Gifford is the founder and chief operating officer of ActiVote, which works to increase voter participation and civic engagement. ActiVote is partnering with the National Vote at Home Institute on a week-long event to highlight bills that affect voting in your state.
Voting rights bills are in the spotlight. Last week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill into law, live on Fox & Friends, joining Georgia, Arkansas, Iowa and Utah in a post-2020 frenzy to change rules and procedures surrounding voting.
More than 1,000 bills have been introduced in state legislatures around the country this year, touching all aspects of the way we cast votes. Some are restricting voting rights; others are expanding them. Some voters may have heard about the bills that get national attention, such as the controversial new law in Georgia, but most have little idea what is happening in their own state legislature.
Helping voters cut through the noise and know exactly what is happening in their state and in Congress is the core mission of ActiVote. Our nonpartisan app ensures that every voter can see all bills that affect them personally, see the candidates that they can vote for, and see where their candidates and legislators stand on the political spectrum.
This week ActiVote is teaming up with National Vote at Home Institute to spotlight all aspects of mail voting. The institute has catalogued and summarized all voting bills and offers the advice that we should be "alert not anxious." In the event, we feature educational summaries from NVHI explaining voting by mail, including signature verification, ballot drop boxes, risk-limiting audits, preprocessing of ballots, ballot tracking and curing, permanent absentee voter lists, prepaid postage and voter data integrity. Everyone can weigh in on where they stand on each of these topics by answering the survey.
Previous studies have shown that voting at home is not a partisan issue: Many people across the political spectrum prefer to have the time to sit down to study their ballot and the candidates for all the various races when they make their choices. At the same time, people want to make sure that their ballot arrives on time, is counted and, of course, that our elections are safe and secure. Many are uncertain about how to ensure that convenience for the voter and security of our elections can go hand in hand.
We believe that this week's event is an excellent opportunity for everyone supportive of convenient and secure elections to learn more about everything related to voting at home, see which bills are going through their state's legislature and to let their voices be heard in the event surveys.
Share your opinion on the various components of the bills in ActiVote surveys.
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.