Corpofascism

Elections & the Franchise

Who administers American elections, who receives a ballot, who is entitled to more than one — and which federal agencies have been turned toward answering those questions.

A national voter roll, which has never existed

This entry is logged as live litigation rather than settled history, because it is unresolved and the November election is the deadline both sides are arguing about. On July 27, 2026 the Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to let President Trump’s March 2026 executive order on mail voting take effect before the midterms — the first time this DOJ has taken one of his anti-voting orders to the Court.

What two courts have said. U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani found the directive and other parts of the order “legally void” as exceeding presidential power and violating separation of powers by intruding on state authority over elections. She barred the USPS rule in the 23 states and the District of Columbia that sued, and barred DHS and SSA from building the citizen lists. Her holding is the constitutional core of the dispute: “The Constitution reserves the power to determine voter eligibility to the States alone. Neither the Executive Branch nor Congress may interfere with this power.” On July 25 a First Circuit panel upheld her 2–1, writing that the order “directs unprecedented levels of involvement by federal officials in how states administer elections” and thereby “plainly affects the Plaintiff States’ sovereign power… to create and enforce a legal code” for elections.

What the government argues. Solicitor General John Sauer asked the Court to permit agencies to proceed while litigation continues, contending the suit was premature because no rule has been finalized — USPS “has issued a notice of proposed rulemaking and sought comments, but it has not finalized a rule,” and DHS “continues to deliberate.” His irreparable-harm claim is worth recording exactly, because it inverts the usual direction of the argument: the lower court’s order harms the government by “impeding the President’s efforts to secure election integrity — and doing so in a manner that will be effectively unreviewable as to the November election even if the government prevails on appeal.”

Status and countervailing facts, recorded for accuracy. Nothing here is decided. The Supreme Court is not obliged to act on emergency applications at all. Democracy Docket notes the Court’s Republican-appointed majority has repeatedly paused lower-court rulings in the administration’s favor, sometimes without explanation — but also that the Court recently, and narrowly, rejected a Republican bid to bar states from counting mail ballots that arrive after Election Day if postmarked in time. A separate anti-voting executive order from March 2025 was permanently blocked by lower courts and the DOJ never appealed it. GOP-led states have joined the DOJ’s application. Source: Jacob Knutson, Democracy Docket (Jul. 27, 2026), reporting on the DOJ’s emergency stay application, Judge Talwani’s ruling, and the First Circuit panel decision. This is a breaking matter and the entry should be re-checked before any use.

Zero for nineteen

The state-by-state voter-roll demands documented in Fraud as Pretext now have a scorecard, and it updates cleanly rather than ambiguously: DOJ has taken these fights to federal district courts nineteen times. It has lost all nineteen.

The 0–19 record holds across circuits and across the judges’ appointing presidents — the Sixth Circuit reached the same result in DOJ’s Michigan case, and Democracy Docket’s own count finds most of the losses came from Republican-appointed judges. No court, to date, has ordered any state to hand over an unredacted statewide voter file.

Source: Yunior Rivas, Democracy Docket (Jul. 31, 2026). DOJ has appealed nearly all nineteen losses; those appeals are unresolved and this count should be re-checked before use.

“Reward productive people with leverage”

The preceding entry concerns an administration litigating for control over who receives a ballot. This one concerns a sitting technology CEO arguing, in public and under his own name, that the ballot should be weighted by wealth. The two are not coordinated. They point the same direction.

Why this belongs beside Chapter 3 rather than only in the Tech Right file. The book’s early chapters trace a period in which political standing was formally tethered to property, and the long constitutional work of severing that tie. This is that tie proposed for reattachment, by name, as an improvement. Canada’s own history is the exact measure: at Confederation the franchise ran only to men over 21 who were British subjects and owned property, rules Elections Canada records as having “excluded a large majority of the population”; income and property qualifications persisted until 1920; all Asian Canadians were not enfranchised until 1948; First Nations adults not until 1960, and then only without forfeiting status. Lütke’s proposal does not resemble a novel efficiency. It is the pre-1920 rule with a tax return substituted for a deed.

The term doing the work is “dependent.” A retiree drawing a pension he paid into across a working life is reclassified as a dependent, and dependency is treated as disqualifying — the same move, applied to anyone whose contribution is not currently legible as taxable income. Unpaid caregiving, disability, full-time education, and child-rearing all resolve to zero votes under the schedule Lütke called a good system. What is being proposed is not a measure of stake in the country. It is a measure of stake in the tax base, offered as though the two were the same thing.

Recorded for accuracy. Lütke’s remarks are personal posts, not Shopify policy; Shopify did not respond to comment requests from CBC News or Fortune. The proposal is also constitutionally unavailable in Canada, and not marginally so: Section 3 of the Charter guarantees every citizen the right to vote, and the notwithstanding clause at Section 33 reaches Section 2 and Sections 7–15 but not Section 3. No mechanism short of constitutional amendment would permit it. The 6.4 million Canadians drawing CPP are in no practical jeopardy. The entry is logged because the position was stated openly by someone with significant economic power, not because it is close to enactment. Sources: Kevin Maimann, CBC News (Jul. 28, 2026); Fortune (Jul. 27, 2026); Radio-Canada International; The Deep Dive, on the follow-up clarification.

Back in the fold, with $120 million

A year after publicly feuding with President Trump, floating a third party, and saying he had gotten “carried away” with politics, Elon Musk has authorized his super PAC to spend $100–120 million on the 2026 midterms. The reversal is the story as much as the number: the same donor who spent 2025 threatening to primary Republicans is now funding their turnout operation.

The spending deepens an existing financial imbalance rather than creating one: Republican super PACs and committees already hold better than a $300 million advantage over Democratic counterparts heading into the fall, a figure that does not include the roughly $400 million sitting in Trump’s own MAGA Inc. Musk’s injection widens a gap that was already substantial. Separate from the PAC announcement, FEC filings show he has already given at least $20 million to super PACs aligned with House and Senate GOP leadership and $5 million directly to MAGA Inc.

A Virginia Tech professor who studies campaign finance, Cayce Myers, framed the strategic problem this creates for Republicans plainly: “Musk as a donor is important because money in politics is important, but Musk himself is a politically polarizing figure… the fact that he is involved does create a complicated political situation for Republicans.” The party needs the $120 million. It cannot fully control what the person supplying it does with the rest of his checkbook.

Recorded for accuracy. The spending figure and state targets originate from a New York Times report citing two anonymous sources briefed on the plans; it is widely corroborated by Axios's independent reporting of the same effort and by at least eight other outlets, but the original NYT article itself returned an access block and was not read directly. The $1 million voter-giveaway controversy referenced in some of this coverage is the 2024/2025 cycle's America PAC payment to Wisconsin voters, which drew a DOJ warning that it “may run afoul of federal law” and is already documented in this book's Tech Right dossier — it is not a new payment, and this entry does not treat it as one. No FEC report yet confirms the $100–120 million has been spent rather than merely authorized. Sources: TheGrio, Forbes, The Hill, Rolling Stone, Political Wire, MS NOW, and AOL/Benzinga (Jul. 30–31, 2026), all citing the New York Times and Axios; AOL/Benzinga separately for the FEC filings on the $20M, $5M, and $10M contributions; the Daily Caller, via AOL, for the Massie exchange.

A specific target has since been confirmed: Maine, where America PAC is expected to spend to support Senator Susan Collins's sixth-term bid against Democratic nominee Troy Jackson. Collins's own campaign has explicitly distanced itself from the effort — a spokesperson said “we have not heard anything about this except press reports” and “we are not working with this group.” Maine's Senate race is projected to draw close to $400 million in total ad spending, doubling the previous record set in 2020. Source: The Portland Press Herald (Jul. 31, 2026), read directly.

Musk items from the same batch, queued and unread: Reuters on SpaceX’s $1.6 billion Space Force order for 18 Falcon 9 launches (Jul. 29, 2026) — which belongs with the defense-contract material in Corruption; MPR News on xAI suing Minnesota over its law barring manipulated sexual imagery; the New Republic interview piece on DOGE cuts; Gizmodo on X’s financial products; and a New York Times opinion piece on Musk and “remigration” — the latter has since been read and filed into Corruption & Self-Dealing above, since it turned out to concern political violence rhetoric rather than a corporate matter, but the specific mechanism (a billionaire donor's public conduct entangled with this book's subject) placed it there rather than in a new section.

The intelligence community, reassigned

This entry was queued as an intelligence story. Reading it, it is not one. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has been turned toward a domestic purpose — supplying material for claims about American elections — which is why it sits here rather than in a section of its own.

The confirmation itself was used as leverage on a voting bill. Trump delayed Clayton’s confirmation to pressure senators into passing the SAVE America Act, the voter-registration measure stalled in the Senate, which the Brennan Center assesses would block millions of eligible Americans from voting. The delay had a second effect: it kept Pulte in the acting role for additional weeks, during which he purged hundreds of officials from the agency and worked with a White House task force declassifying election-related documents. Trump then built a primetime address around those documents, asserting they showed sweeping foreign interference. The documents, heavily redacted, either did not support the claim or directly refuted it.

Clayton’s own position on the question his agency has been tasked with is the part worth recording precisely. He told his confirmation hearing he was “not an election denier,” then repeatedly declined to say who won in 2020, offering instead that “Biden was certified as the president of the United States” — a formulation several nominees have used to avoid conceding that Trump lost. Days before his nomination he had implied, without evidence, that an unspecified “group” was abusing California’s mail voting laws to throw elections. He declined to clarify that statement when asked.

Recorded for accuracy. Clayton was confirmed by a recorded Senate vote, not installed; 51–47 is a real margin and the objection was registered. He has stated he is not an election denier, and this entry does not assert otherwise — it records that he declined four opportunities to say plainly who won, which is a different and narrower fact. Lack of an intelligence background is not itself disqualifying and several past DNIs came from outside the agencies. Separately, Clayton was assigned as U.S. Attorney to examine Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to prominent Democrats; the status of that inquiry is unclear, and he was also involved in the Justice Department’s much-criticized handling of the Epstein file release — noted because it bears on the Epstein material already on this site, not because it bears on his fitness for this post. Source: Jacob Knutson, Democracy Docket (Jul. 28, 2026). Still unread: the Guardian on cuts to ODNI staffing, which would quantify the Pulte purge this entry describes only in the aggregate, and remains the single most useful thing to add here.

40%, then another 30%, then the coordination office itself

Jay Clayton's confirmation as Director of National Intelligence is already documented on this page. What that confirmation put him in charge of had already been cut roughly in half by the time he took over.

One dismissal illustrates what the cuts reach. Will Ruger, deputy director for mission integration — the office responsible for coordinating all eighteen intelligence agencies as a unified enterprise and advising the DNI on how findings get collected and used — was placed on administrative leave, and fifteen to twenty personnel detailed to that office from other agencies were sent back to their home agencies. Senator Tom Cotton has confirmed roughly 45 to 50 career officers returned home in total. Gabbard's original restructuring plan specifically targeted for elimination the Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center, the National Counterproliferation and Biosecurity Center, and the Foreign Malign Influence Center — the offices most directly responsible for detecting foreign election interference. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand pressed Clayton directly, at his confirmation, on cuts to exactly these election-security and cybersecurity mission centers.

Recorded for accuracy. ODNI has faced bipartisan criticism for years as having grown beyond its original coordinating mandate, and reducing its footprint is a defensible policy position independent of any political motive; Gabbard's and Pulte's own stated rationale — ending redundancy and refocusing on statutory mission — is a genuine institutional argument, not merely pretext. What this entry records is the scale and target of the cuts, not a judgment about whether the underlying downsizing goal was correct. The precise current staffing level is classified and not independently confirmed here. Sources: Government Executive and Nextgov/FCW (Jun. 2026); the Washington Post, via the Spokesman-Review (Jul. 23, 2026); Federal News Network and Fox News (Jul. 2026), on the fourth and fifth rounds and Gillibrand's questioning of Clayton; the Center Square/AOL, on Gabbard's original 40% target and stated rationale.

A mid-decade census, and the states its own sponsor says would lose

Orbán's 2010 supermajority let him redraw every Hungarian electoral district, all through legal processes enumerated in the constitution he had just rewritten. The bill documented here proposes the American equivalent: not through a rewritten constitution, but through a mid-decade census that current federal law explicitly says cannot be used for apportionment — unless this bill changes that law first.

Greene did not leave the bill's political effect to inference. In her own video announcing it, she named the states that would lose power under the recount: California, New York, and other “sanctuary states” would lose electoral college votes and House seats. The 14th Amendment specifies that representatives are apportioned counting “the whole number of persons in each State” — not citizens specifically — and MSNBC legal analysis (Ja'Han Jones) called the bill's core mechanism a “fatal flaw” rendering it unconstitutional on its face. A nearly identical effort in Trump's first term, adding a citizenship question to the standard census, was blocked by the Supreme Court.

Recorded for accuracy. The bill had not, as of the most recent reporting available, been formally introduced with a bill number or scheduled for any vote, and this entry documents a proposal with declared presidential and gubernatorial support, not enacted law. Greene's own stated rationale — that noncitizens should not count toward congressional apportionment — is a genuine, if constitutionally contested, policy position argued in good faith by some conservative legal scholars, not manufactured solely for partisan advantage; the bill's likely partisan effect and its stated purpose are not mutually exclusive. Sources: Fox News and WJLA/TNND (Jul. 3, 2025), on the bill's announcement and Trump's endorsement; NPR (Jul. 15, 2025), on the mid-decade census mechanism and current law; Raw Story, citing MSNBC's Ja'Han Jones, on the constitutional analysis; Benzinga, on Greene's own state-by-state framing.

Nearly 500,000, including active-duty service members

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — the same official who publicly refused to overturn the 2020 results — has canceled the voter registrations of nearly 500,000 people, one of the largest single purges in American history.

Read together with the census and apportionment bill documented above, and the SAVE Act — passed the House, stalled in the Senate, which would ban mail, online, and third-party voter registration and require in-person presentation of costly government documents — the pattern is not three unconnected stories. Trump reportedly pressed Senate Majority Leader John Thune directly to force the SAVE Act through, amid polling, including from Fox News, showing the party's midterm position deteriorating. One irony flagged by Mother Jones's own reporting: the SAVE Act's documentary-proof requirement could disenfranchise married women whose current legal name, following a name change, does not match their birth certificate — a group skewing more Republican than Democratic, by some analyses.

Recorded for accuracy. Voter-roll maintenance is a routine and legally required function of every state election office, and removing ineligible registrations — people who have moved, died, or become ineligible — is not inherently improper; this entry does not assert every one of the nearly 500,000 removals was wrongful. Fair Fight is an advocacy organization founded by a former Georgia gubernatorial candidate and a party to ongoing litigation against the state, and its analysis should be read as an interested party's characterization of the purge list rather than a neutral audit; that does not make the 2,300-military-base-resident figure inaccurate, but it has not been independently verified by a source without a stake in the outcome. Sources: The Contrarian (Substack, 2026), citing Fair Fight's analysis; The New Republic (2026), transcript of a discussion with Mother Jones's Ari Berman on the SAVE Act and Trump's pressure on Thune.

A document with no author, no serial number, and no date

Bill Pulte's cuts to ODNI's workforce are documented above. This entry documents what he did with what remained of the office: heavy personal involvement, per NBC News, in declassifying intelligence files specifically to support a presidential address relitigating the 2020 election he had been ordered to investigate as “rigged.”

Steady State, a nonpartisan organization of more than 400 former U.S. national security officials, examined the underlying CIA document Trump quoted to support a separate claim of Chinese election interference and formally called on Congress and inspectors general to investigate it. Their letter states the document “contains no identifiable office, author, scope note, serial number, sourcing methodology, production mechanism, and departs in both style and format from ‘typical’ CIA analytic products,” and raises the possibility it was drafted with direct White House input in violation of the CIA's own internal guidelines. The document's creation date was itself redacted.

The same night, DOJ launched an “election integrity” website claiming 243 completed enforcement actions across all 50 states. Democracy Docket found the site listed inspections in Florida, Kansas, and South Dakota as “completed” on August 14, 2026 — a date that, at the time the site went live, was still nearly a month in the future.

Recorded for accuracy. Steady State's letter raises a formal question for investigators rather than establishing fabrication as fact; the group is calling for an inquiry, not asserting a completed finding, and this entry preserves that distinction. The dated errors on DOJ's website could reflect careless site-building rather than deliberate fabrication of enforcement history, though a federal agency publishing verifiably false completion dates for law-enforcement actions is a serious lapse regardless of intent. Massie's rebuttal, from a member of the president's own party, is notable specifically because it is not the product of partisan opposition. Source: Democracy Docket (multiple pieces, Jul.–Aug. 2026), read directly, including its own sourcing to NBC News on Pulte's role and to Steady State's public letter.

The names, addresses, and phone numbers of the people who ran the vote

More than three months after the FBI seized 2020 election materials from Fulton County, Georgia, DOJ escalated: a federal grand jury subpoena now seeks the names, home addresses, emails, and phone numbers of thousands of people who worked or volunteered to run the county's 2020 election.

A separate lawsuit, filed by Democracy Forward, seeks to force DOJ to disclose its communications with Christina Bobb (formerly Olsen), a figure connected to the 2020 election-denial effort in Georgia. At a hearing, the presiding judge indicated evidence of coordination between Bobb and Dhillon's office would support Fulton County's argument that the underlying criminal investigation and the original FBI raid were pretextual. Democracy Forward's president, Skye Perryman: “People in America deserve to know what the U.S. Department of Justice is doing where our elections are concerned… there is an urgent need for the information requested in advance of the coming federal midterm elections.”

Recorded for accuracy. Grand jury subpoenas for witness identifying information are a standard and often necessary tool in genuine criminal investigations, and this entry does not assert DOJ's underlying investigation is baseless; the specific question in dispute — whether this particular subpoena was issued to circumvent a stalled civil case rather than to pursue an independent criminal inquiry — has not been resolved by any court as of this entry, and the federal government has opposed the county's characterization. Source: Democracy Docket (Apr.–May 2026), read directly, including its own sourcing to Fulton County's court filings and Democracy Forward's public statements.

One voter, one IP address, a potential blueprint for forty-three states

The census bill and Georgia's purge, both documented above, operate at the scale of a state. This entry documents the same underlying campaign reaching down to a single person: in March 2026, an FBI agent asked South Carolina election officials for the IP address tied to one individual's online voter registration.

The specific case matters less than its scalability. Forty-three states allow some form of online voter registration, and Axios's own reporting frames the South Carolina request as a possible blueprint rather than an isolated inquiry. Robert Weiner, a former senior DOJ civil rights attorney: “The administration has gone down every rabbit hole, pursued every possible avenue to undermine the confidence in the integrity of the federal election process and to undermine the process itself.”

Recorded for accuracy. Investigating a specific, individualized suspicion of voter fraud is a legitimate law enforcement function, and this entry does not assert the South Carolina inquiry itself was baseless — the redacted portions of the record specifically prevent knowing what triggered it. IP-address requests do not automatically reveal a person's identity or exact physical location, a technical limit worth preserving rather than overstating the surveillance capability involved. The New Jersey case is offered as a documented instance of an administrative error being mistaken for fraud elsewhere in this same broader campaign, not as proof the South Carolina case has an identical innocent explanation. Source: Axios (Jul. 31, 2026), the original reporting, read directly; corroborated by The New Republic, Raw Story, and Newsmax the same week; Democracy Forward's public records request, which surfaced the underlying emails.

A bill that doesn’t ban selling stock, but does require an ID at the polls

The House passed the Stop Insider Trading Act (SITA) on July 22, 2026, marketed as a response to widespread public disapproval of congressional stock trading. Campaign Legal Center's own analysis of the bill's actual text identifies a structural gap: SITA does not ban members of Congress from selling stock while in office — only from making certain new purchases, with advance-notice requirements for sales.

The bill's sponsor, Rep. Bryan Steil (R-WI), also sponsored the earlier Make Elections Great Again Act, which would have imposed national voter-ID requirements and made DHS a clearinghouse for voter eligibility determinations, and separately led congressional investigations into ActBlue, the Democratic grassroots fundraising platform. SITA itself contains a nationwide voter-ID requirement for federal elections. Rep. Joe Morelle (D-NY), on the House floor: “Republicans have corrupted their so-called stock trading bill with a decaying piece of the SAVE America Act corpse.”

Recorded for accuracy. Requiring photo identification to vote is a policy position with genuine, good-faith public support independent of this specific bill — polling consistently shows broad majorities favor voter-ID requirements in the abstract — and this entry does not treat the underlying policy as illegitimate on its own terms; what it documents is the procedural choice to attach that provision to a bill marketed publicly as financial-ethics reform, which Morelle and other critics argue was designed to make the provision harder for swing-district members to oppose. Whether the bill's insider-trading restrictions, however incomplete, still represent net progress over current law is a genuine point Republican sponsors have made and this entry does not resolve. Sources: Campaign Legal Center's own factsheet on SITA (Jan. 30, 2026), read directly; Politico's live coverage of the July 22, 2026 House floor debate, including Rep. Morelle's remarks; NBC News, on Rep. Bresnahan's Medicaid-provider stock sales; CapitolTrades.com, on Sen. Collins's Pfizer purchase.