Now They’re Coming for Your Vote
The Quiet Coup - Part 3 of a 3-part series
They took control of the courts. They built themselves a permanent judiciary. Now the same network is working from the same blueprint - trying to decide who gets to vote at all. And they’ve already told us exactly how they plan to do it.
My previous two pieces lay out what I believe is the most serious constitutional crisis in American history since the Civil War. In Part 1, I showed you what the Supreme Court has done - the shadow docket rulings, the firing of independent regulators, the immunity the Founders never wrote. In Part 2, I showed you how this Court was assembled: one man, forty years, $1.6 billion in dark money, and a justice who vacationed on a billionaire’s yacht while ruling on cases that billionaire cared about.
If you’ve been reading along, you’ve probably been asking yourself the same question I have. What’s left? If they control the presidency, the courts, and the agencies - what’s the final piece?
The vote. It’s always been the vote.
Because here’s the thing about all the power we’ve talked about: it only holds as long as elections can be controlled or circumvented. A democratic majority, organized and angry enough, can still vote out the people doing this. They know that. And they have a plan for it, written down, chapter and verse, in the same document I’ve been tracking for many months.
Let me show you what’s already in motion.
The Man Behind the Curtain
You need to know a name: Hans von Spakovsky. He’s a lawyer at the Heritage Foundation - the same organization that produced Project 2025. And, he has spent decades doing one thing: building the legal and political architecture to make it harder for certain Americans to vote.
He advised a Virginia voter integrity group in the early 2000s that advocated purging voter rolls. That group honored a company that had erroneously scrubbed thousands of disproportionately minority voters from Florida’s rolls before the 2000 election - an honor for innovation. 1 He was later appointed to oversee the voting rights section of the Bush-era Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, where former colleagues said he injected partisan political factors into enforcement decisions. 2 He was nominated to the Federal Election Commission and withdrew when Democrats refused to confirm him.
And then he wrote the elections chapter of Project 2025's Mandate for Leadership. When Trump said during the 2024 campaign that if he won, people won't have to vote again, von Spakovsky's blueprint is what that looks like in practice. 3
The SAVE Act: A Solution to a Problem That Doesn’t Exist
The centerpiece of the current voter suppression effort is called the SAVE Act - the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act. It passed the House of Representatives on February 11, 2026, by a vote of 218 to 213, and is now before the Senate. 4
Here is what it requires: Every American who wants to register to vote, or update an existing registration, must appear in person at an election office and present documentary proof of citizenship. For most people, that means a passport or a certified birth certificate. Your driver’s license doesn’t count. Your REAL ID doesn’t count. Your military ID doesn’t count. 5
The stated rationale is preventing noncitizens from voting. Here is the problem with that rationale: noncitizen voting is already illegal, already a federal crime, and already exceedingly rare. After Utah conducted an exhaustive review of its entire voter registration list - more than 2 million registered voters reviewed over nine months - they found exactly one confirmed instance of noncitizen registration. One. 6
We are being asked to restructure the entire American voter registration system, and potentially remove millions of eligible citizens from the rolls, to address a problem that a nine-month statewide audit found exactly once.
Who gets hurt: By the numbers
More than 140 million American citizens do not have a valid passport. 7 For context: 153 million Americans voted in the 2024 presidential election. The Brennan Center estimates that at least 21 million eligible voters lack ready access to the documents the SAVE Act requires. 8 The University of Maryland puts the number of citizens with no citizenship documentation at all - no passport, no birth certificate, no naturalization papers - at 3.8 million. 9
As many as 69 million women who have taken their spouse’s name cannot easily present a birth certificate that matches their legal name. Among Americans with household incomes below $50,000, only one in five has a valid passport. Voters of color are disproportionately represented in every one of these categories.
And perhaps most telling is passport ownership, which is overwhelmingly concentrated in blue states. In seven states - West Virginia, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Oklahoma - fewer than one-third of residents have a valid passport. These are, almost without exception, red states where Republican officials have enthusiastically supported the bill. 10
The bill was drafted by Representative Chip Roy, who has said openly that he wrote it alongside Stephen Miller and Hans von Spakovsky. The same man who wrote the Project 2025 elections chapter co-wrote the legislation implementing it. The circle, again, is not hidden.11
The Executive Orders Nobody Covered
While Congress has been working on the SAVE Act, the administration has been running a parallel track through executive orders - attempting to do by presidential fiat what legislation might take too long to accomplish.
On March 25, 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14248, titled Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections. The Brennan Center called it an attempt to illegally overrule and take control of major parts of the nation’s election systems, asserting authority the Constitution explicitly gives to states and Congress, not the president. 12
The order did several things.
It directed the Department of Homeland Security to give DOGE - Elon Musk’s operation -- full access to state voter files and voter list maintenance records.
It directed the DOJ to sue states that don’t comply with its voter roll purge requirements.
It attempted to prohibit states from counting mail ballots received after Election Day, even when those ballots were cast on time.
It tried to direct the independent, bipartisan Election Assistance Commission - which Congress specifically created to be insulated from political interference - to implement the administration’s election rules. 13
Then, in March 2026, Trump issued a second executive order on elections. This one attempts to require the U.S. Postal Service to decide who is allowed to vote by mail - instructing it to refuse to deliver ballots cast by anyone not on newly created lists of approved mail voters. The Brennan Center and other groups have challenged it in court.
Notice the pattern: Each order pushes further than the last, each one tests what courts will allow, and each one does damage in the meantime simply by creating chaos and confusion in election administration.
DOGE and the Voter Rolls
The most underreported element of this story is what DOGE’s access to voter files actually means in practice.
The administration’s goal, as laid out in both the executive order and the Project 2025 chapter, is to use federal databases - Social Security, DHS immigration records, State Department passport data -- to cross-reference state voter rolls and flag registrations that appear to belong to noncitizens. States would then be pressured to purge those voters. 14
Here is why that is dangerous, even if every person operating it has good intentions: the data is not clean. Cross-referencing databases that use different identifiers, different spelling conventions, and different data collection methods produces errors at scale. We already know this because we’ve seen it happen. Vigilante groups, using similar methods ahead of the 2024 election, challenged the eligibility of tens of thousands of registered Americans who were, in fact, eligible citizens. 15
We also know that DOGE itself has a documented track record of data mishandling. Within minutes of gaining access to the National Labor Relations Board’s systems, someone with a Russian IP address made several attempts to log in using one of DOGE’s newly created accounts. This is the operation being given access to every American voter’s personal data.
DOGE employees could try to use voter file access to claim fraud and erode public trust in elections. They might also seek to use faulty analyses of these voter files to pressure state officials to aggressively purge voters who are in fact U.S. citizens.
-- Brennan Center for Justice, analysis of Trump’s election executive order, 2025
The DOJ’s voting section is now led by Maureen Riordan, who previously worked at the Public Interest Legal Foundation - a conservative organization that has spent years suing election officials to force aggressive voter roll purges. Under her leadership, the DOJ has already sued election administrators in North Carolina in what voting rights experts describe as an attempt to trigger a purge of thousands of eligible voters. 16
How This Maps to the Project 2025 Blueprint
Every piece of what I’ve just described has a corresponding line in the Mandate for Leadership. Von Spakovsky’s chapter calls for: expanding voter ID requirements; using federal agencies to force aggressive state voter roll purges; limiting mail voting; restructuring or neutering the independent Election Assistance Commission; raising campaign contribution limits, and using the DOJ’s civil rights division to pursue election integrity enforcement rather than voting rights protection. 17
The SAVE Act delivers the voter ID requirement. The executive orders deliver the agency access and the EAC interference. The new DOJ voting section leadership delivers the enforcement posture. DOGE delivers the data infrastructure for the purges. Each piece was written in the blueprint before Trump took office. Each piece is now being implemented. 18
And here is the part that should stop you cold: the Heritage Foundation’s political arm, Heritage Action, is a founding member of something called the Only Citizens Vote Coalition -- a network of election denial activists and right-wing groups that voting rights experts describe as spreading deliberate misinformation about noncitizen voting to create the public justification for the suppression measures they’ve already planned. 19 They manufacture the crisis. Then they solve it with the solution they already had.
What You Can Actually Do
I want to end this piece differently than the first two, because this one has a more immediate action component. The SAVE Act has passed the House. It is in the Senate. It is not yet law. And the executive orders are being challenged in court.
Check your registration. Go to vote.org or your state’s official election website and verify that you are still registered at your current address. Do this today, not the week before an election. And, then make it a routine verification every so often.
Know your documents. Under current law, you don’t need a passport to vote. But if the SAVE Act passes, you will need one to register or update your registration. If you don’t have a passport, look into what it would take to get one -- and help the people in your life do the same. This is especially important for elderly relatives, young people who have never gotten a passport, and anyone who has recently moved or changed their name.
Contact your senators. The SAVE Act needs 60 Senate votes to overcome a filibuster. That means it needs some Democratic support or some Republican defections. If you are in a state with a senator who might be persuadable, call. Not email -- call. The calls still matter.
Support voting rights organizations. The Brennan Center, Democracy Docket, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and the League of Women Voters are all actively litigating the executive orders and monitoring the SAVE Act. They need resources to do that work.
I’ve presented three pieces now documenting what I believe is a coordinated, methodical effort to convert American democracy into something that looks like democracy on the surface but functions like authoritarian rule underneath. Courts that implement a predetermined agenda. Agencies stripped of independence. And now a voting system being redesigned to produce predetermined outcomes.
The people doing this are not hiding. They wrote it all down. They told us exactly what they intended. They are counting on our exhaustion, our overwhelm, our tendency to normalize the abnormal because the alternative -- staying permanently outraged -- feels unsustainable.
Don’t give them that. Stay in it.
I’m a mad mother. I intend to vote. And I intend to make sure everyone I know can too.
SOURCES:
Media Matters: Rep. Chip Roy Says Election Deniers and Project 2025 Contributors Helped Draft SAVE Act, September 2024.
Democracy Docket: Project 2025 Contributor Outlines How Trump Can Roll Back Voting Rights, December 2024.
Bipartisan Policy Center: Five Things to Know About the SAVE Act, February 2026.
Center for American Progress: The SAVE Act: Overview and Facts, February 2026.
Bipartisan Policy Center: Five Things to Know About the SAVE Act, February 2026.
Center for American Progress: The SAVE Act: Overview and Facts, February 2026.
Brennan Center for Justice: New SAVE Act Bills Would Still Block Millions of Americans From Voting, 2026.
PBS NewsHour: How the SAVE America Act Would Make Major Changes to Voting, February 2026.
Center for American Progress: The SAVE Act: Overview and Facts, February 2026.
Media Matters: Rep. Chip Roy Says Election Deniers and Project 2025 Contributors Helped Draft SAVE Act, September 2024.
Brennan Center for Justice: The President’s March 2025 Executive Order on Elections, April 2025.
Brennan Center for Justice: The President’s March 2025 Executive Order on Elections, April 2025.
Democracy Docket: Unmasking the Anti-Democracy Agenda of Project 2025, July 2024.
Brennan Center for Justice: The President’s March 2025 Executive Order on Elections, April 2025.
Brennan Center for Justice: The Trump Administration’s Campaign to Undermine the Next Election, August 2025.
Democracy Docket: Project 2025 Contributor Outlines How Trump Can Roll Back Voting Rights, December 2024.
Democracy Docket: Unmasking the Anti-Democracy Agenda of Project 2025, July 2024.
Democracy Docket: Project 2025 Contributor Outlines How Trump Can Roll Back Voting Rights, December 2024.
Part Three of The Quiet Coup is live. Parts One and Two showed you the courts. This one is about the vote — the SAVE Act, the executive orders, and the man who wrote the playbook for both. If you've been wondering what's left for them to take, this is it.