A U.S. court rejected on Monday the Alabama legislature's redrawn U.S. congressional district map for November elections, saying it likely violated the Voting Rights Act and stood to deny Black voters an additional representative.

The showdown over voting rights in the U.S. Senate may be over for now. But the issue is still smoldering in a stretch of Northeast Georgia countryside where local officials recently introduced a plan to close seven polling sites and consolidate them into one.

DENVER | Colorado’s Democratic Secretary of State on Monday ordered a Republican county clerk who has echoed former President Donald Trump’s demands for “audits” of elections to return a copy he says he made of his county’s election system, a potential breach of security.

In Vermont, lawmakers are considering bills to make it easier to prosecute people who threaten election officials. In Maine, proposed legislation would stiffen penalties for such intimidation. In Washington, state senators voted this month to make threatening election workers a felony.

Arizona Republicans have put forth two dozen bills this month that would significantly change the state's electoral processes after the GOP's unorthodox review of millions of ballots affirmed President Joe Biden's victory and turned up no proof of fraud.

The November 2020 election was widely considered the most secure in American history. But an anti-democracy movement, fueled by the Big Lie, poses serious threats to the security of elections. Taking these threats seriously requires expanding upon recent improvements to election security.

In a Wednesday speech held before the Senate votes, President Joe Biden warned of future stolen elections: “the prospect of [an election] being illegitimate is in direct proportion to us not being able to get these reforms passed.” Mother Jones’s Ari Berman, a leading journalist on the democracy beat, argued that the Senate is “killing the Democrats’ last, best chance to protect American democracy.”

Several counties in Texas have reported rejecting hundreds of vote-by-mail applications in the past week because of confusion over new ID requirements created by a Republican-backed law that went into effect last month.

This week, Senate Democrats are going to try — and fail — to get rid of the filibuster for voting rights legislation. They need all 50 senators in the Democratic caucus on board, and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and — to a slightly lesser degree — Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) are opposed to changing those rules.

A year-long Democratic push for federal voting rights legislation is set to come to a head on the Senate floor Wednesday evening, with party leaders bracing for disappointment after key senators insisted they would not change the chamber’s rules to overcome persistent Republican opposition.

It is a week of high drama in the Senate. Will our government defend voting rights and uphold fair elections throughout the country? If it becomes clear that Congress cannot act because of the filibuster, ever, and the courts step back, then states will have an open invitation to violate the rights of their citizens.

The lawsuit comes after Peters, a Republican, refused last week to comply with a list of election security terms from Griswold, a Democrat, ahead of the November contest. The terms included that Peters be accompanied when near any of her county’s voting equipment and that she retract statements in which she “indicated a willingness to compromise Mesa County’s voting system equipment.”