Good morning. I’m Corinne Straight, and this is AlterNet America.
Trump is threatening to withhold 20 percent of states’ Homeland Security grants unless they end electronic ballots. A Georgia Republican running for lieutenant governor admitted he and friends faked ballot signatures, including having kids sign, to prove fraud. The DEA let at least 1.8 million fentanyl pills hit New Mexico streets while agents sat back and watched. And a $700 million data center is set to rise 320 feet from the Nashville Zoo’s clouded leopard breeding habitat.
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Now, let’s go.
Trump Threatens to Defund States That Don’t Make Election Changes
Fiscal conservatism is when you spend $2.7 billion to find twelve fake voters.
The Department of Homeland Security is holding millions of dollars in grants hostage unless states agree to stop using electronic ballots and verify voters’ citizenship before they can vote. Trump wants states to run manual election audits at his direction and use his preferred system to confirm citizenship. States that refuse would lose 20 percent of their grant money.
These are the funds that help states prevent terror attacks, protect infrastructure, and prepare for natural disasters. DHS has handed them out for years, no questions asked.
Now the money is conditional on states rebuilding their entire election apparatus, all so the president can keep calling factual results fraudulent ahead of a midterm he is expected to lose.
The nationwide cost of upgrading election equipment has been estimated at $2.7 billion. In Georgia alone, Republican Secretary of State Raffensperger puts the price at $66 million. This means complying could cost states far more than the grant money being held over their heads.
Georgia Republican Admits He Committed Election Fraud
Apparently, the best way to prove a system is broken is to break it yourself.
That is the method Georgia state Sen. Greg Dolezal, the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor, described in interviews posted to his own YouTube channel. Dolezal said in February last year he and “a number of friends” intentionally botched their signatures on mail-in ballot applications to see whether officials would catch it.
Dolezal said he had friends who had their kids sign their absentee ballot request form. In every case, the ballots came back. He named Cherokee and Gwinnett counties as places where the scheme was carried out.
He has cited that as proof Georgia’s signature verification doesn’t work.
Dolezal won his runoff last week and will face Democrat Josh McLaurin in November for the state’s second-highest office. He built the campaign on distrust of Georgia’s elections, and on Saturday he proposed an amendment requiring counties to hand-recount the top two races before certifying.
A signature audit by the secretary of state’s office and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation found no fraudulent absentee ballots in a sample of more than 15,000 envelopes. So, the only confirmed signature fraud in the record is the kind Dolezal admitted to committing.
Somewhere right now a reporter is writing up Dolezal’s hand-recount proposal without mentioning he forged ballot signatures on YouTube. We’re not that reporter. Upgrade your subscription to paid today.
The DEA Let Millions of Fentanyl Pills Hit the Streets on Purpose
Turns out the fentanyl wasn’t sneaking across the border. The DEA was holding the door.
According to three current and former DEA agents and government records reviewed by the Associated Press, the agency permitted over 1.8 million fentanyl pills to reach the streets of New Mexico between 2023 and 2025. Agents monitored the shipments. They did not seize them.
The logic was to build bigger cases. Federal prosecutors wanted to take down major traffickers, so agents followed the drugs instead of grabbing them.
In one June 2023 deal at an Albuquerque mobile home park, agents counted 74,000 pills changing hands and let them go. Days earlier, the same ring delivered a spare tire packed with another suspected shipment, also unseized.
The largest fentanyl bust in DEA history, announced in May 2025 by then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, seized more than 3 million pills. A former supervisor said the same amount was hitting the streets every month while the case dragged on, and that the organization could have been dismantled six months earlier.
Trump has used fentanyl deaths to justify mass deportations, border militarization, and the designation of cartels as terrorist organizations. Meanwhile, his own government was letting hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills walk onto American streets to pad its case stats.
A $700M Data Center Is Going Up Next to Nashville’s Leopard Nursery
Somewhere in Nashville, a 12-week-old clouded leopard is about to get a 40-megawatt neighbor.
A permit has been filed to build a data center campus next door to the Nashville Zoo. The property line sits about 320 feet from the breeding enclosure for the clouded leopard, the crown jewel of the zoo’s conservation program.
The campus, planned by Atlanta-based DC BLOX, would include a 69,000-square-foot building and a second one of at least 261,000 square feet, at a cost of at least $700 million. Zoo officials say they learned of the application in early June and reacted with “disbelief.”
Dr. Heather Schwartz, who oversees animal health, said she is concerned about the light and noise the facility would generate, given that animals are more sensitive than humans. The leopards have produced 51 cubs since 1991, including Azi, a 12-week-old born in the enclosure near the property line.
The backlash has been bipartisan and loud. Country star Brad Paisley called it “an absolute nightmare scenario.” Republican gubernatorial front-runner Marsha Blackburn said, “Let’s revisit this placement.” Democratic Mayor Freddie O’Connell backed a temporary moratorium.
A new Tennessee law grants property rights upon submission of a permit application, not approval. In other words, the data center already has more legal protection than the leopards.
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POSITIVE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
The Senate Passed a Housing Bill That Tells Wall Street to Back Off. For once, Washington did something about the cost of living. The Senate voted 85-5 on Monday to pass the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, a sweeping affordability bill that makes it easier to build homes and restricts large institutional investors from buying up single-family houses. The legislation was negotiated by an unlikely bipartisan group: Sens. Tim Scott and Elizabeth Warren, and Reps. French Hill and Maxine Waters. It now heads to the House, which hopes to vote within days before sending it to Trump’s desk. Trump, by his own party’s account, was barely involved, which may explain how it actually got done.
Delaware Governor Signs Parentage Bill in Big Win for LGBTQ+ Families. Delaware Governor Matt Meyer signed a bill modernizing the state’s parentage laws so LGBTQ+ families who use IVF or surrogacy can establish legal rights over their kids without a courtroom battle. The updated law adds gender-neutral language, replacing the old framework of “mothers who produce eggs and fathers who produce sperm” with the more accurate concept of “parents who provide gametes.” It streamlines the legal process and lets some parents skip court entirely with a voluntary acknowledgment form, establishing parentage immediately. Revolutionary stuff: the government recognizing that the kid you planned for, paid for, raised, and loved is your kid.
California’s Sunflower Sea Stars Are Back From the Brink. A keystone species that scientists feared was gone has turned up alive off the Sonoma County coast. Sunflower sea stars all but vanished from California waters after a marine wasting disease swept through starting in 2013, throwing entire ecosystems out of balance as purple urchins devoured collapsing kelp forests. Last summer, a research team including the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians, two national marine sanctuaries investigated a cove near Sea Ranch and found 18 of them, the largest group spotted in state waters since the die-off. Crucially, several were large enough to reproduce, which a single isolated star cannot do.
OG Anunoby Won a Title, Then Went to Find Homes for NYC Shelter Cats. Days after helping the New York Knicks end a 53-year title drought, OG Anunoby launched “OG’s Starting Five,” a partnership with Royal Canin, VCA Animal Hospitals, and Animal Care Centers of NYC to find homes for five adoptable cats he personally chose and named. The campaign moved fast, with three of the five cats adopted within days of launch. The ACC noted the buzz drew people in who ended up adopting other cats, too. Adopters get a year of free pet food, unlimited wellness exams, and Royal Canin pledged to donate 50,000 pounds of food valued at $300,000, to shelters nationwide in Anunoby’s name.
