Max Flugrath of Fair Fight is on the show this week (for our 250th episode!) to talk all things Trump election rigging. As comms director of the organization, Max is an expert on Trump’s anti-democratic tactics to maintain power; he’s capable of helping us both look back at what Trump has done up to this point to destabilize fair elections and where he might be taking us from here. Watch below:

Fair Fight is based in Georgia, so Max has seen some of the worst of Trump’s attacks on democracy. It’s a microcosm of Trump’s bigger project of maintaining power without popular consent. There, hundreds of thousands of people have been purged from voter rolls through racial profiling. Trump’s fight to overturn the Georgia election results in 2020 — which took several days to come out — garnered massive media attention and is one of the bedrocks on which the case for his criminal behavior has been built. In other states like South Carolina, after a judge stopped the state from sending voter data to the Feds, her house was burned down and her family almost died. All of this is to say that upholding democracy in the age of Trump can literally be an issue of life or death, both immediately for those fighting for it and in the longer term as Trump’s fascist government uses election rigging to terrorize the public with ICE, police forces, and other wings of a repressive government.

As officials in Georgia strike people off the list of a largely young and black voting population, it’s important to note how this is a departure from the consistent racist and classist tactics of election rigging that are embedded in American politics (gerrymandering, voter ID laws, and so on and so forth). Max points to the difference in scale, speed, and coordination as Trump ramps up the voter suppression tactics that have just become politics as usual in American “democracy.” He takes us through the new restrictions, district formations, and policies that will deny Americans — again, overwhelmingly, people of color and people from low-income areas — the right to decide the country’s leadership. As he puts it, it’s a “five-alarm fire for American democracy.” Who among our elected leadership will step up and put up a fight?

According to Max, it’s essential that in our next round of elections and going forward, we need to do everything we can to secure fair elections. What kind of organizing is possible? Hear our thoughts and answers to these essential questions in this wide-ranging conversation, Episode 250 of KK&F! It’ll be available tomorrow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, and other streaming platforms. Thanks for tuning in, and as always, thank you for your support!