Judge smacks down Trump’s anti-voting order, blocks key parts

• A federal judge permanently blocked key portions of the sweeping executive order on elections President Donald Trump signed last year. “Put simply, our Constitution does not allow the President to impose unilateral changes to federal election procedures," the judge wrote.
  
  
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Trump admin officials promised to address state election leaders. They bailed

• Attorney General Pam Bondi, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard were scheduled to address and take questions from chief election leaders attending the National Association of Secretaries of State conference today, where Democracy Docket was in attendance. But the officials canceled at the last minute without explanation.
  
  
• The cancellation drew ire among Democratic secretaries of state, who were planning to ask about the Trump administration’s recent attacks on voting and elections — including the DOJ’s unprecedented legal effort to obtain private voter data from every state, and Gabbard’s troubling presence at the FBI’s recent raid of Fulton County, Georgia’s election hub earlier this week.
  
  
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Judge officially tosses voter roll suit against Oregon, questions DOJ motives

• A federal judge formally dismissed the DOJ’s lawsuit seeking Oregon’s unredacted voter rolls and openly questioned whether the Trump administration’s campaign is driven by improper motives. The judge said the case would be thrown out entirely and warned that a recent letter from Bondi — which linked voter roll access to immigration enforcement demands — reinforced concerns that DOJ’s effort is pretextual, not about election administration.

Michigan investigation debunks GOP noncitizen voting claims

• A state investigation dismantled a noncitizen voting scare pushed by Michigan Republicans, finding the claims were based on misread data and wildly exaggerated. After reviewing records cited by Macomb County officials, the Michigan Bureau of Elections concluded that only a handful of cases even required follow-up — and there was no evidence of widespread noncitizen voting.
  
  
• The findings undercut GOP efforts to weaponize the episode to justify stricter voting rules and attack Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson.

Maryland advances counter-gerrymander map

• Maryland Democrats moved closer to wiping out the state’s last GOP-held U.S. House seat, as a key House committee advanced legislation approving a new congressional map designed to counter Republican mid-decade gerrymanders nationwide.
  
  
• The bill, backed by Gov. Wes Moore (D), would likely shift Maryland’s delegation from 7–1 Democratic to 8–0, positioning the state as an explicit counterweight to Trump-backed GOP redraws in places like Texas and North Carolina. 

Trump DOJ loses experienced anti-voting attorney

• Maureen Riordan, the former acting chief of the Justice Department’s voting section, was confirmed to have left the DOJ, Democracy Docket reported. Her quiet exit removes one of the few experienced lawyers left in the voting section and leaves control in the hands of newer, less experienced hires with records of election denial.
  
  
• That loss of competence matters: With Riordan gone and the section hollowed out under Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon, the Trump administration’s dangerous attempt to centralize voter data now looks even more stagnant — weakening a campaign that courts have begun to unravel.