Eviscerating DOJ’s Longstanding Voting Rights Enforcement
The following is an article drafted by Elizabeth Ryan, who worked as an attorney in the Voting Section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division until May 2025. We are publishing this article with her permission.
The Civil Rights Division was established following the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, primarily to protect the constitutional rights of Black Americans seeking to register and vote in the face of persistent and often violent resistance in the South. Even as the Division’s portfolio expanded to encompass other critical areas of civil rights enforcement — education, employment, police practices, etc. — securing equal voting rights for all Americans remained a core pillar of the Division’s purpose and mission.
In the last year, the Trump Administration has decimated voting rights enforcement in the Civil Rights Division, reversing long-held positions on laws designed to eradicate racial discrimination in voting, and effectively renouncing the Division’s longstanding role as an advocate for inclusive democracy. Instead, the Division is deploying voting rights laws largely to serve the President’s ideological and partisan goals.
Devastating Reversals on Racial Discrimination in Voting
Despite constitutional prohibitions on racial discrimination in voting dating back to Reconstruction, the right to vote was mostly elusive for Black Americans until Congress enacted the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA), widely regarded as one of the nation’s most successful civil rights laws. Section 2 of the VRA, which applies nationwide, prohibits voting practices and procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in a language-minority group. For decades, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, the Division’s Voting Section challenged redistricting plans and other voting procedures that denied voters of color and language minority voters a fair chance to participate in the political process. Most of these cases were small, challenging discrimination at the local level—in cities, counties, towns, and school districts around the country.
In the opening months of this administration, President Trump’s political appointees in DOJ dismissed all of the Voting Section’s active Section 2 cases. The new head of the Civil Rights Division, Harmeet Dhillon, issued a mission statement for the Voting Section prioritizing politically charged work not grounded in the statutes the Section enforces and making no reference to racial discrimination in voting. And political appointees forced out nearly all of the Voting Section’s career staff — many of whom had served in the Section for decades and had built invaluable expertise, institutional knowledge, and relationships with election officials around the country. (Across the Civil Rights Division, about 75% of attorneys left during this period; in the Voting Section, all but two career attorneys resigned, retired, or were involuntarily removed from the Section.)
Now, the administration is affirmatively attacking the VRA. In a break from decades of precedent, the Department is no longer defending the constitutionality of the Section 2 framework. In September, the Department filed a Supreme Court brief in a Louisiana redistricting case arguing that compliance with Section 2’s longstanding “results test” is not a compelling state interest and majority-minority voting districts drawn to remedy violations of the statute are unconstitutional. The Division also sent the state of Texas a letter rife with legal and factual errors that threatened legal action against the state unless it dismantled several voting districts that provided voters of color an opportunity to elect their candidates of choice to office.
This rupture from the Division’s founding purpose goes well beyond a mere shift in enforcement priorities. It is part of a broader campaign to erase facts that are inconsistent with the story of America that this administration prefers.
Indeed, VRA cases challenge the President’s claim that discrimination against people of color is a thing of the past and civil rights enforcement has unfairly disadvantaged white Americans. The question at the heart of a Section 2 case is whether the political process in the jurisdiction before the court is “equally open” to minority voters. To prevail, plaintiffs must build an intensely local record of the political life of the community, exposing racial fault lines in local voting patterns and campaign practices, and uncovering the ongoing effects of past discrimination in the present day. Through witness testimony and documentary evidence, these cases establish a public record of the ways in which race continues to affect civic life and political participation in communities around the country.
By publicly revealing and disrupting patterns of civic exclusion, Section 2 cases provide an opportunity for voters of color to claim belonging and an equal voice in the decisionmaking of their communities. With its reversals on Section 2, the Trump Administration has abandoned this tradition and thrown the weight of the Civil Rights Division behind efforts to perpetuate civic exclusion.
Misusing the NVRA and HAVA to Collect State Voter Rolls
In addition to attacking antidiscrimination measures, the Civil Rights Division is using the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) as justification for an unprecedented nationwide effort to collect state voter roll data.
The NVRA and HAVA require states to implement certain fail-safe measures to encourage voter registration and participation. Among other things, they establish requirements for how states maintain voter registration lists, including limitations on how and when names may be removed from the voter rolls. These provisions promote accurate voter rolls and guard against the incorrect removal of eligible voters.
Since last May, the Division has demanded complete, unredacted voter registration lists from at least 47 states, including social security numbers, driver license numbers, and other sensitive personal information about every registered voter in these states. Attorney General Bondi even linked a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) de-escalation in Minnesota to the state allowing the Civil Rights Division to access its voter rolls.
The Division contends that the NVRA and HAVA authorize it to scour voter registration lists for allegedly ineligible voters and then require states to purge those voters from their rolls. Administration officials have confirmed that DOJ is sharing the data with DHS in an effort to detect noncitizens on the rolls. DHS, in turn, has linked its systems to data maintained by the Social Security Administration and the Department of State, cobbling together sensitive personal information on virtually every American.
It is not unusual for the Voting Section to request information about states’ voter registration and list maintenance practices, but several things are alarming about the current campaign. First, the Section rarely requests full, unredacted voter registration lists, and demanding such data from virtually every state in the country is unprecedented. Second, the Voting Section does not typically share state voter data with other federal agencies during an investigation (this does sometimes occur during civil litigation, subject to strict protective orders and court supervision). And third, to my knowledge, the Civil Rights Division has never claimed the authority to scour state voter rolls for voters it believes are ineligible to vote, let alone pressure state election officials to remove specific voters from their rolls. Large scale database matching projects of the sort the government is attempting here are notoriously complicated, and the government itself has acknowledged its system will sometimes produce inaccurate results. The Civil Rights Division has said little about what precautions are in place to ensure lawfully registered U.S. citizens are not disenfranchised, although many have already been wrongly flagged in the handful of states that are known to have used the DHS system.
The Civil Rights Division has sued 24 states and the District of Columbia for refusing to turn over unredacted voter data. Courts in California, Michigan, and Oregon have ruled on the merits, and all rejected the Division’s legal arguments. (In California and Michigan, I joined amicus briefs with some of my former colleagues advocating for this outcome.) The courts in the California and Oregon cases also found that DOJ had misrepresented the true purpose of its demand for state voter data, which appears to go far beyond assessing the states’ compliance with the NVRA and HAVA. As the judge in the Oregon case put it, “The presumption of regularity that has been previously extended to [DOJ] that it could be taken at its word—with little doubt about its intentions and stated purposes—no longer holds.”
DOJ’s aggressive (and legally questionable) use of federal statutes to hoover up state voting data antagonizes election officials and destroys public trust. One might even wonder if this is (part of) the point. Throughout their months-long campaign to acquire state voter rolls, administration officials have promoted the myth of widespread noncitizen voting — a story repeatedly debunked by election officials and other experts, yet popular with the President, who recently used it to justify his call to “nationalize the voting” in fifteen U.S. states. Even if the Civil Rights Division continues to lose in court, this discourse undermines public confidence in the election system and raises the stakes for already overburdened election officials preparing for upcoming midterm elections.
The Division’s actions in these and other cases severely damage its credibility with federal judges, the states, and the public. This, in turn, impairs legitimate voting rights enforcement going forward. The Voting Section typically conducts extensive outreach and coordination with state and local election officials to promote compliance with the federal voting rights laws. Election officials who may have welcomed or at least tolerated the Division’s enforcement-related contact in the past are now understandably wary. And citizens who previously relied on the Division to investigate voting rights violations have lost an ally in the ongoing project to achieve a truly inclusive multi-racial democracy.
Today’s Civil Rights Division is failing in its core duty to translate the promises of the Constitution into lived realities for all Americans.
Elizabeth Ryan served as a trial attorney in the Voting Section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division from 2012-2025.
