Worst Case Scenario

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.” - H. L. Mencken, American Journalist, 1880-1956

I have spent most of my working life in a state that practically invented the retail theft of elections and then perfected it almost as an art form. I still want to be careful about what I say about our history because Texans of my generation have a bad habit of treating stolen elections as little more than folklore. Their narratives involve a dusty anecdote about a mustachioed patrón in a county nobody visits. We did not create a template, but we know enough about how corruption is executed to speak with authority about the possibilities coming in this country’s direction for the midterm elections. What is being assembled right now for November 3 is not folklore, nor retail, and it is not being done in the dark by a courthouse boss with a bottle of ink. Take a close look because your democracy is being stolen in the open, on letterhead, with a docket number, and the men doing it are counting on the fact that we will not recognize a coup that arrives with a case caption.

Texans ought to recognize the architecture of a lie. Six days after the polls closed in this state’s Democratic Senate runoff of August 28, 1948, Jim Wells County sent Austin an amended return. Precinct 13, in Alice, had found 202 more votes. All but one or two of them belonged to Lyndon Johnson, and they carried him past former Governor Coke Stevenson by 87 votes out of nearly a million cast.

The names had been added to the bottom of the poll list in alphabetical order, in one hand, in one color of ink, while every name above them ran in the ragged inks and handwritings of an actual day’s voting. Some of the people listed said they had not voted. The last man written down before the additions said that when he cast his ballot, there was nobody in line behind him. Dozens of the names belonged to local dead. Stevenson drove down to Alice in late September with Frank Hamer, his old hunting partner, the retired Texas Ranger who had run Bonnie and Clyde to ground, and the two of them walked the main street past George Parr’s pistoleros to the bank where the poll list was kept. The manager let them take a look, but when he saw them start writing names down, he snatched the list back. Nobody ever opened Box 13, though, to count ballots because it was missing, and it still is. One of U.S. history’s greatest lies is contained in a round tin box that people in Jim Wells County will tell you was stashed in a meat locker, or auctioned off by a sheriff, or dropped in the Rio Grande.

Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, Not a Man to Be Trifled With

And today it’s easy to speculate about what might happen because the lies are no longer hidden from us; they are fed to Americans as facts. The SAVE Act, for instance, has passed the House three times, April of last year, again in February, and again this month, when leadership stapled it to the defense authorization bill and also slipped a national voter-ID mandate into a bill about congressional stock trading. The law, if adopted by Congress, requires documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote. The Brennan Center estimates 21 million voting-age citizens cannot readily produce a birth certificate or passport. The president has refused to sign unrelated legislation while trying to force it through the Senate, and he has said aloud what the rest of us were meant to infer: pass it, and Republicans will never lose a race.

On March 31, he signed an executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security to build lists of eligible voters and instructing the Postal Service to deliver ballots only to people on those lists. Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia sued. A federal judge in Boston blocked the order. The First Circuit upheld the block, finding it would sow confusion and disenfranchise eligible voters. On July 27 the Solicitor General went to the Supreme Court on an emergency basis, ninety-nine days out, asking the justices to let it all take effect. The challengers’ response is due Monday, August 3rd.

And circulating alongside all of it, seventeen pages long, is a draft executive order, confirmed by the Washington Post, ProPublica, and Democracy Docket, that would declare a national emergency premised on the theory that China interfered in 2020, and use it to ban mail ballots, force hand-counting, and require every American to re-register. The president says he’s never heard of it. The men circulating it say they are coordinating with his White House.

The only case worse than that involves violence and revolution.

Suppose the court blesses it, come Monday. The executive order is not really a ban and has a kind of dark genius that doesn’t require eliminating mail voting to break the process. Nearly one in three Americans voted by mail in 2024. If DHS builds the eligibility lists, and the Postal Service delivers only to names on those lists, and the lists are built from citizenship databases already documented to generate false positives, then the failure mode is not a locked door and works silently. A ballot that simply never comes. Seniors along the border in towns like Weslaco and McAllen, who have voted from the kitchen table for two decades, wait, and check the mail, and wait. Some of them will drive to a precinct on November 3. Many will not because they are eighty-one, or working a double shift, or their daughter has the car. Turnout doesn’t collapse but quickly erodes, unevenly, in exactly the places where erosion changes outcomes.

The decomposition of the election gets worse when every mail-in voter who gives up on the envelope and shows up in person lands in a precinct staffed and provisioned for a normal midterm. Lines run four hours in Harris County, six in Maricopa in Arizona, maybe longer in the rain of Cleveland, and every hour of that line is a tax paid disproportionately by hourly workers who cannot afford to lose pay while waiting to exercise their franchise.

We can expect most states to refuse. This is the part that gives me something like hope and a touch of dread at the same time. American elections are administered by roughly 8,000 jurisdictions and 3,000 county clerks, most of them women, most of them underpaid, many of them Republicans who have been threatened for four years but are still showing up. Secretaries of state in a dozen states have already said they will not comply with any federal order from Trump, and blue-state legislatures have passed buffer zones barring federal immigration agents from operating within a few hundred feet of a polling place. Federal law dating to Reconstruction, written for precisely this, already bars armed federal men from the polls unless they are repelling armed enemies of the United States.

The dread is that a conflict between a president and 8,000 clerks does not resolve cleanly and manifests at individual folding tables, in church basements and school gymnasiums, at 7:15 in the morning, in front of people’s phones. They aren’t on the list. They don’t have birth certificates. Their maiden names are nowhere in the computer systems.

The Supreme Court closed the easy door in December, ruling against the Chicago National Guard deployment and reading the Guard statute as a backstop to active-duty forces rather than a supplement to civilian police. Guard units came out of Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland. They remain in Washington. What that ruling did was narrow the options to one, and the one that remains is the Insurrection Act, which Trump has wanted since 2020, and requires only a sufficiently photogenic disorder to justify. That is the whole problem. In a system this loaded, the disorder is not a risk of the plan, and is instead, a crucial input. The trigger has already been pulled once when in June, during New York’s primary, ICE agents confronted a poll worker outside a voting site in Syracuse. She said she felt intimidated. State prosecutors reviewed her claims and found them legitimate, but the story only made the trade press and vanished.

Put that scenario on November 3 in a county that is 92 percent Latino. Eight-fifteen in the morning, a strip-center precinct in Hidalgo or Cameron County in the Rio Grande Valley, a line out the door, and an unmarked SUV pulls to the curb. Four men in vests, no visible warrant, detain a man in the parking lot, a naturalized citizen, and it turns out by Thursday, a machinist who has voted in every election since 2004. Somebody films the confrontation. The line of voters watches him go into the vehicle. Half the line is mixed status: a citizen daughter, a resident mother, a cousin with a pending case. Understand what happens next, because it is not complicated and there is no requirement of anyone to be wrong. Nineteen people leave the line. By nine, the video has 4 million views. By ten, the no vayan messages are moving through WhatsApp faster than any county judge can correct them, across a region where a third of the electorate lives in a household with somebody who has reason to fear that unmarked van. Nobody has to be arrested to win. The van is the is a tool of the policy.

By noon it isn’t just the Valley. The digital fear has galloped off to Fresno and Phoenix and the Southwest Side of Chicago, and crowds are forming, not at the precincts, at the field offices, which is where crowds always form, because the precinct is where you were wronged and the field office is where you were wronged from. Counter-crowds arrive by two. Somebody’s rifle is visible by four. In November, darkness falls by 6:30, and night is the variable that turns a confrontation into a casualty. One death anywhere in America on that night, one, on a phone, in vertical video, and the President has his predicate to do whatever he wants and the country has its cause, and both sides will believe with total sincerity that they are the ones defending the Republic.

The worst part has not arrived yet. Not election night. The three weeks after, when the counts are contested, when DOJ subpoenas county clerks for prosecution under the SAVE Act’s criminal provisions, when a House majority sits unseated because certification is enjoined in four states. Democratic winners of congressional offices are unable to take their oath.

There is no other name for it other than a coup. The word people reach for is clearly coup, and the word might be imprecise, but the instinct is right. What is described here is closer to what political scientists call an autogolpe, a self-coup, in which a sitting executive does not seize a government he lacks but dismantles the constraints on the one he already has, which is what we’ve witnessed since Trump began his second term. Alberto Fujimori, in 1992, dissolved Peru’s Supreme Court and Congress and began ruling by decree. A coup rarely arrives with tanks but announces itself with an emergency declaration, a compliant court, and a legal theory just plausible enough that respectable people can say the matter is complicated.

I don’t offer this as a prediction. I hope most of it will not happen. The courts have ruled against this president on elections nearly every time; the justices may well decline to wade in three months out; you will likely know by the time this has been read. A great many Republicans vote by mail, though, and they may suffer broad electoral harm under Trump edicts. The hopeful note is that democracies fail less often than the people who love them fear.

But Texas taught me the actual lesson of Box 13, and it isn’t that a man stole an election. The great cultural horror was that everybody in Jim Wells County and the rest of Texas knew, and the results held anyway. Knowing what happened is not the same as proving, which was impossible with the missing Box 13. Proving is also not the same as stopping a crime, and the people who might have stopped it decided the fight belonged to somebody else. Eventually, though, it belonged to all of us when LBJ became president and escalated U.S. military presence in Vietnam, which led to more than 58,000 dead Americans.

This November, our tragedy might begin with the simple act of a woman clerk sitting behind a folding table at 7:15 in the morning, deciding whether it’s safe or even worthwhile to keep the doors open to voters.