California voters will soon decide whether to tax billionaires — but even if a majority says yes, the measure could still lose to either of two billionaire-funded measures designed to cancel it out. The billionaire-backed group Building a Better California designed two countermeasures to undermine the wealth tax and create multiple ways to defeat it. Recent polling shows slim majorities…
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This article was originally published by Truthout on Sept. 25, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.
A massive backlog of voter registration applications in Texas could affect the outcome of local and state elections, including a contentious election involving a U.S. Senate seat.
Public officials in the Republican-controlled state have not yet acknowledged what the error actually is. It’s also possible that the error could have affected elections from before the primary elections in March 2026, officials have acknowledged.
“Texas county voter registrars across the state have received a flood of new voter registrations and updates to voter registration records submitted through the Texas Department of Public Safety,” said Chris McGinn, executive director of the Texas Association of County Election Officials. “Some of these submissions date as far back as October 2025.”
It’s unclear how many voters could be affected by the error. McGinn acknowledged that “counties have received anywhere from several hundred to tens of thousands of records to process.” In Bexar County alone, around 45,000 registrations that have been submitted have not yet been processed.
All 254 counties in the state appear to be affected. The Texas Secretary of State’s office alerted all counties to the issue in an email last week, writing:
Counties have alerted us to the fact that some older [Department of Public Safety] registrations are now appearing on their dashboard. We are actively investigating this issue to determine the source of these historical records.
The situation is dire, as the registration deadline for Texan voters for the upcoming general election is October 5. County officials have until October 19 to process registrations, which is
With Republican Rep. Mark Amodei retiring in Nevada, his party has rallied behind David Flippo as his successor. The outgoing incumbent, however, has said he will “absolutely not” support the GOP nominee.
“The guy is a fraud,” Amodei said this week, referring to Flippo. “I’m not having my last action walking out the door to hug a guy who I think is a fraud.”
The criticisms came to mind after new allegations emerged of Flippo having repeatedly exaggerated his military service record. The Washington Post reported:
David Flippo, a Republican congressional candidate in Nevada, inflated his military record multiple times in recent years by falsely claiming he received a Bronze Star “for valor” during his two-decade Air Force career.
Flippo received a Bronze Star in 2004 for his service, but not the Bronze Star with valor, a much rarer distinction that recognizes heroism in direct combat with an enemy. Experts on military awards say such exaggerations are tantamount to lying. The Flippo campaign acknowledged the misrepresentations but downplayed them as “honest mistakes” by staff members.
It’s the repetition of the error that stands out in a story like this one. We’re not just talking about a random social media post published by an obscure intern. Rather, Flippo and his political operation, which has made his military service the centerpiece of his candidacy, have included the same exaggeration in television ads and multiple fundraising appeals.
Doug Sterner, a recipient of two Bronze Stars and one of the nation’s foremost experts on military awards, told the Post that Flippo’s error was “a big deal,” adding, “It’s pretty sad that this is a multiple-time thing. It shows a pattern
“If Donald Trump were perverse enough to run a write-in campaign for 2028 president, and, as unlikely as it would be, he won, would he be able to take up a third term?” — Dave
Hi Dave,
No.
The 22nd Amendment says, “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.” Trump has already been elected twice (in 2016 and 2024). Therefore, he cannot be elected a third time.
Running a write-in campaign, as opposed to running as the official GOP nominee, wouldn’t change that. If anything, due to the long-shot nature of write-in campaigns, he would just be doing something unlawful in a more convoluted way. Some states don’t even allow write-ins.
To be clear, your question and my answer thus far are about Trump being elected to the presidency again. On that note, another scenario I have seen floated is that he returns to the White House as vice president and the president (say, JD Vance) resigns and Trump becomes president a third time.
At first glance, such a gambit might seem to evade the 22nd Amendment’s prohibition on being elected president more than twice. But even if that provision were no longer an impediment, there’s still another barrier: the 12th Amendment. That one says “no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President.” Because the 22nd Amendment disqualifies him from the presidency in 2028, the 12th Amendment would appear to disqualify him from the vice presidency, too.
Of course, this is all hypothetical, though it is fair to wonder in light of the president’s antidemocratic actions to date. As for whether he
It was about a month ago when The Atlantic reported that Donald Trump had directed his political operation to create a series of election-season television advertisements about how great he is. It was a dubious idea for all sorts of reasons, but it was clear at the time where the money would come from: The president’s focus was on how to spend his super PAC’s $400 million political war chest, not public funds.
A month later, however, many Americans are already seeing Trump-centric election ads on TV, except they’re the ones who are footing the bill for those commercials. Politico reported:
The Trump administration launched a new television advertisement featuring President Donald Trump calling out socialism, communism and Marxism, appearing to use government resources to go on air in the weeks before the midterm election.
The ad began airing Wednesday night, according to the ad tracking service AdImpact, and has aired on programs on Fox News and Newsmax along with connected TV platforms.
The ads explicitly tell viewers in a disclaimer that the commercials were “paid for by the U.S. government,” although it did not elaborate on details such as which part of the government.
The degree to which the 30-second ad looks like a campaign commercial is hard to overstate. It’s filled with images and video clips of Trump and his campaign slogans and concludes with a Trump ally praising the president’s “toughness.”
The video serves no purpose other than to celebrate and glorify Trump. (The ad’s soundtrack is the song “Love Me” by JMSN, emphasizing the lyric, “I’ll make them love me,” which is every bit as creepy and on the nose as it
The Department of Homeland Security has gone to extraordinary lengths over the past several months to track down noncitizen voters, to the point where hundreds of federal immigration officers have been reassigned from their usual duties to search for potential voter fraud.
The campaign — or as DHS calls it, the “Unlawful Voter Initiative” — has been so aggressive that, according to one recent federal whistleblower, investigators may have broken state laws at the behest of desperate DHS leaders.
At face value, it might seem as if this crusade to address a problem that doesn’t actually exist is profoundly wasteful and counterproductive, but to hear Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin tell it, the efforts have paid dividends: The Cabinet secretary recently claimed that there were as many as 15,903 noncitizens on the voter rolls in Nevada.
The specificity of the claim might’ve led some to believe that Mullin’s statistic had some merit. It did not. The New York Times reported:
When the Department of Homeland Security sent Nevada a list of 185 names last month that it claimed identified noncitizens who had been improperly allowed to register to vote, state election officials got to work.
On Tuesday, the state sent a strongly worded rebuke to the federal government: Every single person on the list was a lawful citizen.
The Trump administration began with the 15,903 figure, although Trump administration officials later conceded this total was unsubstantiated.
Under pressure from officials in Nevada, who were understandably eager to address the highly controversial claims, a DHS official sent an email that read in part, “We’ve manually reviewed some of the 15,903 and confirmed 185 are not U.S. Citizens.”
That, in