Number 30 in our series of occasional roundups on election law and policy:

• Feds intent on meddling: Laramie County Clerk Debra Lee, a Republican, “said the [Department of Justice] monitors’ questions were ‘outside the scope of federal voting rights laws.’ She added that they ‘requested training guides, asked how our new election equipment was acquired, and wanted to examine our tabulators.’” [Adam Edelman, NBC News] 
• “Currently, not a single state meets the restrictive ID criteria in the bill, though Ohio comes close.” A state-by-state survey of the costs, hassles, and burdens on administrators and voters had the Save America Act somehow passed Congress this year. [Institute for Responsive Government] 
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The morning brings news of whistleblower allegations concerning the US Postal Service and its response to President Donald Trump’s executive order on mail voting, key provisions of which are currently blocked by a temporary restraining order as federal courts consider its validity. According to the New York Times’s report, an official with the USPS alleges that the service has moved forward anyway with a “risky and haphazard” implementation of the order that “could lead to a ‘catastrophic failure’ in the mail ballot system ahead of this year’s midterm elections.… The report said that the agency had planned to complete the new digital system overseeing mail ballots by Sept. 1. ‘Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all,’ the official said in the report.”

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Today, the Cato Institute launches Your Verdict Counts, a nonpartisan civic education initiative anchored by an eight-minute short video designed to help Americans better understand their rights and responsibilities when called to serve on a jury.

The campaign focuses on educating prospective jurors about rights they are rarely told about before entering the courtroom. This includes the ability to vote according to their conscience, protections against punishment for a verdict, and the fact that “reasonable doubt” has no fixed legal definition and is left to each juror’s judgment.

Louisiana is no stranger to violating the constitutional duty to disclose exculpatory evidence to criminal defendants. In fact, half of the Supreme Court’s decisions reversing convictions on this basis come from Louisiana. Juan Matthews’s case is yet another entry in that troubling record and a further example of how Louisiana state courts are failing to uphold the Constitution’s guarantee of a fair trial.

Juan Matthews was wrongfully convicted of murder in 1992 after the state withheld a substantial amount of exculpatory evidence. Over 30 years into his prison sentence, a records request revealed previously undisclosed police files. These files “supplied an eyewitness who described a different man fleeing the scene, showed that the state’s central eyewitness may not have seen the shooting as she claimed, and revealed that a witness who did not have a prior relationship with the victim or his family was shown Matthews’s photograph but did not identify him as the suspected shooter.”

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Recently, I’ve begun to wonder how it is that grand juries—which have recently begun rejecting politically motivated prosecutions—have blessed prosecutions as ridiculous as that of former Olympian David Hearn.

Earlier this summer, a DC-based federal grand jury indicted Hearn on felony charges for allegedly vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. US Attorney Jeanine Pirro was eventually forced to dismiss the indictment against Hearn—and others—because the damage was caused not by Hearn or other vandals but by a Trump-connected contractor’s botched and rushed installation. As the US Attorney’s Office in Washington, DC struggles to secure convictions, the notion that DC grand jurors drawn from that precise community have greenlighted these prosecutions seems far-fetched—unless grand jurors are being lied to, manipulated, or aren’t being presented with the full picture.

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Looks like someone has leaked details to the New York Post about a plan led by appointees of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to go after the tax exemptions of major nonprofits perceived as being at ideological odds with the Trump administration. These include George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR); civil penalties and “massive back payments” are also envisaged. (Separately, the federal government is also pressing a criminal case against SPLC based on particular factual contentions unlikely to have a parallel for most other groups.) Treasury would be the lead agency in an attempt at mass revocation because it houses the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

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