BY TREVOR POTTER

Tensions are growing as Election Day draws closer. For election lawyers this year, it is a time of mixed emotions. We celebrate the work that has been done to safeguard Americans’ freedom to vote, while remaining vigilant as the federal government keeps trying to undermine that freedom, in order to promote President Trump’s partisan political agenda. This is why I enter the coming days and weeks feeling wary.

As I told Lesley Stahl of “60 Minutes” during an interview conducted in September, the Trump administration is abusing the executive branch’s very limited role in our elections to intervene in the states’ voting process. This activity is largely focused on states and jurisdictions where Democrats are in charge, but the administration is also forcing state officials in Republican-controlled states to choose between partisan loyalty and defending their role under the Constitution to run elections.

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I expect that, on the whole, states will vigorously guard their authority. Senior elected officials from GOP-led states, like Wyoming (as seen in the “60 Minutes” clip), Utah, and Alaska have been publicly critical of the administration’s heavy-handed tactics. If, however, state officials cave to political pressure and attempt to interfere in the normal process for determining the winners of close races, the response by Campaign Legal Center and our allies will be swift and will most likely involve litigation.

Even in the absence of complicit state actors, there is reason for concern. When pressed by reporters, Attorney General Todd Blanche and Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon have refused to rule out the possibility that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) could try to intervene in the election. And when directly asked if the U.S. Department of Homeland Security will deploy immigration enforcement officers to the polls, the response from officials has consistently been somewhat dodgy, saying that there are no plans to do so.

It is difficult to take these non-denial denials as anything other than bad news. This Justice Department, in my view, is not to be trusted because it has engaged in numerous bad-faith attempts to influence the elections.

• The department was a key player in President Trump’s push to have states gerrymander their congressional maps before the election.

• DOJ lawyers have used highly questionable tactics to pressure states to remove voters from the rolls and not count ballots based on evidence that is dubious at best, most recently in California and Washington state.

• The DOJ has violated its own rule against taking legal actions against elected officials within 60 days of an election by raiding the Washington, D.C, home of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN).

• And, in a stunning display of contempt for the will of voters, the agency, at the direction of President Trump, has sued the state of Alaska, alleging that the state’s U.S. Senate election is in danger of producing an illegitimate result if the Republican candidate loses a close race.

These actions demonstrate a willingness to pursue a political outcome at the expense of the law and the fundamental right of voters to be the ones who choose election winners.

Despite these clear threats posed by this administration, I also enter this period of the election cycle feeling confident. This is because I firmly believe Campaign Legal Center and our democracy coalition allies have done incredible work thus far to prevent the Trump administration from meddling with the midterms, and I believe we are well-prepared to respond to future threats.

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Trump has failed to execute a national takeover of our elections through his illegal and unconstitutional executive orders. This includes his plan, blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court, to give the U.S. Postal Service the power to determine which Americans can vote by mail. The DOJ has lost 27 cases and counting in an attempt to illegally access states’ unredacted voter lists, preventing any number of nefarious scenarios by which that data could have been comprised or weaponized to pressure states into purging eligible voters from the rolls. The president’s top legislative priority, an anti-voter bill called the SAVE Act, remains stalled in Congress.

All of these victories for voters, and more, are a product of legal actions and pro-voter advocacy by Campaign Legal Center, our coalition partners, and concerned citizens who bravely chose to go to court to stop executive overreach, the likes of which we have never witnessed before.

This is why I also feel grateful as the midterm elections draw to a close. The amount of effort and dedication that has gone into pursuing lawsuits and legislative victories in defense of American democracy during this period has been nothing short of astonishing. My gratitude also extends to the thousands of officials, poll workers and volunteers who serve as the backbone of our elections, putting politics aside to ensure all Americans can vote and have those votes counted.

Finally, after everything that has transpired over the last two years, I feel a sense of hope. More than 30 million Americans have already voted, demonstrating their commitment to make their voices heard in the face of a would-be authoritarian president. If, before this second Trump term, some Americans did not fully comprehend the danger posed by a government that fails to follow the Constitution and the rule of law, many more certainly seem to be activated today.

I can attest to this sense of alarm and yearning for action because I have experienced it during my travels across the country. The people I speak with on a regular basis understand that democracy is a precious gift that can be taken away if those who are in control of the government are not held accountable for their transgressions. Elections serve as the primary means by which Americans can hold elected officials accountable. Our task at Campaign Legal Center is to ensure the will of the voters is honored.

P.S. In case you missed it – The Washington Post recently published an op-ed I wrote with former FEC Commissioner Ellen Weintraub about President Trump’s abuse of campaign finance laws and how he is testing the rule of law to influence our elections: READ IT HERE.

In mid-October, the U.S. Department of Justice delivered a letter and a password-protected thumb drive to Dean Logan, the official who runs elections for Los Angeles County. According to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, the password came on a sticky note. The drive was supposed to hold the names of more than 20,000 people the federal government calls “likely noncitizens” who had been mailed ballots for the November 3 midterm election. The letter gave state and county officials 48 hours to review the names, pull aside any ballots those voters had already returned, and hold off on counting them until each person’s citizenship could be confirmed.

Logan’s office never plugged it in. County officials said opening an unknown device from an outside party would break their own data security rules, which is exactly the kind of caution you would want from the people guarding your vote. Two days later, on October 15, the Justice Department sued California, Weber, and Logan in federal court in Los Angeles.

By the next afternoon, Campaign Legal Center (CLC), Bright America’s strategic litigation partner, had filed to join the case on the side of the voters.

A list nobody can check

According to the government’s own complaint, the Department of Homeland Security took California’s voter rolls, ran the names through federal immigration databases, and flagged the people it believed were not citizens. Beyond that rough outline, the government has shared very little. It has not explained which records it used, how it matched one person’s name to another’s file, or how sure it is about any single entry, and it would not share its methods with the state and county officials it was ordering around.

That silence matters, because federal immigration records are often out of date. Someone who became a naturalized citizen years ago can still appear in an old file as a green card holder. Voting rights advocates have warned for months that matching voter rolls against these records is likely to flag naturalized Americans, the very people who worked hardest to earn the right to vote.

Jonathan Diaz, who directs voting advocacy and partnerships at CLC, told Newsweek this week that the administration has “repeatedly used unreliable data sources and questionable methods to incorrectly flag U.S. citizens” and then demanded that those eligible voters be removed from the rolls. California’s list looks like more of the same.

The numbers keep moving, too. Administration officials had earlier claimed that California had about 190,000 noncitizens on its rolls, a figure Weber dismissed as unsubstantiated. By the time the lawsuit was filed, the claim had shrunk to roughly 20,000, and NBC News has since described the list as closer to 18,000 names. Weber told the Justice Department that what it handed over was too thin to support any real investigation, and she said her office would gladly look at genuine evidence of ineligible voters if the government had any.

California already requires every voter to swear under penalty of perjury that they are a U.S. citizen, and state law already requires officials to remove anyone found to be ineligible. Those safeguards were working long before a thumb drive showed up in Los Angeles.

In the courtroom within a day

The Justice Department filed on a Thursday. On Friday, Campaign Legal Center filed a motion to intervene, which is a formal request to join a lawsuit as one of the parties. CLC is asking to stand alongside California as a defendant, representing two clients with deep roots in the communities this list targets. One is the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the oldest Latino civil rights organization in the country. The other is the NAACP, along with its California/Hawaii State Conference and its Los Angeles Branch.

It is fair to ask why voters need their own lawyers when the state is already fighting the case. California’s job is to defend its election procedures. CLC’s job is to defend the people whose ballots are on the line, and to make sure a judge hears exactly how this demand would land on Latino and Black voters in Los Angeles. The filing argues that the federal government is trying to decide which voters stay on the rolls, which ballots get counted, and what voters must do to prove they are citizens, all at the last minute and all while voting is already underway.

Danielle Lang, who leads CLC’s voting rights and rule of law work, called the suit an effort “to interfere in our elections and upend settled election procedures to create chaos and confusion.” She added that CLC is joining the case so that every eligible voter can be heard in the midterms.

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A ballot in a locked box is a ballot that doesn’t count

The Justice Department insists it is not purging anyone. Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, has said the government only wants the ballots set aside so a judge can decide later whether they should count. That framing deserves a closer look.

Federal law bars states from running systematic purges of their voter rolls within 90 days of a federal election. The rule exists because mistakes made in the final weeks can knock eligible people off the rolls with no time left to fix the error. Election law experts have pointed out that this lawsuit seems designed to get around that protection by going after the ballots instead of the registrations. For the voter whose ballot sits in a sealed box while the clock runs out, the difference is mostly a matter of vocabulary.

The timing raises its own questions. Los Angeles County started mailing ballots on October 1. David Becker, a former Justice Department voting rights attorney who now leads the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, asked why federal officials waited until voting had already begun to hand over their list. If accuracy were the goal, there was plenty of time last spring or summer to raise concerns through the normal process. Waiting until the eleventh hour mostly produces suspicion, the kind that can be pointed to after Election Day by anyone who doesn’t like the results.

Since the lawsuit was filed, the pressure has only grown. On October 19, federal authorities announced charges against more than two dozen people in California accused of illegally registering or voting. Trent McCotter, the Justice Department’s acting second-in-command, used a national news conference to hold up the arrests as proof that California’s rolls are corrupted and that state officials are obstructing justice. The department has also warned local election workers that knowingly processing or counting ballots from flagged voters could expose them to investigation or prosecution, which is a heavy thing to put on county staff in the middle of counting.

None of this changes what the evidence shows. Noncitizen voting is rare, hard to prove, and has never been shown to change the outcome of a race. CLC’s Diaz said on a Bloomberg Law podcast that the California suit “looks like political theater,” noting that there is no reason for the department’s second-ranking official to hold national press conferences over a small number of relatively minor alleged offenses.

A new door, after the old ones were locked

This lawsuit did not come out of nowhere. Since the spring of 2025, the Justice Department has demanded sensitive voter information from nearly every state, including partial Social Security numbers and driver’s license numbers. When about 30 states and Washington, D.C., refused, the department sued them. Federal judges have thrown those cases out again and again. By one count the department is now 0 for 26, and several of the judges who ruled against it were appointed by President Trump himself.

CLC has been in the middle of this fight from the start. It has gone to court in states across the country to keep voters’ private data out of federal hands. When the president signed an executive order in March 2025 trying to add new proof-of-citizenship hurdles to voter registration, CLC sued on behalf of LULAC and other clients and won a ruling that permanently blocked a key part of it. When a second executive order this year led to a Postal Service rule that would have thrown mail voting into disarray, CLC won an injunction in Washington, D.C., and in September the Supreme Court declined to let the rule take effect. We wrote about that win last month.

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The pattern is hard to miss. The administration tries one way to control who votes and whose votes count, a court blocks it, and a new approach appears a few weeks later. As Diaz put it on the Election Law Blog podcast this week, the administration’s efforts to reshape how our elections are run “have fallen flat at basically every opportunity.” The thumb drive is simply the latest attempt, and it may not be the last. NBC News reports the Justice Department is weighing similar suits against other states that mail ballots to every registered voter, possibly even after Election Day.

Why we back the lawyers

At Bright America, we call Campaign Legal Center our strategic litigation partner for a reason. Partisan political campaigns may get most of the headlines, but the rules that decide whether an election is free and fair are often settled in a nonpartisan courtroom, on deadlines measured in hours. When the federal government asked a judge to set aside 20,000 ballots less than three weeks before Election Day, the answer had to come fast and it had to come from people who have done this work for years. CLC had its motion on file the next day.

As of this writing, the court has not ruled, and the Justice Department has said it will ask for an emergency order. We will keep you posted. In the meantime, think about who is actually on that thumb drive. Some of them may have taken the oath of citizenship last spring, and some decades ago. Every eligible voter on that list deserves to have their ballot counted the same way as their neighbors’ ballots, and the people making sure that happens are in court right now. Supporting that work is one of the most direct ways any of us can protect this election.

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This past summer, Vice President JD Vance stood inside the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California, and said something that should have stopped the room cold.

“If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story,” he told the audience. “The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.”

He’s probably right about the news cycle, and that is exactly the problem. If the biggest political scandal of the last century would barely survive a weekend today, it says something alarming about where we are now and nothing flattering about Richard Nixon. One commentator summed it up better than I can, saying it “is a testament to how bad now is, not how bad then was.”

Vance kept going: “If you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions, tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration,” he said. “There is a parallel.”

It was easy to shrug that off as a politician buttering up his hosts at a presidential library (not to mention buttering up his boss watching at home)… but perhaps we should have realized it was foreshadowing what would happen this fall when the Justice Department decided to run with it.

Investigating the Investigators, Fifty Years Later

On October 1, the Wall Street Journal reported the Justice Department is spending your tax dollars reviewing whether the Watergate Special Prosecution Force committed misconduct. That was the team of prosecutors led first by Archibald Cox, a Harvard law professor, and later by Leon Jaworski, a Texas trial lawyer and former president of the American Bar Association. Both men have been dead for decades, so nobody is going to be charged with anything. The point of the exercise is the story it tells.

The review grew out of a visit from Geoff Shepard, a former Nixon White House aide who has spent much of his life arguing that his old boss was railroaded. According to the Journal, a senior Justice Department official invited Shepard to headquarters in September, where he spent two hours walking officials through a 78-page slide deck titled “Watergate As Lawfare.” His central claim is that Cox and Jaworski met secretly with the judges in the case and kept evidence from defense lawyers. The Biden Justice Department turned down the same request in 2022, noting how much time had passed. This time, officials wanted to hear him out.

A department spokeswoman told the Journal that the presentation “does not constitute an investigation,” and the people familiar with it described the review as preliminary. Still, the setting matters. Shepard made his pitch to the Office of Professional Responsibility, the department’s internal watchdog, which was itself created after Watergate to keep the White House’s hands off criminal cases. The Journal opened its story with a line: “For nearly two years, the Justice Department has made it a priority to investigate people who previously investigated President Trump. Now it is reaching back in history to consider whether prosecutors mistreated an earlier Republican president.”

A Quick Refresher on the Candidate for Sainthood

In June 1972, burglars working for Nixon’s re-election campaign were caught inside the Democratic National Committee’s offices at the Watergate complex in Washington. The break-in was one piece of what the Journal calls a “wide-ranging scheme of political sabotage, wiretapping and illegal contributions.” The cover-up that followed is what brought Nixon down, and most of what we know about it came out of his own mouth, because he had secretly recorded his conversations in the Oval Office.

When Cox subpoenaed those tapes in October 1973, Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire him. Richardson refused and resigned. His deputy, William Ruckelshaus, refused too and was out the same night. The job finally fell to Solicitor General Robert Bork, who did the deed. In a memoir published after his death in 2012, Bork wrote that Nixon later promised him the next open seat on the Supreme Court. The whole episode became known as the Saturday Night Massacre, and it failed, because Jaworski took over the investigation and went after the same tapes.

The recordings are hard to explain away. They capture Nixon taking part in the cover-up and talking about using the IRS against his political enemies, with ugly antisemitic and racist rants mixed in. There is also a famous gap of 18 and a half minutes, erased from a conversation with his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, three days after the break-in. In July 1974, the Supreme Court ruled 8 to 0 that Nixon had to hand over the tapes. One of them, the so-called “smoking gun,” caught him six days after the break-in directing aides to have the CIA tell the FBI to back off.

Roughly 69 people were charged in connection with Watergate, and dozens were convicted, including Haldeman, top domestic adviser John Ehrlichman, and former Attorney General John Mitchell. John Dean, Nixon’s own White House counsel, famously warned him there was “a cancer” growing on the presidency. Shepard may have found some procedural sins in the prosecutors’ files. Even so, as the Journal notes, mainstream scholars long ago concluded that Nixon, not the people who investigated him, was the one guilty of wrongdoing. If a deep state took Nixon down, it was a tape recorder he installed himself.

The Smoke Detectors Watergate Gave Us

The country learned a lot from Watergate, and it wrote those lessons into law. Congress created the Federal Election Commission (FEC) in 1974 to police campaign money. The Justice Department set up its Office of Professional Responsibility in 1975 and its Public Integrity Section, which prosecutes corrupt officials, in 1976. In 1978 came the Inspector General Act, which put independent watchdogs inside federal agencies, and the Ethics in Government Act, which created the Office of Government Ethics. Think of them as smoke detectors, installed so the next ethics “fire” could be caught early.

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The Trump administration has spent the last two years pulling out the batteries. Four days into Trump’s second term, on January 24, 2025, he fired at least 17 inspectors general by email, skipping the 30 days’ notice to Congress that the law requires. A federal judge, Ana Reyes, ruled in September 2025 that the firings were unlawful but declined to put the watchdogs back in their jobs. A few weeks after the inspectors general were fired, Trump removed David Huitema, the Senate-confirmed head of the Office of Government Ethics, along with Hampton Dellinger, who ran the Office of Special Counsel that protects federal whistleblowers.

The list keeps going. The Public Integrity Section had about 30 prosecutors at the end of the Biden administration, and by March 2025 the department was planning to cut it to as few as five after its leadership resigned. In October 2025, the White House budget office cut off funding for the council that supports all the inspectors general, which took down Oversight.gov, a library of more than 34,000 watchdog reports and the home of dozens of whistleblower hotlines. An administration spokesperson explained that inspectors general had become “corrupt, partisan, and in some cases, have lied to the public.”

The FEC, meanwhile, lost its quorum on May 1, 2025, and has been unable to enforce the law ever since. That is the longest stretch without a quorum in the agency’s history, and the pile of stalled enforcement cases has doubled from 154 to 307. In August, Campaign Legal Center analyzed the government’s own ethics data and found falling compliance with disclosure laws, fewer ethics officials, and criminal ethics violations that are going unreported and unprosecuted. As the Journal put it, the president “has moved to roll back many post-Watergate overhauls.” Rewriting the story of Watergate makes that a lot easier to sell.

It Started With a Night Watchman

It’s worth remembering who actually cracked Watergate. A security guard named Frank Wills noticed tape on a door lock and called the police. Two young Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, kept digging when almost nobody else would. The government’s own institutions did their part eventually, from the courts to the special prosecutors to a Senate committee, but much of the early work came from people outside the government who refused to look away.

That lesson matters more today, because the watchdogs inside the government have been fired, defunded, or left without enough members to act. And while president may be able to force out an inspector general via email, he can’t fire independent nonpartisan organizations, and he can’t stop it from filing a complaint, publishing what it finds, or taking him to court. Outside watchdogs like Campaign Legal Center (CLC) have become the backup system for a government whose alarms have been switched off.

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CLC was founded in 2002 by Trevor Potter, a Republican who once chaired the Federal Election Commission, and it has spent this year doing the work the government stopped doing. Its lawyers pored over federal ethics data that the administration would rather nobody read. They went to court on behalf of people who watch and document immigration enforcement, and they won a ruling that blocked a Postal Service rule threatening mail ballots. None of that requires anyone’s permission in Washington, which is exactly why it matters. Even this latest Nixon story only came to light because reporters at the Journal went looking for it.

CLC is also following the money with its tracker of the Trump administration’s most corrupt transactions, which follows roughly 60 donors, companies and foreign interests that gave to Trump or his causes and then got something back, from cabinet jobs and ambassadorships to pardons and dropped cases.

Why Bother Rewriting a Fifty-Year-Old Story?

The effort to clear Nixon’s name has nothing to do with Nixon. If Watergate can be recast as “lawfare”, then every investigation of a president becomes lawfare, and every check on power becomes a coup by the deep state. That is a very useful story for a president who is still dealing with his own legal history, and for a vice president who is widely expected to run for the job himself in 2028.

In a 1977 interview with the British broadcaster David Frost, Nixon offered his own defense in one famous sentence:

“Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

For decades, that line was treated as a confession of how badly he had lost his way. Now there are people in power who seem to hear it as a mission statement — one that’s been emboldened by the broad presidential immunity recently expanded by the Supreme Court.

Saints are supposed to perform miracles, and Nixon has finally managed one, because half a century after he left in disgrace, he somehow looks good by comparison. The answer is to keep the bar where Watergate set it — and push it higher — to protect the people, inside government and out, whose job is to keep watch. A country that forgets why it installed the smoke detectors shouldn’t be surprised when the house burns down.

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BY TREVOR POTTER

American voters are once again the target of millions upon millions of dollars in political spending designed to influence their decisions about who should represent them in government. According to the tracking firm AdImpact, spending on ads across broadcast, digital and streaming platforms during the 2026 election cycle is likely to reach a record $11.6 billion.

The trend of ultra-wealthy individuals and corporate industries using their vast resources to fund massive political campaigns continues. According to the New York Times, at least $1 billion of this spending will happen in the shadows, with anonymous donors funding political activity of all kinds.

Campaign Legal Center has released a study of the AI industry’s spending in recent elections, which finds that developers like OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as AI billionaires like Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, have collectively given over $180 million to industry-affiliated super PACs and dark money groups ahead of the 2026 midterm election. Elon Musk has started spending what is reported to be a more than $100 million dollar war chest.

Aside from the staggering volume of spending, another notable development during this election cycle involves brazen violations of campaign finance laws — laws that exist to prevent corruption.

While U.S. Supreme Court rulings like Citizens United opened the floodgates for corporations, individuals and organizations to raise and spend unlimited sums on our elections, the courts have consistently upheld laws that prevent candidates from directing how these funds are spent. This anti-coordination doctrine is supposed to guard against the corrupting influence of unlimited election spending.

Campaign Legal Center has blown the whistle on President Trump’s comments indicating he is openly violating this pillar of campaign finance law. In a complaint demanding an investigation by the Federal Election Commission (FEC), we note many instances of the president bragging about his direct control over MAGA Inc., an outside political committee that has reportedly raised more than $400 million, virtually all through six- and seven-figure contributions from special interest groups, corporations, and ultra-wealthy individuals.

By law, this arrangement must put MAGA Inc.’s activities beyond the control of any candidate or elected official, but Trump has repeatedly said the quiet part out loud:

• “I’m going to spend whatever amount of money necessary to try to help us, and this is money from MAGA Inc. This is my money that I control.”

• “I think I have like close to $1 billion in the super PAC… And I’m allocating probably $400 or $500 million [to the midterms]. So, I’ll be spending.”

On another occasion, Trump corrected an interviewer who referred to his allies controlling MAGA Inc., underscoring that the PAC was “Not [controlled by] my allies. I control it.”

The president’s complete disregard for the requirement that federal officeholders not control outside groups opens our campaign finance system even wider as a funnel for torrents of potentially corrupting cash to flow into our political system — with voters suffering when special interests exert influence over politicians through political contributions and spending. But Trump is not alone in facilitating this deluge.

Both major political parties are reportedly already taking advantage of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling from June of this year, eliminating the cap on how much money they can spend in coordination with individual candidates. Previous limits on coordinated spending prevented candidates from taking direct advantage of the fact that parties are allowed to accept dramatically larger amounts in contributions. The Court’s disastrous ruling defies decades of precedent that respected the clear need to limit the risk of corruption posed by massive direct contributions to candidates.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has made this entire situation even worse by expanding a narrow law that requires broadcast TV and radio stations to provide discounted advertising rates to candidates. Under the FCC’s interpretation these discounts must now also be given to entities that can spend far more money on elections than candidates. This includes political parties that coordinate their spending with candidates, as well as joint fundraising committees (JFCs) that involve at least one candidate.

The extension of the discounted ad rate to JFCs is particularly troublesome. The Federal Election Commission in 2024 essentially gave a green light for super PACs to participate in JFCs with candidates, with an advisory opinion that opens up yet another avenue for limitless funds to flow into our political system.

I want to acknowledge that the picture I have painted about the influence of big money on our elections is grim. I believe, however, that if you are reading this, it is because you want to understand the threats to our democracy and what is being done to confront them. On the latter point, there are promising green shoots of progress.

In July, Campaign Legal Center celebrated a significant victory in our effort to defend a groundbreaking election spending transparency law in Arizona, Proposition 211. The core purpose of the law is to provide voters with information about who is directly responsible for spending huge sums on political ads in the state — based on the principle that voters armed with such information can make more informed decisions on Election Day.

Thus far, the courts, including the Arizona Supreme Court, have upheld the law, giving us hope that Proposition 211 can serve as a model for other states to follow. Similar legislation supported by Campaign Legal Center called the DISCLOSE Act has been repeatedly introduced in Congress.

On a broader level, it seems that we may be approaching one of those moments in American history when public disgust with corruption in government — fueled by egregious amounts of political spending by special interests — produces a response from elected representatives. We have had such moments in the past: After the Watergate scandal, and during the early 2000’s when I worked with Senator John McCain of Arizona and others to advance the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, also known as the McCain-Feingold Act.

Recent revelations about an extensive, corrupt scheme to funnel disguised, illegal contributions from a defense contractor to a super PAC supporting Maine Senator Susan Collins demonstrate the kind of pay-to-play collusion that drives demands for reform. CLC was the first to unearth these allegations in a complaint from 2020.

During a career fighting big money in politics, I have seen the degree to which Americans instinctively oppose a political system built on a culture of dependency between politicians and powerful special interests. The public is far ahead of many elected representatives on this issue. But history tells us that, eventually, those representatives will heed the message from voters if that message is delivered in forceful and unambiguous terms. At Campaign Legal Center, we are devoted to ensuring the voices of voters are heard loud and clear.

Looking for more in-depth insights on issues critical to our democracy? Consider subscribing to the “From the Desk of Trevor Potter” newsletter, written by Campaign Legal Center’s founder and president, Trevor Potter. Get expert analysis and learn more about Campaign Legal Center’s efforts to protect and strengthen democracy for all Americans by subscribing via email or on LinkedIn.

For as long as any of us can remember, when a president made an announcement, everyone heard it at the same time. The reporter in the briefing room, the farmer checking the news on his phone, and the hedge fund manager watching six screens at once all got the same words at the same moment, and what they did next was up to them. And now, it seems, this was so normal we took it for granted.

Truth Social, the social media platform owned by President Trump’s media company, has found a way to sell it. Under a new arrangement, users can pay $100,000 a month to see posts from the president and other government officials before the rest of the country does. High-frequency trading firms have reportedly already been willing to pay for the head start, which tells you how valuable the information is and exactly who is lining up to buy it.

Our strategic litigation partner, Campaign Legal Center (CLC), is helping lead the fight to stop it, and last week they brought some serious firepower into the case.

What’s Actually for Sale

Truth Social is owned by Trump Media & Technology Group, and President Trump holds at least 41 percent of the company, a stake worth at least $1 billion. When a subscription brings in money or makes the platform more valuable, he benefits personally. These posts also carry real weight, because White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has said that the president’s Truth Social posts are the official policy of the administration, coming “straight from the horse’s mouth.”

So what’s being sold is advance notice of government decisions.

Think about the small business owner waiting to find out about a new tariff, the military family following news about the war in Iran, or the parent watching for a public health decision. Under this scheme, all of them wait in line while the same news is quietly handed to traders who can afford to pay for a jump on the markets.

Who’s Challenging It

The lawsuit was filed in federal court in New York by The Intercept, an investigative news outlet, and the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a nonprofit that defends the rights of journalists. They argue that reporters and the public have always had equal and simultaneous access to what the president says, and that selling early access to a paying few violates both the First Amendment and the Constitution’s promise of equal protection under the law. They’ve asked the judge for a preliminary injunction, which would shut the scheme down while the case moves forward.

On September 21, Campaign Legal Center filed a friend-of-the-court brief backing that request on behalf of 53 former federal prosecutors and FBI agents who spent their careers working on public corruption cases. Together they served under 11 presidential administrations, Republican and Democratic, and they’ve put in more than 880 years of combined government service. The group includes Ty Cobb, who served as a White House lawyer during President Trump’s first term, and Michael Bromwich, a former inspector general of the Justice Department.

These are people who know what corruption looks like because they spent decades building cases against it, and when they looked at this scheme, they recognized it for exactly what it is.

Five Laws This Scheme Could Break

CLC identified five federal criminal laws that the arrangement would likely violate, and a few of them are easier to understand than you might expect.

Insider trading. It’s illegal for government officials to tip off outsiders about market-moving information that the public doesn’t have yet, and it’s illegal for those outsiders to trade on it. The prosecutors offer a simple example. Suppose the president decides to put tariffs on a country that makes computer chips and posts the news for paying subscribers at 9 a.m., a subscriber sells chip stocks at 9:05, and the public sees the post at 10, when chip stocks drop. That looks exactly like a secret text message to a friend on Wall Street, except that it comes with a monthly bill.

Illegal gratuities. Federal law makes it a crime for a public official to accept something of value because of an official act, and it’s also a crime to give it. Nobody has to prove a specific favor was traded, since the payment itself is enough. Someone paying more than $1 million a year for early access to presidential decisions isn’t paying for the pleasure of reading posts early.

Conflicts of interest. Executive branch officials can’t take part in government business where they have a personal financial stake. The brief compares it to the head of NASA also running the company that sells NASA its rockets, and then points out that this case is worse, because the president sits on one side of the deal, his company sits on the other, and the product for sale is his own words.

Outside pay for a public job. The president earns a fixed government salary, and federal law bars anyone from adding to what an executive branch official is paid for doing the job. Money flowing to the president’s company from people buying access to his official announcements could fall squarely into that category.

Leaking confidential government information. The Trade Secrets Act makes it a crime for federal officials to disclose certain confidential business information they learn on the job, such as which company is about to win a government contract. A system built around telling paying customers first puts that kind of disclosure on the menu.

The prosecutors are careful and clear about the limits of their argument. They don’t try to settle whether these laws apply to a sitting president or whether he could claim immunity, and they openly acknowledge how hard it is to prove any crime in front of a jury, especially against powerful people with deep pockets. Their point is simpler and harder to argue with, which is that if serious people can reasonably ask whether a government arrangement breaks five criminal laws, it can’t possibly serve a legitimate public purpose, and the court should stop it.

A Warning From the Founders

None of this would have surprised the people who wrote the Constitution.

Alexander Hamilton warned in the Federalist Papers that an “avaricious man” (note: avaricious is defined as showing an extremely strong, obsessive desire to acquire and hoard wealth or material possessions) might someday hold the presidency and feel a strong pull to cash in on the office while he had it. That fear is exactly why the Constitution fixes the president’s salary and bars gifts and payments meant to sway him, and why Congress later passed the laws the prosecutors cite in their brief.

Where You Come In

Litigation like this one doesn’t happen by accident. They take experienced lawyers, careful research, clients, experts, and the patience to see a fight through months or even years of motions, hearings, and appeals, often against opponents with nearly unlimited resources. Campaign Legal Center is one of the few organizations in the country with the skill and the track record to take on this work, and that’s why our movement supports their work.

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When you support Bright America, you’re helping make cases like this possible. Elections matter a great deal, but the rules that keep public office from turning into a private business only hold up when someone is willing to walk into court and defend them. If you believe that the president demanding payment to learn about his official acts, and that public service shouldn’t come with a price tag, we hope you’ll stand with us.

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There is a certain kind of person who cannot simply hold a job. This person also needs to flip a meme coin at midnight, license his face to a fragrance company, and sell pardons the way an airline upsells seat upgrades. In his first year back in office, that person made an estimated $2.2 billion, and almost none of it came from being president. It came from everything adjacent to being president.

The revenue streams keep multiplying. There are the crypto ventures, and the Truth Social trades that seem to know things before the market does, and the pardons that arrive with the tidy efficiency of a loyalty program.

Why chasing every hustle is the wrong fight

We could spend the next three years cataloguing every new moneymaker this White House invents, and some ethics watchdogs (not to mention a minority of Congress) have certainly tried. The trouble is that this approach is exhausting, and it is also the wrong fight. Ban one scheme on Monday and three more will appear by Thursday.

A growing coalition of nonpartisan reform groups has a better idea, and it is refreshingly simple. Instead of trying to name every hustle, just say that the president gets a salary, and that the salary is the entire compensation package. That’s it - no other business deals.

What the rule would actually look like

Under this approach there would be no outside income and no stock portfolio quietly padded by regulatory decisions. A president would divest before taking the oath, the same way every cabinet appointee already has to. When the term ends, that person is free to go make millions in peace. While in office, though, the job is to work for the country rather than for one’s self.

None of this is radical. If anything, it is wildly old-fashioned. Every senior government appointee already lives by some version of this rule, so all we are really asking is that the most powerful person in the country follow the same ethics standards as an assistant deputy secretary at the Department of Commerce. It is hardly revolutionary stuff.

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Why Bright America is signing on

Bright America is joining this coalition because the case for it barely needs making. Voters across the spectrum, including plenty who voted for this president twice, are tired of watching public office get treated like a content monetization strategy. This is not a partisan grievance. It is a rule of law problem, and rule of law problems eventually become everyone’s problem.

Will this pass the current House? It will not, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something, quite possibly a meme coin. Leadership that benefits from the current arrangement has no incentive to end it.

Writing rules for the next fifty years

Laws like this are not written for the next six months. They are written for the next fifty years, for the president after this one and the one after that, of any party, who looks at the norms we let collapse and decides to test how far they stretch. If we codify the rule now, while everyone can still remember why it mattered, we spare the next generation the trouble of relearning this lesson the hard way.

Rebuilding trust in government does not happen with a press release. It happens when the rules are simple enough that a ten-year-old could explain them and strict enough that no amount of clever lawyering can get around them. Salary in, side hustles out. That is the entire pitch.

We are in this for the long game. A brighter America is still worth building, one boring, unglamorous, overdue reform at a time.

What you can do right now

Ask the candidates running for U.S. House and Senate — including the incumbents — in your area if they support banning current and future presidents, regardless of party, from profiting off the presidency while in office. Their answers will be telling about what degree of corruption they’re willing to tolerate, particularly when it comes from their own party.

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Late Monday night, the Supreme Court handed American voters one of the biggest wins of the year, and it did so in two quiet sentences. The President’s plan to put the Postal Service in charge of screening your mail ballot is blocked for the 2026 elections.

If you’ve been reading Bright America for a while, you know we’ve been following (and fueling) this fight all summer — and here’s what you should know:

The plan, in plain English

Back on March 31, President Trump signed an executive order aimed at mail voting. It directed the Postal Service to write new rules for how ballots travel through the mail. The final version of those rules landed on August 21, about ten weeks before Election Day, over the objections of more than 200,000 public comments.

The rules said every mail ballot envelope in the country would need a special logo, a machine-readable design, and a unique barcode tied to each individual voter. Every state would have to upload the name and address of every mail voter into a new federal “Ballot Portal” run by the post office. Then, before accepting any ballot mail, postal workers would check each envelope against that list. Envelopes that failed the check would be refused and sent back.

For as long as mail voting has existed, the roles have been clear. Election officials decide who is eligible to receive a ballot. The post office delivers it, the same way it delivers your birthday cards and jury summonses. Under the new rules, the post office would suddenly sit in judgment of ballots, with the power to turn them away. And the federal government would hold a national list of everyone who votes by mail, built inside an agency the president had already ordered to restrict the practice.

More than 50 million pieces of ballot mail are expected to move through the postal system this election. That’s how much was suddenly up for review.

Sixty days is not enough time to rewire an election

Our strategic litigation partner Campaign Legal Center (CLC), the nonpartisan legal nonprofit you’ve met in these pages before, put an expert named Tammy Patrick in front of the court. Patrick has spent more than twenty years working where elections and the mail meet, and President Obama once appointed her to a bipartisan commission on election administration. Her assessment of the rule was blunt. It was “unprecedented,” and implementing it before November would be “virtually impossible.”

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The details from her declaration read like a prank on local governments. Election offices could no longer hand ballot trays to their own mail carrier or use a collection box. They would have to haul everything to special postal counters. If a single envelope in a mailing failed inspection, the entire mailing could be rejected. Travis County, Texas had already spent $21,349 on envelopes that would have become useless overnight. The election office in Madison, Wisconsin was looking at more than $10,000 to reprint theirs. North Carolina started mailing ballots on September 4, while the ink on the rule was barely dry.

This wasn’t a partisan panic, either. Ricky Hatch, the Republican county clerk in Weber County, Utah, told the New York Times he had drawn up plans to abandon mail voting entirely if the rule survived. Seven secretaries of state from Republican-led states asked the courts to stop it.

Two courts said no in a single weekend

On September 13, a federal judge in Washington blocked the rule in the case Campaign Legal Center brought with its co-counsel on behalf of the League of United Latin American Citizens, a military families group called Secure Families Initiative, the Arizona Students’ Association, the city of Madison, and Travis County. The judge was Carl Nichols, whom President Trump appointed during his first term. His reasoning was almost elegant in its simplicity. Congress created the Postal Service to deliver mail. No law anywhere gives it the power to run a voter enrollment system or refuse lawful ballots. Lawyers call that acting “ultra vires,” which is Latin for beyond your powers. The rest of us might call it staying in your lane.

The next evening, the Supreme Court declined to rescue the rule in a parallel case brought by California and other states. The Court said plainly that the government is “unlikely to succeed” in defending it. Justice Brett Kavanaugh added that forcing the rule onto this election would be “arbitrary and capricious” because officials simply have no time to comply. Only Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented. All three of the president’s own Supreme Court appointees let the block stand without a word of protest.

Where a dollar does the most work

Every election year, billions of dollars pour into campaigns. Those races matter, and we’re not telling anyone to stop caring about them. But think about what this one legal fight just protected — mail ballots for tens of millions of voters. In all fifty states. In every race on every ballot, from the Senate down to the school board. No campaign, no matter how well funded, can win an election where the ballots never arrive.

John Adams wrote that we should be “a government of laws, and not of men.”

When the rules themselves are under attack, defending the rules has to come first, because every hard-fought victory at the polls depends on the votes being delivered, counted, and honored. This is why Bright America treats strategic litigation as core infrastructure for democracy, and why we’re so proud to help fuel the work Campaign Legal Center is doing in courtrooms across the country. Because a political campaign contribution helps one candidate in one race for one cycle; while a lawsuit won protects every voter in every race, sometimes for a generation.

More is coming, and that’s exactly why this matters

Monday’s order blocks the rule for this election while the lawsuits continue, and Justice Kavanaugh left the door open for a future version with better timing. The same executive order also contains other schemes still working their way through the system, including a federal “citizenship list” built from famously unreliable databases. Nobody involved in this work is spiking the football and going home.

We should and do expect more of this in the days and weeks before the midterms, and more after that. When one scheme to meddle with our elections gets blocked, this administration reaches for the next one. The attacks are coming faster than at any point in living memory, and they are drawn up by people with the full power of the federal government behind them.

The reason those attacks keep failing is the deep bench of brilliant, prepared, relentless lawyers who wake up every morning and go to work defending our rights, our freedoms, and the Constitution itself. They read every new rule the moment it drops. They have plaintiffs lined up, experts like Tammy Patrick on call, and briefs half-drafted before the other side finishes its press release. That is how a rule published on August 21 could be dead in the water by September 14. Speed like that takes years of quiet preparation, and preparation takes steady support.

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To put it bluntly, without these lawyers, the republic would almost certainly be lost already. With them, and with the people who fund their fights — our fights — it holds.

But this morning, ballots are already in the mail in more than a dozen states, headed to kitchen tables where voters will fill them out in peace. The referees held. The rules held. Your investment in the rule of law held.

We’ll take the win — but we’re not abandoning the watchtower.

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I’ve sat on both sides of an election. As a precinct chairman, I watched poll workers execute a process they’d trained on for months. As a congressional chief of staff, I worked with county officials who plan mail ballot logistics a year out — not a season out. Elections are powered by preparation. So when you change the rules at the last minute (in the name of “security” - ha!), what you create is confusion.

And confusion is exactly what you need to breed if you’re needing to discredit an election.

That’s what’s happening right now.

On August 21st, the U.S. Postal Service published a final rule reshaping how mail-in ballots move through the system, including a new authority for itself to reject ballots before they even get to an election official. A federal judge in Massachusetts blocked it September 4th, but the Administration refuses to back off. It went to the Supreme Court this week asking to implement the rule anyway, with a ruling possibly landing within days.

Our strategic litigation partner Campaign Legal Center (CLC), along with roughly two dozen states, are suing over this. The arguments are obvious and should prevail: the Constitution gives states and Congress power over elections, not the president, and USPS is supposed to answer to voters, not the West Wing. CLC already beat back one Trump election order in court — and we’re confident this will be the next.

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Here’s what still has me worried: County election offices don’t get to wait for the Supreme Court to sort this out before printing ballots and setting up mail processing. Some of them are already deep into midterm prep. A last-minute ruling either way forces them to scramble, and scrambling is where mistakes happen. And every mistake becomes a talking point for someone who wants to argue the result was rigged.

Republican and Democratic election officials alike have said their systems already work. The people running elections on the ground are the ones telling Washington to leave the process alone this close to a vote.

An independent judiciary exists for exactly this moment — to decide whether the executive branch can rewrite election rules by fiat weeks before Americans vote, without turning the decision into a campaign issue. CLC is putting that question in front of the courts on behalf of every voter, not one side’s voters.

The strength of American elections has never been that they’re perfect. It’s that they’re stable enough for people to trust the count. If we allow anyone to mess with that stability this close to Election Day, we open the door to chaos, and chaos is the one thing nobody in this fight can afford.

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Every year, a small federal office most have never heard of sends a questionnaire to more than 140 agencies across the executive branch. It’s called the Office of Government Ethics, and the questionnaire is essentially a report card.

How many ethics officials do you have on staff?

How many of your senior people filed their financial disclosure forms?

How many times did you let someone off the hook for a conflict of interest?

How many possible crimes did you send to the Justice Department, and what happened to them?

The answers for 2025 are in, and our strategic litigation partner Campaign Legal Center (CLC) spent the summer reading them. What they found was quieter than a scandal and yet, I think, more worrying. The federal government’s system for catching corruption is slowly being turned into an honor system, one missing form at a time.

Follow the money… unless you can’t

Start with the forms, because the forms are where the money hides.

When someone takes a senior job in the federal government, they have to disclose to the public what they own, what they owe, and who has been paying them. That document is called a public financial disclosure report, and while it is often quite dull paperwork, it’s also the single best tool the public has for spotting an official who is making decisions that help their own bank account. If the person overseeing a drug approval owns a pile of stock in the drug company, the form is how we find out. If the person writing a defense contract just left the contractor’s payroll, the form is how we find out.

In 2024, 110 of those reports were never filed. By contrast, in 2025, that number quadrupled to 418. Why would four times as many senior officials in the Trump Administration choose to simply ignore the law and fail to disclose their finances? Among a group of part-time advisers the government calls “special government employees,” compliance dropped from 100 percent to 82 percent in a single year. These are often the outside experts and business people brought in to advise on policy, which makes them exactly the group most likely to have a personal stake in the outcome.

I want to be fair about this. A missing form does not prove that anyone did anything wrong. It does prove that nobody could have caught them if they had, and catching them is the entire reason the form exists.

Riding the Waiver

Then there are the waivers. Federal law makes it a crime for an official to work on a matter where they have a personal financial interest. Agencies are allowed to waive that rule in narrow cases, when the interest is so small or so far removed that it could not realistically sway anyone. Those waivers are supposed to be rare. From 2021 through 2024, agencies issued about 120 of them a year, and in 2025 they issued 249. Roughly twice as many people were told, in writing, that the conflict-of-interest law would not apply to them this time.

And when agencies do find something that looks like a crime, the law requires them to refer it to the Justice Department. In 2025, agencies referred 141 possible criminal ethics violations, and the Justice Department declined to prosecute 94% of them. The Treasury Department alone sent 81 cases, and prosecutors passed on all but six.

Put those three numbers together and you can see the shape of the problem. Fewer people are telling us what they own. More people are getting permission to act on their conflicts anyway. And the rare cases that do get flagged as crimes are mostly going nowhere.

None of that happens by accident, because somebody has to chase the missing forms, review the waivers, and make the referrals. Those somebodies are the agency ethics officials, and there are 274 fewer of them than there were a year ago. The Department of Education lost 60 percent of its ethics staff, Treasury lost 44 percent, and the White House went from 18 ethics officials to four. Forty percent of ethics offices told the government they no longer have the resources to do the job.

At the top of each agency’s ethics program sits a person with the clunky title of Designated Agency Ethics Official. For decades, that job went to career civil servants, people who had spent years learning a thick body of law that confuses even the lawyers. But in 2025, one in five of those jobs was held by a political appointee, up from about one in seven the year before. At Homeland Security, Education, Energy, and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the new ethics chiefs appear to have no prior federal ethics experience at all. At the CIA, Health and Human Services, Labor, and Treasury, the position was simply empty.

If you want a sports metaphor, this is a game where most of the referees have been sent home, and many of the refs still on the field were hired by one of the teams. The rulebook is still sitting on the table, and fewer and fewer people are bothering to open it.

I think people sometimes hear the word “ethics” and picture something soft, like the training video you click through on your first day at a new job. The federal ethics program is a much harder thing than that. It is the part of government that stands between your tax dollars and the people who would like to help themselves to them. It is what sends a contract to the best bidder rather than the bidder who golfs with the agency director. It is what keeps a reviewer from waving through a product they happen to own shares in. When that program weakens, the losses rarely show up as a headline. They show up as a slightly worse deal, a slightly slower approval, a slightly more expensive project, repeated thousands of times across the government, with no way to trace any of it back.

That is what an honor system costs. It works beautifully as long as everyone involved is honorable, and it costs nothing to run, which is exactly its appeal to the people who benefit from it.

CLC is leading our movement in asking Congress for two things:

1) An independent ethics body for the executive branch, with real investigators, real enforcement power, and leaders who cannot be fired for doing their jobs. Right now the Office of Government Ethics can write the rules and collect the questionnaire, but it has very little power to investigate anyone or punish them for breaking those rules.

2) Close the revolving door, so a lobbyist cannot walk straight from an industry into the office that regulates it.

Neither idea is new, and neither is partisan. Every administration eventually leaves, and whatever rules we let slide now will be waiting for the next one, whoever that turns out to be. The question underneath all these numbers is a simple one. Do we want to know what the people running our government own and owe, or would we rather take their word for it?

I would rather know, and the forms are sitting right there just waiting to be filled out.

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On Monday, the Supreme Court gave the Trump administration something it had been asking for, and by Tuesday (yesterday), our strategic litigation partner Campaign Legal Center (CLC) had already filed a 71-page lawsuit in response. I want to walk through both of those things, but I’m going to spend most of my time on the second one, because that lawsuit is where the real fight is happening now.

Let’s start with what the Court did.

Back in March, President Trump signed an executive order that does two things that should sound strange to anyone who has ever voted. The first part tells the Department of Homeland Security to build federal lists of who counts as a citizen (from a trove of haphazardly compiled and often erroneous data). The second part tells the United States Postal Service, the same people who deliver your catalogs and birthday cards, to stop delivering mail ballots to anyone whose name doesn’t match up with the new, faulty system.

Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia sued to stop it. In June, a federal judge in Massachusetts blocked the order, explaining that the Constitution explicitly gives the job of running elections to the states and to Congress, not to the president. She also pointed out that the government had offered no evidence at all of fraud in mail voting, which was supposed to be the whole reason for the order. An appeals court agreed with her. The administration then rushed to the Supreme Court on its emergency docket, and on August 24th a 6-to-3 majority lifted her block.

It’s important you don’t stop reading now, because this is the part that matters most and a lot of the news coverage got wrong.

The Supreme Court did not say the president’s executive order is legal. What it said was that the states had sued too early, before the Post Office had actually written its rules, so there was nothing concrete enough yet for anyone to be harmed by. The unsigned opinion even added that nothing about the decision “means that any measure taken by the Government to implement the Order will necessarily be lawful.” In the Court’s own words, “On that score, time will tell.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, writing for the three justices who disagreed, warned that the majority “needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections.” I think she is right about that, but the majority’s own careful wording is the thing worth holding onto. The justices answered a question about timing, and they left the bigger question about power for another day.

The funny thing about a timing problem is that it tends to fix itself.

The Postal Service put out its final rule on Friday, August 21, and it was printed in the Federal Register today. The “too soon” argument that won the government its victory at the Supreme Court has now disappeared, because there is an actual rule on the books that anyone can read.

That is why, less than a day after the Supreme Court acted, our strategic litigation partner CLC filed a new complaint in federal court. This is exactly what Bright America members are funding with donations and subscriptions!

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From “Bad Idea” to “Absurd Idea”

Under the Post Office’s new rule, before a state can mail out a single ballot, its election officials have to log into a brand-new website called the Federal Ballot Mail Portal and enroll every mail voter by name and address. Each voter then needs a special Postal Service barcode on the envelope going out and a second one on the envelope coming back. Every batch of ballots requires its own separate upload. If a barcode on an envelope doesn’t match a name on the list, the Post Office refuses to take it and sends it back to the clerk.

The portal, as I write this, does not exist yet.

Most states have laws dictating when they have to start mailing ballots (for example, North Carolina, by law, has to start mailing ballots on September 4). The rule also says that Post Office workers will scan those barcodes one at a time at the loading dock; that scanning “generally takes less than a minute per mailpiece”; and that the election official should stay on site while it happens. The complaint does the math for us. Maricopa County, Arizona, expects to send about 2.6 million pieces of mail in its first batch of ballots. At one minute apiece, the county recorder would be standing at the postal facility for nearly five years. Even at one second apiece, it would take thirty days.

Madison’s clerk has already bought every envelope she needs for November. Those envelopes don’t have the new barcode, and she has no legal power to redesign them, because Wisconsin’s statewide system controls the design. Reprinting them would cost more than $10,000 that the city has already spent once, and the supplier needs three to nine months of lead time she simply doesn’t have before her September 17 mailing date. Over in Travis County, the barcodes the clerk already uses aren’t compatible with the Post Office’s format, and her scanners can’t read the new kind.

None of this is a guess about what might go wrong. It is what happens when you ask a mail carrier (that can barely deliver the mail) to run an election with ten weeks’ notice.

The lawsuit makes eight separate legal claims that can be summed up in a few bullets:

☑️ CLC argues that the Postal Service has no constitutional authority to write election rules at all, because the Constitution hands that job to the states and to Congress.

☑️ The rest of the claims go after the Post Office rule under ordinary administrative law.

☑️ The Post Office, which would be refusing to carry some Americans’ ballots, is breaking its own legal duty to serve everyone.

☑️ A claim under the Voting Rights Act that turning ballots away at the Post Office amounts to refusing to let eligible voters vote.

More than 200,000 people wrote in to comment on the proposed version of this rule over the summer, and the Postal Service changed almost nothing in response.

Anna Baldwin, who leads voting rights litigation at CLC, called the Supreme Court’s order “lawless” and said her team “will not let the president’s dangerous anti-voter agenda go unchecked.”

The president’s executive order remains unconstitutional, and the Postal Service cannot launder it into a rule that blocks mail ballots weeks before an election.

Sarah Streyder of Secure Families Initiative pointed to the particular cruelty of making it harder for deployed troops and their families to vote from overseas, since those are exactly the people who depend most on mail ballots.

I’ll say the part that everyone in this fight already understands. From the very beginning, the administration’s strategy has been to run out the clock. If the rule comes out late enough, no court can fully stop it before ballots go in the mail, and the confusion does the rest of the work on its own. The Supreme Court’s timing decision, whatever the justices meant by it, fit that strategy perfectly.

And what CLC, with our movement behind them, did on Tuesday was refuse to let the clock decide the whole game. They filed on the very day the rule became something a court could review, in front of the same judge in Washington who told them back in the spring that they would have to wait for a final rule. Now there is one, and they are back in his courtroom.

If you vote by mail this fall, I have two practical suggestions. Nothing about Monday’s decision changes your ability to request or cast a ballot right now, so don’t let the headlines scare you off. And given what the Postal Service is being asked to do to itself, request your ballot early and send it back early. The people who run your county’s elections are already doing their part, and so are the lawyers.

The least the rest of us can do is not wait around.

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A wrecking ball swung into the East Wing of the White House in October 2025, and with it went more than just the historic offices of the First Lady. In its place, the administration proposed a 90,000-square-foot ballroom — a monument to legacy, sure, but more alarmingly, a monument to the highest bidder.

Because Congress never authorized or funded this vanity project, the administration decided to crowdsource it. Nearly $400 million has been raised from a cocktail of corporate giants and private donors, including Meta, Coinbase, Ripple, and Lockheed Martin. But as any seasoned observer of Washington knows: there is no such thing as a free ballroom.

What we are witnessing is the literal privatization of the People’s House. It serves as the crown jewel of what the Campaign Legal Center’s Pay-to-Play Tracker describes as a brazen era of transactional governance.

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When you bypass the congressional power of the purse — a constitutional safeguard designed specifically to prevent this exact flavor of corruption — you enter dangerous territory. The tracker maps out a bleak landscape where seven-figure checks to affiliated PACs or inaugural funds have seemingly become the price of admission for cabinet appointments, ambassadorships, dropped investigations, and even presidential pardons.

Just look at Coinbase. The cryptocurrency giant and its major investors poured $12 million into a Trump-affiliated Super PAC, $1 million into the Inaugural Fund, and an undisclosed sum into the ballroom project. By February 2025, the SEC had conveniently dropped a civil enforcement action against the company. Coincidence? That’s a tough sell.

Fortunately, the guardrails of democracy, though dented, are still holding, and our strategic litigation partner Campaign Legal Center (CLC) is taking the fight to the courts. In the ongoing lawsuit National Trust for Historic Preservation v. National Park Service, watchdogs have stepped in to defend the separation of powers. In CLC’s Amicus Brief, it laid out the stakes clearly: allowing a president to bypass Congress and fund public projects with private, interested money is a fast track to corrupt bargains.

Just this week, CLC doubled down with a filing at the Supreme Court to keep the construction halted. As CLC argued, the Constitution vests the power of the purse in Congress for a reason — to keep the government working for the people, not a shadowy board of underwriters.

We fight for a “Bright America” not because the sun is always shining on Washington, but because our system was built with the flashlights necessary to expose the rot. The fix isn’t a mystery; it’s a matter of will.

We need presidents to divest from conflicting financial interests or use blind trusts. We need a rejuvenated Federal Election Commission with actual teeth, and a complete overhaul of the dark-money floodgates opened by Citizens United. Until then, we rely on the courts and relentless watchdogs to remind those in power that the White House isn’t a timeshare for special interests.

It belongs to us. Let’s keep the lights on.

During the 2024 election, Donald Trump made two promises that people remember: 1) prices would come down, and 2) he would keep us out of war. And now, it’s time for voters to grade him on both.

Groceries, rent, insurance, and the electric bill have not gotten easier for anyone I know, and the country has spent this year watching military commitments grow rather than wind down. When a party is failing at the kitchen table and on questions of war and peace at the same time, midterm elections tend to become waves, and that is what I expect this one to be.

And while I do feel quite strongly about who I hope will win in November, I also know an ever more important thing is us finding our way back to all Americans being able to look at the result — disappointed or not — and believe it was free and fair.

But an expectation of a massive electoral shift is worth precisely nothing if the machinery that turns votes into results gets jammed, and there are a great many people working, at this very moment, to jam it.

That is why I’m so focused on the work of our strategic litigation partner Campaign Legal Center, which is at the forefront of the most important work we can be doing to preserve democracy.

While there’s plenty to worry about, I hope the vigilance of those in our election protection litigation community give you some comfort and hope that we can and will get through this:

“What if DOJ seizes ballots or voting machines?”

This is not a hypothetical, since we have already watched a version of it play out in Fulton County.

The pressure point, though, is smaller than most people realize. A federal seizure requires a magistrate judge’s signature on a warrant, often with no public notice and very little time for reflection, which is why legal teams are putting briefing materials in front of magistrate judges now, so that a legally thin or politically motivated application will meet real scrutiny rather than a rubber stamp.

Running beneath all of this is DOJ’s effort to build a national voter database, a tool that could be used to force purges on the basis of sloppy name matches and to manufacture doubt about the count after the fact. Multiple lawsuits have been brought against both of Trump's election executive orders, and CLC has been central to that fight, winning rulings that struck down the proof-of-citizenship requirement and the provision targeting military and overseas voters, and pressing a pending challenge to the 2026 order's national citizen database and mail-ballot restrictions.

I would add that the record on this front is considerably better than the anxiety suggests. Core provisions of both anti-voting executive orders have been blocked, and DOJ now stands at 0 for 22 in its lawsuits demanding that states hand over their voter rolls. Those twenty-two victories did not simply happen. Wins like these are only possible because somebody filed, somebody argued, and somebody paid for it, and that somebody is people like you and me!

Fuel the Lawsuits Protecting Your Ballot

“What if federal agents show up at my polling place?”

Because speed is everything here, our partners have shell pleadings drafted and ready to file immediately, whether the trigger is ICE at a polling site or a surge of federal agents into a competitive district under the banner of immigration enforcement.

There is a second track that I find encouraging. A growing number of states have adopted legislation allowing ordinary people to sue federal officials who violate their constitutional rights. The New York Times called it “a law that might just save the midterms.” An agent who knows he can be held personally liable behaves rather differently than one who assumes the badge covers everything.

The drill you hope you never run

None of this guarantees a calm November, but I would ask you to notice what all of it has in common: Preparation. And while being well-prepared is neither glamorous nor cheap, it is exactly what needs to be done. That’s why your support is so important right now.

Be prepared - give today

Three things you can do this week

1. Fuel the legal work. Every filing and every state guide costs money, and Bright America members are the reason it gets funded.

   Invest in Democracy-Saving Lawsuits →

2. Call your legislators. Ask them where they stand on protecting election officials from federal interference. Names, numbers, and our calling guide are here.

3. Send this to one person who is anxious about November, ideally someone who doesn’t vote the way you do, because the result has to be believable to all of us.

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Have you been to a naturalization ceremony? I haven’t and I worked in Congress for 20 years, where I routinely witnessed many of the functions of government… which leads me to believe most Americans haven’t, either.

I have, however, spoken to many people who have attended as either newly sworn-in Americans, witnesses, or public officials. And the common thing I hear is that there’s a special feeling in the room — with people from everywhere, all dressed up, nervous, beaming with pride, holding little American flags. They take the oath after a years- or decades-long obstacle course and just like that, they’re Americans.

And for as long as anyone can remember, a key feature of these ceremonies has been volunteers from the non-partisan League of Women Voters who have been waiting right outside with a special question that most of us take for granted:

“Would you like to register to vote?”

For thousands of new citizens every year, that’s their first act as an American. It happens minutes after they become one.

Yet, last August, the Trump administration tried to put a stop to it when U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) barred nonpartisan groups like the League from helping new citizens register to vote after naturalization ceremonies. Instead, only local election officials would be allowed to, and in much of the country, election officials don’t have the staff to show up (and have never needed to). That’s the whole reason the League has been doing this work for decades, since before USCIS even existed.

The effect was immediate, with Leagues across the country canceled registration drives. And the numbers tell you what was really at stake. In 2024, League volunteers held nearly 3,000 events at naturalization ceremonies and helped more than 122,000 new citizens register.

Nobody streamlines that away by accident.

So our movement sued

This is where Campaign Legal Center (CLC), our strategic litigation partner, comes in.

In November, CLC filed suit on behalf of the national League and Leagues in Colorado, New Jersey, Saratoga County, the Charleston area, and Milwaukee County. The argument was simple: helping people register to vote is speech. It’s protected by the First Amendment, for organizations as much as for individuals, and the government doesn’t get to order civic groups to knock it off.

CLC also went after how the rule was made. Federal agencies can’t just change the rules on a whim. The Administrative Procedure Act requires notice, public comment, and actual reasoning. USCIS skipped all of it.

Last week (August 3, 2026), a federal judge agreed and blocked the policy while the case moves forward, finding it arbitrary, likely unconstitutional, and adopted without anything close to the required process.

That means the League is back at these ceremonies — tables up, clipboards out!

Fuel the Fight for our Rights!

Why YOU should share this good news

There are three important reasons you should share this good news (and they’re the same reason I’m writing about this right now)…

1️⃣ Because good news deserves to be shared, and there hasn’t been enough of it

2️⃣ Good news breeds hope, and hope keeps the fight for our freedoms alive and well

3️⃣ At a time when Congress has abandoned its role, and the Executive is abusing power, this type of litigation is how REAL change happens right now

Invest in REAL Hope & Change

We are living through a stretch where we can’t count on elections alone to protect our rights. That’s a hard thing to say out loud, but you already know it’s true. What this case shows is that the courts still work when someone shows up prepared to fight, and that our Constitution and laws still have teeth when skilled lawyers sink them in.

That doesn’t happen on its own. It takes organizations like CLC that build cases carefully, know the law cold, and have earned the trust of partners like the League. And it takes people like you, because litigation like this runs on the support of a movement. Your attention, your sharing, your donations. That’s the fuel.

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We should be honest about where things stand. This is a preliminary injunction, not a final ruling. CLC and the Leagues still have to win the case outright, and then there will likely be appeals — not to mention that this administration will continue looking for new ways to make voting harder. Nobody at CLC is spiking the football, and neither are we.

But a year ago, the government told nonpartisan volunteers to stop helping new Americans vote. And now, a court has told the government to stand down. That happened because people fought back, and it’s a fight we can win again, because the strategy that won it is repeatable.

Somewhere this week, someone will take the oath, walk out of the ceremony, and register to vote at a folding table that wasn’t supposed to be there. And in the time we’re in, and as challenging as it may be, that’s worth celebrating.

Share this one. People need the reminder that we’re not powerless.

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Earlier this week I wrote about conservative provocateur and Trump-whisperer Laura Loomer standing in a Kyiv bomb shelter, telling the Associated Press that Russian propaganda had bamboozeled her. Loomer’s acknowledgment confirmed what many of us already intuited: Putin’s Russia was hiding in plain sight within many conservative media outlets. And the concrete proof came in the form of a federal indictment that finally showed some of us how it got there — $9.7 million of Kremlin money, one Tennessee company, two thousand videos, and six American commentators who say they had no idea.

I ended on a sour note: the government watchtowers that we rely on to scan for this are unmanned.

So what do we actually do?

Before I answer that, I want to be straighter with you than most people writing about this are willing to be. The evidence here is contested. A fair amount of it says “less than you’d hope.” And I’d rather you hear the weaknesses in my own argument from me than from someone who’s arguing with me.

So let’s start with the strongest case against my position.

In 2024, a group of political scientists — Ceren Budak, Brendan Nyhan, and Andy Guess, among others — published a review in Nature arguing that exposure to flatly false content online is rarer than most of us assume, and heavily concentrated in a small group of people who were already out at the far end of things. Their argument is that the engine here is demand, not supply, and that the real damage gets done by domestic elites with microphones.

In other words, most of the consequential false things Americans believe were said out loud, on camera, by other Americans.

Now for the good news, which corrects something you’ve probably heard secondhand. You may have heard of the “backfire effect” — the idea that correcting somebody makes them dig in and believe the wrong thing even harder. Yet, two political scientists, Thomas Wood and Ethan Porter, went looking for it across 52 different issues with more than ten thousand people and couldn’t produce it.

So correct the record — because It does move people. And while it rarely erases a belief outright, it can soften people to eventually accept the truth.

Get There First

The idea comes from immunology, which is why researchers call it “inoculation”.

A vaccine works by showing your immune system a weakened version of a threat, so that when the real one arrives, your body already knows the shape of it. Prebuttal does the same thing to counter lies. You show people the con in advance, in a small and harmless dose, so that when somebody runs it on them for real, something in the back of the mind goes: wait, I’ve seen this before.

There are two ways to do it. You can inoculate against a specific claim — here’s what they’re going to tell you about the voting machines in October, and here’s why it’s wrong. That works, but it only protects against the one claim, and there are always more claims.

Or you can inoculate against the technique, which is the version I’d put money on.

It might look something like “Here’s what a manufactured outrage clip looks like, and here’s how you can tell somebody edited it” or “Here’s how a fake local news site gets built — the county name in the URL, the stock photo masthead, the three real stories on top of one fabricated one” or “Here’s what it looks like when a stranger halfway around the world is working to make you feel like your neighbor is your enemy.”

When people understand a pattern, you don’t have to be able to predict the exact lie that may be told.

Messenger > Message

The messenger often matters more than the message. In a 2021 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers tested vaccine messaging on Republicans. When the endorsement of vaccines came from a Republican elected official, intent to get vaccinated moved up about seven points. The identical message from a Democrat produced backlash — it pushed people the wrong direction.

Same words. Opposite result. The only variable was whose mouth they came out of.

And yet every instinct in American politics rigrht now is to send the most credentialed person available to go explain things to people who have no use for credentials. It doesn’t work — and perhaps it never did. The person who can reach a skeptical conservative on election integrity is a conservative — and preferably one that person might run into at church, or at work, or in a social setting.

Where Trust Still Lives

This is why Bright America is putting its efforts into local communities.

I’m sure you’re aware that the supply of local news in many places across the country is collapsing. But in the Reuters Institute’s survey work, local and regional outlets still post the highest trust of any category of news — year after year, across the map.

Local news is trusted — but it’s disappearing.

We’re partnering with local newsrooms to make prebuttal content in the form people actually consume: short and native to the platform; hosted by a real person with a name and a face, put where the audience already is.

We’re not waiting on national media to carry this. I hold no grudge against it, and I’d much rather it were healthy than sick. But the numbers say plainly that it can’t reach the people who most need reaching. An 8 percent trust rating is hardly a promising distribution channel.

Help Support Our Local Work

The rest of us are going to have to get more literate about our own heads, too. And I mean that without the sneer that usually attaches to “do your research.” What you scroll changes what you think. The people you find most trustworthy were selected for you by a recommendation engine that has no opinion about whether they’re right. And there are foreign governments spending massive amounts of money on a bet that they can use that against you.

Say It Before November

I want to end where I started, because that’s the hopeful part.

It is not an easy thing to admit you’ve been fooled. And that’s because, all too often, it can feel internally and externally like saying “I’m a fool.”

That’s why I’m proud of the conservatives who have moved off Russia’s anti-Ukraine talking points. It’s not just Laura Loomer, but members of Congress, veterans, writers, local officials (and on and on) who took a fresh look at where the arguments came from and had the nerve to say in public that they’d been played. We should be gracious when people are willing to change course — and not just because it’s the kind thing to do, but because these people become the most compelling messengers to the rest of the public who may have been fooled also.

And now I’d like to see a lot more of this, but on a much more challenging subject given the President’s sensitivities…

We need conservatives to speak up about election denialism, and we need them to do it before the claims arrive — not in the wreckage afterward. That’s the whole idea of prebuttal. It means being willing to say now, in August, what we’re all going to be told in November: that the counts are slow because the law requires it, that a lead changing overnight is the system working exactly the way it was built to work, and that your county clerk is not a criminal.

And yes, it means being willing to prebut the President. He is still the single most powerful voice in conservative politics. I expect that to change, because nobody’s influence is permanent and second terms end. When it recedes, something will fill the space. What fills it is being decided right now, by whoever bothers to do the work of building a network.

Our best assets are sitting in places Washington doesn’t spend much time thinking about. The business owner, he sheriff, the county commissioner, the pastor, the woman who’s run the Chamber of Commerce for twenty years and knows everybody’s kids by name. These are people with standing in an actual place — and standing is about the only currency left that still buys anything.

Building that network is the work — not a theory of a network. An actual list of actual people, in specific counties, prepared and willing to speak before the fire starts.

Laura Loomer had to stand in a bomb shelter in Kyiv to see what had been done to her. Most people are never going to get that.

What they’ll get is whatever we manage to put in front of them first.

So let’s be first.

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Last week, Laura Loomer went to Kyiv.

If her name means nothing to you, you should know it means a great deal to a few million people online. Loomer is a highly controversial right-wing activist who built a career out of confrontation — from spreading conspiracy theories, to being thrown out of congressional hearings to being banned and eventually reinstated on most of the major platforms to two failed runs for Congress in Florida — and has had the President’s ear (resulting in some key firings for insufficient loyalty). She is not a journalist and wouldn’t claim to be. But she is loud, and for most of the last decade that was enough to make her one of the more audible voices on the online right.

For five years, what she told her audience about Ukraine ran roughly like this: corrupt country, crawling with Nazis, not worth an American dollar. She floated the idea that Putin should just take the whole thing. She wrote op-eds for RT, the Kremlin’s English-language international network.

And then, last week, she sat across from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy with a camera rolling and told him she had been…

“bamboozled by Russian propaganda.”

She used to think Ukraine was full of Nazis, she said. She doesn’t anymore. Later, after a ballistic missile alert pushed her interview with the Associated Press out of her hotel and down into the building’s bomb shelter, she explained how it had happened:

Once upon a time, Laura Loomer got kicked off the conventional American social media platforms, and found herself on Telegram — because that was what was left. But what she may not have realized is that Telegram is where Russian material circulates freely. The Russians, she said, are very good at capitalizing on people’s rage. And she was angry.

She also wrote something a truth that still hasn’t been realized by many in our country:

“We have been so propagandized by Russia, and we don’t even realize it.”

Some caution is in order here. The reversal is days old and I have no idea whether it will hold. I’m not the audience for it either — I don’t trust her, and I’d be surprised if that changes. But a lot of people do, and if one conservative influencer, who has spent years vilifying Ukraine based on lies Russia fed her, can publicly make this stark of a reversal, it’s — dare I say — encouraging.

What the trip mostly left me with is a question I’ve been chewing on for four years. My entire career on Capitol Hill was spent in rooms where nobody had to be talked into the idea that Russia was our adversary.

So what happened?

I worked on Capitol Hill for Republicans for nearly 20 years. In every room I was ever in — foreign affairs meetings, staff briefings, the ordinary griping that fills an office on a Thursday afternoon — Russia was the red menace. There was no question that Putin was a bad actor and you didn’t have to argue for it.

Rush Limbaugh, perhaps the most influential conservative media figure for decades, told his audience day-after-day that Putin couldn’t be trusted (KGB man, playing a long game, any flattery drifting over from Moscow was part of the con, etc.). Millions of conservatives heard that on repeat for years — it was just a fact.

Then Russia invaded Ukraine in February of 2022, and inside of a week I started hearing an argument I had never heard in my life.

It went like this… “Russia was actually building something enviable. A society ordered around Christian faith. A place that had refused the decadence we’d let take root here. Putin was the last man standing for a civilization the West had walked away from, and Ukraine was a corrupt client state of the same corrupt global order that had wrecked our own country.”

Hearing an argument like this was incredibly strange — most of all because it came out of nowhere. It arrived whole, talking points already attached, at the precise moment it became useful to Moscow.

In those early days of the war, I spearheaded an effort to raise a few hundred thousand dollars in charitable giving for Ukraine — food and medicine, ambulances, medical supplies, and other things you might need if there’s a hole in your apartment building. This seemed like something 100% of Congress could support, and yet I can vividly remember standing inside the Capitol listening to the Kremlin’s arguments come out of the mouth of a Member of Congress.

It made me sick, and was really beyond comprehension. Surely he couldn’t believe what he was saying, right? The only person who could repeat lies like that must be a Russian asset. But we now know there’s another explanation.

Follow the Money

On September 4, 2024, the Justice Department unsealed charges against two employees of RT. The allegation was that RT had secretly bankrolled a Tennessee company called Tenet Media to the tune of roughly $9.7 million, which was nearly every dollar the company ever took in. The money moved through an investor who didn’t exist, invented for the purpose. Tenet Media put out something close to two thousand videos and pulled more than sixteen million views on YouTube alone.

The six American commentators on Tenet’s roster were not charged with any crime — the indictment describes them as deceived. They’ve said they had editorial control and no idea whose money it was, and on that narrow question I take them at their word. The mechanics are what matter, and the mechanics work either way.

That’s the design. You never have to buy anyone. You only have to fund them.

If you’re Russia, and you want a set of arguments circulating in the American bloodstream, this is the cheap way in. Find people who already lean your direction. Then make leaning that direction extremely good business. Pay for the studio, cover the booking fees, fill the comments with agreement, push the clips. The person on camera can be entirely sincere and the operation still works. Sincerity is the product.

It wasn’t one company, either. That same day, the Treasury Department sanctioned a batch of Russian entities and individuals tied to the wider influence apparatus, among them ANO Dialog, which is on paper a Russian nonprofit and in practice was connected to something called Doppelgänger — an operation that cloned real news sites down to the fonts in order to launder Kremlin copy into Western feeds. The Justice Department seized dozens of the counterfeit domains. This is a Russian industry. It has offices and org charts and performance metrics.

I used to think of these operations as rooted in persuasion. But now I realize it’s really closer to gardening. You can’t argue a plant into growing, but you can decide what gets water and fertilizer.

The Danger at Home

What ought to worry all of us heading into November is that the ground Russia was working is ground Americans cleared ourselves.

About one in five American adults now gets news regularly from what the Pew Research Center calls news influencers. Among adults under thirty it’s more than a third. The number I’d highligh is this one: of the influencers Pew studied, roughly three-quarters have no affiliation with any news organization at all. No editor. No standards desk. No lawyer down the hall whose entire job is to say: there’s no real proof, we can’t run that.

Meanwhile the institutions that employ editors, standards desks, and lawyers down the hall are coming apart. Northwestern’s Medill School has been keeping count, and the tally is grim: the country has been losing newspapers at a rate of about two and a half a week, and we’re down roughly 3,300 of them since 2005. More than two hundred counties have no local news source at all. Something like 55 million Americans live somewhere with little or none.

Trust fell through the floor over the same stretch. Gallup’s most recent polling puts trust in mass media at 28 percent, the first time it has ever come in under thirty. Among Republicans it’s 8 percent (!). You cannot build a civic information strategy on an 8.

Then add the past two years, in which we took apart most of the government’s ability to see any of this coming. The State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which tracked foreign propaganda, closed at the end of 2024, and the office meant to replace it was shut down the following spring. CISA — the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the people who worked alongside state and county election officials — has lost about a third of its workforce and stepped back from election security work. The FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force was quietly shuttered. Stanford’s Internet Observatory, which did more public-interest research on this than anyone in the country, lost its funding under legal and congressional pressure.

You may think some of that was justified. There are serious civil liberties objections to the government sitting anywhere near questions of speech. I don’t dismiss them and neither should you. But we should also be clear-eyed about what it costs. The traditional media and government watchtowers are unmanned.

So what do we actually do?

That’s the harder question, and it’s the one I’ll take up in part two later this Saturday — what the research says works, where that research is genuinely contested, and what we’re building at Bright America to make a positive impact.

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Thursday night, the President gave a primetime address about the upcoming midterm elections. He did exactly what we’ve come to expect: he told the country the system can’t be trusted, suggested the results might need to be questioned, and positioned himself as the sole protector of the vote’s integrity. Framing his arguments to justify his demands, he stated, “Our elections were left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen, and the trust of the American people was lost”. He used these unsubstantiated claims to demand that Congress pass the SAVE America Act, a currently stalled voting bill that would be so burdensome that millions of legitimate voters would be denied ballots.

Of course, we’ve heard all of these arguments before. As someone who worked on the January 6th Select Committee and read the documents, the pattern is glaringly obvious.

What We Already Know

The committee’s final report documented a multi-part plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election. As the election lies are repeated more feverishly from the White House, it’s worth repeating some of January 6th Committee’s proven facts:

• Trump advisers drafted an executive order that would have directed the military and federal agencies to seize voting machines across the country.

• While it was never signed, it was written, reviewed, and seriously considered by people inside the White House.

• The Eastman memos laid out a strategy to pressure Vice President Pence into refusing to count certified electoral votes from seven states.

• Officials made direct calls to state election workers demanding they “find” votes.

• Alternate slates of fake electors were organized and submitted to Congress and the National Archives.

Over sixty courts rejected the legal challenges, including judges appointed by Republicans. The system held in 2020 because individual people chose to follow the law under enormous pressure. The Vice President refused to fold, and state officials held the line.

The Fact that Can’t be Spoken

Thursday’s speech didn’t happen in a vacuum. Just yesterday, the President’s newly appointed Director of National Intelligence could not confirm in a Senate hearing that Joe Biden won the 2020 election — on the record, under oath, in 2026.

But he is certainly not the first, as innumerable confirmation hearings have demonstrated that — in this Administration — repeating the fact that Trump legitimately lost the 2020 election is unforgivable.

What this means in practice is that the Administration, much of Congress, one of our major political parties, and their media cheerleaders must operate in an alternate reality, in which history has been rewritten. Stranger still is that many of these same leaders prominently condemned the President’s election lies following the January 6, 2021 attacks.

Who Actually Protects Your Vote

While the political drumbeat gets louder, and fear and anxiety rises as people wonder who is defending the rule of law and protecting our voter freedoms, there is hope! Our strategic litigation partner Campaign Legal Center (CLC) is doing the serious, unglamorous work that matters.

• They helped pass the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022, which successfully closed the specific loophole the Eastman memos tried to get Vice President Pence to exploit.

• They blocked the President’s executive order that sought to implement the SAVE Act by presidential decree. It would have required American citizens to produce a passport (which are expensive and half the country doesn’t have one) or a certified birth certificate that matches their current name (many people don’t have easy access to this documentation, and married women who have changed their names are out of luck anyway).

• They sued and won in multiple states that, following the President’s demands, tried to illegally change their maps this year, despite it being in violation of the state constitution.

• They monitor Hatch Act violations throughout this election cycle.

• They defend election workers, whose expertise and integrity serve as the last line of defense when everything else gets loud.

• Among hundreds of other bold, brave legal actions in defense of democracy.

I’ve watched them do this work, and it matters far more than anything a politician from either party can say in response to the President’s speech. With the President’s speech all but guaranteeing the 2026 election will face unprecedented challenges, we must rush as much support to the current and coming litigation as possible!

Fuel the Litigation Saving Our Elections

What I’m Asking You to Do

Call your representatives. Ask them directly:

1️⃣ Will you commit to certifying the results of the 2026 midterm elections once your state certifies them?

2️⃣ Will you oppose any effort to use federal agencies, including the military, to interfere with counting or certification?

3️⃣ Will you protect the independence of state and local election officials?

You can get their numbers here:

These questions have obvious answers if you believe in the Constitution. The committee documented exactly what happens when officials choose not to answer them honestly.

Get your representatives on the record, and support Campaign Legal Center’s work. And remember: the plan to seize election machines wasn’t a fringe idea floated by someone on the outside. It was a draft executive order written inside the White House.

We can only image what’s been drafted this year, lying in wait for the moment that may challenge our Constitution and Country like never before.

But the January 6th Committee unveiled the playbook — it doesn’t take that active of an imagination to know what they’ll try to do, which means we can be ready. The question now is whether enough people will demand our representatives honor their oaths, support the litigation defending our freedoms, and spread the word that the only way to “keep our republic” is free and fair elections.

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Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opens nationwide Friday, and I can’t wait to see it (quite literrally, I bought tickets for Thursday night weeks ago!).

Like others who grew up captivated by these myths, I’m eager to see how Nolan handles the sweeping scale of the epic. But before sitting in the theater, I found myself listening to one of my very favorite scholars, the classicist Mary Beard, walk through what Homer’s poem is actually about. She made a point that hasn’t let go of me since:

On paper, the ending of the Odyssey is a classic story of restoration. Ithaca, in Odysseus’s twenty-year absence, has fallen into deep disorder. Suitors have occupied the palace, depleted its resources, and corrupted the social order. But by the end, the king returns, the interlopers are cleared out, and order is restored.

But Beard points us to a deeper, more realistic truth behind the myth:

“The reordering of Ithaca is a terribly bloody process.”

In a modern context, this isn’t about violence or physical conflict — it is about the sheer, exhausting friction of systemic change. The “suitors” of our democracy — entrenched interests, eroded norms, systemic decay and the minority who benefit from them — won’t just pack up and hand back the keys because we ask nicely. Reclaiming a home takes immense, friction-filled work.

And when the floors are finally scrubbed, the poem reveals that Odysseus doesn’t just sit on his throne forever; he has to keep moving.

Beard reads this not as a tragedy, but as Homer’s honest wisdom: the home you return to is never exactly the same, because you aren’t the same. The very process of rebuilding changes us, tempers our resolve, and prepares us to protect what we’ve built.

A 927-Page Reality Check

That question has been on my mind for a different reason. Four years of this administration is going to leave this country needing a homecoming of its own, and I don’t think anyone who’s watched things closely believes the country simply snaps back to where it was the moment this presidency ends. Too much has been unmade, among them the working assumptions that 1) the rule of law applies evenly, 2) America’s word means something to allies who’ve leaned on it for eighty years, and 3) a judiciary can be pressured but not outright owned.

Underneath all of it, something even more basic has shifted — the assumption that the presidency is not about self-enrichment.

Putting any of that back in order will not be a matter of flipping a switch. It could look more like Ithaca — slow, contested, and expensive, with real arguments about how far is too far.

Consider how far the distance has already stretched. A recent federal financial disclosure showed the President’s holdings grew by $2.2 billion in a single year, with more than half of it flowing from cryptocurrency ventures carrying his own name. The document itself runs a staggering 927 pages.

To put that in perspective:

• Barack Obama’s final disclosure ran eight pages.

• Joe Biden’s ran eleven.

• The current disclosure is nearly a thousand.

Historians say they don’t have much to measure it against. “There is no precedent to compare it with,” as Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley put it.

Nobody has accused the President of breaking the law here, and in a narrow sense, he hasn’t: the presidency is uniquely exempt from the conflict-of-interest rules that force any other senior official into a blind trust. But that is precisely the point made by a group of former White House ethics lawyers — appointees of both parties: the wall between the office and the fortune was never a law. It was a norm. It was upheld by nothing but mutual agreement and the fear of shame. You don’t notice an agreement like that until it’s gone.

The Modern Gerrymander Arms Race

The damage runs across multiple systems at once. Foreign alliances built on trust in American reliability don’t rebuild overnight. A judiciary reshaped over four years doesn’t rebalance in a single term. An anti-corruption enforcement apparatus that was sidelined requires sustained rebuilding, not a quick press conference.

Look at what happened when a divided Supreme Court gutted a core piece of the Voting Rights Act. Within hours, legislatures in Florida and Louisiana were redrawing maps to take advantage of the opening — the acceleration of what election lawyers had already called a nationwide gerrymandering arms race.

Restoring the system means writing these optional norms into hard law. That requires a Congress and a President with the energy and willingness to take on fights that will feel politically costly, and to face a level of backlash we haven’t seen in the modern reform era.

Polarization has already made accountability harder; that is one of the things these past four years have demonstrated most clearly. Reform will require facing sacred cows directly: the campaign finance structures that entrench incumbents, the gerrymandering that makes legislators unaccountable, and the ethics law gaps that made all of this possible in the first place. Half-measures won’t hold.

The Quiet Work of the Loom

Fortunately, the unglamorous work is already quietly underway. Our brilliant strategic litigation partner, Campaign Legal Center, is successfully fighting those gerrymandered maps in state courts right now — in places like Utah, Missouri, and Florida — while pushing for the slower, structural fix: independent commissions that take the pen out of whichever party currently holds it.

None of this makes the evening news. But it’s exactly the kind of institution-by-institution, statute-by-statute work that turned Watergate into the Federal Election Commission and the campaign finance rules (eroded as they may be) we still use today. A country can legislate its way back into an ethical house. It just requires good people doing the right thing — easier said than done, but intuitively possible.

This is where the Odyssey offers its best, most overlooked lesson:

Odysseus isn’t the only one doing the work of coming home. While he is gone for twenty years, his son Telemachus — played by Tom Holland in Nolan’s version — grows from a boy nobody takes seriously into a man capable of standing beside his father when it finally matters. Meanwhile, his wife Penelope spends years outlasting suitors who assume she’ll eventually hand over the house, famously weaving a burial shroud by day and quietly undoing it by night, buying the precious time the household needs to survive.

Neither of them gets the grand statue or top billing — but neither of them wastes the years they’re given, either.

That is closer to what rebuilding actually looks like. It isn’t one dramatic, cinematic homecoming. It is years of steady resistance by people who refuse to give the house away before there is anyone home to defend it. Somewhere in small rooms on Capitol Hill right now and in judge’s chambers across the country, mostly out of view, that is exactly what’s happening.

The House We Build Next

This is the deeper truth of the Odyssey. Beard’s observation — that the home you restore is never quite the home you remember — doesn’t have to be a warning of failure. It can be a promise of progress.

We cannot simply roll back the clock. We can neither pretend the last two years didn’t happen, nor that we should try returning to a flawed status quo. Democracy was never meant to be preserved in amber — it is a living, breathing thing that must be constantly fortified, repaired, and made more resilient.

Our goal shouldn’t be to merely crawl back into the old house. Our goal must be to build a stronger one.

The hope doesn’t lie in a passive wish that everything will just snap back into place. It lies in the deliberate, active preparation of people who are ready to do the heavy lifting:

• Drafting the blueprints now. Writing the legal frameworks and closing the ethics loopholes while we have the quiet hours to get the details right.

• Gathering the crew. Building the broad, resilient coalitions that will be ready to act the moment the window of opportunity opens.

• Cultivating the will. Reminding ourselves that the unglamorous, day-to-day defense of our institutions is the most powerful way to shape the future.

This is the work of our movement, and we can use your help:

Help Us Build

Odysseus didn’t just stumble onto the beach and hope for a miracle. He took a breath, surveyed the damage, and trusted the people standing beside him. He knew that taking back his home would require everything he had — and he prepared accordingly.

The work ahead is massive, but we are not starting from scratch. The plans are being drawn. The alliances are forming. The looms are moving in the quiet hours.

We know exactly what we are walking into. And we are ready to build.

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A few nights ago, from a damp field in rural Virginia about an hour outside Washington, I watched my seven-year-old daughter look at the sky the way you only get to a few times in a lifetime. Both her hands were wrapped around mine, an expression of awe on her face, absolutely certain the fireworks were performing just for her. A sudden summer storm had rolled through that evening, cooling the air and sweeping away the July haze. It left behind the kind of clear, open sky anyone could appreciate.

It was America’s 250th birthday. And for one night, in that quiet field, it actually felt like it.

The Party in Washington

Two years ago, I was appointed executive director of what was then still called — with typical bureaucratic grace — the Semiquincentennial Commission (aka America 250). I came to the role naively ambitious. I genuinely believed the 250th could be a rare, unifying moment when the country finally showed up for itself — a year when Americans of all stripes could look past the noise, return to the plain language of the Declaration, and agree that the ideas underneath it were still worth the trouble.

I knew going in how fiercely contested that narrative already was. I remember The New York Times dedicating an episode of The Daily to that exact tension, tracing how our founding myth has been claimed, weaponized, and reclaimed by the left and the right — from Frederick Douglass’s generation to our own. But I still believed we could find our way to a shared, honest version of our story — one that acknowledged our deepest failures while remaining aimed at the country we still have time to become.

I expected whoever held the White House this year to put their own stamp on the day; every president does. What I did not expect was that a decade of painstaking, nonpartisan planning would be shoved aside to make room for a one-man show. And I certainly didn’t expect a modern crusade against communism to become the centerpiece of our nation’s 250th anniversary. From a stage at Mount Rushmore on the eve of the Fourth, the rhetoric warned of a “communist menace” painted as more dangerous than the existential wars of the last century. It felt small. It felt exhausted. It felt beneath us, and all who came before.

The 250th Somewhere Else

But the real anniversary happened somewhere else, entirely away from the teleprompters.

• In New York Harbor, forty-eight tall ships from twenty nations cut through the water past the Statue of Liberty for Sail4th 250 — reviving a grand tradition President Kennedy first championed, which our country now brings back once a generation.

• In Philadelphia, even after the official parade was called off, “America’s Time Capsule” was quietly lowered into the ground on Independence Mall. It is a nine-hundred-pound, watertight cylinder holding a Pennsylvania governor’s letter, a Phillies lineup card, and handwritten notes from schoolchildren across the country, sealed until the year 2276.

Someone has been keeping this national chain letter running for a century and a half. We buried a capsule for 2076 during the Bicentennial, and another during the Centennial in 1876, which was dug up by Gerald Ford exactly fifty years ago. It is a quiet, continuous act of faith in our own future.

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, a massive benefit concert raised millions for charity rather than a politician, selling tickets for exactly $17.76. And because the 250th collided with the World Cup this summer, the timing became an unexpected gift. All month, international visitors have been discovering local diners, ranch dressing, gas-station slushies, and the particular American genius of the free refill, while Americans have realized the rest of the world showed up just wanting to celebrate with us.

The Daily ran another episode recently, noting that the tournament’s best story was happening entirely off the pitch, as a wave of global visitors and their hosts really looked at one another for the first time in years. Boston offered the purest glimpse of this: Scottish soccer fans took over the city’s historic pubs, marched en masse to Fenway Park, and left behind so much genuine goodwill that Boston and Glasgow are now, officially, sister cities.

The Mirror of 1976

None of this cultural resilience is entirely new. Fifty years ago, the country limped into its Bicentennial deeply bruised. We had just watched a president resign in disgrace to avoid impeachment, pulled our last helicopters out of a generation-long war in Vietnam, and watched inflation eat away at every paycheck in the wake of crippling energy shocks.

Historians look at the parallels between 1976 and 2026 and find them eerie. A different fight over executive power stands in for Watergate; a different set of messy overseas commitments stands in for Vietnam. Even the commercialization was a headache back then — corporate sponsors piled onto the Bicentennial so aggressively that critics mocked it as the “buy-centennial.”

And yet, out of that cynical mess, the country built things that actually lasted. The National Air and Space Museum opened its doors that same July. New museums dedicated to Black and Native American history were sparked by the anniversary and opened shortly after. Thousands of ordinary towns used the milestone as an excuse to restore a crumbling local courthouse or schoolhouse. A messy national mood and a real civic renewal are not mutually exclusive. We have done this before.

The political incentives of our current two-party system simply do not reward renewal. They reward holding your ground, screaming louder, and solving nothing.

Until that structural reality changes, we will continue to get louder anniversaries and smaller results. The fix isn’t complicated to describe, even if it is agonizingly hard to execute: root out the systemic corruption that is hiding in plain sight, take the dark money out of the decisions that reward political gridlock, and close the gap between what America promises on paper and what it delivers in practice. Do that, and institutional trust will return on its own.

But until that day arrives, two things cannot be treated as optional:

1) Free and fair elections, and

2) A culture willing to abide by their outcomes.

These are are the absolute floor upon which everything else stands. There is no better version of America without it.

Help Prevent Election Sabotage!

A Promise in the Ground

My daughter doesn’t know anything about partisan incentives, executive overreach, or bureaucratic misfires yet. Saturday night, she just saw the sky fill with golden light and understood, instinctively and correctly, that it was beautiful, and that it was for her.

There is a sealed cylinder resting under the stone of Independence Mall right now that will not see the light of day until 2276. It is a promise, buried in the dark, that Americans will still be here to dig it up. And as cool as the idea may be that people 10 generations from now may look back on our lives with interest or amusement - who cares?

Instead of burying something for the future, let’s build a more perfect union for them instead — a country worthy of the staggering wager made 250 years ago, and all that’s been spent to secure it since.

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In the last week of its term, the U.S. Supreme Court issued several decisions of critical importance to voters and our elections. Campaign Legal Center filed legal briefs in connection with each case, urging the justices to uphold the rule of law, the Constitution’s separation of powers, and a more inclusive, transparent and accountable democracy.

The results, in the end, are decidedly mixed. The Court deserves little praise for the meager number of pro-democracy rulings it issued; those cases involved questions that were cut and dry, according to the vast majority of legal experts, and yet still produced dissents. On the other side of the ledger, the Roberts Court majority continued down a well-trodden path of rejecting long-established precedents with rulings that further tip the scales in favor of powerful special interests at the expense of the public interest.

The legal rationale for these rulings will be the subject of ongoing analysis and debate in the coming days and for years to come. What may matter most in a practical sense is how these decisions will impact Americans’ ability to cast a ballot and make their voices heard as part of the democratic process.

Watson v. Republican National Committee

In our democracy, every voter who casts a ballot according to the rules in their state must have their vote counted. This includes ballots that are postmarked by Election Day and received by the absentee ballot deadline established by a given state.

In a 5-4 ruling, the Court preserved the authority of states to set these deadlines themselves. Had this decision gone the other way, laws in 30 states allowing ballots in federal elections to be received after Election Day could have been invalidated, causing confusion and chaos just months before the midterm elections.

The majority opinion cites a portion of the Electoral Count Reform Act (ECRA) of 2022 in explaining its reasoning. Campaign Legal Center played an integral role in the bipartisan passage of the ECRA, which includes crucial safeguards to ensure the peaceful transfer of power from one president to the next. The law explicitly acknowledges states’ authority to set ballot deadlines and does not impose national rules that supersede those deadlines — which CLC highlighted in an amicus brief we filed in this case alongside our partners at Protect Democracy.

Trump v. Slaughter

The issue at the heart of this case was the president’s power over federal agencies that are designed and empowered by Congress to operate independently.

The Court’s 6-3 ruling says that laws restricting the president’s ability to fire the heads of regulatory agencies are contrary to the founder’s intent that the president have full control over the functioning of the executive branch (and holding that the functions of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and similar agencies are part of that branch). This opens the door for this president, and those who follow, to remove top regulators for virtually any reason, including failure to adhere to a particular political or policy agenda.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, reading her dissent from the bench, criticized the majority for extending a “maximalist view of presidential power,” reportedly looking often at Chief Justice John Roberts as she did so.

In 1991, President George H.W. Bush appointed me to the Federal Election Commission (FEC), an agency designed to operate independently from the White House. As a Republican commissioner, I refused to attend reelection strategy briefings at the White House on the basis that the FEC’s role was nonpartisan. The idea that President Bush, or any other president, would try to interfere with the agency’s work was unthinkable.

Now, with the threat of arbitrary removal hanging over the heads of independent agency commissioners, we enter a world of uncertainty, where political considerations could override the public interest and well-reasoned expertise on a wide range of impactful regulatory decisions.

Remarkably, on the same day as Slaughter, the Court issued a ruling in Cook v. Trump that exempts members of one independent agency — the Federal Reserve Board — from this dangerous expansion of executive power. Giving the president the ability to randomly fire Fed governors, according to Chief Justice John Roberts, would be “an interpretive leap out of step with the statute Congress enacted and our Nation’s tradition of central banking protected from political interference.”

Nowhere does Roberts explain why Congress can constitutionally establish an independent federal banking agency but not an independent FTC and other similar independent agencies. It is not hard to see the flaw in these divergent rulings — the Court refuses to defer to the policy decisions made by Congress and gives itself the right to decide which agencies deserve protection and independence.

Campaign Legal Center’s analysis of the Slaughter and Cook rulings is ongoing, focusing on what this could mean for agencies that play a role in our electoral process.

NRSC v. FEC

The Supreme Court has infamously empowered wealthy special interests to have outsized influence on our elections, a dynamic that kicked into overdrive following the Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United.

Until today, however, the Court had upheld limits on election spending by political parties in coordination with a given candidate. By extension, this campaign finance law restricted the degree to which wealthy special interests could use political parties as a conduit to funnel even larger contributions to candidates for office and our elections.

With a 6-3 opinion, the Court has wiped away this sensible guardrail, further expanding an umbrella of First Amendment protection for election spending at the expense of the public’s vital interest in limiting political corruption.

There is good reason to be alarmed about the nullification of these coordinated spending limits. Political parties are allowed to accept much larger donations than individual candidates. When the parties coordinate their spending with the campaigns of particular candidates, it’s no different than giving the campaigns the money directly.

Indeed, as Justice Elena Kagan noted in her dissent, a typical coordinated spending situation involves a candidate’s campaign simply sending the party invoices for spending that the campaign has completely controlled, leaving the party less a “collaborative speaker” and more a “simple piggy bank” for the candidate.

The Supreme Court’s decision thus creates a new campaign finance loophole that turns political parties into yet another vehicle through which wealthy donors can direct truckloads of cash directly to benefit their preferred candidate’s campaign.

Trump v. Barbara

In this case, the Court, by a narrow margin, struck down a Trump executive order issued on the first day of his second term that would have completely upended the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of citizenship to nearly everyone born in the United States.

As explained in the friend-of-the-court brief Campaign Legal Center submitted, the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship guarantee is the key that unlocks equal membership and participation in our democracy. A ruling upholding the executive order would have rendered millions of Americans effectively stateless, depriving them of the rights and privileges that come with citizenship, including the right to vote in federal elections starting at the age of 18.

While the Court majority reaffirmed long-standing precedent and the plain text of the Constitution that birthright citizenship is the law of the land, four justices took the deeply troubling position that nothing in the U.S. Constitution prevents attempts like the one undertaken by the president to strip U.S.-born children of their citizenship and lock them out of the franchise.

An alarming 5-4 vote on the plain meaning of the 14th Amendment is yet another sign that we must remain vigilant against further attacks on fundamental principles of democratic equality.

Taking stock of the latest term

So ends one of the most consequential U.S. Supreme Court terms for our democracy. On the whole, the Court’s rulings in this area of the law have hindered Americans’ ability to express their political preferences through the electoral process. We must not forget that prior to this last round of decisions, the Court dealt a mortal blow to the Voting Rights Act and sanctioned the pursuit of partisan political goals as a justification for gerrymandering.

While the Court ultimately landed on the right side of the law and the Constitution in some of these final cases, to have done otherwise — on birthright citizenship and vote-by-mail in particular — would have been indefensible. Such beyond-the-pale decisions would have made the Court even more vulnerable than it already is to accusations of political and ideological bias.

Regardless of how the Court rules on future cases, Campaign Legal Center will remain committed to our core mission of advancing democracy through law. When this Court throws up roadblocks to the pro-democracy agenda, we will pursue every legal and policy avenue available to ensure Americans can exercise their fundamental right to fully participate in the democratic process.

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Looking for more in-depth insights on issues critical to our democracy? Consider subscribing to the “From the Desk of Trevor Potter” newsletter, written by Campaign Legal Center’s founder and president, Trevor Potter. Get expert analysis and learn more about Campaign Legal Center’s efforts to protect and strengthen democracy for all Americans by subscribing via email or on LinkedIn.

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Voters should choose their politicians, not the other way around. Sounds simple enough — like an idea we could ALL get behind. Yet today, we are watching our political parties drive us down a road to ruin, racing to see who can rig the system the fastest.

Driven by a highly unusual mid-decade redistricting frenzy triggered in 2025 and 2026 , state legislatures across the country are frantically redrawing congressional maps to consolidate their own power. We cannot continue down this dark path. If we want a brighter future for America, we must fundamentally change how we draw our lines.

The Threat to Our Democracy

Gerrymandering — the manipulation of voting district boundaries for political or racial advantage — is a poison in the bloodstream of our democracy. Using sophisticated software, politicians employ two main tactics: “cracking” (dividing a group’s supporters across multiple districts to dilute their power) and “packing” (concentrating them heavily into a few districts so they win fewer seats overall).

The results are — to put it lightly — disappointing. Gerrymandering destroys competitive elections, making politicians less responsive to their constituents and more beholden to extreme primary bases. Because of how our maps are drawn, an estimated 60 million Americans (roughly one in four voters) are structurally disenfranchised, forced to cast ineffectual ballots or associate with parties they don’t endorse just to have a say.

The crisis deepened in April 2026 when the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais significantly narrowed Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. This disastrous decision made it easier for states to engage in racial vote dilution, allowing map-drawers to defend discriminatory maps simply by claiming they were engaging in partisan gerrymandering.

The First Line of Defense

We are not without defenders. The Campaign Legal Center (CLC) is standing on the front lines, fighting vigorously to ensure every voice is heard and every vote counts equally.

Help Us Champion Fair Maps

Because the Supreme Court ruled in the 2019 Rucho v. Common Cause case that federal courts cannot settle partisan gerrymandering disputes, CLC has rolled up its sleeves and taken the fight directly to the states. Here is how they are leading the charge:

• Aggressive State Litigation: CLC is actively suing in state courts to strike down manipulated maps, leveraging state constitutions that expressly forbid partisan gerrymandering, such as in Florida.

• A Federal Ban: They are fiercely advocating for Congress to pass national legislation that prohibits partisan gerrymandering nationwide, establishes neutral map-drawing criteria, and provides a clear path to resolve disputes.

• Independent Redistricting Commissions (IRCs): CLC’s gold standard for state reform is the creation of IRCs — voter-centric bodies completely separate from the state legislature.

• Ironclad Ethics: To ensure these commissions are truly fair, CLC insists on strict ethical rules. They recommend prohibiting recently elected officials, political party bosses, and lobbyists from serving. They also demand total transparency, requiring public hearings and allowing voters to submit their own maps.

Solutions All Parties Can Embrace

If we want to fix a broken system without relying on the goodwill of the politicians who broke it, we need to look at structural upgrades. Here are a few you should know about:

• Proportional Representation: Single-member, winner-take-all districts are a massive part of the problem. If a district splits 51% to 49%, almost half the voters get zero representation. Transitioning to multi-winner districts would allocate seats proportionally. If a minority population makes up 25 percent of a broader district that elects four winners, they can still elect one of the candidates (let us know in the comments if you’d like to hear more about this reform).

• The Fair Representation Act: We can rally behind federal legislation like the Fair Representation Act, which pairs multi-member districts with Ranked Choice Voting to ensure our elected bodies actually reflect the voters.

• All-Candidate Primaries: To stop structural disenfranchisement, states can adopt all-candidate primaries. By putting all candidates on a single primary ballot regardless of party, we eliminate compelled partisan association and give every single voter universal access to a meaningful choice.

We don’t have to accept a system that dilutes our power and rewards extremism. Together, we can build a brighter, fairer America where our voices are heard, our votes are counted, and our politicians actually have to earn their seats.

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