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There is a reason that it has been longstanding Justice Department practice to avoid major investigative steps regarding elected officials right around an election.

That’s because doing something like arresting someone who is running for office just before an election would be perceived by most people as interfering in that election — even if that person was obviously guilty of a crime. But this Justice Department is unlike any other since at least the time of Nixon, and so it’s no surprise that it is placing itself directly in the November midterms by issuing subpoenas for Rep. Ilhan Omar and members of her family.

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Dems Warn of Trump Plans to Seize Ballots

For decades, it has been the policy of the Justice Department to avoid seizing evidence or arresting people involved with election fraud during an election. That has now apparently changed, according to Democrats, who are warning that Donald Trump could use the Justice Department to seize ballots and arrest election officials on or immediately after Election Day in November…

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23 days ago · 183 likes · 13 comments · Justin Glawe

Investigations of public officials are tricky, especially if the people running those investigations are from a rival political party. That’s why the DOJ has long sought to avoid any perception of political motivation behind its investigations. Not so with this DOJ.

Right-wing media is noting that the investigation into Omar — which deals with immigration paperwork her father filled out when she was a child — began during the Biden administration. It’s only natural, then, that it’s coming to fruition now! That’s the apparent argument — that mere weeks before an election, Donald Trump’s DOJ has made a break in the case.

Even many Republicans surely won’t buy this. When you see something this obvious it is, well, obvious.

All of this bodes darkly for November. That the DOJ is willing to interfere this overtly in an election that is 19 days from now means the agency is probably willing to do it in November. That agency, by the way, is increasingly run by people who are inexperienced, Trump sycophants, or both.

What will the DOJ and other federal agencies like the Department of Homeland Security do to further interfere with the midterms? We’re not sure, but we do have some ideas. The ACLU and other organizations are preparing robustly for possible seizure of ballots and other records by the Trump administration.

Voting machines are also a target, as we saw with recent demands from the Georgia State Election Board to have the DOJ and DHS step in to effectively prohibit the use of the state’s voting machines in November.

So far, it doesn’t appear that either agency has responded to the request. But the prospect of federal interference in Georgia and elsewhere looms just as — if not more — important than the results of the election itself.

Today we’re talking about all of this with Sara Tindall-Ghazal, the lone Democratic member of the Georgia state election board.

Listen to our conversation above, on Apple and Spotify podcasts, or at Doom’s home on YouTube.

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Programming note: Head to Georgia Public Broadcasting’s Narrative Edge to hear my conversation about my book, If I am Coming to Your Town, Something Terrible Has Happened, with hosts Orlando Montoya and Peter Biello. Later this week, I’ll have more to share from the episode. For anyone interested, you can purchase the book here. If you choose to become a founding member of American Doom, I’ll send you a signed copy. Now, on to the news… - jg

***

It was a big week last week for displays of unfounded election skepticism here in Georgia, and it’s important to know what it’s really all about.

Last week, the Georgia State Election Board (SEB) approved a resolution aimed at giving federal law enforcement access to the state’s voting machines and elections systems.

First, this resolution was not legally binding in any way. It was a display on the part of the SEB, a way for them to signal to the election denial community, ‘Hey, we’re doing something about all this.’ Secondly, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger will ignore the resolution and proceed with his election administration plan, which includes use of the state’s current voting machines.

By Friday, the board had apparently decided that the resolution wasn’t enough and sent a formal letter asking the Justice Department and Homeland Security to investigate. Except, it wasn’t even the whole board that made this decision. Instead, it was executive director James Mills, a lifelong Republican who has no experience in election administration and has a background as a state legislator and the owner of mini-storage businesses.

It’s Mills who is leading the charge on behalf of Georgia’s election denial movement — whose highest goals are seeing Raffensperger arrested for perceived crimes and forcing every Georgian to vote in every election with hand-marked, hand-counted paper ballots. In other words, completely doing away with the state’s voting machines.

It’s the machines, operated by Dominion Voting, that last week’s resolution and letter are aimed at. (Elsewhere, election deniers have taken aim at another voting machine company, Smartmatic.) Both documents seek to get Trump administration lackeys at the DOJ and DHS under the hood of voting machines so they can look for any scintilla of evidence that the machines could be hacked or manipulated. How do I know this? Because this was the exact rationale for the Trump administration’s accessing of voting machines in Puerto Rico, as Reuters reported in great detail last week.

Those efforts were led by Kurt Olsen, a leader in the national election denial movement who was given special government employee status to carry out his hunt for widespread voter fraud. Olsen was the driving force behind the already-adjudicated election fraud claims that led to the FBI raid on a Fulton County elections warehouse in January.

“Olsen wanted to search for traces of Smartmatic code that, under his theory, would show how Venezuela or another foreign actor such as China could manipulate Dominion machines,” according to Reuters.

In the end, Olsen’s team told the White House that they didn’t find any evidence that the machines had been accessed or fraud had occurred. In fact, they didn’t even find any evidence that the machines could have been hacked or votes manipulated.

But that possibility remains the obsession of election deniers like Mills, and it’s why he is now asking the Trump administration to send lawyers and investigators to Georgia.

***

In the last year, Mills has emerged as a bulldog on the board on behalf of the election denial movement. He is particularly adept in raising questions and concerns about things that he has seen people post about on Facebook, and then acting as if those issues are real threats to election security. This pattern became apparent when, a few months back, Mills saw someone comment about long polling lines in a heavily-Republican county and sent the SEB’s new investigator out to look into things.

Mills has allies in three of the board’s four other Republicans: Salleigh Grubbs, Janelle King, and the newly-appointed Carolyn Roddy.

That’s why it was so interesting to see that Mills didn’t even wait for Grubbs to approve the letter to the DOJ and DHS — which she certainly would have, considering she is such a vociferous believer in election conspiracies that she once chased a garbage truck that she incorrectly believed contained paper ballots. Instead, he sent the letter on his own, drawing a vocal rebuke from SEB chair and fellow Republican John Fervier, who is unflappable in the face of constant vitriol from Mills and election deniers, and rarely speaks to the press.

“We have no control over our executive director, and he does whatever the hell he wants to,” Fervier told Votebeat.

That much is certainly clear. It’s hard to tell who is actually manning the strings above Mills’ head. It could Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, a hardcore Trump supporter who illegally tried to give away Georgia’s electoral college votes to the president in 2020. It could be election deniers in the Georgia legislature, like Sen. Max Burns or Sen. Greg Dolezal. Mills often boasts of his contact with legislators — relationships that have yet to provide the increased legal powers for the SEB that board members like Grubbs have been demanding.

Maybe Mills himself, who in the last year has emerged from the obscurity of his longtime position on the state’s parole board to become the face of the election denial movement on the SEB, is calling the shots.

Regardless, the loud display of last week’s resolution and letter is as much about trying to give the Trump administration (very flimsy) legal pretext to seize or access voting machines in Georgia as it is about making wild claims that the state’s election systems could be manipulated. Under Mills’ apparent theory, if the machines aren’t entirely secure, then lots of fraud is probably being committed. And if there’s lots of fraud, then the Democratic wins that are likely to come from November’s midterms shouldn’t count.

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American Doom is one of the only publications with a complete list of local election denial officials across the country. To support this work, please choose a paid subscription or drop a few dollars in our Coffee Fund. Through Election Day, you can get 40 percent off subscriptions to American Doom. Now, on to the news… - jg

Since 2020, Republicans across the country have set out to remake how elections are run, ballots are cast, and votes are tabulated. They’ve done this in support of Donald Trump’s lies about widespread election fraud, and in some places, have been wildly successful in ensuring that Republicans have an advantage in elections.

There is perhaps no state where this scheme has been more successful than North Carolina. In the wake of Trump’s loss in 2020, Republicans in the Tarheel State began work on remaking the state’s election administration laws, rules and practices. As a result, Republicans now control all manner of election administration — ripping away power from the state’s Democratic governor — and ensuring that election deniers in place across the state have the power to close polling locations in Black and brown areas, and throw out mail-in ballots.

North Carolina is a test-case for what election administration looks like when it’s dominated by Republicans. So far, the results of this have been as expected: Republicans have closed polling locations in areas with a high percentage of Black, largely Democratic voters, making it more difficult for them to cast their ballots. Republicans have also made it easier to throw out mail-in ballots based on highly partisan challenges from election denial activists throughout the state.

Perhaps as a result of anticipated ballot challenges, requests for absentee ballots are down 30 percent compared to the 2022 midterms. This means that many North Carolinians are planning to vote in-person, and possibly at early voting locations to avoid having their votes cancelled by new mail-in ballot rules and challenges that favor Republicans.

It was Republican gerrymandering in North Carolina that helped to give the GOP a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. The legality of that redistricting could be on the table if Democrat Justice Anita Earls holds off her Republican opponent to retain her seat on the state’s Supreme Court.

Despite these efforts, voters in North Carolina have rebuffed Republicans. They elected a Democratic governor last year. Now, Republicans are pulling funding from North Carolina as U.S. senate candidate Michael Whatley trails in the latest polls by 12 points to his Democratic opponent, former governor Roy Cooper.

Listen to our full conversation, watch the discussion on American Doom’s YouTube or Apple and Spotify podcasts.

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Last week began with the Georgia State Election Board passing a desperate (and arguably unconstitutional) resolution demanding that the federal government access state election systems. The week ended with a more formal request that the Justice Department and Homeland Security effectively prohibit the use of voting machines and Georgia’s entire election system in November.

The State Election Board’s (SEB) actions were largely for show, but they have darker implications for what is coming — widespread attempts by government officials and bodies loyal to Trump and Republicans to overturn November’s election results.

The White House has no role in how states conduct their elections under the constitution, but federal law enforcement does have jurisdiction over some aspects of our elections. What the SEB did this week was allege that Georgia is violating federal election law and demand that the government step in.

But none of them can be trusted, because officials at the SEB, the DOJ, the DHS and many, many other government bodies across federal, state and local governments now operate as apparatchiks in service of Trump’s dominant wing of the Republican party.

The SEB’s actions matter not because they will actually result in the DOJ investigating or prosecuting Georgia election officials — although they might — or that Georgians will actually be prevented from using voting machines, but because of the message it sends.

That message is being sent to Americans already primed to believe that elections are full of fraud or who don’t have enough time to understand that, while it may look important that state election officials in Georgia are asking the DOJ to step in, the SEB’s request for federal intervention is not credible because of who runs both the SEB and the DOJ.

Here are some facts about who is laying the groundwork for attempts to question or overturn an election in November that Republicans are on pace to lose:

• SEB executive director James Mills - A lifelong Republican who has no experience in election administration and has a background as a state legislator and the owner of mini-storage businesses

• SEB vice-chair Janelle King - A former Atlanta-area conservative social media personality with no background in election administration, King was appointed to her position by Republicans in Georgia’s legislature. King’s husband recently ran and lost to become Georgia’s next Secretary of State.

• SEB board member Salleigh Grubbs - An election denial activist who rose to fame for chasing a truck she incorrectly believed was filled with shredded ballots in the 2020 election, Grubbs has no experience in election administration and was appointed to her position by Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, who was indicted for his role in the fake electors scheme to illegally give Trump Georgia’s electoral college votes in 2020.

• SEB board member Carolyn Roddy - Along with Mills, Roddy appears to be the driving force behind this week’s actions. Roddy was appointed to the SEB in July, has no experience in election administration, was an appointee under the first Trump administration, and began her career in politics working for Newt Gingrich.

That’s on the SEB side of things. At the Justice Department, offices focused on voting rights and elections have been hollowed out of experienced staff, resulting in things like second-year lawyers representing the government in important cases like Democrats’ lawsuit seeking information about possible plans to seize ballots.

One of those offices, the Civil Rights Division, is led by Trump sycophant Harmeet Dhillon, who is helping to lead the charge in the Trump administration’s attempts to amplify the statistically insignificant number of noncitizen voters. Dhillon is almost surely intimately involved what is Trump’s likely plans to seize ballots.

Zeteo

Dems Warn of Trump Plans to Seize Ballots

For decades, it has been the policy of the Justice Department to avoid seizing evidence or arresting people involved with election fraud during an election. That has now apparently changed, according to Democrats, who are warning that Donald Trump could use the Justice Department to seize ballots and arrest election officials on or immediately after Election Day in November…

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23 days ago · 165 likes · 13 comments · Justin Glawe

At DHS, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin made the extraordinary claim this week that his agency is looking into 300,000 cases of noncitizen voting, or noncitizens who are registered to vote — it’s not entirely clear and Mullin hasn’t clarified exactly what he meant by the 300,000 number.

Even if 300,000 votes were cast by noncitizens in federal elections since 2020, it would not have had an effect on the outcomes of any of those elections. That’s because 300,000 votes amount to .07% of the roughly 406 million votes cast in those contests.

***

What the SEB did this week is attempt to exploit Americans’ somewhat natural belief that the actions of official government bodies are credible.

But the SEB and the DOJ, as well as government agencies at the federal, state and local levels, are now overtly political institutions in service of one party, the Republicans, and more to the point, one man, Donald Trump.

At no point in the next month and, indeed, until Trump is out of office, can any government agency run by Republicans be taken at its word that it is acting in good faith.

It should also be noted why the SEB did what it did this week: If Republicans stood a good chance of winning in November, the apparatchiks at the SEB would not be calling to essentially shut down Georgia’s election systems in order to possibly cast all of the state’s 3-5 million votes by hand — their ultimate goal.

But as apparatchiks, they recognize the warning signs of steep losses for their party in November, and are therefore required to do something about it.

The same can be said for noncitizen voting claims and prosecutions being amplified by the DOJ and DHS. We are witnessing a Soviet-style, whole-of-government operation aimed at securing power for the Republican party, through claims of election fraud, election lawsuits, attempts at federal intervention, ballot seizures and arrests of election officials and, finally, the parliamentary maneuvers that Republicans will employ in January in an attempt to overturn the election victories of Democrats.

And it’s all going to get much worse.

***

This week’s developments were a preview of the chaos to come. The credibility that the SEB has lent to claims that Georgia’s election systems and voting machines are vulnerable to manipulation are just part of a much broader threat matrix that Republicans are employing to cast doubt in November’s results.

Republican lawyers, public officials across the country, members of the Trump administration and federal law enforcement will use that doubt to try to throw out Democratic votes via mail-in ballot challenges, recount and audit demands and more. This is standard practice in the new, Trumpian era of highly-politicized elections, but the ensuing weeks will see these efforts ramped up to 11.

The best way to combat this massive and coordinated effort to overturn the results of November’s elections is to vote for Democrats in such overwhelming numbers that no reasonable person could conclude that Republicans have even a remotely plausible argument that fraud was committed. This is what happened in Hungary, when voters ousted right-wing authoritarian leader Viktor Orban in an unimpeachable landslide.

Americans must do the same in this election, or what happened this week will become the norm: Republicans claiming any election they lose was fraudulent, and therefore doesn’t count.

***

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Things are really heating up. Have you seen all the news this week? If not, take a minute to go back and check out all of our reporting. There’s more coming later today. For now, you know what I’m going to ask: Choose a paid subscription (with a 40 percent discount here) or buy us a coffee to support our work reporting on election interference efforts across the country. You’ll be glad you did because you’ll be supporting reporting that finds troubling stories like this one. Thanks. - jg

***

On Sept. 20, the Justice Department responded to allegations contained in a Democratic National Committee lawsuit that the agency was planning to seize ballots in November. The DOJ then said it would need until just a few days before Election Day to respond.

A federal judge apparently told the DOJ their request was denied, and gave the agency a much tighter deadline. On Monday, the DOJ filed its response to the DNC lawsuit. In non-lawyer terms, the DOJ’s response can be summed up in three words: Go fuck yourself.

The DNC had provided several examples that gave background to their demands for information regarding ballot seizures — information that is behind the closed doors of the agency, and that the DNC is trying to obtain via Freedom of Information Act requests.

The DNC noted that Donald Trump said in January that he regretted not seizing voting machines in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election. Also noted were routine threats of arrests of state and local election officials from members of the Trump administration. Finally, the DNC went into great detail describing the dismissal of “guardrails against ballot seizures,” as the DOJ itself termed the guidelines regarding election investigations that it had removed from its website some time in the last several months.

The DOJ didn’t even bother to deny the DNC’s allegation that the agency had purposefully removed the guidance, which for decades has warned agents against “overt criminal investigative matters” like seizing ballots or arresting candidates and officials “until the election in question has been concluded, its results certified, and all recounts and election contests concluded.”

In paragraph after paragraph, the DOJ argued that all of that background material — Trump wishing he had seized voting machines, endless threats to arrest election officials, the removal of the DOJ guidelines for active elections — was “impertinent” to the FOIA requests demanding information about ballot seizure plans.

That’s certainly one interpretation. Another is that all of that background is entirely pertinent to the issue of whether records regarding ballot seizure plans exist, and whether the DOJ has to release them under FOIA.

The response was simply remarkable, I thought. Who wrote it? I wondered.

The response was signed by Devin Iorio, Assistant U.S. Attorney for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. (That’s former Fox News host Janine Pirro’s office.) So, I looked Iorio up and quickly found his LinkedIn page.

Immediately, I couldn’t help but notice something.

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***

Sorry but…. That’s a kid, right? This couldn’t be him. So I looked up his bar license. Then, I gave the number a call. He answered.

He said he couldn’t comment and apologized if that made him sound rude. It was the most polite “no comment” I’ve had in my life. But I had to confirm it was him. Yes, he just graduated from law school two years ago, he told me. And how long had he been at the DOJ?

Within the last month, he said. Here’s our full conversation.

Iorio has a pretty impressive resume for someone his age. He has interned at the DOJ before, as well as the SEC. He also served as a law clerk in D.C. Superior Court and U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell, according to his LinkedIn.

But he’s only been out of law school for two years, and the DNC’s lawsuit contains very serious allegations on a very serious matter. If the agency follows Trump’s orders and seizes ballots or voting machines in November, it would be the first time in American history that the federal government intervened so forcefully in an election.

Is that the type of case you send a second-year law school grad out to? It’s not just that case but more than a dozen others. Iorio is listed as an attorney of record on about 20 lawsuits that have been filed since the start of the second Trump administration — litigation that also deals with very serious matters like national security, the environment, prosecutorial misconduct, and more.

Devin Iorio, the baby-faced recent law school grad, is now indeed the attorney tasked with fighting the DNC’s attempt to find out whether Donald Trump will seize ballots in the most unprecedented federal election intervention in U.S. history.

***

For the past two years, I’ve heard rumblings of major problems inside the Justice Department. They began back when I was reporting on DOGE’s ravaging of the Social Security Administration for Rolling Stone.

At some point in the course of my reporting I recall speaking to a high-ranking Democratic election official in the South who told that the DOJ had tried to coax one of their lawyers to Washington. The lawyer, who had previously worked for the ACLU, was being recruited by a DOJ office focused on elections, probably the Civil Rights Division.

The election official chuckled as they recalled the story: Here was Trump’s DOJ, which was already well on its way to perverting the mission of the Civil Rights Division to focus on voter suppression instead of voting rights, for some strange reason recruiting their natural enemy: an ACLU lawyer.

The anecdote told me two things: One, the rumors about the DOJ being emptied out from the inside as competent, experienced lawyers left under pressure to pursue bogus, politically-motivated investigations, was true. And two, the Trump sycophants who were left had no idea what they were doing. They couldn’t even do basic homework on prospective staff to weed out folks like former ACLU lawyers who wouldn’t take a job in the Trump DOJ if their life depended on it.

In the time since that conversation there has been much reporting on the exodus at the DOJ and other massive government agencies, and how the people who have filled those empty desks are either incompetent, Trump sycophants, hyper-online conservative social media addicts, or all three.

I don’t know hat category, if any, Iorio falls into. But I bet he’ll never answer a call from a phone number with a Peoria, Illinois area code ever again.

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It is becoming increasingly clear that Donald Trump and his underlings at the departments of Justice and Homeland Security plan to seize ballots in November.

Both the DOJ and DHS are spending an inordinate amount of time and resources to hunt down an insignificant number of noncitizens who have voted in recent elections. Finding these cases won’t fix the problem of the extremely rare occurrences of noncitizen voting, but removing suspected noncitizen voters from voter rolls could alleviate the issue, as conservative groups have argued for years.

But states are prohibited from federal law from removing the many thousands of people who the Trump administration says are improperly registered to vote, or who have allegedly voted illegally. That’s because, since early August, we’ve been in what’s known as the 90-day “quiet period” of the National Voter Registration Act. The law prohibits states from removing voters — even those who are ineligible — from voter rolls within 90 days of an election.

So, if states can’t legally remove these voters, why is the Trump administration pursuing these cases so aggressively, while also threatening to arrest election officials if any noncitizens are found on voter rolls? Because the Justice Department is likely planning to use claims of noncitizens on voter rolls as probable cause in affidavits asking judges for search warrants to seize ballots.

The Democratic National Committee has filed a lawsuit to try to get to the bottom of the Trump administration’s plans to seize ballots. In the DOJ’s response on Monday, a 2024 law school graduate who was hired by the DOJ within the last month completely dismissed every question and allegations regarding plans to seize ballots.

The attorney, Devin Iorio, claimed that guidance that is missing from the DOJ’s website advising attorneys to not actively interfere in ongoing elections, which is part of the DNC’s lawsuit, is not pertinent to the DNC’s requests under the Freedom of Information Act for records related to ballot seizures.

Iorio asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit entirely. The DNC has yet to respond.

American Doom reached out to Iorio and spoke briefly to him. He declined to comment on plans to seize ballots, deferring to this 13 page filing on Monday.

“I don’t mean to be rude, but I do believe I’m going to have to refer you to the response itself because that’s office policy,” Iorio said.

Even if the DOJ doesn’t use claims of noncitizen voting as pretext to seize ballots, the Trump administration, in coordination with groups like the Republican National Committee and America First Legal, will surely file scores of lawsuits challenging election results.

We saw this in 2024 — the RNC and aligned election denial groups like America First and the Public Interest Legal Foundation filed dozens of specious lawsuits over noncitizen voters and other ineligibility claims related to voter rolls. We’ll likely see that again, in addition to the many lawsuits that are likely to result from the RNC’s plans to train poll watchers to grab information from voting machines.

CNN reports that those plans include photographing serial numbers and other information on voting machines — which is illegal in many states — in order to challenge the security of those machines in lawsuits.

The next month will be chaos and include the following:

• Much, much more amplification from the DOJ and DHS of the scant number of arrests of noncitizens who have voted in recent elections.

• More attempts from election denial officials like those at the Georgia State Election Board to coordinate with the Trump administration in interfering with and challenging the validity of elections.

• Lawsuits and fear-mongering over voting machines — on Wednesday DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, made strange and troubling comments about his agency’s apparent monitoring of issues related to voting machines. Reminder: executive branch agencies like DHS have no role in elections that the constitution dictates must be run by the states.

• A possible Supreme Court decision that would allow for last-minute voter purges of tens of thousands of (likely Latino) voters.

• Further calls for troops or federal law enforcement at the polls as the Trump administration attempts to claim that U.S. elections are beset with widespread fraud.

***

With the RNC attempting to deploy thousands of poll monitors to aid in election challenge lawsuits, the Justice Department will also send its own observers.

One of those observers may be David Michael Levin, a Florida lawyer who was arrested and pleaded guilty for hacking into state and county election websites in 2016 as part of a bizarre attempt to “advance” the campaign of a candidate for local election supervisor.

It’s quite the promotion for Levin, who was spotted in Minneapolis in August while the Justice Department monitored primaries there. Prior to joining the DOJ, Levin was apparently making a living as a conservative social media influencer under the persona of “Dave the Lawyer,” where he hawked products like organic beef jerky and cures for low testosterone from a brand called “Barlowe’s Herbal Elixirs.”

“Barlowe’s probably saved my marriage…” Levin posted in July 2025, apparently referencing his issues with low testosterone.

“And let’s just say, Mrs. Dave the Lawyer noticed,” Levin said in a video for the elixirs. “You know what they say, ‘Happy wife, happy life.’”

It’s not clear what experience Levin has that would be applicable to being a DOJ election observer. He does not appear to hold an active law license in Florida, American Doom found.

Levin is a near-perfect example of what has happened to federal law enforcement during the second Trump administration. Agencies like the Justice Department and Homeland Security have become official government arms of the extremist right-wing groups who have pushed harsher policies in the areas of election administration and voting rights, and immigration.

The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has been especially hard hit, and is now a de facto government arm of the election denial movement. Some 300 attorneys have left under the leadership of Harmeet Dhillon, who has perverted the division’s mission to focus on white grievance claims of reverse racism, especially in higher education, and hunting for noncitizen voters. That’s in contrast with the office’s mission since its founding: protect the rights of minorities at the polls, in education, and in the workforce.

Homeland Security, now a de facto paramilitary force for right-wing anti-immigrant groups, has also been dragged into the Trump administration’s growing hunt for noncitizen voters and proof of nonexistent widespread election fraud. Hundreds of DHS agents have been reassigned to work on election fraud cases, as ProPublica has reported.

Whether at the Civil Rights Division or other DOJ offices, or DHS, everyone working on election fraud investigations is being directed from the top — Trump, Susie Wiles and Stephen Miller at the White House, Reuters reports.

***

The DOJ and DHS are touting recent arrests of noncitizens who have allegedly voted in recent elections, but the numbers are scant. Since the start of the second Trump administration’s this whole-of-government effort to stamp out the supposed scourge of noncitizen voting has resulted in less than 200 arrests.

The arrests have comes as the DOJ and DHS have made spectacular claims in virtually every state about the number of noncitizens registered to vote, which are often completely incorrect.

It’s possible that the growing clamor over noncitizen voting is not meant to actually solve the problem by removing ineligible voters from rolls, but instead to lay the groundwork to seize ballots, arrest election officials, and challenge election results based on these cases.

Meanwhile, Latino groups remain on alert about the prospect of ICE agents at polling locations in November. Mullin and others have refused to rule out the possibility of deploying ICE or the National Guard to the polls.

Here in Georgia, two candidates have expressed their support for the completely unprecedented move to deploy federal law enforcement or active duty military to polling locations — such a development would mark a first in American history.

U.S. Rep. Mike Collins, the Republican running to replace Sen. Jon Ossoff, and Rick Jackson, the GOP gubernatorial candidate, are not just unconcerned by the remarkable federal overreach that the Trump administration refuses to rule out, but are supportive of it.

In August, Jackson responded to a town hall question by assuring voters that “we’ll get the National Guard,” saying that current Gov. Brian Kemp “is going to watch it for us.” Jackson never fully clarified what he meant by tying Kemp to the possible presence of the Guard at polls in November.

Last week, Collins responded to concerns over the issue of troops at the polls by saying he was in support.

“I’ve always been a firm believer in local… elections are state, and local level. The last thing we want is for people not to have confidence in their elections and not show up,” Collins said. “So, you know, if that’s something that they decide they need to look at, then that’s fine with me.”

Translation: As a lifelong Republican I abhor the thought of the federal government sending armed troops to tell us what to do here in Georgia. But since Donald Trump is currently in charge of the federal government, I love the idea.

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Key points:

• The MAGA-dominated Georgia State Election Board passed a resolution that likely has no legal authority to allow the Justice Department and Homeland Security unfettered access to the state’s voting machines and election systems.

• Republicans on the board did this to enable the Trump administration to hunt for technical errors or other minor problems that will allow Trump to claim that the November elections were stolen from Republicans.

• The move represents a new front in Republican efforts to insert control over elections by the federal government and Trump himself, in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution.

***

The Georgia State Election Board took the unprecedented step today of attempting to give the Trump administration access to Georgia’s voting machines and election systems — a resolution that is likely to be ignored by Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, and is in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution.

In a 3-2 vote carried by the MAGA majority of board members, the board passed a resolution that would give the departments of Justice and Homeland Security access to servers and hard drives in Georgia’s voting machines and election systems. The resolution was passed under the guise of election integrity — Republican board members and election skeptics claim that Georgia’s voting machines have not been properly maintained with software updates.

Election denial forces in the state argue that the lack of updates has made Georgia’s voting machines vulnerable to manipulation, a contentious accusation that Raffensperger’s office has repeatedly rebuffed.

But the real impetus behind Monday’s resolution is to grant federal law enforcement access to Georgia’s election system so that those agencies can go on a “phishing expedition” as part of Donald Trump’s increasingly aggressive hunt for proof of widespread voter fraud, according to a state election official with knowledge of the matter.

Trump’s manic quest to prove widespread voter fraud is simply an effort to sow doubt in the November midterm elections, which Republicans are on pace to lose.

Across the country, the DOJ and DHS have been threatening to arrest election officials from both parties for refusing to hand over voter rolls and remove tens of thousands of voters that the agencies questionably claim are ineligible to vote. In January, the FBI seized thousands of Fulton County, Georgia ballots from the 2020 election in order to prove Trump’s bogus fraud claims. The Justice Department and Homeland Security have also ramped up claims of noncitizen voting, arresting 16 people across the country who allegedly voted in presidential elections in recent years, and claiming that the agencies are pursuing hundreds of thousands of similar cases.

In Nevada, DHS claimed it had found 185 noncitizens registered to vote on the state’s voter rolls only to have state election officials point out that all 185 people were citizens. It’s part of a pattern of DHS inflating numbers of noncitizens registered to vote as part of Trump’s efforts to sow doubt in the midterms.

Monday’s resolution will almost surely be ignored by Raffensperger, the source with knowledge of the matter told American Doom. That’s because the State Election Board has no power to tell Raffensperger’s office how to conduct elections, or who is able to access voting machines and election systems.

Additionally, there is the plain text of the constitution, which does not grant federal law enforcement agencies like the Justice Department or Homeland Security any role in election administration. Instead, those agencies have jurisdiction over investigations into election crimes, which the State Election Board does not allege have been committed.

“I think this is a ‘Please pay attention to us, we can help you kind of thing,’” the source said.

Under Trump, federal law enforcement is most certainly paying attention. Hundreds of agents within Homeland Security have been reassigned to hunt for noncitizen voters. Hundreds of lawyers have left the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, which has jurisdiction over election crimes, in protest of the Trump administration’s demands to find nonexistent widespread election fraud.

The three Republicans on the State Election Board, which has been dominated by MAGA diehards for years, claimed that a “patch” of software on Georgia’s election systems could be updated in time for the November election, a claim that Democratic board member Sara Tindal-Ghazal said was “impossible.”

“It is not a patch. It is an entirely new software system that would have to be loaded on, and it literally takes months,” Tindal-Ghazal said. “So what you are calling for is impossible to do before the midterm elections.”

Republicans on the State Election Board did not respond to request for comment. For more than a year, American Doom has pressed GOP board members on their communications with Trump administration officials as well as the Justice Department. There has been no response.

Carolyn Roddy, the board’s newest Republican who was appointed to her position by the Georgia GOP in July, said the purpose of the resolution “is to seek support from federal partners.”

Congress is the only branch of the federal government that has any role in election administration under the constitution — not federal law enforcement agencies like the Justice Department and Homeland Security, which fall under the executive branch.

“The Times, Places and Manner of Holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of choosing Senators,” Article I, Section 4 of the constitution dictates.

Republican board member Janelle King, who last year bragged of her contact with DOJ officials in spreading exaggerated or outright false fraud claims in Georgia, noted that Trump had mentioned vulnerabilities in Georgia’s election systems.

“For God’s sake our own president said that they found vulnerabilities,” King said.

“No matter who is in office, I do not support federal intervention in state-run elections,” Tindal-Ghazal replied, noting that the constitution does not allow for federal involvement in elections, other than Congress.

Roddy and her Republican colleagues dismissed or ignored concerns over the constitutional limits of the federal government’s involvement in elections.

“I’m not asking the DOJ to come in and tell the state how to run their elections, what we’re asking the DOJ to do is to come in and support us in nudging our Secretary of State’s office, who is overseeing federal elections as well, to do their job,” King said.

The word “nudging” does not appear in the constitution.

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Americans hate data centers but Donald Trump tells them they’re “backwards and poor” for opposing them. Democrats like Zohran Mamdani are an existential threat to the nation, Trump says, but he glad-hands with him in front of the cameras. Democrats running for Congress are “crazy” “radical” “lunatics” who are completely out of touch with the average American. Meanwhile, most of those Democrats are spending their time talking about the cost of groceries, gas, and healthcare.

The economy is both somehow booming but Trump and Republicans will also bring costs down. Which is it? No one seems to know.

Across the country and in Trump’s constant appearances on every platform imaginable — does this guy ever work, by the way? — Republicans are desperately trying to coalesce around a messaging platform of “we’ve done everything right so vote for us or else the bad, crazy Democrats will take it all away.”

Trump, meanwhile, dismisses Americans’ concerns about the economy and data centers, spends more and more money on vanity projects, seems to be completely uninterested in ending the war he started in Iran, meets with Mamdani, starts trade wars with allies, and is now picking a fight with the White House press corps, something that even many Republican voters simply do not care about. None of this is helping Republicans’ chances in November.

Democrats continue to lead generic ballot polls from every major pollster. Greg Abbott is now in danger, per the latest polls, of losing the governorship in Texas. Also in Texas, James Talarico continues his path to an upset over Ken Paxton to become the state’s first Democratic senator in 38 years. Abdul El Sayed maintains his narrow chance at an upset in Michigan. At least one poll has Democratic Socialist Angie Nixon tied in her race for one of Florida’s seats in the Senate.

Republicans are in trouble, but their blind allegiance to Trump requires them to ignore the danger signs. Some have begun to distance themselves from Trump, but many more are clinging to the sinking ship.

The first major problem with Republican messaging less than 40 days ahead of the election is its fundamental incoherence: things are going very well, but also anything that’s going badly — like inflation and the economy — is Biden’s fault.

Telling Americans that the high prices they’re feeling with their own wallets simply aren’t real doesn’t seem like a particularly good messaging strategy considering the decline of consumer sentiment. Blaming rising prices on Biden might work for some, but not all.

Appearing on Fox Business on Tuesday, RNC chair Joe Gruters was asked why recent polling from Fox shows voters preferring Democrats over Republicans on the economy.

“Voters have a short memory,” Gruters said, claiming that “under Biden,” “gas prices were higher than they are now.”

Sure, but that was then. While it might make some highly-motivated members of the Republican base feel better to hear that gas prices were technically higher (for a brief time) under Biden, it does nothing to motivate voters who are dealing with those prices now — under Trump. And that includes a record high on diesel that will probably continue to rise.

So, Trump and Republicans ignore reality or blame Biden for it at their own peril. The president is polling at historic lows and those numbers continuing to drop. Democrats are polling higher than Republicans even on issues that used to be in the GOP’s wheelhouse — national security and the economy.

Trump has said he wants Americans to imagine that he is on the ballot in November. Democrats would very much like that, too. Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Republicans don’t really have a plan and everything is sort of a mess because they have to do what Donald Trump decides on a whim each day.

Mixed messaging, desperate spending

At the “Midterms Convention” in Dallas, Trump called Democrats “the most extreme and dangerous group of candidates for the House and Senate ever to seek office.”

“In state after state, the Democrat establishment has been overthrown and replaced by crazed lunatics and radicals,” Trump went on. “They call themselves Democrat socialists, but actually they’re communists.”

Among these radicals is Mamdani, who Trump called “a 100% Communist Lunatic.” Why, then, in the midst of a campaign that Trump and Republicans have billed as a fight for the survival of the nation, did Trump politely defer to Mamdani during their appearance together last week?

Part of the reason is Trump’s fragile ego, which requires him to suck up to anyone who remotely looks like a winner. The other reason for this strategic misstep is that, just like their stewardship of the U.S. government, Trump and Republicans don’t really have a plan other than that they would like to be in power so they can hurt people. Clearly, though, they don’t think they can win votes on the merits of their own policies.

Vice President JD Vance said as much in a private meeting with House Republicans. At the meeting, Vance told Republicans running for re-election to simply mention El Sayed if their opponent wasn’t an outright radical, as Vance clearly believes El Sayed is. In response, El Sayed didn’t take the bait.

“If the whole Republican caucus meeting is not about what we can do to actually make lives better but instead what we can talk about so that we can change the subject from what lives are because of their policies, fine, talk about me,” El Sayed said. “But you know what I’m going to talk about? Gas, groceries, how hard it is to see a doctor, the fact that our kids’ schools still look like they did 30 years ago.”

Republicans are now dumping money into congressional races, including Senate contests that they thought they had locked up. They’ve given up in Georgia, refusing to significantly fund Mike Collins’ race against Sen. Jon Ossoff.

So, El Sayed isn’t really a radical, as long as Americans can actually hear what he has to say and don’t simply listen to people like Vance. Mamdani must not be that much of a radical, either, if Trump is willing to meet and work with him. But this is just the second part of Republicans’ messaging problems a few weeks from Election Day.

Data centers

Across the country, Americans of all political stripes are rising up in opposition to data centers. Folks are showing up at local government meetings to oppose the projects, which have benefited from untold billions in tax breaks, are driving up utility costs, and polluting air and water. Much of this is in the service of tech companies trying to make breakthroughs on AI.

Faced with this groundswell of real, on-the-ground voter sentiment, Republicans have largely failed to coalesce around consistent messaging over data centers. A handful of Republicans running for Congress have publicly opposed data centers. In Texas, Abbott finally succumbed to public pressure and halted permits for data centers, part of a growing trend of public opposition actually stopping the projects from being developed. House Republicans last week passed the initial version of a bill that would effectively protect Americans from paying increased utility rates if data centers are developed in their communities.

Still, Republican candidates on the campaign trail can’t get their messaging straight on whether they oppose or support data centers that are increasingly unpopular among their own voters. In Ohio, Jon Husted is getting hammered in attack ads over his support for data centers. In Texas, Paxton talks a big game about his opposition to data centers but as attorney general fought to develop the facilities — and holds millions in investments in the projects, the Lever reported. In Iowa, Rep. Ashley Hinson’s exact position on data centers is unclear. In Alaska, Sen. Dan Sullivan has supported bringing data centers to the state.

Last week Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry said that data centers use less water than golf courses — risking alienating another key constituency of the GOP. Byron Donalds, running to become Florida’s next governor, has come out in favor of them. He’s also removed references to Trump from his campaign website. Again, this is all very contradictory.

Leading the charge against voters’ wishes is Trump himself, who has never met a development project that is opposed by working Americans that he didn’t like.

Under the guise of national security, “beating China,” or just plain making the piles of cash that Trump and his tech billionaire buddies think AI is worth, the president has gone whole hog on data centers. Meanwhile, two-thirds of Americans oppose them.

In response, Trump calls them poor bumpkins.

Costly wars on trade and in Iran

Trump’s trade wars and his attacks on Iran aren’t helping the inflation crisis. Both are causing costs to go up. The Federal Reserve has identified tariffs as a significant cause of inflation. Even Trump’s former Treasury Secretary has said that his constant fighting with other countries — including allies like Canada — and his impetuous tariff-levying aren’t good for the U.S. economy

But many Republicans blindly stand by Trump. He’s the deal-maker, after all. Except these deals aren’t working out, and Americans know it. Republicans are also on the wrong side of Trump’s war in Iran. Just seven House Republicans and three GOP senators have voted to restrict military operations in Iran. But some have started to buck Trump.

Rep. John James in Michigan, Hinson in Iowa, Husted in Ohio, Rep. Tom Tiffany in Wisconsin, and Rogers in Michigan — all have come out with some variation of “We need to end this war quickly.”

“The war with Iran needs to end, and end quickly,” Rogers says in a new campaign ad. “When it does, energy costs will plummet.”

Two months ago, Rogers supported giving Trump congressional authorization for the war.

The war has never been popular, due in no small part that it was almost entirely unnecessary and involved another instance of contradictory messaging — Trump had somehow destroyed Iran’s nuclear capabilities but they also were close to developing a nuclear weapon. How were both possible? Republicans never bothered to explain that to Americans.

Now, it’s less popular than ever, and Trump’s approval ratings are taking a major hit. Most polls have him at his lowest approval rating ever, and approaching historic lows for any president. In recent months, polling on Trump’s handling of foreign policy has plummeted.

But many congressional Republicans have stood by their man, sending their voters’ sons and daughters off to a war that Trump appears to have started out of boredom. Now he’s bored with the war itself, which is why Iran’s theocratic leadership is still hanging around. And in just the last few weeks, Iran and its proxy forces in the region have notched important victories.

While the U.S. isn’t losing the war, we aren’t winning it either. The longer it goes on, the worse position we’re in, and that includes Trump, who is too arrogant to acknowledge any of this.

Maybe Republicans will be forced to acknowledge how bad the president is for them after a bloodbath at the polls in November. Until then, it’s all just desperate, confusing talk.

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It began with a sinus infection. The staff at the urgent care gave me antibiotics to address it, saying nothing about the directive on the label to take a probiotic as well.

Three days later, it began. I won’t go into gruesome detail but let’s just say I very quickly began to wonder how there was anything left to go to the bathroom about. This went on for several days. Another urgent care. This time, they gave me a different prescription. I went to the pharmacist to have it filled. “This is just over-the-counter Imodium,” the pharmacist told me.

I was already taking that, which I had told the staff at the urgent care. So, I had paid $50 and gotten my hopes up for the urgent care to effectively tell me to take a lot of Pepto Bismol.

I called my doctor and scheduled an appointment. Then, a friend told me about his experience with Clostridioides difficile, or C diff. So I called my doctor back and told them I needed to make a decision: go to the ER now or wait until my appointment in the morning.

The first nurse told me something obvious if not particularly helpful: “If you feel bad you can go to the ER.” Thanks, I said, but what I was trying to determine was whether my doctor the next day would even be able to perform the tests needed to identify a case of C diff. She connected me to another nurse who eventually said that, no, my doctor probably wouldn’t be able to conduct the necessary tests to diagnose C diff. So, yes, I should probably go to the ER.

That evening I did, and after a few hours, finally felt like I was talking to someone competent and helpful: the ER doctor on shift at St. Joseph’s Candler in Savannah. But the entire episode — mild by comparison to some healthcare horror stories I’ve heard — was a frustrating reminder of how broken our healthcare system is. Luckily I have a primary care doctor, but if I didn’t I would have had to wait weeks or months to see one. The other option? Urgent cares. We see how well that went.

Yes, I should have know that I had to take probiotics with the antibiotics prescribed by the urgent care. But when I returned almost a week later complaining of stomach pains, diarrhea, the staff there should have sent me to the ER.

Finally, I made the choice that I thought was best for me after a week of serious stomach pain and 20 trips a day to the bathroom: go to the ER. I have insurance, so my bill probably won’t be huge. But the fact that these are the options for most people in this country is a lowdown, cryin’ shame.

***

As I waited to be seen at the ER, I scrolled news on my phone and saw that the Trump administration will kick as many as a million people off Obamacare for allegedly committing healthcare fraud. Vice President JD Vance and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz said they had found people who had allegedly committed fraud because they had never made a claim through their insurance plan under the Affordable Care Act.

Is that fraud? It doesn’t sound like it to me. This initiative of Vance’s “anti-fraud task force” will save American taxpayers $2.2 billion, Vance and Oz said on Tuesday. That’s about the same amount that Donald Trump made during the first year of his second term in office.

Vance and Oz also said they’re stopping brokers from selling Obamacare insurance plans. That’s in addition to the millions of Americans who are now paying much higher premiums as a result of Republicans’ halting of Obamacare subsidies. Oh, and then there are the 10 states — most of them dominated by Republican majorities in their legislatures and governors’ offices — that have refused to expand Medicaid, which would offer coverage to low income Americans.

My brief but frustrating experience these past two weeks with the healthcare system was one of a handful my wife and I have had in recent years. And I’m one of the lucky ones: I’m a relatively healthy middle-aged man who doesn’t drink or do drugs, eats a moderately healthy diet and exercises. (Yes, I still smoke, and yes, I know… The big quit is coming; I’m just not quite there yet.)

This experience revived a conversation we’ve had before about finding a concierge doctor. Again, luckily, we can probably afford that and it’s worth it to us to make our lives a little easier. I know more than a few people who have gone down this path, but it’s one that isn’t available to many Americans.

It also seems entirely unnecessary for a country as wealthy and powerful as our own. The fact that those in the upper-middle class and above can essentially opt out of all the frustrating madness of the American healthcare system and have their own, somewhat private doctor simply because they can afford it seems like an indicator of how broken things are, in addition to being one of those dystopian signs of late-stage capitalism.

But that’s where things have been going lately. There are plenty of news stories about the concierge doctor trend. A new private medical plan in Connecticut costs $45,000 a year. That’s a lot of money, but I bet you get great service!

As I was dealing with and trying to self-diagnose my malady this past week, I also tried to keep up with work. That meant reading a lot of news and paying attention to what congressional candidates are saying about a variety of issues. One statement stood out among all the rest.

Responding to news that Vance had told congressional Republicans in a closed-door meeting to simply mention the name of Michigan’s Abdul El Sayed in order to scare voters about far-left candidates, the doctor and candidate for one of the state’s U.S. Senate seats said that he didn’t care what Vance said, and that he was focusing on issues that affect Americans.

Instead, El Sayed said that he would continue talking about “gas, groceries, and how hard it is to see a doctor.”

I nodded my head in vociferous agreement when I heard the remark. Maybe there are Republicans on the trail talking about the many and obvious problems with our healthcare system, but I haven’t seen that as much as GOP candidates fear-mongering about “Communists.”

The reality is that every single American has a version of the story you’ve read here today. Many, many Americans have several such stories. And many Americans have even worse stories about their interactions with the healthcare system. Republicans can say they’re trying to fix all of this, but they’ve never really said exactly how they’ll do it.

Trump is trying to lower prescription drug costs. But Republicans have never formulated any credible plan for insuring more Americans, or for making healthcare less expensive and more equitable for low income Americans and the working class.

I know it’s not as bad here as it is in other parts of the world, but I think we should hold ourselves to a higher standard. The Republican plan for healthcare, based on the experiences in my lifetime, appears to be entirely market-driven.

Republican voters can continue to believe their party is working toward a solution, if they choose. But I know I’m not alone in navigating our healthcare system and thinking, “This is the best we got?”

At a certain point, even conservative Americans might be forced to look around them at all that is broken and reckon with the fact that Republicans have no plan to fix it, that their ideological drive to make government as small as possible is also making it ineffective to the point that it’s actively harming how our society functions.

Under Trump, Republican voters might even have to conclude that their party is actively trying to break things. And they’re breaking things not for the benefit of Americans who need to see a doctor, or afford a decent quality of life, but for the wealthiest people and most powerful forces in our society.

To not conclude this after taking part in virtually any part of the American healthcare system is to purposefully ignore the realities of it. And for God’s sakes, don’t get a sinus infection.

***

On Friday, the Republican National Committee (RNC) and the Georgia GOP sent a letter to the State Election Board (SEB). In it, Republicans demanded that the SEB force counties to implement procedures that will cause chaos from now until Election Day, and that could slow the vote-counting process.

The RNC is demanding that the SEB implement the rules laid out in the letter at its meeting on Monday.

The letter is important not because of the claims it makes about voting system vulnerabilities in Georgia, but because it shows that the national Republican party and its Georgia wing are all-in on claiming that November’s midterms are rife with fraud before a single vote has been cast. Friday’s letter is further evidence that Republicans will point to anything and everything they can in order to cast doubt on the results of an election they are increasingly likely to lose.

The dynamic of Republicans claiming fraud in elections that have yet to occur has been going on since the start of the second Trump administration, but those claims are about to reach a fever pitch as we inch closer to Election Day.

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The RNC and Georgia Republicans point to an AI-enabled test by Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy that allowed researchers there to identify who voters voted for in the May primary.

Using AI, the researchers were able to combine scans of ballots with other publicly-available voter information to match ballots with the voters who cast them, “thus undoing the secrecy of their cast ballot.”

While that may sound troubling on its face, Republicans and SEB board members who have been warning about ballot-matching for months have never explained whether it’s even a reasonable possibility.

In fact, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, has already ordered counties to remove some voter information that would allow AI-enabled searching to match voters to their ballots.

Just like supposed fraud that could occur by using mail-in ballots, the election deniers who hold a majority on the SEB have never shown that anyone has actually used AI to manipulate data in order to commit some form of election fraud.

On the issue of matching ballots to voters, the SEB’s MAGA majority have effectively advertised a vulnerability in Georgia’s election system for months now. They’ve done so under the guise of “protecting the secrecy of the ballot,” as board member Salleigh Grubbs often says. But in reality, the three MAGA stalwarts on the board — Grubbs, Janelle King and the newly-appointed Carolyn Roddy — are using the vulnerability exploited by Princeton researchers to call for a complete prohibition of voting machines, and a switch to hand-counted paper ballots.

Counting elections by hand would take far longer than using the voting machines that Georgia employs, and it would open the results up to a significantly higher error rate than machines. Not to mention, by forcing counties to count by hand, election deniers like those on the board as well as Republican officials in Georgia and elsewhere could make questionable fraud claims based on the glut of errors that hand counts would present.

While Friday’s letter didn’t go as far as Grubbs and others would have liked — forcing the entire state to count November’s midterm elections by hand — its demands, if implemented, will cause a fair bit of chaos from now until Election Day.

The letter demands that the board immediately implement the following policies:

• Have poll workers shuffle ballots by hand before scanning them to count votes. Context: The errors this could cause will be used to call results into question.

• Publish a report “on the status of ballot secrecy” before early voting begins. Context: Doing so would allow Republicans to raise fear among their voters that their votes could be exposed by unnamed actors, fear that Republicans hope will motivate their unmotivated base to show up in November.

• “Seek federal assistance” to upgrade Georgia’s voting machines and other election equipment. Context: Election deniers like those on the SEB want the federal government involved as much as possible so that agencies like the Justice Department and Homeland Security can lend credibility to exaggerated or outright false fraud claims.

You can read the full letter below. The SEB meets on Monday. By then, I’ll have more exclusive information to share about interference efforts here in Georgia.

Seb Ballot Secrecy Letter 2026 Rnc Approved (1)

171KB ∙ PDF file

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Economics and politics share one commonality that can be very frustrating to people who are experts in both fields — feelings often outweigh facts.

That the economy is technically doing relatively well doesn’t change the feeling of many Americans that it is not. Lately, most of that negative perception of the economy comes from high gas prices, which the vast majority of Americans cannot avoid thanks to decades of failure to properly invest in mass transit.

While the state of the U.S. economy is a complex matter, it does not change our natural reaction to look for someone or something to blame. In the U.S., that often means the president. Presidents have little control over gas prices, but one very simple way to ensure that they remain stable is to not start a war and cut off the flow of oil from the Middle East. Hence, even many supporters of Donald Trump are correctly blaming him for prices at the pump.

Trump’s war in Iran is making everything more expensive, as I reported today at Public Notice. Plus, the world is even less sure of American leadership thanks to Trump’s actions in the Middle East, his volatile trade policies, and his and Republicans’ complete lack of action on reducing the national debt.

As part of my reporting, I spoke to Rodney Sullivan, executive director for the Mayo Center for Asset Management and a professor of economics at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. Like many economists, Sullivan points out that our skyrocketing debt is a major reason why markets are losing confidence in the U.S. economy. There’s also the possibility of a looming AI bubble, which is driving up borrowing costs for everyone from folks looking to buy a house to the U.S. government itself.

We begin our conversation with Treasury yields, a benchmark for the U.S. economy that help to determine interest rates on everything from mortgages to car and credit card loans. Those yields recently hit numbers not seen since just before the 2008 global financial crisis — a dire warning sign that, despite the relative health of the economy, things may be headed in the wrong direction.

***

JG: Treasury yields have been on the rise for some time now. Deficits are continuing to increase at a high rate. Consumer rates and in particular mortgage rates are tied to these rates. What in your opinion needs to be done by the government to change this trajectory to make mortgages/lending affordable for the average American?

RS: There are two important policy channels that could bring down borrowing costs. First, monetary policy must restore confidence that inflation will return durably to the Federal Reserve’s target. The Fed has made clear that it is committed to reducing inflation and restoring price stability. Today, the FOMC raised the federal funds rate by 25 basis points, to 3.75%–4.00%. Markets had anticipated that increase, but they appear to view it as the beginning of a broader tightening cycle rather than a one-time adjustment. Although the Fed does not directly control 10-year Treasury yields or mortgage rates, its actions influence investors’ expectations about future inflation and short-term interest rates. If the Fed demonstrates that it is willing to keep policy restrictive for as long as necessary, it could restore its credibility as an inflation fighter. That could cause long-term yields to fall relatively quickly, even if short-term rates initially rise further.

Second, the federal government needs to address the country’s deteriorating fiscal position. Total public debt recently surpassed $40 trillion, and net interest costs have risen above $1 trillion annually—roughly comparable to national defense spending. With the federal deficit currently around 6% of GDP and expected to remain elevated, investors are demanding greater compensation to hold long-term Treasury securities.

A credible, multiyear plan to reduce future deficits would directly address those concerns. Such a plan would likely require some combination of slower government spending growth—including reforms to entitlement programs—and higher tax revenue. The goal would not necessarily be immediate austerity, which could weaken the economy, but a believable commitment to place the debt trajectory on a more sustainable path. If policymakers simultaneously restored confidence in price stability and adopted a credible fiscal plan, Treasury yields could fall substantially and potentially quite rapidly. Lower Treasury yields would, in turn, reduce the cost of mortgages and other forms of consumer and business borrowing. The government cannot dictate long-term rates, but it can materially influence the expectations and investor confidence that determine them.

JG: There are two seemingly opposing arguments being made: That yields are rising because of lack of trust in the U.S. government/financial stability, and that rates are rising because there is a boom of companies seeking loans for expanding operations, causing the government to have to compete in a narrow space. Which of these do you subscribe to?

RS: I would not view these as mutually exclusive explanations. Bond yields are influenced by several forces, including expected inflation, economic growth, Federal Reserve policy, and the balance between the government’s borrowing needs and investor demand for bonds. Higher oil prices can increase inflation and lead investors to expect interest rates to remain elevated for longer. Geopolitical conflict can have a similar effect if it disrupts energy supplies. At the same time, geopolitical stress can increase demand for safe-haven assets such as U.S. Treasuries, so its effect on yields is not always one-directional. The government’s large and growing borrowing needs are a longer-term concern. More Treasury issuance requires investors to absorb more bonds, while higher interest rates increase the government’s costs as existing debt is refinanced. The May 2025 Moody’s downgrade underscored these concerns.

The AI buildout may also increase demand for capital, particularly as technology companies and data-center operators invest heavily in computing capacity, energy infrastructure and facilities. But I would be cautious about describing this as a direct competition between corporate borrowers and the U.S. Treasury for a fixed pool of funds. Global savings, foreign investors, banks and other financial intermediaries influence the supply of capital. Corporate investment may contribute to higher real interest rates at the margin, but it is unlikely to be the primary explanation for the recent rise in Treasury yields.

There is also a more positive interpretation: some of the increase in yields reflects an economy that is stronger than it was during the unusually low-interest-rate period following the global financial crisis and during the pandemic. The recent rise in 10-year TIPS yields alongside nominal Treasury yields is consistent with higher expected real interest rates, although it may also reflect a higher real term premium.

Overall, Treasury yields reflect expected growth, inflation, investor demand, government borrowing and confidence in future fiscal policy. A bond-market crisis is a much stronger conclusion than the available evidence supports.

JG: Barring the possibility of some type of recession, is the downside here that we could simply be entering a new/renewed era of higher interest rates? In previous eras of high interest rates, have bond yields been this high?

RS: That is one plausible interpretation. Interest rates may be normalizing toward levels that were more typical before the unusually low-rate period following the global financial crisis. From roughly 2000 to 2008, the 10-year Treasury yield was generally in the 4% to 5% range—closer to today’s levels than to the exceptionally low yields that prevailed during much of the 2010s and the pandemic. Yields were substantially higher still during the inflationary period of the 1970s and early 1980s.

The important question is not whether yields are higher than they were recently, but whether they remain persistently high. That will depend on the path of inflation, real economic growth, Federal Reserve policy and the government’s fiscal trajectory. Higher rates may be a “new normal,” but they could also decline if inflation falls, growth weakens or fiscal concerns ease.

JG: Optimistically, AI’s role in companies seeking lending is a sign that they are expanding operations, innovating, creating jobs, etc. But pessimistically, couldn’t this all be one big bubble? I.e. companies gobbling up tons of capital in loans that they’re not going to be able to pay back because AI isn’t worth as much as they think it is?

RS: Yes, that is a meaningful risk. The AI buildout is based on the expectation that demand for computing power, software and related infrastructure will continue to grow rapidly. If that demand falls short of expectations, companies that have invested heavily or borrowed substantially could face lower revenues, weaker profits and difficulty servicing their debt.

That would not necessarily mean that the entire financial system is at risk, but it could produce significant losses for lenders, investors and companies exposed to the buildout. The dot-com experience is instructive: excessive investment and unrealistic expectations eventually led to a sharp market decline and the failure of many companies. At the same time, several businesses that survived that period—for example, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple—went on to generate extraordinary long-term growth. Meta, which was founded after the dot-com bust, illustrates a related point: companies that emerge from a subsequent technological cycle can also become highly successful.

The same distinction is important today. AI appears to represent a genuine technological transformation, while some individual companies, projects and valuations may nevertheless prove unsustainable. The central question is whether future cash flows will justify the capital being committed today. That requires investors and lenders to distinguish carefully between durable economic value and enthusiasm that has temporarily inflated expectations. A severe market correction is possible, but it is not an inevitable outcome of the AI revolution.

JG: Is there a theory here that with the Fed rate hike, businesses will increase prices and lenders will increase things like mortgage rates, therefore driving down demand and eventually resulting in lower prices?

RS: Yes, that is the basic theory, although businesses do not necessarily raise prices because interest rates increase. The main intended effect of the Fed action today is to reduce demand. Higher policy rates generally lead to higher borrowing costs for businesses and consumers. Consumers may pay more for auto loans, mortgages and credit-card balances, while businesses face higher costs for financing inventories, equipment and expansion. Those higher costs can cause households and companies to postpone spending.

Over time, weaker demand should make it more difficult for businesses to raise prices and may reduce the rate at which prices increase. In that sense, monetary tightening is intended to slow demand enough to bring inflation down without causing a severe contraction in economic activity.

The process operates with a lag, however, and not all borrowing costs move together. Mortgage rates, for example, are influenced heavily by longer-term Treasury yields and mortgage-market conditions rather than by the federal funds rate alone. Moreover, the recent rise in interest rates reflects several forces as I mentioned earlier—including persistent inflation, strong economic growth, fiscal concerns and increased Treasury issuance—so it will be difficult to isolate immediately how much of any subsequent decline in inflation is attributable specifically to [last week’s] Fed action.

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Good morning and welcome to the final stretch. We are now less than 50 days from the Midterm elections. Today I have some updates on efforts to interfere in those elections. You should also check out my conversation on election threats over at The Raid, where I spoke to longtime journalist Jon Carlos Frey. Despite the broken American healthcare system’s best effort to knock me off my horse (more on that on Saturday), I’m firmly in the saddle and ready to stay on top of everything related to Trump and Republicans attempts to interfere in the Midterms. If you support what you see here, please spread the word and consider becoming a paid subscriber. You can also show your support by buying us a coffee. Now, on to the news… - jg

On the heels of its crucial loss at the Supreme Court over its attempt to heavily restrict mail-in voting, the Trump administration is refocusing its efforts to interfere in the Midterms by trying to force states to purge voters — and planning to prosecute election officials who refuse to do so.

Here’s how this works: The Department of Homeland Security has compiled its own list of people it says are eligible voters. DHS wants states to remove those voters it has deemed ineligible, despite the fact that election officials are prohibited from last-minute voter purges by the 90-day “quiet period” of the National Voter Registration Act. If states don’t purge voters based on DHS’ (extremely faulty) lists, it looks like arrests are a reasonable possibility.

Like everything else the Trump administration is doing in regards to the election, this is completely unprecedented. The federal government has never arrested election officials this close to an election, just as the federal government through law enforcement agencies like the Justice Department has never seized ballots from state and local officials, like the FBI did with its January raid on a Fulton County elections warehouse.

The federal government has never used passport data, as it currently is, in order to identify voters who could be ineligible to vote. It will be Latino voters most affected by voter purges or intimidation stemming from Trump sending ICE or the National Guard to the polls. Why target Latinos? The Trump administration would say that it’s because they’re the most likely to be found on voter rolls where they shouldn’t legally be. The reality: Latinos tend to vote for Democrats, and Trump wants as few of those people able to vote as possible.

To back up Trump and Republicans’ false claims of widespread voting by noncitizens, last week, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, along with the DOJ, announced the arrest of 16 people across the country who had allegedly committed election crimes. Mullin and the DOJ claim that the voters were either lawful permanent residents or undocumented immigrants who had illegally voted in presidential elections. (Noncitizens voting in federal elections is prohibited by law, but noncitizens can vote in some state and local elections.) The arrests are part of a universe of roughly 1,600 cases of noncitizen voting the DOJ says it’s pursuing.

Those cases go back years, meaning they represent a minuscule fraction of the hundreds of millions of votes cast in federal elections over that time period — meaning that even if all 1,600 cases involved undocumented immigrants voting for Democrats, it would have had no impact on who won those elections. Still, Mullin, the DOJ, and the election denial movement are acting as if the 16 arrests and 1,600 alleged voter fraud cases are the smoking gun that proves widespread election fraud. They are not.

It’s likely that at least some of the people arrested last week didn’t know they weren’t supposed to vote in federal elections — they were automatically registered to vote when they got a driver’s license, for instance, or simply didn’t understand the distinction between being a lawful permanent resident and a full-fledged citizen.

But, as in the lead up to the 2024 election, Trump and Republicans will use the issue of noncitizen voting to lay the groundwork for saying this year’s elections were stolen. The obvious difference this time: Trump wields power over the federal government.

Now, Trump will, at minimum, use noncitizen voting to sow doubt in November’s election results. Slightly less likely but exponentially worse, Trump will use noncitizen voting as an excuse to send ICE or the National Guard to polling locations, and seize ballots.

These are just some of the options on the table. Which one Trump will use is a guessing game. Whether sending ICE or troops to the polls and seizing ballots holds up in court is another unknown. But by the time we reach that point we’re once again in a full-blown constitutional crisis.

The irony of Trump’s ploys is that they reek of how things work in banana republics and oppressive government regimes. While Trump and Republicans call Democrats “communists,” it’s Trump and Republicans themselves who are acting like socialist and authoritarian regimes throughout history — questioning the validity of elections, and sending in armed goons to ensure their side wins.

The dynamic of armed election interference should be familiar to anyone who is even vaguely familiar with the last 70 years of history in Latin America.

One of the lessons in those countries has been — as it’s also been more recently in Hungary — to simply vote the goon out of power by such incredible margins that even Trump’s supporters must concede that Republicans lost the election. It will also take some Republicans who have a shred of morals left to also concede. Based on what polls look like at the moment, it will be no surprise to any of them that Democrats will win in November. The only question is whether they’ll admit their losses publicly, or whether they’ll continue to support Trump’s efforts to undo the democratic process.

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A quick rundown today of all that ails Trump and Republicans as they try to make the case to voters to allow them to remain in power in Congress after November. If you appreciate what you see here, please spread the word, choose a paid subscription, or drop a few dollars in our Coffee Fund. Your support directly funds our independent, adversarial journalism. - jg

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We’re winning the war in Iran — which will be over right after the election. A “great healthcare plan” is right around the corner — forever “two weeks” away, according to Donald Trump.

The economy is doing so well that Trump has promised $5,000 checks to every American — as long as they elect Republicans.

These are some of the narratives that Trump and Republicans are trying to sell as November inches closer, and as Trump tries to buy votes in the midterms. But the reality of these competing catastrophes is far different than the rosy stories being told in congressional hearings and TV hits from Trump and members of his administration.

Here are a few of the disasters brewing as Trump tries to bribe Americans to vote for Republicans, and as Republicans try to convince Americans that everything is someone else’s fault.

Iran

In Iran, the situation has deteriorated rapidly. Iranian-backed Houthi forces have taken a key island in Yemen, giving them control of the Bab al-Mandab Strait, the second-most critical maritime shipping chokepoint in the world. Iran also says it has destroyed a U.S. drone over the Strait of Hormuz.

These developments come after last week’s violence in the Strait. Last week, Iran attacked 10 ships in the Strait of Hormuz and the U.S. blew up several Iranian oil tankers, causing oil prices to rise. Then, Iranian-backed militias in Iraq severely damaged a Saudi oil pipeline that bypasses the Strait of Hormuz, causing it to be shut down for at least the next few weeks, and maybe months. The damage to the pipeline is expected to cause a further spike in oil costs.

Also last week, Iranians damaged U.S. fighter jets at a base in Jordan, and acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao admitted that Iranian forces “blew the hell” out of a naval base in Bahrain in June.

Oil prices

The cost of oil is a major problem for Republicans and their working class base. Diesel is now averaging more than $6 a gallon, hurting the truck drivers, farmers, and construction workers who Republicans desperately need to show up in November. Trump is so worried about the cost of diesel fuel on his working class constituents that he has asked Ukraine to stop targeting Russian refineries.

With control of Congress and the White House, Trump and Republicans are running out of people to blame for the problems affecting the nation. Having deported hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the last two years, there are fewer of them to blame. In fact, the surge of immigration agents to major cities have caused job losses — and not just for the immigrants who have been arrested, according to a study released this month by the Brookings Institute. The study found that job losses outpaced arrests in 64 cities targeted by the Trump administration’s immigration crackdowns. In a city the size of Atlanta, about 13,000 jobs were lost thanks to the surge of immigration enforcement, the study found.

With fewer immigrants to blame, Trump and Republicans can always rely on Joe Biden as a scapegoat for a sluggish economy. But two years into the Trump administration, Trump’s tariffs are more of a factor on inflation than anything left over from the Biden years. Those tariffs “continue to exert upward pressure on consumer prices,” according to the Federal Reserve.

‘The government’

The first months of the Trump administration were dominated by Elon Musk and DOGE slashing 400,000 federal jobs, cutting contracts and government leases, and other efforts to reduce government spending. Now, we know that DOGE can’t account for 96 percent of the $215 billion it says it saved American taxpayers, according to a report released last month by the Government Accountability Office. After the cuts, Trump and Republicans teamed up to run a $1.8 trillion deficit in 2025.

That debt-accumulation continues apace.

The debt

The national debt continues to rise under Trump at rates similar to Biden’s term in office — or higher, depending on the next two years’ federal budgets, and crossed the $40 trillion last month under Trump. Trump claims his tariff revenues will help cut down on the deficit. While tariff revenue rose to $264 billion last year, it has since dropped as refunds required by a February Supreme Court decision have cut into the amount, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Meanwhile, the rate of interest on the national debt is outpacing growth in the form of GDP. While the Trump administration claims that economic growth can help to balance this dynamic, the level of growth that would be required hasn’t occurred since the 1990s.

Trump’s promised $5,000 checks to Americans — only if Republicans win the midterms, of course — would add $1 trillion to the national debt. That’s a steep price to pay for a single election cycle.

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In my first year in what was once called “the newspaper business,” the city editor of the paper gave me my weekend assignment.

I was an intern, and weekend assignments were always pretty bad — some fluff story about a local Boy Scout troop raising money, or a casserole cook-off. It was not the type of stuff a youngish, hungover reporter with a Nelson Algren complex wanted to spend a Saturday writing about. If anyone under the age of 25 is reading this, I know it must make me sound pretty old, but this was only 16 years ago, and this was the way it had been for a long time.

So, on one of those warm-but-crisp Midwest autumn mornings, I drove my grumpy, hungover ass out to Canton, Illinois for a September 11 memorial event at a local church. The editor — who I think would call himself a Reagan Republican but was also a committed truth-telling journalist with Hunter Thompson quotes on his wall — had joked with me about the event, which featured a monster truck and dirt bike jumping.

“Ask the pastor what dirt bikes have to do with 9/11,” he told me. I thought he was joking. Maybe he was not.

At the entrance to the event was a mangled piece of steel from the World Trade Center that, during its demise, had formed into the shape of a cross. People solemnly looked at it as they entered a field near the church.

We billed the event as a “unique” 9/11 memorial. I took the pastor’s words about how the historic attacks that had occurred just nine years earlier were part of the reason that Americans should accept Jesus Christ as their lord and savior, and folks who picked up their Sunday paper had a nice little story to read.

But the strange and, to me, troublesome blending of church and state — not to mention the religious iconography of what was, again, to me, a horrific tragedy that was nonetheless a historic event that had absolutely nothing to do with God and everything to do with U.S. foreign policy and its impact — was not lost on me. The attacks of September 11, 2001 were a terrible, violent shock to Americans. But they did not come completely out of nowhere. And on that day at the church in Canton in 2010, we knew that. By then, we had come to understand why the 9/11 attackers did what they did, as wrong and evil as it was.

Many Americans had also created a Christian-nationalist legend out of the attacks — a story that resulted in otherwise reasonable, perhaps more secular people, supporting or accepting a variety of authoritarian themes that continue to shape our society. Out of fear and anger, many Americans — for a time, myself included — went along with the nationalist fervor that followed 9/11, having little or no idea of its grave repercussions.

It wasn’t my job that day to explore these haughty topics, so I wrote up something that avoided any of that potential controversy and instead described the scene, got some quotes, and framed the event as one community’s way of remembering the fallen. We used to joke in the newsroom that anniversaries of events only really mattered when there was a five or a zero at the end of them. No one cared about the 59th anniversary of D-Day, for instance. But you better make a big splash on the front page when the 60th rolled around.

That muscle memory still resides in me, which is why I’m remembering that day in Canton on the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and thinking a bit more about what it means.

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By now, we know that the surveillance state that came in the wake of the attacks has become a daily part of our lives. The expansion of federal government and executive power has grown to a point that it seems there’s no going back. On September 11, 2001, the Department of Homeland Security didn’t even exist. Now, it’s the largest federal law enforcement agency, with unbelievably sweeping powers to spy on and apprehend citizens and noncitizens alike. Under Trump, the vast powers initially granted to DHS out of our desire to never allow an attack like 9/11 to happen again have reached their inevitable, authoritarian scope.

DHS is now a fully-fascist paramilitary organization that answers only to Trump and Christian nationalist forces in our government. Even under Democratic presidents, its power has expanded well beyond its original intent. Left unchecked, the agency will continue to expand its presence in everyday American lives, further threatening the liberties of even native-born men and women.

But DHS isn’t the only example of the authoritarian shift in American society. That shift was relatively slow at first and threatened primarily those here from Muslim countries, but has expanded to focus on anyone who doesn’t fit a narrow definition of patriotism that has now expanded to anyone who doesn’t subscribe to a white, Christian-nationalist vision of American life. Under Trump, this dynamic has only accelerated.

Following 9/11, the nation developed what I call the automatic hero complex. Under this framework, we collectively agreed to grant all first-responders the title and stance of heroes. It didn’t matter whether they were firefighters who responded to the World Trade Center or a paramedic in Peoria. They were heroes. But that designation began to apply more to police than anyone else. With this granting of hero status, we also gave away some of our collective skepticism of the power of police.

American law enforcement has used this permission structure to collect more and more funding from cities and states, and more acquire surveillance and investigative powers. Perhaps most obviously — because we can see it with our own eyes in the gear and dress of the average police officer — American law enforcement has become almost absurdly militarized.

The attacks of September 11 helped to shift the public’s perception of being a cop, which data shows is less fatal than being a roofer, to men and women who are risking their lives on the frontlines of wars against evil in their own communities. In reality, they’re often just writing traffic tickets.

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The great irony of 9/11 is that what began as a response to a war against us has become our own war against ourselves. Yes, 9/11 has been used as justification for our forever wars across the globe. But twenty-five years on, one of the unavoidable realities of our response to the attacks is that the American right has decided that as much as half the country is fundamentally anti-American for being skeptical or critical of the powers of law enforcement and right-wing government that have grown since that day.

Those who question or criticize the American right’s vision for the nation are effectively viewed as enemy combatants in this war.

At times, our post-9/11 war against ourselves has mostly been a culture war in which Republicans and conservatives decide who is, at heart, an American and who is not. But increasingly under Republican governments, the war is entering the physical realm, turning hotter.

Without a societal shift away from the authoritarianism of the American right — sweeping election wins for moderates, significant policy changes at the national, state and local levels, a rebuke of authoritarian belief systems and behavior at the community level — this war is only going to get hotter, and our decline will accelerate.

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Among the many threats to the midterm elections is a system being created by the USPS that will result in chaos for tens of millions of voters across the country who will vote by mail in November.

Many of those voters might not even receive their ballots if the Supreme Court allows the system to be fully implemented. Now, a USPS whistleblower says those inside the agency working on the system have called it a “shit show.”

The system requires states to provide a list of all people receiving mail-in ballots to the USPS. That list is checked against a second list of ballots — called a “manifest” — that contains voter information required to send the ballot: first and last name, address, etc. Only when the voter list and manifest match — perfectly — are election officials allowed to bring the ballots to a USPS facility to send them.

Then, there is a second check. If the scanning and processing system currently being created by the USPS flags any discrepancies between the list of voters receiving ballots and the corresponding information on the actual ballots — like an address change, or someone who has changed their name because they were married — then the ballot is flagged for rejection. But not just that ballot — every single other ballot in that batch, which can number in the tens of thousands of ballots.

This means that any minor technical discrepancy between a voters’ information on lists provided by states and their actual ballot would result not just in that individual ballot’s rejection, but every other ballot in the batch. In this way, tens of thousands of ballots at a time would have to go back to state election officials, who would then have to fix the lone error, and then re-submit the entire batch of ballots.

“As designed, the process is entirely unforgiving,” a USPS whistleblower wrote to Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) on Aug. 31. “It could delay ballots by the thousands in repeated verification cycles — and thus prevent states from mailing enormous numbers of ballots.”

Trump’s attempt to effectively stop millions of ballots from being sent to voters is just one of a dizzying number of ways that the president is directly interfering in November’s midterms on behalf of Republicans. Not on the ballot himself, Trump is nonetheless aggressively working to prevent Democrats from taking power in Congress, likely motivated by his fear of being impeached or otherwise held accountable for his and his administration’s rampant corruption and incompetence.

The Supreme Court has thus far avoided having to decide on the system at the center of the whistleblower’s letter, which stems from one of Trump’s executive orders on elections. But the court will likely decide on the matter before November. If the court approves Trump’s order and the USPS mail-in ballot system, it will throw the midterms further into chaos as states scramble to comply with the new system, and get ballots to voters on time. (In fact, some ballots like those to members of the military and overseas voters are already being sent out.)

The court may also choose to decide on a case being brought by the Republican National Committee that seeks to purge voters within the 90-day “quiet period” of the National Voter Registration Act. This 90-day window provided by the NVRA was created to ensure that large-scale voter purges — which are often the result of challenges brought by political parties and highly-partisan Republican activists — don’t disenfranchise voters close to an election. The RNC is arguing that because it believes (highly questionably) noncitizens are registered to vote in Arizona, the 90-day quiet period shouldn’t apply. If the Supreme Court decides in the RNC’s favor, it would pave the way for voter purges of voters with Hispanic last names in Arizona within months or weeks of the midterms.

These pending decisions by the Supreme Court are just two of the many, many ways that Trump and Republicans are seeking to interfere in the midterms. Here are a few other issues we’re tracking and ways to ensure your vote counts:

• Not only is the DNC’s lawsuit against the Justice Department over plans to seize ballots a warning that Trump clearly plans to do just that, but it’s also an important move to thwart those efforts: The DOJ could try to seize ballots, even without a warrant, according to a retired federal judge who spoke to The American Prospect, but states couldn’t proactively obtain court injunctions against such actions unless we know that such a policy currently exists. The existence of that policy is exactly what the DNC lawsuit seeks to reveal. As of today, the DOJ has been served and has yet to respond.

• It’s still entirely unclear what the Justice Department is doing with the thousands of ballots it took during an FBI raid of a Fulton County elections warehouse in Georgia in January. Speculation remains that the Trump administration will use the ballots to make further unfounded claims of fraud in the 2020 election, perhaps as pretext to declare a national emergency or invoke the Insurrection Act to take greater control of election administration in November.

• After the Trump administration threatened to withhold federal election security funding to Democratic states that refused to implement Trump’s demands on election administration, Democrats are asking the Department of Homeland Security to explain a delay in funds to states involved with the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC).

• Concerned over the pending USPS mail-in ballot chaos, Oregon will use more ballot drop boxes to allow voters to return their ballots.

• Democrats across the country are urging voters to check their voter registration to ensure it’s up-to-date, with some saying it’s crucial that voters vote early and even in-person. Early in-person voting in Rhode Island’s primaries is already double what it was during the 2022 midterms.

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It takes a lot of reading between the lines to fully understand the threats to elections and other anti-democratic behavior by Trump and Republicans. Much of what they do is obvious for a simple reason: they need credit from the election denial movement (which is indistinguishable from the MAGA base) for saying that elections are rigged and that people like Trump are doing something about it. Hence the SAVE Act, the seizure of ballots in Georgia, executive orders, Trump’s primetime speech, withholding of federal funds to force election rule changes, threats to arrest election officials, and on and on.

But a careful examination of these statements and actions is required in order to try to anticipate what’s coming next, and how it could impact Americans’ right to choose their own leaders. This guess work is at the center of a lawsuit filed by the Democratic National Committee last week that seeks to further expose the Trump administration’s plans to interfere in the midterms.

On Aug. 20, the DNC filed a fairly routine lawsuit alleging that the Justice Department and Homeland Security violated the Freedom of Information Act by not responding to requests for records about plans to seize ballots and other election materials in November. (Federal agencies often fail to comply with the statutory deadlines of FOIA, and suing those agencies in order to get records is a common way to force their hand.)

While holding the Trump administration accountable for not complying with FOIA is the important, technical reason for the lawsuit, its context is perhaps even more important. The lawsuit is the DNC saying, We think you’re going to seize ballots, so show us in court why and how you’re actually not going to do this. In other words, the DNC is saying it is reasonably foreseeable that Trump will seize ballots and other materials under the guise of a national emergency, to be declared at some point between now and November, as has long been expected by election observers and demanded by the election denial movement.

In its lawsuit, the DNC noted that Trump’s Justice Department has been threatening to arrest election officials in all 50 states if they allow ineligible voters to cast ballots in November. The threat comes under the overblown and outright false claims of widespread voting by noncitizens.

“These preemptive threats suggest that federal law enforcement may have already opened initial assessments, laying the groundwork for potential seizures of election materials prior to certification of the 2026 midterm election,” the lawsuit states.

The DNC also notes that the Justice Department has taken down guidance that stresses “non-interference” in ongoing elections — even if there is evidence of fraud — by federal law enforcement.

Threats to arrest election officials and the removal of the “non-interference” guidance are clues, according to the DNC lawsuit, that the Trump administration plans to seize ballots in November.

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We’re already in uncharted territory

Of course, federal law enforcement seizing ballots is not supposed to happen — and in fact prior to January, when the FBI raided a Fulton County elections warehouse, the seizure of ballots by the federal government from local authorities had not occurred in all of American history. (I’ve scoured articles and spoken to many legal experts to confirm this fact, which is also noted in this important Loyola Law School article from former Justice Department election lawyers Justin Levitt and John Keller.) Federal law enforcement shouldn’t be seizing ballots because the Justice Department is an extension of the executive branch, which has no constitutional role in administering elections.

The DOJ does, however, have a role in enforcing election law. That’s why we saw the raid in January: under the theory that election rules and laws had been violated during the 2020 election, an FBI agent in Atlanta applied for a search warrant from a magistrate judge. The judge approved the warrant even though it was based on exaggerated or outright false claims of fraud perpetuated by a variety of pro-Trump election denial activists, including three public officials in Georgia. American Doom filed a motion in court demanding that the DOJ reveal the names of some of the witnesses relied upon for the FBI agent’s affidavit, and won.

The judge probably shouldn’t have approved the warrant — it was based on claims of fraud that had already been investigated and largely dismissed by state authorities — but did so anyway, in part because judges are taught to have a “presumption of regularity” when considering requests from the Justice Department. This “presumption of regularity” means that judges are to assume that the Justice Department is acting in good faith, and has a good reason to be asking for whatever it’s asking for. Under the Trump administration, this quasi-legal precedent can no longer be relied upon, as has been well documented, particularly in relation to ICE tactics.

The judge in Georgia also would have considered the harm that seizing ballots from an election that had occurred more than five years ago would do to the local governments — Fulton County and the State of Georgia — that were the targets of the investigation. Considering that the ballots were from the 2020 election and not one that was occurring in 2026, the judge appears to have decided that seizing the ballots would not do significant harm to the ability of Fulton County and Georgia to carry out an election that had already occurred, as Levitt and Keller note.

But judges being asked by the Justice Department in November for search warrants to seize ballots in an ongoing election is an entirely different matter, Levitt and Keller point out. Theoretically, those judges should immediately deny these requests — seizing ballots in an election that has just occurred and has yet to be legally certified would directly interfere with an election process in which the executive branch has no role under the constitution.

Whether the Justice Department attempts to seize ballots is question number one. Question number two is whether judges will allow the Justice Department or other federal law enforcement to do so.

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A ‘national emergency’ to seize ballots

Clearly, the DNC believes it is likely that the Trump administration will attempt to seize ballots in November. If magistrate judges refuse to sign off on warrants for ballots and other election materials, the DNC anticipates that DOJ lawyers will try to go around those refusals by asking federal district court judges to approve the warrants, likely under the guise of some sort of national emergency.

The DNC anticipates this action because it has already occurred.

In January, as ICE agents swarmed Minneapolis, causing chaos, arresting thousands, and killing Alex Pretti and Renee Good, protesters took to the streets. In one infamous incident, former CNN anchor Don Lemon and independent journalist Georgia Fort accompanied protesters who entered a church led by a pastor who was also an ICE official. The Justice Department arrested Lemon and Fort along with two dozen protesters, charging them with various crimes.

But before agents could arrest some of those involved with the protest at the church, they had to obtain warrants for some of those arrests. Early in the case, a magistrate judge approved warrants for three people sought in connection with the event, but denied warrants for five others. The Justice Department then asked for a district judge to review the magistrate judge’s denial of the five warrants — a situation that, according to one judge in the Eighth District, had never occurred.

“I have surveyed all of our judges — some of whom have been judges in our District for over 40 years — and no one can remember the government asking a district judge to review a magistrate judge’s denial of an arrest warrant,” wrote Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz, who was appointed by George W. Bush and clerked for former conservative judicial icon and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. “The reason why this never happens is likely that, if the government does not like the magistrate judge’s decision, it can either improve the affidavit and present it again to the same magistrate judge or it can present its case to a grand jury and seek an indictment.”

Instead, the Justice Department appears to have believed it could simply get around the magistrate judge’s refusal to issue warrants by having a district judge sign off on the warrants under the guise of a “national emergency,” according to Schiltz.

The Justice Department argued that, if the five warrants weren’t issued, “copycats” would invade other churches as part of growing protests in the Twin Cities at the time.

“Apparently, the government believes that the arrests of the leaders of the Cities Church invasion — whose arrests have received widespread international attention — will not deter copycats, but arresting five additional suspects will,” Schiltz wrote in a January 23, 2026 letter to a judge at the Eight Circuit Court of Appeals. “The government has also argued that I must accept this as true because they said it, and they are the government.”

The Justice Department claimed that there was a “national-security emergency” that required Schiltz to reconsider the magistrate judge’s refusal to sign off on warrants for five protesters. Schiltz dismissed this claim from the DOJ as “frivolous.”

Justice Department lawyers will likely attempt to obtain search warrants for ballots and other election materials in November. Hopefully, the judges determining whether to issue the warrants will be up to speed on the case in Fulton County, as well as the DOJ’s questionable seizures of materials and investigations in at least five other locations across the country.

If magistrate judges refuse to issue warrants, the Justice Department will try to appeal to judges like Schiltz. Regardless, if any judge issues warrants for ballots and allows the Trump administration to seize them before results are certified, we’ll be — once again — in a full-blown constitutional crisis.

By seizing ballots before certification of results, the Trump administration can effectively kneecap Democrats’ chances of winning the House of Representatives and the Senate. Trump’s DOJ won’t seize ballots from Republican strongholds; instead, they’ll take ballots from places like Fulton County, where large swaths of Black voters largely cast ballots for Democrats.

Then, we’ll truly be in banana republic territory. In those less-free parts of the world, elections aren’t decided by how people vote, but on the people controlling what votes are counted — and how.

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Aliaksei Scharbaechenia described the ICE agents who he says beat him unconscious in a Turkish airport as having a “dog collar.” Scharbaechenia, 37, says he “braced” for what was about to come. One agent allegedly beat him over the head before another put him in a chokehold.

“I blacked out for a while,” Scharbaechenia wrote in June with the help of Free Them All VA, an immigrant advocacy organization. The collar was then used to restrain Scharbaechenia as his “body was placed on a cart” and loaded onto a plane back to Washington D.C., the subject of a “failed deportation.”

“Everytime I close my eyes, it still comes back to me when they were beating me, squeezing my neck,” Shcharbachenia told American Doom. “I couldn’t breathe.”

Scharbaechenia fled his native Belarus in the spring of 2025 after he said he was targeted by government authorities for speaking out about corruption. He wound up in Florida where, in August 2025, he was arrested by U.S. immigration authorities and taken to the Farmville Detention Center in central Virginia.

Scharbaechenia languished at Farmville for nine months before ICE put him on a plane to send him back to Belarus — without having even seen an immigration judge, Scharbaechenia told American Doom. But Scharbaechenia refused to board a plane from Turkey to Belarus, for fear that he would again be targeted by government authorities. So, U.S. immigration agents took Scharbaechenia back to Farmville, where his case has been classified as a “failed deportation,” and his future is uncertain.

Scharbaechenia is now one of an undetermined number of “stateless” detainees inside the U.S. immigration detention network. While the number of stateless people living in the U.S. — roughly 218,000 — is known, it’s not clear how many stateless people are currently in ICE detention. While Scharbaechenia may be among a relatively small number of these stateless detainees, he is far from alone in criticizing conditions inside ICE facilities, which are expanding as President Donald Trump’s administration arrests and deports more immigrants than ever before.

More than 580,000 people have been arrested by ICE and other immigration agencies since the start of Trump’s second term. The Trump administration has deported more than 590,000 people and over 65,000 remain in detention centers across the U.S. Meanwhile, more immigrants have died in custody during the first two years of the Trump administration than any similar time period since ICE and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, were created in 2003.

Meanwhile, at least 51 people have died in immigration custody or local jails under Trump, including several whose deaths remain deeply questionable, were the result of poor medical care, or have been declared homicides by local authorities, as American Doom previously reported. Another six people have died during ICE raids or stops — three were shot by ICE officers and three were injured while attempting to evade the agent.

Now, Scharbaechenia is back at Farmville, where he says access to medical care is lacking, and he and other detainees are punished with solitary confinement for speaking out about poor conditions.

“Nothing has changed,” Scharbaechenia told American Doom. “They refused to let me see the doctor. Things are not getting better.”

Beaten by U.S. agents in a foreign airport

On May 20, ICE escorted Scharbaechenia on a flight to Turkey, then to Azerbaijan, where he was supposed to transfer to a plane to his native Belarus — the final stop in his deportation. But Scharbaechenia refused to return to Belarus, saying that he had been targeted and followed while living there, and said people close to him had been targeted for speaking out about government corruption. Because of his participation in protests and criticisms of the government, returning to Belarus could result in persecution and potential death, he said.

In Azerbaijan, local authorities came to Scharbaechenia’s aid and stopped ICE from forcing him onto the plane to Belarus, he said. With help from the Azerbaijanis, Scharbaechenia boarded a plane back to Turkey.

After refusing to board a plane back to Washington D.C., Scharbaechenia was eventually taken to a holding cell in the Turkish airport, where U.S. immigration agents arrived. Scharbaechenia says the agents hit him over the head and placed him in a chokehold, causing him to lose consciousness.

“The ICE agents entered the room; I screamed for them not to touch me, but no one listened to me,” Scharbaechenia wrote. “I thrashed around like a cornered animal in the cage for 5–10 minutes until one of the ICE agents came up from behind and hit me on the back of the head; the next moment I was on the floor, and one of the ICE agents was choking me with both hands using a chokehold; I blacked out for a while, I couldn’t get enough air; I was suffocating. A second ICE agent put plastic ties on me, and my legs and arms were bound. I thought I was going to die; I couldn’t breathe, and my whole body felt weak.”

After the beating, Scharbaechenia was put on a plane to Washington D.C.

“Then a 9-hour flight,” Shcharbaechenia wrote. “Beaten, humiliated, sitting on the plane with my hands and feet bound, I thought for the first time in my life about how nice it would be if the plane crashed right now — this is torture.”

ICE and DHS did not respond to questions about Shcharbaechenia’s alleged beating, his treatment at Farmville, or the conditions there.

Now, it’s not clear what will happen to Shcharbaechenia. Failed deportations like his are rare but not uncommon, said Jeff Migliozzi of Freedom for Immigrants, an advocacy organization. Currently without a lawyer, the status of Shcharbaechenia’s immigration case is not known, according to a spokesperson for Free Them All VA.

But cases like Shcharbaechenia’s are the inevitable result of Trump’s mass deportation operation, in which agencies like ICE and others make “every shortcut possible” with “every guardrail eliminated,” Migliozzi told American Doom.

Isolation and poor conditions

Even before Shcharbaechenia’s traumatizing experience in Turkey, he faced poor conditions and punishment at Farmville, he says.

In March, Scharbaechenia wrote a letter to the ICE officials overseeing Farmville, describing dismal conditions there, including ill-equipped medical staff, lack of translation and legal resources, unavailability of kosher food, and freezing sleeping conditions.

Shcharbachenia blamed the conditions at Farmville for “serious and worsening ailments,” including a tumor on his right arm that went mostly untreated for months upon his arrival at the facility. Suffering from panic attacks, Shcharbachenia has been unable to access mental health treatment; without Russian translators, he has struggled to understand legal documents presented to him. Shcharbachenia says his panic attacks have been exacerbated by frigid temperatures in the facility, the result of air conditioning staying on even in the winter months.

In the close quarters of the rooms, Shcharbaechenia noted that many of the people coming in are sick, and even something as simple as covering his mouth gets him “called out by officers.” Shcharbachenia says he has been “punished for trying to bring attention to the crowded conditions.”

After sending his letter to ICE officials, Shcharbachenia was inexplicably taken to solitary confinement. Detainees at other facilities have complained of being punished by being placed in solitary, and the use of solitary confinement continues to grow under the Trump administration.

Shcharbaechenia’s complaints of poor conditions and lack of medical care at Farmville echo those made in ICE facilities nationwide abound. In May, 300 detainees launched hunger and labor strikes at the Delaney Hall detention centeri n Newark, New Jersey. The detainees complained of moldy and spoiled food and inadequate medical care. An attorney representing detainees there said her clients had been given “expired food and meals with worms in them.”

Some of the detainees who carried out the strike at Delaney Hall have alleged they were “beaten by ICE agents.”

Throughout Shcharbaechenia’s detainment at Farmville, he claims that the facility has had poor medical care. He has been denied mental health assistance multiple times, he said, In December, he developed “egg-sized tumors” on his arm, which he alleged have not been treated, causing him to lose sensation in his right pinky, Shcharbaechenia told American Doom.

After his alleged beating at the hands of ICE agents in Turkey, Shcharbachenia said that he had not been allowed to document the bruises or swelling he sustained from the incident or even see a doctor once he returned to Farmville. He complained of lumps on his head and recurring headaches.

“I think those two officers need to be punished,” Shcharbachenia said. “They have to take responsibility and abide by the law and should not act like that and treat people that way.”

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The amount of money Donald Trump, his family and friends are making off the presidency is historic. The conflicts of interest in his administration are unprecedented. The taxpayer dollars he is spending on vanity construction projects is unheard of. His handling of the Iran war is catastrophic. The economy is a house of cards built on rampant speculation over artificial intelligence and crypto, which Trump and his cronies are profiting from. The scale of Trump and others’ efforts to sow distrust in and likely try to overturn the midterm elections has no comparison in all of American history.

Such is the state of the nation less than 100 days from the midterm elections. Republicans across the country are aware of the grim realities facing Americans, even as they continue to pretend as if everything is going splendidly.

Those Republican voters who aren’t simply tired of the daily drumbeat of scandal, failure and corruption are probably checking out. Now, Republicans running for re-election face the most difficult battle in all of politics: convincing an unmotivated base to choose between the polls and the couch.

Depending on how bad things get between now and November, some of those Republican voters might even go as far as voting for a Democrat. They might even vote for some of those candidates who are — despite the best efforts of Republicans and their right-wing media allies doing their best to scare the folks about “communists” — speaking to working class voters.

When was the last time you heard Donald Trump say the words “working class?” Mike Johnson?

That’s why Republicans are scrambling to concoct new enemies for their base of voters to rally against. With more immigrants than ever before locked up or deported, communities across the country have been emptied out of the people that Trump and Republicans have used as scapegoats to climb to power. Now, it’s Democratic Socialists, “communists,” “jihadists,” as Trump said this week, transgender athletes, and Dr. Anthony Fauci that Republicans say their voters must show up in November to save America from.

The list of the enemies that Republicans hope will convince their voters to pay attention to instead of all of the very obvious corruption, incompetence, greed and waste of the Trump administration changes and grows with each passing day. And it is likely not working.

The American right’s dependence on grievance politics has been going on for much longer than Trump has been around, but in the last 10 years, the party has become almost completely reliant on it. Will it work again in November? Here are the facts of life that those culture war talking points and new enemies conceived by Republicans are up against.

Fiscal responsibility? Gone. No new endless wars in the Middle East? Gone. A return to a robust manufacturing economy? Oh whoops, we actually meant data centers. More and better jobs once we kick all the immigrants out? Not materializing. Locking up the “Epstein class” of liberal pedophiles? Shoot, it turns out that Trump and an awful lot of his friends were involved with the guy, and oh by the way no one is getting locked up anyway.

A “golden age” of winning? We’re getting knocked around by what amounts to a guerilla resistance in Iran, who have effectively duped us into depleting our arms supply on a pointless war that has no end. We have a top-heavy economy that caters — more than ever before, thanks to Trump’s open, rampant corruption — to the wealthiest people and the biggest corporations. Our diplomatic and military failures in Iran (and elsewhere, like Ukraine, not to mention all the allies we’ve isolated ourselves from over the last two long years), combined with our complete folding to giant global tech companies and some the world’s wealthiest people — Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg — have made us look weak and feckless not just to the world, but to the generation of Americans actually consuming reputable news. They do exist, and they are watching.

There is only so much lying and distracting you can do before even the biggest MAGA chuckleheads start recognizing the reality around them. Unless I am very, very much mistaken, that reality check is happening right now in cities large and small across the country.

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For more than a year now, I’ve been picking the brains of many sources throughout election administration, legal nonprofit and Democratic political circles to see what they’re doing about final move that Republicans will try to pull if and when they lose the midterms.

Some folks are prepared; others are not. Probably many more just aren’t talking about their preparations to me, or maybe any reporters. Bottom line: the lawyers who’ll end up fighting Republican challenges to elections — which are explained in great detail today at Zeteo with my colleague Asawin Suebaeng — are probably ready to go. I think they’ll have to be, because I don’t think there’s any way we get out of January, when the House forms itself, without Republicans trying to pull some bullshit like they did on January 6, 2021.

Zeteo

‘Doomsday Scenario’: How Trump and Republicans Could Steal Power – Even If They Lose

Note from our Editor-in-Chief…

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3 months ago · 61 likes · 1 comment · Justin Glawe and Asawin Suebsaeng

Election challenges have been fairly common in our history, with more than 600 of them occurring since the 1st Congress convened in the spring of 1789. When the 120th forms next year, I think we’ll see more challenges.

That’s because perhaps that biggest part of being a Republican in the Year of Our Lord 2026 is refusing to say that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. As such, if and when Democrats win enough races in November to take control of the House, Trump cultists in the House GOP caucus will effectively have no choice but to say Democrats stole the election.

They’ll follow Trump’s lead in saying the election was stolen, which he’ll have to claim in order to help Republicans cling to power in the House — and perhaps the Senate, which Democrats may have a shot at taking.

Why does Trump, firmly in his lame duck years and clearly more concerned with his many renovation projects than anything remotely related to policy, care who controls Congress? Because if Democrats win the House, they’ll provide a modicum of checks on Trump’s runaway executive power. Hell, they might even impeach him again, or otherwise hold him accountable for the many and obvious crimes and impeachable offenses he and his cabinet commit on a near-daily basis.

I encourage you to read today’s report on the doomsday scenario at Zeteo, which is the first in a series of stories we’re cranking out called Start the Steal. Later today, we’ll lay out the many, many ways that Trump and Republicans are trying to interfere in the midterms — and overturn the will of the American people in order to cling to the power they need to protect an out-of-control president.

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