To mark National Voter Education Week, The Fulcrum is kicking off a series of articles to help people navigate the shifting laws that govern elections.
With the midterm primary season concluded, all eyes have shifted to the upcoming general election. While Nov. 8 is Election Day, in reality voting begins earlier in many states and there’s some work to be done in order to make sure your ballot counts. That’s because every state has been tweaking its election laws over the past few years, with some making it easier to vote and others putting new restrictions in place.
To help you navigate the new rules, The Fulcrum has compiled an overview of typical steps to take as voters get ready for Election Day. Rules and regulations may vary from state to state, and we will get into those details in future articles.
This may seem obvious, but the first step in getting prepped to vote would be registering to vote (or double-checking your registration status). Although National Voters Registration Day was Sept. 20, individuals can still register online and in person, depending on where they live. After registering, it's best to check the status of your registration.
When checking their registration status, voters can also review where they are registered, check their party preference, and determine the status of their vote-by-mail or provisional ballot. This becomes a useful tool with long gaps between election dates and people experiencing lifecycle events.
The next step would be to figure out where and how you will be voting – whether at a polling place on Election Day, through in-person early voting, or by submitting an absentee ballot (depending on your state’s rules). Picking a voting method early takes some of the stress off of the process.
Most states will allow in-person early voting during a designated period, but, again, it varies from state to state. Additionally, some states may require voters to submit an absentee ballot to be eligible for early voting. This information is easily accessible on the state or local office website.
Like early voting, absentee voting (or voting by mail) provides more flexibility to those who are unable to physically vote at their local polling place. This demographic includes college students studying out of their home states, those dealing with injury, illness or disabilities, military personnel deployed out of state, or individuals who are traveling or on a business trip. States set strict deadlines for absentee voting, both to request and to return a ballot.
Remember that in many jurisdictions, it’s not just candidates on the ballot. Voters need to study up on both the people seeking office and the state and local initiatives that can impact government spending, services and even democracy itself. Mis- and disinformation run rampant in election season, so be sure to check your sources.
Future articles will go into great detail on these and other steps in the voting process.
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.