Welcome back to Lucid, and hello to all new subscribers. Below are some thoughts drawn from my Substack Live conversation with election lawyer Marc Elias, who is in the forefront of democracy protection in this country, with expertise in voting rights, redistricting, and campaign finance. He is the founder of the Elias Law Group and Democracy Docket.
The Authoritarian Logic of Election Denial
Marc and I started off discussing election deniers (MAGA loyalists who falsely claim that Donald Trump rather than Joe Biden won the 2020 election). As this new Democracy Docket post discusses, they are running for office in increasing numbers. We talked about how this phenomenon can become systemic, so that a lie told by the leader can become a means of policing elite collaborators and followers, a kind of continual loyalty test.
Now the Big Lie is not just the way to retain status in the GOP, but has become a de facto requirement for government service.
At Lucid, we pay close attention to language and how it is transformed in authoritarian contexts. So it is revealing that legal commentators and a Demand Justice investigation have tracked the responses of nominees for judicial positions in Trump’s second term. Whether it was at Senate Judiciary Committee hearings or on Questions for the Record forms, they found patterns of evasive answers to the question “who won the 2020 election?” The use of phrases such as “Biden was certified” that skirt the truth but keep the Trump propaganda machine running recurred.
This is institutionalized lying by party and government: lying as official practice. Election denial also is, in my opinion, a form of corruption: elected or appointed officials are colluding in deciding to tell lies to the public.
Once those election deniers are in office, they can play their part, as requested by the Leader and the Party, to twist and subvert the mechanisms of free and fair elections.
This is where threats to voting by mail come in.
Risks to Voting by Mail and How to Support its Protection
As another Democracy Docket post informs us, the Postal Service appears to be enabling Trump’s attacks on voting by mail, “breaking from its decades-long history as a neutral, nonpartisan carrier of U.S. election mail.” Trump’s March 2026 executive order had mandated that the USPS only send mail ballots to voters on lists created and controlled by the federal government.
Postal workers have denounced the dystopian proposal, but mail-in voting is highly threatening to authoritarians because it allows people to vote their conscience in the privacy of their homes, and lets them avoid in-person harassment and intimidation.
From Italian Fascist blackshirts “helping” people decide to vote for Mussolini (in the years before he declared dictatorship) while brandishing clubs and knives, to referendums staged in military dictatorships where soldiers patrol ballot boxes, to Steve Bannon encouraging armed individuals, whether ICE or civilians, to “surround the polls come November,” extremists know that spreading the idea that voting can be physically dangerous can depress turnout.
All of those intimidation opportunities are taken away if people vote by mail.
Right now, when Trump is weak and becoming weaker by the day, any and all expressions of opposition are important to be heard by the government and GOP politicians. If you know independent or Republican voters who have depended on voting by mail, get them to write, too.
One of my maxims is that we should never give up on elections. The GOP and Trump certainly understand their importance. They know that they are poised for historic losses due to their malfeasance and brutality. That is why they are working so hard to discredit elections now and lay the grounds for electoral subversion and denial later.
Elections are no longer the metric of democratic systems, since autocrats keep them going and seek to manipulate them. Yet one thing never changes: your vote is your voice, and your voice can change history, if the right circumstances are in place. When corruption has become blatant, economic hardship widespread, and the government shows itself to be both brutal and uncaring, then the presence of elections matters because there can be a massive turnout by people seeing a window to restore democracy.
I am pretty sure that Trump thinks nightly about the fate of Viktor Orban. Trump’s frantic wish to will away his 2020 defeat by making magical thinking into policy is in relation to his fear that it can happen again. Trump will try every trick in the autocrat’s arsenal in November and onward, but implementing extreme measures will only make him and the GOP more unpopular, setting up his eventual fall.
