in the courts

In a victory for voters, a Michigan judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by the Republican National Committee (RNC) that sought to make it easier for partisan poll challengers to dispute voter eligibility and interrupt the state’s ballot-counting process.

Michigan Court of Claims Judge Randy Wallace found that the complaint was “barred by laches,” meaning the RNC waited too long to file its lawsuit, leaving election officials too little time to implement changes before voters head to the polls for November’s midterms. 

The RNC sued Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D) in June to overturn guidance she issued in October 2024 limiting the number of poll challengers at each voting location. 

Poll challengers are citizens appointed by political parties and nonpartisan groups to observe the ballot-counting process at polling places. Challengers differ from poll watchers in that they have the authority to challenge a voter’s eligibility or question election administration procedures if they have good reason to believe something is wrong.

Benson’s guidance, which was added to Michigan’s administrative rules in May 2026, aimed to make it more difficult for poll challengers to lodge frivolous challenges that delay or disrupt the ballot-counting process. 

A Nebraska court Wednesday rejected the Republican National Committee’s lawsuit seeking to block certain U.S. citizens abroad from voting in the state, handing the national GOP another major loss in its escalating legal campaign against overseas voters.

Lancaster County District Court Judge Ryan Post denied the RNC’s motion for summary judgment and dismissed the complaint with prejudice.

The lawsuit filed in June challenged a Nebraska law that allows U.S. citizens who live outside the country, are not registered to vote in another state and have at least one parent registered to vote in Nebraska, to register and vote in the state themselves.

The RNC argued that the law violated the Nebraska Constitution’s residency requirement by allowing nonresidents to vote in Nebraska elections.

But the court flatly rejected the RNC’s challenge, finding that the party failed to show the law is unconstitutional in all of its applications.

As The Advocate previously reported, Pennsylvania families went to court after the Justice Department sought extensive information involving young patients, including medical records, intake documents, consent forms and parental authorizations connected with puberty blockers and hormone therapy.

A federal judge ultimately blocked the government from obtaining the records, describing aspects of its conduct as “unprecedented” and saying its rhetoric reflected “callous indifference, if not abject cruelty.”

A superior court judge in Washington, D.C., has ordered the Kennedy Center to pay more than $250,000 to a jazz musician who last December canceled the annual Christmas Eve performance he had hosted there for nearly 20 years. Chuck Redd, a vibraphonist and drummer, decided to cancel the concert after President Trump's name was added to the facade of the arts center that month.

After Redd canceled the performance, the Kennedy Center vowed to sue Redd for $1 million in damages. In June, Judge Tanya M. Jones Bosier dismissed the center's breach of contract suit against Redd, granting his motion to dismiss the case under the district's anti-SLAPP statute, a law designed to protect public interest speech.

In her ruling Monday, the judge decreed that the Kennedy Center must pay Redd $252,479.70 to cover attorneys' fees and other legal costs.

The lawsuit is among several actions the government has taken against Harvard since the Ivy League university refused a list of demands made by the White House after Trump, a Republican, returned to office last year. Trump officials have separately sought to cut Harvard's research funding and limit its ability to enroll foreign students and U.S. military members.

In a separate legal case last year, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to reverse more than $2.6 billion in federal funding cuts to Harvard. That decision found that the White House put unconstitutional conditions on federal funding, using antisemitism as a "smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault" on universities.

A federal judge on Tuesday blocked ⁠the US Postal ⁠Service ​(USPS) from implementing part of Donald Trump’s executive order that aims ⁠to tighten rules for mail-in voting ahead of November midterm elections that ⁠will decide control of Congress.

The ruling by ​US district ‌judge Indira ‌Talwani in Boston in effect expanded on an ‌earlier order she had issued in June that had prevented Trump’s administration from implementing it in 23 mostly Democratic-led states.

A federal court in Nevada Friday became the 22nd consecutive district court to reject the Trump administration’s campaign to force states to turn over their unredacted voter rolls, dismissing the Department of Justice’s case and denying its motion to compel.

U.S. District Judge Anne Traum said she was “joining every other court to have addressed the issue so far” in rejecting DOJ’s attempt to use Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960 to obtain Nevada’s statewide voter registration list.

“Neither letter purported to allege facts showing a need for an investigation into Nevada’s state election system,” Traum wrote. “The lack of a basis is a sufficient reason to conclude that Secretary Aguilar did not, on the facts alleged in the complaint, violate the CRA by refusing to produce the unredacted voter file. The Government has provided ‘no basis — none.’”

“Seizure of cast ballots or other voting system components before certification would threaten the security, transparency, and ultimate validity of an election,” the DNC wrote. “Seizure of lawfully cast ballots prior to certification would violate voters’ First Amendment rights.”

The lawsuit is rooted in the FBI’s January raid on the Fulton County Election Hub and Operation Center in Georgia, where agents seized more than 600 boxes of records from the 2020 presidential election under a federal search warrant.

Fulton County, which includes most of Atlanta, was a central target of President Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

“By banning health-preserving abortion, Idaho attempts to deny this fundamental right on the basis that the threat of harm comes from a fetus, which depends on the woman for survival,” Winmill wrote. “But a pregnant woman’s health is not a state resource to be allocated at the legislature’s whim. The Fourteenth Amendment exists precisely to prevent subjugation like this.” 

The city's Planned Parenthood clinic began offering medication abortion this week, ending a stretch that started in October 2005, when Springfield Healthcare Center closed after three decades in business and left southwest Missouri without an abortion provider.

The Springfield location is the fifth Planned Parenthood clinic to begin offering the medication after a June court decision struck down several abortion regulations as unconstitutional, opening the door to in-clinic medication abortion access again in Missouri for the first time since 2018. Medication abortion appointments at the clinic can be made up to 12 weeks into pregnancy.

Abortion has been legal in Missouri since November 2024, when voters approved a reproductive-rights amendment protecting abortion up to the point of fetal viability.