Stephen Wolf

I’m much more concerned about what Trump and Republicans will do to subvert the results after Election Day than whatever executive orders he issues that courts are very likely to block

State control over running elections has benefitted the right throughout American history.

The Supreme Court is very unlikely to create a precedent that a future Dem president could use to unilaterally expand voting access, particularly when the policy Trump wants has an unclear partisan impact

US constitution article 1 section 4:

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.

Trump won Arkansas by 31 points.

To get signatures in 50 counties, liberals would need some that Trump won by up to 61 points.

Conservatives would only need counties Trump won by 38 points or more.

But liberals can get to 15 with counties Trump won by up to 32 points—roughly his statewide margin

If upheld, this would be a major win against the Arkansas GOP’s effort to make ballot initiatives impossible for progressives but not conservatives.

Most Arkansas counties are small, rural, heavily white, & dark red. Black voters & Dems are concentrated in a much smaller number of larger counties

Update:

As of today, February 13th, there are still NO Dem-aligned candidates for the 3 Georgia State Supreme Court elections on May 19th.

The filing deadline is March 6th.

So why aren't any challengers filing?

See next post in the thread for a possible explanation...

Some Senate races have, on *very* rare occasions, gone uncontested in recent decades, but almost always in states with a lopsided political lean—like when John Thune faces no Dem opponent in South Dakota in 2010.

New Mexico went for Harris by just 6 points in 2024.

According to polling data on who has a U.S. passport, the SAVE Act would disproportionately impact Americans who are...

- white or black (non-Hispanic)
- lower income
- married women
- not college educated
- older
- trump voters

ygo-assets-websites-editorial-emea.yougov.net/documents/Pa...

House Republicans, of course, have access to the same data and very likely know this. They passed the SAVE Act anyway knowing that it wouldn't make it through a Senate filibuster, so that they can argue later that any election the Democrats win is rigged

🚨🚨🚨Virginia Supreme Court lays out schedule for redistricting case

Allows the April 21 referendum to go forward with early voting starting March 6

BUT seems to leave open possibility of final ruling after referendum

This goes back to very limited relief lower court granted

Meta’s internal memo said the political tumult in the United States was good timing for the feature’s release. “We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,” according to the document from Meta’s Reality Labs, which works on hardware including smart glasses.

this is comically evil. brazenly anti-social. just absolute black-pilled nihilism. we will not have a republic, we will not be free, until we regulate these companies to the point where — at a bare minimum — they're too afraid to put stuff like this down on paper.

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/t...

Since the 1970s, the Earth — fueled by greenhouse gas emissions — has been warming at a fairly steady rate.

But 2023, 2024 and 2025 were far warmer than previous trends. A Post analysis shows the warming rate over the past decade increased by 42 percent. https://wapo.st/4qA1kZM

Meta Plans to Add Facial Recognition Technology to Its Smart Glasses

Facebook plans to put facial recognition in its glasses and they think we’re too stupid to fight back.

Their internal memo: “We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns.”

For those of you keeping score at home, the actual cut to the Post newsroom was 45%, not the widely reported one third. Remaining journalists are a bit over 400, down from around 1100 four years ago and 580 when Bezos bought the place.

Again, in actual democracies, ministers resign all the time, under threat of a no confidence vote in the parliament. We have a system where legislative confirmation totally fails ex ante to screen out wildly unqualified people, & ex post accountability depends on a toothless extraordinary measure.

I expect SCOTUS will rule for New York Republicans here to block a new map for 2026.

Regardless, Democrats could still pass a state constitutional amendment that would let them redraw the map for 2028 if voters approve it in a 2027 referendum

Republicans have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block a recent state court ruling that had ordered New York to redraw its 11th Congressional District.

As expected, Republicans argue the state court’s decision would require a racial gerrymander that violates the 14th Amendment

“Not Ready for Prime Time.” A Federal Tool to Check Voter Citizenship Keeps Making Mistakes. The Department of Homeland Security pushed out the revamped tool while it was still adding data. That led to widespread misidentification, particularly for citizens born outside the U.S.

NEW: A federal tool meant to find noncitizens on voter rolls is consistently marking citizens as noncitizens, especially if they were born outside the U.S., causing chaos as election clerks try not to disenfranchise voters, @zachdespart.bsky.social and I found. 🧵 www.propublica.org/article/save...

Following the electoral chaos caused by the COVID pandemic, Texas modernized its election security laws. S.B. 1 aimed to make “the conduct of elections . . . uniform and consistent throughout [the] state[,] . . . reduce the likelihood of fraud in the conduct of elections, protect the secrecy of the ballot, promote voter access, and ensure that all legally cast ballots are counted.” Tex. Elec. Code § 1.0015. Because “the potential and reality of fraud is much greater in the mail-in ballot context than with inperson voting,” S.B. 1 added additional election integrity provisions to prevent mail ballot fraud. Veasey v. Abbott, 830 F.3d 216, 239 (5th Cir. 2016) (en banc). Mail ballots are more susceptible to fraud because they render election workers incapable of knowing what happens to the ballot once it is mailed out. Due to the inherent vulnerability of mail ballots, “[f]raud is a real risk that accompanies mail-in voting.” Brnovich v. Democratic Nat’l Comm., 594 U.S. 647, 686, 141 S. Ct. 2321, 2348 (2021). In particular, “[v]ote buying schemes are far more difficult to detect when citizens vote by mail.” Id. at 685, 141 S. Ct. at 2347 (quoting Report of the Comm’n on Fed. Election Reform, Building Confidence in U.S. Elections 46 (Sept. 2005)).

One particularly common form of “mail ballot fraud” is known as “vote harvesting.” Vote harvesting describes a process whereby paid election operatives “generate applications for mail ballots in . . . targeted precincts.” Operatives often go door-to-door, talk to voters, and get them to sign up to vote by mail. More nefariously, vote harvesting can also be accomplished by paid operatives forging applications for voters without the voters’ knowledge or consent. Later, once the voters receive the mail ballots that were requested by canvassing or by forgery, the same partisan operatives return to collect the voters’ completed mail ballots. As part of the ballot collection process, the partisan operatives ensure that the ballots were cast for a particular candidate. Unsurprisingly, mail-in voting is a rich field for fraud. Between 2004 and 2021, 72% of all election prosecutions undertaken by the Texas Attorney General involved mail ballot fraud. “[I]t should go without saying that a State may take action to prevent election fraud.” Id. at 686, 141 S. Ct. at 2348. Faced with evidence of mail ballot fraud, Texas enacted S.B. 1, which contained multiple provisions to address mail ballot fraud.

Ultra-MAGA Judge Edith Jones of the 5th Circuit peddles deranged conspiracy theories about mass voter fraud and "ballot harvesting," declaring that mail voting "is a rich field for fraud" that's frequently exploited by "operatives" attempting to steal elections. www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub...

Map showing tens of thousands of protests across the US between Trump's inauguration last year and January 31, 2026.

The volume & geographic distribution of protest nationwide during year 1 of Trump's second term was extraordinary.

Trump has lost the voters who weren’t paying attention in 2024 The least-engaged Americans have swung 25 points against him since 2024 — about twice the shift among everyone else. Trump has flattened the engagement gap.

New poll: In 2024, low-engagement voters went for Trump over Harris by 11 percentage points. But now they disapprove of the way he's handling the presidency by 13. They have moved 25 points against Trump — 2x as large as the shift for high-knowledge voters www.gelliottmorris.com/p/trump-lost...

Alito is also the most partisan justice on the bench—yes, more so than Thomas. He sees polls sagging for Republicans and will be worried about Democrats taking the Senate in 2026. He always does what's best for the Republican Party. He knows the safest choice is to step down before the midterms.

Is Samuel Alito Preparing to Disrobe? In this installment of Elie v. US, our justice correspondent explores the week’s big legal news, including a possible Alito retirement. Also, the anti-trans mob’s latest target: tight clothing.

So @elienyc.bsky.social and @strictscrutiny.bsky.social have speculated that Alito may retire soon. I agree. Elie lays out the case here—it'd be odd to release a memoir in October if he's (a) still serving and (b) unable to promote it because he's hearing arguments. www.thenation.com/article/poli...

Morning Digest: How Maine Democrats plan to implement ranked-choice voting for governor this fall The state Supreme Court stands in their way, but they're hoping for some help from ... Alaska

There's a chance that Maine's next governor could be elected with well short of a majority of the vote, especially with two sitting legislators running as independents. But things could change if Democrats succeed in their drive to have ranked-choice voting cover general elections for state offices.

The GOP’s “show us your papers” bill Is the latest effort to help Trump take over elections “If the SAVE Act were to pass, it would be the worst voter suppression law that Congress has ever enacted"

Breaking: House passes new version of SAVE Act, worst voter suppression bill considered by Congress. Could disenfranchise:

-21 million Americans w/out access to citizenship papers
-69 mil married women who took partner’s name
-21 mil w/out valid drivers license

www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

I'm still SHOCKED by the obscene rise in billionaire election spending since Citizens United in the NYT piece, despite already knowing that election corruption w/ $ was profound. (Recall that BCRA fought dangerous campaign $ in *2002*)

The article data didn't have a graph, so I made one to show it.

This is a picture showing that the majority party can set the agenda in the chamber that it controls

Part of the problem:

Democrats in swing districts often try to appeal to some voters on the right to win general elections.

Republicans in swing districts try to appeal to primary voters on the far-right to not get denounced by Trump/far-right media and avoid harassment and death threats.

graph showing massive turnover of election officials in western states

We rely on ethical and honest election officials to ensure we can rely on our elections. Those officials have been threatened and attacked, and are fleeing from the profession. Turnover since 2020 is above 50% in western states/
issueone.org/press/new-re...

Building the camps The warehouseification of detention and initial thoughts on stopping it.

When I got the contract to write a history of concentration camps in 2014, I hoped to keep the US from ending up here. That didn't work out! But now it's critical to understand how much is already in process and the enormity of what's coming. The sooner we act to stop it, the more people we'll save.