How Autocrats Meddle With Elections

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Dawn Baldwin Gibson: For more than 35 years, I have been a registered voter and I have been casting my vote. To this day, months later, I still don’t know why my vote was being challenged.

[Music]

Anne Applebaum: From The Atlantic, this is Autocracy in America. I’m Anne Applebaum.  This season, we’ve been talking about the Trump administration’s unprecedented accumulation of power. But we’re still missing one piece of the story: the elections themselves. We’ve heard people talk about how they fear soldiers on the streets could intimidate voters, or how crypto barons could try to manipulate campaigns. But the [Donald] Trump White House is also very interested in elections: how voters are registered, how they vote, how those votes are counted.

Across the country, state governors and legislators, sometimes inspired by Trump’s false claims about the 2020 elections, are enacting new voter-ID rules; they’re changing registration requirements and crafting lists of voters to purge from the rolls.

Dawn Baldwin Gibson is a pastor in New Bern, North Carolina. She’s one of more than 60,000 North Carolina voters who had the legitimacy of their vote challenged in 2024.

Gibson: One of the races on the ballot was for the North Carolina Supreme Court. The election was between Allison Riggs and Jefferson Griffin. I actually went to vote as an early voter, and this is something that for many years I have done with my family. Showed my ID, went in, cast my vote, and really thought nothing else about it until a couple of weeks went by. I started hearing about this Jefferson Griffin list.

ABC11 newscaster: Republican candidate Griffin is challenging more than 65,000 ballots in the North Carolina Supreme Court race, arguing—

Gibson: The authority in North Carolina is the State Board of Elections. They were not challenging my vote. They were showing that I had done everything that I was supposed to have done for my vote to count. But Jefferson Griffin’s team, they were the ones challenging my vote. And that seemed like changing the rules after the results are not what you want.

I just thought, Do something! What can I do? So we got a local church. We wrote letters. We talked to the local media.

CBS 17 newscaster 1: After months of back-and-forth legal rulings, the challenge to November’s supreme court election ruling is over.

CBS 17 newscaster 2: Republican Judge Griffin is conceding the race. His decision ends the only election—

Gibson: So yes, in the end we did get our votes to count, but it put a lot of stress. It put a lot of worry. I come from a rural community, and the word we would use is: It was a lot of worry-ation. They felt like—every time I go to vote, Is this what I’m gonna have to put up with? Go vote, and then there’s a challenge.

[Music]

Gibson: My maternal grandfather, Frederick Douglas Fisher—both of his parents were slaves. He believed in being a part of the American democracy process, and that process was voting, and that we, as his children and grandchildren, had a responsibility to show up and vote, and so there was a great pride in that. And to know that we are now in a time where we are seeing our votes being challenged, it is our responsibility. The breaking down of democracy is not going to happen on our watch. This is our time, where history will look back and say, In 2025, there were people that stood and said: “I will be seen. I will be heard, and my vote will count.”

[Music]

Stacey Abrams: Voter suppression is one of the core tools of authoritarianism. It is how you shift from democracy to autocracy. And for millions of Americans, it’s about to become the norm.

Applebaum: Stacey Abrams is one of the leading experts on the topic of voter registration and voter suppression. Her work has helped me understand that voter suppression isn’t a single thing or a law, but rather a thousand little cuts and changes, maybe designed to discourage just a few voters but which can make a big difference when elections are as close as ours. She’s the founder of Fair Fight, the voting-rights organization, and she twice ran for governor of Georgia. She’s also the lead organizer of a campaign to fight authoritarianism called the 10 Steps Campaign.  Stacey, what do you make of Dawn’s story?

Abrams:  There are three components to voter suppression: Can you register and stay on the rolls? Can you cast a ballot? And does that ballot get counted? And what she is describing is that third barrier. What we have seen happen over the last decade and a half, since the erosion of the Voting Rights Act, is this wholesale attack on all three of those points of entry to democracy.

Can you register and stay on the rolls? Can you cast a ballot? She covered both of those hurdles, but she got tripped up by: Does your ballot count? And in Georgia, in Texas, across this country, in Florida, North Carolina, we are watching this dramatic acceleration of voter suppression and, sadly, it is going to be the most effective tool used by authoritarians to thwart the will of the people in the next few years.

Applebaum: Okay. Let’s start with gerrymandering, the redrawing of voter-district boundaries. It’s a topic that is not remotely new in America. The word itself comes from Eldridge Gerry, who, while governor of Massachusetts in 1812, designed a voting district that supposedly looked like a salamander, hence gerrymander. So it’s very old practice, but this year, I think for the first time, we have an American president who has asked state governors to create new voter districts and even put quite heavy pressure on some of them in order to give his party an advantage in the midterm. This is now a national project, as opposed to something that happens locally, and it’s also out of season and out of order, because usually voter boundary changes are made after a census.

Now Governor [Greg] Abbott of Texas has already agreed to change boundaries in Texas, even without a census. Am I right that this is new? That the federal government’s involvement in this is different and maybe more dangerous?

Abrams:  There have been maps that have been redrawn in between census years, in between redistricting, but those had been exclusively court-ordered. When lines were drawn that did not conform, the court would take some time to look at these maps. Georgia, almost every single cycle after the Voting Rights Act, had to have its maps adjudicated by a court, and that was true for a lot of southern states.

And so it is not the case that there had never been redrawn districts. It had usually been that those districts were redrawn because the court said, You didn’t do it right the first time. But what we are seeing now, and what you’ve just described, is unprecedented. We have never had a president of the United States explicitly state that the line should be redrawn, not based on population, but based on voter outcome. And when you do that, when you decide that the districts are not designed to allow voters to elect their leaders, it is designed to allow leaders to elect their voters—that is a shift of power, and it is exactly what redistricting is designed to preclude.

Applebaum: What do you make of the response of Governor [Gavin] Newsom to the Texas redistricting? You know, he responded that if this was gonna be a federal-government project, that he was going to also make it a project in California. He held a referendum that has allowed California to also redistrict. I mean, is this just perpetuating the unfairness, or is this a legitimate response?

Abrams: It is a legitimate response because we are in illegitimate times. What is unique in this moment is how aggressively one political party is leveraging this and the ends to which it is being used, which is to overthrow democracy and to install an authoritarian regime. So that is a distinction that is incredibly important if we’re gonna understand what Newsom did. When Trump said that he wanted to redraw those districts, when Abbott complied, when Missouri complied, when North Carolina complied, what they were doing was explicitly trying to strip power away from certain voters. And what Gavin Newsom understands is that performative pragmatism is not the response. This is an open battle for the kind of government we’re going to have. And what he did was not advance the cause of Democrats. He nullified the advance of authoritarianism.

We are going to either win or lose democracy in the next few years. It’s important for us not to think about this in the normative terms of political debate that we tend to have: one party versus the other. You and I both know that autocracies and authoritarian regimes have elections. Venezuela has elections. You know, Russia has elections. But they game before the election begins what the outcome is. The urgency of this moment is that if this holds, there will never again be the opportunity for competition, because if we have a single-party system that does not countenance democracy as the end goal, meaning that people actually get to participate, they will go through the motions, but it won’t really matter, because they’ll change the rules again. Because they will control the means of decision making, meaning they’ll control the presidency and they’ll control both chambers of Congress. And they have a pretty strong lock on the judiciary, which means that we won’t have the debate anymore, because changing the lines won’t matter, because the elections won’t matter.

Applebaum:  Stacey, there’s another form of federal-government interference that the Republicans are also promoting, which is a federal law: the SAVE Act, or the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, which would require in-person voter registration and the presentation of physical documentary proof of U.S. citizenship in federal elections. So they’re asking people for not just a drivers’ license or ID, most of which, I should say, already requires U.S. citizenship to obtain, but for a passport or a birth certificate in addition. And this creates an extra hurdle that people might not think about, or they might not remember to do before the election. Is that the right way to characterize how this law is supposed to work?

Abrams: The SAVE Act has disproportionate effect on very targeted communities: the 69 million women who may have changed their names after marriage, transgender people who may have had name changes. They’re going to say that you don’t have proof of your right to vote, because your name does not match your birth certificate and your Social Security card. That means that millions of people would be disenfranchised and would have to go through multiple hurdles to get back on the rolls. You knock out a group who also are more likely to vote Democratic than Republican.

I wanna be really clear. There are two conditions that are embedded in this argument that are important to understand. One is that you prove your citizenship, and the second is that you prove your identity. In the United States, both proofs are already required. This is not new. And, more importantly, there has been no discernible harm done to elections because people have not met these conditions. So it’s really, really important that we understand that this is a solution that has no problem. Republicans and Democrats both acknowledge—in fact, there was a report that came out after the 2020 election—we don’t have voter fraud in this country. It’s hard enough getting people to vote. People don’t really engage in trying to vote more than once, and people who do not have the right to vote, it is an extraordinary rarity that they will try.

Applebaum:  Right so there was no problem of noncitizens voting.

Abrams: There’s no problem with noncitizens voting. There’s no problem with non-ID voting. You have always had to prove who you are to cast a ballot. The issue was not Did you have to prove it? It was How did you prove it?

Applebaum: Does this requirement affect other groups? What about Black voters?

Abrams: Well, if you were born in the United States during Jim Crow and you were Black, you were legally not permitted to be born in a hospital, which meant that the birth certificate that you got was filed with the county, but it was not the original birth certificate from the hospital. So Black people, thousands and thousands of Black people, do not have an original birth certificate; 146 million Americans do not have a passport. Working-class and low-income Americans tend not to have that paperwork, and if they do, it’s not easily accessible. And so that is why in the U.S. we’ve created systems to allow you to prove your citizenship in other ways. And by changing those rules, you are lining up communities that will not be able to participate in elections.

Applebaum:  Would the lack of participation not also hurt Republicans? Again, there are a lot of Republicans who presumably don’t have passports and don’t have birth certificates.

Abrams: It does. And that’s one of the reasons I think this should be a bipartisan fight. Because when you try to break democracy by targeting one community, the problem is: You break it for everyone. And so they are willing to risk it because they think it will help them more than it will hurt them.

And the reason it matters is that when you tell the average person, You’re not allowed to vote, they’re gonna get mad. But it’s unlikely that they’re going to go to court to force the issue. And in a year, and in a nation, where margins of thousands of voters, not millions of voters, decide the outcome, if the federal government controls that data, if they can manipulate that information, they can then start to attack thousands and thousands of voters and win on the margins—not by actually winning the election, but by forcing voter suppression to lead people to simply not bother trying. And that has the same effect as not voting.

Applebaum: I also want to talk about your own experience with this. So, after you ran for governor of Georgia in 2018, you raised a lot of questions about whether voter-suppression tactics by your opponent had influenced the race. You sued. And, of course, you acknowledged the outcome of the race in the end, that he would be governor, and you wouldn’t. But there was a nuance to your position that opened you up for criticism. I wonder if you could explain the nuance.

Abrams:  The tradition in politics is that once an election is over, you use the word concede. And as someone who is not only a lawyer but also a writer, words matter to me. They have meaning; they have heft. But I’m also the daughter of two civil-rights activists. My father was arrested when he was 14, registering Black people to vote in Mississippi. And so I take very seriously, and it has been my life’s work, since I was 17, to focus on the access to democracy that is contained within the right to vote.

And so when I gave my speech on the night that we realized, despite the very clear and unambiguous voter-suppression tactics leveraged by my opponent, I said, He won. I was very clear about that. I said he was going to be governor. I was not, but I refused to use the word concede, because concession in that statement meant to say that the system that he leveraged was true or correct or proper, and I could not in good conscience say that. I never once questioned whether or not he became the governor. I questioned the system that allowed him and his cohorts to block access to the right to vote for thousands and thousands of Georgians. And because I refused to use the word concede, it became weaponized. But I never once filed a suit to make myself governor. I never once filed a personal suit. Trying to dislodge him. Every lawsuit that was filed was about the system itself. It was never going to solve the problem of me not winning. It was always in service of: How do we ensure that voters have their rights protected?

Applebaum:  Right. Right. So that’s very different from the 2020 campaign, when Donald Trump tried to overthrow the results of an election.

Abrams: Absolutely. And it’s a distinction that anyone with good faith or with good hearing can discern. Running for office does not guarantee you victory, but being a citizen in this country should guarantee you access to the right to vote.

[Music]

Applebaum: After the break:

Abrams: I fundamentally believe, based on what I’ve watched this country do, what we have watched other nations do, that we can indeed fight back. But you cannot fight if you do not understand the opposition.

Applebaum: We’ll be right back.

[Break]

Applebaum: Stacey, it’s illogical to think that illegal immigrants are eagerly voting in American elections, and there is no evidence that they do. Why would they want to attract that kind of attention from the government? Nevertheless, the administration, the Republican Party, MAGA media have been talking for years and years and years, actually, about illegal immigrants voting, even, as you say, proposing legislation to prevent it. Is this because they genuinely fear illegal voters? Or does it have a different purpose? Maybe the point is to create hysteria about an unfair election in advance, just in case the Republicans lose. That would give them an excuse to refuse to swear in new members of Congress. Or maybe they want to intimidate legal voters.

Abrams:  Lies work. (Laughs.) Lies are a very effective deterrent for voter participation. But there’s also the micro issue. When people think that they might be arrested if they show up, then they won’t vote. If people believe that there is some harm they will face, they won’t show up. When people think that it is going to be too hard, when they think that it is going to be dangerous, they don’t vote.

So let’s look at New Jersey in 1981. New Jersey had a tendency to have armed folks standing in the polling places where Black people were voting. And based on that behavior, they were actually denied, the Republicans were denied, the right to do election observation for 30 years. The reason it became so important was that people would say, I’m not going to vote, because I could be arrested. Not that they had done something wrong, but they were afraid of being arrested because you had law enforcement patrolling voting places.

Applebaum: I mean, look. The establishment of ICE as a kind of paramilitary, a federal police that’s not just used to enforce the law but to intimidate people, as well as the decision to send the National Guard into American cities has already got one governor, Governor [J. B.] Pritzker of Illinois, to say that these decisions are not just about fighting crime or public safety, but about creating a pretext to send armed military troops into communities now or during the 2026 election. So it sounds like you think that’s a possibility.

Abrams:  I think it’s a likelihood, because we’ve seen it happen. In Georgia, Hancock County, deputy sheriffs followed Black men home. And that behavior was so egregious that Black men started calling the county, saying, Please take my name off of the voting rolls, because I don’t want the sheriff coming back to my house. That was a decade ago.

We know that when people are afraid, they will do what they can to protect themselves and their families. And just in case the fear isn’t real enough, this administration, suborned by Republicans at every level of government, are willing to threaten the possibility of harm in order to game winning an election. And the reason they are doing this so aggressively is because they believe that if they can do it, they will control every level of government and every lever of power. Authoritarianism isn’t about winning a single election. It is about dismantling a democratic system and installing a system that lacks accountability and has unchecked power. That’s what they’re after, and we cannot be so naive as to think that this is just about who wins a race. This is about who wins America.

Applebaum:  I thought that it was illegal for armed troops, certainly military, to be anywhere near polling booths on Election Day. Is that not the case?

Abrams: I will say it this way: It’s illegal if you note them. But let’s be clear, there are only a few places ICE is not permitted to go. And because they are masked, because they’re unidentified, it is not just the actual harm—it’s the specter of harm. That’s what we have to be thinking about. It’s not just the explicit violation of the law; it’s the implicit threat that the law permits them to exercise. And when the U.S. Supreme Court said that you could detain people based on their race, their accent, or the language they spoke, when you said that ICE could do that, there is nothing to preclude ICE from doing that while you’re standing in line getting ready to cast a ballot. So you may not have the National Guard there, but ICE is not actually military.

Applebaum:  I want to move way upstream in this discussion of elections, from the actual voting to the culture of election information and voter engagement. Here’s an example: TikTok may be about to change from Chinese ownership to U.S. ownership, and the new owners could be U.S. billionaires who are friendly to Trump. We know that TikTok is one of the main sources of political information for young people. Do you think that this change in ownership could be deliberately designed to alter perceptions of the coming campaign, to change how people feel about the candidates? Is that something that counts as election interference? And if so, how do we think about it?

Abrams: Not only is it possible—it is highly likely. Half of young people get their news right now from TikTok and YouTube. Voting is as much a cultural event as it is a practical one. I vote in part because my parents used to take us with them to vote. I watched my parents vote in every election. It was part of our culture. We knew that voting was an important thing to do. There’s a young woman, Esosa Osa, who started a company, an organization called Onyx Impact, and she has done extraordinary research into how disinformation intentionally targeted Black people. It works as a voter-suppression tool.

Applebaum: To convince them not to vote?

Abrams: To convince them not to vote or that their votes don’t matter or that the vote that they have taken is somehow being manipulated. And it works. If you have conversations with those in the Latino population, they will tell you about the very subtle language that got inserted into conversations that they were listening to on the radio, that reminded them that their participation would be akin to supporting a regime that their families escaped from a decade before. And so, yes, culture is absolutely upstream, but when it floods the zone, it changes outcomes.

Applebaum: Stacey, this is the last episode in a season that’s been exploring the administration’s power grab from several angles. We have noted: This is not just arming ICE and sending the National Guard to cities. It’s not just the construction of a biased civil service. It’s not just the reshaping of culture and science. It’s not just the direction of cryptocurrency profits to congressional campaigns. It’s all of these things put together. How should listeners think about the defense of democracy? Is it a state-by-state effort? Is it issue by issue? Should we have a unified national approach?

Abrams: So the Constitution gives oversight of elections to state government. We don’t have a single democracy. We have 50-plus different democracies operating at any given moment. And so, yes, part of the solution is going to be a state and local solution because the ripple effects of this will reach every level of government. We may be having conversations about Congress, but we’ve gotta understand that this will affect city councils and school boards and county commissioners and state legislatures. It will affect everything that government is responsible for delivering or not delivering. And so we have to have a localized response. That means more people have to volunteer to be poll watchers. More people have to organize to ensure that their communities understand what the votes actually count towards.

The young woman at the top of this conversation from North Carolina, she got it—that it wasn’t just about whether or not a supreme-court justice in North Carolina got seated. It was whether or not kids in that school were going to get lunch, because the elections that are happening decide: How do we respond to SNAP benefits being cut? How do we respond to the ACA subsidies being diminished? How do we respond to disabled veterans being fired from their jobs because of the anti-DEI executive orders? Those are all of a piece, and so we have to have a multilayered, multipronged response to what is a multilayered, multipronged attack.

But I fundamentally believe, based on what I’ve watched this country do, what we have watched other nations do, that we can indeed fight back. But you cannot fight if you do not understand the opposition. We could win. But we are very, very, very likely to lose if we keep treating this as business as usual. This is not about whether this Democrat wins or that Republican wins. This is about whether democracy wins or authoritarianism wins.

[Music]

Applebaum:  Thank you so much, Stacey Abrams.

Abrams:  Thank you for having me.

Applebaum: And thank you all for listening. I hope that you’ve also concluded that this is not business as usual. The Trump administration is making deep changes to our political system and to the nature of our government. They are doing so with an eye towards tilting the playing field, shaping the elections in November, and, of course, the next presidential election, in 2028. If we want to keep our elections free and fair, not just this time but into the future, all of us will have to pay attention, take part, join campaigns, learn about local candidates, communicate with others, and vote. We don’t want this to be the last chance.

Autocracy in America is produced by Arlene Arevalo, Natalie Brennan, and Jocelyn Frank. Editing by Dave Shaw. Rob Smierciak engineered and provided original music. Fact-checking by Enna Alvarado and Sam Fentress. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Anne Applebaum.