Less than two months before the election, the Trump-aligned majority on the Georgia State Election Board passed a new set of eleventh-hour rule changes on Friday that could plunge the vote counting process into chaos and give Republicans yet another pretext not to certify the results if Kamala Harris wins the state.

During a highly contentious meeting, the state board voted 3-2 to require county election boards to hand count ballots cast on Election Day and then compare the results to the totals tallied by electronic voting machines to reconcile any discrepancies. While hand counts are commonly used in post-election audits to ensure accurate results, counting all votes by hand is significantly more burdensome, time-consuming, and error-prone than using standard voting machines. The rules were passed by three Republican appointees who Trump praised as “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory” during a rally in Atlanta in August.

“We’re so far off the deep end of sanity here,” Sara Tindall Ghazal, the board’s lone Democratic member, who voted against the rule changes, told me. “It’s a terrible, terrible idea to do this sort of thing with no notice, no training.”

Given the short time period for counties to certify the election—the deadline is the Monday after Election Day—voting rights activists worry that the new hand counting mandate, combined with rules adopted last month requiring counties to undertake a “reasonable inquiry” into the vote totals and access “all election-related documentation,” will be weaponized by Republicans to oppose election certification. “After changing election certification rules in ways that give new power to local election officials to refuse to certify results, the MAGA board is now changing rules in ways that seem meant to create a fail point in our system,” says Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO of the voting rights group Fair Fight.

The new rules put the state board directly at odds with election officials, Republicans and Democrats alike. A lawyer for Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who defended the results of the 2020 election, said they were likely illegal and poorly timed, noting that the new requirements will not go into effect until October 14 at the earliest, after absentee ballots have been mailed to voters on October 7 and just as in-person early voting starts on October 15.

“We’re so far off the deep end of sanity here,” Sara Tindall Ghazal, the board’s lone Democratic member, told me. “It’s a terrible, terrible idea to do this sort of thing with no notice, no training.”

“It is far too late in the election process for counties to implement new rules and procedures, and many poll workers have already completed their required training,” Charlene McGowan, the general counsel for Raffensperger, wrote to the board before Friday’s meeting. The new voting hand counting rules “would disrupt existing chain of custody protocols under the law and needlessly introduce the risk of error, lost ballots, or fraud,” she added.

The office of Georgia Republican Attorney General Chris Carr sent a letter to the board Friday morning informing them that several of the proposed rules, including the hand count of ballots, “very likely exceed the Board’s statutory authority” and “appear to conflict with the statutes governing the conduct of elections.” (At least two other rules approved by the board on Friday, including one that significantly expands the areas where partisan poll watchers can observe the vote counting, also likely violate state laws, the attorney general said.)

“The overwhelming number of election officials I’ve heard from are opposed to this,” said John Fervier, the GOP chair of the board, who was appointed by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp. “It’s too close to the election. It’s too late to train a lot of poll workers. There’s a lack of resources in many counties to effectuate this rule.” Most importantly, he said, “this is not supported at all in statute.”

All five election officials who spoke during the public comment section of the meeting spoke against the new rules. “The only people who support this are activists who think that the 2020 election was stolen,” says Tindall Ghazal. “Election workers don’t want it. Election supervisors don’t want it. You don’t change the rules this dramatically, this close to the election.”

The board did, however, vote 4-1 to table another proposal to count ballots by hand during early voting, which one of the pro-Trump members, Janelle King, said could lead to privacy concerns ahead of the election. (King also criticized Raffensperger for “unethical” behavior for recording the call where Trump demanded he “find 11,780 votes” to overturn’s Joe Biden’s victory in 2020, but did not reprimand Trump for pressuring the secretary of state to overturn the election.)

The push for hand counts has become a rallying cry of election deniers who falsely blame electronic voting machines for Trump’s defeat. One of the biggest backers of this conspiracy theory is MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.

Ironically, under the guise of protecting election integrity, hand counts actually lead to less accurate results due to human error. Numerous studies show that hand counts produce double the error rate of machine scanners. When Republicans in Nye County, Nevada, attempted to hand count ballots in 2022, they reported an error rate of 25 percent on the first day before the courts shut the effort down.   

“It’s a rule looking for a problem that doesn’t exist,” says Travis Doss, executive director of the Augusta-Richmond County Board of Elections. Doss is president of the Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials, a bipartisan group of more than 500 election workers from across the state. The group asked the board last month not to pass any more rule changes before the election because it was “gravely concerned that dramatic changes at this stage will disrupt the preparation and training processes already in motion for poll workers, absentee voting, advance voting and Election Day preparation.” It specifically opposed the hand counting requitement because of “the rule’s potential to delay results; set fatigued employees up for failure; and undermine the very confidence the rule’s author claims to seek.”

There’s good reason to worry that delays or errors caused by a hand count of ballots would then be cited by Republicans as a reason not to certify the election if a Democrat wins. That occurred in 2022, when the election board in rural Cochise County, Arizona, attempted to hand count all ballots, were told by a court it was illegal, then refused to certify the results after Democrats narrowly won close state races. The two Republican board members who led the scheme were subsequently indicted by the state’s attorney general for obstructing the vote counting process.

That kind of controversy over the vote counting process is exactly what Trump and his allies seem to be agitating for, which is why they’ve worked so hard to stack local and state election boards with MAGA election deniers in places like Georgia. The new rules are “throwing things off kilter to the point where it could create chaos when that’s the last thing we need,” Doss says. (The conservative majority on the Supreme Court has also repeatedly warned states not to implement voting changes close to an election.)

Tindall Ghazal predicts that any effort to refuse to certify the election will fail, because courts and state officials will force rogue counties to approve the results, but she worries how Trump could weaponize any delay or dispute in the vote counting process, which are now far more likely to occur because of the new rules passed by his allies on the state election board.

“It leads to public uncertainty and public distrust, because it gets messy,” she says. “And that’s the real goal. To throw enough sand in the eyes of the public to make them think maybe something went wrong.”

Former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams is no stranger to voter suppression in Georgia and she sees a “nightmare scenario” for how Republicans could nullify a Democratic victory in the state in November.

In August, after Donald Trump praised three Republican appointees to the Georgia State Election Board by name at a rally in Atlanta, the MAGA-aligned majority on the board passed a series of rule changes—requiring counties to undertake a “reasonable inquiry” into the vote totals and review “all election-related documentation” before certifying an election—that Democrats and voting rights groups fear could lead GOP-controlled boards not to sign off on the results if Kamala Harris wins the state. “The discrete and immediate concern,” says Abrams, who ran for Georgia governor in 2018 and 2022 and founded the voting rights group Fair Fight, “is that this will delay the counting of Georgia’s Electoral College votes.”

If there’s a lengthy dispute over the vote count, Georgia could miss the December 11 deadline for certifying its Electoral College results. If no candidate receives the 270 votes necessary to win the Electoral College as a result, the presidential election would be thrown to the House of Representatives, where Republicans control a majority of state House delegations, allowing them to swing the election to Trump.

“It is not just a nightmare scenario, it’s a very real possibility,” Abrams told me recently in Austin, Texas (we did a panel together on September 7 for the Texas Tribune Festival). “There’s a timetable, and that timetable presumes that everything is settled by the federal deadlines that are set. A state’s inability to meet that deadline or refusal to meet that deadline, throws the election to the House of Representatives. That is not the electoral body that should be deciding this election. It should be the people of the state.”

What Abrams is outlining is known as a “contingent election” under the 12^th Amendment. If no candidate receives a majority of Electoral College votes, the House selects the president and the Senate picks the vice president. That’s only happened once in US history for the country’s highest office—in 1824, Andrew Jackson won the Electoral College and popular vote, but the House installed the runner up, John Quincy Adams, as president.

“It’s not just a nightmare scenario, it’s a very real possibility,” Abrams says.

In a contingent election, a majority of state delegations, not House members overall, decide the winner. Under this scenario, the House essentially functions as the Senate, with each state getting one vote for president regardless of population. That means California, with 39 million people, has the same level of representation as Wyoming, with 584,000 people. This structure significantly favors Republicans, who are overrepresented in sparsely populated rural states, and who also drew redistricting maps in key states like Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin—giving them control of the House delegations despite the closely divided nature of those states.

A contingent election would amplify the structural inequities built into the US political system. “In the Electoral College, voters in large states have slightly less relative power than their share of the U.S. population would suggest. In a contingent election, this imbalance becomes extraordinary,” noted a report last year from Protect Democracy. “The twenty-eight smallest states control nearly 28 percent of votes in the Electoral College (148)—yet, they control 56 percent of the votes in a contingent election.” (Washington D.C., which has three Electoral College votes, but is not a state, is also barred from participating.)

That could lead to an extraordinarily undemocratic outcome—a candidate could lose both the popular vote and fail to gain a majority of the Electoral College, but become president thanks to House members who do not even represent a majority of the body, let alone a majority of Americans.  

Currently, Republicans control 26 state House delegations, exactly what they need to pick the president in a contingent election, compared to 22 for Democrats, with the rest divided equally. Though a contingent election would take place after the new Congress is seated in early January 2025, Republicans are likely to add another state, North Carolina, where the GOP gerrymandered district lines last year to pick up three or more House seats. “Republicans should have a majority in at least 26 state U.S. House delegations in 2025, even if they do not retain the overall House majority,” writes Kyle Klondike of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. And if Republicans retain the House majority, GOP Speaker of the House Mike Johnson could use his power to further tilt the rules in Trump’s favor.

Of course, a lot of things must go haywire for Abrams’ nightmare scenario to occur. Georgia law clearly specifies that counties “shall certify” the election returns. Democrats are challenging the state board’s new certification rules in court ahead of the election. And if counties refuse to approve the vote counts after the election, they will almost certainly be forced to certify the results by the courts or other state officials—which occurred when Republicans declined to certify election results in other states in recent elections. And Georgia may not be the tipping point state in the Electoral College anyway.

Jessica Marsden, counsel to the free and fair elections program at Protect Democracy, called a contingent election scenario “extremely unlikely.” She said that while she was alarmed by election deniers taking over state and county election boards in Georgia, she remained confident that top state officials, such as Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who resisted Trump’s demand to “find 11,780 votes” to reverse Biden’s victory in 2020, along with state courts, would once again uphold the integrity of the election.

“We’ve looked hard at Georgia law and we think it’s well-established that certification is a ministerial duty,” Marsden explained. “Even with the changes that the state board is trying to make, counties have a deadline and they have to certify by that deadline and state officials, based on our understanding, are ready to hold them to account. I think state officials are going to be all over this problem and will have the tools they need to make sure the election is certified.”

But Abrams’ concerns are not as far-fetched as they might seem given what happened in 2020. Yes, the effort to overturn the election failed. But it did lead to an insurrection at the Capitol. And the election denier movement is much stronger this time around, taking control over key election bodies in states like Georgia. Even if the election results are ultimately certified, any kind of dispute or delay in counting votes could be weaponized by Trump and his allies to disastrous effect.

“The biggest increase in risk post-2020 stems from the concerted, intentional effort to foment distrust in the election system,” Marsden says. “It’s less to me an issue that there are weak points that could be used to overturn election results. My concern is primarily the damage that gets caused along the way by people who have been lied to about the validity of the process.”

Before 2020, Republicans who wanted to subvert fair elections were focused on passing laws that made it harder to vote. But after Trump tried to overturn the election, his allies expanded the voter suppression playbook, shifting from simply limiting access to the ballot to contesting election outcomes, as Georgia clearly indicates.

“Georgia is an incubator for voter suppression and has been for decades now,” Abrams says. “We will not be the only state, and in fact, we’re not the only state, that has seen variations on this certification theme. Those who want to destabilize the system realized that voter suppression has three pieces: Can you register and stay on the rolls? Can you cast a ballot? Does your ballot get counted? Well, they have done what they can to interfere with the first and the second. The ultimate does your ballot get counted is not allowing the certification of your votes, because that is the final administrative step to a vote actually being counted in an election.”

Former President Donald Trump has been very clear about his intentions if he returns to power: He will take revenge on everyone who, he believes, stood in his way during the 2024 election. “WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences,” he posted on Truth Social on Saturday. “Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials.” 

Trump’s threats to prosecute perceived enemies are nothing new. His road to the White House in 2016 was paved with chants of “Lock her up!” But in 2024, Trump now has a blueprint for taking control of the Department of Justice and directing politically-motivated prosecutions—particularly of local election officials.

“This is authoritarian fantasy wish fulfillment reduced to paper.”

It’s all there in Project 2025’s agenda. In a little-noticed section of the Mandate for Leadership, the 922-page right-wing policy tome, a close Trump ally has laid out how Trump could do just as his post threatened. This two-page segment explains how the DOJ would go after local election administrators who make decisions Trump and his appointees disagree with.

According to experts, the factual premises of the section are mistaken, outlandish, and contradictory to current law. But the message it sends is crystal clear: if an election administration official makes it easier to vote in a way that the Trump DOJ does not like, it will investigate and possibly prosecute that official for criminal wrongdoing.

In the lead-up to November, lawsuits already abound over voting rules and regulations. What forms of ID are needed to register? Do mail-in ballot envelopes need to have hand-written dates on them? Is a county or state doing enough to keep voter rolls accurate? Such decisions can change the outcome of close elections by either enfranchising or disqualifying thousands of voters. Trump and the Republican Party oppose laws and policies that make it easier to vote, and advocate for additional hurdles that make it harder for people to register and cast a ballot. They do this under the guise of thwarting fraud, but in reality their policies make it harder for Democratic constituencies, including people of color, to vote.

While the GOP and its allies have long taken local officials to court over these debates, Project 2025 imagines a dystopian escalation: that the Department of Justice could mount a raid, an investigation, and even a criminal prosecution if it doesn’t like voting policies put in place by a local official. 

The proposal is tucked into the chapter on overhauling the Department of Justice, authored by Gene Hamilton, a former Trump official in the department who is likely to return in a second administration. In it, Hamilton envisions the criminal section at DOJ investigating “the appropriateness or lawfulness of state election guidance.”

“They want to criminalize election administration and disagreements over election administration,” Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Law School and a former Obama Justice Department official, said after reviewing the section.

To allow the federal government to threaten prosecutions over the minutiae of local election administration, Project 2025 perversely cites 1871’s Ku Klux Klan Act, a law passed in the wake of the Civil War to protect the rights of formerly enslaved citizens—including their right to vote. Today, one of the law’s uses is to protect the right to vote from race-based discrimination. Notably, Trump himself faces charges under the statute for his attempt to nullify millions of votes and overturn the results of the 2020 election.

“It’s an incredibly un-American effort to scare election officials.”

According to Project 2025, a second Trump administration would take this law that was meant to go after conspiracies that deprive people of rights and weaponize it in furtherance of the administration’s own plots to deprive people of their right to vote. “They’re asking for a world in which every disagreement about what is legally authorized is investigated for criminal prosecution under the Klan Act,” says Levitt. “That is, charitably, nuts.”

The one example Hamilton provides of an election administration decision that would warrant such a prosecution is chilling. In 2020, Kathy Boockvar, Pennsylvania’s elections chief, authorized counties to give provisional ballots to voters whose mail ballots had been disqualified for minor issues.

“We want eligible voters to be able to cast one ballot,” Boockvar says, explaining the decision. “If the first ballot that they tried to cast can’t be cast because they had the wrong date, then that gets tossed. And then they can vote by provisional ballot. There’s no violation of any laws. This is just another way to protect that an American citizen who’s eligible to vote can cast their ballot.”

Indeed, Boockvar’s move helped eligible voters vote. No one was hurt, no one’s rights were taken away, and no fraudulent votes were cast. There was certainly no conspiracy to deprive anyone of their rights. And yet, this is the scenario that Project 2025 calls out, not only as illegal, but as criminal. “That they’ve chosen this example shows not just ‘We’re coming after you for crimes’,” says Levitt, but “’We’re coming after you for things that are not crimes.'”

In fact, in just the past few days, two courts in Pennsylvania came to the conclusion that voters should have access to provisional ballots in such situations. If upheld, the decisions will likely help Democrats in the critical swing state, where the party’s voters are significantly more likely to vote by mail than Republicans.

It’s “part of a trend to make voting more confusing… trying to have a chilling effect.”

If the political motivation for a criminal probe such as the one that Hamilton suggests is clear, the legal one is pure fiction. “This is beyond the pale for any prosecutor,” says Levitt. “It’s difficult to convey how extreme this particular example that they’ve chosen is. And that’s the scariest part of the vibe. This is authoritarian fantasy wish fulfillment reduced to paper.”

“It’s an incredibly un-American effort to scare election officials,” adds Boockvar.

The proposal to investigate and prosecute election officials over administrative disputes—and to do it, no less, under a law meant to protect people’s rights—is almost ludicrous. And yet, with the right personnel under the direction of a Trump White House, such legal action is not inconceivable. 

In Texas, Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general, recently authorized raids on the homes of Democrats and civil rights advocates in the Latino community. He has also used the power of his office to sue Democratic counties working to make it easier to vote. Last week, he sued Bexar County, which includes San Antonio, for sending registration forms to residents. A few days later, Paxton sued Travis County, where Austin is located, for hiring a contractor to encourage people to register to vote. This wasn’t a nefarious crime but, as one county commissioner put it, a “nice thing to do.” Paxton’s moves come on the heels of legislation passed last year that allows the Texas secretary of state to take over local election administration in Harris County, which is home to Houston and is the state’s largest Democratic stronghold. Trump has floated Paxton as a contender for attorney general if he wins in November.

“Look at what’s happening on the ground in terms of civic activists being harassed in Texas, or voter rolls being purged in loosey-goosey ways,” warns Alex Ault, policy counsel at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

To Ault, its all “part of a trend to make voting more confusing, make people afraid to be active in promoting and defending their right to vote, and trying to have a chilling effect.”

Project 2025 lays out an authoritarian plan to wield the law in order to intimidate election officials and stop people from voting. That is surely not lost on Hamilton, who may get a chance to help implement the proposal if Trump returns to power—nor on the former president calling for prosecutions of anyone who stands in his way.

Former President Donald Trump has been very clear about his intentions if he returns to power: He will take revenge on everyone who, he believes, stood in his way during the 2024 election. “WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences,” he posted on Truth Social on Saturday. “Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials.” 

Trump’s threats to prosecute perceived enemies are nothing new. His road to the White House in 2016 was paved with chants of “Lock her up!” But in 2024, Trump now has a blueprint for taking control of the Department of Justice and directing politically-motivated prosecutions—particularly of local election officials.

“This is authoritarian fantasy wish fulfillment reduced to paper.”

It’s all there in Project 2025’s agenda. In a little-noticed section of the Mandate for Leadership, the 922-page right-wing policy tome, a close Trump ally has laid out how Trump could do just as his post threatened. This two-page segment explains how the DOJ would go after local election administrators who make decisions Trump and his appointees disagree with.

According to experts, the factual premises of the section are mistaken, outlandish, and contradictory to current law. But the message it sends is crystal clear: if an election administration official makes it easier to vote in a way that the Trump DOJ does not like, it will investigate and possibly prosecute that official for criminal wrongdoing.

In the lead-up to November, lawsuits already abound over voting rules and regulations. What forms of ID are needed to register? Do mail-in ballot envelopes need to have hand-written dates on them? Is a county or state doing enough to keep voter rolls accurate? Such decisions can change the outcome of close elections by either enfranchising or disqualifying thousands of voters. Trump and the Republican Party oppose laws and policies that make it easier to vote, and advocate for additional hurdles that make it harder for people to register and cast a ballot. They do this under the guise of thwarting fraud, but in reality their policies make it harder for Democratic constituencies, including people of color, to vote.

While the GOP and its allies have long taken local officials to court over these debates, Project 2025 imagines a dystopian escalation: that the Department of Justice could mount a raid, an investigation, and even a criminal prosecution if it doesn’t like voting policies put in place by a local official. 

The proposal is tucked into the chapter on overhauling the Department of Justice, authored by Gene Hamilton, a former Trump official in the department who is likely to return in a second administration. In it, Hamilton envisions the criminal section at DOJ investigating “the appropriateness or lawfulness of state election guidance.”

“They want to criminalize election administration and disagreements over election administration,” Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Law School and a former Obama Justice Department official, said after reviewing the section.

To allow the federal government to threaten prosecutions over the minutiae of local election administration, Project 2025 perversely cites 1871’s Ku Klux Klan Act, a law passed in the wake of the Civil War to protect the rights of formerly enslaved citizens—including their right to vote. Today, one of the law’s uses is to protect the right to vote from race-based discrimination. Notably, Trump himself faces charges under the statute for his attempt to nullify millions of votes and overturn the results of the 2020 election.

“It’s an incredibly un-American effort to scare election officials.”

According to Project 2025, a second Trump administration would take this law that was meant to go after conspiracies that deprive people of rights and weaponize it in furtherance of the administration’s own plots to deprive people of their right to vote. “They’re asking for a world in which every disagreement about what is legally authorized is investigated for criminal prosecution under the Klan Act,” says Levitt. “That is, charitably, nuts.”

The one example Hamilton provides of an election administration decision that would warrant such a prosecution is chilling. In 2020, Kathy Boockvar, Pennsylvania’s elections chief, authorized counties to give provisional ballots to voters whose mail ballots had been disqualified for minor issues.

“We want eligible voters to be able to cast one ballot,” Boockvar says, explaining the decision. “If the first ballot that they tried to cast can’t be cast because they had the wrong date, then that gets tossed. And then they can vote by provisional ballot. There’s no violation of any laws. This is just another way to protect that an American citizen who’s eligible to vote can cast their ballot.”

Indeed, Boockvar’s move helped eligible voters vote. No one was hurt, no one’s rights were taken away, and no fraudulent votes were cast. There was certainly no conspiracy to deprive anyone of their rights. And yet, this is the scenario that Project 2025 calls out, not only as illegal, but as criminal. “That they’ve chosen this example shows not just ‘We’re coming after you for crimes’,” says Levitt, but “’We’re coming after you for things that are not crimes.'”

In fact, in just the past few days, two courts in Pennsylvania came to the conclusion that voters should have access to provisional ballots in such situations. If upheld, the decisions will likely help Democrats in the critical swing state, where the party’s voters are significantly more likely to vote by mail than Republicans.

It’s “part of a trend to make voting more confusing… trying to have a chilling effect.”

If the political motivation for a criminal probe such as the one that Hamilton suggests is clear, the legal one is pure fiction. “This is beyond the pale for any prosecutor,” says Levitt. “It’s difficult to convey how extreme this particular example that they’ve chosen is. And that’s the scariest part of the vibe. This is authoritarian fantasy wish fulfillment reduced to paper.”

“It’s an incredibly un-American effort to scare election officials,” adds Boockvar.

The proposal to investigate and prosecute election officials over administrative disputes—and to do it, no less, under a law meant to protect people’s rights—is almost ludicrous. And yet, with the right personnel under the direction of a Trump White House, such legal action is not inconceivable. 

In Texas, Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general, recently authorized raids on the homes of Democrats and civil rights advocates in the Latino community. He has also used the power of his office to sue Democratic counties working to make it easier to vote. Last week, he sued Bexar County, which includes San Antonio, for sending registration forms to residents. A few days later, Paxton sued Travis County, where Austin is located, for hiring a contractor to encourage people to register to vote. This wasn’t a nefarious crime but, as one county commissioner put it, a “nice thing to do.” Paxton’s moves come on the heels of legislation passed last year that allows the Texas secretary of state to take over local election administration in Harris County, which is home to Houston and is the state’s largest Democratic stronghold. Trump has floated Paxton as a contender for attorney general if he wins in November.

“Look at what’s happening on the ground in terms of civic activists being harassed in Texas, or voter rolls being purged in loosey-goosey ways,” warns Alex Ault, policy counsel at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

To Ault, its all “part of a trend to make voting more confusing, make people afraid to be active in promoting and defending their right to vote, and trying to have a chilling effect.”

Project 2025 lays out an authoritarian plan to wield the law in order to intimidate election officials and stop people from voting. That is surely not lost on Hamilton, who may get a chance to help implement the proposal if Trump returns to power—nor on the former president calling for prosecutions of anyone who stands in his way.

Mormons would probably be psyched. The Republican Party less so.

I’m talking about what would happen if we embraced the idea, proposed by Donald Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance—isn’t he funny?—of empowering families by giving parents of young children an extra vote for each child.

Besides being likely unconstitutional (see the unanimous 2016 Supreme Court ruling in Evenwel v. Abbott, which upheld the 14th Amendment principle of “one person, one vote”) such a policy would be difficult to implement. Who gets the extra votes if there’s an odd number of kids and/or the parents are estranged or have opposing views? Who votes on behalf of stepkids—do they count? Adoptees? How about kids living with their grandparents? Noncitizen parents? Parents with Green Cards? Could undocumented parents vote on behalf of US-born offspring? And how would you verify all of it?

To be fair, in an interview over the weekend, Vance clarified that his proposal was simply a “thought experiment.” Okay then! Let’s think it through.

Assuming this proposal were legal and workable, whom would it benefit? Certainly the Mormons, who are known for prolific procreation (in 2014, according to a Pew Research report, Mormon couples ages 40-59 had an average of 3.4 children vs. 2.2 for all Christians and 2.1 nationally—they also famously have a history of having too many spouses.) Mormons tend to be conservative and vote Republican. But only about 1.2 percent of Americans identifed as Mormons in 2022, per the Washington Post. So who else might benefit?

Predicting voter preference and its impact on a given race is complicated and involves various interrelated factors: One must consider a given group’s cohesiveness, political tendencies, and likelihood of turnout, in addition to age, education, income, and geographical concentration—for example, Michigan’s Somali diaspora, Hawaii’s large Pacific Islander population, and Mexican Americans in the Southwest.

America’s young parents are more ethnically diverse than the broader population, and most minority groups lean Democratic—but turnout wold be key.

To these factors we can now add fecundity.

To make sense of all this stuff, you’d need a pro, so I called up William H. Frey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and US Census expert who has researched urban populations, migration, immigration, race, aging, and political demographics. He’s also the author of the 2018 book, Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics are Remaking America.

I also poked around for useful data. The Census Bureau’s 2023 Current Population Survey breaks down, by race and income, households with children under 18. That’s useful, because income is a rough proxy for education, and families with less education tend to have more children, Frey told me.

Non-Hispanic whites are significantly under-represented among parent households with incomes of less than $75,000—which account for 38 percent of all families with young children—while Latinos are substantially over-represented. In the slightly larger and more educated middle tier, households with $75,000-$199,999 in income, Asians and non-Hispanic whites are slightly over-represented while Black and Hispanic households are slightly under-represented. In the high-income tier ($200,000-plus), non-Hispanic whites and Asians are strongly over-represented while Black and Hispanic households are strongly under-represented—but only 17 percent of all families with young kids fall into this high-income, high-education, and likely high-turnout group.

The US has 3.5 million non-Hispanic, mixed-race kids, whom Trump managed to insult by asking, of Kamala Harris, “Is she Indian or is she Black?”

Slice and dice as you will, the upshot is that America’s youth, and their parents, are more ethnically diverse than the broader population. Non-Hispanic whites are 58 percent of the population, but less than half of kids under 18 are white only. Fourteen percent of kids are Black only, echoing the Black share of the US population. Ditto Asian kids (6 percent vs. 6.5 percent). But Latinos, representing 19.5 percent of the overall population, account for more than a quarter of minor children.

As of last year, non-Hispanic white families had 35.2 million minor children, whereas Asian, Black, and Latino families—all groups that tend to vote Democratic, Frey says—had 33.4 million children combined. (There were also 3.5 million non-Hispanic mixed-race kids—whom Trump may have managed to insult by asking, of Kamala Harris, “Is she Indian or is she Black?” Because one can’t be both!)

Trump’s supporters tend to be older and whiter, whereas most voting-eligible parents of young children would fall into the 25-44 age categories, which are more ethnically diverse, as this chart Frey put together demonstrates. (Scroll over the bars for exact percentages.)

Given our Electoral College rules, geographical clustering matters for the presidential race. Ethnically diverse states such as Texas and California, as Frey points out, "are going to have a bigger share of their voting age population with children and minority children. So that can help bolster the minority vote." Also, a sizeable share of America's Black population resides in red and purple states. And again, minority voters tend to favor Democrats.

"The key issue is turnout," Frey says. "High turnout is largely old people, college educated whites. Not so much for young people. And not so much for most minorities, except in some elections, like when Obama was running." (Note: This could be one such election.)

There's also an X-factor to consider: Might the promise of extra votes serve as an incentive for parents who might not otherwise do so to get out and exercise their patriotic duty, potentially narrowing ethnic and educational turnout disparities?

Frey was too busy to help me conduct an official analysis, but his overall impression is that Vance's idea would likely benefit Democratic candidates and priorities. "The whole thing is a bit hard to execute anyway," he says with a laugh. "Who’s gonna check? They accuse everybody of voter fraud if they just do normal voting. What happens if they do this kind of thing?"

On August 3, Donald Trump held a raucous rally in Georgia, where he attacked Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger for refusing to overturn the 2020 election and reiterated his lie that he “won” the state in 2020. But Trump singled out the new MAGA-aligned majority on the state’s election board for praise.

“I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the Georgia State Election [Board] is in a very positive way,” the ex-president said to cheers. “They’re on fire, they’re doing a great job. Three members: Janice Johnston, Rick Jeffares, and Janelle King. Three people, they’re all pit bulls, fighting for honesty, transparency and victory. They’re fighting.”

Johnston, a retired obstetrician who spread false claims about the 2020 election in Atlanta’s heavily Democratic Fulton County, rose from her seat near the stage and waved to the crowd. “My courage was contagious,” Trump remarked after she stood. “Well, your courage is contagious, too.”

Three days later, on the 59^th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act no less, those three Republicans returned the favor to Trump, passing a new rule on a 3-2 vote requiring that counties undertake a “reasonable inquiry” into vote totals before certifying election results. It is set to go into effect in 20 days, two months before voters go to the polls in one of the country’s most important battleground states.

Legal experts say the rule is illegal and will likely be challenged in court, since county election officials have a ministerial role when it comes to certifying elections and Georgia law clearly states that local officials “shall certify” the results. But if the measure—which does not define what a “reasonable inquiry” is —stands, Democrats and voting rights groups are warning that Republican election deniers will use it as a pretext not to certify an election if a Democrat wins—the very thing Trump unsuccessfully tried to get election officials to do in 2020.

“The risk is using pretextual reasons to fail to certify when folks are not pleased with the results,” said Sara Tindall Ghazal, the lone Democratic Party representative on the board, when the rule was first proposed. “That is my concern—using excuses to fail to certify.”

This very thing has occurred in recent elections. As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported, Republican-appointed board members in Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton, Gwinnett and Spalding counties voted against certifying results during both local elections last November and the presidential primary this March. The “reasonable inquiry” rule was written by a Republican board member in Fulton County, Michael Heekin, who voted against certifying the presidential primary results because of alleged ballot security concerns. Republican officials have also refused to certify election results in states including Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, and New Mexico.

“These are MAGA certification rules, and they’re in direct conflict with Georgia law, which states in multiple places that local elections board officials shall perform their duties, meaning their duties are mandatory, not discretionary,” State Rep. Sam Park, a lawyer and minority whip for Georgia House Democrats, said at a press conference Tuesday.

The Georgia state board’s actions are a consequence of the sweeping voter suppression law passed by the state legislature in 2021 after Trump failed to overturn the results. The law, SB202, included 16 provisions rolling back access to the ballot; the conservative group Heritage Action, the sister organization of the Heritage Foundation, which is behind Project 2025, took credit for the measure, saying in a leaked video obtained by Mother Jones and Documented that it included “eight key provisions that Heritage recommended.”

“These are MAGA certification rules, and they’re in direct conflict with Georgia law”

Most notably, the law removed Raffensperger, who resisted Trump’s demands to “find 11,780 votes” to overturn Biden’s victory, as chair and voting member of the state board, which oversees voting rules and election certification. Instead, it gave Republicans in the heavily gerrymandered legislature more power to choose the board’s members, which allowed election deniers to gain a controlling majority of the body this year.

As USA Today reported:

In January, the Georgia Senate, run by Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, confirmed Rick Jeffares as that body’s pick for the board. Jeffares posted memes shortly after the 2020 election “that suggested dead people had voted by mail, claimed the Democrats and China had colluded, and implied that Democrats had cheated,” according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution. (Jones, the lieutenant governor, served as a fake member of the Electoral College, as part of Trump’s effort to overturn the election.)

In May, the state House of Representatives confirmed King to replace Ed Lindsey, a Republican who faced criticism on the right for his support for no-excuse absentee voting and his lobbying career. King proposed re-opening a state investigation of the 2020 election.

Johnston, the board member who attended the Trump rally, was appointed by the Georgia Republican Party in 2022. She has already hinted that GOP county officials could use the new power given to them by the state board to refuse to certify election results.

“Not all elections are certified,” she said at the seven-hour board meeting on Tuesday. “There are ballot battles and there are elections that need to be addressed carefully, and there may be issues that prevent a board from certifying.”

State board member Tindall Ghazal says that Republican officials who have refused to certify election results “are not operating in good faith” and are trying to sow doubt about the legitimacy of elections. “It’s very clear some of the decisions are being driven by partisan interests and there’s a partisan interest in chaos.”

The move to thwart election certification is just one of many disturbing moves recently taken by the board’s MAGA-friendly majority. In another meeting Wednesday, they voted to re-open an investigation into the 2020 results in the Democratic stronghold of Fulton County, where Trump and his allies spread lies about “suitcases” of ballots being counted on election night after GOP poll monitors left. As a result of SB202, the state board now has new power to take control of election administration in up to four counties it deems “underperforming,” sparking fears that Republicans will usurp election operations in heavily Democratic areas.

The board is also considering another rule that would allow county election officials to demand to review a long list of election documents before certifying results, which could further undercut efforts to certify elections in a timely manner and another measure that would give partisan poll watchers greater access to monitor the vote counting process—a key demand of election deniers who tried to disrupt the 2020 vote.

“Changing Georgia election rules with under 90 days to go should raise alarms for everyone who values the integrity of elections—these changes can be used by Trump and his allies to obstruct certification of the 2024 election results,” says Max Flugrath, a spokesman for the voting rights group Fair Fight.

Even Republicans who have denounced Trump are doing the bidding of election deniers in the state. In late July, the secretary of state’s office unveiled a new online portal that allows someone to cancel the registration of another voter online if they have allegedly died or moved out of state. Users only need to know a voter’s name, date of birth, and county residence to initiate a cancellation request, and the last four digits of the voter’s Social Security number or their driver’s license number in order to finalize a cancellation. That very information leaked online after the portal’s rollout, exacerbating concerns about voter privacy. Georgia Senate Democrats said the site “empowers conspiracy theorists and other bad actors to deny Georgians the right to vote.”

The portal is particularly worrisome because SB202 explicitly green-lit unlimited challenges to voter eligibility and right-wing activists challenged the registrations of roughly 100,000 people during the 2022 midterms. The Georgia legislature made it even easier to launch mass voter challenges this year, sparking fears that more voters could be wrongly removed from voter rolls. ProPublica reported that there have already been attempts to cancel the registrations of Raffensperger and far-right GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene using the new online tool.

Georgia is once again a toss-up state, as the latest projections show Kamala Harris pulling even with Trump. But the election deniers who have been empowered after 2020 are doing everything they can to rig the rules to prevent a Democrat from winning the state again.

On August 3, Donald Trump held a raucous rally in Georgia, where he attacked Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger for refusing to overturn the 2020 election and reiterated his lie that he “won” the state in 2020. But Trump singled out the new MAGA-aligned majority on the state’s election board for praise.

“I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the Georgia State Election [Board] is in a very positive way,” the ex-president said to cheers. “They’re on fire, they’re doing a great job. Three members: Janice Johnston, Rick Jeffares, and Janelle King. Three people, they’re all pit bulls, fighting for honesty, transparency and victory. They’re fighting.”

Johnston, a retired obstetrician who spread false claims about the 2020 election in Atlanta’s heavily Democratic Fulton County, rose from her seat near the stage and waved to the crowd. “My courage was contagious,” Trump remarked after she stood. “Well, your courage is contagious, too.”

Three days later, on the 59^th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act no less, those three Republicans returned the favor to Trump, passing a new rule on a 3-2 vote requiring that counties undertake a “reasonable inquiry” into vote totals before certifying election results. It is set to go into effect in 20 days, two months before voters go to the polls in one of the country’s most important battleground states.

Legal experts say the rule is illegal and will likely be challenged in court, since county election officials have a ministerial role when it comes to certifying elections and Georgia law clearly states that local officials “shall certify” the results. But if the measure—which does not define what a “reasonable inquiry” is —stands, Democrats and voting rights groups are warning that Republican election deniers will use it as a pretext not to certify an election if a Democrat wins—the very thing Trump unsuccessfully tried to get election officials to do in 2020.

“The risk is using pretextual reasons to fail to certify when folks are not pleased with the results,” said Sara Tindall Ghazal, the lone Democratic Party representative on the board, when the rule was first proposed. “That is my concern—using excuses to fail to certify.”

This very thing has occurred in recent elections. As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported, Republican-appointed board members in Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton, Gwinnett and Spalding counties voted against certifying results during both local elections last November and the presidential primary this March. The “reasonable inquiry” rule was written by a Republican board member in Fulton County, Michael Heekin, who voted against certifying the presidential primary results because of alleged ballot security concerns. Republican officials have also refused to certify election results in states including Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, and New Mexico.

“These are MAGA certification rules, and they’re in direct conflict with Georgia law, which states in multiple places that local elections board officials shall perform their duties, meaning their duties are mandatory, not discretionary,” State Rep. Sam Park, a lawyer and minority whip for Georgia House Democrats, said at a press conference Tuesday.

The Georgia state board’s actions are a consequence of the sweeping voter suppression law passed by the state legislature in 2021 after Trump failed to overturn the results. The law, SB202, included 16 provisions rolling back access to the ballot; the conservative group Heritage Action, the sister organization of the Heritage Foundation, which is behind Project 2025, took credit for the measure, saying in a leaked video obtained by Mother Jones and Documented that it included “eight key provisions that Heritage recommended.”

“These are MAGA certification rules, and they’re in direct conflict with Georgia law”

Most notably, the law removed Raffensperger, who resisted Trump’s demands to “find 11,780 votes” to overturn Biden’s victory, as chair and voting member of the state board, which oversees voting rules and election certification. Instead, it gave Republicans in the heavily gerrymandered legislature more power to choose the board’s members, which allowed election deniers to gain a controlling majority of the body this year.

As USA Today reported:

In January, the Georgia Senate, run by Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, confirmed Rick Jeffares as that body’s pick for the board. Jeffares posted memes shortly after the 2020 election “that suggested dead people had voted by mail, claimed the Democrats and China had colluded, and implied that Democrats had cheated,” according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution. (Jones, the lieutenant governor, served as a fake member of the Electoral College, as part of Trump’s effort to overturn the election.)

In May, the state House of Representatives confirmed King to replace Ed Lindsey, a Republican who faced criticism on the right for his support for no-excuse absentee voting and his lobbying career. King proposed re-opening a state investigation of the 2020 election.

Johnston, the board member who attended the Trump rally, was appointed by the Georgia Republican Party in 2022. She has already hinted that GOP county officials could use the new power given to them by the state board to refuse to certify election results.

“Not all elections are certified,” she said at the seven-hour board meeting on Tuesday. “There are ballot battles and there are elections that need to be addressed carefully, and there may be issues that prevent a board from certifying.”

State board member Tindall Ghazal says that Republican officials who have refused to certify election results “are not operating in good faith” and are trying to sow doubt about the legitimacy of elections. “It’s very clear some of the decisions are being driven by partisan interests and there’s a partisan interest in chaos.”

The move to thwart election certification is just one of many disturbing moves recently taken by the board’s MAGA-friendly majority. In another meeting Wednesday, they voted to re-open an investigation into the 2020 results in the Democratic stronghold of Fulton County, where Trump and his allies spread lies about “suitcases” of ballots being counted on election night after GOP poll monitors left. As a result of SB202, the state board now has new power to take control of election administration in up to four counties it deems “underperforming,” sparking fears that Republicans will usurp election operations in heavily Democratic areas.

The board is also considering another rule that would allow county election officials to demand to review a long list of election documents before certifying results, which could further undercut efforts to certify elections in a timely manner and another measure that would give partisan poll watchers greater access to monitor the vote counting process—a key demand of election deniers who tried to disrupt the 2020 vote.

“Changing Georgia election rules with under 90 days to go should raise alarms for everyone who values the integrity of elections—these changes can be used by Trump and his allies to obstruct certification of the 2024 election results,” says Max Flugrath, a spokesman for the voting rights group Fair Fight.

Even Republicans who have denounced Trump are doing the bidding of election deniers in the state. In late July, the secretary of state’s office unveiled a new online portal that allows someone to cancel the registration of another voter online if they have allegedly died or moved out of state. Users only need to know a voter’s name, date of birth, and county residence to initiate a cancellation request, and the last four digits of the voter’s Social Security number or their driver’s license number in order to finalize a cancellation. That very information leaked online after the portal’s rollout, exacerbating concerns about voter privacy. Georgia Senate Democrats said the site “empowers conspiracy theorists and other bad actors to deny Georgians the right to vote.”

The portal is particularly worrisome because SB202 explicitly green-lit unlimited challenges to voter eligibility and right-wing activists challenged the registrations of roughly 100,000 people during the 2022 midterms. The Georgia legislature made it even easier to launch mass voter challenges this year, sparking fears that more voters could be wrongly removed from voter rolls. ProPublica reported that there have already been attempts to cancel the registrations of Raffensperger and far-right GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene using the new online tool.

Georgia is once again a toss-up state, as the latest projections show Kamala Harris pulling even with Trump. But the election deniers who have been empowered after 2020 are doing everything they can to rig the rules to prevent a Democrat from winning the state again.

Kamala Harris’ decision to pick Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate on Tuesday coincided with the 59^th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

It was a fitting coincidence—Minnesota has long ranked at the top of the country in voter turnout, pioneering pro-voter reforms like Election Day registration, and as governor Walz signed bill after bill expanding access to the ballot and safeguarding the right to vote.

“Governor Walz made Minnesota a national model for protecting our democracy and the freedom to vote,” Sean Eldridge, president of Stand Up America, a progressive advocacy group, said on Tuesday morning.

In May 2023, after Minnesota elected a Democratic legislature in the 2022 midterms, Walz signed the “Democracy for the People Act,” which enacted automatic voter registration at state agencies, established a permanent list for mail-in ballots, allowed 16- and 17-year-olds to pre-register to vote, and strengthened penalties against voter intimidation.

“Minnesota consistently leads the nation in voter turnout, and we plan to keep it that way,” Walz said at the time. “We know that the more people vote, the more representative our state government can be. This bill will strengthen our democracy, allow future voters to get engaged early, and keep our campaigns honest and fair.”

Just a month later, Walz signed another bill into law that restored voting rights to more than 50,000 Minnesotans on parole, probation, or community release due to felony convictions.

That same year, Walz also signed several other notable democracy reforms, including expanding early voting and committing to enroll Minnesota in the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which is an agreement among states to pledge their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote and bypass the Electoral College if enough states join to reach the 270 votes necessary to decide the presidency.

Walz didn’t stop there. In May 2024, he signed another package of pro-voter reforms, incentivizing college campuses to host polling places, ending prison gerrymandering so that incarcerated people are counted where they last resided for purposes of representation rather than where they are imprisoned, and creating a Minnesota Voting Rights Act. The state-level Voting Rights Act is an attempt to counteract the gutting of the VRA by the US Supreme Court and the conservative-dominated lower courts by prohibiting voter suppression and vote dilution and allowing private citizens to sue if their voting rights are challenged.

Walz’s record on voting rights is a stark contrast to Donald Trump’s VP pick, J.D. Vance, who said he would not have certified the 2020 election and has spread lies about the presidential result, falsely claiming that “there were certainly people voting illegally on a large-scale basis.”

Walz’s advocacy for democracy reform meshes well with Harris, who was the Biden administration’s point person on voting rights legislation and has pledged on the campaign trail to protect “the freedom to vote” and sign bills restoring the VRA and ensuring federal voting rights protections.

Bryan Sells, a voting rights lawyer in Georgia, wrote on X on Tuesday that “Harris-Walz is easily the most pro-voting-rights ticket in my lifetime.”

“Today is a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that has ever been won on any battlefield,” President Lyndon Johnson declared 59 years ago today, as he signed the Voting Rights Act into law at the US Capitol.

The landmark civil rights law transformed American politics, enfranchising millions of voters of color, but as it nears 60-years-old, the Voting Rights Act is under attack from every angle by a conservative-dominated judiciary.

The most serious blow came from the Supreme Court in the 2013 decision Shelby County v. Holder, which ruled that states with a long history of voting discrimination no longer needed to approve their election changes with the federal government. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his majority opinion that “things have changed dramatically” in the South, but since the ruling nearly 100 restrictive voting laws have been passed in at least 29 states, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. As a result of the Shelby decision and a slew of new anti-voting measures passed by Republicans in the wake of Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, voters in almost half the country will face new voting restrictions at the polls in 2024.

In the decade since Shelby, Trump appointees on the nation’s lower courts have taken a wrecking ball to what remains of the VRA.

On Thursday, the ultra-conservative 5^th Circuit Court of Appeals overruled two previous court decisions and reinstated a county commissioners’ map in Galveston, Texas, that eliminated the only majority-minority district, ousting the lone Black and minority commissioner. In a 12-6 decision, with all of the Republican-appointed judges in the majority, the appeals court overturned its own precedent dating back to 1988, ruling that minority groups who form a combined majority, such as Black and Hispanic voters in the Galveston area, are not protected under the VRA. That will make it much tougher to secure representation for communities of color, since different minority groups often combine to form a majority in an increasingly diversifying country. “Today, the majority finally dismantled the effectiveness of the Voting Rights Act in this circuit,” Judge Dana Douglas wrote in a dissent.

That’s just one example of how Republican-appointees to the federal judiciary, emboldened by Supreme Court rulings curbing voting rights, are going after the VRA.

In November 2023, a three-judge panel on the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers seven states in the Midwest and Great Plains, ruled that private plaintiffs could not bring lawsuits to enforce Section 2 of the VRA, the key remaining provision of the law, which prohibits voting practices and procedures that discriminate against voters of color. As I reported for Mother Jones, that ruling, if adopted nationwide, would amount to a near-fatal strike against the VRA:

The opinion said that only the US Attorney General could bring lawsuits to enforce Section 2, but the vast majority of such cases are brought by private plaintiffs, typically individual voters represented by voting rights groups. As Judge Lavenski Smith, an appointee of George W. Bush who is the only Black judge on the 8^th Circuit, noted in his dissent, of the 182 successful Section 2 cases over the past 40 years, only 15 were brought solely by the attorney general. If voting rights litigation were dependent on the Justice Department, it would slow to a trickle—or, under a hostile administration, to a halt.

Just days after the 8^th Circuit opinion, another conservative appellate court further weakened the power of the VRA. Judge Lisa Branch of the 11^th Circuit, a Trump appointee, overruled a lower court opinion invalidating the structure of Georgia’s Public Service Commission, which regulates public utilities and has had only two Black members in over 100 years, because it violated “general principles of federalism.” The decision could allow Georgia and other Southern states to use voting systems that have repeatedly been found to dilute the power of communities of color.

Against the backdrop of these escalating attacks on voting rights, Democrats narrowly failed to pass legislation restoring the power of the VRA and protecting the right to vote nationwide during Biden’s presidency. But they’ve committed to resurrecting the bills should they win control of Congress and the presidency in November.

“We who believe in the sacred freedom to vote, will finally pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act,” Democratic nominee Kamala Harris said while campaigning in Georgia last week.

When he signed the VRA, Lyndon Johnson called the right to vote “the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice.” The very success of the law has convinced its opponents of the urgent need to do away with it, once and for all.

On March 19, Staci Lindberg, the elected clerk of Nevada’s Lyon County, was hit with some unsettling news: She was being sued for the first time in her life. The plaintiff? Her own political party. 

The Republican National Committee had filed a lawsuit against Lindberg and five other Nevada election officials, alleging they had failed to follow a 1993 federal law requiring they maintain accurate voter registration rolls. As evidence, the RNC pointed to three counties it claimed had more people on their rolls than voting-age residents. 

Lindberg, who in 2022 campaigned for the clerk position as a “patriotic, hardworking, conservative Christian,” says she was “shocked” by the accusation. The RNC hadn’t even inquired about her voter roll maintenance processes before wielding such a serious allegation. “It hurt my feelings,” Lindberg, a soft-spoken grandmother of nine, told me. And she notes: “I truly feel we’re one of the most secure and safest counties when it comes to election integrity.” 

Lindberg shouldn’t take the lawsuit too personally. Three of the other election officials sued alongside her were also Republicans. One, Jim Hindle, was such a Donald Trump diehard in 2020 that he was indicted last December for serving as one of Nevada’s fake Trump electors. (The case was dismissed; Hindle declined to comment.) Lindberg and her fellow Republican clerks are just collateral damage in an aggressive and far-flung RNC strategy to contest the 2024 election before a single vote has been cast. 

In Lyon County—which is located in western Nevada and has not favored a Democrat for president since FDR—the RNC initially asserted that 105 percent of voting-eligible residents were registered, an “impossibly high” percentage, suggesting “an ongoing, systemic problem with its voter list maintenance efforts.” The RNC made similar claims for nearby Douglas (104 percent) and Storey (113 percent) counties. 

More curious than these alarming numbers—and the implications of voter fraud—was how the party came up with them. To estimate registration rates in each county, the RNC compared voter data from the secretary of state to a US census dataset that averaged populations over five years. The census data does not account for the tens of thousands of people who migrated to Nevada during the pandemic. More crucially, it often misses people who are lawfully registered to vote but temporarily residing elsewhere—such as college students and military service members. The RNC’s lawyers also, at one point, projected what they thought Nevada’s voting registration should be by extrapolating from a census survey of 54,000 Americans nationwide, not Nevadans specifically. 

“They take one measure of one thing in one place, purport to compare it with another measure of another thing in a different place, and arrive at a conclusion that does not follow,” says Justin Levitt, a Loyola Law School professor and former adviser in the Biden administration. “It’s a little bit like saying, ‘My clock doesn’t match my thermometer, so that means I need to fill up my car.’” Or as Laena St-Jules, Nevada’s senior deputy attorney general, put it in a letter responding to the RNC’s allegations: “This is comparing apples to orangutans.” 

However math-challenged, the RNC’s organized and well-financed legal approach is a sea change from 2020, when the party’s effort to hijack the Oval Office was frenzied and reactionary. The previous attempt was marked by a bevy of postelection lawsuits brimming with outlandish claims, and surreal press conferences headlined by the party’s legal frontman, Rudy Giuliani, who once famously addressed reporters outside a Philadelphia landscaping business next to a porn shop; in another briefing, black hair dye oozed from the former New York City mayor’s scalp as he stammered on about widespread fraud that he could never prove. (Giuliani was disbarred in July by a state appeals court that said he “baselessly attacked and undermined the integrity of this country’s electoral process.”) 

Even those incoherent efforts had a notable effect. Just before the 2020 election, 55 percent of Republican voters expressed confidence in the electoral process, according to a Monmouth University poll. Two weeks after the election, as Giuliani, Trump, and other Republicans flooded the courts and the airwaves with baseless allegations of fraud, only 22 percent did. 

The party’s recent maneuvering suggests a far more sophisticated—and more dangerous—strategy. Co-led by Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump, the RNC is mobilizing what it has called the “most extensive and monumental election integrity program in the nation’s history,” which will involve “100,000 dedicated volunteers and attorneys.” Spearheading this effort is Christina Bobb, the former One America News personality and Trump lawyer who has been indicted in Arizona for her alleged involvement in Trump’s fake elector scheme.

“This is comparing apples to orangutans.”

The RNC says it is already involved in at least 78 election-related lawsuits in 23 states, often working with white-shoe law firms—including Consovoy McCarthy, which employs multiple former clerks to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who may eventually be called upon to hear the merits of some of the cases. Several of them focus on longtime GOP bugaboos, like signature verification laws and absentee voting protocols. Others are dressed-up versions of Trump’s wilder conspiracies, including his claim that a “tremendous number of dead people” cast ballots in 2020. Importantly, the buckshot legal onslaught is preemptive, not defensive, and appears intended to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2024 election results. (After Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to lead the ticket, Republicans expanded their aim to question the legality of Harris becoming the presumed Democratic nominee. Republicans provided no basis for their argument; the RNC did not respond to broader questions about the legal strategy.) 

“These claims are designed not to change policy between now and November, or to change administrative procedure in elections between now and November,” says David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, “but to seed the ground or claims that an election was stolen.”

Multiple times a month, Ingham County clerk Barb Byrum sits down at her desk in a stone-clad government building southeast of Lansing, Michigan, and compares the recent death certificates her office has received against the county’s Qualified Voter File. Each death gets her condolences—and a distinct marking on the QVF: “CHALLENGED. DECEASED.” 

This same process plays out in all 83 of the state’s counties and is just one of many ways the state maintains its voter rolls. After this county-level review, city and township clerks verify and finalize the county clerk’s markings. In Michigan, Nevada, and almost every other state, secretaries of state and county clerks share the responsibility of keeping their master rolls accurate. In addition to checking the lists against death certificates and Social Security data to cull deceased voters, state election officials cross-check with DMV data to identify changes of address. Further, election mail returned as “undeliverable” allows clerks to mark a voter “inactive” and—if that person doesn’t respond to mailings or vote for two more election cycles—remove them from the rolls. 

Despite these safeguards, Byrum has received multiple emails from so-called election integrity activists urging her to purge batches of purportedly dead voters. Two of the lists she’s received in the last four months contained the same names, which the office investigated, but it found that the voters in question did not have death certificates. 

Activists have besieged clerks around the state with similar lists, prompting Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to twice write to clerks to reiterate the proper rules and procedures for updating the QVF. The lists people send in “do not constitute permissible challenges and clerks should not reject or challenge ballots on the basis of these emails,” she wrote in one missive. 

Such tactics extend beyond Michigan. In March, the New York Times reported that a “network of right-wing activists and allies of Donald J. Trump” was “quietly challenging thousands of voter registrations in critical presidential battleground states.” In some cases, this cabal “pressed local officials,” even cautioning that clerks may be breaking the law if they did not remove the flagged names. In Michigan, these self-appointed fraud watchdogs nicknamed their efforts “soles to the rolls,” a riff on the “souls to the polls” events some Black churches hold to encourage parishioners to vote. 

The attempts may seem bush league, but the underlying allegation that state rolls are teeming with dead people is buttressed by a much more official effort, an RNC lawsuit against Benson this past spring alleging that “impossibly high” registration rates throughout Michigan “indicate an ongoing, systemic problem with its voter list maintenance efforts.” 

If that language sounds familiar, it should: It’s the same phrasing the RNC’s lawyers from Consovoy McCarthy used in their lawsuit against the Nevada clerks. The RNC claims that the fraud it alleges in Nevada is even more pervasive in Michigan—that at least 53 Michigan counties have “more active registered voters than they have adult citizens who are over the age of 18,” and that an additional 23 have registration rates exceeding 90 percent of their adult populations. By this accounting, the rolls in all but seven of the state’s 83 counties would be crowded with voters who have died or moved away. 

“These claims are designed not to change policy 
between now and November…but to seed the ground  for claims that an election was stolen.”

Both RNC lawsuits rest on disingenuous interpretations of the National Voter Registration Act, says historian Alex Keyssar, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School. The bipartisan 1993 law was intended to increase public participation in elections. The Voting Rights Act, passed in 1965, had previously outlawed explicitly racist hurdles such as literacy tests, but until the NVRA was enacted, registering to vote remained challenging. “You had to go down to a voter registration office,” Keyssar says. “You had to figure out, depending on the state and sometimes even the city or county, where the office was, what hours it was open, and what identification materials they would need.” 

Also known as the Motor Voter Act, the NVRA made the process more accessible by requiring state governments to offer voter registration to people applying for driver’s licenses. It stipulated that states must make a “reasonable effort to remove the names of ineligible voters,” but officials also must protect voters from arbitrary or partisan purges by waiting two full federal election cycles before removing anyone they have flagged as inactive. 

The claim of inflated voter rolls in Michigan, according to the secretary of state’s motion to dismiss the RNC lawsuit, is based on a figure that includes inactive voters who cannot yet be removed legally, per the NVRA. The motion also counters that the RNC doesn’t “identify a single voter in any Michigan county that is ineligible to be registered but nonetheless appears as an active voter.” 

Becker, of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, says the RNC is “misunderstanding the difference between active voter records and inactive voter records, and often conflating the two, possibly intentionally, to create the impression that there’s some massive fraud on the horizon when that’s of course not the case at all.” 

What’s more, Michigan and Nevada each backstop their voter roll maintenance with help from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a nonpartisan information-sharing nonprofit whose 24 member states (plus DC) compare voter registrations against DMV data to identify people who are registered in multiple states, who have duplicate registrations within a state, who have died, or who, in extremely rare cases, have cast ballots in more than one state. In 2020, ERIC flagged the registrations of 1.5 million voters who may have moved between states, 1.2 million who may have moved within a state, 135,000 potential duplicate registrations, and 73,000 possibly deceased voters. Many had already been flagged, but ERIC is helpful as a fail-safe to ensure necessary fixes get made. 

Yet in a wildly ironic twist, ERIC has itself become a right-wing target. Since 2022, nine GOP-led states have withdrawn from the compact based on unfounded claims that ERIC is a “left-wing voter registration drive” designed to boost Democratic candidates. This conspiracy theory was promulgated by the Gateway Pundit blog, which also claimed that survivors of the Parkland high school shooting were crisis actors and that Dr. Anthony Fauci planned an avian flu outbreak to promote vaccines. Never mind that ERIC’s mission is to improve the accuracy of the rolls and make elections more secure—or that the top election officials in four of the seven states that founded ERIC in 2012 were Republicans. The withdrawal of those nine states leaves ERIC with less data to cross-check. 

Right-wing fantasies of voter rolls packed with dead and ineligible voters are nothing new, especially in Michigan. In September 2020, a conservative group calling itself the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) and chaired by Cleta Mitchell, an Oklahoma lawyer at the forefront of efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, began claiming that Michigan’s rolls may have contained more than 27,000 dead people. According to court records, PILF never produced the crossmatching information it supposedly used in its determination. The group couldn’t even prove all of the names it cited belonged to registered Michigan voters. It finally filed a lawsuit in November 2021. The case was dismissed this past spring, and the RNC filed a similar action two weeks later. 

The federal judge who tossed the PILF case pointed to US Election Assistance Commission data indicating that Michigan election officials are actually quite good at keeping their rolls up to date: For the 2018 cycle, Michigan ranked fourth out of 50 states for purging the largest number of dead voters from its rolls; in 2020, it ranked fifth, removing 187,608 deceased people. 

Michigan’s Senate, then controlled by Republicans, debunked similar 2020 claims that the dead were voting en masse. In June 2021, after hearing 28 hours of testimony from almost 90 people and reviewing thousands of pages of subpoenaed government documents, three Trump-supporting GOP lawmakers and one Democrat released a 55-page report proclaiming they’d found “no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud in Michigan’s prosecution of the 2020 election,” in which Joe Biden beat Trump by more than 154,000 votes. 

“Is the drive to discredit the election process part of the plan? Absolutely.”

Court cases and investigations often drag on for months or years as fabricated allegations harm voter confidence and even incite violence, like Michigan experienced after Election Day 2020. Court records detail how staffers at the Bureau of Elections began receiving an onslaught of emails and calls, many threatening violence. Over the next few weeks, the bureau shut down its phone lines and closed its offices due to bomb threats. Officials had to hold meetings at undisclosed locations and even be provided with police protection. Dozens of gun-toting protesters showed up at the home of Benson, the secretary of state, as she was putting up Christmas decorations with her 4-year-old son. 

In Maryland and Pennsylvania, the United Sovereign Americans, a far-right group that has claimed to measure “the effect of millions of instances of apparent election fraud,” is pursuing voter roll lawsuits similar to the PILF case. But experts say the Michigan and Nevada lawsuits, with their RNC imprimatur, could prove more dangerous. “We now have a major political party bringing these lawsuits, and what that does is strengthens this narrative that there’s something wrong,” says Caren Short, director of legal and research for the League of Women Voters, which has filed motions to intervene in several suits initiated by the RNC, including the Michigan case. “Regardless of whether they win, whether the case is dismissed, as they usually are, it still has the impact of creating mistrust.” 

Democrats and Republicans alike have long engaged in legal battles over election rules. Some cases challenging new voting procedures are “legitimate efforts by partisans,” says Becker. 

Days before Wisconsin’s April 2020 primary elections, for example, a federal judge extended the state’s absentee ballot receipt deadline by a week at the request of the Democratic National Committee and other groups. Citing an unprecedented surge in absentee ballot demand and postal delays during the pandemic, the judge ruled that ballots postmarked after Election Day must be counted as long as they were received by the extended deadline. The RNC appealed the decision to the US Supreme Court, arguing the change was ordered too close to Election Day. The Supreme Court agreed. Fair enough. 

More recently, voting rights groups sued to block a new North Carolina law that would have permitted officials to discard the ballots of same-day registrants if a single notice sent to their mailing address had been returned as “undeliverable.” Following a January court injunction striking down part of the law, the state elections board issued a memo requiring that election officials reach out to the registrants by mail, email, and phone to allow them an opportunity to “cure” their ballot and have it counted if they could provide proof of address. Makes sense. 

But another category of lawsuits—the sinister type—is abounding this cycle. These lawsuits, Becker says, are “not designed to win” but are regurgitating previously rejected arguments or challenging years-old election laws in hopes of gaining an edge, if only by manufacturing distrust. “They are premised on a view of the world that does not comport with reality,” says Loyola’s Levitt. 

In addition to the voter roll cases in Michigan and Nevada, the RNC is recycling allegations over absentee ballot receipt deadlines that have been rejected repeatedly by the courts. This serves two purposes: Regardless of the outcome, the legal claims will inspire doubt in every state where they are filed. And the RNC may eventually find a conservative court willing to accept its argument. 

That’s the approach that appears to be playing out in deep red Mississippi, where the RNC asked a federal court to strike down a state deadline on absentee ballots. A 2020 law passed nearly unanimously in the Republican-controlled state legislature allows the counting of absentee ballots that arrive up to five days after the election, as long as they are postmarked by Election Day. (This differs from the Wisconsin case, which involved ballots postmarked after Election Day.) In its complaint, filed in a conservative division, the RNC argues the Mississippi law “extends the election” in violation of federal law and dilutes “honest votes” in a way that “specifically and disproportionately harms Republican candidates and voters.” (Trump’s baseless attacks on absentee voting have alienated some Republicans from that voting method.)

More than a dozen states have similar deadlines for mail-in ballots. It’s an important policy that safeguards the rights of voters whose ballots arrive late through no fault of their own, said Greta Martin, the litigation director of Disability Rights Mississippi, which filed an amicus brief in the case. These voters include overseas service members casting ballots from their deployments. As with the lawsuits challenging voter roll maintenance, the RNC’s claims in the Mississippi lawsuit have been previously debunked. Federal judges in Illinois and North Dakota—both Trump nominees—dismissed challenges to the post-election receipt deadlines, with the judge in Illinois writing: “Plaintiffs’ votes here are not diluted by other valid, lawfully cast votes.” (An appeal is pending.) 

A federal judge also dismissed, in 2020, an RNC lawsuit challenging a New Jersey provision that allows clerks to accept nonpostmarked ballots up to 48 hours after polls close. (To arrive within that window, they would have likely been mailed before Election Day.) Here the claims of vote dilution were deemed “too speculative.” But this past spring, the RNC challenged Nevada’s similar policy on nonpostmarked ballots received no later than three days after Election Day. (The case is ongoing.) The Trump campaign is a plaintiff in both cases. 

“Is the drive to discredit the election process part of the plan? Absolutely,” says Levitt. 

Back in Nevada, Lindberg, the Lyon County clerk, is a little less cynical. She came to see the RNC’s lawsuit against her and the other clerks as an opportunity for election officials to build some trust and “share information” in a court setting. “I have an open-book policy,” she says. If any local voter wants to come watch her do voter roll maintenance, she says she’ll “get him a chair and a cold water.” 

A judge dismissed the Nevada case on June 18, but some locals are still riled up. “We get a lot of people yelling at us, calling us names, saying that we’re trying to cheat them,” Lindberg told me after the court ruled in her favor. (On July 2, the RNC filed a last-ditch effort to revive its claims.) 

Byrum, the Ingham County clerk, thinks the RNC’s Michigan case, too, will eventually be dismissed, but she doesn’t believe winning was the group’s primary objective. “The court cases,” she says, “are an attempt to divert attention and resources away from election management and election administration, with the added bonus of sowing additional seeds of doubt in the integrity of our election.” 

Additional reporting by Sarah Szilagy

On Monday, a federal court struck down restrictions on an Ohio law that made it a felony for a non-family member to help return a disabled person’s absentee ballot to a mailbox or dropbox. Other parts of the law in question HB 458, like eliminating an early-voting day and more voter ID restrictions, still remain in practice.

Many disabled people vote via absentee ballot. It can be challenging to commute to in-person voting sites, which may not be accessible.

League of Women Voters of Ohio and individual voter Jennifer Kucera, who has spinal muscular atrophy, brought the case forward, and they were represented by the ACLU, ACLU of Ohio, and the law firm Covington & Burling.

Last December, Kucera said that “under the current laws, I am not allowed to complete my civic duty of voting if for any reason my mom is unable to help me vote, even though my caregivers would be available to help me.”

The Northern District Court of Ohio granted a summary judgment late yesterday, citing Section 208 of the Voting Rights Act, which permits disabled voters to have assistance in voting from a preferred person.

“In any event, the clear violation of a federally guaranteed voting right in this case outweighs any harm State Defendants and Intervenors may suffer,” Judge Bridget Meehan Brennan wrote in her decision.

In a press release, ACLU of Ohio legal director Freda Levenson said that “this is a win for democracy” and “is the correct reading of the Voting Rights Act and a validating decision for Ohio voters.”

The most conservative appellate court in the country on Thursday reinstated a Jim Crow-era felon disenfranchisement law in Mississippi that could prevent tens of thousands of people, who are disproportionately Black, from voting in November.

The full Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas and has become infamous for its fiercely right-wing opinions, upheld a state law dating back to 1890 that permanently prevents Mississippians from voting if they have been convicted of a list of 22 criminal categories, encompassing about 100 specific crimes, that include timber larceny, bigamy, and writing a bad check. The opinion overturns the ruling of a three-judge panel on the Fifth Circuit from August 2023 which invalidated Mississippi’s law, saying that it violated the 8^th Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

Writing for the 13-member majority, Judge Edith Jones, an appointee of Ronald Reagan, said that the earlier court decision “would thwart the ability of the State’s legislature and citizens to determine their voting qualifications, and would require federal courts overtly to make legislative choices that, in our federal system, belong at the State level.” (All but one of the judges that signed on to the opinion were appointed by Republican presidents.)

Six judges, all appointed by Democratic presidents, dissented. “Denying released offenders the right to vote takes away their full dignity as citizens, separates them from the rest of their community, and reduces them to ‘other’ status,” wrote Judge James L. Dennis, who was appointed by Bill Clinton.

The Mississippi law the court upheld is the harshest felon disenfranchisement law in the country. It prevents nearly 240,000 people from voting—more than 10 percent of the state’s voting-age population, including 16 percent of Black residents. From 1994 to 2017, the law disenfranchised close to 50,000 people, according to an expert study submitted by groups challenging the law; 59 percent of them were Black, even though Blacks people make up only 38 percent of the state’s population. Fewer than two hundred people had their rights restored by the state during that time.

The law was adopted in 1890 as part of a new state constitution that was specifically designed to uphold white supremacy. “Let us tell the truth if it bursts the bottom of the Universe,” Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Solomon S. Calhoon said at the constitutional convention in Jackson. “We came here to exclude the Negro. Nothing short of this will answer.”

In addition to adopting a literacy test and poll tax, the ex-Confederates who drafted the Jim Crow-era constitution included a provision disqualifying prospective voters who committed minor crimes like “obtaining goods under false pretenses”—offenses for which Black people were disproportionately charged.

That racist legacy remains alive in Mississippi today. “This ruling only perpetuates a policy rooted in the oppressive Jim Crow laws of the past, which stands in stark contrast to the principles of our supposedly inclusive democracy,” Nicole D. Porter, senior director of advocacy at The Sentencing Project, said after Thursday’s decision.

Mississippi is not alone in trying to prevent people with criminal convictions from voting. On Wednesday, Nebraska’s Republican attorney general blocked a measure allowing people with felony convictions to register to vote after serving their sentences, two days before it was set to become law. And Alabama is set to implement a new law a month before the November election that adds over 120 felonies to the state’s list of “crimes of moral turpitude” (another remnant of a Jim Crow-era state constitution) that bar people from voting.

Of course, there’s a certain irony to the GOP’s embrace of felon disenfranchisement laws nowadays. Republicans are eager to target constituencies that tend to vote against them, such as would-be Black voters in Mississippi, but they take a different attitude when it’s one of their own. The party is now led by a presidential candidate who was convicted of 34 felonies, and a parade of indicted fake electors flocked to the RNC convention in Milwaukee this week to nominate him, where delegates proudly wore “I’m Voting for the Felon” t-shirts.

Last month, Donald Trump reportedly called Milwaukee, host of this week’s Republican National Convention, a “horrible city.” He later tried to walk back the comments, saying, “I love Milwaukee,” but Trump’s initial comments revealed how the demonization of Milwaukee, a majority-minority city where 60 percent of Black voters in Wisconsin live, has been a central strategy of state and national Republicans.

Wisconsin Republicans—and Trump himself—owe their power in part to GOP efforts to suppress and dilute the city’s Black votes. It’s a strategy that dates back to when Governor Scott Walker and Republicans took control of the state after the 2010 election.

“We don’t want Wisconsin to become like Milwaukee,” Walker said in 2012, while courting white voters during a recall election. Wisconsin Republicans did everything they could to make sure that wouldn’t happen.

When Republicans passed a new voter ID law in 2011, requiring strict forms of government-issued photo ID to be able to vote, GOP members of the legislature said behind closed doors that it would target “neighborhoods around Milwaukee and the college campuses around the state,” according to the testimony of a former Republican legislative aide. Neighborhoods around Milwaukee was a widely understood euphemism for Black neighborhoods.

Some Republicans even said the quiet part out loud. On the night of Wisconsin’s 2016 primary, GOP State Sen. Glenn Grothman (now a member of Congress) predicted that a Republican would carry the state, even though Wisconsin had gone for Barack Obama by 7 points in 2012. “I think Hillary Clinton is about the weakest candidate the Democrats have ever put up,” he told a local TV news reporter, “and now we have photo ID, and I think photo ID is going to make a little bit of a difference as well.”

As I reported for Mother Jones, the law did indeed play a key yet little-noticed role in Trump’s surprise 23,000-vote victory in Wisconsin:

The state, which ranked second in the nation in voter participation in 2008 and 2012, saw its lowest turnout since 2000 [in 2016]. More than half the state’s decline in turnout occurred in Milwaukee, which Clinton carried by a 77-18 margin, but where almost 41,000 fewer people voted in 2016 than in 2012. Turnout fell only slightly in white middle-class areas of the city but plunged by twenty points or more in black ones.

After the election, registered voters in Milwaukee County and Madison’s Dane County were surveyed about why they didn’t cast a ballot. Eleven percent cited the voter ID law and said they didn’t have an acceptable ID; of those, more than half said the law was the “main reason” they didn’t vote. According to the study’s author, University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Kenneth Mayer, that finding implies that between 12,000 and 23,000 registered voters in Madison and Milwaukee—and as many as 45,000 statewide—were deterred from voting by the ID law. “We have hard evidence there were tens of thousands of people who were unable to vote because of the voter ID law,” he said.

The study also found striking socioeconomic and racial disparities among those most impacted. “The burdens of voter ID fell disproportionately on low-income and minority populations,” Mayer wrote. More than 20 percent of registrants coming from homes with incomes less than $25,000 said they were kept from voting by the law; 8.3 percent of white voters surveyed were deterred from voting, compared with 27.5 percent of African Americans.

Its impact was particularly acute in Milwaukee, where nearly two-thirds of the state’s African Americans live, 37 percent of them below the poverty line. Milwaukee is the most segregated city in the nation, divided between low-income black areas and middle-class white ones. It was known as the “Selma of the North” in the 1960s because of fierce clashes over desegregation. George Wallace once said that if he had to leave Alabama, “I’d want to live on the south side of Milwaukee.”

Neil Albrecht, Milwaukee’s election director, believes that the voter ID law and other changes passed by the Republican Legislature contributed significantly to lower turnout. “I would estimate that 25 to 35 percent of the 41,000 decrease in voters, or somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 voters, likely did not vote due to the photo ID requirement,” he said. “It is very probable that between the photo ID law and the changes to voter registration, enough people were prevented from voting to have changed the outcome of the presidential election in Wisconsin.”

Four years later, Milwaukee became the epicenter of Trump’s push to overturn the election in the state. His campaign filed a lawsuit to disqualify 221,000 votes cast only in Milwaukee and Dane counties (encompassing Madison)—an unprecedented effort that was narrowly rejected by the state’s Supreme Court. After that failed, Wisconsin Republicans tried to decertify Biden’s victory by falsely claiming, among other things, that grants to help run elections during the pandemic in cities including Milwaukee amounted to “a wave of massive election bribery.”

Even though the campaign to throw out Milwaukee’s votes failed, Republicans successfully diluted the city’s voting power in another way—by gerrymandering Milwaukee and its increasingly Democratic-leaning suburbs. According to a lawsuit filed by voting rights groups, the legislative maps adopted by Wisconsin Republicans in 2021 preserved lopsided GOP majorities by weakening “the voting strength of Black voters in the Milwaukee area by packing them in excessively high numbers in fewer districts” while at the same time limiting Democratic representation in the city suburbs, which are trending blue, by spreading Democratic voters across oddly-shaped districts. (The legislative maps were struck down by the Wisconsin Supreme Court in December and fairer districts will be in place for November.)

Republicans have openly celebrated the decline in Black voting in Milwaukee. After the 2022 election, Robert Spindell, a Republican member of the Wisconsin Elections Commission and a fake elector for Trump, wrote that Republicans “can be especially proud of the City of Milwaukee (80.2% Dem Vote) casting 37,000 less votes than cast in the 2018 election with the major reduction happening in the overwhelming Black and Hispanic areas.” Spindell bragged to Republicans in the state’s Fourth Congressional District that “this great and important decrease in Democrat votes in the City” was due to a “well thought out multi-faceted plan.” Spindell is now a delegate for Trump at the GOP convention.

In addition to trying to undercut Milwaukee’s voter power, Republicans have sought to disregard the city altogether, arguing that it shouldn’t count at all toward state representation. After Republicans convened an unprecedented lame-duck session in 2018 to strip power from the state’s newly-elected Democratic governor, GOP Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said, “if you took Madison and Milwaukee out of the state election formula, we would have a clear majority.”

Republicans chose to hold the RNC in Milwaukee because they believed it would help them carry Wisconsin, but the GOP’s strategy to win the state is premised on undermining the power of the very city that is hosting them.

Local Black, Hispanic, and civil rights groups blasted the decision to hold the GOP convention in Milwaukee. “For at least two decades the Republican Party has been sticking it to Milwaukee,” they said in a statement. “Inviting the Republican Party to hold its convention in Milwaukee is like inviting the fox into the henhouse.”

In April, when he was at risk of being toppled by hardline conservatives, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago and endorsed Donald Trump’s false claims of rampant voter fraud.

Under the guise of allegedly stopping noncitizens from voting in federal elections, which is already illegal, the House of Representatives on Wednesday passed a bill—the SAVE Act—that would require documentary proof of citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, to register to vote. It’s a measure that fuses two of the central planks of the MAGA agenda—anti-immigrant hysteria and voter fraud paranoia. The bill has no chance of becoming law while Democrats hold the Senate and presidency, but it’s a frightening preview of the type of suppressive policies Trump and his GOP allies will pursue if they retake full control of Washington in November.

All of the evidence shows that registration or voting by noncitizens in US elections is exceedingly rare. In 2016, the Brennan Center for Justice surveyed 42 jurisdictions, home to 23 million people, including 8 of the 10 areas with the highest population of noncitizens, and found just 30 instances of a suspected noncitizen voting, equal to 0.0001 percent of total votes. A 2022 audit by the Republican secretary of state in Georgia found just 1,600 noncitizens attempted to register to vote over a 25-year period and none were successful.

Even Johnson admits that he can’t find any proof of the fraud he’s supposedly trying to stop. “We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections,” Johnson said at a press conference in May. “But it’s not been something that is easily provable. We don’t have that number.”

If Trump and his allies regain power, they’ll turn his Big Lie into policies that will lead to the biggest rollback of ballot access in decades.

But the risk of voter disenfranchisement from proof of citizenship laws is something that can be quantified. Nine percent of American citizens, roughly 21 million people, don’t have ready access to citizenship documents, according to a new study by the Brennan Center and other voting rights groups.

“What’s more, our estimates are probably conservative measures of impact,” the Brennan Center writes in its latest study. “While it’s true that most Americans can access these documents, most of us don’t walk around town carrying our passport or birth certificate. If those documents were required for voter registration, most would not have them readily available to take advantage of opportunities they encounter at schools, churches, or other community spaces where registration drives register many Americans to vote.”

When Kansas passed a proof of citizenship law in 2011, it blocked 1 in 7 new registrants, more than 31,000 people, from successfully registering. Nearly half were under 30. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who saw the law as a model for the nation, claimed noncitizen voting was “pervasive” but uncovered only seven convictions for such acts in Kansas over a 13 year period. A federal court struck down the law in 2018; the alleged cases of voter fraud Kobach presented before the court, which he called “the tip of the iceberg,” was “only an icicle,” Judge Julie Robinson wrote.

Despite the Kansas debacle, Republican-controlled states are moving forward with similar measures following Trump’s lead. Louisiana passed a proof of citizenship law last month, as did New Hampshire recently (the state’s Republican governor has expressed reservations about it).

Adopting such a law on a nationwide basis, as Johnson and Trump want to do, could prevent hundreds of thousands of Americans from registering—or more. President Joe Biden has vowed to veto the SAVE Act. “The alleged justification for this bill is based on easily disproven falsehoods,” he said in a statement. But it’s just the beginning of the GOP’s voter suppression agenda.

The newly released RNC platform calls for a return to “same day voting,” which would mean an end to early voting in the 47 states where people can cast ballots before Election Day. If Trump and his allies regain power, they’ll turn his Big Lie into policies that will lead to the biggest rollback of ballot access in decades.

In April, when he was at risk of being toppled by hardline conservatives, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago and endorsed Donald Trump’s false claims of rampant voter fraud.

Under the guise of allegedly stopping noncitizens from voting in federal elections, which is already illegal, the House of Representatives on Wednesday passed a bill—the SAVE Act—that would require documentary proof of citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, to register to vote. It’s a measure that fuses two of the central planks of the MAGA agenda—anti-immigrant hysteria and voter fraud paranoia. The bill has no chance of becoming law while Democrats hold the Senate and presidency, but it’s a frightening preview of the type of suppressive policies Trump and his GOP allies will pursue if they retake full control of Washington in November.

All of the evidence shows that registration or voting by noncitizens in US elections is exceedingly rare. In 2016, the Brennan Center for Justice surveyed 42 jurisdictions, home to 23 million people, including 8 of the 10 areas with the highest population of noncitizens, and found just 30 instances of a suspected noncitizen voting, equal to 0.0001 percent of total votes. A 2022 audit by the Republican secretary of state in Georgia found just 1,600 noncitizens attempted to register to vote over a 25-year period and none were successful.

Even Johnson admits that he can’t find any proof of the fraud he’s supposedly trying to stop. “We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections,” Johnson said at a press conference in May. “But it’s not been something that is easily provable. We don’t have that number.”

If Trump and his allies regain power, they’ll turn his Big Lie into policies that will lead to the biggest rollback of ballot access in decades.

But the risk of voter disenfranchisement from proof of citizenship laws is something that can be quantified. Nine percent of American citizens, roughly 21 million people, don’t have ready access to citizenship documents, according to a new study by the Brennan Center and other voting rights groups.

“What’s more, our estimates are probably conservative measures of impact,” the Brennan Center writes in its latest study. “While it’s true that most Americans can access these documents, most of us don’t walk around town carrying our passport or birth certificate. If those documents were required for voter registration, most would not have them readily available to take advantage of opportunities they encounter at schools, churches, or other community spaces where registration drives register many Americans to vote.”

When Kansas passed a proof of citizenship law in 2011, it blocked 1 in 7 new registrants, more than 31,000 people, from successfully registering. Nearly half were under 30. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who saw the law as a model for the nation, claimed noncitizen voting was “pervasive” but uncovered only seven convictions for such acts in Kansas over a 13 year period. A federal court struck down the law in 2018; the alleged cases of voter fraud Kobach presented before the court, which he called “the tip of the iceberg,” was “only an icicle,” Judge Julie Robinson wrote.

Despite the Kansas debacle, Republican-controlled states are moving forward with similar measures following Trump’s lead. Louisiana passed a proof of citizenship law last month, as did New Hampshire recently (the state’s Republican governor has expressed reservations about it).

Adopting such a law on a nationwide basis, as Johnson and Trump want to do, could prevent hundreds of thousands of Americans from registering—or more. President Joe Biden has vowed to veto the SAVE Act. “The alleged justification for this bill is based on easily disproven falsehoods,” he said in a statement. But it’s just the beginning of the GOP’s voter suppression agenda.

The newly released RNC platform calls for a return to “same day voting,” which would mean an end to early voting in the 47 states where people can cast ballots before Election Day. If Trump and his allies regain power, they’ll turn his Big Lie into policies that will lead to the biggest rollback of ballot access in decades.