Last December, my Atlantic colleague David Graham argued that Donald Trump’s plan to subvert the midterms is already underway He updated his article here, last week, because this is an evolving story. When Trump talks about “nationalizing elections,” when he sends the FBI to raid a Georgia election center, when he and his minions talk constantly about non-citizens voting, something that is extraordinarily rare, pay attention. They are telling us that they are planning to distort the playing field, or to sully the result.
Elections are the topic of the fifth episode of this season of Autocracy in America. We start with Dawn Baldwin Gibson, 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. It might surprise many other Americans to know that your vote can be questioned after you have cast it, but it happened to her, and she is determined not to let it happen again:
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.”
I also talked to Stacey Abrams, whose 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. Abrams founded 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. She points out that the arguments we are having about gerrymandering have some new aspects:
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.
We also talked about how ICE might be used on election day (we recorded our conversation before Steve Bannon explicitly called for ICE to “surround the polls come November) as well as the takeover of TikTok and other tactics that could be used, or are being used, to shape the outcome. This was her conclusion:
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.
How Autocrats Meddle With Elections
The Trump administration has its eyes
on the midterms and beyond.
By Anne Applebaum
Illustration by Ben
Jones
February 6, 2026, 6 AM ET
The Trump White House is changing the
rules of our political system through intimidation, the distortion of
information, financial corruption, and the dismantling of government offices.
In the final episode of this season, we examine whether the administration is
also trying to change the rules of our elections. Dawn Baldwin Gibson, a North
Carolina pastor, tells us about how, in 2024, her vote was challenged for
reasons that still aren’t clear to her. Host Anne Applebaum interviews Stacey
Abrams, who has spent years fighting voter-suppression tactics. Abrams argues
that Gibson’s story is one of many attempts to change how people vote and how
their votes are counted.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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: 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.
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.
