THE BLOCKADE BRIEF: September 9, 2026

THIS WEEK’S BLOCKADES

Missouri Republicans Manufactured Their Own “Constitutional Crisis” Rather Than Accept a Map They Fairly Lost

The Missouri Supreme Court ruled unanimously last week that Trump’s mid-decade gerrymander “is not the law and has never been the law,” ordering the state to use its old map in November. On Tuesday, Justice Brett Kavanaugh denied Republicans’ emergency plea to reinstate the gerrymander, but within hours, a Trump-appointed federal judge revived that same gerrymander for the midterm elections, flatly contradicting the Supreme Court appeal Republicans had just lost. Secretary of State Denny Hoskins directed officials to use the disputed map, and voting rights supporters have now asked the state Supreme Court to hold him in contempt. Republicans built this mess trying to rig a Kansas City seat away from Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, and now they’re citing the chaos of their own making as a reason to keep the map rigged.

USPS Is Back at the Supreme Court, Racing to Purge Mail Ballots Before Anyone Can Stop It

The Trump administration is back at the Supreme Court this week trying to gut Americans’ ability to vote by mail, after a judge blocked the USPS from implementing Trump’s plan on September 4 following a whistleblower complaint that the rushed portal could reject up to 10,000 ballots over a single failed barcode scan. Trump’s Solicitor General John Sauer told the Court that Alabama and other states begin mailing ballots this week and that once ballots are mailed “there is no retrieving them,” demanding an emergency stay before Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s deadline. That urgency is rich coming from an administration that cobbled together a secret anti-voting system in just weeks, after courts already told it to stop.

DHS’s Voter Fraud “Surge” Is Turning Up Almost Nothing

DHS’s “voter fraud surge initiative” is turning up almost nothing. Despite pulling agents off trafficking and drug cases to scour voter rolls in nine states, subpoenas reviewed this week show DHS asking for records on just 13 people in Georgia and roughly 15 in Wisconsin, a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of “potential noncitizens” the administration claims exist in each state. “The small numbers of subpoenas that they’ve issued show that this is not the widespread phenomena they wanted the public to believe it could be,” said former DHS official Andrea Flores. Meanwhile, ICE is still paying up to $5 million to comb through every state’s voter data, DOJ wants 1,000 election monitors this November, and DHS Secretary Mullin still won’t rule out sending ICE agents to polling places.

ABHI RAHMAN, Try And Stop Us Chief Spokesperson:

“Donald Trump wants his SAVE Act, mid-decade gerrymanders, and executive order gutting mail ballots because they’ll help Republicans rig elections they can’t win fairly. But whether any single fight succeeds in court or not, he's already winning something: confused voters, chaos in an election, and a pretext to suppress the votes of Americans he disagrees with. Voters shouldn't be confused, they should be angry, and they should vote in force, because our elections remain safe and secure no matter what Trump says.”