The Coming Attack on Free and Fair Elections

Donald Trump is neither a savvy negotiator nor a brilliant dealmaker. He is a craven bully who telegraphs not only his final goal but his next move in achieving it. He is the kind of mark every poker player dreams of having at the table — rich, cocky and dumb.
Trump and his MAGA movement care about power for power’s sake. He believes in nothing, is willing to deal away any policy or principle and will betray a friend or ally if it helps him personally.
If you want to keep up with Marc and stay updated on the latest voting and election news, sign up for our free daily and weekly newsletters — it’s the most direct way of knowing what’s happening to our democracy during this next administration.
Like most aspiring autocrats, he fears democratic institutions because they threaten to place restraints on him. And for him and his movement nothing is more concerning than free and fair elections. He knows from experience that it is just as easy to lose an election as it is to win. In politics, past performance is no guarantee of future results.
That is why voter suppression and election subversion are always just below the surface. It is why election denialism is the only nonnegotiable principle of the MAGA movement. It is why Trump insists that the Republican Party focus on shaping, bending and, if necessary, breaking the rules to ensure the GOP has an electoral playing field tilted in its favor.
You cannot understand the pardoning of the Jan. 6 convicts unless you understand Donald Trump’s visceral connection to those who fought to overturn an election he lost. When he pardons others — an anti-abortion activist or rogue cop — he does not refer to them as hostages. He does not celebrate them as patriots. Their pardons are transactional, not central to him or the MAGA faithful like those of people convicted in connection with Jan. 6
It should come as no surprise that Trump listed requiring voter ID as his condition for California to receive federal aid following the devastating fires in Los Angeles. Attacking our elections is his top priority. Anyone who was surprised has not been paying attention.
If we truly care about the future of free and fair elections, we must take the threat Trump poses to our elections literally and seriously.
Indeed, on the afternoon of his inaugural address, standing next to Speaker Mike Johnson, Trump claimed he would have won California in November if its election system had required voter ID. Ominously, he said that he would ask the speaker “to really get involved.”
For Trump, like many Republicans, voter ID is shorthand for a series of proposals to make voting more difficult: banning no excuse mail-in voting, abolishing ballot drop boxes, limiting voter registration and using the lie of noncitizen voting as an excuse to disenfranchise millions of lawful U.S. citizens. On this last point, during his California trip, Trump disjointedly proclaimed: “You want to have proof of citizenship.”
We have seen this before.
In 2021, Republican legislatures throughout the country enacted massive voter suppression laws to show fealty to the “Big Lie” and to make it harder for Democrats to win future elections. We saw further GOP efforts in each of the years that followed — a toxic mix of voter suppression and election subversion aimed at making it harder for Democrats to vote and easier for Republicans to cheat.
The Republican attack on voting was not limited to new laws. Following the 2020 election the Republican National Committee dramatically increased its volume of anti-voter litigation. Then, in the run-up to the 2024 election, it increased further. Of the nearly 160 anti-voting lawsuits filed in the last two years, more than half were by the Republican Party.
This is not to say there was no pro-voting litigation effort. There was a massive one. While the Democratic National Committee was less active, other Democratic groups and progressive organizations filed more than 120 pro-voting lawsuits in the last two years and fought many others filed by the Republicans and their allies.
Looking ahead, there is no doubt that under the leadership of Trump, the GOP and their allies are preparing to push even more aggressively to restrict voting rights over the next two years. This time they will also have control of Congress and a partisan Department of Justice assisting in their efforts.
House Republicans have already identified voter suppression as one of their top legislative priorities. The SAVE Act purports to be about noncitizen voting. In fact, it is a thinly veiled effort to disenfranchise young and transient voters. Democrats must oppose it not only because it jeopardizes voting rights, but because it is a naked power grab to shift the partisan balance of who can vote in favor of Republicans.
If we are to preserve democracy, those of us on the left must prioritize free and fair elections. Too often we dismiss the real-world impact voter suppression has on the current election and for lowering turnout in the future. We need to accept that the rules of voting are often skewed against minority and young voters. Most importantly, we must understand that voter suppression and election subversion can affect, and sometimes dictate, the outcome of elections.
While Joe Biden emphasized the importance of democratic norms, Trump used the last four years to turn the GOP into an anti-democratic war machine. And he is not done wreaking havoc. That is the stark reality we face. If we truly care about the future of free and fair elections, we must take the threat Trump poses to our elections literally and seriously.