What’s Happening
Tomorrow is Election Day, and millions of Americans are heading to the polls to make their voices heard. There is always a certain level of excitement that comes with Election Day, when months of campaigning come to an end and Americans across the country have their say at the ballot box.
But this year, that excitement also comes with growing concerns about voter intimidation and efforts that could make it harder for eligible Americans to cast their ballots.
Intimidation at the Polls
Voter intimidation is already a familiar experience for many Muslim Americans. According to the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU), 37% of Muslims reported facing an obstacle to voting in 2024, compared with 11% of the general public. Fourteen percent also reported being intimidated by private citizens, compared with just 2% overall.
Those disparities are an important context heading into tomorrow’s election. Over the past several months, prominent political figures have openly talked about bringing law enforcement into or around polling locations. Trump’s former White House’s chief strategist Steve Bannon called for ICE officials to surround the polls in November and went even further by calling for military personnel to be deployed, arguing that they were needed to prevent illegal voting. Voting by noncitizens, however, is not only a non-issue but also demonstrably false. Election protection groups have been preparing for the possibility of intimidation or disruptions in response, with thousands of volunteers trained to assist voters across the country.
That rhetoric has also entered one of the most consequential races for Muslim American representation this year. In Michigan, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed is running against Republican Mike Rogers and could become the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Senate. Rogers narrowly lost his previous Senate race in 2024 and has continued to question the results in Detroit, including with unsupported claims about ballots arriving after Election Day. Those claims resurfaced as Rogers discussed how Republicans should monitor the vote this year, when he called for retired or off-duty police officers to serve as poll watchers in Detroit and suggested that they could make their badges visible even without their uniforms. “Go ahead, try to intimidate them. Please,” Rogers said in a leaked audio. Although off-duty officers and law enforcement may serve as poll watchers, they are prohibited from intimidating voters and the President cannot call them to the polls.
Questioning Voters’ Citizenship
Voter eligibility has become another point of contention. Noncitizen voting is, of course, already illegal and incredibly rare, but in the final weeks of this election, the Justice Department has used federal immigration and citizenship records from the Department of Homeland Security to identify registered voters it believes may not be U.S. citizens, then asked states to prevent their ballots from being counted until their citizenship can be verified.
That effort first drew scrutiny in California, where the Justice Department went to court seeking to set aside roughly 20,000 mail ballots based on a federal list of voters it believed were likely noncitizens. A federal judge rejected the request after questioning the reliability of the government’s process, pointing to a similar review in Nevada where thousands of suspected noncitizens were eventually narrowed to 185 names and every one of those people turned out to be a U.S. citizen.
Days later, federal prosecutors sent Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs a list of 405 registered voters and gave his office 48 hours to determine their citizenship, asking that any ballots from those voters be set aside in the meantime. But when Washington officials began checking the names, they found that the list itself included U.S. citizens, duplicate entries, and people who were no longer actively registered to vote. Hobbs also said the federal government had not provided enough identifying information for the state to reliably match some of the names to voter records.
The timing makes the consequences immediate. Washington mails ballots to registered voters weeks before Election Day, which meant voting was already underway when federal prosecutors asked the state to determine the eligibility of hundreds of people within 48 hours. California faced the same basic request on a much larger scale, with thousands of ballots potentially being withheld while the government tried to determine whether the voters who cast them were actually ineligible.
Our Perspective
With the administration’s constant attacks on our political process,, it would be understandable to feel discouraged. When political figures openly talk about intimidation at the polls and eligible voters find their citizenship questioned, participating in our elections can feel more difficult than it should. But Muslim Americans have spent too many years fighting for a greater voice in American political life to allow that kind of rhetoric or intimidation to push us away from it.
That voice has grown considerably over the years, with Muslim Americans becoming more engaged in elections and more visible in American political life than ever. Muslim candidates are running for office across the country, our communities are organizing around the issues they care about, and we are increasingly represented in spaces where we once rarely saw ourselves. That progress came from years of people choosing to participate, even when doing so was difficult.
Of course, intimidation at the polls is not the only reason someone might feel discouraged about politics right now. Families are feeling the pressure of rising costs and struggling with the cost of healthcare. Parents are thinking about the schools their children attend and what kind of future they will have. Many in our community have spent years demanding a different response to the devastation in Gaza and people have spoken up about these issues, sometimes repeatedly, and have not always felt that our electeds fully listen.
We should be able to carry that frustration with us without allowing it to silence us or treating our participation as an expression of unconditional trust in the political system. Casting a ballot does not mean agreeing with everything a candidate has done, nor does participating require loyalty to a political party that has disappointed us. No party is entitled to the Muslim vote, and candidates should have to earn our support by listening to the communities they seek to represent and responding to the issues we care about.
And if we want our voices to carry beyond a single election day, our engagement has to carry beyond it too. That starts with voting all the way down the ballot today, especially in the races that may receive far less attention; it also continues with staying engaged with the people we elect once the campaign is over. Our political participation should reflect the full range of places where decisions affecting our communities are being made, not only the elections that dominate the national conversation.
None of our very valid frustrations should make it easier for others to decide whose voices are heard and which ones are pushed aside. Muslim Americans have worked too hard to claim our place in American political life to be intimidated out of it. So tomorrow, make your voice heard.
If you experience issues while voting today, the ACLU’s Know Your Voting Rights guide has information on your rights at the polls and steps you can take.
On Our Radar
Haley Stevens Endorses Mike Rogers Days Before Election Day
Rep. Haley Stevens endorsed Republican Mike Rogers just two days before Election Day, months after narrowly losing Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary to Abdul El-Sayed and subsequently endorsing him. Stevens appeared alongside Rogers at a Detroit church on Sunday and announced that she would vote for the Republican nominee while maintaining that she remains a Democrat. The endorsement was met with immediate backlash, with Stevens’s congressional staff resigning en masse and several prominent Democrats publicly condemning her decision.
DOJ Takes California Ballot Dispute to the Supreme Court
The Justice Department asked the Supreme Court on Monday, November 2, to intervene in its dispute with California over ballots cast by voters it identified as “likely” noncitizens. The request comes after both a federal district judge and the 9th Circuit rejected the DOJ’s effort to set aside those ballots while voters’ citizenship is verified. The appeal was filed just one day before Election Day, as new analysis found that 42% of the names on the DOJ’s list do not appear on California’s current voter rolls and that the list includes naturalized U.S. citizens.
Voters Are Rejecting the Smears Against Muslim Candidates
In a new Common Dreams op-ed, Emgage board member Afsheen Shamsi examines the Islamophobic attacks Muslim candidates continue to face when they run for office, from accusations of extremism to attempts to cast their faith as a reason to question their fitness to serve. Looking at the experiences of Zohran Mamdani, Adam Hamawy, and Abdul El-Sayed, Shamsi argues that these attacks have become a recurring feature of Muslim political participation even as more Muslim Americans run for office and win. She also points to research from the Rutgers Center for Security, Race and Rights documenting this pattern across more than 31 cases involving Muslim candidates between 2001 and 2026.