It’s not just a brand new year; it’s a midterm election year. And the stakes this coming November are mind-boggling, so, of course, Republicans are starting to do everything they can to rig the election.

Just a week ago, for example, President Donald Trump’s Postal Service changed the rules about getting your mail-in ballot postmarked so it’ll be counted. Instead of postmarking letters when they’re received, Post Offices will now postmark them when they get “processed,” which may happen days later.

In the 2024 presidential election, the feds estimated that around 104,000 mail-in ballots nationwide weren’t counted because they were postmarked late; with this change, the number this fall and for 2028 could be in the millions.

Meanwhile, Republican secretaries of state are enthusiastically purging voters from the rolls as they get ready for this fall. Remember, reporter and economist Greg Palast found, using official federal and state numbers, that in 2024:

You’d think we each have a right to vote, rather than voting being just a privilege that Republican-controlled states could take away in dozens of different ways.

Republicans on the Supreme Court ruled, for example, that we have a right to own a gun. As a result, before a state or local government can take away your gun, they must first go before a judge to prove the necessity of doing so.

But, Republicans on the court tell us, Republican secretaries of state can eliminate your right to vote without even telling you; how does that make sense?

After all, the 14th Amendment to the Constitution references “the right to vote at any election” and even says that any state that violates that right shall lose members of its congressional delegation as punishment.

The 19th Amendment references “the right of citizens of the United States to vote…”

The 24th Amendment starts, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote…”

The 26th Amendment is all about “the right of citizens of the United States, who are 18 years of age or older, to vote…”

Additionally, the Constitution, in Article I, Section 4, says that Congress can make federal laws that overrule state laws restricting or regulating voting:

And, sure enough, Congress did just that in 1993 when it passed the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), sometimes referred to as the Motor Voter Act because, among other things, it provided for the option of instant voter registration when a person gets a driver’s license in every state in the union.

Now known as 52 U.S. Code § 20501, this law of the land opens with:

And it wasn’t a particularly contentious law when it was passed: every Democrat present in the Senate voted for it (Rockefeller missed the vote) as did all but two Republicans.

So how did we get from the Constitution repeatedly asserting a “right to vote” and Congress passing a law that unambiguously proclaims that right, to the current state of affairs where states regularly and methodically deprive citizens of their “right” to vote and instead claim that it’s merely a privilege?

As I lay out in The Hidden History of the War On Voting, much of the blame rests with the most conservative and regressive of our federal institutions, the Supreme Court.

The first real test of the NVRA came in 2018, when Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State, John Husted, went on a voter-purge binge (that hit Black, student, and elderly neighborhoods particularly hard) and was sued by the A. Phillip Randolph Institute for violating Ohio citizens’ constitutional right to vote.

Republicans are pushing a full-blown authoritarian agenda, and they know it’s so unpopular that the only way they can get it through is to suppress the vote and thus rig the system.

In a bitter 5-4 decision, the Republican majority ruled in Husted v Randolph that purging voters because they failed to return a junk-mail-like postcard was entirely legal.

It’s a practice that was called “caging” back when Karl Rove’s guy was allegedly doing it, and it was illegal then........

© Common Dreams