The Republican Guide to Rigging Elections By Rob C. Art by Kevin Siers
TL;DR: Traditional Republicans used to win the old-fashioned way: by cheating. The modern GOP has an allergy to democracy dating back to the 1970s when social movements and Watergate threatened their power. From the 1980 “October Surprise” that kept hostages in Iran to ensure Reagan’s win, to the 2000 Florida purge, the GOP has a long history of viewing the “will of the people” as a tumor to be removed. Now, in 2026, Donald Trump isn’t interested in the traditional grift, with Executive Orders restricting mail-in votes, threats of ICE agents at polling places, and an “emergency” war in Iran that could “postpone” the midterms, “Genghis Don” is playing for keeps. We don’t just need to stop the Trump train; we need to rebuild the tracks.
Welcome to 2026, where “representative democracy” is being treated like a distressed asset in a bankruptcy court.
Back in the day, the Founding Fathers had a vision of a government “of, by, and for the people.” Sure, their definition of “people” was basically “guys who own land and wigs,” but the idea was there. Fast forward through centuries of expanding that vision, and we’ve arrived at a Republican Party that has developed a severe, life-threatening allergy to anyone actually casting a ballot. If you want to understand how Trump is planning to rig the 2026 midterms, you have to realize he didn’t invent this game—he just took the cheat codes and turned them into an Executive Order. The modern Republican Party has taken their allergy to democracy to unprecedented levels. They’re not just tilting the playing field anymore—they’re setting fire to the stadium and claiming it’s for national security.
Let’s trace how we got here, from the Founders’ vision of representative democracy to Trump floating the idea of canceling elections entirely because letting people vote might not go his way. The Founders’ Vision: Government of, by, and for the People When the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution, they envisioned a representative democracy that would respond to the majority of its citizens. Government of the people, by the people, for the people. Sure, they had a limited idea of who counted as “citizens”—wealthy white men, basically. But their core principle endured as we expanded that vision through centuries of struggle: everyone gets a voice, and the majority decides.
That’s the promise of democracy. And it’s the promise the Republican Party has been systematically trying to destroy for the past 50 years. In 1976, the GOP was at rock bottom. Nixon had just exited via helicopter, and Gerald Ford was essentially a human participation trophy who pardoned the biggest criminal in White House history. Things looked grim. The Republican Party is in crisis. Vietnam is a disaster. Nixon resigned in disgrace over Watergate. Social movements are challenging both parties, demanding civil rights, women’s rights, environmental protection, and an end to imperial wars. The 1976 election was a turning point. Ford was the incumbent, but the GOP was at a low point. The 1974 midterms had been a bloodbath. Ford’s pardon of Nixon was deeply unpopular. Carter—a previously obscure former Georgia governor—won on a platform of honesty and reform. Republicans learned a lesson: If elections are fair and people actually vote, Republicans lose. So they started rigging the game. But then came 1980, and the Republican elite realized they didn’t need to win hearts and minds if they could just control the game.
The Evolution of the Scam: The “October Surprise” The 1980 election introduced Ronald Reagan—actor, former California governor, and spokesperson for the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), the lobbying arm of corporate America. The country was on edge. Middle East oil shortages. Stagflation. And the Iranian hostage crisis—52 Americans held hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. The “October Surprise” is the stuff of legend (and nightmares for democracy). If Carter could get the hostages released before Election Day, he’d win. If they stayed captive, Reagan would win. So, George H.W. Bush, Reagan’s running mate —a former CIA director, who knew where all the bodies were buried—allegedly helped execute a plan to keep those hostages in Tehran until after the election in exchange for weapons. Walla! The hostages were released the minute Reagan was inaugurated. This later came to light in the Iran-Contra affair, which introduced America to a cadre of criminal operatives (Oliver North, John Poindexter, Elliott Abrams) and made famous the phrase “I do not recall”—the go-to answer when you’ve committed treason but don’t want to admit it. Reagan gave the Epstein class a windfall—tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, union-busting, trickle-down fantasy economics. But after eight years, the country turned back to a Democrat.
The Florida “Creative” Writing Project Year 2000: Al Gore versus George W. Bush. The race comes down to Florida, where Bush’s brother Jeb is governor and the deck is thoroughly stacked. While we were all worried about the Y2K bug, the real virus was in Florida. Katherine Harris, the Secretary of State who was moonlighting as a Bush campaign co-chair, (totally not a conflict of interest!)— used “creative” methods to purge tens of thousands of likely Democratic voters (shocker: mostly people of color) from the rolls. When the count got too close for comfort and the actual will of the people threatened to peek through, the Trumpian ancestors sued to stop the count. And the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court—in one of the most nakedly partisan decisions in American history— looked at the half-finished pile of ballots, and said, “Close enough,” handing the election to G.W. Bush. Five Republican justices decided that counting all the votes would cause “irreparable harm” to Bush. The Supreme Court Steals an Election. Al Gore won the popular vote. Recounts showed he likely won Florida as well.
The Playbook Since 2000: Every Trick in the Book Ever since Bush v. Gore, Republicans have used every trick in the book to tilt elections in their favor: Gerrymandering: Drawing district lines so absurdly partisan that Democrats need to win by 7-10 points nationally just to break even in the House. Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio—maps so rigged that Republicans win supermajorities despite losing the popular vote. Their favorite tactic – “Cracking & Packing.” Cracking: Splitting Democratic strongholds into pieces so their votes are drowned out by rural Republican majorities. Packing: Cramming every blue voter into a single “super-district” so they only get one representative for a million people. Voter purges: Removing hundreds of thousands from voter rolls using faulty data, deliberately targeting minority voters. Georgia’s Brian Kemp purged 1.4 million voters before the 2018 election—while running for governor and overseeing his own election. Restrictive ID laws: Requiring specific forms of ID that minorities and poor people are less likely to have, then closing DMVs in Black neighborhoods so getting that ID becomes nearly impossible. Limiting access in Democratic areas: Closing polling locations in cities and minority neighborhoods, creating hours-long lines that force people to choose between voting and keeping their jobs. Meanwhile, suburban white areas have plenty of polling places with no wait. This isn’t subtle. This isn’t conspiracy theory. Ari Berman documented all of this exhaustively in Give Us the Ballot. The GOP strategy is explicit: make voting harder for people who don’t vote Republican.
2026: Trump Goes Full Authoritarian But in 2026, Trump is going above and beyond traditional Republican voter suppression. Trump has floated taking federal control of elections—a blatantly unconstitutional power grab that would let him determine who wins and loses. Just this month, he signed Executive Order 14399, attempting to seize control of state elections and restrict mail-in voting—ironic, considering ” Scammy Davis Jr.” himself has a history of voting by mail when he’s not busy posting in ALL CAPS. Now, he’s floating the idea of stationing ICE agents at polling places. Nothing screams “Leader of the Free World” like putting masked, heavily armed thugs at the ballot box to “verify citizenship” (read: intimidate anyone with a tan). It’s voter intimidation. It’s probably illegal. And Trump is openly discussing it as election strategy. The Trump Card: Canceling Elections for “National Security” But the real “Trump Card” is the illegal war in Iran. As Timothy Snyder warns in On Tyranny, authoritarians love an emergency. Snyder’s lessons on “anticipatory obedience” and the “tyranny of emergencies” suggest that Trump is likely to use his self-made crisis in the Persian Gulf to argue that an election during “wartime” is a “national security threat.” He isn’t just trying to win the midterms; he’s looking for an excuse to cancel them. Create a crisis. Use the crisis to claim emergency powers. Use emergency powers to suspend democracy. Trump started the Iran war for exactly this purpose—not just to distract from the Epstein files, but to create the conditions for canceling elections if it looks like he’ll lose.
The Warning: A Congressional Coup The “SAVE America Act” isn’t about “integrity”—it’s about disenfranchisement on a tectonic scale. It’s a tool designed to ensure the 2026 maps are redrawn so precisely that the GOP majority becomes a permanent fixture of the architecture, regardless of how many people actually show up to vote.
I’m Not a Party Man—But Only One Party Is Canceling Elections Let me be clear about something: I’m not a fan of either party. Both sides have spent decades treating the American voter like a nuisance. But the “Trump Crazy Train” has moved beyond partisan politics and into the realm of systemic demolition. Only one party is led by a man who explicitly said he’d be a dictator and is now taking concrete steps to make that happen. The Stakes: Democracy or Dictatorship This isn’t about Republican versus Democrat. If we are going to live up to the promise of “We the People,” we have to do more than just survive 2026. We have to dismantle the hyper-partisan machine that allows a single man to treat the Constitution like a cocktail napkin. We need remedies—real ones—that take the power to draw lines out of the hands of the people who benefit from them. We need constitutional amendments to protect voting rights. We need automatic voter registration. We need Election Day as a national holiday. We need to overturn Citizens United and get money out of politics.
Stay tuned. The fight for the ballot isn’t a “Democrat” thing or a “Republican” thing. It’s a “Not-Living-in-a-Theocratic-Gas-Station” thing.
F*CK ICE, RELEASE ALL THE FILES!
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— Robert Cain, author of Democracy for Sale: How Corporate Greed Is Corrupting Democracy and Endangering the Planet. Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Booksellers everywhere.