CLV. Preparing for Midterm Chaos

This is the last issue before the midterm vote, and it is the one I hoped I would never need to write. Read it as an insurance policy, not a forecast, then go vote. An overwhelming vote will be a firewall against what is to come. One good thing to start: a federal judge in Oakland ordered the administration to halt its noncitizen voter investigations in nine states until the polls close, finding they leaned on error-filled data and were scaring off the groups that help people register. Remember that there are thousands of public servants fighting for you right now in courts across the country, and they are winning.

On the night of December 3, 2024, South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol went on television and declared martial law. Soldiers surrounded the National Assembly. Lawmakers, desperate to stop the usurping of democratic processes, climbed over walls to get inside and voted unanimously to overturn the order. Within six hours the declaration was dead. Yoon was sentenced to life in prison for insurrection. His defense minister got thirty years. The police commissioners who carried out the order also went to prison.

Nobody was able to say afterward that they were only following orders.

I recently listened to a long account of the first time Donald Trump tried to steal an election, an event that should’ve forecasted his capacity to lie, cheat, and steal. What struck me was how close it came to being successful.

On December 18, 2020, Sidney Powell, Michael Flynn and Patrick Byrne went to the White House with a draft executive order that would have told the defense secretary to seize voting machines. Martial law was discussed. What stopped it was a few White House lawyers who shouted for hours about its illegality and the principles of constitutional order. The people who said no in that room do not work there now.

Look at the caliber of people who do.

Kash Patel runs the FBI. Pete Hegseth runs the Pentagon. On September 15, Patel sat before the Senate Judiciary Committee and was asked again and again whether he would keep FBI agents away from polling places. He would not promise. In April, Senator Elissa Slotkin asked Hegseth whether he would follow an order to seize ballots. He called it a gotcha hypothetical, then said, "I've never been ordered to do anything illegal, and I won't." The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Dan Caine, wrote Slotkin that the military has no plans to put troops at polling places or seize ballots, and that he has received no unlawful order.

"No plans" describes where we are today.

I do not know what will be tried, but preparation for purposeful chaos is important. The one lesson of these moments is that they were decided fast. In a single day, Trump encouraged supporters to “stop the steal,” and they ransacked the Capitol, resulting in injury and death. Seoul’s survival was decided in a matter of hours. The 1991 coup in Moscow, which tried to stop a fledgling democracy, collapsed in three days.

If trouble in the midterms comes, Ohio could be the first target. This spring Reuters found that Homeland Security investigators had collected voter records in at least six Ohio counties, including Franklin County, home to Columbus and a large Democratic vote. An investigation into voting results only has to eat time and cause havoc to succeed.

Metro Atlanta is the next place ripe for skullduggery. Federal agents seized 2020 ballots from Fulton County in January, and Fulton is where Trump’s fraudulent efforts first began. A narrow Democratic gain in Fulton would be enough to seek a dispute.

Maricopa County in Arizona is another. Its suburban districts are in play, it has years of audits behind it, and the FBI has already subpoenaed records from the 2020 audit that include the county's voter registration database. The forces that stood against fraudulent efforts in 2020 are not there now.

I expect the outcomes on Tuesday will be good, but the goal of this administration would be to create an appearance of doubt in order to take executive actions. Since this administration has pushed against every edict of protocol and policy, that is the play I am watching for.

What would that look like? The first moves are already here. In California, the Justice Department sued to block the state from counting some 20,000 mail ballots it claims came from noncitizens. A federal judge called the demand unconstitutional, and on Friday an appeals court turned it away for the second time in a week. In Alaska, it is suing to block certification of the Senate race if Republican Dan Sullivan loses narrowly, and Governor Mike Dunleavy, a close Trump ally, has ordered a state criminal investigation into the Democrats' reported spoiler candidate to go with it. There will be other actions. It could be a county board that refuses to certify until a federal investigation is finished. It may be federalized Guard troops who are sent to “secure” a counting center. This president could even declare martial law. If the blue wave occurs, which I believe it will, the final backstop would be a House majority that refuses to seat members-elect from districts under a manufactured cloud.

I do not see these efforts being successful. States certify on deadlines written into state law, and courts have forced reluctant county boards to certify before. Judges have ruled against this administration on elections again and again this year.

But we must be prepared for this type of game plan.

Many years ago, my wife and I did some volunteer work during hurricane season. It was an effort to give out checklists to shoppers on what they needed to be ready if the electricity goes out, having enough water, and so on. I remember one man I talked to who said he prayed for the hurricanes. The destruction that it brought put him to work. It gave him opportunity to profit in the form of repairs and construction.

I understood that man. He saw that a disaster for others meant work for him. But this is something much more sinister. Some people would actively work to cause the fall of our democracy. In 1787, writing from Paris about Shays’ Rebellion, Thomas Jefferson told a friend that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Timothy McVeigh wore that line on his shirt the morning he bombed Oklahoma City and killed 168 people, including children. There are people today who read this administration the same way, as permission to do bad things.

I do not want us anywhere near the point of violence. But it would be foolish not to prepare for the possibilities, given how far this president and the people around him have already gone.

So here is how I would prepare.

Start at the courthouse. A president cannot cancel an election. The Constitution leaves the running of elections to the states, and the states hand the work to counties, clerks and sheriffs. That is why he needs people. Ballots sit in county buildings. Machines sit in county warehouses. Polls are staffed by your neighbors. So ask your county clerk, your sheriff, your police chief, your mayor, your council members, your neighbors, what they will do if someone arrives with an order to seize ballots or equipment, or to close a polling place.

The right answer is short. Nothing, without a court order and the state's own authority, and we call the state attorney general first.

That last part matters more than it sounds. In late September, Eric Holder, who ran the Justice Department under Obama, sat down with David Frum to talk about whether these midterms will be free and fair, and how attorneys general should answer an unlawful order from the president. The attorney general is the lawyer your county clerk calls at two in the morning, so find out who yours is and what they have said. If they have any record of appeasing this administration, be prepared.

Then comes the part that makes it personal. Think of anyone you know who might be handed an order. The nephew in the National Guard. The friend at the sheriff's office. The brother-in-law at a federal agency, the friend in state government, the neighbor on the county commission. Call them. Do not argue politics. Say one sentence: if anyone ever hands you an order that touches a ballot, a voting machine or a polling place, you can refuse it, and I will stand with you.

Hegseth has said on the record that he will not follow an illegal order. Make sure everyone beneath him has heard it. And remind them of Seoul. The officers who carried out that order went to prison. An order to seize a ballot is one somebody must answer for later, the same way that rioters were first sent to prison after 2020.

I have been in a few situations in my career where I saw people go along with bad decisions out of fear of losing their position. I’ve also seen faces of regret. People obey in these moments for one reason. Fear of standing out and being alone. That’s why citizens must stay involved and together.

The wheels of democracy can be slow, and in some states counting may take days. Early leads flip as mail ballots come in, and that is how it has always worked. Slow is normal. Slow is not fraud. Whoever calls a close race stolen before the count is finished is telling you exactly what they are up to.

What we’ve learned from these years is that it is not enough to stay on the sideline. Democracy needs care and cultivation, even civil disobedience. If things do get worse, remember this. A clear majority of Americans now stands against this government, maybe even a supermajority. That is what holds the tide if a small group of men try to take control beyond the will of the people. A massive blue tidal wave is hard to cheat out of the results.

Here is the other thing I believe, and it is the part that lets me sleep. What holds this regime together is not tariffs or the border or a tax cut. It is hate. Hate for the immigrant, the liberal, the professor, the city, whoever is useful as the enemy that week. Hate is a strong emotion but a cheap one. It has to be fed every day, and when the people feeding it run out of strangers to blame, they start pointing at their own neighbors.

That effort is breaking down. When it collapses, people are reachable again. Farmers who ignored the obvious and listened to the words of a New York con artist. Parents who wanted a doctor they could afford but heard the word communism over and over. Christians who believed a pampered narcissist was a tool of God. Men who wanted to feel useful at their jobs and in their communities when targets were put on people of other colors.

People are awake, and things are looking promising. It is as if the nation is exhaling the frustration built up over the habitual lies and embarrassment. It can be a new beginning, and it starts with inviting them back. Not agreeing with everything, not excusing who they voted for, but refusing to give the hate back. Hate answered with hate will only profit the few. The neighbor employed at the sheriff's office who voted for all of this is still the person you are calling. The business owner caught up in the hype is still the person who's been in the community for decades. There is a love of country and brotherly kindness before politics. We get our country back when enough of us decide the other side is still made of people, and act like it before they do. The only way forward is some forgiveness, not fear. Not an eye for an eye, but to remove the mote from our own eye.

I would rather be wrong about what is to come and embarrassed in November than right and unprepared. Some part of me still hopes this turns out to be the essay I wrote for nothing. That is the grief of it. It should be unthinkable in this country, but we can no longer assume that it is.

Help keep the Porcupine Press free. Buy a T-shirt!

Every November the president pardons a turkey. This year the family had other plans. A 1940s-style dinner painting, a familiar comb-over on the platter, and one small line along the bottom for the people at the table who know why they're grateful. It only works if you vote first. Then it works all the way through the pie. Comfort Colors, ivory or white, front or back print, and a women's cut too.

In Arizona, Pinal County ran a drill of a federal officer walking into its elections office and wrote a rule for it: call the county attorney and wait, even if the agent has a warrant. The recorder who did it is a Republican, which tells you this is not a partisan chore, it is just the job.

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The Justice Department is planning its largest Election Day monitoring operation ever, about a thousand staff in every state, while the parties, Common Cause and some three hundred other groups have trained tens of thousands of volunteers to watch the watchers. Bring your patience to the polls, and your phone.

Why Would Anyone Do This?

When I ran for office, the question I heard most was some version of, “why would you do this?” It barely mattered what I answered. The system runs on money, so a candidate is assumed to have some or be after some. If you have neither, you’re just a nut.

Here is the thing. If normal, average, working class Americans don't try, the system has done exactly what it was built to do. It has kept out the independent, the unbought, the reasonable.

Jake Johnson teaches high school math in southern Minnesota. Nobody wanted to take on a Republican who won by 17 points, so the new kid got to be the sacrificial lamb. He campaigned in a 2011 minivan with duct tape on the bumper, gave up his salary this fall, and is running neck and neck.

I have loved politics since a grade school exercise on Ford and Carter, when a peanut farmer stood as the symbol of a man of the people. We cannot cede the system to those who would block any change. Run for something. Call it civic duty. Every now and then, a really good one gets in.

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Indianapolis Wrote It Down

On October 2, the Marion County Election Board adopted a written protocol for what poll workers do if federal agents turn up at a vote center. Write down the agency, whether they are armed, and the time. Call the board's hotline. Do not block anyone, and do not volunteer anything. The clerk called the scenario extremely unlikely and said they wanted a plan anyway, for if things get messy on Election Day.

That is the whole lesson in one meeting. Nobody grandstanded. Nobody predicted a coup. A few officials did the boring work of deciding in daylight what they would do on November 3. Federal law already makes it a crime to station armed federal officers at the polls. Marion County just made sure its poll workers know it. Ask your county if it has done the same.

Rob Bonta, Attorney General of California, and the line attorneys behind him

You may be thinking of Josh Shapiro. He is in the case, but as one plaintiff among two dozen. The name on both filings is Rob Bonta.

California's attorney general has co-led both of the serious challenges to this administration's attempt to run federal elections out of the White House. The first, against the March 2025 elections order, won a preliminary injunction and then survived the government's motion to dismiss. The second was filed on April third with Nevada's Aaron Ford, twenty three attorneys general, and Shapiro, and it is the one that got key provisions of the mail ballot order struck down in June. Keith Ellison took two of those rulings in Minnesota inside of two days.

Here is the part worth remembering. There is a whole army of attorneys fighting back on your behalf. Bonta's name goes on the press release, but the work is done by career line attorneys whose names appear once, in small type on the first page of a brief, and nowhere else ever again. They are working nights against deadlines set by somebody else's stunt, for money a private firm would laugh at, on a case that will be appealed no matter how it comes out. Nobody is going to thank them. They took the job anyway because the thing being defended is larger than the credit for defending it.

That is the whole job. It is also the only reason any of this still stands up.

Know someone like that? Send me the name. I would rather run the clerk than the boss.

The language hasn't caught up to the news. We're fixing that.

Probeganda, n. probe plus propaganda. An investigation opened for how it looks, not for what it finds. Turned on an election, it muddies certification with inquiries, subpoenas and lawsuits until a close result can be called suspect, without ever throwing out a single ballot.

This is not a new trick. It is how this FBI and Justice Department already work. James Comey was indicted in September 2025 for lying to Congress, and a judge threw it out two months later because the prosecutor had been unlawfully appointed. In April they charged him again, over a beach photo of seashells spelling 86 47. On Monday they charged him a third time, over a 2016 New York Times story his lawyer says the government had already looked at twice and passed on. Letitia James was indicted, the case was dismissed, and a grand jury refused to indict her again. Jerome Powell got a criminal probe over a building renovation. Adam Schiff and Lisa Cook got mortgage fraud accusations. The verdict was never the point. The headline was. That’s occurring now in Alaska and California with more to come. Understand the politics behind the decisions.

Reach for the Light
Marc Yacht

Overcast skies quickly darken
Thunder rattles the atmosphere
Intense lightning scorches the earth
A flood of rain creates a sea.

Avians flock and fly to safety
Creatures search for security
People remain sheltered indoors
The devastating storm rages.

A prediction of foul weather
Understated the full danger
Concern then elevates to fear
When and will this severe storm end?

But it will for it always does
What is lost can be recovered
What is broken can be rebuilt
One must always seek out the light.

Good things are coming. We are still going to have problems with Iran, something with Cuba is coming, and we are extremely vulnerable to events beyond our control. Our job is to get through it and then fortify the nation so we get better at picking our leaders and knowing ourselves.

Be prepared, not frightened. Above all, always strive to be a good human.