The crit­i­cal 2018 midterms will deter­mine whether the 116th Con­gress can put the brakes on Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump and the Koch-Adel­son agen­da. The out­stand­ing ques­tion is: Will enough Demo­c­ra­t­ic vot­ers turn out Novem­ber 6 to over­come insti­tu­tion­al­ized efforts at vot­er suppression?

Will enough Democratic voters turn out November 6 to overcome institutionalized efforts at voter suppression?

In 1789, the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion allowed the states to deter­mine which of their res­i­dents would be allowed to par­tic­i­pate in elec­tions. Ini­tial­ly, all states extend­ed the fran­chise only to white men who owned land or paid tax­es. Since then, pro­gres­sive activists have fought — and died — to secure vot­ing rights, while the forces of reac­tion, present­ly incar­nate in today’s Repub­li­can Par­ty, have sought to lim­it who is grant­ed access to the bal­lot box.

For exam­ple, 6.1 mil­lion Amer­i­cans are denied the vote because of a felony con­vic­tion, a restric­tion that dis­pro­por­tion­al­ly dis­en­fran­chis­es peo­ple of col­or and the poor. Not coin­ci­den­tal­ly, 4.2 mil­lion are res­i­dents of the 11 states that were part of the Con­fed­er­a­cy, all of which cur­rent­ly have GOP-con­trolled leg­is­la­tures. In Flori­da, this restric­tion bars more than 10 per­cent of the vot­ing-age pop­u­la­tion from vot­ing.

Anoth­er tac­tic in the vote-sup­pres­sion tool­box is to require that vot­ers present spe­cif­ic forms of ID. In Texas, an esti­mat­ed 600,000 reg­is­tered vot­ers (and many more unreg­is­tered vot­ers) lack the required iden­ti­fi­ca­tion. Again, it is no acci­dent that such laws dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly affect peo­ple of col­or and the poor.

Not to men­tion peri­od­ic purges of the rolls, which the GOP has turned into an art form. Those purges accel­er­at­ed after 2013, when the Supreme Court, in Shel­by Coun­ty v. Hold­er, over­turned a 1965 Vot­ing Rights Act pro­vi­sion that reg­u­lat­ed elec­tions in 15 states with a his­to­ry of racial dis­crim­i­na­tion (includ­ing nine for­mer mem­bers of the Con­fed­er­a­cy). Between 2012 and 2016, for exam­ple, Geor­gia purged 1.5 mil­lion vot­ers — twice as many as between 2008 and 2012 — under the pre­tense that it was keep­ing the vot­ing rolls accu­rate and up-to-date. Such purges tend to tar­get black peo­ple who vote Demo­c­ra­t­ic, and are there­fore both racist and partisan.

The secu­ri­ty of vot­ing infra­struc­ture is also a con­cern, with vot­er reg­is­tra­tion rolls par­tic­u­lar­ly vul­ner­a­ble. Accord­ing to a July 13 indict­ment aris­ing from the Mueller probe, Russ­ian hack­ers tried to pen­e­trate the vot­ing sys­tems of 21 states in 2016. In Illi­nois, they accessed ​“names, address­es, par­tial social secu­ri­ty num­bers, dates of birth, and driver’s license num­bers” of approx­i­mate­ly 500,000 voters.

J. Alex Hal­der­man, a Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan com­put­er sci­en­tist, told the elec­tron­ic indus­try mag­a­zine, EE Times, ​“Rus­sia was in a posi­tion to do more dam­age than they did. They could have changed vot­er reg­is­tra­tion data, but they didn’t.”

On a relat­ed note, in July, the FBI report­ed that the pri­vate com­pa­ny that hosts Maryland’s vot­er reg­is­tra­tion sys­tem is con­trolled by Vladimir Potanin, a Russ­ian oli­garch with close ties to Russ­ian Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin.

All that is the bad news. The good news is that on the Left, elec­toral pol­i­tics is being enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly embraced, par­tic­u­lar­ly by young peo­ple. Accord­ing to Pew Research sur­veys, 2018 will see a record turnout of 18- to 34-year-olds for a midterm elec­tion. What’s more, 57 per­cent of mil­len­ni­als who are reg­is­tered to vote plan to vote for Democ­rats, and only 37 per­cent for Repub­li­cans. Vot­ing habits and polit­i­cal com­mit­ments are estab­lished when peo­ple are young. Giv­en the enthu­si­asm among youth for the com­mon sense social demo­c­ra­t­ic pro­pos­als of Bernie Sanders and ris­ing stars like Alexan­dria Oca­sio-Cortez, we have rea­son to hope that 21st-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca, marked thus far by law­less wars and hideous inequal­i­ty, may break its fever and begin a turn toward some­thing like com­mon decency.