As Donald Trump’s campaign collapses into nothing but abject racism, the GOP has a predicament: how can they make whipping up a pogrom against Haitians in Ohio and running around with C-list racist influencers like Laura Loomer drive voter turnout in crucial swing states? The answer, of course, is they can’t. 

Anyone who thinks this behavior is perfectly fine was already aboard the Trump Train. So, Republicans are doing what they do best: trying to manipulate the ballot and suppress the vote. 

Consider North Carolina, which went for Trump in 2020 by only about 75,000 votes. The state is in play this year, with Vice President Kamala Harris currently leading Trump 49% to 46%, though that is within the poll’s margin of error. Harris had two rallies in the state last week, Gov. JD Vance showed up there over the weekend, and both Trump and Vance are going there this week.

But there’s more action behind the scenes, with GOP lawyers using the judicial process to create the most favorable conditions for a candidate who is not interested in appealing to voters and is instead just ranting about mass deportation. 

Early last week, the GOP got the North Carolina Supreme Court to remove former Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s name from the ballot. Kennedy admitted he is only attempting to remove his name in states where it helps Trump. This victory didn’t just give Trump the edge he was seeking—he polls better in a two-candidate race than with Kennedy on the ballot—it also forced the state to reprint millions of ballots and blow through a Sept. 6 state deadline to begin mailing out absentee ballots. Now, absentee ballots won’t start going out until Sept. 20

Not content with delaying absentee ballots for everyone in the state, the GOP then waited just two days to file another lawsuit. This one is targeted at college students, a demographic that Republicans frequently try to stop from voting. Three weeks ago, the North Carolina Board of Elections voted to allow students and faculty at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill to use their digital ID for voting. Switching to digital IDs isn’t some far-fetched thing that only woke schools are doing—beginning in 2025, North Carolina residents can choose a digital driver’s license stored on a smartphone. 

The GOP complaint alleges, without any detail, that the mere approval of the use of the digital ID, well before any actual voting, has forced the state Republican party to “divert significant attention and resources into combatting election fraud.” Additionally, it alleges that the state party’s “organizational and voter outreach efforts” are frustrated by the approval of the use of a digital ID, and that it would result in hundreds or thousands of ineligible people voting.  

Republicans love attacking the use of student IDs, digital and otherwise. North Dakota, Idaho, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas all require voters to show identification but do not allow any form of student ID. Student voter turnout jumped 14% from 2016 to 2020, and young voters are overwhelmingly Democratic. Making it harder for them to vote is just sound strategy when you otherwise have nothing to offer them. 

North Carolina isn’t the only swing state where Republicans are using the courts to gain an advantage they can’t obtain by getting voters to agree with their unhinged ideas. Look at Pennsylvania, where Harris visited six times in seven days, a stretch during which Trump, confusingly, went to California, a state he lost by millions of votes in 2020. Not a terribly sound campaign strategy on his part, but the GOP just prevailed in their lawsuit to block the state from counting any absentee ballots where voters fail to write a date or put the wrong date on their absentee ballot envelopes. 

It’s a dumb technicality, and the best course of action, the one that maximizes the franchise of voting, would be to count all those ballots that are otherwise correct. This is an error on the envelope, not the ballot, and it’s one that doesn’t in any way affect determining who someone meant to vote for. 

The failure to date or mis-dating is common, with over 4,000 ballots being rejected for dating issues during the April 2024 primary. Given that the 2024 primary turnout in Pennsylvania was less than half of the general election turnout in 2020, it’s inevitable the number of ballots rejected for this reason in the upcoming general election will well exceed 4,000. Biden only won the state by 80,000 votes in 2020, and Trump only won by 44,000 in 2016. 

The GOP is trying the same thing in Michigan, where last week it sued Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson over guidance her office issued about verification of absentee ballots. The RNC says Benson’s guidance doesn’t adequately inform clerks that every absentee voter ballot return envelope must contain “a statement by the city or township clerk that the absent voter ballot is approved for tabulation.” 

As with North Carolina, this isn’t an error on the ballot itself. This is about rejecting ballots because a state worker neglects to stamp an outside envelope on an otherwise valid absentee ballot.  

In Nevada, where Biden prevailed by roughly 34,000 votes in 2020, the state Supreme Court removed perennial spoiler candidate Jill Stein from the ballot because the Green Party used the wrong petition to get signatures. Minor party ballot access petitions require “the attestation that each signatory was a registered voter in the county of his or her residence,” but petitions for ballot referendums, which is what the Green Party used, do not contain that language. 

Fresh off insisting the best thing for democracy in North Carolina was to remove a spoiler candidate from the ballot, the GOP ran to the United States Supreme Court to insist the best thing for democracy in Nevada is to keep a spoiler candidate on the ballot. Where in North Carolina, the concern was that Kennedy. would pull votes from Trump, in Nevada the GOP hope is that Stein would pull votes from Harris. 

That’s why the lawyer petitioning the Supreme Court isn’t one who has been affiliated with the Green Party or who shares any of Stein’s views. Rather, it’s Jay Sekulow, who coordinated Trump’s personal legal team while Trump was in office and served as defense counsel for Trump’s first impeachment trial. 

Normally, deciding who goes on the ballot would belong exclusively to the state. Indeed, that’s why each state has a different way of making that determination and it’s a core principle of federalism. Of course, the U.S. Supreme Court ignored that principle earlier this year when it ordered Colorado to keep Trump on the ballot even though he no longer qualified under state law due to his involvement in the Jan. 6 insurrection. There’s no reason to believe the conservatives on this court won’t decide to throw Trump a helping hand in Nevada. 

The GOP has outsourced its ground game and let Trump drain campaign coffers to cover his legal bills. They’re not presenting any appealing ideas to swing voters, instead leaning hard into their rabid, bloodthirsty base. But those voters aren’t enough, which means this path—the one that actively disenfranchises voters—is all they’ve got.