Supreme
Court to Hear Mississippi Ballot Deadline Case
The U.S.
Supreme Court has granted
review of our landmark election integrity case on behalf of the
Libertarian Party of Mississippi. We are seeking to uphold a ruling
by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which struck down a
Mississippi law
unconstitutionally allowing election officials to count mail-in ballots
received up to five days after Election Day.
The Supreme Court now
has an opportunity to reaffirm that “Election Day” means what it says
under federal law. Counting ballots received after Election Day not only
violates federal law but encourages voter fraud and undermines voter
confidence. The Supreme Court should uphold the historic decision by the
Fifth Circuit that sensibly concluded that counting ballots received after
Election Day is unlawful.
The October 2024, Fifth Circuit appellate
opinion
found:
Congress statutorily designated a singular “day
for the election” of members of Congress and the appointment of
presidential electors. Text, precedent, and historical practice confirm
this “day for the election” is the day by which ballots must be both
cast by voters and received by state officials. Because Mississippi’s
statute allows ballot receipt up to five days after the federal election
day, it is preempted by federal law. We reverse the district court’s
contrary judgment and remand for further
proceedings.
In August, we filed a
brief with the Supreme Court, opposing Mississippi’s attempt to
overturn the Fifth Circuit’s October 2024 decision (Michael
Watson, Mississippi Secretary of State v. Republican National Committee, et
al.,
(No. 24-1260)).
Our brief recounts:
In reversing
the district court on the merits, the [Fifth Circuit] panel faithfully
followed this Court’s
precedent … [T]his Court found that the Election Day statutes preempted a
Louisiana law that allowed congressional candidates to be elected in
October…. In interpreting the meaning of “day of the election” within
the Election Day statutes, this Court found that “[w]hen the federal
statutes speak of ‘the election’ of a Senator or Representative, they
plainly refer to the combined actions of voters and officials meant to make
a final selection of an officeholder.” … Accordingly, the “day of the
election” “may not be consummated prior to federal election
day.”
We initially filed the civil rights lawsuit
in February
2024 on behalf of the Libertarian Party of Mississippi, challenging the
election law. The suit was consolidated with one filed by the Republican
National Committee, the Mississippi Republican Party, and other
complainants.
This case is part of our national leadership in voting
integrity and voting rights. Our team of voting rights attorneys has
stopped discriminatory elections in Hawaii, and cleaned up voter rolls in
California, Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, among other
achievements.
We recently filed an amici
curiae (friends of the court) brief along with the Allied
Educational Foundation (AEF) to the Supreme Court of the United States,
asking the court to reverse the Third Circuit’s decision
denying the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) standing to
sue for voter information guaranteed under the National
Voter Registration Act (NVRA).
In October 2025, the Supreme Court
heard oral
arguments in the historic case we filed on behalf of Congressman Mike
Bost and two presidential electors, arguing to vindicate their standing to
challenge an Illinois law
allowing the counting of ballots received up to 14 days after the Election
Day beyond the date established by federal law (Rep.
Michael J. Bost, Laura Pollastrini, and Susan Sweeney v. The Illinois State
Board of Elections and Bernadette Matthews (No. 1:22-cv-02754,
23-2644, 24-568)).
Other examples of our election law work
include:
Federal courts in Oregon,
California
and Illinois recently ruled that Judicial Watch’s lawsuits against
those states may proceed, forcing them to clean their voter rolls.
We
announced
in May that our work led to the removal of more than five million
ineligible names from voter rolls
nationwide.
Michigan Atty. Gen. Coordinated with
Leftist Nonprofit to Target Trump and Supporters
The
seemingly endless list of lawfare instances against President Donald Trump
and his supporters has a new entry.
We received 5,789
pages of records from the Michigan Department of Attorney General in a
Michigan Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that show the state’s
coordination with the nonprofit States
United Democracy Center, which pushed indictments
of President Donald Trump’s supporters, lawyers, activists, and
Republican Party officials who disputed the 2020 election.
These
documents are startling and affirm concerns that Democrat swing state
prosecutors were targeting Trump and his supporters with political
prosecutions.
Indictments of Trump alternative electors by Michigan
Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel were
thrown out by a judge earlier this year. The documents suggest a broad
conspiracy by several states to prosecute Americans over 2020 election
disputes.
We submitted the Michigan FOIA request
on January 2, 2025, for records related to the States United Democracy
Center and/or the Voter Protection Project regarding the investigation of
Republican state electors for the 2020 presidential election. On August 11,
2025, we informed
Michigan Attorney General Veronica Estrada that we are “prepared to
pursue [our] legal rights and remedies in the Michigan Court of Claims”
to obtain all remaining responsive records.
The records show that
States United has a multistate operation aimed at prosecuting and
disbarring Trump attorneys and associates in several states. States United
was started by Norm
Eisen, who was “ethics czar” for President Barack Obama and special
counsel to the House Judiciary Committee for the impeachment of
Trump.
The Michigan documents
confirm close contact between States United and Michigan state
officials.
The records include several email exchanges between top
States United litigator Jonathan
Williams and Heather S. Meingast, Division Chief, Civil Rights and
Elections Division of the Michigan Attorney General’s Office.
On
August 8, 2024, Williams writes
in an email to Meingast:
Following up on our earlier
conversations regarding the USPS, in collaboration with our clients in
Nevada, we’ve put together a draft Common Interest Agreement for your
consideration. Once we’ve got everyone on board, we can schedule a
multi-state call to discuss further. Please let us know if you have any
questions or concerns.
The records include a States
United action plan, which discusses efforts to target Republicans who
raised 2020 election questions in several states, including
Michigan:
Election Deniers scored multiple wins in the
Arizona and Michigan primaries and will now head to the general election in
November. As States United has documented, candidates who continue to
spread lies about our elections are running for positions that oversee or
influence election administration across the country, posing a threat to
our democracy.
***
In
Michigan, Attorney General Dana
Nessel is seeking a special prosecutor to consider charges against nine
people in an alleged plot to gain improper access to vote-tabulating
machines used in the 2020 election. One of the nine is Matthew DePerno, the
Election Denier chosen by Michigan Republicans to run against Nessel this
fall.
A September 28, 2023, email
from Williams to Meingast details interest in cases around the country
attempting to have President Trump removed from the 2024 ballot via the
disqualification clause of the 14th Amendment. States United
Democracy Center would go on to provide a
“litigation tracker,” tallying all efforts in states aimed at removing
Trump from the ballot.
(The U.S. Supreme Court ruled
unanimously in March 2024 that states cannot use the 14th Amendment’s
insurrection clause to remove a federal candidate from the ballot. The
court determined that only Congress has the power to enforce this provision
against federal officeholders.)
The records include a Michigan court
filing in Davis v. Benson and Trump (No. 23-000128))
which points out that Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, who
oversees state elections, had made “many public comments” which
“demonstrate her extreme and incurable bias against President
Trump.”
(On November 14, 2023, the Michigan Court of Claims issued
an order
in favor of the defendants, and later, on June 12, 2024, formally closed
the remaining counts with prejudice.)
On February 22, 2024, Tiger
Mar, a project assistant at States United emails
Pier
King-Piepenbrok in the Michigan Attorney General’s Office and
mentions “our regular briefings.”
We are assisted by Robert Muise
of The Muise Law Group in Ann Arbor.
We continue to work to obtain
records
from Arizona,
Nevada
and Wisconsin,
which appear to have been part of the same coordinated efforts led by the
States United Democracy Center.
Secure Border,
Fewest Illegal Crossings in History
Our once porous southern
border is now operating effectively as we enter President Trump’s second
year in office. Our Corruption Chronicles blog has the details.
When
it comes to border security, fiscal year 2026 got off to a remarkable start
with the lowest illegal crossings in October in history, according to
preliminary figures released
by Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the Department of Homeland
Security’s (DHS) frontline border agency. It is welcome news after a
record-breaking 7.6 million illegal aliens entered the country under Biden,
including hundreds of thousands with serious criminal records and over 1.7
million from
countries DHS says pose a national security threat to the U.S. Classified
as Special Interest Aliens (SIA) by the government, the migrants that pose
a security threat came from some 26 nations, including Afghanistan, Cuba,
Iran, Iraq, Libya, Nigeria, Syria, and Turkey, China, North Korea,
Kyrgyzstan, Mauritania, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Venezuela. Many
SIAs—including some on the U.S. terrorist watchlist—were released
inside the country under Biden, risking public safety and national
security.
The Trump administration hit the
ground running by quickly securing the once porous southern border and
apprehending thousands of criminal aliens nationwide to mitigate an
unprecedented immigration crisis that gripped the nation and devastated
American towns along the Mexican border under Biden. Almost immediately
after President Trump’s inauguration the bleeding stopped with illegal
crossings plummeting by more than a third in January and a 93% decline in
migrants apprehended at ports of entry after Jan. 20. By the summer the
numbers were consistently at all-time
lows with
an average of just 148 daily illegal crossings in June and only 4,598
illegal immigrants arrested by the Border Patrol in July, marking a
stunning 92% decrease from July 2024
(56,400) under Biden. DHS celebrated that apprehensions along the Southwest
border for the entire month of July were lower than the daily average under
the Biden administration. Another important fact the agency revealed is
that no illegal immigrants were released inside the
U.S.
The crackdown continues into the 2026
fiscal year, which began on October 1. Not only did CBP record the lowest
crossings in agency history, but October also marked the sixth consecutive
month that it released zero illegal aliens inside the U.S. CBP had 30,561
total encounters nationwide, marking a 79% decrease from October 2024.
Since Jan. 21 through the end of October, there have been 106,134 total
enforcement encounters along the Southwest Border— less than the Biden
administration’s monthly average of 155,485 encounters. Daily average
apprehensions have also plummeted an incredible 95% to 258 compared to
5,110 under Biden. DHS
Secretary Kristi Noem touts it as the “most secure border ever” and CBP
Commissioner Rodney Scott assures that his agency is “not easing up”
but rather “pushing even harder.” Afterall, Scott reminds, that his
agency’s mission is to secure the border and safeguard the nation without
the excuses and politics used under Biden and his disastrous border czar,
Kamala Harris.
DHS is also cleaning up a
huge mess inside the country, conducting regular operations that target
criminal aliens with serious records released—rather than
deported—under Biden. Judicial Watch has reported extensively on the
initiative which has been ignored by the mainstream media and led to the
arrest of dozens of murderers, rapists, drug traffickers, gang members, and
child sex predators welcomed into the United States or released from local
jails under the previous administration and by local governments that offer
illegal aliens
sanctuary. During a recent operation over
1,400 criminal aliens were
arrested in just three weeks in Massachusetts, a state that has long
offered illegal immigrants sanctuary and forbids local law enforcement
agencies from assisting or cooperating with federal immigration
authorities. More than
600 of the migrants arrested had significant criminal convictions or
criminal charges for crimes committed in the U.S. or are known foreign
fugitives. Some are members of the famously violent Mara Salvatrucha
(MS-13), Tren de Aragua and 18th Street
gangs.
In Houston thousands of criminal
aliens have been apprehended by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
In the last few months in separate operations, ridding Texas’s largest
city of a multitude of violent gang members, convicted murderers, child
predators, and other egregious criminals. In the most recent Houston sting,
ICE arrested more
than 1,500 criminal aliens, including gang members, foreign fugitives
and other serious offenders during a 10-day operation. The 1,505 arrests in
just 10 days nearly doubled the number of apprehensions made by the ICE
Houston Field Office during two separate operations earlier in the year
that caught 822 and 543 criminal aliens. Offenders include sexual
predators, gang members, aggravated felons, burglars and over 140 guilty of
driving while intoxicated.
Until next
week,
