The Republican Plan To End Elections

Written By Leeja Miller

Sources:

Transcript:

The redistricting fight in Texas is going to impact all of us, not just because new districts in Texas could solidify a Republican majority in the House, but also because what’s happening in Texas is a clear indication of what Republicans are doing generally, across the country, to undermine our voting system at every possible level. The whole coup thing didn’t work on January 6th, so now they’re attempting to go through quasi-legal means, the same way Trump has been navigating every one of his initiatives: claim the law says you can, let the lawsuits roll in, wait to see if the Supreme Court rules in their favor, if they don’t, do it anyway. In this case, the Supreme Court has indicated a strong willingness to allow all sorts of Republican election rigging, Trump is increasing pressure to do just that, his creeps behind the scenes have their fingies in other voting issues–Pam Bondi is seeking voter rolls, election deniers have infiltrated the ranks of our election officials, voter ID laws are being pushed that would make it harder for certain populations to vote, all in an effort to rig the elections for Republicans and, if that’s not possible, degrade trust in our elections to such a degree that election results will no longer matter. Let’s talk about what this all means for the country and for our future elections.

First, let’s go to Texas where Democratic lawmakers have fled the state, heading to Illinois to meet with Democratic Governor JB Pritzker, a vocal Trump critic and someone who has been making headlines likely because he’ll probably be running for president in 2028, let’s be real, and now is the time for Democratic Governors like him and Gavin Newsom to gain the name recognition they’ll need to mount their campaigns. Here’s the background. Last week Wednesday, the Texas state legislature released its redrawn map for Texas’ US House districts. They are proposing to slice up the map in such a way that 5 districts would likely flip from Democrat to Republican in the 2026 midterms. This is consequential given that the Republican won control of the House last year by only 3 seats. This would more than double that margin, giving Republicans more breathing room on votes, ensuring any Democratic resistance in the House would be even more useless than it already is. The targeted districts are located in Dallas, Houston, Austin, and along the US-Mexico border. This comes after Trump met with Texas Governor Greg Abbott to push him to hold a special session in Texas to redraw the maps. Trump then openly told reporters that he discussed with him a quote “very simple redrawing where we’ll pick up five seats.” And then, wow, like magic, Texas unveils this plan to flip five seats. It would put 30 of the state’s 38 seats into Republican control even though, for example, in 2024 Trump only won 56% of the vote there. The vote to approve the new map is set for today, but a coalition of 30 Democrats from the Texas state legislature left the state for Illinois over the weekend in order to deny a quorum on the floor, meaning they can’t move forward with the vote. This has happened a couple other times in recent Texas history where a quorum was denied in order to protest Republican election legislation. Eventually the lawmakers return and are forced to vote and the measures go through anyway.

The special session was called not only to address the redistricting but will also deal with other issues in Texas including, importantly, disaster relief for the areas that saw devastating floods last month. Texas democrats blame the Republicans for using disaster relief funds as leverage and withholding the funds pending this vote. Texas Republicans say the Democrats are abdicating their duties to the state. Democrats could face a $500 a day fine and possible arrest for leaving, according to a law that was just passed in 2023 criminalizing these activities after Democrats left the state for three weeks to block voting restriction legislation that ultimately passed anyway. Texas’ attorney general Ken Paxton, who’s running for Senate in Texas and also going through a messy divorce on allegations of cheating, or what in Texas they call a “biblical divorce”, who also was caught red-handed listing three separate properties all as his “primary residences” in financial filings, he is calling for the immediate arrest of the Democrats who fled Texas saying in a tweet that “we should use every tool at our disposal to hunt down those who think they are above the law.” Bold words from a man who has demonstrated he thinks he’s above the law, but sure. The Texas House speaker has said that if a quorum isn’t present by 3pm Monday then quote “all options will be on the table.” It’s before 3pm as I’m filming this so I’m going to insert an update here as I will be posting this after 3pm on Monday. [ INSERT UPDATE ]

Often, the way news outlets report on a story differs depending on the bias of the publication. And it’s hard to know how YOUR own perception of bias influences your interpretation of the news. This headline from The Associated Press caught my eye “Limited options for Democrats to retaliate if Texas Republicans redraw congressional map.” Using the Ground News browser extension, I can see that in the US the Associated Press is considered “left leaning.” To get a fuller picture of the story on all sides of the political spectrum I can click on Full Coverage, which will show me coverage of the same story from publications across the political spectrum.

My partner on today’s video, Ground News, uses 3 independent monitoring organizations to assess the bias rating for each publication. Each news monitoring organization has their own methodology - including editorial reviews, blind bias surveys, independent reviews, and third party research. These are legit INDEPENDENT organizations, but they are limited by the data available to them: their analysis is done in the context of the U.S. political system. Our overton window has shifted so far right that the Associated Press is considered “left leaning.” That tells you a lot about the context within which the media you’re consuming operates. And thanks to Ground News, I get even more context, including how factual each publication is and who owns it, giving me a well-rounded idea of the motivations, biases, and accuracy of the news I’m consuming. Wouldn’t it be great if everyone in America had that much information about the news they consume??

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The Trump regime is also calling for redistricting pushes in Missouri, Indiana, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Florida. And Democrats are threatening to do the same in the states where THEY have majorities like California and New York. Of course it’s not just Republicans that benefit from gerrymandering, there are absolutely gerrymandered states in favor of Democrats. And thanks to this Supreme Court, this is all perfectly legal. In a 5-4 decision back in 2019 called Rucho v. Common Cause, chief justice Roberts wrote for the conservative majority that quote “excessive partisanship in districting leads to results that reasonably seem unjust [but] the fact that such gerrymandering is ‘incompatible with democratic principles’ … does not mean that the solution lies with the federal judiciary.” Basically yeah seems bad, take it up with your state representatives who are doing the redistricting, it’s not our job to solve this. The case shut the door on any challenges to partisan redistricting based on the 1st amendment’s free speech and association protections or the 14th amendment's guarantee of equal protection. Basically, brazen partisanship, redrawing maps that openly favor one party or the other, is fair game. And Republicans have taken that as an open invitation, as evidenced by a quote in The Guardian from a Texas Republican state representative, who said “The map was politically based, and that’s totally legal, totally allowed and totally fair… It’s totally prudent, totally right, for Texas to be able to improve the political performance of its map.” Totally.

And right after that 2019 case, we had the 2020 census. Typically, redistricting happens every 10 years after a census gives back population data that can be used to understand population numbers in order to figure out district populations and make sure they are roughly equal. The constitution requires that Representatives represent populations that are roughly equal in size. The idea being that one person’s vote in one district should weigh the same as someone’s in another district, because the House of Representatives is meant to be the chamber most representative of the people, unlike the Senate where every state gets 2 senators no matter what, so less populous states get an outsized voice in decisionmaking. So population movement will impact how district lines are drawn if one area becomes more populous and one less populous. Beyond that, it’s up to the states to figure out how those lines are drawn. And the people drawing the lines have ever more nuanced and technical data about the populations in each district, and new technology allows for drawing of lines with surgical precision. And so they are going to draw lines that favor whatever party is in power, because they can. And even though the constitution and the Voting Rights Act DO bar the drawing of racially discriminatory maps, it is very hard to show racial animus or race-based motivation in the drawing of these maps, because our long history of racial segregation means that now the people drawing the lines can just say no no these lines are based on PARTISAN reasons, not racial reasons. The fact that this area happens to be mostly hispanic or mostly black is just a happy little accident. And so they water down, for example, votes from Black people, especially Black Women who tend to vote overwhelmingly Democrat, by going in and drawing district lines right through majority black populations, splitting them up across multiple districts that also just HAPPEN to include mostly Republican voters. The result is that Black peoples’ votes in Texas and everywhere else that is gerrymandered to hell for Republicans count less. John Adams declared that district maps should be quote “an exact portrait, a miniature” of the people as a whole. But partisan gerrymandering means that states are sending representatives to Washington that do not represent the will of the people. Again, 30 out of 38 House seats from Texas are slated to go Republican under this new map, nearly 80% of the population represented by Republicans, while the popular vote of the state only went 56% for Trump.

And there is no middle ground solution to this problem. Democrats have been taking the high road while Republicans gerrymander the fuck out of every state they can, very much on purpose. In 2010 Republicans made a concerted effort to win majorities in as many state legislatures as possible in order to have as much control over redistricting as possible after the 2010 census. And they were successful. They controlled the drawing of 213 Congressional districts. According to the Brennan Center, these redrawn maps have given Republicans a net 16 to 17 seat advantage for the last decade. Democrats have also taken advantage of gerrymandering, though Republicans have been the primary beneficiaries. According to the Brennan Center, quote “Regardless of which party is responsible for gerrymandering, it is ultimately the public who loses out. Rigged maps make elections less competitive, in turn making even more Americans feel like their votes don’t matter.”

And now Democrats have vowed that the gloves are coming off in the fight over rigging our elections for partisan outcomes. Even Eric Holder, AG under Obama and a longtime opponent of gerrymandering for any party who has long advocated for blue states to adopt nonpartisan commissions for redistricting along with other “high road” alternatives to the down and dirty gerrymandering Republicans have been doing, even he said Democrats should temporarily embrace gerrymandering to stop the Trump regime, saying that Republican gerrymandering could leave Trump with quote “unchecked power” in the final two years of his term. As opposed to what he has now?? Leaving no doubt about how disastrous the current situation is, Holder said quote “It’s like the Germans have invaded France. Are you going to just say, ‘Well, we’re against war and we’re for the resolution of disputes in a peaceful way’? Sometimes you have to take up arms.”

The problem with this is that yes we are begging our electeds to be more aggressive in their tactics to counter Republicans, but tampering with elections is risky business. As the New York Times put it, “Historians have warned that both parties risk broader unrest if they gerrymander vast sections of the country so effectively that they neuter the opposition at the ballot box, leaving voters without a real choice.” Again, whether it's Republicans or Democrats doing the gerrymandering, the people lose out, because we lose faith in the validity of our elections, something that is already happening on the right by election deniers and on the left from especially minorities who feel their votes don’t matter. Our elected officials on both sides of the aisle are sending the very strong message that they are right. Our votes don’t matter.

And gerrymandering the fuck out of every state isn’t the only tactic Republicans are using to completely undermine our elections. As one anonymous person close to the President told the New York Times, their political strategy is quote “maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.” This includes redistricting to ensure larger margins, but it also includes threatening political enemies with prosecutions, which chills opposition and keeps people from running to begin with, or speaking out once they get into power. Multiple reports indicate that Republican elected officials themselves are terrified of what could happen to themselves or their families if they step out of line with the Trump regime. One negative tweet from Trump and people in the public eye face very real threats of danger. Lisa Murkowski, senator from Alaska who sometimes opposes Trump initiatives, has said quote “We are all afraid, okay? I am oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice because retaliation is real.” Senator Thom Tillis has gotten death threats for voicing opposition to Trump. I made a couple episodes about political violence, one before the election last year, and the threat of violence continues to be very very real for our elected officials, faced with a populace with lots of guns emboldened by a President who is literally above the law. That fear is going to affect how our elected officials conduct themselves, how they vote, but also how they run, if at all. It has already pushed people out of their races, and will continue to have a chilling effect as long as Trump is able to wield his armed goons at his will with the flick of a Truth social post.

Another Trump regime tactic has been in taking over the DOJ and dropping lawsuits aimed at protecting voting rights. Back in April, hundreds of lawyers and staff members left the DOJ especially in the wake of the rebranding of the Justice Departments office of civil rights. Instead of continuing to pursue lawsuits meant to enforce our country’s constitution and civil rights laws, the Trump regime has redirected the Civil Rights offices energy towards cases against Ivy League schools and liberal cities, claiming that quote unquote “DEI” initiatives violate the civil rights of the whites. This means there is no federal body to enforce civil rights aimed at protecting voting rights for historically marginalized minorities, you know, the people whom those laws were meant to protect after a century of discriminatory voter suppression tactics. In its latest move, AG Pam Bondi has directed the civil rights division to seek voter registration lists and inspect voting equipment, especially targeting states where Trump lost. According to The Washington Post, “The Justice Department’s outreach has differed from state to state, according to agency letters and emails. In Colorado, it made a sweeping request for “all records” related to its election. In Alaska, it questioned why no voters had been removed from the rolls for mental incompetence. In several states, it asked detailed questions about the process to remove noncitizens and other ineligible voters from the rolls. … Election officials fear the administration could try to build a national file that includes personal information about voters or impose rules that would boot eligible voters from the rolls and make it harder to cast ballots.” How our elections are run is meant to be left up to the states to decide, with limited guidance from Congress. The Trump regime is doing everything it can to undermine that independence and gain access to voter information and voting equipment far ahead of the midterms.

In another bid to undermine our elections, the Trump regime is now targeting and investigating ActBlue, the organization that processes a huge portion of online donations for Democrats. Back in April, Trump issued an order targeting ActBlue by name, saying it was violating campaign finance laws and allowing foreign nationals to misuse their services to influence our elections. Over the last couple months, the House judiciary committee has subpoena’d Act Blue, saying quote “In light of allegations that online fundraising platforms that serve as conduits for political donations have accepted fraudulent donations from domestic and foreign sources, the Committees are conducting oversight to inform potential legislative reforms. To further our oversight and legislative reform efforts, on April 2, 2025, the Committees requested documents and communications related to internal misconduct and whistleblower retaliation at ActBlue.

"Although ActBlue initially provided documents voluntarily, it has since suspended its cooperation with the Committees. Therefore, the Judiciary Committee must resort to compulsory process to obtain the requested materials." They are of course not investigating WinRed, the largest Republican fundraising platform. As money has been allowed to pour into our elections largely unchecked, and elections for everything from City Commissioner to President of the United States have become unconscionably expensive, attacking the main way that Democrats collect individual donations is a great tactic for Republicans to undermine our elections by getting in the way of the flow of money to Democrats. Attacking ActBlue, by itself, of course won’t completely grind our elections to a halt, but again it’s all out warfare, everything, everywhere, all at once for Republicans, this is just one tactic of many.

And, as we talk about a lot on this show, the Republicans are good at playing that long long game, whereas Democrats seem incapable of anything other than half thought-out and half assed reactionary policies that don’t do anything. And part of that Republican long game to undermine our democratic elections is through fucking with the census. During his first term, Trump tried unsuccessfully to change the census questions in a way that would exclude undocumented people from population tallies. Currently, the census collects data on EVERYONE currently in the US to accurately represent the people here, and representatives are apportioned based on the TOTAL population, not just the citizen population. Who gets counted in the census has a long history of being manipulated in order to affect the outcome of our elections. Remember the whole 3/5ths compromise thing, where black people were counted as 3/5ths of a person for determining apportionment of Representatives? Yeah that was a compromise because northerners didn’t think southern states should get a bunch of representatives based on the number of people they forcibly owned. We amended the constitution to change that, so now everyone is counted as a whole person, including people who don’t or cannot vote, like undocumented people as well as people with criminal records that bar them from voting, people under 18, etc, they are all counted in the population that then determines how many Representatives a state gets. If undocumented people were removed from the census that would have dramatic impacts on the population counts of lots of border states, plus liberal cities with large immigrant populations. For example, New York would lose about 1.8 million people from its census numbers. Republicans are betting that the outcome would benefit them, not only because large Democratic states like New York and California would see their census numbers collapse but also because they have put in the leg work over the last 15 years winning up as many state legislatures as possible in order to be the deciding party for a huge swath of the redistricting that would happen if they were successful in their bid to push undocumented people out of the census. In 2020, the question reached the Supreme Court, which ruled on procedural grounds that the citizenship question had to be left off of the 2020 census, but legal experts warn that the Supreme Court left the door open for it to be added in the future. Republican lawmakers are considering a bill in the House that would require the census to ask about citizenship and immigration status and would exclude noncitizens from counts. That bill passed in the House last year but was blocked by Democrats in the Senate, a Senate which is now majority Republican. Another bill introduced back in January by Representative Chuck Edwards of North Carolina and one introduced in June by Senator Bill Hagerty of Tennessee would leave out ALL noncitizens INCLUDING green-card and visa holders. And Marjorie Taylor Greene has announced that she will introduce a bill with Trump’s support that would call for a new, mid-decade census, a census re-do basically, along with a new round of redistricting, and changing the law so that mid-decade census could be used to reapportion population counts, again in the scenario where the census now includes a question about citizenship. Experts warn that asking about citizenship will undermine the accuracy of the data because people are wary of providing the government that kind of information. The threat of the question alone is estimated to have impacted the 2020 census. The estimated undercount rate of Latinos more than tripled in 2020 compared to 2010.

For the record, the 14th Amendment clearly states quote “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.” Whole number of persons in each state. But of course that last clause “excluding Indians not taxed” opens the door for arguments that other groups should be excluded. Of course not REALLY, that door hasn’t been open in the 150 plus years since that Amendment was written, but the Trump regime will take any opening it can get, and the Supreme Court is easily persuaded by its new and novel legal arguments that a decade ago would have been outright rejected for frivolity. However, that’s not why the question was rejected in 2019 by the Supreme Court. Instead, it was a procedural question about whether the agency, the Commerce Department, had provided a good enough reason for including the question. And the 2019 decision to exclude the question was a 5-4 decision, including Justices Breyer and Ginsburg who are no longer on the court. In the case, Justices Thomas and Alito dissented, saying that the commerce department was completely justified in adding the question, indicating the direction this more conservative court would likely take things if presented with the question again. If Republican lawmakers get their way, they may be presented with the question before 2030, which is exactly what they want. Because they are doing everything in their power to ensure that Trump or his successor if god willing he perishes sometime between now and 2028 will be able to hold onto power long past 2028, but if they don’t then they risk Democratic lawmakers taking over before the 2030 census gets here. Republicans work in Texas and other states pushing for gerrymandered redistricting are just a trial run. If they’re able to solidify their tactics here, they will be ready to hit the ground running if and when non-citizens are removed from census counts and the population of every state goes into flux in 2030, or sooner.

If and when the new map goes through in Texas, Democrats will have very little they can do to fight back other than, say it with me, file a lawsuittttt. Filing lawsuits has been about all that can be done to challenge any number of Trump regime tactics. And 7 months ago at the beginning of this regime, aw guys remember seven months ago?? I had such hope! Cute. I really said lawyers and judges are really gonna be the bulwark holding back the Trump Regime from doing its worst. And listen I wasn’t WRONG. Our electeds are doing jack shit so it really is just the judiciary that has been at least throwing rocks at the spokes of the regime apparatus, slowing it down and getting in its way. But it hasn’t stopped much of anything, thanks to a Trump-happy Supreme Court and to just enough federal judges willing to go along with the Trump regime that enough is passing through the cracks, combined with a power hungry Trump-loyal gestapo willing to arrest anyone, including lawmakers and judges, who step out of line, hundreds of lawsuits and a judiciary dedicated to faithfully interpreting the law can only get us so far. The Trump regime has proven that the system we have been running on for 250 years is capable of being completely broken down in six months. But this truly is still, somehow, just the beginning.

A recent report from the Center for American Progress provides a warning and a way forward. It says, quote, “By exploiting legal loopholes or bending rules to serve narrow partisan interests, authoritarians bypass the very spirit of transparency, accountability, and popular representation that are cornerstones of any democratic system. The impact on democratic systems is devastating: These tactics undermine public trust in institutions and create a perception of government as arbitrary, and in so doing, they weaken the legitimacy of democracy itself. When citizens lose faith in the integrity of their institutions, they become more susceptible to populist narratives that decry democracy as irreparably flawed.24

In modern-day hybrid regimes—those that blend democratic institutions with authoritarian practices, such as Hungary—the state leverages this cynicism to cajole and ultimately pacify its population. “We may be liars and grifters,” the expression goes, “but frankly, so is everyone else.” Kleptocracy thrives in such a world. Corrupt autocrats systematically undermine state governing capacity, diverting resources away from ordinary citizens while concentrating immense wealth and power in the hands of a connected few. The collapse of the public sphere discourages civic engagement and paves the way for what the late historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt called “the politics of inevitability”: Nothing will ever change, so why bother.25 Anticipating the autocrat’s playbook is key. The good news: It is out in the open and can be defeated.” I’ve linked the report below and urge you to take a look if you, like me, are feeling incredibly defeated but looking for answers or solutions.

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And if you liked this episode, you’ll like the one from last week all about how Private Equity is ruining America.

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