In the days following Donald Trump’s clear win, conspiracy theories about how votes were tampered with or how the election was stolen from Kamala Harris have spread on the left, with viral tweets, TikTok videos, and posts on Threads making a chaotic and spotty case alleging a fishy result.

“I’m beginning to believe our election was massively hacked,” wrote former journalist and documented conspiracy theorist Wayne Madsen on Threads, neatly pouring every flavor of suspicion into one overfilled bottle. “Think Elon Musk, StarLink, Peter Thiel, Bannon, Flynn and Putin. 20 million Democratic votes don’t disappear on their own.”

Infowars’ Alex Jones claimed Democrats attempted pro-Harris fraud but simply failed.

Such post-election delusions aren’t particularly surprising—as political science professors Joe Uscinski and Joseph Parent have written, indelicately but accurately, conspiracy theories are for “losers,” and tend to resonate when groups are “suffering from loss, weakness, or disunity.” But what’s far stranger is that conspiracy theories about election tampering are somehow, still, also happening among the winners on the right. 

On the left, Harris voters attempting to make sense of their loss have turned to baseless fears that Trump-backing billionaire Elon Musk somehow tampered with the vote through Starlink. While that satellite internet company is wholly owned by his company SpaceX, it is not, contrary to many of these claims, used by any state to tabulate votes. There’s also the separate claim that 20 million votes are “missing” when compared to the last presidential election. That also isn’t true: results are still being tabulated, and the overall number of votes is on track to be extremely close to 2020’s total. On a broader level, Jen Easterly, the director of the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, reports it has “no evidence of any malicious activity that had a material impact on the security or integrity of our election infrastructure.”

The Meta-owned social media site Threads has been particularly full of left-and-liberal election denialism. As journalist Taylor Lorenz explains, the situation illustrates “how Meta’s efforts to downrank and minimize journalistic content on the app have helped to create a vacuum in which misinformation thrives unchecked and users are unable to find reliable, accurately reported news.” It’s also a clear sign that some social media users are finding that dabbling in election conspiracy theories earns much-craved attention and engagement, with some posts alleging a Starlink plot racking up thousands of views.

There were early signs America was heading toward a post-election season characterized by broad suspicions of fraud: in an October 3 Marist poll, 58 percent of respondents said they were either “concerned” or “very concerned” that voter fraud might occur this year. Of course, fears of voter fraud have haunted American elections for almost as long as we’ve been a country, and have been harnessed by politicians and activists since the early 19th century to motivate their own base to vote—and to change the rules to try to keep some voters, especially immigrants and the poor, from the polls. 

In the run up to last week’s vote, Trump and his allies regularly pushed such fears, raising the false specter of American voters being overwhelmed at the polls by illegal non-citizen voters. That came on top of years of similar claims, and against the backdrop of Trump’s false contention he won the 2020 election. But while the firehose of voter fraud accusations slowed down dramatically after Trump’s win last week, it didn’t stop entirely.

In the very early morning of November 6, not long after polls closed, Mike Adams, who runs the conspiracy site Natural News, wrote that “Dems still have a chance to cheat their way to ‘victory’ in the hours ahead, and trucks of ballots are now seen unloading tens of thousands of ballots in Philadelphia.” While multiple conspiracy peddlers reported on a supposed convoy of trucks bringing fraudulent ballots to Pennsylvania, most dropped the claim after Trump’s win in the state was secured.

Conspiracy theories are for “losers….suffering from loss, weakness, or disunity.”

A similar pattern played out in Arizona, where TruthSocial and right-wing Twitter users claimed early on that voter fraud was occurring against Donald Trump. The day after the election, far-right news site Real America’s Voice devoted a lengthy segment to “apparent voter fraud” in Arizona. “This is such a shady state,” commentator Ben Bergquam proclaimed, claiming that “they are allowing people to vote who they know are not registered voters. They’re allowing fraudulent votes.”

But when Trump’s victory in the state became clear on November 11, prominent Trump fans and conspiratorial news sites maintained that fraud had somehow taken place in down-ballot races, even if it had not in deciding the presidency. After Democrat Ruben Gallego triumphed over ultra-conservative Kari Lake in Arizona’s Senate race, Rogan O’Handley, a conservative commentator who uses the handle DC Draino on Twitter, claimed without evidence (as Lake has) that Gallego was “cartel-linked,” and suggested that had something to do with his win: “I’ll give you a hint. It’s fraud.”

Twitter’s “Election Integrity Community” also focused its muddled attention on Arizona, as well as on the Wisconsin Senate race. In an otherwise triumphal tweet the night after the election, Musk himself conspiratorially wrote that the “few states that didn’t go red are mostly ones without voter ID requirements. Must be a coincidence,” punctuated with an eye-roll emoji. His America PAC tweeted a similar claim earlier in the day; these claims ignore that 36 states already request or require some form of voter ID. Many of the ones that don’t are ideologically Democratic-leaning states where Harris was heavily favored to win.

In what seems to be an emerging narrative on the far-right, Infowars conspiracy kingpin Alex Jones claimed that Democrats tried to carry out election fraud on behalf of Harris and simply failed. “I think the face of the police and the poll watchers and the lawyers, they went, ‘We just can’t do this anymore, this is too obvious,’” he declared. “And then boom, we saw Trump win. That’s not even conjecture. That’s what happened.” 

But true to form, Jones also couldn’t resist pointing to supposed fraud somewhere, darkly claiming that “glitches” flipping seats from Republican to Democrat had been “exposed” by Lara Trump and Susie Wiles, Trump’s incoming chief of staff. That narrative echoed one pushed by Gateway Pundit, which speciously seized on a report that the apparent winners of some county-level races in Michigan could change as votes continue to be tabulated, a process known colloquially as “counting votes.”   

Even Donald Trump himself had to find ways to reconcile an uncomplicated victory with his incessant advance warnings of fraud. He turned to newly relevant slogan, posting a red-tinted photo of a crowd of his supporters, overlaid with the words “TOO BIG TO RIG.”

Since Donald Trump won reelection, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have both done what the now-president-elect and his fellow Republicans refused to do in 2020: publicly accept loss and advocate for a peaceful transition of power.

In a Thursday morning speech outside the White House, Biden told Americans, “We accept the choice the country made.”

“I’ve said many times,” he continued, “you can’t love your country only when you win. You can’t love your neighbor only when you agree.” He added, “Something I hope we can do, no matter who you voted for, is to see each other not as adversaries, but as fellow Americans. Bring down the temperature.”

The remarks, both unifying and a call for calm, sharply contrasted with the Trump campaign’s rhetoric in the final stretch of the election, which included Trump just this weekend saying he would be “ok” with journalists being shot at. Biden’s speech was also radically different from the near-constant conspiracy theories Trump and his allies promoted after Trump lost the 2020 election—which, as recently as today, he has continued to insist he won.

President Biden: "Setbacks are unavoidable, but giving up is unforgivable … The American experiment endures. We're going to be okay, but we need to stay engaged. We need to keep going." https://t.co/627FiKv7Sz pic.twitter.com/hZoGsFc7yl

— NBC News (@NBCNews) November 7, 2024

Seemingly alluding to Trump’s attacks on the voting system, Biden on Thursday also added that he hoped “we can lay to rest a question about the integrity of the American electoral system. It is honest, it is fair, and it is transparent, and it can be trusted, win or lose,” he said. Of course, now that Trump has won, the GOP suddenly appears to agree with this, despite the fact that they and their candidate spent years sowing doubt in the electoral system—including up until election night.

The president also told Americans who voted for Harris they had to keep the faith and keep peacefully fighting for what they believe in. “Setbacks are unavoidable,” Biden said. “Giving up is unforgivable.”

“The American experiment endures, we’re going to be okay, but we need to stay engaged,” the president added. “We need to keep going, and above all, need to keep the faith.”

Harris struck a similar tone during her concession speech at Howard University on Wednesday. “The outcome of this election is not what we wanted, not what we fought for, not what we voted for,” Harris told the crowd. “But hear me when I say, hear me when I say, the light of America’s promise will always burn bright as long as we never give up and as long as we keep fighting.”

Harris also acknowledged that “folks are feeling and experiencing a range of emotions right now,” but urged her supporters to still accept the election results.

“A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election, we accept the results,” she continued. “That principle, as much as any other, distinguishes democracy from monarchy or tyranny.”

The dual speeches came at a moment of widespread concerns that American democracy and so many civil liberties hang in the balance with Trump’s return to power. But with a future so unknown—and even frightening—to many, both Harris’ and Biden’s post-election remarks reminded Americans what leadership looks like: recognition of, and respect for, the will of the people, and a reminder that the future of American democracy remains worth peacefully fighting for.

Spokespeople for the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Democracy is at once everywhere and nowhere—on the lips of the masses calling for freedom and fearing for its safeguarding, while every day asking the question: What even is democracy?

Starting in 2018, that is the question the Our Democracy team—me along with photographer Andrea Bruce and educator and videographer Lorraine Ustaris—set out to answer. Our starting point wasn’t simple, but it was frank. We would travel cross-country to see how Americans live and hear what they say democracy looks like in their daily lives. 

We decided to follow in the footsteps of French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured the United States in the 1830s and wrote an assessment about why democracy seemed to be succeeding here but had failed in other places. We began with the first words of Tocqueville’s 1835 volume of Democracy in America:  

“Of all the novel things which attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, none struck me more forcibly than the equality of social conditions,” he wrote. “I had no difficulty in discovering the extraordinary influence this fundamental fact exerts upon the progress of society.”

For Tocqueville, the “equality of social conditions” is a core principle of democracy that, broadly, meant the absence of aristocracy—a societal state in which, on individual levels, there are few divisions between the people based on birth, wealth, or social status. (Although Tocqueville did note that this equality was one to be found solely among white Christian men. The prejudice against Black Americans was then appearing to “increase in proportion to their emancipation,” he wrote, and he wondered how the United States would recover from being born of the mass genocide of Native Americans.)

“I have looked [in America] for an image of the essence of democracy, its inclinations, its personality, its prejudices, its passions,” Tocqueville concluded. “My wish has been to know it if only to realize at least what we have to fear or hope from it.”

We found a crisis of democracy underlying that of our political fever.

Nearly 200 years later, we set out to examine these social conditions—and to provide an updated record of the state of democracy, local and national, at this moment in American history. 

What we found was a crisis of democracy underlying that of our political fever. A historical, generational, and ongoing inequality and a systemic exclusion—both racial and economic. Scholars like Martin Wolf, author of The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, have said this inequality has been abetted by the neoliberal system, which “poses the most immediate threat to civil society.”

Neoliberalism is loosely defined as the economic system in play from the late 1970s to the 2008 financial crisis. Since then, a study by the Pew Research Center found that even as the economy was growing following the end of the Great Recession in 2009, the gap in income between upper-income and middle- and lower-income households was also rising, with upper-income households seeing more economic growth faster. In 2023, the World Inequality Database reported that the United States is the only country in North America and Oceania in which more than 20 percent of national income goes to the wealthiest 1 percent, with nearly 50 percent going to the top 10 percent.

We found that this crisis of inequality has festered into near-total disillusionment and consequent democratic atrophying on community levels, what Tocqueville referred to as a “loss of spirit,” which he warned could lead to tyranny. Yet we also observed an impulse to form hyperlocal microcosms of democracy to help keep the community alive on an individual level—in Tocqueville’s words, “spirit of association” or “self-governing” that generates democratic participation. 

Crisis, in this sense, is a paradox, a kind of duality—a sort of pharmakon, as philosopher Jacques Derrida might say—both the sickness that kills democratic participation and perhaps the medicine that restores it.      

In Paradise, California, a wildfire decimated the community while activating a group of individuals to restore its livability and ensure its survival.

The November 2018 Camp Fire—the deadliest in the state’s modern history—devastated Paradise, a town in the Sierra Nevada foothills, killing 85 people in Butte County, displacing 50,000, and destroying roughly 14,000 homes. There, we were told persistently and insistently what a great leveler the fire had been. On Valley View Drive, “the richest street in Paradise,” where “you get the full-sized candy bars on Halloween,” $500,000 homes were reduced to fences left standing guard around empty lots. As federal and nonprofit humanitarian aid came and went, residents grew tired of the restrictions and empty promises they said came with it. They started to decline the help and decided instead, despite being unable to lean on neighbors since so many had lost homes and jobs themselves, to use the community to build the safety net all the outside aid could not. It was through the disaster and around its resulting adversity that the community came to congeal. 

I couldn’t help thinking back to our time in Detroit in July 2019. There, we had a chance encounter with an elder named Elemiah Sanders. I was standing on the street, looking at a burned-out home, when Sanders called out to me from behind: “Young lady! What are you all out here doing?” I introduced myself and our project. He looked around before offering his thoughts: “The people lost their spirit,” he told me about his neighbors. “They don’t participate. I think it might be one of those things where we need a disaster to come up and raise up the neighborhood, but I hope it’s not that way.” 

When independence and authority are no longer accessible to the community, Tocqueville urged, when the liberty to self-govern with representational significance that promotes equality is impeded, the ability and desire to swim against the current, to fight to participate when it is felt that participation has been wrenched from the people, wearies, making certain that the institutions and their communities both falter. Spirit withers. It’s just our human nature. Tocqueville insisted: “Patriotism does not long prevail in a conquered nation.” And I came to realize that was true on hyperlocal levels as well.

In Warner Robins, Georgia, the spirit of patriotism is such a part of life and what residents believe democracy to be that it’s in its official motto: EDIMGIAFAD, or Every Day in Middle Georgia Is Armed Forces Appreciation Day. The city between Houston and Peach counties is home to Robins Air Force Base, and American flags appear on house after house as you drive through its neighborhoods. But at the time of visiting in August 2018, the city also had one of the lowest voter turnout rates in the country. 

Larry Curtis, a manager of the drones called “Blue Seaters” on the Air Force base and owner of the Curtis Office Suites, said it all comes down to both “the haves and the have-nots” abstaining from participation, “not calling out local injustice like misallocation of funds,” because the “haves feel comfortable and the have-nots feel like it won’t make a difference.” 

The afternoon Curtis drove us onto base, the gray skies expected thunderstorms. It was no matter to Curtis, he kept driving all the same, past two officers holding M16s and pulling a car over, giving us the breakdown of the city’s economically organized geographical divide. He took us out onto Watson Boulevard, which was the zero degree—on one side was the north side, or “the blighted areas,” and on the other was the south side. A church marquee on the north side of Watson read, “When you reach the end of your rope, look up.”

I asked Curtis what was the biggest problem Warner Robins faced. He answered first with just one word, “equality,” and then went on to explain. “Because when you see one part of town and then the other, you see it’s not equal, even down to cutting the grass,” he began. “In the nighttime, you see the lights—there’s no lights on this [north] side of town. The street lamps are out and you can’t get nobody to come out and fix it. The money’s on the south side,” he continued, before adding, “I hate to say the word ‘racial’—I’m more about what’s wrong and what’s right.”

“At the city council meetings, they ask every other week about getting the lights fixed and getting the grass cut,” he said. “So the big problem is really down at city hall.” 

We went to one of those city council meetings and watched residents address council members one after the other, to little or no response. It was clear there was a kind of agitated exhaustion among the residents, where they were almost too tired to keep speaking up just to remain unseen and unheard, but all there was to do was keep speaking up, so they did—the few who had the persistence and made the time to deliver it, for the sake of the many who had largely, as Curtis said, given up. 

Democracy is not working, he told us, because the people don’t exercise their right to vote. Instead, he added, they just accept things for what they are, making it hard to know how to help create change.

Despite voting being one of the answers we heard most frequently to the question of what democracy is, it was this loss of spirit, which Tocqueville referred to as a side effect of losing the power to self-govern, we witnessed atrophying democratic participation. And that loss of spirit is not always a choice. In vastly different communities occupying vastly different parts of the country, that loss of spirit in relation to voting was the same, albeit for different reasons. 

In Memphis in 2018, we spoke with ex-offenders working hard to put their lives back together through the community organization Lifeline to Success, only to continue to confront what was for many of them an unthinkable and unending punishment: felony disenfranchisement. They felt subjected to a system of governing they have no say in, despite having paid their dues to society, and that their lives were being irrevocably shaped by decisions being made for them that they might not have made for themselves.  

In San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 2021, locals referred to themselves as a colony, with no say in the colonizer’s impact on their lives. Puerto Ricans, as citizens of a territory of the United States, are not granted the right to vote in presidential elections. Vieques, a small island off Puerto Rico’s eastern coast known outside Puerto Rico as the former US Navy bomb training range and testing site, is known by Viequenses as “the colony of a colony.” The sense of silenced despair was especially pronounced as residents, many of them veterans, struggled with everything from meeting basic needs to transportation and the inexistence of medical care amid astronomically high cancer rates—the result of American military pollution, specifically from plutonium and Agent Orange. 

With respect to voting, of the dozen locations we traveled to across the country, one stands out: New Hampshire. We bounced around more than a dozen towns—places like Laconia and Meredith; Tilton, Salisbury, and Moultonborough; Wilmot, Concord, Andover, and Franklin— visiting town hall meetings, schools, families living off the grid, and libertarians, and each town was largely the same. Participation in local direct democracy was not only high, it was an important and ongoing source of pride in the community. Asked why it was such a central part of life in the “live free or die” state, residents said it had always been that way and was a matter of the personal nature of caring for democracy and a sense of duty. But homogeneity also helps. New Hampshire is more than 60 percent white, with an average household income of $90,000 and a 2.6 percent unemployment rate, as of 2024. Self-governing in the best interest of the whole community is often an infinitely smoother negotiation, a process almost unimpeachably straightforward, when most of the members of that community share a relatively secure lived experience.  

In most communities we visited, an enduring existential struggle with poverty was at the root of a communal loss of spirit, offset by the will of just a few individuals to fight back.

When the coal industry largely responsible for building up McDowell County—the poorest county in West Virginia and among the poorest in the nation—dried up, it took most of the economy, resources, and population with it. The coal industry and the county seat, the city of Welch, were at their peak in the 1950s, with a sudden surge in population from roughly 700 to 100,000 and a thronging city center, but machines began to take over the work of men. The county became the first in the country to receive modern-era food stamps after a 1960 visit by then-presidential candidate John F. Kennedy—a program residents said decimated the community, because, they said, they needed jobs, not food stamps. More than once, residents referred to their county as “America’s forgotten county,” left to themselves and out of the national conversation when it was no longer carrying the weight of the state’s economy. Today, McDowell County is notorious as the coal country that changed its often-Democratic vote to Republican in the 2016 presidential election. 

By 2019, most of Welch’s downtown area was shuttered—what remained were a few small businesses, local government services, and the Welch News, the last remaining news source in McDowell County. Missy Nester, the owner and publisher, told us that she would “print until she ran out of paper.” But the paper was forced to fold in the summer of 2023.

“Our people have nothing,” Nester told the Associated Press in July of that year. “Like, can any of y’all hear us out here screaming?”  

Nester and the Welch community had pulled together to save the newspaper in 2018 after learning that the owner had plans to close its doors. The Welch News had an entirely voluntary team of local drivers who drove a six-hour route through the hills to hand-deliver papers to readers’ homes. Often, they took bread and milk deliveries with them for the elderly who seldom saw anyone but them, and they checked in on every resident they handed off to. It was an intensely personal system that inspired awe unlike much else does.

“We have been the forgotten place for so long that we’re just used to taking care of each other,” Nester said. “We vote to take care of ourselves.”

In some places, like among a sizable Somali immigrant community in Garden City, Kansas, in 2021, people struggled to build a community infrastructure from scratch where there had never been one at all. What little support they’d once had was provided by the nonprofit outreach organization LiveWell, which offered assistance programs and services to the growing population, but funding dried up and the community was left on its own to face everything from obstacles to medical care, to a bomb threat and the racism that came with it, and landlords that financially exploited refugees. The challenge became how to organize a community that was outward facing, that could integrate itself into American society while holding on to its cultural customs when the people could only turn inward for help, creating—naturally—something far more insular. 

I thought a lot then about the importance Tocqueville placed on the idea of “assimilation” as a means of survival, of a group’s adaptability to the social mores of the new Americans as the evidence of whether or not it would ultimately endure American democracy. I thought about, on the one hand, how well the people of New Hampshire felt democracy was working for them and the role of cultural, racial, and economic homogeneity in that, and, on the other hand, I thought about the damage the demand for adaptability, the forced assimilation, has done to entire populations of people who don’t fit into that homogeneity. 

Could democracy ever withstand the pressures of governing over the pluralist society we not only have become, but have really always been? It’s a conversation I had with Latrice Tatsey, a citizen of the Blackfeet Nation in Browning, Montana, while watching her children ride at a rodeo in July 2019. In fact, it was a conversation I seemed to be having with many Blackfeet leaders.

The history of the attempted forced assimilation of the Native Americans at the hands of American settlers is, by now, no secret. Today, it is largely recognized as a genocidal effort that decimated the populations of the country’s nations and tribes not just by the violence of slaughter, but by the violence of cultural destruction and dispossession as well. The result is conditions of living—and sometimes dying, as young people face the challenges of poverty, drug addiction, and suicide—caught between “Western influence” and Native tradition, in which leaders have had to work on ways to “keep the cultures indigenous to their peoples alive,” John Murray, the Blackfeet’s tribal historic preservation officer, told me.

“Is it democracy that ruined it all?” he asked. “Corporate democracy?”

It was a question that had come up more than once for us on the road, as people wondered where the line money draws across for whom democracy works and for whom it does not stops. Could even a perfect democracy subsist within the context of America’s particular brand of capitalism? Does the subsistence of one subset of people require the continued subjugation of another—or all others? 

“We’ve had a very difficult struggle, always at the mercy of the government for survival,” Virgil “Puggy” Edwards, a member of the Blackfeet Constitutional Reform Committee, said as he gave a rundown of the Blackfeet history he was working on that day at the office, where he takes care of archiving and documentation.

Paradoxically, this work the community does to keep culture, family, and tradition alive for the Blackfeet is largely democratic, Tatsey said. It comes down to a duality of spirit, of patriotism, and for the Blackfeet, democratic participation goes back long before the arrival of the first pilgrims to American shores.   

“Our family has adapted to live in both worlds, even though we’re all in this one with our cultural values system, and living in the Western values system—no matter what trauma our people have gone through, they’ve been able to adapt, and that’s why we’re still here today,” she said. “Democracy is, for me, just how our people function for immemorial time, because what you have in our tribal makeup is leaders who, in order to have that leadership role, they had to prove themselves to the people and earn feathers,” she continued. “And so for us, it was what you did for your people and how you were going to guide your people that made the people stand behind you.”

Amid a presidential election—that naturally occurring crisis of democracy, as Tocqueville called it—burning like a wildfire across the country, the slow burn of our secondary crisis, that of the inequality of social conditions, is smoldering. The people, having become incendiary themselves, are a lit powder keg—the spark barreling through the wick. We return to Tocqueville’s words: 

“Of all powers, that of public opinion is the hardest to exploit. It is often just as dangerous [for representatives] to lag behind as it is to outpace it.”

The real test of our democracy, for either side of the party line, will be how we get through it—to the other side of not just the wildfire, but of the slow burn. How we make ourselves hard to exploit and make it hard to exploit each other. 

Tocqueville believed that our loss of spirit would either paralyze our participation, further heighten our passions, and risk a break of the state, or be the catalyst for us to rise up and save what we each believe to be at stake. If we are able to marvel at these communities’ capacity for togetherness in crisis as a feel-good feat of democracy in spite of “democracy” itself, then we should be, to the same extent, able to learn from it that the power of democracy, to self-govern, must sometimes be the power to use democracy to wrench self-governing back. The power to use democracy against itself, for its own good. 

We will perhaps find that the only way to fight for American democracy is for the true equalizer to be us (if we want it). If we must fall to Tocqueville’s “tyranny of the majority,” let it be because our heightened passions have unified not against each other, but to number the people together greater than the flawed system of governance so that the tyranny belongs to us all. 

And if it gets too heavy and “you reach the end of your rope,” like that church marquee on the north side of Watson Boulevard in Warner Robins preached, just “look up.” The real work of regeneration comes after the fire. 

Democracy is at once everywhere and nowhere—on the lips of the masses calling for freedom and fearing for its safeguarding, while every day asking the question: What even is democracy?

Starting in 2018, that is the question the Our Democracy team—me along with photographer Andrea Bruce and educator and videographer Lorraine Ustaris—set out to answer. Our starting point wasn’t simple, but it was frank. We would travel cross-country to see how Americans live and hear what they say democracy looks like in their daily lives. 

We decided to follow in the footsteps of French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured the United States in the 1830s and wrote an assessment about why democracy seemed to be succeeding here but had failed in other places. We began with the first words of Tocqueville’s 1835 volume of Democracy in America:  

“Of all the novel things which attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, none struck me more forcibly than the equality of social conditions,” he wrote. “I had no difficulty in discovering the extraordinary influence this fundamental fact exerts upon the progress of society.”

For Tocqueville, the “equality of social conditions” is a core principle of democracy that, broadly, meant the absence of aristocracy—a societal state in which, on individual levels, there are few divisions between the people based on birth, wealth, or social status. (Although Tocqueville did note that this equality was one to be found solely among white Christian men. The prejudice against Black Americans was then appearing to “increase in proportion to their emancipation,” he wrote, and he wondered how the United States would recover from being born of the mass genocide of Native Americans.)

“I have looked [in America] for an image of the essence of democracy, its inclinations, its personality, its prejudices, its passions,” Tocqueville concluded. “My wish has been to know it if only to realize at least what we have to fear or hope from it.”

We found a crisis of democracy underlying that of our political fever.

Nearly 200 years later, we set out to examine these social conditions—and to provide an updated record of the state of democracy, local and national, at this moment in American history. 

What we found was a crisis of democracy underlying that of our political fever. A historical, generational, and ongoing inequality and a systemic exclusion—both racial and economic. Scholars like Martin Wolf, author of The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, have said this inequality has been abetted by the neoliberal system, which “poses the most immediate threat to civil society.”

Neoliberalism is loosely defined as the economic system in play from the late 1970s to the 2008 financial crisis. Since then, a study by the Pew Research Center found that even as the economy was growing following the end of the Great Recession in 2009, the gap in income between upper-income and middle- and lower-income households was also rising, with upper-income households seeing more economic growth faster. In 2023, the World Inequality Database reported that the United States is the only country in North America and Oceania in which more than 20 percent of national income goes to the wealthiest 1 percent, with nearly 50 percent going to the top 10 percent.

We found that this crisis of inequality has festered into near-total disillusionment and consequent democratic atrophying on community levels, what Tocqueville referred to as a “loss of spirit,” which he warned could lead to tyranny. Yet we also observed an impulse to form hyperlocal microcosms of democracy to help keep the community alive on an individual level—in Tocqueville’s words, “spirit of association” or “self-governing” that generates democratic participation. 

Crisis, in this sense, is a paradox, a kind of duality—a sort of pharmakon, as philosopher Jacques Derrida might say—both the sickness that kills democratic participation and perhaps the medicine that restores it.      

In Paradise, California, a wildfire decimated the community while activating a group of individuals to restore its livability and ensure its survival.

The November 2018 Camp Fire—the deadliest in the state’s modern history—devastated Paradise, a town in the Sierra Nevada foothills, killing 85 people in Butte County, displacing 50,000, and destroying roughly 14,000 homes. There, we were told persistently and insistently what a great leveler the fire had been. On Valley View Drive, “the richest street in Paradise,” where “you get the full-sized candy bars on Halloween,” $500,000 homes were reduced to fences left standing guard around empty lots. As federal and nonprofit humanitarian aid came and went, residents grew tired of the restrictions and empty promises they said came with it. They started to decline the help and decided instead, despite being unable to lean on neighbors since so many had lost homes and jobs themselves, to use the community to build the safety net all the outside aid could not. It was through the disaster and around its resulting adversity that the community came to congeal. 

I couldn’t help thinking back to our time in Detroit in July 2019. There, we had a chance encounter with an elder named Elemiah Sanders. I was standing on the street, looking at a burned-out home, when Sanders called out to me from behind: “Young lady! What are you all out here doing?” I introduced myself and our project. He looked around before offering his thoughts: “The people lost their spirit,” he told me about his neighbors. “They don’t participate. I think it might be one of those things where we need a disaster to come up and raise up the neighborhood, but I hope it’s not that way.” 

When independence and authority are no longer accessible to the community, Tocqueville urged, when the liberty to self-govern with representational significance that promotes equality is impeded, the ability and desire to swim against the current, to fight to participate when it is felt that participation has been wrenched from the people, wearies, making certain that the institutions and their communities both falter. Spirit withers. It’s just our human nature. Tocqueville insisted: “Patriotism does not long prevail in a conquered nation.” And I came to realize that was true on hyperlocal levels as well.

In Warner Robins, Georgia, the spirit of patriotism is such a part of life and what residents believe democracy to be that it’s in its official motto: EDIMGIAFAD, or Every Day in Middle Georgia Is Armed Forces Appreciation Day. The city between Houston and Peach counties is home to Robins Air Force Base, and American flags appear on house after house as you drive through its neighborhoods. But at the time of visiting in August 2018, the city also had one of the lowest voter turnout rates in the country. 

Larry Curtis, a manager of the drones called “Blue Seaters” on the Air Force base and owner of the Curtis Office Suites, said it all comes down to both “the haves and the have-nots” abstaining from participation, “not calling out local injustice like misallocation of funds,” because the “haves feel comfortable and the have-nots feel like it won’t make a difference.” 

The afternoon Curtis drove us onto base, the gray skies expected thunderstorms. It was no matter to Curtis, he kept driving all the same, past two officers holding M16s and pulling a car over, giving us the breakdown of the city’s economically organized geographical divide. He took us out onto Watson Boulevard, which was the zero degree—on one side was the north side, or “the blighted areas,” and on the other was the south side. A church marquee on the north side of Watson read, “When you reach the end of your rope, look up.”

I asked Curtis what was the biggest problem Warner Robins faced. He answered first with just one word, “equality,” and then went on to explain. “Because when you see one part of town and then the other, you see it’s not equal, even down to cutting the grass,” he began. “In the nighttime, you see the lights—there’s no lights on this [north] side of town. The street lamps are out and you can’t get nobody to come out and fix it. The money’s on the south side,” he continued, before adding, “I hate to say the word ‘racial’—I’m more about what’s wrong and what’s right.”

“At the city council meetings, they ask every other week about getting the lights fixed and getting the grass cut,” he said. “So the big problem is really down at city hall.” 

We went to one of those city council meetings and watched residents address council members one after the other, to little or no response. It was clear there was a kind of agitated exhaustion among the residents, where they were almost too tired to keep speaking up just to remain unseen and unheard, but all there was to do was keep speaking up, so they did—the few who had the persistence and made the time to deliver it, for the sake of the many who had largely, as Curtis said, given up. 

Democracy is not working, he told us, because the people don’t exercise their right to vote. Instead, he added, they just accept things for what they are, making it hard to know how to help create change.

Despite voting being one of the answers we heard most frequently to the question of what democracy is, it was this loss of spirit, which Tocqueville referred to as a side effect of losing the power to self-govern, we witnessed atrophying democratic participation. And that loss of spirit is not always a choice. In vastly different communities occupying vastly different parts of the country, that loss of spirit in relation to voting was the same, albeit for different reasons. 

In Memphis in 2018, we spoke with ex-offenders working hard to put their lives back together through the community organization Lifeline to Success, only to continue to confront what was for many of them an unthinkable and unending punishment: felony disenfranchisement. They felt subjected to a system of governing they have no say in, despite having paid their dues to society, and that their lives were being irrevocably shaped by decisions being made for them that they might not have made for themselves.  

In San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 2021, locals referred to themselves as a colony, with no say in the colonizer’s impact on their lives. Puerto Ricans, as citizens of a territory of the United States, are not granted the right to vote in presidential elections. Vieques, a small island off Puerto Rico’s eastern coast known outside Puerto Rico as the former US Navy bomb training range and testing site, is known by Viequenses as “the colony of a colony.” The sense of silenced despair was especially pronounced as residents, many of them veterans, struggled with everything from meeting basic needs to transportation and the inexistence of medical care amid astronomically high cancer rates—the result of American military pollution, specifically from plutonium and Agent Orange. 

With respect to voting, of the dozen locations we traveled to across the country, one stands out: New Hampshire. We bounced around more than a dozen towns—places like Laconia and Meredith; Tilton, Salisbury, and Moultonborough; Wilmot, Concord, Andover, and Franklin— visiting town hall meetings, schools, families living off the grid, and libertarians, and each town was largely the same. Participation in local direct democracy was not only high, it was an important and ongoing source of pride in the community. Asked why it was such a central part of life in the “live free or die” state, residents said it had always been that way and was a matter of the personal nature of caring for democracy and a sense of duty. But homogeneity also helps. New Hampshire is more than 60 percent white, with an average household income of $90,000 and a 2.6 percent unemployment rate, as of 2024. Self-governing in the best interest of the whole community is often an infinitely smoother negotiation, a process almost unimpeachably straightforward, when most of the members of that community share a relatively secure lived experience.  

In most communities we visited, an enduring existential struggle with poverty was at the root of a communal loss of spirit, offset by the will of just a few individuals to fight back.

When the coal industry largely responsible for building up McDowell County—the poorest county in West Virginia and among the poorest in the nation—dried up, it took most of the economy, resources, and population with it. The coal industry and the county seat, the city of Welch, were at their peak in the 1950s, with a sudden surge in population from roughly 700 to 100,000 and a thronging city center, but machines began to take over the work of men. The county became the first in the country to receive modern-era food stamps after a 1960 visit by then-presidential candidate John F. Kennedy—a program residents said decimated the community, because, they said, they needed jobs, not food stamps. More than once, residents referred to their county as “America’s forgotten county,” left to themselves and out of the national conversation when it was no longer carrying the weight of the state’s economy. Today, McDowell County is notorious as the coal country that changed its often-Democratic vote to Republican in the 2016 presidential election. 

By 2019, most of Welch’s downtown area was shuttered—what remained were a few small businesses, local government services, and the Welch News, the last remaining news source in McDowell County. Missy Nester, the owner and publisher, told us that she would “print until she ran out of paper.” But the paper was forced to fold in the summer of 2023.

“Our people have nothing,” Nester told the Associated Press in July of that year. “Like, can any of y’all hear us out here screaming?”  

Nester and the Welch community had pulled together to save the newspaper in 2018 after learning that the owner had plans to close its doors. The Welch News had an entirely voluntary team of local drivers who drove a six-hour route through the hills to hand-deliver papers to readers’ homes. Often, they took bread and milk deliveries with them for the elderly who seldom saw anyone but them, and they checked in on every resident they handed off to. It was an intensely personal system that inspired awe unlike much else does.

“We have been the forgotten place for so long that we’re just used to taking care of each other,” Nester said. “We vote to take care of ourselves.”

In some places, like among a sizable Somali immigrant community in Garden City, Kansas, in 2021, people struggled to build a community infrastructure from scratch where there had never been one at all. What little support they’d once had was provided by the nonprofit outreach organization LiveWell, which offered assistance programs and services to the growing population, but funding dried up and the community was left on its own to face everything from obstacles to medical care, to a bomb threat and the racism that came with it, and landlords that financially exploited refugees. The challenge became how to organize a community that was outward facing, that could integrate itself into American society while holding on to its cultural customs when the people could only turn inward for help, creating—naturally—something far more insular. 

I thought a lot then about the importance Tocqueville placed on the idea of “assimilation” as a means of survival, of a group’s adaptability to the social mores of the new Americans as the evidence of whether or not it would ultimately endure American democracy. I thought about, on the one hand, how well the people of New Hampshire felt democracy was working for them and the role of cultural, racial, and economic homogeneity in that, and, on the other hand, I thought about the damage the demand for adaptability, the forced assimilation, has done to entire populations of people who don’t fit into that homogeneity. 

Could democracy ever withstand the pressures of governing over the pluralist society we not only have become, but have really always been? It’s a conversation I had with Latrice Tatsey, a citizen of the Blackfeet Nation in Browning, Montana, while watching her children ride at a rodeo in July 2019. In fact, it was a conversation I seemed to be having with many Blackfeet leaders.

The history of the attempted forced assimilation of the Native Americans at the hands of American settlers is, by now, no secret. Today, it is largely recognized as a genocidal effort that decimated the populations of the country’s nations and tribes not just by the violence of slaughter, but by the violence of cultural destruction and dispossession as well. The result is conditions of living—and sometimes dying, as young people face the challenges of poverty, drug addiction, and suicide—caught between “Western influence” and Native tradition, in which leaders have had to work on ways to “keep the cultures indigenous to their peoples alive,” John Murray, the Blackfeet’s tribal historic preservation officer, told me.

“Is it democracy that ruined it all?” he asked. “Corporate democracy?”

It was a question that had come up more than once for us on the road, as people wondered where the line money draws across for whom democracy works and for whom it does not stops. Could even a perfect democracy subsist within the context of America’s particular brand of capitalism? Does the subsistence of one subset of people require the continued subjugation of another—or all others? 

“We’ve had a very difficult struggle, always at the mercy of the government for survival,” Virgil “Puggy” Edwards, a member of the Blackfeet Constitutional Reform Committee, said as he gave a rundown of the Blackfeet history he was working on that day at the office, where he takes care of archiving and documentation.

Paradoxically, this work the community does to keep culture, family, and tradition alive for the Blackfeet is largely democratic, Tatsey said. It comes down to a duality of spirit, of patriotism, and for the Blackfeet, democratic participation goes back long before the arrival of the first pilgrims to American shores.   

“Our family has adapted to live in both worlds, even though we’re all in this one with our cultural values system, and living in the Western values system—no matter what trauma our people have gone through, they’ve been able to adapt, and that’s why we’re still here today,” she said. “Democracy is, for me, just how our people function for immemorial time, because what you have in our tribal makeup is leaders who, in order to have that leadership role, they had to prove themselves to the people and earn feathers,” she continued. “And so for us, it was what you did for your people and how you were going to guide your people that made the people stand behind you.”

Amid a presidential election—that naturally occurring crisis of democracy, as Tocqueville called it—burning like a wildfire across the country, the slow burn of our secondary crisis, that of the inequality of social conditions, is smoldering. The people, having become incendiary themselves, are a lit powder keg—the spark barreling through the wick. We return to Tocqueville’s words: 

“Of all powers, that of public opinion is the hardest to exploit. It is often just as dangerous [for representatives] to lag behind as it is to outpace it.”

The real test of our democracy, for either side of the party line, will be how we get through it—to the other side of not just the wildfire, but of the slow burn. How we make ourselves hard to exploit and make it hard to exploit each other. 

Tocqueville believed that our loss of spirit would either paralyze our participation, further heighten our passions, and risk a break of the state, or be the catalyst for us to rise up and save what we each believe to be at stake. If we are able to marvel at these communities’ capacity for togetherness in crisis as a feel-good feat of democracy in spite of “democracy” itself, then we should be, to the same extent, able to learn from it that the power of democracy, to self-govern, must sometimes be the power to use democracy to wrench self-governing back. The power to use democracy against itself, for its own good. 

We will perhaps find that the only way to fight for American democracy is for the true equalizer to be us (if we want it). If we must fall to Tocqueville’s “tyranny of the majority,” let it be because our heightened passions have unified not against each other, but to number the people together greater than the flawed system of governance so that the tyranny belongs to us all. 

And if it gets too heavy and “you reach the end of your rope,” like that church marquee on the north side of Watson Boulevard in Warner Robins preached, just “look up.” The real work of regeneration comes after the fire. 

As Donald Trump campaigns to be a dictator for one day, he’s asking: “Are you better off now than you were when I was president?” Great question! To help answer it, our Trump Files series is delving into consequential events from the 45th president’s time in office that Americans might have forgotten—or wish they had.

Donald Trump has said that if he is elected president again, he will use the Justice Department to prosecute political enemies. We should believe him, because he attempted to do just that in his first term, with some success. And he will be better prepared to execute his plans if he returns to the White House.

NPR recently tallied more than 100 times Trump called for the prosecution or jailing of his perceived foes. His stated targets include Kamala Harris, Joe Biden and his family, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff, James Comey, Bill Barr, John Kelly, Mark Zuckerberg, federal prosecutors, election officials, journalists, and pro-Palestinian protestors. He reportedly wanted retired military officers who criticized him, Admiral William McRaven and General Stanley McChrystal, called back to active duty so they could be court-martialed. He suggested that Mark Milley, who previously served as Trump’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, deserved to be executed.

The frequency of those threats makes them seem silly. Trump probably isn’t going to sic prosecutors on all those prominent people. But his record suggests he is serious about using the power of his office against many critics. Contrary to the claims of defenders like J.D. Vance—who said recently that Trump “didn’t go after his political opponents” while in office—Trump made sustained public and private efforts while in the White House to order up probes into critics and political opponents. Trump succeeded in numerous cases in having foes investigated, media reports and accounts of former aides show.

Lock Her Up

After calling for Hillary Clinton’s prosecution on the campaign trail, Trump, despite briefly disavowing the idea, pushed throughout his presidency for Clinton’s prosecution. This campaign came in public tweets and private pressure on aides, and was mounted alongside his anger over investigations into his campaign’s contacts with Russian agents in 2016. Trump pressured all three of his attorneys general to open or advance investigations targeting Clinton. They partly resisted but substantially complied.

Many people recall Trump’s fury at Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from matters to the 2016 election—which led the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller. But despite that pledge, Sessions partly appeased Trump by instructing the US attorney for Utah, John Huber, to reexamine Clinton’s use of a private email server and allegations about the Clinton Foundation. Sessions’ order came amid Trump’s repeated public calls for him to look into Clinton’s “crimes.” After firing Sessions in 2020, Trump privately urged acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker to push Huber to be more aggressive, the Washington Post reported. When Huber’s investigation ended in 2020 without finding wrongdoing by Clinton, Trump publicly attacked the prosecutor as a “garbage disposal.”

But by then, Trump’s third AG, Bill Barr, had appointed John Durham, the Connecticut US attorney, to launch an investigation into the origins of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation. Barr named Durham on heels of misrepresenting Mueller’s report, which found that the Trump campaign “expected to benefit” from secret Russian help in 2016. The Durham appointment also came after reports that Trump and his advisers were seeking revenge against his investigators.

Durham’s effort floundered legally, with the acquittal of two of the three men charged with crimes related to the investigation. But the probe, which lasted four years, fared better as an exercise in arming Trump with talking points. Durham appeared to consider that part of his job, though he has publicly disputed that. When the Justice Department’s inspector general in 2019 issued a report that found no evidence the FBI’s Trump investigation was politically motivated, Durham, in consultation with Barr, issued a strange statement disagreeing, without offering any evidence for why.

Durham decided to charge Michael Sussmann, a lawyer who worked for Democrats in 2016, with lying to the FBI, despite evidence so thin two prosecutors quit in connection with the charge. Sussmann was acquitted in 2022, but through filings in the case, Durham publicly aired allegations about Clinton campaign efforts to advance the Russia story, details that did not appear necessary to his case. Right-wing news outlets in February 2022 jumped one such-Durham motion to falsely report the Clinton’s campaign had spied on Trump White House servers. In his final report in 2023, Durham extensively cited material he acknowledged was dubious possible Russian disinformation in an effort to suggest Clinton had helped drive the FBI probe into Trump.

FBI

After firing James Comey as FBI director in 2017, which resulted in Mueller’s appointment, Trump pressed for the Justice Department to prosecute Comey for mishandling sensitive government information by allegedly orchestrating leaks that were damaging to Trump. According to the New York Times, this pressure led to “two investigations of leaks potentially involving” Comey. The DOJ declined to charge Comey.

Other former FBI officials who drew Trump’s ire—former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, and Peter Strzok, originally the lead FBI agent on the Russia investigation—faced DOJ probes after Trump railed against them. Sessions fired McCabe the day before his 2018 retirement, in what appeared to be a deliberate act to deny him a pension and benefits. Prosecutors in 2019 tried to charge McCabe for allegedly lying to FBI officials about media contacts, but in an unusual move that suggests a weak case, a grand jury declined to return an indictment.

John Kerry

In a March 2019 press conference, Trump said former Secretary of State John Kerry, who negotiated the 2015 deal freezing Iran’s nuclear weapons development, could be prosecuted for violating the Logan Act, a 1799 law barring private US citizens from negotiating with foreign governments in disputes with the United States. Trump was irked at Kerry’s ongoing contacts with Iranian officials and by past threats by Mueller’s team to charge former national security adviser Michael Flynn with violating the act. Trump told reporters that Kerry should be charged, but “my people don’t want to do anything,” adding, “Only the Democrats do that kind of stuff.

False. Trump’s public and private efforts had by then already secured DOJ scrutiny of Kerry. Former Trump national security adviser John Bolton told the Times he’d witnessed Trump demand Kerry’s prosecution “on at least a half dozen occasions” in 2018 and 2019. Trump also made the case in tweets and public statements. Days after one of Trump’s tweets, in May 2018, a top DOJ official had told prosecutors in Manhattan to investigate Kerry’s contacts with Iranians, according to the Times. Geoffrey Berman, at the time the US attorney in Manhattan, wrote in a 2022 book that the Kerry probe appeared to result from Trump’s edict. “No one needed to talk with Trump to know what he wanted,” Berman wrote. “You could read his tweets.”

Trump succeeded in sparking investigations into his critics and political foes by continually pressing subordinates to deliver actual prosecutions, as former aides like Kelly, Bolton and White House counsel Don McGahn have revealed. In some cases, the resulting probes appear to have been solutions settled on by officials attempting to manage Trump’s pressure with partial measures.

But in a new term, Trump will surely be more aggressive and even less restrained, as his public threats make clear. The Supreme Court’s July declaration that the president has absolute immunity from prosecution for many types of official conduct will leave him with few worries about facing legal consequences for his own actions. And the aides who partly restrained him before will be gone, replaced by more sycophantic enablers.

As Trump pledges to pervert presidential power to prosecute critics, Americans have to take him at this word. If he wins, who is going to stop him?

Joe Scott, a West Point graduate with an MBA and a background in finance, ran for Broward County elections supervisor in 2020. At the time, he thought his previous stints as an account manager for a technology company and a facilities administrator at a health care firm would make him a “good fit” for a job that would ostensibly preoccupy him with a mélange of humdrum desk-work.

He was surprised, however, to find how much his military experience in Iraq would come in handy.

With an unhurried demeanor, a lanyard, and a warm smile, Scott comes across more like a beloved social studies teacher moonlighting as a football coach than a soldier. But in the late-2000s, he was an Army captain embedded with the Iraqi military during some of the country’s earliest democratically run elections. In an effort to prepare for hotspots of unrest, the Iraqi leadership of Scott’s battalion pitched going door to door to ask locals how they planned to vote; Scott had to explain to the officer that having uniformed and armed Iraqi military members interrogate locals about their voting plans was “not a good look.”

“It was a different world,” he says of the Middle Eastern country’s shaky, fledgling democracy. “Although,” he adds, “America is kind of moving that way.”

The day after Scott was sworn in as Broward’s elections supervisor, in January 2021, election deniers—incited by Trump’s lies about a stolen election—stormed the US Capitol. He called his wife to ask if she was watching the news. “The Handmaid’s Tale is going down right now,” he recalls telling her. “This is real, right?”

He realized then that in the fleeting moments between the end of his campaign and first week of his new role, the job of “being an election official really changed.”

In the months and years since Trump turbocharged election angst, Scott has had to deal with politically motivated actors spreading misleading information about voting procedures and conspiracy-slinging citizens, some of whom have made physical threats against him and his staff. His experience is not the exception but the norm among the people who have taken up this line of work.

Nearly 40 percent of local election workers have experienced harassment or abuse, according to a recent survey conducted by New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice. Dozens of threats have been so serious as to warrant full FBI investigations, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center, which noted these threats were concentrated in the states Joe Biden narrowly won in 2020. Multiple election officials have even been victims of “swatting,” a dangerous hoax in which a caller reports a fake crime with the intention of triggering a substantial law enforcement response at the home or workplace of their unsuspecting target. These tactics don’t only put election workers at risk, they also intimidate voters. A year after the January 6 attack, the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism asked Americans whether they felt safe at voting locations. Fewer than half said yes.

But if elections are becoming increasingly unhinged, election officials are also making significant efforts to improve their institutions and the public’s trust in them. Clerks and supervisors are fortifying their physical structures with bulletproof glass and GPS-tracked ballot bags and dedicated power supplies and motion detectors. They’re collaborating with law enforcement, and with one another, about how to prepare for and respond to threats in the first presidential race since Donald Trump and his most fervent supporters tried to overturn the 2020 election’s results. This time around, officials like Scott are hoping for a more tranquil transition period. But they’ve also prepared for the worst.

Scott recently showed me around his new election headquarters, which serves as a processing center for vote-by-mail ballots, the recount site for elections that are within half a percentage point, and the place where paper ballots are scanned into Broward’s auditing system. With security guards, a gated parking lot, badge-entry doors classified by clearance level, and windows for inquisitive (or incredulous) civilians to watch over ballot processing, the $103 million building was hardened to withstand both Category 5 hurricanes—and the growing ranks of election conspiracists. Scott notes the building’s design was an exercise in balancing the public’s desire for election transparency with everyone’s need for physical safety. He had managed similar dynamics before.

“Part of my tour in Iraq was preparing for and making sure that those elections went off without any major security things happening,” Scott tells Mother Jones about his service, which earned him a Bronze Star Medal and a Combat Action Badge. “We wanted to make sure people felt safe going to the polling places.”

Nearly 20 years later, that’s exactly what he and fellow US election workers are doing domestically.

Last month, Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold was the intended recipient of a package intercepted by a postal center. Its contents included an unknown powder; its return address was labeled “United States Traitor Elimination Army.” The FBI is investigating its origins.

Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold was the intended recipient of a package with an unknown powder—its return address was labeled “United States Traitor Elimination Army.”

She said the package was in addition to more than 1,000 threats she received since last September. pic.twitter.com/i7C84mQdEd

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) October 28, 2024

Griswold, who chairs the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, said the package was in addition to more than 1,000 threats she has received since last September. One extremist made a threat to her life while she was in the hospital having a C-section; other threats have been sexual in nature. But rather than panic about potential election-related violence, Griswold has channeled her efforts into preventing it.

“We are in this scenario where election officials like myself have to plan for really unnecessary disasters.”

The 40-year-old has worked to reform Colorado’s election landscape, including championing the passage of state election laws, among them one that made it a felony to compromise voting equipment. That was something former Colorado election worker Tina Peters did in 2021 when she allowed an unauthorized person to access data from election machines, images from which were eventually posted on conspiracy-riddled websites. (Peters was recently sentenced to nine years in prison.) Other new regulations Griswold has backed have made it illegal to retaliate against election workers and to have guns near election sites.

Since 2020, Griswold has made available at least $5 million in grant money for more physical security at election sites, which has allowed counties to take measures such as installing bulletproof glass or having Narcan on hand in case fentanyl is deployed as a chemical weapon. “We are in this scenario where election officials like myself have to plan for really unnecessary disasters,” she tells me. “There is no reason we should have to be planning for these domestic conspiracies and the effect it has on our elections, but we have to.”

Election officials elsewhere have been similarly proactive. In St. Charles County, Missouri, the only thing that separated in-person absentee voters from elections staff in 2020 was a row of desks. Kurt Bahr, the county’s Republican director of elections, recently installed a full wall with a locking door and customer service windows to provide a barrier so his employees “feel more secure in case any voter is overly agitated.”

Sante Fe, New Mexico’s clerk has installed GPS tracking devices on all traveling ballot bags. In case someone alleges fake ballots were introduced into the closed system, clerk Katharine Clark can say, “Au contraire. I have this dashboard, and that shows me exactly where my ballot bags are.”

Clark, a Democrat, has also added an accelerometer that measures vibration inside her county’s ballot tabulator to decipher if anyone improperly touched it overnight. Further, her county is issuing personal alert devices for all presiding judges and has hired additional security that will “have eyes and ears on all the public sites.”

One of the remaining challenges election officials face is deciding when a disturbance reaches a threshold that requires the help of law enforcement. “It’s kind of like the definition of pornography,” says Bahr of Missouri. “You know it when you see it.”

Tina Barton has made it her mission to foster coordination between law enforcement and election officials. She learned the importance of this when she became the target of conspiracy-crazed election deniers in the aftermath of the 2020 election.

On Tuesday, November 10, 2020, she walked into her fluorescent-light filled office at Rochester Hills, Michigan City Hall, where she had served as the city’s election clerk for eight years. She saw a blinking light on her desk line. It was a voicemail from an unknown caller.

“Ten million plus patriots will surround you when you least expect it, and your little infantile Deep State security agency has no time to protect you…We’ll fucking kill you,” said the voice, which also threatened bringing a knife to Barton’s throat. “You will fucking pay for your fucking lying-ass remarks…We will fucking take you out. Fuck your family, fuck your life.”

The culprit was eventually identified as Carmel, Indiana’s Andrew Nickels, who has since been sentenced to 14 months in prison; but the victim of the call was effectively hand-selected by the Republican National Committee. After Michigan was called for Biden, then–RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel claimed that fraud had abounded in the state, and case in point were the “2,000 ballots that had been given to Democrats but were Republican ballots,” said McDaniels at a press conference on November 6. “And this took place in Rochester Hills.”

There was a minor issue in Rochester Hills, but it was discovered and corrected well before Nickels left the voicemail. Around 1 a.m. the day after the election, Barton—who had at that point worked more than 18 hours straight—noticed that the county’s website showed a handful of absentee precincts from her county were not showing up. She informed the county, whose officials said they had not received one of Barton’s files. She ran a report and discovered the file was not missing, but saved under the wrong name.

The county advised Barton that the solution was to purge the old file and rerun the absentee precincts, then save that information under the correct file name. But within 24 hours of that step on Wednesday, it was discovered that both files had somehow been added to the county’s total. Immediately, before noon on Thursday, the incorrect file was removed from the system.

Even if the issue was not corrected—it was—Biden won the state by more than 150,000 votes: roughly double the number of people who live in Rochester Hills. An audit led by Republican state legislators would later confirm, in June 2021, that Michigan’s elections were lawfully run, and that temporary mishaps didn’t affect final outcomes. All the while, Barton was perpetually on edge. At the grocery store, she’d think, “Did that person walk too close to me? Why are they everywhere that I’m going?” she tells me. “You become hyper-vigilant about every single thing, and start to view every single thing in person as a possible threat. And that can be really overwhelming.”

While investigators were still working to identify her aggressor, a group called the Center for Safe and Secure Elections (CSSE) was forming in response to threats against election officials like Barton. It was founded in 2022 by a cross-partisan group of current and former national, state, and local election officials, members of law enforcement, as well as nonprofits across the political spectrum. Barton, a Republican who has since left her election clerk role, is now a vice chair.

Over the last two years, she’s convened nearly 150 CSSE training sessions across more than 35 states, bringing together thousands of election workers, members of law enforcement, facilities managers, hazmat teams, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and more to help the various stakeholders preemptively form lines of communication among themselves in preparation for what used to be extraordinary complications: Reports of mysterious substances, menacing phone calls, open-carry demonstrations outside polling sites, accusations of non-citizens voting, bomb threats, and more.

Barton and her co-instructor, former Sheriff for Larimer County, Colorado, Justin Smith, travel to various jurisdictions, pose hypotheticals emergencies such as these, and break the attendees into randomized groups to strategize best practices. “Then we’ll take that opportunity after we’ve heard what they’ve said to see if we have some more things to either challenge them on, or to push their thinking on,” Barton says. CSSE has also made instructional videos and guides for groups and officials who can’t facilitate in-person training.

Election workers, many of whom have already been threatened, are usually eager to accept CSSE’s guidance. But in the beginning, it was sometimes a harder sell to law enforcement personnel, who generally feared engaging in anything political and didn’t realize how rampant election-related intimidation had become. Smith would help convince them by comparing the need for police engagement in election settings with the need for police in school settings.

There were school shootings before Columbine, but the 1999 tragedy was an “awakening period” during which both law enforcement educators realized they needed to work together to prevent future catastrophes. Similarly, Smith says, “2020 was not the first time we were having problems in elections,” but the scale of chaos from that cycle was a turning point requiring groups like CSSE to help bridge the divides between the various relevant parties.

Barton and Smith’s work is just one part of a growing movement in which individuals are collaborating across professions and party lines to prevent chaos-mongers from affecting people’s constitutional right to vote in 2024. Another nonpartisan organization, the Partnership for Large Election Jurisdictions PLEJ was founded in 2022 to facilitate engagement between election officials who share challenges and, with PLEJ’s help, solutions.

Joe Scott of Broward County is a member of PLEJ, as are 89 more of the largest local election jurisdictions across 33 states. Collectively, the group’s members administer elections for 40 percent of the US electorate. At a September PLEJ panel hosted in Washington, DC, Republican and Democratic election officials from eight states came together to talk about their security plans and structures. Carolina Lopez, the executive director of PLEJ and a member of CSSE, says that the officials often invite each other to their sites to trade tips. “Instead of every little fiefdom building something, we’re putting all of our resources together,” says Lopez.

The fraternization may never have happened so quickly—or at all—if Trump hadn’t repeatedly claimed the 2020 election was stolen from him, provoking people like Andrew Nickels to assail local bureaucrats like Tina Barton. CSSE and PLEJ didn’t exist then, and they do now.

Unfortunately, so do new threats. “I’m actually really hopeful as we go into the 2024 general election,” says Barton. “I’m also cautious.”

Over the past few months, Elon Musk has seemingly done everything in his power to get former President Donald Trump reelected.

On Monday, he debuted another effort: X added a purported “Election Integrity Community”—a feed where users of the site can add instances “of voter fraud or irregularities you see while voting in the 2024 election.” America PAC—the political action committee Musk founded and reportedly sent $75 million—is behind the move. By Tuesday afternoon, the “Election Integrity Community” had 10,000 members.

The crowdsourced space appears meant to replace X’s actual team of people employed to ensure election integrity, which Musk said he disbanded last year. But the channel has already been filled with misinformation.

“Everyone needs to watch the movie 2000 Mules to understand what happened in 2020 and be better prepared for it,” one member posted Monday. The discredited film by right-wing commentator Dinesh D’Souza, 2,000 Mules, is the movie that Trump falsely claimed showed widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. It has since been recalled by its distributor.

Several posters in the X community also have shared a video from NBC Boston alleging ballot fraud—which, as the “community note” points out, is actually from a local election in the city of Lawrence, Massachusetts, last November, and led to two people being indicted on voter fraud charges.

Another video circulating in the community purports to show a poll worker destroying a ballot filled out for Trump—but as fact-checks from Reuters and Politifact explain, the video was made as a joke four years ago by someone who admitted they were not actually an election worker.

As Mother Jones has previously reported, Musk’s other moves have included making legally dubious payments to pro-Trump voters in swing states and sharing anti-Democrat disinformation on X, the platform he owns.

The new channel may sound harmless enough—righteous, even. The problem is that voter fraud is rare—and, as I reported yesterday, the right is using unjustified fears about undocumented immigrants and dead people voting to rile up their base to closely monitor polls in ways that could lead to violence on Election Day.

It’s unclear if Musk’s new initiative has any formal connections to the Republican National Committee’s so-called election integrity initiative, which has recruited 200,000 pro-Trump poll watchers to “establish the battlefield” to challenge the election results should Trump lose, as the New Yorker recently reported. A GOP spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones about whether the party was aware of or connected to Musk’s effort, and X no longer responds to journalists’ questions under Musk’s ownership.

One irony of the new “election integrity” channel is that research has shown Musk and his platform are massive purveyors of election-related disinformation. For example, Grok, the AI-powered search assistant available to premium subscribers on X, falsely told users that Harris declared her candidacy too late to appear on ballots in nine states after President Biden dropped out, prompting five secretaries of state to demand Musk “immediately implement changes” to the tool.

The goal of the new community appears to be helping elect Trump—and reverse-engineering allegations of fraud. One member said the quiet part out loud in a post early Tuesday morning: “Congratulations in advance, Trump.”

Over the past few months, Elon Musk has seemingly done everything in his power to get former President Donald Trump reelected.

On Monday, he debuted another effort: X added a purported “Election Integrity Community”—a feed where users of the site can add instances “of voter fraud or irregularities you see while voting in the 2024 election.” America PAC—the political action committee Musk founded and reportedly sent $75 million—is behind the move. By Tuesday afternoon, the “Election Integrity Community” had 10,000 members.

The crowdsourced space appears meant to replace X’s actual team of people employed to ensure election integrity, which Musk said he disbanded last year. But the channel has already been filled with misinformation.

“Everyone needs to watch the movie 2000 Mules to understand what happened in 2020 and be better prepared for it,” one member posted Monday. The discredited film by right-wing commentator Dinesh D’Souza, 2,000 Mules, is the movie that Trump falsely claimed showed widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. It has since been recalled by its distributor.

Several posters in the X community also have shared a video from NBC Boston alleging ballot fraud—which, as the “community note” points out, is actually from a local election in the city of Lawrence, Massachusetts, last November, and led to two people being indicted on voter fraud charges.

Another video circulating in the community purports to show a poll worker destroying a ballot filled out for Trump—but as fact-checks from Reuters and Politifact explain, the video was made as a joke four years ago by someone who admitted they were not actually an election worker.

As Mother Jones has previously reported, Musk’s other moves have included making legally dubious payments to pro-Trump voters in swing states and sharing anti-Democrat disinformation on X, the platform he owns.

The new channel may sound harmless enough—righteous, even. The problem is that voter fraud is rare—and, as I reported yesterday, the right is using unjustified fears about undocumented immigrants and dead people voting to rile up their base to closely monitor polls in ways that could lead to violence on Election Day.

It’s unclear if Musk’s new initiative has any formal connections to the Republican National Committee’s so-called election integrity initiative, which has recruited 200,000 pro-Trump poll watchers to “establish the battlefield” to challenge the election results should Trump lose, as the New Yorker recently reported. A GOP spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones about whether the party was aware of or connected to Musk’s effort, and X no longer responds to journalists’ questions under Musk’s ownership.

One irony of the new “election integrity” channel is that research has shown Musk and his platform are massive purveyors of election-related disinformation. For example, Grok, the AI-powered search assistant available to premium subscribers on X, falsely told users that Harris declared her candidacy too late to appear on ballots in nine states after President Biden dropped out, prompting five secretaries of state to demand Musk “immediately implement changes” to the tool.

The goal of the new community appears to be helping elect Trump—and reverse-engineering allegations of fraud. One member said the quiet part out loud in a post early Tuesday morning: “Congratulations in advance, Trump.”

After former President Donald Trump’s very weird week, more than 400 doctors and health professionals are questioning his mental and physical fitness to serve, and calling for him to release his medical records.

The development—which Mother Jones is the first to report—comes about a week after the group Doctors for Harris first released the letter, with a little more than half the 448 signatures it has now. Since then, another 200-plus medical professionals have signed on, following a slate of unhinged episodes and nonsensical—even profane—comments from Trump over the past week. As I reported yesterday, highlights included swaying on stage for a half-hour to “Ave Maria,” “Hallelujah,” and “YMCA”; calling himself the “father of IVF”; falsely claiming “nobody died” on January 6 other than Ashli Babbitt and that “there were no guns” among the insurrectionists; and making lewd comments about both his opponent and the late golfer Arnold Palmer’s genitalia.

It’s no wonder, then, that as of Monday afternoon, 448 health professionals have voiced concerns about his fitness for office. “With no recent disclosure of health information from Donald Trump, we are left to extrapolate from public appearances,” their letter states. “And on that front, Trump is falling concerningly short of any standard of fitness for office and displaying alarming characteristics of declining acuity.”

As the letter points out, Trump is 78 years old—though it’s unclear if he realizes that, given that he said he’s “not that close to 80” during a town hall Sunday. His age, the writers argue, makes it all the more necessary he come clean about his state of health. (Biden, after all, is 81.) Trump said in August he would “gladly” release his records, but has yet to do so. The most recent insight we have is a three-paragraph letter he posted to Truth Social in which his personal physician claimed he had lost weight and was in “excellent health.”

“While many older adults are highly functional, age can also come with cognitive changes that affect our ability to function well in complex settings,” the letter says. “We are seeing that from Trump, as he uses his rallies and appearances to ramble, meander, and crudely lash out at his many perceived grievances. He also is notably refusing to give the public the ability to properly vet or scrutinize his capacities.” Earlier this month, Trump dropped out of a scheduled 60 Minutes interview. He has also refused to debate Vice President Kamala Harris a second time.

The doctors portray him as akin to a disgruntled grandpa who says things that embarrass his relatives and needs a check-up: “As we saw in the first presidential debate, Trump is displaying irrationality and irritability. Notably, he ranted about migrants eating people’s cats and dogs. This was widely debunked as untrue.”

“Given his advancing age—if elected again, he would be the oldest president in history by the end of his term—his refusal to disclose even basic health information is a disservice to the American people,” the letter concludes.

The signatories are both Democrats and Republicans and represent 37 states, including several swing states, according to Dr. Alice Chen, a volunteer organizer with Doctors for Harris. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Vice President Kamala Harris released her medical records earlier this month, as my colleague Abby Vesoulis covered. The results were “unremarkable,” the physician said—which is to say, normal. Trump cannot relate.

Update, Oct. 22: This post was updated with more information about the signatories of the letter.

After Elon Musk unveiled a scheme to pay $100 to registered Pennsylvania voters who sign a pro-Trump petition, Democratic officials—and legal experts—are sounding the alarm.

As my colleague Arianna Coghill reported yesterday, Musk made the announcement to his 202 million X followers on Thursday, telling them the offer was valid through midnight on Monday. On top of that, Musk also says he is giving away $1 million a day, every day until the election, to petition signers in swing states. The funds appear to come from the billionaire’s America PAC, which he founded in support of Trump—and reportedly pumped with $75 million.

While the petition does not explicitly mention Trump, its support for his ticket over Vice President Kamala Harris is clear. It tells signatories they are signaling their “support of the Constitution, especially freedom of speech and the right to bear arms.”

Unsurprisingly, officials have concerns.

Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-Pa.) told Kristen Welker of NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, “there are real questions with how he is spending money in this race,” adding, “I think it’s something that law enforcement could take a look at.” (A spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office said officials were aware of the concerns but could not comment on whether they were investigating.)

WATCH: Every day until Election Day, Elon Musk says he’ll give $1M to a voter who has signed his super PAC’s petition “in favor of free speech and the right to bear arms.”@JoshShapiroPA: “That is deeply concerning. … It's something that law enforcement could take a look at." pic.twitter.com/2mZY1b5YaL

— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) October 20, 2024

Meanwhile, Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) told the New York Post in an interview that “Musk is a concern,” adding, “not even just that he has endorsed [Trump], but the fact that now he’s becoming an active participant and showing up and doing rallies and things like that.”

Legal experts went further. Rick Hasen, professor of political science and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law, wrote that Musk’s promises are “clearly illegal,” citing federal election law that prohibits paying for voting or registering to vote, including via lottery. Adav Noti, executive director of the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, told ABC News that the giveaway’s requirement that petition signers be registered voters “violates the federal ban on paying people to register to vote.” (The Department of Justice declined to comment.) Musk does not appear to have publicly replied to the critiques, and X no longer responds to journalists under his ownership.

This is far from the first time that Musk has wielded his absurd levels of wealth and power to try to sway the election in Trump’s favor: As I have reported, research has found that Musk’s sharing of election disinformation racked up billions of views on X.

Update, Oct. 21: This post was updated with a response from the Department of Justice.

Update, Oct. 22: This post was updated with a response from the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office.

After former President Donald Trump’s very weird week, more than 400 doctors and health professionals are questioning his mental and physical fitness to serve, and calling for him to release his medical records.

The development—which Mother Jones is the first to report—comes about a week after the group Doctors for Harris first released the letter, with a little more than half the 448 signatures it has now. Since then, another 200-plus medical professionals have signed on, following a slate of unhinged episodes and nonsensical—even profane—comments from Trump over the past week. As I reported yesterday, highlights included swaying on stage for a half-hour to “Ave Maria,” “Hallelujah,” and “YMCA”; calling himself the “father of IVF”; falsely claiming “nobody died” on January 6 other than Ashli Babbitt and that “there were no guns” among the insurrectionists; and making lewd comments about both his opponent and the late golfer Arnold Palmer’s genitalia.

It’s no wonder, then, that as of Monday afternoon, 448 health professionals have voiced concerns about his fitness for office. “With no recent disclosure of health information from Donald Trump, we are left to extrapolate from public appearances,” their letter states. “And on that front, Trump is falling concerningly short of any standard of fitness for office and displaying alarming characteristics of declining acuity.”

As the letter points out, Trump is 78 years old—though it’s unclear if he realizes that, given that he said he’s “not that close to 80” during a town hall Sunday. His age, the writers argue, makes it all the more necessary he come clean about his state of health. (Biden, after all, is 81.) Trump said in August he would “gladly” release his records, but has yet to do so. The most recent insight we have is a three-paragraph letter he posted to Truth Social in which his personal physician claimed he had lost weight and was in “excellent health.”

“While many older adults are highly functional, age can also come with cognitive changes that affect our ability to function well in complex settings,” the letter says. “We are seeing that from Trump, as he uses his rallies and appearances to ramble, meander, and crudely lash out at his many perceived grievances. He also is notably refusing to give the public the ability to properly vet or scrutinize his capacities.” Earlier this month, Trump dropped out of a scheduled 60 Minutes interview. He has also refused to debate Vice President Kamala Harris a second time.

The doctors portray him as akin to a disgruntled grandpa who says things that embarrass his relatives and needs a check-up: “As we saw in the first presidential debate, Trump is displaying irrationality and irritability. Notably, he ranted about migrants eating people’s cats and dogs. This was widely debunked as untrue.”

“Given his advancing age—if elected again, he would be the oldest president in history by the end of his term—his refusal to disclose even basic health information is a disservice to the American people,” the letter concludes.

The signatories are both Democrats and Republicans and represent 37 states, including several swing states, according to Dr. Alice Chen, a volunteer organizer with Doctors for Harris. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Vice President Kamala Harris released her medical records earlier this month, as my colleague Abby Vesoulis covered. The results were “unremarkable,” the physician said—which is to say, normal. Trump cannot relate.

Update, Oct. 22: This post was updated with more information about the signatories of the letter.

After Elon Musk unveiled a scheme to pay $100 to registered Pennsylvania voters who sign a pro-Trump petition, Democratic officials—and legal experts—are sounding the alarm.

As my colleague Arianna Coghill reported yesterday, Musk made the announcement to his 202 million X followers on Thursday, telling them the offer was valid through midnight on Monday. On top of that, Musk also says he is giving away $1 million a day, every day until the election, to petition signers in swing states. The funds appear to come from the billionaire’s America PAC, which he founded in support of Trump—and reportedly pumped with $75 million.

While the petition does not explicitly mention Trump, its support for his ticket over Vice President Kamala Harris is clear. It tells signatories they are signaling their “support of the Constitution, especially freedom of speech and the right to bear arms.”

Unsurprisingly, officials have concerns.

Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-Pa.) told Kristen Welker of NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, “there are real questions with how he is spending money in this race,” adding, “I think it’s something that law enforcement could take a look at.” (A spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office said officials were aware of the concerns but could not comment on whether they were investigating.)

WATCH: Every day until Election Day, Elon Musk says he’ll give $1M to a voter who has signed his super PAC’s petition “in favor of free speech and the right to bear arms.”@JoshShapiroPA: “That is deeply concerning. … It's something that law enforcement could take a look at." pic.twitter.com/2mZY1b5YaL

— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) October 20, 2024

Meanwhile, Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) told the New York Post in an interview that “Musk is a concern,” adding, “not even just that he has endorsed [Trump], but the fact that now he’s becoming an active participant and showing up and doing rallies and things like that.”

Legal experts went further. Rick Hasen, professor of political science and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law, wrote that Musk’s promises are “clearly illegal,” citing federal election law that prohibits paying for voting or registering to vote, including via lottery. Adav Noti, executive director of the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, told ABC News that the giveaway’s requirement that petition signers be registered voters “violates the federal ban on paying people to register to vote.” (The Department of Justice declined to comment.) Musk does not appear to have publicly replied to the critiques, and X no longer responds to journalists under his ownership.

This is far from the first time that Musk has wielded his absurd levels of wealth and power to try to sway the election in Trump’s favor: As I have reported, research has found that Musk’s sharing of election disinformation racked up billions of views on X.

Update, Oct. 21: This post was updated with a response from the Department of Justice.

Update, Oct. 22: This post was updated with a response from the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office.

At a pair of fundraisers on Tuesday, Gov. Tim Walz called for abolishing the Electoral College. “I think all of us know, the Electoral College needs to go,” he told Democratic donors at the home of California Gov. Gavin Newsom. “We need a national popular vote.”

The Harris campaign said that it did not support Walz’s position and the New York Times wrote that his statement risked “rocking the boat for the Harris campaign as it tries to deliver a message focused on economic concerns, abortion rights and the threat of former President Donald J. Trump.” Trump’s campaign posted on X, “Why does Tampon Tim hate the Constitution so much?”

But the Democratic vice presidential nominee is right—the Electoral College should be abolished. Sixty-three percent of Americans agree with that position, according to a recent Pew Research Center poll.

Here are five reasons why the Electoral College “needs to go”:

It’s fundamentally undemocratic

Every sports fan knows that the team that scores the most points wins the game. But that’s not how America elects its president. The US is the only major democracy where you can lose the popular vote but win the Electoral College (or that even has an Electoral College). Not only is the Electoral College out of step with the rest of the world, no other major elected office in America, at the federal or state level, uses a similar system. It violates the most basic notions of “one person, one vote.”

It excludes the vast majority of Americans from counting

The seven swing states that will decide the 2024 presidential election represent 15 percent of the country’s population. That leaves 85 percent of Americans with little incentive to vote for the nation’s highest office, whether you’re a Republican in California or a Democrat in Tennessee. That impacts down-ballot races as well and depresses voter turnout across the country.

It’s unrepresentative of the country

As I reported in April:

The tiny handful of battleground states are whiter and more Republican than the rest of the country. Eighty-three percent of voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania in the 2020 election were white, according to the New York Times, compared with 69 percent of voters elsewhere. Wisconsin, the tipping-point state in 2020, is also 3.5 points redder than the country as a whole. University of Texas political scientists estimated in 2019 that in a 50–50 popular vote election, the Republican candidate had a 65 percent chance of winning the Electoral College.

It incentivizes election rigging

Joe Biden won the popular vote by 7 million votes in 2020 but carried the three closest states in the Electoral College by just 44,000 votes. Trump never could have attempted to overturn the results—and there would have been no insurrection­—if the United States had a system in which every vote mattered equally in presidential elections.

The system remains dangerously vulnerable to partisan manipulation. Just recently, the Trump campaign tried to change the way Nebraska allocated its electoral votes, which could have led to a tie in the Electoral College, throwing the election to the House and leading to a full-blown constitutional crisis. The plan failed when one Democrat-turned-Republican state senator opposed the move. It’s never a good thing when the fate of American democracy comes down to one state rep from Omaha.

It’s racist and antiquated

Most of the founding fathers, who wanted to protect the power of an elite, white male, propertied minority, opposed the direct election of the president. Both the small states and the slave states argued that a popularly elected president would threaten their influence. As I write in my book Minority Rule, Virginia’s James Madison, the most influential drafter of the Constitution, said at the Constitutional convention that “the people at large was in his opinion the fittest” way to choose the president, according to a record of the debates. But, he added, “there was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes.”

The South would be at a major disadvantage in a popular election, Madison was admitting, because its enslaved population could not vote. Pennsylvania’s James Wilson, who had initially proposed a popular election of the president, then recommended a complicated alternative where electors—either chosen by the states or the voters—would select the president. The number of electors a state received would be based on their representation in both houses of the legislature, which gave a huge boost to the small states because of equal representation in the Senate and to the slave states because of the three-fifths clause in the House. Even though electors now generally follow the will of their state’s voters, the Electoral College remains biased toward the same groups it favored at its inception.

There are two ways to get rid of the Electoral College. A Constitutional amendment requires the support of two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of states, a very heavy lift in today’s polarized political climate. A constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College almost passed in 1970 with huge bipartisan support, but it was filibustered by racist Southern senators who believed that previously disenfranchised Black voters would have more power in a direct popular election.

Then there’s the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, an agreement among states to award their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote. It needs 270 electoral votes to go into effect and currently has the support of states with 209 electoral votes. Last year, Walz signed legislation adding Minnesota to the compact.

He was right then, and he’s right now. Democrats can’t credibly run on protecting American democracy if they continue to support the most undemocratic part of America’s political system.

At a pair of fundraisers on Tuesday, Gov. Tim Walz called for abolishing the Electoral College. “I think all of us know, the Electoral College needs to go,” he told Democratic donors at the home of California Gov. Gavin Newsom. “We need a national popular vote.”

The Harris campaign said that it did not support Walz’s position and the New York Times wrote that his statement risked “rocking the boat for the Harris campaign as it tries to deliver a message focused on economic concerns, abortion rights and the threat of former President Donald J. Trump.” Trump’s campaign posted on X, “Why does Tampon Tim hate the Constitution so much?”

But the Democratic vice presidential nominee is right—the Electoral College should be abolished. Sixty-three percent of Americans agree with that position, according to a recent Pew Research Center poll.

Here are five reasons why the Electoral College “needs to go”:

It’s fundamentally undemocratic

Every sports fan knows that the team that scores the most points wins the game. But that’s not how America elects its president. The US is the only major democracy where you can lose the popular vote but win the Electoral College (or that even has an Electoral College). Not only is the Electoral College out of step with the rest of the world, no other major elected office in America, at the federal or state level, uses a similar system. It violates the most basic notions of “one person, one vote.”

It excludes the vast majority of Americans from counting

The seven swing states that will decide the 2024 presidential election represent 15 percent of the country’s population. That leaves 85 percent of Americans with little incentive to vote for the nation’s highest office, whether you’re a Republican in California or a Democrat in Tennessee. That impacts down-ballot races as well and depresses voter turnout across the country.

It’s unrepresentative of the country

As I reported in April:

The tiny handful of battleground states are whiter and more Republican than the rest of the country. Eighty-three percent of voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania in the 2020 election were white, according to the New York Times, compared with 69 percent of voters elsewhere. Wisconsin, the tipping-point state in 2020, is also 3.5 points redder than the country as a whole. University of Texas political scientists estimated in 2019 that in a 50–50 popular vote election, the Republican candidate had a 65 percent chance of winning the Electoral College.

It incentivizes election rigging

Joe Biden won the popular vote by 7 million votes in 2020 but carried the three closest states in the Electoral College by just 44,000 votes. Trump never could have attempted to overturn the results—and there would have been no insurrection­—if the United States had a system in which every vote mattered equally in presidential elections.

The system remains dangerously vulnerable to partisan manipulation. Just recently, the Trump campaign tried to change the way Nebraska allocated its electoral votes, which could have led to a tie in the Electoral College, throwing the election to the House and leading to a full-blown constitutional crisis. The plan failed when one Democrat-turned-Republican state senator opposed the move. It’s never a good thing when the fate of American democracy comes down to one state rep from Omaha.

It’s racist and antiquated

Most of the founding fathers, who wanted to protect the power of an elite, white male, propertied minority, opposed the direct election of the president. Both the small states and the slave states argued that a popularly elected president would threaten their influence. As I write in my book Minority Rule, Virginia’s James Madison, the most influential drafter of the Constitution, said at the Constitutional convention that “the people at large was in his opinion the fittest” way to choose the president, according to a record of the debates. But, he added, “there was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes.”

The South would be at a major disadvantage in a popular election, Madison was admitting, because its enslaved population could not vote. Pennsylvania’s James Wilson, who had initially proposed a popular election of the president, then recommended a complicated alternative where electors—either chosen by the states or the voters—would select the president. The number of electors a state received would be based on their representation in both houses of the legislature, which gave a huge boost to the small states because of equal representation in the Senate and to the slave states because of the three-fifths clause in the House. Even though electors now generally follow the will of their state’s voters, the Electoral College remains biased toward the same groups it favored at its inception.

There are two ways to get rid of the Electoral College. A Constitutional amendment requires the support of two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of states, a very heavy lift in today’s polarized political climate. A constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College almost passed in 1970 with huge bipartisan support, but it was filibustered by racist Southern senators who believed that previously disenfranchised Black voters would have more power in a direct popular election.

Then there’s the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, an agreement among states to award their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote. It needs 270 electoral votes to go into effect and currently has the support of states with 209 electoral votes. Last year, Walz signed legislation adding Minnesota to the compact.

He was right then, and he’s right now. Democrats can’t credibly run on protecting American democracy if they continue to support the most undemocratic part of America’s political system.

GOP vice presidential nominee JD Vance has a refrain he loves to repeat when he’s questioned about his draconian anti-abortion positions and former President Donald Trump’s plans for reproductive rights: Leave it to the states.

That’s essentially what he said when he faced off against Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz at the vice presidential debate Tuesday night when moderator Norah O’Donnell asked if he would create a federal pregnancy monitoring agency. Vance said he would not create such an agency, but then continued: “The proper way to handle this, as messy as democracy sometimes is, is to let voters make these decisions, let the individual states make their abortion policy.”

In a way, Vance has a point. In every state that has put the question of abortion rights to voters since 2022, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the measure has passed with flying colors. And that includes Vance’s home state of Ohio, as my colleague Madison Pauly previously reported.

But there’s a problem. The GOP keeps trying to sabotage abortion rights ballot measures before they even get to voters. They did so in Ohio last year, by instituting a special election in August to try to raise the threshold to amend the state constitution, as we wrote at the time:

Republicans in the Ohio statehouse tried to change the rules before their constituents get a chance to vote for abortion rights. In May, they passed a resolution forcing a statewide vote on whether to make it harder to pass any future amendments. They claimed their effort, which was largely funded by far-right Illinois billionaire Richard Uihlein, was intended to block interference from “out-of-state special interests.” But they specifically made sure the vote on their proposal took place before the abortion-rights vote in November. To that end, they approved a bill this spring reinstating August special elections—which they had just eliminated on the theory that summer elections were too low turnout to be worth the cost. (“These unnecessary ‘off-cycle’ elections aren’t good for taxpayers, election officials or the civic health of our state. It’s time for them to go!” LaRose, who is running for Senate, had previously argued.) 

The effort—which Vance backed—was not successful. A surprising number of Ohioans turned out and defeated the attempt to stymie the abortion rights ballot measure, which ultimately went before voters in November and passed with a wide margin. Now, abortion access is protected in Ohio until the point of fetal viability—usually around the time of 24-weeks gestation. The law also allows for later-term abortions to protect the pregnant person’s life and health.

The Ohio GOP is not alone in its efforts to undermine ballot measures. As Madison wrote, Missouri Republicans have been unsuccessfully trying to do the same thing to their state’s forthcoming abortion ballot measure, as have the Republicans of South Dakota. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis and his cronies have recently tried to tank their state’s upcoming abortion rights vote, including by potentially breaking the law and reportedly sending police to abortion rights supporters’ homes. As I recently reported:

The state’s health department debuted a webpage spreading misinformation about Amendment 4, a ballot measure appearing in November seeking to override the state’s six-week abortion ban that the Florida Supreme Court approved in April. If it receives the required 60 percent of votes to pass, the amendment would guarantee the right to abortion before the point of so-called fetal viability, which is generally understood to be around 24 weeks gestation. But the state’s new webpage—which DeSantis has since defended as a “public service announcement”—attacks the initiative with a litany of false claims, including that it “threatens women’s safety,” would “eliminate parental consent” for minors seeking abortions, and could “lead to unregulated and unsafe abortions” by allowing people without healthcare expertise to perform the procedure.

Meanwhile, in Kansas, where voters have enshrined abortion rights just two months after Dobbs, Republicans have continually tried to ban the procedure—including by overruling Gov. Laura Kelly’s vetoes of four anti-abortion measures.

If, as Vance suggests, abortion policy should be determined by a democratic process, it would be legal nationwide, which polling shows is the preference of the majority of Americans. But short of that, as Vance says, reproductive rights will be left to the states. And the GOP in those states shows no interest in letting voters have their say without a fight.

GOP vice presidential nominee JD Vance has a refrain he loves to repeat when he’s questioned about his draconian anti-abortion positions and former President Donald Trump’s plans for reproductive rights: Leave it to the states.

That’s essentially what he said when he faced off against Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz at the vice presidential debate Tuesday night when moderator Norah O’Donnell asked if he would create a federal pregnancy monitoring agency. Vance said he would not create such an agency, but then continued: “The proper way to handle this, as messy as democracy sometimes is, is to let voters make these decisions, let the individual states make their abortion policy.”

In a way, Vance has a point. In every state that has put the question of abortion rights to voters since 2022, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the measure has passed with flying colors. And that includes Vance’s home state of Ohio, as my colleague Madison Pauly previously reported.

But there’s a problem. The GOP keeps trying to sabotage abortion rights ballot measures before they even get to voters. They did so in Ohio last year, by instituting a special election in August to try to raise the threshold to amend the state constitution, as we wrote at the time:

Republicans in the Ohio statehouse tried to change the rules before their constituents get a chance to vote for abortion rights. In May, they passed a resolution forcing a statewide vote on whether to make it harder to pass any future amendments. They claimed their effort, which was largely funded by far-right Illinois billionaire Richard Uihlein, was intended to block interference from “out-of-state special interests.” But they specifically made sure the vote on their proposal took place before the abortion-rights vote in November. To that end, they approved a bill this spring reinstating August special elections—which they had just eliminated on the theory that summer elections were too low turnout to be worth the cost. (“These unnecessary ‘off-cycle’ elections aren’t good for taxpayers, election officials or the civic health of our state. It’s time for them to go!” LaRose, who is running for Senate, had previously argued.) 

The effort—which Vance backed—was not successful. A surprising number of Ohioans turned out and defeated the attempt to stymie the abortion rights ballot measure, which ultimately went before voters in November and passed with a wide margin. Now, abortion access is protected in Ohio until the point of fetal viability—usually around the time of 24-weeks gestation. The law also allows for later-term abortions to protect the pregnant person’s life and health.

The Ohio GOP is not alone in its efforts to undermine ballot measures. As Madison wrote, Missouri Republicans have been unsuccessfully trying to do the same thing to their state’s forthcoming abortion ballot measure, as have the Republicans of South Dakota. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis and his cronies have recently tried to tank their state’s upcoming abortion rights vote, including by potentially breaking the law and reportedly sending police to abortion rights supporters’ homes. As I recently reported:

The state’s health department debuted a webpage spreading misinformation about Amendment 4, a ballot measure appearing in November seeking to override the state’s six-week abortion ban that the Florida Supreme Court approved in April. If it receives the required 60 percent of votes to pass, the amendment would guarantee the right to abortion before the point of so-called fetal viability, which is generally understood to be around 24 weeks gestation. But the state’s new webpage—which DeSantis has since defended as a “public service announcement”—attacks the initiative with a litany of false claims, including that it “threatens women’s safety,” would “eliminate parental consent” for minors seeking abortions, and could “lead to unregulated and unsafe abortions” by allowing people without healthcare expertise to perform the procedure.

Meanwhile, in Kansas, where voters have enshrined abortion rights just two months after Dobbs, Republicans have continually tried to ban the procedure—including by overruling Gov. Laura Kelly’s vetoes of four anti-abortion measures.

If, as Vance suggests, abortion policy should be determined by a democratic process, it would be legal nationwide, which polling shows is the preference of the majority of Americans. But short of that, as Vance says, reproductive rights will be left to the states. And the GOP in those states shows no interest in letting voters have their say without a fight.

In June, Ohio held a special election to fill an open congressional seat in a district that voted 72 percent for Donald Trump in 2020.

On Election Day, former Ohio Supreme Court Justice Maureen O’Connor drove the length of the sprawling 200-mile district, which Republicans drew two years ago to dilute the influence of Democratic voters and boost their own power. Crisscrossing 11 counties and four media markets, she started at the fairgrounds in rural Marietta, on the West Virginia border; followed the Ohio River through the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains; stopped in Steubenville, near Pennsylvania; and ended at a polling site in urban Youngstown.

Although Democrats performed much better than expected, the outcome of the race was never in doubt. GOP state Sen. Michael Rulli, a grocery store owner who called himself “the Trump candidate,” won easily. “This was drawn to make the 6th Congressional District as favorable to a Republican as possible,” a dismayed O’Connor said after. “That’s the definition of gerrymandering.”

O’Connor, 73, has short gray hair and an affinity for pearls, with the tough, no-nonsense demeanor of a former prosecutor. She’s been a Republican for four decades, serving as the first female chief justice in Ohio and the longest-tenured female statewide politician. But, now retired, she was traveling the state like a Johnny Appleseed for democracy, rallying voters against gerrymandering and taking on leaders of her own party, who have aggressively used the tactic to give Republicans lopsided majorities in the legislature and the state’s US House delegation. (Nationally, gerrymandering gives Republicans an advantage of 16 House seats, according a new report by the Brennan Center for Justice.) She was visiting the 6th District to collect signatures for an initiative on the November ballot that would create a citizens redistricting commission to draw district maps free from political interference. “The system doesn’t work because of the involvement of the politicians,” O’Connor told me. “Let’s get politicians out of the mix and return that power, like it was at the beginning of the country, to ‘we the people.’”

“This is part of a larger story of whether we truly have a representative democracy and how the rules are being written in a way where people don’t have as much of a say. And so the response has been people turning to the ballot measure process.”

Half of all states allow citizens to place constitutional amendments and other initiatives on the ballot, and the importance of direct democracy extends well beyond Ohio. The initiative and referendum process originated at the turn of the 20th century, when Jim Crow was firmly entrenched in the South and robber barons held sway over much of the North and West, leading to growing complaints that democratic institutions were no longer responsive to popular demands. “I believe in the initiative and the referendum, which should be used not to destroy representative government, but to correct it whenever it becomes misrepresentative,” former President Teddy Roosevelt said when he visited Columbus, Ohio, in 1912 to endorse an effort to amend the state’s constitution through ballot initiatives.

Direct democracy does not always lead to good public policy—see Brexit, for example. Special interests and ideologues have often hijacked the ballot initiative process, putting complicated issues before voters that could be better handled by the legislature. But in hyper-gerrymandered states like Ohio, the only way to ensure that the will of the majority is followed is to override representative democracy and go directly to the people. This strategy has taken on renewed urgency in response to recent US Supreme Court decisions taking away fundamental rights, from the gutting of the Voting Rights Act to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. These initiatives can garner support across party lines in a way that is otherwise impossible in a highly polarized partisan political climate.

Since the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, seven states have voted directly on abortion, and in all seven—red and blue alike—abortion-rights advocates have won. This year, voters in 10 states, a record number, will vote on whether to enshrine protections for reproductive rights, including in battlegrounds such as Arizona, Florida, Montana, and Nevada. “Dobbs gave people a real clear example of rights that we thought were guaranteed not being secure,” says Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, executive director of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center (BISC), a progressive advocacy group. “Right now, in a number of states, this is the only way to protect reproductive rights.”

This election cycle, voters will weigh in on 153 statewide measures, including 57 initiated by citizens, according to BISC. In addition to fighting gerrymandering and protecting reproductive rights, they will have the opportunity to adopt ranked-choice voting (Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon), enshrine no-excuse absentee voting (Connecticut), protect marriage equality (California, Colorado, Hawaii), and raise the minimum wage (Alaska, California, Massachusetts, Missouri).

Not all these measures will lead to progressive policies. State-level Republicans are also using the initiative process to advance their own priorities, such as tougher immigration laws, private school vouchers, and new voting restrictions. Meanwhile, they are also pushing proposals that would make it harder for citizen-led groups to get future initiatives on the ballot.

At a time when so much attention is focused on the presidential race, what happens at the frequently overlooked bottom of the ballot will be just as consequential. If Trump regains power, states will become the last line of defense for protecting fundamental rights. And if Kamala Harris wins and Democrats recapture both houses of Congress, the states can once again become “laboratories of democracy,” in the words of former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, showing how to regain freedoms that have been ripped away by Republicans in Washington and a regressive Supreme Court.

“This is part of a larger story of whether we truly have a representative democracy and how the rules are being written in a way where people don’t have as much of a say,” Fields Figueredo says. “And so the response has been people turning to the ballot measure process where they can to make decisions that govern their lives.”

The fight against gerrymandering is personal for O’Connor.

In 2015, 71 percent of Ohio voters approved the creation of a redistricting commission that was supposed to stop gerrymandering in the state. It included the state’s most powerful politicians—the governor, secretary of state, auditor, and leaders of the state legislature—and tasked them with ending “the partisan process” for drawing state legislative maps. Three years later, an even larger percentage of Ohio voters approved a similar initiative applying to congressional districts.

But when Republicans on the commission, which had a 5–2 GOP majority, drew new legislative maps after the 2020 census, they flagrantly ignored this assignment. The lines they approved gave Republicans a supermajority in both chambers of the legislature—67 percent of seats in the state House and 69 percent in the state Senate. GOP members of the commission laughably asserted that because Republicans had won 13 of the past 16 statewide elections, they were entitled to up to 81 percent of legislative seats, even though Republican candidates hadn’t gotten anywhere close to that percentage of votes statewide.

Under O’Connor’s leadership, the Ohio Supreme Court did not buy that argument. By a 4–3 vote, it struck down the maps in January 2022; O’Connor joined her Democratic colleagues to cast the deciding vote.

But Republicans on the redistricting commission, instead of following the court’s orders, kept defying them—not once, but seven times. Every time the court struck down a gerrymandered map, Republicans passed a new one, until a separate federal court stepped in and said there was no time to rectify the gerrymandering before the 2022 election, forcing Ohioans to vote in districts that had been deemed illegal over and over. With a legislative supermajority, “we can kind of do what we want,” bragged commission member Matt Huffman, the Republican state Senate president. And they did, passing one extreme policy after another, from a six-week abortion ban to a bill allowing Ohioans to carry a concealed handgun practically anywhere without a permit or background check to stripping the Republican governor and his health director of the authority to manage the Covid-19 pandemic. Some far-right members of the legislature even floated impeaching O’Connor.

O’Connor grew up as one of eight kids in an Irish Catholic family in suburban Cleveland and rose through the ranks of Ohio politics, from county prosecutor to lieutenant governor, before joining the court in 2002 and becoming chief justice in 2011. She was known for her blunt manner and maverick streak, bucking her party on issues like abortion and criminal justice reform. “When I first met her, I was a bit scared of her, too,” joked former Ohio Supreme Court Justice Yvette McGee Brown, “and the reputation is well-deserved.” In a concurring opinion in the gerrymandering case, O’Connor made clear her disappointment with the GOP-led redistricting commission and outlined how Ohioans could reform the process.

“Having now seen first-hand that the current Ohio Redistricting Commission—comprised of statewide elected officials and partisan legislators—is seemingly unwilling to put aside partisan concerns as directed by the people’s vote, Ohioans may opt to pursue further constitutional amendment to replace the current commission with a truly independent, nonpartisan commission that more effectively distances the redistricting process from partisan politics,” she wrote.

At the end of 2022, O’Connor was forced to retire from the court at age 71 due to term limits. A more conservative justice replaced her, shifting the court’s Republican majority well to the right and ensuring that the gerrymandered legislative maps would not be struck down again. Days after leaving the bench, O’Connor channeled her anger into action, leading a new group, Citizens Not Politicians, in a bid to create what she had called for in her opinion—a citizens redistricting commission divided equally among Democrats, Independents, and Republicans.

Citizens Not Politicians submitted 535,000 valid signatures in July to qualify for the ballot, and this November, Ohio voters could finally end gerrymandering once and for all. “This is the most important thing I’ve ever done,” O’Connor says.

Supporters of the initiative argue that it will bring Ohio’s legislature and US House delegation more in line with the rest of the state, which leans toward Trump and hometown running mate JD Vance, but is more purple than deep red, with a few Democrats, like US Sen. Sherrod Brown, still able to win statewide office.

“It would change the state in a huge way, not because it means Democrats are going to have some guaranteed majority,” says David Pepper, former chair of the Ohio Democratic Party and author of Laboratories of Autocracy: A Wake-Up Call From Behind the Lines. “What it will mean is a majority that generally leans Republican, quite close, reflecting Ohio’s closeness, but most importantly, because you have the safety valve of fair districts and competitive races, the driving force of Ohio politics will not be the extremists in the statehouse.”

The pushback against direct democracy has been just as fervent as the push for it.

In August 2023, Republicans in the Ohio Legislature forced a vote on a ballot initiative, known as Issue 1, that would have made it much harder to pass future initiatives. It called for changing the threshold for passing a ballot measure from a simple majority vote to a 60 percent supermajority, and it required organizers to gather signatures from 5 percent of voters in all of the state’s 88 counties instead of the 44 currently needed. Republicans scheduled the vote in the dead of summer, when many people were on vacation and students were out of town, to try to sneak it through with little public scrutiny.

That move was part of a larger trend. In 2017, BISC tracked 33 bills seeking to alter the ballot measure process. In 2023, lawmakers in 39 states introduced 165 bills to change the process, 76 of which sought to restrict or undermine initiatives. “After the Dobbs decision, conservatives in Republican-trifecta states have doubled down on trying to undermine the will of the people,” Fields Figueredo says.

“You put very sexy things like abortion and marijuana on the ballot, and a lot of young people come out and vote,” former Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Rick Santorum complained.

Republicans claimed the 2023 Ohio initiative was meant to stop “out-of-state special interests,” but one legislator admitted privately that it was designed to preempt passage of an abortion-rights measure that had qualified for the November 2023 ballot, as well as O’Connor’s redistricting reform effort. And, in fact, “out-of-state special interests” were the very people behind the GOP effort. The largest individual donor to the Issue 1 cause was far-right Illinois megadonor Richard Uihlein, who helped bankroll the “Save America” rally that preceded the January 6 insurrection and has funded scores of candidates and groups promoting election denialism. When the bill received a ­hearing­ in the legislature, the only person who testified in favor of it was a representative from a little-known think tank in Florida, the Foundation for Government Accountability, that received nearly $18 million from Uihlein. The foundation, which has led the behind-the-scenes push to limit direct democracy around the country, is affiliated with the State Policy Network, an alliance of conservative think tanks, and it has received more than $5 million from the dark-money network led by Federalist Society Co-Chair Leonard Leo.

The Republicans’ gambit in Ohio backfired spectacularly. The anti-initiative initiative was defeated with 57 percent of the vote, and that November, Ohioans passed new measures enshrining the right to abortion in the state constitution and legalizing recreational marijuana by similarly decisive margins. “You put very sexy things like abortion and marijuana on the ballot, and a lot of young people come out and vote,” former Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Rick Santorum complained afterward.

But the popularity of direct democracy in Ohio hasn’t stopped Republicans from continuing to try to undermine it. After the Citizens Not Politicians initiative qualified for the ballot this year, the Ohio Ballot Board, which like the redistricting commission has a Republican majority, grossly misrepresented the intention of the measure. The summary of the ballot initiative adopted by the board implied the measure would encourage partisan gerrymandering rather than curb it, claiming the initiative would “repeal constitutional protections against gerrymandering” and “manipulate the boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts to favor the two largest political parties in the state of Ohio.” Shortly thereafter, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) came to Ohio to raise money for the campaign working to defeat the anti-gerrymandering initiative.

Citizens Not Politicians immediately sued the ballot board, asking the Ohio Supreme Court to block the “biased, inaccurate, deceptive, and unconstitutional ballot language.” The board’s chair, GOP Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who lost the GOP primary for US Senate in 2024, is a member of the redistricting commission that repeatedly voted for the state’s gerrymandered maps and previously voiced support for impeaching O’Connor. He was also a leading proponent of the effort to make it harder to amend the Ohio Constitution, which he admitted was “100 percent about keeping a radical pro-abortion amendment out of our constitution.”

Republicans are using the initiative process to undermine voting rights in other ways, too. Republican-controlled legislatures have placed initiatives on the ballot in eight states mandating that only US citizens can vote in state elections.

“The self-dealing politicians who have rigged the legislative maps now want to rig the Nov. 5 election by illegally manipulating the ballot language,” O’Connor said in a statement at the time. On September 17, in a 4-3 decision, the conservative majority on the Ohio Supreme Court upheld the bulk of the board’s ballot summary.

That’s indicative of how Republicans across the country are responding to citizen-­initiated measures they don’t like. Take Arizona, where voters will consider an initiative that would repeal the state’s near-total abortion ban and establish a constitutional right to the procedure. The Republican-led legislature put 11 of its own initiatives on the ballot, which supporters of abortion rights call a “voter exhaustion tactic.”

Some of them are particularly egregious. After the Arizona Supreme Court reinstated an abortion ban dating back to 1864 earlier this year, abortion-rights supporters targeted two of the justices for removal at the ballot box. So the legislature placed a referendum on the ballot that would eliminate six-year terms for Supreme Court justices and allow them to serve indefinitely if they adhere to “good behavior.” It would apply retroactively to October 31, meaning that if voters decide not to retain the anti-choice justices but also approve the initiative eliminating fixed terms, the judicial election will be effectively nullified.

At the same time, Arizona Republicans are trying to impose new obstacles to getting future citizen-led initiatives on the ballot, like Ohio Republicans attempted last year, following the playbook developed by the Foundation for Government Accountability and the right’s dark-money network. Currently, voters must collect signatures equal to 10 or 15 percent of the vote in the last gubernatorial election to place a statute or constitutional amendment on the ballot. But another referendum advanced by the legislature would require organizers to collect that number of signatures in all the state’s 30 legislative districts, essentially allowing voters in just one district to veto the wishes of the other 29.

A similar law passed in Arkansas last year, increasing the number of counties in which initiative supporters must collect signatures from 15 to 50 of the state’s 75 counties. Voters rejected a nearly identical proposal in 2020, introduced after initiatives raising the minimum wage and legalizing medical marijuana passed over the objections of GOP lawmakers. Arkansas Republicans also blocked an initiative this year that would have overturned the state’s near-­total abortion ban, with the state Supreme Court disqualifying it from appearing on the November ballot because it said organizers did not properly submit an obscure bit of paperwork.

Utah Republicans have gone even further, asking voters to give the legislature the explicit power to undermine the will of the voters. In 2018, Utah voters, like in Ohio, passed a measure creating an independent redistricting commission to draw new legislative maps and ban partisan gerrymandering. But Utah Republicans passed a new bill that effectively repealed the initiative and drew a map that divided Salt Lake City among all four of the state’s congressional districts to prevent Democrats from winning any of them. After the Utah Supreme Court ruled in July that the legislature had violated the state constitution, Republicans authorized a new ballot initiative asking voters to grant the legislature the authority to amend or repeal citizen-led initiatives. Democratic leaders called it a “blatant power grab.”

Republicans were hoping to convince voters to side against their own interests by including a provision banning foreign entities from donating to initiative campaigns, even though legislative leaders could not cite any evidence of that occurring. But as in Ohio, the move to erode direct democracy backfired on Republicans. On September 25, the Utah Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the measure violated the state constitution and votes for it would not be counted in November.

Republicans are using the initiative process to undermine voting rights in other ways, too. Republican-controlled legislatures have placed initiatives on the ballot in eight states mandating that only US citizens can vote in state elections. The proposals, developed based on model legislation drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, which connects corporations with conservative state legislators, furthers Trump’s lie that noncitizens are illegally voting in US elections, and could lay the groundwork for future restrictions on ballot access.

When voters have used the initiative process to expand voting rights, Republicans have frequently gutted those efforts. The most notable instance occurred in Florida, where 65 percent of voters in 2018 approved Amendment 4, repealing one of the country’s worst felon-disenfranchisement laws, dating back to Jim Crow. But months later, the GOP-controlled legislature passed another law requiring ex-offenders to pay off all fines, fees, and restitution before casting a ballot, which prevented about 700,000 people from voting even after they had served their time. Voting-rights advocates called it a “modern-day poll tax.” In a highly publicized crackdown on voter fraud that seemed designed to have a chilling effect on voter participation, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ election police force arrested 20 ex-offenders, even though some had no idea they were ineligible to vote. (More recently, the election police force has gone door to door questioning the signatures of people who supported putting an abortion­-rights referendum on the ballot.)

The Amendment 4 fight showed how passing a ballot measure is one thing, but successfully implementing it is another struggle altogether. State and federal supreme courts regularly rule on their constitutionality, and state legislatures often seek to undermine or repeal them.

“Republicans voted for a number of these ballot measures and then went on to vote for candidates that don’t support reproductive rights,” Fields Figueredo of BISC says of abortion-rights initiatives that have passed since Dobbs. “This year, folks are having to do more work to make that connection. To make sure the will of the people is heard, we need to have people in governing power to follow through on what voters did.”

Democrats plan to draw attention to ballot initiatives in 2024 as a way not just to boost turnout for the top of the ticket, but to emphasize the importance of down-ballot races that tend to receive little attention but go hand in hand with the initiative process. That’s a tricky balancing act, because if Democrats promote the initiatives too aggressively, it could limit their bipartisan appeal.

In Ohio, supporters are bullish that the anti-gerrymandering initiative will pass—and survive legislative and judicial attempts to kill it. “Would you rather have citizens draw the maps than the politicians?” asks Pepper, the former Democratic Party chair. “That contrast strikes a really strong chord.”

While top Republicans in Ohio view O’Connor as a Liz Cheney-esque figure, a former leading light of the GOP establishment who became an apostate, she has no regrets about taking on powerful forces in her own party for the good of democracy. “I’m not going to let these misguided, self-serving politicians define what kind of Republican I am,” she says.

It appears that even the Trump campaign wants the former president to keep quiet.

That’s according to a story published by Politico this morning, which alleges that the Trump campaign is locked in a disagreement with the Harris campaign over microphone rules at the presidential debate on September 10, specifically over whether they should stay live throughout the debate. Politico reports that the Harris campaign wants the mics on, reportedly because they believe it will give Trump a chance to embarrass himself; Trump’s team is reportedly pushing for muted mics, which they say were the terms they agreed to when the debate was scheduled with President Biden before he dropped out.

In a post on X, Brian Fallon, the Harris campaign’s senior adviser for communications, encouraged Trump to “reject his handlers’ attempts to muzzle him via a muted microphone.”

Trump should honor his commitment to debate VP Harris on ABC on Sept 10 and he should reject his handlers’ attempts to muzzle him via a muted microphone.

The VP is ready to debate Trump live and uncensored. Trump should stop hiding behind the mute buttonhttps://t.co/Ym35j4cNKj

— Brian Fallon (@brianefallon) August 26, 2024

It looks like Fallon may have been right: Later on Monday, Trump told an NBC News reporter who had asked him about reports of the microphone dispute that it “doesn’t matter to me—I’d rather have it probably on.”

.@jake__traylor: "Would you want the microphones muted in the debate whenever you're not speaking?"

Donald Trump: "We agreed to the same rules. I don't know, doesn't matter to me. … The agreement was that it would be the same as it was last time. In that case, it was muted." pic.twitter.com/l7d7Odd7cb

— NBC Politics (@NBCPolitics) August 26, 2024

“Always suspected it was something his staff wanted, not him personally,” Fallon posted on X over a video of the exchange. “With this resolved, everything is now set for Sept 10th.”

Spokespeople for the Trump campaign and ABC News, the network set to host the debate, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Jason Miller, senior adviser for Trump, alleged to Politico that the Harris campaign was “looking for a way to get out of any debate with President Trump,” and claimed the Harris campaign wanted both candidates to be seated with access to notes during the debate—which Fallon denied.

But it seems that Trump is the candidate hoping to avoid a debate. In a Truth Social tirade Sunday night, Trump alleged, without evidence, that ABC was biased and questioned whether he would take part in the debate, though he did not mention anything about the microphone controversy.

Harris, on the other hand, appears ready to go: “The VP is ready to debate Trump live and uncensored,” Fallon posted on X. “Trump should stop hiding behind the mute button.”

It appears that even the Trump campaign wants the former president to keep quiet.

That’s according to a story published by Politico this morning, which alleges that the Trump campaign is locked in a disagreement with the Harris campaign over microphone rules at the presidential debate on September 10, specifically over whether they should stay live throughout the debate. Politico reports that the Harris campaign wants the mics on, reportedly because they believe it will give Trump a chance to embarrass himself; Trump’s team is reportedly pushing for muted mics, which they say were the terms they agreed to when the debate was scheduled with President Biden before he dropped out.

In a post on X, Brian Fallon, the Harris campaign’s senior adviser for communications, encouraged Trump to “reject his handlers’ attempts to muzzle him via a muted microphone.”

Trump should honor his commitment to debate VP Harris on ABC on Sept 10 and he should reject his handlers’ attempts to muzzle him via a muted microphone.

The VP is ready to debate Trump live and uncensored. Trump should stop hiding behind the mute buttonhttps://t.co/Ym35j4cNKj

— Brian Fallon (@brianefallon) August 26, 2024

It looks like Fallon may have been right: Later on Monday, Trump told an NBC News reporter who had asked him about reports of the microphone dispute that it “doesn’t matter to me—I’d rather have it probably on.”

.@jake__traylor: "Would you want the microphones muted in the debate whenever you're not speaking?"

Donald Trump: "We agreed to the same rules. I don't know, doesn't matter to me. … The agreement was that it would be the same as it was last time. In that case, it was muted." pic.twitter.com/l7d7Odd7cb

— NBC Politics (@NBCPolitics) August 26, 2024

“Always suspected it was something his staff wanted, not him personally,” Fallon posted on X over a video of the exchange. “With this resolved, everything is now set for Sept 10th.”

Spokespeople for the Trump campaign and ABC News, the network set to host the debate, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Jason Miller, senior adviser for Trump, alleged to Politico that the Harris campaign was “looking for a way to get out of any debate with President Trump,” and claimed the Harris campaign wanted both candidates to be seated with access to notes during the debate—which Fallon denied.

But it seems that Trump is the candidate hoping to avoid a debate. In a Truth Social tirade Sunday night, Trump alleged, without evidence, that ABC was biased and questioned whether he would take part in the debate, though he did not mention anything about the microphone controversy.

Harris, on the other hand, appears ready to go: “The VP is ready to debate Trump live and uncensored,” Fallon posted on X. “Trump should stop hiding behind the mute button.”