On the second Sunday in April of this year, some 50,000 Hungarians — about one out of every 200 people in the country — spent the day inside polling stations, watching votes get counted. They weren’t election officials; they were volunteers who signed up, took the training, and sat through the count because their movement asked them to and they said yes.

That night, Viktor Orbán conceded.

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Of course, the monitors didn’t beat him by themselves. They were among the most visible components of a strategy months in the making in which nearly everyone had a job. For context, for the United States to match that effort per capita, it would take about 1.7 million people, including you.

The administration’s Deceive, Disrupt, Deny strategy is designed to feel overwhelming. But our movement has a strategy too, and most of what it asks of you is simple. What follows is the practical companion to everything this series has argued: the actions that matter most between now and November, organized by the job each one does. Think of it as the page to print out and stick on the fridge.

Read more — Deceive, Disrupt, Deny in full effect

1. Start close to home. You have the most influence over your own actions and your immediate community: your family, friends, coworkers, faith community or union. That’s where your effort goes furthest.

2. Find a lane and move. Many campaigns and groups are organizing to defend our elections, and every successful effort has used a wide range of tactics, adjusting as the facts changed. You don’t have to find the perfect tactic. Pick action over agonizing.

3. Bring what only you can. Your skills, relationships, and resources are the movement’s raw materials. Lean into the actions that fit your daily life and interests, because those are the habits you’ll keep.

With those in mind, here’s how we win.

Organize

Stop voter suppression and election sabotage, starting now. This is the counter to Disrupt.

• Double-check your voter registration status, then send the lookup link to friends and family.

• Check your state’s key dates and deadlines, and put them in your calendar or sign up for text alerts. Make sure you understand your state’s ID requirements.

• Make a plan to vote early and in person, then make sure your community has one too.

• Find your people. Once your friends and family are set, decide who you’ll engage over the coming months. Start the conversation about what you can do together.

Show up

Vote for the candidates of your choice. And as an act of solidarity, get out the vote everywhere. This is the counter to suppressed turnout, and the foundation for everything else.

• Think through who in your community may need support to vote: a ride, a reminder, time off if you’re an employer, a young person voting for the first time. Set a goal to support as many people as you can.

• Sign up to be an election worker. Competent, compassionate poll workers make an extraordinary difference in whether elections run smoothly and every eligible voter can cast a ballot and have it counted.

• Sign up to help cure ballots. In most states, voters who make a minor mistake, like forgetting to sign the outer envelope, get a chance to fix it and have their vote counted. Cure programs reach those voters in time to do it (look for opportunities to sign up with the League of Women Voters or Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in the fall).

Prove

Make the results unquestionable. This is the counter to Deceive.

• Serve as a poll observer across the process: logic-and-accuracy testing (where election officials test the machines before voting begins), early vote, election day, mail ballot canvassing, and any audits or recounts. Then share what you saw, however feels comfortable. Firsthand accounts build trust in a way that can’t be replaced.

• Be your community’s trusted source. Before and after the election, our communities will be flooded with misinformation about the election process and results. Decide now where you’ll get reliable information — Electionline and Votebeat are good places to start — and be the person who shares it. Learn more about how to combat disinformation here.

Hold the line

Make sure the winners take office. This is the counter to Deny.

The precise work of the post-election period will become clearer as the administration’s strategy plays out, and we will tell you about it as it does. Some of it we can predict now. The officials who certify results answer to our communities, so learn who yours are, and let them know, before the election, that you expect a lawful process. Sign up for updates and alerts so that if the moment calls for mass mobilization, you hear it early.

Everything above is preparation for this stage: a movement that fought, won, and is ready to hold.

Additional resources

• How You Can Protect Democracy — our team updates this page every week with resources and priority actions from across the movement.

• Gen Z Election Defense Toolkit

• Business Election Defense Toolkit

• Faith Communities Election Defense Toolkit

• How to spot (and push back against) federal voter intimidation

Undoing Trump’s golden age of corruption

Protect Democracy’s Amanda Carpenter has a new piece in The Bulwark that is all about the president’s corruption, and how we can still get justice:

No one is allowed to keep the profits of ransacking the public trust. It does not matter if your name is Donald Trump or Bernie Madoff, the same rules should apply to everyone: You loot, you lose.

Read the full piece

On July 16, President Trump used a primetime address from the White House East Room — a platform historically reserved for major national moments — to reiterate long-debunked claims about the 2020 election, alleging a “deep state” conspiracy involving Barack Obama and Joe Biden and accusing China of “sinister election meddling.” Experts found no credible evidence to support his claims, while several points merely exaggerated findings publicly released by the intelligence community years ago.

The speech brings into focus the administration’s organizing priority through November — to use disinformation that has the patina of legitimacy to undermine confidence in American elections, and the 2026 midterms more specifically. By raising these claims now, Trump and his allies are also laying the groundwork to, after Election Day, deny election results they don’t like. American elections remain safe and secure, even as the president works to undermine the confidence Americans have in them.

See The Authoritarian Action Watch.

On Thursday night, the president will address the American people. Reporting suggests he will cite newly (and selectively) declassified “intelligence” about the 2020 election to further his longstanding conspiracy theories.

That claim, on its face, might seem like Trump indulging a personal obsession — he thinks he won in 2020, and he needs to prove it. As we’ve covered over the past few months, though, his claims serve a larger purpose. They are designed not just to relitigate 2020, but to undermine confidence in the 2026 midterms and to justify new measures to enable his allies to override our elections.

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This is one piece of a broader strategy that the president has pursued for months: Deceive the American people about the security of our elections, Disrupt the playing field in ways that favor his party, and ultimately Deny results he doesn’t like after ballots are cast. Protect Democracy first described this strategy in our Executive Override report, issued in March. This week, we published an update that explains how the strategy has evolved in the last four months and how the pushback is faring

Read more — Deceive, Disrupt, Deny in full effect

Politicized intelligence is one threat among many

Politicized intelligence has been a concern since the start of Trump’s second term. After Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard took part in an FBI raid on Fulton County related to the 2020 election earlier this year, Ben Berwick and Ansley Skipper wrote this:

“Gabbard is steeped in election conspiracies and appears to be looking to curry favor with the president by being his election denial point person in the executive branch.”

In the months since, the president has replaced Gabbard with Bill Pulte, an interim appointee with no intelligence experience who seems to have been selected primarily for his willingness to serve the president. Jess Marsden warned:

“Unlike lies about vote-counting or voting machines — which have been circulating for years and have never been proven — misinformation about foreign interference in elections is territory that’s not nearly as well-worn. The DNI could use selective disclosures of raw intelligence — on its own, not evidence of wrongdoing, but potentially highly suggestive to a lay audience — to bolster false claims about the election.”

Like most of Trump’s playbook on elections, then, this threat was entirely predictable. And it’s far from the only development in the Override strategy since we first published our report. Since March, the president has leveraged all three parts of the playbook:

Deceive: The president has spent the spring spreading lies about California vote counting and using the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice to go after the news media — on top of his politicization of the Office of the DNI. These efforts have different targets, but each is designed to use the power of the federal government to sow doubt about the security of our elections and lay the foundation for the administration to interfere in them.

Disrupt: Trump’s continued obsession with the SAVE Act has been joined by an executive order and a proposed Postal Service rule that would let the federal government decide which mail ballots get delivered (both of which have been enjoined by courts for now). Add to that, he’s advocated for a series of Supreme Court decisions that have furthered the administration’s efforts to sow chaos this election season. These developments, along with several others, are part of a broader strategy to tilt the playing field toward Trump and his allies.

Deny: Any effort the president makes to deceive or disrupt also gives him ground to deny results he doesn’t like after the fact. To further that effort, the president has purged dissenting voices from the Republican Party and sought to create a $1.8 billion slush fund to reward allies willing to break the law on his behalf. And his allies in the states have engaged in their own small-scale version of denial, canceling elections midstream and nullifying completed results. All of this is only likely to ramp up as Election Day gets closer.

Read more — The strategy hiding in plain sight

The override strategy is facing pushback

None of this is happening in a vacuum. Even as the president has weaponized the federal government against the midterms, he has met resistance at nearly every turn. And that’s because his approach has no legal authority. Our elections are run by state and local officials across the country; not by the President.

Federal courts have blocked the Postal Service rule, and the administration is 0-15 in cases over its attempts to seize state voter roll data. Congress has, for now, rejected the SAVE Act, forced Trump to back down — at least initially — on the slush fund (which also received a stinging rebuke in court), and pushed him to change course on Pulte’s official nomination before he installed him temporarily.

Civil society has mobilized as well. More than 100 activist groups signed a joint letter of solidarity after the Southern Poverty Law Center and Ohio Organizing Collaborative were targeted. A federal court, in a lawsuit brought by the New Hampshire Youth Movement, struck down a state law that would have made it harder for students to register to vote. 50 labor and religious groups condemned the indictment of anti-ICE protesters in Minnesota. And Illinois, Vermont, New York, and Connecticut have passed laws letting residents sue federal agents who violate their constitutional rights — a direct response to fears that armed agents could be deployed to polling places.

There’s more work to be done, but we have built a strong foundation.

What we can do

We don’t know exactly what Trump is going to say on Thursday night. Odds are, it will be as inflammatory as possible — designed to make some Americans feel unsure about the security of our elections, and to convince others that the president and his allies are already stealing the midterms.

In the months ahead, we expect Trump’s election subversion efforts to become even more focused, and new tactics to be added to the playbook. The administration might use zombie lawsuits to seed legal challenges to election results ahead of time, activating them when results don’t go their way. It could declare emergencies to try to wrestle control over elections from state and local officials. It could set up a conflict with the courts as it continues trying to decide who is and is not eligible to vote. It could also use federal law enforcement to intimidate voters in key areas in the weeks before Election Day. And, as now seems likely, it could politicize intelligence with the goal of sowing doubts about the security of our elections.

Right now, Trump’s election subversion effort is not succeeding — because the American people are not letting it.

The best way to combat election lies is to understand how much control each of us still has over the outcome of this election. The president and his allies want us to feel like we won’t be able to vote, or our votes won’t be counted or won’t matter. Our job is to prove them wrong.

Next week, we’ll have more to say about the actions you can take in the months ahead.

In late September of last year, President Trump declared that Portland was “war-ravaged” after Portlanders protested his deployment of the National Guard there. It wasn’t true.

That didn’t stop the Trump administration. To make good on the president’s claims of violence, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) brought pro-Trump influencers and its own videographers to the Portland Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility, where many of the protests had occurred. As the cameras rolled, DHS fired huge quantities of chemical munitions. When the influencers filmed the smoke-filled streets, it looked like a scene Trump had only imagined.

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But the streets of Portland aren’t a movie set, and chemical munitions have real consequences. The toxins, released again and again at the ICE facility without real justification, caused grievous physical and emotional harm to community members, including families living in the affordable housing complex across the street.

Residents and their landlord sued to stop the rampant use of these munitions, represented by Protect Democracy and co-counsel. The judge who granted a preliminary injunction highlighted the shocking nature of this propaganda-creation behavior by law enforcement officers. A Ninth Circuit panel later stayed that decision, but the government has never contested that it deployed chemical munitions during this period for the sole purpose of creating content, including staged videos that DHS posted to its Instagram account, to support the president’s false story about Portland. On July 10, we’re back before the Ninth Circuit, asking that the injunction be reinstated so our clients can be safe in their homes.

Learn more — Challenging the federal use of chemical weapons against Portland residents

The government is now the superspreader

Portland is one example of a much larger operation. DHS has invited influencers on ride-alongs and inside ICE facilities in cities around the country. It has produced glamorized depictions of ICE raids, set to dramatic music and edited to omit footage of U.S. citizen children being detained. The White House has released videos depicting the war in Iran as a video game or a movie trailer, pointedly omitting any depiction of what happens when the bombs hit.

This strategy has a second half: suppressing the reporting that would undercut the story. The administration excluded local Portland press from the ICE facility while granting access to right-wing influencers. It adopted rules that exclude mainstream media outlets from covering the Pentagon. And the Federal Communications Commission, under Chair Brendan Carr, has repeatedly used threats of regulatory authority to push broadcasters toward the president’s preferred coverage — on the Iran War, and even on late-night TV.

We have been fighting election lies since 2021, when Protect Democracy launched Law for Truth to hold those who knowingly or recklessly spread election disinformation accountable for the damage they cause. But the biggest superspreader of election lies today is the federal government itself, assisted by authoritarian allies in state governments and by many of the same people who have been lying about elections since 2020. In fact, many of those people are serving in the administration to help it elevate these false narratives. Election denier Heather Honey now serves as DHS Deputy Assistant Secretary for “Election Integrity;” Harmeet Dhillon, who represented Trump in litigation to overturn the 2020 election, is now Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. (There are many more.)

As the administration works to ensure its preferred candidates take office after the midterms — regardless of who the voters choose — this propaganda machine will be aimed at the election. As we explain in Executive Override, the plan is to deceive the public about the legitimacy of the elections, creating a pretext to disrupt election processes and, eventually, to deny the results. Content that depicts a false version of events (or places real events in a false context), as in Portland, will be a key part of that deception.

Read more — Inside the federal campaign to sow distrust in elections

We know that Trump will claim fraud wherever his partisan allies lose, and that the pro-Trump ecosystem will back that claim up with manufactured content built on the lies already circulating about noncitizen voting and mail balloting. We may also see propaganda created to justify sending federal forces to key voting districts — showing they are needed to quell out-of-control protests or to control crime.

Rather than using the bully pulpit to persuade Americans, the administration seeks to control the information environment — a kind of manipulation that effectively bypasses the consent of the governed.

Every election lie falls into one of five categories

Knowing the playbooks is the best protection. Researchers at the University of Washington have found that election lies always fall into one of five categories:

• False evidence: The rumor is based on fabricated or manipulated evidence, such as false statements, deceptively edited content, and synthetic (AI-generated) content.

• Misinterpreted evidence: The rumor is based on real evidence that has been mischaracterized or misinterpreted to create a false impression.

• Omitted remedies: The rumor highlights real or perceived issues with election administration but overlooks or obscures remedies, such as downstream security measures, to imply an untrustworthy process or untrustworthy results.

• Exaggerated impact: The rumor exaggerates the impact of real or perceived issues with election administration to imply an untrustworthy process or untrustworthy results.

• Falsely attributed intent: The rumor falsely attributes intention to real or perceived issues with election administration to imply voter or election fraud.

Once you know the framework, the recycling becomes almost comically predictable. The most common category is misinterpreted evidence, when the evidence is real, but its meaning is distorted. Think about the ordinary, effective use of Sharpies on ballots recast as a plot to disenfranchise in-person voters, or accurate vote totals shifting over the course of the count recast as proof of a steal. This year, AI will likely help false evidence become a more common category, so it’s worth reviewing best practices from our partners at the Brennan Center for evaluating potentially AI-generated election content.

2000 Mules, with subpoena power

In many ways, none of this is new. Remember 2000 Mules, the “documentary” released by election deniers that falsely portrayed footage of legal voting at dropboxes as evidence of a nationwide network of “ballot mules” stealing the 2020 election? Millions of people saw it, and it surely fueled mistrust in our election system — but it led to no prosecutions and had no legal effect on the election.

What is starkly different in 2026 is that the federal government itself is executive-producing the movie. Imagine the equivalent in 2026: The White House posts a video that it says portrays election fraud. Millions of Americans see the false allegation, at immeasurable cost to anyone shown in the footage. The Department of Justice will file criminal charges against those it decides to blame. The White House’s allies will seek to use the video in court and in Congress to fight certification of the election results. And they will use it to win in the court of public opinion.

Each of us can do our part. First, learn the five categories. And when the disinformation comes, name the category to your family, your followers, your readers, before the lie sets in. Keep consuming, paying for, and elevating independent media, so that the lies don’t go unanswered. And speak up now when you see government use its power to suppress speech from those who oppose it. Their playbook depends on duping Americans, but we don’t have to let that happen.

What we’re reading

On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear, a new book from Julia Angwin and Ami Fields-Meyer, offers a roadmap to political courage with practical steps for anyone who wants to take collective action.

Together, we can work to save our multiracial democracy and reverse the cycle of capitulation that authoritarians need to thrive.

Learn more about the book

Supreme Court rulings extend the president’s control over federal agencies

On June 29, the Supreme Court overturned Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, the 91-year-old precedent that has allowed Congress to shield independent agency leaders from removal except “for cause.” In a 6-3 ruling, the Court found that Trump’s 2025 firing of Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter without cause was lawful. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roberts dismissed the precedent as “a result in search of a rationale” and declared that “subordinates who exercise the president’s power are subject to removal by him.”

The ruling’s reach extends far beyond the FTC. For decades, Humphrey’s Executor has protected roughly two dozen agencies designed to operate above partisan politics — including the FCC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the National Transportation Safety Board. Stripping their leaders of removal protections clears the way for a president to purge regulators who resist his agenda and replace them with loyalists, collapsing the independence that allows these institutions to police elections, markets, communications, and safety without fear of retaliation.

See the Authoritarian Action Watch.

On Saturday, the United States turns 250.

In 1787, as the story goes, a woman stopped Benjamin Franklin outside the Constitutional Convention and asked what kind of government the delegates had made. “A republic,” he answered, “if you can keep it.” This newsletter took its name from that answer. But Franklin left one thing unsaid: kept by whom?

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The presumption, now more than ever, is that the keeping and the tending of America belong to someone else; to institutions, elected officials, and public figures. That presumption is wrong. A democracy cannot be sustained by any one person or group. Ours has lasted this long because everyday Americans chose, in words popularized by Theodore Roosevelt, to “do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”

To be sure, it’s a mindset that runs against many of the forces shaping American life today: institutional and interpersonal distrust, the loneliness epidemic, and a sense that the challenges facing our communities are simply too large for any one person to influence. Everyone’s feeling the weight.

Read more — How you can protect democracy

It’s natural, then, that we would scroll and search for the fix for our lives and for the candidates who swear they’ll solve it all.

The actual necessary work can seem frustrating, even pointless, in contrast, when so many already feel like we have so little else to give. But this work isn’t asking for more; it’s asking for something different — a democratized heroism where we acknowledge our responsibility to shepherd in a brighter future and appreciate the power found in a commitment to principle, participation, and connection rooted where we are. These principles have guided our democracy at its best over the past 250 years.

Lessons from abroad and our own history

This spring, Hungarian voters ended Viktor Orbán’s 16-year authoritarian grip. Much was deservedly written about the savvy political leadership of Péter Magyar and his Tisza Party, but the breakthrough was equally built by ordinary Hungarians who refused to bow to cynicism and organized localized community groups known as “islands” — small groups of neighbors who met, talked, and built the civic muscle necessary to bring their democracy back from the brink. Their names won’t appear in a history book, but the result of their resilience and commitment will.

Read more — Is Budapest the bellwether?

Our own history tells the same story of everyday courage. The Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement — we remember the generals and the speeches, but the foundation was laid by people whose names are lost: the free Black communities just across the Ohio River who supported the Underground Railroad despite the risks and the Southern families cooking meals for the Freedom Summer activists.

What we look back on as sparks that led to sudden movements are really the natural sprouting of seeds, sown by hundreds of thousands of Americans, most of them unknown, for a harvest they knew they might not see.

Civic life is more than one moment

Movements, in other words, are made of steady personal habits that strengthen over time. For a democracy “by and for the people” to sustain, we the people must integrate democratic principles into who we are. And just like going to the gym or starting a new hobby — intentional, consistent effort is the key.

That sort of engaged life is a meaningful life, and that commitment to the places and people around us shapes how we show up, who we stay connected to, and ultimately what our democracy becomes.

The pattern usually starts in small, day-to-day ways. Someone might start by staying informed about what’s happening locally — checking community updates or attending a local meeting. Over time, those small steps can lead to conversations with neighbors or community groups and a clearer sense of where they can make a difference. Staying informed can also open up new opportunities to get more involved, like becoming a poll worker or helping organize a local voter registration drive after learning that many young people in the community are not registered to vote.

Over time, these efforts form a powerful pattern. They become a way of living that keeps us connected to the communities we’re part of and ripples out.

None of these steps is heroic on its own. But added together, they are the answer to how a democracy keeps itself.

If you’re looking for a place to begin, our How You Can Protect Democracy webpage gathers dozens of ways to start — in your community, with your local institutions, at whatever scale your life allows.

Here are a few entry points:

• Refresh your knowledge on how American democracy is supposed to work

• Connect with your neighbors

• Go to a local community meeting

• Support community engagement at your local library

• Help people register to vote

• Reach out to your elected officials

• Prepare for a local budget meeting

• Join or host America’s Potluck on July 5

• Explore the activity library for America’s 250th

• Start a conversation about what comes next for America

Consistency matters more than intensity. Do what you can, when you can, and stay engaged where you are. Don’t assume someone else will take responsibility for what you care about, and don’t wait for the “perfect” moment to get involved.

America is waiting for us

Each of us might be tempted to wait for a big moment of change or a heroic fix — a savior, the “perfect” candidate, or a transformational political realignment. But the truth is harder and calls us all to account. What strengthens democracy is a people committed to shared, steady work scaling over time.

So, this weekend, do one small thing. Join a table at America’s Potluck. Look up when your town council meets next and put it on the calendar. Head over to a neighbor’s porch and ask them how they’re doing.

America is waiting for us to realize that democracy’s story is the collection of our own. Its promise is dependent on the commitments we each make to live out democracy in our share of the pages.

The president now has more control over federal agencies

The overruling of Humphrey's Executor v. United States gives the president much more direct control over the operations of federal agencies. Earlier this week, we hosted a conversation with Sen. Cory Booker, former Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, and Protect Democracy Special Counsel Amit Agarwal, where they discussed the ruling, which dramatically expands presidential power and weakens Congress’s longstanding ability to ensure that independent agencies can make decisions free from political pressure. You can watch highlights from the conversation below:

Community resilience in the 2026 elections

Election interference has, in recent history, been mostly associated with foreign actors. There were concerns about the role Russia played in the 2016 election, and much of America’s election infrastructure is built to ward off threats from foreign adversaries that might undermine this crucial lever of American democracy.

As we’ve covered extensively, this cycle is different. During the 2026 midterms, election interference from the United States government could be an even greater threat than that posed by any foreign power.

That’s why Over Zero and Protect Democracy created a guide to support communities around the country who are taking action to ensure that all eligible voters can cast their ballots in free, fair, and safe elections — even in the face of threatened interference and voter intimidation.

Read the full guide

Governments derive their “just powers from the consent of the governed.” The founders’ approach to that promise was both brilliant and flawed. A constitution that excluded slaves and women from participation was nonetheless set up with the understanding that neither government nor its people are stagnant. We change. We grow. We amend. But a government that represents us was always the point. Two hundred fifty years in, it’s fair to ask whether that promise still holds.

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The American people seem skeptical, to say the least. Poll after poll shows deep pessimism about whether our political system is working. Two-thirds think the Founders would be disappointed in the country today. Americans distrust every major political institution, with the possible exception of the military: Congress, the Supreme Court, local governments, the federal government. Clear majorities expect a future where we are more divided politically, have a worse standard of living, more economic inequality, and less freedom. A rapidly growing share feel that neither major political party represents them at all, with independent registration now outpacing both parties in much of the country.

And perhaps worst of all, we have lost our sense of agency. Nearly two-thirds of us feel we have little or no “direct or indirect role in what America becomes over the next 50 years.”

This is not ordinary economic anxiety or partisan midterm divides. It is a crisis of representation. A widening gap between our founding promise and the lived reality of a political system that an increasing number of Americans experience as something that happens to us, not something we get to shape.

The crisis has more than one author

One reason for this is obvious. Since first elected in 2016, Trump has aimed to remake our country in ways very few Americans want. He has only supercharged that effort in his second term, deploying his Project 2025 authoritarian playbook. Ignoring our checks and balances, he’s upended our economy, enmeshed us in foreign wars, ignored the law, and dismantled government programs that protect the health, safety, and finances of the American public. Although he’s a term-limited president, he behaves like a despot, insisting that he gets to make these monumental decisions, steamrolling Congress despite the fact that the Constitution specifically assigns it these powers.

In the face of plummeting popularity, he’s aiming to deny voters a meaningful chance to choose representatives who can hold him democratically accountable. Trump’s Executive Override strategy has weaponized the power of the federal government in an attempt to block our ability to exercise the ultimate check — throwing out those in Congress who are enabling Trump. Through deception, disrupting the conduct of our elections, and denying results he dislikes, Trump’s goal is not merely to win elections but to make our elections incapable of serving as a genuine check on his power.

Read more — How the Trump administration plans to interfere with the 2026 elections, and what you can do about it

Trump’s had plenty of help in this, and not just from his allies in Congress. His fellow partisans on the Roberts Court have spent two decades contracting the sphere of democratic self-governance: gutting the Voting Rights Act, enabling extreme gerrymandering, dismantling the government Congress created, inventing presidential immunity, and allowing unlimited spending to drown out the voices of ordinary voters.

Trump’s private-sector allies among media, tech, and AI oligarchs are spending hundreds of millions to prevent the public, through our representatives, from having any say over how those technologies are deployed. Decisions are now being made about artificial intelligence that will shape American life for decades, and they are being made by a handful of people accountable to no one but themselves.

And corruption runs through all of it. Starting with the first family and extending through government insiders and their well-connected allies, public office is being used to cut private deals, enrich the powerful, and foreclose accountability for those at the top. All this is being done at the expense of the rest of us; those who can’t fund the ballroom, buy seats at crypto dinners, or spend hundreds of millions through super PACS are given little say.

Add it up, and the pattern is clear: Concentrated power, across multiple institutions and actors, is systematically eliminating the mechanisms through which ordinary Americans exercise control over our collective future. No wonder so few people think their voices matter.

Not for the first time

We have been here before. The story of American history is one of possibility and hope. The Founders did not create a perfect democracy, and Americans have never been satisfied with what is. In every generation, we strived for what can be. Progress has been far from linear, but in each generation we have demanded and created a more fulsome democracy.

This fight started 250 years ago, when, facing destruction by the British army, the Founders didn’t just fight against the king — they fought for a government by and for the people. Articulating, for the first time with the force of law, that government must derive its legitimacy from the consent of the governed.

In the darkness of the Civil War, Lincoln understood that preserving self-government required expanding it: “In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free — honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.” A month later, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. And out of his charge came Reconstruction and the amendments that remain the constitutional jewel of American democracy.

In 1919, after 70 years of organizing, World War I made the contradiction between fighting for democracy abroad and denying it to women at home impossible to sustain, and Americans adopted the 19th Amendment to give women representation.

And in 1965, after decades of terror and struggle, the footage of state troopers beating peaceful marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge shocked the national conscience and gave Congress the moral obligation to finally pass the Voting Rights Act, making good on the promise of Reconstruction.

Read more — Why collective action is the only way

The pattern is consistent. Generations of Americans stood up to say: We must not despair in crisis, we must demand change. The question at 250 is whether our generation will do the same.

Working toward a government where we have a say

The road to a renewed political system that genuinely represents us will not be straight or short. But we know where it begins. Our charge over the coming months is to prevent Trump’s Executive Override strategy from denying the people a meaningful say in the midterms and a chance to decide whether those in power have our consent. Together, we can insist that in these midterms, eligible voters can cast ballots, have them counted, and see winners take office — without voter intimidation, without the machinery of the federal government interfering in the count, and without the president and his allies overthrowing results they dislike.

From there, we can build toward that fuller representation.

Where a Congress of elected representatives sets national policy on major questions, so that one man cannot unilaterally send armed forces into American cities, upend the economy by executive decree, drag the country into foreign conflicts without democratic authorization, or pilfer from the public to enrich his friends and family. And one in which the Supreme Court helps ensure a fair democracy as opposed to serving as handmaiden to its demise.

Where we have a genuine democratic process for deciding how artificial intelligence reshapes American life — a conversation conducted by the public and its elected representatives, not by a handful of autocrats and oligarchs.

Read more — A steel mill the president might not be able to seize

And where a new system of representation gives Americans meaningful choice, and translates votes into power with reasonable fidelity, so that everyone’s voice counts. That means moving toward proportional representation and reforms that would make our political system reflect the full range of views among the American people, rather than forcing them into a binary that fewer and fewer find adequate.

As we mark America’s 250th, our charge isn’t just to defend what we have been handed down — it’s to remember that we’re still allowed to want more, that questions as large as how we govern ourselves remain ours to decide together rather than have one man decide them for us.

Generation after generation of Americans, in moments darker than this one, insisted on that. They did not wait for the crisis to pass. They used it. Now it is our turn.

Since the 2024 election, we’ve been speaking directly with young leaders across the country about their views on democracy, the barriers to participating in our elections, and what holds back youth-led collective action. One thing we hear again and again from these chats is that efforts to engage youth in the midterms feel “transactional,” which tracks with our personal experience. At this point, we’ve lost count of how many times we’ve been told not a single candidate actually understands what it’s like to be a student, a job-seeker, and a young American today.

It’s a critical midterm year for the pro-democracy movement, and the traditional playbook for engaging young voters is failing.

But as Gen Zers who spend our days organizing and warning about the threats to our democracy, we know the story is far more nuanced than some of the narratives we’ve seen in the media. It isn’t that we don’t care. We do. We are simply exhausted by a system that refuses to deliver for us.

Building a truly resilient, cross-generational coalition to combat authoritarianism starts with treating our youngest citizens as full partners, rather than apathetic stakeholders. And today, National Youth Takeover Day, is a great time to start.

Myth-busting youth disillusionment

Data from The Generation Lab confirms that labeling Gen Z as apathetic is wrong. In fact, Gen Z remains deeply committed to core democratic principles like a belief in free and fair elections and opposition to elected leaders going “above the law.” Commitments to democratic guardrails are also widely shared and cut across some deep partisan divides.

What sets Gen Z apart from other generations, though, is a deep distrust of institutions and democratic systems. The Generation Lab poll finds only 21% of young people believe democracy is currently working well for them, and only 26% are confident that it can address the issues our nation faces. What’s eroding isn’t Gen Z’s belief in democracy, it’s the confidence that this version of it can deliver.

Read more — How do young voters really feel about democracy?

(Rational) skepticism vs. apathy

These stats highlight consistent frustration with the way our democracy seems to ignore young people’s priorities and dilute the political voice of young Americans. For Gen Z — the most racially diverse generation in American history — the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which essentially gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, is a potent example of the system failing in real time. Every young person who has ever wondered whether their vote actually matters has just been handed evidence that it might not.

And just this week, rather than reduce high housing costs (a top concern for Gen Z), the president blocked housing relief to try to coerce passage of the SAVE America Act. The SAVE Act’s changes to mail registration and ID requirements would disproportionately affect student and young voters through proof-of-citizenship mandates and limits on mail-in ballots. So housing relief is in flux, and it’s in flux to make voting harder for our generation, in particular. Actions like these don’t just dilute youth voting power — they confirm exactly what young people have been saying all along. Our skepticism is rational.

It can be easy to mischaracterize skepticism as apathy. But the data tells a different story: in the first two months of this year, 61% of young people participated in at least one act of civic engagement. Gen Z isn’t opting out of civic life — we are expanding it and leading organizing efforts that have led to political wins.

After New Hampshire passed a strict law eliminating sworn affidavits for voter registration, the New Hampshire Youth Movement filed a federal lawsuit to protect first-time and out-of-state student voters. Last month, a federal court struck down the law as unconstitutional, letting tens of thousands of young citizens vote without facing ID hurdles.

And earlier this year, students in Maryland pressured state lawmakers to pass state-level voting protections. Their efforts led to the passage of the Maryland Voting Rights Act of 2026 (SB 255), legislation that gives state authorities new power to fight voting discrimination.

The path ahead for 2026

This is the context in which we approach the 2026 midterms: The anti-authoritarian impulse among Gen Z remains fiercely active, even when trust in institutions is low. That’s a reality the pro-democracy movement has to reckon with if it wants us to mobilize. Failing to acknowledge Gen Z’s real feelings of despair and disenfranchisement by just telling young people to “vote” isn’t an effective strategy.

Our advice for pro-democracy leaders looking to improve youth engagement this election season? Commit to these key practices:

1. Stop misdiagnosing youth disillusionment. Don’t treat youth frustration as a lack of care or a failure of civic duty.

2. Remain open to non-traditional forms of civic engagement. Young people are championing different kinds of civic engagement strategies (including digital organizing) that may be less visible.

3. Embrace intergenerational collaboration. Meaningful collaboration with Gen Z takes more than just featuring a young person on your next event panel. It will require including young people in decision-making spaces and viewing them as genuine partners.

4. Hear directly from Gen Z about their priorities and needs, and amplify by-Gen Z-for Gen Z resources. We know firsthand how helpful it is to hear from our peers about the challenges they face, and what solutions could look like. This consistent dialogue informed the creation of The Gen Z Election Defense Toolkit in partnership with Gen Z leaders from youth-serving pro-democracy organizations.

Young people are eager to join a pro-democracy movement that empowers them, and one they can identify with. As we grow older and gain more experience, we are committed to cultivating a new generation of young leaders that creates a broad multi-generational pro-democracy coalition. That coalition is going to be essential to realizing the democratic values we’re working so hard to defend and strengthen.

We are not asking the movement to flatter us. We’re asking it to take what we’ve been saying seriously — fix what’s broken and treat us as partners. This National Youth Takeover Day, let’s build a democracy that doesn’t just ask for youth participation but earns our trust.

Facing losses in court, the White House is pushing multiple levers of interference

This week, the Trump administration threatened to withhold a portion of more than $1 billion in annual homeland security grants from states that refuse to adopt sweeping election changes — including phasing out electronic voting systems and running voter rolls through a citizenship verification database that produces false matches and could wrongly remove eligible voters.

Courts continue to push back on parallel efforts to compel states to hand over voter data. A federal judge in Maryland dismissed the Department of Justice’s lawsuit seeking voter registration records — joining at least eight other courts — finding the administration’s legal theory contrary to the plain text of the Civil Rights Act of 1960.

The administration also faced losses in court over his executive orders seeking to alter the 2026 midterms. His executive order on mail-in voting was struck down in federal court, and his 2025 order requiring proof of citizenship was permanently blocked.

Even as he faced losses across multiple fronts in court, the president is also working to undermine faith in free and fair elections through legislation. Trump has halted progress on his nomination for the Director of National Intelligence, and the signing of a bipartisan housing bill, in a desperate attempt to force the passage of the SAVE America Act, a bill that would effectively disenfranchise millions of Americans and has become a top priority for the president.

See the Authoritarian Action Watch.

Los Angeles hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 2001. In the 2024 presidential election, Kamala Harris won more than two-thirds of the vote in Los Angeles County. Even in 2013, amid a harsh political environment for Democrats across the country, the top-two vote getters in the mayoral primary were both Democrats. So why are President Trump and his allies now up in arms over the failure of reality TV star-turned-LA mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt to advance to the general election this fall?

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Spoiler alert: It doesn’t have anything to do with Pratt at all. It’s all about how California counts its ballots (slowly) — and how that can be weaponized to erode trust in the elections.

In the hours after voting closed in California on June 2, Pratt — a Republican — had a small lead amongst the first ballots to be counted in the race for a second-place spot to challenge incumbent Mayor Karen Bass. But in this race, tabulations released on Election Day represented somewhere in the range of 60% of the total, and did not include the 25% of votes in California that are typically vote-by-mail ballots cast on or shortly before Election Day. These ballots can be counted if they arrive within seven days after Election Day, as long as they are postmarked by Election Day. As those Election Day ballots were counted, they favored Nithya Raman, a progressive challenger to Bass from within the Democratic party, by a sufficient margin to secure her spot over Pratt in second place.

In other words, it played out as a repeat of the presidential election in 2020: The initial vote count was a “red mirage” favoring Republicans, influenced by the fact that Republicans are more likely to send in mail ballots early and vote in person. As the full picture of the ballots cast on and before Election Day became clear, we learned that they favored Raman, and she secured the second-place spot to challenge Bass.

There’s nothing surprising about this outcome — similar patterns have occurred in races since at least 2020. And there’s nothing surprising about Trump using his megaphone to spew election disinformation. But Trump and his allies aren’t stopping with spreading rumors. Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli posted on social media that he was opening “multiple election fraud investigations” to look into the results in the state. He told Glenn Beck this week that he expected to bring prosecutions after the primary was certified. There is not, as of this writing, any reason to think that these investigations will turn up actual evidence of fraud.

And, it’s worth noting, Trump and his allies don’t seem to care that Steve Hilton, the Republican gubernatorial candidate, made it out of the primary to compete against Democrat Xavier Becerra. In fact, Hilton himself acknowledged that his team hasn’t found evidence of interference. “We’ve seen nothing that would warrant that kind of intervention,” he said in a June 9 press conference.

In fact, Trump and his allies’ crusade doesn’t have anything to do with the California primaries at all. It’s part of their overall plan to interfere with the 2026 midterm, which we explain in Executive Override: to deceive the public about the legitimacy of the elections, thereby creating a pretext to disrupt election processes (for instance, by imposing unlawful new rules on mail voting) and eventually to deny the results.

Read more — The Post Office has no business deciding who votes

A possible silver lining? By claiming that California’s slow vote count is somehow fraudulent now — and giving California officials the opportunity to debunk those claims and continue ongoing work to count ballots faster — Trump could wind up inoculating the public against his claims. In the fall, when control of Congress could come down to the outcome of House races in California, those same fraud claims may be less effective, as election law expert Rick Hasen has argued.

In Ohio, the deceive strategy turns into a show of force

If California shows how the administration manufactures a pretext for election interference, recent events in Ohio show the next steps in the playbook. On Thursday, FBI agents raided the Cleveland offices of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a pro-democracy group that runs grassroots voter registration drives in Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati, with a focus on helping underrepresented communities register to vote. Federal agents — more than 100 — reportedly showed up at the homes of the group’s leaders and staff across the state, serving subpoenas and seeking devices and information. Agents told the people they contacted that the search related to a voter-fraud investigation.

Board member Prentiss Haney described the raids as “straight-up intimidation tactics,” and that seems spot on. As of now, there is no public evidence that the group did anything wrong — and notably, the Ohio Organizing Collaborative has joined lawsuits challenging Ohio’s redistricting on behalf of Black voters, making it exactly the kind of pro-democracy actor the administration has been eager to target. Whether or not these investigations ever yield charges, the immediate effect is to intimidate the organizations that help eligible Americans register and vote — and to feed the “voter fraud” narrative the administration needs to justify intervening later.

Shenanigans at the ODNI could supercharge the deceive strategy

At the same time, Trump and his allies are spreading disinformation about California and intimidating nonprofits in Ohio, they are laying the groundwork for another even more concerning deceive tactic: Trump’s effort to install a loyalist (first Bill Pulte, now Jay Clayton) as director of national intelligence (DNI), replacing Tulsi Gabbard.

The DNI has access to a host of highly sensitive national security information, which affords major opportunities to spread disinformation about candidates, their supporters, and the electoral system itself. This could look like a selective leak designed to tarnish a political opponent or false claims about foreign interference in the election process itself. Gabbard pulled a page from this playbook when she involved herself in the FBI raid in Fulton County, Georgia, where hundreds of boxes filled with ballots and other documents related to the 2020 election were seized.

Because the DNI has so much responsibility for sensitive intelligence, and is a role that is prime for weaponization if placed in the wrong hands, Congress required that the position be filled by someone with “extensive national security experience.” Neither Pulte nor Clayton has any. Pulte (who is still on track to take the DNI role, at least briefly) began his career at his family’s construction company, where he had a history of targeting his relatives with weird, vindictive attacks. He then leveraged campaign donations to President Trump into an appointment to be director of the ​​Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) — and turned that agency into a key node in Trump’s retribution campaign. As director of FHFA, Pulte was behind investigations into New York Attorney General Letitia James, Senator Adam Schiff, and Federal Reserve board member Lisa Cook. (To be clear, none of those investigations have led to convictions — Cook and Schiff were never charged, and the mortgage-fraud indictment against James was dismissed.)

Clayton’s career is more conventionally distinguished — he was a longtime partner at Sullivan & Cromwell and served as chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission during Trump’s first term. He was confirmed last year as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. But he, too, has been willing to embrace (or at least not resist) Trump’s agenda of weaponized law enforcement. He reportedly advised Southern District of New York (SDNY) prosecutor Danielle Sassoon (then the acting head of SDNY) to follow the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) order to drop the criminal case against then-NYC mayor Eric Adams. He didn’t intervene when the DOJ fired respected SDNY prosecutor Maurene Comey, the daughter of former FBI director James Comey. And just last week, he jumped on the California voter-fraud bandwagon, going on CNBC to endorse Trump’s false claims about California’s elections, saying “On the [election] integrity side, we’re doing an absolutely terrible job, and the American people are right to question it.”

As DNI, Clayton (or Pulte) would have access to a new set of tools to supercharge election conspiracies. Unlike lies about vote-counting or voting machines — which have been circulating for years and have never been proven — misinformation about foreign interference in elections is territory that’s not nearly as well-worn. The DNI could use selective disclosures of raw intelligence — on its own, not evidence of wrongdoing, but potentially highly suggestive to a lay audience — to bolster false claims about the election. And media outlets will have less willingness or ability to conclusively debunk lies that purport to be grounded in sensitive national security information.

An additional reason for concern is that Trump is signaling that he wants to make changes at the agency to erode its nonpartisan, professional bona fides. Trump said this week that Pulte should be “less shackled,” and that he would encourage Pulte to fire many of the national security professionals who work in the agency. That’s likely to discourage future whistleblowers about misinformation, a play we’ve seen the administration run at other agencies. (Add to that a new proposal that would allow agencies to require employees to sign nondisclosure agreements, another layer of chill on disclosures of wrongdoing.)

Read more — Muzzling America’s workforce

Senate Democrats are signaling that they will go along with Clayton’s permanent nomination to the post at DNI — and preventing Pulte from a lengthy tenure as acting DNI is definitely a win. But there’s still more we can do to head off the administration’s misinformation strategy, including by continuing to debunk ongoing lies about California:

1. Help inoculate against misinformation by exposing the strategy in advance: Public understanding of Trump’s override strategy is an effective form of inoculation. Sharing that California is following its laws and processes and that there is no evidence of fraud or irregularities is crucial to preventing the spread of conspiracies in the short term. So too is noting Trump’s rush to claim things are rigged whenever his partisan allies lose — something we all need to be prepared for come November.

2. If you lead a nonprofit or civic group, prepare in advance: The Ohio raid is a warning to every organization that helps Americans register and vote. Protect Democracy’s Nonprofit Toolkit walks through how to respond to government investigations — and as we saw with the SPLC, the groups that fare best are the ones that prepared in advance and refused to face it alone.

3. For Californians, call your state legislators: Let them know that they should continue to invest in and protect elections. These instructions on the app 5Calls can help you do so. Bonus points for calling the offices of Senate President Pro Tempore Monique Limón and Speaker of the Assembly Robert Rivas, since they are actively in budget discussions about election funding this week.

ICE surges are ramping back up as we head into the summer

Deployments of ICE agents to cities across the country began in earnest in the summer of 2025, and a year later, they are set to ramp up again. White House border czar Tom Homan has said that one of those surges will target New York City, explaining that the surge would happen because Governor Kathy Hochul is no longer allowing state and local law enforcement to double as immigration officials across the state.

While Homan acknowledged that he “had to” surge ICE into the city, he also made it clear that he doesn’t want to repeat what happened in Minnesota. “You will not see a Minnesota. I will not let Minnesota happen,” he said.

See the Authoritarian Action Watch.

Picture the path a ballot takes to get to your mailbox. A county clerk prints it, seals it in an envelope, and hands it off to a letter carrier, who drives it to your street and walks it to your door. It’s a route that has run, more or less unchanged, for as long as Americans have voted by mail.

Last Friday, the Postal Service proposed a rule that would add a checkpoint to this process. Before that ballot could reach you, your name would have to be checked against a federal list. If your name isn’t on it — or if USPS rules there are other technicalities, like the envelope not conforming to new standards — the USPS could refuse to deliver your ballot.

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There are so many problems with this proposal that it’s hard to know where to begin. But to briefly name a few:

First, it isn’t the Postal Service’s job to be the gatekeeper of who can vote by mail, and the president has no authority to make it do that job.

Second, it’s built on a fiction: that mail voting is rife with fraud. Worse, it’s designed to manufacture proof of that fiction. The voter lists states would hand over, the rule says plainly, are meant to “facilitate law enforcement efforts” — letting officials cross-check how many ballots went out against how many came back and flag the gaps for investigation.

Third, it asks states and USPS to build expensive new systems from scratch, just a few months before an election. Exactly when every hour should go to running a clean election.

Finally, the rule would do what its design all but guarantees: sow confusion, and leave eligible voters without the ballots they’re entitled to.

That last point is the key to explaining what is going on here. It fits a pattern we’ve been tracking all year — what our Executive Override report calls the administration’s Deceive, Disrupt, Deny strategy. This rule falls in the “Disrupt” bucket: using federal power to change the rules of the game and throw sand in the gears of an election.

An election the administration is afraid to lose.

What the rule actually does

The proposed rule implements part of an executive order Trump signed on March 31 — his second attempt to seize control over how elections are run. It would impose new requirements on mail ballots for federal general, special, and runoff elections (though, notably, not primaries, and not military and overseas ballots):

A master federal dataset of mail voters. States would have to submit to USPS the name and address of every voter receiving a mail ballot, along with unique barcodes for both the outbound and return envelopes, through a new “Federal Ballot Mail Portal.”

New envelope specifications. Every ballot envelope would have to carry the official Election Mail logo, be “automation compatible,” bear a uniquely serialized barcode, and pass a USPS design review. To be clear, those are good practices if adopted with the time and funds to do so. As proposed here, it’s a chaotic and unworkable mandate.

A federal gatekeeping function. Before accepting a ballot mailing, USPS would check it against the state-submitted list. Mailings to people not on the list — or that don’t meet the new standards — “will not be accepted and will be returned” to election officials. And any state that doesn’t certify compliance gets shut out and its mailings “will not be accepted.”

Read more — The U.S. Postal Service’s role in elections, explained

It isn’t the Postal Service’s job

Step back from the envelopes and barcodes for a moment, because there’s a more basic problem: The Postal Service has no authority to do any of this.

The president doesn’t run the Postal Service, and Congress built it that way on purpose. USPS answers not to the White House but to a bipartisan board of governors — no more than five from one party, serving staggered seven-year terms — and they, not the president, appoint a postmaster general the president can’t fire. Congress structured it this way in 1970 for a reason: An institution that carries the nation’s mail, ballots included, has to operate free of partisan interference.

The president has even less authority over how elections are run. The Constitution hands the “times, places, and manner” of federal elections to the states and to Congress — not the executive branch. So a presidential order directing the Postal Service to police the nation’s ballots bulldozes two limits at once: It commands an agency the president doesn’t control to do a job the Constitution gives to someone else.

That’s why this is not merely bad policy — it’s very likely unlawful, and the courts have already said as much about its predecessor. They blocked major provisions of Trump’s first election executive order on exactly these grounds, with one federal judge writing that the president “lacks the authority to direct such changes.” This rule implements part of his second order and rests on the same shaky foundation. A coalition of 23 states and the District of Columbia has already sued.

Two ways this rule fails the voter

Even if you take the rule on its own terms, as a piece of policy, it still does not work.

Election officials would have to build almost everything it requires — new envelopes, uniquely serialized barcodes, a roster of every mail voter fed into an untested federal portal — in the few months before November. This is a sizable task, and many simply cannot. As one former official told Votebeat, ordering compliant envelopes for a small county of 2,500 voters can run about $10,000, and rural jurisdictions often have no barcode tech at all. The executive order provides no money to close that infrastructure gap. Many states have no time to find the funding, and many local offices are prohibited from accepting outside help. A financially strapped USPS gets no new funding for these new duties either.

In fact, the rule absolves the Postal Service of the consequences, stating it’s “not responsible for service delays” caused by noncompliant mailings, and “assumes no responsibility” for a ballot until it is accepted into the mail. New hurdles with no money to clear them on an impossible timeline, and when ballots are delayed or denied as a result, it is the voter’s problem.

This points to the second failure, which is not, in fact, a failure in the design: The unworkability is the design. An administration that wanted mail voting to run smoothly would not rewrite its machinery five months before an election with no funding attached. An administration that wants confusion would do exactly this.

This is not the administration’s first reach for voter data. Its Justice Department has already demanded the rolls from nearly every state and pushed to run them through the error-prone SAVE system (an effort being challenged in court). A registry of everyone who votes by mail is another piece of the same project.

Read more — Election deniers want your data

Put plainly: This looks less like a way to deliver the mail than a way to watch the people who use it.

This rule doesn’t stand alone

The postal rule is one move in a larger pattern: the administration and its allies changing the rules while the game is already being played.

Consider Watson v. RNC, which the Supreme Court will decide by the end of June. At issue is whether states can count mail ballots postmarked by Election Day but delivered a few days later — a protection 14 states and D.C. extend to military, overseas, and rural voters. A Votebeat analysis found a ruling for the RNC could have put at least 750,000 ballots from 2024 at risk, wiping out those laws months before November, after voters spent years relying on them.

Or consider Callais. On April 29, the Supreme Court gutted the heart of the Voting Rights Act, leaving Section 2 all but a dead letter two weeks before Louisiana’s congressional primary. The chaos was immediate: the governor declared an “election emergency” and suspended the U.S. House primary days before early voting, while Alabama, Tennessee, and Florida raced to redraw their maps mid-cycle, and Trump cheered that if voters “have to vote twice, so be it.” In some places, voters and candidates didn’t know which district they were in.

Each of these moves — the postal rule, the ballot-deadline case, the redistricting scramble — changes the rules close to, or even during, the election. That is not incidental to the strategy. It is the strategy. When the rules keep shifting under voters’ and officials’ feet, no one can be sure what’s required, ballots get lost in the confusion, and confidence in the whole system erodes. Authoritarians around the world have long understood that you don’t need to cancel an election to control it — you just have to keep everyone guessing about the rules until the confusion itself does the work.

What you can do

Here is the good news: This rule isn’t final. It’s a proposal, and a proposed rule has to go through a 30-day public comment period before it can take effect. That is a real window, and public comment on rules like this one carries weight, especially from the election officials who would have to carry it out. If you run elections, this is the moment to document, on the record, what it would cost and what it would break. If you don’t, you can still file a comment saying so.

And if you vote by mail, the most useful thing you can do is the simplest: Don’t let the noise change your plans. Mail voting is safe; this rule is not in effect, and it may never be. Check your registration, know your state’s deadlines, and return your ballot early. The administration’s strategy runs on confusion and on the feeling that resistance is pointless. Neither is true.

The Postal Service has carried America’s ballots for two and a half centuries without deciding which ones count. It shouldn’t start now.

Register for The UnPopulist’s Liberalism Conference

Protect Democracy is proud to be involved in this year’s LibCon, which will focus on rebuilding American democratic institutions. The event, which will be held on July 16 and 17 at the Watergate Hotel, will feature The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer and Anne Applebaum, Francis Fukuyama, and Protect Democracy co-founder Justin Florence.

Register for LibCon

Trump doubles down on politicization

An executive order signed on June 3 will recategorize thousands of protected civil servants as political appointees, meaning they can be fired at will for no reason. The removal of these protections will extend the president’s reach into more of the operations of the government, and could mean that everyone from epidemiologists to meteorologists who track severe weather could now face political pressures that will be totally new to them. The order does not hit every civil servant, but it’s another attempt to chip away at the independence of the federal workforce, which touches the lives of every American in ways that they usually don’t have to think about.

See the Authoritarian Action Watch.

The $1.776 billion slush fund to reward those who break the law to aid Trump. The mid-cycle redistricting spree Southern states have embarked on to erase minority representation in the wake of the Supreme Court majority crushing the Voting Rights Act (VRA). The purging of dissent from the Republican Party. A throughline connects three developments dominating our politics this week: None of these moves are popular. None are smart politics. All of them are designed to hold power without winning public support — by overriding free and fair elections.

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Jonathan Last at The Bulwark named it earlier this week: The president seems to have given up on popularity outside a narrow base within the GOP and is instead moving to lock in institutional power before voters can take it from him. And he’s building the architecture to do that, piece by piece.

Creating an illegal slush fund for political loyalty

On Monday, the Justice Department announced a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to compensate people who say they were politically targeted by the federal government. The fund was created in a purported settlement of the president’s collusive lawsuit against the IRS.

The slush fund appears blatantly illegal, for a host of reasons: There’s no actual controversy to settle since Trump is on both sides; Congress didn’t authorize funding for it; and the 14th Amendment prohibits payments in aid of insurrection. (Capitol Police officers who defended the building on January 6 have already sued to block it, calling it illegal and a sham.) The design of the fund is beyond alarming: The commissioners who decide who gets paid are appointed by the attorney general and can be fired by the president at will.

And at the same time, Trump has used the deal to declare himself, his family, and his businesses immune from audits by the IRS and off the hook if he didn’t pay his taxes.

The politics of the slush fund are also terrible for the president. It’s bad enough to raid money that belongs to the taxpayers to pay off his friends, family, and political loyalists. Doing it at the same time he gives himself license to avoid paying taxes adds a cherry on top. So it’s no surprise that the slush fund has provoked broad and bipartisan opposition. (Trump’s attorney general may have tried to sell Republican senators on the fund by hinting that they too could receive payoffs from it!)

But for Trump, popularity — or democratic accountability — is beside the point. He’s (for now) got a federal payment program of nearly two billion dollars inside the Trump Justice Department, with eligibility and amounts set by officials the president controls, in the lead-up to a federal election. Here’s why that matters: In 2020, the president called the Wayne County Board of Canvassers and asked them not to certify Michigan’s results, but he had nothing material to offer them in exchange. When he encouraged the January 6 insurrectionists to go to the Capitol, it was only with his megaphone. He has something material to offer them now.

Tilting the field with a little help from Supreme Court allies

On April 29, the Supreme Court gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, removing the primary federal tool for challenging maps that dilute the political power of Black voters.

Corey Dukes and Alison Hirsh explained the consequences for 2026 earlier this week: Mid-cycle redistricting this close to an election is unprecedented, and partisan gain at the expense of fair minority representation is the point. Louisiana postponed its primary after voting had started. Tennessee and Florida enacted new maps. Alabama is using a 2023 map a federal panel found racially discriminatory. Candidates do not know which districts they are running in. Voters do not know where to cast their ballots.

Read more — This is not gerrymandering as usual

For decades, both parties had supported the Voting Rights Act as a seminal achievement in the history of U.S. democracy. President George W. Bush signed the VRA reauthorization in 2006, after it was enacted by overwhelming bipartisan majorities in Congress. The Trump administration, on the other hand, explicitly asked the Court to gut the VRA in Callais. Trump’s allies on the Court did just that. And they did it right in the middle of the midterms in ways that would clearly give the president a partisan advantage. And in the context of the president driving his partisan allies in states across the country to kick off an unprecedented mid-cycle partisan gerrymandering campaign to favor his party.

Our Authoritarian Playbook framework asks three questions to separate normal politics from a democratic threat. There’s a clear answer here.

How far does the action deviate from modern precedent? Gutting the seminal Voting Rights Act, combined with mid-cycle redistricting this close to a federal election is unprecedented.

With what frequency and degree is it happening? Simultaneously, across multiple states, on a calendar set by partisan advantage rather than ordinary process.

Does it present a systemic risk? Combined with Callais, yes again. The floor for fair representation is lower than it has been in 60 years, and the doctrine that previously upheld minority representation and checked the worst map-drawing is gone.

None of this is popular or follows any sort of political mandate. But put it all together and the strategy is clear: Tilt the playing field so that the president’s party can hold onto power, even as his popularity shrinks.

Purging those who have said no

On Tuesday night, after losing his Kentucky primary, Rep. Thomas Massie (a thorn in Trump’s side on various issues) told his supporters: “If the legislative branch always votes with the president, we do have a king.” Sen. Bill Cassidy was defeated in Louisiana after Trump sought to end his political career because Cassidy had voted to hold Trump accountable for January 6. Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia Secretary of State who refused to “find” 11,780 votes in 2020, lost his primary, too. When Indiana state Senators refused to bend the knee in anti-democratic mid-cycle gerrymandering, Trump decided to use his control over his party to take them out. These Republicans who said no, at moments when saying no mattered, will no longer be in the party’s elected ranks.

The same thing has happened inside the executive branch. Loyal civil servants and professional political appointees at the Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and across the intelligence community have been replaced by election deniers and political loyalists. In 2020, the acting attorney general refused to send a fraudulent letter to the state of Georgia. The personnel decisions made in the second Trump administration have been designed to ensure that the person sitting in that chair next time will write the letter.

Trump has also retaliated through his Department of Justice (DOJ). The cases the DOJ has brought against Trump critics, journalists, election officials, and former public servants vary, and some indictments look unlikely to survive. The Justice Department has tried three times to indict Letitia James: once successfully, before a federal judge threw out the indictment, then twice more before grand juries that refused to charge her. And still, new criminal referrals on a different theory followed in March. The investigation into James is one of many. Some end without charges, but with substantial costs absorbed by the target. A very small number result in convictions. The administration does not need to win any particular case to make the cost of resisting high, and discourage the next official who is considering whether to say no.

The president has sufficient power in his party (and controls a substantial enough war chest) that he can pull this off in GOP primaries and within the executive branch he controls. Usually, with an election approaching, a party would seek to broaden its appeal and pull in more people. But democratic legitimacy is not the point; instead, it’s about weaponizing the power of government to limit the chance for democratic accountability.

The endgame

The administration is not trying to win over American voters. Rather, it is trying to make those voters irrelevant. Which federal funds can be grabbed to pay off loyalists, which districts exist and whose votes matter, which voters can register, which officials count the ballots, which agencies investigate the process: the Trump approach is that if these are all beholden to him, then politics doesn’t matter.

Viewed one way, it’s a very dark story. But we’re not writing this to cause despair. The reason the administration is moving openly is that it is losing the contest over public support, and it knows it. We’ve outlined in other parts of this series and the Executive Override report all the ways that courageous people across our country are standing up for the rule of law, for our rights, and for free elections where eligible voters can vote and have their votes counted. Notwithstanding the President’s increasingly desperate efforts, at the end of the day he doesn’t get to control how our elections are conducted — that’s up to state and local officials around the country.

The president’s override strategy depends on officials not following the law. We the people will make sure they do.

This is part of our Executive Override series on threats to the 2026 election and how to combat them. You can see all editions in this series here. If you’re not subscribed, make sure to do so and you’ll get future ones in your inbox.

The Trump administration is “investigating” the 2020 election

On Fox News Sunday, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche claimed without evidence that “there’s a ton of evidence that the 2020 election was rigged” and that the Department of Justice has “multiple investigations going on in Arizona, in Georgia, in Fulton County, Georgia” focused on determining whether “the right people voted.” Blanche offered no specific evidence to support the claim, acknowledged that the investigation has taken more than five years because supposed election-riggers are “very good at hiding what they’re doing,” and declined to provide any timeline for results.

No court, audit, or law enforcement investigation — including those conducted by officials appointed by and loyal to the Trump administration — has produced credible evidence that the 2020 election was stolen or rigged. What makes Blanche’s statement distinct from prior disinformation is its source: it is the sitting head of the Department of Justice, using the authority of that office to validate claims the legal system has repeatedly rejected.

The administration has made election denialism official federal policy — using investigative and enforcement powers to manufacture the appearance of fraud and flood the public with disinformation designed to erode confidence in the 2026 midterms. Blanche’s Fox News appearance fits squarely within that strategy. Conspiracy theories and bogus investigations serve not only to deceive voters now, but to lay the groundwork for the administration’s final gambit: contesting or overturning 2026 election results that the administration doesn’t like. Lending the DOJ’s institutional credibility to election disinformation accelerates both goals simultaneously.

See the Authoritarian Action Watch.

On Saturday, tens of thousands of Americans hopped in cars, climbed on buses, and boarded planes to converge upon Selma and Montgomery, Alabama. They carried one message: “We will organize, mobilize, and vote.”

The march from Selma to Montgomery — first trod in 1965, retraced again this weekend — was organized in a little more than a week by Black Voters Matter and a coalition of civil rights and voting rights organizations under the banner “All Roads Lead to the South.” The message was clear. The fight that produced the Voting Rights Act, and with it America’s second, imperfect attempt at a real multiracial democracy, must be refought. And the people who know that best are the ones who showed up to say so.

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A sprint to disenfranchise

What is happening in the South right now is not a policy dispute or a legal technicality. It is the opening of a new front in the administration’s Deceive, Disrupt, Deny strategy to override the will of the voters and ensure the outcome they want in the 2026 mid-term elections. This is a racist power grab, locking in discriminatory congressional majorities for the foreseeable future — and it is moving fast.

Our colleagues have written extensively on the administration’s Deceive, Disrupt, Deny strategy. On Friday we focused on the attempt by the federal government to disrupt the operations of state and local election officials.

But the most visible form of the administration’s “disrupt” strategy right now is the erasure of minority representation through extreme gerrymandering unfolding across the South. The Supreme Court’s April 29 decision in Louisiana v. Callais gutted what was left of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, removing any protection against racist gerrymandering, and Republicans across the South sprang into action to redraw legislative maps to erase Black representation.

The Supreme Court didn’t stop there. Last week, the Court — with zero legal explanation from the majority — vacated a lower court order that had kept Alabama from using a 2023 map a federal panel found racially discriminatory, with the state’s primary just over a week away. Louisiana postponed its primary elections after voting had already started. Tennessee and Florida have already enacted new maps; other Southern states are scrambling to follow.

This is not gerrymandering as usual; it is the disrupt strategy at play

Partisan, discriminatory gerrymandering is nothing new, which is one reason why the Voting Rights Act was passed in the first place. So it behooves us to understand why what’s happening now is so different. As laid out in Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution, states have historically drawn new district lines for Congress and state legislatures every ten years, after the decennial census, not every two years if the party in charge is worried about losing seats.

The rush to disenfranchise voters of color right before an election — and even after an election has already started, in the case of Louisiana — is categorically different from what has come before. The Supreme Court has opened the floodgates for a coordinated and lawless effort to lock in congressional majorities. This effort is already sowing confusion and chaos and is rightly understood as an attempt to manipulate election rules to prevent certain voters from fully participating.

As we’ve explained, modern authoritarians seek to tilt the electoral playing field by both suppressing participation and by manipulating the rules themselves. The redistricting wave is that strategy operating at its most visible, systemic, and consequential scale. The administration did not draw these maps, but it set the conditions for them. The redistricting wars began when Trump publicly urged Texas Republicans to redraw their districts in the summer of 2025.

Opening the door for states to redistrict mid-cycle so close to an election is unprecedented. It is not only clearly racist, it is also clearly intended to bring chaos into the midterms. Candidates don’t know which districts they are running in. Longstanding primary election dates have been changed mid-election. Poll sites are changing mid-cycle, often without time to educate voters on where to go to vote in their primaries. The result is a coordinated, multi-state effort to disenfranchise minority voters and lock in a Republican Congress before a single midterm vote is cast, precisely what the Disrupt strategy is designed to produce.

This is the authoritarian playbook and the white-supremacist playbook, bound together, aimed at one-party rule. The goal is not simply to win the next election. It is to clear the field before the contest begins.

The people will “redeem the soul of America”

This is why Saturday mattered. The people who traveled from Atlanta, Memphis, Jackson, and Nashville to stand in Montgomery were not engaged in nostalgia. They were responding to a present-tense threat with a present-tense act. Led by Cliff Albright, LaTosha Brown, and numerous faith, community, and thought leaders, those who were in Alabama this weekend did what John Lewis told us to: They got into Good Trouble. Necessary Trouble.

The march from Selma in 1965 produced the Voting Rights Act. That act, for 61 years, served as the primary legal check on exactly this kind of map manipulation. Callais has gutted the legal remedy. The organizers of “All Roads Lead to the South” were explicit about this: The march matters, but so do the maps.

It has opened the doors for southern states to redistrict in an attempt to weaken the power of Black voters by ensuring they do not have majority representation anywhere. But as Justice Thurgood Marshall said, “We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent from the fear, the hatred and mistrust…We must dissent because America can do better, because America has no choice but to do better.” And we must vote.

Voting rights organizations have established a redistricting intelligence operation that tracks every legislative session in Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Georgia, in real time, by district, with the specific seats at risk named and documented. As importantly, they are organizing in each of these states to ensure that voters know where their poll sites are, how to cast their vote, and, most crucially, that their vote matters now more than ever.

That kind of organizing is the answer.

So what now?

The legal check on discriminatory maps has been gutted by the Supreme Court. The political check has not. Here is where to direct our energy:

• Follow the map battles in real time. The Black Power War Room’s redistricting tracker covers every state where maps are being redrawn. Know which seats are at risk and who is drawing the lines.

• Contact your state legislators. Redistricting decisions are made in statehouses, not Washington. If you live in a state where new maps are being drawn, your state representative needs to hear from you now — not in October.

• Support the organizations doing this work. The groups that register voters, educate communities, and pursue litigation under what remains of the Voting Rights Act are under sustained pressure. They need resources and solidarity.

• Get out the vote. Talk to your neighbors and friends. Educate yourself and each other. If there isn’t a contested election in your district, join efforts to call, text, and write to voters who may be confused about where and how to vote. Make sure they know that every vote matters.

The battle will not be over in November. Or in 2028. We can be forward-looking and restructure our electoral system to end the constant gerrymandering caused by a winner-takes-all system that benefits the loudest, most extreme voices. Proportional representation would eliminate single-member districts and establish multi-candidate districts in which minority voters would still have representation.

The authoritarians hope that the maps being drawn this month will shape who represents Americans in Congress for the next decade or more. The people who marched on Saturday understand that. They showed up to say that the rules may be manipulated, but in the end, it’s the voters who have the final say. We will see them at the midterms.

This is part of our ongoing Executive Override series on threats to the 2026 election and how to combat them. You can see all editions here. If you’re not subscribed, make sure to do so.

In April, federal prosecutors served Fulton County, Georgia with a grand jury subpoena. They wanted the names, home addresses, email addresses, and personal phone numbers of as many as 3,000 county employees, poll workers, and volunteers — even the drivers of mobile voting buses — who had worked on the 2020 election.

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This is what it looks like when the federal government turns its investigative power on the people who run elections. It is not an isolated incident — it is just one example of a coordinated campaign that the administration is running through the Department of Justice (DOJ), the FBI, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and even the Pentagon — aimed at the president’s perceived political opponents, the civil society groups that support democratic participation, and the nonpartisan officials who run our elections.

Perhaps the largest shift between the first and second Trump administrations has been this weaponization of law enforcement. It is a core part of the administration’s strategy to disrupt elections by tilting the electoral playing field — one of the three legs of the “deceive, disrupt, deny” strategy that we describe in our Executive Override report.

Read more — How the Trump administration plans to interfere with the 2026 elections, and what you can do about it

The most visible form of the disrupt strategy right now is the rush to erase minority representation through extreme gerrymandering unfolding across the South (with the aid of the Supreme Court). That story is enormous — stay tuned for more on that soon — but it is not what we’re covering here. This piece is about another part of the disrupt strategy that is (understandably) getting less attention right now, but is also very much ongoing — the use of federal investigative, prosecutorial, and regulatory power to silence and sideline the administration’s perceived opponents. In the context of elections, this aspect of the disrupt strategy has three distinct categories of targets:

1. Political opponents and critics,

2. Civil society organizations that support democratic participation, and

3. The nonpartisan election officials who actually run our elections.

Each category serves a different purpose in the broader strategy — but together, they amount to a coordinated campaign to clear the field before a single vote is cast.

Targeting political opponents and critics

This year, according to NOTUS, the FBI created a unit internally referred to as the “payback squad” to pursue cases against the president’s perceived enemies. The name says the quiet part out loud.

The administration has deployed the Justice Department against political adversaries in ways that have no precedent in modern American history. This goes well beyond the traditional rough-and-tumble of partisan politics. We are talking about the use of federal criminal investigations and prosecutions — the most powerful tools the government possesses — as instruments of political warfare.

Time and again, we have seen the Department of Justice pursue Trump’s perceived enemies, sometimes at the explicit behest of the president. Former FBI Director James Comey is perhaps the most prominent example. After the administration’s first attempt to prosecute Comey was dismissed by a federal judge in November, DOJ concocted even more dubious charges. But Comey is not alone — former CIA Director John Brennan, New York Attorney General Letitia James, Sen. Adam Schiff, Minnesota Democratic officials, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, and others have been targeted by DOJ.

Another recent example: On May 6, FBI agents executed search warrants at the offices of Virginia state Sen. L. Louise Lucas — the state legislator who led efforts to redraw the state’s congressional map to add as many as four Democratic-leaning seats ahead of the midterms. The FBI says the search relates to an ongoing federal corruption investigation involving a cannabis business Lucas co-owns and that the underlying probe predates the current administration. Whatever its origin, the decision to escalate to a dramatic, public raid and the timing at least raise questions, particularly under an administration that has shown, again and again, that it is willing to use federal law enforcement as a political tool.

The weaponization of law enforcement is not confined to DOJ. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has now twice opened reviews of Sen. Mark Kelly — most recently on May 10, after Kelly publicly raised concerns about depleted U.S. weapons stockpiles. Hegseth has separately attempted to retroactively demote Kelly from his Navy rank over a video in which Kelly and other lawmakers reminded service members of their duty to refuse unlawful orders. A federal court has so far blocked the demotion.

Meanwhile, the administration has used the FCC to pressure broadcasters, imposed novel interpretations of existing rules to silence political commentary, and appeared to favor media mergers that would concentrate ownership among Trump allies. As we explained in detail earlier this year, this isn’t just about controlling the news — it’s about shaping the information environment heading into the midterms.

Read more — Free speech, ICE, and free elections in 2026

As the election approaches, we should expect continued law enforcement action aimed at discrediting prominent candidates, officials, or the Democratic Party as a whole. This could include investigations or indictments timed to coincide with the election cycle — designed not necessarily to secure convictions, but to dominate the news and tar candidates by association.

And of course, at the same time as federal law enforcement targets the president’s perceived enemies, it has protected or even compensated his allies and supporters. The pattern is not subtle: protection for the president’s allies, prosecution for his opponents.

Silencing civil society

The administration’s weaponization of investigative and enforcement authorities extends well beyond high-profile political leaders. It reaches into the civil society organizations — advocacy groups, voter registration organizations, nonpartisan civic engagement efforts — that are part of the fabric of American political life.

The administration began undermining nonprofits just weeks into Trump’s second term, but the assault accelerated sharply in September 2025 after the murder of Charlie Kirk. The president issued National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), which painted organizations on “the Left” as part of a network of dangerous extremists. A subsequent memo from Attorney General Bondi directed DOJ to create and maintain lists of these “domestic terrorism organizations” based on their ideological beliefs — and to map their “nodes,” “cells,” and “funders.”

This infrastructure for ideological targeting is particularly dangerous in an election context.

Nonprofit organizations play a lawful — and significant — role in registering voters, educating them about issues, and supporting get-out-the-vote efforts. The administration has already taken aim at voter-registration groups by barring nonpartisan civic engagement organizations (like the League of Women Voters) from registering new citizens at naturalization ceremonies. A legal challenge to this policy is now pending.

More recently, a federal grand jury in Alabama indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) — a civil rights organization with a decades-long record of investigating violent extremist groups — on wire fraud and money laundering charges built on a questionable theory that paying informants to infiltrate Klan and neo-Nazi groups amounted to supporting them. SPLC appears to have been singled out for retaliation because it has accused some Trump allies of promoting extremist ideologies. Even Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), a former federal prosecutor and senior House Republican, has publicly said that SPLC is “being targeted for obvious reasons.”

But the attack on SPLC should also be understood as a warning to other nonprofit groups, including groups that work to protect the ability of eligible voters to participate in elections. Even if these charges don’t result in convictions, they create a climate of fear that risks deterring groups from participating in lawful voter-education and voter-registration activities.

That’s the point. The goal isn’t necessarily to win in court. It’s to make the cost of democratic participation so high that organizations stop trying.

Intimidating election officials

Perhaps the most dangerous category of targeting is the least visible: the campaign against nonpartisan election officials.

Trump signed an executive order targeting former Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) director Chris Krebs for the crime of defending the integrity of the 2020 election. Then-Attorney General Bondi appointed a U.S. attorney to lead nationwide investigations of election officials — the same prosecutor whose office obtained the search warrant for the FBI’s January raid on the Fulton County elections warehouse. And DOJ has reportedly explored bringing criminal charges against election officials for failing to meet cybersecurity standards that the administration itself defined — based not on evidence of actual security failures, but on assumptions driven by conspiracy theories.

On March 31, President Trump signed an executive order that directs DOJ to “prioritize the investigation and prosecution” of election officials and others who issue federal ballots to anyone not on a new Department of Homeland Security-maintained citizenship list. The eligibility list is to be drawn from federal databases with well-documented accuracy problems. The order — which is the subject of multiple ongoing legal challenges — requires no showing of criminal intent.

Read more — The SAVE tool, explained

And as already mentioned, DOJ is demanding the names, home addresses, email addresses, and personal phone numbers of thousands of individuals who worked on the 2020 election in Fulton County, even in a volunteer capacity. In a motion to quash the subpoena, the county has described it as a campaign “designed to target, harass, and punish the President’s perceived political opponents.”

This playbook of targeting low-level election workers with threats and harassment is not new, but it is now being executed at scale by the federal government itself. And it is happening in multiple states that are central to Trump’s 2020 conspiracy theories. The FBI obtained a grand jury subpoena for records related to Maricopa County, Arizona’s 2020 audit in March, and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported on May 9 that an FBI agent had interviewed Wisconsin Elections Commission deputy administrator Robert Kehoe about how Wisconsin runs its elections.

The effects are real and measurable. The Brennan Center’s 2025 survey of local election officials found that 59 percent reported fear of political interference in their ability to do their jobs. 46 percent were concerned about politically motivated investigations. In a 2024 survey, 21 percent said they were unlikely to continue serving through the 2026 midterms. The departure of experienced, nonpartisan election administrators is itself a form of election manipulation. It creates vacuums that can be filled by partisan actors more willing to go along with the wishes of election deniers.

And at the same time the administration punishes those officials who follow the law, it rewards allies who break it. In Colorado, Tina Peters — a county clerk convicted of four felonies for giving unauthorized access to voting equipment — was sentenced to nine years in prison. The Trump administration has sought to free her, with DOJ filing a statement of interest supporting her petition and Trump publicly declaring her innocent.

The message to election officials could not be clearer: Those who resist the administration’s agenda risk investigation and prosecution. Those willing to subvert elections in service of the president’s conspiracy theories will be protected and celebrated.

What can be done

The strategy works only if its targets stay quiet and isolated, and the rest of us treat it as business as usual. But neither has to happen. Here’s how targets can refuse to be isolated and how the rest of us can refuse to normalize it.

For civil society organizations: Prepare to fight back and build coalitions now, before the pressure arrives. The SPLC’s decision to plead not guilty and immediately go on offense — challenging false statements by the acting Attorney General and signaling a vindictive-prosecution defense — is the right model for individual responses. And, as we learned from studying how universities and law firms responded to Trump’s attacks, standing together is just as important. Shrinking back doesn’t buy safety; it buys ongoing servitude. For organizations looking to strengthen their own readiness, we have a Nonprofit Toolkit with primers covering government investigations; for organizations looking to strengthen the security and safety of collective action work, our comprehensive guide walks through the operational steps to keep you and your coalition partners focused on your mission.

Read more — A natural experiment in how to survive Trumpism

For election officials: The strategy only works if its targets are isolated. Fulton County’s public motion to quash — filed, deliberately, without seeking a seal — turned an attempted intimidation into a public defense of the rule of law. The multistate lawsuit against the March 31 executive order did the same thing: when 24 attorneys general file together, none of them is the lone target. Both are models to follow. Protect Democracy, the Brennan Center and others have resources and legal support available. You are not alone.

For members of the legal and law enforcement communities: Your professional responsibilities are not abstractions. The Justice Manual, the rules of professional conduct, your own oaths — these were built for moments like this one. Get sharp on what they require, and treat politicized directives with skepticism rather than the presumption of regularity to which DOJ used to be entitled. Hold colleagues accountable when they abuse the power entrusted to them, and support the ones who refuse — like the prosecutors pushed out in the fallout from the Comey prosecution and the other career federal lawyers across the country quietly saying no. They are paying a professional price for the rule of law, and the legal community owes them more than admiration. For those who have paid such a price, organizations like Justice Connection are there to support you. And the Committee for Safe and Secure Elections has resources for members of the law enforcement community who are looking for materials to understand how you can support and protect election workers and voters in this challenging environment.

For all of us: When an election official is threatened for doing their job, that is an attack on your right to vote. When a voter registration organization is sued for registering voters, that is an attack on your democracy. These are not someone else’s fights. We need to show up. The day of action this weekend in response to the attack on minority representation in the South is one place to start.

The disrupt strategy works by making people who run our elections — and the people who support them — feel alone. They aren’t. And the more clearly and loudly we say so, the less their strategy works.

This is part four in our Executive Override series on threats to the 2026 election and how to combat them. You can see all editions in this series here. If you're not subscribed, make sure to do so and you'll get future ones in your inbox.

The closure of Alligator Alcatraz is a meaningful victory

ICE has now formally set a target of 1 million deportations per year in its congressional budget justification. The pace of deportations reflects that ambition: through the first six months of fiscal year 2026, ICE carried out 234,236 removals — roughly 74% more than at the same point in either of the two prior years.

On May 12, though, news broke that one of the signature detention centers of the second Trump administration, “Alligator Alcatraz,” was set to close after rising costs, reports of inhumane conditions, and legal challenges. “Alligator Alcatraz” was more important for the administration and its supporters symbolically than as an actual detention facility, but that’s precisely what makes its closure so meaningful.

Even as the administration continues to target communities across the country in immigration raids, their state partners are facing the meaningful realities of keeping detention centers up and running amidst backlash from taxpayers wondering where their money is going. One facility closing does not change the overall picture, but it does speak to how unsustainable this aspect of the authoritarian project is.

See the Authoritarian Action Watch.

46% of American voters now believe the lie that there is widespread fraud in U.S. elections. Nearly half the country. That’s according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll, which highlights the dangers of the Deceive component of the administration’s Executive Override playbook. (Reuters appropriately notes alongside reporting those results that extensive audits have repeatedly shown fraud to be exceedingly rare.)

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The recent polling isn’t an accident — it’s the result of a deliberate Trump strategy. In order for the administration to successfully interfere with the election and, ultimately, overturn unfavorable results, they first need to convince a sufficient portion of the public that our election system is unreliable. As Reuters captured it: “President Donald Trump’s years-long campaign to undermine faith in U.S. elections has ​gained broad traction with the American public.”

For years, election denialism was a movement of outsiders — fringe actors, online communities, and hyper-partisan media. Trump was the ringleader, but the machinery had limits, particularly within the federal government. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Trump and his allies tried to sell the public on their lies, but never got traction. Then, only about 30% of all voters bought Trump’s claims that the election was rigged. That’s a lot of people — far too many — but it wasn’t nearly enough to lay the foundation for a successful legal and political strategy to overthrow the results. (And of course, ever since 2020, Trump has waged an ongoing campaign to erode trust in elections.)

Unlike 2020, today the lies and conspiracies are coming from not just the Oval Office but all across the federal government. Since taking office in January 2025, the second Trump administration has institutionalized election denialism, stocking the executive branch with loyalists — including leading election deniers — who actively promote the falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen and that our election system cannot be trusted.

And the administration is not simply repeating its old lies; it is using the investigative, intelligence, and enforcement powers of the executive branch to manufacture the appearance of evidence for those lies.

Read more — How the Trump administration plans to interfere with the 2026 elections, and what you can do about it

The three lies to end democracy

The Administration is not just talking. The president has turned the formal powers of the executive branch into an amplifier for election conspiracy theories — and he’s filled the halls of power with people who are equally committed to the project.

Three false claims are doing the heavy lifting.

Lie One: The 2020 “Big Lie,” rejuvenated. Trump and his appointees continue to insist the 2020 election was stolen. And rather than recognize the January 6 attack on the Capitol as a national tragedy, the White House has sought to lionize the perpetrators — turning violent insurrectionists into heroes, or at least victims. We continue to see fidelity to the 2020 Big Lie being used as a litmus test for Trump’s nominees. For months, his judicial nominees have refused to acknowledge Trump’s defeat in 2020 — now the nominee for the Fed Chair (a purportedly independent role) is scared to say Trump lost.

Lie Two: Mail-in voting and voting machines are “rigged.” The administration has repeatedly sought to cast doubt on the reliability of mail-in voting and electronic voting systems. Trump has ordered the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to decertify every voting machine it had previously certified — an order beyond his authority that is now the subject of pending litigation. The Reuters poll found 53% of respondents expressed concern about fraudulent absentee or mail-in ballots. And yet authoritative analyses of this continue to show there is no issue here, which is not surprising given how many controls state officials have in place to prevent this type of fraud. It’s worth noting, as well, that Trump and his family vote by mail. NPR’s headline says it all: “Trump, While Attacking Mail Voting, Casts Mail Ballot Again.”

Lie Three: Noncitizens are stealing elections. This has been the administration’s dominant false narrative. In reality, states have robust systems to prevent noncitizen voting, and it is vanishingly rare. Michigan’s 2024 audit turned up just 15 potential noncitizen votes out of more than 5.7 million cast. Georgia found 20 out of 8.2 million registered voters. The near-nonexistence of noncitizen voting makes sense: States have strong controls over their voter rolls and any noncitizen who tried to cast a ballot would face severe criminal and immigration penalties. Reuters summed it up well: “Years of messaging by Trump and his allies casting doubt on voting have resonated strongly with ⁠Republicans, particularly around claims that non‑citizens vote in significant numbers and that mail‑in ballots are unreliable, despite repeated audits and academic research finding fraud in either case to be exceedingly rare.”

So none of these claims hold up to scrutiny. They have been debunked time and time again. But that hasn’t kept the Administration from taking ever more extreme measures to try to propagate them.

Turning the federal government into a disinformation machine

These lies are dangerous enough on their own, but the administration isn’t just repeating lies. It’s using the federal government's powers to manufacture the appearance of evidence for them, effectively turning law enforcement and intelligence agencies into conduits for partisan disinformation.

Consider four key examples:

1. The FBI’s raid on Fulton County, Georgia. In January 2026, federal agents raided an election office in Fulton County, seizing hundreds of boxes of state election materials. Bizarrely, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was personally present for the raid — despite having no domestic law enforcement authority.

The affidavit used to get a search warrant relied on misleading claims that omitted key findings from prior state reviews. Fulton County’s 2020 ballots were counted three separate times, with results affirmed each time.

The raid is a sign of what’s to come: using federal law enforcement to try to breathe life into repeatedly debunked conspiracy theories. As one Fulton County commissioner put it:

This is just a mechanism to bring 2020 up and say that Fulton County doesn’t run good elections, that they can’t be trusted, so that people in 2026 won’t feel like their vote is accurately counted. It’s just an entire strategy to disrupt the 2026 midterm elections, and we’re not going to let them do it.

And there’s probably more to come: Former Attorney General Bondi appointed the U.S. attorney who obtained the search warrant to lead election-integrity investigations nationwide

2. Seizing state voter rolls — at times, at gunpoint. The administration has demanded full, unredacted voter rolls from 48 states and D.C., and sued more than 25 states that refused to comply. After the murder of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, the administration demanded that Minnesota provide its voter rolls as a condition of de-escalating the terror unleashed by federal immigration authorities. Read that sentence again. They demanded state voter rolls at the point of a gun.

Federal courts have dismissed multiple DOJ lawsuits seeking data. But confidential memoranda reveal the real plan: DOJ intends to analyze the data and instruct states to remove specific voters — an extraordinary assertion of federal authority over state election administration. DOJ is also sharing voter roll data with DHS, creating a serious risk that eligible naturalized citizens will be wrongly flagged and purged before the 2026 midterms.

3. Manufacturing prosecutions to advance a conspiracy theory. The administration has weaponized the Justice Department’s criminal prosecution power to create a fog of deception around elections. It has sought but failed to find and prosecute noncitizens for voting — not surprising, given the paucity of noncitizen voting. But still, their efforts can generate headlines.

The Administration even turns unrelated retaliatory prosecutions against perceived political opponents into efforts to shore up its election lies. Alongside the Trump Justice Department’s indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) last week, Trump posted on social media: “The Southern Poverty Law Center…has been charged with FRAUD.… If it is true, the 2020 Presidential Election should be permanently wiped from the books and be of no further force or effect!” The DOJ allegations against SPLC — the Department’s latest attempt to silence critics, perceived opponents, and those who continue to pursue justice, equality, and the rule of law — have nothing at all to do with the 2020 election. That, of course, doesn’t stop the effort to use vexatious DOJ prosecutions to feed election lies.

4. Seizing voting machines to spread conspiracies about Venezuela. In May 2025, a team supervised by Gabbard seized voting machines and forensic data copies from Puerto Rico, ostensibly to investigate allegations that Venezuela had hacked the territory’s voting systems. Independent experts noted that features Gabbard’s office described as “vulnerabilities” — such as cellular modems transmitting encrypted vote totals — are common, well-understood components of election infrastructure.

The pattern across all four examples is the same: Use the power of the federal government to stage dramatic, high-profile actions that look like they’re indicative of some sort of fraud — even when they’re not.

And so we should be on guard for the administration to use these abuses of power to magically manufacture “evidence” to support its false narratives. Don’t be surprised to see claims of one of the following in the months ahead — and treat it with extreme skepticism.

Silencing the people who fight disinformation

At the same time the administration is abusing power to supercharge election lies, it is systematically dismantling the infrastructure that exists to counter them.

Targeting trusted sources of accurate information. In December 2025, the State Department directed consular officers to deny visas to foreign nationals who have worked in fact-checking, content moderation, trust and safety, or combating misinformation. (Our team has filed a lawsuit challenging this policy.) This directive, coupled with years of political pressure, has already had a chilling effect. Meta eliminated its third-party fact-checking program in January 2025, explicitly citing the political environment. Other platforms have similarly retreated from content moderation.

Gutting federal election security programs. On Attorney General Bondi’s first day in office, she disbanded the FBI task force tracking foreign influence operations from Russia, China, and Iran. Since Trump took office, roughly a third of the workforce of DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) — approximately 1,000 employees — has departed through firings, forced resignations, and buyouts. In March 2025, CISA halted all election security support for state officials and terminated funding for the cross-state threat-monitoring system. CISA’s proposed fiscal year 2026 budget would entirely eliminate the agency’s Election Security Program. And for the first time in years, CISA did not activate its Election Day situation room during the November 2025 elections.

Ramping up censorship of the media. And this week, we saw Trump’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman advance efforts to silence media companies that don’t follow the party line. Alongside Trump’s call (again) to fire Jimmy Kimmel, the FCC issued a highly unusual order threatening ABC broadcast licenses. All part of a long-running campaign to silence or intimidate media that don’t stick to the White House’s preferred narrative.

Put it all together. Election conspiracy theories now face fewer checks — at the precise moment the federal government is working hardest to spread them.

How we can defeat the deception

The White House’s deception strategy only works if it goes unanswered. Here is what defeating it looks like: If you talk about elections — with family, followers, or readers — debunk without amplifying. Instead, lead with the truth, briefly name the lie and why it’s false, then return to the truth — what researchers call the “truth sandwich.” (More good tips on how to prebunk misinformation here.)

If you lead an institution — a company, a university, a church, a civic organization — speak up when the government abuses its power to spread lies. In response to the retaliatory prosecution of SPLC, for example, a broad range of organizations, advocates, and experts have joined a chorus to debunk the Administration’s cooked up claims and stand in solidarity with SPLC. To take another example, Trump’s allies at the FCC have sought to weaponize existing rules to suppress criticism of the administration. This week, we and our partners at TechFreedom asked the federal appeals court in Washington to intervene and stop it. And last week, we described the extensive efforts from our team and many others to stop DOJ from abusing its power to interfere with state voter rolls as part of a campaign of deception.

If you hold public office — at any level — refuse to act on the lies. The election-deception strategy is a pretext to make it plausible for officials to disrupt voting, contest counts, and reject results. The good news is our elections are carried out by state and local officials all around the country, so the administration itself has very little legal authority to interfere in the election. Congress should continue to reject the SAVE Act, which would translate the deception into a federal effort to disrupt voting. State and local officials should continue to administer their elections by the law and facts.

That 46% number in the Reuters poll is alarming. But the administration’s election deception strategy only works if it goes unanswered. It can move the other direction the same way — when the truth is told clearly, when abuses of power are met with resistance, and when the people who run our elections refuse to be intimidated into acting on lies.

Between now and November, that’s the work.

This was part three of our ongoing Executive Override series. All of the pieces in this series will be posted here. Check out the prior ones. And make sure you’re subscribed to get the next ones in your inbox.

Corrupting Elections – Rapidly Escalating

Mid-decade gerrymandering gets a major boost from the Supreme Court

What began in summer 2025, when President Trump urged Texas Republicans to redraw congressional districts to protect the GOP’s narrow House majority, has since grown into one of the largest coordinated attempts to redraw congressional districts in modern American history. As of April 2026, six states — California, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, and Utah — have new congressional maps, with several more in flux.

On April 21, Virginia voters narrowly approved a constitutional amendment to redraw congressional districts in Democrats’ favor, only to see a circuit court judge block certification of the results — a challenge now before the state supreme court. That same day, the U.S. Supreme Court cleared Texas’s redrawn map over a lower court finding of illegal racial gerrymandering. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis then called a special session to consider new maps, since enacted into law, that analysts say could produce a 24–4 Republican advantage in the state’s congressional delegation.

On April 29, the Supreme Court worsened the crisis. In Louisiana v. Callais, the Court’s 6-3 majority effectively gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — the last meaningful federal check on racially discriminatory maps. It removes the guardrail that made extreme gerrymandering legally risky, and could undercut the representation of millions of minority voters. Since the decision, the governor of Louisiana has suspended an ongoing Congressional primary by executive order (which has since been challenged in litigation) and state officials in Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia are attempting to rush gerrymanders in time to enact racially discriminatory maps that could flip additional majority-minority seats. This impact will unfold even further over time — analysts estimate up to 19 majority-minority seats could be removed as a result of the Callais decision through the 2028 election. What is happening is not normal political competition. It is a coordinated attempt — initiated by a sitting president and now enabled by the Supreme Court — to lock in congressional majorities for a single party through map manipulation.

Quashing Dissent – Rapidly Escalating

The administration is pressuring ABC to fire Jimmy Kimmel (again)

In the days following a shooting incident at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the White House is trying to use the episode to renew pressure on ABC and its parent company Disney to dismiss late-night host Jimmy Kimmel. The controversy traces to a Thursday night sketch (days before the assassination attempt) on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in which Kimmel performed a mock host’s speech and joked that first lady Melania Trump had “a glow like an expectant widow.”

Both President Trump and the first lady suggested Kimmel should be fired. But most troublingly, Brendan Carr, the chairman of the FCC, has also taken action against ABC in the days since Kimmel’s joke aired, formally calling for ABC to defend its license to broadcast. This is not an isolated incident. In September, ABC and two of the country’s largest TV station owners — Nexstar Media and Sinclair — suspended Kimmel’s show after Carr threatened affiliates following comments Kimmel made about the death of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

Protect Democracy has been fighting back. Just this week, we filed a legal action in the D.C. Court of Appeals, seeking to force the FCC to respond to a formal petition filed last fall calling on the FCC to rescind the news distortion policy. The policy is one of the enforcement levers that Carr has abused to censor protected speech, and when the petition was filed, Carr responded by tweeting “How about no”. The petitioners behind this action include a bipartisan coalition of former FCC chairs, commissioners, and senior-level staff, joined by the Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA). The stakes extend beyond one television host. As former Republican FCC Chairman and petitioner Mark Fowler warned, the government has no legitimate role in deciding what speech is acceptable.

Politicizing Independent Institutions – Escalating

The second indictment of James Comey is a further weaponization of the Justice Department

On April 28, former FBI Director James Comey was indicted for a second time, on charges of making a threat against the president and transmitting a threat in interstate commerce — stemming from a photo of seashells he posted on Instagram.

This is the administration’s second attempt to prosecute Comey. The first indictment, brought in September on charges of lying to Congress, was dismissed late last year by a federal judge who found that the interim U.S. attorney who secured the indictment had been improperly appointed. The pattern of retaliation is not subtle: Trump publicly urged then-Attorney General Pam Bondi to take action against Comey, writing in a public post on Truth Social that “we can’t delay any longer.”

The Justice Department exists to enforce the law impartially, not to prosecute the president’s critics. Twice now, the administration has sought to use federal criminal charges against a man whose primary offense appears to be his public opposition to the president. The first indictment collapsed in court. The independence of the federal judiciary, and the citizens who serve as jurors, remain the last meaningful check on this pattern of abuse.

See the Authoritarian Action Watch.

Imagine it’s back in November 2020: With the winner of the presidential election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden still uncertain, the Department of Justice (DOJ) writes to election officials in Michigan to request “all ballots (including absentee and provisional), ballot receipts, and ballot envelopes.” If local election officials don’t comply, DOJ threatens to go to court to get the records. What would have happened?

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We avoided this question in 2020 — but only because DOJ refused Trump’s demands to seize election materials. There was no credible evidence of fraud, and partisan Trump loyalists had not fully consolidated control over the department.

Last week, more than five years after the 2020 election was certified, current DOJ officials delivered this exact request to election officials in Wayne County, home to Detroit.

And that’s a perfect illustration of why, when we look ahead to the 2026 election, we don’t expect it to play out just like 2020.

On the surface, the threat to the 2020 and 2026 elections looks similar: A would-be autocrat in the White House, facing the prospect of a sharp rebuke at the ballot box, laying the groundwork to try to overturn an unfavorable election.

But there’s a big difference between 2020 and 2026: This time, the entire apparatus of the federal government will be turned towards the goal of aiding Trump’s election interference. Even as the threat is more dangerous, though, we don’t need to let it succeed.

A fully weaponized executive branch

Although Trump was president in 2020, he hadn’t yet consolidated full control of the executive branch. As a result, in the 2020 election, the campaign to undermine and eventually overturn the result was run narrowly out of the White House, the president’s reelection campaign, and the Republican National Committee (RNC).

The core team was the president and a relatively small handful of acolytes, like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell.

Not only did the rest of the federal government not participate in this attack on our democracy, but most of its critical functions continued working to follow the law and protect free and fair elections. The 2020 effort was attempted from inside the government and failed because of institutional resistance.

For instance:

• The Department of Homeland Security, especially the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, CISA, was at the forefront of both cybersecurity and efforts to combat disinformation about the election.

• The FBI worked closely with local election officials and law enforcement across the country to help secure the electoral process and respond to threats.

• DOJ, famously, resisted the White House’s pressure to seize voting machines and worked in most cases to enforce the law and the Constitution.

2026 will be different.

Read more — Executive Override: How the Trump administration plans to interfere with the 2026 elections, and what you can do about it

As ProPublica documented in a crucial report this month, most of the people who worked within the federal government to protect the 2020 election are now gone, replaced with around two dozen election deniers. CISA has been gutted. Parts of the federal government that used to serve the public interest are now narrowly focused on protecting the president’s hold on power at all costs.

The Department of Justice is Exhibit A in the transformation of the federal government. In the weeks since Attorney General (AG) Pam Bondi’s firing, we’ve seen DOJ officials engage in an Apprentice-style competition to be Trump’s AG (with Acting AG Todd Blanche and Harmeet Dillon, assistant attorney general for civil rights, in starring roles) and make desperate moves just to hang onto their jobs (FBI Director Kash Patel). Over the past week:

• Dhillon has doubled down on illegal and unprecedented demands that states turn over their confidential voter data (more on that later);

• Blanche has declared that Trump has a “right” to prosecute his enemies, while allowing Trump’s former personal attorney Joseph DeGenova to take a leading role in a purported prosecution of former CIA director John Brennan; and

• Patel has promised new “evidence” that the 2020 election was rigged.

That’s why I expect nearly every available lever of executive power will be deployed as part of this campaign to deceive the electorate about the security of their elections, to disrupt the electoral process, and to deny the results.

The groundwork is already being laid for this whole-of-government election subversion strategy.

Seizing voter data: A case study in weaponized government

How does control of government translate into election subversion? The administration’s dangerous and illegal effort to gain access to states’ confidential voter rolls offers a case study.

Let’s start with a refresher on how elections should work: In the U.S., states — not the federal government — are responsible for running elections. They register voters, maintain voter lists, and have processes for verifying the eligibility of every voter. Over the years, in order to promote the right to vote, Congress has taken steps to ensure that states maintain accurate voter rolls and certain uniform standards for voting eligibility. However, Congress has never authorized the federal government to take over responsibility for vetting voter rolls. And, although the Constitution gives Congress the power to make laws involving election administration, under our Constitution and laws, the president has zero role in state election administration — including voter registration.

Despite this, heeding the president’s command to “nationalize elections,” the DOJ Civil Rights Division has contacted nearly every state and the District of Columbia over the past year to demand their complete voter files, which are filled with sensitive personal information for every voter, such as Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, and political party affiliation. During the same period, DOGE worked (unlawfully) to integrate Social Security data into an existing Department of Homeland Security (DHS) database used by a handful of states to check voters’ citizenship status.

The Trump Administration says they want all this data to stop ineligible voters from registering and casting a ballot. But election fraud of any type is extremely rare, in no small part because states already have checks in place to ensure that only eligible voters register, and state and federal laws (including immigration law) impose heavy penalties for illegal voting.

So what is the data grab really about? As my colleagues Izzy Gray and Sara Chimene-Weiss explained earlier this year:

There’s a common phrase in the research world: “If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything.” In short, with enough manipulation, you can make a dataset say whatever you like.

This is exactly what the Trump administration wants to do: accumulate enough voter data that it can torture this data into confessing the predetermined conclusion that, should the president’s preferred candidates lose, it will have been because of fraudulent votes from ineligible voters.

They will do this by mixing and matching the states’ voter data to other federal databases, including the expanded SAVE database, in ways that are almost certain to result in false allegations of voter fraud. For example, they will try to match the state voter data to names of alleged noncitizens in the inherently flawed SAVE database. But we know that SAVE data is often out-of-date — for instance, continuing to identify Americans as non-citizens long after they have obtained their citizenship.

But even false voter fraud allegations will serve the administration’s purposes: baselessly creating doubt and confusion about election security; disenfranchising eligible voters; and creating a false narrative to justify further election power grabs. Each lays the groundwork in service of their ultimate goal: to prevent or overturn the results of future elections that do not go the administration’s way.

The good news? Most states didn’t go along with this scheme: Only 12 states voluntarily complied with DOJ’s request for voter data.

That’s when the federal government turned the heat up on this effort. In January, at the height of Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis, then-AG Bondi attempted to leverage the violence being wrought by DHS agents to blackmail Minnesota officials into turning over their voter rolls. That effort was also unsuccessful — Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon stood strong.

But DOJ isn’t backing down — to date, DOJ has sued a total of 30 states in a quest to force them to hand over confidential voter information.

How we can resist an elections takeover attempt

I don’t say any of this to be alarmist: Even though President Trump has consolidated power in the executive branch to an unprecedented extent, the institutions of our election system can survive this assault. But it will require all of us to take action to defend them.

The ongoing efforts to thwart DOJ’s voter-data crusade illustrates how it can be done.

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First, we all — including the news media — need to tell the truth about what the administration is doing. There is no meaningful amount of fraud in our electoral system, and the voter-data grabs aren’t a serious attempt to find it. Instead, the true purpose is to confuse voters about the trustworthiness of our electoral system, kick eligible voters off the rolls, and cast doubt on election results that don’t go the administration’s way.

Second, officials need to stand up to the federal government and provide the checks and balances the framers intended. The bipartisan resistance to voter-data grabs is a model: In addition to uniform resistance from Democratic leaders, red-state officials like Utah Lt. Gov. Deirdre Henderson have vocally objected to the administration’s efforts to insert themselves into state election processes. And career civil servants who specialize in privacy-protection have resigned from government over this and other data grabs.

Third, voters need to stand up for their own rights when state officials fall down on the job. That’s why five voters from states that turned over their data to DOJ, along with Common Cause, filed suit this week to stop and undo DOJ’s efforts to create a national voter database. Plaintiffs — represented by my colleagues at Protect Democracy, along with our co-counsel at Citizens for Responsible Ethics in Washington, the American Civil Liberties Union and its DC affiliate, and Harvard’s Democracy and Rule of Law Clinic — lay out a compelling claim that our Constitutional delegation of powers over elections, as well as laws protecting individual privacy (among other provisions), bar DOJ from creating a national voter registration database.

Fourth, courts must hold the line against federal intrusion into state elections. So far, they are doing so — all of the five district courts that have ruled so far have held that the federal government lacked the right to confidential voter data.

That’s a lot of work, by a lot of people, to fend off just one of the ways the administration is weaponizing the federal government against our elections. Over the coming weeks, we’re going to dive deep into every aspect of the threat — and then, more importantly, get into how you can help. Because while it’s true that the threats aimed at our elections are greater than they’ve ever been, together we can and will prevent them from succeeding.

This is part two in our Executive Override series on threats to the 2026 election and how to combat them. You can see all editions in this series here. If you’re not subscribed, make sure to do so to get future editions in your inbox.

The investigation into Fed Chair Jerome Powell hits a dead end

The Department of Justice announced that it was dropping its investigation into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, privately acknowledging that they had no evidence Powell committed any crimes. This news comes as President Trump’s nominee, former Fed governor Kevin Warsh, vowed that monetary policy would remain “strictly independent” and that Trump never asked him to pre-commit to lower rates during his confirmation hearing. Dropping this investigation clears the way for Warsh to be confirmed as the new chair.

Because of Warsh’s nomination, though, democracy advocates should continue to monitor the independence of the Fed in the months to come. The Iran war has driven energy prices higher, pushing inflation to its fastest pace in nearly two years, which only makes the independence of the Fed more important.

See the Authoritarian Action Watch.

Last Sunday, Viktor Orbán conceded defeat. 16 years of authoritarian rule in Hungary ended with a phone call to the man who beat him.

Péter Magyar’s Tisza Party won 138 out of 199 seats — a two-thirds supermajority — on nearly 80 percent turnout, the highest in Hungary’s post-communist history. Orbán called the result “painful” but “clear.”

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What makes Sunday’s result so important is not just that the opposition won. It’s how they won — and what they did to prepare for the possibility that they wouldn’t be allowed to.

Hungary’s elections are mostly free, but not fair. Orbán’s party had redrawn every district to maximize its advantage. In 2022, Fidesz won a two-thirds supermajority with just 54 percent of the vote. The opposition needed to clear roughly a five-point structural handicap just to win a bare majority. Orbán controlled nearly all broadcast media. His allies owned hundreds of private outlets. Russian intelligence operatives were actively working to tip the scales. This all built on a long-term effort to change the rules, eliminate meaningful electoral competition, and consolidate power in ways MAGA saw as a model for what they could do here.

The Hungarian opposition didn’t respond to any of this by being quiet about it. They did the opposite. Magyar accused Orbán of “treason” for inviting Russian agents to interfere. He called the government the “Orbán mafia.” He told voters that the election was “a choice between East or West, propaganda or honest public discourse, corruption or clean public life.”

And then they prepared — openly, systematically, and relentlessly — to defend the vote.

Tisza deployed a remarkable 50,000 election monitors to vote-counting committees in polling stations across the country. In a country of 9.5 million people, that’s about one out of every 200 Hungarians. For the U.S. to do the same, per capita, it would take about 1.7 million observers.

Tisza also built its own fraud-reporting system so voters could flag irregularities in real time. Transparency International Hungary convened organizations from across the region to share best practices for detecting manipulation. And six opposition parties withdrew from the race entirely, clearing the field so the contest would be a straight two-way fight that gave Tisza a chance to overcome the system’s built-in handicaps. The Socialists said explicitly that an electoral system amounting to “legalized cheating” could only be overcome by uniting behind a single candidate.

Hungarians named the threats, they built the infrastructure to counter them, and people showed up to do their part.

It’s time for the United States to do the same.

2026 isn’t like 2020

Back in 2020, anyone paying attention could predict that the sitting president might not go quietly into the night. One might have been able to hypothesize the myriad ways the administration might try to interfere in the election, but no one knew how far they would take things.

This time around, it’s different.

As those who have been following this newsletter or read our Executive Override report know, there is no doubt that the Trump administration is preparing to use every tool in its toolbox to try to maintain its lock on power. There’s no one left inside the White House to check that impulse. And the experience of recent elections has made clear to the public the extent to which Trump will go to cling to power and the range of ways he may do so. There’s no downplaying the threat anymore.

Read our report on the 2026 elections

To be clear: None of that means Trump’s attacks on the midterms will succeed. The administration’s strategy requires inducing many collaborators to break the law, keep eligible Americans from voting, and throw out lawfully cast votes. Their transparently malicious approach may have — in tipping their hand to the American people — already doomed them from the start. But it does focus our strategy not just on careful preparation but also on loud, open defiance.

They’re not being subtle about their intentions, so we shouldn’t be subtle about them either.

Why the midterms matter so much

To appreciate the nature of the threat, it helps to understand why Donald Trump even cares about the midterms. After all, in 2018, he didn’t do much to help Republican congressional candidates politically, let alone consider breaking the law and the Constitution to try to keep them in office against the will of their voters.

Unfortunately, Trump learned from that experience.

For the first two years of his first term, the Republican-controlled Congress enabled Trump: They confirmed his nominees, funded his priorities, and ignored his corruption. But when Democrats regained the House in 2018, they reclaimed the power of oversight — and they used it. Many of the most significant abuses of his first term, such as attempting to coerce Ukraine into making up political dirt about Joe Biden, were exposed and stymied by an opposition Congress.

Turns out that, if you want to build an autocracy in America, you need a legislature that’s willing to sacrifice its own power for you to do so. That’s much more likely when your copartisans are in control. Congress should be one of the greatest bulwarks against tyranny. In 2020, that system worked as designed.

And that’s why Trump is so focused on the midterms now: If he manages to rig, overturn, or otherwise mess with the midterm elections such that he decides the next Congress, not the voters, he won’t just have protected his ability to set policy; he will have essentially removed the Constitution’s most important check on his power going forward.

That also explains why the key question this November is not just which party controls Congress, but whether the voters actually get to choose. Yes, if the president’s party retains power in Congress because that’s what the voters choose, it will bolster his efforts to cement himself in power. But Congress as an institution will still exist, and still theoretically be capable of pushing back. The status quo, in effect, will stay the same.

But if the president effectively overrides the congressional elections, picking control of Congress over the objections of the voters, then Congress will cease to be an independent branch of government.

How to explain the dangers

In the 2018, 2020, and 2022 elections, talking about threats to fair elections was a difficult balancing act. On one hand, we knew the threats were coming; on the other, the scope was uncertain and the risks of speaking too loudly were real. You don’t want to hand an authoritarian a roadmap. You don’t want to undermine responsible actors inside the system who are doing their best to hold the line. You don’t want to deter people from participating. And you don’t want to cry wolf so loudly that the public tunes you out.

None of those considerations apply anymore.

The administration isn’t working from a hidden playbook. It’s broadcasting its intentions from every available platform. The president has publicly demanded to “nationalize the voting” in states he doesn’t control. The Department of Justice (DOJ) has sued more than 20 states for refusing to hand over voter data. The FBI has raided election offices. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) — which once helped local officials defend against foreign election interference — has been gutted, with roughly 1,000 staff gone in a year.

As our Executive Override report details, this isn’t a collection of unrelated provocations. It’s a strategy — and it has three parts: deceive, disrupt, and deny.

Deceive the public by manufacturing the appearance of fraud where none exists. Use federal task forces and investigations to produce “findings” that cast doubt on election integrity. Flood the zone with so much noise that ordinary voters don’t know what to believe.

Disrupt the mechanics of voting itself. Use executive orders to try to sow chaos and mess with voter registration systems. Deploy federal agents — or threaten to deploy them — near polling places, creating the conditions for voter intimidation even if no one is formally turned away. Drive experienced election officials out of their jobs through harassment and the threat of politically motivated prosecution.

Deny the results if, despite all of the above, the voters still deliver an outcome the administration doesn’t like. Use the conspiracy theories and the manufactured “evidence” as a pretext to contest, delay, or overturn results through litigation, certification refusals, or outright defiance.

If everyone does their part, we can defeat the strategy

Still, even with all that, America’s election system has an enormous structural advantage. Elections in this country are run not by the federal government but by officials across all 50 states, more than 3,000 counties, and roughly 175,000 individual precincts. That radical decentralization, under normal circumstances, can be a headache. But under these circumstances, it’s an incredible source of strength.

No executive order can take over all of those precincts. No single DOJ investigation can intimidate every county clerk in every state. The president can tweet — or Truth — whatever he wants; he still can’t count the ballots. The Constitution makes that clear, and so far the courts have largely agreed.

Many of those advantages are things the Hungarian people did not have last week. But still, just like in Hungary, our elections need people willing to defend them.

That means state election officials who refuse to hand over voter data to corrupt fishing expeditions. It means local clerks — Republicans and Democrats alike — who follow the law even when the pressure to bend comes from the most powerful office in the world. It means state legislators who protect their states’ electoral processes rather than caving to White House demands. It means judges who continue to apply the law, as they’ve mostly done throughout this administration (with some notable exceptions). It means civil society organizations and litigators prepared to swiftly respond to abuses as soon as they happen. It means protestors prepared to take to the streets at key moments to defend their right to representation.

In short, it means all of us.

We can only be prepared if we’re honest about what’s coming. And then, together, we can Defeat the Deceive, Disrupt, Deny strategy.

Next week, we’re going to get into what we expect — starting with all the ways this election will be different from 2020. But before then, we want to hear from you. Drop in the comments or shoot us an email with what you’re most worried about or what you’re doing to protect elections where eligible voters can cast their ballots and have them counted.

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Authoritarian Action Watch updates

Trump is facing court resistance in his effort to corrupt elections

Since President Trump signed an executive order in March that purports to create federal voting lists that can be used to control who receives a mail-in ballot, the order has been challenged in court multiple times. Those challenges, when taken with the news that the administration’s attempts to consolidate state voter files are facing roadblocks in court, are a reminder that the courts still play a robust role in defending our right to vote.

Trump’s attempts to tilt our elections are far-reaching, however, and not all of them need to succeed to undermine voters’ confidence in the system. Between the mail-in executive order, the demands for state voter file data, and Trump’s declining approval rating, the administration seems to be gearing up to attack the safety of our elections on multiple fronts.

See the Authoritarian Action Watch.

This Sunday, Hungary heads to the polls for a showdown between Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, an elected strongman, and Péter Magyar, a former government insider turned opposition leader. The results will have implications not just for Hungary, but for the global fight against authoritarianism.

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On Tuesday, Vice President JD Vance flew to Budapest to campaign for Orbán. Behind the seal of the vice presidency, Vance implored Hungarians not to oust their leader for the sake of “western civilization.”

Orbán is a primary architect of the modern playbook for dismantling democracy from within. Since 2010, his ruling Fidesz party has rewritten the constitution, stacked the judiciary, gutted civil society, attacked universities, and co-opted independent media to consolidate power.

After 16 years, these power grabs have left Hungary poorer than most of its neighbors, its standards of living degraded by state-sponsored corruption. Hungary is both the model for the autocracy that Donald Trump aspires to build and the cautionary tale for what our country could look like if he succeeds.

And yet, despite his work to entrench himself in power, Orbán seems likely to lose this election.

For well over a year, public polling has consistently shown the main opposition party, Tisza, leading Fidesz. Right now, polls put Tisza 10 points up — an unprecedented lead for the opposition in the Orbán era. Reports indicate some in Trump’s orbit are already nervous about what an Orbán defeat would mean for their own political futures.

This Sunday’s election, then, is a bellwether for the United States. In the best case scenario, it may show how the voters can dislodge even entrenched authoritarian leaders. More ominously, though, it may instead preview what efforts to deny election results and cling to power could look like here.

Two outcomes to watch for.

Scenario one: The end of the Orbán era

The last truly free and fair election in Hungary was back in 2010.

Since then, Orbán and Fidesz have repeatedly tweaked election laws and doled out government favors to protect their parliamentary supermajority. The opposition and its supporters are under no illusion this weekend will be a fair contest.

But here’s the thing: Those built-in advantages can only take an unpopular leader so far.

Our contacts in Hungary describe the mood on the ground as somewhere between “intense” and “excited.” For the first time in a long time, the opposition has a real shot. Many Hungarians, especially young people, are tuning into politics for the first time — hopeful, but also clear-eyed about what the government might do next to retain its grip on power.

With Péter Magyar at the helm, Tisza has managed to break through the government’s propaganda machine and electoral chicanery. Unlike Orbán’s flailing campaign — bogged down by government corruption and a weak economy — Magyar has barnstormed the country, pulling even disillusioned Fidesz supporters into the Tisza tent. He’s refused to engage in Orbán’s divisive tit-for-tat culture wars, focusing instead on building a grassroots anti-corruption movement that has caught the government off guard and galvanized youth support. Polls show just one in five young people now back Orbán.

This momentum among the youth has sent Fidesz (ironically, a Hungarian acronym for “the Alliance of Young Democrats”) scrambling to respond. Not only are they calling in favors from Vance and Trump, but also from other global far-right figures like France’s Marine Le Pen and the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders.

As Laszlo Gendler writes in The Unpopulist:

Orbán has been reduced to pleading with parents on the campaign trail to drive home the stakes to their adult children. Fidesz is no longer in any meaningful sense an “Alliance of Young Democrats” — and hasn’t been in a long time. In fact, it has become the very political machine it was originally created to dismantle.

[Read Gendler’s whole piece: If Orbán loses Hungary’s election, it will dispel the air of invincibility around strongmen]

If polls — and Orbán’s desperation — are any indication, Magyar has a very real chance of not just winning, but of turning the page in Hungarian politics to a new era. If that happens, Hungary will join Poland and Brazil as a template for democratic revival.

For the United States, this suggests a clear pro-democracy political playbook to emulate:

1. Build a multigenerational political campaign that leverages grassroots anti-corruption energy and a genuine reform agenda.

2. Construct a broad-spectrum opposition singularly focused on voter discontent with the regime and refuse to engage in the autocrat’s culture-war narratives.

3. Unite behind a singular, charismatic leader with credibility to bridge disparate opposition factions.

Scenario two: Hungarian autocracy refuses to go quietly

There are already signs, however, that Fidesz has no plans to lose gracefully.

Last weekend, Orbán claimed that explosives were found near a pipeline carrying Russian natural gas through Serbia into Hungary, alluding to Ukraine’s alleged involvement. In response, Magyar criticized the government for fomenting a “false flag” intended to incite paranoia ahead of the election. Orbán has already deployed the military to energy facilities he baselessly claims are under Ukrainian threat, with additional domestic deployments or even an “emergency” election declaration still possible. On election day, voter intimidation, vote buying, and other irregularities are all plausible as Fidesz throws everything at the wall.

(Any of that sound familiar?)

Plus, as Americans have learned all too well in recent elections, the race isn’t likely to be over on election night.

If the results are neck-and-neck, hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots could determine the final results, and Tisza is likely to gain when those ballots are counted. But absentee ballots won’t be counted until later next week — opening a window for the government to preemptively declare victory or cry fraud, setting off a legal battle that could drag on for months.

Any protracted legal fight will only benefit the Orbán government, which wields the resources and institutional power of the state. In any event, Tisza probably needs to lead by at least 5% nationwide to win a simple parliamentary majority and overcome the government’s extreme gerrymandering. And even then, winning a narrow majority of seats would likely not be enough for Tisza to form a stable government.

Or Fidesz may attempt other ploys to hold onto power beyond what we can foresee. It’s a long time between now and May 11, when a new parliament must legally be seated (though, in the event of contested results, this new parliament might initially include only those whose elections have been finalized).

If Orbán attempts to deny and overturn a loss at the ballot box, Hungary may instead offer a preview of threats to come in our own elections.

Watch closely for: How government power and emergency declarations can be weaponized against vote counting processes; how Orbán may seek to get allies in the judiciary to disqualify opposition voters; and the role of state-sponsored disinformation about election results.

Also watch the degree to which the United States government is willing to endorse an attempt by Fidesz to steal the election. If Donald Trump and JD Vance throw their weight behind an effort to overturn Hungary’s election results, it would place the U.S. on the same side as the Kremlin and reaffirm Trump’s general antipathy to democracy — both at home and abroad.

For more on what the administration might have planned heading into our own November midterms, read our report: Executive Override: How the Trump administration plans to interfere with the 2026 elections, and what you can do about it.

Hungary’s most important lesson: Resilience

To be clear: The U.S. isn’t Hungary.

Yes, Trump and his allies will be watching Sunday’s results to see what they might be able to bring stateside, and so we should do the same. But in the United States, democracy still has several key advantages that Hungarian democracy lacks.

Here, courts and laws regularly check the executive branch. Here, our elections are run by the states, not directed by the federal government. Here, our media remains (for the most part) free and independent from the White House. Here, Donald Trump has had less than two years to entrench himself in power, not 16 like Orbán.

On Sunday, the Hungarian people face a far more daunting task than we do in the United States this November (or even in 2028). And yet they remain unbroken. That resilience may be the most important lesson as we look to Budapest as a bellwether.

Hungary has survived autocracy before.

In 2024, after Trump was re-elected, journalist Kati Martin wrote an essay in The New York Times reflecting on the hope that the United States once symbolized for her parents as journalists imprisoned in Soviet-era Budapest.

In his dank Budapest prison cell in the mid-1950s, my father imagined he heard Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony. Though no one in my family had ever set foot in the actual New World, just knowing it existed brought my father solace during his nearly two-year incarceration.

Locked up in Soviet-occupied Hungary’s notorious Fo Street fortress, my father was blessedly still unaware that his wife — my mother, a reporter for United Press International — ­occupied a nearby cell. Nor did he know that his two small children, myself and my older sister, were living with strangers paid to look after them by the American wire services, my parents’ employer. Their crime was reporting on the show trials and jailing of priests, nuns and dissidents that Stalinist satellites of the postwar era used to clamp down on dissent.

The whole essay is marvelous and sobering. Gift link here: Why I’m not giving up on American democracy.

Now it is our turn, in the United States, to look to the Hungarian people as an example. This Sunday, look to Budapest for hope and for solace. And, above all, for resilience.

A party- and candidate-centered approach to proportional representation

As any electoral system nerd knows, there’s an inherent tradeoff between systems that focus on political parties and those that focus on individual candidates. At Protect Democracy, we tend to believe that a lot of the problems in our system come from weaknesses in political parties — but it’s true most Americans are more comfortable with candidate-centric elections.

A new primer by FairVote and Protect Democracy examines one of the electoral systems that bridges the two: Party Preferential Voting.

It’s what Australia calls “above the line” voting, and it’s yet another option for jurisdictions looking for ways to significantly improve our system for translating votes into seats.

Check out the rest of Protect Democracy’s work on proportional representation here.

“On Tuesday, President Trump attacked the soul of the American military.”

Worth a read: David French’s essay on why Trump’s threatening to command the armed forces to commit crimes against humanity is devastating to the institution of the military.

The instant I read Trump’s post, my thoughts turned to a very different quote: “The soldier, be he friend or foe, is charged with the protection of the weak and unarmed. It is the very essence and reason for his being.”

Who do you think said those words? A chaplain? A pope? A woke professor who doesn’t appreciate Pete Hegseth’s constant evocation of “lethality?”

No, they come from one of America’s fiercest warriors, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, speaking after the end of World War II, during the military tribunal he organized to hold Japanese leaders accountable for their own horrific war crimes, including the sack of Manila in 1945.

…

Trump’s post was a declaration by an American president that he intended to commit war crimes so grave that they could, if fully carried out, constitute a crime against humanity. As terrible as that is, Trump’s putative orders also threatened to break the moral backbone of the American military and trigger one of the most serious constitutional crises in American history.

Read the whole thing.

Authoritarian Action Watch updates

The president’s threat to commit war crimes in Iran represents an aggrandizement of his own authority, and is testing the bounds of civil-military relations. Alongside his move to circumvent Congress in paying DHS employees, and Secretary Hegseth’s interference with military appointments, this is a perilous moment for the balance of power in the federal government.

See the Authoritarian Action Watch.

In February, Ansley Skipper and Ben Berwick wrote about a “three-headed monster heading for our elections.”

The combined forces of the Justice Department, Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) are shaping up to be the Trump administration’s election subversion Chimera (that’s the fire-breathing lion-snake-goat hybrid creature from Greek mythology) in 2026.

Ben and Ansley’s argument was, essentially, those three agencies represent the apex of the administration’s powers over law, violence, and propaganda. And so they form a powerful wedge that can — and will — be directed at the midterms.

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In the two months since, two of the three heads of those agencies have been fired.

Kristi Noem was ousted from Homeland Security on March 5 and Pam Bondi was fired as Attorney General effective yesterday. The third head, Tulsi Gabbard at ODNI, is on the rocks as Trump polls his advisors on replacing her, The Guardian reports.

There are three ways to read this turnover in the Chimera triumvirate:

1. This is a positive development because it shows how badly Donald Trump’s efforts to entrench himself in power are floundering. In desperation, he is firing the people who were tasked with punishing his perceived enemies and protecting his party from future accountability at the ballot box.

2. This is a dangerous development because the president will now hand the Chimera to new leaders even more willing to abuse power, people like Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche who was Trump’s personal lawyer and point person for retaliatory prosecutions.

3. This is a sideshow — it matters much less who is in charge of the Chimera than whether our system can stop it. Bondi and Noem’s shortcomings weren’t that they were insufficiently zealous (by all accounts, both were willing to go to whatever lengths to please the White House). They came up short because the legal system and the American people successfully pushed back on their abuse. None of that changes with new leadership who will now face the same substantial obstacles.

What does it mean when an autocrat fires his enforcers?

As usual, it’s hard to know if Trump’s setbacks are truly victories for democracy.

Yes, it’s good news that Noem and Bondi (and potentially Gabbard next) failed in the task the president set out for them: to bring vengeance to his enemies.

But Bondi and Noem were failing to translate the weaponization of their departments into the revenge Trump was hoping for. That’s not a bad thing. And now they’re gone. If the White House is able to install new leadership even more willing to break the law, then they may be able to get their entrenchment agenda back on track.

Or it may not matter either way. The question of who leads the Chimera may be immaterial to whether it succeeds.

When the authoritarian fires his enforcers, should we celebrate? Should we be worried? Should we even care?

The truth is: It’s kind of all three. All of those interpretations are true. Bondi’s firing, like Noem’s before her, is a clear indicator that authoritarianism is losing. At the same time, new leadership may find new ways to succeed. And most of all, the functionaries in charge of the effort to undermine elections aren’t as important as what the rest of our democracy does in response.1

Bondi and Noem didn’t simply fail. They were defeated by a legal and political system that refused to allow them to politicize justice, weaponize law enforcement, and corrupt elections. The pushback is working! But just as there is no superhuman autocratic henchman who can magically entrench the president in power through force of will, there’s also no silver bullet to prevent that entrenchment from happening.

All of us, collectively, need to be even more on guard to protect the election from the three-headed Chimera — especially now that it’s going to have new leaders.

Read more: Executive Override: How the Trump administration plans to interfere with the 2026 elections, and what you can do about it

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How to protect the midterms from the Chimera

So how do we stop the new-look DOJ, DHS, and maybe ODNI (as well as the rest of the federal government) from successfully meddling in the midterms?

Same strategy as before. Everyone in the United States who believes in free and fair elections needs to be committed to these four things.

First, fight the Chimera at every step. Legal, political, communications, and protest strategies need to push back against every abuse. (For instance, as Barb McQuade writes, the Senate now gets a do-over confirming an Attorney General who will uphold the rule of law.)

Second, make the midterm elections the loudest celebration of democracy in American history. Federal agencies like DOJ, DHS, and ODNI can only corrupt the election on the margins; they’re likely powerless against overwhelming turnout.

Third, defend the integrity of the results. Together, we can make them unquestionable and widely accepted.

Fourth, enforce a peaceful transfer of power from this Congress to the next one.

For more recommendations on how different groups — from local officials to civil society to citizens and voters — can do all those things, read Executive Override, our 2026 election report.

Push back against DOJ overreach, today

The Department of Justice published a proposed rule that would allow the Attorney General to intercept and indefinitely delay state bar investigations of current and former DOJ attorneys. This would effectively place an entire class of government lawyers above the disciplinary framework that governs every other member of the bar.

Some of our partners have developed a template for anyone interested in submitting their own public comment opposing this dangerous proposed rule. (Also see: Protect Democracy’s guidance on what makes an effective public comment.)

Individual, personalized comments carry significant legal weight — agencies must respond to every substantive comment, and the record created now will shape any future litigation. The deadline to submit comments is April 6, 2026.

Submit a comment

Protect Democracy sues DHS over warrantless home entry memo

One example of fighting the Chimera: Yesterday, Protect Democracy and partners sued DHS — on behalf of immigrants and U.S. citizens in Minnesota whose homes were searched — over a secret internal memo directing ICE agents to enter and search homes without a warrant.

Read about the lawsuit in The New York Times here and read our statement here.

Said Kristy Parker in the Times:

The Constitution creates a system where we don’t give law enforcement officers — just because they wear badges — unbridled power to seize people on the street or go in their houses… They do have power when they have proper cause to do it, but the Constitution requires them to go outside of the executive branch to another branch of government to have their case assessed, so that there’s some sort of reasoned, neutral inquiry.

This constitutional requirement is especially robust when it comes to the government entering people’s homes. Doing so has long required government agents to get a judicial warrant. That’s not what DHS has been doing. And so our clients are suing.

Is it safe to use Signal?

Sharing information is key to collective action, and in the modern fight against authoritarianism, that usually means communicating online.

Signal has become a critical messaging platform for protesters in Minneapolis and other coalitions across the country. Following reports of groups being infiltrated, though, it’s also fair to wonder whether Signal is safe to use.

In a new piece for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Adam Goldstein shares guidance on whether Signal is a safe tool. Thankfully, Signal is quite safe, even if it’s not foolproof. As he puts it:

Don’t commit crimes, because you’ll get caught. That’s got nothing to do with Signal though. Signal’s fine.

Read the full piece →

For more on how coalitions can operate safely and securely, read Protect Democracy’s guide →

A time of Major Questions

This week, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case that could fundamentally change how citizenship works in the United States. Regardless of the outcome, it’s a startling reminder both of how much power the Court claims to wield and of the fragility of the Court’s legitimacy as it weighs how much to empower an autocratic White House.

The Court does not have to be this way. This week, friend of Protect Democracy Jesse Wegman (a former member of the New York Times editorial board) launched a new Substack with the Brennan Center all about the Supreme Court. Major Questions will analyze everything from major decisions to ways reformers can reestablish the Supreme Court’s independent role in our democracy (as well as its standing with the American public). It’s immediately a must-read for me.

Subscribe to Major Questions.

How you can help:

Protect Democracy advisor Rachel Kleinfeld has a wonderful new piece on the concrete way every American can fight for democracy between elections. The big takeaway? It’s all about eroding institutional support for authoritarianism:

The number one thing regular people can do is figure out where they are in relation to a pillar of support [for authoritarianism] — think businesses, professions, religious groups, or community organizations and start doing things that might persuade those people or organizations to step away.

As Kleinfeld writes, this is an exercise in empathy, and often a difficult one. But it’s also among the most effective ways to break up authoritarian consolidation.

Read the full piece →

Explore Protect Democracy’s database of ways to help →

The White House is pressuring Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, the omnibus voter suppression bill that aims to swing the midterms by mass-disenfranchising voters.

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To say Trump is obsessed with this bill is perhaps an understatement. Just this week, the White House has fomented airport chaos by blocking TSA funding as leverage to try to jam the SAVE America Act through, told senators to skip Easter to pass it “for Jesus,” and argued “we won’t have a Country any longer” if it fails. (All while voting by mail himself in Tuesday’s special elections in Florida.)

The SAVE America Act is going to fail. It doesn’t have anywhere close to 60 votes to clear the filibuster. So why is the president pushing so hard?

Trump is obsessed because, at its core, the SAVE America Act is not just an election subversion strategy in itself. It is also part of a pretext for a much broader strategy to undermine the midterms.

Today, Protect Democracy released Executive Override, a new publication documenting how the Trump administration is deploying the full machinery of the federal government against the 2026 midterm elections. The report describes a coordinated strategy already underway to spread disinformation and conspiracy theories; tilt the electoral playing field and manipulate election outcomes; and, if necessary, try to overturn unfavorable results.

Read the report

This strategy does not require Congress to pass any laws. In fact, the central goal is for the White House to override Congress and states. To do so, the administration plans to use the lies promoted by the SAVE America Act: that elections are rife with fraud and that harsh anti-voter measures by the federal government are a necessary response. As my colleague Alexandra Chandler puts it:

“You didn’t pass the legislation that would have solved this fake problem, and therefore the election results are not valid.”

In other words, Trump is pushing the SAVE America Act not just on a distant hope of disenfranchising some voters. He is, much more immediately, hoping to use its failure to override the electoral process entirely.

The three prongs of the White House’s Executive Override strategy

Over the coming months, we should expect the federal government to attack the midterms in a variety of ways. It’s a three-part plan to try to ensure that the president effectively picks the next Congress, not the voters.

First, deceive: The administration has institutionalized election denialism as official federal policy, using law enforcement and intelligence powers to manufacture the appearance of fraud — including a Jan. 2026 FBI raid on a Fulton County, Georgia election office and the seizure of voting machines in Puerto Rico — while dismantling the agencies that protect elections from real threats.

Second, disrupt: Federal investigative and prosecutorial power is being used to target political opponents, civil society organizations, and nonpartisan election officials. The administration has also created conditions for voter intimidation through the possibility of deployment of ICE agents near polling locations and the use of force against protesters.

Third, if necessary, deny: The administration is positioning itself to contest, delay, or overturn results it doesn’t like through post-election law enforcement action, pressure on certification officials, bad-faith litigation, and potential defiance of court orders.

We don’t know exactly how this strategy will manifest in the months ahead (I suspect Trump and his allies don’t either — they’re going to improvise a lot) but just for example, here are three news stories just from this week that clearly fit into the plan:

• In California, one of the president’s allies — a sheriff who just so happens to be running for governor — seized more than 650,000 ballots from last year’s redistricting election based on an “audit” from a group of citizens. (Not clear yet if the federal government is involved, but it’s a textbook example of casting doubt on elections.)

• In Washington, D.C., Trump’s allies on the Supreme Court expressed extreme skepticism towards mail-in voting, hinting at unfounded conspiracy theories about security and integrity.

• In Oklahoma, the state government handed over its voter rolls — including sensitive personal information — to the DOJ as part of the administration’s demands for data on all voters.

That’s just recent days. Expect stories like this every week between now and when the next Congress is sworn in next January. All of them will fit into this overarching strategy — and they aim at the same goal: overturning elections if the president’s allies lose.

What can we all do about it?

The good news is that this strategy, while genuinely dangerous, faces enormous obstacles. And we are far from powerless.

The Executive Override report identifies five major roadblocks standing in the administration’s way. These are the pillars of American democracy that make it much harder to corrupt and steal legislative elections in the United States than it was in Russia, Hungary, or Venezuela.

None of them are invincible — but together, they’re formidable.

Our elections are decentralized. There is no federal election system. Elections are run entirely at the state and local level, with very little role for the federal government. That means Trump and his allies aren’t seizing control of the machinery from the inside. Even from the White House, they’re attacking it from the outside-in. That’s a much harder thing to do. Still, state and local election officials need to have a clear understanding of the likely threats before the pressure arrives, making concrete plans for how to respond when it does, and building solidarity with counterparts across their states and communities so that no one faces that pressure alone. [Read more here →]

Civil society is ready. Far more so than even in 2020, a wide range of nonpartisan organizations, civic groups, and private sector leaders are prepared to defend free and fair elections. The pro-democracy coalition is bigger and more organized than it has ever been — but it only works if it stays active. All of us need to speak out, organize, and act, using whatever credibility and reach we have to protect civic participation and make clear that attacks on our elections will not go unanswered. And yes: Be prepared to attend large protests if a critical moment demands it. [Read more here →]

The justice system remains a real check — for now. Courts have been one of the most effective counterweights to the administration’s power grabs, and that resilience extends to election law. But “fairly resilient” is not the same as invulnerable, and the legal community as a whole needs to be ready — from grand jurors who scrutinize the evidence to magistrates who decline to rubber-stamp deficient warrants to judges who apply the law rigorously when election subversion moves fast. The judiciary doesn’t defend itself. The legal profession has to defend it. [Read more here →]

The media can connect the dots. Independent journalism — including social and new media — remains capable of covering this story honestly. That matters enormously. The administration’s strategy depends on individual abuses of power being seen as isolated incidents rather than parts of a coordinated whole. Journalists, influencers, and creators need to be prepared to connect those dots: establishing clear protocols for covering government disinformation, linking specific actions to the broader strategy, and shedding light, not spreading fear. [Read more here →]

And finally: We the People. At its core, the Executive Override strategy seeks to rob all of us of our ability to elect our own legislators. That is not something the vast majority of Americans are going to accept quietly.

But we’re going to have to show up. Counter disinformation. Vote. Help others vote. Strengthen community connections. Volunteer as poll workers. Be prepared to mobilize peacefully if a critical moment demands it. (If you want practice, the next No Kings protest is this Saturday.)

Democracy only survives if we’re active participants in it — that’s always been true, and it’s never been more urgent than right now.

Read the report

Want to learn more? Join us on March 31st at 1 pm ET / 10 AM PT to dive deeper into this critical analysis and how we prevail together

Protect Democracy’s acting chief impact officer Ben Berwick and All Voting is Local co-founder and chief executive officer Hannah Fried will dig in to the report, the systems and strategies in place in key races across the country, and why we must face these threats together.

Register here

ICE is not legally allowed to backfill TSA

The administration claims to have found an end-run around the partial government shutdown: sending ICE agents to airports to do crowd control.

This is, of course, as stupid as it sounds (ICE agents have no training on airport security). But just as importantly, it’s against the law. Congress didn’t fund ICE to do airport security — and unlawful spending abuses like these set a dangerous precedent for the future.

Protect Democracy has a new explainer of why: DHS funding is no blank check — and doesn’t permit ICE to backfill TSA

The use of ICE for crowd control at airports — a role that has nothing to do with its authorized immigration enforcement mission — is an alarming and drastic repurposing of federal agents to create a standing security force seemingly deployed at the whim of the President.

The Constitution recognizes the danger of having a “standing army” answerable only to the executive and unaccountable to the Congress. That’s why it limits funding for the Army to no more than two years. While this limit has been largely ignored for the last century, recent questions have been raised about whether Congress should once again take up this important check against executive branch abuses of authority.

President Trump has already shown his eagerness to deploy uniformed military forces for domestic policing operations. Now that those efforts have largely been rejected by courts, it is troubling to see him turn to ICE — newly equipped with military-grade equipment — as an all-purpose civilian law enforcement force.

Read the whole thing →

FCC Chair Brendan Carr has ordered the American media to rally around the flag of war.

Citing Donald Trump’s anger over Iran War media coverage, Carr threatened to revoke broadcast licenses unless broadcasters “correct course before their license renewals come up.” He did not specify which outlets the FCC is threatening, directing his aim at the media generally.

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This threat is as outrageous — and un-American — as it sounds. So much so that Republican former FCC commissioners, chairs, and senior staff called on Congress to step in and stop Carr’s abuses. Here is the full statement from former FCC Chairs Mark Fowler (a Reagan appointee) and Alfred Sikes (an H.W. Bush appointee), and former FCC Commissioner Rachelle Chong (a Clinton appointee), along with former FCC Chief of Staff Jerald Fritz:

While this weekend’s threats by Chair Carr weren’t his first, they represent a notable escalation of attacks against news media, which are especially concerning in an election year.

In a democracy, the government does not get to decide what is news and how to cover it. Chairman Carr knows better. In 2019 he rejected the idea that the FCC could police speech in the name of the “public interest.” The Constitution as well as the Communications Act forbid it. We filed a formal petition last fall with the FCC explaining why the First Amendment forbids the use of the news distortion policy — or any FCC power for that matter — to correct alleged bias in the news. Chairman Carr has failed to take any action on that petition. Instead he has continued his unconstitutional pattern of threatening to strip broadcast licenses from stations whose news outlets report news in a way he or the President doesn’t like.

Because Chairman Carr has shown he is uninterested in following the Constitution, Congress should act. Congress should investigate the FCC’s interactions with media companies and legislate to remove or narrow the regulatory powers Carr is abusing — including the oft-cited news distortion policy. The recent oversight hearings held by the Senate Commerce Committee and the House Energy and Commerce Committee were good starts. But there is much more to be investigated, including the details of how the Chairman’s abusive regulatory coercion has affected media companies seeking to merge. Or, as the Chairman has shown himself to be constitutionally unfit to hold the office, Congress could consider more serious remedies. It is past time to stand up to this intimidation. The future of free speech and the free press in this country are at risk.

The emphasis is mine, but the indignation is clearly theirs.

It’s hard to overstate how far over the line of the First Amendment you have to be before former FCC chairs and commissioners, traditionally some of the most careful and staid voices in Washington, start calling you “constitutionally unfit to hold the office.”

They also aren’t the only Republicans criticizing Carr. Conservatives like Sen. Ron Johnson and even Marjorie Taylor Greene are also raising alarm, including with worries about the censorship precedent he could be setting for future administrations.

If anything, though, Carr’s behavior is even more dangerous than it looks.

Carr and Trump aren’t just aiming for censorship (although they are hoping for that too); they’re also trying to use the threat of censorship to destroy the robust tradition of independent, fact-based American journalism altogether.

Direct censorship through the FCC is extremely difficult

If you go to the FCC’s website, you’ll find a helpful explainer page (which, unlike other FCC pages, does not appear to have been tampered with under the current administration).

On that page, the FCC itself is clear: “The FCC is barred by law from trying to prevent the broadcast of any point of view.”

What Brendan Carr is doing is illegal. It is illegal for the FCC to even threaten to use its regulatory power to coerce or censor speech.

Specifically, the Communications Act — as the FCC’s web explainer helpfully cites — states that:

[Nothing in the law] shall be understood or construed to give the Commission the power of censorship over the [broadcast] communications or signals transmitted by any [broadcast] station, and no regulation or condition shall be promulgated or fixed by the Commission which shall interfere with the right of free speech by means of [over-the-air] broadcast communication.

If Carr were to follow through on his threats and attempt to strip licenses for disfavored coverage, there are many technical, legal, and practical barriers.1 But most of them boil down to this: Such transparent censorship would almost certainly be reversed by the courts. Immediately.

Here’s the Supreme Court’s position as of 2024, as summarized by Justice Sonia Sotomayor in Moody v. NetChoice, LLC:

[O]n the spectrum of dangers to free expression, there are few greater than allowing the government to change the speech of private actors to achieve its own conception of speech nirvana.

Read more: The FCC’s News Distortion Policy should be rescinded.

So why is Carr threatening censorship when doing so is so plainly illegal?

The broader goals are intimidation, self-censorship, and a drift towards media capture

Like anyone who makes similar threats, Carr clearly hopes he will never have to try to follow through.

Instead, the goal is to get media outlets to engage in what’s called “anticipatory obedience” — to obey in advance.

This is a vicious cycle. The more editors, producers, executives, and owners feel threatened by administration officials, the more they will be inclined to check their own coverage.

Brendan Carr doesn’t just want to censor specific outlets or stories. He wants every outlet and every journalist to worry about how the FCC is going to react to every word they write or say. He wants to be in the back of every reporter’s head. To have them temper every headline just to make it “more defensible.” To hold back on controversial stories for more sourcing. To scrap some altogether. To promote pro-administration voices in the name of “balance.”

To think first of politics, not of truth.

The more outlets check their coverage, the more the administration becomes unchecked. And the greater its power to threaten others.

On and on the cycle spins. Over time, as the media drifts from bias to outright capture, eventually the once-free press looks anything but.

As my colleague Rachel Goodman told a congressional spotlight hearing last month:

[The ultimate goal is the] “Hungary model” of media capture, in which a nominally independent media regulator, who in fact is completely aligned with the president or the ruling party, exerts financial and administrative pressure on independent media in an effort to destabilize their business and, ultimately, eliminate the independent media company. In Hungary, when Fidesz achieved its supermajority in 2010, one of the first laws it passed was a media law, justified as a needed “corrective” to left wing bias in the press. Like the FCC, Hungary’s new media authority is authorized to revoke broadcasting licenses and approve or prohibit mergers, and it has used these powers to penalize media critical of the government and encourage the expansion and consolidation of pro-government media. The Hungary model has been deployed in de-democratizing societies around the world; when Poland’s Law and Justice party held the government from 2015 to 2023, it similarly deployed regulatory power to weaken critical media through antitrust investigations, licensing decisions, and retroactive taxation.

We’re already seeing what this looks like at CBS, at the Washington Post, at the Los Angeles Times. CNN may be next if Trump-friendly Paramount succeeds in buying Warner Bros. Discovery. (Note: Carr has openly praised the deal and pledged to swiftly approve it; state regulators have a different view.)

Elections are the target — but remember: Carr’s power is illusory

All of this, like everything else the administration does, should be understood as aimed squarely at future elections.

Importantly, the goal is not just to distort the news that voters are hearing before elections so that they are more inclined to vote for the president’s political allies (although it certainly is that too). The scarier implication is what a captured media could mean if and when the autocratic faction attempts to undermine or overturn future election results.

Instead of headlines like these?

Carr and others in the administration would want you to instead see ones like this.

Here is the good news: The United States is not Hungary. Brendan Carr’s power may be easily abused, but — at least when it comes to censorship — it is also largely illusory. Every single outlet can, indeed they must, respond to Carr’s threats with something that echoes that statement at the top from former FCC leaders:

That the FCC has absolutely no business censoring speech.

That Carr’s abusive threats make him constitutionally unfit for the office he holds.

And that the free press in this country will continue to put facts above politics long after Carr is gone from the FCC.

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The SAVE America Act strategy, explained

This week, the Senate has been ensnared by Trump’s efforts to ram through the SAVE America Act, a Frankenstein’s monster of deliberate voter suppression and disenfranchisement measures that would wreak havoc on America’s elections process. It would, among other things, require a passport or birth certificate to register to vote, impose highly restrictive ID requirements on in-person and mail voting, target elections officials with steep criminal penalties, and potentially disenfranchise the 69 million married women who have changed their last names.

The law is and has always been doomed to failure. So what’s the big deal?

The Atlantic’s Russell Berman and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez explain (with an assist from my colleague Alexandra):

The most pressing question about the SAVE America Act is not whether it’s going to pass, but why Trump and his allies are so determined to see the Senate put up a bill that’s doomed to fail…

Voting-rights advocates have a theory. “It’s a pretext for the next authoritarian escalation,” Alexandra Chandler, who oversees the elections team at the advocacy group Protect Democracy, told us. Chandler and others we interviewed see the Senate’s high-profile debate as one episode in a broad, sustained, coordinated effort by the White House to seed doubt in American elections ahead of what Republicans believe could be steep losses this November. This, she said, would follow a pattern that Trump set both before and after his 2020 loss: before the election, manufacture a crisis upon which he can then blame defeat. “When his allies lose elections, it’s a talking point,” Chandler said: “You didn’t pass the legislation that would have solved this fake problem, and therefore the election results are not valid.”

The whole article is a must-read: A serious Senate debate about an unserious bill (gift link)

What else we’re tracking:

• “What if we make the House bigger?” Highly recommend this conversation on Highway to Hill with Aubrey Wilson and Anne Meeker of POPVOX Foundation on House expansion and proportional representation in practice.

• Sweden’s Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute, one of the most prestigious academic institutions studying democracy, has an alarming new report on the United States: “Our data on the USA goes back to 1789. What we’re seeing now is the most severe magnitude of democratic backsliding ever in the country.”

• Similarly, Freedom House is out with their Freedom in the World 2026 report. Global freedom declined for the 25th straight year (the U.S. is now less free than Poland, Mongolia, and Romania). Still, they write, “even in this especially challenging moment, there are reasons for optimism.”

• Appointing JAGs to prosecute regular civilian cases undermines military and violates law — Admiral James McPherson and Protect Democracy’s Zach West explain the troubling new trend for Law.com.

• I highly recommend this essay from Protect Democracy advisor Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic on Donald Trump’s increasingly irrational foreign policy: Everyone but Trump understands what he’s done.

On January 23, Colleen Fagan stood in a parking lot in Maine and watched federal agents conduct an immigration operation. Fagan, who would tell you with great pride that she is a “lifelong Mainer,” didn’t interfere. She didn’t block anyone. She recorded what she saw — something Americans have an unambiguous constitutional right to do.

A masked man started recording her back. She asked why.

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“Cause we have a nice little database,” he sneered. “And now you’re considered a domestic terrorist.”

Two days earlier, Elinor Hilton was observing ICE agents outside of a Home Depot when agents similarly started filming her.

“He said ‘We’re putting you on a domestic terrorist watch list, and if you keep coming to things like this, we’re going to come to your house later and arrest you,’” Hilton recounted in an interview.

Protect Democracy is suing on behalf of Hilton, Fagan, and other Mainers who have faced similar intimidation attempts. (Read more: Hilton v. Noem et al.)

The same tactics have also been documented in Oregon and Minnesota. Federal agents in multiple cities have surveilled and intimidated community members who observed immigration enforcement operations. The coordination is too consistent to be coincidental.

We don’t know exactly how and to what extent the Trump administration is already surveilling American citizens as the president seeks to intimidate and retaliate against critics. We do, however, know that many in our government are hell-bent on developing unprecedented tools, systems, and databases to keep watch on those they see as “enemies from within.”

The surveillance we’re already seeing in places like Maine may just be the beginning.

If the president gets his way in the months ahead — especially in his administration’s ongoing campaign to control the AI industry — we could be entering a new and Orwellian era for domestic surveillance.

The Anthropic fight is over the future of surveillance and democracy

Earlier this week, AI company Anthropic filed suit against the Defense Department for designating the company a security threat.

On the surface, the dispute concerns the Trump administration’s attempt to essentially take over the company “by force and coerce them into maintaining a product for uses they fundamentally oppose,” as Ian Bassin and Nicole Schneidman explained last week: A steel mill the president might not be able to seize.

In a larger sense, though, this fight is over the future of artificial intelligence in our democracy. The Defense Department attempted to force Anthropic to provide AI technology without agreeing that it would not use the technology for two use cases:

• Mass domestic surveillance.

• Lethal autonomous weapons without a human operator.

Anthropic refused to provide its technology without the Defense Department agreeing to these limitations. And so the federal government is attempting, in retaliation, to destroy Anthropic.

Shortly after Anthropic filed their lawsuit, a group of 37 AI scientists and researchers at competitors OpenAI and Google — including Jeff Dean, the chief scientist of Google’s AI division — filed an amicus brief supporting Anthropic’s position. (Disclosure: My colleagues at Protect Democracy are counsel for the brief.)

Remember, these are people who work for Anthropic’s competitors in the most intense corporate arms race in modern history. And they stood up to defend Anthropic and the red lines that it has drawn against the federal government.

The entire brief is worth your time, but I especially recommend the section on surveillance. Here are the most important parts:

At its core, AI-enabled mass surveillance means the ability to monitor, analyze, and act on the behavior of an entire population continuously and in real time. The devices and data streams required to do this already exist. As of 2018, there were approximately 70 million surveillance cameras operating in the United States across airports, subway stations, parking lots, storefronts, and street corners. Every smartphone continuously broadcasts location data to carriers and dozens of applications. Credit and debit cards generate a timestamped record of nearly every commercial transaction Americans make. Social media platforms log not just what people post, but what they read, how long they browse, and what they posted before deleting it. Employers, insurers, and data brokers have assembled behavioral profiles on most American adults that are already, in many cases, available for government purchase without a warrant. What does not yet exist is the AI layer that transforms this sprawling, fragmented data landscape into a unified, real-time surveillance apparatus. Today, these streams are siloed, inconsistent, and require significant human effort to connect. From our vantage point at frontier AI labs, we understand that an AI system used for mass surveillance could dissolve those silos, correlating face recognition data with location history, transaction records, social graphs, and behavioral patterns across hundreds of millions of people simultaneously.

The mere existence of such a capability in government hands — even if never activated against a specific individual — changes the character of public life in a democracy. Behavioral scientists and legal scholars have long documented what is sometimes called the “panopticon effect”: when people believe they may be observed, they modify their behavior as if they are always being observed, regardless of whether anyone is actually watching. The journalist thinks twice before calling a source inside the military, knowing the call could be logged and crossreferenced. The activist softens her public messaging, calculating that visibility now carries risk it didn’t carry before. The academic researcher avoids certain search terms — not because the research is wrong, but because she doesn’t want to surface in a database. None of these people have been targeted. None have been punished. But their behavior has already been constrained, and with it the democratic functions they serve — a free press, political organizing, open intellectual inquiry — have been quietly degraded. These chilling effects require no abuse, only the awareness that the capability exists.

History offers ample warning. The FBI’s COINTELPRO program, which ran from 1956 to 1971 and was exposed years later, demonstrated how domestic intelligence powers justified by security concerns were systematically turned against civil rights leaders, journalists, and political dissidents. The program did not merely surveil its targets. It fabricated evidence, sent anonymous letters designed to destroy marriages and careers, tipped off employers, and worked to discredit Martin Luther King, Jr. after he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. It operated for fifteen years before Congress learned of its existence. AI does not merely replicate those dangers — it multiplies them by orders of magnitude, automating at national scale what previously required hundreds of human operatives.

Further enhancing the risk terrain for AI’s deployment in this context, the Pentagon operates under a legal framework oriented toward external threats and warfighting, not domestic civil life. The Posse Comitatus Act, passed in 1878 in direct response to the use of federal troops to police American civilians during Reconstruction, reflects a constitutional tradition of keeping military power categorically separate from domestic governance.6 When the Pentagon acts domestically, it is operating in legal territory it was not designed for, with oversight structures that were not built to catch domestic abuses. That is in part why the bulk data collection programs by the Pentagon’s own National Security Agency (NSA), revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013, were so shocking and produced measurable chilling effects on lawful speech and inquiry. A study published in the Berkeley Technology Law Journal found statistically significant drops in traffic to Wikipedia articles on terrorism-related topics following the Snowden revelations, likely as ordinary people adjusted their online behavior in response to awareness that their searches were potentially being monitored.

The harms from building this infrastructure are not easily undone, as we understand in our field. Data collected on a population does not expire. A database of location records, behavioral profiles, and social graphs built today will still exist years from now, accessible to whoever controls it under whatever political conditions prevail then. That data would feed into an AI-powered surveillance infrastructure that, once constructed, tends to expand rather than contract. Agencies find new uses for existing capabilities, authorities get quietly reinterpreted, and the political cost of dismantling something already built is almost always higher than the cost of letting it continue and grow.
…

We do not suggest that the Defendants intend to misuse such capabilities. We suggest that the question of intent is the wrong question. Democratic governance does not rest on the good intentions of those in power. It rests on structural constraints that make abuse difficult regardless of intent. AI-enabled mass domestic surveillance, deployed without transparent legal constraints and independent oversight, removes those structural protections in ways that no amount of good faith can replace.

[Read the whole brief.]

Six ways to keep the genie of AI-powered mass surveillance in the bottle

Despite what the masked agent told Colleen Fagan, Trump has probably not yet managed to weaponize domestic surveillance to its maximum potential.

The main legal safeguards that protect you from surveillance — the Fourth Amendment, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the Privacy Act — are all still relatively intact. But none of these were designed with the immense surveillance capabilities of AI in mind.

Here are six strategies that can help ensure further dangerous lines do not get crossed:

First, legal vigilance — Courts and litigators must firmly stand up for First and Fourth Amendment rights, not just in cases like these where surveillance is directly at issue, but across all of the federal government’s ongoing attempts to intimidate and retaliate against critics. And the courts must uphold the industry guardrails that shore up vulnerabilities in the law when it comes to constraining AI-powered surveillance capabilities. Plus, the government’s targets — like Colleen Fagan and Elinor Hilton, like Anthropic — must refuse to be intimidated and instead have the courage to take their government to court to stand up for their own rights, including in the case of private companies’ right to self-imposed guardrails that on the technology they are developing.

The Temporary Restraining Order hearing for Hilton v. Noem et al., the Maine ICE lawsuit, is scheduled for March 16. Read the full complaint and motion here.

Anthropic v. U.S. Department of War et al. will likely be heard in the coming weeks.

Second, solidarity and collective action — As with Anthropic, the Trump administration will continue to use a divide-and-conquer strategy to build surveillance capacity. Instead of targeting everyone at once, they will continue to pick out individual targets — whether it’s a company or a person — and try to intimidate them.

When someone is targeted, either by intimidation or surveillance, all of us must rush to their defense.

That’s exactly what the senior researchers at OpenAI and Google did when their competitors came under attack. We must all be ready to do the same.

Third, democratic oversight — While courts can protect individuals from the effects of surveillance and intimidation, our democratically elected representatives are the ones who must provide oversight and accountability to ensure that the federal government is staying within the law.

Last week, an impressive list of 35 national security, business, civil society, and technology leaders wrote to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees urging them to uphold their oversight responsibilities as well as to “establish clear statutory policy governing the use of artificial intelligence” on autonomous weapons and surveillance.

Until Congress acts, our freedoms will never be safe. Read their whole letter here.

Fourth, security — If you’re someone that the Trump administration might consider to be a political enemy (and really, even if you’re not), now is the time to review your digital and information security practices. How easy would it be for a malicious government actor to get their hands on your private information?

For tips on how to keep your digital house in order, I recommend Protect Democracy’s new operational security best practices (this document is for coalitions specifically, but it’s useful for everyone).

Fifth, data protections — Surveillance is only as good as the data it has access to, and data access breaches can be catastrophic (for instance, the former DOGE-er who allegedly stole Social Security info on a thumb drive to take to his next job). By focusing on data weak points, we can protect against some of the worst abuses.

Last month, Nicole Schneidman and Edison Forman wrote about how to weaken ICE’s surveillance apparatus by protecting DMV data and interrogating companies that share automated license plate recognition (ALPR) data with ICE.

Read more: When ICE’s surveillance machine comes for Americans.

Sixth, public outcry — All of the above are important and effective, but they pale in comparison to the effect of widespread public outcry. If the American people firmly and loudly reject mass government surveillance, if they protest and confront their elected officials and even vote them out if necessary, then I feel confident that we will never have to live under mass domestic surveillance regime.

But if we shrug our shoulders, perhaps thinking there’s nothing we can do? Then I’m not so sure.

Did that video at the top of the agent talking about a “nice little database” of domestic terrorists make you angry?

If so — don’t keep it to yourself.

A week ago, the president unilaterally launched a full-scale war to kill Iran’s leadership and overturn the Iranian regime.

Our country’s founders would be horrified. The Constitution was designed to prevent an unchecked, imperial leader from dragging the country to war on a whim. Congress was supposed to share warmaking powers with the president to prevent exactly this scenario. (Read about why: The founders gave the first branch war powers for a reason.)

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Our constitutional system of checks and balances over warmaking is functionally dead. With Congress abdicating on Iran, the president is unbound and acting like it. Donald Trump wants you to believe he is already an imperial ruler able to shape the world to his whim.

So are we — and our democracy — already screwed?

No.

The president’s projection of strength, his bravado in starting this war, is not just hubris. It is an illusion. In truth, this administration is currently weaker than it has ever been. And many of the most critical guardrails in our democracy — especially those around elections — are still (relatively) intact. Instead of the hard work to continue consolidating power, Trump instead just gambled his presidency on a quagmire in the Middle East.

Meanwhile, the authoritarian project, which had been stalling since last summer, is suddenly facing the most pronounced string of losses yet (for my whole list, read to the end).

We are still so far from safety. It’s still going to take all of us to ensure that democracy endures over the next three years. But, big picture, authoritarianism is losing.

The spectrum of hard and soft guardrails

How can Trump be so unchecked abroad and still not have consolidated autocratic power at home? It’s because not all limits on presidential power are the same.

Our democracy, like any democracy, has a whole bunch of guardrails. Some are hard and some are soft.

I think of soft guardrails as the things that a president “must not,” “traditionally does not,” and “legally isn’t allowed to” do. We often say a president “can’t” go to war without Congressional approval, unilaterally shutter agencies, or usurp the power of the purse — but really we mean he’s not allowed to do those things. They are against norms, against the law, or even against the Constitution. But unless there’s someone to stop him, semantically speaking, he can do them; the president can violate the Constitution.

Soft guardrails matter, but they’re the first thing to go on the slide to dictatorship.

Hard guardrails are actual barriers, not just rules. In order to abuse power, a president needs to literally have the manpower, resources, and capacity to carry out the abuse.

Or, alternatively, hard guardrails can be countervailing actors in a system able to firmly push back. The courts, the civil service, Congress when it does its job. States passing laws to protect their citizens. Protestors expressing their First Amendment rights who refuse to be intimidated.

Think of it as a series of defensive barriers that get increasingly less permeable as you go from “he’s not allowed to do that” to “no, he actually can’t do that.” An authoritarian obstacle course.

How far an autocrat is able to go from left to right, how far he’s able to get through the increasingly hard barriers, is ultimately up to all of us.

In the United States, we’re still only maybe halfway through the spectrum. Many of the most important hard guardrails are — as of March 2026 — still at least somewhat intact.

There are still many practical barriers to Trump interfering in elections

Consider the many hard guardrails that prevent a president from interfering in elections.

First, the federal government — which is the only thing the president has direct control over — has a very limited role in election processes. Elections are, per the Constitution, run at the state and local level.

Donald Trump cannot order your local elections officials to do anything because your local elections officials do not work for him. He cannot force them to break the law and he cannot fire them if they refuse. If the president tries to issue an order instructing local officials to interfere in an election, they will be legally required to ignore that order — same as you would be if the president tried to issue an order telling you to interfere in the election. And if they break the law, they could face criminal charges under state law (the consequences of which the president, who can only grant pardons for federal crimes, has no power to shield them from).

Yes, there are some areas where the federal government, by law, plays a role in elections. But it’s mostly defining baselines on security, setting standards on voting rights, and providing funding. Practically speaking, the president cannot nationalize, cancel, or otherwise upend an election because there is simply no pathway to him doing so.

To be clear, the White House may (and almost certainly will) still abuse the power that it does have to try to meddle in the elections process. Trump may try to do outlandish things, like unilaterally ban mail-in voting or mass-disenfranchise voters. He might even succeed in some of them. But it’s still a long, uphill battle for him to tilt or rig the elections against the opposition.

It is possible for an autocrat to overcome hard guardrails. It’s just… well, hard.

And if he does, I believe we can collectively ensure that other actors and institutions — the courts, the press, the business community, law enforcement, and yes, even Congress — push back. It’s one thing for the president to abuse his power to topple a foreign dictator, it’s quite another for him to attempt to end representative government in the United States. I’m not saying courts and Congress would never go along with election subversion schemes (after all, 147 members of Congress violated their oaths in voting to overturn the 2020 election), but it’s far less of a done deal than it is with something like war powers.

It’s not a done deal because of the last and hardest guardrail:

All of us.

In an autocratizing country (like ours), the last and hardest guardrail is convincing the public to go along.

That may sound contradictory — isn’t the point of authoritarianism that public opinion no longer matters? Yes, that’s true to a degree, but only after an autocrat has consolidated power. Before, it’s the opposite. Until it’s too late to turn back, modern competitive authoritarians desperately need to convince the populace to accept their authoritarian project.

It is still not too late for the United States. And Donald Trump is losing public opinion. Here is FiftyPlusOne’s tracker:

The White House is losing everywhere

Perhaps because of this deteriorating political standing, the White House lost across the board this week:

• Under mounting public pressure and outrage, Trump was forced to fire one of his key officials: DHS Secretary Kristi Noem.

• In the face of the Defense Department’s efforts to weaponize AI for domestic surveillance and autonomous weaponry, leading artificial intelligence company Anthropic told the administration to pound sand — and was promptly rewarded by becoming the top-downloaded app.

• Faced with the growing reality that the unconstitutional campaign against law firms had failed, the DOJ raised the legal white flag (then, in an even more loser-like move, tried to backtrack on surrendering — presumably after the White House got mad).

• Five Republicans on the House Oversight Committee voted to subpoena Attorney General Bondi as part of the growing Epstein Files inquiry.

• We learned that the Justice Department also tried and failed to — incredibly — indict Joe Biden for using an autopen.

• Lindsey Halligan, the loyalist lawyer who has become the face of Trump’s efforts to bring criminal cases against his enemies, is under investigation by the Florida Bar and could lose her license to practice law.

• On the heels of the White House’s devastating tariff loss at the Supreme Court, a federal judge ruled that companies are entitled to tariff refunds.

• Tuesday’s primary elections, far from showing a demoralized or cowed opposition, saw Democratic voters swamping their Republican counterparts almost everywhere. In Texas, significantly more people voted in the Democratic primaries than the Republican one, including in most of the districts that were targeted by the new gerrymander.

• The effort in Florida to declare CAIR, one of the largest Muslim advocacy groups, a terrorist organization — one of those classic authoritarian tactics to target civil society — crashed headlong into the First Amendment.

And that’s all before the potential consequences of another disastrous war in the Middle East set in.

None of us know exactly where any of this is going. Likely it ends in some pretty dark places.

But this is not what consolidated autocracy looks like.

Welcome Checks & Balances to Substack!

Our friends at the Society for the Rule of Law have a new must-read newsletter. They’re an essential voice for principled conservatives, libertarians, and those without a clear ideological bent — all standing up for democracy.

Read Checks & Balances here.

What else we’re tracking:

• Read my colleague Jennifer Dresden’s letter to the editor of The New York Times on the real reason why gerrymandering, widespread in the U.S., is so rare in other countries. (Hint: it all comes down to the electoral system.)

• A group of 30 defense and policy experts are calling on Congress to investigate the “dangerous precedent” of abusing the Pentagon’s supply chain risk designation to blacklist one of America’s leading AI companies.

• Read this excellent article from The Upshot on how the White House has abused spending power hundreds of times: Trump keeps finding new ways to withhold money even after 198 lawsuits.

• The Supreme Court appears to be questioning some of the bedrock principles of the Voting Rights Act, the law that protects minority representation in the United States. Michael Later, Alicia Menendez-Brennan, and Farbod Faraji explain what needs to happen if the justices take such a damaging step: The Supreme Court questions the future of the Voting Rights Act — Proportional representation should be our answer. (You should also read the Brennan Center’s Jesse Wegman on how we got here: Chief Justice Roberts’s vendetta against the Voting Rights Act.)

How you can help:

Security is one of American civil society’s greatest weaknesses. Basic shortcomings — from failures to safeguard internal communications to lax device security — could leave a significant portion of American advocacy coalitions vulnerable to politicized retaliation or attacks by autocratic actors.

Protect Democracy’s new guide to operational security for coalitions summarizes basic security best practices for all advocacy coalitions and groups. It also includes key resources for understanding and responding to government investigations.

Please: Send this resource to anyone you know who works in advocacy or civil society. They may not think — or know — that they need these. Send it just in case.

See all of Protect Democracy’s toolkits for civil society facing government attacks here.