If You Steal Our Elections, You Don't Get Our Money

Here's how we make this real.

Image of seditious traitors(image from Deepti Hajela, Associated Press)

Bottom Line Up Front for the Hardcore Activists (BLUF-HA): The courts will not save us. The DOJ dropped its voting rights cases. The Supreme Court handed Trump immunity and delayed his trial past the election. He won, and every case disappeared. If we want to protect elections in this country, then we need a tool that’s stronger than hope. Blue states can pass trigger laws that automatically order the redirection of federal tax revenue the moment the federal government interferes with their elections. Go to the end of the article for some governor contact info and where to get ahold of your state legislators.

The Department of Justice has dropped nearly all voting rights cases it was pursuing.¹ The Civil Rights Division has lost 70 percent of its attorneys.² CISA terminated approximately 130 employees in initial cuts, including members of election security teams, and has since lost roughly one-third of its total workforce.³ The Federal Election Commission lacks a quorum and cannot enforce campaign finance law.⁴ In 14 states, the DOJ is now suing to obtain voter roll data, including Social Security numbers, for a citizenship verification database that no law authorized.⁵

This has already happened, all of it in 2025.

At the state level, 29 restrictive voting laws have passed in 16 states this year alone.⁶ Forty-one percent of local election administrators have turned over since 2020, the highest rate in at least two decades.⁷ In North Carolina, Republicans took control of the State Election Board, fired the executive director, and banned digital student IDs for voting.⁸ In Georgia, activists have filed approximately half a million voter registration challenges since 2021, and in July 2025 the state began removing 478,000 voter registrations in one of the largest mass cancellations in U.S. history.⁹ In Nevada, Washoe County commissioners voted against certifying primary results for the first time in the state’s 160-year history.¹⁰

And now this: Trump’s Executive Order 14248 directed the Election Assistance Commission to rescind certifications of voting equipment and establish new requirements that no current systems can meet.¹¹ Courts permanently blocked key provisions, ruling Trump lacks authority to direct an independent agency.¹² The EAC complied on the voter registration form but is proceeding with voting system changes that civil rights groups say violate the same constitutional reasoning.¹³ Meanwhile, across the administration, court orders are being ignored in real time on deportations, funding freezes, and agency dismantlement. Comply where you must, circumvent where you can, defy where you think you can get away with it.

The DOJ took over two and a half years to indict Trump for January 6.¹⁴ The Supreme Court then delayed his trial past the election by granting broad presidential immunity.¹⁵ He won, and the case was dropped.¹⁶ Now he is ignoring court orders in real time and facing zero accountability for doing so. If we are waiting for the legal system to save us, we will be waiting while the 2026 election is dismantled in front of us.

We need to be honest about what we are looking at. The Trump administration faces no criminal accountability for any of this. The courts move slowly when they move at all, and in the case of the Supreme Court, they are complicit. Many say that the only remaining check is electoral: vote them out. But if the only consequence they face is electoral, the rational move is to make sure elections stop working. Why wouldn’t they? Well, they are already doing it. That’s our starting point.

This creates a problem that conventional politics cannot solve. We cannot vote our way out of a situation where the vote itself is the target. We cannot wait for 2026 to see if elections still work, because every month we wait is a month where the machinery of fair elections is being dismantled. By November 2026, we may discover that fair elections no longer exist.

We need a credible weapon, established now, that changes the calculation.

Trigger laws do this. A trigger law is legislation passed in advance that establishes a specific red line and a specific automatic consequence if that line is crossed. The red line is public. The consequence is pre-committed. There is no ambiguity, no debate after the fact, no opportunity for normalization. Cross this line, and this happens.

The red line: the federal government decertifies state-approved voting equipment, deploys federal forces to polling places against state consent, refuses to certify legitimate state election results, or takes any action to cancel, delay, or invalidate a state’s elections. The state legislature and governor jointly determine when a trigger has been crossed.

The consequence: the state orders 90 day compliance for all employers in state to divert federal tax revenue to escrows pending restoration of legitimate democratic governance.

The mechanism is legally sound. I wrote a free ebook detailing how states can execute “Tax Warfare.” The strategies in the booklet were reviewed by CPAs, attorneys, constitutional lawyers, and politicians to ensure the strategies contained within it are legally bulletproof. The legal framework exists. You can download it here: https://buymeacoffee.com/theer/e/485448

This is not symbolic. California, New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Washington together send hundreds of billions of dollars to the federal government every year. If those states pass trigger laws and the federal government steals the 2026 election, those states stop the money the next day. The federal government faces an immediate fiscal crisis. Not a rhetorical crisis. A real one.

The threat has to be credible to work. That means it has to be law, not a promise from a governor. It has to be public, passed and on the books before the election. And it has to be coordinated, because one state acting alone is easier to isolate and crush than six or ten acting together.

Some will say this is extreme. They are right. It is extreme. It is a proportional response to an existential attack on democracy. If they try to end elections, we stop recognizing their authority to govern us. That is the only response that matches the scale of the threat.

Others will warn of escalation. What if the federal government retaliates? That is exactly why red lines must be drawn in advance. The alternative to this risk is not safety. The alternative is a single-party radical GOP-controlled nation achieved through election theft, with no mechanism to ever remove them. That is where we end up if we do nothing.

This strategy does not directly help people in Texas or Florida or Ohio. It will not stop Republican fuckery in their own states or fix the wildly unfair bias our electoral system gives to rural states. Those are real limitations. But the principle of putting on your own oxygen mask before helping others applies here. Blue states must secure their own democratic legitimacy first. That creates the foundation for everything else.

Will governors like Newsom, Hochul, and Pritzker actually do this? Their track records suggest caution, not confrontation. That is precisely the point of red lines passed as law by state legislatures. Laws bind future action. Laws create commitment that political instincts might otherwise avoid.

The alternative is hoping they don’t do the thing they are already doing, hoping the courts will save us while they ignore court orders, hoping 2026 will be free and fair despite everything we are watching happen. Hope is not a strategy. A pre-committed, automatic, public consequence is a strategy.

Here is what we need to do.

Unprecedented times require unprecedented action. We make this happen by evangelizing these ideas. Mormons knock on doors to get people to join their church. We need to show up and educate and build consensus with the same persistence. Every one of us is a lobbyist and evangelizer for the ideas that align with our values. That is how cautious politicians get pushed past caution.

If you live in California, contact Governor Gavin Newsom at (916) 445-2841¹⁷ and your state legislators through the California Legislature’s website at legislature.ca.gov. Demand they introduce and pass trigger legislation that escrows federal tax revenue in the event of federal interference with state elections.

If you live in New York, contact Governor Kathy Hochul at (518) 474-8418¹⁸ and your state legislators through the New York Legislature’s website at nysenate.gov and nyassembly.gov.

If you live in Illinois, contact Governor JB Pritzker at (217) 782-6830¹⁹ and your state legislators through ilga.gov.

If you live in New Jersey, contact Governor Phil Murphy at (609) 292-6000²⁰ and your state legislators through njleg.state.nj.us.

If you live in Massachusetts, contact Governor Maura Healey at (617) 725-4005²¹ and your state legislators through malegislature.gov.

If you live in Washington, contact Governor Bob Ferguson at (360) 902-4111²² and your state legislators through leg.wa.gov.

When you call, say this: I am calling to urge the Governor and legislature to introduce trigger legislation before the 2026 election. This legislation should order all employers to redirect all federal tax revenue in the event of the federal government interfering with our state’s election administration or refusing to certify our legitimate election results. We need this protection in place now, not after our elections are stolen.

Pass trigger laws. Draw the red line publicly. Make politicians show us they are more than talk.

If we wait until after they steal the election to figure out our response, we have already lost.

If you want to go deeper on these strategies, check out the Intro to Soft Secession booklet. It covers things that can be found for free here at The Existentialist Republic, it’s all just organized in a single booklet rather than a series of articles. The booklet is a primer for activists who want to understand the toolkit for taking power away from MAGA and putting it into our hands. You can find it here: Just click anywhere in this sentence.

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