#texas
3 entries with this tag
Months After Gutting the Voting Rights Act So Elected Officials Could Redraw Districts However They Please, the Supreme Court Handed Them the Other Half of the Power Over Elections — Clearing the Trump Administration to Let States Screen Voter Rolls With SAVE, a Federal Database So Flawed That More Than One in Five Texans It Flagged as Noncitizens Turned Out to Be Citizens — Over the Three Liberal Justices' Dissent That Disenfranchising "Even a Few Lawful Voters" Outweighs the Government's "Nonexistent" Harm
On September 25, 2026, the Supreme Court reversed a lower court and cleared the way for the Trump administration to let states use SAVE — the Department of Homeland Security's Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database — to check the citizenship of registered voters before the November midterms. The order, on the emergency docket, drew a public dissent from the three liberal justices. The Court limited the ruling to "individualized" citizenship checks and noted that federal law still bars mass purges close to Election Day, reserving that larger question for a case next term. But the tool it revived is notoriously inaccurate, and it fails in one direction: it disproportionately flags naturalized citizens as ineligible. When Texas ran its voter rolls through SAVE, it identified 2,724 "potential noncitizens" — and then confirmed that at least 578 of them, more than one in five, were in fact U.S. citizens. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Sotomayor and Kagan, dissented that "the harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the Government experiences" — noting there is no meaningful noncitizen-voting problem for the database to solve. Seen alongside the Court's April decision gutting the Voting Rights Act to free legislators to gerrymander at will, this ruling completes a pattern: having let elected officials decide how voters are grouped, the Court is now letting the political branches decide, through a faulty database, who counts as a voter at all.
FEMA Will Withhold 20% of a $1 Billion Anti-Terrorism Grant Program — Money for Cybersecurity and Protecting Crowded Public Spaces — Unless States Rewrite Their Elections to Trump's Demands Before the Midterms, a Power the Constitution Gives Him Zero Authority Over
The Trump administration is holding counterterrorism money hostage to force states to change how they run elections before the November 2026 midterms. FEMA's fiscal-year 2026 Homeland Security Grant Program notice says the agency will withhold 20% of each state's total award — from a $1.064 billion program that funds cybersecurity, emergency planning, training, equipment, and protection of crowded public spaces — until the state proves it has complied with new "Election Security" requirements. Those requirements: submit a plan to abandon electronic voting systems that use bar codes/QR codes and move to hand-marked paper ballots (eliminating ballot-marking devices); conduct 5% manual post-election audits; reconcile voters against ballots cast; run the entire voter roll through the DHS "SAVE" citizenship database within 120 days; and verify the citizenship of every poll worker and vendor. In FY2025 the election-related hold was just 3% for three modest actions; FY2026 escalates it to 20% and a far larger list. The 3% election-security set-aside and the 20% holdback are explicitly separate — meeting one does not release the other. The grants flow largely to populous urban states: New York alone expects about $204 million in FY2026. Switching to hand-marked paper ballots would cost states hundreds of millions — Georgia's Republican secretary of state estimated $66 million for his state alone. The Constitution gives the president no authority over election administration; a federal judge recently wrote exactly that while blocking parts of Trump's anti-voting executive order, and another judge blocked DHS from using SAVE to purge voters, finding the administration "knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens." The DOJ has separately sued 30 states for refusing to hand over voter lists and warned election officials in all 50 states they could face criminal charges. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul: the administration is "once again putting New Yorkers' lives at risk to forward their political agenda." Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows: "Trump is trying to meddle in how states run American elections because he's terrified of losing power after the 2026 midterms."
FEMA Gutted Before Texas Floods Killed 134
After months of calling for FEMA's elimination, catastrophic Texas floods killed 134 people. Only 12% of FEMA's workforce was available. Search and rescue was delayed 72+ hours because DHS Secretary Noem required personal sign-off on every $100K+ expenditure.