Project 2025 poses a significant threat to our democracy

Qu'est-ce que le Projet 2025 ?

Project 2025 is a dangerous policy playbook being pushed by conservative special interests. It could threaten fundamental freedoms by gutting checks and balances and consolidating power in the office of the president.

It’s a sweeping agenda that would reach every part of our lives, from further limiting access to abortion care nationwide to augmenter les impôts pour les familles de la classe moyenne.

How Does Project 2025 Threaten Our Voting Rights?

Project 2025 could drastically alter the state of elections, voting rights, and democracy in America.

The Voting Rights Act (VRA) and the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) work together to protect the freedom to vote. Both laws were designed to stop those who may try to suppress the vote. But, Project 2025 would weaken the enforcement of both laws by stripping the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, which is responsible for enforcing the VRA and the NVRA.

Project 2025 would make simple mistakes in the voting process criminal offenses. The plan shifts responsibility for prosecuting election-related offenses from the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division to the Criminal Division. This move would criminalize voter registration and ballot correction mistakes and open the door to sham investigations and aggressive prosecutions of voters and election officials.

Project 2025 would give the federal government access to state voter rolls. This would allow the administration to disenfranchise voters by aggressively purging voter rolls, a growing voter suppression tactic. The United States still has one of the world’s most decentralized voter registration systems. Anti-voter groups try to exploit cracks in the county-by-county system by removing people from voter rolls. 

How Would Project 2025 Impact Election Disinformation and Security?

Election disinformation is an ongoing challenge for our democracy. The FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency work tirelessly to combat election disinformation and ensure voters are empowered with accurate information. Project 2025 aims to derail those efforts to stop election disinformation.

Project 2025 would restructure the FBI –  including a mandate to prohibit the agency from “engaging, in general, in activities related to combating the spread of so-called misinformation and disinformation by Americans who are not tied to any plausible criminal activity.”

In other words, Project 2025 would prevent the federal government from identifying and flagging false narratives designed to mislead the public and convey these narratives to social media platforms, state governments, and the public. This includes false narratives perpetuated by nation-states like Russia, China, or Iran designed to suppress, intimidate, and influence voters.

Project 2025 would also dismantle the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency, stripping it of its authority and moving it from the Department of Homeland Security. State election officials have come to depend upon – and have praised – the resources and guidance from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency devoted to securing elections.  Located within the Department of Homeland Security, CISA works closely with the intelligence community to learn about cyber threats worldwide and to convey that information to the states.  Additionally, CISA offers various tools to harden and strengthen state election infrastructure.  Dismantling CISA would make our election infrastructure vulnerable to foreign and domestic cyber-attacks.

This plan impacts the private sector, too. Project 2025 would also punish social media companies for limiting election falsehoods on their platforms, leaving them vulnerable to lawsuits for removing election disinformation.

Que pouvons-nous faire ?

The threats to voting rights, elections, and accurate information are just part of the plan – Project 2025 aims to let the next Republican president rule over us instead of representing us. Voters deserve to know.

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