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voter suppression
How Will GOP Fight Back Against Political Fury Unleashed by Trump?
Two words: voter suppression. The Republican Party's recent actions make it clear that they will make it harder for regular folks to cast a ballot, by any means necessary.
Apr 12, 2025
It was the great Kris Kristofferson, whom we just lost last fall, who wrote that “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” Is that what Trump meant by his “Liberation Day” of tariffs last week, which liberated America’s 401K investors of billions of dollars? At least millions of citizens felt the freedom to take to the streets over theweekend with their grievances, which should give all of us hope.
In an America that feels on edge right now, few things in the nation’s capital are more precarious than the GOP’s fragile hold on power in the U.S. House. The Republicans’ current 220-213 majority is one of the smallest in modern times. And with crucial votes just ahead on issues like President Donald Trump’s proposed tax cuts that favor billionaires and corporations, every vote counts.
Well, unless you’re one of 800,000 Texans who live in Houston or its adjacent Harris County suburbs.
Voters who live in the Lone Star State’s 18th Congressional District, which is nearly 76% Black and Latino, have received a series of gut punches, beginning last year when longtime incumbent and civil rights icon Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee died in office. The district then went strongly for another well-known local, Houston’s 70-year-old former mayor Sylvester Turner, giving him nearly 70% of the fall vote, even after his disclosure he was suffering from a rare form of bone cancer.
Sadly, Turner’s career as a U.S. congressman lasted less than 10 weeks. In late winter, the Houstonian fell ill and died on March 5. The intervening weeks — a momentous time back on Capitol Hill, including a budget vote carried by Republicans by a narrow margin — saw a large crowd come together for Turner’s funeral and candidates stepping forward to replace him.
What was missing for more than a month was any effort by Texas’ right-wing GOP Gov. Greg Abbott to call a special election to fill the vacant seat. Last week, as residents in the 18th grumbled and at least one Democratic hopeful — along with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries — threatened to sue, Abbott finally spoke...
...not to call the election, but to say he was holding things up because of his ongoing complaints about how one of the few Democratic counties in a mostly red state conducts its elections. It is true that Harris County voters have experienced problems like long lines — often because of a lack of polling places and other restrictions imposed by the GOP-led statehouse. Meanwhile, Abbott cynically worked with state lawmakers to enact legislation that ousted one Democratic elections chief.
But Turner’s untimely death has given Abbott a MAGA two-fer: a chance to keep a safe Democratic seat vacant for as long as he can get away with it, and to stroke the Big Lie that any election that Republicans lose must involve voter fraud.
“Harris County is a repeat failure as it concerns operating elections,” Abbott insisted in a local interview. “Had I called that very quickly, it could have led to a failure in that election, just like Harris County has failed in other elections. They need to have adequate time to operate a fair and accurate election, not a crazy election like what they’ve conducted in the past.”
Monday night, as the impasse started getting more attention, Abbott did decide to declare a special election — not in June, when a statewide runoff is already scheduled, but during the Nov. 4 general election. That means citizens in and around Houston will go eight full months without a representative on Capitol Hill. It’s outrageous.
Abbott’s filibuster of giving Harris County a free, fair and prompt congressional election may offer an answer to the hottest burning question as spring 2025 dawns across the nation: How on earth do Republicans, who seem to be fueling a voter rebellion with Trump’s insane tariff scheme, consumer prices that are rising despite a campaign promise to bring them down, and the president’s popularity plunging, expect to win the 2026 midterms, let alone keep the White House in 2028?
The governor of America’s second-largest state just said the quiet part out loud: voter suppression.
If you spend too much time on social media, as I do, you frequently see liberals commenting on the next elections, only to add, “assuming we have an election.” It feels like extreme internet paranoia and in one sense it arguably is, because it’s impossible to imagine there won’t be balloting in 19 months.
Or, at least, something that resembles an election.
Although there may be few opportunities to as aggressively put a thumb on the scale of election fairness as Abbott is currently getting away with, it’s also becoming clear that Republicans — who’ve embraced anti-democratic tactics from closing polling places on college campuses to advocating for strict voter ID laws — are taking their war on voting to the next level.
Look no farther than North Carolina, where the Democratic candidate for the state’s Supreme Court, incumbent Associate Justice Allison Riggs, should have been sworn in for a full term months ago, after the 2024 results showed she’d defeated Republican Jefferson Griffin by a scant 734 votes.
The moral of the story should have been that every vote counts, but instead it has been that Republicans can’t accept defeat in a democratic election. After losing a recount, Team Griffin went into state court asking that a whopping 60,000 ballots get tossed out because of a complicated technicality in the way these voters had initially registered, even though they had presented valid IDs to vote as required by law.
A federal court had ruled against this challenge before the election, and the proposed massive disenfranchisement was rightfully called “ridiculous” by Charlotte Observer columnist Paige Masten, who added: “But it seems to be the Republican playbook these days: If at first you don’t succeed, just try to throw the votes out.”
The challenge has dragged out deep into 2025, until last week when Republican judges on the intermediate Court of Appeals powered a 2-1 ruling that stunned the Tarheel State by siding with Griffin’s argument, although most of the potentially disenfranchised voters were given three weeks to prove their identity and make their votes count. Still, the ruling — which Riggs is appealing to a Supreme Court where her colleagues are mostly Republican — could cancel out enough Democratic votes to change the outcome. It’s a grim reminder of what was expected from Team Trump if he’d lost last November, and a warning of what’s ahead.
These miscarriages of democracy in Texas and North Carolina come at the same time that Trump has signed an executive order — arguably not worth the piece of paper he scribbled his name across — with the goal of suppressing future votes.
The sweeping diktat signed by the president late last month demands that would-be voters produce proof of citizenship, seeks greater cooperation between the federal government and states on finding and removing ineligible voters, and also to leverage federal dollars to prevent mail-in ballots received after Election Day from being counted. The order has been panned by legal scholars, who note that such rules are typically set at the state level, and is already the subject of a lawsuit by 19 states.
Still, Trump and the GOP have laid down a marker for the 2026 election, and beyond. The party’s recent actions make it clear that they will make it harder for regular folks to cast a ballot, by any means necessary, including a new wave of voter ID laws, constant legal challenges, and maybe cancelling elections where they can. And any efforts to fight back, by Democrats or other aggrieved citizens, will trigger more Big Lies about election fraud.
The hole in the Republican strategy is that as Trump continues to set America on fire with his unhinged presidency, even extreme suppression can’t stop a tsunami at the ballot box.
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House GOP Approves 'Modern-Day Poll Tax' With Passage of Orwellian SAVE Act
"Congressional Republicans' anti-voting legislation is a power grab to silence the voices of American citizens—full stop," said one advocate.
Apr 10, 2025
The U.S. House's passage of a bill on Thursday that would require Americans to prove their citizenship with documentation when they register to vote was the Republican Party's response to the fact, said one progressive critic, that "every day more people are catching on to their big grift."
"H.R. 22 is how they plan to keep themselves in power," said Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, of the so-called Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act. "Not by making life easier for working people, but by making voting harder."
The bill, proposed by Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), would require all Americans to present a passport or an original copy of their birth certificate in person when they register to vote and update their voter registration—purporting to combat what Republicans have falsely claimed is a "problem that affects voters in nearly all 50 states": that of noncitizens voting in federal elections.
With noncitizens already barred from voting in federal elections, numerous analyses have found that very few ballots have ever been cast by people who aren't U.S. citizens. The Brennan Center for Justice found that noncitizens were suspected of casting just 30 votes out of 23.5 million in 2016—or 0.0001% of all votes cast.
But the Brennan Center was among many rights advocacy groups warning Thursday that more than 21 million Americans don't have easy access to their birth certificates or a passport, and could be disenfranchised by the SAVE Act.
"The House has just passed one of the worst pieces of voting legislation in American history," said Michael Waldman, the group's president and CEO. "The Senate must stop it. The SAVE Act would put voting out of reach for millions of American citizens. It should not become law."
According to Public Citizen, the SAVE Act has the potential to stop tens of millions of Americans from voting.
About 146 million citizens don't have a passport—nearly as many as the 153 million people who voted in the 2014 presidential election, Public Citizen noted.
The bill could also disenfranchise up to 69 million women and 4 million men who have changed their names after marrying, as they wouldn't be able to use their birth certificates showing their names at birth to prove their citizenship.
Voters in states including West Virginia, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, where less than one-third of citizens have a valid passport, could be most impacted by the SAVE Act's requirements.
"The SAVE Act is an assault on a fundamental American freedom—our ability to vote," said Gilbert. "A set of eligible voters who were able to participate in past elections—some who have been registered for decades—will now be unable to cast their ballots."
Along with making voting harder for people in rural areas, naturalized citizens, low-income voters, Native Americans, first-time voters, and people of color—many of whom lack easy access to citizenship documents—the SAVE Act would end voter registration drives, upend online voter registration systems that are used in 42 states, and make it harder for voters to register by mail. States would also be required to establish programs to purge existing voter rolls.
President Donald Trump and the Republicans, said Mitchell, "want to weaken the opposition to their pro-billionaire agenda, even if that means taking away our freedom to vote. But we refuse to be silenced, and we will do everything in our power to stop their shameless power grab."
Four Democratic House members—Reps. Jared Golden (D-Maine), Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash.), Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), and Ed Case (D-Hawaii)—joined the Republicans in supporting the legislation.
Common Cause denounced the four Democrats for their vote "to suppress the vote of millions of Americans."
Common Cause president and CEO Virginia Kase Solomón said the SAVE Act should be called "what it is: a modern-day poll tax."
"If this bill becomes law, millions of hardworking Americans will have to either shell out money getting the right papers to prove their citizenship or have no say in the next election for Congress and president," said Kase Solomón.
The point of the bill, she said, is "to make it so difficult to vote that many people will give up on voting all together."
In the Senate, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) introduced a companion bill earlier this year. The GOP, which holds 53 Senate seats while the Democrats hold 47, would need Democrats to join them to overcome the 60-vote filibuster threshold in order to pass the bill.
"Every U.S. senator who cares about protecting our right to the ballot must vote down this poll tax in any form," said Kase Solomón. "Common Cause and our 1.5 million members will make sure every senator hears from the people that this bill is dead on arrival."
Tony Carrk, executive director of the government watchdog group Accountable.US, said the SAVE Act also "paves the way to toss out legal votes and undermine election results that [the Republicans] don't like."
"Congressional Republicans' anti-voting legislation is a power grab to silence the voices of American citizens—full stop," said Carrk. “Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their allies in Congress are attacking voting by threatening Americans' ability to vote by mail, allowing Musk's [Department of Government Efficiency] to access sensitive personal information, and kneecapping states' ability to run free and fair elections."
"It should send a chill down the spine of every American," he said.
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Trump Executive Order on Voting Denounced as 'Authoritarian Power Grab'
Pro-democracy critics warn the presidential directive "represents a significant overreach of executive power and poses a direct threat to the fundamental right to vote."
Mar 26, 2025
Voting rights groups and pro-democracy advocates responded with uproar after President Donald Trump on Tuesday evening issued what they warn amounts to a far-reaching "authoritarian power grab" in the form of an "unlawful" executive order that would restrict voter access nationwide and punish states that make it easier for citizens to have their political preferences registered at the ballot box.
The official executive order—under the Orwellian header "Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections"—would do the very opposite, warn critics, by making it more difficult for tens of millions of eligible U.S. citizens to cast their ballots in state and national elections.
The order, said Brett Edkins, managing director for policy and political affairs with the progressive advocacy group Stand Up America, "is a blatant effort to usurp state and congressional authority over our elections and stop millions of American citizens from voting."
"This is a blatant attack on democracy." —Lisa Gilbert, Public Citizen
"The order, which multiple legal experts say is likely illegal," Edkins continued, "threatens to punish states that do not comply and could potentially disenfranchise any American who doesn't have a passport. It even invites Elon Musk's DOGE to help enforce the measures. This isn't about securing our elections—it's voter suppression, plain and simple."
The ACLU said the presidential directive "represents a significant overreach of executive power and poses a direct threat to the fundamental right to vote," in part by ordering—by fiat and without the consent of Congress—the Election Assistance Commission to alter the national mail voter registration form to require documentary proof of citizenship, such as a passport, to register to vote—something never needed in the nation's history.
Trump's order also attempts to force states to enact "documentary proof of citizenship requirements". It would force state election authorities, under threat of significant federal funds being withheld, to discard all absentee and mail-in ballots received after Election Day.
"This isn't about securing our elections—it's voter suppression, plain and simple." —Brett Edkins, Stand Up America
Lisa Gilbert, co-director of Public Citizen, echoed others' critiques, saying the president's assault on voting rights represents the opposite of election integrity.
"This is a blatant attack on democracy and an authoritarian power grab," warned Gilbert. The executive order, she said, "would compromise our election systems, suppress the votes of millions of Americans, especially voters of color, and pave the way for still more Trumpian false claims of election fraud."
"A president does not set election law and never will," said Virginia Kase Solomón, president and CEO of the pro-democracy group Common Cause. "Trump's executive action is an attempt to take away our right to vote or make it so hard that we don't participate. The people reject these tactics. Common Cause and our members will fight voter suppression wherever it shows up, including in the White House, because voting is a right for the many, not a selected few. This executive order will not stand."
"A president does not set election law and never will." —Virginia Kase Solomón, Common Cause
Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, warned that the executive order, if enforced, would disenfranchise tens of millions of eligible voters across the country, the very opposite of what making elections "honest and worth of public trust," as the order states. Lakin said the order is the latest in a long line of Republican-led efforts to exploit the myth of pervasive fraud—a myth the GOP created and right-wing media continues to perpetuate—as a way to diminish voting rights and ballot access.
"This measure will no doubt disproportionately impact historically excluded communities, including voters of color, naturalized citizens, people with disabilities, and the elderly, by pushing unnecessary barriers to the fundamental right to vote," Lakin said. "We deserve better than elected officials weaponizing xenophobia and the myth of voter fraud to jeopardize our rights. We will do everything in our power to stop this unconstitutional attack on the right to vote to ensure that every eligible American can participate in our democracy. We will see President Trump in court."
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