We Are Winning
We’re winning. The People are winning.
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.
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.