A private investigator hired by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office to handle sensitive internal investigations had previously worked for an organization designated as an anti-Muslim hate group and participated in the controversial Cyber Ninjas review of Arizona’s 2020 election, according to a newly unsealed report.

Phoenix New Times reported that the court-appointed monitor's 226-page report on the sheriff's office looked at the way AZ Truthfinder, a company founded by former Gilbert police officer Stephanie Ameiss, obtained a county contract worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

It was discovered that the résumé Ameiss had submitted as part of the bidding process omitted important aspects of her background, such as her six years of experience as lead investigator for Understanding the Threat, an organization founded by the former FBI agent John Guandolo.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled Understanding the Threat as a hate group, stating that it was an organization that promoted anti-Muslim conspiracy theories and offered training programs to law enforcement agencies. The group ceased operations in 2023.

The report from the monitor stated that Understanding the Threat had published material that attacked Muslims, Black Lives Matter activists, Democrats and others.

The report states that Ameiss did not include her participation in the Cyber Ninjas-led investigation into Maricopa County's 2020 election results on her resume. After Donald Trump had lost in the state, the Republican-controlled Arizona Senate engaged Cyber Ninjas to carry out the highly criticized review.

AZ Truthfinder was one of the three companies bidding for the contract to carry out investigations in the situation where conflicts had prevented the sheriff's Professional Standards Bureau from dealing with the cases itself, and the leadership of the sheriff's office had chosen the company less than 24 hours after having looked at the bids.

Axios states that the company has obtained approximately $270,000 from Maricopa County since June 2025. The monitor doubted if the sheriff's office had carried out a meaningful background check before giving the contract.

The report stated that either the 'vetting process' was a sham or the vetting that had in fact been carried out had shown some of the same material that we had uncovered, but they had chosen to ignore it.

The results occur while Sheriff Jerry Sheridan and Maricopa County have been attempting to put an end to the years of federal court supervision which followed a racial-profiling lawsuit brought against the sheriff's office.

Chris Hegstrom, a spokesperson for the Sheriff's department, said to Axios that the agency was going over the report and was still committed to "full and effective compliance" with the court's orders.

The monitor suggested that the circumstances relating to the contract should be referred to a possible misconduct investigation.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem made a hastily-scheduled appearance in Arizona on Friday to push for federal legislation that would institute photo identification and proof of citizenship requirements for voters nationwide.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

The announcement that Noem was planning to hold a press conference about “election security” at an undisclosed location in Maricopa County sparked rumors, ultimately baseless, about the purpose of her visit and whether it signaled an election investigation. Her press conference was scheduled to be held just hours before her agency was set to run out of funding and face a partial shutdown.

Ultimately, her focus on the SAVE America Act highlighted the emphasis that President Donald Trump’s administration is placing on the legislation, which just passed the U.S. House of Representatives but faces a difficult path in the U.S. Senate.

Materials initially distributed to journalists announcing the event contained few details — just that Noem would be joined by local leaders to discuss election security.

The announcement came as the Trump administration has been taking increasingly aggressive steps on elections. The Federal Bureau of Investigation recently conducted an unprecedented search of an election office in Fulton County, Georgia, another critical election battleground. Last week, Trump said Republicans “ought to nationalize the voting.” The Justice Department is also suing Arizona for its unredacted voter rolls, one of 25 such lawsuits that it has filed against states and Washington, D.C..

As word of the event began to spread locally, supervisors in Maricopa County called an emergency, closed-door meeting to receive “legal advice” about their “authority and responsibilities regarding election administration.” Jason Berry, a county spokesperson, declined to confirm whether the sudden session on Thursday afternoon was related to Noem’s planned visit.

Meanwhile, election officials statewide told Votebeat that Noem’s visit caught them by surprise, and that they hadn’t been briefed on it.

Reporters who had RSVPed to attend the event were notified late Thursday that they should report to a DHS office in Phoenix. They would then be taken by shuttle to an undisclosed location with limited cell service and no Internet access, per the message.

That location turned out to be an office building for Homeland Security Investigations in Scottsdale, located about 30 minutes from the meeting point in Phoenix. Journalists were transported in unmarked government SUVs, and upon arrival, waited more than an hour for Noem to take the podium.

When she did, she asserted that it was “a fact” that noncitizens were voting in elections, and added that the SAVE America Act was “absolutely critical to our country’s future.” She was joined at the event by several GOP officials from Arizona, including U.S. Rep. Eli Crane, U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar, Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap, and others.

Evidence overwhelmingly shows that noncitizen voting is rare. Arizona already requires its voters to show photo identification at the polls and to provide proof of citizenship — such as a birth certificate or passport — in order to register to vote in state and local races. Voters can register to cast ballots in federal elections without showing such documents, but must still attest to their citizenship status under penalty of perjury.

Later, Noem blasted Arizona’s election processes and procedures, saying it needs “more improvement” than any other state.

“Your state has been an absolute disaster on elections,” she said. “Your leaders have failed you dramatically, by not having systems that work, by disenfranchising Americans who wanted to vote, that had to stand in lines for hours, because machines failed or software failed.”

Those remarks drew quick condemnation from top state officials. Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, accused Noem of “grandstanding” and “spreading misinformation.” Calli Jones, a spokesperson for the Secretary of State’s Office, said that Noem had not reached out to Fontes to meet with him about election security during her visit.

“Don’t come into Arizona there from Washington, D.C., and tell us how to run our elections,” Fontes said in a taped statement responding to Noem’s comments. “We’re doing just fine without you, thank you very much.”

Sasha Hupka is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Sasha at shupka@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

Local Texas officials will vote Tuesday about whether county officials can cut polling places in a key battleground county by 30 percent.

Democracy Docket reported Tuesday that Republican officials in Tarrant County, Texas, crafted a new strategy to reduce access to the polls on Nov. 3 by cutting 92 polling locations. Early voting locations would be cut from 50 to 47.

The vote comes after local officials postponed an initial consideration of an even more sweeping proposal that faced strong public opposition. In the Aug. 4 meeting, the officials attempted to cut polling places by nearly 50 percent, despite increases in the county's population.

It would mean 316 voting locations would be cut to just 176 for a population of about 2,248,466 people, according to 2025 Census data. To put that in context, Phoenix, Arizona, has roughly 1.6 million residents and 236 vote centers across Maricopa County. Tarrant County seeks to have fewer polling places, but with 800,000 more people.

Fewer sites mean concentrated demand. If election officials do not replace the lost capacity and access, the practical effect can be that some eligible voters face greater obstacles to casting a ballot. It can make voting slower, farther away and harder to navigate. This, combined with not enough poll workers, confusing voting equipment, fewer early voting options and limited transportation support, can result in long lines and lower turnout.

After a huge backlash, officials backed away from the initial consideration, but not by much. The new plan is to reduce the number of polling places to 224. It's still fewer than Phoenix, which has 800,000 fewer people.

Democracy Docket explained that the county has a growing minority population and, over the past two years, has shifted more toward Democrats. Earlier this year, Democrat Taylor Rehmet won a special election for a state Senate seat, surprising Texas Republicans.

Opposition has extended beyond angry voters. The Fort Worth City Council unanimously urged Tarrant County officials to preserve or even expand the number of available polling locations. State Rep. Gina Hinojosa, a Democrat running for governor, called the county “ground zero” for Texas elections this year.

“When you look at where those cuts hit the hardest, it’s the same neighborhoods that have always been targeted,” said Democratic County Commissioner Alisa Simmons. “The ones with the lowest income zip codes, the most Black and Hispanic communities in this county. The places where folks are less likely to have a car.”

During the initial meeting, Simmons called the effort a “deliberate act to reduce voter access.”

The public response was huge, gathering so many people to a normally quiet county meeting that they needed two overflow rooms. People were so upset that "O’Hare ordered law enforcement to clear the meeting room," Democracy Docket said. People were arrested, and former state Rep. Lon Burnam (D) was carried out of the room by police and detained overnight.

"The Fort Worth City Council voted unanimously to urge Tarrant County officials" to open more polling places, the report closed.

Republican voters in Arizona sent a litany of election deniers to the November ballot, chief among them the nominees for the top three statewide offices. But they’re far from the only ones who advanced to the general election.

The Grand Canyon State has long been at the center of the election conspiracy theories that have become a tenet of the modern Republican Party under President Donald Trump, who has been doggedly focused on false claims of election fraud over the past decade.

As the belief that elections are rife with fraud — at least when Democrats win — has transformed from fringe online discourse into a GOP article of faith, adherents and promoters of election conspiracy theories have been gaining more elected power.

But those views are growing more unpopular among voters, as issues such as affordability and the war in Iran take center stage.

“It is not sustainable, and people do not have an appetite for it. People want to have our elections be a process that helps us pick our leaders and then they want our leaders to lead for us,” Alex Gulotta, All Voting is Local Action’s Arizona state director, told the Arizona Mirror. “It is not winning people’s hearts and minds.”

Despite that, a growing number of election deniers are running for office in Arizona and across the country, according to Kelly Rader, research director at States United Action, a nonpartisan nonprofit that supports state officials protecting elections and has been tracking election deniers since 2022.

Arizona is one of four states — along with Colorado, Wisconsin and Tennessee — that have three or more election deniers running for statewide office, according to their analysis.

Nationally, nearly 75% of the states have an election denier running for a statewide or congressional office, Rader’s research found. That is 139 candidates across the country, among them 21 candidates for governor, nine running for secretary of state and eight running for attorney general, according to the data.

“Election denial is a comprehensive strategy to undermine trust in our elections so that Trump and his allies can challenge election results they don’t like,” Rader said. “As we move through the primaries and sprint toward the fall, we expect that Trump will continue pushing the same old election conspiracy theories. And we are closely watching which election denier candidates echo those claims in the months to come.”

Gulotta echoed those sentiments, adding that Trump’s continued denialism of the results of the 2020 election has helped fuel the fire for candidates to use the same rhetoric.

“I think as long as the president of the United States and his cronies are acting in a way that seeks to prevent voting and is really focused on denying the results of elections, we will continue to see this,” he said. “I am hoping we will grow out of it soon, hopefully another cycle or two.”

Rader said the corrosive effect of lies about election results has far-reaching effects, but was optimistic about the work being done by the nation’s election administrators to educate people and counter the conspiracies.

“Efforts to undermine confidence in legitimate election outcomes don’t just threaten individual races; they erode voter confidence and threaten one of the most important limits on presidential power,” she said. “The good news is that election officials across the country are educating voters, rebuilding trust, and working to ensure another free and fair election this year.”

It isn’t just election denialism that is on the ballot, either.

This year’s batch of conspiracy-minded candidates ranges from QAnon adherents to former “audit” workers. Some of them may be well known to most Arizonans, while others are newcomers to electoral politics.

The old guard

The top of the ticket in Arizona will be a who’s who of people who have been involved in election related conspiracy activities since 2020.

U.S. Rep. Andy Biggs won the Republican party primary for Governor where he will square off against Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs in November.

After Trump lost his 2020 re-election bid to Joe Biden, Biggs was front and center in Arizona and Congress trying to “Stop the Steal.” He joined fellow Arizona GOP Congressman Paul Gosar in spreading doubt about the results of the 2020 election and made claims of voter disenfranchisement that were not backed up by evidence.

Former Arizona Speaker of the House Rusty Bowers said Biggs called him the morning of January 6 asking him to sign onto a letter calling for the decertification of Arizona electors. Biggs, who voted to reject electoral votes for Biden from Arizona and other battleground states, would later allegedly seek a pardon from Trump for his involvement.

Two other prominent election deniers will also be at the top of the Arizona ticket.

State Rep. Alexander Kolodin, who won the GOP primary for secretary of state, has long pushed unfounded claims around the state’s elections.

Kolodin was one of the key attorneys for Trump’s campaign who challenged the 2020 election results in the state and has represented a number of prominent election deniers. Kolodin was sanctioned by the Arizona State Bar in 2023 for his part in lawsuits challenging the 2020 election that made implausible and evidence-free claims of massive election fraud. He represented Trump’s campaign in the so-called “kraken” lawsuit in Arizona that was based on claims made by people with no actual knowledge of the elections.

In his time in the legislature, Kolodin has pushed for sweeping changes to Arizona election laws largely based on election conspiracy theories.

Then there’s GOP attorney general nominee Warren Petersen, who currently serves as president of the Arizona Senate. He, along with former Senate President Karen Fann, oversaw the partisan “audit” that the Senate conducted in 2021 to scour for fraud in Maricopa County’s election the year before. It found no evidence of fraud, and actually concluded that Biden won the election in the state’s largest county.

Earlier this year, he handed over material from that election review to the FBI and U.S. Department of Justice.

Other prominent election deniers also won their primaries, including Sen. Wendy Rogers, R-Flagstaff. On top of believing the 2020 election was fraudulent, Rogers has also engaged with white nationalists and other extremists.

She’ll also likely be joined in the Senate again by Sen. David Farnsworth, R-Mesa, who has openly embraced QAnon and spread conspiracy theories about the Department of Child Safety.

In its simplest form, QAnon is a conspiracy theory that alleges that a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles are running a global sex-trafficking ring, control world governments and are trying to bring down President Donald Trump — who is himself single-handedly dismantling the cabal.

Farnsworth and Rogers also will be joined by the QAnon-posting and January-6-insurrection-attending Sen. Janae Shamp, who ran uncontested in her primary.

Another prominent election denier who won their primary is former Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb.

Lamb worked with other far-right sheriffs and a group that was involved with the widely debunked film “2000 Mules” to police polling locations in 2022. Lamb won his primary despite lurid allegations about his sex life and the release of a racist chat he had with a border vigilante.

If he wins his election — which is likely, as his district is deep red — he’ll join fellow election denier U.S. Rep. Abe Hamadeh, who unsuccessfully tried to claim election fraud led to his 280-vote loss to Kris Mayes in the 2022 contest for attorney general.

The new class

Among the well-known pushers of conspiracy theories in the state are some new faces that are seeking political power.

For instance, Michelle Altherr is seeking to unseat Democratic Sen. Brian Fernandez in the Democrat-leaning Legislative District 23.

Altherr worked at the partisan election “audit,” citing it as one of the main reasons she has gotten into politics. She has long been a presence at Maricopa County Board of Supervisors meetings, where she has spread unfounded claims of election fraud.

Another new face is James Rogers, who won his primary for the state House of Representatives in Legislative District 10. Rogers has represented Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap, a known election denier, as part of the America First Legal law firm, which was started by top Trump advisor Stephen Miller.

The law firm was also behind a failed lawsuit that attempted to change how Arizona counties use drop boxes and maintain voter rolls.

Then there’s Mylie Biggs, Andy Biggs’ daughter, who won an uncontested race to represent Legislative District 14 in the state Senate.

Last year, during an appearance on The Matt MacCurdy program, she said that she doesn’t believe women should hold public office. On that same podcast, the younger Biggs said she has a fondness for conspiracy theories, telling the host to not get her “started on 9/11.”

Early voting for the general election starts on Sept. 19 for military and overseas voters and early voting for everyone else begins on Oct. 7. The last day voters can register to vote and apply for an early ballot is Oct. 5. Voters can find more information and register to vote at this link.

The White House X account is getting flooded with mockery after the social media site combined a White House post about communism with coincidental reporting about the government's current financial investments in corporations.

Cato Institute's VP of economics and trade Scott Lincicome noticed Wednesday that the U.S. government is taking equity stakes in 30 private companies.

Tad DeHaven of the Cato Institute remarked, "Perhaps most striking about the announcement is how unremarkable government ownership is becoming."

Ironically, a post from the White House, posted shortly after the Cato report, claimed, "Communism is the greatest threat to our country."

Lincicome mocked the funny coincidence with a screen capture, writing, "Twitter putting in some good work today."

He later added another screenshot of an X side-by-side showing an interview with Lincicome talking about the government owning the equity stake. "I mean, this is just art," he said.

Gov. Gavin Newsom's press office account questioned: "Republican Socialists of America?"

Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) similarly responded to the reports of the government's investments, which popped up in X's trending news.

"This is not the conservative position," he wrote.

Former ambassador and political science professor Michael McFaul blasted, "State ownership of the means of production is a communist idea. Why Trump embraces this communist idea is strange to me."

Former Republican Rep. Joe Walsh added, "All these Republicans who shout “the socialists are coming, the communists are coming” when talking about Democrats are the very same Republicans who worship the guy in the White House who’s doing all the socialism and communism stuff right now."

Ex-Republican Kyle Sweetser blasted, "This administration is out of control."

CNN columnist Aaron Blake connected the dots, writing, "the leaders of this government are presently attacking their opponents for being socialists."

New York Times reporter Trip Gabriel also added, "The GOP's midterm message is that Democrats are 'radical left Marxists.'"

Former Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer (R-Ariz.) commented: "This isn't state owning private enterprise and interrupting the market economy, right? Right? Or this the part where JD Vance says free markets are for suckers and that we're just a bunch of Ayn Rand weirdos?"

The pro-Donald Trump legal group, America First Legal (AFL), has taken over the Maricopa County Recorder's office, and it's illegal, one Arizona reporter Brahm Resnik wrote, citing a new court case.

County Recorder Justin Heap hired American First Legal to counsel them in a lawsuit, court documents show. County Attorney Rachel Mitchell sued over the matter and revealed a slew of concerning details in the process.

Mitchell asked for a temporary restraining order and injunction at the Superior Court of the State of Arizona in and for the County of Maricopa, but the court ruled that she lacked standing.

However, a new filing alleges that the "AFL has abused that limited ruling and used it as a launching pad for [an] unprecedented power grab. In the past three-and-a-half weeks alone, AFL, a partisan non-profit organization funded by private donors, and the Recorder have: 1. Proclaimed that AFL will serve as the Recorder's counsel on 'all' matters 'covering the administration of early voting or any election statute that contains the phrase "recorder or other officer in charge of elections," based on self-declared global conflict of interest with the County Attorney.'"

The suit also claims that the AFL has "instructed County elections staff to disregard legal advice from the Maricopa County Attorney's Office (MCAO) about voter instructions at polling locations."

The AFL allegedly told staff they couldn't seek any legal advice from the county attorney and tried to prevent the county attorney from attending a Board of Supervisors executive session about the election, the suit says.

AFL then "threatened to pursue criminal charges against the Board for establishing drop boxes — forcing Attorney General Kris Mayes to write a letter to AFL warning it against making 'unfounded threats of criminal liability.'" The pro-Trump legal group then allegedly sent a letter to the Board threatening to sue them under a criminal statute and demanding public records.

Mitchell's filing makes it clear that AFL was never hired to provide "in-house" counsel for the Recorder's office.

The filing goes on to allege that the AFL is "acting as de facto deputy county attorneys is ultra vires and illegal. The Recorder lacks any explicit or implicit statutory authority to hire outside counsel — let alone a partisan organization — to serve as in-house counsel on 'all' matters under his 'purview.'"

The uploaded filing only contains excerpts from the full document and doesn't cite any specifics about dates for hearings or details about where the case stands.

President Donald Trump is apparently tampering so thoroughly in elections that even a staunchly MAGA official is raising alarms about it.

“[Maricopa County Attorney Rachel] Mitchell garnered national attention after Senate Republicans tapped her to question Christine Blasey Ford during Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation process after Ford alleged that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her as a teenager,” wrote MS NOW’s Ja'han Jones on Wednesday. “Kavanaugh has flatly denied the allegation.”

Yet despite Mitchell’s impeccable MAGA credentials, including endorsing Trump’s 2024 campaign, Jones reported that she has filed a lawsuit against America First Legal, White House adviser Stephen Miller’s right-wing activist group that is trying to make sure Trump does not lose control of Congress during the 2026 midterm elections.

“The office is led by Justin Heap, who has egged on the Trump administration’s push to acquire sensitive voter data in Arizona,” Jones reported. “And the disturbing context to all this is Trump has openly declared that Republicans should nationalize voting processes and ‘take over the voting’ in several cities — like Phoenix, perhaps.”

Jones added, “In a June 8 legal filing, Mitchell’s lawyers asked Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Scott Blaney to rein in Recorder Justin Heap’s politically connected firm, the America First Legal Foundation, which it said has undertaken ‘an unprecedented power grab.’” Her lawyers argued that “the Recorder lacks any explicit or implicit statutory authority to hire outside counsel — let alone a partisan organization — to serve as in-house counsel on ‘all’ matters under his ‘purview.’”

Overall Jones concluded, “The fact that even conservative officials are sounding the alarm here shows how extreme, unprecedented and potentially threatening to democracy this situation could prove to be.”

Speaking with AlterNet earlier this month, Common Cause Senior Policy Director for Voting and Fair Representation Dan Vicuña said that Trump’s various voter repression policies — including trying to stop mail-in voting, demanding voter files, gerrymandering, supporting voter ID laws and stating he will deploy law enforcement to voting places — are all part of a larger plan to steal the midterms. Common Cause is a nonprofit good government group with a distinguished pedigree tracing back to 1970.

“What they all add up to is a desire to avoid any accountability to the voters in the midterm elections — to ensure, to preordain the outcome of a midterm that he thinks is going to go badly for him,” Vicuña told AlterNet. “We know, from the Big Lie of the 2020 election to spurring on a violent revolt to overthrow a free and fair election, that he has no respect for democratic norms, for the voice of the people. This is entirely about his own power and his own ego. He will even invest in protecting that ego and protecting his power at the expense of the needs of the public. People are suffering with high gas prices and affordability issues, and he does not care. All that matters is protecting his power, and he has no interest in whether he does that through democratic means.”

When pardoned former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio throws a birthday bash, the Phoenix New Times says it will be attended by precisely the oily kind of assembly you could expect.

“Highlights of the evening included an Elvis impersonator … ,” reports Phoenix New Times writer Stephen Lemons. “There was also an appearance by wizened mob enforcer and serial killer Sammy ‘The Bull’ Gravano, who gifted Arpaio a bronze bull statuette and made the sheriff an honorary member of the mafia.”

The group also included “disgraced former politicos — including former Rep. Trent Franks and former state legislator David Stringer, both with troubling sex allegations hanging over their heads.”

And then there was Arpaio himself, of course — all 94 years of him.

“Looking frail and scarecrow-thin, his voice whispery and hoarse at times, former … Arpaio sat onstage in a gold lamé empire-style chair. And he remained there for most of Friday evening at the Fountain Hills Community Center as several hundred fellow alter kockers and rogues of all stripes ate a free meal of pasta with meatballs ...”

Arpaio was found guilty in 2013 of widespread racial profiling and placed under the watch of a court-appointed monitor, whose oversight continues to this day.

Lemons said Arpaio stood to accept mob stoolie Gravano’s gift, and he praised Lemons for turning state’s evidence back in the day to help convict his mentor in crime, John Gotti. Gravano then assured the crowd that the 19 murders credited to him were “the same thing to me as being in the military, same thing as being a cop.”

“He got a round of applause when he announced that, despite the hits, he was now a Christian and knew that Jesus had forgiven him for his homicidal transgressions,” Lemons reports.

At some point during the festivities Gravano made a point to white to the Phoenix New Times reporter about an article concerning a sexual harassment lawsuit filed by one of Gravano’s former employees, who “claims Gravano forced his tongue down her throat without her consent and made jokes about his penis.”

“Arpaio also took to his feet to croak out a version of Frank Sinatra’s ‘My Way’ in a duet with an unknown woman who, unlike Arpaio, could actually carry a tune,” reports Lemons. “Arpaio also accepted a letter of birthday congrats from President Donald Trump, who pardoned Arpaio in 2017 for a criminal contempt-of-court conviction in the ongoing Melendres civil rights lawsuit, which has cost Maricopa County taxpayers more than $250 million at last count.”

The FBI agents arrived at David Bolter’s Milwaukee home on a cool, cloudy Wednesday morning in late May. They were armed with a list of questions for the 2020 poll worker, who had raised concerns about the way local officials handled the 2020 election, Bolter told Votebeat.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

President Donald Trump relied on Bolter’s claims in an unsuccessful 2020 lawsuit that sought to throw out more than 220,000 votes. That would have been more than enough to move Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes from Democrat Joe Biden, who won the state, to Trump. Though courts, several election reviews, and many audits rejected Trump’s claims, the Republican never stopped believing that he was cheated out of the presidency in 2020.

That appears to be why, last month, the FBI sent agents back to Milwaukee to question Bolter as part of an expanding national effort by the second Trump administration to investigate long-debunked claims of fraud in the 2020 election.

The investigation into the 2020 election appears to be relying on already disproven allegations from people like Bolter. Bolter declined to divulge more about his conversation with the FBI, which has not been previously reported, but allegations from Bolter’s 2020 affidavit were central to some conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. For example, he alleged that somebody in Milwaukee’s absentee ballot counting facility announced around midnight on Election Day that a “huge truckload of ballots” was going to be delivered — an accusation for which there has so far appeared to be no additional evidence.

Around the same time Bolter says he talked to the FBI, two plainclothes agents with FBI badges showed up at the apartment of a former Milwaukee resident and 2020 poll worker about an affidavit she submitted, according to the former poll worker, who asked to be identified only by her first name, Christine, to give her the freedom to discuss an ongoing investigation.

Christine had also submitted an affidavit about the 2020 election, saying election workers had been told that all votes were counted, but she then saw workers continuing to count ballots around midnight. That affidavit was the focus of the agents’ questions, Christine told Votebeat.

“I suspected wrongdoing, but I’m not saying that it actually happened,” she said. “I’m just one lowly person that was working there.”

During the interview, she added, an agent showed her a photograph of Claire Woodall, the former Milwaukee election chief, asking her if she recognized the former election official who has been central to false allegations about the 2020 election. She identified her by name. Woodall didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Caroline Clancy, a spokesperson for the FBI’s Milwaukee office, declined to comment.

While investigators seem mainly focused on the 2020 vote, some elections experts believe the Trump administration’s wide-ranging probe is actually designed to create more doubts among Americans about future elections, as Republicans face strong political headwinds that could cost them control of Congress later this year.

“This isn’t about the 2020 election, this is about the 2026 and 2028 elections,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research. “This is about intimidating election officials. This is about creating a stream of disinformation designed to delegitimize an election the president may believe he’s going to lose. This is designed by the president’s underlings to satisfy the unrealistic expectations of a president that still cannot comprehend that he lost an election that he definitely lost, and it’s incredibly destabilizing.”

Wisconsin is the latest known target of the Trump administration’s 2020 investigation. The FBI is looking to interview elections officials and Milwaukee police officers in what some worry could be a precursor to an effort to seize ballots from the 2020 presidential race, as it already has in Georgia.

The Trump administration is revisiting allegations of election fraud that have been repeatedly scrutinized

In January, federal investigators seized 600 boxes of ballots from the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia. The heavily Democratic county, home to Atlanta, was key to Biden’s narrow 2020 victory in the state.

As in Wisconsin, the FBI in Georgia has built its investigation on allegations that have already been repeatedly scrutinized by audits, investigations, and courts without unearthing any evidence of fraud or tampering that could have overturned the results.

The Georgia search represented an unprecedented intervention by the federal government into local administration. Even more unusually, Tulsi Gabbard, who will step down at end of this month as director of national intelligence, personally oversaw the seizure and arranged for Trump to speak directly to the FBI agents via cell phone after they carried out the operation.

The Trump administration investigations stretch from Arizona, where federal officials subpoenaed computerized records of a partisan review state lawmakers conducted of Maricopa County’s 2020 election, to Puerto Rico, where the Office of the Director of National Intelligence procured voting machines to examine for potential security risks.

The administration’s investigations aren’t entirely limited to 2020. The U.S. Department of Justice sent a letter in April to Wayne County, Michigan — home to Detroit — demanding all ballots cast in the 2024 election, which Trump won. But even in that case, to support the request, the Justice Department cited accusations of fraud made after the 2020 election, including a lawsuit that was quickly dismissed after a judge wrote that “plaintiffs’ interpretation of events is incorrect and not credible.” Wayne County never handed over the ballots, because it doesn’t have possession of them.

What do the 2020 elections mean for 2026?

The FBI faces challenges in pursuing cases tied to the 2020 election since the five-year statute of limitations that applies to most of the likely charges expired last year. Law enforcement veterans said it is possible that the Justice Department could pursue broader conspiracy charges in the case, but the prospect remains unclear.

FBI Director Kash Patel suggested in April that the Justice Department would soon announce arrests related to the 2020 election, but that has not yet occurred. Officials with the FBI and Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment.

John Keller, a former acting head of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section who resigned in 2025 after refusing the Trump administration’s demands to drop corruption charges against then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams, said the administration appeared to be trying to normalize federal investigations of state elections to pave the way for future intervention.

“They are using enforcement directed at the 2020 election as a test run for what they can get away with on Election Day this year, or after, to try and delay certification or invalidate an election” if the results don’t go their way, he said.

Injecting federal law enforcement officials into an ongoing election is a more extreme and serious action than investigating a past one, and it could face stiffer opposition. But it’s clear, at least, that the administration is scrutinizing current elections closely.

Trump last week blasted California’s long vote counting process in its primary election and asserted that Democrats were trying to steal the election and federal authorities were investigating. Last month, Trump also said he was ordering the Justice Department to investigate an error that led to some voters in Maryland receiving ballots for the wrong party in the state’s upcoming primary. State officials in both cases have explained the true causes of the issues and that nothing nefarious was behind them.

Any effort to seize ballots in an ongoing election would create unprecedented new issues, such as a breach in the chain of custody over cast ballots, that could prevent election officials from declaring a winner and throw results into uncertainty.

Catherine Engelbrecht, co-founder of the Texas-based conservative group True the Vote, which has promoted debunked theories about the 2020 election, said she understands Trump’s intentions but believes the 2020 election questions should have been resolved “in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election.”

“This is not necessarily the way I would have recommended that it would be handled,” she said. “The fact that it wasn’t addressed has left this lingering void.”

In most cases, however, Trump’s claims of voter fraud were addressed in the wake of the 2020 election. Time and again, courts, state investigations, and even the Justice Department concluded that there was no evidence of problems or fraud that would have changed the results.

Engelbrecht said she views the Trump administration’s ongoing investigations as an effort to dig into long-standing concerns about the voting process it wants to address for future elections.

“The past is prologue,” she said. “If we don’t understand what happened, we are doomed to repeat it.”

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

To remind you, here’s what Trump said on “Meet the Press” that aired on June 7:

“The [2020] election was rigged. It was a dirty election … And it’s happening again right now in California…. they’re cheating on the election. … they’re crooked…. You know that these elections are rigged. … Your elections in this country … are like a third world country. Your elections are crooked.”

When Trump lies with this kind of vehemence, does he sincerely believe what he’s saying — in which case he’s seriously demented?

OR does he know full well it’s a lie, and part of his strategy for the 2026 midterm elections is to undermine public trust in our electoral system, especially in predominantly Democratic states and cities — in which case he’s traitorous?

I think it’s both — he’s a traitor to America and he’s seriously demented — both a knave and a fool.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel know full well that the incidence of voter fraud in America is near zero. They’re playing along with Trump because, well, they’re just traitors.

***

Blanche’s Justice Department is now ramping up its investigations of supposed voter fraud across the country.

Blanche has instructed federal prosecutors to prioritize alleged voter fraud cases.

Over the last year, the Justice Department has sought voter roll data from most states; sued those that have declined to comply; opened a criminal investigation into 2020 election results in Fulton County, Georgia (Trump narrowly lost Georgia that year); subpoenaed records tied to the Arizona Senate’s review of Maricopa County voting; and demanded ballots from the 2024 race from Wayne County, Michigan.

A March 2026 order directed the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration to compile state-by-state citizenship lists before federal elections; instructed the Department of Justice to prioritize investigations and prosecutions of officials and private actors involved in issuing or distributing ballots to ineligible voters; and ordered new Postal Service rules for tracking mail and absentee ballots.

Yet despite the Trump regime’s demands for voter roll data, at least eight federal district judges have rejected those demands. Half of those judges were appointed by Trump. The regime is appealing the decisions.

I used to work at the Justice Department, and, to the best of my knowledge, it has never had a 0-for-8 losing streak.

And let me remind you once again: There’s close to zero evidence of any voter fraud in America.

**

California appears to be an early testing ground for Trump’s voting fraud witch hunt.

Speaking to conservative radio host Glenn Beck recently, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, Bill Essayli, promised “[w]e will be charging some people.” The promise would have been a violation of Justice Department policy under past procedures that barred the department from involving itself in state or local elections, but Essayli has no qualms. “It will be election fraud charges in the next … one or two months, I believe. We need some of these results to be certified so we can prove some of the allegations.”

Essayli dispatched prosecutors to offices where ballots were being counted and has appealed for anyone with evidence of voter fraud to come forward, saying that “what we need right now are witnesses.”

Hello? The way justice is supposed to be served in America begins with investigations followed by allegations and then proof.

On social media, Essayli charges that California “has stonewalled every effort to verify that only eligible U.S. citizens are registered to vote.” He warns that his office will “not look the other way. We will investigate and prosecute,” adding that “every legal vote deserves to be counted. Every illegal vote cancels one out.”

Since taking over as the top prosecutor in Los Angeles, Essayli — a former Republican state assemblyman — has proven that his loyalty to Trump exceeds his fealty to the law. He has dropped cases against the president’s allies; aggressively pursued charges against protesters rallying against the administration’s immigration crackdown, only to face a string of losses; and investigated California over its policies toward transgender athletes.

**

Kash Patel’s FBI is participating in this dangerous charade.

Last Thursday, the FBI executed a search warrant at the office of an Ohio-based community grassroots group — the Ohio Organizing Collaborative — that works to register voters. Over 125 federal agents reportedly showed up at the homes of its employees and volunteers to interview them. The agents knocked on doors and demanded to come into their houses to get phones, without warrants. They followed people in their cars, even followed kids to school.

Last fall, Frank LaRose, a Republican serving as Ohio’s top election official, referred 1,084 noncitizens who appeared to have registered in the state to the Justice Department. Federal investigators have also collected voter records in at least six Ohio counties, Reuters reported in April.

Why Ohio? It’s one of the few states where a Democrat — in this case, Sherrod Brown — has a chance to flip a formerly Republican seat in the U.S. Senate.

The FBI is also probing Wisconsin. It recently attempted to interview the director of elections in Milwaukee County. Earlier this year, Minnesota’s secretary of state received grand jury subpoenas seeking some voter records as part of a federal investigation into whether noncitizens are registered to vote or have unlawfully cast ballots.

**

Trump, his suck-ups Blanche and Patel, and their army of prosecutorial lackeys such as California’s Essayli and Minnesota’s LaRose are not out to win cases against voter fraud.

Their real purpose is to create so much doubt in the minds of the American public about whether voter fraud has occurred that it becomes easier for Trump to claim — after Democrats have prevailed in the 2026 midterm elections — that they did so because they cheated. And then for Trump, Blanche, and Patel to contest those wins.

According to this scenario, Trump would declare that the election results were rigged, as he has in the past. He would assert that the results in specific jurisdictions—counties, cities, or states— should not be recognized. He would allege fraud and irregularities, illegal ballots, or foreign interference, including cyber activity.

In response, compliant federal authorities would require investigation of those results before they were finalized. The authorities would move to secure ballots, voting records, or related materials in contested jurisdictions, building on the actions the Trump regime has already taken.

While these investigations are taking place, Trump would then call on congressional leadership to proceed as if the announced results are invalid, urging the Speaker of the House to organize the chamber on the basis of a Republican majority, and encouraging similar action in the Senate, urging them to ignore any jurisdictions in which the federal government was still undertaking its review.

It’s the only real strategy Trump has left — given that his war in Iran has failed, the prices of gas and food are likely to remain elevated through the midterm elections, and most working Americans are struggling far harder than they did before Trump occupied the Oval Office.

But it’s a dangerous, cynical strategy that will further undermine public trust in our system of government.

**

What can stop them?

Governors and mayors need to get in front of this and warn voters about this treachery.

They should give voters the facts about the infinitesimal incidence of voter fraud in their states and cities, show the resources they’re using to stop voter fraud, and explain any anomalies (such as the length of time it took in California to determine the outcome of the primary elections).

Governors also should communicate clearly and early to their constituents that election results will be honored, that certification will proceed under state law, and that the rights of voters will be protected regardless of federal claims to the contrary. That kind of clarity can shape public expectations before a crisis, not after it.

Governors should decide now that they will certify results under state law and will not alter or withhold certification in response to federal claims. They can secure custody of ballots and direct state law enforcement to protect election materials. They should prepare for the possibility that federal agents will attempt to seize ballots or voting infrastructure and define in advance how state authorities will respond.

Secretaries of state should secure chain-of-custody procedures as well as physical and digital records, and prepare detailed audit documentation for immediate release. They should prepare public reporting systems that make results, audits, and underlying data rapidly accessible. Speed matters. Claims of fraud and irregularities take hold quickly; rebuttal must be quick.

State attorneys general should draft complaints now, identify jurisdictions for filing, and coordinate multi-state litigation strategies. They should prepare to challenge ballot seizures, interference with certification, emergency detentions, and federal control of election processes. They should also coordinate with local prosecutors and law enforcement to define how state criminal law applies to interference with election administration.

All this still may not be enough. Trump is a master conman. But he’s also off his rocker — and part of the response to him and his bonkers claims must also be to emphasize that he’s out of his mind as well as responsible for the havoc America now finds itself in — the failed foreign adventures and the affordability crisis — and therefore must not be trusted.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.