Zachary Roth is a national reporter for NBC News digital and the author of The Great Suppression: Voting Rights, Corporate Case, and the Conservative Assault on Democracy.

Donald Trump’s claims that the election will be “rigged” through voter fraud have become a centerpiece of his faltering campaign. There’s no evidence to support this incendiary charge, but the GOP candidate has been energetically spreading the notion that if Hillary Clinton wins, it will only be because thousands of illegal votes will be cast on Nov. 8. Polls now suggest that most Trump supporters fear the election could be stolen from their man.

Trump is right that fairness is going to be a problem this year. He’s wrong about where the problem really lies. In fact, the real voting problem we face in 2016 is almost exactly the opposite of what Trump is complaining about: Officials in at least five states, including several key presidential battlegrounds, have been dragging their feet on obeying court orders to open up access to the polls. As a result, rather than an epidemic of illegal, fraudulent votes, the election is likely to see tens or even hundreds of thousands of people across the country deprived of their constitutional right to cast a ballot.


The election wasn’t supposed to unfold this way. Over the summer and early fall, 2016 was shaping up as a landmark year for voting rights, as a string of federal court rulings struck down, blocked or loosened restrictive voting laws in key states across the country. In the three most significant decisions, North Carolina’s sweeping voting law was struck down, Texas’ voter ID law was significantly loosened, and a court required that Wisconsin promise to make voter IDs available on demand, seemingly blunting the impact of that state’s ID law. Voting rights supporters, who had fought for years against restrictions on who can register and when, breathed a cautious sigh of relief.

But as Election Day approaches, what’s actually happening on the ground in those states reveals a troubling reality: Important as they are, court rulings can’t adequately protect voting rights if election officials simply don’t want to make things easy for voters.

Wisconsin’s defiance has been the most glaring. Last month, U.S. District Judge James Peterson ruled that the state’s hyper-strict voter ID law could stay in place only if IDs were made freely available to any eligible voter who needed one. Lawyers for the state pledged that as long as voters went to a DMV office and presented whatever documents they had, they would get a temporary voter ID in the mail within the week. For voting rights advocates who wanted the law struck down entirely, it was far from a perfect solution—after all, requiring a trip to the DMV adds another burden, especially for working people. But it was far better than the previous situation, in which voters needed to present an array of underlying documents, like a birth certificate, just to get the ID.

Except that Wisconsin hasn’t kept to it. A voting rights group sent volunteers to DMV offices around the state, recorded their interactions with clerks, and shared the audio with reporters. Most of the clerks gave out incorrect information about how to get a temporary voter ID, and several didn’t even appear familiar with the process, instead instructing the volunteers to begin compiling the underlying documents previously required. “It’s very time-consuming,” one acknowledged. In response to the reports, Judge Peterson ordered the state to investigate what went wrong. But it’s no sure thing that things will be straightened out before the election, potentially leaving some portion of the estimated 300,000 registered Wisconsin votes who lack ID out in the cold.

It’s a similar story in Texas. After a federal appeals court found the state’s voter ID law to be racially discriminatory—the third federal court to rule against the law—a judge ordered that voters without an acceptable ID be allowed to vote by signing an affidavit swearing that they couldn’t get one. But some Republican supporters of the ID law are doing their best to discourage voters from using that option. The top election official for Harris County, which includes Houston, the state’s largest city, has warned that he’ll be checking every affidavit and referring anything suspicious to prosecutors. Attorney General Ken Paxton has issued similar warnings. “If you sign that affidavit and you lie about not being able to get a photo ID, you can be prosecuted for perjury,” Paxton declared in August. Voting rights advocates worry that could scare some voters without ID who are nervous about signing an affidavit into staying home.

And the affidavit solution works only if Texas makes sure voters hear about it. A judge described an earlier state public education campaign for the ID law as “woefully inaccurate,” and the new one may not be much more effective: The same judge found last month that the state used misleading language in its promotional materials about the new rules, and ordered them to revamp it just weeks ahead of the start of early voting.

Then there’s North Carolina, whose multi-pronged voting law was struck down by a federal appeals court, which found it had targeted black voters with “almost surgical precision.” Unchastened, the head of the state Republican Party urged local election boards, which are controlled by the GOP, to make “party line changes” aimed at restricting early voting hours and locations. Several counties, including the state’s largest, Mecklenburg, followed that advice, reducing total hours and locations from 2012 despite an increase in population. The result: During the first two days of early voting, several counties that cut voting locations saw sharply reduced turnout compared to 2012.

Other states’ maneuvers have flown further under the radar. In Ohio, a federal appeals court blocked Secretary of State Jon Husted from removing voters from the rolls simply because they hadn’t voted for six years and didn’t respond to a letter asking them to confirm their registration, and ordered that purged voters be restored. Husted, a Republican, complied, but failed to include the restored voters, as well as hundreds of thousands of others, on a statewide absentee ballot mailing, creating yet another hurdle. And in Kansas, state and federal courts ruled that Secretary of State Kris Kobach couldn’t keep voters off the rolls because they failed to provide proof of citizenship when they registered. Kobach, a staunch backer of restrictive voting laws, responded by adding the voters to the rolls without letting them know about it. Threatened with contempt of court, Kobach has now agreed to notify the voters that they’re registered.

It’s not that the summer’s hard-won court decisions were in vain. There’s no question they’ll make it possible for large numbers of Americans, disproportionately racial minorities, to cast ballots who otherwise might not have been able to. They may also help push the Supreme Court, if it gains a fifth liberal member, to issue a broad ruling cracking down on strict voting laws that seem to target racial minorities, as many do. But it’s now clear that, without buy-in from election officials, these court victories aren’t enough.

So what would be? Restoring the Voting Rights Act to full strength would help. Until the Supreme Court gravely weakened it in 2013, the law barred certain areas of the country, mostly in the South, from implementing new voting laws until the Justice Department had signed off on them. Had that system remained in place, the Texas and North Carolina laws would never have gone into effect.

But a full-strength Voting Rights Act likely would have had no impact in states like Wisconsin, Ohio and Kansas. Ultimately, in an age when some see partisan advantage in keeping certain voters from the polls, the only fool-proof way to put a stop these tactics is through the political process: by making support for voting restrictions toxic with voters, and defeating elected officials who seek to implement them.

That’s a long-term project, but access to the ballot going forward may depend on it.