Week of Oct. 29, 2026

From the publisher’s desk

In five days and change, the election will finally be over!

But there’s one problem: It actually won’t be over. Voting will be complete—but the legal challenges are just beginning.

If you follow the news at all, you know the Trump administration has been doing everything it can to sow distrust in this year’s elections—and they’re getting increasingly desperate since the polls aren’t looking great for Republicans.

In California, the Trump administration has been demanding that counties set aside ballots that supposedly may have been cast by non-citizens—yet the feds have refused to provide any evidence regarding those claims. Judges have NOT been impressed by these demands. CalMatters yesterday reported:

Saying the Trump administration had embarked on “a broad, ongoing pattern of attempted election interference,” a federal judge on Wednesday refused to order California election officials to set aside 20,000 ballots over claims those voters might not be citizens.

“Never before in American history has the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state and local government to abandon their own Constitutional elections procedures and bend to the will of the Executive Branch,” wrote U.S. District Judge David O. Carter, an appointee of President Bill Clinton.

“This request violates longstanding constitutional principles mandating that states have control over their elections,” the judge wrote, saying if he granted the Trump administration’s last-minute request “either party could create chaos for their own political purposes to disrupt the election process. Over 20,000 registered Californians would potentially lose the right that generations of Americans have fought to preserve.”

The California shenanigans are just part of a nationwide effort to draw attention to supposed illegal voting—and that effort was dealt a blow today by more unimpressed judges.

Politico reports:

A federal appeals court panel signaled Thursday that it is unlikely to let the Department of Homeland Security resume a crackdown on alleged illegal voting—a campaign civic groups say is a thinly veiled strategy to intimidate naturalized citizens.

A three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals questioned the Trump administration’s emergency demand to resume its enforcement surge, known as the Unlawful Voter Initiative. A federal judge in California blocked the initiative last week.

DHS agents in nine states have conducted street-level operations targeting people who they say have either voted or registered to vote illegally. Officials have paired those operations with a made-for-social-media PR campaign featuring armed, masked agents pulling people out of their homes and placing them in handcuffs.

“Isn’t part of this that the … surge has an aspect of it that seemingly actually wants to intentionally—is making an effort to instill fear?” Judge Kim Wardlaw, a Clinton appointee, said during Thursday’s hearing.

Meanwhile, in Alaska, Republicans are setting the stage for a big legal battle should the Democrat win the seat next week.

The Conversation explained how this is just the latest attempt by the Trump administration to wrest control of elections from the states:

The Trump administration’s lawsuit against Alaska, which seeks to block certification of the U.S. Senate results there if the GOP candidate does not win, is the latest in a long series of actions throughout 2026 in which the administration has attempted to wrest control of federal elections from states.

In the Alaska case, the U.S. Department of Justice, directed by President Donald Trump, claims that it aims to “protect the integrity of the 2026 Senate election in Alaska.” If incumbent Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan does not win re-election in a close vote, the DOJ asserts, it’s likely the result of voter confusion because another candidate with a very similar name—Daniel J. Sullivan, with no party affiliation—is on the ballot, too. So in the event that Sen. Sullivan fails to win re-election, the DOJ demands that Alaska not certify the election and instead should conduct an inquest into who voters thought they were voting for. …

There’s lots of other heated language in the case’s legal filings. But colorful language and legal citations are a much longer way of articulating a simple fact: The U.S. Constitution gives the president no authority over federal elections. That authority rests with the states and, to a limited degree, with Congress.

If there were any actual evidence or legal heft behind these claims by the Trump administration, that would be one thing—but there is no actual evidence or legal heft.

We saw on Jan. 6, 2001, the lengths that Donald Trump and his allies will go to in order to keep their power—so it’s likely that these aforementioned efforts are just the tip of an election-obstruction iceberg.

In five days, voting will be over—but Election 2026 will very much continue within the legal system.

Cheers,

—Jimmy Boegle, publisher/executive editor