Brennan Center for Justice Report: The Campaign to Undermine the Next Election

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/trump-administrations-campaign-undermine-next-election

by tastyface • 12 months ago

138 88 12 months ago

lesuorac2• 12 months ago

Honestly, kinda hope they did require a passport to vote.

It'll be great to see what a shitshow it is when 70% of people in Arkansas [1] can't vote. It seems to be pretty evenly split amongst being the administration and their primary opposition although I guess devil might be in the details [2].

[1] https://www.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/...

[2] https://today.yougov.com/travel/articles/35414-only-one-thir...

jimbo808• 12 months ago

A recent Economist/YouGov poll doesn’t show any party gap on this question, as Democrats (41%) and Republicans (38%) are equally likely to hold and not hold valid passports

TimorousBestie• 12 months ago

Nationwide averages are irrelevant to presidential elections.

xracy• 12 months ago

Sorry, how is a 3% difference "no gap"? Am I misunderstanding those metrics? If a Democrat is 3% more likely to hold a passport, that seems like a potentially huge impact to elections.

favorited• 12 months ago

That's a great way to ensure that only folks who have had the means to travel internationally in the last 10 years are allowed to vote.

mythrwy• 12 months ago

I'm very surprised to learn 1/3 of Americans have a passport. I would have guessed much lower.

16594470912• 12 months ago

It use to be, but sometime in the early 2000's land/sea crossings to Canada and Mexico required a passport for re-entry. I remember reading most Americans that travel outside the US go to Mexico or Canada; changing to require a passport caused a large jump in applications

Modified3019• 12 months ago

We used to be able to afford traveling.

16594470912• 12 months ago

The PDF in [1] has an interesting stat. (from the Notes section)

> Note: According to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, 79% of women in opposite-sex marriages have changed their surname to their spouse’s while 5% hyphenated their surname, meaning that 84% of women who are currently or have been in opposite-sex marriages have changed their legal name and therefore do not posess a birth certificate that could prove their identity and by extension citizenship status under the SAVE Act.

Am I reading correct that this would disqualify them from voting?

65 million "Estimated number of female citizens whose names do not match their birth certificate (last name change only)"

69 million "Estimated number of female citizens (15 years and older) whose names do not match their birth certificate (last name change or hyphenation)"

Guess they are working on the undermining females part of project 1525 now

For completeness:

> Additionally, Pew reported that approximately 5% of men who marry also change their surname - nationwide this would account for approximately 4 million men.

Jtsummers2• 12 months ago

It wouldn't disqualify them outright, but they have to bring more documentation to prove their identity. This is one reason my wife didn't change her name when we got married.

xnx• 12 months ago

And this article is just covering efforts to undermine the election from inside the US.

There's also the rest of the world: "China Turns to A.I. in Information Warfare" https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/06/us/politics/china-artific...

cheschire• 12 months ago

https://archive.is/iTLBB

docdeek• 12 months ago

It is strange that showing ID to vote is controversial in the US and that providing basic ID to citizens for free to allow them to vote is a problem that seems difficult to solve (or want to solve).

My anecdote: I am an EU citizen living in another EU country. As such, I am permitted to vote in local and European elections. When I moved to my current village I registered with the local town hall online. I sent a scan of my national ID card (for my home country) and they registered me to vote for the elections I’m eligible to vote for. Ahead of the elections, they post me a physical election card telling me where to vote (always the same place in the village), and on the day I take my card and ID and vote.

It’s basically frictionless. It’s no problem to register online with a foreign ID document, and it’s no problem to present a foreign ID card alongside my election card on the day when I vote.

If I turned up to vote without my election card or my ID, I would be refused the chance to vote. That makes sense to me and showing ID to vote is not questioned by anyone.

buerkle• 12 months ago

Showing ID to vote wouldn't be controversial in the US if states made it easy to obtain a valid ID for the purpose. But states routinely use it as a backdoor mechanism to prevent people from voting.

cosmic_cheese2• 12 months ago

To add to this, there’s friction from the citizen side of things with a relatively high level of distrust in government that’s been present for decades. If you go out deep enough into the boonies for instance you can probably find people who still don’t have government ID of any type despite being native born and prefer to keep it that way.

antonymoose2• 12 months ago

In my state I bring two forms of ID and a couple of bills to the DMV and I’m issued a same-day license?

How does that compare to a notoriously unfriendly nation like Germany?

In any case, my understanding is virtually any nation in Central and South America requires identification to vote. If the third-world poverty stricken nations make it work there is no reason the rich United States cannot.

frakt0x90• 12 months ago

There's an excellent documentary by Channel 5 (formerly All Gas No Brakes) where he tries to work with a group of homeless people in Las Vegas to get them papers and the process is extremely difficult. Like bordering on impossible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRGrKJofDaw

simonsarris• 12 months ago

In what state is getting an ID difficult?

hypeatei4• 12 months ago

It’s basically frictionless.

You're assuming the theoretical US system would be the same and not be made arbitrarily complex by Republicans.

ncr100• 12 months ago

Which, to reinforce the point, is the actual situation here in America.

All the support systems that help ID cards be fairly distributed to citizens are under-documented for the populace and under-supported by the administration.

It's ripe for the authoritarian takeover that is currently underway here.

Sniffnoy• 12 months ago

It is strange that showing ID to vote is controversial in the US and that providing basic ID to citizens for free to allow them to vote is a problem that seems difficult to solve (or want to solve).

One of the blockers to a national ID system in the US, that would result in voter ID no longer posing any substantive obstacle to voting, has been anti-government paranoia; but another, if you're not aware, has been fundamentalist Christianity and its eschatology -- fundamentalist Christians may associate the idea of a national ID with the "mark of the beast".

The amusing thing here of course is that while Trump's attempt to unilaterally impose ID rules is illegal, if it were successful, it would likely be an own goal. Formerly, the sort of person who is likely to not have any sort of ID -- someone disconnected from any systems that would require it -- was more likely to vote Democratic than Republican, but in recent years, this has reversed. While I can't cheer for breaking election laws (or for a court ruling that this is in fact legal, because it shouldn't be considered so), it would at least be amusing if this backfired.

specialist• 12 months ago

associate the idea of a national ID with the "mark of the beast"

This was absolutely true during the 2000s.

The huge irony is that having a national ID (central authenticator issuing globally unique identifiers) is the only way to protect PII, at the field level, at rest.

Per the Translucent Database strategy. Which I won't repeat here. Unless the peanut gallery develops a genuine interest.

In other words, not having Real ID (or equiv) enables our panoptic surveillance capitalistic dystopia.

nerdponx4• 12 months ago

The kind of actual voter fraud that ID requirements would prevent is extremely rare. There are better ways to rig elections than hiring thousands of people to physically show up at different polling centers and vote several times under different names. Even disregarding the fact that voter ID laws are (and historically have been) widely abused to disenfranchise specific groups in the USA, what do you actually gain by requiring ID?

celeritascelery4• 12 months ago

what do you actually gain by requiring ID?

Preventing non-citizens from voting. Some counties in the US have almost half of the population who are non-citizens. It's great that we have so many people wanting to come to the states, but they can't vote until they become citizens. This is not a controversial issue anywhere except in the US.

Hikikomori3• 12 months ago

Project 2025 phase 1 is progressing quickly. How long until we se military arresting democrats?

tastyface2• 12 months ago

Trump is already making noises in the direction of arresting Obama for... election interference, or something.

galleywest200• 12 months ago

Good thing John Roberts gave presidents complete immunity for official acts then. Wonder how that will shake out.

bjourne2• 12 months ago

Done: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/06/usa-mahmoud-k...

treetalker2• 12 months ago

Article's actual title: "The Trump Administration’s Campaign to Undermine the Next Election"

tastyface2• 12 months ago

Using the actual title will immediately get it flagged/killed. Which is a shame because the article is far from clickbait.

ahns• 12 months ago

Ha, looks like it's finally been flagged.

hypeatei4• 12 months ago

I'm really not sure how we've normalized corrupt behavior at the highest levels of government. Penalizing law firms for supporting things that Trump doesn't like is insane. Doubly so when they enter agreements to provide free legal services for things he does approve of so that they can "get the monkey off their back" so to speak.

All I can hope for is that we punish this behavior in the future when grifting and violating civil rights isn't the normal thing to do.

pogue4• 12 months ago

Decades and decades of the slow but methodical dismantling of the public education system & it's standards. Then, propagandizing the public with right wing news that tells the populace what's happening is perfectly normal and thinking otherwise is unAmerican/unpatriotic are two things that come to mind immediately.

tstrimple• 12 months ago

"We" haven't. Conservatives explicitly have. Unfortunately there are a plurality of conservatives so they get to decide that blatant and open corruption is fine actually. Hopefully the non-voters wake the fuck up but I'm not optimistic.

treetalker2• 12 months ago

Meanwhile look what's happening in Texas: another gerrymander attempt, since even some Republicans are sick of Trump's authoritarian dumpster fires and the kowtowing Republicans in Congress. And, sensing the impending Midterms bloodbath, the GOP is picking its voters instead of letting the voters pick their representatives.

True, Democrats and others have gerrymandered too. But I sense that most people don't want the gerrymander to be possible. Yet we can't get it changed because we're beholden to some dead guys who laid down rules hundreds of years ago, which none of us agreed to or had any input on; and we don't really have representatives in Congress to change things according to law the way we want them to, because they self-deal (looking at you, Rick Scott) and because Citizens United cemented the power of those who really get representation —those with money, and corporations. The People will revolt if things don't change fast.

softwaredoug• 12 months ago

One misread of the situation by the GOP: now their own voters would be just as negatively impacted by the sorts of changes they want to make. They have as many rural voters that rarely vote, may not have ID, may not be able to navigate election bureaucracy, etc as the Dems.

Like I bet the electoral make-up of "people with passports" skews rather left

exceptione• 12 months ago

I don't want to depress people, but try to zoom out a bit.

  1. This is just one part of the slope from which the republic has been sliding down from anocracy towards autocracy.

  2. You, reading and trying to process this, are an exception. Now imagine that the vast majority of the public does not have any overview and is not aware, being smothered in us-vs-them vibes.

  3. You, being a normal human being, trying to make sense of it, trying to see if you can interpret this as normal. When we see something alarming but don't get an `ACK` from our social system, we shut off the internal alarm. This is the original sin of the media rooms, as their role in democracy is to see the big picture; they should ACK, they should sound the alarm loud and clear.

bjourne2• 12 months ago

Honestly, what of it is left to undermine? It's billionaires, Israel, oil, and gun lobbies running the show.

pogue4• 12 months ago

There's still vast policy changes each side believes in and would choose if the shoe was on the other foot. We're seeing the entire dismantling of basic public health policies, vaccines, protection of our food supply & etc right now as just one example.

Brennan Center for Justice Report: The Campaign to Undermine the Next Election

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