The U.S. Supreme Court just gutted the Voting Rights Act. That means state courts matter now more than ever. The next big election is on May 19 — for two seats on Georgia’s Supreme Court.
Your analysis of the potential benefits of supporting these two Democratic candidates, and the almost certain harm to our democracy if they lose is compelling. Thank you for making these potential consequences so clear for us who rely on others for this kind of information and analysis.
After listening to Ken Martin on Pod Save America all I could think was -- this could have been Ben Wikler, this could have been Ben Wikler, this could have been Ben Wikler -- maybe if we all click our heels together it will come true :)
Join up at http://www.postcardstovoters.org - with a pack of index cards from the dollar store and a few postcard stamps, you can help these two excellent candidates get elected. You can write from home on your own time, it’s the best.
In addition, Democratic presidential candidates will either get on board with expanding that shitty court or they won't get elected. People are f'kng fed up.
Aloha Ben, will follow up on your recommendations re Georgia. Also want to take this opportunity to share todays article by Thom Hartmann on the huge issue of purging voter rolls... the truly horrifying extent to which this is a challenge for November. I apologize for inserting a long article into this threat, but believe it is one of the most critical issues we face.
They’re Coming for Our Voter Rolls: Millions Could Vanish Before Election Day
Behind the rhetoric of “election integrity” lies a coordinated effort to purge voter rolls of Democrats, shut down Black access to the ballot, and reshape the electorate before 2026 and 2028…
THOM HARTMANN
MAY 11, 2026
We have shocking news this week from CNN: Trump is preparing to illegally purge tens of millions of Democratic voters from voter rolls nationally, just in time for the election. Just like Modi did to win overwhelmingly in India, following the GOP’s playbook.....the Trump Department of Justice has demanded that all states turn over their voting rolls, complete with names, addresses, driver’s license and social security numbers, voting history, and date of birth.
They’re also requiring states to sign a “Memorandum of Understanding” that says the states will then purge from their voting rolls anybody who Republican partisans within the Trump administration — once they’ve dug into the state’s voter data — find to be a “concern”:
“You agree therefore that within forty-five (45) days of receiving that notice from the Justice Department of any issues, insufficiencies, inadequacies, deficiencies, anomalies, or concerns, your state will clean its VRL/Data by removing ineligible voters…”
(This happened in Florida // as BBC reporter Greg Palast told the world and our media largely ignored, was that in the months just before the 2000 election around 80,000 mostly-Black and Hispanic fully-legally-eligible but also mostly Democratic-voting Floridians were purged from that state’s voting rolls. Thousands of Black and brown voters whose first and last names just happened to be the same as Texas felons; lots of Jose Garcias and James Browns. When those Florida voters showed up on election day, they were turned away and George W. Bush “won” the election by 537 votes after his father’s corrupt SCOTUS appointee, Clarence Thomas, became the deciding vote in Bush v Gore that violated the 10th Amendment by stopping the state-supreme-court-ordered recount that would have revealed the scam and given the 2000 election to Al Gore.
Some 13 GOP-run states are happily going along with Trump’s purge effort. and the feds have obtained simple voter identity and voting history information from Colorado, Florida, Pennsylvania, Utah, and West Virginia.Sometime between now and the election the DOJ will present to these states the lists of voters they must purge, per the Memorandum of Understanding. And the 30 or so mostly Democratic-run states which are refusing are all in the crosshairs of a massive federal lawsuit trying to force them to comply.
As Greg Palast and I have documented in the past, if around 4 million legal American citizen voters hadn’t been purged from the rolls in the months leading up to the 2024 election, Kamala Harris would be president today and Democrats would control the House and perhaps even the Senate. What’s truly astonishing is how little attention is being paid to how Republicans are pre-rigging this fall’s election, both by the DNC and our mainstream media.
But purging voters — by the tens of millions every election cycle — is where Republicans find their best result. As the Demos report notes:
“Between the close of registration for the 2020 general election and the close of registration for the 2022 general election, states reported removing 19,260,000 records from their voter registration rolls. This was equal to 8.5% of the total number of voters who were registered in the United States as of the close of registration for the 2022 general election.”
Additionally, as I lay out in The Hidden History of the War on Voting, 17 million voters were purged in the two years leading up to the 2018 election, fully ten percent of America’s voting population, according to the Brennan Center.
More than a quarter of those purged during this period from 2016-2022 were removed from the rolls either because they failed to vote in the previous election or because they failed to return a postcard mailed out by a Republican secretary of state (that is usually designed to look like junk mail).This card-mailing strategy is called “caging” and used to be illegal......
The Brennan Center found that just between 2014 and 2016, in the two years leading up to the Hillary/Trump presidential election, over 14 million people were purged from voter rolls, largely in Blue cities within Republican-controlled states. Then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp purged over a million voters in Georgia alone in 2018, leading to his 50,000-vote win that year against fellow gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams.
Calling the findings “disturbing,” the Brennan Center noted:
Another strategy that the GOP has rolled out in a big way to suppress the vote in Blue areas of Red states is “strict signature matching.”...This year, Trump promises an “army” of “election integrity” inspectors to double-check mail-in signatures in Blue states, while the Post Office will no longer automatically postmark ballots on the they’re dropped off.
Democrats and all of us in the media need to start calling it all out loudly.Share this story with everyone you know and tell your elected Democrats that it’s way past time to start shouting from the rooftops about Republicans pre-rigging the upcoming election these ways
What a disaster in GA w/ Dems voting for the far right INCUMBENT Justices because … they had an “I” after their names? People thought that meant the judges were INDEPENDENT?!?!?!
Such poor voter education would never have happened in Wisconsin under Ben Wikler.
Now I wish the feckless DNC would crawl to you — Ben — and beg you to take the helm. The current guys is a disaster.
From the outside looking in, the spectacle surrounding Supreme Court of the United States under John Roberts has begun to feel like one of those long, strange American road shows where the institutions everyone assumed were indestructible suddenly look shaky under the neon lights.
Allies, rivals, investors, everybody’s watching the arguments, the rulings, the political crossfire, and wondering what it means for the larger American brand that once sold itself as the gold standard of stability and democratic confidence.
It’s less a clean constitutional debate and more a high-speed collision between law, politics, money, and perception, all unfolding in real time before a global audience that can’t quite decide whether to be alarmed or fascinated.
And Anita Earls in North Carolina
Your analysis of the potential benefits of supporting these two Democratic candidates, and the almost certain harm to our democracy if they lose is compelling. Thank you for making these potential consequences so clear for us who rely on others for this kind of information and analysis.
Here's a doc with resources for taking action: https://docs.google.com/document/d/10WBzf-0I2xUKbfCJURH95ij6a2YniTbrRs3bggaty3o/edit?usp=sharing
Great resource! Okay if I spread these links?
Of course! Thank you!
Sadly, the right wing justices won. Georgia Supreme Court justices fend off Democratic-backed challengers https://share.google/rBTLaPU05p1SEotGd
After listening to Ken Martin on Pod Save America all I could think was -- this could have been Ben Wikler, this could have been Ben Wikler, this could have been Ben Wikler -- maybe if we all click our heels together it will come true :)
Join up at http://www.postcardstovoters.org - with a pack of index cards from the dollar store and a few postcard stamps, you can help these two excellent candidates get elected. You can write from home on your own time, it’s the best.
In addition, Democratic presidential candidates will either get on board with expanding that shitty court or they won't get elected. People are f'kng fed up.
Aloha Ben, will follow up on your recommendations re Georgia. Also want to take this opportunity to share todays article by Thom Hartmann on the huge issue of purging voter rolls... the truly horrifying extent to which this is a challenge for November. I apologize for inserting a long article into this threat, but believe it is one of the most critical issues we face.
They’re Coming for Our Voter Rolls: Millions Could Vanish Before Election Day
Behind the rhetoric of “election integrity” lies a coordinated effort to purge voter rolls of Democrats, shut down Black access to the ballot, and reshape the electorate before 2026 and 2028…
THOM HARTMANN
MAY 11, 2026
We have shocking news this week from CNN: Trump is preparing to illegally purge tens of millions of Democratic voters from voter rolls nationally, just in time for the election. Just like Modi did to win overwhelmingly in India, following the GOP’s playbook.....the Trump Department of Justice has demanded that all states turn over their voting rolls, complete with names, addresses, driver’s license and social security numbers, voting history, and date of birth.
They’re also requiring states to sign a “Memorandum of Understanding” that says the states will then purge from their voting rolls anybody who Republican partisans within the Trump administration — once they’ve dug into the state’s voter data — find to be a “concern”:
“You agree therefore that within forty-five (45) days of receiving that notice from the Justice Department of any issues, insufficiencies, inadequacies, deficiencies, anomalies, or concerns, your state will clean its VRL/Data by removing ineligible voters…”
(This happened in Florida // as BBC reporter Greg Palast told the world and our media largely ignored, was that in the months just before the 2000 election around 80,000 mostly-Black and Hispanic fully-legally-eligible but also mostly Democratic-voting Floridians were purged from that state’s voting rolls. Thousands of Black and brown voters whose first and last names just happened to be the same as Texas felons; lots of Jose Garcias and James Browns. When those Florida voters showed up on election day, they were turned away and George W. Bush “won” the election by 537 votes after his father’s corrupt SCOTUS appointee, Clarence Thomas, became the deciding vote in Bush v Gore that violated the 10th Amendment by stopping the state-supreme-court-ordered recount that would have revealed the scam and given the 2000 election to Al Gore.
Some 13 GOP-run states are happily going along with Trump’s purge effort. and the feds have obtained simple voter identity and voting history information from Colorado, Florida, Pennsylvania, Utah, and West Virginia.Sometime between now and the election the DOJ will present to these states the lists of voters they must purge, per the Memorandum of Understanding. And the 30 or so mostly Democratic-run states which are refusing are all in the crosshairs of a massive federal lawsuit trying to force them to comply.
As Greg Palast and I have documented in the past, if around 4 million legal American citizen voters hadn’t been purged from the rolls in the months leading up to the 2024 election, Kamala Harris would be president today and Democrats would control the House and perhaps even the Senate. What’s truly astonishing is how little attention is being paid to how Republicans are pre-rigging this fall’s election, both by the DNC and our mainstream media.
But purging voters — by the tens of millions every election cycle — is where Republicans find their best result. As the Demos report notes:
“Between the close of registration for the 2020 general election and the close of registration for the 2022 general election, states reported removing 19,260,000 records from their voter registration rolls. This was equal to 8.5% of the total number of voters who were registered in the United States as of the close of registration for the 2022 general election.”
Additionally, as I lay out in The Hidden History of the War on Voting, 17 million voters were purged in the two years leading up to the 2018 election, fully ten percent of America’s voting population, according to the Brennan Center.
More than a quarter of those purged during this period from 2016-2022 were removed from the rolls either because they failed to vote in the previous election or because they failed to return a postcard mailed out by a Republican secretary of state (that is usually designed to look like junk mail).This card-mailing strategy is called “caging” and used to be illegal......
The Brennan Center found that just between 2014 and 2016, in the two years leading up to the Hillary/Trump presidential election, over 14 million people were purged from voter rolls, largely in Blue cities within Republican-controlled states. Then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp purged over a million voters in Georgia alone in 2018, leading to his 50,000-vote win that year against fellow gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams.
Calling the findings “disturbing,” the Brennan Center noted:
Another strategy that the GOP has rolled out in a big way to suppress the vote in Blue areas of Red states is “strict signature matching.”...This year, Trump promises an “army” of “election integrity” inspectors to double-check mail-in signatures in Blue states, while the Post Office will no longer automatically postmark ballots on the they’re dropped off.
Democrats and all of us in the media need to start calling it all out loudly.Share this story with everyone you know and tell your elected Democrats that it’s way past time to start shouting from the rooftops about Republicans pre-rigging the upcoming election these ways
I wish you were there.
Democrats need to prioritize educating voters on what judges to vote for to sit on our courts.
They lost
What a disaster in GA w/ Dems voting for the far right INCUMBENT Justices because … they had an “I” after their names? People thought that meant the judges were INDEPENDENT?!?!?!
Such poor voter education would never have happened in Wisconsin under Ben Wikler.
Now I wish the feckless DNC would crawl to you — Ben — and beg you to take the helm. The current guys is a disaster.
Post script; Georgia Supreme Court justices fend off Democratic-backed challengers https://share.google/rBTLaPU05p1SEotGd
From the outside looking in, the spectacle surrounding Supreme Court of the United States under John Roberts has begun to feel like one of those long, strange American road shows where the institutions everyone assumed were indestructible suddenly look shaky under the neon lights.
Allies, rivals, investors, everybody’s watching the arguments, the rulings, the political crossfire, and wondering what it means for the larger American brand that once sold itself as the gold standard of stability and democratic confidence.
It’s less a clean constitutional debate and more a high-speed collision between law, politics, money, and perception, all unfolding in real time before a global audience that can’t quite decide whether to be alarmed or fascinated.
Where do we sign up to volunteer and donate for Georgia Supreme
Court race?
Nobody gutted anything. Democrats have grown so addicted to racism, they can't survive without it.
💪💪💪💪💪💪💪💪💪💪💪💪