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    Election deniers now hold posts on local US election boards, raising concerns for midterms

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    A number of people who deny the legitimacy of the 2020 election, and often of other elections in which Republicans have not been victorious, have been elevated to positions of power since Donald Trump’s re-election, raising concerns about the potential for partisan meddling in critical parts of the country such as Arizona and Georgia.State by state, activists aligned with the “election integrity” movement have found their way on to local elections boards and elections offices, raising red flags for Democrats who have already started efforts to have them removed.“I think Republicans want to put us in jail,” Fulton county commissioner Dana Barrett said, moments after a contempt hearing in an Atlanta, Georgia, courtroom in August, where she and five other county commissioners were fighting a battle to reject the appointment of two Republican election denialists to the Fulton county board of registrations and elections.The commission’s charter says the board must appoint two nominees made by each political party. A finding of criminal contempt could have resulted in commissioners being jailed until they agreed to make the appointment, but Fulton county superior court judge David Emerson found the board in civil contempt last month for refusing to vote for the appointment as ordered by the court. A $10,000 daily fine for failing to make the appointment is on hold, pending appeal.“At the end of the day, we have no choice but to resist,” Barrett said. “This is not a particularly strategic move on my part, but rather a move to defend the integrity of our elections and to do what I can in my corner of the world to try to help hold this democracy together. If that means I’m resisting, then by all means, I’m resisting.”One of the two appointees in question, Julie Adams, works for the Election Integrity Network, an election denial activist organization founded by Cleta Mitchell, a Trump ally who aided his efforts to overturn the election in Georgia and elsewhere. The other, Jason Frazier, is a consultant for EagleAI, software that collects open-source data of dubious validity to aid activists making thousands of voter challenges at a time. Frazier was a plaintiff in a 2023 lawsuit demanding voter registration purges by the county and the state.“I believe that Jason Frazier and Julie Adams are election deniers,” Barrett said.“We all find ourselves in positions where we have to make tough decisions considering the climate in our country,” said Fulton county commissioner Mo Ivory. “I’m glad to be standing up for the people that put me in office, and continue to fight for our democracy, not for partisan politics, but for what it means to live in a democracy.”In Georgia, board appointments to county election offices are idiosyncratic. Fulton county’s charter gives power to the board of commissioners and to the political parties’ county committees. In neighboring DeKalb county, the appointments are made by the chief judge of its superior court, who is free to reject a nominee by one of the party’s committees if that person doesn’t meet the judge’s legal standards.Such was the case earlier this year, when Shondeana Morris, chief judge of the DeKalb county superior court, rejected William Henderson after a letter campaign by the county’s Democratic committee and voting rights activists. But the judge did allow the appointment of Gail Lee, another Republican activist linked to the Election Integrity Network.During a DeKalb county election board meeting last week, local political activists challenged the qualification of Jason Lary, a former mayor of Stonecrest, Georgia, to run for the city council. Lary recently returned from federal prison, where he was serving a sentence for fraud after being convicted of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal Covid-19 relief funds allocated to the city.Lary is a Democrat and the board has a Democratic majority, but after a brief discussion, the board voted unanimously to kick him off the ballot and strip him of his voter registration, given that he was still under supervision for his sentence and thus ineligible to vote.“The one thing that became clear is the importance of the public to remain vigilant on little things like people who qualified for office,” Lee said at the end of the meeting. “Because if a person hadn’t come for and challenged the candidates then they would have gone forward and possibly had a felon in office.”There’s only so much a Republican activist can accomplish on a five-person board with a Democratic majority, as is the case in metro Atlanta’s core counties. When Adams refused to certify a primary election in Fulton county in 2024, state superior court judges ruled that she was required to do so by state law, a decision affirmed by the Georgia supreme court this week. The duty to certify is “ministerial”, a pronouncement that is obligatory, not discretionary.And many if not most decisions by an elections board involve mundane procedural questions about where to site a voting drop box or how to schedule poll worker training. Even contentious issues often result in unanimous votes.But elections offices are staffed by human beings maintaining sensitive equipment and critical records, all of which are vulnerable to someone with authority and an agenda.Protect Democracy, an advocacy organization, describes a strategy of election subversion in three parts: deceive, disrupt and deny.Disinformation from influencers suggests that voter fraud or noncitizen voting occurs often enough to swing an election. Then these influencers call on their supporters to disrupt election administration and voting process and introduce chaos into the system. Finally, they attempt to interfere or halt the certification process and “declare the true result untrue, unknown, or unknowable”, Protect Democracy’s advocates wrote.The object is to allow the loser to claim victory regardless of the results, forcing a court to either choose a winner or order a new election, delegitimizing a fair vote.Changes wrought by a new law specific to Spalding county, Georgia, populated its board with Republican election activists. The board members and the county’s new elections director called for a hand-count of ballots following elections in 2022 and 2023. The process, observers noted, was painfully slow and riven by inaccuracies that took days to rectify, with an end result that showed Dominion machines had counted votes correctly.They did not hand count ballots in 2024.Spalding county’s Republican elections board members – Ben Johnson, Roy McClain and James Newland – are among the many defendants in a federal lawsuit seeking to overturn a law permitting mass voter challenges passed in the wake of the 2020 election that voting rights advocates argue violates the Voting Rights Act.Meanwhile, Maricopa county’s board of supervisors has been in a political war with the county’s elected recorder Justin Heap to prevent this outcome. Maricopa county contains Phoenix and almost two-thirds of Arizona’s population.Heap, a former state representative, defeated the incumbent Republican in 2024 while refusing to say if he believed the 2020 and 2022 elections were fair and calling Maricopa county elections a “laughingstock”.After Heap’s victory, the board stripped the recorder’s office of its duties to manage in-person early voting and some IT management of voter rolls. Negotiations broke down in May, leading to lawsuits and acrimony. Heap retained America First Legal, a Trump-aligned firm, to represent him in the lawsuit.“Justin Heap is lying about me, and going forward, he better keep my name out of his lying mouth,” Maricopa county supervisor Steve Gallardo said in a July release, refuting claims by Heap that Gallardo had agreed to restore power to the recorder’s office. “Since his election, Justin Heap has taken actions that have confused voters and damaged relationships. This must end. Justin Heap should stop the performative theater and just do his job.”Some states appear to be more fertile ground than others for election denialist’s influence on boards.North Carolina’s Republicans controlled the state legislature with a veto-proof majority last year, even though its former governor Roy Cooper was a Democrat. After Josh Stein, another Democrat, won the governor’s race, legislators stripped the governor of the power to appoint members to state and county elections boards, handing it to newly elected state auditor Dave Boliek, a Republican.The state’s Republican-majority supreme court ratified the law in May after court challenges. Boliek almost immediately replaced 3-2 Democratic majorities with 3-2 Republican majorities across all 100 county election boards.Those appointments have drawn pushback from election denialists as well as from Democratic activists.Places such as Durham county, where less than 10% of voters are registered Republicans, now has a Republican majority on its elections board. But most new board members appear to have been rewarded for their loyalty to the party and not their fidelity to election denialism.“There are concerns that there are people that are getting rewarded as a political favor, as opposed to their working knowledge and their experience in elections,” said Jim Womack, Lee county GOP chair and the president of the non-profit North Carolina Election Integrity Team, speaking to North Carolina news site The Assembly. More

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      Utah emerges as a pivotal battleground amid race to redraw congressional maps

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      In the fast-escalating national arms race over redistricting, Utah has emerged as an unexpected and potentially pivotal battleground.The campaign began in Texas, where Donald Trump openly declared he was “entitled to” five additional Republican House seats. It quickly expanded to California, where Democratic lawmakers are asking voters to retaliate with new congressional maps drawn to “neutralize” Texas.At least half a dozen other states have been recruited into what has is now an unprecedented push to redraw their congressional boundaries in ways that could lock in political advantage ahead of next year’s midterms.The president has been candid about his aims: to safeguard Republicans’ fragile hold on the House. A loss of the speaker’s gavel would derail Trump’s legislative ambitions in the second half of his term – and open the door to a wave of investigations, from his administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files to its mass detention and deportation policies.Deeply conservative Utah, by contrast, has been pulled into the redistricting fray not by the president but by a judge.This week, Judge Dianna Gibson tossed out Utah’s current congressional map and gave the Republican-led state legislature until 24 September to submit a new one.The existing boundaries fracture Salt Lake City – a splash of blue in a sea of red – across all four congressional districts, effectively diluting Democrats’ political influence. A redrawn map could consolidate more of Utah’s capital city into one district, giving Democrats a rare opening in one of the nation’s most reliably Republican states.“There’s no doubt that any map that complies with this ruling would be more competitive than the current map,” said David Wasserman, senior editor and elections analyst at the non-partisan Cook Political Report. But he cautioned that lawmakers could still carve up Salt Lake City in ways that would maintain a Republican edge.On Friday, lawyers for the Utah legislature asked Gibson to pause her gerrymandering order to allow time for lawmakers to appeal the decision to the state supreme court, according to local news reports. The request comes a day after the state’s Republican legislative leaders said they would comply with the ruling, which they denounced as “misguided” and “unreasonable” given the 30-day deadline.“While we will continue to pursue every legal option available – including requesting a stay from the Utah Supreme Court if necessary – we will attempt to redistrict under these unprecedented constraints, consistent with our oath to represent the best interests of Utah,” the state house speaker, Mike Schultz, and senate president J Stuart Adams, said in a statement.The ruling in the Utah case stems from a yearslong legal battle over Proposition 4, a ballot initiative narrowly passed by voters in 2018 that aimed to ban partisan gerrymandering through the creation of an independent redistricting commission. Although the Republican-controlled legislature weakened the commission and enacted its own map, the state supreme court – made up of five justices all appointed by Republican governors – ruled last year that lawmakers had probably overstepped, paving the way for this week’s decision.Mark Gaber, an attorney representing the groups challenging Utah’s congressional maps, called the ruling a “vindication of a fair and neutral process”.“The voters passed this in 2018 to effectively ban partisan gerrymandering and now we’re seeing a push across the country to gerrymander,” he said. “It’s nice to see this standing out as a shining example of a process that can work.”Mid-decade redistricting on this scale is extraordinary. Typically states draw new congressional maps at the start of each decade following the census to account for population shifts.At stake is the balance of power in Congress, where the president’s party typically loses ground in midterm elections. House Democrats need to flip only a handful of seats to retake the majority, and early signs point in their favor: Trump’s approval ratings are low and falling, and since his return to the White House, Democrats have outperformed expectations in a series of low-turnout contests from Florida to Iowa.In a tit-for-tat redistricting fight, political analysts and experts say Republicans still hold the advantage: they control more state legislatures and have fewer constraints on gerrymandering.Yet the Texas plan, which was signed into law on Friday by the state’s governor, Greg Abbott, faces multiple lawsuits, including one alleging that the new districts are racially discriminatory. In California, Republicans have asked the state supreme court to block the proposed countermeasure from reaching the ballot. And even seats drawn to favor one party can become competitive depending on candidate quality, voter turnout and the national mood.In a closely fought election, even a single seat could tip the balance of power, making the prospect of a Democratic pickup in Utah all the more worrying for the president.On Wednesday night, Trump called the Utah decision “absolutely unconstitutional”.“How did such a wonderful Republican State like Utah, which I won in every Election, end up with so many Radical Left Judges?” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “All Citizens of Utah should be outraged at their activist Judiciary, which wants to take away our Congressional advantage, and will do everything possible to do so.”Gibson, the judge, was appointed to the district court in 2018 by the then governor Gary Herbert, a Republican.Trump continued, urging Republicans in Utah to “stay united” and ensure the state’s “four terrific Republican Congressmen stay right where they are!” (One of Utah’s four House members, Celeste Maloy, is a woman.)Trump’s outrage over the Utah ruling is a reminder, experts say, that courts – and voters – also have a say in shaping the political map.Kareem Crayton, the vice-president of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Washington DC office and a leading expert on redistricting, said the Utah ruling “achieves something closer to redistricting with guardrails” – in stark contrast to what is unfolding elsewhere.The lurch toward maximalist gerrymandering underlines the need for national standards, long sought by advocates of less partisan maps, Crayton said, but for now the message from the White House is: “Do more of it.”“This system is broken,” he said. “It’s a broken one when the outcome of the people’s house – the one that’s actually supposed to be the most representative of the public – turns out to be the least representative because people are going back to the maps multiple times and, with no abandon, with respect to partisanship, drawing districts that choose their voters and not the other way around.” More

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      Trump says he plans unconstitutional executive order to mandate ID for voters

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      Donald Trump has said he will issue an executive order to mandate identification for all US elections, a move likely to be challenged in court as unconstitutional.“Voter I.D. Must Be Part of Every Single Vote. NO EXCEPTIONS! I Will Be Doing An Executive Order To That End!!!,” the US president said on Truth Social late on Saturday.Trump also claimed he wants to ban all voting by mail except for those who are very ill or in military service.The US constitution grants primary authority to regulate elections to the US states, while empowering Congress to enact election laws or regulations. It gives no explicit authority to the president to regulate voting.The voting reform push by Trump stems from baseless claims that the 2020 election he lost was stolen from him. Earlier this month, Trump falsely claimed only the US uses mail-in voting. Dozens of countries permit at least some form of mail-in voting.Trump himself has cast election ballots by mail. In the 2024 elections, 14 states and Washington DC had voter turnout by mail exceeding 30%, with Trump winning half of those states, including Utah, which had 91.5% vote by mail turnout and whose elections are overseen by Republicans.Some 36 US states have laws requesting or requiring voters to show identification at the polls, with the remaining states and DC using other forms of identity verification. Voter fraud is incredibly rare and voter ID laws have been shown to disproportionately impact minorities, low-income individuals and disabled voters.“As many as 11 percent of eligible voters do not have the kind of ID that is required by states with strict ID requirements, and that percentage is even higher among seniors, minorities, people with disabilities, low-income voters, and students,” the Brennan Center for Justice states.A previous attempt by Trump to require proof of citizenship to vote was blocked by a federal judge in June 2025, as the law risked disenfranchising millions of Americans who don’t have passports, may not have easy access to birth certificates, and millions of married women with name changes may not have citizenship documents with their current legal name.Enforcement would likely affect tens of millions of Americans every election cycle who vote for the first time or update their voter registration information. Some 146 million American citizens do not have a US passport. More

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      ‘He’s trying to rig the midterms’: Trump intervenes to protect his allies in Congress

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      They are more than a year away – a lifetime in today’s fast and furious political cycle. But one man is already paying attention, pulling the levers of power and trying to tip the scales of the 2026 midterm elections.Donald Trump has made clear that he is willing to bring the full weight of the White House to bear to prevent his Republican party losing control of the US Congress in the midterm elections next year, orchestrating a more direct and legally dubious intervention than any of his predecessors.The US president’s multipronged approach includes redrawing congressional district maps, seeking to purge voter rolls, taking aim at mail-in voting and voting machines, and ordering the justice department to investigate Democrats’ prime fundraising tool.“Nobody’s ever tried to do this,” said Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington. “Most American presidents, Democratic or Republican, have basically played by the same rules and been careful of the constitution. But in his business career Trump never cared about whether he was doing something legal or not; he just went to court and same thing here.”Campaigning, not governing, has often been Trump’s comfort zone. He is constitutionally barred from running for president again but already has an eye on the November 2026 elections that will determine control of the House of Representatives and Senate.He senses that law and order, a populist cause long exploited by Republicans, could play to his advantage. Earlier this month Trump deployed the national guard to reduce crime in Washington DC and threatened similar federal interventions in other big cities. Fifty-three per cent of the public approve of how he is handling crime, according to an AP-NORC poll, higher than other issues.Trump told a cabinet meeting this week: “I think crime will be the big subject of the midterms and will be the big subject of the next election. I think it’s going to be a big, big subject for the midterms and I think the Republicans are going to do really well.”But this is no ordinary campaign. Trump said at the same marathon meeting: “I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States.”Taking a familiar political manoeuvre to new extremes, he has pushed Republican state legislators in Texas to redraw their congressional map because he claims “we are entitled to five more seats”, and he is lobbying other red states, including Indiana and Missouri, to take similar steps to pad the margin even more.Other steps involve the direct use of official presidential power in ways that have no modern precedent. He ordered his justice department to investigate ActBlue, an online portal that raised hundreds of millions of dollars in small-dollar donations for Democratic candidates over two decades.The site has been so successful that Republicans launched a similar venture, called WinRed. But Trump did not order a federal investigation into WinRed.Trump’s appointees at the justice department have also demanded voting data from at least 19 states in an apparent attempt to look for ineligible voters. Earlier this year he signed an executive order seeking documented proof of citizenship to register to vote, among other changes, though much of it has been blocked by courts.Last week the president announced that lawyers were drafting an executive order to end mail-in balloting, a method used by nearly one in three Americans, and threatened to do away with voting machines. He claimed that the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, told him mail-in voting was responsible for his 2020 election loss.There is nothing remarkable about a sitting president campaigning for his party in the midterms and trying to bolster incumbents by steering projects and support to their districts. But Trump’s actions constitute a unique attempt to interfere in a critical election before it is even held, raising alarms about the future of democracy.Allan Lichtman, a distinguished history professor at American University in Washington, said: “We’re seeing a new concerted assault on free and fair elections, harkening back to the discredited efforts of the white supremacists in the Jim Crow south. He’s trying to rig the midterms and then of course beyond that the next presidential election in his political favour.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump previously attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, which culminated in an insurrection by his supporters at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. On that occasion, he was constrained by elected Republicans such as his then vice-president, Mike Pence, and the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger. This time he has locked down near-total loyalty from the party and assembled a cabinet that again this week offered an ostentatious display of fealty.His power grab will not go entirely unchallenged. Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, signed legislation that will allow voters to decide in November on a redrawn congressional map designed to help Democrats win five more House seats next year, neutralising Republicans’ gerrymandering in Texas.But Democrats, activists and lawyers will have to find others ways to “fight fire with fire” when it comes to Trump’s more extreme meddling.Lichtman, author of a new book, Conservative at the Core, added: “Republicans have no principles; Democrats have no spine. Democrats need to grow a spine. They need to stop playing not to lose – that’s a sure way to lose. They need to respond to these outrages powerfully and aggressively by whatever means are possible or we’re going to lose our democracy.”Yet while Trump’s gambit is a flex of executive power, it could also be seen as an admission of potential weakness. The incumbent president’s party typically loses seats in midterm elections. In 2018, Democrats won enough to take back the House, stymieing Trump’s agenda and leading to his impeachment.Only 37% of voters approve of the way Trump is handling his job as president, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll released on Wednesday, while 55% disapprove. House Republicans, who currently have just a three-seat margin, have faced a series of raucous town halls that bode ill for their fortunes.Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, said: “President Trump and the Republicans would not be trying to stack the deck if they didn’t think they were going to lose the hand. They are looking at poll numbers and they know midterms are bad to incumbent presidents over the last 60 years and it’s a very slim margin in the House.“In order for Trump to sustain the loyalty of the House – he’s already gotten everything he pretty much wants – he needs them to think he’s on their side so he’s going to go out and be very public about rigging the voting system to keep them in power.”But Schiller added: “Will that be enough to overcome general unhappiness at the moment that the voters seem to have with the economy, inflation, even Trump’s border policies? It’s not enough to keep the Republicans in line. You have to get independent voters to vote for you again and that’s at risk for the Republicans right now.” More

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      Republicans are trying to ensure we’ll never have another fair election | Judith Levine

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      “Christians, get out and vote, just this time,” Donald Trump exhorted the audience at a campaign event organized by the conservative Turning Point Action in July 2024. “In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”Since his defeat by Joe Biden in 2020, Trump has been building toward delivery on that promise, first by fomenting suspicion of widespread election fraud, then by trying to overturn the results via legal challenge and intimidation, and finally, on 6 January 2021, by force. Now the White House and Republicans both in Washington and the states are colluding more brazenly than ever to “fix it” – “it” meaning free and fair elections they might lose.Republicans’ aim is permanent control of the US government. Trump’s is the crown. As their assaults on voting rights – and the institution of elections itself – escalate, their success begins to look, if not inevitable, alarmingly possible.Trump’s tactics are working.The 2020 election was the cleanest and most efficient in memory. Claims of rampant fraud are lies – the big lie, as the 2021 House impeachment committee put it. But not among Republican voters. A Pew survey taken before the 2024 election found that Trump supporters were “deeply skeptical about the way the election will be conducted”, especially compared with Harris supporters. Whereas over 85% of Democratic voters believed in 2024 that absentee ballots would be counted accurately, and ineligible voters prevented from voting, among Trump supporters only 38% and 30%, respectively, felt the same.Buoyed by the big lie – and liberated by the supreme court’s 2013 gutting of the Voting Rights Act – voter suppression attempts reached a peak after the 2020 elections, when legislators introduced more than 400 restrictive bills. Signing Georgia’s 98-page Election Integrity Act in 2021, Brian Kemp, the Republican governor, was unambiguous about its partisan aim. “After the November election last year” –when record turnout in the reliably red state yielded victories for Biden and two Democratic US senators, and the secretary of state resisted Trump’s shakedown to “find 11,780 votes” to reverse the outcome – “I knew, like so many of you, that significant reforms to our state elections were needed,” he said.By September 2024, 31 states had enacted 114 such laws.In May 2024, Trump told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he would accept the results of the election only if “everything’s honest” – that is, if he won. This definition of honesty took hold. According to some polls, before election day, fewer than a quarter of Trump supporters believed the election would be fair. After it, their confidence rates more than doubled. And while Republican concerns about fraud were pervasive in 2020, they were – surprise, surprise – virtually nonexistent when the 2024 results came in.With their man in the White House, congressional Republicans set about preparing for his coronation. Three days into Trump’s term, the Tennessee representative Andy Ogles introduced a bill to amend the constitution to allow presidents to serve three terms. At Trumpstore.com, you can buy a red “Trump 2028” cap for $50.On 25 March Trump issued the executive order “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections,” which melds his xenophobic paranoia-mongering with his desire to “fix” elections. Its mandates range from requiring proof of citizenship to vote (an answer to the spectral threat of undocumented people stuffing the ballot boxes) to a ban on the bar codes that expedite vote counting.The executive order itself is illegal. The constitution gives the states, not the president, the power to regulate elections.On 4 April, the House passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (Save) Act, requiring registrants and voters to document citizenship.The GOP’s election-interference campaign is accelerating. On 7 July, the justice department’s civil rights division wrote a letter to Greg Abbott, the Texas governor, and Ken Paxton, the state attorney general, alleging that four of its majority-minority “coalition districts” are illegal under the Voting Rights Act and directing the state to redraw its electoral map. Voting rights experts dispute this interpretation. In fact, the law prohibits the dilution of the electoral power of voters of color either by packing them into one district or spreading them out by gerrymandering–which is what the new map would do.In mid-July, the justice department issued broad requests to state election officials to turn over their election data and voter rolls. In Colorado, where Biden won by 11 points in 2020, a guy called Jeff Small – chief of staff to the Colorado Republican representative and Save Act cheerleader Lauren Boebert – began contacting officials claiming he was working with the Trump administration on election “integrity” and asking if they would kindly let the feds, or somebody, inspect their voting machines, according to Washington Post reporting. After one such request, the Department of Homeland Security called to follow up.Officials of both parties were outraged, especially when it came to monkeying with the equipment, an illegal act. “Anybody who is asking for access to the voting machines outside of the law” is suspicious, the Republican executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association told the Washington Post. “That automatically raises red flags in terms of their intent.”Colorado’s Democratic secretary of state made the larger point: “This all is part of a bigger ploy to further undermine our voting in this country,” she said. “They are actively in a power grab.”Meanwhile, the White House was leaning on Texas’s governor and legislative leaders to redraw their electoral map according to Trump’s specifications, dismantling Democratic strongholds to create five more Republican House seats – to which the president averred his party was “entitled”. When Texas got onboard, on 3 August the state’s 51 Democrats left the state, risking fines and arrest, to thwart the effort.To cover all bases, on 7 August, Trump ordered the commerce department to prepare a new US census leaving out undocumented immigrants. Under the constitution, the census counts the number of “persons”, not citizens; it must be conducted “within every … ten years”, and states must redistrict to concur with new data. In a post on Truth Social, the president described a bespoke tally “using the results and information gained from the Presidential Election of 2024”.The same day, the vice-president, JD Vance, descended on bright-red Indiana with a trio of Trump appointees to strong-arm its leaders to redistrict as well. Afterward, on X, Indiana’s lieutenant governor, Micah Beckwith, genuflected to Vance: “Your bold leadership and unwavering support for President Trump’s mission to expand the conservative majority in Congress is exactly what America needs right now.”On Fox News, the vice-president echoed Trump’s contention that counting undocumented immigrants in the census unfairly gives the advantage to Democrats, whom he also charged with “aggressive” gerrymandering. “We’re just trying to rebalance the scales,” Vance said.After two weeks, Democrats returned to the Texas state house. Republican leaders forced them to sign “permission slips” to leave the chamber and assigned police escorts to monitor them. After refusing to sign, one Democrat spent nights in the chamber. While speaking on the phone with Gavin Newsom, the California governor, from the bathroom, she was informed the call constituted a felony, she said.On Saturday, the Texas senate approved legislation creating the new map, which Abbott says he will sign “swiftly”. The move had already set off an avalanche of mid-decade redistricting, led by California. Other states, controlled by both parties, may follow.Last week on Truth Social, Trump announced he would “lead a movement” to eliminate mail-in ballots – an idea he apparently picked up from Vladimir Putin – and also “inaccurate” voting machines. He said he would sign an executive order to this effect soon. “Remember, the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes,” Trump fantasized. “They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.”Maybe the following order will eliminate voting altogether – for the good of our country, of course.

      Judith Levine is Brooklyn-based journalist, essayist and author of five books. Her Substack is Today in Fascism More

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      Schwarzenegger’s mission: terminate partisan rigging of California’s electoral maps

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      Arnold Schwarzenegger brags in his X profile that “I killed the Predator”, but even he was shocked when, as the freshly elected governor of California more than 20 years ago, he saw how unfairly the state’s electoral boundaries were carved up.One district in the eastern part of the state had such a long, thin middle section it was nicknamed the “swan”. Another was known as the “Jesus district” because you had to walk on water to get from one side to the other. Yet another, in LA’s San Fernando Valley, was memorably described by the Stanford law professor Pam Karlan as “a ghastly-looking, multi-headed, insect-like polygon with 385 sides”.This was the time-honored dark art of gerrymandering, practiced in state after state by whichever party happened to have a majority in the state legislature and wanted to keep things that way. To Schwarzenegger, though, a political neophyte after his long career as a Hollywood action hero, it looked a lot like election-rigging.“For a long time I thought that was something that happened way back in the 1800s,” Schwarzenegger said in a 2005 address to the state, “but the practice is still alive and well today.”What shocked Schwarzenegger was not that Democrats, then as now in control of the state legislature, were stealing seats from Republicans. (Decades earlier, Republicans had done much the same in the opposite direction.) It was, rather, that gerrymandering neutered the power of people’s votes. The year before his speech, in 2004, not a single one of California’s 153 congressional and state legislative seats changed party hands.“What kind of democracy is that?” he asked.It was an unusual question for any US politician to ask – most elected officials, of both parties, accepted gerrymandering back then as part of the price of doing business – and it set Schwarzenegger on a reformist path he has never relinquished.First, he proposed appointing a panel of judges to take over from the state legislature in redrawing district lines. When that was rejected by voters, he advocated instead for an independent redistricting commission, which began redrawing state legislative lines in 2008 and congressional district lines in 2010 – a reform that has proved enduringly popular with voters and has made California one of the most competitive states in the union for seats in the US House of Representatives.It’s a legacy Schwarzenegger has no intention of relinquishing, not even now that Texas Republicans, acting on the orders of Donald Trump, have redrawn their state maps to add another five Republican-leaning congressional districts, and California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has vowed to “fight fire with fire” with an initiative to suspend California’s independent commission and add five Democrat-leaning districts in the Golden state.“I’m not going to go back on my promise,” Schwarzenegger told the New York Times last week. “I’m going to fight for my promise.”Schwarzenegger, a rare moderate Republican in an increasingly radical party, is an outspoken Trump critic and said he hated what the president had asked the Texas Republicans to do.But, he said, sinking to the same level in California was no answer, and it made no difference to him that Newsom was pitching his plan as a temporary arrangement. “We are not going to go into a stinking contest with a skunk,” he said. “We are moving forward.”To underline that he meant business, Schwarzenegger appeared for the interview – and later in a post on X – in a T-shirt that read: “F*** the politicians, terminate gerrymandering.”Thus the stage is set for a showdown between the current California governor, who will take his emergency redistricting proposal to voters in November, and the formidable former holder of the same office.Already, Schwarzenegger has started tapping into his old political networks to set up a campaign and fundraising machine to thwart Newsom, and according to his staff he is planning a major policy address – in effect, a campaign launch – sometime in September.The issue is energizing Republicans across California. Kevin McCarthy, the former House speaker, has ambitions to raise more than $100m to defeat Newsom’s Proposition 50, also known as the Election Rigging Response Act. Charles Munger Jr, the billionaire son of Warren Buffett’s longtime business partner Charles Munger Sr, is reported to have pledged $30m towards the same effort.The California Young Republican Federation has described Newsom’s initiative as a “dangerous power grab” – echoing almost exactly Democratic rhetoric about the Trump-inspired gerrymander in Texas – and Steve Hilton, the leading Republican candidate running to succeed Newsom next year, is helping to spearhead a legal challenge.Hilton argues that the independent redistricting commission was already skewed unfairly in favour of the Democrats, since Republicans won a little under 40% of vote in California last November but hold just 17% of California’s 52 House seats.“If we had truly independent districting and fair representation, Republicans would have an extra 12 House seats today,” Hilton says, rounding the number in his party’s favour. (Commissioners would counter that he is overlooking a handful of highly competitive races in Republican-leaning districts that Democrats won by narrow margins.)View image in fullscreenThe first polls on Newsom’s initiative are inconclusive, with voters seemingly split between liking independently drawn districts and a narrow plurality – especially Democrats – understanding the desire to counter what the Republicans are doing in Texas. Independents and Republicans are far more skeptical, if not outright hostile.Still, the campaign to stop Newsom will start at an inherent disadvantage, since Democrats have not lost a statewide election since 2006 and California voters, while not as liberal as Republican politicians sometimes like to portray them, have consistently shown a visceral dislike of all things Trump.Schwarzenegger is likely to be the most powerful weapon in the anti-Newsom arsenal, because he has no fondness for Trump and because his embrace of independently drawn electoral boundaries transcends any partisan allegiance. Since leaving office in 2010 he has campaigned in favour of independent commissions around the country – in states that lean both blue and red – and has spoken outside the supreme court when the justices have considered gerrymandering cases.He is also likely to serve as a bridge between Republican partisans and civic groups like the League of Women Voters of California, which views Newsom’s initiative as a slippery slope from which there may be no easy recovery.“Temporary exceptions rarely stay temporary,” the League warned in a statement. “Once you break a safeguard, you don’t just risk one or two or three elections, you set a precedent that future politicians can and will use again … Long-term damage to democratic norms will outlast any short-term gain.”California’s state legislature voted on Thursday to put Newsom’s initiative on the ballot but, after Texas voted to finalize its own maps, stripped out language that would have automatically abandoned California’s proposed partisan gerrymander if Texas chose to reverse course. Democratic lawmakers argued the escape clause was unnecessary because the Texas legislature had already acted. But scrapping it may also create the perception that Democrats, who enjoy a supermajority in the state legislature, have lost interest in playing fair – exactly the scenario Schwarzenegger warned against back in 2005.“The system is rigged to benefit the interests of those in office … not the interests of those who put them there,” he said then. “And we must reform it.” More

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      Ron DeSantis enters the chat: governor eyes chance to redraw Florida maps

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      With Gavin Newsom and Greg Abbott, the respective heavyweight governors of California and Texas, trading blows over plans to gerrymander the 2026 midterms, it was always kind of inevitable that Florida’s Ron DeSantis would enter the chat.The Republican sees his state, the nation’s third-largest by several metrics, not least its 28 congressional seats, as pivotal in the redistricting wars for control of the House.So few were surprised this week when DeSantis gave his full-throated endorsement to two projects to try to save the Republican majority: Donald Trump’s call for an unprecedented mid-decade census that could blow things up nationally; and state Republicans’ efforts to redraw existing district maps in their favor, similar to Abbott’s scheming in Texas.“We have 28 now, we might have 29, 30, 31, maybe. Who knows?” DeSantis said at a press conference in Melbourne on Monday, expressing his belief that a new national population tally that excludes undocumented immigrants could expand Florida’s congressional delegation.Currently, 20 of those 28 seats are held by Republicans. Even without a census, DeSantis and allies including the Florida house speaker, Daniel Perez, have concluded that tinkering with existing boundaries and dumping blocs of Democratic voters into heavily Republican districts could net them several more.Perez, bolstered by a Florida supreme court ruling in July that approved DeSantis’s wholesale stripping of Black voters’ influence in the north of the state, is convening a “select committee on congressional redistricting” to do the same in the south.The long-serving congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Trump bete noire Jared Moskowitz are two of the prominent south Florida Democrats in DeSantis’s crosshairs.“We are going to have to do a mid-decade redistricting,” DeSantis said. “Obviously you would have to redraw the lines. Even if they don’t do a new census, even if they don’t revise the current census, I do think that it is appropriate to be doing it.”To Florida Democrats who have promised to fight the emerging threat to the eight House seats they do still hold, DeSantis’s maneuvering is a stereotypical power-play by a governor who has frequently been able to bend the state legislature to his will.“This isn’t about drawing lines on a map, this is about who gets hurt and who gets silenced in this thing we call democracy, or in this democratic process,” said Shevrin Jones, a Democratic state senator whose district covers parts of downtown Miami and Miami Beach.“Floridians were extremely clear years ago when we voted on fair districts that the redistricting process should be fair and transparent, that it should be reflective of the people and not the political ambitions of those who are in power. Yet that’s what we’re seeing right now.”To many critics, the Florida supreme court’s ruling, authored by the chief justice, Carlos Muñiz, a DeSantis appointee, was a sleight of hand: it stated that the districts drawn – by Republicans – that ensured fair Black representation violated a 2010 voter-approved constitutional amendment banning partisan and racial gerrymandering during redistricting.Yet the effect of the ruling was to essentially nullify the amendment by validating DeSantis’s manipulation of the northern districts to the Republicans’ advantage, and to give him a green light to do the same anywhere else.Nikki Fried, the chair of the Florida Democratic party, said the governor had seized on the ruling to blatantly attempt to rig the 2026 midterms.“After gutting representation for Black Floridians and stacking the court to uphold it, he wants to further gerrymander and suppress the vote of millions of Floridians,” she said in a statement.“If Ron DeSantis spent half as much time solving real problems as he does scheming to steal elections, maybe we wouldn’t be in the middle of a housing, insurance and education crisis.”Republicans hold a supermajority in both chambers of the Florida legislature, so any walkout by Democrats, similar to that seen in Texas where lawmakers fled the state to deny quorum, would be ineffective.Instead, Jones said, his party, at state level at least, will continue to call out what they see as underhand efforts by the DeSantis administration to join the national Republican drive to save its House majority in support of Trump’s agenda.“I understand where Gavin Newsom and a great deal of Democratic governors are coming from when they say fight fire with fire. That’s fair, we can’t continue as Democrats to show up to a gunfight with slingshots,” he said.“I also understand that the Republicans are in power, and I understand they have no scruples about what they’re doing, I get that. The question is when or how can we find the alliances that exist to push back on the bullshit that the Republicans are doing, because it’s an absolute threat to not just democracy, but an absolute threat to our national security and our future.”Jones said that DeSantis, a lame-duck governor about to enter his final year in office before being termed out, had leapt upon the opportunity to inject himself back into the national picture.Still wounded by the humiliating collapse of his pursuit of the Republican presidential nomination a year and a half ago, DeSantis has seen himself eclipsed in the 2028 race by emerging hopefuls including Vice-President JD Vance and secretary of state Marco Rubio, the former Florida senator.“This isn’t just about Florida, it’s about national political positioning. The only way Ron DeSantis can prove that his voice is still loud is doing or saying asinine things like this to continue to kiss ass to Trump,” Jones said.“I think the governor is trying to restart a failing campaign that lost gas quickly, and I think he’s trying to fill it back up. But that car doesn’t work any more, and I don’t know any mechanic that wants to work to fix it.” More

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      Some Democrats want to use gerrymandering. That’s a bad idea | Carlo Invernizzi-Accetti

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      When Texas Republicans unveiled yet another contorted congressional map last week – one that would all but erase Austin’s Latino-led seat and increase the Republican party’s federal House tally by up to five seats in total – the outcry from Democrats was immediate and justified. But beyond the Democratic state legislators’ brave effort to stymie the proposal by boycotting the vote, a different refrain has also been heard by leading Democrats in other states: if they do it, why can’t we?Governor Gavin Newsom of California has vowed to “fight fire with fire”, advancing a proposal that would redraw California’s own congressional map to offset Republican gains in Texas. New York’s Kathy Hochul has also embraced the prospect of aggressive gerrymandering in Democratic-controlled states, sidestepping the independent commissions that Democrats themselves had once championed and successfully implemented in both California and New York.It is an understandable impulse, but it is the wrong one – for both strategic and principled reasons. To begin with, Democrats are destined to lose a gerrymandering arms race. They control fewer state legislatures and the very nature of electoral map engineering currently favors Republican power-grabbing, since most Democratic voters live in densely populated urban areas, which makes it easier to concentrate them in fewer electoral districts.A simulation conducted through 538’s Atlas of Redistricting in which every state is aggressively gerrymandered to maximize the House seats of the party in power at the state level results in a notional House of 262 Republicans and 173 Democrats: a 30-plus seat jump for the Republican party compared with a non-partisan map that maximizes for district compactness. Nor is this a far-fetched scenario. Rather than forcing the other side to back down, retaliation appears more likely to lead to further escalation, in this as in other domains of all-out binary conflict.When running for governor of Illinois in 2018, JB Pritzker had initially pledged to back an independent districting commission but subsequently signed one of the most brutal Democratic gerrymandering plans in the country, which has yielded just three Republican districts out of 17 in a state where Donald Trump won 43% of the votes in 2024. That precedent is now being pointed to by Texas Republicans to justify their own gerrymandering plan.But there is also a deeper reason why “fighting fire with fire” is a bad idea when the goal is to protect democracy from purported challenges to it: the “fire” in question amounts to a violation of one of democracy’s core values – ultimately, the principle of voting equality – and would therefore end up doing the work of democracy’s enemies for them.The metaphor of “fighting fire with fire” can in fact be traced back to the thought of the German émigré scholar to the United States, Karl Loewenstein, who in the 1930s recommended the use of self-consciously “anti-democratic means” – such as party bans and restrictions of voting rights – to fight fascism, in the name of what he called “militant democracy”.Far from achieving their intended goal, such measures were instrumental in the consolidation of the Nazi regime in Germany, given that Adolf Hitler was first nominated chancellor through an emergency presidential decree intended to forestall the prospect of a socialist takeover (construed as a greater threat for German democracy than nazism itself), and that the ban on other political parties Hitler quickly imposed was justified on the grounds that it was necessary to protect the German constitutional order in the aftermath of the Reichstag fire of 1934.Similarly perverse uses of the logic of “militant democracy” have since become a standard component of the authoritarian playbook – from Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup in Chile to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s 2016 counter-coup in Turkey, both of which undid democracy in their countries under the guise of protecting it against purported enemies.A fully gerrymandered congressional map in the United States would thus not just be bad for Democrats. It would also be terrible for American democracy since it would effectively disenfranchise local minorities across the country, yielding an overall competition between two mirroring forms of authoritarianism: Democratic or Republican one-party rule at the local level.If Democrats want to continue to portray themselves as the party of democracy against the Trump administration’s thinly veiled authoritarian ambitions, they should begin by practicing on own their turf the same principles of democratic civility and self-restraint they accuse their opponents of violating.Crucially, this doesn’t mean “doing nothing” in the face of Republican gerrymandering. The point is rather that (big and small “D”) Democrats should use democratic rather than authoritarian means to protect democracy against its enemies – which is to say, win elections by advancing more attractive policy platforms and mobilizing voters more effectively in support of them, rather than by changing the rules to their own benefit.That the Trump administration’s substantive policy decisions – from its inflationary trade wars to the fiscally regressive One Big Beautiful Bill Act – seem destined to do most harm its own electoral constituencies offers plenty of opportunity for fair-and-square political comeback. Ultimately, however, the Democrats’ chances of success in upcoming electoral cycles will depend on their capacity to present a more attractive political alternative to the current Republican party’s brand of populist authoritarianism.Instead of mirroring their opponents, Democrats should therefore seek to differentiate themselves from them, which at present can only mean: strict adherence to democratic norms and forthright advocacy of a more progressive policy platform. When a house is on fire, more fire won’t help. What is needed is water – which is to say, something different, that is at the same time an antidote against fire’s damaging effects.

      Carlo Invernizzi-Accetti is an associate professor of political science at the City University of New York, City College More