"The Battalion Search and Rescue always carries the Electronic Frontier Foundation's zine in our desert rig. We're finding new surveillance all the time, and without a resource like that, we wouldn't know what the hell we're looking at."
State Senator Creigh Deeds declared, 'I believe that people should choose their representatives. Representatives shouldn't choose their people.' This statement underscores the traditional argument against gerrymandering, yet it serves as a prelude to the Democrats' call for aggressive redistricting.
The Trump administration has since poured billions of dollars into immigration enforcement, and in March, Trump issued an executive order requiring the Department of Homeland Security to ensure that states have "access to appropriate systems for verifying the citizenship or immigration status of individuals registering to vote or who are already registered." In May, DHS began encouraging states to check their voter rolls against immigration data with the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program, run by US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). SAVE now has access to data from across the federal government, not just on immigrants but on citizens as well.
Owing to the fevered narratives proliferating across right-wing media, many have come to believe that the nation faces a scourge of "illegal" voting and wide-scale fraud. But this misdirection, shrill as it is with racist dog-whistles, is itself a fraud perpetrated against democratic rights. The right-wing battle for voter suppression, long waged primarily at the state level, is now being perpetrated by the federal government and the Department of Justice (DOJ) itself.