The Last Election?

For 230 years, America's decentralized election system—where states set their own rules—served as a bulwark against federal overreach. That firewall is now under direct assault. Chairman Bryan Steil introduced the "Make Elections Great Again" (MEGA) Act yesterday, a sweeping bill that would impose federal voting standards across all 50 states.

The specifics are breathtaking in scope: mandatory photo ID for all voters, proof of citizenship for registration, a ban on "universal vote-by-mail," elimination of ranked-choice voting in federal races, and—critically—a requirement that all mail ballots be received by election day, not merely postmarked. That last provision alone would have invalidated tens of thousands of legally cast votes in 2020 and 2024.

The bill will likely stall in the Senate. But that's not the point. The MEGA Act establishes the legislative ceiling for voting restrictions—a marker for what becomes politically acceptable. When "comprehensive election reform" means stripping states of their own franchise decisions, the Overton window has shifted beneath our feet.

In what may become the most consequential state court ruling of the year, the California Supreme Court rejected Huntington Beach's attempt to impose municipal voter ID requirements. The city's "Measure A" would have required identification for local elections—in direct conflict with California state law.

The court's denial was terse: no comment, just a rejection of the petition, leaving the lower court ruling intact. Translation: charter cities cannot create a patchwork of restrictive voting rules that override statewide protections.

This matters beyond California. It establishes precedent that states—not municipalities—control the floor for voting access. In an era when local governments are becoming laboratories for restriction, this ruling provides a template for pushback.

"The law conflicts with state law and is void." —Appellate Court ruling, upheld by CA Supreme Court

The counterpoint to federal overreach may be state-level protection. Federalism cuts both ways. For now, 39 million Californians retain statewide voting standards. Whether other states' courts show similar backbone remains an open question.

FBI agents executed a search warrant at Fulton County's Elections Hub on Tuesday, seizing voting records from the 2020 election. The raid—justified as part of a new DOJ "election integrity" investigation—represents the most aggressive federal intervention into local election administration in modern American history.

Let's be precise about what happened: federal law enforcement, at the direction of political appointees, physically seized election records from the jurisdiction at the center of prior debunked fraud claims. The ACLU of Georgia deployed legal observers within hours.

The symbolism is as important as the substance. When federal agents appear at election offices to investigate already-adjudicated claims, the message to local election workers is unmistakable: administering elections that produce unwelcome results carries personal risk. Thousands of election administrators have already resigned since 2020, citing threats. This escalation will accelerate that exodus.

Pew Research released its latest trust survey this week, and the numbers are historic—in the worst possible sense. Only 17% of Americans now trust the government "to do what is right most of the time." That's near the all-time low. But the partisan breakdown is where the story lives.

Democrats' trust in government has collapsed from 35% in mid-2024 to just 9% today—a historic low for any partisan group in Pew's decades of tracking. Republicans, meanwhile, have surged from 16% to 42%, following the familiar pattern of trusting government only when their party controls it.

But here's what matters: only 25% of all Americans—including those 42% of Republicans—are "extremely or very confident" that the President respects democratic values. When three-quarters of the country doubts the executive's commitment to democracy, the system's legitimacy is bleeding out regardless of which party you belong to.

Democracy requires losers who accept results. It also requires winners who respect constraints. The data suggests neither condition is currently met.

Court filings in a Democracy Forward lawsuit revealed what privacy advocates have feared: the "Department of Government Efficiency" (DOGE) accessed sensitive Social Security Administration records and shared them with private third-party "election integrity" groups—who are using the data to file mass challenges against registered voters.

The mechanism is elegant in its cynicism. Social Security data includes citizenship status, but it's often outdated—reflecting when someone applied for a number, not their current status. Naturalized citizens who've voted for decades are being flagged as non-citizens based on data from their pre-citizenship applications.

The FOIA requests filed January 22 seek to uncover the full extent of coordination between DOGE and these private groups. But the damage is already being done. Thousands of registered voters will receive challenge letters in the coming months, forcing them to prove their citizenship or be purged from the rolls. The burden of proof has been inverted.

The V-Dem Institute—the world's most rigorous academic democracy-tracking project—released updated analysis this month that reinforces their late-2025 reclassification: the United States is now categorized as an "electoral autocracy," joining Hungary and Turkey in a category below full democracy.

The methodology is straightforward: V-Dem measures constraints on executive power, freedom of expression, rule of law, and fair election processes. On each dimension, the United States has declined. The composite Liberal Democracy Index—where 1.0 represents an ideal democracy—dropped the US from 0.80 in 2015 to 0.38 in 2026.

"The US has descended into competitive authoritarianism." —Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt, political scientists

What does "electoral autocracy" mean in practice? Elections still occur, but the playing field is systematically tilted. Opposition faces structural disadvantages. Media is pressured. Courts are captured. The trappings of democracy remain while its substance hollows out. Sound familiar?

The Century Foundation recorded similar findings: their "Democracy Meter" dropped the US from 79/100 in 2024 to 57/100—the largest single-year decline in the metric's history. The threshold for "full democracy" is 65. We're now below it.