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voting rights
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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Today Is the Last Day to Defeat Fascist Billionaire Trump: Vote!
Many of America’s rightwing billionaires don’t want you to vote. Ask yourself this simple question: why?
Nov 05, 2024
Over four thousand Pennsylvania residents who live overseas just had their right to vote challenged by a group using data from a billionaire-funded outfit. As Sam Levine wrote for The Guardian:
“So far officials in Bucks, Lancaster, Lehigh, York, Cumberland, Dauphin, Beaver, Centre, and Lycoming county have all received challenges, said Andy Hoover, an ACLU spokesman.”
Many of America’s rightwing/neofascist billionaires don’t want you to vote. And they’ve funded extraordinary efforts across multiple states to put that desire into law.
Reporter Greg Palast has been busy this year documenting efforts by Georgia Republicans to hang onto control of their state by preventing Democrats from voting. Most recently, they’ve passed a law that allows any individual in Georgia to challenge the right of a virtually unlimited number of people to vote.
As a result, as Palast documents in his new movie (produced by Martin Sheen and George DiCaprio, and narrated by Rosario Dawson) Vigilantes, Inc. America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmen, thousands of Georgia citizens trying to vote today will discovered they’re no longer registered.
Most will think it’s just them, not realizing it’s part of a massive, national effort by Republicans and the billionaires who fund them to prevent Democrats from voting.
“Carry Smith wrote her PhD thesis on the Voting Rights Act and challenges to the right to vote in Georgia,” writes Palast.
“Now dig this: Smith, the expert on challenges to voting rights, lost her vote because a Republican vigilante challenged her registration—along with 900 other Savannah voters—until she was forced to make an appearance proving her right to vote at a meeting of the Chatham County (Savannah) elections board.
“Half of the others challenged still lost their vote in this do-or-die battleground.
“Adrian Consonery Jr. was also challenged, in this case, by officials in Cobb County, Georgia. The elections officers claimed that the signature on his drivers license ‘didn’t match’ the signature on his ballot. Were these local pols forgery specialists? No, they were Republicans. No problem, they told Consonery, a student in the middle of his finals; all he had to do was drive to their offices, eight hours away, and re-sign his ballot.
“Why were Smith and Consonery targeted? At this point in the Ugliest Election in Memory, you won’t be shocked to learn that Consonery is Black and Smith is of Cherokee heritage. (I’ve reported that America’s Tribal members are the number one target of vote suppression tactics.)
“But who knows the motivation of the Savannah vigilante Helen Strahl—who used a Georgia ‘challenge’ statute last deployed in 1946 by the Ku Klux Klan. I tried to speak to Strahl, the self-appointed vote-fraud hunter who attacked Smith and 900 others in this majority African-American city. Was it racism? Or was it a purely a partisan attack on voters expected to vote for Kamala Harris.”
In a few small ways I helped Greg put this movie together but, even after writing an entire book about Republican efforts to block Democrats from voting (The Hidden History of the War on Voting), I was shocked by what he discovered.
The last time there was a concerted effort like this to challenge individual Americans’ right to vote was in 1946. It was done by the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia, running through a front group they started called Vigilantes, Inc. Now they’re back with a vengance, although they’ve traded in the sheets and hoods for law degrees and billionaire funding.
Just between 2017 and 2019, Brian Kemp and friends removed at least 538,485 people from the voting rolls in Georgia, ensuring that he could beat Stacey Abrams in the race for governor by around 50,000 votes.
And now, under this new revival of an old Klan law, the people profiled in Palast’s new movie have challenged tens of thousands more. All in the name of stopping a “voter fraud epidemic” that isn’t happening now, never has happened, and never will happen.
Three years ago, Ari Berman and Nick Sergey detailed for Mother Jones magazine how the billionaire-funded Heritage Action for America helped draft voter suppression legislation that’s now law in dozens of states, with a particular target on the swing states.
Heritage spent a small fortune of its billionaire’s money in “Arizona, Michigan, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Nevada, Texas, and Wisconsin” to pass and defend legislation making it harder for students, low-income people, Blacks, Hispanics, and seniors to vote while making it easier for partisans to challenge the right of people to vote or have their vote counted. As Berman and Sergey note:
“Every Tuesday, the group leads a call with right-wing advocacy groups like the Susan B. Anthony List, Tea Party Patriots, and FreedomWorks to coordinate these efforts at the highest levels of the conservative movement. ‘We literally give marching orders for the week ahead,’ [Heritage Action Executive Director Jessica] Anderson said. ‘All so we’re singing from the same song sheet of the goals for that week and where the state [voter suppression] bills are across the country.’”
Kemp, with billionaire backing, won his election against Stacey Abrams by 54,723 votes, a fraction of the number of Black people he’d just purged from the rolls.
In the two years leading up to 2020, Kemp’s Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger (pronounced Raff-ens-Purger), purged another massive 309,000 voters from the rolls, so Palast hired the same company Amazon uses to confirm addresses to check the list: 198,351 were wrongly purged.
Palast, along with the Georgia ACLU, Black Voters Matter Fund, and the Georgia NAACP, were successful in getting about half of them put back on the rolls, which is why Joe Biden won that state by a mere, as Trump said, “11,780 votes.”
These purges have since spread out of Georgia and are now — with major billionaire funding — accelerating across the country. Keep in mind that, as NPR’s Domenico Montanaro explained:
“Just 44,000 votes in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin separated Biden and Trump from a tie in the Electoral College."
Palast did a similar analysis in 2020 in then-GOP-controlled Wisconsin where 135,000 voters were about to be removed before the election.
Using that Amazon contractor’s name-by-name analysis, he found that about a third of the list, “almost entirely Black people in Milwaukee and students in Madison,” were on the purge list incorrectly. Luckily, the Palast Investigative Fund and Black Voters Matter filed that information with a bipartisan elections commission and stopped the billionaire’s purge so Biden was able to win that state by about 10,000 votes.
“Now,” Palast told me, “we have at least 20 states using this same purge system.”
Most recently, Republican billionaires rolled out a new strategy to get around legal challenges to Red states purging millions of voters: voter vigilantes.
While most states allow whistleblower citizens to challenge the vote of an individual they know and believe is voting illegally, Georgia’s SB202 (written with help from the billionaires who fund Heritage) was the first law in the country since the 1940s to allow “unlimited” challenges to voters by people who aren’t government officials.
The benefit of this system is that states are banned by law from purging people via “list maintenance” within 90 days of an election, but the Supreme Court just ruled that a citizen vigilante can submit voter purge lists right up to and on election day, when it’s far too late for purged voters to re-register and vote.
“In 2022, 149,000 voters were challenged in Georgia,” Palast told me, “not by the government, but by vigilante vote fraud hunters using specious data. There have been two federal court rulings thus far that have allowed this to continue, so it’s now spreading to other states.”
Palast told me about one Georgian, Marjorie Taylor Greene ally Pam Reardon, who challenged 32,000 voters, heavily focused on Black people and college students, using a list from the group True The Vote, who produced the discredited movie 2000 Mules (premiered at Mar-a-Lago by Trump himself) that falsely claimed millions of votes were “stuffed” into drop boxes by mostly Black people across the nation.
Another voter vigilante Palast identified, Chairman of the Ft. Benning area GOP Alton Russell, challenged over 4,000 voters, “capturing a substantial number of Black soldiers.” Russell sees himself as a vigilante, wearing Georgia native Doc Holliday style clothes with a loaded six-shooter on his hip.
The Palast Investigative Fund, Black Voters Matter, Georgia NAACP, and Georgia ACLU found that not one single voter challenged by Reardon, Russell, or any of the other vigilantes who challenged hundreds to thousands of Georgia voters, was a fraudulent voter. They were able to stop the Reardon purge, but Russell’s challenge was sustained and all 4,000-plus were removed from the rolls.
This, Palast told me, “is what election attorney Mark Elias calls the ‘Big new unseen threat.’” And there’s virtually no coverage of this in any of our nation’s mainstream media.
Palast notes:
“Georgia and Texas are not red states: if people were allowed to vote they’d be Blue states.
“Their brand of voter vigilantism has now legally spread to Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. They’re now mass challenging literally hundreds of thousands of voters, and True The Vote has put out the call to get 100,000 volunteers to submit these challenges. They’re probably the most effective vote suppression organization since the Ku Klux Klan.”
Raising the stakes, courts approved the Georgia legislature’s plan to require new voters to prove their citizenship when registering to vote, an effort that Mike Johnson tried unsuccessfully to take national earlier this year.
That billionaire-funded effort will hit married women particularly hard, as the National Organization for Women (NOW) details in a report:
“According to the Brennan Center for Justice, one third of all women have citizenship documents that do not identically match their current names primarily because of name changes at marriage. Roughly 90 percent of women who marry adopt their husband’s last name.
“That means that roughly 90 percent of married female voters have a different name on their ID than the one on their birth certificate. An estimated 34 percent of women could be turned away from the polls unless they have precisely the right documents.”
This hits Black women even harder than white women, and, because Black women have been the key to both the Obama and Biden presidencies, this is a reality not lost on Republicans. Particularly in a country and era where most elections are decided by one or two or three points.
None of these games Republicans are playing would be legal if we had an absolute right to vote or if the NVRA were enforced. Unfortunately, billionaire-supported Republicans on the Supreme Court have repeatedly ignored it, even when referenced in voting rights lawsuits.
— Because we don’t have a right to vote, Red State governors can radically cut back on the number of polling places and voting machines so that working class people are forced to stand in line for five, six, in some cases in 2022 11 hours to vote.
— Because we don’t have a right to vote, legislators in Georgia made it a crime to give a bottle of water or a slice of pizza to somebody they have forced to stand in line for 11 hours to vote.
— Because we don’t have a right to vote, about 40 million registered voters nationwide have been removed from the voting rolls since 2014, so when they show up to vote they are given “provisional ballots” that, in Red States, are often never counted unless there is a lawsuit.
— Because we don’t have a right to vote, back in the 1960s William Rehnquist helped organize “Operation Eagle Eye” in Arizona to pull together a volunteer army of large and often uniformed white men to challenge Black, Hispanic, and Native American voters at the polls. It was so successful it kicked off Rehnquist’s political career, taking him all the way to Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. Republican armed vigilantes have returned, surrounding Arizona ballot drop boxes challenging Hispanic voters.
— Because we don’t have a right to vote, Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis was able to prevent almost a million mostly Black Florida citizens from voting if they owed fines or fees to the government.
— Because we don’t have a right to vote, Louis DeJoy could slow down the mail just in time for the election and not face any legal consequences.
— Because we don’t have a right to vote, in 2000 then-Florida Governor Jeb Bush threw over 90,000 African Americans off the voting rolls, supposedly felons barred from voting, just before the election that Jeb’s brother George “won” in Florida by 537 votes. Yet, not a single one of those Black voters was, Palast and the BBC found, a convicted felon.
—Because we don’t have a right to vote, the Supreme Court told the Republican governor of Ohio — and now all governors — that he could remove millions of big city registered voters from the rolls because they hadn’t voted in the previous election and/or didn’t mail back a postcard.
— Because we don’t have a right to vote, Red State legislators have been able to force through laws requiring citizens to jump through extraordinary hoops like getting IDs they normally wouldn’t need or use, just to vote.
— Because we don’t have a right to vote, Republicans in multiple states are making it extremely difficult to vote by mail or drop off your ballot at a convenient dropbox.
The press says the “Big Lie” is that the election of 2020 was stolen from Trump, but the real Big Lie — that was amplified by billionaire Trump and toady Johnson at their press conference earlier this year at Mar-a-Lago — is that non-citizens vote illegally and therefore all these voter purges and other challenges are necessary.
While it requires lawful due process — your day in court — to take away your gun, Red state governors and secretaries of state can now take away your vote without even telling you.
If Democrats can hold the Senate and White House and take back the House, the first order of business next January — along with blocking billionaire and corporate money from our elections — must be to pass legislation explicitly granting a legal right for average people to vote.
Today’s the last day to beat back this neofascist billionaires’ scheme: Vote!
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Defeating Fascism Our Top Priority Today: Long Before and Far Beyond One Election
If we don't defeat fascism today, we set our progressive movement back during a moment of history in which we don't have a minute to spare.
Nov 05, 2024
It is both complicated and simple.
Liberation is not voting. Voting is a tool. Liberation is the ability to lawfully declare and defend the full humanity of everyone. This election is not about liberation. No single election can or ever will be. This election is about defense and blocking the most immediate threat to our survival so our social movements can continue to struggle toward winning everything our people need to live good lives.
In 2020 when our coalition of social movements defeated former U.S. President Donald Trump, we not only blocked his second term, but we made room for what immediately followed. When President Joe Biden took office in 202, his day one executive orders included rescinding Trump's Muslim ban, canceling construction on the Keystone pipeline, implementing and extending moratoria on deportations and evictions, rejoining the Paris climate agreement, and firing the anti-union lawyer Trump appointed as the general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board. And beyond that, social movements were able to pressure Biden to forgive 175 billion dollars in student loan debt. It mattered then and it matters now who will be president. Not to mention the actual progressive policies that cities and states have been able to pass during this period. Our movements will be better positioned to win more things if we defeat Trump.
And that’s not the lesser of two evils; it’s a strategy. If the coalition to defeat Trump and elect Harris wins, that means we are less likely to lose more Supreme Court justice seats, which means legally we won’t be less human under the eyes of the law.
I'm saying I'm voting for Kamala Harris because all of what Trump represents and will deliver is bad for our movement.
Y'all, fascism has a definition. Fundamentally, fascism is a far-right authoritarian political movement aimed at controlling government. We don't currently live under fascism, corporate Democrats are neoliberal and not liberatory but they're not actually fascists. Trump and MAGA Republicans are fascists because they lie about the legitimacy of elections that they don’t win and have shown they will attempt coups and set fires to ballot boxes and threaten election workers. Trump and MAGA Republicans know their policies are devastating for everyone except billionaires and that their policies don’t actually have the support of the majority of people, so they can’t actually control government without violence - i.e., if they allow democracy to continue. They understand that what our social movements have won is an obstacle to implementing the policies they want.
So basically, I'm saying I'm voting for Kamala Harris because all of what Trump represents and will deliver is bad for our movement. Having a fascist president will destroy (astronomically) more lives than having a neoliberal capitalist president. And because I made a lifetime commitment to ensure that our people are recognized as full humans, I have developed politically to not abandon options that get us closer to or push us away from that commitment. Because my goal is liberation, like it is for so many of you, and because we simply do not (yet) have the political power to influence (let alone make) liberatory decisions/policies/laws (in perpetuity), I’ve come to the conclusion (because preserving life is always my immediate goal and liberation is my north star), that even when the options are unsavory (which is not new, they have always been at the presidential level), a choice to take action within the political system we all live in, must be made.
It is complicated. And it is simple.
Politically, we are and have been in the realm of strategies vs. strategies. Our opposition: capitalist, patriarchal, white supremacist goal since 1865 is to strip away every hard-fought and strategically won right from our freedom movement—like the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments. More recently, these forces have been joined by evangelical Christans in repealing Roe v. Wade. And striking key provisions from the Voting Rights Act. That’s their overarching strategy. That’s the great America our opposition wants. And it is complicated and it is simple. And for 159 years our freedom movement has been utilizing our own (one of many, I might add) strategy to fight back. Yes, elections and voting. There are millions of people who now have the right to vote, not because it was given, but because it was a strategy that won. A political campaign that countless numbers of people across many southern states, throughout multiple decades, dedicated innumerable hours to. Because our ancestors in political struggle understood 159 years ago that elections and voting are a brilliant vehicle to use as we move towards our ultimate goal of liberation.
Y’all. It is complicated. And it is simple. They are both imperialist. One a fascist imperialist and the other a capitalist imperialist. And there is an ocean of difference between the two.
And we might be in the fourth quarter of humanity. I am not being alarmist or hyperbolic when I say this. We have limited time to decrease carbon emissions such that the planet doesn't reach a climate "tipping point" from which humanity cannot recover. We can't lose another four years, and we may lose way, way more than four years, because every time Republicans gain power, they change the rules of the game in order to move closer to one-party, minority rule that can't be challenged through democratic channels (fascism). So we have to be able to shift climate policy—but we're potentially headed into a political reality where everyday people won't be able to impact any policies.
It isn’t true that every time when we fight, we win, but when we don’t fight, we’ll definitely lose.
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