DO NOT LET THEM WIN.

• Author: Boddiger, David
• Position: The future of voting rights and the coming United States midterm elections

Every certain number of years, we hear the refrain "this election may be the most important in our lifetime." While not every election can be the most important, it is certainly true that as voting rights are increasingly under threat and as partisan gerrymandering locks in a system where politicians can choose their voters rather than the other way around, it seems like participating in each election is becoming more and more critical.

Only a few years ago, when Donald Trump began turning his frenzied followers against the basic tenets of decency and respect, the few who warned that he and his enablers wouldn't stop until democracy was destroyed were mostly dismissed as being overly paranoid. But who would have guessed that by the fall of 2022, the Republican Party would have been usurped entirely by a contemptible throng of charlatans, grifters, and authoritarians whose lust for power and control are equaled only by their disdain for anyone unlike them?

The stakes in this election are high: Voters will decide whether abortion will be criminalized across the nation, whether we will take the urgent action needed to save a planet in peril from a raging climate crisis, whether we will have access to Social Security and Medicare, whether our children will be protected from gun violence at their schools, or anywhere else for that matter, and whether they will even have the right to an education, reading any book that they darn well please.

The forces aligned to deny us these fundamental rights and freedoms are doing everything in their power to prevent people from voting on November 8, with the Big Lie excuse that the previous presidential election was stolen. To do this, they're engaging in Orwellian-sounding strategies, using words like "election integrity," while spending tens of millions of dollars in dark money.

Democratic elections lawyer Marc Elias called them a "constellation of anti-voting groups," and they are some of the same players who invented the Big Lie to overthrow our democracy on January 6, 2021: Mark Meadows, Cleta Mitchell, John Eastman, Bill Barr, Leonard Leo, and others. Their partner in this nefarious voter suppression scheme is, unsurprisingly, the Republican National Committee (RNC).

Mitchell, for example, the lawyer who sat in on the infamous phone call in January 2021, in which Trump attempted to strong-arm Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger into committing election fraud, now works with an organization...