Welcome to Brew on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2025.
by: Lala Bonatésta
Here’s what’s ready for you as you start your day:
Since 2019, 47 states have enacted deep sea laws and should know about the August 5 primary for the Seattle Public Schools Education Board of Voting Analysis
Since 2019, 47 states have enacted deep sea laws
One topic that has seen an increasing political and social challenge as artificial intelligence (AI) is the use of deepfakes. A deepfake is a video, image, or audio file generated or manipulated by AI that realistically portrays something that never actually happened.
Last summer, Ballotpedia launched the AI Deepfake Law Tracker to keep readers up to date with Deepfake laws in all 50 states. Today we are examining some of the data from our second annual Middle Aged Deepfark Act Report.
Here are some of the highlights of the report.
Since 2019, 47 states have enacted laws to address deepfakes. Three states without such laws are Alaska, Missouri and Ohio. Some states also have several laws that address deep fakes. The states that have enacted the deepest laws since 2019 are California (18), Texas (10), New York (8), and Utah (8).
Since 2019, the clearest acceleration of legislative measures against deepfakes occurred in 2024. 82% of bills enacted since 2019 were enacted in 2024 or 2025. As of July 10th, state lawmakers had adopted 64 laws related to this year’s deepfake from 52 laws held on the same date in 2024.
The Deepfake law addresses multiple topics. Of the laws enacted so far this year, the three most common topics were bills that address sexually explicit deepfakes (42 bills), bills that address political communications (8), and bills that create regulations on technical entities related to deepfakes (9).
Since January 2025, the number of states that have enacted laws addressing sexually express deep existence has increased from 32 to 45. The number of states with laws regulating political deepfakes has increased from 21 to 28.
Additionally, while state lawmakers remained at a similar pace to last year in introducing and adopting laws regulating deepfakes, lawmakers considered a 10-year suspension on state artificial intelligence regulations.
The moratorium, part of HR1, titled “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” will prohibit any state from regulating artificial intelligence models for ten years. On July 1, the Senate voted 99-1 to attack the ban.
Click here to read the full report and click here to use the AI Deepfake Legal Tracker.
Things you need to know about the Seattle Public Schools Education Board’s August 5th primary
While continuing to cover the school board elections, today we’ll be looking at the primary elections in Seattle, Washington.
Four seats on Seattle’s seven public school education boards are heading for election this year. There will be nonpartisan primary elections for Districts 2, 4 and 5 on August 5th. The district 7 primary was cancelled, and Genlabary and Carollabah advanced to the November 4th general election.
While major votes take place within each geographical district, the November elections are citywide.
The election was later cancelled after a wave of proposed school closures. In September 2024, the district proposed multiple plans to close a wide range of schools to address the district’s $94 million budget shortfall. The plan to close most schools that proposed closure 21, said then-school committee president Liza Rankin, then president of the Schools Committee, “It’s a difficult decision, but it’s something we have to make to do our best for today’s students and keep the district in the future.”
In October 2024, the district announced the names of four schools that are scheduled to close. This list has been reduced to four next community pushbacks led by a group calling everything together for the Seattle school. In November, Principal Brent Jones announced that the district would not close schools for the 2025-2026 school year and would seek financial assistance from the state. The board voted unanimously the following day to approve a suspension of closure.
On November 8, 2024, a group of parents filed a recall petition against Rankin regarding the handling of the school closure process, saying, “Coach Rankin acted on arbitrarily and whimsically, by deliberately proceeding with the flawed school closure process, regardless of fact and circumstances.” After the judge rejected the recall in December 2024 and found the evidence was insufficient, Rankin said, “There is still a fiscal deficit that we have to deal with. We operate more buildings than we have more efficient than the number of students we have.” The Board of Education unanimously selected Gina Topp as its new president in December 2024 as part of its internal leadership choice.
The districts 2 and 4 races feature current positions Sara Clark and Joe Mizrahi, respectively. The Board of Education appointed both appointments in April 2024 to fill the vacant seats. The vacancy stemmed from two resignations over the district’s residential issues. One of the board members who resigned, District 4 Vivian Song is being held in 2025 in five districts.
In the following race, they joined forces with candidates for Sara Clark (District 2), Joe Mizrahi (District 4), and Vivian Song (District 5) for the Seattle schools opposed school closures. The group has approved Jen Lavalley from District 7. The group “will have the opportunity to elect four board members who will guide the district for the better. They can reject failed policies such as closure of schools, rejecting academic rigor, rejecting student safety, neglecting financial supervision, and refusing to treat families as educational partners.”
Here’s who’s running:
District 2: Incumbents Sarah Clark, Eric Feeney and Kathleen Smith.
District 4: current positions Joe Mizrahi, Bill Campbell, Hersimran Kaur, Gloria Suela Menchaka and Laura Marie Rivera.
District 5: Running is with Landon Labosky, Julissa Sanchez, Vivian Song, Allycea Weil and Janis White. Incumbent Michel Salge is not running.
In 2025, Ballotpedia covers elections for more than 30,000 school board seats. In 2024, we featured elections for more than 25,000 school board seats. For more information about the coverage of the 2025 local elections, click here.
For more information about each candidate, see our full Race article.
Voting analysis shows the voting for split tickets
Brew readers may recall in May that they presented the results of more than a century of mixed party elections, or an analysis of elections in which voters select candidates from different parties in different offices.
Now, in a new episode of the vote, Ballotpedia’s Geoff Palay and Joel Williams talk about the consequences of them, how they trended over time, and the practices that sparked them.
For this analysis, we defined mixed party election outcomes, whilst candidates from one party won state votes, while candidates from another party won US Senate seats, a majority of the state’s US House delegation, or a state law majority for the same vote.
As part of our analysis of the 2024 election, we went back over a century ago to examine the results of the mixed election year in Presidential Election, dating back to 1916.
Click here to listen to the episode and read the full analysis.
Subscribe to our polls on YouTube or on your preferred podcast app or click here to listen to more episodes.
