Hello, and welcome back to The Franchise!

Last week, a coalition of officials from 25 Democratic-led states and Washington D.C. filed a federal lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, arguing that the administration is coercing states into complying with new unlawful election changes by withholding billions of dollars in disaster relief funding and homeland security grants if the states do not bend to President Trump’s demands around election administration. 

Specifically, the lawsuit argues that the Trump administration is coercing the states into adopting a number of new election procedures that it is trying to unconstitutionally force on state election officials. That apparently includes demands to transition to a paper ballot system and a requirement for states to run their voter rolls through an unrelated and unsecure database, the Federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system, to check voter rolls, among other things. 

“Last year, DHS and FEMA embarked on an unprecedented campaign to leverage the billions of dollars in federal funding that they administer to coerce States into adopting the Administration’s preferred policies,” the lawsuit states.  

The SAVE system, as TPM has reported, has been co-opted by the Trump administration and used as a way to purge alleged non-citizens from the voter rolls. The issue, however, is that there is evidence to suggest that the system has actually been removing eligible voters from the rolls, the states outline in their complaint.  

It’s worth noting too that the use of the SAVE system to purge voters from the rolls was blocked by a federal judge just last month.

“Congress never gave DHS or FEMA authority to rewrite state election law, require cooperation with federal immigration agents, or terminate federal funding streams at any time and for any reason,” the lawsuit says.

“The Constitution grants the States the power to administer and set the rules governing federal elections, and pursuant to that grant of authority the States have adopted a range of systems for ensuring that votes are counted fairly and accurately. Defendants, however, seek to upend those laws and policies and—using hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds as a cudgel—impose the current Administration’s preferred policies in their place,” the plaintiffs argue. 

We’ll keep you updated as this challenge progresses. As always, there’s a lot more to unpack into this week, so let’s dive in.

Making Sense of the 150,000 Rejected California Mail Ballots

Close to 150,000 mail ballots were rejected in California’s primary last month — the highest number of rejected ballots in recent years. According to data from the California Secretary of State’s office, a total of 148,241 mail-in ballots were rejected, which is 1.7 percent of all the mail-in-ballots cast. 

The majority of the rejected ballots — 93,497 to be more precise — were scrapped due to reportedly not being received on time. In California, all mail-in ballots need to be postmarked on or before Election Day, and they need to be received up to seven days after Election Day in order to be counted. Another 52,000 ballots were rejected due to signature verification issues, meaning either there was no signature on the ballot or there was an issue with non-matching signatures.

“I believe we saw an increase in the number of ballots rejected for being too late to count due primarily to voters holding on to their ballots longer than they might otherwise because of the volatile nature of the race for Governor and many groups encouraging voters to wait,” Kim Alexander, president of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation said in an email to TPM.

And while this is a larger number of rejected ballots than usual, “it’s a comparatively small percentage,” Justin Levitt, professor of law at Loyola Marymount University told me.

“People keep forgetting, California is huge,” he said. 

And Levitt said the incident actually provides evidence that election integrity is alive and well in California — despite what the Trump administration and election deniers might want you to believe. 

“It, to me, is part of the evidence that California takes the integrity of its election incredibly seriously,” he said. “California puts a thumb on the scale for bending over backward in its legal rules to help ballots get counted. But if you’re outside of those legal rules, it’s not going to count the ballots.”

DOJ Uses New Jersey Noncitizen Voter Episode to Bolster Its Demand for Unredacted Voter Data

Democratic New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill is pushing back on the DOJ’s demand to hand over the names of close to 6,600 noncitizens who were reportedly accidentally added to the state’s voter rolls due to a software error in the state’s automatic voter registration program in 2023 and 2024.

Last week, Sherrill announced the error which originated at the state’s Motor Vehicle Commission. As a result of the glitch, 400 noncitizens voted in at least one election since 2023. And although Sherrill has said that these noncitizens were removed from the voter rolls and that these ineligible votes did not impact the results of the elections in which they participated, it’s been good news for the Trump administration’s years-long quest to find evidence of any kind to support the myth that non citizens are voting in our elections.

In response to this revelation, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Harmeet Dhillon, sent a letter to Sherrill last week demanding that she hand over data (including names and addresses) on all these noncitizens. Sherrill, however, is refusing to comply with this demand.

“We are not in the practice of turning over this kind of personally identifying data over to the federal government because we have seen them weaponize it, I’ve seen it personally,” she said last week. “They are working to weaponize personal data, and they don’t have a reputation for keeping it private either.”

Of course, this whole unfortunate episode is now being used by the Trump administration as a way to help bolster its failing campaign to seize sensitive voter data from the states. The DOJ has, for months now, been demanding unredacted voter files from at least 44 states and Washington, D.C. Few states have complied, and the DOJ has sued in response — and it has lost every single case that has gone to court.

On the same day that it sent the letter to Sherril, the DOJ also filed a notice of additional basis in court to help its New Jersey voter roll case, arguing that the incident is evidence that the DOJ truly does need the state’s unredacted voter rolls. 

“The Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice sent Defendant the Additional Basis Letter because the Civil Rights Division learned of Governor Mikie Sherrill’s announcement on X on July 21, 2026, that ‘roughly 6,600 people who indicated that they were not U.S. citizens between June 2023 and June 2024’ were in fact ‘registered … anyway’ by New Jersey election processes—and roughly 400 of those people voted,” the notice reads. 

In Other Election News

TPM: Jay Clayton Confirmed As DNI — A Position Trump Warped to Feed His Election Conspiracy Theories

Democracy Docket: Trump DOJ said some states ‘cooperated’ with voter roll grab by providing public information. It sued other states for doing the same

AP: Trump’s attacks on mail balloting and concerns over delays turn midterms spotlight on Postal Service

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This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.

Kash Patel, the conservative podcaster whom President Donald Trump appointed as the director of the FBI in 2025, is currently suing The Atlantic for $250 million over its reporting that his predilection for drinking “to the point of obvious intoxication” has been a “recurring source of concern across the government.” In a lawsuit he filed in federal court on April 20, Patel characterized the article as a “sweeping, malicious, and defamatory hit piece.” In an interview on April 23, the writer, Sarah Fitzpatrick, said that in the days since The Atlantic published the story, she’d been “inundated” with new sources corroborating it.

Thanks so much to everyone who came out to our event at Crystal Lake bar last night in collaboration with Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket! It was great to see some of you again, meet some local readers making it out to their first TPM event, and connect with readers who traveled just for this show. (Shout out to the lovely couple from Berkeley, California!)

Let’s See the Actual Language

I harbor a growing suspicion that a collective hoodwinking is going on in the Senate confirmation of Todd Blanche as attorney general.

It’s hard to argue that the delay of today’s crucial Senate Judiciary Committee vote on Blanche’s nomination isn’t a pretty big deal (even though he could still remain on as acting attorney general for the balance of Trump’s term).

But when you look closely at what Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), backed by Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), is demanding for his vote, it’s not at all clear what the dispute is actually over — and there’s quite a bit of reporting that suggests Cornyn is not driving a hard bargain at all.

If it seems weird to you that the breathless coverage of the Blanche confirmation is happening without anyone publicly knowing exactly what Cornyn is demanding, I agree! It’s weird.

Going into this dustup, the common understanding was that senators like Cornyn and Tillis wanted more ironclad reassurances that the “anti-weaponization” slush fund was well and truly dead. So far so good.

Then came the somewhat surprising and even refreshing news that Cornyn was also targeting the legally dubious immunity that Trump had also been given in the settlement of his lawsuit against the IRS. Even better.

If Blanche could stick around as acting AG anyway, then extracting a concession on the insanely corrupt IRS immunity provision of the settlement agreement was arguably a shrewd, if narrow, win for Cornyn and those of us in the anti-corruption brigade. If estimates are correct, the value to Trump of securing immunity from past tax liabilities to the IRS was in the range of $100 million. That’s not nothing.

But over the past few days, news reports on what Cornyn is demanding have been very fuzzy and often gloss over the specifics, just saying generally that Cornyn is targeting the IRS immunity deal. But what Cornyn has said himself and what a few reporters have picked up on raise serious doubts that Cornyn is actually targeting the Trump IRS immunity everyone has been up at arms about.

Instead, Cornyn seems to be aiming to keep the immunity deal intact but to limit it to the retroactive immunity everyone already understood to be part of the deal, not prospective immunity, which an expansive interpretation of the loose language of the agreement might have allowed. Cornyn also apparently wants to make sure no one else gets the benefit of the immunity deal other than the parties to the lawsuit — Trump, two of his sons, and the Trump Org.

At this point, you should be saying WTF?

Again, I agree!

Here’s the most comprehensive statement of Cornyn’s position, from his own mouth on Monday (emphasis mine):

What I want is the written document to say the same thing [Blanche] did in his sworn testimony in front of the Judiciary Committee, and, as you recall, what he said is the weaponization fund is dead. He said the audit immunity basically doesn’t extend to parties beyond the lawsuit, and it doesn’t also extend to future actions by federal agencies other than the IRS.

I’m not sure how else to read that other than it locks in the retroactive immunity and applies it only to the Trumps and their company.

That’s still the line Cornyn was taking yesterday, not long before the committee vote was pushed off, as paraphrased by the WSJ (emphasis mine):

To earn his vote, Cornyn said, the simplest fix would be for the parties to the settlement—the Justice Department, IRS and Trump—to revise it to conform to Blanche’s testimony at his confirmation hearing: The weaponization fund is dead, the audit protection doesn’t apply to people beyond the parties to the lawsuit, and it only applies to the IRS, not other agencies.

Here’s how the NYT obliquely puts it: Cornyn “said he had received no written assurances from Mr. Blanche that the audit shield would not apply to future tax liabilities or be extended to a wider circle of people.”

Cornyn and the DOJ have reportedly traded draft language back and forth but none of that has been made public, so it’s impossible to know precisely what they’re haggling over — or if Cornyn is indeed giving away the whole store, as it has started to seem this week.

If the reporting on Cornyn’s demands is correct, then Trump, Don Jr., Eric, and their company still get the $100 million gift from the President’s own administration to himself. And locking that in has the political (though not legal) effect of Senate Republicans publicly ratifying the corrupt bargain by voting to confirm Blanche.

In another worrying sign that Cornyn isn’t really asking for much, both sides seem perplexed that things haven’t gotten worked out yet and confident that they can iron out whatever differences remain over the precise language.

“It’s not a big ask,” Cornyn said yesterday, in what may be the understatement of the week.

Quote of the Day

“This is so dangerous. I’m living proof of the danger. My son isn’t here because someone disagreed with the way I was handling a case in court.”—U.S. District Judge Esther Salas, whose son was killed and husband wounded in 2020 attack at her New Jersey home by a disgruntled attorney, on DHS General Counsel James Percival attacking district judges by name on X

TPM in the World

I talked with Greg Sargent yesterday about the blast of new filings in the James Comey “86 47” case — and about Trump bumping up against the limits of his powers in several different realms:

We Need You

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RIP Glen Hansard

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Good morning. It was great to meet all of you who came out to our event in New York last night with Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket.

Trump Tries to Raise the Stakes on SAVE Again

President Donald Trump made a show yesterday afternoon of preparing to throw Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) to the wolves out of frustration that the SAVE Act is not yet on track to pass in any form. The latest push is to jam parts of the bill through using budget reconciliation, which requires 51 instead of 60 votes, though Trump also continues to agitate for Thune to nuke the filibuster and pass the full voter suppression package.

Asked whether Thune is the right person to lead the Senate, Trump said, “We will find out, and I will let you know.”

“All right. Well, that’s nice of him, I guess,” Thune told Punchbowl. “I don’t know — what do you say on that? That’s a decision that’s made by my colleagues.”

Throughout Trump’s SAVE Act pressure campaign on his Senate allies, he has repeatedly made demands that misunderstand the reality of how the Senate functions, and how bills become law. He has seemed amenable to passing what everyone has taken to calling the “SAVE Act” through budget reconciliation, even though a SAVE Act done through reconciliation, while bad, would likely be without the nationwide voter-ID and proof-of-citizenship mandates that are core to what the SAVE Act is. It is unclear whether Trump realizes this. He has refused to sign a popular housing bill, though without his signature it simply became law after 10 days; in doing so, the president achieved nothing on the SAVE Act while robbing himself of an opportunity to claim a victory on “affordability.” His demands for the SAVE Act to be attached to various funding bills dramatically complicated his allies’ attempts to fund ICE over Democratic opposition in the spring, and look sure to complicate government funding fights this fall.

When we see legislators take bills hostage, an increasingly common phenomenon since the Obama era that has often led to government shutdowns, the more effective efforts involve lawmakers carefully finding legislation where they have maximal leverage. Trump hasn’t done this — perhaps he doesn’t have the attention to detail to do so — and is as a result unable to truly achieve anything beyond making life considerably more frustrating for his fellow elected Republicans.

That’s the case this week, too. Thune is, of course, right that, in the end, Trump does not select the majority leader, though he may wish he did. Other senators do. Trump can’t oust Thune. But he can elevate him as a target at which his activist base should direct their hate.

Trump’s Blanche Nomination Gets Stuck

John Cornyn (R-TX) has caused a vote to advance Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general, scheduled for today, to be postponed.

• Yesterday, Cornyn said he was canceling a meeting with Blanche, explaining that he wanted to see a written modification to the settlement between Trump and the IRS that would have created the “anti-weaponization” slush fund.
• The DOJ told us it sent a “written proposal to Senator Cornyn’s staff.” Cornyn told reporters, “I haven’t seen a single piece of writing that is responsive to what I’ve requested.”
• The vote could move forward whenever Cornyn gives the green light, though at this point that might not happen with enough time to confirm him before the Senate takes a month-long recess, beginning at the end of next week.
• The episode is more significant as a (perhaps short-lived) display of GOP Senate resistance to Trump than as an actual check on the DOJ: Even if Blanche isn’t confirmed, he can remain in the role as acting attorney general. And whatever the fate of the slush fund, settlements for right-wing activists continue, with the DOJ agreeing this week to pay more than a million dollars to an anti-abortion activist who was convicted in 2024 of conspiring to prevent access to a clinic, the New York Times reports.

Tabs

• Republicans may not end up following Trump’s endorsement and picking Darline Graham Nordone to fill her brother’s seat, the Washington Post writes. The Downballot gives a rundown of the many, many other candidates in the race, including some figures we’ve covered quite a bit over the years.
• Kash Patel has lost a defamation suit against an internet poster who called him a “googly-eyed Kremlin bitch” and a “chud,” the New Republic reports. U.S. District Court Judge for the district of Nevada Andrew P. Gordon found he did not have jurisdiction.

Man of the Hour

It’s Alex Jones, the onetime stalwart ally of President Trump who has now turned to demanding his impeachment over the Iran war to attract attention (which, admittedly, he is succeeding in doing). I used a gas station bathroom off I-95 the other day where someone had written “Alex Jones is right” on the soap dispenser — so make of that what you will.

Are We at War?

You bet.

This article is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

On August 4, Kansas voters will decide whether to replace the state’s longstanding merit selection system for Supreme Court justices with direct elections. Republicans want voters to believe the proposed constitutional amendment is just about transparency and giving the public more power over who sits on the state’s highest court, but the debate in Kansas is also part of a broader Republican push to inject more partisanship into state judicial elections. But the differences in where they want partisan elections and where they do not give the game away.

Two influential Senate Democrats are pushing back on the nearly unfathomable idea that a company owned by the sitting U.S. president can sell Wall Street early access to that president’s thoughts and actions.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, called on Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Paul Atkins to “immediately” investigate a forthcoming subscription model from the company behind President Donald Trump’s Truth Social that plans to sell extra-fast access to the most influential posts on the platform to high-paying clients. 

The subscription appears to be founded in the premise that Trump’s social media posts influence financial markets and investors. Providing high-paying institutional customers first dibs on that market-moving information, the senators said in the letter, could give them a trade advantage and further exacerbate the divide between a hyper-wealthy investment class and everybody else.

“The Trump Administration is the most corrupt in the nation’s history, and questions about inappropriate insider access to information about its policies and actions have raised questions on multiple occasions,” the letter, dated Tuesday, reads. 

The Truth Social fast-access plan, though, “represents a shocking abuse of the office of the President and the trust of the American public for his personal gain.”

On July 16, Trump Media and Technology group announced Truth API, the “business-to-business” subscription model that would offer banks and trading firms “real-time” access to Trump’s market-moving musings on Truth Social. A press release about the program boasted that it would feed subscribers the platform’s most influential posts “within milliseconds.” And the company — 41% of which, according to the senators’ letter, is held by Trump’s revocable trust — didn’t shy away from the fact that this scheme will be profitable. It mulled charging as much as $100,000 a month for the subscription, according to a report from Reuters.

“As adoption grows, we expect Truth API to become a meaningful, ongoing source of revenue for the company, creating lasting value for shareholders,” TMTG interim CEO Kevin McGurn said in a mid-July release.

The plan is set to launch by August 1 and immediately drew concerns about insider trading. One former SEC official told TPM the plan should at least draw scrutiny from Congress and the SEC. 

Warren and Schiff are calling on the SEC to provide an analysis of the TMTG plan as it relates to laws about insider trading and market manipulation, to detail plans for enforcement in the event of market manipulation relating to this subscription, and to share legal tools available for retail investors.

Warren and Schiff’s letter to Atkins goes on to list the well-documented ways in which stock performance has changed based on Trump’s social posts: Citigroup outperformed other banks the day Trump made a Truth Social post praising the bank, the letter said. After Trump used Palantir Technology’s ticker symbol to celebrate the Defense Department contractor’s equipment, the company’s stock shot up, it noted. And “Intel shares proceeded to jump 3%” hours after Trump wrote “Intel Stock continues to rise” on Truth Social.

“Ultimately,” the letter says, “Trump Media’s new service threatens to undermine the integrity of capital markets.”

By now, you may have seen the headlines about Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) dragging former Trump and Biden administration health official Dr. Anthony Fauci before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee — during which he berated him for pleading the fifth and kicked Fauci’s attorney out of the hearing.

It looks like we are going to get a big test of some cardinal (possibly outdated) assumptions about American politics. I’m thinking first about the Michigan Senate race (though we might have something similar in the Wisconsin governor’s race). Several recent polls show Abdul El-Sayed holding a consistent, substantial lead over Rep. Haley Stevens. The primary is on August 4. This has been presented as a prototypical Democratic establishment vs Bernie progressive/insurgent race. And in key respects it is.

El-Sayed has all the Bernie/progressive positions. He’s run a campaign that places a heavy emphasis on the Israel-Palestine issue. And he’s centered AIPAC in his campaign in a way that even for many longtime critics and haters of AIPAC (including myself here) has a distinct whiff of antisemitic conspiracy theories. To wit, yes, AIPAC sucks. They’re a blight. They are functionally a Republican operation these days. But they are not the secret hand guiding things in the background every time there’s a bad news story or reverse of fortune for some progressive candidate, which is basically the role they’re playing in El-Sayed’s campaign.