Trump’s Newest Attacks on Elections Are More Desperate, and More Dangerous
The president would literally have us be unsafe from real attacks to win a fight over one he made up.
A Trump-appointed judge in Georgia just kicked the Trump administration out of his courtroom.
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.”
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.