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voter suppression
The GOP Is Already Planning to Win the Midterms... by Suppressing Your Vote!
The party is taking no chances on the upcoming plebiscite and has hatched a plan to rig all future federal elections with the goal of transforming the United States into a one-party state.
May 10, 2025
If you’re counting on the 2026 midterm elections to wrest control of U.S. Congress from the GOP, be forewarned.
The party is taking no chances on the upcoming plebiscite and has hatched a plan to rig all future federal elections with the goal of transforming the United States into a one-party state.
At the center of the plan is the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, passed on April 10 by the House and pending before the Senate, and an executive order issued by President Donald Trump on March 25 with the Orwellian title of “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections.” And looming in the background, with the final word on either measure’s constitutionality, is the Supreme Court, packed with three Trump appointees and holding a long and sorry record of hostility to voting rights.
All of this is happening step by step, setting the stage for what could turn out to be the final chapter for American democracy.
The SAVE Act would require all Americans to provide a birth certificate, passport, or some other documentary proof of citizenship in person every time they register or re-register to vote; require each state to take affirmative steps on an ongoing basis to ensure that only U.S. citizens are registered to vote; and remove noncitizens from their official voter lists. It would also create a private right of action, after the fashion of the Texas anti-abortion law, to allow disgruntled individuals to sue election officials who register voters without obtaining proof of citizenship and establish criminal penalties of up to five years in prison for election officials who violate the act.
Trump’s executive order is no less extreme. Among its directives is a mandate for the Election Assistance Commission, an independent nonpartisan agency created by Congress, to require voters to submit documentary proof of their citizenship when using national voter registration forms. It would also stop states from counting mailed-in ballots votes that are sent in by Election Day but are delivered afterward, require recertification of all state voting systems to meet new security standards set by the EAC, and halt election assistance funding to states that do not comply with the terms of the order within 180 days. Perhaps most alarming, the order would allow the Department of Government Efficiency and the Department of Homeland Security to subpoena state records and use federal databases to review state voter registration lists.
There is some good news amid the darkness. On April 24, federal district court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, a Clinton appointee who sits in Washington, D.C., issued a 120-page opinion and preliminary injunction, blocking the EAC from adding documentary proof of citizenship to the national voter registration form. “Our Constitution entrusts Congress and the states—not the president—with the authority to regulate federal elections,” Kollar-Kotelly wrote, holding that Trump’s order violated the separation of powers and referring to Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 of the Constitution, which states:
The Times, Places, and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing [original text] Senators.
But while voting-rights groups have praised Kollar-Kotelly’s opinion, the judge left the rest of the executive order in place. More concerning, the ruling did nothing to derail the SAVE Act. As the judge noted, “Consistent with [the separation of powers doctrine], Congress is currently debating legislation that would effect many of the changes the president purports to order.”
The dangers posed by the SAVE Act cannot be understated. According to a survey conducted by the Brennan Center and affiliated organizations, more than 9% of American voting-age citizens, or 21.3 million people, don’t have a passport, birth certificate, naturalization papers, or other proof of citizenship readily available. “Voters of color, voters who change their names (most notably, married women), and younger voters would be most significantly affected,” the Brennan Center has warned.
In an article posted after the House approved the act, Democracy Docket, the digital election news platform founded by attorney Marc Elias, featured the views of a group of distinguished historians and voting experts on the act.
“There’s never been an attack on voting rights out of Congress like this,” Alexander Keyssar, a professor of history and social policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, told the Docket. “It’s always been the federal government trying to keep states in check on voting rights, for the most part.”
“Congress has never passed a voter-suppression law like this before,” Sean Morales-Doyle, the director of the Brennan Center’s voting-rights program, said. “When it has exercised its power to regulate federal elections, Congress has usually done so to protect the freedom to vote. If this becomes law, it will be a new low for Congress.”
Princeton professor Sean Wilentz also weighed in with a dire assessment. “It’s the most extraordinary attack on voting rights in American history,” Wilentz said, characterizing the act as “the latest attempt to gut voting-rights advances that were made in the 1960s,” one more dangerous than the Jim Crow-era laws used in the South, because it is national in scope. “This is an attempt to destroy American democracy as we know it.”
All eyes now turn to the Senate, where Democrats have the power to filibuster the SAVE Act to prevent its passage unless 60 members vote to invoke cloture. Thus far, the Democrats seem to be holding the line, even in the face of persistent propaganda spewed by Trump, Elon Musk, and other Republicans that election fraud is rampant and that Democrats are “importing [undocumented] voters” to swing elections. In truth, of course, election fraud in the U.S. is miniscule, with some long-range state-by-state studies finding it occurs at rates between 0.0003% and 0.0025% of total votes cast.
Should any part of the SAVE Act pass and be signed into law, it will likely come before the Supreme Court, where its fate may turn on Chief Justice John Roberts, who along with Amy Coney Barrett, sometimes aligns with the panel’s liberals in big cases.
Roberts, however, has a long history of undermining voting rights that stretches back to his stint as a young lawyer in the Reagan administration and his role as a behind-the-scenes GOP consultant, lawsuit editor and prep coach for oral arguments before the Supreme Court in the run-up to Bush v. Gore, the case that decided the 2000 presidential election.
In 2013, as chief justice, he composed the disastrous majority opinion in Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted the Voting Rights Act. In 2019, he continued his anti-voting-rights crusade, writing the majority opinion Rucho v. Common Cause, which removed the issue of political gerrymandering (the practice of designing voting maps to benefit the party in power) from the jurisdiction of federal courts. And in 2021, he joined a 5-to-4 majority ruling penned by Justice Samuel Alito that upheld Arizona laws prohibiting out-of-precinct voting and criminalizing the collection of mail-in ballots by third parties.
In the meantime, hundreds of lawyers have resigned from the Justice Department, repelled by Trump’s reactionary policies. As The New York Times has reported, the exodus has been especially felt hard at the department’s civil rights division, whose mission Trump has transformed from one of opposing voter suppression to stamping out phony claims of rampant election fraud.
All of this is happening step by step, setting the stage for what could turn out to be the final chapter for American democracy. Not only is it not too early to start thinking about the midterms, it may already be too late.
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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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