The GOP Is Winning by Rigging the System—Shouldn’t Democrats Do the Same?

If Republicans are winning by rigging elections, can Democrats really afford to stay ‘ethical’ and still win?

Democrats are at least 17 years late to the party and damn well better catch up soon if they want to win the House (or Senate) in next year’s election. The history — and lack of Democratic response — is shocking.

While a state must go to court to take away your gun, five Republicans on the US Supreme Court have refused to enforce the “right to vote” provisions of the National Voting Registration Act of 1993 so states don’t even have to notify you when they steal take away your vote.

And, wow, are Republicans committed to taking away your vote!

Back in 2008, following Barack Obama’s win, Chris Jankowski of the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC) organized a program called REDMAP (Redistricting Majority Project) to create, as closely as possible with the aid of sophisticated computer analyses, a permanent Republican majority, both in control of individual state legislatures and in the US House of Representatives.

They’d been running voter suppression scams for years, of course; an analysis by the Center for American Progress found that decades of gerrymandering had given Republicans a more-or-less permanent 19-seat advantage in the US House that they wouldn’t have had without it.

But that wasn’t enough for the GOP, which was facing the headwind of promoting unpopular policies like tax cuts for the rich and gutting the social safety net. So REDMAP was launched with the goal of creating a permanent Republican majority in the House.

The first step was to seize such complete control of a handful of decisive states that they could then engage in outrageous levels of partisan gerrymandering after the 2010 census; this was done with roughly $30 million (much from the US Chamber of Commerce) spent in usually sleepy state house and senate races.

That money spent on 107 state legislative races across 16 states, including pivotal then-swing states Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Florida, flipped 19 legislative bodies from Democratic to Republican control.

As a result, following the 2010 election 10 of the 15 states that were set to redraw their congressional maps in 2011 were firmly in the hands of the GOP.

Then they set about surgically gerrymandering those ten states and the result, according to research done by the Brennan Center for Justice, was that Republicans picked up (and Democrats lost) 16 additional seats in the US House of Representatives and would be able to hold onto them with a high level of confidence in future elections.

REDMAP worked spectacularly: in the 2012 congressional elections, despite Democrats receiving over 1 million more votes for House members nationwide, that gerrymandering campaign helped Republicans capture a 33-seat majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.

That year in Pennsylvania, for example, Democrats won 51% of the congressional vote but only 5 of 18 US House seats; in Ohio, Democrats also won 51% of the statewide congressional vote but because of the extreme gerrymander got only 4 of 16 seats in the House. In North Carolina, Democrats received 50.6% of the vote but ended up with only 4 House seats compared to 9 held by Republicans.

While Republicans were pulling off this evil deed, “good government Democrats” (encouraged by local rightwing media) were embracing an end to gerrymandering in their states with California, Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, New Jersey, Washington state, and Michigan putting nonpartisan or bipartisan commissions in charge of their redistricting to draw maps that are “fair” to both sides.

And now, Trump — looking at an election wipeout next year as he destroys the economy, deploys gestapo-like secret police, and engages in foreign policy that may well plunge the world into WWIII — is demanding that Texas, Ohio, Indiana, and other Red states make their existing gerrymanders so extreme that they’ll essentially lock out most all House Democrats from those states.

Finally, it seems to be waking up Democrats. California’s Governor Gavin Newsom wrote a sternly-worded letter to Trump saying:

“You are playing with fire, risking the destabilization of our democracy, while knowing that California can neutralize any gains you can hope to make. This attempt to rig congressional maps to hold onto power before a single vote is cast in the 2026 election is an affront to American democracy. …

“If you will not stand down I will be forced to lead an effort to redraw the maps in California to offset the rigging of maps in red states. But if the other states call off their redistricting efforts, we will happily do the same. And American democracy will be better for it.”

Will he follow through? If he does, it’ll be a huge departure from past Democratic Party practices of simply ignoring Republican voter suppression efforts.

Similarly, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker said of the proposed Texas gerrymander:

“I think cheating the way the president wants to is improper. … What Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is doing … is trying to cheat mid‑decade here. … They’re attempting to change the map.”

But Pritzker won’t commit Illinois to re-gerrymandering. At least not yet.

And even if they do, gerrymandering California and Illinois is a good beginning but frankly is weak tea. Democrats should never have abandoned gerrymandering when Republicans were hanging onto it; it was a stupid form of unilateral surrender in the name of fairness and good government. They’re noble ideas, but they’ve also stripped the Party of its political power.

Every Democratic state should begin gerrymandering right now, regardless of what Republicans do in Texas, Ohio, Florida, etc. It’s necessary to undo the impact of REDMAP, if nothing else.

But Democrats shouldn’t stop there. An analysis by reporter and statistician Greg Palast — using numbers exclusively from official federal and state sources — found that 4,776,706 mostly-Democratic (and mostly minority) voters were purged from the election rolls in the months leading up to the 2024 election.

Republicans had also organized a nationwide campaign to have partisan election judges sit with vote-counters in swing states where mail-in ballots were counted. They challenged so many signatures or found small errors in ballot markings that an additional 2,121,000 mail-in ballots (again, mostly Democratic) were disqualified from being counted.

Additionally, Republican election officials made sure that 1,216,000 “provisional” ballots were rejected and thus not counted, and 3.24 million new 2024 voter registrations — gathered by Democrats in Get Out The Vote campaigns — were rejected or not entered on the rolls in time to vote.

As Palast writes, using official US Election Assistance Commission, Federal Election Commission, and state-level official numbers:

“Trump lost. That is, if all legal voters were allowed to vote, if all legal ballots were counted, Trump would have lost the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Vice-President Kamala Harris would have won the Presidency with 286 electoral votes.

“And, if not for the mass purge of voters of color, if not for the mass disqualification of provisional and mail-in ballots, if not for the new mass vigilante challenges in swing states, Harris would have gained at least another 3,565,000 votes, topping Trump’s official popular vote tally by 1.2 million.”

The main weapon the GOP is using to purge voting rolls is called “caging.” They were under a federal consent decree forbidding its use from 1982 to 2018, but that year five Republicans on the US Supreme Court legalized the practice.

In the direct-mail business, when junk mail is returned because it’s undeliverable those pieces of mail were put in a “cage” to be later fed into a computer to remove the bad addresses, which is where the term caging came from.

Republicans, though, have elevated caging into a partisan art form. They mail postcards — that intentionally look like junk mail — into heavily Democratic areas that must be returned within a specific time period or the voter will be scrubbed from the rolls for “inactivity.” The typical return rate is 6.8%.

When Democrats sued in 2018 to stop Ohio Secretary of State John Husted from caging voters in that state, Sonja Sotomayor wrote in her dissent in the Husted v Randolph case that voters were purged after missing an election and “…after failing to send back one piece of mail, even though there is no reasonable basis to believe the individual actually moved. … At best, purged voters are forced to ‘needlessly reregister’ if they decide to vote in a subsequent election; at worst, they are prevented from voting at all because they never receive information about when and where elections are taking place.”

She added:

“As one example, amici point to an investigation that revealed that in Hamilton County, ‘African-American-majority neighborhoods in downtown Cincinnati had 10% of their voters removed due to inactivity’ since 2012, as ‘compared to only 4% of voters in a suburban, majority-white neighborhood.’”

In his dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer pointed out that only around 4 percent of Americans move every year, revealing the lie that Ohio’s Husted was “just trying to keep the voting rolls clean”:

“The record shows that in 2012 Ohio identified about 1.5 million registered voters—nearly 20% of its 8 million registered voters—as likely ineligible to remain on the federal voter roll because they changed their residences.”

When Democrats are talking about “fighting fire with fire,” organizing partisan ballot challenges, voter roll challenges, and caging in heavily Republican districts should also be weapons in their arsenal.

After all, there are huge, well-funded Republican organizations like True The Vote actively challenging voter registrations and attempting to remove individuals from the rolls. They include:

— Soles to the Rolls, active in Michigan, formally affiliated with Citizens Outreach Foundation.
— Pigpen Project, based in Nevada. Linked to former GOP operatives; involved in trying to purge over 11,000 voter registrations in Washoe County.
— The People’s Audit operating in Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and Georgia.
— Look Ahead America, active across multiple states, including Missouri, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and others, founded by a Trump campaign alum.
— Wisconsin’s North of 29 connected to Mike Lindell; active in Wisconsin.
— Clean Elections USA (CEUSA) operates in Arizona and has been accused of intimidating voters by showing up at drop boxes in military gear, with drones, and photographing voters.
— FEC United operating in Colorado and Michigan; has ties to Mike Lindell and Kash Patel
— Liberty Center for God and Country operates in Texas to challenge voter rolls
— Strong Communities Foundation of Arizona (aka EZAZ), is engaged in voter roll challenges or suppression-type activity
— Wisconsin Voters Alliance and Wisconsin Center for Election Justice used methods like change-of-address data to target voters for removal; their tactics were questioned by election experts.
— Georgia Nerds: one member challenged over 1,000 voters in Chatham County alone.
— Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections (RITE) was founded in 2022 by political figures like Bill Barr and Karl Rove and has pursued lawsuits aimed at gaining access to voter data and influencing registration practices.
— Rockbridge Network functions like a conservative “venture capital” hub, funding projects including map influence and political coalition-building at the state level.
— Organizations like Heritage Action, the American Principles Project, FreedomWorks, and others are directing substantial funds toward restrictive voting laws and election procedure changes in numerous states.

While there are multiple Democratic-aligned groups working to register voters or encourage election turnout — Stacy Abrams’ Fair Fight Action, Rock The Vote, and Voto Latino — there isn’t even one dedicated to suppressing the Republican vote.

Immediately after the five Republican appointees on the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, 14 GOP-controlled states moved, within a year (some within days), to restrict access to the vote, particularly for communities of color, students, and retired people.

In North Carolina, for example, 158 polling places were permanently closed in the 40 counties with the most African American voters just before the 2016 election, leading to a 16 percent decline in African American early voting in that state. An MIT study found that, nationwide, Hispanic voters wait 150 percent longer in line than white voters, and Black voters can expect to wait 200 percent longer in line to vote.

This is how Republicans work to win elections, and although it’s not a legal crime (under interpretations by the Republican majority on the Supreme Court) it’s certainly a moral crime and an all-out assault on what remains of our democracy.

In Indiana, then-Governor Pence’s new rigorous voter ID law — the first in the nation at the time (2005) — caused an 11.5 percent drop in African American voting. Students sued for their right to vote and lost, and in Red states, retired people who no longer drive but care passionately about their Social Security and Medicare are routinely turned away at the polls by the tens of thousands for lack of a “current” drivers’ license, another GOP trick. In 2008, around six million eligible voters did not vote because of difficulties associated with registration requirements, according to the Census Bureau.

In the months leading up to the 2012 election in Pennsylvania, Republicans had just passed that state’s first voter suppression law. It eliminated the right to vote of 758,000 registered voters because they lacked a Department of Transportation-issued ID, meaning over 9 percent of that state’s then 8.2 million registered voters could no longer cast a ballot.

As the US Commission on Civil Rights noted about the 2000 election after Governor Jeb Bush purged over 90,000 mostly-Black voters and Republicans began seriously challenging voters’ right to vote:

“14.4 percent of Florida’s black voters cast ballots that were rejected. This compares with approximately 1.6 percent of nonblack Florida voters who did not have their presidential votes counted. … [I]n the state’s largest county, Miami-Dade, more than 65 percent of the names on the purge list were African Americans, who represented only 20.4 percent of the population.”

It’s not like Republicans don’t know what they’re doing. This is at the core of their ability to seize and hold power. As Pennsylvania’s GOP House Majority Leader Mike Turzai famously bragged:

“Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done.”

But the GOP was just getting warmed up. In 2018 in Georgia, then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp purged 340,134 mostly Black and entirely legitimate voters (out of the 534,000 total purged) from the state’s rolls. He then “won” the election for governor against Stacy Abrams by about 55,000 votes.

Florida and Texas are among other “close” states where Republican officials hang onto office in part through aggressive culling of voters from the rolls. The DeSantis administration has purged almost a million voters from the Florida voter rolls using the excuse that they failed to vote in a midterm election.

Just between 2020 and 2022 fully 19,260,000 Americans — 8.5% of all registered voters — were purged, flipping control of the House to the GOP in the 2022 election. The purge rate in Republican-controlled Red states was 40% higher than the rest of the country.

When Florida essentially criminalized voter registration drives ($250,000 fines for even minor errors), the League of Women Voters and other groups simply stopped operating in those states. Similar laws were put in place over the past 15 years by Republican legislators in Idaho, Kansas, Missouri, Montana and Tennessee, and are pending in other Red states (and will probably pass soon).

To make matters worse, in March 2025 Trump signed an executive order to overhaul and exert partial control over our nation’s election systems.

He’s demanding that voters must show a passport or similar citizenship document to register to vote, wants all voting equipment re-certified (only one voting system meets their certification standards and that company’s systems were only certified on July 7, 2025), and is demanding voter lists with sensitive, personal information from Blue states so they can be combed for “fraud.”

Democrats are finally talking about “fighting fire with fire,” but Republicans have been going after Democratic voters with flame throwers for two decades and now have the support of the Republicans on the Supreme Court, along with Trump’s efforts to involve the federal government in even worse voter suppression.

Democrats, in addition to gerrymandering, should start caging operations and challenging Republican voters the way the GOP has been doing against Democratic communities for decades. The resulting squeals that will come from Republican operatives and officials might provoke a change in the law outlawing caging and gerrymandering.

If the Democrats’ goal is to prevent the 2026 and 2028 elections from looking like those in Hungary and Russia, they need to be raising absolute hell and get on the ball quickly. Time’s a-wasting…

Louise’s Daily Song: “Why Aren’t Democrats Playing the Same Game as the GOP?”

The song that was inspired by this article is here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is here.
My newest book, The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink comes out soon and is now available for pre-order.
You can follow me on Blue Sky here: https://bsky.app/profile/thomhartmann.bsky.social

Why Aren’t Democrats Playing the Same Game as the GOP?

Verse 1
They’re stacking the deck and playing their hand,
Gerrymandering lines across the land.
Pushing voters out, making it clear,
The game’s rigged, but they’ve got no fear.

Pre-Chorus
While the GOP’s playing dirty,
Democrats stand so damn sturdy.
But in this fight, they’ve got to see,
Fairness ain’t always the key.

Chorus
Why aren’t Democrats playing the same game as the GOP?
If it’s legal, if it’s right, why are they so blind to see?
They’re drawing the lines, purging the rolls,
Winning the game while they’re losing their souls.
If they don’t start fighting back,
They’ll never take the lead, never get on track.
Why aren’t Democrats playing the same game as the GOP?

Verse 2
They’re making moves in the shadows at night,
While the Democrats fight with all their might.
But they’ve got rules, they’ve got pride,
While the GOP’s twisting it all inside.

Pre-Chorus
They’re playing hard, playing fast,
But the Democrats are stuck in the past.
They need to see what’s at stake,
And bend the rules before it’s too late.

Chorus
Why aren’t Democrats playing the same game as the GOP?
If it’s legal, if it’s right, why are they so blind to see?
They’re drawing the lines, purging the rolls,
Winning the game while they’re losing their souls.
If they don’t start fighting back,
They’ll never take the lead, never get on track.
Why aren’t Democrats playing the same game as the GOP?

Bridge
They say it’s wrong, but is it too late?
The GOP’s got the power to dictate.
If they don’t start now, they’ll fade away,
Watching from the sidelines as the game is played.

Chorus
Why aren’t Democrats playing the same game as the GOP?
If it’s legal, if it’s right, why are they so blind to see?
They’re drawing the lines, purging the rolls,
Winning the game while they’re losing their souls.
If they don’t start fighting back,
They’ll never take the lead, never get on track.
Why aren’t Democrats playing the same game as the GOP?

Outro
It’s time to play the game, it’s time to fight,
To win this battle, to stand up for what’s right.
If they won’t play fair, then neither will we,
It’s time for Democrats to finally see…
Why they need to play the same game as the GOP.