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Today, election officials in Nevada found that every single person that Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security flagged as a non-citizen voter is actually a U.S. citizen. California’s top court just ordered a Republican sheriff to give back hundreds of thousands of ballots his deputies seized from the county. The Republican senator running the GOP’s Senate campaign arm is warning his colleagues that November could be a total wipeout for the party. And the White House’s new 24-hour streaming channel is losing a ratings battle to a video of a blank screen.
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Last month, President Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) sent Nevada a list of 185 names it said were non-citizens who had been illegally registered to vote. State election officials checked every name. And this week, they told the DHS that every person on their list is actually lawful U.S. citizen.
Nevada deputy attorney general Greg Ott confirmed the findings in a letter to the administration, writing that the DHS had “provided nothing of substance to suggest otherwise.” Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar accused the agency of trying to scare election officials and voters with baseless fraud claims, adding that “repeating unsupported claims does not make them true.”
This all dates back to July, when Trump and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin claimed that there were more than 270,000 noncitizens on voter rolls in Nevada, California, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. While they presented that figure as a fact, subsequent DHS letters notably used the phrase “there may be as many as.” Again, with no actual proof.
Mullin claimed there were as many as 15,903 noncitizens in Nevada. In an August meeting, a DHS official admitted there was no manual review that led to that specific number. And the state said DHS never even sent them the full list, but rather sent them approximately 6,000 “voter case numbers” with no names, birthdates or addresses attached. As Ott noted, that figure only proves a number exists in a voter system.
According to the New York Times, hundreds of DHS agents were pulled off of highly sensitive terrorism and international crime cases for nearly three weeks to hunt for non-citizen voters. This is despite decades of evidence showing that non-citizen voting is extremely rare and has never once happened with enough frequency to sway an election.
The California Supreme Court has ordered Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, a Republican, to return roughly 650,000 ballots his office seized earlier this year.
Those ballots were cast in last year’s special election on Proposition 50, in which Californians overwhelmingly voted to approve a congressional redistricting map drawn specifically to counter Texas Republicans’ gerrymandering push. Bianco seized the ballots as part of a voter fraud investigation that state officials said was baseless. The court already ordered him to halt that investigation in April, and today justices ruled in two cases that Bianco never had the legal authority to carry out the seizure.
Associate Justice Goodwin Liu emphasized the seriousness of what Bianco did, writing that armed Riverside County sheriff’s deputies removed and handled more than 1,000 boxes that contained “the most precious documents of the citizenry in a democracy: their votes.”
Bianco said some of his residents complained the vote count didn’t match the number of ballots received. But even if that were true, it wouldn’t have mattered in the scope of the election, as Prop 50 passed easily with a whopping 64 percent of the vote. Bianco was also running for California’s Republican gubernatorial nomination when he launched the investigation. However, he finished fourth in the June primary and won’t appear on the November ballot.
Bianco is still refusing to back down. On Thursday, he claimed Attorney General Rob Bonta is blocking an investigation into something he doesn’t want the public to know about, and even invoked the Founding Fathers.
This is a byproduct of Trump spending years teaching Republicans that any election that Democrats win has to be rigged. And now that both Trump and the GOP are polling at record lows, we can probably expect more of this kind of behavior from MAGA law enforcement officials during and after the November midterms.
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With less than six weeks before voters head to the polls, TIME is reporting that Republicans are in a total panic about the possibility of losing both the House and Senate.
On Wednesday, Republican Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, who leads the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), gave the Senate GOP a closed-door briefing warning his colleagues that 2026 will likely be way worse for the party than 2024. One attendee said Scott called on incumbents to run like they were behind so the NRSC could focus on an increasing number of toss-up races. Republicans are now scrambling to hold onto what were previously assumed to be safe GOP seats in Alaska, Iowa, Maine and Texas. If Democrats flip four Republican seats, they’ll retake the Senate majority.
Republican-aligned groups are now even pouring millions of dollars into deep-red states like Kansas and Nebraska. Other solidly red states like Arkansas, Mississippi, South Carolina and South Dakota are also on the NRSC’s radar as potential flips.
In Iowa, which Trump won by more than a dozen percentage points just two years ago, conservative radio host Steve Deace said House Republicans in the Hawkeye State heard from their own pollsters that 15-point GOP legislative districts are within the margin of error, while 10-point districts are underwater. Deace warned that 2026 could be worse than the 2006 midterms, when then-President George W. Bush lost his Republican majorities due to opposition to his unpopular war in the Middle East. And to drive the point home, Republican Congressman Zach Nunn just voted with Democrats to rein in Trump’s war with Iran, while Republican U.S. Senate nominee Ashley Hinson is running ads about working across the aisle with Democrats rather than hyping her endorsement from Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, a Republican super PAC backed by Senate Majority Leader John Thune is on track to spend an astronomical $100 million helping Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton fend off Democrat James Talarico, who is leading in recent polls. And Politico reported that House Republicans have reserved $485 million in ads in districts Trump carried in 2024.
As diesel prices keep hitting new record highs and the Iran war creeping into its eighth month, one GOP strategist confided to TIME that Election Day can’t come soon enough.
This week, the White House officially launched “Trump TV,” which is a nonstop YouTube livestream of old speeches, announcements and highlights. They promoted the new endeavor with clips stolen from The Simpsons and The Office.
Americans aren’t exactly swarming it with views. According to the Independent, a YouTube video of a blank screen with the sound of a box fan droning on in the background had more streams than Trump TV. On Thursday afternoon, fewer than 700 people were Trump TV’s broadcast of the president’s May 2025 University of Alabama graduation address. But a livestream of birds and squirrels eating had over 2,000 viewers, while “Rain Sounds for Sleeping” had more than 4,000 people watching.
The timing of the launch is interesting, as several days before the launch, the president banned CNN, MSNOW and Politico from the White House due to those outlets covering him in a way he didn’t like. Those outlets sued on First Amendment grounds, and U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly — a Trump appointee — ruled on Thursday to restore reporters’ credentials while their lawsuit played out.
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Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent media. I’m John Byrne. Please click the ❤️ and restack this post if you haven’t yet.
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