Jeff Danziger lives in New York City and Vermont. He is a long time cartoonist for The Rutland Herald and is represented by Counterpoint Syndicate. He is a recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons, a novel and a memoir. Visit him at jeffdanziger.com.
Democrats and other democracy well-wishers are spilling gallons of ink and a profusion of pixels on the question of whether ending the government shutdown was a blunder or not. I submit that either way, it won't matter very much if at all in 12 months — and the 2026 elections are where our attention needs to pivot right now.
After the most depressing year in American politics of my lifetime, the 2025 election results were like a defibrillator shock to a moribund body. The landslide percentages achieved by Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill; the record-smashing turnout in New York City; the huge Democratic gains in the Virginia House of Delegates; the sweep of three state supreme court seats in Pennsylvania; the lopsided results in obscure Georgia races, like for the public service commission; and the success of the California redistricting plan (a response to Texas' naked gerrymander) all point to the fact that the electorate — unlike CEOs, partners in major law firms, university presidents and media companies — is not surrendering to President Donald Trump.
Coming on the heels of the massive No Kings demonstrations across the nation, last week's elections are reminders that voters are the final bulwark against despotism.
Of course, these races should not be overinterpreted. Democrats tend to turn out in greater numbers for off-year contests than Republicans; the GOP's Virginia gubernatorial candidate was off-putting; and Democrats ran disciplined campaigns. But the biggest drag on Republicans was something that felled Kamala Harris and is unlikely to change markedly by this time next year: prices remain high. Millions of non-MAGA voters supported Trump because they believed his promise to restore the 2019 economy. That he cannot do, and wouldn't be able to accomplish even if he refrained from the boneheaded tariffs that are his delight.
Over the course of the past year, the question I've had the most difficulty responding to was also the one that was most often asked: What can I, as a citizen, do to counter this descent into authoritarianism? The No Kings rallies were one answer. The 2025 elections were another. And now, the next step is coming into focus.
The Trump team will also certainly attempt to rig the midterm elections while falsely claiming the elections are rigged against Trump. They have already begun. The mid-decade gerrymanders that the president has demanded of red states are a brazen effort to skew election results. It's Trump's style to do the corrupt things openly, so that they almost seem above board.
A president who pulled every lever, jiggled every handle and applied every kind of pressure he could think of, up to and including inciting a riot to prevent his successor from taking office deserves no benefit of the doubt about what he might attempt in 2026. Let's not forget that Trump entertained the possibility of using the military to confiscate ballot boxes in close states.
Still perseverating about the "stolen" 2020 election, Trump is already posting on Truth Social that he detects similar fraud in 2026: "No mail-in or 'Early' Voting, Yes to Voter ID!" he wrote. "Watch how totally dishonest the California Prop Vote is! Millions of Ballots being 'shipped.' GET SMART REPUBLICANS, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE!!!"
The Justice Department sent "monitors" to polling sites in California and New Jersey, which may have been nothing, or it may have been a dry run for deploying large numbers of federal officials to intimidate voters. Since 2020, Trump has been able to install election deniers in key federal posts, most importantly as attorney general, and has created a new, MAGA-inflected paramilitary force in ICE. It is no stretch to imagine ICE agents snatching people from voting queues and thereby deterring U.S. citizens who speak with an accent or have dark skin from exercising their right to vote. God knows, they've already pulled any number of citizens into their unmarked vehicles and held them for hours.
Everyone can participate in the pushback. Thankfully, elections are local and state affairs, not federal, which means the Trump administration has limited power to interfere with the way votes are cast. Still, leave nothing to chance. Sign up to be an election worker. The turnover rate has increased since 2020, with 2 in 5 election workers leaving the job. Contact groups concerned with election integrity, like Protect Democracy, the Campaign Legal Center, the Brennan Center for Justice, the NAACP, States United Democracy Center, Society for the Rule of Law (especially if you have a law degree) or the Fair Elections Center. Contact your state representatives and senators to inquire about funding for election security measures. File Freedom of Information Act requests as American Oversight has done to discover if the Trump administration is preparing military or other deployments at election time next year.
We've witnessed what unified Republican control of the government has meant over the past 11 months. Winning back the House and, who knows, maybe even the Senate, is the whole ballgame now.
Mona Charen is policy editor of The Bulwark and host of the "Beg to Differ" podcast. Her new book, Hard Right: The GOP's Drift Toward Extremism, is available now.
Reprinted with permission from Creators
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump issued a new executive order targeting voter eligibility and voting by mail. Various experts, journalists and commentators are now concerned that Trump may be attempting to put his thumb on the scale ahead of next year's midterm elections.
According to the Washington Post, the order "could prevent millions of Americans from voting" if it passes legal muster. Notably, the order mandates that states require voters provide a "government-issued documentary proof of citizenship" upon registering to vote, and that only Real ID drivers' licenses and passports are accepted, whereas birth certificates alone are not sufficient. The order would also ban states from counting mailed ballots that arrive after Election Day, which would be a significant curtailing of voting by mail (states allowing vote-by-mail typically count ballots after Election Day provided that they were postmarked on or before Election Day).
SiriusXM host Dean Obeidallah accused Trump of "trying to rig [the] 2026 election" with the order, and argued that "banning birth certificates is RIGGING!" Alexei Koseff, who covers the California state capitol for CalMatters, said the order has "huge implications" for residents of the largest state in the union, given how much of the Golden State votes by mail. Ottawa,
Canada-based radio journalist Andy Pinsent observed: "When this is inevitably shut down by the courts, the [White House] will posture that 'radical judges want illegal immigrants to vote.'" And author Mitchell Plitnick flatly asserted: "The order is illegal. This is Trump testing to see if he can get away with it. Win or lose, you can bet this is only the first volley in a campaign to undermine free and fair elections."
"When they said 'voter fraud' it meant they wanted to do it," University of Iowa associate sociology professor Victor Ray wrote on Bluesky.
When combing through the full text of the executive order itself, Harvard Law Cyberlaw Clinic instructor Alejandra Caraballo noticed one line that stood out to her. The order stipulates that the Department of Homeland Security will coordinate with the administrator of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — which is unofficially led by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk — to "review each state's publicly available voter registration list and available records concerning voter list maintenance activities."
"Elon Musk would now be in charge of the databases determining voter eligibility," Caraballo wrote.
"I don't say that the law won't stop this and elections won't matter because I'm a doomer. I'm saying this so people understand the moment we're in. We're no longer a democracy," she continued. "People need to accurately diagnose the problem before they can fix it and waiting for the courts or elections isn't it."
Reprinted with permission from Alternet.
As Republican candidates, parties and groups are poised to legally challenge election results where they have lost or lag behind in the preliminary results, a parallel effort is underway in pro-Trump circles that likely will fabricate propaganda about illegitimate elections.
Candidates have long been able to challenge voters and ballots after Election Day during the vote count reconciliation process – called the canvass – which is before results are certified and recounts occur. But the efforts in Trump circles stand apart from these legal processes.
Trump Republicans and their allies are poised to gather “evidence” that frequently is not legally admissible in determining election outcomes, but can be exploited by propagandists to create distrust about voting, election officials, and the accuracy of voting systems.
“In some states, election deniers motivated by false claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election are engaging in their own deeply flawed investigations to substantiate myths of widespread voter fraud,” reported the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School in a research paper released on Friday. “They have organized to engage in practices like amateur data matching with voter rolls, door-to-door canvassing to compare residents’ statements with voter records, and surveillance of mail ballot drop boxes. These error-ridden practices can disenfranchise eligible voters and strain election official resources.”
Among the most high-profile recent efforts has been surveillance of drop boxes in Arizona, a state where 80 percent or more of the voters cast mailed-out ballots. This effort includes taking photos and videos of individuals dropping off ballots and their car’s license plates. That tactic is among several to make the claim that legions of unregistered voters are casting ballots.
This tactic, apart from possibly intimidating voters, is an example of what the Brennan Center called an “error-ridden” practice. The address tied to a license plate may not be the same as a voter’s most recent registration information, especially if that voter recently moved.
Nonetheless, since the 2020 election, ex-Trump campaign workers and self-appointed data analysts have parsed voter rolls in swing counties in swing states to falsely claim that the rolls were rife with inaccuracies that could be exploited by Democrats to fabricate votes.
Initially, Trump activists started knocking on doors to verify if a voter’s address on their registration record was accurate, to ask if they voted in 2020 and gather personal information. That activity lead to accusations of voter intimidation by civil rights groups. Earlier this year, the focus shifted to filing mass challenges of voters’ credentials, such as in metro Atlanta in Georgia, where more than 60,000 challenges were almost entirely rejected by county election officials this past summer, who, nonetheless, had spent months investigating the complaints.
“Activists are being encouraged by those who claim the 2020 election was ‘stolen’ to perform their own amateur data matching. They are using National Change of Address lists, tax assessor data, a portal operated by government contractor Schneider Geospatial, public map services, and public voter data from multiple states to make inferences about current voter eligibility and past election legitimacy,” the Brennan Center report said. “In doing so, they are cobbling together incomplete datasets that can later become ‘evidence’ for candidates to baselessly challenge the legitimacy of the election if they lose.”
Those behind these efforts have waged recruitment drives to gather evidence for post-Election Day challenges or to generate fodder that almost certainly will be used for propaganda – filling media channels as some battleground states take more time to count their votes than others. (Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, for example, cannot start counting absentee ballots until Election Day. Florida, Arizona, and Nevada can start several weeks before.)
Whether led by ex-Trump White House officials or campaign lawyers based at Conservative Partnership Institute in Washington, or a looser collective of election deniers and self-appointed experts convened and funded by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, the ringleaders have instructed activists to use apps like Basecamp to coordinate their activities, and apps like VotifyNow to report incidents that they deem suspicious.
“In the upper left-hand corner is the menu tab that will bring up your voter integrity tools,” a VotifyNow tutorial said. “When you click on these buttons, such as mail-in ballot issues, you’ll see the app allows you to type in a brief description of any suspicious activity you notice, as well as upload a photo or video... That incident is then sent to our database to be analyzed and compared with other issues in your area.”
Needless to say, just because a citizen observer thinks that they are seeing something wrong does not mean that factually is the case, said Tammy Patrick, a senior advisor at the Democracy Fund, at a November 2 press briefing where threats to election officials were discussed.
“I’ve had some election officials tell me that these observers act like they’re going to find the body; that they are coming onto a criminal site or crime scene,” she said. “When you approach the information that way, when you don’t know what you are looking at, you’re going to find what [conspiratorial evidence] you are looking for.”
Nor are specious observations likely to be accepted as evidence in any post-Election Day administrative review or legal process. But what fails to meet a legal standard of evidence can succeed as disinformation.
“It is important to remember that all reliable evidence shows that our elections — including the 2020 election — are safe, secure, accurate, fair, and free of widespread voter fraud,” the Brennan Center said. “We cannot let these dangerous and defective schemes compromise our democracy.”
Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, The American Prospect, and many others.
This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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