The Just Security Podcast

What Just Happened: Dismissal of Voting Rights Lawsuits

• Just Security • Season 1 • Episode 116

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For nearly 70 years, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division led efforts to protect voting rights and fight racial discrimination at the polls. But in January 2025, DOJ political appointees froze all new civil rights cases and dismissed every major pending voting rights lawsuit—prompting most career attorneys to leave the Division. 

With federal challenges to restrictive voting laws now dropped in several states, the fight for voting rights falls to individual voters and advocacy groups, raising urgent questions about the future of enforcement.

In this episode Dani Schulkin, Director of Democracy Initiatives at Just Security, is joined by Chiraag Bains. Chiraag is a senior fellow at Democracy Fund, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and former Deputy Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council for Racial Justice & Equity. He also previously served in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. 

 Show Notes:  

Dani Schulkin: For nearly 70 years, the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division has played a critical role in protecting the right to vote. It has brought lawsuits to strike down voter suppression efforts. It helped stop North Carolina from implementing restrictions that a court said targeted Black voters with “almost surgical precision.” It has compelled states from New Jersey to California to provide bilingual ballot materials, and it has intervened in countless other ways to make our elections more fair and more accessible. 

The Civil Rights Division has long been the federal government's front line in the fight for voting rights, and today, it's not the same. Nearly all of its career attorneys have left or been reassigned. The Attorney General has ordered the dismissal of every major voting rights lawsuit that is still pending. As a result, the federal government has withdrawn from legal battles in states like Arizona, Georgia, Virginia, Alabama, Texas and Louisiana. So, what does this all mean? What does the historic retreat mean for the future of voting rights enforcement in the United States? What happens when federal leadership disappears, and who, if anyone, is still left to protect the right to vote?

This is the Just Security Podcast. I'm your host, Dani Schulkin, Director of Democracy Initiatives at Just Security, and today I'm joined by Chiraag Baines. Chiraag is a Senior Fund at the Democracy Fund and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. I previously had the honor of working with him at the White House, where he served as Deputy Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, and he's the author of a recent Just Security article explaining, “What Just Happened: The Trump Administration's Dismissal of Voting Rights Lawsuits.” 

Chiraag, I want to thank you for joining us today. You've worked both inside and outside of government in so many different capacities, pushing for civil rights and democratic reform. Can you walk us through your path for a moment? How did you get into this work and what's shaped your perspective over the years?

Chiraag Baines: Yeah, thanks, Dani. It's great to be here with you. I am a lifelong civil rights lawyer. I have spent my time mostly in government and also in the nonprofit sector, essentially trying to make sure that delivered reality for people in this country matches the constitutional principles enshrined in that great document — equal protection, due process, enforcing the guarantees of equal citizenship that we find in the Constitution. And as I said, I did it mostly through government and nonprofits. I worked in the Civil Rights Division as a line attorney, a career attorney, at the beginning of my career, and then as a political appointee, a senior counsel to the head of the division, including working on voting cases. I then worked at a nonprofit organization called Demos, where I led voting rights litigation around the country. And most recently, I was in the Biden White House, as you said, leading the racial justice and equity portfolio, which included supporting civil rights work across the administration.

Dani: So, I want to step back for just a moment, and I want to better understand what the Civil Rights Division is at the Department of Justice. What does it do for folks who want to vote and how does it protect our rights?

Chiraag: Yeah, to understand the Civil Rights Division, it's important to actually start earlier during the Reconstruction period after the Civil War. Of course, we fought a civil war over slavery, and when that war was over, during the war and then after, Congress enacted the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. The 14th Amendment guaranteed equal citizenship for Black people and all people born in the United States. The 15th Amendment guaranteed the right to vote for Black Americans. It prohibited discrimination based on race in accessing voting. 

But the reality is that we went another 100 years without meaningful Black participation in elections. We had rampant voter suppression, and those constitutional guarantees were honored in the breach. That is, they weren't meaningful. It took the civil rights movement during the 1950s and 1960s and the legislation that they produced to finally guarantee the right to vote regardless of race. And during that period, the Civil Rights Division was established. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and established an Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the Justice Department. It also gave the Justice Department new authority to enforce voting rights. The Justice Department got the authority to sue in court to obtain injunctions to stop interference with the right to vote, which again, was rampant across the United States, particularly in the South.

Over time, the Justice Department got new authorities, the Civil Rights Division got the power to enforce the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That is widely considered to be the crown jewel of civil rights legislation in this country, and it is the thing — the Voting Rights Act — is the thing that led to actual, meaningful access to the ballot for Black Americans and for all Americans in this country. But it's not self-enforcing, right? The Voting Rights Act has to be enforced through litigation, and the Justice Department has the ability to do that. There were other statutes that were passed over the years that gave the Civil Rights Division new authorities to try to fight voter suppression and ensure everyone had access to the vote regardless of race, and they've been doing that for years. Their work remains important. We have seen continuing voter suppression up into our present day and continuing. So, it's really critical that the Civil Rights Division exists to be able to bring these lawsuits and obtain court injunctions to protect the vote.

Dani: So, I want to go back to this word that you used, which is “injunction.” Can you explain what that really means in this case? What can the federal government do when a state is doing something that might impact the ability to vote?

Chiraag: An injunction is a court order requiring a defendant to do something or stop doing something. And in the case of voter suppression, we see it take many different forms. For example, if there are unduly burdensome requirements to register to vote or to be able to cast a ballot, a court can order a state to stop putting those barriers in place. For example, a very restrictive voter ID provision that disenfranchises people. Often, those kinds of restrictions have disproportionate impact on people based on race, which is prohibited under the Voting Rights Act. Or racial gerrymandering in drawing districts that could unlawfully dilute the vote of black voters or other voters of color. And in fact, it has been done intentionally throughout American history. A court could order new maps to be drawn.

Dani: So, that brings us to today. In the past couple months, we've seen a lot of changes at the Department of Justice. So, can you walk us through what's happening at the Department of Justice in the Civil Rights Division, and why is it such a big deal? 

Chiraag: Yeah, there's a transformation underway at the Civil Rights Division across the board, including on voting rights cases. The most significant thing that's happened is that the Civil Rights Division has dropped all of its voting rights lawsuits, all of the lawsuits that were pending to protect the vote, to combat racial voter suppression. It dismissed voluntarily and paused for the next several months. It's basically getting out of the business of fighting racial voting, voter suppression and protecting the vote more generally. 

New priorities have been set by President Trump and those priorities revolve around combating this idea that there is widespread voter fraud. Now, that idea has been debunked repeatedly through academic studies in court cases, voter fraud, so people who are ineligible casting ballots is exceedingly rare, and there's no evidence it had any impact on any recent elections. And yet, President Trump continues to claim that he in fact won the 2020 election, and that Joe Biden was only made president because of voter fraud. 

Dani: So, Chiraag, I want to go back for a second. You said that the Department of Justice has dropped its lawsuits. What do you mean by that? What does it mean for the Department of Justice and a lawyer there to drop a lawsuit? 

Chiraag: What I mean is that the Justice Department under President Trump has voluntarily dismissed all of the cases it had that were pending to stop voter suppression. That includes eight salient cases, eight major cases across a variety of issues. One involves restrictions on the right to vote. The Justice Department had sued Arizona over imposing new restrictions requiring that people provide documentary proof of citizenship, a birth certificate or a passport or a similar document when registering to vote, and if they didn't, they wouldn't be able to vote by mail, and they wouldn't even be able to vote for president. This kind of restriction is completely contrary to a federal law that allows people to register to vote by attesting that they are a citizen under penalty of perjury. 

In another case, the Justice Department had sued Texas over a wide-ranging law that the state passed after the 2020 election that prohibited election officials from mailing unsolicited ballot applications, mail ballot applications to any voter, that restricted the counting of certain provisional ballots, that restricted the ability of groups to give food or water to voters who are waiting in line — which they often do for hours in the heat outside of a certain distance from the polling place. And these were things, these were mechanisms that Black voters had specifically relied on in disproportionate numbers during the 2020 election, and so the Justice Department challenged these restrictions. 

DOJ also had several cases on voter purges, that is, the process of removing people from the rolls. Now, you have to keep the voting rolls clean. There's routine what we call list maintenance that occurs. But there are rules around how that can happen, and one of the rules is that there is a so-called quiet period, or a 90-day period before any election, where you can't systematically remove people from the rolls. The idea being that if you make a mistake, there may not be enough time for someone to get re-registered and be able to vote. That doesn't prevent states from removing people who have had criminal convictions or who have died, you know, who are, in fact, ineligible in individual circumstances, but it prevents wide scale purges. 

And yet, in Virginia, the state announced a new purge program 90 days before an election and then proceeded to remove voters. 1,600 voters removed were removed. In litigation, it was revealed that many U.S. citizens, including naturalized citizens, who had voter registrations that were actually stamped new citizens, as well as lifelong Virginians who had voted in several elections, were erroneously removed. Alabama had a similar purge program that they started less than 90 days before an election. 3,200 voters were removed and actually referred to the state attorney general for criminal prosecution. And the state later admitted in litigation that 2,000 of those people, maybe more, were actually U.S. citizens, and so the Justice Department then sued in both of those cases. 

And then there's a class of cases that I'll call vote dilution cases. They're basically around how states draw district lines or how they conduct elections, and the way in which that election process can make it hard for voters of color to have any influence in the election. Texas gained 4 million people from 2010 to 2020. That meant that they got two more congressional seats, and yet the state deliberately drew lines to weaken Black and Hispanic voting power. The two new seats were majority white districts. They packed Black voters into certain districts, overrepresented them and then diluted their numbers so essentially grouped them with far away white counties in other districts to prevent them from being able to form a majority or enough of a population to elect candidates of their choice. 

So, these are a series of different classes of voter suppression, restrictions on the right to vote or register to vote, voter purges, redistricting or other election mechanisms that dilute the influence of voters of color. And the Justice Department was suing over all of this, and they dropped each and every one of these cases over the first four months of the administration. 

Dani: That's really remarkable. Why is the Department of Justice dropping these cases in this moment?

Chiraag: You know, we have seen a de-prioritization of voting rights litigation in other Republican administrations. I mean, this happened during the Bush administration. It happened during the first Trump administration. But we've never seen it at quite this level, dropping every single pending case, and it's responsive to direction coming from the president himself, you know? And President Trump is pushing a narrative that there's voter fraud that's happening around the country, that ineligible voters are casting ballots, and in fact, that that's why he lost the 2020 election. 

Now, there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud. It has widely been debunked that ineligible voters are diluting the votes of eligible voters and in a way that is actually having impact on elections. Often when ineligible people vote, it's due to mistakes. People don't realize that they're not eligible, and the numbers are very, very small. And yet, President Trump has said that voter fraud is why he, you know, was it was not made president again after the 2020, election. Lots of studies, dozens of cases, have all debunked this idea, and yet he continues to push it. And the president issued an executive order this year directing the Justice Department to focus its efforts on so called election integrity, and what he means by that is focusing on voter fraud and making it harder to register to vote and to vote. 

So, that is what we are seeing now with this Justice Department. They're dismissing righteous cases that are about racial voter suppression and voter suppression more broadly, and they're pivoting their resources in order to support efforts that make it harder to vote, to support voter purges, for example. There's also, I think, a broader thing happening here where the administration is moving away from any effort to try to realize the notions of equal protection and equal citizenship, regardless of race, that are enshrined in our Constitution and in the legislation from the civil rights movement. They are attacking all of this as so-called DEI, and it's clear by now that what they mean by DEI includes basic civil rights enforcement, that is, basic litigation to ensure that there is not discrimination throughout society — in voting, in employment, in policing, in consumer protection. They're actually dropping cases across the enforcement apparatus, across many different agencies. I think in voting, there's specific resonance for the president because of his continued false claims about voter fraud.

Dani: We've seen the Department of Justice actually do something in this space, and I'd love to better understand the new case that they're bringing that looks like it's kind of along these lines. Can you walk us through what this case means?

Chiraag: Yes, hours after I published the analysis of DOJ dismissing its cases on Just Security. The Civil Rights Division filed a new case that was more in the mold of the president's priorities. This case was against North Carolina for missing information in some voters’ voter registrations. And to understand this, it's important to just back up a little. This case comes out of a dispute in a recent election for North Carolina's State Supreme Court. There was a very close case between Justice Allison Riggs and Judge Jefferson Griffin, and Justice Riggs won the seat by 734 votes. And yet, Judge Griffin, who had been challenging her, pursued a lengthy course of litigation to try and prevent her certification as the winner. There were very complicated proceedings in state court and then ultimately in federal court. And in those proceedings, Griffin was arguing that there were thousands of voters who shouldn't have been eligible to cast a ballot because they were missing information in their voter registration. 

The Help America Vote Act requires states on their voter registration forms to collect either a voter's driver's license number or their social security number, or else assign them a unique number. And yet, for years, North Carolina used a form that marked that information as optional. So, many people didn't fill it out, and Judge Griffin challenged and tried to disqualify around 60,000 people who fell into that category. Ultimately a federal court — in fact, a district court judge who had been appointed by Trump in his first term — threw the lawsuit out and required the state to certify the victory for Justice Riggs.

Now, DOJ under the Trump administration's leadership is bringing this lawsuit on the same legal theory, arguing that all of these voters who did not provide the information that was marked optional are illegally registered. And so, it is clearly connected to the case in which a conservative candidate ran and lost and ultimately lost his legal battles as well. It's also very much in the mode of ensuring that all restrictions to register to vote are in place and advancing the narrative that non-citizens and other ineligible voters are registered, again, despite there not being any evidence to that effect. 

Now, in this case, if they actually try to get these voters thrown off the rolls, they'll disenfranchise Democrats, Republicans, Independents, many, many people, thousands and thousands of people who are eligible to vote will be disenfranchised, and so hopefully that won't happen as a result of this case. In fact, the state is working on fixing the form and here the state board of elections, the defendant in the case, is now controlled by Republicans. I expect there will be a settlement in this case, and it'll be important to be vigilant that they not impose any new restrictions that aren't required by federal law that would make it harder for eligible people to get registered and be able to vote in future elections.

Dani: So, in your piece, you talk about the brain drain that's happening at the Department of Justice. Who's going to litigate this case as it's going through the courts? What's going to happen now that the voting rights section has lost almost all of its staff?

Chiraag: There has been a mass exodus of attorneys from the Civil Rights Division broadly, and the voting section in particular. The voting section is the part of the division that brings these cases under the Voting Rights Act and other statutes, and they have shrunk from around 30 career attorneys to three. This was the result of a deliberate strategy to drive out career attorneys whom the administration probably doubted would advance the president's agenda. These are apolitical folks. You know, they're hired in a process that doesn't take account who they ever voted for, or what party they might be sympathetic to, and they've served Democrats and Republicans. Some of them have been there for decades, and the administration, as soon as it got there, reassigned the chief of the section and six managers as well, six out of seven managers, to a part of the division that processes employment discrimination complaints that are internal, basically, people who work at DOJ raising employment discrimination complaints. This is not their expertise. It was clearly a move just to get them out of the section. The seventh and final manager retired.

And the administration, of course, is also pushing the deferred retirement program that is trying to get people to resign from the division and from government more broadly. And a lot of attorneys took that. Some people quit because they saw what was happening to cases, righteous cases being dismissed. And the result is that the ranks have dwindled. So, those three attorneys are there, and they will surely participate in some of this litigation at least as long as they're there. I think this litigation in the new mold, you know, cracking down on the right to vote, making it harder to participate, will probably have to be driven by political appointees, so people that Trump has brought in specifically to lead the division. They're going to have to litigate these cases, be very, very involved. Now, perhaps the division will hire new attorneys, but I think, you know, you're not going to have the quality of folks who have been there for years and years, people who understand these very complex doctrines that underlie voting rights law, and who know how to win these cases. I expect the quality of lawyering to drop significantly.

Dani: You mentioned in your piece that there's a new mission statement for the voting rights section. What does that mean for the section moving forward?

Chiraag: This was really surprising. Two weeks after her confirmation, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon emailed new mission statements to career staff throughout the division. I'm not aware of anything like that ever happening before. It looks like she just drafted them herself or with her political staff, and then sent them as the new direction and the new marching orders to staff in different parts. The new mission statement for the voting section states that it has to focus its efforts on implementing President Trump's executive order on election integrity. It repeatedly refers to fighting alleged voter fraud as well as removing voters from the rolls. And while it does cite the Voting Rights Act as one among several statutes that the section enforces, the mission statement contains no reference at all to combating racial discrimination. That is the founding mission of the division, and it's also a continuing need across the country. So, it's really shocking that's no longer part of their direction. 

That's a clear signal that the division, the voting section, are getting out of the business of preventing race discrimination in voting. We'll probably see DOJ on the other side of some of those cases now, for example, coming to the defense of states that engage in reckless voter purges, or that engage in racial gerrymandering and vote dilution.

Dani: So, I want to get into the role of the courts a little bit because, as you've laid out for us, the Department of Justice is stepping back from all of these cases or redirecting its now limited resources to a different mission. So, what do you think is going to happen in the Supreme Court or the lower courts’ approach to voting rights generally? Who can enforce these cases if DOJ isn't there?

Chiraag: I think DOJ is dismissal of these lawsuits is going to have a significant impact. Now, in some of these cases, DOJ disappearing means the case is over. In most of the cases, there are private parties who are involved, so individual voters, voter participation groups, often represented by extremely good and seasoned voting rights lawyers at legal nonprofits, are continuing their lawsuits. So, several of these cases will continue and are moving in the courts right now.

But DOJ’s absence will hurt. DOJ, again, has expertise. People have been litigating these cases for years, so they bring that expertise to the litigation. It also sends a signal when the Justice Department is involved to the court that this is an extremely serious case. Justice Department is able to stay in cases for the long haul, and at least before its career attorneys were driven out. They had folks who were going to be there over the years to continue fighting over the litigation. And their disappearance, that means that the weight of the federal government will not be on the side of these private plaintiffs. 

There's a bigger problem, though, and that is that there is a once fringe legal theory that is catching on that could result in private parties, individual voters, voting rights groups, not being able to sue under a key part of the Voting Rights Act anymore. For years, private parties have brought lawsuits under the Voting Rights Act’s prohibition on racial vote suppression. In 2022, the Supreme Court decided a case involving a key part of the Voting Rights Act that is used to sue over racial vote suppression. And in a short concurring opinion, Justice Gorsuch expressed the view that the Supreme Court had never actually held that private parties could sue at all under this key part of the Voting Rights Act, and in fact, that maybe only the Justice Department could bring these suits. Justice Gorsuch was joined by Justice Thomas. 

That was quickly picked up by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. The Eighth Circuit ruled in 2023 that, in fact, there was no what we call “private right of action” under Section II of the Voting Rights Act, that important part of the Act meaning that private plaintiffs couldn't sue. This came as a shock to the voting rights world, because private plaintiffs have brought more than 400 lawsuits under this part of the Voting Rights Act over the past 40 plus years, and Congress knew this when Congress reauthorized the Voting Rights Act repeatedly. 

It's a really extreme view, and so far, no other court has held that. Recently, the Eighth Circuit doubled down on that ruling just this month, but defendants are pushing this theory, and they're raising it in other parts of the country, and this case might reach the Supreme Court. And if the Supreme Court agrees and overrules decades of precedent and practice and says that only DOJ can bring these cases, then that will really sideline the Voting Rights Act. If private plaintiffs can't bring suit under the Voting Rights Act and DOJ is not willing to, then there will be no enforcement of the Voting Rights Act to stop voter suppression. That is an extreme result. Now I hope the Supreme Court doesn't rule that way, and that no other court joins the Eighth Circuit in the interim. The text of the Voting Rights Act, precedent, practice, all of the evidence in the congressional record makes clear that Congress intended private parties to be able to sue under the Act, but if it came to pass, it would be destructive for voting rights around the country.

Dani: That's a really remarkable change of play that you're describing and potential impact. You get to this a little bit at the end of your piece, but I'd love to talk a little bit more about what happens in that case. You know, who's left to protect the right to vote if you don't have DOJ and if you don't have individual plaintiffs?

Chiraag: Yeah, I think there's a lot that others besides the Justice Department can do. And in fact, this is a moment for everyone else to step up. Nonprofits need more support. They are in the fight. They will continue to bring these cases. We need them to do even more. This fringe legal theory out of the Eighth Circuit could be challenged. The plaintiffs who brought that challenge that gave rise to the Eighth Circuit decision will have to decide whether to seek further review of the decision that is from the full Eighth Circuit or even from the Supreme Court. And it is not the law of the land. You know, their ruling is an extreme outlier, and so nonprofits can and will continue to sue, and they need our support. 

There is a significant role for states here. States can pass their own Voting Rights Acts. In fact, eight states have state versions of the federal Voting Rights Act. More states should pass such legislation and empower their state attorney generals to enforce it. State AGs can bring lawsuits to combat the voter suppression we may see coming from the Justice Department, as the Justice Department under Trump tries to force states to purge voters, or weighs in on legal disputes about how robust federal voting rights law should be. State AGs should get into those cases as well. And then for individuals, I think we all need to be vigilant about our right to vote. You know, understand your rights, report violations to the authorities. Again at the state level, talk to nonprofits, get representation if you need it. People need to stand up for themselves, because the Justice Department is not going to be there to stand up for them.

Dani: Thank you so much, Chiraag, for explaining the stakes of this moment. 

Chiraag: Thanks for having me, Dani. I enjoyed the conversation.

This episode was hosted by me, Dani Schulkin, and produced by Maya Nir. I want to give a special thanks to Chiraag Baines. You can read his article, “What Just Happened: The Trump Administration's Dismissal of Voting Rights Lawsuits,” as well as additional coverage on voting rights, democracy and the Trump administration's executive actions on our website at Just Security and linked in this episode's show notes. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five-star rating on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen. Thanks again.