This is the Authoritarian Playbook of Election Manipulation
On Fridays, I zoom out from the day-to-day election news. This is “Your Vote Is Everything,” a weekly series for paid subscribers. Last week I made the case that your vote is the way out of this moment, and that the people in power know it. This week: their plan to take your vote from you.
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.
