There is a routine every election cycle. As the date of the vote nears, I go online and check my voter registration status. For the past 45 years — when I've voted in Mifflinburg, a town of 3,500 in rural central Pennsylvania — I have taken this precaution not because I think I did anything wrong, but because I follow the news.
Last year, counties in California began purging 5 million voters from their rolls following a lawsuit from the conservative group Judicial Watch. It was one of numerous such efforts in recent years and, as we get close to four months from a critical presidential election in November, the group has turned its sights to my home state, suing to remove 800,000 voters.
Judicial Watch claims the three bellwether suburban Philadelphia counties in question — Delaware, Chester and Bucks — removed only 17 inactive voters in 2017 and 2018. Bucks County official say that's not true and that they removed 14,050 in 2018 alone. With all three having more registered Democrats than Republicans, this looks like a move more concerned with voter suppression than fraud.
The right to vote is a fundamental human right. As the president of a non-theistic congregation of ethics, I take that to heart. Attempts to limit or add barriers to the free exercise of that right can erode citizen confidence that their elected officials can represent and act upon the will of the people. When voices are silenced, our democracy perishes.
I am grateful that Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar seems ready to fight, but we as citizens must do whatever we can to protect the right to vote anywhere it is under attack.
To be sure, ensuring the safety and security of our elections is of paramount importance — and individuals who are erroneously registered should be removed. But too often, purges are used as a partisan weapon. Groups like Judicial Watch claim that when voters are removed, it's because they are either dead or no longer living in the state. Yet, in just the past three years, 870,000 people in Georgia have registered to vote again after being purged. If these voters were dead or lived somewhere else, how did they manage to get back on the rolls?
Delaware, Chester and Bucks are all majority-white counties. But, historically, people of color are the most frequent target of voter suppression. And that doesn't just include voter purges. There's a reason why states with high populations of Black people have tried to implement voter ID laws: 25 percent of Black Americans do not have a government-issued proof of identification. We shouldn't be stripping Black people of one of their basic rights, especially during a time of racial reckoning.
Fighting back against suppression starts with knowledge. In most cases, voters who are purged are not notified until it's too late. Campaigns like Reclaim Our Vote work to notify eligible voters in states with a history of suppression that they may have been removed. My congregation, and others under the umbrella of the American Ethical Union, are working with ROV to send postcards to people in six states where voters may have been purged. Last year, more than one in five postcards sent to residents of North Carolina's 3rd congressional district by ROV resulted in voter registrations.
I would encourage anyone concerned about this issue to volunteer through that group's website.
Yet perhaps the most important thing you can do is speak out against the misinformation that keeps our citizens complacent. Know someone concerned about voter fraud? Let them know that even one of the nation's preeminent conservative think tanks, t he Heritage Foundation, found that no election results were overturned in the states that currently vote primarily by mail.
Do they think the voter purges occurring across the country are legitimate? Let them know that many voters who are removed go on to register again, discrediting the argument they were inaccurately listed as eligible.
Knowledge is power and the more people know the truth, the more voices we have to combat voter suppression.
Regardless of the outcome of the suit in Pennsylvania, I will continue to check my registration status before elections. Your rights may not be under attack but countless others are. I urge all Pennsylvanians and Americans to speak out for their rights.
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.