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Yesterday, federal authorities carried out a raid in Fulton County, Georgia, seizing hundreds of boxes of election-related materials from the 2020 cycle. That should set off alarm bells for everyone at this moment. The raid comes as the Trump regime faces an embarrassing set of political setbacks—from intense backlash to their ICE raids, to the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, and the prospect of yet another government shutdown.
Across the country, the Republican authoritarian regime, led by Trump, has been pressuring Secretaries of State to turn over voter data—pressure many of them have resisted. States like Minnesota and New Hampshire and others refused [ [link removed] ]. Georgia said no. Why? Because the law sets very clear, special and strict rules about local elections officials keeping custody of election records. But when democratic safeguards resist voluntary obedience, the question becomes: what will autocrats do next?
Fulton County is the most populous in Georgia, home to roughly a million people, the majority of them Black, Latino, Asian, and immigrant. It is a backbone of Democratic participation in the state. If you were looking for a single dataset that could be misused to intimidate, challenge, or preemptively disqualify voters at scale, this would be it.
Now place this alongside an immigration enforcement regime that is growing more aggressive by the day—one that increasingly blurs the line between civil enforcement and political control. In mixed-status families, voter registration by naturalized citizens can unintentionally become a map pointing authorities toward their loved ones. And why not? Recent court rulings and enforcement practices have widened [ [link removed] ] the discretion officers claim they have to stop, question, and detain people based on subjective markers like language, accent, or appearance. In the South, that discretion maps directly onto race.
This is how you hollow out a democracy.
In Step 10 of the 10 Steps to Autocracy and Authoritarianism [ [link removed] ], people are still allowed to show up and cast ballots, but decisions will already have been made long before Election Day—about who is allowed to register, whose eligibility is challenged, whose presence is considered suspicious, whose vote is counted, and whose is quietly discarded.
It’s the difference between the right to vote and the ability to vote.
Once that line is crossed, elections can remain technically “free” while no longer being fair—because the outcomes are shaped in advance, and the test is graded before anyone is allowed to take it. In America, we believe that voters should pick our leaders; our leaders should not get to pick which voters to heed and which to silence. We must continue to fight for this aspiration.

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