Undermining Our Election Systems
Authoritarianism Part II
“If by American democracy we mean a pluralistic, multiracial society of political and social equals, then American democracy as we know it began with the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.”[1]
Jamelle Bouie“Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.” [2]
White House confidante on the push for partisan and racial redistrictingBottom Line Upfront
A Democracy in Reverse
Since the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, the legal scaffolding protecting equal voting rights has been steadily dismantled. Black voters again face the old machinery of voter dilution and suppression. Trump’s second term has brought deliberate campaigns to entrench partisan advantage through gerrymandering, mid-decade redistricting, and federal intimidation of state election systems.
The Cartography of Control
Gerrymandering, once an occasional political sin, has become a governing strategy. Operation REDMAP set the blueprint: corporate-funded takeovers reshaped congressional maps to secure dominance. Mid-term redistricting in Texas, Missouri, and Florida signals open partisan warfare over geography itself—politicians now choose their voters.
Election Denial as Policy
Election denialism has evolved from fringe grievance into administrative doctrine. Conspiracy theorists now hold federal posts overseeing ‘integrity.’ Under Trump, agencies have demanded unredacted voter data, paving the way for purges under the guise of fraud prevention.
The Playbook of Distrust
The Brennan Center’s 14 denialist tactics—installing deniers in offices, intimidating poll workers, weaponizing lawsuits—have driven hundreds of election officials to resign. Strategic chaos has turned mistrust into a political weapon.
The Final Assault on the Voting Rights Act
The Supreme Court’s pending Louisiana v. Callais case could erase Section 2 of the VRA, the last defense against racial vote dilution. If struck down, Black and Brown representation across the South will wither. The fight to preserve 1965’s promise now depends on civic will.
Preface
In the final quarter of 2025, I will primarily focus my newsletter on Trump’s march toward authoritarianism and tie it to risks for racial justice and equity where relevant. In my first foray into the topic, I focused on Trump’s executive overreach – HERE..
Last week, I provided a high-level review of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the challenging journey to achieve racial voter parity, and how the Supreme Court’s Shelby v. Holder decision in 2013 initiated the slow dismantling of the Act. I also discussed the numerous attempts by states at racial gerrymandering, with increasing success in recent years. You can read the post here: HERE..
I concluded by describing how Chief Justice Roberts has been determined to dismantle the key parts of the Act since his time as a lawyer in President Reagan’s Department of Justice in the early 1980s.
This week, I explore the latest gerrymandering issues, the recent history and impacts of election denialism, and the current case before the Supreme Court that could lead to the end of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). Ultimately, this post is about how the refurbished, increasingly far-right Republican Party seeks to further undermine our election systems, nationally and state-by-state.
Introduction
I want to begin with a definition of gerrymandering, since it’s not a widely known term among those who aren’t deeply involved in policy and politics.
As Maryland Senator Angela Alsobrooks recently defined it for her constituents last week:
Gerrymandering is the deliberate manipulation of electoral district boundaries to give an advantage to a political party, group, or socio-economic class. While redistricting can be used to ensure fair representation for communities, it is often employed to dilute the voting power of certain groups and entrench the power of incumbents.For most of our post-Civil War history, the dilution has occurred at the expense of African Americans.
Redistricting in the Obama Era
In the post-Civil Rights era (1965 to now), a renewed commitment from those on the Right to gerrymander came after President Obama’s election in 2008. In 2009, “Republican strategists organized Operation Redistricting Majority Project (REDMAP) with $30 million in mostly corporate donations to convince voters to elect Republican state legislators by 2010.[3]
Their success led to the redrawing of maps in nearly a dozen large and small states after the midterm elections in 2010, leading to a 33-seat majority in the U.S. House.
This effort was driven by the desire to “make sure [Obama] had a hostile Congress that would keep him from passing legislation.”[4]
The net effect of gerrymandering is to favor one political party in an election. Once redistricting happens, when voters realize which party is likely to lose, it discourages their turnout.
Renewed State Redistricting
As I wrote last week, nine states are the most gerrymandered in the country; two are in Democratic-controlled states (Maryland and Pennsylvania), and the rest are in Republican-controlled states, mostly in the South (North Carolina, Kentucky, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas), as well as in Ohio and Utah. Specifically, North Carolina, Texas, and Louisiana officials redistricted in ways that adversely affected Black voters.[5]
Since the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder decision in 2013, states have been more emboldened to gerrymander for political and racial advantage. Sometimes lawsuits have stopped the efforts; other times, the states succeed.
What’s happening this year takes gerrymandering to a new level.
In June and July, Trump actively urged the Texas Republican party to redraw the state’s congressional maps to secure at least five more seats for Republicans in the 2026 mid-term elections. Trump believed this move would help ensure the Republicans retained control of the House for his full second term.
Mid-decade redistricting was relatively commonplace in the U.S. in the 19th century, occurring most often when a different party gained control of a state’s legislature. In the 20th century, it was extraordinarily uncommon.
In the 21st century, the vast majority of redistricting that occurred between Censuses came as a result of state-level judicial orders, following litigation that struck down and ordered new maps in states like Alabama, New York, Ohio, North Carolina, and Louisiana.[6]
Before this year, only Texas (2003) and Georgia (2005) changed their congressional maps independently (i.e., without court orders) after winning statewide elections.
In Texas, this shift resulted in six U.S. House seats changing from Democrat to Republican.[7]Following Trump’s order, the Texas legislature approved a new congressional map on August 29, 2025, which Governor Abbott then signed into law. It is currently being challenged in court. Texas Republicans believe it will win them five extra seats.
Then, in late September, the Republican Governor of Missouri signed a revised congressional map into law.
California, a ‘Blue’ state, has sought to counter Texas by passing a revised map in August that could add 5 new seats for Democrats. However, the proposal must first pass a citizen referendum this November.
Here are the other states now considering mid-term redistricting:
Indiana (Red state)
Kansas (Red)
Utah (Red)
Ohio (Red)
Louisiana (Red)
Maryland (Blue)
Florida (Red)
New York (Blue)
Illinois (Blue)
Every state should have an independent and nonpartisan commission to redraw maps every ten years. But that’s not happening any time soon (perhaps never).
Such partisan redistricting, no matter which party initiates it, fundamentally weakens the principle of fair representation by letting politicians select their voters, rather than the other way around.
In 2025, this aggressive push from Red states has prompted a similarly partisan, although arguably defensive, series of countermeasures in Democratic strongholds like California and New York.
There are more Red states than Blue states capable of making this happen, which increases the chances for Republicans to control both Houses of Congress for all of Trump’s second term.
Changing the rules midstream instead of waiting for the 2030 Census to be completed, while also admitting they’re doing so to boost their chances for victory, is simply brazen.
Even before Trump’s directive to Texas’s governor (and then to other governors), Florida had already embarked on redistricting that eliminated a majority-Black district, and in July, Florida’s Supreme Court upheld its redistricting.
The majority-Black district that was divided had, until now, united Black communities from Jacksonville to west of Tallahassee (about 200 miles).
Florida’s court ruled that the district violated the Constitution’s equal protection guarantees.Remarkably, earlier in this redistricting effort, the state legislature had included this North Florida district in its redistricting map. But Governor DeSantis vetoed the bill and then forced his own map through the legislature during a contentious special session he convened for that express purpose.[8]
I only learned this week that a 2019 Supreme Court decision (Rucho v. Common Cause) ruled that federal courts cannot intervene in partisan gerrymandering cases, effectively leaving such disputes to state courts and legislatures.
Common Cause and its Fight for Fairer Congressional Maps
Common Cause, a nonpartisan, grassroots organization, has filed lawsuits against gerrymandering for more than a decade.
In 2024, Watauga County, North Carolina, drew up and approved its own balanced districts.
Then, state lawmakers ignored the will of voters and drew their own gerrymandered maps. Common Cause later filed a lawsuit and filed an additional one with the NAACP that divided Black communities in ways that reduced their voting power.
In Missouri, Common Cause collaborated with local groups to gather enough signatures to block a newly passed gerrymandered map designed to silence Black voters and divide Kansas City, allowing total GOP control. The state will now have a citizen referendum on the 2026 ballot to stop gerrymandering altogether.[9]
In Wisconsin, Common Cause was part of a coalition that secured fairer congressional maps after a decade of organizing and litigation. In Pennsylvania, the organization is also pushing for fair voting districts to be overseen by an independent, nonpartisan commission.
Last year, Common Cause published a report grading all 50 states on a shared set of characteristics for their redistricting processes. The criteria they used included:
“transparency, opportunities for public input, willingness of decision makers to draw districts based on that input, adhering to nonpartisanship, empowerment of communities of color, and policy choices such as rejecting prison gerrymandering.”[10] Prison gerrymandering is the practice of counting incarcerated individuals at the prison’s location rather than their home address to inflate a district’s population.
Here are the results.
As you can see, only two states are graded in the A range, and encouragingly, another thirteen achieved scores in the B range.
On the downside, 16 students scored from C+ to C-, and worse, 13 received Ds, and another seven received failing grades (Fs).[11]
In other words, 40% of states received failing or near failing grades.
This is a profoundly dysfunctional way to operate our democracy, leaving it to parties to decide how boundaries should be drawn. This process will likely not change any time soon, but, as I wrote above, if we want to see more functional and fair politics in America, giving independent nonpartisan statewide commissions the authority to draw maps would be one essential way to make change.
Election Denialism: The Personnel
Before I discuss the current Supreme Court case that might overturn the Voting Rights Act, I want to focus on who President Trump is empowering and enabling to damage our voting processes and systems nationwide.
In August, Trump appointed Heather Honey, a leader in the right-wing movement that falsely claimed the president’s defeat in 2020 resulted from widespread fraud with Pennsylvania’s ballots, as the new point person in the Homeland Security Department (HSD) on election “integrity.” [12]
The administration established the position to help “protect” the vote in the 2026 midterms next November. Because Trump has continued to argue so vociferously since 2020 that he actually won the election, he now seeks to undermine our current electoral system in multiple ways.
In March, before her appointment, Honey proposed that Trump should declare a national emergency related to elections and then have the administration impose new election rules on state and local governments, which currently run elections without federal meddling.
Trump has also hired Kurt Olsen to review the 2020 presidential election results. Olsen is a close ally of Mike Lindell (the MyPillow guy), one of the strongest supporters of the alleged 2020 election. Remember, Lindell was found liable in 2025 for defamation against Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic (both companies that use electronic voting systems) in separate lawsuits.
Marci McCarthy, who, as head of the DeKalb County (GA) Republican Party, made false claims about the county’s voting machines, is now the director of public affairs for the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
Earlier this year, CISA placed nearly all of its election experts on leave during a major downsizing of the agency. CISA’s responsibility during election seasons is to deter “attacks on election systems and combat disinformation about voting.”[13]
This makes election systems critically vulnerable to disinformation, which is CISA’s mission to combat.
Meanwhile, Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) has tried to strong-arm states into helping compile a comprehensive national voter roll to show, presumably, that thousands of non-citizens vote illegally.
For example, in July, the DOJ demanded that Colorado submit all records (unredacted) related to the 2024 presidential election, including voting equipment, one of nine states the department has made such requests to this year.
With access to this unredacted data, federal agencies could employ flawed data-matching algorithms to erroneously flag thousands of legitimate citizens, creating a pretext for mass voter purges in targeted districts ahead of the election.Most states have so far rejected these efforts, along with HSD’s attempts to have states upload voter information to verify immigration status. In two states, Minnesota and Pennsylvania, Common Cause has filed a lawsuit to stop the administration from accessing voters’ private data. The organization already won a similar case in Nebraska.
Beyond those nine, a few states (e.g., Alabama, Indiana) have already struck deals with the administration allowing the Department of Homeland Security “to access a database to verify the citizenship of registered voters.”[14]
Election Denialism: The Methods
The Brennan Center for Justice has monitored various forms of election denial since 2020 and released its “The Election Deniers’ Playbook for 2024” last year. They have identified 14 different methods that activists and officials continue to use to deny or cast doubt on elections.
They range:
From deniers running for office to their subsequent refusal to concede.
From efforts to discredit voting machines to tampering with voting equipment and sensitive voter data.
From recruiting election deniers to serve as poll workers to lobbing threats against election officials and workers.
From anti-voter lawsuits to anti-voter legislation.[15]
And the list goes on.
Let’s look at places where their efforts have already begun to unlevel the electoral playing field.
In 2022, election deniers won statewide offices that oversee elections in Alabama, Indiana, South Dakota, and Wyoming. At the federal level, after the 2022 midterms, we now have 180 members of Congress (all Republicans) who have questioned or denied the 2020 presidential election results.
During that election season, eight counties across New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, and Pennsylvania either refused to certify or significantly delayed certifying their election results.[16]
Also in 2022, the FBI had to warn election officials and workers in seven states about the
“unusual level of violent threats” they were seeing. Activists on social media forced a top Arizona election official into hiding over safety concerns. Pre-election harassment that year caused election officials “in Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin to leave their positions before the midterms. …
[and] since the 2020 election, 26 states have enacted, expanded, or increased the severity of an estimated 120 election-related criminal penalties for people involved in the election process.”[17]This has caused a mass departure of election officials across the U.S. since 2020.
At least five states—Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, and Texas—have allowed denier activists to challenge large numbers (sometimes an unlimited amount) of voter registrations, aiming to disqualify voters and remove them from the rolls. These actions can intimidate voters and overwhelm election offices.
Florida, Virginia, Texas, and Ohio have set up offices for election “integrity” to investigate so-called election ‘fraud’ by mostly targeting Black voters for arrest on fraud charges.
In 2022, litigants filed more than 90 lawsuits to restrict individuals’ ability to vote by citing conspiracy theories about voting-by-mail and drop boxes in three states alone—Wisconsin, Arizona, and Pennsylvania. In 2023, 32 states “introduced 150 restrictive voting bills many of which would limit mail voting or impose new voter identification requirements.”[18]
This summer, Trump has indicated that the federal government will assume primary responsibility for regulating and administering elections to prevent fraud by noncitizens.[19] If he follows through, this will become yet another of the hundreds of court cases his administration is already battling.
Trump has also called for eliminating mail-in voting and electronic voting at polls because he believes they encourage widespread fraud. Trump, in a characteristically blunt directive on TruthSocial, urged Texas Republicans to redraw the maps: “They [states] must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them.”[20]
Louisiana v. Callais: The Supreme Court Case that Could Complete the Unraveling of the Act
Americans committed to fair voting in the country, especially to prevent Black (& Brown) voters from being marginalized, are anxious these days about how the Supreme Court might decide in one of its current cases: Louisiana v. Callais.
First, it’s important to understand that Congress passed an amendment to the VRA in 1982 with strong support to require states to create majority-minority congressional districts. This was aimed at ensuring the African American community would begin to see representation in Congress and in state legislatures that more accurately reflects their population size.
It’s important as well to remember that in 2006, Congress reauthorized the Act unanimously for another 25 years. It was signed by Republican president George W. Bush.
A mere seven years later (Shelby v. Holder), the Supreme Court struck down key sections of the Act (Sections 4 and 5).
While that 2013 decision removed federal preclearance requirements, the 2019 Rucho v. Common Cause ruling went a step further by declaring partisan gerrymandering beyond the reach of federal courts, effectively opening the floodgates for the very maps Shelby had once prevented. Voters had become all but powerless to challenge any gerrymander.[21]
So, now to the case itself.
After the 2020 Census, Louisiana’s legislature drew a congressional map with only one majority-Black district out of six, despite Blacks constituting about one-third of the state’s population. A federal court ruled that the map diluted Black voting strength in violation of Section 2 of the Act. The state legislature then redrew the map to create a second majority-Black district, but a group of White voters claimed this was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
The Supreme Court permitted the second district to be included in the redistricting map for the 2024 election but agreed this fall to review the constitutionality of Section 2 of the Act. Section 2 bans voting practices that discriminate based on race.
Until now, Section 2 has been interpreted to require the creation of majority-minority districts.
If the court rules in the White litigants’ favor (essentially striking Section 2), it would severely restrict states’ ability to create majority-minority districts to address vote dilution, necessitating, when a new Congress is in power, new ironclad federal legislation.
What a Ruling Against Section 2 Would Mean
Many Democrats fear that the Supreme Court is about to rule in this case that will broadly invalidate Section 2 and put the final exclamation point on the end of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
If that truly is the case, it raises several issues:
For Louisiana, will Black voters receive fair representation going forward?
We know throughout our history, including aggressive attempts in southern states for the last six decades, that when gerrymandering occurs there, “it is always at the expense of Black voters and to the advantage of White voters and ultimately White legislators.”[22]
So, the answer is no, Black voters in Louisiana and other southern states will not receive fair representation anytime soon.
Depending on how quickly the Court rules, it is entirely possible that the ruling will impact the 2026 midterm elections.
In the longer term, it could easily cause Democrats to lose at least a dozen majority-minority districts across southern states (AL, MS, SC, LA, TN, FL) and could, over time, mean far less Black and Latino representation in both Congress and state legislatures.[23]
Remember, African Americans are a significant population segment in nearly every southern state.Stripping Black communities of meaningful political representation also risks that their concerns will largely be ignored.[24]
If gutted, it will jeopardize civil rights protections in every arena you can imagine—housing, employment, education, etc.—”by suggesting that race can never be considered, even when used to remedy current discrimination.”[25]
Can the John Lewis Voting Act Help?
It is unclear what remedies will be necessary to restore the key principles of the VRA if the Court nullifies Section 2.
Members of Congress introduced the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act in both the House and Senate this past summer, aiming to modernize key protections of the Act.
According to the Brennan Center:
“It would reintroduce a more up-to-date preclearance system, under which states and localities with recent histories of voting discrimination would be required to obtain federal approval from the U.S. Department of Justice or a designated federal court before implementing changes to their election laws or practices.
The Act would also codify and strengthen the legal standards under Section 2, making it easier to challenge laws that dilute minority voting power or impose disparate burdens on voters of color.
Beyond restoring federal oversight, the bill would expand transparency and accountability in election administration. It would require jurisdictions to justify changes that affect polling locations, voter identification rules, disenfranchisement practices, or other election operations—especially in areas with large minority populations—by demonstrating a compelling interest in preventing fraud or ensuring orderly elections.”[26]
With the judiciary retreating, the fight to protect voting rights now falls to a new generation of legislative action and grassroots organizing, which will determine whether the promise of 1965 endures.
Next week, we’ll look at politicizing democratic and independent institutions while eroding civil liberties.
Footnotes
[1] Jamelle Bouie, “The Death of the Fourth American Republic,” New York Times, August 6, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/06/opinion/supreme-court-voting-rights-act.html
[2] Shane Goldmacher and Nick Corasaniti, “Texas Pushes Redistricting Into an Era of ‘Maximum Warfare,’ “ New York Times, August 2, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/02/us/politics/texas-redistricting-democrats-republicans-midterms.html.
[3] Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, August 2, 2025,
.
[4] Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, August 2, 2025,
.
[5]. “Most Gerrymandered States 2022,” World Population Review, https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/most-gerrymandered-states.
[6] Bill Kramer, Mid-Decade Redistricting Returns as States Abandon Century-Old Norms, Multistate, September 2, 2025, https://www.multistate.us/insider/2025/9/2/mid-decade-redistricting-returns-as-states-abandon-century-old-norms.
[7] Ibid.
[8] “Florida Supreme Court upholds congressional map that eliminates a majority-Black district, PBS, July 17, 2025, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/florida-supreme-court-upholds-congressional-map-that-eliminates-a-majority-black-district.
[9] “BREAKING: We’re going to court against gerrymandered maps,” Email from Common Cause, October 8, 2025
[10] “Charge Report: Community Redistricting Report Card,” Common Cause, June 11, 2024, https://www.commoncause.org/resources/charge/.
[11] Charge Report: Community Redistricting Report Card, Common Cause, https://www.commoncause.org/resources/charge/.
[12] Alexandra Berzon and Nick Corasaniti, “Trump Empowers Election Deniers, Still Fixated on 2020 Grievances,” New York Times, October 22, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/22/us/politics/trump-election-deniers-voting-security.html.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Jonathan Shorman, “Trump’s DOJ wants states to turn over voter lists, election info, Colorado Newsline, July 16, 2025, https://coloradonewsline.com/2025/07/16/trumps-doj-voter-lists-election-info/.
[15] Lauren Miller Karalunas and Wendy R. Weiser, “The Election Deniers’ Playbook for 2024,” Brennan Center for Justice, May 3, 2023, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/election-deniers-playbook-2024.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Trump Order Could Disenfranchise Millions of Voters, Jacob Knutson, Democracy Docket, March 25, 2025 https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/trump-voting-elections-executive-order/.
[20] Matthew Mpoke Bigg, “Trump says he wants to get rid of mail-in ballots.” New York Times, August 18, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/18/us/politics/trump-mail-ballots-voting-machines-election.html.
[21] David Daley, Trump Isn’t the only one to blame for the Gerrymander Mess, New York Times, August 14, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/opinion/trump-roberts-supreme-court-gerrymander.html.
[22] Jamelle Bouie, “Donald Trump and John Roberts Have a Lot in Common,” The New York Times, August 6, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/06/opinion/supreme-court-voting-rights-act.html.
[23] Richard L. Hasen, “How the Supreme Court could aid the GOP’s redistricting games,” MSNBC, October 28, 2025, https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/supreme-court-voting-rights-redistricting-roberts-rcna235949.
[24] What Happens in the South Doesn’t Stay in the South: Louisiana v. Callais – The Supreme Court Case that Could Enable Republicans to Rig Congress,” Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter, p. 5.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Brennan Center for Justice, “The John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act”