Days after the FBI seized 700 boxes of ballots and voting records from the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia, President Trump called on Republicans “to take over the voting in at least 15 places” in advance of the next election, raising new fears that his administration plans to interfere in the midterms and beyond. “Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” Trump told former deputy FBI director and conservative commentator Dan Bongino on his radio show on Monday. “We have states that I won that show I didn’t win. Now you’re going to see something in Georgia where they were able to get, with a court order, the ballots. You’re going to see some interesting things come out.” Trump is once again saying the quiet part out loud, suggesting that the FBI raid in Georgia was a prelude to how his administration intends to interfere in state and local election processes in advance of the midterms. There are still many unanswered questions about the Georgia raid, such as why a criminal investigation has been opened into an election that took place six years ago and was audited three times and why Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was present for the operation when she is barred by law from participating in domestic law enforcement operations. The New York Times reported on Monday that Gabbard called Trump and put him on speakerphone with FBI agents who took part in the raid, which represents yet another erosion of democratic norms. I wrote last week that “the raid was as much about the next election as the one six years ago.” Trump confirmed that on Monday, making clear that his administration’s end goal is to seize control of election administration at the state and local level to prevent his party from losing power. As Trump and the GOP became more unpopular, the tactics they’ll use to attempt to remain in control are sure to become more radical and extreme.

While the country was still reeling on Wednesday from the killing of two Americans by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis, the Trump administration undertook one of its most blatantly authoritarian actions yet, deploying the FBI to seize ballots and voting records from the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia, a heavily blue area in metro Atlanta that has been an epicenter of the president’s conspiracy theories about the election he lost. “People will soon be prosecuted for what they did,” Trump vowed in Davos last week. Fulton County appears to be the newest victim of Trump’s long-running retribution campaign. The raid was as much about the next election as the one six years ago. The capture of ballots in a large urban county in a key swing state is exactly what Trump contemplated when he tried to overturn the 2020 election—federalizing the National Guard to seize voting machines, something he now says he regrets not doing—and sets a chilling precedent for how his administration might interfere in the midterms should Republicans lose the House, Senate, or key state races. > “If people are afraid to leave their homes to go to work or school or get > groceries, they’re definitely going to be afraid to leave their homes to > vote.” “The administration is using Fulton County as a blueprint to see what they can get away with elsewhere,” said Kristin Nabers, the Georgia state director of All Voting is Local, a pro-democracy group. “If they’re allowed to take ballots here, then what would stop them from seizing ballots or voting machines in any future election in a county or state where their preferred candidates lose?” In the past week, the different tactics the administration could use to interfere in the midterms have come into sharp focus. The Fulton County raid came just days after Attorney General Pam Bondi demanded that Minnesota hand over its full, unredacted voter roll to the Department of Justice as a way to “bring an end to the chaos in Minnesota,” which Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon denounced as “an apparent ransom to pay for our state’s peace and security.” On the multiple fronts, the administration is weaponizing the power of law enforcement, from the FBI to ICE to the DOJ, to target blue states and counties and coerce them into taking actions that benefit the administration and punish those who don’t comply. “To make release of the voter rolls a condition for ICE withdrawing from the state in Minnesota demonstrates this is really about power and control,” Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows told me on Thursday. “The federal government is trying to impose its will on the states. It signals what they’ve already indicated, which is they want more control over the 2026 election.” Bellows has experienced the administration’s strong-arm tactics firsthand. Maine was one of the first states the DOJ sued to demand access to its full, unredacted voter roll, which Bellows has strenuously refused to turn over. More recently, ICE launched a large-scale operation in the state last week, which led to more than 200 arrests. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who faces a tough re-election this year, claimed on Thursday that ICE had “ceased its enhanced operations” in the state. “A cynical view of why they’ve exited Maine is concerns that the backlash might topple Susan Collins and cost them a majority in the US Senate,” Bellows responded. She described the ICE raids in the state as “violent and chaotic” and said she worried that ICE operations targeting blue states could depress voter turnout in November. “If people are afraid to leave their homes to go to work or school or get groceries, they’re definitely going to be afraid to leave their homes to vote,” Bellows said. She noted that Maine has a special election for the state House of Representatives underway right now in Lewiston, which has a sizeable Somali community that has been targeted by ICE, and has been urging people that are afraid to go to the polls to cast absentee ballots instead. Bellows sees a connection between the DOJ’s demands for state voter rolls, ICE operations in Minnesota and Maine, and the seizure of ballots in Fulton County. “They seem intent on trying to influence the outcome of 2026,” she says, “because they fear accountability by the voters.”

On Saturday, the same day that ICE officers killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, US Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a pointed letter to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz stating that if he wanted to “bring an end to the chaos in Minnesota,” he should comply with some “common sense solutions.”  Those “solutions,” according to Bondi, included Minnesota providing the Department of Justice with access to the state’s complete, unredacted voter roll, which includes sensitive personal information like voters’ Social Security numbers, drivers license data, and party affiliations. Bondi claimed that the DOJ needed the state’s full voter roll in order to “confirm Minnesota’s voter registration practices comply with federal law.” But state election officials and election security experts say Bondi’s letter is an outrageous attempt by the Trump administration to coerce Minnesota into providing confidential voter data that could be weaponized by the president and his allies to amplify false claims of voter fraud, wrongly remove eligible voters from the rolls, and challenge election outcomes.  “That is simply a disgusting attempt to take attention away from Alex Pretti’s death,” said Joanna Lydgate, president of the States United Democracy Center, a group devoted to fair and secure elections. “It’s also a shakedown. They’re trying now to use the power of the federal government to scare Minnesota officials into handing over voter rolls and backing down on their protective policies. Trump wants that state voter data so that he has the ability to interfere with the upcoming midterm elections.”  Months before ICE agents killed Pretti and Renée Good in broad daylight, the DOJ had already requested complete voter rolls from 44 states and Washington, DC, including Minnesota, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Only eleven red states have complied with the request, with most others citing federal and state privacy laws that preclude officials from sharing voters’ personal information, not to mention the fact that states are in charge of running their own elections under the Constitution. The DOJ has since sued 24 states and counting, including Minnesota, which ranks highest in the country for state voter turnout and is often lauded as a model for having robust election security protocols. > “It is deeply disturbing that the US Attorney General would make this unlawful > request a part of an apparent ransom to pay for our state’s peace and > security.” As Mother Jones reported in December, these requests and lawsuits are part of a decades-long history of right-wing activists seeking private voter data to advance the unproven narrative that there is rampant non-citizen voter fraud proliferating across the US. That the DOJ is now using its considerable resources to promote the same repeatedly debunked theory represents a major escalation of these tactics.  As Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows—who has also been sued by the DOJ for voter roll data—told us: “The Department of Justice has the power to investigate, prosecute, and place people in jail.” Bondi’s letter raises the stakes of the DOJ’s demands for state voter roll data even further, according to Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, by suggesting that ICE will only leave Minneapolis if the state capitulates to the administration’s demands. “It is deeply disturbing that the US Attorney General would make this unlawful request a part of an apparent ransom to pay for our state’s peace and security,” he said in a statement on Sunday. The administration appears to want the voter data in order to construct an unprecedented national database of all registered voters, which it would share with the Department of Homeland Security. Such a database could be a prime target for hackers and could be easily weaponized to spread false claims of illegal voting, which could then be used to remove eligible voters from the rolls and challenge election outcomes. The Justice Department recently admitted that two members of Elon Musk’s DOGE team at the Social Security Administration may have handed over Americans personal information to an advocacy group working to “overturn election results in certain states,” and suggested they be prosecuted.  Three courts have recently ruled against the administration’s demand for such voter data. The first came in California, with U.S. District Judge David O. Carter ruling that the state did not need to hand over its voter list to the DOJ. “The Department of Justice seeks to use civil rights legislation which was enacted for an entirely different purpose to amass and retain an unprecedented amount of confidential voter data,” Carter wrote. “This effort goes far beyond what Congress intended when it passed the underlying legislation. The centralization of this information by the federal government would have a chilling effect on voter registration which would inevitably lead to decreasing voter turnout as voters fear that their information is being used for some inappropriate or unlawful purpose. This risk threatens the right to vote which is the cornerstone of American democracy.” A judge in Oregon indicated from the bench that he would rule against the administration while a third judge in Georgia dismissed the DOJ’s lawsuit against the state, indicating it was filed in the wrong jurisdiction. Weighing a federal lawsuit examining whether the Trump Administration’s “Operation Metro Surge” can continue in Minnesota, a federal judge also expressed outrage at the administration’s new demand for state voter data, asking the DOJ in court, “Is the executive trying to achieve a goal through force that it can’t achieve through the courts?” Bondi’s recent letter to Walz suggests that, after repeatedly losing in court, the administration is now using more aggressive methods, including exploiting a horrific tragedy, to get what it wants. “The administration has really shown its hand,” Lydgate says. “They’re using these violent ICE operations as a weapon to try to get states to change immigration policies, voter data, and to shrink their power. And the states are standing up, and they’re pushing back.”

In a big win for Democrats, a federal court panel on Wednesday upheld a new voter-approved congressional map in California that was designed to give Democrats five new seats in the U.S. House, offsetting the mid-decade gerrymander passed by Texas Republicans over the summer. Republicans challenged the map after voters overwhelmingly approved it last November, arguing that it was a racial gerrymander intended to benefit Hispanic voters. But Judge Josephine Staton, an appointee of President Barack Obama, and District Judge Wesley Hsu, an appointee of President Joe Biden, disagreed, finding that “the evidence of any racial motivation driving redistricting is exceptionally weak, while the evidence of partisan motivations is overwhelming.” They cited a 2019 opinion from the US Supreme Court ruling that partisan gerrymandering claims could not be challenged in federal court and concluded in this case that California “voters intended to adopt the Proposition 50 Map as a partisan counterweight to Texas’s redistricting.” Judge Kenneth Lee, an appointee of President Donald Trump on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, wrote a dissenting opinion, saying he would block the map because Democrats allegedly bolstered Hispanic voting strength in one district in the Central Valley, “as part of a racial spoils system to award a key constituency that may be drifting away from the Democratic party.” Republicans will surely appeal to the Supreme Court, but may not have better luck there. When the Court upheld Texas’s congressional map in November after a lower court found that is discriminated against minority voters, Justice Samuel Alito wrote a concurring opinion maintaining that it was “indisputable that the impetus for the adoption of the Texas map (like the map subsequently adopted in California) was partisan advantage pure and simple.” Though the Roberts Court has frequently sided with Republicans in election cases, it would be the height of hypocrisy for the Court to uphold Texas’s map, then strike down California’s. The California map is a major reason why Democrats have unexpectedly pulled close to even with Republicans in the gerrymandering arms race started by Trump. But the Supreme Court could still give Republicans another way to massively rig the midterms if it invalidates the key remaining section of the Voting Rights Act in a redistricting case pending from Louisiana, which could shift up to 19 House seats in the GOP’s favor, making it very difficult, if not impossible, for Democrats to retake the House in 2026.

Three South Carolina voters with disabilities, represented by the NAACP, filed a lawsuit on Friday against the state’s election commission and Republican attorney general Alan Wilson to challenge rules that limit how disabled voters can receive voting assistance, and who is eligible. South Carolina only allows voters “who are unable to read or write or who are physically unable or incapacitated from preparing a ballot” to receive ballot assistance, limiting that assistance to an immediate family member or “authorized representative”—and imposes felony penalties on any individual who helps more than five voters by either requesting or returning an absentee ballot.  The three voters challenging the law currently live in nursing homes, where many residents rely on staff members they trust to help them vote.  They contend that South Carolina’s draconian voting restrictions violate Section 208 of the Voting Rights Act, which commits to protecting the right for “any voter who requires assistance to vote by reason of blindness, disability, or inability to read or write” to receive such assistance from a person they choose. The Voting Rights Act has come under consistent attack by GOP-governed states, particularly in the wake of Republican upset losses and near-losses; those attacks have largely been upheld by the Supreme Court under the leadership of Chief Justice John Roberts, which has gutted some of the act’s crucial provisions and opened the door for an unprecedented wave of anti-voter state statutes. The new suit calls for the court to permanently block South Carolina from enforcing these limits and order the state’s election commission to oversee the revision of voter guidance to comply with the VRA. The South Carolina attorney general’s office did not respond to a request for comment; the state’s election commission said that it does not comment “on active legal matters.” As my colleague Julia Métraux wrote last year, polling stations are failing disabled and chronically ill voters in both Democratic- and Republican-leaning areas: “What may be accessible to some disabled people may not be for others. That’s why it’s crucial to move towards more accessible options.” 

It was National Voter Registration Day, and Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows was on her way to a small liberal arts college for a voter registration event. That’s when she learned the US Department of Justice was suing her over how she manages Maine’s voter registrant list. While the DOJ appearing as the official plaintiff was new, what the federal government sought through the lawsuit—access to Maine’s complete, unredacted voter roll file—was not. Bellows, a spunky, no-nonsense 50-year-old who grew up in a log cabin without running water, already had received a litany of demand letters, public records requests, and lawsuits throughout her five years serving as the top election integrity official in Maine. Citing the National Voter Registration Act, most of the requests for the state’s voter data had the ostensible aim of ensuring Maine was adequately removing the names of individuals who should not be on the voter roll. But this lawsuit was the first of its kind from the government itself. The September legal complaint was an escalation of a yearslong coordinated effort by conservatives to obtain voter roll data from numerous states, compare it to incomplete datasets they’d found on the commercial market, then attest that mismatches between the two are clear evidence of people illegally voting. The apparent goal: buttressing decadeslong, though still unproven, claims of rampant voter fraud and removing allegedly ineligible voters from the rolls, with potentially dire consequences for future elections. In the past, these sorts of legal gambits came from right-wing groups like the America First Policy Institute, a Trump-aligned think tank co-founded by Brooke Rollins, now the secretary of agriculture; the Dhillon Law Group, whose founder, Harmeet Dhillon, is now the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the DOJ; and the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), a conservative legal group whose former counsel, Maureen Riordan, now leads the DOJ’s voting section. Riordan and Dhillon remain in the same line of business, citing familiar statutes in their barrage of new lawsuits against state election officials like Bellows; the key difference now is that they are promoting their routinely debunked theories from within the US government. Specifically, from the highest law enforcement agency in the country. > “The election deniers are now ascendant in the federal government.” “The election deniers are now ascendant in the federal government,” says Bellows, who spent eight years as the executive director of the Maine ACLU before assuming her current post. “These requests are not unlike the requests that the organizations they used to be affiliated with have asked for years.” But unlike conservative legal organizations, she adds, “the Department of Justice has the power to investigate, prosecute, and place people in jail.” Riordan and Dhillon have been pursuing Maine’s voter information since July, when the voting section of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division sent Bellows a letter requesting the state’s unredacted registration list. Bellows wrote a careful response referencing federal court opinions and state statutes that preclude her from sharing the voter roll without appropriate redactions. In return, the DOJ sent her another threatening letter, followed by the ironically timed lawsuit on National Voter Registration Day. Maine isn’t the only state the DOJ contacted. Over the last six months, it has demanded full, unredacted voter rolls from dozens of states in an effort to create the federal government’s first-ever national database of registered voters, accompanied by their private information: party affiliation, voting history, Social Security numbers, driver’s license information, even physical characteristics. The DOJ has formally sued 14 states for the data so far, 12 of which are led by Democrats. (The sole exceptions are Vermont, which has a Republican governor but is otherwise deeply blue, and New Hampshire, where Republican Gov. Kelly Ayotte has publicly disagreed with President Donald Trump’s plan to redraw congressional maps in advance of the midterms to give Republicans more seats.) Bellows believes Maine was among the first two states to be sued “because of animus”—also known as old-fashioned retribution. The Justice Department already has tried to retaliate against Trump’s political enemies, such as former FBI Director James Comey, who investigated ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and New York Attorney General Letitia James, who sued Trump over allegations that he inflated the value of his real estate holdings. (A federal judge recently dismissed both indictments, ruling that the prosecutor who brought the charges had been unlawfully appointed. The DOJ is reportedly weighing whether to re-indict them.) Bellows, though lesser known, is likely on the administration’s radar for other reasons, too. Citing the 14th Amendment’s clause barring officials who “engage in” insurrection from holding future office, she attempted to remove Trump from Maine’s 2024 presidential ballot based on his connection to the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. But Bellows, who is now running for governor, may not be the only one harmed by the DOJ data grab and the spurious claims supporting it. In 2024, crude analyses of voter roll data by right wingers led election officials in Waterford Township, Michigan, and Virginia to remove duly registered voters from the rolls. So far, challenges like these have taken place on a much smaller scale: state by state or even county by county. The DOJ’s current effort to assemble every state’s voter data poses an exponentially larger threat to voting rights. More than a dozen state election officials, former DOJ staff, and election experts told Mother Jones that a national database of voter registration information could lead to massive data breaches of Americans’ private information and reinforce false narratives about the frequency of voter fraud—narratives Trump and his allies could weaponize to challenge election outcomes. Worse yet, the bad data could give Republican-led states cover to illegally cull eligible voters from their rolls, stopping certain people from voting at all. “These unprecedented demands for vast amounts of voter data are part of a larger pattern of actions indicating a reckless grab for power over American elections,” Bellows says. It could also lead to a vast expansion of the number of citizens who appear on Trump’s hit list—one that, depending on your personal data, may soon include you. The right-wing campaign to weaponize the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, which former Attorney General Eric Holder once called the “crown jewel” of the department, dates back more than two decades. After the election of President George W. Bush in 2000, National Review called for a radical restructuring of the division. “There may be no part of the federal government where liberalism is more deeply entrenched,” wrote national correspondent John J. Miller. “Republicans should work to gain more control over the civil rights division and its renegade lawyers.” > “My tentative plans are to gerrymander all of those crazy libs right out of > the section.” And a year later, that’s precisely what they did. Attorney General John Ashcroft tapped Brad Schlozman, a Kansas-based lawyer with no prior civil rights litigation experience, as deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights. His responsibilities included overseeing hiring and supervision for the division’s voting section, which enforces the Voting Rights Act and other federal voting laws. Schlozman did little to hide his disdain for the section he now led. “My tentative plans are to gerrymander all of those crazy libs right out of the section,” he wrote to a former colleague in July 2003. Schlozman embarked on a hiring spree of what he called “RTAs,” short for “right-thinking Americans,” recruiting lawyers from the Federalist Society, the National Republican Lawyers Association, and the Bush-Cheney campaign. A joint investigation by the department’s inspector general and its Office of Professional Responsibility found that “virtually all of the attorneys (97 percent) hired by Schlozman whose political and ideological affiliations were evident in the hiring process were Republican or conservative.” Veteran civil rights lawyers with decades of experience began leaving in droves, including the well-respected chief of the voting section, Joe Rich. Schlozman made Hans von Spakovsky, who had been among the first major figures in the GOP to push the myth of widespread voter fraud, de facto head of the section. Soon, the department’s political appointees overruled career lawyers to approve GOP-backed laws that were regarded as racially discriminatory, including a mid-decade congressional redistricting plan in Texas that eliminated two majority-minority districts and a Georgia voter ID law that disproportionately harmed Black voters. David Plunkert “You take an oath to uphold the laws of the United States,” Robert Kengle, the deputy chief of the voting section from 1999 to 2005, told Mother Jones’ Ari Berman in his 2015 book, Give Us the Ballot. “These guys didn’t believe in the laws of the United States. They came in to work for an institution for which they had the utmost contempt.” One of the attorneys hired by Schlozman was J. Christian Adams, a solo practitioner in Virginia who had served as a Bush-Cheney poll watcher in Florida. Rich described him as “Exhibit A of the type of people hired by Schlozman.” Adams helped bring the DOJ’s first-ever Voting Rights Act case on behalf of white voters, who claimed they were discriminated against by the Black head of the local Democratic Party in Noxubee County, Mississippi. Career lawyers viewed it as a perversion of the law, which was intended to protect Black voters who were disenfranchised by segregationist whites in states like Mississippi. By the end of the Bush administration in 2008, the DOJ’s inspector general found that Schlozman had violated federal law and committed misconduct by “improperly [considering] political and ideological affiliations in the recruitment and hiring of career attorneys in the Civil Rights Division.” But the anti-voting positions of the likes of von Spakovsky and Adams had already become institutionalized and were spreading within the GOP. A couple of years later, in 2010, Adams loudly accused the Obama administration of anti-white bias when the DOJ dropped a case he spearheaded alleging that white voters were intimidated at the polls in Philadelphia by the New Black Panther Party. An internal review found no evidence of improper political interference, but by this point, Adams had resigned in protest. He would go on to become head of the right-wing legal group PILF in 2015. In addition to filing lawsuits against local jurisdictions to force them to remove voters from their rolls, PILF published two reports in 2016 and 2017, “Alien Invasion in Virginia” and “Alien Invasion II,” that sought to validate Trump and his allies’ claims of widespread voter fraud by noncitizens. The reports, which included names, addresses, and private information like Social Security numbers, claimed that more than 5,500 noncitizens had registered to vote in Virginia and 1,852 people had cast nearly 7,500 illegal ballots since the late 1980s. “This is the real foreign influence on American elections,” Adams told Fox News. “Foreigners are getting on American voter rolls and, as we documented, casting ballots by the thousands.” PILF called on the Justice Department to bring felony charges against the voters it identified. Republican political activists drew up plans to post signs at polling places warning of voter fraud, which Adams said should be “in Spanish” to be “effective.” It soon became clear, however, that PILF had relied on faulty methodology. As Mother Jones previously reported, “Alien Invasion II” spotlighted the “astonishing” example of one voter, Maureen Erickson, who listed a Guatemalan address on her registration form. “Ms. Erickson voted in 14 different elections—most recently in 2008—before her registration was canceled,” the report stated. But it turned out that Erickson was a US citizen living in Guatemala as a missionary. “I think it is odd that they chose ‘Maureen Erickson’ as their poster child for voter fraud,” her husband, Todd Erickson, wrote in a letter to the Washington Times after it picked up the story. “There was obviously not much additional research done on the person that they held up as an example of this illegal activity.” When Virginia election officials warned PILF that it was using unreliable data—such as targeting individuals who did not check a citizenship box at the DMV—to identify “suspected aliens,” PILF staffer Logan Churchwell agreed in an email to Adams that their concerns could “be true.” But this was an opportunity, Churchwell said, to “convert pushback into official confusion to justify our call for a top-down overhaul.” “The fog of war favors the aggressor here,” added Churchwell, who remains research director at PILF. In 2018, four Virginia voters whom PILF falsely accused of voting illegally filed a lawsuit against Adams and PILF, accusing them of violating the Voting Rights Act and the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act—which empowers individuals to sue when vigilante groups threaten their 14th Amendment rights—through “a modern, covert, and particularly insidious method of voter intimidation.” PILF settled the case before it went to trial, with Adams agreeing to apologize to the plaintiffs and PILF pledging to redact sensitive personal information. The reports should have been a cautionary tale about the dangers of overhyped fraud claims and the misuse of sensitive voter information, but Trump and his allies were undeterred and determined to spread such misinformation to a much bigger audience. After claiming with no proof that he lost the popular vote in 2016 because 3 million people voted illegally, Trump brought back veterans of the Bush Justice Department, including Adams and von Spakovsky, as members of his Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. Von Spakovsky advised the commission to reprise the Schlozman-era playbook and exclude Democrats and “mainstream Republican officials and/or academics” from serving on it. He and Adams secretly advised Vice Chair Kris Kobach, then–Kansas secretary of state, on the commission’s first major action: a sweeping request for sensitive voter data from all 50 states, including party affiliation, voter history, and Social Security numbers. Kobach wrote that it would be “very helpful in the Commission’s work identifying fraudulent registrations and other forms of voter fraud.” But the request, made in June 2017, infamously backfired. The Republican secretary of state of Mississippi, Delbert Hosemann, told the commission to “go jump in the Gulf of Mexico.” His GOP counterpart in Louisiana said the “President’s Commission has quickly politicized its work by asking states for an incredible amount of voter data that I have, time and time again, refused to release.” Even Kobach, in his position as the top election official in Kansas, was unable to hand over voters’ Social Security numbers because they couldn’t be divulged by state law, nor could secretaries of state from Indiana, Maine, and New Hampshire, who also served on the commission. In the end, 21 states refused to provide any data, while the rest only partially complied. The commission had tried to validate Trump’s fraud claims, but it disbanded after less than a year while facing at least eight lawsuits. A draft staff report of its findings included a section on “Evidence of Election Integrity and Voter Fraud Issues” that was, tellingly, left blank. The commission’s failure should have put to bed the myth of widespread voter fraud once and for all—and prevented the federal government from ever again asking for such extensive information on voters. But Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election convinced more of his supporters that elections were rigged, emboldening groups like PILF to turbocharge their efforts to restrict access to the ballot. In the runup to the 2024 election, Trump and his allies filed scores of lawsuits designed to make it harder to vote and easier to question election outcomes. PILF, along with the RNC and Harmeet Dhillon’s law firm, were at the forefront of this legal onslaught. When Trump returned to the White House, an emboldened MAGA movement once again set its sights on transforming the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division and its voting section from a place that is entrusted with protecting people’s right to vote to one that jeopardizes it. “This administration is abandoning the congressional mandate that the division has to stamp out discrimination and protect vulnerable populations,” says Chiraag Bains, who served as a high-ranking official in the Civil Rights Division from 2014 to 2017. “They’re not just abandoning it. They’re actually weaponizing the power of the federal government to try to cut off access to the ballot.” A week after the 2024 election, Cleta Mitchell, a recent chair of PILF’s board (von Spakovsky is the current chair) and an attorney involved in Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, called on the administration to fire “every lawyer in the Voting Section and likely in the Civil Rights Division. They are not supportive of Pres Trump or MAGA. There has to be a reckoning.” The now-reinvigorated wolves were back in the henhouse. Two days after the inauguration, the department’s political appointees ordered the Civil Rights Division to freeze work on all new cases. Shortly thereafter, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, who had traveled to Pennsylvania in 2020 to amplify Trump’s false claims of voter fraud, was confirmed as US attorney general. The department put Mac Warner, a former West Virginia secretary of state who claimed that the CIA stole the 2020 election, in charge of the Civil Rights Division on an interim basis. Over the winter and spring, the Trump DOJ began systematically withdrawing from voting rights cases filed under the Biden administration, refusing in nearly every instance to meet with the career attorneys who worked on them. “There was an utter lack of interest in what the day-to-day work of the voting section entailed,” says one former lawyer in the Civil Rights Division. On March 31, when the department dropped a case challenging voting restrictions passed in Georgia in 2021, Bondi alleged that the Biden administration had “fabricated claims of false voter suppression.” “The press release from the Georgia case was insulting to all the career lawyers who worked on it,” says another former DOJ lawyer. “To call something fraudulent from the institution you now lead was deeply troubling.” Days later, the Senate confirmed Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump ally whose law firm had filed several lawsuits attacking voting rights, as head of the Civil Rights Division. Dhillon had amplified Trump’s false claims of fraud as a legal adviser to his 2020 campaign, calling on the Supreme Court to overturn the election results. Dhillon removed the division’s longtime mandate of stopping racial discrimination in voting from the section’s mission statement and instead pledged to address Trump-inspired priorities that included “preventing illegal voting, fraud, and other forms of malfeasance and error.” By the end of April, Trump’s appointees had dismissed every active case in the voting section and reassigned the section’s chief and five top managers to the obscure complaint adjudication office, the DOJ’s version of Siberia. Career attorneys who’d stayed during Trump’s first administration and thought they could survive Trump 2.0 decided to leave en masse. Just a few months in, more than 250 attorneys had departed the Civil Rights Division, 70 percent of the total staff, and the number of career attorneys in the voting section had shrunk from 30 to just three. At the end of May, Maureen Riordan, who had been litigation counsel at PILF during the Biden years, took over as acting head of the voting section. A 20-year veteran of the DOJ who spent much of her career in the voting section, Riordan had resigned when Biden took office. At PILF, she had focused on filing lawsuits against various states, aimed at obtaining their voter roll information for the purpose of analyzing it for purported fraud. When she returned to the DOJ under Trump, the department’s work had effectively become inseparable from the mission of the right-wing “election integrity” organizations whose leaders now staffed the new administration. With the MAGA takeover complete, the voting section launched its most audacious scheme yet, reprising the Trump administration’s demand for sensitive voter data from all 50 states. And this time, it would retaliate against those who refused to comply. A couple of weeks before the DOJ began demanding Maine’s voter rolls, PILF, Riordan’s old employer, sent its own letter to Bellows, alleging that its assessment of commercially available data and newspaper obituaries suggested there were more than 18,000 “apparently deceased” people on Maine’s voter rolls. Responding to that previously unreported accusation, Bellows called its claim a “damned lie from an organization that cares more about conspiracy theories than election integrity.” Churchwell, from PILF, says their data collection methods have evolved since 2017 to prioritize credit data over other “cheap” commercial options: “We’ve raised the standard. Your experts are in the wailing and gnashing of teeth in outer darkness stage of their activism, and my heart goes out to them.” For starters, every month, Maine’s 487 municipal election clerks review death records from the state’s vital records bureau and cancel the registrations of individuals who have died. As a fail-safe, Maine also compares its voter roll to the Social Security Administration’s Limited Access Death Master File at least once annually. Moreover, even if a deceased person’s name did appear on the voter roll for a short time, that does not mean a vote was illegally cast in their name. This wasn’t the first time PILF made such a claim. The group sued Michigan in 2021, alleging that its assessment of publicly attainable data showed there were 25,000 dead voters on Michigan’s rolls. A federal judge dismissed the claim in March 2024. In May, the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals rejected PILF’s argument a second time, concluding that Michigan makes an “inherently rational, sensible attempt at maintaining accurate voter registration lists.” (In November, PILF asked the Supreme Court to reconsider the lower court’s decision.) But PILF succeeded in advancing the voting fraud narrative—even if its lawsuit has so far failed. As is often the case, the rulings on the Michigan lawsuit didn’t get nearly as much attention as the claims that precipitated it. “Usually, sensational allegations of crimes go viral,” Bellows says, “and the less sensational finding that people are innocent often doesn’t have the same reach.” Most of the lawsuits—whether from groups like PILF or the mightier Justice Department—allege violations of the National Voter Registration Act. Congress passed the 1993 bipartisan law with the intention of making it easier to register to vote. Dubbed the “Motor Voter Act,” the law simplified voter registration by making the process accessible at DMVs and other public agencies across the country. The law also included a provision to ensure that state voter rolls, which were anticipated to add new voters, were properly maintained. The US Constitution assigns the responsibility of managing elections to the states, and consequently, the act doesn’t tell states how exactly they should maintain their rolls; it merely says they should “conduct a general program that makes a reasonable effort to remove the names of ineligible voters.” Bellows attests that Maine is doing just that. In February 2025, the state’s election division canceled 180,584 inactive voter registrations—the largest bulk removal in nearly 20 years. But the act’s open-ended language has provided an opening for election denialism crusaders, including the ones who now run the DOJ. > “Many election officials, including me, worry that the Trump administration > wants this information so that it could be used to target, harass, and > intimidate individual citizens.” “These groups are trying to weaponize the law in a way that’s contrary to the purposes of the statute,” says Bains, the former DOJ Civil Rights Division official, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “Most of these lawsuits that we’re talking about are aimed at pursuing mass purges of exactly the nature that the statute was written to prevent.” At least 40 states have received written requests from the Justice Department for their voter files, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. DOJ officials have said they eventually want the data from every state. So far, only two—Indiana and Wyoming—have complied, though the administration has adopted a harder stance in recent weeks. As of early December, the department has filed lawsuits against 14 states, beginning with Maine and Oregon. “On the surface, it may seem like regular oversight, but it’s not,” Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar argued during a September press briefing with the States United Democracy Center, a group devoted to fair and secure elections. “The DOJ has the backing of the federal government. They’re trying to use the immense power to intimidate states into complying.” At the same briefing, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson outlined multiple ways the data demanded by the department could be used vindictively. “Many election officials, including me, worry that the Trump administration wants this information so that it could be used to target, harass, and intimidate individual citizens, political adversaries, and potentially deter entire communities from voting,” Benson said. “It could also be used to pressure states to remove otherwise eligible citizens from the rolls based on pernicious or suspect information.” Administration officials have yet to explain their reasons for trying to create a national voter roll, but the DOJ confirmed to States Newsroom that the data was “being screened for ineligible voter entries.” The agency is working with the Department of Homeland Security to run voter information through Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, an online platform that provides access to various government databases in one place. Since its inception in 1987, the tool has been used to verify the citizenship of people applying for government benefits by checking alien identification numbers assigned to them by DHS. The Trump administration has dramatically expanded the tool in recent months, adding Social Security numbers and passport information to the system. As Mother Jones reported last month, DHS is also trying to connect every state’s driver’s license database to SAVE, so states can run their entire voter rolls through the database at one time. (A spokesperson for US Citizenship and Immigration Services, which administers SAVE, says states will need to ensure they are using the platform lawfully.) The allegation that noncitizens are flooding state voter rolls is not supported by any data. One 2016 survey of 42 voting jurisdictions by the Brennan Center found just 30 cases of possible noncitizen voting out of nearly 24 million votes. Statistically, that’s one ten-thousandth of 1 percent. Further, voter registration forms require Americans to affirm they are citizens, under penalty of perjury. The same form warns that those who lie could be fined, imprisoned, or deported. They’d also risk their future eligibility for citizenship. “To jeopardize that opportunity by voting just doesn’t make sense,” Nevada’s Aguilar says. While using SAVE to root out voter fraud is unlikely to turn up many—if any—noncitizen voters, the massive expansion of the program is likely to wrongly flag some American citizens as noncitizens, particularly naturalized citizens, newly married people who changed their last names, and people whose names don’t match on their documents (for example, a man whose license says Nick but whose passport says Nicholas). A lawsuit filed by the League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center in September warned that DHS and the DOJ are “encouraging and enabling” states to search their voter rolls against SAVE, which the lawsuit alleges may culminate in some states “purging voter rolls.” In November, a federal judge agreed that the new use of SAVE was concerning: “The Court is troubled by the recent changes to SAVE and doubts the lawfulness of the Government’s actions,” wrote Judge Sparkle Sooknanan. However, she declined to block the administration from using it because the plaintiffs hadn’t yet identified someone who had been directly harmed. Even if the DOJ doesn’t find any legitimate evidence of noncitizen voting, false matches would produce sensational headlines across the MAGA-verse, giving the administration more ammunition to undermine trust in elections. “My guess is they want the voter files to be able to say we have the voter files, and we know there are X or Y fraudulent people on it,” says Justin Levitt, who served as deputy assistant attorney general in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division under President Barack Obama. “It will be fiction, but now they’ll say it because they have them. Even if they find an infinitesimal number of wrong people on the rolls, they will lie about the numbers.” The DOJ declined to comment for this story. Beyond the possibility of voters being disenfranchised, the League of Women Voters and EPIC argue that every person’s federal right to privacy would be encroached by the DOJ and DHS sharing data among themselves and state governments. Congress passed the Privacy Act of 1974 specifically to prevent the federal government from creating “formal or de facto national data banks” or “centralized Federal information systems” that would integrate the personal data of Americans stored at separate agencies, the lawsuit points out. Add to all this the fact that a national voter file could also be a gold mine for hackers, especially as the Trump administration dismantles efforts to combat foreign and domestic election interference. “The danger is once you compile all this information, then hackers only have to go to one place instead of going to all 50-plus jurisdictions that run elections,” says Eileen O’Connor, who worked in the DOJ’s voting section for nearly a decade, including during Trump’s first term. “It’s just a hacker’s dream to have all of this private, sensitive information collected somewhere.” In its efforts to inspect state voter rolls, the DOJ is also, evidently, considering sharing Americans’ personal data with outside election denial groups. Rick Richards, a retired physician from Georgia with no experience as an election official, has met with Riordan and marketed his mass voter registration challenge system called EagleAI, which he helped develop with Cleta Mitchell’s support, to the DOJ. “We demonstrated the software to the DOJ. They like it. They would like to use it. Apparently, we can get data they can’t,” he said during a meeting hosted by Mitchell’s group, the Election Integrity Network, according to a transcript obtained by Mother Jones. “I am in conversation with them about letting us have a task, a federal task, to bring their data into what we’re doing and then be able to use the federal data, SAVE data, Social Security data, other data in here as well.” Despite its name, EagleAI uses no artificial intelligence. Like PILF, EagleAI relies on incomplete information, such as self-reported address changes registered with the US Postal Service and datasets purchased from private entities like utilities, credit card companies, or magazine publishers. Richards boasted on the same call that EagleAI flagged more than 50 percent of Fulton County, Georgia, voter registrations as “potential problems”—an indication of the system’s dubious accuracy. Had the right-wing election integrity skeptics behind EagleAI actually believed the county’s voter roll was teeming with fraudulently registered voters, they likely would have presented these concerns to local officials. But according to Nadine Williams, Fulton County’s director of registration and elections, that hasn’t happened; her voter roll is audited monthly using verified data sources, and she’s never heard from EagleAI, which she called an “unverified third-party group.” In response to questions from Mother Jones, Richards claimed that “the EagleAI Network program no longer exists,” even though his email signature still includes that affiliation and the group’s data was used to challenge more than 900 voters in New Jersey as recently as a month ago. If the DOJ takes up Richards on his offer to use EagleAI on state voter rolls the department is suing to collect, it wouldn’t be the first time Riordan has worked at a place that relies on faulty data to spread questionable conclusions about voter fraud. Normally, the DOJ’s voting section would work to prevent these kinds of efforts from affecting Americans’ ability to vote. Now, the voting section itself is in on the effort. “The main activity the section seems to be engaged in at this point,” says Levitt, the former deputy assistant attorney general, “is something illegal.”

On Tuesday, California voters passed Proposition 50, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s congressional redistricting proposal in response to Texas Republicans’ gerrymandered map, by a sweeping 28-point margin. As I reported in October, high-profile Democratic politicians—including former President Barack Obama—were front and center in an advertising blitz to pass the measure, which would tilt five seats in the House of Representatives towards Democrats. But on the ground in California, often with less media coverage, were legions of campaigners with civil rights and racial justice organizations, many of which tirelessly championed Prop 50 in the final weeks before the election—and are now celebrating its passage as a small step in the long fight for Black political representation. > “We understood that it was critical to counter what Donald Trump was trying to > do in Texas.” “There has been a long and steady march to kind of erode our voting rights,” said Phaedra Jackson, NAACP’s vice president of unit advocacy and effectiveness, reflecting on the conservative Supreme Court’s continuing attacks on the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In 2013, the Court eliminated the formula for preclearance, the mechanism by which the VRA prevented certain states and localities from passing discriminatory election laws; six years later, another ruling enabled partisan gerrymandering on a hugely expanded scale. In the years since, the turnout gap between white voters and voters of color has grown—and it’s done so nearly twice as fast in counties that were previously subject to preclearance, according to the progressive nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice. “A lot of folks have framed this as a partisan issue,” Jackson said. “We see it [as] an attack on the ability for Black folks and folks of color to actually have representation.” “You see what’s happened in Missouri, in Texas,” she added, pointing to states where minority representatives, such as Missouri Rep. Emanuel Cleaver and Texas Reps. Marc Veasey, Jasmine Crockett, and Joaquin Castro, all Democrats, were drawn out of their districts, and where the voting power of Black and Latino communities is being diluted. While local chapters of the organization continue to challenge the constitutionality of those maps in court, its goal in California “is to be a counterbalance.” That’s what led the NAACP, in the weeks leading up to the election, to become one of the measure’s biggest direct supporters, including by door-knocking and deploying hundreds of poll monitors across the state. The California Black Power Network, a coalition of 46 grassroots organizations across 15 counties, entered the fray later in the cycle. “We understood that it was critical to counter what Donald Trump was trying to do in Texas,” said Kevin Cosney, the coalition’s chief program officer. But the group waited until it could review the proposed new map—and judge its impact on Black voter representation—before entering the campaign.  Although Proposition 50 would mean 48 of California’s 52 House seats would now likely go to Democrats, the geographic and racial representation of its map is similar to the previous one drawn by the state’s independent redistricting committee, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. When it was convinced that Black voter representation and seats historically held by Black representatives were secure, the coalition’s members reached a consensus to support the measure through phone banking, canvassing, community events and ads.  For Newsom, and many of the measure’s backers in Sacramento, Prop 50’s massive success means it’s time to chalk a win. For racial justice campaigners like Jackson, it’s just “triaging a hemorrhaging situation”—even now, the Supreme Court is considering a Louisiana case that’s likely to further erode voting rights—that needs “long-term systemic fixes” like the decade-old John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which was reintroduced in Congress this summer. Cosney echoed the need for systemic change. While Prop 50 “sets the stage for what is potentially possible,” he said, “we still have to organize and do the work … to make sure that those districts that have been built out are filled by folks who have our best interest in mind.” “This was the kind of first opportunity that Californians really had to swing back,” said Cosney. “But it’s not the last.”

The GOP-controlled North Carolina legislature, which has already gone to extreme lengths to undermine the will of the voters, is set to pass a new Trump-inspired gerrymandered congressional map this week that is expected to give Republicans one additional seat heading into the midterms. It will make one of the most gerrymandered states in the country even more gerrymandered, likely giving Republicans nearly 80 percent of US House seats in an otherwise closely divided swing state where Trump won 51 percent of the vote in 2024. The state senate passed the bill on Tuesday in near record time, with the state house to follow shortly thereafter. The map targets the district of Democratic US House Rep. Don Davis, which has been represented by a Black member of Congress for more than three decades, shifting it from a district that Trump won by 3 points in 2024 to 12 points under the new lines. To make the district more Republican, majority-Black counties in eastern North Carolina’s Black Belt, including Davis’ home county, would be moved out of the district and replaced with majority-white counties that favor Trump. “In the 2024 election with record voter turnout, NC’s First Congressional District elected both President Trump and me,” Davis said in a statement on Tuesday. “Since the start of this new term, my office has received 46,616 messages from constituents of different political parties, including those unaffiliated, expressing a range of opinions, views, and requests. Not a single one of them included a request for a new congressional map redrawing eastern North Carolina. Clearly, this new congressional map is beyond the pale.” > “Instead of nibbling at the margins of participation, today’s strategies are > about cheating outright.” The new map continues the trend of Republicans eliminating the seats of Democrats of color in their unprecedented bid to redraw districts in as many controlled states as possible in advance of the midterms; Missouri’s congressional gerrymanderer dismantled the district of Black Democrat Emanuel Cleaver while Texas’ map, which launched the GOP’s mid-decade redistricting frenzy, seeks to remove three Hispanic Democrats and one Black Democrat from office. “Instead of nibbling at the margins of participation, today’s strategies are about cheating outright,” said Melissa Price Kromm, executive director of the pro-democracy group North Carolina For the People Action. Republican leaders in North Carolina have openly admitted that they drew the new map to placate Trump, with reports alleging that Senate Majority Leader Phil Berger spearheaded the effort in exchange for Trump’s endorsement in his contested primary. “We are doing everything we can to protect President Trump’s agenda, which means safeguarding Republican control of Congress,” Berger said. North Carolina has been ground zero for Republican gerrymandering schemes for more than a decade. The maps passed by North Carolina Republicans after the 2020 census were struck down by the Democratic majority on the North Carolina Supreme Court, leading to an even split in the state’s congressional delegation for the 2022 elections. But after Republicans won a majority on the state supreme court in that election, they overturned the court ruling blocking the gerrymandered map, allowing Republicans to pass a new gerrymander that gave the party three new seats in the 2024 election, which helped the GOP retain control of the US House. “We would have been in the majority if North Carolina hadn’t egregiously redistricted and eliminated three Democratic seats,” House Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D-Mass.) said after the election. That map, which earned an F from the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, attempted to oust Davis, a former Air Force captain and member of the state senate from 2013 to 2023, shifting his district from a Democratic advantage to narrowly favoring Republicans, but he survived in 2024, winning by two points even as Trump carried his district. A federal lawsuit alleges that his current district, which has been represented by a Black member of Congress since 1992, was drawn by Republicans to dilute Black voting strength. But now Republicans are redoubling their efforts to oust Davis, turning an F map into an F-. “Racist maps make racist reps!” protesters at the North Carolina capitol chanted before the state senate passed the bill. (In 2023, the legislature snuck in a provision to the state budget shielding redistricting records from public view, which could make it harder to challenge the new gerrymander in court.) “They want to lock in that no Democrat, especially no Black Democrat, can ever win again,” former Democratic Rep. Eva Clayton, who represented the first district from 1992 to 2003, as the first Black woman elected to Congress from North Carolina, said on Tuesday. It was a case originating in North Carolina that led to the Supreme Court effectively greenlighting extreme partisan gerrymandering in 2019, which has allowed Trump and his Republican allies to redraw districts for partisan advantage in state after state this year. In 2016, a federal court ruled that two of the state’s congressional districts were illegally racially gerrymandered. When Republicans, under the guidance of the late GOP redistricting godfather Tom Hofeller, redrew the congressional maps, legislative leaders openly admitted their top goal was to maintain a partisan advantage. “I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats, because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats,” said GOP state Rep. David Lewis, who oversaw the redistricting process. He conceded: “I acknowledge freely that this would be a political gerrymander, which is not against the law.”  The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, with Chief Justice John Roberts holding in Rucho v. Common Cause that partisan gerrymandered claims couldn’t be brought in federal court—a decision that turbocharged gerrymandering across the country.   Roberts claimed that the Rucho decision did not bar efforts to outlaw racial gerrymandering. But the Supreme Court just heard arguments in a case that could end the Voting Rights Act’s ability to stop racial gerrymandering as well, which would kill the last remaining protection of the landmark civil rights law. Such a ruling could jeopardize majority-minority districts across the country, shifting up to 19 seats to the GOP. North Carolina Republicans have long been at the forefront of GOP efforts to undermine democracy. The legislature convened a lame-duck session after the 2024 election that was supposed to focus on hurricane relief but instead stripped the state’s Democratic governor, Josh Stein, of the power to appoint a majority of members to the state and county election boards. The new state board is now controlled by Republicans with a long history of limiting access to the ballot who could use their authority to close polling places, cut early voting hours, and contest election outcomes. Already, a North Carolina Republican state supreme court justice, Jefferson Griffin, spent seven months trying to overturn the victory of his Democratic opponent Allison Riggs following the 2024 election. “They’re abusing their power to take away the people’s power, the voters’ power, because they’re trying to decide for the voters who their congressperson is,” said Stein, who does not have the power to veto the redistricting bill.   Now, the GOP’s toxic attempt to oust a Black Democrat in North Carolina is a disturbing preview of what a post-Voting Rights Act America will look like.

The Supreme Court, with its six-to-three Republican-appointed majority, appears ready to kneecap what remains of the Voting Rights Act’s protections for minority political representation. During Wednesday’s oral argument in Louisiana v. Callais, at least five conservative justices seemed ready to enfeeble the seminal civil rights law such that it will no longer stop white majorities from locking racial minorities out of elected office. After oral arguments, it’s clear that this cornerstone of American multi-racial democracy is in grave peril. > The conservatives are ready to wind the clock back to 1982, if not earlier. At issue in the case is Section 2 of the law, which requires that racial minorities have an equal opportunity to meaningfully participate in the electoral process. This provision has been used to strike down districting schemes and maps that prevented Black voters and other racial minorities from electing their preferred representatives. Since 1965, Section 2 has given people of color a seat at the table, from school boards to the halls of Congress. It appears this 60-year era is coming to an end.  “Race is a part of redistricting always,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor said, addressing the solicitor general from Louisiana, who was arguing against an existing map that had enabled the election of two Black members of Congress in his state. “What you’re saying to us [is]…’You can use [race] to help yourself achieve goals that reduce particular groups’ electoral participation, but you can’t use it to remedy that situation.'” Several GOP-appointed justices appeared uneasy with striking down Section 2 outright, and instead gravitated toward an approach advocated by the Trump administration which would preserve Section 2 in name only. The administration’s approach would allow states and localities to cut racial minorities out of the halls of power by claiming their maps were simply the consequence of respecting a state’s traditional redistricting principles and the legislature’s prerogative to seek partisan gain. While people of color could still go to federal court to claim they are being targeted by racial gerrymandering, it would be very difficult to prove that their plight was not the incidental result of partisan politics and historic district lines.  The Supreme Court’s recent precedents virtually ensure that this is a trap few disenfranchised plaintiffs will be able to escape. In 2019, in a decision by Chief Justice John Roberts, the GOP appointees held that federal courts have no role in policing partisan gerrymandering—a decision that greenlit our current moment in which President Donald Trump has demanded that his allies in state capitals redraw their congressional maps to give Republicans more seats. Then last year, in a decision by Justice Samuel Alito, the GOP majority ruled that lower courts should presume good faith on the part of legislatures charged with racial gerrymandering, if they maintain that party, not race, guided their map-drawing.  Being able to cite partisan motivation to deny minority voters equal opportunity in the electoral process would “swallow Section 2 whole,” Janai Nelson of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund argued Wednesday. “Party cannot trump the responsibility of states to ensure that all voters have an equally open electoral process,” she continued. “The idea that you have to show that party is the reason for the racially polarized voting would eclipse the entire Section 2 analysis, which is focused on ferreting out and ending race discrimination in the political process.” For several of the justices, however, that may not be a bug, but an alluring feature. Indeed, the Justice Department’s position gives the Republican appointees the opportunity to say they are simply interpreting Section 2 to comply with their own recent precedents on gerrymandering. Such a holding would make it extremely difficult to prove discrimination, without dirtying the GOP justices with the stain of wiping a hallmark civil rights law entirely from the books.  This case arose out of Louisiana, which drew a congressional map in 2021 with one black majority district out of six, even though Black Louisianans make up nearly a third of the state’s population. Multiple courts found this was a likely violation of Section 2, and so Louisiana redrew its map with a second majority-Black district. A group of non-Black voters then sued, alleging that this new majority-Black district was a racial gerrymander that discriminated against white voters. The question the court ostensibly considered at oral argument Wednesday was whether the creation of this second Black opportunity district violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection guarantee and the Fifteenth Amendment’s prohibition on racial discrimination in voting. > “The racially polarized political environment in Louisiana has become worse, > not better.” In their briefs, the lawyers for these non-Black voters, as well the state of Louisiana, pushed for a more aggressive rollback of Section 2. They argued that it should only address intentional discrimination, and not maps or policies with a discriminatory effect. Based on the justices’ reactions at oral argument, they might prevail in that claim. But it would be awkward for the court to outright ban a Section 2 effects test because it already did so in a 1980 case, Mobile v. Bolden. Two years later, Congress overruled the court’s interpretation and explicitly said that Section 2 can block apparently neutral electoral practices that nonetheless have discriminatory effects. If the court baldly overturns Congress’ sanctioning of such an effects test more than forty years later, it would be hard to make it look like anything besides defiance of the legislative branch. Instead, at Wednesday’s arguments justices considered other means to diminish or extinguish Section 2, including, as Justice Brett Kavanaugh pressed multiple times, enacting a time limit on its ability to require race-conscious maps to ameliorate racial discrimination. Justice Amy Coney Barrett appeared sympathetic, seemingly adopting the idea put forward by the non-Black voters that Section 2 may have been constitutionally warranted to enforce equality in 1965, but is no longer constitutional given current levels of discrimination. The idea, essentially, is that we have achieved some undefined benchmark of racial harmony that suddenly made Congress’ vision of Section 2 unconstitutional. There’s an irony to claiming that race-conscious remedies to racial discrimination are no longer warranted at the same time racial animus surges in our politics. In an amicus brief, Black legislators in Louisiana tell the court that “if anything, the racially polarized political environment in Louisiana has become worse, not better in recent years.” You don’t have to take their word for it. Just this week, Politico reported that a group chat of young Republican Party officials and staffers texted each other a constant stream of racial epithets and other derogatory language toward minority groups. Over approximately seven months of chat logs, “epithets like ‘f—-t,’ ‘retarded’ and ‘n–ga’ appeared more than 251 times combined.” But the reality is that the chat logs aren’t always leaked. It’s hard to prove intentional discrimination because it’s easy to hide, especially with the tools that the Supreme Court has already given to legislators to obscure racial targeting behind partisan maneuvering and the presumption of good faith. If the court’s conservative wing takes this path, it would ultimately be winding the clock back at least to 1982, if not earlier—a goal the chief justice has worked toward throughout his entire career. Roberts, then a young lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department, led the fight to weaken the Voting Rights Act during the 1982 reauthorization that overruled the court after Mobile v. Bolden. “Violations of Section 2 should not be made too easy to prove, since they provide a basis for the most intrusive interference imaginable by federal courts into state and local processes,” he wrote at the time. Roberts penned upwards of 25 memos opposing Section 2, arguing that it would lead to “a quota system in all areas.” The future chief justice argued that Section 2 should only be used to strike down instances of intentional discrimination, not laws that have the effect of discriminating against people of color. He lost that fight when Congress overwhelmingly reauthorized the law and reinstated the effects test—but now opponents of the VRA have resurrected Roberts’ arguments forty years later in the Louisiana case. Roberts has already succeeded in gutting the VRA on other fronts, most notably writing the majority opinion in the 2013 case Shelby County v. Holder, which held that states with long histories of discrimination no longer needed to approve their voting changes with the federal government. That eliminated the most effective part of the law. At the time Roberts wrote that the Shelby County ruling “in no way affects the permanent, nationwide ban on racial discrimination in voting found in Section 2,” but to no one’s surprise, opponents of the VRA are now on the verge of gutting the remaining provision of the county’s most important civil rights law. A decision overturning or crippling Section 2 would turbocharge the GOP’s current gerrymandering efforts. The loss of Section 2 would be devastating for communities of color and the Democratic candidates they tend to support, costing Democrats up to 19 House seats. As much as 30 percent of the Congressional Black Caucus could lose their seats, according to a report by Fair Fight Action and the Black Voters Matter Fund. Even by conservative estimates, Republicans could easily eliminate a half-dozen Democratic seats, leaving no Democratic representatives or majority-minority districts in Tennessee and Deep South states including Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Louisiana, where voting discrimination has historically been most prevalent.   Edward Greim, the conservative lawyer who represented the group of non-African-American voters that challenged the Louisiana map, asked the court to rule quickly so that Louisiana could draw a new map that would eliminate the seats of one or more Democratic representatives. The Supreme Court has already fast-tracked the case, which means that a ruling eviscerating Section 2 could come well in advance of the 2026 midterms, giving GOP-controlled states ample time to surgically eliminate Democrats seats and representation for communities of color. Beyond the midterms, weakening Section 2—however the justices choose to go about it—would almost certainly reconstitute state legislatures, city councils, judicial districts, and every other type of political boundary in which racial minorities could be excised from government. “The result,” as the Legal Defense Fund’s Nelson said at oral arguments, “would be pretty catastrophic.”

Donald Trump’s plan to rig the 2026 midterms through a series of unprecedented mid-decade gerrymanders shifted from Texas to Missouri on Wednesday, as the GOP-controlled Missouri legislature began a special session to pass a new redistricting map that would eliminate one of two Democrat-held US House districts and net Republicans an additional seat. If successful, the new map would give Republicans 90 percent of seats in a state Trump carried with 58 percent of the vote in 2024. The Republican leader of the state senate said the plan was designed “to be sure Missouri’s representation matches Missouri’s Christian conservative majority.” The map targets the seat of Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, one of two Black members of the state’s congressional delegation, by stretching his Kansas City-based district 200 miles east into red, rural counties that have little in common with the urban areas he’s represented for 20 years in Congress. Cleaver’s hometown of Kansas City, where he served as mayor before joining the US House, would be split into three districts to dilute Democratic voting strength. According to The Downballot, Cleaver’s district, which he won by twenty-four points in 2024, would now favor Trump by 18 points. > If successful, the new map would give Republicans 90 percent of seats in a > state Trump carried with 58 percent of the vote in 2024. “President Trump’s unprecedented directive to redraw our maps in the middle of the decade and without an updated census is not an act of democracy—it is an unconstitutional attack against it,” Cleaver said in a statement. “This attempt to gerrymander Missouri will not simply change district lines, it will silence voices. It will deny representation. It will tell the people of Missouri that their lawmakers no longer wish to earn their vote, that elections are predetermined by the power brokers in Washington, and that politicians—not the people—will decide the outcome.” After pressuring Texas to pass a new congressional map that is expected to net Republicans five new seats, Trump is now lobbying legislators state by state—much like he attempted to overturn the 2020 election— in an outlandish bid to prevent Democrats from retaking the House and investigating his administration. Even if California approves a new map that would offset Texas’s gains, Republicans believe they can net up to seven additional seats in a gerrymandering arms race, making it much tougher for Democrats to turn Trump’s unpopularity into a wave election. “Trump made the demand and all the Republicans folded,” says Sean Soendker Nicholson, a Democratic political consultant who’s worked on nonpartisan redistricting campaigns in Missouri for many years. “This would be the most extreme Missouri gerrymander since the Civil War.” Gerrymandering is not the only way Missouri Republicans are attacking democratic norms. Missouri Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe also asked lawmakers to severely restrict the state’s ballot initiative process after Missouri voters passed a slew of progressive policies in recent years, including redistricting reform, paid sick leave, a higher minimum wage, Marijuana legalization, Medicaid expansion, and a constitutional right to an abortion. > Missouri Republicans are trying to predetermine election outcomes through > extreme gerrymandering while taking away voters’ ability to do anything about > it. Instead of needing a simple majority to pass a citizen-led initiative, Kehoe’s proposal would require a majority of support in each of the state’s congressional districts (which the legislature is currently gerrymandering). That would allow 50.1 percent of voters in one district to thwart the will of a majority of the state’s voters overall. “You could get 90 percent of the vote to pass a constitutional amendment and it still wouldn’t pass,” says Nicholson. “It’s minority rule on steroids. It would allow any part of the state to veto something supported by the rest of the state.” The plan would still need to be approved by the state’s voters, likely in November 2026. It’s telling that the gerrymandering of congressional districts and the gerrymandering of the ballot initiative process are happening at the same time. Missouri Republicans are trying to predetermine election outcomes through extreme gerrymandering while taking away voters’ ability to do anything about it. Nicholson predicts these efforts will backfire, however. He says the Missouri courts will likely reject the mid-decade gerrymander because the Missouri Constitution states that redistricting must follow the decennial census. And he believes the state’s voters will oppose efforts to undercut the ballot initiative process. “Republicans are pulling out all the shenanigans,” he says. “People will see through what they’re trying to do.”