🌎 Resumen en español · traducción automática
Líderes de fe, trabajo y sociedad civil en Minnesota han elaborado un plan para contrarrestar los intentos del presidente Trump de interferir en las elecciones y sabotear el conteo de votos, titulado "Act Free to Be Free: A State and Local Pro-Democracy Framework". El documento busca organizar la resistencia a través de la movilización de la sociedad civil en aproximadamente 80 grupos en 19 estados que ya enfrentan acoso del Departamento de Justicia y otras intervenciones federales en la administración electoral. Dado que el sistema electoral estadounidense es altamente descentralizado con decenas de miles de lugares de votación, la estrategia enfatiza la necesidad de liderazgo y organización a nivel local y estatal para proteger los derechos de voto de los ciudadanos.
Traducción y resumen generados por IA a partir del artículo en inglés. Puede contener errores; consulte el texto original.
The feckless response of American elites to President Donald Trump’s authoritarian attempt the past decade has often been a failure of imagination: Oh, surely he’ll leave office after he loses. Oh, his immigration officers surely won’t roam our streets racially profiling people and killing our neighbors.
Brazenness is a key tool of tyrants, both personal and political: Just as you’re shocked into inaction when someone cuts the line at airport security, so too Trump relies on baffling our expectations, which is what should concern us about the upcoming election and his efforts to interfere with people’s right to vote and to have their votes counted.
Trump used a nationally televised address Thursday to spew more outlandish misinformation about our election system as a pretext for aggressive federal intervention. He endorsed Mike Lindell – the pillow mogul who has done more than anyone, save Trump, to cast bad-faith doubt on Minnesota election integrity – for governor Wednesday.
In response, Minnesota faith, labor and civil society leaders have declared: Not this time.
They’re also trying to alert and assist some 80 civil society groups in 19 states, many of them already facing Department of Justice harassment and other forms of heavy-handed federal intervention into election administration, in what looks like an effort to keep Republicans in power no matter the will of the voters.
Because our election system is so decentralized — tens of thousands of polling places across the country, thousands of counties counting and certifying votes — the resistance needs local and state leadership and organization.
The blueprint for pushing back is a memo, first reported here, that’s circulating among pro-democracy leaders, titled, “Act Free to Be Free: A State and Local Pro-Democracy Framework.”
The idea of the title is that if we are to be a free people in the face of despotism, we must exercise our constitutional rights to preserve them.
The instrument for organizing resistance is civil society, which “Act Free” describes as “the broad, distributed, multi-sector mobilization of everyday people behaving, with agency, as if the Constitution applies to them. And in doing so, making it apply.”
Although “Act Free” has been a group project, a key author is Doran Schrantz, the former executive director of the Minnesota ecumenical progressive group ISAIAH and one of the most influential people you’ve probably never heard of.
It begins with a bracing warning: “Anyone paying attention knows that Donald Trump is not preparing to lose the 2026 midterms. He is preparing to disrupt and sabotage them, and his administration has been laying the groundwork for months.”
The evidence is all around us, but you have to connect dots and see the full picture:
In Georgia, the former director of National Intelligence was present at an FBI raid of Fulton County, where agents seized hundreds of boxes of 2020 ballots and other documents. Recall: Georgia is where Trump demanded the Republican secretary of state “find” the 11,780 votes needed to give him victory in 2020.
In June, FBI agents raided the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, which Ohio Capital Journal describes as advocates for voting and labor rights and against outsized corporate power.
The Justice Department has sued 29 states — Minnesota among them — and the District of Columbia over their refusal to provide unredacted voter rolls that include the driver’s license and partial Social Security numbers of voters.
Several current and former election officials in Wisconsin confirmed they have been interviewed or approached by the FBI, which is apparently investigating the 2020 election.
The Justice Department is sending election monitors here and other (suspiciously blue and purplish blue) states and cities.
A dangerous MAGA tool beat a principled Republican in 2024 for Maricopa County recorder and is now in charge of vote counting in Arizona’s most populous county.
Trump has issued an executive order that seeks to dictate election administration — in an unconstitutional power grab — via the U.S. Postal Service.
The Trump administration is threatening to withhold terrorism-prevention funding unless states comply with election demands, according to reporting from a progressive outlet that covers voting rights and litigation.
The U.S. Department of Justice sent a letter recently to election officials in all 50 states threatening them with prosecution if noncitizens vote in the upcoming August and November elections. (Voting by noncitizens is prohibited in federal elections, and extremely rare.)
Trump recently fired the two Democrats and forced a Republican to resign from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, thus paralyzing it.
You can read these as discrete events, but Trump’s history tells us that this is all deliberate. As the “Act Free” memo argues, “The point is to generate enough chaos, legal uncertainty, and manufactured doubt to suspend certification (of votes), and in that void, consolidate power around the people already holding it.”
Schrantz told me that Operation Metro Surge “baptized me in the breadth of possibilities of what we might have to deal with.”
Unfortunately, however, the denial continues, especially among the swells on the Acela Corridor.
“When I’m around D.C. and New York elites, they wanna tell themselves a story that there’s some normal way we can get through to the other side of this. I just don’t think so. It’s as bad as it looks, and we need wider bandwidth to imagine what’s possible,” she said in an interview.
Once we get people to understand what’s happening, then what?
The “Act Free” memo sketches out a civil defense of democracy that draws on recent history:
“When ICE and CBP occupied our communities for two and a half months … tens of thousands of trained constitutional legal observers documented every encounter. Mutual aid networks sustained people through the crisis. Small businesses invoked their Fourth Amendment rights and refused warrantless entry. Local law enforcement mostly stood aside rather than collaborate. And when called, 50 to 70% percent of the general population showed up, not because they were activists, but because they understood what was being taken from them and chose to act.”
The political cost of Operation Metro Surge became too great for the Trump administration, and they were forced to retreat.
So, how do democracy defenders replicate what was achieved resisting Operation Metro Surge when it comes to ensuring a free and fair election?
“Act Free” advises that state leaders need “a rigorous, ground-level understanding of the macro threat landscape, the specific vulnerabilities of their state’s election administration system, and a genuine power analysis of the people and institutions inside it.”
Schrantz offers a refreshingly hard-headed primer on power analysis, and it’s worth quoting in full:
“Knowing who sits in which seat is not enough. A genuine power analysis asks: who has leverage over that person? What does it take to move or block a specific decision? Who are the allies already inside the system? What is the procedural timeline for each key decision? Who could be positioned for sabotage? What conservative or election denier lawyers are positioned to act, and when? What have you already seen play out, and what does it reveal about the network of power being utilized? This is the organizing discipline most pro-democracy coalitions skip. It is the most important thing to do first.”
Then you’ve got to recruit community leaders: “Someone with a real network of relationships, in their neighborhood, school, congregation, childcare center, apartment building. These leaders are essential to organizing scaled and aligned public action with agency, and to maintaining a distributed strategy that cannot be decapitated.”
Because Trump’s strategy is racial division — the suspect votes are always in counties with significant populations of Black and Latino voters — the coalition must be multi-racial, as both a core value but also a “strategic necessity,” the memo reads.
Next: Assign roles: legal, political, press and public, tactical/operational, grassroots deployment.
“Act Free” advises employing “deterrence” well before Election Day: Making sure elected officials and other people of influence know they are being scrutinized and will pay a cost if they cede to Trump’s demands — but will be strongly supported if they do their jobs honorably. Clergy and other local leaders can meet with secretaries of state, county boards and county election officials about the importance of free and fair elections and get them on the record about their commitment.
Finally, it’s rehearsal time. Every potential scenario must be gamed out so everyone knows what to do: “Each role has a specific set of actions. Each scenario has a specific protocol. This is what you see. This is what you do. This is who you call.”
Americans assuming the courts will work it all out don’t realize how slowly the judiciary operates. (Which is precisely why Trump never faced justice for his attempt to overturn the 2020 election.) MAGA will seek to fill the vacuum as the courts dither, “manufacturing a pretext through smears and propaganda, using legal maneuvers to suspend seating an unwanted elected official, grabbing and holding power in the vacuum created by the suspension of certainty.”
But if the organizers do their jobs, hundreds of thousands of trained volunteers will be ready to exact severe political costs, and quickly, if the authoritarian tries to intervene in local election administration. If there’s another “Brooks Brother riot” or another instance of MAGA foot soldiers attempting to stop ballot counting, a counterprotest will demand the count continue, and information will be quickly disseminated about the usurpers. If they seek to block polling stations or intimidate voters, precinct captains will film and disseminate.
Those hundreds of thousands of volunteers will need courage undergirded by solidarity and the comfort that comes from knowing they have secured the blessings of liberty for their descendants.
As “Act Free” says, “The woman in the pink coat who stepped forward with her iPhone when Border Patrol (killed) Alex Pretti made a courageous choice that worked to expose the lies of the Department of Homeland Security. That kind of leadership does not emerge from nowhere. It emerges from … people who have already processed the stakes and know what they are willing to risk when the moment comes.”
You can feel despair about what’s happening, but that’s a dead-end choice.
Reading “Act Free” reveals what we should feel: concern, yes, but also vigilance — and hope.
This story was originally produced by Minnesota Reformer, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Kentucky Lantern, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
