Losing the Vote, the Administration Reaches for the Courts and the Count

Start with what the map is telling the people in power. In Arkansas — one of the most conservative states in the country — Republicans have spent millions of dollars playing defense, a tell that the ground is moving under them. In Ohio, the MAGA candidate Vivek Ramaswamy's bus tour has imploded as venues refuse to host him, after an attack ad featuring Democrat Amy Acton's estranged mother drew bipartisan outrage; a top Ohio Republican told Zeteo, "It's that damn ad." Acton, speaking after a Cleveland rally alongside Barack Obama, said Trump and Vance should "look at the facts." In Florida's Doral, the city with the largest Venezuelan population in the country, some voters say the administration's policies have left them discouraged.

That is the pattern beneath the headlines: where ordinary people get a say, the administration is losing ground. And so the response has been to move the contest somewhere people don't decide.

The clearest case is Alaska, where the Trump administration has filed a lawsuit that seeks to block the results of the upcoming election if Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan loses. Attorneys for Democratic candidate Mary Peltola and Senate Democrats have asked a federal judge to throw it out. Read it plainly: a sitting administration is asking a court, before a single vote is counted, to void an election its man might lose. And it is not confined to one state — the same Justice Department is filing lawsuits over voting disputes in California and Alaska at once. In California, federal prosecutors are pressing the state to "quickly" verify 20,000 ballots, a directive election workers warn could disenfranchise citizens.

That filing is not a one-off. The administration is petitioning the Supreme Court to take up 13 additional cases this term, by The Hill's count — and unlike the lower courts, the justices choose which fights they hear. The strategy depends on a friendly bench and a steady pipeline pushing the same direction: more power to the executive, fewer checks from anyone who answers to the electorate. Losing at the ballot box is survivable if you can relitigate the loss in front of judges you helped install.

The machinery runs past the courtroom door. A census designed to deliberately count fewer people while telling us less about them is its own kind of vote-rigging — one conducted with a form instead of a ballot. Julie Morita and Richard Besser warn it will leave the nation ill-prepared for future outbreaks and pandemics. The people written out of the count are not a random sample. They are the same communities the state is already moving against: in Ingram, Texas, a local cop signed on to help ICE deport his own neighbors, tearing the town apart in the process.

Put the threads together and the logic is coherent, if ugly. Erase people from the census and they stop counting for representation and resources. Deputize local police to ICE and the migrants who might otherwise organize learn to stay invisible. Stack the Supreme Court's docket and the executive's defeats get reversed on appeal. Sue in advance — in Alaska, in California — and even a clean electoral loss can be tied up in litigation. Each move answers the same problem: the administration cannot win a fair count, so it sets out to make the count matter less.

This is what power does when consent runs out. It does not persuade the discouraged Venezuelans of Doral or win back the venues slamming their doors on Ramaswamy. It routes around them. The cost lands on the undercounted, the deportable, the Californians told their ballots need re-checking, and the voters in Alaska now being told their choice is provisional on the administration's approval — the people, in other words, who were supposed to be the ones deciding.