This weekly update summarizing legislative activity affecting voting and elections is powered by the Voting Rights Lab. Sign up for VRL’s weekly newsletter here.
The Voting Rights Lab is tracking 2,208 bills so far this session, with 583 bills that tighten voter access or election administration and 1,050 bills that expand the rules. The rest are neutral, mixed or unclear in their impact.
With early voting underway in much of the country, an Arizona court ruled that armed citizens have a First Amendment right to conduct surveillance of drop boxes. Plaintiffs have asked the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for an injunction while their appeal is pending. And another Arizona group announced its intent to stop armed surveillance of drop boxes.
Meanwhile, the Nevada secretary of state ordered Nye County to halt its ballot hand count until it could comply with a court order prohibiting it from releasing results prematurely.
Looking ahead: The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has agreed to decide whether counties may count a timely mail ballot cast by a registered, eligible voter if the voter forgot to date their mail ballot certificate. The decision is expected any day.
Here are the details:
Arizona voters seek protection from armed drop box surveillance. Responding to complaints of armed individuals surveilling voters at drop boxes in Arizona, groups filed two separate lawsuits seeking restraining orders to prevent voters from being intimidated. The defendants in one of the cases announced they would cease monitoring drop boxes, though the judge in that case has not yet ruled. The judge in the other case denied the request, citing the observers’ First Amendment rights. Plaintiffs have asked the 9th Circuit for an injunction while their appeal is pending.
A hand count of all ballots is on hold in a Nevada county, but poised to proceed in an Arizona county. The Nevada Supreme Court ordered that Nye County could not livestream its hand count, or otherwise allow public observation of a pre-election hand count, because doing so would result in the illegal premature release of results. Following the court’s rulings, Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske ordered the county not to resume hand counting until it could comply with the orders.
Meanwhile Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich approved a hand count of all ballots in Cochise County. Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs has indicated an intent to pursue litigation to halt that hand count. Cochise County officials had clarified last week that they would pursue a limited hand count audit after the election, as opposed to a full hand count tabulation of election results, following the threat of legal action by Hobbs' office. It is unclear how the new opinion from Brnovich may affect that decision.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.