A Small Victory for Voting Rights
Elections remain at risk, as one of the three targets of "regulatory repression."
June 14, 2025
There are three broad structural changes that undergird the New Authoritarian attack on democratic societies:
Tinker with electoral systems to shift the center of gravity toward the ruling party;
Consolidate control of the media to suppress messages that contradict established party orthodoxy;
Crack down on nonprofits, universities and other potential loci of opposition.
All of these are difficult to accomplish, the more so the larger and more diverse the country. In the U.S., all three of these systems are vast and highly complex. There are thousands of colleges and universities, hundreds of broadcast news stations and thousands of additional online sources. Because elections are state-run and operated locally, elections are theoretically resilient to centralized control.
Still, consolidation and changing revenue streams challenges the independence of journalism. The university business model is shaky – and Trump is whacking every leg on the stool, research grants, overhead payments and tuition money. Nonprofits are less at risk, but mounting funding losses are taking a toll.
Despite these problems, it is electoral systems that are arguably most at risk.
Over several decades, Republicans have taken the opportunity afforded by the decennial Census to remake voting districts to their liking, developing a sophisticated toolbox to gerrymander districts that reliably put Republicans in office even in states that are evenly divided, like Wisconsin. In the 2000s, accusations of voter fraud fueled GOP efforts to kick voters off the rolls in states like Ohio, with supposed experts like Hans von Spakovsky making (at the time) outrageous claims about Black voters gaming the system on behalf of the Republican party. The Supreme Court aided these efforts by gutting key provisions of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder, leading to dozens of new restrictions on voting in states that have histories of voter suppression rooted in Jim Crow. The collective impact of Republican voter suppression efforts was twofold: it made it more difficult for many supposedly Democratic-leaning voters harder to access the polls, and it gave rise to an entirely false cynicism among conservatives, who after decades of repeated lies are so willing to believe that voter fraud is widespread that they endorsed the 2020 “big lie” and continued to hold that undocumented immigrants were somehow being shipped in and given voter registrations to turn the 2024 election.
On March 25th, Trump issued an executive order to solidify and nationalize some of the tactics used to suppress voting. The order called for limiting mail-in ballots, and requiring that all ballots not counted by the end of election day be discarded. For all federal elections, registrants would be required to show proof of citizenship, something that when more than 21 million U.S. citizens might be unable to do. The move drew criticism from a range of quarters, including those who noted that many mail-in ballots come from U.S. servicemembers overseas, and proof of citizenship is especially troublesome for married women who have taken their husbands’ names.
On Friday, a judge blocked the executive order from taking effect. Associated Press reports:
Judge Denise J. Casper of the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts said in Friday’s order that the states had a likelihood of success as to their legal challenges.
“The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections,” Casper wrote.
Casper also noted that, when it comes to citizenship, “there is no dispute (nor could there be) that U.S. citizenship is required to vote in federal elections and the federal voter registration forms require attestation of citizenship.”
It is highly unlikely that the order would survive judicial scrutiny anywhere in the U.S., given that control of the elections is delegated to the states, and given that Trump chose to attempt to enact these changes by executive order, which does not have the force of law beyond how the executive branch acts.
Pushback has been muted. Even Fox News could not produce any quotes criticizing the ruling, instead running text from the executive order itself in its defense.
There continue to be efforts to undermine each of the three pillars standing between us and a hollowed-out, Orbán-style pseudo-democracy. Stay vigilant.