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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
“We’re living at a time in which the folks who are running this country are denying election results and using tools like this to tamp down the vote and discourage the vote. We’ve got a big election coming up next year. So this to me is also a note to how we could deal with this in a larger fashion next year.” – Celia Israel, Travis County’s Democratic tax assessor-collector and voter registrar, on the use of the federal SAVE system to check voters’ citizenship status [ [link removed] ] and purge voters.
NOTABLE TRENDS
Department of Justice Sued 4 More States Over Access to Voter Data And Threatened to Sue Georgia: In an appearance on conservative influencer Benny Johnson’s podcast, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon said [ [link removed] ] that the DOJ will sue Georgia to get voter data after the state allegedly told her to “go pound sand” and refused to provide the data. Dhillon added [ [link removed] ] that “swing states are the big problem” and that “there are going to be a few more lawsuits filed even later this week.”
The Georgia Secretary of State’s office said [ [link removed] ] in a letter [ [link removed] ] to Dhillon this week that they had provided the voter data but redacted voters’ personal information, such as Social Security and driver’s license numbers, as required by state law.
On December 11, a day after Dhillon’s podcast appearance, the DOJ [ [link removed] ] sued [ [link removed] ] Colorado, Hawaii, Massachusetts, and Nevada, meaning the DOJ has now sued 18 states over access to unredacted voter data.
In a dramatic escalation, the DOJ also sued [ [link removed] ] Fulton County, Georgia for copies of 2020 election records. On the same day, the Wisconsin Election Commission declined [ [link removed] ] to send the state’s un-redacted voter rolls to the DOJ.
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STATE ACTIVITY
Missouri • Gerrymandered Map Set to be Enacted Despite Over 300,000 Signatures For Repeal Referendum: People Not Politicians, the campaign to repeal Missouri’s gerrymandered congressional map, turned in over 300,000 signatures to put the referendum on the 2026 ballot. However, Secretary of State Denny Hoskins said that will not stop [ [link removed] ] the map from going into effect on December 11, a dramatic departure from past precedent where the map did not take effect until the signatures had been verified.
The decision is likely to see legal challenges. Hoskins promised [ [link removed] ] a “slow and steady” review of the signatures, which his office has until July 28 to complete. Hoskins also said that he reserves the right to unilaterally declare the referendum unconstitutional but that he would wait until he knows whether the petition has sufficient signatures to be placed on the ballot.
Texas • Denton County Saw A 16.6% Error Rate of Voters Flagged as Potential Noncitizens: In October, the Texas Secretary of State’s office identified 2,724 people as “potential noncitizens” in the voter rolls after running the state’s voter rolls through the federal SAVE system.
Many counties, however, have found [ [link removed] ] that a number of the flagged potential noncitizens were actually citizens. In Denton County [ [link removed] ], 14 of the 84 flagged registered voters have proven their citizenship so far, a 16.6% error rate [ [link removed] ]. There is not yet any official data on how many citizens were incorrectly flagged as potential noncitizens by SAVE.
ANTI-VOTING GROUP ACTIVITY
RNC And Maryland GOP Sued State Alleging “Impossibly High” Voter Registration Numbers: The Republican National Committee (RNC) and the Maryland Republican Party filed a lawsuit [ [link removed] ] against state election officials, alleging “impossibly high” voter registration numbers in roughly a dozen counties.
The lawsuit is very similar to other lawsuits filed by the RNC in 2024 in Arizona [ [link removed] ], Michigan [ [link removed] ], and Nevada [ [link removed] ] that claimed voter registration was “impossibly high.”
Paid for by Fair Fight Action.

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