The Mechanics of Your Vote

In this issue: One of our leadership group, C. Blatt, makes her newsletter debut with a deep dive into elections, adapted from our most recent All Hands Meeting.

[This piece has been slightly edited to fit the parameters of our newsletter.]

Who Controls the Mechanics of the Vote — and What Are They Backed By?

A researcher named Erica Chenoweth studied hundreds of movements across the 20th and 21st centuries and found something remarkable: nonviolent civic movements succeed roughly twice as often as violent ones. But it’s never one protest, one Tuesday, one moment of outrage. No movement that mobilized just 3.5% of a population — sustained, organized, showing up again and again and again — has ever failed.

There's a fight happening right now - in Congress, in the courts, in statehouses across the country, everywhere - over who controls the basic machinery of this November's elections: who gets to see your voter registration, who decides if your ballot gets delivered. That's not abstract. That's the mechanics of the midterm elections.

Part One: Who Controls the Mechanics

This is how their plan plays out: built over the four years Trump was out of office, put into motion the moment he returned. The National Design Studio executive order, signed in August 2025, wasn't a single decision — it's one visible piece of a roadmap already finished before Trump even took the oath.

The plan has been revealing itself over the last few months, which is why we've all been so anxious about the midterms. Now we've come to the part where the Department of Justice has filed lawsuits against 29 states, including California, and the District of Columbia, for refusing to hand over their statewide voter registration lists, also including your driver's license and Social Security numbers.

Another piece of the game plan - the roadmap - was revealed on June 24, 2026, when Postmaster General David Steiner, a Trump appointee, told the Senate the Postal Service would refuse to deliver mail-in ballots in any state that wouldn't hand over its voter list. Whether that's something they can actually pull off at scale is a separate question.

There is a citizenship-verified voter list being built inside the White House, with a deadline tied to July 4th. Put these together and here is what you get: an administration that wants direct access to the names, addresses, and voting history of American citizens, any which way they can get it. States that say "no" are facing lawsuits from the federal government, and now there's a real threat that mail-in ballots simply won't get delivered at all in states that don't comply.

Sometimes the paperwork itself is the takeover. Your voter data just moved – through a memo. No new law. No vote held. Just paperwork.

And it's not only voter data. On June 24, 2026, Trump canceled the signing of a major bipartisan housing bill, saying he won't sign it until Congress passes the SAVE Act. That same week, a group of Republican hardliners brought nearly all House floor business to a halt over the exact same demand — not just the housing bill, but military funding and other unrelated legislation, frozen until the Senate acts on a bill about who gets to vote, even though there are not enough votes in the Senate to support that bill, which already failed once for exactly that reason.

This is the same tactic, used twice already this year on completely different bills: hold something the country actually needs — a surveillance reauthorization, a housing bill, basic government funding — all held hostage, until Congress agrees to make it harder for Americans to vote. Control the legislative process itself, and you control what gets to count as urgent.

Part Two: What They're Backed By

In January 2026, Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against his own government over his leaked tax returns. On May 18, 2026, he withdrew it before any judge ever ruled on it.

Then he decided all on his own that the case had been settled, and had his Justice Department announce a $1.776 billion fund to pay people he says were victimized by government weaponization. Todd Blanche, the Acting Attorney General, formally named it the Anti-Weaponization Fund — but the number gives it away. $1.776 billion is no accident. That's 1776. Everyone covering this story has noticed the same thing: this has Trump's fingerprints all over it, dressed up as a legal settlement.

Here's the thing - not one part of that claim is real. There was no judgment. There was no court-approved settlement. Thirty-five former federal judges, both Republican and Democratic appointees, said as much in an open letter that all of them signed, calling this fund “a fraud on the court.”

So who is that fund actually for? Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said “anybody in this country can apply” — and in the same breath, he refused to rule out payments to the people who attacked police officers on January 6th. I think it's fairly obvious who this fund is meant for. Congressman Jamie Raskin called it an effort to “re-fund the January 6 militia, presumably to get them ready for the next round of battle.”

And here's why this isn't over even if the courts permanently kill the Anti-Weaponization Fund: there's an older, separate mechanism called the Judgment Fund. But it has one strict requirement — it can only pay out claims tied to a real lawsuit or settlement, where someone has actually proven the government caused them legal harm. The Anti-Weaponization Fund was built as something different: a so-called slush fund with no such requirement, run by a five-person board appointed by Todd Blanche, made up of Trump loyalists who could hand out the money as they saw fit. For this money to flow through the Judgment Fund instead, the DOJ would actually have to follow that fund's rules. As we've seen repeatedly throughout this administration, following the rules has never been the point for them.

Put all of that together, and here's what you're left with: a financed, pardoned, aggrieved group the President has praised. A funding mechanism that answers to no one. And a President who told the New York Times in January 2026 that he regrets not directing the National Guard to seize voting machines after he lost in 2020 — and who a Supreme Court order now limits to deploying the Guard only in states where the governor agrees to it. Most of the competitive races this November are in states with governors who won't agree.

On June 18, 2026, Senator Elissa Slotkin and eight colleagues introduced the Protect Our Polls Act. It is very unlikely to pass a Republican-controlled Senate right now — and that's exactly the point of mentioning it. Every senator who refuses to co-sponsor it, or who votes against it, is telling you something true about whether they can be counted on. This isn't a bill to lobby for. It's a test to watch.

Here's something worth remembering as we go through all of this: every single seat in the House of Representatives is up for election this November — all 435 of them, by constitutional design. That means right now, every House member, in every district, including red ones, is paying attention to their own constituents in a way they won't be in three years.

There's a companion bill stuck in the House, too – the Voting Systems Protection Act, introduced by Reps. Yassamin Ansari and Dan Goldman, a direct response to exactly the kind of federal seizure we saw at Fulton County. Given Speaker Mike Johnson's control of the floor, it's no more likely to move than the Senate bill.

Conclusion: Sustained, and Organized

What's been happening over the last two weeks has moved at lightning speed.

When I started writing this, Trump hadn't yet canceled the housing bill signing. The judge hadn't yet ruled that the lawsuit over the Anti-Weaponization Fund keeps moving forward. The House hadn't yet ground to a halt over the SAVE Act. None of that is unusual anymore. That's just what a week or two looks like right now.

The people who wrote our Constitution were specifically worried about a wealthy, connected few capturing Government for themselves. James Madison's answer was simple: elections would depend on ordinary people, not the rich, not the well-born, not a narrow class of insiders. That was the promise.

Madison's promise is exactly what's under attack right now: a fund built on a fake settlement, a financing mechanism that answers to no one, a president unwilling to rule out force at the polls. And it's the same promise that Erica Chenoweth's research concluded: power has to stay with ordinary people - people like us - sustained and organized, or else it gets captured by the few.

Unlimited money in politics is another one of the ways Madison's promise is being broken. But the state of Maine has been the first to step up and try to restore it. In 2024, with nearly 75% of the vote, Maine voters passed a law trying to limit what super PACs can take in, capping contributions at $5,000. Two PACs sued immediately. A legal scholar named Lawrence Lessig is defending Maine's law, arguing the entire premise of an “independent” super PAC is a fiction. The case is now before the First Circuit Court of Appeals, which has agreed to hear it — and a ruling could land any day. If Maine wins, the case is expected to go to the Supreme Court by next fall.

Everything in this conclusion is not a metaphor for emphasis. It's literally what just happened in the course of a week or two. The only way for any of us to stay ahead of something moving this fast is not one single insight delivered once, but showing up again and again and again, and noticing what changed since the last time you looked.

Actions You Can Take Now

• Find out where your senator stands on the Protect Our Polls Act: this matters most if you're in a state that hasn't insulated itself from federal election interference. Write down what they say, and share it so everyone can track who's accountable come November.
• Call your House representative: ask the same about the Voting Systems Protection Act, and share what they say too.
• Support the organizations backing that bill directly: Common Cause (commoncause.org), Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (citizensforethics.org), and Public Citizen (citizen.org).
• Every single seat in the House is up for election this November. That's not most seats — that's all 435, every two years, by design. Your state legislators have real standing with the same voters and the same local press as your House member, even in red or competitive districts. Find your California State Assembly member and State Senator at findyourrep.legislature.ca.gov, and ask them to publicly pressure your congressional delegation on these bills. Outside of California, search “[your state] find my state legislator” — every state has an equivalent lookup tool, usually through your Secretary of State's office or your state legislature's own website.
• Check if your state is one of the 29 being sued by DOJ over voter rolls. California is. Ask your state legislators what they're doing about it.
• Check your voter registration: LA County — lavote.gov. And elsewhere, search “[your state] voter registration lookup.”