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.”

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.

President Joe Biden called for a series of major reforms to the Supreme Court on Monday that would counteract the unchecked power of its conservative supermajority. In an op-ed in the Washington Post, which was followed by a speech at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library that afternoon, Biden proposed an 18-year term limit for Supreme Court justices and a binding code of ethics, along with a constitutional amendment that would reverse the Supreme Court’s July 1 decision giving presidents “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for official acts in office.

“What is happening now is not normal, and it undermines the public’s confidence in the court’s decisions, including those impacting personal freedoms,” Biden wrote in the Post. “That’s why—in the face of increasing threats to America’s democratic institutions—I am calling for three bold reforms to restore trust and accountability to the court and our democracy.”

Under Biden’s plan, a president would appoint a Supreme Court justice every two years to an 18-year term, which would make it more difficult for one party or president to gain overwhelming control of the court, as is the case now. “The United States is the only major constitutional democracy that gives lifetime seats to its high court,” Biden wrote. He would also require justices “to disclose gifts, refrain from public political activity, and recuse themselves from cases in which they or their spouses have financial or other conflicts of interest.” Finally, the “No One Is Above the Law Amendment” proposed by the president “would make clear that there is no immunity for crimes a former president committed while in office.”

Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, said she supported these reforms. “There is a clear crisis of confidence facing the Supreme Court as its fairness has been called into question after numerous ethics scandals and decision after decision overturning long-standing precedent,” she said in a statement.

Pro-democracy groups praised Biden’s proposals—and said they were long overdue. “The White House’s endorsement is a crucial first step toward holding this MAGA Court in check and restoring Americans’ trust in the judiciary,” said a statement from a coalition of national advocacy groups that included Indivisible, MoveOn, and People for the American Way. Sarah Lipton-Lubet, president of Take Back the Court Action Fund, called the announcement “a massive sea change in the fight for court reform.”

As I’ve extensively reported for Mother Jones and in my new book Minority Rule, the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority has been a key driver of the democratic crisis facing the country.

Five of six conservative justices on the Supreme Court were appointed by Republican presidents who initially lost the popular vote and were confirmed by senators elected by a minority of Americans. That conservative supermajority, in turn, has made the country less democratic in several shocking ways.

They have gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act, upheld extreme partisan and racial gerrymandering, and flooded the political system with dark money. They have issued radical, precedent-shattering decisions that were directly at odds with public opinion on issues like abortion and guns. They have green-lit former president Donald Trump’s authoritarianism, insulating him from facing any legal challenge before the election—or possibly ever—for inciting the insurrection.

And the justices themselves have often acted like they too are above the law; Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have accepted gifts and trips from top GOP donors who have spent millions to reshape the judiciary in a more conservative direction. Meanwhile, they have also refused to recuse themselves from major cases involving January 6 even though both their wives publicly supported the “Stop the Steal” movement. Ginni Thomas sent nearly 30 texts to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows urging him to overturn the 2020 election.

For all these reasons, advocates of Supreme Court reform have been urging Biden to embrace their cause for years. But he resisted calls to change the composition of the court while running for president in 2020. He then appointed a commission of scholars to study the issue after he was elected but did not act on the 294-page report they submitted in December 2021. He only made the issue a major priority now, during the final months of his administration.

His current proposals are likely too little, too late. Republicans in Congress will block any measures reforming the current court, and Biden’s constitutional amendment faces even steeper odds, requiring the support of two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of states. No major Constitutional amendments have been adopted in the past fifty years.

Nonetheless, Biden’s call for Supreme Court reform could energize Democrats to go to the polls in November, much like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s decision to block President Barack Obama from filling Antonin Scalia’s vacancy motivated Republicans to vote for Trump in 2016. It could also lay the groundwork for Vice President Harris to make Supreme Court reform a major legislative priority if she’s elected with a Democratic majority in Congress.

As Biden said at the LBJ Library Monday afternoon, “the court’s being used to weaponize an extreme and unchecked agenda.”

This post has been updated.

President Joe Biden called for a series of major reforms to the Supreme Court on Monday that would counteract the unchecked power of its conservative supermajority. In an op-ed in the Washington Post, which was followed by a speech at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library that afternoon, Biden proposed an 18-year term limit for Supreme Court justices and a binding code of ethics, along with a constitutional amendment that would reverse the Supreme Court’s July 1 decision giving presidents “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for official acts in office.

“What is happening now is not normal, and it undermines the public’s confidence in the court’s decisions, including those impacting personal freedoms,” Biden wrote in the Post. “That’s why—in the face of increasing threats to America’s democratic institutions—I am calling for three bold reforms to restore trust and accountability to the court and our democracy.”

Under Biden’s plan, a president would appoint a Supreme Court justice every two years to an 18-year term, which would make it more difficult for one party or president to gain overwhelming control of the court, as is the case now. “The United States is the only major constitutional democracy that gives lifetime seats to its high court,” Biden wrote. He would also require justices “to disclose gifts, refrain from public political activity, and recuse themselves from cases in which they or their spouses have financial or other conflicts of interest.” Finally, the “No One Is Above the Law Amendment” proposed by the president “would make clear that there is no immunity for crimes a former president committed while in office.”

Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, said she supported these reforms. “There is a clear crisis of confidence facing the Supreme Court as its fairness has been called into question after numerous ethics scandals and decision after decision overturning long-standing precedent,” she said in a statement.

Pro-democracy groups praised Biden’s proposals—and said they were long overdue. “The White House’s endorsement is a crucial first step toward holding this MAGA Court in check and restoring Americans’ trust in the judiciary,” said a statement from a coalition of national advocacy groups that included Indivisible, MoveOn, and People for the American Way. Sarah Lipton-Lubet, president of Take Back the Court Action Fund, called the announcement “a massive sea change in the fight for court reform.”

As I’ve extensively reported for Mother Jones and in my new book Minority Rule, the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority has been a key driver of the democratic crisis facing the country.

Five of six conservative justices on the Supreme Court were appointed by Republican presidents who initially lost the popular vote and were confirmed by senators elected by a minority of Americans. That conservative supermajority, in turn, has made the country less democratic in several shocking ways.

They have gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act, upheld extreme partisan and racial gerrymandering, and flooded the political system with dark money. They have issued radical, precedent-shattering decisions that were directly at odds with public opinion on issues like abortion and guns. They have green-lit former president Donald Trump’s authoritarianism, insulating him from facing any legal challenge before the election—or possibly ever—for inciting the insurrection.

And the justices themselves have often acted like they too are above the law; Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have accepted gifts and trips from top GOP donors who have spent millions to reshape the judiciary in a more conservative direction. Meanwhile, they have also refused to recuse themselves from major cases involving January 6 even though both their wives publicly supported the “Stop the Steal” movement. Ginni Thomas sent nearly 30 texts to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows urging him to overturn the 2020 election.

For all these reasons, advocates of Supreme Court reform have been urging Biden to embrace their cause for years. But he resisted calls to change the composition of the court while running for president in 2020. He then appointed a commission of scholars to study the issue after he was elected but did not act on the 294-page report they submitted in December 2021. He only made the issue a major priority now, during the final months of his administration.

His current proposals are likely too little, too late. Republicans in Congress will block any measures reforming the current court, and Biden’s constitutional amendment faces even steeper odds, requiring the support of two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of states. No major Constitutional amendments have been adopted in the past fifty years.

Nonetheless, Biden’s call for Supreme Court reform could energize Democrats to go to the polls in November, much like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s decision to block President Barack Obama from filling Antonin Scalia’s vacancy motivated Republicans to vote for Trump in 2016. It could also lay the groundwork for Vice President Harris to make Supreme Court reform a major legislative priority if she’s elected with a Democratic majority in Congress.

As Biden said at the LBJ Library Monday afternoon, “the court’s being used to weaponize an extreme and unchecked agenda.”

This post has been updated.

Joe Biden continues to insist he’s continuing with his presidential campaign, but the list of Democrats pleading with him to drop out of the race keeps growing.

A dozen Congressional Democrats called on him to step aside on Friday—the largest single number in one day, according to the Washington Post.

That included Democrats in some of the party’s most competitive races, whose contests will help decide which party controls Congress next year.

Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, who is locked in a tight race for re-election, on Friday became the fourth Democratic senator calling for Biden to step down. “I agree with the many Ohioans who have reached out to me,” Brown said in a statement. “I think the President should end his campaign.”

On Saturday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren told MSNBC that Vice President Kamala Harris is “ready to step up and unite the party,” though she did not explicitly call on Biden to leave the race.

The group of Congressional Democrats voicing their opposition to Biden is becoming more diverse. “We must face the reality that widespread public concerns about your age and fitness are jeopardizing what should be a winning campaign,” Reps. Jared Huffman (Calif.), Marc Veasey (Tex.), Jesús “Chuy” García (Ill.) and Mark Pocan (Wis.) told Biden in a joint statement. These lawmakers are each members of different House caucuses—from the Hispanic and Black caucuses to the Congressional Progressive caucus—which suggests that they are representing a wide range of backgrounds inside the party.

While only about 40 Congressional Democrats have publicly called for Biden to drop out, two Democratic House members told the New York Times that 70 percent to 80 percent of their caucus would like Biden to withdraw.

Biden’s campaign has struck a defiant tone while he recovers from COVID-19 in Delaware, and he has pledged to resume campaigning next week. He also has some high-profile defenders in the party, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). “I have not seen an alternative scenario that I feel will not set us up for enormous peril,” she said.

But it appears that the disconnect between Biden and the nearly two-thirds of Democratic voters who want him to step down is growing increasingly untenable for the party. Democrats have often criticized Republicans for being on the wrong side of public opinion on issues like abortion and guns, but now Biden finds himself in a similar position: flouting public concern about his candidacy and viability to govern in a second term.

“They’re not going to be able to contain this,” Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) told the Times. “I think the dam has broken.”

A Democratic super-PAC called Pass the Torch is running ads in Delaware and Washington, D.C. calling for Biden to end his campaign and is organizing a demonstration outside the White House on Saturday. “It’s time to pass the torch and let us choose a nominee,” says the ad. “One who can bring new energy, new hope, and make sure Donald Trump never gets near the White House again.”

Congress returns from recess next week and Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), who have privately warned Biden that he risks costing Democrats control of Congress, are being pressured by their colleagues to make a public statement calling for Biden to step down if he does not relent by then.

Joe Biden continues to insist he’s continuing with his presidential campaign, but the list of Democrats pleading with him to drop out of the race keeps growing.

A dozen Congressional Democrats called on him to step aside on Friday—the largest single number in one day, according to the Washington Post.

That included Democrats in some of the party’s most competitive races, whose contests will help decide which party controls Congress next year.

Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, who is locked in a tight race for re-election, on Friday became the fourth Democratic senator calling for Biden to step down. “I agree with the many Ohioans who have reached out to me,” Brown said in a statement. “I think the President should end his campaign.”

On Saturday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren told MSNBC that Vice President Kamala Harris is “ready to step up and unite the party,” though she did not explicitly call on Biden to leave the race.

The group of Congressional Democrats voicing their opposition to Biden is becoming more diverse. “We must face the reality that widespread public concerns about your age and fitness are jeopardizing what should be a winning campaign,” Reps. Jared Huffman (Calif.), Marc Veasey (Tex.), Jesús “Chuy” García (Ill.) and Mark Pocan (Wis.) told Biden in a joint statement. These lawmakers are each members of different House caucuses—from the Hispanic and Black caucuses to the Congressional Progressive caucus—which suggests that they are representing a wide range of backgrounds inside the party.

While only about 40 Congressional Democrats have publicly called for Biden to drop out, two Democratic House members told the New York Times that 70 percent to 80 percent of their caucus would like Biden to withdraw.

Biden’s campaign has struck a defiant tone while he recovers from COVID-19 in Delaware, and he has pledged to resume campaigning next week. He also has some high-profile defenders in the party, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). “I have not seen an alternative scenario that I feel will not set us up for enormous peril,” she said.

But it appears that the disconnect between Biden and the nearly two-thirds of Democratic voters who want him to step down is growing increasingly untenable for the party. Democrats have often criticized Republicans for being on the wrong side of public opinion on issues like abortion and guns, but now Biden finds himself in a similar position: flouting public concern about his candidacy and viability to govern in a second term.

“They’re not going to be able to contain this,” Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) told the Times. “I think the dam has broken.”

A Democratic super-PAC called Pass the Torch is running ads in Delaware and Washington, D.C. calling for Biden to end his campaign and is organizing a demonstration outside the White House on Saturday. “It’s time to pass the torch and let us choose a nominee,” says the ad. “One who can bring new energy, new hope, and make sure Donald Trump never gets near the White House again.”

Congress returns from recess next week and Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), who have privately warned Biden that he risks costing Democrats control of Congress, are being pressured by their colleagues to make a public statement calling for Biden to step down if he does not relent by then.

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.