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  • Democrats accuse Green Party candidate in Lehigh Valley district of Republican meddling

    Democrats accuse Green Party candidate in Lehigh Valley district of Republican meddling

    WASHINGTON — In a Pennsylvania election where a few thousand votes could make all the difference, the last-minute entrance of a Green Party candidate with a background in Republican politics has sparked the second allegation of election meddling in three months and complicated one of the nation’s most competitive U.S. House races this fall.

    The Lehigh Valley-based 7th Congressional District matchup features U.S. Rep. Ryan Mackenzie, a Republican who won the seat by 1 percentage point in 2024, and Bob Brooks, a Democratic union leader and retired firefighter.

    Both parties are prioritizing the race as control of the U.S. House could come down to a few seats nationwide.

    But the emergence of a third-party candidate has alarmed both Democrats — who have long claimed that Green Party candidates pull votes from their nominees — and the Green Party of Pennsylvania, which said it does not know the person now representing its platform in one of the state’s highest-profile races.

    “It sounds a lot like somebody’s just fooling around and trying to use the Green Party name, which is a well-known thing that happens in many states,” said Tim Runkle, cochair of the state party.

    Andrew Tupone, 37, of Northampton County, filed his nomination papers with the state last week ahead of a Monday deadline for third-party candidates. He was the only candidate to file to represent the Green Party in a Pennsylvania race for Congress.

    Unlike the Green Party’s endorsed candidate for governor — Tony Dastra of Lancaster County — Tupone does not have a long association with the party or its left-leaning policies. In 2021, he was the Republican nominee for a Northampton County magisterial court seat. Voter registration records show he changed his party affiliation from Republican to Democrat in February, and then from Democrat to Green in April.

    In an interview, Tupone rejected accusations that he remained affiliated with the Republican Party or that he was asked to run in a way that would draw votes away from the Democratic nominee. He described a leftward shift in his political views after voting for President Donald Trump in 2020, though he said he could not recall whom he voted for in the 2024 presidential race between Trump and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.

    “A lot of people are disillusioned with both parties,” Tupone said. “They’re sick of all the stuff that’s going on.”

    Tupone also said he did not pay anyone to help gather signatures for his nominating papers, which he turned in with upward of 9,000 signatures — more than twice as many as required. Runkle said Green Party members encountered paid canvassers for Tupone who declined to say who was funding the effort.

    According to a copy of the nominating papers obtained by The Inquirer, only one of the 22 individuals who gathered signatures is from Pennsylvania. The rest are from all over the country. Multiple have worked for Republican campaigns, according to public records.

    Colin McEvers, who gathered signatures for Tupone in Lehigh County, is a Republican candidate for the Maryland General Assembly who is also listed as the contact for the Maryland White Republican Council. Others — including individuals from Illinois and Michigan — have been paid to canvas for GOP campaigns, according to Federal Election Commission records.

    Tupone said he had no knowledge of anyone paying his canvassers.

    “I went around and I gave a lot of my nominating papers to friends to give to other people, and I sent it to them as well,” Tupone said. “And as I went around, I recruited people and asked them.”

    While the signatures appear to be based in the district — which stretches from the cities of Allentown, Bethlehem, and Easton into the more Republican-leaning Poconos — the other candidates have until Aug. 10 to challenge their legitimacy.

    Such challenges are common, and the Brooks campaign is reviewing its options to decide whether to bring a challenge, according to a source familiar with the campaign’s thinking.

    ‘No one’s paying me to run’

    Jenna Kauffman, Brooks’ campaign manager, in a statement described the situation as a GOP-initiated and “desperate scheme to meddle in this race.”

    She connected it to a last-minute $1.7 million advertising campaign against Brooks in the May primary that appeared to be run by Democrats but was actually funded by a Republican political organization.

    The spending, by a political action committee called Lead Left, was aimed at boosting another Democrat who observers considered to have a worse shot at beating Mackenzie in the November election. But the effort was anonymous, and records that became public only after Brooks won show that it was funded by the Conservative Americans PAC.

    The effort to prevent Brooks from emerging from the Democratic primary came as he coalesced support from across the ideological spectrum with high-profile endorsements ranging from moderate Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro to U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (Ind., Vt.), a democratic socialist.

    “Voters deserve to know who is paying for this effort and whether Ryan Mackenzie and his Republican backers are involved,” Kauffman said, painting Tupone’s candidacy as a continuation of the move in the primary.

    Mackenzie’s campaign did not address that comment when asked about it Monday.

    Tupone said that the inference was “just false,” and that he instead likes the values of the Green Party, which he said included supporting the environment, social justice, and “stopping the corruption and also the genocide in Gaza.”

    “No one’s paying me to run. No one’s asked me to run for this office. I’m running on my own, hopefully with a lot of hope from everyone who wants to volunteer,” Tupone said. “I’m not associated with the Republican Party anymore. I’m not a candidate for them.”

    For years, Democrats have voiced concerns about the Green Party and other third-party candidates “spoiling” elections, from Jill Stein in the 2016 presidential race that first put Trump in power to the 2024 U.S. Senate race in Pennsylvania, when Democratic U.S. Sen. Bob Casey lost to Republican Dave McCormick by about 15,000 votes. In that 2024 election, a Green Party candidate won about 66,000 votes, a Libertarian candidate won almost 90,000, and a Constitution Party candidate won more than 23,000.

    In the 7th District in 2024, Mackenzie defeated incumbent Democrat Susan Wild by 4,062 votes out of more than 403,000 cast. That was the narrowest margin out of any of the state’s 17 districts, making it a key tossup district this year.

    That margin is also significantly different from the one Shapiro potentially faces during his reelection campaign this year as he maintains a sizable lead over Republican Stacy Garrity, and as a Green candidate officially filed to run on Monday. Shapiro defeated Republican Doug Mastriano in 2022 by almost 793,000 votes; the Green Party candidate won just over 24,000 votes.

    Runkle said that nobody solicited the Green Party’s endorsement in a Pennsylvania congressional race this year, and that a conversation he had with Tupone left “a lot of questions.”

    He said the party is concerned about its reputation and about being targeted in ways that do not lift up its platform, which focuses on environmental protections and liberal positions on healthcare. But he also pushed back on concerns that the party should be considered a spoiler.

    “I do solidly believe that the Green Party policies and the values we represent has a solid bloc of voters,” Runkle said. “If people think that’s spoiling the race, then they should try harder to speak to the issues that we speak to.”

  • Pa. lawmakers have proposed dozens of ways to fix the state’s low housing stock. They’re making a database instead.

    Pa. lawmakers have proposed dozens of ways to fix the state’s low housing stock. They’re making a database instead.

    HARRISBURG — More than one million Pennsylvania households spend over 30% of their income on housing. And over the next decade, the state’s housing crunch is slated to intensify, with estimates that Pennsylvania will have nearly 185,000 fewer new homes than it needs to keep up with projected demand.

    State legislators have pushed to address the need, introducing bills that would increase the housing supply through accelerated approval processes and lifting restrictions on new developments — and urged leaders to include those initiatives in this year’s budget negotiations.

    Gov. Josh Shapiro also put housing at the forefront of his budget address in February, asking the General Assembly to ease restrictions for rental applications and to cap costs on manufactured home increases.

    But none of the proposed policies were included in the final budget deal, passed last month. Instead, the budget included the creation of a housing database — a move some lawmakers and advocates say falls short of addressing Pennsylvania’s burgeoning housing crisis.

    “I think the budget generally left a lot of questions unaddressed. And housing, one of the top three issues in terms of the cost-of-living crisis, was one of them,” said Sen. Nikil Saval (D., Philadelphia).

    Here’s what’s in — and not in — Pennsylvania’s $50.8 billion state budget

    Saval was one of six senators who voted against the budget. He has since said that was because it left many key policy issues, including housing, unaddressed. Sen. Katie Muth (D., Montgomery), the only other Democratic senator to vote against the budget, has also said she believes the budget left issues like housing, rising energy costs, and affordability unanswered.

    Shapiro’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

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    The new housing database — incorporated through a bill sponsored by Saval and authored by fellow Philadelphia Democratic Sen. Vincent Hughes — will be overseen by the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency. Saval said it will ensure more robust data collection to provide transparency on how much affordable housing is available across the state.

    Under the new legislation, the agency will be required to create an online searchable database of all publicly financed housing that is subjected to public assistance programs. It will include anticipated termination dates on properties’ affordability restrictions and will note if the property has been granted an extension on those restrictions.

    Saval said the publicly available database will ensure lawmakers have a better idea of the state’s affordable housing stock. Much of the affordable housing in the state was created with the help of low-income tax credits that are subject to expiration dates. As termination dates on these housing units loom, with many set to expire within the next five years, Saval said, the database will keep lawmakers aware of when housing is no longer affordable and allow them to see if restrictions can be extended.

    The database will be updated annually by the PHFA, with local housing agencies submitting data every year.

    Chris Anderson, communications officer for the PHFA, wrote in an email that the database is still in the early stages of being built, but that it will not pose any significant costs to the agency and existing resources will be used to create it.

    There are no penalties if the PHFA does not update the database, and the new law does not make it mandatory for local agencies to report information to the agency. The intended audience is primarily housing advocates and organizations, as well as policymakers, Anderson said.

    Saval said the database will help lawmakers know how much affordable housing there actually is in the state.

    But he said the state budget — where legislators often pass policies in addition to the yearly spending plan — was still a missed opportunity to address Pennsylvania’s housing concerns.

    “Anytime there’s a set of budget negotiations where there’s the potential to allocate funding, or create policy that would increase the supply of housing, or address the concerns faced by renters, and anytime that opportunity is missed as it was in this budget, I think it’s a step back,” he said.

    ‘Missed opportunity’

    Carrie Rathmann, vice president of strategic partnerships for Habitat for Humanity Philadelphia, said one initiative notably absent from the final budget deal was the PA Home Preservation Program, a grant administered by the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development to provide funding for construction cost gaps and keep homeowners in their houses through repairing outdated buildings. The initiative was last funded when it was signed into the budget in 2022, but has not received funding since.

    Previously known as the Whole-Home Repairs Program, the state allocated $125 million toward the program using American Rescue Plan dollars, repairing more than 2,600 affordable homes across the state.

    Douglas Paige (from left), Carrie Rathmann with Habitat for Humanity, Tyron Cheeseboro, and Danielle Paige on the steps of Pennsylvania Capitol during a 2023 rally for the Whole-Home Repairs Program.Alejandro A. Alvarez / Staff Photographer

    Housing advocates have pushed for the state to renew the funding, with the Housing Alliance of Pennsylvania calling it one of the organization’s biggest priorities.

    In an email, spokespeople from the housing alliance noted that the state funding in 2022 was not enough to support the number of people that applied for it, meaning there are still people waiting to have their homes repaired.

    “The program received far more applications from qualified homeowners than available funding could support, highlighting both the scale of unmet need and the importance of preserving existing housing,” the spokespeople wrote.

    The program has not returned in a line item in the state budget since 2022. Companion bills in both chambers supporting the program have received bipartisan support — the House bill passed 122-80 — but are sitting in the Senate Urban Affairs and Housing Committee.

    “That felt like it represented a huge missed opportunity to help thousands of Pennsylvanians stay housed and to keep homeowners safe and healthy in the homes that they already own, because without that dedicated investment, this crisis will only grow,” Rathmann said.

    Habitat for Humanity is a nonprofit that does not rely on state dollars, but Rathmann said state money goes to counties and housing providers like the Philadelphia Housing Development Corp. The money helps an “ecosystem” of housing organizations in the Philadelphia area, and Habitat uses it for a portion of the organization’s work. That included the Built to Last program, an initiative spearheaded by the Philadelphia Energy Authority that inspired the statewide initiative of Whole-Home Repairs in 2022.

    Rathmann said state initiatives that increase efficiency on building houses are key to developing homes faster and cheaper, which in turn increases the housing supply and can keep people in high-quality houses. This includes incentives like building lower density “by right,” meaning property owners can build low-density housing without special approval.

    “We see every day at Habitat that that impact is real, it’s tangible, it crosses different sectors like kids can get to school and do better,” Rathmann said. “Seniors are healthier. People are healthier. People feel less stressed. They have more money in their pocket for medication and food.”

    ‘Risk aversion on all sides’

    Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle in Pennsylvania’s divided state legislature have pushed for their own housing initiatives. Bills have passed through the Democratic-controlled House or Republican Senate, but have yet to move forward in the opposing chamber.

    Democratic-backed House bills sitting in Senate committees include proposals to remove barriers to building accessory dwelling units, lift restrictions on how many unrelated people can live in one home, and seal eviction records to help tenants.

    And the Senate GOP also has a number of bills sitting in the House’s committee, like creating an accelerated approval process for new housing, or establishing a Housing Regulatory Compliance Officer.

    Beth Rementer, spokesperson for House Democrats, wrote in an email that the House has sent 22 bills to the Senate Housing Committee, while the Senate sent two in June.

    The state’s lack of housing action marks a difference from the Republican-controlled federal government. In early July, Congress sent the ROAD to Housing Act to President Donald Trump’s desk — a bill that reduces barriers to home construction and modernizes housing programs alongside other initiatives, including a pilot of Whole-Home Repairs.

    Saval attributed the Pennsylvania legislature’s inaction to a desire to pass the state budget quickly without debate on hot-button policy issues ahead of the November election, when half the Senate and all members of the House are on the ballot.

    “Essentially, there was risk aversion on all sides,” Saval said. “And, understandably, an unwillingness to get into a budget discussion that would prolong the budget negotiation process.”

    Kate Flessner, spokesperson for the Senate Republicans, said in an email that the Senate supports a number of housing initiatives, but that underlying issues lie in how the state will pay for them in light of the roughly $5 billion structural deficit.

    “As we continue working to address the state budget’s serious structural deficit, we will be primarily focused on ways we can improve housing access that do not require vast sums of taxpayer money — and there are many of them,” Flessner said.

    Natalie Javitt is an intern with the Pennsylvania Legislative Correspondents’ Association. She can be reached at natalie.javitt@gmail.com.

  • Federal judge dismisses Trump administration’s lawsuit seeking New Jersey voter records

    Federal judge dismisses Trump administration’s lawsuit seeking New Jersey voter records

    A federal judge on Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit from President Donald Trump’s administration that sought New Jersey’s unredacted voter files.

    The case — one of more than two dozen lawsuits filed by the Trump administration against states ahead of the midterm election — predates New Jersey’s recent disclosure that thousands of noncitizens had been registered to vote in 2023 and 2024 due to a glitch in the motor vehicle system.

    The Justice Department attempted to use that news as leverage in the case, but it was unsuccessful.

    U.S. District Judge Zahid N. Quraishi ruled the department did not have the authority to compel New Jersey to hand over its unredacted records.

    “The Constitution’s architects chose to delegate election administration to the states, recognizing local governments have the deepest understanding of their constituents’ circumstances,” Quraishi wrote in the ruling, which granted New Jersey’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit.

    Quraishi has become the 18th U.S. District Court judge to rule against the Trump administration on the issue, according to data from the Brennan Center for Justice.

    The Trump administration will likely appeal the case, as the president and his allies have made election security a focal point ahead of the November midterms. It is mounting an appeal in a similar case in Pennsylvania.

    The ruling in the state’s favor came a day after New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill formally told the Justice Department she would not release personal information about noncitizen voters who had been mistakenly added to the state’s voter rolls ahead of the 2024 election.

    Sherrill announced last week that about 6,600 noncitizens had been registered to vote due to a glitch in the automatic voter registration system at the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission. She said fewer than 400 had cast ballots and there was no evidence they had affected election results.

    On Tuesday, she said the New Jersey Department of State had begun removing 4,500 voters from the rolls. But there is a chance the rest could actually be citizens, so counties will review those about 2,000 individuals to ensure no eligible voters are disenfranchised, she said.

    Following Sherrill’s disclosure last week, Assistant U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon requested the full names, dates of birth, nationalities, and home addresses of the individuals who were erroneously registered, as well as additional information about the noncitizens who voted, within a week.

    Sherrill had publicly indicated she would not hand over the data, but her letter Tuesday put it on the books.

    The Justice Department’s request has no legal basis, Sherrill said in a Tuesday letter to Dhillon, and sharing “extensive personal information about thousands of New Jersey residents” is limited by state and federal privacy laws.

    “Here and always, I remain committed to protecting New Jerseyans’ personally identifying information,” Sherrill wrote, reiterating her stance from the previous week, when she cited concerns about federal data breaches under Trump.

    In response to Sherrill’s rebuffing, Dhillon said the Justice Department’s request was rooted in the legal authority to “keep ineligible voters off its rolls” and vowed to obtain the information “through all legal means!”

    Sherrill’s “refusal to cooperate with federal law enforcement does nothing to protect law-abiding NJ voters,” Dhillon said on X.

    Sherrill on Tuesday criticized the Trump administration for “weaponizing the government against individuals that disagree with them.”

    She pointed to an issue during her campaign last year in which the federal government provided personal information about her that should have been redacted, like her Social Security number, to an ally of her Republican opponent. The National Personnel Records Center director apologized at the time and called it a rare error, but Sherrill claims her data were “weaponized” against her.

    Sherrill has not shied away from the issue of voter access in New Jersey as it becomes a national talking point in the debate over election security after last week’s revelation that thousands of people had been improperly added to the voter rolls when applying for driver’s licenses and identification cards.

    On Tuesday, she championed a new law, the John R. Lewis Voter Empowerment Act, that offers a slew of policies meant to increase voter participation.

    The erroneous registrations took place between June 2023 and June 2024 under former Gov. Phil Murphy’s administration due to a software glitch in New Jersey’s motor vehicle system, which processes the automatic registration when citizens obtain an ID or a license unless they decline.

    Even though they checked “no” when asked if they were a U.S. citizen, the noncitizens were registered anyway.

    Sherrill pointed a finger at her predecessor but a spokesperson for Murphy said the former governor had “no knowledge” of the glitch.

    U.S. Rep. Jeff Van Drew, a South Jersey Republican, said he planned to hold hearings over the issue and called on Sherrill to answer a slate of questions.

    Sherrill said Tuesday that her administration had hired a law firm to conduct an independent bipartisan investigation. One of the firm’s main partners worked under former Republican Gov. Chris Christie as attorney general and was later appointed by Christie to the Senate, she noted, saying “we have nothing to hide.”

    Christie said in a post on X that Sherrill “made the right choice tapping my former AG Jeff Chiesa to lead the independent investigation into New Jersey’s voter rolls.”

    “Jeff won’t hide anything from the public,” he said. “You can count on it.”

    But the New Jersey GOP questioned Wednesday why Sherrill would not comply with the Justice Department if she “has nothing to hide.”

    “She ran on transparency and accountability,” the party said in a post online. “Apparently, those were campaign promises that expired the moment she was sworn in.”

    Republicans have seized on the noncitizen voter registrations to make the case for the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship like a passport or birth certificate to register to vote.

  • Ro Khanna, a potential presidential contender in 2028, joins Chris Rabb in Philly as he pitches a ‘Progressive New Deal’

    Ro Khanna, a potential presidential contender in 2028, joins Chris Rabb in Philly as he pitches a ‘Progressive New Deal’

    Two months after winning a primary to likely become the first democratic socialist representing Philadelphia in Congress, State Rep. Chris Rabb on Tuesday joined forces in the city with U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna, a California progressive kicking off a week of events across the state as he considers running for president in 2028.

    The like-minded Democrats share a similar progressive platform, and Khanna endorsed Rabb ahead of the competitive primary to replace U.S. Rep. Dwight Evans (D., Philadelphia) in May.

    In a sign that the alliance might continue when Rabb enters Congress in January — and potentially beyond as the party considers its options for the next presidential race — the two kicked off Khanna’s statewide tour Tuesday in Philadelphia.

    Khanna, a Bucks County native who has represented parts of the Bay Area since 2017, is pitching a “Progressive New Deal,” invoking President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s platform, which led to the creation of Social Security and other programs.

    The California lawmaker called for the U.S. to end military aid to Israel and recognize Palestinian statehood as the war in Gaza nears its third year. And he called for progressive economic reforms and the tackling of corruption, which Khanna framed around the case of notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his associations with the rich and powerful.

    “I believe we need a ‘New Deal’ for the 21st century,” Khanna said. “We’re going to have people like Chris [Rabb] and others that are building that momentum. We need bold progressive Democrats: morality on foreign policy, morality on [Jeffrey] Epstein, and a bold economic vision to make this country work not just for the few but for all of us.”

    Khanna is among a slate of Democrats who have branded their platform as “New Economic Patriotism” with a focus on affordability and corruption issues during the first two years of President Donald Trump’s second term.

    Rabb, a five-term state lawmaker from East Mount Airy who ran an unabashedly progressive campaign, has said he is eager to join allies in Congress after the November election, in which he faces no Republican opponent to represent about half of Philadelphia.

    On Tuesday with Khanna, he outlined some of the platform that helped propel him to defeat a pair of more centrist candidates, and that he hopes to carry to Capitol Hill.

    “The issues we’re talking about resonate with a lot of people when you remove the labels,” Rabb said. “Medicare for All. You know, universal childcare. Federal jobs guarantee. No more endless wars. Acknowledging the genocide [in the war between Israel and Gaza].”

    At the Philadelphia City Institute library in Center City, where about 50 people listened and asked questions, Khanna spoke of his upbringing and how he watched people around him struggle after the closure of the Fairless Works steel factory in 2001.

    “My values were shaped in Bucks County,” said Khanna, who has described his week of events in Pennsylvania as a homecoming. “It’s shaped who I am. And I think Bucks County is a symbol for America.”

    But he sees the current anxiety and frustration of achieving the American dream. “I really want to offer a vision about how we can have the economic prosperity,” he said.

    Now, Khanna said, he represents the district that houses Silicon Valley and holds one-third of the nation’s wealth. He said he hopes his advocacy there to tax the billionaires who live in his district helps people all the way to Pennsylvania.

    “We’re in a second Gilded Age,” Khanna said. “I’m saying tax the billionaires in my district and in California so we can pay for free healthcare, so we can have free childcare in this country, so that we can have free college in this country.”

    His itinerary this week included two planned stops in Philadelphia and others across the state, including a Thursday event in Pittsburgh with U.S. Rep. Chris Deluzio, a potential primary challenger to Democratic Sen. John Fetterman in 2028 who shares Khanna’s economic platform.

    State Rep. Chris Rabb greets supporters after appearing with U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna (rear) at the City Institute Library on Rittenhouse Square.Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer

    Rabb has advocated for a similar economic populism, including universal basic income and the Green New Deal.

    Since the primary, Rabb has both campaigned for other similar candidates and visited Washington, where he appeared on stage with Deluzio in June to discuss the surging left — a theme expounded upon again Tuesday.

    Several democratic socialists have won congressional primaries this year in blue districts, including Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York. Rabb endorsed them, as well as Melat Kiros, who beat 30-year incumbent U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette in a Colorado primary.

    Rabb said he would want to see a viable progressive candidate in the 2028 presidential election, but he did not specifically endorse Khanna, who could be among several such candidates in a crowded field.

    U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), who also campaigned for Rabb in May, and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who has had a frosty relationship with him, are also expected to be among the contenders for the nomination.

    “It’s coming up in a moment where there’s extraordinary organizing among folks who are very, very concerned about where we’re going as a nation, and the extent to which we can rely on conventional Democrats to deliver the type of justice and the result we seek,” Rabb said.

  • More than 2,000 of N.J.’s ‘noncitizen voters’ could actually be citizens, Gov. Sherrill says

    More than 2,000 of N.J.’s ‘noncitizen voters’ could actually be citizens, Gov. Sherrill says

    About 2,000 New Jersey voters identified last week as noncitizens could actually be citizens after all, Gov. Mikie Sherrill said Tuesday, a week after her disclosure of a voter registration glitch put the state at the center of a heated national debate over election security.

    Sherrill announced last week that approximately 6,600 noncitizens had been registered to vote ahead of the 2024 election due to a software glitch with the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission’s automatic voter registration program. She said fewer than 400 of those people had voted and there is no evidence that they affected the results of any election. The finding came in the midst of a political fight over President Donald Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud, including by noncitizens, and his aggressive push for an overhaul of the country’s election system.

    The first-term governor said Tuesday that the New Jersey Department of State’s Division of Elections has begun a process to remove more than 4,500 individuals who were registered because of the software error, but that the rest of the registrations will be referred to county election officials for further review “to ensure that any lawfully registered voters are not being disenfranchised.”

    “We are taking this extra step because our initial review indicates that a number of these individuals may be citizens,” she said in a statement. “That has been the case in other states where clerical and administrative voter registration errors have occurred, and we’re determined to get this right.”

    Her office announced the discovery a little more than one hour after celebrating New Jersey’s new John R. Lewis Voter Empowerment Act, which Sherrill signed July 2. Lewis was a civil rights leader who represented Georgia in Congress from 1987 until his death in 2020.

    The law, which is based on a federal proposal that former President Joe Biden unsuccessfully tried to pass, promotes equal opportunity to voting and voter outreach to communities that do not speak English proficiently, and prohibits intimidation, deception, violence, or restraint of voters or election workers.

    The law lays out a process for individuals who want to file a complaint over voting rights and requires public hearings for redistricting.

    If jurisdictions have a history of discrimination, the law requires approval from the attorney general before they can make changes to their election administration. It also gives the attorney general authority to enforce the law through litigation, investigations, and studies, and by representing the public in federal court.

    “Here in New Jersey, if your rights are violated, you have a right of action,” Sherrill said at Union Baptist Church in Trenton.

    Sherrill said New Jersey is the 10th state to enact the model, but the first to do so since an April Supreme Court ruling that weakened part of the Voting Rights Act as the court’s conservative majority ruled against a majority-Black district in Louisiana.

    Supporters of the bill said they had been advocating for it for four years in New Jersey.

    Sherrill’s Tuesday celebration at the church shows the governor is not shying away from the issue of voting rights even as the state becomes a talking point for Republicans who want enact new national restrictions — including requiring voters to provide proof of citizenship to register with documents like a birth certificate or passport.

    Sherrill opposes the national legislation, known as the SAVE America Act, which has been championed by Trump as a way to make elections more secure but which opponents warn could make it tougher to vote for millions of Americans.

    “Trump has only one concern: winning at any cost, and he’s willing to put the right to vote at risk,” Sherrill said Tuesday. “There’s no line he won’t cross, no rule he won’t break, no norm he won’t violate. But we will not stand idly by.”

    The former member of Congress will likely continue to have a role in the debate as Republicans ramp up their advocacy ahead of November’s midterm elections.

    U.S. Rep. Jeff Van Drew, a South Jersey Republican who was elected as a Democrat in 2018 before vowing his loyalty to Trump a year later, led a public letter with other House Republicans calling on Sherrill to answer a series of questions about the noncitizen voting issue. He questioned how she knows it was “just a software glitch and not a nefarious act.”

    Van Drew, who chairs the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Oversight, said he plans to hold hearings over the issue and is “absolutely exploring” the possibility of subpoenas, Politico reported.

    On Tuesday, Sherrill said Van Drew “has a very sordid history as far as elections go.” She said Van Drew’s campaign had hired a political operative who was a “known ballot harvester” — referring to Craig Callaway, who worked on Van Drew’s 2022 bid.

    Callaway, a former Atlantic City Council president, had previously served prison time for blackmail and bribes when Van Drew’s campaign hired him. In 2025 under former U.S. Attorney Alina Habba, Callaway pleaded guilty in connection with fraudulent mail-in ballots during the 2022 election, but Van Drew said he was not aware of any illegal activity and was not accused of wrongdoing.

    Sherrill said her administration hired the CSG law firm to conduct an independent investigation into the voting registration glitch. One of the firm’s main partners, Jeffrey Chiesa, served as attorney general under former Republican Gov. Chris Christie, who later appointed him to the Senate.

    “We have a bipartisan, independent investigation going on right now because we have nothing to hide,” Sherrill said.

  • John Fetterman campaigned on ending the filibuster. Here’s why he changed his mind.

    John Fetterman campaigned on ending the filibuster. Here’s why he changed his mind.

    WASHINGTON — U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, doubling down on a position that has already added to Democrats’ frustrations with him in recent months, offered a more detailed explanation this week for his change of heart about eliminating the Senate filibuster.

    The Pennsylvania Democrat wrote in an op-ed for the Washington Post that he had been “horribly wrong” to support ending the practice that requires bills to win 60 votes rather than a 51-vote majority.

    The rule frequently allows members of the minority party to block policies that fail to win bipartisan support, including some of each party’s top priorities — like abortion protections when Democrats have been in control, or the voting restrictions that Republicans are now attempting to pass at President Donald Trump’s urging.

    Fetterman was among many Democrats in recent years to campaign on eliminating the filibuster in order to secure those bigger wins. During his 2022 campaign, he specifically referred to passing abortion protections established under Roe v. Wade as a reason for that position after the Supreme Court overturned its landmark 1973 decision that year.

    “I became one of the first candidates in the country to call for abolishing the filibuster for a reason: it stands in the way of getting things done for [Pennsylvanians],” his active campaign website still read on Tuesday, nearly four years after he won.

    But as he has more frequently sided with Republicans and criticized his fellow Democrats, Fetterman has said repeatedly this year that he had been “wrong.”

    “We were very wrong about that to nuke the filibuster, and we should really humble ourselves,” he said on Fox News in February. In that interview and others, he needled Democrats who opposed the filibuster but now, he said, express a “love” for it as they find themselves in the minority and try to reject Republican policies.

    In the Washington Post this week, Fetterman wrote that Americans who are “horrified” at the policies coming out of the Republican-led Congress and Trump’s administration would be alarmed if the filibuster had been eliminated and every proposal could become law with a simple majority.

    “We’d have the Save America Act by now, which I do not support,” Fetterman wrote. “We could have extreme policies such as nationwide abortion restrictions, backpedaling on LGBT rights, repeal of birthright citizenship and limited voting rights across the country. With a government trifecta firmly in place, many provisions of Project 2025 would have easily been enacted. Republicans could fundamentally change the entire government and country with a simple majority vote.”

    Fetterman’s reference to the SAVE America Act comes as Trump has pressured Senate Republican leaders to eliminate the filibuster in order to pass the bill, which would enact sweeping election changes. It would require individuals to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and to show photo ID at the polls, and it would scale back mail voting.

    Opponents of the bill say it would make registering and voting more difficult for millions of people. And Fetterman has opposed the bill because of the changes to mail voting, though he has changed his position to support requiring a photo ID at the polls.

    The bill has failed to receive support from 60 senators, and Trump has demanded that Republicans bypass the filibuster to force it through with only GOP support. U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick (R., Pa.), a Trump ally, has said such a scenario is “very tempting” even though he campaigned against ending the filibuster in 2024.

    “It’s a path to get more things done,” McCormick said during a telephone town hall with constituents last week.

    Fetterman, in his op-ed, called the filibuster “a critical line of defense that prevents President Donald Trump from having a fill-in-the-blank government with new laws, deregulation or procedures of its choosing.”

    He wrote that “history has vindicated” former U.S. Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D., Arizona) and Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) for voting with Republicans to block reforming the filibuster when Democrats were in control in 2022.

    Fetterman could potentially play a similar role after the midterm elections this fall if Democrats win control of the Senate with a slim, potentially one-vote majority. Some observers have said Fetterman could also leave his party, becoming a Republican or — as Sinema and Manchin did after serving as Democrats — become an independent.

    “Some of my colleagues, including myself, have been frustrated when engaging with the minority,” Fetterman wrote. “But that process isn’t a bug — it’s one of the best features of the Senate. We have a great democracy that is imperfect, but it requires working together.”

    As Fetterman works more often with Republicans, though, Democrats have become more frustrated with him and vowed to mount a challenge if he seeks a second term in 2028.

    Former U.S. Rep. Conor Lamb — one of the Democrats who has not ruled out another campaign after losing to Fetterman in the 2022 primary — has said the senator’s switch on the filibuster “is probably the worst Fetterman story yet” that most people don’t realize.

    In a social media video in early June, Lamb said eliminating the filibuster was essential for Democrats to “put Roe v. Wade back into law” and to pass legislation on voting rights, gun control, and raising the minimum wage if they regain control of the Senate.

    “When we ran against each other, he promised he would fight for women on this issue and get rid of the filibuster,” Lamb said. “And of course, like so many things, he’s changed his mind.”

  • Trump wants smarter computers, dumber people | Will Bunch Newsletter

    Occasionally, I get to share good news in this space. Wu Shaoping — the Chinese dissident who fled to America but was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement after a Central Pennsylvania traffic stop — was freed from ICE’s Moshannon Valley Processing Center Friday night, not long after my column dropped and a couple of members of Congress pressed for his release. His asylum case is still pending. I’ve learned there’s actually a lot more to this story — stay tuned.

    If someone forwarded you this email, sign up for free here.

    The Trump regime is shifting billions from college into AI. That’s no accident.

    People take photos near a John Harvard statue on the Harvard University campus in 2024 in Cambridge, Mass.Steven Senne

    The U.S. government has become pretty stingy when it comes to finding money for human beings — just ask any struggling single mother in Mississippi needing food stamps, or a physician in Africa waiting on vaccines that no longer arrive through American foreign aid programs.

    But Washington always seems to have an open wallet for computers.

    In fact, the very first one — ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), constructed right here in Philadelphia on the University of Pennsylvania campus as World War II came to an end — was funded by the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps at a cost of about $7 million in today’s dollars. Over the years, billions of dollars in federal funding would fuel key moments in the Computer Age, including the creation of the internet, which was also a Pentagon project.

    Still, there was something chilling about last week’s report from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy that called for a surge in research aid in one area: computers and robots using artificial intelligence, or AI. The nuts-and-bolts of the paper — “Science: A New Golden Age” — highlighted a new, more-than-$5 billion commitment for an AI-in-science program called the Genesis Mission.

    But the White House paper also called for a radical shift in the way the federal government pays for science, with a massive move of $200 billion away from funding research and basic science at top universities — the system that has thrived since the time of ENIAC — and toward individuals and more directly applied AI projects, including those at private tech companies.

    Goodbye, John Harvard. Hello, Claude.

    “This plan raises profound concerns about the future of publicly funded science,” the top union leaders for educators — Todd Wolfson of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) — said in a joint statement last week. “It does nothing to make anyone healthier or safer, and it isn’t what Americans want.”

    Wolfson, Weingarten, and other critics of the new science scheme from the Trump regime say it unravels long-standing protections for academic freedom and transparency on campuses in favor of a process that’s ripe for political interference. “This is a defining moment for American science,” the educators wrote.

    Indeed, while the federal funding gains for AI are still mostly theoretical, the cuts for research projects on college campuses across the United States have been underway since Donald Trump took office in January 2025, and the impact has already been dramatic.

    The playing field is complex, but a recent deep analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice found that the Trump administration successfully froze about $3 billion in previously approved grants for scientific research, is imposing a scheme to slash an additional $4 billion, and issued a budget proposal calling for a whopping $44 billion additional reduction.

    The analysis noted that “these midstream freezes and cancelations have ripple effects far beyond the nominal dollars involved, prompting layoffs, interrupting careers, and destabilizing the budgets of research universities.”

    Of course, federal research grants have been just one front in the Trump regime’s much wider war against the basic foundations of higher education in America, with the MAGA movement seeing college campuses as bastions of liberal indoctrination that should be restored as narrow, beer-drenched pipelines for ambitious white men. This “war on woke” includes attacks on university diversity programs, steep barriers for international students, and the abandonment of college debt relief.

    But now it feels like the White House is stating the quiet part out loud: The bigger goal is simply to build smarter computers, even if that means humans get dumber. Intelligent robots still don’t vote in elections, after all, but poorly educated people do.

    Ironically, the regime’s rationale for spending our tax dollars on making AI more powerful regurgitates a Cold War mentality that, on the surface, sounds like the reasons behind decades of massive college research funding and programs like the space race of the 1960s or the nuclear arms buildup: to stay one step ahead of the communists — this time in China.

    The difference between then and now is that after World War II, Washington made a conscious effort to fund basic science and free inquiry as a way to distinguish the United States from the rigid planned economy of our then-biggest adversary, the Soviet Union. Now, the White House seeks to copy Beijing’s centralized planning. Can we truly promote science without lifting up the actual scientists?

    Trump’s “Golden Future of Science” feels more like an extremely narrow wind tunnel. The irony is that many of today’s politicians in both parties see higher education as mainly workforce development, even as corporate recruiters say what they really want are more broadly educated critical thinkers. In other words, the AI era actually screams out for a boost for the humanities like literature or philosophy — the types of majors that are getting crushed in the Trump era.

    An epic battle is looming between those obsessed with a new nuclear arms race around AI — especially the Silicon Valley billionaires who stand to gain and who, not coincidentally, have heavily funded the second coming of Trump — and a public that doesn’t want our communities ruined by noisy, energy-guzzling data centers that aim to take away our jobs while making reading a lost art.

    A government scheme to build better computers while rendering humans obsolete used to be the stuff of dystopian science fiction. Maybe we can keep it that way before it’s too late.

    Yo, do this!

    • About once a year or so, I write, “Yo, actually maybe don’t do this.” Last weekend, I ventured out of my underground lair to join every other American in devoting three hours to Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. To say I was underwhelmed would be, well, an understatement. The movie was a funeral for the now totally lost art of movie dialogue, amid a plot that meandered from gouge-your-one-eye-out boring to bursts of incomprehensible violence. It was a metaphor — Troy was My Lai, apparently — that got terribly lost at sea. But I do feel there’s something happening here. First the World Cup, now this mediocre whale of a motion picture: Americans are desperate to be a part of something, anything, that is bigger than our politics.
    • Regular readers know I’m a huge fan of the CNN modern history documentaries they now call the Decades Series, but the original format of politics, TV, and music did have gaping holes. A few years ago, they backfilled with a series on The Movies of our post-World War II world. Now, finally, Decades in Sports arrives on CNN with back-to-back episodes (presumably the 1960s and ‘70s) on Sunday night at 9 p.m. I can’t wait. Spoiler alert: Havlicek stole the ball.
    • Another thing you may have noticed is that Rep. Ro Khanna, who meandered west after Council Rock High School in Bucks County and became the congressman from Silicon Valley, is something of a friend of the newsletter. He’s back in our area frequently, and he’ll be at Philadelphia’s Parkway Central Library on Tuesday at 6 p.m. to deliver a special speech: “America at a Crossroads: A Vision for the Future on our 250th Anniversary.” He’ll talk about his background growing up here as the son of immigrants and the need for economic freedom that ends gross corruption and inequality — go check it out.

    Ask me anything

    Question: Who should be DNC [Democratic National Committee] chair? And does it matter? — Martha (@marthagrant.bsky.social) via Bluesky

    Answer: It does matter. Despite everything else that’s happening in the world right now, one of the more revealing stories of the last week was the New York Times article about Democrats in disarray, focusing on embattled DNC chair Ken Martin, who before the 2024 election was the state leader in Minnesota. Under Martin, the party is sliding deeper in debt, and there are complaints about an abrasive personal style, the botched “autopsy” of the 2024 election, and the Democrats’ muddled message. A change should be made as soon as possible. Hopefully, party leaders could rectify the mistake of not picking Wisconsin’s more skilled ex-party chief, Ben Wikler. The problem is that, under the constant assault of GOP fascism, Dems need to fix this plane while it is flying at 37,000 feet.

    What you’re saying about …

    There was an excellent response to last week’s question about what a future Democratic president should do on Day One to erase the stench from two Donald Trump presidencies. I wish I could reprint all the suggestions, but recurring themes included a rapid purge of any Trump holdovers, abolishing ICE and related immigration raiders, and a speedy effort to prosecute the many wrongdoers. The two most frequent suggestions included major reform of the judiciary, from fixing the mangled immigration courts to ethics reform, and definitely an expansion of the U.S. Supreme Court. Mark Cohen suggested two more federal appeals courts and then “assign a Supreme Court justice to each one, bringing a total of 13 justices to the Court for fixed term of 18 years.” Another theme was erasing Trump’s various renovations to the District of Columbia. The ex-congressman Joe Hoeffel wrote, “Strip all the cheesy gold out of the Oval Office.”

    📮 This week’s question: Speaking of Democrats, some top party officials like House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries seem to think the November election is primarily about “affordability.” That seems to miss the bigger moment, but I’m curious: What pithy message would you like to see Dems run on this fall? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “Democratic message” in the subject line.

    Backstory on the Gen Z revolution rocking India

    Protesters participate in a demonstration demanding educational reforms as part of the Cockroach Janta Party’s ongoing protest movement in New Delhi on July 25.Vipin

    Last October, I wrote a column, with great interest and enthusiasm, about a growing revolution of Gen Z 20-somethings that was taking place across the global south — from Madagascar to Peru to Nepal, and elsewhere — who were fed up with the political corruption of grown-ups and threatening to topple governments. I wondered if this very online youth activism might spread to the United States or other more developed nations, but over the coming months, the momentum for these protesters and their Japanese anime pirate flags seemed to fade. The so-called Gen Z revolution looked like a historical footnote.

    But it turns out that the embers of youth unrest were still smoldering, and this summer they have reignited in a big way in the world’s largest — if deeply flawed — democracy: India. And as is so often the case, the spark was something nobody saw coming: a nationwide exam for entrance to medical school taken by roughly two million students, which the government moved to scrap after allegations that some of the questions had leaked. Some young people who’d studied for months for the exam took to the streets in protest, and — as so often happens — a repressive police response only caused these demonstrations to get bigger. So did a comment from India’s chief justice, who described young, unemployed Indians as “cockroaches.”

    That gave the protests a name when Abhijeet Dipke, a 30-year-old graduate of Boston University, posted on the social media platform X that he was starting the “Cockroach Janta Party” — a wordplay on the Indian authoritarian-minded leader Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. Incredibly, this “CJP” has seen its protests — calling successfully for the resignation of the education secretary and for other deeper reforms, using tactics such as sit-ins and hunger strikes — spread to some 30 cities while clogging the streets of the capital, New Delhi. The movement has become arguably the biggest threat to Modi’s strongman rule since the leader’s ascension in 2014.

    All of which raises the same question I posed last fall: Could it happen here? In one sense, it already has. On Friday, about 500 Indian students and other members of the U.S.-based diaspora gathered under a statue of Mahatma Gandhi in Manhattan’s Union Square to express support for the “cockroaches” of their native country. Meanwhile, the kind of pressures that caused India’s youth to erupt — government meddling in higher education, diminished job prospects in a time of rising AI, to name two — are also found in the United States. Young people almost never protest over the same stuff that riles up their parents, as shown by the gray hairs that have populated the No Kings rallies against Donald Trump. When lightning strikes, it will probably be something as unexpected as a college entry exam. But thunderstorms are definitely in the forecast.

    What I wrote on this date in 2019

    A culture of death permeates the Donald Trump regime, from the doomed fishing boats of the Caribbean to an Iranian girls’ school to the scores now dying in immigration detention cells. But this is not exactly new. The seeds were planted in the first Trump presidency, when his attorney general, William Barr, led a push to revive the death penalty for federal prisoners in a big way. On July 28, 2019, I asked: “What took the American Caligula so long to bring back the spectacle of executions to electrify the masses (but not the prisoners … they’d be lethally injected) and juice his 2020 reelection campaign? Indeed, the five executions are scheduled around the Christmas holiday, presumably to remind us of its pagan roots.”

    Read the rest: “The cruelty is the point as AG Barr, Trump return to death penalty barbarism.”

    Recommended Inquirer reading

    • In 2026, I’ve been very focused on the individuals whose world has been turned upside down — or, in some cases, ended prematurely — by the horrors of life in these authoritarian United States. Last week, I took a deep dive into the story of Wu Shaoping, a Chinese dissident who fled his likely detainment by Xi Jinping’s regime and made it to Pennsylvania with his wife and teen daughter, only to get arrested at a traffic stop, turned over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and detained. The outcry may have had something to do with ICE’s release of Wu shortly after the column ran. Over the weekend, I wrote about the police killing of Corey Ruiz in Madison, Wisc. — noting that the shootings of civilians by cops have only increased since the massive George Floyd protest marches of 2020. I urged an end to the new numbness about police violence in America.
    • You didn’t really think I could make it all the way through the newsletter without mentioning the face that launched 1,000 hot takes: basketball king LeBron James. He stunned not just the sports world but America’s founding city by announcing Friday that he is taking his aging but still considerable talents to South Philadelphia, hoping to grab one last title with a completely revamped 76ers. Has there been any other story since then? The Inquirer has told you about the first time James played at the Palestra, his new uniform (No. 23), the speculation over how he will (or won’t) gel with the rest of the Sixers, the speculation over where he might live, his relationship with Tyrese Maxey and Joel Embiid, and on and on and on. Just wait until he actually takes the court this fall! Actually, don’t wait. Subscribe to The Inquirer today, slam dunk the paywall, and read every story from now until the hoped-for parade down Broad Street.

    By submitting your written, visual, and/or audio contributions, you agree to The Inquirer’s Terms of Use, including the grant of rights in Section 10.

  • Shapiro, Democrats blasted Trump’s ‘conspiracy theories.’ That message has not changed after New Jersey’s noncitizen voting revelation.

    Shapiro, Democrats blasted Trump’s ‘conspiracy theories.’ That message has not changed after New Jersey’s noncitizen voting revelation.

    The day after President Donald Trump delivered a prime-time speech contending, among other claims, that 250,000 noncitizens were registered to vote in just four states, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro derided it as “a whole bunch of conspiracy theories that are just simply not connected to reality.”

    A week later, when New Jersey revealed that 6,600 noncitizens were improperly registered to vote in the state and nearly 400 cast a ballot due to a glitch, Shapiro’s message was nearly identical — that Trump is pushing “baseless conspiracy theories” as he seeks more power over state-run elections.

    Pennsylvania and New Jersey were both on the list of Democratic-led states that Trump claimed had thousands of noncitizens on their voter rolls. The methodology of how the Trump administration arrived at that figure remained unclear, but his administration has sought to leverage the New Jersey disclosure as evidence of a larger problem.

    But Shapiro and other national Democrats have not shifted their messaging on the issue ahead of the high-stakes midterm elections. They are refusing to cede to the GOP any suggestion that New Jersey’s voter rolls are evidence of widespread voter fraud and are warning that the changes Republicans seek would make it tougher for many Americans to vote.

    Shapiro, a likely presidential contender in 2028, joined 25 other Democratic officials from across the nation in a lawsuit last Thursday challenging the administration’s ramped-up attempts to coerce states to share their raw voter data by threatening to withhold money for homeland security and disaster preparedness.

    “Withholding this funding will make our communities less safe and would be dangerous under any circumstance, but doing this in an attempt to undermine states’ authority over elections is reckless and unconstitutional,” Shapiro said.

    Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, another potential 2028 candidate, also joined the suit. (Both Shapiro and Beshear lead states with Republican attorneys general.)

    The day after Trump’s speech, Shapiro challenged the administration to present “real evidence” of noncitizen voting, which Pennsylvania election officials say is extremely rare.

    In addition to Pennsylvania and New Jersey, the White House also targeted Nevada and California for additional scrutiny over their voter rolls, according to a document posted to the White House website last week shortly after Trump’s speech.

    California Gov. Gavin Newsom, one of Trump’s most vocal critics in the Democrats’ potential 2028 field, said the president’s speech was fueled by debunked lies.

    “It was unhinged. Unfounded allegations of election fraud — it’s madness. But he’s setting it up. He’s setting you all up. You know what he’s doing. He’s doing it in plain sight. He’s socializing all of this to normalize all of this,” Newsom said last week, during a news conference that took place the same day as New Jersey’s announcement.

    Trump has repeatedly promoted conspiracy theories about California elections in recent weeks — including in two Pennsylvania speeches — despite no evidence that fraud occurred.

    For U.S. Sen. Cory Booker (D., N.J.), pushing back against Trump presents a tougher challenge.

    Booker, also a likely 2028 aspirant, must balance the governing changes he sees as needed in New Jersey with the larger politics of the moment. He said the failure of the software was “not acceptable” but rejected Trump’s efforts to portray the entire election system as faulty.

    “There are those who will choose to weaponize this issue to undermine confidence in our elections,” Booker said in a statement. “We cannot allow that.”

    But Republicans have pointed to New Jersey as proof that a sweeping overhaul is needed for November’s results to be trusted.

    Trump’s allies are pushing the SAVE America Act, which would require voters to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and to show photo ID at the polls. The effort has stalled in Congress amid concern, even among Republicans, that the bill’s restrictions on mail voting could make it harder to cast a ballot and that many citizens could wrongly be blocked from voting if they do not have access to required paperwork.

    Vice President JD Vance, widely viewed as a 2028 Republican candidate and a potential political heir to Trump, seized on New Jersey’s revelations as a renewed opportunity for the legislation’s relevance.

    “If only there was a way to stop this type of ‘software error’ that allowed non citizens to vote in our elections,” he wrote in a post on X that targeted Booker and Sen. Andy Kim (D., N.J.), both of whom are unlikely to support the Republican-led bill.

    But the registration glitch happened despite these individuals answering “no” when asked on a keypad whether they were U.S. citizens. They were added to the system “through no fault of their own,” New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill said last week, so it is not clear that showing additional documentation would have prevented the error.

    Sherrill ordered her chief counsel to investigate the issue, which occurred under her predecessor, former Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy, and promised to hold those responsible for the error accountable.

    Talking about this issue can pose an obstacle for both parties now that New Jersey’s glitch has been identified, said Sam Chen, a Pennsylvania strategist who has worked for former Gov. Tom Corbett and other Republicans.

    Republicans have overplayed their hand and are not seen as an authoritative voice on voter fraud, but Democrats have spent the same amount of time dismissing all of Republicans’ concerns, including some that are legitimate, Chen said.

    “When you’ve got an entire party saying, ‘No, this is never happening,’ and now you see what you see in New Jersey, it is going to leave a serious credibility issue for them,” Chen said.

    Democrats, like Shapiro, could build more credibility if they acknowledged the positive parts of the SAVE Act, he contended.

    “Grab what’s good, vehemently oppose what’s bad, and states can blaze their own path,” he said.

    But J.J. Balaban, a Philly-based Democratic ad maker, said it does not make sense for Democrats to go along with the SAVE Act because the charges are being made in bad faith.

    While many Democrats would support efforts to make election systems more secure, Balaban said, that is not what the Trump administration is trying to do — and New Jersey does not change that.

    “Voter fraud was shockingly rare a month ago. It remains shockingly rare today,” he said.

  • Lindsey Graham chose Trump. History will choose his legacy.

    Lindsey Graham chose Trump. History will choose his legacy.

    When Herman Welker came to Washington in 1951, he had what seemed to be the ideal résumé to become a man of influence.

    The Republican senator from Idaho was an unwavering conservative — a former prosecutor and World War II veteran — whose opinion counted on matters including war, national security, and U.S. Supreme Court seats.

    But Welker’s path to power and prominence — serving as a close ally and faithful wingman to Republican Sen. Joe McCarthy in his abusive, power-hungry, and attention-seeking campaign to root out American communists — undid him in a single term. Welker, known in the Senate as “Little Joe from Idaho,” was implicated in another senator’s blackmail-driven suicide. When McCarthy faced censure in the Senate, Welker tried to delay, dissuade, and, according to accounts at the time, bully others out of officially expressing their disgust.

    Welker lost his seat in the next election, then, after a brief illness, died.

    That’s the thing about influence attained through a grand bargain with those who wield power in ways that defy the law, norms, and anything approaching restraint: It requires a grasp of time and mortality few humans can reliably claim. Which is precisely the risk Sen. Lindsey Graham, a lawyer and a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, ran until his sudden death this month.

    Unlike Welker, Graham transformed in full public view from a man who was once one of Donald Trump’s most strident and vociferous critics into a dependable MAGA workhorse in Congress.

    Now, Graham’s legacy will be forever bound up with that of the 47th president, who took pains to tell NBC News that his faithful wingman’s death would be a “big blow” to the passage of the SAVE America Act.

    In 2015, Sen. Lindsey Graham described Donald Trump as a bigot. Much changed over the next decade, Janell Ross writes.Jacquelyn Martin

    In 2015, Graham was a third-term senator from South Carolina vying for the Republican presidential nomination — a field that included more than a dozen others — en route to being crushed by Trump.

    Trump had such particular disregard for Graham that in a July debate, Trump announced every digit of Graham’s personal cell phone number on national TV.

    Graham, for his part, described Trump as a bigot, interested in anti-American policy, and a malignancy that, if nominated, would destroy the GOP.

    Given that, when Graham offered his pithy prescription for America in a December 2015 appearance on CNN, I wasn’t exactly surprised.

    “You know how you make America great again?” he said. “Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.”

    It was a riff on the recycled bit of American political sloganeering that Trump had pushed into the zeitgeist, again. Trump’s vision was to make America more like it was in the past: less diverse, more exclusionary, with group suspicion as public policy, and strict racial and gender hierarchies governing national life.

    In 2015, Graham’s position on Trump seemed clear and immutable. He told reporters he did not vote for Trump in 2016. Then, Trump won the election, and Graham spent most of the decade since transforming into one of the president’s most steadfast defenders.

    There was a brief interregnum, a wobble of sorts on Jan. 6, 2021. After Trump supporters invaded the U.S. Capitol, Graham gave a speech. On the Senate floor, Graham seemed to point the finger of responsibility directly at Trump.

    Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) speaks with reporters during the second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump in February 2021 at the U.S. Capitol Building.Stefani Reynolds

    “Trump and I, we’ve had a hell of a journey,” Graham said. “I hate it to end this way. Oh my God, I hate it. From my point of view, he’s been a consequential president. All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough.”

    But Graham, converted MAGA bannerman and, his critics say, Trump-era opportunist, soon returned.

    Graham’s devotion to Trump was so sweeping and so sudden that the more conspiracy-minded have embraced the idea that Graham was the victim of blackmail or controlled by some sort of kompromat.

    His indignation over Democratic objections to Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination, his introduction of a national bill banning abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, and his support for providing $400 million in taxpayer money for the new White House ballroom planted him firmly inside the MAGA movement.

    In death, Graham’s defenders — a group that, in these contentious times, notably includes Republicans and Democrats — have described his Trump transition as pragmatic, even admirable; what a skilled legislator must do.

    Graham, they say, managed, in the final days of his life, three substantive foreign policy victories. He hammered out the details of a Russian economic sanctions bill Trump has said he will sign. He secured U.S. approval for Ukrainian strikes in Russia. And with these agreements, Graham effectively shored up NATO and its fundamental goal of staving off world war. Of course, all of that is contingent upon a mercurial president remaining uncharacteristically disciplined and consistent.

    Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) with President Donald Trump at a rally in Charlotte, N.C., in March 2020.DOUG MILLS

    And therein lies the public lesson for us all. Time can and will run out. Redemption arcs, periods of public reconsideration, and book-tour explanations are not guaranteed.

    Entirely honest assessments of the dead are rare. Many will offer familiar strings of superlatives, words of admiration, mutual respect, and sympathy — perhaps in the hope that those sentiments will be reciprocated when their time comes.

    Others might just say our passing was a “big blow” to one of their pet projects.

    Ultimately, though, our actions and associations will speak unvarnished truths about us long after we are gone.

    Visit the block where Welker lived in Washington, D.C. Today there is not so much as a plaque. There’s just a Marriott.

    Janell Ross is a former senior correspondent at Time magazine who frequently writes about race, politics, and identity.

  • New Jersey enacts law to prevent surveillance pricing of groceries. Here’s what to know.

    New Jersey enacts law to prevent surveillance pricing of groceries. Here’s what to know.

    New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill signed a surveillance pricing ban into law on Thursday as she champions herself as a fighter for lower costs in New Jersey.

    The Democrat lauded the initiative as part of her broader agenda and campaign promise of making life more affordable in the state. Also in line with her messaging, she blamed President Donald Trump’s tariffs and the war in Iran for high grocery prices at a news conference announcing the new law.

    “Surveillance pricing essentially gives Big Brother a look into your shopping cart,” she said. “It’s incredibly invasive and it’s expensive.”

    Several states across the country have similar bills under consideration, but New Jersey is just the third to write the ban into law, after Maryland and Connecticut.

    Here’s what to know about the new law.

    What is surveillance pricing?

    Essentially, it’s when grocery stores or apps create individualized pricing based on shoppers’ personal data.

    As defined by the new law, it’s a pricing strategy in which food prices are adjusted, optimized, or recommended by an algorithm or automatic system that uses personal data, such as through biometrics, cameras, sensors, device tracking, or other forms of observing consumers’ personal attributes.

    What does this law do?

    The new law, called the Fair Price Protection Act, bans surveillance pricing or other pricing strategies that determine the cost of groceries based on consumers’ data. The law takes aim specifically at groceries and not at restaurants or other places that sell food or beverage for immediate consumption.

    It also implements a one-year ban on new electronic shelf labels and requires the state to study the use of such labels. The New Jersey Innovation Authority is required to submit findings no more than six months before the end of the moratorium along with policy recommendations surrounding the practice. Companies are allowed to repair or replace existing electronic shelf labels during this moratorium.

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    These labels allow companies to update prices more efficiently and do not mean surveillance pricing is being used. But a group that has lobbied for a surveillance pricing ban — the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union — has also called for bans on electronic price tags and called them “the missing piece of the surveillance pricing puzzle.”

    The surveillance pricing ban will not take effect for a year, but the electronic shelf label moratorium will begin in six months.

    A violation of the new law carries penalties of up to $10,000 for the first offense and up to $20,000 for further violations, and the attorney general can pursue additional civil penalties.

    What did lawmakers think of this bill?

    Earlier this year, some South Jersey legislators said they wish the bill had gone further and banned the practice across other industries.

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    The bill passed both chambers of the legislature on June 30 as part of a slew of last-minute actions before the budget deadline.

    It passed largely along party lines, though two Democrats voted against it in the Senate, including Sen. James Beach, a Camden County Democrat who had been listed as a cosponsor on the bill. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.

    In the Assembly, seven Democrats did not vote on the bill, and one Republican voted for it.

    Does Instacart use surveillance pricing?

    At her news conference, Sherrill cited figures from a Consumer Reports study that found Instacart used artificial intelligence-driven pricing that left customers with price tags differing as much as 23% per item for an annual household cost difference of $1,200 per year.

    However, Instacart has said it did not use personal information to set those prices, and therefore it did not involve surveillance pricing — a practice the company said it does not use. The company also said it has changed its practices outlined in the study.

    That being said, experts have warned that the combination of AI pricing models and the mass amounts of data collected on U.S. shoppers paves the way for surveillance pricing, per Consumer Reports.

    Will this law interfere with your loyalty discounts?

    Opponents of the bill, such as business groups and Republican lawmakers, have argued that the bill will have the opposite effect than intended, leading to higher prices because of negative effects on loyalty discount programs.

    “The reason so many businesses pushed back on ‘The Fair Price Protection Act’ wasn’t because they want to price gouge customers, it’s because the bill threatens the loyalty programs, discount apps, and member pricing that brings in customers and actually brings prices down for everyday shoppers. … This law threatens to take that all away,” Assembly Republicans said in a post on X on Thursday.

    But Sherrill insists the new law will not go after those discounts.

    “Deals are fine,” Sherrill said. “Surveillance-driven surcharges driving up costs are not. If companies violate your privacy to try and make a buck, they’ll be held accountable under our state’s Consumer Fraud Act.”

    The law specifically says it does not prevent discounts with publicly shared eligibility requirements, such as being a teacher or veteran. It also allows companies to offer discounts through loyalty programs that shoppers opt in to and provide discounts based on customers’ purchases as long as all members of the program are eligible to receive them under the same conditions.