This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access. Sign up for their free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Since being released early from prison in June, former Colorado election clerk Tina Peters has been granted extraordinary access to the halls of power in Washington.

Peters said she has traveled to Washington seven times, visited the White House at least twice, and met with senior officials at the Justice and Commerce departments — remarkable access for someone on parole after a 2024 felony conviction for tampering with voting machines in an attempt to show that the 2020 election was rigged against President Donald Trump.

She’s a high-profile example of a group of Trump supporters and conservative activists trying to lay out a roadmap for the president to follow. They are urging him to take more extreme steps to try and influence the outcome of an election that many polls suggest could end Republican control of Congress. But as the election closes in, the activists are now voicing increasing concerns that the president and his administration aren’t going to act on their ideas.

This book excerpt is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

On June 25, 2013, the Roberts Court handed down their decision in Shelby County v. Holder. The 5-4 decision gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965’s “preclearance” condition, which required states and localities with a history of racial discrimination in voting practices to get permission from the federal government before they could change any policy related to their elections. The country had changed dramatically, Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the majority; the “strong medicine” of the Voting Rights Act, he argued, was no longer needed, let alone justified. But Michael G. Miller and I show throughout our new book, An American Problem: How the Country Built – and the Supreme Court Broke — The Voting Rights Act just how misguided that reasoning was. In the parts of the country freed from preclearance by Shelby County, our electoral institutions have grown demonstrably less open to Americans of color.

When Mike and I started working on what would become An American Problem, a promise made by Justice Roberts in Shelby County still held. “Section 2” of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, he wrote — the section containing the tools allowing litigators to attack election laws and policies that disproportionately harmed voters of color ± “is permanent and applies nationwide.” Although the Shelby County majority was happy to invalidate the preclearance regime that June morning, they told the country that tools remained still for removing discriminatory laws from the statute books.

But this is no longer the case.

Hello, and Welcome Back to the Franchise

Just over a week since the Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s effort to take over and/or break mail-in voting, I still don’t think the magnitude of the president’s loss has been recognized.

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

The recent history of mail voting in the United States has more twists and turns than an Emmy-winning drama. But for the cause of democracy, at least, yesterday’s ending is a happy one.

On Monday, the Supreme Court definitively blocked President Donald Trump’s many attempts to sabotage voting by mail — opining, in a three-sentence brief, that Trump can’t implement his new rules for the 2026 midterms. Or for any election, probably. 

Those last-minute rules, you may recall, would have required states to adopt new ballot envelopes and upload absentee voters’ names and envelope barcodes to a still-nonexistent online platform. Many officials argued they couldn’t possibly adopt the new measures before midterm voting starts, which would essentially cancel mail-in voting in their jurisdictions. 

The Supreme Court, of course, has been broadly sympathetic to Trump’s legal antics, even when they appear to clearly flout law or precedent. But shutting down voting just before the midterms? That’s one bridge too far for them.

Go a little deeper

Hobbling vote-by-mail was just one of Trump’s plots to meddle in the midterms, however — and several of the others are still underway. Here’s where some of the president’s most significant election maneuvers stand today: 

How worried should you be going into the midterms? That, my friend, is a question to answer in your own little heart. But I’m taking my cues from Vox’s politics editorial director, Benjy Sarlin, who recently reminded listeners of our America, Actually podcast that there are many, many institutional and logistical barriers to many of Trump’s more concerning legal machinations. 

“We’re taking it very seriously here…and nothing’s guaranteed,” he said. “But it is still a very difficult path [where] so far he has had zero success.”

One link for later

➨ Skip the shrimp. A new analysis by researchers at the University of Bath and Faunalytics, an animal welfare group, attempts to quantify the amount of animal suffering required to produce different factory-farmed foods. They concluded that eating smaller animals = causing greater suffering, simply because you have to eat — and, by extension, farm and kill — so many more of them.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that American founding father Thomas Jefferson was obsessed with mastodons? It’s actually one of the reasons that he sent Lewis and Clark on their famous expedition.
• Today’s trivia: Which English-language remake of an older French film won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2022? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the former pro hockey player who founded a major Canadian restaurant chain. That would be Tim Horton, whose eponymous cafes have occasionally gotten snarled in the trade spat between Canada and the United States.

For several minutes on Tuesday evening, Democrats thought they’d actually scored an important legal victory — and in an election case to boot! But then a single Trump-appointed judge cast a cloud of doubt over that victory, and potentially threw Missouri’s upcoming congressional elections into chaos.

Last Thursday, the Missouri Supreme Court effectively halted a 2025 state law that would have redrawn the state’s congressional maps to give Republicans an extra seat in the US House. Republicans, along with Missouri’s Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, immediately ran to the US Supreme Court, hoping that the Court’s 6-3 Republican majority would order the state to use the new, more GOP friendly maps.

But the Court didn’t just reject the GOP’s request, it did so in the most dismissive way possible. The Court’s order was exactly six words long — “Application (26A304) denied by Justice Kavanaugh” — and it notably was only attributed to one justice, Brett Kavanaugh. The Court’s procedures sometimes allow a single justice to dispose of a case, but the justices rarely invoke this process unless they view the matter as so one-sided that there’s no need to formally involve their colleagues.

This case is known as Hoskins v. von Glahn.

But then, just minutes after the ruling, Judge Stephen Clark, a federal district judge in Missouri, ordered the state to use the GOP-friendly maps after all. Though Clark’s case involves different parties — the lead plaintiff in Clark’s case is a Republican member of Congress, not Hoskins — the legal issues in both cases are virtually identical. And Clark’s opinion even acknowledges that, shortly before he ruled, Kavanaugh denied Republicans the very same victory that Clark wants to give them.

Clark’s case, which is currently on appeal to the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, is known as Onder v. Missouri.

It’s the latest round of chaos to emerge from what is likely to be an unusually chaotic round of preelection litigation. Both Missouri cases arise out of the Republican Party’s decision to launch a gerrymandering war in advance of those midterms, a war that Democrats have fought back against with limited success. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump and his administration have also implemented several new policies that appear designed to skew the election toward the GOP, including Trump’s attempt to sabotage voting by mail, which is currently pending before the Supreme Court.

It’s a terrible time, in other words, to be an election official. State election administrators should expect to spend the next two months buffeted by competing court orders, uncertain rules, and new policies that cannot possibly be legal. They should expect both Trump administration officials and state and federal judges to bombard them with commands that a ballot must be altered, or voters must be denied their right to vote — only to have those commands contradicted by new court orders that may themselves be tossed out on appeal.

For now, for example, it’s unclear which maps Missouri is supposed to use in the upcoming midterms. And the final result in this case will likely turn on why Kavanaugh issued such a dismissive order in the Hoskins case.

Kavanaugh may have ruled against Hoskins because Hoskins created the problem he wants the Court to solve

In both Hoskins and Onder, Republicans raise three separate constitutional arguments that, they claim, require Missouri to use the new maps in this year’s midterms. The Hoskins case, however, is unique in that Denny Hoskins, the Republican elected official who formally sought the Supreme Court’s review in that case, may be the worst possible person to make such a request.

Hoskins opens his brief to the Supreme Court with an alarming statement: “A federal-election-administration disaster is unfolding in Missouri.” But as the state supreme court determined, this problem is entirely Hoskins’s fault. The man literally asked the US Supreme Court to save Missouri from a “disaster” that he created.

Missouri’s Republican legislature enacted the new maps on September 12, 2025. However, under the state constitution, Missouri voters could trigger a ballot referendum on these new maps, provided that they submit “petitions signed by five percent of the legal voters in each of two-thirds of the congressional districts in the state” by a certain deadline. Opponents of the new maps met this deadline, submitting their petitions on December 9, 2025. 

Significantly, the Missouri Constitution also provides that once a referendum is triggered, the law that is subject to the referendum does not take effect, and will not take effect unless it is approved by a majority of the state’s voters. So, under the state constitution, the new maps are not law, and they will not become law unless voters approve them in the upcoming general election.

Thus, as the state supreme court noted in its unanimous opinion in Hoskins, “this case involves a straightforward question of law.” The state constitution prevents laws subject to referendums from taking effect (with limited exceptions that don’t apply here), the state law creating the new maps are subject to a referendum, therefore that law is not in effect. QED.

But why did it take so long for the state supreme court to reach this straightforward result? The short answer is that opponents of the new maps asked the state court to rule sooner, but in a May 12, 2026 opinion, the Missouri Supreme Court determined that it could not rule on whether the new maps are in effect until after Hoskins issued his own ruling on whether a referendum was properly triggered — pointing to a state law that permits lawsuits to be filed in the 10 days after the secretary of state rules on the referendum.

That May decision, however, also warned Hoskins that if the “petition filing is ultimately determined to be sufficient,” then that would mean that the new maps cannot be used in the 2026 election because the law authorizing those maps is not in effect.

Nevertheless, Hoskins waited until August 4, the last possible date that he could rule on the petitions seeking a referendum — and also the date of the state’s primary election — to issue a ruling against the referendum. The state supreme court’s opinion from last Thursday holds that Hoskins was wrong to reject the petitions, and thus the new maps never took effect.

We are now just two months from the November election, yet the state supreme court abruptly required Missouri to use different maps than the ones it used during the recent primary election. This situation is genuinely very bad, because it will be difficult for the state’s election officials to reshuffle voters into their correct congressional districts before the election takes place. 

It also means that, assuming that the Missouri Supreme Court’s decision stands, some voters will vote in a different district than the one they voted in in the recent 2026 primary election.

Incredibly, Hoskins actually argued in the state supreme court that it could not suspend the new maps so late in the game. As Judge Ginger Gooch wrote in response, this argument is “particularly misplaced given the secretary’s delay created the confusion, expense, and practical difficulties of which he complains.”

So one possible explanation for Kavanaugh’s unexplained order ruling against Hoskins is that Kavanaugh did not believe that Hoskins had any business asking the Court to fix a problem that he created. Courts often rule against litigants who have “unclean hands,” meaning that they contributed to the problem they want the court to fix.

But, if that’s the case, then it’s still possible that Republicans could prevail in Onder, because the plaintiffs in that case did not personally create the problems that the GOP now complains about.

Alternatively, Kavanaugh may have ruled against the GOP because he thought their legal arguments are garbage

The other possible explanation for Kavanaugh’s decision in Hoskins is that the justice believed that the GOP’s legal arguments were weak.

Republicans make three arguments in favor of their preferred maps, two of which overlap considerably.

Their first argument rests on a discredited legal theory known as the “independent state legislature doctrine” (“ISLD”). In its strongest form, this doctrine claims that state legislatures have virtually unchecked power to set the rules governing federal elections, and that this power cannot be limited by a state governor’s veto, by a ballot referendum, by a state constitution, or by a state court.

But the Supreme Court first rejected this theory in 1916, and it has done so many times since then — most recently in its 2023 decision in Moore v. Harper (though Moore did open the door to a weaker version of the ISLD that does not apply to either of the Missouri cases). Notably, even Clark rejected the GOP’s ISLD argument in his Onder opinion. So that is, hopefully, a sign that this particularly radical argument is unlikely to prevail in any court.

Clark, however, accepted the GOP’s other arguments, both of which claim that it is unconstitutional for Missouri to sort voters into different districts during a general election than the districts they voted in during the primary election. Clark’s opinion points to US v. Classic (1941), which held that “[w]here the state law has made the primary an integral part of the procedure of choice, … the right of the elector to have his ballot counted at the primary” is protected by the Constitution. 

He also claims that switching voters from one district to another is unconstitutional discrimination because it “creates two classes of voters: those who happen to stay in their HB 1 congressional districts, and those who do not.”

Neither of these arguments is particularly persuasive. Classic held that voters cannot be denied their right to vote in the primary, but no one claims that any of the votes that were lawfully cast during that primary were not counted. And Clark cites no legal authority that supports the proposition that the Constitution forbids discrimination on the basis of which district someone voted in during a primary election.

All laws engage in discrimination of some sort. Criminal legal codes discriminate against criminals and in favor of law-abiding individuals. Welfare laws discriminate against rich people and in favor of poor people to determine who receives benefits. Government employers may discriminate against unqualified applicants and in favor of job seekers who are well-suited for the job they seek. The mere fact that Missouri’s unusual situation sorts voters into “two classes” does not mean that this situation violates the Constitution.

Indeed, it’s not even all that unusual for the winner of a primary election to not appear on the ballot during the following general election — just ask Graham Platner. Like many states, Missouri law permits parties to replace the winner of a primary election on the ballot if their nominee “dies, is disqualified, or voluntarily withdraws.” But, if Clark is correct that the Constitution guarantees every voter a right to vote for the winner of the primary election in their same district, that means that this law is also unconstitutional.

Kavanaugh, in other words, may have looked at the GOP’s three substantive arguments in the Hoskins case and concluded that they were all so weak that he could simply dispose of the case without formally asking his colleagues to weigh in. If that’s true, Republicans should expect to lose again if the Onder case reaches the Supreme Court.

In the meantime, however, we can only guess why Kavanaugh ruled the way that he did. And Missouri election officials are stuck in limbo, unable to actually prepare for the upcoming election until they know which maps to use.