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.

I love the graphic below from the team at Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement (PACE), which depicts a well-functioning democracy as one with fair elections & processes, responsive policymaking, free-flowing information, and social cohesion—all resulting in an empowered citizenry.

Democracy Doesn’t Deliver Voters — So Far

Democrats have had a tough time messaging around threats to “democracy.”

A centerpiece of President Biden’s 2024 campaign was that the election was “a battle for the soul of the nation.” In a major speech, Biden argued Trump was a threat to democracy. While he nodded to topics like the “freedom to speak your mind” and “opening the doors of opportunity wider,” he mostly linked “democracy” to voting rights and Trump’s 2020 attempt to overthrow the election. He used the word “election” 22 times, “insurrection” 12 times, “vote” 9 times, and “Trump” 50 times.

Ultimately, this message failed to resonate.

When asked if they trusted Kamala Harris or Donald Trump more to handle threats to democracy, one poll of 1,600 people who voted in 2024 found that 50% trusted Trump more to preserve democracy, compared to 49% for Harris.

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Canceling Colbert Wakes Hollywood from Hibernation

Last week, CBS canceled one of only three late-night shows to earn an Emmy Award nomination this year.

Here’s a timeline of events, and a depiction of democracy in decline:

• July 2: Paramount Global (CBS’s owner ) reaches a widely-criticized agreement to pay Trump $16 million to settle his frivolous lawsuit against CBS.

• July 7: CBS and Skydance Media ink a merger agreement worth $8 billion—subject to approval by the Trump Administration.

• July 14: On his show, Colbert criticizes Paramount Global’s $16m payout to Trump, calling it a “big fat bribe.”

• July 15: Skydance’s CEO and his top lawyer meet with Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chair Brendan Carr to lobby for approval of the merger. (Note: Carr wrote Project 2025’s chapter on the FCC and recently revived an investigation into CBS that the previous FCC Chair dismissed.)

• July 17: Paramount Global fires Colbert.

Here we see several direct hits to PACE’s democracy wheel totally separate from voting or elections: the corruption of governing institutions; advocacy and policy that are responsive only to those with access and means; and the silencing of critical media voices resulting in a less informed and disempowered citizenry.

Interestingly, the attack on these aspects of democracy is resonating.

As one report puts, it, “A-list stars are taking to social media to speak out against the late night show's abrupt cancellation.” While most celebrities, athletes, and influencers have had little to say in response to Trump’s many recent attacks on free & fair elections, Katie Couric, Ben Stiller, Rachel Zegler, Judd Apatow, Adam Scott, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, and others have spoken out against Colbert’s corrupt firing.

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A Potential Playbook

It’s easy to conclude that entertainers are invested in the Colbert incident because it involves an entertainer—certainly that’s part of it.

But I think we can draw larger lessons in how to shape a pro-democracy strategy that resonates with voters:

• First, when speaking or organizing rallies around “democracy,” progressives should focus on threats to values other than free and fair elections (at least for now). Many election regulations such as voter ID requirements are actually popular with voters, which makes them tricky to message. Meanwhile, everyone loves freedom of speech and hates censorship and corruption. The graphic above depicts almost two dozen non-voting-related democratic values under threat that we can educate and rally voters around.

• Second, it’s better to focus on tangible acts like canceling late night shows than abstract concepts like “institutions” or “the rule of law.” We should identify something specific the Administration has done, explain in the everyday terms, link it to a shared democratic values, and repeat repeat repeat. “Trump weakens all of us when he pressures private companies to do things like fire talk show hosts as a favor to him. This type of corruption threatens our access to information and reeks of un-American censorship.”

There’s little doubt major attacks against our elections and the right to vote are coming. When they do, their severity and impact on democracy will be clear enough and tangible enough that we can and should rally voters in response.

My worry is that if we wait until that moment to explain to voters the many ways their democracy is already being undermined, it may be too late to save it.

The Supreme Court is out with another ruling making it harder for you to protect your rights. Meanwhile, lawyers and the media are missing an opportunity to help voters realize how important this moment is by explaining it with mind-numbing legalese like “universal injunctions” and “placing limits on how parties can seek judicial relief going forward.”

The Supreme Court’s Ruling, Explained

Let’s say the President issues an Executive Order that every voter in the country has to show proof of citizenship (like a passport or birth certificate) before they can vote. The policy applies to you, me, and everyone else in the country.

Now let’s say a few voters in DC or some other place file a lawsuit in their local federal court arguing the “proof of citizenship” rule is unconstitutional.

If the judge agrees that the rule is unfair for the DC voters who filed the lawsuit, then it’s common sense that the law is equally unfair for you and for me. It’s the same proof of citizenship law that applies to every voter in the country—whether or not we’re the ones who went to court to sue over it.

Until today’s ruling, the federal court judge in DC had the ability to project not just the DC voters who filed the case from the unconstitutional Executive Order, but also you, me, and every other voter in America.

Specifically, the judge could enter a “universal injunction” or “nationwide injunction.” This “injunction” is basically a court order meaning that when a policy or law that impacts everyone is unconstitutional in the place where one person filed a lawsuit, it’s unconstitutional everywhere else, too.

This is just common sense. It prevents a patchwork of different laws being in place across the country, and it prevents 340 million different people from having to all file lawsuits to protect their rights.

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What the Future may Hold

This ruling makes it easier for those in charge to harm those with less authority.

This ruling makes it easier for the Executive Branch to grab ever-more power for itself.

This ruling further erodes our checks and balances, and makes it harder for the Judicial Branch to stall the Executive when it seeks to grab that power.

This ruling makes it harder for you to protect your rights (though some pathways still remain open for savvy litigants and capable lawyers).

This marks a huge shift in the balance of power in our government… toward the Executive Branch, away from the Judiciary, and away from the People.

According to the president, these event expenses amount to “MAJOR AND ILLEGAL CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS.”

Where to even begin…

Campaign Finance Law in Two Minutes

Here’s what we need to know:

• The maximum someone could contribute to Harris was $6,600. I know it seems like there’s unlimited money in politics, but rules still exist.

• “Contributions” include not just cash, but also “in-kind” contributions. Think of this as bills that you’d pay on the campaign’s behalf, like office equipment, pizza, or… concert expenses.

• You can’t throw a concert for the campaign that costs more than the limit (or write a check for more than the limit). That would be an illegal contribution to the campaign.

• Accordingly, when an artist racks up costs to put on an event to endorse a candidate, the candidate has to pay the event costs to avoid receiving an illegal contribution.

• Meanwhile, there’s actually no rule against candidates paying someone to gain their endorsement, however:

• Candidates are required to file public reports detailing every dollar they spend, including who they paid it to and the purpose of the payment. Failing to report a payment is a violation, and reporting a payment but lying about its purpose is a violation. Candidates can face severe penalties for filing false reports. If Harris paid Beyonce for her endorsement, we’d know.

Like every area of law, there are exceptions and perfectly acceptable work-arounds to some of these rules, but those are the basics.1

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In short: it looks like the Harris campaign did everything right, and everything Trump knows about campaign finance law is wrong. He cites Harris’s payments to Oprah and others, alleging those payments are illegal contributions. In fact, those payments were necessary and proper to cover event expenses and avoid illegal contributions, and the only reason Trump knows about them is because Harris properly reported them.

Calling All “Major Investigators”

I’m curious who Trump will find to lead his “major investigation.” As I posted a few weeks ago, the Federal Election Commission that enforces these campaign finance laws is de facto defunct.

Trump also gutted the Public Integrity Section of the Department of Justice, which leads criminal investigations into candidates.

Maybe he’ll pull from his new bank of law firm pro bono hours.

Calling Lee Greenwood

Of course, Trump had celebrity endorsers, too. Kid Rock performed at the Republican National Convention. So did Lee Greenwood.

Mr. Greenwood, for his part, Tweeted that he’s “received $0 from the Trump Campaign or the Trump Organization to perform/appear at Trump Rallies or Events.”

In other words, Greenwood suggests Trump never paid him for any expenses he incurred to perform at Trump events (such as travel, paying band members, or renting equipment).

If true, it sure would be nice if there was a functional FEC or DOJ to investigate whether those expenses exceed the allowable limits…

Share A Critical Mass of Voters

Resistance yields results.

Every lawsuit, every protest sign, every call to your legislator at every level of government.

They all add up to playing a role in victories like the one we have in North Carolina, where this morning Jefferson Griffin has finally conceded last November’s state supreme court election to rightful victor Allison Riggs.

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By now you’re familiar with the facts: Riggs won the election by around 600 votes, but Griffen tried to retroactively change the laws after the votes have been cast to cancel over 65,000 votes and steal the election. For months, he refused to concede while his desperate, election-denying challenges ping-ponged through the courts.

This week, a Trump-appointed federal judge dealt Griffin a near-definitive loss, and Griffin finally conceded!

For legal nerds in the audience, the language of Judge Myers’ ruling was notable:

IT IS ORDERED, ADJUDGED AND DECREED that the 1. Retroactive invalidation of absentee ballots cast by overseas military and civilian voters violates those voters’ substantive due process rights; 2. The cure process violates the equal protection rights of overseas military and civilian voters; and 3. The lack of any notice or opportunity for eligible voters to contest their mistaken designation as Never Residents violates procedural due process and represents an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote

Plainly stated: the law doesn’t allow candidates to change the rules after the game has been played in order to deny the results of the election.

In my view, Trump’s weakened position made it easier for Myers to issue this ruling. Pro-democracy groups have filed over 200 lawsuits against Trump’s power grabs since he took office. One statistic I heard last week said that around 130 of them have already been successful in halting his executive orders, illegal firings, and other moves. Add to that his historically weak poll numbers and massive public protests every few weeks and you have an environment where it’s much easier for judges he appointed to hold him accountable than if no one was standing up to him.

Resistance matters.

But what if no one is enforcing those rules? Or what if they’re being enforced unevenly?

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Money in campaigns is, unfortunately, almost everything. If one candidate has limits on how many staff they can hire, offices she can open, or ads he can buy — but the other doesn’t — the advantages are hard to overcome.

The video linked here explains how this is the reality that’s starting to come into focus heading into the 2026 midterm elections.

Here’s the background:

Last month, Trump issued an Executive Order claiming to “Preserve and Protect the Integrity of American Elections.” The truth? The order tries to do something that’s never been done before: give the President of the United States broad authority over how American elections are run.

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Today, a court told Trump to halt a major anti-voter portion of the Executive Order from taking effect.

My video explainer linked here breaks down the basics of the case and explains how this Executive Order fits with Trump’s pattern of attempting to grab power and then eliminate checks on that power during his first 100 days.