Team,

With the midterms now in the books, I wanted to briefly take stock of what we all did together, as well as preview some of the many things coming next (including multiple pretty huge things happening TODAY).

How’d that happen? As I mentioned in my prior note from a few weeks ago, we and the pro-democracy coalition have been preparing for and doing the work for months and years leading up to this point to help bring this about:

• First, focusing on accountability. We’ll be releasing brand new polling data this week with our partners at Citizen Data showing that the work of the January 6 Select Committee and related efforts to explain the dangers facing our democracy – work we’ve invested heavily in this past year – affected voter behavior in at least five key states that we polled: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. In those states, according to our polling, close to 80 percent of voters said that the Select Committee's fact-finding had some influence or a large influence on their votes;

• Second, deterring disinformation. As David French notes in The Atlantic here, the conspiracy dog that didn’t bark was likely deterred in part by our and others’ defamation litigation, which forced media outlets that played fast and loose with legal rules in 2020 as they amplified baseless conspiracy theories to behave more responsibly this time around;

• Third, stopping voter intimidation. In Arizona, efforts to intimidate voters by deploying armed militias to “monitor” drop boxes were put to a halt by our emergency litigation;

• Fourth, rebuilding trust in electoral systems. Months of building trust in how elections are run and what state and local election officials do to ensure votes are fairly counted – much of which was facilitated by the National Task Force on Election Crises that we stood up and staff – helped inoculate voters in key states to baseless claims of fraud and doubt-sowing;

• Fifth, slowing or stopping the enactment of bad law. The persistent reporting we did starting in 2021 with our partners at States United and Law Forward on efforts by state legislatures to alter election rules in ways that risked undermining fair vote casting and counting helped call national attention to those legislative efforts that led to them either being watered down or blocked before they could become law; and

• Sixth, protecting voter files. Voteshield, our voter roll monitoring software, both found multiple clerical errors that allowed election administrators to fix problems before voters were disenfranchised and also provided a window into voter roll changes in 24 states and ballot processing changes in four states that served as a sentry watching guard over the most important data in our electoral architecture.  

But even with these successes, it’s important to remember that this is a generational battle for democracy we’re facing. Even with all that went right, the Authoritarian Warning Survey we co-host with political scientists at George Washington University – which measures the level of danger facing our democracy – still puts the chance of democratic breakdown within the next four years as 1 in 5 (down from 1 in 3 before the midterms). So still alarmingly high. You can read more about the survey results here. 

To illustrate the continuing danger, after House Republicans refused to impeach a president who’d led a violent insurrection on the Capitol and spent two years trying to downplay and even completely whitewash January 6, they were rewarded with control of the House. Just this week, members of their incoming leadership couldn’t bring themselves to declare a member of their Party unfit to hold office even when that person incited insurrection, amplified neo-Nazis, and openly called for the termination of the Constitution.

So as Jonathan Last explained recently in his excellent xxxxxx newsletter, it was great that this recent election felt so “normal,” but by definition such an outcome isn’t “normal” until several elections go by in which voters freely vote, losers concede, violence plays no role, and those elected don’t pose an existential threat to our democracy. When that actually becomes “normal” again, we can declare mission accomplished. But until then, we have work to do.

And we’re doing it. Just this week, we’re engaged in five major events that will have outsized importance for the future of our democracy:

• First, the Supreme Court heard arguments today in the case over the so-called Independent State Legislature theory. We explain here how dangerous it would be if that theory was adopted. With our partners at the Brennan Center and the merits parties, we've helped lead the assemblage of an incredible presentation of arguments to the Court, both through legal briefs and public communications. 

• Second, Congress is likely to take up a statutory reform to the Electoral Count Act, the law that Congress was implementing when the Capitol was attacked on January 6. For two+ years, with our partners at Issue One and the Campaign Legal Center, we've been at the forefront of pushing for changes to that law and helped Senate negotiators on both sides of the aisle craft the compromise that hopefully will pass before the end of the year.

• Third, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit heard arguments in our case on behalf of Capitol police officers who were injured on January 6. We are suing former President Trump over those injuries and what happened that day. We prevailed in the District Court against Trump's effort to have the case dismissed and we are optimistic we will sustain that victory on appeal. 

• Fourth, we have a key court hearing in our lawsuit against the Gateway Pundit on behalf of Georgia election workers Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman, who were defamed and terrorized as part of a leading Big Lie conspiracy theory. Our other lawsuit on behalf of Ms. Moss and Ms. Freeman was one of the key dominoes that led to DirecTV dropping OANN from its channel lineup; OANN also subsequently walked back its claims that there was widespread election fraud in Georgia in 2020.

• Fifth, as part of longer term reform efforts, we just filed the opening brief in our lawsuit challenging New Jersey’s ban on fusion voting. Fusion voting is the method by which minor parties partner or “fuse” with major parties, nominating the same candidate to build a majority coalition. This system empowers voters to support candidates with a realistic chance of winning, while also highlighting to their candidate—and political class writ large—their support for the minor party platform. For this reason, fusion voting can be an important piece in the puzzle of unlocking a less divisive and more representative future.

And even all of that is still just a fraction of the work we’re doing. So while we should celebrate our victories, we’ve always known that protecting democracy goes beyond any one person and any one election – it’s the responsibility of our time and for the sake of the next generation, we can’t let them down. 

Onwards,
Ian