The chartered flights pulled back from the gates at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport.
It was a little after 3:00 p.m. on Monday, July 12, 2021. The runways radiated heat, the Texas summer sweltering around ninety degrees. Onboard: more than fifty of the sixty-seven Texas Democratic state representatives. And once the flights went wheels up, all of them risked arrest.
The lawmakers were fleeing the state capital in order to deny the Republican majority the quorum needed to pass new voting restrictions with, at that point, just under a month left in a special legislative session called largely for that purpose. The Texas House was set to reconvene the following morning but could not proceed without the Democrats present.
At stake was the fate of new state election legislation that would rein in local voting initiatives like drive-through and twenty-four-hour voting, and further tighten the rules for voting by mail. The measures, if passed, would also bolster access for partisan poll watchers and ban local election officials from preemptively sending out applications to request mail-in ballots.
Democrats cried foul. They argued that the measures were being put into place on a false pretense. Republicans were using Trump’s erroneous claim of voter fraud, and the resulting doubt he had created in the nation’s elections, in order to ram through proposals that would dramatically cut back turnout, particularly among Democrats. Those efforts, the Democrats claimed, were in response to a surge in voting during the pandemic and were meant to slow down Texas’s evolution into a swing state.
The flight—which drew some scrutiny for its lack of masks and plethora of beer—landed in Washington a few hours later. The Democrats fanned out in hotel rooms and TV studios across the District of Columbia and took to the airwaves.
“Bottom line, there is nothing special about this special session. It’s based on the big lie—Trump’s claim that he won the 2020 election,” said State Representative Gina Hinojosa, a Democrat from Austin.
They were hailed as heroes on the Left and did dozens of interviews, many on CNN and MSNBC. They wanted to lobby Congress to pass federal legislation that would protect voting rights across the country and overrule what would be passed in Texas. Democrats had initially stalled the bill when they had walked out of a standard legislative session in May, but then Republicans had called for the special session weeks later. The Democrats then considered flying to the home states of waffling US senators but feared that Republican governors would send them back to Texas. To block the pending legislation, the Democratic lawmakers needed to stay away through the end of the special session, which could last as long as thirty days under the state constitution.
They left families and loved ones behind as they fled Austin. It was worth it, they said, as was the risk: absent lawmakers could be legally compelled to return to the state capitol. Republican governor Greg Abbott, who made tightening election rules a priority, slammed the move as a dereliction of duty.
“Texas Democrats’ decision to break a quorum of the Texas Legislature and abandon the Texas State Capitol inflicts harm on the very Texans who elected them to serve,” he said.
In the end, Abbott didn’t need to send the Texas Department of Public Safety to forcibly retrieve the state lawmakers and bring them back to the Lone Star State. The Democrats stayed away in solidarity for weeks, but then cracks began to emerge over strategy, personal lives, and concern that they needed to act on COVID-19 legislation. And they couldn’t stay away forever: the Republicans would eventually get the votes needed to pass the measure. Time was on the Republicans’ side. It was inevitable.
By late August, enough Democrats had returned to Austin to allow the special session to commence. The sweeping election laws passed, over the howls of voting rights activists and communities of color, particularly in the state’s Democratic strongholds, the big cities of Houston, Austin, Dallas, and San Antonio. And the new laws’ impact was swiftly felt.
On March 1, Texas held the nation’s first primary of 2022. And, due to the enforcement of strict new ID and registration requirements, early in voting, a massive number of mail-in ballots were rejected in Harris County, which includes Houston, when the laws first went into effect.
Because of the 2020 election, it had become harder to vote. And it wasn’t just in Texas. The Big Lie had metastasized and was now more than a talking point or a call to action.
It was translating into policy.
Trump’s false claims of election fraud spread far beyond the White House, far beyond the 2020 election. His refusal to accept defeat created a constitutional crisis, with the president using the powers of government in a desperate attempt to hold on to power. His lies led Americans to doubt their own democracy; they had led nearly half the nation to refuse to accept their new president as legitimate; and they had inspired thousands to storm the US Capitol and commit violence in their leader’s name.
But the impact of the lie didn’t end when Joe Biden placed his hand on a thick, 130-year-old family Bible to take the oath of office to become the forty-sixth president of the United States. Nor was the lie relegated to petulant emailed statements sent from Palm Beach and regurgitated in Trump-friendly corners of the conservative media.
It spread to nearly every statehouse in the country. It was picked up by state legislatures and local newspapers. It became a defining issue in congressional elections, as well as down-ballot contests for mayor and city council.
It became an excuse. It became a reason to act.
Republicans across the country used Trump’s relentless claims of fraud to justify revisiting local election laws. The Big Lie was not just a former president ranting and raving on Twitter. It no longer was just the hot rhetoric that inspired an insurrection. It was now also the cold, methodical process of legislation. It infected the boring backroom process of drafting a bill and trying to quietly steer it through a legislature. Trump’s false claims were the lifeblood of new policy, providing cover for something that had long been a GOP goal: to add more ballot restrictions, to tighten the election process.
And the burden of these changes would fall squarely on the shoulders of Americans—the young, the very old, voters of color—who tend to vote Democrat.
In short, the Republicans were making it more difficult to vote. And that’s not all they were doing.
Elections for secretaries of state are usually little-noticed affairs, with candidates typically benefiting from voters who cast straight-ticket ballots: if a voter is casting a ballot for a Democratic candidate for governor, for instance, they tend to pick Democrats in the other races too. But in 2021 and 2022, money began pouring into the campaigns for secretaries of state and other legislative elections. And support and endorsements began flowing from Mar-a-Lago.
Why?
Because in the United States, national elections are conducted on the local level. Outside of the final certification stages that take place under the Capitol dome, elections are held in the states. Regulations are set in state legislatures, and how the votes are counted—and which votes are counted—are determined at the state level, through election boards, legislatures, and secretaries of state. A GOP stranglehold over those seemingly minor offices would allow the party to both tighten voting laws and, potentially, certify the election results only if its favored candidate were to win.
By the fall of 2021, Trump’s emailed statements became so frequent that they were easily ignored, becoming almost the white noise of the political discourse. Often, they were endorsements for one Republican lawmaker or another, a blessing highly coveted in GOP circles but often unnoticed by the mainstream political press. But one endorsement that September raised eyebrows: it was for State Representative Mark Finchem, who was running for Arizona secretary of state.
That is a race usually too local for a former president to offer an endorsement. But Trump was drawn to Finchem, who had promoted QAnon conspiracy theories, attended the January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally, and was photographed later that day at the US Capitol. Trump’s statement saluted him for his “incredibly powerful stance on the massive Voter Fraud that took place in the 2020 Presidential Election Scam.” And it wasn’t even the first time Trump had backed a candidate for a state secretary of state: he did the same in Michigan and Georgia. All three of his chosen candidates supported his lies about the election and were vying for jobs in battleground states where the position’s current occupant had opposed Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. Trump was trying to stack the deck. There was no “2020 Presidential Election Scam.” But this time, elections could actually be rigged. And Trump and his allies were trying to rig them. Trump’s claims were not dead: they were alive and well and shaping the battle for the ballot. The Big Lie would not just define the 2020 election. It was intent on dominating 2022 and 2024 as well.
In spring of 2021, advisers to Donald Trump agreed to an interview for this book to take place later that year. But as more about its subject was released, the former president backed out of the interview.
The right to vote is perhaps America’s most sacred right. It also has a torturous, violent history. And it has truly been available to all Americans for only a short time.
When the Constitution was ratified, the right to vote was given only to white male property owners. Over the next few decades, the property requirements were dropped, but the franchise remained an exclusive privilege. Women have had the right for a century, after the decades-long women’s suffrage movement finally resulted in the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. The Fifteenth Amendment sought to protect the voting rights of Black men after the Civil War but, after a brief flurry of progress during Reconstruction, a series of discriminatory practices and legal barriers—namely the Jim Crow laws in the South—deeply restricted their right to cast a ballot and be recognized as equal citizens. Poll taxes, literacy tests, new laws, intimidation, and outright violence were used to keep Black people from voting. It took the Voting Rights Act of 1965 for those barriers to be outlawed at the state and local levels.
And an extraordinary set of circumstances was needed for it to happen even then. President John F. Kennedy had been wary at first of fully and publicly embracing the cause of civil rights, for fear of the backlash it could provoke among Southern Democrats whose support he needed for his reelection bid. The president believed in the cause, but he and his brother Robert, the attorney general, tried to signal that it would be a second-term priority. But events overtook them, as the Freedom Riders moved across the South, sit-ins were held throughout segregated states, and violence erupted.
And when Governor George Wallace blocked the door of the University of Alabama to prevent it from being integrated, Kennedy was compelled to act, proposing a civil rights bill and, in a televised national address, declaring it both a constitutional and “moral” issue. Kennedy later hosted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders of the March on Washington the same day that King gave his famed “I Have a Dream” speech, on the steps of a monument to the man who had ended slavery a century before.
That was August 28, 1963. Kennedy was killed in Dallas less than three months later.
But the new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, took up that mantle and benefited from the goodwill of a nation mourning the assassination of a beloved young president. Johnson, a master of the Senate, was also particularly well positioned to take advantage of the moment: he knew how to navigate Capitol Hill and, as a southerner, could better relate to those opposed to the efforts. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a significant step, making discrimination in public facilities and federally funded programs illegal.
The following year, after a landslide reelection, Johnson pushed for the Voting Rights Act and, as he made his final case, drove his point home by quoting “We Shall Overcome,” a gospel song that had been turned into a protest anthem for the civil rights movement.
“It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life,” Johnson said. “Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”
John Lewis, the civil rights activist who later became a legendary congressman, watched the president’s speech with King. Lewis said Dr. King wiped a tear from his face when Johnson quoted the song. It was an important step on a journey that, just over four decades later, would lead to the election of the nation’s first Black president. Lewis cried his own tears that night.
But the battle for voting rights would still flare up every few election cycles. One front: gerrymandering, the fight every decade to draw new borders to congressional districts that would stack the deck for one party over the other. That has long resulted in bizarre sights: districts that resemble no traditional geographic shape at all but rather are drawn to keep a lawmaker in power or keep one voting bloc together. In early 2022, for instance, the GOP tried to redraw North Carolina’s congressional districts in order to stuff Democratic cities into tiny blue districts and spread other Democrats across light-red areas, diluting their influence. The result: even though Trump had narrowly edged out Biden in the state, 50–49 percent, the new map would yield ten red seats and just three blue ones. A federal judge tossed it out.
Republicans have traditionally bested Democrats in the process, and voters of color have tended to pay a steep price in the gerrymandering cycle. But, as of early 2022, the conventional wisdom was that the two parties had played to a draw, and neither party looked likely to gain a large number of congressional seats as a result of the altered lines. It remains a deeply cynical, problematic process. Normally, Republicans would want to tighten election security, which in turn would tend to restrict access to the ballot. Democrats would usually go the other way, aiming to make it easier for more people to vote.
For decades, those fights, though important, would mostly be contested out of sight in the courthouses and back rooms of American democracy.
The aftermath of the 2020 election brought them to center stage.
Republicans wasted no time. Most of the new state legislatures elected that November were seated two months later, in early January 2021. Within a month, thirty-three states introduced, prefiled, or carried over 165 measures to restrict ballot access, well over four times the number of measures being considered in that same period a year before. The reasons were clear, if not plainly spoken: it was a backlash to the historic voter turnout in 2020 and grounded in a series of baseless and, at times, racist claims of voter irregularities and fraud.
And that was just the beginning, before much of the political world was paying attention. A new battlefield was quickly drawn, in which there would be a pitched partisan conflict over the future of American democracy.
Broadly, Republicans focused on two pieces of the electoral system: the administration of elections and restrictions on voting, particularly mail-in ballots that were widely used during the pandemic. Some areas sent mail-in ballots to all voters, even if not requested. Other localities expanded voting hours or placed twenty-four-hour drop boxes or drive-through areas for people to place their completed ballots. Forty-three percent of voters cast ballots by mail in 2020, making it the most popular method, according to the Census Bureau. Another 26 percent voted early in person, while 27 percent voted on Election Day itself, far less than normal, according to the Pew Research Center. Democrats in particular flocked to the two forms of early voting, far outpacing the GOP in some states—a trend that raised significant alarm among Republicans.
The GOP, nodding to Trump’s lies, moved to curtail absentee-ballot drop boxes by claiming without evidence that they were susceptible to fraud. New laws restricted identification requirements for voting by mail and banned states from proactively sending out mail-in ballot applications to all citizens. Other provisions aimed to shorten the time frame during which absentee ballots could be requested. And many of these measures appeared poised to disproportionately affect voters of color, who often relied on drop boxes and polling stations with longer hours.
The efforts, to many, evoked the nation’s long history of racial discrimination at the polls. One such flash point was the renewed Republican push to require voters to show valid identification—and the debate over what constitutes valid ID—in order to vote. This GOP talking point predated Trump but was given new life in early 2021 after the former president repeatedly declared, without evidence, that some of the votes for Democrats were actually being cast by noncitizens, illegal immigrants, and dead people.
Democrats have long argued that voter ID laws depress turnout, particularly among low-income voters of color for whom it would be more difficult to obtain a driver’s license or other government-issued identification card. The American Civil Liberties Union has long opposed such measures, noting that the voters they would impact are disproportionately low-income, racial and ethnic minorities, the elderly, and people with disabilities.
Republicans have countered that IDs are required for many aspects of daily life, including boarding an airplane or picking up a package at the post office—and, therefore, should be required to vote too. They also argue that a requirement to show ID would prevent fraud. But statistics don’t back up that claim. In a widely respected study, research by a Loyola law professor found that between 2000 and 2014, there were only thirty-one incidents of voter ID fraud out of one billion ballots cast.
But that wasn’t all. Some of the legislatures took aim at how elections are overseen, stripping some local officials of their powers or pursuing partisan reviews of election results. And it didn’t happen only in battleground states. In Arkansas, for instance, the GOP-run legislature passed a bill that allowed a state board of election commissioners—composed of six Republicans and just one Democrat—to investigate when issues arise at any level of the voting process, from registration to voting to ballot counting to the certification of results. And if needed, the legislation authorizes that panel to “institute corrective action.” It was all but a free pass to change a result it didn’t like. In Utah, an effort to stop mail-in balloting was defeated in February 2022, but supporters of the measure filled five overflow rooms in the Salt Lake City capital, the biggest crowd veteran reporters could remember gathering there. The bill’s proponents vowed to try again.
The targeting of state and local election officials was a new frontier in trying to game the system. Not usually in the spotlight, the officials became vulnerable simply by doing their jobs. In a grim irony, they became political pawns because of the commitment to duty—in the face of threats—displayed by some of their brethren after the 2020 election.
State secretaries of state came under fire. Georgia’s Brad Raffensperger needed security after he refused Trump’s demand, in that infamous recorded phone call, “to find” the 11,780 votes it would take for the president to flip the state. Several armed protesters menacingly stood around Michigan secretary of state Jocelyn Benson’s home in December 2020. A tweet sent to Colorado secretary of state Jena Griswold, a Democrat, read “Bullet. That’s a six-letter word for you” and “I’m really jonzing to see your purple face after you’ve been hanged.” A voice mail left for Arizona secretary of state Katie Hobbs in September 2021 included this message, which she shared with CNN: “I am a hunter—and I think you should be hunted. You will never be safe in Arizona again.”
The threats didn’t appear to be organized nationally, since many came from the officials’ home states. None of the public servants were ready for this. Their offices didn’t have the budgets to monitor threats, nor had any of them been assigned regular security before. No systems were in place at the state or federal level to support them, and the Department of Justice acknowledged that the federal government did not have the infrastructure needed to handle the situations. And the targets weren’t just secretaries of state, who at least had gotten a taste of public scrutiny during their runs for statewide office. They were city commissioners, town clerks, volunteers. Nearly one in three local election workers said they felt unsafe because of their jobs, with about 17 percent of those who responded saying they had received threats, according to an April survey on behalf of the Brennan Center for Justice, which tracks voting bills and advocates for federal election legislation.
One of them was Al Schmidt.
A bespectacled bureaucrat and father of three, Al Schmidt didn’t look like a person who would draw the wrath of violent extremists. He was one of the three Philadelphia city commissioners charged with overseeing election-related affairs for the city. He was even a Republican.
A week before Election Day, an ominous voice mail was left for him, declaring that the election board members were “the reason why we have the Second Amendment.” A short time later, two men were arrested for making threats against the Pennsylvania Convention Center, where ballots were to be counted and where Schmidt and his colleagues were to be stationed. The men were armed with two loaded semiautomatic Beretta pistols, one semiautomatic AR-15-style weapon, as well as dozens of rounds of ammunition.
After Pennsylvania was called for Biden, giving him the White House, Schmidt appeared in the media to defend his role in the process. That drew Trump’s attention.
“A guy named Al Schmidt, a Philadelphia Commissioner and so-called Republican (RINO), is being used big time by the Fake News Media to explain how honest things were with respect to the Election in Philadelphia,” Trump tweeted. “He refuses to look at a mountain of corruption & dishonesty. We win!”
The death threats followed. Schmidt’s wife and children moved out of their family home. Schmidt’s and his parents’ houses received around-the-clock security for months into 2021.
Perhaps even less likely perpetrators of a global conspiracy to deny Trump a second term were the mother-daughter duo of Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss. Moss was a clerical worker in the election office of Fulton County, Georgia, where Atlanta is located. Freeman, her mother, took on a temporary job to help count ballots. Their alleged plot? The two Black women were accused of cheating Trump by pulling fake ballots from suitcases hidden under tables at a ballot-counting center.
Rudy Giuliani falsely claimed that video footage showed the women engaging in “surreptitious illegal activity” and acting suspiciously, like drug dealers “passing out dope.” In early January, Trump himself singled out Freeman, by name, eighteen times in his infamous call with Georgia’s secretary of state. He called the sixty-two-year-old temp worker a “professional vote scammer” and a “hustler” who “stuffed the ballot boxes.” And a publicist for the rapper Kanye West—the hip-hop and fashion mogul briefly considered a presidential run but largely aligned himself with Trump—even visited Freeman and pushed her to admit to the alleged offense.
The women were terrified. Freeman called 911 several times in December, saying, according to records, that she had gotten a wave of “threats and phone calls and racial slurs.” She told police: “It’s scary because they’re saying stuff like, ‘We’re coming to get you. We are coming to get you.’”
Two days later, a panicked Freeman called 911 again, after hearing loud banging on her door just before 10:00 p.m.
“I don’t know who keeps coming to my door,” she said in a recording, which was first obtained by Reuters.
“Lord Jesus, where’s the police?”
Freeman quit her job. Moss took a leave of absence. No one was charged in connection with the harassment.
These incidents across the two states underscored something many Americans never thought about: that election workers are often low-paid employees and, in lots of cases, volunteers. So many of them showed real bravery at their posts during the pandemic—as well as taking on an unprecedented wave of harassment and threats. And now, some states were passing legislation that put them under more scrutiny and undermined their authority.
The GOP rhetoric that accompanied the move to make the voting changes fueled widespread doubts about the integrity of American elections and delivered fervent partisan gamesmanship to parts of the democratic process that once relied largely on orderly routine, helpful volunteers, and good faith. New measures that would impose even relatively modest restrictions on voting could have an outsize impact: in 2020, two key battleground states, Georgia and Arizona, were decided by fewer than twelve thousand votes each.
It was a full-on assault on the voting process, at a time when the nation was reeling from the pandemic and the intense political battles of the last decade. Preoccupied by the pandemic, the Biden administration didn’t truly react to the growing GOP movement until six months into its term. Meanwhile, the restrictions were cheered on by Trump in exile and, soon, the cause would be embraced by Republicans in Washington.
And at the forefront of the local movement were three states that were battlegrounds in 2020—and will be again four years later.
Arizona was a sore subject for the Republican Party. With the exception of Bill Clinton winning it during his 1996 landslide, the state had gone for the GOP in every election for seventy years, until Biden squeaked out a victory over Trump. Fox News calling it for the Democrat still ate at Trump months later. The state’s demographics were tilting toward the Democrats: Phoenix was exploding in size; more Latinos were registering to vote; some liberal California voters were moving east and bringing their politics with them. Yet while Biden had won it, the state government was still dominated by Republicans—and they moved to take steps to help ensure that a Democrat wouldn’t win there again soon.
The GOP in the state proposed a series of stand-alone bills that took on specific aspects of the voting process and were viewed as complements to a series of restrictive voting laws passed in 2016 and upheld by the Supreme Court four years later. Those laws allowed only voters, their family members, or their caregivers to collect and deliver a completed ballot. Further gutting a Voting Rights Act protection, the Supreme Court in July 2021 also upheld a long-standing state policy requiring election officials to throw out ballots accidentally cast in the wrong precincts, which drew an angry response from Democrats who said the state had a history of switching polling places more often in minority neighborhoods and putting them in places intended to cause mistakes.
The state party rolled out several new measures in the wake of Trump’s loss. It passed a law to change the state’s popular Permanent Early Voting List, which determines who receives mail ballots each election cycle. The new rules require that voters who do not cast a ballot at least once every two years will have to respond to a government notice to avoid being removed from the list and in order to continue getting a mail ballot.
Another law stripped power from Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state, by spreading her power around. It would now also allow third parties designated by the legislature to flag ineligible voters for removal and would give voters far less time to fix any mistakes with their early ballots.
In total, the measures are expected to remove an estimated 150,000 voters who don’t vote frequently from Arizona’s early ballot mailing list.
Biden won the state by fewer than 10,500 votes.
Trump, meanwhile, won Florida. Twice. And the election there ran smoothly. Twice. But that didn’t matter.
Florida had long been a state praised for counting its votes quickly and for its long and successful history of using early and mail-in voting. Yet Governor Ron DeSantis, elected with Trump’s help and considered a White House hopeful himself, soon signaled support for widespread election reforms after the 2020 election. Despite anger on the Left, DeSantis in May 2021 signed into law a measure that, as one key provision, required voters to renew their mail voting application every two years and to submit a form of identification.
The use of drop boxes was curtailed, as was the ability of someone to drop off ballots for nonfamily members. The law also gave partisan election observers more access to the ballot-counting process. And initially, a provision was added to prevent behavior undertaken with the intent of influencing a voter—meaning it could be applied to anyone bringing food or water to someone standing in line outside a polling place. That controversial provision was later dropped from the bill.
And then there was the state that became the first flash point for the efforts to restrict voting rights: Georgia.
Georgia was, in many ways, the epicenter of the 2020 election, and it appeared poised to remain that way through the next four years. It arrived as a swing state ahead of its time, seemingly following the southern progression from Virginia to North Carolina (not so much South Carolina) as deep-red states turned purple. Atlanta had exploded, a vibrant hub for the nation’s Black community, and more and more educated and affluent voters flocked to the city and its suburbs. Women in those suburbs, in particular, were turned off by Trump. And Democrats, with help from the voter registration efforts of rising political star Stacey Abrams, saw an opportunity.
Biden’s narrow win there—only the second Democratic victory in the state since Georgia native Jimmy Carter captured it in 1976—was only the beginning of the role the Peach State would play in the election. It was, of course, where Trump harangued the secretary of state to find him more votes. And it was also where Trump’s disinterested performance and claims of voter fraud submarined GOP voter turnout and helped hand two Senate seats—and the entire Senate—to Democrats, dramatically altering the course of Biden’s presidency.
It didn’t take long for Governor Brian Kemp to direct a course of action. He had come under tremendous fire from Trump and his allies for, correctly, noting that Biden had won and refusing to support efforts to overturn the votes. Moreover, Kemp had a tough 2022 reelection fight on his hands, likely against Abrams. So he and the state Republican legislature moved that March to create a new voting rights package, which combined elements from more than a dozen existing bills.
The rules were strict: they prevented proactively sending ballots to voters, cut the time for the application process, and required voters to submit identification as they applied. They also stripped power from the secretary of state, cut the number of mail-in ballot drop boxes, and prohibited any organization from bringing food or water to anyone standing in line to vote.
The reactions were swift: Biden called it “Jim Crow in the 21st century” and “an atrocity,” declaring that the Justice Department was “taking a look” at the measure. While the regulations were being debated that March, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris scheduled a trip to Atlanta to discuss them, but the visit was largely upstaged by a wave of anti-Asian violence in the area. While the spa shootings became the focus of the president’s speech at Emory University, he still touched on the voting rights debate.
“The fact that you held a free and fair election in Georgia that stood up to recount after recount, court case after court case, is something you should be proud of,” Biden said. “But as this state, home to Martin Luther King and John Lewis, knows better than most: the battle for the right to vote is never, ever over. And it’s not over here, in this state of Georgia.”
Trump also weighed in and, after taking more swipes at Kemp, declared that GOP lawmakers in Georgia “learned from the travesty of the 2020 Presidential Election.” He said that a Republican loss in the state “can never be allowed to happen again” and said it’s “too bad” the law wasn’t implemented before the 2020 election.
Tensions soared as the debate broke into the national media cycle. Some major Atlanta-based corporations, including Delta and Coca-Cola, came out in opposition to the measure. Abrams and Georgia’s two new senators, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, were inescapable on cable TV. Conservatives defended the bill, noting that some provisions expanded access to voting, including guaranteeing a minimum number of ballot drop boxes in each county and providing more resources for localities to address long lines for in-person voting. Some on the Right noted that a few deep-blue states, like New York, also had archaic and, at times, restrictive voting measures.
Amid the debate, a few of the bill’s provisions were dropped, including a crackdown on Sunday voting, which was considered to have predominantly hurt Black voters whose churches organize post–church services “Souls to the Polls” trips to polling places. But the bill was passed amid explosive debate. Georgia state representative Park Cannon was arrested and removed from the state capitol after passage of the bill, her hands cuffed behind her back.
The restrictions were not as draconian as the Jim Crow laws, but they absolutely could have outsize effects in racially diverse, densely populated areas where polling places frequently moved and lines were longer. The outcry from Washington and corporate America was swift. An unlikely focal point: Major League Baseball, which was slated to have its 2021 All-Star Game in Georgia. That decision had already come under some scrutiny, since the Atlanta Braves had recently left their not-even-twenty-years-old downtown ballpark for a far whiter suburb without much access to public transit. In the wake of the voting rights law, several MLB stars—including some of its most prominent Black players, like Los Angeles Dodgers star Mookie Betts—communicated privately but in no uncertain terms that they would not play in an All-Star Game held in Atlanta. Baseball made the change, pulling the game out of Georgia and moving it to Colorado.
The impact of the new laws was felt right away: in a late 2021 election in the state, half of the rejected absentee ballots missed the new deadline for returning mail ballots. And two high-profile races loomed for 2022: Warnock faced an immediate reelection challenge from football star Herschel Walker. And Kemp would likely get a rematch with Abrams, if he first was able to survive the Trump-backed primary challenge from former senator David Perdue.
Trump praised the efforts and urged other states to follow suit.
“Republicans in State Legislatures must be smart, get tough, and pass real Election Reform in order to fight back against these Radical Left Democrats,” he wrote in a July statement. “If they don’t, they’ll steal it again in 2022 and 2024, and further DESTROY our Country!”
But Georgia, Florida, and Arizona were far from alone in tightening their election laws. All told, nineteen states, most of them controlled by Republicans, enacted thirty-four laws in 2021 that made voting harder, according to an analysis done by the Brennan Center for Justice. Some of the most extreme bills did not make it past state legislatures, with Republicans often choosing to dial back their farthest-reaching proposals. But numerous new laws—and much of the proposed legislation that failed the year before—sought to exert more partisan control over election administration and make it easier to cast doubt on future election results through partisan ballot reviews. Without question, the process of conducting elections themselves had become more political.
And voters, particularly Democrats in swing states, were staring at a future in which it would be harder to cast their ballots. Many wondered, angrily: How could this be allowed?
One answer: the Supreme Court let them.
The Voting Rights Act that Lyndon Johnson signed into law in 1965 set off a wave of enfranchisement of Black citizens, with more than 250,000 registering to vote before the end of that year alone, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. The bill was widely considered the most effective piece of civil rights legislation in the nation’s history. And only after its passage, most historians agree, could the United States claim to have a measure of voting equality. It has been renewed five times with large bipartisan majorities, including most recently in 2006.
But the Supreme Court steadily hollowed out the landmark Voting Rights Act over the last decade, deeply cutting into the Justice Department’s authority over voting and giving states new latitude to impose restrictions. The Voting Rights Act had contained several provisions protecting the right to vote as well as banning racial gerrymandering and any voting measures that would target minority groups. It also required states with a history of discrimination at the polls to obtain clearance from the Justice Department before changing their voting laws.
The Supreme Court’s 2013 decision lifted the requirement for the states to receive that preclearance to enact any voting law changes. The court was divided along ideological lines, and the two sides drew markedly different lessons from the history of the civil rights movement and the nation’s progress in curtailing racial discrimination in voting. At the center of the disagreement: whether racial minorities continued to face barriers to voting in states with a history of discrimination.
The law had applied to nine states, almost all in the South: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia. It also was in use in scores of counties and municipalities in other states that had seen discrimination.
Barack Obama, whose election as the nation’s first Black president was cited by the court’s majority as to why there was no longer a need for all the act’s restrictions, declared that he was “deeply disappointed” by the ruling. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that Congress remained free to try to impose federal oversight on states where voting rights were at risk but needed to update its thinking and not focus “on 40-year-old facts having no logical relationship to the present day.
“Congress—if it is to divide the states—must identify those jurisdictions to be singled out on a basis that makes sense in light of current conditions,” he wrote. “It cannot simply rely on the past.”
The decision knocked down the federal barrier and paved the way for the states to push forward with many of the restrictions enacted in 2021. Those restrictions spread like wildfire. There were some options still available to voting rights advocates. They could still challenge voting laws in federal court on other grounds, including under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and they could also cite state constitutional protections in state courts.
But the legal process can sometimes take years. And the midterms were on the horizon.
His political fortunes suddenly on the upswing, Trump and his allies in mid-2021 returned to their familiar playbook of misdirection and falsehoods. So much of the former president’s rhetoric, some political analysts long said, could fall under two categories: confession or projection. Trump would, in fact, sometimes say the quiet part out loud: when, for instance, early in 2022, he admitted in a statement that, yes, he absolutely had wanted Pence to take the unconstitutional step of overturning the results of the election one year prior.
And sometimes it would be projection, when he would attack someone for doing the very thing he was doing. As a fierce political debate erupted over states, particularly Georgia, restricting access to the ballot, much of the conservative movement—led by the former president—seized upon the moment to claim that the Democrats and media were overstating its impact, that they were exaggerating what it would do. And many Republicans, Trump supporters and critics alike, did so with a very specific phrase.
The Big Lie.
“All the facts disprove the big lie,” said Mitch McConnell in spring 2021, bringing up polls that showed support for some of the measures, like voter ID requirements, incorporated in Georgia’s package of laws.
McConnell added that “a host of powerful people and institutions apparently think they stand to benefit from parroting this big lie.” And even Liz Cheney voiced support for the new wave of election restrictions, claiming that they weren’t inspired by Trump.
Other conservatives slammed Biden for his Jim Crow comparison or for not recognizing that some of the more extreme measures in the law had been dropped. Newt Gingrich, Georgia native and former House Speaker, tweeted that Democrats were “engaged in big lie smear against Georgia.” And Trump took to using the phrase “Big Lie” to describe both the Democrats’ attacks in Georgia and the nonsensical (in his estimation) claim that Biden had been elected at all. Some of the familiar faces on Fox News—notably Tucker Carlson, who had rapidly become the most dominant voice on the network—also railed against the pushback to the new laws.
The Trumpist smoke machine had kicked up, trying to turn an undeniable fact—that some of the state measures would make it harder to vote—into something far murkier. It was whataboutism, a “both sides” effort to confuse those who only caught a snippet of the news via an ambiguous cable chyron or misleading tweet.
Of course, the claim was faulty. Though Republicans like Kemp argued that the state’s bill was about streamlining the process, plenty of others in the GOP framed the new voting restrictions as a response to concerns about election legitimacy. And the bill stripped Raffensperger of power just after he became a crucial obstacle to Trump’s efforts to overturn the results.
There was no denying any other conclusion: Trump’s claims had both spawned and provided a cover for the tighter election laws. But that was just one part of the new political landscape that had formed with stunning speed after Trump’s exit from office. He wasn’t a pariah; his power remained. William Barr, his former attorney general, wrote a book—titled One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General—after leaving his post that sharply decried Trump’s behavior after Election Day; but when asked in interviews, Barr acknowledged in March 2022 that he would vote for him again. State laws were being rewritten, Trump enemies purged from vital election posts. The Republican Party was, with few exceptions, still in his thrall.
Democrats tried to push back.
Some blue and battleground states looked to expand voting laws. By the end of 2021, at least twenty-five states enacted sixty-two laws with provisions that expanded access. For the most part, these states—almost all run by Democratic governors—made it easier to request and cast mail-in ballots and expanded early voting periods. The laws, in some states, also lengthened the deadlines for ballots to be counted as well as improved access for the disabled, elderly, and non-English speakers. Three states—New York, Connecticut, and Washington—expanded voting rights to those with past convictions, while six others enacted automatic voter registration laws. And eight extended or made permanent policies first implemented during the pandemic, including sending mail-in ballots to all voters, implementing curbside voting, and allowing no-excuse early voting.
But these were modest measures, for the most part not put into place in states that would dictate the control of Congress in 2022 or the presidency in 2024. Only federal legislation would be able to truly protect the vote, worried and angry Democrats increasingly believed. Activists marched. Voters picked up phones. The Texas lawmakers boarded their planes for Washington. The Big Lie could not go unanswered.
Congress would need to do it. Congress would need to be pushed.
They looked to the White House.