Its not like Republicans dont know what theyre doing. This is at the core of their ability to seize and hold power. As Pennsylvanias GOP House Majority Leader Mike Turzai famously bragged:
Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done.
But the GOP was just getting warmed up. In 2018 in Georgia, then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp purged 340,134 mostly Black and entirely legitimate voters (out of the 534,000 total purged) from the states rolls. He then won the election for governor against Stacy Abrams by about 55,000 votes.
Florida and Texas are among other close states where Republican officials hang onto office in part through aggressive culling of voters from the rolls. The DeSantis administration has purged almost a million voters from the Florida voter rolls using the excuse that they failed to vote in a midterm election.
Just between 2020 and 2022 fully 19,260,000 Americans 8.5% of all registered voters were purged, flipping control of the House to the GOP in the 2022 election. The purge rate in Republican-controlled Red states was 40% higher than the rest of the country.
When Florida essentially criminalized voter registration drives ($250,000 fines for even minor errors), the League of Women Voters and other groups simply stopped operating in those states. Similar laws were put in place over the past 15 years by Republican legislators in Idaho, Kansas, Missouri, Montana and Tennessee, and are pending in other Red states (and will probably pass soon).
To make matters worse, in March 2025 Trump signed an executive order to overhaul and exert partial control over our nations election systems.
Hes demanding that voters must show a passport or similar citizenship document to register to vote, wants all voting equipment re-certified (only one voting system meets their certification standards and that companys systems were only certified on July 7, 2025), and is demanding voter lists with sensitive, personal information from Blue states so they can be combed for fraud.
Democrats are finally talking about fighting fire with fire, but Republicans have been going after Democratic voters with flame throwers for two decades and now have the support of the Republicans on the Supreme Court, along with Trumps efforts to involve the federal government in even worse voter suppression.
Democrats, in addition to gerrymandering, should start caging operations and challenging Republican voters the way the GOP has been doing against Democratic communities for decades. The resulting squeals that will come from Republican operatives and officials might provoke a change in the law outlawing caging and gerrymandering.
If the Democrats goal is to prevent the 2026 and 2028 elections from looking like those in Hungary and Russia, they need to be raising absolute hell and get on the ball quickly. Times a-wasting
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