Aloha Reader,

We're 65 days from the general election. Campaigns always heat up this close to the finish — this year, so does the election interference.

Below, we'll walk through the threats to our elections and your vote, and — good news — where those same tactics are backfiring and creating openings we can turn into wins. You'll also find quick, concrete ways to take action further down.

In this issue:

• Voting rights and the long game to strip them away
• Mail voting whiplash
• Make turnout too big to rig
• Blue Wave: targeting small swing states with strong Senate candidates
• Deep dive on Iowa: backing Josh Turek
• Turnout wins races: your action item

Voting rights and the long game to strip them away

Friday, August 28, was the anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I have a dream" speech. There's a straight line from that day, through the freedom marches, to the Voting Rights Act (VRA) — the law that, for the first time, made the promise of democracy real for Black Americans and other communities of color who had been locked out of the vote for a century by poll taxes, literacy tests, and intimidation. The VRA was enormously popular when Congress passed it in 1965, and it only grew more popular over time — Congress renewed it in 2006 under George W. Bush with a unanimous Senate vote and a supermajority in the House.

On this week's episode of What’s The Plan, Elie Mystal, justice correspondent at The Nation, explains how capturing the Supreme Court was a 50-year Republican plan to undo the VRA and other civil rights reforms of the 1960s. Watch the interview here.​

John Roberts, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas were young Federalist Society lawyers in the Reagan administration. By 2013, they had all been confirmed as Supreme Court justices — where they gutted a key part of the VRA in Shelby County v. Holder, a ruling that freed states with histories of voter discrimination from having to get federal approval before changing their voting rules. They kept going. In April 2026, they delivered the final blow to the VRA in Louisiana v. Callais, a ruling that made it much harder to challenge maps drawn to dilute the voting power of Black and other minority voters.

As a result of that Supreme Court decision, most former Confederate states rushed to redraw their congressional districts. To date, they have redrawn 17 House districts, designed to flip them from blue to red. This practice is called gerrymandering, where politicians draw voting district lines to favor their own party. They're trying to pick the voters they need, rather than letting voters pick their representatives.

That's just one attack on voting rights. Voter suppression is another.

Mail voting whiplash

In late 2024, to win Donald Trump's endorsement, House Speaker Mike Johnson pushed the debunked claim of noncitizen voting as a pretext for the SAVE Act (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act) — a bill that would require voters to produce documents like a passport or birth certificate just to register, a burden that falls hardest on married women who've changed their names and on rural voters without easy access to those records. When it came up for a vote, Hawaiʻi's own Representative Ed Case was one of only four Democrats nationwide to vote for it — one reason we backed his challenger, Jarrett Keohokalole, in the primary.

The Senate has never passed the SAVE Act — but Trump has used it as a template for several executive orders, including a March directive giving the United States Postal Service (USPS) the power to decide whose ballots get delivered. That order came to a head this week as court challenges to it worked their way up to the Supreme Court.

It's been a whiplash week. The Supreme Court first ruled a blue-state challenge wasn't "ripe” because the USPS hadn't issued its new rules. This ruling lifted an injunction from a lower court. So as soon as the final USPS rule was published, 24 state attorneys general — including Hawai'i's — filed a new complaint. A federal judge then issued another temporary nationwide restraining order blocking the rule. This fight is moving fast, and it's not over. For real-time tracking of these cases in plain English, Democracy Docket is the best resource we know — voting rights attorney Marc Elias and his team follow every ruling so you don't have to.

In another attempt to suppress the vote, Attorney General Todd Blanche has said the Department of Justice (DOJ) plans to send 1,000 election monitors to swing states.

Make turnout too big to rig

All of these tactics have a single purpose: spread as much confusion and intimidation as possible to keep voters from participating. Reduced turnout can then create close, disputable results — the kind that invite exactly what we saw in 2020, when Trump and his allies filed more than 60 lawsuits trying to overturn the results and lost nearly every single one.

And that's their third tactic: spread doubt about the election, and repeat their "Stop the steal" campaign.

Our job is to make turnout so great and the results so decisive that the outcome can't be credibly challenged.

November is coming: vote, vote, vote, and make it too big to rig.

Péter Magyar, leader of Hungary's Tisza Party, did exactly that this year — he built a grassroots movement town hall by town hall, focused relentlessly on corruption and the cost of living. That movement drove record-breaking turnout and ended Viktor Orbán's 16-year rule in a landslide. We can do it here too.

Blue Wave: targeting small swing states with strong Senate candidates

In Wednesday's webinar with Representative Jill Tokuda, Younghee Overly — who leads our Blue Wave efforts — walked through our strategy: six states — Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Nebraska, and Ohio — and nine House districts within them. Watch the 15-minute segment here.

Blue Wave is a nationwide effort to elect the leaders we deserve — people who stand up for what we believe in. It focuses on five key actions — postcarding, phonebanking, textbanking, canvassing, and social media outreach — each one building momentum toward the 2026 midterms and beyond.

The math behind our target list is simple: these six states are small enough that relatively few votes can flip their Senate races, and each contains a House district we can flip too. Whatever way you want to pitch in, we need volunteers — jump in wherever it works for you.

Read about the candidates we're backing on our Blue Wave resource page. We'll spotlight one race each week, starting with Iowa.

Deep dive on Iowa: backing Josh Turek

Josh Turek is one of the Senate candidates we're working to elect. Born with spina bifida — possibly linked to his father's exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam — Josh went on to medal four times with the U.S. Men's Wheelchair Basketball team at the Paralympics before playing professionally. Watch Josh take on President Obama one-on-one here.

Josh won an Iowa House seat in 2022 by six votes, after a recount, in a district Trump had carried by roughly eight points — becoming the legislature's first permanently disabled member. He was reelected in 2024. In the statehouse, he's built a reputation as a bipartisan, common-sense legislator. His platform centers on public education, a healthcare public option, disability rights, farm support, and restoring abortion protections.

His opponent, Ashley Hinson, currently serves in Congress, where she has voted with Trump's agenda the vast majority of the time. Iowa's farmers are reeling from tariffs and lost export markets just as fertilizer, seed, and diesel costs climb — and they're angry. This Senate race is considered a toss-up. Let's make it blue.

Turnout wins races. Here's how to help this week:

Remember those three election interference tactics — gerrymandering, voter suppression, and spreading doubt about results?

The good news: when politicians gerrymander House districts too aggressively, they sometimes spread their own voters too thin trying to win more seats. It's called a dummymander — a gerrymander that backfires. That means some of these "safe" red House districts are more fragile than they look, and Senate races in the same small states are often close enough that the same surge of voters can flip both.

That's exactly why we target states like Iowa: a modest turnout push can carry a Senate candidate like Josh across the finish line while also tipping a nearby House seat. Every vote we help turn out lifts the whole ticket.

Take action: Help out on our targeted campaigns. Check out our events page to find plenty of chances to help flip Congress blue.

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We'll see you out there — postcarding, phonebanking, textbanking, canvassing, or whatever fits your interests and your schedule.

Bring a friend, bring your ʻohana, bring anyone who's ever wondered if their vote counts. It does, and this November, we're going to prove it. Mahalo for everything you do.

Warmest Aloha

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