Welcome to the Tuesday, July 22, 2025, Brew.
By: Lara Bonatesta
Here’s what’s in store for you as you start your day:
- Forty-seven states have enacted deepfake legislation since 2019
- What to know about the August 5 primaries for Seattle Public Schools school board
- On The Ballot analyzes split-ticket voting
Forty-seven states have enacted deepfake legislation since 2019
As artificial intelligence (AI) has become more advanced, one topic that has become a growing political and social issue is the use of deepfakes. Deepfakes are AI-generated or manipulated videos, images, or audio files that realistically portray something that did not actually occur.
Last summer, Ballotpedia launched our AI deepfake legislation tracker to help our readers stay up to date on deepfake legislation in all 50 states. Today, we’re exploring some of the data from our second annual mid-year deepfake legislation report.
Here are some highlights from the report.
Since 2019, 47 states have enacted laws addressing deepfakes. The three states without such legislation are Alaska, Missouri, and Ohio. Some states have also enacted multiple laws addressing deepfakes. The states that have enacted the most deepfake laws since 2019 are California (18), Texas (10), New York (8), and Utah (8).
Since 2019, the clearest acceleration of legislative action on deepfakes happened in 2024. Eighty-two percent of the bills enacted since 2019 were enacted in 2024 or 2025. As of July 10, state lawmakers had adopted 64 laws related to deepfakes this year, up from the 52 laws enacted as of the same date in 2024.
Deepfake legislation addresses multiple topics. Of the laws enacted so far this year, the three most common topics were bills addressing sexually explicit deepfakes (42 bills), bills dealing with political communications (8), and bills creating regulations on tech entities related to deepfakes (9).
Additionally, while state lawmakers kept up a similar pace to last year in introducing and adopting laws regulating deepfakes, federal lawmakers considered a 10-year moratorium on state artificial intelligence regulations.
The moratorium—originally part of H.R.1, titled the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”—would have prohibited any state from regulating artificial intelligence models for 10 years. On July 1, the Senate voted 99-1 to strike the prohibition.
Click here to read the full report, and click here to use our AI Deepfake Legislation tracker.
What to know about the August 5 primaries for Seattle Public Schools school board
As we continue our coverage of school board elections, today we’re taking a look at the upcoming primaries in Seattle, Washington.
Four seats on the seven-member Seattle Public Schools school board are up for election this year. There will be nonpartisan primaries for Districts 2, 4, and 5 on Aug. 5. The District 7 primary was canceled, and Jen LaVallee and Carol Rava advanced to the Nov. 4 general election.
Primary voting occurs within each geographic district, but the November election is citywide.
The elections come after a wave of proposed school closures that were later rescinded. In September 2024, the district proposed multiple plans to close varying numbers of schools to address the district’s $94 million budget shortfall. The plan that would have closed the most schools proposed closing 21. On the proposed closures, then-school board President Liza Rankin said, “This is a hard decision. But it’s the one that has to be made in order to best serve our students today and sustain our district into the future.”
In October 2024, the district announced the names of four schools it planned to close. The list was reduced to four following community pushback led by a group called All Together for Seattle Schools, which calls itself a “parent-led coalition to ensure SPS schools remain open and amply funded.” In November, Superintendent Brent Jones announced that the district would not close any schools for the 2025-2026 school year and would seek financial help from the state. The board voted unanimously to approve the pause on closures the next day.
On Nov. 8, 2024, a group of parents filed a recall petition against Rankin over her treatment of the school closure process, stating, “Director Rankin acted arbitrarily and capriciously by advancing a knowingly flawed school closure process, without regard to the attending facts and circumstances.” After a judge dismissed the recall in December 2024, finding insufficient evidence, Rankin stated, “We still have a budget deficit that has to be dealt with. We are, by the numbers, operating a higher number of buildings than is efficient for the number of students we have.” The school board unanimously chose Gina Topp as its new president in December 2024 as part of its internal leadership selections.
The races in Districts 2 and 4 feature incumbents Sarah Clark and Joe Mizrahi, respectively. The school board appointed both of them to fill vacancies in April 2024. The vacancies resulted from two resignations over district residency issues. One of the resigned board members, Vivian Song from District 4, is running in 2025 for District 5.
In the races below, All Together for Seattle Schools, which opposed school closures, endorsed the following candidates: Sarah Clark (District 2), Joe Mizrahi (District 4), and Vivian Song (District 5). The group endorsed Jen LaVallee for District 7. The group wrote, “We have an opportunity to elect four board members who will steer the district in a new and better direction. We can reject failed policies such as closing schools, taking away options, rejecting academic rigor, neglecting student safety, abandoning financial oversight, and refusing to treat families as partners in education.”
Here’s who is running:
District 2: Incumbent Sarah Clark, Eric Feeny, and Kathleen Smith.
District 4: Incumbent Joe Mizrahi, Bill Campbell, Harsimran Kaur, Gloria Suella Menchaca, and Laura Marie Rivera.
District 5: Landon Labosky, Julissa Sanchez, Vivian Song, Allycea Weil, and Janis White are running. Incumbent Michelle Sarju is not running.
In 2025, Ballotpedia is covering elections for more than 30,000 school board seats. In 2024, we covered elections for more than 25,000 school board seats. Click here to learn more about our local election coverage in 2025.
Check out our complete article on the race to learn more about each candidate.
On The Ballot analyzes split-ticket voting
Brew readers may recall that back in May, we featured our analysis of more than a century of mixed-party election outcomes, or elections where voters choose candidates from different political parties for various offices.
Now, in our new episode of On The Ballot, Ballotpedia’s Geoff Pallay and Joel Williams talk about those outcomes, how they’ve trended over time, and the practice that causes them: split-ticket voting.
For this analysis, we defined a mixed-party election outcome as one where the candidate of one party won the state’s presidential electoral votes while candidates of another party won a U.S. Senate seat, a majority of the state’s U.S. House delegation, or a state legislative majority on the same ballot.
As part of our analysis of the 2024 elections, we went back more than a century and examined mixed-party election outcomes in presidential election years dating back to 1916.
Click here to listen to the episode and here to read the full analysis.
Subscribe to On the Ballot on YouTube or your preferred podcast app, or click here to listen to more episodes.