Facing increasingly dire polls, President Donald Trump is determined to prevent Democrats from reclaiming the U.S. House in the 2026 midterm elections. So he’s pressuring Republican-controlled states to give the GOP an unfair edge by gerrymandering their congressional maps. Texas, North Carolina, Missouri, Ohio, Florida and Tennessee have already done so. 

Now, more may join them in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais: Alabama, Louisiana and South Carolina may all join in, even though primary contests have already begun in some of those states.

Meanwhile, voters in California successfully authorized redraws that could lead to more blue seats, and state courts in Utah ordered a new map to end the GOP’s gerrymander that split left-leaning Salt Lake City across the state’s four congressional districts, giving Democrats another good pickup opportunity.

We launched the map above in October 2025 to provide a detailed overview of where states’ efforts stand now and where they might end up before the 2026 midterms. It includes all states that have taken formal steps toward redrawing their maps. We’ll continue to update if other states join the fray — as we expect they will.

For each state, we provide the partisan makeup of the congressional delegation today, and the expected makeup after 2026 for those states that have introduced proposals. We also show how the percentage of seats each party would win compares to its 2024 presidential vote share — perhaps the best way to measure just how egregiously gerrymandered the map is.

Text and Research by Claudia Ng, Social Media Specialist, Breaking News, Jen Rice, Reporter, Jim Saksa, Reporter, Design by Madison Coviello, Design Lead & Creative Strategist

The post Mapped: Where Redistricting Battles Are Unfolding Nationwide appeared first on Democracy Docket.

First, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, spurring a rush among Southern states to wipe out Democratic-held majority-Black seats that had been required by the landmark law. Then, Virginia’s high court nullified a referendum in which voters had approved a Democratic-backed map that would have given the party four additional seats to counter Republican gains elsewhere.

The twin rulings have given the GOP a clear, unearned edge in this fall’s midterms. 

But if Democrats are willing to play political hardball, that edge could be neutered by 2028. In fact, by doing their own partisan redraws in big blue states like New York, New Jersey, and Illinois — and trying again in the Old Dominion — the party could even potentially emerge from this scorched-earth battle with anywhere between a six- and thirteen-seat advantage over Republicans, according to a Democracy Docket analysis. 

It won’t be easy. In several states, they’ll need to get voters to amend state constitutions to bypass redistricting commissions, via lengthy and costly processes that are far from guaranteed to succeed — and they’ll need to win commanding majorities in a few state houses before they can even try. In some cases, they may also need to dilute minority voting power, which will risk angering perhaps its most important voting bloc.  And the GOP will likely keep redrawing wherever it can (but probably not South Carolina, where Republican lawmakers decided splitting the lone district held by Democrats there too risky).

It’s also worth noting the GOP likely won’t realize all the gains this fall that its gerrymanders were intended to secure. With Trump’s approval ratings at historic lows — a recent Pew Research Center survey found just 34% of Americans supported Trump — it’s expected to be a strong Democratic year. Pollster G. Elliot Morris estimates that, in reality, Republicans will net only six seats thanks to the redraws. So, if Democratic states do redraw maps after this year’s election, expect the baseline figures and pickup totals to change.

Pollsters and election prognosticators put the GOP’s congressional redistricting advantage at +4, meaning that Democrats need to win 4% more of the popular vote across the nation to break even with Republicans. As bad as that sounds, it’s roughly on par with the Republican’s advantage in 2018, when Democrats retook the House in commanding fashion. 

One note before we get to the numbers: For the two states (California, Utah) that might redistrict for a third time this decade, Democracy Docket used the predicted congressional delegation numbers after the 2026 midterms as a baseline to compare to the potential changes ahead of the 2028 elections, where California might gerrymander more aggressively for Democrats while Utah might re-gerrymander its maps for Republicans. 

Breaking down potential gains across parties

Potential Democratic gains:

• Colorado: 3-4 seats
• New Jersey: 2 seats
• New York: 3-5 seats
• Maryland: 1 seat
• Illinois: 1-3 seats
• Virginia: 4 seats
• California: 1-4 seats
• Wisconsin: 2 seats
• Washington: 0-1 seats
• Oregon: 0-1 seats

2026 redraws subtotal: 6 seats

2028 redraws subtotal: 17-27 seats

Total redraw gains ahead of 2028: 25-35 seats

Potential Republican Gains:

• Indiana: 1-2 seats
• Utah: 1 seat
• Kansas: 1 seat
• New Hampshire: 1 seat

2026 redraw subtotal: 15-17 seats

2028 redraw subtotal: 4-5 seats

Total redraw gains ahead of 2028: 19-22 seats

Potential Democratic redraw gain ahead of 2028: 6-13 seats

Democratic states joining the fight

Colorado

Congressional delegation today: 4 D – 4 R (50.0%-50%)

Potential delegation after redistricting: 8 D – 0 R (100%-0%)

2024 vote share: Harris 54%, Trump 43%

Democratic lawmakers launched the ballot initiative effort to scrap Colorado’s bipartisan redistricting committee in February. But before it can, 55% of voters will need to approve the constitutional amendment – a higher hurdle than 50% in most other states. The state has shifted further left in recent years and a new partisan map could give Democrats all of Colorado’s eight U.S. House seats, but seven might be more likely.

New Jersey

Congressional delegation today: 9 D – 3 R (75.0%-25%)

Potential delegation after redistricting: 11 D – 1 R (91.7%-8.3%)

2024 vote share: Harris 52%, Trump 46%

To bypass New Jersey’s bipartisan redistricting commission, a supermajority of Garden State lawmakers will need to enact an amendment to the state Constitution, and then voters would need to approve it in a ballot measure. Currently, the state sends 9 Democrats and 3 Republicans to the House. A redraw could make the split 11-1. 

Democrats already have high hopes of unseating Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R) from his swingy 7th District. Trump’s net approval is -19% in the 7th, a district that he won by 1% in 2024. And Kean, who has a frosty relationship with the press, recently missed nearly two months of votes with an undisclosed “personal medical issue.” 

Democrats have somewhat lower hopes of unseating Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R) from the 2nd District. Trump’s net approval is -7% there, a huge decline from his 13% margin of victory in 2024. 

New York

Congressional delegation today: 19 D – 7 R (73.1%-26.9%)

Potential delegation after redistricting: 24 D – 2 R (88.5%-11.5%)

2024 vote share: Harris 56%, Trump 43%

New York Democrats are on their way to overriding the state’s bipartisan redistricting committee, which requires a constitutional amendment passed in two consecutive state legislature sessions and public adoption via ballot initiative. Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) says she is all in on the fight, as is Jeffries. Assuming state lawmakers follow leadership here, and the state’s overwhelmingly Democratic voters give it their stamp of approval, a new New York congressional map could swing five seats to Democrats — although three or four maybe more realistic.

However, that would require breaking up a few majority-minority districts, centered in and around New York City, blending them with whiter communities on Long Island, and in Westchester and Rockland counties. 

Complicating matters will be New York’s own constitutional protections for minority voters. State courts struck down the congressional map adopted in 2024, saying that Staten Island’s 11th District unduly diluted the power of Black and Hispanic voters and ordering a new map. But the U.S. Supreme Court halted that decision in a shadow docket order in March. 

Reconsidering redistricting

Maryland

Congressional delegation today: 7 D – 1 R (87.5%-12.5%)

Potential delegation after redistricting: 8 D – 0 R (100%-0%)

2024 vote share: Harris 63%, Trump 34%

The Maryland House authorized new maps in February but Senate President Bill Ferguson (D) declined to bring it up. The map would have split up Republican Rep. Andy Harris’s seat on the Eastern Shore. Ferguson now faces a primary challenge from Bobby LaPin, which observers say will be tight. Even if Ferguson wins, Democrats could pressure him into allowing the redraw vote or oust him from his leadership position if he again refuses. 

If lawmakers do redraw the map, there’ll still be legal challenges to overcome in a state where Republican appointees to the supreme court outnumber the Democratic jurists. 

Illinois

Congressional delegation today: 14 D – 3 R (82.4%-14.6%)

Potential delegation after redistricting: 17 D – 0 R (100%-0%)

2024 vote share: Harris 54%, Trump 43%

Illinois is one of the few Democrat-dominated states that hasn’t adopted a bipartisan or independent redistricting commission, meaning it could redraw its maps tomorrow in a way that would make it all but impossible for Republicans to compete in any of its 17 congressional districts. But that would require splitting up a number of majority-Black districts and local lawmakers resisted proposals to do that when Illinois adopted its current map in 2021. Moreover, Illinois is already arguably the most gerrymandered Democratic state in the nation, so even if lawmakers there do decide to play hardball, they might go for picking up just one or two more seats, not all three now held by the GOP.

Democratic Redos

Virginia

Congressional delegation today: 6 D – 5 R (54.5%-45.5%)

Potential delegation after redistricting: 10 D  – 1 R (90.9%- 9.1%)

2024 vote share: Harris 46%, Trump: 52%

Virginia’s supreme court struck down the voter-approved redistricting on procedural grounds, holding that Democrats added their ballot question too late. They’ll be able to fix that hiccup before 2028, paving the way for a 10-1 redraw. 

As noted above, however, even with today’s maps in place, Democrats could pick up two or even three seats in Virginia, where the GOP’s quiescence as Elon Musk’s DOGE decimated government jobs has Republicans incumbents in hot water with voters.

California

Expected Congressional delegation after 2026: 48 D – 4 R (92.3%-7.7%)

Potential delegation after redistricting again: 52 D – 0 R (100%-0%)

2024 vote share: Harris 59%, Trump: 38% 

House Democratic caucus chair Pete Aguilar (Calif.) told Axios his state might take another crack at remapping. The current map, adopted by voters in November, projects Democrats winning 48 seats to the GOP’s 4. But an even more aggressive gerrymander is possible. As in other Democratic states, the partisan advantages would come at the cost of diluting minority voting power across multiple districts. How far Californian lawmakers would be willing to go remains unclear. 

Where Democrats dare to dream

Wisconsin

Congressional delegation today: 2 D – 6 R (50.0%-50%)

Potential delegation after redistricting: 4 D – 4 R (87.5%-12.5%)

2024 vote share: Harris 49%, Trump 50%

Before Democrats can go about undoing Wisconsin’s current, pro-Republican gerrymander, which gives the GOP six of the state’s eight U.S. House seats, they’ll need to reclaim control of the state house. Republicans hold the state senate by a three-seat margin and the state assembly by nine. The last time the GOP didn’t win both chambers was 2008, because after the party regained total control in 2010, Republicans went about adopting one of the most egregious state legislative gerrymanders and congressional gerrymanders. 

But Democrats have scored some wins in recent years, holding the governorship and gaining 5-2 advantage on the state supreme court, which is elected. While the gerrymandered legislative map has been thrown out, allowing Democrats to compete for control in Madison, the GOP-favored congressional map remains in place.* 

In what is shaping up to be a wave year for Democrats, flipping a couple of seats in the senate and a handful in the assembly seems doable. A recent poll by A Better Wisconsin Together, a progressive activist group, found voters in four assembly districts already preferred a generic Democrat over the GOP incumbent.

Democrats may already be poised to emerge from the midterms with a half of Wisconsin’s congressional seats. Republican Reps. Bryan Steil and Derrick Van Orden both narrowly won their 2024 reelections in a year where Trump won the state. But Trump’s net approval rating currently sits at -24% in Wisconsin. 

In addition to making those seats easier to defend (or challenge again), a new map could put another one or two GOP-held districts into play. But Wisconsin Rep. Mark Pocan (D) recently told Axios he doubts his party would try anything more aggressive, even assuming they win both legislative chambers in a landslide this fall. More likely would be a simply fair map reflecting Wisconsin’s closely divided electorate.

Washington

Congressional delegation today: 8 D – 2 R (75.0%-25%)

Potential delegation after redistricting: 9 D – 1 R (90%-10%)

2024 vote share: Harris 57%, Trump 39%

Before Washington could redraw its maps, it would need to set aside its redistricting commission first, and to do that, it’ll need to win a supermajority in this year’s legislative races. That seems unlikely, given that Democrats there see few strong pickup opportunities. 

But even if they could do that, Democrats already hold eight of Washington’s ten seats, making an additional gerrymander more difficult to pull off. 
That said, Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D) faces a tough reelection race this year. A recent National Republican Congressional Committee poll showed her trailing her GOP opponent. If a supermajority of Democrats in Olympia could tweak the congressional map, it would help Gluesenkamp Perez (or another Democrat) either retain or retake the seat in 2028. And maybe — just maybe — pick up another.

Oregon

Congressional delegation today: 5 D – 1 R (83.3%-17.7%)

Potential delegation after redistricting: 6 D – 0 R (100%-0%)

2024 vote share: Harris 55%, Trump 41%

Democrats have the votes in Salem to draw out Rep. Cliff Bentz’s (R) seat, in theory. But the Oregon state legislature’s quorum rules allow the minority party to effectively shut down any proceeding by running away. They would need a supermajority to get past that hurdle, and that seems unlikely. 

Republican Redraw Renewal

Indiana

Congressional delegation today: 7 R – 2 D (77.7%-33.3%)

Potential delegation after redistricting: 9 R – 0 D (100%-0%)

2024 vote share: Trump 58%, Harris: 40%
After a handful of Republicans in the Indiana senate rebuked Trump’s demands for a new map, the vengeful president spent $7 million in primaries against them, winning most of the contests. It seems unlikely that Indiana Republicans will dare defy Trump again. A new map could eliminate either one or both of the two seats Democrats currently hold.

Utah

Expected Congressional delegation after 2026: 3 R – 1 D (100%-0%)

Potential delegation after redistricting: 3 R – 1 D (75%-25%)

2024 vote share: Trump 60%, Harris: 38%

Utah Republicans fought like hell to keep the state supreme court from replacing its 4-0 congressional gerrymander with a new map giving Democrats a shot in a Salt Lake City area seat. While those efforts fell short of blocking the map, a GOP pressure campaign did lead to the resignation of the supreme court justice who penned the decision. It’s very likely Republicans will try to resurrect their old map again before 2028.

Nebraska

Congressional delegation today: 3 R – 0 D (100%-0%)

Potential delegation after redistricting: 3 R – 0 D (100%-0%)

2024 vote share: Trump 59%, Harris: 39%

Democrats hope to win the Omaha-area seat being vacated by retiring Rep. Don Bacon (R) this year, a district Kamala Harris won in 2024. But while it’s technically non-partisan, Nebraska’s unicameral legislature is dominated by Republicans and the incumbent Republican governor is favored to win reelection this fall. That means any Democratic joy in Nebraska’s 2nd district might be short lived. 

Iowa

Congressional delegation today: 4 R – 0 D (100%-0%)

Potential delegation after redistricting: 4 R – 0 D (100%-0%)

2024 vote share: Trump 56%, Harris: 43%

Democrats have high hopes to compete across Iowa this year, with strong candidates for governor and senate at the top of the ticket. Along with Trump’s tariffs, rising fuel and fertlizier costs caused by the war in Iran have hit farmers in this agricultural state hard. 

Democrats fell just a few hundred votes short of winning the 1st and 3rd Districts in 2024 and the 2nd District could be competitive this year with incumbent Rep. Ashley Hinson (R) running for senate instead. 
But the GOP controls a supermajority in both state legislative chambers and the governor’s mansion. If Republicans hold onto their iron grip on Des Moines, they will face considerable pressure to redraw maps to preserve their 4-0 advantage.

Kansas 

Congressional delegation today: 3 R – 1 D (75%-25%)

Potential delegation after redistricting: 4 R – 0 D (100%-0%)

2024 vote share: Trump 57%, Harris: 41%

Democrat Laura Kelly currently occupies the gubernatorial mansion in Topeka, but Republicans hold supermajorities in both the state house and state senate. While Kelly’s veto pen has blocked many partisan bills, she’s term-limited and can’t run again this year. If the GOP wins the governor’s race, they might try to gerrymander away the state’s lone competitive seat, currently held by Rep. Sharice Davids (D).

New Hampshire

Congressional delegation today: 2 D – 0 R (100%-0%)

Potential delegation after redistricting: 1D – 1 R (50%-50%)

2024 vote share: Harris 51%, Trump 48%

Even though the GOP controls a trifecta in New Hampshire, Republican Gov. Kelly Ayotte declined to answer Trump’s redistricting call last summer. While the state normally votes to send Democrats to Washington, locally Republicans perform quite well. If Ayotte runs for reelection and wins — she has yet to announce — she’ll likely face pressure to redraw the congressional map again. 

*Plaintiffs in some of these lawsuits were represented by the Elias Law Group (ELG). ELG Chair Marc Elias is the founder of Democracy Docket.

Jen Rice, Matt Cohen, Yunior Rivas, Adeline Toile, Maya Bodinson and Jacob Knutson contributed to this report.

The post Don’t despair, Democrats! How the party can get even, or pull ahead, in the gerrymandering war appeared first on Democracy Docket.

The measure had already passed the Illinois House and was designed to write Voting Rights Act-style safeguards into the state constitution.

If approved by voters, the proposed amendment would have directed mapmakers to ensure that no voter is denied an equal opportunity to participate in the political process or elect representatives of their choice because of race.

But after the Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, Senate President Don Harmon (D) said Democrats would not move forward with placing the initiative on the November ballot, saying lawmakers needed more time to avoid “unintended consequences.”

“We want to spend a little bit of time unpacking the Supreme Court decision to make sure we get it right and protect the voting rights of Illinois residents,” Harmon said. “It’s much better and much more important to get this correct than to do it quickly. The worst thing that would happen is if we rushed and there were unintended consequences that undermine people’s voting rights.”

The decision means voters will not get to weigh in on the measure in 2026.

The Illinois episode offered an early sign that the fallout from Callais may reach far beyond the district maps at the center of the case. The ruling did not just dismantle a federal pathway for challenging discriminatory maps. It also appears to have placed Democratic lawmakers in a legal bind as they try to let voters rebuild some of those protections themselves.

And for democracy advocates, that chilling effect points to a much larger problem.

As the Supreme Court decimates protections for fair representation, voters may be forced to rely more heavily on ballot measures and referendums to protect democracy themselves.

“The Callais decision underscores why the people’s tool is so important,” Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, executive director of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, told Democracy Docket. “As communities continue to lose meaningful representation within traditional governing institutions, efforts to restrict access to citizen-led policymaking become even more consequential. Protecting the ballot measure process, defending voting rights, strengthening legal protections, and building long-term multiracial governing power are inseparable.”

Illinois shows how Callais can constrain even pro-voting efforts by making state-level protections harder to draft. While at the same time, it has immediately emboldened Republican officials in other states to use the same weakened legal landscape to override or obstruct voters who try to check gerrymandered power directly.

Fields Figueredo said attacks on the ballot initiative process are part of a broader pattern of using procedural rules to limit voter power — the same dynamic seen in the wake of Callais. 

“People are going to need to rely on the people’s tool even more to build a democracy that not only reflects them, but actually serves them,” she said. “We could see more redistricting-related proposals on the ballot because of this ruling, as politicians move to challenge and eliminate existing majority-minority districts.”

The result, she said, is a democracy squeeze.

As representative democracy becomes less responsive, direct democracy becomes more necessary. And as ballot measures become more necessary, they become a bigger target of GOP and anti-democracy activists.

Republicans have gerrymandered not just without voter input, but in direct defiance of it

Across several states, voters have used the ballot box to impose democracy protections that courts, including the Supreme Court, and legislatures have been unwilling to provide.

In Florida, voters approved the Fair Districts Amendments in 2010, adding anti-gerrymandering protections to their state constitution. The amendments prohibit maps that favor one political party over another.

More than a decade later, those voter-approved protections became the center of a new fight over redistricting.

On Monday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed a new congressional gerrymander that could give Republicans an advantage in four additional races in the 2026 midterm elections. The new map packs Democratic voters into fewer districts, weakening several Democratic-held seats.

Voting rights groups quickly sued, arguing the map violates the voter-approved ban on partisan gerrymandering.

But DeSantis’ office has gone further than defending the map on political grounds. As lawmakers debated the proposal, his general counsel argued that Callais effectively invalidated Florida’s entire voter-approved amendment.

That argument exposed one of the most immediate ways Callais could reach beyond federal redistricting litigation.

Florida voters tried to strengthen representative democracy through direct democracy. Now GOP officials are invoking the Supreme Court’s ruling to challenge the very guardrails voters put in place.

A similar struggle recently played out in Utah, where voters approved Proposition 4 in 2018 to ban partisan gerrymandering. But two years later, the Republican-controlled Utah Legislature attempted to repeal the ban, reduce an independent commission to an advisory role and allow lawmakers to impose their own maps. 

But the Utah Supreme Court last year held that when voters use the ballot initiative process to reform government, those reforms are constitutionally protected from legislative actions that would impair them. The court revived a challenge to the Legislature’s repeal and replacement of Proposition 4, writing that government-reform initiatives cannot simply be nullified by lawmakers.

Utah showed both the power and fragility of direct democracy. Voters used the initiative process to demand fairer maps, but GOP lawmakers moved almost immediately to weaken the reform, taking years of litigation to revive the principle that voters’ government-reform measures deserve protection.

Missouri, meanwhile, presents a different but perhaps more direct warning sign.

After Republican lawmakers passed a mid-decade congressional gerrymander that would give the GOP an additional seat by cracking a Democratic-held Kansas City district, voters turned to a core democratic tool available to them under the Missouri Constitution: the veto referendum.

If successful, the referendum would give Missourians a direct chance to reject a gerrymander pushed through the Legislature without voter approval.

But Republican officials have fought outright that vote. Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway (R) sued to block the referendum, while Secretary of State Denny Hoskins (R) disputed the validity of signatures collected.

The battle has also extended to the wording voters may see on the ballot, a common focus of GOP officials. A Missouri appeals court had to rewrite the ballot summary for the referendum after finding that parts of the secretary of state’s description included biased and misleading claims about the GOP map.

If GOP officials succeed in silencing the voice of Missouri voters, the gerrymander could shape the very election cycle that the referendum was meant to stop and make the post-Callais carnage even more brutal.

Voters have used the ballot box to counter gerrymanders, Republicans have rushed to invalidate them

Direct democracy has not only been used to restrain gerrymandering through neutral reforms. In the rapidly escalating redistricting war, voters have also been asked to authorize Democratic countermeasures to Republican power grabs.

That contrast has become one of the defining features of nationwide struggle and could become even more pronounced post-Callais.

Republican-led states have moved aggressively to pass new maps through legislatures, without direct voter approval. But in states like California and Virginia, Democratic efforts to counter those maps went directly to voters — and then faced Republican lawsuits seeking to block or overturn the results.

In California, voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 50, a temporary congressional map endorsed by Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and other Democratic leaders in response to GOP gerrymandering in Texas. The measure asked voters whether the state should adopt interim district lines aimed at flipping five Republican-held seats. 

A federal court later rejected a Republican lawsuit seeking to block the proposal after voters signed off on it.

“Republicans’ weak attempt to silence voters failed,” Newsom said after the ruling. “California voters overwhelmingly supported Prop 50 — to respond to Trump’s rigging in Texas — and that is exactly what this court concluded.”

Virginia then tried to follow a similar path — until Republicans managed to nullify the will of voters.

Last month, more than 3 million Virginians cast ballots in a statewide referendum that authorized new congressional districts, which could have helped Democrats gain as many as four additional U.S. House seats. 

But almost immediately after voters approved the amendment, Republican-backed lawsuits sought to block the result. A conservative judge later blocked certification of the vote, and Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones (D) appealed.

On Friday, the Virginia Supreme Court ultimately sided with Republican challengers and struck down the voter-approved plan. The ruling restored Virginia’s existing congressional map and delivered a major victory to Republicans ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

Jones warned the ruling invalidating the vote struck at the heart of democracy itself.

“This decision silences the voices of the millions of Virginians who cast their ballots in every corner of the Commonwealth, and it fuels the growing fears across our nation about the state of our democracy,” Jones said in a statement. “The Republican-led majority of the Supreme Court of Virginia contorted the plain language of the Constitution and Code of Virginia to give it a meaning that was never intended, which allowed them to reach the wrong legal conclusion that fit their political agenda. The consequences of their error are grave.”

California and Virginia together show that ballot measures and referendums remain a powerful tool in the struggle for a just democracy — but also how quickly that check becomes a target when voters use it to curb Republican power.

The contrast is stark. 

In Republican-led states, new maps have often been enacted through legislative power alone, often in opposition to the will of voters. While in Democratic-led states, countermeasures were presented to and approved by voters — only for Republicans to then try to invalidate those votes.

The dynamic is likely to grow more extreme after Callais.

The Supreme Court ruling gives Republican-led states more room to defend aggressive and unpopular maps. And as those maps proliferate, voters in blue and purple states may increasingly be asked to approve countermeasures at the ballot box.

The result is an escalating struggle not just over district lines, but over whether voters are allowed to use direct democracy to respond when legislatures manipulate representation. If voters use ballot tools to check gerrymandered power, Republican officials are visibly and increasingly trying to make sure they don’t stand.

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“We need only update the framework so it aligns with the statutory text,” Alito wrote about the VRA’s Section 2, which Congress enacted to ban racially discriminatory voting laws.

But legal experts, voting rights advocates, and even the VRA’s loudest foes all agree with Justice Elena Kagan: “[I]n fact, those ‘updates’ eviscerate the law.”

“Under the Court’s new view of Section 2, a State can, without legal consequence, systemically dilute minority citizens’ voting power,” Kagan wrote in her dissent. “Of course, the majority does not announce today’s holding that way. Its opinion is understated, even antiseptic.” 

Harvard University law professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos went further, writing on X: “Sure, Section 2 wasn’t officially struck down. But it might as well have been. It’s now useless to minority voters under virtually all circumstances.”

Some of the loudest backers of the redistricting war launched by President Donald Trump last year seemed to agree. 

“While not overturning section 2 of the VRA, [Callais] construes it into near-irrelevance. All minority voters are entitled to is that the map drawers NOT use race as a metric in drawing their maps,” wrote Will Chamberlain, senior counsel at the far-right Article III Project. “No more majority-minority districts.”

“You have to understand how brilliant Alito is,” Chamberlain added. “This is actually *better* than getting rid of section 2 outright, because it means section 2 can be used to CHALLENGE majority-minority districts (for impermissibly using race).”

“This is huge,” Trump’s former campaign manager, Brad Pascale, wrote on X. “If states are aggressive, we could see a healthy majority in the House perpetually.”

Election law experts and civil rights leaders said the exact same thing, only in mournful notes. 

“Today’s decision is a bullet in the heart of the voting rights movement,” Rev. Al Sharpton said in a statement. “The Supreme Court has not just weakened a law, it has humiliated and dismantled the life’s work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, and every man and woman who marched, bled, and died for Black Americans to have an equal voice at the ballot box.”

In the decades before Congress enacted the VRA in 1965, lawmakers would draw maps that split or “cracked” minority — mostly Black — voters across multiple districts, all but ensuring that they would be unable to elect someone who would represent their interests. Congress sought to ban that practice with Section 2 of the VRA. And when the Supreme Court in 1980 ruled that plaintiffs suing under Section 2 had to show discriminatory intent, Congress amended the law two years later to ban any voting “standard, practice, or procedure… which results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.” 

Congress further wrote that a practice results in the denial of the right to vote when “based on the totality of circumstances,” it’s shown that racial minorities “have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.” 

But Alito’s ruling in Callais basically pretends Congress never did any of that, as Jay Willis wrote in Balls and Strikes. 

“The Callais requirements come not from Congress, but from the imaginary version of the statute that Alito and company wish Congress had passed instead,” Willis argued. “Throughout, the majority is acting as an unelected, unaccountable miniature legislature whose members, as Kagan writes, made their ‘own assessment’ of what things the Voting Rights Act ought to protect against, and ‘concluded that preventing racial vote dilution’ is not among them.”

The VRA was a huge success, as UCLA Law professor Rick Hasen noted in the first of his many reactions to the Callais decision, “leading to the election of scores of minority-preferred candidates in Congress and on the state and local level.” Since the VRA’s enactment, the number of Black U.S. Representatives rose from less than 10 to more than 60, and those elected from the South — where roughly half of America’s Black citizens reside — went from zero to nearly 30.

Now those gains are at risk. Following Callais, Republican lawmakers in Alabama and Louisiana are now sprinting to redraw their congressional maps to eliminate all of the two states’ majority-minority districts, which are currently held by four Black Democrats. 

“This decision will bleach the halls of Congress, state legislatures, and local bodies like city councils, by ending the protections of Section 2 of the act, which had provided a pathway to assure that voters of color would have some rudimentary fair representation,” Hasen wrote. “It’s the culmination of the life’s work of Chief Justice John Roberts and Samuel Alito, who have shown persistent resistance to the idea of the United States as a multiracial democracy, and a brazen willingness to reject Congress’ judgment that fair representation for minority voters sometimes requires race-conscious legislation.”

Hasen wondered why Alito obscured the real impact of his ruling behind reams of legal sophistry, calling him a “coward.” 

“[H]e’s either lying to himself or to the rest of us about the future of the Voting Rights Act,” he wrote in a separate piece for Slate.  

Kagan noted that Alito turned the link between race and party preference — what used to be “practically an element of a vote-dilution claim” — into an excuse. And relying on the Court’s decision in Rucho v. Common Cause, which held that even though partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional, it’s a nonjusticiable political question beyond the courts’ abilities to resolve, Alito said VRA plaintiffs need to “disentangle race from politics” by proving that race inspired the line drawing, not partisanship. 

Good luck with that, said Kagan. 

“But under the majority’s new test, when those two facts coexist — which is almost everywhere Section 2 has purchase — a plaintiff will have to show — contrary to Section 2’s clear text and design — that the legislators were ‘motivated by a discriminatory purpose.” Kagan wrote. “And that, as Section 2’s drafters knew, is well-nigh impossible.” 

Under the new standards —which Alito cast as minor tweaks to the 40 years of jurisprudence built on the court’s 1982 decision, Thornburg v. Gingles — minority voters challenging a racially gerrymandered map will need to provide an alternate version that still accomplishes the mapdrawers’ original partisan goals. In other words, plaintiffs lose unless they can come up with another map that maintains the status quo, i.e. a new map that still favors Republicans.

Adam Serwer summarized the logic in The Atlantic thusly: “Discriminating against Black voters is okay because they vote for Democrats.” The Brennan Center for Justice’s Michael Li decried its “utter incoherence.” 

“It’s remarkable how the Supreme Court went from ‘partisan gerrymandering is bad but we can’t figure out how to police it’ in 2019 to ‘nakedly partisan goals override the Voting Rights Act’ in 2026,” Li wrote.

An execution 44 years in the making

While Alito may have delivered the finishing blow to the VRA, Roberts has stabbed at it for almost the entirety of his legal career. As a young attorney in President Ronald Reagan’s Department of Justice, Roberts wrote a memo arguing for a narrow reading of the VRA in general, and specifically against the ultimately-successful effort in Congress to amend Section 2 to prohibit voting laws that were racial discrimination in effect, and not just intentionally so.  

Roberts began a far more successful assault on the VRA in 2013 with his majority opinion in Shelby County v. Holder. That ruling invalidated Section 5 of the act, which forced states with histories of racial discrimination to get the DOJ’s approval before amending voting laws. 

Since Shelby County, minority voter participation has dipped, as a 2024 paper in the Journal of Public Economics showed. “Results show that Black, relative to white, turnout among registered voters decreased by about 1 percentage point, with larger effects in counties with greater Black and Hispanic populations,” the authors wrote. 

Then in 2021, Roberts joined Alito’s majority opinion in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, which kneecapped Section 2’s ability to block discriminatory voter registration laws.  Like he later would in Callais, Alito nullified the law without saying it, as Hasen noted. 

“Justice Alito made it impossible for plaintiffs to win their cases, leaving Section 2 on the books, but essentially toothless,” Hasen wrote. “Since Brnovich, as I showed in a recent law review article, no plaintiffs have brought successful suits under Section 2 challenging a law alleged to suppress votes.” 

Throughout the Roberts Court’s systemic dismantling of civil rights protections, the conservative justices have argued that racism’s stain on the nation’s past has all but completely faded. “[S]ocial change has occurred throughout the country and particularly in the South,” Alito argued, pointing to a smaller racial gap in voter participation. 

“Black voters now participate in elections at similar rates as the rest of the electorate, even turning out at higher rates than white voters in two of the five most recent Presidential elections nationwide and in Louisiana,” he wrote. 

But as political scientist Kevin Morris noted on Bluesky, Altio cherry picked those figures; the two elections in question were in 2008 and 2012: when Barack Obama, our nation’s first Black president, was on the ballot, and before Shelby County axed Section 5 of the VRA. 

The idea that Americans only see political racism in black-and-white news reels during history documentaries is sadly belied by recent history. Just weeks before Callais, Republican lawmakers in Louisiana rushed to eliminate a county criminal court clerk position that Calvin Duncan, a Black man who was exonerated of a murder after spending decades behind bars, won with 68% of the vote. 

And in the small, predominantly Black hamlet of Newbern, Alabama, white residents handed the mayorship down to one another for decades until a Black man named Patrick Braxton filled out the paperwork to run in 2020. As the only candidate on the ballot, he automatically won. But instead of recognizing Braxton’s victory, the white town officials locked him out of town hall and held a secret election to reinstall themselves.

NPR’s Hansi Lo Wong predicts Callais will pave the way for “the largest-ever decline in the number of Black representatives on Capitol Hill,” one even bigger than the drop at the end of Reconstruction. And the impact might be even starker at the local and state level, the Brennan Center’s Li noted.

As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg noted in her Shelby County dissent, tossing out a civil rights law “when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

Ashley Cleaves contributed to this report.

The post Alito says Supreme Court is just updating the VRA, not killing it. That’s false appeared first on Democracy Docket.

The immediate wave of filings and court orders offers a stark preview of what’s to come as the heart of the VRA becomes almost impossible to enforce and the consequences unravel ahead of the 2026 elections.

At the center of the rapid shift is Section 2 of the VRA — the plank that has long allowed challenges to discriminatory maps and election rules.

In Callais v. Louisiana, the court said Section 2 violations require a “strong inference” of intentional discrimination, not just evidence that a system disadvantages minority voters. That significantly raises the bar for plaintiffs and opens the door for states to push and defend maps that reduce the power of Black and brown voters and that would have previously faced serious legal hurdles.

Courts are reconsidering active voting cases

In Mississippi and Florida, courts are scrambling to assess how Callais reshapes ongoing voting rights litigation — even in cases that were nearing resolution.

A federal court in Mississippi had found that the state’s Supreme Court districts violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by diluting Black voting strength. But following the Supreme Court’s ruling, the judge has now ordered both sides to submit new briefing on how Callais affects the case and what happens next.  

The move throws uncertainty into a case that had already produced a win for voters — raising the possibility that the ruling could now be reconsidered and overturned under a stricter legal standard.

A similar dynamic is playing out in Florida, where a trial over alleged racial gerrymandering in state and congressional maps has concluded and a decision was pending. Instead of issuing a ruling, the court has directed the parties to address how Callais should factor into the outcome.

Together, the developments show how quickly Callais is injecting uncertainty into active voting rights cases — delaying decisions and forcing courts to reevaluate claims that were litigated under a very different understanding of the Voting Rights Act.

State officials are moving quickly to shut down claims

In Indiana, state officials are already using Callais to try to dismantle a voting rights case outright — offering one of the clearest early examples of how the nationwide ruling is devastating local Section 2 claims.

The lawsuit challenges Indiana’s system of appointing some judges in certain counties rather than electing them, arguing the policy reduces opportunities for Black voters to elect candidates of their choice. 

In a new filing, state defendants argued that the plaintiffs’ claims fail under the Supreme Court’s updated interpretation of the Voting Rights Act, pointing to Callais as controlling authority. They contend that Section 2 applies only in narrow circumstances and does not cover the kind of claims at issue in the case — a sweeping argument that, if accepted, could bar similar challenges moving forward.  

The filing also leans heavily on the court’s emphasis that Section 2 requires a “strong inference” of intentional discrimination, not just evidence that a policy has a discriminatory impact on minority voters.  

In practical terms, that shift could make many voting rights claims far more difficult to bring — or easier for states to defeat at an early stage.

Defendants further argue that plaintiffs failed to “disentangle race from politics,” echoing language from Callais that raises the bar for proving discrimination in cases where race and partisan voting patterns overlap — as they often do.  

The arguments preview how Callais may be used to narrow — and even eliminate — entire categories of voting rights claims, particularly in cases where pro-voting plaintiffs rely on evidence of disparate outcomes rather than explicit proof of discriminatory intent.

Republicans are asking courts to let them gerrymander

In Alabama, state officials are dashing to capitalize on Callais — urging the Supreme Court to act quickly in a separate case so they can regain control over congressional mapmaking.

Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen (R) filed a motion asking the court to expedite consideration of the state’s long-running redistricting case in light of the new ruling, signaling that officials see an opportunity to reshape the legal landscape in their favor.  

“As the appellant in Alabama’s redistricting case, I have taken the legal measures necessary, in cooperation with Alabama’s Attorney General Steve Marshall to ask the US Supreme Court to take quick and decisive action which will allow Alabama to pursue congressional maps that reflect the will of the people,” Allen said. “It is my hope that our right as Alabamians to draw districts will be swiftly restored and that the days of court appointed mapmakers will be behind us.”

The request underscores how Republican-led states are positioning Callais as a tool to limit court oversight and move more aggressively on gerrymandering — particularly in cases where courts had previously intervened to protect Black voters.

If successful, the push could clear the way for new, aggressive GOP maps ahead of the 2026 elections, reshaping districts under a legal standard that now makes it harder to challenge discriminatory outcomes.

And they are suspending ongoing elections

Even with the Supreme Court’s ruling, the Callais case itself remains unsettled — and its ripple effects are disrupting active elections.

After the Supreme Court struck down Louisiana’s congressional map, the case was sent back to a lower court to determine what happens next, including what map should be used for upcoming elections.  

But before that process could play out, Louisiana officials took the extraordinary step of suspending congressional primaries that were already underway — halting voting midstream to give lawmakers time to draw a new map.

The move has triggered a separate lawsuit alleging the state is unlawfully nullifying votes, underscoring how the uncertainty created by Callais is spilling beyond courtrooms and into elections themselves.

At the same time, plaintiffs in the original case are pushing for a swift resolution, urging courts to move quickly to implement a new map or impose one if the legislature fails to act — warning that further delays could leave upcoming elections in limbo.

Trump officials signal a broader push

The effects of Callais may extend even further — with Trump administration officials signaling they are ready to use the ruling to attack voting rights nationwide, including in states like California where maps were drawn to protect fair representation.

A day after the decision, U.S. Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) called on the Justice Department to review congressional maps across the country and identify districts “improperly drawn using race,” urging officials to reopen Section 2 cases and issue new guidance reflecting the court’s ruling.

“Senator — we are ON IT!” Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon wrote in response.

The exchange signals that a law long used to protect minority voters could now be deployed to target the very districts created to ensure those voters have a voice.

The post Demise of Voting Rights Act already hurting minority voters across the country appeared first on Democracy Docket.

In the first half of the week, the EAC, a bipartisan commission created to help states administer elections, heard local officials’ concerns about the Supreme Court’s pending decision on mail voting, an alarming new voter registration data initiative.

Toward the end of the meetings, several election officials were left alarmed and angered by the Trump administration’s recent unexplained actions against a federal committee that helps create guidelines for voting equipment.

Democracy Docket was among the few outlets covering the gatherings. Here are four big takeaways you need to know:

1. Local officials wary of pending SCOTUS decision 

During the first day of meetings, local election officials from the EAC’s Local Leadership Council (LLC) said they were very worried the Supreme Court’s pending decision on state grace periods for late-arriving mail ballots could unleash chaos before the upcoming midterm elections.

The court, which is hearing the Republican National Committee’s challenge to Mississippi’s grace period, could send election officials in 14 states and D.C. scrambling to inform voters that they could be disenfranchised if they don’t mail their ballots on time.

One official said the court’s pending decision was “akin to a natural disaster” because they don’t know when or how it will come.

Officials asked the EAC for assistance in informing voters of the potential effects of the court’s decision. However, the commission said its hands were tied until it received a legal interpretation from the Department of Justice of the court’s ruling.

2. ‘ERIC by the Feds’ alarms 

Several LLC members were also alarmed by a proposed resolution that would ask the EAC to pursue the creation of an expansive voter registration data-sharing network between states.

Many voter registration data exchange initiatives already exist, like the nonpartisan Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), but the network proposed this week would be the first located inside, and partially funded by, the federal government.

Several officials said they opposed the federal government’s involvement in the exchange of voter registration data between states, saying the prospect raised severe privacy concerns and security risks.

The proposal comes as the Trump administration has embarked on an effort to create a national voter registration list — a vast trove of election data the federal government has never had and that it likely lacks the authority to collate and maintain.

After Democracy Docket reported on officials’ concerns about the proposed network, the LLC tabled the resolution until its annual meeting next year. Despite the decision to postpone an official vote on it, the resolution is technically still active.

3. ‘I don’t want to talk’

Christy McCormick, the EAC’s Republican vice-chair, really did not want to talk to Democracy Docket this week. She said she had calls to make and lunch to eat.

It wasn’t surprising. Last year, we broke news on the conspiratorial rant she made against Democrats during a panel with a Trump-aligned organization. She claimed Democrats promote and rely on votes from “illegal citizens” to win elections. 

Asked Wednesday if she regretted her comments, McCormick did tell us one thing: her comments, apparently, were under “some sort of investigation.” Asked if she could specify what investigation she was referring to, she politely declined. The EAC also did not clarify her statement.

In an interview with Democracy Docket, Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read again called for McCormick’s resignation, saying, “If that’s how she really feels, she should not be in this role.”

“This is supposed to be bipartisan,” Read said of the EAC. “This is supposed to be about how we do the technical work of making sure that every eligible person’s vote is counted and reflected.

4. Blocking the experts

By the end of the week, election officials were stunned to learn the Trump administration has been quietly blocking appointments to the Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC) — a key federal committee that helps set standards for voting machines.

The unexplained rejections — described by one official as “crazy” — have sidelined bipartisan experts from TGDC, the body responsible for shaping the rules that determine which voting systems are certified and used nationwide.

Officials warned the move could have far-reaching consequences: without full representation, the committee risks approving flawed or insecure systems — or missing critical recommendations to keep voting accessible and safe.

The blocked appointments are unprecedented in the committee’s two-decade history and come as federal officials are already under pressure to implement changes to voting system standards tied to Trump’s 2025 anti-voting executive order. 

“It’s not a partisan committee,” one official emphasized. “If you don’t have the right experts guiding that, it puts the entire process at risk.”

With nearly half the panel’s seats now vacant, officials warned the group is operating without full expertise or representation, raising concerns that critical perspectives — including on cybersecurity — are being left out of decisions.

The post 4 big takeaways from key federal election commission’s  annual meetings appeared first on Democracy Docket.

But to some far-right Christian influencers, that’s small potatoes. 

They’re pushing for even harsher voting restrictions. Among them: revoking women’s right to vote, instituting “family voting,” and only allowing property owners the right to vote. 

These ideas haven’t made it into legislation — yet. But they’re growing in popularity among far-right Christian nationalists, many of whom are motivated by a belief that women should have no role at all in public affairs. 

Kai Schwemmer — an influential conservative influencer who was recently appointed as political director for the College Republicans of America — said in an online debate last year that women shouldn’t be able to vote, according to The Guardian. 

“I believe they currently have the right to vote,” Schwemmer said. “But I’m in favor of probably like a family voting thing. I think that’d probably be a better way to do it.”

Family voting is a concept championed by Christian nationalists that only allows the patriarchal head of a family’s household to cast a vote on behalf of his wife and children.  

Schwemmer — whose supporters describe him as a “Mormon Nick Fuentes,” the far-right streamer known for his misogyny and antisemitism — is hardly the first influential figure on the right to call for family voting. 

In August 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reposted a CNN interview with Doug Wilson, Hegseth’s Christian nationalist pastor, who doesn’t believe women should vote. 

“Women are the kind of people that people come out of,” Wilson told CNN. “The wife and mother, who is the chief executive of the home, is entrusted with three or four or five eternal souls.” 

Just before the 2022 midterm elections, as polling showed Democrats were performing well with women voters, another conservative pastor and YouTuber, Joel Webbon, tweeted that “the 19th Amendment was a bad idea.” He’s since used his large platform for misogynistic rants where he regularly advocates for revoking women’s rights. 

“A woman as a mother is a precious gift, but a woman as a civil magistrate is the death of the nation,” Webbon recently posted on social media.

In 2024, Dale Partridge, another Christian nationalist pastor, posted on social media that “in a Christian marriage, a wife should vote according to her husband’s direction.” In January 2025, Partridge said Congress should repeal the 19th Amendment because he thinks women are too empathetic. 

“I don’t think we should repeal the 19th Amendment because I don’t love women,” Partridge said. “I think we should repeal the 19th Amendment because I love America and American women and want to protect our nation from their suicidal empathy.” 

Even the powerful venture capitalist and conservative activist Peter Thiel once wrote that he thought the women’s suffrage movement was bad for democracy.

“I used to teach this as, ‘This is this fringe thing that’s out there,’” Beth Allison Barr, a history professor at Baylor University, told the New York Times. “Now I teach it as, ‘This is no longer fringe’…It’s being made to sound more palatable and reasonable.”

Not allowing women to vote isn’t Schwemmer’s only controversial view. In the same debate where Schwemmer expressed support for family voting, he added that he’s “very much an anti-universal suffrage guy.” 

“I don’t think there’s a good defense for allowing people to vote who don’t take the time to return shopping carts,” Schwemmer said. “I think that’s a huge issue.”

Schwemmer is referencing the shopping cart theory — a litmus test that distills a person’s entire morality into whether or not they return a shopping cart to its designated cart corral when they’re done shopping. As outrageous as it sounds, far-right figures are constantly scheming up new ways to shut out voters. 

“Allowing those people the same leverage in your electoral system as a homeowner,” Schwemmer added. “That’s crazy to me.”

Allowing only homeowners the right to vote is a form of voter suppression that dates back to the 1800s — but conservative activists besides Schwemmer have floated reviving the practice over the years, which would stand to disenfranchise millions of voters. 

Among the most prominent may be Steve Bannon, the popular podcaster and former senior advisor to Trump. A former colleague of Bannon told the New York Times in 2016 that he “occasionally talked about the genetic superiority of some people and once mused about the desirability of limiting the vote to property owners.”

Back in 2012, Ted Yoho, a former GOP congressman, said at a campaign event that only property owners should vote. 

“I’ve had some radical ideas about voting, and it’s probably not a good time to tell them,” Yoho said. “But you used to have to be a property owner to vote.”

Since then, allowing only property owners to vote hasn’t come up much among GOP lawmakers, but as conservatives fervently push to restrict voting with the SAVE America Act, more right-wingers are reviving the proposal. An op-ed in the online conservative magazine The American Thinker last year advocated only allowing property owners to vote.

“We must require that voters meet certain reasonable standards of competence,” the writer, Robert Arvay, argued.

With the SAVE America Act still being pushed by the GOP, conservative influencers are using the opportunity to push for other extreme anti-voting measures. Right-wing podcaster Steven Crowder recently posted on social media that, in addition to family voting, only people in “mandatory selective service” should be allowed to vote.

Crowder also said that only people who “have at least three years of gainful employment and are currently paying taxes,” should vote, too.

“Those who only stand to gain will always vote for more gain,” Crowder wrote.

The post ‘The 19th Amendment was a bad idea’: The far-right’s wish list for extreme voter suppression appeared first on Democracy Docket.

In a largely admiring profile, Politico explains that Dhillon — the Department of Justice (DOJ) Civil Rights division chief who’s reported to be in line for a promotion — has a “personal familiarity” with what she calls “woke ideology,” as a San Francisco Republican “vastly outnumbered by Democrats.”

“The entirety of my career has been a minority, conservative viewpoint in a very liberal profession,” Dhillon says, providing a framing for the story that Politico does little to challenge. “I’m not here for a popularity contest.” 

Democracy Docket’s coverage of Dhillon’s tenure at DOJ has been very different. 

We’ve understood Dhillon’s effort to turn the Civil Rights division away from protecting, um, civil rights as part of the Trump administration’s bid to undermine democracy on behalf of existing powerful interests — not as a bold example of independent thinking.

We’ve highlighted Dhillon’s hiring of numerous lawyers with records of working to overturn the 2020 election — including naming an acting chief of the voting section who has collaborated closely with election deniers. 

We’ve revealed the numerous basic lawyering errors — from missed deadlines to failure to properly serve defendants to a seemingly unending string of embarrassing typos — that have hamstrung the division’s effort to grab state voter rolls. 

We’ve even explained how Dhillon’s extremely active social media presence has at times appeared to undermine DOJ’s cases.

You won’t find any of that mentioned in Politico. 

If you needed more evidence that legacy media isn’t equipped to meet the challenge to democracy posed by our current moment, you don’t have to look much further.  Luckily, that’s why we’re here.

The post Legacy media paints Harmeet Dhillon as plucky underdog fighting ‘woke ideology’  appeared first on Democracy Docket.

Republicans will bring the bill — deemed the most restrictive election legislation in U.S. history — to the Senate floor for debate today. If enacted, voting experts warn the bill could disenfranchise millions of voters.
“I WILL NEVER (EVER!) ENDORSE ANYONE WHO VOTES AGAINST “SAVE AMERICA! ! !” Trump wrote a morning social media message.

He described the bill as “one of the most IMPORTANT & CONSEQUENTIAL pieces of legislation in the history of Congress, and America itself” and said that only “sick, demented, or deranged” lawmakers would vote against it.

He also touted several provisions banning no-excuse mail voting, transgender women in women’s sports and gender-affirming care for minors that aren’t actually in the current bill. 

It is expected that Republicans will attempt to include those provisions as amendments, but will fail to get the requisite 60 votes needed for them to be adopted. 

Despite Trump’s full-throated endorsement, the SAVE America Act is not expected to make it through the Senate. Republicans simply don’t have the votes to pass it without amending Senate rules to remove the filibuster — an unpalatable prospect for the GOP senators. 

Nonetheless, Trump has made it his top priority. Last week, he doubled-down and said he supported “not approving” any new legislation until the SAVE America Act is passed.

The post Trump: ‘I WILL NEVER (EVER!) ENDORSE’ any senator who votes against SAVE appeared first on Democracy Docket.

Those courtroom battles have often checked Trump’s attempts to undermine the Constitution. But have they kept democracy defenders too busy to launch legal counter offensives — i.e. convince judges to strike down restrictive voting laws? 

To find out, Democracy Docket tracked the number of pro- and anti-voting lawsuits launched in off-cycle years — 2021, 2023 and 2025 — between federal elections. (Election years see a spike in lawsuits by both parties trying to gain an upper hand in their races or challenge disappointing results.)

We labeled lawsuits that sought to force election officials to purge voter registration rolls or block state laws aimed at making it easier to vote, like universal mail-in ballots, as anti-voting. Pro-voting lawsuits were those challenging laws that made it harder to vote — like English-only voting instructions or voter ID requirements. Other lawsuits related to elections, like redistricting fights, were not counted. 

We found that anti-voting lawsuits have proliferated from eight in 2021, to 19 in 2023 and then jumping to 43 last year — thanks, in large part, to the Department of Justice (DOJ) filing 25 lawsuits demanding access to voter registration rolls in 2025. (The DOJ filed another seven lawsuits in 2026, leaving 32 active lawsuits, including one paused and another under a consent decree.) 

At the same time, pro-voting lawsuits jumped from 32 in 2021 to 51 in 2023, before falling to 27 in 2025. Put another way, pro-voting litigation went from 80% of all voting lawsuits filed in 2021 to just 38.6% in 2025. 

At first blush, those figures seemed to suggest that pro-voting groups were too busy playing defense — defending against the onslaught of anti-voting lawsuits driven by the DOJ — to go on the offense against voter suppression. 

But the lawyers leading these litigation campaigns say that’s not a concern. 

“I don’t think it’s because of the lack of capacity,” said Jon Greenbaum, founder of Justice Legal Strategies and former chief counsel at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights. “I have been involved in voting stuff since ‘97 and on the nonprofit scene since 2004 – the resources of nonprofit groups in the voting rights space is the greatest that it’s ever been.” 

“I wouldn’t say that voter suppression laws are slipping through the fence,” said Lis Frost, litigation chair at Elias Law Group.*

According to Frost, the recent drop in pro-voting lawsuits can be attributed to a relative dearth of targets. 

“We litigated so many bad laws in prior cycles — and we were quite successful — that there’s just not as many laws to target as there have been in the past,” Frost said.

Most of these lawsuits — whether pro- or anti- voting — target new state laws. But, Frost said, “we’re not seeing the same kind of large volume of anti-voter legislation coming out of the [state] legislatures,” like in 2021, after Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. 

And Trump’s own actions in office might have taken the pressure off of state lawmakers, Frost said. Between his attempted executive order, the DOJ’s voter roll lawsuits, and the campaign to pass the SAVE America Act, it appears as though voting issues are being handled at the federal level, leaving state Republicans free to pursue other legislative priorities. 

“Part of the reason we’re not seeing the volume of anti-voter legislation we’ve seen in the past is because we have an executive who is attempting to do it by fiat,” said Frost.

And while some Republican lawmakers have explored following Trump’s loud and frequent demands to Congress for requiring voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship (DPOC), by passing state laws to do the same, Frost said the Ninth Circuit and U.S. Supreme Court’s rulings in RNC v. Mi Familia Vota in 2024 — which struck down an Arizona law requiring DPOC to vote in federal elections — had impeded those efforts.  

Moreover, as Greenbaum noted, simply counting cases to get a sense of what side of an issue is more active can also be misleading. The three separate lawsuits challenging Trump’s March, 2025 executive order on elections were consolidated into one successful lawsuit with dozens of pro-voting plaintiff organizations represented by even more lawyers from legal nonprofits, law firms*, and academic institutions. (Democratic-led states also sued in a pair of lawsuits to block the order).

And if Trump issues another executive order — as he has said he would — those groups would all sue again to block it, said Greenbaum. 

His concern is what happens if the administration attempts some widespread election interference action — like ordering federal agents to seize ballots in multiple states or deploying troops to polls in every major city, despite federal statutes prohibiting that. 

“That sort of thing is much more challenging to be able to figure out how to respond against,” Greenbaum said. 

But, he added, groups like his were already coordinating with others on identifying potential methods Trump and his MAGA allies in state or local government might try to disrupt elections, and coming up with gameplans to counter them. 

“You’re constantly trying to think about what things the Trump administration may do. They are unprecedented things and in the past, nobody would have thought about doing them,” Greenbaum said. “But we have to prepare ourselves for anything at this point. Nothing’s beyond the pale.”

*Democracy Docket founder Marc Elias is chair of the Elias Law Group (ELG). ELG represents parties in a number of lawsuits mentioned in this report, including Democratic party plaintiffs challenging Trump’s executive order on elections. 

Ashley Cleaves contributed to this report.

The post DATA: With Trump’s offensive DOJ, are pro-voting groups too busy playing defense to attack anti-voting laws? appeared first on Democracy Docket.