Hello, and welcome back to The Franchise
The Missouri gerrymandering fight felt a lot like old-school Republican politics: boring, procedural trickery to rig the systems of government in their favor.
Denny Hoskins, the normal-seeming Republican Secretary of State, sidestepped the provision of the Missouri constitution that lets citizens bring new legislation to a statewide referendum simply by delaying his assessment of whether the petition had enough signatures. He took advantage of his minor administrative role to make sure the primaries were held under the new gerrymander, the better to bolster Republicans’ case in court that the general election must be held under it too.
In one easy step, Hoskins thought he had rammed through a maximal gerrymander and whittled down the people’s veto, declaring that it no longer applied to maps passed by the legislature. By dragging out the paperwork, he planned to reduce the power of Missouri citizens and thus make the state less democratic.
What Hoskins did was not Trumpian fire and brimstone, bellowing about the criminality of Democrats and immigrants to try to overturn elections. It’s the unsexy, quietly effective cheating made possible by placing party loyalists in key bureaucratic positions. This is the stuff of GOP voter repression past, of stringent voter ID laws and shuttered polling places in blue cities, of curtailed absentee ballot grace periods and rejected independent redistricting commissions.
But Hoskins ran into another institution of yore: a state Supreme Court that still makes good-faith attempts to interpret laws, rather than solely advancing the interests of its partisan allies. In Missouri, it’s a branch of government state Republicans have not yet corrupted; Missouri’s governor selects a justice from a pool of three candidates provided by a nominating commission built to, as much as possible, guard against partisan bias.
The Missouri Supreme Court issued a ruling preserving the referendum process for maps and freezing the new gerrymander until voters get a say in November. It proved too much for federal courts to overcome (not for lack of trying). Missouri Republicans were forced to watch from the outside as their peer red states freely ripped up their maps to steal House seats for the GOP.
I’ll be watching to see if these same Missouri Republicans target their state Supreme Court next, perhaps trying to smear the nominating commission as a smoke-filled backroom of the dread elites, as red states have done elsewhere.
The Trump-level attacks on our elections wouldn’t be possible if Republicans hadn’t, for decades, laid the groundwork to make it easier to disenfranchise voters and easier to win elections — not least by getting the party faithful into positions of power. Donald Trump didn’t come out of nowhere; the Republican Party’s belief that it would be better served by letting fewer people vote predates his rise by decades, spreading a rot through this country’s elections that he now seeks to turbocharge and exploit.
Seeding Chaos
- Defense Department Secretary Pete Hegseth decided at the 11th hour to instruct the military to help protect U.S. elections from foreign interference. His memo mostly detailed work that the agencies have done predating the Trump administration. Of course, such a directive is rather hollow after the administration shuttered key offices within the FBI and Office of the Director of National Intelligence that combat foreign interference, and that, in past cycles, started their work months before the election. The former Fox News weekend host is caught between his boss and a hard place, as Trump routinely discredits proof of Russian and Chinese election meddling.
- In line with the theme of old-school GOP opposition to voting that I outlined above, the seemingly unintentional Texas Department of Public Safety glitch that I wrote about in last week’s edition — which turns out to have affected a staggering 200,000 voter registration applications — stems from purposeful GOP opposition to voting access. Per the Texas Tribune/Votebeat, Texas is one of very few states that doesn’t have universal online voting registration, so voters are forced to use the DPS portal — the very software that glitched out and has given election administrators an additional herculean task during their busiest period.
Unseeding Chaos
- A U.S. district judge in Washington D.C. shut down the Trump administration’s longshot attempt to coerce states to overhaul their elections, or risk FEMA withholding their counterterrorism funding. Judge Amir Ali, a Biden appointee, ruled that it was quite a stretch to include micromanaging election administration within FEMA’s remit of shoring up vulnerabilities to terrorist attacks. The administration keeps bumping into this same obstacle: It’s difficult to circumvent the plain constitutional reality that states are in charge of administering federal elections. So far, most of its attempts to force state action with the sticks it has — withholding funding, Justice Department prosecution — have failed.
- The California Supreme Court is forcing Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco — a MAGA nut with ties to the far-right constitutional sheriff movement and the Oath Keepers — to return roughly 650,000 ballots he seized after the November 2025 special election in which voters granted state Democrats the power to pass a retaliatory maximal gerrymander. Bianco, an election denier extraordinaire, was running for the Republican nomination for California governor when he took the ballots as something of a stunt. He finished in a dismal fourth place.
- Trump’s vendetta to punish officials who investigated him in the past is hemorrhaging personnel as prosecutors struggle to find charges to bring. They include senior prosecutor Kurt Olsen, an election denier with no previous prosecutorial experience who initiated the raid of Fulton County’s election office last January. He reportedly had difficulty securing a security clearance (lol). Don’t let the door hit ya.
2028 Incoming
The Supreme Court, over the dissents of the liberals, will allow the Trump administration to use a beefed up citizenship identification system as a tool states can use to weed out (virtually nonexistent) noncitizen voting. The problems with the system are manifest: In court documents, citizens attest that they have already been wrongly disenfranchised, as much of the information is outdated. We are in the pre-election voter purge pause, when states are barred from systematically removing voters from the rolls. But keep your eye on this for future election cycles.
Dessert
The Abdul El Sayed campaign in Michigan released a social media ad riffing on the famous Tim Robinson hotdog “we’re all trying to find the guy who did this” meme. It’s fun.
