I have written this piece with Dahlia Lithwick for Slate. It begins:

It’s bad enough when a trio of voter suppression groups led by charlatans gets together at an annual secret conference sponsored in part by a group created by the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo to talk about all the ways they might make it harder for people to register or vote in future elections. But it is much worse when the participants in that secret conference also include Secretaries of State and other top election officials from 13 Republican-led states, plus Don Palmer, a member of the United States Election Assistance Commission, plus counsels to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and the House Administration committee’s Republican staff, and a sitting Texas state Senator. The entire conference—whose existence was revealed in a blockbuster report by The Guardian and Documented last week—shows that there is a thriving network of interlocking organizations working with elected and election officials to use unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud to try to mess with fair elections for partisan advantage.

It is understandable if this particular report flew below the radar for you. We are all living in Steve Bannon’s Trumpian dreamworld in which “flooding the zone with shit” has become a remarkably successful political tactic. From the past week’s stories of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas failing to report lavish free vacations including a $500,000 jaunt on a private plane, to a bonkers antiabortion ruling from a Texas judge banning an abortion drug that lays the groundwork for recognizing a fetus as a human being entitled to full constitutional protection, to the expulsion of two Black state legislators from the Tennessee Legislature because they had the temerity to protest gun violence fueled by a Supreme Court stuck in the 1790s to—yes—more mass shootings, it is too easy to be distracted. But that doesn’t change the fact that there are people meeting, behind closed doors, to plot out new paths to voter suppression, with direct implications for the type of democracy that we may have in the United States in 2024 and beyond.

In some ways, this everything everywhere all at once vibe is simply, well, everywhere : Dark money donors capture the courts and the levers of government to make actual vote tallies irrelevant to who holds power. This story didn’t start in Tennessee or the Amarillo district court. For nearly two decades, we have been chronicling the actions of members of the Fraudulent Fraud Squad who have been active in perpetuating claims of voter fraud to make it harder for people to vote. Members include people like Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation and J. Christian Adams of the Public Interest Legal Foundation (Pilf) who have long lied or exaggerated claims of pervasive election fraud to support their efforts to crack down on normal voting….

Finally, the very existence of this conference also highlights the coming together of fringe elements of the Republican party with its allegedly saner mainstream. As The Guardian noted, on Pilf’s board sits attorney Cleta Mitchell, who was deeply involved in Donald Trump’s efforts to reverse the results of the 2020 election in Georgia and elsewhere, based upon ridiculous and unproven claims of voter fraud. Sober election officials should be running away from organizations in which Mitchell and her ilk are involved. The choice to embrace them, and in so doing to help rehabilitate them, is to invite repeat performances of January 6, 2021 in the future.

When the fringe gets to meet with top election and elected officials and their representatives, these ideas enter the Republican mainstream. They also lay the groundwork for future, unwarranted voting crackdowns. One can speculate whether serious state actors are unaware that they are playing with fire by asking “hard questions” about how to deal with the non-existent problem of massive voter fraud. But convenings such as this one suggest that they are willing and even eager to use whatever means at their disposal to both foment national mistrust in future election contests, and also to weaponize that mistrust into partisan election suppression efforts to come.