As the 2026 midterm elections enter the final stretch, it’s important to know your rights in case your vote is challenged.
The best way to ensure that your vote is counted is to advocate for yourself. I’m a an attorney and lecturer for the University of Southern California’s undergraduate civil rights advocacy initiative, Agents of Change. Here are several straightforward ways to ensure your vote is counted and two practical remedies for you to consider if your vote remains challenged.
A major part of ensuring that you are able to vote is doing the necessary preparation before you even get to the polling place. Read on to find out how and where to register, where and when you can cast your ballot, and what numbers to call for any information you can’t find online.
Are you registered to vote? Check it out
Before you vote, you need to ensure that you’re registered to vote. You can verify your registration status using this tool. If you can’t use an online tool, then call your local election office or a voter help line like the ones listed in the hotline section below.
If you find you’re not registered, you can use this tool from the National Conference of State Legislatures to find your state’s online registration application. If you need to do this in person, then call your local election office for instructions.
At this point, you may have missed your state’s deadline for voter registration. But it may not be too late to register.
Many states allow same-day registration at the polling site. You can find your state’s same-day voter laws detailed here. Ask the poll worker, at the correct polling location, for a same-day registration form; complete the form and then ask for a “conditional ballot.” A conditional ballot allows election officials to count your vote after verifying your voter eligibility. If you can’t research online, you can call your local election office to find out if you can register on Election Day.
Marchellos Scott, right, helps Morehouse College students fill out a voter registration form at a college registration booth on Aug. 19, 2024, in Atlanta.Elijah Nouvelage/AFP via Getty Images
Gather documents to verify your identity
If you live in a state that requires identity verification to vote in person, gather the required documents – which may range from a driver’s license to bank statements with identifying information – before traveling to the correct polling place. You can find your county election office’s contact information here. This webpage includes a table listing each state’s acceptable ID documents and possible exceptions for some people. You may also call your local election office to find out what’s required.
Absentee voters: Locate your state’s identity verification rules here.
Find the correct polling location
You can ensure that you’re headed to the right polling place with this tool. Or call your county election office to find your polling place and its hours of operation; you can look up your county’s election office contact information here.
Once you know your polling place and its hours, you can go there and check in. In most cases, you’ll be handed a ballot, shown where to vote and asked to put your ballot in a machine or a box, and then you can go merrily along your way.
But the moment of check-in is where things might go wrong.
Fake Query Letters by Dead Authors: A Satirical Craft
Guide to Writing Queries That Survive the Slush Pile, by David Brown
and Michelle
Barker (Darling Axe Publishing)
How-to books for authors abound in today’s market. Not
all the advice is worth taking. Indeed, much of it seems to be based on
outdated practices, flawed “conventional wisdom,” or is intended for novice
self-published authors. Very little is aimed at serious authors interested in
traditional publishing or established midlist authors scrambling to keep up
with today’s rapidly changing market. Much of it is contradictory and involves
a great deal of telling the author how to get an agent instead of showing
pitfalls and best practices.
The latest entry in this field is the delightful, highly
informative book, Fake Query Letters by Dead Authors: A Satirical Craft
Guide to Writing Queries That Survive the Slush Pile, by David Brown
and Michelle
Barker of Darling Axe. They open with this intriguing premise:
What if the greatest novels ever written had to
survive today's slush pile? No reputation to fall back on—just a cover letter
and first page... and an agent who's already read 200 queries before lunch.
Spoiler: most of them wouldn't make it.
Using five classic novels (Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering
Heights, The Scarlet Letter, Anne of Green Gables, and Jane
Eyre) they first demonstrate the worst possible way the authors could query
an agent and how to fix their disastrous mistakes.
Query guidelines for literary agents vary, but most include
a letter, synopsis, and sample pages, which are often the first chapter). We already
know (and, hopefully, love) the text, which gives us a foundation to evaluate each
horrible, rejection-guaranteed sample letter and synopsis. The authors invite
us to imagine ourselves as literary agents at the end of a punishing work week,
facing an Inbox jammed with queries. (So much fun!) What would tempt us to read
the entire query and then—oh joy!—request the entire manuscript?
Highly recommended for fiction writers at all stages of
their careers for whom a literary agent is appropriate. Also highly
recommended for indie (self-published) writers for invaluable insights into how
to craft a compelling novel and then present it at its best. After all, in
today’s overcrowded market, readers will decide to pick up a book on the same
basis of a dynamite pitch.
Whether in an Oval Office proclamation signing about commercial fishing or during a Fox News interview while discussing Iran, President Donald Trump finds opportunities to share his views on transgender people.
During a June 2026 signing event, Trump claimed, in response to a question about proposed legislation regarding election procedures, called the SAVE America Act: “We are talking about saving America, right? No men in women’s sports.” He continued, “And we have no mutilization of your children for transgender purposes … where your child leaves your house, and they take your child from you. … In six states, they take the child and do what they want to do. What they do is, is I don’t even want to talk about it. No transgender mutilization of your children.”
Meanwhile, public approval of Trump’s approach to trans issues is relatively high, as compared with his approval ratings on other issues.
A 2024 report by the Human Rights Campaign decried an “epidemic of violence” against trans and gender-expansive people. A 2025 Pew report found that 70% of trans adults have feared for their personal safety, and only 13% of LGBTQ respondents reported social acceptance of trans people.
Though the causes for changing trans views are complex, research suggests Trump’s rhetoric and policies have powerful influence, the ramifications of which are clear. Anti-LGBTQ+ laws and debates negatively affect young queer people, according to the Trevor Project’s 2025 U.S. National Survey on the Mental Health of LGBTQ+ Young People, and are associated with increased stress, discrimination and suicide attempts.
Trans people and their allies have pushed back against a recent wave of restrictions. Here, supporters rally for the Transgender Day of Visibility in March 2025.Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images
Moral panic as political strategy
From the Salem witch trials in the 17th century to the war on drugs in the 20th century, moral panics have emerged across history to stoke fear against a perceived threat to a society’s values or well-being.
Moral panics, coined by sociologist Stanley Cohen in 1972, follow a similar pattern: a threat is defined, media exaggerates the threat, public concern increases, authorities respond with laws and policies, and society is transformed.
Moral panics elicit a range of negative emotions, but disgust and paranoia are especially potent. Originally a response meant to protect us from disease and spoiled food, disgust has evolved to also express social inappropriateness. Disgust asserts that its object is inherently bad. Since disgust is culturally dependent, it can also be used to marginalize groups of people.
Meanwhile, paranoia focuses on visualizing and preparing for future threats. When experienced as an emotion – outside of psychiatric disorders – paranoia has a righteous undertone, as it seeks to uncover perceived enemies.
Disgust and paranoia are a powerful combination for sustaining moral panics. While disgust produces an intense, immediate physical feeling, paranoia is long-lasting, stewing and existential.
Stimulating disgust and paranoia
Trump’s offhand remarks often invoke disgust and paranoia against perceived enemies – for example, toward immigrants, whom he has repeatedly described as dangerous criminals. These same patterns emerge in the Trump administration’s formal communication regarding trans issues.
The release asserts that former President Joe Biden’s 2024 Proclamation of Transgender Day of Visibility “desecrated Easter Sunday with a ‘transgender’ message that elevated radical leftist ideology over faith, family, and biological truth.” Rousing paranoia, “radical leftist ideology” (and later in the release, “gender ideology”) is portrayed as an existential threat that puts Americans and their beliefs in danger.
The release also claimed that “the Trump Administration is celebrating a decisive victory: the swift and unrelenting dismantling of subversive, woke policies that endangered children, eroded women’s rights, assaulted common sense, and dragged America toward moral and cultural decline.”
As a rhetoric scholar, I read these allusions to religion and war – using words like “desecrate” and “victory,” respectively – as implications that the U.S. is in a battle between good and evil. Schools, hospitals, bathrooms, locker rooms, sports facilities and military bases are spaces declared under attack.
The release also condemns “the chemical and surgical mutilation of minors” and “child mutilation programs” – revolting imagery that misleadingly depicts gender-affirming care and incites shock, concern and disgust.
Similarly, invoking images of nonconsenting, victimized children and women, the release denounces “the un-American indoctrination of schoolchildren” and “the unfair, demeaning practice of forcing women to compete against biological men in sports.” Stimulating anger and moral panic, these descriptions encourage anti-trans views and discrimination.
Recognizing these rhetorical patterns is key to understanding how politicians use inflammatory language to denigrate trans people and other marginalized groups, including women, Black people and immigrants.
But four years later, one of the most impactful developments has been less visible: a significant, sustained and politically consequential shift in public opinion. In the wake of Dobbs, the debate over abortion rights did not simply return to the states. It fundamentally altered how many Americans think about the issue and how they vote.
In our recently published book, “Not Going Back: Public Opinion on Abortion in Post-Dobbs America,” we examined how and why these changes have occurred, and what they mean for U.S. politics. We believe the shift could have real consequences for the November 2026 midterms.
Post-Roe stability
Drawing on several nationally representative surveys conducted before and after Dobbs, we examined how Americans’ abortion attitudes, political priorities and voting behavior have changed in response to the most significant shift in abortion policy in half a century.
For nearly 50 years after Roe, public opinion on abortion was remarkably stable. In 1975, Gallup found support for legal abortion in certain circumstances at 54% and support for a ban in all circumstances at 22%. In 2021 – the year before the Dobbs decision – these figures were virtually the same: 48% and 19%, respectively.
Despite heated political rhetoric, most Americans held nuanced views. They were neither fully anti-abortion nor fully pro-abortion. Instead, they supported legal abortion in some circumstances and not in others.
That underlying stability shaped both policy and politics for decades. Republicans were able to rally a committed core of supporters around opposition to Roe, while the underlying constitutional right to access abortion remained unchanged.
As states moved quickly after the Dobbs decision to enact abortion bans and strict gestational limits, public opinion moved in the opposite direction.
Today, more Americans identify as pro-choice than they did before Dobbs. And, as we document in our book, more Americans are now taking absolutist positions. They support legal access to abortion in all or most cases and oppose government regulation altogether.
How Dobbs shattered the equilibrium
One of the most striking changes in the post-Dobbs era concerns who cares most about abortion. For decades, abortion was a higher priority for Republicans and those identifying as pro-life.
That dynamic has now flipped. In both 2022 and 2024, Democrats and pro-choice Americans were more likely than Republicans to say abortion was a top political issue shaping their vote. In our book, we document how in both 2022 and 2024, pro-choice Democrats were especially motivated to vote and remained highly loyal to Democratic candidates.
At the same time, the considerable minority of Republicans who support legal abortion found themselves politically cross-pressured, meaning they experienced conflicting political influences.
