How Trump Triggered California’s Redistricting Fight

“Trump, who urged Texas and other Red States to redistrict before the end of the decade in a shameless attempt to help the GOP pick up additional seats as we head toward the midterm elections. The Republican Party holds a slim House majority, so a slight shift can slow its agenda.

As the president posted on Truth Social: “Big WIN for the Great State of Texas!!! Everything Passed, on our way to FIVE more Congressional seats and saving your Rights, your Freedoms, and your Country, itself. Texas never lets us down. Florida, Indiana, and others are looking to do the same thing.”

This isn’t as ominous as, say, the GOP effort to steal the 2020 presidential election with absurd claims, bad lawyers and a mob attack on the Capitol. But it’s yet another GOP assault on democratic norms. Prop. 50 is the Democrats’ attempt to neuter these ill-gotten GOP gains. It’s not good, but it’s justifiable. It’s temporary, with the redrawing heading back to the commission in 2030.”

https://reason.com/2025/10/17/in-californias-redistricting-fight-there-are-no-principled-combatants/

Legislature passes new map in Utah, creating 2 more competitive seats

“The new map was the least favorable for Democrats of the six that the Legislature considered”

Legislators choosing voters rather than voters choosing their legislators.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/06/utah-new-map-redistricting-00595076

‘There could very well be consequences’: Trump’s team pressures wary GOP lawmakers to draw new maps

“President Donald Trump is ratcheting up pressure on Republicans to redraw congressional maps across the country, going as far as weighing a primary challenge to New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte if she continues avoiding a remapping effort in her state.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/30/redistricting-republican-loyalty-test-trump-00584932

Moldova’s pro-EU party wins clear parliamentary majority, defeating pro-Russian groups

“The alleged Russian schemes included orchestrating a large-scale vote-buying scheme, conducting more than 1,000 cyberattacks on critical government infrastructure so far this year, a plan to incite riots around Sunday’s election, and a sprawling disinformation campaign online to sway voters.”

https://thehill.com/homenews/ap/ap-international/ap-moldovas-pro-eu-party-wins-parliamentary-election-fraught-with-russian-interference-claims/?amp_js_v=0.1&tbref=hp

Analyzing the Digital Traces of Political Manipulation:The 2016 Russian Interference Twitter Campaign

“We collected a dataset with

over 43 million elections-related posts shared on Twitter between

September 16 and October 21, 2016 by about 5.7 million distinct

users. This dataset included accounts associated with the identified

Russian trolls. We use label propagation to infer the ideology of all

users based on the news sources they shared. This method enables

us to classify a large number of users as liberal or conservative

with precision and recall above 90%. Conservatives retweeted Rus-

sian trolls about 31 times more often than liberals and produced

36 times more tweets. Additionally, most retweets of troll content

originated from two Southern states: Tennessee and Texas. Using

state-of-the-art bot detection techniques, we estimated that about

4.9% and 6.2% of liberal and conservative users respectively were

bots. Text analysis on the content shared by trolls reveals that they

had a mostly conservative, pro-Trump agenda. Although an ide-

ologically broad swath of Twitter users were exposed to Russian

Trolls in the period leading up to the 2016 U.S. Presidential election,

it was mainly conservatives who helped amplify their message.”

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.04291

How Trump’s purges weaken the CIA & Russian ship on fire after drone hit

Trump is purging the CIA of people who contributed to reports with evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election. Trump is punishing people for doing an appropriate job while also weakening U.S. intelligence on Russia.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNveMlSeA7o

Trump cites Colorado’s mail-in voting in moving military space HQ to Alabama

“U.S. military operations in space will soon be led from Huntsville, Alabama. President Donald Trump announced he is moving U.S. Space Command headquarters out of Colorado Springs, Colorado, citing the state’s use of mail-in voting as a “big factor” in the decision.

“The problem I had with Colorado, one of the big problems, they do mail-in voting,” Trump said. “When a state is for mail-in voting, that means they want dishonest elections … so that played a big factor also.”

Trump also touted his support in conservative Alabama and slammed Colorado’s Democratic governor as he announced the relocation, the latest move in a years-long partisan tussle over the military’s space program.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/trump-moving-military-space-hq-161244515.html

Researcher who has distorted voter data appointed to Homeland Security election integrity role

“A conservative election researcher whose faulty findings on voter data were cited by President Donald Trump as he tried to overturn his 2020 election loss has been appointed to an election integrity role at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Pennsylvania activist Heather Honey is now serving as the deputy assistant secretary for election integrity in the department’s Office of Strategy, Policy and Plans

The political appointment, first reported by Democracy Docket, shows how self-styled election investigators who have thrown themselves into election conspiracy theories since 2020 are now being celebrated by a presidential administration that indulges their false claims.

Her new role, which didn’t exist under President Joe Biden, also comes as Trump has used election integrity concerns as a pretext to try to give his administration power over how elections are run in the U.S.

The president has ordered sweeping changes to election processes and vowed to do away with mail ballots and voting machines to promote “honesty” in the 2026 midterms, despite a lack of constitutional authority to do so. Trump’s Department of Justice also has demanded complete state voter lists, raising concerns about voter privacy and questions about how the federal government plans to use the sensitive data.

Since 2020, she also has led a variety of election research groups whose flawed analyses of election data have fueled right-wing attacks on voting procedures, including in battleground states Pennsylvania and Arizona.

In 2020, her election research misrepresented incomplete state voter data to falsely claim that Pennsylvania had more votes reported than voters. Trump echoed the falsehood during his speech to supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, saying Pennsylvania “had 205,000 more votes than you had voters.” Shortly after, his supporters violently attacked the U.S. Capitol in an effort to prevent Biden from becoming president.

In 2021, Honey was involved in the Arizona Senate’s partisan audit of election results in Maricopa County, she confirmed in a podcast interview with a GOP lawyer. That review in the state’s most populous county, which spent six months searching for evidence of fraud, was described by experts as riddled with errors, bias and flawed methodology. Still, it came up with a vote tally that would not have altered the outcome, finding that Biden actually won by more votes than the official results certified in 2020.

In 2022, Honey’s organization Verity Vote issued a report claiming that Pennsylvania had sent some 250,000 “unverified” mail ballots to voters who provided invalid identification or no identification at all.

Officials in Pennsylvania said the claim flagrantly misrepresented the way the state classified applications for mail-in and absentee ballots. The “not verified” designation did not mean the voter didn’t provide accurate identification information, nor did it mean their ID wasn’t later verified.

Former Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer said he received dozens of public records requests related to elections from Honey during his time in office, which took up “scores of hours of staff time.” He said he was surprised to hear she had been elevated to a position of such “authority and responsibility.”

From what he saw, Richer said, she’s “not a serious auditor.”

Honey’s hiring at the Department of Homeland Security comes amid reports that Trump’s administration has met with several other election conspiracy theorists in recent months.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/26/dhs-election-security-2020-election-conspiracy-00527453