🚨 🚨 Name It: Voter Registration Manipulation

“Now many of our Christians have what I call the ‘goo-goo syndrome.’ Good government. They want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

- Paul Weyrich, conservative political activist and strategist, 1980

There is a Death Star hovering over American elections and democracy at the moment.

A threat as great as any suppression tactic we’ve seen in a long time. But one well know in the annals of our history—and at our nation’s darkest moments.

Right now, most see it largely as the so-called SAVE Act, along with the president’s outrageous executive order that one federal court has already ruled to be illegal. But because of that court decision, and the the belief that a filibuster may stop the SAVE Act for the time being, people have some hope that these actions may not take effect.

But do NOT fall for that!

The truth is, those two actions are part of a far broader assault, motivated by that Paul Weyrich quote above (only fueled further by the victory of the Obama coalition in 2008). States across the country are moving fiercely in the same direction, with Ohio as one of 24 states pushing a SAVE Act-style bill in the coming weeks or months, with three other states (Louisiana, New Hampshire and Wyoming) having recently passed them. (This is how Laboratories of Autocracy work).

And we need to start calling it by what it really is: voter registration manipulation.

And history tells us that that is a form of voter suppression that truly slashes at the jugular vein of American democracy.

By narrowing or closing entirely the front door into the electorate, forms of voter registration manipulation have proven to be among the most damaging to a fully inclusive democracy over the centuries, reducing overall involvement in our democracy—especially voters of color, new American communities, and women. It’s the tool that did much of the work to destroy Reconstruction and build Jim Crow, disfranchised urban and immigrant communities in the North repeatedly in the 1800s, all while reducing overall participation in America’s democracy to a level well below other nations.

The recent wave of voter registration manipulation renews this oppressive and brutally effective tactic, driven by similar fears and disguised with similar myths and lies.

We just aren’t calling it by its name. We must.

Backdrop: Registration as the Front Door to Democracy

Going back centuries, the battle over America’s democracy is in many ways a battle over the process of voter registration.

We take it for granted now, but the step all citizens must take prior to actually voting—better thought of as “pre-registration”—has essentially served as the front door to democracy for most of our history. How widely that door is open or closed, and who gets to enter it, determine the size and shape of the American electorate. And if you’re not even in that (registered) electorate, you basically aren’t part of our democracy whatsoever.

At the peaks of our democracy, spirited and aggressive registration efforts have expanded the electorate—in size and diversity—nearly overnight. A military-led registration drive following the Civil War allowed hundreds of thousands of newly freed slaves to enter American democracy, which upended Southern politics. A similar drive happened immediately following the Voting Rights Act, when federal registrars registered huge numbers of long-suppressed Black voters and old tactics of registration manipulation were outlawed.

On the flip side, disastrous declines of participation have followed periods where anti-democracy forces clamped down on the registration process , or closed it outright—wielding it as a weapon against certain groups, and in a way that dramatically reduced overall participation.

In the early to mid 1800s, concerns about Catholic-Irish immigrants corrupting American elections led to a voter registration process in the first place. As my old friend and now UC Davis professor Gregory Downs explained a few years ago, even basic registration had a suppressive effect:

“Requiring [voters] to go on one day to register to vote and then to go again to vote” had three impacts: (*remember these—they are still relevant)

1) “Increased the Literal “Opportunity cost” of voting…two times, especially during work days”

2) “requires a longer period of time in which you can demonstrate a stability of address…if you register in one location and move to a different district in the months in between, you’ve self-disfranchised,” and this need for residential stability “specifically aim[ed] to capture a group that is…marginal, or moving among different forms of temporary housing”

3) requires citizens to go “to confront representatives of the established order” (city hall, a political registrar, etc.) as opposed to “show[ing] up on the day of and to vot[ing]”

Add in literacy and English language tests, durational residency requirements, and other obstacles that could directly target certain populations (some only applied to certain cities), and the shaping of the registration processes shaped democracy itself. And excluded many, as intended.

While these steps ebbed and flowed in the North depending on the era (and new waves of immigrants), over time, they led to an overall diminished participation level.

BUT….when white Democrats in the South were looking for ways to crush the new Black participation in Southern elections during Reconstruction, the North’s use of registration to suppress immigrants provided a perfect model. So, starting in Mississippi, new Southern governments imposed it to great effect, adding not just a registration process—and requiring all voters to register anew—but added a wide variety of hurdles, including literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses (waiving hurdles for white voters), etc.

The shutting off of voting through registration manipulation worked to brutal effect. As I’ve explained elsewhere (and in my first whiteboard ever), it was a central part of wiping out high Black registration and voting rates in the 1870s and 1880s, down to almost 0 by the 20th century. Lousiana’s number of registered Black voters, for example, fell from 130,000 to 730.

And this of course meant actual voting cratered as well. As Professor Downs summarizes—in 1880, every Southern state saw between a 40% to 80% Black voter rate in elections; by 1912, every Southern state had a Black voting rate of 3% of lower. (Alabama fell from 55% to 2%; Florida from 84% to 2%; North Carolina from 81% to 1%.)

Tragic.

That lack of voting is what allowed the rest of Jim Crow to kick in for lifetimes…until, back to our theme, the Voting Rights Act re-opened the voter registration process and actively registered huge numbers of those excluded voters.

The Lesson:

So, take heed.

As Professor Downs says: “Registration is secretly the place that voter disfranchisement has happened in American history, even though it sits off stage.”

And right now, it’s exactly what they’re trying to repeat under the lie that non-citizens are voting in huge numbers.

As I explain in the whiteboard above, and previously, 95% of the ways that we all choose to register and re-register would be rendered functionally illegal by these laws, including:

• online voter registration

• automatic voter registration (AVR)

• mail-in voter registration

• voter registration by third parties and non-profit groups

• campaigns or parties conducting voter registration drives (same reason)

• all on-line BMV registrations: and any in-person BMV appointments where the voter has not brought the IDs required beyond their updated drivers’ licenses

Instead, every registration or re-registration (or undoing of a purge) would have to take place by traveling and waiting in line at a county elections office, which for most citizens is less convenient—which is why only 5% use that option now when they register or re-register to vote. And each time a person moves, they have to head back to that same inconvenient office to stay on the rolls.

They are re-running the old playbook, aiming for the same effects that Professor Downs summarized above:

1. to increase “the opportunity cost of voting”

2. disproportionately impacting “a group that is…marginal, or moving among different forms of temporary housing” — the more inconvenient registration becomes, the more Professor Downs’ quote (that by moving, “you’ve self-disfranchised”) becomes the reality again

3. to require citizens to go to an official government office as opposed to registering in ways that may be more comfortable or easy, such as with non-profit or community groups they know

As in both Jim Crow and the anti-immigrant Northern examples, these new inconveniences and the IDs required disproportionately impact certain groups disfavored by those in power, including women, voters of color and young voters.

And over time, the impact of all this can and will dramatically change the size and balance of the voting electorate, watering down the participation of these groups.

As Downs warns: “If someone can successfully disfranchise once, they’ve changed the electorate that will weigh in on those laws.” That allows them to keep going further.

“We might not see that impact until it’s almost too late and fix them.”

Beyond the SAVE Act

Yes, the SAVE Act may get bottled up in the Senate. May.

And yes, the President’s executive order will unlikely survive court challenge.

But history shows us that the real damage comes from statehouses enacting these bills—that’s how it played out in both North and South. And it was the state-by-state manipulation of registration that made it so much harder to undo over time.

And that’s how it’s playing out now. Again, 24 states are now pushing these bills, including Ohio as we speak—while we largely focus on Trump and a do-nothing Congress.

Very soon, I’ll provide a toolkit on how you can help fight back against this in Ohio (which we must do loudly), and other states.

But first, I wanted to ensure all readers knew how dangerous this all was.

More to come….

Day 163 — May 3, 2025

I don’t watch Sunday shows anymore. The format seems completely incapable of handling the moment that we’re in. But as a historical record (and to document historically inane comments), I want to include some of the quotes from Trump’s long interview with NBC yesterday.

Just so people know and remember what this man is saying:

Recession and Costs

• “I think the good parts are the Trump economy and the bad parts are the Biden economy because he's done a terrible job.”

• “I was able to get down the costs. But even that, it takes a while to get them down, but we got them down good. We lost 5 to 6 billion dollars a day with Biden. Five to 6 billion. And I've got that down to a great number right now in a very – in a record time.”

• “Costs are down, gasoline is down, groceries down, eggs, even mortgage rates are going down.”

• Asked if he was OK if the US entered a recession short-term:

  • Q: "Are you comfortable with the country potentially dipping into a recession for a period of time if you are able to achieve your long-term goals?"

  • A: "Look, uh, yeah, it's everything's okay. What we are, I said, this is a transition period. I think we're going to do fantastically."

Due Process

Q: “Your Secretary of State says everyone who's here, citizens and non-citizens, deserve due process. Do you agree, Mr. President?”
A: “I don't know. I'm not a lawyer. I don't know.”
Q: “Well, the Fifth Amendment says as much.”
A: “I don't know, it seems – it might say that, but if you're talking about that, then we'd have to have a million or 2 million or 3 million trials. We have thousands of people that are some murderers and some drug dealers and some of the worst people on Earth. Some of the worst, most dangerous people on Earth. And I was elected to get them the hell out of here and the courts are holding me from doing it.”
Q: “But even given those numbers that you're talking about, don't you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president?”
A: “I don't know. I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said. What you said is not what I heard the Supreme Court said. They have a different interpretation.”

Tariffs and Rationing

• “The tariffs have just started kicking in. ... The tariffs are going to make us rich. We’re going to be a very rich country.”

• “I don’t think a beautiful baby girl needs – that’s 11 years old – needs to have 30 dolls…I’m just saying [children] don’t need to have 30 dolls, they can have three, they don’t need to have 250 pencils, they can have five.”

• “We were losing hundreds of billions of dollars with China. Now we're essentially not doing business with China. Therefore, we're saving hundreds of billions of dollars. It's very simple."