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Retired Generals Urge Americans to Protect Trusted Elections in 2026
Oct 06, 2026
Four years ago, a group of senior retired military leaders delivered an unusual message to the American people: trusted elections are not a partisan aspiration—they are a national security imperative. Today, as the country approaches the 2026 elections, these leaders have returned with a fresh warning and a revived hope. Their message is simple, urgent, and profoundly American: free and fair elections constitute the backbone of our constitutional republic, and every citizen has a role in protecting them.
Their new video featuring Gen. Michael V. Hayden, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, Lt. Gen. James Clapper, Maj. Gen. Marilyn Quagliotti, and Maj. Gen. Charles Bolden do not traffic in political rhetoric. Instead, they draw on decades of service, sacrifice, and direct experience in places where trust in institutions has collapsed. These leaders have seen what happens when citizens lose faith in the shared rules that hold a nation together—from the aftermath of elections in Iraq, where uncertainty led to widespread unrest, to the recent instability in Venezuela, where doubts about electoral legitimacy fueled chaos and division. Their message is not about party. It is about country.
To fully grasp the urgency of their message, the generals urge Americans to watch their new video. You can view it here:
- YouTube youtu.be
The Five Principles for Trusted Elections
The principles center on five core principles advanced by Team Democracy, the Ford Presidential Foundation, and the Carter Center. The principles are pillars that define what makes elections trustworthy and what keeps a democratic republic strong:
- Honest Process — Elections must be conducted with impartiality, transparency, and adherence to the rule of law.
- Nonviolent Campaign — Voters and candidates must be free from threats, intimidation, and violence.
- Secure Voting — Every eligible vote should be counted, and every effort to secure the process must preserve access.
- Responsible Oversight — Poll workers, observers, and administrators must understand and respect their roles.
- Trusted Outcomes — Once results are certified and lawful challenges resolved, their legitimacy must be upheld.
These principles are not abstractions. They are the practical standards that allow 330 million people to govern themselves peacefully. They are the guardrails that prevent chaos, manipulation, and mistrust. And they are the expectations that all Americans, regardless of ideology, should demand.
Why Their Voices Are Significant Now
In their message, the generals remind us that protecting elections is not politicians' job alone. It is the responsibility of citizens who value evidence over rumor, law over impulse, and country over faction. This means, for example, taking time to verify information through trustworthy sources before sharing it with others, and fact-checking claims that circulate online or in your community. By actively seeking out the truth rather than passing along unverified reports, every citizen helps guard the integrity of our democratic process.
Their warning is grounded in years of experience. Around the world, they have watched nations fracture when leaders undermine electoral legitimacy or when citizens abandon patience, verification, and peaceful acceptance of lawful results. They have seen how quickly misinformation corrodes trust, how rapidly intimidation erodes participation, and how easily force can replace democratic norms.
Their call is not alarmist. It is preventative.
Citizenship Requires Action
Supporting trusted elections is more than signing a pledge. It requires engagement:
- Learn how elections actually work.
- Share trustworthy information with your community.
- Serve as a poll worker. This involves ensuring the voting process runs smoothly and fairly, from setting up polling stations to checking in voters and assisting people as they cast their ballots. Poll workers play a critical role in safeguarding election integrity and making the experience accessible to all.
- Visit an election center. By touring an election center, you can observe firsthand how ballots are processed, meet the officials who oversee the process, and ask questions about safeguards in place. This helps dispel myths and fosters greater transparency.
- Encourage friends and family to rely on evidence, not speculation.
These minor acts have big consequences. They strengthen the civic muscles that keep democracy resilient.
A Moment to Rise Above Partisanship
The retired generals’ message reminds us that trust in elections is not a Democratic value or a Republican value; it is an American value. Some readers may wonder if any group of leaders, even senior military officials, can truly rise above the political divisions of our time. Yet these generals have served administrations of both parties and have long been respected by Americans across the political spectrum. Their voices carry weight not because of their rank, but because of their experience defending the Constitution in moments when its survival wasn't guaranteed. Their commitment to nonpartisan service and to upholding the rule of law has earned them trust beyond partisan lines.
At a time when political messaging moves faster than verification, and outrage often outruns evidence, their call for restraint, patience, and integrity is not just welcome—it is essential.
The Path Forward
As the 2026 elections approach, Americans face a choice:
Will we allow distrust to deepen, or will we recommit to the shared principles that make self-government possible?
The retired generals have made their position clear. They are asking us to join them at www.PrinciplesForTrustedElections.org, not in partisanship, but in patriotism.
Trusted elections are how a free people keep their republic. And keeping the republic is up to all of us.
David Nevins is the publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
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An aerial view of a Flock camera in Burbank, California. U.S. President Donald Trump expressed support for Flock cameras, saying he likes the AI-powered surveillance technology because of its use by law enforcement, despite concerns that it infringes on privacy.
(Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Flock Cameras Are Coming Down – but We Need More To Dismantle the Surveillance State
Oct 06, 2026
Chances are, you’ve seen one in your neighborhood. Flock cameras have become a major flashpoint for voters in the leadup to the midterms. The concept sounds straight out of 1984 — a network of government-owned cameras that track your movements — it’s no wonder that Americans across party lines are demanding their states and towns sever ties with the controversial company. Surveillance fears are only getting stronger as we enter the AI era.
But the problem isn’t just Flock. These cameras, Automated License Plate Readers or ALPRs to be exact, are a symptom of a larger “surveil first, ask questions later” attitude that has been adopted by local and federal government for decades. In recent years, the federal government has been dramatically expanding the nation’s surveillance infrastructure. This has taken many forms, from facial recognition technology at the airport, to law enforcement monitoring your mail, to the government watching what you’re posting on your personal social media pages. Since April, many Democrats and Republicans in Congress have united to stop what would effectively be a blank check for surveillance via FISA reauthorization, demanding surveillance reforms such as closing the “data broker loophole”, which allows the government to buy Americans’ personal data without a warrant.
Using all of these tactics, the government can obtain outrageous amounts of information about you. The new prescription you picked up last week? The government might know about it because they purchased your search history data. Your trip to the gun range, or a protest, or grandma’s house? With approximately 120,000 ALPRs stationed across the country, a simple warrantless search could reveal that, too. To make matters worse, AI is supercharging all of this. Data brokers, for instance, already sell sensitive information to the government. Now, using AI, federal agencies and law enforcement can build dossiers on individuals in a matter of seconds. No oversight. No accountability. No warrant. The use of AI in ALPRs Flock or any other license plate readers means your movements can be flagged and reported to law enforcement.
The danger isn’t abstract. Just this month, Anthropic reported how several nations attempted to use Claude to “build, run, and otherwise facilitate surveillance operations.” This, not too long after a stunning letter earlier this year, sounded the alarm on the profound risk of domestic mass surveillance using AI.
The government’s willingness to use these technologies with little to no regulation is the very definition of dangerous. The Fourth Amendment exists to protect us from dragnet government surveillance because surveillance can be used to silence and punish anyone who speaks out against the government.
The right to privacy is one of our nation’s most powerful and closely held values and yet, it is under attack.
The outrage against Flock points to a much broader discontent with the state of surveillance in our country. Flock is just the straw that broke the camel’s back because it reveals just how in-your-face surveillance has become. But if the backlash to Flock is a symbol of how angry people are that their privacy rights are being eroded, the response from public officials—asleep at the wheel while surveillance has expanded, or worse, cheerleading the expansion itself—is a sign that speaking out against the surveillance state can wake them up. Florida and Texas both pulled back from Flock this week. Nearly 150 cities and growing have canceled Flock contracts, rejected new deployments, and taken down existing cameras. Imagine what’s possible if we build on this momentum and demand the government stop buying our private data, sifting through our e-mail, and follow the Constitution?
In America, government answers to the people. It has a responsibility to act. States, municipalities, and even Darth Vader are stepping up, but Congress needs to defend the privacy rights guaranteed to us by the Constitution. That means going beyond Flock and passing laws that keep up with technology. It means ending warrantless surveillance in all its forms.
We are in a critical moment where public outrage over Flock and unrestrained AI are high, but more is required of us to dismantle this system of mass surveillance. Government being able to crush our privacy rights and peer into our personal lives—for any reason, at any time, using increasingly powerful AI to know us better than we know ourselves, would all but obliterate our civil liberties. Congress must step up and pass legislation that stops dragnet surveillance in all of its forms, not just Flock cameras.
Don Bell is senior policy counsel at The Constitution Project at POGO. In this role, Don manages the organization’s policy and legal advocacy portfolio to protect constitutional rights, particularly when threatened by our government’s domestic law enforcement surveillance practices.
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What the fight over The Meadow, formerly EPIC City, reveals about pluralism, Pew data on Muslim Americans, and the duties of both sides.
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Freedom Without Friction: Navigating Identity and Public Life in Pluralistic America
Oct 06, 2026
America runs on a deal nobody signed but everyone is expected to honor. Host communities open their schools, their courts, and their markets. Newcomers, in turn, fold into the civic mainstream instead of asking their new country to rearrange itself around them. It isn’t written into any statute, yet it has been the quiet engine behind two and a half centuries of messy, mostly successful assimilation.
That deal is being argued out right now on a stretch of prairie forty minutes northeast of Dallas.
A Test Case, Not a Symbol
The development once called EPIC City, and now rebranded The Meadow, is a proposed 402-acre community in Collin and Hunt Counties near Josephine, Texas, built around the East Plano Islamic Center. Plans call for more than a thousand homes, a mosque, a K-12 faith-based school, and commercial space. Since it was announced in 2024, it has drawn a state securities investigation, a federal fair-housing inquiry from HUD, a request from Senator John Cornyn for a Justice Department probe, and, as of August 17, 2026, a fresh lawsuit from Attorney General Ken Paxton. A Travis County judge has already sided with the developers once, ordering a state agency to honor its own agreement with them. The dispute is not settled, and it is not going anywhere soon.
National coverage has treated The Meadow as a referendum on whether Texas, and by extension America, can accommodate a visibly Muslim, self-organized community without triggering a political backlash. That framing captures something real. It also skips past a quieter, larger story unfolding around it.
What the Numbers Actually Say
Roughly 1.1 percent of the American population is Muslim, spread across nearly 2,800 mosques nationwide — more than double the number that existed in 2000. Contrary to the “epicenter of Islam” language that has attached itself to this fight, that population is not a monolith arriving from one country. Pew Research Center finds that only about a quarter of Muslim-American adults are immigrants from the Middle East or North Africa; a fifth are converts, and four in ten U.S.-born Muslims identify as Black. Separate analysis of the same Pew data finds Muslim Americans wearing the hijab in public at roughly two-thirds the rate of Muslims surveyed internationally, and expressing overwhelmingly unfavorable views of groups like al-Qaeda — 81 percent unfavorable, among the highest rejection rates recorded for any group in that survey. None of that fits a “Sharia city” headline. It doesn’t fit a pure persecution narrative either. Both caricatures are doing work the data doesn’t support.
Two Obligations, Not One
A fair accounting has to hold two things at once.
News organizations and, in this case, elected state officials who elevate a handful of inflammatory soundbites into a narrative of regional religious war are trading accuracy for engagement. Texas has absorbed rapid demographic change in its suburbs over the past decade without the civic unraveling that cable-news segments imply, and that story deserves as much airtime as the shouting match does.
At the same time, communities entering that public square carry a reciprocal duty to read the room. Promotional language describing a housing project as the future “epicenter of Islam in North America” was always going to be heard by anxious neighbors as closer to a territorial claim than a marketing pitch, whatever the legal reality behind it. The First Amendment protection here is not in question. The political judgment behind how that project was pitched to a skeptical public is a separate matter — and it was handled poorly.
What Pluralism Actually Requires
None of this settles the underlying legal fight, which courts will decide by weighing fair-housing law against a state government that has, at points, reached for “Sharia law” as a rhetorical bludgeon rather than a legal argument. But the legal fight isn’t the whole story. The larger question is whether Americans can still tell the difference between a contested land-use dispute and a referendum on an entire faith community’s right to exist in a suburb.
They can, if both sides keep their end of an old bargain: restraint from the institutions and officials who shape the narrative, and civic self-awareness from those entering a new community. Neither is a large ask. Both are increasingly rare.
Meda Parameswara Reddy, Ph.D., is the Director of the Reddy Center for Critical and Integrated Thinking. A former R&D executive holding 30 U.S. patents, he specializes in interdisciplinary research and public policy analysis. His writing has appeared in Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. (PNAS), RealClear platforms, The Fulcrum, The Humanist, AFRO American, The Friday Times, and South Asia Monitor, where he serves on the editorial board. He also hosts the interview show "SAM Dialogues with Dr. M. P. Reddy." Website: mpreddyinsights.com | Contact: mpreddy54@yahoo.com
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As Congress weighs AI risk after researcher Jacob Coxon's viral warning, an opinion piece argues fear of 'losing control' can entrench Big Tech's power.
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The Business Value of Losing Control of AI
Oct 06, 2026
A warning that artificial intelligence may escape human control can make its developers look more important, not less. For companies trying to establish AI as the defining technology of the century, even the possibility of catastrophe can increase the perceived significance of what they are building.
That possibility is now moving rapidly from Silicon Valley into Washington. On Sept. 16, senators were scheduled to gather for a private bipartisan briefing organized by Sen. Bernie Sanders on what he called the “extraordinary dangers” of advanced AI. The meeting followed the resignation of Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, whose warning that people building frontier AI genuinely believe the technology could kill humanity drew more than 100 million views. Coxon had spent three years working on pretraining at OpenAI and Anthropic.
The warnings deserve serious attention. But another development this week suggests that Congress should examine not only whether the danger is real, but also what follows institutionally once we begin treating it as real. Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson questioned AI companies seeking antitrust exemptions while also advocating new regulation. Speaking in his personal capacity, Ferguson argued that the combination could create barriers protecting established firms from competition. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has proposed a narrow antitrust waiver that would allow competing AI companies to coordinate on certain safety measures.
The dispute raises two separate questions: whether coordination among AI companies would reduce genuine technological risks, and what such an arrangement would do to the power of the companies participating in it. The first does not settle the second.
This is also why arguments over whether AI executives and researchers sincerely believe their warnings can miss the more important point. Coxon, for example, left Anthropic roughly two months before his equity there would have vested. That is substantial evidence that he was not simply trying to increase the company’s valuation. But individual sincerity does not determine institutional effect. A warning can be honestly given and still create advantages for the institutions around it.
For an industry trying to establish artificial intelligence as an unprecedented technology, the possibility that it may exceed human control is also a claim about capability. Ordinary software crashes, miscalculates, or fails. A technology capable of escaping its creators is understood differently. That does not mean a warning necessarily increases a company’s value; fear can discourage customers and investors as easily as it can attract them. The narrower point is that claims of extraordinary danger inevitably shape how we understand the power of the technology producing that danger.
The regulatory consequences are more concrete. If advanced AI could pose a civilizational risk, developing it safely may require enormous computing resources, specialized expertise, extensive testing, and continuous interaction with government. Some of those requirements may be necessary. They also favor organizations that already possess those resources.
The companies building the technology can therefore occupy an unusual position. They produce the systems said to create the danger while becoming important sources of expertise for the government trying to manage it. The issue is not whether developers should participate in designing safety measures; obviously, they possess knowledge the government needs. The more difficult question is whether regulation makes those companies answerable to independent authority or gradually makes public authority dependent on them. A genuine risk can produce a response that strengthens the institutions responsible for producing the risk in the first place.
There is a related problem with the language of losing control because it can blur where responsibility still resides. We increasingly say that AI decided, refused, deceived, or recommended. Sometimes that is harmless shorthand. But an AI system does not decide that it will screen job applicants, review insurance claims, or advise government officials. Institutions decide to use it. They determine what information it can reach, what tools it can use, what weight its output receives, and what happens when the output is wrong.
The discussion becomes especially imprecise when unpredictability is treated as evidence that control has disappeared. A developer may be unable to predict every response a model will generate. That is a genuine technical problem, but predictability and control are not the same thing. Human beings still decide whether the model is connected to external systems, whether it can take consequential actions, what safeguards surround it, and whether its use continues after failures occur.
Those controls themselves can fail, and ownership does not guarantee containment. But failure makes the decision to deploy an unpredictable system more consequential; it does not make the people who authorized that deployment irrelevant.
Consider what happens when we say that “the AI” rejected an applicant or generated a consequential recommendation. The description directs attention toward the machine, while the questions necessary for accountability point elsewhere: who authorized the system, what evidence justified relying on it, what limits were established, whether an affected person could challenge the result, and who had the authority to suspend its use.
These are institutional questions. They remain institutional questions even when the underlying technology becomes difficult to understand or predict.
AI can produce enormous harm without consciousness, intention, or independent purpose. It can amplify errors, enable surveillance, accelerate fraud, and operate at a scale no individual human could match. Those risks justify serious governance. But the purpose of governance should be to make responsibility easier to locate, not harder.
Humans may eventually lose meaningful control of advanced AI. If that possibility is real, we should prepare for it. What we should not do is allow predictions about future machine power to obscure present human authority.
The business value of losing control lies partly in what the idea can accomplish before control has actually been lost. It can elevate the perceived importance of the technology, make its largest developers more necessary to government and turn technical expertise into institutional power. None of that makes the warnings false. It does mean that we should pay as much attention to the human arrangements forming around AI as we do to what the technology itself may become.
Before accepting that AI has become the principal actor, we should keep looking at the people and institutions that still decide where it is used, what it is permitted to do, and who answers when those decisions go wrong.
Sebastian Saviano is an author.
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