On Tuesday, exactly two weeks after the November 5 election, the Republican-controlled legislature in North Carolina reconvened in Raleigh, ostensibly to pass disaster relief for areas affected by Hurricane Helene. But, with no public notice, they snuck provisions into the bill stripping power from the state’s incoming Democratic governor and attorney general and dramatically changing how elections are administered. The bill passed the state House Tuesday night, just hours after it was publicly released, and is expected to be approved by the state Senate on Wednesday.

“It’s a massive power grab,” says Melissa Price Kromm, executive director of the pro-democracy group North Carolina for the People Action. “They didn’t like what happened in the election, and they want to overturn the will of the people. That’s not how democracy is supposed to work.”

Though Trump carried North Carolina, Democrats won five statewide offices—governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, secretary of state, and school superintendent. They narrowly lead in a pivotal state Supreme Court race that is headed to a recount.

Democrats also broke the GOP’s supermajority in the state legislature, which they had held due to extreme gerrymandering. This means that unlike in previous sessions, come January, Republicans will no longer be able to override the vetoes of the state’s incoming Democratic governor, Josh Stein, who easily defeated scandal-plagued Republican candidate Lieutenant Gov. Mark Robinson.

So, in a lame-duck session, Republicans preemptively stripped power from these Democratic officials before they are sworn in.

Most notably, the bill prevents the governor from appointing members of the state election board and transfers that authority to the state auditor, who, for the first time in more than a decade, is a Republican. Under North Carolina law, the governor, a position held by Democrat Roy Cooper for the past eight years, appoints a majority of members on the state election board and county election boards. The auditor will now have that authority, giving Republicans the power to appoint majorities on the state board and 100 county election boards.

These appointments will likely have major ramifications for elections in the state. The state board administers elections and issues guidance to county officials, who in turn have the power to decide where polling places go and the number of early voting locations. In addition, both the county and state boards must certify election outcomes. That raises the possibility that the new bill will enable Republicans to cut back on voting access and refuse to certify election results should a Democrat narrowly win. Price Kromm noted that the bill was introduced only one day after results showed Democratic Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs leading her GOP opponent by just 623 votes after trailing by more than 10,000 votes on election night.

“Legislators have put forward a bill that fails to provide real support to communities hit hard by Hurricane Helene and instead prioritizes more power grabs in Raleigh,” Cooper said in a statement.

For years, Republicans have been trying to prevent Democratic governors from appointing a majority of election board members, but they have repeatedly been blocked by voters and the courts. So now they have bypassed the precedent and handed the power over to the state auditor—a position with no expertise or previous authority in elections.

“This makes no logical sense other than he has an R next to his name.”

“No other state has that,” says Price Kromm. “This makes no logical sense other than he has an R next to his name.”

Other Democratic officials will also see their power stripped under the new legislation. The bill prevents the state’s incoming attorney general, Jeff Jackson, from filing lawsuits that contradict the positions of the legislature or joining lawsuits that originate in other states or with private actors, which state attorneys general frequently do.

The bill also changes the composition of the state courts. It eliminates two judicial seats held by judges who ruled against the legislature in voting rights cases and creates two new judicial positions that will be appointed by the GOP legislature. And, it specifies that the governor can only fill judicial vacancies with members of the same party, which would prevent Stein from appointing a Democratic judge to fill the position of an outgoing Republican judge.

This is not the first time Republicans have convened a lame-duck session to strip power from Democrats—and not just in North Carolina. They did so when Cooper beat Republican Gov. Pat McCrory, preventing him from appointing members to boards of University of North Carolina schools, restricting the number of state employees he could hire or fire, and subjecting all of his nominations to confirmation by the GOP-controlled state Senate, which was not previously required.  

Back in 2018, after Democratic Gov. Tony Evers defeated Republican Scott Walker in Wisconsin, Republicans also held a lame-duck session before Christmas to strip Evers of power and pass new laws making it harder to vote. Democrats called it a soft coup, and Evers viewed it as a precursor to the January 6 insurrection. “There hasn’t been a peaceful transition of power,” he told me.

The latest power grab in North Carolina could foreshadow the next few years in Washington under GOP control—and how the Republican Party’s antidemocratic tendencies have become more institutionalized, going much deeper than Trump. As Price Kromm puts it, “It’s batshit crazy down here right now.”

It can be challenging to manage the symptoms of a disability or chronic illness during a long workday. For disabled and chronically ill poll workers, Election Day—which can mean 14-hour shifts—certainly takes the cake.

Being a poll worker can be a meaningful civic duty for those who participate. Disabled poll workers are also crucial: They understand the importance of making sure disabled voters’ access needs are met—11 percent of disabled people had trouble voting during the 2020 presidential election, according to the Election Assistance Commission. It’s unclear just how many poll workers have a disability, but in addition to long days, concerns about the job’s impact on Social Security benefits may hinder some.

After last week’s election, I spoke with four poll workers about how the day went for them.

Allison Kukla: Chicago, Illinois

Kukla lives with epilepsy and has focal impaired awareness seizures.

I’ve been a poll worker for a couple of years now. I’ve always been politically engaged. I previously worked in President Obama’s administration, and I always want a way to give back to the community.

I brought a seizure first-aid poster with me so that I could educate my fellow poll workers if anything were to happen—here’s how you handle a seizure—and educated them on my seizure type. I also had my partner’s contact information in there, in case anything were to happen. I wanted to make sure they were comfortable.

One of my roles was doing the ADA accessibility checklist that the Chicago Department of Elections has, where you have to go through and make sure the accessible voting machine has a certain radius around it for people in wheelchairs to be able to maneuver, and also have certain cones and signage up around accessibility. I’m happy to take on this role to make sure our polling location is ADA-accessible. People with disabilities and chronic conditions have a different perspective and might think of things other people do not.

Kira Wills: Providence, Rhode Island

Wills lives with fibromyalgia, hemiplegic migraine, essential tremor, and spinocerebellar ataxia.

I have the time, and I know how important elections are. It was my second time doing it, this time with my daughter—I had done it in September, and the polling place, a community center, was the one that my grandparents were founding members of. So us being there together, with my grandparents in a mural in the building, was that much more poignant to me.

My daughter was really vigilant about letting everyone know, no matter what, that they would be able to use an accessible voting machine. There were more than 35 people who used it. Some of them had a visible disability, some for an auditory disability, and for others, it was a language difference. Some people had surgery, and the height is what made it accessible to them because they were in a wheelchair.

Four people were there from the Office of Civil Rights. We did have bilingual poll workers there for Spanish and English, including me, to help out with things, and people from the Office of Civil Rights did stand back to be able to hear how we were checking people in with their IDs, making sure to verify their address and their name, but in a way that was still respectful and clear for people. I was very proud to be able to facilitate such an important process and make them feel welcome.

Taryn Balwinski: Chattanooga, Tennessee

Balwinski lives with cerebral palsy.

This is my very first time being a poll worker. This year, I didn’t volunteer with a candidate, so I really wanted to be involved in the election in some way or form. I worked over 13 hours straight.

My significant other was telling one of his co-workers that I was going to be an election poll worker, and his co-worker happened to know that I have a disability and that I’m in a wheelchair. His response, word for word, was, “Wow. They let them work.” I forget that some people just blatantly do not understand that people with disabilities work and are out in the community.

At our polling station, each person that came in to vote was given a piece of paper, and they had to put their name and address on it, and when they got to our station, there were like five different things we had to write on the paper. That just surprised me, because whenever I go to vote, I show my ID and they have a paper that already has my name and address on it.

I can see why that might be a literacy issue for a lot of people, and it really troubled me—I didn’t realize that was something that people voting at that location had to do until the day I was working.

Veronica Ayala: Galveston, Texas

Ayala lives with cerebral palsy and arthritis.

In 2008, I was inspired by the Obama campaign to really get involved, more so than before. I got a call from my aunt, who’d always been an election worker, because I speak Spanish, and they needed interpreters—she asked me if I would be willing to become an interpreter at the election.

One of the Republican election judges actually approached me and was like, why aren’t you a judge for your party? I thought my disability would hold me back from being a judge. There’s a lot of equipment and things like that the judges are responsible for. I’m like, “There’s no way I can lug that stuff.” She’s like, “They have people that would do that for you.”

We don’t do it in shifts like people think we do. I try to hydrate as best I can. I sit for too long helping with provisional ballots. It can be detrimental to my joints if I don’t get up and stretch and things like that, so I move at a snail’s pace. If I didn’t think I could do this job, I wouldn’t. The county calls me back every time, so I must be doing something right.

I’m a person with a disability. You may not be able to tell, but when I get up and move, you can tell. Knowing that someone with a disability is in that location makes them more comfortable with the idea of coming in and exercising their right to vote, because someone in there understands and will help them cast their ballot in a safe, secure way without any judgment.

Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

Disabled and chronically ill voters: What was your experience casting a ballot in person, either this week or in early voting?

Civil and voting rights protections like the Voting Rights Act and the Americans With Disabilities Act are supposed to protect disabled people’s right to vote in person, which means having the right accommodations: wheelchair-accessible entrances; lower voting booths; and chairs for people who have trouble standing for long periods. But polling stations often fall short, in both Democratic- and Republican-leaning areas.

Disabled and chronically ill voters: What was your experience casting a ballot in person, either this week or in early voting?@metraux_julia on voting access pic.twitter.com/D1Pck8tSmv

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) November 9, 2024

Disabled people don’t all have the same preferences—or needs—when it comes to voting. Some people with fatiguing conditions like Long Covid may prefer mail voting to conserve energy and minimize Covid exposure; some Blind people may prefer to vote in person in order to cast an unassisted ballot with an accessible voting machine.

As I wrote for Mother Jones in April:

Counties are responsible for choosing the locations where their residents vote. The right response to inaccessible voting locations is not to have fewer of them—polling place closures disproportionately impact voters of color—but to find more locations that are accessible. The Department of Justice also provides guidance on temporary solutions to make sure disabled people can vote, such as installing a ramp and keeping doors propped open…As of now, no state mandates that poll workers be trained in accommodating disabled voters.

What may be accessible to some disabled people may not be for others. That’s why it’s crucial to move towards more accessible options both in-person and by mail—mail-in voting with paper ballots isn’t accessible, for example, to people who are Blind and have low vision, the subject of a lawsuit filed in Wisconsin…arguing that disabled voters should be able to vote electronically. 

If accessible voting—and disabled voters—were taken more seriously in America, more disabled people would take part in the electoral process. It’s that simple.

Ohio voters defeated a major ballot initiative on Tuesday that would have ended partisan gerrymandering in the state and curbed the lopsided majorities Republicans hold in the state legislature and US House delegation. The measure, known as Issue 1, was voted down with 54 percent of the vote.

Republicans aggressively used their power to thwart a measure that seemingly had the support of a large majority of the state’s voters. Ohio voters passed two previous redistricting reform measures, in 2015 and 2018, with more than 70 percent of the vote each time.

But when it came time to put Issue 1 on the ballot, Ohio Republicans grossly misrepresented the intention of the measure, which would have created a citizens redistricting commission to draw new maps for the state legislature and US House after GOP legislative leaders gutted the previous redistricting initiatives. The summary of the ballot initiative adopted by the Ohio Ballot Board, which has a Republican majority, 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.” 

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 GOP-dominated redistricting commission that repeatedly voted for the state’s gerrymandered maps that gave Republicans supermajorities in both chambers—67 percent of seats in the state House and 69 percent in the state Senate, despite Trump only getting 53 percent of the vote in 2020. The Ohio Supreme Court struck down the gerrymandered state legislative and US House maps seven times, but Republicans like LaRose kept overriding the court’s opinions.

The group behind Issue 1, Citizens Not Politicians, which is led by former Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, a Republican, immediately sued the ballot board, asking the Ohio Supreme Court to block the “biased, inaccurate, deceptive, and unconstitutional ballot language.”

But the Ohio Supreme Court, which gained a more conservative Republican majority after O’Connor’s retirement in 2022, largely approved the misleading language. That led to complaints from Ohio voters that they had been tricked into opposing a redistricting reform initiative that they actually supported.

As Bolts magazine reported:

When Songgu Kwon went to the polls earlier this month, he was eager to help Ohio adopt an independent redistricting commission. The comic book writer and illustrator, who lives near Athens, dislikes the process with which politicians have carved up Ohio into congressional and legislative districts that favor them, enabling Republicans to lock in large majorities. So he was pleased that voting rights groups had placed Issue 1, a proposal meant to create fairer maps, on the Ohio ballot this fall. 

“I’m in support of any measures that make the process more fair to reflect the will of the people, instead of letting the politicians decide how to gerrymander,” says Kwon.

In the voting booth, he reviewed the text in front of him. His ballot read that voting ‘yes’ would set up a panel “required to gerrymander the boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts,” and that it would “repeal constitutional protections against gerrymandering.” 

So Kwon voted ‘no’ on the measure—given what he’d just read, he thought, that had to be the way to signal support for independent redistricting. He’d gone in planning to vote ‘yes,’ but he was thrown off by this language he saw; he guessed that he must have been wrong or missed some recent development. “The language seemed really specific that if you vote ‘yes’, you’re for gerrymandering,” he now recalls in frustration. 

But when he left the polling station and compared notes with his wife, he quickly figured out that he’d made a mistake: He had just voted to preserve the status quo. To bring about the new independent process and remove redistricting from elected officials, as was his intention, he would have had to vote ‘yes.’

Those reports of confused voters were widespread. Eight in 10 Ohioans told pollsters they believed that it was important that “a candidate of one political party isn’t always guaranteed to win” when it comes to drawing legislative districts. But when the misleading GOP-crated ballot summary was read to voters, support dropped precipitously.

The result is a major defeat for democracy reform efforts nationwide. And it was also a sign of how Republicans were using their entrenched power to thwart direct democracy.

That happened in other states as well. In Florida, 57 percent of voters supported a measure to enshrine protections for reproductive rights in the state. But it became the first to fail to pass an abortion rights measure since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade because Florida requires a 60 percent supermajority to pass a ballot initiative and the state’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis campaigned heavily against it, even going so far to send his election fraud police to the homes of voters who signed a petition supporting abortion rights. That was a brazen abuse of power, but it was par for the course in the GOP’s bid to preserve minority rule.

Ohio voters defeated a major ballot initiative on Tuesday that would have ended partisan gerrymandering in the state and curbed the lopsided majorities Republicans hold in the state legislature and US House delegation. The measure, known as Issue 1, was voted down with 54 percent of the vote.

Republicans aggressively used their power to thwart a measure that seemingly had the support of a large majority of the state’s voters. Ohio voters passed two previous redistricting reform measures, in 2015 and 2018, with more than 70 percent of the vote each time.

But when it came time to put Issue 1 on the ballot, Ohio Republicans grossly misrepresented the intention of the measure, which would have created a citizens redistricting commission to draw new maps for the state legislature and US House after GOP legislative leaders gutted the previous redistricting initiatives. The summary of the ballot initiative adopted by the Ohio Ballot Board, which has a Republican majority, 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.” 

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 GOP-dominated redistricting commission that repeatedly voted for the state’s gerrymandered maps that gave Republicans supermajorities in both chambers—67 percent of seats in the state House and 69 percent in the state Senate, despite Trump only getting 53 percent of the vote in 2020. The Ohio Supreme Court struck down the gerrymandered state legislative and US House maps seven times, but Republicans like LaRose kept overriding the court’s opinions.

The group behind Issue 1, Citizens Not Politicians, which is led by former Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, a Republican, immediately sued the ballot board, asking the Ohio Supreme Court to block the “biased, inaccurate, deceptive, and unconstitutional ballot language.”

But the Ohio Supreme Court, which gained a more conservative Republican majority after O’Connor’s retirement in 2022, largely approved the misleading language. That led to complaints from Ohio voters that they had been tricked into opposing a redistricting reform initiative that they actually supported.

As Bolts magazine reported:

When Songgu Kwon went to the polls earlier this month, he was eager to help Ohio adopt an independent redistricting commission. The comic book writer and illustrator, who lives near Athens, dislikes the process with which politicians have carved up Ohio into congressional and legislative districts that favor them, enabling Republicans to lock in large majorities. So he was pleased that voting rights groups had placed Issue 1, a proposal meant to create fairer maps, on the Ohio ballot this fall. 

“I’m in support of any measures that make the process more fair to reflect the will of the people, instead of letting the politicians decide how to gerrymander,” says Kwon.

In the voting booth, he reviewed the text in front of him. His ballot read that voting ‘yes’ would set up a panel “required to gerrymander the boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts,” and that it would “repeal constitutional protections against gerrymandering.” 

So Kwon voted ‘no’ on the measure—given what he’d just read, he thought, that had to be the way to signal support for independent redistricting. He’d gone in planning to vote ‘yes,’ but he was thrown off by this language he saw; he guessed that he must have been wrong or missed some recent development. “The language seemed really specific that if you vote ‘yes’, you’re for gerrymandering,” he now recalls in frustration. 

But when he left the polling station and compared notes with his wife, he quickly figured out that he’d made a mistake: He had just voted to preserve the status quo. To bring about the new independent process and remove redistricting from elected officials, as was his intention, he would have had to vote ‘yes.’

Those reports of confused voters were widespread. Eight in 10 Ohioans told pollsters they believed that it was important that “a candidate of one political party isn’t always guaranteed to win” when it comes to drawing legislative districts. But when the misleading GOP-crated ballot summary was read to voters, support dropped precipitously.

The result is a major defeat for democracy reform efforts nationwide. And it was also a sign of how Republicans were using their entrenched power to thwart direct democracy.

That happened in other states as well. In Florida, 57 percent of voters supported a measure to enshrine protections for reproductive rights in the state. But it became the first to fail to pass an abortion rights measure since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade because Florida requires a 60 percent supermajority to pass a ballot initiative and the state’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis campaigned heavily against it, even going so far to send his election fraud police to the homes of voters who signed a petition supporting abortion rights. That was a brazen abuse of power, but it was par for the course in the GOP’s bid to preserve minority rule.

In the days and weeks after the 2020 election, more than 65,000 mail-in ballots were rejected for arriving too late—and given how much is at stake in 2024’s races, nationally and at the state level, it makes sense that American voters would do just about anything to make sure their vote gets counted. For millions of people, that includes waiting in long lines at polling places, sometimes for hours, even at the risk of fainting.

While waiting in line can be exhausting for anyone, it has unique impacts on disabled and chronically ill people. Standing for long periods can send some chronically ill people into weeks-long flares, a trade-off many were willing to make to try to stop a Trump victory—which, especially through the machinations of Project 2025, could greatly hurt disabled people.

The closure (or lack) of polling places is one factor in those wait times, particularly in Black neighborhoods, where the wait to vote is typically already longer. The burden falls disproportionately on disabled and aging Black people; in Texas, for instance, from 2016 to 2018, there were more closures of polling locations in counties where more Latino and Black Texans lived.

Meanwhile, Republicans across the country have launched many lawsuits trying to make the definition of “on time” stricter—which, as my colleague Abby Vesoulis has reported, is part of a bogus GOP strategy to try and turn the election in its favor. It may be working: Just one day before the election, the Georgia Supreme Court ruled that Cobb County could only count ballots received by 7 p.m. local time on Election Day.

When I spoke to Michelle Bishop, the National Disability Rights Network‘s voting access manager, in April, she told me that voting locations should consider “moving people with disabilities to the front of the line” if they cannot stand for long periods. While some polling places do have separate lines for disabled voters, as well as curbside voting, it’s far from uniform.

Rachel Green, who lives in North Carolina’s Davidson County, voted early—like more than half the county’s voters—at a local polling place. In person, they told me, they could trust that their ballot wouldn’t be rejected.

(Charles Stewart, the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Election Data and Science Lab, told me that voters shouldn’t have much fear that mail-in ballots won’t be accepted—but that “it is simply a matter of fact that if you take the same person, have them vote in person, and then vote by mail, the mail ballot has a slightly lower chance of being counted.”)

But the wait was physically taxing on Green, who lives with arthritis in their knees and feet. The whole process took two to three times as long—an hour and a half—as in previous years. With invisible disabilities and no blue parking placard, Green didn’t expect to qualify for curbside voting, and there were no seats available, even once they got in. “I’m doing a shuffle from side to side, bending my knees,” they said to me. “People were looking at me funny.” Green thinks there just needed to be more chairs.

Standing isn’t the only challenge in long lines—so are rules against providing voters with food and water, known as “line warming,” which the American Bar Association says “can serve as a tool to make it easier to stay in line so eligible voters who want to vote can cast their ballot.” (Line warming has been illegal since 2021 in Florida, but similar laws have been limited in Georgia, and completely struck down in New York, by federal judges.)

It’s not just Republican-controlled areas that have long lines. In Philadelphia—the largest city in a crucial swing state—Eshani Surya, who lives with ulcerative colitis, had to leave a voting line on Election Day to go to the bathroom during her 45-minute wait. There was no line for disabled voters, and although her husband was there to save her spot, there was no guarantee that she could get back in line.

But, like many others, Surya still elected to vote in person to be involved in the real-life excitement of it all: “There was an energy about being there,” she said.

Nevada’s secretary of state, the New York Times’ Danny Hakim reports, is concerned about the large numbers of absentee ballots getting rejected in the state’s most populous counties because of signature mismatches—potentially enough ballots to change election results. From the Times:

More than 11,300 ballots were reported by the state Monday night as still needing signature curing in Clark County, home of Las Vegas, and more than 1,800 in Washoe County. In particularly close elections, a large number of ballots that need curing could determine the outcome.

States that make such comparisons typically match the voter’s signature on the absentee ballot envelope against signatures in the registrar’s voter database and DMV records. If a mismatch is declared, voters are given the opportunity to “cure” a rejected ballot—in Nevada this year, they have through November 12.

The numbers above were much higher than the ones reported in 2020 and 2022, and they are expected to grow as more ballots arrive and are processed, Hakim wrote. “It’s mostly the fact that young people don’t have signatures these days,” Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar told the Times. “And when they did register to vote through the automatic voter registration process, they signed a digital pad at DMV, and that became their license signature.”

This is a problem his office might have seen coming, and it’s just one reason that having minimally trained people matching ballot signatures is not a great practice. Or so people who do it for a living told me when I was reporting on the subject during a past election.

There’s a lot of natural variation in people’s script related to health issues, aging, injuries, changes in mental state, and the circumstances in which a signature is created—that DMV touch pad yields a very different signature than a ballpoint pen at a desk will, for example.

“A person could write their signature 100 different times and none of those will be exactly alike.” 

Sample size is also an issue. “You have to have a series of signatures,” Patricia Fisher, a professional documents examiner from Northern California, told me. “They need to be closer in time, and on similar types of documents, because one signature is not going to represent the full range of variations in someone’s handwriting.”

Fisher, who at the time had spent more than four decades verifying disputed signatures, said her No. 1 rule was as follows: You never compare just two signatures to determine a mismatch. And you certainly don’t call a mismatch by comparing a recent signature with one collected years earlier—as might be the case with older voters who originally registered to vote—or drive—some time ago. 

Six signatures is about the minimum for a solid comparison, Fisher told me. A trained examiner looks for “the commonalities, the permanent characteristics, the fleeting characteristics, the other characteristics like the fluency, the speed, the rhythm. There are dozens of variables,” she said.

I spoke, too, with Mark Songer, a former forensic documents examiner for the FBI. “To do any kind of meaningful examination, I like to get anywhere from 6 to 10 representative samples that are pretty contemporaneous with the signature itself,” he told me. “A person could write their signature 100 different times and none of those will be exactly alike, because we all have a range—the only way to establish that range is to have a sufficient number of samples.”

Signature disputes are becoming increasingly common as more people, starting during the pandemic, began voting absentee. And thanks to the ubiquity of touch-pad signatures and the fact that cursive is no longer taught in many schools, signatures have become ever less reliable as a quick verification of a person’s identity.

“If they use a driver’s license signature and you’re signing an electronic pad, that changes many of the characteristics, because it’s not natural,” Fisher told me. “So you’re comparing apples and oranges for such an important thing—to say, ‘No, your vote doesn’t count because your signature doesn’t look right.’”

For a lot of those Nevada voters, that may be the only thing on file: “We’re seeing high engagement and turnout amongst our youth,” Aguilar told CNN.

I reached out to Nevada officials to ask whether it was true, per a rumor on X, that elections workers were attempting to call those voters, as opposed to, say, texting them. Because, I have a couple of first-time voters in my own household, and those people do not pick up the phone—unless it’s dad, and sometimes not even then.

A Clark County elections spokesperson assured me that elections staffers do, in fact, text voters—and call and email and even send them notices in the mail, and then continue to do so right up to the deadline. Yet despite these efforts, she said, only about half of the rejected ballots got cured in previous elections. That could yet be significant, since Clark County still had 9,600 uncured ballots as of 4 p.m. PT. And Washoe County’s website listed 1,375 still in need of curing.

In any case, “the whole signature thing needs to be totally reevaluated,” Fisher told me. “There should not be all these untrained people—and you probably won’t get trained people there, because trained persons know you don’t compare one signature to another signature.”

The morning of Election Day, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger blamed Russia for creating bomb scares at polling places in the swing state of Georgia. “They’re up to mischief it seems,” Raffensperger said at a press conference of Russia’s efforts. “They don’t want us to have a smooth, fair, and accurate election.”

The bomb threats temporarily closed two voting sites in Union City, Georgia, just outside Atlanta, according to the Election Protection Coalition, which monitors Election Day disruptions. Union City is nearly 90 percent Black and therefore tends to be overwhelmingly Democratic. The county is attempting to extend voting hours at the affected locations.

Five non-credible bomb threats were called in on Tuesday morning. Raffensperger said Russia was the culprit and that federal law enforcement had helped make that determination.

The presidential race in Georgia is expected to be very close and it is one of the states that could determine who wins the White House. Russian President Vladimir Putin has a clear interest in former president Donald Trump retaking the White House. Trump is much more interested in appeasing Putin’s war in Ukraine, has expressed little loyalty to other allies, and is generally solicitous of the authoritarian leader. Vice President Kamala Harris, conversely, has stated her commitment to supporting Ukraine as well as strengthening NATO.

Georgia appears to be a target of Russian meddling this year. A fake video purporting to show recent Haitian immigrants illegally voting for Harris in the state was produced and disseminated by a Russian disinformation outfit, US intelligence officials revealed last week. And this is only the most recent example of a months-long effort by Russian-backed propaganda to target the Harris campaign. As Mother Jones previously reported, the disinformation group responsible for the Georgia video also is believed to be behind another fake video purporting to show ballots for Trump being destroyed in Pennsylvania.

Cliff Maloney is the founder of Pennsylvania Chase, a door-knocking, “ballot chasing” operation meant to encourage conservative voters in that crucial swing state to return mail-in ballots. The 32-year-old is also, of late, the face of a particularly bumbling public attempt to root out supposed illegal voting—one that, despite him having already been heartily scolded by a group of nuns for intimating they were involved in election fraud, he’s largely refusing to retreat from.

As one nun wrote, “His insisting does not change reality, at least not on this planet.”

As has been widely reported, Maloney tweeted on October 22 that one of his organization’s staff members visited an address in Pennsylvania where 53 voters are registered. 

“Turns out it’s the Benedictine Sisters of Erie and NO ONE lives there,” he wrote, adding, “Our attorney’s [sic] are reviewing this right now. We will not let the Dems count on illegal votes.” The post has been viewed 2.8 million times, and also featured repeatedly in Twitter/X’s conspiracy-addled “Election Integrity” community.

But the Benedictine Sisters of Erie do live there, and the very next day the nuns issued a sternly-worded press release in which their prioress, Sister Stephanie Schmidt, pointed out that Maloney could have done the barest amount of due diligence before accusing the nuns of nonexistence, voter fraud, or a puzzling combination of the two. 

“We do live at Mount Saint Benedict Monastery and a simple web search would alert him to our active presence in a number of ministries in Erie,” Schmidt said, per the release. “A free republic depends on free and fair elections. It depends equally on a discerning and conscientious citizenry who do not unquestioningly accept the word of anyone who has a social media platform.”

When reached for comment by Mother Jones on November 1, Maloney refused to admit any error, and insisted that a “staff member”—possibly a receptionist, he thought, “or whatever the politically correct term is these days”—at the monastery had deceived his ballot chaser into believing no one lived on the property as part of a deliberate plot “to paint [Pennsylvania Chase] as ‘election deniers.'”

“Did you ask the nuns why their staff member lied?,” he wrote in a Twitter direct message. “Not one reporter has included that in their story. Sad, really.” 

Maloney repeatedly referred to the sisters as “the pro trans, pro Ukraine group,” and didn’t directly respond to my efforts to clarify why. (The Benedictine Sisters of Erie have hosted sister nuns from Ukraine to speak about religious life in a country under siege. A handful of them also joined a “read-in” supporting a local library after it faced complaints over stocking LGBTQ+ children’s books.)

“I’m Catholic,” he explained at one juncture, adding that he used to sing in a campus choir. “They are nuns. The problem is their staffer bold face lying. No one wants to report that.”

When reached for comment on Maloney’s latest claims, Sister Linda Romey OSB, the monastery’s coordinator of communications and development, reiterated to Mother Jones that no one would have told ballot chaser that “no one lives” in the place where they live. “Our receptionists are our sisters,” she explained. “And there is no sister who would say no one lives at the monastery where we have been living since we built it in the late 1960s. We have been in Erie since 1856.”

“None of our sisters had such an interaction with the canvasser,” she continued. “If he had come in and spoken with a sister he would most likely have been invited to prayer and possibly a meal—hospitality is one of our values.” 

“That said,” Sister Romey added, “even if Mr. Maloney’s canvasser did come into our monastery (which means he was buzzed in) and spoke with someone, I suppose it is possible that he has hearing issues and maybe misunderstood. But even so, once the misinformation was corrected, the appropriate thing for Mr. Maloney to do would have been to simply acknowledge the error and post an apology for the accusation and for violating our sisters privacy by posting their personal information online.” 

“I suppose it is possible that he has hearing issues and maybe misunderstood.”

‘Mr. Maloney can insist all he wants but his insisting does not change reality, at least not on this planet,” she told Mother Jones. “It is an outright falsehood that he continues [to] promote… The fact is that PA CHASE and Mr. Maloney cannot admit they made a mistake and take responsibility for posting misinformation. It’s that simple.” 

Maloney claims that, in the wake of his post about the monastery and the blowback that followed, his ballot chasers have been subject to threats and “defamation,” as he put it, at the hands of media organizations. “Death threats… vile comments,” he wrote. (Ellipses his.) “The uniparty is unhinged.”  

“It’s a lynching of Republican ballot chasers and I won’t stand for it,” he wrote.

Pennsylvania Chase is sponsored by the Citizens Alliance of Pennsylvania, whose funders include libertarian billionaire Jeff Yass, the richest man in the state, a longtime Rand Paul supporter who has thrown his financial weight behind electing Donald Trump. (He also owns a stake in TikTok.) Pennsylvania Chase has set ambitious goals to increase Republican turnout, with support from characters like Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk. 

Maloney is not unfamiliar with controversy; as The Spectator recently reported, he was previously the president of Young Americans for Liberty, a right-wing student group, before being removed from that position in 2021 over allegations of sexual misconduct against him and other leaders. Maloney denied those allegations at the time; as Spectator reporter Jacqueline Sweet noted, he also “voluntarily surrendered his Pennsylvania teaching credentials” after being charged in 2022 with raping a first-year student at the University of Pittsburgh-Johnstown in 2013 when he was a resident assistant there; a jury acquitted him last year of four counts, and the other two were dismissed by a judge after the jury could not reach a verdict on them.

This story was published first by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox as soon as they are published.

In public remarks, former President Donald Trump has repeatedly made unfounded claims about the threat of widespread voting by “illegal aliens” and noncitizens in the 2024 election.

Away from the spotlight, though, at least one Republican National Committee official is telling volunteer poll watchers a completely different story: that such voting is close to impossible.

In a private Oct. 29 training session for poll watchers in Pennsylvania, an RNC election-integrity specialist told volunteers not to worry about noncitizen voting in the 2024 election because the electoral system had safeguards in place to prevent illegal votes.

ProPublica obtained a recording of the training session. The RNC official’s comments have not been previously reported.

The RNC official’s assurance contradicts statements made by Trump and his Republican allies warning about “illegal aliens” casting ballots this year and potentially swinging the election in favor of Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris.

“It is good to see the RNC official recognizing the truth, in contrast to the many lies about noncitizen voting coming from Trump and his allies,” said Rick Hasen, a professor and election-law expert at the UCLA School of Law. “It would be even better for the officials to say it publicly.”

The RNC official who led the training session and a spokesperson for the RNC did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to ProPublica that Democrats were “pushing for non-citizens to vote and influence the future of our country,” adding, “President Trump and the RNC will continue the fight to secure tomorrow’s election so that every American vote is protected.”

Voting by noncitizens is illegal under federal law and it almost never happens. State and federal elections require voters to be U.S. citizens. Government election officials from both parties have emphasized that there are protections in place across the country to prevent noncitizens from casting a ballot.

Yet that hasn’t stopped Trump and some of his most high-profile supporters from making unfounded claims that noncitizens are registering and voting in large numbers this year. “THE DEMOCRATS ARE TRYING TO ‘STUFF’ VOTER REGISTRATIONS WITH ILLEGAL ALIENS,” Trump posted on Truth Social in September. Other prominent Trump supporters, including billionaire tech investor Elon Musk and House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana, have also amplified unfounded claims about Democrats seeking to “import” such voters.

But on the ground, Trump’s own party, at least in the important battleground state of Pennsylvania, is undercutting those dark visions of illegal voting. During the Oct. 29 training session, Joe Neild, a member of RNC’s election integrity team in the state, said such a scenario is nearly impossible.

A participant in the training session asked Neild about the potential for noncitizens to cast votes in the election and what poll watchers could do to stop them.

Neild replied that, in Pennsylvania, undocumented people can’t legally register to vote and so they would not be included in the list of eligible voters used at voting precincts, known as poll books.

Here is the exchange:

Training participant: “I have two questions. The first one is: How do you know if they are illegal aliens or not, like, when they’re voting, as far as what you were explaining with the ID? And if they’re from another country it was OK as long as they had an ID. How do you know if they’re illegal aliens? How can you stop that?”

Neild: “Well, if they’re illegal aliens, they’re not going to be inside the poll book. Because if they’re illegal aliens, they’re not going to be able to register to vote, because they’ll need a driver’s license number or a Social Security number.

“And since the recent litigation in the years past, you do have—to be able to get a driver’s license here in Pennsylvania, you have to show proof of citizenship. So that is one way that they will not be able to get a driver’s license.

“And then you have to be—since they’re illegal, they’re not going to be able to get a Social Security number either.”

Three election-law experts reviewed the exchange between Neild and the poll-watcher trainee. All of them said that Neild’s description of the law and the safeguards in place against noncitizen voting were accurate.

Adam Bonin, a lawyer in Philadelphia who practices election law, said Neild gave an accurate description of Pennsylvania law and the safeguards against noncitizen voting there. Bonin said Neild’s comments were “absolutely consistent” with what Pennsylvania’s secretary of the commonwealth, Al Schmidt, a Republican, has said about preventing noncitizen voting.

“As has been the case before, Trump has local experts on his team who know what the law is here in Pennsylvania and who understand the reality of how our elections work,” Bonin said.

Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School and an expert on voting rights who worked in the Obama and Biden administrations, said he applauded Neild for using factual information in his training session. Levitt added that he was not surprised to hear Republican volunteers raising fears of noncitizen voting given Trump’s campaign rhetoric.

“There’s been a very effective effort to misinform,” Levitt said. “But I’m glad that when push comes to shove and it comes time to really get training, they’re being set straight.”

In addition to the registration hurdles Neild pointed out, Levitt explained that there are clear incentives to discourage noncitizens from voting in U.S. elections. Criminal penalties can include a hefty fine and prison time as well as deportation and losing the ability to become a U.S. citizen in the future. What’s more, Levitt added, the very act of voting creates a clear and obvious paper trail, making it that much easier for law enforcement to bring criminal charges for illegal voting.

“Every once in a blue moon you see noncitizens showing up on the rolls,” he said. “It’s usually by mistake because it’s just not worth it, and they’re gonna get caught, guaranteed.”

Levitt said that he only wished the factual information given out by the RNC at the grassroots level was also reaching the party’s presidential nominee. “It sounds like the former president should be sitting in on some sessions with the people training his poll watchers,” Levitt said.

Do you have information about the Trump campaign or voting irregularities that we should know? Andy Kroll can be reached by email at andy.kroll@propublica.org and by phone or Signal at 202-215-6203.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

This story was published first by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox as soon as they are published.

In public remarks, former President Donald Trump has repeatedly made unfounded claims about the threat of widespread voting by “illegal aliens” and noncitizens in the 2024 election.

Away from the spotlight, though, at least one Republican National Committee official is telling volunteer poll watchers a completely different story: that such voting is close to impossible.

In a private Oct. 29 training session for poll watchers in Pennsylvania, an RNC election-integrity specialist told volunteers not to worry about noncitizen voting in the 2024 election because the electoral system had safeguards in place to prevent illegal votes.

ProPublica obtained a recording of the training session. The RNC official’s comments have not been previously reported.

The RNC official’s assurance contradicts statements made by Trump and his Republican allies warning about “illegal aliens” casting ballots this year and potentially swinging the election in favor of Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris.

“It is good to see the RNC official recognizing the truth, in contrast to the many lies about noncitizen voting coming from Trump and his allies,” said Rick Hasen, a professor and election-law expert at the UCLA School of Law. “It would be even better for the officials to say it publicly.”

The RNC official who led the training session and a spokesperson for the RNC did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to ProPublica that Democrats were “pushing for non-citizens to vote and influence the future of our country,” adding, “President Trump and the RNC will continue the fight to secure tomorrow’s election so that every American vote is protected.”

Voting by noncitizens is illegal under federal law and it almost never happens. State and federal elections require voters to be U.S. citizens. Government election officials from both parties have emphasized that there are protections in place across the country to prevent noncitizens from casting a ballot.

Yet that hasn’t stopped Trump and some of his most high-profile supporters from making unfounded claims that noncitizens are registering and voting in large numbers this year. “THE DEMOCRATS ARE TRYING TO ‘STUFF’ VOTER REGISTRATIONS WITH ILLEGAL ALIENS,” Trump posted on Truth Social in September. Other prominent Trump supporters, including billionaire tech investor Elon Musk and House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana, have also amplified unfounded claims about Democrats seeking to “import” such voters.

But on the ground, Trump’s own party, at least in the important battleground state of Pennsylvania, is undercutting those dark visions of illegal voting. During the Oct. 29 training session, Joe Neild, a member of RNC’s election integrity team in the state, said such a scenario is nearly impossible.

A participant in the training session asked Neild about the potential for noncitizens to cast votes in the election and what poll watchers could do to stop them.

Neild replied that, in Pennsylvania, undocumented people can’t legally register to vote and so they would not be included in the list of eligible voters used at voting precincts, known as poll books.

Here is the exchange:

Training participant: “I have two questions. The first one is: How do you know if they are illegal aliens or not, like, when they’re voting, as far as what you were explaining with the ID? And if they’re from another country it was OK as long as they had an ID. How do you know if they’re illegal aliens? How can you stop that?”

Neild: “Well, if they’re illegal aliens, they’re not going to be inside the poll book. Because if they’re illegal aliens, they’re not going to be able to register to vote, because they’ll need a driver’s license number or a Social Security number.

“And since the recent litigation in the years past, you do have—to be able to get a driver’s license here in Pennsylvania, you have to show proof of citizenship. So that is one way that they will not be able to get a driver’s license.

“And then you have to be—since they’re illegal, they’re not going to be able to get a Social Security number either.”

Three election-law experts reviewed the exchange between Neild and the poll-watcher trainee. All of them said that Neild’s description of the law and the safeguards in place against noncitizen voting were accurate.

Adam Bonin, a lawyer in Philadelphia who practices election law, said Neild gave an accurate description of Pennsylvania law and the safeguards against noncitizen voting there. Bonin said Neild’s comments were “absolutely consistent” with what Pennsylvania’s secretary of the commonwealth, Al Schmidt, a Republican, has said about preventing noncitizen voting.

“As has been the case before, Trump has local experts on his team who know what the law is here in Pennsylvania and who understand the reality of how our elections work,” Bonin said.

Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School and an expert on voting rights who worked in the Obama and Biden administrations, said he applauded Neild for using factual information in his training session. Levitt added that he was not surprised to hear Republican volunteers raising fears of noncitizen voting given Trump’s campaign rhetoric.

“There’s been a very effective effort to misinform,” Levitt said. “But I’m glad that when push comes to shove and it comes time to really get training, they’re being set straight.”

In addition to the registration hurdles Neild pointed out, Levitt explained that there are clear incentives to discourage noncitizens from voting in U.S. elections. Criminal penalties can include a hefty fine and prison time as well as deportation and losing the ability to become a U.S. citizen in the future. What’s more, Levitt added, the very act of voting creates a clear and obvious paper trail, making it that much easier for law enforcement to bring criminal charges for illegal voting.

“Every once in a blue moon you see noncitizens showing up on the rolls,” he said. “It’s usually by mistake because it’s just not worth it, and they’re gonna get caught, guaranteed.”

Levitt said that he only wished the factual information given out by the RNC at the grassroots level was also reaching the party’s presidential nominee. “It sounds like the former president should be sitting in on some sessions with the people training his poll watchers,” Levitt said.

Do you have information about the Trump campaign or voting irregularities that we should know? Andy Kroll can be reached by email at andy.kroll@propublica.org and by phone or Signal at 202-215-6203.

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.

It was no surprise. Instead, call it the October reveal.

In the final days of the 2024 election, ugly rhetoric from Donald Trump’s campaign drew major national attention when a speaker made a racist joke about Puerto Rico as part of the ex-president’s Oct. 27 rally at Madison Square Garden. The event was an inevitable culmination for the Trump campaign, a six-hour pageant of divisiveness and bigotry that featured multiple speakers launching racist and misogynistic attacks on Kamala Harris. It concluded with Trump at the podium delivering the same demagoguery he has used in dozens of rallies this year: painting a wildly exaggerated picture of national decay, promoting baseless conspiracy theories, and stoking fear and anger about an alleged “invasion” of America by murderous migrants.

Such themes have been at the dark heart of Trump’s politics ever since he entered the presidential race nearly a decade ago. As he has taken these tactics to new extremes over the past few months, law enforcement and national security sources I’ve spoken with have warned about a growing danger of far-right political violence inspired by Trump’s messaging.

This is not theoretical. It’s based on a lengthy history of violence associated with Trump’s rhetoric, which by 2021 led a bipartisan group of top national security experts to take the extraordinary step of labeling Trump, effectively, a terrorist leader—the de facto head of a violent extremist movement within the United States.

Given that another central tactic of Trumpism is to try to cover up the truth and push anything damaging down the memory hole, the time is ripe to revisit some of the major violence coinciding with Trump’s incitement. I’ve been documenting these grim events for more than six years.

As I reported in an investigation begun in summer 2018, white supremacist attacks grew deadlier during Trump’s tenure in the White House. The violence unfolded amid a surge in far-right plots and threats, according to law enforcement sources I spoke with then. That included a wave of menace specifically targeting journalists, who Trump and his allies smeared repeatedly as “the enemy of the American people.” Two devastating mass shootings—one at a synagogue in Pittsburgh and another at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas—involved perpetrators who were focused on a migrant “invasion,” a core theme also emphasized back then by Trump. The echoes of Trump’s rhetoric in the El Paso case were particularly stark, as I detailed again recently:

The gunman had driven to the border city from 650 miles away. In custody, he told police he’d come to kill Mexicans. Some writings he’d posted online said his attack was “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas” and that his mission was “defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.” He cited an extremist ideology known as “The Great Replacement.”

These were not obscure ideas. The gunman wrote that he agreed with a recent mass shooter in New Zealand who had espoused them. He also knew some of these themes were being championed at the time by President Donald Trump. With help from Fox News pundits, Trump was whipping up fear and hatred of an alleged “invasion” coming across America’s southern border—the message was central to Trump’s reelection campaign in 2019, a focus of his ads and speeches warning ominously of a national demise.

At the end of the shooter’s screed posted online, he sought to validate his attack with a pseudo-clever twist, suggesting that his views predated Trump in the White House. “I know that the media will probably call me a white supremacist anyway and blame Trump’s rhetoric,” he wrote. Then he used Trump’s own rhetoric as supporting ammo: “The media is infamous for fake news.”

Notably, Trump backer Tucker Carlson, who has long pushed Great Replacement themes, alluded to the ideology again in his caustic speech at the Madison Square Garden rally. And Trump’s biggest financial backer, Elon Musk, has also been emphasizing it down the campaign homestretch.

Most infamously, of course, Trump’s incitement provoked the brutal insurrection at the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The former president and his allies have spent the years since then trying to erase the truth about Trump’s indelible role in motivating that unprecedented attack on American democracy.

Numerous Republican Party leaders have consistently helped deny, justify, and cover up Trump’s incitement of political violence, and some have since adopted his tactics. Others, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, have just played dumb. As one national security source told me recently, “Silence is its own form of participation.”

Trump continues to weave his virulent strands of demagoguery into a grand conspiracy theory alleging the election will be “stolen” from him. As I reported in late October, the further escalation of his extreme rhetoric has been accompanied by a rise in violent threats reflecting his messaging. With the 2024 voting results imminent, the question now is where this defining feature of Trumpism may take us next.

This election cycle, voters in some states will be presented with a confusing question when they cast their ballot: whether to make noncitizen voting—which is already illegal—illegal.

As many as eight states have a ballot measure to amend their constitution to make voting for citizens only: Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Wisconsin. These amendments are intended to make it explicit that only Americans can vote in state and federal elections, even though it is already very much illegal for non-US citizens to vote (with the exception of a few jurisdictions that allow it in specific local races).

Former President Donald Trump and his allies, with the help of Elon Musk’s disinformation megaphone, have been promoting false claims of noncitizen voter fraud as part of a deep-pocketed preemptive effort to cast doubt on the electoral process and, if need be, challenge the results.

“I realized that we needed to focus on this threat of illegals voting in November because I absolutely believe that that is how [Democrats] are planning to try to steal the election this year,” Cleta Mitchell, who is behind the Election Integrity Network’s highly organized machinations to contest a Trump defeat, told Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk earlier this year.

Without providing any evidence to support her claims, Mitchell said “illegals” are being registered to vote by nonprofits “that are shepherding these migrants all over the country, getting them IDs; getting them housing, paid phone cards, and food cards; and getting them on the voter rolls.” (As I’ve explained before, there is no evidence that noncitizens are voting in significant numbers.)

Election experts have warned that these noncitizen voting ballot measures are not only unnecessary, but also risk disenfranchising voters who are naturalized citizens. A recent investigation by ProPublica, the Texas Tribune, and Votebeat identified at least 1o Americans in Texas who were mistakenly removed from voter rolls over suspicion that they were noncitizens.

Ballot measures to ban something that is already illegal can also serve as a stepping stone for the future introduction of stricter and burdensome voter registration requirements, such as asking for documentary proof of citizenship. Millions of Americans who lack a passport or birth certificate could be shut off from the electoral process as a result.

Noncitizen voting is essentially a myth. But here is where and how it will appear on the ballot in the 2024 election.

Idaho

Voting as a noncitizen in Idaho constitutes a misdemeanor. The question on voters’ ballot will look like this: “Shall Section 2, Article VI of the Constitution of the State of Idaho be amended to provide that individuals who are not citizens of the United States may not be qualified electors in any election held within the state of Idaho?” Idaho’s secretary of state, Phil McGrane, recently told the Idaho Capital Sun that his office identified—and was in the process of removing— 36 likely noncitizens on the registered voter rolls. “Out of the million-plus registered voters we started with,” he said, “we’re down to ten-thousandths of a percent in terms of this number.”

Iowa

The proposed amendment in Iowa would change language in the constitution to say “only a citizen” instead of “every citizen” is entitled to vote. In the meantime, state officials already have taken action to challenge the ballots of suspected noncitizens—a move that risks excluding eligible voters. Secretary of State Paul Pate, a Republican, recently said his office identified 87 people who had reported not being a citizen to the state Department of Transportation and who voted in the last 12 years. The audit also reportedly found 67 registered noncitizens who didn’t cast a vote. Another 2,200 names have been flagged as potential noncitizen voters, though some may have naturalized since the time when they self-reported their status. The League of United Latin American Citizens and four naturalized citizens have since filed a lawsuit challenging the state’s program to purge suspected registered noncitizens from voter rolls, claiming the secretary of state’s list “failed to account for naturalization and is designed to facilitate the mass challenging of voters.”

Kentucky

One of two constitutional amendments on Kentucky’s ballot this election, Amendment 1 would add the following sentence to the constitution: “No person who is not a citizen of the United States shall be allowed to vote in this state.” Again, that is already the case. But proponents of the amendment, like Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams, insist the original text stating that “every citizen” can vote isn’t the same as saying “only citizens” can vote. Adams has admitted that he hasn’t seen any evidence of noncitizens attempting to cast a vote in elections.

Missouri

The first checkbox on Missouri’s voter registration document requires applicants to certify they’re citizens of the United States. Still, voters in the November election will see Amendment 7, a ballot measure to ban noncitizen voting (by changing “all citizens” to “only citizens” in the constitution) and simultaneously prohibit ranked-choice voting. Two residents filed a lawsuit challenging the language of the ballot measure as “unfair and inaccurate” for leading voters to think noncitizen voting isn’t already illegal in Missouri. But in August, a judge upheld the ballot language. Critics of the provision have called it “ballot candy” to trick voters into approving a ban on ranked-choice voting.

North Carolina

In June, the North Carolina General Assembly, in which Republicans have a supermajority, passed a bill to amend the language of the constitution to read that “only a citizen of the United States with the listed qualifications is entitled to vote in an election.” (Currently, it states that “every person born in the United States and every person who has been naturalized” has the right to do so.) Between 2015 and 2022, the North Carolina State Board of Elections documented only eight referred cases of noncitizens registering to vote or voting. The “wording of this amendment, which strips out specific language acknowledging that citizens may be born or naturalized, may confuse naturalized citizens and discourage them from exercising their fundamental right to vote,” the ACLU of North Carolina wrote in September.

Oklahoma

Voters in Oklahoma will see on their ballot State Question 834, an amendment to make it clear “that only citizens of the United States are qualified to vote in this state.” In May, the Republican-controlled legislature passed, along party lines, a resolution to place the amendment on the ballot. If approved, it would have the effect of changing a single word in the state constitution’s text: to say “only”—in place of “all”—US citizens may vote in Oklahoma. The Oklahoma State Election Board’s website states that registering to vote in the state as a noncitizen constitutes a felony.

South Carolina

Similar to Oklahoma’s, the ballot measure in South Carolina would amend the state constitution to say that “only a citizen,” instead of “every citizen,” is entitled to vote. But the way the measure appears on the ballot makes it unclear that the constitution already limits voting to citizens. It asks voters: “Must Section 4, Article II of the Constitution of this State, relating to voter qualifications, be amended so as to provide that only a citizen of the United States and of this State of the age of 18 and upwards who is properly registered is entitled to vote as provided by law?” You can’t blame voters for thinking the answer to that question should be yes.

Wisconsin

Wisconsin already requires voters to be US citizens, and when registering to vote, people need to check a box confirming they are citizens. Since 2019, the Wisconsin Elections Commission has identified only three cases of noncitizens being referred for prosecution for casting a vote unlawfully. In most instances, people were mistaken about their eligibility to vote. According to the ACLU of Wisconsin, no jurisdictions in the state currently allow noncitizen voting. But supporters of the proposed amendment—which would change the constitutional text from “every” to “only a” US citizen “may vote in an election for national, state, or local office or at a statewide or local referendum”—say it’s necessary because other states have allowed it.

On October 8, about two dozen conservative activists gathered in the rotunda of the Georgia State Capitol, where a meeting of the state election board was taking place. A US Army veteran named Richard Schroeder, from Hall County, in the northeastern part of the state, led the group in prayer. Schroeder, who testified that day, was a regular presence at the board meetings, where he has spread debunked claims about election security and once identified himself as a poll worker in charge of tabulating votes. 

Schroeder first asked God for forgiveness for allowing the “evil” of migrants and transgender people to permeate the country. Then he turned to voting machines. 

“Nobody’s got more votes than President [Donald] Trump ever in the world,” Schroeder said. He and other members of the prayer circle wore shirts that read “IYKYK dvscorp08!,” referring to an alleged password to Georgia’s voting machines that was obtained by right-wing election deniers and spread online. 

“Our votes have been stolen,” he continued in prayer. “The Dominion voting machines have taken our God-given dominion and have been selecting winners—not electing winners.”

“Amen,” responded David Hancock, a member of the Gwinnett County board of elections. 

The activists were part of a small but influential network of election deniers who had successfully convinced the board’s pro-Trump majority to launch probes into unfounded claims of election fraud. They also persuaded the board, which issues guidance to county election officials and investigates problems with the voting process, to pass a series of controversial rules in the runup to the November election that Fulton County Superior Court Judge Thomas Cox recently deemed “illegal” and “unconstitutional.” In August, Trump had touted the trio of sympathetic board members by name at a campaign rally, calling them “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory.” 

The rules would have led to the spread of misinformation and could have been used as a justification not to certify results, Democrats and voting rights advocates warned. The changes also would have slowed the counting of votes, according to Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. “Everything we’ve been fighting for since 2020 has been to give the voter quicker response, quicker results,” Raffensperger said on October 14, noting that one of the board’s rules, requiring a hand count of ballots on Election Day, could have delayed the reporting of results into the wee hours of the morning. “Really, that just becomes a breeding ground for conspiracy theories.” 

Democrats and election watchdogs breathed a sigh of relief when Georgia courts blocked the Trump-inspired rules, including two that would have given local election officials more power to attempt to block certification. But they should not rest easy, as significant peril still remains. At least 21 election skeptics who have expressed support for Trump’s false claims about election fraud sit on county election boards throughout the state. And over the past four years, Trump-aligned election deniers have asserted their power throughout local GOP organizations, according to the Center for Media and Democracy, a nonprofit watchdog.

Together, these MAGA Republicans could throw the election in Georgia—and thus the nation—into disarray. Officials at the county level, for instance, could still attempt to refuse to certify the results if Kamala Harris carries Georgia, while the state election board could amplify false allegations and launch bogus investigations supporting Trump’s inevitable claims of a stolen election. And those are just a couple of the nightmarish scenarios that could unfold next week.

Whatever transpires in the November 5 election, the radicalization of the board into a nakedly partisan arm of Trump’s election denial machine shows that our democratic system rests on a knife’s edge. What took place in Georgia can—and is—happening throughout the country. The takeover of much of Georgia’s election apparatus offers a distressing vision of the future if Trump returns to the White House, one in which the federal government is run by zealots whose only qualification is their fealty to Trump. 

“That’s exactly what Project 2025 is all about,” says Sara Tindall Ghazal, the state election board’s lone Democrat. “It is about replacing the bureaucrats within the federal government with political employees whose sole requirement for the job is loyalty to the president.” Tindall Ghazal points out that some of those people “don’t understand and don’t care about what the law requires. They’re completely unconstrained in their actions.”

The path to this troubling reality began on election night 2020, when Republican activists began spreading claims of widespread voter fraud. Believing that Trump ballots had been thrown out, a crowd gathered at an election office in Griffin, the seat of Spalding County, an hour south of Atlanta. Led by a county commissioner who filmed election workers through the glass, some in the crowd eventually climbed into a dumpster to find the supposedly discarded ballots. In Marietta, an Atlanta suburb, Salleigh Grubbs, the Cobb County GOP chair, chased a truck she believed contained shredded ballots. In an Atlanta ballot-counting facility, plastic bins under a folding table were labeled the infamous “suitcases full of ballots” that supposedly flipped the election in favor of Joe Biden. In the small town of Douglas in south Georgia, a county election board official claimed that voting machines had flipped votes. The state became ground zero for election fraud claims. 

None of it proved true. The dumpster in Griffin contained no ballots—just empty ballot envelopes that had been thrown away by election workers. The truck in Marietta did not have shredded ballots, Grubbs eventually discovered. The boxes under the table in Atlanta didn’t hold ballots for Biden that were double-counted to seal his victory over Trump. Instead, they just held regular ballots that were opened when workers were told by the secretary of state’s office to stay late and count more votes. The Dominion voting machines Grubbs and others prayed over never actually flipped votes—in Douglas or anywhere else—but they were broken into by local officials and attorneys working on behalf of Trump.

At least 21 election skeptics who have expressed support for Trump’s false claims about election fraud sit on county election boards throughout the state.

From these debunked origins, the claims of a stolen election grew, spreading to include other outlandish allegations of a plot that supposedly involved Italians and Venezuelans hacking voting machines and the forgery of untold thousands of ballots that were placed in drop boxes by “mules.” 

Top Georgia election officials repeatedly discredited claims of a stolen election, as did multiple legal proceedings and court judgments. Three separate counts of ballots reaffirmed Biden’s 2020 victory. Voting-machine companies won major settlements against Fox News and Newsmax for airing false claims about their machines. A Fulton County judge threw out a lawsuit filed by DeKalb County Republicans challenging the security of the state’s voting machines. Two Georgia poll workers in Fulton County won a $148 million defamation judgment against Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani for spreading the myth of “suitcases” of ballots. Jenna Ellis, another top lawyer for Trump, took a plea agreement in a wide-ranging election interference case and admitted she made false statements about illegal ballots being counted. 

Nonetheless, Trump-aligned Republicans throughout the state and nation began amplifying these claims and calling for investigations. They also got to work making sure “the steal” couldn’t happen again, beginning at the local level, where influential figures like Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn were encouraging Trump supporters to take over local election boards. In 12 counties, local representatives in the state legislature passed laws that remade county election boards in favor of Republicans. One of the bills, HB 769, transformed the Spalding County board of elections from a mundane government body on which Black Democrats held a majority to an activist board controlled by white Republicans who amplified Trump’s election lies. 

When Spalding County officials first heard about HB 769 in the spring of 2021, they were confused. Typically, when the county’s representatives in the state legislature introduce a bill that affects the county, local officials are part of the process. But that wasn’t the case with this measure, which changed how the members of the board of elections were chosen. The board had always been essentially split between the parties—Democrats got two appointments and Republicans got two, with the foursome then choosing a fifth member to serve as chair. But HB 769 changed that—the board’s fifth member would now be chosen by local judges in a closed-door process and secret vote. In May 2021, the judges chose Republican Jim Newland, giving election deniers control over the board. 

Two of the new Republicans—Ben Johnson and Roy McClain—believed Trump had rightfully won the election. Johnson is a Trump-supporting QAnon fan and Elon Musk aficionado who frequently posts on Facebook about various right-wing culture war grievances and conspiracies, including that voting machines were subject to hacking and fraud. McClain has pushed for automatic hand recounts of all elections and in 2023 made a public showing of his refusal to certify results while privately signing off on certification, fulfilling his legal duty while maintaining his MAGA bonafides. Both Johnson and McClain were involved in a brief but failed effort in August 2021 to hire an Atlanta law firm to help them access voting machines in their hunt for evidence of election fraud. The plan was nixed when Raffensperger’s office warned them that it would be illegal to allow a third party to access election equipment.

Even in counties where election boards weren’t overhauled to favor Republicans, election deniers still had a presence. In Fulton County, home to Atlanta, two election deniers sit on the election board. Boards in the Atlanta metro counties of Cobb, DeKalb, Floyd, and Gwinnett also include skeptics who, while not holding a majority, frequently amplify misinformation about elections. By early 2024, at least 21 election deniers were in place on election boards in nine counties.

As election deniers won seats on election boards, they also gained power in local GOP chapters. In Spalding County, Republicans who refused to go along with Trump’s claims of a stolen election were pushed out of the local party. There and elsewhere, Republicans refused to give campaign funds raised from donors to Gov. Brian Kemp for his unwillingness to toe the line on Trump’s lies about election fraud, said Mary Braun, a Republican in Spalding County who told Mother Jones that Johnson and some local party members had a “vendetta” against her for opposing the false claims spread by her colleagues. (Johnson and other members of the Spalding County election board, along with its election supervisor and county attorney, did not respond to a request for comment.)

Meanwhile, Republican state lawmakers set their sights on perhaps the biggest prize of all, the state election board. In March 2021, the GOP-controlled legislature tucked a provision into a sweeping new voter suppression bill that removed Raffensperger as chair and a voting member of the board, a previously obscure body of appointed officials whose meetings were scantly attended and typically mundane. Raffensperger had become a leading target of election deniers for defending the legitimacy of the 2020 election and refusing Trump’s demand to “find 11,780 votes” to reverse Biden’s victory. In addition to removing Raffensperger, Georgia lawmakers gave the state election board the authority to investigate the secretary of state for his handling of the 2020 investigation—and virtually anything else the board dreamed up. 

“This was punishment for him not obeying the president and revealing that conversation,” Tindall Ghazal, the Democratic member of the board, said of Trump’s infamous phone call to Raffensperger, pressuring him to overturn the 2020 election.

After ousting Raffensperger, influential state Republicans continued to remake the board in Trump’s image by pushing out establishment Republicans and replacing them with election deniers. In 2022, the Georgia GOP used its appointment to place Dr. Janice Johnston on the board. (Each party gets an appointment to the five-member board, both chambers of the legislature pick a member, and the legislature chooses the chair unless it is out of session, in which case the governor appoints the chair.) A former obstetrician, Johnston served as a poll watcher in Fulton County in 2020 alongside Julie Adams, an election denier who currently sits on Fulton’s election board. Johnston began frequently attending Fulton County board meetings after the election, spreading false claims about the 2020 vote count. 

In January 2024, the state Senate appointed Rick Jeffares, a former GOP state senator, to replace a well-regarded conservative election attorney Matthew Mashburn, who had opposed investigating Raffensperger. Jeffares was handpicked by his neighbor, Georgia Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, a fake elector for Trump in 2020, who said Jones urged him to “be strong” on the board. (Jones did not respond to a request for comment.) Jeffares had spread memes on social media questioning the outcome of the 2020 election, including false claims that dead people had voted by mail, and had few obvious qualifications for the job. The owner of three wastewater treatment companies, Jeffares went on to solicit a director position at the Environmental Protection Agency in a second Trump administration through a campaign intermediary while serving in his role on the State Election Board, which Democrats said raised ethical questions about his independence on the board. 

At that point, election deniers were one vote short of a majority on the board. So they began to pressure Edward Lindsey, a lawyer and former Republican member of the state House, who had also voted against bogus investigations into the 2020 outcome, to resign. Lindsey’s term was up in May 2024, but he told Republican House Speaker Jon Burns that he was willing to serve through the election to maintain continuity on the board. 

“I think they want to remove source documents from the election department prior to certification so that all weekend, they can comb through things with their friends and start whatever narrative they want. I don’t use the term ‘conspiracy’ lightly, but this is a conspiracy, full stop.”

At a board meeting in February 2024, Johnston introduced a resolution asking the legislature to repeal no-excuse absentee voting, which MAGA Republicans blamed for Trump’s defeat in 2020, and to limit mail voting to those who were disabled, over 75, or out of town. Lindsey voted against it, blocking the resolution from passing. “We should not as a board, only a few months before the 2024 election…start to limit the ability of people to vote, particularly people who find it most difficult to stand in line because of certain life situations,” he said.

That infuriated Trump, who privately told Georgia Republicans that Lindsey had “got to go,” according to Rolling Stone. Local GOP chapters called on Lindsey to step down. In May 2024, Lindsey voted against referring officials in Fulton County to the attorney general for prosecution over their handling of the 2020 election. Election deniers who packed the state board meeting responded with jeers and carried signs that said, “Time to Go Ed!”

A few weeks after that vote, and just days before Georgia Republicans met for their state convention, the House speaker announced he was replacing Lindsey with Janelle King, a conservative media personality with no election experience who was married to a Republican candidate who lost the 2022 GOP primary for US Senate to Herschel Walker. King tweeted on election night in 2020 that she had “questions!!” about the “vote counting process” and later said on her podcast that she opposed no-excuse absentee voting. 

The MAGA takeover over the board was complete. “I believe when we look back on November 5, 2024, we’re going to say getting to that 3–2 election integrity–minded majority on the state election board made sure that we had the level playing field to win this election,” Georgia Republican Party Chair Josh McKoon said at the party’s convention after King was appointed to the board. 

The takeover of the state board went mostly without notice until August, when Trump praised Johnston, Jeffares, and King during his Atlanta rally, saying they were “on fire” while going on a 10-minute tirade against Kemp for refusing to overturn the 2020 election. Johnston sat in the second row and stood and waved to the crowd when Trump name-checked her. (Johnston, Jeffares, and King declined to comment for this article.)

With mainstream Republicans out of the way, the board’s pro-Trump majority quickly got to work. State election board meetings became election denial symposiums, where conspiracy theorists spoke for hours about their demands for investigations and rule changes. Anyone can introduce a rule to the board, but in recent months, almost all of the new rules proposed have come from the network of election skeptics that includes some of the people who held a prayer vigil at the state Capitol in October. Between September 2022 and May 2024, no new rules were introduced. Since then, election denial activists and officials have introduced 31 rules for the board to consider. Of those, 15 have passed or are under consideration by the board. 

Days after Trump’s August visit to the state, the board passed its first controversial rule change. It came from Adams, the Fulton County election board member who served as a poll watcher with Johnston in 2020 and had refused to certify the state’s May primary election. Adams works with the Tea Party Patriots, which helped organize the “Save America” rally that preceded the January 6 insurrection. She also serves as regional coordinator for the Election Integrity Network founded by Cleta Mitchell, a Trump attorney who worked to overturn the 2020 election and was on the call in which Trump demanded Raffensperger reverse Biden’s victory. Finally, Adams is a member of a state network of activists and officials called the Georgia Election Integrity Coalition. The rule Adams introduced, which was eventually blocked by a state court, could have allowed local officials to refuse to certify election results if a “reasonable inquiry” determined that fraud had occurred. The rule did not spell out what a “reasonable inquiry” entailed, and voting rights advocates warned that it could be used as a pretext by GOP officials not to certify the results if a Democrat won Georgia. 

At another contentious board meeting a few weeks later, Grubbs, the GOP chair of Cobb County, introduced a rule that allowed county election board members to request a virtually unlimited amount of records and documents relating to voting machines and vote tabulation before certifying results—what became known as the “examination” certification rule. The measure, which passed 3–2, was a welcome addition to officials like Adams in Fulton County and David Hancock in Gwinnett County, both of whom had demanded scores of records before refusing to certify results in recent years. 

In abstaining from a vote to certify the results of both a May primary and a runoff election in June 2024, Adams said she had not received election records and documents she wanted to inspect for evidence of fraud. Cathy Woolard, at the time the Democratic chair of the Fulton County board, said Adams had received extensive records and documents related to the collection and tabulation of votes.

“Julie asked for these things with great authority, but she has no idea what she’s looking at,” Woolard told Mother Jones. “When she gets the records, she goes outside in the hallway and calls somebody. I can’t quite figure it out; the only thing I can come up with is, they just want to be right. They want to be right for Trump so they can say, ‘See, I told you guys, you cheated.’ Nothing of the sort happened.” (Adams did not respond to a request for comment.) This has led Democratic officials and voting rights groups to allege that Adams and her fellow election deniers at the local level are coordinating with national Republicans to enact skewed rules that could rig the state for Trump. Adams continues to push for more power to refuse to certify results as part of a lawsuit she filed with the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute. 

“Here’s what I think they really want,” Woolard says. “I think they want to remove source documents from the election department prior to certification so that all weekend, they can comb through things with their friends and start whatever narrative they want. I don’t use the term ‘conspiracy’ lightly, but this is a conspiracy, full stop.” 

“The 2020 election taught us to be ready for every possible permutation of legal argument and also every possible factual scenario. I don’t think that Democrats in Congress were ready for a whole decision tree of different parliamentary objections. The decision tree is a decision forest right now.”

Finally, in late September, just weeks before early voting began, the state election board approved another rule that would have required poll workers to “reconcile” the number of ballots cast on Election Day with the number of voters who checked in at every precinct in the state. This time-consuming task—referred to as a hand count—would have slowed the tallying of returns throughout the state, Raffensperger said. He accused the board of engaging in “activist rulemaking” and, along with Attorney General Chris Carr, also a Republican, said the board was both acting outside of its authority and passing rules that were in direct conflict with Georgia election law. 

The board’s MAGA majority had overstepped the law. Amid a national outcry, its rule changes were blocked by Fulton County judges as early voting began. The Republican National Committee appealed, but the Georgia State Supreme Court declined to reinstate the rules before November. 

Trump supporters throughout Georgia denounced the state Supreme Court’s decision. McKoon, the state GOP chair, called the rules “common sense” on X, claiming they would enhance election security. He blamed “Democrats and their allies” for the court’s ruling, even though the court is composed solely of conservative justices. 

But court rulings can do only so much to restrain a movement that has already shown how far it will go to undermine democratic norms. 

Hancock said in an email that Gwinnett County had passed its own ordinance requiring the release of a lengthy list of documents that he and other election board members could inspect before certifying results in November. 

“Even if the policy is somehow revoked, I will still be looking at these documents,” Hancock vowed in the wake of a judge’s decision that the “examination” certification rule conflicted with Georgia election law. (He did not respond to a request to explain his comments.)

Despite a separate court ruling in October reaffirming that election certification is mandatory for county officials, Tindall Ghazal worries that some counties under the sway of pro-Trump activists could still attempt to refuse to certify results “in a bad-faith way.”

A nightmare scenario in which numerous county election board members refuse to certify results could require Carr, the attorney general, to step in, filing court orders known as writs of mandamus to force officials to certify. Carr has tried to have it both ways when it comes to pro-Trump election deniers, his critics say. He sent a letter to the State Election Board saying many of its rules were illegal, including the hand-counting rule. But an attorney in Carr’s office also defended the state election board in a separate lawsuit over the certification rules that were challenged by Democrats. Moreover, Carr shielded Kemp from responsibility over the board when Democrats alleged ethics violations on the part of Johnston, Jeffares, and King in a lawsuit. In a motion to dismiss the suit, Carr wrote that Kemp didn’t have the authority to consider removing the members. 

“He’s less solid” than Raffensperger, state Sen. Elena Parent, a Democrat, said of Carr. “He’s not an election denier, however, he’s planning to run for governor and has to contend with that base who believes the election was stolen.”

Widespread certification refusals could cause Kemp to miss a crucial federal deadline on December 11. That’s the day Kemp will have to certify slates of presidential electors for whoever wins Georgia’s popular vote. Unlike in 2020, when Trump pressured Raffensperger to “find” the votes he needed to defeat Biden, it could be Kemp, who has backed Trump’s presidential bid despite the abuse he has received from the former president, getting a call from Trump urging him not to certify Harris electors. 

Missing the December 11 deadline is one of the scenarios that might allow congressional Republicans to reject certification of a Harris win—and install Trump regardless of how Americans voted, according to US Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), an election law expert and former member of the congressional January 6 committee. 

“The 2020 election taught us to be ready for every possible permutation of legal argument and also every possible factual scenario,” Raskin said in an interview. “I don’t think that Democrats in Congress were ready for a whole decision tree of different parliamentary objections. The decision tree is a decision forest right now.” If Georgia misses the deadline to certify its electoral votes, depriving either candidate of a majority in the Electoral College, the election would be decided by the House of Representatives, where a majority of House delegations, not a majority of members, choose the winner. Because Republicans control a majority of those delegations, that could allow them to install Trump as president in a disputed election. 

Courts have dulled the Georgia election board’s fangs for the moment. But in the longer term, the threats to fair elections continue. The trio of Johnston, Jeffares, and King appear to be laying the groundwork to potentially take over election administration in Fulton County, the epicenter of past and ongoing election lies. The board could also pressure Georgia’s General Assembly to enact more voter suppression laws or give them the power to certify election results instead of the secretary of state. Recently, Johnston was voted vice chair of the board.

“Despite a judge blocking their unconstitutional rules changes, the MAGA board members continue plotting ways to plunge our election into chaos,” said Max Flugrath of Fair Fight, a progressive voting rights organization. 

Johnston has already sown distrust about the results in Fulton County, questioning the legitimacy of a monitoring team that is overseeing election administration there as part of the county’s punishment for erroneously double-counting ballots in 2020. (About 3,600 ballots were double-counted in Fulton County in 2020 but were found not to have changed the results of the election.) Johnston had proposed her own monitoring team that would oversee elections in Fulton, what Flugrath called an attempt to “force partisan monitors onto the county, with the ultimate goal of undermining confidence in the election, to provide Trump fodder to claim fraud if and when he loses.”

Instead, the county chose a monitoring team that includes Ryan Germany, a former staffer in Raffensperger’s office, who is a frequent target of election deniers because he defended the legitimacy of the 2020 election and debunked conspiracies about ballot counting in Fulton. “Will the Ryan Germany Monitoring Team account for all absentee ballots?” Johnston posted on X.

Perhaps most importantly, the board could amplify disinformation spread by Trump and his MAGA allies, like US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has falsely claimed that voting machines “switched” votes during the state’s early voting period. In reality, the incident Greene referenced happened as a result of a Republican voter who made an error on her own ballot, but Greene’s post on X went viral nonetheless, garnering nearly 4 million views.

Election deniers at the county level—influenced by the likes of Greene and members of the state board—could use false claims of fraud to refuse certification in defiance of the law, furthering the distrust of the election process that Trump’s movement has weaponized so successfully. 

“The only reason not to to certify is to provide fodder for an election challenge and for the disinformation grist mill,” Tindall Ghazal says. “Disinformation is what led to January 6.” 

Correction: The original version of this story misidentified a member of the prayer circle gathered at the Georgia capitol.

On Wednesday, in a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s decision to remove nearly 2,000 registered voters from the state’s rolls, after two lower federal courts deemed the purge illegal. At least 1,600 voters will now have to fight to get reinstated—with less than a week to Election Day.

“It was a lawless decision in which the Supreme Court did not explain its decision or rationale,” said Anna Dorman, counsel with voting rights advocacy group Protect Democracy.

Two months ago, Youngkin filed an executive order to purge Virginia’s voter rolls, ostensibly in a quest to prevent “noncitizens” from casting ballots. Since then, his administration has unceremoniously kicked thousands of actual citizens off the rolls, an outcome that advocates and election officials warned Youngkin about before he initiated the program. According to Dorman, most people have had their registration revoked due to simple clerical errors on DMV paperwork.

“There has been no prosecutions of any noncitizen for voting in Virginia in the last 20 years, despite Gov. Youngkin’s Election Integrity Unit searching high and low,” Dorman said. “But if there was, this program wouldn’t stop it. Those people can still just sign an affidavit and vote. So the only people actually being hurt by this are eligible US voters who are confused about whether they’re allowed to vote.”

As I reported last week, a judge with the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Youngkin’s purge violated the National Voter Registration Act, a law that stops states from removing ineligible voters from the rolls within 90 days of the election. On Sunday, an appeals court rep9ortedly upheld that decision, according to the Washington Post.

However, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has tossed out those rulings, allowing the governor to remove as many voters as he pleases with little to no explanation of the legal reasoning.

Voting rights advocates warn that the court’s actions tie into Donald Trump’s bigger plan to undermine the results of the 2024 election. As my colleague Pema Levy reported, the conspiracy theory surrounding noncitizens voting in the 2024 election was stoked by Trump’s right-wing donors:

So who’s behind the push to make baseless claims of non-citizen voter fraud a bogeyman? According to a new report, the money funding the groups pushing the lie comes from the same stew of rightwing donors backing Trump, his authoritarian agenda, and the judges who enable him.

The non-citizen voting myth, in other words, is coming from the same activists who may seek to weaponize the lie for political gain this November. 

“This is just another attempt to launder conspiracy theories and lies in the public consciousness,” said Doman. “They’re repeating these lies so many times that even if people don’t necessarily believe any specific instance, they have a generalized sense that there is something amiss in order to deny the election results, if they don’t go their way.”

If you’ve been removed from Virginia’s rolls, all hope is not lost. Because the state allows same-day voter registration, anyone affected can reinstate their registration before voting, either during the early voting period or on Election Day. All they’d have to do is sign an affidavit confirming their citizenship at their polling location.

However, they must cast those votes in person. If you’re one of the many folks who rely on absentee ballots, then your voting options in Virginia’s elections are nonexistent.

“Anyone who wanted to vote absentee has been who has been purged under this program has been disenfranchised,” said Dorman. “That impacts college students, that impacts disabled individuals, that impacts people who just can’t get time off from work. And I think that that is contrary to the purpose of the National Voter Registration Act, which is the law that we sued under here.”

On October 8, about two dozen conservative activists gathered in the rotunda of the Georgia State Capitol, where a meeting of the state election board was taking place. A US Army veteran named Richard Schroeder, from Hall County, in the northeastern part of the state, led the group in prayer. Schroeder, who testified that day, was a regular presence at the board meetings, where he has spread debunked claims about election security and once identified himself as a poll worker in charge of tabulating votes. 

Schroeder first asked God for forgiveness for allowing the “evil” of migrants and transgender people to permeate the country. Then he turned to voting machines. 

“Nobody’s got more votes than President [Donald] Trump ever in the world,” Schroeder said. He and other members of the prayer circle wore shirts that read “IYKYK dvscorp08!,” referring to an alleged password to Georgia’s voting machines that was obtained by right-wing election deniers and spread online. 

“Our votes have been stolen,” he continued in prayer. “The Dominion voting machines have taken our God-given dominion and have been selecting winners—not electing winners.”

“Amen,” responded David Hancock, a member of the Gwinnett County board of elections. 

The activists were part of a small but influential network of election deniers who had successfully convinced the board’s pro-Trump majority to launch probes into unfounded claims of election fraud. They also persuaded the board, which issues guidance to county election officials and investigates problems with the voting process, to pass a series of controversial rules in the runup to the November election that Fulton County Superior Court Judge Thomas Cox recently deemed “illegal” and “unconstitutional.” In August, Trump had touted the trio of sympathetic board members by name at a campaign rally, calling them “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory.” 

The rules would have led to the spread of misinformation and could have been used as a justification not to certify results, Democrats and voting rights advocates warned. The changes also would have slowed the counting of votes, according to Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. “Everything we’ve been fighting for since 2020 has been to give the voter quicker response, quicker results,” Raffensperger said on October 14, noting that one of the board’s rules, requiring a hand count of ballots on Election Day, could have delayed the reporting of results into the wee hours of the morning. “Really, that just becomes a breeding ground for conspiracy theories.” 

Democrats and election watchdogs breathed a sigh of relief when Georgia courts blocked the Trump-inspired rules, including two that would have given local election officials more power to attempt to block certification. But they should not rest easy, as significant peril still remains. At least 21 election skeptics who have expressed support for Trump’s false claims about election fraud sit on county election boards throughout the state. And over the past four years, Trump-aligned election deniers have asserted their power throughout local GOP organizations, according to the Center for Media and Democracy, a nonprofit watchdog.

Together, these MAGA Republicans could throw the election in Georgia—and thus the nation—into disarray. Officials at the county level, for instance, could still attempt to refuse to certify the results if Kamala Harris carries Georgia, while the state election board could amplify false allegations and launch bogus investigations supporting Trump’s inevitable claims of a stolen election. And those are just a couple of the nightmarish scenarios that could unfold next week.

Whatever transpires in the November 5 election, the radicalization of the board into a nakedly partisan arm of Trump’s election denial machine shows that our democratic system rests on a knife’s edge. What took place in Georgia can—and is—happening throughout the country. The takeover of much of Georgia’s election apparatus offers a distressing vision of the future if Trump returns to the White House, one in which the federal government is run by zealots whose only qualification is their fealty to Trump. 

“That’s exactly what Project 2025 is all about,” says Sara Tindall Ghazal, the state election board’s lone Democrat. “It is about replacing the bureaucrats within the federal government with political employees whose sole requirement for the job is loyalty to the president.” Tindall Ghazal points out that some of those people “don’t understand and don’t care about what the law requires. They’re completely unconstrained in their actions.”

The path to this troubling reality began on election night 2020, when Republican activists began spreading claims of widespread voter fraud. Believing that Trump ballots had been thrown out, a crowd gathered at an election office in Griffin, the seat of Spalding County, an hour south of Atlanta. Led by a county commissioner who filmed election workers through the glass, some in the crowd eventually climbed into a dumpster to find the supposedly discarded ballots. In Marietta, an Atlanta suburb, Salleigh Grubbs, the Cobb County GOP chair, chased a truck she believed contained shredded ballots. In an Atlanta ballot-counting facility, plastic bins under a folding table were labeled the infamous “suitcases full of ballots” that supposedly flipped the election in favor of Joe Biden. In the small town of Douglas in south Georgia, a county election board official claimed that voting machines had flipped votes. The state became ground zero for election fraud claims. 

None of it proved true. The dumpster in Griffin contained no ballots—just empty ballot envelopes that had been thrown away by election workers. The truck in Marietta did not have shredded ballots, Grubbs eventually discovered. The boxes under the table in Atlanta didn’t hold ballots for Biden that were double-counted to seal his victory over Trump. Instead, they just held regular ballots that were opened when workers were told by the secretary of state’s office to stay late and count more votes. The Dominion voting machines Grubbs and others prayed over never actually flipped votes—in Douglas or anywhere else—but they were broken into by local officials and attorneys working on behalf of Trump.

At least 21 election skeptics who have expressed support for Trump’s false claims about election fraud sit on county election boards throughout the state.

From these debunked origins, the claims of a stolen election grew, spreading to include other outlandish allegations of a plot that supposedly involved Italians and Venezuelans hacking voting machines and the forgery of untold thousands of ballots that were placed in drop boxes by “mules.” 

Top Georgia election officials repeatedly discredited claims of a stolen election, as did multiple legal proceedings and court judgments. Three separate counts of ballots reaffirmed Biden’s 2020 victory. Voting-machine companies won major settlements against Fox News and Newsmax for airing false claims about their machines. A Fulton County judge threw out a lawsuit filed by DeKalb County Republicans challenging the security of the state’s voting machines. Two Georgia poll workers in Fulton County won a $148 million defamation judgment against Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani for spreading the myth of “suitcases” of ballots. Jenna Ellis, another top lawyer for Trump, took a plea agreement in a wide-ranging election interference case and admitted she made false statements about illegal ballots being counted. 

Nonetheless, Trump-aligned Republicans throughout the state and nation began amplifying these claims and calling for investigations. They also got to work making sure “the steal” couldn’t happen again, beginning at the local level, where influential figures like Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn were encouraging Trump supporters to take over local election boards. In 12 counties, local representatives in the state legislature passed laws that remade county election boards in favor of Republicans. One of the bills, HB 769, transformed the Spalding County board of elections from a mundane government body on which Black Democrats held a majority to an activist board controlled by white Republicans who amplified Trump’s election lies. 

When Spalding County officials first heard about HB 769 in the spring of 2021, they were confused. Typically, when the county’s representatives in the state legislature introduce a bill that affects the county, local officials are part of the process. But that wasn’t the case with this measure, which changed how the members of the board of elections were chosen. The board had always been essentially split between the parties—Democrats got two appointments and Republicans got two, with the foursome then choosing a fifth member to serve as chair. But HB 769 changed that—the board’s fifth member would now be chosen by local judges in a closed-door process and secret vote. In May 2021, the judges chose Republican Jim Newland, giving election deniers control over the board. 

Two of the new Republicans—Ben Johnson and Roy McClain—believed Trump had rightfully won the election. Johnson is a Trump-supporting QAnon fan and Elon Musk aficionado who frequently posts on Facebook about various right-wing culture war grievances and conspiracies, including that voting machines were subject to hacking and fraud. McClain has pushed for automatic hand recounts of all elections and in 2023 made a public showing of his refusal to certify results while privately signing off on certification, fulfilling his legal duty while maintaining his MAGA bonafides. Both Johnson and McClain were involved in a brief but failed effort in August 2021 to hire an Atlanta law firm to help them access voting machines in their hunt for evidence of election fraud. The plan was nixed when Raffensperger’s office warned them that it would be illegal to allow a third party to access election equipment.

Even in counties where election boards weren’t overhauled to favor Republicans, election deniers still had a presence. In Fulton County, home to Atlanta, two election deniers sit on the election board. Boards in the Atlanta metro counties of Cobb, DeKalb, Floyd, and Gwinnett also include skeptics who, while not holding a majority, frequently amplify misinformation about elections. By early 2024, at least 21 election deniers were in place on election boards in nine counties.

As election deniers won seats on election boards, they also gained power in local GOP chapters. In Spalding County, Republicans who refused to go along with Trump’s claims of a stolen election were pushed out of the local party. There and elsewhere, Republicans refused to give campaign funds raised from donors to Gov. Brian Kemp for his unwillingness to toe the line on Trump’s lies about election fraud, said Mary Braun, a Republican in Spalding County who told Mother Jones that Johnson and some local party members had a “vendetta” against her for opposing the false claims spread by her colleagues. (Johnson and other members of the Spalding County election board, along with its election supervisor and county attorney, did not respond to a request for comment.)

Meanwhile, Republican state lawmakers set their sights on perhaps the biggest prize of all, the state election board. In March 2021, the GOP-controlled legislature tucked a provision into a sweeping new voter suppression bill that removed Raffensperger as chair and a voting member of the board, a previously obscure body of appointed officials whose meetings were scantly attended and typically mundane. Raffensperger had become a leading target of election deniers for defending the legitimacy of the 2020 election and refusing Trump’s demand to “find 11,780 votes” to reverse Biden’s victory. In addition to removing Raffensperger, Georgia lawmakers gave the state election board the authority to investigate the secretary of state for his handling of the 2020 investigation—and virtually anything else the board dreamed up. 

“This was punishment for him not obeying the president and revealing that conversation,” Tindall Ghazal, the Democratic member of the board, said of Trump’s infamous phone call to Raffensperger, pressuring him to overturn the 2020 election.

After ousting Raffensperger, influential state Republicans continued to remake the board in Trump’s image by pushing out establishment Republicans and replacing them with election deniers. In 2022, the Georgia GOP used its appointment to place Dr. Janice Johnston on the board. (Each party gets an appointment to the five-member board, both chambers of the legislature pick a member, and the legislature chooses the chair unless it is out of session, in which case the governor appoints the chair.) A former obstetrician, Johnston served as a poll watcher in Fulton County in 2020 alongside Julie Adams, an election denier who currently sits on Fulton’s election board. Johnston began frequently attending Fulton County board meetings after the election, spreading false claims about the 2020 vote count. 

In January 2024, the state Senate appointed Rick Jeffares, a former GOP state senator, to replace a well-regarded conservative election attorney Matthew Mashburn, who had opposed investigating Raffensperger. Jeffares was handpicked by his neighbor, Georgia Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, a fake elector for Trump in 2020, who said Jones urged him to “be strong” on the board. (Jones did not respond to a request for comment.) Jeffares had spread memes on social media questioning the outcome of the 2020 election, including false claims that dead people had voted by mail, and had few obvious qualifications for the job. The owner of three wastewater treatment companies, Jeffares went on to solicit a director position at the Environmental Protection Agency in a second Trump administration through a campaign intermediary while serving in his role on the State Election Board, which Democrats said raised ethical questions about his independence on the board. 

At that point, election deniers were one vote short of a majority on the board. So they began to pressure Edward Lindsey, a lawyer and former Republican member of the state House, who had also voted against bogus investigations into the 2020 outcome, to resign. Lindsey’s term was up in May 2024, but he told Republican House Speaker Jon Burns that he was willing to serve through the election to maintain continuity on the board. 

“I think they want to remove source documents from the election department prior to certification so that all weekend, they can comb through things with their friends and start whatever narrative they want. I don’t use the term ‘conspiracy’ lightly, but this is a conspiracy, full stop.”

At a board meeting in February 2024, Johnston introduced a resolution asking the legislature to repeal no-excuse absentee voting, which MAGA Republicans blamed for Trump’s defeat in 2020, and to limit mail voting to those who were disabled, over 75, or out of town. Lindsey voted against it, blocking the resolution from passing. “We should not as a board, only a few months before the 2024 election…start to limit the ability of people to vote, particularly people who find it most difficult to stand in line because of certain life situations,” he said.

That infuriated Trump, who privately told Georgia Republicans that Lindsey had “got to go,” according to Rolling Stone. Local GOP chapters called on Lindsey to step down. In May 2024, Lindsey voted against referring officials in Fulton County to the attorney general for prosecution over their handling of the 2020 election. Election deniers who packed the state board meeting responded with jeers and carried signs that said, “Time to Go Ed!”

A few weeks after that vote, and just days before Georgia Republicans met for their state convention, the House speaker announced he was replacing Lindsey with Janelle King, a conservative media personality with no election experience who was married to a Republican candidate who lost the 2022 GOP primary for US Senate to Herschel Walker. King tweeted on election night in 2020 that she had “questions!!” about the “vote counting process” and later said on her podcast that she opposed no-excuse absentee voting. 

The MAGA takeover over the board was complete. “I believe when we look back on November 5, 2024, we’re going to say getting to that 3–2 election integrity–minded majority on the state election board made sure that we had the level playing field to win this election,” Georgia Republican Party Chair Josh McKoon said at the party’s convention after King was appointed to the board. 

The takeover of the state board went mostly without notice until August, when Trump praised Johnston, Jeffares, and King during his Atlanta rally, saying they were “on fire” while going on a 10-minute tirade against Kemp for refusing to overturn the 2020 election. Johnston sat in the second row and stood and waved to the crowd when Trump name-checked her. (Johnston, Jeffares, and King declined to comment for this article.)

With mainstream Republicans out of the way, the board’s pro-Trump majority quickly got to work. State election board meetings became election denial symposiums, where conspiracy theorists spoke for hours about their demands for investigations and rule changes. Anyone can introduce a rule to the board, but in recent months, almost all of the new rules proposed have come from the network of election skeptics that includes some of the people who held a prayer vigil at the state Capitol in October. Between September 2022 and May 2024, no new rules were introduced. Since then, election denial activists and officials have introduced 31 rules for the board to consider. Of those, 15 have passed or are under consideration by the board. 

Days after Trump’s August visit to the state, the board passed its first controversial rule change. It came from Adams, the Fulton County election board member who served as a poll watcher with Johnston in 2020 and had refused to certify the state’s May primary election. Adams works with the Tea Party Patriots, which helped organize the “Save America” rally that preceded the January 6 insurrection. She also serves as regional coordinator for the Election Integrity Network founded by Cleta Mitchell, a Trump attorney who worked to overturn the 2020 election and was on the call in which Trump demanded Raffensperger reverse Biden’s victory. Finally, Adams is a member of a state network of activists and officials called the Georgia Election Integrity Coalition. The rule Adams introduced, which was eventually blocked by a state court, could have allowed local officials to refuse to certify election results if a “reasonable inquiry” determined that fraud had occurred. The rule did not spell out what a “reasonable inquiry” entailed, and voting rights advocates warned that it could be used as a pretext by GOP officials not to certify the results if a Democrat won Georgia. 

At another contentious board meeting a few weeks later, Grubbs, the GOP chair of Cobb County, introduced a rule that allowed county election board members to request a virtually unlimited amount of records and documents relating to voting machines and vote tabulation before certifying results—what became known as the “examination” certification rule. The measure, which passed 3–2, was a welcome addition to officials like Adams in Fulton County and David Hancock in Gwinnett County, both of whom had demanded scores of records before refusing to certify results in recent years. 

In abstaining from a vote to certify the results of both a May primary and a runoff election in June 2024, Adams said she had not received election records and documents she wanted to inspect for evidence of fraud. Cathy Woolard, at the time the Democratic chair of the Fulton County board, said Adams had received extensive records and documents related to the collection and tabulation of votes.

“Julie asked for these things with great authority, but she has no idea what she’s looking at,” Woolard told Mother Jones. “When she gets the records, she goes outside in the hallway and calls somebody. I can’t quite figure it out; the only thing I can come up with is, they just want to be right. They want to be right for Trump so they can say, ‘See, I told you guys, you cheated.’ Nothing of the sort happened.” (Adams did not respond to a request for comment.) This has led Democratic officials and voting rights groups to allege that Adams and her fellow election deniers at the local level are coordinating with national Republicans to enact skewed rules that could rig the state for Trump. Adams continues to push for more power to refuse to certify results as part of a lawsuit she filed with the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute. 

“Here’s what I think they really want,” Woolard says. “I think they want to remove source documents from the election department prior to certification so that all weekend, they can comb through things with their friends and start whatever narrative they want. I don’t use the term ‘conspiracy’ lightly, but this is a conspiracy, full stop.” 

“The 2020 election taught us to be ready for every possible permutation of legal argument and also every possible factual scenario. I don’t think that Democrats in Congress were ready for a whole decision tree of different parliamentary objections. The decision tree is a decision forest right now.”

Finally, in late September, just weeks before early voting began, the state election board approved another rule that would have required poll workers to “reconcile” the number of ballots cast on Election Day with the number of voters who checked in at every precinct in the state. This time-consuming task—referred to as a hand count—would have slowed the tallying of returns throughout the state, Raffensperger said. He accused the board of engaging in “activist rulemaking” and, along with Attorney General Chris Carr, also a Republican, said the board was both acting outside of its authority and passing rules that were in direct conflict with Georgia election law. 

The board’s MAGA majority had overstepped the law. Amid a national outcry, its rule changes were blocked by Fulton County judges as early voting began. The Republican National Committee appealed, but the Georgia State Supreme Court declined to reinstate the rules before November. 

Trump supporters throughout Georgia denounced the state Supreme Court’s decision. McKoon, the state GOP chair, called the rules “common sense” on X, claiming they would enhance election security. He blamed “Democrats and their allies” for the court’s ruling, even though the court is composed solely of conservative justices. 

But court rulings can do only so much to restrain a movement that has already shown how far it will go to undermine democratic norms. 

Hancock said in an email that Gwinnett County had passed its own ordinance requiring the release of a lengthy list of documents that he and other election board members could inspect before certifying results in November. 

“Even if the policy is somehow revoked, I will still be looking at these documents,” Hancock vowed in the wake of a judge’s decision that the “examination” certification rule conflicted with Georgia election law. (He did not respond to a request to explain his comments.)

Despite a separate court ruling in October reaffirming that election certification is mandatory for county officials, Tindall Ghazal worries that some counties under the sway of pro-Trump activists could still attempt to refuse to certify results “in a bad-faith way.”

A nightmare scenario in which numerous county election board members refuse to certify results could require Carr, the attorney general, to step in, filing court orders known as writs of mandamus to force officials to certify. Carr has tried to have it both ways when it comes to pro-Trump election deniers, his critics say. He sent a letter to the State Election Board saying many of its rules were illegal, including the hand-counting rule. But an attorney in Carr’s office also defended the state election board in a separate lawsuit over the certification rules that were challenged by Democrats. Moreover, Carr shielded Kemp from responsibility over the board when Democrats alleged ethics violations on the part of Johnston, Jeffares, and King in a lawsuit. In a motion to dismiss the suit, Carr wrote that Kemp didn’t have the authority to consider removing the members. 

“He’s less solid” than Raffensperger, state Sen. Elena Parent, a Democrat, said of Carr. “He’s not an election denier, however, he’s planning to run for governor and has to contend with that base who believes the election was stolen.”

Widespread certification refusals could cause Kemp to miss a crucial federal deadline on December 11. That’s the day Kemp will have to certify slates of presidential electors for whoever wins Georgia’s popular vote. Unlike in 2020, when Trump pressured Raffensperger to “find” the votes he needed to defeat Biden, it could be Kemp, who has backed Trump’s presidential bid despite the abuse he has received from the former president, getting a call from Trump urging him not to certify Harris electors. 

Missing the December 11 deadline is one of the scenarios that might allow congressional Republicans to reject certification of a Harris win—and install Trump regardless of how Americans voted, according to US Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), an election law expert and former member of the congressional January 6 committee. 

“The 2020 election taught us to be ready for every possible permutation of legal argument and also every possible factual scenario,” Raskin said in an interview. “I don’t think that Democrats in Congress were ready for a whole decision tree of different parliamentary objections. The decision tree is a decision forest right now.” If Georgia misses the deadline to certify its electoral votes, depriving either candidate of a majority in the Electoral College, the election would be decided by the House of Representatives, where a majority of House delegations, not a majority of members, choose the winner. Because Republicans control a majority of those delegations, that could allow them to install Trump as president in a disputed election. 

Courts have dulled the Georgia election board’s fangs for the moment. But in the longer term, the threats to fair elections continue. The trio of Johnston, Jeffares, and King appear to be laying the groundwork to potentially take over election administration in Fulton County, the epicenter of past and ongoing election lies. The board could also pressure Georgia’s General Assembly to enact more voter suppression laws or give them the power to certify election results instead of the secretary of state. Recently, Johnston was voted vice chair of the board.

“Despite a judge blocking their unconstitutional rules changes, the MAGA board members continue plotting ways to plunge our election into chaos,” said Max Flugrath of Fair Fight, a progressive voting rights organization. 

Johnston has already sown distrust about the results in Fulton County, questioning the legitimacy of a monitoring team that is overseeing election administration there as part of the county’s punishment for erroneously double-counting ballots in 2020. (About 3,600 ballots were double-counted in Fulton County in 2020 but were found not to have changed the results of the election.) Johnston had proposed her own monitoring team that would oversee elections in Fulton, what Flugrath called an attempt to “force partisan monitors onto the county, with the ultimate goal of undermining confidence in the election, to provide Trump fodder to claim fraud if and when he loses.”

Instead, the county chose a monitoring team that includes Ryan Germany, a former staffer in Raffensperger’s office, who is a frequent target of election deniers because he defended the legitimacy of the 2020 election and debunked conspiracies about ballot counting in Fulton. “Will the Ryan Germany Monitoring Team account for all absentee ballots?” Johnston posted on X.

Perhaps most importantly, the board could amplify disinformation spread by Trump and his MAGA allies, like US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has falsely claimed that voting machines “switched” votes during the state’s early voting period. In reality, the incident Greene referenced happened as a result of a Republican voter who made an error on her own ballot, but Greene’s post on X went viral nonetheless, garnering nearly 4 million views.

Election deniers at the county level—influenced by the likes of Greene and members of the state board—could use false claims of fraud to refuse certification in defiance of the law, furthering the distrust of the election process that Trump’s movement has weaponized so successfully. 

“The only reason not to to certify is to provide fodder for an election challenge and for the disinformation grist mill,” Tindall Ghazal says. “Disinformation is what led to January 6.” 

Correction: The original version of this story misidentified a member of the prayer circle gathered at the Georgia capitol.

On Wednesday, in a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s decision to remove nearly 2,000 registered voters from the state’s rolls, after two lower federal courts deemed the purge illegal. At least 1,600 voters will now have to fight to get reinstated—with less than a week to Election Day.

“It was a lawless decision in which the Supreme Court did not explain its decision or rationale,” said Anna Dorman, counsel with voting rights advocacy group Protect Democracy.

Two months ago, Youngkin filed an executive order to purge Virginia’s voter rolls, ostensibly in a quest to prevent “noncitizens” from casting ballots. Since then, his administration has unceremoniously kicked thousands of actual citizens off the rolls, an outcome that advocates and election officials warned Youngkin about before he initiated the program. According to Dorman, most people have had their registration revoked due to simple clerical errors on DMV paperwork.

“There has been no prosecutions of any noncitizen for voting in Virginia in the last 20 years, despite Gov. Youngkin’s Election Integrity Unit searching high and low,” Dorman said. “But if there was, this program wouldn’t stop it. Those people can still just sign an affidavit and vote. So the only people actually being hurt by this are eligible US voters who are confused about whether they’re allowed to vote.”

As I reported last week, a judge with the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Youngkin’s purge violated the National Voter Registration Act, a law that stops states from removing ineligible voters from the rolls within 90 days of the election. On Sunday, an appeals court rep9ortedly upheld that decision, according to the Washington Post.

However, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has tossed out those rulings, allowing the governor to remove as many voters as he pleases with little to no explanation of the legal reasoning.

Voting rights advocates warn that the court’s actions tie into Donald Trump’s bigger plan to undermine the results of the 2024 election. As my colleague Pema Levy reported, the conspiracy theory surrounding noncitizens voting in the 2024 election was stoked by Trump’s right-wing donors:

So who’s behind the push to make baseless claims of non-citizen voter fraud a bogeyman? According to a new report, the money funding the groups pushing the lie comes from the same stew of rightwing donors backing Trump, his authoritarian agenda, and the judges who enable him.

The non-citizen voting myth, in other words, is coming from the same activists who may seek to weaponize the lie for political gain this November. 

“This is just another attempt to launder conspiracy theories and lies in the public consciousness,” said Doman. “They’re repeating these lies so many times that even if people don’t necessarily believe any specific instance, they have a generalized sense that there is something amiss in order to deny the election results, if they don’t go their way.”

If you’ve been removed from Virginia’s rolls, all hope is not lost. Because the state allows same-day voter registration, anyone affected can reinstate their registration before voting, either during the early voting period or on Election Day. All they’d have to do is sign an affidavit confirming their citizenship at their polling location.

However, they must cast those votes in person. If you’re one of the many folks who rely on absentee ballots, then your voting options in Virginia’s elections are nonexistent.

“Anyone who wanted to vote absentee has been who has been purged under this program has been disenfranchised,” said Dorman. “That impacts college students, that impacts disabled individuals, that impacts people who just can’t get time off from work. And I think that that is contrary to the purpose of the National Voter Registration Act, which is the law that we sued under here.”

Before I could knock on the door of the house in rural, upstate New York, a big, burly man dressed in a plaid lumberjack jacket came outside to greet me. “I’m looking for Yvette Ovitt,” I told him, when he asked me what I wanted. “Oh, she’s dead,” he replied calmly. “She died back in June. Heart attack.”

After expressing my condolences, I explained my mission: I was testing a get-out-the-vote app that the Turning Point Action political action committee is using this election season. On its website, Turning Point says this app “is vital” to what it claims “will be the largest and most sophisticated ballot chasing operation the movement has ever seen.” The conservative youth organization is specifically deploying the technology to try to turn out “low-propensity” voters in Republican areas—people they believe are Trump supporters but who have rarely voted in recent elections. People like Yvette, apparently, may she rest in peace.

Rather than rely on the traditional campaign or Republican Party apparatus for the 2024 election, the Trump campaign has outsourced much of its ground game to Turning Point and other conservative PACs. The strategy is largely untested, as are the groups running the operation. Turning Point has promised to spend more than $100 million on its “chase the vote” effort this cycle to get Trump elected. The youth group was involved in such efforts in 2022, and many of the most high-profile candidates it backed lost. Others, like America PAC, a super PAC funded almost entirely by billionaire Elon Musk, got into the game just this summer.

Bad addresses, dead voters and people who refuse to answer the door are a regular feature of political canvassing for both the parties, so I wasn’t especially surprised to find that one of Turning Point’s targets was no longer with us. Fortunately, I wasn’t using the app to persuade people to vote. I was at the Ovitt house because I was interested in how well this app worked. I also wanted to know how Republicans it identified might feel about the ease with which I was able to access their personal information with it.

Phone apps are now a canvassing staple for elections. When they’re used by the major political parties, their use is closely supervised by the campaigns. The primary app used by Democrats is called MiniVan. When I downloaded MiniVan, I needed a code from a campaign official to access any of the data, which I did not have. No such privacy protections exist for the Turning Point app, where its extensive data is accessible to anyone with a phone.

Turning Point’s app was developed by a company called Superfeed that has close ties with its founder Charlie Kirk, whose mother-in-law is on the Superfeed board. Superfeed’s former CEO, Jeff DeWitt, was previously the Arizona GOP chairman, until he resigned from the party post in January after news broke that he’d allegedly tried to bribe Kari Lake to keep her from running for his state’s Senate seat.

Turning Point officials have marketed the Superfeed app to other conservative groups. Also using the app this cycle is Early Vote Action, a PAC founded by MAGA activist Scott Presler, whose GOTV work for Trump was recently boosted with a $1 million donation from Elon Musk. Presler has spent the past year trying to register Republican voters in overlooked groups, like hunters and the Amish. He claims to have flipped the voter registration figures in several Pennsylvania counties from blue to red. The Nevada, Delaware, Georgia and Arizona state Republican parties have also adopted the app.

The Superfeed corporate website is nonfunctional, but the Apple store says the Turning Point app allows users to “read original content and feeds from TPUSA top creators.” The app originally started as a vehicle for right-wing news distribution, not for election work. Giving how much is riding on the app in this election, I decided to give it a test run this month when I was in upstate New York leaf peeping in the reddest part of a reliably blue state.

After downloading the app, I discovered a mess of X social media posts on the home screen, from Kirk and other Turning Point surrogates including: pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec; Benny Johnson, a right-wing influencer and former Turning Point employee who was allegedly duped into taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from a front group to create pro-Russia content; and Tyler Bowyer, the Turning Point COO who’s been indicted in Arizona for his alleged participation in Trump’s “fake elector” scheme to overturn the 2020 election results. (Bowyer has also served on the Superfeed board.)

Among the social media posts is a button that says, “Register To Vote: Tap Here.” Users are then led to the Turning Point Action website, where they’re instructed to fill out a form as if they were registering to vote. But there are clues that this is not an authentic voter registration form—“referred by,” and “referral email,” queries that have nothing to do with voting and a lot to do with data harvesting. Once the form is filled out, a new window opens announcing, “Wait! One more step! Confirm your state to register to vote online.” That’s when users click a state and are redirected to a government website where they can legitimately register to vote.

The arrow for the election “activist suite” is buried like an afterthought among the other junk on the app home screen, and accessing these tools requires users to again provide all their personal information and enable location tracking. Turning Point Action did not respond to questions about its privacy protocols and what it does with the data collected through the app.

The “activist“ tools include, among other things, a text-spamming and calling feature, both of which employ the users’ actual phone number. In contrast, Democratic phone banks always anonymize phone calls to protect the privacy of volunteers. There’s also a feature that invites users to upload all their phone’s contacts into the app. Users’ friends will no doubt appreciate this giveaway of their lucrative personal information once they start getting spammed with texts and calls.

I declined to give Turning Point my phone book, skipped the spam texts, and instead hit “knock on doors.” Then I hopped in my car to try to find the “voters near me” listed in the app, all of which eventually led me to Yvette Ovitt’s home.

As a journalist, I have never canvassed for any political party or candidate, so I am unfamiliar with these types of operations. Yet even my unsophisticated use of the app felt like a massive privacy violation. As I drove, a list of target contacts appeared, with the names, addresses, ages, and phone numbers of people up and down the road. Several entries were tagged with a red flag indicating that the address was home to multiple voters over the age of 75—a potential goldmine because older voters tend to vote more than younger ones.

This feature alone should be cause for concern by app users and potential contacts alike. A Democratic National Committee spokesperson told me that the party’s canvassing app doesn’t allow this sort of universal, geolocated address lookup; the party provides canvassers only a predefined walking list created by campaign administrators. The DNC spokesperson also says the systems are protected with encryption, two-factor authentication and other modern security measures—none of which was present on the Turning Point app.

Once I settled on an address to visit, I had trouble locating the scripts the app provided for talking to any potential voters. A so-called training video that I found on the Turning Point Action website was an hour-long gabfest on Rumble, frequently interrupted with ads for Ivermectin, so I didn’t finish it. By comparison, the Democrat’s MiniVan training video is a quick, ad-free five minutes.

No one was home at the first couple of addresses I tried, but I finally hit pay dirt at a large house with a beat-up old truck covered with graffiti parked on the road out front. A man outside asked me suspiciously if I had come up his driveway to buy his pickup. I explained that I was looking for a 22-year-old woman named Sophie, and showed him the app. He grudgingly informed me that Sophie was away at college.

He declined an interview and warned me not to knock at the house next door. A woman there, also listed in the app, was his 80-something year old mother. “She won’t want to talk to you,” he told me in a tone suggesting he was just about to yell at me to get off his lawn.

I moved on to a few more empty houses, and one address I simply couldn’t find. Finally, the app directed me to Yvette Ovitt’s home, a modest wood structure fully decked out with yards of artificial spider webs that looked professionally wrapped around the fence and adorned with smiling pumpkins and spooky signs wishing people a Happy Halloween.

The man who came out to meet me turned out to be Yvette’s older brother, Randy Ovitt. He lived there, too, so I showed him her name and asked what he thought about how easy it was for anyone to find this much information about his sister and their neighbors. “That’s fucked up—I mean messed up,” he corrected, laughing as he lit up a cigarette.

Looking at Yvette’s listing, I asked Randy whether his sister was a 51-year-old Republican. While he could confirm that his sister had died just shy of her 51^st birthday, which happened to be the day I showed up, Randy had no idea about her party affiliation. They didn’t talk about politics, he said, except about the “towelheads they keep dropping in here, getting their $1,000 debt cards.”

Randy was referring not to a Fox News myth, but a story that has gained prominence on the network and morphed into a MAGA talking point. In March, New York City mayor Eric Adams started giving pre-paid debt cards—valued at about $1,440 a month for a family of four—to migrants who had been bused to the city from Texas, so they could buy food and baby supplies. The cards were a cheaper way for the city to provide meals to the new arrivals than the city’s food-service contracts but they’d quickly become an anti-immigration talking point.

Randy was not listed in the app, possibly because he may have been a registered Democrat. At first, he told me he thought he wouldn’t vote in November. “It’s terrible, ain’t it?” he said of this year’s election. But after his second cigarette, he confessed that he “might of” voted for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, and hinted that he might vote for Harris, too. When I showed him the list of voters I was looking for, he pointed to one name and said the man had been dead for a while. Randy explained that someone else listed at the same address was the partner of the dead man’s daughter Dawn, who also lived there. “Ernie will talk to you,” he said.

Encouraged, I headed down the road to a large compound in the woods, full of trailers, a mobile home, a small house, plus several vehicles. There I found Ernie Gray, cutting plywood to build an enclosed deck on the mobile home for Dawn. He told me he’d swapped a 4 x 4 for the work on the roof because at 60, he thought he was too old to be getting up on the ladder. He was doing the rest of the work himself.

I showed him the Turning Point app with his listing in it. “How the hell did you get that?” he asked with a good-natured growl. “All my information is supposed to be private!” The app had his phone number wrong—it had belonged to Dawn’s deceased father and had been disconnected ages ago—but the rest was spot on.

Dawn and Ernie were die-hard Trump fans, not low-propensity voters. He said they’d both already voted for Trump in the primary and planned to do it again in November.  Ernie elaborated extensively on the many ways he hated Joe Biden, as Dawn nodded along from behind the screen door, where she stood with a tiny dog at her feet. Ernie, too, complained about immigrants getting debit cards, an issue that seems to rank high on the list of concerns of voters in these parts.

It was getting late in the day, so I bid Ernie farewell and packed it in. After two hours of driving around, I’d used the Turning Point app to identify two dead people, one missing college student, an elderly woman with a protectively hostile son, a closet Democrat, and one Trump supporter who needed no persuasion.

Later, I spent some more time noodling around on the app. I finally found the door-knocking script, which instructed me to ask potential voters questions such as “Do you usually get an early ballot?” or “Can we help get your ballot in on time?” Just to see what happened, I clicked “no” or “I need more help” on these questions for a voter in Virginia and then hit “submit.” The app then helpfully made a pie chart report on all my efforts. Apparently, once I tagged these people as contacted, they dropped off the list so other canvassers would not bother them. The potential for mischief with this app seemed very high and I wondered: Is this the way to win an election?

“These people are amateurs,” a longtime Republican consultant who wanted to remain anonymous told me after I described my app test results. In a close presidential election, he said, “People are voting not because someone came to their door, certainly not because somebody they never met came to the door. They’re going to vote because of something they’ve read or seen, or because someone they know dragged them to the polls.” Still, he predicted, “I think Republicans are going to have a good night in 11 days, and then all these grifters are going to take credit for it.”

On an unusually warm Thursday afternoon three weeks before Election Day, Joe Sheehan, a Democratic candidate for the Wisconsin Assembly, took me on a tour of his hometown of Sheboygan, an industrial city of 50,000 on Lake Michigan that calls itself the “Malibu of the Midwest” and is best known for its bratwurst. We stopped on Superior Avenue, a wide, tree-lined street that runs east-west across the city, from the lake toward the countryside.

“This is one district,” Sheehan said, pointing to the north side of the block. He walked 10 feet to the other side of the street. “This is another district. Ta-da, gerrymandering!”

Both sides looked identical, with maple and oak trees and two-story homes festooned with Halloween decorations and blue Harris-Walz yard signs. But in 2011, when Republicans drew new redistricting maps in secret to give themselves lopsided majorities in the legislature, they split the city of Sheboygan in half at Superior Avenue to attach both parts to the surrounding redder rural areas. Sheboygan had been represented by a Democrat in the Assembly in all but four years between 1959 and 2011, but ever since it has elected two Republicans, becoming a poster child for the gerrymandered maps that were regarded as among the worst in the country.

Last year, however, a progressive majority took over Wisconsin’s Supreme Court and struck down the skewed lines. The Republican-controlled legislature reluctantly passed new maps proposed by the state’s Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, which gave both parties a roughly equal chance of winning control and dramatically increased the number of competitive races. Democratic-leaning Sheboygan, which Joe Biden carried by 8 points in 2020, became whole again and is now one of the 15 seats Democrats need to win to regain control of the state Assembly (the lower house) for the first time in a decade and a half.

“Wisconsin was not a democracy by any meaningful definition of that word. This year, Wisconsin is a democracy. Whoever gets more votes, will probably get more seats.”

Sheehan is running for office for the first time at 66. He served for 20 years as the superintendent of Sheboygan-area schools, but came out of retirement to help Democrats regain control of the Assembly after new maps were put in place. “That’s a huge part of me running,” he told me. “Previously, when the city was split up, Democrats had a really hard time winning because their vote was split up. Now their vote isn’t.”

Sheehan has a bushy salt-and-pepper mustache and describes himself as a Tim Walz Democrat, “not formal, more of a coach-teacher type.” His first TV ad shows him in the classroom talking, much like Walz, about the importance of free breakfast and lunch for kids, which his opponent, GOP Rep. Amy Binsfeld, voted against. He’s the type of home-grown and authentic candidate that Democrats believe can help end 13 years of hard-edged GOP control of the state.

While the presidential race consumes virtually all of the country’s political oxygen, there’s a tremendous amount at stake at the state legislative level in 2024 as well. Democrats are vying to retake or maintain control of legislative chambers in more than half of the presidential battlegrounds, including Wisconsin, Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

The new lines in Wisconsin represent a sea change in one of the country’s most important toss-up states. Democrats have won 14 of the past 17 statewide elections in Wisconsin, but Republicans control 65 percent of seats in the Assembly and 67 percent of seats in the state Senate, just short of a supermajority in both chambers. “For over a decade, we had maps in Wisconsin that made it more likely that Republicans would have two-thirds supermajority than Democrats would have a majority in an almost perfectly 50–50 state,” said Rep. Greta Neubauer, the Democratic leader in the Assembly.

This seemingly voter-proof advantage gained through gerrymandering gave legislative Republicans a green light to entrench their power through tactics like voter suppression, dark money, and stripping Democrats of power, while the size of their inflated majorities allowed them to block, with little accountability, popular policies on issues like abortion rights, health care, gun restrictions, and education. “For more than a decade, Wisconsinites knew the victor in the state legislative races in advance,” said Ben Wikler, chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party. “Wisconsin was not a democracy by any meaningful definition of that word. This year, Wisconsin is a democracy. Whoever gets more votes, will probably get more seats.”

In 2022, there was just one true toss-up Assembly race in the state, according to the Milwaukee-based journalist Dan Shafer, despite competitive elections for virtually every statewide office. Now, under the new lines, there are 10 districts that Biden won by 2 points or less. “We absolutely believe there’s a path to a Democratic majority here,” said Neubauer, while admitting that picking up 15 seats to regain control “is a lot to flip in one year.” (Only half of the state Senate is up this cycle, so 2026 is the earliest it could flip to Democrats.) But even if Democrats simply reduce the GOP’s advantage, that will bring the legislature more in line with the purple nature of the rest of the state. “What the gerrymander did was prevent the voters from holding Republican legislators accountable for the decisions that they were making in Madison,” said Neubauer. “I really do see these fair maps starting to restore the democratic process in Madison and hopefully increasing bipartisan work.”

Wikler believes that legislative candidates like Sheehan represent a “secret weapon” for Democrats up and down the ballot this year. Democrats recruited candidates in 97 of the state’s 99 Assembly districts and the increase in the number of competitive races could boost Democratic turnout, he argues, which could make the difference in a state that is regularly decided by 20,000 votes or less in presidential elections.

“There’s always these moments in the Fast & Furious movies when Vin Diesel hits the nitrous and pulls into the lead, and that nitrous super boost this year for Democrats could be the state legislative races,” he said.

The progressive group Run for Something, which recruits candidates for downballot races, calls it the “reverse coattails” effect. The group studied seven battleground states in 2020, including Wisconsin, and found that when Democratic state legislative candidates ran for office in districts where Republicans previously ran unopposed, the Democratic vote share for the top of the ticket increased by anywhere from 0.4 percent to 2.3 percent.

Wikler predicts there’s a small but significant number of potential Democratic voters in the state who are disillusioned by national politics but will vote in state races because of issues like Wisconsin’s 1849 abortion ban or cuts to public schools. “It’s not a huge number, but it doesn’t take a huge number of people to tip statewide elections in Wisconsin,” he said. “If you turn out a few hundred more voters in a handful of key state legislative districts that could add up to the statewide margin of victory in the presidential race in the state that tips the entire Electoral College.”

He’s betting that candidates like Sheehan can break through stereotypes of the party in a way that Harris might not be able to do, like the one splashed on a giant red-and-white sign I saw when I drove into Sheboygan: “Kamala wants to do to Wisconsin what she did to California.”

Few voters will perceive Sheehan as a California liberal, however. His yard signs are green, the color of his beloved Green Bay Packers, and the campaign material he gives to voters has the team’s schedule on the back. “That’s one thing they won’t throw away,” he said.

As Sheehan knocked on doors in Sheboygan, his crossover appeal became evident—but so did the difficulty of automatically translating his support to the rest of the Democratic ticket. He turned off Superior Avenue and passed a gray house adorned with colorful Halloween decorations, including a severed head that looked all too real. Darbie Magray, a welder who wore a purple-and-blue tie-dye sweatshirt, yelled out that she’d already voted by mail for Sheehan. She is the type of swing voter Democrats need to win if they hope to flip the legislature and carry the state—a registered Independent who is skeptical of Trump but still not sold on Harris. “I don’t like Donald Trump at all,” she said, as her son precariously climbed on the porch railing to attach a head on a skeleton. But she wasn’t a fan of Harris, either. “I don’t like some of the things she’s done either,” she said. “I don’t like that she let all these immigrants come over.”

Magray wouldn’t say which candidate she supported for president, but she openly expressed her admiration for Sheehan, citing his support for public schools and vow to protect abortion rights. “I just think he’s the best candidate,” she said.

Sheehan said he’s knocked on 3,000 doors in Sheboygan and talked to 40 voters who said they’ll vote for him and Trump. “What they told me is, ‘Joe, it sounds like you’re listening to me and want to get along,’” he said.

“If you turn out a few hundred more voters in a handful of key state legislative districts that could add up to the statewide margin of victory in the presidential race in the state that tips the entire Electoral College.”

After knocking on doors, he took me to his favorite bratwurst restaurant, Northwestern House, a former brothel next to the railroad tracks. The owner gave him a dap as he entered and said he’d voted for him. So did a number of other elderly white patrons who didn’t look like your stereotypical wine-drinking, latte-sipping, Zoom-watching Harris voter. Sheehan ordered a double brat sandwich with butter and brown mustard, a Sheboygan staple, with a side of tater tots—the type of meal that would put most candidates to sleep. “You got a familiar face,” a man visiting from Janesville told him. “You’re either running for something or a car dealer.” When Sheehan said he was running for Assembly, the man told him, “You got a friendly face. Good luck.”

With so much polarization in politics these days, maybe a friendly face eating brats is exactly what could swing the balance of power in a battleground state that will be decided by the smallest of margins.

In 2010, as Democrats were preoccupied with passing Barack Obama’s legislative agenda in Washington, Republicans blindsided them by picking up nearly 700 state legislative seats. This “shellacking,” as Obama called it, gave the GOP the power to draw four times as many state legislative and US House districts as Democrats in the subsequent redistricting cycle, including in critical swing states like Wisconsin.

Democrats have been playing catch up at the state level ever since. They unexpectedly picked up chambers in Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania in 2022, but remain at a significant disadvantage, with Republicans controlling 56 legislative chambers compared to 41 for Democrats.

The States Project, an outside group that supports Democratic state legislative candidates, is focusing on nine states in 2024: flipping GOP-held chambers in Arizona, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin; defending new Democratic majorities in Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania; preventing GOP supermajorities in Kansas and North Carolina to preserve the ability of Democratic governors to veto legislation; and winning a Democratic supermajority in Nevada that could override the vetoes of the state’s Republican governor.

Major national developments, including Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election at the state level and the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade, have underscored the importance of state legislative races. “2024 is potent combination of state legislatures posing a risk to a free and fair presidential election and state legislatures having been handed a fundamental constitutional right,” said Daniel Squadron, co-founder of the States Project.

In addition to the weighty issues state legislatures decide—from voting laws to abortion rights to gun control to book bans—their balance of power is often decided by a handful of votes. New Hampshire Republicans won a majority in the state house by 11 votes in three races in 2022. Control of the Virginia House of Delegates was determined by a coin flip in 2017.

Despite the outsize importance of state legislative chambers—and the fact that Republicans have used their power over state politics to roll back so many hard-won rights—Democrats continue to pay less attention to these races than Republicans.  

On October 10, one day after the Harris campaign announced that it had raised a staggering $1 billion, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC) warned that it was $25 million short of money needed for “essential voter contact tactics,” including funding for TV ads, mailers, digital outreach, and door-knocking programs, despite receiving $2.5 million from the Harris-Walz ticket.

“The latest data from the field shows our party’s collective effort to win key state legislative races could fall short this cycle without a significant increase in financial support to close essential funding gaps in the final weeks of this election,” wrote DLCC President Heather Williams. “Right now, our internal data suggests we may be on an eerily similar trajectory to the 2020 election outcomes—when Democrats narrowly won the White House and took full control of Congress, yet lost more than 100 Democratic legislative seats and two chamber majorities in the states.”

Those resources are especially vital because Democrats are less likely to vote for downballot races than Republicans, who tend to vote straight-ticket for all contests. That could end up costing Democrats control of pivotal swing chambers. “It’s no secret we are still working to tell the story of what I would say is an ‘and’ strategy,” said Williams. “Democrats need to care about what is happening in the White House and the Congress and the states.”

When I asked Squadron, a former New York state senator, if state legislative races were getting enough attention amid the presidential race, he responded, “The answer is an emphatic no! Enough attention relative to the ability to impact electoral outcomes? No. Enough relative to their impact on people’s lives? No. Enough attention relative to their role in preserving a liberal democracy in this country? No.”

Even though many Democratic candidates, including Harris, have focused their campaigns on issues like abortion and fair elections, a shocking number of Democratic donors and voters still don’t seem to understand that states are far more likely to decide these issues than the federal government, especially in the wake of recent Supreme Court decisions embracing states’ rights.

“Structurally, state legislatures don’t get the attention that top of the ticket races do,” said Squadron. “There continues to be a fundamental belief, especially among Democrats, that the federal government is a greater source of harm or improvement in people’s lives than state governments in a way that just isn’t accurate.”

But deep-pocketed GOP donors do understand the importance of investing at the state level.

Two GOP megadonors, Elizabeth Uihlein (whose family has bankrolled much of the election denial movement) and Diane Hendricks (the state’s richest woman), donated $4.5 million last month to Wisconsin Assembly Republicans, giving them a $2.5 million advantage over Assembly Democrats. Republicans changed Wisconsin law in 2015 to allow unlimited donations to legislative campaign committees—one of the many ways in which they undermined the democratic process under GOP Assembly Leader Robin Vos to entrench their power. “We have no one who can write us a $1 million check,” Neubauer said. “That puts us at a competitive disadvantage.”

But what Democrats lack in money, they hope to make up in old-fashioned shoe leather. Compared to past elections, where GOP control of the legislature was predetermined, Neubauer said she’s “seen incredible enthusiasm in Sheboygan and the other districts that were significantly gerrymandered under the old maps. People are thrilled to have the opportunity to compete in a competitive election at the legislative level.”

After I visited Sheboygan, I drove an hour north to Green Bay, where Harris was holding a campaign rally across the street from Lambeau Field. Wikler spoke first to the crowd of 4,000 supporters. One of the biggest applause lines of the night came when he referenced the state legislative races. “We finally have fair maps in the state of Wisconsin!” he said to cheers. “We can make Robin Vos the minority leader in the state Assembly and Greta Neubauer the majority leader.”

Few voters nationally could name these people, but everyone at the rally in Wisconsin understood the stakes.