By Dylan Cooke

This year, Seed the Vote is treating election defense as part of our core midterm strategy. Here’s why, and what it means for the work we’re doing together.

Let me start with the question I hear most often: are the midterms actually going to happen? Yes, the elections will happen. Our job is to win by the largest possible margin, in as many locations as possible, fight their election subversion every step of the way leading up to election day, and be fully prepared after the election to enforce the results.

What we are watching unfold is a coordinated effort to control who gets to vote and how votes are counted before a single ballot is cast. What we’re seeing unfold is a five-alarm fire: 

• On March 31, President Trump signed an executive order targeting vote by mail, attempting to override how states have run their own elections for decades.  
• The SAVE Act would impose burdensome proof-of-citizenship requirements to register to vote. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, more than 21 million American citizens lack ready access to the documents this law would require
• The threats of ICE deployments at polling places are part of the same strategy. They’ll use fear and intimidation to prevent working-class voters and people of color from exercising their right to vote.

These are intimidation tactics but understanding how a steal actually works helps us understand what we need to do. 

The framework we’re working from comes from scholar Hardy Merriman, who has spent years studying how democracies backslide into authoritarianism and what it takes to make a democratic U-turn. It breaks down into four phases: Fight, Win, Prove, and Enforce.

The Fight phase is everything happening right now, from today through election day. The gutting of the Voting Rights Act through the Callais decision, mid-decade redistricting designed to wipe out majority-minority districts, voter purges, attacks on mail-in ballots, the SAVE act… These are not isolated incidents. They are slowly carving away at our ability to have anything close to a free and fair election, never going so far as to provoke mass outrage, but slicing steadily enough that by election day. 

The Win phase is us. Our answer is to get so many people to the polls, winning as many elections as possible, so the margin isn’t close enough to contest. Our conversations on the doors are the first line of defense against voter intimidation and suppression. 

Think about Trump’s phone call to the Georgia Secretary of State, where he said “find me 11,780 votes.” It’s entirely possible that Secretary Brad Raffensperger would have nullified the state election results if Georgia were the only swing state that Biden didn’t win by huge margins. The fact that we had won in so many different places was what protected the election in 2020. If we can win in as many House seats as possible, in as many Senate seats as possible, it becomes harder and harder for them to steal any one place. 

The Prove phase is about parallel vote counting infrastructure, separate from the government, to validate election results. This has been done in Venezuela, in Hungary, in Serbia. We have legal  partners that are looking at building this kind of infrastructure, which would be the first time in American history.

The Enforce phase is where legal strategies alone will not be enough. Gathering evidence matters only if it creates mass mobilization and mass outrage. What we actually need is an infrastructure of mass noncooperation across the country. This is where mass movements and protest organization become necessary. 

Here is the other thing we have to be clear about: the elections will happen. I know that fear is real, and I know people are asking whether any of this will even matter. But authoritarian governments at this stage of power consolidation do not cancel elections. Saying they will only suppresses participation and does their job for them. The way we respond to the threat of a steal is to win by margins too large to steal, to fight subversion every step of the way, and to be fully prepared to enforce the results when they come in.

The fear they are manufacturing in our communities is part of the same strategy. When ICE terrorizes neighborhoods, when protesters face federal retaliation, when people are punished for speaking out, that intimidation does not stay in the streets. It follows people to the ballot box. That is the point. Black, Latino, Asian, Indigenous, and immigrant communities face the sharpest edge of this, and we need to name that plainly rather than burying it.

Our answer to all of it is the same thing it has always been: show up, refuse to be intimidated, and turn out in numbers that are impossible to dispute or deny. We saw what that looks like in Hungary in April, when nearly 6 million voters turned out at record levels and voted Viktor Orbán’s government out in a landslide. The American right had held that government up as their blueprint for years. Voters sent the blueprint to the trash.

That is the organizing frame for everything Seed the Vote is doing this cycle: primaries in California, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, and a fall general election campaign across Arizona, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and beyond. Door-to-door conversations by volunteers remain the single most effective voter contact tactic that exists, and that is what we are building. And after the election, we will be ready to work with our local and national partners, and to mobilize YOU to ensure we enforce the results.

The work is so urgent and we’re thrilled to have you on this journey with us. 

—Dylan Cooke, Organizing Director, Seed the Vote