The cancellation of elections has begun

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“We should not be waiting for the next shoe to drop,” Wendy Weiser, vice-president for democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice, warned last week. “There is a full-blown effort to seize control of some of the mechanisms of our elections and to lay the foundation for interfering in upcoming elections.”

In a normal universe, if a president of the United States floated the idea of the federal government “canceling”, “nationalizing”, “taking over” “fraudulent” elections, it would garner 24/7 media coverage and likely tarnish that president’s reputation for the remainder of his or her term.

But we aren’t in a “normal universe,” are we?

Midterm elections are nine months away, and it’s unlikely most are paying attention to them at this point. But that’s exactly what the current regime fulfilling Russian president Vladimir Putin’s wish list is counting on. It’s hoping that by the time November rolls around, people will be so weary of the fire hose of perfidy, corruption, lies, and everything else going on in their personal lives, they won’t care about armed ICE agents standing sentinel outside polling places “for national security”. Maybe they won’t care about the millions purged from voting roles because they’ve been suspected of being “illegal”. Maybe they won’t even bother showing up to vote.

If that happens, it’s over. There will no longer be a United States of America as we recognize it. The fix would be in.

But let’s be optimistic and assume more people are paying attention now, are horrified about the possibility of the United States sliding into a Russianesque strongman autocracy, and will be sufficiently outraged to top last year’s impressive election outcomes.

That is precisely why the most corrupt regime in recent American history is RIGHT NOW attempting to subvert this year’s and the next presidential election.

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Technically, the president cannot unilaterally cancel elections. Under federalism, elections are constitutionally administered at the state level. A dictatorial president’s fearful whim cannot just sign them away.

But states procedurally chipping away at election laws and processes through gerrymandering, voter ID laws, polling location access changes, and absentee and mail-in voting availability, are how the 2026 midterm and possibly 2028 presidential elections could be quietly “canceled”.

And they’re telling us they’re going to try to do it.

White House Press Secretary — and propaganda delivery device — Karoline Leavitt told reporters she could offer “no guarantee” ICE goons would not be at polling sites.

Last week, Steven Bannon, former senior advisor to the pedophile protector pretending to be president, pronounced on his “War Room” podcast, “We’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November”.

Addressing Democrats, he threatened, “We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again. And you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stolen.”

History professor and one of the foremost scholars of fascism, Dr. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, recently warned:

It could be the Insurrection Act, it could be trying to have a state — some kind of state emergency to cancel the election. ICE could be used in violent ways or intimidating ways to get people to stay home. All kinds of tricks could be used. They’re not going to give up without a fight.

It doesn’t have to be that overt, though. Republican-majority state legislatures can work to undermine election integrity by engaging in “legal” or semi-legal shenanigans.

It isn’t like they don’t already.

Investigative journalist Greg Palast has done amazing work the past decade uncovering the machinations the republican party has employed to suppress voters’ voices.

In a piece he wrote in June titled “Trump Lost. Vote Suppression Won.”, Palast explains about the 2024 election:

Trump lost. That is, if all legal voters were allowed to vote, if all legal ballots were counted, Trump would have lost the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Vice-President Kamala Harris would have won the Presidency with 286 electoral votes.

And, if not for the mass purge of voters of color, if not for the mass disqualification of provisional and mail-in ballots, if not for the new mass “vigilante” challenges in swing states, Harris would have gained at least another 3,565,000 votes, topping Trump’s official popular vote tally by 1.2 million.

And he brings the receipts.

“Here are key numbers,” reported Palast:

4,776,706 voters were wrongly purged from voter rolls according to US Elections Assistance Commission data.

By August of 2024, for the first time since 1946, self-proclaimed “vigilante” voter-fraud hunters challenged the rights of 317,886 voters. The NAACP of Georgia estimates that by Election Day, the challenges exceeded 200,000 in Georgia alone.

No less than 2,121,000 mail-in ballots were disqualified for minor clerical errors (e.g. postage due).

At least 585,000 ballots cast in-precinct were also disqualified.

1,216,000 “provisional” ballots were rejected, not counted.

3.24 million new registrations were rejected or not entered on the rolls in time to vote.

Thom Hartmann wrote a piece titled “The GOP’s New Civil War Against America Isn’t With Bullets — It’s With Ballots” in which he stated:

From Georgia to New Jersey, from Congress to the courts, the GOP is in the middle of an all-out assault on the very foundation of American self-governance: the vote. And unlike Trump’s attempts to steal the 2020 election in full public view, this campaign is quieter, more technical, and far even more destructive.

Hartmann warns:

The New Civil War the GOP has declared on America is in a way reminiscent of the Old South’s Confederacy, although this time it isn’t being fought with bullets; it’s with ballots.

The 2025 elections and the 2026 midterms and beyond will be fought not just on the campaign trail, but at your county elections office, at your state legislature, and in your mailbox.

And if we don’t demand that our Democratic state officials gerrymander, purge, publicize, litigate, and employ every other legal method to counter this GOP assault on democracy, we may wake up one day soon and find that, like in Russia and Hungary, the ballot has become meaningless.

There’s a reason the Texas legislature tried to aggressively gerrymander a year and half before upcoming midterms.

In December, the un-elected monarchs on the US Supreme Court gave Texas the green light to redistrict, a move that is predicted to hand republicans five more U.S. House seats this November.

In her dissenting option, Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, explained, “[The decision] ensures that many Texas citizens, for no good reason, will be placed in electoral districts because of their race. And that result, as this Court has pronounced year in and year out, is a violation of the Constitution.”

Just like GOP-run states rushed to roll back decades of racially motivated vote suppression after the the pre-clearance requirement in the Voting Rights Act was eliminated, GOP-run states are now emboldened to follow Texas’s lead.

Dean Obeidallah explained:

In Florida, GOP Gov Ron DeSantis declared…he’s “seriously” looking at asking the Florida Legislature to redraw the state’s existing congressional map to add more GOP seats to Congress. And in Ohio, the GOP legislature will be re-drawing the congressional maps this fall. All of this to establish one party rule on the national level — exactly like Trump’s close friend Viktor Orban has achieved in Hungary.

Now that Democrat Taylor Rehmet just won a special Texas state senate election in which he flipped a district that had gone 17 points in 2024 to Jefferey Epstein’s best friend, and Democrat Chasity Verret Martinez just flipped a republican district by 13 points in Louisiana, the republican party has an even greater inclination to cheat.

In September, the New York Times reported the Justice Department (DOJ)’s civil rights and criminal divisions are actively compiling a national voter database — something that has never been done before — to “revive lies of a stolen election, or try to discredit future election results.”

It isn’t like we didn’t see this coming.

Two months before the Times reported it, Greg Palast explained in his piece “Evil Scheme to Purge Half a Million Voters”:

The violently partisan Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, announced that he is removing tens of thousands of voters who live in addresses that Republicans rarely haunt: office spaces used as housing [and] homes with 10 or more registrants.

That’s ON TOP OF the **480,000 voters** the State is about to remove as “inactive voters.

Another way states are surreptitiously rigging it so only those they want to vote can and those they want to sideline are disenfranchised is through passing more restrictive voter eligibility laws.

According to the *Brennan Center for Justice*:

In 2025, state legislatures enacted at least 31 restrictive voting laws, the second highest total since the Brennan Center began tracking this legislation in 2011. At the same time, state legislatures enacted at least 30 expansive voting laws, in a departure from recent years, when the country saw significantly more expansive laws enacted in a given year than restrictive laws. Thirty of the 31 restrictive laws and all 30 expansive laws will be in effect for the 2026 midterms, and parts of the remaining restrictive law will also be in effect.

***Between January 1 and December 31, 2025, at least 7 states enacted 8 election interference laws. All are on track to be in effect this November.***

Those restrictive laws entail abridging registration, early voting or mail-in voting periods; requiring additional proofs of citizenship (proof of citizenship is already required on enrollment applications); limiting polling locations to make traveling to them more inconvenient; purging voters from the rolls; eliminating universal mail-in voting; and intimidating voters at the polls.

Writing for Democracy Docket, Yunior Rivas reported:

In recent years, red-state voters have approved initiatives to end partisan gerrymandering, raise the minimum wage, expand healthcare access and protect reproductive rights, among other progressive steps. In 2026, GOP lawmakers are pushing back harder by rewriting the rules: proposing higher vote thresholds to pass ballot measures, manipulating ballot language, burying petitions in red tape and working to overturn or ignore results.

One of the most subtle — and insidious — ways is by messing with something as simple as the mail.

Back in the lifetime ago of August 2024, the Associated Press (AP) published a warning from state election officials across the country about the US Postal Service (USPS)’s inability to handle the anticipated glut of mail-in ballots for the upcoming November election. *Newsweek* published a story confirming the postal service was changing delivery times.

In 2020, at the end of the former host of Celebrity Apprentice’s term 1.0, the Russian Manchurian Candidate said the quiet part aloud when he admitted to Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo he was blocking Postal Service funding in a coronavirus relief bill to hamper Democrats’ mail-in voting efforts.

Earlier that year, then-Postmaster General Louis DeJoy warned about “major operational changes” in the postal service, like mail sorting machines being removed, overtime being curtailed, and carriers being ordered to leave behind undelivered first-class mail.

This past December, the postal service changed the rules about postmarking letters when they’re received. Now, offices will postmark mail when “processed,” which may happen days after being brought to a post office. This may not seem like a big deal in an age of email, text, and social media until we recognize its intent — to disqualify voters’ mail-in ballots that may not now be “received” in time.

This is a quiet, under-the-radar age of sabotage most people will not even notice, but is, in effect, “canceling” potentially thousands if not millions of mail-in ballots.

To put that into perspective, around 104,000 mail-in ballots nationwide weren’t counted for the 2024 presidential election because of late postmarks. The USPS’s recent change could result a decrease in the millions this fall and for the 2028 presidential election.

On January 14, the SCOTUS handed down a 7–3 ruling in Bost v. Illinois State Board of Elections that states Illinois Rep. Michael Bost (republican, of course) could challenge a state law allowing the counting of mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day as long as they are postmarked before.

Right-wing legal group Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton characterized the decision “the most important Supreme Court election law ruling in a generation.”

No kidding.

In a recent study, the Brennan Center for Justice explained:

From the new research, we know that voters whose ballots were rejected in that primary were significantly less likely to vote in later elections. Specifically, voters whose mail ballot requests were rejected in the 2022 primary were 16 percentage points less likely to vote in the 2022 general election. And the trend continued for the 2024 primary election — a full two years later.

Worse, these weren’t sporadic voters. “85 percent of those whose mail-in votes or ballot requests were rejected voted in the 2016, 2018, and 2020 general elections”.

Disenfranchising the vote is all perfectly “legal” if it’s done through bureaucracy and litigation.

A perfect example of this is the so-called “S.A.V.E.” Act, which, if passed through Congress and signed by the president, would require American citizens to show documents like passports or birth certificates to register to vote. Some may wonder what’s wrong with that until we understand that more than 21 million Americans don’t have those documents. About half don’t have passports.

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The Fifth-Avenue tax cheat is itching for someone to throw a brick at an ICE agent so there will sufficient pretext to invoke the Insurrection Act.

There’s a lot of talk about this lately with its share of misinformation.

First, the 1807 law that allows the president to deploy active-duty military onto American streets does not allow for the suspension of elections. It allows federal soldiers to assist local law enforcement with carrying out suppressing civil unrest, but it does not permit violation of constitutional rights and civil liberties.

According to the Brennan Center again:

It is illegal to deploy federal troops or armed federal law enforcement to any polling place. In fact, it is a federal crime for anyone in the U.S. military to interfere in elections in any way. More specifically, it is a crime, punishable by up to five years in prison, to deploy federal “troops or armed men” to any location where voting is taking place or elections are being held, unless “such force be necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States.” The law, which dates back to the end of the Civil War, originally also allowed troops at the polls when necessary to “keep the peace,” but that exception was removed more than 100 years ago.

Of course, this would require someone with a strong moral compass and respect for the rule of law willing to adhere to it, which, as we have seen, this regime is not exactly willing to do. So maybe we shouldn’t be breathing a sigh of relief yet. With no one holding this chaotic band of rogues accountable, it’s going to try anything.

Remember that anyone blindly supporting this regime is going to get a pass, so someone showing up at a polling place to “check IDs”, “make sure everyone is a citizen,” or “make sure they aren’t voting for Democrats”, while illegal, is probably not going to get anything more than a slap on the wrist, at least as far as the federal government is concerned. So don’t be surprised to see MAGA goons standing around at polling sites out to intimidate people into leaving without casting ballots. In fact, we should count on it. We should also count on republican secretaries of state “finding some discrepancies” in certain vote tallies.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer was recently asked in an NPR interview if she assumed pro-Trump forces would attempt to interfere with ballot counting. She responded, “It would be a mistake to assume that they’re not going to. So I don’t know precisely what it is that they might come up with. But we’ve got smart, sophisticated, savvy people around the tabletop that we will continue to get prepared.”

There’s a line in George Orwell’s iconic novel 1984: “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”

That’s why the former host of Celebrity Apprentice is so obsessed with 2020. If he is able to “erase” any evidence of legitimate loss, no one can prove him wrong when claims future elections that don’t go his or the republicans’ way are “rigged”.

The reason Bannon and his fellow criminal syndicate brothers and sisters have been pounding the drum of the “stolen” 2020 election is so that it will become gospel. It’s pounded away at in right-wind hate media, and prominent people repeat it so there’s widespread belief the most secure election in history that elected Joe Biden with more votes than any presidential candidate in history was illegitimate.

Evidence of trying to cast this down the memory hole came last week when Director of National “Intelligence”, Democratic turncoat Tulsi Gabbard is reported to be “conducting her own review of the 2020 election,” and traveled down to Georgia to seize almost 700 boxes of 2020 election documents.

Why?

Recall on Jan. 2, 2021, the convicted felon, who was weeks away from having to cede the presidency to Joe Biden, tried shaking down the Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 more votes.

Raffensperger rightly refused.

Democrats kicked serious ass in November, and Vladimir Putin’s adjudicated sexual assaulter sidekick’s poll numbers are tanking. Where before it seemed Democrats had little chance of re-taking control of the Senate this year, in addition to the House, pollsters are furiously re-figuring that prediction with the entrance of Alaska Rep. Mary Peltola into the Senate race. With the international rules-based order of liberal democracies now sadly turning their backs on an 80-year alliance with the United States, we are becoming the pariah state we never imagined becoming. The economy is failing. Fossil fuel corporations are enjoying putting the final stake in the environment’s heart. ICE is gunning people down in American streets. No wonder the geniuses calling themselves our “federal government” want to scare us into believing they’ll snatch away our right to vote. It doesn’t mean they won’t try, though.

Elections in America are at the core of our representative government. They are the lynch pin holding the together. Likely you know someone, or several, or claim “Elections don’t matter.”

If that were true, there wouldn’t be so many people in power at the state and federal levels working overtime to undermine elections’ security, availability, and legitimacy. Those who claim “Elections don’t matter” have just bought into the con.

Check your voter registration, especially if you live in a republican-controlled state.

Canceling elections doesn’t happen with a grand pronouncement. It happens slowly, administratively, on paper, behind desks and doors — and most people don’t even know they’ve lost their ability to vote until it’s too late.

If we are going to have even a chance of ensuring future fair elections, we need to be laser focused on this year’s midterms. If those go badly, it could mean the end of the republic.