~~ recommended by newestbeginning ~~
This, imo, is an important article - but there are two others that I was tempted to post - about how the Regime demonizes and creates false fear mongering narratives about their "enemies". They are unable to prosecute those they target (because the charges are made up), but after they loudly smear people, they then quietly walk back their slander AFTER the news cycle has died down so most people are unaware of the lies. The propaganda is the point - even when they know they don't have a case, they still "win" by framing public perception. As the Fascist so often says: Thank you for your attention to this matter!
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This is a long article. It’s long because it substantiates a bold claim: that if you are waiting for elections to save this country, you are dangerously wrong. A criminal organization has captured the electoral system, the courts, and the Justice Department itself. The evidence is clear and we will walk through every piece of it.
But the ending is not despair. The ending is bad people in handcuffs. State-level prosecutors can investigate and charge corrupt federal officials right now, immune from presidential pardon, and thorough investigation will find plenty to charge. Every state that can do this should start tomorrow. Do not wait for a coalition. Do not wait for permission. Do not wait for someone else to go first. Justice is the path to a healthy democracy.
Last weekend I spoke to Indivisible Charlotte at their ninth anniversary. Incredible people. The kind of people who give up their Saturdays to discuss ballot access and gerrymandering when they could be doing literally anything else. They had spent the morning discussing get-out-the-vote efforts for 2026, pop-up protests, how to tailor messaging for different communities, how to hyper-localize the issues they talk about, the machinery of democratic participation that has kept this country’s lungs pumping for two and a half centuries.
While speaking to the several hundred activists in attendance, I asked a question: if you are concerned about having free and fair elections in 2026, raise your hand.
Every hand in the room went up.
It took a moment; some went up fast, some went up slowly, like people checking to see if it was safe. But they all went up.
That same scene is playing out in living rooms and church basements and union halls across the country right now, where people who know something is deeply wrong are still being handed the same playbook and making strides to run it better. We know that Republican leadership is willing to win by rigging the game. They have shown us, and courts have confirmed it. We know they fired the election security officials, gutted the agencies that catch cheating, and sent home the lawyers whose job was to enforce voting rights. We know they control more than half the states. So why is our answer the same playbook, but better?
That gap is what this article is about. Not the threats themselves, though we will walk through every one; not the statistics, though they are devastating and we will use them. The gap between knowing something is wrong and doing something proportional about it. Because the people in those rooms understand the danger, and almost none of them have been told the full scope of what they are up against, and fewer still have been given a framework for response that goes beyond winning elections we can actively see being rigged.
So let me lay it out.
There is an assumption running through almost every conversation about American democracy right now, from cable news panels to kitchen-table arguments to the strategy sessions of the most sophisticated political operatives in the country. The assumption is that elections remain the mechanism through which this crisis gets resolved, that if we organize better, register more voters, raise more money, and file more lawsuits, we can win our way through it. The assumption treats the game as legitimate and the task as playing it better.
This article is about what happens when that assumption meets the evidence.
Nobody is going to cancel American elections. Elections are too useful; they provide the one thing that raw power cannot generate on its own, which is legitimacy. They let the people in charge say they were chosen, let allies in Congress claim a mandate, let courts defer to the “political process” rather than intervene. Elections, properly managed, are the instrument for consolidating power.
The threat is that elections become something else while still looking the same.
Political scientists have spent the last two decades studying countries where this has already happened, and they have an ugly name for it: competitive authoritarianism. The term describes a system that holds elections, counts votes in front of observers, and lets the opposition campaign, while structuring the rules so that the outcome is effectively predetermined. Sometimes the opposition even wins, which makes the whole arrangement look more legitimate, but captured courts and corrupted institutions make progress nearly unachievable and regression easy. The elections are real; the competition is not. The dice still roll, but one side loaded them.
Hungary is the proof that this works.
In 2010, Viktor Orban won a legitimate 52 percent of the vote, which the old Hungarian electoral system translated into a two-thirds parliamentary supermajority. He used that supermajority to rewrite the constitution, redraw every electoral district, and redesign the voting system itself, all through legal processes enumerated in the constitution he had just rewritten. He eliminated runoff elections, which had previously forced coalition-building, and created something called “winner compensation,” a mechanism that gives surplus votes from winning candidates back to the winning party’s national list. In any normal proportional system, those votes would go to an opposition party; in Orban’s, they feed the machine that already won.
Kim Lane Scheppele, the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton, calculated the effect. Winner compensation alone catapulted Fidesz from a simple majority to a constitutional supermajority in three consecutive elections: 2014, 2018, and 2022.¹ One rule. Three supermajorities.
In the very first election under the new system, 2014, Fidesz lost 625,000 voters.² Eight percent of their support vanished, and they kept their supermajority anyway, winning 44.5 percent of the vote while taking 66.8 percent of the seats.³ The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe sent observers and called it “free but not fair.”⁴ That phrase has applied to every Hungarian election since.
Then Orban captured the media. He did not ban opposition outlets; he bought them, starved them of advertising revenue, or had allies acquire them through friendly holding companies. By 2022, the OSCE found that “the government’s message was the only one that voters could hear.”¹ Rural voters, who make up Fidesz’s base, have functionally no access to independent news, and the opposition cannot reach them no matter how sharp the message or how polished the campaign, because the infrastructure for delivering it does not exist outside Budapest.
In 2022, the Hungarian opposition did everything American political consultants dream about. They unified across the entire ideological spectrum. They ran a single candidate in every district. They polled neck and neck with Fidesz for more than a year. They executed the strategy perfectly. And they lost by twenty points. Not because they ran a bad campaign. Because the system was designed so that running a perfect campaign within it would produce exactly that result. Their participation, their earnest and well-organized participation, gave Orban’s supermajority the appearance of a legitimate mandate. Fidesz took 135 of 199 seats.⁵
This is what a finished machine looks like. The dice still roll. The opposition still plays. But the system converts any governing-party plurality into a supermajority, and a supermajority lets the ruling party keep rewriting the rules that produce supermajorities. After each loss, the opposition tells itself it will work harder next time, and next time it does work harder, and it loses again, and in the years between those losses the regime uses its supermajority to capture another court, buy another television station, redraw another set of districts. By the time “next time” arrives, there is less to win and fewer ways to win it. The volunteers who knocked those doors, who organized those rallies, who believed their effort would be converted into political power through the mechanism of free elections, provided the one thing the regime could not manufacture for itself: the appearance that its dominance was earned.
Now watch the same machine getting assembled here, piece by piece, using American parts.
Start with who gets to vote. In June 2013, the Supreme Court gutted the preclearance requirement of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder (570 U.S. 529), a provision that for almost fifty years had forced jurisdictions with histories of racial voter discrimination to get federal approval before changing any election rules. The Court struck down the formula that determined which jurisdictions fell under that requirement, and the effects landed within hours: Texas announced it would implement a voter ID law that had been blocked under preclearance,⁶ while Mississippi and Alabama moved the same day. In the decade that followed, at least 29 states passed 94 laws making it harder to vote, with the sharpest impacts falling on communities of color in formerly covered jurisdictions.⁷ North Carolina passed a law so precisely targeted that the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled it attacked “African Americans with almost surgical precision.”⁸ A Brennan Center study, drawing on over a billion voter records, found that the racial turnout gap in formerly covered states grew at twice the national rate after Shelby.⁹
That was twelve years ago, and we know what the removal of federal election oversight produces because it happened and we measured it.
Now the removal is accelerating. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the federal body responsible for helping states protect election systems from cyberattacks and foreign interference, has lost roughly a third of its workforce since January 2025.¹⁰ The Trump administration terminated funding for the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, an early-warning system that alerted state officials to election security threats crossing state lines.¹¹ The proposed 2026 federal budget would eliminate CISA’s Election Security Program entirely, zeroing out 14 positions and $39.6 million in funding.¹² Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem warning that without CISA support, “our capacity to conduct this important work will be severely compromised.”¹³ Noem did not respond.
The Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, the sole federal body charged with enforcing the Voting Rights Act nationwide, has lost roughly 70 percent of its attorneys since Harmeet Dhillon took over as assistant attorney general.¹⁴ Dhillon, who worked as a lawyer challenging the results of the 2020 election, issued a new mission statement for the Voting Section that reframes its purpose around prosecuting voters rather than protecting them; career voting rights attorneys received instructions to dismiss their active cases.¹⁵ The Brennan Center identified 14 active Section 2 cases at the start of 2025, and the DOJ has since withdrawn from or reversed its position in the majority of them.¹⁵ The Federal Election Commission, the bipartisan agency that regulates campaign finance, saw its chair targeted for removal in an unprecedented move just as the commission prepared to adjudicate complaints about Elon Musk’s contributions to the Trump campaign.¹⁶
Add up what just happened. The federal government has withdrawn from election protection; the agency that helped states defend against cyberattacks has been gutted; the lawyers who enforced voting rights have been sent home; the campaign finance watchdog has been neutralized. All of it has already happened.
David Becker, a former DOJ official who now leads the Center for Election Innovation and Research, put it plainly in a Votebeat report last week: the internal guardrails that stopped Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, Bill Barr disputing fraud claims, CISA pushing back on disinformation, national security officials blocking the seizure of voting machines, all of those guardrails depended on individuals who chose to enforce them. “That line of defense is largely gone,” Becker said, “because the primary and perhaps only qualification for being hired by this administration is loyalty to this man.”¹⁷
In 2020, individual courage backed by functional institutions held the line: Brad Raffensperger in Georgia, Bill Gates in Maricopa County, Jocelyn Benson in Michigan, and Kathy Bernier, a Republican state senator and former county clerk in Wisconsin who publicly defended election integrity and ended up carrying a gun for protection before leaving the legislature.¹⁷ The institutions that once supported people like Bernier no longer exist in functional form, and without institutional backing, individual courage produces martyrs rather than systemic protection.
The Brennan Center’s 2025 survey of local election officials paints an even grimmer picture at the ground level, where the actual mechanics of democracy take place. Sixty percent said they are concerned about federal cuts to election security services,¹⁸ and fifty-nine percent fear political interference in their ability to do their jobs.¹⁹ One in three has been harassed, abused, or threatened,²⁰ and twenty-one percent say they are unlikely to continue serving through the 2026 midterms.¹⁹ The people who actually run elections, the ones who set up the machines and train the poll workers and count the ballots at two in the morning, are leaving; the people replacing them have less experience, fewer resources, and weaker institutional support than the officials they replaced.
Now move to what voters know. An executive order eliminated CISA’s capacity to help states counter election disinformation,²¹ and Attorney General Pam Bondi disbanded the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, the unit that had monitored foreign interference in American elections.¹⁶ Project 2025 called for targeting university researchers who study election misinformation, and the administration has followed through.¹⁶ The administration is dismantling the infrastructure that delivers accurate election information to voters at the same time that the infrastructure for delivering disinformation expands without constraint; an information environment where one side controls the signal and the other side loses the ability to broadcast a correction is an information environment where elections cannot function as an informed choice.
Now move to what votes produce. The Supreme Court declared partisan gerrymandering unreviewable by federal courts in Rucho v. Common Cause (588 U.S. 684, 2019), a ruling that let state legislatures draw maps with whatever partisan advantage they choose and no federal judicial check. In 2025, President Trump personally directed Texas to redraw its congressional map to create five additional Republican-leaning districts, and the legislature complied.²² North Carolina’s Republican legislature redrew its maps after gaining a veto-proof supermajority, projecting an 11-to-3 Republican advantage in a state where statewide elections regularly split down the middle.²³
And then there is Louisiana v. Callais, the case that could end the Voting Rights Act as a tool for protecting minority representation entirely. The Supreme Court heard argument in March 2025, declined to rule, and ordered reargument on a far more sweeping question: whether Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the last remaining federal protection against racial vote dilution, is itself unconstitutional.²⁴ In a shift without precedent, the Trump DOJ withdrew the United States’ brief defending Section 2 and reversed its position to argue that the law’s protections are no longer constitutional.¹⁵ If the Court rules against Section 2, an analysis projects the elimination of 19 congressional seats currently protected by the VRA.²⁵ State Representative Terry Landry Jr. of Louisiana described what that means for the people who live in those districts: “This will affect state legislatures. This will affect city councils. It will affect school boards. You will see a huge impact on minority representation at every level of government.”²⁶
Orban rewrote the constitution, then staffed the courts that interpret the constitution he wrote. The American version follows the same sequence: stack the Supreme Court, then use it to declare gerrymandering unreviewable (Rucho v. Common Cause), preclearance dead (Shelby County v. Holder), racial gerrymandering harder to prove (Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP), and potentially Section 2 itself unconstitutional (Louisiana v. Callais). Once you control the body that decides what the law means, every move you make is “legal” by definition, and every move your opposition makes can be declared illegal at will. The DOJ reversal fits here too: Harmeet Dhillon redirects the Civil Rights Division from protecting voting rights to prosecuting voters, and that becomes the “legal” posture of the United States Department of Justice. Legality stops meaning “consistent with the rule of law” and starts meaning “approved by the people who captured the system.” That is the final stage of authoritarian consolidation, and it is the one that locks all the other pieces in place.
Now put yourself in Texas and watch all of this hit one person at once.
You are a voter in Harris County, sixty-three years old, and you have voted in every election since 1984. In 2020, you voted by mail; the rejection rate for mail ballots in Texas that year was 0.8 percent. In March 2022, after SB 1 took effect, the statewide rejection rate jumped to 12.4 percent, and in Harris County it hit 19 percent.²⁷ Federal District Judge Xavier Rodriguez found that the law violated the Voting Rights Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, that Black voters faced rejection rates 86.9 percent higher than white voters, and that the state designed these barriers with discriminatory intent.²⁸ The Fifth Circuit reversed his ruling, and the mechanisms Rodriguez documented continue operating.
You want to vote in person instead, but Harris County has 4.8 million people and one ballot drop box, the same number as Loving County, which has 64 residents.²⁹ The average transit time by public transportation to reach that single drop box is 88.1 minutes.²⁸ You do not own a car; you are one of 143,000 Harris County voters in that situation.²⁸ In 2020, Harris County offered drive-through voting, which 127,000 people used, and overnight voting, which nearly 16,000 people used.²⁸ Texas banned both.
Political scientists have a name for what happens to people like you inside a system like this. In a 2024 study of competitive authoritarian regimes, the European Journal of Political Research described it as “acquiescence through participation,” a process that “legitimizes the ruling party and simultaneously divides and demoralizes anti-regime actors, thereby diminishing threats to the regime.”³³ Andreas Schedler, who coined the term “menu of manipulation” to describe how authoritarian regimes manage elections, put it more bluntly: the system lets those in power “reap the fruits of electoral legitimacy without running the risks of democratic uncertainty.”³⁴
And Texas is one state; Georgia purges voter rolls at rates that would trigger federal intervention if preclearance still existed, and the 50 counties with the highest minority population growth closed 542 polling places after Shelby while the 50 with the lowest minority growth closed 34.³⁰ Across the country, states have made it harder for citizens to bypass captured legislatures through ballot initiatives, raising signature thresholds, imposing supermajority requirements, and giving legislatures the power to override results.³¹ The last escape valve is being welded shut.
Put it together and look at what we are watching being built. Control who votes, through purges, ID laws, and registration barriers. Control where they vote, through polling place closures, drop box restrictions, and early voting cuts. Control what they know, by gutting CISA, disbanding the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, and targeting researchers who track disinformation. Control what their votes produce, through gerrymandering that no federal court can review and the potential elimination of Section 2. Control who counts, by driving out experienced election officials through threats and replacing them with loyalists who owe their positions to the people whose power the counting is supposed to check. And close the last escape valve by making ballot initiatives harder to pass and easier to override.
No single piece of this is the kill shot. Together they build a system where elections still happen, votes still get counted, observers still watch, and the machine structurally predetermines the outcome across enough cycles that the opposition’s only path to power runs through the handful of jurisdictions the machine has not yet reached. That is competitive authoritarianism, that is what Hungary looks like, and that is what has been built, in public, with our tax dollars, while we watched.
Here is the thing the people in that Charlotte room, and every person doing this work across the country, need to hear. The people building this system need us to keep playing it the way we have been playing it. They need us to keep canvassing, keep phone banking, keep filing lawsuits one county at a time, keep treating each election as though the rules are the real rules. Our participation is the legitimacy. It is what makes the results look earned. The Hungarian opposition gave Orban his mandate by showing up and losing inside a system designed to convert their effort into his power. Their hard work, their real and sincere and well-organized hard work, was the raw material the machine needed to produce the appearance of democratic consent.
That is not an argument to stop showing up, and the people in that Charlotte room deserve better than being told their work does not matter. Their work matters enormously; the canvassing matters, the voter registration matters, the phone banks and the door knocks and the rides to the polls. All of it matters.
But it matters for what comes next, not for what is.
What comes next is this: the effort has to point somewhere different. We need to elect people who will use the power of the offices we help them win, not people who will hold the office and give good speeches and file press releases about how concerned they are, but people who will govern like the emergency is real.
A governor with executive authority and an attorney general with prosecution power do not need a friendly legislature for the most critical parts of this fight. The governor can direct state election security resources, issue executive orders on election infrastructure protection, and refuse to cooperate with unconstitutional federal demands. The attorney general can investigate and prosecute corruption under existing state law; because of dual sovereignty under Gamble v. United States (587 U.S. 678, 2019), those prosecutions are immune from presidential pardon. Corruption concentrates where accountability is weakest, and thorough prosecution has an asymmetric effect, not because we are targeting one party but because we are being thorough and the chips fall where the corruption is.
The tools for structural independence already exist. The Existentialist Republic team drafted model legislation for state attorneys general to criminally prosecute federal corruption immune from presidential pardon, for states to escrow federal tax revenues triggered by specific constitutional violations including election interference, to force corporations to choose between receiving government contracts and subsidies or donating to politics, and for states to independently investigate and prosecute child sex trafficking networks even when the federal government covers for them. All of it is available for free at The Existentialist Republic. Our team is in the process of reaching out to every state legislator in the country with these bills, and readers are independently doing the same, scheduling meetings and making the case in person. I have sat down with state legislators who are preparing to introduce them.
I keep coming back to that room in Charlotte, where every hand went up. Those people give their weekends and their evenings and, for some of them, their safety to the work of democratic participation. They have earned the right to know the full scope of what they are up against, and they have earned the right to a response that matches it. Find your governor, your attorney general, your state legislators. Call them. Tell them to prosecute corruption aggressively, fund state election security, and use the power they already have. The model legislation is free at The Existentialist Republic. Share it with them. Show up at their offices with it. Make it easy for them to act and uncomfortable for them not to.
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