Rallying to Limit the Vote
Terry H. Schwadron
July 15, 2025
As Republicans gather this week for an emotionally charged national convention in Milwaukee fresh off the weekend’s assassination attempt against Donald Trump, expect what was to be a spirited, cheerleading rally among fervent supporters into an even more reverent anointment.
Beyond the evident emotions about political violence, only the vice-president pick has a feel of drama.
Still, it seems useful to remember that beyond the balloons and costumed comradery on display, these same forces are leading a quite serious, extensive campaign to make it harder to vote.
Clearly, Republican operatives following on the election denialism and constant charges of “election rigging” by Trump are following up their stings from the 2020 election by organizing poll watching armies, passing state restrictions on voting eligibility and filing scores of lawsuits ahead of any filing of ballots.
In response, Democratic attorney Mark Elias, founder of Democracy Docket, the American. Civil Liberties Union and organizations across the country like Stacy Abrams’ Fair Fight have engaged in restriction-by-restriction legal warfare over the most basic democratic right of individuals to vote.
Like the rest of our political landscape, the fights over how to cast a ballot, how to count a ballot, and how to certify the results have become full-time, industrialized, well-funded efforts to try to pre-squeeze the November election process for partisan gain.
For election denialists, the only reason Joe Biden topped Trump was because of election fraud — never provable fraud with no hint of credible evidence. It could not have been because of competing ideologies or personal character issues or even a desire to have less chaos in Washington.
Laws passing Republican state legislatures nationwide have tightened signature and voter identification procedures, challenged voter rolls and the procedures by which counties or states might drum out names of voter registrants who have not voted recently, sought to limit voting around college campuses, and generally targeted areas with large minority voter registrations to eliminate polling places or limiting the right to water while waiting in newly created long voter lines.
The debates over safety of mail-in ballots and ballot drop-boxes are on again, despite desires by both Republican and Democratic organization to want to use such methods to encourage early voting.
Republicans are pursuing organized plans for an “army” of 100,000 poll watchers to stand as close as legally possible to volunteer election vote counters, a move that screams intimidation.
Voting under Intimidation
In short, even as eager conventioneers this week sneer at Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and at Democrats in Congress about just how wrong they are to lead the U.S. government, the real effort is about using tactics that look a lot like intimidation to secure the results before they begin.
It bothers me that so much time and effort is going towards trying to change the rules of the game rather on the essential reasons we have a vote.
We’ve seen the outcome of election denialism in the deep divisions over 2020 voting, in the insistence that counted votes were not counted, in the conspiracies about election machines that changed votes, and in the schemes that led to the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, that essentially was an attempt to undercut the peaceful transfer of power.
Republicans have set out early this time to ensure that if they control who votes and how, who counts the results and to launch various legal processes to best guarantee the outcome they want — even if the popular vote again goes against their preferences. A close election this time could send a disputed Electoral College vote to the House, where numbers guarantee a Republican victory.
What makes all this possible, of course, is that we start with a race that few are particularly eager to see, with two top candidates who are re-writing the book on Flawed. Biden is fighting with his own crowd about overstaying his political welcome as the party head because of age and perceived acuity and agility, not even because of what he wants to do as president. Trump, the convicted felon, cannot make a single speech or appearance without making up the facts about the issue or offering boasts about his divine right to win.
For all that, we have a race that remains essentially tied, with slight polling advantages moving back and forth, depending on what is asked and where. That is remarkable since the two are diametrically opposed on lots of public policy issues and visions about economics, democracy and America’s role in the world, individual rights and so many specific issues like immigration and abortion.
When it is so tight, especially in the handful of states that likely will determine the Electoral College results, the difference of a few voters can matter.
Disputes Over Voting
Clearly, county and states need rules to run elections, just as they do any governments activity. They probably do need updates in places, or to be more in harmony across state lines. People who let voter registration lapse, for example, may create election confusions that need cleanup.
But that doesn’t justify restrictive use of voter identification challenges across the board or forcing voters in Democratic areas to wait longer to cast ballots than in Republican zones.
The sheer number and breadth of the restrictions underway to limit voting — many of which started building after the U.S. Supreme Court cut the heart of the Voting Rights Act meant to protect minority voters — suggest that this is all for partisan gain, not for fairness.
The efforts are certainly not about encouraging more people to be informed and to participate in the American experiment. The continuing efforts in Arizona to throw out hundreds of thousands of votes from 2020 to change the clear voter outcome of the state’s last election for governor show that this is not about participatory democracy. It is about winning.
What we should be hearing this week in Milwaukee is a reasoned case for changing our leadership and moving in a direction that would address specific issues about our American choices. It won’t be reasoned, of course, and the policy issues already are being blurred because there is a negative response to much of the Project 2025 agenda created for Republicans by Trump appointees working as the Heritage Foundation. Instead, Republicans naturally will blame Biden for all evil in the world, an emotional plea for which they are willing to anoint Trump as a near monarch.
We should keep one eye on the activities far from the convention that concern the manipulation of who votes and will count the vote.
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