Republican election theft used to be covert and was almost never covered by the press. Now they are doing it out in the open and defying federal courts to stop them, while ignoring press coverage that outs what they are up to.

As Alexander Hamilton pointed out in the Federalist Papers, the courts have neither sword nor purse: they don’t have any mechanism to force compliance with their rulings.

So it appears that multiple Republican states have chosen to simply ignore their own courts, as well as the federal courts and the Supreme Court. This is a big step up from how they used to steal elections.

In 1968, for example, after tens of thousands of American deaths and millions of Vietnamese, President Lyndon Johnson had worked out a peace deal between the US, North Vietnam, and South Vietnam. His vice president, Hubert Humphrey, was running for president in the 1968 election against Richard Nixon, and announcing the peace deal in the fall of ’68 would almost certainly swing the election in Humphrey’s favor.

So Nixon went to work. He had his people reach out to the South Vietnamese officials and tell them that he’d make them rich if they’d just refuse to go along with LBJ’s peace deal. It worked.

The FBI had been wiretapping the Vietnamese and told LBJ about Nixon’s effort to prolong the Vietnam War. Thus, just three days before the 1968 election, Johnson phoned the Republican Senate leader, Everett Dirksen:

President Johnson: Some of our folks, including some of the old China lobby, are going to the Vietnamese embassy and saying please notify the [South Vietnamese] president that if he’ll hold out ’til November 2nd they could get a better deal. Now, I’m reading their hand. I don’t want to get this in the campaign. And they oughtn’t to be doin’ this, Everett. This is treason.

Senator Dirksen: I know.

Those tapes were only released by the LBJ library in the past decade, and that’s Richard Nixon who Lyndon Johnson was accusing of treason.

At that point, for President Johnson, it was no longer about getting Humphrey elected. By then Nixon’s plan had already worked and Humphrey was being wiped out in the polls because the war was ongoing.

Instead, Johnson was desperately trying to salvage the peace talks to stop the death and carnage as soon as possible. He literally couldn’t sleep.

In a phone call to Nixon himself just before the election, LBJ begged him to stop sabotaging the peace process, noting that he was almost certainly going to win the election and inherit the war anyway. Instead, Nixon publicly said LBJ’s efforts were “in shambles.”

But South Vietnam had taken Nixon’s deal and boycotted the peace talks, the war continued, and Nixon won the White House thanks to it.

An additional twenty-two thousand American soldiers, and an additional million-plus Vietnamese died because of Nixon’s 1968 treason, and he left it to Jerry Ford to end the war and evacuate the American soldiers.

Nixon was never held to account for that treason, and when the LBJ library released the tapes and documentation long after his and LBJ’s deaths it was barely noticed by the American press.

Because Nixon got away with it, Reagan tried the same stunt, this time with Iran’s mullahs. His campaign — confirmed just this year by The New York Times — reached out to the Ayatollah and told him that if he’d hold the US hostages taken in the last year of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, he’d begin shipping weapons and spare parts to Iran as soon as he became president.

American soldiers died trying to rescue the hostages, but they were firmly held by Iran to meet the terms of Reagan’s deal; it was during Reagan’s swearing-in ceremony on January 20, 1981 that Iran released them, just as Reagan put his hand on the bible, to the minute.

Reagan and Nixon getting away with rigging elections inspired Texas Governor George W. and his brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush. Jeb had his Secretary of State, Kathryn Harris, throw around 90,000 African Americans off the voting rolls and then, just for good measure, invented a new category of ballots for the 2000 election: “Spoiled.”

“Spoiled ballots” were ballots mostly coming from Black neighborhoods where Bush’s and Harris’ people had installed old, defective, and unreliable punch-card voting card machines. When people weren’t sure all the right holes had been punched (because some hadn’t worked right), they’d often write in “Al Gore” in the “write in” space along with punching the Gore button.

This, according to Bush and Harris, “spoiled” the ballots so they didn’t need to be counted, although there is no state or federal law that would back up that claim and require those ballots to be ignored.

As The New York Times reported a year after the 2000 election when the consortium of newspapers they were part of finally recounted all the ballots:

“While 35,176 voters wrote in Bush’s name after punching the hole for him, 80,775 wrote in Gore’s name while punching the hole for Gore. [Florida Secretary of State] Katherine Harris decided that these were ‘spoiled’ ballots because they were both punched and written upon and ordered that none of them should be counted.

“Many were from African American districts, where older and often broken machines were distributed, causing voters to write onto their ballots so their intent would be unambiguous.”

George W. Bush “won” the election by 537 votes in Florida, because the statewide recount — which would have revealed and counted the “spoiled” ballots, handing the election to Gore (who’d won the popular vote by over a half-million) — was stopped when Sandra Day O’Connor became the deciding vote on the Supreme Court to block the recount order from the Florida Supreme Court.

She had told friends, when the election was initially called for Al Gore by CBS News, that she wanted to retire that year because her husband had just been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and she did not want her replacement to be appointed by a Democrat. So she voted to hand the White House to George W. Bush, Florida’s voters be damned.

At least back then the GOP was listening to the federal courts. The Supreme Court this year upheld the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that makes it illegal to gerrymander a state based on race.

Since then, federal courts have ordered multiple Red states to re-do their electoral maps to strip out racial gerrymandering, and all have essentially told them to go screw themselves. They know the courts lack enforcement powers, so they’re just ignoring the orders or playing legal games to drag things out.

Just this week, North Dakota’s Republican House Majority Leader Mike Lefor told the Associated Press and the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals that “[T]here’s no way” the Republicans will re-draw the maps in a way that will meet the deadlines the court has imposed.

Also, earlier this month Georgia gave the federal courts the middle finger, drawing new maps that were just as offensive as the old ones the courts had earlier rejected. As Steven Wolfe wrote for Daily Kos Elections:

“As a result, even though Joe Biden won Georgia in 2020, Donald Trump would have carried a 9-5 majority of congressional seats, a 33-23 majority of state Senate seats, and a 95-85 majority of state House seats under the new maps. Democrats could win majorities in only the most implausible of landslides.”

Meanwhile, both Louisiana and Alabama are ignoring court orders to draw fair maps, hoping that by hanging on to their old maps through the 2024 election Republicans can continue to hold power, even if abortion and fascism concerns produce a bumper crop of Democratic voters showing up to the polls.

As the Brennan Center noted in September:

“Ten years ago in Shelby County, Chief Justice Roberts wrote, ‘Things have changed in the South.’ In many ways, they have. But, sadly, Alabama and Louisiana illustrate some of the ways they haven’t.”

Ohio had been similarly gerrymandered to favor white people, with five maps struck down by their state supreme court. But when the chief justice was forced to retire because of her age, her replacement flipped the tie-breaking vote and in a stunningly partisan act approved the heavily gerrymandered maps for 2024.

In North Carolina, Republicans just waited long enough that the challenge to their 2023 redraw of their heavily gerrymandered maps wouldn’t affect the 2024 election. If the state complies and produces less racially gerrymandered maps, the earliest they can now be used is the 2026 election. As the NAACP and Common Cause pointed out in a lawsuit filed this week:

“The General Assembly targeted predominantly Black voting precincts with surgical precision throughout the state in drawing and enacting the 2023 Plans, at the expense of traditional redistricting criteria, to achieve preferred district lines that diminish Black voters’ ability to elect candidates of their choice at all levels of government.”

Republicans have a long history of ignoring or breaking the law when it means acquiring or holding onto political power. They know that most Americans have little interest in their main agenda of gutting the middle class, destroying unions, banning abortion, throwing people off Medicaid, keeping the minimum wage at $7.25/hour, deregulating polluters, and giving unending tax breaks to billionaires.

Thus, they cheat. And that doesn’t even begin to address the tens of millions of voters Republicans have purged from voting rolls in Blue cities located within Red states across the country. As Demos noted:

“Between the close of registration for the 2020 general election and the close of registration for the 2022 general election, states reported removing 19,260,000 records from their voter registration rolls. This was equal to 8.5% of the total number of voters who were registered in the United States as of the close of registration for the 2022 general election.”

Additionally, seventeen million voters were purged in the two years leading up to the 2018 election, fully ten percent of America’s voting population, according to the Brennan Center.

Democracy Docket points out that in last year’s election fully six Red states used illegal maps in defiance of the courts, keeping the House of Representatives and state legislatures in GOP hands through the 2022 balloting:

“In 2022, voters in six states cast ballots in congressional districts that have been ruled in violation of either the 14th Amendment, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), or state constitutions.”

The election in 2024 may be even worse.

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Thom Hartmann: Republicans Plan to Suppress the Vote in 2024

Thom Hartmann writes here about Republican efforts to rig the vote in 2024.

He wrote recently:

Other than last Sunday’s revelation that Saudi Arabia and Russia have begun manipulating oil availability to create high gas prices to kneecap Biden this fall, the most under-reported story of the week was also posted to The New York Times the same day.

Alexandra Berzon and Nick Corasaniti wrote for last Sunday’s Times:

“A network of right-wing activists and allies of Donald J. Trump is quietly challenging thousands of voter registrations in critical presidential battleground states, an all-but-unnoticed effort that could have an impact in a close or contentious election.”

Noting that there’s virtually no evidence of voter fraud in any of the states targeted by this new group, which is run by “former Trump lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, and True the Vote, a vote-monitoring group with a long history of spreading misinformation,” the Times article notes that their targets are quite specific. 

In Michigan, for example, they have:

“[T]urned up large numbers of supposedly questionable voters in dense areas of Detroit and in student housing in Ann Arbor, both overwhelmingly Democratic cities.”

Using arcane laws and loopholes, Republican-affiliated groups are challenging the right to vote of thousands of mostly democratic voters across the states most likely to determine the outcome of the 2024 election.

While the Times report makes it seem like this is a new tactic, it’s been a major part of Republican electoral strategy since the 1960s. They’re just getting more sophisticated these days.

William Rehnquist, for example, was a 40-year-old Arizona lawyer and Republican activist in 1964, when his idol, Barry Goldwater, was running against Lyndon Johnson for president. Rehnquist helped organize a program titled Operation Eagle Eye in his state to aggressively challenge the vote of every Hispanic and Black voter and to dramatically slow down the voting lines in communities of color to discourage people who had to get back to work from waiting hours to vote.

As Democratic poll watcher Lito Pena observed at the time, Rehnquist showed up at a southern Phoenix polling place to do his part in Operation Eagle Eye:

“He knew the law and applied it with the precision of a swordsman,” Pena told a reporter. “He sat at the table at the Bethune School, a polling place brimming with black citizens, and quizzed voters ad nauseam about where they were from, how long they’d lived there—every question in the book. A passage of the Constitution was read and people who spoke broken English were ordered to interpret it to prove they had the language skills to vote.”

Rehnquist was richly rewarded for his activism; he quickly rose through the GOP ranks to being appointed by President Nixon, in 1972, to the Supreme Court and then elevated in 1986 by President Reagan to chief justice, a position he used to help stop the vote recount in 2000 and hand the election that year to George W. Bush in the case of Bush v. Gore.

(Interestingly, three GOP-employed attorneys who worked with the Bush legal team to argue that case before Rehnquist included then-little-known lawyers John Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett, and Brett Kavanaugh. Bush rewarded Roberts by appointing him not just to the Court but directly to the chief justice position when Rehnquist died. Roberts was also a tie-breaking vote to allow Ohio to continue its voter purges in 2017, and he wrote the 5–4 decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013.)

But ever since Kathrine Harris and Jeb Bush got away with stealing the 2000 election from Al Gore, Republicans have redoubled their efforts. When they suffered virtually no blowback or media exposure (beyond Greg Palast’s BBC reports) for the open theft of the presidency, that election became a major turning point for amping up Republican election fraud across the nation.

Months before the election, Florida Governor Jeb Bush had his Secretary of State, Kathryn Harris, throw around 90,000 African Americans off the voting rolls and then, just for good measure, invented a new category of ballots for the 2000 election: “Spoiled.”

“Spoiled ballots” were ballots mostly coming from Black neighborhoods where Bush’s and Harris’ people had installed old, defective, and unreliable punch-card voting card devices. When people weren’t sure all the right holes had been punched (because some hadn’t worked right), they’d often write in “Al Gore” in the “write in” space along with punching the Gore hole in the ballot.

This, according to Bush and Harris, “spoiled” the ballots so they didn’t need to be counted, although there is no state or federal law that would back up that claim and require those ballots to be ignored.

As The New York Times reported a year after the 2000 election when the consortium of newspapers they were part of finally recounted all the votes and discovered tens of thousands of uncounted ballots:

“While 35,176 voters wrote in Bush’s name after punching the hole for him, 80,775 wrote in Gore’s name while punching the hole for Gore. [Florida Secretary of State] Katherine Harris decided that these were all ‘spoiled’ ballots because they were both punched and written upon and ordered that none of them should be counted.”

The result was that 45,599 Florida ballots that were clearly intended to be cast for Al Gore were not counted. As the Times noted:

“Many were from African American districts, where older and often broken machines were distributed, causing voters to write onto their ballots so their intent would be unambiguous.”

George W. Bush “won” the election by 537 votes in Florida, because the statewide recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court — which would have revealed and counted the “spoiled” ballots, handing the election to Gore (who’d won the popular vote by over a half-million) — was stopped when GHW Bush appointee Clarence Thomas became the deciding vote on the Supreme Court to block the recount order from the Florida Supreme Court.

Since then, Republican voter purge efforts have gone on steroids. More recently, a shocking 2023 study from Demos lays out the dimensions of this voter purge crisis of democracy brought to us by an increasingly desperate GOP.

Republicans are doing this because they know that their policies are unpopular: most Americans aren’t fans of tax cuts for billionaires, more pollution, deregulation, high-priced drugs, privatizing Medicare, ending Social Security, criminalizing abortion and birth control, student debt, hating on Black and queer people, and the GOP’s war on unions and working people.

So, the GOP does everything they can to make voting difficult or even impossible, particularly for people in heavily Democratic neighborhoods (which are usually college towns, big cities, and Black neighborhoods).

When Republicans run elections in such areas (typically Blue cities in Red states), they’ll close or change polling places at the last minute to sow confusion and cause people to give up when they show up at their normal polling place and find it closed.

For example, in last fall’s election in Ohio the state changed polling places for voters in heavily Black Cuyahoga and Summit counties just five days before the election, as Newsweek noted in an article titled “Ohio GOP Changing Polling Locations Days Before Election Raises Questions.”

Ohio voters were outraged, and that outrage spread across X (formerly Twitter) with comments like this:

“The Ohio GOP is playing ‘Your polling place has moved’ with 47,000 voters in the largest African American voting county in Ohio—just five days before the election. Making it harder to vote—in the crucial August 8th special election (deciding if a majority of voters still can amend Ohio’s state constitution)—is wrong.”

Another X user noted:

“Ohio Republicans are so damn shady! … This stinks to high heaven. At the last minute, before Ohio’s special election, polling locations were changed in Cuyahoga and Summit counties. More than 47,000 voters are affected by changes to 50 voting precincts.”

The fact that this little trick in Ohio last fall got virtually no national press coverage guarantees Red states will be doing more of it in the upcoming 2023 and 2024 elections.

But that’s just the beginning.

Knowing that working-class people are less likely to vote Republican than white upper-class suburbanites, Republicans also engineer polling situations so people paid by the hour will have to wait for hours in line to vote, losing out on income. 

Every year, we’re treated to pictures and videos of hours-long lines to vote in Blue cities in Red states, while lines in white suburbs in those same states typically run less than 10 to 15 minutes.

Similarly, many Red states have imposed draconian penalties on people conducting voter registration drives for making even the smallest mistakes, or for failing to “properly register” themselves with the state. This has shut down many voter registration programs, including some from long-term organizations like the League of Women’s Voters.

As The Kansas Reflector newspaper noted, the penalty for even a minor, inadvertent error is now 17 months in the state prison and a $100,000 fine:

“The League of Women Voters of Kansas and other nonprofits are suspending voter registration drives for fear of criminal prosecution under a new state law.”

The League has sued Florida, Tennessee, and Texas for their criminalization of voter registration drives as well.

But purging voters — by the tens of millions every election cycle — is where Republicans find their best result. As the Demos report notes:

“Between the close of registration for the 2020 general election and the close of registration for the 2022 general election, states reported removing 19,260,000 records from their voter registration rolls. This was equal to 8.5% of the total number of voters who were registered in the United States as of the close of registration for the 2022 general election.”

Additionally, 17 million voters were purged in the two years leading up to the 2018 election, fully ten percent of America’s voting population, according to the Brennan Center.

Given that the most radical purges took place among Black and youth voters in Republican-controlled Red states, those 8.5 percent and 10 percent “national averages” could well be two or three times that percentage in the states where these purges were concentrated.

They added, most of the purge activity was taking place in former Confederate Red states that — before five Republicans on the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in their 2013 Shelby County decision — had to have purges pre-cleared by the federal government:

“The median purge rate over the 2016–2018 period in jurisdictions previously subject to preclearance [Red states] was 40 percent higher than the purge rate in jurisdictions that were not covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act [Blue states].”

More than a quarter of those purged during this period from 2016-2022 were removed from the rolls either because they failed to vote in the previous election or because they failed to return a postcard mailed out by a Republican secretary of state (that is usually designed to look like junk mail).

This is called “caging” and used to be illegal, but Sam Alito broke the tie and wrote the 5-4 decision in the 2018 Husted v A Phillip Randolph Institute decision when the five Republicans then on the Court ruled that Ohio Republican Secretary of State Husted could continue his practice of mailing the postcards into Ohio cities with the largest Black populations.

In his dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer pointed out that only around 4 percent of Americans move out of their county every year. Yet, he wrote:

“The record shows that in 2012 Ohio identified about 1.5 million registered voters—nearly 20% of its 8 million registered voters—as ineligible to remain on the federal voter roll because [Republican Secretary of State Husted said that] they changed their residences.”

The Brennan Center found that just between 2014 and 2016, in the two years leading up to the Hillary/Trump presidential election, over 14 million people were purged from voter rolls, largely in Republican-controlled states. Then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp purged over a million voters in Georgia alone in 2018, leading up to his 50,000-vote win that year against Stacey Abrams.

Calling the findings “disturbing,” the Brennan Center noted: 

“Almost 4 million more names were purged from the rolls between 2014 and 2016 [just after the Supreme Court legalized large-scale no-oversight voter purges in 2013] than between 2006 and 2008. This growth in the number of removed voters represented an increase of 33 percent—far outstripping growth in both total registered voters (18 percent) and total population (6 percent).”

Another strategy that the GOP has rolled out in a big way to suppress the vote in Blue areas of Red states is “strict signature matching.” They primarily use this against voters who’ve succeeded in obtaining vote-by-mail ballots, which are authenticated by comparing the signature on the envelope with the voter’s registration card.

Because signatures change over time and often vary a lot when people are in a hurry, this is low-hanging fruit for the GOP.  Last year they started a program to field an “army” of 50,000 “poll watchers,” including interviewing candidates from among white supremacist militia groups, for the 2024 election.

While some of these poll watchers will be on hand to try to intimidate or challenge Black and young voters (a practice that’s legal in most Red states), many will be overseeing the counting of mail-in ballots, which are generally more Democratic than Republican.

All they have to do is claim that, in their opinion, a signature doesn’t match and the ballot goes into the “provisional” pile and won’t be counted until or unless the voter shows up in person at the county elections office. Most people never even know their ballot was challenged and not counted.

Meanwhile, the GOP in Texas is quietly recruiting 10,000 white volunteers “courageous” enough to go into Black and Hispanic polling places and confront people trying to vote.  

“Common Cause Texas on Thursday shared a leaked video of a Harris County GOP official discussing plans to ‘build an army’ of 10,000 election workers and poll watchers, including some who ‘will have the confidence and courage’ to go into Black and Brown communities to address alleged voter fraud that analyses show does not actually exist.”

Which brings us back to last weekend’s report about the aggressive voter roll purges detailed in The New York Times. Not only are they trying to strip people of their right to vote, but they’re also laying the groundwork to challenge Democratic winners after the election.

The Times reporters found that even when Republican efforts to get clerks to remove Democratic voters from the rolls fail, the registration purgers consider that a victory because they will then use the initial allegation that those voters were “fraudulent” as the basis to contest the election after the fact — as Trump tried to do in 2020 — by claiming they should have been stripped from the rolls.

As Joanna Lydgate, the chief executive of the nonpartisan States United Democracy Center, told the Times, in some cases:

“It really is aimed at being able to cast doubt on the results after the fact.”

Voting in Red states has become difficult, and registering voters is now treacherous since five Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized all these tricks and strategies to purge or discourage Democratic voters.

If you live in a Blue area of a Red state, or one of the swing states that will decide the next president, get ready: the GOP is pulling out all the stops for this fall’s election.

Double-check your voter registration every month or two at Vote.org, and be sure to double-check it in the weeks just before the deadline for registration, as Republican Secretaries of State prefer to purge people in this window so by the time people discovered they’re purged it’s too late to re-register. And let your friends, relatives, co-workers, and neighbors know that they need to do the same.

Forewarned is forearmed. Pass it on.

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Protecting Voter Registration: An Assessment of Voter Purge Policies in Ten States | Demos

Evaluating a spectrum of states for their voter removal practices related to an important but often overlooked voting barrier: voter purges. Purges played a part in more than 19 million voters being removed between the 2020 and 2022 general elections.

Voter Purge Legislative Resource Guide

Research
Campaign Legal Center
Common Cause
Demos
Fair Elections Center
League of Women Voters
Southern Poverty Law Center
State Voices

Executive Summary

Tweetable quote:

An inclusive democracy demands full access to the ballot by all eligible voters, yet many states use election procedures that create unnecessary burdens on the right to vote.

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An inclusive democracy demands full access to the ballot by all eligible voters, yet many states use election procedures that create unnecessary burdens on the right to vote. This report focuses on an important but often overlooked voting barrier: voter purges. Too often, registered voters are kicked off the voter rolls in error, with little or no notice and opportunity to correct the error. When these voters show up to the polls, they may be turned away and their voices silenced—even though they are fully eligible to vote.

Between the close of registration for the 2020 general election and the close of registration for the 2022 general election, states reported removing 19,260,000 records from their voter registration rolls. This was equal to 8.5% of the total number of voters who were registered in the United States as of the close of registration for the 2022 general election.1  Of course, some removals are necessary for the proper maintenance of voter rolls, such as for persons who have died or have moved away from their voting jurisdiction. One of the most frequent reasons for purging, however, was “inactivity,” or failure to respond to a confirmation notice and not voting in at least two consecutive federal general elections. This reason accounted for more than a quarter of all removals while 26.8% and 25.6% were for address change or death of the registrant, respectively.2

Tweetable quote:

Flawed voter purge practices–such as removals for inactivity or based on inaccurate identification of felony status or citizenship status—often disproportionately target voters of color, naturalized citizens, and other communities[.]

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Flawed voter purge practices–such as removals for inactivity or based on inaccurate identification of felony status or citizenship status—often disproportionately target voters of color, naturalized citizens, and other communities,3  and can prevent many eligible persons from exercising their right to vote. In addition, too many states lack readily available data on voter purges, which prevents advocates, organizers, and voters from stopping improper purges before they happen or correcting an erroneous purge in time for an election. As a result, tens of thousands of eligible voters who have taken all the necessary steps to exercise their right to vote are wrongly prevented from making their voices heard in our democracy.

Dēmos conducted an analysis of voter removal practices, the safeguards in place to protect eligible voters from disenfranchisement, and the accessibility and transparency of voter registration data across ten states: Arizona, California, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, and Wisconsin. The voter removal laws we analyzed include both routine list maintenance laws—those allowing election officials to remove voters who have moved, died, or otherwise become ineligible to vote4 —and more problematic practices, such as laws targeting voters for removal for not voting (also known as a “use it or lose it” process), allowing mass third-party challenges to voters’ registrations, and granting catch-all removal authority to election officials without proper safeguards. We evaluated these states on four dimensions:

  • Does the state follow practices that minimize the risk of erroneous removal?
  • Does the state have safeguards in place that allow persons who were erroneously purged to correct their information and vote at election time?
  • Does the state have accessible data on voter removals?
  • Does the state provide transparency on the reasons for removal and other data allowing an analysis of whether removals are improperly targeting specific demographic groups?

We chose these ten states because their voter removal laws and safeguards, as well as the accessibility and transparency of their registration data, provide representative examples of the spectrum of laws and practices across the United States. Additionally, many of these state legislatures are either considering bills or have recently enacted laws that impact how voters are removed from the voter rolls. In the 2022 legislative session, state lawmakers introduced at least 43 bills that would allow or require problematic voter purges, and in 2023, as of the writing of this report, states are considering at least 28 additional bills.5

We found that none of these states received a perfect score for removal practices or for safeguards against erroneous removal, which are the most important in protecting ballot access for eligible voters. Only a few states received a perfect score on data accessibility or transparency, but good data alone will not prevent eligible voters from being inappropriately purged.

All ten states must modernize their removal practices to ensure that only ineligible voters are removed from the rolls, and all need better systems to ensure that erroneously removed eligible voters can re-register and vote in the current election. Additionally, almost all these states need improved policies to ensure that they collect and publish voter registration data in an accessible and transparent format. While we examine only a subset of states, we know from work with partners in other states that the problems identified here are not confined to these ten states but are likely representative of issues across the entire United States.

Bottom line: Every examined state must improve its laws and practices to guard against improper voter registration purges. Further, based on our analysis of these ten states, we suspect the issues documented within this report are widespread and must be examined and addressed in states nationwide. We offer actionable solutions here to ensure that no voter is removed from the rolls without a legitimate reason—and that no eligible voter is denied the right to vote because of administrative malfunctions. By following these recommendations, states can improve their voter removal practices and protect the strength of our democracy while ensuring the integrity of their voter registration rolls.

  • 1 U.S. Election Commission, Election Administration and Voting Summary 2022 Comprehensive Report (Report to 118th Congress) 159, available at https://www.eac.gov/sites/default/files/2023-06/2022_EAVS_Report_508c.pdf.
  • 2Id. at 160.
  • 3Jane C. Timm, “Fraud hunters challenged 92,000 voter registrations last year,” NBC News, February 27, 2023 (noting that analysis of Cobb County voter challenges showed disproportionate impact on Black voters and young voters), available at https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/ fraud-hunters-challenged-92k-georgia-voter-registrations-2022-rcna71668; Ari Berman, Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 195-97; Michael C. Herron and Daniel A. Smith, Estimating the Differential Effects of Purging Inactive Registered Voters, Conference Draft prepared for the 2018 Election Sciences, Reform, and Administration Conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, 20-21, 27 (available at https://esra.wisc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/1556/2020/11/herron.pdf); Texas League of United Latin Citizens v. Whitley, 2019 WL 7938511 (W. D. Texas 2019); Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Inst., 138 S. Ct. 1833, 1840-41 (2018) (Sotomayor, J., dissenting) (citing Brief for National Association for the Advancement of Colored People et ano as Amici Curiae on behalf of Respondents, 18-19, available at https://advancementproject.org/resources/amicus-brief-filed-husted-v-philip-randolphinstitute/); NBC News “Do Voter Purges Discriminate Against the Poor and Minorities?” Aug 2016, available at https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/do-voter-purges-discriminate-against-poorminorities- n636586; “North Carolina Voter List Maintenance: 2023 Update,” Southern Coalition for Social Justice, available at https://southerncoalition.org/resources/north-carolina-voter-listmaintenance- 2023-update/; U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Voting Irregularities in Florida During the 2000 Presidential Election, Ch. 1, Table 1-4 and accompanying text, June 2001 (available at https://www.usccr.gov/pubs/vote2000/main.htm).
  • 4For example, a voter may become ineligible due to an adjudication of incapacity or conviction of a disqualifying felony.
  • 5Comprehensive Bill Search, Voting Rights Lab, available at https://tracker.votingrightslab.org/pending/search (last visited April 20, 2023)
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  • The GOP Vote Thieves Strike Again

    Image by jette55 from Pixabay

    The first rule of business and marketing is that if you make it easy for folks to buy your product or engage with you, more people will do so. If you don’t want people to buy or use your product or service, on the other hand, just make them jump through hoops to complete the transaction and many won’t bother.

    Republicans know this and have been applying it to voting for the better part of 50 years; recently they’ve turned it into a science.

    Polling before the 2020 election in Texas, for example, showed that Joe Biden may beat Trump just as he did in so many other swing states across the country. From Trump failing there, the Republican elders in the state knew, it would be a short jump to flipping the entire state Blue, as happened with Michigan and Wisconsin.

    Harris County — basically, solid-Blue Houston — laid out a plan to send out forms to all its 2.5 million registered voters to qualify for mail-in ballots (it was during the pandemic and before vaccines were available, after all).

    Making it easier to vote, even during a pandemic, was definitely a bridge too far for the GOP: it sent (now impeached) Attorney General Ken Paxton into action.

    Paxton immediately filed a lawsuit to stop the largest Democratic county in all of Texas from making voting convenient.

    The state had spent years, after all, driving up the number of hours voters in Democratic parts of the state had to wait in line to cast a ballot and they weren’t about to let voting become painless.

    A 2020 study by Northern Illinois University ranked Texas dead last in the nation in ease of voting, with the GOP having put into place a whole series of roadblocks designed to make it hard to register or even to vote during elections.

    Paxton explained to Steve Bannon how well his lawsuit worked, bragging about forcing millions of Houstonians to take their lives in their hands if they really wanted to vote:

    “If we’d lost Harris County—Trump won by 620,000 votes in Texas. Harris County mail-in ballots that they wanted to send out were 2.5 million,” Paxton told Steve Bannon in June, 2021 adding, “and we were able to stop every one of them.”

    Texas’ 38 electoral votes were crucial to Trump even getting close to beating Biden, and if heavily Democratic Harris County/Houston had been able to easily vote in large numbers — it was even less safe to vote during a pandemic in a high-population-density city like Houston than in rural Texas — Republicans would be toast.

    So he essentially denied them an opportunity to vote without exposing themselves to a deadly disease that ultimately killed over 1 million Americans.

    “If you want to vote in Houston,” Paxton essentially said, “you’re going to have to expose yourself to Covid.”

    As Paxton pointed out to Bannon:

    “Had we not done that, we would have been in the very same situation — we would’ve been on Election Day, I was watching on election night and I knew, when I saw what was happening in these other states [that did expand mail-in voting for the pandemic], that that would’ve been Texas. We would’ve been in the same boat. We would’ve been one of those battleground states that they were counting votes in Harris County for three days and Donald Trump would’ve lost the election.”

    This kind of massive and morally reprehensible voter suppression is pretty much limited to Republican-controlled states. It’s their latest strategy for holding power.

    In contrast to Texas (60.4% voter turnout), I live in the easiest state in the union to vote: Oregon (75.5% voter turnout).

    For over a quarter-century, voting in Oregon has been conducted entirely by mail. There are polling places in a few government buildings for disabled people, but otherwise everybody gets their ballot in the mail six weeks or so before the election and can send them back in an enclosed, postage-paid envelope right up to and including on election day.

    From Minnesota (79.9% turnout) to Maryland (71.1% turnout), Democratic-controlled states that make it easy to vote and don’t throw up obstructions to voting by mail generally have the highest turnout.

    Colorado, Oregon, Washington state, Hawaii, and Utah conduct their elections entirely by mail. By contrast, Oklahoma (54.9% turnout), Arkansas (56% turnout), West Virginia (57.5% turnout) and Tennessee (59.8% turnout) all throw up obstacles to registering to vote and voting by mail, and thus have low voter turnout.

    In the week or three after our ballot arrives in the mail, Louise and I find the time to sit down at the dining room table with a laptop and look up all the obscure races that used to confound us when we had to vote in person and couldn’t bring anything into the booth with us.

    Voting for judges, ballot measures, city and county races, etc. that once involved wild guesses are now thoughtful and specific: democracy in Oregon is strengthened by every voter having this same ability.

    And throughout those two-plus decades that Oregonians have voted entirely by mail, there hasn’t been a single credible claim of consequential, election-altering voter fraud. It’s a phrase that only makes the local newspapers when Republicans in some other state are using it to justify blocking people from registering or voting.

    Using Donald Trump’s “stolen election” lies as the basis for their actions, legislators in every Republican-controlled state in the nation have made it harder to vote over the past few years. States under Democratic control, on the other hand, have uniformly made it more convenient to vote.

    With the exception of voting-obsessed first-in-the-nation New Hampshire, all of the top-10 voter turnout states are controlled by Democrats.

    This is no way to run a democracy: the right to vote should not be a partisan issue.

    America needs national voting standards, and the Guarantee Clause of the Constitution offers a basis for them. Section 4 of Article IV of the Constitution says:

    “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government....”

    The Framers of the Constitution were clear about the importance of that clause; it was proposed by Pennsylvania’s James Wilson at the Constitutional Convention on July 18, 1787 and almost the entire day was spent debating it.

    It’s an amazing sentence, that could be as sweeping in its power as the Commerce Clause (which JFK and LBJ used to force integration of the South) but has never been used in any meaningful way since it was written on that hot summer day in 1787.

    The first time the “Guarantee Clause” came before the Supreme Court, slavery was the law of the land and Chief Justice Roger Taney, a slaveholder himself, was determined to keep it that way by bottling up the Clause’s power under the rubric of states’ rights.  

    Seven years before he tried to cement slavery into the law of every state in the union with his Dred Scott decision, Taney ruled in Luther v Borden (1849) that the Supreme Court should never be allowed to interfere with “state’s rights” on the basis of the Guarantee Clause.

    “Under this article of the Constitution,” Taney wrote, “it rests with Congress to decide what government is the established one in a state.”  

    In other words, Taney said: The definition of what a ‘Republican Form of Government’ actually means isn’t yet laid out in the law or previous interpretations of the Constitution: therefore, it’s politics. And politics is the province of Congress, not the Supreme Court, which must limit itself to law.

    On that foundation, later Supreme Courts repeated Taney’s pro-slavery “states’ rights” assertion that the question was political and not one to be decided by the courts: instead, it was up to the politicians in Congress if they were going to “guarantee a Republican Form of Government” to — or within — any particular state at any point in the future.  

    Taney was quoted “lucidly and cogently” in Pacific States Telephone & Telegraph v Oregon (1912) and Chief Justice John Roberts noted in 2019 that, “This Court has several times concluded that the Guarantee Clause does not provide the basis for a justiciable claim.”

    Thus, to this day, it’s up to Congress, not the Court, to decide what a “Republican Form of Government” is and how Congress will guarantee it to and/or within every state.

    Which brings us to today, and how Congress can use that clause to end partisan gerrymanders, dial back the power of money in politics, and guarantee the right of every American citizen to vote without undue difficulty.

    Back in 2021, Joe Manchin and Lisa Murkowski joined with Senators Kaine, King, Merkley, Padilla, Tester, and Warnock to propose the Freedom To Vote Act.

    The opening of the Act laid it’s goals out clearly:

    “Congress also finds that it has both the authority and responsibility, as the legislative body for the United States, to fulfill the promise of article IV, section 4, of the Constitution, which states: ‘The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a “Republican Form of Government.”’” [emphasis added]

    The proposed law even notes as justification for its existence how the Supreme Court has dropped — or laid down — the ball and therefore Congress must pick it up:

    “Congress finds that its authority and responsibility to enforce the Guarantee Clause is clear given that Federal courts have not enforced this clause because they understood that its enforcement is committed to Congress by the Constitution.”

    The Freedom To Vote Act would have ensured a “Republican Form of Government” in America and undone 50 years of obstacles Republicans have placed in front of voters. It included: 

    — Automatic voter registration and online registration for 16 year olds who will be 18 and thus eligible to vote in the next election
    —     Same day voter registration nationwide
    — An end to partisan gerrymandering
    —     Limits on campaign contributions to a maximum of $10,000
    — Criminalization of “pass through” groups to get around campaign finance laws
    —     A requirement by all corporations to fully and rapidly disclose all election spending over $10,000
    — Making all websites (like Facebook) with more than 50 million users create a publicly available and publicly searchable archive of political ads
    — Brings web-based election expenditures under the same disclosure rules as TV
    — Makes it a federal crime to prevent a qualified person from registering to vote
    —     Requires 14 consecutive days for early voting, at least 10 hours each day
    — Requires easy access to polling places for rural and college campus voters, and easy access to voting for all voters by public transportation
    —     Guarantees that all voters, nationwide, can vote by mail with no excuses necessary
    — Guarantees that all voters can put themselves on a permanent vote-by-mail list and automatically receive a ballot in the mail
    —     Requires states to give voters the ability to track their mail-in ballots to be sure they’re counted or contest any challenge to their ballot
    — Forbids states from forcing mail-in voters to have their ballots witnessed, notarized, or jump through other onerous hoops
    —     Requires secured and clearly labeled ballot drop boxes in all jurisdictions
    — Requires the Post Office to process all ballots on the day they’re dropped off and without postage
    —     Requires states to keep voting lines shorter than 30 minutes in all cases and places
    — Allows people waiting in line to vote to receive food or water from others
    —     Gives the right to vote to all felons who have served their sentences, in all states
    — Prohibits voter “caging” where failure to return a postcard gets you purged
    —     Prohibits states from deleting voters from the rolls because they haven’t recently voted
    — Empowers voters to sue in federal court any state or local officials who interfere with their right to vote
    —     Criminalizes intimidating, threatening, or coercing any election official or election worker
    — Requires federal prosecution of anybody who tries to harm or undermine public officials by doxxing the personal information of an election worker or their immediate family
    —     Makes it a federal crime to publish or distribute false information about elections (when, where, etc.)
    — Increases federal penalties for voter intimidation or otherwise interfering with our absolute right to vote
    —     Keeps partisan “poll watchers” at least 8 feet from voters in all circumstances, including while voting
    — Requires paper ballots in all cases and all elections (there are exceptions for disabled voters)
    —     Requires post-election audits 
    — Provides criminal penalties for any candidate or campaign that fails to fully and immediately report any interactions with foreign governments
    —     Gives lower income individuals $25 they can use to give to candidates in $5 or more increments.

    The legislation died from a Republican filibuster in the Senate in 2022, but if Democrats and Republicans who actually believe in democracy can gain a large enough majority in the upcoming elections this November and next, it should be pushed to the front of the line of new legislation.

    Republicans know the only way they can continue to hold onto national power — and even keep their control over states like Texas, Georgia, and Florida — is by making it difficult to register and vote, by criminalizing voter registration drives, and by arresting and parading before TV cameras Black former felons who unwittingly voted.

    There are limits to their cynical game, though, and the more clearly Americans realize how a process that should be painless and convenient, including vote-by-mail — as it is here in Oregon and in many other advanced democracies around the world — the sooner we can achieve that “more perfect union” the Founders set as our national aspiration.

  • xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

  • Is Texas Going To Invalidate an Entire Election in Democratic-Leaning Houston?

    Image by Marc Hatot from Pixabay

    Two years ago, Texas Republicans set out to rig the 2022 election, passing into law Senate Bill 1 over the objection of Democratic legislators who left the state to try to block its passage. That law, among other things:

    — Bans Harris County (Houston) from keeping polls open overnight for shift workers, while expanding early voting in rural white counties.

    — Lets the state throw out any absentee ballots that don’t come in with the voter’s driver’s license number attached.

    — Makes it a felony for any state employee to mail out an unsolicited absentee ballot.

    — Requires election officials to do monthly purges of voting rolls without notifying voters they’ll no longer be able to vote.

    — Provides new legal protections for so-called “partisan poll watchers” when voters believe they’re being intimidated by same, making it a 1-year-in-prison offense to stop possibly Proud Boy “poll watchers.”

    — Maintains the state’s lack of convenient online voter registration, making it the most difficult state in the union to vote in..

    This follows a decade of similar attempts to suppress the vote of anybody who isn’t white and middle aged/middle class.

    As the Texas Civil Rights Project noted, in just the first 4 years after corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 2013, Texas Republicans closed 1,173 polling places in counties — predominantly Black and Hispanic — that had previously been protected from manipulation by the VRA.

    But none of that was enough for Texas Republicans to feel comfortable they could continue to win elections. After all, the state’s largest county — Harris County, the home of Houston and 4.7 million residents — is now reliably Democratic. In 2020, Joe Biden won the county by 13 points.

    As The Houston Chronicle noted two days ago:

    “Harris County was a Republican stronghold as recently as 2014. Since then, though, Democrats have won the majority of county commission seats, the county judge's office, and swept nearly every judicial seat. Statewide candidates like [Governor Greg] Abbott, Sen. Ted Cruz, and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who all have deep ties to Harris County, won the county in 2014. But all three have lost the county in recent years, narrowing the margins in their statewide re-elections.”

    So, this week the Texas Senate approved a new law that will let the Secretary of State invalidate an entire election in Harris County — and, out of Texas’ 254 counties, only in Harris County — if the Republican Secretary of State declares he has “good cause” to suspect something went wrong, like running out of paper for voting machines for more than one hour in even one of the polling locations in that county.

    Once the election is declared void and the results are subtracted from statewide totals, the County will have to put on an entirely new election at its own expense, requiring voters to take another day off work and try to show up.

    Such special elections, Republicans know, always lean heavily toward the GOP with its larger pool of salaried workers and retirees who can show up for every election without difficulty or financial penalty.

    The Attorney for Harris County, Christian Menefee, was blunt in his assessment of the legislative efforts:

    “They are not about making elections better,” Menefee said. “They are about targeting the largest county in the state, which is led by people of color.”

    As my radio colleague Joe Madison would say, “Meet James Crow Esq.”

    This is a continuation of the GOP strategy that first took shape in the election of 1980, when Heritage Foundation co-founder and Reagan strategist Paul Weyrich famously told a group of Republicans in a large Dallas church:

    “Now many of our Christians have what I call the ‘goo goo’ syndrome. Good Government. They want everybody to vote. I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

    Four years ago, I wrote The Hidden History of the War on Voting, noting at that time that Republican secretaries of state across the nation were vigorously purging voters from the rolls (over 17 million, more than 10 percent of America’s active voters, in just the 2016–2018 period, according to NBC News[i]).

    After five Republican appointees on the US Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, 14 GOP-controlled states moved, within a year (some within days), to restrict access to the vote, particularly for communities of color, students, and retired people.

    In North Carolina, for example, 158 polling places were permanently closed in the 40 counties with the most African American voters just before the 2016 election, leading to a 16 percent decline in African American early voting in that state. An MIT study found that, nationwide, Hispanic voters wait 150 percent longer in line than white voters, and Black voters can expect to wait 200 percent longer in line to vote.

    In Indiana, then-Governor Mike Pence’s new rigorous voter ID law caused an 11.5 percent drop in African American voting. Students are suing for their right to vote, and retired people who no longer drive but care passionately about their Social Security and Medicare are being turned away at the polls by the hundreds of thousands because their driver’s licenses have expired.

    Voter suppression became the foundational and primary go-to tactic for the GOP in the 2000 election, although they’d been practicing it since the 1960s.

    Newspapers in 2000 talked about how the GOP attacked Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore with smear and innuendo (ridiculing him for helping write the legislation that created the modern internet, for example), but the main thing that got George W. Bush into the White House was voter suppression.

    His brother, Florida governor Jeb Bush, and Bush’s secretary of state, Katherine Harris, threw somewhere between 20,000 and 90,000 African American voters off the rolls. They were able to get the vote close enough that five Republican appointees to the Supreme Court functionally awarded Bush the presidency. (The BBC covered this in 2001 in two major investigative reports by Greg Palast that were seen all over the world — except not on any American media.)[ii]

    By 2016, the Republican Party had fine-tuned its voter suppression and intimidation systems to the point that they ran like well-oiled machines in nearly 30 states. Between the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections, for example, Ohio had purged more than two million voters from its rolls, the vast majority (more than two to one) in heavily African American and Hispanic counties.

    The five Republican appointees on the Supreme Court ruled in 2017 that they could keep the purges up, and other states have since adopted their new tactic of caging voters (challenging their registration status by mailing them postcards and then striking them from the voter rolls if the postcards aren’t returned).

    The New York Times reported in 2017 that just in Wisconsin about 17,000 registered voters may have been turned away at the polls in November 2016 because, even though registered as voters, they didn’t have the particular types of ID necessitated by Scott Walker’s new voter ID law (and Ari Berman reported in the Nation in 2016 that as many as 300,000 Wisconsinites lacked the ability to even register to vote because of the law).[iii] [iv]

    In 2018, investigative reporter Greg Palast sued[v] a number of Republican secretaries of state and got his hands on purge lists that included more than 90,000 people in largely Democratic parts of Nevada, 769,436 voters purged in Colorado, 340,134 in Georgia, a large but then-as-yet-uncounted list from Nebraska, and 469,000 purged in Indiana.

    Without these major voter purges, and without the disenfranchisement of young people, old people, and poor people by voter ID laws, it’s a virtual certainty that America would have had President Al Gore and President Hillary Clinton, and the Democratic Party would have a six-to-three or larger majority on the US Supreme Court.

    In 2018, in Husted v. Randolph,[vi] Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion allowing John Husted, Ohio’s secretary of state, to continue with an aggressive purge of voters from that state’s rolls heading toward the 2018 election.

    In his dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer pointed out that around 4 percent of Americans move out of their county every year. Yet “[t]he record shows that in 2012 Ohio identified about 1.5 million registered voters—nearly 20% of its 8 million registered voters—as ineligible to remain on the federal voter roll because they changed their residences.”

    The Brennan Center found that just between 2014 and 2016, in the two years leading up to the Hillary/Trump presidential election, over 14 million people were purged from voter rolls, largely in Republican-controlled states. Brian Kemp purged over a million in Georgia alone.

    Calling the findings “disturbing,” the Brennan Center noted, “Almost 4 million more names were purged from the rolls between 2014 and 2016 than between 2006 and 2008. This growth in the number of removed voters represented an increase of 33 percent—far outstripping growth in both total registered voters (18 percent) and total population (6 percent).”[vii]

    When races often are won by small percentages, such kinds of changes in the pool of voters will swing elections. Just ask Beto O’Rourke.

    In the minority voting precincts that had been overseen by the DOJ back when the Supreme Court’s Shelby County decision stopped the feds from looking over the shoulders of state officials in those places with a long history of race-based voter suppression, Republicans totally closed 868 polling places between the 2013 Shelby County decision and the 2016 election.[viii] The result is that between the 2012 and 2016 elections, Black voting participation nationwide fell nearly 7 percent.[ix]

    In 1982, a federal court signed a consent decree prohibiting the Republican National Committee from “poll watcher” voter-intimidation schemes (including William Rehnquist’s old 1960s tactic of loudly challenging voters of color on the spot), and the GOP practice of armed “watchers” confronting Black voters as they approached polling places.

    Although the consent decree was renewed in 1987 and 1990 — in both cases because Republican abuses continued — it was allowed to expire in 2017 during the Trump presidency. Since then, the GOP has started a program to field an “army” of 50,000 “poll watchers,” including interviewing candidates from among white supremacist militia groups.

    Meanwhile, we just learned, the GOP in Texas is quietly recruiting 10,000 white volunteers “courageous” enough to go into Black and Hispanic polling places and confront people trying to vote.  As Jessica Corbett reported for Common Dreams:

    “Common Cause Texas on Thursday shared a leaked video of a Harris County GOP official discussing plans to ‘build an army’ of 10,000 election workers and poll watchers, including some who ‘will have the confidence and courage’ to go into Black and Brown communities to address alleged voter fraud that analyses show does not actually exist.”

    And lording over the entire enterprise is a network of rightwing billionaires that has more employees, more offices, and a larger budget than the GOP itself. The media almost never mentions them and they operate largely invisibly, but they are the dark-matter mass that deforms the orbit of American politics. 

    The rightwing billionaires don’t much care about race, but gleefully have their think tanks and media outlets like Fox “News” use lies about CRT and other racial issues (“Replacement Theory”) to get people out to vote for Republicans who will then give the billionaires more tax cuts and deregulation.

    And they’re serious about holding onto power, no matter what.

    Last month, Republican attorney Cleta Mitchell told a group of GOP high-dollar donors about their plans to prevent college students from voting by moving polling places off-campus and changing ID and residency requirements. She told the fundraiser:

    “What is this young people effort that they do? They basically put the polling place next to the student dorm so they just have to roll out of bed, vote, and go back to bed.”

    Between their war on women, fascistic attacks on trans and queer people, demagoguing so-called Critical Race Theory, book bans, blocking efforts to mitigate climate change, defunding public schools in favor of all-white “Christian” academies, recurrent tax cuts for billionaires, and efforts to destroy union and voting rights, the GOP is widely unpopular across large parts of America.

    The only way they believe they can hold onto power in the face of this unpopularity is with their phony proclamations of “voter fraud” as the excuse to restrict the franchise to white people, using the shutdown of polling places, purges, and intimidation.

    Will it work in 2024? The answer will depend on how determined we are to push through, past, and around all the roadblocks they throw up so we can regain a large enough majority to put an absolute “right to vote” into law.

    Between now and then, we all must work to get as many people registered to vote as possible. And, if they’re in a Red state, to keep them registered in the face of the now-monthly voter roll purges.

    We can do this. The alternative — the loss of democracy and rise of fascism in this country — is simply unthinkable.

    Thank you for reading The Hartmann Report. This post is public so feel free to share it.