In September 2010, the District of Columbia unveiled a pilot project to enable overseas residents and people serving in the military to vote over the Internet, and invited users to test the system. Within 36 hours, University of Michigan computer scientist J. Alex Halderman and his team were able to hack into it, flipping votes to candidates named after famous computers, like HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and playing the Michigan fight song, “The Victors,” after every recorded vote. Amazingly, it took two days for election officials in DC to notice the hack and take the system down. The pilot project was eventually scrapped.

Though online voting remains a distant prospect in American politics, this wasn’t the first election system that Halderman hacked. On June 21, 2017, he testified before the Senate Select Intelligence Committee in a hearing on “Russian Interference in the 2016 U.S. Elections.” “My conclusion,” Halderman told the committee, “is that our highly computerized election infrastructure is vulnerable to sabotage, and even to cyber-attacks that could change votes.”

“Dr. Halderman, you’re pretty good at hacking voting machines, by your testimony,” Senator Angus King of Maine observed. “Do you think the Russians are as good as you?”

“The Russians have the resources of a nation-state,” Halderman replied. “I would say their capabilities would significantly exceed mine.”

It is now clear that Russian interference in the 2016 elections went far beyond hacking Democratic National Committee e-mails; it struck at the heart of America’s democratic process. “As of right now, we have evidence of election-related systems in 21 states that were targeted,” Jeanette Manfra, the chief cyber-security official at the Department of Homeland Security, testified at the Senate hearing.

Only two of those states have been publicly named: Illinois, where hackers stole 90,000 voter-registration records, including driver’s-license and Social Security numbers; and Arizona, where the voter-registration list was breached via a county-level infiltration. On June 13, Bloomberg reported that “Russian hackers hit systems in a total of 39 states.” And The Intercept, citing a leaked National Security Agency report, stated that “Russian military intelligence executed a cyberattack on at least one U.S. voting software supplier and sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials just days before last November’s presidential election.”

“This was a well-planned, well-coordinated, multi-faceted attack on our election process and democ-racy,” said Bill Priestap, assistant director of the FBI’s counter-intelligence division, at the Senate hearing.

“Any doubt it was the Russians?” Senator King asked.

“No, sir,” Priestap answered.

“Any doubt that they’ll be back?”

“No, sir.”

While there’s still a lot we don’t know about the extent of the hacking and why it occurred, it’s painfully clear that the US voting system is dangerously insecure. Even though voting machines aren’t connected to the Internet, hackers can inject malicious software into them by accessing the computers used to program the machines, which are sometimes online. Five states in their entirety, and some counties in nine others, vote using electronic machines with no paper trail, which could make such a hack almost impossible to detect. And even though 36 states use paper ballots or electronic machines with paper backups, that paper is rarely checked thoroughly enough to ensure the results are accurate (only a little more than half the states require even basic post-election audits). Moreover, 42 states are using machines that are at least a decade old and run primitive software like Windows 2000. This is an election meltdown waiting to happen.

The intelligence community has repeatedly said that no votes were changed by Russian hacking, but DHS officials admitted at the Senate hearing that they have not conducted a forensic analysis of any voting equipment used in the presidential election. I asked Lawrence Norden, a voting and democracy expert at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, how confident he was that no votes were altered in 2016. He took a deep breath, sighed, and said, “It’s impossible to know.”

Without changing a single vote, hackers could even more easily wreak havoc on US elections by accessing state voter-registration rolls, as they did in Illinois in 2016. The theft of 90,000 records there went undetected by officials for three weeks, until they finally took the system down for 10 days in response. “Attackers could try to interfere with the ability of voters to cast ballots by deleting them from lists of registered voters, marking them as felons prohibited from voting, or changing party affiliation to keep them from voting in their party’s primary,” notes the Brennan Center in a new report. In states with strict voter-ID laws that require an exact match with voter rolls, changing even a few letters in a person’s name could block thousands from casting a ballot.

“The bigger point here is that what happened in 2016 could easily happen again and go much further,” Halderman says. “In fact, I think it’s only a matter of time before some attacker, be it Russia or another hostile country, really does either sabotage or manipulate the country’s election infrastructure…. Eventually it will happen, unless we take steps to stop it. And so far, very little has changed since 2016.”

Halderman says the solutions are obvious: Record all votes on paper, perform routine audits of ballots, and conduct regular threat assessments, as is done in many industries. But the White House and Congress are doing less than nothing: President Trump regularly refers to reports of Russian hacking as “fake news,” and House Republicans voted to eliminate the Election Assistance Commission, the only federal agency that helps to protect states against hacking. “We’re doing way too little,” Norden says. “The intelligence community has their hair on fire saying the Russians are coming back, but there’s almost zero discussion in Congress about taking steps to protect our elections ahead of 2018 and 2020.” Things are hardly better at the state level, where in most cases there’s no money for new voting machines or added security precautions.

The truth is that the same Republicans who benefited from Russian hacking of the DNC and Clinton campaign e-mails in the 2016 election have been trying for years to suppress Democratic-leaning votes. As civil-rights leader Rev. William Barber notes, “Voter suppression hacked our democracy long before any Russian agents meddled in America’s elections.” Since the 2010 election, 22 states—nearly all of them controlled by Republicans—have passed new laws making it harder to vote, which culminated in the 2016 election being the first in more than 50 years without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act.

According to a new study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 12 percent of the electorate in 2016—16 million Americans—encountered a problem voting, including long lines at the polls, difficulty registering, or faulty voting machines. And last year’s election was decided by just 80,000 votes in three states.

Republicans have accelerated their voter-suppression efforts at the state and federal levels in 2017. According to the Brennan Center, 99 bills to limit access to the ballot have been introduced in 31 states this year, and more states have enacted new voting restrictions in 2017 than in 2016 and 2015 combined. Arkansas, Iowa, North Dakota, and Texas passed new voter-ID laws; Georgia made voter registration more difficult; and Montana is in the process of limiting the use of absentee ballots.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s new presidential commission on “election integrity” is preparing to nationalize the GOP’s restrictions on voting under the pretext of combating the virtually nonexistent problem of voter fraud. The commission’s vice chair, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, has pioneered the voter-suppression efforts in his home state, including requiring proof of citizenship to register, which has blocked one in seven Kansans from registering to vote since 2013 (because most people don’t carry around a copy of their birth certificate, passport, or naturalization papers when they register). If such laws were adopted at the federal level, they would disenfranchise millions of voters.

On June 28, Kobach sent a letter to all 50 states asking for sweeping voter data, including Social Security numbers, party affiliation, felony convictions, and military status. The federal government has never made such a broad request before, and voting-rights advocates fear that such data, in the hands of the Trump administration, will be manipulated to spread lies about voter fraud and purge the rolls in inaccurate and discriminatory ways. “[Vice President Mike] Pence and Kobach are laying the groundwork for voter suppression, plain & simple,” tweeted Vanita Gupta, the former head of the Justice Department’s civil-rights division under President Obama. That same day, the Justice Department also asked states how they plan to remove people from their rolls under the National Voter Registration Act, which seems like further proof of plans to limit voting access.

The good news is that red and blue states alike unexpectedly rebelled against Kobach’s request, with 48 states refusing to turn over sensitive, private voter data. Some of the sharpest criticism came from Republican secretaries of state, like Mississippi’s Delbert Hosemann, who told the Trump administration to “go jump in the Gulf of Mexico.” The opposition at times bordered on the surreal: At least two members of Trump’s handpicked commission, the secretaries of state for Maine and Indiana, rejected Kobach’s request, and even Kobach, as secretary of state for Kansas, couldn’t hand over voters’ Social Security numbers to himself, because they’re not publicly available in his home state. One commission member, Maryland Deputy Secretary of State Luis Borunda, resigned.

The bad news is that under the guise of “election integrity,” Trump’s commission marks the beginning of a nationwide voter-suppression campaign by the GOP. It’s impossible to overstate the threat this poses, at the same time that the administration is practically inviting another hack from Moscow or elsewhere. Whether its enemies are foreign or domestic, American democracy is in grave danger.

On July 3, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed suit against Kris Kobach and the Trump administration’s “election integrity” commission for not conducting a privacy-impact assessment before requesting sweeping voter data from all 50 states.

“The collection and aggregation of state voter roll data by a federal commission is without precedent,” wrote EPIC in its motion for a temporary restraining order to block the release of the data to the federal government. “The Commission’s pending action would increase the risks to the privacy of millions of registered voters—including in particular military families whose home addresses would be revealed—and would undermine the integrity of the federal election system. Further, the request for partial Social Security Numbers that are often used as default passwords for commercial services, coupled with the Commission’s plan to make such information ‘publicly available,’ is both without precedent and crazy.”

In remarkably short order, the commission’s request for voter data has led to an unprecedented political and legal backlash. Forty-eight states have refused to provide all of the data Kobach asked for. And EPIC’s lawsuit was followed by similar suits by the ACLU, Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights (two lawsuits), Public Citizen, and voters in Florida, who allege that Kobach and the Trump commission have violated at least six different federal privacy and ethics laws. In the span of a week, six major lawsuits have been filed against the commission. The Trump administration told states yesterday not to send any voter data until a federal court ruled on EPIC’s motion.

Before the commission has even held a single in-person meeting, its work has been an unmitigated disaster. Yet it’s already having a devastating impact on voting rights—which may have been exactly what Kobach and company wanted.

In the days following Kobach’s request for voter data, election offices in states like Arizona, Colorado, Florida, and North Carolina have been deluged by angry voters seeking to un-register to vote. Denver saw a 2,150 percent increase in voters canceling their registrations, according to Director of Elections Amber McReynolds. “In over 12 years of administering elections I never expected to see a day in the office where we would have more withdrawals than new registrations,” she told The Colorado Independent.

The Raleigh News & Observer reported:

Hundreds of people have called the Raleigh office of the Bipartisan State Board of Elections and Ethics Enforcement, and at least 380 people sent email, said board spokesman Patrick Gannon.

Some of those voters—the office doesn’t have a count—are asking to cancel their registration or for instructions how to do so.

“Kindly remove my name from NC voter rolls immediately. Thank you,” one voter wrote Wednesday, adding that the commission “smells funny” and the people in charge could not be trusted.

This is a stark example of the damage this commission is doing. And it’s only going to get worse. The Trump administration has assembled a who’s who of discredited advocates of voter suppression, led by Kobach, who’s lost four lawsuits to the ACLU in Kansas. He’s joined by former Ohio secretary of state Ken Blackwell, who tried to disenfranchise countless voters during the 2004 election in Ohio, and by Hans von Spakovsky, a former official in the Bush Justice Department whom six attorneys in the department’s voting section called “the point person for undermining the Civil Rights Division’s mandate to protect voting rights.”

The latest addition to the commission is J. Christian Adams, who served alongside von Spakovsky in the Bush Justice Department. Their boss, Bradley Schlozman, said he wanted to “ “gerrymander all of those crazy libs right out of the [voting] section.” Adams was “exhibit A” for the improper hiring and rampant politicization that occurred during the Bush years, according to former voting-section chief Joe Rich.

Today Adams is best known as the leading figure behind the New Black Panther Party conspiracy theory. He accused the Obama administration of “a hostility in the voting section and in the Civil Rights Division to bringing cases on behalf of white victims for the benefit of national racial minorities.” Since he left DOJ, Adams has been suing states and counties to force them to purge their voting rolls, as Mother Jones reported—a preview of the types of suppressive tactics the Trump DOJ is prepping and the commission will no doubt recommend in its report.

On March 28, Kobach, von Spakovsky, and Adams sent a letter to Jeff Sessions denouncing the “ideological rot” of the Obama Justice Department and advocating policies that

Return to race-neutral Voting Rights Act enforcement that seeks to block discriminatory policies and procedures based on demonstrable impacts rather than mere statistical analysis.

Put an end to politically-driven pursuits against state photo voter identification requirements, citizenship verification in voter registration, and common-sense adjustments to early voting periods.

Return to enforcing federal statutes barring against voter intimidation. Repeatedly, the Obama DOJ failed to act.

Return to enforcing Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act requiring that voter rolls meet federal maintenance standards.

That’s a fancy way of saying DOJ should not enforce the Voting Rights Act and should support discriminatory voter-ID laws, documentary proof of citizenship for voter registration, cutbacks to early voting, and voter purges. This would have a catastrophic impact on voting rights.

The likes of Kobach, Blackwell, von Spakovsky, and Adams have for years spread debunked lies about voter fraud and have championed efforts to make it harder to vote, often in violation of federal law. Putting them on an “election integrity” commission is as bad an idea as Trump’s forming a “cybersecurity unit” with Vladimir Putin.

Listen to Ari Berman on the Start Making Sense podcast.

On June 28, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the vice chair of Donald Trump’s presidential commission on “election integrity,” sent a letter to all 50 states requesting sweeping voter data, including Social Security numbers, party affiliation, criminal backgrounds, and military history.

At first, only a few states, like California, Kentucky, and Virginia, said no, denouncing the commission as “a waste of taxpayer money and a distraction from the real threats to the integrity of our elections today.” But over the holiday weekend, opposition to Kobach’s request dramatically increased from both red and blue states. As of Thursday evening, 48 states have refused to turn over private voter data to Trump’s commission. “I’ve been studying America’s election administration since 2000, and I’ve rarely seen a firestorm like this,” wrote MIT political scientist Charles Stewart III.  

Illinois denies Kris Kobach request for voter data. 48 states now refusing to provide all of the data Kobach asked for pic.twitter.com/jhM3E4oqyh

— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) July 6, 2017

Twenty-one states are refusing to give Kobach any data and 27 states are handing over only limited public information on voters (a full list of the states appears below). Even Kobach couldn’t hand over Social Security numbers to himself because they’re not publicly available in Kansas. Two states have not yet responded. 

Most notable is the strong opposition from Republican secretaries of state from red states like Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arizona. Mississippi’s Delbert Hosemann told Trump and Kobach to “go jump in the Gulf of Mexico”; Louisiana’s Tom Schedler said “the President’s Commission has quickly politicized its work by asking states for an incredible amount of voter data that I have, time and time again, refused to release”; Arizona’s Michele Reagan blasted “this hastily organized experiment.”

Also notable is the opposition from members of Trump’s own election commission, like Indiana Secretary of State Connie Lawson, who said, “Indiana law doesn’t permit the Secretary of State to provide the personal information requested by Secretary Kobach,” and Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, who told Kobach, “Upon review, the request is denied.” One member of the commission, Maryland Deputy Secretary of State Luis Borunda, has already resigned.

The outpouring of bipartisan opposition shows why Trump’s sham election commission should be disbanded before it does any more damage. The commission was set up for one purpose—to spread false information about voter fraud, like Trump’s gigantic lie that millions of people voted illegally, in order to build support for policies that make it more difficult to vote. Kobach and his ilk have long advocated for suppressive policies like strict voter-ID laws, documentary proof of citizenship for voter registration and voter purges, along with weakening landmark voting-rights laws like the Voting Rights Act and National Voter Registration Act.

.@AriBerman: “They're going to lie about voter fraud to then put in place policies that suppress the vote." #AMJoy pic.twitter.com/sllm8eUkFh

— Formerly 'AM JOY' on @MSNBC (@amjoyshow) July 2, 2017

The commission was never going to be able to prove that millions of people voted illegally because that never happened. At most, there were a few hundred illegal votes cast in 2016. Even if this was a good-faith effort to study America’s election system, the commission won’t have access to reliable data after so many states rebelled against Kobach’s request. “Most likely, the results of low-quality matches using the voter files that do arrive will significantly overstate the amount of double voting and voting by noncitizens,” writes Charles Stewart in Politico. “If a poor match occurs, the list maintenance programs of the states will be unfairly impugned, lowering the confidence of voters for no good reason. This is why no one I have talked to who runs elections, Democrat or Republican, is happy with Kobach’s request.”

Representative Marc Veasey, co-chair of the Congressional Voting Rights Caucus, has introduced legislation to ensure that no taxpayer funds are spent on Trump’s commission. “The commission’s mission to study non-existent voter fraud cases has nothing to do with ballot security and everything to do with voter suppression and discrimination,” he said.

We need a commission to investigate the impact of Russian hacking and voter suppression on the 2016 election. We don’t need a disgraced commission on election integrity that only threatens the integrity of our elections.

The full list:

States that won’t comply with Kobach’s request: Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Mexico, New York, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, Vermont, Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming.

States that will hand over only select public voter data: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Washington, West Virginia.

States that haven’t responded yet: Hawaii, Nebraska.

Editor’s Note: This story is being updated to reflect new developments.

Four things happened yesterday that pose a grave danger to voting rights.

1. The House Appropriations Committee voted to defund the Election Assistance Commission, the only federal agency that helps states make sure their voting machines aren’t hacked. The House Administration Committee previously voted to kill the EAC in February, but yesterday’s vote makes it one step closer to reality—practically inviting Russia to try to hack our elections again. Russian hackers targeted election systems in 21 states in 2016, according to intelligence officials. The $4 million funding request for the EAC is less than the cost of two trips by Donald Trump to Mar-a-Lago.

2. The Department of Justice sent a letter to all 50 states informing them that “we are reviewing voter registration list maintenance procedures in each state covered by the NVRA [National Voter Registration Act]” and asking how they plan to remove voters from the rolls. While this might sound banal, it’s a clear instruction to states from the federal government to start purging the voting rolls. “Let’s be clear what this letter signals: DOJ Civil Rights is preparing to sue states to force them to trim their voting rolls,” tweeted Sam Bagenstos, the former deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Obama administration. There’s a very long and recent history of Republican-controlled states’ purging their voting rolls in inaccurate and discriminatory ways—for example, Florida’s disastrous purge of alleged ex-felons in 2000 could have cost Al Gore the election—and it’s especially serious when the Department of Justice forces them to do it.

3. The White House commission on election integrity, led by vice chair Kris Kobach, also sent a letter to 50 states asking them to provide sweeping voter data including “the full first and last names of all registrants, middle names or initials if available, addresses, dates of birth, political party (if recorded in your state), last four digits of social security number if available, voter history (elections voted in) from 2006 onward, active/inactive status, cancelled status, information regarding any felony convictions, information regarding voter registration in another state, information regarding military status, and overseas citizen information.” While Kobach asked for “publicly-available voter roll data,” much of this information, like someone’s Social Security number or military status, is, in fact, private. Never before has a White House asked for such broad data on voters, and it could be easily manipulated by Trump’s commission. Kobach has a very well-documented record of making wildly misleading claims about voter fraud and enacting policies that sharply limit access to the ballot in his home state of Kansas. He’s been sued four times by the ACLU for voter suppression and was sanctioned by a federal court last week for “deceptive conduct and lack of candor.”

4. The Trump administration named Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation as a member of the commission, who’s done more than anyone other than Kobach to spread the myth of voter fraud and enact suppressive policies. Von Spakovsky was special counsel to the Bush administration’s Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Brad Schlozman, who said he wanted to “gerrymander all of those crazy libs right out of the [voting] section.” It was a time when longtime civil-rights lawyers were pushed out of the Justice Department and the likes of Schlozman and von Spakovsky reversed the Civil Rights Division’s traditional role of safeguarding voting rights. When von Spakovsky was nominated to the FEC, six former lawyers in the voting section called him “the point person for undermining the Civil Rights Division’s mandate to protect voting rights.” My favorite example of von Spakovsky’s ethical lapses is the fact that he published an article praising voter-ID laws under the pseudonym “Publius” at the same time he was in charge of approving Georgia’s voter-ID law at DoJ. With the likes of Kobach and von Spakovsky on it, Trump’s commission has nothing to do with election integrity and everything to do with suppressing votes ahead of the 2018 and 2020 elections.

Today GOP:

Defunded fed agency protecting against vote hacking

Told states to purge voter rolls

Asked for voter data to suppress votes

— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) June 30, 2017

All four of these actions would be disturbing on their own, but taken together they represent an unprecedented attack on voting rights by the Trump administration and Republican Congress. The actions by Kobach, in particular, appear to mark the beginning of a nationwide voter-suppression campaign, based on spreading lies about voter fraud to justify enacting policies that purge the voter rolls, and make registration and voting more difficult.

How would Kobach use this data? Look at his efforts in Kansas. His Interstate Crosscheck program compares registration lists among states to search for double voting, but because it uses very rudimentary data—only voters’ first and last names and date of birth—it generates thousands of false matches, leading to misleading claims about the prevalence of double voting that results in legitimate voters being removed from the rolls. Academics have found that Crosscheck could lead to 200 voters’ being wrongly removed from the rolls for every double vote found. Look at what happened when Virginia used the program in 2013, as I reported in my recent New York Times magazine profile of Kobach:

In 2013, after Virginia joined Crosscheck, and in the midst of a hotly contested governor’s race, the state board of elections sent counties a list of more than 57,000 voters to purge because they were supposedly registered in other states. The data was littered with errors: Lawrence Haake, then the registrar in Chesterfield County, told The Richmond Times-Dispatch, “We do need an interstate checking mechanism, but I’m not real impressed with this one.”

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.

Kobach has used similarly dubious means to argue that registration and voting by noncitizens is “pervasive” and to justify Trump’s debunked claim that 3 million to 5 million people voted illegally. But although Kobach is the only secretary of state in the country with the power to prosecute voter-fraud cases, he’s convicted only one noncitizen of illegally voting in Kansas. That’s probably because it makes no sense that a noncitizen would vote illegally and risk deportation from the United States.

Kobach has already said that he plans to compare voter lists with government databases of noncitizens—another reason he needs the data from states—even though such databases are not designed for that purpose, as I also reported:

The Trump commission marks a major step forward in Kobach’s efforts to nationalize his restrictions on voting. He’ll have a presidential bully pulpit and access to government resources that weren’t previously available, such as a nationwide database that includes noncitizens that could be run against state voter rolls to generate new allegations. But that Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database does not automatically reveal the status of immigrants who become U.S. citizens, which means thousands of noncitizens who are subsequently naturalized could mistakenly be tagged as illegal voters.

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.

Luckily, election officials from states including California, Kentucky, and Virginia have said they’ll refuse to comply with Kobach’s request, calling the commission “an attempt to legitimize voter suppression efforts across the country” (Kentucky), “a waste of taxpayer money and a distraction from the real threats to the integrity of our elections today” (California), and “a pretext to validate Donald Trump’s alternative election facts” (Virginia).

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 early May, a federal judge extended the voter-registration deadline for the special election in Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District by two months, from March 20 to May 21. That allowed nearly 8,000 additional people to register to vote in time for the June 20 election.

Democrat Jon Ossoff praised the decision. “Voting rights are constitutional rights,” he said. “I encourage all eligible voters to ensure that they are registered and make their voices heard on June 20th and in all elections, regardless of their party or political persuasion.”

But Republican Karen Handel did not. “This is going to boil your blood,” she wrote in an e-mail to supporters. “Just hours ago, the Democrats won their lawsuit to extend voter registration in Georgia before our election. This lawsuit should be seen for exactly what it is: A partisan attempt to change the rules in the middle of an election for a nakedly partisan outcome.”

There was more than a little irony in Handel’s e-mail: Not only did she not want more people to register and vote, but shaping election rules to achieve a partisan outcome was exactly what Handel was known for as Georgia’s secretary of state from 2007 to 2010. She has a long record of making it harder to vote—supporting Georgia’s strict voter-ID law, trying to purge thousands of eligible voters from the rolls before the 2008 election, repeatedly challenging the residency of qualified Democratic candidates, and failing to secure the state’s electronic voting machines.

Let’s start with the purge. Weeks before the 2008 election, thousands of registered voters in Georgia had their citizenship challenged by the state, a policy spearheaded by Handel. One of them was Jose Morales, a student at Kennesaw State University, a legal permanent resident since he was a toddler who became a US citizen in November 2007. After filling out a voter registration form in September 2008, Morales received a letter from Cherokee County telling him that he must provide evidence of his citizenship in court or would be kept off the voter rolls.

Morales drove 30 minutes from his home in Kennesaw to the Cherokee County Elections office in Canton, to give the clerk a copy of his passport. He was told that was sufficient evidence to prove his citizenship and received a copy of his voting card a week later. But a month before the election, on October 7, 2008, he received another letter saying he was still not qualified to vote and had to appear again before the Cherokee County Elections office to prove his citizenship again or else he would be purged from the rolls.

At that point, the ACLU sued Georgia on Morales’s behalf, holding that the state’s citizenship verification process violated the Voting Rights Act and the National Voter Registration Act. “Despite all the steps he has gone through, Mr. Morales’ right to vote is still being threatened,” the lawsuit said. “Mr. Morales wants to vote, particularly in the upcoming election, and wants to make sure his vote is counted.”

Handel criticized the lawsuit and spread unfounded claims about noncitizens voting. “Unfortunately, some groups appear to want to open the door to allow non-citizens to register and vote in the General Election,” she wrote.

As Ian Millhiser of Think Progress noted, a panel of three Republican-appointed judges ruled against Handel and ordered her to “reasonably ensure that no voter is permanently deleted from the voter registration list.”

However, despite the court victory, nearly 5,000 registered voters were told by the state they had to cast a “challenge” ballot at the polls. Congressman John Lewis called it “an attempt to take us back to another dark period in our history when people were denied access to the ballot box simply because of their race or nationality.” Of the 4,700 “challenged” voters, 2,700 never cast a ballot or had their ballots rejected, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

After the election, the Justice Department said the voter purge violated the Voting Rights Act and was “seriously flawed.” “African Americans comprise a majority of the registrants flagged,” Acting Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Loretta King wrote to Georgia officials. “Hispanic and Asian individuals are more than twice as likely to appear on the list as are white applicants.”

But that wasn’t the only way Handel undermined election rules, during the 2008 election or after. She repeatedly tried to prevent Democratic candidates from running for office, no matter how small, including Jim Powell, a candidate in 2008 for the Georgia Public Service Commission. Powell had moved from Cobb County to Towns County but Handel ruled he couldn’t run for the Fourth District seat on the commission because he didn’t live there, even though as the AJC wrote, “Powell had bought a home in the district in 2006, had voted in the district three times, and got his mail, attended church, paid taxes and spent the majority of his time there.”

Handel removed Powell from the ballot and, even after an administrative court ruled in his favor, there were signs at polling places during the July primary that votes for him wouldn’t count and he was disqualified from running for office.

“She’s wrong, she’s absolutely wrong,” Powell said. “I’m troubled that she continues to disadvantage my campaign by filing these legal challenges and tries to keep me off the ballot by legal means.”

Handel attempted to strike Powell’s name from the ballot on two more occasions through the courts before the Georgia Supreme Court ruled unanimously for Powell a week before the election. “No matter the outcome of Tuesday’s election, a loser has emerged—Secretary of State Karen Handel,” wrote the AJC.

But the damage to Powell’s campaign was done. He lost to a Republican in 2008.

At the same time she was trying to purge qualified voters from the rolls and prevent Democrats from running for office, Handel championed Georgia’s strict voter-ID law, among the first of its kind to take effect in 2005. Four of five career lawyers at the Justice Department recommended blocking the law, but political appointees in the George W. Bush administration approved it even though the bill’s Republican sponsor in the legislature, Rep. Sue Burmeister, told DOJ lawyers: “If there are fewer black voters because of the bill, it will only be because there is less opportunity for fraud. She said when black voters in her precinct are not paid to vote, they do not go to the polls.”

“Opponents of photo ID have failed to produce even one voter who has been harmed by the requirement, despite nearly three years of scouring the state in search of such an individual,” Handel wrote in the AJC.

That prompted a response from reader Ed Neubaum of Marietta, who wrote:

My 73-year-old mother is one.

After moving to Georgia from Florida, we attempted to obtain a Georgia ID. Based on the then-published requirements on the Department of Motor Vehicles Web site, we gathered proof of her new address (bank statement), birth certificate and valid Florida driver’s license. At the DMV, we where told that as of May, the secretary of state required her marriage certificate because the name on her birth certificate did not match her driver’s license. They would accept a passport with her married name, something she has never applied for.

The harm:

Tracking down and paying $40 for a copy of her marriage certificate.

Two trips to the DMV, time and gas.

Missing the July 15 primary.

In fact, political scientists M. V. Hood III and Charles S. Bullock III found that the Georgia law did reduce voter turnout. When the law passed, they noted, 289,622 Georgia registrants—5.66 percent of the electorate—had neither a driver’s license nor state ID card.

Before the voter ID law: “In 2004, those registrants lacking photo ID had a turnout rate of 47.6% compared with other registrants with a 72.9% rate of turnout.” After the voter-ID law: “In 2008, the turnout rate for those registrants lacking ID drops to 39.6%, whereas for those with photo ID the rate falls to 70.0%.”

“Stated succinctly, we estimate turnout in Georgia in 2008 would have been about four-tenths of a percentage point higher had the courts blocked the law.” That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it could be enough to swing a close election. They called the turnout drop “a conservative estimate of voter suppression.” They also noted that Handel’s predecessor, Democrat Cathy Cox, who was secretary of state from 1997 to 2007, didn’t have a single case of in-person voter fraud reported to her office, which was the supposed justification for the law.

To this day, Handel cites the voter-ID law as one of her “most important accomplishments.” She said in a TV ad for the Sixth District race: “As secretary of state, I fought President Obama to implement photo ID and won,” even though Georgia’s voter-ID law was passed in 2005 and took effect in 2007, well before President Obama assumed office.

Handel was so busy fearmongering about voter fraud that she ignored a far more serious problem: the security of Georgia’s electronic voting machines, which to this day have no verifiable paper trail. As Politico reported, she was warned as secretary of state about the system’s vulnerability, but did nothing:

In 2006, when Handel ran for secretary of state of Georgia, she made the security of the state’s voting systems one of her campaign issues. After her win, she ordered a security review of the systems and the procedures for using them.

Experts at Georgia Tech conducted the review and found a number of security concerns, which they discussed in a report submitted to Handel. But, oddly, they were prohibited from examining the center’s network or reviewing its security procedures. Richard DeMillo, who was dean of computing at Georgia Tech at the time and led the review, told Politico he and his team argued with officials from the center in Handel’s office, but they were adamant that its procedures and networks would not be included in the review.

“I thought it was very strange,” says DeMillo. “It was kind of a contentious meeting. The Kennesaw people just stamped their foot and said ‘Over our dead body.’”

Although Handel could have insisted that the center’s network be included in the security review, she didn’t. But when DeMillo’s team submitted a draft of their report, he says she sent it back instructing them to add a caveat about the center’s absence from the review. It reads: “The Election Center at Kennesaw State University fills a key role in Georgia’s statewide election procedures, which makes it a potential target of a systematic attack. We did not have sufficient information to evaluate the security safeguards protecting against a centralized compromise at the state level.”

But once they delivered the finished report to Handel, DeMillo says, “We never heard anything more about it.” It’s not clear whether Handel’s office acted on recommendations made in the report.

Handel’s failure to protect Georgia’s voting system and repeated attempts to limit access to the ballot stand in sharp contrast to Jon Ossoff’s pledge to protect the right to vote. When asked in a debate to name an issue he wouldn’t compromise on, Ossoff answered: “voting rights.”

“I am concerned by apparent inclination of the Justice Department under Attorney General Sessions to back away from strict enforcement of civil rights and voting rights legislation,” he said. “I will stand up for the right of every Georgian to exercise their right to make their voice heard at the polls. I will conduct aggressive congressional oversight to ensure that federal agencies are enforcing the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act.”

In 2015, Larry Harmon, a 59-year-old software engineer and Navy vet, went to the polls in his hometown of Kent, Ohio, to vote on a state ballot initiative. But poll workers told him he was no longer registered and could not vote.

“I felt embarrassed and stupid at the time,” Harmon told Reuters. “The more I think about it, the madder I am,” he said.

Harmon voted for Barack Obama in 2008, but had not returned to vote until 2015. He later learned that he was purged from the rolls in Ohio for “infrequent voting” because he had not voted in a six-year period, even though he hadn’t moved or done anything to change his registration status. From 2011 to 2016, Ohio purged 2 million voters from the rolls—1.2 million for infrequent voting—more than any other state.

Harmon challenged Ohio’s voter purge in court, with the assistance of groups like Demos and the ACLU of Ohio, and in September 2016, the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled in his favor, finding that Ohio’s removal of “infrequent” voters violated the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, which says voter-roll maintenance “shall not result in the removal of the name of any person from the official list of voters registered to vote in an election for Federal office by reason of the person’s failure to vote.” As a result, 7,500 people who would have otherwise been purged were able to vote in the 2016 election, including Harmon, according to Secretary of State Jon Husted.

Ohio appealed to the Supreme Court and today, to the dismay of voting-rights activists, the Supreme Court decided to hear the case next term. If the Court reverses the Sixth Circuit and rules in favor of Ohio, it could make it easier for states to purge the voting rolls in inaccurate and discriminatory ways. (Fifteen Republican-controlled states, including Kris Kobach’s Kansas, filed an amicus brief supporting Ohio’s position.) This will be the first major voting-rights case heard since Neil Gorsuch took the bench, reviving the Court’s 5-4 conservative majority.

“We’re very disappointed because we believe the Sixth Circuit ruled correctly,” says Freda Levenson, legal director of the ACLU of Ohio. “It was a very important ruling.… There were hundreds of thousands of voters who were illegally purged.”

At least 144,000 voters in Ohio’s three largest counties, home to Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati, were purged since the 2012 election, with voters in Democratic-leaning neighborhoods twice as likely to be removed as those in Republican-leaning ones, according to a Reuters analysis. These cities are heavily Democratic, with large minority populations, and there was a clear partisan and racial disparity to the state’s voter purge.

In Cleveland’s Cuyahoga County, 5 percent of voters in neighborhoods that backed Obama by more than 60 percent in 2012 were purged last year due to inactivity, according to the Reuters analysis of the voter lists. In neighborhoods where Obama got less than 40 percent of the vote, 2.5 percent of registered voters were removed for that reason.

In Franklin County, home to the state capital Columbus, 11 percent of voters in Democratic-leaning neighborhoods have been purged since 2012 due to inactivity. Only 6 percent of voters in Republican-leaning neighborhoods have been purged.

The disparity is especially stark in Hamilton County, where affluent Republican suburbs ring Cincinnati, which has one of the highest child-poverty rates in the country.

In the heavily African-American neighborhoods near downtown, more than 10 percent of registered voters have been removed due to inactivity since 2012. In suburban Indian Hill, only 4 percent have been purged due to inactivity.

The purge worked like this: If a voter missed an election, Ohio sent them a letter making sure their address was still current. If the voter didn’t respond, Ohio put them on an inactive list, and if the voter didn’t vote in the next two elections, they were removed from the rolls.

In addition to the partisan and racial disparities, the state’s non-voter list was riddled with errors, reported the Akron Beacon Journal:

In Summit County, 36,822 registered voters will not get an absentee ballot application mailed to them. This includes 10,901 who voted in the 2008 presidential election (80 percent of whom voted Democratic in the contested primaries that year) and 123 who voted as recently as this March.

Kristina Hall, a lab courier who’s lived in Cuyahoga Falls for the past four years, can’t figure out why she’s one of them.

Hall voted in the Democratic Party primary in March. When she arrived at her polling location, she was told she was not on the list. An elections worker gave her a provisional ballot. Her vote, after everything checked out, was supposed to be used to update her address, which apparently was out of date with county election records.

It didn’t. An active voter in every presidential election in Ohio until she moved briefly to New York in 2012, Hall swears she voted in 2014 when she returned. State records show she didn’t.

The hassle has driven her to skepticism, especially since she said she’s received three notices from the board of elections to update her address and get off “confirmation status.” She said she sent all three back and has voted twice since they first arrived last year.

“I get so mad when people don’t vote,” she said. “That’s why I thought it was a problem when I’ve done everything I’m supposed to.”

This isn’t the first time a controversial voter purge in Ohio has attracted scrutiny. In 2004, the Ohio Republican Party sent a mailing to 232,000 newly registered voters, urging them to vote Republican. When 35,000 mailers were returned as undeliverable, the GOP tried to purge those voters from the rolls. As I reported in my book Give Us the Ballot, “more than half the challenged voters lived in Ohio’s two most populous counties—Cuyahoga (Cleveland) and Franklin (Columbus)—which were overwhelmingly Democratic and heavily minority.” The DNC sued the RNC and a federal court blocked the purge, ruling that voters “faced irreparable injury” to their “constitutional right to vote.”

But Republican-led voter purging efforts proved disastrous during the 2000 election in Florida, when the state wrongly labeled 12,000 registered voters as ex-felons and scrubbed them from the voter rolls—a number that was 22 times George W. Bush’s 537-vote margin of victory. That election taught the unfortunate lesson that a small manipulation of the country’s voting laws could make a big difference in close elections.

There were problems in Ohio in 2016 even after the Sixth Circuit ruled against the state’s purge. One in seven registered voters were not mailed absentee ballot applications because they were labeled inactive or were thought to have moved.

Freda Levenson told me a story of a 104-year-old-blind woman who couldn’t vote in 2016 because she was removed from the rolls at 102. She last voted in 2008 and was purged in 2015. As a result, her request for an absentee ballot in 2016 was denied.

“Here’s the problem: people don’t realize when they’re purged,” says Levenson. “In Ohio, voting is use it or lose it.”

To counteract the Trump administration’s “election integrity” commission, the Democratic National Committee is launching a new Commission on Protecting American Democracy from the Trump Administration. While the Trump commission plans to focus on so-called “fraudulent voting,” the DNC says its commission will debunk the myth that voter fraud is widespread, document the impact of voter suppression efforts in the 2016 election, and propose solutions to expand voting rights.

Trump’s commission is “part of the continuing dissemination of alternative facts,” DNC Chair Tom Perez says. “The commission itself is fraudulent, in the sense that voter fraud is a virtually non-existent phenomenon in this country.” Perez calls it “nothing but a sham to justify the GOP’s voter suppression efforts across the country…. Our commission will be ready to counter every move that the Trump administration makes to silence eligible voters. We simply cannot trust Trump, Jeff Sessions, or anyone in this administration to protect the integrity of our democracy.”

Former Missouri secretary of state Jason Kander, president of Let America Vote, will chair the DNC commission, and Alabama Representative Terri Sewell, who represents Selma and Birmingham, will be the vice chair. The other members will be New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, Texas Representative Joaquin Castro, Colorado House Speaker Crisanta Duran, Maricopa County Recorder Adrian Fontes, Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, New York Representative Grace Meng, Wisconsin Representative Gwen Moore, California Secretary of State Alex Padilla, DNC Vice Chair Karen Carter Peterson, and District of Columbia Attorney General Karl Racine.

“When Donald Trump made the false and baseless claim that three to 5 million illegal votes were cast in the 2016 election, he told one of the biggest lies in presidential history,” says Kander. “While Trump’s misleading claims about voter fraud were probably made to mend his bruised ego after losing the popular vote, he created an opening for Republican politicians to nationalize their efforts to complicate voting and suppress eligible voters. I’m excited to join with the DNC and defend the rights of eligible voters from the Trump administration’s attacks on democracy.”

“Our commission will document and report on today’s wave of voter-suppression tactics and provide recommendations for strengthening access to the polls for all Americans,” adds Sewell.

The commission is part of the DNC’s new Voter Protection and Empowerment Unit, which represents the party’s most ambitious effort to safeguard voting rights. “With the relentless attacks on voting rights that have become a staple in the playbook of the Republican Party, it’s absolutely imperative to develop a robust and permanent infrastructure within the Democratic Party for voter protection and empowerment,” Perez says.

In the past, the DNC had one full-time staffer focused on voter protection. The new unit will have four staffers—integrated with state parties and the broader voting-rights community—in addition to a new Voter Empowerment Caucus within the DNC and revived Lawyers Council. (The staff and members have yet to be announced.)

“We have to develop a much better capacity to play both offense and defense on voting rights,” Perez says. That means challenging restrictive voting laws in the courts and through on the ground organizing in states like North Carolina, Texas, and Wisconsin while also pushing for policies that would expand access to the ballot, like automatic voter registration. (As assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Obama Justice Department, Perez filed suit against strict voter-ID laws in Texas and South Carolina.) Perez also mentioned more far-reaching solutions, like abolishing the Electoral College through the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.

“We have a bully pulpit as a party, but I don’t think we’ve used it sufficiently,” Perez said. Given the threats to voting rights at the local, state, and national level, this effort is long overdue.

On May 15, the Supreme Court let stand a decision from the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruling that North Carolina’s sweeping voting restrictions targeted African-American voters “with almost surgical precision.”

A week later, on May 22, the Supreme Court struck down two of North Carolina’s congressional districts as unconstitutional racial gerrymanders, upholding a lower-court opinion that “race predominated” in drawing the districts.

It’s now overwhelmingly clear that Republicans in North Carolina illegally made it harder for African Americans to vote and diminished the power of their votes. Today’s decision could have far-reaching ramifications for striking down gerrymandering nationwide.

In a 5-3 opinion today, Justice Kagan (surprisingly joined by Justice Thomas) ruled that North Carolina artificially increased the number of black voters in the state’s 1st and 12th congressional districts. In the 1st district, the black voting-age population jumped from 48.6 percent to 52.7 percent and in the 12th from 43.8 percent to 50.7 percent. Although black Democrats had held both seats since 1992, Republican leaders said they needed to make the two districts over 50 percent African American to comply with the Voting Rights Act, which Kagan said was blatantly untrue.

Kagan cited a conversation former congressman Mel Watt, who represented the 12th District from 1993 to 2013, had with GOP State Senator Bob Rucho, who oversaw redistricting efforts:

Perhaps the most dramatic testimony in the trial came when Congressman Mel Watt (who had represented District 12 for some 20 years) recounted a conversation he had with Rucho in 2011 about the district’s future make-up. According to Watt, Rucho saithat “his leadership had told him that he had to ramp the minority percentage in [District 12] up to over 50percent to comply with the Voting Rights Law.” And further, that it would then be Rucho’s “job to go and convince the African-American community” that such a racial target “made sense” under the Act.

Watt recalled that he laughed in response because the VRA required no such target. And he told Rucho that “the African-American community will laugh at you” too. Watt explained to Rucho: “I’m getting 65% of the vote in a 40% black district. If you ramp my [BVAP] to over 50%, I’ll probably get 80% of the vote, and[] that’s not what the Voting Rights Actwas designed to do.”

Under the guise of complying with the Voting Rights Act, Republicans in North Carolina turned the VRA on its head, packing the number of black voters in as few districts as possible to deprive black voters of political influence in surrounding districts. This was a strategy adopted by Republicans across the South after the 2010 election, as I reported in my article “How the GOP Is Resegregating the South.”

In virtually every state in the South, at the Congressional and state level, Republicans—to protect and expand their gains in 2010—have increased the number of minority voters in majority-minority districts represented overwhelmingly by black Democrats while diluting the minority vote in swing or crossover districts held by white Democrats. “What’s uniform across the South is that Republicans are using race as a central basis in drawing districts for partisan advantage,” says Anita Earls, a prominent civil rights lawyer and executive director of the Durham-based Southern Coalition for Social Justice. “The bigger picture is to ultimately make the Democratic Party in the South be represented only by people of color.” The GOP’s long-term goal is to enshrine a system of racially polarized voting that will make it harder for Democrats to win races on local, state, federal and presidential levels.

This cynical strategy worked for Republicans. Before the 2010 election, Democrats held an 8-to-5 advantage in North Carolina’s congressional delegation. But after the 2011 redistricting plan went into effect, Republicans have a 10-to-3 advantage today. (A new report by the Brennan Center for Justice found that extreme racial gerrymandering gave Republicans an extra 16 or 17 seats in the House, with North Carolina as one of the prime examples.)

However, these GOP efforts are increasingly running afoul of the courts, who’ve now struck down GOP-drawn redistricting maps in Alabama, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia—all states that previously had to approve their voting changes with the federal government under the Voting Rights Act.

Republicans in North Carolina and elsewhere argued that their redistricting maps were constitutional because they drew them to benefit their party politically, not for racial reasons. Justice Alito made the same point in his dissent, which was joined by Roberts and Kennedy. But Justice Kagan, in a very significant finding, said that race and party cannot be separated in states like North Carolina where African-Americans overwhelmingly vote Democratic.

“In Footnotes 1 and 7, the Court explains that in places where race and party overlap so much they can be treated as proxies for one another,” writes Rick Hasen. “Holy cow, this is a big deal. It means that race and party are not really discrete categories and that discriminating on the basis of party in places of conjoined polarization is equivalent, at least sometimes, to making race the predominant factor in redistricting. This will lead to many more successful racial gerrymandering cases in the American South and elsewhere, and allow these cases to substitute for (so far unsuccessful) partisan gerrymandering claims involving some of these districts.”

There is more to come on this front: The courts also ruled that North Carolina’s state legislative districts were also illegal racial gerrymanders, and that decision is being appealed to the Supreme Court.

For now, North Carolina joins Texas as the only state where courts have found that new voting restrictions and post-2010 redistricting maps discriminated against voters of color.

Listen to Ari Berman on the Start Making Sense podcast.

On June 25, 2013, the Supreme Court struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act, ruling that states with the longest histories of voting discrimination no longer had to approve their voting changes with the federal government. A month after that decision, North Carolina—where 40 counties were previously subject to that requirement—passed the country’s most sweeping voting restrictions.

The state required strict voter ID to cast a ballot, cut a week of early voting, and eliminated same-day voter registration, out-of-precinct voting, and preregistration for 16 and 17-year-olds. On July 29, 2016, the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit invalidated these restrictions, which it said targeted African Americans “with almost surgical precision” in violation of the Voting Rights Act and 14th Amendment.

The decision was the most significant victory for voting rights since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. North Carolina Republicans appealed to the Supreme Court. Today, in a big and unexpected win for voting rights, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case, meaning that the country’s worst voter-suppression law will remain blocked indefinitely.

Despite this important legal victory, North Carolina remains a cautionary tale for how low Republicans will stoop to suppress the vote.

Even after the Fourth Circuit called cuts to early voting “as close to a smoking gun as we are likely to see in modern times,” North Carolina Republicans brazenly cut early-voting hours in local counties. The executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party, Dallas Woodhouse, urged Republican-controlled election boards to “make party line changes to early voting” by adopting fewer early voting days, eliminating polling places on college campuses, and prohibiting Sunday voting, when black churches hold “Souls to the Polls” mobilization drives.

The cynical strategy worked: Black turnout decreased 16 percent during the first week of early voting because of long lines and fewer polling places. The North Carolina GOP bragged before Election Day that “African American Early Voting is down 8.5% from this time in 2012. Caucasian voters early voting is up 22.5% from this time in 2012.”

Then, after Democrat Roy Cooper was elected governor, one of the first things the GOP-controlled legislature did, in a lame-duck legislative coup, was take away the governor’s power to control a majority on the state’s election boards—the very election boards that cut early voting in Democratic areas. This is the same GOP legislature that has been found guilty of rampant racial gerrymandering and will have to hold a special election to redraw many of its seats.

Beyond North Carolina, attacks on voting rights are going to get worse because of the establishment of President Trump’s “election integrity” commission and a new conservative majority on the Supreme Court. Republicans lost a major battle in North Carolina, but they won’t stop fighting a longer war against democracy.

Two days after firing FBI director James Comey and creating a full-blown constitutional crisis, Donald Trump signed an executive order today creating a presidential commission on “election integrity,” based on his debunked claims that millions voted illegally in 2016.

Vice President Mike Pence will be the chair and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach will be the vice chair—two men with very long histories of making it harder to vote, especially Kobach. Given the lack of evidence of voter fraud, the commission seems designed for one purpose: to perpetuate the myth of fraud in order to lay the groundwork for enacting policies that suppress the vote.

If you want to know what such voter intimidation looks like, take a look at Pence’s home state of Indiana, where state police in October 2016 raided the offices of a group working to register African-American and low-income voters. They seized thousands of voter-registration applications, even though only 10 were suspected to be fraudulent and no one has been charged.

In Kansas, Kobach has been the driving force within the GOP behind policies that erect new barriers to the ballot box and the most fervent evangelist of unproven voter-fraud claims.

When Trump tweeted on November 27 that “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” White House advisers cited Kobach as a key source of the discredited claim.

When he ran for secretary of state of Kansas in 2010, Kobach alleged that “the illegal registration of alien voters has become pervasive,” even though there were only five alleged cases of noncitizens voting in Kansas during the previous 13 years on a report of 221 “incidents” he distributed widely.

That led Kansas to enact a law requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote, such as a birth certificate, a passport, or naturalization papers. Since the law went into effect in 2013, one in seven Kansans who attempted to register have had their registrations held “in suspense” by the state. The United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit blocked a key part of the law last year, ruling that “there was an almost certain risk that thousands of otherwise qualified Kansans would be unable to vote in November.”

According to a 2006 survey by the Brennan Center for Justice, 7 percent of Americans “do not have ready access to citizenship documents,” but a much larger number don’t carry those documents around with them, which made it impossible for groups like the League of Women Voters to register voters in Kansas. If Trump followed Kobach’s advice and pushed for policies like requiring documentary proof of citizenship for voter registration nationwide, it would have a massively suppressive impact on voting in America.

In 2014, Kobach became the only secretary of state in the country with the power to prosecute voter-fraud cases. Despite his assertion that such fraud occurs with “alarming regularity,” he’s convicted just nine people out of 1.8 million registered voters in Kansas and successfully prosecuted only one noncitizen for illegally voting. In a withering editorial last week, the Kansas City Star called Kobach the “Javert of voter fraud,” comparing him to the fanatical villain of Les Misérables. “Keep this up, sir, and you may yet prove that of the 1.8 million registered voters in the state, the number of those who have perpetrated this crime is in the double digits.”

Just yesterday, as part of a lawsuit by the ACLU challenging Kansas’s proof of citizenship law, a federal judge ordered Kobach to produce documents by Friday that he shared with Trump after the election that called for purging the voting rolls and amending the National Voter Registration Act to require proof of citizenship for registration. When he met with Trump on November 21, Kobach was photographed holding a white paper that advocated for a wish list of radical right-wing policies, including “extreme vetting” and tracking of “all aliens from high-risk areas,” reducing the “intake of Syrian refugees to zero,” deporting a “record number of criminal aliens in the first year,” and the “rapid build” of a wall along the US-Mexico border.

Despite what Trump and his advisers say, all of the evidence shows that voter fraud is a very small problem in American elections. The Washington Post found only four documented cases of voter fraud in 2016 out of 135 million votes cast, equal to 0.000002 percent of total votes. A state-based review by David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation & Research found at most a few hundred alleged cases of fraud, nowhere near the millions Trump is claiming. There were just 31 credible cases of voter impersonation from 2000 to 2014 out of more than 1 billion votes cast during that time. During the recount in Michigan, even Trump’s lawyers said, “All available evidence suggests that the 2016 general election was not tainted by fraud or mistake.”

Voter suppression is a much bigger problem than voter fraud. The 2016 election was the first in 50 years without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act and fourteen states had new voting restrictions in effect for the first time. On Tuesday I wrote about a new study finding that 200,000 votes could’ve been suppressed by Wisconsin’s strict voter-ID law in 2016. In comparison, Wisconsin didn’t present a single case of voter impersonation in court that the law would’ve stopped.

We’re at a very dangerous moment for democracy right now, when the core institutions of our democratic system have repeatedly been attacked by the president of the United States. The director of the FBI was fired; Trump is under FBI investigation; our elections were hacked by a foreign autocracy; judges have been denounced by name; the media is called fake news. And now votes are being suppressed.

Saving American democracy is the most urgent fight of the Trump era.

Prior to the 2016 election, Eddie Lee Holloway Jr., a 58-year-old African-American man, moved from Illinois to Wisconsin, which implemented a strict voter-ID law for the first time in 2016. He brought his expired Illinois photo ID, birth certificate, and Social Security card to get a photo ID for voting in Wisconsin, but the DMV in Milwaukee rejected his application because the name on his birth certificate read “Eddie Junior Holloway,” the result of a clerical error when it was issued. Holloway ended up making seven trips to different public agencies in two states and spent over $200 in an attempt to correct his birth certificate, but he was never able to obtain a voter ID in Wisconsin. Before the election, his lawyer for the ACLU told me Holloway was so disgusted he left Wisconsin for Illinois.

Holloway’s story was sadly familiar in 2016. According to federal court records, 300,000 registered voters, 9 percent of the electorate, lacked strict forms of voter ID in Wisconsin. A new study by Priorities USA, shared exclusively with The Nation, shows that strict voter-ID laws, in Wisconsin and other states, led to a significant reduction in voter turnout in 2016, with a disproportionate impact on African-American and Democratic-leaning voters. Wisconsin’s voter-ID law reduced turnout by 200,000 votes, according to the new analysis. Donald Trump won the state by only 22,748 votes.

The study compared turnout in states that adopted strict voter-ID laws between 2012 and 2016, like Wisconsin, to states that did not.

While states with no change to voter identification laws witnessed an average increased turnout of +1.3% from 2012 to 2016, Wisconsin’s turnout (where voter ID laws changed to strict) dropped by -3.3%. If turnout had instead increased by the national no-change average, we estimate that over 200,000 more voters would have voted in Wisconsin in 2016.

This reduction in turnout particularly hurt Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

The lost voters skewed more African-American and more Democrat. For example, Wisconsin’s 2016 electorate was 6.1% more Republican, and 5.7% less Democrat, than the group of ‘lost voters’. Furthermore, the WI electorate was 3.7% more White and 3.8% less African American than the group of ‘lost voters.’ This analysis suggests that the 200,000 lost voters would have both been more racially diverse and have voted more Democratic.

(Priorities USA is a progressive advocacy group and Super PAC that supported Clinton in 2016 and Barack Obama in 2012. The study was conducted by Civis Analytics, a data science firm founded by the chief analytics officer for Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012.)

Though Wisconsin saw the most dramatic reduction in turnout among voter-ID states, it was reflective of a worrisome broader national trend.

In states where the voter identification laws did not change between ’12 and ’16, turnout was up +1.3%. In states where ID laws changed to non-strict (AL, NH, RI) turnout increased less, and was only up by +0.7%. In states where ID laws changed to strict (MS, VA, WI) turnout actually decreased by – 1.7%.

The drop in turnout in these six states led to 400,000 fewer votes relative to turnout in states where ID laws did not change. In Mississippi, Virginia, and Wisconsin, strict voter-ID laws had an especially pronounced negative impact on African-American voters.

In counties where African Americans make up less than 10% of the population AND there were no changes to voter ID laws, 2016 turnout was up +1.9% from 2012, but in similar <10% African American counties where ID laws changed to be strict, total turnout decreased by -0.7%. In counties where African Americans make up more than 40% of the population, however, 2016 turnout was down -2.2% from 2012 in states where ID laws did not change, but down -5 points in states where ID laws changed to be strict.

The study also compared turnout in Wisconsin to Minnesota, which has very similar demographics but no voter-ID law, and found “turnout in African-American counties dropped off at significantly higher levels than in their Minnesota-counterparts.”

It’s important to note that this study was conducted by a Democratic Party–affiliated group and has not been peer-reviewed or gone through the typical academic vetting process. While some studies have shown big reductions in turnout among minority voters because of voter-ID laws, others have not. But the Priorities USA study is consistent with a 2014 study by the Government Accountability Office, which found that strict voter-ID laws in Kansas and Tennessee reduced turnout by 2 percent, enough to swing a close election, with the largest drop-off among newly registered voters, young voters, and voters of color.

This study provides more evidence for the claim that voter-ID laws are designed not to stop voter impersonation fraud, which is virtually nonexistent, but to make it harder for certain communities to vote. This matters greatly today, because 87 bills to restrict access to the ballot have been introduced in 29 states this year, including voter-ID laws in 19 states. Arkansas and Iowa have already passed strict voter-ID laws in 2017.

“Americans’ fundamental right to vote is under attack by Republican governors and state legislatures around the country,” said Guy Cecil, Chairman of Priorities USA. “Under the false pretense of combating voter fraud, Republicans are passing laws that make it more difficult and time-consuming for average citizens to participate in the democratic process.”

On March 22, 2017, Jill Boyd Myers moved from Atlanta to Sandy Springs, Georgia, relocating from the Fifth Congressional District to the Sixth. She wanted to vote in the special election to replace Congressman Tom Price, Donald Trump’s secretary for health and human services, but she was unable to because Georgia’s registration deadline of March 20 for both the April 18 open primary and the June 20 runoff between Democrat Jon Ossoff and Republican Karen Handel had already passed.

That meant nobody who registered after March 20—90 days before the runoff election—could vote in the hotly contested Ossoff-Handel race. Registration had effectively been frozen in the Sixth Congressional District.

But a federal court granted a preliminary injunction yesterday against the state’s 90-day registration cutoff, finding it violates the National Voter Registration Act, which prohibits setting voter-registration deadlines more than 30 days before an election. Civil-rights groups, led by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, filed suit against the law. “If a preliminary injunction is not granted requiring Defendants to process voter-registration applications received after the previous deadline of March 20, numerous voters who would otherwise be eligible to vote in the runoff will be denied that right,” wrote District Court Judge Timothy Batten, a George W. Bush appointee.

Now Myers and thousands of others will be able to register until May 21, which could have a big impact in an election that could be decided by the narrowest of margins. “This just felt like a real prohibition of our rights as citizens,” Myers said after the ruling.

Voter registration is surging in Georgia—464,000 more people have registered this year than during the last non-presidential-election year (559,000 voter-registration applications this year compared with 95,000 in 2015). Ossoff’s campaign said it is registering more than a hundred new voters a day. “Voting rights are constitutional rights,” Ossoff said after the decision. “I encourage all eligible voters to ensure that they are registered and make their voices heard on June 20th and in all elections, regardless of their party or political persuasion.”

Voter suppression is not an incidental issue in the special election. As Georgia secretary of state from 2006 to 2009, Karen Handel had a long record of making it harder to vote, supporting Georgia’s strict voter-ID law, trying to purge thousands of eligible voters from the rolls before the 2008 election, and repeatedly challenging the residency of qualified Democratic candidates. Handel has bragged about these issues, saying in a TV ad: “As secretary of state, I fought President Obama to implement photo ID and won,” even though Georgia’s voter-ID law was passed in 2005 and took effect in 2007, well before President Obama assumed office.

The same discredited rhetoric about voter fraud that Republicans have used nationally has also been deployed in the Sixth Congressional District race. In a fund-raising e-mail for Handel, Trump accused “Liberal Democrats” of “spending millions of dollars trying to steal a Congressional seat from Republicans in Georgia.”

In fact, the only way the election had been tainted was by eligible voters not being able to participate because of Georgia’s absurd voting rules. If Democrats want to take back the House in 2018, especially in the wake of yesterday’s health-care vote, challenging voter suppression must be a top priority for the party.

My grandmother Sylvia moved from Brooklyn to Iowa when she was 89 years old. It was a culture shock, to say the least. When my mom took her to vote, she complained of the candidates, “There isn’t anybody who’s Jewish!”

I thought of my grandmother, who passed away in 2005 at 99, when the Iowa Legislature passed a strict voter-ID law today. She didn’t have a driver’s license because she never drove (she’d frequently walk two miles from her apartment to the grocery store). Her passport expired long ago. She never had a US birth certificate because she was born in Poland and fled the Holocaust. She used her Medicare card as identification. She didn’t possess any of the forms of government-issued photo identification that Iowa will soon require to vote.

The ACLU of Iowa reports that 11 percent of eligible Iowa voters—260,000 people—don’t have a driver’s license or non-operator ID, according to the US Census and the Iowa Department of Transportation, and could be disenfranchised by the bill. My grandmother, if she were still alive today, would have been one of them.

There’s no evidence the new law is necessary. Iowa has some of the best-run elections in the country. There were only 10 alleged cases of fraud out of 1.6 million votes cast in 2016 and no cases of voter impersonation that a voter-ID law might’ve stopped. The only conviction was a Trump supporter who voted twice because she thought the election was rigged and her first vote wouldn’t count. “We’ve not experienced widespread voter fraud in Iowa,” admits Secretary of State Paul Pate, the architect of the bill. (However, Pate still pushed misleading fraud stats over the objections of his own staff.)

Yet Iowa Republicans, who now control state government for the first time in two decades, say the law is necessary to combat the “perception” of fraud—a perception created by Republicans who alleged for a decade without evidence that such fraud was widespread. “It is true that there isn’t widespread voter fraud,” State Representative Ken Rizer told The New York Times. “But there is a perception that the system can be cheated. That’s one of the reasons for doing this.” The fact that Republicans are pointing to the mere “perception” of fraud as a reason to disenfranchise thousands of voters shows why Trump’s baseless assertions that millions are voting illegally is so damaging.

The county auditors who run Iowa’s elections say the system works just fine and testified against the bill. “Our system is incredible here in the state,” said Johnson County Auditor Travis Weipert of Iowa City. “Incredible. We have 99 auditors who work their tails off…. The system works perfect and they are trying to fix a problem that isn’t there.”

Secretary Pate says no one will be disenfranchised by the law because the state will mail new ID cards to the 85,000 active registered voters without one. But that doesn’t include the much larger number of eligible voters, 260,000, who don’t have strict voter ID. Not to mention the 57,000 out-of-state students who might not be able to vote because student IDs aren’t accepted. Or the fact that Iowa will spend at least $1 million implementing the new law at a time when there’s a $118 million budget shortfall in the state.

“Iowa has some of the best elections in the country with some of the highest rates of voter participation and zero indication of any voter-impersonation fraud,” says Rita Bettis, legal director of the ACLU of Iowa. “But under Secretary Pate’s voter-ID bill, voters would be confused, lines would be longer, and some voters simply would not have their ballots counted because they lack a narrow class of three acceptable photo IDs.”

There’s also a stark racial disparity: In Waterloo’s Black Hawk County, for example, “African-Americans make up 27 percent of voting-age residents who lack an Iowa driver’s license, but only 10 percent of all voting-age residents,” according to the ACLU. In addition, the law “effectively ends” Iowa’s popular system of Election Day registration for those without voter ID. “That’s because for those people who don’t pre-register 11 days before the election and who don’t have one of the three forms of ID, they won’t be able to get a ‘free ID’ mailed to them in time,” according to the ACLU. (In addition to voter ID, the bill also cut early voting and banned straight-ticket voting.)

Iowa, which went for Obama twice before Trump, is one of the first states in 2017 to pass a new law making it harder to vote, but it likely won’t be the last. So far in 2017, 87 bills have been introduced in 29 states to restrict access to the ballot, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. (And that’s on top of the 21 states that already passed new voting restrictions since 2010.) Arkansas recently passed a new voter-ID law, similar to the one that was unanimously struck down the Arkansas Supreme Court in 2014. New Hampshire has tightened residency requirements for those using same-day registration and even proposed that local police would knock on doors to verify addresses. Georgia is now requiring that information on voter-registration forms exactly match state databases or ballots might not be counted.

In early March, the Iowa House passed a bill severely loosening the state’s gun-control laws. (Republicans have also introduced legislation to defund Planned Parenthood, ban abortions after 20 weeks, gut collective bargaining for unions, and reinstate the death penalty.) “House File 517 lets kids use guns, legalizes sawed-off shotguns, allows guns in city council meetings and gives vigilantes a stronger excuse for shooting someone down on the street,” according to Des Moines Register columnist Kathy Obradovich. The GOP’s argument: The state shouldn’t be restricting a fundamental right. Somehow that same argument doesn’t apply to voting, the most fundamental right in a democracy. “The number of people killed in the United States by firearms each year is about 33,000,” wrote Obradovich. “The number of people killed by voter fraud each year is zero.”

My grandmother never owned a gun, but she voted.

On March 10, a federal court in Texas found that the state’s congressional redistricting maps “intentionally diluted minority voting strength in order to gain partisan advantage.”

Exactly a month later, another federal court in Texas ruled that the state’s strict voter-ID law “was passed with a discriminatory purpose in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.”

Notice a pattern here?

Yesterday’s ruling by District Court Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos was a big victory for voting rights and a big loss for Jeff Sessions and the Trump Justice Department, who reversed the Obama administration’s position that the law was intentionally discriminatory.

Ramos’s decision was the fifth time Texas’s voter-ID law has been struck down by the courts. A federal district court in Washington, DC, first blocked the law all the way back in August 2012. But after the Supreme Court ruled in June 2013 that states with a long history of discrimination no longer had to approve their voting changes with the federal government under the Voting Rights Act, Texas’s law went into effect within hours.

The law was blocked again in September 2014 by Judge Ramos, who found that 608,470 registered voters in Texas, 4.5 percent of the electorate, did not possess the limited forms of government-issued ID required to cast a ballot (a handgun permit was accepted but a student ID was not), with African Americans three times as likely as whites not to have a voter ID, and Hispanics twice as likely. “It is clear from the evidence,” Ramos wrote, “that SB 14 disproportionately impacts African-American and Hispanic registered voters relative to Anglos in Texas…. To call SB 14’s disproportionate impact on minorities statistically significant would be an understatement.”

She called the law “an unconstitutional poll tax” and said it was passed by the Texas Legislature “because of and not merely in spite of the voter ID law’s detrimental effects on the African-American and Hispanic electorate.”

In July 2016, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, one of the most conservative courts in the country, affirmed the bulk of Ramos’s ruling, saying the law “imposes significant and disparate burdens on the right to vote” and had “a discriminatory effect on minorities’ voting rights.”

The court called out Texas for not presenting a single case of voter impersonation to justify the law. “Even under the least searching standard of review we employ for these types of challenges, there cannot be a total disconnect between the State’s announced interests and the statute enacted,” the court wrote. “The provisions of SB 14 fail to correspond in any meaningful way to the legitimate interests the State claims to have been advancing through SB 14.”

However, the court also asked Ramos to re-examine the evidence to see whether the law was indeed intentionally discriminatory. She held a new hearing on February 28 and came to the same conclusion. “SB 14 was passed, at least in part, with a discriminatory intent in violation of the Voting Rights Act,” she wrote. The court found that “the suppression of the overwhelmingly Democratic votes of African-Americans and Latinos” was done “to provide an Anglo partisan advantage.”

The intentional discrimination finding is significant because it means Texas could become the first state to once again have to approve its voting changes with the federal government since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, which would set an important precedent. (The Texas Legislature is now considering a new voter-ID law allowing those without strict photo ID to cast a ballot by signing an affidavit attesting to their identity.)

We’re learning more and more about the real purpose of such laws. An article in The Birmingham News yesterday described how the top adviser and mistress to disgraced Alabama Governor Robert Bentley suggested closing 31 DMV locations, many in majority-black counties, after the state passed a new voter-ID law. The head of the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency “claims he then reported the closure plan to then-Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange’s office because he was concerned about a Voting Rights Act violation.” The US Department of Transportation subsequently determined it violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

However, these voting-rights victories could be short-lived if new Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch provides the deciding vote reinstating such restrictions should they reach the highest court.

Many in the media are portraying the Republicans’ move to invoke the nuclear option to confirm Neil Gorsuch as a mere squabble over Senate rules, the latest example of hyper-partisanship in Washington that both parties are equally responsible for.

The “both sides do it” narrative is the worst kind of false equivalence. In fact, the GOP’s use of the nuclear option highlights in stark terms the Republican Party’s unique hostility to democracy, which has come to define the party in recent years through efforts like voter suppression, gerrymandering, and a stolen Supreme Court seat. (Not to mention Donald Trump’s attacks on the core pillars of democracy—like fair elections, a free press, and an independent judiciary.)

Following President Obama’s election, when Republicans took control of many state legislative chambers after the 2010 election, 22 states passed new restrictions on voting. Through challenging the Voting Rights Act, voter-ID laws, cutbacks to early voting, limits on voter registration drives, closing down polling places, purging the voting rolls, and disenfranchising ex-offenders, Republicans attempted to manufacture an electorate that was more advantageous to their party. So far this year, 87 bills to restrict access to voting have been introduced in 29 states.

In addition, Republicans controlled the redistricting process in 20 states after the 2010 election, compared to only 11 for Democrats, and aggressively gerrymandered state legislative seats and US House districts to retain power for the next decade. In 2012, for example, Democratic candidates for the US House of Representatives won 1.4 million more votes, but Republicans won 33 more seats. Courts have found that Republican-drafted redistricting maps in states like North Carolina and Texas intentionally discriminated against minority voters.

Republicans in North Carolina took their hostility to the democratic process to the extreme degree after the 2016 election when Democrat Roy Cooper was elected governor, passing a series of bills in the lame-duck state legislative session to reduce or eliminate the governor’s essential powers. The bills prevented the governor from appointing a majority of members to the state Board of Elections or 100 county boards of elections; reduced the number of public employees the governor could appoint from 1,500 to 425 and prevented the governor from appointing members to boards of state universities; and made it harder for the state Supreme Court, which has a 4–3 Democratic majority, to review future challenges to election-law changes. It was nothing less than a legislative coup. The courts blocked the changes to the boards of elections, but Republicans are still trying to change the rules.

When Republicans didn’t like the fact that President Obama would get to fill Antonin Scalia’s Supreme Court seat in 2016, they simply invented a new argument—that a president in the last year of his term or during an election year couldn’t make a new appointment—to avoid giving Merrick Garland a hearing, let alone a vote. In fact, on seven different occasions since 1912, a president in the last year of his term or during an election year was able to fill a Supreme Court vacancy. “All vacancies in an election year in the last 116 years were filled,” reports Factcheck.org.

I’m no great fan of the filibuster, but it’s stunningly hypocritical for Republicans to deny Garland a hearing and a vote and then change the Senate rules to confirm Gorsuch. The very things they demanded for Gorsuch, they denied to Garland. Yes, Democrats did invoke the nuclear option for lower-court nominees in 2013, but Republicans have been far more obstructionist toward judicial nominations than Democrats have, as David Leonhardt of The New York Times wrote recently.

The pattern is clear—when Republicans don’t like the legislative rules or an outcome of an election, they change the rules or try to nullify the election. The story isn’t that both sides are to blame for hyper-partisanship in Washington. It’s that one party believes in democracy and the other does not.

The Senate Judiciary Committee approved Neil Gorsuch’s nomination in an 11-to-9 party-line vote today. But 41 Senate Democrats have now pledged to oppose Gorsuch, which gives them the votes needed to block his nomination. In response to a planned Democratic filibuster, Republicans say they’ll invoke the nuclear option for Supreme Court nominations and confirm Gorsuch with a simple majority of 51 votes. “Judge Gorsuch is going to be confirmed,” Mitch McConnell vowed on Sunday.

In addition to conservative supporters of Gorsuch, some liberal legal experts have also raised doubts about filibustering Gorsuch. “I have no doubt that a Justice Gorsuch will be awful for progressives on the issues that they care the most about: abortion, affirmative action, campaign finance, voting rights, environmental protection, gun rights, and everything else,” writes UC Irvine law professor Rick Hasen. But he cautions:2

Imagine if in a year or so Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, or Kennedy leave the Court. Then things get MUCH worse from the point of view of progressives. Then Roberts becomes the swing voter and there goes affirmative action, abortion rights, etc. If you think things with the Supreme Court are bad for progressive now they can get much, much worse.3

Better to save the firepower for that fight. It is possible that Senators like Susan Collins would be squeamish about such a nominee, and they might not vote to go nuclear. At that point, people can take to the streets and exert public pressure. At that point, the left will perhaps realize what they lost when they lost the 2016 election and how bad things will be.4

The problem with this argument is that it’s delusional to believe that Mitch McConnell—who prevented Merrick Garland from even receiving a hearing—would allow Democrats to filibuster the next Supreme Court vacancy if they allow Gorsuch to go through. If Justice Kennedy or a liberal justice like Ginsburg or Breyer stepped down and Republicans had the ability to overturn landmark laws like Roe v. Wade with a 6-to-3 vote, they would do everything in their power to make it happen and wouldn’t blink for a second about going nuclear. Moreover, because a number of red-state Democrats are up for reelection in 2018, Senate Democrats may have fewer seats and even less leverage when the next Supreme Court vacancy occurs.5

There are at least five good reasons to oppose Gorsuch now.6

The first reason is Merrick Garland. We wouldn’t even be talking about Gorsuch if Republicans hadn’t stolen a Supreme Court seat from President Obama. And now Republicans are engaged in an unbelievable rewriting of history, literally deleting Garland from recent memory. “Even President Obama’s two Supreme Court nominees were recognized for their ability to do the job and confirmed without incident,” Arizona Senator Jeff Flake wrote in The Arizona Republic on March 25. Except there were three nominees!7

Republicans must pay a price for their unprecedented obstructionism. “I have a very hard time getting over what was done to Merrick Garland, a very hard time,” moderate Democratic Senator Tom Carper of Delaware told The Washington Post. “That’s a wrong that should be righted, we have a chance to do that, and it won’t be by confirming Judge Gorsuch the first time through.”8

The second reason is Gorsuch’s own record, as I’ve written during his confirmation hearings:9

We know enough about Gorsuch to surmise that he was nominated by Donald Trump to be a smooth-talking advocate on the bench for a far-right ideology. He was handpicked by the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation. He has close ties to a conservative billionaire and has praised one of the GOP’s most notorious voter-suppression advocates. He’s criticized liberals for challenging gay-marriage bans in the courts. During the Bush administration, he praised the Guantánamo prison and defended harsh anti-terror policies. As a judge, he joined the Hobby Lobby decision restricting a woman’s right to choose and ruled against a truck driver who abandoned his trailer in subzero temperatures after it broke down. He’s consistently favored corporate power and corporate influence in the political process. In fact, a review of his opinions suggests he will be more conservative than Roberts and Alito, second only to Justice Thomas.10

The third reason is his refusal to answer even basic questions about his judicial philosophy before the Senate. Writes Garrett Epps in The Atlantic:11

In his answers to senators, Gorsuch seemed like a man whom one would dread sitting next to on a long airplane trip. The charm he displayed was oddly repellent; his vaunted humility was relentlessly overbearing; and his open-mindedness was rigidly dogmatic. He seemed to have trouble concealing contempt for the process, his questioners, and the public itself.12

Gorsuch was by turns condescending, evasive, and even dishonest. In fact, it’s not too much to say that he, in his aw-shucks gentlemanly way, gaslighted the committee in a genteel but nonetheless Trumpian style.13

Senators Tammy Duckworth and Catherine Cortez Masto said recently that Gorsuch refused to meet with them, which is the height of arrogance for a nominee up for a lifetime appointment.14

The fourth reason is that the president who nominated Gorsuch is under FBI investigation for colluding with Russia, which casts further doubt on the legitimacy of this process. As Elizabeth Warren tweeted, “Is the Senate really going to pretend there’s no cloud over @realDonaldTrump & move on w/ the Gorsuch nomination like things are normal?”15

The fifth reason is that Gorsuch could tip the balance of power on the Court for the next 40 to 50 years. Some argue that replacing one Scalia on the Court with another isn’t that big of a deal. Yet nearly all of the worst opinions by the Roberts Court—the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, Citizens United, Hobby Lobby, District of Columbia v. Heller—were 5-to-4 decisions. Gorsuch would immediately shift the Court to the right. On issues like voting rights, that could mean reinstating discriminatory voting restrictions and gerrymandered maps in states like North Carolina and Texas that have been blocked by the lower courts.16

Democrats might not be able to ultimately block Gorsuch but they at least need to try, as my colleague Joshua Holland writes. Put pressure on moderate Republicans like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. Energize the Democratic base. Shine a spotlight on the importance of the courts. Show the public they stand for something. Caving on Gorsuch will make it harder, not easier, to wage future battles.17

When John Roberts was nominated as chief justice of the Supreme Court in 2005, Senator Ted Kennedy asked him: “You do agree, don’t you, Judge Roberts, that the right to vote is a fundamental constitutional right?”

“It is preservative, I think, of all the other rights,” Roberts responded. “Without access to the ballot box, people are not in a position to protect any other rights that are important to them.”

“I’m just trying to find out on the Voting Rights Act whether you have any problem at all, and trouble at all, in terms of the constitutionality of the existing Voting Rights Act that was extended by the Congress?” Kennedy asked. He noted that Roberts had been a leading opponent of the law during the Reagan Administration.

“The existing Voting Rights Act, the constitutionality has been upheld, and I don’t have any issue with that,” Roberts answered.

Roberts famously told the Senate: “I come before the committee with no agenda. I have no platform.” He described his judicial philosophy with this analogy: “Judges are like umpires. Umpires don’t make the rules, they apply them.”

Yet eight years later, Roberts authored the majority opinion in Shelby County v. Holder gutting the Voting Rights Act. He’s aggressively pushed the Court to the right rather than calling balls and strikes, writing or joining reactionary opinions on issues like outlawing school integration, blocking Medicaid expansion for millions of Americans and allowing unlimited, secret corporate spending on political campaigns.

Neil Gorsuch has been compared (including by me) to Antonin Scalia, whom he called “a lion of the law,” but after two days of hearings it’s clear he’s closer to John Roberts—another handsome face with an ugly ideology. When asked about his legal philosophy, Gorsuch invoked the mantra of Justice Byron White, saying, “I decide cases.” He refused to weigh in when asked about controversial cases like Citizens United, saying “I can’t get into politics.” His personal views, he frequently maintained, were irrelevant to his rulings as a judge.

Yet we know enough about Gorsuch to surmise that he was nominated by Donald Trump to be a smooth-talking advocate on the bench for a far-right ideology. He was hand-picked by the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation. He has close ties to a conservative billionaire and has praised one of the GOP’s most notorious voter-suppression advocates. He’s criticized liberals for challenging gay marriage bans in the courts. During the Bush administration, he praised the Guantánamo prison and defended harsh anti-terror policies. As a judge, he joined the Hobby Lobby decision restricting a woman’s right to choose and ruled against a truck driver who abandoned his trailer in subzero temperatures after it broke down. He’s consistently favored corporate power and corporate influence in the political process. In fact, a review of his opinions suggests he will be more conservative than Roberts and Alito, second only to Justice Thomas.

So many of the most controversial decisions of the Roberts Court—the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, Citizens United, Hobby Lobby, District of Columbia v. Heller—were five-to-four decisions. That means Gorsuch could be the decisive vote shifting the Supreme Court to the right for a generation on issues ranging from civil rights to corporate power to women’s rights.

Democratic senators attempted to pin Gorsuch down, but had little success. It’s worth noting that every Democratic senator, simply by attending the hearings, treated Gorsuch with more respect than Republicans showed Merrick Garland. They could have easily boycotted the hearings as a charade, since President Obama should have been the one to fill the vacant seat over a year ago. The Supreme Court would look very different with Garland on it instead of Gorsuch.

Few people in the Republican Party have done more to limit voting rights than Hans von Spakovsky. He’s been instrumental in spreading the myth of widespread voter fraud and backing new restrictions to make it harder to vote.

But it appears that von Spakovsky had an admirer in Neil Gorsuch, Donald Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, according to e-mails released to the Senate Judiciary Committee covering Gorsuch’s time working in the George W. Bush Administration.

When President Bush nominated von Spakovksy to the Federal Election Commission in late 2005, Gorsuch wrote, “Good for Hans!”

In another e-mail, when von Spakovksy said he was participating in a “Ballot Access and Voter Integrity Conference” at the Justice Department, Gorsuch wrote, “Sounds interesting. Glad to see you’re doing this. I may try to attend some of it.” Though the Justice Department was supposed to investigate both voting discrimination and voter fraud, the latter cause took priority and eventually led to Republican US Attorneys’ being wrongly fired from their jobs for refusing to prosecute fraud cases.

At very least, the e-mails suggest Gorsuch was friendly with von Spakovksy. But it’s far more disturbing if Gorsuch shares Von Spakovsky’s views on voting rights. Given that we know almost nothing about Gorsuch’s views on the subject, this is something the Senate needs to press him on during confirmation hearings next week.

Though the e-mails sound mundane, they’re much more important when you consider what was happening at the Justice Department during the time Gorsuch overlapped with von Spakovksy. In 2005–06 Gorsuch was principal deputy to the associate attorney general and von Spakosvky was special counsel to Brad Schlozman, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, who said he wanted to “gerrymander all of those crazy libs right out of the [voting] section.” It was a time when longtime civil-rights lawyers were pushed out of the Justice Department and the likes of Schlozman and von Spakovsky reversed the Civil Rights Division’s traditional role of safeguarding voting rights. When von Spakovsky was nominated to the FEC, six former lawyers in the voting section called him “the point person for undermining the Civil Rights Division’s mandate to protect voting rights.”

In particular, von Spakovsky manipulated the process to approve Georgia’s strict voter-ID law in 2005, which was among the first of its kind. (I tell this story in great detail in my book Give Us the Ballot.) Von Spakovsky had been an advocate of such laws nationally and in Georgia specifically, where he was from, since the 1990s. “Requiring official picture identification such as a driver’s license with a current address would immediately cut down on a large amount of fraud,” he wrote in The Wall Street Journal in 1995. Two years later, he recommended, “Georgia should require all potential voters to present reliable photo identifications at their polling locations to help prevent impostors from voting.”

Georgia’s voter-ID law was submitted to the Justice Department in 2005 under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which required states like Georgia with a long history of voting discrimination to approve their voting changes with the federal government. The sponsor of the law, Republican Representative Sue Burmeister, told department lawyers, “If there are fewer black voters because of the bill, it will only be because there is less opportunity for fraud. She said when black voters in her precinct are not paid to vote, they do not go to the polls.”

Her racially inflammatory assertions set off alarm bells among the team reviewing the submission, indicating that the law may have been enacted with a discriminatory purpose. Department lawyers feared the bill would disenfranchise thousands of voters.

Atlanta’s Mayor, Shirley Franklin, told the story of her 84-year-old mother, who had recently moved from Philadelphia to Atlanta and could not obtain a new photo ID for voting. Her expired Pennsylvania driver’s license was rejected as sufficient documentation to obtain a Georgia ID card, and she was told to produce a copy of her birth certificate. But Franklin’s mother had been born at home in North Carolina and, like many elderly African Americans who grew up during Jim Crow, never had a birth certificate. After voting for 40 years, she would be disenfranchised by the new law.

Citing the high number of voters without ID, the disparate rates of ID possession among blacks and whites, the number of DMV offices that did not issue IDs, the cost of the ID and the underlying documents needed to obtain an ID (ranging from $20 for an ID card to $210 for naturalization papers), four of five members of the Georgia review team urged that the law be rejected under Section 5. “While no single piece of data confirms that blacks will [be] disparately impacted compared to whites, the totality of evidence points to that conclusion,” they wrote in a 51-page analysis.

Yet von Spakovsky placed a conservative lawyer on the review team, Joshua Rogers, who argued that the law should be approved. Von Spakovsky began secretly e-mailing Rogers copies of his articles, and arguments and analysis in favor of the Georgia ID law. He told him to password protect his computer so that no other attorneys on the team could see their correspondence. Rogers’s dissenting memo, which was drafted with von Spakovsky’s input, became the basis for the Justice Department’s preclearance of the law.

A year later, when von Spakovsky was nominated to the FEC, it was revealed that he published a law article praising voter-ID laws under the pseudonym “Publius” just a week after Georgia submitted its law for review. The article in the Texas Review of Law & Politics, a conservative legal journal, was titled “Securing the Integrity of American Elections: The Need for Change” and its author was identified as “an attorney who specializes in election issues.” Publius, aka von Spakovsky, wrote: “It is unfortunately true that in the great democracy in which we live, voter fraud has had a long and studied role in our elections,” the article began. It continued: “putting security measures in place— such as requiring identification when voting— does not disenfranchise voters and there is no evidence to suggest otherwise.”

DOJ ethics guidelines clearly stated that von Spakovsky, given his longstanding advocacy for voter-ID laws and the strong viewpoints in his then-anonymous article, should have recused himself from consideration of Georgia’s law. Indeed, his ethical lapses and deceptive support for new voting restrictions were a major reason Senate Democrats blocked his nomination to the FEC and President Bush was forced to give him a recess appointment. (Then-Senator Barack Obama put a hold on von Spakovsky’s nomination and he withdrew in 2008, joining the Heritage Foundation, which has championed Gorsuch’s nomination.)

But that’s not all. In addition to the FEC, Von Spakovsky was also appointed to the advisory board of the Election Assistance Commission, created by the Help America Vote Act to analyze the country’s election problems. The commission hired two well- respected experts, Republican Job Serebrov and Democrat Tova Wang, to produce a comprehensive study on voter fraud. “There is widespread but not unanimous agreement that there is little polling place fraud, or at least much less than is claimed, including voter impersonation, ‘dead’ voters, non-citizen voting and felon voters,” a draft of the report stated. After von Spakovsky complained to the commission’s GOP leadership, the wording in the final report was changed to, “There is a great deal of debate on the pervasiveness of fraud.”

More recently, von Spakovsky has argued against that the Voting Rights Act was “constitutionally dubious at the time of its enactment” and praised Trump’s promised investigation into voter fraud, which has been widely panned by Democrats and Republicans. “The real problem in our election system is that we don’t really know to what extent President Trump’s claim is true because we have an election system that is based on the honor system,” he wrote with John Fund after Trump said with no evidence that 3 million to 5 million people voted illegally.

Given that von Spakovsky hailed Gorsuch as “the perfect pick for Trump,” it’s safe to assume he believes that the Supreme Court nominee shares his views. The Senate needs to aggressively question Gorsuch to see if that’s the case.

Gorsuch has already cited Justice Antonin Scalia as a role model, who said the Voting Rights Act had led to a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.” Gorsuch, if confirmed, could be the deciding vote on whether to weaken the remaining sections of the VRA and whether to uphold discriminatory voter-ID laws and redistricting plans from states like North Carolina and Texas. In many ways, the fate of voting rights in the United States hangs on this nomination.

On Friday night, a federal district court in Texas issued a bombshell opinion, ruling that three of Texas’s congressional districts were drawn to discriminate against black and Hispanic voters. The redistricting maps drafted by Texas Republicans after the 2010 census “intentionally diluted minority voting strength in order to gain partisan advantage,” wrote Judges Xavier Rodriguez and Orlando Garcia of the Western District of Texas.

The court found that Texas Republicans unnecessarily concentrated minority voters in certain districts to reduce their influence statewide while diluting minority representation in other districts, specifically naming Republican-held seats in South and Southwest Texas (CD 23 & 27) and a Democratic-held seat based in Austin (CD 35). This means Texas could gain at least two more Latino-majority congressional seats, which should favor Democrats. More importantly, the opinion paves the way for Texas to once again have to approve its voting changes with the federal government under the Voting Rights Act for a period of time.

Here are the relevant facts of the case: Texas added 4.3 million new residents from 2000–10. Nearly 90 percent of that growth came from minority citizens (65 percent Hispanic, 13 percent African American, 10 percent Asian). As a result, Texas gained four new Congressional seats, from 32 to 36. Yet under the congressional redistricting map passed by Texas Republicans following the 2010 election, white Republicans were awarded three of the four new seats that resulted from Democratic-leaning minority population growth. The League of Women Voters called the plan “the most extreme example of racial gerrymandering among all the redistricting proposals passed by lawmakers so far this year.”

Texas Republicans went to extreme lengths to thwart the state’s changing demographics, as I reported in my 2012 article “How the GOP Is Resegregating the South”:

Only by reading the voluminous lawsuits filed against the state can one appreciate just how creative Texas Republicans had to be to so successfully dilute and suppress the state’s minority vote. According to a lawsuit filed by a host of civil rights groups, “even though Whites’ share of the population declined from 52 percent to 45 percent, they remain the majority in 70 percent of Congressional Districts.” To cite just one of many examples: in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, the Hispanic population increased by 440,898, the African-American population grew by 152,825 and the white population fell by 156,742. Yet white Republicans, a minority in the metropolis, control four of five Congressional seats. Despite declining in population, white Republicans managed to pick up two Congressional seats in the Dallas and Houston areas. In fact, whites are the minority in the state’s five largest counties but control twelve of nineteen Congressional districts.

Texas’s voter-ID law, which was passed at the same time as the redistricting maps, was also judged to be intentionally discriminatory by a federal court in October 2014. As the federal court noted, “the Texas Legislature enacted its 2011 redistricting plans in the context of strong racial tension and heated debate about Latinos, Spanish-speaking people, undocumented immigration and sanctuary cities, and the contentious voter ID law.” Federal courts initially blocked both the voter-ID law and the redistricting maps in 2012, but the decisions were voided in June 2013 when the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act.

There’s already been a hearing in the Texas voter-ID case and one will occur in the redistricting case soon to determine whether Texas will be “bailed-in” to the Voting Rights Act and have to once again approve its voting changes with the federal government for up to ten years. (Before a hearing on February 28, the Trump Justice Department reversed the Obama Administration’s position that Texas’s voter-ID law was intentionally discriminatory.)

This is a potentially big victory for voting rights, but in truth neither of these laws should have seen the light of day after the courts initially blocked them. Texas’s elections have been tainted since the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act. The evidence of intentional discrimination in these opinions shows why it’s so important for Congress to restore the law.

Listen to Ari Berman discuss voting restrictions on the Start Making Sense podcast.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is rightfully in hot water for lying to Congress about his contacts with Russian officials during the presidential campaign. This underscores the need for a special prosecutor to independently investigate alleged Russian interference in the 2016 elections as well as possible ties between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.

But the problem with Sessions goes well beyond Russia. He’s put the Trump administration on the wrong side of every major issue when it comes to civil rights, the Constitution, and the rule of law.

Before Sessions was even confirmed, he “lobbied for a ‘shock-and-awe’ period of executive action,” according to The Washington Post, which included the Trump administration’s disastrous Muslim ban.

In less than a month on the job, he’s reversed the Obama administration’s positions on voter-ID laws, private prisons, transgender rights, police abuse, and marijuana legalization.

On Tuesday, he had the gall to give a speech on Black History Month at the Department of Justice, where he praised the Voting Rights Act on the same day the Justice Department argued in federal court that Texas’s voter-ID law did not intentionally discriminate against black and Latino voters.

This is not the first time Sessions has lied to Congress. In his Senate questionnaire for attorney general, he claimed he “personally” handled important civil-rights cases while US Attorney in Alabama, even though lawyers in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said he did no work on the cases beyond putting his name on the briefs.

He never should have been confirmed as attorney general. Sessions was blocked as a federal judge in 1986 for a history of discriminatory actions and views—including wrongfully prosecuting civil-rights workers for voter fraud—and there’s no evidence Sessions has changed since then.

In a must-read story for The New York Times Magazine, Emily Bazelon writes about how the Trump administration plans to use Sessions’s Justice Department “advance its nationalist plans”—which includes suppressing votes, terrorizing immigrant communities, ignoring police misconduct, and launching a new war on drugs.

For the good of the country, Sessions should resign or be removed as attorney general before he does any more damage.

UPDATE: This afternoon Sessions said he would recuse himself from the Russia investigation. That is not enough. A special prosecutor must be appointed to oversee the investigation. Moreover, given that Sessions lied under oath to Congress about his meetings with the Russian ambassador and has been the architect of the most disastrous administration policies, he is no longer fit to serve as attorney general. 

Ahead of a crucial hearing in federal district court tomorrow, the Trump administration is reversing the Obama administration’s opposition to Texas’s strict voter-ID law, withdrawing the federal government’s claim that the law intentionally discriminates against black and Latino voters.

According to a new brief, the federal government is withdrawing its intentional-discrimination claim because Texas legislators are currently drafting a revised voter-ID law to allow those without strict forms of photo ID to cast a ballot if they have a “reasonable impediment” to obtaining one. “The United States has determined that, rather than continuing to litigate the purpose claim on an evolving record, it should give full effect to the Fifth Circuit’s directives by withdrawing that claim and allowing the Texas Legislature the opportunity to rectify any alleged infirmities with its voter identification law,” says the brief signed by John M. Gore, deputy assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division. (The DOJ’s acting head of the Civil Rights Division, Thomas Wheeler, had to recuse himself because he advised Texas lawmakers during passage of the original bill.)

Texas’s voter-ID law—which allows voters to cast a ballot with a handgun permit but not a student ID—has already been blocked three times by federal courts.

A federal district court in DC first blocked the law in August 2012. But after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in June 2013, ruling that states with a long history of discrimination no longer had to approve their voting changes with the federal government, Texas’s law immediately went into effect.

Thousands were disenfranchised as a result. I’ve been telling their stories for years. Elizabeth Gholar was born in rural southwestern Louisiana in 1938, in the small town of Jennings, the county seat of Jefferson Davis Parish. After growing up in the Jim Crow South, she felt voting was always important.

In 2013, after retiring as a school cook, she moved to Texas to live with her daughter in Austin. She had a driver’s license and birth certificate from Louisiana, but ran into problems when she tried to get a driver’s license in Texas, which she needed to vote. She was told that the name on her birth certificate, which had been incorrectly filled out by the midwife who had delivered her at home and listed her mother’s maiden name, had to match her current name.

Gholar returned to a Department of Public Safety office to apply for a voting-only ID, but was once again told she needed a matching birth certificate. She then hired a lawyer in Louisiana to get her an amended birth certificate. She called the cost and time of getting a new birth certificate “another form” of a poll tax. “Voting is a right that everybody else had and it’s a celebration,” she testified in a federal trial in 2014. “And it’s been taken away again.”

The law was blocked again in September 2014 by a federal district court in Texas. Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos found that 608,470 registered voters in Texas, 4.5 percent of the electorate, did not possess the limited forms of government-issued ID required to cast a ballot, with African Americans three times as likely as whites to not have a voter ID, and Hispanics twice as likely. She ruled that the law, known as SB 14, violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which the Supreme Court kept in place.

“It is clear from the evidence,” Ramos wrote, “that SB 14 disproportionately impacts African-American and Hispanic registered voters relative to Anglos in Texas…. To call SB 14’s disproportionate impact on minorities statistically significant would be an understatement.”

She called the law “an unconstitutional poll tax” and said it was passed by the Texas legislature “because of and not merely in spite of the voter ID law’s detrimental effects on the African-American and Hispanic electorate.”

In July 2016, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, one of the most conservative courts in the country, affirmed the bulk of Ramos’s ruling, saying the law “imposes significant and disparate burdens on the right to vote” and had “a discriminatory effect on minorities’ voting rights.”

The court called out Texas for not presenting a single case of voter impersonation to justify the law. “Even under the least searching standard of review we employ for these types of challenges, there cannot be a total disconnect between the State’s announced interests and the statute enacted,” the court wrote. “The provisions of SB 14 fail to correspond in any meaningful way to the legitimate interests the State claims to have been advancing through SB 14.”

However, they disagreed with Ramos’s finding that the law was intentionally discriminatory and urged the district court to hold another hearing to reexamine the issue. That will take place tomorrow in Corpus Christi.

The Fifth Circuit also allowed the law to stay in place but said those without strict photo ID could cast a ballot by signing an affidavit stating they had a reasonable impediment to obtaining ID. More than 16,000 voters used this option in 2016. However, counties across Texas still wrongly told voters strict photo ID was required to vote.

Here’s why the hearing tomorrow matters: If Texas’s law is declared intentionally discriminatory (again), the entire statute will be invalidated and Texas could be forced to clear its voting changes with federal government for a period of time. This recently happened to Pasadena, Texas, where a federal district court found that white officials “intentionally discriminated against Latinos” by reducing the number of majority-Latino districts on the City Council. The court ordered new elections under the previous districts and, because of the finding of intentional discrimination, required Pasadena to approve all future election changes with the federal government through 2023. It is the first jurisdiction to be subject to preclearance requirements since the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder decision. (The Fifth Circuit heard Texas’s appeal on February 1.)

A similar ruling in Texas’s voter-ID case could set an important precedent. “The intent part of the claim is really important,” says Gerry Hebert of the Campaign Legal Center, a former high-ranking official in the Civil Rights Division. The case will still proceed with civil rights groups arguing against the voter-ID law, but they will no longer have the federal government on their side. Nothing has changed to make the law any less discriminatory, except now there’s a new administration that is trying to suppress votes instead of protect them. The DOJ’s brief in Texas is a disturbing preview of what’s to come.

Tom Perez could’ve been attorney general if Hillary Clinton had been elected president. Instead he’ll be chair of the DNC.

Conventional wisdom portrayed the race for DNC chair as a rerun of the 2016 presidential campaign, with Perez as the corporate establishment and Keith Ellison as the insurgent progressive. That narrative was greatly overstated. While I preferred Ellison as DNC chair, Perez has a strong and impressive progressive record, especially on civil rights.

As head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division under President Obama from 2009 to 2013, Perez challenged strict voter-ID laws in Texas and South Carolina, sued Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio for racial profiling and objected to Arizona’s anti-immigration SB 1070, investigated police misconduct in a record number of cities, and rebuilt the Civil Rights Division after rampant politicization during the George W. Bush Administration.

I liked @keithellison for #DNCChair but @TomPerez has strong record. Fought TX voter ID, sued Sheriff Joe, rebuilt DOJ Civil Rights Division

— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) February 25, 2017

Following that, as Obama’s labor secretary, Perez expanded overtime for 4 million workers and championed the Fight For $15 movement. Mary Kay Henry, president of SEIU, called Perez “one of the finest labor secretaries since Frances Perkins,” referring to FDR’s labor secretary. Perez is also the child of refugees who fled political persecution in the Dominican Republic.

This experience is particularly relevant now, as the Trump administration plans to wage war on voting rights, Jeff Sessions is already reversing Obama-era directives on LGBTQ rights and private prisons, and congressional Republicans are pushing a national right-to-work law. Trump is the greatest threat to democracy in our lifetime, and few are better equipped to fight back than Perez. (He also shrewdly made Ellison his chief deputy.)

Among other things, he’s called for a “voter empowerment office” at the DNC to make protecting voting rights a top priority for the party. “I’m proposing that the DNC dramatically expand its voter protection efforts and scale a voter empowerment office that is fully funded and fully staffed with legal experts operating year round and integrated with the party’s regional, organizing, and digital staff,” Perez said in January. “This investment is critical to ensure that everyone who is eligible to vote can do so without obstacles.”

Perez’s first task will be to revitalize the party internally—boosting forgotten state parties with a new 50-state strategy, repairing the breach that exists between the DNC and grassroots activists who are bitter about the Debbie Wasserman Schultz era, and channeling the resistance against Trump into electoral results. Perez doesn’t have the political experience of someone like Ellison, so time will tell if he’s up to the job. But at a moment when Democrats are searching for leaders, Perez can powerfully take on the Trump administration on issues like voting rights, policing, immigration,  and the economy. For progressives upset about Ellison’s loss, Perez is a pretty darn good second choice.

After falsely alleging that 3 million to 5 million people voted illegally in 2016, Donald Trump debuted a new lie about voter fraud in a meeting with senators on Thursday, saying, according to Politico, that “thousands” of people were “brought in on buses” from Massachusetts to “illegally” vote in New Hampshire. Trump claimed that’s why he and former GOP senator Kelly Ayotte lost their races in the state.

White House Senior Adviser Stephen Miller repeated Trump’s latest lie in an interview with ABC’s This Week on Sunday. “This issue of busing voters in New Hampshire is widely known by anyone who’s worked in New Hampshire politics,” Miller said. “It’s very real. It’s very serious.” When pressed for evidence by George Stephanopoulos, Miller said, “This morning, on this show, is not the venue to lay out all the evidence.”

“For the record, you have provided absolutely no evidence,” Stephanopoulos responded.

Miller could provide no evidence for Trump’s claim because there is none.

Trump aide Stephen Miller repeats Trump's blatantly false claim about mass illegal voting. There is zero evidence. pic.twitter.com/9NvPXjPYVO

— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) February 12, 2017

“We have never gotten any proof about buses showing up at polling places,” New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner, who’s been in office since 1976, told The Boston Globe.

“I will pay $1000 to 1st person proving even 1 outofstate person took bus from MA 2 any NH polling place last ElectionDay,” tweeted former New Hampshire GOP chair Fergus Cullen.

Republicans in New Hampshire have made similar claims for years with no evidence. “The Democrats are very sly.… [in New Hampshire] we have same-day voter registration, and to be honest, when Massachusetts elections are not very close, they’re busing them in all over the place,” gubernatorial candidate Chris Sununu said five days before the election. Politifact called Sununu’s statement “ridiculous” and gave it a “Pants on Fire” rating.

“We haven’t had any complaints about widespread voter fraud taking place,” New Hampshire Deputy Secretary of State David M. Scanlan, head of the state’s Election Division, said after the election. Both Trump and Ayotte could have requested a recount in New Hampshire if they believed there was foul play, but did not.

Yet here’s why Trump’s lies about voter fraud are so dangerous: Republicans in New Hampshire, who now control the state government, have introduced 40 bills in the 2017 legislative session that would make it harder to vote.

The proposed legislation includes ending same-day registration, which boosts voter turnout by up to 10; restricting voting rights to only residents of New Hampshire who plan to live in the state “for the indefinite future,” which could prevent college students and military personnel from voting; and requiring that New Hampshire residents live in the state for 13 days before voting and get an in-state driver’s license and register their car in New Hampshire within 60 days of registering to vote, which the New Hampshire ACLU calls a “post-election poll tax.”

What’s happening in New Hampshire is part of a disturbing national trend. Already this year, 46 bills have been introduced in 21 states, mostly controlled by Republicans, that would make it harder to vote, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

At least 12 states are already considering stricter voter-ID legislation—Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Maine, Maryland, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New York, North Dakota, Virginia, and Wyoming. Arkansas and North Dakota’s bills have already passed in their state Houses. Legislation from the Iowa secretary of state to implement voter ID will likely be considered in the legislature, with the possibility of more restrictive bills originating in the capital.

Along with Virginia, Texas legislators have introduced legislation that would create strict documentary proof of citizenship requirements to register. In Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, and New Hampshire, legislation has been introduced to eliminate or limit Election Day registration, and bills that restrict students’ ability to claim residency where they live and go to school have been introduced in Arizona, Maine, and New Hampshire. Legislators in Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, and Texas have introduced legislation that would cut back on early-voting opportunities.

Numerous states have seen legislation that threatens individuals or groups who help others vote or register. Legislation making it more difficult to help others deliver their absentee ballots has been proposed in three states: Arizona, Montana, and New York. Virginia legislators have introduced burdensome requirements on community-based voter registration, along with increased penalties for alleged misconduct. In Texas, a bill has been proposed to make it harder to offer voter assistance, undermining a court settlement last year.

The Trump administration is likely to massively intensify GOP voter-suppression efforts, especially with Jeff Sessions leading the Justice Department. “The issue of voter fraud is something we’re going to be looking at very seriously and very hard,” Stephen Miller said on This Week, falsely claiming that 14 percent of noncitizens were registered to vote.

The Trump administration’s sham investigation into voter fraud will be a prelude to future suppression efforts, which could include forcing states to purge their voting rolls in inaccurate and discriminatory ways; launching bogus prosecutions that target voters of color, like Sessions did as US Attorney; switching sides in existing Justice Department cases by backing restrictive voting laws in court; and pressing Republicans in states and Congress to pass voter-ID laws and proof-of-citizenship requirements to register.

We’re already seeing how such efforts can have a chilling effect on political participation. Last week, the state of Texas sentenced Rosa Marie Ortega, a permanent resident and mother of four, to eight years in jail and certain deportation thereafter for mistakenly voting in 2012 and 2014. (Ironically, she was a registered Republican.) The outrageous sentence is, unfortunately, a preview of what’s to come.

We’re having the entirely wrong conversation when it comes to voting in America. Seventy-eight House Democrats wrote to Trump last week and reminded him that the 2016 election was the first in 50 years without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act and that 14 states had new voting restrictions in place for the first time. Instead of perpetuating the myth of voter fraud, we should be investigating how thousands of legitimate voters were blocked from the polls.

In a little-noticed 6-3 vote today, the House Administration Committee voted along party lines to eliminate the Election Assistance Commission, which helps states run elections and is the only federal agency charged with making sure voting machines can’t be hacked. The EAC was created after the disastrous 2000 election in Florida as part of the Help America Vote Act to rectify problems like butterfly ballots and hanging chads. (Republicans have tried to kill the agency for years.) The Committee also voted to eliminate the public-financing system for presidential elections dating back to the 1970s. 

“It is my firm belief that the EAC has outlived its usefulness and purpose,” said Committee chair Gregg Harper (R-MS), explaining why his bill transfers the EAC’s authority to the Federal Election Commission. 

Thirty-eight pro-democracy groups, including the NAACP and Common Cause, denounced the vote. “The EAC is the only federal agency which has as its central mission the improvement of election administration, and it undertakes essential activities that no other institution is equipped to address,” says the Brennan Center for Justice.

This move is particularly worrisome given reports that suspected Russian hackers attempted to access voter-registration systems in more than 20 states during the 2016 election. Moreover, the Presidential Commission on Election Administration set up by President Obama in 2014 outlined an “impending crisis” in voting technology and the Brennan Center found that 42 states used voting machines in 2016 that were at least a decade-old and at risk of failing. The EAC was the agency tasked with making sure these voting systems were both modernized and secure.

The EAC is not a perfect agency. It lacked a quorum of members from 2010 to 2014 and was paralyzed by inaction. Then, last year, its executive director unilaterally approved controversial proof-of-citizenship laws in Kansas, Georgia, and Alabama, which the federal courts subsequently blocked.

But given the threats to American democracy at this moment, the EAC needs to be strengthened, not replaced.

It’s particularly ironic that the Trump administration is preparing to launch a massive investigation into nonexistent voter fraud based on the lie that millions voted illegally while House Republicans are shutting down the agency that is supposed to make sure America’s elections are secure. It’s more proof of how the GOP’s real agenda is to make it harder to vote.  

On February 27, 2013, the Supreme Court heard a challenge to the heart of the Voting Rights Act. Justice Antonin Scalia shocked the hushed courtroom by saying the law had led to a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.” He went so far as to mock the name of it: “Even the name of it is wonderful: the Voting Rights Act. Who is going to vote against that in the future?”

The courtroom gasped audibly as Scalia spoke. The fact that he viewed the country’s most important civil-rights law as a “racial entitlement” was a textbook example of the radicalness of his views. Four months later, Scalia joined a 5-4 opinion gutting the law, ruling that states with a long history of voting discrimination no longer needed to approve their voting changes with the federal government.

The Roberts Court, with Scalia as a key influence, weakened voting rights protections, allowed corporations to spend unlimited secret money on US elections, overturned the District of Columbia’s handgun ban and ruled that businesses didn’t have to pay for contraception care.

Merrick Garland should have been the one to fill Scalia’s vacant Supreme Court seat. It was unprecedented and outrageous that a judge as qualified and mainstream as Garland didn’t even get a hearing. And it’s more than a little ironic that a president who won 5 million more votes than his opponent in 2012 couldn’t make the selection but one who got 2.9 million fewer votes than his opponent can.

But after Republicans stole the seat by denying President Obama his constitutional mandate, Donald Trump said he wanted to appoint a justice “as close to Scalia as I could find.” Neil Gorsuch is that person.

Gorsuch has praised Scalia as a judicial role model. “Mark me down, too, as a believer that the traditional account of the judicial role Justice Scalia defended will endure,” he said in a lecture last year. Like Scalia, as a judge on the US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, Gorsuch has been hostile to abortion rights and environmental regulations, and sympathetic to large corporations and the religious right. He has criticized liberals for challenging bans on gay marriage before the courts. Though his paper trail on civil-rights cases is slim, he’ll presumably be in sync with Scalia on these issues too.

Gorsuch could be the deciding vote on critical voting-rights cases very soon. The Supreme Court will likely hear challenges to voter-ID laws and related voting restrictions from states like North Carolina and Texas in the near future. There are already indications the Trump Justice Department is preparing to switch sides in these cases, backing restrictive voting laws instead of minority voters facing disenfranchisement. In addition, conservatives could take aim at what’s left of the Voting Rights Act—Section 2 of the law—which Chief Justice John Roberts challenged when he was a young lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department.

Another Scalia on the Court is particularly concerning given that Trump’s choice for attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has a 30-year history of opposition to civil rights. Trump’s lie that millions voted illegally in 2016 is a near-certain prelude to massive voter suppression by the GOP, beginning with an executive order authorizing a broad DOJ investigation into nonexistent voter fraud, which White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer suggested will focus on “urban areas” in blue states like California and New York. The Trump administration will perpetuate the myth of voter fraud to “strengthen up voting procedures!” as Trump tweeted, meaning more laws designed to make it harder to vote. (In written answers to Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, Sessions refused to say whether he agreed with Trump’s lie that 3-to-5 million people voted illegally, saying, “At this point, I do not know how many people voted illegally.”)

These restrictions, which could include mandating strict voter-ID for federal elections or documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote, will almost certainly be challenged before the Supreme Court. It’s already clear that many of Trump’s policies will be constitutionally suspect, beginning with his disastrous Muslim ban.

The recklessness of Trump’s policies and the threat he poses to the very foundation of American democracy underscore the importance of an independent and thoughtful judiciary. Another Scalia on the Supreme Court is the last thing we need right now.

Four days before Donald Trump attacked him as “all talk” and tweeted that his district was “crime infested” and “falling apart,” Georgia Congressman John Lewis testified against Trump’s pick for attorney general, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions. “Those who are committed to equal justice in our society wonder whether Senator Sessions’s call for law and order will mean today what it meant in Alabama when I was coming up back then,” Lewis said, when “the rule of law was used to violate the human and civil rights of the poor, the dispossessed, people of color.”

Lewis was describing days like March 7, 1965, when he was brutally beaten in Selma while marching for the right to vote. One of the people who marched directly behind Lewis on Bloody Sunday was Albert Turner Jr., a top aide to Dr. Martin Luther King. In the now-iconic photo of Lewis being clubbed by an Alabama state trooper, Turner can be seen running from the police.

Twenty years later, on the 20th anniversary of the march from Selma to Montgomery, Sessions, as US Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama, prosecuted Turner, his wife Evelyn, and his fellow civil-rights activist Spencer Hogue on voter-fraud charges, claiming that they had illegally helped black voters cast absentee ballots. The three were accused of improperly collecting and, in a few cases, filling out the ballots on behalf of elderly and sometimes illiterate voters—a tactic that was frequently used by white candidates in Alabama but never prosecuted. Sessions was the first US Attorney to charge civil-rights activists with voter fraud since the Voting Rights Act became law. The trial occurred in Selma, of all places, and the jury acquitted the defendants of all charges after just three hours of deliberation.

The voter-fraud prosecutions were a major reason why the Senate rejected Sessions for a federal judgeship after he was nominated by Ronald Reagan in 1986. In addition, lawyers at the Justice Department and the US Attorney’s Office testified that Sessions had called the NAACP and the ACLU “communist-inspired” and “un-American” groups that were “trying to force civil rights down the throats of people”; addressed the first black prosecutor in Alabama as “boy” and told him “to be careful what he said to white folks”; and dubbed a white civil-rights lawyer “a disgrace to his race.”

Back then, Senator Ted Kennedy called Sessions “a throwback to a shameful era which I know both black and white Americans thought was in our past.” Coretta Scott King told the Senate Judiciary Committee that Sessions would “irreparably damage the work of my husband.”

At his confirmation hearings for attorney general 30 years later, Sessions attempted to rebrand himself as a champion of civil rights. He denied calling the NAACP “un-American,” took credit for prosecuting members of the Ku Klux Klan, and called the voter-fraud prosecutions “a voting-rights case.” (That’s like saying Jim Crow was about water-fountain integrity.)

But there’s little evidence that Sessions has changed. Despite pledging “aggressive enforcement of our laws to ensure access to the ballot for every eligible American voter,” Sessions stuck by his characterization of the Voting Rights Act as “intrusive” and said “it was a good feeling” when the Supreme Court gutted the law. He said that voter-ID laws were “OK” and don’t “appear to be” discriminatory, even though courts in North Carolina and Texas have found such laws to be intentionally discriminatory against black and Latino voters. When Sessions was pressed about the court decisions, he claimed that he was “not familiar” with them, despite their being among the highest-profile cases filed by the Obama Justice Department.

In one of the most revealing exchanges of the two-day hearings, Minnesota Senator Al Franken (by far the best questioner of Sessions) asked him about Trump’s debunked tweet that “millions of people voted illegally” in 2016. “Do you believe that millions of fraudulent votes were cast in the presidential election?” Franken asked.

“I do believe we regularly have fraudulent activities occur during election cycles,” Sessions replied.

By perpetuating the myth of voter fraud and vowing to “ensure the integrity of the electoral process,” Sessions was laying the groundwork for future voter-suppression efforts. As Trump’s attorney general, he could be disastrous to voting rights in a whole host of ways. He could support a federal voter-ID law as well as a proof-of-citizenship law for voter registration, which would disenfranchise millions of eligible Americans. He could pressure states to purge their voting rolls in discriminatory and inaccurate ways and force US Attorneys to prosecute bogus cases of voter fraud, as happened during the George W. Bush administration. He could switch sides in cases that the Justice Department is arguing under the Voting Rights Act and question the constitutionality of its remaining parts.

Sessions will be the most dangerous on issues where the Obama administration has been the most successful, such as voting rights and criminal-justice reform. As a US senator, he “is one of few Republican legislators who does not support bipartisan efforts to reform the nation’s criminal justice system,” according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

Sessions has opposed bipartisan legislation to reduce unnecessarily long sentences for nonviolent crimes, as well as the Obama administration’s efforts to end mandatory minimum sentences for certain drug offenses. He has criticized the consent decrees between the Justice Department and cities like Ferguson and Baltimore to curb police misconduct. He testified that “law enforcement has been unfairly maligned and blamed” three days before the Justice Department released its scathing report on the Chicago Police Department, which chronicled widespread violations of the Fourth Amendment.

As Lewis testified, Sessions would take America back to a time when the government was all too often on the wrong side of civil rights.

Donald Trump’s incoherent and insane press conference today reinforced how the president-elect is the greatest threat to democracy in our lifetime. He has little regard for the Constitution, the rule of law, or core democratic institutions.

Trump’s press conference was exhibit A for why we need a strong and independent attorney general who can stand up to the president. Yet while Trump rambled from the podium, civil-rights activists were testifying about how his attorney-general nominee, Jeff Sessions, would undermine one of the most important rights in a democracy: the right to vote.

“It is Senator Sessions’s record on voting rights that is perhaps the most troubling,” said NAACP President Cornell Brooks, pointing to Sessions’s prosecution of civil-rights activists for voter fraud, support for gutting the Voting Rights Act, and backing of discriminatory voter-ID laws.

“He will be expected to enforce voting rights, but his record indicates that he won’t,” said New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, who took the unprecedented step of testifying against a fellow senator.

The civil-rights icon John Lewis was one of the last people to testify during the two-day hearings, but one of the most powerful voices. “Those who are committed to equal justice in our society wonder whether Senator Sessions’s call for law and order will mean today what it meant in Alabama when I was coming up back then,” Congressman Lewis said. “The rule of law was used to violate the human and civil rights of the poor, the dispossessed, people of color.”

Lewis said he’d come to testify on behalf of “millions of Americans [who] are concerned that some leaders reject decades of progress and want to return to the dark past, when the power of the law was used to deny the freedoms protected by the Constitution.”

In 1965, Lewis nearly died marching to pass the Voting Rights Act, which Sessions called “intrusive.” One of the people who marched directly behind Lewis on Bloody Sunday was Albert Turner Jr., who Sessions prosecuted for voter fraud 20 years later. When Lewis was brutally beaten by Alabama state troopers, Turner can be seen running for his life.

On Bloody Sunday in Selma, Albert Turner, who Sessions prosecuted for voter fraud, is running from police while @repjohnlewis beaten pic.twitter.com/hl3fJJYO0E

— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) January 11, 2017

Sessions defended his handling of the 1985 voter-fraud case from Perry County, Alabama, in an attempt to redefine his record on civil rights. “I was accused of failing to protect the voting rights of African-Americans by prosecuting the Perry County voter fraud case,” he testified yesterday. “The voter fraud case my office prosecuted was in response to African-American incumbent officials who claimed that the absentee ballot process involved a situation in which ballots cast for them were stolen, altered or cast for their opponents. The prosecution sought to protect the integrity of the ballot, not to block voting. It was a voting rights case.”

It was a remarkable statement by Sessions. Calling the prosecution of civil-rights activists “a voting-rights case,” is like saying that segregation was about “water-fountain integrity.”

Here are the facts:

A white district attorney urged Sessions to prosecute the civil-rights activists—the same DA who excluded all black jurors, including six for “low intelligence,” when trying a death-row case against a black man before an all-white jury in Selma. (Sessions defended that case on appeal.)

The black candidates in Perry County who supported the prosecution were backed by the segregationist White Citizens Council and the local white establishment, as Emily Bazelon of The New York Times Magazine reported.

The civil-rights activists who Sessions prosecuted had previously gone to the Justice Department to complain that white voters were casting absentee ballots. They were told that black candidates should start using absentee ballots themselves. When they did precisely that, the Justice Department and FBI investigated them. “Sessions didn’t investigate those who helped white voters, but he did investigate those who helped black voters,” testified David Cole, legal director for the ACLU.

Of 700 ballots investigated in the 1984 election, the prosecution could find only 27 that had been altered, and government witnesses, including elderly and sometimes illiterate black voters, testified that they had asked Albert Turner for help filling out their ballots.

This was not a run-of-the-mill case but an extraordinary and historic abuse of power. As The Washington Post noted, Sessions was the first US Attorney to prosecute civil rights activists for voter fraud since the Voting Rights Act became law in 1965. The people he prosecuted had nearly died fighting for the right to vote. The trial took place in Selma on the 20th anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery march. The jury acquitted the activists of all charges within three hours. For all of these reasons, the Perry County case was a major reason Sessions was blocked as a federal judge in 1986.

Sessions made it sound like he was Martin Luther King, but he was more like Strom Thurmond. “If he was a champion of civil rights, wouldn’t the civil rights community support him instead of standing nearly unanimously against him?” asked Representative Cedric Richmond, chair of the Congressional Black Caucus.

This is Albert Turner, who led MLK's funeral procession. Jeff Sessions prosecuted him for helping black people vote https://t.co/LjC2deRFfC pic.twitter.com/tFVAeAXrSO

— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) November 18, 2016

All of this matters because there’s no evidence Sessions has changed since then. “Senator Sessions record of prosecuting voter fraud is connected to a record of voter suppression legislation today,” Cornell Brooks testified.

Sessions pledged “aggressive enforcement of our laws to ensure access to the ballot for every eligible American voter,” but stuck by his characterization of the Voting Rights Act as “intrusive” and said “it was a good feeling” when the Supreme Court gutted the law. He said that voter-ID laws “don’t appear to me to be discriminatory,” even though courts in North Carolina and Texas have judged such laws to be intentionally discriminatory against black and Latino voters. When Sessions was pressed about the decisions in North Carolina and Texas, he said he was “not familiar” with the rulings, despite the fact that they were some of the most high-profile cases filed by the Obama Justice Department.

In one of the most revealing exchanges of the two days, Senator Al Franken (by far the best questioner at the hearings), asked Sessions to respond to Trump’s debunked tweet that “millions of people voted illegally” in 2016.

“Do you believe that millions of fraudulent votes were cast in the presidential election?” asked Franken.

“I do believe we regularly have fraudulent activities occur during election cycles,” Sessions responded.

It was a remarkable assertion, given that there have been only four cases of voter fraud in 2016 out of 135 million votes cast. But Sessions was pursuing a well-worn GOP strategy of perpetuating the myth of voter fraud to support more restrictive voting laws that disproportionately hurt Democratic voters and people of color. At the hearing, Trump officials passed out an article by Hans von Spakovsky, the originator of the voter-fraud myth, titled, “How Black Democrats Stole Votes in Alabama And Jeff Sessions Tried to Stop It.” When Sessions said he wanted to “ensure the integrity of the electoral process,” he was invoking a well-known code word for future suppression efforts, like stricter ID laws, cutting early voting, restricting voter-registration drives, and purging the voting rolls.

As Franken, put it, “Because you say that 3 million fraudulent votes were cast, that’s your excuse to suppress votes.”

In a speech last year, Sessions said, “I feel I should have stepped forward more” during the civil-rights era. When Senator Chris Coons asked Sessions what more he could’ve done or why he didn’t support legislation to restore the VRA today, Sessions didn’t answer. The measures he has taken, like awarding the congressional gold medal to the Selma marchers, have been purely symbolic.

On related issues, Sessions took credit for prosecuting the Ku Klux Klan for lynching a black man in Mobile in 1981 even though the first black prosecutor in Alabama testified that he was pressured “to drop the case.” Sessions said he’d never called the NAACP “un-American,” despite multiple witnesses testified in 1986 that he did. Under repeated questioning from Franken, Sessions admitted that he did not work on “20 to 30” desegregation cases as he’d originally claimed, which ex-Justice Department lawyers disputed, and that he didn’t even know one of the lawyers who handled a key case he supposedly oversaw.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0u1uClZQLU

Sessions is likely to be confirmed because he’s well-liked by his colleagues, according to reports. But it’s his record, not his personality, that Senators should be focusing on, Lewis testified. “It doesn’t matter how Senator Sessions may smile, how friendly he may be, how he may speak to you, we need someone who is going to stand up, speak up and speak out for the people that need help, for people who have been discriminated against.”

There have been many previous attorneys general who have been hostile to voting rights. The Justice Department under Nixon and Reagan pushed legislation to weaken the VRA. John Ashcroft made investigating voter fraud a personal crusade, and the Bush administration fired US Attorneys who didn’t pursue trumped-up fraud cases. But these efforts were largely unsuccessful—a bipartisan coalition in Congress strengthened voting-rights protections under Nixon and Reagan and reauthorized the VRA under Bush. The law was so popular that it passed the Senate 98-0 in 2006, with Sessions voting for it.

But that coalition has collapsed because Republicans across the country have decided to make it harder to vote. Sessions will be uniquely dangerous because of his own extreme views, because Congress will not constrain him, because his boss has little regard for democracy, and because the Republican Party he represents is now firmly on the wrong side of civil rights.

The party of Lincoln died long ago, but if Sessions is confirmed as attorney general, it will be the final nail in the coffin.

On June 27, 2013, two days after the Supreme Court ruled that states with a long history of voting discrimination no longer needed to approve their voting changes under the Voting Rights Act, the mayor of Pasadena, Texas, proposed changing the structure of City Council elections so that whites could remain in control. With Latinos close to gaining a majority of seats in the racially divided city of 150,000 outside of Houston, Mayor Johnny Isbell proposed switching from eight City Council districts to six districts and two seats elected citywide—which would give white residents, who turn out in higher numbers, a better shot at electing their preferred candidates. The net effect was that one majority-Latino district was eliminated, and Latinos had three fewer seats on the council.

Isbell proposed the change “because the Justice Department can no longer tell us what to do.” Voters narrowly approved the referendum in 2013, even though 99.6 percent of Latinos opposed it.

On Friday, a federal district court in Texas found that white officials in Pasadena “intentionally discriminated against Latinos.” The court ordered new elections under the previous districts and, because of the finding of intentional discrimination, required Pasadena to approve all future election changes with the federal government for at least five years. It is the first jurisdiction to be subject to preclearance requirements since the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder decision.

In 2013, Jeff Sessions, Donald Trump’s nominee for attorney general, cheered the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, calling it “good news…for the South.” He claimed, “If you go to Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, people aren’t being denied the vote because of the color of their skin.”

In fact, as the decision in Pasadena shows, there is ample evidence of ongoing voting discrimination throughout the South (and beyond). Sessions’s home state of Alabama tried to close 31 DMV offices, many in majority-black counties, after instituting strict photo-ID requirements to vote. “In the 10 counties with the highest proportion of minorities, the state closed driver’s license offices in eight,” wrote Kyle Whitmore of AL.com. The US Department of Transportation found that the closures violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Alabama agreed last month to increase hours as part of the federal settlement.

Elsewhere, North Carolina passed the country’s worst voter-suppression law in July 2013, which the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit said targeted “African-Americans with almost surgical precision.” Georgia was found to have illegally purged tens of thousands of voters, who were disproportionately people of color, from the rolls. Texas’s voter-ID law was judged to be discriminatory by the very conservative US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. And on it goes.

Sessions seemed clueless about the details of the challenge to the Voting Rights Act. “Shelby County [Alabama] never had a history of denying the vote, certainly not now,” he said. “There is racial discrimination in the country, but I don’t think in Shelby County, Alabama, anyone is being denied the right to vote because of the color of their skin.” In fact, Shelby County found itself in court after the city of Calera ousted the only black city council member by reducing the percentage of African-Americans in his district from seventy-one to thirty percent—a textbook example of the type of voting discrimination that the Voting Rights Act was designed the stop.

Last year, Sessions awarded the Congressional Gold Medal to the foot soldiers of the Selma movement, but has refused to support restoring the Voting Rights Act that many of them nearly died to win.

As Trump’s attorney general, Sessions could be disastrous to voting rights in a variety of ways. He could support a federal voter-ID law and/or a proof of citizenship law for voter registration, which would disenfranchise millions of eligible Americans. He could pressure states to purge their voting rolls in discriminatory and inaccurate ways and force US Attorneys to prosecute bogus cases of voter fraud, which happened during the George W. Bush administration. He could switch sides in cases the Justice Department is arguing under the Voting Rights Act against states like North Carolina and Texas, which are on appeal to the Supreme Court, and question the constitutionality of the remaining parts of the VRA. He could bring reverse discrimination suits on behalf of whites instead of historically disenfranchised communities.

Sessions has received renewed scrutiny recently for his unsuccessful 1985 prosecutions for voter fraud of three civil-rights activists from Perry County, Alabama, including Albert Turner Jr., a close aide of Martin Luther King Jr. who was brutally beaten by police on Bloody Sunday in Selma. The prosecutions were not an isolated incident but revealed a more disturbing pattern from Sessions, which led to him being rejected for a federal judgeship in 1986.

This is Albert Turner, who led MLK's funeral procession. Jeff Sessions prosecuted him for helping black people vote https://t.co/LjC2deRFfC pic.twitter.com/tFVAeAXrSO

— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) November 18, 2016

Gerry Hebert, a lawyer in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, testified that Sessions had called the NAACP and ACLU “Communist-inspired” and “un-American” organizations that were “trying to force civil rights down the throats of people.” Thomas Figures, who worked under Sessions as the first black prosecutor in Alabama, said that Sessions had called him “boy” and told him “to be careful what I said to white folks.” Sessions said the Voting Rights Act was “an intrusive piece of legislation.”

“Mr. Sessions is a throwback to a shameful era which I know both black and white Americans thought was in our past,” Ted Kennedy said in 1986. “It is inconceivable to me that a person of this attitude is qualified to be a U.S. attorney, let alone a U.S. Federal judge…. He is, I believe, a disgrace to the Justice Department and he should withdraw his nomination and resign his position.”

Thirty years later, there’s little evidence to suggest that Sessions has changed his views. He has consistently opposed efforts to enforce the country’s civil-rights laws, to make it easier to vote, or to bring more diverse representation to his home state. He remains, unique among all attorney-general nominees, an advocate for the Old South he grew up in.

In his Senate questionnaire for attorney general, Sessions lists the Perry County prosecutions as one of the 10 most significant cases he handled. He has never apologized or admitted he did anything wrong.

In an attempt to repair his reputation, Sessions also lists four civil-rights cases he “personally” worked on, including litigation that successfully dismantled discriminatory election systems in the Alabama Black Belt, including in Selma, leading to the election of the first black elected officials on the county commissions and school boards of places like Dallas and Marengo counties. But lawyers with the Civil Rights Division say Sessions did no work on these cases and they put his name on the briefs simply because he was US Attorney at the time.

“Those were my cases,” Gerry Hebert says of the litigation in Dallas and Marengo counties. “He played no role in either of them. When I filed the briefs, I put his name on them, but he never saw them. He had no role whatsoever in filing or approving these cases.”

After stepping down as US Attorney in Mobile, Sessions served as attorney general of Alabama from 1995 to 1997. There, he opposed litigation brought by civil-rights groups and agreed to by his predecessor that would have led to the first black judges being appointed to the Alabama supreme court, court of criminal appeals, and court of civil appeals.

More recently, Alabama State Senator Hank Sanders and other black political leaders from Alabama met with Sessions to ask him to support African-American judges the Obama administration was planning to nominate for vacancies on the federal districts courts in Montgomery and Birmingham and the court of appeals in Atlanta. “Nothing came out of it and the positions are still not filled,” says Sanders. “There was no movement on his part. The Obama administration didn’t want to nominate somebody that Sessions would just kill.” If Sessions had pledged not to oppose the nominees, Obama would have nominated three black judges to fill crucial vacancies, Sanders says.

“During the 20 years Jeff Sessions has been in the U.S. Senate, only one black person has been appointed as a federal judge in a state that is 26 percent African American,” Sanders wrote in the Selma Times-Journal.

Time and time again, Sessions has taken positions that would make it harder to vote, which give a disturbing preview of what he’d do as the nation’s top law-enforcement official.

Sessions has perpetuated the myth of voter fraud to support new restrictions like voter-ID laws. “We have seen fraud repeatedly and there is a problem if you don’t use an ID when you go to vote, because you can vote for some other name that you know is not available to vote that day,” he told CNN in August, while echoing Trump’s bogus claim that Democrats were “attempting to rig this election.” (There have only been four cases of voter fraud in 2016 out of 135 million votes.)

He has called on previous attorneys general, including Eric Holder, to aggressive push states to purge their voting rolls. On the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery march, he told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! that he opposed early voting, same-day registration and voting rights for ex-felons. Here’s the exchange:

AMY GOODMAN: Senator Sessions, one last question: the question of why not make voting easier for people in this country; let people vote early, longer days; the whole issue of opening up the voting process so that people can feel welcomed into the process?

SEN. JEFF SESSIONS: Well, I’m uneasy about this law on pre-voting. Things happen between two weeks or more to the Election Day, and oftentimes people are—are, you know, urged to go to vote and vote before they’re ready to vote. And so I think there’s nothing wrong with voting on Election Day. That’s the way we’ve had since the founding of the republic. I just told you—

GOODMAN: But especially for poorer people, when it’s hard to, in a working day, be able to get out and vote.

SESSIONS: Well, you can vote absentee, and if you’re employed and can’t go to work, you can vote absentee, and you can vote absentee if you’re ill or have a number of other reasons. So, I’m just not for extending the time. That’s an unusual thing that—

GOODMAN: Same-day registration? More places?

SESSIONS: No, I think same-day registration is very dangerous.

GOODMAN: Because?

SESSIONS: Well, because it can allow fraud to occur, and people can vote more than once.

GOODMAN: What about felons, people who have been in prison, served their time? In some states, they’re allowed to vote. In some states, they’re allowed to vote from prison. But in many states, they lose that right forever.

SESSIONS: Well, it depends on the conviction and depends on the state, but that’s historically been the rule. You’ve been convicted of a serious offense; most states, at one time or another, have denied people the right to vote.

GOODMAN: What is Alabama’s policy?

SESSIONS: Alabama, you can get citizenship restored, I think, after you complete your time in jail for some crimes, but I don’t really know the details of it.

At a time when there’s the greatest need to protect voting rights since 1965, Sessions would take America back to an era when the government was on the wrong side of civil rights.

On September 12, 1986, Earl McGahee, a 29-year-old African-American man, was convicted of murdering his ex-wife and another student at George Wallace Community College in Selma, Alabama, and sentenced to death. Though the trial took place in Selma’s Dallas County, which was 55 percent black and the birthplace of the Voting Rights Act, McGahee was convicted by an all-white jury because prosecutors struck all 24 eligible African-American jurors from the case. Six black jurors were removed for “low intelligence,” the prosecution said.

As Alabama’s attorney general from 1995 to 1997, Jeff Sessions defended the prosecutor’s actions when the case was appealed. The district attorney for Dallas County, Roy Johnson, who oversaw the McGahee prosecution, had also recommended that Sessions prosecute three longtime civil-rights activists in Alabama for voter fraud—a trial that Sessions lost and that contributed to his being blocked for a federal judgeship in 1986. Sessions called Johnson an “outstanding prosecutor” and a “personal friend.”

“When he was attorney general, we had a horrific problem of racial bias in jury selection,” says Bryan Stevenson, the renowned civil-rights lawyer and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama. “Before Sessions took office, courts had reversed 23 cases where there had been intentional exclusion of people of color on juries and his office defended most of those cases…. He was defending the prosecutor’s conduct in the McGahee case and saying it was not unconstitutional or illegal or discriminatory, despite the fact that all 24 African Americans who qualified for jury service were excluded.”

Stevenson argued McGahee’s case on appeal and in 2009 the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit vacated his death sentence, citing “intentional discrimination” by the prosecution and an “astonishing pattern resulting from the total exclusion of African-Americans.” When his sentence was overturned, McGahee had been on death row in Alabama for 23 years.

Stevenson, who has been a civil-rights lawyer in Alabama for over 25 years, says the McGahee case is just one example of Sessions’s extreme and increasingly outdated views on crime and punishment and racial justice. This is particularly noteworthy given that Sessions was blocked as a federal judge in 1986 for his discriminatory actions and views, and has done little to support racial equality since then. As Trump’s attorney general, Sessions would almost certainly roll back the Obama administration’s efforts to make the criminal-justice system more fair and just in areas like policing, incarceration, and private prisons.

“He has been complicit in the broad effort at resisting racial integration and racial equality,” Stevenson says of Sessions. “He has been complicit in the effort to deny the legacy of segregation and terrorism. And he has provided no leadership to help the state move away from the era of segregation and pervasive racial bias.”

When Alabama became the first state to bring back the use of chain gangs in 1995—a horrific remnant of Jim Crow—Sessions, as Alabama attorney general, defended it as “perfectly proper.” (The chain gangs were scrapped after a year because of a federal lawsuit.)

As a US senator since 1997, Sessions “is one of few Republican legislators who does not support bipartisan efforts to reform the nation’s criminal justice system,” according to a new report by the Brennan Center for Justice. Sessions personally blocked bipartisan legislation supported by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley and House Speaker Paul Ryan that would’ve reduced unnecessarily long sentences for nonviolent crimes. He’s opposed consent decrees between the Justice Department and cities like Ferguson and Baltimore to reduce police misconduct, calling it “one of the most dangerous, and rarely discussed, exercises of raw power.” He opposes efforts to end mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenses or to decriminalize marijuana, saying last year “good people don’t smoke marijuana.” When he was US Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama from 1981 to 1993, 40 percent of his convictions came from drug offenses—double the rate of other Alabama prosecutors.

“We haven’t heard or seen anything from him that suggests there’s a problem with the criminal justice system: overcrowding in prisons, excessive sentencing, bias, abuse of power, politicized sentencing,” says Stevenson. “That will contrast dramatically with previous attorneys general.”

Stevenson says members of the Senate Judiciary Committee need to ask Sessions during his confirmation hearings this week: “Are you going to continue to pursue remedies for these serious violations, or are you going to retreat to the chain-gang days where things were ‘perfectly proper?’”

Violations of the criminal-justice system have been particularly acute in Alabama, where African Americans make up 26 percent of the population but 54 percent of prisoners. A federal investigation into Tutwiler Prison for Women in Wetumpa, Alabama, found that 60 percent of guards sexually abused and assaulted women prisoners. Abuses detailed at male prisons in Alabama by the Equal Justice Institute include:

• The fatal beating of 24-year-old Rocrast Mack by correctional officers at Ventress Correctional Facility in Clayton, Alabama.
• Inmates at Elmore Correctional Facility being handcuffed, stripped naked, and then beaten so badly by several guards that they required hospitalization and suffered permanent injuries.
• Male correctional officers at Donaldson and Bibb Correctional Facilities forcing male inmates to perform sex acts and threatening to file disciplinary charges against them if they refused or reported the abuse.

In October 2016 the Justice Department announced it was opening a wide-ranging investigation into Alabama’s prisons, focusing on “whether prisoners are adequately protected from use of excessive force and staff sexual abuse by correctional officers, and whether the prisons provide sanitary, secure and safe living conditions.” Sessions has said nothing about these abuses, Stevenson says, and should be asked if he’ll continue the federal investigations if confirmed as attorney general.

Already, there’s a disturbing pattern of Alabama officials’ resisting federal law. After the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage, the Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, Roy Moore, said he would refuse to issue marriage licenses to gay couples. (He’s since been suspended and is rumored as a contender for Sessions’s Senate seat.) When the Supreme Court overturned the death penalty for juveniles in 2005, Alabama Supreme Court Justice Tom Parker, who worked for Sessions when he was Alabama attorney general, said the Alabama Supreme Court should ignore the order. “State supreme courts may decline to follow bad U.S. Supreme Court precedents because those decisions bind only the parties to the particular case,” Parker wrote. Stevenson says Sessions has been similarly silent on these issues and should be asked: “Do you believe that state judges can defy federal law?”

More than any nominee for attorney general in modern American history, Sessions would be an unapologetic defender of the old Confederacy and has refused to criticize policies that stem directly from Jim Crow. For example, Alabama’s 1901 Constitution still includes language authorizing a poll tax and segregated schools. Referendums to remove such language—which Sessions failed to support—were defeated by voters in 2004 and 2012. Interracial marriage was illegal in the state until 2000. When Sessions was state attorney general, there were still officially segregated proms in the state.

Last year, after the massacre of nine African Americans in Charleston, South Carolina, Alabama Governor Robert Bentley removed the Confederate flag from the grounds of the Alabama statehouse. When he was asked about it, Sessions, who is named after a Confederate general, said, “I’m not going to criticize the governor,” but defended Confederate history. “This is a huge part of who we are and the left is continually seeking, in a host of different ways, it seems to me, I don’t want to be too paranoid about this, but they seek to delegitimize the fabulous accomplishments of our country.”

“There was a lot of nostalgia and comfort with the iconography of the Confederacy,” Stevenson says. “That’s unprecedented in a nominee for attorney general.”

While the news last week focused on reports of Russian interference in US elections, Republicans in North Carolina were busy subverting democracy at home.

What began as a special legislative session to help victims of Hurricane Matthew quickly turned into something very different when the GOP-controlled legislature hastily passed a series of bills stripping incoming Democratic Governor Roy Cooper of his constitutional powers. Most noteworthy, Cooper will no longer get to appoint a majority of members to the state board of elections or 100 county boards of elections, and the state board will be chaired by a Republican in all even-numbered years—i.e., any time there’s a major congressional, statewide, or presidential election. With Republicans holding a super-majority in the legislature, this is a guaranteed prelude to future voter-suppression efforts. The bill also makes it harder for the state Supreme Court, which has a 4-3 Democratic majority, to review future challenges to election-law changes. Outgoing Republican Governor Pat McCrory signed the bill 48 hours after it was first introduced.

In addition, Republicans reduced the number of public employees the governor could appoint—from 1,500 to 425—prevented the governor from appointing members to boards of state universities, and required the governor’s cabinet picks to be confirmed by the legislature. These moves have been described as “a brazen power grab,” but they are more akin to a coup.

Republicans have turned North Carolina, previously one of the most progressive states in the South, into a laboratory for voter suppression and offered a disturbing preview of what’s to come under Trump. The legislative coup is merely the latest in a series of outrageous and illegal actions by the North Carolina GOP to undermine democracy in the state.

First, after taking power after the 2010 election for the first time since 1870, North Carolina Republicans gerrymandered legislative and congressional districts by resegregating the state politically in violation of the Voting Rights Act. Federal courts have already struck down two congressional districts for racial gerrymandering and ordered new elections for 28 General Assembly districts next year. In other words, the legislature that stripped power from the next Democratic governor was elected by illegal means.

Second, a month after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in June 2013, the North Carolina legislature passed the country’s worst voter-suppression law. The “monster” bill required strict voter ID, cut early voting, and eliminated same-day registration, out-of-precinct voting, and preregistration for 16- and 17-year-olds. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit found that North Carolina’s law targeted African Americans “with almost surgical precision” and was “as close to a smoking gun as we are likely to see in modern times.”

Third, even after the courts restored a week of early voting in 2016, GOP-controlled county election boards limited early-voting hours and polling locations. The executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party called on Republicans to make “party line changes to early voting” that included opposing polling sites on college campuses and prohibiting early voting on Sundays, when black churches held “Souls to the Polls” voter mobilization drives. The North Carolina GOP bragged before Election Day that “African American Early Voting is down 8.5% from this time in 2012. Caucasian voters early voting is up 22.5% from this time in 2012.” After aggressively using their majorities on state and local election boards to suppress votes, Republicans then took those majorities away from the new Democratic governor.

Fourth, despite all of these suppression efforts, Cooper managed to defeat McCrory—the only race in 2016 where Democrats picked up a governor’s seat in a state Trump carried. But McCrory refused to concede for nearly a month, spreading bogus allegations of voter fraud that included wrongly accusing a 101-year-old World War II veteran of voting twice.

The pattern in North Carolina is clear: When Republicans win, they suppress the Democratic vote to solidify power in future elections. And when they lose, they rig the rules to prevent their opponents from being able to fairly exercise and maintain power. This is what happens in a dictatorship, not a democracy. And it’s a preview of what’s to come in Trump’s America.

I’ve written that Trump is the greatest threat to American democracy in our lifetime because, unlike his Democratic or Republican predecessors, he has little respect for basic democratic institutions like a free press or a fair election. But Trump is also such a threat because his party, as we’re seeing in North Carolina, has displayed the same brazen disregard for the will of the people. And now it will control the White House, the Congress, the courts, and two-thirds of state legislatures.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that the struggle to preserve what’s left of American democracy will be a defining fight of the Trump era.

Less than a month after Donald Trump unexpectedly carried Michigan by 10,000 votes, Republicans in the state legislature are already pushing to make it harder to vote. The presidential recount hasn’t even finished yet and Michigan Republicans are trying to pass a strict voter-ID law through the lame-duck legislative session before the end of this year.

Under current Michigan law, a voter who does not present photo ID at the polls can sign an affidavit confirming their identify, under penalty of perjury, and cast a regular ballot. Under the new bill, which passed the House Elections Commission on a 5-3 party-line vote on December 1, voters without strict ID would have to cast a provisional ballot and then return to their local clerk’s office within 10 days of the election with photo ID to have their votes counted.

This change to Michigan’s election laws could make a big difference in future elections: 18,339 people without strict photo ID used the affidavit option to vote in 2016—8,000 votes greater than Trump’s margin of victory. One-third of the affidavits came from Detroit, where Hillary Clinton won 67 percent of the vote in Wayne County.

Already, Trump’s discredited lie that “millions” voted illegally in 2016 seems to be impacting Republican actions. “A multitude of candidates have raised the concerns about the integrity of elections,” said GOP Representative Lisa Lyons, who sponsored the bill. “We need to respond to those questions. We are going to make sure that we’re protecting you—all voters—and the integrity of the election.”

Like Trump, Lyons presented no evidence of voter impersonation or other types of fraud to justify her bill. She passed the bill in her committee after just two days of testimony last week, when the rest of the state was preoccupied with the recount. The bill included $10 million to pay for the voter-ID law, which sounds like a good thing, but makes it impossible for voters to overturn the law via referendum.

“Donald Trump tweeted that millions had voted illegally and 48 hours later this bill popped up out of nowhere,” says Dan Korobkin, deputy legal director for the Michigan ACLU. “That’s either a giant coincidence or a very concerted effort to disenfranchise people at the state and local level based on lies.”

Despite their stated concern for voter fraud, Michigan Republicans on Friday sued to block a recount of the state’s presidential votes, which would’ve ensured the accuracy of the final count. The brief by Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette criticized Jill Stein because “she cited no evidence of fraud or mistake in the canvass of votes,” even though a similar paucity of fraud hasn’t stopped Republicans from pushing for voter ID.

Michigan election officials urged the House not to pass the measure. “I am about the only clerk who can be here today because of the massive recount we’re preparing for,” said Kent County clerk Mary Hollinrake. “This comes as a large surprise. We have not had time to look at these bills.”

“The effective consequence of this bill is to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of eligible voters in Michigan,” says the ACLU’s Korobkin. “As far as we know, there are virtually no instances of voter impersonation in Michigan. It’s nothing even close to a systematic problem.”

The fact that Michigan Republicans are pushing a strict voter-ID law so soon after the election, despite no evidence of fraud, signals that Republicans will intensify their push to restrict voting rights in the Trump era. On the Sunday talk shows, top Republicans like Mike Pence, Reince Preibus, and Paul Ryan refused to condemn Trump’s lie that millions voted illegally, laying the groundwork for a massive war on voting. “Whether there’s widespread voter fraud or not,” the executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party said recently, “the people believe there is.”

This is happening in other states as well.

In New Hampshire, newly elected GOP Governor Chris Sununu has called for eliminating same-day registration, and Republicans in the legislature want to tighten residency requirements to vote.

In North Carolina, GOP Governor Pat McCrory spread bogus claims of voter fraud before finally conceding to Democrat Roy Cooper, while conservative groups are challenging same-day registration and the GOP legislature is considering packing the state Supreme Court in a special legislative session beginning December 13 to reassert Republican control after Democrats won a 4-3 majority on election night.

In Wisconsin, Republican leaders called for cutting early voting, again, after high early-voting turnout in Democratic cities like Madison and Milwaukee. “We’re probably going to have to look at it again to make sure that everybody in the state has the same chance to vote,” said House Speaker Robin Vos.

In Texas, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has called for reviving the state’s strict voter-ID law, which has repeatedly been struck down as discriminatory by federal courts, listing it as one of his top 10 priorities for the 2017 legislative sessions. “I know we’re going to do photo voter ID again,” he said.

The push to make it harder to vote is especially concerning in Michigan given how the state has already subverted local democracy through the emergency-manager law, which has had disastrous consequences in cities like Flint. Half of African Americans in Michigan live in cities that no longer have local control. When voters overturned the emergency-manager law in 2012 via referendum, Republicans in the legislature took only 13 days to pass a new one.

The state’s attempt to ban straight-ticket voting was blocked in 2016 by federal courts, which found it had “a disproportionate burden on African Americans’ right to vote” and would lead to longer lines in cities like Detroit.

Michigan already has some of the worst voting laws in the country—there’s no early voting or same-day registration, you need an excuse to get an absentee ballot and there are frequently three-to-four hour lines in urban areas like Detroit. Moreover, the process for obtaining a driver’s license or state ID in Michigan can be incredibly complex, as this chart tweeted by Dale Ho of the ACLU shows:

https://twitter.com/dale_e_ho/status/804723926085599232

According to the secretary of state’s instructions, “There may be some applicants who simply are not eligible for a driver license or personal identification card because we cannot adequately identify them.” If that applies to IDs for voting, it means the new law will almost certainly prevent eligible voters from casting a ballot.

In 2012, Governor Rick Snyder vetoed bills requiring proof of citizenship and photo ID to get an absentee ballot. With Snyder’s approval ratings plummeting because of Flint, can the governor again do the right thing?

Donald Trump’s tweets yesterday about “the millions of people who voted illegally in 2016” and “serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California” cannot be dismissed as just another Twitter meltdown from the president-elect. (It goes without saying that Trump’s claims are categorically false.)

His conspiracy theories about rigged elections during the presidential race were meant to delegitimize the possibility of Hillary Clinton’s election. But now that he’s won the election we have to take his words far more seriously. He will appoint the next attorney general, at least one Supreme Court justice and thousands of positions in the federal government. His lies about the prevalence of voter fraud are a prelude to the massive voter suppression Trump and his allies in the GOP are about to unleash.

Unlike his Democratic and Republican predecessors, Trump has little respect for the institutions that preserve American democracy, whether it’s freedom of the press or the right to vote. As I wrote in The Nation recently:

Trump undermined the basic tenets of democracy in ways unseen by any previous presidential nominee. He said he might refuse to accept the outcome of the election if things didn’t go his way; his supporters explicitly called for “racial profiling” at the polls; and his campaign openly boasted that “we have three major voter-suppression operations under way” to reduce turnout among African Americans, young women, and liberals.

We can already glimpse how a Trump administration will undermine voting rights, based on the people he nominated to top positions, those he has advising him, and his own statements.

His pick for attorney general, Jeff Sessions, wrongly prosecuted black civil-rights activists for voter fraud in Alabama in the 1980s, called the Voting Rights Act “a piece of intrusive legislation,” and praised the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, saying that “if you go to Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, people aren’t being denied the vote because of the color of their skin.”

Trump’s Justice Department could limit voting rights in a number of critical ways, as I wrote in The New York Times last week:

It could choose not to vigorously enforce the Voting Rights Act, instead pressing states to take more aggressive action to combat alleged voter fraud. This could include purging voter rolls and starting investigations into voter-registration organizations.

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a front-runner to head Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, has called for precisely this. During a meeting with Trump last week, Kobach brought a “strategic plan” for DHS that advocated purging voter rolls and drafting amendments to the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, presumably to require proof of citizenship, like a passport or birth certificate, to register to vote, which prevented tens of thousands of eligible voters from being able to register in Kansas. It’s chilling that a top Trump adviser like Kobach views voting rights as a threat to homeland security.

Trump’s chief adviser, Steve Bannon, has even more radical views. According to The New York Times, he “once suggested to a colleague that perhaps only property owners should be allowed to vote.” A co-writer of his on a Reagan documentary told the paper:

“I said, ‘That would exclude a lot of African-Americans,’” Ms. Jones recalled. “He said, ‘Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.’ I said, ‘But what about Wendy?’” referring to Mr. Bannon’s executive assistant. “He said, ‘She’s different. She’s family.’”

Trump himself said, after courts struck down voter-ID laws in states like North Carolina, that “the voter-ID situation has turned out to be a very unfair development. We may have people vote 10 times.” Ironically, one of the only documented instances of voter fraud in 2016 was committed by a Trump supporter who voted twice in Iowa—and was caught in a state without a voter-ID law.

If you want a better idea of the lengths a Trump administration might go to suppress voting rights, take a look at what Republicans are doing in North Carolina right now. A month after the Supreme Court ruled that states with a long history of discrimination no longer had to approve their voting changes with the federal government, North Carolina Republicans passed a “monster” voter-suppression law that required strict photo ID, cut early voting, and eliminated same-day registration and pre-registration for 16- and 17-year-olds.

Like in so many-GOP controlled states, Republicans in North Carolina justified the voting restrictions by spreading false claims about voter fraud. (Such fraud was in fact exceedingly rare: There were only two cases of voter impersonation in North Carolina from 2002 to 2012 out of 35 million votes cast.)

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit found that North Carolina’s law targeted African Americans “with almost surgical precision.” But even after the court restored a week of early voting, GOP-controlled county election boards limited early voting hours and polling locations. The executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party called on Republicans to make “party line changes to early voting” that included opposing polling sites on college campuses and prohibiting early voting on Sundays, when black churches held “Souls to the Polls” voter-mobilization drives. The North Carolina GOP bragged before Election Day that “African American Early Voting is down 8.5% from this time in 2012. Caucasian voters early voting is up 22.5% from this time in 2012.”

Things got even crazier after the election. After Republican Pat McCrory lost the governor’s race to Democrat Roy Cooper by 9,000 votes, his campaign began filing bogus complaints about voter fraud in an attempt to overturn the election result or have the North Carolina legislature reinstall him as governor. Those challenged by the McCrory campaign include a 101-year-old World War II veteran in Greensboro wrongly accused of double voting.

That wasn’t all. After a black Democrat, Mike Morgan, won a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court, giving Democrats a 4-3 majority, Republicans have proposed expanding the size of the court by two justices, who could be appointed by McCrory in his last weeks in office, allowing Republicans to retain control. This would be an outrageous rebuke to the will of the voters and the rule of law, but you can’t put anything past the North Carolina GOP these days.

North Carolina is a case study for how Republicans have institutionalized voter suppression at every level of government and made it the new normal within the GOP. The same thing could soon happen in Washington when Trump takes power.

Donald Trump has chosen a white nationalist as his chief strategist and a white-nationalist sympathizer as his pick for Attorney General. Like the Confederate general he is named after, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III has long been a leading voice for the Old South and the conservative white backlash vote Trump courted throughout his campaign. Sessions, as a US senator from Alabama, has been the fiercest opponent in the Senate of immigration reform, a centerpiece of Trump’s agenda, and has a long history of opposition to civil rights, dating back to his days as a US Attorney in Alabama in the 1980s.

The Senate rejected Sessions for a federal judgeship during the Reagan administration because of racist statements he made and for falsely prosecuting black political activists in Alabama. He opposed the Voting Rights Act, the country’s most important civil-rights law.

Here’s more on his checkered past, which is more relevant than ever today:

On March 7, 1965, Albert Turner, a tall, sturdy bricklayer from Marion, Alabama, walked directly behind John Lewis during the infamous Bloody Sunday march in Selma. When Lewis fell from the force of police blows, so did Turner. “I fell down and ran,” he said. “Then I fell down again and ran some more.”

After the passage of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), Turner became known as “Mr. Voter Registration,” working as Alabama field secretary for Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. After King’s assassination, Turner led the mule wagon that carried King’s body through the streets of Atlanta.

Because of Turner’s work, African Americans gained political control of many counties in the Alabama Black Belt, where you could practically count the number of black voters on one hand in 1965. But the flourishing of black political power in the Black Belt didn’t sit well with the old white power structure.

In the Democratic primary of September 1984, FBI agents hid behind the bushes of the Perry County post office, waiting for Turner and fellow activist Spencer Hogue to mail 500 absentee ballots on behalf of elderly black voters. When Turner and Hogue left, the feds seized the envelopes from the mail slots. Twenty elderly black voters from Perry County were bused three hours to Mobile, where they were interrogated by law-enforcement officials and forced to testify before a grand jury. Ninety-two-year-old Willie Bright was so frightened of “the law” that he wouldn’t even admit he’d voted.

In January 1985, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, the 39-year-old US Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama, charged Turner, his wife Evelyn, and Hogue with 29 counts of mail fraud, altering absentee ballots, and conspiracy to vote more than once. They faced over 100 years in jail on criminal charges and felony statutes under the VRA—provisions of the law that had scarcely been used to prosecute the white officials who had disenfranchised blacks for so many years. The Turners and Hogue became known as the Marion Three. (This story is best told in Lani Guinier’s book Lift Every Voice.)

The trial was held in Selma, of all places. The jury of seven blacks and five whites deliberated for less than three hours before returning a not-guilty verdict on all counts.

Four months later, the Reagan administration, to the astonishment of civil-rights supporters, nominated Sessions for a federal judgeship on the District Court of Alabama. “Mr. Sessions’ role in the voting fraud case in Alabama alone should bar him from sitting on the bench,” Ted Kennedy said.

Albert Turner’s brother flew to Washington from Perry County to oppose Sessions. In a highly unusual move, attorneys from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division also testified against him. Gerry Hebert, who worked in the Department of Justice’s Voting Section, told Congress that Sessions had called the NAACP and ACLU “Communist-inspired” and “un-American,” and labeled the white civil-rights lawyer Jim Blacksher “a disgrace to his race.” Thomas Figures, a black assistant US Attorney in Mobile, said that Sessions had repeatedly referred to him as “boy.” Figures said he heard from colleagues that Sessions “used to think [the KKK] were OK” until he learned that they were “pot smokers.” Sessions admitted to calling the VRA a “piece of intrusive legislation.”

A bipartisan coalition of senators sunk Sessions’s nomination, making him the first Reagan judicial nominee rejected by the Senate. Democratic Senator Howell Heflin of Alabama, who’d been elected with large black support, cast the decisive swing vote. “My conscience is not clear,” Heflin said, “and I must vote no.”

Now Sessions will be in charge of enforcing the civil-rights laws he once opposed, like the Voting Rights Act. He’s almost certain to further weaken what’s left of the law and to encourage the kind of bogus prosecutions for voter fraud that led him to be rejected for a federal judgeship.

Sessions hardly reformed his views after he was elected to the Senate in 1996. He frequently earned an “F” rating from civil-rights groups like the NAACP and “consistently opposed the bread-and-butter civil rights agenda,” Hillary Shelton, director of the NAACP’s Washington office, told The New Republic. He voted to reauthorize the VRA in 2006 but praised the Supreme Court’s decision to gut the law in 2013, cluelessly saying, “if you go to Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, people aren’t being denied the vote because of the color of their skin.” (As but one example of ongoing voting discrimination, his home state of Alabama tried to close 31 DMV offices, many in majority-black counties, after instituting strict photo-ID requirements to vote.)

In February 2016, Sessions spoke at a ceremony awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to the foot soldiers of the Selma voting-rights movement—some of whom he once falsely prosecuted for voter fraud. “Clearly I feel like I should have stepped forward more,” he said. But, like the man he’ll soon be working for, Sessions’s past and current views show that he remains on the wrong side of history.

Fred Leidel was born in 1916, before women got the right to vote. At 99 years old, he biked to the polls in Madison, Wisconsin, on Election Day. He designed propeller blades for airplanes during World War II and was an engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin. Everyone knew him at his polling place, Schenk Elementary School, where he volunteers to read to kindergartners.

But for the first time in his life, Leidel was turned away from the polls. He no longer drives, and his faculty ID, which he’d used to vote in the past, wasn’t accepted under Wisconsin’s strict new voter-ID law. “I never had any problems voting until today,” he said.

The poll workers called Molly McGrath of Vote­Riders, who helps people get voter IDs, and she took Leidel to the Department of Motor Vehicles branch in East Madison, where he was issued a new state ID and given a temporary receipt for voting—an option only available because a court order forced the state government to make IDs readily available. Leidel returned to the polls a second time and successfully cast a ballot. If it hadn’t been for McGrath’s assistance, he would have been disenfranchised a month before his 100th birthday.

Not everyone was as determined to vote as Leidel. Margie and Alvin Mueller, who are 85 and 86, respectively, went to vote early in Plymouth. They’ve been married for 64 years and always vote at the same place. But Margie, who no longer drives, wasn’t able to vote because her driver’s license had expired.

Election officials said she had to get a new ID at the DMV in Sheboygan, 25 minutes away. But Margie, a cancer survivor who’s in between radiation treatments, wasn’t up for the trip. “When you’re 85, I guess you don’t count anymore,” she said. Her husband was so angry, he decided not to vote, either.

“I could’ve voted, but when they pulled that crap, I didn’t want to vote,” Alvin said. “We could’ve gone to Sheboygan, but it’s just the idea of it… to pull that crap, when she has a picture ID—what more do you want?” He blamed “the damn Republicans,” who “don’t want Latinos and old people to vote.” The Muellers were both Democrats who would have voted for Hillary Clinton.

The 2016 election was the first presidential contest in 50 years without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), because the Supreme Court ruled in Shelby County v. Holder that states with a long history of discrimination no longer need to have their proposed voting changes approved by the federal government. Partly as a consequence, 14 states had new voting restrictions in effect for the first time in 2016—including important swing states like Wisconsin and Ohio.

We’ll never know how many people were kept from the polls by these restrictions, but in states like Wisconsin, they had at least some impact on the outcome. Donald Trump carried the state by 27,000 votes, but 300,000 registered voters, according to a federal court, lacked the required forms of voter ID. Turnout in Wisconsin was at its lowest level in 20 years and fell by 52,000 in Milwaukee, where 70 percent of the state’s African-American population lives. “We saw some of the greatest declines were in the districts we projected would have the most trouble with voter ID requirements,” Neil Albrecht, executive director of the city’s Election Commission, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Wisconsin wasn’t the only state where people had trouble voting. On Election Day, there were 868 fewer polling places in states with a long history of voting discrimination, like Arizona, Texas, and North Carolina. These changes impacted hundreds of thousands of voters, yet received almost no coverage in the media. In North Carolina, as my colleague Joan Walsh reported, black turnout decreased 16 percent during the first week of early voting because “in 40 heavily black counties, there were 158 fewer early polling places.” Republicans set the early voting hours and locations for all 100 counties, and black turnout decreased the most in the 17 counties that had only one polling place for the first week of early voting.

Far too many in the media ignored the GOP’s attack on voting rights. There were 26 debates during the presidential primaries and general election, and not a single question about the gutting of the VRA. Cable news devoted hours and hours to Trump’s absurd claim that the election was rigged against him, while spending precious little time on the real threat that voters faced.

Trump undermined the basic tenets of democracy in ways unseen by any previous presidential nominee. He said he might refuse to accept the outcome of the election if things didn’t go his way; his supporters explicitly called for “racial profiling” at the polls; and his campaign openly boasted that “we have three major voter-suppression operations under way” to reduce turnout among African Americans, young women, and liberals.

If anyone was rigging the system, it was the Republicans—by making it harder to vote. Evidence of voter fraud never materialized in 2016—except for the case of a Trump supporter in Iowa who voted twice and was caught—but as we saw in states like Wisconsin and North Carolina, voter suppression was all too real.

Now, with Republicans in control of the presidency, Congress, and 69 out of 99 state legislative chambers, attacks on voting rights will get even worse. If Trump appoints a Supreme Court justice in the mold of Antonin Scalia to fill the current vacancy, as he’s vowed to do, there may be a five-vote majority to weaken the remaining provisions of the VRA. Congressional Republicans are likely to push for new restrictions on a national level, such as requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. Trump will staff his administration with right-wing zealots obsessed with voter fraud, like Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a key member of his transition team.

Things won’t look much better in GOP-controlled states. Voters in Missouri approved a constitutional amendment on Election Day requiring strict voter ID. After taking over the Kentucky Legislature, Republicans now control every Southern state legislature. Republicans in Wisconsin are already vowing to cut early voting after a high turnout before Election Day in cities like Madison and Milwaukee. “We’re probably going to have to look at it again, to make sure that everybody in the state has the same chance to vote,” said Assembly Speaker Robin Vos.

The few bright spots are in blue states like Oregon, which became the first state to enact automatic voter registration this year. The state added 250,000 new voters to the rolls and had an overall turnout of 79 percent, according to state government estimates—among the highest in the country. Voters in Alaska approved a ballot measure on automatic registration, and four other states—California, Vermont, Connecticut, and West Virginia—are or will soon be implementing similar programs. In addition to combating a flurry of bad restrictions, it’s critically important that Democrats and progressives work to aggressively expand voting rights in the places where they have power.

The election results showed that when more people vote, Democrats do better. That’s why the GOP is so invested in voter suppression. History teaches us that the fight for voting rights didn’t end with the passage of the VRA in 1965, and the struggle is far from over today.

There were 25 debates during the presidential primaries and general election and not a single question about the attack on voting rights, even though this was the first presidential election in 50 years without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act. Fourteen states had new voting restrictions in place for the first time in 2016—including crucial swing states like Wisconsin and Virginia—yet we heard nary a peep about it on Election Day except from outlets like The Nation. This was the biggest under-covered scandal of the 2016 campaign.

Most undercovered story of 2016: today is 1st presidential election in 50 years without full protections of Voting Rights Act pic.twitter.com/ARVvBRnVzb

— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) November 8, 2016

We’ll likely never know how many people were kept from the polls by restrictions like voter-ID laws, cuts to early voting, and barriers to voter registration. But at the very least this should have been a question that many more people were looking into. For example, 27,000 votes currently separate Trump and Clinton in Wisconsin, where 300,000 registered voters, according to a federal court, lacked strict forms of voter ID. Voter turnout in Wisconsin was at its lowest levels in 20 years and decreased 13 percent in Milwaukee, where 70 percent of the state’s African-American population lives, according to Daniel Nichanian of the University of Chicago.

I documented stories of voters in Wisconsin—including a 99-year-old man—who made two trips to the polls and one to the DMV on Election Day just to be able to vote, while others decided not to vote at all because they were denied IDs. When Margie Mueller, an 85-year-old woman from Plymouth, Wisconsin, wasn’t allowed to vote with her expired driver’s license, her husband, Alvin, decided not to vote either. They were both Democrats. “The damn Republicans,” he said, “don’t want Latinos and old people to vote.”  

Andrew Voegele, a schoolteacher, recently moved from Minnesota to Wisconsin and was forced to cast a provisional ballot yesterday that will not be counted unless he surrenders his Minnesota license and spends $34 for a Wisconsin driver’s license by Friday. The ACLU filed a court order last night to have his vote count. Over 200 people in Wisconsin petitioned the DMV on Election Day to get a voter ID.

How many people were turned away from the polls? How many others didn’t bother to show up in the first place? These are questions we need to take far more seriously. In 2014, a study by Rice University and the University of Houston of Texas’s 23rd Congressional District found that 12.8 percent of registered voters who didn’t vote in the election cited lack of required photo ID as a reason they didn’t cast a ballot, even though only 2.7 percent of registered voters actually lacked an acceptable ID. Texas’s strict voter-ID law blocked some voters from the polls while having an ever larger deterrent effect on others. Eighty percent of these voters were Latino and strongly preferred Democratic candidates.  

On Election Day, there were 868 fewer polling places in states with a long history of voting discrimination, like Arizona, Texas, and North Carolina. These changes impacted hundreds of thousands of voters, yet received almost no coverage. In North Carolina, as my colleague Joan Walsh reported, black turnout decreased 16 percent during the first week of early voting because “in 40 heavily black counties, there were 158 fewer early polling places.” Even if these restrictions had no outcome on the election, it’s fundamentally immoral to keep people from voting in a democracy. The media devoted hours and hours to Trump’s absurd claim that the election was rigged against him, while spending precious little time on the real threat that voters faced.

I want to salute the people that did cover voting rights doggedly, including Rick Hasen of the Election Law Blog; Michael Wines of The New York Times; Sari Horwitz of The Washington Post; Alice Ollstein, Kira Lerner, and Ian Millhiser of Think Progress; Tierney Sneed of Talking Points Memo; Zack Roth, Joy Reid, Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow and Al Sharpton of MSNBC; Mark Joseph-Stern and Jamelle Bouie of Slate; David Graham of The Atlantic; Brad Friedman of The Brad Blog, in addition to great local reporters like Bryan Lowry of the Wichita Eagle; Patrick Marley of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel; and Colin Campbell of the Raleigh News & Observer. ProPublica organized an essential Electionland project with reporters across the country.  But when it really mattered, too many in the media treated the right to vote as a fringe issue instead of the most fundamental issue in the election.

3 minutes of advice: here's how @AriBerman says newsrooms should handle "rigged election" claims today https://t.co/maIW1wsML3

— Reliable Sources (@ReliableSources) November 8, 2016

Madison, WI— Fred Leidel was born in 1916, before women got the right to vote. At 99 years old, he biked to the polls in Madison, Wisconsin, this morning. He designed propeller blades for airplanes during World War II and was an engineering professor at University of Wisconsin–Madison. Everyone knows him at his polling place, Schenk Elementary School, where he volunteers to read to kindergarteners.

But for the first time in his life, Leidel was turned away from the polls. He no longer drives, and his UW faculty ID, which he used to vote in the past, wasn’t accepted under the state’s strict voter-ID law. “I never had any problems voting until today,” he said.

The poll workers called Molly McGrath of VoteRiders, who helps people get voter IDs. She took Leidel to the DMV in East Madison, where he was issued a new state ID and given a temporary receipt for voting. Leidel returned to the polls a second time and successfully cast a ballot. If it hadn’t been for McGrath’s assistance, he would’ve been disenfranchised a month before his 100th birthday.

Leidel has always voted. “It’s my country,” he told me. “I’m only one person, but I want to be recorded for what I believe.”

He considers himself a Democrat and voted for Hillary Clinton. “I think women are equal to men. We had our first black president, it’s time we had our first female one.”

This is Fred, 99, from Madison. Engineer in WWII. Made 2 trips to polls & 1 to DMV with @votermolly to get photo ID to vote in WI today pic.twitter.com/B5w2EUTnnN

— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) November 8, 2016

Across Wisconsin today, many longtime voters had difficulty exercising their most fundamental right because of the state’s voter-ID law.

Ruby McGhee, an 80-year-old African-American woman, was born on a farm in Jim Crow Arkansas on Thanksgiving Day 1935. She lived in Illinois since the 1940s and voted without problems since her 20s. She moved to Wisconsin in 2008 to live with her daughter and brought her Illinois ID, Social Security card, and proof of Wisconsin residency to the DMV to get a Wisconsin voter ID. But she was denied an ID because she didn’t have a birth certificate.

“They said what I needed was a birth certificate, which I don’t have,” McGhee said. “My mother had me at home. I couldn’t get the ID. That was my downfall.”

She contacted McGrath, who helped her get a temporary credential for voting, which she used on Tuesday. Voting has always been important to her. “I want to put the right person in the right place at the right time,” she says. “That’s why I always vote.”

This is Ruby, 80, from Madison. Born in Jim Crow Arkansas. Took 2 trips to DMV & court order for her to get credential to vote in WI today pic.twitter.com/YQuetxI0uE

— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) November 8, 2016

McGhee was lucky enough to vote today, but her temporary voting credential is only valid for 120 days, which means she will not be able to vote in the next major election unless Wisconsin’s law changes.

Not everyone was as determined to vote as Leidel and McGhee.

Margie and Alvin Mueller, who are 85 and 86 years old, went to vote early in Plymouth, Wisconsin. They’ve been married for 64 years, have lived in the same house since then and always vote at the same place. But Margie’s ID was not accepted because her driver’s license is expired and she no longer drives.

Election officials said she had to get a new ID in Sheboygan, which is 25 minutes away. Margie is a cancer survivor who’s in between radiation and wasn’t up for the trip. “When you’re 85, I guess you don’t count anymore,” she said. Her husband was so angry, he decided not to vote, either.

“I could’ve voted, but when they pulled that crap, I didn’t want to vote,” Alvin said. “We could’ve gone to Sheboygan, but it’s just the idea of it—to pull that crap, when she has a picture ID, what more do you want?” He blamed “the damn Republicans,” who he said “don’t want Latinos and old people to vote.”

Hey @RepGrothman,remember that voterID suppression secret that you said outloud?

Here are two of the constituents YOU SERVE.

Shame on you. pic.twitter.com/gsB7u77PPG

— Molly McGrath (@votermolly) November 6, 2016

The Muellers, incidentally, live in the district of GOP Rep. Glenn Grothman who predicted during the primary that Republicans would carry Wisconsin in November because “now we have photo ID.”

When Aracely Calderon, a naturalized US citizen from Guatemala, went to vote in downtown Phoenix just before the polls closed in Arizona’s March 22 presidential primary, there were more than 700 people in a line stretching four city blocks. She waited in line for five hours, becoming the last voter in the state to cast a ballot at 12:12 am. “I’m here to exercise my right to vote,” she said shortly before midnight, explaining why she stayed in line. Others left without voting because they didn’t have four or five hours to spare.

The lines were so long because Republican election officials in Phoenix’s Maricopa County, the largest in the state, reduced the number of polling places by 70 percent from 2012 to 2016, from 200 to just 60—one polling place per 21,000 registered voters. Previously, Maricopa County would have needed federal approval to reduce the number of polling sites, because Arizona was one of 16 states where jurisdictions with a long history of discrimination had to submit their voting changes under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. This part of the VRA blocked 3,000 discriminatory voting changes from 1965 to 2013. That changed when the Supreme Court gutted the law in the June 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision.

The polling place reductions in Maricopa County were a glaring example of a disturbing trend. The Leadership Conference for Civil Rights surveyed 381 of the 800 counties previously covered by Section 5 where polling place information was available in 2012 or 2014 and found there are 868 fewer places to cast a ballot in 2016 in these areas. “Out of the 381 counties in our study, 165 of them—43 percent—have reduced voting locations,” says the important new report.

While new statewide voting restrictions like voter-ID laws and cuts to early voting in places like Texas and North Carolina have received national attention, the polling place closures could have as big of an impact in 2016—the first presidential election in 50 years without the full protections of the VRA.

Arizona, the poster child for voting problems in the primary, closed the highest percentage of polling places in the study. “Almost every county in the state reduced polling places in advance of the 2016 election and almost every county closed polling places on a massive scale, resulting in 212 fewer polling places,” says the report (emphasis in original). Tucson’s Pima County—the second largest in the state, which is 35 percent Latino and leans Democratic—“is the nation’s biggest closer of polling places,” from 280 in 2012 to 218 in 2016.

Many of these counties have been hot spots for voting discrimination. Cochise County, on the Mexico border, which is 30 percent Latino, was sued by the Justice Department in 2006 failing to print election materials in Spanish or have Spanish-speaking poll workers, in violation of the VRA. Today, the county “is the nation’s biggest closer by percentage,” having shuttered 63 percent of its voting locations since Shelby. There will be only 18 polling places for 130,000 residents in 2016, down from 49 polling places in 2012.

Texas has closed more than 400 polling places, more than any other state in the study. “Almost half of all Texas counties in our sample closed polling places since Shelby, resulting in 403 fewer voting locations for the 2016 election than in past years,” according to the Leadership Conference.

Medina County, a heavily Republican area in South Texas, closed a polling place in the town of Natalia, which is 75 percent Latino and the only Democratic-leaning part of the county. “We’ve had a polling place for at least the last six decades,” Emilio Flores, a local activist and registered Republican, told me. When Flores asked the county elections administrator, Patricia Barton, how low-income and disabled Latino voters were supposed to vote without a polling place in their town, he said she told him, “If you think it’s such a big issue, why don’t you shuttle them yourself?” Last week the county commission approved a polling place in Natalia for Election Day after local activists like Flores raised alarms, but Medina County will have only eight polling places in 2016, down from 14 in 2012.

We’re already seeing the impact of polling place closures during early voting in states like North Carolina. The state cut a week of early voting for 2016, which was overturned as discriminatory by a federal court, but many GOP-controlled counties still limited early voting hours and locations, leading to four hour lines in cities like Charlotte and a 16 percent decrease in black turnout compared to 2012. Black turnout decreased the most in the 17 counties that had only one polling site for the first week of early voting.

Thirty percent of the 40 counties in North Carolina that had to approve their voting changes with the federal government closed polling places on Election Day. The Leadership Conference spotlights the impact:

Cleveland County, which is on the outer edge of the Charlotte metropolitan area, is a textbook example of a change that would have received enhanced scrutiny under Section 5. In the 2012 election, voters in Cleveland County were served by 26 polling places; in 2016, they’ll only have 21—a drop of 19 percent. In the summer of 2014, the county’s board of elections merged five of these voting locations into two in the city of Shelby—which is 40 percent Black—over opposition from the Cleveland County NAACP. Rev. Dante Murphy, the Cleveland County NAACP president, said, “We know that this is part of a bigger trend—a movement to suppress people’s right to vote.”

There are a variety of reasons for the polling place closures. Most counties cite budget shortfalls. Some said they couldn’t comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. A few states, like Arizona and Texas, have switched to “vote centers,” where there are fewer polling places but county residents can vote anywhere they like, rather than at an assigned polling place. This model works well in some places, but was a disaster in Maricopa County during the primary, when officials allocated far fewer polling places than necessary.

Still, it’s impossible to ignore that polling places are being closed on a major scale in states with a very ugly history of suppressing voting rights, like Louisiana and Mississippi. “Since Shelby, 61 percent of Louisiana parishes have closed a total of 101 polling places since 2012,” says the report. “About 34 percent of all Mississippi counties surveyed have closed polling places since Shelby, resulting in at least 44 fewer polling places for the 2016 election.”

In June 2013, Percy Bland was elected as the first black mayor of Meridian, Mississippi, where the Ku Klux Klan abducted the civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner during Freedom Summer in 1964. A month after Bland’s election the Supreme Court gutted the VRA, and in 2015 the majority-white board of elections in Lauderdale County closed seven polling places over objections from the mayor. That included eliminating a polling place at the historic Mt. Olive Baptist Church, a major site during the civil-rights movement, as the place where the singer Pete Seeger announced that the bodies of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner had been discovered after they were missing for 44 days. “In an effort to honor the legacy of those who paid the ultimate sacrifice in order that we enjoy our civil rights, we proudly offer our historic facilities [as a polling site],” said church spokesman Ronald Turner.

“Things have changed dramatically” in the South, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the Shelby decision. “The tests and devices that blocked ballot access have been forbidden nationwide for over 40 years.” But as we’re seeing clearly in 2016, the states previously covered by the VRA keep finding new ways to undermine the right to vote.

There are so many different voting problems in this election, it’s difficult to keep track. In Texas, voters are wrongly being asked to show strict photo ID to cast a ballot. In North Carolina, voters are being purged from the rolls and early-voting locations have been cut. In Wisconsin, voters are being turned away from the DMV without getting voter IDs and polling places have been denied on college campuses. In Ohio, thousands of ballots could be thrown out because of minor technical errors.

On top of all this, Donald Trump is working his supporters into a frenzy by claiming the election is rigged and recruiting poll watchers to “Stop Crooked Hillary From Rigging This Election!” His white-nationalist allies, including neo-Nazis and Klan members, say they’re planning to deploy thousands of poll watchers to urban areas. And Trump adviser Roger Stone is sending volunteers to nine Democratic cities with large minority populations, like Cleveland and Las Vegas.

The question I’m asked more than any other is: What can be done to protect voting rights? This question is more salient than at any time since 1965, since this is the first presidential election in 50 years without the protections of the Voting Rights Act. Fortunately, the GOP’s campaign to suppress the vote is being combated by a vigorous effort to defend voting rights.  

The Election Protection coalition, spearheaded by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, is running the 866-Our-Vote hotline, which is a great resource for voters who experience problems at the polls. Election Protection will have 22 nationwide call centers fielding questions from voters and an on the ground presence in 26 states, with 5,000 lawyers and 3,000 organizers deployed nationwide. More than 120 organizations are part of the coalition, from the NAACP to the National Association of Latino Election Officials to the Arab-American Institute.

“The fact that this is the first presidential election cycle without the full protection of the Voting Rights Act makes it extra important for us to be on the ground, making sure voters have the information they need to cast a ballot but if there are problems, having people to address the issue,” says Chris Melody Fields, manager of legal mobilization at the Lawyers Committee.

Here are some groups in the Election Protection coalition that were recommended to me by voting rights advocates: VoteRiders and Project Vote are helping people obtain voter IDs. Local chapters of national groups like the League of Women Voters, Common Cause, and the ACLU have been very active on the ground. State-based groups have been incredibly important in the fight for voting rights, including State Voices, Democracy North Carolina, New Florida Majority, New Virginia Majority, and Arizona Advocacy Network.

In addition to these nonpartisan efforts, the DNC is suing the RNC and GOP state parties in Ohio, Arizona, Nevada, and Pennsylvania to stop coordinated voter-intimidation efforts, which are prohibited by a consent decree against the GOP dating back to the 1980s. The lawsuits say the Trump campaign, RNC, and GOP state parties are violating the VRA and Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 by “conspiring to threaten, intimidate, and thereby prevent minority voters in urban neighborhoods from voting in the 2016 election.”

Voter intimidation efforts are especially concerning this year because the gutting of the Voting Rights Act “severely curtailed” the Justice Department’s ability to send federal election observers to areas with a long history of discrimination, according to Attorney General Loretta Lynch. Now the DOJ can dispatch observers only to areas where there’s a specific court order authorizing them. Thirty-two thousand federal observers have monitored elections since the VRA passed, and in 2012 the DOJ sent 780 federal observers and personnel to 51 jurisdictions in 23 states, including cities like Cleveland, Dallas, and Phoenix. In 2016, the DOJ will send federal observers to only seven counties in Alaska, California, Louisiana, and New York, according to press reports.

The DOJ says it’ll make up for the loss of federal observers by sending lawyers and other staff as election monitors in roughly half the states in the country. “But unlike the specially trained election observers, monitors are not allowed inside unless local election officials invite them,” The New York Times reports.

The federal observer program was one of the most important and little-known parts of the VRA, writes Julie Fernandes, director for voting rights at the Open Society Policy Center and a former deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights:

There are countless examples of the federal observer program being used to protect voters from racial discrimination at the polls. In 2012, federal observers monitoring an election in Shelby County, Alabama, documented the closing of doors on African-American voters before the voting hours were over, as well as voting officials using racial epithets to describe voters. That same year, observers were sent to Alameda and Riverside Counties in California to gather information regarding reports of serious failures to provide language assistance to voters who needed it. In 2011, a federal court relied on observer reports to conclude that Sandoval County, New Mexico, had effectively disenfranchised members of the Keres tribe. In 2010, during the early voting period in Harris County, Texas, federal observers documented intimidation and harassment targeting Latino and African-American voters by an organized, well-funded Texas-based organization with clear partisan electoral goals. And during a primary election in Grenada, Mississippi in 1999, white poll watchers showed up at polling sites with cameras that were used to take pictures of black voters who needed assistance casting their ballots, in an effort to intimidate them. Thankfully, as soon as these individuals found out that there were federal observers monitoring the election, they exited the polling site.

At a time when there’s the greatest threat to voting rights since 1965, the federal government has the fewest tools at its disposal to protect the right to vote. That makes the work of groups like Election Protection all the more important.

Just weeks before early voting began in North Carolina, Grace Bell Hardison, a 100-year-old African-American woman, was informed that her voter-registration status was being challenged. If she didn’t appear at a county Board of Elections meeting or return a notarized form, she would be removed from the voting rolls.

Hardison has lived in Belhaven, North Carolina, her entire life and voted regularly for the last 24 years, including in North Carolina’s presidential primary in March. “The first thing out of her mouth was ‘I can’t vote,’” her nephew Greg Sattherwaite said after she received the letter. “She loves to vote. She will not miss election time.”

Hardison’s registration was challenged by Shane Hubers, a Belhaven Republican, after a mailing done last year by a candidate for mayor. Mail that was returned as undeliverable in 2015 became the basis for the challenge list.

But the mailings included many incorrect addresses. “My mail comes to the post office,” Hardison told WNCT TV, which brought attention to her plight in an October 18 broadcast. “I don’t have no mail come to the house. Ever since I’ve been here, my mail has been coming to the post office.”

The challenge list compiled by Republicans also overwhelmingly targeted black and Democratic voters. “Of the 138 challenged, 92 of them were black and registered Democrats. 28 voters were unaffiliated, 17 were Republicans, and 1 was Libertarian,” reported WNCT.

Hardison’s challenge was withdrawn after a local outcry, but 14 voters have been purged so far in recent weeks in Beaufort County, which previously had to approve its voting changes with the federal government under the Voting Rights Act because of a history of discrimination.

The North Carolina NAACP says the purge violates the National Voter Registration Act, which “prohibits the mass removal of voters from the rolls within the 90 days prior to the election.”

“These purges have a long history of being racial and inaccurate,” says Penda Hair, a lawyer for the North Carolina NAACP.

In a letter to the state Board of Elections, the North Carolina NAACP pointed out that Hardison’s challenge was not an isolated case:

Since October 4, 2016, four individuals have submitted forms challenging 139 registered voters in Beaufort County. While several of these challenges have been withdrawn or resolved by the Beaufort County Board of Elections, 103 challenges are still pending and have been scheduled for hearings on October 24 and 29. Over 60% of the challenged voters are African American. The challenge list includes 59 active voters, including 19 individuals who have voted in the last year.

Among the challenged voters are Sharon Woods and Mary Harris Butcher. Ms. Woods is a 42-year-old African American resident of Beaufort County who has voted in the county since 2001. Ms. Woods has voted in Beaufort County fifteen times, including when she cast her ballot in person in the March 2016 primary election. Mary Harris Butcher is a 75-year-old African American resident of Beaufort County who has voted in the county since 1994. Like Ms. Woods, Ms. Butcher voted in person as recently as the March 2016 primary election.

The same thing is happening in other North Carolina counties, reports the NAACP:

In Moore County, an individual challenger, N. Carol Wheeldon, submitted forms challenging approximately 400 registered voters, on the basis that first-class mail sent to those individuals’ addresses had been returned to the sender. The Moore CBOE notified those individuals of a hearing on the challenges, and, after holding the hearing on Friday, October 14, 2015, removed nearly all of the several hundred challenged registrants from the voter rolls

Wheeldon is the secretary of the Moore County Republican Party and has worked closely with the right-wing Voter Integrity Project, which has aggressively pushed discredited claims of voter fraud. The group recently accused Democrats of “Raping the ‘Retard’ Vote.”

The GOP-led voter challenges in North Carolina appear very similar to the type of voter purging and intimidation the RNC is prohibited from doing.

As I reported in The Nation:

In 1981, during a New Jersey gubernatorial election, the Republican National Committee launched a “Ballot Security Task Force” that sent sample ballots to voters in predominantly African-American and Hispanic precincts. When 45,000 letters were returned as undeliverable, the RNC tried to remove the voters from the rolls and hired off-duty cops to patrol polling sites in black and Hispanic neighborhoods of Newark and Trenton. Police carried firearms at polling places and wore armbands reading “National Ballot Security Task Force,” while the RNC posted large signs saying, this area is being patrolled by the national ballot security task force. it is a crime to falsify a ballot or to violate election laws.

After the election, the Democratic National Committee won a court settlement ordering the RNC to “refrain from undertaking any ballot security activities.”

The consent decree was upheld by the courts in part because of subsequent voter intimidation done by Republicans in states like North Carolina. The US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit wrote in 2012:

In 1990, the DNC brought a lawsuit alleging that the RNC violated the Consent Decree by participating in a North Carolina Republican Party (“NCRP”) program. The DNC alleged that the RNC had violated the Decree in North Carolina by engaging in a program of the North Carolina Republican Party (“NCRP”) in which 150,000 postcards were sent to residents of predominantly African-American precincts. This program allegedly attempted to intimidate voters by warning that it is a “federal crime…to knowingly give false information about your name, residence or period of residence to an election official.” The postcards falsely stated that there was a 30-day minimum residency requirement prior to the election during which voters must have lived in the precinct in which they cast their ballot.

Now the DNC is asking the court to extend the order for another eight years following the Trump’s campaign call for poll watchers to “stop crooked Hillary from rigging this election.” From the legal filing yesterday:

Defendant Republican National Committee (“RNC”) has violated the Final Consent Decree…by supporting and enabling the efforts of the Republican candidate for President, Donald J. Trump, as well as his campaign and advisors, to intimidate and discourage minority voters from voting in the 2016 Presidential Election

Trump has falsely and repeatedly told his supporters that the November 8 election will be “rigged” based upon fabricated claims of voter fraud in “certain areas” or “certain sections” of key states. Unsurprisingly, those “certain areas” are exclusively communities in which large minority voting populations reside. Notwithstanding that no evidence of such fraud actually exists, Trump has encouraged his supporters to do whatever it takes to stop it—“You’ve got to get everybody to go out and watch…and when [I] say ‘watch,’ you know what I’m talking about, right?”—and has been actively organizing “election observers” to monitor polling stations in “certain areas.” Trump has even encouraged his “watchers” to act like vigilante law enforcement officers.

The lawsuit notes that one of Trump’s top advisers, Roger Stone, “was a key advisor to the 1981 campaign of former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean, in which a ‘ballot security’ force wearing black armbands engaged in widespread voter intimidation in Newark, Camden, Paterson and other minority neighborhoods in the State, leading to this very action and the Consent Decree that Stone is helping to violate today.” The Huffington Post reported yesterday that Stone planned to send poll monitors to nine cities with large minority populations, using fake ID badges and to conduct fake exit polling.

“We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” a Trump senior official told Bloomberg today. According to Bloomberg, the campaign is trying to depress turnout among “idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans.” Though this sounds more like negative campaigning than actual suppression, it isn’t likely to help the RNC’s case in court.

As we’re seeing in states like North Carolina, the GOP is going to great lengths to make it harder for Democratic-leaning voters—including a 100-year-old woman—to cast a ballot.

Carly Stumpner, a junior biology major at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay, had an hour between classes to vote during Wisconsin’s April 5 presidential primary. But when she arrived at her polling place on campus, the line stretched for two hours across the student union. She returned to the polls a second time after her classes, but the line had only grown, and Stumpner had to get to a meeting for work. She wasn’t able to vote because of the long wait times, a frustrating experience for her and many students at UWGB that day.

When polls closed at 8 pm, there were still 150 students waiting to vote. “Some people described it as chaos,” reported Ellery McCardle of the local ABC affiliate. “People were standing shoulder to shoulder, there was absolutely no room to move around in here.”

After the primary, leaders of eight different student groups—including the Republican, Democratic, and Libertarian parties and the Black Student Union—asked the city to put an early-voting location on campus to alleviate long lines. But city officials ignored the request and opened only one early-voting site on September 26 for the entire city—the third-largest in Wisconsin—at the clerk’s office, a 15-minute drive from campus, which is open only during business hours. City Clerk Kris Teske, an appointee of Republican Mayor Jim Schmitt, a close ally of Governor Scott Walker, said the city didn’t have the money, time, or security to open an early-voting location on campus or anywhere else.

But privately Teske gave a different reason for opposing an early-voting site at UW–Green Bay, writing that student voting would benefit the Democratic Party. “UWGB is a polling location for students and residents on Election Day but I feel by asking for this to be the site for early voting is encouraging the students to vote more than benefiting the city as a whole,” she wrote on August 26 in an e-mail to David Buerger, counsel at the Wisconsin Ethics Commission. “I have heard it said that students lean more toward the democrats…. I have spoken with our Chief of Staff and others at City Hall and they agree that budget wise this isn’t going to happen. Do I have an argument about it being more of a benefit to the democrats?”

The e-mails were provided to The Nation following an open-records request by the One Wisconsin Institute, which has successfully challenged early-voting cutbacks in the state.

In 2014, Wisconsin’s Republican legislature eliminated early-voting hours on nights and weekends and restricted early-voting sites to one location per city. GOP State Senator Glenn Grothman, who’s now a member of Congress, cited extended early-voting hours in heavily Democratic cities like Madison and Milwaukee and said, “I want to nip this in the bud before too many other cities get on board.”

The early-voting cutbacks were overturned by a federal court on July 29. “The court finds that the legislature specifically targeted large municipalities—Milwaukee in particular—intending to curtail minority voting,” wrote Federal District Court Judge James Peterson, who said Republicans were “suppressing the votes of reliably Democratic minority voters.”

As a result of the court decision, Madison opened 11 early voting locations, including at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Edgewood College, and Milwaukee opened three sites, with a massive increase in hours from 2012. State Representative Eric Genrich proposed opening an early-voting location at UW–Green Bay for 20 hours during the week before Election Day, at a cost of no more than $10,000, which the city had a surplus to pay for, but the city clerk wouldn’t budge. The early voting turnout in Green Bay has so far lagged behind the rest of the county and the state.

Green Bay’s refusal to put a polling place at the campus is indicative of the Wisconsin GOP’s broader attack on student voting. Under Wisconsin’s strict voter-ID law, student IDs from most public and private universities and colleges are not accepted because they don’t feature signatures or a two-year expiration date, compared to a ten-year expiration for driver’s licenses. Only three of twenty-six schools in the University of Wisconsin system offer compliant IDs, according to Common Cause Wisconsin.

That means many schools, including the University of Wisconsin–Madison, must issue separate IDs for students to use only for voting, an expensive and time-consuming process for students and administrators. To get the new IDs, students also have to bring proof of enrollment from their schools, an extra burden of proof that applies only to younger voters. They must additionally provide proof of residency when they register, which can be difficult for students who live in group apartments and do not have a utility bill or lease in their name.

Republicans have been explicit about suppressing Democratic-leaning votes, including those from students, to win elections. Glenn Grothman, who sponsored the cuts to early voting, said that Republicans would carry the state in November because “now we have photo ID.” When Republicans debated the voter-ID law behind closed doors in April 2011, GOP State Senator Mary Lazich argued in favor of the measure by saying, “We’ve got to think about what this could mean for the neighborhoods around Milwaukee and the college campuses around the state.”

Nikolas Austin, the student-government president at UWGB, led the charge for an early-voting site on campus. He’s a Libertarian and says it shouldn’t matter which party students align with. “It’s not about who people vote for, it’s about them having the ability to vote,” he said. “If I have an exam on Election Day, I can vote early or vice versa. It allows students the flexibility they need.” He’s concerned about what’s going to happen at the polls on Election Day, when more people are likely to show up.

Last month, The Nation reported how Wisconsin was systematically refusing to issue the voter IDs people needed to cast a ballot, while claiming everyone was getting an ID. The e-mails from the Green Bay clerk are more evidence of how Republicans in the state are saying one thing publicly while pursuing a different agenda privately.

“Voters across the ideological spectrum will be outraged that partisan considerations by a Republican political appointee led to students not getting the access to early voting they would have otherwise,” says Analiese Eicher, program director at One Wisconsin Institute.

Representative Genrich told me he was flabbergasted by Teske’s e-mails. “Whether or not more students voting benefits Democrats is beside the point and that shouldn’t be the position of a nonpartisan city clerk,” he said. “I don’t know what Kris’s politics are, but it’s really unfortunate to see her echoing the sentiments of Republicans in Wisconsin, who have been making it really difficult for citizens to vote in this state.”

Donald Trump’s refusal to commit to accepting the legitimacy of the presidential election is an unprecedented attack on the foundation of American democracy and rightly drew widespread condemnation from political and media leaders.

Yet many Republicans, while condemning Trump’s comments, still stoked fears of a rigged election after the third presidential debate. “Let’s not kid ourselves, can we please not act like voter fraud and irregularities don’t exist,” said RNC Chair Reince Preibus. “I don’t think you’re going to get Republicans to back down on the fact that voter fraud is real and it needs to be dealt with, but it isn’t something in most cases that overthrows an election.”

Other commentators, like CNN’s Jake Tapper, said fraud was a small problem, but so was voter suppression. “CNN equating voter fraud and suppression as things that sometimes happen, but very rarely. That’s very flawed,” tweeted Daniel Nichanian of the University of Chicago.

This is a dangerous false equivalence. Voter fraud is a very small problem in American politics and voter impersonation, which GOP-backed voter-ID laws are meant to address, is exceedingly rare. As I’ve written over and over, you’re more likely to be struck by lightning than impersonate another voter at the polls.

The real danger to American democracy stems from GOP efforts to make it harder to vote. New voting restrictions—like voter-ID laws, cuts to early voting and barriers to voter registration—that are in place in 14 states for the first time in 2016 will make it harder for millions of eligible voters to cast a ballot. And voters are lacking crucial protections because this is the first presidential election in 50 years without the full provisions of the Voting Rights Act.

That is the problem we should be focusing on. Take Wisconsin, for example, where Preibus warned of “voting irregularities in Milwaukee” last night. Wisconsin didn’t present a single case of voter impersonation in court to justify its voter-ID law. Yet 300,000 registered voters, according to a federal court, lack strict forms of photo ID and could be disenfranchised by the law. “It is absolutely clear that Act 23 will prevent more legitimate votes from being cast than fraudulent votes,” wrote Judge Lynn Adelman. Another federal judge in Wisconsin, James Peterson, wrote, “A preoccupation with mostly phantom election fraud leads to real incidents of disenfranchisement, which undermine rather than enhance confidence in elections.”6

I’ve documented case after case of voters disenfranchised in Wisconsin alone:7

Zack Moore, a 34-year-old African-American man from Illinois who brought an Illinois driver’s license, Social Security card, and proof of Wisconsin residency to the DMV, but was not given a Wisconsin voter ID.8

Claudell Boyd, a 62-year-old African-American man from Illinois who made 2 trips to the DMV, but was not issued a valid voter ID because one letter was misspelled on his birth certificate.9

Christine Krucki, a 90-year-old white woman who’s been voting since 1948 and made three trips to the DMV, bringing an Illinois photo ID, proof of residence in Wisconsin, a birth certificate, and her marriage certificate, but could not get a Wisconsin voter ID.10

Sarada Hanumadass, a 42-year-old Indian-American woman who’s been a naturalized US citizen since 8 but was told she’d need to pay $345 for her naturalization papers, which could take up to two years, to get a Wisconsin voter ID.11

The same is true in North Carolina, where there are many more people who have been blocked from the polls than cases of voter impersonation. As I wrote in The Washington Post:12

In North Carolina, for example, the watchdog group Democracy North Carolina documented more than 2,300 cases of voters whose ballots were rejected in 2014 because of the state’s elimination of same-day registration and out-of-precinct voting. That was 1,150 times greater than the two cases of voter impersonation committed in North Carolina from 2002 to 2012, out of 35 million votes cast.13

Last night many pundits praised Al Gore for conceding to George W. Bush, without noting the many instances of disenfranchisement during the 2000 election in Florida that raised real questions about the legitimacy of the election outcome. Such as the fact that 12,000 registered voters, who were disproportionately African-American and Democratic-leaning, were wrongly labeled as felons and purged from the rolls.14

Trump can’t even keep his story straight on how the election is rigged, offering at least five different explanations. First he claimed, after voter-ID laws were struck down in places like North Carolina that “we may have people vote 10 times.” Then he said undocumented immigrants would “pour into the country so they can go and vote.” Then he said, “the election is absolutely being rigged by the dishonest and distorted media pushing Crooked Hillary.” Then he said “1.8 million deceased individuals” will vote for “somebody else.” Then in last night’s debate he said of Hillary Clinton, “She shouldn’t be allowed to run. She’s guilty of a very, very serious crime. She should not be allowed to run, and just in that respect I say it’s rigged.”15

On MSNBC this morning, Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said Trump would accept the election results “absent widespread voter fraud, irregularities and malfeasance.” Let’s be very clear: It’s incredibly unlikely there will be widespread voter fraud on Election Day. But there will be eligible voters who show up to vote and are turned away from the polls. That’s the real threat to election integrity we should be focusing on16

Donald Trump is at it again. After claiming in August that “we may have people vote 10 times,” he’s doubling down on his rigged-election screed. He’s called for his supporters to monitor the polls in “certain areas” and is recruiting “Trump Election Observers” to “Stop Crooked Hillary From Rigging This Election!” Trump tweeted this morning: “Of course there is large scale voter fraud happening on and before election day. Why do Republican leaders deny what is going on? So naive!”1

Trump’s rhetoric is working his supporters into a frenzy. Seventy-three percent of Republicans believe the election could be stolen from him, and Trump’s supporters are explicitly calling for “racial profiling” at the polls, reports The Boston Globe:2

“Trump said to watch your precincts. I’m going to go, for sure,” said Steve Webb, a 61-year-old carpenter from Fairfield, Ohio.3

“I’ll look for… well, it’s called racial profiling. Mexicans. Syrians. People who can’t speak American,” he said. “I’m going to go right up behind them. I’ll do everything legally. I want to see if they are accountable. I’m not going to do anything illegal. I’m going to make them a little bit nervous.”4

Some Republicans have denounced Trump’s rhetoric, but the GOP has been crying wolf about voter fraud for two decades. Trump is pouring gasoline on a fire his own party created.5

The GOP’s voter-fraud crusade dates back to the 2000 election in Florida. That year, the state of Florida wrongly purged thousands of voters from the rolls, as I reported in a Nation excerpt from my book Give Us the Ballot:6

The NAACP sued Florida after the election for violating the Voting Rights Act (VRA). As a result of the settlement, the company that the Florida legislature entrusted with the purge—the Boca Raton–based Database Technologies (DBT)—ran the names on its 2000 purge list using stricter criteria. The exercise turned up 12,000 voters who shouldn’t have been labeled felons. That was 22 times Bush’s 537-vote margin of victory.7

No one could ever determine precisely how many voters who were incorrectly labeled felons were turned away from the polls. But the US Civil Rights Commission launched a major investigation into the 2000 election fiasco, and its acting general counsel, Edward Hailes, did the math the best that he could. If 12,000 voters were wrongly purged from the rolls, and 44 percent of them were African-American, and 90 percent of African-Americans voted for Gore, that meant 4,752 black Gore voters—almost nine times Bush’s margin of victory—could have been prevented from voting. It’s not a stretch to conclude that the purge cost Gore the election. “We did think it was outcome-determinative,” Hailes said.8

The 2000 election in Florida forever changed American politics and kicked off a new wave of GOP-led voter disenfranchisement efforts. “Other people began to see that in very competitive elections, you could make a difference by keeping certain voters from participating,” Hailes said. Bush’s election empowered a new generation of voting-rights critics, who hyped the threat of voter fraud in order to restrict access to the ballot.9

After disenfranchising Democratic-learning voters to win an election, the GOP brazenly labeled the Democrats as the party of serial cheaters. The incoming Bush administration prioritized prosecutions of voter fraud over investigations into voter disenfranchisement—longtime civil-rights lawyers were forced out of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, US Attorneys were fired for refusing to pursue bogus fraud cases, and the first strict voter-ID laws were passed by Republican legislatures. The Bush Justice Department launched a five-year investigation into alleged voter-fraud abuses.10

But the administration never found the widespread fraud it was looking for, as I explained to the filmmakers Kelly Duane de la Vega, Jessica Anthony, and Ian Inaba of Project Turnout.11

This was a crusade by the administration to find instances of voter fraud that would then build support for a more restrictive legislation that would make it harder for certain communities to be able to cast the ballot.12

Everyone said, “There’s all this evidence of voter impersonation,” but when the Bush administration did its own investigation, they didn’t find one case of voter impersonation that they could prosecute.13

That’s because voter fraud is a rarity in American politics and voter impersonation is exceedingly rare. A major national study found only 31 cases of voter impersonation since the 2000 election out of 1 billion votes cast. It’s an incredibly stupid and ineffective way to try to rig an election, as Reverend William Barber II of the North Carolina NAACP explains to Project Turnout:14

In order to effect an election through impersonating somebody at the polls, you would have to do something that is incredibly impossible.15

Number one, you’ve got to find out who you’re going to impersonate. Number two, you’ve got to be sure they don’t come to the polls. Number three, you’ve got to hope nobody at the polls knows you. Number four, you have to be willing to sign your name and risk five years a felony, and then, you’ve got to find about 5,000 or 10,000 other folks that can do it and keep quiet. It doesn’t make any sense at all.16

But the myth of voter fraud gets repeated over and over so much that people believe it is true. Instead of repeating discredit claims, the media need to do a much better job of setting the record straight, former attorney general Eric Holder told Project Turnout:17

Well, I think that people who are supporters of these restrictive voting laws have to be put to the test, and say, “What is your proof? What is your proof that we have integrity issues with regard to our election process? Where are the numbers? Where are the cases?”18

The true danger to American democracy stems from Republican-led efforts to make it harder to vote. This is the first presidential election in 50 years without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act, and 14 states—nearly all controlled by the GOP—have new voting restrictions in place for the first presidential cycle in 2016. There are far more people turned away from the polls by restrictions like voter-ID laws, cuts to early voting, and felon-disenfranchisement efforts—which disproportionately impact people of color, young voters and low-income voters—than cases of voter fraud.19

As I explained in The Washington Post:20

The real threat of election-rigging lies not in the small number of voting irregularities, which Trump and many Republicans have blown wildly out of proportion, but in the much larger number of people disenfranchised by new voting restrictions. “A preoccupation with mostly phantom election fraud leads to real incidents of disenfranchisement, which undermine rather than enhance confidence in elections,” US District Judge James Peterson wrote in a decision striking down Wisconsin’s voting restrictions on July 29.21

In North Carolina, for example, the watchdog group Democracy North Carolina documented more than 2,300 cases of voters whose ballots were rejected in 2014 because of the state’s elimination of same-day registration and out-of-precinct voting. That was 1,150 times greater than the two cases of voter impersonation committed in North Carolina from 2002 to 2012, out of 35 million votes cast.22

It’s unbelievable that the party that is disenfranchising people right now in states like Wisconsin is claiming the election is rigged.23

On July 29, US District Judge James Peterson called Wisconsin’s process for issuing voter IDs “unconstitutional,” “a wretched failure,” and “pretty much a disaster.” The state’s strict voter-ID law “has disenfranchised a number of citizens who are unquestionably qualified to vote, and these disenfranchised citizens are overwhelmingly African American and Latino,” he wrote.

The judge ordered that “Wisconsin may adopt a strict voter ID system only if that system has a well-functioning safety net” and that the state must “promptly issue a credential valid as a voting ID to any person who enters the [ID petition process] or who has a petition pending.”

But Wisconsin never followed the court’s order. On September 22, the same day Wisconsin assured the judge in a legal filing that everything was hunky-dory, Zack Moore, a 34-year-old homeless African-American man who moved from Chicago to Madison, was turned away from the DMV without a voter ID despite bringing an Illinois driver’s license, Social Security card, and proof of Wisconsin residency. He was told to go back to Illinois and get his birth certificate, or else it would take six to eight weeks for him to get an ID for voting, despite a sign in the DMV that said, “Get your ID to vote! No birth certificate? No problem!”

Reporting in The Nation and the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, based on DMV recordings provided by VoteRiders, confirmed that across the state Wisconsin was systematically failing to promptly issue IDs for voting as required by the court order. In response, Peterson ordered an investigation and held a hearing on October 12 and 13.

Kristina Boardman, the DMV’s administrator, admitted on the stand that for two months after the court’s July order, the DMV was giving voters incorrect information about the voter-ID law. “I’m very disappointed to see that the state really did nothing in response to my order,” Peterson said on October 12. “There was really, as far as I can tell, no effort made…to inform the public.” He called the DMV’s voter-ID training “manifestly inadequate” and said, “Undeniably there are people who have been disenfranchised.” He concluded, “The state really needs to step up and make sure the IDs get into the hands of voters who can’t have them [under the current system].”

In his written opinion, Peterson said that “defendants have not complied with the court’s order” and “have done little to inform the general public that credentials valid for voting will be issued.” The judge ordered the state to immediately provide clearer information to voters about the law and promptly issue IDs for voting to anyone who needs one, but said “the court does not believe that it has the authority to suspend Wisconsin’s voter-ID law for the November election.” That means that, despite the well-documented problems, one of the country’s worst voter-ID laws will be in effect for November, and the very state agencies that have been non-compliant with federal-court orders will be relied upon to implement it.

Early voting is already underway in Wisconsin, and people are being disenfranchised. I wrote four stories in the last two weeks about longtime voters who could not vote because of the voter-ID law.

• Zack Moore, a 34-year-old African-American man from Illinois who brought an Illinois driver’s license, Social Security card, and proof of Wisconsin residency to the DMV, but was not given a Wisconsin voter ID.

• Claudell Boyd, a 62-year-old African-American man from Illinois who made 2 trips to the DMV, but was not issued a valid voter ID because one letter was misspelled on his birth certificate.

• Christine Krucki, a 90-year-old white woman who’s been voting since 1948 and made three trips to the DMV, bringing an Illinois photo ID, proof of residence in Wisconsin, a birth certificate, and her marriage certificate, but could not get a Wisconsin voter ID.

• Sarada Hanumadass, a 42-year-old Indian-American woman who’s been a naturalized US citizen since 8 but was told she’d need to pay $345 for her naturalization papers, which could take up to two years, to get a Wisconsin voter ID.

These are not isolated incidents, as the hearing this week showed. According to the Center for Media and Democracy:

In Madison, the clerk attempted to call hundreds of voters who failed to send in identification, yet 355 who were contacted still failed to get in proper identification. In Milwaukee the situation was worse. The Milwaukee clerk estimated that 150 voters who sent in ballot applications indicated they did not have the required ID at all, an estimated 1-2 percent.

Wisconsin is not the only GOP-controlled state where Republicans are ignoring court orders to restore voting rights.

Ohio has purged more than 2 million voters since 2011, more than any other state, and refused to mail absentee ballots to 1 million registered voters. A federal court struck down the state’s voter purge in late September and ordered the voters to be put back onto the rolls. But Ohio is now refusing to reinstate many of the purged voters before the election, according to Think Progress. “This is shameless behavior that endangers our democratic process,” says State Representative Kathleen Clyde.

In Texas, a federal court ordered the state to relax its voter-ID law and allow those without strict forms of photo ID to cast a ballot. But even after the court order, the state has issued misleading information for voters and is now threatening to prosecute voters who sign an affidavit instead of showing photo ID.

Texas county election offices still saying "photo ID required for Texas voters" even though it's not pic.twitter.com/Rwn4rIZ5RO

— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) September 12, 2016

In North Carolina, after a federal court restored a week of early voting, the North Carolina Republican Party called on GOP-controlled county boards of elections to further cut early-voting hours and days. “Republicans can and should make party line changes to early voting,” wrote executive director Dallas Woodhouse, which included adopting fewer early-voting days and prohibiting Sunday voting, when black churches hold “Souls to the Polls” mobilization drives, and polling places on college campuses. The state board of election rejected many of these cuts, but five major counties in the state have reduced early voting.

It’s long past time for these states to comply with the Constitution and the law.

Sarada Hanumadass was born in Ireland in 1974, to Indian parents, and moved to the United States when she was 6 weeks old. She became a US citizen when she was 8 and grew up in the Chicago suburbs. (Hanumadass is her maiden name, she did not want to include her last name for privacy reasons.)

In 2012, after having twin girls, she moved to Wisconsin because her sister lived there, and taught high-school English in Sun Prairie, a suburb of Madison. She’s voted in every election since she was 18, including twice in Wisconsin in 2012 and 2014.

But after Wisconsin’s strict voter-ID law took effect in 2016, Sarada suddenly wasn’t able to vote. She had an Illinois driver’s license and proof of Wisconsin residency, but not a Wisconsin-issued photo ID. “I looked at my husband and said, ‘I don’t think I’ll be able to vote,’” she told me. “And he said, ‘no, no, no, it’ll be fine.’”

When she went to get a Wisconsin driver’s license, the DMV in Sun Prairie said she’d need a copy of her birth certificate to prove her citizenship. But she wasn’t born in the United States and her childhood passport had expired. The DMV said she needed to get her naturalization papers instead.

She called the DMV a month later and said her father couldn’t find her naturalization papers and asked if there was another way she could get a Wisconsin ID for voting. They wouldn’t budge. She then called Immigration and Naturalization Services, who said it would cost $345 and take up to two years to get a copy of her naturalization papers. “We weren’t in the financial situation to do that,” said Sarada, whose twins have cystic fibrosis, which is expensive to care for.

Despite working for the state and having a driver’s license, a Social Security card, and a marriage certificate, she can’t vote in Wisconsin in 2016. “I’m an American,” she says. “I’m being asked for my papers in Wisconsin and I’ve never been asked in my life to prove my citizenship. I feel disenfranchised. It’s super-frustrating and offensive.”

In addition to wanting to vote in the presidential race, Sun Prairie has a referendum on the ballot to build two new elementary schools, which is very important to Sarada as a teacher. “As an employee in the schools, as someone who sees what’s happening with kids every day, I can’t vote on the referendum,” she says.

Her story is not unique. Sarada is one of 300,000 registered voters in Wisconsin, according to a federal-court decision, who do not have strict forms of voter ID. And many are still not able to vote with Election Day four weeks out and early voting already underway in cities throughout Wisconsin.

On September 29, The Nation published an exclusive story detailing how two African-American voters, Zack Moore and Claudell Boyd, brought multiple documents with them to the DMV confirming their identities but were still turned away without the necessary voter ID. Recordings from the DMV provided to The Nation by VoteRiders detailed how Moore and Boyd were not offered certificates for voting within six business days, as required by a federal court order resulting from a successful lawsuit brought by One Wisconsin Now.

Federal District Court Judge James Peterson ordered the state to investigate how the DMV is implementing the voter-ID law and scheduled a hearing for October 12 to consider blocking or relaxing the law. Subsequent reporting by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel showed how workers at seven different DMVs across the state provided inaccurate information about the law. “You’re not guaranteed to get an ID card,” a worker at the DMV in Hudson told a volunteer from VoteRiders. “Nothing’s guaranteed.”

I published a follow-up article on October 5 telling the story of Christine Krucki, a 90-year-old woman who’s voted since 1948 but now can’t vote in Wisconsin. She made three trips to the DMV, bringing an Illinois photo ID, proof of residence in Wisconsin, a birth certificate, and her marriage certificate, but could not get a Wisconsin photo ID for voting.

Wisconsin filed a response to the federal court order on October 7, defending the state’s actions. “DMV acknowledges that some recordings show that some DMV employees communicated inaccurate or incomplete information,” the state admitted. But it said all the problems had been fixed.

Notably, DMV has also conducted quality assurance checks at 31 service centers across the state. In these checks, undercover state troopers presented themselves as customers inquiring about obtaining an ID for voting without all of the required documents. And in these instances, DMV employees provided accurate information about obtaining an ID through the [ID petition process].

Yet hours before the legal filing, Governor Scott Walker, who said during the primary that the voter-ID law “works just fine,” reported that the state troopers’ investigations “overall had a series of good responses but they had some things they had concerns with.” However, none of these concerns were mentioned in the state’s response.

“Plaintiffs’ broad request to enjoin the entire voter ID law is a non-starter,” the state asserts. Regardless of what the state claims, there’s overwhelming evidence that lifelong voters like Sarada continue to be turned away from the polls. These voters either have to pay money to get the documents they need to cast a ballot, which is a modern-day poll tax, or won’t be able to vote at all.

Wisconsin shows how problems with voter-ID laws are a feature, not a bug.

At 10 am on a Tuesday morning in September, Babatunde Adeleye, a 33-year-old naturalized US citizen from Nigeria, arrived at the Bexar County Elections Department in San Antonio. It’s a brand-new building in an otherwise unappealing industrial park along the interstate, 10 minutes south of downtown. There were inspirational posters on the wall featuring American flags and sunsets, highlighting words like “success” and “momentum.”1

Tunde, as everyone calls him, stood up, raised his right hand, and took an oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States and of this State.” He was being deputized not as a cop, but instead to register voters. The parallels, however, were impossible to ignore: Texas treats voter registration like a criminal offense and makes it as difficult as possible to do.2

Tunde grew up in Lagos and studied petroleum engineering at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He got a job in the oil fields of Oklahoma but was laid off when the industry went bust. He became a citizen last year, so 2016 marks the first presidential election he can vote in. After moving to San Antonio three months ago, he began working with MOVE San Antonio, a progressive nonprofit that registers young voters. “I come from a background where poverty was the order of the day,” Tunde says. “The first step to empowering people to have a say in their community is to register them to vote. If you don’t vote, you don’t have a say.”3

* * *4

Before he could register anyone, however, Tunde had to navigate Texas’s draconian voter-registration laws, beginning with this course. The state has no online registration, and anyone who registers voters must be deputized by the county at a training session that typically occurs once a month, sometimes less. The volunteer deputy registrars (VDRs), as they’re known, must be deputized on a county-by-county basis, which makes statewide drives practically impossible in a massive state like Texas, with its 254 counties.5

If Tunde led a registration drive outside a San Antonio Spurs basketball game, for example, he could collect forms only from people who live in Bexar County, where he’s deputized, and wouldn’t be able to register anyone attending the game from Austin, Dallas, or Houston. This is a huge problem in Texas, where many cities sprawl over multiple counties. A voter-registration drive in the state’s 13th Congressional District, which encompasses most of the Panhandle, would require deputizing workers in 41 counties.6

“It’s a big barrier,” Tunde says. “We already have low turnout. By having all these new restrictions in place, it further draws down the number of people who vote.” In 2014, Texas ranked 45th in voter registration and dead last in voter turnout. Tunde was the 908th person deputized in Bexar County as of mid-September, which means there are roughly 1,000 people who can register voters in America’s seventh-biggest city during a critical presidential election.7

The restrictions don’t end there. Only US citizens with Texas residency can become VDRs, which prohibits out-of-state workers, legal permanent residents, or undocumented immigrants from helping. All VDRs must deliver voter-registration forms to the county election office in person within five days of receiving them. They can’t photocopy the documents to keep track of new registrants, and must personally input all of the registration data. Failure to comply with any of these provisions can lead to criminal prosecution.8

VDRs can be terminated at any time by the county registrar, and their appointments expire at the end of even-numbered years, which means that Tunde will have to do this training all over again if he wants to register voters in 2017 or 2018. “You have to have a PhD in voter-obstacle-ology to navigate the system,” says Lydia Bean, executive director of Faith in Texas, which registers voters in the Dallas–Fort Worth area.9

VDRs were established in 1985, but the restrictions on voter registration were significantly toughened by the Texas legislature in 2011 to require county trainings, ban non-Texans, and prohibit VDRs from being compensated based on the number of people they register. As a result, “Texas is the most restrictive state in the union when it comes to voter registration,” according to the Texas Civil Rights Project.10

The law’s sponsor, GOP state representative Jim Murphy of Houston, sees this as a good thing. “It takes away the defense of ‘I didn’t know I couldn’t do that,’” Murphy said, speaking to the Austin American-Statesman. “Clearly, I would agree it’s additional work, but so is having insurance for your house if it burns down.”11

Nationally, a quarter of eligible Americans—62 million people—are not registered to vote. Three million of them live in Texas, including 2.2 million unregistered Latinos and 750,000 unregistered African Americans. Texas has more unregistered voters than the total population of 20 states. While its strict voter-ID law has attracted national scrutiny for discriminating against people of color and has repeatedly been struck down by the courts, the state’s restrictions on voter-registration drives have received little attention, even though they prevent millions of black and Latino citizens from participating in the political process.12

“If you’re not deputized and you register your mother, you can get a felony,” says Jeremy Bird, the national field director for Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign. “The barriers are so great, and the penalties are so high, nobody wants to invest resources in registering voters.”13

After the 2012 election, Bird founded Battleground Texas to help long-suffering Democratic candidates in this deep-red state. The group deputized 9,000 people and registered nearly 100,000 voters during the 2014 cycle. But they were threatened with prosecution by the state after right-wing activist James O’Keefe filmed an undercover video showing an organizer copying phone numbers from voter-registration forms so that Battleground Texas could follow up with the voters, which opponents of the group claimed violated the Texas election code. A judge dismissed the charges, but the threat of criminal prosecution had a chilling effect on registration efforts. In 2016, Battleground Texas has a fraction of its staff from 2014 and plans to register just a fourth of the voters it did that year.14

“Anytime someone has success registering minority or Democratic voters, there’s an investigation opened to scare people away from doing it,” says Chad Dunn, a voting-rights lawyer in Houston. After a progressive group called Houston Votes submitted 25,000 voter-registration applications in 2010, mostly from low-income people of color, Tea Party activists accused the group of voter fraud. Then–Attorney General Greg Abbott, now the state’s governor, sent agents in bulletproof vests to raid the group’s office and destroy its computers and records. Charges were never filed, but Houston Votes was forced to shut down.15

National groups that specialize in voter registration have been forced to abandon Texas. “We decided that there was no way that we could do voter-registration work here without the risk of prosecution,” says Michael Slater, president of Project Vote, which has registered 5.6 million voters nationwide since 1994, including 35,000 in Texas in 2008. Project Vote challenged the registration restrictions in 2012 and won a preliminary injunction from a federal district court, but it was overturned by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, the most conservative appellate court in the country.16

Texas has a long and ugly history of blocking blacks and Latinos from voting through poll taxes, all-white primaries, and English-only ballots. The civil-rights movement used large-scale registration drives to challenge voter-suppression tactics in the Jim Crow South. In 1964, hundreds of college students from the North went to Mississippi for Freedom Summer, which helped lead to the passage of the Voting Rights Act. A similar effort would be impossible in Texas today: The state’s voter-registration laws “would have rendered Freedom Summer illegal,” federal district court judge Gregg Costa wrote in August 2012.17

* * *18

The same day I attended the VDR training session with Tunde, I received an announcement that Oregon had registered 300,000 new voters in the past year, a 14 percent increase from 2015. If Texas is the toughest state in the country to register voters, Oregon is the easiest. In January, it became the first state to automatically register any citizen who obtains a driver’s license or a state ID at the Department of Motor Vehicles. There are no deputies to train, no forms to return within five days, no threats of criminal prosecution.19

It’s a favorite parlor game in Washington to predict when Texas will go blue, but most people are severely underestimating the difficulty of translating the state’s changing demographics into a shift in political power. In 2012, only a quarter of Texas Latinos were contacted by political parties or organizations before the election, making them “the most undermobilized [group] in the country,” according to the group Latino Decisions.20

Jeremy Bird estimates that hundreds of thousands of new Democratic-leaning voters must be registered in Texas over the next four years to make the state competitive. The opportunity is there—905,000 new Latinos will become eligible to vote in Texas in 2016—but few organizations have the capacity to register them en masse or to comply with the demands of Texas law.21

“There’s no resources to register Latinos in Texas,” says Selene Gomez, a San Antonio–based organizer for Mi Familia Vota. “People look at it as a red state and move on. Campaigns keep going to the same people. That’s why a lot of Latinos don’t come out: because a lot of us are never talked to. No one thinks about us.” There are half a million unregistered voters in the Rio Grande Valley, which comprises four counties in South Texas along the Mexican border, but only one group—the Advocacy Alliance Center of Texas, which has just two staffers—is working full-time to register them.22

Despite the obstacles, people are registering, especially in urban areas with targeted registration drives. According to US census data, 2.1 million new voters have been added to the rolls since 2012, and the Hispanic share of new voters has increased by 6 percent during that time. But the overall percentage of registered voters has remained flat, at 74 percent. That means registration efforts are barely keeping up with the state’s rapidly changing demographics.23

It’s only a thought experiment at this point, but automatic registration would make a bigger difference in Texas than in virtually any other state. “If you got millions of unregistered Latinos, African Americans, and Asian Americans registered, that alone makes it a competitive state,” Bird points out. “There would be a fundamental shift immediately.”24

* * *25

MOVE San Antonio, where Tunde works, is part of a collection of state-based civic groups known as the Bus Federation. The founding affiliate in Oregon, the Bus Project, started out in 2001 by crisscrossing the state in a bus to register voters.26

The Bus Federation’s “secretary of states” is Henry Kraemer. He’s 29 years old, with a scruffy beard and a tattoo of the last 10 words of the Gettysburg Address on his back. He admits that he’s “infected with the quirk of Oregon pretty intensely.” He was wearing red Vans and a tie with American flags and a bald eagle on it when I met him.27

During the 2008 election, the Bus Project registered 23,000 new voters. But Kraemer couldn’t stop thinking about all the people it didn’t reach. After the election, the group’s organizers sat down and thought about how to get rid of voter registration as it currently exists. Since 1951, North Dakota has held elections without a voter-registration list. Historically, registration laws have been used in the United States to prevent people from voting, including African Americans in the Jim Crow South and immigrants in states like New York and California in the early 1900s.28

Kraemer learned that a number of industrialized countries—including Canada, France, and Sweden—automatically register their citizens to vote based on information the government already has. Iraq, of all places, used an automatic-registration system for its elections after the US invasion. “It seems like we do a lot of things better than the rest of the world,” Kraemer says, “so why don’t we do voter registration at least as well as the rest of the world?”29

In 2009, he pitched the idea of automatic registration to Kate Brown, Oregon’s newly elected secretary of state. Brown had won her first race by just seven votes and shared a passion for expanding voting rights. She wanted to build on Oregon’s history of political innovation (in 1998, it became the first state to conduct its elections entirely by mail, sending a ballot to every registered voter).30

“Oregon was really great in terms of voter turnout, because we put ballots in people’s hands,” Brown says. “But we were only slightly above average in terms of voter registration, and we wanted to make it as convenient and accessible as possible.”31

She wrote a bill to that end, which failed by one vote in 2013. But Democrats expanded their legislative majorities in the next election, and in 2015 Oregon became the first state to pass an automatic voter-registration law. Brown, who had been sworn in as governor just a month earlier, had the good fortune of signing her own bill.32

The system works like this: Any eligible citizen who requests or renews a driver’s license or a state ID card through the DMV is registered to vote. They receive a letter from the state and have 21 days to opt out if they choose not to be registered. They can choose a party affiliation by returning the letter, but if they do nothing, they’re still added to the voter rolls.33

The results have been impressive. Since January, more than 230,000 Oregonians have been registered to vote this way, nearly four times as many per month compared with 2012. Oregon is registering 735 new voters a day, roughly half of whom are under 35. Within a few years, 95 percent of Oregonians will be registered to vote, Kraemer predicts, giving Oregon the highest registration rate in the nation. “It is meeting and probably exceeding my expectations,” Brown says.34

Republicans unanimously opposed the bill in the legislature, but the people who run the state’s elections love the new system. Steve Druckenmiller has been the clerk of Linn County for 30 years. It’s firmly Republican territory in the heart of the Willamette Valley, dominated by the agriculture, mining, and timber industries. Druckenmiller describes himself as a conservative. In his office, there’s a smiling portrait of Ronald Reagan on the wall and political pins like the one that says “OREAGAN Country.”35

Druckenmiller sees automatic registration as a way to remove unnecessary red tape from the process. “We have a fundamental right to vote,” he says. “Assembly, speech, voting—those are fundamental rights. And government should not insert itself between a citizen and that right unless there’s a compelling reason for them to do that.”36

Druckenmiller argues that Republicans worried about voter fraud should support the new system, because only people who provide proof of citizenship at the DMV—such as a birth certificate or a passport—are automatically registered. “And I never understood why people who were so concerned about alleged fraud would not support a system that makes it that much more secure,” he says.37

Oregon’s law is quickly being replicated nationwide. Similar automatic-registration laws are in the process of being implemented in California, Vermont, West Virginia, and Connecticut. In California alone, 2.4 million new voters could be registered next year. “We’re seeing a sea change, in terms of automatic voter registration becoming how people see that voter registration is supposed to work,” Kraemer says.38

* * *39

At a time when states like Texas continue to make it harder to vote, Oregon is not just registering a lot of new voters but reframing the national debate over voting rights—treating the franchise as a fundamental right rather than a privilege. “I believe that Americans should be able to access the right to vote simply by virtue of their qualifications: that they’re old enough, that they’re citizens of this country, and that they’re residents of a particular state,” Brown says. “And we shouldn’t require any type of barrier to people accessing that very fundamental right.”40

While in Portland, I went to the DMV with Natalie Hawwa, a 34-year-old communications consultant who recently moved from Washington, DC. She needed a new license and had been up all night studying for her driving test. After she passed it and got her license, I told Natalie that she’d also be registered to vote. But she wasn’t convinced, since she hadn’t filled out any additional paperwork.41

Two weeks later, a letter from the secretary of state’s office arrived. “It looks like I’m good to go,” Natalie reported. “Registered to vote; everything is in on time. I essentially did nothing but go and get my driver’s license, which I needed anyway, so it’s been pretty awesome.”42

If only it were that easy in Texas.43

Christine Krucki was born in Lublin, Wisconsin, in 1925. She first voted in the 1948 presidential election and has voted ever since. She’s an independent who has voted for John F. Kennedy but also Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. But after Wisconsin passed its strict voter-ID law in 2011, Krucki lost her right to vote. She made three trips to the DMV, bringing an Illinois photo ID, proof of residence in Wisconsin, a birth certificate and her marriage certificate but could not get a Wisconsin photo ID for voting.

Krucki first traveled to the DMV in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, in June 2013 with her daughter. “My mother does not have an unexpired passport, Wisconsin-issued photo ID, or any other kind of photo acceptable for voting,” her daughter, Sharon Erickson, said in a court declaration filed by the ACLU. Krucki lived in Illinois most of her life, before moving to Wisconsin five years ago, and no longer drives. She brought her Illinois photo ID, a bank statement and an insurance statement to the DMV. But DMV workers said she needed a birth certificate to get a Wisconsin ID for voting.

The problem was that Krucki was born on a farm and didn’t know where her birth certificate was. Erickson called the Wisconsin Department of Health Services and paid $20 for her birth certificate. However, her Polish last name, “Zaszczurynski,” was spelled “Zaszcronynska” instead.

She brought the birth certificate with her on a second trip to the DMV, but the DMV once again would not issue her a voter ID because the birth certificate didn’t match her current last name, Krucki, which she adopted after getting married. They said she’d have to obtain her marriage certificate from Illinois. Erickson paid $15 to get the marriage certificate from Cook County, Illinois, but it listed her maiden name as “Bandys” because Krucki had adopted that name, rather than the Polish name Zaszczurynski, after moving in with her stepsister in her 20s.

Krucki made a third trip to the DMV, but could still not get a voter ID because the maiden name on her Illinois marriage certificate did not match the name on her Wisconsin birth certificate. They said she’d have to change the name on her Illinois marriage certificate. “She almost went over the counter at the DMV, she was so mad,” her daughter told me.

Erickson called the courthouse in Cook County and they said it would cost between $150–300 to amend her mother’s Illinois marriage certificate. A clerk in Eau Claire said there was a “chance” a Wisconsin judge would amend her mother’s documents if they paid $300 in court fees. At that point, Erickson gave up trying to get her mother a Wisconsin voter ID.

The April 5, 2016, presidential primary in Wisconsin was the first election in her life in which Krucki was unable to vote.

After Governor Scott Walker said the voter-ID law “works just fine,” Erickson wrote an angry letter to the governor telling her mother’s story. “We want you to know how the law that you supported and signed into law affects your constituency in an extremely negative way,” she wrote. “Why are the Wisconsin Republicans as well as the Republicans nationwide attempting to rig elections by stifling the right to vote of good and honest Americans?”

Less than five weeks before the presidential election, there are still major problems with Wisconsin’s voter-ID law. Last week, The Nation published an exclusive story detailing how two African-American voters, Zack Moore and Claudell Boyd, brought multiple documents with them to the DMV confirming their identities but were still turned away without the necessary voter ID. Recordings from the DMV provided to The Nation by VoteRiders detailed how Moore and Boyd were not offered certificates for voting within six business days, as required by a federal court order.

Federal Judge James Peterson ordered the state to investigate how the DMV is implementing the voter-ID law and report back to the court by Friday, October 7. Subsequent reporting by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel showed how workers at seven different DMVs across the state provided inaccurate information about the law, in violation of the court order. “You’re not guaranteed to get an ID card,” a worker at the DMV in Hudson told a volunteer from VoteRiders. “Nothing’s guaranteed.”

Yesterday, the voting-rights group One Wisconsin Now filed a new brief asking Peterson to block the law before the November election. “Taken together, this evidence makes clear that the State does not have—and is incapable of implementing—a functioning safety net for its strict voter ID law. Because the existence of such a safety net was critical to this Court’s issuance of a partial stay and the en banc Seventh Circuit’s decision not to grant initial en banc review, the voter ID law must be enjoined unless and until the State can demonstrate that eligible voters will no longer be disenfranchised because of that law,” the lawsuit states.

Peterson has scheduled a hearing on the motion for October 12.

The filing noted that voters with ID issues are still not being given the help required by law.

1/3 of the voters who were formally denied IDs—most of whom were already disenfranchised in elections earlier this year—still do not have the ID they need to vote in the general election.

Nor is the state doing an adequate job of informing the public about the new ID requirements.

The State has not allocated any additional funding for paid advertising beyond the $250,000 that was appropriated for generalized voter ID advertising prior to this Court’s order.

The State’s advertising and outreach efforts are also plainly not targeted in any meaningful way at the individuals who are most likely to need to use the IDPP—voters who are poor, African American or Latino, and live in urban areas.

The State reports that it has placed advertisement in 52 movie theaters throughout the State, id. at 10-11, but not a single one of those theaters is in Milwaukee.

The DMV defending its handling of the voter-ID law during a legislative hearing yesterday, saying it planned to retrain 400 workers by Friday. “We believe that process is sound,” said Mark Gottlieb, head of the Department of Transportation.

Democrats were not satisfied with the response. “I have very little faith in the training measures that were discussed,” said Representative Lisa Subeck of Madison.

Democrats on the Joint Committee for Review of Administrative Rules proposed holding an emergency legislative session to eliminate the voter-ID law before the election, but Republicans blocked it on a party-line vote.

Meanwhile, voters like Christine Krucki, Zack Moore, and Claudell Boyd will still not be able to cast a ballot in November unless the law, or the way it is implemented, changes very, very soon.

On Wednesday, The Nation published an exclusive story showing how the DMV in Wisconsin was systematically failing to provide the voter IDs required to cast a ballot this election. We told the story of two African-American voters, Zack Moore and Claudell Boyd, who brought multiple documents with them to the DMV confirming their identities but were still turned away without the necessary voter ID. Recordings from the DMV provided to The Nation detailed how Moore and Boyd were not offered certificates for voting within six business days, as required by Wisconsin law.

Today federal district court Judge James Peterson ordered the state to investigate the DMV and the voter-ID process. “Recent news stories in Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and The Nation have reported that DMV personnel have provided incorrect information to persons who have applied for Wisconsin IDs for voting,” Peterson wrote. “These reports, if true, demonstrate that the state is not in compliance with this court’s injunction order, which requires the state to ‘[p]romptly issue a credential valid as a voting ID to any person who enters the IDPP or who has a petition pending.’”

He ordered the state to report back to the court by October 7. “The report should explain the scope of the investigation, its results, and any corrective action to be taken,” Peterson wrote.

This is significant because 300,000 registered voters do not have a valid voter ID, 9 percent of the electorate, and many are still struggling to obtain one. The US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit upheld Wisconsin’s voter-ID law based on the premise that the state would make IDs accessible to every eligible voter—which it is clearly not doing.

Wisconsin is not the first state to disregard a court order to make it easier to vote. Texas issued misleading information after the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ordered the state to soften its voter-ID law and counties in North Carolina cut early voting after the Fourth Circuit restored early voting days. Republicans like Scott Walker seem to believe that suppressing the vote is the only way they can win.

Madison, WI— Zack Moore, a 34-year-old African-American man, moved from Chicago to Madison last year. He worked at a car wash and then a landscaping job before breaking his leg and becoming unemployed. After staying with his brother, he’s now homeless and sleeping on the streets of Madison.

On September 22, he went to the DMV to get a photo ID for voting, as required by Wisconsin’s strict voter-ID law. He brought his Illinois photo ID, Social Security card, and a pay stub for proof of residence. But he didn’t have a copy of his birth certificate, which had been misplaced by his sister in Illinois, so the DMV wouldn’t give him an ID for voting. “I’m trying to get a Wisconsin ID so I can vote,” Moore told the DMV. “I don’t have my birth certificate, but I got everything else.”

Under Wisconsin law, the DMV should’ve given Moore a credential he could use for voting within six business days. But that never happened. They told him to “drive down there [to Illinois] and get [a birth certificate] and come back.” That would cost Moore money he didn’t have. If he entered what the state calls the ID Petition Process (IDPP), it would take six to eight weeks for him to get a voter ID and he most likely wouldn’t be able to vote by Election Day.

“I’m disappointed in the government,” Moore said after leaving the DMV. “I guess they’re trying to keep people from voting.”

Moore voted in the last two presidential elections and wanted to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. “I consider myself a Democrat and I don’t think Republicans are for poor people or minorities,” he said. He was so disgusted with conditions in Wisconsin that he was thinking of moving back to Illinois before the election.

Nine percent of registered voters in Wisconsin don’t have a valid voter ID and many are still struggling to get the documents they need to vote in November. It appears that Wisconsin is violating multiple court orders by not promptly giving eligible citizens free IDs or certificates for voting. This is particularly concerning, since early voting began this week in cities like Madison and Milwaukee and thousands of Wisconsinites are casting ballots. 

In an July 29 ruling, US District Judge James Peterson said the IDPP was “unconstitutional” and “pretty much a disaster. It disenfranchised about 100 qualified electors—the vast majority of whom were African American or Latino—who should have been given IDs to vote in the April 2016 primary. But the problem is deeper than that: even voters who succeed in the IDPP manage to get an ID only after surmounting severe burdens.”

He ruled that “Wisconsin may adopt a strict voter ID system only if that system has a well-functioning safety net.” He said the state must “promptly issue a credential valid as a voting ID to any person who enters the IDPP or who has a petition pending.”

Wisconsin claims it is doing this. In a legal filing on September 22, Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel cited a press release from the Department of Transportation stating, “DMV will now be issuing photo identification receipts no later than six business days from receipt of the petition application.” The Wisconsin Election Commissions issued a similar press release saying, “Free Photo ID for Voting Now Available with One Trip to DMV.” The Wisconsin attorney general said, “DMV is carefully administering the process to ensure that anyone who is eligible for the IDPP will have a valid ID for the November general election.”

But recordings from the DMV clearly show this is not the case. Molly McGrath, the national campaign coordinate for VoteRiders, which helps people get voter IDs, accompanied Moore to the DMV and recorded the trip. Read this exchange between her and DMV employees:

Molly: If you initiate the petition process do you get an ID for voting?

DMV Employee 1: No, you don’t get anything.

DMV Employee 2: No, you don’t get anything right away.

Molly: Ok, so even if we start the petition process, and it takes eight weeks, he wouldn’t be able to vote.

DMV Employee 1: Right, right, right.

DMV Employee 2: Well, I don’t know, they’re working on that. It’s kind of up in the air right now.

…Molly: I thought you could get an ID, like the sign says over there: “No birth certificate, no problem.” You can get an ID to vote.

DMV Employee 3: You can. It just takes the time.

Molly: So even if we just start the petition process, he wouldn’t get anything temporarily that says you can vote?

DMV Employee 3: Nope. Nope.

This is not just a problem in Madison. A volunteer for VoteRiders traveled to 10 other DMVs across the state to see what would happen to a voter who did not have a birth certificate and wanted to get an ID to vote.  DMVs told her “it’s going to take quite a while”  to get the credentials needed to vote and “it’s hard to predict” when that would be. 

Several suggested she get a birth certificate on her own.  One said it would be “easier for everyone” to have her purchase a birth certificate from her home state than it would be to use the petition process to get an ID to vote.  Most DMVs did not have IDPP forms readily available, but needed to hunt for them online, in a file drawer, or in a different part of the room. 

 Overall, only three of 10 DMVs assured her that she would get an ID to vote in a week or less, as state law requires.  

“I’m worried there’s not a uniform process in place and it’s extremely unreliable from DMV to DMV,” McGrath says. “And that leaves me uncertain on how to advise voters about getting a voter-ID.”

Legal experts say they’re extremely troubled by the state’s continued failure to fairly enforce the voter-ID law. “Wisconsin has promised the court that voters would be able to get an ID with whatever documents they have,” says Sean Young of the ACLU. “They’ve completely failed to live up to that promise.”

The state keeps frantically changing its procedures to mollify the courts, leading to even more confusion among voters. Last week the Walker Administration proposed issuing “voting purposes only” IDs that could not be used for anything else, like opening a bank account. “The Division of Motor Vehicles also wants the free IDs—born of voter-fraud fears – to be cheapened in quality, with some fraud protections removed,” the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

“The more they change the procedures, the clearer it becomes that this has nothing to do with voter impersonation,” Young says. “The whole process has no meaning anymore. It’s just a pointless obstacle to the right to vote.”

The US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit struck down an affidavit that voters could sign in lieu of showing strict ID because Wisconsin claimed everyone would get a voter ID who needed one. But that’s not happening. “As we’re seeing on the ground, people are going to be disenfranchised,” Young says.

Moore’s case is part of a disturbing pattern. Claudell Boyd, a 62-year-old African-American man, moved to Wisconsin last year to escape the violence in Chicago. But because the first name on his birth certificate was spelled Clardell—the result of a mistake caused his mother’s cursive handwriting—the Wisconsin ID he was issued also says Clardell. He made two trips to the DMV to try to fix his Wisconsin ID, bringing his Illinois state ID, Social Security card, and marriage certificate with the proper spelling of his name, but the DMV said he had to go back to Illinois to correct his birth certificate. He was not offered a certificate for voting or enrolled in the IDPP. They said he either needed to change his name or his birth certificate.

“I don’t think that’s fair,” Boyd said. “I don’t think I should have to change my name after all these years just to vote…. I’m going to keep going to the DMV and arguing my point until somebody helps me.” Like Moore, he had voted twice for Obama and said he wanted to vote for Clinton in 2016 because “Trump is not somebody you want to be president.”

His parents were born in Mississippi, at a time when most African-Americans in the state couldn’t vote. Now history is repeating itself up north. “It looks like Wisconsin is making it harder for people like me to vote,” he said.

The Supreme Court today declined to overturn a ruling from the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit that upheld Ohio’s elimination of the first week of early voting in the crucial battleground state. There was no explanation for the decision or dissents.

This is a blow for voting rights, after the Supreme Court declined to reinstate new voting restrictions in North Carolina and Michigan in recent weeks. In 2012, 80,000 people voted during the first week of early voting in Ohio and 14,000 used same-day voter registration during the period known as “Golden Week.” African-Americans were five times more likely than whites to vote during Golden Week in 2012. The US District Court for the Southern District of Ohio found that cutting early voting “results in less opportunity for African Americans to participate in the political process than other voters.” (That ruling was overturned by the court of appeals.)

Ohio still has 28 days of early voting, but voters will no longer be able to register and vote on the same day during the early-voting period. Today’s decision is particularly worrisome given the news that Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, who defended the early-voting cuts, refused to mail absentee ballots to one in seven registered Ohio voters. Husted said that more than 1 million registered voters were either purged for “infrequent voting” because they didn’t vote in the last three elections or had moved.

Ohio’s voter purge is currently being challenged in court, with a ruling in the Sixth Circuit expected soon. At least 144,000 voters in Ohio’s three largest counties, home to Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati, were purged since the 2012 election, with voters in Democratic-leaning neighborhoods twice as likely to be removed as those in Republican-leaning ones. Voting-rights advocates claim the purge violates the National Voter Registration Act.

Moreover, it seems that Husted’s non-voter list may be riddled with errors, according to the Akron Beacon Journal:

In Summit County, 36,822 registered voters will not get an absentee ballot application mailed to them. This includes 10,901 who voted in the 2008 presidential election (80 percent of whom voted Democratic in the contested primaries that year) and 123 who voted as recently as this March.

Kristina Hall, a lab courier who’s lived in Cuyahoga Falls for the past four years, can’t figure out why she’s one of them.

Hall voted in the Democratic Party primary in March. When she arrived at her polling location, she was told she was not on the list. An elections worker gave her a provisional ballot. Her vote, after everything checked out, was supposed to be used to update her address, which apparently was out of date with county election records.

It didn’t. An active voter in every presidential election in Ohio until she moved briefly to New York in 2012, Hall swears she voted in 2014 when she returned. State records show she didn’t.

The hassle has driven her to skepticism, especially since she said she’s received three notices from the board of elections to update her address and get off “confirmation status.” She said she sent all three back and has voted twice since they first arrived last year.

“I get so mad when people don’t vote,” she said. “That’s why I thought it was a problem when I’ve done everything I’m supposed to.”

Ohio has had major problems at the polls in recent elections, which is why reforms like expanded early voting and accessible absentee ballots are so important. As I reported for The Nation:

During the 2004 election, Ohio had the longest lines to vote in the country, with five-hour waits in heavily Democratic cities like Cleveland and Columbus. A post-election report for the DNC estimated that 3 percent of Ohioans—174,000 people—left their polling places without voting, a larger number than George W. Bush’s 118,000 vote margin of victory in the Buckeye State.

“The Election Day experience for most African American voters was starkly different from that of most white voters in Ohio,” the pollsters Cornell Belcher and Diane Feldman found. African Americans waited an average of 52 minutes to vote, while the wait for white voters was only 18 minutes. Twice as many black voters reported experiencing problems at the polls.

In response to the long waits, Ohio adopted 35 days of early voting after 2004. Early voting was widely popular and widely used during the 2008 election.

But high turnout among black voters during early voting sparked a backlash from the Ohio GOP. “I guess I really actually feel we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban—read African-American—voter-turnout machine,” explained Doug Priesse, the chairman of the Republican Party in Columbus, in 2012. Ohio Republicans are, sadly, still trying to make it harder to vote.

On July 29, the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit struck down North Carolina’s sweeping voting restrictions, saying they targeted black voters “with almost surgical precision.” The decision was the most significant victory for voting rights since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act.

Today the Supreme Court declined to reinstate three key voting restrictions that had been appealed by North Carolina—the state’s voter-ID law, cutbacks to early voting and elimination of preregistration for 16- and-17-year-olds. The Court deadlocked 4-4, which upholds the Fourth Circuit ruling. The death of Justice Scalia left conservatives short of the five votes they needed—Justice Thomas would’ve reinstated all of the restrictions, while Justices Roberts, Kennedy, and Alito would’ve reinstated everything except the elimination of preregistration.

This is a huge victory for North Carolina voters and will make it easier for hundreds of thousands to cast a ballot this November.

However, the fight for voting rights is not over in the state. Even after the appeals court called cuts to early voting “as close to a smoking gun as we are likely to see in modern times,” GOP election commissioners are continuing to brazenly cut early-voting days and hours in local counties. The executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party, Dallas Woodhouse, urged Republican-controlled election boards to “make party line changes to early voting” by adopting fewer early-voting days and prohibiting Sunday voting, when black churches hold “Souls to the Polls” mobilization drives, and polling places on college campuses.

In Charlotte’s Mecklenburg County, the largest in the state, where 70 percent of African Americans voted early in 2012, Republicans subsequently cut 238 hours of early voting.

The same kind of thing is happening elsewhere in the state, The New York Times reported today:

“It is equal to voter suppression in its worst way,” said Courtney Patterson, the sole Democrat on the Lenoir County elections board.

He was referring to a proposal by the board’s two Republicans to allow 106.5 hours of early voting before the Nov. 8 election—less than a quarter of the time allowed in the 2012 presidential election — and to limit early balloting to a single polling place in the county seat of a largely rural eastern North Carolina county that sprawls over 403 square miles.

In a county where Democrats outnumber Republicans by better than two to one, and four in 10 voters are black, the election plan limits voting to a single weekend day, and on weekdays demands that residents, including those who are poor and do not own cars, make long trips to cast a ballot.

Another lawsuit could soon be filed if this behavior continues. Even after they’re strongly rebuked by the courts, it’s becoming increasingly clear that North Carolina Republicans believe that voter suppression is the only way they can win.