Election Integrity
The goal of elections in a democracy is to accurately capture the will of the populace. This sounds simple enough, but achieving this goal requires a sustained commitment to the following key steps:
It should be as easy as possible, and it should be equally easy, for all eligible Americans to vote.
Tabulated vote counts should accurately and verifiably reflect the choices of all eligible voters.
The lead-up to the election should be free of attempted interference such as disinformation campaigns and efforts to suppress voter turnout.
The results of the election should be respected by all.
We are fortunate in Santa Cruz to have elections that come closer to fulfilling these requirements than in numerous other locations across our country. However, key elements of our electoral process are controlled at the state level, and there is still room for significant improvement. We are committed to pursuing these improvements.
Protecting the 2026 Midterm Elections from Sabotage
It is one thing for an administration to attempt to influence the outcome of an election via manipulative messaging or even by promoting potentially appealing legislation. It is quite another for an administration to try to prevent opponents of that administration from voting. However, authoritarian regimes often falsely promote these latter efforts as essential steps to “preserve election integrity.”
When we point out that U.S. elections already have a high level of integrity, apologists for the current administration respond that “there may be fraud we haven’t yet detected,” or “tighter controls on who can vote will improve voter confidence in the integrity of our elections,” or “tighter controls on who can vote are just ‘common sense.’ “
All these responses are designed to obscure the fact that the primary effect (and, indeed, the primary intent) of this administration’s various directives and its proposed laws is to make it either much more difficult or effectively impossible for a disfavored subset of Americans to cast their vote.
This is the result when we allow stricter “voter ID” requirements or “scrubbing of voter registration rolls.” It is also the practical consequence when we make it harder to vote by mail and when we allow the selective closure of polling places in districts that are likely to garner lots of anti-administration votes.
We want to find ways to help people see the extremely anti-democratic reality underlying the superficially plausible rationales for these voter suppression efforts. We also want to encourage people to fight to preserve their right to vote. The idea that “voting shouldn’t be made too easy” is antithetical to a true democracy.
A potentially even more severe threat to democracy comes in the form of post-election interference in determining and accepting the actual vote count. This is, unfortunately, a tactic that the current president has already demonstrated a voracious appetite for. We are preparing ourselves to lend support as needed to legal battles and, in the worst case, to a nationwide, non-violent, mass mobilization protest.