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The Voting Rights Lab is tracking 2,197 bills so far this session, with 581 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.
The Midwest was home to the latest legal maneuvering of election rules last week, while a court opinion in Delaware delivered mixed results for voting rights advocates in the First State.
In Michigan, a court upheld state statutes that prohibit some types of voter assistance and a Wisconsin group filed a new lawsuit challenging the state’s use of the federal voter registration form. The Delaware ruling prohibits voters from voting by mail this election, unless they have a specifically enumerated reason but upheld the state’s new same-day registration law.
Looking ahead: The North Carolina Supreme Court is expediting a challenge to the state’s 2018 voter ID law. The state’s highest court will hear the case in October and determine the law’s fate prior to the November election. A lower court struck down the law, finding it intentionally discriminated against Black voters.
Here are the details:
Delaware court blocks no-excuse mail voting, but upholds same-day voter registration. Earlier this summer, Delaware enacted new laws creating no-excuse mail voting and same-day registration. Both laws were challenged in court. On Wednesday, Vice Chancellor Nathan Cook of the Delaware Court of Chancery issued an opinion enjoining the state’s Department of Elections from offering no-excuse mail voting for this November’s general election, finding that the law likely violates the state’s Constitution. Cook wrote that he was bound by judicial precedent to come to this conclusion, but that if he were looking at the issue “on a blank slate,” his finding would be different. No-excuse mail voting was established earlier this year by S.B. 320. In a consolidated opinion, Cook also dismissed the challenge to the state’s new same-day registration law, which was enacted by H.B. 25.
Federal court upholds unusual Michigan laws that prohibit certain types of voter assistance. A federal district court denied challenges to unusual Michigan statutes that prohibit hiring transportation to the polls for most voters and prohibit people who are not registered voters from assisting with absentee ballot applications. In the past, the challenged transportation law has been an obstacle for third-party organizations providing rides to voters without easy access to public transportation, rideshare apps offering discounted or free rides for voters, and organized voting efforts like “Souls to the Polls.”
Wisconsin group sues to prevent the state from using the federal voter registration form. The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty has filed another lawsuit to restrict voting access. After successfully ending Wisconsin Election Commission guidance authorizing drop boxes and allowing spouses and friends to return ballots for one another – and winning another case that will disenfranchise some eligible voters this November – WILL is now attacking the WEC’s approval of the federal voter registration form. WILL argues the form violates state law and cannot be used. Although the National Voter Registration Act requires most states to accept the federal form, Wisconsin is exempt because it offered same-day registration when that law was enacted. WILL is not challenging the registration of the people who previously used the form.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.