David Levine is the senior elections integrity fellow at the German Marshall Fund's Alliance for Securing Democracy, where he assesses vulnerabilities in electoral infrastructure, administration, and policies. Previously, he worked as the Ada County, Idaho Elections Director, managing the administration of all federal, state, county, and local district elections.
Last month, Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen announced a new system, the Alabama Voter Integrity Database (AVID) that he said would improve the accuracy of the state’s voter rolls by comparing the state’s voter registration information to the state’s driver’s license database, the National Change of Address File, the Social Security Death Index, and voter lists of five other states. Sound like a product worth building? The good news is that someone has already tested the concept and shown it works. The bad news -- that same entity is the interstate compact for sharing voter registration that Allen left immediately upon assuming office – the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC).
Allen touted the security of AVID by stressing that voter information would be housed on a server in Alabama, and that the state would get information directly from its own agencies and other states directly, rather than through a third party. While noteworthy, neither of these measures offers strong assurances about the security of AVID.
More important for AVID is how Alabama’s voter information will be stored and transmitted.
When Alabama was part of ERIC, its voter information was kept in one central location with all the other ERIC member states. Now, Alabama has memorandums of understanding to share voter information with Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi and Tennessee, and is looking to make similar agreements with more states. That means that there will be many more connections for Alabama to monitor to ensure that its voters’ information is not compromised, a potential threat that is not merely abstract.
In 2005, the Kansas Secretary of State initiated a voter registration program called the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck (IVRC) with Iowa, Missouri and Nebraska that combined each state’s voter rolls into a database and sought to identify whether voters in different states voted in the same election. By 2014, the program had expanded to twenty-nine states. Unfortunately, IVRC had inadequate data security protocols in place that contributed to the accidental disclosure of sensitive, personal information for 1,000 Kansas voters in 2018, raising potential concerns about these voters being subjected to identity theft, foreign interference, and other forms of tampering.
Close attention will also need to be paid to how Alabama’s voter information is stored, particularly since data storage practices vary from state to state. ERIC addresses data storage by not possessing the raw data of sensitive, personally identifiable information, such as date of birth, social security numbers, or driver’s license numbers. Instead, that information is “hashed” by states before it is sent to ERIC as a string of characters that is not human readable or decodable. Then ERIC hashes it again, so that even the states cannot reconstitute the records. Alabama isn’t naïve to preparing and securely transmitting data, but neither were other states who recently engaged in similar efforts without success.
Another potential concern with AVID is whether it will be as helpful as ERIC. For example, when Alabama was part of ERIC from 2016 through early 2022, ERIC identified more than 19,000 voter records of potentially deceased Alabama voters, and 98% of those voter records were subsequently removed from Alabama’s voter rolls. One big reason for this success was because Alabama’s voter list was compared to the voter lists of more than half of the other states, along with those states’ driver’s licensing data, the National Change of Address File, and the Social Security Death Index. It is hard to see how a system with five states can provide the same quality of information as one with twenty-five.
AVID will hopefully help improve the accuracy of Alabama’s voter rolls, but it is far from a certainty, particularly ahead of 2024.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
____
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.