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voter suppression
The Worst Existential Threat to American Democracy Is Already Here: Voter Suppression
If the present strategy of voter suppression by the Republican Party is not stopped, the results of the midterms in two years and the 2028 presidential election are already decided.
Mar 01, 2025
The past few weeks have seen a deluge of devastation from the second Trump administration, which in less than a month has broken many democratic norms and customs and even ignored the Constitution in several ways.
During these head-spinning times, it's more vital than ever to zero in on the threats to our democracy. Today, one of the worst challenges we're up against is increasingly widespread voter suppression—a peril accelerating under President. Donald Trump and easy to lose sight of amid the chaos.
As we write, Congress is trying to pass the SAVE Act, which would require all citizens to produce a document such as a passport or birth certificate when they register to vote. It would apply even when they re-register after a move or, as many do, between elections. This new and unprecedented national requirement would severely limit online, mail-in, and automatic registration and has the potential to block millions of eligible Americans from casting ballots.
Universal suffrage is the heart of democracy but deeply threatened today.
The now almost-official Trump doctrine, Project 2025, also promises potentially disastrous consequences related to suffrage. The Department of Justice's Criminal Division would become responsible for investigating voting offenses, likely leading to bogus prosecutions of voters and election officials. The government would also gain access to voter lists that could facilitate purges of minority voters. Project 2025 also proposes restricting or abolishing programs that encourage voter registration.
We need to acutely oppose these potential dangers. To do that, it's helpful to understand the history of suffrage in our country.
America began its democratic experiment in the 1700s with a small demographic of eligible voters: white, male landowners. Voting rights were not directly in the text of the Constitution, but instead left to the states to decide.
While Americans no doubt rightly lament that voting was so restricted, it's worth recognizing that the very idea of suffrage was an audacious departure in and of itself—a profoundly progressive advancement that pivoted away from predatory monarchy with aristocracy that dominated the European continent. Indeed, some of the Founders expressed remarkably enlightened views on voting. Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1776 that "the influence over government must be shared among all the people."
Even though our democracy was—and still is—deeply flawed, suffrage has always been its bedrock. Throughout our history advocates have fought to expand and enshrine suffrage, and today most state constitutions protect the right to vote. After the Civil War, several constitutional amendments codified and extended voting rights and since then legislation, such as the 1965 Voting Rights Act, has added further protections.
Sadly, however, voices from our country's Founders ring hollow when looking at our recent presidential election, which saw unprecedented organized voter suppression by the Republican Party.
Consider a report released this month by Greg Palast, acclaimed investigative reporter, forensic economist, and statistician. Using data from the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission, he found that voter suppression led to 14.1 million voters being deemed ineligible or having their ballots disqualified. Note that Trump won by a margin of only 2 million votes.
Almost 5 million voters were purged from voter rolls without credible evidence, and another 2 million mail-in ballots were disqualified for minor clerical errors, e.g. postage due. Almost another 800,000 ballots were disqualified or rejected for other, non-credible reasons, and over 3.24 million new registrations were rejected without credible evidence.
Palast points out that historically organized voter suppression was overwhelmingly directed at Black and Latino voters such as Jim Crow Era literacy tests and poll taxes.
How did we get here?
In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court changed course from its history of protecting voter rights when it debilitated the Voting Rights Act of 1965, removing the requirement that jurisdictions with histories of racial discrimination obtain federal approval for new voting procedures. The result is a pernicious plethora of conservative state laws undermining or restricting voters.
A 2024 Brennan Center for Justice report found voter suppression has dramatically increased in the last 20 years. Many conservative states created obstacles by imposing unreasonable voter ID laws, and decreasing early voting times.
Unsurprisingly, voter suppression laws disproportionately impact communities of Black and Latino voters. For example, a 2022 Washington state audit reported that Black voters were 400% more likely than white voters to have their mail-in ballot rejected.
Universal suffrage is the heart of democracy but deeply threatened today.
What then is to be done to end this scourge of voter suppression by Mr. Trump's neofascist's advocates? Amid the chaos of the first hundred days of the second Trump administration, let us focus on defending these rights. If the present strategy of voter suppression by the Republican Party is not stopped, the results of the midterms in two years and the 2028 presidential election are already decided.
We are heading down a dark path reminiscent of a troublesome past. But we can be motivated by really great successes made possible by people's movements: The right of Blacks to vote was driven by inspiring and hard-won action, and women's suffrage struggles were also achieved through grassroots organizing.
The time is now. It will take all of us, joining in mass demonstrations and pushing our elected leaders to withstand the pressure and do everything in their power to block legislation and eliminate existing voter suppression regulation when—and wherever possible—before it's too late.
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How Years of GOP Voter Suppression Helped Trump Win in 2024
Numerous efforts over the years, at numerous governmental levels, have worked to play games with the electoral process and interfere with—and outright eliminate—certain voters’ right to vote.
Feb 01, 2025
As the Trump presidency digs its claws into the country—winner take all!—I look on in terrified amazement as he begins arrogantly instituting what can only be called his plan to devolve America back to the good old days: back to the era of Jim Crow certainty and whatever that might mean.
We’re white, we’re Christian, and we’re the best! Just ask Pete Hegseth.
This is the “Gulf of America”! It’s not President Donald Trump’s smugly renamed Gulf of Mexico; it’s the hole in the country’s collective consciousness, which Mr. President is hellbent on expanding. His plan is to make America safe for what it used to be and allow our old, beloved prejudices to return. Deport the illegals! Kill wokeness! Kill understanding and awareness!
All of which leaves a few glaring questions hovering over the daily news: How the hell did this guy win a majority of votes? Is he really aligned with the nation’s primary beliefs? And if he isn’t... uh, what happened last November? Was the election rigged? Was it stolen? And if so, how? Do we live in a publicly proclaimed—yet fake—democracy?
This is a fascinatingly awkward question to ask, considering what happened on Jan. 6, 2021. A portion of the MAGA base—spurred on by their leader, who instantly proclaimed “fraud!”—stormed the capital, busted its windows, tasered the police, clomped through the halls, left a gift of excrement on then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk, and politely asked that then-Vice President Mike Pence be hanged.
This time around, the Democrats had tea with the guy who beat them. They respected the transfer of power. They upheld our alleged democracy. But let’s be clear: There are questions that must be asked. Our system of government has serious flaws—it always has! And let’s be clear: When you’re in power–and want to stay in power—democracy, “the will of he people,” can be an enormous inconvenience.
All of which leads me to the amazing work of Greg Palast, who has been investigating the electoral process—tracking its flaws and lies–ever since the George W. Bush era. This time around, the essence of his analysis is this:
Trump lost. That is, if all legal voters were allowed to vote, if all legal ballots were counted, Trump would have lost the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. Vice-President Kamala Harris would have won the presidency with 286 electoral votes.
And, if not for the mass purge of voters of color, if not for the mass disqualification of provisional and mail-in ballots, if not for the new mass “vigilante” challenges in swing states, Harris would have gained at least another 3,565,000 votes, topping Trump’s official popular vote tally by 1.2 million.
This wasn’t done with the simple snap of a powerful finger. Palast outlines numerous efforts over the years, at numerous governmental levels (in particular, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia), to play games with the electoral process and interfere with—and outright eliminate—certain voters’ right to vote. These efforts include such tactics as rejecting mail-in ballots without valid reason, failing to enter newly registered voters in the voting rolls in time for them to vote in the presidential election, failing to count “provisional” ballots, and allowing registered voters to be challenged by ordinary citizens for extremely spurious reasons (e.g., their names match other names, such as a name in an obituary).
And who are these “certain voters” who are targeted? In essence, they’re voters of color: Black, Hispanic, Muslim or whatever, often identifiable as such by their names. And powerful Republicans target them because they’re statistically likely to vote Democratic.
And this brings up Palast’s recently released documentary: Vigilantes Inc.: America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmen, which is available for view online. The term “vigilante,” with all its violent, KKK-esque implications, refers to those ordinary (white) citizens who have volunteered to be Republican name-checkers, looking for any and all possible reasons to challenge... oh, let us say, people with names such as Jose Garcia or James Brown. Challenge them bureaucratically, so their legitimacy as voters may be rescinded.
What I found utterly compelling about Vigilantes Inc. is the race-based—and historical—context in which the vigilantism is carried out. This documentary is about far more than the 2024 election. America’s present-moment racism is put under the harsh, glaring light of its own past—its post-Reconstruction, Jim Crow-era past, when efforts to “get around the 15th Amendment” included not only poll taxes (for Blacks only) and spurious questions (“how many jellybeans in the jar?”), but also outright intimidation and vicious violence.
In the documentary, Palast interviews Black voters who were “disappeared” from the voting rolls, intimidated, threatened, arrested—and enwraps such actions in the country’s past. For instance, the story is told of 10 Black women who were elected to the school board in Quitman, Georgia, in the early 2000s, shortly after Brian Kemp became Georgia’s secretary of state. He accused them of stuffing tampered ballots into mailboxes. The women faced multi-year prison sentences. They were ultimately acquitted, but one of the women had considered suicide and another, who suffered from lupus, died in the midst of the ordeal.
The hell the women endured brought up memories for people in the area of the horrific lynching of 13 Blacks in southern Georgia nearly a century earlier. One of them was a woman, Mary Turner, who happened to be in her eighth month of pregnancy. A mob surrounded her, hung her from a tree—upside down–by her ankles, then cut open her abdomen, while she was still alive. The unborn child fell to the ground, where the mobbed killed it.
This documentary opens our souls. Oh my God, the past is still alive, but the film’s primary vision is transcendent. This is not a film of us vs. them, but of love and extraordinary courage: the courage—of so many people—to create the democracy the country has not yet become,
As the film ends, the narrator says: “But spirits drowned will rise. America is a haunted house and our ruling dynasties have gone to war with our ghosts—the ghosts of our history. Until America hears those spirits, neither they, nor we, will be set free.”
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With Project 2025, the State of Future Elections Hangs in the Balance
Given the results of this election, future political contests in our country face heightened threat levels that demand our vigilance and action.
Nov 18, 2024
While votes are still being counted in some states, turnout for the 2024 general election continues to near (although not quite yet reach) 2020 records, despite our country’s incredibly polarized voting landscape. In our current environment, these levels of participation are a testament to the tenacity of organizers to overcome voter suppression and ensure all voters can fully participate in our democracy.
However, this success cannot lull us into a false sense of security in our push to make voting more accessible. The fight to protect unrestricted access to the ballot box is a year-round effort and responsibility. And now, given the results of this election, future political contests in our country face heightened threat levels that demand our vigilance and action.
The fight for voting rights is one of the greatest litmus tests for the health of U.S. democracy.
Over the last four years, anti-voting rights extremists have made their mission clear: to turn back the hands of time and further disenfranchise Black and brown communities and other historically targeted groups to ensure their continued grip on power. In nearly half of the country, it is now harder for people in Black and brown communities to vote compared with the most recent midterm elections. Yet, Black and brown voters persist. However, as the new administration prepares to reenter the White House for a second term, anti-democratic forces are, once more, being given an opportunity to radically dismantle and change election administration in our country.
And Project 2025 is their blueprint to do just that.
Project 2025 is the extremist playbook laying out the tactics to dismantle critical democratic infrastructures and rights, including the right to vote. Among its multi-pronged approach to accomplish this, Project 2025 would criminalize the voting process, shifting the responsibility for prosecuting election-related offenses from the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division to the Criminal Division. This move would allow for ill-intentioned individuals and leaders to intimidate state and local election workers, and cobble up sham investigations that could lead to the prosecution of voters and election officials.
Policing voters to this magnitude would transform our elections into a system of fear and oppression, severely weakening our country’s electoral integrity.
Yet, that’s not all.
Speaking of lowered electoral integrity, another key provision of Project 2025 would end all federal-level measures to combat misinformation and disinformation campaigns online. These toxic narratives, meant to discourage voter participation, are already widespread and known to target Black and Latino communities disproportionately. By choosing to abandon any federal responsibility to protect these groups from falsehoods, extremists are choosing to make the truth an option rather than a right in election cycles so the outcomes can favor their camp.
Lastly, and perhaps most insidiously, Project 2025 would allow the federal government to access voter rolls by creating stipulations of eligibility that would force state and local recipients of Department of Homeland Security funding to turn over DMV and voter registration databases. This tactic would open the door to justifying aggressive voter roll purges that would further target Black and brown communities. Furthermore, based on the Supreme Court’s increasingly conservative and extreme ideology, we cannot rely on the court to hold the line and protect voters from such an egregious move.
In addition to federal rollbacks, we can also anticipate a flood of anti-voter bills to be introduced as soon as legislative cycles commence. Fueled by misinformation and this recent electoral win, these bills will more than likely work to chip away at voter access among the youth, people of color, those in rural areas, and those living with disabilities. These bills, like Project 2025 itself, aim to limit who can cast a ballot to dictate who has a say in the future of this country.
Both State Voices and Common Cause are proud members of the Election Protection Coalition, a national coalition working year-round to ensure that all voters, regardless of their race, sex, and location, have an equal opportunity to vote and their ballots are counted. Our coalition is made up of more than 300 local, state, and national groups united under one profound belief: Democracy requires constant, committed protection. We understand that our democratic systems do not come under attack every four years, but every day there’s an opportunity to weaken them.
Now, with Project 2025, we have an opportunity to not only identify the threats but begin to mobilize against them. It is imperative that we remain vigilant in our fight against anti-voter legislation and work together to combat any proposed administrative changes designed to undermine how elections are conducted and how votes are certified.
The fight for voting rights is one of the greatest litmus tests for the health of U.S. democracy. We are only as strong as our willingness to protect the rights of all people and not just a few. This moment calls us to action—we cannot afford paralysis in any shape or form. We are called to stand on the shoulders of the activists who came before us so that the elections of the future remain fair and free. We know that Black and brown communities will, once again, lead the charge to protect this precious right, but the moment will call for all of us to do our part to push back against anti-democratic extremism. The future and everything we hold dear depends on it.
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