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Project 2025 Is Already Here

While we continue to expose the many anti-democratic features of Project 2025, it is important to maintain sight of the anti-democratic efforts that are already well underway in virtually every corner of the nation. As we collected stories for this newsletter, families in Springfield, Ohio were at home with their children, because right-wing terrorists  threatened to blow up their schools and to commit racist violence against the Haitian immigrant community. Rather than correct the record, the same people who first spread vile, false rumors about the immigrant community have doubled, tripled, and quadrupled down on racist demagoguery, and now are running the same smear campaign in another city, well aware that they are lying. A disgraced former police officer and David Duke supporter, now a member of Congress, made threatening statements against Haitian immigrants, and one of the architects of Project 2025’s mass deportation policy was even invited to the capitol to testify, where he defended slavery in Haiti. Meanwhile, the Haitian community in America must now grapple with how it can keep its children safe and an entire Ohio town is reeling.

In Mississippi, a child who was raped at age 12 was forced to give birth under the new post-Roe legal regime. Meanwhile, the male-dominated Louisiana legislature has slowed access to life-saving medication for women in the state who are hemorrhaging blood after giving birth, simply because the medication is also prescribed for abortions. 

In Georgia, at least two women have died because they could not access life-saving treatment due to their state’s draconian ban on reproductive care. One of those women, Amber Thurman, was a 28-year-old medical assistant, otherwise healthy, and the mother to a six-year-old son. While Georgia has one of the highest rates of maternal mortality, Amber’s death was entirely preventable, and played out in almost the exact way doctors had warned Georgian officials about before the state enacted its abortion ban. 

As the above examples show: Project 2025 isn’t merely a future threat. It is alive and growing. While we will continue to explore the anti-democratic right’s future plans, we will also highlight for you where its policies are already happening, and how places are fighting back. And we will start with one of the biggest attacks on democracy: our fundamental right to vote.

The Attack on Voting Rights: Project 2025 is Already Here

“The experience left me shaken. What troubled me was he had a folder on me containing my personal information—about 10 pages. I saw a copy of my drivers license and a copy of the petition I signed. It was obvious to me that a significant effort was exerted to determine if indeed I had signed the petition.”
-A Florida voter after state police came to his home, under the Governor’s orders, to “investigate” whether he signed a petition to put reproductive rights on the ballot

The Governor of Florida is using law enforcement to intimidate voters ahead of this Fall’s election, where reproductive rights will be on the ballot. Under his orders, state police were dispatched to question citizens who had signed the petition that would overturn Florida’s six-week abortion ban. Without any evidence, the Governor abruptly claimed that fraud had led to the almost-one million signatures required to put the measure to a vote (organizers, in fact, collected almost 100,000 extra signatures). No other ballot measure was subject to this wild, unproven claim, and the petition had already been approved by the state. 

This effort comes on the heels of the same Governor creating his own election police unit to uncover “voter fraud,” despite no evidence that such fraud existed. To the contrary, after 20 highly publicized arrests by the unit in 2022, most of those cases crumbled in court. The bottom line is that the Governor opposes reproductive rights, has criticized the state Supreme Court for allowing voters to have a say in the matter, and has used a state panel stacked with his loyalists to add language to the ballot that the reproductive rights measure would inexplicably cost taxpayers money. Now, he has gone even further to use law enforcement to intimidate and harass supporters of the initiative. 

Not to be outdone, just days ago, the Ohio Secretary of State sought to pressure and investigate local prosecutors who declined to file charges in hundreds of claims of voter fraud identified by his office that proved to be meritless after individual reviews by several local prosecutors. 

These efforts to leverage the criminal system against voters follow a nationwide campaign to make it more difficult to vote:

  • In perhaps the most-watched and most-influential state election in modern history, thousands of Pennsylvania voters could be disenfranchised this November for having the wrong or missing hand-written date on their ballot, even if the ballot is unquestionably received on time. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court reversed an intermediate appellate court decision protecting voting rights on a technicality, after vigorous litigation from the anti-democratic right, leaving voting requirements in the state in limbo headed into the pivotal election. The intermediate appellate court just released a subsequent decision mandating that voters be given a chance to cure ballot “defects” but the litigation remains ongoing. 
  • In Oregon, a major party nominee to run statewide elections wants to ban voting by mail, which the state has used since 1987. In New Hampshire, the state made it more difficult to vote in post-2024 elections by enacting a strict voter-ID law that did away with the normal, well-established exceptions for those who may have lost their identification or had it expire. 
  • In Arizona, lawmakers are attempting to restrict the public’s right to vote on new laws, after voters placed reproductive rights on the ballot in the Fall.
Texas-Sized Voter Intimidation

The above are some isolated examples, but look no further than Texas to see how elected officials can systematically use the courts and the legal system to stop opponents from voting. Everything is bigger in Texas, including disenfranchisement.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is currently using every tool in his arsenal to stop people with differing views from voting. In the last month, AG Paxton has sued Travis County (Austin) and Bexar County (San Antonio) and has threatened Harris County (Houston) as elected officials try to increase voter registration.  

  • The Travis County Commissioners hired Civic Government Solutions to contact non-registered residents and encourage them to register. Paxton, claiming such typical voter outreach was illegal, stated in a press release: “Travis County has blatantly violated Texas law by paying partisan actors to conduct unlawful identification efforts to track down people who are not registered to vote. Programs like this invite fraud and reduce public trust in our elections. We will stop them and any other county considering such programs.” Civic Government Solutions is explicitly a non-partisan organization, and there is no state law against soliciting people to register– just to vote. Paxton’s complaint is that they are registering voters in a blue county. 
  • Bexar County Commissioners likewise dared to hire Civic Government Solutions to mail residents voter registration forms.  Paxton also filed suit and claimed officials had no authority to send unsolicited registration forms. And Harris County Officials also sought to send out voter registration forms but abruptly stopped the effort after Paxton threatened to sue.

These suits over voter registration are not the only ways that the AG is using his office to try and suppress voting. He has been doing this for some time.

  • In 2018, the AG accused Leticia Sanchez, a church deaconess and teacher’s aide, of forming an “organized voter fraud ring” that targeted elderly voters. He claimed she applied for mail-in ballots on their behalf that they didn’t actually request. In reality, Sanchez had just been helping people in her majority-Latinx community register to vote. Five years later, the Texas Supreme Court dismissed the case, finding the AG had no authority to prosecute her. By then, Sanchez had lost her job.

Such prosecutions have a tremendous chilling effect, regardless of their success. It is not just the threat of jail or prison that matters to voters or people working in the voter space, but also the mere possibility of even entering the legal system.Non-profits report turning away people seeking help with ballots and refusing to drive people to the polls. Charities in Texas now must operate in a climate of fear of prosecution or litigation. 

In the months leading up to the November election, phony voter fraud “investigations”  have again ramped up.

  • In late August, at Paxton’s behest, investigators executed search warrants on a group of Abuelitas located in the San Antonio area, searching for evidence of voter “harvesting.”  One of the women investigated was the 80-year Mayor of Dilley, Texas.  The other three women searched, all of whom have done GOTV work for years, were in their 70s and 80s, and all received early-morning visits from armed investigators. 87-year-old Lidia Martinez described it as a “gestapo-style” raid and told reporters investigators spent three hours searching her drawers and garage.

In total, according to an investigation by the Washington Post, the AG’s election integrity unit has opened at least 169 cases of voter fraud in the last 8 years. There has been only one judgment.

It is also not just the AG who is using the court system to suppress dissent and voting.

These examples, from Texas and beyond, illustrate some of the many ways that the virulently anti-democratic policies underpinning Project 2025 are already here. Project 2025 is not a hypothetical and did not come out of nowhere. But it is also poised to deepen these anti-voting, discriminatory policies.

Project 2025 Spotlight

Rigged Elections, Gutted Protections, and Political Retaliation

Whereas Project 2025 authors have been transparent about many of their objectives, they have remained uncharacteristically cryptic about their vision for voting rights. Do not mistake their opacity for indifference. Several provisions of the manifesto would curtail voting access and profoundly reshape future elections:

  • Politics for Sale. Project 2025 calls for hiking election “contribution limits” to “much higher” amounts because the authors complain that current contribution limits “hamstring candidates and parties while serving no practical anticorruption purpose” (p.866). Such a move would only further exacerbate a problem wrought by Citizens United v. FEC, which opened the floodgates to unlimited independent spending in federal elections. The 2024 election is projected to unleash billions in political spending, outpacing the 2020 race in historic outside and dark-money contributions, and many voters are rightfully worried about the outsized influence of top-donors. Project 2025 amplifies those concerns. 
  • Unsecure Elections. Project 2025 also aims to gut the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the agency responsible for protecting election security and combating mis/disinformation, echoing conservative accusations that “the Left has weaponized [the agency] to censor speech and affect elections” (p.135). Some experts say that neutering CISA “runs the risk of creating a bubble where Russia or China or any other nation-state threat actor could have a safe space for a massive disinformation campaign” while also leaving election workers vulnerable to attacks. 
  • Speaking of election workers, the combined efforts of weakening CISA and politicizing the Department of Justice (DOJ) places a bullseye on the thousands of workers across the country who manage polling sites, handle ballots, and assist voters. Since the 2020 presidential race, election workers across the country have been enduring unprecedented attacks, including death threats, harassment, coercive pressure, and abuse–so much so that several states have been forced to pass new protection laws and election officials are now installing panic buttons and bulletproof glass in their offices as part of a ramped up security effort for the upcoming election. Project 2025 would further imperil those workers by stripping them of existing CISA protections while also intensifying threats of prosecution against them, going so far as to suggest that Pennsylvania’s election chief should be prosecuted for her efforts to provide provisional ballots to eligible voters in the 2020 presidential election (p.563-4). 
  • Voting Rights Act at Risk. It is less than clear why Project 2025 authors hope to transfer responsibility for prosecuting election-related offenses from the Civil Rights Division to the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice, but the move is likely a nod towards diminishing the power of the Civil Rights Division (the mission of which the authors revile as “enshrin[ing] affirmative discrimination in all aspects of its operations under the guise of ‘equity,’” p. 561). Switching divisions, coupled with the Project’s demand for access to state voter registration databases (p.138), also clarify that enforcing voting protections would take a back seat to prosecuting voters and election workers, a priority that many conservatives have advocated for as they boost baseless claims about widespread voter fraud. 

But an administration more hellbent on punishing than protecting also spells death for another law conservatives have been trying to actively kill for years: the Voting Rights Act. Already, they have managed to successfully strike down key provisions of the Act and many predict they are poised for a Supreme Court showdown to destroy the Act altogether. A sneering attitude towards fighting racial discrimination found throughout Project 2025 and a politicized DOJ featuring a weakened Civil Rights Division and an agenda of prioritizing voting prosecutions over protections place the already-endangered Act on the chopping block.     

Fighting Back: What’s Working

Despite opponents’ efforts, Nebraska voters will now have a say on reproductive rights in the Fall election, after similar measures have made the ballot in 9 other states. Meanwhile, a state district judge overturned North Dakota’s near-total ban on abortion. And the Missouri Supreme Court reversed the right-wing secretary of state’s removal of the already-approved reproductive rights ballot measure at the 11th hour, ensuring the voters would decide the issue this November. 

In another pair of victories for voting rights, a lawsuit by anti-democratic groups to block California’s vote-by-mail provisions lost at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. And a district court judge in Mississippi ruled against anti-democratic litigators seeking to weaken the state’s vote-by-mail provisions. 

Larry Krasner impeachment put to bed: In 2022, the Republican-controlled Pennsylvania House of Representatives voted to impeach Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner, even though he received 72% of the votes for DA in 2021. This vote, which passed “almost exclusively among party lines,” formed the centerpiece of non-Philadelphia electeds’ strategy to blame the reform-DA for crime. It also mirrored other efforts, including in Florida, Texas, California, Tennessee, and Georgia to use anti-democratic methods to remove locally elected reformers from office.

One year ago, the Commonwealth Court ruled that the allegations showed no “misbehavior in office,” concluding that the House had offered no valid grounds for impeachment.

Yesterday, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court found a second flaw in the proceeding, holding that the impeachment articles “became null and void” at the end of the 2022 legislative session, under a doctrine known as sine die. Under this doctrine,  a newly constituted Senate could not rely on impeachment articles from the prior legislative session. 

A victory for democracy, a victory for Krasner, and a victory for legal nerds everywhere who love the doctrine of sine die.

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