the Blythe city manager and representatives of the governor in which he said the city itself was promised direct financial assistance.

The era of sweet-talking the state is over now, DeConinck said.

“They wouldn’t even have a conversation with us,” said Vice Mayor Johnny Rodriguez. “They’re not doing anything to assist us because they have this political mantra that all prisons are bad.”

Rodriguez said the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and the Department of General Services sent representatives to a meeting on the future of the shuttered prison site. It didn’t go well.

“We had just one meeting with a potential developer who had some interest in it, and all the state provided was, what you can’t do, what they won’t do,” Rodriguez said. “They won’t give a timeline when they would start talking about it, so what’s that going to do?”

Newsom’s office referred questions to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Will Matthews, a corrections spokesperson, said in a statement after this article first published that the state sent $995,000 to the Riverside County Workforce Development Division in August 2024.

“State representatives met with local leaders in July 2024 to discuss these resources and other available assistance,” Matthews said. “There was no commitment to providing direct financial assistance to the City of Blythe.”

Matthews said until the Blythe prison site’s infrastructure is separated from neighboring Ironwood State Prison and its bond obligations are resolved, the property can’t move through the state’s process for dispensing with surplus property.

In a March hearing before a Senate budget subcommittee, Corrections Secretary Jeff Macomber said he’s eager to end his agency’s control over closed prison sites.

“I don’t want to hold on to closed facilities,” Macomber said. “Believe it or not, I have to provide a little bit of staffing. It’s unpopular, there’s security risks. We have people break in because who doesn’t want to run in, to break into a closed prison?”

Newsom began closing prisons with the deactivation of the Deuel Vocational Institute in Tracy, followed by the prison in Susanville, and then a prison in Blythe near the Arizona border. The state also ended its contract with a private prison in Kern County, a site now being operated as an immigrant detention center. A prison in Norco, also in Riverside County, is scheduled to close in October.

More prisons probably will close. The Legislature this year passed a budget that called for the state to shut at least one more. Its passage reflected Democratic lawmakers’ desire to save money — about $150 million a year per prison — by eliminating underused correctional facilities.

And some state prisons have astronomical deferred maintenance bills. The state auditor recently released a report estimating that five of them need repairs that would cost $2.4 billion.

Rodriguez is still fighting for a prison on the shuttered site. He has plans to pitch the federal government on opening a women’s prison there to account for the closure of the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, which closed after 10 guards were charged with sexually abusing the prisoners.

“Closing Chuckawalla was a mistake,” said Assemblymember Jeff Gonzalez, a Coachella Republican. “For our rural communities, these facilities are critical employers that support local families and local economies.”

Ready for change on edge of Bay Area

If any town was prepared for a prison closure, it was Tracy.

Optimism abounds, even on the city website, which promotes it as “one of the fastest growing suburbs of the San Francisco Bay Area.” The city has for decades been a bedroom community for commuters to the East Bay Area and San José.

The offers are pouring in to fill the abandoned prison site, said San Joaquin County Supervisor Robert Rickman, who was mayor of Tracy from 2016-2020.

“We’ve been in contact with folks in the agricultural industry, the education industry and even some of them who are interested in opening a casino,” Rickman said. “I would say [the prison closure] was neutral. The property isn’t sitting forgotten. South county is a very prosperous portion of our county.”

Prison guards and support staff mainly transferred to the California Health Care Facility in Stockton, Rickman said.

“I guess you’re never really prepared for a closure,” Rickman said, “but the good thing is that nobody lost their jobs.”

Tracy has the advantages that Susanville does not: It’s next to Interstate 5 along a busy commercial corridor in a populated and growing section of the state. Tracy also doesn’t have the drawbacks of Blythe and the Inland Empire desert — the weather never gets too hot, and there is reliable access to water.

Instead of challenging the state government like Blythe, Rickman gets to play host and pitch man to businesses.

Back in Susanville, it’s been a struggle to get any business to return calls.

Hard choices in Susanville

“For the last two years, we’ve adopted deficit budgets,” said Newton, the erstwhile city manager. “We’re deficit spending in order to fill public safety vacancies, and expenditure increases are outpacing our revenue increases.

“It’s going to start eating at our cash reserves.”

The town is hoping some industry — any industry — can come in and save it. City leaders have little hope for state assistance. But the city also has its own limitations.

First, Newton said, it’s hard to make a businesses on the border of California and Nevada choose California, with its higher taxes and stern regulatory environment. That choice in finance terms is known as regulatory arbitrage.

Second, industry needs power, and Susanville doesn’t have a lot of power on the grid, nor the infrastructure to support it. A bad thunderstorm can knock out the lights to half the city. The city’s transmission lines can’t handle the wattage demanded by heavy industry.

Third, the city and county’s limited population is working against it. Prisons force people to work and live in an area, and the state supplies the workforce. But there is no big workforce base on which to draw for any industry. When the prisons close, the guards transfer to new locations or retire and leave the rural, geographically isolated area.

The pandemic didn’t help. Downtown businesses were already struggling when people started buying more retail goods online, a trend that didn’t abate when lockdowns ended, Schuster said.

Now, some of the largest tax generators in town are on sales from online shopping and fuel taxes — people stop in town to get gas because Susanville has the only gas stations for 20 miles in any direction.

A baseball grandstand burned down last year, and in March, a lumber mill that employed about 30 people caught fire. No one was injured, but the mill burned to the ground.

Now the 8,000 people in this remote corner of California have to ask themselves what more they can wring from the land, what more they can take and what more it can yield. One idea includes a new truck stop.

Whatever salvation comes for the town, if any salvation comes at all, won’t be at the hands of the state government that built a prison and then took it away, Newton said.

“No one is coming to save us.”

This article was updated to include information that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation shared after publication.

Duara writes for CalMatters.

ANCHORAGE — Alaska prosecutors are dropping voter misconduct cases against a group of residents born in American Samoa after a state appeals court threw out felony charges against a woman who wrongly checked a box saying she was a U.S. citizen.

The state’s Department of Law announced the decision Friday, after a three-judge Court of Appeals panel ruled a week earlier that state law requires proof that defendants who erroneously filled out voter registration forms had a “consciousness of wrongdoing” and intended to break the law.

The panel found flaws with a state trooper’s questioning of Tupe Smith, the woman involved in the case that was thrown out, as well as with the grand jury process that led to her indictment. It overturned a lower court’s decision that had kept the charges against her alive.

Acting Alaska Atty. Gen. Cori Mills said in a statement that after reviewing the decision and applying it to the facts, prosecutors concluded that they could not prove cases against Smith and the others beyond a reasonable doubt. Her husband, Michael Pese, had also been charged.

“We respect the role of the courts in interpreting Alaska law and will faithfully execute our duty to apply the law and carefully evaluate our prosecutorial decisions,” Mills said.

In a statement Saturday, Smith’s lawyer Whitney Brown said the dismissal would allow the community “to put this ordeal behind them and begin moving forward.”

Earlier in the week, she heralded the Court of Appeals decision, saying it “establishes an important safeguard against imposing felony liability for an honest mistake.”

The court “made clear that Alaska law requires more than simply showing that a statement was false — the State must prove a person acted with a consciousness of wrongdoing,” Brown said. “That distinction makes a world of difference to Ms. Smith and helps ensure that Alaska’s voter-misconduct statute is applied as the legislature intended going forward.”

Neil Weare, part of the legal team representing Smith and Pese, said Saturday that the decision to drop charges “raises questions about why this prosecution was even brought to begin with.”

“It’s clear that all along, they really had no evidence of any consciousness of wrongdoing on the part of Michael, Tupe or the other defendants,” said Weare, co-director of the nonprofit Right to Democracy.

In all, 11 people from the small community of Whittier, about 50 miles southeast of Anchorage, were charged with falsely claiming U.S. citizenship either when registering or trying to vote. Messages seeking comment were left for their lawyers.

American Samoa is the only U.S. territory where residents are not automatically granted citizenship by being born on American soil and instead are considered U.S. nationals. Paths to citizenship exist, such as naturalization, though that process can be expensive and cumbersome.

American Samoans can serve in the military, obtain U.S. passports and vote in elections in American Samoa, but they cannot hold public office in the U.S. or participate in most U.S. elections.

Smith was arrested after winning election to a regional school board in 2023. She has said she relied on erroneous information from election officials in Whittier when she identified herself as a U.S. citizen on voter registration forms.

Smith said she marks herself as a U.S. national on paperwork. But when there was no such option on voter registration forms, she was told by city representatives that it was appropriate to mark herself as a citizen, according to court papers.

Prosecutors contended that Smith falsely and deliberately claimed citizenship, pointing to warnings on voter registration forms she filled out in 2020 and 2022 that noncitizens “are not eligible to vote.”

The Court of Appeals panel said in its ruling that toward the end of a police interview, a state trooper asked Smith “a long compound question that implied that Smith actually knew she was not eligible to vote” but wanted to be involved in the school board.

When Smith, whose native language is not English, did not respond right away, another state trooper clarified, “He’s asking you,” and the first trooper again presented his question, which the panel described as “a lengthy and complex statement containing four individual questions.”

Smith answered “Yes,” the panel said, leading to her arrest and indictment on two counts of felony voter misconduct.

SACRAMENTO — Labor leader Dave Regan claimedFriday that he was the victim of a “smear” campaign orchestrated in part by wealthy Californians and said he has been falsely accused of attempting to “extort” an endorsement of the billionaire tax ballot measure and of physically assaulting a female union leader.

Investigations commissioned by the Service Employees International Union and SEIU California, and conducted by outside law firms, determined the allegations against Regan were credible, along with reports that he threatened and intimidated other female labor leaders. Regan, who is president of SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West, vehemently denied the allegations, which were first reported by The Times Friday morning.

During a video news conference hours after the allegations were published, Regan claimed the probes were launched by opponents of Proposition 40 — the billionaire tax measure he helped place on the Nov. 3 ballot — as well as members of the SEIU California labor council with whom he had clashed in the past.

Regan, joined by other SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West union leaders and members, also criticized Gov. Gavin Newsom for opposing the proposed one-time 5% tax on billionaires’ assets.

Newsom is “trying to curry favor with the richest people in the state to fund [his] presidential campaign,” Regan said. “That is shameful behavior.”

Newsom and other opponents of the measure, including Democratic gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra, Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California and the California Teachers Assn., have expressed concern that Proposition 40 could push many of the state’s biggest taxpayers to relocate and destabilize state finances.

“The Governor supports a national tax on billionaires and is proud to stand with teachers, firefighters, reproductive health clinics, and others in opposing this poorly written state measure that will harm California,” said Newsom’s spokesperson Izzy Gardon.

Regan also criticized The Times’ reporting on the allegations, and an editorial opposing Proposition 40. He alleged that Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the Times’ owner, influenced coverage about the measure because he is a billionaire.

“We stand by our reporting,” said a Times spokesperson.

David Huerta, president of SEIU-United Service Workers West, and three other labor leaders filed a rare formal union charge against Regan in February. The SEIU investigation report, which was reviewed by The Times, supported Huerta’s claim that in December, Regan suggested the state council could be investigated for “governance issues” if the council did not endorse the proposed billionaire tax. Huerta was then president of SEIU California, which along with their national arm, did not endorse Proposition 40.

In July, the executive board for SEIU California voted to take a neutral position on the proposed wealth tax.

The investigation and a second inquiry conducted on behalf of SEIU California substantiated allegations that Regan threatened and intimidated women who worked for the state council. The investigation also determined an allegation that Regan physically assaulted a former executive director of the state labor organization, Courtni Pugh, in 2009, was credible.

Regan called the allegation that he assaulted Pugh a “complete fabrication.” Regan and other SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West members downplayed Pugh’s allegations against him because of her political consulting firm’s role opposing Proposition 40.

Pugh called his remarks “offensive” to the women who participated in the independent investigation.

“My testimony and the testimony of the other women were substantiated by investigators,” she said. “His claims were not.”

Regan remains in his job as the SEIU administrative process moves forward with hearings. Regan will get a chance to make his case before SEIU determines any appropriate disciplinary action.

Times Staff Writer Phil Willon contributed to this report.

Hollywood’s film and TV post-production workers took their case directly to Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday, urging him to sign a bill that would create the state’s first standalone post-production tax incentive.

Workers such as editors, singers and sound supervisors joined bill author Assemblymember Nick Schultz (D-Burbank) and Mayor Karen Bass at a news conference Thursday morning in front of the Television Academy’s headquarters in North Hollywood.

The bill, AB 2319, is aimed at supporting the industry’s editors, sound mixers, composers and visual effects artists. It passed the state Senate 33 to 5 on Aug. 30, and the Assembly approved the final version 72 to 2 the same day. Newsom, who has not taken a public position on the measure, has until Sept. 30 to sign or veto it.

Bass urged supporters not to let up before then.

“We need our industry in full force,” Bass said. “It’s all a part of making our city more affordable. We know that this is one of the biggest issues in our city, and so having a strong, robust industry helps Angelenos across the board.”

The incentive would allow a 35% to 50% credit on qualified expenses relating specifically to post-production in California. The state’s existing film and TV tax credit program already covers post-production, but only if 75% of filming or the overall budget is spent in the state. The new credit doesn’t require productions to shoot in California.

Even if Newsom signs the bill, the program would start small. Schultz initially proposed $100 million to fund the effort, but the Legislature’s end-of-session budget sets aside $10 million to launch it.

“When you think about production, it’s easy to think about the actors, the directors and the writers; you don’t think about all that happens when the camera stops rolling,” Schultz said. “What’s changed is that they’re now telling their story about the struggles they’re facing.”

For industry veteran Karen Baker Landers, the decline in local post-production work is impossible to overlook. A two-time Oscar-winning supervising sound editor, Baker Landers is vice president of California Post Alliance, the group sponsoring the bill.

“It’s affecting people in huge ways, like losing their health insurance. I get people calling me asking to get just two weeks of work to qualify for coverage,” said Baker Landers. “It’s really difficult.”

Last year, California expanded its film and TV tax credit program, more than doubling the old $330-million cap to $750 million through June 30, 2030. But a state budget measure Newsom signed in June capped how much in tax credits a business can claim each year, a limit industry groups warned would undercut the expanded program. Lawmakers passed a fix on the final day of the legislative session and it is also awaiting the governor’s signature.

Despite the state’s bigger bet on the industry — and this summer’s fight over the cap — L.A. City Councilmember Adrin Nazarian, whose district includes North Hollywood, argued at the press conference that this is the right moment to keep asking for more.

“It’s that exact momentum that we need. When you double down on something, you’re giving more than hope, and you’re saying welcome back. Please come and do your work. Don’t stop doing this,” Nazarian said.

Sept. 10, 2026 9:42 AM PT

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is promising $500 rebate checks to an estimated 1 million Affordable Care Act enrollees across 30 states, who the White House alleged were overcharged by the Biden administration for exchange fees.

The promise comes after Trump pledged Wednesday to send every American adult $5,000 if Republicans retain control of the House and Senate in the midterm elections and as affordability has become a central issue for voters heading into November.

“The relief begins with refunding everyone who was overcharged and the rebates are going out in just a few weeks,” President Trump said in a recorded address released on the White House X account Thursday. Enrollees who can expect refunds are those who do not receive premium assistance.

Critics called the move a “gimmick” that doesn’t represent a plan for addressing soaring healthcare costs.

Trump in his address accused former President Biden’s administration of “gross mismanagement” of ACA funds, without providing evidence, and said that the Biden administration collected user fees from insurance companies that consumers paid through higher premiums.

In a fact sheet, the White House claimed that Biden’s administration “accumulated a significant surplus of funds that were not used to benefit the Americans who paid these higher premiums.” It said the rebates would be sent out beginning next month.

It is unclear whether the $500 rebate represents what each enrollee may have overpaid, where the money for the rebates would come from and whether it requires congressional approval for disbursement.

Trump’s announcement comes as the price of ACA insurance has skyrocketed for many Americans during his own second term. The Trump administration opposed extending COVID-era subsidies that had helped offset the costs of health insurance for most enrollees during Biden’s term.

After the Republican-led Congress allowed the subsidies to expire this year, premiums doubled or tripled for many enrollees, prompting millions to downgrade their plans or exit the program entirely.

Brad Woodhouse, a Democratic strategist and executive director of advocacy group Protect Our Care, called the rebate plan “an absolute joke” in a statement.

“Since Republicans took away tax credits from working families, millions of people have seen their monthly premiums rise by hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars,” Woodhouse said. “At a time when people are scraping by to keep up with the high cost of groceries, rent, and healthcare, this $500 gimmick won’t even begin to dig them out of the hole that Trump and Republicans created.”

Officials at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services did not respond to Associated Press requests for comment, and a White House official referred back to the fact sheet.

Roughly 19 million people receive insurance through the Affordable Care Act exchange.

Hussein and Swenson write for the Associated Press.

Sept. 10, 2026 12:04 PM PT

WASHINGTON — An appeals court on Thursday upheld a block on President Trump’s executive order limiting mail voting, a decision that comes as the Supreme Court considers the same case and states have already started sending out ballots for the high-stakes midterm elections.

The three-judge panel refused to lift a preliminary injunction against the order issued last week by U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani. It prohibits the U.S. Postal Service from implementing Trump’s directive. The Postal Service has said it would not deliver ballots from states that did not pre-clear their envelope design with the federal government and submit a list of voters to an online portal, which has yet to be activated.

Election officials warn that it’s impossible to comply with those terms, especially with the first mail ballots already being sent out in Alabama, North Carolina and Wisconsin.

The panel of three judges nominated by former President Biden agreed with the plaintiffs that the president does not have the power to regulate states’ election policy.

“Appellants have not made a strong showing that the district court erred in determining that the Final Rule is likely unlawful,” they wrote, a reference to a rule published by the Postal Service to implement Trump’s order.

The panel wrote that the Trump administration had done little to dispel arguments by many election officials that the changes would bring “chaos and widespread disenfranchisement.”

“Indeed, appellants have not even seriously challenged this aspect of the district court’s ruling, much less demonstrated why it is clearly erroneous,” the order states.

The government also hasn’t shown evidence of past fraud to justify the restrictions, the judges said.

A request for comment from the White House was not immediately returned.

The panel’s decision comes even as the Supreme Court is already considering the same case, which is part of a frenzied legal rush as states are beginning to send out mail ballots for this fall’s midterm elections. Democrats and civil rights groups in a separate lawsuit in Washington, D.C., also are trying to halt the executive order.

The 1st Circuit also had upheld a previous hold Talwani placed on the executive order. But that ruling was lifted by the Supreme Court in a procedural decision that did not determine whether the plan was constitutional.

The plaintiffs swiftly filed new lawsuits after the Postal Service finalized its rule governing mail ballots.

Riccardi and Whitehurst write for the Associated Press.

California and nearly two dozen other states warned the U.S. Supreme Court Wednesday that allowing the U.S. Postal Service to move forward with President Trump’s new rules for mail ballots in the November election would cause “chaos” and could disenfranchise millions of eligible voters.

“In some States … compliance with USPS’ rule would be impossible ahead of the midterms, meaning that millions of voters would be unable to vote by mail and some would not be able to vote at all,” the states argued. “In the remaining States, there would be chaos — and a significant risk that millions more voters would be denied the ability to vote.”

The Democrat-led coalition — which includes California, 23 other states and the District of Columbia — also cited objections from lower-ranking state and elections officials in conservative states that have not objected to the Postal Service’s position, including the lieutenant governor and other officials in Utah saying implementation of the new rules would “be an unmitigated disaster.”

Similar warnings have emanated from Florida, Ohio, Texas and Wisconsin.

“Whatever else may be said of USPS’ new rule, it would wreak havoc on States and their voters if it takes effect at this late point,” the Democrat-led states wrote, pointing out that some States, including North Carolina and Wisconsin, have already begun to mail out ballots.

The states’ arguments were in response to the Trump administration over the weekend filing an emergency appeal to the high court, asking it to overturn a lower-court ruling halting the plan from being implemented for the Nov. 3 election.

The new rules — developed in response to a March executive order from Trump — require states to submit their complete voter lists to the Postal Service, and to adopt new ballot envelopes with individualized voter bar codes designed by the Postal Service. They require the Postal Service to then reject any mail ballots that don’t match those lists.

Trump’s order also directed the Department of Homeland Security to develop its own list of eligible citizen voters, ostensibly to be compared against the state lists.

Trump and other supporters of the changes — including top officials from a dozen Republican-led states — argue they are necessary to prevent widespread voter fraud, including by non-citizens. Elections experts say there is no evidence of such widespread fraud, despite robust audits and other searches for it.

The Democrat-led states sued to block the changes on multiple grounds, including that neither Trump nor the Postal Service have any authority to regulate state-run elections, that the changes would illegally prevent eligible voters from casting ballots, and that the timeline imposed by the new rule — formally issued by the Postal Service on Aug. 21 — made compliance by November impossible.

Independent voting rights groups also sued, alleging the new rules threatened to disenfranchise voters and make their work educating voters on their options for casting a ballot impossible to carry out.

A Postal Service whistleblower recently added skepticism to the agency’s ability to implement the new rules on its end, alleging in a statement published by congressional Democrats that the agency’s online portal for verifying ballots was built in a “slapdash” manner, is “fundamentally flawed” and threatens as built to reject thousands of ballots if just a single one cannot be properly read.

Last week, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani granted requests from the states and the independent groups to halt the plans from being implemented nationwide, issuing a preliminary injunction requiring the Postal Service to cease all work on them.

The Trump administration then bypassed the U.S. 1st Circuit Court of Appeals to ask the Supreme Court for relief from Talwani’s order.

Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer, the administration’s top litigator, argued that the warnings from states that the changes are unworkable, represent an overreach of federal authority or would cause chaos in November are all baseless.

“The Rule ensures that States remain responsible for determining voter eligibility and eligibility to vote by mail, and it does not dictate ballot content, mailing or receipt deadlines, or ballot-counting procedures,” Sauer wrote. “The Rule thus plainly does not seize control of States’ administration of elections — it simply imposes reasonable preparation requirements for certain election-related mail.”

Sauer argued that if the court does not allow the changes to proceed, it would cause “serious irreparable harm on the federal government, the States themselves, and the voting public” by “nullifying the Postal Service’s efforts to address the risk that the federal mails will be used to perpetrate voter fraud.”

Experts have consistently rejected those claims — including in their own filings before the high court.

Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA Law, joined three other election experts to argue to the lower court that the Trump administration’s claims of injury were “speculative and weak.” They noted that the administration had “offered no evidence” in court that the new rules would “stop any appreciable amount of voter fraud or even that voter fraud through the mails is a widespread problem that USPS should address.”

Meanwhile, they wrote, there was “undisputed evidence” presented to the lower court that the Postal Service is “still not prepared to implement its new rule or do so accurately and efficiently, even as states have begun mailing out their ballots,” and that the “harm to the states and to voters is enormous, as the rule threatens to disenfranchise millions of elderly voters, disabled voters, military voters and all others including the most vulnerable who depend on mail voting, in both red and blue states.”

The Democrat-led states also noted that the Trump administration hadn’t proven that widespread voter fraud is a legitimate threat, but had shown it is ill prepared itself to implement the changes without causing widespread disruption — as evidenced in part by the whistleblower’s claims.

It’s unclear when the Supreme Court will rule, though a relatively quick decision is expected given the emergency nature of the appeal.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said Wednesday they attacked two US vessels, eight oil tankers and 10 “non-compliant vessels” trying to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, state media reported.

“Two US vessels, eight oil tankers, and 10 non-compliant vessels attempting to pass through the prohibited and unsafe zone of the Strait of Hormuz were targeted,” the Guards said in a statement published by the official IRNA.

Meanwhile, six cargo ships transited the Strait of Hormuz yesterday, Tuesday, compared to nine ships the previous day and an average of about 12 ships over ten days, according to shipping data released today, Wednesday.

These numbers may change, as some ships typically choose not to operate their transponders during the voyage.

Preliminary data from Kpler at 0200 GMT showed that five of the six ships entered the strait while one exited, and the group included a Panamax-sized tanker and a medium-sized tanker.

The US-Israeli war on Iran escalated yesterday, Tuesday, as Houthi militia in Yemen, allied with Tehran, launched attacks on Saudi cities, further involving the kingdom in the conflict.

Simultaneously, US forces targeted several Iranian oil tankers, while Iran struck a US base in Jordan.

Meanwhile, 25 cargo ships transited the Bab El-Mandeb Strait yesterday, Tuesday, with 11 ships entering and 14 exiting the other vital Middle Eastern waterway.

This compares to an average of about 27 ships transiting the Bab El-Mandeb Strait over the past ten days.

Among the ships that transited the Bab El-Mandeb Strait were two Suezmax tankers, eight Aframax tankers, and a Very Large Crude Carrier.

Sept. 8, 2026 3:02 PM PT

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday rebuffed an appeal from Missouri officials who wanted to use new congressional districts backed by President Trump in the November election, a defeat for Republicans who had hoped the new map could help them hold onto their slim House majority.

The justices let stand a decision by Missouri’s top court, which said the new districts were automatically suspended by a citizen petition demanding a statewide vote.

The ruling marks a rare setback for Republicans in a nationwide redistricting battle that Trump urged Republicans to launch last year.

Missouri’s new districts were used in the August primaries. But the Missouri Supreme Court ruled in September that the state must revert to districts adopted after the last census.

Republican state Atty. Gen. Catherine Hanaway, who appealed, had argued it would violate federal rights to switch districts for voters between the primary and general elections. She also said it would cause confusion.

Missouri currently is represented in the U.S. House by six Republicans and two Democrats who were elected under districts that Republican state officials approved in 2022.

But at Trump’s urging, Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe called the Legislature into a special session last year to redraw congressional boundaries to their advantage ahead of the midterms.

The revised map targeted the 5th Congressional District, held by longtime Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver of Kansas City. It reassigned portions of Kansas City to two neighboring districts represented by Republicans and stretched the remainder of Cleaver’s district far eastward into rural Republican areas.

Cleaver was unopposed in the Democratic primary. State Sen. Rick Brattin won the Republican primary in the reshaped district.

On the same day as the primary, Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins rejected a petition with thousands of signatures seeking to force a November referendum on the map. Hoskins asserted that Missouri’s Constitution doesn’t allow a referendum on congressional redistricting. A lower court agreed, but the state Supreme Court reversed Hoskins’ decision.

The state’s top court said the new districts were retroactively frozen in December, when the petition signatures were submitted, and thus never became law. Hoskins on Tuesday assigned the redistricting referendum as Proposition A on the November ballot, in compliance with the state court order.

The Missouri Constitution does not specifically say that a referendum can be used for congressional redistricting. But the state Supreme Court said a constitutional provision allowing a referendum on “any act” of the Legislature encompasses congressional redistricting legislation.

Missouri was the second Republican-led state, after Texas, to respond to Trump’s call last year to redraw congressional districts. Several other states followed. All told, Republicans had hoped to win as many as 16 additional seats from new House maps enacted in eight states — Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Florida, Tennessee, Louisiana and Alabama. Democrats, whose counterattack faced several setbacks, think they could win up to six additional seats from new districts in California and Utah.

It remains to be seen whether the redistricting works as intended for Republicans. The president’s party historically has lost congressional seats in the midterms, and Trump’s poor approval ratings could provide an extra hurdle for Republican candidates.

Whitehurst and Lieb write for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — Republicans appeared to have a firm grip on the Senate heading into the final two years of President Trump’s term. But with less than two months until Election Day, control of the chamber is now up for grabs.

Democrats have found themselves competing in states that once seemed beyond their reach as Trump’s slipping approval ratings and voters’ dissatisfaction with the economy create a difficult political environment for Republicans. But races Democrats once counted on winning have also become more complicated.

It’s a battle that’s expected to exceed $3.4 billion in spending across all races during the midterm campaign. The implications are huge for Trump’s agenda and his ability to fill administration jobs and open court seats for the remainder of his term, as the Senate is empowered to confirm or block presidential nominees.

Republicans say it’s unlikely for everything to break in Democrats’ favor, but they acknowledge they’re facing a difficult landscape. Senate Majority Leader John Thune told South Dakota’s KELOLAND News last week that he does “worry” about losing the chamber.

“I’m a realist,” Thune said. “I don’t ever try and sugarcoat things. I think it’s a competitive environment right now.”

Democrats face a scrambled path to the majority

Democrats need to net four seats to win the majority. The original path had been to hold Michigan, Georgia and New Hampshire while winning back Republican-held seats in Alaska, Maine, North Carolina and Ohio. But things have changed.

“We now have multiple paths for the majority,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said last month. “We found new states — Iowa, Texas — which people a year ago weren’t even paying attention to.”

Some of the states where Democrats were feeling most optimistic at the start of the election cycle, such as Michigan and Maine, have grown murkier.

In Michigan, where there’s an open seat this fall, no GOP candidate has won a Senate race since 1994. But Democrats are struggling to unite behind nominee Abdul El-Sayed. The favorite of progressives narrowly defeated moderate U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens in the August primary, and feelings remain raw from a bruising contest that saw nearly $70 million spent against El-Sayed.

Republicans believe Mike Rogers, who lost the 2024 Senate race by fewer than 20,000 votes, has an improved shot against El-Sayed. The Senate Leadership Fund — Senate Republicans’ spending PAC — added $6 million to its Michigan advertising investment after El-Sayed won, bringing their total spending to $51 million, the third-highest total.

Democrats also saw a prime opportunity to finally defeat five-term Republican Sen. Susan Collins in Maine, where Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris won more votes than Trump in 2024.

Progressive Graham Platner easily won the nomination in June, but he left the race the next month over a sexual assault allegation that he denies. Democratic delegates in late July chose Troy Jackson, a lesser-known former state legislative leader, to replace him.

Jackson has been forced to play catch-up. Collins and aligned super PACs have spent almost $80 million so far, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact, while Jackson and Democratic-aligned groups have spent and reserved close to $45 million since he became the nominee.

As one path narrowed for Democrats, others widened

Democrats increasingly see a real possibility in Texas, a state that has been an elusive goal for decades, and other GOP-led states including Iowa, Alaska and Ohio.

In Texas, Democrat James Talarico faces state Attorney General Ken Paxton, who ousted four-term incumbent Republican Sen. John Cornyn to win the GOP nomination. Senate GOP leadership backed Cornyn, seeing him as the stronger general election candidate.

Paxton has been shadowed for decades by legal and ethical questions, including indictments for securities fraud, though he was not convicted.

Talarico and allied groups have spent nearly $30 million on advertising since the May runoff, compared to less than $3 million by pro-Paxton groups. The political fund associated with Trump last week spent $10 million on TV and digital ads to help Paxton — the first major general election investment by MAGA Inc. for the midterms. Senate GOP leaders had petitioned Trump’s political team to spend some of the more than $400 million it had last month to help Paxton.

Democrats have also upped their spending in Alaska, Iowa, Ohio and North Carolina, all states currently held by Republicans. The GOP, meanwhile, is feeling more optimistic about New Hampshire as well as Michigan, while spending more to defend seats in Iowa and Alaska.

The expanded map has upped the anticipated total spending this cycle. AdImpact in June projected $3.4 billion in advertising spending on Senate races, a significant increase from the $2.8 billion the ad spending firm projected in the fall of 2025.

Why more states are in play than expected

Democrats’ path has widened in part because of Trump’s slumping job approval, notably on handling the economy, which was at 32% according to an AP-NORC poll in July — down from 40% in March 2025, shortly after he took office.

Trump’s trade policies and the war in Iran, with its corresponding inflated fuel costs, have added to the economic uncertainty for voters less than two months before Election Day.

“Things still cost too much. And so we’ve got to work on that issue,” Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio told The Associated Press. “We understand that and we know that’s real.”

Ohio Sen. Jon Husted heard the concern firsthand at a roundtable last month. Husted is looking to fend off a comeback from former Sen. Sherrod Brown in another key matchup for both parties.

During the discussion on housing, one attendee told Husted that costs were “skyrocketing” in part because of uncertainty around tariffs.

“Uncertainty is the killer to this economy,” said Dean Windham, a real estate developer who previously ran for office as a Republican.

Some Republican Senate candidates have defended Trump’s policies while confronting concerns about their economic impact.

In Michigan, where Trump’s tariffs on Canada have become a central issue, Rogers has backed the president’s approach while leaving room for disagreement.

“President Trump is right to put America First — and tariffs are necessary, but are not a one-size-fits-all solution,” Rogers said in a recent statement.

Republicans believe the math still favors them

Even if Democrats hold every seat they currently control, they would need to flip at least two seats in states Trump carried by double digits in 2024 to win the majority.

Republicans are betting that those underlying advantages will matter more as Election Day approaches — particularly as Trump and the party turn their attention toward mobilizing voters who helped return him to the White House.

Trump told reporters last week that he will “be making a lot of stops” in the last 30 days before the election.

This week, Republicans will hold a midterm convention in Texas, where Trump is set to speak and top Senate candidates including Rogers and Husted are expected to attend.

But Republicans acknowledge they have work to do.

“Politics is local,” Republican Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota said. He pointed to Trump’s decision to import beef, which he said made farmers and ranchers “feel just like the administration pulled the rug right off from underneath” them.

“They’re hurt,” Rounds said. “They feel like they’ve been let down.”

Cappelletti, Beaumont and Jalonick write for the Associated Press. Beaumont reported from Des Moines, Iowa.

Days before California voters receive their mail-in ballots, gubernatorial candidates Xavier Becerra, a Democrat, and Steve Hilton, a Republican, will debate in a nationally televised face-off.

On Sept. 30 at CNN’s Burbank studio, the two candidates hoping to succeed termed-out Gov. Gavin Newson are expected to spar over sharply divergent visions for the future of the state. California’s next leader is expected to face pressing fiscal issues, as well as continued battle with the Trump administration.

Given California’s deep Democratic tilt, there was a question whether the two men would debate.

On Aug. 19, Becerra promised multiple debates with Hilton ahead of the general election.

“We will have debates, and between now and Nov. 3, we will continue to go out there and meet with folks to make sure they have an opportunity to see the candidates,” Becerra told reporters after greeting business owners, community leaders and voters in a walking tour of Little Tokyo in downtown Los Angeles. “Voters need to have good information. We’ll make sure they have it, and there will be debates.”

The following day, Hilton said he was skeptical of Becerra’s promise.

“I don’t believe him unless he commits to an actual debate. Invitations are on the table for dates and places,” Hilton said. “Why can’t he just accept them? I think he’s lying. I don’t think he wants to do debates because he doesn’t want to debate his record.”

September’s hour-long debate, taking place shortly before county elections officials begin mailing ballots to all the state’s registered voters, will be moderated by the cable network’s anchors Dana Bash and Jake Tapper.

It is the most attention a California gubernatorial contest has drawn since 2010, when “Today” show host Matt Lauer and NBC News Political Director Chuck Todd moderated nationally televised clashes.

That is perhaps unsurprising given how sharply the California electorate has swung left, with no Republican winning a statewide contest since 2006. Two did that year.

While there will not be a studio audience, the debate will air on CNN, CNN International, CNN en Español, CNN.com and related TV and mobile apps for subscribers.

Times staff writer Nicole Nixon contributed to this report.