Note from the author: Below you’ll find a factual accounting of what has been done to attack free and fair elections and stack the deck against the will of the American electorate. After that you’ll find a call to action so you can do something to influence the situation towards justice. After that you’ll find resources for ER books, booklets, and other tools so you can go on the offense for democracy and human rights.
The GOP does not need to overturn the results, though they’ll try that too, with an army of January 6ers ready to give that another go, pardoned, several given government jobs, and some now in line for government payouts, every signal telling them there is reward and not punishment for doing it again.
What they have built is more sophisticated than that alone: an apparatus operating in multiple domains, before, during, and after the election. Lawsuits and friendly rulings rewrite the rules in advance, agencies and statehouses thin the rolls and the ballots while people vote, and litigation and certification fights wait for after the count.
If all else fails, they’re taking every step possible to use force if necessary. Taken together, it dampens even a landslide to an ineffectual federal margin, one too thin to stop the GOP’s unitary executive, a president who treats every federal agency, prosecutor, and investigator as his to command, with every GOP-led state readily abandoning democracy to their king. This is the measure of how much weight a vote has already lost before it is cast.
The Supreme Court narrowed the Voting Rights Act, making racially biased maps far harder to challenge. Its 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais lets a state defend a discriminatory map by calling the motive political, not racial.
The same ruling now threatens state and judicial maps, not just Congress. States from Mississippi to Alabama are redrawing lower-level maps to cut majority-Black districts more aggressively than ever before.
The Supreme Court let Texas use a map a Trump-appointed judge ruled a racial gerrymander. A three-judge panel, including Trump appointee Jeffrey Brown, found Texas drew the 2025 map predominantly by race to add Republican seats; the Supreme Court reversed that finding, 6-3, and let Texas use the map for 2026.
The courts bend the rules to the GOP’s benefit and tell everyone else it is too early. The administration wins emergency rulings without showing harm, while citizens trying to stop it are told to wait until the damage is done.
The Supreme Court’s emergency docket lets the administration win first and face review later. It filed 34 emergency applications through 2025, more than the 19 the prior administration filed in four years, and won most.
A federal court stripped ordinary citizens of the power to sue under the Voting Rights Act in seven states. The Eighth Circuit ruling leaves only the Justice Department to enforce it there; it is paused for now, and the same Supreme Court will decide whether to make it permanent.
The GOP is one Supreme Court ruling away from ending late mail ballots in about 30 states. Watson v. RNC could void ballots mailed on time but delivered after Election Day.
Trump’s mail-voting order is in force right now. It directs the Postal Service to deliver ballots only to federally approved lists and DHS to decide who counts as a citizen, and a judge refused to block it.
This weakening of voting protections has been underway since 2013. Shelby County v. Holder ended advance federal review of voting changes, and at least 31 states passed 114 restrictive laws in the eleven years since.
States passed more voting restrictions than in any period on record. Forty-four in 2025 and 2026, beating the post-2020 record, after an uncontested election with no fraud.
Republicans launched the mid-decade gerrymander and come out ahead. Their new maps could net up to 14 seats against the Democratic Party’s six, and courts voided Virginia’s response.
The map favors Republicans before anyone draws a line. Even with both sides maxed out, one analysis finds Republicans about 36 seats ahead because Democratic voters cluster in cities.
The system was tilted before any of this began. Two senators per state and a House frozen at 435 since 1929 let a party win more votes and still lose the Senate.
Five states will make voters show citizenship papers in 2026. Arizona, New Hampshire, and three others will demand a passport or birth certificate to register.
Their stated reason barely exists. Georgia’s Republican secretary of state found zero noncitizen ballots in 25 years, and a Brennan study put noncitizen voting at 0.0001 percent.
The administration built a mass citizenship check on Social Security data. DHS turned SAVE into a bulk voter-roll scanner that produces heavy false matches; the data sharing is in active litigation.
The DOJ demanded every state’s voter file and sued the states that said no. It sued 29 states and D.C. to build a single national voter database; six courts have thrown the suits out.
Republican-controlled states are purging their voter rolls aggressively. Texas reported over a million people removed since 2021; the governor cast it as an anti-fraud crackdown, though most were deceased or had moved, and watchdogs asked whether some removals broke the federal 90-day pre-election limit.
Voters wrongly purged or challenged are pushed onto provisional ballots that often do not count. A provisional ballot is the fallback when a name is missing from the rolls, and their use and rejection vary widely by state, so a bad purge can quietly become a lost vote.
Nine Republican-controlled states quit the system that keeps voter rolls accurate. Texas, Florida, Ohio and six others left ERIC after a conspiracy campaign, several admitting it would make their rolls worse.
Activists are using software to challenge voters by the thousands. Tools like EagleAI and VoteRef let a handful of people auto-generate mass challenges against tens of thousands of registrations.
Six people challenged nearly 100,000 Georgia registrations. Courts called the methods unreliable, and the activists are filing more.
Trump is rebuilding a partisan army to work the polls. He says the GOP “Election Integrity Army” will return bigger and stronger for 2026.
New laws turn election workers into criminals for honest mistakes. Forty-one such laws since 2020 attach penalties to routine acts, pushing experienced staff out.
The federal government cut off election cybersecurity months before the midterms. CISA ended the program that warned states of cross-state threats and skipped its Election Day monitoring for the first time in years.
The most-used voting machine company changed hands to a single Republican owner. Dominion, whose machines served about a third of U.S. voters, was bought in October 2025 by former Republican election official Scott Leiendecker and rebranded Liberty Vote; he adopted the paper-ballot language of Trump’s election-machine critics while pledging to operate it impartially.
Signature matching rejects young voters and voters of color at the highest rates. A Washington audit found Black voters rejected four times as often as white voters, nearly all over signatures.
Some states require a witness or a notary just to return a mail ballot. Five states require a notary and four require a witness signature, an extra step that is a leading reason ballots get thrown out.
More states are pushing photo ID that the poorest are least likely to hold. Nevada’s amendment needs a second vote in 2026 and would not take effect until 2028.
States are making it harder for students to vote. Seven states require ID but reject student IDs, and some moved to pull polling places off campuses.
Republicans are suing to block overseas and military ballots. Suits in several states and Arizona target voters who lean non-Republican; about 40 percent are service members and their families.
Four million citizens cannot vote over a past conviction, and some must pay first. Florida conditions restoration on paying every fine and fee, a barrier traced to the post-Reconstruction era.
Polling-place closures force the longest lines on Black neighborhoods. A 2016 study found they waited 29 percent longer; a worker who cannot wait three hours does not vote.
The FBI is now investigating the people who administer elections. It has sought 2020 records and the identity of every Fulton County election worker.
The Justice Department fired most of the lawyers who enforced voting rights. Its voting section fell from about 30 lawyers to an estimated 3 and was redirected to hunt fraud instead of protect voters.
The agency that enforces campaign-finance law can no longer function. The FEC has had only two of its four commissioners since October 2025 and cannot enforce the law before the midterms.
The last attempt to overturn an election went almost entirely unpunished. Trump pardoned about 1,500 January 6 defendants, erasing the federal cases against them, and his administration is now moving to pay some of them.
The opposition is not standing still.
Senate Democrats stood up their earliest and largest election-protection effort. Built with Eric Holder and Marc Elias to map and blunt the threats.
The DNC is putting trained observers in the precincts that get targeted. More than 120,000 volunteers and 465,000 hours across 63,000 sites from 2021 to 2024.
Voting-rights groups are suing to stop the database and the orders. Protect Democracy, the ACLU, and others are in court, and six suits for voter files are already dismissed.
States are rebuilding the Voting Rights Act in their own law. Sixteen states plus D.C. have one in law or in progress, enforced in state courts the federal bench cannot reach.
Some moves they have threatened but not yet made.
Putting troops and ICE agents at polling places. Officials are planning for it; a Supreme Court order limits troops to consenting states for now. What stops them from sending the troops anyway? Will the Roberts Court suddenly reverse course in their corrupt and partisan goals? Unlikely.
Refusing to certify results. Reporting lays out how a Republican-controlled chamber could withhold certification to shape who is seated.
Others they have already tried and lost, which is the proof that single pieces can be stopped.
Trump’s order to demand citizenship papers and throw out late ballots was struck down. Courts blocked the core of his March 2025 order, which tried to force proof-of-citizenship onto the federal registration form and bar the counting of ballots that arrive after Election Day.
The SAVE Act stalled in the Senate. It passed the House; 21.3 million eligible Americans lack easy access to the papers.
Maine voters killed a suppression package. A 2025 ballot measure to cut absentee days, ban prepaid postage, limit drop boxes, and require photo ID was defeated 63.9 to 36.1.
Texas could not force every voter to re-prove citizenship. The bill stalled after passing the state Senate.
The rulings, the purges, the lawsuits, and the firing of the voting-rights lawyers do something quiet and difficult to undo: they dampen a landslide election to an ineffectual federal margin, one too thin to stop the GOP’s unitary executive.
Some of it can be stopped, and a few of these measures already have been. But the field is tilted so far that governing with them at the federal level is comparable to climbing a cliff face with a backpack full of rocks. The states are the exception. Republicans have rigged the ones they control, Texas and Georgia and Florida among them, but their reach stops at the state line.
The Democratic Party has its failures, but largely protects and defends democracy and voting rights. Those states need to cement their positions now, protect their people, and restore democracy from a position of strength.
Here is today’s effective activist action, and it is the same whether or not the Democratic Party governs your state. Contact your state representatives and your state attorney general, and ask them to commit now to a red-line trigger action: a response defined in advance that takes effect automatically the moment the GOP crosses a serious enough line of conduct
Set the red lines as serious, unmistakable violations that are easy to prove: canceling or nullifying an election, refusing to seat the people voters chose, sending troops to shut down the polls, another assault on the Capitol like the one on January 6, 2021. If one of them is crossed, the state acts on a plan already written into law. One version: it directs every employer within its borders to divert the federal taxes they withhold from workers’ paychecks into a state-held account, where the money stays until constitutional order is restored.
That is leverage that does not depend on the federal courts, and it is oppositional federalism and soft secession in practice. A state that commits to it publicly, before the violation, turns a vague warning into a credible notice.
This works from anywhere. In a state the Democratic Party governs, push your reps and your attorney general to pass it. In a state it does not, push anyway, build the consensus, and make your representatives go on the record, because the more states that adopt the red line, the harder it is for the GOP to isolate and overturn any single one. This is their chance to show the voters that they are ready to defend democracy in a substantive and serious way.
Building this consensus is already underway. Every week I am meeting with groups across the country, including in deep-red counties, with state party chairs and sitting state legislators. We will not see it arrive all at once, because consensus is not built that way. It builds quietly, and you only really see how far it has moved looking back over months and years. So keep building it, keep educating the people around you, and keep acting where you are.
Just so you know, The Existentialist Republic needs 10 subscribers every article, that’s what it takes for this publication to continue delivering for millions of activists. Don’t let this be the reason you miss a meal or are late on rent! But if you can be an activist subscriber, you’re the reason this is able to continue for everyone.
One extra note. The Existentialist Republic has released multiple full length books, around a dozen booklets, model legislation, and more. If you want to expand your influence, they are all available in free downloadable versions and paid physical copies. Thanks for being here and getting after it. - Chris
Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder — physical copy / free download
Intro to Soft Secession — physical copy / free download
Oppositional Federalism and You — physical copy / free download
Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Dismantling American Fascism — physical copy / free download
Grab Them By The E.A.R.R.: How to Get Politicians to Do What You Want — physical copy / free download
More Free downloads:
Soft Secession: 100 Policies That Pass
Being Dangerous: Go From Activist to Operative
All Four Completed Model Legislation Bills
The Opposition Guide to Tax Warfare
Six-Panel Soft Secession Brochure
Prosecution Memo: Jonathan Ross
The Opposition Guide to Tax Warfare
Six-Panel Soft Secession Brochure
Yesterday, when you said, “Stay tuned,” (on this issue) you meant it! Without even considering that they may have cheated on elections and/or plan on doing so again.
In my own State of Oregon, our Democratic Governor is very unpopular and faces a formidable challenge from a supposed “RINO” who won’t give a solid answer when asked if she would defend our Voting Rolls.
I’m getting ready to get my talking points in order, print up leaflets, grab a buddy, and go door-to-door to talk to everyone in my town. Talk AND listen. Will keep you posted.
The Supreme Court has obviously decided it is their responsibility to manipulate our elections to guarantee Republican control for decades.