According to USA Today, the Supreme Court struck down the 1965 Voting Rights Act in 2013, claiming it was obsolete. Within hours, Texas, Mississippi, and Alabama proved them wrong by enacting laws intended to prevent minorities from voting.

According to the New York Times and the Daily Beast, local Republican officials told reporters that the party champions so-called "voter identification laws" in order to prevent non-Republicans from voting. Several years after those articles went to press, Donald Trump himself confirmed this. According to the Washington Post, Trump told an interviewer that if there were high "levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again." Congressman John Kavanagh echoed that sentiment a few years later. Kavanagh thinks everyone should have access to guns, but "Republicans... don't mind putting security measures in that won't let everybody vote... everybody shouldn't be voting."

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, "In 2016, 14 States will have new voting restrictions in place for the first time in a presidential election. The new laws range from strict photo ID requirements to early voting cutbacks to registration restrictions. Those 14 States are: Alabama, Arizona, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin." Typically, these "Jim Crow"-style laws require photo identification for elderly and minority voters unable to get them. Those States also closed voting sites in poor and minority areas, making voters travel hours in order to vote and risk losing their jobs. According to the Washington Post, "After a federal appellate court knocked down North Carolina's voting restrictions because they targeted black voters with 'almost surgical precision,' dozens of counties still cut hours for early voting, which minority voters use disproportionately."

According to the Huffington Post, Texas's photo ID requirements were struck down in court, but officials demanded them from voters anyway. Furthermore, "Erie County, Pennsylvania, home to at least seven higher education institutions, unlawfully turned away scores of college students who presented their student photo ID to vote. College students in Boca Raton, Florida were turned away after election officials told them their Florida Atlantic University address was considered 'a hotel' and not a residence."

According to Think Progress, "Donald Trump won [Wisconsin] by fewer than 30,000 votes. According to the State's own records, ten times that many eligible voters -- as many as 300,000 people -- lacked the proper ID and may have been disenfranchised."

Investigative journalist Greg Palast wrote in TruthOut: "The nasty little secret of US elections is that we don't count all the votes.
"In Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania -- and all over America -- there were a massive number of votes that were... not counted. Officially, in a typical presidential election, at least three million votes end up rejected, often for... absurd reasons.
"Voters in Michigan and Wisconsin fill in bubbles next to their choice. The cards, filled up with darkened bubbles for each race, are gathered and fed through an 'optical scanner.' These robotic eyeballs mess up all the time.
"Are machines calibrated with a Republican or Democratic bias? No, that's not how it works. But just as poor areas get the worst schools and hospitals, they also get the worst voting machines.
"According to the US Elections Assistance Commission... Americans cast 2.7 million provisional ballots in the [2012] presidential election. About a million were simply discarded.
"You show up at your normal polling station and they can't find your name, or they don't like your ID, or you're supposed to vote in another precinct. Instead of letting you vote on a regular ballot, you fill out a "provisional" ballot and place it in an envelope, sign your name, and under penalty of jail time for lying, affirm you're a properly registered voter.
"It's up to highly partisan election officials to decide if [that] vote counts. Hillary Clinton only won one swing State, Virginia, notably, the only one where the vote count was controlled by Democrats. She lost all swing States -- Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Arizona, North Carolina and Florida -- where the GOP [Republican Party] set the rules for counting these ballots and... acted as the judge and jury on whether a ballot should be counted.
"...At least half a million absentee ballots... just don't get counted. The cause: everything from postage due, to 'suspect signature.'"

Trump claims that "millions voted illegally" because they supposedly voted in more than one State in the same election. Palast explains that "Trump's claim is based on a list of 'potential duplicate voters' created by his operative, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. Kobach... directs a program for hunting down fraudulent voters using a computer system called 'Crosscheck.'"
Palast "spent two years investigating the Trump/Kobach claim for Rolling Stone. We obtained the 'confidential' suspect list of several million citizens accused of voting twice. In fact, it was no more than a list of common names... A true and typical example: Michael James Brown of Michigan is supposed to be the same voter as Michael Kendrick Brown of Georgia.
"About 54,000 voters in Michigan, five times Trump's plurality, lost their right to vote based on this unfounded double-voter accusation. In Pennsylvania, about 45,000 were purged." Palast explains that voting twice is a felony, punishable by five years in prison. Even though Kobach claims to have uncovered thousands of cases of people voting twice, he has only won nine convictions. According to the New York Times, "the nine convictions he has won since 2015 have primarily been citizens 60 and over who own property in two States and were confused about voting requirements. Only one noncitizen has been convicted."

Palast also reported that Ohio turned off voting machines' security functions.

After the 2016 election, the Green Party filed for a recount in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. A recount can find uncounted ballots, but since the main problem was that innocent people who wanted to vote weren't allowed to, there shouldn't have been significant numbers of missed ballots to find. However: Donald Trump successfully sued to stop the recount. Since Trump himself claims the election was rigged, why did he want to stop the recount? By his own logic, it would only prove he won!

Officially, Trump won Michigan by 10,704 votes. Greg Palast told Democracy Now! that the Michigan recount uncovered another 75,335 uncounted votes in the heavily Democratic areas of Detroit and Flint. Because Trump stopped the recount, the original total stood.

In Wisconsin, the only State to complete a recount, the ballots were fed through the same antique machines as the first time. As no one checked the ballots by hand, the totals were about the same as the original tally.

Nearly a year after the election, an investigation by Mother Jones revealed that "voter suppression played a much larger role than is commonly understood," and that significant efforts to stop innocent American citizens from voting continue today. The article relates stories of several innocent people affected by this. (One individual found her name had been inexplicably struck from the voting rolls. She filled out a provisional ballot, only to be told she had to get a new identification card at the DMV within 72 hours of election day for that ballot to be counted. She was unable to take the time off work, and her ballot was thrown out.)
Kenneth Mayer is a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin. His study concluded that "We have hard evidence there were tens of thousands of people [in Wisconsin] who were unable to vote because of the voter ID law."
Former Miss Wisconsin Molly McGrath is now a voting rights advocate. In helping people register to vote, she discovered government officials refusing to obey a court order helping people obtain voter IDs. Mother Jones reported her findings: "Only 3 of the 11 [Wisconsin] DMVs confirmed they would issue a voter ID in a week or less, as the court had ordered."
Mother Jones found that "Emboldened by these efforts, Republican-controlled statehouses have already passed more voting restrictions in 2017 than they did in 2016 and 2015 combined... The lesson from 2016 is terrifyingly clear: If voter suppression can work in a state like Wisconsin, with a long progressive history and a culture of high civic participation, it can work anywhere. And if those who believe in fair elections don't start to take this threat seriously, history will repeat itself."

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich reports that nine states have passed laws denying the right to vote to poor people who have outstanding court fees. In Alabama, for instance, 100,000 people have been struck from the voting rolls using this tactic. This is illegal under the 24th Amendment.

As noted above, Trump insists that millions of people voted illegally for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Presidential election. Trump's claim was widely dismissed as a lie. The overwhelming majority of experts, Republicans and Democrats alike, agree that voting fraud is statistically nonexistent in the United States. (The Washington Post reported that out of the 139 million people that voted in the 2016 election, only four people voted twice -- and they all voted for Trump.)
Nevertheless, in May, Trump established the so-called "Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity." Instead of securing future elections against further meddling from Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, the Commission planned to remove millions of names from voting rolls -- even though Trump's lies about fraudulent voters were widely debunked.
According to the American Civil Liberties Union, Trump's Commission is chaired by Mike Pence. The vice-chair is Kris Kobach, the Kansas official notorious for his many attempts to stop innocent American citizens from voting. (Kobach created the bogus "Crosscheck" list.)
According to the New York Times, Kobach advocated "voting restrictions that make it easier for Republicans to win [elections], as the vehicle for implementing policies that protect the interests and aims of a shrinking white majority."
Kobach's commission got to work in June. According to The Hill: "Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach [sent a letter to all 50 States] seeking several pieces of information about voters, including their names, birthdays, the last four digits of their Social Security numbers and their voting history dating back to 2006... The letter also stipulates that documents submitted to the commission 'will also be made available to the public.'"
According to technology website Gizmodo, Kobach "requested that every State surrender a laundry list of voter data, including partial social security numbers, using an insecure email address unprotected by even basic encryption technology." In other words, Kobach has no intention of safeguarding voters' private information and may accidentally expose millions of voters' records to hackers. Moreover, Kobach notified State officials of his intention to make millions of Social Security Numbers public. This will result in widespread identity theft.

Mother Jones asked the experts.

• "'This is the Trump administration creating a government database that hasn't existed before, and it's one that asks for voters' political parties,' says Jason Kander, former Missouri Secretary of State... 'It looks more and more like they're going to target certain voters who aren't going to vote for them.'
• "'Pence and Kobach are laying the groundwork for voter suppression, plain & simple,' [tweeted] Vanita Gupta, who ran the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department during the Obama administration.... For voters, the data presents a real threat because it makes private information that was closely guarded by the state available to anyone with an internet connection." (Vladimir Putin tried to steal this information, and now Kobach plans to make it publically available.)
• "The data will be handled by employees in the executive office of the president, who serve as the commission's staff. 'No one should trust the likely shoddy data analysis of this commission headed by people with a track record for not being accurate about the prevalence of voter fraud, working for a President who has made wildly unsupported allegations of voter fraud,' election expert Rick Hasen of the University of California-Irvine School of Law wrote on his blog.
• "...Now that Russia has interfered in US elections and is likely to try to do so again, it's risky to make the entire nation's voter data public. 'It's just shocking,' says [voting rights expert Myrna] Pérez, that 'in a period where we know that there's a risk that we have foreign interference and foreign attacks on our registration systems, that somebody thinks it's a good idea to take the voter registration rolls in all 50 States and put them all together in one place.'
• "With all this data made public," the magazine concluded, "a person could look up nearby... voters, track them down with their addresses, and harass them or intimidate them from voting."

The Nation explained exactly what Kobach's presence on the commission meant. "Right now 32 States are part of Crosscheck. If Kobach got voter data from all 50 States, he could run the program nationwide, leading to thousands of false cases of double voting, voters being wrongly purged from the rolls, and erroneous prosecutions for voter fraud... Why does he want to do this? By making voter fraud seem rampant, he can build support for policies like requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote, which has blocked one in seven Kansans from registering since 2013. Nearly half of them are under 30. Kobach says he wants to see proof-of-citizenship laws and similar voting restrictions adopted in every State... Let's be clear what's happening: Republicans have no desire to prevent another hack from Moscow, but they are dead set on limiting voting rights at home."
In 2018, Kobach ran for Governor of Kansas. According to the Huffington Post and The Hill, Kobach violated the Hatch Act by using his position as commission vice-chair to promote his candidacy. (The Hatch Act forbids White House officials from using their "official authority or influence for the purpose of interfering with an election or affecting the result thereof.")
According to The Nation, 48 States announced that they will refuse to comply with some or all of Kobach's request. However: journalist Greg Palast reported that 21 of those States had already given Kobach their voter rolls before he sent the letter.
According to Mother Jones, the American Civil Liberties Union sued Trump's Commission. Per the lawsuit, the Commission violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act by holding its meetings in secret and by appointing a two-to-one majority of members who "have a record of making exaggerated and/or baseless claims about voter fraud, and/or have implemented or supported policies that have unlawfully disenfranchised voters."
The Huffington Post adds that Trump's Commission violated the Paperwork Reduction Act that requires "federal agencies to seek approval from the Office of Management and Budget before requesting information about the public." According to attorney Larry Schwartztol, "The Kobach letter was... an unlawful request."
Also: "the Electronic Privacy Information Center... accused the commission of violating privacy law and asked a D.C. federal court to block it from collecting voter information. The suit accuses the commission of violating the 2002 E-Government Act because it did not undertake a required privacy impact assessment to analyze the safeguards that would protect the information it wants collected. The lawsuit also says voters are threatened by irreparable harm because the commission has yet to prove it has a secure way of storing voter information."
Furthermore: Law Professor Justin Levitt "wrote the commission may be violating the 1974 Privacy Act."
Mother Jones subsequently reported that Trump's so-called "Election Integrity" commissioners deny that the Russian hacking into America's election infrastructure even happened. As George Orwell wrote in his novel 1984: "The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation."
Technology website Gizmodo reported that "To suggest that state officials involved with the [Crosscheck] program have been grossly negligent is simply too kind... the records passig through the Crosscheck system have been stored on a server in Arkansas operating on a network rife with security flaws. What's more, multiple sets of login credentials, which could be used by virtually anyone to directly access the Crosscheck system—as well the encrypted voter data it contains—have been compromised." Gizmodo determined that it would take only a few hours for a novice hacker to break into and alter the Crosscheck voting records.
In January 2018, the number of lawsuits against the Commission forced Trump to disband it. Predictably, Trump claimed there was "substantial evidence of voter fraud," even though his so-called Commission didn't find any. Trump then said the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) would investigate voting fraud instead. Civil rights attorney Kristen Clarke told Mother Jones that the DHS "was set up to protect Americans from terrorism. Moving this commission over to DHS would be an abuse of the agency's power."

Trump's efforts to stop people from voting did not end with the dissolution of his so-called election commission. In June 2018, the Sessions-led Justice Department sued the State of Kentucky and forced them to purge their voter rolls.

The 2018 elections were also marred by voter suppression. According to Mother Jones, "In Georgia, more than 750,000 voters were purged from the rolls over the past two years by Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who was also the Republican candidate for governor. Some voters near Atlanta waited more than four hours to cast ballots." Kemp won the governor's race by 55,000 votes. "Voter suppression wasn't limited to Southern states with a history of disenfranchising voters," Mother Jones continued. "In Florida, more than 20,000 absentee ballots were rejected, disproportionately from voters of color. In North Dakota, 5,000 Native Americans living on reservations were initially barred from voting because a new law wouldn't accept their P.O. boxes as valid addresses... In Kansas, the lone polling place in Dodge City, which is 59 percent Hispanic, was moved outside town, a mile from the nearest public transportation."

Four years after the 2018 election, Trump decided to run for President again and began attacks on his likely rival for the Republican nomination, Governor Ron DeSantis. Trump claimed that, in 2018, he had been single-handedly responsible for DeSantis becoming Governor of Florida. "I sent in the FBI and the U.S. Attorneys," Trump wrote, "and... I stopped his Election from being stolen..." by stopping Florida officials from counting any more votes from Democratic-leaning counties. This looks like another Trump lie: there's no evidence that Trump sent Justice Department officials to disrupt the vote-counting process. However: Trump brazenly admitted that he abused his Presidential power -- or tried to -- in order to stop anyone who disagrees with his politics from winning elections. Trump believes that the President has the power to do that, and moreover, the President should do that.

Mother Jones reported on Republican efforts to purge over 500,000 registered voters before the 2020 election in Wisconsin and Georgia. The disenfranchised voters are mostly Democrats, college students, and people of color.

The Huffington Post reported that, between 2012 and 2018, the State of Texas closed 512 polling places in counties with large minority populations. In the 2020 Texas primary, one Houston voter had to wait in line for seven hours in order to cast a ballot.

According to the New York Times, subsequent Republican efforts turned the 2020 Wisconsin primary into a fiasco. As in most states, Wisconsin residents were asked to stay home for the month of April to stop the spread of the COVID-19-causing coronavirus. When Democrats tried to hold the primary by mail, Republicans obtained a court order preventing that, and the election went forward on April 6. The only way for Wisconsin residents to vote was to risk their health by gathering in large groups during a pandemic. Many who requested absentee ballots were denied. At the same time, poll workers in Milwaukee -- rightfully afraid of getting sick -- obeyed the shelter-in-place order. The city was only able to open 5 out of their 180 polling places. Green Bay intended to open 31 polling places; they opened 2. Voters were forced to wait in line for hours. At least 40 people contracted COVID-19 in Milwaukee on election day.
In a stunning feat of hypocrisy, the order for Wisconsin to hold the vote in person came from the United States Supreme Court. The Justices made the decision while sheltering-in-place at their homes. (The 5 Republican Justices issued the order; the 4 Democrats opposed it.)

The Georgia and Kentucky primaries were ground zero for voter suppression. According to USA Today, Georgia closed many of their polling places, forcing voters to wait in line for seven hours during a pandemic. In some places, poll workers were unable to fix malfunctioning machines. Other places ran out of ballots. According to The Independent, Kentucky closed 3,500 of its polling places, leaving just 200 for the entire State -- a 95% reduction. The entire city of Louisville had to serve 616,000 people from a single polling place.

Some Democratic leaders have since claimed there's nothing they can do about voter suppression, and tell voting rights activists and voters to organize their way around it. They urge activists to re-register the hundreds of thousands of innocent American voters that Republican officials removed from voter registration rolls. They urge activists to drive voters to polling places on election day. However, there is only so much that voting rights advocates can do to overcome the efforts of local government officials who are using their power to violate the Fifteenth, Nineteenth, Twenty-Fourth, and Twenty-Sixth Amendments. Voting rights advocates cannot drive every voter in Louisville to a single polling place in one day.

The loss of the Voting Rights Act allowed States to pass "Jim Crow"-style laws making it difficult for minorities, senior citizens, and college students to vote. Coupled with voter suppression, that led directly to Donald Trump's so-called 2016 electoral victory in swing States. In many elections, not counting 1% of the vote doesn't make a difference. In 2000, 2004, 2016, and 2018, however -- where the vote was 49% to 49% -- not counting 1% of the vote made all the difference.

The Voting Rights Act existed to protect the right of all innocent American citizens to vote, and Congress must immediately pass a modern version. (Sign the petition.) The Federal government and individual States must empower voters, not prevent innocent American citizens from voting.

Donald Trump's assault on voting moved from the un-American to the criminally insane when he moved to block all absentee balloting for everyone except himself during the COVID-19 pandemic. His plan: steal the election by forcing voters to either (1) risk their health by waiting in long lines for hours, or (2) give up on trying to vote. Trump's attack on the election affects Republicans and Democrats alike. What can we do?

• Register to vote.
• Apply for an absentee ballot.
• When your ballot arrives in the mail, fill it out that day and take it to your local drop off location, such as the county election office, as soon as possible. Only mail it if you can't deliver it in person.

In November, 2020, Trump was voted out of office by a factor of seven million. American voters clearly repudiated Trump and the cruelty, misogyny, xenophobia, plutocracy, and white supremacy he stood for. The Republican Party had a choice: win future elections by disowning Trump, or win future elections by passing laws preventing the people who disagreed with Trump from voting.

They chose the latter. The Republican party responded to the largest voter turnout in American history by trying to prevent it from ever happening again.

Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky -- a Trump sycophant -- explained this in late 2021. "How to steal an election: Seeding an area heavy with potential Democratic votes with as many absentee ballots as possible, targeting and convincing potential voters to complete them in a legally valid way, and then harvesting and counting the results," he wrote. The problem is, that isn't how you steal an election during a pandemic -- that's how you conduct one.

It's perfectly legal to encourage people to agree with you to vote -- and that's what Republicans should be doing. Instead, they're trying to prevent people who disagree with them from vorting. As the Huffington Post pointed out, "To the modern GOP... there's no such thing as a 'legally valid' vote for a Democrat, and no such thing as a legitimate election if a Democrat wins it."

According to Mother Jones and Wikipedia, Republicans proposed 425 bills in 49 states intended to prevent Democrats, minorities, the elderly, and college students from voting. 19 Republican-controlled States have enacted 33 of those bills at this writing. In almost every case, these voter suppression methods were passed along party lines -- with Republicans passing them over Democratic opposition. The Nation reports that Republican voter suppression efforts are blatantly racist and mostly target African-Americans.

The New York Times reported Republican efforts to take control of the House of Representatives by gerrymandering. Their plan would redraw district lines so all a State's Democratic voters would live in a single district. All the other districts would have Republican majorities -- regardless of how many Republican voters actually lived in the State. (According to Slate, the Republican-controlled Alabama State legislature achieved this by drawing Congressional districts so almost all the State's Black voters were packed into a single district, leaving Republican majorities controlling every other district. Voting rights advocates sued, and won the case; however, the Republican-controlled Supreme Court overruled the lower court in February 2022, leaving the map in place. After the Supreme Court's intervention, similar racially gerrymandered districts were established in Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, Texas.)

The Republican plan is to use gerrymandering to give their minority party a majority of Congressional seats in 2022. (According to Slate, this worked.) However, they know that a Republican candidate has only won the popular vote once in the last eight Presidential elections. Instead of trying to win the popular vote in 2024, they plan to replicate what happened in 2000 and 2016. They hope to prevent enough Democratic and minority voters from voting in the swing States so their candidate can win those States by a few hundred votes -- and then win the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote nationwide.

According to the New York Times and the Washington Post, the State of Georgia made national news when Governor Kemp signed voting restrictions into law in March 2021. According to Georgia's new law, it is now a crime to bring food and water to voters waiting in line. The law reduces the number of drop boxes available and eliminates their use entirely starting four days before an election. It also requires anyone who wants to use an absentee ballot to get a new voter ID -- which are difficult for the elderly to obtain. Kemp claimed these measures were necessary to combat "fraud irregularities." Of course, Georgia's existing anti-fraud measures were already working perfectly, and there was no fraud in the last election. According to MSNBC, only ten people nationwide voted illegally in the 2020 election, and all of them voted for Trump.

Mother Jones reports:

"During municipal elections in November [2021], Georgia voters were 45 times more likely to have their mail ballot applications rejected -- and ultimately not vote as a result -- than in 2020. If that same rejection rate were extrapolated to the 2020 race, more than 38,000 votes would not have been cast in a presidential contest decided by just over 11,000 votes.
"In November 2021, Georgians who successfully obtained mail ballots were also twice as likely to have those ballots rejected once they were submitted compared to the previous year. If that were the case in 2020, about 31,000 fewer votes would have been cast in the presidential election."

According to Vox, voting by mail doesn't favor any political party, and Republican efforts to curtail voting by mail hurt Republican voters as much as Democratic voters.

According to Mother Jones, in 2021, all 50 Senate Republicans unanimously filibustered four Democratic attempts to reinstate the Voting Rights Act and pass other legislation that would fight voter suppression. In contrast, in 2006, the Senate reauthorized the Voting Rights Act 98-0, and the reauthorization was signed into law by George W. Bush.

Trump failed to steal the 2020 election -- and hopes to succeed in 2024 where he failed in 2020. Mother Jones reported Trump supporters' efforts to gain control of State election infrastructures. For instance, Georgia elections supervisor Brad Raffensperger -- a lifelong Republican -- refused Trump's demand that Raffensperger break the law and declare Trump the winner. The Republican-dominated Georgia State legislature subsequently stripped Raffensperger of his authority to do so in the future and passed a law giving themselves that power instead. Similar laws were passed in Florida, Kansas, Kentucky, and Montana.

The Atlantic concluded: "For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party's national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump's crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted [Trump's] points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters.
"Even in defeat, Trump has gained strength for a second attempt to seize office, should he need to, after the polls close on November 5, 2024."

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich made a video explaining how all this will work. Corrupt Trump supporters are running for election supervisor in many States. If elected, they will declare Trump the winner in the next election, regardless of who their constituents actually voted for.

All political parties must champion the rights of all innocent American citizens to vote. Any politician who does not uphold this principle must be voted out of office in the next election.

According to the Washington Post, over half the Republicans running for office in 2022 believe -- or claim to believe -- Trump's Big Lie that he won the 2020 election. "Election deniers would hold enormous sway over the choice of the nation's next speaker, who in turn could preside over the House in a future contested presidential election... The proportion of election deniers on the November ballot is particularly high in three of the battleground states where Trump contested his defeat in 2020: Arizona, Georgia and Michigan. Election deniers have targeted offices in each of those states - as well as in other battleground states, including Wisconsin, Nevada and Pennsylvania - potentially giving Republicans a platform from which to challenge a popular vote they do not agree with in 2024."

According to Business Insider, Tim Michels - who is running for Governor of Wisconsin, vowed "Republicans will never lose another election in Wisconsin after I'm elected governor."

According to Rolling Stone, Trump is planning to file lawsuits challenging the results of any race where the Republican candidate loses. [Apparently nothing came of this.]

The battle for fair elections is not over. According to Mother Jones, "Wisconsin has been one of the most gerrymandered states in the country... Republicans hold six of eight US House seats despite the evenly divided political makeup of the state...
"In 2022, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers was reelected with 51 percent of the vote and Democrats won 4 of 6 statewide elections, but Republicans retained 67 percent of state Senate seats and 65 percent of Assembly seats. They attained a supermajority in the senate and came just two seats short of gaining a supermajority in the assembly, which would have allowed Republicans to overrule the governor's vetoes and make him functionally irrelevant."

Legacy Links: [But Today, I Confess: Political Satire in Verse] | [Obamawatch] | [The Legacy of George W. Bush]