On February 26, armed deputies from the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department pulled up to the county registrar’s office and hauled off about 650,000 ballots from last November’s Prop 50 special election. Sheriff Chad Bianco, then running for governor, had a sealed warrant to investigate a “discrepancy” in the ballots (which the registrar had already fully explained at a public meeting).

Last Thursday, the California Supreme Court ruled 7-0 that the seizure was illegal.

I’m not surprised if you didn’t hear about it. The ruling got little attention, even from commentators who spent months warning that the Riverside seizure could become a new election sabotage playbook.

The playbook just got tossed out of court. The case turned on the plain language of California Elections Code: “[i]n no event” shall voted ballots “be taken from the custody of the elections official.” Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero, said the law intends “that ballots remain in the elections official’s custody even in the event of a criminal investigation.”

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The opinion gives election lawyers and election officials everywhere new armor to protect elections this fall. The court explained that the code “contemplates that voted ballots remain in the continuous custody and control of elections officials from the moment the voter deposits them until the moment they are destroyed.” And it rejected Bianco’s “election integrity” argument: “allowing law enforcement unfettered access to ballots, or the ability to handle and count them in secret based on unregulated protocols, itself creates a substantial risk to election integrity.”

Justice Goodwin Liu’s concurrence offered: “Free and fair elections are the lifeblood of democracy. And election officials are the backbone of our electoral system.” He calls the ballots the deputies carted off “the most precious documents of the citizenry in a democracy: their votes.” He closes with a reminder that “every public official has an independent duty to follow the law. The judiciary serves as an essential backstop, but the rule of law depends in the first instance on the conscientious discharge of that duty by all officials.”

We Need to Celebrate the Riverside Win

Two weeks ago I wrote about why celebrating our wins matters. People join fights they believe they can win.

Riverside was won by people doing their everyday jobs well. Four voters refused to let a sheriff cart off their ballots, with the UCLA Voting Rights Project suing on their behalf. Registrar Art Tinoco, who has worked in that office since 2002, stood before his Board of Supervisors and explained how the vote count actually works. The county’s own lawyers wouldn’t represent its own sheriff.

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Every one of those people sits somewhere within systems that authoritarians like Trump depend on for support (courts, officials, everyday voters), and every one of them held the line. If we skip past a win like this, we give in to the narrative of voter fraud and threats to elections. Celebrating the win vocally and visibly tells the next registrar handed a demand for ballots that we have her back.

Authoritarian Power Depends on Support from Across Society

No one rules alone. Gene Sharp built his work on that idea: power rests on the cooperation of many people, and power weakens when they withdraw it. We call those sources of cooperation “pillars of support,” including police, civil servants, courts, business, media, faith communities, and schools.

In Why Civil Resistance Works, Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan studied 323 resistance campaigns and found that defections were a key driver of success. Defections inside the security forces alone raised a campaign’s odds of success by nearly 60 percent. A 2022 study from Chenoweth and her colleagues found that persuading the pillars directly works better than relying on mass mobilization alone.

George Lakey and Training for Change built a tool for this, the spectrum of allies. Imagine everyone spread across five categories, from active allies to active opposition. We don’t have to convert the hardliners. We win by moving each group even one step toward us.

Most defections are small: a county lawyer who won’t defend the sheriff, a prosecutor who won’t bring a case without evidence, or a Farm Bureau chief that tells Trump he’s selling out the country’s ranchers. Each of these is an example of someone inside a pillar of society deciding not to go along.

Right now, our farm communities are showing us what these defections look like at scale.

Farmers and Ranchers Are Breaking With Trump Over Beef

In late August, Trump announced a plan to bring in cheap foreign beef to lower grocery prices before the midterms. His plan backfired.

The American Farm Bureau Federation and three national cattle associations urged him “to reverse course.” Kansas Farm Bureau President Glenn Brunkow accused him of “selling out American farmers and ranchers to buy votes in November.” Fox’s Tomi Lahren posted that “[i]mporting a bunch of foreign beef” won’t help ranchers. Montana Senator Tim Sheehy warned that the plan hurts ranchers, “most of whom are MAGA Republicans.”

Trump signed the plan anyway. Less than two weeks later, he signed executive orders that NPR called “an olive branch” to ranchers, with policies they’d wanted for years.

None of these groups has left Trump’s coalition entirely. We don’t need them to. Each moved one step in our direction. Authoritarian power erodes the same way, one public letter and one statement at a time.

And farm country isn’t alone.

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Inside the Justice Department. Trump’s “grand conspiracy” probe of his perceived enemies has lost three prosecutors this year, including loyalist Joe diGenova, who resigned and told the New York Post, “If you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem.”

In the courts. The Supreme Court kept Trump’s mail-ballot rule blocked for the midterms, with only Alito and Thomas dissenting. Trump’s response: “These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court.”

Among business leaders. In 2021, few in Arizona’s business community publicly condemned a misguided, election-denier-driven review of Maricopa County’s 2020 ballots, as Leadership Now Arizona co-founder John Fees now points out. This year, sixty Arizona business executives have signed a pledge to back the officials running the election and stand behind legitimate results.

Among faith leaders. In July, clergy from more than 1,500 Christian, Jewish, and Muslim congregations held events in nine states asking election officials to pledge to follow the law. “Loving our neighbors means protecting the rights of our neighbors to vote,” said Bishop Betsey Monnot of the Episcopal Diocese of Iowa.

None of this, on its own, is enough to stop Trump from interfering in our elections. Together, however, it shows that more and more people are refusing to blindly follow Trump’s extreme tendencies.

Riverside’s ballots are safe because voters, a registrar, state officials, and judges each did their part, and a sheriff with armed deputies couldn’t get enough people to go along. In farm country, people who’ve stood with Trump for years told him no, and within two weeks he was offering them concessions.

Power that depends on cooperation can be withdrawn by the people who give it. That includes all of us.

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But if our goal is “saving democracy,” then is talking about the threats to democracy the winning strategy?

The answer is probably some version “maybe” or “it depends which voters.”

To start, let’s agree that “saving democracy” means getting people to vote for Democrats and other pro-democracy candidates in 2026 and 2028. So that’s our test: does talking about how hard Trump is working to block, cancel, and throw out votes drive more people to the polls to vote for pro-democracy candidates? Let’s dig in.

Talking About Sabotage Motivates Voters Who Are Already Motivated

There’s research (focus groups and national surveys) showing that talking about the anti-voter agenda makes people who already care about voting more motivated and more likely to push their friends to vote. Defiance is a motivating emotion! It’s been the fuel of countless movements against authoritarian governments.

But were those voters going to vote anyway? The research can’t tell us, but—based on the rest of the research I outline below and what I’m learning in my work in this field everyday—I suspect many of them were. The voter who gets fired up when you tell them the government is trying to take their vote probably already reads three election newsletters and votes in off-year elections.

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Motivating these voters feels good (and it is good!), but measured against our test it doesn’t add many new votes for pro-democracy candidates. The voters we still need are the ones on the fence about turning out at all. So what does “spreading the word about the threats to democracy” do for them?

Fear Keeps the Fence-Sitters on the Fence

The same research found that many voters are simply tuned out of the news, especially about voting. When these less-engaged voters were asked whether the attacks on elections connect to the other things the Trump administration is doing to their lives (like higher prices), a lot of them said no.

Moreover, only about a quarter of people think that voter suppression could ever get so bad that it would change the outcome of an election. Voters are more likely to believe someone who tells them that voter fraud is real and it’s the thing that could steal an election.

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So when we say “your vote might be blocked,” a tuned-out voter doesn’t necessarily hear “go vote in defiance!” Some hear “voting may be pointless.” Anat Shenker-Osorio, who has spent years testing messages for progressive campaigns, has found that “fear is incredibly suppressive to a progressive base.”

We also know that repeating a claim in order to debunk it makes the claim more familiar, and science tells us that the more familiar we are with a claim the more we believe it’s true. This phenomenon—the illusory truth effect—holds up even when people know a claim is false.

That means any time we talk about a threat (even when trying to debunk it) we actually make more people believe it’s true. Think of it this way: a post that walks through all the reasons Trump doesn’t have legal authority to sabotage election results actually teaches the reader that the results could be sabotaged.

During the 2018 midterms, researchers showed voters tweets warning about voter suppression. The warnings didn’t change whether people said they would vote. The tweets did, however, lower people’s confidence that the election was legitimate. (When the same warnings came paired with something the reader could do, like calling a hotline or asking for a provisional ballot, the damage to confidence disappeared.)

Bob Bauer Warns Legal Commentators Against Overdoing It

This week Bob Bauer, President Obama’s White House Counsel and my onetime boss, wrote about this phenomenon as it applies to legal commentators. His case study is a much discussed piece by former federal judge Michael Luttig warning that the “final battle for America’s democracy” comes on January 3, when House Republicans might refuse to seat newly elected Democrats in Congress.

Bauer doesn’t wave the threats away. Trump’s assault on voting “warrants a healthy measure of concern, perhaps sometimes rising to a level of alarm,” he writes, and explaining it to the public “is a service.” His worry is that we could fail in the opposite direction by seeding “undue and damaging alarmism, which potentially drives voters from the polls and undermines their confidence in the legal institutions on which they depend for ultimate protection of their voting rights.”

In plain English: the January 3 plot is very hard to pull off for a variety of reasons, starting with the fact that Mike Johnson won’t be Speaker of the House when seating of the new House takes place. Turning an unlikely scenario into a campaign issue “simply elevates it.” Bauer even names the debate I’m having with myself in this post: warnings might “stimulate voter turnout powered by defiance,” or they “could also have the opposite effect.”

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This Year, Collective Joy is the Strategy

Traumatized people don’t turn out to vote if all we feed them is more trauma; they motivate when they can picture something better for themselves and their communities. Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan found that nonviolent movements succeed more often because more people join them, and people join fights that look like they’re winning. I made the case last week that celebrating our wins is a pro-democracy strategy.

A Columbia and Harvard study last December found that online influencers who don’t usually talk about politics had about three times the influence on their audiences’ political views as partisan influencers did. People trust the friend who isn’t selling anything. The most persuasive way to people to do anything has always been a neighbor saying “I’m going, come with me.” Minneapolis proved that in January, when 50,000 people marched at twenty below to drive federal forces from their communities.

Determination, joy, collective action. That’s how we fight back.

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Looking in the Mirror, and Looking Ahead

I’m hardly innocent here. Scroll my archive of posts and you’ll find FBI raids, ICE in the voter files, a canceled election in Louisiana, and a Justice Department threatening to jail election officials. I’ll keep covering those stories, because explaining what Trump is doing to our elections in plain language is a main reason this newsletter exists.

Now, however, I have a sharper understanding that explaining a threat and getting people to vote for candidates who’ll stop the threat are two different things—especially if you’re talking to voters not already on your side.

My conclusion, for now, is that we lean into joy, determination, and collective power. Don’t pretend the attacks aren’t happening, but zoom out from each one. There will always be more attacks than I can write about, and my goal isn’t to keep up. What I can do is help you understand the attacks in a way that makes you feel like part of a movement that’s bigger than any of them. That’s how we get more people to the polls.

Three places to start:

• We Are America, and We Vote leads with real people and everyday heroes. Watch the video and send it to a friend.

• It’s Ours is about claiming this election, and our future, as ours to run. Join the team.

• Hands Off Our Vote has trainings and events for protecting the vote in your own community.

Thanks for reading.

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California looms large on the 2026 midterm map. Last November, voters passed Prop 50 to redraw the state’s congressional districts in answer to the Texas gerrymander, and as many as five Republican-held seats could flip in November. CalMatters put it plainly: the road to a House majority could run through California.

Trump knows it, and he’s spent two years treating Gavin Newsom as his favorite enemy. If you’re an authoritarian looking for a state where election sabotage could pay off (and where the governor’s name alone would make it tempting), the Golden State is a good one.

On Friday, Governor Newsom signed 13 new laws protecting California’s election infrastructure from these very attacks:

• AB 282 protects ballots, election records, and voting machines from seizure until the results are certified. In January, the FBI walked out of the Fulton County, Georgia, elections office with ballots. Then California’s own Riverside County sheriff ordered more than 650,000 ballots seized. Anyone who tries that in California now is committing a crime.

• SB 259 is a direct response to Trump spending the summer trying to get the Postal Service to refuse mail-in ballots (which the Supreme Court blocked). Interfering with a mail ballot on its way to the elections office is now a felony in California.

• AB 1664 provides a mechanism for state officials to step in the moment any law enforcement agency shows up at a county elections office with a warrant or subpoena for election records or voting equipment.

• SB 884 limits arrests near a polling place to real crimes against people or property and real disruptions of voting, which means nobody gets hauled out of line for anything less.

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As Newsom said, “Donald Trump won’t stop until he can exert dictatorial control over your free vote and disenfranchise millions of people this November. California will stop him at every opportunity.”

Thousands of Your Neighbors Are Signing Up So You Can Vote Peacefully and Joyfully With Your Community

Picture your polling place on the first morning of early voting: The line is moving, a poll worker is greeting people at the door, and nearby is a neighbor with a nonpartisan name tag making sure all your voting questions get answered.

Common Cause announced last Thursday that it’s deploying an enormous election protection program for these midterms. Thousands of people have already signed up nationwide. They’re everyday Americans who raised their hand to get trained up on the voting rules in their state, and they’ll be at polling places and drop boxes answering questions, catching any problems early, and calling in help if needed. Their on-the-ground effort is supported by the 866-OUR-VOTE hotline, which any voter can call with questions or concerns.

Thousands of neighbors haven’t signed up for something like this out of fear. They’re signing up because they’ve decided the answer to Trump’s threats is to show up in person for their fellow voters. They’re signing up to help you vote peacefully and joyfully with your community.

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This Year, Voting is a Movement

This is our playbook: the People’s Playbook. This election belongs to us, and we’re taking steps in advance to make sure they know it.

If you know someone anxious about voting this fall, send them this news. Let them know they’re not walking into that polling place alone. They’re walking in behind the power and protection of state legislatures, civil rights attorneys, and thousands of volunteers who got there first—all so that voting can feel like what it is: millions of us, together, choosing our own future.

Here’s how you can join in that joy:

• Sign up to be an election protection volunteer at protectthevote.net.

• Save 866-OUR-VOTE in your phone. Text it to anyone who might be nervous.

• Check your registration and your state’s early voting dates.

• Make the midterms feel celebratory with efforts like It’s Ours and We Are America, and We Vote.

Trump will never stop trying to make our elections feel uncertain. We don’t have to listen. We are not a People who sit idly by in the face of fear and oppression. We’re America, and we vote.

Share A Critical Mass of Voters

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We need to celebrate this as a win, even though our fight to defend democracy is far from over. People cheer for a winning team. They join the winning side. If people don’t know we’re winning–if all they hear about on the news is fear and confusion and attacks on their rights–then why should we expect them to vote with us, march with us, and stand up to authoritarians with us?

We celebrate our wins because it brings more people to our side, and that leads to more winning.

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Trump’s Postal Service Rule is Blocked

The Postal Service had issued a 95-page plan requiring every state to submit a pre-approved list of eligible voters through a “federal portal” so the Postal Service could check each ballot before delivering it. States that didn’t comply risked having their voters’ ballots go undelivered.

A federal judge in Boston froze the rule, saying there’s no legal basis for the Postal Service to regulate elections. The Supreme Court’s Monday order keeps her freeze in place. “The Postal Service exists to deliver Americans’ mail, not to rewrite election rules,” said Celina Stewart, CEO of the League of Women Voters.

In August, I wrote that an earlier Supreme Court order in this same fight wasn’t the win the headlines made it out to be. Monday’s order is more solid: it means the Postal Service won’t be allowed write new rules for mail-in voting in November.

Chenoweth and Stephan Tell Us That Movements Win When More People Join Them

Political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan spent years studying why some movements against authoritarians succeed while others fail. They found that positive, nonviolent campaigns win more often mainly because more people can take part. You don’t need to take a huge risk to hand out flyers, take a day off to march, or mail your ballot. That lower bar brings in bigger and more varied groups of people, and size and diversity are what give a pro-democracy movement strength.

Large movements are harder for authoritarians to shut down.

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Talking About Your Wins Brings More People to Your Movement!

People are very good at deciding whether a fight is worth their effort, and their decision usually comes down to whether the fight seems like it’s working. This is exactly why political campaigns are always talking about who has “momentum.” More people join the side that seems to be winning.

This means we can’t note a win like Monday’s quietly and move on. Yes, more attacks are on the way. But every time an attack on our elections fails so completely and so publicly, the country learns that none of this is inevitable and that we aren’t powerless. Americans have agency in this moment, and that terrifies Trump.

As it turns out, today is National Voter Registration Day. In this moment, registering to vote is how a person says: I’m going to be counted, I’m not going to be silenced by the campaign of fear and division against my community.

It’s the same thing 50,000 people in Minneapolis said when they marched at twenty below zero and forced federal agents to leave town a few weeks later. It’s what the voters and cities who sued to keep armed agents away from the polls said in court last week. It’s what the Ohio Organizing Collaborative said when it threw a block party the week after the FBI raided its office.

Standing with your community against fear is who we are, and when you stand strong it makes it easier for others to stand strong with you.

Here’s to a just and joyful future.

The lawsuit asks court to confirm what the law has always said: no one will have to walk past an armed federal agent to cast their ballot. I’ll explain the law briefly, but the more interesting part of this story is what it says about how people are standing up for each other—over and over again—in the face of authoritarianism.

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Federal Law Has Banned Armed Agents From Polling Places Since 1865

Federal law has barred armed federal agents from polling places since 1865 when Congress wrote a law saying no president could put soldiers between voters and the ballot box. In every election since, the number of armed federal agents legally allowed at your polling place has been zero.

The Trump administration knows this. That’s why each “assurance” it offers comes with an exception: ICE won’t be at the polls, except for a warrant, or a threat, or an arrest that just happens to occur there. So, with early voting set to begin this month, the plaintiffs asked a federal judge to say plainly, in advance of the election, what the law already says: no armed federal forces at polling places, drop boxes, or counting rooms.

Minneapolis Already Proved That Standing Together Works

This lawsuit is another example of how people are running their own playbook against authoritarianism. Last December, the administration sent thousands of ICE and Border Patrol agents into the Twin Cities, the largest immigration operation ever in a single American city. Federal agents murdered two people in Minneapolis alone.

Minneapolis refused to be scared. Clergy knelt on the airport pavement and were arrested singing hymns. Unions, congregations, immigrant defense networks, and block-by-block mutual aid groups fed joined in coordinated response. On January 23, 50,000 people marched through downtown in twenty degrees below zero, and hundreds of businesses closed in solidarity. By mid-February the surge was over and the agents were gone. Scot Nakagawa summarizes these tactics in his post, the Minneapolis Model, which is worth checking out.

Authoritarian power depends on people feeling alone and outmatched. Minneapolis answered that by showing up together, in the cold, in numbers Trump couldn’t ignore. Now that same playbook is activating to prevent the federal threat from moving from neighborhoods to polling places. Filing a lawsuit is a quieter tactic, but it’s the same strategy: people refusing to accept that masked, armed federal agents get to disrupt our communities and our democracy.

Common Cause president Virginia Kase Solomón put it this way: “Putting armed officers in polling places is a tactic used by dictators, but we won’t be scared out of exercising our rights.”

Civil Rights Groups, City Halls, Clerks, and Courts Are All Pushing Back

Look at who signed this complaint. The oldest Latino civil rights organization in the country. The largest Hispanic advocacy organization. A voting rights group with members in every state. And a city government, whose mayor promised to “fight tooth and nail” and whose clerk, the person who actually runs Denver’s elections, said the city will protect them “with cast-iron certainty.”

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And there are so many more examples from the last 18 months: States passed their own laws to keep federal forces from the polls. Election officials refused to hand over private voter data. Courts blocked Trump’s mail voting order and stopped the SAVE database purge. The Ohio Organizing Collaborative threw a block party the very week after the FBI raided its offices. Faith leaders, unions, neighbors, clerks, judges, and now the plaintiffs in this case.

Authoritarianism survives by picking off one pillar of society at a time. We win by uniting all those pillars in a common opposition.

This Doesn’t Change Anything About Your Plan to Vote

North Carolina and other states have already started mailing ballots, and some states start early voting in just a few days. You have more ways to vote than ever, and nothing about Trump’s efforts should change your plan. Vote early if you can, and remember that your county clerk runs your election, not the federal government.

If you want to do more than vote, get active:

• Nonpartisan groups are holding Hands Off Our Vote trainings across the country.

• There are state-specific election protection trainings you to join.

• Check out two incredible efforts: It’s Ours and We Are America, and We Vote. Both of these campaigns exist to help make this election feel like what it is: millions of us, together with our communities, choosing our own future.

Joy is a strategy. Defiance is a strategy. Minneapolis proved it in the snow, the groups in this lawsuit are proving it in court, and we’ll all prove it at the polls.

Here’s to a just and joyful future.

Except… that’s actually not what happened. The AP headline that the “Supreme Court sides with Trump administration on mail voting restrictions ahead of midterms” is, to be blunt, fake news.

Let’s be clear, the ruling wasn’t a good one. But it didn’t decide one way or the other whether Trump’s anti-voter executive order is legal, and it didn’t change anything about anyone’s right or ability to vote by mail. This was a preliminary, procedural ruling. We need to keep an eye on it, but this is not your take-to-the-streets moment.

Yet.

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This Doesn’t Change Anyone’s Rights or Ability to Vote by Mail

Trump’s March 2026 anti-voter executive order directs the Postal Service to only deliver ballots to people on pre-approved government checklists of eligible voters. The USPS set out to write a rule implementing the executive order. Twenty-three states and D.C. sued to stop USPS from moving forward, and in June Judge Indira Talwani in Boston agreed. Monday night, six justices lifted the block and told the Postal Service it can finalize its rule.

Some important context:

• The court has NOT said the President gets to decide who gets a ballot or who gets to vote by mail. It merely said that the states can’t even bring their lawsuit until the USPS actually issues a rule implementing the executive order. The justices even wrote that Monday’s decision “does not mean that any measure taken by the Government to implement the Order will necessarily be lawful. On that score, time will tell.”

• Monday’s ruling was limited to the case where the 23 states sued the government. In a separate lawsuit brought by the League of Women Voters, the same judge blocked the executive order throughout the country. That second order still stands. Nothing about your rights or ability to vote by mail changed Monday night.

State and County Officials Run Our Elections, not Trump, the USPS, or the Federal Government

The Constitution gives states the power to run elections, and Congress the power to set rules for federal elections. It gives the president no power at all over elections. Your county clerk and your secretary of state will run this election, just like every election this country has ever had before. Your ballot in still their hands, not his.

Yes, we need to keep an eye on this. Trump’s executive order about the Post Office isn’t business as usual, and we shouldn’t act like it is. It’s one of many maneuvers, from false fraud claims to threats to prosecute the local officials who run our election, designed to undermine our confidence in our own election system so we stay home on Election Day and Trump gets to keep his power.

But we can skip the panic for now. If you’ll vote by mail this fall, send your ballot as early as possible, just in case. Between now and then, find someone you know who saw the panic-inducing headlines about the Supreme Court’s decision, and tell them their ballot is fine, and their trusted county official still runs their election.

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The Trump regime will continue to do everything it can to push its farfetched plans forward, and we’ll continue to fight to protect our freedom to decide our future, choose our leaders, and ensure the will of the people prevails.

Here’s to a just & joyful future.

Yawn.

A strong leader wins and moves on. Six years later, Trump is still shopping for someone to tell him he won the 2020 election. He already has an intelligence report on our voting machines. It’s been sitting in a drawer for six months, because it didn’t say what he needed it to say. His fixation on an election he lost in 2020 has become a national security problem.

Don’t take the bait. Here’s how we handle claims that a foreign government hacked, breached, or rigged our elections: laugh it off. Don’t argue back with facts. Debating whether a lie is true is exactly what they want.

Instead, here’s a short, sharable set of talking points for when this comes up with your family, your friends, or the coworker who saw it on TikTok.

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Don’t Believe That This is Just About 2020

Yes, this is about Trump’s ego, and about desperation in the face of a losing streak. But mostly it’s about the midterm elections.

This is how the authoritarian playbook works. Doubt is the product. If enough voters walk away from Thursday night’s “announcement” a little unsure whether their voting machines can be trusted, a little less certain their registration is still valid… then the Trump regime wins simply by talking us out of voting.

A country convinced its elections are broken will stand aside while this administration “fixes” a crisis the administration itself invented. That’s their excuse to station ICE agents around voting locations, raid the organizations that register voters, and seize voting machines. It’s all a solution in search of a problem.

It’s actually worse than that, and it’s straight out of the authoritarian playbook. What they’re building is an excuse, months in advance, to throw out a result they don’t like. They think if they manufacture enough doubt now, they can reject the 2026 outcome before the votes are even counted.

If Trump still can’t accept losing in 2020, imagine what he’ll do in 2026. This is exactly why we ignore the claims, laugh them off, and don’t allow anyone we know to take them seriously.

We Can’t Win by Trying to Out-Fact Them

Our instinct with a story like this is to reach for the facts. Line up the receipts. Explain, one more time and very patiently, why none of it holds up.

Trying to out-fact them is exactly what they want, because winning the argument isn’t actually their goal. If they get you in the argument at all, they’ve already won. They want us so busy relitigating a six-year-old election that we’ve got nothing left for the one that’s coming in less than six months.

Every hour you spend debunking is an hour spent playing their game on their turf.

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How to Talk About It (and How Not To)

When this comes up at dinner, in the group chat, or from a coworker, try this—

Do:

• Call it what it is. “This is a desperate distraction, and I’m not falling for it.” You don’t owe it more than that.

• Keep the focus where it belongs. The real story is the next election. One party is trying to earn your vote, and the other is trying to scare you off from voting at all.

• Answer it by voting. The best reply to anyone trying to make you doubt the system is to go use it. Check your registration, show up, and call on your neighbors to do the same.

• Share this. The more people who simply laugh off the lie rather than debate it or repeat it, the less it works. Send this to the person you know who will be “fraud-curious” on Thursday night and might believe what they hear.

Don’t:

• Don’t repeat the specific claim, even to knock it down. Saying it again, in any form, is how it spreads. Talk about why they’re spreading it, not what they’re spreading.

• Don’t reach for the fact sheet. Rattling off very serious facts feels productive but changes nothing. Fighting feelings with facts is a losing game.

• Don’t give him the ratings. You don’t have to watch it live.

That’s our plan: call it ridiculous, don’t get baited into an argument, and go vote.

Hands off our vote.

The Justice Department had demanded the names, home addresses, and phone numbers of nearly every person who worked the 2020 election in Fulton County: thousands of county workers and volunteers who show up before dawn to run your polling place. Judge William Ray refused. He warned that such a sweeping disclosure “threatens to chill participation in future elections.” Fulton County bluntly called the DOJ’s gambit an effort to “target, harass and punish the President’s perceived political opponents.”

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Trump asked a court to help him hunt down poll workers, and he lost.

They lose a lot. Their attacks on our elections keep failing in court, over and over. This was just the latest.

And now they’re getting desperate.

Losing Didn’t Slow Them Down, It Set Them Off

The same day, news broke that the Justice Department sent letters threatening to criminally prosecute the top election officials in all fifty states and the District of Columbia. According to the head of the Civil Rights Division (whose salary you pay with your taxes), any state election official could face “criminal liability” if noncitizens vote in that state. The federal government is telling the people who run our elections that they’ll go to prison if they don’t accommodate Trump’s noncitizen voting lie.

The same DOJ also just announced it’s sending federal “monitors” into three Michigan cities and a half dozen other states for the August primary. Sending monitors is, by itself, routine. Administrations of both parties have done it for decades. What’s different now is who’s doing the sending: the same DOJ that just tried to unmask an entire county’s poll workers and is suing dozens of states to obtain your private voter data. This one isn’t a reason to panic, but it’s worth watching closely.

And hanging over all of it is the most brazen, audacious ransom note I’ve seen in my career in elections. The administration is now threatening to withhold states’ federal counterterrorism money, roughly a billion dollars a year, unless they rewrite their election rules to Trump’s liking. That’s money for security barriers, cybersecurity, and the exercises that prepare localities for an actual attack. States are right to call the plan “desperate” and say it “endangers American lives.”

Trump would literally have us be unsafe from a real attack to win a fight over one he made up.

Their Desperation is Showing

None of this is random, it’s the playbook. The whole basis for these election “reforms” is invented; it’s the same recycled misinformation authoritarians have used for years to undermine our confidence, so we don’t vote and they get to stay in power. Make it harder to vote, stoke fear and uncertainty, make us feel overwhelmed and alone, manufacture a reason to send in federal agents.

They’re not doing this because they’re winning. They’re doing it because they’re desperate. If you’re winning, you don’t need to threaten officials, volunteers, and entire states with prison, doxxing, and funding cuts. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán leaned on local officials, squeezed funding in places that voted against him, and bent the rules to hold onto power. This is what the losing hand of authoritarianism always looks like.

No Spectators

We refuse to watch from the couch. Your state’s election officials are being threatened right now for doing their jobs, so say their names, thank them, and show up to the meetings where they get shouted down. Check your own registration and help three other people check theirs. When those monitors turn up in Michigan or in your state, make sure every voter walking in knows they have every right to be there.

They’re counting on us to feel small and outnumbered and like this is out of our hands. It isn’t. There are far more of us than there are of them, and that’s what they’re afraid of.

No spectators.

Then the president called FIFA.

Trump phoned FIFA president Gianni Infantino, the same guy who awarded him a “peace prize” last year. FIFA waived the red card suspension, the first time it’s done that in more than sixty years of World Cup play. The Belgians said they were “astonished,” because the reversal breaks FIFA’s own written rules.

You can believe the ref got it wrong… and still know this is worse.

It’s not good for anyone–and it’s definitely not good for our right to vote and protect our freedoms–when the most powerful man on earth can change any outcome he doesn’t like with a phone call.

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When They Can’t Win, They Change the Rules

This is the oldest move in the authoritarian playbook. When people with too much power hit a result they don’t like, they don’t dig in and play harder like the rest of us: they change the rules and erase whatever came before.

A red card Trump didn’t like becomes no red card at all.

An election result he didn’t like becomes no election at all.

Even Our Imperfect System is a Better Option

For America’s 250th, VoteBeat’s Jessica Huseman published a sharp little history that’s worth your time. Her point is one many of us never learned in school: the Constitution has never contained a national right to vote. The founders left voting rights to the states, not to a president and not to one government in Washington.

That wasn’t an oversight; it was the design. For 250 years states have widened the franchise and rolled it back. New Jersey let some women and Black men vote under its 1776 constitution, then stripped those rights in 1807.

Whether and how you can vote has always been a matter of which state you’re standing in–for better or worse. States don’t always get it right. Sometimes they get it horribly wrong. But leaving the vote to fifty states, fifty sets of hands, was the whole point. It means no single ruler in Washington gets to set all the rules.

This is Happening With Elections – Right Now

Unlike cheating your way out of a red card after it’s given, the easiest time for an authoritarian to steal an election is before Election Day. And they’ve already started.

Look at the past few months: Trump’s administration has moved to have the Postal Service refuse to carry your mail ballot, sued thirty states to pry loose their voter rolls, pushed a national proof-of-citizenship system built on a broken database, and sent ICE into county election offices to pull names straight from the files. The FBI has raided the voter-registration groups that help people get on the rolls.

It’s all the same move, all part of the same plan. Trump doesn’t like how the election is shaping up, so he changes the rules while the game still being played. He’s trampling the states to seize control of who gets to vote, just like he ignored the World Cup referee and the FIFA rulebook.

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When the Ref Really Does Blow It

Sometimes a state is the problem. Red states are quietly writing their own citizenship tests for the ballot box. Louisiana redrew its map to erase a Black district after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in Callais.

Even then, the answer is never a strongman reaching beyond his authority to put things right for his own side. The answer is to let the system–imperfect as it may be–do its job. Voters in California and Virginia killed mid-decade map grabs at the ballot box. Wisconsin’s supreme court is taking up its gerrymander. Federal judges have thrown out Trump’s demand for voter rolls ten times and counting. The people’s elected and appointed leaders fixing it a step at a time; not a thumb on the scale to rig the whole thing.

In America, Voters Pick Their Leaders—Not the Other Way Around

So here’s what our 250th birthday should teach us. Because the founders left the vote to the people’s elected representatives in the states, your own vote is where this is won or lost. Your secretary of state race, your state supreme court, the ballot measure two towns over.

The strongman is on the phone with the referee, right now. He’s making his plans for this election. Are you making yours?

Hands off our vote.

Last week’s post asked you to stop seeing the headlines as chaos. An FBI raid in Ohio, a canceled election in Louisiana, and a Postal Service threatening to stop delivering ballots aren’t a hundred separate fires. It’s one plan. So let’s walk through it.

The good news is we’re dealing with the dumbest authoritarians ever. These are not creative people. They reach for the same handful of moves, in roughly the same order, whether they’re in Santiago or Seoul or the swamp of DC.

He Models Who He Admires

Trump calls Hungary’s Viktor Orbán “smart,” a “tough” “strongman,” “a great leader.” So it’s worth knowing what Orbán did to Hungary.

He didn’t send tanks. He rewrote election laws, redrew the districts so his party could take two-thirds of the seats on barely half the votes, packed the courts, turned the public airwaves into a party megaphone, and choked the funding of the groups that register voters. Every move was legal. Every move was done in the open. Hungarians kept voting, and for sixteen years it kept not mattering.

The three tactics I’m about to walk you through are the same as Orbán’s, shaped to fit an American system.

First, Change How We Vote and Who Gets to Vote

Before a single vote is counted, they shrink the number of people who can cast one, and the number of ways to do it. Right now the Postal Service says it might refuse to deliver mail ballots in states that won’t hand over their voter rolls. The Justice Department is suing thirty states and D.C. to pry those same rolls loose. New registration rules are being drafted to trip people up before they ever reach a ballot.

None of it grabs national headlines, and that’s the point. When Ukraine’s rulers wanted to hold power in 2004, they were cruder about it: whole regions reported turnout above 100%, with one district coming in at 127%. The American version doesn’t stuff the ballot box; it creates quiet chaos, done “legally” and out in the open.

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This morning, the latest attack on our elections and freedoms failed in front of the Supreme Court. The Republican Party had asked the justices to let states throw out ballots that are postmarked on time but show up a few days after Election Day. They lost. If your state says you can mail your ballot by Election Day and it counts, then that’s still the law. The Republican Party’s latest attempt to roll back our rights has failed.

Hold your applause for the Court. Four of the nine justices were ready to throw those ballots out, and this is the same Court that gutted the Voting Rights Act back in the spring. It rescued nobody. This attack on our freedoms only lost by a single vote.

What’s important is that this is far from our only win. The people who have spent this year trying to seize our elections keep losing, over and over. This morning’s decision makes fourteen in a matter of weeks.

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Here’s the scoreboard

Ten times, the Justice Department went to court to force states to hand over your private voter information. Ten times, it lost, in front of judges appointed by presidents of both parties.

Trump’s first big executive order tried to make us show citizenship papers just to register, and to throw out mail ballots that arrive a day late. A judge blocked that, then made that block permanent, and reminded the President that the Constitution gives him no say over how we run our elections.

His second order leaned on the Postal Service to refuse our ballots in states that wouldn’t hand over their voter lists. A judge blocked that one too, just last week.

Don’t forget the SAVE database: They built a system to run 67 million of us against records they knew were unreliable, looking to label citizens as noncitizens and knock us off the rolls. A court ordered them to pull the plug.

Add the attack that failed this morning at the Supreme Court, and it is fourteen victories for voters.

The Postmaster General’s very bad 24 hours

Last Wednesday, the Postmaster General sat in front of the United States Senate and was asked a plain question: would the Postal Service still deliver ballots in states that refused to hand over their voter lists? On the record, he said, “Under our proposed regulation, no.” The man who runs the mail told Congress he was ready to kidnap your ballot and block your voice.

The next morning, a judge in Boston answered him for us. No law gives the Postal Service any power over mail-in voting, she wrote, and the President has no authority over our elections, period.

One day he threatens to hold our ballots back. Twenty-four hours later, a court reminds him he never had the power to. They said the quiet part out loud, and we beat it by the next morning.

They’re coming after our votes because our votes matter

There’s a reason they’re working this hard. You don’t try this desperately to take something from people unless that something scares you. Our vote is the one tool strong enough to change who holds power over our lives, our paychecks, our families’ future. They’re attacking it because they know it’s our way out of this moment.

In twenty years working in elections, I have never seen attacks come this fast, or fail this consistently.

None of these wins fell from the sky. We won them. It was the state officials who refused to surrender their voters, the twenty-three states that sued shoulder to shoulder, the lawyers who filed, and the regular people who made enough noise that filing was worth it. Courts are where these wins landed, but the People are who made the wins possible.

I hope you feel like a winner

For months the story has been everything they are doing to us. Here’s the better version of the truth: we keep beating them. The same people who want you discouraged and staying home on Election Day are the ones walking out of courtroom after courtroom with nothing.

Stay registered, and check your status today instead of in October. If you vote by mail, send it in early. And the next time someone tells you it is hopeless, hand them this scoreboard.

We’re not the ones losing. They are. We have the power, and we are just getting started.

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Voting is the most powerful tool we have. They know that, and that’s why they’re trying so hard to take it away. This series explores what we can all do to stop them.

Think about what’s keeping you up at night.

Maybe it’s the price of groceries. Insulin. Whether your rent is going up again next year. Maybe it’s the fear that someone in your community is going to be pulled off the street by agents in unmarked cars with no names and no badges. Maybe it’s what’s happening to your healthcare, your kids’ school, your retirement.

These are life issues, which means they’re election issues.

Voting is how you fix this. All of it.

If you want drug prices to come down, you need elections. If you want federal agents off your streets, you need elections. If you want to retire with some dignity, you need elections. Everything keeping you up at night traces back, eventually, to who we elect.

Which means it all traces back to whether we vote, and to who is allowed to vote. Voting is our way out of this moment.

They Keep Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud

The Trump administration knows that voting is your way out of this moment. That’s why, months before a single ballot has been cast in the 2026 midterms, they’re working overtime to make sure you can’t.

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Not today! Today we’re doubling down on joy the whole way through.

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The week after more than a hundred federal agents descended on the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, did the OOC go quiet? No. They threw a block party.

Agents had searched the group’s offices, followed canvassers’ kids to school drop-off, and seized phones from volunteers. The OOC’s answer was to gather and get back to work, and the entire pro-democracy movement stood up to rally around them.

On June 18, OOC organizers held a Freedom Summer Kickoff in Cleveland. They seized on a moment built to scare people and transformed it into a day of action: doing the exact same voter registration work in Black communities that the FBI’s raid was designed to stop. The lineup wasn’t lawyers and grim press statements. It was college students and senior citizens, faith leaders and workers and neighbors. The “everyday Ohioans” the OOC has spent nearly two decades organizing, standing in the sun, proclaiming joy and justice out loud.

That’s the part the intimidation playbook never accounts for. You can seize a laptop. You cannot seize our entire block party.

The OOC wasn’t standing alone. Within days, the response grew into something bigger than any one organization. The Ohio Democracy Defense Coalition launched #HandsOffOhio. The incredible organizers at People’s Action stood up in solidarity. Labor unions spoke out. The Brennan Center, Nonprofits Together, and the Leadership Conference ran know-your-rights trainings, so the next group facing a knock at the door would already know its footing.

Fear is designed to isolate people. The FBI raid achieved the opposite.

Then the OOC said it best themselves. In an open letter, executive director Molly Shack Strickland and board chair Rev. Michael Harrison Sr. wrote: “We have done nothing wrong. We are proud of our work… and will not be deterred from carrying out our vital mission.”

They named the tactic for exactly what it is: “For groups that have done nothing wrong,” they wrote, “the intrusive investigative process is the punishment.”

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As organizer Amy Pritchard put it, this crackdown isn’t aimed at famous names with the platforms to fight back. It targets “the unglamorous, under-the-radar organizations doing the daily work of democracy.” Crowds gather and disperse. What scares those in power is when people keep showing up after the cameras leave. Pritchard says it best:

They want to bury us. They don’t know we are seeds.

This isn’t only an Ohio story. Amanda Litman has been tracking a vibe shift: the backlash to this administration is turning into a growing public hunger for its opposite, for warmth, joy, and a sense of looking out for one another.

From Zohran Mamdani’s win, to Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl, to the neighbors who faced down ICE in Minneapolis, to the World Cup: people keep reaching for joy as the answer to a political culture that runs on fear. A Freedom Summer block party in Cleveland is that same instinct, the same page from the People’s Playbook. As Litman puts it, good vibes won’t save democracy on their own, but they are “a necessary prerequisite for us to do the work.”

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The resistance isn’t a goal, it’s a thing that’s happening right now: in a Cleveland parking lot, on a voter registration clipboard, in an open letter signed “Stay strong.” OOC leader Prentiss Haney framed this moment not as one of mere survival, but as the possibility of a just and joyful future:

“When we fight, we win. And what we’re fighting for right now is not to get back to what was. It’s to get the opportunity to build anew.”

“When we fight, we win. And what we’re fighting for right now is not to get back to what was. It’s to get the opportunity to build anew.”

If you want to feel that for yourself, read it in the OOC’s own words. This is what powerful, joyful resistance sounds like from the people who weathered the raid:

👉 Read the Ohio Organizing Collaborative’s open letter →

Trump’s FBI wanted Ohio afraid, overwhelmed, and isolated. Ohio answered with a block party.

Go find your people, and let’s keep that joy going.

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The Supreme Court is about to decide whether that’s still true in Watson v. Republican National Committee, and a decision could land as soon as tomorrow morning.

Watson is just one front in our wider fight. 2026 is a year when voting by mail is under attack from nearly every direction, as I explain below.

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But it’s not all as bleak as it sounds, and in some ways our work is simple:

• First, make sure everyone understands that each case—each attack—is all part of the same attempt by power-hungry politicians and their allies to silence our communities.

• Second, make sure every friend, neighbor, and relative knows that they’re stronger than the people betting against them.

• Third, this election, we all vote as an act of resistance.

Watson is a Case Voters Are Supposed to Win

Here’s the background: Over a dozen states (plus DC) count mail ballots postmarked by Election Day even if they arrive a few days later. The RNC sued to end that, arguing for a new rule that every ballot must reach the office by Election Day itself.

It’s a change that would fall hardest on the voters who already wait longest on the mail: troops and overseas citizens, and rural counties far from a fast post office.

When the Court took the case, election experts thought voters would win easily. Rick Hasen wrote in Slate that the case had Trump salivating, but that he might be disappointed in the Court’s decision. The constitution clearly says that states can make their own election rules unless Congress passes a federal law, and no federal law requires ballots to be received by Election Day. (As Justice Jackson noted, if Congress still has to pass a law to do it, the law doesn’t do it yet.)

Then came oral argument back in March, and the questions from the bench told a different story.

The conservative justices showed little interest in the legal question of what Congress did or didn’t do. One worried aloud about a “big stash” of ballots that could “radically flip” a result and shake public confidence—a fear that isn’t in any law, wasn’t the question before them, and misunderstands basic election procedure. By the end of the argument, SCOTUSblog reported the Court “appears ready” to strike the grace period.

This Isn’t an Isolated Headline, It’s a Coordinated Plot

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Look at who’s coming after the freedom to vote, and when.

The executive branch has been at it for over a year. The President ordered the Postal Service to stop handling mail ballots in states that won’t hand over their voter data (multiple states are fighting that order). The Justice Department and ICE have gone after voter rolls and county records. (I wrote about that last week.) Congress is in as well: a bill at the President’s urging would ban states from counting late ballots, the same thing the RNC wants from the Court.

If Watson comes out bad, the right to vote will officially be under attack by all three branches of the federal government.

We already watched this Court gut the Voting Rights Act in Callais this spring, a decision we should name in the same disgusted breath as Citizens United. Watson would be the Court reaching past the maps and into your mailbox.

But wait, there’s more: last week the RNC and the Georgia GOP sued two metro-Atlanta counties, Fulton and Gwinnett, to shut down convenient ways for voters to return mail ballots. Same goal: fewer ways to vote by mail, implemented right before November.

Whichever way Watson lands, our right to vote by mail is under attack on every front.

We Have the Power to Respond

For now, do one thing: see the whole. The mail ballots, the voter rolls, the canceled primaries, the gutted Voting Rights Act. Seen together, they stop looking like individual bad headlines and start looking like a coordinated plan, run on purpose by people who know how much our votes matter—and how much risk our votes pose to those currently in power.

Think your vote doesn’t matter? They wouldn’t be fighting so hard to block your vote if it didn’t matter so much. We’re stronger than these attacks want us to feel, and what matters now—and what comes next—is up to us.

So keep your eye on the Court starting tomorrow morning. A great deal is about to be decided about a ballot you haven’t even mailed yet.

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Here’s what happened:

The Voting Rights Act (VRA) was the crowning legal achievement of the Civil Rights Movement. Black Americans across the South could finally walk into a polling place without facing the poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses that silenced them.

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The VRA also gave communities of color the power to challenge maps that watered down their votes. Politicians have tried this for decades: dividing Black communities across multiple districts to dilute their power, or packing them into one seat to limit their influence.

Callais ended that protection. Now, map-drawers have almost unlimited cover to design districts that drain Black and Brown communities of political power.

As Justice Kagan said in her dissent, the decision “renders [the VRA] all but a dead letter.”

What it means for voters: In state after state, politicians can now draw maps that ensure Black and Brown communities elect fewer representatives, have less say in the laws that govern their lives, and have less power to hold leaders accountable — and voters and the courts will have almost no tools left to stop them.

From Bad to Worse

One day after Callais, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry issued an executive order suspending the state’s congressional primary due to an “emergency.” The actual reason: Callais gave Louisiana license to gerrymander its maps, even though tens of thousands of Louisianans had already cast absentee ballots.

On May 29, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey went even further, entirely voiding the results of the May 19 primary elections in two state senate races.

Voiding the results. Not because of any alleged fraud, misconduct, or evidence that something had gone wrong in the election. Alabama simply decided those votes didn’t count anymore so it could redo the election under a map it likes better. Callais made that possible.

This is happening now.

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This Started in the South, but It Won’t Stay There

What’s happening in Alabama and Louisiana is very much a Southern story. It’s no accident that the South has always been where these fights happen first.

But the legal precedent set by Callais doesn’t stop at the Mason-Dixon line. It covers every state where there could someday be a discriminatory map. Which is every state. And the same logic they used to cancel elections in Louisiana and Alabama could now be wielded to cancel yours.

This is the authoritarian playbook applied to elections: change the rules in the middle of the game; lock in power before anyone can stop you.

Freedom Summer Is Here

In 1964, organizers from across the country went to Mississippi to register Black voters during what became known as Freedom Summer. They organized even knowing they could be beaten or killed.

Sixty-two years later, a national coalition is doing it again.

Freedom Summer 2026 launches this week with a Juneteenth Week of Action: Atlanta on June 17, Harlem on June 20, with satellite events in communities nationwide.

More than 275 organizations are involved. They’re running voter registration drives, community trainings, and direct action campaigns that run through November. Endless Freedom Summer.

Together, we’ll make sure that every vote counts. Visit freedomsummer2026.com to find an event, sign up to volunteer, or help bring Freedom Summer to your city and join the South in saying:

What happens next is up to us. Our country is strongest when all of us show up, speak out, and refuse to be intimidated. Hands off our vote!

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And if you want to understand how this fits into the larger authoritarian plan — and what we can actually do about it — there’s more coming for paid subscribers. Starting tomorrow I’ll launch a new series that goes deep: the full authoritarian playbook, the ways they’re attacking elections right now, and the framework for how we fight back. Upgrade to paid to get a full authoritarianism deep-dive in your inbox each Friday.

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Now imagine a federal immigration agent emails the county election worker who keeps your record, says he’s conducting “ongoing investigations,” and asks for a file on all voters in the county—including you. The election worker looks at the email, wants to be helpful, and sends the information back. Nevermind that ICE has no jurisdiction over elections.

That happened in Webb County, Texas last May. It happened in Forsyth County, North Carolina last November. Axios broke the story last week, and those are just the counties we know about.

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A Not-So-Sneak Attack

There was no court order, no federal judge signed off. Agents from Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the investigative unit inside ICE, just emailed county election offices. The administrators in both counties handed over voters’ personal data voluntarily.

Another HSI criminal analyst emailed the Texas Secretary of State this spring. He said he was conducting “ongoing investigations,” and wanted to know how to obtain voter information and what subpoenas he’d need to get it at scale.

We’re not dealing with the smartest authoritarians in the world here: they’re telling us exactly what they plan to do to block our votes. We’ve been warned.

But Wait, There’s More

The county-level disclosures are just the most recent development; the DOJ’s full election disruption operation is vast. The Justice Department has sued 30 states and Washington D.C. to force them to turn over their complete voter rolls. That’s worth emphasizing: the federal government is demanding your private voter data. If your state tries to protect your private data, the Trump Administration will sue your state in federal court to force them to disclose.

We also know that Attorney General Pam Bondi sent Minnesota a letter demanding the state’s private voter data. The administration’s message was unmistakable: keep refusing to turn over your voters, and ICE keeps operating in your state. Experts called this for what it was: extortion.

What They Want with the Data

Getting your data is their first step, and the Brennan Center for Justice has documented exactly what comes next:

Once the administration has voter roll data, it could run it through a federal database called SAVE — the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program — to supposedly identify noncitizens who are registered to vote. SAVE has a documented problem: it relies on incomplete and outdated records, and it regularly produces incorrect results.

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Here’s the thing: the incorrect results aren’t a flaw. They’re the point.

Those false positives will become “evidence,” and the evidence will become a government report claiming to have found thousands of ineligible voters, and that report justifies their next steps: purging your neighbors from the rolls, challenging election results the administration disagrees with, prosecuting organizations that register voters.

Even if none of that is successful, they’ve still planted the seed that there’s a bug in the system and something about our elections that people just shouldn’t trust.

What This Means for Voters

Think about who this impacts—think about how it impacts them.

Not just immigrants, though the chilling effect on lawfully registered citizens in mixed-status families and communities is real. Think about the organizer registering voters in a Texas border county who now has to explain to her neighbors what might happen to their information. Think about the naturalized citizen who’s voted in every election for twenty years and now wonders whether her personal voting record is being run through DHS databases.

Election interference doesn’t always look like a raid on a nonprofit’s offices, but it’s election interference all the same.

The Brennan Center has mapped the full strategy — from voter data grabs, to frivolous government reports, to manufactured prosecutions. Read their report.

Tell someone.

Our silence is the Trump Administration’s ally.

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And if you want to understand how this fits into the larger authoritarian plan — and what we can actually do about it — there’s more coming for paid subscribers. Starting this Friday, I’m launching a new series goes deep: the full authoritarian playbook, the ways they’re attacking elections right now, and a framework for how we the People fight back.

Upgrade to paid to get the deep-dive on the authoritarian playbook delivered to your inbox each Friday.

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On June 12, FBI agents raided the offices of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative. They seized laptops. They showed up at the homes of OOC staff members to interrogate them.

The FBI said it was investigating alleged voter fraud. Unsurprisingly, they’ve offered zero evidence of this.

Let’s be clear: The OOC isn’t a government agency. Its employees aren’t government workers. The OOC a nonprofit coalition of 18 community organizations that registers voters and organizes nonpartisan civic participation across Ohio. They’ve been doing this great work for 20 years.

We’ve seen this film before, and we need to pay attention now:

The FBI’s Recent Anti-Election Activity

January 2026: Fulton County, Georgia. FBI agents raided Fulton County’s main election operations center. They seized thousands of records, including ballots from the 2020 presidential election. The search warrant was based on conspiracy theories about the 2020 election that Georgia’s own Republican Secretary of State has already debunked.[1]

March 2026: Maricopa County, Arizona. The FBI served grand jury subpoenas and took more than three dozen hard drives from the Arizona State Senate building. Those drives contained records from an audit of the 2020 election Maricopa County (where Phoenix is located).

May 2026: Milwaukee, Wisconsin. FBI agents showed up at the home of Milwaukee County’s election director. They also called, texted, and visited other current and former election officials across the city without warrants or other formal legal process. Federal agents, knocking on private doors, in a swing state. A pattern emerges.

Now they’ve come for Ohio.

Zoom Out From Each Headline: This is All Connected

It’s easy to miss one of these stories, or forget about the last one so the next one seems unrelated. But we know that the easiest time for someone to steal and election is before Election Day, and that’s exactly what this is about.

• First, they go after the records. Fulton County. Maricopa County. The target is the physical records of past elections—ballots, audit data, documentation—all in a fool’s errand to prove “fraud” in an election that happened a half-decade ago.

• Then, they go after the workers. Milwaukee election administrators, visited at home without a warrant or any other just cause. The Trump Administration knows this is intimidating; it knows they don’t have to arrest someone to do real damage to our elections, or election workers, and voter confidence.

• Now, for the first time, they’re going after civil society. OOC employees are private citizens who help people register to vote and participate in our democracy. The FBI raided their offices and their homes. That’s a new and dangerous escalation.

Their Goal Isn’t Evidence. It’s Uncertainty.

The Trump Administration knows it doesn’t need to prove anyone at OOC actually committed a crime to suppress voting. They really don’t even need to press charges.

They just need enough of nonprofit organizations doing good work in key swing states to worry that registering voters might not be worth the risk of a federal agent knocking on their door.

They’re creating a chilling effect that can be effective whether or not their baseless investigations ever produce a single valid charge. The uncertainty itself is their goal, and it’s their weapon.

This is what election subversion looks like in this moment. Yes, they’re passing restrictive voting laws. Yes, they’re gerrymandering maps. But this is new: Federal agents at the doors of people who work on elections, months before voting begins this fall.

The Ohio Organizing Collaborative isn’t staying silent, and we can’t either. Organizers in Ohio have already launched Hands Off Ohio in direct response to the raids. Everyone should visit it to see how Ohio is fighting back, and how you can support them.

The most powerful thing authoritarians need is our silence. Don’t give it to them.

[1] The Fulton County search warrant affidavit, released after a court order, relied heavily on witnesses who are now Trump administration employees, including a former Trump campaign lawyer who participated in the effort to overturn the 2020 election.

Let’s start with the basics: These far-reaching DOJ demands for voter information are unprecedented. Requests from the Department of Justice might seem like normal oversight, but in reality nothing like this has ever happened before.

What’s worse, these DOJ requests—which we believe will eventually be filed in every state—make elections less secure by introducing new data vulnerabilities into the system and by putting state and local election officials under immense strain.

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As for the President, his only task when it comes to elections is to run in them (which he’s no longer allowed to do after his second term), not run them himself. The Constitution gives states the power to run voting. It should concern all of us when a president tries to change the way elections operate or tilt the process in his own vision.

And let’s be clear, that’s exactly what’s happening. Here’s his plan:

• Stepping back for a moment, this entire ordeal of requesting your voter information to build the first-ever “national voter roll” has its roots in made-up MAGA claims that we have a massive noncitizen voting problem in America. We do not. Our elections are free, fair, and secure. There’s simply no upside that justifies the risk the President is creating.

• Meanwhile, we know this Administration can’t trusted with math, data, or facts. Don’t like the latest government labor statistics? Fire the statistician. The same thing will happen with voter data:

  • First, in the short term, federal agencies may falsely claim that large numbers of non-citizens are registered to vote and then pressure states to purge those names voter rolls—an unreliable process that almost always results in lawfully registered voters losing their right to vote.

  • Later, when there are election results the Administration doesn’t like, false reports of voter rolls “bloated with noncitizens” could be used to justify attempts to contest those results or undermine public confidence in elections.

• Beyond unreliable purges, contesting results, and undermining confidence, DOJ has also verified our concerns that voter data won’t be handled confidentially by confirming it will share that data with other agencies for use in criminal and immigration-related investigations. Given the risks of criminal prosecution or even deportation that come with these investigations, the consequences of unreliable data practices and “false positive” matches become even more dire—especially considering there’s zero benefit for our already safe and secure elections.

This direct attack on our freedom to register and vote is about little more than fear and control. If we live in a democracy, then voters—not politicians—should decide elections.

Trump’s actions are taken straight out of the authoritarian playbook, aimed to take power away from us and put it in his own hands. We need to stay informed, see through his efforts, and be ready to speak up and fight back at the ballot box.

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Whatever volunteer, civic engagement, or election protection efforts you or your company, law firm, or philanthropy supported in previous elections were certainly admirable. If you match those same efforts in 2025, 2026, and 2028, your work will unfortunately appear quaint against the new authoritarian threats that voters and our elections now face.

In very short order, each of us will be called on to do more than we’ve ever done before to protect American voters and elections.

A New Type of Coward & New Type of Threat

American elections are a thing to behold. Over 230 years ago, the Framers gave states authority over "the time, place, and manner" of elections, and for 230 years state officials have been the keepers of a voting system that has remained open and transparent to the public and press; secure against attack and manipulation; and—with pressure from activists and advocates—become more equal and equitable over time.

Of course, some have always sought to manipulate our system for their own purposes, whether to horde power, exercise cruelty, or both. We recognize this for what it is: a cowardly, centuries-old strategy to grab and hold power—and often to keep Black and Brown leaders out of power.

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That history of disenfranchisement has long been grounded in excluding voters from the process on the front end: i.e., literacy tests, ID requirements, and blatant harassment and intimidation designed to keep voters from casting ever a ballot.

But voter suppression circa 2025 don’t stop at keeping voters from the ballot box. Instead, today’s election sabotage is dual-impact: it seeks to both disenfranchise voters and undermine the validity of elections even after votes have been cast—whether by nefariously casting doubt on the results, the workers who administered the election, or the integrity of the entire system.

The always-fantastic team at the Brennan Center identified four likely components of the upcoming authoritarian attacks on elections:

• Federal agencies that are currently making unprecedented requests for private voter data could use that data to launch false claims that large numbers of non-U.S. citizens are registered to vote. This can lead to errant voter roll purges and drive down voter confidence.

• The President has prompted agencies to investigate and even decertify previously approved voting equipment. This could be a precursor for government reports containing false or misleading claims about the security and accuracy of election systems.

• Executive Orders and other statements suggest we’ll see an increase in politicized investigations and prosecutions of election workers and other individuals who work to assist voters.

• Based on recent military deployments and other actions, we could even see scenarios where federal agencies could be used to interfere in election operations, including through efforts to prevent legal votes from being counted.

Again, each attack is a twin threat against democracy: it seeks to both disenfranchise voters or intimidate them from voting, and simultaneously lay the groundwork to subvert perfectly valid election results after the fact. This is the new threat we face.

A New Theory of Election Protection

For years, lawyers, advocates, and political parties have led election protection efforts. This made sense. Courts and legislatures were the obvious places to fight for a level playing field, political candidates were obvious leaders in that fight, and nonprofit advocates could help amplify voting rights messages to their members.

Protecting our votes from an autocrat determined to deploy new tactics to meddle in elections to grab and hold power for himself and his party will, however, take more than just lawyers volunteering to monitor polling places on Election Day and celebrities posting links to voter registration websites.

Don't get me wrong: we'll need every lawyer and celebrity we can get.

But safeguarding elections and voters from an authoritarian who is already laying the groundwork to subvert elections will require more from each more of us than ever before contributing more than ever before starting sooner than ever before.

• New Timelines: This is not a Summer or Fall of 2026 problem, it’s a today problem. The authoritarians are organizing now, and we’re already behind. There are major elections in just 50 days in California, New York City, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Detroit, Atlanta, and elsewhere. Authoritarians will use what happens in 2025 as a basis to tilt the playing field in 2026. The midterms in 2026 will feel like a Presidential year in terms of intensity, because the authoritarians will use whatever happens that year to further hamper free and fair elections in 2028. We must organize and activate starting today.

• New Tactics: Activation and volunteerism must be robust before, during, and after Election Day—all the way until the last vote is certified and the final court case challenging the results is settled. We need people pre-butting and debunking election disinformation in the streets and on social media and on podcasts and (most importantly of all) with friends and neighbors and coworkers and fellow churchgoers. We need businesses to be brave and amplify pro-voter messaging to employees. We need philanthropy to be more generous than ever before.

• New Coalitions: We’re going to need to do all this numbers that make previous national activation weekends like No Kings look small. Lawyers and non-lawyers. Students and retirees. We need the business community and the creator community and the faith community to show up en masse, both in person and online. And we need each and every person that I just listed to recruit three friends to volunteer or march or post with them. Case studies from other countries teach us that the most effective way to stop authoritarian election manipulation is people standing up in huge numbers and saying, “no!”.

Essential voting rights and election protection litigation is still essential. The leading pro-democracy nonprofit organizations will still lead. They need your support and your funding and your amplification, just like you’ve done for them in the past. But they, and we, and America need you to do more.

Now, or never.

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Not on the list: elections.

It’s so rare for anyone to lobby for free and fair elections that regulators didn’t even list elections in the top 129 categories alongside fisheries and the gold standard.

American companies spent a record $4.53 billion lobbying in 2024. While we can’t know how much was spent on election policy, it’s safe to say there’s room to grow.

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There’s little question businesses should put dollars behind free and fair elections. Democratic countries have a higher GDP per capita than non-democracies. Over 96% of executives agree that a well-functioning democracy is needed for a strong economy, and 71% of CEOs are “very concerned” that geopolitical instability would harm sales.

Evidence also shows that stakeholders reward organizations that lead with their values: 81% of consumers are more likely to buy a company’s products if it speaks out against restrictive voting laws, and 76% are more likely to work for a company that promotes democracy.

We also know how to tell companies to spend election-related lobbying dollars effectively. For example:

• A survey of local election officials by the Brennan Center says 75% of election officials need more funding to meet demands around security, machines, and polls workers. Congress, however, just proposed a paltry $15 million in election funding. Companies lobby more over appropriations than any other issue, so it should be easy for them to lobby around election spending.

• Protecting elections from foreign influence is something we all agree on. However, the agency that does this—the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA—has seen drastic cuts, and election officials are worried. DHS Noem says that, despite the cuts, CISA will provide some cybersecurity resources. Maybe a few of the 659 companies that lobby on technology, the 487 that lobby on homeland security, or the 398 that lobby on telecommunications can lobby Noem to stick to her position around providing basic election-related cybersecurity services?

Others have pointed out obstacles to this plan: C-suites aren’t versed in election administration, and corporations are good at advocating for their own business interests but “less well equipped to act on shared social concerns.”

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Given what’s on the line, these obstacles are worth overcoming. Organizations like Leadership Now Project are educating and organizing business leaders. Private executive briefings and bespoke advocacy strategies are also available.

So let’s get to it. If you’re an employee, look up your company’s lobbying budget and email leadership saying you want some of it spent on elections. If you’re in leadership, get educated. If you need resources, I’ve got them.

There’s very, very little time to waste.