I’ve got to give Mike Lindell credit for engaging our questions about whether he’s actually registered to vote in Minnesota, where he’s running for governor. But his explanation here – he texted our reporter a copy of a temporary driver’s license that expired in January – will truly make your day. See here.

New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill held a press conference today in which she announced that the state had just discovered that in 2023 and 2024 the state’s motor voter compliance system had automatically registered to vote 6,600 non-citizens who had said on the form that they were not citizens. (In other words, these people affirmatively said they were not citizens and were automatically enrolled as voters anyway.) She went to say that “fewer than 400” of them had gone on to vote.

A few weeks ago I wrote this post about how Google, once a foundation of the open web, had shifted decisively against it by transforming search into the front end of a chatbot. Now the Times has a piece that examines the same issue. This is usually presented as a extinction event or at least a catastrophe for publishers. It is. (It’s not for us because we were never very reliant on search.) But as I noted in that June post, there’s much more here than an issue for publishers. It’s part of the broader oligarchic moment in which a literal handful of monopoly tech platforms further entrench their monopolies, lock in ever greater profits and continue to plug that money back into to the political system they need to control to sustain and guard those profits.

I wanted to direct your attention to this podcast episode from Slate. It’s actually the first episode of a series Slate is doing on popular constitutionalism. (The page linked above is paywalled. But, I’m told, the ‘By the People’ pod series itself is not. So you should be able to find it on podcast platforms.) It brings together in a engaging and coherent way a number of themes we’ve been discussing over the last couple years about the problem of and the corruption of the U.S. Supreme Court. And it frames the question around a 20-year-old book on popular constitutionalism by Larry Kramer (The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review).

First, thank you again to everyone who has contributed to keep us moving forward toward our goal in this year’s Annual TPM Journalism Fund Drive. We have a chance to hit $300,000 tonight. If you’ve been considering joining us by making a contribution this afternoon and evening are great times for it. Just click right here. And thank you for supporting our work.

We’re now ten days into this year’s Annual TPM Journalism Fund Drive. Just over half way to our goal we’re now into the toughest part of the drive. We’re past the first rush of contributions but still pretty far from the goal of $500,000 when momentum starts to build again. If you’ve been considering making a contribution this year please make it today. It will go a long way toward keeping us on track for our goal. Just click right here. It’s your dollars that make what we do possible, keep TPM vital and moving forward. We can’t do this without you.

In press conference comments today, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened that state election officials could face jail time if they fail to cooperate with the White House’s purported efforts to “secure” the midterm elections, which seems to involve a range of illegal demands from the White House, Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department. The specific demand is for states to feed their voter rolls into the federal “SAVE” database which purports to identify noncitizens on the rolls. Mullin seems to be saying that if states refuse to bend to these illegal White House demands, the federal government will then scrutinize those states’ election returns (by seizing ballots?) and hold state election officials criminally responsible for any illegal voting. (Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon has already sent out threats all 50 states and D.C. along these lines).

We have here again the old story. States run elections in the United States. This is guaranteed and mandated by the federal Constitution. Congress can set uniform rules for administering elections. The executive branch plays no role at all in setting rules for elections or administering them. The White House’s strategy is to use illegal means (threatened criminal punishment against state officials) to assert power or compel authority the Constitution simply doesn’t allow. This isn’t how anything works. A president cannot legitimately create by force powers that the Constitution specifically denies him.

The AP has just posted a detailed investigation into the background of David Brouillette, the recently hired ICE agent who shot and killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine. It’s genuinely horrifying on more levels than are easy to describe. Brouillette was hired during ICE’s recent hiring spree, as the agency attempted to rapidly staff up to manage a program of mass deportation. Brouillette has a long history of severe mental illness, a lengthy history of violence against at least two wives as well as his children, stalking, a seemingly endless list of restraining orders, violent threats against other family members and more.

The big announcement of a “prime-time,” “Oval Office” “address” was typical Trump, encouraging Americans to live in his world. In the end, none of what he said was new. He did make the ill-founded claims about non-citizens on voter rolls, described in that “draft press release” which was covered by Politico and which Josh noted below. He also said some stuff about China acquiring voter files that we’ve known for years. He did not even go so far as to baselessly allege votes were changed, or that the election was otherwise stolen, as so many predicted he would. He of course concluded with a demand that the Senate pass the SAVE America Act.

We’ll look through the documents his government released and share any interesting or amusing details. More soon.

Voting rights, voter intimidation and the politics of voting have been central themes of TPM reporting going back more than 25 years. Over a quarter century you develop a lot of institutional knowledge. Today we’re seeing some of the most egregious journalistic negligence, sloppiness and ignorance helping propel forward the Trump White House’s assault on the integrity of the 2026 midterms. The piece I want to point you to this evening is Politico’s claim that DHS found “thousands of non-citizens on voter rolls in California and three other states.”

This claim is almost certainly false for reasons I’ll explain. I want to briefly summarize the multiple levels of journalistic negligence in Politico’s reporting.