Levine is an elections integrity fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, which develops strategies to deter and defend against autocratic efforts to interfere in democratic institutions.
Krystyna (Krysia) Sikora is a program assistant for the Alliance for Securing Democracy, where she serves as the assistant to the director.
Earlier this month, Harris County sued the State of Texas to temporarily block a law, known as Senate Bill 1750, that would eliminate the Harris County elections administrator position effective September 1st. Harris County really messed up its administration of the 2022 midterms, but removing its top administrator position with less than two months to go before the start of early voting for a countywide election is likely to cause more problems than it solves. Harris County needs more checks and resources behind their election officials, not an elimination of the top election position altogether. While the lawsuit is ostensibly about preserving a critical election position, beneath the surface it is also about the weaponization of mistakes to justify the takeover of election operations.
The 2022 midterms were not the first time Texas’ most populous county experienced election administration problems. On Election Day in 2022, more than a dozen voting locations ran out of ballot paper. As had occurred in past elections, there were widespread reports of voting machine malfunctions, paper jams, and unusually long lines. Several polling places failed to open on time for various reasons, including election workers quitting, not showing up, or not being given the keys required to operate voting equipment.
The mishaps did not impact Harris County’s election results, but they were significant enough to justify greater state oversight of the county’s election administration. However, rather than taking the opportunity to help Harris County improve its elections, state officials wielded the mistakes to increase partisan control over election processes in a way that could further cast doubt on the legitimacy of its elections. In addition to Senate Bill 1750, Governor Greg Abbott also recently signed Senate Bill 1933 into law, which authorizes the secretary of state to essentially take over Harris County’s elections on vague grounds, as well as Senate Bill 1070, which enabled Texas to resign from the Electronic Registration Information Center, an interstate compact that allows states to share information to help maintain accurate voter rolls. Another proposed bill would give an Abbott-appointed official authority to order an entirely new election in Harris County if 2% of its polling places run out of ballot paper for an hour. The bills were justified by the false claim that the election problems were deliberately orchestrated to disenfranchise certain voters.
Harris County is not alone in facing repercussions from election errors. A new report by the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund examines election administration mistakes made in three pivotal counties across the United States—including Harris—during the 2022 and 2020 elections, and how those mistakes were subsequently weaponized. For example, misreported results in Antrim County, Michigan served as the basis for a swarm of conspiracy theories about Dominion voting machines, which subsequently sparked the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. Likewise, after Maricopa County, Arizona reported issues with vote-counting machines reading ballots printed on site, losing candidates claimed malfeasance and sued to overturn and rerun the election. The claims underlying the suit were found to be without foundation. The weaponization of election mistakes is likely to increase in the run-up to the 2024 General Election as long-serving election officials leave their posts and less experienced—or ill-intentioned —officials replace them, risking more mistakes.
In a voting system as complicated as those in the United States, mistakes are bound to happen.
But without more evidence they are not signs of malfeasance. State lawmakers should bolster election administration processes through proactive, intermittent reviews that enable all counties to improve their administration of elections, making legislation like that adopted by Texas misguided. State lawmakers should strive to improve systems before problems arise, such as adopting vote counting timelines that can ensure election officials can accurately count ballots without unnecessary pressure. And if a mistake is made, post-election audits are an important tool for verifying results amid skepticism.
As polarization continues to prevail, it is more important than ever that our democratic institutions cooperate with and support one another. This includes our election system. Heading into 2024, less than half of Americans have high confidence that the votes in the next presidential election will be counted accurately. It is not too late to begin fixing this problem, but it will require political leaders to support their fellow election officials, not weaponize their mistakes for partisan gain. As the Harris County situation demonstrates, the latter risks undermining the work of election officials and casting doubt on legitimate results.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.