Bad News Weekly: November 17, 2025

Welcome to Bad News Weekly, your rundown of key attacks on voting rights and independent elections across the country – it’s a way to keep up with what the opponents of democracy are up to. We’ll highlight some of the worst anti-voter efforts, with a spotlight on the South, the original frontline in the fight for voting rights, and still its fiercest.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“This is yet another expression of the fact that Donald Trump does not care for democracy.” – Justin Levitt, professor at Loyola Law School in California and former Justice Department official, on Trump’s pardons of allies involved in the effort to overturn the 2020 election.

NOTABLE TRENDS

• Supreme Court to Hear Case Challenging Counting of Mail Ballots Received After Election Day: The Supreme Court agreed to hear Watson v. Republican National Committee, a case from the RNC challenging Mississippi’s law that allows the counting of mail ballots received after Election Day. The RNC and other plaintiffs argued that Congress had intended for voting to take place on a single Election Day and that allowing ballots to arrive later reduced time to resolve post-election disputes and “deprive the electorate of a clear nationwide deadline.”

  • Lawyers for Mississippi who defended the law argued that invalidating the state’s law would “have profound and destabilizing nationwide ramifications” because it “would scrap election laws in most states” and would “invite breakneck litigation and threaten electoral chaos.” About 30 states and DC accept ballots that are mailed by Election Day but received later.

• DOJ Filed A Motion To Intervene In Lawsuit Challenging California’s New Congressional Map, Arguing That The Map Was A Racial Gerrymander: The Department of Justice filed a motion to intervene in the California Republican Party’s lawsuit challenging the state’s new congressional map. In its motion, the DOJ argued that the new map is a racial gerrymander that violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment because “the professed goal of increasing Democratic representation was subordinated to increasing Hispanic-majority districts.”

  • The DOJ asked the court to declare that Proposition 50 was adopted “with the purpose of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race or color, in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.” In a statement, Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed that “California’s redistricting scheme is a brazen power grab that tramples on civil rights and mocks the democratic process.”

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STATE ACTIVITY

• Arizona • Maricopa County Discovered Over 2,000 Misplaced Ballots Days After Election Day: In Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, over 2,000 ballots were placed in sealed boxes and mistakenly put in a blue drop box instead of being returned to the count’s election center and were only found Friday morning.

  • A bipartisan team of election staff took custody of the sealed boxes and worked to ensure chain of custody was followed.

• Montana • Thousands of Ballots Rejected Over New Birth Year Requirement: According to election office data compiled by Montana Free Press, a new requirement for voters to write their birth year on mail ballot envelopes led to more than 2,700 local election ballots being rejected in the state’s six largest cities.

  • Sarah Bell, Missoula County’s deputy elections administrator, said that the birth year requirement resulted in a tenfold increase in rejected ballots over the September primary election, which occurred before the new requirement took effect. Voters had the chance to cure their ballots; however, in a few races the rejected ballots were high enough that they could have changed outcomes.

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ANTI-VOTING GROUP ACTIVITY

• Trump Pardoned Dozens of Anti-Voting Activists Involved In Effort to Overturn 2020 Election After Public Push to Do So From Other Anti-Voting Activists: President Trump issued “full, complete, and unconditional” pardons for dozens of anti-voting activists who were involved in the effort to overturn the 2020 election.

  • The people pardoned included Christina Bobb, Kenneth Chesebero, John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, Arizona state Senator Jake Hoffman, Georgia Lt. Gov Burt Jones, Georgia state Senator Shawn Still, and Wisconsin Election Commissioner Robert Spindell.

  • The pardons, however, are largely symbolic since they only apply to federal crimes and none of the people included are currently facing federal charges.

  • The sweeping pardons came days after Cleta Mitchell, the founder and chair of the Election Integrity Network and former Trump lawyer, repeatedly called for Trump to pardon people involved in the effort to overturn the 2020 election “now.”

Paid for by Fair Fight Action.