Analilia Mejia's win with a nearly 20-point margin over Hathaway is significant, indicating strong voter support for Democrats in the current political climate.
James Talarico, a Democratic Senate candidate in Texas, has raised a staggering $27 million so far this year, with California donors contributing just under $1.2 million to back his campaign - second only to Texas supporters among those donors whose names were disclosed.
In 2024 alone, authorities imposed 304 internet shutdowns across 54 countries - the highest number ever recorded. This reflects a growing trend of governments treating connectivity as a weapon.
A group of researchers from Berkeley, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, and Yale warn that the rise of AI bots and AI agents could pose a serious threat to democracy. For example, power-hungry politicians around the world can relatively easily create swarms of AI bots that flood social media and messaging services with propaganda and disinformation. In this way, they can not only influence election results but also persuade parts of the population to replace parliamentary democracy with an authoritarian regime.
The prosecution of SGO furthers their collective false narrative that President Trump did not actually lose the 2020 election. Attorneys for the company said the decision was prompted by Trump's demands to prosecute his perceived enemies and his 'mantra' that Smartmatic helped rig the 2020 U.S. presidential election won by Joe Biden.
The Washington Roundtable discusses Donald Trump's threats to "nationalize" elections in fifteen states, the recent F.B.I. raid to seize 2020 voting records at an election facility in Fulton County, Georgia, and the ways in which the Administration might meddle with a free and fair vote in 2026. Their guest, Richard Hasen, is the director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at U.C.L.A.'s School of Law.
The Trump administration has since poured billions of dollars into immigration enforcement, and in March, Trump issued an executive order requiring the Department of Homeland Security to ensure that states have "access to appropriate systems for verifying the citizenship or immigration status of individuals registering to vote or who are already registered." In May, DHS began encouraging states to check their voter rolls against immigration data with the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program, run by US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). SAVE now has access to data from across the federal government, not just on immigrants but on citizens as well.
President Trump's firing of IGs and removal of acting IGs, and then the subsequent appointment of some very political folks as IGs ... does raise the specter of a politicized inspector general community," one of those fired watchdogs, Mark Lee Greenblatt, told Nextgov/FCW.
The concerns follow a series of election-related actions by Gabbard, including her recent appearance during an FBI raid of a Fulton County, Georgia elections office that was at the center of President Donald Trump's false claims of election fraud in 2020. Her team seized voting machines in Puerto Rico last year, per Reuters reporting, and has since said the systems contain cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
