Politics

‘There’s something bigger going on’: Democratic state election chiefs rebuff Trump bid to seize voter rolls

Published

5 months ago

January 31, 2026

Democratic state election officials say the Justice Department’s letter to Minnesota over its voter rolls represents a significant escalation, with several warning that the Trump administration could use immigration enforcement to exert influence over November’s midterm elections.

The officials are baffled by the Trump administration’s continued demand for access to state voter information and refuse to comply, telling Blue Light News they view the requests as part of a broader effort by the administration to insert itself into state election proceedings.

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, has been at the center of the push after Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote in a letter to Gov. Tim Walz that one condition of restoring “law and order” in the state amid the administration’s aggressive immigration crackdown would be for Minnesota to turn over its voter rolls to the federal government.

Minnesota — one of two dozen states, along with the District of Columbia, sued by the administration — has rejected the request, prompting an unprecedented legal clash between the Justice Department and state election officials.

“To me, [it] seems to be a project in service of the president’s longstanding but false view that election systems around the country are rigging elections,” Simon told Blue Light News. “And this project seems to be in service of that, and that’s the best I can tell.”

Simon said he has not heard back from the Trump administration since responding to the Bondi letter. “This was already a dispute, but it was a dispute being fought where it belongs, which is in a court of law,” he said.

Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat running for reelection this year, called the letter to officials in Minnesota “extortion” and echoed the suggestion that the effort was aimed at something beyond voter rolls.

“The voter roll stuff is not about voter rolls. There’s something bigger going on,” Fontes said in an interview this week, as dozens of secretaries of state gathered in Washington for a meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State. “They’re bits and pieces, interchangeable in this jigsaw puzzle, and we’re being told something that’s not true,” he added.

The highly unusual push for access to states’ voter rolls is part of a yearlong campaign by the Trump administration, which says it is seeking to ensure that states’ voter registration practices comply with federal law and safeguard election integrity. The White House has requested voter records from nearly every state and Washington, D.C. The move comes as Trump frequently repeats his false claim that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged.”

The White House and Justice Department did not immediately respond to Blue Light News’s request for comment on this story.

At least 11 states have complied with the administration’s request, according to the Brennan Center.

Wyoming is one of the states that complied, and its secretary of state, Chuck Gray, a Republican, told reporters on Friday that it has been “very disturbing” to watch Democrats rebuff the administration’s request to engage in what he described as regular upkeep of voter rolls.

“We’ve been engaging in routine voter list maintenance that people support in making sure the voter lists are clean,” he said.

The Justice Department has sued the 24 states — most, but not all, of which are helmed by Democrats — that have refused to comply, with most citing concerns over exposing sensitive voter information.

“I’m certainly concerned that people may fear that the Department of Justice having access to the voting rolls might make them a target in some way,” said Maine Democratic Secretary of State Shenna Bellows.

“This Justice Department has weaponized its office to target people based on identity and based on political affiliation,” she said.

Uzoma Nkwonta, a partner at Elias Law Group, which is representing several states in litigation over the voter roll demands, called the effort “another example of overreach by the Department of Justice and the federal government.” “The fact that DOJ officials have stated publicly that they expect to see hundreds of thousands individuals removed from the rolls once they have this data … should set off a red flag,” Nkwonta said, noting that maintaining voter registration lists is a responsibility for the states, not the federal government.

Politics

World Cup match collides with Florida GOP bash

Published

2 hours ago

June 26, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

HOLLYWOOD, Florida — Colombia and Portugal’s World Cup match in Miami Gardens won’t be the only major draw pulling crowds to South Florida this weekend: Florida’s Republican grassroots are heading to Hollywood for their “Sunshine State Showdown.”

The GOP’s event at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino is one of the state party’s biggest of the year. The GOP sold more than 800 tickets, with the party’s most devoted volunteers and many donors coming in from all over the state to get revved up for the midterms, gameplan their messaging and hear directly from top candidates.

The shindig will feature speeches from Sens. Rick Scott and Ashley Moody, as well as gubernatorial candidates Rep. Byron Donalds, former Florida House Speaker Paul Renner and Lt. Gov. Jay Collins. It will also include two congressional debates.

Several “Showdown” attendees said they were thrilled about the convergence of their party’s bash with a World Cup match. South Florida has already seen a huge economic boom in recent years, and the Magic City is poised to become even more prominent given Miami is set to be home to Donald Trump’s future presidential library and will host the G20 in December. “Miami is again at the center of the universe,” observed Miami-Dade County GOP Chair Kevin Cooper.

Several prominent Republicans said they see the international event as an opportunity to showcase the state. State Rep. Dean Black of Jacksonville, who also chairs the Republican Party of Florida’s fundraising committee, said he’d enjoyed seeing fans from abroad show appreciation over social media for American culture. “They have fallen in love with the greatness of America,” Black said. “By being exposed to the Republican Party event, they will learn just how that greatness came to be.”

Collins’ team said that while the lieutenant governor wasn’t attending the game, he was “happy the state of Florida is hosting so many fans from across the world experiencing the beauty of our state.”

Former Fox 35 Orlando anchor Ryan Elijah, a GOP candidate for Congress who’s attending the showdown, said he would be checking his phone regularly for World Cup updates.

“What a night for Florida to see the biggest names in Florida politics and World Cup soccer be just miles apart!” he said in a text. “It’s a dream night for tourism numbers and local businesses!”

But the packed weekend also risks turning into a logistical headache. The Hard Rock Hotel is one of the pickup points offering shuttle services to Miami Stadium. It’s less than 9 miles away from the big game.

Angie Wong, Republican executive committeewoman in Miami-Dade, attended Wednesday’s match between Scotland and Brazil. She said her family paid $200 for parking near the stadium and that it took more than an hour just to get out of the parking lot.

“We were lucky — we actually left before the game ended,” she said.

Yet this year’s “Showdown” is a more scaled-back affair than in the recent past. It won’t, for example, feature a dinner like in previous years. But that’s probably good news for any attendees who don’t want to miss the soccer match — or who are just trying to get back home without getting stuck in traffic. And it doesn’t have any major Trump administration officials attending, in comparison to last year, when the event prominently featured White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and now-former deputy chief of staff James Blair, who is currently running Trump’s political operation for the midterms.

Florida’s GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis — who remains highly popular with the state’s grassroots — won’t be speaking at the “Showdown” this weekend and his office didn’t reply to an inquiry about whether he’d attend Saturday night’s game. The governor was in the Miami area during the last couple of days, including hitting the Brazil-Scotland game on Wednesday night and holding a press conference at the former Alligator Alcatraz immigration detention center on Thursday.

Evan Power, chair of the state party, had already arrived at the Hard Rock Hotel on Wednesday night and said he got to watch a Brazilian victory parade happening right outside the restaurant where he was having dinner. He added he hadn’t had any issues getting in and out of the events center and that Republicans sold out their room block, “so I think we were able to get in before the craziness.”

“In our room block, people are happy because they’re not paying the market rate that is out there,” Power said. “Seeing some of the prices — they’re crazy now.”

Politics

A drag queen, a rainbow festival and a game FIFA can’t control

Published

3 hours ago

June 26, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

SEATTLE — FIFA has not endorsed the Seattle host-city committee’s “Pride Match” designation, which will not be part of the official branding when Iran and Egypt meet tonight at Lumen Field.

“I think they’ve always been aware of what we’re doing,” said Louise Chernin, who as chair of the organizing committee’s Pride Match Impact Council began planning for the day nearly a year and a half ago.

Chernin began her match day at Rough & Tumble, a women’s sports bar in Ballard, a historically Scandinavian neighborhood where a crowd had gathered to cheer on Norway against France. The bar was notably free of FIFA’s commercial imprint: The World Cup posters on the walls and the merchandise for sale were all drawn by local artists without any official logos.

It all reflected the extent to which the “Pride Match” has become a gentle challenge not only to FIFA’s record of clamping down on some expressions of LGBTQ+ rights but also the corporate monoculture it creates in host cities through its restrictive sponsorship rules.

“If there’s going to be revenue spent, let us bring it to LGBTQ-owned businesses,” said Chernin, a longtime head of the Greater Seattle Business Association, an LGBTQ+ chamber of commerce.

Just down the street, fans had gathered at a “regnbue” street festival — the word is Danish and Norwegian for “rainbow” — organized by a local Ballard business association. The Norway-France match was being shown on an oversized screen, but when halftime hit attendees did not listen to any of the ads on the Fox broadcast.

Instead DJ SummerSoft took the stage as Sativa the Queen, a local drag performer, vamped through the break.

Politics

The world’s not big on the US. The World Cup might help.

Published

3 hours ago

June 26, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

America’s stint hosting the World Cup is drawing mostly positive reviews to date — and it couldn’t come at a better time.

According to a new report from the Pew Research Center, views of America across the world are worsening and confidence in President Donald Trump’s leadership is dropping.

Pew surveyed 42,000 people across 36 countries between February and May, and found that America has a largely negative impression on the global theater. Only 23 percent of surveyed adults expressed confidence in Trump’s leadership — eliciting less confidence than Chinese leader Xi Jinping (34 percent) and Russian President Vladimir Putin (31 percent).

Foreign policy is the biggest pain point for Trump’s international critics, who take issue with his handling of tariffs, Gaza, Iran, Greenland and the Russia-Ukraine war, according to Pew’s findings.

Meanwhile, fewer countries — and longtime allies — believe the U.S. is a reliable partner. In Canada, where 83 percent of respondents described the U.S. as reliable in 2022, that number is now down to 35 percent.

In 2023, 60 percent of Germans said the U.S. considers international interests in its foreign policy decisions. That share has now dwindled to 23 percent — Germany’s public opinion of the U.S. is “now similar to or more negative than what was measured during George W. Bush’s presidency, when many people in Europe and elsewhere strongly opposed the war in Iraq and other major elements of U.S. foreign policy,” writes Pew.

There are only seven nations where a majority rate the U.S. well — Israel leads the pack, with 81 percent of respondents viewing America favorably. Some of the country’s lowest ratings come from predominantly Muslim publics, “such as Malaysians, Pakistanis, Turks, and Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.”

Over the past decade, Pew’s polling has found growing concerns about the health of American democracy. A 2013 Pew survey, just as Barack Obama entered his second term, an all-time high of 75 percent of respondents in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Poland, the Philippines, South Korea and the U.K. said the U.S. respects its citizens’ personal freedoms.

Since then, declining shares of world respondents believe the U.S. respects its citizens’ personal liberties — and this year, 56 percent of respondents said the U.S. does not.