More Mail Ballots Are Arriving Late This Cycle, and They’re Getting Tossed

“State officials say they worry about the Postal Service’s ability to deliver votes this fall. They are urging voters to mail their ballots early or use drop boxes so their votes count.

Aug. 31, 2026Updated 8:48 a.m. ET

Nearly twice as many mail ballots were rejected for arriving late in Michigan’s primaries this year when compared to 2024.Rebecca Cook/Reuters

The rate at which mail votes have been rejected for arriving late has ticked up in primaries this year and general elections last year in roughly a dozen states, prompting election officials to worry that the U.S. Postal Service is ill-equipped to deliver ballots in the fall midterms.

The states studied by The New York Times include some of the most critical battleground House and Senate seats where control of Congress will be determined, as well as key races for governor and secretary of state. The Times obtained data from California, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Nebraska, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Utah, Virginia, Wisconsin and Washington.

In Wisconsin, which hosts an open race for governor, a competitive House election plus contests for both chambers of the state legislature, lateness accounted for about 5,000 rejected mail ballots in the spring primary this year, or 78 percent of all tossed ballots. During the last spring election, in 2023, the figure was roughly 2,300, or 47 percent of all tossed votes.

The increase is particularly striking when comparing primaries in 2024 and this year. In Michigan’s primary earlier this month, more than 10,000 mail ballots were rejected for arriving after the state’s deadline of 8 p.m. on Election Day. That is nearly double the number of ballots rejected in 2024. In Washington, the number of late-arriving mail ballots increased from about 16,000 to more than 20,000 in the same period.

The rise in rejected ballots comes at a time of immense upheaval at the Postal Service, where a budget crisis has prompted widespread complaints about delivery delays. The increase also comes as President Trump and his allies are trying to transform the 251-year-old agency into a central player in their quest to restrict mail voting and otherwise overhaul the nation’s elections.

Roughly two dozen states sued the government over the president’s executive order governing mail voting, which would require states to hand over voter information and would empower the Postal Service to block mail ballots from being sent or delivered in states that do not comply. The moves have especially alarmed Democrats, who fear the president could use the Postal Service to tip the scales of a midterm election that polls show currently favors their party. Mr. Trump has stated publicly that curtailing mail voting is good for Republicans.

A federal judge issued a ruling on Thursday blocking the Postal Service from proceeding after concluding that the agency’s plan appeared to overstep its legal mandate and could spark chaos by changing rules fewer than 70 days before an election. The administration is appealing.

Meanwhile, the uptick in rejection rates for mail ballots this year could fuel the partisan battle. The ballots that were tossed because they arrived too late represent a fraction of the overall mail ballot total — the Postal Service typically delivers more than 95 percent of mail ballots on time. But the agency has curtailed its services in the face of budget shortfalls in recent years, leading to slower mail delivery across the country.

Election officials say the rise in rejections, along with the general sentiment out of Washington, has prompted them to scramble to put safeguards in place to ensure that voters’ ballots are counted.

In Colorado, Jena Griswold, the Democratic secretary of state, has rapidly increased the number of drop boxes across the state — by 78 percent since 2018 — so voters can return their ballots without concerns of postal delays or interference.

Election officials are scrambling to put safeguards in place to make sure votes aren’t rejected because of postal delays. In Colorado, officials have dramatically increased the number of ballot drop boxes.Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images

“We did change the law last legislative session,” Ms. Griswold said in an interview. “Mail ballots are going out sooner, and drop boxes are going out sooner. That is in direct response to the uncertainty coming from D.C. and Trump’s attacks on our democracy.”

In a statement, The Postal Service countered claims that the agency has become unreliable by noting that over 95 percent of mail ballots have arrived on time in recent elections.

“There are any number of factors that may impact the timeliness of a returned ballot,” the statement said. “As such, our consistent message to voters who choose to vote by mail is to mail early.”

Following the 2020 election, when a deluge of voters opted to vote by mail during the coronavirus pandemic, the agency developed new procedures to prioritize on-time delivery for mail ballots. After a court case in 2021, the Postal Service agreed to maintain the new measures for all even-year federal elections through 2028.

William Hensley, a former election mail specialist at the Postal Service who helped establish the new procedures, said the fact that mail ballot delays were more prevalent in odd-year and primary elections suggested that the measures were effective. But he conceded that structural changes within the agency slowing service across the board were also affecting ballots.

As part of a 10-year-plan established in 2021 to shore up the Postal Service’s finances through structural changes, the agency set up regional distribution centers to process mail and increased the delivery standards for first-class mail, from three days to five.

The Postal Service further slowed down mail in 2024 when it implemented a centralized system that postmarks mail when it reaches regional centers, not when it first enters the mail stream. The delay has particularly affected mail voting, especially in states that rely on postmarks to determine if a ballot is valid.

These cost-cutting changes have so far struggled to make a substantial dent in the agency’s multibillion dollar deficit, but they have slowed the delivery of mail votes. Election officials are starting to notice.

In Wisconsin’s state Supreme Court election in April, several hundred ballots arrived a day late in Dane County, home to Madison, the state capital, according to Scott McDonell, the county clerk.

“That was highly unusual,” he said. “In the past, we would only see a handful.”

In a survey by the Wisconsin Elections Commission, two-thirds of clerks reported observing problems with mail delivery times in that election.

“The worst mail delivery day of the week is Tuesday (unfortunately for elections!) and our office jokingly but sadly refers to it as ‘no mail Tuesday,’” read one submission from a clerk in Waukesha County.

Mr. McDonell, who is a Democrat, says he now tells voters to use drop boxes, vote early in person or mail their ballots at least two weeks before Election Day.

In Washington, a universal mail-voting state, more voters are using drop boxes than trusting the Postal Service with their ballots, said Stuart Holmes, the state’s elections director.

“The Postal Service, these are great people, hard-working people,” Mr. Holmes said about the state’s local postal employees. “But their operation has become unreliable.”

In Washington’s primary earlier this year, 75 percent of rejected mail ballots were tossed because they arrived too late.

Ricky Hatch, a Republican election official in Utah, a state that relies almost exclusively on mail voting, said he had noticed a nationwide increase of election officials encouraging voters to mail their ballots early because of Postal Service slowdowns.

“We’ve definitely morphed over time from going from ‘Hey, get your ballot in before the deadline’ to ‘Mail your ballot at least a week early, if you want to have it counted,’” Mr. Hatch said.

Now, he added, the advice is even more cautious: “Better yet, use a drop box.”

Adam Sella covers breaking news for The Times in Washington.

Nick Corasaniti is a Times reporter covering national politics, with a focus on voting and elections.“

If Your Family Came From These 7 Southern State — These Records Revealed Your True Ancestors

 

Therapist Reacts to Bill Maher's Different Take on White Privilege (Bill Maher is a dumb rscist, plain and simple!)

 

  Therapist Reacts to Bill Maher's Different Take on White Privilege

The Quiet Disappearance of Black History in Higher Ed

African American Studies Department are Dwindling Across U.S. Colleges

"More than 12 private colleges and public universities have either reduced or eliminated Black programs studies departments and majors.

By

Angela Wilson

Published

August 27, 2026

Thoughtful young bald female student looking away while sitting with friends in classroom at college (Photo: Getty Images)

A Washington Post report found that over a dozen U.S. colleges and universities have scaled back or downright eliminated Black, African, and African American studies departments and majors over the past two years. So much so, nationwide completions for African American studies degrees dropped to the lowest levels in two decades — a number administrators now cite as justification for the next round of cuts."

The Quiet Disappearance of Black History in Higher Ed

RFK Jr lied in Senate confirmation hearings, newly revealed documents indicate | Trump administration | The Guardian

RFK Jr lied in Senate confirmation hearings, newly revealed documents indicate

"Letters obtained by Guardian and AP contradict testimony that 2019 visit to Samoa had ‘nothing to do with vaccines’

Michelle R Smith

Robert F Kennedy Jr testifies before a Senate confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill, on 30 January 2025. Photograph: Nathan Howard/Reuters

Newly obtained documents indicate that the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, lied during two congressional hearings last year, when he told lawmakers who held the key to his confirmation that a 2019 visit to Samoa had “nothing to do with vaccines”.

Letters obtained by the Guardian and the Associated Press contradict that testimony. In one he wrote to the Samoan prime minister before the trip, Kennedy explicitly said he wanted to study the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine in the Pacific island nation. In it, he used the words “vaccine” or “vaccination” eight times."

RFK Jr lied in Senate confirmation hearings, newly revealed documents indicate | Trump administration | The Guardian

Trump’s DHS is using an obscure law to secretly snoop on journalists, non-profits and unions: ‘It’s outrageous’ | Trump administration | The Guardian

Trump’s DHS is using an obscure law to secretly snoop on journalists, non-profits and unions: ‘It’s outrageous’

"Even after judges rejected the same ploy, the Trump administration is going directly to social media and telecommunications companies

Sam Levine

Federal agents in Newark, New Jersey, on 30 May. Photograph: Julius Constantine Motal/The Guardian

The Trump administration has been deploying an obscure legal maneuver to try to obtain private information on journalists, non-profits and unions, raising alarm over a power the government has asserted without judicial oversight.

In one instance, the government obtained six months of telephone records for Georgia Fort, a Minneapolis journalist. Fort was not notified of the request for her information, nor was she given a chance to contest the government’s effort to obtain them, her lawyers said in court papers.

In February of this year, federal prosecutors twice sought search warrants for account information for the YouTube channel of Fort and the journalist Don Lemon, both of whom have pleaded not guilty to criminal charges in connection to a protest at a Minneapolis church in January that they were covering. A judge twice rejected the request, writing that the government had failed to establish probable cause of a crime and that he wanted Lemon and Fort to be informed of the request so they could have a chance to challenge it. About a month after the judge’s ruling in late February, the government said it was withdrawing the request.

But officials hadn’t given up on getting the data.

Less than a month later, the DHS served Google with a different request for the YouTube information. This time, DHS utilized a different method that didn’t require approval from a judge, only a sign-off from a DHS official. It served Google an administrative summons citing an arcane provision of federal law – 19 USC 1509 – dealing with customs imports. The provision gives the DHS broad power to inspect records in order to determine whether duties and taxes are being correctly levied on imported items. It also instructed the recipients of the summons to keep it secret.

The DHS summons was issued under a statute that does give the agency broad power to demand records, but only in the limited circumstance of there being a need to investigate a customs issue, said Chris Duncan, a former lawyer at the Department of Homeland Security. “These laws have absolutely nothing to do with a domestic situation at a church, a social media post, even an immigration matter,” he said.

“It’s outrageous conduct on so many levels. It’s hard to know where to begin,” said John Roth, who served as the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security from 2014 to 2017. “This is an improper use of the subpoena under any circumstances. This is not a customs case; it is not a customs violation. They are not investigating a customs violation.”

The episode in Minnesota was particularly alarming because it appeared to be an end run around a judge who was skeptical of the government’s need for the information.

“There is no judge in the loop. You don’t have that independent authority to scrutinize the demand and to say whether or not it’s legitimate,” said Caitlin Vogus, a senior adviser at the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

The DHS also sought and obtained six months of phone records for Fort from T-Mobile, which included records for more than 10,000 calls and text messages. Fort was not notified the government was seeking the records until mid-July, when government lawyers produced them to her lawyers. Fort’s lawyers wrote in a filing this week they were “stunned” to see the government had unilaterally been able to obtain a log of her communications after a judge had warned them about obtaining records about a journalist.

“That’s very concerning because the information demanded can help the government uncover a journalist’s confidential sources,” Vogus said.

In a statement, T-Mobile did not address why it turned over the information.

“We take our responsibility to protect customers’ privacy and personal information very seriously. Our team carefully reviews government demands for customer information and responds in accordance with the law. We don’t comment on specific law enforcement demands,” the company said.

The Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security both declined to comment on the use of the summons.

In addition to Fort and Lemon, the DHS also sought information on the YouTube accounts for the left-leaning outlet Democracy Now, conservative podcaster Megyn Kelly, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and an independent journalist named Brendan Gutenschwager. Some of the videos they cited in the summons were livestreams of the protest, but not all of them. The video cited as part of the request for information on Democracy Now involved a news report on the protest and an interview with Nekima Levy Armstrong, who led the protest. The video cited on the request for Kelly’s show included an interview with Jonathan Parnell, the pastor at the church.

It’s unclear why exactly the DHS wanted the YouTube account information, which includes things like a user’s IP address, and information about when a user was logging in.

“It’s still concerning that the government sought subscriber information for Lemon and Fort because there’s no reason it would need this information for the criminal charges that it’s brought against them,” Vogus said. “It’s not a crime to post a YouTube video, and it’s not at all clear why the government is demanding this information about Lemon and Fort’s YouTube accounts.”

The episode was the most recent example of an alarming pattern in recent months in which the DHS avoided judicial scrutiny and deployed a summons related to customs enforcement to pressure companies into turning over information on Americans. The US constitution’s fourth amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures and law enforcement generally must show a judge or a grand jury they have probable cause to believe the materials they want to search will produce evidence of a crime.

But over the last few months, the Department of Homeland Security has undertaken a brazen effort to get around that fundamental safeguard. In addition to efforts to obtain records on Minnesota journalists, the DHS has used 1509 summonses to pressure social media companies to unmask the identities of people who have criticized ICE officers and to obtain financial information on a host of unions and left-leaning non-profit organizations in Minneapolis.

In a separate case in which 15 activists face criminal conspiracy charges, DHS successfully obtained the financial records of the Sunrise Movement, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the Communications Workers of America, as well as Venmo records for a non-profit organization called Voices for Racial Justice. None of the organizations is charged with crimes and the DHS did not offer an explanation for why it needed the records. PayPal, Venmo’s parent company, declined to comment.

“There’s a long history of DHS abusing this summons authority in particular, and using it to seek both records that are clearly outside of its scope in general, and more particularly to try to go after people whose speech DHS is somehow irked by – but whose speech is protected by the first amendment,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union who specializes in privacy issues.

It is difficult to determine the frequency with which the DHS is serving the 1509 summonses and how often they are successful in obtaining information. The summonses often remain hidden from public view unless the company being served, or the user, challenges them. Companies are not required to notify users that they have been served with a 1509 summons for information, though some do. The New York Times reported in February that the DHS had served hundreds of administrative subpoenas on social media companies for information on users.

“Without knowing how many of these subpoenas there are and what they’re being used for, there’s no way for courts or lawmakers or the public to put checks on executive branch abuses,” said Wessler, the ACLU attorney.

In the Minneapolis church case involving Lemon and Fort, the Trump administration has argued it had the power to use the customs-related summons to obtain information even though the crimes the defendants were charged with have nothing to do with customs. The protesters entered the church because a local ICE official was a pastor there, and could have potentially assaulted him or interfered with his duties, justice department lawyers wrote in a filing earlier this year. Even though the man does not appear to have been there, and there were no DHS officials at the church or involved in the protest, lawyers said the DHS was entitled to issue the summons because it was investigating a potential assault on a law enforcement officer.

In court filings, the Trump administration has argued the Department of Homeland Security has the power to demand such records without judicial oversight.

“Although § 1509 references ‘duties, fees, and taxes,’ the plain language of the statute does not limit DHS’s investigative authority to those subjects; instead, DHS is authorized to investigate potential crimes to ensure ‘compliance with the laws of the United States administered by the United States Customs Service,’” which has been folded into the Department of Homeland Security, a lawyer wrote in a December court filing last year.

That is an overbroad misreading of the statute, one expert said.

“I don’t buy that,” said Duncan, the former DHS lawyer. “It’s not a free-for-all that was thrown in there. Congress does not operate that way. Given these provisions were specifically incorporated into title 19, the customs statute, Congress obviously intended to authorize only records, demands and interviews in furtherance of investigations into customs violations, not wild goose chases into possible violations of any federal law without any judicial oversight.”

In Fort’s case, Google did not comply with the summons for any of the accounts. The company responded to the DHS by saying it had not offered evidence of how it was related to a customs investigation.

A Google spokesperson said the company reviews each request for data it gets to ensure it is legal and pushes back when it is too broad or doesn’t follow the correct process.

Many social media companies say they notify users when law enforcement makes a request for their information and give them a chance to contest the summons. It’s not always clear what the companies will do if the user doesn’t respond or won’t contest the request themselves. But privacy experts question whether that notice is adequate, saying many users are confused when they are contacted and do not have the resources to get a lawyer to contest the demand in court.

“They want people to think that they are going to stand up for people’s privacy, but they really shifted the burden completely onto the user,” said Lauren Regan, executive director of the Civil Liberties Defense Center, which represented a Reddit user who challenged the government’s efforts to get Reddit to reveal their identity through a 1509 summons.

Companies are not required to respond to a 1509 summons and can ignore the request if they think it is unlawful, forcing the government to go to court to try to enforce the summons. The Guardian was unable to identify any cases where the government attempted to get a court order to enforce a 1509 summons outside of the traditional customs context. Companies can also file their own motions to try to quash the summonses.

“If a user actually hired a lawyer, it would cost tens of thousands of dollars to fight one of these,” said F Mario Trujillo, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy watchdog. “They are not shouldering that burden; they’re pushing that cost onto users and onto non-profit groups when they could easily get their high-powered lawyers who are being paid $500 to $1,000 an hour to fight these.”

In 2017, Twitter filed a lawsuit challenging a Department of Homeland Security 1509 summons seeking to unmask an account, @alt_uscis, that was critical of the DHS. The department ultimately withdrew the summons.

In several cases, the DHS has withdrawn a 1509 summons after it was challenged in court and before a judge could rule on its legality. That may be a deliberate strategy to avoid having a judge rule on the legality of the summons.

In one instance last year, the DHS served a 1509 summons on Meta to unmask the user behind an Instagram and Facebook account that monitored ICE agent activities in the Philadelphia suburbs. The user challenged the summons in court, saying it was clearly not authorized under the law. Lawyers for the DHS defended the summons, saying it fell within the scope of laws the DHS enforced. Both sides presented arguments before a judge on 15 January and DHS withdrew the summons the next day.

“They don’t want a judge to take away this scary tool because they are getting stuff out of it,” Regan said. “Once a court ruling says ‘thou shalt not use this statute’, it does not apply.”

In 2017, the DHS inspector general issued a report finding “inconsistent – and, in some cases, improper” – use of the 1509 summonses after the @alt_uscis case.

The office of the inspector general review found that officials in Customs and Border Protection’s office of professional responsibility were regularly misusing the subpoena and recommended a series of reforms to ensure more oversight over those that were used. The office agreed to the reforms."

Trump’s DHS is using an obscure law to secretly snoop on journalists, non-profits and unions: ‘It’s outrageous’ | Trump administration | The Guardian

In Georgia, Ossoff Courts Broad Appeal With an Anti-Trump Script

In Georgia, Ossoff Courts Broad Appeal With an Anti-Trump Script

Senator Jon Ossoff, the youngest sitting senator and the only Democrat seeking re-election this year in a state President Trump won in 2024, hasn’t moderated his message in his critical race.

Aug. 29, 2026, 5:02 a.m. ET

U.S. Immigration Crackdown

At rallies across Georgia this summer, Senator Jon Ossoff has delivered a series of blistering rebukes of the president and a challenger for his seat, Representative Mike Collins.Alex Kent/The New York Times

By Robert Jimison

Robert Jimison, a congressional correspondent who has covered Georgia politics for more than a decade, reported from across the state.

Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia entered this election cycle with every reason to tack to the political middle.

He is the only Senate Democrat seeking re-election this year in a state President Trump carried in 2024, making him one of the most vulnerable incumbents in his party and an obvious Republican target from the start.

But Mr. Ossoff hasn’t moderated his votes or his message to appeal to a broader swath of voters, as Democrats in competitive statewide races often do in the conservative-leaning South. Instead, he has dived into his party’s efforts to thwart the president’s agenda in Congress, and sharpened his attacks on Mr. Trump and Republicans on the campaign trail.

The approach risks alienating some members of the coalition whose backing he needs to win re-election in Georgia, including independents and conservative-leaning voters.

His strategy appears to be based in large part on taking advantage of two factors: Mr. Trump’s sagging approval ratings — a Fox News poll in June found him with net-negative ratings in Georgia, with 56 percent holding an unfavorable view of him — and a Republican challenger endorsed by the president, Representative Mike Collins, who is regarded by strategists in both parties as relatively weak.

Mr. Ossoff has submitted himself to little tough questioning and has not pushed any major policy proposal. He has leaned heavily on circulating flattering video clips of himself making his case, and in a recent interview with The New York Times, stuck to a disciplined script as he laid out his theory of the race.

“The crisis that the nation’s mired in is born in large part of widespread disillusionment that flows from negligent and ineffective public service,” he said between campaign stops in Savannah. “Trumpism feeds on and deepens the sense that the Constitution, the Congress, elected officials, don’t care and can’t deliver.”

The message appears to be resonating. Less than three months from Election Day, Mr. Ossoff leads Mr. Collins in every major public poll and holds a commanding fund-raising advantage, putting him in a strong position to keep a key seat critical to Democrats’ uphill battle to win control of the Senate.

At rallies across Georgia this summer, he has delivered a series of blistering rebukes of the president and Mr. Collins.

In Savannah, standing in front of a large crowd of supporters last month, he said Mr. Collins lacked the “judgment and integrity to serve in the United States Senate” and labeled him a Trump “puppet.” In Atlanta this month, he said Mr. Trump and those close to him — a group he calls the “Mar-a-Lago mafia” — have “taken American corruption to spectacular new heights,” a line he has used repeatedly. He has called Mr. Trump a “draft-dodging, crook president,” and recently drew the president’s rage by mentioning the name of his most devoted aide, Natalie Harp, as part of a screed in which he said that Mr. Trump “doesn’t want to do the job” of being president.

Along the way, his adherence to anti-Trump talking points — he repeats some so consistently that he can at times sound almost robotic — has turned Mr. Ossoff, at 39 the youngest member of the Senate, into a social media sensation. It has fed speculation he refuses to indulge about his potential as a presidential contender in 2028 at a time when other Democrats have struggled to coalesce around a clear message.

Mr. Ossoff still faces challenges in a state Mr. Trump won less than two years ago. Mr. Collins, the 59-year-old son of former Representative Mac Collins of Georgia, has focused heavily on the issues that animate the Republican base — illegal immigration, transgender athletes, crime and grievances surrounding the 2020 election — while adopting an aggressive online persona of the kind Mr. Ossoff has eschewed.

Mr. Collins wrote legislation requiring that immigrants in the country illegally who are accused of crimes be detained for possible deportation. It was named for Laken Riley, the 22-year-old nursing student who was murdered on the University of Georgia campus in 2024, and became the first bill Mr. Trump signed into law in his second term. (Mr. Ossoff and 11 other Senate Democrats voted in favor of the legislation in January last year.)

In Washington, Mr. Ossoff has not made the traditional election-year pivot to the center. He joined Democrats last year in voting to shut down the government — and against repeated efforts to reopen — in an unsuccessful bid to force Republicans to extend expiring health care subsidies. He did so again this year as part of Democrats’ failed attempt to impose new limits on the tactics of federal immigration agents.

As his party has shifted away from unequivocal backing for Israel, Mr. Ossoff has grown more critical as well; he has voted repeatedly, including twice this year, to limit or block some American weapons transfers to the Jewish state. But this week, he broke with Hasan Piker, the left-wing streamer, saying he “unreservedly rejects” a comment Mr. Piker made warning that support for Israel could prompt violence against American Jews.

He also drew outsized attention last month when he questioned Jay Clayton, Mr. Trump’s nominee to lead the nation’s intelligence community, so intensively at his confirmation hearing that Mr. Clayton was briefly left speechless. In the Times interview, Mr. Ossoff — who has made it a standard practice to repeat the same question several times in such settings — said he meticulously prepares for such moments.

“I take great satisfaction in putting folks who have abused their power on the spot and forcing them, through effective investigation and interrogation, to answer for what they’ve done,” Mr. Ossoff said.

But in recent months, the senator, a former congressional aide and documentary film executive, has also aggressively courted Republican backers. He appears to be winning over some, despite his frequent verbal broadsides against the president.

In Toccoa, a city of less than 10,000 residents in the foothills of northeast Georgia, Mayor Gail Fry, a lifelong Republican who voted against Mr. Ossoff when he ran six years ago, is backing the senator.

“We have gotten more support from Senator Ossoff than any other office that we’ve contacted,” she said in an interview, citing an $8.4 million federal grant he secured to replace aging natural-gas infrastructure. “He calls us and says, ‘What do you need?’”

Other local Republican officials, including Mayor Scott James Matheson of Valdosta and Mayor Julie Smith of Tifton, also endorsed Mr. Ossoff.

In the interview, Mr. Ossoff said that bad public service is what ushered in the Trump era and that voters would reward him for focusing on the basics.

“Thousands of folks across the state have my cellphone number,” he said. “They know that I will move heaven and earth to deliver for them, no matter their politics.”

He rejected the notion that his harsh criticism of the president — in the interview, he called Mr. Trump “a disgrace” and his administration “an obscenity” — would alienate the voters he needs to win. And he argued he was still able to work with Republicans when necessary.

“A big part of my job is to have the legislative skill and the relationships across the aisle to get results for the state,” Mr. Ossoff said. “I don’t think these things are in tension.”

That is a tricky balance to strike in an election year. Partisan tensions are running high as Mr. Collins is working to draw a stark contrast with Mr. Ossoff on issues including law enforcement and border security in a state that remains conservative.

At a campaign event this month, Mr. Collins said the choice between himself and Mr. Ossoff was “common sense versus communism crazy.”

Speaking to a crowd of supporters in Augusta, he called Mr. Ossoff a “trust fund kid” and portrayed him as out of step with the state’s deeply conservative values, accusing the senator of voting “to have that border wide open,” for the Biden-era domestic policy bill “that caused all this runaway inflation,” and for legislation “to allow men to play in girls’ sports.”

(Mr. Ossoff voted with his party last year to block Republican-written legislation aimed at barring transgender women and girls from school sports teams designated for female students.)

Mr. Ossoff, for his part, has attacked Mr. Collins for his ties to aides who have trafficked in racist and antisemitic material and associated with prominent bigots. The Washington Post reported this week that a former staff member had posted an image of a swastika and one in which he appeared to be dressed in Ku Klux Klan garb. (In a statement to The Times, a spokesman for Mr. Collins said he “unequivocally condemns” the posts.) The Republican also replaced his chief of staff last month after reports that he had been in communication with the white supremacists Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer.

Mr. Ossoff’s strong position in the race, formidable fund-raising and increasingly prominent confrontations with Trump administration officials have supercharged speculation about his presidential prospects, a topic he stubbornly avoids.

“I have zero interest in running for president in 2028, and, frankly, zero interest in the 2028 fantasy football right now,” Mr. Ossoff said in a recent interview on MS NOW.

Mr. Collins has sought to capitalize on the presidential chatter to portray Ms. Ossoff as out of touch with the state.

“Jon Ossoff sees Georgia as nothing more than a steppingstone and has abandoned our state to court the radical El-Sayed, Hasan Piker wing of the Democrat Party,” said Meyer Siegfried, Mr. Collins’s spokesman, referring to Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the progressive Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan.

Yet some longtime Republicans are looking past Mr. Ossoff’s party affiliation.

Gary Paulk, a fifth-generation muscadine grape farmer in Wray, a small community in deeply Republican South Georgia, once backed Mr. Trump and plans to vote this fall for Rick Jackson, the Republican nominee for governor.

But for Senate, Mr. Paulk plans to support Mr. Ossoff.

He disagrees with the Democrat on abortion, among other issues, but Mr. Paulk has experienced the negative impacts of many of Mr. Trump’s policy moves — including tariffs that have raised his costs, an immigration crackdown he complained left crops to rot for lack of workers to pick them, and health care cuts that have hit rural areas like his particularly hard.

“You pick what’s important, and you go with the person that’s best,” he said. “You’re never going to find anybody that does everything like you want it.”

Robert Jimison covers Congress for The Times, with a focus on defense issues and foreign policy.“

 

Judge Rules Trump Unlawfully Targeted Foreign Students Who Criticized Israel

“The ruling was a win for Stanford’s student newspaper, The Stanford Daily, and it followed another court victory for students targeted by the Trump administration last year.

Published Aug. 28, 2026Updated Aug. 29, 2026, 10:09 a.m. ET

A lawsuit argued that student journalists had been forced to self-censor out of fear of government retaliation.Jim Wilson/The New York Times

A federal judge in California ruled that the Trump administration violated the constitutional rights of international students when it sought to deport them for criticizing Israel’s war in Gaza.

In a 90-page ruling, Judge Noël Wise found that the key legal foundations that the Trump administration had relied on to arrest and deport foreign students were unconstitutional, because Trump officials had wielded them to target students who used their freedom of speech to express opinions that the government did not like.

“In the United States,” Judge Wise wrote, “free speech, including the freedom to criticize the government and its leaders, is not a sign of our democracy’s fragility. It is evidence of its strength.

“That strength is diminished when members of our society — citizens and noncitizens alike — must self-censor and ‘behave’ or suffer the government’s retaliation,” she wrote. “This downward spiral is antithetical to our Constitution that recognizes our right to speak freely. Here you can simultaneously hate the content of a person’s speech and love the country that cherishes the freedom to allow it.”

Judge Wise, who was appointed to the Northern District of California by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., effectively declared that a section of immigration law frequently invoked by the Trump administration violated the First and Fifth Amendments, reasoning that the provision was vague and allowed the secretary of state to remove noncitizens for speech and other activities protected by the First Amendment.

Conor Fitzpatrick, the chief supervising attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which brought the lawsuit, celebrated the ruling.

“Today’s ruling proves that free speech isn’t a privilege, but the inalienable right of every man, woman, and child,” he said in a statement.

The ruling follows another court victory for students targeted by the Trump administration last year. A federal judge in Massachusetts appointed by President Ronald Reagan ruled in September that Trump officials had violated the First Amendment as part of a broader strategy to stamp out campus activism. Judge Wise relied heavily on the reasoning of that court, which found that the Trump administration singled out “pro-Palestine and anti-Israel speech for a campaign of speech-chilling retribution.”

In California, lawyers from the free speech group brought their lawsuit on behalf of The Stanford Daily, a student newspaper at Stanford University. They argued that several of its staff members had been forced to self-censor or quit the paper out of fear that the government could retaliate for what it published.

In court filings, the newspaper, which is open to all students and has more than 150 members, said it had weathered resignations and withdrawn stories by noncitizens who were concerned that publishing content about Israel or the conditions in Gaza could leave them vulnerable to deportation.

The climate of fear at Stanford that the lawsuit described followed a series of arrests last year, when the Trump administration began targeting prominent student activists, including Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk, over their speaking out against the Israeli government and the mounting death toll in Gaza.

In those and other cases, immigration agents arrested the students after Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, invoked the challenged provision, deeming the students a threat to U.S. foreign policy interests. In each case, Mr. Rubio personally signed off on the decision to revoke a student visa or render a lawful permanent resident deportable after determining that those interests were at stake.“