The GOP has a plan to undermine free and fair elections. We must stop them

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Donald Trump is deeply unpopular. The Republican Party has little to show for its time in power. Prices are up, and the economy is stagnant. We are at war in the Middle East.

The GOP is not acting like a party trying to persuade voters to support its candidates — because it isn’t. Instead, the Republican Party’s entire strategy boils down to this:

I have written about each of these tactics separately. But with less than 100 days until the election, it is important to understand that they are part of one holistic strategy.

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For example, the threat to place federal agents near polls is not only aimed at intimidating immigrant communities. Closing roads and imposing checkpoints will be used to make voting more inconvenient for everyone in high-density Democratic areas.

The same is true of so-called proof-of-citizenship laws. For U.S. citizens born in the United States, proving citizenship is surprisingly difficult — requiring either an unexpired U.S. passport or an original birth certificate. Except in five states along the Canadian border, driver’s licenses — including REAL ID — will not do the trick.

Women who changed their last name when they married face additional hurdles. Their current last name won’t match the name on their birth certificate, leaving a passport as their only straightforward option.

Then there is the vast array of typical voter suppression techniques Republicans are set to deploy — making it more difficult to vote by mail, reducing the number of early voting days, targeting college students, and rejecting ballots.

This cycle has seen an explosion of litigation over these technical rules. The Republican Party has used its vast pile of cash to litigate case after case aimed at challenging laws that allow people to cast ballots and have them counted.

We have fought back, and in the biggest case — Watson v. RNC — we won in the U.S. Supreme Court. As a result, hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots that were set to be discarded if the RNC had prevailed will now be counted.

But the most significant legal fights this election cycle have been over Donald Trump’s efforts to collect vast troves of sensitive voter data from the states. He wants this highly personal information to build a nationwide database of registered voters that he controls. Once in possession of such a database, his administration would dictate to states which voters must be removed from their current rolls.

The threat to free and fair elections is existential. Indeed, there is no more important fight happening in the courts right now than this one.

The Department of Justice has sued 30 states for access to this data. So far, they are 0–17 in those cases, including eight defeats before judges nominated by Trump. But they are appealing these defeats, and the fight in court continues.